skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing was done? This person's privacy was violated, and the country I love is slipping away in some ways. That's what was done.

No, it's not a police state, but yes, it's very bad to have things going in the direction they're going. We MUST stand up and STOP this kind of stuff. We must not let it keep getting worse.

EDIT: To quote Picard, "the line must be drawn HERE!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGF1NP-FrCU
Well. Sometimes, you can only best solve problems you understand. And those that you understand best are usually the ones you experience yourself. Many of us have the luxury of being healthy and well-fed, so that's not the problems we focus on.

And were this written in 2004, would you have said social connection is adequately addressed by Friendster and MySpace?

Just as Alta Vista was not the last word on search (nor is Google for that matter), Facebook is not the last word on Social Networks.

I think there's something to be said, however, about digging by following your own sense of curiosity and intuition about good problems to solve, instead of seeing where everyone else is digging and just digging there.

Use your noggin and explore. If it happens that no one else is digging there, so be it. And if that's what the OP is encouraging, then I'm all for that. But I don't feel there's a need to discount the current range of problems being solved.
It definitely can tell you whether you have staged files, because I use it for that among other things. I don't remember how I turned that feature on, but it wasn't hard. Perhaps someone will chime in with the details.
Example in a stream: http://twitter.com/#!/colegleason
Example as independent tweet: http://twitter.com/#!/colegleason/status/26719075299

I suppose you can't see it if you don't have the new interface though.
Scribes(a very nice editor) gets a PPA
I don't think so. Both Adobe and Microsoft benefit from the existence of (and their coexistence with) Linux.
This is my single favorite comment on Hacker News, ever. Well done.
I had to google 'revieled' ;P
If you're using the word "strategy," then you might as well go a little bit deeper into the military metaphor than just having "strategy" and "tactics" as concepts.

Modern military doctrine says that there are three levels of thought, not two. Strategy represents the idea that lets you achieve your objectives. Tactics represent the day-to-day actions that you take. The third level, Operations, sits between the two, and ensures that the tactics you are using actually implement the strategy you've chosen.

Customer Development isn't a strategy. Nor is it tactical. It's an operational tool to generate to-do lists comprising tactical actions.

The problem with using the word "strategy" is that too many people lack awareness of the depth of thought that the analogy encompasses, and fail to see past the common strategy/tactics binary misconception.
EcoPlum goes Environmentally Friendly Living with Site Redesign
someone who got into this to be a biologist is going to see administering a database or whatever as a chore that gets in the way of their real work, and they're not going to do a fraction as well as a professional

What about techies doing pro-bono work. I interviewed with a group associated with the human genome thing, and one of the biologists was bragging about using a stack -- as if that was some sort of hyper-uber-esoteric data structure.
Twitter isn't a really good place for code tips and tricks with the messages being so short.

That being said, I follow @codinghorror, @migueldeicaza, @jonskeet, and a few others.
I've become very partial to PlainText myself.
The winner gets paid, sure, but the "losers" get nothing for their time.
Expect to be contacted by lawyers very soon.
http://forrst.com/ might be slightly more valuable, then again, I never use it.
This only confirms my conviction that solipsism syndrome should be studied more closely in relation to the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism_syndrome

Edit (corollary): therefore Farmville is actually healthy.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but Project Natal is really, really stunning stuff, even if it only works half as well as claimed. I studied computer vision in grad school; this stuff is hard.

Hats off to you, Microsoft.
Yeah, I bet none of Microsoft's or Adobe's products ever worked for you.
Do you remember that recent scandal at the CRU, when people wanted to verify their dubious findings and they'd "lost" the data? Now maybe they did delete it to cover up falsifying their conclusions, I don't know. Or maybe they just didn't have a clue about IT and no-one was paying attention to the backups.
The most charitable reading I can give it still has it missing the point and not understanding what it is that's being built up with all these companies.

Facebook, as I've said, restores and maintains social connections. This is absolutely not a minor thing, it's life-altering. Perhaps it's too early on in the process to understand that, but 10 or 20 years from now, everyone will get it when they look at who has been around and what they've shared as experiences.

Twitter is the global hive-mind. It tracks what everyone in the world is thinking about, or at least it or its successor will when extends its reach that far. Yes, most of that is shallow, because most of what most of us think about is shallow. Duh. That's sort of by definition if you think that through for five minutes. If we were all deeper, then the norm would be redefined and we'd all seem shallow again. Twitter succeeds at capturing the hive-mind specifically because it is so short. Your immediate thoughts are immediate, they're bite sized. The format matches the format of your thinking. There's value in knowing what people are thinking, though of course that value will be applied in different ways.

