skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was a quote from Nokia exec called Anssi Vanjoki, who leaved the company when Elop was hired.
I'm not arguing against that, I'm saying the US military isn't ever going to get there. The military is made up of people, when this kind of order comes down from Congress you'll be entering the area of a military coup.

This isn't the middle east, our populace is raised in a democracy where they took freedom of speech for granted. Also our population hasn't allowed itself to be in a state of war with a neighbouring country for 50 years under essentially martial law.

University Fees led to ~40,000 people protesting in London. Over the poll tax they ended up with 200,000 (by police estimates) protesting in London, the police had so little control that they actually wanted to use an armed response (which IIRC was denied due to the crowd having no small arms). What do you think will happen if our government tried to ban free speech?

I don't know about Americans, but I know we Brits will protest over anything.
> There's people who are going to buy, no matter what

Most of those people do it out of convenience. They want to play on their console, in the living room with the big screen, and they don't want to fuck around with torrenting ISOs and hacking their machine so it can play copied games. Next to convenience, morality takes a distant second place; they probably pirate music and movies without hesitation. But fans of Crysis 2 have long been awaiting its release, and being able to play it months before its street date, even if it means playing on PC and hitting the torrents, might tip the convenience equation.

That is why this is so dangerous for Crytek.
I wish there was a 'compulsory licensing' for individuals for personal use. Pay a lump sum and then you're obliged to receive a license for downloading whatever you want from whatever source you like. If the MPAA/RIAA goons log your IP address and send you a notice of copyright infringement, slam the license on their face, and politely ask them to fsck off.
Comment Addict - Bookmarklet for Hacker News and Reddit Comments
Models and Bottles
If you are a startup and don't have downtimes, you're either building something trivial or a god.

We've actually had less broken downtime since we started doing automated deploys than we did beforehand. It's partially the result of good testing, partially because the changes are just so much smaller than they used to be, and partially because pushing to our master git branch is now serious business.
This is my entry for the New England College Hackathon (http://www.nech2011.com/). Enjoy!
It was released well before the HL2 release, because I remember having HL2 pre-downloaded for day of release.
Loggly uses it for handling large amounts of web POSTs and translating them into syslog like TCP packers which are sent to our indexers.

Basically it can be treated like a big ol' expensive load balancer, except its not expensive.
Use node for anything that has a HTML(5) front end. The big win is that you no cognitive disconnect between the client-side and server-side code. The productivity increase is significant.

All the async event goodness (which is great for streaming of course) is just icing on the cake.
Egypt's wasn't the only revolution this week
That particular site generates its following (and income) by stoking Malthusian fears. Underestimating technological and economic progress is to be expected.
Shameless plug -- we're building hosted continuous integration and deployment for heroku. We'll be opening up our beta real soon, email hn@zenslap.me to get an invite. More information at http://zenslap.me.
Ask HN: Apple is featuring one of my apps. Should I drop the price to $0.99?
Apple has posted a review of one of my apps in the App Store's official Facebook page. Its price is $2.99 and it's currently ranking 27th on iPhone and 16th on iPad in its category (News).

I'm thinking in lowering the price to $0.99 for the weekend, but I see both upsides and downsides:

Upsides:
- More sales
- More exposure, since it will climb the rankings higher

Downsides:
- I might make less money
- Some users who bought the app might be annoyed when they see I dropped to price to $0.99 just after they bought it (this one specially worries me)

So, dear HN, what would you do?

App Store's official FB page: http://www.facebook.com/AppStore

Printful (my app) http://itunes.apple.com/app/printful/id385487729?mt=8
Good tests are almost a pre-requisite to continuous deployment. Usually code is only deployed after passing the tests. Check what "continuous integration" is.

