skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't generally mind free services adding whatever advertising or other things they want, but imo it gets into considerably different territory when there's anything like a transfer of ownership or substantive licensing of ownership-like rights. Those kinds of transfers should be very explicit, where users consciously and knowingly agree, "yes, I agree to license this content for [x,y] use". Of course, Instagram claims they didn't do that here (though EFF's lawyers seem to disagree).

For example, I use Flickr as a free service, and I don't think they owe me anything. They could add advertising if they want, they could remove the free tier and shut down my account if I don't pay, they could shut down the service entirely, etc. That's all well within their rights, since they run the service. But imo it's a qualitative difference from those kinds of changes if they were to add new ToS terms claiming ownership or ownership-like rights over my photographs. That's very different because it can actually damage my career outside their service if I fail to notice the relevant ToS change and they grab some rights I didn't intend to license to them.
I agree with Alex. The dynamic equity concept doesn't sound simple to begin with, and I think your suggestions would just complicate the idea further.

A business can't spend all day meta-managing their equity, after all.
A huge amount of Unix software uses UTF-16 just like Windows (including Java). You're just being deliberately ignorant of the history. UTF-8 didn't exist and UCS-2/UTF-16 was the standard. One could argue that the Unicode Consortium screwed up assuming that Basic Multilingual Plane would be enough characters for everyone.
7 Lessons From Random Steve Jobs Encounters
In all these cases, you measure benefits against costs. Costs (eg negative impact, not price) of limiting firearms: low, mostly political. Costs of limiting cars: catastrophic, economy-devastating. That's why we should stop at firearms.
> What are you talking about?

You might want to read the link you posted.
Agreed. I read this:

> What Hacker News doesn't prepare you for, however, is when a competitor gets acquired for a billion dollars, work-life imbalance, and getting dumped by your World of Warcraft girlfriend.

and was pretty interested. It sounds like the start of two pretty interesting stories. Instead of actually telling these stories, however, the post descended into platitudes. I'm beginning to feel that I should be flagging posts that are as meatless as this one.
Agree, at least on its own right. But that wasn't what the line read, and it quite sent me off.
No. There are, in fact, ongoing discussions in the US about Facebook being used for authentication at banking and government sites.
Build an open alternative to Instagram.
In case you don't understand the American tax system:

In the US we pay income tax. That is, a percentage (a large percentage) of my income goes directly to the federal government.

In addition to this, when goods I buy that are manufactured in other countries are imported, there is a tax levied against them.

I was using the passport thing as an example of "poor marketing" on behalf of the US Federal government because my perception is that I already did pay for it.
I apply the same test to pretty much everything I do online these days, and as a result, I maintain a dignified silence through most social media channels.

I whitewalled my Facebook a long time ago, don't 'like' any pages, and provide minimal personal information only to friends.

I don't use Twitter because I figure, even if I had an account purely to follow people, the individuals/organizations I follow could come back to haunt me. The same applies to YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc.
She hasn't said she doesn't consent or request it.
It's a science fiction idea I think, but something that would also fly, given their statements, would be to show photos of people who look like your friends (Facebook have the machine learning / pattern matching capability) in order to influence your decisions; someone who looks like a great crush you had, dining at a nearby restaurant, for example.

This would neither necessarily fit into the classification of 'advertising', nor be showing photos to 'your friends', who would immediately call this kind of behaviour out. This would sorta tally with the fact that photos are public by default AFAIK, and the comments about privacy.

Hopefully irrelevant, but just a thought.
Good job!

But there's one feature that every site I've seen like this is missing - a history state so you can go back. I always find that I "next" something that I wish I could go back and check, would be nice to do this with the back button (or a history on the page).
A pain? Sure. Impossible? Not by a long shot.

A few points:

1. The main discussion here was about HTML5 based apps using a native web-view app wrapper. That makes "OS version" and "browser version" identical, and puts you in an identical position to native apps in terms of number of platforms to deal with.

2. Even if you're dealing with multiple browser versions, there isn't very much difference between how a given version of a modern browser behaves under different OSes. And if a page works correctly in an old version of a browser, it is very unusual for it to start working incorrectly in a newer version of that browser.

3. Maintaining a single code base with special cases for different platforms is way easier than maintaining multiple disparate code bases. It's the old DRY principle.

The fact is this: writing an app and supporting multiple OSes (even multiple versions of the same OS) is hard. Doing so while making everything pixel-exact across different platforms is really hard, and usually pointless. But the idea that it would be somehow easier when maintaining entirely separate code bases is ludicrous.
You are probably correct. Although to my credit I made sure the language I offered had been previously litigated. One argument offered was that it was "too much trouble" to have a special employment agreement for me and a different one for everyone else. They really meant "too much more trouble" since there were at least 3 revisions of the agreement between the time I started and the time I left. Interesting to read the revisions though and compare them to lawsuits that had transpired. (kind of a sick hobby of mine)
The users didn't help build anything. Instagram built a cool service, and the users used it. They didn't build anything.

