skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AFAIK : office webapps are currently in beta.
These are not centralized solutions in the way Facebook is. If I use Gmail does that force you to use Gmail?

Great services like Gmail only became possible because SMTP isn't tied to a particular proprietary service. Individuals can use the service that's most appropriate for them. For some people, that's Outlook, for others, a webmail provider. Competition works.

What we really need is a system that crosses social-networking-service providers in the same way that SMTP broke down the barriers between various mail systems.
Yeah, that's the way I read it also.
For the source code, I wouldn't include the compressed jQuery if possible. Speed isn't as important here as transparency and it's quite difficult to scan to tell whether there are any issues. I know you don't want to take up a lot of room with jQuery but it really will help increase my ability to recommend to others if all the code is easy to read.

You might also want to put comments on slightly scary things like PARTNER_APPS to be sure people don't believe Yelp are YOUR partners or something crazy like that.

Some of these things sound paranoid, but I'd like people to feel 100% comfortable using your bookmarklet.

It worked great for me and identified some things I missed somewhere. Nice work.
You would need serious funding to enter that space.
Why Diaspora* is great news for Facebook
"Different than they have been"...

...so y'all have hopes of disposing of the status quo of being able to take your daughter shopping without having to explain to her why those three men in the picture were filling all holes on that nice lady?

Speaking as someone who has no issue with porn, and who has shamelessly rubbed a few out to some in my day, I've got to say that being able to point mobile Safari anywhere I want to, and to sync pictures and movies if I'm so inclined, is sufficient for me.

Not having porn in the App Store is no more a blow against high hopes for the internet than is not having porn at overstock.com.
What makes me most pessimistic about it is that even in the face of empirical, observational evidence of global warming, there are still people out there who deny it.

The real gravity of this situation in the Gulf is being drastically underplayed -- because no one has accounted for the combination of its enormity plus the fact that hurricane season is nigh. And NOAA is predicting a higher than average hurricane season. Even if NOAA ends up being wrong about that, one or two hurricanes of even moderate strength anywhere near that enormous oil spill, which I suspect is FAR larger than anyone at BP has admitted (several researchers indicated that based on analyzing BP's video, BP's estimate of 5000 barrels per day is short by close two orders of magnitude), will whip the entire coastline into a toxic nightmare.
Depends how much finessing it needs. Say they went with the "drop a big dome over it" idea that's been suggested. The sea floor is uneven; if they want the solution to last they need a tight seal that can withstand significant pressure. I don't know the dynamics of underwater concrete jobs, but I'd imagine you can't just pump concrete down the sides of the dome and hope that it ends up in the right place.
Managing strong passwords: You got a better idea?
I wasn't using diffs, my editor directly represented everything as patches, to the extent it exists at all. Much easier to do in some GUI environments than from a web browser.

Of course one of the issues is that a lot of stuff comes down to details. Working in a browser is a hell of a constraint, I wouldn't dream of writing a collaborative editor in a browser. (Not because it's impossible, but because that's an amount of stress I don't need in my life. Obviously it's possible.) It would be interesting to talk to the people involved about the issues, but I suppose that's almost always true.

(BTW, this is me interested in someone who has actually done the stuff I've only designed and curious about the exact details to a fairly deep level about the actual issues they encountered and stuff, as partially indicated in my "to the extent it exists at all" above. I am not trying to tell anyone what they should have done, I'm just chewing the fat as an interested party who stands to learn some interesting-to-me-things. I'm not in a position to tell implementors anything. As usual, tone can be hard to convey in text.)
> I do believe that ideas matter

No one believes that they don't. The question is how much they matter.

> that dismissing the work of academics is dangerous

Why is it more dangerous to dismiss the work of academics than it is to dismiss the work of other people?

