skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I get the point. They're still not funny, and that's what I take issue with.

Steve Mobs is a joke about Jobs' charisma.

And it's a bad, unclever one.

The Genius Bar: it's not parodying the attitudes of the actual Apple Geniuses, it's making fun of the ludicrous idea of calling your tech support guys geniuses.

Again: that's not a funny joke.

Powered by dreams and imagination: it's mostly parodying the way Apple users talk about their Apple products (I know Mac users that gush about how beautiful they are). It's also mocking Apple's marketing, like the iPod dance commercials, which are all style and no substance.

I get that. But still: it's such a stupid no-brainer target, and they didn't do anything particularly clever about it.

Glowing computer being turned off: it's parodying the glowing/pulsing light on Apple notebooks when they're in sleep mode.

That's quite obscure. And that glowing light isn't exactly something mockable. It's a damn good design choice.

iPhonies: it's parodying the white headphones being associated with iPods, not only in all of the iPod marketing, but in the minds of the public as well. For a discussion of the significance of the white headphones, see "The Perfect Thing" by Steven Levy.

That I get. I just don't see why that's funny: I've never met somebody with the headphones who wasn't using a Mac. I don't think I know anybody who would think that was a good way to stand out and be cool.

I'll check out the book: thanks for the recommendation!

iPhonies are expensive: it's parodying the perception that you pay more for Apple products and all you get for the price premium is the status associated with having the products.

"Parodying perception" isn't anything unless you're actively mocking the fact that perception is wrong. Until then, you're just taking popular parody and taking it because people who already don't like something are an easy target. If this clip had also parodied anti-Mac sentiment, I could see this as a more legitimate point.

Steve Mobs calls himself "insanely great.": it's parodying the Steve Jobs is the Savior of the Computing World attitude some Apple Fanboys have, not how he sees himself.

See, I see that as a lazy and unfunny joke. I get it, but I think that The Simpsons could have done better by actually showing Jobs as he reportedly sees himself.

People don't get Mac products to look cool: this directly contradicts my anecdotal experience with an Apple fan. But, it doesn't matter. The show isn't parodying individual people's attitudes, but rather a certain perception of Apple users, whether it's true or not.

But that's lazy! I'm sorry, I know I keep saying the same thing. But it's true. Lazy humor is the easiest and worst, and I can't stand it, especially not when it's a show that used to be so good.

Finally, just naming something and calling it "not funny" doesn't make it not funny, and isn't a critique of it.

No, it doesn't. What makes it not funny is the fact that it isn't funny. It's the fact that it's lazy and takes the easy way out with every single joke.
You should have an escape mechanism handy for the notation of email-addresses, though.
It could be. I didn't vote it up, even though I usually do vote for this kind of posting, because I can't review his app (and wouldn't anyway unless he made it available to me for free). It probably depends on the user in question. Looks like this guy's had an account for a while, even if he hasn't participated much.
The Phoenix Scene
No offense taken :)

I'm a back-end programmer without much UI experience. I was trying for a simplistic layout. Any specific suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!
I am surprised that Bayesian Reasoning has not yet been suggested.
there is a way to derrive an unbiased random number, even if everyone else is cheating. take this:
http://everything2.com/title/Coin%2520tossing%2520protocol
and extend for N participants and results from 1 to N.

Given this, a lot can be done.
Getting Real About Agile Design
Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise
Be civil, have your coffee.

That made me laugh! Actually the coffee kicked in as I was writing, which you can probably tell. I don't know why I didn't go back and edit the first part... I compulsively edit everything else.
My hard-core alpha-uber-geek friend gave up on Linux long ago. (Except for games.) He uses some BSD.
I think Google knows the success of Chrome depends on the plugin community. The open support of AdBlock is a signal that Google will prioritize user interests over everything else.

Seems like a smart move to me -- getting Chrome out is strategically important -- browser diversification mitigates bigger risks, such as MS pushing a default ad blocker through ie; and helps them raise the bar on all browsers (esp. js rendering) to make their web apps run better.
Educating the Client on IA
The next big step for chrome would be if it could use any firefox plugin ;) I know its almost an oxymoron.
I too would like advice on how to find a UI designer to clean up an existing site without paying a fortune?
Firefox Surpassing 50% Market Share in More Regions
I ll second that. Appearance is more than most think.
This reminds me how much I wish it would be possible to attach notes on Google Analytics graphs so I can look at them later and know what I did.
Is MySQL really this bad?
There is no "best" in software
It looks like all the 'my fail story'-blogpostings are quite elaborate for what they're trying to say.
With this story the same, it reads like a breeze but all he says is:
"Hey, I didn't delete the cache everyday because of a fault I made in the crontab. That costed me pagerank and visitors."
Doesn't mean that I don't like reading those stories =)
The aiming argument does kind of fall apart if your agressors have access (and they virtually all do) to any kind of high-powered automatic weaponry with a high fire rate.

