skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the encouragement. I have spent a few hours learning Octave this afternoon, and indeed the matrix operation support is nice.
I've visited the website and I'm confused: are Facebook-less creatures unable to partake in the service? Wouldn't that be kind of weird?
And then we'd have had people writing applications that Lisp isn't suited for complaining at what could have been if only we'd gone with a simple register architecture. Don't get me wrong - I believe in owning the whole stack, and I'd love to see some Lisp machines. I fully believe that something like this may reappear in the future. But let's not kid ourselves: none of these singular visions of simplicity is going to be good enough for everything.
> No, users look for documents and text labels in the taskbar, not icons

I think you're wrong. Before the grouping was added, I watched people click through half a dozen different windows trying to find their document. The labels were never useful once you had multiple documents, because they got truncated so short.

Moreover, I don't believe that the entire UI world just randomly decided to add icons to everything. It seems more likely that all indications are that people use the icons.

> 7 won't allow it at all.

I don't know what you're talking about. The "never combine" setting is still there.

> And don't try to tell anybody that thumbnails of sustantially-similar looking text documents are a substitute for taskbar labels.

Actually, they're much more useful, because the thumbnail often reveals a lot about the document, and also because the title is right above the thumbnail.
Elderly man confused when trying Windows 8 for the first time (video)
I read that as the royal 'you'.
The search quality meeting (video)
Because an acquihire doesn't have a positive effect on Dave Morin's life. He's back at a big company again, and he's already filthy rich so what's a few more millions?
Why God never received a PhD?
1. He had only one major publication.
2. It was in Hebrew.
3. It had no references.
4. It wasn't published in a refereed journal.
5. Some even doubt he wrote it by himself.
6. It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then?
7. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
8. The scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results.
9. He never applied to the ethics board for permission to use human subjects.
10. When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it by drowning his subjects.
11. When subjects didn't behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample.
12. He rarely came to class, just told students to read the book.
13. Some say he had his son teach the class.
14. He expelled his first two students for learning.
15. Although there were only 10 requirements, most of his students failed his tests.
16. His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountain top.
17. No record of working well with colleagues.
Well, remember that Linux is just the kernel. In my post--and I assume others' posts as well--I used Linux as a synecdoche for Free Software. In reality, it could as well be BSD or Hurd--it's just that (as far as I know) neither is quite as suitable for mass consumption as Linux.

However, just because Ubuntu--which happens to use the Linux kernel--becomes popular with the general public does not mean other distros have to change at all. Even now Ubuntu is not that much better for "geeks" than OS X or Windows--other distros and environments offer much more customization and power. You can still use Arch, or Gentoo, or Slackware or with whatever environment you like however you like. And since "Linux" is really a loose confederation of Free Software, nothing can change that.

That said, there are some immediate benefits for everyone if Linux gets wider adoption. From a purely selfish standpoint, interacting with and supporting my less-technical friends' and relatives' computers would be much easier if they were on Linux. Also, large companies would be much less likely to disregard Linux when releasing drivers and software. And on a less selfish note, I really do think--and it matches my admittedly anecdotal experience--that non-technical people are themselves better off on Ubuntu than on OS X or Windows. If all you do is browse the internet and some casual document/multimedia stuff, Linux is great (as soon as you sort the hardware out, of course). There is also the philosophical justification of Free Software I won't get into here.

So really, you present a false dichotomy: Linux for casual users and Linux for power users are not mutually exclusive; if anything, you can't force Linux to only fit one mould. And since we could benefit both power users and casual users by making Linux more accessible and wide-spread, we really should.
Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson
IMO, I'd highlight that its actually not their phone number rather its a Twilio number etc which is used to call them up.

So I would change:

we would give you a number for the other group, and YOU WOULD CALL THEM (not us) TO APOLOGIZE.

To something like:

we would give you a number for the other group which does not reveal their actual phone number, and YOU WOULD CALL THEM (not us) TO APOLOGIZE.

The reason for this, is if users read your company blog it may put them off when/if they read it as, I immediately assumed that their number is be given out which could lead to confusion.
I see 24 hours (not the correct 23) when I follow that link.

Edit: Now I see that the link has both times in EST, which is not on point. See chrisrhoden's link in a sibling to this comment.
Good luck with it. It's a very nice site, and interesting project.
Finally, documentation that speaks to me.
> They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies of physical property to be just as valuable as the original.

Wow, talk about missing the point.

Digital copies of movies and music are just as valuable as the originals, particularly as CDs and DVDs become obsolete. Copies of dollar bills are somewhat less so - you can't buy stuff with them.