Note that the "ideas aren're worth much" folks aren't restricting that to ideas from academics. Are academics as egalitarian wrt ideas from non-academics?
Developing Business Models on the iPad
http://www.missilebases.com/properties
yep. we all work at the bank it seems :)

I e-mailed pg about it, he says it should be fixed.
My Android app sales have noticeably increased in the last few weeks, probably because of the HTC Incredible launch.
Its one of those things that unless we have direct access to your gmail account we'll just go running around in circles second-guessing...
If you're not happy with Facebook's privacy, you have 4 choices.
JavaScript: Debugging closures and modules
Not sure if you know this, but Alexis Ohanian is a member on this forum.
I completely agree with Jason. The way Diaspora is starting goes against everything I've learned in my experience with startups. Unexperienced hackers raising a ton of money without as much as an MVP to show for it seems like a recipe for disaster. Probabilistically, they will fail, especially without any outside influences or wisdom.

I can only hope these kids have connections with people (and resources, such as PG essays) which can help guide them in making smart decisions. And I hope they listen.
Basically 90% of their customers are on Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL. Apparently they tried something with MySQL (http://www.sap.com/press.epx?pressid=2208) but never went anywhere.
Only an idiot would even suggest that. It's one of the few remaining wildlife refuges in the world that's still truly wild, and if we destroy it, we might as well just give up and admit that our grandchildren will be living in acrylic domes surrounded by a toxic hellhole.
> Even more generally... if you saw two wolf pups play-fighting in the wild, would you tell them they're wasting their time since they're never going to eat each other?

Wolves do fight one another. They also fight their prey, which they do eat. Practice fighting seems quite relevant to real wolves.

What do you learn by pitching? One answer is "sales".
Someone rewrote my ironic headline. Had they read the article they would have understood what I was doing. Thanks for dumbing it down moderator.
More importantly at the end of the announcement. "Also, please note that the release of Django 1.2, expected later today,"
Not sure why that matters.
This is great. How long until facebook tries to block it?
Nope, but I imagine they read Hacker News, and would like to see them succeed. I think Y Combinator could potentially help with that.
Ask HN: Good resources/articles on laying out a landing page?
Hey all. I'm at the point I need to start creating landing pages as part of my customer discovery process. The goal of each page is to measure interest for a particular feature I could implement in my startup's site.

I know which features I want to test, but I'm foggy on exactly how to go about it. In particular:

1) How should the elements of the page be laid out?
2) How much/little information should I pitch to the user about the feature I'm measuring for.

I'm just creating the wireframes that I can pass on to my designer, who will make it pretty. So I really just need a little guidance for the actual content.

Any advice or links to resources?
Clarifications around Ubuntu using “Google Chrome”
Advocating for Something Larger Than Ones Self
Option 4 should be more like assume any interaction you have with Facebook (be it through what you post or clicking like buttons or what sites you login to using Facebook Connect) is public knowledge. If you don't want something to get out on the internet, don't put it there in the first place. Even private emails between people get out when one party decides to forward it to someone else.
Thank goodness rbanffy wasn't sarcastic or anything ;)
Debunking the Google Interview Myth
Impressive numbers, I'm looking to see how this will affect the android market.
Steve Jobs has gone from the arbiter of cool to the angry old guy down the street who yells at kids for getting on his lawn.

Apple is still making a ton of money under his watch, so it must be (mostly) working.

It will be interesting to see what happens with there is some serious competition in the smartphone space. I think the HTC Incredible gets pretty close.
sounds good, do you have any numbers?
I've never seen so much unsolicited advice before. Why is everyone telling Diaspora what to do? Because they are young? Because everyone else knows better? This doesn't seem like the typical reaction to a startup's announcement.

A lot of these people just want Diaspora to succeed because they want someone to keep Facebook honest. The real solution is not to all cross our fingers for Diaspora and hope. Instead maybe this is a sign several startups need to take Facebook head on. A lot of them will fail, but something will succeed. Sure Facebook has a massive network advantage - but so did MySpace. People will adapt.

