skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can retain a subset of the functionality of the webapp while offline, but that doesn't really cut it all the time.

* Google maps won't work very well offline. You don't have the entirety of the map titles cached locally or the direction database/logic.

* It's the same with Gmail. IIRC, you don't have access to your archive of email while offline.

* If I have all my financial data in Mint, do I have access to the full functionality of Mint or just access to my account info / transaction history? If not then it's sort of worthless.

* If I upload all of my photos directly from my camera to Flickr or Facebook, do I have access to those offline?

I'm not poo-poo'ing the idea of webapps, I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it seems that most people are too focused on their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.

My other point is this:

As we more more and more of our data onto servers controlled by other people, what are we giving up? Sure we can keep backups of the data just in case the remote data is lost (for whatever reason), but what happens when the only means of using that data is a webapp? Then the backup becomes useless without the service. (i.e. I could be offline and have all my financial data in some sort of backup format from Mint, but how do I grok the raw data without a local tool? If all the tools are online, then it's useless (don't talk about offline webapps here, because they can't access/parse local data IIRC)?
He's not pointing out something subjective; he's giving you a heads-up on what the lawyers are going to say to ensure that their case against you comes with a preliminary injunction.
> If they stop all of the oil immediately, they've already done damage that we'll be cleaning up for decades. They've probably destroyed about 100 billion worth of revenue in the fishing business alone over the next 10 years.

Does the Exxon Valdez experience support this theory? How about the IXTOC blowout in 1979, which lasted for 9 months and dumped way more oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

I ask because both of these were the roughly the same size (EV) or significantly larger (IXTOC) and their impact was much smaller than you've claimed. If their not relevant, why not?

So, what's the basis for your claim about the amount of damage?
Man leaves career to walk across U.S.
I would provide access to the vaccine and individuals could choose whether they wanted to take it.

It actually doesn't lead us to overpopulation. Once wealth & education increases to a certain point cultures change and people have fewer children. Paul Ehrlich went over this in the 60s and then made the famous wager with Simon over resources. I think this Malthusian argument has been thoroughly debunked.

The best result for the well being of whole populations is generally achieved by each person in that population doing what is best for themselves.
Not an issue. What makes it fail is the insane erosion it suffers when it rams into air at 2km/s.
Content aware image resizing implemented with JavaScript
That guy is just a prick who hates everything Google/Android.
Pretty much. The interview will be text based and not video based.
I prefer to be able to read a book or use my laptop than drive, but I'd rather spend those extra 4 hours with my family. If it was 6 hours instead of 8, it would be more worth it. But 8 hours is essentially an entire day of travel. I could drive home, visit, and drive back in the same day if I wanted to.

And it's not just the elapsed time, either. I have to be at the train station at a specific time (preferably having purchased the ticket in advance), and then need to do the same thing for the return trip. I have to pack everything I want to bring in baggage and make sure not to lose anything. With a car, I can decide to go home and be there 5 hours later with no other planning at all. A few changes of clothes may already be packed inside.

Not to mention that when I get to the destination, I'm stranded and dependent on people, because there's essentially no public transit where my family lives.

Believe me, I am not a car person. I avoid driving whenever possible, the bicycle I bought a few weeks ago already one of the best purchases I've ever made. But for me, it's worth having a car, and I often choose to use it.
"I consider making $35,000/year in a few hours a week to be a "commercial success." Especially, since the kind of work he is doing is easily repeatable in other niches."

If you have followed his story at all on the JoS boards, It sure doesn't seem like only a few hours of work a week. If he is only working on it a few hours a week, he even has less credibility. It's little more than a side project that is now making some money.

I think it's great that he's making money, I just get tired of seeing interviews, articles, and posts claiming that he is running some kind of really successful business.

"Especially, since the kind of work he is doing is easily repeatable in other niches."

Marketing experience can be used in other niches. However, if you spend 5+ years on a niche to make $30,000, you are doing something wrong.
Take down the map and it probably would be. We had an intersection in my city with three roads/six entrances. Originally it was a 6-way stop, but it had very poor visibility and there were numerous accidents. Now, it's a roundabout, and traffic flows much more smoothly (I've never seen more than three cars waiting to enter, and it usually takes about 5-10 seconds per car). Multi-lane roundabouts are probably more confusing than single-lane, as well, but if the street is primarily traveled by locals, give them some time to learn it and speed should pick back up.
that's great and all but that's not everyone. Often, especially while skiing or taking road trips far away from a major city I can have horrible service if not none at all
I'm currently available for freelancing, especially to commit to a fixed amount of hours. I'm a kickass front-end and back-end guy. Send me an email to get in touch, logan@loganleger.com.
Yes currently I have iPhone but I don't like the fact that I will have to pay Apple $100 per year to run my own apps on my phone. I am a Java Developer and I love the fact that I can write Android apps in Java.

