skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm saying it's not the quid pro quo. I'm saying that generally are multiple sides to an issue, and people want to represent their side. A corporation would just fund the person who represents the views that are most inline with theirs. Corporations would tell the candidate what they feel is important, and then when he espouses the views the candidate receives anonymous donations.

And by corporation I don't just mean GE etc, I'm thinking of any group of people who have a shared ideology and are working to influence policy.
Do we have a right to use Twitter and Facebook?
The Mobile Earthquake
Quite so! Lion autocorrect keeps leading me into interesting malapropisms.
Probably customer + talent acquisition as opposed to technology/infrastructure.
The Citizen Consciousness of Chinese People
I think a lot of people are missing that they make stuff like DSL modems and IPTV too. If I was google I'd be interested in having a piece of that too.
Daily Crunch: Mainframe
No.

C-x k
What a great start! I think this has the potential to be a powerful tool for future car buyers. It will need some work first.

The user interaction will be confusing to many. Legends, instructions, and a general UI cleanup will help lots. Another thing to consider is adding more search parameters (year, model, price range, body style, location, source, etc.). I'm sure you've already got all of this in the development pipeline.

If you gave this a little polish and its own memorable domain name, I would almost certainly use this tool to research my next car. Also, car buyers are a significant demographic to car manufacturers. I could see this being a valuable resources for buyers and sellers (of new cars) alike.
Interesting requirements:

1. Must be a PNG
2. Must be the same resolution as login screen
3. Must be 72 ppi/dpi

What happens if one or more of these requirements is violated? No background image? Revert to linen? Solid color?
He didn't "forget" them; the profitability of component manufacturers has no more to do with the fact that most Android licensee Phone manufacturers aren't turning much profit off the business than the profitability of shovel salesmen has to do with the fact that most gold prospectors never found anything worth selling.
Qualities of a Great Team
It is interesting the level of poker these tech firms are starting to play with each other.

We don't see these announcements playing out the way they would have in the gogo 90's, but the magnitude of these deals are equal or bigger, and have more meaning in the long term than what we saw in the last tech boom.
The constitution and the laws are our written contracts with the government.

There are several explicit means by which people make the social contract with government. The commonest is when your parents choose your residency and/or citizenship after your birth. In that case, your parents or guardians are contracting for you, exercising their power of custody. No further explicit action is required on your part to continue the agreement, and you may end it at any time by departing and renouncing your citizenship.

Immigrants, residents, and visitors contract through the oath of citizenship (swearing to uphold the laws and constitution), residency permits, and visas. Citizens reaffirm it in whole or part when they take political office, join the armed forces, etc. This contract has a fairly common form: once entered into, it is implicitly continued until explicitly revoked. Many other contracts have this form: some leases, most utility services (such as phone and electricity), etc.
We're building the definitive personal trust rating.
Next generation commerce platforms and marketplaces are launching at a frantic rate.

P2P and collaborative consumption commerce are only going to get larger and more mainstream.

Whether you're buying goods or services from others, renting their rooms, cars, power tools etc etc. You need to know with certainty the trust level of the person on the other end of the transaction.

Each service currently has their own silo'd (if any) trust and reputation system. This gives you only a tiny insight into the overall trust rating of the person you're transacting with.

Trust systems online are fragmented and decentralised. It's impossible to get a succinct, aggregated value for an individuals trust rating.

Much like Klout & Peer Index are doing for influence and reach, we are putting together a Trust Gold Standard which will take inputs from an increasing number of existing trust systems (ebay, etsy, AirBNB etc) and output an aggregated value.

This trust standard is valuable to people on both sides of each P2P transaction and can also be used by new service providers in lieu of building out their own walled garden trust systems.

We'd like to know what you thought of our plans and whether, if you run a platform yourself, whether you would integrate this trust score for your users if it made sense for your business.

We're at wibbba@gmail.com - if you want to chat..
Sorry about that, missed it when I looked.
Nor have I, but reemrevnivek's concern does raise an interesting question about the clarity of the copywriting.
'Swarmanoid' distributed robotics system (video)
To: CEOs of Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony-Ericcson.

From: Andy Rubin

So we're buying Motorola. We need a short statement from each of you for our press release tomorrow morning. Please restate the following in your own words for our press release (1-2 sentences max):

We welcome this acquisition that demonstrates Google's deep commitment to defending Android, it's partners and the ecosystem.

Try and limit yourself to 1 or 2 sentences. Our team has a couple of examples attached, first come first served and no exact duplicates please, that would be awkward. I think it goes without saying that this is a stop ship issue.
> If I have $1 billion to invest, then I don't have the option of "not investing" that money. It has to sit in stocks, bonds, or some other financial instrument.

