skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Public Policy Blog: Learning what rocks the music industry
Django I don't feel qualified to comment on (and I am going to stay as far away as humanly possible from the pointless religious arguments that tend to rage around these kinds of articles), but one thing I could point to in Rails that supports the "web app" over "web site" lineage is how you handle static (or "semi-static") pages in a Rails app, and the techniques and workarounds that have sprung up to deal with this issue.

Stuff like this really does make me feel like Rails was (at least originally) meant for "web apps" more so than websites with a large amount of static content. Not to say the latter can't be done in Rails, though. But the original focus of the framework seems clear.
I don't quite follow you. Entirely my fault I'm sure - I'm exhausted

I can't say what criteria JoelSutherland applied in the parent post, but I think the general guidelines for patents are a good start for a discussion about the worthiness of Apple's claims
The Writing is on the Paywall
d2l is awful in its own right - the University of Arizona uses it and I'm absolutely boggled as to how this software was ever sold. It's not terrible from the student's perspective, but the professor/TA interface is abysmal. It reminds me of interfaces from the 90s, before we had figured out things like going to the next page without a specific button to save the current page.
PR on Websites: Press Area Usability
Yea this happened to me the other day. Not sure why but clearing your cookies will fix it.
If they stopped how long do you expect it would take until food production and delivery where nationalized?

Money might seem all powerful, but it's less important over the short term than people with tanks.
BitTorrent in Developing Countries
A career change, imo, would be anything that requires a significant amount of 'new' skills though this piece is all about how we should be less dependent on professional occupation
I remember asking a friend who wrote software why it cost what it did. Their answer $20k is the amount an average middle manager can sign off without running it up the chain.
I'm not sure that's always true.

Imagine a WW II era politician in London who gets elected on the promimse of building a new University. Right after the election Germany declares war and starts bombing London. Under those circumstances is it still wrong for him to go back on his promise of building a University?

You have to judge people by the circumstances they're handed and sometimes that means giving them a pass on certain promises
Haskell comprehension measured through WTF/min
That might be true in the general population, but I'm hoping that at least in the scientist or the hacker population this effect is mitigated...
This is absolutely true in my experience. I never connected it to SES, though. I just thought the fidgeter/groomer was probably just a jerk.
Do you by any chance have links to any of those papers? Curious.
Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites
Years ago the author of Dress for Success reported a study noting that women say they like men who are "confident," which asked men to go into bars to start up conversations with women, who then rated the men. If the men were prompted to act confident, the women didn't like the men much. But if the men were prompted to act arrogant, they got much higher ratings from the women. Hmm.
Yes, I do hack my body language, though not in the ways described in the article.

Through college, I had a weak posture, submissive body language, and tended to fidget/move around. I often looked goofy.

About six months ago, I decided to improve all that. I consciously developed an upright, chest-out posture. I cut down or eliminated unnecessary motions. I keep my hands extended and parallel to the arms, instead of close-fisted and angled inwards. I keep my chin up and my gaze high. I keep my legs outward and, when comfortable, spread apart.

By now, it's all become second nature. And it works. Women react much more strongly to me (in a good way). I feel more confident. My body image has greatly improved.

As software developers, most of us spend a lot of time seated in chairs and have less than Adonis-like physiques. I highly recommend body language hacking.
Websites must be painfully clear about a company's purpose, products, and services. Websites for high-tech start-ups are particularly notorious for presenting generic, buzzword-filled mission statements that could apply equally well to both their worst competitors and companies producing completely different products.

Good advice that I've often found disregarded.
Having been through the immigration process myself with a corporate immigration lawyer who used an online system for streamlining I can attest to this.

Lawyers are there to do 2 things, spot anything which might become a problem before it does, when it becomes a problem get your back. No 100% automated online system could do that.

However an automated system could probably reduce costs a lot.
A Google Patent search does not turn this up. Can anyone show us the patent?

http://www.google.com/patents?q=3.5+mm+inassignee%3AApple
I think some of these have been invalidated:

http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali...
Yumbunny (launched at HN): Crowd-Sourced Matchmaking With Hilarious Results
Dilution of quality in social aggregators
Wow nice one!
This is what the new idea I'm working on is all about.

I still have a half developed primitive version of an already successful idea in the west and I hate to copy ideas. But the one I'm working on is a local version that suits the prices and standard of living locally. I've even edited the idea to make it simpler to understand as guys in my surrounding are not too much into tech (they rarely understand the internet. for them all they know is that there's a gate to it called google).

I was always wondering if this was a valid base to work on an idea.
Funny you say that—I'm a startup partner with the submitter of this Ask HN, who linked me your comment, and I'm working on another startup that's trying to do that.

