skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think "beating" is fundamentally different than "hacking." I view hacking as more of an act of creativity, or at the very worst an act of defiance. "Beating" implies that someone has been "beat"; there's a winner and a loser. "Hacking" a system can just as easily be a win-win.

It just requires a certain amount of "ballsiness" in putting yourself out there to try to change something that already exists, and a certain amount of opportunism in recognizing when things can be done differently without violating rules/personal ethics/the law.
For pg, diversification would be to take that $1M and plow it into 30 promising startups.
Ah, yes. That IS a replacement for the "Profit" step.

Who would buy such a thing? Seems like an interested party might not like the idea that the TOS is so locked down (I'm presuming that the privacy is spelled out in a TOS, I haven't looked). Is a developed social graph really worth that much, especially if (as is mentioned in another thread) the groups are temporary, one-time use? I guess there's always the possibility of buying it and dispensing with the TOS and replacing it with a more open version.

Again, I'm just very curious. Having a hard time wrapping my head around this.
I'm already doing it. I set up cucumber + webrat to run through some quick UI tests. I wrote a mock-object framework into the last feature I designed so I could test it. There's still a huge resistance to change. I'm just hoping I can show how useful it is in the long run. In the short run it just looks like I'm wasting a lot of time tinkering on silly side projects.
I imagine if you build something cool and get traction, YC will consider you even as a single founder.
True wealth is how long you can maintain your preferred lifestyle without working. By scaling back, you become wealthier.
I love webOS's notification system
Fair enough. I'd much rather go to vegas :/
This looks great, hopefully Splunk will get some competition. Its a great tool but its far-far-far too expensive for the typical startup team.
at the moment we only "link" groups when there are common users in both. we are finding that as more and more groups are formed (around interests, events, organizations) more and more overlap occurs.

while this isn't terribly valuable right we might introduce the concept of larger contextual groups that are open to invites that we can start suggesting for related context
Very Unusual Golden Tabby Tiger
A golden tabby tiger is one with an extremely rare color variation caused by a recessive gene and is currently only found in captive tigers.
thanks! working on a faster/less janky version to be released anyday...
I've used several iOS devices heavily in the past two years and I'm not even certain what he's talking about. At no point have any of my devices become unusable due to notifications. If you can create a scenario where a dozen or more notifications pop up at once, and all vie for your attention, then you have my admiration, because that would be an awful bug.

Unless you frequently schedule alarms to go off when your friends are going to be SMSing you and create twitter notifications, and you miss several calls at the same time, this is unlikely to be an issue.

I suppose there is a small chance that Apple's push notification servers could bug out and delude your device with notifications, but everything I've read and seen about their architecture (from the perspective of a 3rd party app developer) indicates that this is designed to be impossible. Notifications (because they are disruptive) should not be able to render your device inoperable.
Can you tell me what the incriminating evidence is and what the nefarious behavior you're referring to is?
How about turning it in to a startup community gathering place?

YC benefits: Instead of just receiving a lot of apps from the area from people you never heard of, you'd be able to get to know them for months before they apply; It'd help your application process, and let you make more accurate judgments on who would succeed and who wouldn't; You'd be able to tap in to the Harvard/MIT crowd and get more of them interested (although I'm sure YC isn't slouching here already).
"everything was looked at, everything thought about"

When I went to WWDC this year, the lead UX guy from Apple said that one of their major design considerations is how to make the interface seem like a real thing with which you're interacting directly (known as a NUI in some circles).

If you keep this mind it explains a lot of their UI decisions... For example, the letter headers pushing each other out of the way as if they could not occupy the same space at the same time.
Before Unicorn, traditional setups with Nginx + mongrel_cluster, Nginx + Thin, Apache + mongrel_cluster, Apache + Thin, do exactly the same thing.

Actually, this isn't entirely correct. Traditional setups with nginx have needed HAProxy in the middle to perform the same balancing that Unicorn provides.

I've deployed Nginx + Mongrel, Nginx + HAProxy + Mongrel, Nginx + HAProxy + Thin and finally Nginx + Unicorn.

For any non-trivial app, you will need some form of balancing of requests to avoid the 'single request hurts everyone' problem. Unicorn does this in the cleanest way, as the number of places to define the process count is in a single location with Unicorn, and in at least 2 places with HAProxy + <Thin or Mongrel>.

We tried testing Phusion Passenger 2.x for our workload, and found that it often ran more processes than we configured it for, and could take out the entire server by over committing memory. This then needed yet more config in out monitoring solution and became more trouble than it was worth.