Foursquare is a few things. One, it's designed as a universal customer loyalty system on its primary level. I suppose if you think commerce is of necessity shallow, you can dismiss this as meaningless. Of course, it does give the small niche businesses a tool to level the playing field, but even that's probably not enough for some. But what about this- it's also restoring a sense of place to urban and suburban environments. There's a trackable history of who was where and when. It's not as disjointed as it was, there's a throughline. "Oh", you might say, "Bob goes to the same coffee shop I do, but three hours later". Now you're closer to Bob, and the coffee shop has more history for you.

Yeah, ok, none of this is curing cancer, but it does matter, it does make a difference, and it does improve people's lives.

You can tell me it's meaningless, but you're wrong.
Perhaps that was the anonymous tip the FBI referred to?
Bidz.com Brand Name & Jewelry Auctions - Live | Rings, Watches, Sunglasses
My first reaction was the same. However, I bet Apple tried to patent these things, too. So it would be sort of balancing justice - you want software patents, let them bite you...
http://www.droidforums.net/forum/xeudoxus/78843-apks-unlocke...

http://www.xeudoxus.com/android/Skype.apk
Is the link to the unlocked skype app.
Windows Live & Wordpress Join Hands To Give Customers a Better
Realizing and understanding the blogging requirements of website users or bloggers, Windows Live felt a need to merge with Wordpress, as, Wordpress created a good impression on them with their impressive features and appreciated output on different levels, be it a scalable stage, the most important spam protection or the task of personalization and customization.
from what i've gathered, MSFT 'routinely' cans things that they've invested heavily in.
I think this also has to do with more people underestimating the trend you refer to than overestimating it. I think what this means is that because of the pace of technology, we have things that go from an idea in someone's head into an ecosystem of businesses, applications and technologies in just a few years. The ability to rapidly develop and share what we've built lets people fill in the gaps from deep meaningful, concepts like "never lose track of your friends" all the way to "Mary gained 20 points on farmville today" so quickly that it's hard not to mix them up as being one in the same.

I'd argue that this is similar to the car going from "new sector of transportation, economy, and way of life" all the way to "now with rust-proof undercoating with 0 down, 0% APR and $1000 Cash back", just much more quickly. If you were to look at the automobile industry after the arrival of the used car salesman as a solved problem due to the abundance of its superficialities, you'd miss the opportunity to build the hybrid car, the Smart car, the electric car, the hydrogen car and more, and all of the smaller incremental yet meaningful advances in car safety and technology over the years. In the larger scheme of things, Facebook is probably the model T of social networks...
Sounds like you're distributing a web app like a desktop app. Maybe it would have been better off as a desktop app in the first place?
You're construing his "Nothing was done" to fit your point, but you're obviously being too literal about it.
Thinking further, I'm now wondering if customer development isn't actually a doctrine. Hm. More thought is required here.
Um, no. Not at all.

The $26 per unit isn't the problem. It's paying for textbooks, housing, food, reliable transportation, medical insurance, and daycare while you're going to school and studying. Or trying to concentrate after a 50 hour workweek. I'm not saying that we shouldn't offer inexpensive community college courses, but pretending that it's anything but a small start is silly. If we really wanted, as a society, to get people through college, we'd pay for the full price instead of something that often represents only a fraction of the true cost of college.
The premise of the article is that because there are so many fluff start-ups, there are so few non-fluff start-ups.

Now, for the sake of debate, let's agree there are lots of fluff start-ups. But does that mean there are fewer non-fluff start-ups? I don't think so. It's a false dichotomy. Just because you have more Zynga-like companies does not mean you don't have more start-ups today than a decade ago going after cancer.

This is the most common flaw I find in arguments related to this.
With what right do you presume to tell people what problems they have? Surely that would be the choice of the individual free person?
Similar thoughts come to me from time to time, mostly when I realize I spend 50-60 hours a week making advertising more efficient. Still... there are upsides. I left a career as a scientific programmer creating medical research software because selling out offered me a 90% raise. That's not an exaggeration. And a chance to work for companies that offer enough equity that it might change my life, even if it's just a hefty downpayment. And the chance to work in my choice of cities on America's coasts.
This may be unpopular, but anyway, my recipe:

1. Don't use twitter. Remain offline as long as possible.

2. During the time you're offline do this: think / code / think / remove code / think / code tests / code (order may vary)

I esp. like removing code. "Every line of code not written is a correct one" !! I recently did a very successful project for a demanding customer by cutting the code by 60%.

3. Make your time window for learning, comparing code, check others' code. Resist coding during that time. Use the right source of information - the best would be analyzing the whole programs to have a better context. Avoid CPDD (Copy/Paste Driven Development) like a plague. Read paper books on programming - the brain works in a different way when reading a dead tree text.

