skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Off the top of my head, Mancur Olson's book 1982 The Rise and Decline of Nations is one of the better explanations. It's a formal modeling of lobbying and interest groups. The incentive structure is such that small groups capable of action can easily push for their specific interests, exceptions, loopholes, and other private goods. Whereas, the general public, which in general would prefer simplified and rationalized laws that treat everyone equally, has a hard time mobilizing to protect their interests because of their size and diffuse character.

Wikipedia summarizes the core of the argument:

The idea is that small distributional coalitions tend to form over time in countries. Groups like cotton-farmers, steel-producers, and labor unions will have the incentives to form lobby groups and influence policies in their favor. These policies will tend to be protectionist and anti-technology, and will therefore hurt economic growth; but since the benefits of these policies are selective incentives concentrated amongst the few coalitions members, while the costs are diffused throughout the whole population, the "Logic" dictates that there will be little public resistance to them. Hence as time goes on, and these distributional coalitions accumulate in greater and greater numbers, the nation burdened by them will fall into economic decline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancur_Olson

So, the idea is a kind of 'death by a thousand cuts' where each little loophole or exemption is not so large that the public will rally against it, but the cumulative effect of interest groups ends up creating a byzantine system of laws which become unintelligible and hold back growth.

Politicians, while running under the banner of broad ideologies, know that their practical support comes from smaller groups capable of mobilization (whether it's financial contributions or unions getting out the vote). So, interest groups win out over the general public interest.
If you need a tool like this, I would recommend turning on the anti-procrastination HN filter.
Surely you're not implying that Google is pushing out Quicktime because they don't want h264 support provided by 3rd parties.

That's ridiculous, especially since all versions of Chrome shipping still have h264 support. That would be a bit horse before the carriage.
Yeah, not like the famously open Adobe Flash.
Thanks! Glad you like the article!

My advisor from grad school had a blog post on the front page as well, with similar vote counts. He tracked about 5,000 UV total for the 48 hour period it was popular (24 hours on the front page). So the views seemed in line with my expectations.

I think the value of HackerNews is not in the quantity but the quality of users. I only had two spam/garbage posts on my blog, and no spam signups that I noticed. At its core, this community is a set of really passionate, generally positive early-adopters.
Second, there's risk. Capitalist society always allocates most of the reward to those who take the monetary risk, not those who do the work.

This assumes that having a paying job at all is not itself much of a reward, and that the programmer's take-home pay constitutes no profit for the programmer. But this is wrong, because the programmer would rather have the money than his free time, so the transaction is highly profitable to him. (It's also invalid to suppose that the main human motivation is only to make so many dollars while ignoring all the other relevant context.) Who is it that said "the maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not separate issues?"

Another problem with your way of looking at it is that it ignores non-financial rewards. Doing a good job causes an increase in self-esteem (the real kind that results in the creation of value, not the fake thing we call by the same name, where your teacher gives you and everyone else a gold star), and that is a reward. No one else can ever give you genuine self-esteem.

It doesn't bother me that there are other people out there with a great deal of money, while I don't have very much at the moment. All I care about is myself, and how I'm going to make the most of my life. The only thing I think about when I hear about people with lots of money is, "if they let them keep their money, we're doing great as a society. If and when I earn lots of money by creating and trading value voluntarily with other people, I'll be able to keep what I've earned by the same principle enjoyed by others who have earned their wealth, and that's good for my flourishing life."
Wait, is this true for OS X as well? I could understand this for Windows, but Quicktime on OS X is great (especially with Perian...)

Hopefully this isn't true for the OS X version of Chrome. Otherwise, I'll be switching back to Safari...
How does Adobe make the new version relevant enough to warrant its purchase? Do they do so in an honest or deceptive way?

I'm not a designer, but I use Illustrator often. I just bought Illustrator 10 for about $100 and it more than meets my needs. How many truly relevant new features can really be added to a vector drawing program?
He's definitely correct in this. Good thing Chrome also disables Flash by default.

Between this and the Honeycomb source I just checked out through git, Google has really hooked me up with the mad openness.

edit: Really, though, this is a bullshit argument that's been cooked up. These are two companies trying to preserve their ability to make money. That's it. The thing I admire about Apple, though, is that they're not making any bones about it. They go with what works better for them, and, as they see it, what works better for users. No silly holy wars or sanctimonious proclamations.

