skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to agree with you. This sounds awful, and cynical.. but in my experience formal Agile methods are a great way to get acceptable results at an acceptable pace with a team of mediocre developers... It's sad that it's constantly only compared to waterfall (the other way of building disappointing software).

There was a Kettering quote on HN yesterday that immediately reminded me of Agile.. “If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.”
Dude, do you seriously think the people here at HN are stupid?
A Egyptian friend of mine had this to say about the current events:

"My guess is that it was something planned by the government. You have four things that happened pretty concurrently:

1. Speech yesterday, concessions made

2. Army backs out of the square, supposedly doing crowd control, but just let these people walk

3. Internet is back up

4. A pro-Mubarak rally

Seems like somebody wanted this to happen and wanted as many people to hear about it as possible."
I will include a photo of the scene

zefhous, do you have this photo? Can you make it available?

Amazing submission, thank you.
Didn't see this - we already support HTML5 games (via an iframe). We've gotten very few submissions though.
I'm disappointed. There are many other options for licensing that would bring in revenue without hurting the solo developer or non-commercial developer. It could be free for non-commercial use, or it could be limited to a 3 users within a corporate environment. I believe their revenue will come from companies adding it to their developer tool budget, not from the individual. Let the individual love it at home and then ask for it at work. Every company I've worked at was honest about paying for 'commercial use' or more than X users.
Microsoft vs. Google in the Cloud
Word up.

The conference is going to be in the black thanks to the support of Sequoia, Google, SecondMarket, MailChimp, Trada, Yammer, Zelkova, Mark Suster and a couple of more sponsors/partners we haven't announced yet.

Any money we make I'm going to invest in the startups personally as an angel.

This conference is just a huge celebration of entrepreneurship.... and we're dropping $100,000 on 250Mbits up/down from two different providers.... so that internet at the event should kick ASS!!!! :-)

If any YC companies want to present let me know! jason@launch.is! :-)
I have to agree. I think it's odd that just natural curiosity didn't take over, and a real account made and paid for. I'd donate $5, as I'm sure others here would, just to see the results. I think someone else mentioned that looking at the messages and emails would certainly prove the point with zero doubt.

I realize that women responding instantly to a horse picture is obvious, but why not nail all the nails in the coffin? Seems like an easy step to pay for a month of an account to read the emails.
The thing is though, .NET Reflector used to be Freeware, written by a guy in his spare time (incidentally, who is now an architect on Blend). He sold it to Red Gate, who keep trying to monetize it in increasingly intrusive ways (forcing updates, popping dialogs, etc).

While I understand Red Gate's need to make a return on their work, they've gone about it in an unpopular way, trying to force people to pay for an extra feature (debugging through code w/o source) that many people simply don't want.
It is very frustrating to hear this constantly touted as hypocrisy.

It is not.

Users and developers are free to use any and all Flash components. Flash itself is a published standard (although proprietary). You can create alternative VMs largely w/o caveat (the only one i've heard raised was some DRM junk having to do with Flash Media Server, which no one should use anyway).

There is no threat of patent licensing hovering over people who use Flash. That is not the case with H.264 encoding.

Furthermore, it is obnoxious that Flash is always uncritically trotted out as the only example of proprietary components in Chrome. What about Java plugins? Anything you want to say about Flash you can say about Java applets.

Please stop spreading FUD.

Also, Google didn't own WebM 5 years ago. It's hardly sensible for criticizing them for not moving more quickly on the issue.
This is very saddening. I met my wife on okcupid, and I was hopeful okcupid was going to work out for my best friend. I tried a lot of sites, and okcupid was the only one that delivered a satisfying dating experience.
Face to Facebook - Stealing 1 million Facebook profiles
Ask HN: How do you read the news efficiently?
Consuming news presents a problem of reconciliation: (1) news wastes vital time that should be spent elsewhere, and yet (2) news is important for us as informed, intelligent citizens. Then: we should consume news more efficiently.

