skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes Ubuntu isn't going anywhere. App developers want one and only one OS and Ubuntu doesn't make life easier by being free.

As far as new technologies, I imagine internet protocols and bandwidth in 2018 will make it possible to share massive databases of information. New parallel chips will enable anyone to analyze massive databases of information, a whole economy of data sharing could emerge. New possibilities in online education, government, healthcare will all depend on the availability of currently private data.

By 2030 we will be living in "The Matrix" where AIs will learn from us by monitoring every single thought we have.

It's an important perspective. Facebook is just a tiny step, just like Windows was. They don't need to be perfect. Most importantly they should not be imitated or duplicated with a "free and uber-private" label. They need to be rethought with the long term perspective in mind.

What's the point of privacy? Do people care about distant data miners going through their lives or do they just want to avoid being fired or ridiculed by those close to them? And if some data miners gain magic knowledge on how to manipulate the masses, don't get paranoid. It's likely government will be redesigned around the new technology by then.
The Evils of URL Shorteners
While I agree that drugs such as cannabis or morphine can be status lowering, others such MDMA or LSD have a powerful one off effect and don't usually lead to addiction. So I am not sure that these drugs fall under the "gift protocol".

Where I am, on one of the many tips of Europe, the argument against drugs seems to revolve around risks, for example the potential long term effects of taking MDMA as it has been linked decreased cognitive performance, Parkinson (this later one has been disproven), etc...
A. Go to profile -> down to friends list -> click on the pencil -> Remove the tick in the box (Will still show mutual friends though)

B. Change your privacy settings, Make it so you can only be found by searching certain things (eg: email address), Block your boss

C. Unfortunately not (yet?)
Are HN anti-fb articles coordinated by Zynga?
fb and zynga are supposedly in some sort of struggle. are all these anti-fb articles part of it? no evidence for this, but wondering what you think.
Having written code myself makes me more appreciative of the amount of effort that goes into building good software. Compared to Windows users, more Linux users probably interact with code in one form or another.
You mean desktop linux vs the web? Or even Linux vs iPhone OS?
Agreed, and these days I'd say most of Zynga's marketing is piggybacking on their existing games. They use their position as leverage to introduce new 'properties', which I'd guess they could use to direct you off of Facebook. Especially if this off-FB site of theirs takes off and the bad press continues.
I thought everyone was seeing this? I've been hearing tons of complaints from my room mates and friends, and former schoolmates. No one likes the damn sidebar.
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions [video]
Startup ALGO claims trading software nears speed of light
Through this article I found out that Facebook has a "Chief Privacy Officer." That made me giggle.

How long till CPO Chris Kelly's job is obsolesced by the utter lack of privacy on FB?
Why don't you slap it on a cheap VPS and start an invite-only beta for prospective buyers? You might even make some decent money off it :)
Yeah; there was a bunch of HN discussion yesterday as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327132
Why? Git logs both author and committer. When you apply patches from the fork queue, the author is the original author and you are the committer. So any stats that look at committer would be ... wrong, github or not.
Recreational drugs aren't status-lowering because of their effects, they're status-lowering simply because they're mostly used by people of low status. Perhaps the difference in Europe is that recreational drug use is associated with people of high status?
this might be better
http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=014927534610857777870:r3kw...
The End of the World 2012
Wellbeing of conscious creatures sounds like a good fitness function to optimize for, but clearly many people disagree, most religions for example optimize for the afterlife.
Sometimes I see such visualizations and it makes me depressed.

I'm a day dreamer most days and any other days I feel like it takes me twice as long to get productive with a certain framework than it does other colleagues.

But I have other visions and I see the bigger picture and at some points there are ideas, BIG ideas that no else seems to get excited about BUT I can get excited about and I think to myself "You're so slow, how are you ever going to get to the end of your vision?"

So maybe that's my big challenge, how do I make my vision complete? Do I use Rent A Coder? Do I code it myself and not worry about a time line because time constraints are just worries made up my by subconscious?

I don't think I will ever work at the speed of DHH, Jamis Buck, or any other contributor.

But I think I have a vision. And I will complete it.
4 interesting facts about customer support
Comments like yes, no, agree, disagree, good post, and lame are concise, but also boring wastes of time which add little to a discussion. The aggregate measure of those sentiments (as expressed in a point total) is both more concise and of some value, as it serves to encourage and highlight good posts and discourage thoughtless or pointless comments. It also provides a relatively unobtrusive outlet for those who wish to voice appreciation of thoughtfulness; this is preferable to the sea of "agree"s and "disagree"s that might spring up in the absence of a point system.
Not a fan of Twitter at all honestly.. But thats just me..
This is exactly the reason why we need search on YC.