Sorry for not answering your question directly. This was a polite - I hope - way to say that gists on twitter won't win the game.
a really bad thing about current patents (enforcement) is that it redistributes significant resources - time&money - from possibly productive purposes in an engineering company to [both sides] lawyers' pockets. A "40% patent layers tax". A parasitic drag if to speak aerodynamically.
Smart people typically underestimate their skill while dumb people overestimate theirs. However, by acknowledging and discussing this, we're probably both thinking we're smart, so maybe we're overestimating ourselves and are really dumb. Or something like that.
I'm not sure I'd be willing to turn my life upside down, and possibly destroy it, on a hopeful chance of pushing back against the weight of the US government. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that people who do that are brave but foolhardy - probably not the sharpest crayons in the box.
Hypothetically, if I have my blog at "example.com/journal", how can I host it on Posterous/Tumblr/etc?
Advice for design students
Hacker News is bad at a persistent conversation of this type though, it will drop off the front page in a day and no one will add to it further. Something like this benefits from longer conversation though as it is a day to day and ever changing discussion.
Delicious (http://www.delicious.com/) - keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues :-)

PS: This post is going to my delicious account
Football's new game in town: Disrupting the NFL
Seems like anyone with $50 could game angieslist's system.
Unlogo project: remove logos from videos
That and MSDNAA.
This seems to be a list of fake names and addresses. See http://gist.github.com/192658/ef073d2c9109b9da8d439a5976fee7...
The list of names is similar to the one you linked to.

Searching for "github dodgit" did the trick. How come i searched for it? All entries contain an email from a throw away address.
Since if found the file directly by searching for the first entry I figured the file is part of a project and that it would most probably refer to the throw away mail providers.
Looks very suspiciously like test data:

Exactly 10,000 rows in the dataset

Every name (Firstname, Surname, Streetname) occurs ~50-70 times

Every email address is from a small set (~5) of mail hosts
Top Ten iPhone Apps Using Facebook Connect | Technorox
The label I think you're looking for is "zero-sum thinking". That there are only a fixed number of startups to go around, and if they're all off doing web stuff, there is no room for other fields of endeavor.
Introducing consumer exoskeleton legs for wheelchair users
I like following programmers on Twitter as a way of knowing them more personally and to get away from the code and all the things in our professional and developer lives (as much as us programmers can at least.)

Just follow more people on Github or something, it's easier to find programmers on there for your interests, and you just get all things programming-centric on there.
I don't get it. 9/11 was a disaster and humiliation for security agencies. Now they just do their job in the best way they can and their job is to ensure the security of US citizens. Why making their job more difficult ? I would cooperate and help them focus on real potential threats.

Are we talking about torture ? About secret detention for months ? About deprivation of elementary defense rights ?
Organization defending citizen rights should be helped to focus on real threats and problems too, like this fishy 9/11 event.

I'm not US citizen, don't live in the US and have no particular connections or interests in the US. I just wanted to let you know that the reactions to this incident where it seem defending peoples own right has priority over defending peoples security gives an impression of selfishness and short sighting.

The other thing I don't understand is why the discovery and the device wasn't immediately reported to the police. It could have been put there by black hat people on to something on his behalf. According to his profile, this would be very plausible. Something like turning him into a terrorist, or whatever.
That remote irks me for one reason:

Sony's already made a small keypad and a remote for the PlayStation 3... Duct taping them together would be strange, but it would still look (and probably work) better than that Jaguar-esque oddity.
I've been working with this hardware for a month. I have not been impressed. The GTV interface itself isn't bad. The Google TV team have really been working their asses off for the last few weeks cleaning stuff up and fixing bugs.

Some of the downsides are basically around performance in the browser. The hardware in question (pictured in the article) has only about 2-3x the javascript performance of an iPhone 4. CSS transitions and animations work pretty well. The other big downside is the keyboard. Its a cheap plasticy thing thats hard to type on and feels like it was made for $4.

I am anxiously waiting for different companies to start making some very performant hardware for it. I think the OS has a lot of capabilities, but I can't recommend getting this particular hardware.
This is such a ridiculously ridiculous post. I'm saying that having worked on a number of media campaigns for a small but excellent medical research charity that has benefited enormously from the technical progress made in the last few years.

That benefit comes from making savvy use of everything from (now) cheap digital cameras and video editing, to carefully cultivated email lists, dedicated web-pages for outreach teams, and growing profiles on social networking sites.

All that seems like basic stuff, I know, but that's what's so amazing. Five years ago it was either much more expensive, or nonexistent. Today, it's ubiquitous (Facebook, for example, had 1% of its current base in 2005, and today I can shoot a better picture with a $5k camera than a $75k camera could capture back then).

