skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thought this sentence was interesting:
"An enigmatic politician with strong convictions, Mr Obama in many ways resembled the driven young spirits that venture capitalists love to take a punt on."

I bet in British-English it comes out right, but in reference to American Football, 'taking a punt on' would mean passing on these driven young spirits and not backing them. Ahh linguistics
And AFAIK, they did - http://developer.htc.com/

HTC Tattoo - Donut - 2.6.29 kernel source code -
http://dl3.htc.com/RomCode/Source_and_Binaries/click-656120....

The difference; HTC pays a group of people who's job it is to make things work. The fact that that 2.2 has even an minimal port for the Tattoo is testament to the open source community.
>What taxes are going to be raised to pay for the radical increase in spending?

That's an unanswerable question. In order to determine how much taxes will have to be increased to pay for current expenditures, you would need to be able to predict what the economy will be like in a year. If the administration's economic initiatives were successful, there's a possibility taxes will not have to be raised at all. So you're getting angry at Obama because he can't predict what your company's revenues will be in a year, which is totally unreasonable.

I think that applies more generally to most of the points you raised. The Obama administration didn't make the world unpredictable, it has always been that way. I don't even think another failure in the economy makes anything the administration has done categorically bad decisions. I don't think we're in a worse position now than a year ago, and I don't think the fall can be any harder now than it could have been. (Because it could have been atrocious.)

In general I think it's reflective more of business leaders' politics, and those on the left will say that times are hard, and those on the right will say that Obama and the Democrats are making times hard, which again, is totally unreasonable.
Not having any logical reason to worry about money. Meaning that you have enough money so that should you care to set things up the right way, you'll likely have enough income to live where ever you want for the rest of your life. Happiness and health are another matter, but without money, it's difficult to have either of those things.
Wealth is both having enough to do (mostly) what you want in life and enough to help children and grandchildren if the need occasional help.
If you want something more lightweight than Trac, why not just use the Issues feature in GitHub.

It seems to me the choices are:

1. ditz (command-line based version tracker that keeps data in your version control repo - plays well with DVCSes like Git/Mercurial)

2. whatever comes by default with your repo hosting (Github or BitBucket or Google Code for open source SVN)

3. hosted Trac, Redmine or Bugzilla

For client work, I'm using Redmine, although I'm thinking of switching to ditz (or something similar) to make my life simpler.

For personal projects, I either use TODO.txt or the repo-provided bug tracker.
Nice, I was wondering if the name had any link to the town, which isn't too far from me.
I think you're making the right argument about the wrong company. Facebook is making millions/billions in legitimate ad and other revenue. Twitter is making money only in investments.
Truth behind Twitter CEO demoting himself
My favourite writing advice quote (sadly I do not know where it is from) is:

"There are only three thing wrong with this script: you wrote too much, you wrote too much and you wrote too much"
i have to agree with the op. i think you can't, e.g. for entrepreneurs, disentangle risk from reward. similarly, with base jumping, risk itself can't be disentangled from the thrill of speed. for instance, i like to snowboard because it gives me the thrill of speed, which is tightly bound up with the sense of being on the edge of control and being out of control.
I'm skeptical about this "control by engineers = compatibility / standards compliance" conflation - it smells like an emotional association (control by engineers is good, standards are good, therefore control by engineers must correlate with standards compliance).

To me it seems just as likely that engineers, who often have strong opinions and dreams about creating frameworks etc. the way they think is right, could be more likely to feel stifled by having to conform to somebody else's standard, and prefer to go their own way.
Shouldn't they be angry about the system that polarizes the two sides into waring factions that cannot get anything done in a reasonable timeframe? Look at right now, the right will not vote anything controversial in that may or may not be good for the economy because they are too worried about conceding to the left. The same thing happens when the right is in power. midterm elections make the window of possible change so small that nothing really gets done.
I hate Pivotal Tracker. I've been forced to use it on a few projects and found it way too hard to use. E.g. it never shows what you're working on by default and you have to open up a special window for it. And you can't just mark something as done - you have to move it through a whole set of crazy states like accepted and delivered. I'd much rather use any other bug tracker or something simple like a spreadsheet.
Some thoughts, assuming most of everyone's comments are ignored (success being a stronger function of practice instead of inborn genius) and that commenters with high means are probably being pulled up by a number of outliers.

