skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The flaw is that no one wants to fix anything because fixing things is boring"

I've always thought this was the funniest thing as I relish digging into a piece of open source software that I love to use and fixing little flaws. Just this morning I wrote a patch for guake the drop down terminal that allows the width to be resized on the fly as it was broken on Unity in Ubuntu 12.04. The sense of accomplishment at taking a piece of broken software and making it "right" is phenomenal for me. I guess different strokes for different folks.
I see a few flaws with the author's analysis:

The first is the premise that that which a father does for his family outside of the home does not count toward "caregiving". Being successful in a career puts a roof over a child's head, provides him with material comforts, creates educational opportunities, and establishes a positive role-model. It may not be a romantic sentiment, but I wouldn't exchange all that my father provided for me growing up (nice home, good schools, help with tuition, good example of professionalism, etc) for him changing my diapers or playing catch with me a few more times than he did.

In many ways, a man does right by his family by focusing on his career. The same can be true of a woman. Ultimately, there is a set of requirements for raising a child - among these, physical proximity with a caregiver, instruction, affection, socialization, and all of the material necessities, such as housing, food, and health care. How parents divvy up the provisioning of these things is up to each couple, however in my experience, a division of labor (as opposed to doing everything 50-50) is often more practical.

This whole conversation is sort of silly since no gender and no individual can ever "have it all". Life requires compromise - saying no to some things we want in exchange for a higher value. No man or woman can put in 100 hours of work as a CEO captain of industry, and simultaneously spend 8 hours a day reading to their kids. Both spheres of life demand time, a finite resource, and thus it is up to parents to strike a balance.

The other issue I have with the author's analysis is the "ought." The "ought" is the idea that 50-50 (fathers and mothers having an equal focus on child-rearing and career) is a thing to aspire to for our society. This relies on the assumption that there is no meaningful difference between men and women that should allow for this, or at least the assumption that if such a difference exists, it ought to be resisted. I disagree. There are benefits to many of our biologically and culturally based gender norms, and we should embrace the productive ones that relate to child-rearing.
Obama's Tax Calculator
Interesting concept on driving time to a concert as opposed to distance in miles...
This looks just like the one used in the new Flickr Upload page http://www.flickr.com/photos/upload/. Are they related?
It's not the device its the software, the platform. Surface is just a device. Maybe it will succeed, may be it will fail but windows as a platform has been there an will be there as long as Microsoft is around. An app for surface is not limited to Surface it can run on millions of other PCs that run Windows 8.
Can you explain what you feel is foolish about encrypting passwords on top of SSL?
Of course the real danger is that they will get hacked and their coverage will actually get better :-)

On a more serious note is would probably be worthwhile for news agencies to to at least put a digital fingerprint on their published stories to raise the cost of creating a credible fake story.
An example: Rapportive was a browser plugin that put social information (from FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) directly in your Gmail.

This was great from a user perspective (puts a picture with an email so you recognize that this is 'Bill' who you met at the hackerspace even though his email is cypherdog26@crytomesh.org).

However it was NOT so great for Gmail:

1. Rapportive overwrote the section of gmail where they display ads.

2. It further entrenched Google's social competitors.

There is no way that Google was going to launch a set of Rapportive equivalent features in Gmail. However, Rapportive was beloved by users and exited to LinkedIn.
I recommend you the "Intro to Physics: Landmarks in Physics" course made by Udacity (http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/ph100/CourseRev/1). I'm currently halfway through it and I'm having a lot of fun doing it! Here's the syllabus of the course:

Unit 1: How can we measure the circumference
of the Earth?
Basics of geometry and trigonometry

Unit 2: How do objects move?
Data analysis and kinematics

Unit 3: What causes motion?
Forces, acceleration, and Newton’s Laws

Unit 4: How can we use motion?
Work, energy, and simple machines

Unit 5: How can we determine our longitude at sea?
Simple harmonic motion

Unit 6: What is electricity?
Charge and electric fields

Unit 7: What is left to discover?
Modern physics and open questions
(sort-by
(fn [u]
(* (:age u)
(:tuition u)
(if (rhymes-with (:name u) 'Warvard)
1
(+ 0.9 (rand 0.1))))
univs)
I found this tool intriguing because the tax code is such a complex beast that a candidate could simply overlook the negative points during a campaign. I like giving individuals a direct, simple way to see what the plan would mean to them instead of deciphering rhetoric.

