skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's get one thing straight: these are not products, they're services. Nobody is producing anything here.
These are very useful. Here in Ireland that service already exists as ParcelMotel.

As someone who has used ParcelMotel, I can't help but notice the differences between the things I love about the PM site that aren't on the BufferBox site. BB use uninspiring stock images but PM have commissioned an entire set of custom artwork that's a strong brand and very cutsey and describes their service using metaphors.

PM are very explicit about the pricing. It takes up a big chunk of their homepage. After several minutes I still can't find how much bufferbox costs!

And do BB only email out the PIN? Surely sending it to everyone by SMS would be a better idea?

The product is a great idea and it's implemented so well through different companies here in Europe. It's good to see something similar starting off over there also.
Exactly what I was thinking as well. Most Presentations are there to present data. I'd need at least bullets, tables and the ability to show multiple images (charts) for comparisons. Even if you only do sales pitches - how are you going to compare features, prices, traction etc. with this app?
"Craigslist would be a valid counter-argument had it been initially built on the strength of third-party clients and then killed them."

You haven't made a case for why this distinction matters. I don't think it does.
"Matrix: An artificial reality construct created by MBAs to imprison the minds of those upon whom they feed."

From the source Gruber linked.

Yawn. MBA bashing is a lazy circlejerk and adds nothing constructive to an otherwise valid argument against Twitter's self-effacing API policies.
TextDrive No More, AKA Screwed by Joyent
Some customers don't want a refund. They want Joyent to perform its half of the contract.
The Silent Industry Ripe for Disruption
This must be the Twitter analog to a Voight-Kampff test, because "social CRM" and "social influence ranking" seem to me to be the fuel for spambots, mindless marketing accounts, and other general filth. The MBA behind this plan would probably stand outside his bakery demanding payment for people stealing smells.
I didn't see any customer blaming, nor condoning of this behaviour. Just an accurate analysis of why when you see "lifetime" or "unlimited" advertised, it's generally best to run the other way.
Does Statwing have an API? If so, I am willing to write a plugin for Fluentd, a versatile log collector (Disclaimer: I am one of the active contributors to Fluentd)
Fabric is amazing.
What doesn't make sense about the diagram?
As an American living in Sydney: I've found it to be exactly the opposite. Sure there's a ton of coffee places, but mostly they're the same crappy $4.00 burnt roast. I suspect Melbourne is probably better, but I haven't had enough coffee there to confirm.

My speculation is that this is due to a general lack of hip/divy/young "artisan" cafes/restaurants in Australia (yes, yes, I know there are some, I'm talking purely about prevalence) compared with "hip" American cities. This is particularly true outside of the hip parts of town (Surrey Hills, mostly).

US coffee quality depends greatly on which city you're in, and the barista being a cool job is true in many places as well. The Pacific Northwest (Portland, Seattle -- despite the Starbucks black mark) has really amazing coffee shops, and they're everywhere. If you're ever in Portland, I highly suggest Barista -- http://baristapdx.com/ -- it will change your life.
it should be named "introduction to multi-threading"
So we have a walled garden network fucking over its users, and you think the solution is to replace it with another walled garden because its rulers are supposedly more benevolent? That's not very ambitious. Think bigger. StatusNet/Identica is free, open source, and (most importantly) federated.
Twitter isn't very big in my circles, but of those that use it, none of them use the website.
Scaling is Hard, Case Study: TripAdvisor
Check out http://www.salon.com/topic/ask_the_pilot/ -- he's done at least one good piece on the myth of the overpaid pilot.
Wonder how they got the bright idea to advocate limiting the quadrant named "Consumer Engagement".

