skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Point taken: I'm being really, really picky in this post. It's is far from the most confusing code I've seen today.

But I'm making a larger point: JavaScript tends to be a lot less readable than code written in other languages not just because of the language itself but because of the byte-squeezing habits web developers have picked up over the years. I think JavaScript tools have advanced to the point that we can finally drop those habits.
Agreed. I was surprised by this similar sentence in the article, stating that autism "has increased dramatically in children over the past 20 years."

Such an important component of the article shouldn't be misstated like that. That really should be written as "the number of children diagnosed with autism has increase dramatically over the past 20 years."
We sent them an email after we pushed the change live. If I could do it over again I would send them an email a week in advance and funnel all the complaints to our support team. The biggest mistake was having nowhere for them to complain because then they took to fb, twitter etc...
Seriously? You're asking me to defend some barely relevant quirk of functionality from Office XP, which came out nine years ago, and Office 2003, which came out seven years ago?

I can tell you what was considered important on the Word web app, which is brand new and is what I worked on. I have no insight into the design process on older versions.
Hey Steve,

I'm sorry to hear that you've had a bad experience with our support. What was your ticket number? I'd be more than happy to help you figure this out, shoot me an email here: giannii@disqus.com

-Giannii
Weve been with esupport for about 1.5 years now. I find it somewhat cumbersome to do certain things, and there are 2 minor things that really piss me off, but overall, it being a piece of shit, sounds a little of an over statement. I wouldnt exactly rant and rave about it, but it seems to do its job and its not that expensive. Maybe im missing something...
They've already got a ton of storage for end users - I imagine Gmail attachments alone are a pretty massive corpus.

What this adds is information about site traffic - who's using what from where. Between Google Analytics, search trends, and toolbar, they've already got a lot of that. But I imagine that's part of the rationale for this.
I thought I had seen this before. I remembered some candle/tacks/box task. I believe it was this TED video.
FTA:

“With the Internet it has exploded, but a lot of chief and command officers didn’t understand and chose to put their resources in things like burglary or homicides.”

This is probably the most egregious example of justifying something "for the children". I'd much rather the police department put resources into catching murders. Murder is worse.
as I don't think sun has any effect on skin cancer.

We can think anything. the article talks about scientific rigorous way to test something.
FTC to investigate photocopier data storage
Dr Dobbs - Supercomputing Like A Cat
Crichton's book "State of Fear" is a great source of information about Global Warming. Even though it is fiction, all of the research that he mentions is real.
IPhone Xcode deploy & debug over Wi-Fi
I knew I'd seen this ad somewhere before:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/353-fly-on-the-wall-lifelock-...
"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."

Since the industry doesn't use Gimp, those students would be putting themselves out of the market.

"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)."

This idea may work with a handful of apps. It doesn't work with the mid-sized software company trying to make a profit.
Yup. I myself am a "young techy" I started out not caring about the little bits of data I let out. But now I'm really clamping down, identity theft is too real to take a risk.
Again?! Just as I was done nailing this one down. Sigh.
Way to go! Also, you sure you want to reveal your office blueprints? On account of social engineering sploits and all...

i.e. pop by for any event held in your new theater, "oh, the guest bathroom is down the hall, left after the door, thanks", instead swing a right after the door, hello electric and server rooms, don't need long, just one usb stick, thanks see you later guyz!
"I would love to see either side of the debate pull this argument away from the hypothetical realm.

At least we know fairly objectively claims of economic harm caused by piracy are hyperbolic:"

The same could be said about DRM.
When I can't handle it anymore, there's a number of things I can do.

1) Make the emails more random - if I only send half the emails, it stands to reason that I'll only get half the responses!

2) Stop sending them! There are other ways to gather feedback that may work better later.

I haven't spent too long worrying about this, though. It'll be a good problem to have.
Interesting.

Never thought about that.

Not sure if that will be a good place to start, but I will definitely look into it.

My main issue now though is to get some sort of cash flow going as soon as I can.

So we will see.

Thnx though.
Perhaps he already did?

'If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off topic'.
I've been an early beta tester and became premium member when they launched their mobile version (which you must pay to use). Now whenever I hear someone with the ad supporter version I don't understand how they can stand all the commercials.
I think they have about 5% paying customers which is pretty high. Considering they have a few million users it adds up to quite some revenue.
Good job he's got a $1 million compensation fund to cover him.
RavenDB goes live
Other platform developers who are nervous about the changes. The highly-publicized (and probably highly-exaggerated) blowup between Zynga and Facebook has been of little interest to anyone else.
Of course it did. But there are a lot of ways to say no without sounding dismissive - I'm more offended by the fact that some intern responded to my email (that was a reply to a purported personal email) than by the fact they declined my suggestions.
FYI the upstream has it done already.
I'm getting tired of those discussions. From Apple's point of view, Flash is like MSDOS: they don't want to support antiquated apps.