Even zigzagging won't help against a hail of bullets. You're likely to get a few hits.
It lowered the barriers to entry for using everybody else's product too, though. I think it probably helped other people more than Sun, though. IIRC, the Sparc had a pretty advanced development environment in the mid-90s, yet developing on/for a Linux system in the same time period was pretty painful.

And they said "we have the best hardware for running Java", but the average business doesn't care. They just want their software to run, cheaply and fast. Everybody I know runs their Java apps on commodity Dell servers. Maybe it was different in the first dot-com boom; IIRC, Sun servers were the big thing back then.
Jason Calacanis.
"Effects?" Do you mean the effects of Apple being parodied? I mean, if anything this clip will sell more Macs. But I still think that this post inspired more one-way other-way dispute than it did enlightened conversation.
20 Years Ago Today: Dijkstra's "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science"
"Spirit of Christmas?" What's that? Is that the South Park clip?

I might actually play with that. It sounds like an interesting enough challenge.
I wish my blog would get picked up when it is NOT making me look like an idiot. sigh

Edited to add: So I was trying for a less pithy comment when the phone rang from overseas. Sorry about that.

Anyhow. Yep, this story really did happen to me. The good news: a one line tweak to a little file I didn't touch in something like six months probably added about 50% to my sales. The bad news: in those six months, this probably had actual economic costs of several thousand dollars. Or, to put this in relative terms, the worldwide economy just freaking collapsed and I still managed to do more damage to my net worth with a freaking typo than the total massacre in my IRA.
p.s. One possible future thing could be to make extensions for things like Thunderbird that actually gives a "Todo", "Remind" and "Follow-up" buttons alongside the "Reply" and "Forward" buttons ;-)

That would be very much in the future! I actually have a a prototype working at the moment, but its for my eyes only for a while yet until I can iron a few things out!

Good tip on the stemming - I will certainly give that a go.
Starbucks does this intentionally. They place franchises within walking distance of each other (in downtown Boston, there are literally 2 Starbucks on opposite sides of the block), knowing that they'll cannibalize each other's sales. But they do it for branding reasons: by placing stores so close together, they make Starbucks ubiquitous and turn it into a cultural phenomenom, which helps the corporate bottom line at the expense of individual franchisees.

It seems to have worked fairly well, at least up until the recent economic downturn.

Dunkin Donuts as well. In my town, there are 3 Dunkin Donuts within a 500 foot triangle. One is standalone, one's in a supermarket, one's in a gas station.
I think I agree with you. As an outsider Chrome looks like an application platform/sandbox for Google apps ('Google's AIR') that is just disguised as a browser. With their own platform they can move features more quickly than by fitting the apps into whatever box Apple/MS/Mozilla build. It could be the early MS playbook all over again. So...

Build whichever browser components remove barriers to entry for users (ad block, compatibility with many existing web apps, better performance/stability/ease of use, etc.) => build widespread adoption => commoditize desktop operating systems.
Interestingly similar to Yahoo!'s YQL. http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/
also when it sends under an "alias" mine always says From x using y (where y = my original account) ;(
Lesson 0: Don't do premature optimization.
I just wanted to point out that the parent-parent made no reference to Windows. It would be better if your arguments didn't require this reference.
Imagine a self-powering cell phone that converts sound waves into energy...
100 Useful Tips and Tools to Research the Deep Web
Experts say that typical search engines like Yahoo! and Google only pick up about 1% of the information available on the Internet. So, how can you find all the rest of this information? This list offers 100 tips and tools to help you get the most out of your Internet searches.
This book will fail because Godin already has the market on made up words cornered.
That might have been Jeff Atwood. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html

I haven't run an AV on the computers I use the most in a couple of years, and have had no infections. I don't download warez, surf "questionable" sites, and don't open email attachments unless I'm expecting them (and these days most attachments can be viewed in google docs first). I only use IE to view my employer's Exchange based webmail and to test HTML I'm writing. I do run Vista with UAC on.

If I do encounter a file that I need to open that may be questionable, I fire up a VM with AVG and test it out.

For me, the performance penalty for an always on Anti Virus is too much for what it provides. For my parents, I make sure they have the latest updates to their AV software 24/7.
What's that site that lets you see iPhone apps in your browser? I don't have iTunes handy to look at this.
I'm very closed to points of view. I try to be open-minded, and I welcome debate at all time, but if I think I'm right, I won't change my mind unless I see a good argument as so why I'm wrong.

