skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This whole "it's made by 1000s of people who do it in their free time" is pure marketing bullshit.

No it's not. Projects like Linux were started by people doing it in their free time. It was only later, when people started using the software in corporate environments, and open source became acceptable, that companies started paying people to contribute to those projects because it was in the companies' interests to do so.

Contrast Diaspora with something like Retroshare which is developed by people in their free time. The only difference between between Diaspora and Retroshare is that Retroshare didn't manage to catch the hype wave and raise $200k like the Diaspora team did.

Sorry, I tell a lie - there's one other key difference: Retroshare works.
Agreed, however I've run in to compatibility issues with 3 a few times and so resolved to stick w/ 2, deal with the text parsing issues myself, keep the libraries I like and leave the ops team alone.
I'm not saying that good things were not accomplished and I'm not saying that they didn't push the world forward in some ways. They have. They've also managed to destroy the world's economy and leave it in debt for at least another two generations.

Ehh, the current unsustainable debt binge goes back a lot further than the Baby Boomers. Remember, the first baby boomer president was Clinton.

I'd blame it largely on FDR (born 1882) and Lyndon Johnson (born 1908) and their contemporaries. They created the unsustainable welfare state in the US.
You're right, but they also weren't created in a vacuum. There must have been something behind the idea that it got to the point that Hollywood would make a movie about it. And these aren't the only two cornerstones, for some reason David Cross (while hilarious) comes to mind as someone that embodied that smugness that everything sucked. He put out another album last year and I couldn't get through it because he was still doing the same thing.
I heard from a friend Poker sites got referrals too. Wonder if you can use this technique for those sites.
But as long as you're using it in read-only mode, what's to complain about?

The deletion of noteworthy information about popular programming languages is one example.
World's best universities ranked
Hi Manuel,

Speaking as a long-time affiliate (for better or worse), I'm glad to see you release this in the wild!

So, with that in mind, here's my thoughts:

1. Overall, I like your concept of making a powerful turnkey storefront for affiliates. I especially like your outsource-ready concept. However, there are tons of others across the world, and many of them are working the work-from-home-churn-and-burn scam and have a hell of a lot of money to burn.

2. A big difficulty is going to be content and keeping the storefronts valuable. You see, with SEO and PPC, you generally need to have a fairly unique site with some different content. Google will heavily penalize sites that are recycled data or affiliate links with little to no information in them. A good example is this HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099875

Matt Cutts weighed in on this and his feedback was quite clear to that affiliate: "You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with keywords for unrelated products."

Remember that for search and PPC, the lifeblood of 99% of affiliates out there, content is king. You need to provide many ways for them to do this and site maps, tags and clean code don't go that far.

3. You're going to face serious competition from the very established combo of Wordpress.com + Skimlinks. It is very easy to make a content-heavy affiliate site using that combo, as blogging is fairly simple and Skimlinks makes the monetization almost instant. If you want to hit those guys, really work on some content tools for affiliates. Writing product descriptions really isn't enough and reviews have to be really verbose to get ranked, so the more tools you provide for that, the better.

With all this in mind, do you have a winner here? Not yet, but you are on to something. Really refine your product and add some core tools. I think you'd be best served by making a solution akin to WP+Skimlinks, but look more at what your users want because it is only my opinion :)
One thing to consider is that large organizations often time have business units work against each other just as a sort of accident or unclear goals.
And if it's bad to us but manageable to them, then there is worse out there that they are trying to get away from.

If every person's situation is relative, then how do we oppose slavery or abuse? It's better than starving to death, right?

The real problem here is that there's no recourse in our current economy. China makes well over half the electronics we buy so it's not like a boycott of Apple would necessarily help.

I see two approaches that could help. We can appeal to the humanity of CEOs, boards, and investors and try to press them to enact change. Or we can use their vanity by embarrassing them with productions like "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs."
Fail early. Fail hard. Be paranoid
Do you tweet out their Klout score when it increases? Seems like a smart strategy to get a response.
maybe i should re-phrase:

wouldnt drive without it. it is astonishing how many americans are so dependent on their navigation system
Tight Lines Fishing - Catch the Biggest Fish on Facebook
As another note, your pricing structure should be free. Be an affiliate for every merchant under the sun through CJ/LinkShare/ShareaSale/GAN/etc. and then have them be sub-affiliates. Keep about 20-30% of each commission, ala Skimlinks.
I've been trying to get into using Backbone for a while, but I've been frustrated by the lack of resources - the official docs are essentially just a lengthy reference and an extremely basic Todos demo, neither or which has been all that helpful in getting normal app started. I'm excited to try out this screencast :)
Do you also have a problem with marketing that says "we're revolutionizing the XYZ industry" by arguing over the use of the word "revolutionizing"?

While technically they haven't "taught" anything, I think you're also blowing it out of proportion.

