skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There are few companies out there more polarising in internet discussion these days.

I don't think they're trolls per se, but it's divided between worshipers,haters and those who don't see the point of worshiping or hating a multinational company motivated by profit.

http://consumerist.com/2011/05/mri-shows-apple-stimulates-fa...

No wonder the discussion degenerates into people who see the light vs. the people who don't.

For example, from Gruber's take on the iPhone 5 event:

>And what shows they were. When Schiller unveiled the iPhone 5, it rose from the stage floor on a smoothly-rising and rotating pedestal, pinpoint spotlights hitting the phone and only the phone. The rotation of the iPhone atop the pedestal was in perfect sync with the rotation of the iPhone projected on the big screen at the back of the stage. There’s no store where you buy such pedestals; Apple designed and engineered it specifically for this event. It was on stage for about a minute.

>Likewise, when Cook introduced the show-closing Foo Fighters, the screen rose and from behind the screen slid the band, on a raised dais that smoothly rolled to the front of the stage. Such stagecraft is one of the rewards Apple can reap from its $100 billion (and growing) war chest

For people on the opposite sides on the Apple fan spectrum, those two paragraphs elicit very different emotional responses. One HN comment said reading it make him/her feel physically sick while an Apple fan might get goosebumps.

Also curious is the fact that the Apple blogger network Gruber/Siegler etc. seem to be very bent on hating on and being snarky on all things not-Apple and rivals i.e Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook etc.
Lobster is exactly the same thing. Up until the mid-19th century, it was low class food - something only the very poor would eat. Now it's served with steak.
I agree. Something about Kickstarter seems to inspire a lot of negativity here on HN. Perhaps because it's an alternative to the VC funding model that's such a part of the HN identity?

Personally, I love Kickstarter. I've funded a project with it myself. It's has great potential for an individual or small team with "1000 true fans" to make a living, and I think we'll see a lot of success stories come out of it.

And some notable failures, of course. But I don't see that as an indictment of the Kickstarter model. Personally, I wouldn't back Lifx. It's expensive, I'm skeptical of its ability to ship, and I don't need color-changing light bulbs. But if someone wants to spend $70 to take a flyer on something cool, more power to them.
Polished everything helps. I think some research was done the other day that shows users look at Icons then Screenshots then Reviews or something like that. Not enough devs/organisations understand the importance of showing the latest design and the impact it has on their customers.
It's an old slashdot reference. When the iPod was announced (the first one), that is what CmdrTaco said. CmdrTaco being the founder of slashdot.
As always, great job smartasset!
Google that quote. It's from a comment on Slashdot a decade ago predicting the swift death of the iPod.
Eh? "prevalence of sexual offenders"?

I see a single "Various sexual offences" case in the list of 21...
This smells like an ARG. And even if it isn't, there are plenty of overlapping demographics who'd like it.

I can see all kinds of weird unintended uses for it, too. ("Alice <3 Bob" marked in random places.)
Love the presentation of the various API calls in each language. My only nitpick is one I have for a lot of code displays like this -- selecting the code also selects line numbers =)
I'm guessing they will attempt to dismiss iPads and Android tablets as "toys" and tout theirs as the only tablets able to do "real work" or whatever because they run Windows/Office. It will be lame and annoying, but it probably won't work.

Well, I take that back. It will probably work on some folks, the kind that wear khakis all the time. You know what I mean.
JetBlue to offer free inflight wifi in 2013
Automatically restore SQL Databases with simple Windows service.
The Benefits and Risks of Using the Cloud
The Xbox, which is not a general purpose computing device, is an extension of the desktop, while a tablet (which is a general purpose computing device) is not? How does that make any sense?
On the history of kickstarter lightbulbs: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/09/18/kickstarter...
Ask HN: What tool do you use to keep track of all passwords?
What tool do you guys use to keep track of all of your startup accounts and passwords?
Abstractions in Nature, Linguistics, Mathematics and Programming
Wow! This is terrible! BoA is such a nice bunch of talented, innovative, productive people! Is there any place I can go volunteer to help them get their valuable and valued services and cheerful customer service back on line!?!
Making support calls hurt less

Introduce man-in-a-middle: phone service (like Google Voice, Conferencing, etc). Used specifically for people calling tech/customer support and provide services to make that experience less painful.