The unwillingness of people to tackle head on competition is understandable. At first glance it would appear to make it more likely to fail. With a social network, maybe because of the network effects that is true. In general having competitors is a good sign that the market has money in it, and finding the market is at least as hard as making a product and selling it.
Its sad when a company like SAP, that produces such god awful, trivial to improve, software has $5.8 billion to throw around - these guys need to go down if we are ever going to see an improvement in enterprise management relational resource buzzword whatever-it-is software (business software).

Its a shame start-ups are pretty much doomed to fail in that environment because businesses trust established names over demonstrable results - its just common sense from their side really.
Why is git still a collection of bash scripts ? Does nobody care enough to wrap the core into a library (yes, i do know about the glacial libgit2 project) and put a Python/Ruby/Lua interface over it ?

Dulwich exists, but it is not a drop-in replacement.

When will I get a true platform independent Git (none of the msysgit stuff) ?
The light in your fridge goes off when you shut the door anyway
The argument against SaaS in your billing process
It's not like that. Unless you actively seek porn, you won't find it, be it in the web, be it in mobile applications for platforms other than Apple's.

The right analogy is your daughter being unable to find porn when she actively and deliberately seeks and want it because some authority deemed it immoral and banned its production.

This is not what I expected from Apple and not what I want for the future.
done. I left the compressed version deployed for now, but the source code is now 100% uncompressed and commented:

http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/blob/master/javascri...

thanks for the feedback, esp about the PARTNER_APPS constant (now called BLOCKABLE_APPS for clarity)
Git gives me everything I needed MQ for, but with the complete safety of the reflog. There is no such thing as a change I can't undo. The fact that patch management is "special" in Mercurial is the problem!

With respect to history modification:

First, I rebase a couple dozen times per day. I'm on a team that doesn't use merges unless we have a reason to (this makes it easier to bisect and think about history). I also create, destroy, and rebase many of my own branches every day.

Second, I amend commits a lot. I'll often spike some little piece of code I don't understand, then start amending the commit as I rewrite it with TDD, until the commit no longer contains any traces of the original spiked version. For more complex spikes and TDD rewrites, I'll do it over many commits, rebasing the spike over the rewritten version until the spike commit is empty and gets skipped by the rebase. Doing that in Mercurial would be... arduous. I can easily do multiple history rewrites per minute while doing this.

Third, I amend commit messages a lot, usually with "git rebase -i". Maybe I forgot the ticket number, or maybe the meaning of the commit changed (see the next point).

Fourth, I sometimes do drastic commit rearranging. This is harder to explain, but it usually involves splitting commits (in the simple case) or moving sets of related changes from one commit to another (in the complex case). These are sometimes at the file level, sometimes at the hunk level, and sometimes within a hunk. This is rarer than the others; I probably do it once or twice per week.

Fifth, I "git reset <ref>" a lot. It took me longer to start doing this, but it's useful in a lot of situations. For example, "oops, I accidentally created a merge bubble."
Not very impressive in absolute terms, but it's gone from an average of around 15 $0.99 sales per day to 30.
In "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum", Alan Cooper presents the following equations:

Warship * computer = computer
Alarm clock * computer = computer
Camera * computer = computer

Any damn device when crossed with a computer turns into a computer—with the negative properties of a computer dominating, of course.

Soon it'll take a two minutes to boot your car in the morning after which you're greeted by a BLING that comes with a useless explanation that the car went and booted itself into safe mode, or that chkdsk failed, or that there's a critical update available which you must first download and install before driving.
Skype for Windows Phone 7 "on the roadmap", not killed
I disagree on making `git commit -a` the default behavior for commits in git. It discourages making nice, atomic commits.
Tie up your money in long term investments
160% increase in H.264 video online since January
Torrentfreak seems to be down, too. Just getting a blank page. Edit: looks like it was just my ISP.

