skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[Ask HN]: Please Review/Discuss the Concept implemented in Twit-e-mart
Hi guys,

bit of a side project I've been working on, and would love to get your input on the subject and the use of the concept of directed tweets/targeted accounts (fancy name for mentions and hashtags :) for 'directing'/sorting data on twitter and building a number of new services around Twitter and its community. Please read this to get the general idea (it's not long at all. . promise):

http://www.twitemart.com/info/faq
I don't fully buy this concept of "morally wrong". You ask what kind of person could do X considering consequences Y for victim, but that presumes the person knows and understands Y, which in this case, they didn't. So no, they are not necessarily an asshole because of this.

I also think it's deeply immature to divide the world into black and white, good and bad, and put curious kids on the bad side of the line with the rapists and murderers. The world isn't black and white. The perspective on the other side of the line can be quite different; and the people who really are bad are probably more in need of being locked up for medical reasons than some biblical, retributive, medieval eye for an eye logic of punishment
There was nothing directly on the linked site. Was able to track down this PDF on a bankruptcy specific site.

http://www.bordersreorganization.com/Reorganization_Closure_...
The premise doesn't make sense to me. Open source is a business model, not a technology. How do you build a "hub" out of that?

I think you are arguing that familiarity with the business model is transferable across organizations, but that seems dubious. At least so far, there has never been a "hub" based on an investing or management talent pool. It's always been based on the employee talent pool -- for the Bay Area, electronics and software.

FYI, I'm a Montrealer by birth, San Franciscan by choice.
The author's premise is flawed.

I would argue that New York and DC are extremely important as well. Centers of finance and government? Beijing and Shanghai may soon become quite influential so I would hold off on making judgments. They come off as self-congratulatory and insular.
Capturing knowledge that doesn't fit Wikipedia is one of my goals as well.

My hunch is that because such topics may be more obscure, a little more space/context, and some new modes of search/display, will prove helpful for readers/contributors.
WeWork Teases 'Totally New Concept' Coworking Scheme
New Apple Patent Shows iPhone 6 Dispensing Ice Cream
Reminds me of a story about Larry Ellison:

"He told me a story of how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say, let me help you out. What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings."

I love that quote, via: http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/12/why-google-cant-build-insta...
A Surveillance Drone Flying Inside Your Living Room?
The Fitbit Public API has arrived
This feels more like a good marketing attempt by TinyGrab than the real deal. For starters, just like many other services calling foul, TinyGrab has not removed its app from the app store. Everyone is waiting out the deadline for compliance which seems to indicate that companies are hoping Apple will change course and are more or less playing a game of chicken in the meantime.

Many of the issues they also explain as problems can be resolved in their case. For instance while Apple will have the registration data, they could set up a way for customers to allow access to other devices.

What we're more likely seeing that they have 3 reviews since their version 2 release in December, is that TinyGrab just is not that popular on the iPhone. They could make the changes, but it wouldn't be worth the trouble. So, whether intentionally or not, they've made a blog press release that will get a good deal of attention and probably be more valuable to them then doing nothing and staying on the app store as is.
For a while, there was a major problem with blogspam on the science subreddit. There was a user who would ripoff content from other sites, paste it into a blogspot site, and slap ads on it. It would regularly get upvoted to the top. He's probably still at, and cursing at people in Hungarian when he gets caught. Ask the folks at /r/ReportTheSpammers about "Ralph" sometime if you'd like to know what spam on reddit looks like.
I cannot see the difference between software patents, process patents, or patents on pharmaceutical drugs etc. If one is against software patents then one is against patents in general.

I think that the key differentiating factor for software patents is the rapid time-scale of innovation in the technological sector. Patents are awarded for long durations (20 years or more) because that is the time it used to take to extract value from them to justify the risk that the early stage innovators took and to reward them for their creativity.

But with the rapid speed of development in the technological sector such long durations of protection benefit the innovator disproportionately, to the detriment of society which would benefit once the patent was in the public domain.

I think that instead of arguing about whether software patents are valid or not, patent durations should be self-calibrating and should be tied to the time-scale of innovation in that sector.

So a software patents should for example be awarded for a duration of 2-3 years. This will still reward creative innovators, allow them to extract value from their work, without hampering further growth and innovation in the sector.
Doing the dishes will not save your marriage
Promote literate programming!
You can't sell at a loss and make it up in volume.
Looks like the original, open access, paper can be found here:

http://mbio.asm.org/content/2/1/e00005-11.full

I'd guess the obvious first question is, is this a sequencing artifact? I wouldn't like to judge, but it looks like they are alive to the possibility (different isolates etc.)
Turning Cell Phones into Urban Supercomputers
Zynga’s Next Big Move
It's ironic, but Microsoft almost always supported products that reverse engineered their software. One of our products was based on internals research and we received a proposal from their QA team to test our product in Windows 7.