1. Median obviously is less suspect to a small number of very
popular comments which probably describes many users pretty
well. It's the "betting value" for a game where loss is
linear with error.
2. I'm not sure whether median would be higher or lower for
most. Poisson distribution suggests higher medians, but
many probably have a bunch of 1-karma comments to weight
the origin.
3. A HUGE psychological difference is that median would be
discreteness. Instead of seeming to be a smooth value
related (probably naively) to community engagement and
improvement it'll look more like a set of clubs. 0-medkarma
could be a rabble-rouser, 3-medkarma is consistently
meaningful. 10-medkarma means maybe you should run for office.
Really helpful to see how a successful team builds apps end to end.

My most recent experience has me leaning towards spending the time to wireframe though. Ryan warns against this as a waste of time "building higher fidelity sketches" (than paper), but to me building a sketch in omnigraffle is much faster than on paper, and it can be easier to convey more complicated user interactions as you can copy and paste etc. Also, for more interactive components of a UI, showing interactions through a wireframe is much much faster than prototyping it in javascript, so it becomes worth it to quickly validate that the interactive UI makes sense (by sharing the wireframes with a few people) before diving into the code (the simple example he had wouldn't really warrant a more interactive UI, but imagine, say, designing mint.com's transaction browsing / management / tagging app). That process might last a few extra hours, but if it saves you from building a snazzy UI that doesn't make sense, time well spent.
> We don’t want America to lose self-confidence. Who else is there to take over America’s moral leadership?

My first reaction on reading this was "the world doesn't depend on one country", but on thinking about it, it does depend in this case. There is currently no other country that can take up America's ideals of personal freedom of expression, individuality and openness and embrace them as completely. To be sure, those ideals are getting distributed everywhere around the world mainly through the Internet, but being present in diluted quantities in a lot of places is not as good as being the loud voice in a particular place.
What if you have a cushy job that earns you $100k / year working 4 hour a week? (lifestyle business like Ferris like)
Cargo that is loaded on to passenger planes should be subjected to the same level of security as passenger luggage.

It should be more. It's more costly for a terrorist organization to put a bomb on a plane they also have to ride on. You have to find, train and forfeit one "martyr" per bomb.

After 9/11 I seem to remember something about not allowing people to put luggage on a flight they weren't going to be on. As in, if you didn't show up at the gate to get on, they would remove your luggage too. What happened to that?
Certainly some time ago it was also based on your average, not just the absolute value. Perhaps that's related to the UI change of putting your average in the top bar.
Blocking for short periods of time is fine if you run more than one instance of the python application per core.

If database database access is taking more than a second, then I recommend fixing that problem first.
Who are they going to attack? As with Oracle's suit, you can bet Google will be chomping at the bit to invalidate anything they put in the pool, which doubtlessly would weaken their bread and butter MPEG patents.

And the thing is, hardware H.264 will almost certainly be in every phone built until the patents expire, so ragging on a free alternative is just going to jeopardize their existing revenues, for a shot at the hacker community's websites like Wikimedia running H.264 and paying royalties - which will never happen anyway. Meanwhile most likely future for WebM is that some forward thinking companies serve WebM if you're using Firefox/Opera, but most are lazy, pay their H.264 tax, and require you to use IE/Safari/Chrome.
Learning the basics in any language will help, I'd suggest Python, Ruby, or C++. Rails is actually a web development framework built on top of the programming language Ruby and Drupal is similar to a framework and I think uses the programming language php (not too sure though don't know too much about Drupal). C/C++ will be harder to pick up and isn't really necessary for someone just looking to learn. Try going through a python or ruby tutorial and pick the one you like better.

http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/
I'm not saying you don't have value to bring... just like the programmer who hasn't yet completed a major project, you might be brilliant, but you might not be. The thing is, choosing a bad/useless co founder is nearly always fatal to the venture, so people can be a little conservative.

If some business guy without money approaches me and claims he knows how to raise money, well, maybe he does and maybe he doesn't. How would I know? but if the same guy approaches me and can prove that he's already raised $bignum dollars from various investors, then I at least know he's good at raising money. I mean, that's not the whole of the business guy job, but it's certainly an important part.
I think you're remembering things from a Netscape perspective. For example you cite vbscript which was introduced a mere 8 months after Javascript (which was called livescript at the time to match Netscape Livewire). So they were competing technologies and not either side ignoring a standard (MS to their credit quickly rushed jscript out when Javascript started to become dominant)

(Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. Javascript was implemented by Netscape in Dec. '95. MS implemented Jscript in Aug 1996. Javascript was adopted as the ECMAScript standard in June '97)

As for extensions I don't think you can consider those incompatibilities. Both sides were doing it. Yet on the Netscape side they were actually taking parts of the standard and not implementing them (which is something the open source team had to straighten out after it was turned over: http://oreilly.com/news/flanagan_1100.html)

You can even find old IE reviews that point out Microsoft was implementing standards far quicker (like this one I found via wikipedia: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/peripherals/671/internet-expl...)
I don't think the criticism is premature. The has been visible as long as I've been here.

