skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: AT&T Mishandled My Two Duplicate Shipments. Thoughts?
So AT&T finally buckled down and pushed a new Android phone, the HTC Aria, on Sunday. I've been in the market for a new phone for awhile now and I decided I'd have to settle for Droid's little brother given my current contract with AT&T.

(Side note: I have nothing against the iPhone. I can't personally warrant purchasing one if I can't develop apps with my Linux distro easily.)

Long story short, my girlfriend and myself have a family plan. We both decided to make an online purchase for the same phone as they weren't in stock locally. I placed my order a matter of minutes before my girlfriend completed hers. So here we are a few days later and AT&T approved and processed her phone at 11:50 PM last night. My phone, on the other hand, was not approved and processed until 9:19 AM this morning. Considering I made my purchase before hers and we're on the same account, wouldn't this imply that AT&T has a very botched queue for processing new phone orders? I'm a little baffled here, especially considering her phone is now going to arrive tomorrow and my phone's ETA is Monday. We can't activate them separately or we'll screw up our account. What gives? The only other valid information here is that she is the primary account holder whereas I'm the secondary.

Any insight as to why shipments were handled in such a manner? I'm intrigued yet a little upset at the same time.
> The good news is that if you are a control freak (and what designer isn't, another reason for the lock down) then you can simply design for PDF. Which, if you require actual layout control, and not just typographical control, is a world class standard (one with LOTS of design options.)

Yes. But remember: PDF is still evil. Go for PS instead.
A friend of mine has been interested in setting something like this up in the states. Is there a website documenting the process/pitfalls?
If you just want to host some bug tracking software then I don't suppose it matters if you use 32 or 64 OS. Though, frankly I would look to someone else to host and maintain that kind of stuff so you can concentrate on development. I also never install that on a production server that is hosting your site.
I'm fairly sure none of the 3 people responding to this HN article are members of cartels. Piracy doesn't discriminate between good or bad. There is no 'major label only' torrent site.
Looking For A Startup Job?...Startup Talent Database
Big Victory for Google and UGC in General
From the FTC website, the list of "reasonable steps" that twitter (and really, any web app) should have taken:

* requiring employees to use hard-to-guess administrative passwords that are not used for other programs, websites, or networks;

* prohibiting employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text within their personal e-mail accounts;

* suspending or disabling administrative passwords after a reasonable number of unsuccessful login attempts;

* providing an administrative login webpage that is made known only to authorized persons and is separate from the login page for users;

* enforcing periodic changes of administrative passwords by, for example, setting them to expire every 90 days;

* restricting access to administrative controls to employees whose jobs required it; and

* imposing other reasonable restrictions on administrative access, such as by restricting access to specified IP addresses.

[http://ftc.gov/opa/2010/06/twitter.shtm]
Ask HN: Video format for Web and Mobile?
I'm starting a new start-up and one of the requirements is to be able to show video on the website and various mobile handsets (iphone and droid to start).

I haven't been able to come up with a good strategy at handling this particular part of the requirement. Seems like there isn't really any straight answer, so I guess I'm looking for what have others done to minimize the 'pain in the ass' factor with video right now.
On the Nexus One you can enter a test settings screen where I'm pretty sure you can turn off the GSM radio completely.
The article mentions that there are plenty of good examples from other locations, just they believe that it gives them a great chance of success.
It's even worse than that. It's not the Harry Potter books (plural) they were talking about--it was just one particular Harry Potter book, book 7, which was the last book in the series. How many people are going to read 6 books in a series, and then need a review to decide if they want to read the 7th?

About the only reason I can think of one might check reviews before buying is to see if there are any goofs, like chapters printed out of order or things like that, that might make you want to delay purchase until the second printing.

The Amazon review system is kind of annoying. There are three kinds of things I've seen people cover in reviews: content, presentation of content, and purchasing issues. For instance, I did a short review of a math book. The content was excellent. However, the conversion to ebook for the Kindle was unusable. Various mathematical symbols were not recognized during the OCR and were replaced with blank space.

Amazon provides no way for me the rate the content at 5 stars and the presentation at 1 star for the Kindle edition. (And it provides no way to review just the Kindle edition. The reviews for all the editions are collected together).
He must be right! He uses so many exclamation marks!! Wow!!!
Of course, McCrystal was Obama's hand-picked guy. Senator Obama trashed Petraeus. (Remember the whole "General Betray Us" thing? No, Obama didn't say those words, but his questioning did the equivalent.)

The Bush-era cry was "Bush should listen to the generals (who agree with us)" while it's now "civilian leadership, damnit".
You're not allowed to collude or leverage dominance in one market (infrastructure) into an unfair advantage in another market (content).

Citation needed.
Apple dominates the college student/professional artist demographic. They sell hardware coupled software - it is illegal to run their software on any non-Apple hardware.