Anyway, here's the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/17/pirate...
You can remove all of your boxes and delete the likes/interests facebook generates for you by clicking the delete button next to the avatar for the page.
Ad hominem doesn't mean "a public attack". It simply means arguing that a point is invalid/less valid because of who is making it.

Or as Wikipedia says: "attempt to persuade which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise." -- in this case, the characteristic is "has not done something great in the eyes of Jobs".
Torrentfreak is not down for me (France).
What backlash? Facebook is growing like mad
This reminds me of that board game (I forget the name) in which some silly definition is read and the players have to make up words and convince their opponents (who are guessing which word matches the definition) that their word is correct. With some of these words, I feel like I'm playing that game and someone is trying to trick me. I mean, zenzizenzizenzic is a number raised to the eighth power? Seriously? But it exists! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenzizenzizenzic
Great bookmarklet, I thought I had made everything private but it looks like I missed a few settings. I shared this on facebook. Thanks.
Pointing out a logical fallacy that, when used by an accomplished person against a critic who is not accomplished in the same field, is quite heavy handed, does not mean I'm engaged in "a dialectical interrogation of Truth".
Sure, but Diaspora, by virtue of the interest on Kickstarter has a priori traction. I'd rather see a bunch of people interested in this problem work together, and form Voltron as it were, than a bunch of different groups try and fail.
Google seems pretty attached to their advertising-subsidized business model; Diaspora hosting might be more likely to come from Amazon with a "consumer" version of EC2. Or Apple could decide to fight Facebook by adding Diaspora to MobileMe, but I think that's a long shot.
Unrelated: What is the point in publishing an interesting list such as this and then restricting my ability to highlight so I can copy and paste? (Chrome 4.1 on Windows)
Is Facebook Good for My Business?
This is a question I get on a monthly basis and while the answer is usually the same, there are some things to consider before locking in on your decision. Can you do business on Facebook? Should you be “on” Facebook? Is Facebook good for my business? The answers are yes and no.
The app being described is The Green Safe, and already exists: http://apps.facebook.com/thegreensafe/index.php
Is Mark Zuckerberg the Howard Roark of the web?
The present OT is very much an epicycle theory. They always have that one last issue to fix. In fact, several, if not the most of, classic OT papers were later found to be inconsistent, e.g. some combination of concurrent edits makes copies diverge (source: P. Molli). And that problems are extremely hard to find/understand.
Apparently, the original authors of OT had a local network in mind: universal connectivity, instant message propagation, etc. But the internet is full of "relativistic" effects: different clients have different views of the state, messages propagate with finite/varying speed, etc etc.
After reading the article, try to estimate what happens if e.g. one client syncs hourly/daily/monthly (like in the git), or suppose we don't have a central server (like in git), or if the stream of edits is too dense... like we really have a hundred of monkeys...
Maybe Google engineers managed to get the probability of OT screw-ups lower than the probability of all other screw-ups... but that does not make the theory any better.

(...and the way they dealt with XML is a very special song. OT is pretty much a complexity explosion itself, but they also multiplied it by the complexity of XML; got 15 kinds of mutation operations and all the stuff. The fact they invented "annotations" to skip XML nesting speaks for itself.)

Conclusion. OT is a big messy mess.
Being biased is OK, but that site is just flat out wrong on some of its points. Mercurial has cheap local branching. There are good hosting services for hosting Mercurial repositories.
Web designers, grab your pens
I started out thinking about Facebook and I ended up here
Just curious, since you have been successful publishing ebooks, how do you determine what to write about?

Do you look it purely as a business proposition (ex: google search for subject matter x is trending over the last 6 months, I'll become an expert in that and write a book) or do you write about things you already know and care about?
Related: bathykolpian
Right – this is why I think the solution isn’t a local possibly-too-curious nerd, but rather a "Wave Federation" of official Diaspora servers and other third parties, possibly charging a small monthly fee. Maybe (almost certainly not, but maybe) some ISPs would provide such a service as part of their bundle.

