skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unlike the kernel, desktop development for Linux is done almost wholly by volunteers in their spare time. There aren't many paid developer seats for KDE, Gnome, et al.

Bold new interfaces, new APIs, and complete reinventions of the desktop metaphor are really exciting hobby projects for these brave volunteers.

Perfecting backwards compatibility, re-implementing buggy behaviour from prior versions, and ensuring ABI stability do not make exciting projects. These are the torturously painful, labor-intensive foundations of Microsoft's success.
I'm fine with the idea, but I'd suggest also adding a

Who is looking for a Co-founder (Month YYYY)?

to the list.
I think finer grained consistency models (as well as some other options) would be a step forward for RDBMS systems. However, that doesn't get over the fact that the relational model is not always the best fit for your data. This is especially true if your data is semi-structured. I work with the MongoDB/10gen team and we have a lot of users who enjoy working with the document model, and have seen drastic reductions in both amount of code and time-to-production from it.
As someone who has worked with ecologists in the field on a number of wildlife projects in rural Africa, I find this to be truly repugnant. There are many ways of controlling "problem elephants" other than killing them -- in fact, killing an elephant is almost never an option. If the villagers don't have the financial resources to implement non-lethal control measures, I'm sure Bob Parsons does.
It is getting tiresome to hear Apple fans, having long bashed Google's Android because "open" was bad, now bash Google for being somewhat less "open."

From my admittedly Apple-fanboy perspective, I always thought the argument wasn't that open = bad, just that that Google shouldn't use it as a marketing point if they're not 100% open.

Here's my admittedly Apple-fanboy perspective: Apple took a "closed" approach which helped in quality control. Google took an "open" approach which allowed others to add or modify their OS in ways that did not benefit the consumer, or just plain sucked. This resulted in multiple products that either simply lack polish or just stink to use. Google found this out the hard way and is now trying to tighten their control, and Apple's approach is being entirely vindicated.
While I respect your opinions in support of Parsons, I'm going to have to disagree with you on a lot of your arguments.

>Bob Parsons has always run his company the way he wants, and he has particular freedom to do so since he has zero investors and is the sole owner

Parsons does have the freedom to do what he likes but there are consequences to those actions. No one is questioning his freedom to do what he chooses.

> He does certain things for shock value...

True but I think killing an elephant and then posting a video about it is a bit different than showing scantily clad women dancing on the hood of a convertible. Both can be equally demeaning and morally questionable to certain parts of the population but let's be real here, killing an "innocent animal" is much more controversial than what is shown on TV almost every night.

> Slaughtering an elephant might offend some of your sensibilities, but hunting in Africa is wide spread and as long as the elephant is not endangered, I don't think your outrage has a leg to stand on.

Not sure if you read the article but Jacques specifically states there's a clear difference between a rich dude shooting the Elephant and a native Zimbabwean game warden doing it to protect his crops (which btw, there are many other ways of going about that than shooting it). The psychology behind the former doing it can be extremely powerful (and enraging) compared to the latter.

> There are much worse things going on in America's food industry then this.

Agreed. But that's missing the point.

> I can understand how this might offend vegetarians but even then, it's not like the animal was wasted.

I'd assume this statement was more offensive to vegetarians than watching that video. I'd assume that b/c I am one.
3 Factors for HubSpot's success via CEO Interview
That sounds highly doubtful to me.
Until there's a local root exploit. ;)

My point was simply that this feature carries with it some very large security implications. I'm sure the people developing it are aware of that and will do their best to mitigate any potential issues.
Google +1 Button Discovered
Depending on how broad you use the term "startup", I might agree. The discussion about programming (and other technical) topics here is usually on a pretty high level, apart from the usual crowd jumping on every hyped bandwagon. Generally on a much, much higher level than "pure" startup news – which most of the time are (bad) economics 101 or sheer self-help book territory.
GUI pls!!
Google making a face recognition app that leads to your personal info
Did they file in the UK? British libel laws are so bad that the BBC is doomed, if they did.
tl;dr: hire talented engineers with strong programming backgrounds and let them work on areas of the company they are interested in, regardless of domain experience.

