skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that sub-optimal policies can still work as a good heuristic. For instance, you might say "it's so hard to wade through these resumes, I'm just going to toss out everyone who doesn't have a degree in Computer Science from a list of preferred universities, everyone who is unemployed, and everyone whose age doesn't fall between 26 and 35".

This is where "fairness", in spite of how hard (and even dangerous) it is to define, does matter, because many people believe that a civilized society has an interest in enforcing some basic standards of fairness. The goal isn't to make life fair, which is impossible, it's to set a minimum standard.

For instance, auto insurance companies used to charge men under 25 more for car insurance than women. And it was very clear that males were more likely to result in a claim than women in this age group. However, does using this distinction violate basic standards of fairness? What if you could make a similar claim for a religious group? A racial group? An age group? People tend to differ on exactly where they draw the line, though almost everyone agrees that the line should be drawn somewhere.

Personally, I think that using employment status as a screen strikes me as unfair on a gut level, but I think it does exceed the basic decency standard. In other words, I don't think it should illegal, but I definitely don't like it.
I'm sorry, but you're missing my point entirely.

I'm not talking about reading a violent comic book, or watching a movie, or even playing one of the current generation of video games. Please re-read what I wrote.

My question is about whether we should consider ethics as technology advances. If we reach the point that we can create realistic simulations, and then put children into those simulations, do we have any responsibility for the content of those simulations?

Please don't be so ideological about the issue. It should never be wrong to question things.
"Pic A Fight was built on Ruby 1.9.2 with RVM and Rails 3 hosted on several Amazon EC2 micro instances (we spun up 5 during load) behind an Amazon elastic load balancer instance, using Amazon RDS (it's like a database instance) for our MySQL ..."

Would love to see a follow-up post with details on this part. How you configured the EC2 instances, what your deploy.rb file looks like, etc ... and how this compares in price and difficulty to simply using heroku

Great post, though.
Be Intimate With Your Customers
How to Design and Structure a Successful Personalized Newspaper
The Internet Explorer 9 Countdown
Isn't that MeeGo? It allows millions of desktop GNOME (er, GNOME-Qt hybrid) developers to reuse their skills to develop phone and tablet apps. Oh wait.
North Korea seems to be among the trending, non-tech-related topics on HN. Really interesting stuff.
> It doesn't matter if they're using Square, Veri-whatever, or some beige-colored plastic card reader with a register that looks like it's from the 90's -- my data is vulnerable before it ever gets to the card reader.

How is your track (magstripe) data vulnerable without a reader?
Fusion IO files for IPO
No longer available free for those without the $99 Mac or iOS developer membership.

It is, however, only $5 from the app store.
FYI it's "Gmail" (lowercase m).
I pray you don't work in IT...
Yes, extremely bad.

Email sales rely on the fact that people need to take action to get the email out of their face. It's an attention-intensive process.

This will shift that dynamic to the other side, where people will need to go out of the way to check their marketing messages. For sites like LivingSocial, it'll be especially bad because those deals may expire before they're even seen.
it may be practical in the office setup where 6+ antenna phased arrays Wi-Fi switches are "cost-practical". With phased array you have much more geometrical flexibility - you may "narrow beam" transmission to a client while better adjusting the transmitter's null onto the receiver's physical location to the current conditions, reflections, etc...
You haven't seen whether the services will succeeded, though.
> What's the difference between using Square, swiping a customer's credit card and storing the data, or using a POS system, swiping a customer's CC and storing the data from that?

Nothing, really. Most POS systems are resistant to data extraction. Square's is less so. My main point was that the USB card reader things are not POS devices. (Or are they?)
It does support 2d transforms:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-nl/ie/ff468705.aspx#_CSS3_2D_Tr...

