skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are three forms of communication (typically): verbal, written, and gestural. Verbal is either face to face - and often is heavily laced with gestural - or via telephone. And of course written in all its wondrous forms. Also the most "difficult" of the three. (Pardon... if I seem to be generalizing...) If you think about it, social networking is like a "holiday note" stuck in the card... sent to everyone on the list - but continually. You could do the same with email and then you would retain some ownership of your content. And Twitter is everyone's text messages - which would be spam if you got in your inbox. But it certainly is entertaining for some reason. I tried using Twitter as an RSS feed... eh! Actually, everyone has an email that uses a "social network"... so why not just use email? Email is peer-to-peer ... and creative developers could easily come up with a Facebook like email GUI. So you parse all your friends emails into a nice timeline and profile page... and when you update, you would send out a "group" email to your network - or select subset... and they would get it parsed out in their GUI. That's really all FB is... or Linkedin. What's the first thing they want to do when you sign up? Get your email contact list! So in essence, we give them our contacts and content so they can tell us what we can and cannot do with it (TOS) and then inundate us with more spam. What am I missing here?
"do any of you -- aside from our realm of early adopter computer savvy tech types -- genuinely remember any everyday computer users actually complaining that Windows came preinstalled with IE instead of Netscape?"

That's a really narrow view of the damage done by the IE monopoly. The ubiquity of IE6 continues to stifle the development of new web technology by requiring developers to cater to hapless prisoners of corporate IT policy.

I don't have the patience to spell it out, but i'm sure you'll piece it together if you lurk moar.
Can't they just change it to App Market?
They did, last year (and I have seen people with it in conferences). I donated and asked for this t-shirt but I never received it :(
Is it an industry requirement that in order to write about patents you have to not know anything about them? In particular, the author seems to not understand that a plaintiff claiming that their patent is being used by defendant to accomplish X does not mean plaintiff is claiming that their patent covers all possible ways to do X.
Lecture quality improves, and students can also learn at their own rate. You should read some of the feedback on Khan lectures. Students can pause, and look up other sources. And they can daydream, but still not miss any material.

It's unclear to me that even a 1/3 reduction in lecture time is sufficient. I'd like to fundamentally change education so the teachers are really mentors and facilitators of learning and activities. Lecturing can be done via video almost exclusively -- at least for those topics where video lectures make sense.
Konami Code found on Sendoid
Just type the Konami code there. DISCO STYLE!
API ecosystem poaching is definitely uncool.

Twitters recent moves are disturbing and definitely will have a negative impact on how people view APIs.

The bad decisions by Twitter doesn't mean everything is going to shit.

Amazon is building their ecosystem with consideration of their ecosystem players - http://www.cloudave.com/10992/aws-vpc-and-impact-on-ecosyste...

NPR is retooling their APIs to support partner efforts, licensing, digital rights, etc. - http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2011/03/17/134259537/the-npr...

This is some tough shit. No quick answers. Its different for different industries, mediums, etc.

Some API owners are making poor decisions, but there are plenty others like NPR, Amazon, and Netflix that are innovating and sharing their stories on problems they face and what went into their decisions.

The key in any of this is don't get swept up in the short term undercurrents. Step back and look at bigger pictures. I've been using APIs for 10 years. Cloud computing for 5.

I feel like we are just getting going. Lots to figure out.
Btw, anyone know how they are doing those various views ? Are they using Canvas or is there something else ?

I love that they are doing all of this with just css & js and no flash.

It is things like this, that make me excited about the future of the web.

It is highly likely we will see more complex things with non-flash technologies, than we have seen with flash technologies to date, in my humble estimation.
How did Facebook manage to acquire secondary meaning for the the name, when the term "face book" existed as a descriptive term for the exact same thing that sucker-borg created a variation of?
Perhaps because the suit is a signal that Apple fears competition from Amazon?
I'm in no way a lawyer so I hope what I say is at least feasible, but I would like to see Google come to the defense of their platform, after all the widespread adoption of android is what has it where it is today. Especially in terms of market share.
Is github a service to provide code reviews?
What is sad that MS had it's own Tasman engine used in IE5 for Mac. Why didn't MS port that to Windows?
Well I don't know of how many previous black founders were in YC, however, I know for sure there is at least 1 in the current batch.

I've attended one of the YC dinners only last week, and I saw him there, though i did not have the opportunity to talk to him.
Apple has a loooong history of not respecting other trademarks and "name and likeness" (eg: Beatles, Carl Sagan/BHA, Cisco's iPhone) that it's pretty rich that they're trying to stuff the "Kleenex™ back in the box" (so to speak) with the term "app store".
Wait... You're complaining that Gruber is putting an Apple angle on one of his articles? Do you also complain that water is wet darnit?
The author writes:

From my understanding of how HN operates, there are
two possibilities to explain this anomaly

* It was moderated by the admins
(Which I do not believe was the case)
* It was flagged seriously
(which I believe was the case)

There is another force at play. Items which are text, and not links to external sites, are penalised. I don't know how severely, or whether this is enough to explain all of the ranking differential you perceive, but it is very definite.