Its a creative hack, clean to setup, and useful for their users.
Yeah, got sold on that one too. It was also a very good deal at that time in that price range (k200d), 11 focus points and water proof body with upper lcd.

A shame the selection of lenses seem to be that limited, many times with one type of make/model for given parameters only.
@WalmartLabs
Let's call this article what it is. This article is just shameless self promotion by an obese man with nothing to do. its disgusting that he had to single out Apple and Steve Jobs to get media attention, when Motorola/Samsung/Sony/HP/Dell/Cisco/etc. does the same thing.
Any idea what the throttling rate is on this api?
A non-App Store version is probably a good idea — I've heard from developers who offer them that the website version is a decent portion of their sales. But don't put in a lot of effort to cater to people on OS X versions older than 10.6, and I say that as somebody who regularly uses Macs with 10.4 and 10.5. That's a demonstrably stingy demographic whose numbers are decreasing all the time — not a good investment.
The Downside of Crowdsourcing (comic)
Accidentally downvoted you while trying to upvote. Sorry.
Tesla Vs Top Gear: Telsa loses libel case
In English, "we" is a term that changes meaning based on context, and does not always include "you" the reader, thanks.
> No smudge trails left on the screen

Surely you're still going to touch it after you've unlocked it? :-)
"they don't feel they have the willpower to resist these hyper-personalized ads"

Although it's not necessarily a discussion of their own willpower but rather whether the masses will lose portions of the power to think for themselves. Not always the same or hyperspecific portions, but we're slowly giving away more and more of our decisions to advertisements.

/Disclaimer: not sure whether I paraphrased this correctly./
I do understand concerns over what happens to your data moving forward (changing laws, organizational/management changes etc.). But again, I can't think of any of the information on a social networking site being all that damning. The information that I share on say Facebook or Google+ (at least for me) never really consists of ultra-private information.

And I think your example is a bit extreme.
The fact they are distinguishable on many letters is why the quest exists. See http://typewar.com/stats/typeface_pair/Helvetica_Neue/Roboto... for what letters people find easy to distinguish and not so easy.
Absolutely on the money. Roboto looks really similar to Helvetica; in fact, so similar, that it wouldn't be improper to accuse Google of ripping off something without due credit (at least the presentation had nothing to say about Helvetica).
Google has the money to license a font, and with Apple moving to Helvetica Neue as the default font on iOS , Helvetica could have been a fair option.

That being said, I like Robota and am glad that Android has a nicer font now. Also, people don't care, or shouldn't have to care, if it's Helvetica or something else, as long as it is more pleasing to the eye. On that count, Google did a good thing; good but not classy.
Ed (edw519) recently gave us the I'm going to give it to you straight and I hope that you don't get offended or upset routine and after working with him we came out a million times better. If you are sincerely looking to improve your situation then you have my recommendation to take Ed up on his offer.
The demo video showed the screen saying there wasn't enough light and then reverting to the gesture lock.
That site is excruciatingly slow. I had to wait 20 seconds for every page!
> Projects like Linux were started by people doing it in their free time.

v0.1 of project X was not the version where 99% of the work was done, nor is the latest version just a incremental & minor update to that first one-person release.

You can, at the same time, praise the founder(s) and assign credit where it is due.
Redgate send a developer to Hull
5 New & helpful UIKit features in the iOS 5 SDK
We'll likely add testing on larger bodies of text at some point.
Are there any good examples where a single founder made it big, truly on his own? You can imagine that maybe Drew could have done it without Arash, or Gates could have done it without Allen, etc. But they didn't, which validates the exception. So before we casually say /oh if you don't feel like you need a co-founder then don't bother/, it would be good to know if any single founders have been successful.

And maybe we should define success as financial/market success, not emotional fulfilment or getting your first two round of funding.
Do you feel having your own homepage is important? I wonder if the conversion rate would be higher if you funneled people directly into the Mac App Store web link.

I'm now two weeks in, selling two Mac Apps: one for $2 and the other for $99. Thanks for the blog post, I'll be doing the same when I get back results for the month.
HTC keeps everyone in the dark over plans for Android ICS
Boomers were the hippies

But y'see, this is the problem with these sorts of generalizations. The vast majority of boomers weren't hippies. The vast majority of them were sensible people who finished their education, got jobs, got married, raised families, and lived like people have always lived.

Similarly, the so-called Generations X and Y and the millenials and however you want to divide us up. Most of us have been doing the same thing. We all grow up, we all get jobs, we all have children. Half of us wind up voting one way, half of us wind up voting the other way.

