skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook as a company are refreshing in their ability to actually respond to criticism. They do not shy away from it as other technology giants have a tendency to do.

:laugh track:
The rooms are designed to keep sound inside.

I'm curious if they have an acoustical consultant involved or if they're depending on the architect to design the sound insulation. If they latter, I suspect they're setting themselves up for disappointment.
Having worked in PR, there are no length requirements or even people valuing wordiness.

What does exist is a stifling press release style that everyone loves to write and no one loves to read. It doesn't mater how long each thing is, but you need "about this company" and "about that company." You need garbage quotes from the execs (written by the PR guy of course), and you need everyone's statement of business in the first paragraph.

So, with all that crap, you already have a page of nonsense. Then, add in a few paragraphs on the actual announcement, and that is how the sausage is made. Some press release writers are better than others, but no one can write good press release.

Personally, I don't write press releases anymore. I write casual blog posts.
37signals took investment and don't seem interesting in a) or b) so I'm not sure that's true. Not everyone has the same goals.
Now what needs to happen is Heroku seamlessly using Google Storage concurrently with S3.
linode's datacenter offline for 2 hours... and no official explanation. i know everybody's supposed to expect downtime, but it would be nice to know what happened too so i don't just assume it was linode's fault.
I'm with the GP on this one... Readable code is very important. Using the short-circuiting property of && doesn't decrease readability in most cases (unless someone isn't familiar with the language, or the concept of using short-circuiting for flow control).
What's so special about your favorite Linux distro?
And when it launched, Quake 2 supported software rendering at fairly respectable framerates.

My point is that for applications that requires any degree of processor power javascript will struggle to match native hardware that's many generations old.
I'd say freeform is a pretty good way to go if you don't need automated systems looking at the data. We've had issues with having specific fields for all the reasons mentioned in the comments (certain places don't have states/zips, etc.). However, we offer estimated shipping, so we have to be able to easily parse the address to send data to shipping carriers' web services (UPS, DHL), and that would be a total nightmare with freeform text. I would say making a nice interface that changes depending on the selected country would be ideal (google checkout seems to handle this pretty well).
Panera lets customers pay what they want
New gadget extracts evidence from cell phones
&& and || are commonly used as "short circuit" operators in JavaScript. I have no problem with this.
I prefer this:

if(foo()) bar();

No {} necessary if it's just a single command.
Semi-Supervised Recognition of Sarcastic Sentences in Online Product Reviews
Yeah, college students tend to be more rebellious too. Maybe they will even organize delete-your-facebook parties. Getting one of these parties in the media will be pretty effective PR.

Targeting school newspaper / TV station for that kind of PR is a good first step.
FTC targets copy machine privacy concerns
SimpleGeo: Its been a big year
I didn't say saturation should be a goal, I said that they didn't have anything like it and therefore had room to grow. When each additional paying customer over a certain number is almost pure profit, the number of customers you have is a pretty important factor in determining how to reach the highest possible profit margin, but you know that.

Nobody in this thread ever said "don't raise prices", so I don't really understand why you're preaching the price-raising religion so hard. Fine, yes, raise prices, but grandfathering existing users might be an easy way to do so without causing a backlash that might hurt your ability to acquire new customers at the raised prices. It's certainly not such a stupid idea as to be "not really an answer", like you claim.
"As a result, a fleet of Royal Naval warships and tug-boats were employed to act as a deterrent against any future harassment of British fishing crews by the Icelandic craft. The conflict involved several cases of vessels ramming each other."

Was that all it took to have a conflict classified as a war back then?
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/central-to-the-facebook-zyn...

Facebook’s VP of communications Larry Yu tells us that the 30 percent fee has remained the same for this deal.
"You have to take whatever they throw at you and just assume their useless total idiots like Chris here."
I've always found the Perl

foo() or die();

idiom to be quite readable. And if you're familiar with that, this is a pretty straightforward extension.
Facebook Privacy is as bad as ever, but you have options
It is beneficial for a translator to rate similar translators negatively, especially with languages for which very few translators exist (for example, my native language Dutch has 5 translators at the moment), which creates a new problem.

You'll probably get the best quality by letting N translators translate a certain text, and let another translator select the best match, all anonymously of course.
What if I told you, in the US, the opposite is true? That, on average, people ate more meat in 1830
Then I would ask you what your sources are.

If people aren't eating meat, what are they eating? grains? sugars?
Vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts, etc. Most people in the US who eat tons of sugar are not vegetarians.
dyslexic delicious deviants around the world thank you (i'm not one, i quite liked the exclusive deli.cio.us domain)

(yes that was intentional)
Here's the patent: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...
Great idea. I'd much prefer this to an alarm clock!
I don't understand your question.

Edit: I see that you've edited your post.

