skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a thoughtful piece written by a tech-savvy author who expresses concerns about the idea that we, as tech consumers, will be subject to the greed-driven restraints placed upon the technology we use by various corporate interests.

The unstated premise of the piece seems to be that, as technology matures, control over it becomes consolidated in fewer hands, each of whom has a proprietary interest to limit its ultimate use in order to serve its short-term profit interests. Thus, service providers charge high roaming fees and structure their charges to serve their interests at the expense of consumers while apps that are offered come increasingly within walled gardens where proprietary overlords dictate all terms.

I believe this is all true but disagree as to its alleged threat to our future as tech consumers. Human innovation in a free enterprise system tends to take on a force of its own that overwhelms individual corporate interests. If this were not the case, then our current overlords would be Barnes & Noble (for books), Tower Records (for music), Blockbuster Video (for video rentals), Western Union (for instant messaging), IBM (for enterprise computing), and so on. These were yesterday's corporate giants and they each declined in their influence specifically because they failed to anticipate key trends in technology and thus became laggards instead of leaders.

Telco service providers, of course, have incredible power and will use that power to further their particular narrow interests if at all possible. This has resulted in a variety of frustrating user experiences. Even here, however, technology will tend to outrun their long-term ability to dictate terms. Those who are old enough will readily remember the outrageous expense, while traveling, of "long distance" charges, of the scarcity of reliable phone systems in many countries, and of the difficulty often incurred while wanting to make a call of trying to find an available phone booth while on the road. We are worlds removed from that old environment today owing to amazing advances in technology, and we as consumers are far better off than before in spite of the hassles, inconveniences, and expenses we experience with our service providers.

I resist walled gardens and proprietary traps in the marketplace as much as the next guy but these too do not threaten my choices in the long run. I may or may not like what Apple does but Apple will not control the future any more than the companies listed above. Corporate control in this sense is powerful but ephemeral - absent government restrictions that give it quasi-monopoly status, it lasts only as long as a company serves important needs of consumers. Once that slips, so too does the corporate dominance (over the long term). I may be wrong about this but, given what I have observed over my lifetime, I take a much more relaxed view of it than does the author of this piece.
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/what-is-watson/co...

Has a nice little video too.
The people who didn't pay for In Rainbows are just going to pirate it anyway, but they save on bandwidth, I suppose.
Cool! Makes sense. What are some good examples on the govt side?
Same here.

Thanks LSE for providing us with one of the simplest protocols to code against!

For those wondering what kind of protocol I'm talking about: http://goo.gl/ld9aj (MIT203 and MIT303).
Didn't know. I'm sorry.
Would the list contain itself?

Ohhh. Damn you, Bert Russell!

(I kill me.)
This might be a good place for a link to the HN Contractors spreadsheet: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...

It was discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262467

And turned into a website: http://hnhackers.com (discussion for that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262467 )
Happens to me too sometimes, I think they are shown for a few seconds, as nobody clicks it it dives in the hierarchy of posts...
I'm not talking about escaped @ symbols here (that's bonkers). There is still plenty of code out there that assumes a domain suffix is only ever 2 or 3 letters long and that usernames are only letters and numbers.
A lot of "Elephants" were brought up in this. I'll just cover one: 7. Politics - A more systematic and thorough acknowledgment that organizational politics play a big role.

Agile accepts that there are politics and does acknowledge this. Agile can't fix politics any more than it can fix needing locks on doors. But, it does make it a lot harder to play politics by requiring a lot of transparency in the process and requiring people involved to play very specific and well defined "roles" just to name two.

With Agile, organization politics do come to light a lot faster. In my opinion this is good.

Agile does not, nor should it try to, fix the problems brought to light.
So this guy's basically the "small town douchey cop" of wikipedia editors? Is he gonna try to organize sting operations on high school parties next?
I still use a map instead of a GPS and an old Sagem (my 810X) phone with prepaid card that last almost one week on battery. Not because of FUD of the (French) FBI tracking me, and not because I can't see all the benefits of using a GPS or a smartphone, but because I feel free this way: I don't have to pay for a smartphone + contract or (exhorbitant) roaming fees and I'm not dependent on batteries. Plus, I still know how to read a map ;-) Guess what, I lived in the French Alps, in Tokyo and now in Paris and I didn't get lost nor did I miss events.
I expect it to be similar to what happened with the printing press and computers in that you'll be able to download (/pirate) actual objects. The revolution will be huge.
Whether or not he can get rid of his shares in the short term, what is good for Microsoft is good for his net worth which, it would seem, creates a conflict of interest.
I'm not sure what you mean by an "authentic community". I have many friends on social networks whom I've never met in real life and whose names I have no knowledge of, but they are real people, and the relationship is authentic, based on our interactions.