Just saying there may be things that were missed.
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This is the main reason I cannot see myself using HTML5 form validations - they look awful and inconsistent across user agents.
I didn't know there was a website where I could borrow and lend physical books to random people across the world with the click of a button, absolutely no shipping fees, and a rock-solid 14 day return policy.

Does that site exist, or are you exploiting the (obviously false) "ebooks are books" train of thought for a pithy comment?
I'm just wondering why they aren't including Firefox 4 and IE 9 final. Both versions are available (though Firefox 'officially' launches tomorrow).
As a software engineer I pledge to never work for or in any other way assist the following companies as long as they continue their anti-competitive abuse of software patents that is harming our industry and the future of mobile computing: Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Kodak, RIM.

Will other devs pledge with me?
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I'd rather ask why the article was voted so much. It's a very funny but useless anecdote.

/takes off his snobbish cape
Would the fact that "app" has been used as a shortened form of "application" in "web app"/"web application" have any bearing on it's ability be trademarked? Is it specifically for the combination "app store"? It would seem to me that its primary meaning is what they're trying to trademark, because it's bluntly self-descriptive.
I have a simple cell phone plan. It's called Ben (http://www.ben.nl) and it's a subsidiary of T-mobile in the Netherlands that's historically (since the 90s) been the simple cell phone plan provider.

Here's what I pay: €3/month for 50 minutes or texts and €9.95 for unlimited data. If I go over, I pay a premium of €0.25 for each minute/text I go over. Simple.

It can be done!
Scribd is ruthlessly efficient with their SEO even though they don't create linkbait content.
Yes! May have some "disclosure" issues...
So, first he talks about how simplicity of pricing is key. Then he describes how an Apple Ipad, with about a dozen different prices depending on what you want, is simply priced. Then he describes how the New York Times, which has only one price that most people will ever care about ($15 for unlimited web access), is unsimply priced.

True brilliance.
Apple has successfully promoted the heck out of name "App Store" and spent a fortune doing so. If that's the criteria they have a solid case.
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Excellent service! I tried it and it's very simple and easy to use. I'm curious... how does one initiate a P2P transfer between two computers using just browser technology?
If Barnes & Noble refused to pay (which is what Microsoft says), it's actually a matter of fairness that Microsoft enforces its patents because otherwise those who respect Microsoft's rights would be at a competitive disadvantage versus non-paying infringers.

Jeez Florian, you have come a long way since your campaign against software patents.

A few days ago you blow up the Bionic GPL issue as if it was an unprecedented tactic used by Google (and were soundly rebutted on LWN by the way ;) and now this.

Have you received funding from Microsoft at any point, perchance?
Some projects we're not much concerned about the source code being secret. I'd rather it be good than secret.
Distimo finds higher prices, slower growth in the Mac App Store
It's Pandora of music videos. You select music "styles" you like, and they get played non-stop.
Back in the day, when table-based layouts needed content with certain dimensions to ensure widths and heights in all browsers, I used to rely on an image with src set to about:blank, instead of the silly 1x1 transparent pixel spacer.gif technique.

Later on, when I stumbled upon a CSS problem in IE6 where elements wouldn't show up unless they had a background, about:blank was back to save the day.

It's really like /usr/bin/yes or /dev/null of the web in a way. I really wanted to read more 'folklore' about it's meaning, rather than an article about the perils of it's implementation. Now I'll have to start another Googling odyssey [CMD+T -> about:blank].

Hope they manage to nail it. We're pretty used to slight delays (hiding elements until they're ready), so an asynchronous callback seems like the way to go, if it solves things for the FF developers.

Trippy page load btw, looked like some HTML art example from the nineties at first..
I've met PG too last week at one of the famous YC dinners. He was a really cool and down to earth guy, but it was really exciting to meet you.

And the best thing about him is his memory. He will remember the most peculiar things about people. He may not remember your name, but he will remember something peculiar about you.
Not sure I understand - github is a revision control system, not a site where I can request that my code be reviewed.
hm. I'm also not a lawyer or a tax professional, so I may have it completely wrong, and I should probably shut up. But my understanding was that if you owned equity in a company and you worked for that company, if the IRS looked at it, in nearly all cases you'd be ruled an employee.
I just realized that since the NYT paywall is copy protection, View Source on the NYT is now illegal.
The font resource is obviously taking a while to load.

I opened the page in Chrome and page with just the fixed width fonts until the font finally loaded 30 seconds later. I was wondering if it was some kind meta-joke about blank pages. All I saw was the text "about:blank" placed randomly around the page.

