skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all in a name, isn't it? There are strict rules around how you're allowed to describe legislation as it appears in the voter guide, and this can be very contentious. Prop 8 in California was ultimately defined as "Eliminates Rights of Same-Sex Couples to Marry", but proponents of Prop 8 fought pretty hard to have it listed as "Defines Marriage as a union of a man and a woman" (or something like that). It makes a difference.

How it is presented in the media is, of course, completely up for grabs. I think prop 8 was promoted as "Defense of Marriage Act", and some media outlets went with it, others didn't.

I find examples that irritate me on the right and the left. I'm socially liberal, but I prefer to say that I support legal access to abortion, rather than describing myself as "pro-choice".

Of course, in the bare-knuckles world of politics, many people would say "thanks for the civics lesson, now please put some grease on my facial cut, check my glove strings, and get my water bottle, cause the bell is about to ring for round 10".
Some years back Coke took many bars to court that were serving Pepsi with rum as most customers said they want a "rum and coke" even if they didn't care it was Pepsi as the mixer. Coke argued (and won) on the customers behalf that they should be given what they asked for.

Afterwards some pubs put signs up saying "we only serve Pepsi" which covered them but most just started serving Coke coke.
Google+ Marks The End of Blogging As a Means of Personal Expression
Basecamp versus Google+?
What's about CD-Rs? 10 years? I know it depends on the quality of the disc.

In college a photography professor once mentioned that he used gold plated CD-Rs or something like that because they would last longer.
Let's talk about DAU then I'll be impressed.
Come on.

It would require non-trivial work to scrape the pages to get the html, set up parsing to handle different types of content, get into a format that could be imported into something else, etc. Not something I'm willing to spend my time setting up, and what about all the people who might want to export their tumblr content but can't program.
total aside but i went to set up Firefox sync for someone the other day and ended up ditching it all together.

in addition to a username/password for a sync account, you need to use an (unretrievable) sync key to add a browser. i understand the desire for security and privacy, but this is just horrible usability. i can get it all working obviously but there's no way this person (who is 80 years old) is going to be able to enter a key to set up the remote machines.

chrome's sync is much better. just use your gmail/google account credentials, and you're all set.
Committed to the repository - thanks!
At the cost of working on iOS.
I enjoy mine. It's solid and comfortable. I got it on Craigslist for $300. A company was going out of business and had a bunch of them to get ride of. You might get lucky like I did.

At my office we have the Human Scale Freedom's which are also comfortable, but not as adjustable. We've had 2 break (1 arm rest, one handle on the back) recently, but other than that they are great chairs.
Designing pro creative apps
"Tell me about screen sharing, audio and recording of both. That's what I really care about."

That issue is so specific to the litany of using current solutions it's not even funny - something we definitely hated before building.

We spent a LOT of time making sure audio integration and recording worked beautifully - we even built our own phone bridge system from the ground up so that when you click "record" you get audio from dial ins and from digital users all in one session.

After post-processing the recording on server side you can one click to export to YouTube, lots more formats coming soon.

In terms of screen sharing, beta accounts let you share with up to 50 (contact us if you need more), everything is cloud based (multiple cloud solutions for redundancy) so we're harnessing massive CPU power to deliver an experience that balances / beats the big boys on speed / quality.

Give it a try - if you didn't follow the link in the post go to http://www.meetingburner.com/ and enter beta code "boring" for instant access today.

Also blog contains updates from the last two cycles that list more specific feature details.
Even better as Pandora was using Flash via OpenLaszlo (translation: making flash even slower via another layer of indirection). Now to convince my company that Flash+OpenLaszlo is not the future...
I wish it had gone more into the advantages to this, over the standard method of switching on a state variable.
Let’s Build MyColorscreen Creative Community Together
Cover Flow in JavaScript
Let's bury Nokia when they are no longer the biggest mobile phone vendor in the world.
For HTML/CSS, Bulletproof Web Design is a great book. It doesn't get into graphical design though.
have you ever spent the first 10 minutes of your meeting answering technical questions from guests that are still trying to figure out how to log in?

