skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great Read!

I am experiencing the awkwardness of a change in personal wealth as we speak.

I have a friend I met at 16 via a t-shirt venture. We would hang out & work on his company. As time progressed we would hang out off and on. After an extended gap in communication, I emailed him to get his number & he came by to pick me up.

We drove for about 15 to 20 minutes until we reached an office warehouse. He then told me, "welcome to his company". He had started what is now one of the country's top promotional products companies. He now owns a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley, $3M home, and more.

I feel awkward around him & I think he feels the same at times. We are both entrepreneurs but he has had more success financially. I've since taken a major interest in philanthropy. I recently asked for a contribution toward my non-profit & it was amazingly awkward as well. LOL, I was sweating... I felt like a panhandler.

Lastly, when I ask how he's doing & about other things outside of business I feel fake. It's usually a general response as to not seem ungrateful as mentioned. But, I genuinely want to know.

Anyway, that's my experience with this issue.
It's also rather likely that unions and patent holders have some shared interests, so I doubt this is solely about the money.

Both patent holders and unions are rent seekers. Strict patent laws make monopolies/oligopolies easier to form, and unions find it easier to extract rents from monopolies/oligopolies than from competitive markets.

In a monopolistic/oligopolistic situation, the monopoly can extract rents from customers, and the union can demand their cut. In a competitive market with many players, profit margins will be thinner, and it's likely that the non-union shops will undercut the union shops. So this move might be as much about shared interests, or at least shared ideology, as it is about money.
I'm guessing the timestamp, in its simplest form would just submit the time when the page was loaded as a hidden variable in the form, and compare it to the time the form was submitted.

If it's less than something reasonable for a person (say, 20 seconds or something), then it was clearly auto-filled.

With a little help from javascript, you could even expand this to the individual fields.

As someone mentioned in the comments above, it would be pretty trivial for spammers to adapt to this if they thought it was common, with a few random pauses. Perhaps they already have...
We have been experimenting with LaunchRock and will launch our beta invite site in about two weeks using LaunchRock. Actually, we're trying to get some feedback on the background image so I'll submit a separate post asking for feedback on that from the HN audience :-)
The Next 10 Years of Mac OS Will Look Nothing Like the Last
Up again, watcher script managed to get the wrong port number.
You as the "general you", the reader.
24 Sleepless Hours of Work = 1 Prelaunch Page
http://loudly.com

Was it worth it?

--

BTW, we aren't publicly revealing what we're up to yet, but if you email me asking for details, I'll likely spill the beans confidentially.
See Dylan.
I wonder if RIM or HP can make a play for the #2 tablet, given the floundering in the Android camp?
click, click, click

http://loudly.com
The plural of 'anecdote' is not data. Simply reporting an anecdote makes you neither a scientist nor a journalist, no matter how strongly the anecdote supports your feelings on some matter. In the end, this is about his feelings on captchas. He hasn't made the case that a better trade-off between fighting spam and a higher conversion is possible; he has only suggested something based on an anecdote. As others immediately questioned: what happened to spam levels? 'Apparently' is not good enough when dealing with that serious problem.
You've hit on the real problem with bubble analysis: for most people most of the time, knowing we're in a bubble doesn't actually help you decide what to do about it, since we don't know when the bubble will burst.

It's a great idea to invest during the frothy phase of a bubble - as long as you cash out before the crash. The trick - the risk - is predicting when that's going to happen.

I realized we were in a housing bubble back in 2004, but aside from sighing when friends bought houses as "investment vehicles", I wasn't able to put my realization to much use. I was right about what was going to happen but dead wrong about when: the bubble ended up inflating for another four years, time during which I could have cheerfully flipped properties at great profit had I been able to know in advance when the market was going to peak.

Back in the late 1990s, I remember watching people buy Nortel shares at $100+ per share and thinking they were absolutely nuts - but some of those people sold at the right time and still came out ahead (while others saw their investments collapse to pennies on the dollar).

In both cases, knowing we were in a bubble gave me no competitive advantage.
This looks cool. Some random comments:

* I'd need it to work offline. Not everyone does, though.

* Cutting over to a two-column layout at 1260px: don't lots of people have 1200px? It'd be neat if you could accomodate them.

* Is the prominent "edit" link at the latexdemo page supposed to work? It didn't for me.
I think he wanted to use the same name. So probably he had to get some sort of blessing from the original author.

He also ended up using all the levels - 79 of them - which would have been a huge time saver.
Your question is ambiguous, depending on how I read the word any... so I'll address both.

1. ...to compromise the idea of openness at all...

The point is not to be open. Openness is a tool that Google uses to create the product and ecosystem that it wants. In sacrificing a little openness, it loses a little bit of the perks of being "open," but probably gains other things, so I can respect that.

2. ...to compromise the idea of openness entirely...

