skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why should Google not have a Buzz tab?

Edit: Also, you can show or hide the tab. So if you don't use Buzz and you don't want that tab shown on your profile, just hide it. However, this way Google can let their users that still use Buzz display it on their profile.
I was a NACHA member for the better part of the past year so I've talked to many of the bankers, consultants and government-types involved with running the ACH network about this.

It's not about the float. It's about the up-front investment in the standard, which millions of bank customers have already implemented. It's also about the risk of allowing instantaneous funds transfers; the current delay allows for at least some mitigation. It's also about the fact that there is no new standard yet. (Based on what I know about NACHA, there won't be for a while.)
EDIT: The deleted post asked what I thought about assisted suicide. I don't know why it was deleted. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable question to me. So I am leaving my reply, for better or worse.

--------------

It is not anything I have come up with some "position" on. I know I wanted to die ten years ago and saw that as the only hope of an end to my suffering. I know that I continue to routinely feel like "god must hate me" and feel like death is the only way out -- that getting well, paying my bills and all that is just too much for one person to do without real support. It feels really, really unfair. I could get rewarded and supported for not getting well -- I could get free medical care, go on disability as I get too sick to work, etc. But getting well? Up yours, bitch. You're crazy and made this entire thing up anyway. Forget any kind of financial support for the costs involved. There isn't even sympathy in most circles.

So my life is still hard. And has always been hard. Living without a diagnosis and being routinely accused of being a hypochondriac was also hard. And I did attempt suicide at age 17.

But what I believe is this: They now have such an ability to keep you technically "alive" that our definitions have to change and right to die legislation and discussions like this one are inevitably going to be part of the struggle to come up with some meaningful, humane means to decide it is okay for someone to just stop pursuing heroic efforts and, if nothing else, let nature take its course. My "position", if I have one at all in this debate, is to offer information on a more humane alternative that offers better quality of life rather than merely extending life but at the cost of so much suffering that many people would rather die instead. The only possible alternative that makes sense to me is to make it a priority to make medical care more humane so that staying alive doesn't so completely destroy your quality of life as to make one desperately wish for death.

A few years ago, a relative was in the hospital in a critical care unit. A very old, very ill person (like in their 80's) on the same ward coded over and over. They spent two weeks resuscitating this person and performing gruesome invasive procedures -- because the family wasn't ready to let go. This person was not ever going to get better and go home again. Everyone knew that. The family knew that. The staff knew that. They did not prolong her life. They only prolonged her death. And her suffering. We have no choice but to wrestle with such questions given where medical technology has brought us. Otherwise we are in danger of coming to a point where everyone gets put on an iron lung or some such and we just don't bury you.
i seem to remember threewordsme being hosted on Linode, they always seem a good choice. (btw, im no expert at all! no my side of the business :P)
If you worry too much...
Corporate Busy vs Creator Busy
Hah. Last year I've significantly cut down the number of "friends" on facebook. 6 months later, one of them was the first to notice this missing connection. When asked why, the response was essentially "_because_ it took 6 months to notice" (on top of the original criteria for 12+ months of no communication via FB).

So in the alert message, can you include "... but it was N months since you've last talked, so whatever."?
One possibility for funding the small market app would be customer funding from the start: talk to some of the people you know in the industry and see if they would prepay (possibly in return for some sort of discount, or free until the product leaves beta) for a year's service or so.
I think I've mistook the source of the comment I assumed that the label of "Muslim-American activist" was placed by the FBI when speaking to the reporters (it may have been but that's not how it's reported). I apologise for that error.

That said.

WRT equivalence of mentioning an "Christian-American activist" and "Muslim-American activist" I can't see how we can establish this nor even come close there are too many variables to adjust for. The sunnah gives a mandate for terror activities against those who don't accept Islam - Mohammed was a war lord who used deadly force to further his aims. Whilst the life of Jesus gives no such model (quite the opposite as I see it). Moreover you'd have to base the analogy around a foreign country into which Christians (acting in that capacity) had moved to enact terror activities.

--

Aside.

Aladdin Afifi, for that appears to be him, was first (2010-08-10) mentioned in international press by MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39583860/ns/technology_and_scien...). Here he is referred to as:

"Afifi's father, an Islamic-American activist, died a year ago in Egypt. It is not clear what the circumstances of his death were, or if this was the reason for the FBI's investigation of Afifi."

Subsequent reports (the ones I found) appear in Wired and CBS News and transmute this to being "community leader" instead of activist [no biggie, just saying] and fail to mention any lack of clarity about his death. They do (eg Wired, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device...) flesh out other details.