Surprised they didn't try to make it a bit less obvious.
Twitter had better take a long, hard look at Joel's old essay on Platforms: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html

Declaring war on your third-party developers is shortsighted at best, fatal at worst.
app.net looks more attractive, until the same shit starts happening there in 5 years. The problem is walled garden social networks. It's a fundamentally bad idea for everyone involved, except the people who own it and can turn a profit. StatusNet/Identica is a much better solution to this problem than yet another walled garden. Free, open source, and federated. How many times does the same shit need to happen before people realize the only long-term solution?
This. I've been using HN for years now (significant portions of that time as purely stalking) and I check it rarely, but I'm very interested in these startups as I've had nothing but praise for the ones who's products I do use.

It would be a great help in trying out their stuff.
Hey, you welcome!
The writing is on the wall though; Kinda has been for a while. I think this is why App.Net might actually get some traction. People will move when that's where all the cool features are, and none of the crappy ads. Maybe.
but not all of the subpoenas are secret, certainly is it rare for them to include NSLs (as Appelbaum has indicated the FBI hinted) and rarely if never are the dockets themselves sealed (as Appelbaum's lawyer is currently fighting)
I wouldn't have as much immediate issue with this if Twitter's own clients were acceptable - they are not. And this is an asinine move either way.
Great summary. Yeah, TextDrive was presented as an alternative to Dreamhost that, although seemingly much more pricey, was not oversold (you can use all the space/bandwidth they give you), had better support, ran more smoothly, etc etc. By and for people who love the web, or something like that.

But there were tons of reliability problems from the start. It didn't help that Jason Hoffman handled criticism very poorly. I vaguely remember one incident where someone complained on the TextDrive forum and, taking it as a personal insult, he deleted the person's (hosting, not forum) account on the spot. There seemed to be always an excuse or a promise that some exciting better thing was around the corner to solve all the problems.

ZFS was one such exciting thing as you mention. There was also supposed to be a new administration interface called TextPanel, and it was constantly being talked up on the forums, how great it was going to be. Complete vaporware. In 2012, the crusty super-slow Webmin interface that was claimed to be temporary is still all that's available.

The shared hosting eventually became reasonably stable and reliable, but I suspect that's only because it wasn't being touched at all, and anyone doing anything nontrivial there had probably moved it to another host. Last fall I tried to set up a WordPress blog. Couldn't, because the PHP version was too old, and when I checked, it turned out (in 2011) the version of PHP being used dated to 2006.

My server just had a multi-day outage starting August 13th due to hardware failure, and is not fully restored even now (a bunch of emails are missing). I suspect this is what precipitated Hoffman's announcement. Apparently lifetime hosting was supposed to mean zero maintenance on Joyent's part.

Honestly, they should've done what Google Fiber recently did for its free internet deal: just say it's "guaranteed for at least 7 years". Many would still have signed up and they'd be within their rights to shut down most of those accounts by now. But what happened instead was a lot of us paid for "lifetime" hosting that lasted only 7 years or less, which was actively maintained for only 1 or 2 years, and during that time never lived up to the quality advertised.

But who knows, maybe Joyent and Hoffman have learned some lessons since 2005. I do expect they'll be good enough to give me a full refund, obviating the need to join any lawsuits.
>There's really no such thing as 'Aussie' coffee

Demonstrably untrue. Like most coffee producers, a lot of the beans are imported, some of it is grown locally. But they are hand selected, blended and roasted here in Australia and are most definitely produced in commercial quantities to be consumed here and exported as far as Korea.

To name but a few Campos, Sprocket, Lavazza.

Australia has very rich Italian and European cultural heritage which means we cultivated a coffee culture quite early on, relative to other western countries.
A walled garden lets anyone in, but not out. You're thinking of something more along the lines of a gated community.
My understanding is the same. I, like you, haven't followed F# since it diverged so much in development, but it's understandable that those features would be in-commensurable with how it interoperates with the .NET framework.
Nope, EC2 is essentially a VPS host, unlike Heroku.
How are they expecting to enforce that? Are they really going to download and test every third-party app?
Why not price the coffee at $30 then for millionaires? Surely the marginal utility of $30 to them would be similar to that of $5 to someone earning $60k? Why would one pay $5 for the same amount of gas one month and $3 in another month when the marginal utility derived from the purchase of gas is precisely the same?

