skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
to a layman, this is the clearest evidence yet that Zuckerberg was involved in some shady dealings

Really? Perhaps to the sort of layman who's already quite convinced 'shady dealings' took place. If someone got some college kid to sign an unenforceable (and certainly ridiculously unfair, from an ethical, if not legal standpoint) contract, how is that evidence of 'shady dealings', rather than inexperience and naivete?

The whole thing seems completely preposterous, I think to anyone who's entered a contract or two. It's hard to imagine the 'everyone' who would take this contract at face value, at least, not the subset of everyone who's ever signed a lease, mortgage or employment agreement and/or has had the most passing consultation with a lawyer about one. The fact that someone with professional legal expertise feels the whole thing is likely preposterous makes it more, not less likely that is the case. To suggest otherwise is to possess an oddly conspiratorial turn of mind.
The interesting point is the infrastructure behind this.
Have an idea and instead of needing to build factories, employ salesmen, visit customers - you can build an online store in minutes (all the billing and payment handled by a dozen sites), get the stickers printed by another online store and advertise on HN, Reddit etc.

Build a business empire (ok a small principality) in an evening!
Well, kind of. The difference being that a much larger fraction of the American population can afford to rent a ZipCar than the fraction of Indians who can afford a driver.

Edit: I just realized that your statement makes more sense if one counts taxi services as "hiring a driver".
Ask HN: Any good suggestion for marketing a new startup service?
A few months ago, I am impressed about this startup story (From an idea to our first customer in 7 days):
http://www.martinadamek.com/2010/02/02/the-startup-story-from-an-idea-to-our-first-customer-in-7-days/

I am inspired by it and tried to do a single simple service to market. I think Adwords is great, it brings customers from worldwide very soon.
But now, I sadly found the service in that story closed because after ran out of Adwords credits, ALMOST NO ONE will go that site.

My experience is, even I post a good stuff to forums or blogs, the visitors will only increase to very high on that day. After few days later, nothing left, especially for a tool type service.

Any good suggestion for marketing a new startup service?

Thanks.
If I recall correctly, D allows you to disable garbage collection and do your own memory management, and it does give the programmer a lot of power over how memory is managed, up to and including literally using C's malloc and free. I think it's more accurate to say that D has optional, on-by-default garbage collection. I still wouldn't write a kernel in it, and I can't agree more about D 2.0, but it's a bit misleading to say that D "requires" garbage collection.
Good move. With 90K users, Microsoft can test units as well as the Operating System itself. And if WM7 is good, they'll start developing for it (since the learning curve is short, now, that you can use .Net for Mobile)
They did ask for it, they texted to a number or clicked a pop-up.

Scott Adams wrote an article about this, in America it's a lot more profitable.
To the Indian poster it's not worth cancelling a 60cents/month service, to Scott Adams or a middle class American iPhone/Blackberry user it wouldn't be worth spending an hour each month arguing with customer service minions to cancel a service that might cost $20-30
You've grown beyond envy! Congrats!

The Windows 7 phone so far looks like something that might be able to do well in the market. As an Android and iPhone user, I can say it definitely has more visual appeal than the former. It also appears to run more smoothly and have a better media experience. Now, is it going to be as useful overall? That remains to be seen. Getting Trident's HTML5 support to a better place than it is now is going to be a critical step on that path.
What search does Hacker News do itself?

I don't think it's a bad sign at all. Good search is HARD, and plenty of companies outsource it.

This said from someone who was part of a search startup acquired specifically to power a larger site that couldn't do a good job themselves.
I have spent an hour on the phone almost everyday for a few weeks talking to our patent lawyer, then there are all the extra hours of searches they bill me for.

This is for a complex piece of opto-electronics, explaining to the lawyer (who has a physics degree) exactly why this is different to the dozens of similar patents is expensive - but a different bit of wording now can be important when I'm being sued by IBM or Sony in a few years.
What Would You Ask Jason Fried, Founder of 37 Signals?
Tech/startup podcast interviews UFO historian [Audio]
I love skype on the iPhone - the audio quality is so much better than normal phone calls (at least on AT&T in New York) it blows me away... even over 3G.
Any item of litigation will resolve itself based on two major factors: (1) legal technicalities; and (2) what I call "motivating factors."

I upvoted irq11's comment, though I disagree with the conclusion, for flagging this important distinction.

Any lawyer who assesses a case purely on legal technicalities will likely get caught short because all concerned at a trial (judge and jury) will normally be taking a wider view of the case based on their sense of what really happened between the parties, regardless of legal technicalities. If they see someone as a liar, a jerk, a schemer, a shark, or whatever, they will be highly "motivated" to find against that party so long as the law gives them any hook upon which to do so.

