skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which if I was a TwitPic user might be the thing that provokes me into leaving their service.

"Oh, they're trying to crack down on users exporting their data? Better export mine now then..."
For the record: Posterous API allows 100% access to your data on Posterous. Users own their content and are free to move.
-Sachin Agarwal (http://bit.ly/9MYzfP)

What hypocrisy?
The content is also quite tight on an iPad. (e.g. The mockup logo is touching the left side of the screen, or is maybe chopped by 1px.)

Also, the examples are blank for me. (not sure if that is an iPad or general problem.)
Entertaining emotions: TV may be teaching us to overreact
Right, but what I mean is, something that has less volatility / risk than equity, but similar 'social good' profile. Like, some vehicle that was responsible, environmentally sound fixed-income or suchlike. I wish there were a way to park money short / medium term that was also 'good.' I know (And have invested in) clean energy ETFs and the like, but not really hitting on what I'm looking for, which is something where I'd be satisfied with a much lower return (potential return, obviously) in exchange for just peace of mind knowing that the investment is at least a bit helpful versus say, just feeding the financial-services-industrial complex that has caused so many problems.
Yeah, Posterous are playing a little bit rough, but Twitpic shouldn't respond to that by making it look like they want to make it difficult for users to export their data. If something Posterous have said is untrue (maybe the dying platform part) then call them on it - post growth stats, demand a retraction, whatever. Don't alienate your users to get back at another company.
They absolutely get a say - they can choose to put it on posterous, or not. They can also choose to put their data wherever they want.

What they don't get to do is force a business, unless it's part of a paid-for contract, to spend it's own resources and bandwidth to help an unrelated competitor (or anyone else).
They control MacRuby, and indeed have added new syntax. MacRuby is actually not forwards compatible with regular ruby.
This is a 15 year old paper. Alvy Ray is a great guy, a luminary, love the paper, but at this point it's a historical document.

The basic discussion was covered in my college graphics class in 1988. Anyone working in graphics, fonts, rendering or gaming who thinks this is news should have their literature examined.
Or how well the sleeper cells have had the programming subsumed into their consciousness...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spies_Reminiscent_of_Us#Plot
In general, yes. They might have careful attention to detail in general but show less attention here or there. But in this case, the feature that they're paying such close attention to is the same feature they messed up.
Blogging about the hype only constitutes more hype. Your actions are at odds with your intent.
I used to daytrade IPOs like crazy during the 2006-2008 period. From what I read from the many IPO boards that I participated, you need to have an account with the underwriters of the IPO in order to get allocation. Usually, these premium accounts have higher fee and your balance must be above some amount ($50k-$100k). When there's an IPO you can ask for shares, and the underwriters use this information to gauge how hot the IPO is and adjust the offer price. When they allocate you shares, you can decide to take it or not. Some people say they rank you based on how often you fulfill your promise, so if you always ask for shares but seldom buy you won't get allocations for hot IPO.

I don't have these types of accounts so I never get pre-IPO allocation, but what I did on IPO day was continuously refreshing the page to catch when it's first open (IPO usually open b/w 10am-12:00). You can almost always buy at lower price than the offer price within the first 15 minutes. Most IPOs (~80%) close lower than the offer price on the first day, and they continue to go down after that, you don't want to touch these. The remaining 20% are hot, and you know they're hot b/c the underwriters keep bumping the offer price up. I only played these and for very short term, from only a few minutes to a few days.

I'd time when the price starts bouncing back after the first 15 minutes, probably b/c more people realizing the stock is opened to the public and buy in, and buy 300-400 shares. After about 20 minutes of insane rising, the price will start to level out. At this point, I'd sell half of the shares to lock in the profit (~5% gain). I'd keep the rest for the next day, if the stock closes lower than open price then it shows weakness, I'd get out and never look at it again. If it's higher, I'd keep it for 2-3 more days.

With this strategy I was able to make a lot more than my day job. There used to be 7-8 IPOs every week, and a couple of those are hot so I was able to test this strategy for awhile. There were weeks that I made 20% on a position just over a few days (if I remember correctly the IPO was STV). There haven't been a lot IPOs since then and I haven't followed the market lately. May be it's time to start watching again.
It's a common misconception that wine pricing is all to do with labelling, and nothing to do with actual price inputs. While it is certainly true to some extent, truly great wine comes from truly great vineyards, which are in limited supply due to the exact agricultural/climatic conditions required to grow them. Also, expensive wines such as Champagne which take a long time to make are still very much a hand-made product.

None of these applies to cultivation of pot, even the more exotic varieties. As it can be successfully grown indoors, the conditions for creating it can be created just about anywhere. There is none or very little post-processing involved and the supply chain is astonishingly short.

So I think the comparison to things like wine and coffee are incorrect, as these 'commodities' actually require exact growing conditions and post-processing to get high quality results.

