skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I'm a newbie here, my account is less than a year old, god knows I've trolled and flamed my share, etc. But when I first joined, I saw the guideline/notion that upvotes should indicate contribution to discussion rather than agreement and was impressed. I'd be sad if this position was abandoned. Upvoting for contribution to discussion promotes good discussion. Upvoting for agreement promotes hivemind, of whichever variety.
Somebody saw something huge in their app. I wasn't this person.

I am happy that somebody saw something huge in their app because it means that a few developers have found some success, and seeing other people be successful makes me happy.

I personally think that a lot of the comments I've seen here stem from jealously because I personally am jealous of their funding.
It's going to be interesting to see how they scale. Each person has their own body of data that needs to be crawled and updated on a regular basis. Google, on the other hand, has one body of data (the web) that is applicable to every user. Getting to just 1 million users will be very impressive.
An "active user," by their definition, is someone who has logged on in the last 30 days.
Meanwhile on Twitter...

http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23stoprightthere

None of these people care, I'm afraid.
Just seems like the typical Cathedral vs Bazaar discussion to me. Android always has been a Cathedral.
So let's call Color the Rebecca Black of Web 2.0.

Too immature, too early to tell, too much attention out of nowhere, too much momentum for too little effort. But it looks good, right?
Reputation is another way of saying "estimate of ability based on past accomplishments."

I'm sorry that, in spite of having more talent than 90% of CEO's, you haven't actually accomplished enough for people to trust your self evaluation.
Actually, it's more like this. Most CEOs aren't going to start R&D projects because (a) they'll pay off later, during a successor's tenure, and (b) vision can't be taught in MBA programs.

On the other hand, cutting the R&D projects and saying that "unprofitable operations" (even if they were profitable) were slashed will pop the stock price in the short term.

You're naive if you think CEOs don't have ways to benefit from temporarily popped stock prices even if their restricted shares can't be sold until much later. If they want to be a bit sleazy and secretly sell early, they can ask a spouse or sibling to short-sell or buy puts on the open market. Or they can use foreknowledge of the pop to hand one-day gains over to their friends. Illegal? Probably. (The reason I don't say "yes" is that insider trading has a technical meaning that most violations of the law's spirit don't meet.) Unethical? Yes. Likely to lead to jail time? No. Common as dirt? Yes.

It's pretty rare for people to commit insider trading violations for their own accounts, because it's easy to get caught. Instead, they tell their friends what is about to happen as a means of favor-trading. With that, it's pretty much impossible to get caught.

I don't think most corporate executives are malicious, so much as avaricious and narcissistic. Will they help their companies if it suits them? Yes. Will they hurt their companies if it suits them? Most of them will. The "we are the nobility and you are the peasants" mentality prevents most of them from caring too much either way about their companies; they care more about themselves, their friends, and maintaining their social class.
I agree with your tone, but disagree with the conclusions.

Unfortunately, the only people who care about Twitter's recent actions are the nerds.
...
SMTP and POP are protocols, Twitter and Facebook are websites with APIs.

A protocol is literally a standard or convention for communicating. In the case of twitter and facebook, the tools they provide for declaring social networks enables (arguably new) forms of social communication. Comparatively, SMTP, POP, HTTP, etc didn't require social scaffolding, or at least, it was not the central element. Without the social scaffolding, twitter and Facebook are useless; without social scaffolding, SMTP and POP still let me communicate with friends I already know.

(That being said, I would have preferred that Twitter was a distributed and open protocol from the start; however, I'm not going to switch to an open product just because it's open. I want the more accessible and wider cast social network.)
In 2009 I dated an actress (musical theatre) who was being approached by the recording industry to do an album. So I went to a lot of parties with Music execs and I'll tell you what they told me.

Their strategy IS to be the bad guy.

Ask any record exec over 35 and they'll tell you people have always hated record companies. Heck, the artists themselves bad mouth the record companies and always have (James Taylor wrote a whole song bashing record execs in the 70s: http://tinyurl.com/49greg6).

