skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Explain how? Where is Apple saying you can't access content not purchased through them? All I see if Apple saying if the apps sends users someplace else to purchase, then the app should also allow them to purchase from inside the app. There is nothing about what content can and can't be accessed.
$14.29 on iTunes

Math ftw.
Used to? I still do. San Francisco is too beautiful a city to not want to explore it's heights. If this scares you off, good, you're not the kinda person I want to collaborate with, but thanks for the advice!
It's such a great line, and such a classic one, that you don't even notice that the premise isn't true. It's like the opening line to Anna Karenina in this respect.
The mobile nature of the app necessitates it. I imagine this will be optional once they release native apps.
I do believe Ben is talking about Giff Gaff (giffgaff.com)
Thanks for bringing up this good point. Let me explain. I think a government agency should not intervene if there is no law violation. I think this case is very clear - Apple is neither physically compelling nor defrauding anyone. It is offering terms of contract - contract between firms engaging in voluntary trade - and its counterparties are free to accept these terms or to walk away. However, if the FTC is not sure about this and needs to investigate to ascertain legality, I would say that the law they would be referring to is not a very objective one. I think that an essential characteristic of a good law is that its definition allows a person to understand, before he/she takes an action, whether that action is forbidden or not, and what the exact consequences would be if the action is actually forbidden. Clearly, Apple's management is sophisticated enough to understand an objective law.

About the role of the FTC: My understanding is that the FTC, together with the Antitrust Division of the DOJ, tries to ensure that companies comply with antitrust laws. Even though this is a different discussion, based on my knowledge of this field, I think that antitrust laws, generally, lack in objectivity. I disagree with many of them. This, however, does not mean that a company should break them. I would certainly not agree with such an action. A serious problem for companies is, however, that even with their hordes of sophisticated lawyers, it is very difficult for them to determine what constitutes a violation. As proof, consider the lengthy battles Microsoft has had with the European Commission. After years of fines and appeals, neither side fully understands the problem and neither side can define the actions that would guarantee compliance with the law in the future.
i too am agnostic. i think they're both great designs.

that said, looks like Chimpy is back :)
This is why PC gamers should stay away from Gametrailers.com
Did you know that the Xbox is more powerful than 85% of all the (billions) of computers out there? Or that Real-Time-Strategy games are actually "turn based" and popular on the PCs because they’re "Single player". These are just a few gems amidst the treasure of knowledge about computer gaming that you’ll discover at the brilliantly reliable Gametrailers.com.
This are a few of the things that I am to following :

Server side:

Testing:

- Expresso [1]: TDD framework for node -- high speed parallel testing!

- Zombie.js [2]: fast, headless full-stack testing using Node.js

Tools:

- load.js [3]: Lazy load your JS

- npm [4] a package manager for node

- JSDoc [5] Documentation tool

- Docco [6] Literate documentation.

- underscore [7] provides a lot of the functional programming

- node-openid [8] openid.

Frameworks:

- Express [8] Sinatra inspired web development framework for node

[1] http://visionmedia.github.com/expresso/

[2] http://zombie.labnotes.org/

[3] https://github.com/chriso/load.js

[4] https://github.com/isaacs/npm

[5] https://github.com/micmath/JSDoc

[6] https://github.com/jashkenas/docco

[7] http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/

[8] https://github.com/havard/node-openid

[9] https://github.com/visionmedia/express
A casual user should at the very least be able to flag an answer for review by a more senior user (and earn rep).
For example, fixing broken links, or Facebook API changes that make old answers invalid.
Similarly, in my experience great code solves a problem that would seem very difficult in a way that seems very obvious but usually only in retrospect, or as we're reading the code. A corollary would be code that reveals some truth about the system being coded that isn't obvious except in retrospect.
There was a great article in the new yorker a couple weeks ago about the current CEO of AOL and how he is building the largest team of journalists in the country (and possibly world). don't have it on hand at the moment but it was a great read.
I'm not sure that understanding color as we experience it is required to be a good artist, but it might help the more engineer-ish of us.
I've been privileged to try out early releases of Localmind, and it looks very exciting. A friend of mine was at dinner last Friday and answered an unsolicited Localmind query on the spot--and he wasn't entirely sure where it was coming from!

I think users will enjoy feeding data into the system as long as it's fun and they get a sense of accomplishment from helping out their fellow man. Robust, rapid answers will definitely be the hinge on which the app relies.
> I think finding a tool that is no longer used and has no "children" would be the truly interesting find.

I'd look at tools used for gas lamps.

Candles are still legitimately used for emergency purposes, but without a gas distribution network using gas lamps is pretty much impossible, given that it's no longer reasonable to keep gas fixtures around as long as electricity works reasonably reliably.

