skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using meta programming whenever possible
Ask HN: Better to use Javascript or CSS
I have a lot of animations to fulfill on my website, right now I'm doing pure CSS for these animations. Is it better to use CSS or is it better to use Jquery?
Venture Capital Deal Buzz: SportsMEDIA Technology Corporation
not really. Consider for example yahoo's implementation: when I get redirected to Y! for login, I have my personal login seal on the page that grants me that I am actually talking to yahoo and not some scam site.
Verizon will offer only $30 unlimited data plan for iPhone 4 users
Great article. It would be cool if someone posted a similary article for Hyde: http://ringce.com/hyde
Show HN: PopBuzz.me A Social Filtering News Aggregator
URL: http://www.popbuzz.me

we aggregate news from hundreds of popular news websites or blogs and sort them based on how many times they have been shared on facebook, twitter and google buzz. By doing that, we can filter out the most interesting news out there, to save your time looking for news over different websites.
I actually like this model too ... you're never going to get everybody to use one provider for storing their identities, because nobody will go and create one unless they absolutely need to.

So, it makes sense to go where users are. What I think needs to be done is standardize an api for the sites like twitter, facebook, Google and who-knows-what-in-the-future to use in providing accessing to user information to developers ...

That way, when superdupersocialnetworking.com explodes and has 1 billion users, providing sign on access to its users for your app is as simple as changing one or two lines of code.

That would be really awesome
http://www.popbuzz.me
Yes, that's understood. But what are the gunslinger character's motivations behind wanting to kill the bad guys? After all, we encounter really bad guys all the time in our lives, e.g. Jared Lee Loughner. If he were out in the wild, would you be willing to seek out and kill him. It takes a certain kind of person to be motivated to do this. What are those motivations? For being a Western that delves into some of these issues, I love The Unforgiven.
Using some Google customer's secret information to trade also counts as insider trading. If anything, it's more unethical.
Good point. I have seen some linux distros rename apps according to functionality. So instead of a "Firefox" entry in the application menu they'd have "Browse The Internet" or just "Internet".
would love feedback on the valuation tool in this article for anyone who has tried it.
Assurance contracts are the one I'm mainly interested in.
Facebook has a registration tool, too, now: http://swombat.com/2011/1/24/facebook-registration-tool

This might be the good middle ground between facebook login and an entirely new login... a facebook-assisted signup procedure.
I don't know if it is the "making of" book you mean, but there is a good book called "The Lost Worlds of 2001"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Worlds_of_2001

I found one at a used bookstore ages ago and it was a fascinating look at the partnership and conflict between Kubrick and Clarke as well as a look at the different ideas and plots they discarded.
Taco Bell "meat" only 35% beef...
All the random rake stuff I wrote while writing this post itself as I came up with the ideas for them, so the code is kinda dirty and needs a good refactoring. :)
Not having seen it before, I was confused when I landed on the page. I wasn't expecting an editor, just an intro page. I would put a traditional landing page up with a heavily emphasized "try it live" section.

edit: corrected ipad autocorrects. I don't thing a panting page is appropriate at all.
I don’t think people really like it, they pick it because their choices are overwhelming, confusing and subtle.

Comic Sans’ message is obvious, it’s easy to pick out in the long list of fonts in Word and has a memorable name. It’s obviously and painfully friendly and playful.

How are normal people supposed to be able to tell that a font like Georgia is also much friendlier than the angular and rickety Times New Roman while at the same time being entirely appropriate for nearly every imaginable formal setting (unlike Comic Sans)?

Friendly fonts exists on everyones’ PC, it’s just that Word’s font picker doesn’t allow you to tell the difference at a glance unless it’s really obvious like in the case of Comic Sans.