Totally agree. This almost always works.
Just a thought, but how about an interface that shows all the values as stacked columns (or concatenated rows) and you can only drag the border between them?
>> I'll be moving my domains away from GoDaddy asap.

I moved all my domains, ~30, from GoDaddy about 18 months ago. It was a slog. There was no "asap" to it. It took about 2 months to get them all moved over to namecheap. Transfers gets curtailed for various reasons and the current registrar is usually little help in solving the mysteries.

I'm telling you this not to take the wind from your sails but to prep you for a bit more effort.

The reason for my move was the full-on "retail experience" of GoDaddy. It just didn't work for me anymore. I wanted a more spartan registrar.
excellent product for GTD. nice work on the design Pete!
>They argue that we should be able to change GMail's javascript code just like we do other applications we use.

What the FSF doesn't get is that its actually much easier to change proprietary JavaScript than it is to modify a binary running on your system.
IndexedDB, where is the support for application-managed indices?
Notice the QtNX client in the video - this is powered by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology which is a sort of proxy layer for X11.

A lot of people hate on the fact that X is network transparent, but this just shows why it's more important now than ever.
Does HN pride itself on being objective? This seems like wishful thinking. HN is supposed to favour hacking software, hardware, and the ultimate in social and business hacking, disruptive startups. I would call that being biased.

If we were "objective" about everything, we wouldn't actually have any culture. It's our lack of objectivity that makes us cohesive. To put it another way, "biased" can often mean the same thing as "opinionated." Sometimes that is annoying if you have a different opinion. Sometimes it is refreshing.

So what I will say in response is that without agreeing or disagreeing about whether HN is biased in favour of or against Apple and/or Gruber's writing, we should be careful to distinguish "bias" from "mindlessness." I do know what you mean, humans have a tendency towards groupthink and conformity. Voting a certain way solely because you observe other people voting that way is mindless in the sense you are using, and that dynamic has been seen on HN.

But the other thing that takes place on HN is bias that is not based on conformity, the bias that comes from a set of people with similar values tending to interpret objective facts in similar subjective ways. If what you want is to reduce the conformity and deaden the echo-chamber effect, you have my support. I'm only cautioning against assuming that all bias--especially bias towards disagreeing with you--comes from the same place.

p.s. Please don't think I'm arguing with you. It would be ironic indeed if I were to argue that bias is acceptable and healthy yet tell you that you are wrong to have a different interpretation of HN's behaviour that I have :-)
Honest question: Why do people listen to and retweet Gruber? Everything I've read from him is pure biased hypocritical garbage.
Oh, of course it does, but I'm sure they do...
Thanks for putting this out there. Just transferred my domains and hosting away from GoDaddy. I won't even get into how I hate the needless killing of ANY animal. There are almost always alternatives.
Google making app that would identify people's faces
It's actually the NoMachine NX client. It's great.
I wonder what the best way to cook corn-fed elephant is? Maybe montreal steak seasoning, a cajun dry-rub, southern-style malt vinegar bbq sauce, something else (http://funkymunky.co.za/elephantstew.html)?

But, seriously, if we as a society are so concerned about dwindling elephant numbers, why aren't we actively managing them as a luxury food source instead of leaving them to their own devices on the savannah where they frequently(?) tick-off the locals. Why aren't there enterprising elephant ranchers in the open spaces of Texas? I would think that mesquite-scrub country would be great elephant habitat. That rancher is going to make damn sure he has a sustainable population of elephants, because if he doesn't, there goes his livelihood. And, I imagine that the rancher could profit handsomely off of just the pure novelty of the product. I know I would pay quite a bit for elephant steaks.
Just install a different browser. Chrome has Flash built-in, so no dependencies there. If you want Chromium, it's just a question of finding the right repository hosting pre-built packages.