So the strategy is to use that. Let iTunes, Pandora, Mog and the rest be the good guys. While the recording industry uses the RIAA to punish anyone who dares pirate with fees outrageous enough to make $10 a month seem like a gift.

One thing record execs realize that most of the general public doesn't: They have an unregulated monopoly. For example the law treats hiphop music like it's all one product and so it's held to the law in that way. As long as there are multiple hiphop record labels there's no anti-trust issues. But that's B#llS#it. If you love Eminem than you want his music and that only comes from one label. And if that label can force you not to pirate than they'll get your money no matter how much you hate them.
Exactly, and I believe that is the best FB is ever going to achieve if their innovation strategy continues to be "copy everyone else."
I was actually surprised that my comment went through as soon as I hit Done, instead of showing me what the comment looks like and another button to post it

Seriously? Because that's pretty much how all forum and comment software works. I'm just boggled that you find this so surprising, it's the path of least effort.
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned sockpuppeting? :-)
http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html

One test of whether you're explaining your idea effectively is to ask how close the reader is to reproducing it. After reading that sentence I'm no closer than I was before, so its content is effectively zero. -pg
This might explain it for you: http://www.quora.com/Is-37signals-a-lifestyle-company-Why
The labels are already getting 70% of every sale; it's hard to imagine that getting 80-90% would save the industry.
WebKit is (mostly LGPL v 2.1
It's like Foursquare/Facebook where you have to opt out of publicizing your entire life. I suppose advertisers (the FBI?) are drooling over the possibilities, and that's probably what fuels the investment more than user excitement.

Also, "everyone who was at the bar last night automatically sees the pictures (without any pesky 'publish' button or other form of 'opting in')" may be a more compelling user story than you give it credit for.
Facebook started basically as a photo-sharing app. Look at it now.
Poll: Engineers/Hackers, can you touch type?
I noticed that many of my hacker/programmer friends don't ten finger touch type. How many of you can?
Yes, I can touch type using all 10 fingers.
No, I cannot.
They should offer an entrepreneur pack which has a template for iPhone, iPad, Windows, OSX, plus all the browsers. After all, they're dry erase, so why would you need more than one?

Also, they should affiliate themselves with the makers of the lightscribe pen so that scribbles can be uploaded to the web.
It took me over a year before I "got" twitter. Now it would be hard to see how I could replace it - tracking outages, ongoing event updates, what my friends are up to, revolutions in Egypt - Heck, our company's public feed is actually the best way for me to track what's happening at our company than our internal mailing lists.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether there's any money in it. Everyone I know uses AIM - but I don't know if AOL has ever been able to monetize that.

Regarding Color - I'll give it a bit of time, and see what I think after I go to an event with groups of friends, and see what happens when we (and others) are taking pictures.
Bad lawyering here: as an advocate, it is good to assert every valid legal position that makes sense for a case but it is always bad to cast your client's position in a light that holds it up to ridicule and mockery. When that happens, any valid claim that might exist gets caught in the downdraft caused by your bad judgment and the whole case is compromised.

I feel for the judges trying to apply 1976 statutory law to modern technology. The 1976 revamp of the Copyright Act was the last comprehensive one and its major purpose was to account for the effect (since the enactment of the 1909 Act then in effect) of motion pictures, sound recordings, radio and other then-modern forms of communication on IP laws. Common law is made by judges case-by-case and it is by nature slow and evolving, as is a parallel type of judge-made law based on case-by-case interpretation of old statutes. It is precisely the vacuum left by this case-by-case handling of an antiquated set of statutes that creates the problems today. What is needed is a comprehensive statutory enactment by Congress to bring these laws up to date and to make them fair. Even if that means keeping copyright under the rubric of "property" and defining wrongs in that area as "thefts," this can still be done fairly by defining sensible penalties that are commensurate with the scope of any wrong committed.