They are not fake, they are simply anonymous.

Further, by having some anonymity, I can say things that I otherwise would not be comfortable saying. This is important on a site where the purpose is to answer questions.

Is it better to get a vague question or to have an answer that fails to reveal critical information because this information might make a business associate look bad? Or would it be better to be able to say X attempted to do Y because they believed Z, and I thought Z true, but Z turned out to be W and so Y caused a Q. X is a good entity, they just made a mistake here, so beware of this kind of error if you do business with X.
One thing I'm interested in is any skew in the questions from normal. In particular I hope they ask linguistically tricky questions where you can't even figure out what's being asked at first. I felt like they went a bit easy on that front in the preview round:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE
> Very broadly, things on the Internet will be described with descriptor languages

No. This will not happen.

Look, before Google, internet search relied on people adding meta tags to their pages so that the search engines could know what a page was about. You had two languages, one for humans, and one for computers.

But people don't really care about having correct meta tags or headers or other invisible markers containing instructions for search engines, which is why Google steamrolled the market when it appeared. Google ignored all the instructions and instead analyzed the human language on web pages, and inferred relevance based on that.

If semantic search engines or analyzers or other technology wants to become widespread, it cannot rely on extra markup, it cannot rely on people adding descriptors of meaning to the data it indexes, it has to determine that meaning from the data directly.
If you're looking to recreate the lemmings experience on modern hardware, don't forget Pingus:

http://pingus.seul.org/

My kids and I have hours of fun with this game. My only complaint is that the penguins can't swim.
HTML Working Group Charter: HTML 5 will be standardized in 2014
Unless you have an unlocked (i)phone, I believe this will probably fail. Sadly.

Highly likely to be the case if you are American.
I had thought from the counter that IBM had run on the Watson page that there might be but it seems that us non-US residents will have to wait. Still very much looking forward to this. History in the making.
FTD caught inflating prices for Groupon offer, Groupon to offer refunds
as it stands, Yahoo! Answers is currently far more useful to the world than Quora. This may change as Quora grows and builds a broader audience, but in terms of value delivered to # of people, it isn't even close...
No, I wouldn't pay. There are several sites designed for this out there that don't charge anything already. That said, majority of the sites I come across while great are not generally services I would normally use or consider a must have. Paying to have access to the latest and greatest startup seem to be more valuable to press if that even matters, which I presume isn't since most startups want attention and would gladly get any press they can receive.
On the website I run, I ask for an email address during signup.

All I do to check whether someone appears to be real is to use Rapportive in Gmail and see whether they appear on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

http://rapportive.com/

I don't force users to use real names, I think there's a real benefit in allowing people to use aliases. Rapportive allows me to really quickly grok whether the alias has an underlying real ID in terms of fighting spam and trolls.

It's hardly a fool proof technique, but it answers the questions 9 times out of 10 which removes any need for me to create obstacles for my users to jump through.

PS: Interesting aside: I really loathe Facebook due to a personal incident in my life that occurred on there. Rapportive were kind enough to understand this and then to write an exception into their codebase such that it never prompts me to connect with Facebook. Talk about customer service.
I'm sort of surprised by the surprise here. As a graduate student myself, my peers and I have all come to the sad conclusion that Wikipedia is good for breadth and bad for depth, at least in CS (I cannot speak for other areas). The primary issue seems to be the combination of deletionists and campers. The former we see in this case.

The latter is something my theory friends complain about. According to two of them who have tried, attempting to expand or correct any of the fringe topics in algorithms and graph theory is futile because of the instant-reverters who will simply revert any change they make.

Of course, what's most disturbing to me about this is... dear gods, man, you're at Princeton! If you don't understand what the contributions of Alice ML are to the field, walk down the hall and talk to Andrew Appel! Or David Walker, if Andrew is too hard to track down. I would hope that by this point this student has learned that there is a lack of fidelity in the search engines for anything published in the 90s and earlier, as the scanned PS converted to PDF is neither as well-indexed nor as comprehensively available (e.g. Springer-Verlag work from that time is frequently not indexed in scholar/citeseer due to a lack of non-subscription links, particularly if published by someone who is no longer in academia).

