skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technically, these would probably be referred to as "DRTV": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_response_television

I actually believe the ubiquitous "crazy local salesman" is less about brand awareness, and more about demonstrating a unique selling proposition - even if you know about the crazy mattress salesman down the street, you can still order a mattress online just as well. But you can only interact with a completely hilarious insane person if you stop by the store.
If Sony's not accountable for defects in products shipped under their brand name, then why do they bother to maintain a single global brand? Gee, it's almost like they want the benefits of a unified corporate identity without the drawbacks.
> the Ronald McDonald Charity is associated with the fast-food giant, so obviously it is deserving of our disgust.

And why not? Just like with tablets, there are other charities you can contribute to.
It's a flavor of Linux?

This survey seems half-assed....
Some of the comments are missing the point that the information in the chart is to be used for dating globes, which sometimes show place names for places before they change political status (e.g., gain independence after being United Nations trusteeships) or sometimes are published after a place name changed near the end of the previous calendar year.
Tiny lightweight Erlang web framework: Spooky
Black Hat: SSL and the Future of Authenticity
There's holding your nose to deal with flawed companies with questionable policies... and then there's battered-spouse syndrome. At this point, anyone who expects a square deal from Sony falls into the latter category.
The subject really shouldn't say "(google.com)" in it... very misleading. Initially, I had thought this was posted by Google, but then saw the content/url and realized it's google docs.
Donor heart kept warm, oxygenated and beating during transport with new device
Facebook To Launch Music Platform With Spotify, MOG & Rdio as Partners
I think the difficulty is that none of the technologies that you are using were designed for building software applications, but for showing text and images on a screen.

In other words, there is a perfectly fine solution for offline G-mail, it's called "e-mail client".
If Google fails, it is an unsolved problem

Alternative: it's a completely contrived problem. Interviewers really don't like it when you point that out, though. :-)
There are at least a few problems with that happening from what I'm aware.

1) That would require Verizon's cooperation and it isn't the company under scrutiny. For all Verizon cares AT&T's merger can fail and those guys can get stuffed with the breakup bill.

2) Verizon and AT&T use almost completely different LTE frequencies. Although they are both in the 700mhz band, they have separate subsets between 700mhz and 800mhz that don't overlap much.

3) Verizon and AT&T currently only use LTE for data. Voice is still carried over the existing 3G network until some future date. Even then, whose network would these hybrid phones be designed to fall back on in the absence of LTE? All the hardware to support multiple network standards isn't free in terms of financial cost or design constraints.

4) If the US government really wanted spectrum to be shared in this way it would have enforced it when it freed up the 700mhz spectrum a few years ago instead of auctioning bits of it off to individual companies for virtually exclusive use.
I've written some programs like this, even to the point of replaying the entire input history every time my CGI script got invoked. It's surprising what a large set of apps even that naïve approach is applicable to, and there are some much more exciting possibilities under the surface.

To the extent that you could actually write your program as a pure function of its past input history — ideally, one whose only O(N) part (where N was the length of the history) was a fold, so the system could update it incrementally as new events were added — you could get schema upgrade and decentralization "for free". However, to get schema upgrade and decentralization, your program would need to be able to cope with "impossible" input histories — e.g. the same blog post getting deleted twice, or someone commenting on a post they weren't authorized to read — because of changes in the code over the years and because of distribution.

I called this "rumor-oriented programming", because the propagation of past input events among the nodes resembles the propagation of rumors among people: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2004-January...

I wrote a bit more on a possible way of structuring web sites as lazily-computed functions of sets of REST resources, which might or might not be past input events: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-Novembe...

John McCarthy's 1998 proposal, "Elephant", takes the idea of writing your program as a pure function of its input history to real-time transaction processing applications: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html

The most advanced work in writing interactive programs as pure functions of their input history is "functional reactive programming", which unfortunately I don't understand properly. The Fran paper http://conal.net/papers/icfp97/ is a particularly influential, and there's a page on HaskellWiki about FRP: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_Reactive_Progr...
Apparently their sales increased over 200% following that commercial.

I'm with you- pissed off that I had to listen to it and avowed to never buy the product. But some people did.
I wonder how these non-US-residents were able to handle their visa issues.
What makes you think it's GWT? The blogpost doesn't mention it.
Has Sony Missed a Major Vita Sales Opportunity?
Jvascript web applications seems too generic as a title. The book covers one way, but there are many different approaches to skin that cat.

