skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see far too many distortions and exaggerations in Sorkin's script for this to be credible. Some are already noted in this thread, but to add a few more:

- In this rebuttal Sorkin says that the party sequence is something Mark is imagining and seems to suggest that's right out of Mark's blog. I don't see how this can be supported by what was in the film; it is depicted as a real event. I don't see anything in Mark's blog (at least those few pages commonly quoted on the web) to support the contention it's Mark's fantasy.

- For most of the period the movie covers, the real Zuckerberg has a girlfriend and is an athlete himself -- he's a fencer. The movie Zuckerberg is a dateless wonder who believes athletics are beyond him.

- In a sequence that only a Hollywood screenwriter could have invented, interns are tested by hacking into a "python webserver running SSL (??)" while being forced to drink shots according to highly implausible rules. The script actually has stage directions for HOT ASIAN WOMEN pouring shots to be stationed a pace behind (!!) each male hacker.

Sorkin defends himself in this rebuttal by noting that the Erica Albright character, and the unnamed lawyer at the end, are Mark's moral superiors. But that's a form of sexism too, when you only have "good girls" and "bad girls".

The movie is clearly setting these two kinds of women in opposition and had to wildly exaggerate things in order to get there. The movie Mark Zuckerberg is frustrated he can't win the respect of "good" women like Erica as a peer, so he attempts to rise above the entire social system by creating Facebook, and thus enters a more narcissistic world (embodied by Sean Parker) in which "bad" women are mere accessories.

As a movie it works. As a programmer I am disturbed that so much innocent tomfoolery as well as brilliant creativity are dismissed as embodiments of misogyny.

For the record, I'm not a fan of Facebook or even Mark Zuckerberg. But many people, even smart people, are taking the movie at face value as a depiction of the real Mark Zuckerberg. I've seen feminist writer Naomi Klein quoting this "Facebook was born in a night of misogyny" thing too. It looks like this is destined to be part of Zuckerberg's legacy, whether he deserves it or not.
Just a few off the top of my head: Apple, Android, Windows, Nike, WNF, Playboy, NBC.

EDIT: I didn't realize that all of these variations of Batman logos were actually used at one time, so I just thought of logos that could be stretched and skewed while still being recognizable.
travel agents still exist, they're just fewer and doing slightly different things.
Okay, awesome. I think its an awesome project for learning. You'll get community development, coding, marketing, databases, ad words experience.

I would be surprised if you make much money off of it.

pg warns against the music business, and I think he's right on a lot of things. But I think you should throw it out there and see if you get any traction.

Honestly, I have my doubts of this being a real pain point. It's like, wouldn't it be awesome if lyrics sites were better, but I'm going to go to the one that has 100% of the songs I search for.
Virgin Mobile, NEt10, Oracle, IBM, IRS, and any bank
Review HN: Google replacement, use other search engines along with Google
Please review my project

Url: http://www.shodhel.com/

It replaces Google as default search engine, still allows you to access Google as usual.

Only thing is you can access other search engines by clicking on Back button.

Everyone here will find it useful. And you can safely use it as Google replacement since you don't compromise privacy (query is part of URL fragment) or speed of searches (adds approx. 50ms on Firefox, even less on Chrome).

This really is a basic version. I will be adding some vital features in coming weeks. But I wanted your feedback if you will use it. There is no reason why you shouldn't but I would like to know what will make you use it daily.

I see immense potential here, I would love to know what you think.
Opera mobile solves that problem. Not that it is a problem in the first place. What bothers me about this phone are the missing features like copy-paste and multitasking.
I wonder where this one came from: “We will still be annoyed by people who pun, but we will be able to show them mercy because punning will be revealed to be some sort of connectopathic glitch: The punner, like someone with Tourette's, has no medical ability not to pun.”
Aren't you significantly more efficient than the travel agents of the 80s?

