skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't imagine this would take off, especially once people realize they can't receive any automated emails anymore (sign up confirmations, email validation requests, e-bills, reciepts for online purchases, any kind of service notification, etc). It would require probably maintaining a second email for those kinds of things, and then you've got the same problem as before but now with a second (extremely limited) email on top of it to worry about as well.

Something a little less extreme such as a whitelisting system might work better (only people on my whitelist may email me... if you email me and you're not on my whitelist you have to fill out a captcha or something in a response before I ever see the email, and then I have the option of either whitelisting you, doing nothing, or adding you to a permanent blacklist). That would allow me to whitelist the addresses I really care about while cutting out all other unwanted content. Main problems I see with something like that would be that email becomes even more asynchronous and unreliable than it already is.

Best solution is to just tear it down and replace it across the board with something better like XMPP. (A man can dream.)
I'd like to add, I love the controller design. That alone must be worth a couple of hundred ;) Does it use bluetooth? I hope it is not a standard RC transmitter because they can get jammed fairly easily (leading to injury and death, etc etc) even on the new(ish) frequency-hopping 2.4Ghz models.

PS. are you hiring ? ;)
Two questions:

Can it be used as a normal skateboard when the battery is dead?

How loud is it?
The selling point here would be that the charity donation isn't thrown in there as a value-add, it's that the cost is a necessary feature and to prove the case of necessity over greed the money will be going to a good cause rather than the receiver's bank account.
I will never buy another laptop
>is that going to count as tethering?

How about using DLNA to broadcast to a larger screen and a bluetooth keyboard for input when you chmod into Ubuntu on your Android phone? That's a reality right now even if it's not a popular choice. The smartphone data plans are ridiculously different from the laptop data plans, but... what if they're the same thing?
Alert: Your cat is throwing up all over the house.
It's a windows-in-html simulating tail by vimeo.com Hands up if you were expecting a Vim plugin.
Blackwater? Chiquita? Coca-Cola? De Beers? And between the both of us we've barely gone past the ones that commit outright murder.
What a Slinky Knows
Another possibility: content companies said, do this, or we'll try to get the USG to force you to, which will be more expensive for both of us.
They would get (well) annoyed when the message bounces back with no prior warning. Perhaps slightly less annoyed if they could see a 'countdown'. Hence a new interface or dedicated app as suggested above.
I believe the best defense would simply be education & knowledge of all the encryption/privacy tools available to the average user, if they feel their ISP/whatever is snooping or intruding too far.
Attractive look. First problem: I typed my ZIP (10002) and pressed enter, not expecting a location autocomplete, and received the "location cannot be found error." Consider either doing the lookup on enter press or refusing to submit before a lookup is complete.

Edit: options need a price level search, a la Yelp/Menupages.

Edit 2: the "dice" need a visual indicator (slide in arrow or such) that they can be used again for another suggestion.
Indeed. Another gem: I haven’t map-reduced a toaster cluster for years.
Facebook suspends account, sends substance abuse warning to 9/11 truther
The problem is that you are trying to enforce it on top of an existing platform with a use case for which it doesn't really make sense.

If you really don't want to receive long emails from strangers you can always add a filter in your mail setup that deletes any email over 500 chars long from people not in your address book with an autoreply that says "I don't read anything over 500 chars long".
That's true in general, but some of those quotes are just gibberish. "Swimming in the social stream"...
"Nothing’s scarier than getting going too fast down a hill on a skateboard." Actually if you know how to power slide, going down hills is actually quite fun.

Also, is this a full electric board, or do you have the option of pushing and then you can use the motor when you want to?
That is a good point. However, this already happens. How often do you email support@somewhere only to get a response that says "your email has been received, we'll process it within 24 hours?"

In some cases you'd like to have the option to pay something so that it's processed in one hour.

Also, some people don't care if you're annoyed. VCs, celebrities, etc. get tons of email that they can't read anyway. What if Lady Gaga received 30 short emails per day from fans who paid $100 (adjust the numbers until it's manageable for her) instead of 100k emails that go to /dev/null ?
Great, empowering more idiots to set out on public thoroughfares and ignore every basic traffic law (stop signs, red lights, for starters; look 'em up if you're not familiar with the concepts) not to mention common sense.

Ought to produce a few Darwin Award winners.
The OP gives great advice. But I was amused by the Dorsey quote referring to "...founders - who may not have been there at inception."

Let's take some highly desirable attributes in an employee and give them a label "Rockstar". Er, no. "Founder".

When words are the currency of persuasion, expect inflation.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Reviewed
More like 50/50 html and css. All the symbols are text. ♣♦♠♥
This is pretty dumb and reflects the increasing mentality of "it's like X with the useful functionality removed".

I think there is something to this idea. It's wrong to call it "email" though.