Two sources of inefficiency:

(1) It's difficult to find all important/interesting news in a single place. As a result 50% of my news-reading time is spent consuming information that I needn't have read.

(2) I frequently read the same news story multiple times (at different sources) and often the slants aren't distinguishable enough to make the re-reading worthy of my time.

So, how do you read the news? And, have you solved problems (1) and/or (2)?
The article is not about the DBMS interface. It's about Fault Tolerance (what happens when stuff breaks) and Availability (can I still use my database when there is a fault).

MongoDB claims to support both. So does Clustrix. I'm comparing both claims.
The Bill Gates interview on the Daily Show [video]
White House Launches Startup America
I did look into cloning Reflector when Red Gate originally acquired it. The work involved looks similar to that needed to build a .NET compiler, but in reverse. That is, you take a low-level machine representation; then build up a control flow graph; then map that control flow graph onto common high-level constructs such as if statements and for loops.
Greg Egan has a similar concept ("neural mods") in his book Quarantine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_%28novel%29
New Resource for Web Design Inspiration by SitePoint Team
Amazon Working on Subscription Web Video Service to Take on Netflix
WikiLeaks among nominees for Nobel Peace Prize
It's kind of interesting that the review (and the other comments here so far) doesn't even mention the book's political themes - the pro-market forces vs the evil socialistic Emergency. Is that view just so ingrained that it's not even worth mentioning?
Top welding schools
Up to now the price difference between iOS devices and Android devices hasn't been decisive but this feels like the point at which Android starts to eat away the bottom 2/3 of the iOS market.
Yes, using their pseudo-transactional campaigns. I'm using it right now on multiple sites. Which makes me wonder why they decided to build on SES, they've already got the functionality there...

http://blog.mailchimp.com/transactional-email-support/
Do you really think that was an accident? Heh.
Topic drift: but I'm convinced that ASP.NET postback was a very deliberate design decision from someone who perfectly understood HTTP - and is intentionally obscuring HTTP in order to keep programmers and implementers ignorant of it and dependent on the Microsoft ecosystem.
Revolution makes for strange bed fellows. I'm not sure Egypt is better off, in this case, considering the philosophy of the protesters seems to be "anything is better than this". I have yet to see a clear vision of what "anything" will look like when there's a power vacuum. I hope for the best, but I'm expecting the worst...

Seriously, I'm expecting some kind of brief attempt at communism or heavy handed socialism, followed by complete economic collapse, followed by an Islamic dictatorship.
I just tried what the blog said and it's simply not happening.
Xeround | Win an all-expense-paid trip to the 2011 MySQL Conference
I've never liked karma systems.

On the surface it seems to make sense: People who are helpful/insightful get lots of karma.
In practice, it fails on two fronts:

First, karma systems in and of themselves work based on popularity, under the mistaken idea that popularity = correctness/insightfulness/suitability. Quite often, the most insightful or thought provoking ideas are unpopular (or speaking the truth is unpopular). What you get is a system that automatically filters out the ideas that the majority are unconfortable with, and so you end up with an echo chamber which doesn't admit new ideas.

Second, the policies formed around the karma system grow biased AGAINST new users over time, which leads to community stagnation:

The initial couple of years are great. The early adopters are all eager to participate in meaningful ways, and build a thriving, vibrant community.

Then the gamers join in. They learn how to game the system to gain points. They do this just to show that they can.
Closely related, the karma whores move in. Their sole goal is to gain points for self-worth. The community is meaningless; points are everything.

As the gamer's techniques become more widly known, the spammers move in, automating the techniques to promote their spam, and the cat-and-mouse game begins, usually at the expense of making things more difficult for the users. These measures are almost always done with consideration of the already established user base, using them to determine what a "normal, real" user is like.

Once you hit this point, it starts to become prohibitively expensive for a new user to join in, thanks to the biased notion of a "normal user". Stack Overflow is a prime example of this, where you have to jump through all sorts of crazy hoops just to be able to even comment or gasp edit your own question because upon re-reading, you decide it's not as clear as it could be.