So, your single-person living has removed the need for 10 or 20 (or 50?) travel agency folks of a previous non-Internet 'must visit that travel agent around the corner to get my trivial purchase Thanksgiving tickets' world.
Clickable Link: http://www.shodhel.com/
He didn't characterize the comment as 'juvenile', that was me. Pay attention to the commenters' names. :)

>I see a nickname that claims Microsoft cares primarily or only about money.

The original commenter clarified that it meant something along the lines of 'Microsoft, who has money'. That shows that it's a term that can result in a lot of confusion, but I have seen it mostly used as a put down by people who think it's cool to use it.
Have you considered using these extensions:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmip...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476/
>The ad hominem is not always fallacious, for in some instances questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue.
I think the author is just taking advantage of Java's name having been drug through the mud by Oracle to push his point-of-view.

Many of Apache's projects are Java-based, and I don't seem them making any effort to port all of them over into a different language.

Though Oracle stunk up JavaOne this year, and the lawsuit against Google is making Oracle look like a supreme ass, companies like IBM, RedHat, SpringSource, and many, many others have a significant investment in Java.

Java has been and will continue to be close to the top of Paul's heap in terms of jobs for the foreseeable future:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2C+Python%2C+Javascri...

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java

However, I would be the first to say that if you are looking to the future, explore dynamic and functional programming languages. If I had to pick one right now, I'd lean toward Ruby, not because it is the most well adopted (and for goodness sakes, it has had enough time to be), but because the language itself is great, and it has a growing and thriving community.

But Java is not dead yet, and it is far from a trap.
Carbon Fiber Scribbles You Can Sit On | Co.Design
This is a common complaint. I wonder where people are leaving their unused plugs that they constantly tread on them? Probably not in a storage box/drawer.
I disagree. The Windows logo is just a cross in a box with multi-colored panels. You can twist, turn, bend, or re-color it considerably before it's unrecognizable. When they've wanted to make their images more dynamic, they've curved the lines. When they've wanted to look more professional they've muted the colors and outlines. It's still clearly a divided four-panel window.

In contrast, Tux seems a bit stuck. It's going to be hard to make him anything but cute and cuddly. A more stylized penguin would look cold and sinister.
Why would the only choice to replace the huge UK plugs be US plugs? This one might make much more sense for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko given the specs (much smaller, all the same advantages expect being fused - if I understand correctly) and also given the UKs geographic location ;)
I could imagine living there if I lived alone, except for that bed. I'd give myself a concussion every morning.
It's not about taking it seriously or not. It's not even about liking Microsoft or not. It's about keeping conversations interesting by avoiding dropping back to memes and in-jokes that pepper many other places on the internet for discussions. And that includes the 'Fixed that for you' meme, as well as M$ or others like 'fanboi'.
I use Virgin Mobile Broadband 2 go. That website would have been bad in the 90s! Plus the flow for topping up is pretty poor. After adding money, I should be given the choice to purchase MBs, instead of going back to the main screen!
I expect some learning will be necessary, like how to use multitouch API and all that mobile-specific stuff.
Online Gambling Addiction Growing
You are an inspiration specially for budding 1 person entrepreneurs in India like me. :)
Good luck !!
Wasn't the point that all the Batman logos were different but all still recognisably Batman?

I'm not sure how that's true with Nike - the swoosh is very specific. Change it even slightly and it stops being a Nike swoosh and just becomes a curve or a tick.

Similarly Apple has been black and white or colour but the basic design is the same. Playboy I'll bow to your greater knowledge ;-). Android hasn't been around long enough for any significant variation that I'm aware of. Change it and you just end up with another cartoony robot.