If Flash is so great, just port it to the iPhone and install it (with ad-hoc distribution) to the 100 top journalists and bloggers, and see what they think.
The 9-year-old Microsoft genius
Shocking! Next we'll probably find out that the guy from Video Professor doesn't actually have a doctorate..
CCNA Drag and Drop Question
International Networking in Education
International Networking in Education
From the article, the identity thieves don't sound that crafty at all. They basically just filled out an application and were approved at instant loan shops, phone companies, etc., etc. It goes to show how silly it is to have so much resting on our SS#.
Yahoo Buys Associated Content for $100 Million
i guess this could serve as a kind of honeypot so the company can observe the attacks on this guy and then improve the service. but according to the FTC in this article their service doesn't work so apparently it was nothing more than a marketing stunt.
That guy Kreci that just posted his info recently. He made 1500 last month.
Very strange hybrid of models. The non-profit food "seller" with flexible payment/donation policies is taken straight out of the traditional hippie and anarchist food co-ops model (though one thing they often have that this seems to be missing is the ability to volunteer some labor in lieu of monetary donation). But in this case it appears to be merged with Panera's branding and some sort of raise-money-for-charity goal, and stuck in an upscale suburb.
There are quite a few successful bootstrappers on The Business of Software forum:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz
Unfortunately these "credit monitoring services" are basically useless. The only real solution is to "freeze your credit" which makes credit inaccessible to anyone unless you provide an unlock code (which temporarily "thaws" your credit). The cost ranges from $3-$10 per person per bureau to freeze a credit report which is considerably cheaper than the $10/month lifelock service. More information on how to do this here:

http://clarkhoward.com/topics/credit_freeze_states.html
From a business WHY are they doing this?

There are at least two good reasons.

The first is that it commoditizes the Internet further, which means more people will use it to look at Google ads.

The second is, as other people have said, that they can potentially get valuable data out of it. It's actually rather scary how few web sites Google is not able to keep track of, if you consider both ads, analytics and search traffic.
That's awful and I'm sorry. When was this? We've been making changes to how we handle support to better address problems like this and it sucks that you were shafted here.

Since Disqus is a service used on sites (and not contained in our own world), our support inquiries come from both website owners and their audiences and involve so many different scenarios. So we need to better educate users on how things work first of all. But that support volume made finding real bug reports or big issues hard (I just posted a HN comment about using our support software earlier today). We've made some changes here though.

This also pains me because we try really hard for great interaction with users, even calling up users to help them figure things out. We're definitely closer to a more holistic solution in this area.

(P.S. the most likely reason for your issue is perhaps you changed your post's permalink URL so Disqus could no longer find the right association. Still our fault, but that's an explanation if you still care to wonder.)
I'd think this would be more successful if you didn't have a national brand behind it. Nobody feels guilty taking things from a big corporation.
Heh. When I first read "SEM Specialist", my first thought was "why does Airbnb want to hire someone who knows Scanning Electron Microscopy"?
Success vs Achievement (They Are Not The Same)
It was funny, but also a low blow. And further, since the direction to Max was veiled, it felt like an indictment of sustainable/lifestyle businesses instead of businesses you just want to avoid as a growth investor.

(Thanks for your other excellent commentary.)
I think you're probably just being snarky, but it is a pretty great marketing concept.

After all, it's not always the case that product->quality == marketing->quality.
I would like some way to "flag" a dead post for revival. Every so often I see a dead link that in my opinion should not be dead. You could use the flag link on dead posts for this.
The entire identify-theft problem can be solved by a very simple mechanism. If I apply for a loan for a car, the dealer takes my info and tries to run my credit online. Immediately I get an automated phone call that says "Dealer ABC is trying to sign you up for service: AUTOLOAN. To allow this service, enter your 4 digit pin." If I do not have my cellphone, I can directly call a 1-800 number, enter my SSN + PIN and confirm the sign up. I do NOT have to provide any vendor with my PIN.

Who manages/offers this service? Experian/TransUnion etc. could do this for a very small fee. Sure, there would be the issue of lost PINs, unavailability of Internet access, not having your cell on you etc. but I think it could work very well. Right now, it is possible for someone to find out my SSN# from a piece of paper from a trashcan and immediately buy a phone in my name. At least I can change my pin if someone finds out.
I have to imagine this business model must have existed in various ways throughout the history of commerce, but it's fascinating to see it experimented with again by a business in a traditional industry. Particularly so now that we've seen it expand throughout the tech world, in both the passive "donate button" form and the active form popularized by Radiohead.
duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358932
Google has gotten so big on the web, anything they can do that will increase the usability, adoption and speed of the web may help their bottom line. In this sense, it may be the same strategic initiative as getting into the ISP space and offering Chrome.
get a co-founder.
Read my comment below. A similar service already exists with all the credit bureaus. It's called a "credit freeze".