I don't think we can say that they've done this, at least not yet. I'm just look at it as an experimental branch of the code that isn't yet ready to be merged into the trunk. It makes a lot of sense to me that, if they rushed this code out for strategic reasons, that they would want to keep it a little close to the chest until it was more stable. Remember, while to you this is an abstract principle of openness, to them this is a product they ship, and they WILL be judged on its performance.
I haven't tried this but I really want to. I've noticed that I'm most productive when I'm working on the laptop and I don't have anywhere to plug in. I hover over the battery icon and notice that I only have an hour left... and I work like crazy. Motivation levels are high and there's no procrastination. I usually get my task done, too.

I wonder if the effect will be the same if the time limit is artificial and planned. I also wonder how much discipline it takes to make it work. Only one way to find out, I suppose.
>Maybe it is, but you really can't go around claiming openness when you don't provide it.

How does "closed Honeycomb" reflect on any of the code that you previously would have considered "open"?

Before someone commits code to an open-source project, that code isn't available. No one would claim that the existence of that unavailable code says anything about the openness of the available code. And that wouldn't change if the unavailable code was shared with some of the author's friends.

So why does "closed Honeycomb" have that effect?
thank you both for proving my point.
They closed that bug on the bridge awhile ago when they redid the Charles/MGH station.
Thanks for the link. Have you used this technique and can you comment on its effectiveness?
Fixed it for ya: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=django%2C+%22ruby+on+rails...

Edit: Another point to note is, Indeed aggregates traditional job boards where Rails jobs are less posted. Rails job postings are usually done on Github job board, 37signals job board and many Ruby oriented job boards like toprubyjobs.com.
While I'm sure they aren't, apple vs. google articles are so polarizing, and so many people, journalists included, seem to have portions of their identities wrapped up into the war that it's apparently inevitable some stuff that sounds like this comes out. I'm not wanting to debate how right or wrong google's position might be here (it's clearly not awesome), but it's hard to take this specific article seriously when it's written with such a polarized tone.
I think Jabber has had a reasonable success in a very closed space.

First there was ICQ, Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL, etc. And now it seems that you can talk to anybody in any network.
And jabber provided a way to create your own network.

I think in the end Openness wins.
It's just a marathon not a sprint.
Async postgres client for Tornado
If there were a checklist of guidelines about comments and you had to physically check each one to post a comment, it would A) reduce trivial posts by making them more work to post and B) provide reminders -every time you post- about the kinds of content desired for posts.
Weak meaning my skills are on the novice level for javascript and PHP which is what is needed for a front end job.

I went to school at the Art Institute for Web Design but I realized I am not much of a designer and love to code.

I don't have a twitter but my email and portfolio with a couple stuff is up in my profile.
This just encourages spambots to upgrade their technology. You could upgrade spambots quite easily by just running them inside a headless browser with full javascript support, like phantomjs.

There is very little distinction between writing a phantomjs unit test and writing a spambot.
I notice 2.

Microsoft and Nokia.

Also "BlackBerry" is a brand/model, not a company. What does that say for RIMs status in the market? It's defined by a single product.
I'd think that would strengthen the point.

That said, I'm sure you could argue over who gets to claim WebKit as their own these days since I've seen a few people refer to it as "Google's WebKit" since they surpassed Apple in checkins at some point (or had for a month at least, it's not something I care to follow that closely).
If you care about that, you shouldn't have bought from Motorola. Linux isn't non-open because of the existence of Tivos.
Sorry, I didn't mention it because I am willing to go any where. I am in Florida now.
The kid's 14. Give him a break. I wish I could write as half as well when I was his age. Hell, now.
This kid's coming for you, John Gruber.
Free software might be open from a legal standpoint, or even a tech standpoint, but if it's not actually making itself accessible to people, it's still closed. Maybe you can assuage your conscience by sticking a GPL license in your source code directory on your FTP server, but if your users can't actually change anything, it's still closed to them.
If anything I'd think the existence of Daz as an existing brand devalues it. Daz is a nice, pronouncable three letter domain but if someone were to buy it with the aim of developing it they may be put off by the prospect of P&G lawyers trying to strong-arm them into handing the domain over.
Public Cloud vs Private Cloud the business case in images
I used to be more likely to click a link on Google if the domain name looked more authoritative. So, a lot of those common names with high prices would seem to be valuable for that reason. And, I think Google ranks sites higher if the domain name has the keyword in it.