Windows has flexed a fair amount - the same but different - so that one is fair, but I'm not sure the others have.
Just because jobs (like travel agents) disappear does not mean that there are not going to be any middle class jobs. It means that we have found a way to make travel arrangements more efficiently so we have freed up resources to be better spent on other things. And if there is no middle class, who does he think is making the travel arrangements online?
Now I need to read something happy...
I've actually started using a VA to 'google' for me, although the tasks I give him are more 'research' than a dumb 'google'. One of the interesting side-effects is that I get results I don't expect because he doesn't have the early adopter bias I have: when I ask to research e.g. a market or software options he'll come up with things I'd never consider. I still have to fine-tune the results but it's certainly a time-saver.
I don't think he was referring to "middle class" in the same sense you are. You are using "middle class" to describe a certain standard of living. The author is saying that we will all achieve this standard of living and it will no longer be a status marker.

You can already see this occurring. Having a cell phone, for example, is not a status marker anymore - everyone who wants one has one. Status is now about having the most pictures/friends/farms on facebook.
OK, you're a happy Clojure user (I'm not familiar with Groovy and haven't heard of Solr). Clojure is very functional and I expect idiomatic memory usage patterns are different than those of Java and other imperative OO languages.

Oracle's patent lawsuit against the Dalvik VM has cast a cloud on deep innovations in JVMs, such as GC implementations tuned for Clojure.

Is there going to be a long term problem? Who knows, who can say? All we know is that Oracle's lawyers were eager to sue Google whereas "patent suits [were] never in Sun's genetic code" (http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits...); what follows will depend on how that goes and who knows what else.

At the very least I'm pretty sure this is having a chilling effect. If you have various areas in which you can do things, why do deep JVM innovation. E.g. for Clojure, perhaps Clojure-in-Clojure targeting another platform, most especially x86_64? (This is not idle speculation, BTW.)
I guess around x10
I agree with the article, but I'm also starting to not see why Oracle even cares about Java anymore. There are enough fantastic free / open source products available that if you told an investor you were starting a company to build J2EE infrastructure, they'd probably laugh you out of the room. At this point the only reason to use a commercial J2EE platform is either lock-in (it'd be too much time to move to open source) or for some corporate reason (support, big name, impressive, etc). In what other ways can Oracle monetize the Java platform at this point?
Not only that, but they archive their forums after a while.

So even if the info was partially useful you can't reply with updated information, since they've put in the artificial restriction that you can't reply to threads from say 2008.
Every restaurant website ever created. It's like they hired Ron Jeremy to do the usability on these things (and that's being unfair to Ron Jeremy).
Absolutely, even if that person is just there to listen.

I often find that just the process of explaining a problem with spoken words forces me to think about it in a different way. Sometimes I even talk through a problem with my non-programmer girlfriend. She's nice enough to listen, but doesn't really understand what I am talking about. It just doesn't really matter though because often I don't need another persons perspective I just need to talk through the problem which allows me to come up with a different angle of attack.
It would be great if they gave points for tagging answers with the pertinent releases.
A less ambitious goal would be to patch some of the widely-used higher-level applications so that they would run on Plan9. E.g., if I could get a virtual Plan9 machine with Python/django, PostgreSQL, and lighthttpd, I would have a starting point where I could do something practical, and then I could explore how to use the specific features of Plan9 to make those tools more productive.

It looks like even that would be a big undertaking: http://www.mail-archive.com/plan9-gsoc@googlegroups.com/msg0...
The only thing wrong about the next 10 years will be that we will have to share them with pessimists.
And people say startups don't lead anywhere in India. Great going!
On the other hand, you can view the current fad of virtualized everything and hypervisors as a kind of exokernel.
Solid solution for US users but it is not available yet in the UK.
I love Excel and wish more people would actually spend the time to learn the nuts and bolts behind it. Most people think of it as a band-aid solution used by people who don't know databases but to me doing things without coding using Excel's built-in functions is like those 1k/5k competitions - how much can you do with so little?

Here's my favorite problem that I'd like someone else to take a stab at:

Sheet1:A1-A999 (source) is an unsorted list of alphanumeric strings, with lots of repeats. Without using macros/VBA/scripting code, put all the unique strings in Sheet2:A1-A### (destination) such that any changes in source list is reflected in the destination automatically (auto calculate option is enabled). Destination list should have no more than 1 blank row. You cannot use any sorting/grouping functions manually. It has to be completely automatic. I want to delete the entire source worksheet, paste 399 items, insert 400 more, paste in another 300, and delete 100 of the rows randomly, and when I switch to the destination, it should have my list ready.