_delirium's post had two things in it that are incorrect. It was highly rated, so many other people are presumably wrong in the same way. I pointed out why they're wrong.

On most other topics, it wouldn't occur to anyone to object to my pointing out why some things are wrong, just because it wasn't apropo [sic] the origin of the thread. This is why I don't talk about this and a few other topics publicly unless I'm anonymous, and mostly even then. People just tell me to shut up, in so many words (and that's if I'm lucky).
howl looks neat (good domain) how are you better than tumblr?
I co-founded a startup called NetWinner. It was a casino style online game that allowed users to win prizes. Everything was absolutely free and users never paid. They just watched ads while they played the game and they could instantly win gift cards and cash prizes.

When the economy started to tank our ad revenues tanked and the model as it was could no longer be supported. So we changed it so that users won raffle tickets for prizes instead of winning prizes directly.

We did not message this to our users well and the BBB got over 250 complaints about the change we made. It was covered on local TV in charlotte, NC and lots of other bad stuff happened. They could never take legal action because they never paid but they still tried. They posted stuff all over the web about how we cheated and scammed them out of the prizes they won (which we did). I was just the technical co-founder and did not have a vote in financial decisions but since I owned the domain people thought I was the head guy and came after me. Good thing it was always free to play.
More documentation on Unicorn is always nice, since it feels a little sparse in places, and sometimes I'm left wondering whether I've overlooked something in my production setup.

Could have used a little more discussion on signals (e.g. USR2 for reloading code) or possibly other daemon control type issues, which I recall doing the most fiddling with.

I'd still like to hook Unicorn up to Munin or Nagios (for historical stats, not process monitoring), but haven't found any resources on the subject.
Is it safe to say that Yahoo is no longer a tech company?
They've taken investment. They are by definition interested in either a) selling or b) going public.

That doesn't follow "by definition" -- although I agree that the former generally implies the latter.
Wow. I installed adblock only a short while ago, and I hadn't noticed how much it improves the browsing experience until you made me disable it out of curiosity too.
$5/20 GB = 25c/GB - that's more than 15c/GB at Amazon. Are you dreaming about price increases? :-)
I guess what you find readable also depends on where you're coming from. When I first saw that foo() && bar() line in the OP, I knew what it meant immediately. It's because I use it myself, and I've seen raganwald's andand operator and heard of Haskell's Maybe monad.

I've used it for so long that it's come to mean "if the first exists, then do the second", and not just "this expression is true if both are true", and I don't really confuse the two.
processing power isn't the point; the browsers must/may evolve to expose hardware features.
This is pretty straightforward and intuitive, so I agree with this reply. Maybe it's because of the equivalents in lisp (I tend to use lisp a lot):

(if (foo) (bar))

equals to

(and (foo) (bar))
I prefer to always use {} for readability and consistency's sake, regardless of line count. Also reduces human error.
I've been maintaining this list on Wikipedia (with references to each) since before the acquisition, and I'd be surprised if the author didn't use this article to create his own - there's very little difference between them.

So if you'd like an ad free & CC version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle#Impac...
Seems to be working just fine for webkit already.
> I do wish there was an option to disable the +/- buttons from appearing, though - with pinch and double-tap, I never need them.

Agreed. CyanogenMod makes this easy, but it should be added to the stock OS.
Replacing "if" constructions with boolean operators is powerful. The simplistic example in the article doesn't really show the purpose of using || and && to control flow.

It's scalable. What if you have to test a third expression? Surely this:

foo() && bar() && buzz()

is more readable than

if(foo()) if(bar()) buzz()

It's flexible. Since an "if" statement is not an expression in most languages, you have to be careful where you place it. For example, what if you wanted to pass the result to a function?

qux(foo() && bar() && buzz());

Javascript (and a few other languages) have the neat feature with boolean operators that they return the result of the last tested expression. So the above example would pass the result of buzz() to qux if all statements are true, otherwise it would pass false. Here is the same code with "if" statements:

var res = false;

if(foo())
if(bar())
res = buzz();

qux(res);

There are many more examples of why you should be used to constructing expressions with boolean operators. It doesn't matter much for the simplistic example in the article, but the same technique allows you do write more complex code in succinct ways.
> There is very little overlap between those who'd spend $2000 for a PRADA handbag and those who buy the chinese version at $5.

If anyone could buy the Chinese knock-off for $5 (in a legal fashion), then the people with $2k to spend on the 'official' version would probably be less likely to do so because it would seem less 'exclusive.'

> Analogously, there's little overlap between those who'd buy full price photoshop from adobe and the kid who will download it from rapidshare.

The difference here is that the full version Photoshop is not a status symbol. People don't flaunt the fact that they paid 'good money' for the latest version of Photoshop.

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.

