skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your use of the world "frivolous" is ambiguous. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frivolous_litigation :

In law, frivolous litigation is the practice of starting or carrying on law suits that have little to no chance of winning. While colloquially, a lawsuit may be termed frivolous if they personally find a claim to be absurd, regardless of its legal standing, in legal usage (with which this article is concerned), as by the judiciary of the United States, "frivolous litigation" is considered to consist of a legal claim or defense presented even though the party or the party's legal counsel had reason to know that the claim or defense was manifestly insufficient or futile, that is to say, had no legal merit and may also lack legal standing.

By the legal definition, if a lawsuit is likely to succeed, then by definition, it cannot be frivolous.
That's true.

But it doesn't matter. It's a bit like opening a make-your-own-pizza Pizza Parlor and thinking that point of differentiation matters against the power of say, Papa John's. Yeah, maybe Papa John's doesn't cater to a niche of pizza enthusiasts who really want direct control of the mundane elements of configuring and baking the pizza. Maybe they're leaving a bit of money on the table there.

Doesn't matter. They know the majority of the market wants pizza twenty minutes ago, they want it delivered to wherever they are, and they don't want to give it anymore thought than that. No problem -- Papa John's builds an infrastructure that can address this problem well, and screw the artisans. So they'll battle it out with Domino's and Pizza Hut and make a good chunk of money.

Apple has a funnel that is greased like a pig. They don't care that a few nerds can't sideload their dingus through an alternative whatsit. Most people are being served through their absurdly convenient ecosystem.

Consumer: Solid core of a few thousand truly excellent apps, plus decent games > Reasonable discovery experience > Convenient payment with existing account.

Developer: Write for (mostly) one device configuration > Get into a crowded store filled with a bunch of people who can buy in seconds without touching their credit card.

It's easy. Android does. not. have. this. And until it does, very few incentives will exist to create outstanding Android applications. As usual, Google has gone off half-cocked without making sure their product does what it should. They need to fix this, or we're all stuck with only one decent mass market for mobile apps, controlled by Apple.

Someone needs to step up and actually compete with Apple on the things that matter, otherwise the standard never moves forward for devs or users, and that sucks.
Android/Google and the decline of carrier independence
I actually found reading through his tweets that a lot were valid criticisms. I'm disappointed that there is such a "fanboy" divide on Apple vs Android. Why can't we acknowledge there are pros and cons of both and accept that different things bother people differently?
You do realize that Google has a strong political stance of annexationism with regards to Canada. That's why they withhold features from Canadians, to induce them to agree to annexation by the US.

Google made their stance blindingly obvious when they named their phone Nexus One! Unity through annexation of Canada by America!
They're having the same growing pains as Microsoft had in the mid- to late-90s. Everyone prior to Windows 95 had a LOT of options sitting in the wings waiting to be vested or for a galactically large liquidity event (like, say, the revolution of the Desktop PC), and everyone post windows 2000 were left with the big company sitting on hoards of cash and a stock price that will never go above their options value but maybe 2-5 bucks max.

Google has all of its earnings built into the stock price for more than a decade, so anyone they hire (unless it's a chief muckety-muck) is going to be even-steven in stock. So, Google has to differentiate on culture, salary, and benefits, which they can obviously do.
They don't have a clear income. They aim to get big and then think of income after that. I don't like this model, because at first, I'll have to rely heavily on Buzz and VCs.
Why is this a link to someone's personal blog that features only a short synopsis and a link to the real article?
I'm possibly the person on HN who is most vocal about their (current) failings, and even I don't think they're just making things up. I do think, however, that it was a calamitous decision for them to start editorializing. It wasn't a small mistake; it's been devastating to their credibility.