A better comparison would be tomatoes. There is very little price difference between the cheapest tomato and the most expensive, highest quality, organically grown version. I'm not saying that pot is like tomatoes, just that the market conditions are closer to tomatoes than they are to wine, and so the price discrepancies are unlikely to reach the levels between a cheap bottle of no-label wine and a bottle of vintage Dom Perignon.
I'm familiar with NYC, not Seattle. This is not particular to any type of development - at a startup in the publishing space, a hedge fund, a marketing company or big bank, these are low salaries for the caliber of developer rethink is trying to hire.

But it's important to note, I'm not talking about the average developer here. I'm talking about the top 5% who think "reverse a linked list" actually is a warmup question, and can maybe even explain how a binary tree speeds up finding ordered objects.
Calling this "hypocrisy" is way overblown.

When they block and threaten legal action against a company for writing a custom "importer" to pull content from Posterous - then you have hypocrisy.
Ask HN: "best" UI JavaScript library/framework?
I have an idea for another application and want to do it "right" this time just to learn new stuff. This will be desktop-like web application. Right now I am trying to decide which library/framework to learn and use for browser part. I really like Cappuccino look'n'feel, but their Objective J look weird to me. Is there is something like Cappuccino with plain JavaScript or it's better to invest some time into learning this Objective J thing? Any thoughts are really appreciated!

Update: I am looking for open source libraries/frameworks =)
One of the comments from the techcrunch post:

there is no hypocrisy here. We have an API that gives users 100% access to all their content on Posterous, including the original media that was uploaded, in it's full size.

This API can be found here:
http://posterous.com/api/reading

There is nothing stopping people from writing Posterous exporters that go to other services. In fact, Wordpress released a Posterous importer a few months ago.

We support data portability. It's the user's content, not ours. It's our privilege to host it for our users, and we are working hard to be the best service out there.
Surely the "scan rss feed and grab all the photos" tool could be re-written as a client side javascript app? Then they could only block it by blocking all their users :-)
Guess TwitPic disaggres that "Every Site Should Have A Data Portability Policy": http://www.techcrunchit.com/2010/06/23/why-every-site-should....

This episode can backfire on TwitPic a lot if users decide to leave it, and even more if Posterous decides to open source its TwitPic liberation tool to http://dataportability.org/. These were brought up by same guys from Google's data liberation front (http://www.dataliberation.org/), which is actually endorsed by google: http://twitter.com/google/statuses/17271511025
> I wanted an advanced search

I agree. SO has advanced search capabilities, but you have to be an uber power user and know all the esoteric switches, which I think is by design, so fanboys can be "leet". There is this page: http://stackoverflow.com/search (which isn't linked from the homepage), but why don't they take the 4 hours to build an advanced search form so people who aren't frickin experts on the SO platform can do advanced searches? I think this is by design.

>I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.

Meta is not a particularly friendly place, and this seems to be the only place that Jeff takes guidance from, but I think it has to a certain degree become ineffective as the people that rule meta are super-uber SO users, and it it is a very homogeneous group of users, so genuinely new ideas basically can't enter. Maybe they could, but after the initial rude reception you get with a new idea, most people just can't be arsed and leave, as you did.
SproutCore (http://sproutcore.com/) is essentially like Cappuccino, but not Objective-J.
I particularly like this part:

"While WebKit has recently taken some steps forward on fullscreen support, it's not yet sufficient for video usage (particularly the ability to continue displaying content on top of the video)."

I.e., we need to put ads over the videos.
What was the site? Surely not experts-exchange?
For some reason I think "mock soup"
a) you've presented a false dichotomy between social comfort and programming skills. FWIW, most of the great programmers I've know were quite socially capable.

b) If you want to advance as an engineer (of any sort, I would say), social skills are nearly mandatory. People who just code well-specified problems, no matter how well, are going to be stuck at the lower tiers of the profession. Being able to talk with your customers (internal or external) and understand, and help them understand, their needs is essential to increasing your value as an engineer.
I think the ideal would be vocational school first, followed by part-time university studies.
From what I've heard, it's practicing 10 minutes a day for a while.

Going to a session helps too
Got the invite! Thanks a lot.
I don't understand the conspiracy theory. The investment bank will only agree if kickback > shortfall, and a big investor will only agree if kickback < shortfall. Obviously I'm missing something. Why can't the investment bank sell directly on the market in the first place?
That came to my mind too, but I don't think it's doable thanks to XSS restrictions.

To prevent nefarious scripts, XSS (cross-site scripting) isn't allowed by browsers. Thus, when you're on a posterous.com page, javascript can only make requests to posterous.com. When you're on a twitpic.com page, javascript can only make requests to twitpic.com. The way sites get around this is by making the request to the external site from their servers, but then the calls would still come from Posterous servers, so it would get blocked.
I have a question for you. I'm comfortable answering those coding questions, but not on a whiteboard.