Fortunately, most of the work in PL was done in the lifetime of people still working. If you're too busy to do a thorough search of relevant work, you can sit down and talk with the people who were there when concurrency was first being introduced and formally modeled to understand Alice's place and contributions (or lack thereof, if that's the conclusion you come to).
Dear Dribbble, I Quit.
+1

To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.

The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.

Another way to put this is that it's a bubble story: journalists and Valleywags think it's much bigger than it is because all the other people in the same bubble talk about it. Outside of SV/SF, nobody really knows nor cares.

It's a bit like the AT&T-iPhone story. Sure it sucks in SF/NY (it really does) but journalists and bloggers seem incapable or uninterested in considering that these two cities are representative of the whole country.

Last year Quora got funding at a staggering $86M [1] (this sounds like post-money). It's Yahoo Answers meets Facebook, which just so happens to have an insider audience that won't necessarily translate more broadly. Frankly, I'd sell before people catch on.

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchma...
"as the business potential became obvious to corporate warlords, they struck, [...] getting willing governments to enact rules, regulations and laws to protect corporate interests"

Aye, there's the rub. Corporate welfare programs are the root cause of everything he's describing, and of a lot of other problems with today's economic system. Restrictions on competition, created by the government, have been a major obstacle to everyone's welfare since at least the 18th century (Adam Smith rails against them at length in Wealth of Nations).
You'd be surprised how many people supply bogus email addresses for something they ostensibly actually would like emailed. Like the To field on "tell a friend" or the signup box for an email newsletter.
Minor correction here: the "Alice programming language" page was deleted, only to be moved to "Alice (programming language)". The one you want is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_(programming...
Would you say the same thing to a PC manufacturer after Windows 95 came out? Like it or not, Android is already the "Windows" of the phone industry. Going with another OS, that ust happens to have the Windows name on it, but with a much smaller market and momentum, is a catastrophic mistake.

What if this is going to be true a few years from now and Nokia fails with WP7 because the Android ecosystem assimilates everything. Will they still be able to go to Android? They'll be destroyed by then, and it will be way too late too switch. At least by going Android now, they would have a fighting chance, and would just need to become a competitive company again, which they haven't been for a while, even in hardware. Yes, the N8 looked pretty good, and the camera was nice, but that's about it.
Your understanding is wrong. It is this attitude of yours, that of ascribing fictional motives to those who criticized you, and the failure to comprehend the impact of your actions, that had a role to play in precipitating the outrage in the first place. I am no fan or user of any of the language that you helped delete. But that does not mean I would be ok with those deletions. See my other comments for an elaboration. I know enough that important knowledge also exists as folklore and it is important to preserve them on Wikipedia, precisely because they are not represented adequately elsewhere.

You are clearly disingenuous. You complained about: if only people had told you that you were doing wrong. People did, and you came up with snarks and smileys and gratuitously appointed yourself the position of a judge that decides which citations had impact and which did not. And when it went out of hand, you played the victim and you changed your excuse to 'if only _more_ people did, more reasonably etc. etc'.

``I only recommended a deletion, did not delete it myself``, is another exhibition of dis ingenuousness and irresponsibility. Same for the shuttling between, "I am sorry" and, ``I was right in every case``. (Things between `` `` aren't actual quotes)

I believe you are an adult, everybody expects adults to possess some degree of understanding of what is being told to them and act and apply rules with ownership and responsibility. What is specifically galling is that when push came to a shove you took up the excuse that notably rules are broken. But, earlier, had no problems argumentatively enforcing them blindly. No one had a gun to your head to do whatever you went about doing, you went about doing it anyway and then hid behind a straw-man.

Nobody has the time an energy to, as you indicate, to reason with someone at length. Especially when the other person is being unreasonably pedantic and obnoxious. Most people have a real job and more important things to do.

Edit: @runjake your point well taken and upped.
How to sync a table with a database using AJAX
Ha, that's awesome
Never Have a Boss Again: How to Be a New Entrepreneur
Reminds me of The Diamond Age aproximate quote "The windows where made of diamond, because as a simple carbon structure it was cheaper than glass".
OpenGL graphics on a Windows form with C#
You can know how to read a map and use GPS. I use a GPS, but I still check road signs to make sure it's right, and so I can use my map if the GPS breaks.
This is truly annoying and makes me hesitate to use the '+' feature. The problem I've had is when I get manually subscribed to an email list (like when giving my email on paper or being added after sending a senator an email) and then cannot unsubscribe due to validation failures.
I think you mis-interpreted him. He actually said he believed that all the articles he submitted for deletion were deserving. He did however, say that if people really felt that he was being mis-guided, by following protocol, then, instead of leaving messages on his talk page, he would suggest people work on fixing WP notability guidelines.

