skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>No company dominates forever esp in technology.

I'm not so sure (for reasonable values of "forever"). From what I see, once some software hits a critical mass, it's nearly inextricable.

Look at Microsoft. Before they became a major player, the dominant OS and computer system would seem to shift every couple of years; Amiga, Commodore, Apple, etc., but once Microsoft became a major player they never really lost their grip. They continue to maintain that grip simply because so many people were familiarized on their systems and so much software was written for those systems. Does anyone really believe that someone looks at OS X and Windows these days and decides that Windows is objectively superior? Most people, even technical people who hate Apple's MO, would admit that OS X is better on its merits alone.

The reason that MS has dominated and continues to dominate is because of the software available for the platform. It's all about lock-in. People don't use Windows because it has more compelling features than OS X, they use Windows because they want to play games, buy software off the shelf and know it will run without any problems, or run their company's internal software.

Let's take Facebook as another example. For years there was a pretty constant, roughly bi-annual shift in the most prominent "social networking" site; LiveJournal, Friendster, Xanga, etc., until Facebook. Around 2008 Facebook began eating MySpace's lunch and Facebook remains undisputed social networking champ today with no signs of slowage.

I'm concerned that Facebook is the new Microsoft -- it has become the de-facto standard, and despite any number of superior features that may be developed in other systems, it doesn't look like anyone is going to be able to challenge Facebook seriously. Some would say that Google was perhaps the most worthy challenger, but even they have failed to really make a dent despite the fact that most of the world visits their search and email services daily.

I'm not sure exactly where that critical mass gets hit but I think it's hard to reverse once it happens. Maybe it's something like, "Once your grandparents use a certain program because everyone else does, it's relatively safe to call it 'ingrained'." I know that my grandma had no compulsion to create a MySpace profile even though she constantly [attempts to] check[s] Facebook now, and I also know that it'd be extremely difficult to train her to use a non-Windows interface.
The ethernet port is also critical for a fast migration.
Oh, I agree 100% that if the community disagrees with the behavior of an entity they they have every right to berate them. And if a company behaves poorly enough, it will open the floodgates for competitors and revenue loss (i.e. GoDaddy during SOPA probably lost an appreciable number of customers).

That being said, in this specific case I think that whether or not there is a moral obligation to let a third party scrape and mix-in your data is very debatable (given that Craigslist does not provide an API).

Sure, people should play nice. And some may interpret playing nice as 'don't scrape other people's stuff for your own startup'. Or at least don't be suprised when they get pissed ;)
Our ideas of pocket money must differ..One company I worked for, allowed you to buy shares at a 15% discount once every six month..and you got the shares at the lowest price point the shares had been at for the previous 6 months.
I bought as many shares as I was allowed to, and I can assure the money I got from that amounted to a hell of a lot more than pocket money for me.
Laser pointer shooting-game released
LaserVR Alpha Range has been released. Use a pico projector with your iPhone to have the most compact arcade game at the party. Also works with big ass projectors.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxSXdgUH9FY

App store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/laser-vr-alpha-range-pico/id531874849?ls=1&mt=8
Yup.

The source material on liquidity traps (written in 1936): http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_maynard/k44g/

An alternative explanation on why they happen (written in 1933) here: http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/meltzer/fisdeb33.pdf

And yet another alternative explanation here: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp74.pdf

All three explanations written by people who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930's. All three worth reading IMO.
If the value provided by alternatives to CL were as superior as most
HN readers believe them to be then END USERS would see that as well and
migrate just like MySpace users migrated to FB.

That's not necessarily true. I see network effects as something of a negative externality, one that is hit particularly hard by the tragedy of the commons. The problem is that even if every single person on Facebook decided that YourBookSpace was a better website that provided more value, no one would leave because until everyone else followed, your network wouldn't be there.

This type of dilemma is known as a collective action problem. When these problems arise the best way forward is often to have a superauthority such as the government step in for everyone's benefit. For example, even though it is generally accepted that free trade increases the world's prosperity when it is practiced around the world, individual countries occasionally see immediate advantage in adopting mercantilist or protectionist economic policies. The GATT is an attempt to provide a superauthority to stop such practices, because the immediate gains possible when a country embargoes an enemy are not as valuable as a system where the majority of actors behave in open and unbiased ways.

