skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The last thing we need at this stage of the game is "Regulators" messing around in the market. It's early years, in the tablet market, and Google is going to come out with some awesome android operating systems, and I'm confident we're going to see some great tablets that will let me read my Kindle books on.

If Apple wants to shoot itself in the foot, and send everyone over to Google/honeycomb tablets by coming up with some insane pricing strategy for resellers - I think they should be free to.

If _anything_ this step by Apple, at this stage of the tablet market, _ensures_ we'll have competition. If they weren't making blunders like this, then the argument for going with an Android tablet would have been much, much weaker. As it is - I, Mr Apple fanboy himself, am finally preparing to purchase a non-Apple tablet, simply because all the content providers I'm interested in (WSJ, NYT, Economist, NetFlix, KINDLE(!)) are going to start abandoning the iPad and moving over to the Android Tablets.

And I'll follow them. No government assistance required.
Turn off overdrafting on your bank account. Transfer the money out of that account as soon as paypal sends it in.
Your definitely right. I was just wondering from past experiences, if anyone had an idea of how long it takes or if anyone receives a rejection letter right away.
Welcome back to client server computing!
I remember when another giant monopoly got investigated by Anti-trust regulators a few times a year. I miss hating on MSFT. But Apple actually worries me more than MSFT ever did.
Don't forget about: http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit/
Ask HN: Hacker News invisibly banned my site, anyone know why that would be?
It appears that HN has put some sort of ban on my site from appearing on the homepage, regardless of the community votes. Someone submitted a piece I wrote today, it did send some traffic to my site, I came here, voted for it myself as I do when I find one my my stories here, and then waited to see if there were any comments. What I noticed is something that I saw the last time someone submitted a story of mine here... regardless of the vote to time ratio the submission never showed anywhere but the "New" category. If you look here, you can see that it is indeed showing up, with 4 votes in 53 minutes:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/images/hn-new-submissions.png

The one underneath it has less votes over a longer time period, with only 3 points, and it is showing in the "Popular" list, at #46, whereas mine is nowhere to be seen:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/images/hn-popular-page2.png

The same thing happened a few weeks back when I wrote a piece about Matt Cutts, that involved the HN community itself:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163390

You can see on that someone else noticed the behavior too, and asked about it. They never did get an answer though. Personally, I assumed that perhaps there was some moratorium on discussing HN on HN, and that a moderator had prevented that particular story from getting any exposure. That story did hit the front page very briefly, enough for 3 people to visit it, and was then removed (I am getting that from the traffic reports). There have been other stories that people have submitted from my site that have gone popular in the past, usually ones I have written about Mahalo or Jason Calacanis, and since I did get those 3 hits from the homepage 3 weeks ago I am pretty sure it was that exact story that caused this.

Don't get me wrong... I am in no way trying to imply that my site has any "rights" when it comes to HN or even being submittable at all, let alone the right to be voted to the front page. If the HN mods don't want people submitting posts from my site here so be it. I will even remove the icon from Socializer on my site if they want me to. I am very curious as to why it happened though. My tin-foil hat self automatically goes to "Maybe Matt Cutts saw the submission and asked a mod to kill it", but it's also just as likely that they didn't like the implications behind me saying that Matt was using the HN community to accomplish some hidden agenda, or that even the mention of HN in a story triggers some guideline. If that were the case though, I am still unsure why it would have been a permanent thing.

Does anyone have any insight into this? Thanks.
The most obvious slam-dunk I can think of is Emacs. Twenty years later there's still nothing else like it when it comes to extensibility and interactivity.
Google Preparing to Fuel Webapp Growth with Native Client for Chrome
If Twitter bans modifying tweets for monetization and told the company to stop, or if the company actually was playing fast and loose with privacy issues, then it seems to me it's not Twitter who left anyone hanging out to dry.
Libya Blocks Facebook, Twitter and Aljazeera.net
Right. I understand that these things are done to retain employees, so it's really not even remotely worth working at this company unless I'm committed to doing so for the 4 years until an exit. I guess the real thing to figure out at this point is whether I want to walk now, or stick around--- and that's basically just a function of whether the options offered are sufficient.
Seems to be that way. Never worked with Jonathan but I did do my undergrad at IU. Both 311 as well as 422 (? compilers) were a ton of fun. I may still have the code for scheme to C lying around somewhere... If you are a programmer and have never used scheme I'd recommend having fun one weekend with it.
> "I wish more people would listen to me when I suggest copying the reddit "hotness" algorithim & commenting system"

We did with Yak, which has many features of Reddit plus several original ones and different positioning. Agree that hotness and un-sucky comment surfacing are the "secret sauce" of Reddit. Not quite ready to open the doors, but taking emails at http://yak.to
Thanks, it wasn't a typo but a limitation of the custom font I am using, I have made the necessary adjustments.
Yep, I just got an email from Twitter a few minutes ago. The text was the one that's in the article.
Right on.

