skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
backed up by a dis-interested electorate

An uninterested electorate. They are discovering now that they were never disinterested.

And they erred by being uninterested. I hope a lot of potentates will lose their jobs and influence when the situation is rectified.
But what's the point? What is this useful for, or is it only academic?
Thanks, maybe I should read a EULA sometime. ;-)
Give that you know of IRC (and were inconvenienced that it was blocked), have you tried irccloud.com? The people who did that are also on HN and it has worked out great for the friends of mine I've gotten to use it so far (I have a lot of friends with inconsistent network connections or who are not very technical that I wanted to be able to access my IRC server).
Bonus: the "license plate" is ZU O666. "Zuo" is the, uh, internet spelling of "zło," "evil."
I think we should credit the two of you for convincing PG. After all, having a solid group of people is more useful than having a solid product. This is a great start and with you two at the helm, we can expect a lot more. Looking forward to it!
You own the device!
Apple sell you the device!
There is no place for apple in the way you experience the device once you pay the money!
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
You own the device!
Apple sells you the device!
There is no place for apple in the way you experience the device once you pay the money!
Right, Netflix has proven that with their algorithm (worth $1M in a developer contest!)
Or, you know, it's a way to get content providers to sell through Apple. If there's a 30% premium to get on iOS through Amazon, a way around that is to just sell through iBooks.

We'll see how it shakes out. Maybe it'll be like the "nothing but objective-c" thing. People freak out too much about this kind of stuff.
There are many reasons people like vim and emacs, not because they want to "say they are cool and roots." They're both simple, in their own way, but extensible and powerful. And for all the different tasks that you need a text editor, it's nice to always be able to use same thing.
That's an excellent piece of writing. Hopefully wide dissemination of pieces like this will start to put paid to the idea of 'too big to fail' and the idea that a government should underwrite a banks losses. That sort of thing kills long term growth and endenders moral hazard the next time a boom comes around.
This.

More than the actual policy, what disturbs me is the number of people blindly defending it saying it's in the best interest of the users.

It is not.

This new subscription mechanism will effectively boot all newspaper/book/music subscription services off the App Store.
This is great only if you're one of those people that believes every piece of technology you ever use should only be made by Apple.

The only entity that benefits from this scheme is AAPL
I wonder if 'voting' on a story will be tied to something other than 'has an account' in a future iteration of this social up/down news model.

It's been my experience that a comment section often contains far better critical/ordered information than is represented by the sum total of upvotes a link roll receives.
As to your point number 2, the top upvoted answer to that question is by one of the founders who clearly states the three ways that they are making money.
Treating The Common Cold
Somebody put this on a T-shirt, please. I will buy Several copies. (Relatedly, product is almost always the tip. If you think Zygna is defined by Farmville or Google is defined by that one big web page they have, you're crazy.)
Google is bad for business?? this is an utterly bizarre statement.

HTC seems to be doing well for itself tooling their machines with Google android.

Consider the potential revenue business generates from Adwords. Or freeing small businesses from having to run and manage their own email systems.

My favorite example is the benefit a myriad of startups gained from having access to Google API's like maps, and the benefit business gets from being easily found on a map, a bar for instance is a business too, i find them with Google maps.

You also dont seem to qualify having the most advanced search engine in the world a benefit for businesses, talk about a tremendous impact on the entire ecosystem.

I could go on, with ease. but i think you might get the point, your view of business benefit is too narrow, your sharp dichotomy between business and consumers is false as well, businesses are consumers of other businesses too.
I'm looking forward to Antitrust.
Regarding your first paragraph: Are you seriously suggesting that the iPhone, iPod and iPad are anything but ridiculously profitable without Apple taking a 30% cut from Pandora? Apple's reports to its shareholders seem to indicate otherwise. (And if you're not claiming that, bringing up Sun is a red herring.)