There are ways to use svg to implement scalable gradients: http://css3wizardry.com/2010/10/29/css-gradients-for-ie9/ . With some clever engineering someone could make a library that automatically converts gradient styles into SVG backgrounds.
I actually stumbled across this while experimenting with libsndfile(www.mega-nerd.com) I built a .NET wrapper around it for converting telephony .vox files to a more user friendly format. In the process of beta testing I found you can feed any bits you want to it and it will spit out a "wav" or other of its supported formats to be played by any media player. I guess I will have to revisit that project for musical inspiration...
sophacles and pmjordan had already given enough info on Jacques. One thing I can say about his posts (having recently posted a couple of them to HN myself) is that they are simple, clear and thoughtful and very much in line with the wavelength of people here at HN.
Yes, thanks. To clarify, I'm asking whether the creators of content should have any responsibility for the way in which it will be consumed.

There's no black and white line that I would draw. Parents ARE responsible for their children's upbringing.
Does that relieve the rest of us of all responsibility for the society we create?

I don't believe that playing GTA or watching Saw XVIII is going to make anyone a murderer. That doesn't mean I think we should be racing to the bottom, trying to see how far we can take things.

To be clear, I consider these issues ones that people should solve for themselves, not ones for the government to get involved in. As far as I'm concerned, any censorship or forced labeling of content is a violation of the First Amendment. It's not the government's job to police, but it should be our responsibility to consider.
what you proposing is equivalent to increasing the frequency of the channel. If both do the same "2-nd" order frequency - we're back to the same "1-frequency" channel problem. If different - that's outside of the "1-frequency" channel problem.
I don't know. Seriously, I don't-- so I'll ask.

I've read that people will attach skimmers to gas station pumps/etc to get card info, so I assume there's more to be skimmed than just credit card numbers. So if you have 1 waiter with a Square-skimmer (or any other kind) and another without, can the first one get any more fraud-ready data than the second?
it seems like this is just a group of hosted plugins. what am i missing?
Its good to look at your idea objectively. But its hard to answer most of the questions in the App Quiz. They boil down to "will it be a big win?" and that's what we're trying to figure out.
I'm going to be amazingly honest and come out as a Steve -- I love building up a new project, or iterating over a prototype until it's actually something that people can use, and then afterwards suffer from a critical deficiency of steam/gumption/moxie.

It's like running flat-out into a brick wall, minus the reconstructive surgery. At moxie-zero time, I can do anything else, but need to take a break from the codebase.

Timeline seems to be at somewhere between thirty days and three months, and I'm really curious to hear from other Steves what your personal run-time is.

Now, this is hell on a team, and double hell on a company that needs to ship on a regular basis, but I've come up with a few coping techniques that really seem to help:

1. Comment copiously the how and why things are written (people can usually figure out the what on their own). I know that my code is going to get handed off, and I don't want to inspire my successor to commit heinous acts of violence.

2. Build small, nearly independent projects that function as building-blocks for bigger systems; e.g., build service-oriented architectures. You often finish well before the steam runs out, and can then build something technically 'new' on top of what you just finished.

3. Develop another valuable skill that allows you to contribute even when you're not writing code.
I guess I earned the downvotes for the bad attitude. I'm just amazed that in a time when everyone else is iterating and pushing out updates in a Big Hurry, they're announcing (celebrating?) the fact that they took a year to go from preview to release.
Anyone know whether this learns from your actions, in the same way as spam filtering and Priority Inbox do? i.e. if I remove the Bulk label from a conversation, does that make similar conversations less likely to be labelled as Bulk in future?
I'm using Gnus, problem solved. Only 4 separate mailboxes, but it could scale to any number of sources, without trouble. The UI is the same as the rest of my environment, fits in perfectly, it's flexible beyond imagination, and tailored to my specific needs.

I used to use the gmail web UI before, but due to the problems you yourself outlined, I switched to something much more powerful, something much more flexible.

I love Gnus, now that I managed to set it up after more than 10 years of using Emacs, and resisting the temptation to finally give gnus a real try.
You can get any of the sauces they put in the burgers on the side to dip your fries into also.