Having a search button would simply "officialise" the default mode of searching on searchyc and then coming back here to submit the story.
On top of this, I would bet that they have so many Linux
contributors precisely because no-one releases AAA games
to Linux, so their sample size is disproportionately
represented by Linux users.

That's the point tho - if you're an indie developer it might be worth your time to develop a cross platform game even tho not that many people use linux & mac compared to windows (since you care about people who buy your game not people who run that particular OS).
I think a big part of the problem with the Mac games market is that to some people, Mac games are worth less. I myself would never buy a Mac-only game (ie, a Mac OS only license) despite being a fairly avid gamer (and game design major) and using Mac OS as my primary OS, because buying a Mac game means that I've effectively tied my purchase to a weaker gaming platform. I think this is part of the reason for the high rate of piracy of Mac games. I would love not to have to reboot into Windows to play games but the reality is that there are a few problems with Mac-only games:

1. They don't age well.
Try playing a game from before ~2006. Many of them will either a) not run due to OS version incompatibilities or b) run poorly due to being PPC-only and running on Rosetta. If you're lucky there will be a Universal patch, but due to the small market, they often don't have parity with the Windows version in terms of patches. For OS 9 (or earlier) games, you're SOL. Its far easier to run a DOS game on OSX with DOSBox than even a much newer OS 9 game.

2. They are overpriced.
Well, okay that's not fair. They don't have a big enough market to benefit from the kinds of bargain prices that PC games get down to, even only 6 months after release. The exceptions to this are games that are released in a Windows/Mac combo SKU, but these are rare (The Sims 3 is a notable recent-ish one).

3. I might actually want to run the game on Windows some day.
As someone who flits back and forward from one OS to another, owning software that's locked to one platform is annoying. Free software covers me for a lot of things, but not for games. At least with a Windows copy of a particular title, I can run it with a Wine-based wrapper (there is a dedicated group of people at http://www.portingteam.com/ who release customised Mac wrappers for individual games, and they work pretty well).

My hopes for the SteamPlay feature of Steam for Mac are very high. It would mean that I could buy new games to play on my platform of choice, with the knowledge that I can always take them back to Windows if things go south. I'm just hoping that more developers get on board. While it's unlikely for the moment, if other developers/publishers were to honour previous Steam purchases of Windows games with their Mac versions, they might actually have a decent library of SteamPlay titles on the release of Steam for Mac.
And here's Google's blog post about it: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-...
It is a form of content protection: accessibility to hw to deal with it will be much further down the road for consumers than monopolies. Old format will be "good enough" for home video until the inevitable comes.

Would GOOG fast-track vp8 as an ISO standard, like MS did with OOXML? After all, it is ubiquitous in flash video, just as Word is -- a de facto standard needing rubber stamping.
site:news.ycombinator.com on google?
i bought the indie pack only because i wanted some games to play in linux
HN Meetup - New Delhi(NCR) India
Folks we are having a Hacker News Meetup in New Delhi on May 30th, 2010 - thats a Sunday. Exact time and place will be communicated later on email. If you are coming over drop me an email, so we can make the necessary arrangements.

kashif.razzaqui [at] gmail
Yeah! Now google is closer to the design of bing and yahoo!
Extremely clear plastic sheeting (tarp-like as opposed to a firm solid). Compare to videos of kids running across plastic pool covers and then mentally replace the pool cover with something perfectly clear that moves with the water.
http://onesocialweb.org
The iPhone 4G / HD LCD Frame, Legislative Body Parts Appeared
Would be great if you shared the number of hits to that url after about a month or so.
LOL HN has been littered with tons of articles about this rolling out for like the last 3 days. Every official Google blog has mentioned it.

And you used imageshack. Wow.
Everyone sees it, most of the countries got it now... AND IT SUCKS!

The sidebar is retarded, at best!

Also, NO ONE likes their previous changes neither:
- The fade-in menu on mouse movement.
- Large font in the search bar.
No one reads Google's blog, it's like reading the private diary of a retarded 7yo child.
Why the shortened URL? It detracts from HN. I like being able to see the domain the link is from.
Facebook could always hire their own team to build games, and give them priority placement as some kind of special class of application all over the site. Then launch facebook credits with these games and give more perceived value with some kind of half price credits on these games deal.
>The result is a spartan site with good content.

Umm, yah, content that users constantly gripe they cannot access (search) easily

it's 2010, search on a link aggregation site is, imo, fundamental, not "crap"
this by-example cheat sheet is a lot handier than, say, http://clojure.org/cheatsheet which is just a big list of function/macro names
Text may be black and white physically, but can express a wider range of nuance.
To which YC funded startup are you reffering?
Whoever figures out a way to controlledly repeat this little freefall will get insanely rich. If you knew the DJIA or ACN were going to take these dives, shorting the market for this period would have made scads of money.

