skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think regulation can solve those problems, but there is no doubt that Regulation helps stop things like virus outbreaks and companies from doing anything they want - like putting the cheapest paint (with the highest concentration of lead) on kid's toys.

Not saying the gov't should regulate everything, obviously not, but there should be some regulation on somethings.

Things to do with health, finance, and food are clear ones. Especially given the current structure of the tax code that provides subsidies and tax incentives/distortions to politically connected parties.

As Milton Friedman says, big business hates the free market. So the government has to protect it - by regulating lightly.

Edit: Btw, your example about the iPhone app, drives my original point home even more. The government is incompetent when trying to pick winners. Their job is to protect wider society from things that can threaten health (cancer causing additives, wide spread infections, virii - not the computer type, etc.). Although, there could be an argument for allowing the companies to do whatever they want and let the market handle them. If a drug company releases a drug that kills a bunch of people, I think that pretty much decides the fate of that company - however, that is predicated on the fact that the drug industry is indeed free and firms can enter and leave at will (without barriers). The issue with that though, is that is politically impossible to have a government stand by and do nothing when 10 - 50 people have been killed by a drug put out by a company. So no politician would dare do that....even though it might work out better for society, assuming of course, that we can avoid those 'fringe' cases where drugs create an infectious disease that kills millions and spreads like crazy (possibly creating zombies, although that would be a pretty Epic scenario IRL assuming I am not one of those zombies and I have a shotgun with unlimited ammo :) )
Wayback Machine Way Better in Beta
And if you could elaborate on those "dozens of problems" then we would be most accepting. Broad, overarching statements aren't beginner friendly.
No, you're focusing on a tiny segment of what he said. There's a host of factors that go into the trust, a big one of which Apple has a tendency to keep its products updated and polished up vs. a lot of other manufacturers. When you buy a mac, you're relatively certain that they're not going to leave you out to dry just to make a quick sale.

One notable exception recently (though it may have technical reasons) is the old Apple TV not getting Netflix where the new one did. People expected better of Apple, and thus complained bitterly.

EDIT: He also mentions that the other manufacturers offer an overwhelming number of barely-differentiated products, which you have to read about in-depth in order to decide what's really right for you. Paralysis of choice is a very bad thing for a lot of people, especially for non-experts.
The idea that a small percentage of inputs account for a large percentage of outputs does not mean that unexpected inputs account for a large percentage of the outputs. I see your thought pattern that unexpected events are rare, and thus, small in number, and thus, qualify as a small percentage of inputs. However, that does NOT mean that being unpredictable will have a large effect on the outcome of your situation and it definitely does not mean that those effects will be positive. Besides, if you are always unpredictable as a rule, then you are, by definition, predictable, and have just defeated your own purpose.
"By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all."

Disagree. Our quality guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en... say "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content." Duplicate content can be content copied within the site itself or copied from other sites.

Stack Overflow is a bit of a weird case, by the way, because their content license allowed anyone to copy their content. If they didn't have that license, we could consider the clones of SO to be scraper sites that clearly violate our guidelines.
Look, you don't mention Chrome as your one and only browser, and yes, 1password for Chrome isn't as integrated as for Safari/FF, but you can still use the "CMD-\" to login quite well... what specific issues are you running into? I've simplified your 5-step process to:
1) Click logout on site
2) CMD-backslash
3) If I have only one account, no step 3, otherwise, choose the account for the site I want to use from a dropdown navigable by arrows
4) Browser back button (or keyboard equivalent) to go back one page.

Honestly, I agree that the whole issue of managing several accounts on a given service is quite weak anywhere you go... the fact that website/services think you should be limited to one account goes well back before the web (credit cards nubmers per servicer, home phone lines, physical addresses)... in all of these categories it's very easy to assume a given user will only have one account (and it's true for 95% of the populace). Given the virtual nature of the web, it's sad that web services fall into this trap as well (e.g. trying to run several power e-trade pro sessions for different accounts on the same box is an exercise in frustration).

