skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Apps is okay. We use it but are looking to change because of the upcoming privacy policy for Google Drive (they basically say they have the right do do whatever they want with your documents). I also don't find Google Docs/Spreadsheets to work very well with Microsoft documents. (we have a few vendors that use MS Word/Excel and it's kind of annoying to not access/store it in Google Apps). Lastly, Google Docs is ugly. That last point isn't super important but you'd think they could design something a little more esthetically pleasing.

I personally have been playing with SkyDrive from Microsoft and so far that has been pretty good. Seamlessly opens and edits MS docs made on the desktop - which is nice. If I was just starting out again, I think I'd start with SkyDrive.

That said, my company is heavy Google Apps users and it works fine most of the time.
Also checkout neocomplcache, https://github.com/Shougo/neocomplcache
The missiles are stationed in 6 areas in London.

Whether they'll be used is another matter. People were asking "what's the difference between a plane that has been crashed into London and a plane that has been shot down over London?", to which the reply is "a plane that is shot down is, effectively, disintegrated and burnt in the air, leaving small fragments to scatter."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18766547
نتيجة الثانويه العامه برقم الجلوس والاسم 2012
Guest Blogpost from UI_MAN – Why PowerCLI is making things worse…
Exactly. I live in Oregon where there's no sales tax no matter where I buy something. I still get most non-grocery items on Amazon. More selection, cheaper, and I love the reviews. I don't think I've ever been disappointed by a highly reviewed Amazon item.
a) You probably didn't come up with something new and awesome worth the court's protection (sorry)

b) If you did, HTC is going to use it anyway and bury your suit in the courts until you run out of money (sorry)

c) Either way, your example only applies to hardware or you wouldn't have a supply chain or manufacturing

Ultimately, theft of the biggest idea of your 5¢ company doesn't warrant tens of billions of dollars of legal overhead.

Perhaps I agree that raising the bar fixes the problem: if your invention can be implemented by a general purpose computer, it does not deserve patent protection. And that's "can", not "is" : if it is at all possible to implement an invention in software, it is essentially math and does not deserve patent protection. Patent protection is for mechanical inventions (wheat threshers) and material transformations (metal casting). If pharma deserves protection, it is the exception, not the rule.
One difference between Americans and non-Americans is that Americans will apologise.

Smith is a tool and US politics sucks, but he isn't significantly worse than the norm in other countries and neither is US politics.
Resolution Enhancement by Vibrating Displays
(not provided) is lame, but I don't think that will hurt how this service tracks who's Googling you. It looks like they look up the IP address to see who is searching for you.

BTW - I run notprovided.com and have had 100% days of (not provided) keywords referrals....at least I have a good idea of what they were searching for : )
Though the shoes at H&M (in particular) are at least really cheap.
Did you see any Mooses while you were out there?
If those are the Chuck Taylor model Converse, then I'm not surprised that your feet hurt. I don't know how hoops players wore those back in the day.
With respect, the attitude above is the problem. The point is to never give them an inch, as they'll use it to take a mile. It goes against the very foundation of modern justice, innocent until proven guilty.
> ok, how about this: an imaginary buddy of mine running a porn website asked Olympics officials to put some porn ads. a couple doing it. on every runner's and jumper's t-shirt. he was willing to pay $10MM per runner, $20MM per jumper. guess what? bummer. they didn't agree :(

> is this specific enough?

It's "specific" but not evidence. You're assuming that they'd say no.

Moreover, your claim was "any offer". Do you really think that they'd turn down $1T?
Cloudability closes an $8.7 million Series A round
We have been doing at work with our web product for quite long time and it works well. Instead of simply showing a 500 page when an error happens and logging it, we also provide a link to let the user add information and comments about what he was actually trying to do. This helps us a lot to figure out how to reproduce the problem (it can sometimes be hard to do if it's a problem that only 1 user on over 100000 is having).
Diablo III: “The grocery store is just a playground for a sound designer.”
The fifth one from the right is a spaceship and works the same way as a glider does -- it moves to the right, instead of diagonally.

The last four are Methuselahs. They take a very long time to stabilise, and their subsequent generations tend to cover a large area: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_(cellular_automata)
Thanks for sharing the lessons
Hey these are really good questions

1) In terms of duplicate names, the product also helps you optimize for specific relevant terms like "Patrick Ambron, developer" or "Patrick Ambron, BrandYourself" "patrick ambron, NYC" etc. So people looking for you will be able to find you. That said, if two people are competing for the first page of Patrick Ambron using our service, the person more actively updating and creating content will edge the other out (google loves new, relevant content). But, at least they'll be a leg up on all the other Patrick Ambron's of the world