And so you complain. But people don't like complainers, so they all jump on you and say "It's not so bad! I went through the red tape and so should you!" and "If you don't like the red tape, there's no place for you here!"

There's a word for this: Bureaucracy.

As a service provider, you should be doing everything in your power to make things MORE accessible to new users, not LESS accessible. You should be ENCOURAGING participation, not throwing hurdles in their way. New users are fickle. Their first experience on your site will largely shape their perception of it forever. Start them off with a bad experience and they'll refuse to participate. Rampant bureaucracy is a sign of severe failure in the system.
> Why is no one competing with PayPal?

Go raise yourself 20-50 mil in VC money, then get several suites of legal types. PayPal has licenses in (by my count) 42 states. To operate in foreign countries, I'm sure the issues become much more involved. This isn't a matter of writing some cool code and getting server space somewhere.

https://www.paypal-media.com/licenses
(which for me Safari is unhappy about the certificate for some odd reason)
Tree octopus exposes Internet illiteracy in students
Fair enough, I'll definitely take the time to read the article. Though I'm not sure it's a fair analogy to compare Mongo to ColdFusion in terms of doing the wrong thing first.
Amazon responds.
Buy directly from Amazon.com and receive a 30% credit towards your next Amazon purchase!
Why is no one competing with PayPal? Because these stories are the exception, not the rule. PayPal has posed absolutely no problems to our business since we adopted it early last year. I feel like a total idiot for drinking teh internet kool-aid and boycotting them for so long.
Having never done embedded work, I don't have an opinion either way. There are people successfully doing embedded work with Python, though (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/240996/anyone-using-pytho...), though I would probably choose Lua over Python in most cases.

If I were teaching somebody who wanted to do embedded work (and Python/Lua/<insert "easier" language here> really wasn't a deployment option, which is very feasible), I would start them with Python to get them to the point of understanding how programming works, then switch them to a more appropriate language for the project. Teaching the algorithms in Python, then converting them to C is a great way to learn the difference between the languages and to introduce the resource management that occurs.
We bought Roku a few months ago. I find we use Netflix and Amazon in a complimentary fashion. However, we lean towards Netflix because of the pricing model - a flat monthly rate - rather than Amazon's brick-and-mortar video store model. Also, Amazon's library is mostly, from admittedly my own small sampling, purchase only. Even though the purchase price is often not very much, I still don't want to own videos.

Basically, I'd love to see Amazon's library grafted onto Netflix's pricing model.
IPad newsstand "The Daily" finally makes debut at 99 cents per week
I loved the Vinge novels, and I'm also a fan of Accelerando. I looked at a couple of Culture books, but really didn't like them. So here's one data point saying that things don't break out that way.

Never heard of the Morgan books before. Looking them up, it looks to me like the author is playing on popular conceptions of capitalism, without a solid grounding in real economic theory. Is that a fair impression?
Anyone with experience on Direct Mail(http://ethreesoftware.com/directmail/)? I'd like to use it with SendGrid and later move to SES.
Yeah, both a Deepness in the Sky and Fire upon the deep didn't do a whole lot for me.

The Aliens in DitS were too "human", which was a problem for me because he went to great lengths to describe what their planet was like, and their physiology and how and when they reproduce. Oh, and they have a major world war, and discover the exact same technologies in the exact same order as humans on earth!

Additionally, Vinge has very litte "reward" in his stories. Very few deep insights.