No it doesn't. I could buy an extensive auto collection. Or a yacht or some paintings. Something that is pretty much guaranteed to depreciate, but at least I'll get some use value out of it in the meantime. (This is why when Britain had top tax rates close to 100%, people bought Bentleys and Rolls-Royces.) When investment is taxed at punitive rates, consumption becomes more attractive.
Check out ShareJS:

https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS
That’s certainly also possible. I was just thinking there was more involvement because I have a really hard time imagining that some PR person at Google was writing one statement after another and didn’t notice how odd they would sound if you put them together on a page. Noticing stuff like that is something PR people are supposed to be good at.

That’s why I was thinking that Google gave them some talking points and they got oddly similar sounding statements back and didn’t really bother changing them afterwards.
I'd like to go to this but can't (live outside of NYC but I'll be in IL at the time). From the description of the event I'd guess it won't really be suited for this, but is any part of it going to be recorded and/or streamed?
Measuring support for independence
Sure, Catalonia has been asking for independence, or more self-government, since it was conquered in 1714. But how strong is actually the support for independence in Catalonia? How do you measure it in a kingdom (Spain) where only the central government can call referendums?
Teenage Sex - The Sleepover Question
They're also huge hypocrites.

No one questions that Google is fighting and needs this for their defense. People are calling bullshit when Google points fingers at everyone else but themselves for creating a "bubble" in patents.
I wonder how the shop owner felt about him washing his feet in this bathroom.
Flawed Evidence In EU Apple vs. Samsung Case
"It's a defense mechanism for sure - but not for that reason. The real reason, in my view, is that techies are terrible at recognizing intelligence/skill if it does not somehow relate to math, logic, or, more concretely, code. I have no idea why, but the shoe fits."

I really don't agree. I have/had nothing against business people (they always threw way better parties in college after all ;).

Similarly, MBAs are great at running businesses. The trouble arises when we do what we did in the 90s and let them drive the businesses, make the businesses, that sort of thing.

The issue can be summed up I think as MBAs squeezing out high status technologists (http://www.codebelay.com/blog/2011/08/14/low-status-and-high...). When that happens, the 90s happen. To fight this perceived threat, we have negative stereotypes that keep people on their toes. They are essentially antibody memes.
Apple's evidence may be flawed/manipulated in European Samsung case
>If there's one consistent pattern to OS platforms (MSFT or otherwise) is that you can expect your OEMs to completely manhandle and abuse it.

It's not easy to manhandle and abuse WP7. No one can preinstall running services and non-uninstallable(!) apps like on Android. All OEMS/carriers get is a longer tile on the homescreen that can be removed/uninstalled with a long press. There are strict minimum hardware requirements. I think MS learnt the lesson from the PCs.

>Is it any surprise that the most sought after phones have all been vertically integrated?

Care to back that up? The only recent example is iPhone. RIM and WebOS are either slow or going down. The counter examples are Android which seem to be doing VERY well and displacing iPhone/Symbian/RIM as the top dog.
Look, this is about patents more than anything, given that Google ended up not controlling all the patents it needs for Android (which was kind of dumb, but I digress). That directly impacts on Google's partners to build phones for the Android platform.

The bigger win in profit and power for Google is to have Android running on as many phones as possible (across multiple manufactures), and not turn this into a zero-sum game from the profits of Motorola alone.

Therefore my guess is Google has bought Motorola Mobile simply to keep the business running independently but to ensure the patents are not enforced against the other manufacturers and be able to leverage non-Android patents in the Moto portfolio to wrangle the Android ones it still needs. The value of all this, along with the profits of the business, are probably worth the $12bn price paid.
Also received certified letter from Manatt
Thank you all for posting, I don't feel quite a miserable now. It's not enough that we spend endless hours trying to grow our businesses and keep people employed. Now I have to waste time and money with frivolous lawsuits.
Here's where the author gets lost:

Either Buffett is making a point so fine I have missed it,
or he's just blowing smoke up my ass. He doesn't know people
who don't invest when you decrease their return by a
significant percentage? What? If he's not fighting for
each percentage point here and there, just what the
heck kind of investing is he doing? Can I get in on
some of this action?

This is in response to this statement of Buffet's:

I didn't refuse, nor did others. I have worked with
investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone
-- not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent
in 1976-77 -- shy away from a sensible investment
because of the tax rate on the potential gain.
People invest to make money, and potential taxes have
never scared them off...

What the author has overlooked is that taxes lower the effective return on all investments. If capital gains generating investment X is better than capital gains generating investment Y when capital gains is taxed at 15%, X will still be better than Y if capital gains is raise to 20% or even to the 39.9% it was in 1976, and so in choosing between X and Y, the rational investor will still choose X.
They didn't re-implement KVM. They ported it (to the greatest extent possible), because it was already a suitable solution.

