skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heads up: Google does this with Gmail, too. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1047_3-6050295.html - "Judge grants subpoena and orders that all e-mail messages, including deleted ones, be divulged."
Infected by the Entrepreneurial Parasite
Looking back it seems like iPhone & Linux were almost neck and neck for most of 2010, but iPhone pulled ahead in December 2010 and has stayed slightly more popular since.

As a keen desktop Linux user, this saddens me. But I'm also not particularly surprised, Wikipedia on smartphones is pretty useful.
Retype email sucks - could email color work instead?
You are evil
Anyone want to open a pool on the day a 'mobile OS' becomes the outright most popular Wikipedia browser?
(from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3037018 )

Seeing http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm I think we have good reasons to believe that we currently are several orders of magnitude above that amount of irreducible complexity.

So, while I mostly agree with what you just said, I don't think we've hit the bottom yet. Silver bullet-like progress still look possible.
This is a project that I was thinking about as a way to overcome the need to have the annoying retype email address box found on sites.
financial industry has the capacity for 10 facebook like startups - currently its all Five big banks, five big IB/trading, wall.st banks etc.

There is huge opportunity here for innovation in finance industry, as all(most) of its functionalities can be reduced to computation.

Obviously the Wall.St insiders dont want any innovation, they are glad earning avg 500K-to-mil total compensation for starters. (3 years in, you could potentially make min. mil total compensation)

Dont understand why all the startups/ventures in silicon valley go after social networking - how many groupons, or photo/message/social do we need ?
Fantastic post, very good to see someone's similar experiences. I haven't sailed around the world, but been through things that taught me the same; I'm glad for it every day.
And even if you know where you can find the hosts file and know what it's good for, it is tedious to collect all the domains and subdomains and add them to the file. There is no wildcard mechanism like *.facebook.com to block all subdomains.

Another solution is to set up a local proxy and apply filter rules, but this is also complicated.

I would love to agree with everybody who says: You don't like Facebook, then simply don't use it. I don't have an account there, but their clutter is everywhere on the web, "like" buttons and stuff like that. I wish that people who maintain their own website or blog would think more about these things and their consequences, before they add fancy buttons to their page layout from a third party site.
I have to say I agree with most of what he said. These are really basic tenets of design. The only thing I take exception to is number 6...the source code beautification. I don't necessarily agree with his logic here. "Ugly source" is not necessarily buggy. I know you can take "ugly source" a number of different ways, but let's assume that you are good at writing software and check for bugs. Some projects have over 1 million lines of code it may not always be pretty, but it can work bug free. The only exception, I believe is open source. If you're creating something explicitly to be used in the wild, you should try to make that as clean as possible.

On another note, in between what is a Microsoft user experience and an Apple user experience, there should be an open platform that gives me a streamlined, intuitive user interface as good as Apples. I'm by no means an Apple fan boy. Far from it actually. But I cannot deny the attention Apple gives to user experience. But in actuality they still use a one-size-fits-all approach. With the processing power we now have in our computers, we should be working on machines that conform to us the more we use them. We apply behavioral analysis to almost everything digital and online, let's translate that over to user interface. New operating systems be it from Apple, Microsoft or Google, should all start out with the widest possible options and conform to our behavior the more we use it. Personal computing should go way beyond the aesthetic of my desktop and start menu. I know you can make keyboard shortcuts, macros and favorites. But I'm talking about a deeply customizable interface as unique as me and my habits. My computer should be learning me instead of me learning it.
It also seems to indicate a deliberate quasi-law-enforcement role being played by Facebook. If Facebook handed over data when presented with warrants, the "without judicial review" wouldn't be true. That can only be true if they're purposely partnering with law enforcement, to voluntarily offer them data that courts haven't requested.

