skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook is a really strange and scary phenomenon. The idea was to keep in touch with those acquaintances you lost contact with for one reason or another. Yet, it turned into a huge attention whoring platform because it slowly chipped away at any real-world interaction people ever had prior. So, what do you do when you do something cool or interesting? You let your Facebook "friends" know about it. It makes you feel better that someone read about the shit you did today. You feel like you're cool now. It's unbelievably sad what an immense psychological effect Facebook has on its users. I didn't even realize how addicted i was to Facebook until i closed my account and had frequent urges to reopen just to update my "friends" with something i did. Everyone on it is just feeding off of each other. It's a perpetual pat on the back that makes you feel cozy that you have 300 friends and hides the fact it's making you socially inept. It's been 4 months and i never looked back. Even had 2 of my close friends follow my lead. Get away from this shit and get your social interactions back.
The problem with that explanation is that half of those patents were filed in the 1970s or 1980s and should be expired by now. So go through the expired ones and so long as you don't infringe on the newer patents then it is ok to use it royalty free. That is the whole point of the patent after all - once it expires, everyone can benefit from the invention, not just the inventor and his/her customers.
I hate those things. They drastically reduce the viewable height of the actual content I'm trying to look at.
I know what you mean. It's a bit like lumping big screen cinema in with made for TV movies.
I see, thanks for elaborating. I suppose I took your comment ...

They clearly have absolutely no interest in serving me content or helping me do what I want to do

... too literally. I believe the trouble of developing and offering a mobile app supplements their motivation to serve content, in a better way.

But your point was well stated, and it's clear you're not against a better mobile experience, but rather the manner in which it's advertised. In which case I agree ... shoving a full screen ad down a user's throat is frustrating.
Just as likely as 12:25 on 12/24.
> (as a side note, I don't see how productivity is involved. What does "being productive" mean here?)

Umm - I guess "convincing" would have been the better word? :) If you blame people for demanding too much security, then it only makes Linux look bad and insecure in comparison to Windows, or at least that was my impression in this thread. I don't think that the threat is inherently less realistic than any of the other things we protect against - the problem is Microsoft's implementation of this particular security measure.
Well, that doesn't seem to work ...
reminds me of my college days!
The Tux Droid, maybe?
Personally I've gotten quite good at estimating when the microwave is under 10 and stopping it right at 1, however I've never seen anyone else resort to this behavior so I feel awkward about it.
Flame of whom? The problem is being nagged, popovered, redirected, or otherwise bothered to install something that does nothing to enhance the content but takes time to install and wastes space on your phone. Apple has indeed recently introduced a partial solution, but as many have pointed out few have adopted it yet.
yeah, +1. I actually cloned the repo so I could peek at the source for the hooks to all these services I'd never heard of. Was easier (lazier) than googling.

https://github.com/github/github-services/tree/master/servic...
In case anybody runs across this in the future... after evaluating Spreedly, Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Segpay, Dwolla, and FeeFighters, I decided to go with Recurly + Feefighters.

Recurly has a focus on recurring payments that I like and a strong emphasis on reducing failed charges that the others lacked (or didn't document well enough). Their API seems reasonable and modern, and it looks like I can scale from a "get it up right now" hosted payment page to a more-custom solution in the future.

Fees look like they might be a bit high--$69/month, plus 1.25% + 10¢ per transaction, PLUS merchant account fees--but having somebody else do a good job of handling my dunning and invoicing emails well should be worth the cost.

Recurly will set you up with a merchant account (or so it seems) but I'm going to augment that with a FeeFighters search. FeeFighters provides competitive bids from merchant accounts provider. They're paid by the provider, so it won't cost me anything to give them a shot and compare what they find to what Recurly offers.

My second choice was Spreedly, for its abstraction over multiple services, which would give me more flexibility in the future. Unfortunately, their service came across as a bit immature and I had trouble finding webhook information I was looking for in their documentation. Also, they didn't look like they had the sophisticated dunning that Recurly offers, which was Recurly's main draw for me.
The reported behavior has now changed. The latest results for a search on the word "sell" on Google Finance

http://www.google.com/finance?q=sell

show a rather boring list of companies, with no prominence given to Apple.
You weren't down because an Amazon engineer fat-fingered a maintenance command, you were down because you chose to put all of your eggs in one basket. The basket you chose failed, and you had no redundancy basket to fail over to. Choosing a new basket to put all your eggs in isn't going to fix anything just because the new basket hasn't failed on you yet.

Make smarter decisions. If being up on December 24 was really that important to you, you'd have had backup hosting in place with the ability to quickly fail over to it. You'll start being a better engineer when you quit blaming some poor bastard's bad luck for your failures and learn the real lesson from your downtime: you fucked up by not having high-availability hosting to meet your claimed high-availability needs.

