skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it possible that there is a much simpler explanation here? For anyone who has touched a XOOM, it's clear that Honeycomb wasn't ready when it was launched. Bugs, incomplete features, and general lack of polish was really evident.

I think this is Google admitting that. They're not releasing it not out of some closed-source conspiracy, but rather because the damn thing isn't ready to be released. Sorry Motorola, but you pushed something out the door you shouldn't have.

It's the simplest explanation, and IMHO most likely the correct one. Google doesn't want this in the wild simply because it shouldn't be. They can't say that, but that sure seems to be what's happening.
I can't imagine it would be particularly valuable outside of work in defense. If you want to work in defense, then it's valuable because it opens those (admittedly well paying) avenues to you. Otherwise, I can't imagine what it would bring you.
Presentations were so short this cycle that there was no time for demos.

Since everyone asks how we decide how long presentations should be, I'll just answer that now. People can sit for about 55 minutes. Two sessions = 110 minutes. 43 startups presenting means slots are at most 110/43 minutes.

The solution will be to move to 3 sessions. That was inevitable anyway, as the number of startups per cycle increases. It will make DDay as a whole longer, but I think investors will be ok with that, because it is still much more efficient for them than meeting the startups individually.
Definitely do a video, it would demonstrate really well what the app does without need of user interaction.
I'll give you an unopened copy of NHL 94 for Sega Genesis for ww.com.
No, I think 3pt14159 is saying that though he can downvote comments and links by most people (because he doesn’t like the content), he can't downvote links or comments by those who have a higher average comment score than him (even when he dislikes the content). Since I am unable to downvote anyone, I can't comment on whether HN really does have this rule.
You can't do the same with captcha because that would require a degree of brute forcing. And my point was that existing spambots could trivially be upgraded to handle hidden form values and keystroke timers and other automated javascript validation.
Nice, all great pictures! Where's your about/contact? Would love to learn more abt loudly, confidentially of course.
A/B Testing is not Snake Oil.
You may well be right, that's just what I was told. The logic was that it's a dictionary term, and so a company like Eskimo Pops might want it for a marketing campaign. Or maybe some sort of adult site targeted at women, that was the other angle.
mostly via Reader, occasionally via mobile app
Clickable links (?):

Apple’s Mac App Store Opens for Business http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/01/06macappstore.html

iPad style Launchpad http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/#gallery-launchpad

Full Screen Apps http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/#gallery-fullscreen

Apple removes Samba from Mac OS X 10.7 Server http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/inside_mac_os_...

Bertrand Serlet to Leave Apple http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/03/23serlet.html
In that case, I WILL download a car.
Then why did they release it to manufacturers like Motorola?

Edit: To clarify, I think being open means that you either release to everyone or to no one. So arguing that it isn't ready became irrelevant once the xoom shipped.
Why are the samples individually compressed in the package? Too much hassle to uncompress them on Windows. There should be a single package containing the software and the samples, and I should be able to run the test with a single click.
From the point of view of investors and entrepreneurs looking to cash out before the crash, I agree that riding the bubble is risky business. However for entrepreneurs with a solid business plan that involves long term revenues and growth, the business can be largely immune to bubble vagaries while still being able to take advantage of readily available investment capital during a bubble.
We didn't have a choice in the matter. We inherit the subjection our ancestors tolerate. Deviants shall be shamed and jailed.
I also suggest so.
People like video as it is clear and they can see what they can do without much effort.
Via a Xoom port of Amir's HNdroid, but I haven't added poll support yet so I can't vote. :-)
I meant more in the sense of how tightly controlled Mac has always been, whereas Windows ran on a variety of platforms.
This will greatly reduce the rate at which they are able to send the spam though, even if the delay is tiny. Similar to how bcrypt works.
Twitter feed is useful as well.
judges are not even remotely amused by attempts to manipulate them, and if they discover it, i can't imagine things ending well for parties making such an attempt.
I don't understand all the animosity. Google should have never called Android "open-source", which is a loaded word, and called it a "Mobile Platform with Viewable Source" or something. If Google did the exact same thing under a non-loaded name, they would be praised for the fact that they handle all the carrier bullshit/politics and developed an OS that is not a black box. To have a true "Open Source TM" mobile OS, Google would have to stop working with carriers(the definition of a closed ecosystem). I would rather develop on a platform with delayed source code releases that will be on the majority of phones in the world, than an open-source platform that carriers were too afraid to use on their phones.

So as a developer, I'm not really pissed about the fact that the source is delayed for a month or two. I'm more pissed about the shitty Market experience which drives customers away and the many countries that are not allowed to purchase paid apps.
Ask HN: Know any good AdWords bidding automation SaaS solutions?
Keeping all my AdWords CPC bids optimized is taking me a lot of time (I have about 20 campaigns, all with different seasonality, so periodic tuning is necessary). I'm guessing this should be a very common problem for small startups.

