skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one doubts that Android is a complement to Google's business but fundamentally if the app store developers can't make money then it's largely pointless.

iOS is the place where people like 37Signals can thrive.
Android is the place where people like Facebook can thrive.

They've got a market of millions of people who don't buy anything, but click ads occasionally. Android should team up with AdBusters because on the Marketplace everyday is buy nothing day.
Yeah, although I wonder how many wedding planners exist in a given locale assuming most wedding couples seek local planners?

It might be overkill if you can see the portfolio of a NY planner when, in fact, you are living in Omaha and are more likely to pick someone from Omaha.
Employees Who Identify with the Company Boost Financial Performance
IOS/Mac OS X Debugging Magic
> How many people now have gmail accounts, and are searching through google then before they had Android devices?

Judging by Android users I see around me, not a single one.
There's definitely some good content in the mainstream media, like the NY Times, Washington Post, Independent, Guardian, Spiegel, Japan Times, etc. But there's also a lot of propaganda and slanted journalism (witness all the disgusting cheerleading for the pro-war side during the lead up to the Iraq war).

Advertisers, corporations, and the government have a corrupting influence on the media. I'd much rather the media be 100% listener-supported, like Pacifica Radio is. Then there'll be a lot less conflict of interest.
This also presents a problem if the app is not frequently used. The social/notification aspect should keep users coming back. I guess the hard part is you need at least 50-60 friends for users to engage once a day.
jDownloader.

Both of the free antivirus I know about for Windows (AVG and Avast).
Employee options are common shares. VC gets preferred shares (typically). When the company is acquired for less than the investment or goes under, preferred shares get paid out first. So even if common shares have vested, there's no guarantee they're worth some percentage of the current valuation of the company.
This is a good thing for Microsoft.

Microsoft needs to become more outwardly focused and influential softies leaving the fold and pushing from the outside will do that. Right now the two good things Microsoft has going for it is MVC and C#. Both of which were inspired or heavily influenced by outside forces (MVC by Castle and C# 4 was influenced heavily by Python).

Phil Haack moving to Github will hopefully push Microsoft to embrace open collaboration systems a little better and because he's outside of Microsoft he won't have to deal with "you might kill off VS Team Foundation" hindrances.

All this in turn MIGHT give Microsoft a chance at becoming relevant again in the developer space (and please don't say "a lot of people use Microsoft" because I'm one of those people and I know a lot of those people and they're all looking at their future with worried eyes)
To add to the chorus: college is what you make it. I haven't finished my degree, financial reasons caused me to pause (27 now, going back will be weird). But I'll be back. Honestly, even when I graduate I'll probably still pop in for the occasional literature course or odd class I hear of that's interesting. College is a great place for discussion, flexing new ideas, and just general growth as a person. But, it's not for everyone.

I've seen a few articles like this pop up on HN and it always reminds me of this article I read a few years ago:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b...

I think it's worth mentioning that many of the reasons I enjoy college, and college classes, are the same reasons I love coming to HN. I am not a programmer, I do not work for a startup, I'm actually a literature student working in a support role that has little to do with technical skill. I come to HN because I enjoy a forum filled with intelligent discourse, where most visitors understand that intelligent people can disagree.

edit: I should also add to that list of reasons I like to keep up with computer and technical news, too :)
How to Use Video to Increase Conversions
This could possibly be the dumbest reply ever on HN.

>There is no question of 'use something else'.

Yes, there _is_ an alternative. It's called use something else. Use a distro that doesn't change. Use a BSD, use Slackware, use RHEL/CentOS. Don't use a bleeding edge distro that is best known for change if what you really want is the same thing you've seen since before you were born.

If you don't like how Ubuntu does it, don't use Ubuntu.
Can we use this as a comments system? For example, a blog would have an email address and leaving a comment would basically send an email to the address, and then it would be displayed as a comment beneath the blog entry. The benefit would be that we can use email spam filtering on the comments. The email could be sent either from the user's email address or you could send it from the application's email address to itself.
No, the core problem was that man motd did not help tell him how to do something. That's what the man pages are supposed to do... man motd on my Oneiric system still says nothing about this lovely little 'feature'.