You still haven't commented on usage of SSBs like Mozilla Prism for separate site/account combos (apparently, Prism is the only SSB that separates the cookie cache).
It seems to be a valid alternative: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chomp_at_the_bit
Re: 5., the Scala syntax isn't awkward to work with at all. In fact, it's based on CSS. For example:

<ul class="l:Users.userList">
<li class="user">
<span class="username">shadowfiend</span>
<div class="profile">
<ul>
<li class="name">Person Name</li>
<li class="hometown">Hometown, ST</li>
</ul>
</div>
</li>

</ul>

class Users {
lazy val users = User.findAll()
def userList = {
".user" #> users.map { user =>
".username" #> user.username &
".name " #> user.name &
".hometown " #> (user.hometown + ", " + user.state)
}
}
}
it doesn't matter

$ man bless
>If you're sick of your current job, want a change, and hate being a subordinate, the answer is 'no'.

According to Illusions of Entrepreneurship, most entrepreneurs are in their 40s, not 20s.

Additionally, many entrepreneurs, (I believe it said a plurality) were entrepreneurs because they didn't like or couldn't work well under a boss more than any other reason.

[1] Non-aff link: http://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Entrepreneurship-Costly-Entr...
Related and very recent: http://hivelogic.com/articles/setup-guide-rails-stack-with-p...
Bord - Turn your iPad into a chalkboard
First All-Automated Hotel Opens in Norway
> Think about it, how many different types of laptops does Dell of HP or Toshiba sell? It's absurd. It's like the difference between the GM when there was Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Saturn. There were just too many overlapping products that confused their customers. They (GM, Dell, HP, et al) spread themselves too thin. Look at who ended up doing well: those companies who narrowed their product scope down: BMW, Honda, Acura, Scion. Maybe companies need to think about staying ahead of Apple instead of just playing catch up.

Given that Apple's computer business has largely fallen by the wayside and still has only fractional sales of Dell, I fail to see your point. Laptop sales go: Dell, HP, Acer, Toshiba, Apple.
Mods: Please make sure that posts like this don't become common. Reddit has tons of "Does Anybody Else?" posts. They are a thinly veiled "Upvote if you like <some popular thing>". I'd hate to see the practice creep into HN...
hit me up with the domain name. E-mail in profile.
Sure, but the user experience on Linux is nowhere near that what Apple's Mac OS X or iOS provides.

That is the issue, and why Linux has not yet become a major force on the desktop. Too many times stuff will go wrong and it is down to a command line to fix it. Too much configuration exists within the command line there is no graphical user interface for it. There is no single Linux version, so stuff is stored all over the place. There is not a single package manager (Do I need the .deb, or the .rpm?).

This is what confuses users, and the choice paralyses them.

I am a geek, I absolutely love playing with different OS's and whatnot, but I am sick and tired of having to worry that updating is going to cause my OS to not boot (I'm looking at you Ubuntu and your nouveau graphics driver).

Linux package managers may have "solved" the problem, but that is not what you get points for. You get points for getting users to adopt it and use it. Apple gets an A in that category (App Store on Mac OS X and iOS is a success), Linux a D (Package managers are a success, but the user experience isn't).
As your edit indicates, when we've looking into Experts Exchange, they weren't cloaking--they were showing the same content to users that they show to Googlebot. If they were cloaking, that would be a violation of our guidelines and thus grounds for removal from our search results.
Your best bet is to get an actively managed brokerage account with one of the big players and try to convince your broker that they should get you a cut of the action. You'll pay some extra fees, but I don't think anyone smaller than a Goldman or a Morgan Stanley will have much chance at it.

All that said, with the fees and (IMO) over-valuation of the company, I can't really think of any reason average Joe would want to...
Also interesting how the original oops submission had close to 100 comments whereas this one has less then 50.