How it works is when you're about to apply for credit somewhere, you ask them "what bureau are you checking?" Then you go online to that bureau and temporarily "thaw" your credit just for that inquiry. And there's a nominal charge for this service.
The downvoting in this thread is interesting - it's not like the frustrations being aired are overly harsh or unfair. I think it's fine to air contrary viewpoints, surely.
I so wish I had $15k that I didn't care about. I'd buy this thing and send it to bars just to say cheesy pickup lines to women.
Newspaper Guardian Says It Needs to Become an Open Platform
Taking money from taxpayers under the guise "to create jobs" is idiotic - the overhead in such events eventually means everyone is sitting around moving virtual dollars from Pot A to Pot B. If government thinks more investment is needed in science then government needs to make it easier and less, ahem, taxing to do so.
As soon as I meet your criteria I'll point you to my blog.
Thepiratebay down again?
Did thepiratebay just go down again?
From the article:

"The first location bears the name St. Louis Bread Co. Cares"

I suspect detaching themselves from the national chain brand will help; really, I think branding and location choices are going to end up being the primary success factors here.

This will be very interesting to watch.
Using PySpeech (http://code.google.com/p/pyspeech/), I put together something in a couple hours last night that will listen for its name (currently "Jarvis") at the beginning or end of a sentence and offer the rest of the sentence to whichever "app" matches it most highly. Right now the "apps" are echo (I say "Jarvis, echo "a big blue house" and my computer says "a big blue house"), a 'manners' app (I say "Thanks, Jarvis" and it says "You're welcome, sir."; it also gives me time of day-appropriate greetings) and a weather app (intelligent responses to "Jarvis, weather" or "Forecast for Friday, Jarvis"). It just runs with my headset mic right now, but once I move in a few months I'll start looking for some better hardware. Alarm and appointment apps are next.

Anyway, the point is that this is really easy to build yourself - most of the hard problems have been solved (I was really surprised how well Win7 speech recognition works), and you just have to write the glue.
If Jason's in the same general area of the city as he used to be in, he's a short walk from The Publican. HE WINS.
I would imagine that would happen when you put your social security number all over the place...
This saga is about Apple’s ability to control its own destiny
Would you mind linking a few examples, by pointing to their revenue confession posts?
I'm not sure what the solution is, but it can be difficult to vote on a touchscreen.

Perhaps a mobile stylesheet where the vote arrows are to the left and right of the screen would suit, though I'm unsure of the aesthetics would be suitable. The current design is pretty attractive.
Self promotion alert, but I just wrote this last week and people seemed to like it:

http://spencerfry.com/how-to-bootstrap

And then why you shouldn't be transparent:

http://spencerfry.com/disclosing-your-finances
I believe that fleaflicker.com was done by a single, bootstrapped founder. It was acquired by AOL. The founder, Ori Schwartz, did write some on Reddit (where I heard about this) and likely elsewhere.

An older story was Bob Parson's development of his tax software company, which was acquired by Intuit for 64 million. He's quite transparent about it, to say the least.
/me reads a bit

ow.
In other news: sky to be blue, grass to be green, and bad journalism to be obvious.
Let's try another one then.

1. open gtalk. (this one should be coded correctly, right?) and type anything. do not send.

2. long press home.

3. go to another app. let's say, browser.

4. long press home.

5 select gtalk.

awesome! your text is there. awaiting you to send it.

now, repeat step 1 to 3. but this time also open google maps, and google earth... and let's say google navigator (you are tring to confirm where something is)

now proceed with steps 4 and 5.

oh no! your text is not there anymore! did the guys that coded google talk do not know how to use their own OS? or you just took your information out of nowhere?
Our company was actually just looking into licensing eSupport and we thought it looked pretty good.

Why is it a "complete piece of shit"?
I wrote an application for a banking client a few years ago that required a valid SSN. In addition to using the information available on ssa.gov to check the validity of a number, I built a simple filter to exclude valid, but otherwise fraudulent numbers. While none of the steps I took are a bulletproof measure against identity theft, they do lighten the load a bit.

I cross-referenced the SSN death index to ensure dead people had not risen from the grave to apply for credit. I also excluded the popular "fake" SSNs used in advertising (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#SSNs_inv...), and I most definitely added Todd Davis's number to the list. This last step seemed like a no-brainer given all of the publicity at the time.

