skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Why do all companies have to operate the way you want them to[?]

Obviously they don't, but I'd like them to. I've no right to tell you you have to save energy (for example), but I'd rather you did. Your right to do something is in no way impaired by my right to have an opinion about what you do, and vice versa. Nobody's saying Apple HAS to run a certain way, but boy would we prefer if they did a few things differently.

> Why do you have to buy their things?

I think the problem with Apple in particular is that they're Really, Really good. The products they put out are normally class-leading - I have a Droid, but the iPhone is just flat sexier. That said, I won't buy an iPhone, despite the fact that I think it's a really sexy, really well-made piece of hardware, because of certain policy and design decisions Apple made.

I'm obviously not Apple's target demographic - my droid is rooted and I spend most of my day staring at a terminal window, so they're not going to do a whole lot to make my life easier, and I understand that, but it's still frustrating to see a drop-dead sexy piece of hardware that doesn't live up to what I see as it's potential.

IOW: Sour Grapes.
How about the more general case of gray and black hat link building techniques? Especially in internet marketing and certain SEO communities, everything from forum profile backlinking to blog comments and mass article submissions are done daily to rank sites in all niches, not just the really spammy viagra-type sites.

There's a growing concern/consensus that in loads of non-spammy niches, the only way to get decent rankings is to build links.

I know this is naturally something that would be very hard for Google to tackle (since if 'junk' backlinks = domain penalty, black hatters would simply spam their competitors' sites with backlinks and get their competitors deindexed), but are there active efforts being made so that gray and black hat link building campaigns aren't (in some cases) pretty essential to a site getting good rankings?
It's not about minimal, it's about scope. I see HN as content-based system, where as, Digg and rest of the others went the route of social-based. The site where the content is the king, is still valuable versus the site where people are the king. There is a trade off with reputation of course, one has to first build the reputation and credibility before one can claim a solid content-based system.

If you recall, the problem started with Digg when people started gaming it. There were stories after stories of how people are gaming the system. This is when they first lost their credibility.

There is a fine line.
I love that he protests the "He is not a lawyer" with "Some of my blog posts have been recommended by leading legal websites"
There's a major difference between eating soy products and eating washed soy proteins that are combined with corn to create heavily processed foods. And while soy isn't directly correlated with obesity, it's usefulness as a protein has created additional venues for corn to be used.

Furthermore, corn is generally used on feedlots for beef, and disastrously: beef there contains whacked-out levels of fat types, and is much more fatty overall.

In terms of internationalism: the French, long held as bastions of good eating, are experiencing similar patterns of obesity as per the US in the early '90's as French diets change to fast foods and prepared meals.
So the OO.o binaries -- http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#tested-full -- include unit tests?
There are so many more people involved than just building the site, so one of my goals was to produce a system that would allow everyone involved to get listed
A Gamer's Misspelled Rant Becomes An Epic Viral Video
This is just lip service - Google's quality has dropped off and its really obvious. Recently, I've been regularly comparing the results I get from Google and the ones I get from Bing. Needless to say, Bing's far more relevant. The biggest point people have made are on the money searches like "MP3 Player" but the results I've been comparing have been local searches and programming things like: "show/hide text boxes in Javascript." In Google all I get is links to Amazon and other random results to link farms like javascriptworld.com. In Bing, I get links to forums and tutorials which is what I'm looking for.

Time and time again Google has failed. I've already moved on to Bing and Duckduckgo and I would recommend you do too. Unless you like digging through hordes of useless SERPS.
Yes, win7 was a success, but weighted with Vista's failure & its 5 years to debut, I won't call it so. wp7? we still have to wait it out, but again, it'll have to be weighted along with Kin's billion dollar failure. xbox360 does not define Microsoft. I think you're looking more at what he did, which isn't much in the past 10+ years, in terms of both market penetration (except for IE, but it's declining) and in terms of market capital, instead of what could have been done in hands of more capable person. If Eric Schmidt or say Steve Jobs were running Microsoft in the past 10 years, I don't think Microsoft would languish as is. If the board had been doing its job, it had to have planed his exit for years. Why it hasn't happened yet could be lack of better candidate or lack of excuse like HP's dismiss of Hurd.
The author doesn't really expound why 1password wouldn't work. It's available for Mac/Win and integrates nicely with FF, IE(Win), Chrome and Safari(Mac).

