skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What’s Google’s decision whether to sell crap like this got to do with freedom of speech?

It’s not that hard: The police arresting the asshole developers of those themes? That’s an attack on freedom of speech [+]. Google not allowing them to sell their stuff through the Android Market? Not so much. (I very much expect that Google will remove the themes. It’s no big deal.)

I think it’s ludicrous to even bring up freedom of speech in this context. You can install whatever you want on your Android phone. The developers can sell this theme on their own website and there is an officially supported way of installing third party stuff like this — it’s not like they have a right to be in the Android Market.

I really don’t know why Engadget puts this stupid spin on the story. Google might not be as prude or wimpy as Apple when it comes to curating their Market but I’m mystified why people would believe that Google won’t curate their Market at all. Android is freer than the iPhone because the Android Market is not the only way to install Apps, not because of the Android Market.

[+] Little excursion on constitutional freedoms: Their main purpose is to protect you from the state, not other citizens or groups of citizens (like companies).
It seems to me (with no privileged information) that he suffered from sending a written copy to a selcet number who he expected would treat it in confidence, but not all of whom did. I think it's great that he had a "thought piece" written, and I think it's great that he started to consult a few trusted colleagues. I think it's a real shame that the "think piece" was leaked.

If he'd taken six months to go over it in person, orally, calmly and in seclusion with a few chosen colleagues then there may have been a chance to either declare it unworkable, or to fix the holes. As it is, that didn't happen and we get this mess.

On the other hand, lots of people have seen - in some sense - real math in action. Maybe that's a good thing.
Couched political story....flagged.
I think you're hinting that the existence of stop orders make this unnecessary. For some people that may be true.

Quote Sentinel only notifies you -- at the time the first Quote Sentinel script was written, I couldn't find something that would send me a text message when my limit was about to be triggered.

Basically I personally had 2 main use cases:

1. I want to go to lunch and I want to be notified if something is happening and I should come back to my desk.

2. Markets are dynamic. Today I'd love to buy AAPL 10 bucks lower than it is, but if the market drops like a rock, it might not seem that great anymore. For big moves, I'd rather be notified so I can make a decision with the new information instead of my limit/stop getting filled based on what I thought was a good idea before.

Its definitely not an app for everyone, but it solved a specific need for me so I thought it'd be worth turning it into an app for others.
Even if you accept that it should be illegal to publish certain things, it doesn't follow that everything has to be piped through a censorship authority. Punishing offenders should be enough.

Otherwise, where to stop? It is illegal to kill somebody, therefore we need a watchdog to approve our every moves, in case it is a killing move?
My chat partner got disconnected. Perhaps it should play a tone when you are the listener...
It's just more anti-java noise. There are a lot of anti-java folks out there and I don't see how this isn't more ammunition.

All things being equal, Oracle suing somebody and doing it in part because of "java" does have to make you take notice if you do anything with it. It's not like there is some open standard for Java and 10 different yet fairly equal implementations to choose from like it is with a C compiler. For serious java work, there still are maybe 3 implementations (Sun's, IBM's and maybe OpenJDK?) and they share some common components and ancestry.

Time will tell though, we'll see what happens. The java haters will continue to hate it, the java lovers will continue to love it and then those in the middle will have a raised eye brow and sort of pay attention.
One of the worser ones, Max.

Over the past few years, just hanging out on HN, I've read a lot about happiness and pleasure. I've even had some great books recommended by fellow HN'ers (latest one is the science of pleasure. Great read so far! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393066320?ie=UTF8&tag=...) And none of it tracks with your blog entry.

One of the interesting things that has happened in the last decade or so has been a serious study at just what happiness and pleasure really is. I wish I could give some trite answer, but the real answers are much more interesting. Things like experiences beat possessions, or the great beauty of essentialism. In all of that reading, I've never read anything that jived with your blog post.

I think I'm getting the happy bit. The more interesting bit is whether or not people are made to be unhappy. I'm not so sure total happiness is a good thing. (which sounds really strange, huh?)
Your implementing a different instruction set.
Trying the website resulted in this:

We recommended these books based on the following terms:
schon, only, when, that

It's really weird that any of the suggestions made sense when words like these aren't blocked. The "schon" is German, but the rest should really not play into any ratings
I've always heard it in reference to politicians.
Can't be the REAL C&H search engine: I tried typing in "Bill Watterson" in the box and got NO search results. Seriously? If there's one query to get right, it's that one.
You know, they can always put in filters i.e. phrases like 'I want to kill myself' etc. get automatically tagged and a helpline number gets shown. A bit like what google has, but the troll problem will still remain.
Not-invented-here syndrome, probably. Dalvik seemed intentionally as different from a conventional JVM as possible (different instruction set, register-based rather than stack-based, different executable format, etc), and given the maturity of the JVM architecture it's hard to believe those decisions were entirely for engineering reasons.
What I tried to do was split by section, then within each section split by source type. Some work better than others but for example the tech section is split mostly by social media, primary sources, e-zines (sort of), and major blogs.
Sean Ellis Normal vs. Network Effect Growth Startups (vid)
Oh, boy. No, don't rely on common sense, particularly because you won't have much at the beginning (lack of sleep can make you impressively stupid).

