skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
gmail is more than "good enough" for the vast majority users, any valid criticism of it as a "could-based" email service (whatever that means) would have to compare/contrast it with the alternative "non-cloud" email service.

More importantly, it probably is not a good idea to use email (of any form) as long term storage. Much better to "zero" your inbox periodically and only save what really needs to be saved outside of the email system.

Finally, there's are HUGE distinctions between losing some/all of one's emails, temporarily being locked out of email, and whatever other problems actually occurred. It is not at all clear what the severity of the problem actually was and how permanent it was. Perhaps it is premature to create a scare story about using gmail at this point?
>as soon as Republicans hold the White House again, that the government has to be able to regulate the Internet as well, in order to make the world safe for Jesus and protect us from the terrorists.

I don't agree with the political "back and forth" that is prevalent on both sides of the spectrum, but certainly this could have been rephrased to be a bit more objective.
>There's no reason why we can't do this. This is America.

Exactly. It isn't China, France, Spain or Japan. People in this countries are :

1. used and able to [relatively comfortable] live very close to each other

and

2. not able to live far apart - not enough cars, land, etc...

In short - they don't have choice.

The 1. and 2. are completely reversed for America. I personally like it this way. I spent enough years doing public transportation to value what i have here (Bay Area).

Add: and don't tell me about global warming - will talk about it once everybody get really serious. Even today there is enough technology do avoid it - nobody [with real political and economical power] just care about it. For example (do you own research) - 20-30KWt/Hr batteries (300-450Kg) can get you 100-200 miles range. Even at today's prices (no economy of scale) $1000-500 per Kwt/hr - lets say $20K (though you can do even with $10K). Minus complicated engine, transmission and other related stuff (around the same weight) - pretty much the same price of the car. Gas station infrastructure - complete saving. Instead of all these underground and transportation gas tanks, safety measures, etc... - each existing gas station _already_ has high-amperage electrical connect to it - the only investment is a plug with card reader attached.
Gin. Or beer. Or whiskey.

Also there are no ladies in San Francisco.
As have I. When you have to support other people it just makes sense (silent update).
Yes - if it's anonymous. (added after there were about 50 votes - yes, this will skew the results.)
- "It's all about which side of the money you're on"

- "it's all about practice"

- "it's all about passion"

It's all about overgeneralizing.
Thanks for the heads-up. Yap, I'll probably discuss some issues/ideas on accessibility metrics (beyond WCAG's A/AA/AAA).
I think you may be under a misapprehension here. Every major series I've been involved with has been very successful indeed - Google 'em. ;)

But they could have been even more successful - for example, if I'd implemented the techniques I talk about in the article. That's my point.

(Perhaps they'd even have been more successful with visually slicker sites - but the belief that a prettier site automatically equals better conversions is a reasonably well-known business fallacy.)
Agreed. This is something someone might find useful in a project they're working on. Unlike any Techcrunch or Gruber post.

If HN were my personal pet project, that would be my link litmus test. "Is this something that might be useful info for making something, and not just 'news' to jabber on about?"

Might be too restrictive at first blush, but that is what I come here for, not to read "news" stories that are posted everywhere else too.
I like your example but I don't think that a web page is like a person in public space. As you say their is no tort generally in approaching someone in the street but it is possible that a legal barrier has been erected and so an uninformed observer can't assume that no infringing/illegal activity is being undertaken (think exclusion orders, stalker laws, anti-social behaviour orders and the like; I think these are reasonably common across jurisdictions).