That said, my own view tends to align with yours (pvg). As I see it, this thing has "shark" written all over it, and the shark here will likely be seen to be Mr. Ceglia (both because of the heavily lopsided contract terms and because he is opportunistically trying to sandbag FB's shareholders - who clearly are innocent even if Mr. Zuckerberg is not - after lying in wait for many years, a dirty shot by any measure). I could be wrong on this, of course, but I would be quite surprised in this sort of case if someone who did what Mr. Ceglia did here would be viewed sympathetically at any phase of this court proceeding. In other words, I would say that the "motivating factors" for this case would tilt in favor of Mr. Zuckerberg (and Facebook) from the facts revealed so far. Reasonable minds might differ on this (with respect to Mr. Zuckerberg only), and other facts might later be revealed to alter this conclusion, but that is how I see it so far.

Of course, there is no accounting for how people might choose to see this outside of court but I think this tends to confirm my point that many people simply have a desire to see Mr. Zuckerberg get his comeuppance and that is why the reporting comes out the way it does as well.
Ask HN: So i am down to Ext.js or Sproutcore
I have spent a whiles going through a dozen js frameworks and these two seem to top my list. I need to choose one of these, an suggestions pls? I don't mind the licensing fee for Extjs, its just down to capability regarding making web apps with desktop performance.
Thanks in advance for suggestions.
Why software startups decide to patent ... or not
How do you suppose their power and cooling needs are "unique" (i.e. different from any other company that has a datacenter)?
This is the reason class action lawsuits in America exist and should exist. That kind of behaviour would be quickly punished by class action lawyers in the States.
BP Oil Spill = Amount of Barrels China Saved Banning Plastic Bags
Or becoming enticed in extremely interesting articles on HN when there is billing to be done, or problems to work through...

Edit: This seemed really snarky when I reread it - I do want to state emphatically that I would REALLY miss HN. But I must confess that I have to give myself a mental shove to get back to work sometimes...

And back to the point of the article, I have to keep my eyes on the path _through_ the obstacles - I think the same thing. Like my grandmother's bumper sticker "Look for the good and praise it."
My friend at Microsoft is really going to be bummed. He loves his iPhone.

This isn't a joke either. I saw him about 6 months ago and he was raving about the thing. He said, "Microsoft could never have made this."
Just throwing these out there... since he didn' put out many alternatives...

http://live.gnome.org/Vala

http://ooc-lang.org/
A rather inspiring post. I'm currently editing my hosts file.
It would be a pain in the ass to make a bunch of well ranked article directories just to spin your content for 1 product. I have to assume just submitting it to other people's sites.
Great post. In our strategy, UX is the most important ingredient for success. We live by the broader term of UX. In sjobs words: "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
To your last point: we already have such engines, and Google indeed does not do well in those areas. For example, academic research is an area where Google's take on search does not work as well. But it will take more than the existence of such areas for Google to falter. It would take people in general not being able to find what they are looking for by typing a text query in a box, or finding such a means less efficient than some other. I doubt we will see anything like that before either neural interfaces or devices that can anticipate what you want without any interaction at all.
It depends on which school you're talking about. Some programs prepare students for jobs in software development better than others. I agree with the author that coop programs help a lot; the university I attended had mandatory coops as a degree requirement, so I ended up working at Microsoft, DuPont and WebCT for half a year each before graduating. Plenty of experience and a great resume for the job market.
Your position is as biased as any other -- you're just choosing to focus on Zuckerberg's age, and consequently assume that he was victimized. Perhaps that's true, perhaps not.

When I look at this, I see an incredibly unsophisticated legal agreement. The author of the contract hardly strikes me as a knowledgable player, and I'm not inclined to assume that he ever had the upper hand in a battle
of wits with Zuckerberg. In any case, the fact that a contract is poorly written doesn't automatically make me disregard it's intent, and here the intent of the contract is so clear that even Mark Zuckerberg -- innocent babe that he was -- could have understood it.
There is no Apple Store in Redmond. The nearest one is Bellevue which gets a lot of traffic from Seattle proper as well as from Redmond.
Thanks, I have some reading to do :)

The company is based in HK, so have to filer out the non US company options..

Cheers
Haven't looked at Ext.js lately, but SproutCore has a pretty solid client-side ORM, as well as excellent KVO/KVB and a useful computed property system (think of them as observable getter/setter functions that appear like any other property from the outside).

The view layer is okay, although it takes some time getting used to. It does, however, focus heavily on performance, which you mentioned is important.

Regarding versions of SproutCore, I'd highly recommend sticking to keeping up to date with the master branch on GitHub. The released version (1.0) is missing some nice performance and bug fixes found in the master branch. There is also another branch that is focusing on a new theme and view rendering system but I haven't looked at it recently.

