skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me try this again.

Let's say we form a company to develop a web layout engine. We haven't made anything yet, and we're wondering if it would be better to make our layout engine closed source or open. We decide to go with open. Why? Because we're fed up with having to support slow, non-standards-compliant browsers for our web apps. If our fast, standards-compliant layout engine is open source, maybe more browsers will use it, and web development will be less sucky for us in the future.

It turns out that there's already some great open source code called KHTML that we can build on to create our engine, and it's licensed with the LGPL. Well, that's no problem, because we decided our layout engine was going to be open source anyway. So why not fork it? We don't have to, but it's good code, so we might as well. Thus, our open source layout engine ends up being based on KHTML. But it was not our decision to use KHTML that made our engine open source. We decided that it was going to be open source, irrespective of whether we decided to use KHTML.

Likewise, Apple chose whether or not WebKit would be open source, irrespective of whether they decided to use KHTML.

You seem to be making the argument that Apple just decided to base WebKit on KHTML without much concern for the licensing implications, and inadvertently ended up "stuck" with a WebKit that must adhere to the LGPL. Hence, Steve Jobs is disingenuously suggesting that WebKit was intentionally open source. And what I'm saying is, given Apple's long history of tight control over its software, not to mention their willingness to rewrite their software from scratch, that assumption just isn't credible. Whereas they have credible, self-interested motives for creating an open source layout engine, just like Google has credible self-interested motives for making Android open source.
I googled the name and I guess the first google hit probable isn't the same person: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner
Ask HN: How do you advertise without spending money?
If someone wants to share their story, it would be of enormous help to people here (HN users are constantly launching new products).

With a 2 man work force, I do basic advertising by sharing content of the product to free services (email, print stuff (brochures, posters, etc), twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services). I have also the benefit of being a designer myself, in this way I can deploy targeted websites, and somehow try to impress the potential customer with graphics or words.

(edit: It gets tricky to track all this services, though, without paying services who offer dedicated stats/tracking)

As a developer, what do you do to advertise without spending money (ie. by not paying services)?

Or, if you're a designer, what other methods do you use?
Fact: some non-US companies explicitly forbid their people to search using google, especially patents through google's service.
You can already do this now with a jailbroken iPhone and it's amazing. And jailbreaking an iphone now is probably the simplest hack a person can do. Seriously, now that I've gone jailbroken and have MyWi and the other app that fools apps into thinking they're on WiFi instead of 3G.

jailbroken iPhone + iPad = amazing
I wonder how well this would work in real-time over the web. We could establish an API and let everyone hack in whatever language they please.

Here is a short list of open-source MMO servers we could start with:
http://www.reddwarfserver.org/
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.next-gen.cc/
* 1st gen iPhone (7/10/07 to 7/11/08; 367 days) - 981 MB (2.67 MB/day)

* iPhone 3G (7/11/08 to 6/23/09; 347 days) - 1.9 GB (5.48 MB/day)

* iPhone 3GS (6/23/09 to present; 343 days) - 2.8 GB (8.16 MB/day)

For reference, 200 MB/month is ~6.5 MB/day and 2 GB/month is ~65 MB/day.
There's a book called "The Millionaire Next Door" that gives all the citations you could ask for on this topic. It basically corroborates what you're saying -- wealth usually doesn't last past the 2nd generation.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d...
Except that it's now available for pre-order, which your other link distinctly does not mention.
Apple puts a button for 'picture frame mode' right on the lock screen of the iPad. So, no, it's not because they're offended that people might use it as a picture frame.
Ahhh stuck on 8 too... what is the fox symbol? It's killing me!!

I recognized it... FoxPro
Indeed; here's just the most recent (this morning) ideological but not partisan essay/rant I've come across on this topic, which says that "that federal employees now earn double the compensation of those in the private sector" on average (quoting a Cato Institute guy): http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026436.php

That said, it's not universal at the state and local level. In Missouri and my SW corner of it, state and local workers are getting laid off, having the salaries frozen, etc.

Again, this is again an "ideological" vs. partisan thing, our new as of 2009 governor who's laid off thousands of state employees is a Democrat. He, the Republican legislature and the state colleges and universities have worked out an agreement whereby if they don't raise tuition they won't get their state funding cut.

To tie this back to the original essay, Reagan famously noted that the reason the D.C. suburbs were some of the wealthiest in the nation was "that's where your money is going to".
I would need to see a lot of good attribution/documentation to be convinced this is not a forgery. I have seen so many different versions of this that it stinks like an urban legend. It is the "organizational man" version of the "protocols of the elders of Zion" and is often attributed to the 1950s "communist 5th column working in the US."
Everything I learned investing in (and selling) Associated Content
The problem with Digg is that the community is terrible and that it's a miracle whenever something remotely intellectual makes it to the front page.