Frankly, gas lamps are the worst of both worlds when compared to candles and electric lighting: They're reliant on complex infrastructure, even if you somehow have your own gas supply, and they're still based on the toxic and fire-hazard-prone technology of burning flammable things. When you factor in the risk of gas leaks, they're actually worse than candles.
Hey Tel,
Thanks for your reply - no worries re: sounding critical. Your points were valid.

The Victorias Secret thing is something I keep reminding myself. Life is not about "usability" - the experience is more importantly.

Reminds me of a Joel Spolsky quote

"Usability is not everything.

If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms.

But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other— - Joel Spolsky"
S&P warns on Nokia's credit rating
Seriously. Add the Sunset and the Richmond to that, too. Unfortunately the plastic bag ban was only for "large markets" (eg Safeway, Whole Foods).
From getting to know the guys at Instructure over the years I'm sure they have considered everything that might be coming down the pipe. If anybody can navigate the waters and succeed competing with Blackboard, it's them.
The convertible note insists on a pro rata right on future rounds. Someone who removes that would be offering a slightly better deal.

Pro rata rights cause more dilution in later rounds, but they are pretty standard and at seed rounds most people don't think about removing that term.
I wish conferences weren't so damned expensive.
It's because people know how much money to expect.

A company that requires significant physical capital investment won't bother with YC. Now they can.

For instance I bet this will produce more hardware companies like WakeMate. Companies that sell more than just software.
You should let people know that you're going to SMS them before you do. Having skimmed the blurb and just signing up, I was surprised when my phone started buzzing. Thankfully I had my google voice number tied to my foursquare vs. my actual number (which doesn't have a text plan anymore.)
founder salaries
Instead of deep discounts, lower discounts and 2 for one offers. Get people coming back.

Build email lists and Facebook fan pages and send out special discount codes or printable vouchers. Give them a free small pastry every fourth purchase within a week (stamp a voucher or better still, record their names/emails....). Maybe they get a discount for referring friends too.
Actually, this kind of encoding is quite common. Analog television, digital video and JPEG images are all encoded using brightness, red-green and blue-yellow channels. The details vary (eg. between YUV, YCbCr and YPbPr) but they all take advantage of the fact that our eyes are more sensitive to variations in brightness than to variations in colour. As a result, we can subject the colour data to higher levels of compression without noticing any visual degradation of the image.
How organized crime solves the social networking privacy dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omerta
I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO--I will grant that "where do I find an Ubuntu driver for my video card" will almost certainly be answered more quickly on #ubuntu than on Serverfault or Superuser.
The article's link is to an informationless blog post. The conference site is http://codeconf.com/.
It was great to see Paul make the very first connection that I made upon hearing the news. The deal had to be absolutely fantastic for the founders otherwise some portion of the best wouldn't take it. Having looked at the deal, it looks like it qualifies.

I agree with wave that it looks like something that should have worked so far, and one can presume they're getting better at what they're doing and hopefully will have a better economic environment for these current startups.

It's really cool that this happened.
More than 2% of world's Web traffic comes from Apple's iOS devices
Also, how do I disable my account so I don't get texts in the future?
For a minute, I thought CodeCon was coming back. Darn! That was a cool conference. I somehow managed to scam my way into speaking at the first one -- I was the least smart person there by far!

http://www.codecon.org/2009/
The Joy of Popup Windows
I was typing Dropbox, but realized their limit is 100 GB. Seriously though, for backup, nothign can compare to Dropbox. Continuously synced, no user input required, little resource consumption, and continuous versioning.

I've heard they've planned to offer more than 100 GB, but all in all, I think its far superior to Mozy or other alternatives, which I've used.

The peace of mind, knowing that my laptop can catch on fire, or be stolen, and I won't even loose a minute of work is very rewarding. With Mozy, I was always stressed, checking if my backup ran because I closed my laptop lid, or left it in the bag.

Besides, loosing even a day's worth of work is incredibly depressing.
The last batches of IPv4 Internet addresses will be distributed Thursday
Investors owning 5% of the company? Unlikely. YC takes an average 6% I believe? Then VC takes say 10-15% in next round for $700K (average after-YC investment).
Do you think the spam will continue being sent to millions of addresses that won't receive it, or do you think the spam will start getting sent first class?

also: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt063.shtm
It's sfganjastartup@gmail.com, let's talk!
Stackoverflow's WISC (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, C#) Architecture
Option 4 would be for Apple to cut them a deal
Thanks for the comment :) We've just started marketing our product today, yes it is light on technical details right now, but we'll be improving that over the coming weeks. Cheers.
5% is high.

If the Series A rounds were 1 on 3 ($1M on $3M pre-money valuation), then $150k would get him 3.75%. For hotter startups, 1 on 4 or 5 might actually happen. Presumably they would have the option to put more in, but that would increase their basis.