I wasn't referring to the KVM port as a solution to an exciting new problem (it was, but a while ago, thus making the problem stale). But it was a much needed solution. I was referring to innovations that originated in the Illumos code base such as ZFS, DTrace, zones, doors, crossbow, ctf, least-privilege, etc. All of these are either unavailable on most systems, have inferior clones (i.e. systemtap, btrfs), or are partially available (the Mac DTrace port doesn't have a complete, systemic scope, due to Apple's classist tendencies, and most of the kernel providers like fsinfo are missing, for example).

Either way, I still maintain that Illumos is a nexus of systems innovation compared to other kernels, based on how much innovative technology originated in the Illumos kernel, before being ported to or reimplemented on other kernels (the Slab Allocator is an example of a technology that originated in this code-base and has been reimplemented on almost all other kernels; ZFS and DTrace are examples of technologies that have been ported over to some other kernels, albeit with less functionality/stability).

Also, the release of Illumos-KVM (among other improvements in the last year) only goes to show that Illumos is still innovating in various ways, while other kernels are either still catching up (I believe that FreeBSD didn't support DTrace'ing userland apps until their 2009 release) or losing differentiators (linux just lost KVM). Seeing as how the Illumos project has quite a bit of engineering talent and corporate investment behind it, I doubt that the rate of innovation will drop below that of other kernels... in fact it might just increase, now that potential contributors know that Oracle/Sun doesn't have a monopoly
You don't know ahead of time what's going to happen. That's the key here.

Maybe they'll lie (probably not that common), or maybe what you said will somehow implicate you in a crime, or maybe...? That's why it's important. It's not after the fact knowing the police lied but beforehand when you don't know how things will play out that remaining silent is important.
Typing Haskell in Haskell
Kevin Rose used to work for PayPal? His Wikipedia page doesn't mention this.
> I'm not sure I see the point of opening an Android release after it's developed.

Why? I certainly see a point in having the source to the software running on devices being sold.

> It defeats a primary benefit of open source software.

The primary benefit is having the source, being able to modify it and to build upon it. No OSI compliant license grants you the right to immediate access to the latest commits by all developers.

> And even then, on most models (HTC, Motorola), unless I'm willing to violate my warranty and root it or unlock the bootloader, I'm not able to actually use the source.

The decision is yours. I voided my warranty and I am very happy with 2.3.4 on my phone.

> This whole "Android is open!" thing seems largely for marketing

Things like Cyanogen Mod wouldn't be possible without this "Android is open!" thing. If that's marketing, then I love it.
Audyssey Lower East Side Speakers
Ask HN: Capital Gains Strategy on Company Stock
I have a significant amount of my portfolio tied up in my company's stock. The opportunity to take some profits (~200% gain from my options) presented itself last month and I passed to wait out the capital gains period which would have taken around 6 more months. The money wasn't desperately needed, but I've been tucking it away in a nest egg for my own startup one day.

Long story short, tech recently got hammered and even with the bounce back I lost far more than I would have saved in a preferential tax rate. Normally I'm pretty objective about my stocks and will take profits without being greedy. In hindsight, I think I didn't make the "a dollar saved is a dollar made" connection: not making the right play simply because of taxes is still a form of greed. Are there any good rules of thumb for incorporating tax scenarios into your trades?
Tech co-founder, Social Travel Marketplace, NY
SOA
TDD
JavaScript
PHP
CakePHP
jQuery
Agile development
SEO

http://inbed.me > diego@inbed.me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAdUEbfJPl4
I think this is a really smart, fair program that every startup should read, especially since most companies (even those that want to) don't get sold/IPO at a huge price that makes tiny options worthwhile.
Positing an alternative is not required (in any sense) when asking for support to an argument.
NetRexx IBM's Java alternative opensourced (Android compatible)
GooMoto is Great for Consumers, Bad for Android and Great for Microsoft
The edit feature has been there for a long time. They have added an improved editor.
Amazon Admits Multiple Problems at Dublin Datacenter
I did this back in 2007 to kickstart my freelance career. Find local businesses with the worst websites compared to their competition. This works great for non-chain restaurants, hair salons, small law firms, etc. Here's an example of a restaurant down the street from my house that has a terrible website: http://gwrestaurant.com/. Just go ahead and redesign it without even contacting them. The existing site will already have enough content to work with. The work will go quickly because there is no client to slow things down. Then you go into the business and talk to the manager and tell them you are a local web designer and you are building a portfolio, and you redesigned their site already (I would bring a laptop and show them over a wireless connection...now you could use an iPad). I would then offer to sell them the website for a small fee ($250-$500 + $25/mo hosting). I did this for a few dozen local businesses over a 6 month period before I started getting much bigger contracts ($5000-$8000+). Usually I could close the deal on the first try, but for businesses who don't buy, you can easily swap out the content, and sell it to a competitor.
That just proves my point. Once again, we feel poor because we have so much more stuff to spend money on. Houses in America today are HUGE compared to what was acceptable in the past. A nice house today would have been considered outrageously opulent 40 years ago.

