skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to mention that this way of addressing it has no doubt created some new enemies. Sure, it looks like some of the stuff from GetSatisfaction is a bit shadey, but do you really want them as an enemy over it? If you loudly called my startup extortionist and mafia like, I'd be more than a little pissed off, even if I had screwed up.

The startup world seems too small to want to create that kind of karma.

But again, if the post had said, "Hi folks, just to let you know, the GetSatisfaction page for 37s is not official and we've worked something out with them where they'll now offer an option to all companies to redirect to their real support page and will ask permission to use logos in the future and tone down the language." it wouldn't have been the top story on HN.
this app is pretty tight. basically you can have it prank call any of your friends and it makes it seem like it came from your #...i wonder what tools he used to build it.
> The application lets users connect their G1 Android phones via Wi-Fi to their laptops and then access the Internet from the laptop using the phone's cellular connection.

This is stupid. So T-Mobile has a problem with using their paid-for service more?

I access my internet from a phone - this is just stupid. Why would they have a problem with something that gives them extra revenue?

Connecting your phone to your computer as a modem is a standard feature for all other phones.
Pushing the Limit: Climber Still Seeks Larger Meaning in His Epic Escape
Fried didn't post about the private sex lives of people working for Get Satisfaction. He accurately described their operation and characterized it unfavorably.

While the law differs in other parts of the world, in the United States libel has to involve knowingly false statements meant to give someone a negative image.

Making complaints on one's blog and having the party you're complaining about show up, act highly apologetic, and immediately start rewriting parts of their website to address your complaints is about as far from "defamation" as you can get.
Good luck if anyone passes along those URLs to the companies in question. :)
Yes, it does really use HTML and JavaScript. Cappuccino "participates" in the open web as much as any other application written on top of open web technologies.
$50k is vastly underestimating it.

My grandfather just had a double bypass, a stent, and a pacemaker put in. (After his third heart attack.) The grand total for operation and post-op therapy came to $942,000.

Granted, the surgery itself was only like $25k. It was all the stabilization in ICU beforehand, and all the therapy afterwards, that really ran up the bill. The majority of it was paid for by Medicare and his supplemental insurance too, which probably ran the price up as well.
This reminds me of a TEDTalk from a recent BestOf TEDTalks post.

The tragedy of suburbia - James Howard Kunstler

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dis...
I am not a T-Mobile costumer, but maybe they have another plan/hardware/usb dongle which allows internet access from laptops? So they want these people to pay differently.

PS: not making any judgements :)
I can't tell if you're joking or not.
GM paid dividends up until last year, decades after it was known that they had large health care obligations. Divert a couple years of dividends in keeping their side of the bargain, and GM is in good shape. GM management made a deal they were unwilling to keep.

AMD employs 15,000. GM directly employees 240,000 and suppliers employ millions more. These companies are not easily replaceable. If they were, another company would have replaced them by now. Setting up an operation of that magnitude requires decades of experience and huge capital expenditures.
This is pretty cool but, as others have said, some of its functionality can be replicated using FF3 (on Windows). Examples:

1. Fullscreen mode - hit F11 in firefox. Address bar/tabs/buttons are all hidden

2. Hotkey sites - Use tab hotkeys in firefox. Ctrl+1 is the first, Ctrl+2 is the second, etc. This doesn't break out of fullscreen and would work well in a presentation.

That said, the other functions of Plainview, such as presentation recording and popup handling, are quite appealing.
"letting the market figure it out" is unregulated capitalism. Unregulated capitalism is exactly the extremist economic policy nonsense that created the mess we are in. When Bush eliminated most of the regulation on the financial services industry, what that "let the market figure out" is that it is very, very easy to steal money when there is little regulation.

Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.

I don't know why libertarians can't figure out people steal money that is left around unguarded, but they just don't comprehend that fact.
Of course, you could just go download the APK from somewhere else.

I doubt many people (myself included) would have -any- issues with the App Store's restrictions if, like the Android Market, it wasn't the exclusive and only way for distributing applications, and you could distribute the binary like you can distribute an EXE or DMG.
No, I was saying: "What is 37s trying to achieve with a response?"

I think the correct answer is: "To get GS to make the site look less official/confusing and a bit less insulting".

If that's the goal, which gets their business there faster? A 15 minute phone call or a well-worded 1 hour rant on the blog?

I TOTALLY agree that GS is confusing, especially for novice users. In fact, I'll go farther and say that the changes they are making aren't enough to fix that. They need to change the page titles/descriptions so that they are obviously 3rd party in the SERP.

In short, I agree with the offense. I'm not sure about intent/malice. Because of that, I think the response falls into the self-gratifying torch-and-pitchfork vigilantism that plays so well on the internet. Humanity should be better than that and give companies the benefit of the doubt unless they have obvious malicious intent and/or a track record of evil.

