skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazing how groupthink works. Even people that don't work at Adobe now refuse to see the issue from the other side's perspective.

This guy says that Flash performs consistently across platforms, when it doesn't. That's the main reason for the whole argument, Adobe neglected Macs for years. They did not improve things that could have been improved without Apple's help. Like http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82

And why should Apple devote resources to Flash when they're working on a technology that does the exact same thing in WebKit, canvas, etc..? Flash is not a standard, no one agreed to improve it or support it. They only agreed to support HTML/JS/CSS web standards. No one owes Adobe their support.

Microsoft could ignore Flash and push their own Silverlight instead. The lack of cooperation might make Flash inferior over time, but that's the risk Adobe took by not agreeing to become a standard when offered the chance.
What if parents with autistic tendencies prefer vinyl flooring? We already know that there is a genetic connection.
Facebook 0: no data fees for mobile Facebook, say goodbye to competition
The pricing is just right too.
Correlation != Causation.
Targeted Facebook ads are not worth much; I would expect untargeted, privacy-friendly Diaspora ads to be worth even less (i.e. zero).

Also, I think hosting can be done for $99/year which doesn't seem like that much to me.
when asked he replies, "hmmmm.... uh. Of Course!"
Congrats on funding another cool company/idea, from the Awesome Foundation Boston! It was cool meeting up at sxsw

Additionally, I really dig what you funded there. I like musical toys, synths, kits, etc... and I might just buy one. Get them to make a YouTube clip and I'm probably sold on it. Even moreso if I could buy it as a kit for ~70% of the retail price.
Hell, they might as well. Our college used them as ID numbers for the first year I was there. We wrote it on all our tests. Forget about it, that stuff isn't secure.
In fact, the US military uses the SSN for the serial number, as in "name, rank, and serial number", the (only) information you are supposed to report to your captors if taken prisoner.

I've always worried that enemy forces would capture our troops, steal their identities, and then ruin their credit.
That's cool, take away choice in emerging markets so competing social networks don't stand a chance.

Let's let the CEOs of the Telcos and Marck Zuckerberg decide which social network everyone in emerging markets will use.
State of media 2010: businessweek for $5m, associated content for $90m. gulp.
Not a chance. I remember PCs from that era struggling when playing MP3s.
I like how it looks on the outside as an experiment, but it obviously can't be sustained without rules -- surely they won't let someone come in, take everything for a penny, and leave?

It has the stench of a publicity stunt, but it seems well intentioned nevertheless.
Apple iPad supply dwindling? NYC Metro area sold out?
Except it isn't just between apple and adobe. I wrote a little browser called Arora and constantly had to deal with the pink elephant in the room that was flash. While my browser ran good on arm boxs, tvs, and random embedded hardware eventually those who were messing around with arora on embedded hardware would come and ask me how to run flash at which point my only option was to tell them to give lots of $$$ to adobe who may or may not give them something they can use (assuming x86 or arm to begin with!). On the desktop it wasn't much better. Flash would cause crashes, behave stupid and without the source it made things harder then it should have been. Not to mention memory leaks. I quickly added FlashBlock as a standard feature to Arora. Flash also prevented me from looking into serious process separation (back before it was big with chrome) due to the amount of work involved because of flashes dependency on a top level window. As a user I hate how flash uses memory and cpu. As a developer I just hate flash.
Well you gotta admit, you can't accuse this guy of lying, or not putting his money where his mouth is.
> lucky

Or Lifelock is pretty good.
That has got to be one of the most comprehensive comparisons out there. Been waiting a long time for this!
Funny, I am still waiting for Wakemate to give me hardware so I can evaluate the product!
Dictionary definitions are typically not scientific definitions in that they are colloquial and potentially ambiguous.

