skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that's looking at it in entirely the wrong way. It's naive to assume that long form marketing works like that and that those on the lower half are more receptive to the style.

I see two steps to understanding why long forms works and why people like us have an aversion to the method:

* Seeing the same things in different ways

* Assumptions about our place on the Internet

Seeing the same things in different ways

Take as an example the face mask adverts halfway down this A List Apart article on Whitespace in design: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whitespace

Looking at the direct mail version of the face mask advert we primarily see a bad design with no budget invested in it. We may assume that the face mask is likely to be of poor quality.

Others (e.g. those not versed in design theory/used to seeing nice designs… i.e. those who are not able to readily grasp why something just looks badly designed) may well see a small, honest, single-person company that didn't waste money on graphic design. He invested in the product, not the design.

The two designs are designed with intent; positioned differently for a different clientele. One no-less intelligent than the other, just less educated in marketing tactics and design.

We see the same thing in vastly different ways, drawing different conclusions about different aspects of the same offer.

Assumptions about our place on the Internet

It doesn't surprise me that long form works so well on the Internet.

Because we surround ourselves with people in our own social circle -- be it on Twitter, here on HN, etc. -- we forget that we are only a tiny subset of the Internet population: the subset of people who enjoy testing, reading about and discussing marketing, design, entrepreneurship, sales, psychology, etc.

Most purchasing and browsing on the Internet is done by those not as well-versed in these areas as us: we're out numbered by the people who know less about these topics by a huge factor.

They come across a long form marketing piece and good copy will snag them and bring them in, selling it to them slowly but surely.

When we see it: bad design!, scam!, psychological tricks!, close! The copy doesn't get to us. It doesn't sell us. It isn't positioned toward us.

Combine this difference of opinion and our temporary delusion that everyone should be like us and you have your reason why we find it hard to comprehend why long form works so damn well.

- OK, my apologies for the length of this reply. Rant over. Hope it makes sense.
Does this girl have a flaw? haha
The Economics Of Cruising For Parking [pdf]
Finally... I heard they were working on this 6 months ago. I don't like and won't use Get Satisfaction (confusing, terribly designed widget, and extortionate business model) and have been waiting for a good solution. I haven't looked at this yet but have high hopes.
Isn't that what Tumblr is?
I'd like to think it's the latter. At least that's the goal. I'm pretty sure you get better experience from companies that take the time to engage their customers with something like us.

You can actually customize your design (see http://foodily.uservoice.com/) of your site and also your widget (including the text and colors you want to have on the tab).
My favorite celebrity/scientist is Mira Aroyo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira_Aroyo. Musician, model and a published research geneticist from Oxford University's Biochemistry department. She co-authored an article published in Molecular Microbiology in 2003 and sometimes sings in her native tongue - Bulgarian.
I am not an expert on Node. But IIRC, Dahl tried and rejected a coroutine style for Node. The problem was that context switches that may or may not happen inside of any function that you call end up creating consistency problems that are almost identical to the thread-safety issues that he was explicitly trying to avoid by creating Node.
Seems like a pretty logical ruling as long as it also applies to Trade Groups (ex. RIAA, MPAA) and unions. Might be a really nice vehicle to find out some additional information.
You're correct. We're very bad about being stealthy. We have high hopes as well so if they're not met do let me know :)
Chicken.

Egg.

Discuss.
Episodes Archive - JSConf.eu - blip.tv
PostgreSQL pg_xlog filling up disk
Looking at many of the comments, I wasn't aware that HN was for personal attacks on various people.
These mp4 files seem to be re-compressed from the original avi files. They are much blurrier now, to the point that handwriting on the board is sometimes not readable.
What about the stack? With all these function calls, it's nightmarish to optimize.
Online, in my emails with him he has never been rude, always factual and not ignorant. In my discussions with those who've met him in person, paint a very different story. He does little towards the causes he believes in by being so anti-social as he has been renown for.
I'm pretty new here (though I lurked for a like a year before creating an account), but I don't think your comment will be considered "shady". What your comment has that the others lack is, 1) actual descriptive information, and 2) an attempt to participate in the discussion.
I used to be a big fan of Gruber, but I'm getting increasingly tired of his "defend Apple at all costs" mentality.

When Apple was the underdog, it all seemed to be about not what was possible, but what was fair, and what was right. Now it's a "Well, of course Apple would do that, wouldn't you?"

And he then punts on the biggest question of all:

What if Microsoft did this with Windows, and, say, tried to require Apple to pay them 30 percent for every purchase made through iTunes on Windows? To that, I say: good luck with that.

Not "well I'd certainly write a slam piece about it", not "well, that would definitely require competition regulators", not "that would be a dick move." Just "they couldn't do it anyway, so your hypotheticals mean nothing."