Bonus points if the destination list is sorted. Double bonus if you don't use any {array} functions.

Hint: You would be using functions like VLOOKUP/MATCH/ADDRESS/INDIRECT and similar.

So why is a problem like this useful? Because if destination is generated completely dynamically using items from the source, you can pull in dynamic web data into the source and have your Excel work reliably even if macros/scripting are disabled. Also, you can have users log in manual data into the source and you can generate the summary of their data in the destination without having to rely on any code or external service.
Iran ftw
Windows Phone 7 is... 1.0? While I believe the WP7 team does indeed deserve credit for overcoming all the entanglements endemic to Microsoft's current bureaucratic mess, I think it's a bit silly to call this a 1.0 product. Even if the WP7 software was a complete rewrite, I think you lose the ability to refer to your mobile OS as 1.0 when:

* You've been shipping mobile software for years

* You have "version 7" in the name of your product

Not trying to be pedantic here -- I know what you mean when you refer to this new mobile OS as "1.0". I just think it's more appropriate to refer to, say, the original 2007 iPhone as 1.0 than the WP7 product.
Audio: GitHub and Opscode DevOps talk Chef and datacenter innovation
I suppose you could make a case for Google. They change the look of their logo on their homepage very frequently, but you still know what it's supposed to be. And they also add extra "o's" to the logo for the pagination.
46) Pundits will produce lengthy lists of vaguely doomy-sounding predictions without any explanation of why they're making them or why we should believe them.
"NASCAR navigation"... good term. It express exactly how I felt today while reading on TFS (Team Foundation Server)
Thats just the revenue, surely there are some costs that offset that number. Still quite nice.
A better example might be Pepsi, who have changed their logo / branding many times over the years but have kept consistent, recognizable features:

http://logotalks.com/2009/03/05/new-pepsi-logo/

Their 2009 logo takes these recogizable features even further, making the loop on the p's circular and adding the wave to the letter "e".
The big difference between a single 8 gang extension and this system is that you're putting all those connections in series, whereas in an 8 gang extension they're in parallel.

That's a lot of contact resistance, this socket already has twice as much contact resistance as a normal one (because of the twist in the contact section).

If we're talking 'light' consumers, say below a 100W or so you might get away with it but if a 'heavy' consumer would be plugged in as the last element in a series of 'light' ones you'd be concentrating an awful lot of energy in to a small spot.

But hey, what do I know about electricity ;)

At 10 mOhm (new and very clean) per contact with 5 plugs 'ganged' up that's 5x4x10mOhm or .2 Ohm. With a 240V working voltage and a 2 KW consumer that would be 8.3 Amps so about 1.6 V drop, 8.3x1.6=13 Watts, which the copper wiring alone can probably remove without any heat building up.

If the contacts wear and get older they could get to as much as .3 Ohm apiece. Now you're looking at 5x4x.3 Ohm, 6 Ohm, in total so that's a 49 V drop, almost 400 Watts to dissipate just in the contacts. That's a lot of heat.

That's why some older wall sockets will get warm (or even hot) when you plug in a large consumer.

And your circuit protection will not care even a little bit about all this, it's just another heater.
I made a solution to the exact same problem: http://www.dashler.com

Very interesting implementation you have with the back button. Great idea there. Personally, I don't like using the in-browser search thing. It just never became a habit.
Could be a great tool for monetizing games and online video through micro payments.
Anybody going to the PayPal X conference?
… but you should really stick to one form.

It’s nice to have a logo everyone can draw from memory and that is then still recognizable. I don’t think it’s advisable for organizations to change the ductus of their logo all that often, though.
There is nothing inherently bad about a lack of status symbols, if you even consider a cell phone a status symbol. You can get a cell phone for free on a $20/month contract.