You can do continuous deployment without an automated test suite. Heck, I've hacked source code on production servers more times than I like to admit, skipping the deployment part altogether :p

Tests are the reason why continuous deployment works. The path going from what the programmer has typed to running on the production server becomes so short, running the test suite non-stop increases confidence on the changes.
I would tell you if I got one :(
If I had a dollar for every-time a potential client thought their app was so cool that I should be begging to work on it just to get a portfolio piece, well, I would have quite a few dollars.

To be quite honest I would look at some half implemented Reddit mock-up as a half implemented amateur example of someones work. I want to see fully working apps that a developer can explain to me what portions they built and why features where built.

To be honest I would be embarrassed to use a few hour throw together as an example of my work. When I have far better examples of applications that are professional and complete.

My intent is not to be arrogant about the matter but the reality is there are very few professions where asking someone to work for free to get a portfolio piece would be met with a straight face.

Lawyers do pro-bono to help the downtrodden doctors do research work to advance the state of the art but nether do routine work to get a portfolio piece. So unless you are asking someone to do state of the art groundbreaking research work or it is charity (open source) to ask someone to do it for portfolio work is akin to asking a lawyer to take your DUI case or a doctor to fix your problem to get some portfolio work.
I agree with acrum, a niche would probably serve you best. You have a lot of features, but the benefits aren't crystal clear. Solve a real problem, which I'm sure you have insight into, and you'll be on your way.

Having more features is actually a big problem, since it dilutes your core value, and creates customer confusion, as most will have differing ideas about what's "core".
> The Christian myth is so obviously false to anyone who takes an even casual look at the historical evidence.

Could you elaborate on that a bit? My first instinct would be to assume you are talking about Jesus rising from the dead, but your words seem intentionally more general.
The mistake happens in these two sentences:

"The bill makes the wrong assumption that all startups raise angel or venture capital. As my team’s research has shown, nine out of 10 successful entrepreneurs don’t."

Entrepreneurs are not identical with startup founders. An entrepreneur is someone who starts a new business. Only a small fraction of new businesses are startups; most are unscalable service businesses like barbershops.

As of now, at least, nearly all successful startups have investors.
One of the great benefits of continuous deployment is that it really helps you hone in on a useful testing philosophy.

We've been doing continuous deployment at Ars for about 1.5 years. We would generally write tests for our apps before that, but they were somewhat directionless (and awfully easy to blow off for a "minor" change). Once our tests became crucial, we did a much better job of picking relevant tests and feeling their importance.

Many people visibly shudder when we tell them about our deploys. What they don't consider, though, is that manually ensuring a given release is "good" is less reliable than letting a well instructed computer system do it. When you make changes, run your tests, and then eyeball things to make sure everything's cool, you're really just doing unstructured integration testing. You're likely to miss regressions, unintentional bugs in seemingly unrelated systems, etc.
This topic has made me relook at my employment contract and I'm a little concerned.

Does this sound like I'm exempt having to hand over my IP for non-work related coding?

"All Intellectual Property developed, created or used by you or with your assistance during your employment with the Company in the context of the business of <Company Group> or any related activities shall be and at all times remain the property of the Company."

It feels like anything that is done outside of work that is not related to the company is exempt, but I'm not sure.
That depends on where you live. For a US-based audience, the answer to all of these will probably be, "No."
I'm using node for all my new web development.

It has an awesome community, and by that I mean: awesome package manager, awesome packages/libraries, actively maintained and developed.
This is the first of a 10 days series...
We use Capistrano[0] to automate releases in the same manner. It keeps multiple copies of the site in timestamped directories and has a 'current' symlink which it just points to the latest. If you ever need to roll back, just point the symlink to a different timestamp.

Similarly, for our rails apps we use unicorn[1] to do no-downtime deploys. When we roll out new code, unicorn brings up new workers while the old workers are still running. The old workers are not sent any new requests, and once they finish their in-progress requests, they are killed.