I have worked with bidding algos in the past (unfortunately I am not at liberty to use them in my side projects), but I remember a little bit of trickery got you a long way in terms of CPA optimization. I googled around looking for bidding automation solutions, and all I can find are ugly-looking ms-windows applications that seem to belong to an age long gone.

Where's the snappy, startup-friendly SaaS adWords bidding automation provider?
I bought 98% of my ebooks from B&N because they allow to download them in ePub. I've also removed the DRM from all of them, not to share them, I haven't shared one single ebook yet, but to have them open and readable from every other reader.
Tim O'Reilly perfectly got the point.

This is my first message here (sent from my CR-48 with Verizon :)), Hacker News is a great community, I also read you guys on my iPhone, keep working hard!
I wonder if people would be less upset if it were called Gingerbread-tablet, and described as a temporary closed fork to meet manufacturing deadlines. That's really what it is, but giving it the Honeycomb name makes it look like the future of android, which it isn't.
Stupid Question:

How do you know where your karma comes from?
The Illusions of Entrepreneurship
Does interpolation ever work in forecasting?

My gut instinct would be that markets and human systems are chaotic in nature. Even in the most chaotic systems, if you look at a suitably small sample, you can see some correlations and patterns between different factors which really don't exist. These are mirage correlations.

Take the lorenz attractor as an example. At some points, it will cycle on the same "wing" of the butterfly many times. But betting that it will do it again is a really lousy bet.

Polynomial approximation and curve fitting in general works when we're trying to explicate relationships between variables in a problem space in which we understand causal linkages very well (and they're constant) - it can be really useful in engineering.
Maybe they'll respond in a month.
I've added a post-script to this story, updating with developments over the last year:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2011/03/facebook...
In particular, I know from my friends in the academic community that they're quietly putting together processes for working with researchers. That's a big step forward in my view, as long as they can safeguard privacy, there's a lot of potential for world-improving research.
I reader headlines in Reader. If it's compelling I click into comments/link.
Wow. A sobering reminder to me that even for a tech-savvy readership, only about ten percent are using RSS. Maybe this warrants another survey on why people don't use RSS.
You've lost your mind. Why so much fuss when Apple is simply trying to make their user experience better?

Apple sells into different markets, developers being one of them, and as OS X is the only official development platform for both OS X and iOS then there will be, by necessity, a "developer mode", at the very least, into the distant future.

I am 100% with Apple in their efforts to make installing and launching applications easier. It is embarrassing to have to explain to people how to download and install applications because each vendor has their own take on how to do it, and the whole process is completely mysterious until you've done it a dozen times and seen most of the quirky methods used.

As much as people decry the "30% tax" Apple imposes on sales, I would gladly pay it if I knew my sales would double by going with Apple's distribution channel. This might be because of better placement, or perhaps people being more willing to use Apple's check-out process than something like Kagi which has a worryingly amateur feel to it and would reasonably scare off a first-time app shopper.

It's like we're up in arms because the city wants to demolish a bunch of tin-shack houses, crack-dens, and dog fighting pits and replace it with a mall. This is merely gentrification, not "closed".

If you're opposed to making computers easier to use for the average consumer who has no interest in learning how computers work, what a hard drive is, or any of the other things you must internalize simply to install an application, then you're entitled to your opinion, but don't go stirring up panic.

Just as Apple has introduced drool-proof interfaces before, such as their launcher in OS 9, Lion will have yet another. As before you will be able to side-step it or disable it entirely if you so choose.
I think you're reading too much into it. Apple need a developer community, and the developer community needs a platform to develop on. If not OS X, then what else?
>What I would like to see is the calling-out of rent-seeking behavior from both sides.

Oh yes, certainly. We should ensure fairness to the fullest extent by making workers fight just as hard for their wages as the largest multinational corporations do for profit. Really, who do they think they are, shamelessly organizing themselves to guarantee access to medical care, education, basic living necessities? Thank goodness for our discerning even-handedness.
Scheme and the functional idiom [vid]
I use RSS a lot but I wouldn't use it for HN. You miss out on the ordering of stories on the frontpage and the browsing of comments.
12 year old devising new theory of relativity
No DRM? What are they talking about. As a "Safari Books Online by O'Reilly" subscriber I'm constantly confounded by annoying "features" that seem to have almost no purpose but to prevent you from copying anything from the online versions (like code sections). While it's not technically blocked or prohibited, these features sure don't seem to be there to enhance online reading.
Interesting analysis.
I knew that people put effort in spamming, but never new they go so far.
Android has never been that open. If Google was committed to a truly open source mobile operating system, they would have released it under the GPLv3.