The definition implies that the substance has to enter the body somehow, so hair gel and plaster are out. As for intention, there's potential ambiguity, but for the most part we know what it means. Word definitions aren't programs, we can settle for "good enough." But the parents definition was, to me, obviously too inclusive.
Taxonomy of the Apple iPhone
It's not about getting clicks while you're reading gmail (the adwords on the side), it's about mass gathering data about you and others.

Re-read run4yourlives message. He does not say gmail tries to sell you product X, but gmail tells Google you might be in a buying mood for product X.
phthalates have been linked to behavioral problems in children before, http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/phthalates-a...

It's also been linked to asthma, allergies, endocrine disruption, obesity and diabetes. The federal government recently banned them in children's toys.

So even if this study turns out not to hold up, you should keep this stuff away from kids. The other worrisome chemical in plastic is BPA.
How the Computer Gets the Answer
http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic_example

Teaches you how to use the Authlogic plugin for authentication. Uses neat things like before_filters, helpers, partials, layouts, and more.

Good luck!
I don't have any technical objections to it, but there is value to having a consistent experience across the platform.

Right now, the difference probably is not that great between Sense and stock, but I'm sure HTC sees Sense as a competitive differentiator, and there-in lies the danger.

I'm sure it will be tempting to keep tweaking it, until at some point you could hardly tell the phone was an Android device, and non-HTC apps looked wildly out of place.

If I have any misconceptions please correct them, this is just my take from reading what information there is out there on it, I don't have a Sense device.
Isn't this headline kind of the same as saying that hunting is wrong when they buy meat from a store? It seems to ignore all the things that happen around a person to allow them to live (e.g. fertilizer for crops). Reducing dependance is one this (good on him), but the need wasn't eliminated.
A gift to HNers working on a startup - Giving back to the community
FYI... This is from 2002. I was hoping for some new info as I loved working with HyperCard during college.
Two out of three ain't bad?

While I'd like to blog about the internals and experience, we sell mostly in the B2B large corporation space, and our small size is our largest pain point during the sales cycle. I think an open blog about our internal business growth would make things worse for us, not better.
Red Dead Redemption 360 vs. PS3: our thoughts
Thanks Giannii. Just so everyone knows, it looks like Giannii and I have gotten this close to solved over IRC now. +1 for Disqus's new support.
It's somewhat annoying to me that Flash proponents seem to muddy the lines between app development and website development. I've seen so many arguments lately that either Flash is more open than the App Store, so Apple should allow Flash in the browser, or Flash is more capable than HTML5 so Apple should allow Flash apps in the App Store.

Flash is less open than HTML5 in the browser, it churns the battery, it's slow, and it's unreliable. It crashes on the Mac often, it doesn't support hardware video decoding (yet) and there isn't a stable version released for ANY Arm platform yet. Adobe is so far behind it's not even funny, and the arguments that Apple should have allowed Flash from the start are ridiculous because three years later it's still not ready for prime-time.

As for app development, Flash produces much larger apps that run slower and use more memory than native iPhone apps. There's no way to provide a truly 'native' UI (CocoaTouch) so developers will have to re-invent everything in ways that doesn't work or look like regular iPhone apps. Like Adobe Air apps, Flash apps on the iPhone would end up working and looking different not only from other native apps, but from each other as well. Users would have to get used to different behaviour from every app, instead of having a uniform set of behaviours that they can quickly learn and internalize.

If you're going to complain about Flash on the iPhone, it would behoove you to specify which specific implementation of Flash you're referring to, and compare it just to the equivalent offering for the iPhone. Otherwise, you're just making confusing arguments that don't hold water.
Thanks guys. How did your interview on NPR go?
Its interesting you could do all this with a SSN. The program I mean. If you can do this easily, then why can dead people still vote... I am being serious.
The "Too long, didn't read" version: Thanks for sharing your experiences while you build your startup. We want to help you by allowing you to advertise your startup on our site for free for the rest of the summer (end of August).
10.1 is not just a port, it's a bunch of changes that were made specifically for mobile devices - including suspending execution state, reducing performance of player instances when in hidden tabs/outside of view, hardware acceleration, better reuse of bitmap instances (targetting lower memory), and a bunch of other stuff. I'm not the one to say how successful they were with that, but apparently they had "much-needed improvements" in mind alright.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht...

