skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah it confused me for a long time. After enough time and context I figured it was something that amounted to a happy face or a wink or something, but was some start-up colloquialism I missed out on.
As raganwald pointed out, when they adopt standards they adopt the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy.
Ask HN: What makes coders happy?
I'm a non-coding founder trying to develop a website. I'm looking to find a technical cofounder and I need to understand how to better work and connect with coders.

I've read a fair amount about retaining programmers but most of those articles are confusing to me because they contain lots of coder specific language. I thought it would be more fun to have a discussion around the following question:

What should non-coders do (or not do) to make it easier for hackers be excited about collaborating and developing a great product?
Insert a delay of, say, 10 minutes until a new comment is shown.

Of course, the commenter should see it immediately and should be able to correct it (or even delete it) in the meantime. But everyone else should see it only after 10 minutes.

This will slow down A-B-A-B-... types of conversation which are usually only productive when being written thoughtfully and thus slowly anyway.
crunchbase says they raised almost 10MM. So what do you think facebook paid them? 15MM? 20MM? More?
Paying to hit "Like"? That is a really good idea actually. Wouldn't it also make sense if Flattr-ing something also "liked" it on Facebook? Something like posting "XYZ Flattrd foo.com" on XYZ's wall. That would also bring marketing to the Flattr concept.
TextSlide Launches a Chatroulette for SMS
first pp of the article..
"A New York child can be sued for crashing a bicycle into an elderly pedestrian and causing injuries that led to her death, a judge has ruled."
>Then why not connect all those thoughts together? If it was so easy

Who are you responding to? I didn't say it was "easy". I further said that Apple is a software company, not a hardware company. They do software well.

Their hardware superiority is 90% myth, 10% reality. There were excellent Windows Mobile devices with high resolution displays, better processors, more RAM, and on and on, long before Apple brought that "innovation".

You could directly attribute the fact that Apple isn't responsible for most of that hardware R&D for their high profit margins. They know to buy the cutting edge from the rest of the industry, put some software on it, and they've got a product.

Apple puts some great software on it and made a well integrated device. Their only innovation is in software. In hardware they're not much more than a VAR.

>From what I've encountered with many of the low-margin commodity products

I like the addition of the editorialized "commodity" there.

However your core point is utter nonsense. Almost every bit of extremely high quality electronics hardware you can buy in the industry, from ultra-high end LED televisions to audio equipment to high performance routers to digital cameras, came from a company making very low margins, yet managing to yield a very respectable billion or so in profit.

Apple has a short time where they essentially could go to the bank on the backs of a cult-like following. That isn't a scalable business model, which is exactly why Apple is warning about reduced margins going forward.
Fedora 13 / GNU IceCat 3.6.10 Works fine.

Couldn't scroll out because I don't have a mouse right now. :(
Man Dies Of Caffeine Overdose
That isn't unique to ladders - wood for any project should acclimate to its environment (humidity) before starting construction and it doesn't take 15 years.
The question is, is Facebooks huge role on the internet a sustained groundswell or a passing fad? Will Facebook be as big a deal 10 years from now, or will we all be using personal gossip AI's to keep track of our friends instead?
Thanks for posting. I try to stay up on the news yet had not heard of this. I do consider this HN appropriate.
You can purchase a 3rd party USB3 interface, so if you really need it for a certain peripheral, it's available.
While you're slippery slope description is entirely valid on it's own. It's not the gist of the quote.

This is about apathy towards injustices that don't directly impact you and a lack of foresight. I.e. Wow that's so wrong, I'd raise a stink if it happened to me.
I don't see what makes this so amusing.:wq!
> I think it's the only method to ensure that all the ladders are of perfect quality

I think there must to be more to it than that.

Or airlines are making their own airliners now? :)
There is no life quite like the pirate life and I haven't looked back once since leaving Corporate America to start the Addoway marketplace even if people still believe that starting a marketplace is almost as impossible as Arrington dunking a basketball. lol. I always said there is no sense in dreaming if you can never make any of them a reality. Entrepreneurs dream just like everyone else does, but the difference between us and the rest is that we act on our dreams no matter how crazy they might sound. You only get one shot at this life, one true shot to make a difference - you have to make it count! A great post to start a Sunday!
I'd guess less. This sounds to me like a "company is dying, founder starts looking for a job, facebook throws a few dollars in the direction of the VCs to make sure they don't cause any fuss" scenario.
I use a unit test framework to write tests. These tests take a logical component and test the interface it provides to the rest of the application. I do this for every logical component certainly not every individual class and I certainly don't write a bunch of fake code to pretend like the rest of the app works. I don't care if my code works when provided with a bunch of mocks and stubs I care weather or not my code works with the rest of the system.

