skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2 Weeks With a Broken G+ Profile
So, being the intrepid beta tester I am, I decided to put non-English ascii characters to use in my Google+ Profile. In going for alt+129 which generates an ü, I mistyped a few ascii characters, thinking it was 0129 or some other wrong key combination. I thought I had erased them all when I got the proper ü, but no apparently I did not.

After saving my profile I was quick to discover my mistake, this has rendered my profile un-editable for two weeks.

I've submitted feedback, even talked with a handful of Google employees all who assure me it's on their bug tracker. While obviously I'm just one user out of millions, I can't help but wonder what the bug might do for other non-American ascii characters.

So now I sit in limbo, with an uneditable Google+ profile until the powers that be fix this specific bug.

Oh the joys of being an early adopter. I can get my "I Broke Google" merit badge.
She seems to have combined a few separate gripes into one large rant.

The main issue (as I read it) was that the "YC system" has attracted people that are only there for a quick exit and a pile of cash. She wants more of those brilliant graduates of Stanford, Harvard and Yale to make the world a better place instead of cloning Groupon for a fast buck.

It would be nice, but it's probably a bit too idealistic for the real world.
Watching Videos and Vote your Favorite Parts :  HTML5 Video Voting
Microsoft's strategy so far seems to be to choke the air out of Android by going after the handset vendors and not Google itself. If they can use the Nortel patents to further this strategy then they could seriously hinder Android's growth by making it too expensive for handset makers to continue to sell Android phones.

Personally I find this collective ganging-up on a disruptive newcomer while shrieking about the sanctity of "innovation" to be one of the most disgustingly disingenuous tactics I've seen in 13 years of working in software. Neither Microsoft nor Apple would be in business today if they hadn't copied their competitors outright and Google is bringing at least as much real innovation to the mobile marketplace as they are. Witness the wholesale appropriation in iOS 5 of Android's superior notification system, for instance.
Why Microsoft’s tablet strategy might not be a complete mistake
Does Comcast give people the option to upgrade if they exceed their cap? The whole situation would have been very different if Comcast told him he had to upgrade to $100/mo.
Who's the programmer?
It's an interesting tidbit on economics and mass psychology. Also the effect is most likely is being used "hack" the economy.
"I don't know how you can reasonably value a company that has only existed for a year or two at that level."

That is a fair question.

Brad Templeton once observed that if he sent a joke to everyone on the Internet with the caveat "If you chuckled, click here to send me a penny." and only 1% of the population found it funny. That would be a $100,000 payday with a billion readers where 99% of the people didn't even think it was funny.

The secret truth that Brad captured (way before it was well known too) is that the rate at which a pure information company can earn money is essentially unlimited. Not a lot of people could imagine Brad's scenario, they got bogged down in the details like "gee processing the payment would cost more than a penny" or "how do you force them to pay a penny" or whatever. But now Google comes along and capitalizes on exactly that idea, except that rather than have the users click on something if they think its funny, they have someone click on something if they think it may be an answer to their question, and rather than processing them one penny at a time, Google gathers those clicks and just does an accounting transaction which becomes an actual payment once a month for the aggregate transaction. But they don't make anything, rather they convert an action into money, and they do that at web scale. No limit to how much money they can generate. So from an investment value, they have a very very large rate of return. The actual limit is how much money advertisers are willing to inject into the system.

So if you have a company whose revenue is only limited by the amount of money its 'customers' are willing to inject, and you can make a credible case for the fact that customers will be willing to inject $100M+ per year into the system, then you can make the argument that the company is 'worth' a billion dollars. (or multiple billions of dollars).

So while I agree with the unspoken criticism that some recent valuations seem high based on available information, if those valuations are coming from folks who have done their due diligence then I expect they have some line of reasoning that justifies that value to their own satisfaction. In the 'individual investor' bubble of the late 90's it was clear that individual investors were doing no diligence at all.
For a long time Twitter apps were developed simply to enjoy the Twitter hype rather than any financial gain. For some reason Mainstream media adopted Twitter as the invention of the century, so developing a unique Twitter app was a way to get linked to from some gushing NYT article.

Now that Twitter is less of a novelty, and the chances of making any money off it are not impressive, it's not such an attractive prospect, regardless of Twitter's own actions.
I disagree: you definitely have to be able to understand lots of complicated stuff to get a PhD in astrophysics from a place like Caltech. And even if string theory isn't physics (i.e., doesn't make testable predictions) it still is a kind of math or at least inspires a lot of math.
Yeah because Matz never really left japan, or spoke to "westerner" developers before. So this will be a HUGE change... seriously?
I rediscovered legos after more than 30 years, when my son got big enough to use them. Soon I was having more fun than he, creating vehicles (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilamont/4298420256/) and other objects.