I would have much preferred Firefox's behaviour.
swipe doesnt seem to work on ipad
I was all set to vote this up until I got to the last paragraph.

It seems that a lot of people have the idea that HN is a democracy, run by the will of the people. Nothing could be further from the truth. pg and the editors have the last word on everything. It's not immediately obvious, because pg doesn't go around saying "I banned this guy because he was a jerk." That's polite of him, but the truth is, quite a few people get banned for being jerks, every day. And quite a few submissions get killed for being off-topic.

Having said that, I agree with you that this is a good submission, and I'm a little dismayed that raganwald is arguing against it. When I saw the subject line, and that it had over 100 comments, I figured it was going to be ugly. I was delightfully surprised to find myself honestly learning something from almost every comment I've read here. I haven't upvoted this much stuff in months. Pretty well restored my faith in humanity, it did.
From the first comment on that article:

I never post here, but after seeing this, I just had to.
The Light article is very biased and disingenuous - they have an agenda that's obvious from the tone of their text. For a realistic rebuttal, check out:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/07/the_costs_of...
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/08/that_43_mill...

There are many other realistic, balanced rebuttals to the Light article out there as well.
I've worked in the the biotech and drug industry (10 years) and am currently an academic. I've been on both sides of the fence and have a realistic perspective on how much it costs and how tough it is to discover and develop new medicines. The Light/Warburton figure is WAY off.
In other words, exactly the same way you deal with AdBlock on your ad-supported website.
>there are Apartheid apologists on HN

that's absolutely deplorable! I'm clearly missing whole genres of conversation on this forum. So as to avoid charges of libel, let me encourage you to provide examples. Can you cite examples?
Congrats Zac! Works like magic :)
For many students -- perhaps as high as 80% IMO, something like the Khan Academy, combined with a supervising adult to coach you could easily replace teachers, and should.

Why? Schools work the way that they do because it is convenient. They ignore the needs of the bright (most of whom are bored out of their minds) and those who need some more help. We push kids through school, use outdated, repressive discipline to keep them in control, and spend alot of money in the process.

Education hasn't always been this way -- in rural areas as late as the 1950's 1 room schools taught K-12 successfully -- with one or two adults. How? The kids taught each other.

I could think of nothing more rewarding (for teachers and students) than designing schools to be institutions where kids actually enjoy learning. I don't think staffing needs would be reduced as much as one may think. It will by necessity shrink somewhat, total teacher compensation is growing beyond the ability of many communities ability to pay.
We built a reliable file transfer method on top of the peer-to-peer media streaming technology used by Chat-Roulette and its clones, RTMFP.
Agreed. A lack of huge technical leaps forward hasn't stopped the automotive industry from planning obsolescence. I don't see any reason to assume electronics will be any different.
I like the emphasis on sending rather than hosting. I think the Drop in DropBox makes sense for sharing folders, but I don't think it makes sense for sharing individual files. There are services for hosting different types of large files, like Vimeo, DropBox, GitHub or just a web server. Secure transfer of files is a different problem from the user perspective IMO.

I also like how they've went through the trouble to actually make it more powerful than (most of) the competition, by allowing direct connections. (Sure, AIM supports it but it's brittle, has a confusing UI, and requires more coordination between users.)
Whoa. Waitaminuteherejustasec.

That page says that it's going to be available for Rogers and Telus. Does this mean that there's UMTS band 5 version of the Nexus S? Hopefully Google will be selling this unlocked too...
By acquiring business you mean acquiring users? Acquiring companies that will offer deals on them? Interested.
I found the phrase 'Java bloatware' to be indicative of a certain sentiment towards the language (or JVM environment) in general (as compared to just 'bloatware'). And, given common use cases for machine learning toolkits, the overhead incurred by the JVM doesn't warrant (IMHO) ruling out Java-based options. I must have misread your comment, thanks for clarifying!

I'll have a look at the underlying C++ classes API (http://waffles.sourceforge.net/apidoc/html/index.html).
And we all know that the web habits of the majority of broadband internet users is primarily based on rbanffy.
I'm pretty sure a PDF is served as a single file. The 'parts' of a PDF aren't loaded seperately, and hence aren't streamed individually of the entire document.
Phone lines are secure of course ...
1) "[ ] Set a Password [ ] Reusable Link?"

Should have <label> tags on the text.

2) When you click "Set a Password" it should set focus to the input. I couldn't even tell it was an input box, I thought it was just a gray box. Style changes could help too.
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I agree, competition is great; it spurs innovation. But I don't see how all browsers using the same rendering engine is bad for competition. Are Safari and Chrome not competing? Are they not innovating?

Users would still have a choice of browsers, but the web would be a much better place for users, and developers/designers.
We definitely agree and think it's a huge area that's been overlooked. Files keep getting bigger and it takes forever to get them up to hosted services.

