skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know that calling out Kevin Rose personally is fair, but I do know (and have mentioned on Hacker News several times in the past) that I'm far less likely to invest any time using the products of startups because I've been burned multiple times by a service that I came to enjoy using disappearing nearly overnight.

This isn't just a problem for startups (though for practical financial reasons it tends to occur on a bigger scale there), it is basically a huge problem for the entire web app ecosystem in general. In the desktop-centric past there were apps I used that were killed off but I continued using for years afterward because the existing code didn't suddenly stop working when it wasn't being supported anymore. The web gives you no safety net here, once the app is killed the servers are likely to be brought offline within a matter of days/weeks and then you're usually SOL.

Feels bad man.
Yup, the Toyota Sienna is a (North) American built car.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_manufacturing_fa...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_manufacturing_fa...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Motor_Manufacturing_de_B...

So are...

Honda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Honda_assembly_plants

Nissan: Smyrna, Tennessee; Canton, Mississippi; Decherd, Tennessee

Mitsubishi (DaimlerChrysler)

Mazda (Ford)

Subaru (GM)

Isuzu (GM)

It is very very difficult to import a truly foreign built car. There are many many obstacles in the way. The "Made in Japan" cars are leaps and bounds ahead of anything built "for" North America. If we were actually able to buy them here, the prices for cars from South East Asia would totally disrupt the North American car market -- maybe there are some startup ideas in this!
> Hand guns are made with the specific purpose of killing human beings

Citation needed. Since they're not that effective at that "specific purpose", either their designers are incompetent or that isn't actually their "specific purpose". (And no, "what are they designed for if not killing people?" isn't actually an argument, evidence, etc.)
You really need to provide a means of at least browsing a pre-filled wishlist without supplying an email address first. You've got to earn my email address.
Yeah, but...Daisey really isn't a journalist. He's a playwright and an author. He does one-man shows off Broadway. As far as I know, he's never had any training in journalism, nor has he worked as a reporter.

This is a case where I suspect that both parties were mis-interpreting the intent of the other party; This American Life does a lot of "artistic" work (e.g. nearly everything by David Sedaris, or David Rakoff), and perhaps Daisey felt that he fit into that model. Likewise, TAL seems to have felt that Daisey was venturing into journalism, even though he's clearly an amateur at it (they make skeptical statements to this effect in the original piece).

That said, I think there's a bright-line distinction between "art" and "fabrication" -- when you present your work as a documentary without disclosing it as a work of fiction -- that Daisey seems to have crossed.
Are they still worth listening to?
THIS. This is my biggest problem with this entire issue. It is ALWAYS reported as an Apple problem, when in reality

(i) There is no evidence presented that Apple is doing something other companies are not doing.

(ii) The reasons for these working conditions are pretty well known: (1) China is still a relatively poor country (2) Electronics customers are very price conscious - you can't compete if your costs aren't low.

I think it's fine to pressure large companies to improve working conditions (even if it leads to higher prices) - but I have not seen the reason why Apple got almost all the scrutiny on this issue.
scraped ?
>Perhaps there is a market here: Inexpensive boarding houses for young people trying to get a start in high-cost-of-living job centers. If there were a place for young folks to live where you could get a room w/space for a bed and a desk, shared bathroom/showers, and 2 meals/day for, say $300-500/mo in Boston, I bet they would fill up. Allow people to focus on finding work, give them a leg up of sorts.

I have two responses here:

A) In Boston, it would never be allowed. Boston-Cambridge municipalities have LOVED the boom in rental values from both the growing student populations and their low unemployment rates. Why would they ruin a good thing by allowing new building, let along ugly, high-density boarding houses that resemble nothing more than student housing? And everyone official in Boston who isn't a student despises students.

B) I've thought of starting just this, but it WOULD be your college dorm (or at least, in the style of my old college dorms). Checks on room conditions every so often, eviction for damage or partying too much, month-to-month tenancy. You're missing an angle here: many people like the dorm/boarding-house lifestyle better than the apartment/house lifestyle. Many people enjoy not owning very much and having the majority of their life be "out there".