Using fonts is hard, that’s why most people who are not used to doing it and have no experience with it pick extreme fonts with obvious differences.
I was about to post this very link! It takes upwards of 1 year to get stable and rewriting at that point without considering refactoring and/or creative solutions is cumulative team/company failure.
I want hardware support. I want a set of open specs on a laptop. That way FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, and Slackware could all possibly run on it. I don't want to purchase a system in which if you use their preinstalled version of Ubuntu it works but anything else your hosed.

So when I look at a 'Linux' laptop that is what I'm looking at it for. Can I run FreeBSD with working sound/sleep/wireless?
This is easy to solve for the developers.

Just generate a unsubscribe url for each user and send the same link on every email.
Something like http://www.example.com/newsletter/unsubscribe?id=6e85d15bdbd...

A simple newsletter registration doesn't require that much security anyways.
Been there but with a confirmation email at the end...
Cloud APIs are like military parades
It seems to me that every generation has to learn about IT the hard way. Not just devs but also MBAs. The problems that your IT guy solves are not going away.

1. How to glue disparate systems together.

2. Determine what services to standardize on.

3. Prevent business types from choosing tech sizzle over steak.

4. Translate technology to human readible form.

So long as control and management of information is important to businesses there will be sysadmins.
Insincere is comparing climate change to eugenics. Eugenics was purely a theory and promoted taking away people's right to have children (or in the worst cases, genocide). Climate change involves hard evidence that the world is warming and demands economic changes to mitigate.

Any policy debate is going to be far more complicated that any testable hypothesis and scepticism is healthy, but your comparison to eugenics is bullshit.
I hate it when this happens, especially because I read most of my email on my phone and I can't be bothered to go through all that. So I just mark as spam.
Why on earth would you want Flickr to be bought by Google? Do you want one public company to own the whole Internet?
2010 US digital music purchases reach new highs
The nerd and wannabe designer in me was fascinated by reading the article, but I struggled with the takeaways other than a detailed reason to "not use comic sans" (which I think I've been able to do post 1997.)

Are there more conclusions in the article that I should apply to my designs beyond the typography choice?
Ticket master needs 72 hours to unsubscribe from their mailing list. I cant begin to fathom the logic behind this.
Geeks optimize everything. 99$ extra for Win (esp. if you don't use it) is 99$ wasted. Many of us are also finicky about taking a stand. A thousand geeks saying no to 99$ extra is a lot of money and a community in itself.
I agree it's not easy to pull off with no starting fan base, but isn't that true of breaking into the industry the old way too? An unknown band with no fan base is not going to have an easy time convincing an RIAA label to sign them and put out their album. I'm not sure their current problem (put out demos, find fans) is actually harder or lower-probability than the older problem was (put out demos, impress A/R person).
The RFC curmudgeon in me says we shouldn't be using login forms anyway; we should be using HTTP Digest authentication. No passwords are sent over the wire, in the clear or not.
Microsoft offers olive branch to hackers of Windows Phone
They just want to make it effort. O well. Spam.
I had this idea several years ago. What stopped me going forward was a feeling I couldn't make the game spy-like enough to be as fun as I'd like. There are practical limitations to the real world vs. virtual world as some comments already point out -- potential legality/abuse issues etc. Although I thought I could push some of those bounds as much as possible I still couldn't envision how to keep gameplay new and interesting.

I'm glad to see this concept going forward! I would be in, except I don't know how interesting it could be considering the practical limitations as I saw them. From your description I imagine something like: Agent A hides Object along a Mountain Trail where Agent B must find and recover it. That does sound like it could be a fun activity to get fresh air and exercise, but would get old pretty quick in terms of fun factor for a real spy-like experience. I'm pretty sure there would be more in store for the game than that, but how much more is the question...
Good luck guys, eager to see a SA startup make it big (well post Thawte at least)
Meetups I was planning on attending have been cancelled because it was too much trouble for me and the other 3 people also planning on attending to carry out all the steps necessary to RSVP on meetup.com.
BofA mails your PIN to the same address as the card it unlocks
What You Need to Know About the New York Times' Pay Wall
Nice article. Liking the clean new look.
Which you've paid for separately. This is inclusive if you've got an EC2 server.
(Sorry, this is a bit off-topic)

For some reason I always seem to have exactly the kind of people around me in the theater that Ebert describes, whether the movie is a sophisticated one like "2001" or just your ordinary Hollywood junk. And I've heard others complain about the same thing.