In the case of a website a copyright to that site is automatically created when the work itself is created - this is true in the vast majority of countries at least. Being able to view the site by making a temporary copy in your computer's cache is not clearly non-infringing. Someone aiding the creation of an infringing work can be acting tortuously in "contributory infringement" and hence linking to a website could, strictly, be tortuous. Applying common sense by assuming an implicit contract avoids the need to concern oneself with such apparent infringing actions.
They just don't go to hacker meetups :-P
Exotic Superfluid Found in Ultra-Dense Stellar Corpse
To be clear, I didn't say it was "all" of the nails, just one :)

Yes there have been several creative ways to work around the limitations imposed by Apple and I imagine these will continue but would you agree that this "handicap" discourages innovation on the platform, and provides a "leg-up" to developers on other platforms?
From a year ago, but still relevant. It's also a good lesson in handling program state without needing to make it mutable.
+1 for mentioning the Flexible Box Module. I'm ashamed to say I only discovered it recently, but that thing looks like a lifesaver.

Now if only Opera and IE would get on board...

http://caniuse.com/flexbox
yup -- great post and great insights. san ef, looks like a cool city, pretty much as thessaloniki in greece is. but skg (thessaloniki, airport code) hasn't that much of tech-scene: it only can be related with booze drinking, bar hopping, the everyone knows everyone thing plus that everything is close to you from everywhere. startup & tech scene is "growing up" smoothly and good—we call it the "sallonikon valley". anyway, again, great post.
Looks great so far!

I'm writing an RPG in Scala, and am taking a different route - I'm adding a GUI after the mechanics (battles, equipment, map navigation, tasks) are complete in the console. This is my first game, too, so I'm not sure that this is the right plan, but it seems like a good idea.
Unfortunately the nation of Eritrea does not offer domains through Godaddy, and I wanted to get this up and online in a few hours.
He wants to protect "our most basic freedoms", right?

Matt Yglesias explains: Freedom’s Just Another Word for "I’m An Orthodox Conservative With Orthodox Conservative Views": http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/?p=41091

He also provides an example in: The Freedom to Build: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/02/the-freedom-to-bui...

Where freedom means the freedom to prevent a real estate developer from building what they want, on property they own, because you don't like it.

Also somewhat apropos: Freedom-Talk in Colonial Georgia: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/02/freedom-talk-in-co...

The Georgia dissidents rallied behind the revealing slogan “Liberty and Property without restrictions”—which explicitly linked the liberty of white men to their right to hold blacks as property. Until they could own slaves, the white Georgians considered themselves unfree.
To be followed up by next post: "San Francisco dating scene, city of 6's." ;)

Oh but what fun it is.

One legit addition is the weather is beautiful, just not in June, July, or August, so be prepared to get out of the city a lot. The peninsula escapes the summer gloom, where it's a steady 80-90 every day for like 6 months straight.
IPhone and Android template for online store that feels like native app
Intel Announces SSD 510 Series Drives With SATA 6Gbps Support
Brilliant. There's a few problems unique to my own situation, but I like where this is going.
Great advice from a well respected entrepreneur. His advice on knowing your buyers resonates with me. I can't stress enough in knowing the most about your users & buyers. Understand what they value, and most of all, understand what they need in order to be a long-lasting customer.
Who needs to own cables? You could rent cable in some areas, rent satallite for others, build short range wireless towers in others, use laser transmission here, build above ground infrastructure there, channel packets through power cables here, and phone lines there, and speed it up with local caching here, here and here.

Technology changes, don't expect the ISP killer to look like an ISP. Just as the land-line phone killer in no way looked like a better land line phone provider.
I'd be a little less concerned about this one, because it's riskier for the attacker: once you find it, you can probably get a court order to have Verizon tell you who's paying the 3G bill.

Although I suppose that just means Step 0 is to get service under a false identity.
Mentoring Organization Applications Now Being Accepted for GSoC
A product developer also has to pay ~$5 per device Apple licensing fee
“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points”
It's easy to get very basic Word/PDF documents to look decent in HTML, but to get ALL documents to look virtually identical in HTML is extremely challenging.