Of course, to do this, you need Congress to break free from the grip of lobbyists whose influence would inevitably distort the amending process. Good luck with that.
This is almost ridiculous to imagine.

Artists fifty years ago couldn't imagine -- or would have killed for -- near-instant global distribution of their work. Record companies only existed to record and distribute their works.

They've now been out-done on the distribution front, but that should be fine for them, because a recording contract isn't about distribution anymore, it's about marketing and promotion, which (to be fair) they're pretty damn good at, and already making tons of money with.

I honestly don't understand why they don't just concede distribution, or at least set up their own official torrent tracker you can subscribe to for a paltry sum, and focus on promotion.

This is obviously speculation from someone who doesn't know the internals of the recording industry, but I believe it's smarter than attempting to sue your customers.
Avoiding left turns is one factor considered by the route-optimization software, but not the only one.

And unlike the mythbusters test, the route-optimization software can reorder deliveries; there are many cases where the optimum order to make deliveries while avoiding left turns is completely different from the optimum order to make deliveries if you include left turns.
That is a weak defense of an equivocation fallacy. Claiming he didn't play along "hard enough" doesn't undermine -his- point that the original statement is an equivocation fallacy.

While there is no platonic definition of the word, any two people communicating have some definition, and each has some sense of what the other's definition is. Intentionally violating that is acceptable in certain cases when you are careful to ensure you don't poison the conversation. No such care was given here.

It's a shifted definition of the word "worship" which then shifts the definition of the word "atheist" which then shifts the definition of the word "belief" in your post, and which then shifts the definitions of the word "faith". We've created an entire parallel vocabulary which will do -nothing- helpful to the conversation.

And two posts away you have this: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2365864

A guy talking about how atheists have faith. Except it's not atheists, it's "atheists". And they don't have faith. They have "faith". The equivocation fallacy is complete.

This is what happens when you let someone poison a conversation with an equivocation.
Anyone who comes to a conclusion about something inevitably in the end has faith. The fact that I sit in a chair right now, I know obviously that the chair can support me. But at the end of the day, I don't know for sure, so that knowledge is also rooted in faith that it will continue to support me and won't spontaneously break. And I've had chairs spontaneously break on me before too, so there's physical evidence in my history that my conclusion isn't a sure thing.

The only people who don't have faith are skeptics, and I'm talking about skeptics who are skeptical about everything here. Like they aren't even sure of their own existence.

Faith is a logical requirement of any personal conclusion whether you like it or not.

http://xkcd.com/242/

Even if you experiment to beyond reasonable doubt, you still risk that you could be wrong. Any true scientist trusts in the scientific method, but the scientific method itself leaves things open to new questions, new evidence, and new experiments. That's what makes the scientific method wonderful. But that's also why any conclusion by the scientific method also in the end has a final requirement of faith for any immediate conclusions.
What's up with the downvotes? I also feel like the best option to sign up to a twitter's competitor service is by NOT using twitter.

The signup button goes to a "Internal Server Error" as described above. He wasn't bashing anyone.
"mo money mo problems my ass, you'se a naive cat if you still believe that, thats just some shit they tell you to keep you where you at" -ODB
I guess sometimes I have trouble remembering whether a conversation occurred on my old gmail account or my new one.

I am also 19, for what it's worth.
My impression is that iOS still has more developers, many of whom are producing work of much higher quality and polish than the average Android dev. That's just my subjective judgement though.

The Android audio APIs are still too primitive for a bunch of apps I want to write but there are others that should be ok. Maybe I'll test the waters.
That's the first blog post. I admit that it doesn't give you much information right now, but in a few days it will make sense.
I hope RIM realizes they aren't competing with the iOS SDK from two years ago.
Color.xxx pitch deck
Precisely what I was going to post. Both Identi.ca and rStat.us need a compelling reason to switch. Either doing twitter better, or something you can't do on twitter.

