skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm wondering how serious you are about this. You really can't think of a single scenario where it hasn't?

Moore's law shutting down tomorrow, the whole Western world going into a Japan-style Lost Decade, an asteroid strike in the Pacific causing a tsunami wiping out the West Coast, Japan, Korea, and part of China - or just the Big One hitting California* - a demographic apocalypse choking off all major investment, a limited biotech/nanotech plague, limited nuclear exchanges (touched off by Russian adventurism into Georgia, North Korea, Iran...) etc...

Heck, I'm not even trying here. There are tons of scenarios in which no Singularity of any kind has hit by 2040. (Good quip, though.)

* do you live in those areas and expect to not survive any major disaster? then rewrite them to take out the East Coast, England, etc.
Believe it or not, but most advertisers are actually not brand marketers, and are interested in performance and results over impressions(think SMB e-commerce).
And people have been making your point ever since Facebook opened up to the general population. But MySpace, even in its heyday, wasn't nearly as big as Facebook was a year or two ago.
This is a very interesting analysis, thank you.
"It just sucks that consumers are getting caught in the middle."

Yes and no. If the rumors are true, the original iPhone was offered to VZW and they wanted to do their standard load it with crapware, limit standard features and then charge the customer to get them later, etc... game. Apple refused and they ended up stalemating. That lead Apple to then Cingular (IIRC) who let Apple have all the control it wanted, and even gave them a cut of the subscription pie.

VZW and others still put extra crap on phones [1], but at least it seems it's getting better.

[1]http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/07/android-j...
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My guess is that there's a huge pent up demand among people who want an iPhone in theory, but not enough to switch carriers in practice. It's hard to believe that the iPhone could literally "fall on its face", as you say.
Thats how I write CSS. A good front-end dev can write one set of clean CSS for Chrome, FF, IE8 and IE7 with a small set of styles in an IE6-specific stylesheet.

Combine clean CSS with SCSS (http://sass-lang.com/) for mixin awesomeness and also PIE.css (http://css3pie.com/) for CSS3 on IE. Thats pretty much the winning combo IMO.

Will they hire someone remotely, especially someone with heavy ruby/rails exp?
I'm not buying the idea that a social graph has long term value. Relationships come and go. People die. People delete their Facebook accounts.

A social graph is just a digital incarnation of a yearbook.
I don't recall yearbooks being valuable or useful...perhaps on a personal sentimental level.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical.
I don't think you agree with his point. Most people have no desire to move on from Facebook not because moving their data is a hassle, but because everyone they know is on Facebook.

Everyone didn't move from MySpace to Facebook. Facebook pulled in many, many new people.
From my reading, this combined with the use of the unclean hands defense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_hands, helps to protect them against both types of damages.
I can do that. I'll add it to my todo.
> but rarely do I check my work in IE as I'm so sure it'll look fine

That's pretty scary.

To me that sounds as though a programmer would say:

"I hardly ever compile my code on BSD, I'm usually sure it'll work just fine"

And I'd not believe him. In your case, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but at the same time I'd urge you to test it anyway but that's from a programmers perspective again.
This looks like a pure fluff announcement to me -- it's not enabling any new functionality. Mark Zuckerberg even said that this is built on top of the Graph API so anyone could have built this app but no one cares.

It looks to me like facebook slipped on the deadline to launch whatever they've been in "lockdown" for and they had to scramble to put this and the other minor things together for the press.
He is a fascinating creature. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be alive at the same time as various historical characters. With him, I think I am. I believe history will treat him kindly, regardless of his idiosyncrasies.
Exactly. If I think I'll have overage, I can purchase 200gb of bandwidth for $20, or I can purchase another node for $20, which includes 200gb of pooled bandwidth. In my case, whenever, I need more bandwidth, I get more for my money by just purchasing a whole new node.
I would love this. I use BackupMyTweets.com, but I didn't know it existed until I had around 3500, so my first 300 or so updates are missing. (They might be on Facebook; after I download my data, I'll see when I started importing updates from Twitter.)
Direct link: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-html5video/

No reason to link to the blog instead.
What happens if the RMB is forced to revalue?
> I have been bullied and I have also been a bullie myelf (frist the former then the latter).

Username appropriate?
The response to Android in markets where the iPhone isn't carrier hobbled like with AT&T is lukewarm, to say the least.
Another advantage of having comments 'on' for a job posting.

I think that when YC funded companies look for applicants with comments off they're signaling that they are afraid they'll be drawn in to a discussion of their product rather than of the job at hand, but that might just throw away more good stuff than bad stuff.
I think I understand what you mean: a critic generally wants to have his or her point of view understood and acted upon, to which you could conclude that they might ultimately want to be able to be silent.

