skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we're going to make it look like a train wreck, let's not forget that even the fabled YCombinator is cutting back. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861867 for verification.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, history is full of examples showing that one of the best ways to come up with great ideas is to try a lot of different ideas out. This process sucks for all of the people who had hope and will lose their businesses. But in the long run it is better for all of us that they exist.

Sure, historically Silicon Valley has created 10 great companies per year. And many more successful but not widely known real ones. With the frothiness we might get 10 still. But hopefully they are better great companies. With all of the information being shared on how to be an entrepreneur, maybe we'll get half again as many moderate successes. (And the moderate successes are better off without venture capital. Really.) And established companies will get more entrepreneurial employees.

Believe it or not, this is actually a good outcome. It means more startups. More dashed hopes. And on the whole a better economic outcome.
Trolls hack Tumblr: "Never expected it to get this big"
The people have spoken.

I wonder how often these studies are taken- annually? Quarterly? It'd be neat if they were done frequently, rather like polls during campaign season. Maybe a month or two after major product launches to gauge if satisfaction has changed.
That's what I was thinking reading this. Whether it is due to "overzealous fans" or not, click fraud is click fraud. Google (really any advertising broker) can't make a business out of selling fake "clicks", they have to sell views by real users. There has to be a solution to prevent these clicks from registering, and they picked the easy one.
I was just thinking a hackernews userscript that tossed these up somewhere in the layout might be good, given the audience. The core of it's just picking a random quote from an array so it should be simple. You could select lines or quotes from users and add them to the queue with LocalStorage or something.

I am now apparently working on this...
Thanks! Our biggest issue that got us headed this direction was how many times we'd use chat to decide something... and then separately need to track those decisions (spreadsheets, project management systems... we tried them all). From our early experience with this approach, it just feels right to have it all in one spot. The added bonus is that the lightweight, informal feel of chat promotes a lot more usage than any other approach we've tried.
Putting Cyber-warfare into perspective
I am about to graduate from DBC; also grateful. I have an M.S. in Information Science & Technology (and my first 3 semesters were in Computer Science). Dev Bootcamp taught me more about programming--and more importantly, how to work with other programmers--than grad school did in two years.

And I heard about it here on HN.
30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: John Stultz
I don't want another TC type, I've found I've become tired of hearing who was acquired or who raised how much
I used to work in AppleCare and would advise OP to simply try again with a different genius/agent. Apple will set some guidelines but ultimately it was up to the agent's discretion. I was there for antenna-gate and almost always tried to make the customer satisfied- although I would have to run through the tests to protect myself.

Its a bureaucracy like anything else, some are more susceptible to empathy.
It's not really a script kiddie if it's an original exploit, and is still a vulnerability that has cost businesses money.
So basically Google has enabled trolls/people with bad intentions to destroy someone's cash flow. This seems ridiculous! That's the one thing I hate about Google...their lack of customer service. Regardless if their service is free, they are making more than enough money to set up a call center or something.
> Interesting. I've had the exact same problem, and yet what happened to me was the best customer service I've ever experienced.

Not all geniuses are created equal. Some of them are horrible. Some are great. It's like any other population of human beings. I've gotten both kinds.
Just as it has always been, the T series will be the best built laptops. You were free to purchase a T530 with any of the i5 or i7 CPUs and 1920 x 1080 screen. The only downside to them is the lack of higher end GPUs. They are just about as solidly built as the older T series.
I'm hoping the staggering lack of concern for proper customer service for any of their products will someday start to affect their bottom line.

These stories are not new and seem to be adding up. I'm still confused why they haven't invested in a call center or some type of dedicated customer service for the products they support.

It makes absolutely no sense to me.
Mind sharing where you found this info? Did you figure it out yourself?
I started monitoring recent posts (including this one) for downvotes awhile ago.

Whenever I get one, regardless of how many upvotes I've gotten, I delete the post immediately.

Sometimes, I'll also delete any other recent posts done in the same reading session, if they're of a similar quality.

This had the effect, over time, of increasing my karma. It also caused me to write things that are generally uncontroversial and, well, bland.
> TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste

I don't see how it is. It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row.

When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable?

In fact, I have completely disabled the trackpad on my ThinkPad in the BIOS. I have no need for it when there's the TrackPoint.
No you should buy shirts made of cotton, not tinfoil is what I'm suggesting.
Kickstarter averaged £48 a minute during the first month live in the UK
Sounds like a property management firm. :-)
It's easy to mistakenly believe HN is meritocratic if you have enough HN celebrity for people to seek your comments out. My comments with the least thought behind them get the most upvotes. Those with the most thought pass by unseen.