I couldn't really find much about the father and less about the brothers (not even in Egyptian news sources like Al-Masry Al-Youm who don't appear to have run the story at all). SF Bay MCA mention him as Ala Afifi in respect of a donation to his "trust fund" (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:u2eBtfghTeAJ:w...) but nothing else I could really see.
SEO (the term) is here to stay - but what it means will fundamentally change
I've never lived in a large metro, so I'm unsure how prevalent brokers are (or even how they operate). Do you have to deal with rental brokers in all large cities? Even the Midwest/south like Dallas, Indy, Atlanta, KC, Phoenix, etc?
Sure.

- I was offered two technical editor gigs for iPhone development & design books because the main editor of the project found me on Twitter.

- I built a friendship with a fellow UI guy that turned into a business relationship and I'm now speaking at his conference in San Diego this spring.

- Without spending any money on marketing, I got over 4,000 signups to an email list that will announce when my next big project is launching. All I did was tweet about it.

- Again, without spending any money, I tweeted about a Mac twitter app I was working on last year and it up becoming a trending topic, eventually responsible for over 30,000 downloads.

- I've been able to help friends of mine with their projects (newly-released iPhone apps, website redesigns, icon sets available for purchase, etc.) by linking to them on Twitter. I keep track of all my URL statistics and many times a link I tweet will get over 3k clicks. I've had friends make hundreds of dollars (within an hour or so) directly from a link I tweeted which is pretty awesome.

Sorry to go on and on, but by extracting the positive things that have happened to my career since 2006 (when I first got on Twitter) I can say that nearly all happened because of a relationship built from Twitter. Which is pretty nuts.
www.unfriendfinder.com does this too. Actually you can get notifications about unfriends, rejected friend requests and list of all friend requests you sent that have not been responded to yet.
This is the height of inanity.
no, other pc's often have a bios setting to swap fn and ctrl. FWIW I can't find ANY documentation on how to fix this on Macbooks.

Please prove me wrong.
But older people have more commitments, more balanced lives, a higher price tag, and often less energy. Early/mid 20s male fanatics are the workhorses of the engineering world and surely the best bet from an investment POV. They will break their backs for you(r capital). Just pair them with 1 or 2 older guys for guidance/experience.
Who is Wael Ghonim, why should I watch this video?
Bootstrap the safe one, and with the profits play with risky ideas.
A Web server hosting www.example.com and example.com aren't necessarily the same. When typing a URL into the box, he prefix "www" is getting chopped off by the backend irrespective of this fact.
What is this? Need more explanation.
cooldeal's criticism is that your world view is binary; there is no "better" or "worse", only "broken" and "just dandy".

The problem argued is that the system prevents people from starting a business in the U.S. - something a "rational" person who is able to "comprehend" wouldn't conflate with everyone being prevented from starting a business.

The system could be better. That's hardly a controversial statement.

One of the biggest problem in this environment is the survivorship bias.
My point is, why would NASA employ him as a Group Leader if he were, dare I say, delusional?

There's got to be some truth in it.
> There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!)

The breadth and depth of well-written technical information available on the web is far, far beyond what was available in Byte in its heyday. Consider:

http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage
http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming
http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/
http://prog21.dadgum.com/
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/
http://diveintomark.org/
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
http://www.facebook.com/Engineering
http://research.google.com/video.html
http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/
http://www.exampler.com/blog/

The big difficulty these days is not getting access to well-written, broad-ranging tech material; it's choosing which well-written, broad-ranging tech material you want to read out of all the immense quantity of material out there, and avoiding spending all of your time reading it. Services like HN, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, and Slashdot basically exist to solve this filtering problem (although not, obviously, limited to the tech press).

> What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what advertisers will pay for.

That's true, but fortunately it's irrelevant, because what gets written about on the web isn't determined by what gets funded—it's what people want to write about.
Yeah, it opens with snark. But then the article goes through the arguments and figures in the paper and refutes the hypothesis, so it's not empty snark.

Publishing a paper in a fake journal does damage the validity of the claims. Papers with sufficient evidence for their claims can get published in journals with strict peer review policies. By choosing such a crap journal the authors are essentially admitting that Nature or Science would never accept their arguments.
Financial Times goes to lunch with Sean Parker
How Charlie Sheen and Other Stars Get Paid to Tweet
Ask HN: Facebook Connect bad for business?
So Dave Winer has been talking about data silos, here is a link http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/04/whatIMeanByTheOpenWeb.html

Question: If we use Facebook Connect for our service and for some reason Facebook revokes our API key we will be screwed. Our users data will be locked away and our users will no long be able to log onto our service and keep the data they had before. This seems like an overly high price to pay for an increase in accessibility. Thoughts?
Thank you Rudiger.
That has be Google's social trump card. If they ever pull the trigger on that, that is a real Facebook competitor (Actually, seems more like LinkedIn competitor now that I think about it). I always like the rumored branding of Google Me for this reason.

