skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft makes a killing in the enterprise services market (aside: where, arguably, quality and user experience is less important than scaleability, end-to-end services, and feature set). The problem is that the latest round of technology (mobile, gaming, etc.) is not enterprise in the least. For an example of enterprise thinking failing in recent years, look no further than Research in Motion.

Businesses will always have their own set of problems and solutions. As Dustin points out, this is very profitable. But I think the line between enterprise and consumer software (and hardware) is blurring to the point that there's not a clear delineation. If you can't be attractive to the consumer market, you're going to start seeing other people eating your lunch in the consumer market (see also: rise of iDevices in corporate IT shops, entrants like Google and Dropbox, etc.).

Microsoft throws its legacy weight around, which counts for a lot. And they have some genuine good products, which counts for a little. But, IMO, their progress moving forward is more hindered than helped by Ballmer.
A trial is a problem in maximizing the reasoning, under law and supported by fact, presented to a judge and / or jury. Those audiences have limited bandwidth to begin with. The "under law" constraint largely drives which reasonings and facts will be most important -- especially as all that must cross a barrier of evidentiary rules and trial procedure. The ability to weave all of that into a coherent narrative is crucial to communicating to the audience.

Boies can grab enough of the subject matter to speak to the key legal issues, and to ask experts the questions that define the boundaries around those questions. Another lawyer might know more of the subject matter, but that won't matter if they can't translate that extra knowledge into legal strategy.

Remember also that while you might be able to find legally pertinent technical responses to Boies' work in court, you're reacting to that after hearing his strategy. Good trial communication requires telling a unified narrative -- if your story doesn't already provide a basis for your response, that response will be weaker and may even distract from the story you do have. Boies' ability to anticipate arguments, mentioned by another comment, is crucial to all this -- it's not enough to have an answer, you really need to have that answer in advance of his question.
Groupon already advertises in Facebook.
It's not illegal to drink beer in public places (like the subways, parks, streets) and it's also legal to smoke tobacco in many places.

Weed is not legal, but it's tolerated and discriminated.
Convince Your Parents to Support Your Startup - Not Just Financially
Obat Darah Tinggi Herbal
Untuk anda yang saat ini bingung dengan penyakit darah tinggi anda, kini telah hadir Obat Darah Tinggi Herbal yang ampuh dan baik untuk kesehatan anda. Ace Maxs merupakan Obat Darah Tinggi Herbal yang aman di konsumsi tanpa efek samping apapun. karena obat ini terbuat dari dari dua herbal yang mengandung zat baik bagi kesehatan.

sekilas mengenai darah tinggi :

Tekanan darah tinggi (hipertensi) adalah peningkatan tekanan darah didalam arteri. Arteri adalah pembuluh darah yang mengangkut darah dari jantung dan dialirkan ke seluruh jaringan dan organ tubuh. Tekanan darah tinggi (hipertensi) bukan berarti emosi yang berlebihan, walaupun emosi dan stres dapat meningkatkan tekanan darah untuk sementara waktu.
Headstartup – Apps, Tools and Resources for Startups and Entrepreneurs
Hacker News is Reddit by a different name
Same people, same pedantic assholery. Why do you keep following me everywhere I go on the internet? Why can't I have a discussion with intelligent people about whatever I like without someone getting into a hissy fit about how social norms are being overstepped when the conversation flows in a manner they do not agree with? Why can't we all just get along and respect each other? I mean, I know that geeks are notorious social retards but this is ridiculous. I guess that this is the effect of implementing a popularity contest and applying it to what people say. That is to say, it creates swarms of idiots who dickride each other and a narrow-minded culture.

Produce, signing off, have a nice day.
I really enjoy the graffiti in Berlin. It's because I've done so many underground rave parties and I'm fond of old factories, warehouses etc.

If you don't like that, I would then prefer Paris over Berlin.
As far as I know micro-payments is not a solved problem yet.