EDIT: maybe I didn't understand what you mean ;)

However, I'd argue that a single act is really just a grand gesture. To expect to silence critics with such a gesture is unrealistic - and doesn't do anything to positively resolve the issues involved with any cause worth fighting for.

The privacy issues that Facebook might need to address are deep and wide ranging. Facebook instigates cultural change - it's the nature of that change which should be up for debate.
The fucking Batman?
Right now, they just need to make the transition online. But if you wanted to run a small online newspaper for a small town, the cost is low.

If a town of 20,000 people wanted to ensure that the newspaper stuck around and produced solid quality news they could access online in perpetuity, they'd need to subsidize it to the tune of about $1.25 per person per month. Advertising would likely take care of the rest.

If one was worried about government interference, this fee could be bundled this into cable subscription packages and it would basically work out the same way.
I get the feeling you were a big fan of Ender's Game when you were a kid.
No, what I am doing is merely looking at recent data points and suggesting where the trend is going and the motivations of the players involved.

Is the G2 less open than the iPhone? I'm having trouble finding much difference, both are locked to a single version of a single OS controlled by a single third party, the only difference now is app provision. How long until a provider provides their own app store and only their own app store? Months, weeks? Verizon is already working on it. Go on Bing it on your new Droid, once you finish using the undeletable Blockbuster app.
How does that affect heat and battery life? Does the second disk switch off when not in use?
Tricks to get Welcome Voice Message during Logon on Windows 7 PC
This is precisely the kind of thing we need more of. Most people simply don't understand everything there is to know about loans they are signing up for.

Two main culprits in my opinion: 1) the language that is used to describe these financial products; 2) the unwillingness of businesses to take the time to explain the terms of the deal.
It doesn't help that the carriers stole the goose that lays the golden egg by rebranding the phones; they'd be doing better if people were shopping for "Android" phones.

But of course they aren't.
Hum, the "one button" is a real problem on the iPhone. Having one interface element working in an extremely modal manner is a bad ergonomic choice for the sake of esthetic. Having 3 or 4 different buttons is much more practical.
Ruby has by far made me the happiest because I understand it the best and can get the most done in an elegant way. However, I do get bouts of language jealousy. For example, I am enamored with the way Haskell deals with looping constructs and lists but I don't understand IO well enough to get something very useful accomplished with it. That is much more my fault than the language's.
>Anyways, the moral of the story was stepping back and discovering the root cause of these symptoms can be very beneficial. Don't block it out with meds unless that is really the cause.

If the meds fix the problem, and they have proven fairly safe, why not use them? (I mean, they aren't absolutely safe, but they are very safe compared to, say, driving to work every day.)

It's not a lifetime choice, either. You can decide that you need some help, and get it for the next six months, then stop and work on your personal issues. This is actually what I'm doing now (though, I'm nearing the end of my rest... it's time to get some work done.)
This is not an accident of interpretation.

It's much less clear than this. Highly recommend watching this show:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/inside-the-kor...
I go to plenty of used book sales at libraries and these guys are annoying as hell. They scan and hoard a lot of the books irrespective of the topic, and later spend time looking at each one to check its resale prospects. What they don't want, they dump back, not necessarily where they were supposed to be, and head out.

My library has even started posting flyers saying hoarding is disallowed. Libraries have also started not bringing out all the books at once, so that once these guys have done their "business", there's more quality books left for the rest. As for me, I think they should just ban the use of these devices at these sales.
I said what I said and meant it, and it's accurate. You might think I'm making it up, but I'm not. I really don't know how I can be more accurate.

Maybe you could explain why I'm wrong?
Motorola sues Apple for patent infringement
Good point. Verizon's vcast was garbage, and they insisted on sticking it on everything for a while. (Maybe they still do.) Plus, they're still one of the worst carriers for causing consumers to bear data charges because they hit the center button on a phone.

And then there was the time a few months back where one of my clients had a shiny new Android phone, and the manufacturer or carrier had replaced the Android mail application with their own -- which also happened to silently fail on outbound ssl connections.
I agree ... I like the simplicity - but I think there's a really strong possibility that you'll stumble across someone else's phrase too.
Great post guys. I have used Groupon many times and the places I revisit are the ones that have excellent customer service.

I think an important factor to note is Deal Expiration date. Many businesses only give customers 1-2 months to redeem a certificate, if you span this out across a year you will save yourselves a lot of energy when the Groupon is about to expire.
Most bookshops do, in fact since Amazon/abebooks/etc most used bookstores do <50% of their business through the door. They make their money on Amazon, others don't even bother with the store anymore - they buy job lots of books put them in cheap warehouse space and sell them for 1c making money on the s+h

This guys trawls library sales, thrift stores etc. Library sales are normally run for charity and everything is 50c, the librarians have already selected the books to go into the sale so there isn't much chance of a $100 book being found. The aim of 'friends of the library' group of little old lady volunteers isn't really to invest $1000s in high tech to make a little more money.
"AT&T gave up its exclusivity deal with Apple for the iPhone back in the spring of this year."