2) This is definately a possibility--in the same way, I can go and create a wordpress site using your name. It's hard to detect, but there are warning flags we look for. If you create an account for Patrick Ambron, but don't have the authentication for any of the other profiles (FB, twitter, LI) it looks suspicious and we check it out. We also have a policy where if you email us because somebody is using your information in an account, we will suspend the account for you, until the user can verify that they are who they say they are.
If they're going to allow queries on arrays of lists -- not a bad idea -- why not simply implement a SQL subset? I can see a huge collection of new array functions...
Good to see the compilation target list is growing. The Clojure->Scheme->C target has previously been discussed on HN, sad to see it isn't being actively worked on now. The Clojure->C target is new to me though, and is active. The documentation is a bit light and I can't gleam how to use it from the tests. Has anyone here played with it and know what's going on?

https://github.com/schani/clojurec
That wasn't my intention at all. I'm sorry if that's how it came across. It's just that I got tired of seeing people refer to code as procedural because it uses functions, and refer to code as OOP because it uses classes. I was just trying to point out that the approach is different from the tools that you use to implement the approach...
Let's chill in NYC
If you and I were to get together and agree on a certain aesthetic, and then we were to declare people who agreed with our aesthetic "experts", and then we were to test random people against our set of experts, our experts would agree with our aesthetic more often than the others.

That says nothing about peoples enjoyment. If people, experts or not, enjoy expensive wine more than inexpensive wine, they still enjoy it more even if their reasoning is flawed.
People staring at computers
Agreed. I tried using the Libre suite for a while to save on costs, but the time I spent grappling with Libre was worth much more to me than the $120 cost of Office.

You can rightfully accuse Office of feature creep, but I'd still rather use it over any of its competitors.
Also, we have a very different view on customer service

Indeed. Though going above and beyond is important to me as well. We just seem to have different ideas about what that means too.

I think patio11 says it best:

"I appreciate that you'd feel safer going with Brand Name X, and Brand Name X will indeed have someone around to answer your phone call at 2 AM. Unfortunately, they won't be able to do anything for you. Their only job is getting you off the phone before you can speak to someone capable of resolving your problem, because those people cost money. And you know what happens if you call at 2 PM? You get the same guy."

As in, you might not get a response for 16 hours, but when you do it will be from me, the guy who built the thing. And it'll be to tell you that your problem has been solved and no further action is required on your part.

Incidentally, I don't have email on my phone. Nor do I carry my phone around most days. I sometimes go a few days without checking email while on vacation, and I'm on vacation a lot. If I could give you one piece of advice, one solo-founder to another, it would be to figure out what you can change about your product so that you can do the same. It's entirely your gig, so it's up to you to choose whether anything unpleasant is part of it.
Cynicism is something the Chinese have in spades. The thing is that I know that Americans will eventually realize that education is what's important and not the diploma. But the Chinese, they will latch on to the concept of a "diploma" forever.
Good point.

Then perhaps minify and add a comment referring to http://daneden.me/max-css ?
EmTech Colombia: MIT Tech Review in South America (Spanish)
Rovio and the ‘Amazing Alex’ gamble
Yes. If you choose your four words from a dictionary of, say, 2000, then there are 1.6e13 combinations -- about 44 bits of entropy.
100% agree. So many blogs and books talk about how X is better than Y, or how Z is bad, but it is usually just a gut feeling with very little data to back it up. This book on the other hand is chock full of actual data on many topics that are debated all of the time. If you only read one programming book this decade make it this one. For me it replaces mythical man month as one of those books I now expect others have read if they want to debate the topics it presents.
"from 0 to C" - Teaching programming using a more tangible approach
Great points all around, but I don't necessarily agree 100% with his thoughts in the pharmaceutical industry.

For specific drugs, this may be the case, but when you have pharmaceutical companies doing things like patenting specific gene sequences, causing both other companies and academics to have to get licenses/permission just to perform research on something completely different, that's just ridiculous.

How patents work should be more flexible, and not limited to just whatever industry they're in.
Iceland Court Orders VISA To Start Processing Wikileaks Payments Again
The migration from MS Office to LibreOffice is not straightforward, especially if you have millions of documents. In my experience, any complex document will almost always fail to render correctly ...
> Yes, the law doesn’t actually apply to you is you’re the Home Secretary.

Well, no. The law doesn't say 'if you have encrypted information you have to decrypt it'. It says 'if you have encrypted information you have to decrypt it if the police (or someone else with statutory powers to detain your property) require you to'. The HS wasn't required to.

You can't just email someone an encrypted file and key, snap your fingers, and have them be breaking the law. They have to actually refuse to comply with a notice.

Yes, it's a stupid law, but this stunt doesn't actually show anything.
RL.com – An Inside View of The Million Dollar Battle
> Every hashing algorithm allows it, even bcrypt.

That is not the meaning I intended in my usage of the word "support", but if you equate "support" and "is compatible with", then this API also "supports" peppers, just as much as bcrypt does.