Now obviously network effects help something like this grow, but don't kid yourself. They aren't running a charity. They are running a business. At some point you have to start making money or the service just goes away. Then all that those amazing users "built" will be gone in a second when they flick the power switch.
Yup, I guess that's the point, but dissing the whole platform because a kind of software product is not particularly buoyant...
There's more than one real living Mr. Test or Mr. Null in the world.

Hashtag sounds like it could be a respected German surname. (Does it translate?)
My Christmas wish is for Nintendo to stop developing hardware
The title of the article should really be "Are you a Broken Human Being?"
Licence is: "non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use"

So I would say "sub-license" means "re-license". It would be very unfortunate to have to compete with Instagram on pricing for your own content to a third party. Or some company that buys Instagram/Facebook out.

Just read this bit:
"To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear."

So I think that clears up the 'sub-licensable' aspect. It doesn't rule out giving them away for free - which come to think of it, would hard to compete with price-wise! I'm really starting to wonder what they had in mind.
Instagram doesn't even have a business model... why replace it? I don't imagine 1 billion sells for a pic app with no revenues happening again so soon...
A modern GPU is actually pretty essential for html5 games to run right (whether using canvas or webgl).
How do I swap Apple for Android? Your tech questions answered
Indeed, and that's the subtle (but significant) difference. I've noticed for example that in my Facebook feed it never says "Bob likes Pizza Hut", it says instead "Bob liked a page: Pizza Hut".

It certainly goes into a gray area - but something as explicitly as "Bob likes Domino's! You should get Domino's too!" is a legal minefield I doubt anyone would willingly wade into.
Exactly. So I move into the office and sleep under my desk.
Modeling the falling slinky
I’m keeping my Instagram account
Each EC2 instance type has a different amount of ephemeral storage, from 160 GB to 3.3 TB. You need to arrange for it to be mounted when you launch the instance.
3 Reasons Not To Convert Your Nexus 7 Into An Ubuntu Linux Tablet
Even the smallest instances have 160GB of storage, all the way up to 3TB on the cc2.8xlarge. New high I/O instances have 2TB of "holy shit fast, destroys my $1000 enterprise SSD" storage. (just tested it last week)
They didn't exactly face this problem. Linux kernel actually mostly has no idea of any kind of unicode or encoding except two places: character console code and windows-originated unicode based filesystems. It's interesting to note that NTFS in windows kernel implements it's own case folding mechanism for unicode and that this is also probably only significant place where windows kernel has to care about unicode.
Security enhancements in Java SE 7 update 10
I can imagine a better response, but not one that would take significantly longer for lawyers to vet. An ideal response would actually show examples (i.e. "This is an example of your photo being used in conjunction with an advertisement. This is an example of how your photo will never be used"), because as it is, the language is just couched enough that Instagram users, once burned, will be even more suspicious and cynical.
Mozilla seems to have issues with prizes they offer for stuff. I was supposedly selected to receive an FF4 t-shirt for my continued bugzilla participation and bug filing. I replied with the size (+ maybe design) I wanted and that was that :(
Look for Danny Thorpe's comments, he mentions that it was created by a company called "Cinematronics", which was later acquired by Maxis, which was then acquired by EA.
I posted something similar on here[1] about how Instagram cannot sell its users photos and what they're actually doing is trying to monetize similar to how Facebook does Sponsored Posts.

Instagram's terms of service stated that was their intentions:

To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

And "Section 106: Exclusive rights in copyrighted works aka. 17 U.S.C. § 106"[3] essentially states Instagram cannot sell its users photos and it cannot use its users photos and alter them in any meaningful way.

The problem was how they communicated the change and they've admitted that too[2] although they've started to fix this with this blogpost and will continue to communicate this.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939650

[2] https://twitter.com/instagram/status/281133360833773568

[3] http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html
I don't believe you're really responding to what Anig said. He didn't say that you weren't allowed to ever be called anything but your real name; he just said that your legal name does have some special status in society.

Similarly, I was recently informed that it was my Twitter birthday. It was not the same as my legal birthday. This does not, however, deprive my legal birthday its significance.
The sentiment reads 'Yeah yeah, we hear you, here's some token feel goods but we're going to continue to forge ahead and hope the idiots among you generate enough positive noise for us to drown out the dissenting signals'.

