skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D58LpHBnvsI )

Seriously, though, this has irritated me since the days where dialup internet access was all a normal person could get. All these plans were "unlimited", but in the TOS they made it clear that if you tried to use the service too much, or tried to stay connected too long, you're account would be suspended or closed.

Something is either unlimited or it isn't. If there's a cap it isn't unlimited. I guess I might cut them some slack if they described it as "effectively unlimited" (meaning that there was more bandwidth than an everyday person could expect to use). Of course, on many services that have been labeled "unlimited", even that would be arguable.

Of course, I don't expect most people in advertising to be honest about anything (goods/services are usually described as a hundred times better than they could possibly be), but that doesn't mean I'm not still annoyed by it.
Well its not in effect yet, because I just now signed up for the 29.99 unlimited plan via my iPad (I've been meaning to for about a week). AT&T having a large bureaucracy, there is probably a sizable delay between this announcement and its actual rollout.
It's worth noting that hn doesn't aspire to profitability via advertising - pg doesn't have to worry about things like "stickiness" and "reach".

So yes - hn is a great service to the community.
Submitted the correct pass phrase for 5, but stumped as to what to do next. I'm assuming the 404 is supposed to happen?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398391
So if I bought an iPad a few days ago am I grandfathered? Or does it need to be delivered and activated before I'm a 'customer'?

I feel like I was bamboozled. I bought something for a certain price, and by the time it arrives the terms have changed and suddenly I'm getting a lot less data for slightly less money.
Delete them off the list if it makes you feel better. It won't make a bit of difference in the long run though.
> If things get bad enough, can't Apple buy out the rest of the contract ahead of time?

The cost of doing that depends on the contract.

How much do you think that Apple should pay to do this? How much do you think that they're willing to pay? (My guess is that Apple isn't willing to pay more than they'd make by doing so.)
> That is an oversimplification, in important respects. There are multiple competing options for most of those platforms, responsibility for them is diffuse, and change happens very gradually.

Also, at some point it's not platform, it's infrastructure. You could assume that your business will use credit cards and online payment since this is part of the infrastructure but when you are using the payment API of company MegaCorp to have those payments, you might get burned with their particular Platform.

> I mean, yes, technically speaking, I am dependent on electricity. But that doesn't mean there is a $8 an hour representative at the power company whose job is to shut down 24 businesses today to preserve the power company's vision for what proper use of electricity looks like, and whose decision is beyond repeal.

This isn't a good comparison. The thing is the electricity provider is much more regulated by laws, more stable and slower in changes compared to some other companies. Also -- it's infrastructure.

Technically, some "power company vision" is kept since you can't actually put any two wires to make a gizmo and sell it on the market as a product.

Another interesting factoid: home users have a limit on how much electricity you can consume. After a given limit you have to ask special permit from the electricity provider and probably pay extra. The trick is all these things are stipulated somewhere and public.
"You can use PowerShell to script all of your deployment and server management operations, and you can remotely invoke all of those scripts as well."

I've looked into powershell, but remote powershell isn't much better than shell scripts executed over SSH (and in some ways worse). Tools like Capistrano, Puppet, Chef, etc. don't seem to exist for Windows as yet.
This is definitely the answer :)
Ah the free market at it's best. Allowing consumers to unwittingly screw themselves over and over. Steve Jobs approved.
Jon "maddog" Hall Evaluates TCO vs ROI on Software
I have to agree, actually. More to the point, this submission violates both the written and unspoken rules of submissions here: "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something", and the unspoken rule that content-less submissions are generally frowned upon.

This is something that could have been equally effective as a brief email to pg. As the current top-ranked post here, it's kind of ... masturbatory.
The MOTO Cliq is stuck on 1.5. The G1 runs 1.6 just fine.
And don't forget to use the new cover sheet. You did get the memo, right?
Out of interest, which IDE do you use that is Windows-only? Visual Studio?
from comments: "Another one, not yet ripe in 1943, is to require non-job-related mandatory annual training in such areas as diversity, sexual harassment, ethnic sensibilities, etc. Especially as critical deadlines approach. Use outside consultants to provide training. Put the whole requirement under a cost sink department like HR. Tie HR performance bonuses to 100% compliance goal."