I trust the guy who is honest about his self-interest a whole lot more than phony altruists.
Maybe it's just me, but how can you embrace Flash but not Quicktime without looking like a hypocrite?
When the FED is buying US bonds through QE2 they push the other bond-buyers into buying other things, instead of the bonds the would have bought, had the FED not distorted the market. This pushes prices up for other asset classes. There's excess liquidity desperately looking for ROI. The money has to go somewhere.
Creating a Database Table in ASP.NET
In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a database table in Visual Studio 2010.
I'm interested to see how the international pricing will look for this. Here in Australia the CS5 Master Collection costs $4,344.00 compared to $2,599.00 in the US. Given that the AUD is now worth more than the USD it's rather a slap in the face.
Yes, terribly cynical. There are prominently displayed donation links. Perhaps they can also use donations?
Spot on points here by Sim regarding the fact there is never a bad time to join a good startup and never a good time to join a bad one.
Note: this is under the assumption that this scales down to the individual level. The idea that a good developer can earn a company $3m isn't unreasonable: it's the idea that the developer is doing it on their own that is incorrect. There are many other people involved in magnifying the value of what a software developer creates.

Conversely, it's also quite possible for a software developer to cause a company to lose $3 million .. and again, it's a question of amplification. :)
I wouldn't be shocked if Quicktime is as high in crash statistics as Flash used to be, and that's why they disabled it. It's a horrible plugin.
It's likely the perception that geohotz hacks have something to do with 'cheaters'.
Poll: Would you even consider moving to the south for a job?
Finding experienced engineers that have dealt with harder problems like scaling or distributed systems has been a challenge in this part of the country. That's probably no surprise because a lot of internet companies are clustered around larger cities with more robust economies.

Other engineers I've spoken to in smaller, less economically robust cities have expressed the same concern. I'm curious as to whether or not a more general cultural barrier exists. So, given an opportunity would you even consider moving to somewhere like the south that is not particularly well known for having a strong tech culture?
You're asking the wrong question
The ratio between legitimate uses of the quicktime plugin that aren't otherwise covered by chrome, and attempts to exploit the cavalcade of bugs that are regularly developed for it must be quite low indeed. I have no problem believing this is due to security concerns, and I applaud them for making the move. Blindly running plugins that have a history like QT is very poor behavior. Hopefully they will be flagging oracle java for similar treatment soon.

To be clear, you simply have to manually enable QT for a domain you want it to run. All plugins should be set to run this way - "do you trust this domain?". It would cut down on 90% of drive by exploitations where the user never even sees the malicious iframe and has no idea that they visited the domain hosting the exploit code.
It's not as easy to move out of the country as you seem to think, for a lot of us. Yes, it really is disturbing that I now live in a country that tortures people, and holds them for years without any trial at all. It's disturbing that it seems that humans are getting to be less and less important to our government than corporations all the time.

Still, what can I do? I'm disabled, and dependent on the government for survival. The only way I'm going to be able to get out of this country is by dying.
Startup Weekend in San Jose April 15th
Why not do it through a PEAR channel instead of basically creating your own version of it?
Having worked as a programmer on a couple of products for the medical industry I would suggest learning as much as possible about what is actually legal / bureaucratically acceptable to do with new technology.

I have an anesthesiologist friend who asked if I could do something to streamline the reporting process he has to go through before and after a procedure. The process involved entering similar or exactly the same information multiple times. Upon further investigation the process was built on a list of internal and external requirements that would be extremely difficult to change.

As a developer I would love to work on something that could improve medical care but without someone who knows the regulations (hippa, fda, etc.) it is hard to know where to start. It gets frustrating to present a list of ideas that are possible (maybe even easy) technologically but get shot down because another authority says you just can't do that.
I was responding to this: "For profit colleges are selling garbage degrees to poor people in urban areas."

As you say, non-profits engage in similar bad behavior. So why single out for-profits specifically? Why not just say "colleges are selling garbage degrees..."?

I wasn't trying to excuse anything. I just think prepending the word "for profit" in front of any criticism of low end colleges ignores half the problem and plays into a media narrative created by various vested interests (non-profits trying to eliminate the competition).
Err..I don't see what's wrong with referring to companies in that way... it happens all the time in almost all articles. If, say the court wants to penalize for the lies in the documents, would they penalize Google's lawyers or Google as a company?

How would you want him to refer to Google as?

>The author seems overly aggressive, and assumes that whatever "Google" did, it did rationally and intentionally.

Said author is a VP and general counsel of Microsoft, what do you expect?

>I think the most reasonable explanation will involve some large amount of miscommunication between several people who work for Google.

It is really hard to imagine such a long and protracted miscommunication over such a key thing while suing the US federal government.
> That would be a bit horse before the carriage.

