skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now that makes sense iani, if what I predict below is correct about FB and the fact that Spotify have secured a US deal with Sony and EMI + they might buy Warner Music. All of these put together would give them a tried and tested advertising model away from search ads, at better margins than Apple. Plus maybe musicians would possibly feel better, as less companies are taking cuts before the musicians get paid. That said Spotify have 1m paid customers and musicians are sort of only just understanding this new model...imagine their tunes were selling (bought or in exchange of an add) to 550m+ listeners. Plus why do you want a Spotify app when you could access it all from FB. Love it or hate it, but for the end user simplicity counts.
He wasn't insulting. Absence of ass kissing isn't an insult.

>In fact, I'd argue that it is even less than useless as if someone talked to be like that, I'd be even less reticent to try to help.

you sound like you're an ass with overgrown ego.

In general, one chooses whether to get things done or waste the time on gentle handling of ego of the people who can't control their own ego. It is a great boon for humanity that Linus has been choosing the former.
huh. yeah. not seeing a big need for this in my life.
> has named a liquidator to start divesting its assets.

So you could say that they've Died In A Fire Sale. That's pretty close to what many people seem to have been wishing they would do...
What is this about? I'm sure there are plenty of things that are collectible and that people pay money for. There are also probably plenty of people who own stuff they think is worth way more than it is.

And what's with all the points? Surely the only one you need is "these things aren't selling for a high price right now". That is either true or false, you can find out if it's true or false for your specific items and once you've done that who cares about the other stuff?

So why is this article here? Is there a context that gives it meaning for some people here that I'm not getting? Maybe it's because I don't own anything I believe to be worth lots of money for being collectible...
They might just be indirectly lucrative: pro users might just happen to be the ones contributing the most to the Twitter firehose, thereby generating traction for free users. In short, even if not lucrative, pro users may be a worthwhile investment.
Hmm, looks like it's still ongoing: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/india-gives-rim-march-31...
> butter ... contains milk solids which are an enormous problem for those who are lactose intolerant

And, by the way, so does fake butter, usually.

As someone who is lactose intolerant (and who has spent enormous amount of time reading food labels), I can assure you that the vast majority of butter substitutes sold in the U.S. contain some dairy. Sad, but true.
> Well except it's easy to know where they're stored.

Sure, I can control-click the folder, select "Show Package Contents" (?!? an obvious way to say "open this folder"), open the directory named "Originals" and then drill down into the year-stamped folders until I find my albums. But clearly Apple doesn't want me doing that. Otherwise, the photo library would work like all the normal folders. I could simply double click to open it and view its contents.

This is all I meant by "Apple goes out of its way to make this harder."
-module(opine).
-export([opine/0]).

opine() -> io:format(gen_opine(random:uniform())).

gen_opine(R) when R > 0.2 -> "I love the new website.~n";
gen_opine(_) -> "I hate the new website.~n".
Yeah let me rephrase that:

When the business is scamming customers,
competition in a free market is not a pretty sight.

And no, I'm not aloof enough to believe we have a truly free market. But it's free enough to let thousands of Swoopo clones race bid prices to the bottom. Now it seems customers may even be winning more from the auction sites than the auction sites are taking in.

But fear not for Swoopo! They'll undoubtedly sell their soon-to-be patented "technology" to the likes of Intellectual Ventures, who'll use it to extort other would be scammers, completing the circle of evil!
Title is linkbait. While true, I doubt it's the main reason he didn't get accepted. His entire story is a laundry list of the kind of people you -don't- want around. He consistently proves that he has no respect for anyone or anything.

I'm actually surprised that he eventually got in after getting his HS Diploma.
Please, someone create 20 accounts and follow these users and publish a free 50% firehose.
I'd be happy if they based the docs on erldocs.com - having a decent, live search is crucial.
I don't buy that argument. If that were true, then the lottery and every casino would be out of business right now too.
I do mean that it's inconsistent between OS X and other OSes. I mean that Apple+Tab is more annoying, and I would prefer it all to just switch windows instead of applications. Most apps on other platforms have a consistent shortcut to the preferences and/or menu bar (Alt).
A more serious take: The Trough of No Value. http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra... and Doctorow's commentary: http://boingboing.net/2009/02/10/trough-of-no-value-t.html "If all ephemera were preserved [well], [their value] would never rebound, because it would never become scarce."
Why would any business want anything to buy their IP? There is no profit in their idea or IP.
After that quote I actually re-read the section in the Snowball where they talk about Mrs. Blumkin (Furniture Mart).