It's a powerful disincentive for putting much thought into comments.
Only very few websites are blocked in China, not the whole Internet.
It appears that the Curiosity Rover has discovered simple organic molecules on Mars, but they are in the process of determining whether or not they are indigenous to Mars.
Yeah.. - but why read this over any one of hundreds other books/blogs/articles which make similar claims?

Phrases like 'quantifying their happiness' make me sad.
Leaping Into the Gesture-Control Era
Color Blender
Fallacies of Data
Heat heals USB drives
You come across as an Apple hater here. You're not making objective arguments or even providing personal anecdotes. You're just pushing your personal opinion as fact.

> And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there.

When you call someone ignorant, you should typically follow up with a factual statement and not just your personal opinion. In my experience, the TrackPoint is tedious and awkward. Good for you if you like it, but everyone else in the world isn't "ignorant" for having a different opinion.

> It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad.

Not in my experience, but a bigger issue is that the TrackPoint is abstracted further, which makes it less intuitive. If touching something on the screen directly is a first-level abstraction, introducing a mouse or trackpad is a second-level abstraction, because your motions are moving a proxy (the cursor) around on screen. The TrackPoint is a third-level abstraction, because you're using a joystick to move the proxy, so your motions are no longer paralleled on the screen (i.e. the cursor moves but you didn't actually move the TrackPoint).

> And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important.
Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality.

This is just unadulterated Apple hate combined with some vacuous claims. This doesn't convince anyone that you're correct. It just makes you sound petty and bitter.
I'd rather have the freedom of choosing a feudal e-lord than trust governmental regulations. Maybe there's a reporting bias but the ones I hear about are always god-awful.

From seizing domains[1], blocking fairly random sites[2] to threatening ISPs over content[3], governments make Google, Canonical and the like look very attractive in comparison. Especially considering you can dump them with only moderate effort and cost.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/feds-seize-101-do...

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/uk-isps-block-pirate-bays-artist-pr...

[3] http://olgierd.bblog.pl/wpis,jak;urzad;celny;bogu;ducha;winn...
Show HN: Pvsh - A reverse Kickstarter (make feature requests for any product)
I have always found it interesting that the tech titans, whose employees seem to overwhelmingly support high-tax blue-state politicians and policies, are also engaged in the most aggressive tax avoidance in the world, and given their wild success, probably the largest in history.

We only need to look at Europe to see how widespread tax avoidance plus high government spending creates an unsustainable path that puts the entire economy and country at risk.

Since silicon valley seems like such a civic minded place, I'm wondering if we will ever get realistic about what we'd really like to see happen: either support lower government spending across the board to complement the aggressive tax avoidance, or demand that leading companies pay taxes according to the state or country where the revenue is received, and not based on wherever a shell company may reside.
Stem cells made from blood
With all due respect, and I agree that it wasn't your "fault", but your friends were engaging in click fraud, and you admit as much. (I'm not completely sure I'd believe they were doing it just "once" a day, but that's between you guys). What should the response to click fraud be for a $10/day account? They simply can't afford to dedicate a human being to something that small.
Note also that he's got his canvas set to half the CSS size, i.e. each canvas pixel is 4 screen pixels on a normal display. On a retina display each canvas pixel will be 16 screen pixels. So if you tried to manipulate real pixels this way on those devices it wouldn't be pretty. (Retina version: http://jsfiddle.net/RFLaW/)
I stopped reading TC a long time ago for all the reasons mentioned plus their site is so full of widgets, it keeps crashing on my iPad 1 (not a lot of sites accomplish that, well done TC).

I also like to avoid Pandodaily as much as possible. Is there a HN extension that can filter out these submissions for me?
Why Legalizing Pot Won't Curb the Drug War
Plivo has useful features that Twilio doesn't have, e.g. Playing in call notifications, bidirectional SIP and IIRC early media. I think Plivo basically copying Twilio's API schema was a mistake as IMO it's not perfect itself. Twilio most certainly should not be resting on its laurels.

One thing I'm happy to see Plivo stop doing is arguably trolling Twilio at every turn. All that did was to indirectly make the conversation about Twilio, instead of Plivo. It's a mistake Twilio has never made, and IMO one of the reasons behind their success.
It's not just Apple. It's all companies. When was the last time you tried to repair your washing machine under the warranty? Good luck.