That software is indispensable to me, as I often login to numerous dev and test instances of webapps in addition to my shopping and forum sites... I can now have long, secure passwords/phrases that are autogenerated. In addition, with dropbox, I have 1password distributed on all my devices.

I avoid the Google problem he mentioned by using separate browsers (ie, FF for work, Safari/Chrome for personal) or separate computers/devices (I only really use Facebook on my mobile). If multiple instances of a particular browser is desired, something like http://fluidapp.com/ or Mozilla Prism could be used to segregate the profiles.

In short, the author ignores existing products and is re-inventing the process.
Not to mention it actually costs less to buy a bushel of corn than it does to produce it

!... but... but... but that's not a reason to use all that "surplus" cheap corn to make ethanol. It's a reason to stop subsidizing corn.
The New Yorker is pretty much the standout print publication of our age (certainly in the US). Expecting everyone to be this good is understandable but unrealistic.
Microsoft doesn't charge you to develop for their PCs and neither does Apple. However, if you'd like to develop for the XBox or the Windows 7 phone, you are under almost the same terms as Apple.

This is something Apple pioneered, and you can bet other companies are going to want a slice of that sweet sweet revenue pie.
Google News is "The Most Efficient System" : CJR
FWIW, the Ford family used to have an even more favorable arrangement for their shares of Ford Motor Company. The family preferred shares were the only ones with voting rights; the publicly traded shares got dividends, but didn't have voting rights at all. They revamped this arrangement ten years ago, but the family "class B" shares still have disproportional voting rights. See http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,823982,00.h...
It depends on the quality of the content, in my opinion. Ultimately magazines are 'content farms'. Various game review sites are 'content farms', since they're both designed to 'churn out' content and articles. (To give a couple of quick - albeit silly - examples). The difference is that the content in these two cases is high quality, usually containing images and possibly videos, and with lots of unique ideas and opinions given.

So I guess it depends. If a 'content farm' produces good, helpful content, then that's great and should be encouraged (even if it is done on a massive scale). But when it comes to a case like WiseGeek where content is spat out en masse, even if the content is crappy and really short, then it becomes a problem.
Agreed. Any time I can ditch the password, I do. Certs are a pain in the ass to setup, though. SSH without passwords is pure freedom.
my confusion i think stems from the fact that it looks like the results (with the star above) on the bottom happen when i was hitting the merge button (with two words in the box). when in fact the results are not the seemingly random one at the bottom.
It plateaus around 195 distance after about 15 generations.
I found the problem: it works iff the HTML uses an absolute URL for the image.
I did read the site further, and realised quickly it wasn't a US-centric group. I am by far a reactionary person and if it made me initially click away, I felt it was better to make a comment so the author could see it, rather than keeping it myself - considering the post is calling for collaboration.

The use of the image has remained culturally strong because of the many brilliant satirical treatments it has received, not because it is a powerful signifier calling for people to work together.
From the release - Facebook "expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012."

TC interpretation - "Clearly, it looks like Facebook plans to IPO no later than April 2012."

My understanding (worth sharing, if I'm correct, as I think TC's surety in their statement is misleading) is that Facebook can report publicly for as long as they like without having to go through an IPO and list.

