skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh. My. God.

So, first off, they're so far off of being the "first company to do this" that's it not even funny, but this is a common claim in, well, every company to release a product ever. For apps, there was Body Heat (http://www.ohmibod.com/app/) and Closer ToGetHer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGMrGN5ViNo) for iphone, Dildroid
for android. For bluetooth, there was The Toy, possibly the worst named product in the history of naming things, which established Bluetooth comms with a phone to pick up SMS messages to set patterns on a vibrator.

Vibease will be selling their own vibrator, but that's not really a very big deal when you can get a OhMiBod and do audio control (though you lose voice streams since you can't split audio channels to be different between speakers and headphone output).

Secondly, their marketing is... so wrong it's scary. They're CRAZY heteronormative, to the point of telling me that gay couples couldn't use it and should find another toy. It's a damn vibrator, people. It works in a surprising amount of locations on all genders you can think of and some you can't and a few you probably don't want to. (Can you tell I live in the Bay Area?)

That said, they're one of the first teledildonics companies to really get out there and try to pull VC funding. Jimmy Jane did this with their luxury vibes, though continued success on that is not looking so hot.

This is an incredibly difficult industry to stay alive and relevant in, because people's wants and needs change, and if you don't get the interface 100% right the first time, you product is done. Finito. The end. Your app doesn't work right or crashes, you crash someone's brain chemistry in an intimate moment, and you will never, ever recover from the resulting experience memory.
This is the argument that comes up every time a C vs. C++ discussion occurs. It is faulty, because it assumes a false premise -- that the C and C++ implementations will be largely of the same complexity.

Unfortunately, in the C implementation of anything beyond a trivial application with no large-scale data structures, the majority of the "reasoning" being done will revolve around basic data structure implementations! The very containers, memory allocation structures, and such that require virtually NO reasoning in the C++ implementation, because they are proven.

After you've implemented the same basic structures again, and again for the hundredth time in large-scale C programs, C++ is a breath of fresh air.

Unfortunately, many people approach C++ before they have many miles on their programming chassis; this is like handing an infant a revolver. Bad things are likely to happen.

This is not a problem with the revolver; it is a parenting issue. Don't let a junior programmer use a language requiring significant reasoning skills, before they have earned the right -- by developing those skills, repeatedly implementing the very structures they'll be accessing in the C++ implementation!

We wouldn't let a first-year civil engineering student develop a bridge design, without first gaining many, many years of experience developing -- and failing -- on much simpler designs. Why should we expect wide-spread success, allowing junior programmers access to a spectacularly powerful and complex programming tool?
The DNSSEC Key Signing Ceremony
I would like to understand why you think being able to tweet from your fridge is a good idea.
He also decided to use XHTML 1.0 Transitional to teach us about CSS3, which is funny, since I'd think HTML5 and CSS3 would go hand-in-hand.
Also, just noticed the original poster. Hi Dema! :)
Uber is a small company. Google is big enough to pay politicians. I don't think political opposition will be a big problem.
Wow, I never thought it would be possible to use the webkit developer tools for a completely different technology stack to such an extent.

Impressive to say the least.
I never found merit to the point about not putting logic in templates.

The impressive feature of knockout (and angular) is automatic updating of UI when model data changes.

Knockout calls it "viewmodel", that is, the model is not necessarily your data model (though it could be!) but rather it's a model for the view: the state of the viewmodel determines the state of the UI.

Why would you say that this is wrong?

It even has a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_View_ViewModel (not that this matters, but it's a counter argument to "it's not standard").
Another Middle-Eastern Energy Giant RasGas Under Malware Attack
There's also the "phone story" app that was intended to raise awareness of human rights abuses that go into manufacturing devices such as the iPhone itself.

http://phonestory.org/banned.html

"Phone Story was pulled from the iTunes App Store on Tuesday September 13 at 11.35am, only few hours after its official announcement."
This is great, thanks for the breakdown. Never dealt with Noah or the AppSumo guys but I get all their emails. Really nice to know there are guys behind it all and they're being conscientious with what they are sending out.
Why have meeting alerts? I could just check my calendar. Why have text message alerts? I could just check my inbox...
I think HN understands that the expense and time involved in having to license every simple idea is a barrier to innovation. Licensing should be reserved for protecting the kind of things that require substantial investment -- implementation details, for example -- rather than simple ideas.
In some sense, many billionaires stop being a citizen of their home country and become a "citizen of the world." This also goes for multinational corporations.