Regarding your second paragraph: I agree with you. The Mac is the best personal computing platform, yet it is not a monopoly. But having a monopoly in the mobile app market does give Apple a monopoly.
I think it'd be a little different if they didn't lock down the device so that their App Store is the only (supported/permitted) way to install applications. If it was only "you sell through us, you pay", that'd be one thing; as it stands, it's "you want to run on these devices that our customers bought, paid for, and own, you pay us too".
Thanks. Looks more similar now than on the linear scale.
The Future Of Online Education - Learning & Teaching Edition
This is an excellent point and SO has previously stated (Pre VC) that they've had issues with doing so in part because of the community.

I can specifically recall them describing how their attempts to do Amazon Affiliate sales of books on the site were being undermined by people removing the affiliate codes from the links.
Just FYI: we run a very large web service with purely PostgreSQL, and have no need for sharding or anything of the sort.

Scale up first. Use redis or memcached to store 'overview' stats. If you lose those stats, recalc from Pg.
The Death Of The Music Industry
IPads replacing restaurant menus & staff
>Google has not had this kind of impact on anything short of SEO consultants. Very few industries have trusted Google and ended up satisfied with the outcome.

You've never heard of Google Ads, I suppose.

The idea that Apple's gouging is somehow a boon is completely shortsighted. Android's Market offers a much more lucrative path to the future plus it's possible to create verticals in Android that don't rely on a centrally planned store for approval and distribution. Mobile is young and my guess is these verticals are going to be big. Apple's store won't scale in the long term.
A general purpose tool with criminal uses? Well, yeah.
Unfortunately I can't give out any exact numbers :(
I work on "this kind of market" since 2003, when there were already millions of smartphones out there. And even now, the Apple Store has been constantly proving as the only successfull app store out there, specially compared to Android and OVI...
The good thing is that functional programmers will barely notice that they are using the new data structures. (It's still just filters and maps. Just your fold-functions will take slightly different arguments.)
No, I'd say it's like a very fast and free bicycle copy machine. No one loses their bike, but it might upset bicycle-makers.
1) You're not locked into Apple's devices. ITunes is standard mp4 audio and plays on a variety of platforms; the DRMed video plays through itunes on windows too.

2) Amazon's VOD service provides DRMed video, too.

Then what's the issue?
Spartacus Gods of the Arena Episode 5 Online
Crixus be told a lot of character in Spartacus Gods of the Arena Season 1 Episode 5 "Reckoning" it is. Titus father of Batiatus have plans to dedicate Crixus as gladiators to be used as shields in power. Watch Spartacus Gods of the Arena Episode 5 in time.
Yes, he says, 'here's how we bring in revenue, and you should be able to do the math'.

I'd say he avoided the actual question rather deftly, which is how SO is going to scale from a traffic and ad site to a site that brings in the kind of money that VC's want.
That's exactly the approach we're taking. We're not going to spend any time prematurely worrying about various scaling things until we can forecast that it's legitimately going to be a problem.
The Engineer Who Built Facebook's Massive Data Infrastructure
We'll see how it shakes out. Maybe it'll be like the "nothing but objective-c" thing. People freak out too much about this kind of stuff.

I think part of the reason they rescinded on that is because people freaked out about it :)
How much technical capability has Anonymous demonstrated so far?
Back to Paper Calendars
Tell HN: Catch.com raises 7m. Didn't get in as solo founder (S08), kept pushing
It's been such an incredible journey, HN has been such a huge source of inspiration.

I still vividly recall some my of earliest conversation on HN and what a transformative effect they've had on me (thank you Paul Buchheit!)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157432

It was early 2008 and I had just moved to San Francisco. I was working on Catch.com with the idea of making it easy for people to capture what matters to them and let them recall the interesting ideas, notes, places, images that they had captured. I had a basic web and Android app with a fairly goofy name (3banana), but it worked.

I applied as a solo founder to Y Combinator for the Summer '08 class with high hopes. Then I get this email:

Date: 10 Apr 2008 03:13:28 -0000
Subject: YC Funding Application (aschobel)

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. ...