I found HN through StackOverflow about a year ago and haven't looked back.
"GNU is an operating system."

It's pretty easy to confuse the two when you slap GNU in front of everything (including operating systems and licenses). Stallman even tried rename Linux a few years back to: GNU/linux

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

"the EFF is not suing people; gpl-violations.org"

you're right, I meant the FSF, which convinces many people to assign them the copyrights of their apps and then sues violators in court.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
I hate to say this because it just makes me angry but it's all our fault.

If we didn't buy so many ipads with practically criminal TOSes then we wouldn't be stuck with a device that is tied to one of the worst cell phone providers in the world.

If more people demanded open network selection, and refused to buy an ipad until it was available on any network then we would have the features we want.
Open Source HTML5 Video Player with WebM/VP8 (from Zencoder, YC W10)
Such capabilities were in Smalltalk for a long time. Not much was done with them.
PragPub #12 (06/2010)
Huh. There are so many companies that spend so much time far, far beyond the bad side of the border that my expectations are entirely different than yours.
Fish Factory (Canvas and CSS3)
It is a personal user report, because the guy trying to sell folks an A/B testing service uses it to A/B test his own site.

That doesn't strike me as abnormal. In fact, if hypothetically a multi-billion dollar multinational advertising firm did not routinely dogfood its own A/B testing service, I would consider that a strike against them.
Careful. "The Black Swan" is a pop non-fiction book, and reading it won't give you an intimate understanding of markets. Taleb has taken his share of criticism (http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html) and his ability to capitalize on the deep insights he'd like you to believe he has is somewhat questionable (http://www.businessinsider.com/did-nassim-talebs-universa-ge...)
The bottom line is - they know you exist. If you are a real threat to them then they will find out anyway - how hard is it to ask a mate to sign up on your behalf and forward the email or use a disposable account.

They aren't doing their job properly if they aren't watching you like a hawk. (and, by the same token, you of course you clearly are doing yours properly because you know who your competitors are and and paying attention - which is a good)

You need to measure everything you say in public as if it is lowering barriers to entry/ giving a competitive advantage to someone else. If you are in a really competitive space then its going to be like this from here on in.

However its good to remember - its the execution that counts and not the ideas.

Good luck
Does it matter? Either way, the result is the same. If he's not setting the policy, he's explicitly supporting it.
God, a warehouse full of lego.

That's what heaven is like.
The comment on the submitted blog post about the Reich Ministry of Production being destroyed by a British bombing raid is food for thought. The claim is that killing bureaucrats of the Nazi government raised German military production for the remainder of the war--probably not the result the Allies intended.
Interesting fact, happen to have a source?
You're right. They're limiting themselves to the bottom of the barrel in web developers, and setting up their schedule around the standard malpractices that lead to the deplorable state of the current IT systems in the first place.

The idea that they can spend a month in the host city learning how things will work, and then six months designing & developing a production-ready application that's significant enough to matter is at best laughable. The only projects that succeed are going to be the ones that are too small to make an appreciable difference to anyone -- especially the government.

On top of that, they're filtering out exactly the people that they need most: experienced developers and designers. Speaking for myself for example, I would not mind doing something like this in principle, but in reality I can't afford to, because I have a mortgage to pay. I'd also have to put my side business and blow off my karate students for a year. The people that they need have lives. The people that they'll get aren't qualified.
Yes, that is exactly the crux of the problem. I imagine the following could help:

- Ensure raw Android devices are as pleasant to use as Sense and Rachel. This means stock updates will work on any phone, rather than having to wait for Handset manufacturers to port their UIs to new Android releases.

- Ensure that handset makers have updated their existing units before allowing them to provide 'Google experience' prorietary apps (Gmail etc) to them for new devices.
Eric Naggum's library is for sale
Indeed, and you can avoid the ones that do this by never divulging your salary history. You definitely don't want to lie about something that can be so easily checked.
Erik Naggum's library is for sale
As one of those people chiding you, I see now why you make the distinction between those two kinds of platforms.

I do think you have a legitimate point, but I'm not sure how to fix this problem. There's so much potential in web platforms...
I went to Penn with the founders, though I didn't know them personally during my time there. I did meet Mike Provenzano, one of the cofounders, earlier this year though. He's a great guy and I knew upon meeting him that he was building something great at Invite. Congratulations to the entire team.
I'm sorry for linking to the tweet, but Xach's livejournal appears to be killfiled here.
Not sure, but carrier lock means that you cannot use a SIM that is not from the carrier that it is locked to ( like the iPhone ).

Carrier unlocked does not mean that it will work well with other US carriers, just that i can work with any SIM.