For that reason I always wanted to move to Android. I went to stores every time new Android device launched but I am not satisfied with the User Interface and touch screen sensitivity. Android UI is not quite up to the level where iPhone UI is or for that matter Palm WebOS UI.
Google acquires AdMob
I use perl every day and awk almost every day. Awk is useful for commands where it forms a small part of an overall pipeline and needs to be somewhat terse, and yet fast. Gawk is actually fairly fast, mawk[1] even more so.

[1]: http://invisible-island.net/mawk/mawk.html
supposedly there is a risk of it making the leak worse.
Important fiduciary duty case for major non-controlling holders in Delaware corp
Please work on reading comprehension. You'd only be able to try 15 of them. That gives you a 0.15% chance of guessing. That's far bigger than 15/(2^128), but I wasn't proposing an optimized system.

From the standpoint of industrial espionage operation, a 0.15% chance of success is pretty dismal. This is only good for the standpoint of protecting a particular device. If there is a secret that absolutely must be protected on every single device, I think that the company's security has much bigger problems than iPhone PINs.
I'm sure you can look at a coverage map and see that 3G service does not cover 100% of the continental USA let alone the world. Just because you live in a city (or major metropolitan area) doesn't mean that it's the only way of living.

It's like talking about how easy it is for Americans to get a variety of foreign foods nowadays because you happen to live in an area that has a diversity of people and food markets, while ignoring that there are places in America where those foods aren't in enough of a demand to make a speciality store feasible (or profitable enough for a major supermarket chain to carry them). [i.e. Just because you live in an apartment above an Indian food restaurant doesn't mean that it's just as easy for someone on the other side of town to get the same food from the same restaurant. -or- "It's sooo easy to get good organic food these days for all Americans, you just have to go to a Whole Foods! What? Whole Foods aren't in every city in America?"]
I have a relative who doesn't perceive red as a color at all, only as a change in brightness when it is added to or removed from an image. Presumably he still perceives red lights as having some sort of color and not just gray, but it isn't red.
The Antikythera mechanism (2 century BC) basically reset what we believed of science, mechanics and mathematical knowledge during antiquity. That, and some other things : Hero's Eolipyle, Nero's emerald monocle, Provence "industrial" mills... They had the ability, they lacked the will.
This essay is "super long" by web standards only.
> It's simple.

You're forgetting that Obama and the Dems campaigned on "we're far more competent than Bush and the Repubs. If you elect us, sea levels will fall, [etc]."

It's sort of like the "huge financial firms aren't giving money to Obama, that money comes from their executives" argument. While true, you never hear it about money going to Repubs.
Because it took a while to set this up. It seems like they are trying every solution they can think of, in the order in which they become ready.
Apple's Great Mistake - not allowing cloning of Apple Hardware
Well, if you don't understand your own code, it's probably not a good idea to write it that way (for-loops are a lot easier to read & verify if the stop condition depends on the loop variable, for example).

But your solution isn't just hard to read, it's also horribly broken. If you cannot figure out why, try printing the value of 'i' inside the loop.
It's not, just as much as VS2010 is not the best IDE
They may not abandon them completely, but they come pretty darned close. Diablo 2, for instance, still pegs my system pretty hard - 100% on a single core. Their display code apparently requires 256 color mode on startup, but not in-game, leading to the Mac launch problems a while back. It also lags occasionally on a single player or local network game and takes a second or two to catch up. And if you've ever tried allowing more than one person behind a NAT to connect to Battle.net, you'd realize just how little they've touched the older games, despite how much money they still get from them.

(For those interested:) The only way to allow more than one person to connect to Battle.net in the older games is to rewrite packets on your router (iptables or similar), because the games steadfastly refuse to communicate on any other ports, and don't even communicate error messages. They just fail to connect, as if the servers are down. How hard would it be to specify a launch parameter which sets which port you use? Even if it's not simple for the average user, a solution is better than none, and this has been an acknowledged problem for many years.
Whom is he arguing against? Does anyone say any of those things that he impersonated?
That would be a huge pain for me in Cambridge. Parking is a major expense and hassle here. And by this point, I don't really care to learn much more about cars. There are tons of things I'd rather be doing than auto maintenance.
J.L. interviewing Alexis Ohanian (reddit) right now (started 1pm PST).
> There are lots of items I consider too expensive and that buying it would be an invasion of my wallet.