It pains me to think that there are firms on Wall Street right now trying to figure out how to cause another 1000-point fluctuation and achieve the above. When so many traders make their money off of volatility, I can't help but imagine that this entire system will careen towards total collapse as the trading and the algorithms get faster and more impossible to regulate.
Nope. There's the download button. There's the thumb and title. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to view the doc, short of clicking the download button for the PDF (which works). Actually, why go through the trouble of htmlizing the doc when i can just view the PDF (which renders beautifully on iPad)?
...which is illegal: http://consumerist.com/2006/04/mega-update-requiring-minimum...
One could make a pretty strong argument that Amazon is at its core a recommendation service (with really good logistics that take care of the rest of the whole "oh, I just bought this thing I didn't know I wanted" process).
In a free society, you would own, along with your neighbors most likely, your own street and the rest of the infrastructure.

Owning the last mile will make it a lot easier to strike a good deal utilities and the rationale for monopolies collapses.

Voluntary cooperation leads to more power for the individual than coerced aggregation, which just gives it to those who get control and whoever who buys them off.
It may be "sweet" technology. I just haven't found out yet what the purpose of this or the previous technology is.
This is what all you "designers" get for insisting on setting fonts and colors and whatnot. Now you have a Web where you have gotten everyone to force their tiny sans serif fonts and bright white backgrounds down my throat, but one Web site you like makes a change you don't like and suddenly you are up in arms. If people would leave the fonts and colors alone then everyone could set their browser how they liked and be happy.

I notice this guy has all kinds of fonts and colors explicitly defined in his blog's style sheet. He gets no sympathy from me.
huh. neat. where are you finding out what is and is not supported? user forms? or do drive data sheets actually have useful info?
Thailand censors more websites as protests persist
Right github would record the author as being the person. SVN has no conception of an author/committer distinction.
We have now updated fifobooks - the entire catalog is browsable on the web, and you can buy and download books (epub, mobi, or mobi dx). Because you download the ebook file, you can put it on any ebook device imaginable, including mobile phones such as Blackberry and iPhone.
It is not only that. Smoking cuts across cultural lines - you can smoke with someone who have great difficulty to speak English (which would otherwise be a stupid situation). You can also have a conversation with very poor (manual labourers) without it being akward.

What is also nice is that you can meet people - by just asking for a light. Most smokers are extremely friendly to other smokers and if two people stands outside a building smoking, it is natural for them to talk. It is the new Freemasons.

I've sometimes wonder why tobacco companies doesn't embrace this with a slogan such as: "Smoking turns strangers into friends".
Is there some sort of metric out there that quantifies the number or percentage of people that care enough about privacy to drop out of Facebook in disgust? What if FB is right and most people don't care about comprehensive privacy features? It may simply be enough for FB to keep random stalkers and identity thieves away. It's easy to imagine that the Ebay effect will stick to FB and it'll be the only heavyweight social network site around for some time.
Name your business with strategy
Yeah, who do they think they are, Apple?
Pointlessly mean comments aren’t tolerated here.
I expect a surge in piracy as a result.
I think (hope) that Twitter has found (and realizes that it has found) a niche for itself in the 'what is happening now' part of the web. If they can focus on this, they might have a shot at becoming successfu.
There's an opportunity cost for every feature added, and it's not just the time lost in implementation. More features = more code, which means more things you have to consider each time you add the next feature. More features = more interface complexity, which means additional things that your users have to consider each time they use the site. More complexity also tends to scare off new users. And more features = more bugs, which is a further drain on productivity in the future.

Didn't we just have this thread yesterday when Google introduced a few new features that everyone seems to hate? ("Changing crap", I believe PG called them.)

Besides, the argument isn't that you shouldn't add features unless the lack of the feature would lose users. It's that you should be careful which features you add so that you can spend your limited resources on the features that truly delight your users. Big companies usually aren't mediocre because they're complacent (well, perhaps except GM). They become mediocre because their userbase is broad enough that every feature they introduce will piss someone off, so they end up with collections of features such that any given person will love 10% of the product and loathe the remaining 90%.
It is always technically 'possible,' to figure out how to make Facebook's privacy settings match yours, the fact that there are forum posts and blog posts like yours show that Facebook on some level is doing it wrong with privacy. Granted Facebook is a huge network, but if they are going to succeed, they need to match privacy with as much intuitiveness and perfectness as Google manages search results.
Well, I quit. But not only I can confirm that what the article says is true, but also that I miss those conversations with strangers during my trips in USA (they were very fun, and bridged the gap I had with my very bad English).
And, yes, lung cancer is a reality... but the alternative of "office drink afternoons" is not way more healthy... ;)
I wonder how could any Facebook replacement (or Facebook itself) allow somebody to support some group while not telling anyone. Of course it's possible, donate some money, do some job for them, but… on Facebook or something like Facebook? How?
Some of these issues are solved by using rel-shortlink and following other best practices. (I wrote about this here: http://alanhogan.com/tips/rel-shortlink-for-short-urls)
The secret is: there is no genius programmer. One just needs to stop worrying start with something and eventually it will turn into a success which will make other people assume that you are the genius programmer. But there really isnt such a thing.
No. Even if some of the articles were seeded by Zynga, a lot of people here legitimately dislike Facebook's changes and dominant position, so it would be irrelevant.
Or, everyone will just put their money in volatility options:

http://www.cboe.com/DelayedQuote/DQBeta.aspx?content=http%3A...