> md5($salt.$pepper.$clearText)

How cute, not just md5 but length-extension vulnerable MD5. I'd recommend not using that scheme for MACs (and more generally not using md5 directly, really, as there are precious few reasons to do so)

> The problem with this API is that if you pass in the "salt" as $salt.$pepper then the output hash also contains the pepper.

Which just happens to be the exact same way bcrypt's API works. Here's an idea: combine the pepper to the password (this is usually done through hmac), not the salt. That's how you use a pepper and remain compatible with the Modular Crypt Format.

> The whole point of a pepper is to keep a second salt out of the database [blah blah blah]

Contrary to your apparent belief, I am aware of what peppers are, how they are used and what they're supposed to do.
This is awesome! Is there documentation anywhere on how to get this set up?

Also, does this mean you're resuming work on decac?
MIT 3D goes glasses-free
The problem with the "solve it with a library" answer is interoperability. You and your dependencies usually need to agree on which paradigm you're going to use.

The Node ecosystem clearly has no consensus on this point. So you spend a lot of time gluing pieces together.

And I do know how to find the style I'm after. At the moment I'm doing a lot with Q, and I have also used node-fibers. But in either case, you end up doing a lot of plumbing, because you end up depending on other people who chose different (or non-existent) high-level flow control abstractions.
on the other hand, I feel the sophisticated language is rather shallow, probably based on simple rules (e.g. if a form is dominant on the website, add "accepting" to the opinion).
>Uk Judges are separate from the govenment.

And how did that work out for the Guildford four for example?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seve...
I totally agree -- Posner's contribution to the law in general is incredible, and this article is a great example.

Tangent, re: Posner and his place in the law:

The thing to keep an eye on is where his approach is helpful and where it isn't. His hammer is the field of law and economics -- he predicts and explains the ramifications of laws and regulations by casting them in economic terms and applying economic theories to them. That's really useful because economics is all about predicting how people will behave and how much value they'll create in various systems, and those are things the law should worry about.

It breaks down, however, in cases where the debate is about how to assign value to behavior. For example, his 2005 discussion of same-sex marriage vs. civil unions weighs the "outrage cost" of the passionate opponents of same-sex marriage against the interests of people who want to get married, coming down in favor of the first group.[1] That might make sense if you assume that one person's outrage at another person's marriage is something that should be valued, like float(10-pissed-off-Tea-partiers) > float(1-happily-married-couple) -- but the whole point of the debate is whether that outrage deserves a voice in our law.[2] His argument added basically nothing to the debate (other than, in my case, a tickling sense of annoyance) because he encoded his answers to the important issues in hidden assumptions about what was valuable and what wasn't.

This is not to drag the man down at all, who I think is amazing. Just to say that when you see a law and economics argument -- "we should do X, because if you view condition Y in economic terms it should lead to condition Z" -- you have to decide not only whether you agree with the internal reasoning, but also whether you agree with the implicit translation between economic terms and reality. Patents, of course, are the embodiment of an economic theory -- so they're the perfect nail to Posner's hammer, and I'm happy to see him out there swinging.

/Tangent

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=IRMgP6-EjDMC&pg=PA14...
[2] In legal terms, whether it constitutes a rational basis or compelling interest for a discriminatory law. In social terms, whether it's something we want to care about and cater to.
It's time the tech industry got proactive in stopping this.

If there was a campaign for statutory licensing for streaming videos (in the same way there are statutory licenses for streaming music) then the MPAA would be forced to play defence instead of constant attack.

Remember when SOPA occurred the biggest problem in Washington was that the tech lobby had no counter proposal. It's time to fix that.
Good read and the points you list as How to Get More Candid Feedback are valid in many aspects of life.

I have found the flow of a good conversation is about activly listerning as well as talking and the point your raise "what would you do in my shoes" is a great example of that. Also removing overhead such as uneeded compliments are is another great one as anybody who is impressed by irelevant flattery is somebody who is not realy adding any value.

Like most of the points they can also pertain to job interviews and the parralels are huge. Remember it is a two way process and whilst your after a VC for financial backing you are also after one that can offer ontop of that with advice and contacts etc. So questions like "if it gets down to chosing from yourself and another person" what would you feel would make you stand out for us as a startup. Though you need to carefuly ask these type of questions as you can come across as too aragant and alianate yourself; Though that will also help find those who are not the best fit for your startup.

Good read, good advice and as I said it is alot like a job interview, your looking at the longterm and in that it is not always about the money, but the prospects down the line. It is a relationship and in that works both ways and if your just after the money there are plenty of banks who offer just that if your startup has promise. That is what a VC is in many respects, though they can and do offer more and in that you need to establish what your looking for and not rush into the first wave of money in your face.
I came across an israeli company two years ago that did this in php but its possible its home grown and proprietary. There is a reason why php is not the language of choice for nlp. Most nlp applications require performance and speed for common nlp computations. Php is not performant enough for doing any serious nlp. Python is a much better choice for a variety of reasons.