Also, it sounds like there is a discrepancy between how you initially installed Flash, vs. how you're trying to do it now. If you have the Flash repository, it should be a simple update. "Should be," but since it's not, it sounds like you're using a different method now.

If you keep /home on its own partition, re-installing the distro should be trivial (although definitely overkill).

In terms of why the browser can't leave feedback anymore, nor play videos, those are bizarre breakages which makes me think you can't be sure it's not the hardware (perhaps run "dmesg" just to see if there's anything interesting, always do Memtest86+ to make sure you have good RAM).
Dude, nice!
Infosys Tries to Thwart Public Hearing of Visa Fraud Case
This is so true. "Open" has become a software-politics analog of "freedom" in ordinary politics. An undefinable, but very good, thing. (Freedom from taxes? Freedom from poverty?)

One point of clarity, however, regarding these recent statements is that Andy Rubin helpfully gave his definition of the term:

http://twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429

This definition allows much less wiggle room! It's wiggle room that Google wants back now. ;-)
EBay Bets On Online To Offline Shopping, Adds Milo to local
I agree, but Redhat is staring at a billion dollar annual revenue. Innovation follows platforms that people want to use in their own spare time. Redhat needs to make this happen in the long term or they risk ending up like Solaris where no one wants to use them after 5pm.
Mobile Video Grows More than 40% in Last Year
Karma is just a metric and should be treated as such. If someone is judging someone else by their karma score, that says more about the judger than the judgee.
Google and Android are not open, get over it.
That's actually one of the more popular suggestions on the StackExchange question I asked that motivated these prototypes:

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3736/how-to-build-a-bu...
So these articles seem to imply that they are completely doing away with QR codes. This makes zero sense because these are two completely different technologies. A QR code can be printed IRL or posted on the internet and thus can be viewed and accessed easily. This NFC business would not only require everyone to have a device that is ready to accept NFC communications but also require an emitter at each location. The ability to put a QR code in something as simple as a magazine or put it on a sticker that can be placed anywhere is just being tossed into the oblivion. I am all for technological advances but sometimes bridging the gap between the analog and digital worlds is an important feature.
The post begins:

'It is getting tiresome to hear Apple fans, having long bashed Google's Android because "open" was bad, now bash Google for being somewhat less "open."'

But Gruber didn't say "open" was bad, did he? He (and others) argue that "open" is used as a synonym for "good", a virtue of itself, but that in the end you don't get something that's either "open" or "good" for pretty much any definition of "open" or "good".

Open would mean I can do anything I like to the OS (update it, customize it, replace it). In most cases I can't.

Good would mean I can have the latest OS on my phone if I want it. In most cases I can't.

Open would mean I can easily get access to the complete source code for my phone if I want it. In most cases I can't.

Seriously -- for what values of open or good do we get a big fat green tick?

It's not like Gruber is biased and other people aren't. Everyone is biased. Argue the evidence.
This was my thought as well -- nobody's mentioned the Britain libel angle yet.

On the other hand, who would you guess has the largest libel lawyer team and budget in Britain? Other than the Sun, I mean.
Oh. I figured it was for today (It's already 1st, in India).
10 pizzas? I'm getting ripped off. For me that's 7 pizzas.
Snow Leopard, RubyGems and MySQL
I really wanted to be able to upvote from that interface.
Someone Just Found an Embeddable Google +1 Button - It Works
Right, I find it difficult to believe that any of this was uncalculated (does that make me a high-mach?)

They appear to target the bottom 90% who needs a domain name. And, they very wisely get name recognition with non tech savvy business owners who often have the ultimate decision in which registrar to use.

