skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yeah, too bad we need a written consent, i'm just scraping theater showtimes and will have to include links to imdb for more info, thankfully they let me do this "You are granted a limited, revocable, and nonexclusive right to create a hyperlink to IMDb.com" they are so generous for letting me link to them
i use programmer dvorak :D all the brackets (except <>) are unshifted
Yes, but now he's on the board of NowPublic. As well as a partner at GarageVentures. Should make it easy for NowPublic to raise more money. I.e. I'm characterizing it as a thinly described bribe. I have no idea if that's true, of course.
They had a weak case when they started. They had a mediocre case midway through. They had a strong case once Reiser took the stand.
Urbanspoon on iPhone spotted in the wild
It's tempting to blame the U.S. automakers for being shortsighted... but, really, when gas prices in the USA were (and still are, believe it or not) so much lower than in the rest of the world, how can we be surprised to find U.S. automakers evolving to suit that environment?

Hummer-scale SUVs weren't just an available, overwhelmingly tempting marketing niche for U.S. automakers -- it may have been the only niche that could have kept them alive during the last couple of decades. I remember when we nearly buried the US auto industry the first time, back in the 1980s. Toyota and Honda had already sewn up the market for well-engineered, highly efficient small vehicles. Competing directly with them didn't look like a winning strategy then, just as it doesn't look like one now. But, back then, there was a choice... and who can really blame the automakers for making that choice when the only clear alternative was to go broke?

If you want to change the design of cars you need to change the cost of fuel... just as, if you want people to reduce carbon emissions, you need to increase the cost of carbon emissions.
I resemble that remark.
Keynesian answers to this crisis will only worsen it. It's a complex set of supply shifts.
Even if you could pick the day, testing the above hypothesis would be very hard. IF you could guess when the most iPhones would be bought, you couldn't possibly know when people would first visit the App Store (they might not go on the same day they buy the phone). Moreover, even if you got on the list of top apps for that day, it might not be as useful as having already been selling your app for a few days. To me, having known customers is more useful than waiting for the moment of the most potential customers. It sounds nice to be able to wait to launch on the best day and have a nice launch day, but I'd rather get out there sooner and build up my customer base, even if it's slow. In my view, unless you have an actual promotion planned, any day after your app is ready is too late.
You can always use BSD if you want a non-GNU userland.
While it is not directly hacker news, I believe it's of utter importance to know what's happening with the currency you earn most of your money.

Take my example. I currently live in Switzerland and am now moving to California, for entrepreneurial reasons.

But I must say it has become less attractive if you look at the Swiss Franc to US Dollar: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=usdchf

In 5 years the Dollar has lost 25% ! That means that now Americans in average are 25% poorer compared to Switzerland than they were 5 years ago.

And the worst that can happen to America is if the smart, driven and hard working people it has been attracting for centuries stop coming. They are the ones that drive America's growth. And with the dollar down the tubes they might think twice before following their American Dream.
I Wonder What This Button Does
RMS doesn't seem to really care that much about credit, per se. Certainly, he believes it right and proper that GNU receive credit for what GNU is and has done. But more importantly, if GNU is not part of the name of the system, then users will be prone to forget about GNU, and in so doing forget about (or never even become aware of) the issues pertaining to software freedom.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html
Disclaimer : I am the author. I posted about the Urbanspoon iPhone app a few weeks back and many of you were curious when it would ship.

Techcrunch likes it too:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/10/iphone-application-over...

and we were in the New York Times yesterday:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/technology/personaltech/09...
Everyone should, don't be afraid to boast about your business successes. I know we have been taught to be modest, but press releases are an acceptable format and wide reaching vehicle to building up your personal brand.

If you're not proud enough to talk about your business achievements, why should anyone else.
A smart person.
Yeah it definitely didn't workout for the YouTube founders. Better luck next time I guess.
Matt, I want to focus on the part of your argument that FOSS is related to Communism. First, let's define our terms. Hopefully this is not a false accusation, but it seems like you are using "Communism" in the way that conservative politicians and radio hosts use it, i.e. as a straw man political system that is assumed to be restrictive and contrary to free Democratic ideals.

Communism is too loaded of a word, but I think for our purposes "democratic socialism" is a suitable replacement. Democratic Socialism, successfully practiced throughout the world, and very compatible with the goals of many progressive Democrats in the US.

I will contrast Democratic Socialism with Market Liberalism. Market Liberalism is the idea that markets should be unrestricted and do not need to be regulated because they regulate themselves. However there seems to be a consensus among economists that this rosy rhetoric is just not true. The failure of this model may ultimately make the failure of European Communism look like child's play.