Point is you can take it anywhere in the world there is 3G coverage (at the right frequencies) stick a SIM in it and it will work. Not so with the iPhone (unless you bought an unlocked one, which is not possible in the US).
Leaves in the wind - Erik Naggum's Library For Sale
And the experience pretty much sucked. Their Flash player leaves a lot to be desired. I loaded it on my iPad, just so I could watch using <video>.
This is starting to sound like some kind of monarchist apology -- "the King always makes the best possible decision, but sometimes his flawed underlings provide him with bad reports".
anyone know how much bandwidth is consumed by a movie (2hr) on NetFlix?
It seems to me that a widget app, if popular, would become a new target for 3rd party applications, and I can't see why Apple would want that.
yay! two other people in utah. At this rate by 2015 I think we can schedule our first meeting. I am pretty surprised by this considering the university of utah uses "how to design programs" as their intro to CS. Maybe if they used SICP it would be different?
Android 1.5 is going to be the IE6 of the mobile world.

You'll have to code workarounds for it for years.
Wow, I just read that my startup will fail.
Hiring for speculative summer project?
I'm probably in a situation that is familiar to some here. I'm a PhD student with a highly speculative research project I'm working on related to data analysis. I'm fully invested for the summer (i.e., not sleeping) but will certainly fail without some additional help. It's too big a project.

Because of the chance of failure, I'd prefer to hire somebody with the limited funding I do have (~$5000). At the same time, a low-skill hire I'll be flooded with posting on craigslist is essentially worthless. What I need is somebody who lives and breathes web app development -- the product will be horrible if the frontend is horrible.

How does one go about finding somebody like this? I have very little sense for how to find talent for a speculative, relatively low-paying, summer gig.
To Paul Graham
I recently read a short blog article talking about the doom of Digg and the final paragraph caught my eye:

But Digg is in a deadly, unrecoverable tail spin. The fact is, people -- real people -- are beginning to tire. Submit this, upload that, vote on this, "like" that, be my "friend", check in here, suggest this, retweet that ... there's already so much to do. The only thing left to "Digg" is a grave.

It is, precisely, the simplicity and minimalism of Hacker News' feature set that keeps it usable for everyday, busy, -- real people --. Obviously, the culture on Hacker News keeps submissions and comments in check, but that culture would not exist if HN were trying to become a social network for entrepreneurs.

Your continued interaction and consistent fine-tuning makes this a place that I like to come back to. There is a certain social satisfaction with knowing that one is a part of a community in which the creator is still a participant.

I know you are cognizant of what makes this community tick; I also realize it wouldn't be what it is today if your intentions hadn't been clear (and they obviously are) - so I didn't need to say this, but I did want to say this: thank you.
I don't see how I can responsibly spend effort on developing an iPad app. The "approval" process is chaotic and arbitrary - witness intelligent cooperative people having their whole business shot down seemingly at random. I will develop for other platforms - the market leader Android for instance - which operate on the oldfashioned principle of "free market".
Their Future, Made by Hand
I have. Well, not exactly like George, I've never gone back to a company I used to be employed at. However if the work looks fun and the company is interesting and they throw in the odd intangible perk, then I'm more than happy to negotiate on price.
Where Startups Get Started
It's that with certain methods of encoding, a piece is entirely worthless without the rest of the file. That is, I could give a chunk to the IP owner to inspect, and there's no way that he could tell me if it represented a part of his work.

Surely, even without encoding, the piece is pretty worthless without the remainder of the file.

But I see what you mean though (you couldn't even reconstruct a portion of the file).

Im not sure it matters; the point is definitely the intent to supply the copyrighted media in whatever form. It's similar to the persons idea not long ago of supplying obfuscated MP3's by encoding them as Tweets and then supplying the code or algorithm to recover and reconstruct the file. It's all part and parcel of the same thing. It's just obfuscating the delivery method not the actual package/intent.

More importantly I don't think the court will be sympathetic to the idea; and if that is the case it risks invalidating other arguments you may bring.

(there is a similar thing in money laundering; many launderers try and get away with it by rotating very small parcels of money from lots of different batches through legitimate transfers. The idea is twofold; it's difficult to reconstruct the original larger packets of illegal money and b) they can claim, for various reasons, they had no idea of the origin of the money. This argument, as you can imagine, doesn't last long in court :))

I think, ultimately, it is not currently possible to fight the idea that distributing copyright materials in any form could be legal (or at least not illegal).
Friends best way to find jobs?
Yes, absolutely. A project I've wanted to run with for a bit is writing a Scheme implementation in PyPy. It would provide a wonderful way to better learn the parts of Scheme I don't know, and use Scheme alongside Python code (which is nice, because it would mean I could conveniently use Sexps as a data language and do the data handling in Scheme, but do the real work in Python, for example). I'd been looking into some of it idly, but as you say, there isn't much.

More significantly, one of the projects I've been working on really requires a new language, and while I could implement using, say, PyParsing and so on, having free JIT is really nice.
You're right of course, institutional traders are not searching Google or Yahoo Answers for "should I buy or sell AAPL?" However - strong analytics could tell you some interesting habits if you analyze search strings coming from IP blocks known to be used by said institutional traders.

