skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
/usr is the name of the blog, and the title of the HN item was pulled from the title of the page (likely by the submit-to-HN bookmarklet).
This is a transient reaction. They still habe 24M subscribers, are a monopoly in their field, and are robustly expanding in other countries.

The real danger to Netflix is not subs leaving because of price hikes (what alternative do you have really, shell out $70 per month to Comcast for horrible TV content?) but disruptions to their content sources, like the recent Staz debacle.
Netflix is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They don't control the content (the studios) and they don't control the distribution infrastructure (Amazon). They have a large subscriber base but it's just been shown that that might be fleeting. Netflix can't ride any network effect from their customer base. In short, their market position is indefensible. Their suppliers have the interest and ability to wring any profit margin out of them. If the suppliers demand too much, it's just an incentive for the consumers to buy direct from the source.
Mozilla Open Badges
Getting started on the Google+ API
Greed is evil - selling is good
I find it less intrusive than Linkedin's soft login, which really annoys me, especially as I cant remember my password often. You can go as far as writing someone a message, then you need the password. If I can read my private messages, surely I am good to send one?
We owe it to the dead to keep on living. For people like this, I say: "move on and stop living in the past". Life goes on and must go on.
I'd disagree with you, but I'm too busy watching Mad Men and Breaking Bad on Netflix right now.
If we ever want to be free of Hollywood's firm grasp, then there needs to be a revolution in content creation. Netflix should create their own shows.
Installing speed rely in every car might be unpractical and expensive. How about install road sensors and displays flow speed on the side of the road?

Currently people use brake light to signal and detect slowdown ahead, but sometimes people slow down without hitting the brakes. Displaying flow speed every 500 or 1000 feet on the side of the road would give fore warning on traffic slowdown ahead.
Well, it doesn't cost exactly zero, as there are costs to handling the paperwork, etc. And if you look at economy-wide costs, it distorts economic decision-making, which definitely has costs.

But what the OP is referring to as "cost" would be better said as repealing it would bring the budget $130 billion closer to balance (through increased revenue). But if you insist on that distinction, make sure not to call (for example) tax credits offered for renewable energy a cost, either.
Ask HN: Why do we tolerate IE?
We should all just put links to browsers that work whenever someone visits our stuff in ie. Why not?
Netflix’s price hike underestimates the power of the bundle — Online Video News
This is a perfect example of a posting I do Not want on this list.
Get a job. 2000 a month is peanuts, and assuming a standard 40 hour work week, breaks down to $12/hr. You don't need exceptional skills to hit that wage. Get a job and keep studying on your own if you really want to make something by yourself down the road, but your basic needs (rent, food, utilities) have to take precedence over your wants.

It's admirable that you want to make something work yourself, but the fact of the matter is that starting your own business isn't like turning on a light switch. There's problems of customer acquisition (who's going to give you money?), product development (why are they going to give you money?) and cash flow (when are they going to give you money and will they keep giving you money?) to solve, and solving those problems will take significant amounts of time.

Don't put the cart before the horse. Get a job first and then worry about how to pick up the pieces and move onto something you want to do.
Is there anything stopping you from doing both? Can you work a "normal" job during the day, and code at night? What's your business background (that makes you a "business guy")?

I found that when I was just learning to code, I wasn't able to absorb more than 2 or 3 hours of material every day. It would have been a waste of time for me to "just" do that. Working a "normal" job during the day could help you extend your runway a bit. It really depends on where you are right now skill wise. There can be a lot to learn about launching a SaaS, much more if you still need to develop a viable idea. Affiliate marketing is fairly well arbitraged. People make money there, but there can be a costly learning curve up front (you'll be spending a lot more than you make until you figure some things out).

Lots of places around the country are hiring developers. Depending on your skill level, that could be a viable path. You could spend the next month or two learning/networking and put yourself in a good position there. A lot of things depend on what you can already do, and not knowing that, it's hard to say exactly what you should do.
Interesting. Incidentally, this would make a great Fermi type interview question, to replace how many gas stations or piano tuners are there in the US.
Freedom Watch Podcast With Ron Paul
Actually, that’s the thing – if you are starting now it’s not amazing, it’s normal. :)

It’s amazing to us fogies.
First, you have to ask yourself what you like doing (or learning about) the most, regardless of how much money you can make with it. Then you should work on that. If it's really what you want to do, you will make it work! Even if it takes longer than 3.5 months. Maybe get a "normal" job, as you say, until you have figured it out.

What I'm trying to say here is that you should look at the long-term and not the short-term.

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

- Confucius
That was the same mistake I made. I cancelled sometime at the beginning of last week. With a better part of the month ahead, it was very strange to see a message like that from Netflix (who have been very good in the past as far as customer service goes)
Mobile Minute: Are you considering SMS
Another plus with adding rel="next" and rel="prev" is that you can easily add keyboard navigation to your pages with a script like this: http://vemod.net/rel-keyboard-navigation
Who's "we"? And what's IE?