I think if I had to define the primary difference between Market Liberalism and Democratic Socialism it would the idea that society should be able guide and shape itself intentionally. This guidance is accomplished by making the structure of society be programmable by the people (instead of the structure being determined by blind market forces).

Market Liberals want to put the future in the hands of complex systems that are not directly related to any human values or guidance. That is the primary difference I think.

Their childish definition of freedom as being able to "do whatever you want" is simply a fairy tale. Freedom has more to with defining the constraints of government, via democratic process, such that the citizenry are maximally empowered, and minimally hampered.

The Market Liberals have no concept of the citizen or duty to cultivate community, the group-level. They only believe in the individual, the selfish gene/meme. They believe in a grossly misguided notion that markets optimize and automatically generate solutions, so that we don't need to choose our own direction as a society. It doesn't take a PhD economist to know how wrong this is. Computer scientists should also know how wrong the market liberalist model is-- optimization does not come for free! At least not in any reasonable amount of time. And as far as government is concerned there is such a thing as "too late".

So, Democratic Socialism does have a relationship to FOSS, though not a necessary one. FOSS shares a philosophy that works well with notions ranging from cooperativist economies (Libertarian Socialism) to Marxism, to plain old vanilla regulated capitalism. The philosophy of government that it clashes with is this permissive "let the market be free" philosophy, in which people can "do whatever they want". The reality of that system is not freedom for people but oppression of the weak by the strong, the gated fortress lifestyle, and gridlock on innovation due to the lower bandwidth of information exchange.
And now you've included one. My dismissal of this guy's point as being meaningless and fueled merely by envy is not ad hominem -- it's not the same as saying "that guy's just a jerk".

However, that's pretty much what you've just said about me. Isn't it ironic? Don'tcha think?
The funny thing is that there are three flashlight apps that cost a dollar, and a fourth one that is free.
Exactly. The way I see it, you can think of a piece of code sort of like chain links. GPL code looks like this: http://ace.imageg.net/graphics/product_images/pACE2-988564dt... AND it requires that ever piece 'below' it on the chain also look like that. Open source, BSD-licensed code also looks like that, but allows later links to be closed as well.

The upside to GPL is that any link N has the same rights to use and modify N-1 as 2 had on 1, with the downside being that N has limited rights on itself. BSD grants maximum control to each link, with the downside being that any given link may choose not to allow any links to be added below it.
The podcast list is moderated, but fairly open. However the app store is a commercial entity and different quality measures should be expected. Much like how you can assume base quality measures for iTunes paid content (certain bit rate, perfectly legal, it comes with album art, it will really work on your iPod, etc etc).

Since they are letting so much crap through it's pretty likely they aren't actually looking at all the apps. I gotta imagine Steve Jobs isn't going to smile when he sees 10% of the apps in his store are public domain books. One of the benefits of a walled garden is a base line of quality.

I still haven't heard the customer service side of the app store. What kind of data do you get about your customers? How do you make paid updates? How do you do demo copies? Evaluation copies? Who decides when a customer gets a refund? Etc etc. Since it's Apple's merch account they have the last say, but to date they haven't said much to developers.
I actually think it's great news to have e-books available for the iPhone. It may not be cutting edge technology-wise, but convenience-wise, it's smart to use the iTunes app store as a distribution channel for e-books and to use Apple's payment system instead of one's own. Simple and effective. I like it.
Micah, thanks for checking in. BOSS is going to solve a problem I've had, and I'm sure it's going to be a boon for a lot of others.
Too bad TorPark (aka xBrowser and a lot of other things) swayed too far from the Mozilla/Open Source path and into the hands of a semi shady privacy company.

Was a cool project.
how do you know what he knows?
Mr. Harold is missing the point here. Protocol buffers are not meant to replace XML as a "public" API transport, they are meant to replace it on backend solutions, where one entity controls both endpoints.
They were photshopped by the news agancy. International Herald Tribune and other newspaper showed the real picture from the start: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/09/asia/10iran.php
It doesn't take much to get way faster than Telstra's network.
Actually it is Iraq * 3 in population, area, economy and fanatics.

Edit: But Iran never said it wants to attack anyone, or made any threads besides retaliation in case they are attacked.
> Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).

IIRC, Joel Spolsky called this "commoditizing your complement."
What's hilarious is that the site got the majority of its traffic from popurls.com. So without Guy's "fame" and popurls the site would have fizzled long ago (i.e. not made it based on its own merits). Now it gets acquired and really demonstrates the importance of connections.
Ineed. Mayson, I hope there are a few copies of the Ways of Knowing left on AbeBooks because that's where I scored about six copies a few months back.

I realize now that in littering my friend's apartments with these books, I've been trying to transform my town into Cambridge (or into what PG says Cambridge is). But I seem to be a size too small for that job. Or as Montague might say, I don't command the prepotency needed to elicit that kind of change... yet.