Obvious things:
) Track the time things really take
) Record conversations (some thoughts around one-party and two-party consent here, but if they say 'this conversation can be recorded', you can probably record it too)
) Everybody calling the same tech-support number is also in the same text chat conference. Gives them something to do and also creates a sense of community around shared pain. Maybe even some solutions.
) Give them some pausable social games to play. E.g. 'Hangman with a 'customer support' rep hanging and swear words to guess? :-)
) Integrate GetHuman
) Provide estimated Queuing time based on sample of people using the service

Less obvious things:
) Allow injecting crisp English/whatever voice commands to the system who expects voice navigation. Helps all those for whom English is second/third language (see http://youtu.be/fhE2WgHIuzc)
) Offer AutoMute (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/01/telephone_moni...)
) Provide journalistic interface with statistics/breakdown
Allow people to say 'allow/disallow to be contacted for the story'
) Visualise call tree and let user click straight on the result (A company was started just around that couple of years back)

Making money
* Allow companies to place their agents into the call, like Comcast Cares
* Allow NLP api hook to promote specific customers in the queue (or every customer using the service....)
* Allow customers to pay for anonymous accounts (why?)
* Allocated inbound number that automatically records that ==nobody ever called back==
* Let users do Amazon Turk tasks while they wait as a way to pay for the service

And another page of thoughts.....
What do you define as an apprenticeship program? We bring in 3-6 development interns each summer, for a company size of about 80 developers.
Ha! I was just thinking I should get rid of those :)
!OVER-THE-TOP-ALERT
In-browser/Facebook MMO PVP game

A browser game(not HTML5 magic.. those that function like RTS, for example) that permitted all sort of harassment, apart from directly competing/fighting(example.: click to send 10 thugs to attack other player HQ), it would also possess other mechanics like slowban and hellban to fire at other players, Area of Effect stuff, scorching earth, looting, reputation, karma

Other than fu#king with your enemies/friends by making their game slow or making them silent without them knowing, there could be all kinds of creative "bans"(that would be like curses, but since I haven't thought of a setting to run this on top on I won't call them this way).. mess with the player interface, steal/spy on resources, the more over the top, the better

the game would be designed to encourage everyone to harass everyone(or to polarize harassers/good people, like in UO), with some additional mechanics that would encourage different types of interaction too, like parties, guilds, if you're teamed up, collaborating could mitigate a 'ban' that could make you die easily... but betraying is game too

Monetizing through micro-transactions, with a big eye on balance(evade the "pay-to-win" path to the max)
Baxter: $22K robotics for manufacturing, no programming, uses "common sense"
Anecdotal, I must admit, but bereavement may be best resolved through MDMA, I find. That's in response to:

'The hypothesis was that MDMA would make the negative memories less painful. "We saw a boosted brain response to positive memories, and a weaker response to negative ones," says Carhart-Harris. "It fits the idea that MDMA can help people access negative memories without being overwhelmed by them and they might be able to change the way they feel about what happened."'

I have Asperger's, and so not only have I a pallid response to gore or human pain but I can understand it, visualize it, repeat it in thought, allot it a mental space. Horrific murder is latent with images, which I believe only become a growing gestalt in the mind's of those humans with Optimally Performing Long-Term Memories. It is perpetual moral education, as if with an admonishing tone, on the significance of human life. The morbid sense of humor which Aspies tend to develop becomes a fatal flaw in a world incapable of sustaining its own net happiness. (News which promulgates, indirectly, our Net Unhappiness Quotient. -- News becomes the Negative Nancy to unwitting optimists, aspie or otherwise. Granted, good news without explanation is pointless, and News' marketing format is non-amenable to Demonstration, Explanation, Maturation, and Observation (DEMO) of Knowledge.)

