skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I've never commented at techcrunch, but since I refuse to get a facebook account, it looks like I never will. MMmmmmMMMmmmMMM Those grapes sure are sour!
Ask HN: Are there other services similar to LaunchRock?
Are there any homepage placeholder services similar to launch rock? A single field for email sign up coupled with a viral component that can be tracked?
Thoughts on Investing
Visually it looks like Facebook and LinkedIn for real estate agents.
If you have an icon that lets you run away from a battle you can keep coming back to zombo.com to use this trick over and over. Pokemon.com has a skill called Run Away that is perfect for this.
Have you looked into iOS 3 users? If I'm not mistaken, in iOS 3, deleting an app prompts the user to rate the app and if your update borks the app for them, they're probably going to delete and rate it one star.
Sorry, but people won't move away from Facebook for something else until all of their friends do.
yes, move back to sfo.

mindcrime is right - whatever you focus on will come true. your biggest enemy at this point is negative belief. Lots of 30 and 40 year olds start startups and do very well.

stop talking to your negative friend - people like that are to be avoided like the plague.

You should be first getting a lot of insight and then applying. If your state of mind while applying was similar to what it is now you might not be able to put together the best pitch.
I am using similar idea in one of my Windows apps -- it has a one-time notification that prompts the user to join a mailing list or subscribe to the Twitter feed [1]. After much experimenting I have converged to the following criteria:

The app has been up for at least 5 minutes
&&
It was first run at least 7 days ago
&&
It (executed primary function) no more than 12 hours ago
&&
It (executed primary function) at least 3 times
&&
There was some user activity in last 60 seconds

The app is of a service nature, it runs in a background, so some conditions are unique to that, but the general idea is the same - talk to users that are engaged and happy rather than to all of them. Seems to be working really well so far.

[1] http://bvckup.com/tmp/notification.png
I hope you die slowly and painfully.
I think the author missed the point a little bit:

"If you’re going to do that though, why should I need an update to keep the malware from doing anymore harm? Since Google is going to rip out the rotten programs anyway, wouldn’t it better to just get it over with rather than just block its functionality?"

I suspect that the 'software' being applied is a patch to prevent this sort of behavior from happening again. In short, it is the right move. It didn't read, to me at least, that they were blocking the one particular 'doHarmfulActivities()' API, rather, patching the bug that allowed harmful activities to be executed.

As for the fear of Google being able to remotely uninstall, I get that. I sort of share the notion, but the flip side, of course, is that I didn't know they had the feature, which means this is probably the first time it was executed. This is a good time for the feature to be executed.

Considering the high-profile invocations of the same method by Apple, I can definitely understand the worry that it COULD be abused, but so can anything. What matters more is that at least thus far, it hasn't been.
They are not "old European rules". The US used to be a leader in establishing treaties like the Geneva Conventions, Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions, Nuclear Non-Proliferation, etc.

It is a more recent phenomena in the US that is paranoid about UN governance and refuses to sign onto things like the ICC and the Mine Ban Treaty, and tends to want to ignore international law in favor of a might means right approach. Things have gotten much worse for the respect of international law after Bush's aggressive stance after 9/11.

Still, these are valid treaties that most countries have signed.

For the US and Israel to be banging the drums of war over Iran's supposed violation of the NNPT while at the same time committing illegal acts of industrial sabbotage is huge irony.
Whoa, you're giving each person their own number (as opposed to, say, an extension). That means you're paying $1/customer/month even for dormant customers. Seems like a really bad call.

Other than that, I really like it. Sorta like Awesomeness Reminders, but recorded by people who love you. Design could use some work, but the signup flow was nice (not requiring any info but phone number). Though now the only way to login involves you calling me again and telling me the pin I already know, which isn't great.

Also, I'd stop using a redirect and set it up so that Appengine serves write.
All of Apple's 'post-PC' products have been competitively priced. And the one exception, the Mac, is hard to compare because almost no PC manufacturers build to a comparably high standard of industrial design. The few that try (eg. Dell Adamo) end up asking similar prices. Plus they aren't singlehandedly funding development of an operating system.
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An unmentioned reason it's hard for startups to hire, is because most startups sound lame. Very few programmers dream about moving to Atlanta to work 12 hours a day at a startup for corporate marketers using Facebook.
That is not the point of the article.

The author specifically writes:
"The nature of commenting on the web needs to feel organic and fluid, just like it does in real life. And even anonymous if necessary, though that’s not at the core of my argument."

The point of the article is that people present different images of themselves to different friends. Binding all a person's online discourse to a single identity forces them to go for the 'lowest common denominator' image.

Regarding your Dunbar's number remark:
The author probably meant 'friends' in the sense of facebook friends, which really includes 'acquaintances'.