And it's software too. I can't remember the last time I installed a piece of software that wasn't filled with bugs. Some of them just glaring. Companies mantra, "Oh we'll fix that in an update". Six months down the road. Meanwhile they already have my money. This especially true with games.

It's the way we do business now. "Sell now! Report earnings now!" And worry about the rest later.

I mean who cares if out of 25 million customers 15,000 have bad monitors. Just make sure none of them write for the New York Times. :)
Most of the data are generated automatically from SEC forms regarding the trades of insiders over the previous 24 months.

Ballmer's last transaction was 11/23/10. Hence, his name will not show up in data generated that way. In 2010, he sold 12% of his stake for about $1.3 billion. He's probably not hurting for cash.

Fidelity reports his ownership here: http://eresearch.fidelity.com/eresearch/evaluate/fundamental...
That's nonsensical. Apple is marketing these staff as "geniuses". They're supposed to operate on a higher standard than the stereotypical brain-dead tech support; thus we should hold them to that standard.

If Apple's standards are as low as those of other companies then they really don't deserve to earn the price premium they charge.
Agreed. This is a result of me clicking and laughing, and not thinking and judging. Who knows what other (less publicly appreciable) clips are being passed about West Mids police.
>Your income should not solely depend on one party

The networking effect is naturally monopolistic.

There aren't any practical alternatives to facebook and youtube. Being kicked from either would be disastrous and neither has to offer an alternate ad network or even need a good reason to get rid of you.

I imagine a simple mediation or ombudsman process is all these companies need, but they have no incentive to really make that work. They're still making money hand over fist.

From a regulator perspective, these are major issues, especially since we've officially entered the age of the walled garden/centralized store. I don't think this is the kind of thing the free market will magically be able to fix if we sit and our hands and wait. I imagine its going to get worse once MS and other big players start making it much more difficult or impossible to install unsigned software or software from outside their store.
To rebut his claim though you'd need a survey asking people how many times they've had faulty components/hardware. Not how good they feel about the supplier.
Bionic hands are getting closer to the real thing
> Having watched Notch write Prelude of the Chambered (which I then ported to JRuby) it seems he really loves this direct pixel manipulation style - as do I!

> The sad part, though, is it doesn't particularly scale well with canvas (yet) and using sprites, shape primitives, or even WebGL is way to get full speed at a regular resolution.

It doesn't just not scale well with canvas, it doesn't scale well with modern hardware. A single call to draw a textured polygon of any size is ~as expensive as the call drawing a single pixel. A call to draw a stored model with with thousands of polygons is ~as expensive as the call to draw a single polygon.

When doing pixel at a time drawing like that you are completely ignoring the specialized hardware found in the GPU, which is vastly more efficient at pushing pixels than the CPU, even in the lowest-end Intel integrated GPUs of the newest generation.

If you want to do serious graphics, you really should just get used to OpenGL/DirectX.
I see what you are saying. Evasion is avoidance by deceit. However minimisation is defined as reducing something to a least possible amount, and so cannot be avoidance, or combined with deceit, evasion, if that least possible amount is determined by measure of its legality.
Ericsson steps up patent enforcement against Samsung with request for US ban
At the bottom of the spam post it says if you delete the post it will delete your Tumblr account. Since this spreads by people viewing it, it's probably important to point out that deleting the posts will not delete your tumblr account, and you should do it immediately so people viewing your blog don't get infected themselves.
Impossibility of tablet native journalism
I keep seeing this over and over on numerous landing pages: Why do people run ads for other companies? Do you guys get Apple hardware at a discount and must show them in your pictures?

This has nothing to do with being for or against any vendor. It's alienating your users, and you never want to do that. Brands communicate emotions, it's risky to expose yourself to that.
Or is that on purpose?
You wouldn't do DNS lookups asynchronously in Go to begin with. Modeling concurrency of any sort in Go the way you would with an event loop is usually a code smell.
If Google knows the clicks are no good, why do they have to ban the user instead of just voiding the clicks and not giving them any money?
That Disruptive Retina Display
Looks nice, want to try it :D
This is the journalism equivalent of the problem he is espousing. An article about nothing, a writer with a self-entitled attitude shamelessly riding something topical. No thanks.