If I remember well, the Samba team had issues in the past with this practice, and also the activesync protocol is jealously protected (and licensed to Google).
Named captures are a great way to document your regular expressions. Don't use the "#" notation to comment on what the regex is doing, just name the group instead!

.Net has had them for a long, long time and they are AWESOME!

It'd be cool to see Ruby get something like a MatchEvaluator, too

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.text.regulare...

A MatchEvaluator lets you much more complicated regex find replace. Currently, find/replace only lets you re-order or remove groups or insert static text. A MatchEvaluator lets you handle what to replace the match with code - meaning you can call a webservice that will replace MM/DD/YY with the equivalent Mayan/Persian/Lunar date.
I agree. With many applications it makes no sense to buy anything 'in app'. The app I was working on (now halted) would require information from an online account, that would not work in reverse. I can understand this thinking behind this for real in app purchasing. But it definitely locks out apps that enhance functionality cross-platform service.
Have EULAs been upheld in court? The idea that I need special permission to use software that I've purchased seems a bit ridiculous. Kind of like a EULA on a car that restricts my driving to Ford toll roads.
If someone claims they have "excellent verbal and written communication skills" and then has a litany of spelling and grammar errors in their application, it goes to the circular file.

It doesn't take much to have another person review the thing for correctness. If you don't know anyone who can, spend the money to have a professional check it over.
Haha, yes I am. The point was, as I admitted, pedantic! It perhaps seems rather more amusing to a Brit, where 400 year old houses, though not common, nevertheless are around. A house here described as Tudor is, more likely than not, actually Tudor. Much unkind amusement is also often expressed over here at statements from Americans such as "it's so old! Over 100 years!", but that is simply an old saw. As I say, people missed my point a little, which was out of place snark (though I hoped it would raise a smirk with some). Sadly I learn my lesson! :)
Wait... this whole thread wasn't a running meta-gag?
The content is free to the end user. In the event it has ads (certainly not all I donate to do), my access through readability is no different from using AdBlock on my browser or even, in my case, completely failing to notice ads.

The point is that unlike, say, Netflix, I am not paying anybody to serve me licensed content. I am donating (extremely selectively in my case) to specific publishers. It's hard for me to see how Apple needs to be involved here.

I should add that I never used Readability and used Instapaper extremely rarely prior to this scheme. My only interest here is that this is the first content micro-donation scheme that I have seen that allows me to pay for content I like. I don't see where Apple fits into this, morally.

Let me ask this question: if there was a free Red Cross app that allowed you to make donations, should Apple get 30% of that?
Apps for the living room. WHEE !
> it needs to change this cheap labor mindset into one of innovation.
I agree with your point that Montreal needs to change its cheap labor mindset, but I'm pretty sure the innovation part is and always was very strong here.

Thankfully, Canada's currency has reached parity with the US Dollar, in part because of Canada's stability during the clusterf*ck recession but mostly thanks to our country's vast natural resources. The dollar parity is forcing a lot of people to rethink the cheap labor approach, whether they like it or not. It was not so long ago that the US dollar was 1.5 Canadian dollars, but wages and costs were much less than 1.5x. The arbitrage opportunity was way too easy to ignore. That's over.
Cooking has become a pretty important part of my life. It's a great change of pace from sitting in front of the computer. Acquiring a very sharp knife helped me enjoy it even more.

Here's what I've cooked recently, plus other recipes I've saved:

http://yumtab.com/sarah-justin

(I actually created YumTab specifically to keep track of this stuff.)
I wonder how much longer realtors and mortgage brokers will be able to charge their hefty fees, once it is understood that house prices may stay the same or even decline during the next several years (at the least).

Would you pay 6% over and above the price of a new car, to the car salesman as his fee?
I love to cook. Focusing on chopping carrots, caramelizing onions, stirring and tasting, etc. is a good antidote to hours spent worrying about abstractions of abstractions.

I'm also drawn to "project" cooking, stuff that involves aging and/or fermentation. Making cheese, various kinds of pickles, growing tempeh and yogurt, sourdough, etc. I also homebrew (beer and mead). If you like being a mad scientist in the kitchen, _Wild Fermentation_ (http://www.wildfermentation.com/) has a lot of recipes and techniques.
Infographics: Internet Censorship Is Rampant Around the World
Apple's been doing this for a long time. Plenty of developers that got started in the jailbroken space have since gotten developer licenses and moved to the app store. The economic incentives are much better at larger scales.
Your general point is true and worth repeating but that's a very weak example: pets.com and the rest of the bubble companies were overhyped by speculators for business reasons and failed for reasons which have very little to do with the technology which they happened to use. In that particular example, having had some professional interactions with some of their senior web developers makes me inclined to say that they were if anything tech-starved rather than dominated.
Ability to React
Battery Eater Pro taxes the CPU and GPU blocks slightly and continuously. It doesn't peg anything just keeps the machine working moderately and not idle. It's a little more strenuous than web browsing but not much more.
PS3 Hacker Raised All the Legal Funds Needed to Beat Sony in a Weekend
I think the word is "unconscionable". Or at least that's the term for when a contract is so abusive it is not valid.

