skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the point of the field is just to make ie work correctly, wouldn't it be more appropriate to leave utf8 out of the name and write something like "ie=💩"?
Cool idea, except 20-50% more of 99 cents is still squarely in the race-to-the-bottom category, in my book.
There is no editing of Yglesias' regular moneybox posts. Spelling and grammar errors are pretty common.

It's probably possible to defend this as having been correct but poorly worded, on the grounds that Google's Android strategy changed around the time they bought Motorola.
I literally can't remember the last time I had driver issues in Ubuntu. The last time I had one in Linux at ALL was early Raspberry Pi builds that didn't include Broadcom drivers. And even that was easy to fix.
First off, as others have said, disabling port 80 is a great way to handle this, I don't really care that much if I can see/use github the website for a few hours, but I'd be much more upset if I couldn't pull my code.

Secondly, I kind of like when big sites go down when I'm not in desperate need because it means a really nice aftermath write up is on the way. Can't wait to hear more about this one.
>Also, no gun to your head. run whatever you like man. I'm only engaging you because you're kind of being a jackass.

I'm being a jackass because frankly I am tired of Canonical's shit. I can sort of forgive unity, okay, fine, ignoring what your users want in a UI seems to be the in thing nowadays (c.f. Microsoft, Gnome).

The Amazon lens was a bridge too far. I don't care if it's opt out - any form of advertising in a core OS component should be optin, not the other way around!

What put the final nail in the coffin for me was Shuttleworth's flippant response to those concerns.

And now with this whole "developed in secret" thing, the coffin reaches 5 feet under. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu's only real asset now is popularity. (And even that's declining, if the Distrowatch numbers mean anything...)

Rank	Distribution	H.P.D*
1	Mint	3403
2	Mageia	2462
3	Ubuntu	2042
4	Fedora	1522
5	openSUSE	1311

If they keep going out of their way to make their users feel like they don't matter, that final advantage will also disappear.
M.dot Launches iOS App For Building Mobile Websites From Your iPhone
Interesting! As an aside, did you have any feeling about $9.95 v $10?
I assumed 1 year when I first read the ad. I get your point, but it still seems like a pretty nice feature.
My first thought was, "I'll just buy a new one every two years."
Uhm, don't do an inplace upgrade anyway, they suck. If you have /home on another drive, there's no "backup" or "restore" stage.
Oddly, the 3G model (which I can't understand why it isn't LTE) is listed on Amazon[0] as packing an Exynos 4210 instead, which is over a year old.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-XE303C12-H01US-Chromebook-3G-1...
Could not have come at a better time, I was literally going to sit down this weekend and build a multi-provider auth for my project. Just take my money. Take it!

I 'get it', it's awesome. Thanks for building :)
Bold? They're losing money like crazy. Advertisers haven't been paying the rates they need to survive for almost a decade.

It was bold to keep printing and mailing the thing for the last 5 years as it became absolutely clear that printing news on paper has no future at all.

I'm surprised that so many major daily newspapers are still being printed today. That shoe is going to drop any month now.
+1 For Privacy (blog post) and free extra GB's with Spideroak.com
I came to a similar solution as you, and am on my way to becoming a polyglot (English, French, Spanish, Russian and Swedish/Norweigan). I even started learning Na'vi, but the person I was learning it with wasn't as into it, so it got dropped.

I believe this has also driven my adoption of languages like Haskell and Clojure, While making it easier for me to pick up languages such as Java and Obj-C.
Fear Pays the Bills, but Accounts Must Be Settled - Bruce Schneier
It's just a browser environment, nothing that can't run perfectly well under Android. Why put resources into this stillborn thing, when they can leverage their hugely successful mobile OS?
Pushing The Limits of Web Browsers (by the creator of V8 and Dart)
At what point do we stop outsourcing services to the cloud and start actually building things ourselves again?