The way I put it (crassly) is "When you're Top Dog, you don't need to play like a bitch." Which is what Apple is doing, and honestly, they're turning me off from their products. And that's not about "Oh well, Apple likes to make money, and why shouldn't they be allowed to?" It's about looking like you're above it. Brands like Costco and Amazon make a huge chunk of change, but you don't see them getting into petty stuff like this.
We bought Beluga because we love it, too. We bought it because we love the functionality and the team.

So I wouldn't stress too much :)
The author seems oblivious to the fact that there are now many different kinds of applications on the web.

If every website was a blog, then sure - addressability, archiveability, searchability are paramount. If you're building the control panel for a nuclear power plant, you have a completely different set of concerns.
RMS's forays into politeness are a rather recent endeavor. He used to be particularly nasty about stupid things like GNU/Linux instead of Linux.
Rhapsody, Sony and Instapaper were all geared up for the old subscription rules. That loud noise you hear from them is from the grinding of gears. They'll get back up to speed, but they sure had to downshift when they weren't ready to. They may not be able to take the same road they were expecting to, though.

I think one outcome you're going to see from publishers is that there will be separate plans for iOS users. Before, there was naturally only one option and the App Store app was just a client to the same subscription. Now, I can see where it makes a lot more sense to have an a la carte iOS subscription for these publishers.
pretty sure that's posterious or however you spell that
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2277570
Getting data into and out of applications is a big issue in the era of SaaS. We've built data export into every single (non-free) plan we have (Though clearly there is a data translation issue. Anyone want to setup a company that helps you move your data between services for a cut of the service providers fees because I'd totally pay for that).

We've focused on doing less but doing it really well. We already had a lot of startups using us for feedback and using email for support. For $5/mo they can now get both. We hope that's workable for the 2 guys and a dog eating ramen crowd and if not we're open to feedback.
It's not -- or at least it wasn't. Nearly all the rude comments (and the rudest of them, I might add) are all from new users. We know where they come from.
The Price is Right: What to charge for App Books
OK, but what does that have to do with whether he maintains his own website? He could code the site himself, if he wanted to, using Emacs, and without an internet connection most of the time.

In fact I think the context works the other way around. RMS maintains a complicated personal website, and apparently does it mainly by writing emails. That, with no other information, is something of a feat. The explanatory context is that he has a bunch of volunteers who mark up what he writes, and put it on the web for him.
Some Gruber's articles feature a lot of insight, and are highly enjoyable. And some of his articles may be easily dismissed as blatant fanboyism. Unfortunately, this is an example one of the latter and not the former. I stopped reading after the second blatant "pull-it-out-his-ass" assumption he makes about the "complainers".
Are you sure? If some of your content was written in 1996, you'd be trying to buy you extra protection by claiming that it's copyrighted in 2011. Not that it woud matter for another 70 years or so, but still...
How much were tickets last year?
NASA readies for world's largest can crusher test
Well, technically there's a 'ch' sound in aitch, so it sort of includes its own sound.
The code above doesn't provide a Singleton implementation, you can test it by using the expression mySingleton() == mySingleton() which should evaluate to true, while it evaluates to false. The problem is that the function returns an object literal but every time the function is called it creates a new one (i.e. {} == {} evaluates to false). You can find a sound definition of a Singleton in JavaScript which makes use of the (quite tricky) Lazy Function Definition here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1895635/javascript-single... . EDIT: Took a deeper look at the "book" and the singleton section and I think it somewhat misuses the term Singleton (or it uses in a "broad" sense): the example you reported provides some information hiding but no single instantiation restriction, which it is instead provided by the final example/iteration.
After reading your post I struggled to decide whether I truly believed that coroutines were better than callbacks. This HN thread provided some useful discussion for me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549168

I still don't know enough to take sides, but the thread I just linked helped me to better understand the issue.
Google issues ultimatum to Yelp: free content or no search indexing
Because it's awesome! Microbreweries, a wonderful community, excellent food, and you can cross off the #35 place you must visit in 2011 according to the New York Times!

(I recommend Scratch for breakfast, Toast for lunch, and Dos Perros for dinner…)

(currently waiting for my visa to come through so I can join my wife there, so forgive me for waxing lyrical about the place :))
I see this image (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KMqOPeCgoT0/S_ABM6dl-II/AAAAAAAAF0...) atop a radiantly-colorful meme backdrop, a la Courage Wolf, with such sayings as "I Just Divided By Zero" and "Maybe You Should Have Kept Your Documents in the Cloud, Tesla"
I'm pretty much in agreement with everything Gruber said (first time for everything).

The one thing that really annoys me though is that Apple have decided is that if you offer a subscription-model outside of the app store, you now have to offer it at the same cost inside the app store.