I understand they need to monetize (god, it's taken HOW LONG!?!? Jesus!), but that doesn't excuse them from intellectual dishonesty. People have genuine concerns and they should be addressed clearly.

I think the market would simply be happy with a 'Creative Commons' default option tbh (like deviantart, flickr etc) with an account or picture level opt-out. Really simple, just put a cherry on this crap. Somewhere.
Google UK managing director details Nexus 4 supply and communication issues
Entrepreneurship Proverbs
Young, Unemployed and Living on the Street
Excell breaks badly for trivially small data sets
Motivation for Startup Founder (check out the reviews)
Jesse,

I completely feel your pain. I moved up to San Francisco the previous June with the grand vision of building out my team, raising a round of investment and building my PaaS for hosting node.js apps (NodeSocket) to something really special. I left a cushy director level job in San Diego and left a core group of good friends as well. I simply packed up everything in my car and made the drive up. The first couple of months I stayed on friends couches and did AirBnB, essentially living out of my suitcase, and hacking all day and night.

The trough of sorrow is deep, with extreme peaks and valleys. One day I was talking with Sequoia Capital and first tier angel investors flying high and optimistic, the next day, they are all passing, and I realized that I have burned through my entire savings.

The thing about startups is they are born easy, but die a very long and drawn-out death. I recently just came to terms, and announced that NodeSocket is shutting down (http://blog.nodesocket.com/shutting-down) to pursue a new opportunity Commando.io (http://commando.io).

Keep with it, take some time off from startups and entrepreneurship. Doing a startup is the hardest thing most people will ever do.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-privacy-terminology-01 tries to define some of this terminology:

* Pseudonym: An identifier of a subject other than one of the subject's real names.

* Real name: The opposite of a pseudonym. For example, [...]

* Pseudonymous: A property of a data subject in which the subject is identified by a pseudonym.

* Pseudonymity: The state of being pseudonymous.

Pseudonymity is strengthened when less personal data can be linked to the pseudonym; when the same pseudonym is used less often and across fewer contexts; and when independently chosen pseudonyms are more
frequently used for new actions (making them, from an observer's or attacker's perspective, unlinkable).

So according to these definitions, you're right that a pseudonym by itself may not require one to conceal their "real" identity. However, pseudonymity clearly does.

I think pseudonymity is the more fundamental as a general security property. So your example of a person using a pseudonym without significant desire for pseudonymity is more of a corner case, at least in serious discussions.

If we need a term for a pseudonym without strong pseudonymity, I propose we use the term from IRC and call it a "nick".
If you think success will cure depression, your youthful inexperience is showing.
Why HTML5 is more semantic
<rant>
I really have no idea what people are complaining about. What are you putting in your Instagram photos? It's a cool service that lets you share pictures with friends. What is it that you think your pictures are worth?

When you sign up for a free service, you have to know that you are the product. PERIOD. Don't sign up for free services if you don't want to be the product. Go pay flickr. They will take your money. Stop bitching about free services adding ads so that they can keep the lights on and keep offering your free service.
</rant>
Thank you so much for sharing this. It's about time people started pointing out that EBS is a disaster. If we all do, maybe Amazon will finally fix it.
As others have pointed out, all EC2 instances come with large ephemeral volumes already attached as /dev/sdb, etc; you just have to mount them:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/In...
Apparently, you can just copy the folder across to an installation of the later versions of windows and it's "fully functional"

http://mspinball.weebly.com/

I can't try this right now, since I don't currently have access to a Windows machine, but can anyone confirm/deny this? Do you get the floating-point gravity bug?
Narcissism (Delusions of grandeur) is a psychological affliction, not a drug.
They don't allow you to do this anymore. Back when Amazon started, lots of families only had one email address from their ISP. They allowed you to make multiple accounts with different passwords for this reason.

If you try to set it up today, it won't work.
All that is true, but still ... medical errors kill 195,000 people per year. Unintentional falls kill 24,792 per year!

So the number of gun homicides is shockingly low! I was shocked yesterday when someone pointed this out to me.