C) That fact leaves us with the opportunity to create a social environment for the long-term residents and to branch off into things like supplying network access or food-service.

In short, this is an amply viable business model (works for all the damn colleges!) that never gets used due to municipal and cultural biases against it.
Would you feel more confident that the app is going to be around in the long haul if they charged you money for using it?

See my other comment about charging users money too.
You're not left with anything new at the end of a football game.
Hardly a worth a "Wow."

Apple was a sponsor of NPR in FY 2008 and 2009, and 2010.

I suspect they continue to be one.

Money is the best explanation for the PR push behind your email.

http://www.npr.org/about/aboutnpr/annualreports/NPR_AnnualRe...

http://www.npr.org/about/aboutnpr/annualreports/2009_NPRAnnu...

http://www.npr.org/about/aboutnpr/annualreports/NPRSponsorsD...
I don't know how you'd place some of the tiny surface-mount chips by hand, especially if the neighboring chips weren't already soldered down. Check out the new iPad teardown's photo of the logic board.

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ipad-3...
I had the same impression. As I listened, I remember thinking: "This seems very dramatic and and one sided." But I never really considered This American Life to be news so much as short stories. I just assumed that I was listening to a story with a strong (non-objective) point of view.
Welcome to America. Standard behavior with all broadcast media. I'm not blaming NPR.. but the producers of This American Life, in their zeal of catching a top story cut corners. And now, I consider this Daisey fellow as low as Rush Limbaugh; making up crap as hes running to the bank cashing checks.

It's sad.
Maybe they don't do much for you. But hearing about those things definitely influences how I vote and what I say when I contact my elected representatives.
Check out http://www.saavn.com, I think they do provide such licences.
Charging money just by itself isn't enough to boost my confidence, charging money and reaching a publicly obvious critical mass of users combined would help but then you've still got a chicken and egg problem in creating that critical mass.
What I like about bitcoin, even if it only a side benefit, is that make people think about things that most of the time are taken as granted.

That the conclusion is flawed, as it is in this case, is not that relevant.

PROOF: Suppose you have garnered half of all the bitcoin in existence. An absurd supposition, but it is only to make a point.

Now you have half of the purchasing power of the bitcoin economy, the other half being hold by other people. Now if destroy half of your coins you (surprise, surprise) you only hold ⅓ of the all bitcoins. So you have succesfully reduced you purchasing power. Congratulations.
> If we all went by probability, nobody would do anything great.

You can be humble and productive at the same time. That's one of the goals of the Lean Startup.

Skeptically analyse the viability before doing something. That's different from avoid doing at all. You just need to be skeptical about your own knowledge and abilities, and then you can make a better decision. That's a good advice. But "believe in yourself above all else", not so much.
> the question isn't so much whether he could have tried to help her, as whether it would have done any good.

How about letting her know what was up, thus preventing several months of intense stress and anguish followed by the eventual burn-out?

She deserved to know she was being used as some sleazy douchebag's pawn in his games of office-politics.

The OP claims he tries to be a good person and do what's right. Well, actions speak louder than words.
>what you're interested in is furthering a persona of being a hard-ass concerned with individual responsibility and tough love (or, on the other side, a persona of someone who is exceptionally sympathetic and caring toward others).

Ah, but that's what people are actually interested in!
The right thing to do is often easy, technologically. The harder part for an organization is deciding "yep, we want to e-mail everyone on our list and tell them we made a big mistake".
If you have a working directory checked out in ~/Dropbox, beware of multi-machine madness. I've run into issues with a git repo in ~/Dropbox + IntelliJ + multiple computers -- if you leave IJ running on a machine you're not using, it'll notice file changes and re-index things in git. This can, in turn, cause Dropbox to create conflicts, effectively corrupting your git repo. As a result, I tend to keep only non-Java (i.e., non-IJ) projects in ~/Dropbox.