But your assessment is right. Average time to liquidity for a VC backed startup is 7+ years-- older than the oldest YC company, right? There is a TON of value locked in in previous YC companies.
What I see is that Bing filtered out 93/100 of the deliberately planted seeds, and what I don't see is how many times Google sent each seed packet to Microsoft. If Google sent each packet through the Bing tool bar once, it is different than if they sent each one through 1000 times. [edit] In that case what Google did was exploit a feature of Bing toolbar in a manner somewhat akin to an injection attack. It is also not evident what Google tried that didn't work.[/edit]

Finally, what I find interesting is that Google basically broke what they claim to be their prime directive - not hard coding search rankings - for PR purposes. There isn't a good story behind that either way. Either approval came from the top, in which case senior management broke the directive to embarrass a competitor or it was broken by cowboys outside of management control. Of course it is also possible that this sort of thing is done regularly within the course of business.

[Aside] I want to be the first to dub this "Binggate."
> I commute only 6 miles each way, drive a cheap, fuel efficient car, do some of my own maintenance, and live in an area with low tax and gas rates, so I don't think it would be hard to spend at least twice what I do.

Your fuel costs are less than $700/year. Your car cost is $2650/year.

It's easy to spend a lot of money on a car, but it's rarely necessary to do so.
I'm pretty sure this isn't semantic. I expected that the footnotes would be in the source when I went to view it and they're not. It's a fun video metadata demo, but it's not semantic HTML.
OP is blocked by WebSense--

Access to this web page is restricted.
Reason: The URL Filter category Pornography is filtered.

Is the site nsfw?
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/
From the website : Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales as tightly integrated vector and raster data ...
The only good use I've seen for turning a template into a callable bit of code for performance.
That would be like, you sell 6 items a year, but you make $90 on each one.
"stated that the boy’s teacher was a “fat ass who should stop eating fast food, and is a douche bag.” "

Nothing wrong with feedback. :-P

It's a bit over the top though. Kid said it on his on Wall, that is -not- the same as going up to a person and saying the same thing.

He should have just got detention, as a lesson about "not to say mean things".
Not all of them are! PyCon (http://us.pycon.org/2011/tickets/) is 30% cheaper (40% if you got earlybird).
He said your code should be boring. Your website can be interesting.
Ill add to this the idea that HN needs to be taken to another level. Its becoming the victim of its own success. Theres becoming more and more comments and more and more posts and you have to spend hours trying to parse through it all. With the comments when you have a thread with alot of comments its so difficult to follow them that it reminds me of debugging code. It all just becomes noise.

Whats frustrating is this is becoming a goto place for hackers and whatnot and yet its becoming more and more difficult to use by the day. In part because of what you are mentioning. Good threads get lost in noise. I sometimes click through to see whats on page 5 or 10 but it becomes dizzying after a while to do that.

I really hope PG who apparnetly is the only one running this eventually does built it into something more useable. For the time being he doesnt really seem to care as it was supposed to be just an experiment for testing a new programming language i think.
How about a REPL?

http://svn.python.org/view/python/tags/r271/Lib/code.py?revi...
jfm3 has responded to the furor over changes in his imaginary App Store and its policies that many believe could affect the popular Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader apps. The man claims he has not changed any of its guidelines given to developers in his imagination, but he indirectly confirms that accessing content purchased elsewhere could be a no-no if that content isn't also available to be purchased through jfm3's own system.

"I do not actually run an App Store," said jfm3, "but if I did, and I managed to make all you bitches have to use it all the time, I'd totally want a piece of every single drop of hint of money that could possibly pass through there."

"I can't believe you're paying for that crap," he added, in between sips of his excellent tea. "What the hell kind of hackers are you?"
If you ignore the fact that in some cases amazon's cut is 30% of the total sale to begin with (all books priced from 2.99 to 9.99). So in all those cases no amazon would not find the ease of use worth it.
High-Res Image of Winter Storm Covering U.S.
A user makes a mistake in typing email, adds in rest of form. Presses submit. Form takes 3s to send. Throws validation error and highlights email. User corrects it and sends it again (hopefully you're not punishing your users by clearing the form).

Or, you could present client-side validation which alerts user on focus out.

Other uses for client-side validation:

+ Multiple emails (Gonna verify them all in many calls?)