That massive and very sudden shift has allowed organizations to do things (real, saving lives and avoiding death things) that simply wouldn't be imaginable - let alone possible just a few years ago, at least not with the limited resources they had for outreach.

So, Jolie O'Dell, if you want to see homeless people getting help, stop waiting for 'tech to do it'. Instead, just go out and talk to some homeless people. You don't need an app for that. Nor, you'll find, do they. And when you do figure out what's most likely to help, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised at how helpful all these new resources can be - provided you're creative enough to use them imaginatively.

Separately - all of you working on this 'pointless' stuff; you're awesome. And thank you. You're making vital connections. You've helped tremendously. The world is a better place because of you. Please, by all means, carry on.
Your linked article is not really a "confirmation": the BBC talked to a professor from Tufts University who says that the government is behind the account. Alternatively, Forbes talked to Alejandro Cao de Benos (a Spaniard who runs the "Korean Friendship Association": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Cao_de_Benos_de_Les_y... ), who claimed that the government has nothing to do with it: http://blogs.forbes.com/taylorbuley/2010/08/23/north-korea-t...

I think the most that we can say is that the evidence is inconclusive.
People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world

Although I have a CS degree and I absolutely love CS, I did "just ok" in my life science courses and viewed it as necessary evil to graduate. Life science is just not my thing. Just because I can write software doesn't mean I want to be in pharmacy :/
@haacked said that they'll accept patches from the Mono guys for compatibility.
I wouldn't expect it to degrade. This is using canvas - it's not creating a new copy of the image every time, but just painting that one image to the canvas.

The resource consumption is constant over time, so performance really shouldn't degrade.
yeah, by the tone of the post, I don't think he was going to even design a fake logo without having someone to send an invoice to.
Google Voice + Sipgate, I believe, gives you free calls in and out.
i'm not invited to that party.
I think the most alarming comment made by the FBI was towards the end:

"We have all the information we needed," they told him. "You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring."
With a Gizmo account in the middle. And of course, Sipdroid doesn't support the codec that Gizmo uses, so you need some other provider in the middle to do the transcoding.

I kind of almost made a call once this way.
Mobil Keluarga Ideal Terbaik Indonesia — Nyul Blog
"often"?

I've been stopped by customs a number of times, and they have never made this request. It's too bad, because I want to be the test case.
I think this is a great criticism of Silicon Valley, in general. It used to be filled with nerds who wanted to change the world. Now it's filled with hackers who want to get rich.

Let me quote the author again:

They’re creating "bread and circuses" ... apps that are wildly popular, infinitely entertaining, and exactly what people want.

The only problem is that they don’t really do anybody any good. They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems.

I'm ringing the bell on Silicon Valley. It's days are not up, but they're numbered. Because it doesn't understand this, it will begin its slow descent to become part of Hollywood. And real innovation will happen elsewhere.
We use:

Salesforce for CRM

Google Apps for Mail, Chat, non-sensitive Doc sharing

Mailchimp for Mailshots

Gradwell for VoIP

Github for source control
First off, I feel using mechanisms like method_missing should be used carefully. The Perl community abused things like AUTOLOAD & monkey-patching some years ago and learnt hard lessons and have now established good practises for their use. I feel Ruby/Rails world is going through the same growing pains but it does look like they are now maturing (eg. Rails 3).

Now IMHO I see a builder as a good case for a method_missing mechanism (I think there were a few others mentioned in thread/post). No magic, just a simple one-to-one relationship between code and what it does (result):

b.name "Jim" => <name>Jim</name>

However I feel something like find_by_name_and_address in ActiveRecord is cute (both in nice and ugly sense!). There is so much more going on underneath an ORM that I'd be wary of the extra layers of complexity upon what is already an (acceptable) impedance mismatch.

Bottom line, an ORM is important to me and I don't want any loose cogs lying around! I'd prefer to be explicit here:

# using DBIx::Class
my $p = $schema->resultset('Addresses')->find({ name => '...', address => '...' });

So while find_by_name_and_address is a pretty nice aesthetic its feels more plastic cosmetics compared the elegant cosmetics that Builder solutions provide.

Disclaimer: I haven't touched Rails for about 4 years now. I don't actually know for certain that something like find_by_name_and_address did or still uses method_missing. It could actually build methods like these straight from schema introspection. I would guess method_missing was used to avoid a performance hit on building all these at startup? If so then this could be a good argument for using method_missing here!
And that is why those who do stand up for their rights should be recognized for their courage on our behalf.

Personally, were I to discover such an item on my vehicle, it would go directly to my lawyers office; it wouldn't get posted on reddit.