For all we know, a call to GS could've gotten a response of: "Ya know-- we never looked at it that way and have been so darn focused on stuff that I think we didn't see the forest for the trees."
Vancouver HN April Meetup
Amazon has an obvious business model; the case for grabbing as much of the market as they can makes much more sense for them. Facebook on the other hand doesn't. Who cares how many users you get if no one knows how to monetize them?

I understand they're hoping by the time they get all the market wrapped up that they'll figure something out; that doesn't make it any less stupid. There was a time VC's wouldn't talk to people without an exit strategy up front, this was for a damn good reason.

Facebook isn't the first social network, and it won't be the last, social networks are faddish. Fads fade.
Thanks mustpax! I agree that stateless things are cool :)
Btw optimizing the dictionary specifically for urls much better compression ratios are possible.
I'm pretty blasé about Facebook from a user's point of view

You and I both. That's Facebook's fundamental problem. I and millions of others will walk in a heartbeat if something more interesting and less annoying comes along.
Any statement can be grounds for defamation if it can be proved true or false in a court.

A statement made as a fact (for example "The site also hosts, without permission, company support pages for over 14,000 companies.") is potentially actionable.
The Business Behind WooThemes
It's a matter of personal responsibility. Granted, there will be people who

A: Don't save,
B: Invest their savings foolishly,
or C: Fall on hard times and burn through their savings,

but guaranteeing a retirement income will push more people into the A and B categories. I believe that society should help people who fall into the C category, either through welfare programs or nonprofit organizations, but it hurts the rest of society when the people who acted responsibly are required to subsidize those who are in the A or B category. My argument is that it hurts society more to pay for the A and B people than it does to let the A and B people take the consequences of their actions. I argue that the more retirement is subsidized, the more people will rely on the subsidies. The only way to make retirement an institution that runs on its own is to make it the responsibility of the individual.
There are other concerns, though, like what the botnet is going to do. You may be using Linux, but you're on the internet, and you use internet services.
Full-screen browsing really helps to stay on task when browsing the web. Usually after 15 minutes of browsing I have 8 tabs open and no idea why I started the browser in the first place :)

Kudos.
The combination of Fox "News" the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. left 85% of Americans believing Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 at the time the Congress was voting on whether to invade Iraq.

That was, of course, proven to be complete and utter nonsense with evidence people like Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, etc. had at the time of that vote. That information was not provided to the American people by any of the major outlets of corporate-owned media.

How do you think that happened?
I'm reading through that filing, and it's not clear to me why the guy stopped paying rent, or why Macy didn't personally contact him after that. The whole story is bizarre. If Macy wanted to do things by the book, then he should have drafted a written lease, and if he wanted a handshake agreement then he should have talked with Morrow about the eviction, repairs, etc. On the other hand, Morrow is pretty obviously paranoid, and it's hard to see how the DA could have missed that.
In what way is the speaker out-of-touch? He has personally overseen circulation improvements of ~ 30 - 100% in the newspapers he has redesigned.

"Design" in this sense goes far beyond "graphic embellishment" and is actually about changing the entire product/company involved -- and thus very relevant to the future of newspapers.

A few quotes from his speech:

"It was my personal, intimate challenge to talk to the readers."

"the changes we made were not about changing the look, it was about changing the product completely"

"my bosses wondered, why is he asking all these business questions, why is he not showing us pages? This is the new role of the designer, to be in this process from the beginning to end."
I don't think so unless it's pointlessly clutter (e.g. "amen"). In general I reserve voting something below 1 for things that are offensive or contain zero content.
The modular approach is really cool, because someone could completely rewrite one part and everything else can still work. And if all an app does is import a whole bunch of modules, then it's not that hard to recreate.
Why there is no AIDS vaccine
This is what 37S is complaining about - it's borderline defamation.
You will be able to use your own domain shortly.
Need? No. Want? Maybe.
Netbook 'Kill Pill' Nukes Deadbeats
Good point, we will be making adjustments to the front page shortly.
So I went through the motion to dismiss --- this is a motion from Macy's own attorney, for whatever that's worth --- and what I learned in addition to what the Chron wrote is:

* There's an SFPD officer who testified against the Macy's.

* That city inspectors had to instruct the Macy's not to board up Morrow's windows.

* That the Macy's do in fact seem to stipulate that they (or their contractors) cut triangular notches into load-bearing beams below Morrow's apartment --- "by accident".

The substance of the filing seems to be that the grand jury proceedings were unfair; for instance, a grand juror made an inquiry about Morrow's mental health, exerting her own claimed expertise as a psychiatrist, and therefore that the indictment should be dismissed on a technicality.