Most benchmarks show great improvements in performance and memory use between 10 and 10.1.
We (iTeleport) meet these criteria. We just started our blog a couple of weeks back:

http://blog.iteleportmobile.com/

Our latest post details some revenue numbers:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329108

We're going to try to keep posting actively...
"Take away choice"? That is a bizarre characterization of this move.
I always knew this was a good idea. This just shows it. and Couch surfing sort of backed it up. Im glad to see that this is really taking off. Maybe hotels could start charging less. I imagine they could be seeing a extremely small decline in their revenue.
You're inverting a business positive into a consumer negative. Of course businesses want loyal repeat buyers. Of course businesses will all use similar tactics to win loyalty. But "evil and monopolistic" could only be the case when you're talking about an application or platform like Photoshop or Windows that influences an entire ecosystem of other work. Businesses based around content like music or games stand to benefit from piracy equally well; it's an opportunity for the best creators to rise in popularity and build their brand outside of traditional publishing mechanisms. As pointed out earlier in this discussion, content pirates aren't content buyers and their demographics are wildly different. If they become part of the pool of buyers at a later time(e.g. when they have disposable income), they're going to seek out familiar brands and buy from them. But this doesn't impact any other content business, since it's based almost entirely on the strengths of the work and not lock-in.
What Is Yahoo Thinking? Buying Associated Content Opens Up A Whole Can Of Worms
You check out Zencoder? http://zencoder.com/

Another HN community gem imho.
Bonzai Tree
View our vast range of Bonzai Trees collection online at http://emperorsbonsai.net/
Subsidizing access to Facebook makes all competition relatively more expensive.
Everyone that I know are using Chrome right now, except guys like me that like to tweak their browsers (something that Chrome fails miserably) and some extensions that sadly does not fit well into Chrome architecture. The other major problem (a search bar) was partly solved by Duck Duck Go.
We'll now within 10 minutes of installing 4. If it's not drastically faster than the current version, then the story is over and we're starting a dull, pointless addendum.
This came up recently in reference to Steve Jobs terminating with extreme prejudice an iPad HyperCard ... after saying someone should do it.

runRev says they have Hypercard for a variety of platforms, but they'll be punting for the most part on the iWhatever ecosystem: http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev-blog/revmobile-and-appl...

As for a grander vision of Hypercard as discussed in the article, I'm not sure, but you can check their site and see what they say.
You can sketch inside of a Popplet. I don't think of this as an app so much as an organizer. If I were Apple, I'd acquire this and let Files from various apps populate a Popplet, with the App "zooming" to view or edit each file.

Something like that would pretty much be the full equivalent of Courier.
It is consumer friendly.

Credit bureaus are designed to protect lenders, not lendees.
I seriously doubt Oracle has the right philosophy and ideals to preserve what was good at Sun.

Sun was a hardware company and should focus on it and open-source whatever they could. OpenSolaris is a wonderful driver for sales of Thumper-class servers.
How about iPad + Bluetooth keyboard?
Black duck eggs and other secrets of Chinese hackers
Making it free is actually providing an option where there wasn't one before. Many people around the world can't afford data.