Warren Buffett is a notable exception to this, however, being "bullish on America."
Spend the 3 day weekend hacking big data - win $1000 cash + other prizes
My niece, also 10, has been bugging me to teach her how to make computer games of her own. After thinking about this for a couple of months the Raspberry Pi came out so I ordered 2 (one for her, one for me!) and set her up with Scratch. While waiting on the RasPis to arrive, I bought her a copy of Loren Ipsum[0] and read it first to make sure it was good for kids and had the right kind of information (it does!).

IMHO this might be the best way to introduce kids to programming. The book teaches fundamental concepts (she was blown away by the infinite string being less than 2 inches) without bogging them down in jargon and syntax (fuck semicolons...). On top of that, Scratch has really great visual logic and design pieces that fit together like a puzzle and let kids explore the concepts themselves, again without all the nitpicky syntax. This keeps things fun an interesting while they learn.

She is now a Scratch wiz and loves making stuff. Since she is an avid reader, she likes to create characters from her books and make them do crazy stuff. During the months I considered how to approach her education, she has amassed an impressive amount of design notes on her first game, including characters and levels. She is now working out the story to go with it and will begin putting it all into scratch soon. I can't wait to see what she comes up with!

EDIT: Forgot the link for [0]!

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Lauren-Ipsum-Carlos-Bueno/dp/146117818...
"TextDrive will relaunch anew as a separate hosting company"
And how will that fork get on any phones for customers to use? "People can just sideload the OS" is not a feasible answer here.
What was it used to do? Can somebody tell, please?
That RoR isn't typical for government is much of the point. They've been spending 20x too much for one-tenth of what they should have: moving to traditional web tech is a pretty brilliant step forward.

As regards scaling, it's a valid concern but one I suspect they'll have considered. A good number of brilliant people work there (I've visited and know the crowd).
It has more to do with layout than with access control. Fields belonging to one class get stored and laid out with another object. They're accessed as part of the other object, but the locks they acquire are for the original object.

I see faint echoes of ruby's open classes if I squint..
At least for 2nd problem mentioned wouldn't

std::unordered_map<person *, person *>

make sense?
I doubt this particular solution would end up being looked kindly on. This is one of those places where the edge cases get weird. Netflix, for instance, is well entrenched as legal. And Zediva was basically Netflix with the latency removed. But because of the streaming nature, the one-copy-to-many-eventual-viewers thing was able to be labeled a "public performance." When really the difference in a "spirit-of-the-law" way is that the lack of latency would require the service to need far fewer DVDs than Netflix, which would result in less payments to the content creators for the same amount of people watching their stuff. Which gets back to the mess that copyright law has evolved into -- in terms of compensation for content, is there any reason that a Netflix service should be worth more to a content creator than a Zediva service? It creates a really perverse incentive in terms of creating more useful services.

So going back to why I think this would most likely be struck down: I think the most likely way it would be shut down would be by calling the "purchase" system (while a clever hack) not legally meaningful. Especially since the only person this hack enriches is the service provider: now if someone wants to watch more movies, they have to "buy" and then "sell back" more "discs", losing some small amount of money on each of those transactions.
I think fein meant heap allocators and deallocators, which vectors rarely use if you are careful.
"Yehuda Katz launches Lobste.rs" where he is only a user and not involved behind the site at all. As noted elsewhere, it is run by someone who was banned by HN because they were banned from HN, so, to me, a presumption of bad faith is warranted.
Friend only allows others to access your private members. It doesn't allow you to define members in other classes though.
So between Sinatra's default error message giving away sensitive information and the suggested "params[..]" approach gets ALL input variables, regardless POST or GET.

What other gotchas should be know about Sinatra development?
If political ads are any clue to sentiment:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/wacky-fl...

Tl;Dr

Politician creates attack ad based on his opponent's support for autonomous cars.
This isn't too far from the truth! I make extensive use of dotjs[1] to inject my own CSS rules into web sites that I use frequently. ~65% of what I do is simply hiding useless divs/ads/flash and removing background colors, with the other 35% being mostly typographic tweaks (`line-height` and `font-size` being popular candidates here).

[1]: http://defunkt.io/dotjs/
Many places encourage the kids to pledge allegiance to the country carrying out those strikes. It seams like that talk should happen before they're taught the pledge.
Agreed. The first iPad was amazing for a first gen device.
I personally can't wait to read a book on the way to work.
REST – Epic Semantic Fail
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Which Comes First, Entrepreneurs or Capital?
Stripe seems to be the perfect one, wepay looks like a great competitor to PayPal, in fact all the great payment processing companies are US only, I'm desperate finding a good solution available in europe, working in France as far as I'm concerned.
Finaly, I'll go with PayPal, just because it's the only one working worlwide without a merchant account.
Thank you for taking the time to help educate us on the issue. It's comments like this that make me love reading the comments on HN. It reads like this wonderful discovery but someone has taken the time to dissect it and actually explain what's going on for those of us who don't really have a complete understanding.
Isn't this exactly how ReDigi operates? Is it different if the first sale is to a consumer rather than a company?