The worst thing Amazon could do is fire this guy. They've just paid a lot of money to have him learn from his mistake. They'd be fools to throw that hard-earned experience away.
I hate using a microwave when other people are sleeping. Loud beeps on every button press. Beeps at 30 second intervals saying it done (as if something terrible will happen if you don't rescue your food!). Even opening and closing the door makes an excessively loud noise.
This is why I love AWS post-mortems: They don't hide things.

Most companies would have said "the outage was caused by a system being accidentally misconfigured" or even less; Amazon, in contrast, admitted (a) that a specific person was identified who made the mistake, (b) that he had access to the systems in question because a process was being run manually which should have been automated, and (c) that if there hadn't been an error in the access control rules, he wouldn't have been able to make that mistake.

I often wish that Amazon was more open about their internal systems; post-mortems are the one time when I'm never wondering what they're not telling me.
Don't you think that Social is about to move from reporting events that just happened to organizing your (near) future activities?

Don't you think that Social is about "friends" not "followers"?

Is a Social Utility, a la App.net, the right architecture for that? I don't think so, Google can change the game and own that space, if they choose to.

What's arrogant about that? Maybe you need to re-read the post.
You started out with product and then started doing consulting after a fairly large amount of time spent on a product. (I've been following your work for awhile, it's been inspiring.)

I'm a programmer who has done consulting before with a keen interest in product and marketing. If I want to become self-employed (preferably in the form of working on a bootstrapped product), should I start by bootstrapping a product or by consulting?

I believe that consulting would mean becoming self-employed sooner, but my concern is that I'd end up on a "get work, seek work" treadmill harming my ability to work on bootstrapping.

Alternately, my concern is that if I focus on bootstrapping a side project while working a full-time job, that will also mean not getting self-employed again for a very long time.

Sorry for the rambly comment, do you have any insights or suggestions to offer?
You just ignored 90+% of what I wrote as answers to your strange opinions. Sigh... OK.

Wiki page says "outspoken critic of the Nigerian government ... hanged in 1995 by the military government"

1995 is not "today" -- and the whole execution might even have been done by the military dictatorship, without Shell even directly asking them to do it. (From what I've read about Nigeria, this doesn't seem unlikely.)

If Shell was involved (why would they murder internationally known critics -- the resulting sh-t storm is obvious) -- was any higher up Shell people involved?

It is ridiculous how you limit your criticism to corporations. Any of the tyrants worth his own weight in human ears have done worse than most any corporation since 1995.

I think I'm being trolled.
Yeah, it looks like they "fixed the glitch" :)
Here's the link to this CNN story: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/29/google-finance-apple-...
This is not just about a single purpose app by any website. I think the problem is that apps in general have been isolated silos. That's one other area where windows phone kicks ass IMO. It has neat app contracts that lets one app talk to other thus making it more connected and hence more useful
If they ran php it probably did work. That right there is the keys to the kingdom
Google is a search company at heart. They use keyword relevance in many of their products. Apple is a company that generates clicks when it is in headlines. Stock websites constantly write linkbait articles about Apple. Many along the lines of "5 Reasons Why You Should Sell Apple Stock Now" or "Is Apple Overvalued" etc...I bet if you researched, you would find that there are a high number of stock market related websites linking to the google finance page for Apple that also use the word sell as a keyword. Hence the association between "apple" and "sell" in the google finance search algorithm. Or maybe, it's just an Easter egg.
What about showing each user who logins a summary of what's new? It could be in a modal, or could just be a brief area with a link at the top of the page, perhaps pointing to your blog post?

(Also an engineer)
> You spend the time and money developing an app, and you want your visitors to know about the app

These popovers/nags/redirects are typically annoying because the apps do little to nothing to add to the content or user experience. Just because the company spent time and money developing them doesn't make them useful. Why burden users with the company's poor decision?
I made no mention of any specific societies or countries. I was merely stating that "everyone is doing it" or "they might do it to us, so we should do it to them first" are not really valid excuses.
Wouldn't that project also benefit from jpegtran?
"The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect." <-- is exactly how you do not do customer development. You have stopped listening to the user.
Interestingly enough a similar article on the front page scapegoated Windows Azure.

People can't own up to the fact that customers don't really care if it's Amazon AWS or Heroku or some other platform that failed -- if your service is down, its your fault!
As a man who has been hustling flat out to get into a program such as this for the past several months and is currently dead broke living in an 8 square meter apartment in SF, it's very difficult to read this kind of article and not wonder. I'm passing the technical filters (which admittedly should be weak for a school), but not quite making it in. I not only went out of my way to visit multiple schools and talk to former graduates, but I even sold a bank on the idea of giving me a (small) loan to cover living expenses.