[0] https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki
While most of the docs talk about rails, capistrano isn't ruby-specific. We use it to deploy node.js apps as well.
[1] http://unicorn.bogomips.org/
A forking ruby http server
I, for one, will certainly buy it. I am a programmer myself and I want other people to pay money for my work--hence, I can't justify not paying for other people's work.

I also believe that polishing up a game is just about the most agonizing--and important--work there is (in the games industry). Polish makes all the difference in games. Downoading a pirated pre-release, under-polished version of a game is getting you a sub-par, less fun version of the game and thus undermines the very reason to play the game: to have fun.
You don't have to reduce the feature set by a lot, but you can at least put the technical features under an 'advanced' section or something so non-technical users are not intimidated.. or you can take them off completely. Facebook integration would also help, I'm sure.. Can't tell if you have it or not from the site but it looks like just twitter. The ability to share events and such on FB that would take members to your site would help (I would think).
It's a little bit of everything.

It would be nice to earn a living doing what you love while avoiding a typical 9-5 job. (I'm no where near that yet).
Microsoft got in trouble doing what Twitter is doing
Excellent LWN piece, as usual.

I just want to point out that there ARE cases where you MUST use volatile in userland. For instance, double-checked locking (see this Scott Meyers essay on DDJ for info: http://www.aristeia.com/Papers/DDJ_Jul_Aug_2004_revised.pdf) is only guaranteed to work on the MSCV compiler as of the 2005 release (and others at different versions) with volatile bools (though the same caveats mentioned on LWN will apply): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-checked_locking#Usage_in...
Do you also have timestamped databases? How do you deal with schema changes between versions?
The biggest advantage I see from my experience with node.js is that you can code in just one language from the client side to server side. Of course, server side JavaScript is _not_ exactly the same as in client side - but for most part, that does not get in the way and the language basics remain the same.

It also helps that it scales well for the traditional web apps, and currently there is a huge momentum behind it, and an active community working on it.
I highly disliked Far Cry, it was the epitome of graphics over gameplay. The graphics were astounding, but the gameplay was a tedious uncoordinated piece of crap. Story basically had all the point of a Mario game, stealth didn't exist as the AI could seemingly spot you from 200ft away with their backs turned (maybe a little exaggeration).

I disliked the game so much that I've essentially avoided any game with 'Cry' in it since playing Far Cry.

IMO the best outcome for EA would be a pre-release that with such great reviews that I would actually consider playing the demo, although that still requires the HDD space that I'd likely prefer to waste on a blu-ray rip of virtually any movie as I'd expect it to entertain me for longer (I love the 5hr gameplay that most FPS now provide, real 'bang' for my buck when I can usually spend less for an RPG that'll give me anywhere from >20 to 100 hours like Mass Effect/Dragon Age)
The great thing about node.js is the flexibility it provides. It isn't what Rails is to Ruby or Django is to Python, really it is a way for Javascript to interact with the OS outside of the browser, e.g. on servers. This versatility leads to a ton of options, which many don't even focus on the web. With that in mind, know that using node.js is more than building a web app, it has given us slick tools to do things that in other languages or options would be painful or annoying.

Here is a good list of things that should be done: http://blog.nodejitsu.com/ten-node-apps-that-need-to-exist

I personally have made simple tools with it, like a desktop image uploader, or a cli gist (github) maker. I enjoy how easy it is to connect many different technologies together with very little effort.
I am a programmer in the game industry. Games I have worked on have sold millions of copies. That said, I've pirated plenty of things when the convenience made up for the dubious morality of it. I'm not proud of it or justifying it but that's how it goes.

Since Steam took off, I haven't pirated a single PC game. In fact, I've only played a third of the games in my Steam library because the sales have made it so easy and enticing to buy on a whim. Close the convenience gap and offer extra benefits and you can easily turn most normal middle-class adults like myself into happy paying customers.

> Downoading a pirated pre-release, under-polished version of a game is getting you a sub-par, less fun version of the game and thus undermines the very reason to play the game: to have fun.