You don't have to buy lots of books if you know a lot of smart parents who can bring you up to speed (and who live nearby or with you), but there's a lot of info to learn if you don't have solid kid experience yourself already.
Nic Brisbourne responds to PG on seed funding
Sorry I don't. This was quite some time ago, like maybe Clinton's first term. It was probably something I read in print rather than online.
It'll be really cool if Amazon ever figures out colour on the kindle.

Actually, the display is made by eInk, not by Amazon.

There are color versions in development, last I heard they should be going in to mass production around the end of this year. I'd guess that Amazon will have a color version of the Kindle soon after the displays are available.
The contrast of e-ink, in my experience, improves with brighter lighting. Outdoors in sunlight it's quite good. Also, I find a bright white CFLs to give better contrast than similarly-bright incandescents.

Your mileage may vary, of course.
I own both a Kindle and an iPad and have used both for reading books. I prefer reading on the Kindle because of the eInk screen, weight of the device and the orientation of the buttons. I do find the iPad has a much more engaging screen and is a very usable reader, except when it comes to reading outside. I made the mistake of taking my iPad with me to the park to read; the glare was far too much, even in the shade.

Ultimately for me it feels better to read on the Kindle. The Kindle is made for reading and it shows in the engineering, just as the iPad is a multimedia device that has a few apps for reading books.
Look at you. Now look at him (http://infosecurity.us/images/Dean_Kamen_IBot.jpg). Now back to you. Now him again. Sadly, you aren't him.
True. How come your irc client lives on the same IP address as your website(s) though?
I think it's a nice site, but I don't know why someone would pay for the feature.

- Your motivating example is someone who wants to buy or sell a stock at a certain price threshold. Why wouldn't you just set a limit order or a stop-limit order? Both are available from virtually ever broker.

- I don't see which exchanges you support. Is it just the NYSE and NASDAQ? Do you support European exchanges?

What would probably be helpful is if you created a way for me to specify some complex criteria about the time, price movement qualities, technical indicators, etc. For example, I could imagine being long MSFT at $25 and wanting an update if the price drops by more than $0.25 in less than 5 minutes and the DMI is less than 30. I believe some brokers actually offer this kind of algo trading already, though I'm not sure whether they also allow for only sending updates.

As a side note, if you offered an API of some sort and allowed me to specify a time (e.g., I want the closing price of the 9:30 bar) and you covered all major global markets/indices (I'm interested in HSI, DAX, FTSE, CAC, TOPIX, ASX), then I would probably be willing to pay $10 a month for that service if you had live prices. However, I imagine you would run into serious data licensing issues (if you're not already?).
Although one could have a "make throwaway account" link from the account page.
How is a twitter bot costing Twitter money?
Ah, just let her sleep in the bed with you. Babies aren't really designed to be "put to bed" separate from their parents, evolutionarily, so it's guaranteed to be tough going for most of them.

Leaving them to cry it out is not a great idea, because it undermines their sense of security and may make them more clingy later.
are you dead? no, then good.

Go find something you enjoy doing, and then find people willing to pay for it. Enjoy your life. Don't go searching for the next big thing.

Then, when you least expect it, you will have an itch that needs scratching, that might be of value to other people, and you will be rested and ready to try again.
That's a terribly short sighted thing to say (by the poster). I know HN users don't seem to value education, but a college degree has a lot of value outside of the education component. Living with others, compromising, group work, social life, classes outside your area of focus, etc. I'd rather hire someone who has been through this than a hacker who has only spent time in the echo chamber of forums and fellow geeks.

As of July 2010, unemployment rate for college grad was 5.0% while for HS grad was 9.9%.
Facebook Tops Google in Directing Web Traffic 
People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends' recommendations or their friends' activities
Android, Inc. (the original company) chose Java because their target market (smartphones) nearly universally supported Java (JVM) at the time of the inception of Android, so the phones ran Java and phone developers knew and were comfortable with Java.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#...

I was unable to ascertain whether Dalvik came from Android, Inc. or was created by Google after acquiring Android. My memory says the later.

The Dalvik VM is an end-run around the Sun JVM licensing issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_virtual_machine

See especially the reference http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/

This raised more than one eyebrowse, and sure did make me raise mine: how did Google manage to get Sun to license off a platform that could very well kill their own?

Turns out, they didn’t: their move was even smarter than Sun’s.

Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals... and found the solution for the licensing problem. It’s called Dalvik and it’s the new name of Sun’s worst nightmares.
There is a lot of evidence that Happiness is much like IQ in that you are born with a basic peak and while it can be dragged down there is little that can rise it. For the most part, outside of extraordinary circumstances it's fairly constant over your lifetime.

PS: And yes this means there are probably people in the middle of a 20 year prison sentence that are on average happier than you are.
I am slightly confused. What is he saying? The compromise was wrong? Is it a sort of apology without being an apology? Or is he talking about something which has no relation to the net-neutrality debate, in which case, what on earth is he talking about?

As for transparency, the meetings between google and verizon were held in secret.
Is it just me or is there as much urban slang (chillax) as there is PHB-speak? (paradigm shift)
Changing Culture to Enable DevOps
There's a joke in there about language being dynamic and you referring to @VictoriaCohen (clearly female) as a 'dude'.
Go check out the discussion on their Google Group. It is already filling with insightful discussion.

http://groups.google.com/group/banksimple-api
I see your point, but I worry about this creating barriers for people wanting to get into our profession. As it stands, you can still get a job in this field without any formal education in it, as long as you can show you've got the goods. I'm quite fond of this fact, and there is some real talent out there that might get the door shut in their face if there were a wall of licensing.
Right now this looks like gorillas arm wrestling. I'm sitting on the fence until I see real anti-open-community action from Oracle.
The only mention of spam I see in Twitter's ToS: "You may not interfere with the access of any user, including sending a virus, overloading, flooding, spamming, mail-bombing the Services, or by scripting the creation of Content in such a manner as to interfere with or create an undue burden on the Services."
http://twitter.com/tos

No mention of "unsolicited replies". Heck, for most early users, all @replies on twitter are unsolicited. Most of the time I have an exchange with someone before I follow them. Twitter's just designed to be more promiscuous than email. Anybody can see your tweets, so you're encouraging strangers with insight to jump in.

I think that makes what he did a grey area. Depends on how good his recommendations are, basically.
You only fail if you don't learn from it.
You can always start again, you might need to learn a few tricks, but starting over is always an option. Might need a little time.

It will all work out if your are persistent.
The Android platform itself is free, but, as I understand it, important software written for the Android platform needs to be licensed by handset makers: the Google Maps app, access to the Android Market, etc.
I hope this leads to Google getting rid of Java from android entirely. Possibly even removing Dalvik.
I think the "kindle is awesome" crowd are people who use a reader to read novels. The Kindle is simply almost identical to the experience reading a printed book. However good the iPad is as a reader, it is not even close to the same as a printed book mainly because of the backlight.
What happened to AltaVista and Yahoo? From innovator to imitator to forgotten
startup-like? How many hundred million dollars have they lost so far?
http://unsuck-it.com/define/
Re 4, I would add that if you have already started to think hard about moving away from MySQL, you really should now.
Well, yes, obviously the comparison is only informative for the "reading" application of the iPad. This is also the reason that comparing the prices and some other aspects of the devices is pretty worthless. But if you're interested in the differences in screen technology this is a very neat comparison.
I wouldn't like to guess how many man hours it has taken them to develop the software and processes required to deal with spam on twitter? Then there are the ongoing costs of dealing with new spamming methods, and the increased hardware costs of having to deal with the extra load caused by the spam. And then there is the less obvious negative impact it has on their brand and image when their users are sent unsolicited spam.
What did an actual recommendation tweet look like?
Yahoo's got many parts, Search came over from Inktomi and they've got a good culture. Unfortunately the executives decided to STOP doing search.

YDN, YUI, Flickr, and a few other parts of the organization are pretty good.

But in general, the management is more interested in things like "ONE YAHOO" than innovation. There is tremendous pressure to get everybody marching in the same direction, doing what they are told.

I mean, there was a big push at one point for the Yahoo OS. To give you a sense of how non-hacker yahoo is, OS did NOT mean operating system!

It's a culture driven by a huge heavy bunch of PM's who mostly spend their time doing terrible powerpoints, fighting, and trying to get each other fired. A few sections of the company managed to escape that fate, but the general culture is toxic.
I sincerely hope that this lawsuit results in dalvik being removed from android. They should never have used dalvik. It's an arm linux. They should have stuck to gcc toolchain like every other arm linux implementation out there. They are missing out on a wealth of development resources for no reason at all.
The immovable brick wall of change? That doesn't sound right...
Hi, thanks for the feedback!

Apparently my corpus isn't a large enough size to naturally filter out useless words like the ones you listed so I have added stopword filtering. Give it another shot and see how it works for you.
His posts were unsolicited, bulk advertising. How well they were targeted doesn't really matter.
Because it stinks, technically: JVM (even on mobile devices) was never designed to be memory efficient. Dalvik is, big time. I would even say that we all need "Dalvik for desktop" as JVM, with its enormous startup lag and memory appetite is nearly useless outside of data centers.