The whole javascript apps scene won't stabilize until we get cross-framework ways of building ui components and doing layout. I should be able to take a sproutcore component and use it in an extjs layout, without it becoming a giant hack.
You don't even need the capacitors or battery backup if your memory is sufficiently distributed.
Startup idea: Cloud storage platform with configurable SLAs
I must say that, unlike with Doom I and II, it will certainly be more exciting to wade through the source code and learn tricks than actually play the game and wade through the endless monotonic, boring action.
I find I mostly use google to see how others have implemented something rather find the exact solution. But either way you have a problem to solve and google takes you from knowing nothing to at least a starting point.
For your case I can see that being a big deal. I'd strongly recommend PenguiNet for people with slightly more conventional needs--aside from feature reqs like this, I feel that it's head and shoulders above PuTTY and the programs that hang as a bag off the side of it like PuTTYCM.
> (Don't we live in a free-market?)

No, we do not, and certainly not like what you seem to be implying. Governments have the right and duty to step in when market actors are pursuing actions which are likely to have a deleterious effect upon the market as a whole. Dramatically decreased competition via acquisitions is one of those cases, especially in high cost-of-entry markets like wireless.
Development Postmortem: Arrowhead Game Studios' Magicka
Do you want my work information or my personal projects information? Because they are very very different...
Yes, that's why I asked him.
Whoa, thanks. I moved to PenguiNet because older builds of Poderosa had severe and crippling rendering problems, but I'll give it another shot.
> Ubuntu is not an operating system.

Ubuntu seems to disagree http://www.ubuntu.com/

"Ubuntu is a fast, secure and easy-to-use operating system used by millions of people around the world."
This was basically the point of view behind ReiserFS, and mp3.com funded the Namesys guys for a while on that basis.

Also, see maildir and various things associated with qmail.
> It's a flavor of Linux?

That doesn't disqualify it from being an operating system.
Since every thread on HN about google+ has a top comment about how google+ should have this (self-tagging, able to follow user+topic in addition to being able to follow user), I'm glad someone has written something like it. playing with subjot will give me a feel for how this concept plays out in practice--well done!
And also after searching, to not have it enter visual mode, and stay in command mode, the way Vim does.
Yes, that would be a problem, but it would have an easy fix, revert!
Even worse: imagine a poisoned update that gets installed on every browser within the hour.

Or just an update with a non-malicious bug that breaks the updating mechanism. (This last has happened to companies the size of McAfee and Skype.)
Shucks, no ColdFusion haha
The results would be meaningful but not as interesting as someone who is under more pressure to find a job due to currently being jobless.

Speaking for myself interviews are always much easier when you already have a job and always more difficult when you really want to work where you're interviewing - just an aspect of self-inflicted pressure.
Ok, how about, you built a porch, and you liked the porch, but then bees built a hive on it, and you're scared of bees, and before you were able to eradicate the bees they created a new version of your operating system that had behaviors you didn't like.
He looks ridiculous, sure, but you can't look at that image with the huge stage decoration and the jean patches and think its any time but the 90s.
Congratulations, you have reinvented the integrity constraint! Except IBM have been working on this for 40 years, making it reliable and performant. I have yet to see anyone roll their own data integrity layer that comes anywhere close to the major vendors.
The article is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942768.
+1 (no pun intended) those services clearly have a large overlap. And there's also google pages.
On a related note, wordpress.com/.org, thumblr did manage to held quite firmly. This also sounds like, not letting blogger degrade into an obsolete bulk, which clearly was (is?) happening.
What next? Copyrights being used to disallow photos of buildings?

Misplaced slippery slope argument.

The transferable nature of patents in general (or copyrights, since you brought it up) is a totally different subject than patent/copyright violation through abstraction (how far removed is far enough?).

The argument covering architectural photography may be better suited for use within the context of the prevailing software patent discussion, where abstraction is quite the core issue.
I've wondered for a while about doing something similar for authentication.

1) Visit a new web app, click Sign In

2) For a moment, your webcam turns on (some UI clearly telling you so)

3) Your photo is taken and compared to millions of tagged photos on Facebook.

4) System determines that you are indeed John Smith[1], due to the fact that dozens of facebook users (with similarities in their profile such as age/location/college/etc.) tagged someone that looks just like you as "John Smith." Therefore, the wisdom of the crowd (as measured by previously created and tagged photos on Facebook) have determined that you are who you say you are.

Zero-click sign-in.

[1] One teeny tiny issue: maybe you're not John Smith but just some guy with a printed-out photo of John Smith :-)

In any case, I think authentication is a fascinating area that needs some attention. It's really hard to create a not-easily-breakable-or-gamed way of determining that a person is who they say they are.
M$ is seriously over thinking this. The first commentator on the post has it right.

Step one should just be to theme Windows7 with the metro look, and apply animations to complete it. Having the two world design is less than ideal and unfortunately "so Microsoft."
As a tablet user, I actually like this; when I got a honeycomb tablet, I realized I had come to miss the split-screen view after several years of using Gmail...not that I want it to turn in gOutlook, but there are definite advantages.

