skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be honest I believe this was true in the past as well. People will read one specific newspaper because of one journalist. Somewhere along the way people stopped doing this and it's become more easy to observe this with the advent of the Internet where anyone can become a writer. I do really hope we'll get back to quality focused writing because at the moment there's not a newspaper that figured this out. They're all stuck in the past.
Verifying to whom a given Bitcoin address belongs - Bitcoin - Stack Exchange
Investment firms get acquired all the time. There's nothing any less acquirable about an organization that deploys a pile of capital into third-party companies to produce return than any other type of company. Sometimes investment firms even sell chunks of themselves to the public, like BlackRock or Berkshire Hathaway (which is a slightly different story, and a different structure, but not in the important senses)

Hell, giant BHCs are investment firms, they just focus on very different opportunities (sovereign debt, insured mortgage bonds, etc.) and they have a different regulatory regime and funding source (deposits, short-term debt finance)

Man Group plc is a large acquirer of investment firms and stakes in investment firms.

If you broaden the definition of "investment firms" slightly (from the top down an insurance company looks an awful lot like an investment firm with a strange 'cost of float' funding source), then they get acquired all the time. E.g. everything Sanford Weil has done in his life.
Right in their privacy policy (http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/privacy-policy.html):

We may collect the following types of information:

<snip>

User communications – When you send email or other communications to Google, we may retain those communications in order to process your inquiries, respond to your requests and improve our services. When you send and receive SMS messages to or from one of our services that provides SMS functionality, we may collect and maintain information associated with those messages, such as the phone number, the wireless carrier associated with the phone number, the content of the message, and the date and time of the transaction. We may use your email address to communicate with you about our services.

<snip>

In addition to the above, we may use the information we collect to:

Provide, maintain, protect, and improve our services (including advertising services) and develop new services;
and
Protect the rights or property of Google or our users.

If we use this information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.
There's a theory of interpersonal relationships that says you need 4-5 positive interactions to balance every 1 negative interaction, if a friendship / relationship is to be sustainable. I'd argue that with devices and software, that ratio goes way up - maybe at least 10:1 or 20:1. That's why even a small annoyance can balance a largely positive experience.
There is only one way to win in this space: unlimited file size. Unlimited. Desktop app, fancy drag and drop, etc... are just "putting lipstick on a pig".
Sure.

I've been thinking of taking a stab at Romance novels first because they tend to be very formulaic and are a surprisingly profitable fiction niche.
No outdoor activities in Colorado? I'm surprised.
Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things

No we aren't! We are one of the few rich countries where the economy is growing, and our currency is very strong. At the moment we are very attractive to offshore companies because we offer revenue growth.

Amazon executives are in discussions with several large independent data centre providers in Australia to house another availability zone for its global cloud computing service.

http://www.crn.com.au/News/267585,amazon-hires-first-aussie-...
Ask HN: Startup a company or a department?
Recently, I talked with my sister. She wants to start a company and hates corporations. I love corporations and I would like to have my own department there.

Let's say you have a job and you have a good business idea. You can do one of two:

* Quit your job, create a business plan, work on a prototype, get funded by VC, hire people, grow to become a corporation or become a department in some corporation

* Stay, propose a plan to your CEO, work on a prototype, get funded by your CEO, hire people, become a department with its own budget or form a subsidiary company

Do I have it "more or less" right? Why there seems to be an advantage of creating a startup company over creating a new department if eventually your "core" idea becomes a department in a company one way or the other? I also notice that most advices for a company founders apply also to department founders.
Most sites aren't. reCAPTCHA has an accessible version, though, featuring a voice recording of a sequence of digits distorted by noise and background voices.
Considering the fact that Google has had such easter eggs for years* I don't think getting this one through was that hard.

* "ascii art", "what is the answer to life the universe and everything", "tilt", etc.
I'm really excited about being able to load jQuery as an AMD module. This means you can load jQuery with RequireJS and write nice, modular code. I highly recommend anyone doing large-scale web projects to use Require, it changed the way how i write Javascript.
This should be covered by the statement "don't be evil"
What if middle class jobs disappear?
He answers his own question in the article.
"https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... says that the answer to “Is Google reading my mail?” is “No” but doesn’t elaborate ..."

So, he's looking for a more elaborate answer? This is PhilG, so I should cut him some slack, but it seems pretty clear to me.
HR 2930 (Crowdfunding for Startups bill) passes the US House
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Summary: consider Bulgaria for outsourcing your software development.