> So why can’t YouTube ask me to Pay to not have to see ads? In my experience the amount that they would have to charge me for such a premium feature would be ridiculously low – meaning they could make ridiculous money by only charging me a modest fee. Hell charge me a lot, time is money and you have no idea how much my time is worth.

I would love to pay for content. I'd love to pay to have ad-free content. Let's use The Atlantic as an example. I never read the whole thing. I only read the occasional article that appears in Longform or HN.

Should I pay per article? How much? 0.05 USD? 0.25 USD?

Or should I pay for an online subscription? That would possibly encourage me to read more of the product, but might put me off actually getting an online sub. Especially if I'd want to sub to very many newspapers.

Maybe they shouldn't have ads or micro-payments. Perhaps once a year they can have a fund-raising drive; HUGE banners with photos of James Bennet asking for funding?

But, whatever they do they now have a more complicated mix of revenue streams - free users; ad-supported users; micropayment users; online subs; IRL subs. That's a complex mix of numbers to present to advertisers. I know you're trying to get away from ads, but that's a big ask.
I don't see it as a jab, but a helpful reminder. At least, personally I often find myself starting to compose a funny reply that would be fine for reddit, before remembering that this is Hacker News with different standards. Like many others, I'm active both places, and don't want to dilute the difference.
The Real Reasons Why Brands Like GM Still Don't Like Facebook Advertising
Roger McNamee : App defeats web
Why Is Twitter The Least Liked Tech Company?
I absolutely did. The way he phrased his comment and the timing seemed very suspicious.
My commute route also takes me by a few traffics semaphores. I can tell if they are not functioning properly (flashing red only) by the long backup.

During heavy traffic at commute times, the lights facilitate semi-smooth traffic. Off peak and I see where they interfere -sometimes they turn red on you, even though there is no cross traffic.

Also, conversely, there are moderate-traffic intersections which only have stop signs. I hate them. I wish they'd put in some quick phase traffic lights to smooth out traffic.
Ask HN: building a product for 6 months, beaten to the punch
HNers, what do you do when you're beaten to the punch by a competitor?

I've been working on a service/product for the past 7 months. Everything was going great with a fantastic response from beta testers. Now, a few weeks before our public release, a competitor has brought out a very similar service. They're getting plenty of coverage as the first to enter into this segment of the market.

Am I screwed? Without the first mover advantage, it feels like all my work may have been a waste.
I'm having difficulty with this. I also agree that APIs should not be copyrightable, because that defeats the purpose of an API. Their value to technology in general goes down if people can claim copyright infringement if someone else implements the same API. And that is, I think, the true test for what should and should not be legal: how will this impact society? I think that being able to copyright an API is a clear harm to society.

My difficulty comes from the fact that designing a good API is hard, and I think that there clearly are creative aspects to it. Doing a good job requires having an intimate knowledge of the component being interfaced with, and how programmers are likely to use it. The mere fact that we have said before "This API sucks" implies that it is not just a mechanical process.

Basically, I want one result because I feel it's better for society. But based on first principles, that's not the conclusion I arrive at.
+1 simonw, for reference, I helped build the "twitter buttons". As simonw mentioned, any amount control/access a widget may have to a hosted page can be immediately blocked by just wrapping the entire thing in another iframe.

this post is a bit misleading in that it might suggest that the attack occurs "sans click". this particular attack minimizes the ability for the victim to notice the attack, but it is still using the same 'hide the button, make it follow your mouse, wait for a click' strategy.

As darklajid pointed out, we try to occupy as little space, and cause as little annoyance as we quietly sit in client pages.
Back when I was a PHP programmer the "PHP Cookbook" published by O'Reilly was a terrific resource. Unfortunately it looks like that isn't being maintained. Still might be worth picking out of the bargin bin though.
They don't talk about pedestrians at all here. Lights might be annoying, but it's also seriously nerve wrecking for all involved when dealing with a pedestrian crossing without lights. As a pedestrian trying to cross, it's often difficult to judge the driver's intent, even if they are slowing down, so I'll end up staying off to the side until they stop completely. Needless to say, that's hilariously inefficient.