The free market doesn't work on its own. When there are systemic problems in the way actors conduct business, judiciously applied regulation can help promote the public interest.
The argument (like all "nobody is entitled" arguments) is self-defeating. If others are not to whine about X, what validates the author's whining about such others? What the author offers is an explanation of why corporations offer and revoke features like APIs. I think that is fairly well understood. That does not answer why others should not complain when that happens ("such is the world" is not an answer). It is as much a tactic of businesses to use pressure to open up APIs as it is a tactic of other businesses to offer or not offer them. What the spurned group are doing is really is making an appeal to the users of LinkedIn, etc, who are the "owners" of the data. Perhaps the author does not really wish to lecture others on entitlements, but means that such complaining is not effective. In which case, some data would help.
Or, look at things from the opposite direction. Most cells die fairly quickly (in weeks to months) relative to the life expectancy of the organism (decades, for humans). This short life is probably terminated by the buildup of obstructive particles, such as plaques of misfolded proteins, to the point where the energy required to "repair" that cell exceeds the useful functionality that the organism could derive from it by keeping it fixed up. (The analogy would be a car worth $300 requiring a repair that costs $1000.) At that point, it is now "cheaper" to just kill that cell and replace it with a new one. And so this is how most tissues in an organism work: constant turnover and production of new mature cells from tissue-specific stem cell precursors (as opposed to "pluripotent" stem cells which can in theory produce any cell type, not just a certain tissue).

Neurons, in contrast, are special in that they are not replacable, since a "replacement" neuron would have no way of recreating all the synaptic connections made by the old one. A neuron's connections constitute information storage that would be irrevocably lost if that neuron were to die. Hence, neurons have evolved to spend lots and lots more energy keeping themselves alive compared to a typical cell in a multicellular organism, because the information stored in that neuron is (on average) very valuable to the organism. But life didn't evolve with neurons in mind, and it certainly didn't evolve with 100-year-old metabolically-active cells in mind, so this gets harder and harder as the cells get older, because they are pushing the limits of what cells are capable of.
Nice. However, too bad that on scrolling you set a "position:fixed;" style on the map/calender part. On my netbook screen, I can only see the first row of days on the calender, and because of position:fixed, I can't scroll down to see the rest.
The older Intel cubes allow the desks to be affixed in the standing position. The newer style cubes have sit/stand desks.
I believe that Alzheimer's has different clinical presentation than either BSE and CJD, and that the misfolded protein being blamed for Alsheimer's is a different protein than those blamed for the other two diseases.
Med student rescues body part? More like German pilot.
Because there are strict laws in place to prevent money laundering and there are fierce protections to help reduce fraud.

Asking money services to handle payments for anyone is problematic.
Does any flagging take place in the brain at all? I have tried to keep up to date on Alzheimer's without knowing much about the human body. One thing I've thought about given the debate over whether Aβ is the culprit, one of many culprits, or just a visible sign of Alzheimer's got me thinking about it as a flagging mechanism. If a synapse is dead or in some way misbehaving it might be good to flag it as "corrupted", might that be what Aβ is doing at all? I mean system-wise it makes sense, but I know way too little about the human body or the brain.
Thierry Legault - Astrophotography
I spent several minutes on it on my iPad and can't figure out how to get past the first page.
But the point is, entrepreneurs are currently fighting on the basis of their ideas, and failing, even though their ideas are better than Craigslist, because Craigslist is winning merely because of network lock-in, not because of innovation.

Craigslist disrupted the classifieds industry because it had first-mover advantage in a new medium, the Internet. It now abuses that advantage in order to not innovate or even compete.

The market is not working over time -- proof is how everyone complains about how crappy Craigslist is.

But a solution, for example, could be something like: legislators could force companies with over, say, 25% market share, that are mainly based on user-generated content, to not be able to sue other companies if those companies re-display information originally input by users, that is publicly visible on the site.

This wouldn't force Craigslist to alter its behavior one bit. But it would allow entrepreneurs to actually fight once again on the basis of their ideas, as opposed to whoever had first-mover advantage and subsequent network lock-in.
Putting all your eggs in one basket
1) Microsoft Office

2) Windows Media Center

3) VS.NET

4) Games
Yes. A reliable double spend attack would require many millions of dollars worth of machines, and would be noticeable and verifiable (you could provably say "hey I just got a double spend from this account for this amount"). This means that you're unlikely to get the money in that case (depending on what the community wanted to do in response) but you could reasonably expect to know if people are issuing double spends. I don't think it is in the interest of miners (the ones who have already invested, in sum, millions in mining machines) to collude for double spends except on incredibly valuable transactions, as it would undermine the value of Bitcoin, which they are profiting from and have significant investment in.
You're taking anti-monopolistic sentiments to an extreme.

1. The goal of almost every rational business is to achieve a monopoly in a certain space. If the public or the government had the power to systematically break up every company who comes close to success, there would be little incentive to start a business. Perfectly-competitive industries are awful for business owners. You have to draw a line in the sand, before-which monopolies as tolerable. I don't think Craigslist is anywhere near that line.