Reduces any qualms I might have about calls for Facebook to be regulated as a public utility, if it's actively choosing to act as an arm of the government anyway. Public utilities are actually, despite being much more entangled with the state in some ways, more separated from the state when it comes to law-enforcement. For example, the phone company can't just choose to record all your calls and give them to the police without a warrant.
Interactive Multimedia Technology
FT.com hijacked?
Anyone else being redirected to a landing page?
Really? The answer with the highest upvotes appears to be rotating words to "random" angles, and links to a post[1] which has minimal code for just doing that.

[1]:http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/9323/are-there-any-la...
Remote Access: Danger-to-Go
Retails for $50.

https://img.skitch.com/20110926-fgc35nm4q2wr8mspaq7c8fpyf7.j...
Age Management: The Secret To Healthy Aging
WebDirectX was rather humorous thing, but the point is that if IE would support any API, we could write some wrapper and actually let things work. Now it's as you said, only hacking. There is not much money (equals manhours) involved when technology is not well supported.
Correction: $50 pen body.

https://img.skitch.com/20110926-fgc35nm4q2wr8mspaq7c8fpyf7.j...
Health-Care Industry: Heal Thyself
oblig http://xkcd.com/77/
That's user error.
A friend of mine works in the publishing business. He equated the previous few CEOs of his (large) company to locusts.

They move through, cut cost by laying of people. That leads to great profit increases for a quarter or two, after which the lack of qualified employees shows its toll.

By the time that problems become apparent the CEO collected a huge bonus and moved on, leaving the mess for somebody else to cleanup.
Logout has never meant "stop using unique id cookie tracking". Ad networks have been using them forever even without login/logout functionality.
Never mind, looks like I've got a virus. Something to do with searchdeiscovered.
That's a good comparison to make, but once you have a Python program or Ruby program importing 20 packages, each with several modules, then it gets really slow. Like 100-500ms, which is more work than the "real" work of a handling many HTTP requests. Bad packages can do arbitrary computation at import time.

To be fair, I haven't run any Lua programs with 20 packages... AFAIK Lua didn't have a module system until Lua 5, and it's not as capable as Python or Ruby's.
Precisely - this is a design feature, working as intended.
It's only "sweeping hyperbolic pseudo religious" if you discard the facts that ARE there: http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/agileFebruary2008.html#Figur...

Scott Ambler has been running these surveys for a few years now, and they are consistent. In 2010, agile and iterative methodologies (that include RUP, which is rybbish I agree, but looking at the facts here) lead to +10% in success rate compared to ad-hoc or waterfall.

But now you are going to tell me Scott Ambler is one of these agile consultants preaching for his own church, right?
I was actually thinking more about the very last sentence of the top answer where he says he doesn't know how to modify the font-size and spacing randomly. This led me to assuming the footnote angle thing was somehow specialized or insufficiently general. I don't really understand the code in the answer you linked to well enough to see how to apply it more generally.
I'm not going to go in on the pool but I think that's an inevitability. The amount of mobile devices is growing be it on netbooks, tablets or mobile phones. It stands to reason that with more access on the go sites such as Wikipedia, search engines, maps or other information portals will get more hits from mobile devices.
Somewhat disappointed after realizing that the videos are all in Flash. So I can't watch this on my iPad. Does anyone know if these exact videos are also available on iTunes U?
Reminds me of what Jeri Ellsworth told about making electronics in China[1]: "After getting to Hong Kong I opened one of the units to find that they had cost reduced my reference design without telling me. "

[1] http://www.eeweb.com/spotlight/interview-with-jeri-ellsworth
I've never framed it that way. Analyzing this as "network effect" is an interesting thought. But no, network effect is not the key insight I'm attempting to communicate.

I'm talking about a generation of kids growing up with technology. This isn't about the value of the network increasing as people use it. It's about a fundamental shift in one's worldview by encountering the technology during formative years. I'm basing much of this on Clotaire Rapaille's work, as described in his book, The Culture Code (http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Code-Ingenious-Understand-Peop...).