And it definitely discourages commenting in low-traffic threads when the average isn't normalized for viewers.
I generally find engineers to be more in favor of standards than anyone else but that's anecdotal.

The point I was actually making is the engineers are told to "catch up as quickly as possible" which leads to standards compliance because you don't have time to reinvent the wheel. So it's not an emotional reaction or judgement call it's just pragmatism.
It also has an API to integrate with standalone bugtrackers like Trac/Jira as well as Github.
I don't think flattr will work just because this type of service needs a huge user base and a huge customer base to work. IMO the best thing that could happen to flattr, is being bought by Facebook. Facebook has the users and the range to actually make this work, though I doubt the overhead is worth it for them.
I think generally if you want to second someone's recommendation, it's best to upvote their recommendation and add your comment as a reply - otherwise, the votes get fragmented between the two recommendations and if a person comes to the post and just scans the top comments, might not even see either of them.
I completely agree with a the need for more fundamental research. What about another generational project akin to the space race or the Manhattan project? These efforts did an amazing job of mobilizing both students and professionals around big, hairy goals, and the work that ensued sparked an untold number of innovations and new technologies.

Also,

1) Only larger companies can sponsor H1b's, not startups. The so-called "startup visa" would be a small step forward, but it sets a pretty high bar.

2) We rank towards the bottom of developed countries in math and science, and by college it's too late; by then you either got a good education in these areas, or you didn't.

3) I agree that government is super inefficient, and in some ways it may appear incompatible with the near-opposite agility of the startup world. That said, small businesses of all kinds need capital, and often credit, and the short-term effects of banking reform was to tighten capital markets even more.
I second that. I love Pivotal.
Great insight bbhacker. Mr. Zuckerberg's quip did not sound off the cuff.
wait, what are these levels? I don't know if I have ever been aware of this other than just the downvote privilege based on average comment score.
I tend to agree to some extent; I think there's things that could have been done better, but I can't imagine what realistic event could have occurred in 2008 that would have produced a Federal government that would have produced some sort of sure-footed, firm, correct policy. In fact I would very much argue that the putative sure-ness we experienced in both the 1990s and the middle of the previous decade was always illusory; I tend to agree with the Black Swan theory. (Which is more than just "they exist", but also why they exist and are fundamentally unpredictable.)

Nevertheless, confusion and uncertainty exist, regardless of how "fair" any of it is. The President is always the figurehead of the Federal economy, regardless of his actual powers; that's not new. I've rather often thought actually wanting to be President is indeed the sign of insanity that Douglas Adam's thought it was...
Also consider the cost of food in other countries. I lived healthily on about a US$2/day food budget when I spent six weeks in India (Bangalore). This isn't true for all places, of course, but I imagine it holds reasonably true.
The Flash industry suffers the same curse. I can and do remove games and even entire accounts from my distribution feed. One thing I did do to mitigate it is to let individual people have their own personal listings so people can still get their games if they're explicitly looking for them.

Ultimately you have to just man up, ignore the details and don't even bother telling them why they're rejected - that sucks for the developer but it'll sap your resources and you'll get stuck arguing about it. Just send a nice, generic, neutral message:

"Your game has been declined because it does not meet our quality standards. Please review them at x and remember to polish your game until it shines."

If you want to be extra nice link to them some resources on the importance of polish.
When your ability to produce is much greater than your ability to consume.
I'm not sure how you were using it, but Pivotal was one of the easiest task trackers I've used (used it for all planning and dev work for six months at a previous job). The tasks you're working on just show up in a separate column, and as for moving through states, I don't see how clicking a button to deliver/accept is crazy - you don't even have to reload the page like you do in Trac when you mark a bug as complete.
The Consumerization of IT
"You're in a desert, walking along the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise crawling toward you. You reach over and flip the tortoise on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"
>>What taxes are going to be raised to pay for the radical increase in spending?

> That's an unanswerable question.

Which is pretty much the point, in a nutshell. Businesses seek confidence on what their costs are going to be, and the fact that such confidence has always been impossible doesn't really affect that. Which business in New Orleans correctly planned for Hurricane Katrina?
The President controls the military, can veto bills that congress/the senate passes, and appoints supreme court justices.