That's not to deny that there are certainly cultural changes over the years, these are obvious to everybody. But a few thousand people making a lot of noise in the direct sight of some TV cameras isn't a cultural movement, it's just Al Capone dancing the Charleston on top of a flagpole.
Sorry, we're get high load at the moment
Custom research paper
Well-written research paper can improve your academic record if you pay for professional help at a original website.
Awesome, I really hope it helps you out! And don't hesitate to ask me any follow up questions as well. :)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/11/50-cent-makes-87-mi...
IOS is singled out because iOS is what all the test cases featured in the post were done on. The author does mention the issues are likely endemic to all mobile app platforms.

As a word of unsolicited advice, It's best to set your emotional attachments to a platform aside if you want to engage or broaden the discussion on legitimate technical matters.
Something's weird with their table sort. When I sort the table by Academic Reputation Score, I get 99.8, 99.9, 99.8, 100.0, 99.8...
Homage to Windows phone 7. How about we call it what it is. A Windows 7 rip-off.
FYI I was using a 3GS with iOS 5 for a few days before I got the 4S and location based reminders are not available for it.
And Perl6 can also provide an expressive example:

say [+] (1..10).map: {$_ * $_};
This is a hive mind ant game!
I agree. Individual letters don't really say much about the typeface, and that's not at all how we use them. When it comes to the use of a mobile OS' main typeface, it would make more sense to compare words and short phrases, and I think the two would probably be more distinguishable by a larger set of people than this test will probably show. FWIW I got 70% — some letters are definitely similar, but others were very distinguishable.
Customer service over Twitter is an obvious plus. Though I don't think it's possible to achieve anything (At least, anything that involves private/account information, without following/DM-ing), it certainly looks good on the company. When complaining about a problem, even if the response is just "Hi, please send an email to [address]", it shows they are prepared to communicate with their customers.
Stream Wirelessly to Your HDTV with AirPlay Mirroring
Whichever recession you're talking about, they only lasted a couple of years each (at most) so there's no way an entire generation could have graduated into one of 'em.
Its simple - FB is not transparent about the value exchange. Why?

We represent top 1% most aware users here.. most users do not understand they are exchanging their data / attention for a social networking service.
I don't think that's true. Life was slower when most people were farmers. But culture has always changed with time.
Every time I hear things like this, I can't help but ask "what generation raised the generation you're complaining about?". Among other similar questions.
"Separation of corporation and state" is more like it.

Succinct, unburdened, and who really could disagree (aside from corporations and the media appendages who love them).
Samsung And Google Unveil Galaxy Nexus Smartphone
Most of the large apps in production I'm aware of have just stuck with 1.8. It's stable and fast.
Boiling Down Mary Meeker's Trends
Paradox of Choice: why more is less
I did the same thing. Listened to Jars of Flies with lunch.
I have a better question: Does anyone care? Seriously? The debate has degenerated to whether Google is ripping off Apple's choice of font? WTF?
eeeh the problem is it's way to chaotic. I've head people of the generation who have gone out to the protests say it's about all kinds of things including "fair wages AROUND THE WORLD" for instance which to me means everyone in north america takes a hilarious pay cut 0_o
so yeah, it's hard to see this huge group shouting so many different things, some a bit crazy and assign them any one sensical view point.

Sure, some of them want more sane things like banking reform. And so do I. And I can empathize with that. But the group is larger than just that, and crazyier. So I get what the author means when he says he doesn't know what they want other than some utopic thing, because as a whole, it's pretty schizophrenic and nonsensical and impractical.

There are too many people out there for too many reasons for it to be a clear and coherant movement. Which is it's strength and weakness. With no clear solid one true path/plan it can continue to draw people from all over the place and amass a much larger group of protesters than otherwise might be possible, which is good in so much as more people is more attention getting, but it's bad in that there is no clear voice or opinion. It means something different to everyone. So it's going to be hard to accomplish too much.
Daily Mobile Minute: Blowing the lid off of mobile numbers
pkamb it's a good question. As someone pointed out, until I get the reviews (and they are good) I have to do what I can to attract traffic.

From everything Apple is great it their reporting system is like waiting in line in the Soviet Union pre 89. So unstable reporting and when it's finally there so horribly lacking.
Is this really a problem or are people just reacting to hype? It seems to me that our data has been monitored for years both online and offline. That data is used to target businesses marketing messages but its nothing new. For example, insurance companies collect data on people and re-sell it to marketing companies. They then use that information to send you custom messages in the mail or offers based on your demographics. Data on customers will always be sold to advertisers and frankly, we should encourage this evolution. Instead of watching advertisements for motorized wheelchairs during "Murder she wrote" (I cant help it, I love that show) It would be more enjoyable if I saw advertisements for something like Motorized Dirt Bikes. People will always have to see advertisements so isn't it better to see things that interest you? If the product is free, you are the product and I prefer to be sold to what intrigues me.
Does anyone know what is the twist that Google music plans to implement??
Any ideas of what might be ???
I'm slightly amazed at how inconsistent these special queries work. For international users (I simply assume it's not just me), this trick only works if I add &hl=en to the URL. Any explanations?
This isn't about Apple. Helvetica is one of the most popular fonts, it's used everywhere.

edited
Sure, there was something behind the idea. But it was a combination of thinking:

a) "Waah, life sucks, I can't get everything I want", and

b) "This is somehow a problem unique to my generation"

both of which are universal thoughts held by the more introspective and less thoughtful members of each generation.