Screenshot of general page:

http://screenshots.markbao.com/bbcd72149092d041f5aa310f2f2d3...

http://screenshots.markbao.com/c637d2dc73f4b51c5e74111b86d7e...

One of the biggest problems with LMS (USPTO Blackboard patent 6,988,138) is that they're often hard to use, so teachers don't use them. I'm trying to change this by making things mindlessly simple, and using words they're already familiar with (Attachments, like with email):

http://screenshots.markbao.com/cecd9f592564abe2cd5cac2ae8060...

It's certainly not to the caliber of Blackboard, but I'm trying to target the long tail who just want websites and not huge, bloated LMSs, and scale up from there. Release early iterate often! It's going to be charged on a yearly basis by school, which includes unlimited teachers, file storage included.

It's mostly going to be a sales and marketing learning experience for myself.

Let me know if you think there is a market for this in middle schools/high schools/college... contact email/AIM is in profile.
Microsoft receives 10,000th patent, links objects to data
Energy-Harvesting Shock Absorbers
Social skills can be hacked. Remember unconscious incompetence -> conscious competence.

RE: Body Language.

Move slow, talk slow, be an approval giver (not a seeker). We all have the capacity to be at the level of Bill Clinton or other legendary communicators - we do it on first dates, job interviews - he does it all the time. One of my most networked/outgoing friends consciously goes into certain situations like 'she owns the venue'. Also if you talk to everyone, you can hide the fact that you are interested in not everyone. You might also try videotaping your body language when you are with friends/familiar situation vs strangers/safe situation. You will have to try this to realize the power of this - but if you really, really want to talk to a group or even a cute female who is seated alone/together, drag a chair over from the other side of the room (noisily if possible) and sit down with them. That demonstrates commitment and is an opener all-in-one.

RE: Peer ratings

They are a form of social proof (raters do not exist in a bubble).

"Similarly, a person who has been unemployed for a long time may have a hard time finding a new job - even if they are highly skilled and qualified. Potential employers attribute wrongly the person's lack of employment to the person rather than the situation. This causes the potential employers to search more intensively for flaws or other negative characteristics that are "congruent" with or explain the person's failure and to discount the applicant's virtues."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

RE: SES

One of the more clever and disturbing ways to gain 'power' over an individual is to play the student in the master-student role. E.g. by having them teach you something - which is doing you a favor, you can gain their favor.

Ben Franklin: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145544
25 would be good. 50 is a long way. I'm was at 221 4 weeks back and I'm still at 232. (I don't comment on threads that I don't understand) and there are many like who are doing it this way. So keeping the posting threshold as low as 25 would be nice.

What happens if this guy heard from someone that people here give good feedback abt his new idea or startup? Should he wait for long (like 2-3 weeks to get 25 or 50 points) to get feedback? So I'm a bit biased about having posting thresholds for new threads.
There are still a lot of innovations you can make here without replacing the SMS backbone wholesale.

For example, users interact with user interfaces, not messaging layers. If you can get people using your interface, you can switch the messaging layer where appropriate. Notice Google now sending IM to SMS?

At my startup, Borange, we send group SMS for free on the iPhone, and are working with metadata and a user interface to innovate around sharing social availability and impromptu invitations, one of SMS's big use cases. When the time is right (read PUSH for iPhone?), we'll migrate users to a modern mobile messaging layer, and keep our backwards compatibility with free SMS for interacting with the rest of the world.

Check us out, by the way. We just launched our iPhone app and are looking for investors and partners who believe in the Matrix and major change in the communications space. http://www.borange.com.
I wonder how long people will say "called their fund managers" when really most just use their dedicated app or log into a website and click a few things.
"If you never read a paper (because for example, you needed to pay to read it), then you'll not be interested in this news, and you won't see any need to pay for it."

Yet newspapers have been charging for quite some time, and people have been paying to read them, up until they found cheaper, faster, more complete sources.

You're digging yourself into a hole of ignorance if you are only following what you've become accustomed to follow.

Newspapers offer the accidental, and I bet many people enjoy them for that reason. You read things you didn't know would be interesting until you turned the page and there it was.