As an employee of a web development firm, I have to support IE because our clients don't want to arbitrarily exclude some large percentage of the web.

As a person who has a blog, I don't want to exclude people from reading what I write just because I happen to disagree with a user-agent string my server received.

Not to mention, there are at least four versions of IE in the wild, some less bad than others.
Ask HN: recommendations for temporary office space in SF?
We need to set up a temporary office in San Francisco to work on a project for a couple of clients we have in SF and the valley. Any recommendations for a good source of temporary offices? We could always go the Regus route but I'd be interested in any alternatives.
How much money did Microsoft sink into Silverlight?
Exactly. If there is no revolution in content creation, then Netflix is doomed. Distribution and content creation are inexorably linked. Netflix needs to produce content.
Streaming doesn't come from AWS, they have agreements with CDNs for that
Affiliate Resurrection Review Bonus
Affiliate Resurrection Review Bonus
That's interesting. Why do you do this?
Huh, I've been using an "algorithm" for 30 years. I noticed on the freeway that when traffic slows in front, drivers overreact and brake more than necessary. This causes the driver behind to also brake more than necessary, eventually slowing traffic to a complete stop.

The point where traffic stops then flows backwards along the freeway like a wave. You can see this if you have a long view of the freeway ahead.

So what I'd do is slow down in advance of the wave reaching me, and try to time it so that the traffic starts moving again before I reach the stoppage. Many times, I've been able to stop the wave from progressing by doing this.
if enough do it then people will download good browsers
To mention the obvious, this won't work in all circumstances. For some technologies, you will want to branch and release (e.g.) new features in the 2.0 branch, and bugfixes in the 2.6 branch. If I'm on 2.6, I can plan to permanently stay up to date with the most recent 2.6.x release, without worrying about new features messing me up.
So what do you guys think?

I am really curious to try just the date as a version number, but it seems just too alien and unconventional. The only real-life example I am aware of is Kuznetsov's iproute2 tool for Linux (or just ip). It uses the DDMMYYYY format and that's not much of an improvement over regular versions in my opinion.

Can anyone think of any other notable examples of unconventional versioning? It'd be nice to have a list for a reference.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iproute2
I wonder if there can be a third side to this debate. How about Thomas Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."
The Greenhopper acquisition was pretty slick.

What used to be (I think) a $700 plugin now adds $2,000 to the annual maintenance cost of JIRA.
I don't know if I'd go that far, I still manage to find interesting things to watch on a regular basis. That said, I would happily pay 2 or 3x more if all of their dvd selection was available on instant (of course, I have no idea if that's feasible for them or if it would cost me more like 10x more for what the studios would charge)
The main problem Netflix is facing is not subscribers quitting because of a price hike but their seeming inability to make progress expanding their streaming catalogue.
Mono for iOS and Android and MonoMac for OSX all have different API calls for their respective platforms. GTK# is its own thing too. You might avoid a total rewrite from scratch, but the UI is going to need significant tailoring to each platform still. And it's not like Java, ObjC, and C# are radically different from one another.

Does keeping C# as a constant really solve this problem? (I honestly don't know, I've never done a multiplatform product like this)
How is this legal? What kind of twisted legal logic is used to justify this?

How does contract law work if you can sign a contract preventing other contracts from being signed?
Remind anyone of the Facebook/Joyent partnership 3-4 years ago?
Asking the user if they want to upgrade only makes sense if it can potentially mess something up, like dropping support for something or changing file formats, or take long enough to interrupt their train of thought, like old Firefox updates.

Otherwise, asking the user is unnecessary and gets in the way. In browsers, for example, any changes to the rendering engine will have to be backwards compatible and any changes to the interface will be minimal as there's not that much too change. Chrome's model does really well here.

The version number itself can be anything you want, as long as it's relatively simple- it's really only necessary when the user is troubleshooting, so it just needs to be easy to say over the phone or compare to something on the web.
Content Marketing – Key to Internet Marketing Success
> If they hadn't introduced all 7 seasons of TNG

Thanks for the heads-up, I didn't know that.
> Fewer subscribers = lower revenues. <- That's the problem.

That's not the problem. In fact, it might be the solution. What matters is profitability, not revenue.
Are Gifting Activities And Gifting Programs Legal?
Yep, sure thing. This is more in a context of end-user products that tends to have linear release stream and shorter release cycles.
> It seems to me that somebody should invent a "life processor" that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after death, to somehow more actively participate than we've ever done before.

