skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: In your career, what are you most embarrassed about?
In your career, what are you most embarrassed about?

Have you made a fatal mistake that you, of all people, should never have?
ITA are actually the technology behind Orbitz, Kayak, and various airlines' own search technology. IIRC one of the few (and proud) Lisp shops making money hand over fist.
It's built with open standards.
"If you are GPL then its trickier because you have to call out what sorts of assets and distribution mechanisms are covered."

This is a straight up lie. We were discussing assets like pictures, blog posts, etc. None of these assets, distributed in any way, would ever be affected by the license of the software used to build the website on which they appear. Just like the text you edit in Word is not owned by Microsoft and the photo you edit with Photoshop is not owned by Adobe.

There is nothing tricky about the GPL (or any other Open Source license) in this context (or really in any other, since the license is extremely well-documented), and it is FUD to suggest otherwise.
But if you lend someone a copy that they could keep indefinitely, the creator doesn't get paid for that copy. Isn't that simple enough?
You're totally right, that market share argument is often vague and probably unfalsifiable, but there's at least a clear logic to it.

"It hasn't happened yet," on the other hand, is not an argument at all. An analysis charting data of total malware vs. market share would be more interesting, but an argument for why it hasn't happened yet, and will continue not to would be the most interesting to me.

I'm not sure I follow your last point.
Rendered meaningless by different countries.
Lose Experience or Time?
Which is better?
I might be able to use Hype for a client project to replace a Flash animation. But I need to know what versions of Internet Explorer that Hype animations will work with (most likely using explorercanvas). I couldn't find browser compatibility information on the website.
Right. And sorry, I need to clarify. That number is the sum of our two cat apps. Our second app is a painting game (for cats). The code is essentially the same, just with a bit of GL painting + facebook sharing. (Yup, people post their cat's paintings on facebook.)
I'm thrilled that you've actually played our game.
If it is going to be an annoying animation that is getting in the way of getting things done, I will skip it or the site, no matter what it is built in.

Frankly, I don't miss the Flash animations - 30 seconds of nonsense I have to click through before I get to see the real deal. Thank god for FlashBlock. Now I wonder if this will make folks say "ah, so you have flashblock, eh ? how about this ? html5 animations ftw...". Hopefully this will be put to more good use.
5 Strategies for Maximizing Your Website’s Conversion Rate
Why you ask?

The license commercial software uses gives you no rights to do much of anything, yet nobody thinks Adobe owns photos edited in Photoshop.

Exactly. No one thinks that with Adobe. Yet as the original poster pointed out, people do have confusion with open source licenses.

Why should granting more rights change that? It makes no sense to me.

Rights granted with GPL aren't strictly more to the person deploying the GPL code.

And GPL already calls out what is covered. Source code. It's incredibly clear.

The GPL definition of source code is the following:

The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.

Honestly, I'm not sure exactly what that means. I have a good idea, but if deploying with it, I'd certainly get a lawyer involved.
"You can complain all you want about food manufacturers making tasty/addictive foods which are bad for you, but they were responding to the public's demand for "low fat" driven by bad science."

I am arguing that they were responding to the public's demand for cheap, tasty, convenient food driven by... people liking cheap, tasty, convenient things. The "bad science" didn't do much harm because the science didn't have much influence over what people ate anyway.

Given what I've quoted you saying above, and the fact that you don't have to scroll down very far to hear the suggestion of lowering one's fat intake called "the greatest scientific fuck up of all time", I don't think I'm arguing against a claim that isn't being made.
Parabola GNU/Linux joins the FSF list of free distributions
Most of the youngsters are spam machines.
I have 10 invites...
Hipmunk CEO on Today’s Climate: Yeah, Entrepreneurs Think It’s Getting Wacky
ITA's site actually predates Hipmunk and the Google merger.

The reason ITA keeps it a secret is because ITA is a middleware company and not consumer facing. Bing, Hipmunk, Kayak, Orbitz, Hotwire, and many more are all customers of ITA[1] and it takes pains to not compete with its customers.

That's also why everyone was freaking out when Google offered to buy ITA. Google could have easily pulled the plug on all of those sites and taken over the industry. So Google had to commit to tons of concessions to ensure that wouldn't happen in order to get approval for the merger. Basically, Google has agreed to ongoing audits by the Justice Department for years after the merger. [2]

[1] http://www.itasoftware.com/about/customers.html

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/technology/09google.html
Webs of Trust and How To Decentralize Them (Bitcoin)
Oracle vs. Google - jostling for position
As everyone else here has said, actually do something. Start or contribute to an open source project. Write a web app and get people do use it, just make something that shows off your skills.
Yep. Let me use this thread for an alternative phrasing. What is your annual income / your monthly expenses? < 12? 12-18? 18-24? 24-36? >36?
This is a straight up lie. We were discussing assets like pictures, blog posts, etc. None of these assets, distributed in any way, would ever be affected by the license of the software used to build the website on which they appear.