As typically happens, no mention of language issues, culture issues, timezone differences, or what kind of talent level you're getting for your dollar. All warm bodies are equal myth, etc. In theory, it can work great. Sometimes, it does. Often it doesn't. Caveat emptor.
Wouldn't those kids where you grew up think it was just as much fun to throw a brick through someone's window if they couldn't get to the TV cable?
Dell sells off-lease equipment much of which is in the price range:

http://www.dfsdirectsales.com/
Not sure if const/private are a good fit for contracts but things like "account balance is always positive" can be done right now with contracts.coffee using object invariants. For example, verifying the invariants of a binary search tree hold [1].

[1] http://disnetdev.com/contracts.coffee/#duck
agree with you, i don't even see how its different from s3. Just upload and create shareable link.
You could say the same thing about a law firm, or an investment bank, or a talent agency. But people acquire both of them all the time, just like people acquire Hollywood studios all the time. The question is, "why would the people leave?" or "How do I ensure that they stay?" I think you have a point, I just don't think it is quite the point you are trying to make.

To wit, this is a lot of the reason the storied SF law firm Heller Ehrman collapsed a few years ago: a large group I believe simultaneously left the firm, and the firm had losses, and there was no capital base left to draw on to get over bad times (for the record, a lot of professional services firms like investment banks used to be organized this way, and in bad years, the partners would be responsible for recapitalizing the firm. This is one of the reasons you so frequently saw IBs and other similar firms so anxious to sell themselves in the 90s, and it was, in fact, the primary driver behind the notoriously secretive Goldman Sachs going public: they had people rejecting partnership because losses made it unattractive, and their capital base was too unstable to compete in the global big leagues when it was just partners).

That said, Heller was cobbled together through a series of acquisitions, most notably for the HN audience, the famed Venture Law Group. And it's not like this was all terrible, the firm lasted for well over 100 years.

Similarly, people have acquired real estate brokerage firms, where you'd think there'd be even _less_ of value to acquire, but they do it profitably. I think Cendant paid like $50m for Corcoran Group. Organizing people and assembling clients is difficult: if you can buy an organized group of people with an active customer list/market position...there is some value there, it's just not going to be at sales/earnings multiples we are used to seeing with companies that own technologies.
Confidence Declines Again Among VCs in Silicon Valley and in China
Possibly, but I'd say if you know the places a person goes to - that's enough information to figure out what they like. Foursquare wins there with check-ins and tips (which tell you which dish to order)
From the github page:

"MATE Desktop Environment, a non-intuitive and unattractive desktop for users, using traditional computing desktop metaphor."

Excellent! Just what I want!

I wonder how active this will be and whether it will see any improvements or just maintenance
I once worked for a company that made a staggering amount of money off producing milk (or other paper) cartons. They were vertically integrated from initial design all the way to dropping it off on your factory floor.
The attention that this is getting is absolutely ridiculous. Do we not have anything better to do? :(
Ha, it looks like it! They're competing head on (.. will be soon).
My thoughts on GTAC 2011
Then I stand corrected. Is there any means to declare partitioned state that the runtime then handles for the user, or does the user always have to manage it themselves? This is one of those things that is, I think, easier to do declaratively one level up in abstraction. (You can see examples of this by looking at invocations of our Aggregate operator in the above documents.)

I had assumed there was no arbitrary state because of the replay semantics. Let's say bolt A sends tuples to bolt B. B has internal state. A sends tuples t1, t2, t3 and t4. A receives acknowledgements that t1, t3 and t4 were processed. So t2 needs to be replayed. But the semantics of what that means is undefined - B has internal state that already incorporates, for certain, t3 and t4, and maybe t2. (While it's unlikely, you never know where a tuple got lost.) So replaying t2 is problematic - do you just blindly replay it, and allow potentially broken semantics? The alternative is to do rollback, which is quite hairy.
guess it didnt come through, meant to have text:

O'Reilly.com has a coupon code "MYUPD" which reduces the price of their technical eBooks to $4.99 each
No need to break captchas, just get humans to type them for you at $1.39 / 1000 captchas.
http://deathbycaptcha.com/user/login

Also the article mentions that reCaptcha is the most secure implementation of captchas so far. This is semi-true. Up until mid-August of this year (if I remember correctly) reCaptcha was quite trivial to break. Then in late-August/early-September someone apparently kicked their ass into high gear and they released several different variants of reCaptcha only weeks apart (unfilled in letters and lines that ran through multiple words). Again these were trivial to crack by simply modifying the old OCR to work remove the new distortions.

Then in late September (I believe, I don't record these dates anywhere) they finally settled on a wave distortion that I have yet to figure out how to break (due to lack of skill, time, and interest). You can check it out here:

http://www.google.com/recaptcha/demo/ajax

But all spammers that need to crack reCaptcha usually do so for account creation. In this case, their margins are high enough for them to simply use deathByCaptcha. So, captchas are defeated, not due to the security of their implementation, but due to economics.
Scirra dev here. This is indeed a problem. The thing is Chrome is ultra-strict about the MIME type and rejects it if it's wrong. Firefox seems happy with it. Given HTML5 is new and nobody has their servers set up with this MIME type, and lots of people are already making HTML5 games with our tool, I'm tempted to say it's Chrome's fault for being too strict... getting everyone to reconfigure their servers is a real PITA just because Chrome is fussy.
HTML, CSS and Javascript. Occasionally some PHP. Autocomplete is not that brilliant, and AFAIK it doesn't have integration with browsers (not sure about compiler integration).