The only way to call it unit testing is if you make unit mean something completely different to what most people mean by unit. Yet it is automated testing that covers real functionality.
How much of this works on IE6? Or even IE8?
User interface is AMAZING. Color schemes and the default look... not so much. :)
Why? Then they'd concede that Microsoft are the true kings of the internet, and that their arbitrary application of undocumented ad-hoc protocols is something the rest of the world should spend resources catching up to.

If they did, however, they should put a yellow notice-bar in there saying "This messages contains non-standard extensions specific to Microsoft Office users. It has been cleaned up to the best of our abilities."
I would say the phenomenon is merely a sign of the times.

An echoing of the cries from the world and its people.

People are frustrated with rising food/gas/health insurance, with layoffs after layoffs and local businesses closing, with governments that work with banks to steal from the citizen, with corporations that pollute the environment and food source without consequences.

Their mood is sour. Their heart is heavy.

They know the good times is over, but they can't see when the bad times will stop, if ever.

They weep for their children, yet they intoxicate themselves with alcohol and tv and sports and video games, unable to rise up to fight for themselves.

And so they come online and vent their frustration and anger on others, because its just easier. Because nothing of consequence happens anyways, except we all drag each down further and further.
Thank goodness for expansion slots, eh?
This is exactly the same reason why people who are hiring and decide not to give you a job offer usually won't say why they passed. There is a large percentage of people who can't take rejection.
This is ridiculous. And that's all I'll say about it.
I am a bad user who was a good user.

I stopped bothering after a few incidents where content-free snarky bullshit written in response to my genuine comments was upvoted, and pg was unwilling to remove any of it.

Then, I got banned for some very genuine, but negative, opinions. I don't expect people to agree with them, but banning me for them again seemed asinine.

I didn't bother changing my proxy, so this will probably auto-dead, but that's true. pg's lack of action was an endorsement of shitty, snarky, content-free behavior. Unsurprisingly, shitty, snarky, content-free behavior has grown since then.

Want to fix HN? Fire pg.
Facebook's "Friendship" option pretty similar to Hashables
Has anyone noticed the "Friendship" option on Facebook (below a person's comment and right next to the like button) that takes you to a page devoted to two people? Hashables much?
In San Francisco in 2007 there were over 8000 city employees making over $100k/yr.

http://www.sfgate.com/webdb/sfpay/index.shtml
aka. "flow" or "in the zone". Mentioned widely as early as 2000: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html
I'm sorry, but do you have some kind of source for the claim about recipients taking on personality traits from the donor? I know it's been the plot of a few movies, but I don't think I've ever heard someone suggest it was based in reality.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but it doesn't seem very plausible.
I don't think it's online, and unfortunately i've now lost my copy of the magazine.
It looks like part of an ongoing discussion though, so contacting Wired to get the whole storyis probably best. Good luck!
What have they extinguished so far?
I think you're hugely over estimating the competence of a large percentage of internet users.
I agree with you. The only times i have wanted to downvote was to mark some comment as spam and/or troll. Given that we have a 'flag' link on comments, i don't see a need for downvote, except to undo a upvote.
Advance could change modern electronics
Oui, ç'est vrai.
VLC Developer Takes a Stand Against DRM Enforcement
Dude, thank you so much. That is one I definitely could not have tested on my own.
I'm definitely assuming (a). I think we have different user stereotypes in mind. I think that lots of people spend little to no time hearing about, or talking about, applications they aren't using already.

These are the kinds of people that go to mint.com not because they've heard about it, and are excited about it, but because they typed "track my finances" into Google and it was the first result.
"Hold still, baby, hold still. This won't take more than two seconds."

(Version for people on iOS with an iPhone 3G: "Holy still, baby, hold still. This won't take more than forty five seconds.")
I'd guess that the 4-year-old's parents have an insurance policy of some sort that could pay for the elderly woman's medical bills. Assuming the parents weren't negligent in allowing the 4-year-old to ride, then it could be that the woman's survivors had no alternative for getting the insurance company to pay, other than suing the 4-year-old herself.
Slashdot attempts to fix this with meta moderation. Users are given the chance to judge up-votes essentially. Whether that is actually effective for them or applicable to Hacker News, I could not say.

http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
Basically, rail travel suffered when jet aircraft became commercialized, and when the personal automobile and interstate highway system became widespread. This happened in Europe to a lesser degree (although there higher density sort of saves the rails, as well as a less-degregulated air industry until recently -- however in the 1990s and 2000s, they ended up in the same situation as the US with respect to trains).

In the 1960s and 1970s, freight lines were losing money on passenger service, and shutting it down. There were a variety of political problems with shutting it down entirely (certain constituencies, especially people in small towns with major trains running through them, religious or cultural groups who liked trains, etc.) strongly supported rail travel.