This is why free markets work -- if we refused to regulate anything, ever, it'd be oligarchy, and there'd be precious little "free" about it.

That is absolutely wrong. By definition a free market has no regulation (besides prevention of fraud). In fact the only thing giving telecom companies a monopoly is the government.

EDIT: To the person who voted me down, would you mind explaining why? I'd be fascinated to know.

EDIT 2: From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
A free market is a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to enforce ownership ("property rights") and contracts
I don't normally correct people's spelling but in this case...you've got an error on your company homepage. Should be "they don’t need to be as daunting as we tend to _perceive_ them."
The article has important advice for startups with user generated content - register with the Copyright Office to get full DMCA safe harbor protection.
Someone needs to update Nigeria's Wikipedia page to list spam as its major export.
Salt Satyagraha was a protest against a government tax, by those in favor of free markets - not a protest against free markets. See the link you just posted.
This guys explanation of "quote stuffing" seems incorrect to me:

"What benefit could there be to whomever is generating these extremely high quote rates? After thoughtful analysis, we can only think of one. Competition between HFT systems today has reached the point where microseconds matter. Any edge one has to process information faster than a competitor makes all the difference in this game. If you could generate a large number of quotes that your competitors have to process, but you can ignore since you generated them, you gain valuable processing time."

I don't think this is correct, since it's not a trivial matter to ignore your own quotes. Say there are two orders about to come in, and you place a third. The market data feed then tells you [order 1, order 2, order 3]. It does not tell you which order is yours. So you need to separately run code which remembers when you placed orders, and then guess that "look, order 1 and order 2 match the order I placed, I guess order 1 is mine, lets ignore it when doing the rest of our calculations". That's not fast code.

Besides, if your broker thinks you are DOSing the markets (as well as the broker's system), they will shut you down FAST.

My "stupidity, not malice" explanation: novices didn't throttle the oscillations in their code and feedback loops developed. Some were self-loops - basically, you just don't have the self-order detection code I described above, and try to trade based on your own actions. Some were loops between traders - trader 1 places an order, trader 2 cancels in response, trader 1 cancels in response to 2, trader 2 places an order in response to the cancel, etc. The band-saw patterns look like bidding wars on wildly undervalued stocks (e.g., one system places an order for accenture at 0.05, another at 0.06, another at 0.07, etc), which is actually a very good thing since it pushes prices back up to their proper levels.
The magical Helvetica..

Still probably not a good choice for the body of a text.
I really don't understand how anyone expects to stop people from downloading things for free. It's even possible to get songs directly off youtube and tv shows directly off hulu, just as it is possible to record songs directly off the radio. Nobody seems to notice though.
You can post photos to http://ourdoings.com/ via dropbox. It's a blog-like photo sharing site.
Not implementing features is easy. Explaining your abstract minimalist reasoning to users who have legitimate needs for the features is the hard part.
Reasons people will post reviews of a product on Amazon:

1) That's where they bought it -- sometimes when I buy something at Amazon I get an email from them asking me to review it

2) Sharing one's opinion is its own reward

3) Lots of people visit Amazon, so your opinion is going to be meaningful. What's more, your review will appear on the page for the product itself.

4) If you use Amazon a lot, you look at the reviews before buying. This means you are aware that they exist -- you trust them, maybe. Having the chance to add to a corpus of reviews you use and respect is a powerful incentive.

I'm not sure a plain-vanilla reviews site will be able to compete successfully with Amazon reviews. Maybe find some niche, like IMDB (movies) or Harmony Central (musical instruments) or KVR Audio (music software).
In my experience it's trivial to get a TN1 visa if you are Canadian. It is tied to a specific employer, but an employer could just be an LLC set up by your friends. There is a similar visa for Australians now, the E-3.
Fixing the quotes to be timestamped properly seems to be a much simpler fix than relying on additional circuit breaker logic.
I'm not sure how activating then separately will screw up the account. Who told you this?

I'm on AT&T family plan and my wife and I have activated phones separately without issue.
How about EU citizens?
When a person says exactly what they are thinking, and it comes out horribly -- but accurately -- it's not "poor communication," it's "poor being."
I saw that it wanted me to sign up before I could try it out, and clicked the back button. I have no idea if your service is a good one or not, I guess I never will.

And facebook integration? Seriously I think it is quickly becoming the obvious sign of a douchey website. Not saying that facebook integration isn't a useful feature in some sites, but nowadays when I see a site and it has a whole row of social network integration buttons it just looks desperate and exploitative, like the site cares more about using the audience to gain traction than to provide a good service.
That's a great analogy. If I had a nickel for every goof with a "hot startup idea" in the valley, I'd be richer than most of the people who have hot startups.