For example, I imagine institutional traders do a lot of research on companies before taking a position in them - this research might show up in search analytics data and Google traders could place a position before the institutional traders do.

Would this be considered illegal by the SEC? I have no idea, but I could definitely see Google doing this.
Or he could develop for iPhone devices, and use the freed time to make his apps better. Or start on a new app. Or take a break.
Agreed. J2ME is a nightmare to develop for. Devices with wildly different capabilities and features, many of which are often buggy.
> You seem to be making the argument that Apple just decided to base WebKit on KHTML without much concern for the licensing implications

No.

I'm saying 'we used something OSS! Then we decided to make it OSS!' is either nonsensical or misleading.
And benmark draws from and defeats both :-)

http://github.com/markoconnor/cells/blob/master/minds/benmar...
Google could provide (paid) update services for handset makers or carriers. The incentive for those to pay for this service would be that those devices would be much more attractive for customers. As a consumer I would be willing to pay more for a phone if I could be sure to get updates for 3 years ASAP.
My guess is that it would primarily focus on the mental health and social interaction - as that becomes a bigger concern for longer missions. So I guess it depends on your definition of 'hard science'.
Yes, Symbian is the platform I was thinking of. Some of the problems can be alleviated by ignoring old devices (N95 era and before) or by ignoring all non-touch devices. But, even then, you have lots of variations between the remaining devices.
Organic search engine optimization. I could talk about this topic every day and not get tired. My two best tips are that 1) create a way such that linking to your site solves a problem for someone else and 2) do #1 in a scalable fashion. If you can do that, organic search is like a free money buffet.

Failing that utopian outcome, at the very least you can create things on your website which solve problems for the type of people who give links. For example, I'm a Rails developer. Among other talents, I can write code. Being able to write code means I'm able to write OSS projects of use to other businesses which use Rails. I host them on my site, and when other developers write blog posts taking credit to their friends and bosses for solving the problems that I actually solved for them (grins), I generally get a backlink.

OSS is by no means the only thing you can do. Good tutorials, evergreen resources (things which will never go out of style in your field), authoritative statistics, high-quality visualizations of data, etc etc, all attract links. Again, try to do them at scale.

twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services

Do you find that that actually gets results? I am kind of outside the Valley, physically and spiritually speaking, and I just can't imagine a business spending time on Facebook or Flickr and that benefiting them more than spending the time on their own website.

SEO getting you a little money to reinvest into AdWords or similar paid acquisition strategies is a nice feedback loop if you can get it, too.
Why would they have licensing issues?
Here's a word i haven't heard in a long time...
In those days we chose to learn Clipper over Cobol, each CL would take 2-3 minutes to compile on a 8086 processor. Now it takes less than 1 sec to do it, lol
Does apple not see how this will end up badly for them?

Apple, you're scaring off talented developers; soon the only people who will be left are people who can afford to have gobs and gobs of apps rejected.
You need them in one of the earlier puzzles.
I think we've proven time and time again that "anal" Beurocracy is absolutely a destructive and time consuming force :)

It's probably one of the most disruptive ideas in that handbook!

(the handbook has been posted here in the past too; I can't find the commentary around that just now)
This is fun, I'm on 7 now - was easy until now. Might as well get a coffee.

edit: OK, 8 is really tough.
Casual sealed bidding, aka rot13 for numbers
There is no intellectual conversation on Digg. The commenting design is too one dimensional and the users don't contribute. Yes, even on reddit there are 'stupid' comments but within specific subreddit there is definitely some good conversation.
The previous plans were not unlimited--they were capped at 5GB, IIRC.

AT&T said that 98% of its customers will save money by switching to these plans. And, AT&T doesn't have the capacity to handle many people who would exceed these limits. AT&T will now send alerts directly to your phone when you get close to reaching the caps. I think this is a much better solution to the "worrying" problem than forcing everybody to over-pay for under-provisioned service.
Or really, any computer supporting OpenGL. This stuff is always an issue: figuring out the correct depth buffer size (not as much of a problem as it used to be), finding the vendor-specific version of the extensions you need to use, different pixel/vertex shader versions which require completely different code... It's always a pain in the ass.
Doesn't seem like a widget app to me. More like a picture frame with lots of features. Where is there a 3rd party widget feature?
We just released Student Revolt which adds a social network to existing courses. You can see a screencast of how it works on the home page.

http://www.studentrevolt.com/
Well, I tried my best.
That's great stuff! I guess I didn't mean no one's actually doing it, but that there used to be a whole industry interested in and capable of doing amazing investigative journalism with backers willing to stand up for them. If these guys run afoul of the law, how long will they last?
Wireworld Cellular Automaton