skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Sebastian has given me personal advice that I consider incredibly valuable, and has changed my plans in the coming year.

Was this advice on his blog or was it offline? If was offline in person, it doesn't really have anything to do with the utility of the blog. Hopefully, nobody is attacking Sebastian the person. Seeing as how the vocal defenders of the site know the person, maybe it's worth considering that Sebastian the person colors your view of sebastianmarshall.com. Possibly it's why you don't find it as obnoxious as so many others do.
Title is false. Samsung will not elaborate on their plans. The CSR clearly said that they DO plan to push Froyo to the phone. He just can't say when.

They have no plans for Gingerbread yet, though, which is understandable since it's so new. I'll be surprised if it gets it.

I'm actually seriously considering dropping my Vibrant and getting a G2 or Nexus S. The G1 had a decent record for getting updates, and the Nexus S is a developer phone so I could just put the latest on it at any time.

I looked into upgrading my Vibrant with a third-party ROM, but it didn't seem to be as easy as when I did my G1 like that, so I didn't do it yet. But that was months ago, so I'm seriously considering it again.
While Stockholm Syndrome may be the observable result, the underlying emotion is fear.

Addressing one's fear is a shared part of the human condition. Which may be why we admire those who act, persevere, and succeed.
I can see how you would think that, since owning your reputation could be considered a form of intellectual property. but the two areas of law are separate.
Like this? http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20081219/business_week_kevin_rose...
Sure, salaries are much higher in US, even more so in California. :-)

But, by european standards, it's pretty good. London and Paris are more expensive cities and salaries are lower (except maybe in finance).

I went from 31K in Toulouse (France) to 45K in Amsterdam 3 months later :-) Not really rags to riches but still a very nice increase, even adjusting to the higher cost of living.
People who only have time to make ends meet usually only 'recycle' quotes by intellectuals and those in power, they go with the accepted as they cannot afford to think about it deeper.

I'm sure Chomsky acknowledges that. Even more back in the time he wrote the article, access to information and having the time to disseminate it was very uncommon. Which is why it is important that the people who have such a luxury use it responsibly.
Hayek explains that the purpose of this "separation of responsibility from power" is to keep the policy-making uninfluenced by the political process, because it's impossible to create a policy that makes everyone happy.

We need a better way to reverse the separation when it's no longer useful, like in this TSA situation.
Right. He was like 30 in that picture.
JRuby 2010: Year in Review
It’s been a spectacular year for JRuby, with adoption rapidly increasing, folks accepting JRuby as both a top-notch Ruby implementation and a top-notch JVM language, and JRuby itself improving by leaps and bounds. Let’s dive in and explore some key contributors, milestones, and events from the past year.
Facebook profile page redesign presented on paper prototype
Some time ago UXPin got quite popular on YCombinator. This time we've used our paper prototyping kit to present changes on Facebook profile page redesign.

Hopefully our stop motion video can present what redesign paper prototyping is capable of. Also we write short analysis of Facebook changes on our our blog. You can consider that as an addition:

http://www.uxpin.com/188/facebook-profile-page-redesign-with-uxpin-paper-prototyping/

Hope you'll enjoy it guys.
Color theming with emacs 24
Yes, I've often heard this argument.

Personally, speaking as a "little guy' who is interested in advancing technology and making a good living doing it, I am far more worried that some corporation will be able to claim patent "protection" over my ideas. This seems far more probable to me than the inverse situation of someone else independently discovering my invention and beating me in the market. Also even if that happened I'd much rather compete in the market than in a court room.

As for the specific case you mention, I think, especially in software, that it's becoming far easier for an individual inventor to take his invention to market rather than needing to sell it to a large corporation. Also this argument seems largely based on the notion, which I think is most often incorrect, that most value lies in a simple idea rather than in the execution of that idea. In other words that you have some idea that can be stated in a few English sentences that has tremendous value and that no one else has thought of. You only need divulge that idea and anyone on the planet will be able to beat you in the market. Such ideas, if they exist at all, are exceedingly rare, maybe once in a generation occurrences. All recent examples of highly successful innovation: Microsoft, Google, Facebook relied far more on the quality of execution - the construction of solutions from many small ideas - than on one overarching genius discovery. And it is exactly this form of value creation which patents impede.
From March 2010...
Well, maybe so. But I stand by my disappointment at the lack of knowledge about patents around here. We don't understand patents, but we're mad as hell about them!
The US should act more like Israel: accept that acts of terrorism will happen, don't publicize it, just clean it up and quietly go after the bad guys. And, most of all, don't act terrified--just go about business as usual.
Oh I was well aware what I should say once my "not having to drive is akin to a small raise" was shot down as "being good for you, not for the department"

I don't want to bluff though, so at this point I'm just moving on. If I'm required to throw a tantrum and threaten to quit to get what I want I'm happy to find work elsewhere.