+ Prerequisite for further steps

Of course, have server-side validation. Client-side validation is convenience for the user.
I think this is key. I answer questions to help other people. I also answer them to help improve my own ability to explain solutions to programming problems. Usually the problems are ones that I myself have dealt with before. I tend to answer questions pretty late, in a few relatively low-view tags, and I can tell from the view counts that maybe 10-50 people at most ever read any of my answers. But usually the asker of the question sees it and finds it useful enough to accept it.
Ask PG: Would YC fund applicants in close space as a previous startup? 
How does Y Combinator consider startup applications where the idea is in the same space (yet with key differences obviously) to an already funded company? Is this just an absolute "no" or is it considered independently? I can see 2 situations: One where the applicant aims to develop (or has developed) a product that is a magnitude better than the previous startup, and the other where the applicant isn't a direct competitor, but may be confused as one by those not knowledgable in the industry.
How about a comprise: deliver the phone books on one (1) CD. Trees are saved, publishers cut costs, local business still get advertising space surrounded by phone numbers, directories are now grep-able and therefore better, and residents get free AOL-style Frisbees so they can party like it's 1999. I have no idea if a CD is worse in a landfill than a CD, but I would be more likely to make use of a free Frisbee than a free doorstop.
WiFi?
Make your own awesome deals for consulting trips
Brand new. Hopefully they will automate their backend soon. ;)
There are plenty of gas streetlights burning today in modern American and European cities. They never turn them off since it's cheaper to let them burn than to have someone light them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_lighting#Gas_street_lightin...
> Nope, but hopefully I can elect people who will fix the problem.

How is that working out for you? Or rather, when has it worked?
In other words ... the autopromotion happens to people who provide quality contributions rather than those who add to the noise?

And you don't see how that's significantly better?
Like the name.
It's cheaper then you think to build a hardware prototype (of anything really), and 150K is hardly enough to have a decent first manufacturing run of a brand new hardware product.

I don't think this significantly impacts the hardware/software equation at all.
I wonder if "boring" here just means "clear." I had a great case of this yesterday. We were reviewing a piece of code by someone that could have been better with a basic algorithm change. It did most of the right things but in the wrong order, sometimes on the wrong data, and did one major piece probabilistically were specific computation wasn't intractable.

The coder wasn't completely getting our explanation, but the code was so "boring" or "clear" that we opened up an editor, copy-and-pasted some blocks around added a few if statements and expected it to be basically functional. This was a complex algorithm and a complex change, and we offered provisos that we didn't know what that function returned so a "not" might have to go in front, and a variable name would have to be changed and one piece was going to have to operate on a new key in memcache, but it was basically there.

The point is, the code was so well-written that we could read it well enough to do this never having seen it moments before, and our resulting chopping was clearer to the original coder than 20 minutes of histrionics on a whiteboard full of formulae. That's how it should be. :-)

And for any haters in the crowd, it was all in Perl. So much for "write-only" complaints. :-)
Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
Small Town Doctor Runs ‘Donations Only’ Clinic
Damascus steel.

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

I'm sure there's tons of tools that are extinct and no surviving record of them exists, so we don't know about them. In that sense, you could say it's all a matter of documentation. If something doesn't exist at a given moment but is documented, it's likely that it will be made again at some point.
All this does is make me regret paying more for extra memory... With a dozen programs open, I am sitting at 2.3GB free, according to this. I guess it was wrong to splurge for that extra memory.
I guess you never dealt with microcontrollers, right?

The company is about popular DIY electronics kits, I think it's a marvelous project if you consider that, but nothing close of an iPhone, if that's what people want they should play with an ARM board.
Very sorry about that. We just finished the MVP and we're still in the process of putting up the blog/video. All should be ready by Monday. I'll email you when it's done.

Thanks for your interest.
That's just stupid. It's like asking the casinos in Vegas to stop with flashing lights and sounds. I'll agree that we're a population that is over marketed and flooded with advertising but part of the excitement of times square is all about the signs and advertisements. Take all that away and it would be a pretty boring spot.
I was going to suggest the physicians head mirror (the one with a hole), except http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_mirror says "They are still routinely used by otolaryngologists in the clinical setting, particularly for examination and procedures involving the oral cavity."
Pokebot - never waste time following up on emails again
I think you're right in some respects (e.g. most artists have a much more sophisticated understanding of color than red, yellow, blue -- that's the version you get taught in elementary school).

But you're missing the point in others: half the article is devoted to explaining the inadequacies of the RGB model for handling actual real world color. (This is why photos of sunsets -- digital or film -- never look right.)

A simple example -- color looks weird under "white" LEDs (at least the current ones) because they're actually RGB LEDs balanced to create the illusion of "white" light. Some orange things will look all but black under a white LED while others will look orange. Why? Because orange light can be actually orange, or a mixture of wavelengths that gets a similar response from your eye.

And so on and on. The article is a bit annoying (and it would help if it assumed most readers will know about CMYK and RGB color models already) but the fundamental lesson -- that color is more complex than you think and you need to understand the underlying physics and physiology to really understand color is worth making.