Something like most of Motorola's recent phones with locked down bootloader, those aren't in any meaningful sense running an open source OS. At least not any meaningful sense for the average consumer. For a business with the money to roll their own hardware, they can take advantage of the source, but for me, I can't get that kind of touchscreen hooked up to that kind of battery, CPU, and GPU unless I'm willing to accept a closed OS.

Of course the point is moot, since Motorola would never use a GPLv3-licensed Android. I don't really see why, since, as I said, it's not the software but the hardware that I want to pay them for. (Though there's a good chance I would leave the software unmodified.)
How to have a rational discussion
It depends when the Daz trademark was registered.

The domain was regged in 1998, and if the TM was registered after this date then it should be okay.

There are pushes by some US law makers (e.g. the silly Senator Olivia Snow) to change this so that TM holders have much more rights over domains, even if the domain existed before the TM, but for now it should be fine.

Would be worth consulting a domain lawyer if an offer is made for it though.
Link: http://xkcd.com/632/
Fairly amusing that a page with this title returns a 404 at this moment (and I tried reloading twice more).
When should you start a startup?
Indeed. A poll doesn't say much if anything at all if one does not account for self-selection bias.

Today I'm reading the main site, normally I would be reading a daily/weekly/monthly digest. Today I'm commenting, any other day I probably wouldn't. I'm still the same person.
Shameless plug: I'm still using the realtime UI I showed here a few weeks ago (http://hackerstream.com, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301871)

People sometimes think it's only useful if you're consuming HN all the time, but it turns out it's just another random slice of HN, one that's guaranteed to be all new no matter how often you check.
What's significant or interesting about the ordering of stories on the frontpage?

I still have a link to comments for each story in Google Reader (although I don't get the number of comments). What I gain with Reader is the ability to mark all as read and therefore the ability to see what's new since the last time I checked.
CssUpdater - Sync your FireBug CSS changes with one click
>Do you agree?

Based on what you posted? No.

What does a user interface change ("iPad style Launchpad", "Full Screen Apps", "Four Finger Swipe") have to do with openness? That sounds like a lot of the outcry over the removal of the Apple menu during the transition to OS X 10.0 - you may not like the interface change but that doesn't make things less open.

Similarly wrt "Bertrand Serlet to Leave Apple" - unless you have some evidence that he's leaving because of an "openness"-related reason, I don't see what this has to do with your thesis. People leave companies all the times, particularly 20+year veterans.
If they're ready to ship the binaries, they should be ready to ship the source code.
Just adopt a convention and have someone start posting comments to every thread with searchable tags: HNTAGcplusplus HNTAGsquirrels. I nominate the giraffe rider. No griefing, guys.
hckrnews.com for me.
The ordering on the Front Page takes into account the age and the upvotes. "Good" stories that have been noticed end up on the Front Page. "Bad" stories, and stories that don't get noticed for random reasons, don't.
It's more the case that that's not investors' biggest worry. Investors are willing to believe (usually correctly) that the kind of people we fund can build things. They worry more whether there's a market for what the startup is building, whether the founders can actually ship, how much money they can make, etc.
AT&T one step closer to forging the One Ring
I believe tagging, like sorting, is best left to machines. I've built an auto-tagger, and I've already auto-tagged Hacker News:

http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/

For example, here is the topic "conversion":

http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/term/7c/...

You can search for tags, and on tag pages you see the most related tags and the most related articles. So you can browse, effectively.

Quality of the autotagger has improved since I ran this demo a few months ago. It's also only through articles through 2009. But it demos the tech and the concept. To what extent are people interested in seeing this updated?
Good point. Though keep in mind there are spam botnets with thousands and thousands of members.
Much Ado About $41 Million Dollars
<sigh> Occam's razor. Google seems to be committed to open source when ready.
Before I noticed the age of the author

So you're saying he must be wrong just because you're older than him? This can't be right because I'm 30 and I agree with him. It doesn't seem like age is the critical factor here.

If I happen to be older than you, should I be able to dismiss anything you say as youthful naivety?
I've noticed that not all posts show up in my RSS reader, I guess it's because of the large number of posts vs the pickup schedule on google reader.
if anyone wants me to add a choice let me know
Have you ever known that person who won't check in his/her code until they're satisfied? Have you ever been that person? I know I have.

It is a very, very bad sign when somebody is in a social environment and will not share their code. It means they are insecure, it might mean they're not getting any work done. It always means that the code is in a state where they are not proud of it and aren't comfortable receiving feedback. It typically means that the code isn't getting a whole lot better.