I think it would be "fairly well-done" if it had been an Internet video. But The Simpsons! I still have the old DVD sets and it used to be a beast. The writers were untouchable: they'd let out a stream of jokes at a pace that just blew everything else out of the water. This was beyond mediocre in comparison.

I think that it's popular because there are so many people who will laugh at anything mocking Apple. I'd also think that if it had been smarter-written and more critical of both sides - at first I'd hoped Comic Book Guy's appearance would be the arrival of the cliched ANTI-Mac person - it might not have been as popular. Blindly attacking something is always more digestible in its way.
That was great. Not as well-written as the first PDF, but damn was it accurate.
Dynamically Generated Tag Clouds for Tumblr
There was this paper about how competition eliminates the ability of employers to discriminate..
One of the original viral videos, passed around as a .mov file in the mid-90's, eventually got the attention of Hollywood and got turned into South Park.
I made the original statement that Java set back OOP by 20 years. And I stand by it. I used Java extensively for 8 years. I also programmed in Smalltalk for 10 years prior. Your assertion that "OOP, at the moment, is recognized as being what C++, Java, .NET are" is precisely the problem. People don't know their history.

Java is not a horrible language. It did set back good OOP by about 20 years. There is no reason to bring C++ into the debate. Prior to Java, the C++ community understood that C++ was not a great OOP language. C++ was C++ and people chose it for its unique characteristics, none of which was that it was a great OO language.

Next invested heavily in Objective-C for precisely the reason that they needed to get closer to the metal but knew that C++ was not great at OOP.
I think those echoes are what make me call it a parody. It's a serious parody - I think that it mirrors it to prove a serious statement - but at the same time, it's saga-length and absolutely epic, yet it focuses on the mind rather than on great actions and deeds. Perhaps it's not a direct parody - it does much more than parody - but I think that parody's still in there.

The part near the very end - the Sinbad the Sailor monologue - still cracks me up. What excellent writing.
I'd question just how much of a problem this is, even on Windows XP. I've worked with lots of firms where end users don't have admin rights and still use dozens of apps without any issue. It's really inexcusable for a Windows app to require admin rights in 2008 (unless it's actually doing system-level stuff), but even if you've got one that does, there are still options for a reasonably savvy user to work around it.
Let's hope we'll have enough competition to enforce tolerance.
Portrait is close to Joyce's autobiography. And absolutely reading it will make Ulysses easier to read. Otherwise, it's nearly incomprehensible. Joyce believes in in media res to an extreme.

Ulysses isn't directly parody, as was said in response to my original post. There are elements, but it's very much a serious book at the same time. Funny, but serious.
I have no idea what this is doing on HN and I have flagged it. It's not appropriate to this forum and it's a piece of really bad writing.

What has dental flossing your laptop (which appears to be a strategy copied from Sean Connery in 1960s era Bond movies with a strand of hair) got to do with a terrorist attack on a hotel? Because terrorists who are about to launch an assault on a hotel have first popped up to your room to take a look to see if you've got a .pr0n directory.

And thanks for the advice on slipping a knife past TSA. Great idea. Hey, advise readers to try to get a knife past a TSA agent.

Also, the whole thing about high floors is BS. Why? If I was a terrorist my next move in hotel attacks would be do go with a repeat of the Brighton hotel bombing. Book rooms months in advance, plants bombs in those rooms, set them off months later destroying the hotel. This article is a typical example of planning for the attack you've just experienced.

Frankly, he should take Schneier's advice and just not worry about this stuff.
Lesson N: Use a system that doesn't require you to manually remove cache files. Seriously.
I don't think this makes you look like an idiot. I submitted this article from your blog because it is insightful and shows how apparently small, unimportant "display errors" can have very real consequences in terms of traffic and revenue.
It's true, but a gun can only fire in one direction. Someone is going to die, but statistically, it will be someone other than you.

That said, if you jump out the window and break both of your legs, you are going to be the dead person. I haven't actually tried this, but I imagine it's pretty easy to finish off someone that can't move with a machine gun.
I agree. If you're asking for free reviews here you should be giving free access (even if it's limited in some way).
Sequence can be essential. Ever see a picture on a camera and not be able to place it or decode it ... then if you look at the pictures before it and after it. Then sometimes this is the context you need? Yep - just like that!
Given that they were big fans of not publishing books the old fashioned way in the past, I'd be interested in understanding what made them change their minds.
> I don't know git well enough to know these, except for one: handling large binary files that change frequently.

For the curious among us: what systems handle this better than git?
Although not even remotely scientific, my meager time paintballing seems to confirm this. Even marginally-aimed semi-automatic fire is going to be hard impossible to dodge, especially if you have nothing that even remotely looks like cover.