Instead of paying 1-4% credit-card transaction fees with 24 hour payment terms, you now have to potentially pay a 30% app-store transaction fee with payments taking a month or more if your users decide to take up the option of paying via the app store.

Now I can see why Apple can't discount their 30% as this is the margin they seem to give to stores selling iTunes cards (yes, Apple makes nothing on apps bought with iTunes cards). But to require all apps to be forced to use the in-app subscription model is just ridiculous. What next? A native SAP client forced to sell their $100k product through the app store?
Yeah, I'm sure. Copyright in the United States is implicit anyway and writing "I wrote this in 1996" isn't a form of legal protection.
I don't think it's sad at all. People seem to forget that college can be about more than career advancement.

In this case, he clearly doesn't need a degree to be gainfully employed. Chances are that he's a pretty intelligent kid with other interests. If he puts 3-4 years into startups, not only will he probably be able to pay his own way through college, but will be at a point in life to appreciate the learning options a lot more (I can attest to this having taught many "older" undergraduates).

Maybe he'll develop an interest in advanced algorithms, or number theory, or neuroscience, or literature. At 19, there are a lot of possibilities in life, and college is a great way to be exposed to them, as well as people with passions in other fields.
Emacs will do that to you.
Congressmen, Facebook go back and forth over personal data sharing
Zepto.js 0.5 is out. New features include .children, .siblings, .anim callback
I have no trouble voting that one up. Thanks!
I don't believe Costco publishes their vendor agreements so you really have no idea how Costco treats their suppliers.

Also, no one complains that Google takes 32% of AdWords.
I just know one thing: the moment Kindle is removed from the app store, I'm selling my iPad.
In some accents it's pronounced "haitch".
I don't have all that much money to play with at this point, so really I'm looking for something cheap

Interestingly, I write software for Sage Line 50 as part of my day job, and can get bleeding edge developer editions, unlimited license keys etc. It is a bit overboard for what I want to do though - and FreeAgentCentral suggested above seems to do all of the accounting stuff, plus some smart project/time management features which IMO make it worth £15/month - although in the fullness of time this will no doubt be the more expensive option.

Great suggestion though, I hadn't actually thought of that! (Couldn't see the wood for the trees I suppose :)
I saw the videos, but they weren't very good and didn't give me any sense of how the app worked.

2)If SSO isn't an option due to support costs then how about having no user registration at all. I don't see any reason why people should be able to sign into a support site.

3) I know you have design customization, I am just not willing to pay the price for it. I think it should be standard with all accounts.

That said the foodily example is quite nice, but the navigation is hurting my head. I am getting lost rather easily.
A Technical Jargon Generator
This lets a client patch a server-side resource.

For the other way, a server sending a patch to a client, I wrote up a few notes here: http://vi.to/nathan/oEmbed.html#line-39

Which it turned out were mostly in sync with Digital and AT&T's notes from 1997: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-97-4.html
It's sad because his parents won't talk to him guys, c'mon.
Ask HN: Why isn't a content addressable cache built into the Internet?
I have a simple internet protocol in mind. Does it already exist? If not, why not?

The idea is that there should be a content-addressable request protocol. By presenting a (20 byte) hash the server responds with a chunk of data (say, 2M in size) which is associate with that hash. If a publisher (NetFlix) were to offer their content using this protocol, they would transmit to each authorized viewer, a list of 500 hashes for a 1 GB movie (total size of hash list - 10K). The client then requests each chunk by hash key in order to stream a movie.

Any ISP (Comcast, Level 3) seeing this protocol coming over their network, realizes that they can service a chunk request by returning the cached data, instead of forwarding it upstream to the source to fetch it over and over again. Routers could incorporate the protocol into their stack, so they can short-circuit high volume chunk requests out of a local cache (from several gigabytes to terrabytes). Once an ISP has the chunk data, they can serve it 1,000 times without requesting it from the origin server. They can manage their cache purely based on demand for each chunk.

With this protocol widely in place, I think it would be possible for 100M households to simultaneously watch a movie when it becomes available for download. I don't think that's possible using the current Internet protocols and CDN's.

Would this not be far superior for the network to transparently handle caching this way, rather than the messy system of CDN's we have today?

Does copyright law or the DMCA make it impossible to operate a system like this?
They don't take 32% of the purchase price for purchases that were made by someone who clicked on an AdWords link, though.
This feels like Gruber wanted to write an article from Apple's side, and felt an obligation to do so, but couldn't come up with any arguments nor solutions, yet still continued to write the piece out of obligation to his cause.
I found the pricing part of the site confusing. I clicked on "Plans & Pricing" expecting to see the new services pricing but it was just for the main UserVoice product.

It took me a while to realize you have to click "Start Free Trial" to see the pricing.