So I'm taking a break from all that to compare Cities and Ambition with my own experience. My train leaves for Cambridge in a few weeks.

Giddiup.
I believe that the FSF's stance on the OOXML standard is that the standard is so unwieldy, obfuscated, and incomplete that it is infeasible for any group but Microsoft to implement it, and that that deliberate infeasibility is sufficient reason to exclude OOXML from being ratified as an ISO standard.
I agree a lot of this China stuff is hype but I don't think it is the same as the Japan stuff.

First of all Japan has about the same population size as the US, I think it fits between the US and Germany. China and India on the other hand have MUCH bigger populations. And all of their people want to be middle class.

The Asian tigers went through a financial crisis (who hasn't) and I think they have already largely recovered. So while any one of them is small, Vietnam is only about 80 million people, together they are a very significant economic region. And people in all of them want to own cars, eat stake, be just like the first worlders.
Last.fm is a really great value website for users and producers. They are the best at what they do and are not letting up.
"Banning the web site and removing it from Google's indexes."

You and I have a very different understanding of why Google does and does not ban web sites. They ban web sites for SEO black hattery.

In this case, Apple presents information that people searching Google want to find. Why on Earth would it benefit Google to ban this practice?

Are you equating the iTunes application to some sort of drive-by-download malware? If so, please make that point and not frame this as a violation of Google's quasi terms of service.

Do you think that Google is unaware of what is happening, that Apple is fooling them? Send them an email and let them know how Apple is tricking their spiders.
You Can Now Add Custom Widget Galliers to *Any* Website
When I watch TV online, recognize the pundit and flash historical accuracy rates on the screen while she talks

Is subtitle data available in a usable form? If so, that would include pundit names. Pulling them out and cross-referencing against sourcewatch or wikipedia doesn't sound impossible.

But I know nothing about TV (yet). Anyone know if this is plausible?
Entrepreneurs: Resources to build the right team
Even though the payments are very very small, this is still a great step in the right direction. The real challenge is finding these bands, and convincing the user to do the same. The user is flooded with options when it comes to what to listen to and sadly it's much easier to stick with what's in the Top 40 or a big label musician.

Pandora is pretty good with recommendations, but doesn't include all the "long tail" bands. Something is missing...all of this needs to be integrated somehow.
any recommended reading/tips for doing so?
Ah, I see. What we're asking for is an Apple-authored, Apple-hosted service to make it easier for Jeff Atwood to get free information from Apple without the risk of becoming an Apple customer.

I admit, it would be really, really useful to have a service which provided links to album information and cover art without asking you to download a special application. Perhaps that's why such services predate iTunes by six years, and were originally available as (anybody else remember this?) Gopher sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allmusic

I find it hard to blame Apple for not bothering to reinvent that wheel. What's the profit margin on it? And, for all I know, Apple isn't even contractually allowed to serve up album info and cover art outside of iTunes. Apple has signed a lot of stupid contracts (cough AT&T cough); it's part of the cost of being the ones who drag ancient monopolies kicking and screaming into the future.

Perhaps I wouldn't have misunderstood Atwood if he'd given his essay the proper title: "Why the people I follow on Twitter are anti-web for linking to a non-web resource when AllMusic is just sitting there."
Live fulltext search in Ruby on Rails
I'd rather this link than another TechCrunch post.
By this definition, mailto links are anti-web.

Unless you have some serious browser hacking () kungfu, it takes you to (gasp!!) a desktop email client!

() kungfu measured against general populace, not HN populace.
For you, it can be an advantage to keep your earnings in your Swiss bank in francs, and take out money as needed in USD.
Are you sure about that? Here's a photo showing just the opposite.

http://www.ricksteves.com/blog/photos.cfm?action=display&...
Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web

I'm not sure what you mean. Google is gradually opening its technology - you see one announcement after another these days.

And here lies the difference between Google and Apple: both benefited from the open-source world big time, except the former contributes back as an acknowledgement, and the latter contributes nothing.
Except that the next sentence talks about terabit capacity, which does require picosecond switching.
Porno for Geeks
Ask Aubrey de Grey About Longevity Research on Slashdot
80 hours of overtime per month? 20 hours per week? He died of overwork when he worked 60-hour weeks?

It's tragic that he's dead, but it's nonsense to think that 'overwork' was the main factor.
I think I saw a graffiti in New York saying USA is a fascist state that drops bombs everywhere, or was that in Europe, or maybe in Brazil... just saying
This is incredibly important, to the point where I think you can characterize chances of success based on having PM skills in your founding team.
I don't think we are talking about the same thing, 1 picosecond * the speed of light = 0.2998 millimeters so a lightly longer cable and your packet is time shifted a few picoseconds. Anyway, The Switch 8800 has an impressive 1.44 Terabit-per-second backplane This does not mean it can route 1.44 trillion packets per second even if it can handle that many bits.
Software Millionaire Missing in Hawaii
Industry behemoths have been known to change to keep up with the times (case in point: IBM), although it's damn rare. So maybe some of the studios and newspaper companies will figure out a way to endure.