Run "find .git -name 'conflict'" in your working directory to see if this has happened to you.
I don't think he means by integrity what I do.
So I've been comparing my ipad3 to my ipad1 (I didn't get an ipad2 because I only wanted the higher density screen)

Back in 1999 I saw a technology demonstrator at IBM's Almaden facility in San Jose where they showed a 200 ppi LCD display. It blew me away. The scientist who worked on it talked about eye strain and how 200 ppi was the 'magic' spot where more thank 75% of the people stopped noticing the strain of making lines out of pixels.

So after unpacking my ipad3 one of the first things I did was to download the Economist app (my favorite btw) and bring up the latest issue on both the ipad1 and ipad3. Side by side the difference is very visible, absolutely can distinguish between the ipad1 and 3 with p < 0.01 :-) More interestingly comparing the ipad3 version to the print magazine its clear that the ipad3 is pretty much identical from my eyes perspective (disclaimer I do wear glasses, no 20/10 vision here).

Now if I could convince folks that send me catalogs to offer an ipad version I'll be in good shape.
Agreed, the Arrow was pointing somewhere completely unrelated on my system. Best to redesign that rather than try to guess it.
I bet that a lot of startups don't engage in that kind of customer service since it's uncertain whether they'll even be in business in five years.
Sadly, ctrl on a mac means you right-click instead of left-click. It then gets stuck editing anything you click near :/ (edit: ah, I see they've added alt support. fantastic, works a lot better now)

The setup is awesome though, and it does a great job demonstrating what all the values do. I'll have to watch the talk now.
> Apple was a sponsor of NPR in FY 2008 and 2009, and 2010.

That's nice, but This American Life isn't made by NPR.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Radio_International

> PRI is a major public media content creator and also distributes programs from many sources, competing with National Public Radio and American Public Media to provide programming to public radio stations.
Who Wouldn't Pay a Penny for a Sports Car? Right Strategy Doesn't Win Auctions.
How would he even know? He wasn't allowed into the factories.
Why We Mourn Kodak And Dance On Yahoo's Grave
Rumor: Nexus tablet is a “done deal”
Showers: Get a gym membership. Has the extra benefit of the occasional workout to stay healthy and sane.
Can you hook into another movie trailer service? Perhaps Apple trailers? I imagine that since trailers are Ads, there might be a service that provides some sort of affiliate commission, or at least shows them without ads and without fees.
Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International aren't affiliated with NPR. PRI is a competitor.
"It's not an anti-apple movement its a fair and humane electronics manufacturing labor movement."

China's labor problems aren't limited to their electronics factories.
More from PyData 2012: Python for Big Data, NumPy, & SciPy
If you just make the pixels 100 times smaller you could have a holodeck.

Source: http://www.phased-array.com/1996-Book-Chapter.html
I just logged on there and saw some pretty bad power flaunting / judgment by an op. Doesn't seem like the most open-minded or helpful community so far.
I'm curious about that as well.

I know of two companies that sell movie theater schedule datasets (through data dump or API): Tribune Media Services (http://www.tribunemediaservices.com/) and West World Media (http://www.westworldmedia.com/).

I'm not sure that there are any other. It's my understanding that the main movie sites (Google, Yahoo!, RottenTomatoes, MovieTickets…) all get their info from one of these two companies. This is also probably why you won't find a free API with that data.

Because the trailers are on YouTube, I suspected that the info was scraped from Google (I believe these two companies have their own trailer hosting); however, that would then make the connection between that info and RottenTomatoes a bit tricky… Peter, do you mind sharing?
I listen through Skype calls with my laptop's speakers, and just hit the record button for potentially useful dialog. So, no integration with the app or sound card. BTW, for this to be useful, I try to record as little dialog as possible so in cases where I want to check something, I don't have a lot of material to listen to and sort out.
>Money is the best explanation for the PR push behind your email.