Email is nothing like twitter at all, twitter became popular because it allowed celebrities and the like to share their thoughts with their fans without feeling like they had to maintain a longform blog.

This would be something to get brief, easily digestible feedback from their fans. Right now, this either means going through lots of messages, or relying on social media to filter the message for you, but the former takes time or money, and the latter results in only the loudest voices being heard. The proposal above would cause people to filter and edit themselves.

Email is used for 2 way communication, yes companies like to build email lists and use it for push marketing but that's usually seen more as a nuisance to email users.

You just contradicted yourself here. Email is versatile enough to be used in many ways. That's both the best and worst quality of it.

If somebody is going to charge me in order to send them an email the message I read into that is "My time is so much more valuable that if yours that if you want me to read what you say then you better make it worth my while".

Yes, that is the message such a service would have to send. (But in a more subliminal way.)

And sometimes emails need to be long, am I supposed to maintain 2 separate email accounts?

This is precisely why calling this "email" is wrong. It would be like the counterpart of twitter, going the opposite way. It would be the multiplexer to the Twitter demux. It would not be email, however users could possibly access it through email.

Maybe call it "Faninn" "Feedforward" or "Feedgram?" I would allow messages to be marked private or public, with the public messages appearing on a white-labeled website, subject to a reddit or HN style upvote system.
I'd hazard a guess it's due to two things, each not necessarily independent. First, males in many countries are prone to societal "honor" and may kill themselves in times of great shame (poor Indian farmers loosing everything to shady Monsanto salesmen and then drinking pesticide). And second, women are often mothers, and while a suicidal man tends to not "think of the children" women (being mothers and all) do consider the fates of their children, and likely forestall killing themselves out of compassion/concern for their offspring.

Given the shit the world generally dumps on women, I'd say the female gender is simply built of sterner emotional stuff than their male counterparts.
This is somewhat tangential to the post but isn't the 140 character limit on Twitter messages directly related to the fact they started it as an SMS service and couldn't figure out how to stitch together multipart inbound messages?

I personally think having the character limit that low is horrible but even if you love it, it wasn't some brilliant design decision imposed by Jack Dorsey it was just a limitation of the technology they were working with initially.
It's also inappropriate to compare "infant mortality" across countries. A 490-gram baby that is born with trouble breathing and dies in 2 hours will count as a stillbirth in some countries and an infant mortality in others.
Because news outlets are not peoples only source if news.
Timcook.blog.apple.com would have been quoted thirty seconds after the OP got put up - but it does not exist.

I can only surmise that apple does not reply directly because that sort of thing is not how apple works. Perhaps they should change.
The problem with that of course is that automated emails won't get through unless they can also solve your CAPTCHA or you have whitelisted them in advance which would either make usability worse (when you sign up for a service you have to remember to go and whitelist them) or your CAPTCHA has to easy enough for a bot to break which basically defeats the point.
PayPal's service (the standard web forms, which your service is competing with) has them all over the place, such as https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/demo...

It is generally expected that you have a cancel option (to cancel the transaction). Every online system I've used for payments has a clear "cancel transaction" button.
Arma3 developers arrested for spying on a Greek army base.
I think Cloud Code is a good example of why this is not the case. The more flexibility and customization they allow in the platform, the fewer long tail features they need to implement because people will be able to do it themselves.
New Attack Against Chip-and-Pin Systems
Screw plants. Leave the washing machine alone. Just give me a WiFi-controlled wall switch and it will be a huge step forward for everyone interested in home automation.
Are the boards waterproof? I would love to have one but I live in an area that gets a lot of rain, and I'd be terrified of getting caught in a storm and ruining my $1200 board. On the flip side, if it does handle water okay, then I imagine boarding in the rain could be a lot of fun :)
Yeah by your definition i would be a liberal.

I can see good reasons for every position on Steve Yegge's spectrum. But i have a way harder time seeing a good reason to be conservative on your spectrum. Which makes IMO Steve Yegge's spectrum better for value neutral discussions.
I've always wanted to get an Arduino myself.

I also have an excellent book, it's very simple to understand if you follow it linearly, and it definitely starts from the "bottom, up."

http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Elements_of_Computin...

(The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles; Nisan and Schocken)
Im unable to duplicate this, but I'm trying because this is pretty bozotic behavior if true.

When you say "add a person's phone number" you mean as a new contact in your regular phone book (since it seems that you can't add contacts to the "Facebook" group), right?

I havent messed with this previously (not interested in syncing my FB friends to my phone book) so I may not be doing it right.
Blog Wars
Watched the presentation live at techcrunch. I like the idea and the enthusiasm of the team but I wonder how compelling a layer on top of these services really is?