Rapaille conducted a study for Nestle. Nestle wanted to open up the Japanese market for hot chocolate. Using his research methods, Rapaille found that adult Japanese never formed early childhood impressions of chocolate, and so introducing chocolate products to Japan would fail miserably. As a result of the study, Nestle shifted its marketing strategy towards introducing chocolate to Japanese children, with the idea that twenty years down the road, they can sell chocolate products when they become adults.

Half a million daily Android activations means that a generation of children grows up encountering a personal computer in the form factor of a smartphone. Having come from the older generation, I still picture a desktop computer in my mind when I see the word "computer", despite working primarily with web technologies and cloud servers. To make sure my products do not become obsolete, I have to step into the shoes of someone who grew up picturing "smartphone" when someone says "computer". It means that any web/cloud application I make must be delivered on a smartphone first, with the desktop experience being an after-thought. I can live with that. That will mean twenty years from now, software development will mean keyboard-less IDEs, but I can still live with that.

I apply the same frame to these Facebook announcement. What is it like growing up where your first impressions of social dynamics is Facebook? I can separate my online identity because I entered my teenage years in the era of text-based MUDs and email. I had access to the internet when most of my friends do not know what it is. I could and did interact with adults. But a pre-teen or a teenager growing up now, knows that you can't separate the social identity like that. What, are you crazy?

What would a society with the unexamined assumption of "Facebook = Social" look like? One that accelerates the general trend for the past several generation: further isolation from the deep wisdom of previous generations; rites of passages conducted by clueless peers that end up in tragedy; a new life stage to describe young adults in their 20s to describe an extended childhood, much the way "teenage" was invented to describe the emergence of an extended childhood.

I do not like what I see in this thought-experiment. So while I might embrace the future when it comes with mobile devices, to this ... travesty ... called Facebook = Social, I say, "bah humbug."

(And next thing you know, I'll be walking out my front door with a cane, shaking a fist, "Dang kids! Get off my lawn!")
Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives
Jellema start-up ZeroMail gets Citrix backing
99designs expands into non-English speaking countries
You can be mindful or mindless in "doing things other people are doing." Many people choose to mindlessly "do things other people are doing." Leaders take a step in a direction, and the crowd may or may not follow them. If they do, it's because people tend to follow, rather than to lead.

Which is interesting, considering that many of us are here because we want to take some risk as entrepreneurs, to step out and do what people are not doing. Does that mean entrepreneurs are not social?
I thought this was the whole rationale for saving GM - that the gov't would then easily be able to make use of OnStar.

Seriously, no one finds the idea of law enforcement being able to turn off your car remotely, without a court order or a hearing, a little scary?
It's not Facebook's call. The USA PATRIOT Act allows for National Security Letters, or NSLs, that legally function like warrants but require no judicial review. The US government uses them over 60,000 times per year. The law allowing them turns ten years old next month.
Arcade Fire's HTML5 Movie
I didn't say anything like that. I never said you didn't know your thing about industrial engineering, but if you had practiced lean software, you would know that beyond the name and a few key concepts, it has been greatly adapted and cleverly tailored to take into account the reality of software engineering constraints. All I'm saying is that I have seen it work on several SOFTWARE projects, now have you even tried it for real? (sincerely and humbly asking...)
Giving a link to an article behind a paywall is not very useful.
Do you happen to know if the other two classes in this series will be available online as well?
Alternative HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3036351
If you got in on the Kickstarter round. After that, it's $99 according to the link on the front of the kickstarter page.
And at the bottom of the article is the call to "Like" it. And a button that has already told Facebook that I've read the article.

(Don't get me wrong, the web page has also told Google (via Plus and Google Analytics), Twitter, Chartbeat, and a bunch of ad platforms I was there. And a couple of CDN platforms, too, I guess. It's not just Facebook here.)