And when it gets dark, it just gets worse. It might be possible for the driver to see the pedestrian pretty well, but the reverse isn't always true.
Activities & Places for backbone.js
Let us know when its done! There's so much junk and old tutorials out there on PHP, it's very hard to know what's right and what's wrong. It's impossible to know where to start.

Starting from practical, useful exercises would be an amazing way to (finally) truly learn PHP.
And what about a ray-tracing function? I don't see the point here. It's not what's being discussed.

The ubiquitous "gotchas" in binary search are well documented; Jon Bentley did a talk on it. At Google, if memory serves.
When I code I usually listen to Ambient music, like Brian Eno. Otherwise I listen to brown noise generated by this site: http://playnoise.com/.
I do not know why you would say that GM does not grasp this, can you explain? GM does lots of impression-based ads all over the Internet which is all about name recognition so they seem to understand what that is about. Do you know something more about why they are saying Facebook is ineffective that I have not read in the media? If any companies in the world should know how to evaluate advertising effectiveness I would expect it to be the auto manufacturers (and car insurance companies who also advertise their faces off).
Federal Workers' 2011 Salary Data Exposed Online
Do what Sun did for Java, create a really extensive test suite and make sure no device gets the Google stamp of approval unless it passes.
I say carry on - if there's a competitor, there's validation there's a need (assuming the competitor is making money) - focus on what differentiates you from them, and keep at it!
Want to build a perfect website? Don't trust the designers
Maybe it's the Microsoft-backed start-up that got some negative PR a few days ago?

http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-funded-startup-aims-to-kil...

Whoever it is, I'd be surprised if they aren't discovered in a few months time, especially if they keep doing it. So I hope it's worth it for them, because as far as I know this is illegal in many countries.
When it comes to iMessage, I wish people would turn read receipts on. The default is off, so most people don't bother turning it on, which almost makes the feature useless.
People say that the open web is dead, but I think the walled garden approach is never really long-term sustainable.

I'm even more pessimistic than that about it. I think the real lesson of all these predecessors such as AOL is that you can't put a wall around the garden in the first place. You can say you have, but that would be putting your mouth in a place your money shouldn't follow.

People thought nobody would leave the AOL because of network effects - if all your friends are there, and your Internet social life is centered there, then that would create a barrier to exit. What it seems to really create is something more like the effect that happens in real-life social gatherings: For a while people may stay, but only because of social pressure. They're actually ready to leave, they're just waiting for a cue that causes them to be comfortable with leaving. That usually comes in the form of someone else finally deciding to go. That triggers a chain reaction so that all of a sudden, a party that seemed to be still going strong empties out all at once and without much warning.

A lot like the WeLL, AOL, MySpace, etc.
Yeah I don't really like them either, and I wrote them. I thought twice about including the percentages, and I did try to highlight that fact:

Note that the percentages below are only relative to
these 2 sets of 3 characters, and don’t represent the
total percentage of keystrokes saved.

The percentages are only really there to provide an easier way to compare the (relatively small) Ruby sample, and the (relatively large) PHP sample. Simply saying that one project saved 6000 strokes vs. the other with 100,000 strokes seemed a bit meaningless given the relative sizes of the projects, and doing a full-on frequency analysis of modifier key usage seemed like more trouble that it was worth... perhaps in hindsight I should have done it anyway.

zokier provided an interesting link to a previous discussion below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2973776, specifically http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2977303) which does a much more thorough analysis of Finnish/Swedish vs. US layouts - I'd like to run his code using the Japanese layout when I get a chance.
Oh, I just assumed that it had some digital input (DVI-D at least).
I wonder if part of the reason is that on shorter trial periods, people are still in the 'honeymoon phase'. When you make a good first impression, people will go 'oh this is the best thing ever'. Nothing ever is, of course, and it takes a while (weeks to months, depending on the product) to find out that some aspects aren't that great. But when you've made the first payment, you've committed yourself, and now you're prone to confirmation bias.