But grand jury proceedings are always unfair. The point of a grand jury is to clear a procedural hurdle before bringing people to actual trial. You have almost no rights in a grand jury. It seems premature to suggest on this basis that the Macys are victims of a miscarriage of justice.
My understanding from reading the filing is that the Macys wanted to get rid of Morrow, were told that Morrow had a year to move out because he was "disabled", and paid Morrow $7500 to move. Then Morrow just, err, didn't move.

I'm sure that the Macys didn't want any sort of handshake agreement with Morrow at all.
You don't need to believe Morrow is a good guy to believe that the state has good cause to put Macy on trial.
"Obsession, creativity, drive, focus" have nothing to do with the symptoms of schizotypal personality disorder. I admit that "discomfort in social situations" can contribute to programming expertise and productivity, but it doesn't always work out that way. Plus, I don't think he's worried about productivity. He's either worried about the guy's well-being, or he's worried about the guy's disorder negatively affecting his coworkers.
From the presentation: "Did design do this? No. Not alone."

Mr. Utko recognizes that design cannot create a 20 to 100 percent increase in circulation. He isn't claiming that it can. He claims that if you "put your work to the highest possible level," you can pull off changes as successful as his.

I agree with your statement about TED, but this does not exemplify the "disconnect" of TED. It's ignorant to claim that his ideas are not relevant in the real world, since they very obviously increased circulation.

The most important slide from the presentation showed a Taijitu (yin and yang) diagram and made the following comparison: function is to form as content is to design.
The article basically argues that they didn't "cave" - instead they made a rational choice to write contracts that were detrimental to the long-term viability of the company in return for short-term margins and profits.

The same could be said for the legacy airlines. They made their contracts under regulation, where they could raise rates to match their labor costs without fear of competition, and now are suffering the consequences.
I can't say anything about this site in particular, but be wary of these prank websites in general. A friend of mine sent me a prank call through one and I've received a bunch of sales calls since then. I didn't get any (zero) before he pranked me.
I would have thought this was cool when I was 10 years old.
A blog post can be classified either as slander or libel, depending on the jurisdiction. Some courts have placed blogs together with other broadcast media and libel law, while others have ruled blogs are part of an ongoing conversation and fall under slander laws.
I don't think many people have seen any studies that compare quality of GM cars versus other brands.

It's probably more of a perceived quality than anything based on numbers that is detrimental to GM.

If GM cars are at par in terms of quality but nobody believes it, that still hurts GM.
You're very correct about the corporate thought control -- for years, GM employees were forbidden to buy anything but a GM car, and foreign cars were often vandalized in Detroit. There's still a mantra that 'Americans don't buy small cars.', even with the success of the Miata, the Mini, the Civic, and so on.
Here's an intro article: http://yourbiz.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/13/996827.aspx

But the sentiment is pretty clear: you can pay to stay in the BBB's good graces. If you're naturally OK, you should be fine, but if you're bad, you can pay to get OK.
I hope this isn't an April Fool's joke!
I just logged into our GetSatisfaction account to see if I could direct people to our UserVoice. Nope, can't do it.

Until today, we encouraged people who visited our UserVoice page to go to GS with complaints (the idea was that UserVoice would be for feature requests only). I'm trying to remove that language as a result of today's brouhaha.

EDIT: couldn't figure out how to change it on http://dawdledotcom.uservoice.com but at least we're sending people to UV at http://getsatisfaction.com/dawdle/ .
Motions to dismiss are usually filed by the defendants' lawyers. :-)

Other things indicated by the document include that:

* There are a lot of charges which seem to have no evidence behind them aside from Morrow saying "well, I saw someone who looks sort of like one of the Macys shortly before/after something happened".

* There are a lot of charges where, when they first investigated, the SFPD said "we see no evidence of any crime here".

* There are some charges which appear to be based on very odd legal theories, e.g., that entering a room which a tenant isn't renting counts as burglary, or that moving an ex-tenant's property into a storage room constitutes theft.

As for the focus on the grand jury proceedings: Well, that's just the way the system works. These charges were originally filed by the DA, which would have resulted in a preliminary hearing being held to examine the evidence and decide if there was any reasonable basis for the charges; but bringing the charges through a grand jury bypasses that process (since grand juries, at least in theory, won't indict someone without reasonable evidence).
Ask HN: What WYSIWYG editor are you using to make HTML form/textarea input easy
There's FCKEditor, TinyMCE, MarkitUp! and WysiHat. Which one are you using and why? And are there any new ones that I should be looking at?
Apple used this to build its mobileme webapps.
It would make sense for google to make sure that companies it buys are doing it the google way. I think they have learned from jotspot and jaiku that it is probably better to get in earlier rather than rewrite the entire system to fit on their infrastructure.
Countdown to Nuclear Fusion: National Ignition Facility Warms Up
When you say "room that the tenant isn't renting", you're referring to another room in the apartment the tenant was renting, not some random room in the whole building. It's worth knowing that there's a dispute about whether Morrow had any kind of tenancy in the "shared" rooms in the apartment.