If you actually want to argue against the movie and music industries, you'll need to use real facts, not convenient, pretend ones.
No it doesn't errode confidence, most customers are not part of the startup ecosystem. (unless your target demo is other startups) To be frank, I'm not sure what Posterous being acquired by Twitter has anything to do with most of your points.

First of all, Posterous is not bootstrapped, it's received $10M in VC funding. Second Posterous has few customers compared to users, but well paying ones like Coca-Cola, I'm sure they will be taken care of.

If you have a product worth buying your customers will not question how long you've been around. Some will but there are enough that won't. If you're really worried about it, buy an off the shelf company with updated filings, it's not very difficult to find a company 3 or 4 years old. If you've got the cash you could even buy a publicly listed shell. Even NYSE shells come up now and then but those are very pricey.

But honestly, unless you're selling items in the thousands of dollars per month range no one is going to pull your corporate charter.

As an aside, do you offer Cilantro in bulk / whitelabel or do you have an affiliate program?
It has nothing to do with the perf issues. They're drawing way more elements with Metro now, anyway.
Toastmasters is quite helpful for this. I did it for a while and highly recommend it. It's also a great way to practice social skills, generally.
It's not necessarily the case that Lisp machines would be the only way. I'd think more like what Intel is doing these days, adding instructions to SSE to speed up things like string processing.
>It was hard for me to write them off as people who just didn't understand how modern computers work.

I'm glad you didn't fall for that trap. Software engineers constantly make excuses for doing things in idiotic ways. Almost nothing I use really works anymore. It just "kind of" works most of the time. Look at your average web applicaton and the ridiculous resources it takes to get the thing up on the screen and interacting with the user. We've become addicted to high powered machines and finding more complex and inefficient ways of doing the same things.
I think the dots actually appear to show you that the message is draggable. They're like a handle on the email. Now, the dragging feature is rather useless as far as I can tell, but the dots do make sense in that context.

That said, I personally like most of the new Gmail quite a bit more. It's probably because I get everything done with keyboard shortcuts anyhow and so care more about how it looks that how the buttons actually behave :P.
By not wasting any more of his money on shitty movies? "Fool me once, shame on you" and all that?
This isn't just a PayPal problem. All of the large Internet companies have this totalitarian approach to customer service. Google, Paypal, Ebay, etc. One bit goes from 0 to 1 somewhere in their code and you are friggin screwed. Can't talk to anyone. Can't email anyone. Can't SMS anyone. Can't even send smoke signals.

It's a totalitarian hit-them-with-a-hammer approach that truly needs to end.

I don't know what it will take for this to change but it has to change. For example, AdSense alone has left a trail of destruction like no other service out there. You read stories all the time about legitimate businesses being cutoff for no apparent reason without even the possibility to engage in dialog.

This thing with PayPal is downright scary. Having done tens of thousands of dollars of business with PayPal its one of those things that can keep you up at night.

The problem isn't the suspension of accounts for investigation. I welcome a responsible approach to preventing fraud at all levels, as a consumer and a vendor.

No, the problem lies in the fact that they don't engage in any kind of mutually-constructive dialog in order to try to determine whether or not there's a real problem. By not doing so they can ruin people's lives and, because they have so much money, they don't really care because it causes them no pain at all.

I for one hate government burrowing too deeply into anyone's affairs. However, this is one case where I find myself really hoping that one day we'll see Congressional action here in the US in order to protect us from the monsters that these huge corporations have become. Remember, vendors are customers too, not just the end-users/buyers of products and services.

This, very plainly, is wrong and evil.
I am concerned that sites like this do more harm than good because they misrepresent the issue. Taking this joke to its logical conclusion, why not instead post a shell script that makes a trillion copies of dollar_bill.jpg and then offer to "license" it to the RIAA for a modest fee?
Don't write off sbierwagen's comment as flippant. For this kind of thing, this will be more and more the future. I think.

I think a site that acts as a reseller/affiliate for pair.com, dropbox and the like, where all you do is set up someone's (new) domain, connect it to the storage provider, and provide an easy install of something jekyll-like and turnkey would be a good thing to try.

At first you'd only get people who are aware of the user-as-a-product issue with Google and other free providers, but as those providers are more widely recognized as problematic, the market will increase.
If I take the chair from you, you'll force me to give it back (or rather the police will, on your behalf).

...which sounds reasonable enough to non-anarchists. But consider something closer to our hearts:

If I design an algorithm and patent it as mine, where's the force?
Nowhere. But that's not property, right? I mean, that's a man claiming he owns a chair.