Oh, and I just remembered. The only training we were ever offered came in an excel spreadsheet with over 1000 courses offered by some training firm.

We were told to email back "Three of four choices" and if there was enough interest in one of the courses it would be paid for. There was no possible way for any single course to be chosen definitively by the staff with so many choices.

But at least management got to feel good about "offering training, but there wasn't enough interest."
I hate making generalizations about huge entities like states, but I can't resist on this one. I think this kind of thing will ultimately trip China up, and prevent China from ever gaining a significant technological lead. The more closed their internet is, the less ideas people will be exposed to, and thus there will continue to be less innovation.
Air nazism is a disincentive against air travel, which are necessary given the current environmental situation.
A couple others I've witnessed:

Ideas only go down When employees tell you of actually useful innovations to a product do NOT agree it is a good idea. Mention that it is cute they are trying, and pretend to forget about it. In 3-6 months have a VP flash brilliance and push that innovation down from the top. All employee protests of "I have been pushing for this for months" are to be stonewalled, possibly with discipline.

Permanent emergency mode VP or CEO comes down to the dev team in a panic at least once a week handwringing about how "OMG we're fucked if we don't fix this" Complaints of "its been crunch time for a year" are met with replies about other duties as assigned, how if they just did their job this wouldn't be necessary, and company solvency.

Praise only the shitty employees Never ever ever praise the employees who solve a problem. Actively deride the employees who consistently solve problems, deliver results and so on. This triggers a "what am I doing wrong" response in them, and gets them working even harder.

Keep the situation confusing Give employees a set of tasks today and have them undo that same set of tasks tomorrow. In a week, do it over. Half way through a day, come down and demand something at top priority, then raise hell at the end of the day that they didn't finish the work you preempted w/ a top priority request.

rules! (this one works quite well in the food service industry) - impose rules that almost make sense at slow times, but which add unnecessary process and overhead. Insist on these rules being followed strictly during the busiest times. If the plebes find ways to speed up the process that is still with in the rules and has the same effect, begin the firings. Double down if the process reduces tips or rate of sales for the business. (It turns out most employees want to make you money, even waitstaff).

Find ways to keep your employees cash-poor Make them pay out of pocket and have very slow reimbursement procedures. Delay paychecks or even sneakier, have "problems" with direct deposit. The net effect is employees with less liquid money than they might otherwise have... helping get them into that nice trapped state.
We have had "part time doctors" in the US for a while, not to mention a movement toward "girl specialties" (read: gyno/derm/few others). It's a significant contributor to our rising medical costs.

Actually, an increase in the number of doctors (or, presumably doctor-hours) seems to lead to an increase in medical care costs. Adding more doctors increases the amount of medical service provided rather than providing the same amount of service at a reduced cost.
I don't think that those things all necessarily combine. For example, you could hate everything about the job, but be afraid to leave because the benefits package is good. There is also the chance that you haven't 'shopped around enough' and think that the benefits package is better than it actually is.

E.g. my employer was touting that our healthcare costs are ~$300/month less than the 'industry average' (though they didn't state which industry they think that we are in -- it's not cut-and-dry like 'financial services' or something). Someone that I know left the company for a ~$30K/year increase in salary. The difference in benefits payments does not out-weigh the salary difference, but if you're focusing too much on something like 'competitive salary package' you may not have the whole picture. [Obviously it's more nuanced that this, because different healthcare packages have different levels of coverage too, but this is just a simple example off the top of my head where focussing too much on the micro can cause you to miss the macro.]
Hopefully, nobody is attacking Sebastian the person...

cheering on charlatans...

Kind of hard to call somebody a charlatan without attacking them as a person, isn't it?
Trick for viewing the 3-D snowflakes:

Close your right eye, cover the left image with your left hand.

Close your left eye, cover the right image with your right hand.

Cross eyes.
While this looks like click fraud to the advertisers, is that failure due to the people clicking? Or Google?

This seems to be to be a failure on Google's part to properly leverage a real audience, rather than a legitimate detection of click fraud.

Google's Ad system is assuming a transient audience with little invested in the content, so that sending the same (content targeted) ad repeatedly to the site is the right thing. This is a small audience with much invested in the site. Sending ads from the same advertiser to the same small audience has diminishing returns. This is a failure to capture value, based on the investment of the audience rather than the type of the content.