Hilarious. I had to go through one of these time wastes for "customer support training" recently: the outside consultant's one advice was: "don't say 'no problem' to a request because it may imply negativity."
Hacker News is the craigslist of Social News sites.
I'm another one of the mostly passive readers of the site, mostly because I'm teaching myself to program, rather than actually being a programmer.

HN has raised my awareness, made me more thoughtful about how and what I actually think about things (part of the passivity comes from the idea that any sloppy thought will be immediately shot down (rightfully so)), and overall contributed to an ongoing desire to be a larger part of the overall tech community online.

Thanks to PG (whose essays I often reread -"Keep Your Identity Small" is one I constantly refer to other people - for HN and providing this nonname wannabe programmer a place to learn. And to learn to think. Thank you, PG.
Verizon may be testing 4G iPad
hn owes a lot of it's success to it's small audience. simply put, this site would go down in flames fast if it attracted a larger crowd. all of the complex facilities of a site like digg or slashdot come from trying bubble up relevant content to a wide audience
Is a meta-platform possible? Leaving 3.3.1 aside, what about a company acting as a clearinghouse that takes care of all of the platform issues for you, submits your app, markets it, takes care of payment.

Perhaps this is possible with Javascript web apps for mobile devices?
EXACTLY. Why are these updates PAID!. I know many phone users would love to pay for them.
Tell you what - hack into the SEC and DOJ servers and give me the skinny on that Goldman Sachs case. Yeah I know access is restricted, but its our tax dollars, right? I mean, what could go wrong?

Basically, if you persuade the pilot of a plane or boat to flout FAA or Coast Guard regulations by bribery or deception, you could be charged with reckless endangerment or be accused of having committed various torts. I do not agree with this media blackout at all, but as a practical matter most journalists and pilots would rather not run afoul of some overstressed official with arrest powers.
Illegal to record an on-duty officer?
(Ruby-Ru) + (FoxPro-Kung Fu Panda-XX)+

The panda is Po, and I assume the other is Fox.

(CD-PHI-XX) + (JAVA-XX-J) +
Should be
(Delphi - PHI - EL) + (Java - VA - J)

EL is the initials of Emmeril, and VA is of course Virginia abbreviated.

I'm still stuck on the boot. =/
General explanation of how this is possible:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/sailing-into-the-wi...
FoxPro - Po - Fox

It's an "ugg" not a boot!
This really throws some light on how misleading "unemployment" numbers really are. There are an increasing number of underemployed Americans who are sometimes worse of than the unemployed because they are not eligible for unemployment benefits
5 Ways to Start Commenting Like a Rockstar
Although submitted later, for this submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398402

the person submitting it has taken the time to trim the URL of all the crap that this one has:

utm_source=feedburner &
utm_medium=feed &
utm_campaign=
Feed%3A +
oreilly%2Fradar%2Fatom +
%28O%27Reilly +
Radar%29
&
utm_content=Google+Reader

Please, people, trim the URLs and give the duplication detection mechanism a chance. It would make HN a marginally better place.

Alternatively, please, PG, implement the mechanism I suggested ages ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215

It's not perfect, but it would help keep discussions in one place instead of getting spread over multiple submissions.
Or just use links instead of arrows:

4 points by alanh 18 minutes ago | link | parent | flag | upvote | downvote
Objective-C Moves Into Top of Tiobe Programming Language Index
for some reason when i first looked at it .. i thought it was startups - hovels = homes for startups .. or is it supposed to be startup - shovels ... confused ??
The issue seems to be reliability. Ventrillo was a bad situation because it could change one day and break anything built on top of it. With an OS and some hardware, I can be confident that a program written today will still run a year from now, because those have proven to be reliable platforms.
What's interesting, is that Hacker News does generate revenue in a very indirect way. By cultivating a hacker community around his early stage investment company he is ensuring there will always be top-notch thinkers and doers participating in the niche he has created. Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know, but it works well for both parties: he has a thriving community of leading edge people, and the people have a leading edge outlet. It's a well balanced form of co-creation.
Perhaps Apple has been taken over by foreign insurgents following the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
The apps that I have developed were so small and the requirements for the projects did not require it to be fast. I hope to do a few more projects down the road where speed will be an issue, but that is a ways away.
The most amazing is that developpers have to pay to develop for Apple. I won't.
Call it "abstain."
Thanks for the tip. I asked a rep at the AT&T store about this and was told by them it wasn't possible. Would be nice if they knew their stuff.
That was the missing link! Perfect answer!
Yes, I have same issue - unless it's a dummy error....
Agreed as well; HN has a "fourth wall" in a sense - meta posts are discouraged where possible.

This is the very definition of a meta post (and from a personal perspective I dislike the fawning tone too)
Layar’s New Augmented Reality Browser Makes For A Strong Location Play
Venture Pimp: CookUp Books makes personalized kids books on demand
Temp agencies depend on people not having effective strategies for selling themselves.
I agree with what you are saying. Someone who spent years trying to build a real startup and working hard at it would likely make a fine employee if they failed (and have no need to work if they didn't want to if they succeeded in a big way).

But that is not what this article is about. Most the entrepreneurs they are talking about are not startup founders in the sense you mean. They are not trying to build the next big thing. They are instead working as individual contractors at poor pay (compared to what they had before at least) soley because they cannot get full time work.

While I do not necessarily think this should be held against them, especially not with the way the global economy has been lately, this is still a very different situation than being a startup founder trying to build something brand new.
What Will You Miss When The Internet Is Gone?
I will miss the Hacker News.
" I might be more tempted to null or downvote the original point if the second one is better"

Can't both comments be good?
Article is better than expected. Because it looks like the application itself isn't doing much at all (receive message over socket, touch some memory) you're probably better off with a simple thread pool and some lock free data structures if you're really going for raw performance. On the other hand, it does serve as another data point that a Java solution can be fast enough.

Anyway, I think that thinking in terms of "message throughput" is really harmful. The author starts with a throughput of 120.000 messages per second and ends up with 800.000 messages per second which gives the advertised 6 times speedup. But essentially at 120.000 messages per second you have a "process overhead" of a mere 0.008 milliseconds. That's 8 microseconds. Microsecond!

I'll just repeat that. Overhead of 0.008 milliseconds per message in the SLOW case. So if you want to write the message to file, or do any kind of hash table lookup or want to do any kind of back end processing, whether you have 0.008 milliseconds or 0.002 milliseconds overhead per message is not going to be that big of a deal.
Funny how they don't mention Reddit. I got tired of Reddit during the Ron Paul days and other than some nutty basement libertarian flare-ups, it's been quite good lately. I've never seen a community like that actually recover.
> I agree with Buffett's sentiments when it comes to dynastic wealth in America (namely, I oppose it).

That's nice, but let's look at how Buffet behaves.

(1) He's set up his estate so it won't be taxed.

(2) He sells insurance to pay estate tax bills. Yes, he profits from the estate tax.
It does look like startup hovels. Maybe StartupShovels.com would be better?
I've often thought the same.

This should be easy as a greasemonkey script to save other people having to make changes to support it.

---------------

EDIT: Out of curiosity I made up a javascript bookmarklet that seems to do the trick... upsize all the page's upvotes to 30x30

javascript:{im=document.images;iml=im.length;for(i=0;i<iml;i++) {if(im[i].src=="http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow.gif"){im[i].width="30";im[i].height="30" } } alert("Done"); void(null);}

Cut and paste that into your browser URL bar, or bookmark etc. It's easy to validate by eye, for the worried
hn's nested threads built with <table> are so simple that they're brilliant. No horizontal scrolling, no flipping between pages, just click "reply" and you're good to go.