While they're unlikely to do so indefinitely, I don't think their statement means that "Clearly" they'll be doing an IPO in the next 15 months.
You can also up the mutation rate to knock it out of a rut
Yes, the title just didn't have the same ring to it
I was under the impression that, at least in the US, it was now legal to jailbreak your hardware.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ytech_wguy/ytech_wguy_tc3236

Did something change?
Glad to hear with it resonated with you. We're definitely looking at other platforms but for right now the iPad was the easy choice for us to target initially.
For sure. At least as of about a year ago the record was somewhere around 1.3B total for Clear. So not only did they break the record for total investment, but they also raised more in a single round than anyone else had ever raised in total.

Curious that when breaking all the records they don't even have a explanation for why they're doing it. Perhaps they think the funding environment is going to change for the worse.
I've never lived in the Bay, so I can't say. But I've recently done apartment searches in San Diego and Phoenix, and by far the strategy of most landlords is just to put up a "For Rent" sign with a phone number outside.
>How does the average Joe get in on the shorting action

FTFY

I am chomping at the bit to short them so badly.
> As a user I think it sucks, but I have to respect that as a business strategy.

No, I do not think respect is quite what it deserves. It does not flow from their capability, but from particular exploitation of given laws that allow market restriction. Respect them for making good products, not for avoiding competition. Respect them for persuading you to buy their products, not for preventing you from having more choice.
Why does the site for this product read like it's trying to sell me age defying supplements?

Worth a quick eval but the site leaves a bad taste.
Could you live with yourselves if the company made WAY more from your app then they paid you for it? If yes, then sell.

I'd just ask for the number that would buy me freedom. And if they gave me that, I'd happily sell.And I wouldn't care how much more they make.
There’s no reason to see it as zero-sum between writers and curators. One of the reasons The New Yorker has such good writing is that is has such good curators, or “editors” as they’re called in publishing jargon. Kottke (assuming he’s as good as he used to be – I haven’t been keeping up) is a net benefit to the reading public because he exposes and encourages good writing.
A quick ruby script to grab texts from your iPhone and print them in a PDF
Something tells me you have a good chance of hearing about it before it happens.
I frankly cannot understand why, but on my old yahoo account at least 50% of the spam gets through, including those in suspicious russian (which, since I do not speak the language and have always flagged as spam, makes zero sense to me).

So, either the gmail engineers are better than most, or it is still not trivial to get it right.
There needs to be a reality check at some point, however.

A company's needs might not be in tune with Heroku's general security policy. If you're creating an app that handles personal information, then I hope to god that your developer/ops guys are security minded.

This particular vulnerability is quite embarrassing, however: separation of environments should at least be a given on Heroku.
Interesting?

✓ web server + ssl + dynamic content

✓ runs on linux

✓+ superlative performance claims

✓ free

☹ binary only download?

☹ no source?

☹ tenuous legal reasoning displayed on web site

No thanks.

(And I wish Unicode added the WTF glyph for posts like this. http://www.typophile.com/node/16343 )
Hello there,

First of all, the design is very clean. The homepage as a very nice greeting box and a basic news feed of the current project.

I enjoy the UI throughout the website. Again, very clean. Although, the black gradient footer is unnecessary. If you want a gradient, I would make it much more subtle to avoid it from looking tacky.

I would also shrink the header. A smaller, more simple logo would be much more memorable. You can place the logged in user info horizontally beside the "ADD PROJECT" button.

I would also prefer the "skills" to be placed in a categorized list format rather then a tag cloud. Easier to find what you are looking for. Same goes for the "roles".

I would also like to be able to sort the "members". You could sort them by project, geographical location or even profession.

I enjoy the relationship capability similar to a Twitter follow.I registered for an account without any problems.

I would like some AJAX capabilities added to the forms. You can use it for validation. Keep the server side validation in case the user has Javascript off. You can also add some style to the form inputs. Maybe an inset effect. The "Submit" buttons could have a similar style to the "ADD PROJECT" button.

This is a great idea for developers to show what they can do. This is a great app for freelancers trying to build a reputation. Great app.

Good luck!

Karl
> But detecting duplicate content should not be very difficult, esp. now that Google indexes everything almost in real time. The site that had the content first is necessarily canonical and the others are the copies?