But if you choose to buy it, isn't it no longer an 'invasion' by your logic?
With balancing college and startup life, I have done almost the exact same thing with my girlfriend. We even use shared GCals to manage all this, so that either of us can see if the other if free
Negroponte: One Laptop Per Child is now a $75 Android Tablet
> The barrier to space activity is heavy lift capability to get there at all.

Pipe dreaming. The barrier to space is the _tremendous_ amount of energy required to get anything to low-earth orbit, let alone getting raw material going back from Jupiter's vicinity. Even with 1000 times better technology (which won't arrive soon), your asteroid iron still will be costlier than platinum.

Science-fiction is mostly fiction, you know.
Ok HN, 5 weeks in, here's where our startup is at...
A couple weeks ago I started an ASK HN post to review our startup. We got lots of interesting advice, and we'd love more (original post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353337).

So here's an update with our startup, http://www.howl.com. We need your thoughts and suggestions and criticisms. Our initial post was less clear as to what we did. It should be clearer now, so here's what we've got.

Howl.com is a link blogging platform, a place to share and discover links. To post a link, you simply paste the URL. We'll grab the titles, description, thumbnails, and embed images or videos.

In the past couple weeks, we've added some features we think can give a bit more value to our users. They include:

- Ability to automatically post to Facebook and Twitter accounts whenever you post on Howl.
- Reblogging: 1 click to repost content directly to your link blog

- Thumbnail selector on the edit page, which scans the URL for images and lets you choose one as your post thumbnail. (we may include this directly in the posting process)

- Users subscriptions which will show posts in a a basic feed, and an explore page so people can see whats being posted and what the site is about

- A few little things like avatars, location/about fields, and giving your blog a custom title

Some things we haven't added yet that we want to do:

- Globalized comment pages, so that anyone who shares the same links can get to a centralized discussion page, where they can also see other people who posted the same link and other networking data.

- Add a "Preview" button that lets people see and edit their post before they publish it.

- Faster spider and posting process.

Please give it a try, you can use our demo account (demo // asdfasdf) or register your own. We'd love your feedback and can handle the tough stuff. Thank you very much!
get over it. some people like consistent ui controls between apps (hello, HIG) for a less confusing user experience. and really folks, flash has never been allowed to be in the store, yet somehow they've built a 200,000+ app ecosystem worth > $4B in revenues.

"get over it"? why?

Can I be the judge of what kind of UI controls I like instead of Apple deciding for me? This hasn't be a problem with any Windows or Linux app I've ever used or any webpage I've ever visited. I guess I don't confuse easily.

And without those same app store policies holding them back, how long do you think it will be before Android passes Apple's ecosystem?

200,000+ is a lot of apps, but how many of them are "fart apps" or something equally as useful?

The $4B in revenue also sounds like an impressive number, how much of that money is because users had to pay for apps to make up for the lack of flash? And why does it matter to me how much money they've made? Isn't that part of the problem? At the end of the day the app store doesn't exist to serve users, it exists to make Apple as much money as possible, this motivates them to maintain as much control over it as possible no matter what the cost to users or developers is.
Watching it on Justin.tv's gorgeous iPhone App.
And still no proper way to manage nuclear waste.
> Nuclear fission is currently on decline. We aren't even building enough power plants to maintain its output, nor are we likely to do so in the next 20 to 30 years.

That's a choice, one that we could change.

There are no technical or economic obstacles to building nuclear plants for far less money and in far less time that are just as safe (or safer) than what we have now. (France is an existence proof for much of the potential savings.)

There are, however, legal and political obstacles.
Yeah, and the Republicans campaigned on "all you need to know about energy is drill baby drill".

So do you think the government should have done more to prevent this? Or that this isn't a big deal and that the private sector is handling it fine?
That's what I mean : they had the ability to go to industrial age, they lacked the will, the impulse.
Maybe to a lesser extent on Hacker news, but I have definitely heard people attributing success to luck or just being at the right place at the right time more then a few times.
It seems like at a hardware level, commercially available stuff is catching up to something vaguely like the original OLPC vision: a stripped-down but fully functional portable computer available for circa $100. So basically frees them up to worry more about the software they're going to put on there, while it seems their first few years were spent largely on trying to find creative ways to get costs down without crippling the end result.
Even more amazing how fast it gets voted up here. You'd think this crowd would know better. :(
> Networking is the price of admission.

Obviously it is, but there are way too many people that seem to assume that networking is a given.