Hacking used to be all about solving these problems yourself. Now its about integrating a bunch of other peoples solutions. I'm gonna start a SaaS service that integrates your SaaS services. Hows that? I'll make millions.
GitHub, YouTube, I'm having trouble on Wordpress.org, anything else down for people? Anyone noticing any correlations?
I've driven around the Los Alcornocales Natural Park in Spain, it's one of the largest cork forests in the world. The road on the edge winds a lot and I had to stop along the way from feeling queasy from all the bends which is unusual for me. I've also driven around Southern Portugal and from time to time would see a couple of trees with bark looking like a harvested cork tree. It must be fairly intensive to use these. I've noticed most Spanish and Portuguese wine bottles have real cork, I suspect most wineries have a specific supply of cork in the area.
Full quote then.

"And it's pretty clear that when you account for the costs of the Motorola purchase, Android has been a pretty epic failure. And yet as a product it's an enormous success—the most popular smartphone OS on the planet and even more than that a huge driver of smartphone adoption."

This does not change what I said in my previous comment. Even if you relate it JUST a business aspect and ignore that you can't do that. Lets look at googles stock breakdown.

http://www.trefis.com/company?hm=GOOG.trefis&from=home%3...

Motorola makes up 2% of googles worth, where Mobile Ads make up 34%. Granted this can be assumed to not be completely Android, even if we assume that only 25% of that is from android devices, thats 8.5%. So 8x Motorolas worth and about 21Billion based on Googles 245B market cap. So a worth of 21 Billion in worth is an "epic failure"? Ok...
Who DDOS'es twitter? Mercurial committers? the Bitbucket people?
Interesting idea. Are email addresses redacted? Is the redacted data configurable?

I like being able to round file resumes from weedwizard420@gmail.com and domains like hotmail, msn, or aol.
It sounds like their client is going to automatically perform the decryption. I would guess you'll be able to just pass in the key in the URL, so indexing sites will make Mega just as easy to use as BitTorrent is with magnet URLs. Remember that Mega only makes money if people use it.
And yet as a product it's an enormous success—the most popular smartphone OS on the planet and even more than that a huge driver of smartphone adoption.
On Google Drive I had a previous per-year subscription for storage - 80 GB for $20 per year. It just got renewed because they don't cancel or upgrade old accounts, you just have to make sure that the yearly payments don't stop.
But he is making a good point. You're buying something that the seller essentially have no control over. You better be ready to lose that $20.

That said, I still think the app is worth it.
I wonder if this is a variation of the analyst theme of never, ever give a stock a sell rating?
The idea is to mine when not playing the game. I know that some people seem to play games 24x7, but most people don't.
https://twitter.com/AnonymousOwn3r is taking credit for attacks against YouTube and GitHub amongst others.
Thanks! We started out w/ $9.95, which I personally preferred... At some point we moved to $10, but didn't really A/B test back then like I am more into these days. My expectation is that $9.95 was a better match for our offering/branding etc. I think the $0.05 difference is large psychologically, especially for a monthly subscription. We also had many subscribers supporting the site more for social benefits than purely business value, so I think that'd be consistent with that as well.
Slate was property of Microsoft in the past.

It seems like the old owners remain a big influence there.

I suppose it is MS Ads money what creates continuous praises to the Lord there like with other media (PC magazine...).
I freely admit I'm making a value judgment here. But I am not imposing my values on anyone. I'm just noting that I find the thought of anyone spending their whole life sorting or boiling corks depressing.

I'm willing to go out on a limb to imagine they could have more interesting and more fulfilling jobs than that, and even that those jobs need not be environmentally destructive -- they might be environmentally beneficial, even. Is this such a stretch? Would that be so wrong?

Is it inconceivable that some of these people might not actually enjoy spending all their work hours sorting or boiling cork? Just because they and perhaps their ancestors have been doing this for a long time, does that mean that they enjoy it or would not rather be doing something else with their time?