I don't think <table>s should get undue praise. With <div>s, the code would be easier to read mechanically (for manipulation with Greasemonkey, say) and even though there'd be a little more CSS, the page weight might be reduced a little (I'd have to make a mockup to be sure ;-))
does anybody have any idea what's going on here?

If I had to guess I'd say that the code is doing too much synchronization between threads that, in the end, only one thread really gets to run at a time anyways at which point moving the process from CPU to CPU is the only thing going on besides running that one thread on the server, hence it's way faster if it doesn't have to do any moving around.

IMHO this is an indication of a bug in the code and not generic advice. Or does somebody see another issue that might cause this?
This is nonsense - I know people in quant funds who have tried to do things like this. All the boring stuff that Google doesn't care about, like SEC filings and Quarterly Reports, matter far more than aggregate attention. I'm sorry but if you're making decisions for a multi-million dollar fund, and you tell investors that your investments are based on the twitterings of the unwashed masses, you'll be sent home before you've had your lunch.

Even if there is value in their data (and I do imagine enough PhD's could find some reasonable strategies) - there would be such a public outcry that it wouldn't be worth it from a PR perspective.
Well, why not combine a 3D printer AND lego?

Since I've got a long summer, I'm now really tempted to make a RepRap (http://reprap.org/) with lego like this. Imagine how cool it would be to show that to kids: A lego-robot making lego!
If HN ever got as large as digg it would suffer from much of the problems that digg has, and you will not be able to remedy those by 'staying simple'.

Digg is complex because it is that large, and I think that if HN ever got that large it would start to suffer in much the same ways. HN is not so much a reflection of the person that built it (though that definitely does help) as it is a reflection of the people that participate here.

If and when HN gets to the size of digg and it retains its character it will have broken the pattern that any social news site has so far exhibited, until then the jury is out.
Commercial platforms are for suckers. Open platforms are huge wins.
You also get stories in publications that are always hurting for an interesting story.
^^ THIS. I love it when sites use DIVs because it makes much much easier to chop them up and display them the way I want to by using Stylish or GreaseMonkey. The browser is a customizable viewer...your stylesheet is just a suggestion.
I up voted you because you're correct. It would have easily sufficed as an email to PG.

However, the impact of appreciating something and having communal pooling of appreciation affirms the intent. I want HN to remain what it is and I did not want to be "just another email" in PG's inbox; I suppose by submitting this in the first place I contributed to "what HN is not" but I do still feel that my submission was appropriate in the sense that my intent was an intelligent choice and not a "masturbatory" choice.
I'll concede that there may be a jump in logic. And it is upsetting that a developer that plays by the rules gets denied for some unforeseeable reason. But I am tired of reading the same Apple is screwing the developers story. Why so much negativity in this thread?
Hear hear.
Phew, thanks for that. You just saved me from wasting away the rest of my night. Head smacking moment when I got the final answer.
Stuck on 9. Think I'll stop before I lose my whole day.
It's an ego problem. They can't do your job, so they assume you can't do theirs. If you could, then clearly you're smarter and that's hard to handle.

Of course the real problem is that non-tech people rely more on political skills and networking to get and keep their jobs. Their day to day work skill set is often quite low.
Why are Bing and Yahoo not viable alternatives?

Mostly because they have decisively lost the search market in the United States. I deal with one of the most non-technical niches imaginable, and Google gives me 10x the traffic that Bing does. (It is an interesting question of whether this is solely because Google is crushing Bing in market share, or if it is a reflection of adaptation of my business to meet Google's demands. That is largely academic, though. Its a factor of freaking ten.

Bing and Yahoo could both go dark tomorrow permanently and I might not even notice. The last time Google went dark, for 45 minutes, I started fielding customer support queries about how I "broke the Internet". And while that is amusing phrasing, I don't think it is false. Google is navigation on the open Internet. (Insert obligatory disclaimer: for English speaking Americans. It is a bit different in Japan. It is even more lopsided in the UK in Google's favor.)