Even in a case like this, the subtexts are all wrong. Why is Wikileaks summarizing anything about this release? Why are they playing it up anywhere? Anyone can read it and see that it's not newsworthy (the issue of reciprocity in extradition isn't just years old, it's decades old!). It's not that any of their sources are false; it's instead the issue that who knows what they're not publishing? Surely, nothing that hurts their narrative!
Political speeches are great at this. They use words and phrases that mean different things to different groups of people. And it scales to millions of people.
I've been practicing Vipassana Mediation for several months now. It involves focusing on the breath. I started doing it for about 5 minutes once or a couple of times a day. Now I it's about 20 minutes a day. Benefits: More restful sleep, more relaxed, increased clarity of mind, less stress, less anxiety, less tension, more productive, and of course being able to levitate (occasionally).
Wikileaks publishes a (purported) CIA "Red Cell" report
> it seems like that would easily exceed 200k a year

it seems to me like that wouldn't exceed 100k a year, and "2 kids in college, 1 in private high school" is probably your highest consumption year. Seems like we have vastly different expectations as to what's reasonable to spend on those things. See also my comment [0] and kscaldef's [1] on the previous thread.

I'd also assume you don't have mortgage/car payments with a $4.3m buyout, but instead pay those things in full but amortize the costs in your budget spreadsheet.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627640
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627551
It's depends and varies from one to others. It also depends on how you define 'failure'.

I think it's mostly dependent on personal preferences. Some will start another, some will get a job, some will travel and change career. So whatever it'll happen, why do you care?
Their value, despite spinning thir leaks, lies in publishing original, often secret, sources after all and also in exerting distinct pressure on certain players who have something to hide from the public (e.g. government, julius bär case etc). The public is much better off for the existence of the Afghan War Logs. No need to trust embedded journalists or the government anymore, but access to direct source material.
A Dashboard for Bugs
Mozilla Labs now accepting code via Github
To be fair to Joe, while in the middle of presumably working on an Android application, he has been posting tweets about his frustrations with that process.

This isn't quite the same thing as a blog post or article lambasting the Android platform. I wouldn't read too much into this.
I've been writing code on android for almost a year now have even made modifications to some of the tools and android itself to meet our needs, and I totally agree with all of his complaints.
Google still has great perks. If you just need a job and having the best cafeteria outweighs working with dinks, it's the best choice next to Facebook, and the only choice of giant dot-conglomorates if you live in NYC.
This sounds like a fixable problem. What would some acceptable variants of your name be? If you email me (avi@twitter.com) I will see what we can do. I'd certainly love to see you on Twitter.
So hire an accountant, be careful what debt you create and it's not really that scary?
Hey Ryan, is there a background post/etc to this?

What are the figures based on (real numbers, log(/similar) real numbers, fake numbers) - would love to know more behind this other than the generic pdf from BVP!
file----> download (excel...etc)

googledoc---->upload file.

you are done.
Dont underestimate non computer related questions like:

What sets you apart from others?
WL is very agenda-driven. It's easy to see. It's not the same agenda as we see in traditional US media, but it's an agenda all the same, and it's not altruistic. Assange and co. attempt to paint WL as a puppies-and-rainbows bastion of human rights. Let's call a spade a spade, shall we?
Flash in freezer, Javascript on cutting board
Eureqa - software tool for detecting mathematical relationships in your data
Web as a platform, or Twitter: a public shell?
Yea i think I have both of those down.
Ive also been looking at questions like efficiency of algorithms O(n) and so on
Why on earth is this not available through, you know, http://google.com/voice. Or is Voice going to get rolled into Gmail?
> someone you can't trust.

Judging who you can trust, especially based on brief, early impressions, is quite a skill. Some have a natural intuition for it, others don't, but like many things I bet that intuition can be deconstructed into a series of learnable techniques. Would you consider writing an essay deconstructing how you and Robert judge who you can trust in business?
right, but the comment I was replying to was focused on the idea that I'm an angstful 20-something who is just starting a professional career. I'm not, and i have a much smaller place than my parents did at my age. 1200 sq/ft vs 3000ish sq/ft. I think my theory holds for areas that have already developed most of the available land. As population density increases we'll have smaller places than the generation before us in areas that have very little new land to develop.