The other solution is for the "local nerd's" set-up to never view unencrypted data. If you watch the Diaspora* intro video, they are talking about having encrypted content available for each friend… if this encrypted content were uploaded to the local nerd’s server, that solves the untrusted admin problem.
They missed "discombobulate"
In your scenario the people who care about privacy can run their own nodes and the people who don't care can use Google, and everyone can still communicate. That's better than today's world, where basically everyone has to use Facebook.
You're elected.

Let us know what you come up with.
I have a free app, the first one I built last November, that was stalling out around 6K downloads in early April. It's closing in on 10K today.
ruchi -- ok ok ruchi I'll upvote you.
I assure you ruchi that these desperate pleas for us to notice you and your cool handle, ruchi, haven't gone unnoticed.

I had never thought of this, but it clarifies why so many people on the internet (and sadly some friends irl) seem not to be trolling but just making relatively ludicrous statements. Ever since reading this I've been analyzing everything everyone in the office is saying and the conversations they've started. It's like a weird Heisenberg conversational thing.
I had been working at a startup for 3 years when I entered a few business plan competitions to stretch my skills. I entered MIT100K, Princeton, One run by the state of RI, and one by OATV, O'Reilly's venture arm. What I "Won":

- Met Tim O'Reilly/Went to FOO Camp: Part of winning the OATV competition was going to SF, Foo Camp - an amazing networking/educational event.

- $25K in cash and services. Not a huge amount, but enough to be meaningful.

- Connections: The judges of these things tend to be successful business people. They opened doors for me and passed on great info.

- Experience: Pitched 10+ top tier VC firms, and learned how to create demand. Getting VC's competitive juices flowing was a great experience. You also get to talk to a lot of folks with training wheels, your ignorance doesn't seem out of place.

- Knowledge: Thinking about markets: YC really seems to push product, but it is important to think through market opportunities. These semi-academic exercises force you to research the markets to a granular and overcome common criticism.

- Knowledge: Most people who are starting companies haven't had a ton of exposure to legal issues. These competitions tend to be heavily sponsored by local law firms who are happy to share info.

- Experience: Pick your team carefully. It is a lesson PG espouses, but is really impactful when you learn it first hand with founder fallout. Luckily I learned this before quitting my job.

Is this as valuable as doing YC? I don't imagine so, but if you are in school anyway doing one of these competitions is a ton better than some useless elective.
So basically you're saying don't fight it just let the warm embrace of facebook envelope you and take over.

Why do I see the scene in the Matrix when Agent Smith would touch someone and they would become another Agent Smith when I read this?
Django 1.2 Released
The sum of digits of prime numbers is evenly distributed
On average, there are as many prime numbers for which the sum of decimal digits is even as prime numbers for which it is odd.This hypothesis, first made in 1968, has recently been proven.
I was rather skeptical of this due to the absence of specific detail on what was going to be taxed and how.

It seems reform proposals include the idea of taxing a fund manager's share of a fund's annual profits, known as 'carried interest' - a performance bonus in addition to regular management fees, sometimes as high as 20% - as ordinary income. Currently it is booked as capital gains, although the fund manager may not have invested any capital. You can find out if a fund manager is invested in their own fund by reading the 'Statement of Additional Information' (SAI) on their website/prospectus.

Investors in a VC fund would continue to be taxed under capital gains provisions, as they are now. Also, a fund manager's own capital investment in a fund would be continue to be taxed as capital gains; only the amount paid as a performance bonus for success in managing other people's money would be taxed as income. Losses would continue to be offsettable for tax purposes as they are at present, it seems.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-13/senators-seek-ve... has some additional information, and http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WBne-r3... reprints the relevant language in the house bill.
Is there a downloadable version of the video anywhere?
Just a description of how to use some speech recognition APIs.

Would have been much more interesting if it was a speech recognition engine written on Node.js ;)