Now whether or not this thing is accurate is another story, but I do like huge buttons.
I agree with the author. Having just built a very large responsive website, every new update / feature is (almost) mulltiplied in complexity by the number of devices we support. Especially when the feature is doing complex interactive stuff. For instance, we just built an interactive newsletter reader with drag-click-slide whirling html5 shaz that i ended up having to do 3 version for in css & js on Tablets, Desktops(plus IE), and phones. What I'm wondering is how to monetize as a devloper in the long term. After a year or so experience now I'm definately seeing that a one time up front bill for a mobile version does not cut it.
You're wrong that the same argument can be used on cars. Because one thing that we have with cars is lots and lots of real data from the field. We don't say that cars today are safer than cars from the 70s because we have a list of safety features. We can say it because we have actual accident statistics and casualty rates.

Yet even with cars, even with the fact that they have experienced designers, when you build a new car model and put it out, you don't always get it right. You don't know what you did wrong. Which is why we regularly see safety recalls issued on cars - even from the best companies - for everything from software updates to changing the floor mat.

Until you see a model in use in the real world you simply don't know. Even if you have experience on a related model, there is the possibility of something new going wrong. Something you would have never thought of. Like the gas pedal getting stuck on a floor mat.

You take into account everything you know about. You run every feasible test that you think is useful. You run tests in simulators, on isolated components, on the whole model. You review and double review your work. You set up safety checklists to verify everything on the spot. But until you actually see the accident data, you don't really know whether you missed something important.

This is true for cars. It is true for airplanes. It is true for rockets. But the critical differences are that rockets are inherently more dangerous, it isn't feasible to do the same number of tests on them, and we don't get nearly as much accident data.
Both touchpad and playbook failed because the platform ecosystem failed. You are equating Surface the device to Windows the platform ecosystem. One is unproven the other has been the most vibrant platform there ever has been.
Ending mixed scripting vulnerabilities
Here's why it's likely the manned Dragon capsule will be one of the safest manned spacecraft in history.

First, the Falcon 9 so far has a 100% success rate. The rocket engines are designed to be able to handle having a stainless steel nut pass through the fuel lines without shutting down. More so the vehicle is designed to be able to withstand an engine exploding, even at launch, without damaging the other engines and without preventing the launcher from reaching orbit. And the vehicle has already demonstrated the ability to safely abort on the pad after all the engines have been started.

Second, the launch escape system for the Dragon will be far more capable than anything that's been developed before. Instead of using a separate, heavy solid fueled tractor rocket like Apollo or Soyuz an integrated liquid fueled rocket system will be used. This will provide full escape coverage from the launch pad all the way to orbit, which no manned launcher in history has had. Additionally, the escape rocket will have a high level of redundancy.

Third, the advanced thermal protective system, simple capsule design, and robust drogue and parachute system make atmospheric reentry a lot less risky than, say, the space shuttle or even Soyuz capsules.

Fourth, before a human ever gets in a SpaceX capsule the launch escape system will already have been demonstrated on unmanned launches. By then the confidence in the system should be enormously high.