Now let's say I steal your chair. This is the moment in our narrative where we get to see whether you and I live in a society that adheres to the property principle.

If I steal your chair, and everyone gets sort of angry with me, and I say shove off and sit on my new chair, then we live in a society where the property principle is at most weakly enforced.

Let's say I steal your chair and get arrested. That implies that there are police, who are funded by some kind of entity which has taken it upon itself to enforce property rights. Which means that the means by which property becomes a real social fact is force enacted by, say, the state, against those who choose to disregard the principle.

Thus in a society where the property principle is taken for granted, that principle is in itself upheld by the implicit threat of force.
Open Domain Directory
Sorry, @weff.

Right now we require Facebook, because we heavily rely on the graph to match groups while requiring minimal work from our members. For instance, we want to make sure the two groups don't already know each other, and we haven't figured out a good way to replicate this functionality without Facebook (e.g. "tell us all the people you know!")

If you have any ideas, though, we'd love to hear them.
The Bender Brewer Project
True enough, it will get better.

Old mobile browsers will be to html5 games what IE6 was to web devs.
I'd like to see some evidence of that, please.
This is speculation but I assume that some of the following factors play a huge role in folks choosing which company to work for:

Pay, stocks, flexibility, benefits, etc...

I'd imagine Apple is probably the least appealing in many categories when compared to Google or Facebook even if they are one of the most awesome/innovative companies out there.

Then there are other factors to consider for some people such as network (folks they'll be connected to), environment, learning experience, etc...

I assume these also appear to be better at other companies.

Of course whether or not any of the above is better or comparable is a different story but it would seem if those are the things important to folks, Apple would be slightly lower on the list.
Nice! Right after I read the blog post, I looked at the docs and they weren't updated. I should have just been patient and waited for everything to update.
Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

We can have a government because we can set expectations and behavior. Only when we have police and a state apparatus do we then become a society whose mode of governance is via the state.
> what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place?

One has a natural right to at least one property: one's own body. A natural right that is routinely violated in most so called 'free' societies; I should add. This notion of property is established (and recognized) without the threat of force, implicit or otherwise.

Now assume the existence of only one person on the entire planet. None of our political philosophies have any effect on the dealings of that one person. If another person is added however, the two have now the possibility of interaction over a limited resource. The two can attempt aggression as a means of securing the resource, or they can attempt to set out a contract. That is, a set of rules that determine how the two deal with scarcity. For example, they can agree that the person who finds something first shall consider it their property.

The two can reach this conclusion in the absence of any force, implicit or otherwise. They can reach this conclusion in the spirit of cooperation, or for entirely selfish reasons: to avoid or at least minimize the stress of conflicts.

The two can indeed introduce the possibility of aggression as a means of enforcing the contract. But if you think closely, you will see that this aggression is not defined as an initiation of force, but rather as a response to it. That is, contract or not, the first person to go against the will of the other is the aggressor. And since there is no political philosophy which prohibits one to defend themselves - libertarianism included - it seems safe to assume that everyone would agree: the return aggression is justified.

So all the contract winds up doing, is codifying the interaction and determining exactly what the two view as aggression. For example, unilateral contract termination is typically viewed as such.

When scaled up to more than two persons, the complexities increase, but the principles remain the same. A contract is a document that governs interaction. This is markedly different from a person who governs interaction in that the contract requires the agreement of all parties involved, whereas a tyrant simply imposes his or her will, unconcerned about the will of others.

Libertarianism is a way of thinking that rejects the initiation of force. It is not a way of thinking that denies the existence of force. Neither does it deny the necessity of force -- but only in response to it.
The difference is (a) most hardware is owned on premises and Sun can't simply walk in your server closet and yank it out, and (b) these companies usually provide support for hardware for a few years after the product is shelved. If I'm not mistaken, auto manufacturers are required to have certain parts/service available for a few years after the production of each model.

With web startups, you get (at best) an email with 90 days notice.
We can't, really! But we try anyway. That's the nature of political and social problems: there's no specification that we can refer to to clarify our terms.
That's very true, when my dad first tried to use a mac (after being a windows user for many years), He was totally lost for days, until I gave him a little tutorial on the basic stuff. So to me what this video shows is that windows is trying to do a very drastic change on their interface, thats all.
For what it's worth, anyone who liked this post would probably really like this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communities...
With New Tool, Visual.ly Wants To Replace PowerPoint With Infographics
The LA Tech Scene Finally Moves Out of its Parents’ Basement
> Taxes are often levied on residence and behavior, rather than citizenship.