The thing is that, as you say as I understand it, whether a contract is considered unconscionable is normally a complex question; for example, terms that are unconscious in a residential real estate contract can be included in a commercial real estate contract because a commercial renter is considered more sophisticated (and so if you rent commercially, you better be sophisticated and count your fingers after every hand shake). One guiding question is whether the signer really knows what he getting into.

By that token also, I believe a number of terms are considered unconscionable if you click through them on a website. I would speculate that if a vendor sent an actual devil who blew smoke out his ears and demanded a video-taped signing in blood celemony, that vendor would have a stronger claim that "the signer knew exactly what he was getting into".

Will Apple employ Devils in the future? I think Microsoft may have them all tied up...

IANAL of course...
I dislike Apple as much as anyone, but I don't think they really need advice on getting people to use their products.
Yes, that's my point: as robots become more human, their activities will "blend in", as you say, with the things we normally do with folks. Right now it's much too jarring.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not rooting for the robots. Far from it. I don't want to live in a world where we are all networked together and have armies of little robot friends to help us with all of our needs. Yuck.

I was getting more to the true nature of the Turing Test. If you can't tell whether there's a person or robot talking on the other end, it really doesn't matter. In fact, you could argue that, for our own personal needs, internet bots could end up becoming much better "people" than real people. Which is very strange.
Google Chrome Concept Would Kill the URL Bar
It was criminal and morally wrong.

But the law allows for intent as well. From the article, it seems that his acts were committed as a result of maximal fanboyism rather than any real intent to do harm.

So, in this case, it's about whether the sentencing is punishment or deterrent. Sentencing as deterrent is only useful a small part of the time (if it was more effective, then the death penalty would be an excellent deterrent - which it appears not to be). Sentencing as punishment really depends on the person being sentenced and in his case, he actually worked pretty hard to turn his life around.

So, from the article, it appears he got what was coming to him, without having to waste his life in prison, where it does no one any good.
Knowing something and doing something with what you know are two different skill sets. Small companies realize this soon.

Google is driven by numbers, If they see enough people who are very informed and smart but actually they gamed the system just to get in Google but really do not do much, then companies will be forced to make major changes.

Every idea/process has an expiry time before everyone realizes and try to game the system.
Whiteboard doesn't work very well with trackpads...
Setting Posteriorities And Learning From Your Mistakes
Hard Sell: Motorola's $800 Xoom Tablet, No Flash Support
Address List of Borders Stores Closing
Don’t send the developing world PCs: send them Kindles
Dual-core and 4x the RAM offer no benefits to non-hacker customers? Sometimes page elements must be reloaded when browsing a SINGLE PAGE on the iPad. Surely you can admit that 4x the RAM would offer a notable boost to browsing experience.
You didn't purchase the software. You purchased a license to use it, which included agreeing to Apple's terms. To use your car analogy, it would be more like renting a car, and the rental company saying you have to stay in your state/province/country/etc., which is perfectly legal and pretty standard. You didn't buy the car, but instead purchased the right to use it.
- Lots of creativity? Check.

- A ton of talent available to those that know how to find it and care for it? Check.

- A vibrant hacker community like nowhere else? Check.

- A vibrant entrepreneurial community like nowhere else? Check.

Seriously, did Silicon Valley step on your mother's grave or something? You sound like Oscar Wilde's definition of "cynic": someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The next class is scheduled to start March 15, so hopefully before then :)
Death match EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS
The Foreign Office started migrating its servers to Linux in 2001 and since 2005 has also used open source software such as Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on its desktop systems.

Even in 2005, configuring printers in Linux was painful. And a big government bureaucracy cannot be deploying every distro-du-jour to keep up with improvements... most comparable Windows shops are still running XP.

One thing that I think a lot of tech folks don't appreciate is how much business generally craves reports and printing. Its just reality, utopian dreams of a "paperless office" notwithstanding.