Of course a point is often made that industrial capitalism depends on a sufficiently self-imposed unhappiness, otherwise "no one would work," etc. The cost, however, is that those who can remember what is good in "bargain reality," and remember it well, flack and flail at those who are habitually forgetful, habitually like an agent whose sense of time must be perpetually engineered for them.

MDMA does not "wake one up" but established a greater memory retention for those events existentially nurturing to one's happiness.
I think this is interesting, but I suspect any solution will cost more than the loss incurred from the problem. But, ignoring that,

A good way to implement it might be to have an entire line of cups that have the QR code printed, with a peel-off sticker inside hiding it. Then you could just have one type of cup and peel it off whenever someone asks for water/soda.
It's a slashdot meme.

When the iPod was announced CmdrTaco said that, it stands as a classic example of tech geeks' tendency to focus on the details (specs, price, etc.) while missing the bigger picture. In that case superior design beats out a spec check sheet.

http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...
I could pretty much sign under this post as well. Never understood why people even bother with quora, since StackOverflow&co. is free and far more easier to get going.
Seriously, I'm tired of seeing her name in the press for no valuable reasons: no assigned parking, iphone for all employee, open space, now the (r) removed from the logo. Come on all of these changes are ok but not worth all the press.

Let me know when she actually change the group strategy or announces new products !
It's read "one thousand four" in US english. In British english (and in many Commonwealth countries like Australia and New Zealand; not sure about Canada) it's read "one thousand and four", regardless of whether the and is unnecessary or ambiguous.
Show HN: Buy Back Your Vote - track corporations' political contributions
Yup--I believe it was Scheme that introduced lexical scoping to Lisp, with Common Lisp adopting it later on. Of the commonly used Lisps today, only Emacs Lisp is dynamically scoped.
UniKey is doing the "iPhone door opener" idea. Very cool tech - can't wait until it's available.

http://www.unikeytech.com/
As a former economics major, it pains me to have my lost love's name used to describe mundane finance calculations. My liberal arts education be damned; I know nothing of this madness!
Missing a comma in the first screenshot ;)
Cool, thanks for pointing that out. I'm about to move and thinking of ditching broadcast TV so this will come in handy.
You might be able to tackle this at a much smaller scale with things like CSAs (community-supported agriculture). In a CSA, you are essentially buying a farm share and getting some amount of veggies or meat per week/month/etc.

One issue with a CSA is that I'll get odd amounts of things: not enough potatoes to get a dish for instance or an overwhelming amount of parsley, etc. It would be good if there were a feedback mechanism so that (a) I would get the food that I wanted, and in the amounts that are good for me or my family, and (b) so that the farmers knew what kinds of crops to focus on and deliver to their members.

In my experience the people who run CSAs are passionate about their farming and not on technology. If someone could provide a service like this, it might be helpful to them.
Why not give tablets away free with a Software licence or subscription? At this point tablets could be much cheaper than most enterprise software licences. Why not an office tablet, or a Sharepoint tablet? I am sure it would suck, but it would have more benefits to Microsoft than a tablet that no-one will ever buy.
I've used e-faxes before, but isn't it predicated by the other side (the tax office, or whoever) having either a fax machine or the inclination to accept an e-fax?
I'd love to hear what mistakes other HN readers have made when launching products. I'm always trying to learn how to better market and sell products.
Shops within reach

Find my a shop (e.g. hardware) by travel distance including public transport, rather than a physical distance. If I am close to a metro/subway, it is often easier to go extra 3 stops on that than walk 300 feet/metres/meters/whatever to do big shopping. And could bring up completely unexpected useful matches.
Perhaps they should pay for time spent on interviewing?
Did he ever claim it would die? http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip... just called it lame, which it was, not that people wouldn't buy it anyway.
Isn't that a bit like saying, "If you want to know what Monsanto is up to, read their publications"?