Source? I thought Apple was still in the middle of their 5-year agreement.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/10/confirmed-apple-and-atand...

http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/Apple_iPhone_Ex...

http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/Apple_iPhone_Ex...
Who's suing who in the mobile business
Yep, it is off when it isn't and use. It does affect battery a little bit but I have found it be negligible.
>How do they check?

It's an interview process. But really, as far as I can tell, the check is "do the drugs make you hyper or do they make you focused" The only definition of ADD that I've heard that differs appreciably from simply being lazy sometimes is that people with ADD respond differently to stimulants. Jack up my nervous system enough and I'll actually lay down for a nap.
This year at the Phoenix Book Fair (http://www.vnsabooksale.org/) there was an incident where 2 people who were in line when the doors opened got into a fight. Apparently both men had scanners and shopping carts and were scanning books for the same reason listed in the article. One of the men began reaching into the other's basket to scan his items and that is when the fight began. I think they were just grabbing handfuls of books and putting them in their basket and then starting to scan to see what to keep.

I spoke with one of the organizers and she told me that she goes and sorts books twice a week at their warehouse. It is all volunteer work ... but it got me thinking that you could earn extra income by bringing a scanner. Although in this case it might be better to just alert the charity running the book sale of the item's value.
I think the statement that his answers may seem impolite is more a commentary on many people's inability to distinguish terseness from impoliteness. It's not saying that he's rude.
> * [...] but not enough to switch carriers in practice.*

Why? Switching carriers is a piece of cake these days. That's not a barrier at all.
You just said you were a member of the group of people who wouldn't use the iPhone because it was "encumbered" with AT&T.
If the time comes when Apple does release a Verizon iPhone, it won't matter. Apple has already alienated potential customers by forcing them to switch to AT&T. Droid's success is an indicator of peoples' unwillingness to switch. Verizon's customer service can be lacking at times, but not enough that I would have switched to AT&T.
At no point did I assume that. If, I extrapolate based on something that is not true (aka we stop mining uranium) and look at it in a given area (aka the land area currently occupied by the USA or the Earth) then clearly I am not trying to predict human behavior in some other location.

If you want a prediction of human behavior, fine. I suspect that we will move to a mixture of fusion, wind, and solar power long before our supply’s of fissile materials become an issue. I also expect that our initial expansion into space will primarily involve exporting technology into space and collecting raw materials from space. However, initial space exploration is going to have minimal impact on life on earth with few material goods being sent back and forth. I also suspect that it’s going to take far longer than 1000 years before 1 billion people live outside the earths atmosphere.

Edit: The Americas where "discovered" 518 years ago and dispite being there for the taking and far more hospitable than space 200 million more people live in India than all of the Americas put together.
I feel the need to fact-check this.

Wikipedia's explanation of Sharia is more complex than what you say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia. Perhaps you could share why you think Wikipedia is wrong? The article states:

"Sharia (Arabic شريعة Šarīʿa; [ʃaˈriːʕa], "way" or "path") is the sacred law of Islam. Muslims believe Sharia is derived from two primary Sources of Islamic law; namely, the divine revelations set forth in the Qur'an, and the sayings and example set by the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh ("jurisprudence") interprets and extends the application of Sharia to questions not directly addressed in the primary sources by including secondary sources. These secondary sources usually include the consensus of the religious scholars embodied in ijma, and analogy from the Qur'an and Sunnah through qiyas. Shia jurists replace qiyas analogy with 'aql, or "reason"."

The article further explains that Sharia covers areas of life such as diet, dress code, sexuality, personal morality, and the punishments prescribed for crimes - the aspects of law in Islamic countries that Westerners view as harsh and sometimes barbaric. For example, punishing theft with hand amputation is part of Sharia. In five Islamic countries under Sharia law the crime of Sodomy is punishable by death.

"Sharia" is no more a specific set of laws than Anglo-Saxon "Common Law". But it is a certain way of creating and judging law based on Islamic religious tradition that is incompatible with a modern secular state.