Not necessarily. The rate at which Google refreshes its crawl of a site, and how deep it crawl, depend on how often a site updates and its PageRank numbers. If a scraper site updates more often and has higher PR than the sites it's scraping, Google will be more likely to find the content there than at its source. Identifying the scraper copy as canonical because it was encountered first would be wrong.
I said "the average user", not "all Mac users". It's the same thing with PCs - the 90% of people who aren't experts or ninjas or developers are web-itunes-facebook-email people. You may not know many of them, but that's a result of your professional and social circles.

Apple doesn't sell millions of computers every quarter to Rails developers, it sells them to 90%-ers. Sure, some developers buy them, but they're not the main market.
Speed has its advantage, as in the case of this story posted here a mere four hours after what it reports about: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128825
they'll probably register the securities/file an S-1 by April but won't actually hold a sale of new shares until Augustish (Google followed the same timetable in 04).
Would be nice to see some dates on the list so we can see how long the modules have been around or when they were last updated. Otherwise pretty awesome to see Cappuccino is still alive. 280North's website seems dead.
In my opinion Apple is the best marketing company out there and they just happen to sell (mostly) consumer level computing and entertainment devices.
Thanks by the comment!
Well, about counting LoC it depend, anyway on the blog post you will find comments with some pov about the topic.
I see. My excuse is that Khan Academy hasn't covered this yet. :)
Meguru is the world's first EV rickshaw it didn't know it needed (video)
For the sake of the argument: if you get 3000 messages of spam per day it means that it takes a lot of effort to check them all.

Also, as you receive a lot of spam, the distribution is highly skewed towards spam, so it is unlikely you find a false positive because there are a lot more true positive, not because the false positives are absent.

So there is a chance you are getting false positives, but have failed to spot them (I know it happens to me).
If my understanding is correct, rather than creating a new thread for each client request, it handles connections asynchronously, much like Nginx. But unlike Nginx, it uses only a single process, so it doesn't require any interprocess communication overhead. Too bad they don't release the source code.
And I hear this is the year of Linux on the desktop too
Ask HN: Please give your experience/opinions to help me with my future path
Okay. This is my situation:

- Live in Melbourne, Australia

- Very interested in tech startups or tech businesses

- Also, as of recently, interested in the 4HWW lifestyle

- Currently in final year of highschool

- Debating between (major: CompSci):

- a decent uni (Monash - top 250 in the world) 10 minutes drive from me

- pro: easy, cheap ($8k per year)

- an awesome uni in the SF/Valley area (UCB/Stanford)

- pro (for all sf options): live with people like me, who are more open to my crazy ideas, and who are the desired customer for many of my ideas

- con: extremely expensive, away from family friends, might not like living there

- a reasonable uni in the SF/Valley area (or community college?)

- going to Monash in Australia, and then applying to transfer to UCB

- con: no guarantee on being able to transfer

- ditto the above, though from a community college in SF

- not going to uni at all, and travelling 4HWW style

- con: miss out on the 'uni experience'

- pro: much free time

What I would love, and what would help me:

- Please tell me anything you can to help my decision, including:

- Your experiences

- Your opinions

- Contacts for people you know who went through something similar (international admission to Stanford/UCB, moving to the USA for a startup, etc) - or at least the decision (eg considered moving to SF for a startup but didn't)

- Good places (forums, organizations, etc) or people to give questions like this post to

- Would taking a holiday to check out the USA help me? If we did - what should I do if the trip was solely for the purpose of making this decision?
How is this suggestion any different than telling the gov't to choose industries?

i.e. invest in 'clean tech' or 'electric cars' or 'the internet' or 'nuclear energy' or whatever.

The point of the free market is that no one knows where the next major innovation will come from.

Y Combinator is a product of the free market working. Not some government bureaucracy. Encouraging incubators is a bad, bad idea because all that will happen is that a lot of money will be wasted very quickly.