Going to the movies used to be a very special thing (at least to me). The big screen, the darkness, the comfortable seats, the sound, fresh popcorn... These days, you can get almost all of these things at home, sans annoying people making phone calls in the row behind you. Movie lovers now often prefer to spend their money on home entertainment system, even though they'd have to go a lot of movies until they've spent the same kind of money.

Does anyone have a theory why this changed? I mean, the experience of seeing a movie in a theater? Or is it just me?
You know, as hackers become more and more responsible as custodians of the conduit through which citizens access government records, including court records, I hope this article will spark some discussion. Good find.
Ofcourse, they can be submitted multiple times.

Here's what I thought - If you post something with the same external link, the post will deleted if the earlier one was posted within certain interval, say two days.
Comic Sans is despised precisely because middle-aged, middle-class moms love it. It's not great, but it's not as terrible as the design snobs, itching to deploy their portfolio of expensive Zapf typefaces, are making it out to be.

You want a bad font? Try the garbage that MTV used for titling in the mid-90s. They stopped using nice, clean Kabel for music video lower thirds and started using this uneven-baseline, uneven-stroke-width trash font.

The 90s sucked in so many ways...
I doubt those hn users that think this is working will say so. ;)
I always assumed these BAD experiences were done on purpose. The more steps involved, the less likely you'll go through them all.
What would you use an Alienware Linux machine for?
Also dont require me to email you from the address that I want to unsubscribe. Most of my email is forwarded. A token in a URL is all that is needed, like maushu said.

Previously I have just created a filter to archive the email rather than hitting spam, but flagging it would do more damage to the sender. I guess I'll consider next time if its bad enough that their poor admin needs to deal with his domains being blacklisted. It's almost certainly not his fault after all, but all the misery will be dumped on him when "THE EMAILS ARENT GETTING THROUGH!"
The problem is that the number of people hosting their own OpenID solutions is, and will be, rather insignificant.
ebay?

Theirs is the worst I've ever experienced.

Think I eventually had to close my ebay account entirely to get rid of all mail (which was after 4 support tickets).
If I get a unique link and click it, it's me. You don't have to verify the login, because if I don't remember the password, I'm just going to reset it via the exact same email address I got the link from. Also, it's likely that if someone sends me a newsletter, I used a one off password for that site and I would have to do the reset anyways.

If the unsubscribe action chain is longer than setting up a new email filter - you're doing it wrong. Not the OP, but I do leave and add the address to auto-spam as soon as I need to log in / do something else.
That may be true, but from what I remember, the transition past 2000 was very difficult with Google Apps. In the end you'll have to go with a email provider like SES (or the now troubled PostmarkApp).
Interview with Instapaper's Marco Arment
Taco Bell sued for calling its food 'beef'
Mmmmmm... double chalupa.
http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index....
Egypt is pissed
It is a lightweight, inexpensive, spaceship-deployable sheet. Currently it is being used as a drag parachute, but it could just as easily be used as a sail.

I think.
How to dual-boot WP7 and Android on the same SD card?
Humans advance on their own accord. The monoliths direct nothing, they're just intriguing objects that arise curiosity.
For what you're looking to do, once a day is plenty often enough. (How much does karma change in a day and does it matter if your site is a few points behind?)

If it were me, I'd cache the results of an api call to HN with a last-retrieved timestamp and check against that for requests > 24 hours to retrieve again.
It could well be that they have a 'service provider' for bulk email that requires a list of email addresses and content to be handed over in advance. I can't imagine what effects it would have on user privacy though.