I didn't say they were. I said you'd have to explain it. You'd have to make a distinction about code, non-code, services, shipping code, etc...

Otherwise this same company says, we can use this same code to compile with this fancy new HTML5/Javascript compiler and deploy on iPhone. The nice sales guy said that we don't need to be concerned with the GPL license. Uh oh. If only he would have spent five minutes telling us how the GPL worked. (That said, I'm not really sure what the OP's product provided, to know what other assets would be effected, if any. So this scenario is purely speculative)

My point, you do need to explain the GPL in more detail than many other open source licenses. The OP made this clear in the real world from the fact that potential customers didn't undertand it.

But I think this is the problem with the GPL movement. They're in such disbelief that people may not understand they flame anyone who takes the time to explain it.
It's not all that epic. These effects had already been measured by other experiments and were found to agree with general relativity to much more accuracy than the GP-B measurements. What GP-B brought to the table was a direct measurement, as opposed to indirect measurements used by the other experiments.

However, because the way they measured it pushed the limits of engineering, if GP-B had NOT agreed with GR there is good chance the results would have been dismissed as most likely due to equipment flaws.

While it is in general a good idea to confirm measurements, especially using different techniques, in a case like this where the confirmation will be much less precise than the other experiments and will likely be rejected if it fails to confirm, you have to wonder why this was funded over other projects.

The answer to that turns out to be simple: politics. When space scientists ranked all the proposed missions under consideration, GP-B came in dead last. However, its proponents went to Congress, and got Congress to override the normal process for prioritizing missions, forcing NASA to move it to the front, ahead of more scientifically worthy missions.

There are a lot of very worthwhile scientific missions that we can't fly due to budget limitations. It's a shame to see $750 million of the limited budget go to a mission so far down on the importance list.
How to get things done: don’t open your post
If you use git-svn, this makes git svn dcommit -n actually useful to review what you are going to commit:

[alias]
svndiff = !"$(git svn dcommit -n | grep "diff-tree" | sed 's/diff-tree/git diff-tree --color=auto -p/')"
Google Was Warned on Rogue Drug Ads
At least one of us isn't outraged, and why should I be? The news media goes too far sometimes. It's about time they learn to respect people's privacy, even if it means there's no news!
I think you mean "owned a really cute gray cat and was able to get a lot of models to pose semi-naked and only wearing his brand t-shirts while holding the cat". Maybe there was real porn too.

He also did AdBrite and a few other things; pud is pretty damn prolific, and a smart/nice guy (I've seen him speak at Founder Institute and other startup events). The other people involved in blippy are earlier in their careers but also pretty involved in online forums, clueful, etc.
Not quite true.

This app makes money because anyone that owns a cat and an iPad looks for apps that their cat(s) can play with.

The same is true for baby apps. There are some super simple apps that babies enjoy, and those apps make very good money considering the development effort.

That being said, not everyone can pull it off. This particular cat app is fairly well done in my opinion. One must also keep in mind that just cause it makes $4k/month right now, it doesn't mean it'll continue to make that much 6 months from now.
I didn't get the PMP cert after it cost me the offer from google.
Submitted earlier, clever way to get around the filter though: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568900
Yes. Thank you very much. Although commercial PSDs for iPhone are still very rare. Hopefully it will pick up soon.
As far as predicting the market share at which Macs get malware, Adam J O'Donnell seems to have given a 5 to 10% of the Internet population estimate in this presentation: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/spamconf/SC2008/Odonnell_gamet..., with a more cautious paper here: http://www.securitymetrics.org/content/attach/Metricon3.0/j3...

That presentation dates from 2008, it looks like, and O'Donnell gives both Mac and Linux a 4% market share at the time, which seems a little suspicious in that almost everyone else gives Linux just barely 1% even now.
Hacker News now supports https
While I'm not particularly defending the situation that's arisen, what public good is served by knowing that a footballer had an affair?