So, the way it's supposed to be?
Thanks. I like your approach of not having to deploy to change the min/max value of workers. Though it's hard to implement (I think) if you're working with a worker/ratio configuration like HireFire. Currently HireFire also supports the Mongoid ODM. I'm looking in to implementing the Resque worker as well so people can use HireFire with Resque with Redis on Heroku as well.

Thanks for your input!
Google's Steven Bazyl to talk about federated login schemes Tuesday
Rather than using a web site, join (or start) a local software craftsmanship group. I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to donate some time to look at your code, and you get the benefit of meeting other people in a community specifically dedicated to improving code quality and acquiring technical mastery.
No, I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not using the spot price. I'm using the values that people are actually selling for. If you put in a sell order with a minimum price of something like $0.60, the orders would go through immediately, and you'd get $5600 in your Mt. Gox account. Once again, you've failed to actually fact check your post. The daily volume of Mt. Gox is routinely 10,000-15,000. Yes, you would bring the price down about $0.10 in a matter of minutes and possibly trigger a sell off, but that wouldn't make a difference to you if you just wanted your $5600.

EDIT:
Here's the actual spreadsheet if you'd like to double check my work: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AomGTgVWFh3WdDAxQ01...

Here's where I got the data on mygox: http://mtgox.com/trade/history
Yeah, those anti-police surveillance laws are pretty lame.

My only point about being able to spy on the government and large corporations was just an illegal counter measure to potential illegal actions by the usual suspects. I would never condone such behavior ;)
Honest question: does the RCMP require background checks for employees of civilian telephony providers?
They also disable Java by default in the nighties. Lifesaver.
>While I agree that it may very much amount is 'miscommunication'. You would think - that a company which proud itself on having the 'best, brightest and smartest' would do its own due diligence before openly starting a significant legal battle with Microsoft - a company renown for suing everyone in existence - and complaining to the government that it's basically being anti-competitive.

The legal battle is not with Microsoft. It is with "The United States".
I've been living heavily by the mantra "Luck is when opportunity meets preparedness," and it has been serving me very well. Anytime anyone brings up luck, I tend to point out how that person was ready for that phase in life.

This is one of the key things that I teach to my son (and the fact that talent can be interpreted as a deep understanding of a subject) so that he'll see that he has some since of control over his path in life and everything isn't decided by some outside, unknown force. I'd feel like I would have failed as a parent if I ever hear him utter "Man that guy is so lucky, wish it were me."

I think that this article illustrates those two points very well, just look at every "lucky" occurrence and you'll see an opportunity with someone that is prepared to take advantage of it (even lottery winners :).
Board Meetings vs. Bored Meetings
You missed an enter/return there ninja. That way you'll highlight "whateveri".

Also, as a free tip, try hitting esc (or better still, map it to jj) soon after you finish inserting, not before you want to run a command. This way you're always in normal mode, ready to edit and issue commands. That's whole point of vim: inserts are rare, edits are common.

Regarding the actual script, server is down for me, but the idea is quite nice. Editing and reloading is very different from live editing.
I am a T-mobile customer and up until now I was very happy with their service. The only reason I do not have an iPhone is because I did not want to go to ATT. Now, I have no choice but to go with Verizon, and I will.
Dude. Talk about over-analysis fail. I wasn't really saying anything complicated. All I was trying to explain was that, because I've always approached life so positively and with an open mind, even those times that seemed "darkest" -- in quotes, no less! -- I simply pushed on, positively, and assumed they would be for the best.

And they were. Hence, I was lucky. As always.
? Not a fan of Flash, but video-playback is a very, very small part of the Flash platform (and even then it's often producer-friendly in the form of supporting extensive DRM for the illusion of content control), while it is virtually all of QuickTime. QuickTime is completely obsolete. Flash is just mostly obsolete.
Interesting and light-weight approach. Though, does it support other ORM's or ODM's like Mongoid? Currently HireFire supports ActiveRecord and Mongoid with Delayed Job. Planning to add Resque with Redis support fairly soon.
Around the time this was posted to HN, Stuart Morgan of Google and the Chromium project added a comment to the bug report that "this is a security feature that is applied to certain specific plugins even when they are up to date."

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78768#c1

[speculation]

Maybe it's to do with this, patched in a new OS X release only a couple of weeks ago?

"An integer overflow existed in QuickTime's handling of movie files. Viewing a maliciously crafted movie file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. "

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10770

[/speculation]
Microsoft Accuses Google of Misleading Security Certification
Sure officially. Unofficially - it's with Microsoft.
Agreed. I guess some people (and companies) just like to "Think Different.™" :)
It is true for OS X, in the latest dev builds, at least.