And if "ideas are worthless" why do all major companies use NDAs?
But Apple made the other path illegal, so as it stands, you have to give the bandits your money.

Personally, I just hope people realize the kingdom of Android has a much nicer path. Sure, some parts aren't as nice as iOS, and the locals tend to do less business, but there are no bandits, and no gate keeping you out if the king suddenly decides he doesn't like what you're selling.
World’s first hummingbird-like unmanned aircraft system takes flight
Weekend Project Opportunity: Online Persona Management Service
The Technical Communicator’s Manifesto | Text and Context
Promoting your own app to all users of a rival client you've just suspended raises a few (quite possibly unwarranted) suspicions about their motivations. If they wanted to avoid that they could have mocked up something akin to the "Browser Choice" Microsoft got pushed into offering.
2010 was the year to invest in platforms. 2011 is the year to invest elsewhere. So long Facebook, Twitter, Apple - I no longer trust your platforms enough to put any significant resources into development.

It's time to end the walled garden resurgence and the best way to do that is on the ground floor.
Thank you for your reply, this is providing me with a great foundation for contemplation on what and how I should change my direction. The problem is that I can do a lot of things well and I don't want to limit myself by only showcasing one or two.

But I do know that too many options is usually bad (or atleast not optimal).
In Praise of Brevity | Text and Context
One thing I hated about jslint is that it would exit after catching a few "errors" too many, even if the errors were not actually syntactically incorrect. it's basically impossible to use if you're using jslint over large js projects that you don't own (I rarely go into someone else's js library to fix all of jslint's complaints!)

I'm guessing Crockford's code is extremely pristine, or that he's never used anyone else's code before.

I challenge anyone to run jslint over one of the many jquery libraries out there. I guarantee that there will be more than 100 errors per library, which is completely useless for debugging with all that noise.
Anybody know what "changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money" actually means in this case?

Were they inserting affiliate IDs into Amazon links or something?
Automattic has around 70 people working full time. I can't keep track. Not everyone works on WordPress.com. Without referring to any records, I'd guess we have a couple dozen on technical, a dozen on support, a handful on design, and a handful on business.
The problem is not the 30% fee. The problem is the requirement to offer inside iOS the same or better deal that you give outside of it.
If you're using OCaml for webdev, may I ask why you chose that over F# + ASP.NET?
> I've seen several people who think taxes are too low,

Oh really - how much extra do they pay?

What - they mean that other people's taxes are too low?

Do they actually mean "taxes are too low" or is that a proxy for "not enough govt services"?

I ask because the US govt collects about as much per person as Western European govts (and more than Canada). Yet, those countries do provide more services, but it's not because they collect more money. (The US has lower rates but has a higher gdp.)

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=4626
What sort of business are you in that you're fighting with your customers over chargebacks? Couldn't you interpret this as something being horribly broken with the way you handle refunds?

If you're selling software, there's no reason you should ever have a chargeback happen against you. Just make sure your policy is to refund anybody for any reason at any time. I remember reading a JoelOnSoftware article where he talked about running 4 years straight with zero chargebacks using a policy like that.
The disappointing part is that the lecturer talks about handouts that are given to students with the example code he uses during the lectures, which isn't online AFAIK. I find myself taking screenshots of the full screen flash video and replicating code I want to try out myself.
While I agree the users are in control for the most part, I can't help but think of one issue that pushed Steve and Alexi toward leaving reddit, that is, the censorship during the Sears debacle. I think there have been other cases where Conde Nast had to step in and lay down the law as well.
How does one know when the the market has entered the stage where regulation is ok? I'm not sure how anyone can tell whether if the timing is "too early" or "just right".
Because Apple's terms are distinctly anti-market. Apple is forcing vendors that sell content on their platform to incur a 30% overhead, and then forcing them to maintain the same pricing across all platforms.

So you have an overhead that doesn't exist on other platforms artificially introducing pricing inefficiencies elsewhere. Just the tip of the iceberg, really.
Can you work on an elevator pitch; 100 to 150 words max? Can you identify three intangible benefits you offer a customer? Can you list a few customers, or provide referring comments from past customers? Give it some thought and post here. You may find yourself able to break your web presence down into two offering specific sites.
Any idea how IP laws work under these contracts? Does IBM have the same patent rights that they would if they had developed the computer on their own?
How does a foreign national open a US business bank account?
I have an EIN for my company, but getting a US business bank account is like pulling teeth.

They require a 'site' visit for a web-based company.

Does anyone know of a US based bank that I can open an account with so I can launch ?

Btw, my company is registered in Jamaica - but I can register one in the US (that's no big deal).