I've never lived in LA, but living in San Francisco feels like the technology version of every hard-luck-actor tale I've read of Hollywood. It's so easy to run across the modern equivalent of a waiter with a script (a hacker with a business plan), that it's actually disconcerting to go to valley conferences or social events. You're usually bombarded by so many people who want something -- funding, partners, customers, external validation -- that you tend to shut them all out.
The Genius is in the Details
And check these out too:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1445500
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455670
Really!?! That is exactly what someone doing this would want you to think...
Good point: in order for the author to be "schooled" he would have to realize the folly of being alarmed that her whimsy resonated with over 500 people on a planet with half a billion english speaking internet users.
Sorry, my mistake.

The author of the post isn't explicitly labelled, but your name (and Jeff Lewis) appears to the right of the blog post. I got confused.
You know, I often forget to mention formula notation as a reason I love R. It is superbly natural. R's natural support for data frame (collections of multidimensional observations) and formula notation make's it easy for every single disparate library to convene on a common language for high-level usage. Pretty near every function shares the same first two parameters:

out <- f(formula, data-frame, ... other options ...)
Weak Consistency and CAP Implications
Mahut vs. Isner: The Most Epic Event In Sports History
I just noticed that they don't even feature the Xserve on their main store page anymore.
Sadly, I think EU citizens have to use the H1B visa or else one of the special-important-expert-person visas I know nothing about.
This is one of the reasons I'm planning to home-school my children: encouraging them to do real work as early as possible. 13+ years of fake, unimportant projects is a very efficient way to generate apathy.

Recommended Reading: John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm) Interesting tidbit from Chapter 1: Admiral David Farragut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farragut) entered the US Navy at the age of 9, and received his first command when he was 12 years old. Kids are capable of far more than we currently give them credit for.
Could you provide a source?
There's no stopping Apple from automatically "signing you up" to their new social networking site that conveniently shares all that info to the world. However, AT&T has privacy concerns to uphold.
I believe Tom is alluding to the fact that making a UI or JS library GPL'ed is a dick move.

The Ext guys moved here from Flordia to take advantage of funding. They have a very "outside the valley" view of things, including wacky licenses.
The money comes from the end-user either way. So right now the difference is between paying $250 for an iPod Touch vs. $99 or more for an iPhone plus a contract of some kind that embeds the subsidy in the monthly fees.

If Apple wants to offer iPod Touches for $25 or even free and recoup the cost through monthly fees, it can do so without the carriers by bundling them with MobileMe subscriptions or by offering Apple Credit Cards.

Apple really doesn't need the telcos to offer financing to its customers.
Allowing you to login using an id you already have with a major provider saves you time.

One can have a 'junk' account with a provider an use it for stuff like this, if needed.

Edit: Having said that, I agree with your premise that a sign in should not be mandatory to using the site.
This is utterly fascinating to me. What kind of protocols does it use? What kind of use cases have sprung up around it and what roles is it playing in peoples' lives? Is it more of a ham radio kind of enthusiast thing or is it working its way into the general community?
This feature has been available in the iPad client for some time now.
32-bit Windows is deprecated. Windows 2003 is on its way out.

If it's easy to spin up a new server instance, move to Windows 2008R2 x64 as soon as possible, and save yourself the pain.
This article, and many like it, seem to use "startup" and "consumer-facing web startup" interchangeably. If you're doing the latter, you will at least be in better company in the Bay Area. There are certainly companies that benefit from having a presence there, but there's something to be said about being outside a consumer-web echo chamber as well.

In Founders at Work, the one founder who I remember stressing the importance of location the most was Mike Lazaridis, who started his company in a smallish town an hour or two from Toronto. They have a higher market cap than all but a few of the companies Jessica interviewed.
This is getting silly. It's fantastic that we finally got canvas in Explorer, but people are putting too much weight to one demo designed to highlight one particularly well performing feature (HW accelerated image draw on canvas #).

This has as much significance as Chrome getting ridiculously better results in V8 benchmark [1] compared to all other browsers.

Please go to CanvasDemos [2] or ChromeExperiments [3] and try some third party canvas demos to see how well IE9 fares across wider variety of canvas use cases.

Spoiler alert: it's nowhere near so clear cut performance champion as it may seem from fish and asteroids demos.

----

Edit: (#) in practical terms, the biggest benefit would go to use cases like the upcoming Aves JS game engine [4] and FreeCiv JS port [5].

----

[1] http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/current/run.htm...