(I first got bugged by it clicking on the Pow video link at http://pow.cx/ -- when a Mac browser won't play a straight .mov file for political reasons it could be time to change.)
I applied for Summer 2011. I'm a single founder - point against. I'm not working on a social networking project or something with mass consumer appeal - point against. It's a fairly trivial product (though a great demand exists) - point against. I'm also older (29) which might not be favorable to YC.

Admittedly I was a little intimidated by a few questions on the application and my video sucked. I've been in real estate for the last few years and am now getting back into software development. Being in real estate though is what gives me tremendous insight into the niche market I'm targeting with my startup. It's impossible to know for sure why I wasn't invited for an interview considering they don't give any feedback. I'd assume they were just more interested in other founders/projects. That doesn't make me a "B" grade startup, I just don't fit the YC criteria (at least right now).

Point being that it benefits YC to bet on projects with huge upside potential. Fewer big hits compensates for massive misses. Isn't that the same strategy that nearly all VC's use?

All in all I'm learning as I go and moving forward regardlessly.
> Why not follow the recursion down the rabbit hole

The thought did cross my mind. ;)

Seriously though, we plan on focusing the blog on analyzing press releases, political speeches, and other text currently making headlines. We just were so excited by the HN response that we thought this would make a great "Hello World" post. I also think it's the only funnel analysis follow-up for a HN submission; most usually focus just on page views and unique visitors.
GeoHot raised arms for a battle. George Hotz exited through the alley.
No silly holy wars or sanctimonious proclamations.

I'm really torn trying to figure out which parts of your post is sarcasm. Because if you're really claiming that Apple hasn't pursued almost every initiative with "sanctimonious proclamations", you must not be paying attention. Gruber echos the Apple talk points, and they all revolve around "just trying to do right by the customer" (instead of "just trying to ensure massive profit margins aided by complete control and industry domination).
That's their legacy, however the trend suggests they're losing half of their visitors every 10 months.
"Fool me once - shame on you. Fool me twice - shame on me."
That's a bad move IMO. Would be better if they let people at least pay off a version of it, or issue benchmarks as an incentive.
Quicktime just had horrible (breaking, crippling) support for Windows. Have things changed significantly in the last 2 years?
Is it normal to buy multiple domains for 1 startup
I've decided on the name for my startup but the name uses a word i'd like to own in the market, such as myspace owns www.ourspace.com .. So is it normal to buy a lot of similar domains names like this?
You suggest a dichotomy that doesn't exist.

Apple makes massive profit margins by doing right by the customer (as they see it).
I think Apple's anti-Flash position was justified using some pretty "sanctimonious proclamations", though, wasn't it?
Ford and John Deere are two brands that I believe have been integrated into the identity of some. I'm trying to think of other examples, news, maybe beverages? coke&pepsi is now obvious to me, others are harder. I guess apple/google/microsoft is the only other I can find.
Clear stickers are used for marketing of business ideas and goods
Idsketch.com offers very beautiful and clear stickers to its valued customers all over the world. We serve our customers worldwide. We know how to serve you better as we have more modern technologies and talented designers than others.
Ask HN: What do you dislike most about HackerNews?
And if you're up to it, what do you like most?
moving to somewhere like the south that is not particularly well known for having a strong tech culture

That depends on what part of the south you're talking about. North Carolina, in particular, has a very strong tech culture, especially around the Research Triangle Park[1] area. There are other pockets of activity in the south as well... there's a lot of smart, well-educated engineering types (if not software specifically) around Huntsville, Alabama[2], for example. These areas are reasonably well known.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle_Park

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville,_Alabama

Of course it's all a moot point to me, since I already live here (NC).
If I could fork your code and get it working with environment variables, would you be interested in pulling that in? (Not sure if you made a deliberate decision to avoid that).

MiddleManagement works great for my needs, but if these libraries serve the same use case(s), I'd rather converge towards one library than have things spread out.

One other thing you may want to add is a retry loop for the heroku API calls. Every now and then, the heroku gem will throw a RestClient::ServiceUnavailable: 503 Service Unavailable exception. In the worst case, I'm not sure if this is best handled in the gem or at the application layer; however it's definitely worth retrying a couple times if you can avoid the blowup completely. I got some feedback from the Boston.rb group on handling this if you're interested: http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup/browse_threa...
I worked for a big general contractor (top 100 in the US) for a number of years and they regularly had tools and equipment factored into their bids because about half of them walk of each job (not that you can fire union labor for that).