skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I kind of agree, I've used SES for a side project through Mailchimp's STS api and it is pretty simple and reliable, and quite free at first. Other than some other bells and whistles like handling unsubscribes I'm not sure MailGun is that much more revolutionary.

I've heard people say before that to beat Gmail you can't just build an email service 10% better. Gmail works well enough that 10% isn't worth the switching costs. Same goes for this I believe.
> I'd be surprised if anyone that has built a few significant rails applications with devise would continue to use it. Unless you're going to have the most vanilla session/user/authentication management ever, fighting against devise gets downright nasty.

Authentication can get downright nasty no matter which solution you use, but Devise does a lot of things well, is actively maintained, and well documented. In fact all of the gems from Jose Valim, including inherited_resources and simple_forms are such first rate plugins, it's difficult to imagine anyone throwing any of his work under the bus.
You can download the documents directly from scribd or dockstok (sp?). Most of us just want to read them w/o DLing the whole frickin file. Do you have any counter points to actually refute the claims in the post? I'd be interested to here about them rather than a document embedding trend that you disagree with.
Turoczy, next time I'm in Portland we gotta meet up
The Plot to Kill Google [2009]
You seem to be the product of your area code. Realize/appreciate the difference in surfing habits of a rural Pakistani and yourself?
Shake-a-Rater - Realtime Gestural Voting for TV
Implemented ;)
Translating Human Capital into Financial Performance
I have no idea, and that's my point. I think it will have unforseeable effects. Interaction with future business partners, friends, talks with possible employees who read it and decide not to apply. Everything is coloured from now on.
Developer here - If I were about to interview for a dev job at svpply I would surely find this blog post and promptly cancel my interview. No way am I going to go to work for a guy who has no experience doing what he is tasked to do. This is kinda scary.
I can vouch for this activity as well. As I mentioned, South Florida is not as much on my radar as some of the other locations (partly also because I've lived here forever and want to move just to change things up). There is plenty to find here and the competition isn't so stiff that you'd have to be a rockstar to find anything. That said, things are ramping up in a big way in South Florida and you'll definitely see things trending for the better as the months continue.
Next iPhone will be Called iPhone 4S with Better Camera, A5 Processor and HSPA+
This is good, I think people are close to realizing that the term NoSQL is silly and practically meaningless. In a few years we'll all have a good laugh about it.
Depending on how secure you want to be, the existence of encrypted/non-encrypted information reveals things as well. Someone could infer something by just knowing that you turned on OTR at a certain time.
It's a shame so many of the comments here are criticizing this guy for not lying more.
How do you know he runs Lodsys or Webventions?

Do you have any evidence he's a patent troll?
Ask PG: Can we have comment scores back please?
Links with a ton of comments are harder to sift through. Sub-threads don't contain as much validation information as before.

Are your intentions to keep it this way or are we still in a test mode?
IDENTITI: Creating Shared Value (CSV) through star power
Calculating your customers lifetime value (with code)
Its got some idiom in it as well. Try:

What did you want to bring that book (that I didn't want to be read to out of) up for?
Ask HN: How to gain access to presenting at SV events.
Are there any good resources that list events startups can participate in to present their product?

I'm new to the area, and definitely new to having a developed product to showcase. Somehow it seems like I always hear about events after deadlines have passed.

I greatly appreciate any advice, thank you!
Galaxy Tab 10.1 won't work with OS X, Windows usability is spotty
It was my understanding that the derogatory use of "sophistry" implies an intent to deceive, which is not professed by the author of the article.
How does one start a HackAndTell meetup? I'd like to maybe start one in the Milwaukee area.
This is lipstick on a poopsicle.

I've tried this for years. And cygwin is garbage. Git bash has done the best at letting me do 70% of what I need.

In either case. 15 minutes after installing ubuntu I realize what an aweful waste of time it is. 1 day after installing ubuntu and customizing it I realize that windows is only good to boot into to remote desktop to work and play video games.