A major software company like Google, or a team within that company, can't be compared to a lone cowboy coder. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to hold back code. In this case, though, if this is really the reason - that Honeycomb was rushed to market and the code just doesn't look good, we'll fix it later and let you know - how does that make the relationship with the open community look? Not good. It's not good to be afraid of community feedback, whether you're the Android team or a fresh programmer in an unfamiliar shop.

And as for me personally, it doesn't give me a lot of hope for a pleasant experience on the Honeycomb development I'm going to be doing soon.
Well I don't think Google has any choice about releasing their Kernel modifications, Android will still meet this openness criteria.

Or is that what you were saying? If so, that's kind of a silly definition of openness--If you care about the kernel being open source, you probably also care about the rest of the OS. I'm disappointed about the delay, but Android is still way more open than iOS in the ways I care about, i.e., I can run any app I want.
I'm new, just comments at the moment
Automated Code Quality Checking In Ruby And Rails
For a true lightweight modern web framework in Java that's based on Guice, checkout my little embedded web framework for the next generation of Hadoop.

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAPREDUCE-2399

No XML, no YAML, no config/properties files, no templates. Everything is statically checked by java compiler with instant feedbacks in an IDE. It's better than rails :)
Let me try this again, more verbosely, since I appear to have overestimated the audience when I tried to ask this more concisely:

So? How is this different from what pretty much every other company large enough to afford lobbying (Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Amazon, Wal Mart, Comcast, and a gazillion others) does?

There's only one interesting (in the sense that it is at all out of the ordinary) thing in that article, and no one has mentioned it.
You're not launching because you can't find a good domain name? Sounds more like an excuse than anything else. I see about a post every month on HN about how someone creatively found a good domain name, but you're here complaining everyone wants 10's of thousands of dollars for them. Hate to say it but average sale price on Sedo (one of largest domain markets) is only around 2000$. Plenty of names to be had at reasonable prices, and plenty of creative ways to find ones available to register.
In the spirit of A/B testing, perhaps you could point to some reasonable and well-planned tests that produced no actionable results. Contrast that against a test that did produce actionable results. Then compare what went wrong and what, if any, lessons can be extrapolated. That would make for an interesting---and possibly meta---blog post.
If there was no significance to the frontpage it wouldn't exist. It's doing curating for you, a hint at what stories to look at, and all without becoming yet another ever-growing set of things to catch up on if you don't return for a few days.

"I still have a link to comments for each story in Google Reader (although I don't get the number of comments)"

If you browse comments a lot you end up spending almost all your time outside the reader anyway, so it doesn't seem to help that much. I can see how you want to avoid the frontpage if you check HN often - it just shows you the same stories all the time.

I've thought a lot about this, and RSS doesn't really fit social news, especially comments. So far the best UI I've been able to come up with is hackerstream like I said elsewhere in this thread.
For this reason, I always add some brief text explaining that the field is there to detect spam and must be left blank.

I'm sure blind readers would prefer this approach to a CAPTCHA.
@mayank is right, when you get popularity you are EXPOSED, and every developer could be able to spam your système without that much effort.
Captcha are Effective even if they are EVIL, anyhow i think that one day we'll find a viable solution again's spams.
Metric of the Week: Prisoners:Patrolmen Ratio
seems like laurenzos bulletproof node.js code just got caught in the eventloop
The Idiocy of the Record Labels' Claim Vs Limewire, Put Into Perspective
The ability to work for private security firms that are located outside of DC, but handle large DOD and SD contracts, could be a good in to the security IT click.
I'm not sure I follow a lot of your points about moving from an open OS to a closed one, Mac OS X is still very open (http://developer.apple.com/opensource). They blatantly said they were adding iOS-inspired touches to Lion and I don't think this will have any consequences for the open source base of OS X. I don't have any knowledge about the removal of Samba, but I wouldn't get too worried.

As for Bertrand Serlet, his departure was planned at least a year in advance. I doubt it was anything to do with open source or iOS taking over.
This kid is my hero...
...every single US household would have to spend all of its income buying nothing but music for over 13 years in order to arrive at what the music industry has deemed a reasonable settlement.
Please rate my lang
I added an in-browser REPL to my site so that people could try out the ideas : http://www.typesandotherdistractions.com/2011/03/try-purity.html

There are a few basic things missing that I'll be adding soon, most notably a module system and generic types, but for now, please let me know what you think.

Some sample code is available here: https://github.com/paf31/Purity/wiki

which can pretty much be pasted right into the REPL (modulo removing comments), and my blog contains a few guides to the syntax in the more recent posts.

Thanks!
So you want to get a PhD in theoretical computer science
I saw it via RSS, and then clicked through to comment.
The RSS feed users can just click the link and post comments as well.
A rewrite of this: http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-an... (he even used the same picture!)
I agree, no matter how much a problem you have with spam, you shouldn't put the burden of combating it on the user.