Ugh. I was pretty devastated, but fortunately had enough money to bootstrap my baby for a bit longer. I knew in my heart that the time for Catch.com was right, folks we moving to smartphones in droves and that enabled a huge part of the vision.

A few weeks later I hit uninteresting roadblock, a recruiter for a hot startup contacted me. I ended up interviewing and getting a job offer for a role where I could impact millions of users.

Should I keep burning money and follow my dream or join this startup with a ton of traction? To the dismay of my parents I turned down the job and pushed forward with a renewed sense of purpose.

Later that summer I met my co-founder Steve. We connected right away and I knew this was something special.

The Catch.com story continues, we raised a bit of money and made a bet on Android. We grew pretty quickly with Android and everything transformed when we change the name to Catch.com in Fall of last year.

It's humbling to see how far we've come and the huge opportunity in front of us.

It would have been so much harder to get to this point without the HN community, you are a beacon of hope.

Be determined and trust your gut.

Thank you HN & PG,

Andreas

Oh, and a bit of celebration: http://mashable.com/2011/02/15/evernote-competitor-catch-com-raises-7-million/

Yay! :P
Developer recruitment is a $2bn/year market in the US alone.

SO's currently making about $150k/month from job listings on a tiny fraction of the market.
I'm impressed. Can you share how, or what kind of response those likes give you? Do you post updates regularly and see visible results?
IBM's Watson Supercomputer Defeats Humanity in Jeopardy
Having some issues with this. I have a few mails I added to a task in the last week. When I browse to related emails in the task now, they are still listed, but some of them will return "The conversation that you requested no longer exists."
Curveball: How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam
Negative 0 means that you have a negative value, but the value is too small to be represented with available precision. It's a way of noting the sign of the value even if the magnitude is unavailable. It could be useful if you're testing edge cases, or if you're looking for signs of an infinity (or negative infinity) in your program.
+ extremely lightweight in comparison.
I'll admit I'm not familiar with JS, but assuming that it conforms to the IEEE standard for floating point and you can do bitwise logical operations, can't you just AND it with a 1 in the sign bit place and 0s in all other places, then do a logical right shift of it and see if it's 1? (In the IEEE floating point standard, negative numbers have a 1 in the most significant bit.)
By becoming the sole gatekeeper for content, Apple is ruling out larger distributers. Users don't gain from this. Only Apple.

You mean users lose out on the larger distributers. I know I'm going to get voted down for this, but I think an ecosystem of small and independent players producing content might actually be beneficial to users in the long run.

Apple is doing the distribution, so what purpose do the large distributors have? The only things that the customer needs are discovery and tastemakers. Distribution isn't so much a problem in the age of the internet.
Techcrunch is pouring out anti-Apple articles today, huh? I mean, the criticism is legit, but does it still seem like a bit much? The last two articles could have been one single one...
That's not why I use Vim, and that's not why most people use Vim.

I use Vim because it's an enormously powerful tool that makes me more efficient and because I enjoy using it. (I've never spent four hours attempting to debug my code only to discover that the problem was a bug in Vim. I can't say the same about Eclipse.)

Vim and Emacs are not toys. If you think they're toys you haven't invested enough time in them to understand how they work. Note that I'm not saying that a competent Vim/Emacs user might not prefer something else. I'm saying that you can't get to the point of being a competent Vim or Emacs user without understanding how enormously powerful both are.

Vim and Emacs can do just about everything your IDE can do (and, in many cases, more). The difference is that you're not starting with everything built in and crowding a complicated GUI. You're starting with something simple and powerful and (if you want) building it up with exactly the features you want.
Congrats! Keep moving forward...
Seems to be loading very slow for me right now in Gmail. Maybe the Techcrunch attention has it crawling?
And just like bolt cutters, it can be used for many things other than stealing. Therefore, it is very useful tool and it is now and should in the future remain legal.
The key is 17 random letters generated using the password generator at GRC.COM.