These days with so much spam, I try to avoid domain names with my search keyword in them.
Quality PDF Reports with Subscript, Superscript & Margin Rendering
Aspose.Pdf for Reporting Services 2.1.0 has been released. This new release includes very demanding feature of rendering Subscript and Superscript text in resultant PDF which is not supported by default export feature of SQL Reporting Services. Users can either use “custom report property” or “Sub and Sup HTML tags” to render the text accordingly. The margin rendering has become even more precise and the resultant PDF’s are more identical to the source report documents.
Really? Interesting. I've found that perf gets worse with more traffic so, that's why I first suspected the host.
Maybe they'll produce cheaper 3D printers and make profit again!
Does your company culture allow mistakes?
I understand the honeypot technique, which is quite cool. However what is this timestamp analysis stuff? anyone has a link to a decent explanation or care to say it in a few words?
Erik Meijer’s suggestions for further reading in functional programming
Haha, as the author of that commit, I'm embarrassed to see it here. Maybe it's a story, though.

I heard about Heroku Bartender from http://devopsweekly.com

It pushed me to finally use a Linode slice for which I had a $60 credit from http://appsumo.com and play with Ubuntu, which is outside my typical skill set.

I had fun installing Ruby, git, Postgres, and https://github.com/defunkt/cijoe on that slice. While stuff was installing, I added the favicon to Heroku Bartender.

There's a lot of cool software and tools out there. Open source, DevOps Weekly, etc are awesome for learning and playing.
Thanks! I wasn't aware that somebody had created a search utility for hackernews. :)
> Not enough oversight or regulation?

More of the same is bound to work...

When there are benefits to buying legislation, legislators will be bought.

If you don't want govt to be corrupt, you can't ask it to run things.

As they said in "WarGames" - the only way to win is to not play the game.
I'd just like to point out that the way they did their A/B testing might be flawed, you can't run the test until you get a certain confidence, you have to decide beforehand how long you'll run it. They seem to have run it until they got 99% confidence, which is probably the wrong way to go about it.
I use honeypot fields myself and they stop a ton of spam submissions. I'm sure timestamp analysis can be very effective too. I'm totally a fan. But are there bots smart enough to defeat it? You bet!

Some of my forms also have a CAPTCHA. I think it's got to be case-by-case. Do you have something desirable to bad guys (like the signup for a new Yahoo account, or a high-ranking blog about pharmaceuticals)? Do you have tools in place to deal with spam submissions effectively when they do occur? Will a bunch of bots signing up for accounts degrade service for legitimate visitors?

For example, the Contact our Sales team form definitely does not have a CAPTCHA. The sales team will gladly sort though a pile of junk if it means one more inbound lead. But the Post a Comment form would be an absolute disaster without a strong CAPTCHA. A surprising amount of junk gets through anyway, in fact. (As far as I can tell, it's actual humans in developing countries copy/pasting into comments by hands. Blocking referrers from Google that have the phrase "post a comment below" made a dent)
+1 on this. If I were to make a list of reasons that a FOSS mobile OS is great, then "porting it to devices which it was not originally designed for" would be at the very top of the list! Restricting what people can do with Android because they are worried that they might do something that is ugly -- that is the absolute antithesis of being open, and it's directly harmful to the people who may have very well been interested in using a hacked-up version of Honeycomb on a smaller device, not to mention the people using Honeycomb on the Xoom right now who wish to access source.

Although Google is far more open than their competitors, that doesn't put them beyond criticism. It's not reasonable to compromise a core virtue of your ecosystem because you think you might have a branding problem.
Choosing A Cheap CDN Service Providers, My Discovery
I have been looking for a reliable but cheap CDN service these days. I have to say that: the popular saying you get what you pay for is always true and in my case, during the trip of choosing the best CDN services that is suitable with my current budget, I am sure it is not an exception.
An old favorite, it gets lots of comments every time it's submitted. Here are a few:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1727004

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232024

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63004
Getting your first job in a field can be a pain, if I had a dollar for every time I saw an ad for a graduate position that wanted experience that you could only get by already having a similar job, I'd have been able to retire early...

Companies look for experience since it demonstrates your ability, do you have a design portfolio, even if it's just mock up sites you've done in your own time to learn?

I've done a fair bit of hiring for the company I work at (unfortunately we're not hiring at the moment) and if a candidate with little experience can show us the kind of things they can build we regard it more highly than someone who has had a job for a year but hasn't shown much initiative beyond being given a task list and doing it.
It's not too young for an interested person to know this stuff. In the eighth grade, I was already dual-booting Linux on the family computer, was following VA Linux Systems' and Red Hat's IPOs, and was looking for alternatives to MS Office for my school.
Ask HN:  Help select our startup landing page
If you're a football fan, swing by http://beta.onsidekick.com and send us an email to let us know which landing page you think makes the biggest impact.

We're using the LaunchRock service to publish our invite site - expect that to be live in about two weeks but any early feedback just on the graphic would be helpful. Getty Images is too damn expensive for us to go buy 8 of them :-)
I Love IM
The author of the article is making the point that the device is "more open" because although it has a lower "unit openness" it is appealing to more people, thus raising the "total openness".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
The main features that I get out of HN are that (1) I get to read the opinions of a lot of very smart people and (2) I get exposed to industry news and trends that I wouldn't from sites with far more noise.