I have an internet connection at home and at work, but I do not pay for 3G on my cellphone or just for my laptop. Where do I fit into the world where all our computing happens 'in the cloud?' Will I be forced to start shelling out money for 3G in addition to the other costs that I incur to access the internet already? What happens when my carrier has a dispute with me over billing and they cut my 'everywhere' wireless access? Am I now powerless to get any work done on a computer, until I patch things up with them? Should this be considered some sort of blackmail since they are threatening my ability to use my computer when they threaten to take my internet connection away from me?
Some of us don't like paying for internet access twice to get it over our cell phones. Nor paying $100+/month for access that doesn't exist everywhere anyway.

As to encountering lack of internet access (ignoring cell access, which I don't have), how about all the time while driving? Or 95+% of the time when stopped, and not near a free, unencrypted wifi location? If you want to use your computer to get directions, you could save them locally... or lose access to them the moment you lose internet access, and nuts to you if you're lost.
You don't keep the turbofans in front of the scramjet all the time - you use them to give the scramjet enough air to start. As the speed increases, the turbofan engines would eventually cease to operate and could be shut off completely, leaving the scramjet to operate freely.

The turbofans are dead weight when you are cruising at Mach 7 in the upper atmosphere, but are useful for take off and landing.
> Right, but it's still finite to some degree, and selling people on growth which we cannot guarantee is possible is just plain irresponsible IMO.

Do you plan as if disk drives won't get more capacity? That ram and cpus won't get cheaper?

It's only irresponsible if you promise growth that won't happen. It's irresponsible to ignore growth that will or can happen.
This might be pretty technical legal stuff for HN but I posted it to alert private equity investors to an important California decision that limits their fiduciary-duty exposure for corporate actions in Delaware corporations.

Bottom line: if you are not a "controlling" shareholder, you can exercise special rights as a shareholder (such as a right to veto a deal) given to you by the terms of your investment without having that action second-guessed as being allegedly inimical to the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders on some theory that you breached fiduciary duties owed to the company (the ruling held that no fiduciary duty is owed in such a case). In other words, when it comes to exercising special rights given to them by a startup in connection with their investment, investors can freely act in their own self-interests without regard to its impact on the company.

This is primarily of interest to angel and VC investors (who might have a direct financial stake in such matters) but also to founders who need to understand that, when special rights are given to investors, they may be freely exercised against what the founders perceive to be theirs and the company's interests (therefore don't give these rights unless you intend to live with the consequences).
The Bartender of Your Dreams
You haven't seen many WinMo apps lately, have you?
You really haven't answered the question - what UI things need to be changed? I have very little exposure to Android, so I'm just asking out of curiosity rather than defensiveness.
The mac mini is more than a reasonable machine for development. I use it for gaming, design work in CS4 and development, when I don't feel like using my laptop.

That would mean that the 'tax' is only $500, or cheaper if you get it refurbished.
It's interesting they dropped the charges. I wonder if they were afraid to take the risk of a verdict that would have legalized alternate game servers (when you think about it : you bought the damn game, you should be allowed to plug it wherever you like). Even if that's really implausible, they really had nothing to gain with the lawsuit once they had scared the hackers away.
I'm pointing out their weaknesses because it
seems that most people are too focused on their
strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.

It's because people deal with strengths every time they use
web app, while weaknesses are encountered rarely and sometime
can be prepared for (getting maps cached, etc.)
Local mail app can get DB corrupted too.
This is also a great exercise to improve your writing of prose, if anybody is interested. Take a well-written couple of paragraphs (Hemingway, etc.), and try to write it better. It's a short exercise that teaches you the importance of the subtleties of style.
Guide to Evaluating Startup Ideas
> What happens when we don't have cell reception or and Internet connection?

This is a good point, and you can be certain that in any future wars/conflicts disabling "the cloud" will be a primary objective. My advice would be to by all means make use of cloud based services, but also make sure that you have local backups of any data you consider to be important.
Why not? If they paying you to train in it, there is nothing wrong with GWT. It might not be the best framework to do things in, or it might be, but the learning experience alone might be worth it. You can easily transfer those skills to Java Swing development and Adobe Flex.

So doet!
Technology sucks, it never works...
Nullege lets you search through code, while Google Code lets you search for projects. Pretty big distinction there, but I'll leave it up to you to decide which you find more useful. Either way they serve two completely different purposes.
i think he's talking about the small sliver of people on the opposite end of those that say "only by my bootstraps did i get to where i am". there definitely are people that revel in being seen as super humble and full of humility.

he said it briefly toward the beginning - "sure, there is some of that" (referring to luck playing at least somewhat of a role in most success). most people seem to be in this camp.
Best story of a lawyer trying to run a software startup (Loki). http://web.archive.org/web/20020418225227/http://www.linuxan... Not for the feint of heart.