I don't think I'm giving away anything by confirming that at least one of those three letter groups is "THE".
They own the infrastructure, but they do not own the device. The customer does. They bought it.

Apple comes along and says that anything you want to use on the device you bought and paid for needs to go through their infrastructure. That's where it becomes a huge problem. Not that they're charging for using their services, but because they're charging to let people do things with their property.
Babushkas = B2B matchmaking club
Also, Amazon is able to produce content without DRM. Mp3 format music, etc.

I'm not sure I see your point

Apple music = Amazon music = DRM free

Apple iBooks = Amazon Kindle books = incl DRM

Apple movies = Netflix = everyone else = incl DRM
The Third Era of Computing
Another wet US dream to force everybody under their rules. Wikileaks demonstrated the urgent need of an US independent Internet infrastructure, i.e. DNS, payment.
Recon 6.0 Programmable Rover hopes to make coding appeal to the younger set
> the DRMed video plays through itunes on windows too

That's the problem. The DRM locks it to Apple only software and/or hardware.
FTA: "Piracy has all but dismantled our recorded music industry. Any business plan in the music industry must now take into account that piracy is the rule, not the exception."

I think that this doesn't seem to be quite true. There is ample evidence to support the idea that it's current laws and litigation that are stifling innovation and "business plans". I'm of the opinion that if there is anything that is promoting or enabling piracy, it's the lack of innovation.
And because they realized that it ruled out large swaths of application classes that they don't have an issue with (games, for example).

Mostly, it was about keeping crappy flash apps of iOS. And from a platform perspective, that did actually make a lot of sense.
I did suck it up and switched to Android. It isn't painless. I now like Android better than iOS, but you need to change your muscle memory and learn where various options are. And all of the apps and content you purchased on iOS are no longer accessible, which is the real pain-point.

These things weren't difficult for me, but they're a pretty big hurdle for 'normal' people. If Amazon pulls the Kindle app, a user is probably more likely to "just switch" to iBooks as opposed to a different platform that supports Kindle. Which is apparently what Apple is counting on.
Pelo menos mais alguém gostou :)
> you can't be productive with it if you need to write more than small pieces of code.

This is possibly true in Java, but in better languages you don't need much help from your editor to be productive.
This is what Google should have been building instead of Buzz or Wave.
Enough to be dangerous. How much more to they have to demonstrate?
Great to hear. :)

While we're here, here are some PG tips:

1. Make sure your PG install is fully optimized. I've seen countless postgresql.conf's at major companies with no opts what so ever. Take a look at this book: http://www.2ndquadrant.com/books/postgresql-9-0-high-perform... .

2. Make sure you're using PG 9+.

3. Use pgbouncer for connection pooling and try to write your app so you can use 'pool_mode = transaction'.

4. Please don't run PG virtualized.
Yeah, a big challenge here seems to be lowering the barrier to entry for copyedits without opening the spam floodgates as well.
I say this every couple of months but no one believes me: Paypal has gotten religion on business support. Fraud sucks for everybody, but they really are making AB effort on it.

I got my account auto locked when an apartment move, sales spike (Valentine's day), and large withdraw all hit at once this week. It took one call and two minutes on thhe phone to resolve. "Sorry Mr. McKenzie, we just saw an unknown individual try moving a lot of money in and out of your account and wanted to make sure it was you. You're good to go."
Valid points. You're right. Maybe I went a bit overboard. But you can't deny that Apple is continuously trying to prevent people from using anything but their services and goods. I don't blame them for that. What I blame them for is pushing everyone else out just because they control enough of the market to do so.

> I suppose it could be your alarms, preferred weather cities and stocks app choices. Or your SMS database, which I bet most people don't even consider as something that should easily transfer from phone to phone (though obviously it should).