Lego knows that their customer base includes adults. Besides expositions and clubs that get some support from the company, you sometimes see Lego sets with a photo on the front of the box featuring an adult male instead of little kids!

Another thing I've noticed about Legos since rediscovering them a few years back: They have a really sophisticated retail operation that's not unlike what Apple does with the Apple Store. They're well designed, have very knowledgeable staff, and feature lots of goodies that you won't see in mass market retail outlets, including high-end sets and even a 3D animation/"augmented reality" that is activated when you hold certain boxes in front of an in-store camera (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20003273-1.html)
Thanks for the no-login suggestion. I really didn't want to go down the 4chan road, but it might make this interesting.
No, potentially world changing products. Most of which will fail. As most vc funded companies fail the failure is ok. She is complaining that the potential upside is too low due to lack of ambition to really change things radically.
I think it's better to think of OSS as commoditizing infrastructure. OSS hasn't been very successful at developing finished, end-user applications and there is still a healthy market for polished, professional apps.

Honestly I think the bigger threat to the indie developer is big companies dumping products on the market at rock-bottom prices and making up the difference with ads and addons. When everybody is used to paying a dollar for Angry Birds it's very difficult to charge a more reasonable price for other software.
RC4 has known weaknesses, but it's still extremely difficult to crack when implemented correctly. Attackers want to go for your weakest point, which is almost certainly not RC4; typically it's far more difficult to crack RC4 than to steal your data by finding a SQL injection or buffer overflow, or simply breaking into your building.
Been iterating on a realtime social video app. Does HN approve?
Do you have some examples of Lego boxes that show adults on the box? I tried a quick search on Google images, but only found some jubilee sets (like http://www.flickr.com/photos/sackerman519/3687795718/) featuring an adult.
Microsoft COO Relishes Windows on Mac at Retail Store
I find this extremely irritating too.

The way I overcome it is by using "Read It Later" (http://www.readitlaterlist.com) to bookmark the interesting ones during my initial early morning scan.
There's just one thing about this article that makes me feel eerie. It sounds like a piece of propaganda. PG tries evoking an emotional response out of the reader, pulling some random unsupported facts out of nowhere, like a religious preacher who'll do anything to support his point of view. What doesn't help is that since he's an investor, he is directly profiting from people working for rates below market rates and making it big. Nothing wrong with that. But still. Eerie.

" The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups."
WHOA! really? I mean, I don't disagree but this is a fairly huge statement. He should back it up or <every intelligent reader> will assume that he's holding them for idiots.

"I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. "
Oh, no! I'm not an animal! And if I am, I'm certainly the WILD TIGER FROM THE JUNGLE rather than a zoo-domesticated kitten. I SHOULD QUIT RIGHT NOW.

Again, very broad connection. Full-time employees are nothing like zoo animals. They can leave any time they want, for one.

The question is -- did PG ever work at a big company like Microsoft/Google/etc? Hard to tell from the article. Perhaps PG's intense imagination caused him to believe certain things are true while in reality they're illusions.

"It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. "
This smells. Smells bad. This would be a lot better and believable:

I worked at <a huge company> and it sucked. I spent most of my time figuring out how to impress my boss and come to the office on time, and how to log my hours properly. When I quit because it got unbearable, I realized that my logging-hours-properly skills and and getting-to-the-office-on-time skills are unmarketable, and quite frankly, a bunch of bullshit.
You can get in our beta international SMS program here http://www.twilio.com/international-sms
Watch,harry potter,Online Free
Watch,harry potter,Online Free
Actor, which describes the part of Ron Weasley, has shared the auspices of the next Harry Potter film franchise would blossom into a fairytale climax and the intersections of Hogwarts school of magic
I wonder if this is going to push the NH guys to do an official migrations package. You can already come pretty close to it just using the schema migration APIs, so they have a lot of the pieces. I'd love to see some competition in what I think is historically an under-addressed part of development on any given Microsoft stack.
This is a good point. The handful of genuine OSS success stories obscures the fact that most OSS products just aren't very good.
You can upgrade without paying until your balance runs low. Just set up auto-renew and you can buy a number.
You can see I've posted at least one pg article I found insightful but wasn't voted up, so anecdotal evidence suggests people don't vote it simply because it is written by pg.