If those same students could not pirate the latest version of Photoshop, they may well learn Gimp or PaintShopPro or something else, and use that once they get into the industry. This would affect Adobe's bottom line in reduced sales.

It's the same argument for Microsoft and Windows. Pirated version of Windows increase the install-base for Windows. If those same people said "fuck it" and used Linux (or something else) instead of pirated Windows, then Microsoft would have less marketshare (and mindshare).
Blind Justice? Attractive Get Breaks with Juries
How much of that time is people watching illegal retransmits of live TV?
And an attached pub in your case. :)
Unfortunately, I don't have source in front of me, but I've read some research that indicates that subvocalization is actually necessary for full comprehension, and that claims to the contrary are apocryphal. It's probably best to investigate before trying to eliminate subvocalization.
Holy cow, has Smashing always published these sorts of articles, or is this an outlier? Quite the departure from their often-linked "40 Wordpress Themes!" posts.
Would love to know why you went this route.
LifeLock CEO’s Identity Stolen 13 Times
This post conflates security and privacy. Facebook released two new security features, and the author criticizes them for not being about privacy.
Apple works to reassure rivals, government about iAd
That's 25c/GB/year compared to 15c/GB/month.
Microsoft Seeks to Put the Hot Back in Hotmail
Nothing will come of this. The probe will end up being a set of Congressional Hearings "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
My wife created her Facebook account to play some Zynga game a colleague was playing. Later on I had to make a Facebook account in order to be a neighbor to this Zynga game.

At least 3 other people in our circle use Facebook only for and due to Zynga. The social issue becomes just a side issue.
No, he's an artist.
It was a conflict that was prosecuted by force instead of at negotiation tables, I think that'll suffice for the word "War". There was certainly a lot of treasure expended, if not blood.
Are you thinking ahead to when there are too many new signups for you to continue? I don't mean that accusatively. There are good reasons not to think that far ahead.
Hey rmoriz. I just wanted to follow up on your email issues with Tender. Did you have an open support discussion I could pull up? We certainly strive to provide the best service possible as we built Tender for supporting our own services and clients and are highly dependent on it.
I disagree -- it probably is not immediately understood by most programmers.

The main flaw of the technique is that the author uses the '&&' not as a logical operator (the intuitive use) but as a conditional operator.

'&&' is the 'Logical AND'. The statement "foo() && bar();" just doesn't make initial sense, because the logical result of the expression is thrown out.

After thinking this, the programmer probably will realize that the functions are actually called to evaluate the expression. And then finally (hopefully) the programmer realizes that they are evaluated short-circuit.

So, the code may be functional but it is not very readable.
HyperCard: What Could Have Been
The problem with nicotine, and part of the reason its so addictive, is its extremely short half lfie (2hours). However there are studies showing improvement in cognitive impairments with nicotine patches.

One medication currently used for alzheimer's is Galantamine ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galantamine ) which raises general acetylcholine levels as well as increasing nicotinic acetylcholine activity specifically.
This was a fascinating and very informative read. I spent many a nights toiling over the intricacies of the Devanagari script when I was coding http://chime.tv/products/hind2000/ss.shtml as a kid. My biggest take-away was that combining different characters is pretty much required though difficult to implement. If you spell "MItI" and then edited it to "MIttI", I would have to replace the 't' with a special double 'tt' character. Simply adding another 't' character would not suffice.
From a business WHY are they doing this?

The vast majority of their revenue comes from selling advertising on Google OWNED sites eg google.com:

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-...

Google is the industry leader at monetizing search, but nothing else they do comes close.

I am truly curious - is the reason that Google keeps investing time and money in "line-extension" businesses to distract competitors, keep the antitrust police away, what?
IIRC, linoleum floors have BPA in them, but I don't think that really has an effect on anything.
At first I thought it was gonna be something like "Ah'm sorry, sir, but 'round these parts a circle is exactly 3 times as long 'round as it is 'crost. 10 cubits wide, and 30 cubits 'round, that's wut the Good Lord said, an' if you try an' teach our kids otherwise, that's grounds for revokin' yer teachin' certificate for denyin' the Word of God."

It actually turned out to be horrifyingly worse...
Try trac for a bit.

We tried it and got hooked.

5 people doing support, thousands of tickets by now and not a single glitch. The built-in wiki also comes in handy.

I had to fiddle for a bit with plug-ins to get email notification and ticket handling to be working properly.
If you have a Technet plus account you can still download both MS-DOS and Windows for Workgroups just for kicks.