Besides which, its not a physical rule that you can't have 700 friends. Dunbar's number, as applied to humans, is a fairly crude heuristic extrapolation; its not a hard limit to friendship capacity.
That'd be ace! I just hope that I can keep the size of the file down to a minimum
This is a bit annoying since if you want to make three async requests you have to write the following

Well, beyond a style issue. You can unfold the events and make it a lot less "annoying".

Consider,

var cb1 = function() {

}

var cb2 = function() {

req(cb1);

}

var cb3 = function() {

req(cb2);

}

req(cb3);

It's a lot cleaner and it looks like a state machine (and kind of looks like erlang/message passing).
Wow. That's awesome. Thanks for letting us know.
Thanks for the feedback! I plan to add some more features and tidy it up a bit, but I wanted to see what people thought.
Top 10 Ways To Be The Man Women Want
it's not as shallow as you probably assumed.
Amen to that. Presumptuous as well, that should have been titled Killing _my_ Authenticity.
I was JUST coming here, as someone who got two degrees in the US and went home to start an internet based company, to say that I opened this article and saw the name of the author - rolled my eyes and closed the window without even reading it.

How many times can you beat a dead horse ?

We get it. America is "losing it's edge" to emerging markets.

His articles have always been disappointing to me, as someone who has been through the immigration process and hoped that maybe he had more detailed figures to backup his assertions - which would help my case.

But he often doesn't.
Another way is to have an array of functions and just loop||recurse through them. This gives the illusion of serial execution.

There are actually a number of other ways to get around the function nesting issue as well.
Wow. I hadn't heard about this. Hugely useful.
My site to help events, athletes, teams, and organizations find sponsors
Great article. I haven't had time to read the whole thing, but I disagree with the characterization of Jaron Lanier as an artist who can't speak technically (as the author of this article surmises from a choice quotation). Mr. Lanier is a rather gifted hacker.
Is your product a new product, an existing product, or a re-segmented product (a mix of new and existing)?
Up-Inspired Floating House (14 photos)
Shed Simove: “I Suggested ‘Lie Pad’ But Apple Didn’t Like That Either”
I won't be commenting on techcrunch because of this change, and if I can't comment I'll be less likely to visit regularly. I liked disqus .. and I'm annoyed that Facebook is invading this space.
Is it not a terrible name "Google Profiles" for facebook killer ?
People generally segment their lives. For example you have your work friends, your family friends, your hobby friends. For various people these groups may or may not overlap to varying degrees. Facebook doesn't allow you to segment your friends like most people do in real life, that has consequences for what people say and do and not just in the sense of civility. That's what this article is essentially talking about.
The question is if they hate this enough to actually go and rate the app, but give it a negative review. And I don't think they do. Those who are ticked off would simply not bother rating, so no harm done by asking.
Proxy Companies in the App Store
IANAL, but I wanted to share a thought I had on subverting the subscription model for companies that cannot afford the 30% on subscriptions.

I am curious if it would be viable to give a proxy company access to your API, allowing them to offer your services to your users. They would be completely unable to offer subscriptions, they would have access to the functionality only. Any monetary exchange would be independent of them.

Then the app they create would have access to the paid sections of the API only for users that upgrade on the website. They cannot charge, so they cannot be obliged to make in-app payments available. They might even be able to redirect users to your website to pay without violating terms.

And it seems like Apple couldn't work around this without restricting a number of third-party apps.

The downside, of course, would be that you cannot put your own app in the app store.

While Apple is surely within its rights to take commissions from in-app sales, I suppose developers are also within their rights to find solutions like this (if it is viable).
What is a legal vs. illegal attack? Is there an authority that determines legality in this case? If it rules the attack is illegal, how is the attack prevented of the perpetrator punished? If we have all that what's up with Gaddafi or Myanamar or North Korea etc etc?
Even though I have a facebook account I doubt I'd ever comment outside of Facebook using it.

I'm not embarrassed by my comments, I just don't want to be spamming friends' news feeds with all of them.
Are you asking for a study? I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say.
I wouldn't want every blog post from every blog I read submitted to HN. By the same logic, the problem I have with Facebook comments is that I don't want everything I comment on to be broadcasted to all my Facebook friends, mostly because most of the content wouldn't interest them and just increase the noise on Facebook.