- Shankar Ambady | shankarambady.com
Paul has articulated clearly what I had as a visceral reaction after attending this year's RailsConf: Rails is being relegated to being an API machine, and DHH et al are none too happy about it: http://amillionbetterthings.com/2012/04/26/the-rails-times-t...
Being an obnoxious french fry I'm actually akin to like the Dafts but here it just added to the overall confusion (my confusion I mean). I really think that some of your thoughts during and about the whole process would have been of better value.

I didn't read the backstory at the time of my comment, I apologize for that.
5 Things Kitten Photos Can Teach Us About Internet Marketing
A Duck Bears no Grudges by Buster Benson
I am thinking of organizing vim user groups or tutoring sessions where an experienced vim user sits and watches a novice try to edit, and basically just yells at them (corrects them between NGGGGGHGHHHGHGBNNNN noises).

I look forward to being one of these novices. I'm faster in vim than any other editor by far, but I know I could still be 2x faster.
> There seems to be a propensity on HN to question everything no matter how absurd it is on it's face.

There's a tendency on HN (and other places) to make statements based on "facts" that aren't actually known by the person making the claim.

> "I can assure you that Obama wouldn't be happy if his daughter became a porn star".

Unless you have specific knowledge about Obama, you can't accurately "assure" that. Yes, it's likely that Obama, like most fathers, would prefer that his daughters not be porn stars, but some fathers are different in this respect. To "assure" in this case requires Obama-specific information.

> Oh yeah, how do you know that he wouldn't be happy? Do you know him and have you spoken to him about that specifically????"

You seem to think that that's wrong. How about explaining why? I agree that speaking to Obama isn't necessary, but surely some Obama-specific information is. Do you disagree?
How many clicks does it take? Too many on the Apple TV.
Over 450,000 Yahoo Accounts Hacked Today
+1 for ninja being 4th most used password
Oh, boy. I never expected my "Maserati and supermodel" comment[1] to be quoted in a reply on this topic. OK, just for anybody who didn't realize this before:

That was about 40% "literal truth about how I feel", about 30% "true but somewhat metaphorical" and about 30% "totally tongue in cheek." IOW, don't take it literally. My real point was that for some people - like me - criticism is something we use as fuel, and is actually valued in a sense.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108061

All of that said, I definitely appreciate this post on "how to get valid feedback." This is good stuff, and will definitely be filed away for use when the need arises.
Nice compilation!
This is absolutely correct. The lack of consensus is the heart of the problem. There are several nice solutions (node-fibers being one), but none of them is dominant, so none of them work out of the box with everything else.

I'm convinced the only way you get this kind of consensus is by building a feature into your language's standard library. This is one big reason that languages with robust "batteries included" standard libraries have been successful. It makes it so much easier to interoperate when everyone can just assume the same abstractions are always available.
Hmm Did you check the specs
yep sent it to marc {at} compversions {dot} com last night :)
Says down below that it isn't: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4234959
Fullscreen in Mountain Lion still renders second display useless
Our team built a very similar product to Brewster, which shared many of the same features. We discovered a lot of issues with building an iOS address book replacement, and we never launched the product for those reasons.

1) You cannot access the recent calls list. Most people don't use their address book to keep in touch, but rather use their recent calls list. Not being able to access that list means that a huge number of people can't replace the default address book with your product.

2) You cannot be the default. Whenever I make a call, I am kicked back into the built-in Phone.app. This is incredibly confusing for users.

3) It's a momentous performance challenge. When users open the default Phone app, their contacts appear instantaneously. If you want to replace the default, you need to be sure that your address book does whatever it needs to insanely fast. We managed to get the process of syncing an address book down to seconds, but Brewster has unfortunately taken nearly an hour for me. Many, many people will drop out at this point and think the app is broken.

4) It's an enterprise product. Most people's address books are incredibly tiny and include bad data (nicknames, just first names, no names at all), which makes it very hard for a service to provide any type of value add. The only place where you can do an excellent job is for people with thousands of contacts.

5) Privacy concerns. For a product like this to have a great value add, you need to provide the service with a ton of personal data. You need my Facebook, you need my email, you need my address book and much more. Many folks will see this and drop out of the app right then and there.

It might be possible to get around these hurdles, but Brewster has a long way to go.
How can you say that when you also talking about taking calls from customers in the middle of the night? That would be pretty bad for me, at least.
Cletus,

to clarify/add to your point - when we speak about pharmaceuticals, usually we are speaking about one patented molecule, one...

Before any pharma company can either start producing or outlicense, it shall go through Phase 1, 2 and 3 clinical trials. The cost of those is estimated [if we speak about serious stuff] close to 2-3 billion usd.