Facebook hating is trendy lately but not everything they're doing is bad. Be real.
This guy says that Flash performs consistently across platforms, when it doesn't. That's the main reason for the whole argument, Adobe neglected Macs for years. They did not improve things that could have been improved without Apple's help. Like http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82

Agreed. Why has it taken this long to develop a 64-bit version of the Flash plugin for Linux? Yes it's a difficult software development task, but a company like Adobe should thrive on solving difficult software development tasks where its competitors fail. Apple certainly did. One of the main problems that I see with Flash (and Adobe in general) is they make closed platforms--that are bad! If they were closed and worked great they wouldn't have half as many detractors. If they were more open (so that other developers could fix them), same deal. Instead, they're closed and bad which is, in my view, the worst possible situation.
Cool. Do you have to have a credit card on file?
It also increases Adobe's bottom-line because poor university students learn to use the tool by downloading the pirated version while they are in school (the 'edu' version of Photoshop was still $300 last I checked), then they pay for the full version once they are actually using it for business.

Actually, Adobe's edu prices are actually very reasonable. Looking at my colleges sales site (well, SUNY system's), the minimum edu discount given is upwards of $1000, and usually closer to $1300. CS5 {Design, Production, Web} Premium are all $385, Design Standard is $220.

I could definitely afford $225, let alone $385, if needed. As could most others that I know (even if they would complain about the price).

The software company that I havent found this to be the case for is Quark, with XPress. And thats when selling to colleges directly, not to students. Its still $600-$700 off for students to purchase on their own (totaling ~$200). And SUNY has an even better discount, bringing the cost down to $100.
Facebook’s emergency privacy meeting was a total failure
That is not taking away choice or making any other choice more difficult. Your logic implies that any improvement Facebook makes would "take away choice" by making other products less attractive to choose.

You should also consider the fact that there are many people in the developing world who couldn't afford to use any social network on their phone before this. They've gone from zero choices to one.
> Most people in the US who eat tons of sugar are not vegetarians.

How do you know this? Have you studied the sugar consumption of vegetarians?
I foresee a product placement in The Hurt Locker II.
You say that as if it doesn't affect me.

I'm not against flash because that happens to be the stance I get after choosing my preferred corporate side, I'm against flash because it's a pain in my side personally as an end user and that happens to be Apple's side so hey hello Apple.
Voter rolls do not contain your SSN (since volunteers man the registry at polling stations it is considered bad form to put something like this on a list that may just walk out the door at the end of election day.) Voter rolls contain name and address at time of registration or last update to registration. These registries are occasionally purged of dead people when possible, but the risk (a few "dead" people voting) is considered slight compared to the cost of keeping the registry up to date or of disenfranchising someone by mistakenly deciding that they were dead.
Google Duplicate Content And WordPress – An Unresolved Problem | BPWrap
Majel Barrett, please.
Sal Khan gave an interesting hypothesis about why his lectures were more engaging (he uses a blackboard) than a traditional one with a person in the front. I recommend watching the video, but his point is that we tend to focus on the person, the movement of the hands. When you remove the person, you're sort of left with a voice inside your head explaining stuff.

http://vimeo.com/11731351
> But "evil and monopolistic" could only be the case when you're talking about an application or platform like Photoshop or Windows that influences an entire ecosystem of other work.

Are you sure that you're responding to the right comment? I said nothing about 'evil' or 'monopolistic.'
I've heard of a study that found a link between U.K. nuclear power plant sites and cancer ... including ones they were only thinking about placing a plant in.
Two wheel balancing does have some advantages: We wanted the robot to be human height and have a small footprint so that it could navigate nicely through doors and tight spaces. To keep a tall, small based robot from falling over you have two choices:

1) You can put a whole bunch of weight in the base. (This is the route that Willow Garage seems to be going. They have a huge lead acid battery in the base. The advantage of this is that it is static and 'always on'. The disadvantage is that your robot has to be really heavy.

2) You can be dynamically stable. With this approach when you are bumped you use your drive system to actively deal with the disturbance. The advantage of this is you can deal with much larger disturbances (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkzgglYjNvY) The disadvantage is that it only works when there is power.

I totally agree on the battery failure scenario and it is something we have thought about a lot. We have a separate board that just does the balancing and it has a separate Ultra-capacitor power supply that can power the drive system for several minutes; long enough to put our kickstand down and sit. You can crash the main CPU and pull the batteries out and the robot will sit safely.