I actually don't care that my place is smaller, and a bigger place wouldn't increase my quality of life much.
One big concern with real estate is that properties are extremely undiversified investments that have high transaction costs, high holding costs (taxes and maintenance), and low liquidity.

The example of Amsterdam's housing prices comes to mind as an example of the risks of undiversification. Various accounts say that here has been no appreciation in house prices since 1736[1] or that it has only doubled in 350 years [2,3].

[1] http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2007/11/14/house_pri...

[2] http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1019261.shtm...

[3] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=598
I don't know if this has been discussed before, but... since when are tweets news?
There are absolutely pros and cons of both. There is no question about it. However Joe is being used as a pawn with people quoting over his over-the-top hyperbole like "Android tools are horrendous, OS is hideous". That isn't a "pro and con" point.

I somewhat sense that Joe is perhaps still fighting his evangelical battle about the Apple thing (note that I'm not taking his Tweets as ultra serious, and I picture some jocular hyperbole, even if some net reporter takes it as statements of concrete truth), and it's like Android is his abused rebound mate, used as a prop to try to strike back. Like he's trying to aggrandize how extraordinary his suffering is to announce the depth of his principle.
Pretty cool Org-mode/Beamer demo
fyi, it's debt
Cryptome has being doing this for years: http://cryptome.org/
He doesn't like Eclipse and he'd prefer to write Objective-C instead of Java? Uh...
The raise in taxes might actually have the effect of decreasing the tax base by being the point at which people leave the state. Michigan has a lot of years with a strong Detroit. Now, they have to look at getting new industry and/or belt tightening. It looks like they went for the "in your face" version instead of reducing staff in the counties.
But you can write in plenty of other languages. ASE gives you TONS of options for other languages you can use to target the Dalvik VM. Not to mention that Mono on Android just launched (a beta?) a few days ago.
It is far from clear that the public is better off for the existence of the Afghan War Logs. The claims in favor of them are about as credible as the claims against them.

Maybe they're a revelation on the same scale as the Pentagon Papers. Or, maybe they're a raw running transcript of a phenomenon (AfPak becoming a counterproductive slog) even the government itself acknowledges.

Maybe they're putting tens or hundreds of informants who worked against the Taliban --- or even people who just have similar names to those people --- at risk of assassination. Or, maybe that's never going to happen and Wikileaks did a good enough job sanitizing the release.

It's also one thing to suggest that we shouldn't trust "embedded journalists", and another to suggest that there is no value in filtering, contextualization, and summarization by experts. Maybe most of our "mainstream" experts suck, but I think you'll have a hard time with the argument that all of them do, or with the idea that people in general will do a better job with "the raw feed". Look at the Tea Party, the Cordoba House controversy, and the "Obama is a muslim" meme for evidence that backs up my side of this argument.
Congrats to Nate Silver for his fantastic job. 538's success in predicting the 08 elections was really impressive and glad to see him get even more (well-deserved) coverage.
I agree with the guy but he has seriously lost the right to talk because of piece of crap that is the FB iPhone app.
lsc makes some good points. One of the biggest, which I'll reiterate because it's so big:

Run your business like a business!

Hold board meetings, even if it's just you and your mom. Keep separate bank accounts, even if it's just for 40 bucks. Make everything look legit, so when it comes before a court the court can say it was an independent entity. (Courts prefer to say that.) In other words, don't treat your business like it's your personal piggy bank. That will lead to pain.
Mate.
Isn't an ID10t error an old joke and not really a secret code? meh.
Linux Mint 9 Xfce Screenshots
Ask HN: How bit.ly make money?
I'm curious how bit.ly (url shorteners services in general) make money. They don't use Ads, they don't even register users.
This is the big clearing-house site for businesses for sale (it includes offline and online businesses):

http://www.bizbuysell.com/

I haven't used it personally, but a friend of mine is always raving about it for idea generation and small biz opportunities.
IBM: Cybersecurity problems hitting record levels
If you can't afford to pay a potential CTO for their time (rather you are giving them equity), there's a good chance they will need to have a day job. If they can't handle coding during the day and working on your startup at night, you'll run into serious problems. Air out all these issues right at the start.
I do find it ironic for a hosting company to post that their DDoS strategy is to offload the load on other hosting companies.