On a related note, I recently at at 5 guys and it was 2x as expensive and about 1/2 as good as in-n-out. Anyone who says it's better is absolutely nuts. They expanded too fast.
The credit card number (and security code, and expiration date, and account holder name -- i.e. everything you need to "use" a credit card) is printed right on the card.
I've always liked the pyramid analogy (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundame...) - once you have quality content, you can build traffic by using higher order strategies. The better you are at creating the former, the less you have to rely on the latter.
Do you mean you'd like to have labels displayed on the sidebar in something other than alphabetical order?
luckily, my windows 2008 r2 server does not have graphical... eh... nevermind.
It figures that this would come out just when I let the latest version download overnight for a new computer.

That having been said, I'm excited to give it a spin. I've heard a lot of great things about it.
Apple releases iOS 4.3
If you are logged in and are trying to download but are getting an access denied error, go to http://developer.apple.com/membercenter and accept the new terms. You should now be able to download from http://developer.apple.com/xcode/
Subtext: we're torturing Bradley Manning.
If you want to put a face to the suffering of north koreans, check out the young man in the middle of the embedded video. Quite unlike anything I've ever seen.
I took this article as a counter to all the articles last week about how no one can beat the iPad on price.
16GB RAM upgrade for the new MacBook Pro
the 10 years warranty is only for the 1st owner.
Xoom sales are either extremely strong or very weak
Here's the light at the end of the tunnel: I have a bug tracking app, and can honestly say that IE is an insignificant part of my traffic - comparable to Opera. Granted, it's a technical audience, but I can safely just not support IE.

Our day is coming...
So what if they call you lazy? Are you going to stop getting invited to the parties they are too busy studying to go to?
An Epic Tale of How It All Happened : The Story of an Indie Book Writer
Yes, they are, that's how most of those systems work.
I wonder who filled these positions at that time in particular.
Very few Caltech students have jobs.

The faculty contributed from what I could see, but primarily in indulging procrastination by students. It was quite common for students to hand in the majority of a terms problem sets in the last week, and the professors would accept them even if there was a stated class policy that late assignments would not receive credit. (Of course, I acknowledge that this was particularly onerous to me, because I would be the one who then had to grade a full term worth of assignments in a week.)
This happens a lot in the art production world actually. You end up with character designers and finishers. I think it's possible to learn to be both (or at least enough of one to complement the other). But it's certainly most efficient to play up your strengths if you have the man-power to complement your short-comings.
I posted this because I'd never read a tale of a writer that sounded so much like a hacker. BTW, she is one of the best selling authors on the Kindle with something like 7 books in the paid Kindle top 100.
It was funny to see them explicitly mention "casual dress atmosphere" - I don't think many software startups would even bother to say that these days.
He certainly is a genius, and you're right that the first version of TeX was not written using literate programming tools; he planned it out on paper instead and programmed it using SAIL.

He had a nasty bootstrapping problem since he needed TeX to exist before he could write a first version of WEB. But once he had a first version of TeX (TeX78), he built WEB, and then he re-wrote TeX from scratch (TeX82) in a different programming language (Pascal/WEB instead of SAIL).
Nah, it works fine... each account stays open in it's tab and I can just switch tabs to see each account I care about. Note that I've only ever tried this using Chrome, so I don't know if they do something special to make it work or not.
I remember seeing a comment by pg that if he really thought there was a bubble and was cynically exploiting that fact, he just wouldn't say anything at all.

I think, from the perspective of pg and YC, there really is no bubble, at least with angel investments. With YC, high quality startups building things people want are raising enough money to bring products to market.

The real bubble is on the high end with Facebook's valuation jumping billions of dollars every week, even though they're obviously not creating billions of dollars of value in a week. That's the definition of speculation.
I use the standard mail client on my iphone, macbook and imac. They all have an "all accounts" inbox so you can view all your email at once.
No. They've done this to prevent web sites from outputting sound when they're loading (or just as they're done loading).