I am guilty of this too - being drawn to inflammatory headlines - but to be honest, the truth is much less interesting in this case.
JSFiddle is great for embedding code examples in a library's docs too. Highcharts uses them in the API reference, and it's outstandingly useful.
I mean that the collective sentiment from these blog posts will remain, though, and form the reputation.
It's possible to do, but by default Lift's form element bindings are done in a stateful way, and your session's lifetime is determined by an occasional AJAX heartbeat request. In short, while you can write applications that should work with JS disabled, you lose many things that make it awesome.
That's his point: the vast majority of Android distributions are likely to be binaries installed on devices, not source distributions including the allegedly infringing code. This changes the discussion at least with respect to Oracle's remedies should Google be found guilty.
Instead of looking are sheer quantity look at consumer satisfaction of said purchase.

My sister for example bought a Toshiba laptop, and it has failed (the mousepad), everything else worked fine) three times now and has had to be serviced three times, and during those times it was gone for a month at a time. Whereas with Apple she could have taken it to an Apple store and if they had the part in stock had a replacement same day, if they don't have it on stock she could have used an external mouse until they called her and she could get it replaced same day.

Customers are much more satisfied with their Apple products than with products from Dell, HP (don't get me started on their shitty hinge design ...), Acer, or Toshiba.
Physician Demand for iPad EMRs is Growing. Are Vendors Ready?
Actually that's not true. Apple made $6 billion in profit vs Google's $8.44 billion in revenue (and $2.54 billion in profit).

sources:
- http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_17152005
- http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-18/apple-profit-rises-...
They should really integrate (or at least link to) their GitHub wiki on their official website. Every time we look into using Cappuccino for a project, the lack of (new or updated) documentation on their website is a turn off (was hoping it would get better after they were acquired).

Compare this [1] to this [2]

[1]http://cappuccino.org/learn/

[2]https://github.com/280north/cappuccino/wiki
Here are some that hackernews have already discussed:

http://www.google.com/search?q=podcast+OR+audiobook+site%3An...
I think you got downmodded for whining about other people whining - clearly you have no problem complaining about things you don't like, so let us do the same.

FWIW, I buy and love apple products, I just like to tinker as well.
> Talk to some Rails developers, I will bet my nuts that none of the experts, ninjas, you name it are developing on a Mac.

I use a Mac with OSX to do rails development. I don't want to stroke by own ego here but I'll be having those nuts. :)
I hope thats the case. I dont want them to pull a Yahoo and kill a product that people still use/love (delicious)
It is not the critic who counts...
Since hearing of fragment T. Rex DNA being found a few years back I find myself only reading these articles to see if they've found intact DNA of a species.

I would pay more to go to a 'Jurassic Park' than I would on any of those flights to 'space'. I mean make an Eden Project somewhere naturally inhospitable to the majority of dinosaurs and clone me some T. Rex's
No, but with the iPhone for example is that I with an 3G still was able to get the latest version 4.2.1 for my phone, it is not until 4.3 comes out in the near future that I will no longer be running the latest iOS.

The iPhone 3G was released in July of 2008, I will have gotten software updates with new features, bug fixes and other stuff for almost 3 years. Owners of Samsung Android phones are not getting the latest and greatest (not yet at least).