And towards your second point, as someone who has been on this site for little over six months, this is the first time I came across this article and found it interesting, insightful, and gave me lots of things to think about. I presume there were enough other people who also thought so.
Often times details surrounding an act will be kept from the jury. That's how you get juries that send a husband who was growing pot for his cancer-stricken wife to jail. The context was kept from the jury.
Note to college students and other professionals, you might have access to all of these ebooks via Safari Books Online. Stop playing the game and get back to coding in JS.
For that matter, why can I get 200GB/mo at 50mbit/s plus a server for $20 from a VPS provider, and $.15/GB beyond that ($.10 if purchased in advance in the case of Linode)? Why do consumer ISPs need to charge so much more?

The ISP has to maintain and upgrade thousands of miles of physical plant to deliver data to customer's homes in the geographic regions they cover. For a typical cable ISP for instance there's about 3-5 miles of copper between your modem and the the fiber node and typically dozens of miles between the fiber node and the provider's headend/datacenter where they uplink to the Internet -- which incidentally for smaller rural ISPs may itself be hundreds of miles away from competitive rates on data. Going back to the cost of maintaing/upgrading the infrastructure a small plant of only ~1000 miles typically requires at least a dozen full time employees simply to maintain it day to day and that's not including things like management, network engineers, customer service, technical support, equipment, contracted labour, customer installation, etc. On top of that you've got the cost of leasing access to the poles/underground conduits and the cost of powering the 3-5 miles of plant plus whatever operational costs you have to put gas into your fleet of vehicles, the cost of the vehicles themselves, insurance, etc. When you put this all together you're looking at some pretty huge overhead on the consumer side of Internet access plus whatever profit the company wants to make to justify all of the above. It's not a charity after all.
Some universities and clever ads have brainwashed non-technologists like Ms. Way into thinking that software do a lot of things that they do not really do. In some cases, the illusions are lies; in other cases, these folks are hoodwinked into believing that what software can do is done without much effort.
Speaking as a former reserve police officer: Law enforcement agents have many more restrictions places on their conduct than private citizens do. That's why there needs to be an "exigent circumstance" exception for them specifically.

Rest assured, a private citizen would be perfectly within his or her rights entering an apartment to stop a gas leak.
These 'tech people' are trying to run and grow businesses. Everything mentioned in the GP is relevant to that so I'm surprised that she (and you) would think differently.
Repost? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2757142
Just checked; it's actually opt-in. I made a new throwaway and visited proggit and was greeted with the option to add it to my frontpage.
Jury nullification (basically what you're referring to here) was a major justification of juries in the first place as it was thought to be a check on state power, but of course the state has neutered it over the last century along with most other checks on its power. Jury nullification is mostly a memory at this point and juries are generally instructed only to consider whether the defendant actually broke the law as such - not whether the law itself is just.
250GB is a rather absurd amount. But there's no reason Comcast couldn't just cut him off for the rest of the month, right? Seems pretty dumb.
How 28 poor countries escaped the poverty trap
Ask HN: I quit my job to start my own company. Now what?
For the last 5 years I've been the lead developer at a technology company in Nagoya that specializes in digital signage and custom internet solutions.

Over the last year and a half, I came to realize that I was not happy at my current job, and that I was depressed with the way that much of Japan handles developments in technology, specifically their reluctance to embrace such basic concepts as data-driven development and customer pattern analysis. (or even such simple things as being searchable on Google!)

For Japan to succeed in a global (and even domestic) market, that has to change.
I want to help bring about that change, and I've come to realize that I can't do that at my current job.

So because of a dream to change Japan (and the constant prodings of Patio11) come August, I will no longer be employed at my current company, and frankly that scares the bejesus out of me.

I have contacts, and I can probably make it as a freelancer, but that's not the reason I quit (although being freed of salaryman hours is a nice benefit).

I have a dream, but don't know how to bring it about.
It may be a stupid thing to post on a public forum, but it is what I believe in.

Are there any of you on HackerNews who have been in the same position?
What helped you see your dream through?
I wonder how hard it would be to turn this into a POS technology? Seems like if you just taped a Nexus S to the counter it would be almost there and you would be doing direct PayPal transactions with your customers.
Up to 41 percent of Netflix users plan to cancel
You have to switch to a small business account instead of a residential account with comcast. Then you get genuinely unlimited use, no bandwidth cap. That is the only way to get past their 250GB cap. It's absurd that they won't sell you more bandwidth on any residential plan at any price, and that they kick people off the service rather than charging overages.