Of course, they are getting some heat for the OneBox stuff they do, so there is some danger there.
I'll bite ... what is it about their reader / product line that makes it equivalent to a "gorgeous eight-track"?

I've thought the reader looked a bit fragile (and wouldn't hold up to heavy use), but that doesn't make it obsolete right out of the gate.
If you're a python or java programmer you could use Google App Engine. It seems ideal for small projects.

I know breakupnotifier.com was hosted on GAE.
Thanks for the response phlux. It's a healthcare patient management related software. However, we do have product on a completely different area. May be looking for a generic catchy name for the company is better than product based domain name? I appreciate your help very much.
It wouldn't be the first time a smart, accomplished person has espoused a weird belief. See Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer:
http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscie...
>"IE9 was built from the ground up to use technologies like DirectWrite, GPU Accel. etc. Porting all these to XP would not be trivial."

Indeed, hence why I asked why not design it to work (even in a limited form) with other platforms from the off. I realise going backwards now is not really possible what I was questioning was the original decision.

>I am sure developing IE is an enormous cost since MS has to be careful about not breaking corporate software.

Couldn’t they plug in the past DLLs as other apps do so as to render as if it were IE6 under XP(SP2) or whatever?

--

OT :you say "Most run those OSes because they don't like MS". Do you think this is true? I'd have thought the majority run OSX for [perceived] usability or possibly lifestyle reasons and maybe Linux for price reasons. Personally I run Linux based on a mixture of ease of usability and price. Despite being vehemently against MSIE (due to time served web developing) I thought MSIE8 was quite good and should it be available for my distro I'd give it a trial despite being pretty entrenched with FF. It's not really me that I'd see them marketing too though.
The banks earn by investing the money while the money is "in transit", so they want to keep it there as long as possible. Not all banks do this. I can transfer money from my account to friends' accounts and they get the money in seconds.
Yeah really. The responses here to Chris Dixon's article were pretty negative.* Looks like others agree.

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2292901
From reading your post, my first thought is, "stop panicking, employers smell desperation from miles away". Stop worrying about it for a second, realize what you have to offer, and don't throw yourself out there as "please! I'll do anything!"

What I would recommend, is that you join ODesk, ELance, or one of the many other "let's play consultant" websites. Yes you'll be competing with the Bangladeshis but actually the good ones want big salaries too so you aren't competing against too much. What I would do, is when you submit a bid, write in something like "I'm only doing this to enhance my portfolio -- can I reserve the right to show this to future employers?" and if they say yes, you have something to show! If they say no, double your asking price, or at least bring it up to standard value, and if standard value doesn't scare them away, you get moneys!

Seriously, there are threads on both HN and reddit about people who have made serious money on those sites, with piles of advice about which jobs to take and stay away from. Using whatever portfolio you build up, take this into your resume.

And if you take the advice of others here, list your startup as "self employed", as well as the consultant time, odds are future employers won't even look at your code (and HR wouldn't know what to make of it anyway).

There is a lot of other great advice here too. Best of luck.
the problem is that everyone is focused on SEO, so new startups have a hard time ranking for anything decent, since all their competitors that they are trying to overthrow have spent decades link building.
The only objective criticisms I saw in the article were about the SEMs not being to scale and the preservation state of the "organisms". Other than that, it seems like it was snark at the beginning, snark in the middle, and snark at the end.
Would this argument make sense if we had a "Google clone"?

There's a market to be tapped, and they seem to be doing just that. One wonders why this is even possible, and if Groupon's dropped the ball in India. Regardless, they're running a business. What's not to like?

Many Silicon Valley start-ups are incredibly derivative, but a flip is still a flip.
Also, as a generic facebook user, I feel increasingly queasy when I see some app I signed up to use is posting all my activity on that app on my facebook page. Not welcome. Yes, I can control the publishing right for the app on my facebook page but usually I find myself tend to remove the app entirely. It's getting prevalent to use facebook connect as login for a new business, but personally I doubt if this practice is viable and applauded by the user.
It's an interesting way to look at it. For most startups, I think the key is coming up a small highly-targetable market segment to start with -- the place you get your 100 first true fans and then can expand by word of mouth (as well as all your other marketing strategies). I've always thought of it more as a niche than an MVM but the analogy to the MVP is an intriguing one...
What I don't get is why they show them in the first place?
Having looked into emigration from the US, I am under the impression that, by comparison to other developed nations, we have wonderful immigration policies.
Then you could CONFRONT them about it!
Thanks for responding, I certainly see where you're coming from, as you've said, you can't change an entire industry over night, but that won't stop people like me from wishing that you could.