Anything else the media claims Obama is responsible for is a disingenuous attempt to garner views by name dropping the President and is actually doing a disservice to all it's readers by misrepresenting how the American political system works.
"... programs like TechStars — which engage the entire entrepreneurial community for 90 days a year — are the icing on the cake." - The icing on the cake is the important part. A lot of communities forget the base steps such as the meetups and the forums and they jump right to the funding. This limit the growth of the entrepreneurs and the community just as Brad discusses.
280North built a pretty amazing front-end to the GH Issues using Github API and Cappucino - check out http://githubissues.heroku.com/
5 years later Microsoft catches up with RoR [video]
Ad hominem.
Complexity of breaking (presumably, prime factorisation in the case of RSA) is exponential wrt key size, whereas encryption has polynomial complexity. We'll be fine.
Nope, that will teach you "why" and "what" to design
and will teach you the most important thing
""HOW NOT TO DESIGN""

Take a demo project and implement your learnings. Not really sure what you mean by implement :/
Users with highest karma avg
There is no easy way to find this. I just collected this from the leaders list.

22.29 edw519
19.00 grellas
17.55 pg
12.15 wheels
11.23 patio11
10.45 mixmax

Its difficult to find out double digit karma avg for users who are not part of the leaders list. Who else has high avg?
If you earn $100k per year (no matter how long you work) and have no savings and spend $100k per year, then your wealth is "0 day" and will remain the same, by this definition.

If you earn $100k per year, spend $80k per year (saving $20k per year), then you'll earn "3 months of wealth" each year.

If you earn $60k per year, spend $20k per year (saving $40k per year), then you'll earn "2 years of wealth" each year.
Koobface Can Infect Linux Systems Too
Because SF has low hanging power lines and because the weight makes them more stable in windy situations. Why not? It's not like if they had firemen do ladders in their free time. They have a different department where only 2 people work making ladders.
I agree with most of those points, with an addition to #1: people are generally happy.

On my most recent visit to Bangalore I went out of my way to go into the more run-down, impoverished areas of the city to see what life was like for people there, and I was really surprised at just how excited and happy people there were when I asked to take their picture. It really changed my view of the people that live in what I'd consider to be pretty depressing conditions.

The pictures can be seen here (flickr): http://goo.gl/CsgD
When the economy improves, the president's approval will start climbing as well.
SFGate article on why they use wood ladders (2007): http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-06-25/bay-area/17249021_1_wo...

They said sales of wooden ladders doubled in the 5 years prior to when the article was written.
If you're a startup, don't use an agency. Trust me. Hire someone internally to manage your PPC campaigns, it will be cheaper and they will do a better job. You know your customers better than anyone.
You know what their interests and demographics are, what they're searching for, where they go online. Use this information to inform your campaigns, and hire someone to worry about the technical details like optimization and quality score.

The entire agency model is geared towards brand advertisers who spend obscene amounts of money on "branding" without tracking performance or looking at results.

The problem here is a profound misalignment of incentives. An agency gets paid a percent of spend, so it's in their best interest to spend as much of your money as possible testing without thinking about conversions or results.
I just noticed that, too. Presumably there is some new, average-based threshold for downvoting in this rep grind system?
Uh huh... so it can infect Linux after you click the applet to "trust" it.

This like saying giving someone a shell script to rm -fr / and having them run it is infecting the system.
The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power
I completely agree with you. The argument that you should be able to charge 10x as much to target the 1/10th that is your most likely customer falls apart when you are advertising in a place where people generally don't want to think about buying stuff. People kill time, make plans, and stalk friends on FB; they don't go there to shop.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I've generally heard that CTR on FB ads is terrible. According to the logic above you should be getting 10x as many clicks because you are paying 10x as much, but advertisers aren't seeing anywhere near this ROI.

It's like a bunch of salespeople coming to a party that's been running for 10 years and trying to push sales onto people; sure, you might hook a few, but people are there to party and not to spend money on your junk.

The only way I can see them leveraging what they have a real advantage in, is by using the social graph to promote products to people's friends. That's kind of what Yelp does; you're more likely to spend money on things/places your friends recommend. The problem is that FB has done this before, it was called Beacon, and it was creepy. They are late to the game with Places, and they are getting so much cash from corporations for sponsored Pages that I don't think anybody uses them to judge actual value of a product.
I don't have any experience with them but Trada's model seems attractive. They might be worth a look.

www.trada.com
Replace comment arrows with a plus and a flag. Plus increases karma and plays into the comment arrangement on the page. Flag is scored separately and silently as a measure of meanness and/or community culture clash. From two dimensions of data you'll have a better capacity to guess whether someone is a bad participant on HN.