While I can understand a small boutique store not going to those lengths to prevent a fraudulent account, I am a little surprised that AT&T and Verizon were among the casualties.
Tangential hypothesis du jour: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash (in the "middleware" sense, ignoring Flash-as-plug-in) on their iAppliances because it would offer a _significantly_ superior development experience when compared to Objective-C/Cocoa? From my experience w/ Flash development, it would be _perfect_ for at least ~50% of the (rather) simple games and applications that are on the App Store nowadays.

In other words: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash because it's so bad, but because it's too good?
I welcome self-promotion, but you don't seem to fit the "successful" criteria, by revenue? do correct me, if I'm wrong.
Mobile phone is the new browser
A hacker I know (who has I team I believe - the debuggable.com guys - both successful bloggers and core teamembers of the cakephp community) has been working on transload.it for a while, it's a pretty good service despite still being in beta, but I haven't put it through its paces like I'm sure you would. (I was working on a wordpress plugin.) It sits on ec2 and will save right into your s3.

http://transloadit.com

I don't know their plans for the full release, but they could be a way to break out of your lock in with encoding.com.
In 2004, I had a friend who tried to convince me that Bush and Kerry would both lose in the upcoming election to Woodrow Wilson.

"You see, every time the Boston Red Sox have won the World Series..."
I'm a single-founder, bootstrapped, successful (by your definition - my monthly revenue has ranged from $2.5k to $13k since launch) startup founder. I don't, however, have a public blog about how I run or started the business. It's not that I'm trying to hide it, I just don't have a blog. My site is http://www.dkpsystem.com (Hosting for MMO guilds). Woo self-promo.

A while back (over a year), I had a reasonably open discussion about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423249

I'm not afraid to discuss just about any internal operation I do with my business, I just don't have a blog yet. I started one a while back, but never really updated it.
Actually, I remember reading it and having the exact same reaction the 37 signals guys did in their thread -- so I certainly wasn't immune to the marketing ploy myself.
The problem is that even if the meaning is clear, it can still be very poor language. In fact, you could possibly end in a situation where a certain idiom is translated directly which might give a bad result but look fine when translated the other way.

If you translate "I won't take no for an answer" directly into Danish, you would get something like "jeg vil ikke tage nej for et svar", which isn't very good Danish though the meaning is quite clear. Translated back, it would give you the impression that the translation is excellent.
Perhaps you're unaware of using the irony of using the internet to make this comment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA
don't they know they could get bloggers for free these days?
the real issue here is everyone assuming social security numbers are meant to be 'secret'. It is a terrible way to authenticate someone. There have been recent studies to show how non-random someone's number actually is.

Someone recently suggested the 'nuclear' option of making everyone's social security number public and forcing all institutions to figure out a better model. This may be too extreme but something like that may be necessary
Number and value of tech mergers is on the upswing
I would like to nominate Mr. Norvig for the post of Internet Resident Expert please.
not sure if you know this, but all Panera's in St. Louis are branded "St. Louis Bread Co."
RT has the most seamless workflow imaginable. It puts every other ticket system's e-mail integration to shame.
That's the application, the actual granted patent seems to be: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec... (note that the date is May 11, 2010 - last week)
Maybe feelings aren't always valid.
I apologize for sounding ignorant, but what is the book?

Edit: Got it. Thanks.
Wow, that was Freudian. LOOK OUT, JASON. WE'RE COMING FOR YOU. We're calling our product Spacecamp.
Even Apple users does not find this reasonable. And also here is an opinion pool which shows most of the people thinks that this is a wrong move: http://www.applevsadobe.net
That's a crucial point. I wonder why that angle keeps getting overlooked when there are studies that support and explore it so well. Are the scientists dropping the ball? Are the writers?
Isn't that kind of extortion? "We've collected all of this data about you, and we'll give it to anyone unless you pay us some protection money."
Surely my Russian grandma and my dad, an important part of the demographic that we care about as far as the iPhone users go, have voted, and those using the Flash authoring tool on a daily basis have not.
I can't even begin to make sense of these "reviews"
This proposal allows a seller to avoid being a victim of buyer identity theft, but it provides nothing for a consumer who must prove that he did not sign for an auto loan.
All stores were originally St. Louis Bread Co's (at least as far away as Chicago/Evanston back in 1996 or 97 or so), but they adopted the Panera name outside the area as they expanded.
Check space shuttle/ISS visibility this week in your town
Mind a link?
How big is your customer/subscriber base?
Thanks for the headsup, no idea how I managed to miss this technique. It's hilarious that this is what it takes to not be screwed by the current credit system.
The greatest bug I never fixed
I agree that SSNs are used in a contradictory manner. They are both a universal identifier -- something you have to give to open a bank account, etc., and something that many places use to track your information, and a universal authenticator, wherein only YOU are supposed to know your SSN.

It's like requiring everyone's username to double as their password. It is seriously broken system, something else has to be figured out.
Wow. That is not even close to being a legitimate poll.