I guess I'm impatient for a company like yours to succeed and visibly improve things for renters & buyers. I wish you the best of luck going forward.
check out the GoF book

also, people have put together various collections of server side or 'enterprise' patterns. And the various 'pet store' implementations will be sprinkled liberally with them
I'm surprised they stayed afloat this long. If I owned Blockbuster I'd make applications for devices like the iPad, PS3, Xbox, Apple TV, etc, or made a cheap box that could connect to the network and stream/download movies to it and made them void when the rent expires. Similar to what a lot of other companies a starting to do.

Nobody (i don't mean to stereotype) wants the hassle of having to go to a physical place to pick a DVD and bother with the returns process.

They need to adapt.
Android Like Web Notifications Toolbar
Great recommendations everybody. One more:

Once you're in Seattle, NWEN events are also great places for networking with startups. http://www.nwen.org/
More free publicity for Twitter, great.
Go with the smaller/safer one first and roll it out asap (2-6 months), then move on to the higher risk/reward venture. This approach will help you negotiate better terms with vc backers.
Otherwise, if you start out with the "bigger" venture first and fail, then it might be too late to go with the smaller venture idea since the void in the niche can be filled by someone else by that time...
"Papers with sufficient evidence for their claims can get published in journals with strict peer review policies."

Do you have any evidence that this is actually true?
The next generation of payment technology will not be plastic card-based or involve a magnetic strip. They've created a really nice magnetic strip reader for plastic cards. It's kind of making the most amazing tape deck ever right before the mass distribution of Audio CD. Certainly it's an impressive feat of engineering and design, but it's not what I would pour my time into as an entrepreneur or my money into as an investor.

Personally I think my company's technology does make Square's obsolete right out of the gate. We just face a much different adoption hurdle because we replace the entire system from end to end.
Buzz symbolizes everything wrong with Google's social strategy. They need to move on.

Linking to dead properties and adding a few fields isn't going to fix social.
Thank you for the links. I saw this post and thought, "Isn't this old news?" Maybe not, but I could have sworn I saw something in this vein weeks ago.
Speaking of which, has anybody tried google.com/health? Or how about the cool WebGL-powered site bodybrowser.googlelabs.com?
Hey just saw your post. I couldn't find you email address in your profile, so I had to post here. I also live in Zurich (engineer from ETH actually), want to get together for a beer sometime? Would be happy to meet a fellow HN-reader :-)
> There are tons of research papers and projects, which just cannot be implemented on GNU/Linux in non-kludgy way.

Do you recall any of these offhand? Thanks.
Are you talking about Fedora's seunshare? That's not without its issues: http://vigilance.fr/vulnerability/Fedora-RHEL-file-access-vi....
If you dont want to get involved with the sys admin

Heroku for Ruby Apps
Google App Engine, Java or Python
Windows Azure .net

If you want to maintain the server yourself a VPS is probably the best best
Linode/Slicehost

Amazon S3 for static file storage
Anyone else find it incredibly ironic that, despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when Apple's ability to remotely uninstall apps was discovered a few years ago (e.g, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3358115/Apple-iPhone-k...), Google has ended up remote-killing apps before Apple?
When I'm sleeping, I get no work done whatsoever :)
I'm skeptical that it was Netflix that killed Blockbuster. The Blockbuster a couple of blocks from my house closed about a year ago, depriving the neighborhood of an important outlet of fancy imported foods such as A-1 Steak Sauce and Top Ramen. According to the graffiti, it stiffed its employees on their last paychecks. But as far as I know, Netflix doesn't provide service anywhere in the country.

If you want to watch the kind of videos Blockbuster would carry, though, you can cross the street and walk half a block to the DVD guy and buy a DVD for, I'm guessing, about the same price as a Blockbuster rental. He has a pretty good selection laid out on the sidewalk there.

Basically, Blockbuster's video business (as distinct from its Yanqui snack business) consisted of allocating their scarce shelf space to supply the needs of the local movie-watchers. But hard disks are a much more efficient way to maintain a stock of movies than shelf space.
From your description I guess that you've been working out for mass not for strength. I can believe you feel unfit after that. Especially since you were lighter some time ago.

I can totally relate to how air quality influences all outdoor sports.
Is TED Elite?
"Christianity was the prototypical religion of the Book..."

Er, that would be Judaism.
Beautiful, i'm going to justify the weeks of procrastination with this.
What does it mean for a product to "symbolize" something? Is it the product you are objecting to or the branding?

(There are also pockets of really high quality activity on buzz. See Terence Tao's very active feed for instance: https://profiles.google.com/u/0/114134834346472219368/buzz )
> Without designers forcing things on you that you don't necessarily want, and not giving you an option to turn it off, you end up with animated Myspace backgrounds

The problem with MySpace was not that it was customisable, it was that it was not customisable enough. What they should have done was to allow users to customise their page -- and also to allow users to customise how other people's pages would look to them.
Abolishing truancy and unintended consequences