For my money, Neal Stephenson is a much more entertaining SF writer. Every time I read Anathem, it changes the way I see, well, everything, for weeks after I'm done.
The Game Just Completely Changed
You could strongly argue that collecting clickstream and other user browser session info via a toolbar is not a form of web robot (crawler, spider, etc.), and thus robots.txt does not apply.
I'm just getting started, but I've found that writing regularly helps keep the words flowing. When I go for a month or so without writing, it takes forever to get back into the flow. I've set a goal of averaging one or more posts per week on my personal blog for this year.
Draggables – Exchange Data Between Web Sites Using Drag & Drop
Yes, sorry it's so small.

http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/4778/protestl.jpg
EFF Urges Supreme Court to Crack Down on Bad Patents
Learning some assembly should be required for anybody who wants to make a career writing software and is very valuable for hobbyists. I don't know that I would start there, but at some point along the way, understanding what that nice, high level language is really doing down at the metal makes for much better engineers.
FORTRAN, on a mainframe, with punched cards, in the early 1970s. Shortly after that, BASIC on a hard-copy terminal. (Yeah, I'm an old geezer.)
Microsoft builds HTML5 Chrome extension that plays h.264
This Extension is based on a Chrome Extension that parses HTML5 pages and replaces Video tags with a call to the Windows Media Player plug-in so that the content can be played in the browser. The Extension replaces video tags only if the video formats specified in the tag are among those supported by Windows Media Player. Tags that contain other video formats are not touched.
Regulations are only as ethical as the regulator -- just ask Bernie Madoff's victims how well that worked. Indeed, more regulation leads to a false sense of security, and certainly stifles innovation.

Better to have the market, and market players like TechCrunch, sort out this type of low-level malfeasance.
barf, heh. As a rider, I don't think I'd want to date another rider. :)
I'm pretty sure the Bing Crawler does respect robots.txt. The data Bing collected didn't come from spidering Google.
Ah, the Kindle version is not available in Europe.
WikiLeaks Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
only a year... yeah that's about right.. you should be due for a business-crippling lockout by paypal any time now.
Ehcache At 2 Billion Entries...
Is there any programmer on the planet who has trouble justifying the ROI of a $35 expenditure for a useful tool? This is a total non-issue.
I'm in Venezuela and it just didn't happened, I've parse HTML results from Google a couple of times and Google discriminates results from Address IP, Browser and Languague. So far, I think it's pretty wrong to say something like this without being 100% sure.
Older versions look like they’ll remain freeware; you can’t really begrudge Red Gate for charging for future work.
HBase vs Cassandra
Mozilla's on the record as being told by their counsel not to openly publish patent research they did for Theora. They weren't happy about it, because it opens them up to FUD, but we all know patent law is messed up, one more absurdity shouldn't surprise us.
Advertising was, for the most part, invented for traditional media (papers, radio, television). In many ways traditional media and the marketing industry are the same thing, so bringing that up as an example of a proven business model doesn't really say much.

As far as the Internet, how many publicly traded Internet companies actually make their profits primarily from advertising? Okay, all the search engines obviously, but who else?

I just don't think you can say that ad-revenue-based models are as proven of a business model as just selling things.
Embedly is a Gem: How Kalimba was Built
The State of jQuery, and What’s to Come in Future Releases
Insurance is protection from a defined set of liabilities. A lot of people conflate umbrella insurance with "everything" insurance. It's not. Wells Fargo has a good page [1] on the topic. Insurance isn't a bad idea if you're engaged in a business with specific liabilities.

It gives you a chip to play if you are sued. You can say to the plaintiff, "I have insurance that may allow us to reach a settlement without going to trial." Then you and the plaintiff engage in a settlement negotiation that may or may not be successful. You can further strengthen your position by limiting your liability to your corporation. I can tell you from my experience that you feel much more exposed when it looks like the lawsuit is coming at your personally than you do when it is your business.

[1] - https://www.wellsfargo.com/biz/insurance/property_liability/...
As far as facebook: No one would have heard of facebook if not for facemash

As far as Google: One person's raw dump of data is someone else's valueable copyrighted material.

I could argue grabbing Google "raw dump" of bytes and presenting it my way is unique and original. It's not black and white as you seem to think.
Interviewing Front End Engineers : The Technology Breakdown
Here is what the site does (or at least did two-three months ago, when I tried it).