Or perhaps the text was written by someone who had no idea of how subscribe/unsubscribe worked and took a 'reasonable' guess.
I'll just guess that their email marketing database is separate from their users database and there is an update process that runs nightly to add or remove contacts and their preferences. However if there is a problem during the update, they want to be sure they have given a large enough window of time to correct it without either exceeding the time frame given to the user or having to shut down emailing until the problem is fixed. The other possibility is that they queue up email jobs for approval a couple days in advance instead of pulling the data from a live system when it is time to go out.
It's nice to see an example of real life security holes instead of software security holes
Submitted because actual point-of-purchase sales data (what Nielsen Soundscan tracks) doesn't seem to jive with the decline in sales that the RIAA reports (inferred from shipment data.)

Nielsen reports that total sales have been increasing every year except last year, but album sales have been going down, down (and I understand that album sales are where record companies make most of their money.)
"World's first unfurling of a solar sail in orbit" would be quite a bit more accurate.
This was my wife's experience. She recently signed up for her own eBay account with her work email (she was buying me a Christmas present, ha) and was dismayed at the amount of spam they sent. Went through exactly this and was in utter outrage that eBay said she might still get spam for up to four weeks.

I don't know how typical she is, but you do wonder whether eBay's mercenary attitude towards spam isn't a detriment to their public reputation.
Yeah, the last time I watched 2001, it struck me that it essentially advocates intelligent design.
Sendgrid is half as expensive once you get beyond sending a handful of emails. $.005 vs $.01

I am a sendgrid customer, and unless Amazon is cheaper and can solve the deliverability issues, there is no way I'm switching.
Can Apple Find More Hits Without Its Tastemaker?
Which was still infinitely better than racking your own servers and then, later, driving to the colo at 4:30 am because of yet another contingency you failed to anticipate in your HA planning. One of the earlier contingencies was that the colo's "remote hands" service was actually staffed by bonobos.
Attack of the vapor tablet « Observatory
The trouble with these financial models is that once they become common knowledge, it's too late. The market absorbs these algorithms into its pricing mechanism and renders no further arbitrage profits.
I don’t think aliased 12px Comic Sans (a heavily hinted font, with large x-height and even strokes, designed explicitly for the screen) can fairly be compared with whatever Garamond variant he flashed on screen (a font intended for use with high-resolution printing on paper, by appearances not at all hinted, and maybe even a type 1 font). A reasonable comparison would be to Verdana or Georgia, which would nicely show the Comic Sans version to be dramatically worse looking.
I've tried unsubscribing and just ended up flagging it because I didn't want to log in. Typically I don't remember my login information because I'm not that interested in the first place.
Amandla
The History of Social Networking
Companies that have non-public information about companies that they trade with are barred from using that information to trade stocks. For example if company B which manufactures bullets orders gunpowder from company G, and company B starts ordering a lot more gunpowder, employees from company G can't buy more stock of company B due to that knowledge. It seems like Google could fall into the category of company G since it has non-public search terms from other companies.
It's not hard to put together your own system including a dedicated hardware RAID card. You should even be able to specify the components and have your local computer shop do the assembly.
The real answer is that for the web to continue as it is, no such system must exist. If you require a single authentication, the web stops being a loosely couple system and becomes dependent on a single entity.
The music industries real problem is not having a new format that they can resell you all the same albums on for 5x the price.

Or it could just be piracy!

For example UK cinema attendances fell from 1.6Bn/year in the 1940s to 55M/year in the early 80s - this was entirely sue to people seeing the future of being able to download movies - and not due to the crap films produced in the 70s and 80s.
If the email is sent by a US company and you can't unsubscribe in two clicks, they are probably violating the CAN-SPAM act and you could most likely sue them if you were so inclined.
"They'd also like to measure the pressure of sunlight on the sail, although atmospheric drag could overwhelm that effect."