I don't know if self balancing is for sure better than statically stable, but I think it is less clear cut than what you imply.

-Benjie (Engineer at Anybots, obviously)
Surely in that case the solution is simple: if he didn't sign for an auto loan, then his signature will not be on file with the auto loan company, and the burden of proof should fall on them to demonstrate that he is who he says he is (by checking suitable ID during the loan application, if necessary).
Newzbin (paid usenet search engine) closes due to legal action
The Future of Music – Statements, Musikmesse 2010 | The Future of Music
Strongly agree. The book is a quick read and has broad implications. I worked with the author (Daniel Pink) to create a mobile app based on the book. Daniel is a great guy who lives what he writes.

Plug: the app is free and called "Dan the Motivation Roo" currently on Android only
Tradeshift launches in Denmark
Your shit-free religion seems delicious. Especially this part:

"... The discussion always seems to revolve around funding, or getting acquired, and retiring.

Or growth. Or hiring. Or tech tricks. Or it’s about affiliates and IM products, and getting rich off teaching people’s parrots to talk.

Or it’s about hyper-optimization, and split-testing which way you should orient the toilet paper roll. (The answer is over, not under, by the way.)

Or everyone in the group agrees that they are working on the next big breakthrough, when really they’re just building a social network for dogs.

..."

I feel your pain -I'm also reading HN. Looking forward seeing your take.
> the article talks about scientific rigorous way to test something.

The article is about a specific study. It does not 'talk about scientific rigorous way to test something.' Nowhere in my post did I mention that we should all abandon the scientific process, or just disregard it when we 'believe' something different than what the results say.
most of the internet doesn't use HTTPS, they use plain HTTP. HTTPS prevents man in the middle attacks...
For you to say that, you probably didn't share the same experience I did.

Surely there's some aspect that is norm versus unique, but that's not what kept me watching it to the very end. If that's all it was, I would have stopped watching halfway through (as the uniqueness wore off).

No-- instead, the presentation style held my attention the entire time. And this is for a talk that I had already heard previously. It was stronger than one of those unfortunately placed TVs at a restaurant playing something colorful, this drew my attention and held it even though I would have typically moved on much sooner.

Perhaps no one else had the same reaction to it as I did, but I don't think I'd easily tire of lectures being presented with this kind of quality. Just my $.02.
Ask HN: Feedback on Collaboration Platform - MooGroups
We just launched the public beta of Moogroups.com ! The service creates a webpage to host your group conversation that looks similar to a private Facebook Wall. Letting you share embedded media, files, and poll friends in your conversation. We are still working out some minor bugs but the service is pretty much functional.

Please give it a try and send us your feedback!

How to use Moogroups?

step 1| Email us at start@moogroups.com
Write as if you were sending a group email without the recipients.

step 2| See the workspace you made
We reply instantly with a link to your new workspace.

step 3| Add participants, files, or polls
Customize your workspace and add participants using our simple layout
Students in Laptop Spying case get to view 58k photos
The Increasing Irrelevance Of The Major Record Labels
At the end of the video it says images were done by "cognitive media". Here's a link to that company: http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk/
SEC, exchanges mull tight circuit breakers to avoid future market free falls
Ask HN: Hackers' Movies
Hi all,
It seems to me that even Hackers need to relax ! I think that we can learn a lot from movies so if you know movies that can help us in our hacker dailylife please share !
How can I tell the code running on the server is same as the code you posted on Github?
>Certainly, Google Chrome is now growing at a much faster pace than Firefox is.

I get tired of seeing this repeated ad nauseam. It's easy to grow fast from zero; Firefox grew fast from zero. It's a lot harder to grow fast from double-digit penetration.
I want to see its memory management. Chrome destroys FF in this area, in my experience. It is even worse when you're running add-ons(which I can forgive, to an extent), but even when disabling those, it is still a hog.