For documentation, docs.sproutcore.com is nice, but nothing beats reading the source code for this framework. There's also the mailing list and #sproutcore on IRC.
Why your Referral System Won't Work
So you never followed the story very closely, but are suprised by some of the facts in the story? I never really read much physics, but was surprised to learn that Gravity = 9.8m/s/s. Does that make much sense?
Try installing "Sun Java6 JDK" on Ubuntu using apt-get, I was nearly pulling my hair out, i had to add new repositories when it finally got installed.

Another problem is verbosity:
I use Hadoop which is written Java and the verbosity of the code saddens me.

It has stuff like

public static class Reduce extends MapReduceBase implements Reducer<Text, IntWritable, Text, IntWritable> {

public void reduce(Text key, Iterator<IntWritable> values, OutputCollector<Text, IntWritable> output, Reporter reporter) throws IOException {

have a look at the code here : http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/r0.20.0/mapred_tutorial...
Say you have a pro account for larger photo sizes, and then your pro account expires. Neither you (or anyone else ) can access photos that you uploaded at their original sizes anymore. You're limited to 1024x768. The only way to get the original sized photos back is to get another pro account.
"edit a file, and then restart"

Our of curiosity, what operating system do you use? On Windows, hosts entries take effect immediately. No need to restart.
As a Microsoft employee, I resent that statement. I use a Nokia N900, thank you very much.
They're opening themselves up to counterfeiting. The U.S. currency has the largest R&D budget in the world to make sure all its notes in circulation are the real deal. They wont have anything even remotely close to it.
So building MRI machines, x-ray machines, defibrillators, seat belts, and airbags isn't factory work because they save lives?
It looks like there might be a few more people unhappy with their antenna than Steve Jobs wants us to believe.
Too bad they don't have a generally available android version.
I dont think you have ever been to India. My driver has been with me for 10 years and his job has allowed him to fund his daughter to attend high school (in her village) - something that is unheard of in rural India. Also my driver sends a nice stipend to his family every month. India has 1 billion people - if they all became drivers, we would be 10 times richer than any nation in the world.
No one's stopping him using his iPhone - he'll just have a free WP7 phone too.
Well cited -- the actual post I was referring to is http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/information-density... and the relevant quote is probably "Is it a victory for information density? Maybe. I think Craigslist is conceptually pretty close to what Dr. Bronner was doing."
I don't know, although there were items like a blowout preventer that would be required in other areas.

I also don't know what the contract was, was BP in day-day charge of the rig or was that the company the rig was leased from? The capping operation was apparently being done by Haliburton!

I do know that the US has 4x the industrial accident rate of Uk/Germany/Scandanavia and it's not due to foreign companies.
Having larger than average hands I welcome a larger touchscreen phone in to the marketplace; but it does look a bit overly large when held by the reviewer in the opening image, yes.

I used to have an iPhone, and now I have an original Droid, and I didn't and haven't found a way to hold either of them in portrait and type with both thumbs comfortably. The iPhone soft keyboard was a bit better than the Droid's, but the Droid's hard keyboard is much better for me than either on-screen option.
RIP David Warren, inventor of flight data recorder
Ideas in the Shower
Question: You have just suffered the embarrasement of a incredibly low uptake for a phone (the kin), how do you ensure to get at least 90,000 users straight away?

Answer: Give every employee said phone.

If they want more developers, they are better of offering competitions to attract developers. They are already talking to popular iphone developers apparently.

Why do so many Microsoft tactics (paying for bing users, approaching iphone developers, giving away phones) seem so desperate and tacky?
This happens in Australia, they usually just start going off on the same tangent again.
A book that deals directly with the strengths and limitations of the unconscious reasoning pg is talking about is "Hare Brain Tortoise Mind".

http://www.amazon.com/Hare-Brain-Tortoise-Mind-Intelligence/...

I recommend it to everyone I know.
If it helps anyone: this kid was already well known in jailbroken iPhone circles before this. Like, when I saw it was Nick Lee I burst out laughing.
1 Din Car DVD - Single Din Car DVD Player - Wholesale 1 Din Car DVD Players
Software isn't built it's designed, then prototyped, then finalized. The guy on the assembly line isn't designing an MRI machine, that's already been done, he's screwing screws into place. Building implies it's done more than once in a repetitive fashion which is definitely not the case with software, software is written to overcome that.
I would not say that was common at all. Working in several large offices, I have never seen this. I have seen people diverting their home/office number to the other device. I am the only person I know who carries around more than one phone, and people to look at me weird.
Already exists:

http://wiki.github.com/tcurdt/iProxy/
Welcome to non-unlimited data plans, where AT&T is motivated to support and maintain towers and actively wants to encourage developers to do awesome things with bandwidth. I'm super excited about how awesome developing for handsets is going to be now that we got rid of that screwed up set of misincentives.
I hate these leeches. "Yeah, I hired him to shovel the driveway, and you didn't do the sidewalk behind the garage, so I own your house now."
Were PC Gamers Too Good For Microsoft's Cross-Platform Gaming Project?
True, but how much money can you get out of a small fry 30 million dollar company as opposed to a 30 billion dollar company? It may be that paying 100 million or 500 million dollars for a settlement may not be that much for a 30 billion dollar company but the cost is a lot more than that. They spent several million dollars paying the lawyers and then there is the cost of the distraction. Thrust me, if I'm a patent troll, I rather go after the big fish where the payoff is so big. And the more lawyers and resources they have the more it costs them to defend the lawsuit to the point were it makes more business sense to just settle for several millions of dollars. Otherwise defending the lawsuit would cost them more than the actual settlement amount. Makes a lot more business sense to go after the big boys doesn't it?
I love it that the big guys who pushed for the current patent system were too stupid to realize this big flaw in the system.
Yes, yes - but it's not productive, is it? Particularly the biblical example that you gave.

Suppose that I'm an evil supergenius - someone cuts me off in traffic or tells me that unitards are going out of fashion, so I use my orbiting death ray to blast the entire world into ashes. Perhaps it's assuaged my sense of injury, but at what cost?

This is what happens when you use 2,000 year old fiction to support your moral choices.
Developer in DC | Developers in DC
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Microsoft is going to land the Windows Phone 7 in a very big way, giving a phone to every employee is just another way they are showing us (their employees) that they were serious about it.

Microsoft does not currently give out phones to everyone, as far as I know, this is the first time they've done so.

I've used a Windows Phone 7 prototype for several days - the phone will not be a flop.
Ah, interesting, thanks.

Well, it looks like I'm wrong about what Tufte meant by information density. In that case Tufte wouldn't say that information density is the only thing. "Every pixel doing work" != good design.

But I definitely heard that exchange on a podcast.
I'd pull the trigger after seeing a trailer, probably with some kickstarter-like funding scheme (I've helped fund a kickstarter DVD project). And call me old-fashioned, but I'd be more likely to pay outright for a self-contained chunk of content (think movie or tv season) than to subscribe to something open-ended. I'd only subscribe to something open-ended if I trusted the artists and vision behind the project.
Cheap iPhone App Developer
With the launch of Apple iPhone 4, new era of technology experience has begun. The iPhone 4 puts even more features at your finger-tips. It has given a boost
We knew that the Kin was a mistake before it was launched. I have no idea why it was launched. The Kin is to a Windows Phone 7 as the ROKR was to the iPhone.
http://tweetphoto.com/26363986
IE 9 will eventually run on the phone, just not at launch.
Right but it's exactly the intent that seems almost predatory, however legally unsophisticated it is. Let's assume, as seems reasonable, that both parties were fairly clueless and acting without the benefit of good professional advice. When you read the contract, doesn't the stuff Ceglia is asking for seem kind of nuts? And not in any technical legal sense, just in general.
Think of how much money we would save if we abolish the whole patent system, at least the software patent part.
Pointless comparison. And the amount of water I saved by turning the tap off while I brushed my teeth was the same as the amount they used to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed!
Back in the day, we called it "eating [our] own dogfood." Qv http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_ones_own_dog_food
If you implement closures as thunks, you can just free them when done, no need for GC.

closure int foo(int x) {return x + y;}
int(*foo_p)(int) = malloc(sizeof(foo));
memcpy(foo_p,&foo,sizeof(foo));
return foo_p;

So, you can add working closures in one keyword (and possibly a special case for function pointer decay).
May be less circadian than a typical enterprise datacenter, due to Twitter's global reach and continuous usage during waking hours.
Don't block sites completely... Control the times you view sites! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476/ (No Affiliation but I love this thing)

Summary: LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.
pg: "A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days..."

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
Your Idea Rocks
Yes. Many a time I have wished to import a library's symbols without importing its macros. Or better yet, import its symbols under alternate names. "namespace x = import<y.h>" anyone?
How googly of them.
See Also: http://xkcd.com/386/
So true it'll be hard not to think about in the shower.
The Lost Tribes of RadioShack
Or when your reading somewhat interesting articles on subjects that are well outside your current areas. As in I find myself occasionally reading things on Haskell or Scala or some other language despite not even knowing the basics of the language.
Having held one in person I actually found it to be relatively comfortable in both your hands as well as in your pocket. Just because it is larger than the other "thin" phones out there, I sorta think it works out to its benefit. Typing on the Droid X was slightly easier than on my N1 (and typing on my N1 is simple)
Consider the MOTOFONE. Fancy e-Ink display, but has battery life measured in days. Designed for the third world market, it can text message... badly, and that's it beyond good call quality.