Not to mention the questionable desirability of stacking complexity upon a very simple goal...
Negative feedback in markets often brings stability to a dynamical system and there is reason that there are negative feedback loops in markets.

A popular model of a negative feedback relationship in markets is called the 'Demand curve'.
Yahoo Studio coming up in New York, But Why?
I wish I had such a cool last name!
Except for the fact that he didn't know to do that because the documentation was incorrect. Not even merely omitting it -- no, directly contradicting the behaviour. To find out to do as you say, he had to read the Ubuntu-specific patches to the source code of the package. That is broken.
It's my opinion. Working at a startup, you're underpaid and overworked for very little financial benefit.
Google is more open than Microsoft ever was, though. There's no Cyanogenmod of Windows.
OPERA neutrino anomaly remains unresolved
You're suggesting that having classes of shares is unconscionable?

If the idea of preferred shares shocks your conscience, you should spend a lot more time studying how startup financing works (at a nuts and bolts level) before taking the plunge and working at one.
I expect this to be exactly the sort of thing that a commercial vendor will support: here is the language version and library versions that we support. Don't upgrade any of these until we tell you that you can, or you're on your own.

I'm just starting to experiment with Scala for scripting on top of existing Java, so the current state is not a hardship for me. The article is helpful in pointing out the task (technical as well as P/R) to be faced by any would-be "golden standard" vendor, though.
Three Months After Bartz’s Firing, It’s Hurry Up and Wait at Yahoo
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to say "This is already on HN", but more "Here's some more reading for people who are interested".

I need to practice my tone and style a bit.
It's not a horribly ugly theming system.

I'm mainly an HTML and CSS guy, and know a healthy amount of PHP.

But I don't know enough to set up a server, databases, write a CMS from scratch (well, maybe I could), and I don't like spending a lot of time in the Terminal. I'm not a programmer.

Even as a designer, I'm able to use WordPress' powerful theming system (which is pretty easy to understand and, in my opinion, not ugly at all) to build out an entire easy-to-use site for a client without having to also hire a developer. The WordPress community is massive and helpful, PHP is well-documented and simple to work with if you know HTML, and you can literally use WordPress to make almost anything on the web. Maybe it would be better theoretically to hire a developer or learn to be one, but I don't like hardcore programming and sometimes just don't need a developer that I have to pay for, wait for, etc.

WordPress, in a way, makes the ability to make simple web apps, dynamic sites, and blogs a more democratic thing; many people can pick enough WP knowledge in a few weeks to do things that would take months or years of programming training.
Russian scientists to clone woolly mammoth
That'll need to be a different poll, partly because I've worked for a number of startups and only had one exit - in general, we'll need to vote in some other way to get a feel for that.
Well I find that the Microsoft 'embrace, extend, extinguish' sounds more like Google today. When was the last time Gmail had introduced innovative features, there is still much improvement to be done. Chrome browser is by far the best, but when they get the market share, I imagine we will see improvements and innovations come to a slow as well.

But sure, let's talk about how Eric Schmidt was the Apple board during the development of the iPhone. That is fascinating. How could that not have influenced the only competition to the iPhone. That seems suspicious to me, as no other company besides Google anticipated it.

So let's talk about the design similarities between Android and iPhone.

These topics are fascinating.

So Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle are all claiming that Android violates their products, while Google, before this, had no patents regarding OS. That is also fascinating.

