skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My 8 year old son LOVES the hardy boys, though he's mostly reading stuff a bit older now. I wonder sometimes about the...cheesiness and some of the less-than-PC content in this series and others, but I figure if I turned out OK he could too.

He likes the cheesy dialog, but I suppose he's young enough that I won't worry about his tastes too much. I'm just glad he likes to read. It's a huge load off--like now all I have to do is point him in the general direction if something he likes.

I think I'll hold off on mentioning the article, though. :)
Along those same lines - I started working on my first iPhone app and added a simple feedback button to gather user feedback. Then it occurred to me that this feedback mechanism itself can be offered as a service. Kind of like a Get Satisfaction or UserVoice for mobile apps.

Anyone think this would be useful? Would anyone actually pay for something like that? It'd probably have a lightweight library for the various platforms, and any app can integrate the feedback button with just a couple lines and an include. Initially it'd just gather raw feedback - probably with a interface that helps let the user know what the form is for - and later on adding more community-based feedback features that other web-based feedback services provide.

I know there are a few companies that offer mobile feedback integration, but none that are very active or solely focused on mobile.

What do y'all think?
Fecious?
YouTube's business model was to hemorrhage money while getting the groundwork laid, then start making money. Google bought them first, but is still continuing the same path they were on.

You don't give up just because you got a bad review or people laugh at you. If you did, nobody would ever do anything.

You also don't give up just because the competition was there first. Nothing would ever have competition.
Xmarks has been essential for me when fiddling between multiple devices and OSes. Quite handy.
I used to have a lot more extensions installed on Firefox, but right now all I actually use is:

AdBlock Plus, Download Statusbar, and Tab Scope.

Although one personal 'hack' almost counts: I moved the bookmark toolbar up next to the system menu, to use up all that space and give me quick access to all the sites I read. I have about 14 folders up there, and the Readability bookmarklet. I'm nervous about FF4 because I don't know where I'll be able to put my bookmarks...
Any time I hear someone say they spent a year working on a few hundred lines of code, I have to wonder how much of the problem was other people, and how much was that person.

I suspect there's a ton of exaggeration going on here, and that's probably not the only code they worked on. It's also probably not the highest priority, either.
Djangoembed, a rich media consumer/provider for django
> With critical accounts like your car, apartment, cell phone...

Well, if you're using zipcar, it's precisely because your car is not in the same category with these others. If it were in that category, you'd just buy a car.
Cultural taboos are always ripe for humor. Be careful judging someone for something you might not understand as well as you think.
I think he overestimates the value of connections in this respect. Acquirers are not easily influenced. I don't think any investor can affect e.g. Google's interest in an acquisition by more than a couple percent.
The Permission We Already Have
Well, creating a common vision would have been a good start, as would having had a single owner. There is a point where it becomes more valuable for managers to delegate and step away than it is for them to try and keep abreast of the minutiae. In order for delegation to work there must be comprehensive trust. In my experience, large organizations usually fail miserably at this combination of trust, vision, and delegation [at some point of scaling]. The better you are the better you can scale, but even revered learning organizations like 3M, Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC relied [mostly] on small, self-organizing organic project teams with very little management oversight... but oodles of charisma & responsibility.
It's all because TC cover stories related to YC companies a lot. I think that's about it.
Moore on the optimism of visionaries is fun: they see with their eyes closed. That's how they see.
+1 for template engines.

Cheap scanning services only go so far. Any sane template engine should automatically escape all strings when outputting an HTML/XML document, unless the developer explicitly tells it not to. Django does this perfectly. A lot of other modern frameworks also has secure defaults.

PHP is a PITA because it is a template engine in some sense, but it doesn't escape anything by default. PHP's last attempt at something like auto-escaping was magic quotes, which was an epic failure. The few times I need to write vanilla PHP, I end up defining an escaping function and use it instead of echo.
Professor's self-experiments in cybernetics have provoked debate in the field
Judges' sentencing criteria are not opaque, because they're set out in the opinion and subject to appeal. Sentencing guidelines have been a mixed bag at the federal level as far as quality of results goes, and their original mandatory nature were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme court in 2005, largely due to sustained opposition by Justice Scalia.
On Bacon
I think this is probably about how the situation is framed rather than the objective facts.

Consider a restaurant that charges $3.50 for a cup of coffee unless you are a senior citizen in which case the charge is $2.50. Here are two ways that this can be framed:

* Coffee: $2.50 (add $1.00 surcharge if you are young)

* Coffee: $3.50 ($1.00 discount if you are a senior citizen)

The objective facts are the same but our subjective feelings are different. We hate getting "charged" for things but don't mind a higher baseline price if we can get a "discount".