'Because Twitter is mean' doesn't pull many users.
This is a company working on a big idea that got a large amount of funding to work on that big idea uninterrupted for a couple of years.

Given the reminder of why Duke Nukem failed making its way up the board this is actually quite funny. Not having constraints can often be a bad thing, not a good one.

And regardless of this, what is the 'big' idea? There's nothing big about it. It's a pathetically small idea.

This is why the bubble thing is making the rounds, there's nothing big about social apps, they're notoriously hard to make any return on.
My app store acccount only required a web form. How was it difficult for you?
then webhttrack from the same group.
Covert Hypnosis - Exposed
And all the reviews of those devices say Honeycomb isn't fully baked.
She's not saying that the idea is wrong in and of itself, but that we should all be focusing on ideas that go beyond sharing photos - solving hard problems.
For the most part, money doesn't create problems, but it can certainly enable and magnify them.
You'll want to 'switch views' by having more than one.

Cool project, even though I prefer having paper so I can refer back to it later. Did make a 4:3 view template though for quick sketching.
6.8 Earthquake Hits Burma
To save RoG some trouble, we already have this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2365725
So you think you had a shitty day?
we take a photo when we're finished, I've got about 100 sitting on my iPhone....

Every time I use a whiteboard I wish I could "create a new tab"
I think it's more interesting to enable people to share other people's photos. I can certainly take more creative commons photos that other people took than I can take myself. See

http://ookaboo.com/
The "always use signed" rule is a source of endless debate in C circles. I personally like almost everything in the Google C++ Style Guide, but this is one place where I think they got it wrong.

The problem is that the riskiest place for a signed/unsigned mismatch is when calling an unsigned API with a signed value. Simply deciding to not use unsigned at all doesn't fix this because ANSI C and STL use unsigned types throughout (f.e. memcpy)

if (size <= 10) {
// Yay, I have plenty of space
memcpy(buffer, src, size);
}

The code looks fine, but if "size" is an int with the value -1 there's a hard-to-spot bug. Plenty of security holes have been caused by just this sort of mistake. If you don't fight against the types that libc uses you don't have this problem.

There will still be spots where you'll need to compare signed and unsigned values, but the compiler will warn you about these. You'll have to cast one side or the other but that's a GOOD thing. Since neither a signed-compare nor an unsigned-compare is always what you want you want to be explicit about it.

There are other advantages to using unsigned types. For instance, it gives an explicit hint to the person reading the code about the range of the value. I think this makes interfaces clearer. For instance if you see a function signature of "void foo(const uint8_t *, size_t)" you'll immediately guess that you're dealing with a memory buffer and its explicit size without even seeing the names of the parameters.

Actually, if I had my way "int" would default to being unsigned and you'd have to specifically request "signed" if that's what you want. I find that I probably use unsigned types 5x as often as signed ones.
Most of the reviews of the Xoom noted some lack of polish but I don't recall any massive problems that would suggest Honeycomb is simply too unstable/feature incomplete to be released.

Sure, and as a traditional F/OSS advocate, I generally do believe in the "release early / release often" philosophy, and I'm a little bit disappointed that Google are holding the code back. I'm just saying that I don't see it as being a "Big Deal" (tm).

Some of the articles and comments about this are painting it like this huge, terrible affront to the F/OSS world and act like Google somehow magically went from "friends of F/OSS" to "the Devil incarnate" because of this. And I think that's a little silly. So they want to finish merging some things and get it cleaned up, etc., whatever. I - personally - am fine with allowing them the time to do that. Sure it would be nice to have the code right now, but let's not break out the tar and feathers just yet.
If there's really that much value in free music then there's a heck of a case for making music a freely available public good.
It might help to take Chris Martneson's Crash Course (www.chrismartenson.com) where he makes it clear that inflation is necessary under the present Federal Reserve system. Although Chris was a biological scientist before being an internet content provider, he has a pretty good way of describing the economics behind the Fed. It doesn't take a conspiracy theory to address the fairly human activities of the superbanks. Activities that vastly increase their power and in no noticeable way improve our lives. They don't have to conspire. In fact, they are often vicious competitors. Anybody tried to get a home mortgage lately? Hard to get, now. And why? The banks get free (as in no interest) loans from Treasury which the Fed will pay interest on. So they loan it back to the Fed to get paid interest. Why take the much higher risk of loaning us money to buy or refinance a home?
There is no bubble - but there is plenty of room for disruption
Pick any "how do you debug?" submission anywhere, and you'll see a lot of people claiming that using printf, etc, is retarded in the age of good debuggers.