Also, Google is betting on mobile big. And if you want to play in that space you better have your own platform and not depend on someone else's licenses. I think it only proves that it was the right move: JVM is now owned by assholes and being in court for patent "infringement" with them is still a lot better than betting the company future on the OS based on a platform owned by assholes.
Patent and licensing issues are so complex and the outcome of litigation so unpredictable that good faith and precedent are what count. This suit demonstrates that Oracle is perfectly willing to pursue offensive suits on Java IP and that's a very damaging precedent.
Of what relevance are those numbers to a deft software developer? What's is the unemployment rate for skilled software developers?
I think Google will hit Oracle with a counter lawsuit. Google posses a lot of patents in area of Information Systems. Or they can cross license using patents like Map-Reduce, E.g. Google allowed ASF to use MR patent for Hadoop, however if tomorrow Oracle comes up with a proprietary solution for MapReduce, Google might not be so generous.
How To Make Things Go Viral
I saw this award winning Russian animation short sometime back - Its called GAGARIN. After watching it,I felt it spoke of those who tried before their time and failed. Not sure how relevant it is to this post, but I try not end up like Gagarin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA7RKwhrOT0
Duplicate of my comment on the blog:

How much are Twitter/Facebook/Spotify spending on customer acquisition? Is that really what they raised money for?
I'm astounded more people don't use HeySpread or TubeMogul to upload their videos to EVERY video site.

Or better yet, make five slightly different versions of the video and upload it via HeySpread.

The more you can syndicate your content, the better off you'll be.
$400.

Just go ahead and release the code. It didn't make you that much money.
The division isn't intuitive to me at this point, but maybe I rely too much on actual labels/headers. I think it's little things that throw me off, like Digg being separate from its counterparts on the Tech page.
Anyone up for building this?
Yup, I tried using it and ticgit for a little while. Didn't really care for either of them.
Saying American English evolved from British English is just as false as the reverse, and just as false as saying humans evolved from monkeys. Both evolved from a common ancestor. British English has changed just as much as American English has since they began to split in the 17-18th centuries.
Which would also be censorship.

Even if Google remove it from their marketplace people could still install it directly. So Google can make the choice not to allow bigotry "in their house" without preventing others from having free speech. Which seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
This is probably because Sun no longer exists.
You seem certain of your views and I won't try to convince you. I just want to explain why I and perhaps others aren't 'speaking out against it.' We're entrepreneurs here, and we're trying to learn from each other about what works, especially what's in the grey areas. When you're little you need every little advantage you can get.

Every major piece of social software got off the ground by "spamming a bunch of people." But it was different spam. And the gradations do matter because they're orders of magnitude better and orders of magnitude less load on the system.
Having been acquired a couple of times, "integration meetings" normally occur after the deal is made public but before it closes. So the decision would already have been made.
Are you smart enough to get invited to a Facebook party?
And as usual, i presume this is only going to be available in the U.S.

Seems great financial products either make their way to the UK very slowly, or dont come at all.

Mint still doesnt support UK Banks, so i'm using lovemoney but its reporting is not as good as what Mint has on offer.

BankSimple looks really good, and if it was in the UK, i'd certainly be interested in signing up.
Personally I'm sick and tired of working on "charge of the light brigade" projects that are run by people who've got no understanding of technology, no understanding of target markets and that are doomed to fail from square one.

Honestly I'd rather have a secure job with benefits and a fat paycheck, but that doesn't seem to actually exist anymore, so I'd rather hitch my star to something I believe in. The way I see it, "playing it safe" means that I'll fail 100% of the time -- with my startup it's possible I'll succeed.
I think that's the point. Good writing often doesn't make sense on a literal level. Apart from this, my favorite example from recently: "and with Kevin Garnett and the newly-signed Jermaine O’Neal, Danny Ainge has just successfully assembled the greatest collection of big men in the history of 2002." http://freedarko.blogspot.com/2010/08/luke-harangody-boston-...
The above is the actual first claim from the patent. Of course it's subject to interpretation in context, but that is the text of the first claim.
But does it add to Twitter's costs in spam management? It's not nearly in the same league as untargetted, extremely high volume spam which follows a million people and sends out essentially the same ad over and over again.

To answer your original question, yes, I think Twitter isn't bothered by spam until it gets past a certain threshold. They're in it to make money, not to wage religious war.
Ask: I just read about Branchr. How does one start an ad network like this?
I've always had an idea about a kind ad network but no idea how to get started. I'm inspired that Christian Owens started one.
Well, iTunes is not for HIM to sign, its for YOU.