Ignoring the price effects induced by the supply/demand characteristics and intrinsic nature of the good in question (inelasticity of gas demand, in this case) leads to bad pricing as much as incorrectly estimating the marginal utility of a product to consumers.
Require screenshot submissions, hire a bunch of temps, and they're all set.
In terms of being anti-rape, it's all you're doing, jumping up and down and telling us how against rape you are. Do you understand what a straw man is? Yes, Julian Assange needs to be handled like anyone else accused of a serious crime. That's all he wants. Quit trying to imply otherwise, as if he is somehow getting an easier time of this than a random person would.

What you are trying very hard to miss is that Assange is available for questioning. He pretty much always has been. Sweden doesn't want to question him or they would have, they want him in custody and don't want to state charges.

As for being a rapist yourself, you keep speaking in possibility. And you're still a possible rapist. You mean to speak in probability. But you fail the understand that normal probability (of charges being false, or the purpose of his arrest being limited to those charges) can't be assumed when there's obvious evidence of the circumstances being abnormal.

Your political ideals may be miles from a Fox News broadcast but your rhetorical techniques aren't that different.
driven by sales targets rather than real business need

If you're in the business of selling software, sales targets are a real business need.
Do you not consider a releasable piece of software a 'product'?
Expendables 2 unité spéciale Streaming
This completely ignores the fact that Twitter has more than a small amount of its success owed to the vibrant third party ecosystem early on. They're not slowly opening up from a closed position. They're trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle and in the long run, I don't think it will work out well for them.
Fresh Mountain Lion Cheat Sheet for Ruby
You won't be accused of raping a woman if you avoid lying to her about using a condom, avoid coercing her to do things she actually doesn't want to.. stuff like that.

If you feel that you won't get laid because women "always say no when they mean yes" you can remind them that nowadays, if they mean yes they'd better say yes, or THEY won't get laid.

eventually it will all shake out.
That's how we used to make GUIs. Miss those days.
The silver lining here is that this finally lit enough of a fire under my ass to go sign up for app.net as a developer.
It's fun to bash social media douchebaggery, but I've come to the conclusion that opting in to thinly-disguised ads might be the best use of Twitter. It's not good for conversations (see Branch) or for actual socializing. I guess Twitter is also kind of good for ranting, trolling, and bragging (see RKOI), but those might be even less productive than advertising.
Really good job at using Bootstrap there. You guys have really made it your own.
Twitter is like Cosmopolitan or People, not like "technology." Except to the extent that all media relies on technology to enable it.

Twitter is an experience. I actually hardly use it because all I can figure out it is good for is passively receiving spam from people I am following as they try to market their ventures to me.

But I recognize that early adopters mean nothing in this context, technology is irrelevant. You guys need to start trying to create some real tech and stop this fantasy that markup is some kind of high tech stuff in 2012.
Using the phrase 'considered harmful' in the title of a blog post is considered harmful
Ask HN: Asking what you did wrong in an interview?
I've only tried this a few times and I seem to get silence in return.

This is only after the phone interview; after I get a "Thanks but no thanks" email I've asked in polite terms why I got passed over. I've heard back only once out of the few times I've done it and I felt that it really was a kind of hard decision for them to make.