I mostly use specific tools (either GUI or CLI) for specific tasks (such as git or svn), because that allows me to work faster. I've tried an IDE a few times, but i usually dislike the implementation of certain features (such as git) and the slowness. I could learn vi i suppose, but i'm just lazy :)
It's interesting to see that in such an early year, Jobs and Woz's offices are almost as far apart as they could possibly be in the building.
This reminds me of a blog post I read several years ago where the author connected the concision of code to the experience the author of the code had. More experienced coders needed less comments and could read higher-density code with less mental effort.

Wish I could find that blog post again, I've thought of it from time to time over the years.

edit: speeling.

edit2: Yegge strikes again. Wow. Amazingly influential guy for me.
Dart Client + Server tutorial app
I've since given up hoping people will stop thinking that tiny, tiny fonts are awesome. Cause I guess nothing makes the article you wrote more awesome than making it impossible for humans to read. Readability, ftw. http://www.readability.com/
Moral Hazards & Wedding Planners
Apple Bringing Virtual SIM to Fight With SIM Unlock
André Malraux
André Malraux, pour l’état civil Georges André Malraux, né le 3 novembre 1901 à Paris[1] (18e), mort le 23 novembre 1976
http://www.psdmate.com/2011/11/03/andre-malraux/ , André Malraux , André Malraux , André Malraux , André Malraux ,
Uh, that privacy policy (or at least the snippets you posted) provide NO explicit assurances that Google is not reading your stuff. At all.

It tells you what they WILL do. And it says if they decide to "use" (vague) "this information" (vague) in other ways, they'll ask for consent. Does simply reading it count as "using" it? Google doesn't say.

I wouldn't trust these assurances at all.
Less than a year ago, all you got in the USA was free 2 day delivery.

Licensing videos and books is surely very complex legally, so starting more than one country at a time would undoubtedly be very hard.

I'd hardly call that "bittersweet".
NYC H1B shopkeep.com

The most dangerous labor of all was the twelfth and final mission. Eurystheus ordered Hercules to kidnap the beast called Cerberus who guards the gates of hell - the brazed voiced hound of Hades and a monster not to be overcome and that may not be described, who eats raw flesh, fifty headed, relentless and strong. Near the gates of Acheron, a weaponless Hercules found the beast waiting for him. He resembled a retailer’s point of sale system.

You are a Hercules incarnate. Your weapons will include CoffeeScript, Ruby, JVM, Mac/Win/Lin[1], iOS, Android, maybe even a little C. Help us crush the mediocre POS industry incumbents. Multiple headed beasts, they are tired, decadent organizations and veritable deserts upon which the seeds of innovation and creativity find no purchase.

ShopKeep is fixing point of sale and becoming the “last mile” for local. A profoundly disruptive solution, we have established a beachhead in a sector in dire need of innovation. A well funded NYC based startup, we are fixing technology depressed, mind numbingly overpriced, and overly complex POS solutions and making them less expensive and highly customizable for both very large and very small customers.

Help us as we take this battle to the next level. You will lead the development of our products. Your releases will immediately be running[2] in thousands of actual brick-and-mortar stores. Like this one http://bit.ly/tEn61i. And this one http://bit.ly/w1n3vc

Contact jasonrichelson on github or david@shopkeep.com for more info...

[1]Don't worry, the Mac/Win/Lin registers consist almost entirely of cross-platform code
[2]CI + better auto-updating than Chrome!
according to their site, they're still in rate-limited beta (which is fine). however, when i entered my email address to get an invite, it told me i could move up the invite queue by entering the email addresses of three friends, which definitely had a bit of a scummy feel to it.
I actually had this problem, and tried to use Dropbox, but Dropbox does not fully solve this.

Last time I checked there were two options for transferring large files on Dropbox. (1) if the recipient has dropbox as well you can just share the file privately. (2) If the recipient does not have dropbox, then the only way to share the file is to put it in a public folder where it will become publicly accessible to anyone.

It is obvious that this does not solve things for all situations. In my case I had to send a copy of our software build to a potential client. I did not want to make our software build public. And it would be certainly considered rude to ask a potential client to sign up for dropbox just so they can test our software.

I think most HN readers kind of assume that everyone has dropbox by now, but this is not something you can rely on once you get out of the US tech sphere.