My reading was that ReDigi facilitates the "sale" of a song form one user to another by switching a DRM bit. Couldn't Zevida have done the same thing? Transfer ownership of the file to the user before pressing play on the dvd player?
This is great. I believe CrunchBase, in the long run, will prove a more valuable resourse than TechCrunch itself. Arrington has often suggested this as well.

Whereas TechCrunch lives and dies by the strength of its' reporters, CrunchBase has cemented itself as the "Wikipedia of startups" and as long as they continue to make gradual improvements I don't see what will change that.
IIRC it was originally a shared web host. I think they also had a gimmicky lifetime subscription if you pre-paid for a year's worth of service.
I got that. Not very nice to say his point was dumb because you wanted to make a different one, though. I think we can all agree that C++ is annoying and leave it at that.
I disagree. Maybe one in ten of the professional photoshop artists I know use _ANY_ 3rd party plugins. I think the photoshop plugin ecosystem is surprisingly unhealthy for such a dominant platform.

I have tried to convince myself to put out some photoshop plugins, but I just don't see many people buying the plugins already out there.

Also the photoshop plugin API is crufty as hell.

What percentage of plugins out there are being rewarded well by the marketplace? I would bet that there are only a few plugins on the market right now that make a noticeable amount of profit.
>Wake me up when I can join a class action suit against lawyers who chase high profile cases, win mega payouts for themselves, and leave the harmed with $1 checks or worthless discount vouchers.

This makes the assumption that the only reason to join a class action suits is to be compensated or make money.

How about to punish the entity that did you harm and stop it from doing it in the future? I could not care less if I made $0 on such a class action, if the end result was that PayPal was forced to reconsider it's ways.
RX For Innovation
Why I dropped out of college for Y Combinator
What innovations ought we aim for?
A robot-driven version of my personal car (and how I use it today), is moderately appealing. But as a stepping stone to a future where an autonomous robot-driven (flying?) cab pulls up curbside, picks me up, and smoothly, safely speeds me through a city where the absence of any manually driven vehicles allows for safer more efficient use of road-space, well, that's very exciting to me.
I first learned to program back in the '90s with Adventure Simulator and World Builder, which made old-school adventure games.

Adventure Simulator was buggy as crap and would crash pretty regularly with about a 33% chance of corrupting your data when it did so, but I still learned a lot from it.

World Builder was much more solid, but I think most programmers would still consider it fairly awkward. A lot of things (non-static maps, even basic animation) required some weird hacks, and it had a bunch of separate bins that your code went into that all interacted but which you couldn't view at the same time.

Despite the fact that modern programmers (and probably most "real" programmers of the time) would view both of these tools as difficult and limiting, I still thought it was a great, fun way to learn that kept me motivated.
NFL live statistics with Python
Cantinart visual lab.
How do you explain the rise of Objective C using that same logic? Will ObjectiveC go the wayside and be replaced by web browsers? I would rather make the argument that Qt will rise and fall on the platforms it works on. In the past this was the classic desktop, but with Nokia on the helm they refused to let resources go to making Qt on anything mobile, but their internal projects. So now with the classic desktop being replaced with both mobile and the web Qt feels out of place. If Digia does well and gets Qt working on iOS, Android, etc then suddenly it becomes much more interesting for tech news and not so "old". And if someone were to take Qt and build a successful platform on top of it then suddenly it becomes _really_ interesting. Platforms usually make and break languages and toolkits. Witness the rise of JavaScript which while being a neat language, no one would say should be the most important language out there like it is.

Disclaimer: I currently work on WebKit during my day job and used to work for Trolltech
Here's the e-mail that was sent out:

[Name],

If we haven't met, I'm Dean Allen, a founder of TextDrive, the shared hosting company started by Jason Hoffman and me in 2004. I'm also a founder and erstwhile President of Joyent, which some time ago merged with TextDrive, though I haven't been active with that company for a while.

If we have met, I hope it went okay.

A couple of weeks ago I received, at the same time as Joyent’s shared hosting customers, a message announcing an end to support for shared hosting, affecting customers who’ve been with us for years, some of whom invested in accounts we had intended to support for the rest of the life of the company. The announcement struck many as abrupt. Some took it to be an abandonment of, if not an insult to, your good faith, written in marketing and lawyer speak.