The only reason why Android is 'open source' is to make it more difficult for litigation. And I don't think a company that develop's open source should be able to place ads on it, as to me, that is still 'selling' the software.
Conference calling, notifying large numbers of people by phone quickly, menu trees, etc.
I see a Mythbusters episode in the future!
Nassim Taleb addresses this sort of thinking. He calls it a "ludic fallacy", which is the over application of games to our down detriment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy
Canada is at the top of the list :) send me mail at patrick(at)twilio(dot)com happy to get you access to the ongoing canadian SMS beta
Show HN:Infographic Showing HN Demographic-Income,Residence,Depression,Tech etc
The wording of the question negates the necessity of that as a choice.
need 3rd choice: use Flash blocker; which blocks a lot of ads but not all, as nice side effect
Interesting curve.
Okay, that's how you would like things to be, but I'm still curious about what you do now.
Same for me but in the order: Privacy, Speed, Security. I don't mind seeing them too much either. I have zero sympathies for websites that whine about ad-blockers when they don't care about my privacy.
Picture this: Steve Jobs gets bronzed
Xbox Live Terms of Service Updated to Prevent Class Action Lawsuits
If options are "underwater" at the time of acquisition, it can be part of the deal that acquiring company does not need to honor those, and they are basically deleted. That happened to me, when options at a public company were acquired by another public company. All the vested but underwater options were simply deleted. When share price rose at the acquiring company my options would have been worth $600,000+. Oh well... ;(
I would disagree.

If I request twitter.com/userr but there is not account named "userr", should twitter decide I misspelled that and redirect me to "user" if that exists? I say no.

First of all, a 404 response needs to be sent regardless so that a script can check for 404 and handle that as deemed appropriate. If I got a 301 or 302 to what the server thought was what I was looking for, the script won't know that the server is now guessing at what I wanted. I assume this is important for bots like the google crawler.

Second, content with that 404 is very useful. It adds context to a user that cares. A well designed 404 will tell the user that the page/item/person/etc couldn't be found. Then it will offer an action such as suggestions of what it could be. Getting back to my "userr" example, there could be links to "user", "users", etc. There could be a prominent search feature or a way to report this to the company. Maybe a way to contact support, like a live chat widget. Further more, a 404 in your logs are very useful to look for what is commonly not found. Do people regularly try going to example.com/login even though your login page is at example.com/user_login? Apache access logs will show this very nicely and you can then decide to manually add a redirect.
So, who are the lucky few to have earned more than 11M :)
Windows 8: Dead Before Arrival?
I voted three times...but this is missing a negative entry - you know, the scenario where you pay an obscene amount of taxes on the ridiculously inflated price of your shares when you exercise (and can't sell yet while awaiting a liquidity event), but the shares are later downgraded to 1/10th taxable estimate...so you get to hold on to that loss for years, hoping at some point to be able to be in the position to write off the tax loss! Yay, equity! ;)
Would be more interesting to see values divided by founders, early employees, late employees.
Just as an example, it is better to make an app like BaseCamp or Campfire with Ruby on Rails than WordPress. But I can learn enough in a matter of weeks to make something like the P2 Theme (http://www.p2theme.com) with WordPress; god knows how long it'd take me to go from completely zero programming knowledge to the level required to build the same thing in RoR
URDU SEX STORIES: May Akeli Aur Pathan
Yes. In my opinion a website that is open and honest about its caring about privacy would do that.
If everyone sticks to older versions of Windows, Microsoft will stop making money. It does Microsoft no good to keep people on a legacy system. Either people upgrade to Windows 8 or Microsoft goes out of business.

Have you not thought "hmm, wonder why people are buying tablets in droves, while Windows sales are declining"? People _like_ the interface. The only people who don't like it are the people most notorious for hating change of any kind, and the people who they tell to hate it. It's gotta be tiring hating things that you've never used.
It's a little hard to complain about Ubuntu if you're not using Ubuntu. Your argument boils down to "don't complain".
At the time I didn't realize how rare this was, but the company was sold for cash, all options were accelerated to vest at close and people were payed with a check.