Are you sure the core of the problem isn't just that it "feels wrong" that the chip has parts that are disabled?
You shouldn't forget that blacklisting is not enough. Whitelisting is usually as important (specially for displaying rss full of html), and there are far fewer open implementations.
If I want to auto renew a contract it should be something I willfully decide to do

But in the contract, you already agreed to let them charge you every month. I don't know the wording, but it probably doesn't say "as long as this card is active". This wasn't a case, if I read correctly, of automatically renewing when he hadn't agreed to that, but of him promising to pay until he cancelled his account, and then admittedly attempting to defraud zipcar by neither paying nor canceling.

There should be a federal law preventing this behavior. It's dishonest and a very bad practice.

To be clear, do you mean the practice of agreeing to charges you have no intention of paying? ;)

I agree, though, that we desperately need contract reform. Maybe contracts which are not individually executed by at least one person on each side should be advisory only, or something. What with the uncertainty surrounding TOS, EULAs, licenses, and 20 pages of fine print, they nearly are anyway, in practice.
"So perhaps my problem actually lies in the idea that these were sold at face value as one thing and then weeks, months or even just days later they were told, oh but wait, we could also make it do this if you wished, but that will cost you $(insert arbitrary amount here)"

I really have a hard time seeing how this is a bad thing. If I see a product and I agree that it's worth my money, I buy it. If it turns out that the product can do more than I originally expected it to, I really have a hard time seeing this as a problem. I only see the problem if the product ends up doing less than I expected.
As I understand it, Intel are not selling these CPUs directly to consumers at all. The CPUs are in a specific model of Gateway machine.

I presume that Intel will have discussed with this Gateway, since it has their name on the card, and will have sold the CPUs to them 'at face value'.

Did the use of these CPUs affect Gateway's pricing for the machines they sold to consumers? Seems unlikely, the low-end PC market has no margin to allow manufacturers to charge extra for something that's not an immediate benefit.
For Safari:

Gmail Checker - Adds an icon to the toolbar with a badge of how many new emails I have.

Helvetify - Forces Helvetica Neue as the font for all websites.

Facebook Photo Zoom - Zooms photo thumbnails on Facebook so you don't have to reload the whole page when you want to see a photo.
Ask HN: How do you launch a network effect startup like a Groupon clone
Hi HN, lets take a groupon clone as a case study. Assuming you had a significant differentiating factor that would make you more attractive than Groupon to a particular group of businesses/buyers - how would you go about launching it? How would you line the first set of businesses and attract buying customers the first week of launch?
AdBlock, FlashBlock, Readability and Instapaper. The web is an obnoxious assault on the senses. There is some useful stuff in between all those flashing billboards and neon lights so I block all of the distractions that I can. I wish there was a SocialNewsBlock plugin to get rid of all of those damn buttons everyone puts on their sites, too.
I'm not sure I understand the point of these services... seems like most are completely static; first of all, if you have any kind of javascript that touches the DOM, these things are useless, second, if you figure out that your page is rendering wrong you have to figure it out on your own and then run them again to make sure you've fixed the problem? That just seems like a totally broken workflow....
Addoway announces new homepage design and Etsy importer
The future of work will not contain resumes
Hacking Movies
A complete and definitive guide to every hacking related movie ever made.
Who says they have to build the whole OS? I bet it's just gonna be a variant on Android.
The response on here are different than on most other pulications: most people called Jobs rude in his dismissal. Anyone has noticed a age-bias or journalism-bias previously on HN, or it is somethine else?
> Taking down their website for a few hours, is fairly close to harmless.

That just makes it even more stupid. Not only does it not accomplish anything, but it's illegal and stoops down to their level. You'd basically sacrifice principal for nothing except a little "gotcha back" feeling.
If your app is missing a feature, it is less useful and thus deserves less stars. If it has more features, it is better and deserves more. This is another developer entitlement issue. Users aren't going to give you five stars because your one feature works really super well even though you have five missing features that don't work at all.

Your app can and should be ranked against other apps that are more fully featured and usable. If you aren't on the upper side of the curve quit spending time complaining about it and spend some more time learning and using that to code your app to be better.
I have just installed Tree Style Tabs. My impressions so far is that it's way cleaner and more organized than the traditional tab style.
Project MKULTRA: A covert, illegal CIA human research program
I'm reminded of a quote:

"Positions are seldom lost because they have been destroyed, but almost invariably because the leader has decided in his own mind that the position cannot be held." - General A. A. Vandegrift, United States Marine Corps

I think this is often true in entrepreneurship.
It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations (my marker for the beginning of the decline is WWII reconstruction). A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge.