Speaking of imposing values, perhaps these workers should actually be asked about what they want to do and whether they want their lives and their children's lives to be dedicated to sorting cork.
Anyone considering to use it for development? (Similar to the iPad + Linode experiment?)
The weirdest thing about these Chromebooks is that they are terrible machines to code on. You would think that Google would make some sort of effort to put some free development tools on them to promote their technologies like AppEngine, DART, Go, etc.

Instead we are left with various garbage pail cloud IDEs.

I would totally get one of these, but I'll probably install Ubuntu on it (at least as a dual boot).
Please do a blog post! I imagine lots of HN readers would be interested.
Get Minecraft to work on it and you will introduce the Chromebook experience to many, many kids.
Server Filesystem Capacity Analytics Utility for Cloud Systems
Just posted on GitHub, a free cloud capacity planning utility tool for public and private cloud server filesystems to be used in conjunction with CopperEgg RevealCloud (as a free add-on) and built on the CopperEgg API, the tool extracts, analyzes, and reports on historical server filesystem usage data collected from Linux systems (e.g., Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat, Gentoo), Windows servers, MacOS systems, and FreeBSD servers. The data is extracted from the RevealCloud server monitoring histories and exported to an Excel spreadsheet – one .xlsx file per server. Each spreadsheet includes a detailed filesystem usage history and capacity planning charts that compare filesystem usage versus filesystem capacity.
'Free' and 'polite' are not mutually exclusive. The first pillar of free software is not '$0 free', it's 'respect'.
I thought the 100,000 limit was just the limit for free tokens - "you have to talk to us". I mean, if Twitter is willing to sell tokens at $2 each, then Tapbot can sell this app forever giving Twitter their cut.

I also find it ironic that the app maker has to ask beta testers to revoke access to free up tokens for others.
Advertising is where they make their money. It is nice that they do cool things, but few of those things have anything to do with their core business.

My point was that they do a lot of fun things that aren't core to their business. Properly filing their SEC documents might be worth a little more attention. Not quite as sexy as self-driving cars, but if they can't keep the core business running then they won't have time for autonomous cars.
And the counter argument seems to be, "Because someone could conceivably like that job, everyone doing that job must like it."

Or maybe the counter argument is, "Well, they look happy in the pictures."

Or is it, "They'd be even less happy without a job"?

Except that no one's disputing these latter two arguments. Yes, they might be even more miserable without a job, but that doesn't mean their present job isn't depressing. And the apparent happiness in pictures cherry-picked by some PR hack for the wine industry is proof of nothing.
World's first all rubber speaker made from artificial muscle tech (video)
This particular hit comes from Motorola losing money last quarter, not the costs related to acquisition.
Yelp Outing Businesses that Solicit Reviews
Just upgraded. If anyone is running the open AMD/ATI drivers and the UI becomes slow and unusable you should try to install the proprietary drivers. It made the UI snappy again because everything seems to require hardware acceleration now.
"This article seems like a strange mix of a Microsoft marketing piece, and a call for app developer collusion."

Author here; definitely not asking for collusion. More specifically, here is what I said:

"Look, you’re a developer – not a rodent in a maze. You should be able to recognize the pattern and the habit-forming behavior from a distance: if you bring iOS’s terrible economics to Windows 8, then Win8 will have similarly terrible economics.

Microsoft set the minimum price of an app in the Windows Store to $1.49 for a reason: to give developers a clean slate on app economics. You want a better opportunity than iOS? Then don’t ship iOS-utility (low-utility) apps with iOS prices on a platform that is purposefully engineered to do better!"

What I'm asking developers to do is: don't ship fart apps and other toys that pollute the iOS app store. Do what Router .CoCPit did and take advantage of WinRT's rich feature set (UPnP support in that particular instance) to deliver apps that are higher utility and thus worth more.

WinRT's native capabilities give developers access to a lot of things that could only be done through traditional desktop apps previously, and combines it with an App Store distribution model that has some new twists on pricing and monetization (expiring in-app purchases, for instance.)

I'm telling developers to take advantage of that and not blindly replicate what they did on iOS or Android.