This isn't a function of how easy software is to use. Some of the stuff I use, I find extremely easy and intuitive. What I fail to remember, is that depending on who's in my group, they may not necessarily understand how to Google small problems they have, or how the internet works in general (yes, I had to explain that URL referred to the text input bar at the top of the browser).

In one case, I actually wrote a PDF document with screenshots, on how to get a specific software working. As the meeting started, I received a call on my cell, with a member asking for help, in connecting. After diagnosing for a little while, I realized it was my fault - I had forgotten to write down that the software needs to be installed first.

As for this: Plugins? Downloads? Port restrictions on certain computers? I haven't checked this out yet, but I appreciate the effort of making meetings easier... but I'd bet six pennies that someone will still manage to screw up.
So, you have built a lot of interesting tools. For example, Youtube, and vimeo have usefull JS API's that you can use to interact with the their flash players, but other sites don't.
The way you solved this by asking the user could be an interesting way to bootstrap the problem of not knowing how long a piece of media is.

Here is where you fell short though. I have the ability to mark part of the timeline, but then I have no idea what to do next.

This is a little bit how I felt about the whole site, I wasn't entirely sure what I was suppose to do.
My reason for down voting is it came across as mocking Peroni. I certainly understood it was sarcasm but I did not think it was funny.

Edit: well, Peroni found it funny (didn't see his post when I replied.)
Can you make it work on Xbox 360, please?
No, tracking could lead to the very confusion that you are being warned against.
Pretty much every single bug or WTF in our legacy web app is the result of mis-managing or abusing mutable state. I am absolutely convinced that mutation is the enemy of reliable software. This is a good writeup, but I think we need to do more to demonstrate the difference to the average Java-slinging code monkey out there.
I'm sort of in the same place. I've been working on making my own blogging system that can house various projects I'm working on and it's been going... slowly. I'm nearly done with the first iteration of it though. I've rewritten it maybe 3 times, but I've learned a lot about coding while making it. Its current iteration is made so that I can extend it in various ways and once I get a few extensions I plan on open-sourcing it. It's been good to have a pet project to work on.

I would love to have someone with a lot more programming talent/knowledge than myself to show me what I'm doing wrong and how to do it better. Is there some way I could submit it when I get the basic structure finished (should be within the next week or two) and get someone to look at it? Is this the kind of thing I could bring to a hackerspace to show off and get ideas from?
I've been checking out Chicago Boss to get involved with Erlang on the web front.

Chicago Boss is an open-source web framework inspired by Rails and written in Erlang.
http://chicagoboss.org/projects/chicagoboss/wiki

Looks like a nicely coded and laid out project.
I know my rate of karma increase decreased substantially when I quit my previous job and started working for a small company (a startup, for a loose definition of "startup").

I don't know if historical karma values are readily available, it would be interesting to plot the rate of change over time.
341 * 20 * 0.8 = 5456 minutes of reading CVs.

Looks like a lot of work.
Very impressive and I like your message - solve real problems that people who have budgets are willing to pay for.
Companies Flee California
Wondering if those of you out in California are seeing/feeling this, or if it's sensationalism?
In the article you say "(As an aside, the conclusions of this study are wrong, although I appreciate the effort.)", giving a link to an article entitled "Floppy Disk Migration Pilot Project: Phase One Report". ( http://www.library.illinois.edu/prescons/pdf/Floppy_Disk_Mig...). But you don't say why the conclusions are wrong. You don't give any data to back up your assertion. I'm not arguing for or against the conclusions of the article, but it would be nice to have something more than a "because I say so".

I realize it is just an "aside", but it would be a lot more meaningful if you had a link to at least one other source that rebuts the conclusions of the article.
I had no clue what a printed facebook was until recently. I went to a community college that didn't have one of these and have never actually seen a real one. I'd be willing to be that the substantial portion of Americans which you speak of is actually the minority when it comes to knowing about the etymology of the word facebook.