Dual purpose study.
I led a counter case where a rewrite was very successful. There had been a major component of the architecture that just approached the problem wrong at its inception. Changes that one would have thought should take a few hours or day to make took weeks. And once you dug into the code, you learned why. It lacked adequate tests, proper componentization, error handling and operational visibility. It was far beyond refactoring, it was just ill conceived. It's poor functioning had cascaded into other systems; they were riddled with hacks to compensate for the problem system's deficiencies; technical debt had become a cancer that spread around the architecture. At a certain point, we declared the technical debt had reached technical bankruptcy and acquired buy-in across the organization (execs to engineers) that we needed to start a new code base.

However, part of making the rewrite succeed was sucking it up and doing continued maintenance on the legacy system. It was no fun but it had to be done. Things that couldn't be implemented in a reasonable time with the legacy system but were high priorities were implemented in the new system to assure that the win wasn't just one of purity of essence, it was enhanced functioning. Enough was learned from what worked and what didn't in the legacy system that we had a good deal of clarity on what requirements we wanted to fulfill. The hand wringing over excessive feature creep and other foibles that can make rewrites fail were attacked with discipline.

I've heard of many big rewrites that failed but don't buy the argument that they demonstrate that it can't be done. It can.
This is true unless you're a bank or something. Email is insecure.

I have to log-in to unsubscribe from investment notices to my bank, and I'm cool with that because I don't want Mallory reading the stream and ubsubing me.
same here, I feel guilty for clicking 'spam' on emails that do not really spam but demand me to login and and change subscription settings of my account, which takes way more than 5 clicks but I still click on 'spam' because it is easier and faster and because the sender could insert a 'unsubscribe' link in every email but for some reason did not.
I think that movies used to be a viewing event. Now, they're a social event. They're where you go when Micky D's or Chipotle is too bright.

Recently, I've read (not confirmed to me) that some theatres have developed problems with bedbugs. That's the final nail in the coffin, for me. I'll stay home, where I can still have an undisturbed viewing experience and, ya know, like, actually enjoy the film.
Wolfenstein 1-D
Art Is The New Math
Incidentally, the startup my partner and I are working on is very much inspired by the same notion found in this XKCD comic. We're entering private beta in two weeks so if you're interested, shoot me an email.
I would bet something along the lines of my first born that the algorithm is significantly more complicated than you make it out to be.

jwz's threading algorithm from the 90's - http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

But, if it's so easy, I urge you to write and open source it, so that other products might take advantage of it :)
I agree that comic sans is the wrong choice of font in most applications, both from a legitimacy and readability standpoint.
However, if you're into game development, I've discovered no better font for in-game text. Almost all other popular fonts looks out of place in a game.
Introducing the Amazon Simple Email Service
Google Apps Stocks Its Marketplace Full of Educational Apps
In my limited experience, the actual costs have been small enough that I regret even spending time on a detailed spreadsheet based cost model to predict costs.

At some point, that will change. At that point I'll have a very clear basis for calculating ROI on migrating to different infrastructure.
Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store rather than NoSQLs?
Except then if you forward that newsletter or message to anyone else, you've unwittingly sent them your login credentials as well!
Zurich, Dublin and Paris (OR nerds, Chromium, and others) come to mind. We're always looking for solid people for our Datacenters, but they're Sekrit. Ssh!
With most of dedicated server providers now, you can get any server with a 1 month contract, no strings attached, for a fraction of the price of an equivalent ec2 instance, and good IO as a bonus. And good providers usually delivers within 24h.

I love aws services and use them myself, but for ec2, but I doubt most users have such volatile needs. The main advantage I see, for aws users (non ec2) is to have everything in the same place.
Space Case
I suggest Red Stapler Office.
Great stuff guys! well done, looking forward to seeing more about SnapBill in the media
You're right, I misspoke when I said "innovate" - what I meant was, Amazon's goal is to create reliable base-level services for the developers of the world. Whereas a Sendgrid might provide unsubscribe management and fancy graphing, I don't see Amazon adding on additional services like this.