It's always possible to miscalculate or ignore risk, but SpaceX is doing a tremendous job to increase the reliability of their launcher and to make their manned capsule fundamentally safe by design.
It's not that high. A lot of the losses in take-off aren't the consequence of drag. I think I saw on wikipedia that the aerodynamics losses are only 1-200 m/s of the delta-v budget.
Discovered WorkFlowy last year, wrapped the page in an Android WebView and put it free in the market. Seeing a huge boost in downloads today. It's already tripled my best day yet, almost a 10% increase in active installs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codysand.f...
A Spacecraft Within A Spacecraft
I looked up "data grid":

A Data Grid is an architecture or set of services that enable individuals
or groups of users the ability to access, modify and transfer extremely
large amounts of geographically distributed data for research
purposes.[1] Data grids make this possible through a host of middleware
applications and services that pull together data and resources from
multiple administrative domains and then present it to users upon request.

Uh oh.
This is almost nothing. The surface of the Earth spins at almost ~450 m/s near the equator and that's being some ~6300 km from the center. Climbing up another 10 km is not going to appreciably change your horizontal velocity.
Perhaps you should ask yourself why you thought it would be funny, rather than psychoanalyze a stranger on the internet.
I'm pretty impressed with the speed of this. I'm wondering if anyone has thought of implementing a grappling hook mod? Would be fun to see a TW style harpoon in here!
Itemization is where you can deduct out-of-pocket if it gets high enough, but you are correct.
Name one better tool that I can explain how to use over the phone to a non-savvy user running Windows.
My friend is high enough at Groupon to know accurate numbers.

I'm not sure what more I can say that would satisfy you. Can we stop now?
Everybody waits to respond to some messages. Everybody knows this. Just because someone knows you've read their message doesn't mean you need to respond immediately.

Read receipts make messages more useful. You don't have to guess if someone is a frequent email-checker. You simply know if they've seen it or if they haven't. If they haven't and the message is urgent, you can try other means of reaching the person.

Relax. It's going to be okay.
>We should have identified that our service was not adding much value and moved on. We should have done this 6 months in and not waited a year to cut our loses.

Coulda figured that out a priori, which is partly why VCs have economic value. They have their limitations, but they're not quite so hypo-maniacally deluded as most valleyite entrepreneurs.
I think Apple's iMessage did this the best: read receipts are off by default, and "delivered" really just means it made it to the device, no more, no less.

The new "Seen" aspect for Facebook messages is particularly sneaky, and I'm not a fan, but whatever. I expect people to respond in time eventually.
Did you forget that they are not bundled and you actually have to pay for it? Office is built in for free with Surface.
I fully agree with this. It reduces the quality of interaction from both ends:

From the receiver's end: Like this post says, it creates a sense of urgency as the sender now knows that it's been seen. It also puts the receiver in a tough situation if the sender is an annoyance but the sender doesn't want to possibly hurt their feelings. By default -- without doing anything -- that possibility exists. There becomes an obligation to respond.

From the sender's end: Likewise, if you send a message to someone and you're really nervous about a response (think of a potential boyfriend/girlfriend, for example), if you see that the person has "seen" or "read" your message, and they don't respond, you might begin to worry that they won't ever respond. Of course you know that they might just be busy or taking their time to write a thoughtful response, but the fact that the time is now ticking since they've seen it can make you anxious.

So really, this kind of passive sharing helps nobody.
The Boston Ruby Workshop For Women and their Friends
This. I think it's an attempt to keep the PPC prices for certain keywords down. Exhaust the budgets of competitors.
show HN: Peer-to-peer group video chat in the web browser
Outside of the US quality degrees are often orders of magnitude cheaper to obtain as well, perhaps justifying the requirement.
I'd flip a coin and then shoot myself.
you can list it by a topological sort.
When your job is on the line due to stack ranking your opinion may change.
Except it's written by users, so it's really Yahoo Answers with real names.
i wish mine were acyclic.
"In addition to" vacation days, I could see it, but in lieu of? No thanks.

Taking time away from work is an important part of my mental health. The last thing North American culture needs is another way for corporations to replace leisure time with yet more work.
Making a website that works on desktop, tablet, and mobile all at the same time is difficult and expensive. Responsive Design's value proposition is that it is somewhat less complex and expensive than having a bifurcated experience on an m. subdomain. It also avoids some issues attendent with bifurcated experience[1], and maybe you can even have a decent tablet-specific design.