Is it impolite? Is it a legal concern? Do they not like me that much? What?
That blog post is ridiculous and makes Square look bad, so I'd say it's accurate. It may not be what the author had in mind though.
Wow - this comment shows just how out of touch people who do not live in day to day Latin America are, with respect to Ecuador's decision to grant asylum. I am an Aussie/Brit, who has been happily living in Ecuador for the last four years. I would never have thought the day would come where I felt prouder looking at my Ecuadorian ID than I do my Aussie or British passports. But that certainly happened today! Anyway, to the point at hand. Ecuador has given Assange asylum because it has seriously considered the situation he's ended up in, and considers that not only is the whole clusterfuck politically motivated, but that if they DIDN'T offer asylum, at the very least, Assange's human rights would be violated. It is certainly NOT some cynical exercise in obtaining "unrelated concessions" from the UK ... that much I can assure you! It seems the UK Foreign Office also made such a misjudgement in trying to actually threaten Ecuador prior to the announcement, in the hope of perhaps intimidating them into NOT giving Assange asylum. What a monumental fail that was! It is actually hard to imagine how the UK could have made this situation much worse ... oh ... wait ... yes, they could've stormed the sovereign and inviolate territory of the Ecuadorian Embassy! Anyway, the point is that Ecuador is standing on principle here (remember that quaint concept?), and fortunately they are operating at a level of integrity which has allowed them to repudiate the skulduggery of two of the most powerful nations in the world. Viva Ecuador! Shining a light on what are some very very dark dealings indeed. Anybody who hasn't woken up to what is really going on here yet, is probably not going to reach the baseline IQ requirement in this lifetime anyway! And trying to explain this sort of stuff to those sorts of people is like banging your head on a brick wall (probably more painful actually!). Ciao for now. :)
There can be a legitimate rape charge that has been grabbed for use by political forces, which is what I see has happened.
"Twitter is a B2C product, so they're going to limit B2C"

"Now, Twitter is not a B2B company"

Awesome. Now they aren't, and when they decide they are?
And speaking of acquisitions - well, they can essentially kill you willy nilly so you better settle for the price they want.

The dangers of sharecropping are well known around these parts, Twitter has squandered their reputation and has brought these things to the forefront of anybody who would consider building a business on top of their platform. It will not end well for them.
The possible difference there is that app.net has both a business plan (sell access to post to the service) as well as a feedback model if they do something stupid (people will stop paying them).
> I would say review systems and internet research negates most of the 'gamble' involved with most app purchases.

Logically, it seems like it should. But a lot of apps are just good fits for some people and bad fits for others. Some people love Angry Birds, and some people hate it. For a lot of apps, it doesn't matter how many reviews you read -- you just can't tell if you'll like it or not.

I bought the $0.99 Tetris app because it was getting rave reviews. And after just a few minutes, I realized I hated it. In my experience, reviews/popularity are a very bad predictor of whether or not a particular app will be useful to me.
App.net is going to support ActivityStrea.ms
I really want to like Twitter, I really do. So many possibilities, so many interesting services built on top of them, it would be a great centre for "online identity", a main front to communicate with friends and audience.

Except when they do these kinds of things, and I wonder how on Earth it makes any sense besides "because we can"?
Is this more evidence that they haven't completely figured out their own business model yet?
The Statwing homepage looks really nice. I think they did a good job of something quite hard: making a data analysis tool look interesting!
the one time I asked for this I actually got a detailed list of notes each of my interviewers had made, I found it very helpful
Mixpanel - Join our engineering team and help the world learn from its data.
I don't see this ending well for them. Alienating the very developer base that helped them grow as a platform early on is a huge mistake.

As an aside, I feel even better about backing App.net after seeing this news.
Perhaps there is a class of people who pay for email apps. I'm not one of them. I don't see twitter as a platform, or at least don't use it as one. It is a communication medium which, for all my usage, could have no developer ecosystem.

Professionally I would love to have free access to the Firehose, that's some juicy data. But as a consumer Twitter 'apps' are no more worth my money than email apps.
This is really interesting, the case of the girl you described certainly isn't new phenomenon. I lived with my parents in China up until 1993, and back then this was also a common situation, someone would be dying on the street but for hours nobody will help. I distinctly remember arriving in Australia to find people will help out strangers on the street that are in trouble, it was very different to how things are in China.