The Audio API's .play() method is now always disabled. It was working on the iPad iOS 4.1 only through a hack, but Apple closed that hole in 4.2. I have no hatred of Apple, I own plenty of Apple products, but absurd strategic crippling of standards does not help my impression of them. It just wreaks of Microsoft-style embrace, extend, extinguish.
"Life After Y Combinator" Panel at SXSW
In that case, what would they say drives economic decisions?
Yes it is. Of course hazing/weeding processes are the means used to achieve this.
Wow! Apple is really doing some weird things lately. I don't like where this is heading. But when you think about the price and what you are getting it's unbeatable.
Since when do you have to be a member of the ios or mac developer programs to download xcode? I'm pretty sure I've downloaded previous versions just using my apple account.
Each radio would have a unique 2-nd order frequency for it's own filtering use, as a "tag" of it's signal. The primary frequency is known and used for the transmition, and the 2-nd order one is piggybacked on it. I'm not saying there are 2 transmiting frequencies.
Since when do you get downvoted on hn for speaking the truth? Oh, yeah, always.
Imagine all the people

Spelling words properly, just for one day
I would say 'free' beats it, even at $5.
Still, it's gonna be worth it for the single window interface alone.
I think that the stock Nook Color app is not that great for reading pdfs. I use the Adobe one and I've tried one other pdf viewer (that I can't recall the name of now), and they were markedly better.
Advice to entrepreneurs: ‘Never stop selling your company’
Facebook Movies: Won't kill piracy, but may help reduce it
Actually, chrome and firefox demonstrate that there is a technical reason, since they both only implement accelerated compositing on XP, not accelerated content layout.
Just take some melatonin and force yourself to sleep in 30 minutes. (Plus it makes 7 hours feel like 8 hours.)

If you're still unconvinced: http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin.html
"Levis said a researcher even told the students their idea was "so simple and effective, it won't work," because something that obvious must have already been tried unsuccessfully."

That's going up on the wall above my monitor.
Looks heavily inspired by Eclipse, and I mean that in a good way.
The upside is you can run your code on other people's hardware and bandwidth, so you don't need revenue just to keep running.

I think a bigger problem for a lot of applications is security. Distributing your app where anyone can modify nodes and data arbitrarily is fine for some applications, but not all.

Down the road, something like Byzantine Paxos might help.
I actually laughed when I saw that happen. amazing.
I'll pony up the $5 but I have to say, Apple sure is ignoring past lessons of the industry. Namely, those with free dev tools have little problem attracting developers.
You pretty much can only be a psychiatrist or family doctor with little or no hope of every specializing.

And that's the problem (not your problem but the profession's problem) - the hope is to specialize whereas being a family doctor is the booby prize.
Hell, Xcode was on the OS X install discs. You didn't even need to download it, unless you wanted the latest version. Not anymore, I guess?
Wow, what a pleasant surprise. Didn't think it would be released before Lion.
It's great software, and definitely worth $5, but one thing concerns me.

Most open source software I use requires Xcode to be installed in order to use GCC and other build tools.

Does this mean you'll have to purchase Xcode 4 in order to (easily) install these tools from now on?
Used to do this "back in the day" (circa 2k2) for getting nice audio glitches back when I was producing significantly noisier music.

http://sickmode.org/scrap/mercykilling.mp3

perhaps it will inspire a new generation of noisemakers ;)
I saw this on TechCrunch, thought it was cool, and posted it; they didn't link to the original Gmail blog source, so I figured they just found the feature on their own.
"this system will not allow 2X information to be carried"

I believe that is the entire point of the article. To allow double the capacity between two devices. The original capacity would be the amount of data that could be sent by a single device. However if both devices can send at the same time that is double capacity.
Facebook's 'Dark Knight' may be Netflix's dark day
Wow. The multiple tabs + account switcher thing works surprisingly well.