You do not need to have a business location to do this, or actually have a business. They will sell you small business cable internet at your residential apartment.
What search engine?
I might be missing obvious examples, but I can't actually think of top-tier examples of a founder taking the company from 0 to 100, turning it over to new management, and leaving, with the results being a great, long-lasting tech company. At least, I can't think of any that produced companies with impact on par with the founders-stay-for-the-long-haul companies: Microsoft, Intel, Sun, Google, Dell, nVidia, etc. Apple is an almost-example; both founders were gone in less than a decade, but the general consensus seems to be that the post-founder management didn't run it well.

It's hard to imagine counterfactuals properly, but I can't imagine any of those turning out better if the founders had left within, say, a 5-7-yr exit timeframe. An Intel where Gordon Moore checks out in 1975? Or, a Google where the founders retired post-IPO, around 2004-05?
I can personally relate to this perspective as someone who doesn't live in the valley but follows it very closely.

Ultimately I think what the author is trying to say is that there is a lot of "disgust" (I'm trying to use that term loosely) about the current problem solving that is being produced out of the valley. Is it a problem that I walked by an old friend at a restaurant and didn't realize we knew each other? Oh, there's an iPhone app for that!? There is a difference between satisfying a market and actually solving what is to be considered a real life problem. I do think the current nature of the valley is that of "Wouldn't it be cool if I could..." rather than "My life would be substantially better off if I could..." I suspect this is what she is trying to highlight.

So this begs the real question - what do we consider to be real life problems? For an upper class American a problem may be that you were unable to figure out the name of the last song played on the radio and for poor villagers in Africa it's having no access to water. Is solving one person's problem more advantageous than another?
From Comcasts AUP:
What will happen if I exceed 250 GB of data usage in a month?

The vast majority - more than 99% - of our customers will not be impacted by a 250 GB monthly data usage threshold. If you exceed more than 250 GB, you may receive a call from the Customer Security Assurance ("CSA") team to notify you of excessive use. At that time, we will tell you exactly how much data you used. When we call you, we try to help you identify the source of excessive use and ask you to moderate your usage, which the vast majority of our customers do voluntarily. If you exceed 250GB again within six months of the first contact, your service will be subject to termination and you will not be eligible for either residential or commercial internet service for twelve (12) months. We know from experience that most customers curb their usage after our first call. If your account is terminated, after the twelve (12) month period expires, you may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to your needs.

They say they will help you identify the reason you went over your cap. "When we call you, we try to help you identify the source of excessive use and ask you to moderate your usage, which the vast majority of our customers do voluntarily." Which they clearly didn't do in this case. This would be acceptable if we had another option for broadband internet, but we don't.
GWT is awesome if you have a team of Java developers who aren't really web developers. You can be productive without having all the HTTP/css/javascript/html skills you would need otherwise (though you still want someone on your team who can look at the details underneath the abstraction).

But if you want something as fast and as scalable as possible, of course you can do better by working at a lower level.
But if you used Vonage it would count? Same type of service, different application of rules.
Code-generation has always been a major annoyance for real (ya, I said it) developers using MS tools. It'll be interesting to see if recipes are able to do what decades of similar promises from MS have failed to deliver.

The mention of a recipe for an AJAX grid is frightening though...like we are heading back into server-control world. Despite all the talk, MS never really bought into jQuery.

Also, I worry when the 2nd feature listed is that the default CSS/theme (which no one uses and is pretty ugly) supports mobile devices.

They mention deployment as a theme, but no feature to accompany it. It'll be interesting to see what they manage to do here. It's certainly a major pain point right now.

Of course, none of this addresses the primary issues with ASP.NET MVC: it's much, much, slower to develop in than Rails or Django.
It gets you funding
Using this system, you can still gather a bunch of web-published articles, print them out together, and call the results "Nature". Just in case you miss the current system.
OT: Is LLC better than C-Corp or S-Corp in CA? Isn't LLC mostly for real estate holding? What I have been doing is having a parent C-Corp and using DBA for individual product/company under it. I wonder whether I should switch to LLC.
To be pedantic, Protovis did also use SVG; it just had a layer of abstraction that somewhat obscured this, whereas D3's lower-level syntax makes it feel like you're manipulating SVG directly (making it a bit more intuitive to learn if you're already familiar with SVG).

I'll +1 the recommendation though. D3 is (unsurprisingly, coming from Mike Bostock: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/) brilliant.

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/