I've never actually seen Reality Bites -- too early for me. But I've seen "Fight Club". Wow, has that movie aged badly.

"We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives." Awww freaking diddums, Mr Durden. We have four wars and a depression, wanna swap?
I took all lessons yesterday, and completed the problem.
I found some UI glitches (% of classes completed), and I think that the UX can be improved by highlighting at any point which lessons/exercises are not done yet - rather than simply highlighting how many are left.

The problems are valuable, and I enjoyed solving them. I think that you might want to show multiple alternatives for solving the same problem - that's one of the cool things about Ruby.

I would love to find something similar to HTML/CSS. I know that codeschool have an HTML5 one, but unfortunately, I need something more basic :)
> There is certain information (address, account numbers, ss #, etc.) that if obtained by a third party, could result in some real world problems that will negatively impact my life. But information social networks sell to advertisers doesn't fall into this category.

That's both wrong and incredibly short-sighted.

First, Facebook collects way more data than necessary. In fact, they try to collect data of people which aren't Facebook users. And what's more, in some cases (facial recognition), there's nothing you can do against it. But wait, you can! Guess how? By registering on Facebook, to remove tags. I don't know what to call this, but it feels awfully similar to extortion.

Second, the unnecessary data that Facebook collects is dangerous by virtue of existing. Yes, that data might be safe now. We cannot guarantee this to be true tomorrow, next month or in five years, actually, we cannot even be sure if it is safe right now (which is a matter of transparency again). Besides, I don't see how a detailed (which might be an understatement) biography of my life is necessary to sell targeted ads.

Third, as rwolf pointed out in another comment, it's not like targeted ads are the only option. Yes, it might be the best alternative in terms of making profit, but we cannot ignore the side effects.

Besides, I seriously ask myself when in the hell "profit" became an argument to infringe on basic rights and liberties (of which privacy and control over your own data is - or at least should always be - part of). To present a hyperbole: slavery was very profitable as well. I don't see people arguing that we should allow slavery again.
Thnx for the feedback. Do you have any recommendations for "app store" services I can use?

Alternatively I guess I have to use something like paypal.
Monitoring HIV on a Cheap Chip
Startup Valuation
Hi everyone,
A hacker pal in Davos said $0.4 should be the cheapest software-based advert to sell in any software industry. Since most or all startups are close to nothing for a value starting out, I felt that figure should be good enough for naming an original purchase price for a startup stock.

So here's my math for what an angel gets for investing $2,000 in a startup if the number of nominal shares before outside investment was 30,000 for example:

2,000 / 0.4 = 5,000 shares

5,000 + 30,000 = 35, 000 (the new stock of nominal shares)

5,000 / 35, 000 = 0.14 (approx.)

So the angel gets 14%.

Just wondering if we could attach the value of a startup stock to a software product of the cheapest rate. I'm out on your take. What do you think please?
Actually, the point is just to play a fun typeface recognition game :-)
It's hard to read that data because there's no label on the vertical axis. But through all the charts there, it looks like 1.8.7 is still the most widely deployed version. I'd imagine it'll remain that way for a while longer.
There's a difference between allowing customization by the user (good) and by the manufacturer/carrier (bad). Users will pick apps they like, by definition. Vendors will pick apps just to be different. That's sort of OK if the choice is really better (e.g. bundling Swype on my Epic). But they get it wrong more often than not.

Example: samsung wrote their own camera app. For reasons that are clear only to them, it refuses to work (literally, it pops up a message box and exits) if the battery charge is less than 15%. I'm sure they thought they were "conserving" battery (because clearly they know better than me how I want to spend my battery energy). But of course the real effect is that this is a $250 phone that won't take pictures in the evening. And this is routine in the market, Samsung is hardly the only offender. That's the disaster Google is hoping to avoid.
I wonder how this will impact on the legality of sites such as thepiratebay in Canada. The first quote,

"I would conclude that a hyperlink, by itself, should never be seen as “publication” of the content to which it refers."

would seem to suggest that merely hosting a torrent file, which is analogous in function to a hyperlink, cannot be seen as equivalent to hosting the material to which it grants access. While one of the judges said something to the effect of "intentions matter", there could be a fairly strong case here.

IANAL, don't go starting a torrent site in Canada on my advice, etc.
Haha, OK, I was thinking of this other post on the topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3130822
when do people finally get it? everything is a remix.