One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree. Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Most children not only don't get this, they aren't even being taught the basic building blocks.

I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them.

I have exactly the same problem recruiting programmers. Like many large corporations we are primarily a Java & .Net shop and it is incredibly disappointing when 50% of the candidates can barely do more than drag controls out of the toolbox (<--- slight exaggeration, but not too much. I hire mostly in MX, BR, and IN and skilled folks are hard to come by. Ironically, this is usually because the cream are already working in the US/EU or earning US/EU pay in consulting gigs that are geography independent. Good for them.)

My apologies for the rant, but this struck a nerve.
As a graduate student looking to learn LaTeX, I'm curious if you know of any decent first references? I've had to work in it before and learned enough to get by, but am looking to learn more.
Another good way to ensure that you keep services you absolutely need is to review your credit card/bank details and make sure you're not getting charged for any ghost recurring services.
If you were designing an algorithm, I assure you it would look nothing like FICO. It's very counterintuitive.
I dunno, it's not really "nice" or "mean". It's an amoral act. If a user automatically prepays for services and isn't under a more formal contract (as they would be with a cell phone provider, and possibly cable), opting not to pay is their prerogative. Just as opting not to provide services is the seller's prerogative.

Monthly services fees are a convenience for both the buyer and the seller, not just the seller.
The older we are the closer to the surface lies that nerve! Yours is not so much a rant as a much needed plea...
Aluminium!
Perhaps someone has a system that evolves bots by mutation, and these patterns are just the effects of 'bad' mutations. I'm not serious either, though.
I use many of the ones people have mentioned here, but in Firefox. Can't switch to Chrome because it doesn't have a good implementation of two of my favorite add-ons:

Stumbleupon - for whenever I need a distraction that even HN can't fullfil

Colorzilla - For getting colors of web pages; use this about a dozen times a day
When reading resumes I always look for supplemental information first. I saw a post here recently that explained how to read patents. There should be a similar article explaining to candidates how technical managers/recruiters read resumes & CVs. Put simply, college/resume/coursework/memberships/keywords will get you past HR but the hiring manager or team will skip all that and look for project details. I'm only bothering to post this because you are saying exactly the same thing but using the context of the modern web. I just want applicants to know that they don't have to use the web to get interviews as long as their resume contains the same kind of information.

I wish university career counselors would teach students this....
I couldn't even get past the "you have too many speeding tickets phase" - nor could my girlfriend...
I know Readability is a bookmarklet but your comment made me search the FF add-ons for a Readability add-on that was applied to every page I visit automatically.

That might be a nice hack.
Glad to help. The first one I read was "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine." In that story the professor builds a new type of computer that's much more powerful than anything else in existence, and much smaller (about the size of a Vax maybe). It was published in 1964, so that was small back then. Danny and his friends start using it to help them with their homework. Then they become dependent on it. Very prescient.

And I misspelled the series in my first post. Danny's last name is Dunn, not Dunne.
This story is popular for the same reason as Dunning–Kruger. People cite D-K because everyone acts as certain as them and it's frustrating. If we're all equally certain, what makes me different from you? D-K gives the answer you want to hear--the other people are mistakenly confident in their abilities, unlike you.

If you look at the numbers and graphs for D-K, the actual conclusion is that everyone thinks they're in about the 70th percentile (with some minor variation) regardless of their ability, a non-conclusion. That is, however, not the interpretation we want to be true, so we continue to perpetuate the more specious analysis that skilled people know their ability level and unskilled do not, when really it is just a side effect of everyone rating themselves in the 70th percentile and some people inevitably landing at that same skill level.

Here's an essay that puts the same reversal in perspective for the Bell story: http://essays.dayah.com/face-the-music. It argues we love to promote and repeat this story because it proves that _we_ could be unacknowledged geniuses. In our retelling of the Bell story, we are not referencing the masses that walk by rather than listen, we're pointing out that others walk by us.
Swedish Pirate Party Fails To Enter Parliament
'Unix system programming in Objective Caml' sounds like what you were thinking of.

http://ocamlunix.forge.ocamlcore.org/
Oh, Good Lord, the 11-year-olds. Yeah. Mine just got a Wii - our family's first game console. Our daughter somehow managed just fine with PC games on her laptop, but that's not quite cool enough for the boy.