Don't get me wrong. I think that Science is the time and again proven method and culture to move society forward. That said, Science has also become very politicized and needs to be scrutinized so that it remains trustworthy and beneficial.

Publications are all well and good, but with all the public money and resources being shifted toward climate study and CO2 remediation policies, I think that we should continue to look behind the curtains wherever we can.
The trouble is the population of the UK is a vast spectrum of tastes and they all pay their licence fee. If they don't feel like their getting their moneys worth then they won't pay and the BBC will be shut down as it won't be able to afford to carry on running and you lose everything.
In the example provided the ad link has a decent amount of white space between it and the inbox link

"Decent" for whom? For you, maybe, because your motor skills are sharp. For those whose aren't, maybe not so much.

Are we to ascertain the shakiness level of the user to determine the proper amount of white space? A CSS media query maybe? ...But then, I'm just being rude here, sorry.

Yes, you are. Degraded/impaired motor skills aren't just something older people deal with, they come with a range of illnesses and disabilities too. Snarking about a media query for "shakiness" is sort of like a retail store owner snarking about whether he needs to put a camera on his store door to check if people using the ramp are really in wheelchairs.

There's even an intended barrier between the two in the form of a horizontal rule.. I don't understand how one can predict behaviors of people who do not fully read what they are clicking on.

These comments indicate that you don't really understand the problem we're talking about here. It's not that the user doesn't know the ad link is a different link. It's that she tries to click the link she wants but ends up clicking the ad link accidentally because the close placement of the two links makes it easy for a bump on a trackpad to send a click intended for link A skidding over to link B instead.
Infographics: Restricting Social Media at Work
How many of these ridiculous lawsuits will it take before lawmakers realize how bad software patents are?

This will waste a lot of time and money for something that shouldn't even exist.
I feel the same but they have to try to appeal to everyone as it's publicly funded and there are a lot of people who like "Soap Operas, Strictly Come Dancing, The Voice etc" - unfortunately :).
The NLP course needs some improvement in particular the Chris Manning sections. It was allow over the internal discussion forums. Dan Jurafsky was very good, can't say the same about Chris Manning.
This is actually a pretty interesting tool. Not sure how accurate it is, since its telling me I should be making the same salary I've made at large corporations the last two years.

Based on the interviewing I've been doing, most of the start-ups around here (Midwest) were offering close to 30-40K less than my corporate gigs.
> When I attended the first time to present, I found a nearly empty room with five or six people and another entrepreneur presenting on stage. Next up, was me. Before I started, I just asked, “Who were the actual Red Herring judges?” No one raised their hands. Since it was only five others, I asked who they were with. They were all entrepreneurs waiting to present next. We then realized, there were NO judges and NO “esteemed panel.”

I expected the "conference" to be lackluster and crappy, but I didn't expect that they would literally not even bother setting anything up for the awards. Amazing.
Technology is our nomadism as a species
The tablet is an extension of the desktop. Microsoft has never been successful with them though. Now that the iPad has shown what a tablet can do perhaps Microsoft will be more successful this time around.
Lastpass. It's awesome. I use it for passwords, but also as a digital lockbox for random account information where I don't want to keep the cards. A lot better than evernote, which is where I used to keep this type of stuff.
Maybe swift death was an overstatement. He certainly wasn't a believer though.
Author simply changed to a pay as you go provider and only uses data. Not impressive.
Access is denied. any mirrors?
Fantastic read. Bernays (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays) was also an interesting character.
Your rent would go up a lot. But if you are careful about other spending, you can probably save up some money.
Looks clean. Nice.
At minimum you'll be paying $300 extra since you won't be running a "full OS" on any tablet costing < $800.
Could anyone translate the legalese into plain English for us lay-men.
New mobile payment platform from Scvngr
Forget Learning, Start Doing
Ugh, I'm starting to get sick of Bootstrap. You've got a great idea and you remove value from it with bootstrap... How integral can your product be if you can't even give it a unique UI?
Ask HN: What challenges are there in crowdsourcing realtime approval ratings?
A few of us are working on a dial test app for the presidential debate. During the debate you will continuously adjust a slider based on your favorable or unfavorable response at any given moment. On the screen you will see an aggregate line graph of the current sentiment of undecided voters. CNN does this with about 40 people, which you can see here: http://bit.ly/RQVGv2 We want to open that up to the entire country.