I will add that starting anything is difficult and companies like a food delivery service for dogs can easily pivot into an efficient way to get senior citizens their medication, cheaper faster and more efficiently. Many things start small, uninformed and experimentally.
Replied via email. Thanks
Gotta agree with this point. I was a 2006 MBP owner (1st-gen), and at one point a CD got stuck in the drive. Took it to an authorized reseller, but I was made to pay for not only the CD drive repair but also a case repair since apparently that was also dented. The reason for all this? The CD drive on the 2006 MBP was located underneath the area where one might rest their wrists on the laptop, so over time this force simply made the hollow CDR drive collapse.

Cost me over $600, after I already purchased AppleCare. It's all good now though, I've been pirating Logic and Final Cut for years so it's pretty much paid back. :)
Text Messaging Turns 20, Will It Survive Another Two Decades?
There's no reason why customer support can't scale. That's just another kind of scaling problem. I think the explanation is actually that it's too expensive and Google has done quite well not offering that level of service.
I've been thinking we're on the cusp of what I'm just going to call "Web 3.0" even though that term looks stupid to me now so I apologize to me browsing my history in a couple of months (sorry). The big social media darlings have gone bust and the cycle looks a lot like (but obviously not as bad as) the web 1.0 crash. People look up, realize that they're doing some really silly shit and then work on "serious" enterprise stuff for awhile as the market sorts itself out and as the market is sorting itself something weird and new bubbles up on the consumer side, last cycle it was social connections, cycle before it was the existence of the consumer itself.

I personally think it's going to come with google glass-likes and powerful mobile computers(read: phones) and have to do with blurring the lines between the internet and real life but that's just a guess.
Agreed!

TNW Article:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/03/a-worm-is-hijacking...
Command & Conquer in HTML5 with multiplayer
You'd think if they could identify 'suspicious' clicks, they could just ignore them: don't hold the impressions/clicks against the ad-buyer, don't reward the ad-bearing site operator. Problem solved.

If it's an honest misunderstanding: no harm done.
If it's a money-making scheme: they'll give up and go elsewhere, guaranteed.
I think what he's going for is that, had you kept your original MBP, you would be unsatisfied. Not saying he's right or wrong there.

However, I think it is fair to say that the majority of Apple fans often have a pretty frequent upgrade cycle. Consequently I don't think there are too many "long term customers" of Apple products in his sense of the word. I think Meaty is really going for "long term" customer as in - infrequent customer, keeping devices for long term.
The fact of the matter is that every first-gen product has had and will have issues regardless of the manufacturer.

Not just first-gen. My second generation iPad has the same problem.
Intel's Tiny NUC "Next Unit of Computing" PC
I don't see it as spam, I see it as a necessary part of getting the kinks worked out ahead of when we middle-adopters buy the 2nd or 3rd gen products. The more bloggers gripe about these problems the more likely Apple will have prioritized fixing them before the next generation comes out.
See point #10 from http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/hacker-group-exploits-...
Yes I assumed that, I need a new phone :S
This is really cool. I really hope you guys pull it out!

But I still think the best way to fix team chat is to give people free beer. :)
This is an ad hominem attack that is senseless here. Turkey was a cool guy; "his independent rediscovery of the factorization that allows the FFT to be computed absolutely qualifies as evidence to that effect." Yes, you are absulutely right. But that's not what the article said; that's what lutusp said.
> When you call someone ignorant, you should typically follow up with a factual statement and not just your personal opinion.

Funny, this is what I would call "personal opinion":

> the TrackPoint is tedious and awkward

And this is what I would call a "factual statement":

> It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row.

> When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable?

I would say that I have provided a much more factual basis for my argument than your explanation that it's "tedious and awkward".

> The TrackPoint is a third-level abstraction, because you're using a joystick to move the proxy, so your motions are no longer paralleled on the screen (i.e. the cursor moves but you didn't actually move the TrackPoint).

The fact that the TrackPoint doesn't move is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It allows you to scroll infinitely, never move your hand from the home row, etc.

Getting used to the TrackPoint is just a matter of time (a few days for me), but having to move your hands a lot when using a trackpad or mouse will never change - it's physical reality.

And if it's so difficult to use a joystick to control things, how is it that millions of people are able to play console video games without any problem? Many of the people who complain about the TrackPoint are the same people who play Wii, 360, or PS3 games that make extensive use of joysticks.

> This is just unadulterated Apple hate combined with some vacuous claims. This doesn't convince anyone that you're correct. It just makes you sound petty and bitter.

I'm sorry you feel that way, but I find no reason to return your ad hominem attack on me, so whatever.