The rule is simple: do my wife's college algebra grading, gain game time. So far it's working great. It's the first job we've assigned him that he does without complaint.
'jumping around' wasn't me being derogatory - just how some employers would rather have someone with, say, 6 years of deep JEE experience rather than 6 years of mixed Java/.Net/etc experienced mixed together. For some positions, that makes sense, and for others, that requirement may not make sense.
You've convinced me that Alex Kurtagic is racist, which I never really doubted. You have yet to explain why pointing out this fact invalidates his reasoning, or the reasoning of Scott Locklin.

In fact, I don't think you even are trying to argue against his reasoning. I think you are instead attempting to lull us into a false sense of sharing an identity with you. And that, according to all kinds of psychological research, can end up with us conforming to your other ideals as well -- if we believe they go part and parcel together, we will, on some level, strive for consistency [1].

You are hoping that if we pay a lot of attention to Alex Kurtagic being racist, we will share an identity with you ("I'm not racist at all"). Then, based on a shared identity, we will assume that Scott Locklin's opinions must be wrong, without even examining the content of his argument.

I think HN is smarter than that [2].

[1] Yes, I did steal that paragraph.

[2] I realize I'm playing the same game ahoyhere is.
Down with fun: The depressing vogue for having fun at work
The major 3 in the US - experian, transunion and equifax - all have that level of detail.
Chrome dev channel:

AdBlock

Aviary Screen Capture

Awesome Screenshot - (to capture the whole page)

Better Facebook Fixer

Chromey Calculator

DayHiker - For Google calendar. Check schedule and tasks from toolbar.

Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google)

Forecastfox Weather

Gmail Notes (Beta) - Add notes to conversations in Gmail and save these notes to Google Docs.

Gmail StrikeThrough - Enable StrikeThrough in Gmail or Google Apps Mail.

Gmail Unread Message Count in Favicon

Google Calendar Dynamic Icon - Changes the number on the
Google Calendar favicon to reflect the current date

Google Chrome to Phone Extension

Google Mail Checker Plus

Google Voice (by Google

Graph Your Inbox - Visualize your Gmail data.

Novell Moonlight

Rapportive - (Disabled)

Speed Dial

Tab Sugar
To be clear, I mean the practice of opting into a renewed contract automatically. If you sign up for a year, and you want to sign up for one more year automatically, the decision to opt in should be something that you willfully do--not something that is written into a contract. There is no practical way for people to manage 20 different auto renewals. If your service has value they will sign up for it without being tricked into it by some slimeball legal wording.

oh and you can write a contract to do a lot of things--doesn't mean they all should be legal.
He recently released a printed collection of his best work, including your two favorites:

http://www.amazon.com/Fiddler-Subway-World-Class-Violinist-P...

Great Zucchini is my favorite, too. And his favorite.
Voiceover is really impressive. I'm sighted, but I keep the shortcut to turn it on (triple click home button) enabled so I can use it quickly when I want to.

I use it to read and type short text messages when I'm driving without taking my eyes off the road. Other times I use the screen reader to read websites to me while driving.

So to the other developers out there, remember, accessibility helps the sighted users as well as the blind.
I agree to a large part with what you wrote, and I certainly didn't mean to imply that kids would be completely ostracized for not playing games. And of course, I also see the problem with letting kids do whatever they want simply because their friends do it. But a few things:

* I was actually thinking about much younger kids -- elementary school, not teens in middle or high school. They often don't really have the option of getting new friends, since they're in the same class all day with the same (small) group of kids.

* The line has to be drawn somewhere (and understandably at different points by different people). What if you never let your kids watch any tv or movies or listen to any music? At what point does not allowing such experiences fall into the category of "cultural deprivation" (or whatever vaguely evil term people like to use)?
How come Robert sucks?

edit: ok, if you didn't notice source's filename; http://sota.gen.nz/compat2/robert_you_suck.c

And just in case... also ;)
I am assuming you are implying that the real purpose of school, then, is to teach kids to "grit [their] teeth and get shit done, no matter how unpleasant." In other words, to teach kids self-control. Reminds me of Robin Hanson: http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/academia
Ebot - erlang web crawler using AMQP and CouchDB(Riak)
As a company scales, it becomes necessary to add or codify process. The key tradeoff under consideration is always whether the drag imposed by the process is worth the gains in efficiency or effectiveness.

I kind of like "process drag" as terminology for the overhead associated with formalized processes. It sounds a little more pejorative than simply "process overhead". It might make a good addition to the lexicon, right next to "technical debt".
I would highly recommend taking the time to learn LyX [http://www.lyx.org] rather than LaTeX itself unless your dissertation will contain a lot of equations. LyX is now a pretty mature piece of software that makes working with LaTeX very easy while still giving you access to all of its advantages.

In any regard, for the love of god, please don't use Word or OO.org, you WILL regret it :-)