Look at it from the vantage of a typical conservative small business owner here in America. Slaughtering a beautiful and rare animal is not deaf-ear branding - it's shrewd marketing. GoDaddy is not afraid to kill to solve problems. The association is powerful and on target.
Toy Story 3: How Dolby Revolutionized Sound for 3-D Movies
I've never understood the "MP3 support on Linux was terrible for a long time" thing--when was this long time? I'm pretty sure I was playing MP3 files under Redhat 6.2... how long ago was this?
Both can be equally demeaning and morally questionable to certain parts of the population but let's be real here, killing an "innocent animal" is much more controversial than what is shown on TV almost every night.

In a culture where steakhouses dot the roadsides, it seems odd to assert that killing an "innocent animal" is controversial at all. In some US locality where vegetarians make up the vast majority of the population, maybe, but does a place like that even exist?

I haven't seen the video; I'm just speaking to that one sentence, really.
Claiming it's 'more' open just begs a Godwin conclusion.
I'm firmly in the camp that dealing with timezones in code is hellish at best, but I think this will probably get as much adoption among regular folks as Julian dates or UNIX timestamps.

I would love to be proven wrong though, I really hate working with timezones.
Eythor Bender demos human exoskeletons
Google is clearly trying to push the world towards NFC, they are pushing to hard. QR has many applications that NFC won't be able to compete with. Googlers might be fine with rapid technological advancement however the average joe has just adapted to QR codes recently and most likely doesn't want to learn to use/implement a new technology. Android will help push the move from QR to NFC, but QR needs to be kept alive for a while still.
I started to write a comment that suggested 'Ebeats' was no better than just trying to popularize GMT/"Z" time for coordination. These Ebeats are GMT-based; their benefit is that by their format they can't be confused with TZ-based times; their problem is they don't mentally map to the old divisions like hours and minutes.

But the more I think about the problem, the more I suspect that the instant-distinction is the key success factor. I can imagine future calendaring software always showing both customary local time and Ebeats alongside each time-range. It'd still be hard to casually set an Ebeats meeting time, without your software open, but with software open it becomes easy.

The one refinement I would suggest to prevent day-rollover confusion would be to add an optional one-letter A-G prefix to each Ebeat time specifying the GMT day-of-week. Thus without including the whole traditional, locally-varying (2011-03m-31d) date or day-of-week (Thursday/Th/R), or relative phrasing ("Tomorrow"), any off-by-one day errors can be avoided.

By this convention, the Ebeats time right now is @d792. This time tomorrow will be @e792.

(A potential problem is that 'f' now means GMT Saturday. Moving the first-day 'a' back to Sunday makes 'f' line up nicely with Friday, but goes against ISO/international practice calling Monday the first day. I suppose another convention for getting a day-of-week 'check-digit' in would be a 1-7, but set off somehow to avoid confusion with beats... eg @4.792 or @4d792 or 4@792.)
Work on the site's design! For a JS framework to succeed, I think it has to have a beautiful site. I'm guessing designers are one of your biggest audiences.

Also, the site doesn't work with the StumbleUpon plugin for Chrome.
Unreasonable Effectiveness
To paraphrase P.T. Barnum "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the buying public."
The problem isn't that they threw ads all over the place. It's how they did it. Ads and new features should be released to a few users--at least start with your own employees--and iterate until you get it right, if at all. It doesn't seem like they did this.

Their second biggest mistake was admitting that it was a mistake. You don't do that--well, unless it involved something serious, like a user's privacy (think Buzz and Beacon).
Linux Mint is awesome, though I use the KDE version instead of GNOME, it's a very polished distro.
True, true, but you're not seeking something out when you watch television and there are commercials. or listen to the radio. Or listen to pandora, or many others.

People are ok with advertising in general. I think this has more to do with the implementation, not that people are opposed to ads on twitter in general.
> How did this happen? Was Bill Gates president and make that the law?

He used product tying and manipulated vendors into anti-competitive agreements such that they would either use what Microsoft wanted them to use exclusively or they wouldn't be able to offer it at all.

As for how they got the initial traction, they managed to get bundled with the IBM PC. IBM back in the day used exactly the same sort of tactics ("Nobody ever got fired for using IBM" & they invented FUD), though they've reformed quite a bit since then.