After 2 months, people are more likely to have hit the not-so-great parts and may think 'meh, I'm going to try other options first'. The shorter the trail period, the more people (at least of those who actively try at all) will still be in the honeymoon phase and more likely to sign up.

Just thinking out loud, I have no numbers to back this up, and I wonder how one could measure this. I guess you'd need to correlate user activity to the duration of the trial and the likelihood that somebody signs up - maybe there is an overarching trend to be found there somewhere. It would require a fairly homogeneous set of users though, or otherwise a large number of users and additional data (either user traits or usage pattern commonalities) to slice the users into more homogenous groups.
Epic time-lapse map of Europe [video]
Yep. Been discussed. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3580013/should-i-use-past...

The tl;dr - use present tense if working on large distributed (open-source) project where the commit may or may not be used. Use past tense if the change isn't really optional (people basically can only merge/rebase)... which applies to most projects.
If you click full story or next page, it allows the site to know how much you read.
really? the article seemed pretty neutral to me, no sensationalistic spin.
The 10k Bootstrap Challenge
You may be right, but the problem is that the number of businesses that can take advantage of "the proper way" to use Facebook for advertising is but a small percentage of those who are actually using Facebook for advertising (based on what I see, at least).

My friends that work at the big CPG companies and ad agencies tell me one story consistently about their interactions with Facebook (the company) - if it's not working, Facebook universally points their finger at the customer and says "You're doing it wrong". That can't end well. (Or maybe it can. Print ads are pretty awful as well.)

Can an ad platform that requires so much specialized marketing skill work at that scale? I tend to think "no". Facebook will wind up selling ads that don't work to people who don't know or care, just like the newspapers do. Look for Facebook's analytics to suck in the future once they come to grips with this.
There's a very frustrating mix of "concern for privacy" vs "being effective".

All these different agencies have their own databases (with slightly different fields making transfer of data between them a bit tricky) and they're not allowed to communicate apart from a few limited examples.

To get anything done I need to fill out a form, on paper. That same information needs to be filled out across many different forms, to different agencies. It's so bad that sometimes one form asks for the same information (address, date of birth) twice.

I'm not sure how governments could kludge all that data into one big database and protect people from hideous privacy violations that result.
they should advertise on yelp where people are, you know, looking to buy pizza.
Fucking logical pedants.

Less not stopped is logical and correct if you consider the individual. If you read the comment again, it does not exclude other drivers so the logic is correct. The comment was not inclusive.

Perhaps I should clarify: "If you don't apply the one size fits all rules, you will increase the number of deviants."

Now there is a logical fallacy there for you to ponder...

Happy now?

bangs head on wall
Git Agility
To Susser(?)'s comment: Perhaps, but on the other hand people were saying the same thing about AOL vs. Prodigy and CompuServe.
Thanks, this is the best answer to all the "don't learn to program" arguments.
You'd be surprised but Yellow Pages can sometimes be more effective that a social media strategy. Targeted ads are targeted at people who aren't exactly looking for a service. People that check out Yellow Pages are looking for something to purchase.
That would be amusing.

Especially considering Microsoft's prominent take-down of botnets recently.

Perhaps they just assumed control over them...
What about those who consult (wikipedia, redit, and wherever prof. Kelly is going to strike next) casually? Do you always go back to see that the information you quickly looked up has not been deleted later by some professor playing games with your credulity?