2. A huge part of anti-trust laws means that companies engage in anti-competitive practices. To the best of my knowledge, Craigslist isn't doing this. It's simply refusing to willingly participate in its own destruction.

3. I question your usage of the words "normal" and "natural". First you claim that monopolies indicate the failure of normal capitalistic competition. Then you claim that monopolies naturally occur. Then you claim that we need to act to bring back natural market competition. So which is it? Are monopolies "natural" or is competition? And why does something being "natural" make it good?
Actually, this is really interesting. If a free newspaper did start repulishing ads and the primary paper cut them off, the ad posters would be up in arms because their audience is now reduced.

Its a loose loose scenario, much better to allow the reproductuon for everyone.
A lot of potential value is materialized by entrepreneurs who expect to entrech themselves in such positions. Many would not run the risks and do the work if they could not, when and if successful, enjoy extraordinary benefit.
Ask HN: How to meet people at Dolores Park this weekend
Dolores Park has a huge number of people around this weekend. How do you meet new people?
Just change the current working directory in the script before running the task. No need to move them then.
All insurance companies are/will have to spend billions on data mining...

...says the guy who sells data mining.
HKSTPC Incu-Tech Graduate Enjoys Sweet Tune of Success
>we've seen thought the history of time that it's ok to punish
otherwise-acceptable behavior as long as it acts as an insurance in order to
prevent more harmful acts.

I doubt there's actually any evidence for it. It's not that I don't understand
the rationale behind it, it's that I reject it. Outlawing something merely
because of the potential for abuse/escalation is almost always a slippery
slope argument of the fallacious kind.
Actually, he simplifies it down to four for explanation purposes. In reality, the TF2 economy has many, many different tradeable items.
Turing on programming
The not-so-secret advantage of the Microsoft Surface tablet
my insurance company doesn't let me buy those anymore.
Indeed, we are in agreement -- because FLV is a simple container format, it indicates that VLC is not using Flash Player, and is in fact notably more efficient in decoding.
I don't see how Craigslist refusing to better themselves justifies the millions of hours wasted by their customers using their shitty UI. What a strange sense of justice.

If you value users, don't hurt yourself to show it. Rather, don't shut off sites that save them hours of their limited and precious lifetime.
Almost anything that involves subjective judgement can cause this sort of thing, I think.

Because at that point it is about you. At a certain point, iOS vs Android or Ford vs Chevy comes down to something personal. Something about you made that choice, so you better defend who you are(not what the product is).
I for one would have no problem with this. I'm well aware that the sites I go to will in many cases show custom experiences, just as I'm aware that Google tailors it's ads based on my browsing history.

If I am heading into an online retailer, or searching on the web, I'd much rather see relevant content.

I find this kind of customized experience a lot less intrusive/creepy than, say, having stuff randomly posted to my Facebook timeline, or ads showing up with my implied endorsement to my friends.
Craigslist is the IE6 of classified ads. They are a monopoly that keeps the product shitty and prevents innovation.

Padmapper is the Mozilla.
Check this awesome (and cheap) design:
http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Ikea-Standing-desk-for-22-dolla...
It's very unlikely that any free API is going to make you enough money to deal with any legal hassles. Some companies will charge API clients through the nose. Others will cut off access. Either way, it's not going to lead to a more free ecosystem.
Watch his review of the Cayman S.

"You get the impression that the engineers could have made the Coxter[1] faster and better. But they weren't allowed to because it would have been faster and better than the 911. So the Coxter then, isn't quite as good as it could have been.

I couldn't live with that. I like to think a car has been designed to be as good as it could be, not just to fill a gap in the market." --Clarkson

[1] Coxter being his pet name for the Cayman
I don't understand this argument at all.

I've posted a couple things to Craigslist. Maybe it's different for rental listings, but for what I've posted, Craigslist did not demand exclusivity. If I wanted to post my listing to some other service, I was free to do that.

Similarly, regardless of what Craigslist's policies are with regards to third party access: it's still your data, right? You are free to post it to an open classifieds service?

That being the case, from where do you derive this idea that Craiglist has somehow taken custody of your data, and thus owes the rest of the industry some measure of access to it? Why is that Craigslist's job? If you want there to be multiple competing listing services, push your data to multiple services.
> this is too little too late.

Think so? I would be surprised if Google, so full of smart people and with enough marketing skills that they took over digital advertizing, really were so inept at negotiation.

It doesn't seem a coincidence to me, that this price change comes not even 2 weeks after their major competitor in the mobile market has committed to a different maps platform.
Some advice from an old journalism professor of mine: no matter what anyone else says or does, just smile and says "Thanks for letting me know how you feel!" It's a difficult person disarming tactic.
No. Craigslist is an objectively better product because it has a better network.