Even so, you're pretty much guaranteed to be killed like livestock if you stay, so running away is still the better strategy. Hitting the fire alarm may also be advantageous, as it will make it harder for the baddies to see and hear (water, flashing lights, loud klaxons), and it might help others feel that natural instinct to get the hell out.

Let's also not forget that gunshot wounds are not guaranteed fatal; the shock of being hit is far more severe than the actual damage caused by the bullet. Not that being shot is all that much fun, of course, but you're statistically likely to survive.

Since I'm rambling, let's also bring up the oddity that normal people can be coaxed to riot with surprisingly little provocation, yet when their lives are directly threatened by a small number of aggressors, many will cower in fear and be led like cattle.

Since I've never been in that position, I don't know how I'd handle it.
I think you're defining culture too narrowly. It's not just about wearing jeans or visiting nightclubs, it's about a shared perspective around religion, community interaction, concepts like freedom and responsibility and traditions. That kind of culture runs deep, very deep, which is part of the reason (for example) Pakistani immigrants are finding it so difficult to assimilate into the UK. They wear jeans, go to nightclubs and all the rest, but find it very difficult to break those cultural ties and perceptions.

And yes, I'd argue that the same cultural flaws that make corruption acceptable in Africa are visible in Asian societies like India and China, though they are far less severe. Perhaps one could argue that they have a far more recent history of prolonged totalitarianism than the US or Western Europe; that with all the years of kings and Rajs, followed by colonialism (Mao's Communist Party in the case of China) and then socialist dictators there just has not yet been time to shift cultures enough.

And I'm frequently in rural villages and settlements, yet the same cultural bias in favour of poor governance and corruption are just as visible there. Village chiefs and the heads of important families are allowed the most outrageous excesses simply by virtue of their rank and there is little anger when money gets skimmed off the top of funds coming from the outside, even when earmarked for development. I can't quite understand it.

So yes, I do regard culture in some parts of the world as being a causal factor towards their countries' poor economic performance. I think economic success in this world requires a certain outlook on self interest, the shared good and work and that without that a country helps cause its own poverty. But I have no idea how to change it.
More on the recession and opportunity
And thanks for the advice on slipping a knife past TSA. Great idea. Hey, advise readers to try to get a knife past a TSA agent.

If it is easy to get a knife past security, I want to have mine so I can fend off the terrorists that smuggled them in too.

The TSA is very bad at screening. I have smuggled in liquids on all of my recent flights. The reason they yell at you 50 times in line to take the liquids out of your bag is because they cannot detect them when you sandwich them between electronics. (Recently, a friend of mine accidentally went through security with a full CamelBak of water. Guess what, the x-ray machines don't detect water.)
Here,

Even though we had tremendous success self-publishing Getting Real, we decided that this time we wanted to write a best seller. We want to sell hundreds of thousands or millions of copies. We couldn’t do this on our own, so we decided to work with a traditional publisher.
This whole thing just doesn't taste right. I feel like our community is being taken advantage of with the whole 'AskHN' thing when I see this type of offer. This isn't about iTunes apps, it's about how you position the product for the community.

The product costs money, he could have built a feature-limited free version for us to download and check out. The author didn't provide any insightful information here or on a blog.

And a direct link right into iTunes, ugh, that's almost as bad as linking a PDF and not mentioning it.

It's this exact type of thing that will eventually force the community to say: 'no more'. And that's sad, because not only do we get to see some really cool services early on, but we learn from the feedback the community gives.
The walled garden has given Apple enormous powers. It also gives some of us developers visibility that we couldn't otherwise get. And it makes things consistent and simple for the end-user. It's a tough call.
One trick for training users on your grammar is to have the program always talk to the user with it. If the program imports my existing calendar and talks about stuff like "lunch with fendale in 3 days" all the time, I'll talk back to the program in similar language. Making users learn syntaxes, especially with any punctuation that you don't pronounce out loud, is lousy.

Then, don't be afraid of ambiguity. In many cases, you can Branch Both Ways. 12/10/2008 could refer to two dates, so put the item on both, showing clearly why it's there. "Lunch with Bill" could refer to a few people in my address book, so just link all of them. If your software manages to get some additional data, sort the choices so the likely one is on top.
I agree on the ugly factor. A simple, temporary fix might be to center everything (after moving the "just drag.." text below the two subtitles near the logo). Some things are aligned left, some centered, doesn't flow well.

Also, the logo (specifically the font used) is very 90s. Pick something cleaner.
"Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else"

When was this written? I do not think that China, Korea, Taiwan, India, Japan can be considered part of "the West," and they are certainly employing capitalism to great advantage.
New title please: How to stay alive during a Reddit-izing.
I think it'd be awesome if there were some additional categories here. I wish Jobs was open to everyone (and allowed comments) and Reviews was a section.
Loopt Still Homing In on Location Based Networking