1) The business wasn't distressed and was doing great.
2) Mrs. B was growing old and her son Louie had taken over most of the work, she was still active in managing the carpet section
3) They were looking at a German company to take them over; their offer was $90.0 mn
4) Buffet told them they would get a higher valuation if they waited and then laid out the pros and cons of Berkshire being in charge. Also pointed out that many other firms would have managers which would inevitably try and run the show.
5) BRK wanted them on as partners to run the firm, without bringing someone in from the outside, which is something both Louie and MRs. B wanted. She didn't want to sell to a German company, being a Russian immigrant.
5.1) T His is generally BRK policy, it invests in strong, track record proven companies and teams, after doing massive amounts of diligence on them.
6) She then told him she wanted $55.0 mn in cash, for 90.0% of the company.
7) Buffet signed, with the caveat that if she wanted to change the deal she could. She said no.
8) Her son and his grandson stayed on and helped grow the business.
9) At some point Mrs. B got very irritated with her growing lack of control, and when her son/grandsons overruled her on a carpet purchase decision she got mad and left.
10) She started her own business opposite the road and began to beat Furniture mart. Since Buffet did not take sides she was quite hurt and betrayed.
11) BRK pays her $5.0 mn for the name of her new mart, makes sure shes happy and in charge of furniture mart, and ensures her non compete clause is bullet proof.

Its an interesting story to read about, as is Mrs. B - she also had a laser focus on her expertise; she didn't care to go beyond it, and was extremely effective within it. She also made decisions quickly and never looked back.

Funnily, 20% of the stake was held by her daughters, and her sons-in-law came to sign the deal. They were aware they would get more if they signed with the Germans but Mrs. B basically harangued them into submission - "how much do you want, I'll pay ya".

Her management style was... interesting - Buffet had been told that she wanted to sell the place 20 years earlier. When he got there to sign the deal, Mrs B. had part of her office (may have been sons/in laws) lined up, just so that she could yell at them and call them a bunch of bums. Once she abused them enough, Buffet was allowed to walk away.
File under "things that don't need fixing".
Casinos won't go bankrupt because they are a monopoly protected by the state ( although the state(s) does not have allegiance any one them and is increasingly in the process of granting many more licenses to shore up deficits, Casinos still have a very, very high barrier to entry ). See my comment downthread. And yes, they are equally predatory. And lotteries, well, yeah ... owned by the state, not going anywhere because there is zero competition.
The same could be said for TV. The solution is to cater to those that would pay attention to ads on TV, ergo, dumb content like the history of Rednecks on Discovery (or so I hear).
If you could change one thing...
In any of your favorite movies, what would it be? Would it be a character, the twist, the storyline in general, the way someone dies. I would love to know what film you would change, and what would you change in that film.

In the Film Brick I would love to know what Laura whispered in Brendan's ear I have a clue what she did say, but I would love to have heard it.

Now lets hear your ideas what would you change...
"I understand that there is a staff behind the scenes that puts these publications together -- editors, admin. staff, etc."

Actually, at least the editors, are almost always unpaid academics as well, almost all of the work for academic journals is "free" to the publisher
That's a separate problem. One can be against the death penalty and against giving death row inmates kidneys. Even if all the death row inmates in the world are innocent, giving them kidneys still wastes kidneys. (Since most of them will not be exonerated.)
All you've done now is shipped off the responsibility to the API. The API is not bug free, I guarantee you. There will still be XSS vulnerabilities, but they'll just live in the API now.

Imagine you decide to fix buffer overflows by switching from C to Java. You're no longer relying on the fact that your code won't have buffer overflows, you're relying on the fact that (1) the JVM code doesn't have buffer overflows and (2) the JVM will catch all your buffer overflows and throw exceptions.

I feel very confident Java has few, if any, bugs. I do not, however, hold that same level of confidence with most APIs in use today. They simply haven't had the time to become as robust.

However, even then, this does not solve all of your issues. There are times when you need to insert tags dynamically, and once you start doing that, there are a million more ways things can go wrong. Sure, you can put another restrictive API in front of that which requires the programmer to take ten lines to describe the single tag she wants, but those APIs will rarely get used because of this.

At the end, for any class of vulnerabilities, there is always a way to entirely eliminate it. Rarely is it the case, however, that you can do so without dramatic losses in other areas.
I wanted to note that Ulrich Drepper has proposed a way around the issue, and clearly said at the end "I'm happy to entertain a patch to this effect."

When I first read the parent comment it sounded as though Ulrich immediately shot it down, which he did not. (Note I'm not blaming the OP of the parent comment for this, I am just trying to help future readers from making the same mistake I did)

While he is not immediately agreeing with what Linus proposed, at least it is progress.
Actually, Apple's use of the Command key for GUI shortcuts both precedes the use of Ctrl for the same task and pioneered many of the conventions, such as Ctrl/Cmd x, v, c & s, that are universal today.