The head of webdev for my company says that a responsive design is usually about 20-30% more expensive than a traditional mobile-ignorant design. This is significantly higher than 0%. It is also significantly lower than the ~100% increase it would take to build a separate dedicated m. experience. The resulting mobile experience is significantly more full-featured than the shitty bifurcated experience[1] you could otherwise get with 30% of the main site's budget.

Responsive Design is not a silver bullet, and should not be sold as such. If it is worth your time to make a mobile version of your site, it is an extremely attractive option for doing so, and generally superior to the alternatives. Doesn't mean it's free or perfect, just means it's better than the other ways of doing it.

[1] http://xkcd.com/869/
The patent office will grant you a patent on $anything, as long as you add "...on a computer" or "...on the internet" or "...over a cellular network".
If you're having trouble finding the actual complaint (as I was) here it is: http://www.scribd.com/doc/101954002/EA-v-Zynga-Complaint-Fin...
If you're looking for a REALLY non-complicated list app, check out http://minimalist.ngokevin.com which makes use of local storage and app cache to work offline.
If your SSL is compromised, the attacker can insert javascript to send the unencrypted password somewhere else.

That is why security experts like tpacek have repeatedly said js encryption schemes aren't secure.
Advertising is now available on iOS-Blog.
Or better yet add color:

WARNING: REPLACE ASTERISK with the ATERISK character, keeps italicizing

alias facts="echo -ne '\033[36m'; curl -s randomfunfacts.com | grep '<i>' | sed 's/.ASTERISK<i>\(.ASTERISK\)<\/i>.*/\1/'; echo -ne '\033[0m'; tput sgr0"

And run it in BG so we don't have to wait for call to website before we pull

alias gpl="( facts ); git pull"
Just because someone knows you've seen their message, doesn't mean you need to reply or do anything. The same goes for in person interactions. If anything, these "Seen at" notifications make chatting more like (dun dun dun) real life interactions - complete with sometimes awkward situations that you need to deal with.
> On the graduation rate: why shouldn't a school be penalized for a low graduation rate? The point of those rankings (beyond selling magazines, of course) is to give prospective students an idea of how each school will help them in life.

Its easy to look at this from the other side though.

I think a lot of people look at these rankings as the value of a degree earned from that institution. That is, they are looking at it from the side of the alums as opposed to the prospects. Suppose two schools have the same admissions criteria and everything else, but the graduation rate of one is much higher. I would think the school with the lower graduation rate would be viewed as more rigorous and therefore "better".
"If I have a choice of going to school A from which I'm 90% likely to graduate and an otherwise equally ranked school B which is 50% likely to kick me out without a diploma, which am I going to choose?"

The "otherwise equally ranked school" part shows where a single-dimension ranking system falls on its face. Does it mean they accept the same quality of applicant? If so, graduating from the school with the lower graduation rate might be a much more impressive accomplishment. Or does it mean that the quality of education graduates receive is considered to be basically the same? Does that then mean the second one is just easier to get into?

How would all colleges having high graduation rates avoid pigeon-holing people even further into the box that their high-school performance marked them for? If everybody can graduate, the potential signaling is reduced from "got into and graduated from school x" to just "got in to school x."
The author of that post says he sold them for way more than he paid for them, so .. um.. yes. That's a sustainable business model.
Couldn't agree more. Zynga is the biggest scam since Facbeook. Assholes like Pincus are not innovators at the least, they are just plain scumbags who are taking advantage of the boom. It's unfortunate. Especially how Pincus and others cashed out $400M+ and left investors to dry.