With such high applicant to acceptance ratios, I can't take things too personally, but it's hard not to feel discouraged. Am I getting passed over largely because people just don't value investing in a 30 something man? Would a female in my shoes have gotten in long ago?

I know having more money would help, but it's a bit of a reinforcing cycle since the social proof and skills gained at such a program help greatly in making money. As my last submission to HN should make it clear, I love this kind of teaching system. I strongly believe that people learn way faster with guidance and peers working towards the same goal than they do working alone. What can I do to up my chances of acceptance into a similar school/bootcamp/dojo/academy?
I've owned and used microwaves since 1977, and indeed the majority of them have worked this way. Not all, however.

But I don't think the variations from this de facto standard have anything to do with patents. I think it's more the "NIH factor" ("Not Invented Here").
I played tons of video games as a kid, and did some table-top RPGs, too! The role playing games I played all involved characters and a story.
Microwaves generally have an obscure settings menu where you can disable things like that.
From my experience, ovens these days are not any easier to use control wise.

For example, I have to press a separate cancel button for the oven timer and to turn the oven off. How many times would you want to keep the timer on, but turn the oven off? My parents oven from the early 90s did turn off both and I didn't realize how useful such small things were until you lose them. I think interfaces for kitchen appliances have gotten worse in many cases since then.

For my microwave (a Samsung), I have to explicitly hit the timer button to start the timer for it (not to cook, just the timer), instead of just typing the the time and pressing start. Also, the start button does not work, I must push an explicit timer on/off button. Just ridiculous.

The microwave does have an "add 30 seconds timer." However, if I want to use it after checking to see if my food is hot enough, I have to hit the start button to turn the microwave back on first and then hit "add 30 seconds." Just drives me crazy as the 30 second button should turn it back on as well. My old microwave (an LG) did have this functionality and I miss it.

I only assume the designers of these appliances assumed that being as brutally explicit as possible would help those that have issues with technology more, but I think it has the opposite effect.
Nice reflective article to round up the year!
The idea of using an iPhone app to browse a particular website reminds me of AOL keywords like "www.cbs.com".

Every time I see an "Ask HN: what app do you use for HN?" I wonder why people don't just use the browser. What is the allure?
It's opt-in for the forum admin, but it's opt-out for me... opt out every single fucking time I visit a forum that has opted in.
Actually... I think it's because I'm an ex tech journo and am jaded from seeing how reporting like this happens. Not because I particularly care for instagram.
What I wonder is why when I buy a microwave, I'm stuck with just one set of controls.

My HVAC gives me a choice of thermostats. There's a standard "API" for talking with HVAC's over a few wires and I choose my interface. If I'm feeling all Star-Trek, I get a NEST. If I just want something simple, I can get a gizmo with a slider, a spring, and a mercury switch that was made in the 60's from a thrift store.

Now that touch screens are ubiquitous and practically free, (and in my pocket all the time) why I'm I stuck with some ridiculous amalgamation of knobs and buttons that seems to have no thought at all given to usability. Would it be so much harder to include a simple default that could be re-flashed, replaced, or augmented?

Its not just microwaves, mind you. Cable set top boxes have been reliably irritating me for decades. I posted a rant, complete with tech demo a few weeks back. Here's how I want the world to work:

http://www.thesinglestep.org/thoughts/qrcontrol/
Is this kosher? It looks like they're re-bundling the Glyphicons set that comes with Bootstrap[1]. Glyphicons has a free set with a CC by-nd license[2], which wouldn't work here.

1. http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#icons

2. http://glyphicons.com/
Awesome! milesmatthias at gmail :)
Do you write and edit at the same time? I found that separating the two tasks made it much less painful.
Because EVERY piece of hardware that I have bought is mine, and that means I should be able to do what I want with it.
> People can't own up to the fact that customers don't really care if it's Amazon AWS or Heroku or some other platform that failed -- if your service is down, its your fault!

I don't, necessarily, have a problem with saying, without animosity, "we're down because our hosting provider is down". For many small businesses, being down when your hosting provider is down is an acceptable tradeoff -- your business simply isn't critical enough for it to be worth the costs of maintaining fail-over redundancy in case of primary hosting loss.

That's totally fine. Most people probably don't want to pay the higher cost of having every service they use having the ability to survive their main host going down. A couple 9s of uptime is more than enough for the vast majority of businesses.

What I have a problem is with people who were behaving as though they were fine with that tradeoff screaming about how they needed to be up when it comes time to pay in a little downtime for those cheaper hosting costs. Grow up and accept the tradeoffs you choose to make.
This was used in a AWS demo in re:invent or something like that I recall.