Amtrak was a political solution to let the freight lines discontinue offering passenger service (and thus be more profitable), while keeping service for political reasons. It would have taken a much larger (20x? 100x?) investment to really create a viable passenger rail service, and it still would have suffered for fundamental technological reasons. If Amtrak were not political, it would have just ended service entirely across most of the country, focusing service on specific markets where rail makes sense (Northeast corridor, essentially, and maybe some commuter services not run by states).

There are some new factors which make rail maybe more suitable today than it was 40 years ago (1. congestion at airports -- we're unwilling to build new/big ones in most cities, 2. the carbon intensive nature of air travel 3. a greater population and general increase in density due to people moving to cities and near suburbs of the biggest cities), so maybe rail makes sense for certain routes now where it didn't before.

Passenger rail, no matter what, makes absolutely no sense for genuinely long distance travel between endpoints separated by nothingness, which characterizes most long distance trips in the US.
The Complications Of Owning Software
Not exactly related, but in the absurd uses of the legal system front, in the US you can have civil suits (in asset forfeiture) against specific physical assets, e.g. "State of Texas v. One 2004 Chevrolet Silverado".
That still doesn't explain why it would be in a message from someone who wouldn't use a smiley in the first place.
I have to disagree with your points above, Apple create stylish / iconic user friendly products, built to last, which will reflect in the price from a consumer point of view. Where the likes of Dell, Sony, LG, Samsung and the rest build Laptops and PC's to compete in a very competitive & affordable price range set by millions of retailers world wide, whom created a price war amongst themselves. A company does not need to own or create all of their IP in order to be successful or ask a higher MSRP, they just need to distance themselves from their competition and create a buzz, which Apple have done remarkably well.

I see Apple as a type of Fashion brand or a designer - look at the handbag market for instance, why do they range from $10 -$10,000 if they do the exact same thing and majority of the time they're made from near enough from the same materials and on average cost the same to make.

Regarding your last point "And it is simply perverse seeing people actually bragging on behalf of Apple about the fact that they are rolling in cash." I find it quite amusing to see how many people are so unhappy about the success Apple have made, when they really should be pointing their anger to laptop manufactures that are responsible for consumers spending huge sums of money constantly replacing or updating poorly built products that only last 12 months before they start cooking themselves!
Ask HN: Do you have more ideas from running your own company?
I was just reading this essay http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html and had a question about this quote from it:

"An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. And vice versa: when you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do. So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful."

I was wondering if this was actually true? For a little perspective, I am 41 and have been self-employed since I was 20 (I am not a programmer), and I have ideas constantly. There are several books filled around my house with notes on business ideas, and now I have a secret Posterous account I email whenever the next idea strikes. My wife finds great humor in this - sometimes I will have the same brilliant idea more than once - 'You thought of that one two years ago dear' will be her response. So to me, ideas come constantly like a raging river. I read posts by others, and they seem to have problems coming up with ANY ideas at all. So the question is this:

Do you think being self-employed helps with idea creation or not?
I don't think you can really claim "full browser support" with an asterisk that says "assumes latest beta". That's really not helpful when you're trying to figure out if you can actually use something. That said, this is a pretty nice preview of what's coming with CSS3.

(If you are looking for that kind of information, http://www.quirksmode.org/compatibility.html is by far the best resource I've found anywhere online for it, although I don't think it includes all of CSS3.)
It seems to me that it would make more sense to sue the parents - aren't they supposed to be responsible for their children?
Title should have [US] in it. At first I was horrified to imagine it was in the UK (based on bbc site). In the US it's not very surprising at all.

But why this is on HN I have no clue.
Very good news for startups out there today! How many acquisitions has Facebook closed?
This is a better article on the matter. http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/vlc-enforcement/

Thanks for taking a stand, but isn't it a given that apple owns and controls the app store. If one doesn't like the rules, don't buy apple and don't make apps for their store. Simple no?
Captcha adverts capture your attention
It's a good point. I stopped reading another well-known site years ago in large part because so much there was outright wrong, and I was afraid that I'd picked up and internalized false ideas, and would continue to do so, in unwary moments.
Did you actually read that article? That is lease cost for their data centers (in 2009 no less). That's basically just paying the rent on their data centers.

That doesn't include a 200 million dollar data center project to be built in Pineville, OR. And that does not include infrastructure, bandwidth, software, hardware maintenance etc.

Let's face it, Facebook does not sell a product. Their only current viable revenue model is through advertising.
I hijacked a Facebook account with Firesheep
It'd make even more sense to:

a) not have medical bills (Have a decent state provided health system)

b) stop suing people for random accidents
SpiderOak has always been an all-SSL site, for all services (including data storage and retrieval.)