I can't remember the time I started my day out by worrying about whether someone I loved would die that day from an accidental fall. But that's twice as likely to happen as them being murdered with a gun. Shocking.
Facebook CEO Zuckerberg donating $500M in stock
How Forensic Linguistics Identified Online Trolls in New Orleans
Can you actually buy them at that price? Don't they get auctioned off, and so that the actual yield is lower? From reading that web page it looks like the effective yield was only 4-4.5%
Interactive storytelling built with Meteor
Hmm. Or worse.. http://www.thelocal.se/45142/20121218/#.UNBmPUKjC2w
Focus, Or Else
Why do you think my view is backwards specifically? Can we agree that businesses and individuals in general tend to succeed according to the power law? On average, in a population, there will be a very few extremely successful individuals, a moderate amount of fairly successful, and a vast majority that aren't very successful. All evidence from every society of every corner of this world seems to indicate this. I think this holds true with both businesses and individuals if left by their own accord. If this assumption is true, it would be impossible to look at society membership as a simple "fee" or renting. This will simply hit a majority of people disproportionately hard. In my world, it makes much more sense to take an analogy from the investing world. Investors have to invest in many duds before getting a payoff. If investors simply required a one-time fee for helping a company out, they could simply not exist unless that fee was extremely large.

You might want to argue that the successful people rightly deserve their exponential wealth, but I believe that circumstance and chance is a large factor in success, and I also believe that it's in the best interest of the successful to fund the failures to some degree. Again, all evidence I've seen points to high income inequality being the main perpetrator in criminality, unhappiness and overall societal disfunction.

Full disclosure: I grew up in Sweden, so my view on government will probably be fundamentally different from yours. The Swedish system has many problems but also many benefits. I have seen enough benefits that I would gladly pay the high tax rate, yet there are many in Sweden who don't.
>Everybody installs the same OS, and it transparently works for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

Or doesn't work. Didn't the recent releases drop support for 32-bit Macs?
Decent response, but I remain unconvinced.
Facebook makes $36/user per year, on average. They are mostly about photos. Instagram knows this. $0.99 will be cutting it way too short.

I don't understand why companies like this don't just offer an ad-free pay option with a stronger privacy policy as an alternative to their free option and make everyone happy, except the total freeloaders who want free and their privacy protected. Seems to work fine for Flickr.
That's a very interesting "survival of the most litigated" sort of evolution. I wonder how much of a given document is unnecessary evolutionary baggage copy & pasted because it's part of That Standard Clause. I'd love to read more if you happen to recall the comment/story
Authentication and Encryption in Inferno OS
Windows is saddled with baroque interfaces that are there only because they've always been there. Microsoft OS developers try to simulate or stub out old behaviors, in an effort to keep old app code running without breaking anything too badly.

Such a crust of backward compatibility code weighs heavily on a decades-old OS.
Exactly. And what happens when a user needs a legitimate refund/exchange and Amazon then refuse because their account has had so much fraudulent account gone unnoticed? Not very good customer service at this point...
I tend to aggregate data into something manageable before I attempt to graph it, regardless of what tool I'm using. If you can deal with daily numbers, you only need 365 rows per year, and less than 9k per year if you're doing hourly numbers.
Hahah loved this part: "That’s it. Of course you’ll need to find another photo service to see photos of meals and your friend’s feet." ^_^
Tutorial: HTML5 and Flash Video Streaming with CloudFront
How much in taxes did you pay during the first 19 or so years of your life, though? Enough to fund your medical care, education, etc. during that time?

Taxes can't work as a real pay-as-you-go system. The times in your life when you're directly consuming the most services are pretty much the times when you're not capable of paying much in taxes -- you're too young to work, still in school, sick, old, disabled, etc..

The people earning the most money, and the most able to pay taxes, are done with their education, in good health, and generally very capable of taking care of themselves.

Especially at the beginning of that period of their lives, it seems extremely unlikely that they've already paid enough into the system to cover services they've already consumed. At some point (ideally) they'll pay off the debt from their pre-work lives and start paying down the services they'll need after retirement... again, though, this is not at all pay as you go.

(And of course this is ignoring taxes that fund more general and/or indirect benefits -- like economic infrastructure -- but those can be thought of more as pay-as-you-go).
Very cool, thanks for this. I've never heard of MicroConf before. Looks like 2012 had some interesting speakers. Looking forward to seeing when this takes place next year.

Edit: Link to MicroConf: http://www.microconf.com/
Unix command-line tools are seriously undervalued for processing data, even big data.

Need parallelization? Try xargs -P on a multi-core machine.
Even when you look at syscalls themselves there is difference: Linux kernel deals with mostly opague strings of bytes (that are today by user-space side convention mostly utf-8) while NT kernel deals mostly with UCS-2 unicode codepoint strings (that are sometimes UTF-16 and this way madness ensues).
If you need to lots of one-off visualizations, consider Tableau (http://www.tableausoftware.com/). Although not as versatile as D3.js and although it's proprietary, it is really easy, essentially all click and point. My firm started using it recently and I am really jealous because MBA types can in seconds create visualizations that take me hours to do with D3.js. It supports a wide variety of data inputs, including excel and various databases. Also, Tableau has excellent support for working with maps and shapefiles.
Why we should make an example out of instagram.