Would you be OK if instead of writing on the white board, I whipped out my laptop and coded the answer there in front of you? If the answer is no, I would happily walk out of the interview knowing I would not be a good fit for the company.
> I don't think I've seen oblique, sans serif type used in an iOS user interface.

The system font in OS X (Lucida Grande) doesn't have an italic style either.
If SO was smart they would write an advanced search form that basically just translates into google compatible syntax and forwards it to google (assuming there are no legal issues with this.) Are there legal issues with this, is this a violation of the google TOS??
The article mentions that Taleb believes the randomness of Black Swans is merely an appearance resulting from the lack of information. More information -- better information -- can improve predictions.

Besides, Alan Kay would suggest that the best way to predict the Black Swan would be to invent the Black Swan.
I don't see why I'm getting down voted. I've been meditating on and off for years and I wouldn't just jump into a 7 day retreat until I was ready, it's do-able but probably not pleasant.
I guess that's a good point, I didn't think of situations like that. So maybe some extra tax is in fact in order. However, what about banning stays less than one month? Doesn't that smack of trying to get rid of competition?
Interesting. You filter not only automated spam but also all the people who don't know what's the capital of France.
Can normal users know how to use this API? Why don't you give a button which says export my posts to a text file or something else.
The only part of his comments that really amounts to negative criticism is about the glass back.

He isn't hard on Apple about the missing italic face in the same way he is about e.g. Microsoft's errors (he basically treats it as a regression for Apple to fix), and it's a gross distortion to characterize his verdict on the antenna as "This could be a fatal design flaw." Almost every mention of the antenna issue is cushioned with soothing positivity. He repeatedly states his belief that reception only drops when your reception is lousy to begin with, and overall he seems to think it's likely that the issue will be helped by a software patch, or maybe a small hardware fix. The "fatal design flaw" angle is brought up very briefly, immediately said to be unlikely, and then further softened by reiterating his belief that the issue doesn't affect your reception that much anyway.

I mean, I like Gruber. He's a good writer and has a lot of interesting insights and I actually value his opinion, but you'd have to be stark raving mad to read his blog and think, "Wow, this guy is kind of hard on Apple."
techtruth, we do offer your data in standard formats: XML through our API. See:

http://posterous.com/api/reading

What exactly are you looking for? We're open to suggestions and will gladly expand our API to keep Posterous open and flexible.

There's no hypocrisy here. Our goal is to let users move into and out of posterous at will, and use whatever service they find to be best.

Thanks!
Places like Anderson Consulting and Perot Systems used the same approach back in the 80s and 90s.
and what will a normal user do with that text file?

We find it much more effective to have an API that other people (like you) can use to write an exporter to whatever other service they wish.

Maybe you should just write a Posterous exporter using our API, instead of complaining. Just let me know if you need any help!

thanks
Ask HN: Convince me to learn Emacs/Vim
I've always used IDEs and GUI editors for coding: Zend Studio, Visual Studio, Eclipse or even Dreamweaver (believe it or not, it's very handy when it comes to CSS/HTML auto-completion, validation, cross-browser compatibility and boring stuff like DTDs). Lately, I've been trying to convince myself to learn Emacs or Vim since it seems to be the cool editor for hackers. Yet, I am still unsure whether learning those tools will really make me more productive in the future or just make me look cool... So, I'd like your opinion on how those editors are superior and if they are really worth learning. Have you seen an increase in productivity after learning to use them? How do they compare to fully featured IDEs? If that can help, I do mostly web development (PHP and Rails).
It would be cool if they will sponsor some effort to marry ruby and llvm. ^_^
Reverse cellphone number lookup, privacy issues?
Because what are you going to import that file into? Everything needs a custom import format. Making the API available makes it easy for someone to write something that exports to the format needed. Do you think Posterous should host a different file that allows easy importing for all of its competitors? If the competitors care, they can make a tool that imports into the format they desire. Likewise, if a user just wants a text file of their contributions, they are free to obtain one. Someone could write these tools and publish them, but it's a little over the top to expect Posterous to write an exporter for everyone else's custom formats.
I find that two finger and three finger (and even four finger) gestures are pretty awesome.
Ok here you go:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/posterous-importer/

There's information and a direct link to a plugin that lets you export your site out of Posterous to Wordpress.

We think we're a better service than they are, but we aren't afraid of data portability. Users can switch as much as they want and choose the best service
As an outside investor, you're unlikely to be able to tell genuinely socially responsible investments from greenwashing. For example, how are you going to tell the difference between a environmentally net negative windfarm investment that only exists to help itself to government subsidies and tax treatments, with a windfarm that is a net positive in terms of environment and investment cashflow?

