skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>1) dominate their respective markets (as monopolies or one of a small number of oligopolistic suppliers),

Check. Most people can't be bothered to maintain a presence on more than two social networks. So Facebook, Twitter (and in a distant third place) Google Plus have a de-facto oligolopoly on users' ad viewing. And given Facebook's enormous userbase, it's not exactly convenient for users to switch away, due to network effects.

>2) are spectacularly unresponsive to customer/user sentiments.

Every change Facebook has made lately has been vociferously opposed by its userbase, usually because it erodes privacy and reduces the perceived level of control that people have over the broadcast of their status updates.

>"We don't care, we don't have to. We're the Phone Company".

Replace "Phone Company" with Facebook and that may as well be a paraphrase of Mark Zuckerberg.
PhD Comics: What is Open Access to Journals and Why it Matters
I once wrote a piece of software for my own use that used Markdown, and I wrote a thin preparsing layer that would allow it to do the right thing regardless of which of these I typed:

[http://foo.com][text]
[http://foo.com](text)
(http://foo.com)[text]
(http://foo.com)(text)
[text][http://foo.com]
(text)[http://foo.com]
[text](http://foo.com)
(text)(http://foo.com)

I think it might even have accepted {}'s.
I love Markdown, and, this is an awesome effort! I'm working on a Markdown editor/platform that could really benefit if this sort of stuff wasn't so fragmented: http://www.nimblenot.es/ (yes, that was a shameless plug)
As long as they're obviously dumbasses I don't mind their just getting down-voted to the bottom. Not much harm done and they'll get `dead`ed before too long.
How to Cross the Divide with Your IT Operations Colleagues
What is this command? Is it in any of the Windows 8 guides?
It looks like the original study dealt only with "communication of feelings and attitudes" i.e. emotional content:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian#Misinterpretat...

I don't see any evidence that this applies to communication in general.
I agree, but it seems to be a fundamentally different scenario than other companies with sky high P/Es such as LNKD and FB. While LNKD and FB have yet to figure out how to monetize their product, AMZN has a relatively simple (and demonstrated) growth plan. I think many investors are simply betting that Amazon will be able to capture significantly more of the retail market, and/or new revenue streams from places like cloud services.
Talking about "luck" in a presentation like this is like talking about the life benefits of physical attractiveness.

Precious little of it is in your control, so what's the point? Address what you can control, and hope for the best.
Probably trying to reverse-engineer the Twitter geolocation database instead of buying one.
I thought about this conflict of interest too. But imo people should still be able to use aff links. Their trustworthiness should be deduced from other factors.
More than just a straight-forward Rails app, it's been cleaned up so that a Heroku/etc. deployment is hassle-free! I spent some time in the Portland tech community and Calagator made the experience much nicer than Meetup.com ever has in my default tech environment of Seattle.
Right. The Android app doesn't have this functionality at the moment, but we're going to port it over soon.
Or, instead of being "out of touch, immature, or just content with corruption", things like outlawing abortion, preventing same-sex marriage, and installing theocratic laws don't seem so "lesser" to me.
Like you said, they are a decoration. When handwriting something, some people use underlines for different kinds of emphasis. Those people want to make text look a certain way. It's good that HTML5 brought back underlines, just in case someone wants to use them, they at least have the option.
It sounds like you're making the common mistake of projecting your own reasonable expectations onto a piece of legislation like the DMCA.
Great point. I see so many sites making this mistake. If you have cool functionality or content that you can show without a login then show it right away! If I can't figure out if I like it within 20 seconds, then I'll probably leave.
If you change your vote based on a hotspot name, I'd like to ask you not to vote.

Or drive or be around children for that matter - because you are dangerously ignorant.
I agree, I am having trouble thinking of a situation where specific line break positions would be important to me in regular text that isn't covered by some other markdown structure such as code blocks or lists.
Why Amazon customers might think twice about going east
There's a book here that looks good - published by Packt - http://www.packtpub.com/game-jam-survival-guide/book ... its by Christer Kaitila, a game developer with 17-years experience.
I don't think its got any technical information. I haven't read it myself, but these headings from the table of contents look like good advice...

- Go with what you know

- Don't try a new language

- Don't worry about making it beautiful!

- Keep It Simple, Stupid!

- No-art (rectangles) gameplay proof-of-concept

- Heinous hacks and ugly code are A-OK.
Wow.. Good job.
Texts — Edit in Rich Text, store in Plain Text with Markdown
Believe me, you're not the only one who prefers this behavior. It makes working with hard-wrapped text a hell of a lot easier.
PG, mind sharing some insight on the "Panic" nickname? I'm curious about how/if the two are related.
Email: christopher.bui@folkrobots.com
This is one of the best articles I have read in a while. Obviously you see a lot over 7 years/ 500 startups.
I have rejected a large number of apps because they want write access to my twitter account for no discernible reason.