We've found the Erlang implementation of SSL scales more comfortably than OpenSSL. (The new Erlang implementation, available since r12, and the default in r14, isn't just a wrapper for OpenSSL.)
But if $12 MM is the median sale price, then the risk no longer makes it worth it, especially with so many >= $5m valuations at the moment.
Please consider running the anonymization experiment.

Mean-spirited comments can quite possibly be the response to the rampant favoritism that exists on HN and that can be as dangerous to maintaining discussions balanced and interesting.
20 Things I’ve Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years
It is well known that GPL licensed software on the App Store is currently a grey area.

The developers of VLC for the iPhone, Applidium, took a risk with this app.

Interestingly that risk initially was Apple not approving the application.

But now that risk has actually become their fellow VLC developers turning against them and filing copyright infringements with Apple to get the app removed from the store.

Nobody wins. Sad.
China Adopts a New Way to Fight Pirating Software
Maybe you should look through this: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_guy...

and search for more information from MrGrim on reddit.

I think one thing about free image hosting is that it can really add up in bandwidth.
Same question from a different angle in a blog post from back in August - http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme
I'm glad you made some revenue and/or publicity via flattr. But may I say that I pointed to that in my article:

"By no means does my experiment imply any significant validity for the general public, but I see no reason to keep the advertising buttons on my blog, either."

BTW: Thanks for that link. It has been quite some time that I played FreeCIV. To make it playable online is a nice feat. Thanks for that!
This culture of suing and starting litigation for anything is stupid. How would one know what kind of insurance to take out? So now every citizen of a country should need to have "random accident and counter litigation insurance"?
I've often thought of it. The reason I had downvotes originally was to deter people from saying things that were mean or stupid. But maybe the right way to deal with that is a separate mechanism from voting, as it is with stories. Maybe the right combo for comments is an uparrow, plus a flag link, and encourage users to flag comments that are mean or stupid.

I'll think about the real solution more after I'm done reading applications, but I'll increase the downvote threshold to 500 now.
Ask HN:  Will Windows Phone 7 apps be worse on average than those for iOS?
From what I understand, it is more difficult to program for iOS than it is for Windows Phone 7.

This difficulty acts as a filter to prune out poor developers, thus leaving better ones to build apps.
I completed a survey on entrepreneurship the other day for a local college kid's project. There was a multiple-choice question asking why I became an entrepreneur. The options were things like "being my own boss", "working from a preferred location", and "making more money".

I had to choose "other" and write in "I can't not do this."

It is an almost uncontrollable urge. I think it could be safe to say that kind of compulsion limits my ability to do a really good risk assessment. So far it works for me though :)
Downvotes can be used to stifle dissent, but are generally valuable.

I feel like 60-70% of the heavily downvoted comments I see are already trolling or flaming (or in some cases something dumb, like a 3-word reference to an internet meme). With the grayed out text, I think this is a fantastic visual cue about how not to act on HN.

(I could have just written this comment as "/disagree", and then watched it get appropriately downvoted, and learned my lesson)

Edit: I should also add that as a barely-contributing user, I don't have the ability to downvote. But I'd still like other people to be able to do it, to enforce the community's standards.
Actually downvoting a bunch of someone's comments doesn't work. There has long been protection against that.
The article is only referring to the motion to dismiss the case, not the case itself.

The ruling by the judge, Justice Paul Wooten of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, did not find that the girl was liable, but merely permitted a lawsuit brought against her, another boy and their parents to move forward. (I apologize for not providing the actual names, they're on the article)

However, this paragraph from the decision itself is somewhat curious to me:

"A parent’s presence alone does not give a reasonable child carte blanche to engage in risky behavior such as running across a street” A reasonably prudent
child, whom we may presume has been told repeatedly by the age of four to look both ways
before crossing a street‘, knows that running across a street is dangerous even if there is a
parent nearby. Despite this, if a parent or other trusted adult actively directs a four year old
child to cross a street at a ceoain time, the only logical inference is that the child will reasonably
believe it is safe to cross the street at that time."

It seems to imply that if I am driving down the street, and a 5 year old runs in front of me and I run him/her over, he can be accused as negligent. He should know he has to look both ways? He has presumably been told so many times that he has completely understood the underlying risks? This doesn't seem rational to me; one of the first things I heard related to driving was that behind every bouncing ball there's a child running for it. Hell, I've been that child a few times! Can children of age 5 actually be reasonably prudent?

I'm not saying that there's not a crime here, or that I'm an expert in kids or anything like that. I don't even have kids. But reading that decision rendered me literally speechless for a while.
Apple’s iPhone apps still more, but Android picking up fast