On the negative side, it's very weak that there are no formatting controls in this version. I miss them on the tablet side already, which means that messages sent from that device necessarily have a different signature from those sent from my desktop. It's not necessary or even desirable for mail recipients to know I was using one device or another. Some people like to signal that they are on the go with 'sent from my phone' or the like, but I would rather have some basic editing functionality, and this would not be hard to add. On a tablet it's annoying, on the desktop or a laptop where I might need to work offline it's unforgivable. On the up side, this is a good starting point for building an editing/configuration interface that could find its way back towards the tablet space. With wide-format screens the norm nowadays, I was struck by how much more pleasant the panel experience was on my desktop monitor and could see myself switching to this from the page+widgets approach of existing gMail, which is beginning to feel very long in the tooth.

This goes double for Google Docs, although it's slightly off-topic. I like working on my tablet a great deal and find I can type surprisingly fast even with the on-screen keyboard as opposed to an external one. But Google Docs on a tablet is so unusable that every manufacturer ships with some open-source office suite to make up for the deficiency. since Android does not have the same mind/market share as iOS/iPad, Google needs to offer compelling software alternatives. In many respects it already does so; but productivity tools are noticeable by their absence or abridgement. A minimally-capable version of Google Docs made sense on a smartphone, but on a full-size tablet it's absurdly self-defeating, and inimical to a corporate or academic environment. I would pay for a 'power user' tablet version of core apps like gMail and gDocs. The fact that there is no easy way to leverage forms into an Android clipboard/data-entry interface is a major missed opportunity.

This really needs to see some movement in tandem with the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich launch. I know both Docs and Android are outside of your remit, but hope you could circulate these concerns in the cafeteria, so to speak. I mention this here because *@gmail.com is increasingly acceptable as a professional address, but this will only last so long as the tools cater to the needs of professionals.
> Yes, neither of these companies may be offering me the best deal possible, but unless they are colluding, the government should not be involved.

It's interesting that you make a dichotomy between collusion - in which you think the government should intervene - and mergers - in which you think the government shouldn't intervene. What is the difference?

If you are such a free market proponent, why should the government intervene in collusion? Doesn't a merger just codify any such collusion?
Sorry, I don't see the logic behind this. You basically imply that if something works well, it must be benign, and this is clearly not always the case.
Stated another way, for most large enterprises, the functionality of intranet in-house browsing for internal systems is more important than public web browsing. And this really is true for the enterprise's day-to-day business and ultimately profitability. Once you understand that, it naturally follows that the corpus of installed software and updates will be controlled to favor the former case at the expense of the latter.
Gee, looks like a LOT of dedicated, devoted English majors here. Who would'a thought?!
Evolution of the Data Center [infographic]
You're completely ignoring that in many rural areas, there are only one or two providers. When I visit my parents in rural northeast Ohio, there are only AT&T and Alltel (now Verizon) towers. My T-mobile phone roams (free to me) on the AT&T towers and works just fine. The companies can work out roam-exchange agreements among themselves that allow for sharing of infrastructure.
Are screensavers considered useful?
>In just four attempts, they successfully predicted the first five digits of students’ social security numbers nearly 30 percent of the time—all from a single photo.

The first 5 digits are not of much interest (compared to the last 5) AND it can only guess right 30% of the time if it has 4 tries....

This is a non event. This type of FUD is going to generate some sort of legislation that solves a problem we don't have. There are legitimate privacy problems, but this isn't one of them.
"HAPPINESS CANNOT BE PURSUED; IT MUST ENSUE, AND IT ONLY DOES SO AS THE _UNINTENDED_ SIDE EFFECT OF ONE'S PERSONAL DEDICATION TO A CAUSE GREATER THAN ONESELF OR AS THE BY-PRODUCT OF ONE'S SURRENDER TO A PERSON OTHER THAN ONESELF."

V. Frankl
Daily Discount Sites - Are we really Saving Money?
What makes an author
Company Customer Pact - Back online
I was mainly just replying to the person claiming the pythonistas don't use windows. I've never met anyone claiming to be a pythonista so I don't know. I have however met lots of people who program on and for windows and who use python.
Google suffers blow in Oracle patent reexam - key Oracle patent will be upheld
You're right, I misspoke. I have to revise my statements a bit.

On Windows, there are hard links, junction points (I believe they're the same, junction points are for directories), symbolic links, and shortcuts. Junction points only work for local NTFS drives. Shortcuts work on anything, pointing to anything, but they're just .lnk files and an app has to know how to process them.

Here's the kicker: you basically can't create a symbolic link in Windows unless you're running as Administrator! There's even an option to enable symlinking in the Local Security Policy, but it doesn't actually work (a known bug since, I believe, Win Vista)! The 'runas' command (basically, sudo) can't really be used, though perhaps it works if you create a 'real' Administrator account (by default, there isn't one that you can log into).