WordPerfect, Borland's compilers, etc. were widely considered the best back in the day, so I don't think it was primarily the strength of Microsoft's products which made people use them.
May be few percent of customers care about Android 'openness'. Majority of people just don't care. They see android is from a trusted brand called Google and believe in the product.
Good points all around. We'll definitely consider a DOW prefix, for social time that really fits the usage.
Isn't it just England, not the UK? And the amount of lawyers you can field still makes a difference, even in the UK. So I guess the ol' boys at the BBC won't be shaking in their Savile Row suits.

Just a few weeks ago a reform of the libel law went one step further, although I don't know if that would apply here. As far as I remember it was mostly to prevent suing people who weren't UK residents, which certainly won't help the BBC.
How we built a web application and didn't launch in 482 days
I guess 'open' doesn't always win.
That's how Tweetie originally worked on the Mac and everyone was fine with it. The Dickbar was a bad idea because it laid on top of everything.
They don't really give any detail on exactly what is stopping them. I haven't worked with it myself, but as far as I can tell, YouTube has a perfectly public API: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/getting_started.html#dat...
I'd be curious to know what the results of this survey question were from companies that made it to the first round but were not selected for the incubation phase. I had the entry fee waived through endorsements last year, but had an experience during the pitch round similar to others who have commented here-- judges who had nothing resembling a clue. I've heard this story over and over and have no intention of participating this year.
RedHat isn't interested in making a desktop OS, though. Their focus is on the enterprise market, with the Fedora team doing their best to make a desktop OS. It would be very difficult for RedHat or Novell to really make a push into the mainstream desktop market, and I imagine that justifying to their shareholders would be impossible.

The desktop distro teams can't organize enough to get support from major companies, and the enterprise companies can't push into desktop because it's financial suicide to try and support normal desktop users who can barely use Windows.
Typo.js: Client-side JavaScript Spellchecking
This is only OK when it comes from a wise and benevolent company (e.g. Google). I would not want to encourage this sort of behavior in all software (think Skype, Acrobat, etc... ugh!)
It is if they have no good evidence of wrongdoing.
Awesome promo video :D
You have to wonder who is/are the animal(s) here?
You can watch this video for starters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89xc_1Vv69k
(Google IO 2010 Android Keynote)

One selected quote:

1.) "So if you believe in openness, if you believe in choice, if you believe in innovation from everyone†, then welcome to Android."

† Everyone, depending on where the innovation is, being Google employees, and select partners who are given access to the Android source before public release.
"With notably rare exceptions..."

http://crookedtimber.org/2011/03/30/with-notably-rare-except...
Having lots of points in these games means that the person has spent a lot of time submitting content, answering questions and commenting. I consider that this time would have been better used to write open source code, to directly teach neighbors, teenagers, friends or if the person is a real expert, to create a website with all the good advices, tips, tricks or simply contribute to a wikibook.

Really? Should people also spend all their time contributing to open source instead of exercising? Cooking? Painting? Why judge someone's technical merit on the fact that they find it enjoyable and stimulating to spend some of their free time actively participating in online communities?
I don't think this will have any tangible effect on GoDaddy's brand except for maybe a slight increase in visibility via the free press you are giving them right this second.

As far as actually shooting the animal, I'm not an African game warden so I can't give any scientific or even remotely educated comment. That being said, the only facts I know are these:
Bob Parsons shot and killed an elephant in a completely legal way, and was so proud of what he did that he had a professional make and edit a video which he then posted on the internet.
The people in the video seem grateful and excited that he has done this. They are also wearing godaddy hats.
This morning, a lot of people who weren't there are passing judgement.

I guess I'm just confused as to the source of the controversy?
Article is factually incorrect; MediaWiki doesn't run on HipHop yet. They're currently discussing adding support on their dev list.
CEO Blind Spots - What are Yours?