Censoring that Trafigura were dumping toxic waste was, I agree, wrong. But revealing that two people are/were sleeping together is just salacious gossip; I can't see who it helps and it certainly doesn't help the families of the individuals concerned.
Spam targets.
Options are available for trading only after a certain number of days (generally 60 to 90 days, but in some cases much earlier than that).
For a long time matrix.itasoftware.com was password protected but bugmenot/bugmenot worked. I am not sure when they made the search service non-password protected. I imagine if it gets popular, it will go back to being password protected, as it is rude to compete with your own customers.
I don't understand why these examples even need to be optimised, just keep a pinkie finger hovered over tab and leverage bash's autocomplete :|
You'd need a bunch of callbacks to chain the animations in jQuery, plus the cost of including the library.

The Smashing Magazine article is not using the shorthand declarations for -webkit-animation, which would compact it much more.

Give it a spin, you will be pleasantly surprised, especially when it comes to tiggering the animation (with :hover).

You are right that browser coverage is a joke, but support is there in FF Aurora (who knows about IE10).
40 Unusual & Attractive 404 Page Designs
The 404 page is about as ubiquitous on the Internet as Google itself. It’s the most common error we see, thrown at us when the server can’t find the page we’re looking for. Particularly on larger sites, 404 errors are bound to show up after a while, due to mistakes made during changes to a site, its content and design.
If you use firefox and https everywhere, here is a rule you can put in
<firefox-profile>\HTTPSEverywhereUserRules\News.ycombinator.xml

<ruleset name="News.ycombinator">
<target host="news.ycombinator.com" />
<rule from="^http://(www\.)?news.ycombinator\.com/" to="https://news.ycombinator.com/"/>
</ruleset>

I discovered this via the HTTPS Finder extension

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/https-finder/

used together with HTTPS Everywhere is very nice for discovering sites that serve via HTTPS

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/
Absolutely brilliant work. Site is perfectly aimed to the target market, polished, the way you made it initially free with an upgrade, and working with the zoo? Spot on.
I completely agree.

Every time I see a digital library service, where you can borrow a book or other media that then is deleted after certain lending period, I can't help but thinking that they are missing the point.

The time-limited lending period used by libraries is a bug. A bug that's solved by technology.

Libraries exist in order to spread knowledge and information. But they can't share their knowledge to everyone who wants it, they physically can't keep enough books or duplicate them in a timely manner. This bug has been fixed by digital technology, and we can duplicate them in a timely manner to anyone who wants it.

But some people insist on keeping the bug, and that they are doing society a favor.
I don't know that the "market share" argument is unfalsifyable. The Witty Worm of 2004 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witty_(computer_worm)) attacked a particular vendor's firewall implementation. It seems to have infected every one of the 12,000 members of the susceptible population. That's a pretty small market share, even in the firewall market, even in 2004.

The Witty Worm seems like a good counter-example of the "market share" argument.

As for full disclosure, I personally regard the "market share" argument as a form of the Special Pleading logical fallacy.
Earbits (YC W11) is a new breed of artist-focused Internet radio
> If we keep the protests without flags

Huh? What flags are objectionable?

> and political bias it shouldn't be a problem with sunday's elections.

What's the point of a protest without "political bias"?

Heck - what is a protest without political bias? "We want gravity?"
Iterating Over The Full Range
> For comparison, how far in "debt" is the road system (which costs far more to operate and has zero "revenue")?

When did MA repeal its gas taxes, license fees and taxes, and sales tax on auto related stuff?
I find SML a much "prettier" language than OCaml, but OCaml is much more widely used and maintained; SML seems to be largely a dead language now.
Ask HN: Going freelance. What are your best advice to new consultant?
I am going freelance consultant as of 6/1 -- I am excited yet nervous.<p>What are your best tools for keeping your self organized, managing client info/time/data/etc?<p>I am a health care systems design consultant - not a developer. Ill need to track time spent, just found Toggl. and invoice etc..<p>What do you do as a consultant?
"That will be a fight we take on at some point," he said. "My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age."

Sounds like a great reason to avoid Facebook, because I can assure you the kids who are spending time on Facebook today are doing it instead of expanding their education.
how are you making money with it?
That's a seriously cool business model. Can't believe no one thought of it before. Brilliant.
Alternatively, what's your salary in liters of Coca-Cola? Or Mars bars?
That just isn't fair at all. He clearly wants to fix things. That's why he's experimenting.

How does hiding scores reduce the quality of content on HN? I'm still not seeing any relationship between the issue and what you're complaining about...
Nice! Here's a version with CSS transitions

http://jsfiddle.net/KJAh2/
When put next to how far Facebook has come in the same amount of time, Twitter really feels like a shadow of what it should be in terms of adding new feature sets and even stability. The potential to be great is still there, but they could also be the next MySpace if they don't start to play catch up.
It is epic because he predicted this before any of the technical wizardry was even in existence.

So, sure - the proof may not be epic -- but the prediction certainly is, especially even moreso that he is correct (again)
Hey Mike, I have a technical question.