It's not that there is a cost, it's that despite the cost newspapers are still increasingly inferior to, say, Google News.
I notice it's hard to get things done in a meeting when your arms are crossed over your chest or abdomen. It's the universal sign of "I disagree with you and I'm on the defensive" Try this: cross your arms, and the person across from you will inevitably do so as well. I find that when they do that, it's much harder to convince them of your point of view. It's almost as if their defensive posture puts their mind into defensive mode. The opposite seems to hold true as well: relax your posture (open arms) and the person will be more receptive.
The title is misleading- ConnectU's former lawyers published the estimated value of the settlement inadvertently.
Yeah, it's been time for them for 10 years. Those and fuel cells in cars. It's a race to see which one humanity realizes is pointless first.
I swear I've seen this exact post from HN awhile ago. But it must have been stolen from somewhere if so, because the date is new. looking ...
Forget Micropayments -- Here's a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content
The biggest thing I fear about music is that it is emotional. People want to be in a band and will work for less then minimum wage while living out of a van so they can maybe make it big, but really just to play music. Combined with the fact that in the mind of the consumer a song is near worthless means that the money has to either come from selling massive quantities, aka iTunes and they only break even or something else. And everything that is something else that I have heard of isn't that revolutionary.
I lost my JSTOR account, but here is the first one that came up in Google:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118832742/abstrac...

If you read through that you can probably find more using the citations and keywords they use. There might also be more papers by the same authors.

There is another one where they turn around and have people try to fake having higher IQs, but unfortunately I didn't save it.
You are talking up the stack, users, sessions, etc. I'm talking about using controls at lower levels of the stack; basic ip-based bandwidth throttling, forcing all requests to pass through a proxy, and the like. If the business requires that users be able to point random postbots at their account you have to plan for misbehaving counterparties; and application level controls while important will not be sufficient to keep the system up in the face of a broken client that is spamming the server with oversized requests at a pace higher than it can accomodate.
re: last point - Sounds like every girl who ever asked me to help her with her homework...
django-accounts has a very simple implementation of interaction with authorize.net. havent tried it. but it looks good.
Maybe the problem is that you have the 20-man team. There is no coherence in the code. The design is wrong, coupling is too high, and the module cohesion is too low. The large team makes certain that is the case no matter how "tight" (aka heavy) your quality control process.

I have found from working in large teams, there is a core four who get things done. The rest are simply dead weight dedicated to shuffling paper and attending meetings. At best, they do nothing. At worst they create more work than they do.

Use the right four and dump the other sixteen. You will get at least ten times more productivity and ten times higher quality without even breaking a sweat. If you don't have the right four, you are hosed from the start.
The problem is when people mix them up, I think. Rants are usually written to appeal to the emotions (whether intentionally, e.g. to rally support, or just venting), and sometimes people get so caught up in them that they miss major gaps in the author's argument...and people busy cheering aren't usually in the mood to coolly debate.
He'd have to nail down the rules at some point--you can't sign a contract that isn't written. So, you'd know what you're getting yourself into before getting into it.
Fred Wilson's Soccomm Presentation: Truth
Always looking for new fonts to keep in my tool box, thanks.
> And if we reached a point where people couldn't even get money out of ATMs,
> we're talking about complete social breakdown.

And in a country like USA it would mean a civil war. People have a tendency to freak out too much, like post 9/11. I don't see the Argentinean-style civil protests and spontaneous grassroots organizations. I'd bet on dog-eat-dog. (I write this with sadness.)
The data is that more fidgeting and grooming correlated with higher SES, and more nodding, agreeing and eybrow raises correlated with lower SES. There's no link to the study itself, but there's no support in this article how they established causation, and further, even with causation established, that the behaviors are for the reason they give.
Or "late binding".
it would be interesting to know how the body language changed over time.. i.e. is the arrogant body language a cause or effect..
Do All founders need to submit a separate application ? couldn't find it in the FAQ?
Even if you do low level throttling that maintains the stability of the system, it doesn't necessarily ensure usability. Who would want to use webhooks if there was much of a chance of frequently getting flooded by spam? It doesn't matter if the trickle isn't enough to kill your server, if you keep getting buzzed on your mobile every thirty seconds, you won't want to use the service any more.
California's Pain Is Only Beginning
I haven't used Django. Rails is both great and seriously flawed. Comparisons are generally fatally biased but they still get people thinking.

The transition of Rails to Merb shows that things are still in play. The reason that even the short-sighted, flawed comparisons are worthwhile is because we have so far to go towards creating a web framework that really helps or, for that matter, a language that really helps.

However difficult the discussion here is, it is necessary.
Python has a numpy and matplotlib, as well as really easy binding with boost (which gives you ublas etc.) This allows you to write really nice optimized numerical algorithms that plug right in. That's what sold me for Django over Rails.
This is a great article.

In summary, as technology progresses to the point where most (if not all) common tasks can be automated the uniqueness of the UI will be what is left to the user to control.
Encapsulation can also be handled well at the module/package system level, though. (The package system in OCaml has some particularly interesting features.)