Sending a wide variety of ads is necessary to properly leverage a small invested audience.
I am forced to adjust my beliefs in the direction of "crazy conspiracy theorists" more every year.
I couldn't agree more. Being a Kindle owner, I was really excited with this proposal when it was initially pitched. Amazon took a great idea and implemented it horribly.

It's not clear if this is the publishers or Amazon (out of fear from pubs) imposing such limitations on the lending process.

It really pisses me off that in the digital world with DMCA and DRM you don't have fair use of a product/art you purchase legally. You should be able to disseminate it freely. If I want to loan a friend a music album or book, it should be my right.

Lastly, has Amazon or anyone thought of modifying the DRM to allow ownership transfer? For instance after reading a DRM Amazon book I could transfer ownership to my local library.
Somewhat related, I love this quote from Eliezer_Yudkowsky:

"Have you ever caught yourself saying something like, "I just don't understand how a PhD physicist can believe in astrology?" Well, if you literally don't understand, this indicates a problem with your model of human psychology. Perhaps you are indignant - you wish to express strong moral disapproval. But if you literally don't understand, then your indignation is stopping you from coming to terms with reality. It shouldn't be hard to imagine how a PhD physicist ends up believing in astrology. People compartmentalize, enough said."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hs/think_like_reality/
Well, it's hard to distinguish where to draw the line between a good faith attempt to execute an idea -- failing because a competitor outright copied it in 2 days, and patent trolling.

That's why unless we figure out how to distinguish this effectively, either patents get abolished in software or they persist.

Personally I did invent something that's relatively easy to copy. How would a big company ever agree to buy what I made when they can just copy it?
Skype finally brings video chat to the iPhone, one-ups Apple’s FaceTime
Me too. All my first drawings are crayon-on-punchcard. This would have been ‘83,‘84, guess my Dad’s computing department we somewhat behind the times!
Your friends don't have to be "useful to you". Real friends are waiting there for you when you take a break from work to have fun, relax and shoot the breeze.

I've worked maniacally for the past 4 or 5 years and declined many many social invitations because I was focused on building my business. I would never EVER express that as "improving when my friends aren't" and I find this attitude deplorable.

They're just living life differently to me. They don't get in the way of the way I want to live my life at all and when I take a break I go hang out with them and we have fun - it's just that I don't do that very often.

There is no difference between focusing on a business, focusing on education, focusing on raising a child or on a new relationship.

It seems like such a cliche that you "improve" somehow and leave everyone else behind and then see them later in the street with your new friends and ignore them as you walk by and make them all jealous with how much better you've become.

Life just doesn't have to be like that. True friends are friends forever regardless of whatever life projects you're working on and if you're incapable of maintaining friendships with people who aren't living exactly the same life as you then there is something wrong with you.

The whole "I want to win so I surround myself with winners" approach is just admitting that you're so susceptible to peer pressure that the only way you can succeed in life is to set yourself up with a bunch of friends who will force you to succeed. That's a strategy for addicts, not winners.
yeah his "get a real job" comment seemed way rude
I had an English instructor that would give handouts in which the word "Internet" was not capitalized. (There is only one Internet so it should always be capitalized.) I decided that I would wait until I was finished with school before sending her a correction. (I never actually got around to it, though.)
Very true. Even better are open-bar parties.

Here's my absolute favorite trick, though: Blow past the PR people, sales people, and models who typically staff tradeshow booths and find the lone engineer. Ask questions like, "What's your favorite cool feature that didn't make it into this release?" or "If you had 6 more months to work on it, what would you have done?"

Even engineers/product managers with some public relations training can't resist talking about that thing they spent months working on, but didn't make it into the final release.
"leaving not only the juicy bits there for all to read but corporate hardware unattended and ripe for the picking." was indeed one of the threats I mentioned, and it happens all the time. It's relevant to at least part of the discussion. "Shoulder Surfing" is very low-tech. How often it's exploited for personal gain is anyone's guess. Is it really that hard to hit Windows-L when you have to step away for a moment? To lower your voice (or better yet, find a better time or place) before yelling your account numbers into that mobile phone of yours despite the fact that you're in a quiet coffee shop? To take one of the many open seats where your back is to a wall before you spent hours upon hours poring through corporate IP on that massive 18" laptop screen? Sure,it's a trade-off sometimes. It's not always quiet and the good "privacy friendly" seating isn't always available, and sometimes you forget to lock your screen but I see stuff that boggles my mind almost daily.
There seems to be a bug...

If I start a new note (the note I started is called "Bananas are great because:"), add a line, then add another line by pressing enter...then press tab to indent, it won't let me do a ( character.