We need to set up a LAMP server that runs VPN for some remote printers. What hosting solution to choose that allows for setting up and tuning of VPN for our needs with as little constraints as possible?

Thanks!
Can you describe what you mean by "scalable content generation"? Sounds very interesting!
Otherwise this same company says, we can use this same code to compile with this fancy new HTML5/Javascript compiler and deploy on iPhone. The nice sales guy said that we don't need to be concerned with the GPL license. Uh oh. If only he would have spent five minutes telling us how the GPL worked.

None of those are rights you would have with commercial software. You can't redistribute Word or Photoshop or Camtasia, and you can't bundle them up with a new UI and call it your own work and sell it on the iPhone. The GPL just happens to give you some ways to go about doing so that would have been illegal under commercial licenses. The end user has more rights under the GPL than they would under commercial licenses, generally speaking, and it is disingenuous to keep repeating FUD that says otherwise.

My point, you do need to explain the GPL in more detail than many other open source licenses. If you disagree, I say you're the liar.

We are discussing content like blog posts and photo assets. There are no discussions to be had about the license of the software used to distribute them, as it has no affect on them.

So, yes, I disagree with you, and I don't understand how you can come to your conclusions. They simply do not make sense in this context. You're making outlandish claims about the GPL that simply are not true, and defending them against all reason.

This is why I really didn't want to discuss this with you, again. You clearly have a bone to pick with the GPL that makes no sense to me, and you repeatedly spread FUD about its power to control end users, with no regard for facts.
Did the experiment use a control? That is, did they put other gyros in places where space time should not have been twisted and observe no deviation?

If not, how do they know that the deviation was in fact caused by twisting space time?
I wonder if a system that weighed upvotes based on the commenter's karma would make things better. The top 10% (or 50%) of users could get full upvoting capability, while the rest can give a fraction of an upvote based on their location on the karma order.
>Mac market share will reach a tipping point and writing viruses for OS X will be lucrative

Playing with the $59.99 "price" of Mac Defender it's probably only taken a dozen or so purchases to get a return on the design/HTML/CSS, the Cocoa, and hosting, etc. general development time required to put this together.

Depending on the numbers (un)reported - it's not hard to imagine:

a) Mac Defender is already profitable
b) it could become very profitable
c) other malcontents will likely recognize this...

So I think it reasonable to speculate the OS X malware inflection point is now.
HELP ME DEVS
Hey DEVS my profile got hacked I need some help
So one of my businesses is a remote Rails shop. We helped to couple dozen statups to develop prototypes fast, get new version of product, support, consulting etc. Many of them got funded after, some became profitable businesses. Am I doing something wrong? :)
Yeah, that struck me too. I'm pretty sure that's definitely a pretty serious crime to be blogging about casually.
A tool won't keep you managed, only you can keep you managed. So I wouldn't go crazy with trying to find the perfect tool, aim for something that's simple and easy to maintain so you can focus on billable time and marketing.
I majored in Latin, thinking that teaching jobs would be easy to come by when, in fact, they weren't. That cost me around 6 years, with the dubious benefit that I was fluent in a dead language and that I nearly know the etymology of a fantastic number of words in English.
I may be a corner case, but I suggest you https your entire site. I have my browser set to alert upon transitioning from https to http, and the alerts quickly become annoying while navigating your site.

That aside, I'm one more hoping you can bring some sanity, on behalf of the consumer, to this market.
Eh, what would you know?
looks pretty interesting, but I think your homepage needs some more explanations. Is this for local networks only, or can I use it to install software across the internet? We have staff in 6 cities, many working from home with company supplied computers. I would like a solution like this to keep the virus software etc, up to date. You may want to look at a monthly charge instead ($9.95 per month) or a charge for an account with so many licenses - 10 PCs for $10, 50 PCs for $25 per month, etc.
Ancient argument long settled. Those don't come close to meeting the cost of maintaining this stuff. Even roads (e.g. the pike) which are expressly mandated by law to support themselves via usage fees fail to break even.

It's a hypocrisy argument: government subsidies on transportation are bad, except for the method of transportation you use. Some people actually take those buses and subways and have different perspective.
I find the best entrepreneurs aren't embarrassed by much of anything and seem to embrace their mistakes.
Original source: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/05/malware-on-the-mac...

From the Hacker News Guidelines[1]: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

The fact Mac OS X is a security pushover is pretty well known[2]. I wouldn't be surprised if more macs weren't rooted with something much stealthier than Mac Defender. Disclaimer: I use a mac.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/faster-forward/post/ie-s...