Just simplify the tax code, reduce the marginal corporate tax rate and get out of the way.

Let the private sector handle the rest.

Regulate the industries that need to be regulated of course - finance, health care, etc. But even then, loosen up where is reasonable.

FWIW, I am not a 'political conservative', just a government skeptic. I would much rather the free market decide who the winners are, than some gov't bureaucrat.

This reminds me of trying to 'buy' the top Digg users. Or buy your way onto the 'suggested list' at Twitter. Lame and won't work in the long run.

Edit: Also, when the government 'encourages' Accelerators, then the focus shifts from the entrepreneur to the fund manager (that is essentially what PG, and the partners are). In other words, people stop wanting to start their own company and want to start their own accelerator and they figure out how to game the system so that they can make their 2 & 20. Basically, it becomes another bubble and valuations would sky rocket. You think we are seeing frothy valuations now? HAH!
exploring lift is the free (and more updated) version of the apress book. Lift in action is not completed yet, but already provides a nice starting point to Lift. It has a tutorial like feel to it.
http://stable.simply.liftweb.net/ is the founders book, which has been in the workings for a couple of months only.
Looks like we'll have some data to back up these assumptions. That's all they've been in the past.

Who says entertainment and quality have to be mutually exclusive? I don't. I think the counterpoint to this is what got us in this situation where people are turning off the tube en masse.
And we're here... anybody in the Raleigh / Durham / Wake Forest / Chapel Hill / Cary / etc. area, come join us! :-)
i registered mobilejason.com for the same reason...
Show HN: GitHubby, my iPhone GitHub client
My new iPhone app was finally approved yesterday, and its now in the appstore:

http://escoz.com/githubby

It's a github client for the iPhone, and its free.. As i bet a lot of you guys here in HN use GitHub, I would love to receive some more feedback!
Thanks guys, love HN!
Protect your passwords and text notes
⌘-} in Chrome and Firefox. ⌘-] navigates history in those 2 browsers, which works more consistently than backspace too.
"if Heroku simply spawned a new instance (they're already running on EC2) for each customer, wouldn't this be mitigated?"

Yes, but that'd cost a ton more than what they're doing right now. Consider the number of apps that they are hosting at the free level right now. Offering private instances as an upsell might make some folks happy though.
Have you noticed sites that scrape google groups content ranking higher than the google group they've scraped? How can that possibly happen? Still seems rampant.
Ask HN: Have you ever moused over the "Green Site" logo?
Thanks for noticing that Kottke's post is really an epic troll.
"As any programmer will tell you, you don’t ship your unit tests with your product. Unit tests are tools used internally to ensure the quality of the software before you ship it."

Two things.

1. When you do Open Source - you ship the source.
2. I don't remember copyright law being concerned with "shipping". I think "distribution" is what counts and if it's in the git tree - that's distribution.
they want you to have a perspective
This is HN, so I'll give an example related to my startup. We make a wireless (802.11g) flash drive called the AirStash, which works like an ordinary USB SD card reader on a PC and uses HTML5 for the interface on wireless devices. Here's an example of spam content from eHow that talks about our product:

http://www.ehow.com/how_6861903_install-wireless-flash-drive...

"Wireless flash drives communicate with wireless devices using wireless protocols."

You don't say?

"Advanced wireless flash drives stream data to more than one device at a time."

Well, we're the only one out there, so I guess they're all advanced!

"Insert the USB portion of your wireless flash drive into an available USB port on your computer. Your computer should automatically recognize the device. If not, click the "Start" button and then click "My Computer." Double click the flash drive in the removable media section. This opens the drive and displays the files. Double click the executable file (start.exe, for example) to start the installation process."

Uh, no. No software installation is ever required, a point we make abundantly clear on our web site.

Basically, it's all wrong.
If it were "ideal", it wouldn't be game-able. I'm not going to claim that this ideal is possible!