I wanted to make:

Bananas are great because:

They are full of potassium

---(Thanks, Honey I Shrunk The Kids)

but it wouldn't let me make the ( symbol. Cool though :). As far as charging for something like this...I don't know if I personally would ever pay for it. What benefit am I getting from this that I don't get from emailing notes to myself?
Watch this incredible Minecraft machine burn a Creeper in effigy
Poll: Ask HN: Which web application framework programming language do you use?
The programming language behind the web application framework, but you can specify what you use in the comments.
Other (please specify)
"Somebody also pocketed a $7.5 million “finder’s fee” for helping to put the deal together."

That's interesting and a lot of money. Is it common?
Reading this makes me think back and draw parallels to the Internet boom and compare that to our current mobile boom.

Is it possible that Apple (Mobile) = AOL (Internet)?

--Walled gardens

--Curated content

--Centralized control

For a while there AOL looked unstoppable, much as Apple does now. Can Apple navigate the errors that AOL made? I'm not certain, but I'm also not certain enough they'll mess it up that I want to go short $AAPL with some 5 year out options either.
could you explain the technology behind the scene?
I'm surprised there's a demand for this degree of power subdivision.

Other than regulatory issues[1], it wouldn't be terribly expensive or difficult to modify an existing low-end PDU with multiple small-amperage breakers. It may even be possible to get reasonably priced[2] self-resetting ones.

The main trick would be getting oddball values like 3.75A, though four 3A ones would allow the sub-tenants to run at full breakered capacity, while maintaining 80% overall.

Perhaps there's a hardware startup in this. How much would you pay for a power strip with individually breakered outlets?

[1] Could be as practical as Perfectly Spherical Cows, I realize.

[2] Under $20 even in small quantities
The thing that isn't clear to me: Is this some sort of medical profession electronic document 'standard?' Or is this doctor just running up against the limitations of a single vendor's solution to an issue that has no standards?
That was a pretty clipped quotation. I didn't even see it as specific to Sebastian in my quick reading of alnayyir's comment. I suspect taking the entire sentence wouldn't have served your rhetorical purposes so well.

Setting aside that issue, I suppose the answer depends on your values. Obviously there's a connection. If you do terrible things online, you're probably not a great person. That said, I for one see it entirely possible for a blogger to be full of BS and false bravado when online, but a perfectly fine person in the real world. In fact, I don't think it's uncommon.
Oh, I try to change things. However the reality is you're working against a much larger force. It's difficult to create enough inertia to force real change.

Regarding the second point, I quit my job in early October. I had my first offer in hand in 23 days, and three in hand after the first month. Income was $0, which was a good motivator.

Though the amusing thing this time around is my former employer is now looking to become one of my clients (the place loved me, I just didn't like them).
In my experience, I have seen that very attractive women who want to be taken seriously by men will have a man as a business partner. This seems to take the edge off for other guys who may be too intimidated to approach the beautiful girl or who assume that someone so beautiful cannot also be intelligent and capable of doing business.

As a woman, what bothers me is that we have to constantly tow the line between being beautiful and not taken seriously or being average/butch/unattractive and judged to be too serious. It's a problem because even the most open-minded men are still heavily influenced my a woman's appearance and will make assumptions about her business acumen and character based on that alone.
It's called a creative commons attribution license. Personally if we operated under the assumption of "once it's released, it's gonna get copied" then entertainment would be released in a completely different fashion.
I dunno, random-generation pages like this or http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com (which has thrown me some neat recipes) seem a bit different from single-essay sites.
WAC: new widget platform, an answer to iPhone & Android by telco consortium
I second glassdoor.com -- although I'm sure it skews toward the negative... good info you won't find anywhere else.
It might clash with his philosophy buy really, in Groupon's position, what else can you do?

In my opinion, this is a perfect example of what's currently very broken with the VC/funding model. Groupon is wildly successful, wildly profitable, and yet it's investor can't get paid anything without the whole company having to do this weird funding rigamarole.

In the old days they would have just gone public and everybody would be happy. But with the latest regulations nobody wants to do that anymore. And they don't want to sell their company, for good reason. So they're stuck.

What there really needs to be is some accepted, pre-defined method for investors to profit from a successful company's cash receipts. That would simplify this whole process, but I don't know how feasible that is.
1,000 characters? What, are they paying for storage by the byte? Was this system designed in 1960? For that matter, were any doctors involved in the design of the system?

How on earth do they store medical imaging, compress it down to 128x128 GIFs?
Yep, that's how it goes. How embarrassing.
Considering that it's the exact same identical terms as the B&N Nook lending feature, I think that it's the book publishers who are responsible.
Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak comparison
Even after seeing the domain name, I was hoping beyind hope that it would be...