They're talking about $5-10/month VPSes and want them to handle 100Mbps each? Sure those providers love that traffic.
The Apple Guessing Game Commences
I never said it was "hard", just that I was surprised that the simple task of "get me this URL" required me to work with some abstract classes for "async tasks". Strikes me as overengineering. The networking classes could easily encapsulate the threading stuff and let me just stay on the UI thread, as every other networking library I've ever worked with has done.

I've found other places in the Android SDK when, rather than simply using callbacks to encapsulate asynchronous work, I'm required to deal with the threads myself (see GLSurfaceView). You can accuse me of being "confused and ignorant" but I feel I am making a valid critique of the API design.
Sure, I don't believe they're making things up either, yet. But my point is, how do we know? How can we tell?

Their editorializing makes them much more vulnerable to being gamed by people who are willing to make things up (even CBS had this problem). Again, I'm wondering what the value-add of wikileaks is. The access? That seems very outmoded in today's hyper-connected age.
Direct link: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/
> How do you know they've filed a ptent on it? Just saying it on a website doesn't make it true.

It is illegal in the US to claim patent pending unless you've actually filed a patent application. However, that notice doesn't have to identify the claims with any specificity.
> Is that hard?

No, but he never said it was hard.

> What hoops are there?

it's not built into the HTTP request process, even though async HTTP is what you want... basically always. With the example, for every single type of request you have to create a new class. If you generalize the thing a bit, you only have to write an anonymous class every time.

He's comparing that to NSURLConnection where 3 out of the 4 constructors (well technically 1 constructor and 2 initializers) are asynchronous and simply take a request and a delegate (total: one line).
Bienvenido a My Bank Reserve - Tu cajero automatico en casa
something tells me he will never have a family
I started a thread, how url shorteners services make money, if they really make some.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633979
Autopsy of Google Wave
Yes, sorry for not being more clear in my original post. It sounded to me like fees from outbound international calls originating in the US will be used to subsidize the domestic US calls.
Brutally short intro to ggobi (interactive, open-source data visualization tool)
I'm interested in item 2 (things that succeed do so quickly). Is this true?

Edit: (I should note that I'm more interested in this observation as applied to people than I am applied to products, though. Are great salespersons great on the first day, or is it possible that some people just need time to get used to the environment?)
The Chromification of Internet Explorer
That's how media works. I'd argue that some of the news stories that came out about him quitting over App Store policy were over-the-top hyperbole.
My mom home-schooled my little sister and it was wonderful.

My sis left grade school below average on all standardized tests. She was home-schooled for a few years. I'm pretty sure she only did about two or three hours of school work per day--but my mom does all sorts of "field trip" type stuff so there were plenty of learning opportunities outdoors.

Anyway, sis went back to school and smoked the tests. She just graduated from undergrad as the top student in all of the sciences and 2nd highest grades in the university. Bam!
When EventVue failed we wrote a post-mortem about what went wrong. If you're interested, you can read about it here: http://blog.eventvue.com/post/372936164/post-mortem One of the benefits of having an open-casket funeral for your startup like we did is people know you are available for a new gig. After we announced the news, our phones started ringing from friends, users and former competitors giving their condolences. We also got calls from companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and a few dozen startups wondering if we'd be interested in new positions. For us, our "worst case scenario" of completely failing had come true and that's when we discovered even the "worse case scenario" is not that bad. My cofounder took another job. I started contracting. Both of us are making considerable more money than if we'd never tried with EventVue. I know we're both going to be back in the startup game before long.
This is a far better article than the title lets on. A really practical "walkthrough" of what they did and how it panned out. Finding this quite inspiring. I've only made one graphic that "went viral" and I see a lot of similarities to what they're saying.
I read somewhere once that while 90% of startups fail, 80% of second time startup founders succeed.