This is about the 5th time I've had the same experience. Every time I decide "i can do that in windows" I realize its 10x easier to do it in linux. It don't matter the flavor. Having things like a good shell, symlinks, etc. is just awesome.
How malls and stores are designed from the ground up to make you spend [video]
that;s a good line :-)
There are no details. What kind of tests? What languages? What is even being tested?

Also, without telling me anything you then expect me to tell other people about you. What am I suppose to say: here's something someone said might be interesting once we find out what it is, but to find out what it is you have to tell other people it might be interesting as well?
|Kids are creative, middle age people are not.

In most fields(except the web) , most serious entrepreneurs are around 40.
You CAN short it.

1. borrow some bitcoins on #bitcoin-otc
2. sell them on MtGox
3. wait for the rate to decrease
4. buy som bitcoins at a now very low rate
5. pay back your debt
6. profit
Drugs, Transpants, Chemotherapy, Vaccines, chemical fertilizers, nuclear energy, internet, Wireless, Jet Engines, Petroleum Cracking, Plastics, polymeric fibers, lasers .......
NoSQL stands for "Not only SQL". Stupid acronym, but that's what it means...
Contention is only the case if it's necessary to maintain versioning across the entire data set. Store subsets in branches.
In the early 90s, IBM made classic "big corporation" mistakes, especially with respect to how wily Microsoft was.

They also made classic "big corporation afraid to cannibalize it's old profits" mistake, and more arguably, they made some ickky design decisions in OS/2, like not going with fork/exec when starting a process, not having a good, clean definition of "a process",and some other things.

Why bring this up again now?
The way I remember it, Prodigy killed CompuServe and AOL killed Prodigy.
republics are a tad bit easier to buy off than actual democracies just because of the number of people you actually need to bribe.
As far as I know, most e-mail products focus only on sending e-mails and not receiving them. Mailgun works both ways.
So much for "All men are created equal," eh?

Over ten million people each year apply through this program for only 50,000 green cards. In a nation of 300 million people, I think we can manage this.
I can see that on the top of their list already. Somebody has to fix this problem with less-complicated solution than PGP.
To borrow a line from Nike: Just do it.

Flippancy aside, that's all it takes. The guy who started it in New York (Andrew) was very open to letting me mix/mash the format as it fit with the local need. (I found that the 5 minute limit was not needed so far.) And being part of a bigger movement adds to the credibility of the event and Andrew was happy to let me use the name. All the promo, sweat, oompfh and (most importantly) longevity/staying power is self-provided.

(And further, even if he didn't let me use the name, that probably wouldn't have stopped me. That sort of mentality helps.)
Yeah I feel terrible for all the people that were told they won just to have their dreams yanked out from under them. I wish the government could do something to make it up to them. Once they notify people that they've won they should have to make good on it. If it were up to me all the people that won by error would be allowed their visas, and another draw would be made for the remaining entrants.
Then the remaining candidates would have a better chance than the original draw. Sure we'd have double the lottery immigrants coming over this year but this seems like the closest thing to fair to me considering the mistake that's already been made.
so the darknet is working then?
Cool, I think its a really good idea! Thanks for the encouragement.
I don't get this meme. Innovation can happen anywhere - and in fact it often does regardless of how seemingly 'useless' the application is. Livejournal is 'boring', but out of it we got Memcached; Facebook is a 'PHP doodad' (actual news article called it that, I kid you not!); out of it we got HipHop and Cassandra and Thrift. Friendfeed is a 'frivolous social app', and out of it we got Tornado.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Sound true at face-value. But guess what? In order to process the huge amounts of data necessary to 'make people click ads', we use map/reduce, and we get and/or improve Hadoop. Both of which may then be used for other Big Data applications.

Sure, web applications seem trivial. But the innovations created as an aside to them very often are not.
1. You are being rude. Don't write anything that you wouldn't say to someone's face.

2. I believe you completely misread the parent's point: that there are only a few technologies that are 100 years old. (Not sure what that means with regards to the 'transformative' argument, but still...)
The important point is that the startups doing meaningful innovation are not founded by college and high school dropouts, but rather PhD students, or Scientist or Consultants.