When he said "fixing" I don't get the feeling _he_ thinks it's broken but rather is acknowledging other people's take (as evidence) and lead him to believe that there could be room for improvement.

To me this shows that he believes things are ok, but he would agree to any changes if the community thought changes were necessary. That's quite reasonable to me.

That's quite different from the allegation. (That he thought they were wrong but just followed the guidelines anyway. Or have I missed another quote where the allegation is true?
Simple. Charge customers who insist on IE6 for the extra development work required to support it.
According to the below Times article (Dec 2007 - a month later), 62% paid zero and 12% accounted for more than 52% of revenue. Average price paid was $6 globally. US average price was $8.05; outside the US was $4.64.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/th...

Article also quotes Fred Wilson: "This shows pretty conclusively that the majority of music consumers feel that digital recorded music should be free and is not worth paying for."

As for me, I paid zero. And then bought the vinyl a few months later.
It'll be interesting to see whether this is widely adopted. As others have said, I've been reading this sort of article for at least 4 years now and there doesn't seem to be much progress.

Perhaps the metacrap rant (http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm) was right?

Seems that way at the moment.
You can watch the PBS Nova episode about the building of Watson for free on their website (about 60 minutes long, aired Feb 9 2011):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth....

One question I have about Watson that I don't recall being mentioned in any videos or articles so far - what sort of interface does Watson receive the questions over? Is Watson performing speech recognition or getting the text of the question via some sort of interface?
Hope is all you have, if email is the black box wilderness you describe. You rely on hope regardless of whether or not your email address contains "super-special characters".

My whole point is that there is a standard for an email address, outlined in a freely-available document. If an application claims to handle email, that claim implies conformance to that standard. Any deviation should be documented.

Your claim appears to be that there is some other definition of a "legit" email address, that you can absolutely 100% guarantee will be handled by absolutely every single email-handling application ever (without relying on hope).

Please answer these questions -

1) What, exactly, is the format of such a "legit" email address, according to your definition?

2) Where does this definition come from?
Honest question: how do you handle the extremely common case of a lost password without an email address?
I think you might have heard a similar statement in 1991 to the effect of:

"It doesn't take economics into consideration. most people/companies aren't that interested in sharing their documents in an anonymous way.

WWW is a web of documents.
SemWeb is a graph of data.

More reading:
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/
Killzone 3 leaked, 41.4GB torrent appears on file-sharing networks
The activation email isn't a panacea for users fumble fingering (or misremembering, or not knowing) their email address. Users who don't receive it will either a) ignore it if you let them use the application anyway or b) frequently bounce hard if they don't get it, because they assume naturally that your Googles are broken.

The single most compelling reason to send people activation emails is -- I kid you not -- to remind them that they signed up for your website and how to get back to your website. A secondary consideration is not proving that they got their inbox right but proving that they didn't get someone else's inbox wrong.
"If this were not the case, then our current overlords would be Barnes & Noble (for books), Tower Records (for music), Blockbuster Video (for video rentals), IBM (for enterprise computing), and so on."

Amazon operate in every one of those markets, and they dominate in a couple.
How Boeing failed at outsourcing
Hulu refers to crackle.com. Crackle has "minisodes" which seem to date from 2002-2003.

It is owned by Sony, distributed by CBS and seems to be syndicated, which means there is no network that carries it specifically, and thus no online distribution, as each market has a different station (Eg: Fox might buy it in one market while ABC might buy it in another).

This is near as I can tell looking into it.
Two interesting stories I've crossed paths with are Bill Strickland, author of Making the Impossible Possible, and Sugata Mitra and his "child-driven education" and another referred to me by a friend:

+ http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_543015...

+ http://www.bill-strickland.org

+ http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/bill-strickland/topics/Bill%...

+ http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...

+ http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com

+ http://www.georgejuniorrepublic.org/programs.html
;-) denoted humour. Also, "using a map -> keep your map reading skills updated" doesn't imply "using a GPS -> can't read a map". And even A->B doesn't necessarily imply B->A.
But there's a visual cue letting the players know that clickers are open (a light flashes, I think), so the computer probably gets some notification too, at which point it could instabuzz.
"...followed by a cease-and-desist letter from Sony."

I thought that was just a random reference to Sony's recent legal trigger happiness. Didn't realize they actually owned Lemmings until reading comments here.

That was one of the most ported games in history. Imagine all the platforms it could appear on now, if Sony didn't own it.