The reason posted above makes sense but it would never have occurred to me so I would have rejected this out of hand.

Companies should say why they need write access with clear reasoning if they want me to use them.
> As we all know, manufacturing in the US has been gutted and is now largely based in developing countries

We all know it, and yet it's not actually true. America is the largest manufacturer in the world.

The main that happened is America switched from making many multiples of cheap item, to making smaller quantities of much more expensive and complicated items.
Is it possible to use just the alert features and disable the open/close mechanism? My first impression -- being able to open a deadbolt with a text message seems like a bad idea (sooner or later it has to become hackable) but knowing, remotely, when someone's knocked or used the deadbolt seems really useful.
"While Apple hasn't exactly disrupted any industries lately, it's not as if they've had a long dry spell"

Just how often is a company supposed to disrupt an industry? Most companies don't even do it once.
For non-professional investors, the "so let's buy Gamestop" strategy isn't necessarily a bad strategy. Assuming you are putting the bulk of your investments in low cost index and mutual funds, using a little bit of you savings to play the market by investing in companies that you are familiar with can be productive. I've had some big hits and some big misses, but overall, my picks have matched the pace of my index/mutual funds.
I agree completely. Visually highlighting a paragraph that went a bit too wide and cleaning it up with 'gq' makes me a happy camper.
This is excellent -- and very much in the spirit of Charlie Munger's often-repeated saying: "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there."[1]

--

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wsw/news/fortunearticle_20031026_03.html
If everyone gets on board, great.

If only a couple sites band together, then I see it more like this:

http://xkcd.com/927/
Something this flexible for images would go down nicely too.
It's true, verifiable, basically uninteresting, and unusually rude.
Shen is pretty amazing and is built with a type system in mind from the beginning. If you don't want the type system, just turn it off, in the middle of a REPL session if you want!
A few updates:

OSHPark now sells the bare PCB for $4.60: http://store.oshpark.com/products/pi-crust-v4

There's a Google Group to discuss ideas, etc:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/picrust
iFixit MacBook Pro 13 Retina Teardown with Kittens
We actually did the same with our app Soundbox (https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/soundbox-for-youtube/id44466...).

On "regular" days we tested price points $0.99 and $1.99 to see which worked better. On holidays & long weekends we'd give it away for free.

It worked fabulously in terms of getting users...and surprisingly, the retained % of users was the same irrespective of whether they were paid or unpaid. On a particularly good weekend we got ~30,000 downloads.

We wanted the high number of users to:
1. Prove that people actually wanted the app
2. Using the high number of users as a channel for growth

We achieved #1 without question, the #2 is yet to be achieved.
The primary reason is to provide for Chinese proper name marks (where underlining has a semantic meaning) and occasionally for misspellings (in English, we'd probably add the editorial text [sic]). As a decoration, it is useless, but there are circumstances where it has semantic meaning. (The <b> and <i> tags were promoted back to respectability for the same reasons, since using <em> for text that is not stressed or <strong> for text that would traditionally be bolded without implying extra importance is just as semantically incorrect as using <i> and <b> for stress and importance would be. Arbitrary spans don't imply any semantic meaning. Where I would have used <span class="foreign" lang="fr"> previously, I'd now use <i class="foreign" lang="fr">. The <i> tag marks the text as special rather than just arbitrarily styled.)
Also an ex-Googler here, they cast the net far and wide trying to pick up SRE. When I was there they were offering significant bounties for submitting recommendations that only had to make it pass the resume screen. Want a brand new shiny PS3? Less than 10* that made it past the resume screen, and it was yours.

I has additionally heard rumors that recruiters were so silo'ed that they would actually just throw away a resume rather than route it. Reason being that they were in a competition with all recruiters, and worst performers (based strictly on a numbers game) didn't get their contracts renewed.

*May have been as low as less than 5, its been a few years, and I never really took to memorize what was posted on the wall while I was at the urinal.
I partially agree with you.
I don't think Udacity disintermediates HR - it disintermediates 2nd and 3rd tier universities whose main value, beyond the degree, was to have a career services department that was sort of helping out students by putting together career fairs, etc...
It also allows people in random parts of the world to get recognized and hired by top tier firms, providing them with opportunities that were not possible before at that scale.

Re: HR and founders- that's true in most successful startups. Their value is not what they can technically do. It is the fact that they did everything they could to make it happen. It is a totally different skill set than being an employee of a Company, where people look for people with repeatable, proven skills.
fwiw, my parents NEVER argued in front of me and my 3 siblings[1], but I'm confrontational to a fault. I suppose the only difference could be that I had 3 siblings, and my parents took a "let them workout their own fights" approach which, with 3 siblings (all within 7 years of each other), will teach you how to deal with confrontation real fast.