That is why the idiots such as Peter Thiel and others in Techcrunch/HN/YC who stupidly argue that college education is worthless, should silenced.

Also an important point to note is that nearly all YC startups are also of the same Crap Crop as mentioned in the article.

See I can blog by sending an email [and trash talk by competitors] how innnnooovative!
Brilliant! I'm doing this tonight.
Other states have ballot / referendum and are doing pretty good. California is more a case study in "voting money to groups to elect me to vote for more money".
This is running a startup.
But there's no way to program domain-specific knowledge into the compiler like you can with macros.

You can. It just won't be as syntactically elegant. Use expression trees and code emission the language exposes. The optimization happens at run-time, rather than compile time. But you'll actually, in most cases, get more optimization opportunity.
How Viral PDFs Of A Naughty Bedtime Book Exploded The Old Publishing Model
I didn't call it a bad thing. I said it was purporting to be something that it isn't.
While I agree with you, there was no need for the personal attack. If you disagree with someone, say it politely and directly. Don't call them stupid in a roundabout, passive aggressive way.
Meh. Nothing all that neat.
Different people respond differently. Maybe his post will work in helping the right candidates to self select in, while others select out.
How dare you go against the Cannon of YC/TechCrunch
Everyone who is 30+ is an idiot.
People are smartest when they are in High school and progressively detoriate as they learn more
> Macros allow you to easily improve your syntax, but offer less guidance for improving your semantics.

This IMO is the biggest problem with macro usage today and needs to be overcome. I've started a campaign against the "macros are syntactic sugar, and I have a sweet tooth!" camp (http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/2010/08/input-needed.html). I recommend reading this excellent parody blog post (written at the height of PG-inspired Lisp mania) for background: http://classic-web.archive.org/web/20070706135848/brucio.blo...

> Macros almost never call macroexpand recursively, except inside of code bodies.

This is by design. The expansion of a macro needs to be opaque - otherwise where is the abstraction? When you macroexpand, you're opening the black box. You can only rely on macroexpanding macros that you have some control over.

> This means that macros like defclass usually cannot be extended in an incremental or modular fashion.

This is because it's the same problem as extending an arbitrary grammar. You can't compose two grammars and expect the result to be non-ambiguous.

> Instead, you need to declare a def-your-class macro that can't usefully compose with any other def-her-class macro that you might encounter.

This is completely, totally wrong. Things like def-your-class is the reason I started my education campaign. You should never write a def-your-class macro. Macros are the wrong way to solve this problem, which is why CLOS and the CLOS metaobject protocol include all the facilities you could want for extending defclass in a composable way (Art of the Metaobject Protocol is a comprehensive, but confusing, reference).
It's like "Entourage" but in Silicon Valley
I believe one of the main points of the article, and the blog post it references, is that SQL solutions solve the CAP Theorem problem for C + one other and most NoSQL solutions solve for A and P (i.e. allowing temporary inconsistency).

Git provides Availability and Partition Tolerance and therefore, and provides solid mechanisms for conflict resolution - merges. So it that way it is a NoSQL solution.
All of these are hacks. Interesting and useful, but hacks. None of these will be around in ten years. It's not the kind of future-inspiring innovation the author was referring to.

Web applications don't seem trivial -- they are trivial. Scaling them means being creative, but don't confuse that with true innovation.
Social media experts aren't known for their math skills.
Sunspot Financial Malware Targeting Windows Systems
On a project I worked on that require massive scale distributed, time-delayed merging, we once pondered the use of putting XML-ized objects in Git and merging it that way. Don't think it was fast enough with hundreds of thousands of objects and we still would have to had built a XML merger.
Who would suggest using Java, of all things?

It makes perfect sense to point out that most anyone using a normal alternative to PHP such as Python or Ruby is probably using a framework where output is escaped by default, such as Django. How about that - a system that does it automatically, you don't need to call htmlspecialentities.... or html_special_chars.
I agree its impossible to know for certain what effects this will have, but I definitely dont think they will all be negative.