Edit to add: Do not get me started on their PPC services. Its like Bill Gates said "We want this to have the technical chops of Google and the dedication to service of a convent!" and the memo got horribly, horribly misread.
I had a chance to examine some at Maker Faire and it has a rubber feel. Do any of these other materials? I'd be interested in alternatives because Sugru isn't cheap.
If you use Selector Gadget - http://www.selectorgadget.com/ - it's possible to divine pretty horrible and complex CSS and XPath matches for things on Hacker News but.. they're far from entirely reliable. A lot of ugly TABLE TD:nth-child(5) stuff..
my htc on tmobile was stuck on 1.5, I had to do a bit of googling and some command line hackery to upgrade it. I'm guessing most moms & dads are not going to know what to with a command line prompt, even with great instructions.
I like the simple layout, but sometimes I wish I could minimize threads (kinda like how Reddit does it)
Nope.

There is nothing preventing people from abandoning Android 1.5. Contracts run up and people are thrown fancy new phones for free. Nobody has built mission-critical business apps around Android 1.5, as some big businesses have ActiveX/IE6.

Android 1.5 will simply be discarded. It's already closer to that than IE6 is!
I like everything about the post except for the word "platform." That is an overly broad word that does mean web browsers and the Internet itself and electricity. I prefer the phrase Proprietary Platform, because the issue is one of control.

If a single vendor gains control of the "market" for web browsers, as Microsoft did for a while, you are at their mercy. If there are multiple, competing web browsers and control of the APIs (e.g. HTML, CSS, JS) is decentralized, you are at the mercy of the whims of the marketplace, but no one person can wake up in the morning and decide to shut you out.

The concerns raised in this post are isomorphic to Apple's concerns about Flash. They don't mind developers using web standards to develop apps because no one vendor controls HTML, CSS, and JS. If developers write their apps in HTML, JS, and CSS, Adobe cannot flip a switch overnight and break every app on iPhone because their proprietary tools no longer emit a flavour of JS that runs on iPhone without errors.

So...

Proprietary Platforms are for Suckers.
I watched the video, and had absolutely no fucking idea what the point was, or what it was, or anything. she just stuck some orange shit to a pair of scissors.
Facebook 'Like' button draws privacy scrutiny
#824 stackoverflow.com - Music
As of right now, if you're an existing iPad user, you can still sign up for the unlimited plan (I just tried it).
good list.
great information. thanks :) strange that it didn't get more atention
> How exactly do you logically go from "Don't make apps that do what Apple devices can already do natively" to "Thou shalt not make a cool picture frame app"?

When you make your picture frame app look like a desktop.

I feel sorry for the guys, because it was certainly unintended. The path they took to adding value to their picture frame app unfortunately shifted the gestalt from picture frame to desktop, and when you're moving in that direction, you might fail to notice the shift. But it is entirely reasonable for Apple to disallow apps that can confuse the UI hierarchy for the user. Obviously, none of us on this site are going to be confused by it, but they have to take a much broader demographic of users into account.
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man. - - - - Leon Trotsky
Corporate HQ in Paradise
hint: The name of the picture might suggest something.
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes
Eating for Peak Brain Performance
Sometimes I wish people still wrote down their thoughts, instead of telling a camera about them and uploading it to Vimeo.
I have learned to quickly sort people out by telling them about whatever is the most improbable project I'm fiddling with at the moment. The project is unimportant; what is telling is their response. I get one of three responses, no interest, that's cool, or you're an idiot. Quickly tells me whether they're worth further time or not.
Smart. Both you and them. They knew that they were ultimately saving time and money.
Find Your Voice: Writing for a Webzine
Agreed. I upvote contradictory comments all the time. I don't see it as lacking consistency; I'm voting for quality and thought, not necessarily "right" opinions.
Well operating-system obsolete. You can probably still get apps as long as the developer targets an older version number.