This was also primarily caused by a housing bubble. A bubble that was created in part because of government intervention causing increased demand for houses (mortgage interest deduction, low interest rates).
The simple truth about procrastination is that it happens because you delay your happiness. The act that you are procrastinating or putting off is motivated by a risk of your final reward.
Only if you take into account the marginal rates and ignore the many, many breaks and loopholes.
The V7800P... requires 10 CFM of airflow, supplied by the chassis cooling system.

Maybe 10 CFM of air is low compared to comparable graphics cards, but it's not passive cooling. The design simply makes an external system responsible for providing the required airflow.

Passive cooling would be if the "chassis cooling system" was able to deliver 10 CFM without any additional electrical or mechanical energy input.
Well, I just did a fork -> edit with Ace -> pull request for two little documentation fixes in a library I use. It was quite convenient. But I don't see using it for a project I frequently contribute to, unless I'm stuck away from my usual dev environment (which would be strange, since it's my laptop).
Building my first startup - Day #1 - The Ideea
Ha, can't believe I completely missed that.
I only have my own experience. And the MBA was as valuable to me, if not more valuable, than my engineering degree. I'm not saying you need an MBA (or that I need one). I am saying that there is value in an MBA, and it goes beyond a rubber stamp demanded by big business.

There is real, honest value in bringing a bunch of smart people from a wide range of backgrounds together for two years to study the way people behave while engaging in commerce. That the nature of business is poorly described by physical laws makes it no less worthy of study. There are good and bad ways to do accounting, finance, operations - even marketing. Why not learn about it? And if you do learn about it, how can that be a bad thing?

Education is about learning how to think. My engineering profs and peers taught me a lot about one way to approach problems. My business school professors and peers taught me an equally useful, and almost completely orthogonal outlook on life.
4G BlackBerry Playbook We Announced?
Yes I agree, and moreoever a mobile device company with social/search/payment infrastructure built in.

The days of ad-subsidized, and democratized mobile devices are upon us!
The three year average might be low, but the average speed of the Opportunity rover over the past eight years is over 2700 mph.
That is not algorithm tweaking, that's a separate search.
It's like anti-profit sharing. The employees own part of the company, but only for acquisitions and not for profits.
To further your video game example - psych studies have shown that if you pay someone to do something they like, they start liking it less. Great post, edo.
Just wanted to note that a fork is automatically created and a pull request created when you edit a file in a repository you don't have push access to. So the workflow is even simpler: 1.) see file, 2.) edit file and save, 3.) land on send pull request page.
I've checked Ace live demo[1], turned on "Emacs" keybindings and failed to see what do they have in common with Emacs, apart from the old, carpal-tunnel-syndrome-powered C-p/n/b/f movement keys.

They could use an Emacs hacker to fix it up, but Emacs hackers already have perfectly fine editor, so I do not predict any great success in this field.

[1] - http://ajaxorg.github.com/ace/build/kitchen-sink.html
Download Dragon Nest SEA Open Beta Client
No? This is exactly the sort of "pedantry" the average user won't care about -- they just click on a menu item to get there.
You may choose not to call it technical debt, but you have to call it something, and it seems very much a debt to me. The term you use to describe it doesn't get to cast judgement as to the merits of the debt. The debt may be inherited debt from an acquisition, for example. Any judgement you would choose to cast regarding the debt's merits does not necessarily reflect on the current holder of that debt, but the debt is just as real. If I buy your company and you have debt on your books from stupid decisions that did nothing to advance your company, it's still debt that I now owe.

If it causes inefficiencies that could have been avoided, it's technical debt, regardless of the cause.
Tech Crunch is the best blogging site
That news story is from 2007; living in Queens, I just got junkmail from them about how much good Walmart is doing for hunger, suggesting that they're not done with NYC yet.
a quick search shows that it was republished:
http://www.amazon.com/Self-Discipline-10-days-Thinking-Doing...

I haven't read it, but looks interesting.
The problem is knowing which part of Motorola held the patents, if it was mobility, which would seem logical in some ways (encryption of video streams and media) it would be a boon. Microsoft have a big case against Motorola over the license fees for h264.

Plus I assume there's the iDEN patents, which I suspect will have lots in the download/media area. It will certainly keep the wolves from the door.

My big hope is that Google do something altruistic with this, however it's shareholders may have other ideas.
My cofounder and I moved from NYC to the Valley to be part of the S2010 YC batch. The time we spent there was incredibly valuable and definitely worth it, even though we knew from the start our company would ultimately be based in NYC.

Doing YC in no way means you have to leave New York for good.
I'm a "he".
Review: Audyssey Lower East Side Speakers
Is github is speeding up even internet time? The edit button was only added to unowned repositories at the end of April. https://github.com/blog/844-forking-with-the-edit-button