All I could think after finishing the article was, "I sure hope she has those messages backed up somehow." Too many horror stories of Google locking up someone's account with no hope of getting it back. (And yes, that could happen with any service provider, she just happened to mention that she's using Gmail).
Holy crap. Normally stories like this don't affect me very much. I'm on my lunch break, on the verge of sobbing. Is somebody cutting onions?

Part of me wants to delete all of my chat logs so that I can never relive this stuff if something were to happen to my SO. But then I'd lose all of that, and the thought of losing those memories is terrifying.
That's lesson number 0.
We just started using Confluence. Design-wise, it's an absolute piece of junk. Nothing aligns, everything is ugly. Lots of plugins to adapt to what you want (which is great), but all those plugins add yet more design differences.
Create Node and Node + Express applications with WebMatrix Templates
You could make the same argument about C, which exists on much more platforms than C#.

But writing in C does not make a program portable. Neither does writing it in C#.

So yes, C# compiler might be portable, but programs written in C# are not.

So yes, C# compiler might be portable, but C# programs are not.
1. huge effort ? you can have common app logic core on almost every platform in lang having decent tooling and very nice BCL, wish you luck in rewriting c# app to ObjC

2. Mono's c# implementation is up to date - in fact they are even closer to implement c# 5 than MS is as of today.

3. There are more patent issues related to java than c#, in fact c# core is much more safe than java (due to Microsoft Community Promise)

I don't see i loose anything important WPF ? It's win toolkit from start, EF ? Give me a break it talks only with SQL Server NHibernate
Actually, it used to be spelled with a double "λ" but went out of fashion in favor of the simpler form.
Some of you might enjoy this TED talk abut last status update: http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_ostrow_after_your_final_status...
Because we don't know what topic maps are! Please tell us.
But then 'really' modifies 'were too young', not 'to cope'.
Marc Andreessen Wants To Buy Yahoo
Win8 Slates Charge iPads
I'm curious as to why you think they are a monopoly in their field? On any given evening, when I want to watch video content, it's a total coin toss as to whether I (a) end up buying on iTunes, (b) Go watch with amazon prime, (c) Use netflix, (d) bittorent the content.

I end up with (d) only when the content is not available on the first three. I can't say I have any particular bias - so "monopoly" is perhaps an overly strong word.
Because plenty of customers use it and do not want to change.

Seriously, do you think they are going to change their browser just to use whatever application you got?
I definitely agree that the content producers are taking a short-sighted POV here. And while another poster argued "you're not their target market," I disagree. It might be mostly geeks and power-users who go to bittorrent at the moment, but if they make their content progressively harder and harder to get hold of (which seems to be the case) I predict more and more people will switch to torrenting the content.

I don't know, maybe the percentage of people who use bittorrent will remain small enough that it won't really affect the studios, but their tactics strike me as self-defeating. I mean, nobody wants to have to jump through hoops to get to the content they want to watch. When torrenting becomes the path of least resistance, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
Versioning software and displaying "what's changed" to end users are completely orthogonal. By all means, provide this simple summary when you pop up an update window. Also provide sane, informative version numbers for developers, especially if your software can interact with other software.
Define "overkill".
I was wondering how a frivolous facebook game that disrupts nothing beat out startups like:

www.trello.com/
www.talkto.com/
http://prismskylabs.com/
and http://www.farmigo.com/

all of which have obvious value propositions and disruptive potential. This explains it.
I canceled streaming (and kept DVDs) the other day and it takes effect at the next billing cycle. If they don't want to offer refunds, they could at least make cancellation effective at the end of the already-paid-for month.
I'd hate to use such a system in the rain. The road is worn down (i.e. is lower) where the tires usually run. That means the pavement is drier if you drive on a "rain line" that is slightly offset from the usual line. This is often enough to keep the car from hydroplaning.
Has anyone actually done the math here:

25 million customers at $10/month was the old calculus;

24 million customers at $16/month is the new calculus;

I don't see any problem here. At all. (Okay, I'm handwaving because I'm too lazy to actually look up the revenue figures, but losing subscribers when you raise your prices is not necessarily a bad thing at all.)
W3school.com is great of beginners. Youtube is a great way to see development in action, it really comes together that way. Blogs, I like blogs because you get the lastest of everything. All you have to do is check the date of the blog. Find people that you like and follow their blog. Finally, friends, if you can make friends with a descent developer that you can call when you get stuck that's the best resource you can have to becoming a good web developer.

Oh and dont forget firebug. Firebug is a tool that allows you to look at the html, css, and javascript layout of most sites. So if you see a site that you like and you wonder how they did it. Click the firebug button and it opens up the layout of the site. Then you can look and learn how they did it. Just firebug and download it. You can miss it.

I turn to books more as like a dictionary then anything else. Usually, you can find what you need online for free. Stackoverflow is a good site too.
Changes by definition can mess things up. From a user's standpoint, if there's no issues that they're seeing, moving to a new version offers unknown gain for unknown loss. The unknown loss can be estimated by the user's previous experiences with the developer, while the gain can be estimated based on the change log.