Here is the same document displayed in Crocodoc as well as an online "PDF to HTML" converter, for example:

http://crocodoc.com/ElpNgF

http://www.pdfonline.com/convert-pdf-to-html/DocStorage/678a...
Ironically that's the mode of access most likely to be affected by not having net neutrality laws passed. Google was even willing to give wireless a pass in their pact with Verizon.
The fact that you can jump on Caltrain in sunny 90 degree weather and jump out in SOMA in relative dreary weather continually amazes me.
Technological barriers mean high profits for existing players. This in turn brings more and more entrepreneurs looking to bypass the barrier (either through new technology, capital intensive partnerships, or other avenues) and reach the gold.
Since you say it would "just as useful to me", then I would assume that means it doesn't have to do with the actual person who submitted it (and correlate to age, or something) because you couldn't do that (easily) without a name attached.

Couldn't you then, in that case, give each anonymous user a number, and say "Anonymous User 1"? On the other hand, given that it might be possible to reverse it to the user who made those upvotes.
Purely Functional Retrogames: http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html

And his conclusions: http://prog21.dadgum.com/37.html

This walkthrough is in Erlang but same patterns apply.
I only have 46, but I'd be happy to send those over if suitable.
Mundial de Rugby 2011
Información, noticias, fotos y más sobre el Mundial de Rugby en Nueva Zelanda
Managing 400m users, Disqus shares 3 hacks for a better UX in lean startups
No it certainly doesn't have anything to do with that. However it does set the precedent that the FCC can set rules for how businesses operate their networks, and once that precedent is set it will become much easier to extend it to regulation of traffic. Keep in mind that governments rarely give up a power once it's become accepted, but that they are quick to extend any powers they do have.

This isn't necessarily the first or last link in that chain, but it is a link in the chain.
Check the following totally misleading article put out by the Corporate front "Ameripac":

FCC: Information Superhighway Traffic Cops
http://conservativeactionalerts.com/blog_post/show/2120

This looks to be a campaign intentionally designed to confuse with the goal of restricting a truly free Internet in order to benefit big money interests.

Frankly I've had more than enough of mega-corporations corrupting good governance.
> to buy $300 sunglasses in Washington State

It looks like you're the explanation for the popular factoid that Seattle has the highest per-capita sales of sunglasses in the United States.
I'm very interested in this. Let us know how you want the data.
FBI activates electronic posse to go after serial rapist
Seven year SF/Bay Area resident here. This rings true for me in a number of ways. Two anecdotes:

1. SF is small. Several years ago I was reading Dreaming in Code. Turned out a guy that I had been working with for a year or so had come from OSF, and sat in the desk the author vacated at the OSF office.

2. Right after I moved to the Bay Area I was chatting with someone at a tech writing meetup. She mentioned that she knew someone who worked at a company that could maybe throw me a contract, and they did. Things didn't go that great but it got my career going.
To clarify, stories are automatically “saved” and put in that list when you upvote them. Only upvoted submissions appear in the list, not upvoted comments.
i'm looking to hire people with php, jquery, and postgresql skill.
The fact that it's only 0.02% of users affected doesn't mean the situation should be taken lightly. I'm amongst those lucky users and trust me, it freaking sucks.

So far, it doesn't seem like Google cares much about us or is doing anything to restore our accounts. I hope I'm wrong.
I agree. This (or a similar tool) is set to become a genuinely useful part of my web development toolkit.

If it used random CC images from flickr, rather than kittens, I wonder if there would be so much objection.

If you let the /b/tards' love of kittens forever bond the "kitten" symbol in your brain indelibly to the "idiocy" symbol, you are letting the /b/tards win. They are just mammals. (Kittens, not /b/tards.)

However, it probably doesn't warrant the #1 spot.
Just so that we all know, are you saying this from a (strictly) commercial perspective, or from that of a hecker's?