There was a 50/50 chance we could have grown the company to be very cashflow positive (ie - we sold too soon) and there was a 50/50 chance we would have folded (ie - we sold at just the right time). We were bought for our novel technology and the engineering team was for the most part kept around and given good incentives to stay on for a bit.

That job and the acquisition kind of launched my career so I don't spend too much time worrying about whether the CEO or the board pulled the trigger too early.
send me mail at patrick(at)twilio(dot)com happy to get you access to the ongoing canadian SMS beta
Well, how much do you think shares in a bankrupt company should be worth? If there's not enough money to go around, someone is going to get left with the short stick.
Anyone else has a problem loading this page?
To be "obese", maybe you need to be a serious bodybuilder, but being overweight is pretty easy.

My numbers: 6'5", 233lb, BMI 27.6 (solidly overweight), squat 180, bench 160, press 120, snatch 90. All numbers are 5 rep work sets except snatch, which is 3 rep work set. ORM might be higher.

The problem is that BMI was designed for sedentary people. It's a good guideline, but it's no substitute for a pinch test.
I stand corrected. Thanks for sharing.
"... Phil also invented C# ..."

Anders Hejlsberg is credited as being the principal designer & architect of C# at Microsoft [0] and I don't see this listed on Phil Haacks resume. [1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg#At_Microsoft

[1] http://haacked.com/Docs/PhillipHaack_Resume.html
> I sure hope Apple is working on a way to enable free trials.

Official support would be nice, but can't developers already implement trials using in-app purchases? Download the app for free to get the trial, then pay to unlock the full version. Many apps are already using this approach.
What possible benefit was there from overcomplicating the bloody MOTD file?

I dunno, but does it really matter? If the motd mattered anything to me, I would have been aware of the change.

I was blindsided by this change too and one day, like years ago, I noticed that the motd wasn't working as I expected and reset itself. I did (something to the effect of) this:

$ ls -l /etc/motd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-09-23 21:44 /etc/motd -> /var/run/motd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2009-06-14 15:01 /etc/motd.tail

Then I thought "oh I see what they did there", dropped a banner in motd.tail and moved on with life. Wow, yeah, 2 and a half years ago. Didn't care then, still don't care now.
In Southern California, Stucco is a very common outer surface of a house. It's sort of a cement/plaster type material that yields a rough surface.

California is VERY earthquake prone. The state is a giant fault zone. Bricks and stones make bad building materials in that region because they fall on people and kill them in an earthquake.

I live in the Southeast US where earthquakes basically do not happen. Houses are often at least partially built with bricks here (especially older homes). My 80 year old home is built out of bricks on a dirt foundation with plaster on the interior walls.

Newer houses here are often built with pine frames, poured concrete basements and various types of siding (including brick).

Picture of stucco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stucco_wall.jpg

Picture of typical California suburban home:
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-11376808/stock-photo-shot-of... (The stone is non-structural)

Picture of typical Southeastern US home (circa 1950):
http://hwandn.com/respics/IMG_0713_1.jpg (Bricks are structural)

Picuture of 1930's Southeastern US home (not mine):
http://www.redfin.com/homes-for-sale#!lat=33.78267975865834&... Brick, and not updated, brick is structural.
Contest alert find my intern and win tickets
What a bizarre conspiracy theory.

I know some of the people at Evidon rather well. They provide a mechanism that allows individuals to opt-out of behaviorally-targeted advertising via an icon in the advertisement. In other words, the company makes it easier for individuals not to be tracked.

You might not be paying Evidon directly - the ad networks that use their tools do that - but that doesn't mean you're the product. 'Keeping the FTC off your ass' is the product. Since the FTC is a pain, that product's worth a fair amount of money.

As far as I know, all Ghostery collects (if you opt-in) is which trackers appear on which page. It's a simple way for large organizations too screwed up to know which tags are on which pages (in other words, most large organizations) figure out if they're complying with the FTC regulations.
There's huge opportunity for android, just look at what's happening with the amazon market, that should give you an idea of how android can be re-invented and sold to a world-wide user base. Plus the more affordable equipment. Of course this means there will be more crappy versions of it, but that's exactly what happened to windows and the pc.
The "Pokemon argument" was never considered valid within Wikipedia, and indeed no longer applies -- a few of the best-known Pokemon have their own pages, but most are relegated to lists.