But, keep in mind that when people cause an event like this to go short, people that go long while it's happening will also make money. And, the people taking long positions will create demand for the security, raising the price. The demand will increase as the price decreases (unless the stock is actually worthless), and this has a buffering effect on whatever's causing the short.

Now, if you do 9/11 or something to make the market crash, that might work.
Does it really take more time to type "site:news.ycombinator.com my query" into the OmniBar than it does to find a text box on the page and type "my query" into it?

I've used search 100s of times as well to find a comment or article that I previously read, but I just Google it. I don't see how having a dedicated search box would be any faster. (And if he used Lucene or a custom algorithm instead of offloading things to Google, it'd probably be significantly worse.)
AddThis - Get Your Button
And so does every popular webmail provider. I remember learning about this when I was 12.
Every? My mail appears to originate from mail.jrock.us, my MX, regardless of whether or not its actually composed on that machine.
> Interesting that you claim the efforts that have gone into developing Linux are now obsolete

reminds me of OS X and BSD, Webkit and KHTML.
The first and last animations are jumpy in my browser (Chrome 5.0.375.29 beta on OS X Snow Leopard), almost as if the last 20% of the frames are being skipped. The Facebook-style and three-dot animations are also off: The last two dots are synchronized nearly synchronized.

Is this a browser bug? If so, CSS3 throbbers aren’t ready for prime time yet.

Reloading the page seems to greatly reduce the visual bugs.
The Incredible Camera Showdown: Droid Incredible VS Nexus One
You can check the post here ... http://www.nikesh.me/blog/2010/05/ajax-style-loading-animati...
LambdaTheUltimate? No points there, and it's resisted the influx of trolls better than most.
Great meeting you there, thanks for coming!
I'm eagerly awaiting:

Rage by id Software

Diablo III by Blizzard

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty by Blizzard

These are all going to be simultaneously released for Windows and Mac.
It's true that discovery can be a problem. It's interesting though to tackle it by trying to emulate TV, the thing that that online video has been trying to move away from as a selling point.
It is very likely that Steam is releasing it's client for MacOs sooner or later. Some even say it will be available for Linux.

I think this shows the market is changing. The OS will be unimportant.
And I thought it was China that was supposed to worry me.

50 years in prison for allowing someone to post a comment sounds like something the US would come up with. (But only if the comment was a link to child porn, or instructions on how to join Al-Qaeda.)
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
Why though? I mean, we generally don't think it is important to respect other people's irrational beliefs — why is this one any different from all the other irrational beliefs a person can hold?
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327309
Oh right, Rails was originally SVN.

I wiped the SVN era from my memories as a way of coping with the pain it caused me.
Asking for a light also provides a natural excuse to start a conversation with someone who there's no real reason to approach otherwise.

(I don't smoke myself, but I've ended up in more than one conversation I wouldn't have otherwise had, because I was with a friend who smoked, who approached a stranger in that manner.)
> "I stood outside a building that houses a large online marketing company in Los Angeles employing about 150 people—I have already said too much..."

I know the author was half-joking, but: "Software Engineer" + "Sooraj Akkammadam" + "Los Angeles" + LinkedIn = LowerMyBills.com
I dont think Scribd made too much investment in Flash developers. On server side they were using "PDF2SWF" released under GPL by Swftools.org. My understanding is that, initially they were using 'FlashPaper' to display documents in front end.
This made my day. :D Sorry this was too funny had to paste my favorite:

1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence. Build times suffer. Skynet's motives for performing the service remain unclear but spokespeople from the future say "there is nothing to be concerned about, baby," in an Austrian accented monotones. There is some speculation that Skynet is nothing more than a pretentious buffer overrun.
Conan O'Brien at Google: The World Has Completely Changed
Have you tried netflix?
Here in the uk there is a semi popular tv show called rudetube; which shows Internet video clips based on a rough user ranking metric (YouTube views). So the idea could have legs.
Don't know why its not working for you .. coz I have tested it on Chrome 5.0.375.29 beta on (Mac OS and Windows), animation works very well on both one.
It might be a good idea to have a follow up for this article in 6 months to see if the results can be sustained...What iPads Did To My Family After 6 Months.