I'm not convinced that any one social network can capture or handle all of my communication needs.
Interesting. Thanks for letting us know. I'll look into it. We're definitely working to make sure we have the best coverage.
Alternate interpretation: Facebook is making you act like the authentic you all the time. If you are unwilling to stick to your principles because of what your friends will think, are they really your principles?
I want diversity.
Now, the world don't move to the beat of just one drum,
What might be right for you, may not be right for some.
Fantastic. Another part of the internet that can be as bland and humorless as my Facebook news feed.
Thanks for letting me know. Can you tell me what carrier you use?
Ask HN: Was I right in my decision to turn down offer from Goldman Sachs?
I think this is the best place to ask this question. I was recently offered a Tech Intern from Goldman. As it was the only good option I had at that time, I decided to go for it. Working there was a great experience and definitely learned a lot about financial markets. My main goal going there was to understand the inner workings of such a big Investment Bank. I grabbed a lot about that.

Working there was good, but throughout my work I had confusion regarding these:
1. People were way too professional.
2. I was tightly following what Goldman had done during recession. I felt it was ethically wrong (watch "Inside Job"). Result, I was not able to feel myself as a part of Company.
3. There were too much restrictions on employees. Surveillances were running on our accounts. Everything was tracked etc. etc.

On other side I must say that their technology was great. The size of data they process everyday is marvelous. But finally, after a lot of thought I rejected the final offer from their side. Right now I am working in a big company, with relatively less compensation. I am happy with my current job.

I still stand on my decision. Just want to know your opinion about the same. Was I too childish raising above questions in my mind?
What is authentic behavior?

If you can say something with one group of friends, but need to change or hide that to speak to another group, are you being authentic?
Also, can you let me know the carrier that you use?
175 Exceptional Typography Art
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How the iPad can revolutionize music notation software
There is a very clear checkbox that says "Post to Facebook", which you can uncheck.

Doesn't address your other issues about communication needs, but broadcasting to all your friends is a problem with a check-the-checkbox fix.
When I argued that anonymity was a major factor contributing to vitriolic comments on the Internet[1], I took a lot of heat for it. Sample comment from Hacker News[2]:

"It's darkly amusing how people pretend this is about anonymity. As if there had never been a sexist jerk who had a name. ..."

I have to say that the results of this experiment make me feel vindicated.

On another note, multiple commenters here say that they won't be using Facebook comments because they don't want to spam their friends' feeds. Apparently they missed the checkbox right underneath the comment box that says "Post to Facebook"?

[1] http://33bits.org/2010/08/30/women-in-tech-how-anonymity-con...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647760
You and I must live on different planets, that doesn't remotely sound like the world I live in. And I have a great distaste for this industry.
lol: "bing.com used Search, but google.com was not hurt!"
Carl Sagan once fought for the right and asked that it be treated as an honor or duty that every scientist examine claims no matter how unrealistic in order to expose the greater amount of people to the scientific method and basic science. Carl Sagan's debunking of Velikovsky was just as snarky if not more so.

For those of ill-uniformed..Velikovsky had similar theories.
I'm not sure what happened to the DNS; use this link instead:

http://moral-support.appspot.com/
Google Responds to Android Malware with Remote App Removal
Appirater (the lib mentioned in the post) does it like this:

"every time the user launches your app, Appirater will see if they’ve used the app for 30 days and launched it at least 15 times. If they have, they’ll be asked to rate the app, and then be taken to your app’s review page in the App Store. If you release a new version of your app, Appirater will again wait until the new version has been used 15 times for 30 days and then prompt the user again for another review. Optionally, you can adjust the days to wait and the launch number by changing DAYS_UNTIL_PROMPT and LAUNCHES_UNTIL_PROMPT in Appirater.h."

Tweaking those two settings lets you target any selection of engaged users (eg. 15 launches in 30 days will reach primarily very engaged users).
Absolutely. In light of your comment, perhaps I am misunderstanding what the original article means by a generic learning algorithm?

The points you make are well understood in academics. There are probably hundreds of papers on feature selection and domain specific modelling in bioinformatics, for example.

In terms of boxed learning algorithms, I would assume that such a thing would provide for a way to supply models and inputs in a variety of formats. The latter allowing for users to do their own domain specific feature selection or other types of data reduction before applying a particular learning algorithm. In that sense, I could see things like Google's prediction API being useful in principle, even though it won't eliminate the large domain specific portion of the work.
Moved back to Tumblr after 6 months with Posterous » http://vijei.tumblr.com/amp

Tumblr lets me use script tags at will, and that opens up a whole world of customization possibilities that I didn't have on Posterous. There's only so much you can do with iframes before running into cross-domain roadblocks.
Several commenters point out that long-running computations can be performed outside the main request thread without the server having to do anything special.

It's also possible to divide up long-running computations oneself. This can lead to very interesting designs.
great. i'm sure my company will do a "meeh too" now and make me implement it.
Seemed fishy to enable JS but I was curious. I'm being tracked by at least 0 companies. Pretty good.