Your statement however is worthy of a WOW.
I'd rather call this "don't trust anyone who is not you to give a rats ass about your data" aka http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717
this guy really believes in people waking up on time enough that hes going to live in his car for a summer?
Yahoo Decides to Fire Its Brightest Tech Minds. Facebook Will Gladly Take Them.
Interesting historical comparison (865 days ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915971
I don't see how this is of any benefit other than self-promotion...which isn't a bad thing for an entrepreneur, but I'd be willing to bet that the time it takes to worry about all the other daily needs has a net negative impact on your success when weighed against the publicity etc you receive. I think if your goal is to be "famous" for living in your car in the blogosphere etc, its a good way to do it, but to help you actually produce/build something.....not so much. GL either way.

Do you have an actual idea for a startup, or just looking for a cofounder then going from there?
note: brudgers is Mike Daisey's publicist.
If everyone took your advice, South Dakota would have high unemployment. It's not a solution.
Getting people's email addresses in the first place is the "hard part" I'm alluding to.
Devoting an entire hour to detail the errors in the story is an amazing show of integrity. This only improves my regard for both This American Life and for Ira Glass.
First, I wanted to say Happy 7th birthday to Y Combinator. So, happy birthday! Before I even knew there was a Y Combinator, I began learning of innovative companies such as Stripe that I could get excited about implementing in building the platforms for my own businesses. Scribd was a helpful resource for me while working to finish my MBA as well. After applying, I learned that both of these companies were Y Combinator alumni. A real benefit of the process for me has been gaining an awareness of more companies like these. Y Combinator has helped facilitate a cooler world. Thanks for that.
Italy Said to Pay Morgan Stanley $3.4 Billion
That talk was mind-blowing. Was there any good discussion on Hacker News?
Grab the attention of gamers now Apple
The Road Ahead: The Death of the PC
The Verizon Store on Launch Day of the New iPad
24 Hour Fitness, for one. (cheap)
As I was reading this story, I thought to myself: I'd give this guy $100 if he was on Kickstarter or something.
I submitted it. Now that I look at the headline with fresh eyes, I agree -- it's exaggerated, so I'll change it. Thanks.

UPDATE: Changed the headline to use Bruce Schneier's description: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/bitcoin_securi...
I am reminded of a short article from Harpers which suddenly feels relevant all over again.

http://harpers.org/archive/2012/02/0083770
One suggestion on working spaces if you're traveling up to the city. There's a place called Noisebridge in the Mission that is more or less a free hacker lounge with a lot of creative folk in. The only caveat is that it tends to be noisy and sometimes it feels a little too hipster for my tastes.
Dog walking and lawn care put you in competition with illegal aliens charging less than minimum wage, and parentally-subsidized teenagers for whom minimum wage is a gold mine.
Good point. I think it helps to learn more about the people behind the app and their motivations.

I made Handpick (http://handpick.me) as a side project and have not taken any outside investment. Hence I have no investor pressure to obtain a critical mass of users in an insane period of time.
So Yahoo! is essentially a two pronged business: Patent litigation, and asset firesales. Oh, and fantasy football. That sucks. I always rooted for the once-king and perpetual underdog.
> The Audacity Team is elated to announce the release of Audacity 2.0 for Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, ...

Seems weird it's specifically GNU/Linux they support, yet they can't be dependent on GNU userland or GNU libc if they support Mac.
"This American Life" Isn't the Only Outfit With Retractions Due
This explains a few things to me:

I feel a particular affinity between D.C., SF and NYC, I wonder if it's the similar mix of cars that do it?

More importantly, I see sales figures for some American cars, and find them unbelievable. I see way more Hondas, Toyotas and Hyundais these days then just about anything else. Stop at a stop light and I guarantee there will be on of the above three cars one car away from you.

Then I travel to the midwest, lets say Ohio. And boom, American cars everywhere. Those three brands above are almost nowhere in sight. And suddenly the sales figures make sense. I can't remember the last time I've seen a a Ford Fusion, but they move around 20,000 a month. In Ohio, I can't remember not seeing a Ford Fusion.
Nope, don't have one of these, sorry.
Vitamins or Antibiotics
Or you could do an out-of-source build, which is cleaner anyway. CMake and autoconfiscated projects support this by default.
I'm using python for the first time right now in my Udacity car course. Hate it. It's Internet BASIC.
Daisey isn't a journalist, he does theatre. He shouldn't've gone on a journalism program.
Wait a minute. Is it just me or is the author talking about fixing the public key at a default value?
I hope it is meant to be read as the default maximum bit SIZE of the public key instead.
Look, they're all part of the same Kenyan muslim communist atheist climate-change-imagining prius-driving organic-food-eating "fact and reality" based conspiracy.