Proof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon

(The links are all to the individual names -- but most of those are just redirects to sublists, not individual articles.)
It's funny seeing this posted so soon after "Don't be a Free User"...
Didn't these changes make the addition of dynamic content to the MOTD really trivial? That seems compatible with Ubuntu's mission to me.

It sounds to me like this whole rant could have been replaced with a bug report on the documentation in Launchpad.
This seems like a bad attitude - that whatever sleazy thing people do is excused by them having over-spent their way to desperation.
I agree with you. I stopped reading at

"almost without exception, economists since Adam Smith have viewed economic systems as being in balance or equilibrium, and as having a natural tendency to return there after any disturbance. In this view, crises can be understood only as anomalies, the consequences of unusual outside shocks."

That quote shows a huge lack of contextual knowledge. A more accurate quote could be that since BEFORE Adam Smith Economists have disagreed on this point. (Menger/Walras, Rothbard/Schumpeter etc etc etc)
Thank you. I think people are dissecting my comment a bit much like they have an axe to grind. Someone mentioned getting things done over checking spelling. Please. Does it take that long to type an extra character or two. That's a bullshit argument. Then dyslexia? Well that's fine but dyslexia doesn't cause you to spell "because" as "cuz" so while I feel for dyslexics, that too is just not good enough. The remark about "oh what if the Nobel Prize winner was a Russiin chemist?"... Oh, come on with that. It's obvious what I mean. The point is that this type of spelling can make the smartest of us and those of us worthy of a lot of respect look like fools. People will write you off for it. Suppose this were written by Steve Forbes or Bill Gates or PG himself but we didn't know it. I'm willing to bet that if the recipient wasn't a close friend and didn't recognize the sender's address that they wouldn't be taken seriously. That's my point.

I think you get it darklajid. When someone writes this way it just reflects poorly on the person. My point was that people don't take you seriously even if you really are a genius that can help them if you write and speak in a manner like we see in this email. It it's a close friend then maybe it's fine but my overall point still stands despite the nit picking.
As a trained economist I can attest to the fact that most micro economist view these issues you raised as basically irrelevant. I understand that it is basically damning experimental evidence but it is completely disregarded.
There actually should be a negative category for all those that got hit with taxes after excersizing and then couldnt cash out. This unfortunately happens more frequently than you might think.
H&M creates the perfect virtual body
I agree. This is the reason I no longer watch the show. It may be "longing for the old days", but I feel like the earlier seasons had a higher ratio of explanation to repeated viewing of explosions.
For those confused readers, superavit is the Spanish and Portuguese word for surplus.
Solar storms could sandblast the moon
"But... the movie The Social Network told me and showed me that..." -The thoughts of too many HN folks
> I lay no claim that all minorities will be offended, only that a minority population exists that will be offended.

There's always someone who will be offended, no matter what you do. (Example - some folks are offended by "Happy Holidays", and the reasons are not mutually consistent.)

Some minorities are worth worrying about but others aren't, and they're not the same in every situation.
That makes sense. Still incredible that it had so much energy that it was still going after making it through a door and a wall.

It's also surprising that it could bounce so high (at least once) after hitting a floor.
His kid has an even cooler name: http://haacked.com/archive/2007/06/06/introducing-cody-yokoy...
There is no question of 'use something else'.

So, what you're saying is that this new motd system is some seriously disruptive technology? Good on those ubuntu kids, showing us all how its done.
Even more confusing... Go to AppFog (who they renamed to, but seem to still be furthering PHPFog) and click on "Blog" and it goes to the PHPFog blog... but there actually is an AppFog blog, just nothing links to it.