I worked at a company that built a web-based system for a government agency. One thing we did, with EVERY release and EVERY new feature was include new or updated reporting (Crystal Reports) that paralleled the new features. Developers hated working with Crystal and hated doing report work in general. But the customer LOVED it.
In my experience people who are very much into meditation are those people who are still seeking the holy grail of how to feel better about life and about themselves, people who have experienced a lot of pain in their lives or periods of depression. Meditation won't solve that.
Along the same lines, how would this affect an email client that connects to a paid email service? Would be accessing content purchased outside the device?
Yep. They've had no competition forcing them to do better. At least with Flash they now feel the heat from native H.264 playback and JavaScript/CSS animations.
New for Canadian SEO: getlisted.org comes to Canada
Good points. I think that Apple is clearing out the competition before they introduce their competing subscription music and movie services. I predict that they'll introduce these in the next few months.
Warning: I can write about cooking all day long. I can cook for ever longer.

Cooking is my form of artistic expression and a perfect outlet for nearly every aspect of my personality and work experience combined.

I've been cooking seriously for years, even going so far as to have trained formally in commercial kitchens from commis to chef as a form of vacations from the IT world. Adding to that over 15 years of constant travel; I've eaten just about everything and everywhere in thousands of restaurants and food stalls. I have incredibly high standards and test myself against them constantly.

It keeps me grounded in all things I do and gives me a way to directly please others and gratify my own need to test for success or failure. (Try cooking for a nationally renown chef and his girlfriend in your home several times. No excuses and the pressure is intense, no matter how gracious the guest.)

Order, discipline, attention and eye for detail, intuition, physical sciences and chemistry, good taste, a rock solid internal clock and ability to spin dozens of plates with one hand - all of these skills help in many ways outside the kitchen.

My favorites foods are too many to list, but I'm a big fan of making house pate and terrine. Duck and rabbit rillettes. You work with me, you'll need to watch your waist line. I'm hoping to have a full-scale commercial kitchen in our next office location and I intend to use it daily.

How many bosses do you know want to run their own brasserie style cafeteria? I may be totally nuts, but I have confidence I can get the job done in the kitchen.
"How I Run a Website with Swap On"
We just applied this morning, hopefully its around March 1st or so. If people get accepted they need a bit of time to get stuff in order to head out there.
On the plus side, I now have one incentive to become a manager: the ability to say "You'll never work in this town again!" when I fire someone.

Oh well, I'll just have to bide my time until then demanding a bigger trailer.
> Seriously, did Silicon Valley step on your mother's grave or something? You sound like Oscar Wilde's definition of "cynic": someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Not bad going, two ad-hominems and not a single rebuttal of my arguments.

Oh, and my mother is alive and well, thank you.
ok, that's kind of cool. Thanks for fixing the XSS.
President Obama in the Valley
Persistent Whiteboard with node.js and websocket
Galaxy: Deployment Management
I'd definitely start with the completed tasks. Anything not completed I'd save for the end and try to brush off as "putting the finishes touches on" or "need to rethink some of the workflow" or something like that.
Nice post, zeemonkey. A few more for your list:

- substance trumped by image ? check.

- 99% of players only one level deep ? check.

- disdain for any other industry ? check.

- being notorious better than being unknown ? check.

- "where" more important than "what" ? check.

- lack of understanding of the real world ? check.

- religious worship of youth ? check.
Most of the highest traffic sites on the web use linux/unix with the exception of MS owned sites and a scattering of other sites. Smaller sites tend to gravitate toward linux as a matter of course due to lower operating costs and wider availability of hosting.
A lot of those stories are more in the realm of folklore, and the agencies that are said to have offered such choices have "alternate choices" for reduction in personnel than a private business has if the arrangement doesn't work out.
The last version of Java was released in 2006. Since then Microsoft has released two new versions of C#, two new .NET frameworks, two new versions of Visual Studio and a plethora of new libraries. People buy so many C# books because there is so much new stuff to learn.
When in doubt, reboot? Not Unix boxes
The content is not free to the end user and it's not given away for free by the publisher. The end user doesn't pay cash for it, but they do pay by becoming a target of numerous ads and a demographic metric for selling additional ads.

Let me answer your question with a question: Does Visa take a percentage of donations made to the Red Cross using a Visa credit card?
No pistachio flavor. Less ounces produced than a Kitchen-Aid ice cream maker. Lame.
Agreed. If there is anyone here who knows the justification for the latter two, please explain.

Edit: found the explanation for the last one: http://www.aimred.com/news/developers/2008/08/14/unlocking_t... So, basically, it's just using it as a normal case equality operator and you generally shouldn't use it in place of a regular #call.
I got a Leatherman for Christmas 2009. Since that time, it's been amazingly convenient to have pliers, a screwdriver, a knife, and a bottle opener wherever I go (in roughly that order). The pliers are especially nice, with strong forged jaws and a very slender shape, not quite a needle nose. I find myself using them when I'm standing right next to my toolbox with 8 styles of pliers available.

It's a Leatherman Skeletool CX, FWIW.
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Donations pour in for PS3 hacker; Sony court battle continues
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