For ease of configuration and actually working as advertised, I would recommend Unicorn to anyone running a Ruby web server.
Speaking of toolbars - am I the only one that loathes the fact that you can't use the keyboard to access them on OS X? Sure, a lot of them have keyboard shortcuts, but what if I want to access "Page Setup" with the keyboard alone?

http://i.imgur.com/MpfwV.png
I suggest you spend an hour in a store and try each of the devices. Don't buy one immediately, but try to remember the things that bothered you the most on each platform. Picking the device that has the least memorable issues works well for me.

Picking a device based on the "wow" factor, or based on which features you like the most is giving into all of the marketing and positioning these companies create to get you to buy the device. Since (to a degree) you can accomplish the same tasks with one as you can with the others, you should pick the one that causes you the least discomfort. Joy will follow.

edit: disclaimer, I like android devices a lot, but I use an iphone. I've spent approximately 10 minutes watching someone else use a palm pre.
I asked similar questions in the thread announcing the Fridge two months ago and didn't get a reply that answered my question.

To paraphrase a fake Mark Zuckerberg, "I got people to share their personal information with me because I assured them I believed in privacy. When I found out how much advertisers were willing to pay for that information, I stopped believing in privacy."

EDIT: Link to my question in the previous thread about the fridge: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1628877
This is where we wrote a good deal of the code for Kiko, and where Steve wrote a lot of Reddit. It makes me nostalgic for our 2005 YC batch, and sad to see it go on the market. I hope whoever buys it puts it to good use.
A little pointer that might help people who are confused by the “app manager” and think it’s cluttered: think of it as merely showing you the apps you recently used because it’s just that. It’s not an app manager. Nobody would complain about a cluttered “Recently used” list on a desktop OS.
So by initially talking up the privacy aspect in both PR and on the site, your goal is to eventually get people to care less about privacy and be more open on your site?

I don't mean to belabor the point endlessly across submissions, but I'm really seeing a disconnect between the marketing and PR for your site and your goals.
Ask for money, get money (or pledges), write book, distribute book.
18 Iconic Products That America Doesn't Make Anymore
I write software and give it away for free, how about you? :P

Also, there's a whole culture of free fiction on the internet. It's pretty huge, although most of it is crap, there are some real nuggets of goodness out there.

Of course, most of the stuff people charge for is crap, too.
the social graph we are building are around specific context, relationships, events, and interests that you actually care about versus linear connections that linger in a 1 to 1 friend based social graph. single Fridges might be single serving and temporal but as more are created the relationships that are built/formed/carried on to others are what is valuable.

monetization is definitely in the works with a few things cooking and not necessarily from freemium offerings only.

while the right acquisition is fine and dandy we are trying to build something that has legs...
Once menus are open, the first letters of the item can be typed, e.g. typing "P" highlights Page Setup in an open File menu. Also, the Keyboard pane in System Preferences can be used to assign keys to directly invoke any item in an application (but you have to type in the command's exact name).

Actually, you can get to window toolbars...but only with the highly-intuitive keystroke "control-F5" (where control-F4 returns you to the main window, and also acts as a global rotate-between-windows-in-any-app key). From there, you can tab between items one at a time.

Once you reach the end of the toolbar, the behavior is slightly different depending on how the application was implemented (Cocoa or not); it might switch to the main window and/or attached drawers, or it may rotate back to the first toolbar item.
You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance (response to Stonebraker)
I've been working on my own framework called Manos de Mono. It runs on top of Mono and is styled after node.js. I am hoping that it will be really good for these scenarios and the Mono runtime will address some of these concerns.

All that being said: node.js is impressively good. Its a beautiful piece of software.
I'm not certain about this, but I'm pretty sure that in the US, you do have the right to take photos of people through the window, even when they're in their homes. Whatever is visible from the street (a public place) is fair game.

Having said that, I know there were some recent cases where this was brought in to question. I just don't know what the outcome was. Also, different countries obviously have varying views on this topic.
I imagine that perhaps they visited a site without logging in, or spoke with their friends who also frequent the site.
Why don't you use long polling rather than sending a request a second?

You could even incorporate the timer into a single request.

do {
sleep(1);
$seconds_remaining = fetch_auction_time_from_memcache();
echo "<script>updateActionTime($seconds_remaining);</script>";
flush();
} while ($seconds_remaining > 0);
The same phenomenon doesn't really exist with books

I would argue that a budding hobby novelist culture already exists, and will only grow, just like the free software movement did.

Heck, we're already seeing open source movies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_film
Great story, it really matches up with the first point in PG's latest essay, determination. I don't want to work for a "business" person doing a project on the side. I want to work with someone who has this kind of infectious energy and will get it done.
My kingdom for proper ePub support!
Yep. I suspect the state's claim won't stand when it's all hashed out, but that'll probably be after the next election...
ClickToFlash has a "Text Replacement" setting in its preferences to automatically load Flash used for fonts.
Little steps and all that. I know it comes as a shock to a lot of the internet generation but most business have a hell of a hard time changing their business model and surviving it, the bigger the company the harder it becomes as with everything in life.