Have you ever run into problems using it this way? Seems like this is somewhat outside of the normal usage (maybe because of all of the disclaimers when you add extra accounts?).
Blitz: Making load and performance testing a social sport
I think you're making my point for me. Right now, a lot of people simply don't know what is going on or the implications it has for their privacy, so they can't possibly make informed judgements about whether they are willing to accept that behaviour. Any argument that some sort of market forces would drive change is completely negated as long as you keep your market in the dark about what is really going on.
I remember http://dumpanalysis.org does something like this.
Yes, but Eclipse is still free.
How Tim O’Reilly bootstrapped O’Reilly Media
Reducing the value of a technical object to the sum of its components is ridiculous. Compare the internal design of a MacBook Pro or an iPhone to their counterpart (Hint: take a look at ifixit).
The companies that are being talked about are not public yet - Facebook, Twitter etc. so would a tradational bubble really apply to this?
Xcode 4 (Download)
I think it's interesting to see their early focus on hiring the right people. They are even hiring for a College Recruiting Program Manager already- even when they only have about 50 people at the company. That's thinking big from the beginning.

Also- given all the MBA hate on HN, I thought it was interesting that they asked all their "business" positions to have MBAs.
Yes, a pale blue dot is our home :)

There is only one and a lifetime is not enough to see all of it.
That is true if you don't promote your site on social media sites. If you do, and have interesting content, you'll regularly hit front pages and your analytics will look like a series of horse ears. When you get up to 100,000 page views in a single day from sites like Reddit, it's pretty hard to have 80% of your traffic coming from organic search.
Voting has always puzzling me here, but karma is not the pathway to haven.
Tweet Button Count Not Working? Here's How To Fix It
I coded a Chrome Web App and can sympathize. I eventually had to entirely recode my app because the first go was crashing the tab randomly when audio was playing. I can't imagine trying to do short sounds like in games.
Even MS gives away its Express Editions for VS. I'm a little surprised to see Apple move to a paid model, though $5 is very cheap, I admit.
Kudos to you. :-)
I wouldn't really call NeXT a failure, considering OS X.
But that's what you're doing, whether you choose to add hardware or improve the code -- it's not like your time as a business owner is free, and every moment you're spending on the codebase is a moment you're not marketing or selling.

The real question is which is more valuable to your business.

Consider these two examples:

Let's say I'm a bootstrapper, and have a startup that earns $3k monthly. My customers are happy, and my business is growing, but I'm having some serious scaling problems.

Scenario One: I've outgrown the small Linode that I started on. If doubling the cost of my Linode allows me to service 2X the number of customers, I do it, because $3k in revenue is way higher than the cost.

Scenario Two: I've maxed out the biggest Linode, and the next step up is a cluster of dedicated nodes at Rackspace for $4k/month, which will allow me to scale to 2X my current volume. At this point, I fix the code, because my earnings will drop even if I get twice the number of customers.
PG - your enthusiasm is inspiring.
The Kart Racer That Addicted One Third of Korea Is Coming to Your Phone
>If that breaks web games -- tough luck.

It's worse than that, it breaks the standard. Audio API can no longer be used reliably if a major portion of the audience can't utilize it. Remember when days when one major heavyweight would refuse to follow standardized web protocols? You know, like how SVG was standardized in 2001 and 10 years later can still not be used reliably. Stuff like that needs to stop.
That was Voyager 6
Another example from the video is that a 10M valuation for a startup isn't really saying the startup is worth 10 million, but rather that it has a 1% chance of reaching 1 Billion.

One can actually look at Facebook the same way. One could argue that Facebook is competing with Google at being the primary way people discover information online, and at being a driver of incoming traffic. So one could say that Facebook's valuation with the GS investment reflects a belief that Facebook has around a 25% chance of becoming as valuable as Google.
If you're just learning iOS, you can still download 3.2.6 for free by logging into the Dev Center with a standard iTunes account.

If you just want to play around, I'd recommend that. https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/mac/index.action is where you'll find the download (unless they decide to pull that).