Just a couple weeks ago hundreds of thousands of SmoothGestures users learned the perils of auto-updating when an update introduced phone-home mechanisms into an extension which ostensibly does mouse gestures.
Google+ API released
(a'hem) ...ah, well at least google's on top :]
I'm definitely looking for a long-term investment (I think coding fits the bill), but I do need short-term money and if I can combine both that'd be a win.

Coding is fun (atleast the stuff I did at home, aside from the university problem sets), but I'm no whiz so that's why I think I could become a product manager in the future.
This is true, but it may come down to the hidden cost of switching rather than the actual cost they pay every month.
They have large fixed costs for content. Subscriber growth amortizes those costs across a wider base.
Cloud Hosting Company FireHost Raises $10 Million
MonoDevelop on the Mac bothers me. Even though the apps you create can be proper (and they emphasise that fact), the IDE itself screams "this is a second-class environment" by looking and feeling nothing like a Mac app.
Two things:
1. How does one access the SSL session ID from PHP?
2. Wouldn't that ID change with almost every request?
This is a really interesting question. I did some quick skimming over the docs there and even where there is conceptual overlap, the BCL wins in terms of feature breadth. It would be challenging to replace it, I think.

My suspicion is that .NET 5 will merge the two.
Which open source configuration management tool should I use?
I'm intimately familiar with the decision pattern that took place at Netflix, and what analysis they did, as I know some of their sr. operations staff.

The net-net is that Netflix could have saved 20-30% on their infrastructure costs by not going with Amazon, but then they would have to hire smart operations and infrastructure people. They wanted to focus on Software, and had no Operational leaders in their organization, so they walked away from that 20-30% infrastructure savings - likely because they realized that over time - infrastructure costs are not going to be particularly material to their overall cost of business - which will be dominated by the cost of the content.
Love the idea, though: 1) email me when new feedback is received, 2) let me reply to people's feedback, and 3) preferably don't show me sites I've skipped, and definitely don't show me sites I've already given feedback to.

Good work!
Male Extra Read before you buy
1.5 year business degree, with some side-"businesses" on my own (i.e. needed a bike, asked the shop owner whether I could re-design his homepage, he agreed, I outsourced the job and got the bike at 95% reduced price).

I do have (simple) ideas for possible Saas Apps (who doesn't? :) ) - but I'm not sure whether I can make them work financially, so I'm kinda trying to estimate my chances before diving in too deep.
Talk about a reality distortion field. I was doing things that would supposedly "knock over an ipad" almost 2 decades ago on bargain-bin hardware.
I think the OP misses the point.

Inspirational talks don't work because inspiration is natural and emergent. Inspirational talks have often convinced me of an idea, but have never inspired me. Which is weird, because I have heard many speeches or talks that weren't inspirational talks, and yet they were inspirational!

You have to inspire people, not give them reasons to be inspired. There's a big difference, and all of the inspirational talks I've been to were presented as the latter.
But even if you have a linear release stream, you've probably got branching going on internally once your product gets to have a significant installed base (i.e. you fork a release branch to let your main-line development continue while you polish the release up before shipping it). At this point, you have builds going on in two branches, and thus tracking the version numbers when you get issues reported becomes critical ("are you using release 37 installed 2 days ago or today?").
basic needs are covered for 3.5 months (at a emergency case [i.e. no job] maybe a little longer) that's why I want to invest this time wisely.
Shouldn't my descendants be able to easily browse and use them?

I'm not so sure... there's a lot of things I've written that, looking back a year or two later, I wish I hadn't, yet alone other people reading them too.

And I'm not talking about the generic big examples that people talk about like "that picture of you on facebook throwing up" or anything, just small things, whether it's an MSN conversation where I over-reacted and acted like a complete dick, flirting with someone on MSN in what is later obviously a really embarassing way, or that time I told my friend that my mum/child/brother was boring/annoying/whatever me.

And of course secrets, whether they're ones I want to keep from certain people, or something private that I don't want anyone knowing, but for some reason wrote about in a not-for-public-eyes personal diary sort of way.

I don't know how much there is that I don't want other people seeing, but I know I've seen old stuff I've written/said/done/made that I cringe at now, and I'm sure there's plenty more that I just haven't noticed.
... which corresponds with the state of almost every IDE on OS X.
I was wondering when an official public API would be ready. It should be interesting to see what people come up with.
Given the number of attempted GPL violations I think that the answer is 'yes', it should be enforced legally.

Corporations would run roughshod over he rights of their users otherwise. The GPL is one of the most creative uses of the copyright system ever.
I think the need for diverse photo sharing sites is only slightly smaller than the need for diverse word sharing sites.