WinRT will create opportunities for developers to build sustainable businesses off of higher utility, higher price,d and highly targeted applications - apps that are used by 10s of thousands, not millions.

The hit-driven mentality that pervades iOS need not apply here if we realize what we have in front of us.

Does that make more sense?
...in what context would this make any sense?: "If that doesn't scare the shit out of you, then I already know that you're not Russian =)"
Economists also think that WWII ended the depression.

As if flattening the major cities of every developed country except the U.S. and spending the majority of the world's economic activity on objects whose sole purpose is to destroy and be destroyed. That brought prosperity.
"It is ruined in the context of being able to make a living on an app without getting insanely lucky."

That was a moment in time, really. It wasn't long enough to get nostalgic about it. The market was just developing. In any case, you had to be insanely lucky to create the right app at the right time then as well.
Solid state hard drive, acceptable processor, 6 hour battery. Could be an awesome linux box. Though, you always could just flash it and put your own OS on there.
Really? Even now in its juvenile stage the Windows 8 store suffers from most of the problems of the that plague the AppStore - the microsoft imposed censorship, guarantees that some interesting apps will never be made. And never be payed for. So you are left with yet another bland clone.

The other thing that the store gives you is low visibility. Because there is one and one only channel of distribution for these apps - currently if I take only the most popular games - it is a list of 60 or 90 titles. I cannot read the titles of the games, let alone try some non-free. There are no humble bundles, gogs, desuras, gamersgate or key-sites from which to obtain or which can increase the visibility and renown. And no - review sites are not good enough because the seller loyalty lays with the customer. The professional reviewer usually with the company that pays the bills.

The problem with apps is there are too many of them. You get overloaded. Where as with an open platform you can tune to the distribution channel that serves your needs best in the app store world this is impossible.
yes, but having separate systems that cannot interact is problematic. The ability to join "tables" from different systems is a game changer.
In math. Writing public policy to address anecdotal or individual cases is an awful way of writing public policy.
Author here; sorry that you didn't like the tone - was trying to do something different stylistically and I can see how it comes across as condescending. That was not my intention :(

I don't have as much data on the OS X app store - but prices do trend towards traditional desktop economics moreso than native app economics.

Windows 8 will be interesting, because it's not just the desktop ecosystem - it's also tablet and phone too. However, as I pointed out - I think the dominant devices in market will be X86 and X64 for some time to come.
did you mean "who DDOS'es Github"?
This guy is like Linus T. with the ego surgically removed ...really doesn't try to "sell himself" ...he should start doing some corporate training classes to teach people this skill of his.
I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, but have gone off the derech (I no longer believes in Judaism and do not practice it anymore) an Orthodox is not supposed to use (and carry) money on the Shabbat, or even supposed to carry umbrellas, even inside an eruv[1] for those who believes in its validity (The Jewish law is not a monolithic concept, it's basically discussed to interpretations which the majority agrees).

It's common to see religious people going to the synagogue in raincoats in the Shabbat in neighbourhoods with a large Jewish community.

Anyway, this is not the point of the article.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv

EDIT: The guy can sell umbrellas in the religious services in other days which are not holidays or shabbats, there are three religious services each day, the maariv, the shacharit and the mincha.
Yes, it defaults to full retina resolution (2880x1800). Although it doesn't look too bad like that, and Ubuntu let's you modify the UI font size, I'd probably run at a more reasonable 1920x1200.
> So for approximately 10 months work, $1.4M divided by 2 developers, so, annualized, about $1M/yr/developer.

$1.4 million is the all-time, sell out all your tokens maximum, assuming 0 piracy (because every pirate takes away from that 100k token ceiling), not for 10 months of work but for 10 months of work + all work going forward. Very, very few products are sustainable when their absolute all time revenue ceiling is a paltry $1.4 million. To argue that that ceiling is too high, that they should be selling for, what, $9.99 (all time revenue ceiling: $700k) or $2.99 ($210k lifetime max) is nuts.

> I'd love to have a labour of love that nets me around $250,000/year income as a base.