[2] http://www.canvasdemos.com/

[3] http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

[4] http://www.dextrose.com/en/projects/aves-engine

[5] http://www.freeciv.net/
Django Hidden Hires
New sharing service for media data - Libox
In my experience its easy to get but not trivial. You need a lawyer first of all, or they'll deny you just for spite. Then the firm that's hiring you needs to demonstrate that it has

- employees

- an office

- revenue or funding

I've got my (successful) application right in front of me, and it has proof of all 3 of those things. Also they have to pay you the "market rate" for an engineer (presumably that's the category you would be in), and you have to have a degree in order to prove that you fit in that category.
It's standard 802.11g/n (5Ghz antennas) - check out http://ptawug.co.za for more information.
I just want to clear this up: I'm not developing a competitor to Amazon - I already have a niche for the reviews, but without the reviews the site loses much of its value.
Civil rights movement?
Nice (but quite scary) article. Reminds me a lot of the 'if the internet were like cable TV/mobile phone pricing' image I saw a while ago: http://imgur.com/5RrWm.png
For reference: It's only a little less than I've made working at a newspaper in California, and the savings on gas might actually make it break even.
Thank you, I will do the php install on my current x64 server and not worry about 32 bit dlls until the time comes up again.
I'm just an end user - So I don't know much about the process. Here's the project's website: http://ptawug.co.za
Sweet. If the 50ms rule goes into effect HFT traders could conceivably be set up anywhere in the US, no?
Ask HN: video manipulation libraries?
Anybody has any good/bad experiences with libraries that do programmatic video manipulation? Especially something that can be driven by a scripting language. Free/inexpensive if possible...

Thanks in advance!
Search the googlephant for wifi mesh setup or related terms.
I was responding to the statement "But its Javascript, so its basically open source" which is wrong (assuming they take "open source" to mean licensed under an OSI approved license)

Just because the JavaScript is accessible by users that doesn't mean companies will want give others the right to reuse/redistribute the code.

ExtJS's model (after the whole license switching scandal) was to provide the GPL version for free for projects that didn't mind being GPL, and provide a commercial license for those that wanted to remain proprietary. Presumably Senscha is similar.
Being caught measuring the water level of toilets would be something I'd never be able to live down. As if Hasselhoff, Nazis and fecal porn aren't enough food for stereotypes...

And no, it wasn't a fancy hotel, it was a Holiday Inn Express. Since then, I staid in quite a few company apartments, been invited in a few homes etc.
I didn't measure any water levels in Germany (or England, Greece, Italy...), either, so this isn't exactly scientific. But considering that I haven't seen that many toilet brushes here in Jersey (and NYC), you probably need a higher water level.

I bet it's different in states where wasting water is worse. And if I remember correctly, Dave Barry wrote quite a bit about water-saving toilets a couple of years back.
True. Erma Bombeck could laugh at herself and her everyday life struggles, and her writings resonated with bajillions.

Coincidentally, she once wrote: "When humor goes, there goes civilization."

So maybe we're doomed after all, but because Max couldn't pick up on the humor.
Looking to comments on an internet post to asses the maturity of a generation is like indexing Hacker News comments to determine the technical prowess of the mid-west. People who write comments on blogs are, by their nature, on the outsides of the statistical bell curve. Just as the average hacker news reader doesn't represent the technical capacity of an average internet reader. If you want to make informed guesses about the state of a generation...please stop reading blogs and, furthermore, stop reading the comments.
Did your history teacher skip the Gilded Age?
they had me at "goo://" and "dis://"
It's a reference to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act
I have to admit, I've never been satisfied with any of the arguments for teaching this, other than intellectual stimulation. Now, I took a PL course before my working career, so I don't have a frame of reference, but does it really make a difference?

That is, does a Programming Languages class make it faster to learn new languages, give us the ability to choose the "right tool for the problem," or provide any other benefit? This paper (and my professors) all said so. But I can't help but wonder if this is confirmation bias: most of the time, language choices seem to be made based on what other people are using on the target platform, and there's no scientific way to track how quickly any given individual learns a new language.
a low delay post :)
On the bright side, maybe all those videos from the nineties will have finished buffering.
Steve Jobs is famous for not talking about or acknowledging future products until they are released.

This says nothing about cancelling existing products, and you should not extrapolate it as such.

Can you name one example where Apple has cancelled a successful product? By all accounts, the Mac Pro is a successful and profitable product, so why cancel it? It makes no business sense.
1. Technically no, but it does occasionally happen in practice.

2. Yes, iAd will target ads to you based on your location. Go ahead and type in "pet groomers" to Google, and I'll bet that you'll see a local ad displayed to you. Google is using your location, and I believe it's even using past search habits to display more relevant results. This isn't Apple's doing, it's the norms of the market that they've just entered into.

3. What? Because you have to use open standards and codecs, the media will be wrapped in "insane amounts of red tape"? I haven't seen signs of that yet. My experience with HTML5 audio and video has been quite pleasant on Apple's devices. Furthermore, Apple no longer uses DRM for Music and if I had to guess they could be going that way for other forms of media in their store as well. But again, this generally isn't something that Apple is doing. It's the entertainment industries dictating terms by which Apple must sell the media.