We're hyper-sensitive about our data as well, and wanted to create something that gives people built-in security and privacy but make it all super-easy.
it actually works. not sure about the mechanism but well done guys.

what I like most about this startup is that they provide file sharing service without actually incurring any storage costs.
Apple Update Adds More Problems for New MacBook Pros
Which is a relatively recent addition to Flash.
Another measure would be number of employees. Google has 24k. Bigger on the linked graphic are Oracle (105k), Nokia (132k), Hitachi (360k), Sharp (64k), LG (177k), Apple (49k), Samsung (276k), and Motorola (60k).

Another measure would be total assets. Google has $58 billion. Oracle has $60 billion. Hitachi has $95 billion. Nokia has $57 billion. Apple has $75 billion. Samsung has $294 billion. Microsoft has $86 billion.

I would consider total assets to be a better measure than market cap when it comes to determining whether the company is larger or smaller in the context of a lawsuit.
This is creeping Redditization: it's based on it being a boys' club in here, it isn't particularly funny, and we can expect to hear it and variations repeated in every thread forever if this behavior is rewarded.
if we go 2 levels down the stack, to me that situation with private APIs [more precisely - "API services" ] provides a glimpse into the future what would happen with Internet without net-neutrality (as the service of carrying your network packets is just a "network API service" which owner of the service would be able to decline/limit access to to anybody he feels like to).
Missing from the article (and the linked summary of other sites that do this) is letscrate.com, which does it so well that I'm not even interested in looking at sendoid. It's dead easy, and my clients understand and remember the name after I say it once.
If you read to the bottom of the article you'll find a link to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2349723 which tells you who that founder is.
Keep in mind I'm only working with that one splash page (which explains nothing as to what you're actually doing) and my imagination. I imagined a dating site for founders, which could be broken into networks by region or city that could be scaled relatively well by a small team.

On the other hand, I'd be excited for a "founder incubator" community site so to speak, a mix of online demos, profiles, etc but also real world events to pair people. In that case, I could see the focus. For general dating site, however, I don't see it. My immediate reaction though is, "So he plans on moving to the winning city?"
There are 6 prices for iPads. 16/32/64 Wifi. 16/32/64 3g.

I would say people would care about the other NY Times plans. I would personally much rather use a NY times App on my iPad (Which would mean the $20.00 plan) versus using it on my iPhone. But if I wanted to use both apps, it would cost $35.00. It's cheaper just to get the physical paper delivered to your house.
That's more or less exactly what I do. Last time I overhauled my wardrobe was 3 or so years ago; I went into Old Navy, found jeans I liked and got 4, and found a shirt I liked and got 7 colours of it. Total in-store time, including browsing, trying on, and check-out was 22 minutes. I'm rather proud of myself.

It makes complete sense. I can't stand retail spaces, and honestly, even shopping every leap year is an insufferable, demoralising sink.
Microsoft: Begins Planning Next Xbox For 2015 Release
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http://www.paperbackswap.com/ doesn't hit all your points, but it gets the spirit of what you said. Enjoy!

See also: http://bookmooch.com/
Would love to read more about your solution. Am I correct to assume that your business model will focus on licensing this technology?
Both Apple and Amazon are run by two of the smartest businessmen in the world.

For Amazon's part, they're attracted to the phrase "app store" because:

a. due to Apple's efforts, the phrase has gained an amount of familiarity and also
b. it's simply a good name.

If only Apple products have this "app store" thing, they have another unique offering. But if you can access an "app store" from any device, there's less incentive for the consumer to specifically buy an iPad (over a Kindle, for example).

For Apple's part, they know right well that they're pushing it by contesting their exclusive right to the generic phrase "app store". But for the reasons outlined above, it's very much in their interests to prevent others from using it and they have relatively little to lose by going to court to attempt to do so.
A system that needs some serious hacking (the food system)
Thanks for the feedback, we're really working to make the site as easy to use as possible and you're right on about the set password input box.
Haha yeah, its a pretty awesome addition to Flash. I kind of gloss over that word because I hate Flash as much as the next hacker, but it provided a method to solve a problem that was plaguing John and I and was impossible to solve otherwise.
Are they still not producing which patents these people infringe on? How anyone, especially techkies, could pat MS on the back at any point in history is beyond me. MS is still at war with open source
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I'm really anxious to learn more about p2p tech so I can apply it to my research. Do you know any really good references, libraries, and or literature? How did you go about exploring it? Any advice? (Is RTMFP suitable for distributed data processing?)

Also, congrats on your startup! You're working on a problem that is a major headache for all of us.
Today's News Summary:

Apple = Trademark Troll

Microsoft = Patent Troll

AT&T = Monopoly

If Amazon fights this they could win and it could be good news for everyone, except Apple.

p.s. Yes I know Amazon is a patent troll as well.