There's at least three points to be made here: There's a irritating design choice that doesn't let you easily specify a granular enough privacy setting (although this is weighed against the general pain of making choices). There's the fact that having a private or counterfeit or incomplete public online identity is getting ever harder these days. And there's the fact that large corporations are collecting ever more data on us, and this data is increasingly hard to evade.
I'm amused at the mindset of trying to do low-volume and hence (for the factory) low-profit manufacturing runs in China and complaining when it turns out to be more difficult than uploading a file and waiting for a box of Apple-quality products to arrive at your front door.

Simple economics - if it was easy, everyone could do it.

I work on construction projects in China so I have an idea of the difficulties re: quality and expectations
I don't find any of this surprising. All of the data Facebook has on me I have given to them. Just like anywhere else on the internet or not, if you don't want somebody to know about something then don't share or keep a record of it. Privacy is not absolute, it is contextual.
I wonder if taking both ai-class.org and ml-class.org is going to be too much load for a person who is working full-time and if they are going to cover a lot of the same topics or not? Does anyone have an insight?
Sorry for getting back to you so late. What I meant by making it easy to see the breweries near me is, instead of showing me a map with arrows on it, it would be more useful (for me at least), to give me a list of breweries/beers within a certain, reasonable radius (like 50 or 100 miles).

The "Featured Beer" is a prominent on your page, which is great as it highlights a specific beer or brewery, but I think it makes more sense to list ALL beers brewed near me, and have the location of the brewery available on a subsequent page if I'm interested, like the page of the specific brewery (which you already do).

Another thought: sort all the beers in my area by how high their ratings are. Maybe you could be the Yelp of craft beers?

Just my thoughts. I understand the hesitance to buy ads with no clear monetization strategy.
This is cool, but check out Yahoo Pipes ;)
Alternative HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3036618
How much better would the world be if it was easy and everyone could do it?

I'd go so far as to say that it should be this way and will be this way. The more people who run headlong into the frustration and disappointment of this exercise, the sooner some talented people will realize that this is broken and fix it.
Startup Brings Innovation to Higher Education
I've tried porting some AI and physics from AS3 over to JS and realized that there are some fundamental problems with JS that simply isn't on the roadmap to fix. Overall "engine-like" code performance can be 2x-5x slower in JS then in a language that supports basic typing.

I found it very telling that Unity3D announced compiling for Flash 11 and nothing about WebGL.
What Is the Point of the Female Orgasm?
Doesn't relate to code really, but it break's the monotony a little...
Nobody is suggesting that they don't trust you, are they? I'm just observing how bad web browsers are for the kind of UX you hope to have.
interesting take on the entrepreneurial spirit. Most call it a bug, but he's named it.
But my entrepreneurial spirit has been different. I would say I discovered my entrepreneurial spirit. For me, it was always there I didn't have a name for it I just knew I like doing things differently. My very first summer job at 13 give me a strong dislike for working for other people. The next summer I realized I could make more money working less hours if I was my own boss. A few years later in a corporate setting, finding out the disparity between what I was paid vs what I was bringing in for the company was like adding insult to injury.
My point being, I was an entrepreneur before I knew what an entrepreneur was. I think most of us, it's something that has always been inside of us pushing us to branch out and do things on her own.
I wonder if we should make basic cooking a required class in high school? Even if people who would otherwise eat fast/junk food every night would cook at home just a couple nights a week, it would probably make a noticeable improvement in our overall health.

There are some basic dishes that are very quick and easy to make, and very cheap. For example, consider spaghetti. A box of dry spaghetti is cheap and has a very long shelf life, and is quick and easy to cook (boil water, drop in spaghetti, turn heat down slightly--read HN on your mobile device for 10 minutes, occasionally stirring the spaghetti). Drain, put on plate. Pour on some bottled sauce that you've heated up (go ahead and use the microwave).