Also, Microsoft has shot themselves in the foot multiple times. Plays-for-Sure and some of their other music initiatives have not been compatible with each other, especially the Zune. Why would I go with Microsoft if within the next couple of years that I own the device they could suddenly close down a music store or deprecate a certain music format thereby making my device instantly unusable. Apple has proven since the first iPod came out that if I purchase music on the iTunes store that I will be able to listen to it on any Apple device I own for years to come. That stability is important to a consumer.
It means that your IDE can add all sorts of auto complete magic and cross-referencing if it knows the types and semantics of the code it is displaying. It can also prevent runtime errors to some extent via static analysis of the query.
List the ones that Rails does and how you achieve them (briefly). I'm pretty damn good with Rails, and it doesn't do a good chunk of this stuff, much as I love it.
It is, to some degree. For one, you buy into certain module management systems when you choose a library like jQuery, Dojo, MooTools. Another example: you buy into unique implementations of promises which are used throughout the library. If you used jQuery before 1.5, you didn't even have them and had to use callbacks -- that definitely impacts your architecture.
I think you're getting at the real objection a lot of people have to Apple, which is that they're such a big and powerful force in the market that their practices can make a particular strategy seem normal. While the reasoning behind keeping software ecosystems and physical hardware closed is actually good—keeping out the well-meaning but poorly-trained developers and amateur tinkerers who want to "repair" or "upgrade" your hardware, not to mention enforcing the consistent user experience as mentioned in the article—those practices also have other effects which are troubling in the long-term, which is what a lot of "techies" object to.

I am not in Apple's market, so their practices don't affect me directly as a user. However, their practices do affect me in that having one of the largest, most successful companies in the world engage in what I see as problematic practices tells other companies that it's a good, or at least tenable, idea. In the future, a fledgling company could see a choice between the Pro-Consumer But Difficult path and the Closed Everything But Simple path, and think, "Well, Apple did it, so I guess if we do it, it's okay." And that's why I find Apple troubling.
> Paralysis of choice is a very bad thing for a lot of people, especially for non-experts.

It's paralyzing for experts, too. The fact that I can properly evaluate the options makes it incredibly hard to actually decide. It's much easier when I can get by with ignorance.
I don't mention that, because I don't. I use Chrome for everyday browsing, and FF for development, because I like Firebug. I've also had to extend my FireFox usage for a separate set of Amazon credentials. Then I got another one, and it seems like adding another browser to the mix would be a PITA, which prompted me to think about how it could be done better.

Whether its your 4-step process or my 5-step (which are really the same things, so thats just semantics), wouldn't a 1-step process be much better? If you really like clicking things, no one is stopping you from doing it your way, so why poo-poo anybody else's attempt at making progress?
I'm a techie. I use a mac. I have an iPhone. I love the devices I have from apple.

Apple's strategy is not one of creating hardware. It isn't one of creating software. It's one of creating a digital ecosystem which interoperates with almost magical fluidity.

I'd consider myself to be in the top percentile in terms of technical ability worldwide - fine, sounds like bragging, but there are precious few people on this earth who know code from machine to assembly to a few dozen high-level languages, and also know how to build large, highly redundant and highly available systems. I know others like me - and the vast majority of them use apple hardware and software for their daily computing needs.

The reason? When you're ascending, and you're in that top 5%, you're still at the point where you want to tinker with everything. You want to switch motherboards. You want to upgrade your graphics card. You want to build a custom firmware for your phone just because. Eventually, you master those skills, and you move on - you move into industry, or you move into an area of expertise in which you don't want to have to worry about whether you've got enough cooling on your overclocked GPU.

The point is - apple make some of the best tools out there. The iPhone just works. Sure, you can't run custom, unvetted code on there, but the code you can run on it does what it says on the can and does it damned well. Sure, upgrading a mac is a pain in the jacksie, but those elements which you'd reasonably want to upgrade within the lifecycle, you can, easily. As for reliability? In the organisation I run, we have a 50/50-ish split between commodity hardware (think dell) and apple machines. The overall failure rate is roughly even between the two, and given that all of the macs are laptops, I think it's a fair cop.

Summary: apple make tools. They make tools which work for everybody from total noobs to über-leets. Plenty of people don't get this. One day they will. Therefore this doesn't matter.
Depends on your definition of pain. I've found the full stack of Lift features quite accessible, if at times somewhat poorly documented (but the group is quite excellent for these situations), from the basics to situations where I needed to short-circuit most of the Lift handling pipeline entirely to serve up something specific.