On the other hand Google+ sounds like a better version of Google. Which I feel is more in line with their vision than merely an attempt at a Facebook killer.
Love that this was on top of HN this morning. Personally, step 1 is simply knowing what your employees are doing, what out of that they like, and what they want to be doing. Then jointly develop a plan to get them more of what they want.
This got me to sign up for the beta. Not to mention the fairly amusing demo video on their homepage. Interested to play with it and see if it lives up to it's own hype.
10 Free Beautiful Sets of Google+ Icons
Anonymous Releases 90,000 Military Emails
Amazon Wants California Voters to Decide Sales Tax Issue
+1 for "boring" products. I like making them; it's really a pretty decent gig.

First, there are still interesting problems even in less juicy domains. That's not particularly relevant, though, because the juicy domains have those too. At least we're pretty even so far...

The best part, for me, is that I get to make money solving some hard or tedious problems; clients happy to pay for that, and I'm happy to be in business. Then, I get to have actual fun with my "toy" projects rather than worry about finding some obscure way to monetize something that has very little intrinsic economic potential. I can afford to experiment, run a bunch of small operations, get other people involved, and see where they go.

In being somewhat tightly bound one side, I have almost unlimited creative freedom on the other.
The perfect auto transport company
We're in this exact same situation in my company.

A couple of engineers gave notice in the last week complaining about boredom. They ended up convincing one to stay(salary+ & better projects) but I feel their pain.

I think what happens in a start-up is that once the company reaches a certain size, the 'hard-part' is already done. The type of engineer that gets attracted to working at a start-up is usually one that likes to be in over their head a bit and trying to solve hard problems. Once that 'problem' is basically solved unless they move on to other things(platforms/frameworks/languages/etc), they're inevitably going to get bored, complain, hate their life and then quit.

I'm forwarding this article to management here, hopefully they'll get the hint.
Firefox version numbers and add-on breakage
Combination lock sleeve flash drive brings new meaning to hardware encryption
Facebook Groups/Lists vs Google Circles, Facebook you screwed up
Android Market “bug” leads to major decline in app sales
Exactly, I couldn't find this on the main site. I will sign up.
"Chrome version of Angry Birds", "Chrome version" was not built for all platforms from the beginning.
> Well mine neither.
Is Scanning and Situational Awareness a cure for Multitasking Drift?
GPL source code for Android 3.2 available in AOSP
Some additional reasons to solve boring problems for business:

1) People pay serious money for solutions.

2) Your competition is often clueless companies or, even better, clearly subpar manual processes or Excel spreadsheets. (Every Excel spreadsheet which has ever been emailed is a startup waiting to be born.) Nobody in the Valley will realize you exist, since they'll be too busy with mobisocialfotogames and other businesses attempting to separate jaded twenty-something's from money that they don't have and wouldn't spend if they did.

3) Most boring problems have a fascinating underbelly, if you're inclined to look for it. I knew a guy who did paper sales once. He was brimming with enthusiasm for it: he was an absolute magician who spoke the secret language of Paper. Every sheet had a character and a story, and he knew them all.
A friend of mine build the same thing for Spotify called mutify, but Spotify released an update within a couple of weeks just making the advertisements pause whenever your audio is muted. The Spotify client will also pause the ad if the audio level in Spotify is below ~30%. Hulu will have a harder time though since it's web based (right?). Nice hack anyway. :)
Same for me. 95% positive.
What you described is totally a function of how easy it is to use.
But those people aren't really savable anyway, are they?

If you've grown bored and decided that you aren't going to attempt to communicate that in any way to your employer, or do anything to change that boredom, you've already decided that you are on your way out, even if you haven't admitted to yourself.
40 Lessons from Southwest Airlines
341 * 20 * 0.8 = 5456 minutes.