The latter is a mixed blessing. It's often very convenient, but sometimes there isn't a clear answer which object should be the primary one in a binary operation. (This is particularly troublesome with non-commutative operations.)

Lua's syntactic sugar for this ( obj:method(args) vs method(obj, args) ) seems like a good balance; it's explicit that it's just sugar for convenience, but you aren't required to use it.
As a lurker, I sort of agree. That is, I don't think that I'm a real part of the community - being more the type to hang around the edges, listening to the conversation - but I think that that is a valid way of figuring out community standards; watching other people try, and seeing what works. So yes, I'm sort of biased against restricting article submission based on points and comments.

On the other hand, neither do I expect to submit anything very soon, so I suppose that not being able to wouldn't matter much to me (until I want to submit something, of course). It would be quite interesting to see statistics for who submits articles, and how many comments / points they have, and how long they have been a member.
and what about the person who has an AMAZING story but just joined?

I realize that we have these issues, but anything that's not going to make it take way too long for people to be able to submit isn't going to help the signal/noise ratio much.

It's kind of presumptuous and pompous to assume that just because someone hasn't been on HN, they don't know hacker culture through some other means. HN may be "hacker news," but plenty of hackers aren't on HN (even though it may seem as if everyone is on HN now).

And the more emphasis we put on karma, the more people will do things with the intent of enhancing their karma rather than enhancing the discussion.
Tell HN: One URL Per Day
I think an interesting experiment would be to only allow users to submit one URL per day. Find two really interesting URLs in one day? Submit it the next day. How many people think that they are actually going to find more than 365 worthwhile stories in one year?

This also serves the dual purpose of focusing attention on discussion, which I believe is the most important part of this site. It'd be an interesting system to try, if only to see how it turns out.
just asking out of curiosity: wouldn't $1 still qualify as a micropayment as well, i.e. a charge easily consumed by processing fees alone? as much as half of $1 easily goes to fees until you aggregate-charge the buyer (if that is even feasible).. and even amazon fps and paypal fee schedules are not that cheap.

I do remember someone bringing up how Apple does micropayments (a la iTunes Store) and Apple charges once or twice in the beginning and then aggregate-charges the rest anywhere from the same day to a few days later. Most places interested in micropayments don't have that kind of luxury of users who will store credit card numbers and buy things on a regular basis..
one of the simplest things that blackboard manages to screw up is the message board.
each class should have a board generated for it for that specific semester with a message area, a collaborative blackboard (auto generated for each thread and saved!), and assignments posted all on one page. I suppose you need a widescreen monitor to really get it all laid out nicely.
If there wasn't a financial cartel blocking new players with regulation it would probably be very easy to [implement] and in many different ways.

Fuel cell cars and many other technological attempts at fixing a major problem get a minuscule crumble of the pie. Perhaps the waste is mostly on mainstream media and reader/watcher time. Who cares, that was time and resources lost.

Now my attempt at a red-herring: those particle accelerators sure waste money for some meaningless questions.
What has been described here really isn't all the different from what much of the online community has been railing against with net neutrality - content providers controlling content distribution by price per use. Really if a blog cost you 1 cent to read and a news article 5 cents then who is price controlling this?

You mentioned it would need to work across several platforms, but there needs to be an organization or company in charge assign prices, collect money, redistribute it, and take a little (or a lot) off the top for their services. In old or 'real world' business models this would be akin to a publisher, label, or other content provider. This is the exact thing that the internet has inherently undermined in many ways by making content distribution available to the individual.

Don't get me wrong, in many ways micro payments are enticing, but a completely new business model will have to emerge for them to work on the internet. I don't have a better suggestion, but then if anyone did you wouldn't be writing a speculative entry on the matter.
A few months ago I switched to Yahoo! Search as an experiment. I'm quite confident that, if you'd replaced the Yahoo! branding with Google's, I would never have known the difference.

But yet I switched back. Why? I was hosting the Silicon Valley Rails meetup, and our speaker Emmett Shear (of Justin.tv) had forgotten to bring his laptop, and had to borrow mine. I was so uncomfortable at the idea of my home page---Yahoo!, of all things, and not Google!---being broadcast to a room of Rails hackers that I changed it back to the Canonical Choice. And now inertia has returned, and I'm back in the warm bosom of mother Google.

I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! Search and Live Search are basically as good as Google nowadays. When it debuted, Google was qualitatively better than any other search engine, but today Google's lead is based mainly on branding.
It did say "up to 10%", which I think is fairly believable since they were testing with large vehicles.
Thanks for posting this. Was travelling and was gratefully surprised when they covered us. Thanks guys for all your great feedback.