Not a great UX.
Does Bird Flu + Swine Flu = Superflu?
Chrome And IE Shows Growth, Firefox Remains Stagnant
P.S. I also asked this on Quora - as an experiment to see what kind of answers I'll get there vs. here.

http://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-a-content-addressable-cache-bu...
Genius! In the future he can replace himself with email generating machines and nobody notices.
Goldfinger
From Microprocessors to Nanostores: Rethinking Data-Centric Systems [pdf]
I agree that JavaScript is breaking the traditional web - linked static HTMLs with some forms in it. But I also believe that one day people will start to forget this bumpy ride. I am thinking of http://nodejs.org/ and http://jsdom.org/ - if the user agent has javascript disabled - the client side javascript code could be executed on the server.
How do you know that?

Another case in point: taxi drivers apparently have growing brain regions for geographic stuff (learning their city by heart). I guess you wouldn't expect most taxi drivers to have above average intelligence, but if you tested their geographic "senses", they might register as geniuses. But they also probably didn't become taxi drivers because of their talent - it developed by them being taxi drivers.
Survey Results
http://goo.gl/ZKVwa
I just ignore it and use the TLD when I have to relay a URL verbally. Most Web servers (at least for sites that I build or refer others to) are configured to serve pages without the www in the URL.
Just use the history api and call it an user incentive to upgrade their browser. The site would still work it would just be slower.
I don't think one really needs to take sides one simply needs to know their tools and know that they can be dangerous if not used properly. Both sides of the coin have merits. Personal I am a big Haskell user so my views on IO should probably be disregarded.
The marketing site certainly could use some work. It is a bit confusing.

Plans for Full Service are here: http://uservoice.com/fullservice/plans
I can't wait for this. The first conj was a great experience. I hope this years will be bigger and better than last, and there's no reason to believe it won't be.
TV One, Koin 47 Miliar Untuk Pembebasan Darsem
So many issues with such a short comment!

* If the back button behaviour is important, perhaps not breaking it in the first place is an appropriate approach

* The addressability of resources is one third of the fundamental basis of the Web. Ignoring it is essentially non-web, so I suggest the label "web-app" is incorrect.

* The user-expectation of clicking the back button but expecting to remain on your one-page website sounds like a usability problem brought about by applying a non-web-like interface inside a web browser. Perhaps a better user-experience is not breaking the well-understood web-navigation model, and thus not be confusing to the user. Or perhaps these "web-apps" need to make it clear to the user that they deliberately don't follow the characteristics of a web resource?
Ad hominem. You should address logical flaws and false statements.

And he was critical of Apple in two of the four points, so your premise is false.

Edit: This discussion is also something of a strawman, attacking none of the important arguments made in the article.

The point about what Gruber would say if Microsoft had done this is simply a preemption of an ad hominem attack against himself and it's quite unfortunate that he chose to address it. It has absolutely nothing to do with Apple's fairness in charging 30%, which is what we should all be talking about because it's a very important topic.

Very sorry to see this community of rationalists fall for a refutation of something that's irrelevant to the main discussion.
That's what canonical URLs are for.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...
Google Acquires Reverse Engineering Company Zynamics
Definitely agree. Plus defending every single part of Apple's policies makes him set up straw men and false dichotomies like nobody's business.

Take his summation: "iOS isn’t and never was an open computer system. It’s a closed, controlled console system..." The implication being that iOS users have no right to complain because they signed up for a "closed" system.

Systems are never just "open" or "closed." Apple's move here is making the system more closed.
I think it's better to think "when I'm 95", instead of "in 1 year".
My only complaint is that it'd have been nicer if it was downtown instead of close to the airport (apparently Durham doesn't have any large event space downtown, which is why it wasn't--or so I was told). I'd have maybe liked to explore Durham a bit more.
CEOs Want Better Sales Forces
With that logic, Microsoft is selling literal windows.
What To Look for at Tomorrow's iPad 2 Event
I know many reports claim that many iPhone apps "steal" your private information. Beluga is the first iPhone app I've ever used where I've actually seen it happen before my eyes.

I signed up for Beluga while on a ski trip with a bunch of friends. I used it for the weekend -- it worked pretty well -- and then forgot about it.

A few weeks later, I started getting notifications on my phone: "Firstname Lastname is now on Beluga". The only problem? I had no idea who Firstname Lastname was. But I had a suspicion. See, I had synced my iPhone contact list with my Google Account, so unfortunately my iPhone has just about anyone who has ever emailed me inside it's address book.

I checked the address book and, sure enough, the person Beluga was notifying me about was in there.

So here's the thing: iPhone notifications are push, not pull. Which means a Beluga server pushed this notification to me. Which means the Beluga server knew this person was in my address book. Which means the Beluga app uploaded my address book to their servers.

I know that in this day and age, practices like this are becoming commonplace, but I think downloading someone's address book without asking permission is wrong, even if it is contractually allowed by Apple's TOS and the API.