[1]the one time we ever saw them fight, it was about the dishes, and the 4 of us kids were all so distraught about it we went into a corner and cried together while they fought. I remember it vividly.
A little-known feature of Postgres' streaming replication is Synchronous Replication or 2-safe replication, available from version 9.1 onward. It allows you to specify that a given commit must be durable on a standby server prior to the server returning to the client.

You can turn this on cluster wide, or just for single transactions using session variables. In your example, you can specify that this update must be synchronously replicated, and as such the consequent request will show the user the updated data.

Read more about it here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/warm-standby.html#...
Oh great.

Ubuntu 12.04 Server crashes randomly due to some obscure bug in 3.2

I upgraded the kernel to 3.6.3 specifically to stop the machine from crashing. Now let's hope that INDEED it doesn't crash, else I might get hit by this newfangled Ext4 bug.

Sounds like the accelerated kernel development is hitting various limits, they should go back to more stodgy stable series like before.
This illustrates the need for the Markdown language to be open to extensions. For instance I'd like to write TeX blocks that render to MathML.
I thought the exception for DVD ripping was interesting. There are many references to "video quality" as a persuasive factor. This point might be useful in further requests for exceptions sent the Register.^1 Strategy: Complain about low quality. Apparently, screen captures are "not good enough" but Blu-Ray is "too good".

Under the exception individuals are entitled to extract a small portion of the DVD for commentary, criticism or educational purposes. What if enough individuals independently choose unique excerpts, so that together they cover the entire motion picture? Sites could be set up to catalog which portions of a DVD have already been extracted and reviewed. Commentary might be something as simple as subtitles of the type vlc or mplayer can handle; these are nothing more than text files - removing subtitles is a matter of not loading the text file. Then one simply downloads all the clips and combines them into the full film using ffmpeg.

Implausible? What do you think?

1. Why are people not organising mass mailing campaigns to the Register to seek DMCA exceptions? Am I missing something here? It seems like she only receives a relatively small number of requests for exceptions considering the large audience of people affected by her decisions.
Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that they could obtain the key, just that hijacking the agent was equally dangerous (provided they know where to use it).
Apple iMessage Not Working How To Fix It
Surely you could just edit the ol' msconfig startup items for free, right?

They still have that, right? It's been a while since I used Windows.
The intuitive cynic in me sees a combination of 1b and 2 explaining this:

1b: Many people barely know the name of, let alone trust their neighbours these days. They are turning to the neighbour out of necessity, rather than old-fashioned good will.

2: Perception of hi-tech security, or rather perception of making an effort at security. Just like the gahzillion dollars spent of on body scanners that don't do very much for air plane safety, certainly not in proportion to their cost.

It's hardly the first first-world product that satisfies a want rather than a need.
No, Service Packs sometimes even introduced significant new functionality. Mostly, any non-critical fixes would wait for a SP, to make testing easier.

I imagine that Microsoft will do for Windows what they do for other products like IE: Offer periodic "rollup" updates that apply several updates at once.
"When we realized that multiple YC partners had already independently contributed to the Kickstarter project because they wanted to use Light Table themselves, it was not a hard decision." --thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992343
Well it definitely looks like a $30 logo...

I see a lot of people here saying an early stage startup doesn't need good design. That's funny because I heard the exact opposite advice from Tom Preston-Werner of Github at YCombinator Startup School last weekend. With so many startups competing nowadays, success usually comes down to who executes the idea the best, and a huge part of that is design and user experience. An amateur logo is just going to make you look like an amateur company to users.

I say this as a programmer: skimping on design is just as likely to cost you users as skimping on engineering. There's a reason why top designers are becoming just as sought after as top programmers in the startup world.
The bit about your daughter keeps cracking me up. That that would be the first thing she would try... Thanks.
Question is, can I downgrade it to 7pro... I have some machines I want 7 pro on, but not 8... The upgrade from Vista Business to 7 Pro is $200
Yes - I've conflated my AppStore Game purchasing with my App Store Total purchasing - I have a lot of purchases on my iPhone that aren't games. And, I don't get the same utility of, say, MotionXGPS, and GPSDrive, and Shazam as I do my games.
Sometimes people come into the office on the weekend. Sometimes they don't realize that they lost their office key until they get to the office (they're never the first one in during the week, for instance). It would be nice if they could text me and I could remotely open the office for them.
>think bags of groceries in both hands and you forgot to preunlock

If you've got both your hands busy, whichever keylock system is on your door is irrelevant. Only a voice activation system would be Ok.
I don't believe that. Throughout history, labor-saving machinery has put people out of work, and they become available labor for entirely new industries.

For example, there's a growing industry now of digitizing the zillions of documents, books, photos, movies, art, etc. This is low skilled labor.

Or Apple/Google/Microsoft sticking camera hats on people and having them hike trails to develop maps.