That is correct. But if you think this will prevent most fans who have been eagerly waiting for the game then you are mistaken. It's the short-sightedness of human nature.
Nice, we've had a signup! That surely validates it >.<
Since submitting this, I've been looking around for a kind of "Hacker's Guide to Software Licenses", and haven't come up with anything. Does anyone have a good reference that lists out the more common licenses and explains in what situations a hacker should be cautious?
Mailing list post announcing the blog series:

http://www.erlang.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?4:mss:56379:201102:p...
Topology, Algebra, and Geometry explained with donuts
That's a very good point - I should have maybe added "Freedom" as an option (not necessarily 'financial' freedom, but more flexibility in lifestyle).
You're right: no Facebook integration yet.

I've been so discouraged about the whole thing lately, thinking I need to shut it down and do something else. Though, it sounds like, you're saying I'd be better off making some significant changes in my approach and seeing if that works.

I just wonder... when do I say, this isn't going to work. I guess that's the whole point of entrepreneurship... not giving up. :-)

[edit: not sure why I thought HN might advise me to give up. :-) ]
my experience working on gov contracts and many stories such as this causes me to believe this (being middle man / providing deniability, PR scapegoat) is the primary service (some) lawfirms offer. accounting aggencies too.
Looks garbled on FF 3.6 under Linux (tags are not aligned, items below title bar start on a new line...)
No, you have the story wrong. We didn't push him to apply to YC. And he definitely didn't split up the company for us. He hadn't yet done it when he arrived in SF, and when we learned he was planning to, we advised him not to.
WordPress Change wp_mail_from
Because I have a need and there is nothing out there to fill that need, so i am making it.

Plus, I'm old and bored of working for other people and I have 0% chance of buying that Lamborghini making $100K/y with a family and kids.

My mid-life crisis is approaching soon so I need to get prepared. :)
So, the plan here is:

1. Read someones feeds, twitter, etc. and find what they link to

2. Find other things the person hasn't seen that might be related to what they like, and deliver it to them as a set of suggestions.

3. Profit.

#1 and #3 seem easy... #2 seems hard, as there are plenty of things I see in my own incoming streams (twitter, RSS, etc.) that are curated by those sources, but I'm not interested in. Similarly, finding on topic sources that I haven't already followed would be difficult after a while - there are only so many people discussing any one topic at any depth (especially if it's new and tech related).

This sounds like a "Netflix Challenge" difficulty problem, except with a much wider, shallower, and more capricious dataset.
If you like this, you might be interested in these:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209991

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209970
Actually i think it own of the rare phones that does not look like a iphone clone and looks gorgeus.
As I said before, Nokia is the only phone company that has design on level with Apple - what is really hard by the way
I'm 45. I don't feel as efficient as when I was 25. But I still really enjoy programming.

Most moderately (in)competent developers stop programming in their mid 30 if not earlier, this is a blessing.

Without passion nothing great can be done in this world -- Hegel
http://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/ is more up to date and the developer is still actively maintaining it. Like Box2DJS, it is mostly automatically converted from the ActionScript port of Box2D (though Box2DJS, again, is based on an outdated version).
Fair enough, I guess.

I still think his activism is not related to any quality in the archetypal hacker personality.
Ask HN: How do I sell my (M)MORPG?
So I have this everyday problem of having a smallish MMORPG hanging around and I need to get rid of it. It makes on average maybe 500$ profit a month, but can surely be made bigger by someone who actually works on it. Personally I haven't had motivation to work on it for about half a year.

So, uh, what kind of sites are there where I could put up an ad for this kind of thing? Or should I shamelessly email competitors or something?

The game in question can be found at http://www.zezeniaonline.com
I'm working on my Shareaholic Rank
> After the iPhone came out, every manufacturer now makes phones that are 90% screen.