If I go to a site like http://answers.onstartups.com, I have trouble scanning the page because of all the visual elements like the tags, the background image, the blue text, the side bar advertising, and so forth. I realize not everyone is as visually distracted by those things as I am, but I really appreciate not having any of those page elements on HN.
Yeah I think this sort of backlash hurts the overall push towards openness because for example Adobe probably looks at the possibility of publishing Flash player source but they know that instead of being celebrated that move will just create angry blog posts because of the license or that they don't accept patches etc.
I think this might work well for people who like to experiment, but it might not work as well for people who like to passively learn about things. It could be interesting to also create a video demo and then split test the two.
Those that want Google PDF viewer links can get them added automatically wherever they go. This greasemonkey script (of several available I'm sure) adds a Google viewer icon after all pdf links: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/code/user_scripts/goo...
You're right that it's a gaping hole in the article, but it's not hypocritical. All web projects involve people from different disciplines working together. My background, for example, is in Psychology and User Research. People in my role can relay user needs, goals and expectations to you, but we can't tell you what development approach to use to solve it.

Your analogy does not stand true: security labels in real-world stores don't cause a percentage of customers to give up their purchases in frustration.

Having said that, in a forum like HN, most readers would expect both a statement of the problem and some proposed solutions. Frankly, when I posted this article, I didn't expect it to get onto the No. 1 spot on the front page. It must be a slow news day.
Wow, are they misusing that money! They say they need money for their amazing data mining infrastructure, yet the Android app is in shambles. I press the BACK button and the app can't even bother to exit! Never mind, the deeper bugs. Makes me wish I hadn't uninstalled my app-killer app.

It looks like they are focused on step 2 of the business plan when step 1 is broken.

We've seen over and over again that the household name big companies of today have evolved through organic growth, not through this forced process that Color is undergoing. $40 million is not going to buy you a fanatical fan base. You have to earn it.
The fact that Google does more work on it would tend to weaken the point. Also, the fact that Google is using Apple's software tends to undermine the Team A vs Team B regime that's the premise of most of these discussions.
I run a Travel Blog host, and get several hundred spam attempts per day, accounting for more than 90% of the posts on the site. Still, I refuse to put CAPTCHAs in between my users and what they want to accomplish. It's just a terrible use experience.

Instead, I use a combination of human detection scripts, bayesian filtering, and moderation. Combined, this keeps the site pretty much 100% spam free from the perspective of our end users, and more importantly, Googlebot.

More details here:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2010/03/care-and-feedi...
We've got some great designers ready to help us simplify the experience and provide a clearer and more comprehensible message. It can't be stressed enough how important great design is to a project like this, and I'm looking forward to crafting a truly elegant experience.
Is Apple a Social Company?
So now "BlackBerry tablet apps" will be based on (I might have gotten a few of these wrong) Flash/Air, HTML, old BlackBerry OS, new BlackBerry OS, and [non-tablet] Android? And maybe Java? Interesting to see someone take the exact opposite route from Apple, who's obsessed with "owning" the app/development environment for their systems.

Sure, technically they've solved the problem of not having any apps... but I bet they've just shifted the problem to not having any good apps. That might be an even worse problem to have.
+1 Web Faction - starts you off with shared hosting with some dedicated memory for your application. You can add more as needed, for a small fee.

+1 Linode - Best bang for your buck for a VPS loaded with features and reliability.
If delivering on the promise of a slate/tablet like the iPad is difficult, and any company is its own worst enemy, then I'd say that closed vertical integration is the right strategy and openness is the wrong one. (With regards to winning in the general marketplace, not with regards to software freedom.)

All Apple has to do with iPad is to maintain a tight ship, and wait for their opponent's missteps.

As I commented elsewhere, I wonder if HP or RIM can now make a play for #2 tablet?

EDIT: For those concerned with software freedom, take a cue from Gandhi's playbook: Concentrate on examples of software freedom that are understood by the general marketplace. (Just as he concentrated on the pain of everyday Indians.) Sometimes, there is a place for the unpopular stance. Just be clear on what you're trying to accomplish when you're using that tactic.
But is it reasonable to say that Google has "sacrificed any idea of openness" by delaying the release of source code for one iteration of its platform?
What browser are you using? The edit button should work on every page (although saving may require a password).

I'll add offline to my list of features to work on, it hopefully shouldn't be difficult, although MathJax lazily loads files it needs from the CDN, which could be tricky.

EDIT: I just pushed a patch related to fieldSelection in Firefox 4.
This ignores the difference in technical competence of consumers versus Apache users. If some vendor makes a crappy tablet that runs Android, users will associate that crappiness with the Android trademark because they are unable to tell whose fault it is. There is no similar risk of the Apache trademark being tarnished because some guy sets up a crappy webserver with it.