Zynga will face their fate, as will Facebook, a lot of people will get rich, a lot of people will lose money, but at the end of the day Zynga won't be around for long and Facebook will be the next AIM.
Any positive review is an ad. That's why products that are well-liked are popular.
Thanks! It was really a pain point for us as founders, most of my life I haven't lived in a big city but been a die hard music fan willing to drive to shows hours away. It was always tedious having to go through and check each nearby city that got decent shows.
Paranoid Androids
Sendicate - Simply send beautiful emails to people that matter.
We are all so eager for adoption before the implementation. Big things on internet were not made wide adoption guaranteed. as @dglassan said, "Refactoring the internet is not the solution". Create something, invite small group, dev friends to take part. Either it is an api, platform or an application. If it is any good, it will get picked up for the wide adoption.
He has no plans to sell

It is a brave man that gets in to bed with the government thinking he can withstand the intolerable pressure they can bring, if they decide, to bend his will.

Nationalisation...

How likely do you really think that is?

Surely, it is for the oracles to strike a claim on future events, but when you consider gold confiscation in the 1930s, oil nationalisation in the 1950s, the absurd nationalisations of the 1970s, and the crony-saving bail outs of the 'Too Big to Fails' in recent years, it is obvious, I would think, that politicians are happy to corrupt the free market when it benefits their short term interests.
I was referring to the statement that "there are no decent office like apps available on the tablets" and the inference that "apple wants iPad to primarily be a consumption device". When did we start talking about bundling?

EDIT: Oh, I see. When you said "no decent office like apps available on the tablets", I interpreted that as meaning that they weren't available at all, but you were saying you were frustrated with them not being bundled. Apologies for having misunderstood.

It's still impossible for me to see that Apple "wants" the iPad to primarily be a consumption device — why would they? (They want to sell iPads! They don't care too much what you do with them.) And, if they did care, why would they make iWork? The iPad introduction keynote spent a lot of time showing each of the iWork apps off, very much casting the device as a productivity device (among other things, of course).
This is why it's important to be able to switch vendors. If Google isn't responsive, these guys can switch to offering their product on the Amazon app store [1], for example.

Avoiding vendor lock-in is an extremely important part of the business side of technology.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/b/ref=topnav_storetab_mas?...

Why http://www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/ 404's is incomprehensible.
The Apple II went on sale in 1977. The Comodore 64, in 1982. So, half a decade later another computer was introduced and you say that he's "rewriting history" to ignore this computer that came so much later?

It is people like you who ruin HN for everyone.
There are tons (maybe more?) companies that are successful without the help of an incubator. People have been raising money and building successful companies decades before the idea of an incubator even came about.

Not making it into an incubator didn't contribute to the flop at all. A bad company going through an incubator is still a bad company. I'm not saying your company was bad, I'm just trying to explain that this whole idea that a startup can only be successful if they go through an incubator is completely bogus.
This is cool. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me in Safari 6.0 on OS X 10.8. The title updates but the favicon stays as the default GitHub icon: http://imgur.com/kIzXX
Is there anything more to Workflowy than an outliner with search capability? Outliners have been around for decades.
If you are healthy and rich, it makes no difference.

I've known quite a few freelancers and unemployed people in the US who had no insurance because they couldn't afford it (and, in the pre-obamacare days - because no insurer will take them).

The big difference becomes visible when something in your condition changes. Lost your job? in the US, you lost your coverage (COBRA[1] is only partially a solution). Found a new job, but had a pre-existing condition? too bad, you didn't get into the new healthcare plan. (Obamacare is solving that now, after a few decades)

Part time employee in a low wage job? You're unlikely to have had health insurance until recently.

Switched jobs? You're likely to have to switch your doctor, because your old doctor / hospital is not on your new network.

I've heard people in the US complain about pains and then say "but it's not horrible enough for me to go to the doctor - I can't spend the $150 right now". That's unthinkable in universal healthcare systems.
Here is the google group discusion on this:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/discuss-w...

Here is the demo:

http://multiwebrtc.nodejitsu.com