What technical challenges are we going to face? What is the best way to collect and display this data in realtime at scale (e.g. long polling, websockets)? If you have experience in this area we would appreciate a heads up with anything you've learned. If you have experience in this area we would appreciate a heads up with anything you've learned.

We are trying to optimize for two scenarios:

1. Take in and send out data during the debate to provide an engaging real-time experience

2. Provide a complete dataset for analysis after the debate. The resolution on this data will likely be greater than the resolution in scenario 1.
IE7, IE8 and IE9 zero-day exploit
That's great if you're marrying a woman who is a scientist. Everyone else will just roll their eyes, unfortunately.
Has anyone used this site to success?
ack! fixed!
The New Wave of Data as a Service
On the initial view, only the 40th to 60th percentiles are shown. On subsequent views, only the 25th to 75th percentiles are shown. There are many above those ranges, including some outliers with 3% or more of their company (choose Scientist > Fellow for one example).

Also, according to the Source line at the bottom, executives and founders are excluded from the data set. Getting a large share of equity of a private company is rare for everyone else.
I read that as UnlikelyTech.com
Beauty and the Beast gets a Ghetto Makeover
As an update to my previous post, my book is now at $21,000 in sales after 2 weeks.
WebGL shader effects in Construct 2
Could you add syntax-highlighting to the examples?

Using httpie as an alternative to curl would also make that easier. :)
As someone who is just now tackling USPS integration for the first time on behalf of a client, you certainly have my interest.
The patents were issued and the law must be enforced. You might not like it -- so change it! Reminds me of when Teddy Roosevelt vigorously enforced prohibition to the point that is really pissed people off. The point that I gleaned from this was that he wanted people to stand up and change the law.

I hope that patent trolls raise a stink and enforce their rights because it will hopefully lead to change.

UPDATE: see comments below.. I was incorrect in that he enforced prohibition. It was liquor sales on Sunday that he was enforcing as police commissioner in new york.
I like the TI resale program. I know it would have been very easy to get my TI89 off me after college for a steal. The difficulty comes from the fact that anyone who doesn't need that calculator anymore is almost certainly no longer around people who do. I didn't have the foresight to pre-sell it to a freshman prior to graduating. Good money says almost no one does. Great idea!

[edit] This could also spin into a rental program.
I would also like to give it a shot. I teach HTML/CSS to newbies at a graduate school, and am always looking for tools to recommend. Email is in my user details.
It is not an understatement to suggest that Sourceforge is by people with no idea about open source.

This comment is quite simply out of line. SourceForge played a crucial role in the promotion and distribution of Open Source software well over a decade ago. It was the first successful repository that freed projects from the uncertainty of university or personal web hosting, it provided collaborative development tools and multi-developer project management years ahead of Github's very existence, and continues to distribute some of the biggest names in Open Source.

Learn your history! (Man, I feel old saying that)
"Access denied", what is going on? S3 is messed up or they pulled the page?
Is anyone else experiencing DNS issues resolving api.easypost.co?

; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> @8.8.8.8 api.easypost.co A
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 20795
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;api.easypost.co. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
easypost.co. 1667 IN SOA dns1.web-hosting.com. hosting-notifications.namecheaphosting.com. 2012091008 86400 7200 3600000 86400

;; Query time: 44 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Tue Sep 18 09:48:17 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 128