Looks like a lot of work.
I bought the Herman Millar Mirra - the version down from the Aeron - about 4 years ago.

Was it worth the cost? Yeah, yeah it was.

Ignoring the ergonomic benefits, it's just a damn good chair. It's very comfortable. The tilt options are particularly good. I've been known to drag it into the living room to watch TV on if I'm having a bad posture day.

And the lifetime guarantee is really nice, and appears to Really Mean Lifetime. The seat started going about three months ago - I phoned HM up, and a new seat turned up in a truck about a week later.

I can imagine not buying another chair for 10-15 years or more, and at that sort of timescale, it's a bargain.

(See also: the Captain Vimes "Boots" theory.)
I have been thinking the same thing for the past week. In fact, I clicked around the website to make sure that I was reading the same news I was reading when I first found this site (about a month ago.) I was impressed with the logically valid articles I was reading. Now it seems that the site is turning into another reddit or digg. Sometimes I am under the impression that users submit stories that are really clever ruses for pushing a product or service. It's also baffling why every page is 3/4 filled with articles about Google +. I guess the site takes on a form suitable to the majority of its users so I should not complain.
Fundamental difference of Google+ relationships and Facebook Friends
Some people don't seem to have picked up on the fundamental difference between the 2-way style relationship of Facebook friends and the 1-way style relationships as employed by now Google Circles (just like Twitter).
I imagine that if you disable the use of your app by paying customers, the damages you will incur will dwarf the pain you feel from piracy.
I don't know about books, but I took an introductory art class at my local junior college and it helped me a lot. Just understanding the basics of color and how artists go about laying out pictures translated a lot to helping me at least understand why designers did things online.
You mention that one might link 'm' to 'Green', for arbitrary reasons. Makes me wonder if anyone has tried actually colourising the typography. If every instance of 'm' was tinted green, every 'p' was tinted red, and perhaps a rainbow of tints for the most problematic characters, might the colour patterns made with words assist the reading process?
Wow. This article knows me better than I know myself. I've always wondered if that slow creep-in of boredom was a personal failing of mine. Whether it is or not, it's at least nice to know that this a known phenomenon, that someone else has managed to describe to a t. Reading this has actually really empowered me. I really had a lot of shame in feeling bored and bent over backwards to hide it until I quit in a boredball of boredom. I might be more forthcoming about boredom in the future.
Volume vs. price: one indie dev describes Steam sales
Human behavior: To resist temptation, forget guilt or shame and think positive
One of the most enjoyable posts I've read in a long time. Great topic, analysis and beautiful site. Thank you Charlie.
Ceftriaxone-Resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Japan
Rebstock 2011: a micro-gathering of artists, culture jammers, social hackers &
And have fun telling Google all about where you get your porn. Chrome's sync is not a reasonable option for anyone who cares about his privacy enough (which should be everybody on Hacker News).

you need to use an (unretrievable) sync key to add a browser

No you don't. You need a 12-character weak secret that shows up on one of the computers.
Can you explain your business model? After beta, whats the price point?
Sure, but that's an introverted interaction mode. Introverts might have a public persona, and they certainly might lurk. You're using it more as a Twitter replacement, not as a Facebook replacement, but I'd still argue it's more friendly to the socially cautious.
I would like to echo this sentiment. Although ecommerce was reasonably sexy in 1999, it is generally regarded by the current tech zeitgeist as stodgy and boring, despite the fact that there are often very interesting problems to solve in the domain.

I still love what we do, and the environment still feels very startupy, even after a few years.
I'm going the other way--why am I still using FB? It feels out-dated. At its current pace, G+ will have all the people I care about in a few weeks at which point I can delete Facebook and not ever skip a beat.
What about Orkut and Buzz? I'd say that G+ is, in essence, another iteration of products they already had.
Ah ah ah! I am Count Dyscalculia. I vont to suck your cerebral cortex.
Poor cross-browser support: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/the-state-of-html5-audi...