What 'board' are you talking about?
good idea, I actually built a webservice for exactly this type of service but never bothered to launch it. The challenge would be getting restaurants to commit to using your service as the only place they'll put their menu information so that it is always current... people would only pay if they know that the data is current, otherwise why not scrape it from other sites...
It would appear the market knows which continents to build high-speed rail on, and where to build them, which--I would guess--is the point you wanted to make in the first place.
Man pays $200,000 to save fake girlfriend in online scam
Rather than being organized by language names, the items in the pie graph should have been grouped by size (largest at 12, proceeding clockwise to the smallest at 11:59, for example). What relationship is there to show between the grouped names of programs that outweighs making this clear?
As the converse, if you don't know what's in the POSIX spec, or haven't tested widely, please put "#!/usr/bin/env bash" at the top of your script. Most people who don't have bash as the default shell at least have it somewhere. And those who don't would rather have your script fail with an obvious error than a subtle one.
Apple sees more competition in tablets than phones, sees huge market
I don't think anyone said Apple is against innovation, just that a side-effect of their need for control creates obstacles to those who would like to use their devices in ways Apple does not anticipate.

I can understand (and appreciate) the desire to control the platform, and for the first two years I even defended it; all I am saying now is that the cost of this control is growing as competing devices close-in on providing similar levels of functionality without such restrictions.
Similarly, weather is an ugly, painful, lost-in-yesterday category--which is why we're so glad to be in it.
I spent some time in retail sales myself, working for Apple in a Best Buy, and learned a few valuable lessons. There are two ways to sell to people: logic and trust.

My approach was logic. I would spend as much time as was necessary very methodically detailing all the reasons why Macs were superior to PCs, and I did it in a way that made it obvious I was a fan and not just a salesman. It took a long time to make these sales, but I was good at it and converted literally hundreds of people to $1000+ Macs, most of which came in to buy a $500 PC. A lot of people do respond positively to technical facts and information.

However, there was another salesman who didn't give a rats ass about which solution was best, and based what he sold entirely on the spiffs he would get for selling them, most of which were based off how many accessories and service plans he sold with the computer. He consistently beat me in sales every day and could barely tell you the difference between firewire and usb (insert nerd chortle). He didn't need the technical knowhow. He would talk to them about completely unrelated things - the weather, their kids, the local sports team, etc. I'd look over at his customers and they'd be laughing and smiling, and then look at mine and see skeptical frowns. But his customers would have an entire cart full of crap they didn't need and the whole process was complete within about 15 minutes.

Most people just want to feel comfortable when they shop. They want a friend to tell them what to buy, not a salesman, so the quicker you can establish yourself as "one of the good guys" the better.

My only consolation was that my return rates were far lower than his.
Just spend half an hour throwing together a Chrome plugin and see how many you get to install it.
> "our most basic freedoms"

"Our" here means media/telecom corporations.
Well put, thanks.
why has it become so ridiculous to pay even $1 for things even when the value is obvious

Mental transaction costs: http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
TechStars announces startup madness competition
Not in defense of Wolfram Alpha, I'm just curious if W|A does this out of concern of possible degeneration effect on their search accuracy caused by programmed search queries? For a human user of W|A, he will construct the query with certain syntax, and further drill down the search query with W|A's recommendations. W|A may very well monitor the pattern of user search queries to optimize their search algorithm. It is possible that programmed search queries, especially coming from a third party application where users do not use the W|A like syntax, may "pollute" the usage pattern for W|A and affect their algorithm's efficiency. Just my 2 cents.
This is an excellent resource. I've been recently looking for a collection of design patterns because I'm currently stuffing all of my js into a huge collection of object literals. While its alot easier to manage than js spaghetti code all over the place, I always felt there was a better way.

I think overall, this compliments both the jQuery Fundamentals book and Eloquent Javascript quite nicely.
)

c'mon, it's Clojure! Can't leave us hanging like that!

also: http://xkcd.com/859/
One of the things we did here was insure that managers stayed "in the middle" since at a small company its important to be accessible. That being said, sometimes as a manager one has to look at data which is private (say one of your direct report's current compensation plan) and for that we have private offices where folks can take their laptop and work privately for a while. Its a reasonable mix.