Then I'd suggest building good software and charging what you're worth. By playing the "a very polished piece of software is overpriced because it costs as much as the price of having a pizza delivered" game, you're only participating in the devaluation of your own skills.
Pfft, always down these days. BitBucket for me.
Don't bother reading that. All politicians lies. Come November that isn't worth the bytes used to transfer the text.
It seems pretty clear that you're not a native English speaker. Could you try rephrasing your argument here? I can't understand your post, sometimes in a raw English semantics sense.
I put a 40 GB SSD in my Cr-48, re-installed ChromeOS, then overwrote the BIOS, loaded Ubuntu, works fine. So long as they have an SD card slot, onboard memory shouldn't be a huge issue, but 16 GB is cramped.
Tables carry semantic weight.

The web started a move to being all about semantics, machine readability and interpretation of pages by robots (like Googlebot). Personally I threw my lot in with XHTML and started moving to XFN and other microformats.

One of the big things with tables was screenreaders. Screenreaders assume a table is tabular data and treat it as such leading to a terrible UX. Where I am, a business that doesn't make reasonable changes to accommodate disabled users is acting unlawfully.

Screenreaders basically amplified the error of using semantic markup where non-functional style is intended. Semantics was the in thing for a while and separation of function and style pushed people towards using pure [X|]HTML with no extraneous tags and all styling performed outside the markup via CSS files. Tables for tabular data only.

CSS promised to bring table-layouts to 'display:' in CSS1 but IIRC MSIE put the kibosh on that one [that's en-gb euphemism for 'stopped it'] and indeed it's only just become fully supported in IE9 I think.

Markup philoshopies aside it was a real bitch trying to edit tables or change layout with tables without decent visual layout tools. You'd have a page-table (for body centering), then that would have a table for a main grid, then you'd have a table for the visual header, a table for the menu, a table for the ads column(s), tables for the footers, tables to put pull out quotes in, tables for aligning images. All those tables made page markup significant at a time when home users didn't have ADSL connection yet.

You'd end up with nests of tables easily 10 deep on some sites and working out in the markup what was happening in such a site was a nightmare. In contrast a well CSS formatted page is (was?) slim, the content is simple and changing layout is just a matter of altering the CSS and not re-writing the whole page.

It became a point of pride for many to avoid frames, a way to show one knows ones game. For a while it seemed that as no really needs to wrangle with IE6 all the fun would have gone out of CSS layout ... but then we got iPad and a million different android resolutions to worry about and so again there is pressure to use liquid responsive layouts where in the interim things have gotten very much focussed on pixel-perfect presentation.

That all said I was having the same thought the other day - that CSS grids are starting to look a bit messy and that I'm ready for the next iteration.
> Fundamentally as a developer if I want my app to sell for more money, I should make it bring more value to the customer, not hope for minimum pricing constraints on all apps.

Fundamentally, you are making a major category error. iPhones and iPhone apps are complementary products. You can't use an iPhone app without an iPhone and an iPhone is useless without apps (clue: Apple advertise the apps available for an iPhone - not the iPhone itself). Apple's marketing approach is to 'commoditise the complements' ie charge high prices for their side of the pairing whilst driving down prices on the app side. Market Theory (see Michael Porter's book Competitive Strategy - Techniques For Analyizing Industries And Competitors) indicates that pricing pressure between a company (Apple) and its suppliers (app developers) lies with the party that can most easily expand its operations into the others market. It is easy for Apple to write an app that duplicates your app - it is hard for you, as an app developer, to launch your own global smart phone. Therefore Apple has prices pressure against you (make you apps cheap, give me 30% of in-app purchases). The Windows team have less competitive price pressure to apply - therefore the price per app sold is higher than the Mac (but your volume is likely to be less).

Apple have (consciously) structured the market to capture the value for themselves - don't kid yourself otherwise. Anti-competitive legislation is designed to mop up this sort of behaviour - when it becomes extreme - I don't think Apple is in the monopoly position yet, personally, YMMV.