Are small startups the target user? I own a small business that uses all of these services. But in the case of dropbox, team members see when files change. Google docs is google docs and file changes are pretty clear. We use lighthouse house for task management and are in constant communication on google talk but we are less than 10 employees.

Does this make more sense for the 30 person company? But at that level I would assume we are investing in a more centralized project and content management platform, box.net?
Taking the ‘Cheap’ Out of the Small Car
A prediction: Members of Anonymous (or similar) will hack the home wifi of every congressman/woman related to this, and cause them to receive six "educational alerts" and then get cut off.

Soon thereafter the law will change or die.
It feels weird (as a conservative leaning pseudo-libertarian) believing that Big Business is doing a far better job of screwing up the Internet than Big Brother.

The next step will be prohibiting US-based services from providing truly-encrypted communication/storage.
Data Privacy: What the V for Vendetta speech would look like today
Bit-torrented videos probably constitute a significant fraction of their bandwidth. If this is cut down significantly, their equipment costs will be less, possibly with added revenue as well. If they accidentally happen to flag Netflix videos, then pass the popcorn. (I wouldn't be surprised if class action lawyers are already gearing up).
Our goal is to help you build great mobile apps faster. We want Parse to be not just easier than running your own backend, but also more powerful. If that involves a lot of hard work on our part, so be it.
You might have luck in voluntarily limiting the power output to 1,000W and trying to follow the California guidelines for electric bicycles. Then gradually petition the government to delete the current motorized skateboard law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bicycle_laws#Californi...
Our motor control ESCs, remote control electronics, battery management systems, and software are entirely custom. Off-the-shelf RC parts aren't smooth, reliable, safe, or quiet enough.
In a bike just sqeueezing the handle will also throw you away, especially when downhill. It takes practice as well to be able to move your gravity center backward in emergency brakings.
I think there is something to this idea. It's wrong to call it "email" though.

This would be something for celebs to get brief, easily digestible feedback from their fans. Right now, this either means going through lots of messages, or relying on social media to filter the message for you, but the former takes time or money, and the latter results in only the loudest voices being heard. The proposal above would cause people to filter and edit themselves.

This is precisely why calling this "email" is wrong. It would be like the counterpart of twitter, going the opposite way. It would be the multiplexer to the Twitter demux. It would not be email, however users could possibly access it through email.

Maybe call it "Faninn" "Feedforward" or "Feedgram?" I would allow messages to be marked private or public, with the public messages appearing on a white-labeled website, subject to a reddit or HN style upvote system. (Private messages would be subject to the fee.)

Think of it as a way for any celebrity to have their own HN-style site and executive ombudsman, without the work or expense of setting it up themselves.
> I don't think so. I remember reading on a blog that Mac & Windows users have to pay too.

From the article "Android phones and tablets and Windows and Macintosh laptops will be able to make use of this service"
Yet oddly for more the case with "the cloud"

I am hopeful that openstack will give me a large range of
providers I can use with the same Apis - and that
my app design will be sufficient that even the remaining
non fungible parts of a hosted computer (OS, connectivity, size of data stored) will be mitigated

I am not sure if it's a good or a bad thing but pretty soon every computer other than the ones I carry will be commodities
Developers are allergic to career advancement for a few reasons. They tend to be a fairly risk averse lot, with many unwilling to trade the devil they know for the devil they don't.

They also tend to have a low bullshit tolerance and get worn down quickly with the hassle that recruiting/employment has become. Multiple phone interviews, HR people, code tests, and then the "used car salesman" process of salary negotiation. Its draining, especially when you're an introvert by nature.

I went through this once with a semi-established startup when I was looking for my 2nd job. 3 interviews in they wouldn't discuss salary over the phone, wanted me to come in to meet with the CTO again to discuss. I burned the bridge at that point, and became fairly jaded to the whole process. Get salary info up from, if what you want is near the top of any range they give drop it and move on theres no oppertunity for advancement. If they won't give salary range, drop it and move on. More than 2 interviews after the inital HR screening, move on. And realistically if you're a somewhat proven commodity you should be able to hammer out all the details off-site over coffee/beer and finish up the formalities in a few hours at the office.

We're fortunate enough to have a high demand skillset at the moment, and thankfully most of us can approach these situations from a position of "power", but sadly most of us don't.
Are You Sure That Your Program Works?
So, Box.com?
Hey all, we've been working on our prototype for this now at www.gramicon.com. The idea is that it won't replace email, but will serve as a replacement for reaching out to strangers as well as set market-based prices for people's attention. Would love feedback, though we are not yet finished. Best, joe
Yea. Kevin Mitnick wrote "The Art of Deception", which is specifically about social engineering, 10 years ago from next month. And he'd been using such techniques for decades.
Agreed. You would have to pre-whitelist, or at least have a junk folder you could look in where non-captchad messages get stored for a certain amount of time before being purged so that you could fish out the emails from non-whitelisted addresses that you're actually expecting to get (and then presumably whitelist them from there for future emails).
That list is definitely incomplete.