Its interesting to see some of the changes that have impacted offices, and phones and IRC are a good example. It used to be that a company phone meant a unit on a desk somewhere, these days it can easily be a cell phone. With that restriction lifted.

I find the tools (workstations, laptops) vs file cabinets, notebooks, and reference books, makes it easer to be 'present' where you have your laptop and your phone. And while 'open plan' is less expensive (certainly from a build out perspective) the communications you miss can be a bigger cost over all.
I'm currently at a startup and this is probably my fifth or sixth, I cannot remember, and I've experienced pretty much everything you've listed: people suck, pay is wonky, managerial incompetence, hush money. Those traits are germain to any business, but in the startup game you have to understand that you're making certain sacrifices in exchange for greater reward at the end. If you see no end, then you have to ask yourself the following:

Do I share the company's vision?

If the answer is "no", then pack your bags (fire up resume, get job first) because life will not get better for you even if the company succeeds in meeting their short or long term goals.

If the answer is 'yes', then you have to realistically determine if your personal success is tied to the company's. Will you be compensated adequately once the company achieves success (sale, merger, continued investment)? Is that compensation commensurate with what you'd be making at a similar firm? What is your opportunity cost for not pursuing those same goals (cashing out) at a similar firm? And, realistically speaking, can you remain at the company without losing your mind or getting fired in order to complete your personal goals (vesting period)?

In most cases, any given Friday is a good time to leave a startup as you'll have an entire weekend to relax and get over leaving an unhappy situation and begin to work on your future. Most people are tied into their job and don't leave because they're unsure if they'll be able to obtain similar or better employment elsewhere on their own. If you have the skills to work somewhere else and you've proven that you can do your current job, I'd start floating my resume out there and test the waters. It's best to do it while still employed (note to self)!

And when asked, "why are you unhappy in your current position" simply respond "I no longer share their vision."
Tolkien Estate Says Just Mentioning Tolkien Infringes
I really wish more people would know about/use/and reference sites like http://opensecrets.org and http://opencongress.org when discussing politics and influence. Great and severly underused resources run by open initiatives and groups like the Sunlight Foundation and The Center for Responsive Politics. If you care, get educated and contribute to, help support, donate, code, whatever for OpenCongress. Great tool I check daily.

Full disclosure, I'm an active participant and donater to OpenCongress. Also, I am not the shii of shii.org fame, to preemptively stop questions about that...
i think a better name would have been loremkitten.com
Could each dimension (at least popular ones) contain multiple images? Like serving placekitten.com/200/100 is one of three or four random images?
Linus Torvalds: Pearls before swine
> HTML content can be shared between desktop and mobile devices with just a stylesheet change.

Have you been able to pull this off in most cases?

In my experience, the mobile version of a site requires changes to the HTML, such as turning links into buttons and removing content.
I suspect that some of the problems with Flash are Apple's fault.

Here is the evidence. Flash crashes in Safari but not in Firefox, using the same computer and Flash installation.
I see many comments like that and I'm always left wondering.

Does this happen when a user deletes their own comment? Or is it only for flagged comments?
Just to qualify that, since apparently it wasn't clear. If their site is that prone to dos'ing, they would probably use something other than a tos to protect it with.
Sorry, by 'school' I was meaning tertiary only. High school didn't add much in the way of critical thinking, I agree.
2 New Robots: The Cheetah and Humanoid Atlas
Isn't the FCC already regulating the Internet through CALEA? I don't quite understand the idea that NN is the FCC's "foot in the door".
Fair point - I have only ever used sl on a box with no sound, didn't know it did that.
wait, why are Greg Hoglund and HBGary still 'reputable' sources linked and quoted from in this article written 4 days ago?
Flash could end world poverty and somehow increase battery life at the same time, Apple would still not include it. While I am sure performance doesn't help, Apple's Flash policy reasoning is very similar to its subscription policy. Either you are made by Apple or you take a back seat.
How do we best store and chart time-series data?