Although I was a bit skeptical at first, once I got used to the concept it made a lot of sense. On a Mac, Ctrl+key combos are for contextual menus in the GUI and navigation/commands in terminals and text areas. For instance, you can navigate to the beginning and end of nearly any text element in OS X by using Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e, the standard Emacs shortcuts. And the Cmd+key combos are for GUI and application-level shortcuts, such as copy, paste, print, close, etc. There are two different contexts being handled, so it makes sense to use a different key. The combo to copy a line from a terminal window should not interfere with the combo to cancel the running process within that window, as an example, and on OS X it doesn't.

Most importantly, those shortcuts are implemented consistently across applications. No matter what app I'm working on, Cmd+, will always bring up the Preferences window, Cmd+w will close the window, Cmd+q will quit the application, Cmd+h will hide it, Cmd+p will invoke the print dialog, Cmd+s will save, Cmd+S will save as, Cmd+z will undo, etc. I never have to stop and think about it, or get jarred out of my train of thought by an application that uses some non-standard shortcut to save, or quit or similar. I use Ubuntu at the office and while many apps are making good progress on presenting a consistent interface across the OS, I still get frustrated regularly by apps that do things differently.

Finally, Cmd+Tab provides the same functionality as Alt-Tab on Windows and Linux. Cmd+` lets you switch between the windows of a particular application, which I've found to be quite useful on a many occasions.

Point being, don't knock it till you understand why others like it. While I don't agree with all of Apple's UI decisions, there are plenty of excellent usability features in OS X and I now prefer it to both Windows and Linux because those features line up nicely with the way I work.

Aside from a few crappy lowest-common denominator Java desktop apps that haven't been optimised for OS X, but thankfully those are disappearing fast.
Whilst obviously I see it as ultimately down to parental discretion and judgement, I just don't understand the mindset that sees a parent buying their 12 year old child COD Black Ops.
KashFlow : http://www.kashflow.com
Has a kick-arse SOAP API if that's your thing: http://accountingapi.com
If you're not a designer, this will clue you in to the joke: http://www.specialops.co.nz/blog/arial-vs-helvetica/
This seems like a step in the right direction, but I'd love to see a bookmarking service make accessing and utilizing bookmarks easy by 1) indexing bookmarked pages and extracting keywords & identifying content & enabling tag based search + auto-organized index
2) offer an easy to use interface for accessing the bookmarks.

The main annoyance I have with bookmarking present day bookmarking tools is the amount of steps it requires. Selecting text to be bookmarked is nice but it's an extra action. I don't want to have to file/tag/place in folder, mouse drag and click around just to bookmark a page. Why not a single click?

*currently using the note in reader bookmarklet for google reader
This was an awesome presentation, quick, funny, to the point.

However, it brought up some interesting questions for me. How many people can truly create software for the sole purpose of selling it? Unless he really likes Bingo cards, he worked on this software not out of love but love for money.

This isn't a bash, I'm insanely curious actually. The more I think about it, the more I know that I cannot create software for women because I have absolutely no interests that would coincide with an underserved market. Maybe I'm just not creative enough? And honestly, for me to create an awesome product, I'd have to be invested in it somehow.
The goals of functional programming are to abstract away as much detail of the calculation as possible where as the goals of imperative programming seem to be providing a lot of transparency as to how the problem will be calculated. If you get away from being in one camp or the other you'll actually see that the two camps are moving closer together. Personally, I think the best example of this is C# (an imperative language with functional extensions) and F# (a functional language with imperative extensions).

Sometimes I really want to specify that a calculation must take place via a certain method (lets say newton's method and the performance improvements that are possible with certain hacks) and sometimes I don't care (such as partial application of a function).

The best situation is to put both tools in the hands of a programmer and let them decide what to do. Neither the functional nor imperative camps are 'right' but there are a lot of good ideas in both camps.
What's your personal philosophy on charities?
Some of these I think are valid points, the update process needs to be improved. Currently it feels like the WP7 update process sits somewhere between iOS and Android, all the problems of both and the benefits of none. Smaller updates released more regularly would go a long way to solve these issues.

The marketplace update process I've never had a problem and I've used both Firefox and Chrome never IE. I'd love to hear some of the marketplace rules that he feels are broken. Most to me seem pretty up front.
>roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users---where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however, bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories.

nice portrait of the human race.
Try Google Latitude. The history feature is probably a rough approximation of what the cell phone company (and by extension, law enforcement) would see.
Interesting. Was this paper actually published somewhere? I didn't see any listing of a conference name. Am curious what kind of academic conferences for which this paper would be suitable. Would like to check those proceedings out.

And as an aside, I had no idea that Yahoo had a research division.
Unladen Swallow Retrospective
Kind of along the lines of this is Spolsky's advice that he would give out at the Dev Days conference tour he does/did with Carsonified: How is your software going to get someone laid?