I still have no idea what to use them for, but I just had to download them out of nostalgia. At less than 5MB it was the least I could do :)
http://www.omniglot.com

brings me hours of enjoyment.
Republicans nuke science bill by forcing porn down Dem throats
The Airbnb team is a talented group of engineers and designers. I had the opportunity to stay with them during Startup School last October and observe their work environment over the course of a few days. These guys are focused on their product and determined, good luck on the hiring! //from Texas
Duke University Using Game Systems To Crunch Scientific Problems
Because I guess they see 'cloud computing' in their future and generating money from that. I guess they need some kind of beefier storage service as they start making more ground with their Google App product line.
What did you do to get the message to users, and what more would you do knowing what you know now?
I don't see that any 3 of "connections, notoriety, experience, exposure" are at all the same thing. Here is what I understood him to mean by each of those:

Connections: Lots of people you know personally who you can call on as resources and who may call on you in return.

Notoriety: A reputation that makes strangers have a sense of who you are before you talk.

Experience: You've seen things enough to be able to learn what works and what doesn't.

Exposure: You hear about a lot of opportunities and get to decide which ones you want to be involved in.

If you want an analogy for what he's doing, I would suggest that he's trying to create a mutual fund of angel deals with one investor (himself). He's making lots of investments, spreading his money, not getting too deeply involved in any one, and is likely to rise or fall with the overall sector. (But h still wants to beat said sector.)
These kinds of postings MUST be fake.
The old rule of thumb was, "Online, go for readability. Batch, go for speed." This almost always translates into, "Online, use 'if' or 'case'. Batch, use Boolean."

In the first case, maintenance programmers will thank you. In the second, users processing millions of records will thank you.
Or you can press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to the console.
Isn't that also with free bandwidth? ~$0.02/GB/month with free transfer. I'm in.
Steve Jobs missed out on $10 billion from stock options adjustment
Interesting! It had just occurred to me that I could write a competitor to s3 using app engine and blobstore. I guess someone at Google realized that too.
Yeah, why not have the police just make arrests and have the courts hold hearings? Have people who actually handle criminal investigations handle this!
Yahoo Acquires Associated Content
...and then Britney will have another break down and everyone will forget about the oil spill.
fyi, this article is from March 2009. This is not new.
You could replicate the s3 api in a simple (< 30 line) python app for app engine.
Wonder wheel on my name shows my professional interests, and doesn't show any names of women at all. (My wife of twenty-six-plus years has little Internet presence.)
They can start by getting rid of the spammy taglines at the end of outgoing email messages.
Awesome. I tried using SongBird (http://www.getsongbird.com/) for a while, but it never seemed natural to switch to a specialized browser every time I landed on a music blog. This is a much more user friendly proposition.

One major problem: it's an unwritten rule for music blogs (at least the well established ones that I read) that they don't host the MP3s forever. They put them up for a couple of weeks, and delete them after that. The artists and labels tolerate the infringement because they like the publicity. This extension doesn't seem to store the files at all. Maybe it could be coupled with S3, Dropbox, etc, and upload to the cloud the tracks you listen to?
Even they aren't saying anything about linoleum...

"Infants or toddlers who lived in bedrooms with vinyl, or PVC, floors were twice as likely to have autism five years later, in 2005, than those with wood or linoleum flooring.
I think it was the Scientific American compilation that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. They repeatedly quote "this is only preliminary, don't draw conclusions!" then finish the paragraph by drawing conclusions...
Smallest man-made pump revealed
OK, you hold a legitimate view, one I mostly share.

However, please stop equating 'loss of potential sale' with simple theft. Clearly, if I take one of your DVDs, it is lost to you. If I copy a digital file of the same movie, you still have the use of your own copy.

Now from a publisher's point of view, what TPB is doing is not so much depriving them of movies or other content, but interfering with their right to bring it to market at a price of their choosing - if the same software is easily available for $0, there is little incentive to purchase it. (We can argue about whether the purchase would ever have taken place; eg if a student downloads some high-end 3d modelling software to learn how to use it, but that's been addressed elsewhere.)

This is an extreme case of the ongoing economic struggle between publishers and distributors in general.
Apologies if you've posted on this before/elsewhere, but what do you specifically look for when deciding: team, product, market? Is there one that is more important than the others?

Even though we are not raising, the idea of raising money from someone who is actively part of the HN community is quite appealing. I think that speaks a lot about the character of the investor. Just like investors look at team, I think startups also look at the 'people' side of thier investors.

EDIT: I just saw a similar question cross-posted on your AMA post, so no need to answer here. My bad for not noticing that post first. Great stuff there!

EDIT2: Would love to know why the downvote after my first edit?
I'm worried about the track deletion as well. My guess is that doing anything that involves storing would lead to legal issues which have befallen nearly every other music startup.

I would hope that eventually they could automatically point you to another URL w/ the same MP3 if it existed w/in the ex.fm database.
The report is from a mainstream news TV channel. I presume they're thinking of Beacon, nicely reborn as automatic app adding.
There's always space for someone who does it better and/or cheaper than the competition.