It would be a useful exercise to go over the list of companies that were in the S&P 500 in 1950 and see which ones did better than their peers in 1950-2000 and which ones faded from view. Unfortunately, the last time I checked, online stock listings only go back to about 1970, and with all the mergers, breakups, name changes, and stock splits that have happened since then, running these numbers by hand strikes me as a non-trivial project.
Goodbye, World
"Ah, I see. What we're asking for is an Apple-authored, Apple-hosted service to make it easier for Jeff Atwood to get free information from Apple without the risk of becoming an Apple customer."

Information about music is marketing material for Apple. They're just doing a poor job of using it. I'm more likely to purchase a song if I can figure out what the iTunes link is pointing to instead of having to install a program first.
They call it 'Internet'
The internet in 1991
Comcast's scary precedent: A business deal influencing how your Internet connection works.
so now that Apple has the best music organization program out there, people can only complain about it. I remember back in 1999, when I began to listen to MP3's, we used a program on the PC that was a major pain in the ass, but it was the one popular program so we dealt with it. iTunes works well for me, it's easy to get, and it does pretty much whatever you want it to. Don't buy music from the iTunes store if you don't want compressed AAC files, rip your own CDs to your iTunes with the Apple lossless compressed format.
From the NYT:

{Still, Apple could end up at odds with some developers - particularly creators or distributors of content and media - who offer applications that compete directly with iTunes. Rajeev Raman, chief executive of Mywaves, an ad-sponsored free mobile video service available on millions of handsets, including Nokia and BlackBerry smartphones, said he would like to offer Mywaves in the App Store.

But he has made little headway in his discussions with Apple, he said: "We have a reverse conflict because they are not providing video for free, but we are. We are interested, but we don’t want to jump into anything that will have our hands tied behind our backs."

When asked about it, Mr. Jobs said: "He’s right. We will compete." He added, "That’s a discussion to have."}

Looks like you may be waiting for a while...
Tracking who's hot and who's not presents an algorithmic challenge
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2008/4/the-britney-spears-problem
The three laws of great graphs
from the comments:

"I know that these missles are part of a threat to wipe Israel off the map, but now they’ve proved that they have the photoshop capabilities to do it."
don't worry, techcrunch will cover this story any minute now. Just gotta come up with a provocative title so that people will come and read it
As I understand it, it's not really switching at all.

Different signals are sent simultaneously down the same fibre at slightly different wavelengths. This device splits the signal into its individual components. This is the same as what's already done, except currently the splitting is done electronically -- here, it's all done in optics, which makes it a lot faster.
Reinventing the wheel, in this case, could be seen as a way to direct traffic to a profitable business. Being the central point for people investigating or sharing information about music on web seems like it might possibly have some value too. As you said, maybe it is a business Apple is contractually precluded from entering. If it isn't, it would seem Apple could fairly easily leverage their existing resources to create it. As was implied by other posters, perhaps they are not because they do not wish to dilute the iTunes channel.
Twitter's problems have never been Rails problems
Thanks for posting this development. Mashable, as usual, did a nice job covering the launch
Sell to the people who say he's full of hot air and traditional media will be around for a long time.

Saying that one should sell or buy a security is always an exercise in predicting the future. When you say "sell", it's shorthand for "In the future, there will be fewer buyers and more sellers for this than there are now, so the price will go down, so you should unload now while you can still find eager buyers." You could be wrong about your future prediction, in which case you lose money. But if you're right, you stand to profit from all the people who thought you were an idiot.

I found it curious that a lot of people seem to think Marc is trying to pump & dump media stocks. He's got plenty of money already, and I bet he dumped all his old media a long time ago. Rather, I think he wants to be seen as the guy who correctly foretold the death of old media - his incentive is to be right, gosh darnit, and not to make a whole lot of money.
IPhone 2.0 Firmware (5A347) Available Early
I dont want to watch video in that sense.

I want to stream live video from an iphone to the net.
"remember truemors?"
"no"

none the less - quick turnaround and maybe a 2-3x return for Guy and crew, not bad at all.
$1 Million prize offered for cracking an encryption algorithm
downloading this in safari causes the file to be automatically extracted, which is not what you want. either download with FF or from the command line (I'm sure there's also a way to tell Safari not to automatically extract the downloaded file by I don't know that much about Safari).