My advice would be to optimise your investing strategy while ignoring the actual investment vehicle, then putting the returns to work in a way that you can see the direct results. You can avoid companies that truly offend you if you must. So invest in a financial services/ IT company that produces the returns you need, then spend those returns on an environmental/social improvement project in your local area, whether it is a pollution cleanup or a skill training centre. This is the same strategy as Bill Gates, just on a smaller scale.
thanks! well said.
Except this is exactly what was said about the iPhone when it came out -- that it was amazingly designed.

If good design is supposed to be timeless, how can once-beautiful pieces of design now be considered as "rounded blob[s] of plastic" that "isn't very exciting"?

This is the kind of fanboyism that really turns off a lot of us.

Thought experiment: if Apple came out with a new phone with the exact design of some previously maligned older phone, I'd be willing to bet that most Apple fans would immediately claim that this "new" design is amazing and perfect and all the other superlatives that are pitched about...
Managing the Backchannel in the Classroom | Hack Education
How to Actually Get Hired
It seems extremely unlikely that Ruby will displace ObjC. I can imagine that it will become the blessed scripting language for the Mac, in something like the way that Visual Basic has been for Windows.

Either way I'm glad to see Apple's support behind Ruby.
This is HN, not Reddit.
That's bizarre. I happen to enjoy it, and while I would grant you this isn't the norm, I don't think it is exceptional either.

Some people, maybe most people, can't be bothered to deal with the hassles of lower level work.

Myself, I don't have to re-invent every wheel in the world, but when I had a web dev job I found I had gone a year without actually writing anything but glue. For people like me, the feeling is "what's the point?" Don't ask me why the finicky lower level stuff is any different, but for me, for some reason, it really is.
ExtJS would be a good bet. Its parent company, now known as Sencha, just "acquired" 2 popular Javascript frameworks, jQTouch and Raphael. They also received an investment from Sequoia capital recently. The only downside is that it requires a license for non open source projects.
It's also a great filter when you are the job seeker. If they want a yes man, they won't hire you.
You went to a better college, that's not what they taught me. They herded us to services to improve our resumes, and told us to check their job boards and other such bullshit.

I've done what Derek suggests. It's not begging, it works, and the salary I was offered was more than fair.

I'm currently hiring for my startup. Someone who showed keen interest like this would have a much better chance at getting hired.
Mongrel2 Almost Valgrind Pure, Bstring Happy
G20 Community Day of Action illegal search
> It was a way better experience than using a hotel. He actually double booked the room for a couple of the days, so he gave us a different apartment in Manhattan for those days.

How good would the experience be if he didn't have that second apartment?
"Most people will take advantage"

If you're going to research companies though, find some that are going to be fair. You don't have to beg to be persistent, and if you have ideas for how to improve processes and understand the business, you will be able to negotiate a decent salary.
This is a good idea, I'll go with hitting a small sample first.

But they didn't really opt-in, there was no explicit opt-in option.
I would say that they are BBEdit-specific, except for the review of differences on Tiger. That's only tangentially related to Apple. It's not like he wrote something for the iPhone and/or Mac.
Tricky When You Least Expect It
ChatRoulette enlists Shawn Fanning in his fight against the adult content
Why is this on the front page? I could understand it IF he switched to PostgreSQL because it outperformed Tokyo Cabinet, but he switched back simply because he finally learned SQL. This isn't about technology, it's about his understanding. This story is lame.
NABERS | NABERS Assessment | NABERS Energy
Beac is an 'Independent' National service designed to provide NABERS assessors, NABERS Mandatory Disclosure and project information for all NABERS assessments.
video (flash-based) 4chan? It should be expected.
I've been on interviews where the questions are so basic I've been variously confused and insulted. "This job must pay crap," I'd think, or it's pointless work. Now, thanks to the Internet, I've learned that these things can't be taken for granted.

And I'm not a coding genius. I don't particularly like being put on the spot. I've had problems coding before (personally) and just had to go away until the problem magically became easy. Under the pressure of an interview, that kind of lockup would be disastrous.

So it sucks, but apparently the industry is in a place right now where a lot of less capable people have resumes that suggest they can do the jobs for which they are applying to.

I object far more to the presumption that some company can waste my time for two days of non-stop interviews than ask me to code up some problem for them.
Just wondering, why are you leaving Posterous, and to what do you want to switch?
LCD pixels are a set of three monochrome rectangles placed next to each other horizontally. Except for the ones that are vertical. And PenTile, which is missing some subpixels. And TVs, which display anamorphic video (or might be 768p) and whose pixels are not mapped to the monitor pixels.

None of them are little squares of one color.

What's wrong with sampling theorems anyway?
Running electrified fencing is probably cheaper in the long run.

Although I guess it'll only solve the problem once per guest.