Its a slow transition but its becoming acceptable for business to not operate as if they were big brother, and not all communication needs to be double speak, sure the CEO of goldman & sachs isnt going to get away with a blog post like this, but a young bookmarking startup, the only negative reactions are from people saying "this isnt the done way", with actual reason for it being negative.
How to break up with a startup
Tweet From Google Reader Without Overwhelming Your Followers
Except for NaCl.
I didn't hear any noise about this compared to, say, when Tumblr was down for a similar amount of time. Does that speak accurately to their relative popularity?
Witholding the truth isn't lying.
Sounds good. Please let me know when you're in town. And let's make that happen.
Thanks for the thoughts - We'll share more about our solutions as we approach our launch.

Also, Playoff Beards rock; perhaps the word lickable is a bit over the top...
Oh, boo-hoo. You've also apparently been raised to believe that someone (probably the government in some form) owed you the life of your dreams, and as it dawns that you might have to work for a living, you assume your "rights" are being violated, have a tantrum, and compose yet another leftist manifesto.

I suspect there is something wrong with how you were educated by "the system," but it's not what you think.
Python wrapper for the FrameNet (lexical resource for English) library
It's pretty easy to disprove statements like "America Lacks Meaningful Innovation" by counterexample. The iPhone. kiva.org. Tesla. SpaceX.

Something along the lines of "Much of America's so-called innovation is meaningless" might be more accurate. But any environment that is sufficiently conducive to innovation will produce a lot of meaningless innovation along with the meaningful stuff. Innovation consists of a huge number of failed experiments and a few successful ones.
So....after wasting a few years on failed useless ventures, then 10+ years on a successful useless ventures, then hopefully being one of the dozen companies in a decade to make billions either thru an exit or revenues, enough to finally launch your world changing venture and accomplish success in another 10 years or so?

Yeah, that explains why America is morally and monetarily bankrupt.
Using the logic of this company, why stop there? Why not go after users of the apps that use in-app purchases?
How do you arrive at the conclusion that his follower list is "mostly organic?"

It's true that having over 500k followers puts you in the top 700 Twitter users.

It's equally true that having over 500k followers does not automatically make someone a "social media expert" (Donald Trump, Lindsay Lohan, & Nicole Richie are in that list - I don't think I'd hire them for social media strategy).

Is it also true that you can't be a social media expert with <500k followers? I don't know the answer to that one, probably not.

It's definitely true that Gary V's follower count alone does not confer expert status, nor deny it from anyone else.
A bit more detail on the non-randomness:

But when the numbers were drawn, it turned about that 90 percent of the winners came from applications that were submitted on just the first two days of a 30-day registration period.
This can be a slam dunk!

If I can say "I want to see positive coverage of my product in NYT, WSJ, SF Chronicle etc and am willing to pay $500 for each positive piece", then that’s it!

I'd pay $500 for each full review in a tier 1 publication (and half that for a simple mention), $300 for tier 2, and $200 for tier 3, and $100 for blogs etc.

I'd define each tier by the number of impressions or circulation etc. I'd also like to say which demographics I want to focus on etc.

You're an explosion waiting to happen, and will truly disrupt PR firms (I think you’ll be a hit even if you’re mildly idiotic ;)! A caveat, a PR person can ruin a product’s or a business’ reputation by being shortsighted and annoying the press too much (shortsighted PR people don’t care about the long term relationship between the client and the press, they just want one piece in the press, grab the $500 and move on, so you will have to put safety mechanisms in place, also mechanisms against 2 or more people pitching the same product to the same guy at the same time (the press will hate this and blacklist the product due to the companies over-aggressive PR tactics), then fighting over who got the coverage). These are all easily addressable, if you can’t figure them out then I can help you figure this out (free, I don't mind helping its fun).