Meanwhile, luxury items stay out of reach for most people, even if they want them (designer anything, expensive cars, mansion sized houses, etc).

I digressed, but there is no danger to cell phones or any new tech for that matter, being universally available.
Yes. Though not all mouse wheels are created equal. Some of them are much more suited to third-button use than others.
Fred Wilson writes:

"The pile on seems to be gaining attraction for both entrpreneurs and VCs. But I don't think it's the best way to finance your company and hope that our firm can avoid them."

I get that the VCs themselves might like to have more control over what they are investing in. The entrepreneurs, however, usually feel that they know best what their startups need. From the point of view of the entrepreneur, one way of retaining control of one's company is to be sure each VC has only a small slice of the company. Most of us who have been following the startup scene for awhile remember what happened to Phillip Greenspun, and the clever way the VCs were able to take his company away from him. Most of us who are thinking about starting our own startups want to avoid that fate.

And I think there is a much larger context that should be considered. The USA went into recession in December of 2007, and in September of 2008, it suffered a financial crisis that caused markets all over the world to seize up, leading to the worst post-war recession in the USA, and triggering crisises in many other countries.

The point is this: yields have collapsed.

Last week, 30 year USA Treasuries traded for 3.676%. Think about it. If you would like to give the government a million dollars, the government will happily give you $36,760 a year for the next 30 years. (Several key rates hit all time lows last week.) If you would like to get so rich that you can live comfortably on your asset income forever, you will need… uh, wow. Being a millionaire is not what it used to be.

The amazing thing here is not the low rate, but that this is for 30 years – anyone who buys at this rate is essentially investing in the idea that inflation will not return to the USA for several decades. Honestly, my mind staggers at the implications.

In this context, it is not surprising that we might get a glut of VCs, a glut of equity funding, and VCs having to settle for small slices. Startups are one of the only things in the world that can still promise the possibility of exciting returns. If I was rich, I’d be out chasing yield too. And I'd be willing to settle for just a slice of a startup. I'd be putting my money into VC funds, hoping to find a way to get better than a 4% return.

I do get the argument that the best VCs offer a kind of guidance that goes way beyond the value of the money they invest. But my point is, a glut of money chasing yield must lead to a glut of VCs, and that means most VCs will not be at the level of Paul Graham or Fred Wilson. Most VCs will be somewhat mediocre. The more money that sloshes into the VC market, the more new, inexperienced VCs there will be. Their money will, in fact, be the main thing they have to offer.
The Batman logo is something rare, I think. Most of the logos you list are bound by either color (NBC's peacock looks funny in monotone) or shape (Apple would have a hard time reshaping the apple, Nike can only make minor changes to the outline of the swoosh.) A bright orange batman logo would still evoke the same character. I'm not a graphic designer so I can't speak to why this works, but it's pretty neat.
This sounds like a great way to get an account (the one you're using to post the emailed stuff) banned.
As PG says in http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html - we're essentially all middle-class, even Bill Gates in the original sense of the word. As he states, even a poor American on welfare has many more amenities than a king of old.

Nearly everyone has an increasing standard of living. It's this you've got to look at. You just can't use the standards and markers of the past to judge how things are now, or how they are going to be. Because the standards of the past cannot, by definition, take into account the choices of today. You can't balance out, say. widespread mobile internet coverage with, say, people having larger homes 50 years ago. Because even the richest guy in the world couldn't access the internet on a mobile device 50 years ago.

It's natural to be pessimistic. It's also natural to believe that the problems of today can only be solved using the solutions of today. Tomorrow will bring new problems, it will also bring new solutions. But even as each new set of problems is created, and old set is solved and the overall standard of living creaks one step higher, unlikely to slip backwards again.
Yeah, I always end up searching "my random problem karmic".
Here is an alternative for the Duct Tape Programmer:

http://www.brightyellowcow.com/blog/A-thin-13A-Plug.html