A real news outlet determines the truth before, optionally, looking for or fabricating facts to support it.

Now, what's a good synonym for "slut"?
Van Rossum: Python is not too slow
IIRC you can reformat as case-sensitive.
Generalists, founders and the impostor syndrome.
Listas de interés Facebook
Thanks for pointing that out. And it still boggles my mind that Pogue has a job at th NYTimes.
A good point. I do wonder what proportion of Ubuntu users take advantage of the LTS releases rather than, say, just outright using Debian. I also intuitively want to say that anyone deciding to go with a LTS release would, if given the choice between a 2.7 library and a 3.2 library, choose the more "mature" option anyway.

I agree that it would have been smart to backport such a seemingly small and unobtrusive change to 3.2 (and who knows, maybe they still will).
I feel sorry for his wife.
It sounds like all you really mean is #3.

#2 is bizarre. I'm not even aware of a modern car that requires this as regular maintenance.

More importantly, until fairly recently, American cars have a long history of requiring aggressive maintenance. They aren't as bad as say, German electrical systems, but they've been pretty darn bad.

#1 is also strange as many foreign cars make specific American versions of their cars for the larger Americans. Or their world cars are sized for the large U.S. market.
Because for the last few years, everyone is copying Apple. If you get them to change, you get the copycats to change as well. If on the other hand you get some generic brand shoelace manufacturer to change, no one, not even the protesters, notice, let alone follow suit.
I think this is really silly. How is living uncomfortably in a car make you relentlessly resourceful? It seems entirely counter productive. You won't get good rest and even have a decent work environment. Half the fun of creating a start-up is not having to go to an office every day in peak hour traffic.

Right now I'm sitting outside in my backyard working away. It's a beautiful quite day and I have already achieved heaps. If you already have a nice apartment then you're better off working from there.
Kernel Comment: Btrfs too fast?
NEScala Keynote: Effective Scala with Josh Suereth
Looking in the source for the Slate article, secretly hoping the author might have put sort of comment in for developers, I came across this:

<!-- CHUNKY BUTTONS -->
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The Baloney Detection Kit: A 10-Point Checklist for Science Literacy
That they're making their way in the world just fine despite their histories, rendering any imaginary cosmic retribution impotent?
Not true. Unfortunately.

The Schengen agreements regulate short-term stays only. For long-term stay or work there are specific laws, different for each country.

I wish this were different, but Europe still has a long way to go before it is a single open market.
Unofficial Github Latest Commits Widget
It was an unintended consequence of Github's use of rails. So I think my characterization (Github's rails bug) is fair.
Also, it says "dl.dropbox.com" wants to track your physical location, this doesn't match the site's domain name.
With very few exceptions, everything from This American Life is worth listening to. I would still listen to this, as not everything he said was fabricated, but I wouldn't file away anything I heard as objective fact.
I think it's telling that a reporter investigating reports of pollution and poor labor comditions was accused of working for Apple.
What about doing laundry? Washing your socks in a nearby toilet on a gas station might seem a bit shady to some people.
That makes perfect sense. I agree with you that some things will always be enterprise products, sold the traditional way. The interesting thing to me is wondering which products people think are enterprise-only, but are actually ripe for disruption like survey tools were. Only time will tell, I guess.
Why just startups? here are a few counter examples:

Google Health, Desktop,..

Microsoft Money, Encarta,...

Apple G4 Cube, Newton,..
Not to mention that Python3 has some awesome features, especially the concurrent.futures module.
An RSA public key is made of of two parts -- a 'modulus' and an 'exponent'. The modulus is the part you're thinking about -- very large, computed from your private key, hard to factor, etc. He is talking about the exponent part, which can indeed be very small (and the same everywhere event).