That's the problem. Everyone is copying Apple. Most cars are just four wheels, an engine, some seats, and a steering wheel, but between Lamborghini, Ferrari, Königsegg, Maserati, etc. there is a ton of variation and very iconic design unique to each brand.

The only company _designing_ phone hardware right now is Apple, and the only two companies designing phone software are Apple and Microsoft. For a piece of phone hardware to elicit the responses in this thread it should do something more than copy Apple's design from 4 years ago.
"Piracy continues to damage the PC packaged goods market"

That sounds quite oddly phrased. Why is it not "the PC gaming market" or something to that effect? Why should anyone care about a specific distribution model?
Apple sets deadline for Amazon's Kindle app to change - They want 30% per book
CONSUMER LOYALTY CLUBS – HOW MOBILE MARKETING..
I Believed the hype. Thought I could quit my job, and have my web app be my sole source of income. Boy was I wrong. After 4 failed web app, I'm still trying to design one that will make me a sustainable income.

Don't believe the hype. It's a lot easier to get funding, than to make a web app financially sustainable. Don't quit your day job. Program during your free time.
The front half of the phone, besides the bottom row of buttons and lazier curves around the edges is almost an exact clone of every iPhone made. Where is Nokia's influence on this design?

Edit: Put another way: the Nokia N8 is distinctly a Nokia product and would never be confused with an Apple product from any angle. I consider that a handsome phone and something exciting and fresh. On the other hand, something that looks like an iPhone seems lazy and unimaginative from a company that has done much better.
33 must-follow JavaScript developers
Because I heard you can get hookers and blow if you IPO fast enough with a social web app funded by YC that has a mobile platform to help drive synergy in enterprise environments as well as grow revenue for B2B customers.

Also, people will take care of my cats for money. Get this, money can be exchanged for goods and services!

That really changed my world view.

So I decided to build a web app. I'm close to hookers-n-blow profitably now. I skipped the ramen part because I'm so cash like that.
actually i didnt post this to HN... i just commented on techcrunch and i had no idea that this response would happen. If you read my comment it's pretty relevant. Just saying.
Looks good but the font is a little too big for me liking. I want to see more on a page at a time.

However, great job getting it up and running!
Feels like trunk.ly has the data to be able to do this...

I don't know much about recommendation engines but seems fairly easy to be able to see what links I share, see similar users and then recommend me things I might have missed.
i answered in another thread so didn't feel like repeating; but basically you'd need a phased approach to get off email, it wouldn't happen overnight. from day one at company x, you'd get an email address and social id, you'd have both mechanisms for communication. over time the benefits of a social app would most likely outweigh the benefits of email and a natural progression would occur, i.e. lots of companies will start to adopt it.

i use email now only because it's a legacy standard though this is definitely decreasing in favor of social apps. this is analogous to television and internet.

my prediction is that a social app will take over email as the primary internet communication method and you will start to see this manifest itself very soon, even inside of corporations.
My feed shows you what I'm interested in, not just what I link to. There are words in the headlines, and in my descriptions of the stories. Those words are a goldmine.

You also have 2500 other people's feeds, who are using the same service. You have all kinds of ways of matching my interests against the stories they push through the system. This isn't new territory. It's how Amazon's algorithms work. They know that people who are interested in 3TB hard drives are also interested in (or at least like) Snickers bars. They know this because they ahve the stats in the database that correlate the two.

In other words, 2 is easier than you think. Lots of prior art.
You could split the difference, with $1.99. People who already paid wont be so irk'ed, and others will be more likely to find value in your app at the new pricepoint.
Here's the thing: as a phone, the 6310 was simply never beaten. It's almost as though Nokia thought that if they left it on the market, those sales would result in consumers stepping off the upgrade treadmill for several years. I know several people who still have theirs, and frankly I'm utterly envious.

My 6310 was the last phone I could use (as in, answer calls, dial arbitrary numbers, use the phone book, whatever) without actually looking at it. Damn, I miss that phone.
What is my Facebook ID?