While I think it's a totally made up statistic (there was no citation, IIRC, and there are all sorts of problems with measurement and bias), there's probably a grain of truth to it.
Ask HN: Is my project a potential startup?
I am working on a project called spotted.at. http://spotted.at I am not really sure what it is. I just wanted to do some cool shit w/ HTML5 location stuff and node.

I have a habit of finishing projects and not ever launching them because I just did to learn etc... I don't know if I should ditch this and go start another for fun or if i should stick with it. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

When non-geeks ask what it is i say its a quick and easy way to locate people in your area that either have what you want or want what you have.

To geeks I say: spotted.at is a realtime hyperlocal social utility that connects people based on proximity and intent.

What's there now

1. click "I Have" and put a pic or email of what you have then send it

2. It will show up on the map and be searchable by any user in the area

3. Whatever you have in the search box when you click I have will be used as the description

4. If you use app from phone you can see other people in area looking for what you have (updates in real-time; thats kind of cool IMO)

What's next

1. More user interaction (e.g.: chatting)

2. Fixing video (currently only works for HTML5 video tags)

3. Adding data from twitter & fb to search results

4. Add game mechanics

5. Building out the finders fee affiliate style program

--thx
I'm not an economist either, but heuristically I'd expect the precise opposite to be true: the products/services with elastic demand curves (that is, luxuries) tend to require time to consume in addition to money. Simply having more money available will not necessarily increase demand for these things.

If you wanted to make this argument, I think a better way to approach it would be from the supply side. The supply of goods and services should increase, because well, that's what workers produce. This should theoretically lower the prices of existing goods and services, because increased supply of a commodity puts downward pressure on pricing.

That's all in theory. I highly doubt it's anywhere near that simple. The thing about macroeconomics is that it's somewhere between cargo cultism and ancient mythology: people compare situations that superficially resemble each other, and then invent models that explain several situations but are entirely untestable.
I believe that Google sees Gmail as the primary app that people use and are rolling the other one into it. One is much more likely to keep a Gmail tab open all day long than a Google Voice one, so it makes sense to have it in Gmail.

Note that it integrates with Google Voice: the outbound calls show up with your GV number and inbound GV calls can ring inside Gmail. I would be surprised if ultimately GV is not completely inside Gmail.
Read "Hacking a Google Interview" from MIT (http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/). Solid gold.

Besides that, a lot of startups ask about distributed computing. So make sure you understands the AWS tool ecosystem, as well as have an understanding of new (NoSQL) data stores.
Well done! Bravo!
IPhone ios 4 with Exchange 2010 issues? Finally FIXED
My good friend and coworker @reecewilkinson seems to have found a REAL fix for the Exchange 2010 issues with IOS 4. He obtained this profile directly from an engineer at Apple. If you were getting issues (mostly with sending emails), this profile update will likely help you. More specifically, it’s a work-around that disables support for EAS 14 and defaults back to EAS 12.1.
...who is also spending non-billable time finding good clients.
I agree that the way you show is easy. Could he have been doing it in some other fashion that is not that straightforward and assumed that it was the only way to do it? Probably. Was he jumping the gun by saying that there were too many hoops. Definitely.
Not if they are even halfway decent. That's the entire point. An hour a month should suffice.
I stand corrected ;)

But Google is different than poker sites, just imagine the uproar. Just for gathering data for maps they've gotten in a ton of trouble.
try this: http://niniane.org/interview_howto.html