If I don't have to travel, that would be preferred.
Barry has the strength of ten sysadmins.
From Bill Gross, founder of UberMedia:

"Twitter has requested that we make some small changes to our clients, which we are doing right now, & we will be back live again asap."

http://twitter.com/Bill_Gross/status/38692931690954752
http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub too
/r/ is, I think, the defining quality of reddit - it's a very elegant solution to the (x) is turning into (y) problem. /r/truereddit is already a pretty strong contingent of people pining for 06 reddit. But when all the cool redditors start hanging out on /r/truereddit, it will be choked with complaints that it's becoming like vanilla reddit. And thus, http://www.reddit.com/r/truetruereddit
It has Google in the title, instant upvote for any article with Google, Quora or Stackoverflow.
There would be fewer hits on the port sure, but it wouldn't really raise the bar to getting in, which is the point he was trying to make.

Obviously, not all 18,000 of those attempts were going to succeed. Finding the port is the easy part.
Damn that Cheney - he's been out of office for over a year and gas keeps going up....
And, of course, I just realized - if it is a moratorium on discussing HN itself, then there is a chance that this post will never get seen (or answered) either...
That reddit will never take off because "startup" is not a common a word outside the Silicon Valley social bubble.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/
This happens in the wild with Java updates. We have been burned twice with minor point versions that broke our app, that were pushed out automatically.
Idea Portability
Firstly, let me start by saying that the level and quality of entrepreneurial tech ideas in the core technology clusters within the US i.e SV,Boston,NY (Yes NY) are at the highest that I can remember. However, with the internet being a truly globalized platform, ideas(especially those that are not based on core technology or specialized algorithms) can be quickly replicated/copied in various parts of the world, at the expense of possible market share the founding company might have been able to aquire. Not every company is a GROUPON sitting on a billion dollars in cash and willing to acquire copycats. A companies initial strategy has to taken on the question of global competition and formation of partnerships with local distributors/developers to counter some of the losses due to idea emulation abroad. This is more than true for companies receiving very little in VC cash and needing to capitalize quickly worldwide knowing that most money will pay for development activities and there will be little left in the form of free cash flow.
Whatever font is being used/requested for the headings looks awful on Chrome under Windows 7 on my box. Looks like all anti-aliasing is missing.

The general layout of the site looks good, if a little busy, but the font issue really detracts from it.
I kept it simple: Reverse order = Number of points
i.e. #3 on front page = 28 pts etc.

Points are accrued every time a snapshot of the front page is taken.

There is a flaw with this system in that outside of peak hours, some less important item might hang around the front page a little longer and earn a too many points but I feel that it still works well enough to catch up with HN Content.
Apple has gone too far trying to gouge developers and the backlash is well deserved. I was planning on buying an ipad but I decided to boycott all Apple products until they back off from this madness. I bet if 90s Microsoft could travel ahead in time and see apple's behavior recently, even they would blush with blatant anti-competitive moves, monopolistic practices and gouging of their users.
The hassle is hardly linear. Choppers are probably closer to being linear, because they are more vulnerable, but the motorcade consists of armoured vehicles - they're basically tanks - so it changes the whole game plan just to have more than one target.

I'm sure there are other advantages to having transport doubles.
If the online game market that Zynga dominates continues to grow this shouldn't be surprising. EA and Activision are just not maneuverable enough to carve out the share that their IP and experience could potentially open to them. Chances are that they'll belatedly launch a few titles (or try and buy a few studios to do it for them) and screw it up by not getting the changed environment.

But it's a WTF moment to be sure, that shows how much things are changing.

I'm also intrigued by the fact that Tencent has a market cap of USD $46 billion (it's on the HKSE). Ten cent is a internet portal but it's stock jumped after online games sales surged
(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...)
They're offering users who probably just want to use Twitter easy/quick access to an alternative client so they can get back to tweeting. Given that the app they used to use was banned for privacy violations, the fact that it's the official app is probably a good thing in terms of trust.
Thanks for posting this - its a pretty good example of requirements creep. I doubt that anyone in the fifties planned out that the president would need 16 cars to go anywhere, but thats whats happened. One can picture the Secret Service holding meetings in which they decide to add "just one more" agent.
Mobile Maps Need a Zoom Out Button
Their two day class, right? I'm a fan of that also; it quickly gets you to a level where you can do basic things and lookup slightly more complex things. http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ind...
A. It's still not clear exactly what the issues were. Having use the app, I can't think of where Twidroyd steps on those toes. (I suspect that in its case Twitter is throwing a fit about trademark).

B. Suddenly cutting off two apps that are among the most popular on their platforms without prior warning is crappy for users. Publicly issue a drop dead date to fix the problems to the developers, and give your users a chance to be ready for things first.
I think Crockford is right about that error.

Declaration of variables in the loop could lead to this type of error:

http://cam.ly/blog/2011/01/javascript-interview-question/

(All of the 4 <li> will do alert('4') when clicked, when the programmer expects alert('1'), alert('2'), etc.)