Kerbal Space Program is Unity-based and has been fairly successful, but appears nowhere on that page, for example.
I agree with your sentiment and would like to take it a step further.

As someone who lives in San Francisco and commutes using all three of bike, foot, and car (and back in college rode a skateboard around a large and busy campus) I don't think skateboards belong on the sidewalk - and definitely not motor powered ones.

Anything that has the potential to move much faster than a person running at full speed is extremely dangerous on the sidewalk for everyone involved: cars, bikes, and especially pedestrians. It breaks everyone's mental model for what could possibly be coming from where. Cars making a right turn do not expect bikes or skateboards to entering the sidewalk at 5-10 mph from their blind spot and so they almost never check. Pedestrians turning a corner don't expect the possibility of something oncoming that is moving too fast to stop before hitting then and so they almost never look. And so on..

As an individual YOU might be a considerate skateboarder who has learned when and where to be careful. That's great, but it doesn't change the fact that there are still idiots and assholes out there that are going to do idiotic and asshole things. The only system that makes sense is: fast-stuff in one place where everyone knows to look out for fast-stuff, and slow-stuff on the sidewalk.
I have been longboarding for 10+ years, and riding Loaded boards for most of it (the company that makes the deck they are using). Loaded decks are friggin amazing, and i'm super excited to see a product like this exists. If they can make it function with similar flex as the normal loaded board, and disengage the motors as needed to ride like a normal longboard this could be the best short-range commuting vehicle ever!!
You're not alone. I had to shrink the window to get past the first couple of paragraphs. A truly terrible background for a blog.
That's an answer I can understand :-). Where would you start with Arduino then? Any links?
We are in this situation, primarily, because food and medicine is present-enough to enable more life but is not yet at levels sufficient to allow that life to thrive to the point that people reduce their procreation rates by choice.

But all of that is an aside to my point, which is that you are still either mis-understanding or mis-representing the OWS position as something of a "blame everything on the 1%" philosophy.

OWS has a very narrow platform of "money has corrupted politics". The fact that OWS was roundly criticized as not having a point is attributable to the fact that the Occupiers didn't agree on much beyond the statement of the problem. That is: they all agreed that money needed to be taken out of politics, but they disagreed on whether, say, ethanol subsidies were necessarily bad, or GM seeds were causing problems in the developing world, etc.

Some of them obviously believed in those things. Others just wanted to see an end to 'too big to fail' and socialized losses. But those were not 'occupy's positions.
Here is what I prefer to call a singleton in JS, I don't think it could be any simpler than that:

mySingleton = {
initialized: false,

init: function() {
if (this.initialized == false) {
this.initialized = true;
// Initialize the singleton here
}
return this
},
}

singleton1 = mySingleton.init()
singleton2 = mySingleton.init()

Both underscore notation and returning "public" methods feel awkward in JavaScript, though the
second appraoch introduces major trade-offs which I belive are not worth it. E.g. how do you create inheritance chains
when using this pattern? Are you just copying public methods returned from one object into another? Or how do you inspect private properties in Dev Tools? Are you setting breakpoints for that purpose?
That may be true, but that would be a pretty small market.
It's not so much the small size of the font it's whether or not it is a fixed-width font. A font is considered fixed-width if every character that can be represented in the font set has the same width and height for each character. As an engineer this is extremely important because it makes the text easier to read. This is because in programming a single semicolon among thousands and thousands of lines of code can literally make or break a program.
As I re-read your article with less quickness to reply, I see you're making exactly that point. I'm mostly pre-occupied lately with that very tension between working for one's self and working for others, so my response had a fair bit of that going into it. Great post.
Seems nice. The only problem of using it instead of Nailgun for the Clojure development workflow is that starting a new instance of the JVM would mean to re-evaluate all the code, and not only the modified definitions.
How is it everyone's opinion of PaaS went sour when Google AppEngine readjusted its pricing to reflect costs. Now someone else comes along and PaaS is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

These guys will never be bought by a bigger company with nothing but profits in mind?
That is true, and my point was more an aside about businesses that have a profit motive and incorporate a charity component to it so this probably wasn't the best thread to muse in.

That being said, I don't know if the charity aspect would still accomplish the desired goals. What if the recipient started skimming emails, with no real intention of following through, just because they want to see their favorite charity get a few more bucks? If the money went to the recipient instead I would probably think there would be a greater likelihood of it being read as anybody I'd be willing to pay to read my emails would stand lose only their sense of integrity but the charity aspect might make it easier to blow off.

I might be splitting too fine a hair here.