Video is simpler: you normally play one video at a time, for long time periods. Audio tends to be used to play short clips simultaneously, and if the browser drops some or delays them, it ruins the effect.
Doesn't matter, a bad history in investing doesn't statistically mean that you're more likely to get it right the next time, that would mean that everyone gets it right eventually if they just keep trying, which isn't really how investing seems to work.

Even if investing was a lottery, it past failures don't indicate future success.
One of the best javascript coverflow implementations I've seen. Very smooth, yet feature rich.

Then I saw the php dependency (just for the reflection if I understand it correctly). A bit of a bummer as reflections really make it sing. I don't know much CSS3 yet, but I wonder if that can help remove the php dependency.

Great work though.
Which version? I'm fairly certain my parents owned at least two, and I believe we had three different readers at work.
I beg all of you to read this article by Douglas Rushkoff, it predicts the demise of facebook cleanly. My opinion, time is up for facebook.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/07/rushkoff.facebook....
I think the point is that users no longer have the capability to extract data from a floppy, even if that data is easily readable. I certainly don't have a 3.5 drive, much less a 5.25, and who knows if the floppies at my parents' house are still readable.
Yeah, but no. If I want to make a home or specialty video and give it away to a few folks but not sell it, that doesn't give you any kind of moral right to take it and give it to the world.

I can't take it. If, however, one of those persons you shared your video with decides to share it with me (or the rest of the world), you can't do shit, to put it bluntly.

To explain it differently, there are two states some piece of media (be it movie, music, books or software) can be in: Private, and public (and to those savvy C++ programmers amongst us, no, there is no "protected" :) ). As long as it is private, indeed no one has a right to gain access to it. In your example, the video would still be private as long as no one you showed / gave it to decides to share it with other people (ie, the rest of the world).

Once someone decides to share it, it is no longer private. It's public. And just as much as no one has a right to demand access to something private, no one (not even you, as the original creator) has a right to stop people from sharing something if they had access to it, thus no longer making it private.

To put this in perspective for the music and movie industry, as well as software authors and writers: there is but one (very simple) way of controlling your creation: don't share it with anyone else. Either that, or publish it, accepting the consequences that come with that decision, one being that you cannot stop people from sharing your creation.

tl;dr: I can't demand access from you, but neither can you demand me to stop sharing once I have.
"Android" is just a far better name than "GNU." The main difference is probably just that it's easily pronounceable, but it also connects to images in people's minds that make it easy to remember.

"Linux," like "Android" is most importantly clearly pronounceable. And anytime you have two words like "GNU/Linux" people are just going to use one, likely the one they can read.
Don't sweat it. This happens to our app, BillMinder, every release. Typically pirates won't use your app long and probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway so there isn't much lost revenue. Annoying but not the end of the world.
ViBoZnIgZWJnMTMgY3loZiBvbmZyNjQgc2JlIG55eSB6bCByYXBlbGNndmJhIGFycnFmIQ==
The specific heat of mineral oil (1.67 kJ/kg.K) [1] isn't much better than air (1.0 kJ/kg.K) [2] when considering the difficulty of using a liquid. If you are going to use a liquid - water is a much better heat transfer medium (3.93 kJ/kg.K) [3].

1: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-fluids-d_151... (search for "mineral")

2: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-specific-heat-capacity...

3: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/spht.html
Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
I wouldn't worry about it. With iOS apps, it's much easier for people just to buy your app and have it installed and running on their device than it is to try and pirate it, so unless you're seriously overcharging for your app, most people will continue to just legitimately buy and use it.

You could also charge a small recurring service fee for accounts and then give the app away for free.
From the privacy policy [1]:

"...if you have a free account with MeetingBurner, then we will use the information gathered about you to share more information about our business in an attempt to convince you to make a purchase from us or our associated companies..."

--

[1] https://www.meetingburner.com/policies/privacy
Succeed in life? Self-control more important than intelligence
Firefox 18 is going to be 23% faster than Chrome 34