If the variable had been declared at the top, that error probably would not happen.
It's all about where the customer enters the process. If they are using the software and say, "Hey I think this sucks" then they will likely go to your site and request a refund. If, however, they look at their credit card statement and think, "I didn't like that program, I meant to cancel it" or "Hey I don't remember buying anything from ABC Software" (because the name of your product is "Really Cool Thing Pro") then they are likely to find it easier to dispute the charge.
Sure they can: Charge $13 for Netflix with iOS streaming, or $10 for Netflix with no iOS streaming.
As a Posterous user this makes me cringe.

This, the GoDaddy bar in the admin panel that can't be made to go away and the spammer "subscriber" I can't delete even though he's not an admin definately have cheapened the experience. And the worst part is I can't even pay to make it go away like I could with wordpress.com.
Understanding Flowcharts (flowchart/humor)
There is only one thing the DOJ should be concerned about with Apple's app subscription program, and that is the price requirement. As it's highly dubious that Apple has any kind of monopoly, it should be free to set whatever requirements it sees fit for its platform, but mandating other prices outside the App Store sounds an awful lot like restraint of trade to me: http://dictionary.findlaw.com/definition/restraint-of-trade....

*Not a lawyer
Let your social network be your search engine
This is true. After a person has received and accepted an offer for employment, they work as a member of the Happiness (support) team for three weeks before starting on their own job. When WordPress.com opened, everyone in Automattic (Matt, Ryan, Donncha, myself) got a copy of every support request in email. So the support tour is a part of a long tradition. It's also a good way to learn the ropes according to those who have done it.
I started using one of those productivity tracking applications that monitors your program use, as well as your browsing history. When I forget it's tracking me and it gives me a report of how I just spent an hour watching hulu and other crap like that, it's embarrassing enough just for my own eyes - based on that, there's NO way I'd want anyone else looking through my history.

Now, if there were a way for it to know what the cool "trailblaze"-y things are that I'm doing and skip over all the irrelevant (99%) stuff...
What makes you think he hasn't?
PhosphoCon 2011 Call for Papers
A Flat Stomach - Abs Exercises And Information
Actually it isn't - my joke-y comment was to get people to think ... Thomas Jefferson and many of the other Founding Fathers wrote extensively on the subject; as did many others who were not American...including Bastiat, Gesell, etc.
To me, "creep" implies that much of what's there is unnecessary. If you told me adding 4 more cars to the motorcade would make the President more secure, I'd so, "go buy 4 more cars now". No part of the motorcade comes close to the cost to the world --- in damage to the markets and in the stupid subsequent policymaking that would result --- of a successful attack.
Socialist computer overlord to control army of surveillance hummingbirds
In retrospect, I probably should have used a term like "typical" or "statistically representative".

The point is that there are a lot of people who are currently running startups, most of whom are not much like Jobs or Zuckerberg (these are the "average" people). There are also many people who have not started a company, but who might decide to do so if circumstances changed slightly (the marginal people) [1].

In aggregate, both of these groups have just as big an impact on the economy as the few outlier successes.

[1] One might also consider startups which failed, but only barely, as marginal.
As do Kickstarter. They're the only reason I'm aware of Amazon Payments's existence.
And in 06, you may have had to work a little harder to find reddit.
It seems odd to me that charging business credit cards would cost you more with a merchant than charging normal consumer credit cards. Are businesses really more likely to incur chargebacks or generally be problematic than consumers?
I don't think they "shot themselves in the foot" in terms of profit. If they actually have a dominant position in the market (kinda true for ipads), then Amazon and the others will accept Apple's terms.

That means that EVERYONE ELSE will subsidize Apple prizes (since they have to sell their products at the same prize as in the ipad). With that subsidy, Apple can choose to lower the prices of ipads, thus cementing it's incumbent advantage.

Let's put it in another way:
If MSFT circa 1999 forced every shop selling Windows programs for a 30% share (and lower or equal prices than everywhere else), and with that share they gave away Windows at a low price (or for free), then it would have been VERY HARD for Apple or any other competitor to disrupt Windows.
You Can Make Skype Calls Using SMS With CallByText.com
Senators Dump Internet ‘Kill Switch’ for Cyber-Attack Response
High Frequency Trading blog
Seeing the evolution of reddit in screenshots was simply awesome.
http://reddit.blogspot.com/2006/12/time-machine.html
It wouldn't be hard to implement in Scheme -- I'd actually love to work in Scheme -- but if another developer asked me how to update the code for a second customer and I replied, "Start with this Scheme source code, make your changes, then apply this series of transformations and translate the resulting code into C," I would get doused in gasoline and set on fire.
Seth Goldstein and Steve Gillmor tried this more than 5 years ago with AttenTV / Attention Trust. It'll be interesting to see if the idea takes off now.