Consumers do not get to choose alternative railways. They can chose alternative classefeids services; those services are just inferior (maybe they have a better UI but they aren't as good at selling things)
True, there's something of a tradeoff to make there in terms of waiting vs risk. This is the case with existing payment systems to some extent as well, isn't it? Blizzard for example recently took some heat with regard to fully activating digital downloads of Diablo 3, saying that it typically takes around a day, but may take as long as 72 hours. Speculation was that this was a response to spammers fraudulently buying short-lived accounts (perhaps with stolen credit card numbers, or issuing chargebacks).

1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/diablo-iii-digital-pur...
My perspective is a developer on a small team who had to try and support a legacy environment in which no two machines had the same versions of the kernel, native libraries, web server, script engines, and our code, and every box was an irreplacable work of art which we basically had to /bin/dd to migrate. It took us a traumatic year to get from there "yum install our-app" producing a usable app server on a freshly-imaged box, and I don't think we would have succeeded without being able to express all our dependencies regardless of language.

As for mixing different versions of a library, that way lies madness. I regard it as a problem I want the package manager to prevent. An app that isn't on the company-wide version of a library is like radioactive waste—keep it tightly contained on separate hardware and dispose of it as soon as we possibly can. This does make upgrades a Big Deal involving a lot of regression testing, but it's better than troubleshooting code that both is and isn't what's running.
Article:  Implementing Aggregation Functions in MongoDB
I'll also add that the day I saw the Facebook logo on my Wal-Mart receipts I knew we were in deep trouble. Some companies use their Facebook page as their only website. This isn't something that just goes away.
The topic that inspires the most vitriol by far is anything to do with Israel or Palestine. The comments on any YouTube video or nasty even by YouTube comment standards.
You're reading too much into it. I'm pretty sure it's just run of the mill sensationalism.
ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration
The robot community is really amazing, I'm going to join the effort, starting from this drone, I hope they're running ROS and the hardware schematics are also open sourced, so that I can build and play with them, for fun.
I always use the Glider (Hacker's Emblem) as my wallpaper (from this Deviantart artist), it makes a great minimalist dark background:
http://mientefuego.deviantart.com/art/Carbon-Glider-12926852...

Minimal representation (using 2 Braille Unicode characters) is:
⠠⠵

But Apple's version contains a single cell in the top right that will interact with the Glider and will mutate and become a static structure 4 iterations later. I tested in this html5 Conway's Game of Life online simulator:
http://www.quesucede.com/public/gameoflife/game.html
Need TALENTED people in the Bay Area to join "insanely awesome" product idea.
@Folks in the Silicon Valley:

I am a software developer & entrepreneur with passion in mobile and web technology. I am currently pursuing a venture, which I believe is a great solution for selling/buying products online.

The business plan is finalized, and I currently have 2 top level & experienced business leaders as Advisors.
I am looking for the following people in the team :

1. MBA graduate, who can operate as CFO.

2. Web developer who has experience with online payments, and backend work.

3. Android developer.

( I am currently taking the role of iOS developer and will work alongside with the Web development)

If anyone is interested in learning about the idea, and the entire concept, I would love to meetup and discuss everything in detail. Please send your resume to launchstartup@gmail.com

Godspeed.
This is a problem that can easily be dealt with if/when it arises.
If a company has a monopoly on data and refuses to provide an API they're saying that they don't want to compete on the quality of their product

This implies that part of the quality of a product is NOT the ability to gather data. This would be like me walking into a Walmart, setting up a cash register next to theirs and start ringing up customers and arguing that Walmart can't compare with my customer service. Ignoring that customer service is just one small part of the business. Walmart had to find the property, buy the property, do the legal work to get the product on the shevles, the negotiation, the supply chain management, etc... I can't just focus on the last mile and then argue that I'm entitled to everything else they did.

Craigslist built its name, it's reputation, it's backend, it's API, vetted a business model for its services, scouted out regions to focus on etc...

Furthermore, people are arguing the data is the users, not CLs. True, but the user gave it to CL, not to you. When I loan books to a neighbor I assume they aren't going to create a library of my loaned books (unless they specifically told me so).
> That's what happens to incumbents. The market takes care of them.

I'm not so sure. Communication tools are fundamentally different than most other products, because their primary value is the number of other people reachable through the service. This isn't true of most other industries, where you can drive a Toyota and I can drive a Ford and everyone is happy.

When your a whole market is based on the ability to interact with other people in some way, and a single company can flip interoperability on and off like a light switch, it has the potential to be a dangerous monopoly. The government stepped in and broke up Ma Bell because of this.