Absolutely. However, those things aren't huge. Different platforms have equivelants anyway. If I go from iOS to Android (or the other way around), I have plenty to take the place of those. Setting them up again may take a little time, but not much.
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

-- Jack Valenti, MPAA president, in testimony to Congress, 1982 http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm

I guess the film industry has gotten a bit less hyperbolic in the intervening years.
A place to create, distribute and consume RESTful APIs. What do you think?
> Ok, I agree, maybe for scripting and small code, but anything more complex is just for the Hype of saying I am a Emacs user and you are just a plain dumb Java developer that uses eclipse.

Sorry, no. I don't have any prejudice on whatever programming language you use, but you're making yourself look like a plain dumb person, period by saying that you can't be productive with Vim or Emacs with large pieces of code.

Here's just a few notable cases...Guido and Python with Vim and Emacs, Torvalds and Linux/Git with MicroEmacs, Stroustrup and C++ with Sam, DHH and Ruby on Rails with TextMate, Matsumoto and Ruby with Emacs, Zawinski and Mozilla with Emacs, Steele and Scheme with Emacs, and on and on.

Ridiculous.
Calyphrox, a webproxy with everything you always wanted
-A New Kind of Webproxy is almost out there, With all the Features you always wanted-

We only wanted to tell you about the new version of one of our web services: Calyphrox.
Calyphrox is the Official Xenode Systems Webproxy and basically it's a webapp that helps you if you want to surf the web in an anonymous way.

This new version (v5.0) it's loaded of new features, we can't talk about all of them but we can give you a sneak peek about what's coming next:

- New slick, well designed and very beautiful interface.

- Support for unlocking Megavideo, Megaupload and Rapidshare

- Based on new web technologies such as HTML 5 & CSS 3, But with support for all browsers, (Including IE)

- A "permanent server" option, always available for you. (We will try to keep it without saturation so you can use it anytime)

- Possibility of Checking your Gmail protected via the webproxy and using a encrypted connection.

- It will be much more than a simple webproxy, it will have a lot of tools and useful things for you. We will carry this to the Next Level.

- All the Features we offered in past versions will be some way enhanced

And well, that would be the basics of the launch, but there are some other cool secret features coming, so if you want to know more about the new calyphrox and receive a notification when we launch it, do not forget to visit:

http://www.calyphrox.com/

Thanks and please, Stay Tuned!
Sure - the fun of programming (or the relative comfort of a desk job) is a benefit of the job. That's why you're not necessarily underpaid just because a welder can earn more.
Finally I find something I want to use with Geocities but, alas, I am too late.
I suspect that your analysis is completely wrong. IANAL, and all.

1. Apple disallows in-app purchases for physical goods; presumably this would include services that are provided in the physical world instead of wholly electronically.

2. Apps have to be (minimally) useful to people without requiring a for-pay subscription.

3. These new rules would only kick in if you offered content (or possibly services; this is the SaaS question still unanswered, but it probably only applies to content as delivered content—that is, it seems to me to not apply to rental content, e.g., Netflix or Hulu) to people that is dependent on a subscription fee or a one-time fee.

As an example, let's say your wife's app were to have two news feeds about her fitness bootcamps (regular and premium). If all of her fitness bootcamp clients (the people who pay $200) are given access codes to the premium feed subscription, she may be required to offer in-app purchase of access to the premium news feed to people who are not or cannot be her physical customer at a price equivalent to or less than what she charges for the physical customers to have access to that feed.

All you'd have to do to comply is provide access to the premium news feed as an in-app purchase for $200 or less and let Apple take 30% of that. They're not getting anything for her fitness bootcamp services.
haha that's true too. nice comparison dtran ;)
I couldn't disagree more. I had the hardest time switching over to Vim because there is such a high learning curve, but once it "clicked", I could never back. Sometimes I'll have to do some .Net work in Visual Studio and I feel like I just switched from a Ferrari to a Corolla.

Now, if you're doing work in compiled languages like Java and C#, the code-completion of Visual Studio and Eclipse is very valuable. But besides that, I'd much rather have a simple and fast editor over a bloated IDE with tons of features.
Watson doesn't decide instantaneously; did it pass its buzz threshold before or after the 'light' went on?