Maybe they're just a noisy minority.
The Joy of Erlang Or How To Ride A Toruk
I regret so very much that David Foster Wallace is no longer with us. I'd love to see an E Unibus Pluram for the internet.
What if they're hand-painted?
Ahhh different views/screens, good point! Or maybe I'm just slow...
no clue, just pulled the # off their website. they also said that approximately 250m log in every 24h
Online Bookmark Manager - StartAid: Add-ons for Firefox
The alternative is to learn their native SDK, so I think this is at least a better option than that. Anything to lower the barrier to entry. I have to believe <i>some</i> headache will be involved.
I remember a stock trading company found Microsoft's quarterly earnings report on their website hours before they were supposed to be made "public" and made a neat profit.

source : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-28/microsoft-earnings-...
Companies like those do get funded, but they are usually run by industry veterans that cut their chops on consumer internet companies the like. ie. Tesla Motors. I do not think it makes sense for internet entrepreneurs to go after markets with such heavy capital restrictions, it's not reasonable, it's much more reasonable to start small and slowly mature/graduate up to the more complicated and advanced problems/companies.
Nike Zoom Kobe VI 6 China Shoe for Sale
I think you vastly underestimate the driving compulsion of millions of attention whores to get random men to tell them how hot they are by virtue of myspace angles and flattering lighting.
I like everything except the marketing speak liberally sprinkled throughout. :/
I think his point is that the photo sharing is little more than a proof of concept. The exciting thing is the automation of ad-hoc networking. The internet collapses geography, but as a result it does a poor job of many tasks at the local level - search for 'Bob's diner' and you may find that you're just on the wrong side of the block, or you might get info on cheap flights to some completely other city containing a more famous restaurant with the same name.

The technology underlying Color seems like a much-needed metric for establishing spatial (and by implication, temporal) relevance. An accurate and behavior-based metric of relevance, as opposed to one based on self-selection via search/signup, would be very, very easy to monetize. Say you're in the fashion business. You could buy online ads to reach people who search for fashion-related stuff online, but wouldn't you rather reach people who spend a lot of time in the same places as your target demographic?
Myanmar earthquake 2011
In 2009, I wrote a little parody of the Zen of Python that includes a bit about what I felt upvotes were/should be used for: http://marcuscavanaugh.com/zen-of-hn/ -- I think that regardless of what guidelines were created initially, people do upvote as agreement, whether we like it or not.

I like upvotes as an expression of agreement because it gives an indication of the truthiness of the comment (wisdom of the crowd). If someone says something in a field I'm not familiar with, and I don't know if they're right or not, I know that the following will occur:

- If they're right, people will upvote.

- If they're wrong, people will either downvote or reply stating why they're wrong.

And since I don't think any of us want comments like "I Agree", upvotes are our only option for providing a vote of confidence in a comment.
NodeJS Powered Pastebin
Just a tiny project whilst taking a break from developing Social Drop
Ask HN: What can Color possibly accomplish with $41 million?
After seeing what Color is all about and reading about their $41 million funding, I do not understand why such an exorbitant amount is even necessary for their application. It seems simple enough. Where will this money go? Realistically, could they not accomplish the same with $1 million, even $100,000? Color is clearly no Facebook or Twitter. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!