So, you can create a symbolic link to a file on a network file system, but not to a directory. And you'll have to run as Administrator to make it happen at all.

I'm sure that's more than you ever wanted to know about Windows and links. :-)
I don't automatically have a problem with the benefit in a patent is selling it to someone else instead of licensing it. I just have a problem with BS patents being issued in the first place.
Yes,

Beefman's argument is of the "who you gonna believe me or your own eyes" variety supplemented by an appeal to authority via some link. It's not just an argument I disagree with but an unfortunate style of argument.
Rapid Blog Cash - Easy Money from Blogs
I really really really hate the new square buttons.
Running Windows on a Mac: Lion vs. Win7 performance shootout
How's the battery life as compared to Windows?
Earliest Homo Erectus Tools Found in Kenya
Hospital garb harbors nasty bacteria, study says
The point 22 doesn't have any samples: A web based database/Excel hybrid. I think Wufoo (a YC company), if used for oneself, could be thought as something like this.
On those lines, I have realized lately that I am more inclined to buy products that have familiar names, especially if it is a type of product I am not familiar with. For example, if I needed some allergy medication, I would look for something I have seen frequent commercials about. Not because I think they are better, but because of my limited knowledge, the ads are all I have.
The specific requirement for being whitelisted is that it shouldn't have a MIME type that Chrome wants to open inline. Give me a list of extensions that you'd like to see supported and I'll see what I can do.
It's positively hilarious how many Facebook likes they are getting.
That's an interesting take. You do have to have tools that adapt to your personal style, and it sounds like you felt that you needed to push yourself into different habits, which is commendable.

I've found that many programmers who come from a Java background over to .NET have a bad habit of writing their code and deploying it without debugging it even once. It's so much trouble to debug for them, they just wait until it blows up and takes down the server. Or their error handling is just throwing a stack trace to a screen instead of actually handling the error.

Bad programming finds a way.
That sounds interesting. However, as soon as you have several distinct applications that share e.g. the same master data, how do do interface them? You will have to design the in-memory transactional store as a kind of global component. Then, not much is left until you end up with a real database.

I am working on a team that is building an in-memory SQL database. It features a custom language that makes it possible to push the time-critical, data-processing parts of the application directly to the database, which allows for the same speed as this no-DB approach. But you don't have to build your own DB and do everything yourself (correct persistence, backup, transactions...)
True. Cite: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

They plan FileReader and FileWriter though.

Now I wonder:
a) What is Moz leaving out? Why?
b) Which of the other items from FileSystem does the Google team need, if any?
The importance of silly projects
Do you have any source?
Exactly.

"This tablet made by Sony! You know it's great, because look at all the other great things Sony makes! It's the same Sony!"

"Didn't Sony do that rootkit thing and have lots of security problems?"

"Oh... well we're really a different Sony. Not the same at all!"
It's a software distribution. It includes GNU/Linux, which is an operating system, but Ubuntu itself is not an operating system.
Making posts to inquire about why one got downvoted seem to throw fuel on the fire, resulting in yet more downvotes. At least, this is what I've observed time and time again here.
AIDA doesn't mean separate campaigns for each. It's a guide for each ad to follow so that it achieves results.

Brand awareness campaigns mostly just lack the Action portion (At least directly).

I think startups trying to create effective ads can greatly improve their campaigns by thinking about AIDA. I have transformed the marketing campaigns and ads of small companies I have worked for and create all of my own ads for my company while thinking about AIDA principles.

Brand awareness/institutional advertising is largely useless for startups but I think they can benefit a lot from learning a little bit about AIDA. It helps cut through the clutter.
Is it for commercial use?

Yes

How do you plan to protect IP?

Mainly by asking nicely.

We do use py2exe to package up our application, but that is more for convenience and to act as an indicator that we don't want people to go hacking around in the source code. Also, even though python makes up the bulk of the app, measured in lines of code, that is not where the really interesting things happen, so we're not too bothered one way or the other.
I dono if ycombinator is good or bad at teaching people about branding... but personally, I don't really think a name has that much to do with it. I mean, you want something unique that doesn't sound like it's a weak knock-off of something else, and you want something that shows up in google, but I think a brand is something you build up over time.

Your brand is a reputation; just like changing your name to something that sounds better isn't going to improve your reputation, having a cool name isn't going to make your brand strong.
Some link? It's a link to something else I wrote in this thread. I thought linking preferable to copy-and-paste.
Sony debuts Android-based Walkman prototype
How is patient's data public?
Health is such an interesting space- there is so much that can be done to make people's understanding of their health and their health costs better. The problem is the enormous amount of bureaucracy and the artificial barriers of entry (boards, professional organizations, other semi-public institutions). How do you go about dealing with that?