I also recall being extremely impressed (you know, the whole.... autoscaling!!!! thing) and thought it was an internal Amazon product.
The Countess who would Legalise Drugs
Great work landing on your feet and got it going great. It's very impressive to do it for the first year, even more so for doubling over your old salary in the first year. Keep it up.
No NSF Charges. No Embarrassing Excuses. No Budget Budget [w/ free audiobook]
I find it funny that this is on #14 on the homepage :)
Judging by your two comments in this thread you should probably study statistics for a short while, even a minimal amount of knowledge in that field would have saved you from two mistakes!
>>"everyone is doing it" or "they might do it to us, so we should do it to them first" are not really valid excuses.

Not a relevant answer to what I wrote.

I noted, amongst others, that the atrocities in question were SOP (Standard Operation Procedure) of the non-modern times. So no (heart felt, at least) excuses were generally needed...

Edit: Please don't do as others here and insist on judging (just the) western society of X centuries ago after our present moral standards. I'm misanthropic enough.

(I'm sorry if I addressed that comment to the wrong recipient. It seemed you were continuing the argument from previous comments.)
The worst for me was a site (forget which one) which asked me to download the app, and then redirected me to their homepage when I declined (as opposed to the article I was trying to read). That was an unfortunate user experience.
A Little Hack to Read FB Messages Without Alerting the Other User
Grrrr. Existing SF residents are facing an influx of newcomers, who are pushing out (pricing out) some existing residents. And somehow, it never occurs to them to just make room for more people, so that existing residents don't get pushed out.

SF has plenty of opportunities to build upward, but as long as SF insists on being anti-development and anti-height, the housing supply problem is going to continue.
The subsidy is paid back by the customer being locked into a service contract for some number of years. It shouldn't affect the customers' freedom to run their own software on the phone.
But, let me guess, "everything you've read" does not include the source code?

Are we talking the "part of OSX" that is called "Darwin"? If so, the code is all online. Easiest way to determine how much code is from NetBSD is to read it. And diff it against NetBSD's CVS repo.
They might've had employees that don't celebrate Christmas.
Fscking Tapatalk. I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever install your app, even if it scratches my back. Ever; just because of your incessant, annoying spam on every god damn forum I ever go to. Give me a global opt-out.

I can't wait to get over this hard-on for native apps.

ABC, you too, for god's sake, I clicked on a random news story, I don't need your app.
Semantic symbol fonts
Although zooming in would require a re-rendering of the image, which could cause lag/jitter.
Yes! We had one of those it was the first microwave my family ever bought it was in the early 80s quite forward for us little folks.

The rotary knob was the best I really miss it. The other great feature was the handle a big actual handle you pulled to open not those push in plastic indents.

The "beast" lasted for a good two decades before my parents had to buy a new microwave which broke in about a year. Now they are on microwave oven number three and it's already falling apart.
The long term push is towards html5 mobile apps period. The only problem is performance (which is improving), immature javascript programming libraries/communities and poor adoption of HTML5 mobile features by the OSes (such as being able to use datepickers and other essential APIs for building apps).

That's why native apps are still important. Once the above is figured out, I highly doubt companies will want to pay to develop on 2-3 different codebases in different programming languages than their website, to support native apps.

But iOS/Android make their money from native apps so I doubt they're particularly motivated to make mobile HTML5 apps the standard.
Agreed, but it is much better than most popups. Also its easily dismissed to reclaim the space.
This is one of the best advantages android has over iOS - you don't have all those goddamn app nag screens all over the internet.
And what is the fundamental difference?

You can tell Padrino what you want during the creation of a new project.

You can tell Rails what you want immediately after the creation of a new project. Rails simply saves you time by having sane defaults. Convention over configuration at its best.
Wait until we get drones for water environments. I can see the follwing news flash scrolling along the bottom of the screen:

Captured! We surpise $celebrity doing #2 on their home bathroom. Visit bathroomcelebrities.com for more!
smart banners have made things both better and worse. it's good when sites use them instead of a javascript alert or a full-screen nag, but it's encouraged so many more websites to start nagging you to install their app.
All the Darwin code is online so why not just check for yourself?

A more interesting question is how useful is OSX if we stripped away Darwin? That is, if we just left the proprietary bits, like the graphics code.

Assuming I don't need Apple's graphics, I'd just as soon use NetBSD than Darwin.
Same here, the more I save, the less I want to spend on these things.
The one huge exception is traveling. I even set myself a goal of visiting at least one new country per year.

The interesting thing is that with the years this has also affected other broader considerations.
Nowadays I don't really think about buying a house anymore, as it is too big of a 'money and time' commitment and also because it would make it harder for me to move somewhere (which I've been doing quite often now).

Same applies to having a car. While I agree that having one can be incredibly convenient (and, sometimes, even necessary), I feel so much better not having to worry about gas, taxes, or maintenance.