I'm not sure how far this phenomenon goes back, but the idea behind the thinking is that helping might bring great trouble upon yourself - part superstition and part selfishness. I remember when was around 5 and I saw this other kid who was starving, I had pity on him and wanted to give him some food, but I remember my mother stopping me. There are also many 'pianzi' in China - they trick/lie to you in order to gain something, and people are very weary of this. This is why family/relationships are so much closer in China - people are only willing to help those they know.

I've heard that young people(particularly girls) in China are today more obsessed with money, so there very well may be truth to what you say about people being selfish.

>China is now more individualistic than America because people are forced to be.

I agree with this - competition is so high today compared to when my parents were growing up. The pressure back then was low as opportunities under the communist regime simply didn't exist - only those with great ambition would work hard. Most student/workers played around all day at that time.
This is the one you're talking about: http://www.monmouthcoffee.co.uk/shops/the-borough

It's very good, but you'll wait a long time on weekends.
Statwing is cool, but IMHO it comes from people who have never struggled with the problem it ostensibly solves.

Ask anyone who uses SAS/Stata/SPSS what their pain point is, and I guarantee its not 'analyzing data nicely so I can look at charts instead of SPSS outtables'. The hardest part is collecting and organizing data (which I'm sure is a market Statwing is planning on entering.) Point-and-click stats software is nice, but the people who are using SPSS and Stata weren't hired because they could use SPSS and Stata.

(Also, I think its pretty disingenuous to compare SPSS output with Statwing output, because it implies SPSS can't output a similar histogram -- which, of course, it can.)
Really? I honestly prefer the website experience better than any Twitter app I've ever used. But I guess that may just be me... Haha
I didn't even notice.
Of course their plan to become a billion-dollar business could causes them to become a zero-dollar business.

The problem is that they seem to be overreaching, and doing it in what may be a self-destructive manor.
It's a great goal to hope for one day, nonetheless. :(
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See my article http://jackfoxy.com/a-course-of-fsharp-study/ I've got a bunch of references to F# tutorials, articles, and references. IMO the best tutorial is http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/F_Sharp_Programming
For now, that's a ways off, but I was picturing the BOM vendors be crowdsourced based on what people have been using to build the project.
Founder of Digital Music Company Is Ousted, and Theories Abound
Sorry, your rationalization doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.

When someone has BEEN raped, and I know you don't want to hear this, there is very often a reluctance to admit that's what happened. And of course, a HUGE reluctance to be treated like a filthy liar by people who really want their hero to not have raped someone.

It is, in fact, perfectly possible for someone to fuck up and create a situation that will be a huge political debility. It's perfectly possible that your idol- and mine-- isn't so great when his 'nads get involved.
A good place to work
I, for one, love seeing all the new companies launching - Hacker News feels like an even livelier more vibrant place this time of year. Keep 'em coming!
Whatever "it" is, it's way more about them than it is about you.

It hurts, but the best thing really is to just take your lumps, and try to detach yourself from the the idea that the rushed, off-the-cuff judgements that utter strangers make of you in the heat of the most awkward of social contexts imaginable has any relation to you as person.

That is to say: do take inventory of what happened, and do try to learn from the situation and do better next time... but please don't take it "inside" you as a person.

Life is just way too short for that.
That's the sort of thing I was hoping for. I genuinely want to improve my shortcomings. "Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points." -- Knute Rockne
Helium Found in Moon’s Atmosphere
Good point, I was assuming this was done transparently. In the same way that contests are run, a date is chosen, announced and then met with the full knowledge that pride and perhaps a reward are on the line.

Also this can't be the only way you set deadlines as any team would rapidly burn out.
If so, it would be about moving wood that hasn't been heat treated. The law is generally worded to specifically be related to the funeral business. There are other laws that are similarly restrictive, such as a law in Louisiana that prohibits anyone from selling "funeral merchandise" if not licensed:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/casket-making-monks-fight-sel...