While a little far-fetched, it does help keep everything in perspective although it serves the young guy demographic a bit more.
I stronly suggest you experiment with charging a one-time fee based on your estimated lifetime value of a customer. $1.99 in monthly fees for a personal utility like this is not too much to pay, it's the mental overhead which stops me from buying it. And you lose money per transaction.

Pinboard's pricing model is great here. A one-time fee of around $10 to use the service and $25 per annum archival fees. You should consider doing something similar.
250,000 Crowd Central London in Budget Protest
In the nineteenth century, there were still many people who argued that certain organizations had a "right" to profit. An excellent read on this topic is Stanley Kutler's _Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case_[0].

[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801839831/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Interesting, but not surprising. I believe this is pretty standard human behavior. If you are creating something of value (or perceived value), the "elite" (top X%) will own a large chunk of this value.

This statistic can probably be spun around: I'm sure the 20K elite users have a large % of the total followers of every twitter user.

Similar, tangentially related: About 43% of the financial wealth of America is owned by the top 1% of American households[1].

[1]: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
If you see finance as infrastructure to help other businesses grow (as I do), then it's growth should result in the growth of other industries. Instead what we see is finance growing and other industries declining. To me that suggests a general dysfunction in the role of finance. It simply isn't doing the good it's supposed to.

There may be many or even most individuals who are acting in good faith, but the sector as a whole appears to be broken.

This isn't about demonization. It's about pointing out a serious threat to society's continued prosperity.

And as for the auto industry - they shouldn't have been bailed out either - that doesn't somehow make it better that the financial industry was. Also the auto bailout was a rounding error compared to the financial bailout.
Audience Choice Winner of first Venture Capital Fundraising Club Meetup, Feb 3
Sites that try very hard to make their product appear as auctions, but are in reality gambling qualify as scam in my book.
Now I enjoy gambling as much as the next guy, but I want to know that I am gambling and what my chances/odds are and I want that information to be in plain sight.
Well on the other hand look at how much these, huge cash (no ideas) rich companies spend prematurely buying out new ideas before these startups have flourished, thinking this will help their brand and traffic stats. However, If they succeed acting like an incubator, awesome ideas will have the time to blossom (with cash and high level support).
Terrain generation using CoffeeScript
I quit applications because open applications leave UI remnants laying around. If they can figure out a way to do the Right Thing with the UI, then it wouldn't bother me.
Growing a thick skin and dealing with a curt reply allows information to flow faster. All Linus is doing here is setting the bar. Doing it in flowery everyone-wins language is more time-consuming and the longer you communicate on the web, the more you realise that frequently it's just not worth the time drain. The attitude Linus is commenting on is something he's known for railing against for a very long time.

If you're trying to make a world-class product, you can't afford the time to wrap all comms with your developers in niceties - you need to define where you stand and what's expected in solid terms.

Also: given his thorough explanations that go along with the chiding, I'd much rather be on a forum that has that kind of poster.
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This guy may be happy to know that the new Mac OS that's coming out doesn't have running lights on the dock by default. So you can't really tell if an application has quit or not. In fact, apps now resume when launched.

The trouble is, not all apps support resuming when launched. So it's like a big mishmash and you're quite sure which are running and which are not. The transition will not be pretty! I'm gonna turn my running lights back on as the first thing I do on the new Mac OS.

Look, I actually LIKED the Mac's paradigm of being application-centric, and not document-centric. The latter was Windows' way: MDI, SDI, and all that. When you closed the last window, the app closed. Or did it?

On the Mac, I had control over when I wanted the app to close. Even when I did not do development, I understood what was a program and what was a document. It ain't that hard to do. As a developer, I really love to know what app is running and be able to shut it down, without having to force-quit it.
Yes! And this is basically how Google Docs does it.
Ha, thanks for the tips.
How much of that GDP growth is just the financial sector itself inflating?
This is the engineering equivalent of offering discounts to new users, while ignoring loyal customers; it leads to churn, but not much progress for day to day users (i.e. the biggest users of the software). Applications that I like the most have "levels" of the user interface; you can switch to a more complete, complex, user interface once you get more used to the program.
Hmm... 67% of users agree that "Swedish Opera Singer" is indeed a good snack.
In hindsight, it is easy to see and understand how their business model didn't work out. But when they launched, it seemed to be a nice idea.

Even in casinos, the odds are stacked heavily against the player. Still, people do keep playing. Swoopo was similar. I guess it's hard to get new users when every blog calls you a scam.
I noticed there was one particular slide that appeared only a fraction of a second after to gestured for it to appear (It looked like a human operator was watching you and advanced the slide when you indicated). That's some incredible timing!
heh, nearly the same situation... here... Have to try it out with my son.
Yes, you're right. To clarify, I meant positions like copy editors.