But not always. The US govt taxes overseas earnings of its citizens and resident aliens. (There's an exemption for the first $95k (plus some deductions) - see http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,... )
> They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies of physical property to be just as valuable as the original.

What does this even mean? It appears the message of this campaign is that digital music is devoid of monetary value.
Mayhem - IfThisThenThat for Windows
If Your Startup Is Actually Good, Chances Are You're Not At SXSW
You can separate commercial rights from copyrights.

You can see this in anyone who finds a difference between
"Hey, listen to this mp3 of Rihanna's We Found Love",
"Hey, buy this unofficial mp3 copy of Rihanna's We Found Love", and
"Hey, listen to this mp3 of grellas' We Found Love"
HTML5 is critically dependent upon hardware acceleration. So anything that can't be hardware accelerated wherever the games are running will be slow. If your drivers are bad it will be slow. The next step will be people creating ridiculously complex JIT setups just to get back somewhere near native throughput. Note that is _throughput_, not latency. Every layer of abstraction adds more unpredictable pauses and non-reproducible glitches. All so people can slap together the next Angry Birds clone with zero technical artistry.
Nope (at least not elected), and the reason's simple: nobody smart wants to go through that level of BS for their daily job.
If you want to see a movie in the theatre - some of the money you're paying should go to the studio.

Just wanted to point out that that particular example -which covers a lot of movie income- doesn't really require acceptance of intellectual property: the studio just needs to contract with the movie theaters before giving them a copy of the movie. They'll have no incentive to provide a copy to their competition, and a movie theater that displayed a "leaked" copy would lose business from the studios.
I understand your concern, and to be honest we thought about this a lot when making the product. The reason we upload your bookmarks to our server is so that we can download the html, index it and display excerpts in the timeline. For further information, you can read our privacy policy here: http://stashmarks.com/privacy
Don't a lot of copiers/scanners have technology that prevents them copying currency? Thought there was a special dot pattern or something.
Small claims courts will not handle intercompany disputes. They are intended for small disputes between individuals.
First of all, I'm sure the actual original copy actually has more value for collectors and the like.

The real argument is that they are just copies and literally cost the studios nothing--that is, the studios do not have to spend any money on your downloading the film from a third party. So, by extension, you pay them in a way that does not cost you anything, by using a copy of money.

The only value a copy--distinct from the media its on and the bandwidth it takes--is through copyright. If you do not believe in copyright, or at least not in the system as is, (and I imagine the person who set this up does not) then these copies do not really have value. The analogy is to the smell from a restaurant--it costs the restaurant nothing, so if somebody outside enjoys it, they do not have to pay the restaurant anything.
> How is that not a government?

You could call it that. But most anarchists are not opposed to the existence of structures of government, but rather the existence of the nation-state.

> I'd like a society that can plausibly exist in the world as it is now, thanks.

Okay, now you're being much more specific.

> This would work on a small scale in the presence of massive social pressure to conform. All anarchy seems to be predicated on the existence of massive peer pressure to conform to their social norms, and we all know where not being able to question peer pressure leads.

I'm not sure; where does it lead? ;) But really, we already have massive social pressure to conform, that's how societies work. Anarchism doesn't get rid of that. Anarchism isn't utopianism, or at least not only utopianism.

> This is incoherent because it tries to force a distinction where none exists. The very existence of cottage industries and family farms puts the lie to the concept.

What do you mean? Distinctions never exist a priori, they're always conceptual tools for the sake of delimiting between situations.

> In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

Not quite; according to most anarchists you're still kosher, unless the renumeration you give that field hand is worth significantly less than the surplus value you obtained via his cooperation. Moreover, most anarchists object to an entire society being based on that model, not simply the existence of it.

Again, I'm not saying these are all 100% coherent or viable political options, I'm just trying to articulate my understanding of an anarchist position.
Early adopters yeah. But consumers used Kodak for 100 years or so before changing. Average people hate data migrations.
I was at MSFT and I used to hear the exact same thing - on it being used for defensive purposes. That changed in a hurry.
I tried a similar thing in high school to stop saying 'like' as a filler word. For me, it completely backfired though - I found myself saying 'like' twice whenever I would have said it once!

I guess doing this as a group (as others have suggested) might work better.

Years later, and the habit went away by itself.
Bad phrasing. I see oAuth as having access to your data.

The joke I was making is that Microsoft started, kept changing, and ironically may one day just end up buying a startup to make their passport scheme finally useful.