After you pay for your account, it immediately asks you "do you want the site to introduce you to people who may be of interest" or something like that. A little later, I looked at my Sent folder and saw that I had said "hi" or "what's up" to dozens of people, many who are not local or I otherwise would not be interested in.
I really don't read the (general) news. As bad as it sounds, I still manage to stay relatively informed. I think there's three reasons for this:

1. If it's big enough news, I'll hear about it from my friends/co-workers/etc.

2. If it's big enough news, it will usually pop up on a site that I do frequent (like HN.) For example, the abundance of stories about Egyptians using technology informed me of what was going on RE the revolution.

3. Most of the news out there is completely irrelevant. "Don't miss" on CNN.com: Groundhog predicts early spring, Charlie Sheen, How to Avoid Salt, and something about Bush's daughter.
with a team of mediocre developers, you're doing well to get acceptable results at an acceptable pace.

with a team of good developers, agile can be great if you do it well: the fastest way of getting high-quality stuff in users' hands.

if you've got at least one great developer (or a mix of experienced/inexperienced), agile's even better: the emphasis on shared ownership brings up the level of the team.

and of course it can be done really badly, and often is. if all your experiences are bad, i can see why you're cynical.
Has anyone been forced to downgrade or reduce feature sets for free users when introducing paid plans? Is the generally accepted approach to grandfather in all existing free users?
Tell HN: My account got ghosted, very unhappy
My normal account has been "ghosted" at this site. Which means I was not notified of any wrong doing or warned, but my posts are no longer displayed to the world.

Being ghosted is an extremely unfriendly and bewildering way of dealing with users you do not like. I was not noticing it for days after when for some reason I stumbled into my profile while being logged out.

This is the ghosted account: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=flawawa2

This is what you are not seeing: http://i.imgur.com/wCmi8.png

This is the thread which I guess lead to my ghosting since it is the first post that was made invisible: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2123981

That does not seem like a valid reason, maybe a moderator abused his rights?
No, they won't. Red Gate has timebombed them so they'll stop working in March.
Exactly as other people have responded "This." is often used as a response to say that that portion or that article being referenced is of extreme significance. I hate when people use it, it just seems lazy, but the significance of that statement I quoted meant a lot to me, and I consider myself agnostic with no religious beliefs what so ever.
Did anyone else just think "cheap testing device?"
Well, let's assume for the sake of argument that the post was pulled as a result of pressure from IAC, Match.com, etc. I don't know that this is the case, but it certainly seems plausible.

So, what should IAC/Match.com/whoever have done in this situation? Leave it the heck alone! First of all, by owning two of the biggest players in online dating, customer acquisition is basically a zero-sum game as far as IAC is concerned- presumably, any customers lost to Match.com from OKCupid's blog post would end up going with OKCupid instead, and therefore either way IAC wins, so what does it matter? Of course, this assumes that an OKCupid customer is of equal value as a Match.com customer, which may or may not be true.

Secondly, it's important for IAC/Match.com to keep in mind larger question of why they felt like it was worthwhile to own OKCupid in the first place. Presumably, they wanted to own it because it targeted a different customer population than their other properties; part of the reason that it does so is because of its quirky, "edgy", and open image. It's 2011; people notice when companies take down influential and well-known blog posts, and their opinions of these companies change accordingly. Ergo, by pulling these sorts of shenanigans, IAC or Match.com is potentially undermining the very thing that made OKCupid attractive to them.

I suppose one could try and do some sort of calculation:

X = # customers lost to Match.com as a result of OKCupid's "don't pay for online dating" post;
Y = # customers alienated, amount of bad publicity, internal drama at OKCupid, bad karma, etc. resulting from taking down a well-known (and accurate) blog post

Is X > Y? Mazel tov, take down the post. Is Y > X? Leave it alone; monkeying with it will do more harm than good.

Note that this sort of calculation is essentially impossible to do in a principled way; as such, it seems to me that the sensible course would have been to just leave it alone and focus on making better products.

But what do I know? I'm just a informatics nerd, not a business expert, so maybe there's more to the situation than I'm seeing.
The fact that they were simply posited, with no explanation? There was no science there, just a mystical "this is the way it is".