I soon spoke with my friend Jason, who by then was deluged with abusive emails and imaginative threats. After I rubbed some salt in his wounds, we began imagining what it would take to continue providing what we'd intended all along to those who put their faith in us. After some wrangling, we’ve found a way to make it work.

I’d like to announce that on November 1st, 2012, TextDrive will relaunch anew as a separate hosting company, staffed and funded, run by me. Please consider the recently announced end-of-life for Joyent’s shared hosting customers now revised to be a continuation-of-life, to be carried out in the same friendly, creative, publishing-centered spirit of TextDrive’s early days.

No matter its humble beginnings, Joyent now operates in a very big arena, producing heavy artillery for the armies of cloud computing, and it's been years since the company has been structured to service the retail hosting customer. Moreover, the servers on which your accounts still reside are old, slow, inefficient, and they go down on occasion. Everyone deserves better.

Current shared hosting customers can expect to have at least double the resources provisioned have now, running on vastly more stable and efficient infrastructure. Running, in fact, on the very heavy artillery mentioned above.

I intend to have all current paying and lifetime shared hosting customers moved from our old data centers to new, modern and efficient infrastructure by November 1. We'll be doing all we can to automate the migration process and keep discomfort at bay. More communications and instructions on the migration process will follow. For now, know that Joyent shared hosting customers, whether paid or lifetime, are now TextDrive customers and that service will not be interrupted.

For updates and resources click here [the page linked by the OP].

It gives me great pleasure to indicate that I’ll talk to you soon.

Dean Allen

TextDrive

Edit: Here's the previous HN thread discussing this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669
If true this would be of phenomenal benefit and this alone could boost the economies of whole regions of Africa.
http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls-credit-...
I'd love an invite, if available.
In Battle With Amazon, Walmart Unveils A Semantic Search Engine For Products
It's used to kinda be that way, but you're right that they're just crudely attempting to rest on their laurels.
Google's really good for those sorts of questions. But yes, they were a shared hosting provider that was one of the early leaders in supporting Rails application deployment.
I believe the issue at hand was that TextDrive sold "lifetime" hosting packages, was then subsumed by Joyent, who then (about a decade later) reneged on the lifetime hosting packages, scheduling them for cancellation later this year.

The lifetime package subscribers (and the community at large) were up in arms about it. Here's the earlier YC thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669
Missouri cell phone tracking law challenged
Previous discussions of earlier versions of the bill: in March: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3688267, and in May: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010297

Current bill text: http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_1251-1300/sb_129...

What seems to have changed since May:

- The California DMV will set safety rules before 2015 instead of waiting for NHTSA to allow production use,

- The manufacturer must apply to the DMV before production use.

- Cars must record sensor data for 30s before every collision.

What I don’t like about the bill is that it requires an operator to be able to take manual control of the vehicle at any time. I’d imagine that as autonomous vehicles develop in the coming years, this restriction will have to be removed.
Yes, the mainstream media and the educational establishments in both the US and UK are dominated by the same leftist statists who, in order to promote their social agenda, need to portray all those who don't surrender themselves to the state programs as obvious nutjobs.

Those who leave the herd do so for all sorts of reasons, religious, academic (my case--like many homeschoolers, I'm an atheist), political, special educational need, lifestyle (e.g., frequent travel), or whatever. That's the nature of independent individuals. That level of diversity means that you can find plenty of people you'll consider nutty, which makes it easy for the media to push the message that those who leave the state herd are mentally defective.

But look at the effectiveness of the state schools and ask yourself, if the state system were shrunk down to the size of the various small homeschooling alternatives, would the state program be one you would pick for your own kids, or would one of the alternatives seem much more sensible? If you suspect the latter, maybe the state system is the real nutjob territory.
Yes, we do pay our interns.
Strawman. He wants a process to dispute them unilaterally holdin on to your money, not to do business with you.
The antecedent of "this" is ambigous.

You don't think it true that HN has significant financial incentive to censor or promote the links of YC companies?

or you think there has been a lot of discussion about the HN conflict-of-interest? (perhaps I don't read regularly enough.)

I suppose you could mean both.
Whoa, that's exactly it. Now at least I know what to look for. Thanks for the reference!
How many malicious apps were in the Android store? A few? A dozen? Thats a pretty good ratio out of the hundreds of thousands available.
A multi-colored 3d topology of bullshit would really make it hit home
Code Like a Chef: Work Clean
Square pays their interns.
Interesting tool.

I've done something like this in the past using Charles or Fiddler and the proxy settings on my iOS device.
Oracle Trying to Set Standards for Cloud Tech??
It's only a big deal to TechCrunch "writers."
D-style Mixins in C#