PS. I never said or assumed that 'all lies are childish mistakes'.
You Have $75 Billion To Save the World - How would you spend it?
I think the right answer might be writing a tool that uses the Facebook API to "open" your message and immediately reply saying "OpenAllMessages just opened your message. The actual person will read it when they get around to it."
Conversely, good luck buying gas from an automatic pump if you're in the US and paying with a European card. In the absence of a PIN they'll ask for a ZIP code, which you don't have.
I agree with your last statement. I don't think people on Facebook are looking to buy anything and hence, why it hasn't really been successful. People on Facebook go to have fun and interact with their friends - not buy stuff.
The Sky’s the Limit
There are two things that separates TV adds during the Super Bowl vs. banner adds on Facebook first there is no competition for a users attention. If Facebook could set things up so every 30 clicks a user was forced to watch a 30 second clip then they could make a lot of money until they lost all their users. Second, people talk about the good ones, people basically don't talk about banner advertising at all. Part of that is the poor ad copy, but mostly it's because people are only barely aware they exist in the first place.
Is this a "small, innovative application" or "just another instagram clone" ?
Sounds cool...I guess that's a new VeriFone piece of tech. It has been a while since I went into an Apple Store, they certainly used to use separate terminals.
Their goal was to increase sales, not increase likes on facebook. They considered the likes on facebook to be a metric, and it turned out to be useless by itself.

I've never advertised on Facebook, nor do I use it any more, but I thought the whole purpose of getting "Likes" was having a wider audience to which send offers and coupons. In that case it is a metric, it's not useless.

This article made it sound like Likes are supposed to be promises of business. They're not. They're just the opportunity to win business.
The semantic web: Can it make Google as smart as IBM Watson?
Exactly. I know some programming by now. I am planning to buy a guitar to play with 'Hotel California'
This is why I put Zero x because it looks like ox.

I write about me all the time. The article in itself was a parody (as are a lot of things on my blog). This was on front page HN for a while: http://robbieabed.com/fire-me-i-beg-you/
You need to bear in mind that in most of Europe there was a large advertising campaign when Chip & PIN was introduced, along the lines of "signatures are very insecure, so we're introducing Chip & PIN". So there may well be some resistance from users who have been educated to understand that at point-of-sale they should be using PINs. There may well be people put-off with signing rather than using a PIN.
> The servers are doing a lot of work, so it's not surprising in the slightest that they are having lot's of launch day issues.

If it's not surprising in the slightest, then they should have planned to scale.
Really? They only spent $240. Would flyers for the neighborhood cost less than that?
Seconded. Amazon was late to the "sell books on the internet" party, but first-mover books.com was sold to Barnes and Noble around 2000 or so.
There are varying degrees of maniac/deviant. Lots of drivers routinely change lanes without signaling, cut other drivers off, refuse to wait for pedestrians standing at the crosswalk, etc. There aren't nearly so many who routinely run red lights.
You are asking for honest feedback, so… if you want to excite people about your work, you need to be excited yourself. To my ears you sound rather bored during the video which made me click the back-button midway. Engage!
Hacker tied to Lulzsec and Anonymous pleads not guilty
Facebook messenger on my android phone has been showing me if my messages have been read by the recipient for a while now. They must have enabled it on mobile before they did in the browser
Programming is for Anyone
Interesting idea.

Tiny typo. It should be 'live' not 'life'.

"So I'm betting £10k that I can build a portfolio of products which is profitable enough to life off before running out of money."

should be

"So I'm betting £10k that I can build a portfolio of products which is profitable enough to live off before running out of money."
sure this will be great for private namespaces and i'm all for trying it ... but if you add one of these alternative NICs to your DNS doesn't that mean they can then hijack mainstream domains?
This is true and a good point.

But obviously Google gets to call the shots with their own services. They only answer to their customers, who aren't whining about this.
... Considering that the new shares are not being sold by The Company but by the existing investors, you are not at all correct.

> More specifically, certain insiders are selling more. Venture capital firm Accel Partners, for example, has increased its number of shares being sold in the IPO from 38.19 million to 49 million. DST group from 26.25 million to 45.66 million, while its Mail.ru affiliate has bumped its number from 11.27 million to 19.6 million.
The Jester: Unmasking or Clever Plot to Raise Money
Some of the worst jams in Mumbai I've experienced are when a policeman decides to direct traffic at a junction rather than let the lights do it...