This is a little step but it is down the right path. As much as we would all love to have the same abilities as we do with physical copies of books going the full wack of unlimited lending for unlimited timeframes is most likely too big of a shock for publishers to deal with. Hell we don't even have a legal way to do this with iTunes, Amazon MP3, and other online media services (at least not that I am aware of? please correct me if I am wrong, note I said legal, technically it is possible as there is no DRM but legally there is no way, it could be argued this is true for physical media too due to the "license" on the inside of the CD, DVD, or whatever it is you bought but no court would ever actually follow thru on that however sharing MP3s online doesn't get the same treatment, go figure).

Anyway back to my point, I am pretty sure in time limitations will be lifted, maybe not to the same as you get with physical media but pretty close. One thing that is the same, if you lend a friend a book you certainly can't keep reading! It would have been pretty cool (and a much bigger deal IMHO) if the publishers used this as a marketing tool for word of mouth advertising by letting you "lend" the book to a friend while you can still read it but limit the lending limit to 14 days (or N number of chapters, which is better in IMHO as people read at different speeds, only at the weekends, etc. Time limits are a pain in the ass whereas content limits make it a lot more user friendly, at least to me it does, it is also much easier to manage, no clever ways to check when it has been 14 days (dealing with users who never connect to wifi and just set the date back, etc), no hacks to have to patch in the next firmware update, etc. just lend the friend 50% of the book, not 100% but with a digital lock around it that will be broken before even 1% of the user base upgrades their firmware) That way they can probably exploit the "omg I just got this amazing book you should sooo buy it" factor when someone first gets a book but hasn't finished it yet so won't lend it to a friend, then they forget or it is crap and they just dump it in a book store and the publisher never gets to sell that friend a copy.

Just my 2c
You raise good questions about usage costs... Right now charges are still being tweaked, but I would like to keep all scenarios to a max of $100/month. An upper tier plan would permit, at this stage, the launch of 1500 instances per month. That's 75 per business day, which would meet the scenario you mention above quite easily.

You're right about your second point. Customers can rip off whatever they want from the VM. But they can do this today. I've been selling a thick client solution for the last 7 years and change the registration code every couple of months. Within two days you'll find cracks for the latest release. It's the nature of the game.

I see the use of Virtual Demos more for the distribution of enterprise software, and less for ad-hoc demos by small businesses. I've worked in banks and found that 90% of vendors have powerpoint as their selling tool, but only 10% can actually give you a functional copy of their app to test. Enterprise software is bulky, complex to install and configure, and frequently has SW or HW requirements that are difficult to meet easily with resources at hand. With LabSlice Virtual Demos I want to enable a Sales Engineer to walk into a company, show off their powerpoint and then finish off by sending an email with a LabSlice link to a functional product demo/evaluation, launch as a VM through our environment.

Appreciate the feedback. Please let us know more of your thoughts...
Why would Jeff Bezos go to jail? Maybe if he directly was the one who decided to do something illegal then sure, if Martha Stewart and Wesley Snipes can go to prison, then sure Jeff
Bezos should too.
Tax evasion does not equal 'business activity' that's just tax evasion, or a crime.

You still haven't answer my question as to where in the article Stigletz wants to make a new category of behavior to punish? I don't see that anywhere in the article. Or did you just make that argument up and attribute it to him?
The big question here is: what evidence do you have of that?

So far, I haven't seen any. Please let me know if you do know of any people negatively affected by this.
This is exactly the reason Chrome moved to shipping with Flash included

No, Chrome ships with Flash because it is in Google's competitive interests to do so both as a browser vendor and advertiser.
Conversation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1821465
Fabled Buttons. UX implementation to substitute ok/cancel dialogs?
Talk about cloud computing...
Architects are usually advised to have light on two sides of every room. It doesn't seem to happen often. And this place has light on three sides. Hot Damn.
How about Dick Hamming's thing at Bell Labs about crediting programming help in scientific papers? (from You and Your Research)

I also did a second thing. When I loaned what little programming power we had to help in the early days of computing, I said, "We are not getting the recognition for our programmers that they deserve. When you publish a paper you will thank that programmer or you aren't getting any more help from me. That programmer is going to be thanked by name; she's worked hard." I waited a couple of years. I then went through a year of BSTJ articles and counted what fraction thanked some programmer. I took it into the boss and said, "That's the central role computing is playing in Bell Labs; if the BSTJ is important, that's how important computing is." He had to give in. You can educate your bosses. It's a hard job. In this talk I'm only viewing from the bottom up; I'm not viewing from the top down. But I am telling you how you can get what you want in spite of top management. You have to sell your ideas there also.
Currently, Apple controls the Java implementation for OS X. In the future they will not. Currently Apple controls what version of Flash ships with OS X. In the future they will not. The OP asserts that these changes will increase Apple's control over the user experience. To me, it looks like with these changes Apple is actually giving up control over some things.
This is a referendum on the legality and morality of the Iraq war, hiding behind the word "wiki".
Google TV Growing Pains: Networks Block Web TV Shows
Yes I agree the details are important, but initially avoiding mentioning the tech means I hopefully got some less biased answers. I found that valuable.