Anyway, big need, big market, do it already! :-)
You're ideal man is a university professor, he gets funding from NSF and NIH, and if you do work your ass off, Yes you do get significant share of the credit.

Go to a CS PhD program if you really want to innovate, forget all the crap that is spread on HN if you do get into top 5 or top 10 school, you will have equal amount of resources and at University even though they do have their own interests, they still want to see you succeed.

This is main difference between working and PhD, at a job you are a replaceable number at university depending on your advisor they are more concerned about your success and theirs as well.
He actually replies to every single person who contacts him (via email or whatever medium). Kind of scary.
Despite the downvotes, I actually think this comment is quite a useful viewpoint. Posting something like this is a risky thing to do, and I'd be curious to know either in this situation down the road or other similar ones whether this gambit pays off. Does the goodwill-via-brutal-honesty outweigh potential loss of consumer/employee confidence?
1.) I read his website.

2.) I Googled terms including "abelow", "lodsys", and "patent troll".

In other words, he plainly states he runs those businesses on the provided links and has a history of patent trolling.
It's also on youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43P0kWswWWI&feature=youtu...
Another developer here -- I already like the guy. Assuming he's not an ass in real life, I'd happily work for him (if I was looking for work).
Are you there, HN? It's me, Fernando!
The PDF file was 720 KB. The Scribd reader page was 3.1 MB (800+KB of JavaScript alone). So the PDF would actually load quicker than the cloud reader.
1. changed
2. read his argument again, he implies that someone from 100 years ago, would hardly find anything different
Seems like punishment instead of logic.
Your comment forced me to think harder about what makes an "inferior" product. Yes, Betamax was the first example that came to mind. But, as you say, it was superior only to engineers since picture quality mattered most to them. In the same vein, Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, metric standards in general -- in my mind, it's so absurdly clear which one is "better." However, in the pro-Fahrenheit camp, there are lots of reasons (which are irrelevant to me) why people think F is better. PAL is (arguably?) better than NTSC. Linux is better than Windows.

So, I should amend my original statement and say that there are lots of products which were superior in engineering terms but lost the battle on other grounds, whether it's user-friendliness, price, availability, installed user-base -- all of which I (incorrectly) grouped into the term "marketing" in my original post.
Thanks. I was beginning to despair that no one was going to catch it.
If someone here wants to create a safe-haven start-up with Nameservers, hosting, the works, I'll be the first to give you guys a hundred bucks.

Hell, I would give you fifty just to try and blog about your experiences.

I don't know where and how to host and direct to my sites anymore just to avoid what, to me, is unwarranted seizures and surveillance of my digital data.
If you were linked to them in any significant way, wouldn't you already know this? I'm sure his co-founders know he's inexperienced, investors certainly should, so it's probably not a surprise to any of them.

I do appreciate the humility and openness.
Implement vague and capricious laws that criminalize large swaths of the target population. Enforce them only against your enemies and use the threat of prosecution to eliminate dissent.
LimeWire settles: are Google and Amazon next on RIAA's docket?
I loved that podcast... also, you can find his QVC work on youtube. Gold.
Teen arrested for ranking looks of classmates on Facebook.
Thanks. The "only 3 innovations have lasted over 100 years" premise isn't original. I first heard it at a graduation ceremony and it made a lasting impact on me. Ofcourse the speaker was very charismatic & way more dramatic than I am :)

But the phrase keeps popping up in several places. For instance, in Hedgehogging, Barton Biggs goes to a pre-2000 tech conference where they famously declare that technology innovations will propel the Dow to 20,000 in 1 year! Biggs calls bullshit & points out that genuine innovation like Air Conditioning & steam engines are once-in-a-lifetime event. He is asked if the internet is a "fundamental" innovation & he disagrees. He becomes a laughing stock. The next year the Dow drops 2000 points.
It is trivially true that you're not lying if you believe what you're saying.

However, in context, his message is closer to "it's not lying if you lie convincingly to yourself first," which is one of the more pernicious flaws in our culture.
iphone == meaningful???
Lol
iphone is just maarketing