Congratulations--you've now made an alternative to your usual Big Mac, in 10 minutes, and it cost you under $0.50.
Ra.One Movie Online Watch 2011 
Ra.One Movie Online Watch 2011
Don't forget UDP—you can't make a decent multiplayer shooter on top of TCP.
Audio is the #1 missing peice right now. In the work I've been doing, everything else has solutions or workarounds, but there's no good answer to this one. Using a SWF to play sounds is a terrible kludge.
seems to me people who use facebook a lot do it bec it's a status thing: they have to be in on the latest trend, they have to be in on the latest tech. just the same with people who just have to have the latest gadgets... it's all very superficial
Most computer scientists want to help the world. Including those who believe in the free market.
This assumes that Wall Street banks are trading on ability rather than prestige or that these things aren't in part one-in-the-same in the industry.
It's out of date. The planet has enough resources for everyone. Humans do not need to prey on our own species.
> Additionally you should write in big letters over the scan "Request to access Facebook Data <date>", so that nobody else can use the scan of your ID-card for anything else.

This serves no purpose as it is trivial to 'shop these big letters out of the image.
Pretty low on detail, such as how dies this differ from the old method and what makes it so much more efficient exactly.
oh, and it must be even more lonely, down in that rabbit hole where everything is scammy, consultantware, bullshit and anecdotic in comparison with your huge experience of everything. I just wish you could enlighten us with better alternatives and constructive criticism instead of just bashing everything for the sake of it.
Wonder if they even tried to find a manufacturer in the USA. Small volume, and technically very simple. No language, time zone, import, or travel barriers.
What Exactly Am I Doing Here At Uncrunched?
That's an interesting model.
Why the browser?
Not madness, but widely accepted reality. We use CSS3 animations to get the benefit of hardware acceleration on devices that support it. Canvas isn't hardware accelerated. Our current game gets over 40 fps on iOS devices with a couple hundred sprites in action. That would not be the case if we were just blitting into a canvas.
Hmm. Maybe? Seems impoverished to me.

Someone on the comments for the original article said, the big idea in Rails wasn't so much MVC as much as separation of concerns. I'm on-board with that. Thinking in that way has brought a lot of advantages for me over the years I've been working with Rails.

By extension, if the big idea is "separation of concerns", then I should be applying it in my non-Rails code too, whether that's "MVC" or not "MVC". In fact, my small taste of functional programming allowed me to play with "separation of concerns" in a different coding style, one that I've imported back into the Ruby code I write. Write functions without side-effects. Treat data as immutable. Interesting times.
The Lean Startup Book Tour
The OP's question got me thinking about the expense/cost breakdown. I had calculated this earlier but figured I'd share the numbers in case its of any help.

For my project, I bought a new server ~3 years ago which I used for development and hosted from home for my prototypes etc. I paid around 1K for it.

I'm finally ready, so I looked at the cost of Amazon EC2 vs. hosting. Two months ago I also bought a switch(new) and a server off Craigslist: total cost $550.

My provider has a bandwidth cap, like most. Making certain assumptions about the amount of b/w each user is going to consume etc, I believe I can support 3M users/month off my provider for a little more than $200/mo before I am upgraded to the next b/w tier.

For the same amount of CPU/bandwidth etc, making the same assumptions about users I'd pay ~$1K/mo on Amazon EC2. But I'd be able to support around 100K users/mo. Yes I know this is a huge number but its less than 3M.

Which is why I'm not going the cloud route. Plus in the worst case I can sell or donate my servers for a tax write-off.

I'd love to hear from others as well :)
SMK Blog
Twilio Connect is Not OAuth for API Billing
I'm dual Australian/UK and just tried it with my British passport (and Australian address).

Almost immediately I got an email saying that "Unfortunately, we won’t be able to respond to your email directly, as this form is only applicable in certain jurisdictions." Might try again when I'm back over Christmas.

Edit: On inspection of the Facebook T&C page, it says I'm contracted to Facebook Ireland, so I'm not sure what the email's about.