The backend of the app is PHP, and it already has an API. The front end is Adobe Flex. The rewrite would involve dumping Flex for a HTML/JS approach.

We initially went with flex because our app is quite rich in interactivity, but we could do the same thing in JS now.

It's not an enterprise play, but it is B2B. We could cross-train, but hiring more tech's for Flex would be expensive and hard to do (not a lot around). It is a SAAS model, so my customers don't care at all what tech I use (unless they are a tech firm, at which point they screw up their nose at Flex). But they don't mater, as they are not our target market.

Essentially, changing to JS would double our speed of dev in the last 8 months of the runway. But, it may take longer to do than we expect and we may cut off too much runway to make it worth our while.

It may be better to stick with Flex to the point of cash flow positive....then rewrite.
Regardless of whether human creativity is intrinsically bound to economic reward (I would strongly argue that it isn't), the fact of the matter is that you can't make the case that what we're dealing with isn't a matter of artificial scarcity.
Everyone else doing it doesn't make it right.
You're making assumptions and misrepresenting Stigletz argument. Stigletz isn't suggested we should punish failure with prison. He is saying the penalties for corporate criminals need to be enough to discourage deceptive practices that encourage corporations to break the law because that's what's best for business:

"the financial industry was engaged in predatory lending practices, deceptive practices. They were optimizing not on producing mortgages that were good for the American families but in maximizing fees."
"Meanwhile, stock-based compensation created further skewed incentives by encouraging executives to pursue short-term stock gains at the expense of long-term corporate sustainablity, Stiglitz said, and in some cases encouraged them to deceive their own shareholders."

We're not talking about punishing failure, we're talking about punishing crime, note the word deception, in other words fraud or lying.
In attempting the rewrite, the developer who covers the 40% of the existing tech would be a critical component of the new build....so probably not viable to do both.
Correct. The reverse proxy pulls from the fast, local network apache, and then passed the data to the slow clients. Apace is connected for a shorter time. Basically you're trying minimize the time a "memory expensive" process like apache is open per client.
We already have an API...it is the front end of the app we are looking at swapping out (swap Flex for JS).
Lots of really good comments here (except mine ;-)). I'm glad I read this. Is there a "Best of Hacker News" out there?
They could learn....that is true.
not quite. (and definitely welcome the discussion)

all Fridges will always be accessible to only those in the group. if you aren't in the group you don't have access to it. we are already seeing users create Fridges for larger and more "open" groups like conferences, events, interest groups, etc... and the members are the ones that share the invite URLs to add members.

the main point here is that members of one group do NOT have any information or access about the others groups you are in unless you share it. the group members of a Fridge can decide how open or closed they want their group to be.

in the future an administrator can customize group settings to enable a group to be "listed" or "discoverable" allowing organizations or events that want to open to be open. it would definitely be transparent to the members and settings ONLY for that group with their other groups closed, private, and not listed...
Fascinating, because I have a newspaper cutting with this quote attributed to him that must be more than 20 years old. I'm not doubting you. It's just I've always had this quote in my head and attributed it to Kroc.

It doesn't matter, of course, in this context, so thanks for the heads up.
My Weekend Project: Verbal Juicer (Text-to-Speech tour of HN, GitHub, etc)
Lending ebooks is a feature demanded mostly by people who don't pay money for ebooks (and don't pay money for movies, music, or videogames if they can possibly avoid it) and will not be induced to pay money by the feature.
Thousands of Reddit Users Donate Their Data to Science: Facebook Should Do This
Coda update due in a couple of weeks
The NDA wasn't for the data, it says in the article that they had no access to it:

2. We had no knowledge of the data before the official release date (or as little as was needed from the technical aspect);

It seems to me that the NDA was more a product of Assange's paranoia than anything else.
That's sort of the point. Engineer is a term thrown around, from QA to UI designers. While their positions are no less important to a company, calling them engineers is just wrong.

Also, you can get a true 'engineering' degree in software in Ontario, Canada (UWaterloo)
This interview does not reveal much. This is more of a teaser than anything. It would be nice to see more technically-oriented answers beyond just some basic stats and why he uses MS technologies.
> I write software and give it away for free, how about you?

For a living, eh? So do we presume you feed yourself with soup kitchens, and live in a cardboard box on the street?