I don't like opting out of things because in order to opt out; you need to tell them who you are which combined with the instantaneous nearly free communication tools (email). I would be adversely affected, probably more so after 'opting out' (eg increased exempted robo-calls from charities/politics since they know you pay attention).
It's telling me something.
Ah, you're right, I totally forgot about that. Although given Facebook's history, I wonder if they'll remove that option once they achieve critical mass.
adds hugely to personal dictionary of adjectives
Padmapper is phenomenal, but craigslist sucks so bad, that it ends up just being mildly useful. The ability to constantly and repeatedly relist the same (often fictional) property really depresses me. So easy to fix, and would make life so much better for users, yet, it will never get fixed. And yet, craigslist continues to dominate so many markets. Why god, why?
Contrary to the author's opinion, I think the facebook comment system almost forces a synthesis of various online personae into a single facebook persona—one that's at least based in part on your real-world self. And while that may often increase self-censorship, it's not at the expense of authenticity. I would argue that it encourages authenticity.

One interesting thing that facebook commenting seems to have done is connect people based on mutual interest. Until now, it's primarily been a networking tool based on a map of real world relationships (with the exception of pages, and those are most often not community building but vehicles for one-way, marketing driven communications). It's a pretty radical shift for facebook.
And BtrFS. On Linux.
What comforts me is I believe that I will go to the same place I was before I was born. I don't know what exactly that is, but it led to me being alive. Can't be all bad. :-)
Thanks!

what specifically is a bit blurry? or are you talking about the feed images?
And you can install sox from homebrew. (I, at least, didn't have it installed by default)
Cave in moon:Base station for astronauts?
Infinite USB
Bing HTML5 preview site goes live, available soon
Summarized:

1. Mobile location-based services

2. Predictive analysis

3. Vision computing

4. Video analytics

5. Unified advertising platforms
I'm curious what the age and experience of these developers is... because I'm also in the D.C. area, and of all of my friends who are relatively recent graduates (2004-2007), absolutely none of them are making 160-170k. Some even work for major defense contractors with top secret clearance, and don't make that much money.
Entrepreneurs Need Fewer Hot Ideas and More Plans
Can anyone suggest a better architecture than that of node.js for a server side Javascript application engine?

Perhaps still using Google V8 but maybe being more intelligent about threading/multicore, maybe using something like gearman (gearman.org) to distribute tasks, and addressing some of the criticisms of node.js but still maintaining good performance.
Looks like a good idea to me.
You can implement most of those ideas with FUSE filesystems. The archiver is a simple one (keep file tree, compress on unmount). Yor config file is another (albeit the wisdom of imposing a config file structure from the file system reminds me of the Windows registry.

I am using the snapshot feature in BtrFS for 6 months now. Love it.
Wonder if it's a coincidence that the guy who was getting the most trolled (MG Siegler) broke this news...
Both sides of the Carl Sagan and Velikovsky affair:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/velikovsky.htm

Some interesting reading as Velikovsky also was a Hoyle believer..
Market forces can't really work effectively on the problem when there is information asymmetry, can they? Market forces presume rational behavior, and perfect information.

I will assume that the expected result of this startup (why YC invested in it) is that the market will somehow become more "efficient" because communication between brokers and landlords will be facilitated.

I will predict that the actual result of this startup will cause the market to become less efficient, due to the increased cost of information asymmetry.
By hooking up brokers with landlords, the information asymmetry between the "producer" (both landlords and brokers would be considered "producers" of listings) and the "consumer" (the renter or home-buyer) becomes even greater.

A pretty interesting paper that explores the idea that the costs of derivatives are increased as a result information asymmetry: www.cs.princeton.edu/~rongge/derivative.pdf

So, the "cost" is being doubly passed on to the consumer from both the broker and the landlord. The market is not more efficient, it's less efficient.

In general, financial experts suspect that the sheer volume of derivative transactions probably allows many kinds of manipulations to go undetected. We are highlighting one particular kind of manipulation where this undetectability as well as its financial cost can be made precise. from
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rongge/derivativeFAQ.html
I decided to build one of these ideas - check out http://firstfan.me! (@wendyhk wished there was a site where you could record the time & date you discovered a certain band. I am in the middle of mid-terms and couldn't crank out the site just yet so I made a landing page and I'll put the site together in the coming week.)
Given how dumb many of my thoughts and questions have turned out to be in retrospect, there is no way I'm associating my common Internet interactions with my real identity.
Yeah - I had stuff to say there - but the article was already way too long - as you point out.

But I don't believe Apple represents the desired fusion - it leans too much on the artistic ideology side imo. But I think that would be much more the controversial claim and more difficult to support - it's another 25k word topic in itself.
I thought Orkut (by google) did amazingly well in some parts of the world?

http://www.labnol.org/wp/images/2008/02/social-networks-popu...
Cloud insurance
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