The list is endless.
Collecting the DNA of world leaders as a bio-weapon
When you were a teenager living with your parents, did you poop with the door open? Did your parents poop with the door open? When a friend or coworker is visiting at your place, do you poop with the door open?

For most people, the answer is "no" in all those cases, because most people nowadays do not find the sight of pooping people appealing. Thus, when one does poop with the door open when their SO is around, but does not do so when others are around, the message one is sending is that the SO does not deserve the common courtesy that other people do, that the SO has become just a fixture around the house or perhaps a pet.
One word: poetry. Traditional break behaviour (new para) is great between stanzas/verses; not so much between lines. (It's also the primary reason why the <br> tag still exists in HTML.)
I'm seeing this ploy more and more - come join us, and if you're awesome we'll fund you and help you get set up. But the pitch doesn't scale (unless you're not just running a company, but also an investment firm). Is there a place for a company that helps you scale this?
For people (like me) who hate pagination:

1. Don't stop holding her hand
2. Don't stop trying to be attractive
3. Don't always point out her weaknesses
4. Don't stop cooking for her
5. Don't yell at your spouse
6. Don't call names
7. Don't be stingy with your money
8. Don't argue in front of the kids
9. Don't encourage each other to skip working out
10. Don't poop with the bathroom door open
11. Don't stop kissing her
12. Don't stop having fun together
13. Don't pressure each other
14. Don't label each other with negative labels
15. Don't skip out on things that are important to her
16. Don't emotionally distance yourself after a fight

Having wrecked a good number of serious relationships in my time, I really feel those are just symptoms of underlying problems that can't be corrected by adhering to lists. There seem to be categories of things going wrong and a lot of these points are redundant in that context. Maybe the message should not be primarily that relationships require work, but that they often need to run better algorithms. People need to make more of an effort to see the world through their partners' eyes, but they also need to establish a clearer understanding about their own goals and feelings.

Holding hands (1), cooking for each other (4), kissing (11), having fun (12) - those are kind of obvious relationship indicators and they should not be items on a to do list. If they don't happen there are underlying causes such as lack of time, stress, apathy, or a general lack of affection.

Making an effort to be desirable (2), working out (9), not pooping publicly (10, WTF?!?) are general maintenance problems related to attractiveness, and they're kind of obvious.

The highly redundant items pertaining to not being a total dick (3, 5, 6, 13, 14) look like they might happen increasingly when the relationship has already entered failure mode.

Emotional distance (16) is what you're supposed to feel after a serious fight. Effort should go into addressing the issues leading to the fight, as well as the behavior of both people during the actual confrontation. If you feel distance after the "battle", that means the war is not over and you have a serious problem there that can't be addressed by simply forcing yourself to not feel distant anymore.

Finally, 15, skipping out on activities that are important to your partner. Well, I think it's important that both partners remain full individuals even during a relationship. Shared interests and activities are great, and it does make sense to attend stuff for the sake of your better half sometimes. However, if there are things one party doesn't like to do at all, there should always be a way to opt out peacefully. Attending stuff you don't like won't do anyone any favors in the long run, it's not healthy or sustainable.
"Luck" is showing up consistently so that you're present whenever opportunity decides to show up. Thus, you make your luck. And I believe this is where the resilience mentioned in the essay comes in; to ensure you always show up.
From the grandparent post:

> Her book is truly excellent. And in previous articles I've seen Paul say that the #1 thing that they want in a founder is determination, and the person that they rely on to spot it during the interview is Jessica.

So which part of that are you trying to contradict?

The way I read it, your description of her book supports the grandparent's claim. If you are able to create a collection of wonderful interviews, what's the common denominator there?
There's a point to be made here about putting all your eggs in one basket...
I feel your pain. Parens in links made me never forget %28 and %29. But I think your solution causes more problems than it solves. The biggest issue is that it's not backwards-compatible with current markdown. For example, in a citation following parentheses:

Blah blah blah (side note)[1](http://url1).

Your markdown generator could output

<a href="1">side note</a>(http://url1).

or

(side note)<a href="http://url1>1</a>.

The latter is current behavior, but your suggestion makes the grammar ambiguous. Most parsers are "greedy", so the former is more likely to be output. Unless you specified more complex behavior, people would have to go back and escape their parens near links.
My apologies but what sciurus might be addressing and what I am talking about are addressing two very different things.

There is a bug in ext4, https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/25/521

Note that this is dated after the "Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:31:29 -0400" post and talks about changing code related to a truncated journal.

My post does not say anything about the likelihood of the dataloss due to such bugs, I mention what happens in every design in a WAL journaling system.

Talking about the impact of a particular ext bug is up to the people who post on the LKML. To be honest, I don't really care how severe the bug is, I care about why there are bugs and journal truncation is a source of them.