So yes a service like this would be pretty useful.
Fun little game where when the twist became opaque, I immediately was excited to play more levels. That's a game design win. Thanks for sharing.
Helpful Forum Marketing Tips For Everyone
TIPPMANN US Army Project Salvo Marker Reviews
The section you've excerpted could be interpreted as saying that Google does reserve the right to have both its software and personnel read your email in order to "[p]rovide, maintain, protect, and improve our services (including advertising services) and develop new services; and Protect the rights or property of Google or our users."

Which is, more or less, for any reason whatsoever except those already blatantly illegal (harassment, blackmail, etc.).
Misleading.

What that document actually says is this:

No, but automatic scanning and filtering technology is at the heart of Gmail. Gmail scans and processes all messages using fully automated systems in order to do useful and innovative stuff like filter spam, detect viruses and malware, show relevant ads, and develop and deliver new features across your Google experience. Priority Inbox, spell checking, forwarding, auto-responding, automatic saving and sorting, and converting URLs to clickable links are just a few of the many features that use this kind of automatic processing.

In other words, Google IS most certainly "reading" your email, at the very least with computers, for various purposes.
Then why would you hit back instead of home?
How many legs does a dog have?
I agree that human reviewers will be needed, especially in the beginning, to both fix-up the output stories and to iteratively improve the engine.

But, I think that the engine could definitely pump out and use characters that are interesting. For example, lets say we give the character 1-n flaws. Drawn from our list of flaws, we could pick "Abandonment issues", and that flaw could have modifiers like "abandoned by parents at birth", "abandoned by crew on an island", or "abandoned by creators to shovel trash into little cubes". That flaw could then be used to pick certain plot devices to be used at certain points in the story skeleton.

Characters drive stories and we've just made the basis for Luke Skywalker, Captain Jack Sparrow, and Wall-E.

Also, I agree that it will take a little while to define the different cadences and vernaculars used in, for example, a Fairy Tale vs. a Crime Noir story, but I do think it is possible to make such definitions. "Once upon a time in a land far, far away, ...." vs. "On a dark and stormy night, she burst into my office with legs a mile long...."
If the FBI comes knocking on Google's door and says they have a terrorist under surveillance, and they need to read his email in order to save a busload of schoolchildren from a bomb, should Google let them do it?

Is it evil to read a bad person's email, or is it evil not to read it?

That's why a clearly stated policy that says exactly when Google will or will not let a human look at your documents and email is important. "Don't be evil" is cute, but it's not a policy statement.
"Seemingly consumer friendly" because it may very well be so in the short term, but not, it seems to me, in the long term.

Short term: less malware, better UX. Long term: software distribution carefully controlled by a cartel.
It's because Woz always wanted to stay as an engineer, not as a manager. That's why Jobs and Markkula is one place while Woz near the software team.
Haven't heard of jotly before but it seems jotly is available for ALL platforms not just iphone so I already like it 100x more then oink.
Adobe AMF configuration files demystified
It's Apple's Sandbox, Developers Just Play in It
No, we don't invest in later rounds. Partly because you can't do that without harming the reputations of the companies you don't invest in, and partly because we'd rather fund a new startup than put more into an existing one. I.e. we'd rather expand breadthwise than depthwise.
Tennis Courts!
The big advantages to the startup in this case are the following:
1) More potential for upside since you own it yourself and can potentially reap the financial benefits more easily.
2) Potentially less oversight and freedom to pivot/pursue different directions (depends on how your startup is financed).
3) Freedom to use different technology, personnel, and office space than in the parent corporation.

I think #2 and #3 are the main things that are driving people to start companies today.
Will HTML5 replace native apps?
Hey John,

I'm in the UK also and maybe able to help, even if it's just to throw ideas around to help you get to the next level.

I'm helen842000 on gmail.
They're definitely reading my email.

I know this for a fact as the last time I mailed them they replied.
Well I did also say that I was whining like an indulgent nerd about an OS I got given for free. Which pretty much sums up the characterisation you've given here, as well. ;)

I do see your point, I really do. My concern, and the part that I specifically labelled hubris - which in hindsight is a regrettable term - was neither the desire to make changes nor the desire to not maintain old configurations. Those things are understandable. When I tried Unity in 11.04 I was impressed that Canonical were working to advance the state of the art.

The part that irks me is when I try to imagine the assumptions behind the choices for the upgrade behaviour in 11.10. Users are proactively prompted to make that upgrade, and I perceive a disconnect between their expectations of a simple upgrade and the resulting user experience.

In the post above I mentioned some ways in which this could have been made much smoother (simply warning users that their entire desktop environment was about to change, for instance.)

Canonical doesn't have to answer a single thing to me for the operating system they worked hard to give me for free, but I still wonder why they chose that path.