So if I were to use the term "Sharia" to refer to a strict and expansive system of law based on the Muslim religion, I would be correct.
Right. Microsoft, Apple, and the carriers would all be pleased if Android were to be replaced by WP7 in the market. No more pesky suggestions of user freedom, so everybody gets to keep their comfortable oligopolies and maintain veto power over potentially disruptive innovations. Expect to see many more Mac fans praising WP7, especially once it or the iPhone is on Verizon.
This story can be spot-on (Apple's producing a CDMA iPhone) without fulfilling the only aspect which US-centric HN readers care about (that Verizon will carry it). The story is framed in terms of technical capability, not in terms of a deal in place.

A Verizon deal would be news. A CDMA iPhone in January just means Gruber has good sources.
Seems like you're having it both ways: Do his ideas only make economic sense because he's an academic grant recipient or because one of the largest commercial technology companies on earth has embraced the output of his work, helping foster an ecosystem around it?
This actually seems like a rather thinly veiled marketing attempt for your company, pulling on the heart strings of local paper lovers for the company's profit.

There was a lot of subjective emotion and very little objective facts in the blog. How about some sources and reality checks on costs and benefits.
Patrick Moore (Greenpeace founder) and James Lovelock (Gaia theory) must also be "cranky old guys" as they also believe nuclear makes sense.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04...

It is super frustrating. And we aren't building enough to replace the old ones!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environmen...

Sometimes it seems as though Western civilization has peaked, simply because we've lost our mojo.
At the moment - Scala.
Previously - Python.
The only thing that matters to me now is the day apple starts selling all iphones unlocked. I don't want to go through firmware hacks to unlock an iphone or be forced on to a contract in order to buy it, I just want to be able to throw in any sim card and just go.
I've made three:

http://www.boostcam.com - Built it in a weekend a couple of years ago. costs next to nothing to run and makes money on adsense.

http://www.sproutvideo.com - SaaS video hosting platform that I built with a partner (I coded everything and he's the business man) in a couple of weeks. We've got a lot of paying customers already.

http://www.physicalfix.com - Fitness web app that I've been building with another partner (Again, I'm the coder and he's the talent) for a couple of years and just launched. Taking a little time to get tracking but doesn't cost much to run and has a few paying customers already.

None of them make me enough money to work on them full-time yet but it's a nice supplement to my day job salary.
I'm pretty sure those were AT&T commercials, not Apple commercials. And given that no Verizon customers have simultaneous voice/data, it's pretty clearly not make-or-break to the target market of a Verizon phone.

Also, the limitation only applies to cellular data; anywhere a Verizon customer has wifi they can use both.
The combined size of social networks that aren't Facebook is over 1.5 billion people, probably more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi...

Facebook has the most users in one place, but the dust is nowhere near settled on where everyone will end up.

This bodes very well for a decentralized solution. I doubt Diaspora will be the first (I think Appleseed (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org) is much more likely), but ultimately, it will be an easily implemented protocol with mature cross-platform libraries that'll really take it down.

This is a good PR move on Facebook's part, because it willfully misinterprets people's frustrations with Facebook. It's not that you didn't have a local copy of your data, it's that you had no control over your data when it was out in the wild. This will take some wind out of the sails of the decentralized solutions, but the armada is still coming.
So is it a porn site or is it a url shortener? I'm confused.
Keep in mind that RMS' email policy should not be confused with his face-to-face conversational style.

I ran into him at a train station in Milan, and completely commandeered his time and attention for a good 30 minutes, despite the fact that he had a train to catch. He politely answered all of my questions, and he even responded to my criticisms with civility and respect.

If you ever get him in a casual, face-to-face conversation, you will find that he actually comes across as quite meek and restrained, rather than the arrogant blow-hard that he is generally portrayed to be.
Yeah I actually have 3x750gb right now for media storage and a 500gb drive for OS. I get a performance boost from the RAID, and don't have it impact my OS. Ideally I would toss in another 500gb and RAID for performance on my main drive, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. SSD would be nice, but 500gb HD for $60 is hard to beat.
I never doubted that NIC.ly was perfectly within their rights to shut down vb.ly. The concern is that they are also perfectly within their rights to shut down -any- other domain as well. Currently, they -say- they only shut this one down because it promoted itself as 'adult friendly'. (Not 'sex friendly', just 'adult friendly', which in the end probably means the same.)

How do we know that they won't suddenly decide that bit.ly is 'adult friendly' also? Or that failing to prevent sex sites is enough for dismissal?

They could change their terms at any time to say anything they want, too. There's no stopping that. Sites like bit.ly are -built- around the domain name. To change it is to destroy the business.

The previous blog posts have been correct in their concerns. It's something that needs to be considered when choosing a domain name.
This reminds me of a Wizard of Id comic where the local paper comes in to interview the king.

Reporters: We'd like to ask you some questions on your environmental record.

King: How many trees are killed to print your paper?

-Reporters leave-

Squire: That was a quick interview.
I can't really remember Duncan being a bully?