As for big projects, well, Foursquare is written in Lift.
just before the world will come to an end (mayan calendar)
Did Google Just Declare War on Demand Media?
You've hit on the right word - sentiment. Prejudgement, reaction, emotional appeal, and biasing of expectiations before one word of content is read.

I'd really go further and say that many of the reactions here have a lot more with Kottke's framing than even anything to do with The New Yorker, if the relative dearth of comments and adoration on the thread about the writer's actual post at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127876 is anything to go by.

As I write this, not much at all there about how awesome, well-written, and insightful those three paragraphs are.

And to more directly respond: not really. This blog post could be utterly wrong and, absent someone screaming bloody murder enough to embarrass The New Yorker, not affect their reputation one iota.

These things are aggregate in nature. In the specific, things aren't so harmonious. Mistakes get made; Pulitzers get awarded to frauds.

That's why I get dismayed at people turning off their brains and pointing to reputation.
A few questions:

-Why Ruby 1.8.7 and not 1.9.2?

-I've installed 1.8.7, 1.9.2 & 1.9.2-head via RVM without having libyaml-dev or libffi-dev installed (I see they're listed in `rvm notes`). Any idea what's up here?

Thanks!
'The Comfort Xpress Hotel in Oslo now allows guests to reserve, check in and check out without ever having to deal with a pesky human.'
I love technology as much as the next geek, but there are some places I would really like to deal with pesky humans -- hotels, hospitals and restaurants come to mind.
Fun - it really brings out my juvenile side:

We denydealized a few crapplicants for bonership.
JQuery in Seaside (slides) from Lukas Renggli
1) I think FB actually did almost $2B in revenue:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/18/...

2) I think the best analogy is to 2003. At that time, when people started to talk about Microsoft vs. Google, I was like, "huh? What do you mean? Google does search and MS makes operating systems."

It was after the IPO, with Gmail, that Google moved on from being a category killer in search to just demolishing so many other verticals (Gmail, Maps, Docs and more recently Chrome, Android) and taking the throne from MS.

If history repeats, it will be over the next two years -- probably when Facebook launches social search, and it's really good -- that the game will have decisively shifted.

PS: I'm sure you didn't meant it this way, but pointing to the revenue scoreboard is what Microsoft employees did and still do when talking about MS vs. Google. MS still makes more money than Google and always has. The top dog title is about mindshare/rate of growth/poaching ability in addition to revenue.
George Zachary on Doing 30 Seed Deals a Year
Blatant IP Theft In App Store Garners Little Response From Apple
> Yeah, pat yourself on the back, you're smart.

He put you into that same category ...

> Never used EBay, never bought anything from Amazon and I also Google for URLs from time to time ... pretty sweat if you can't remember the exact string.

He is referring to people that type "facebook" into google to go Facebook.com. He is making a generalised statement. Generally to present an argument or point it is okay to make generalised statements to help bring a point across.

> I actually think we underestimate the "average" computer user more often than not.

I tend to overestimate them, to each their own. Who are you qualifying as "we" here anyhow? Clearly I don't belong in your "we".

> Apple's products are not idiot proof. The iPhone itself does take some time before you become productive with it. But they make the learning process fun and they respect their customers enough to not make them feel like idiots.

No, not idiot proof but they are easy enough to pick up and start using by just playing, click on options, turn stuff on and off, download new apps to play with, hit the home button and back you are in familiar territory. The same could not be said for some other pieces of software. It took me a while to figure out how the Zune worked for instance, it wasn't intuitive like my iPod was.

> Also, there is no such thing as an "average" computer user, as that would mean some kind of common-denominator, which would be false since all people have different personalities / skills.

"average computer user" is used in the same manner as "average person" or the "average child" (such as "the average child at age 10 can read X").
Forgive me if I'm being dense, but in what way is "I can be snarky!" a response to "Apple weren't exactly the first people to pursue this basic idea"?
Thanks but I am actually on Linux and I don't believe an automated tool could prepare the result as I like it.
Apple patent application details magical mouse with a built-in display