If I'm renting from you, and I have a bedroom, and I have a roommate, and she has a bedroom, and we share a living room, and you enter my apartment without notice and start messing around with the living room, I call the police and you get cited. In San Francisco, I get to deduct an amount from my rent if you get cited. I like that rule; so should you.

Having said that: there clearly are people who abuse tenant law in San Francisco. A strong case has been made that Morrow's one of them. But even if you just look at the stuff that appears to be stipulated: that the Macy's cut the beams underneath Morrow's apartment, boarded up his windows, and cut his power --- there seems to be a real case here.
Should Your Buy a Home Right Now?
Hello chime, it should be very simple to port the lib to JS. Given that JS supports hashes you get a much shorter implementation compared to the C one.
Every web app that I've ever created in my five years as a web developer has been ugly as hell, because neither I nor my employers could or would ever pay a good designer to make it pretty. I've spent literally years creating ugly things.

This could change that. I likey. I likey a lot.
I would pay dollars for something that could hide my OS X menu bar in the same way that I can hide the dock. An added benefit would be to hide all my desktop icons (which I right-align) until I move my mouse to the edge of the screen.

Having tried a few isolation apps, I now wish more of that stuff was built into the OS itself.
I do wonder to what extent Google can control the company from the board. It seems they could abuse this control to make sure that the company is not able to compete with Google, except on its terms.
Introducing the gBall
Since the gigabit+ links they are paying for are symmetric, that is, they can move the same amount of data in both directions, I will make the assumption that Amazon's "outbound" traffic is less than their "inbound" and thus, an increase of inbound up to a certain point costs them nothing.

Also, transfer-in means that in order to get any use out of it, you now have to transfer-out (another charge).

Not being critical, just pointing out that this is a bit of a "give the razor for free, sell the razor blades" strategy.
Since it wasn't clear in my previous comment, Amazon's TextBuyIt is the exact same service but via SMS and you can purchase via SMS too.
I've been complaining about this for a while now and I'd tend to agree here. The whole getsatisfaction service is sort of like a blackmail scheme to start out with: They try hard to attract all of your users to their site, to be the "Weebly support forum", and then users are disappointed when their requests aren't answered.

What's most annoying is that GetSatisfaction has a strong selection bias towards the users who have problems, and so it very negatively affects the image of the company. There is no way to respond to those users or fix their problems besides buying into the whole scam and doing support on their site.

FYI, their support system has so much more overhead than the one we use internally that I'd estimate our support costs would increase 2-3X by moving all of our support into their system.
>but GM comes up with a new technology that allows them to sell GM cars profitably at 150 dollars, Ford is out-of-business.

And? Obviously then, people don't prefer more expensive Fords. That's how the free market works after all.

Point is, if people don't want to pay for news on paper, so be it.

>Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.

Now, if this is true, then there will be plenty of people willing to show this by paying for local news, online or otherwise.
You are absolutely right. I apparently was drinking something when I read the guidelines. I read them again now and it's indeed not hacker news. Apologies.
Further reading reveals: I am a moron. Disregard. :)
Local flavor for Google Suggest
"To get GS to make the site look less official/confusing and bit less insulting" is only part of the answer.

The other part, as mechanical_fish has elqouently pointed out above, is to reach present/past/potential customers of 37s who were mislead by GS into thinking that 37s does not answer customer questions. Contacting GS alone would not have solved the damage GS already did. It was not enough for 37s to prevent future abuse, but also to turn back the damage already done in the past.
GetSatisfaction's opening line in the "conversation" was: "We will be using your trademarks and collateral to imply that you are not interested in supporting your customers." GetSatisfaction had already lambasted 37 Signals.

How did GetSatisfaction, and you, reasonably expect the conversation to proceed from there? Gentle pleading on 37 Signals part? What???
Microsoft closing the book on Encarta
Jimmy Wales "we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project"
The Debate Over H-1B Visa Numbers
I'm pretty sure most hackers use a text editor and a web browser. When dealing with CSS and JQuery, a wysiwyg editor will really get in your way (it's hard to visualize ids, classes, and onClick) and it doesn't make things very much easier, I think.
Is there an SDK available?
There is no way this is going to be truly good for the local economy, that bridge may make it _easier_, but it won't make it _possible_ (meaning, transit was already ver, very possible). Redmond is tiny, if you can't get motivated enough to drive to the next bridge to get Taco Time and bolster the local economy, a closer one isn't going to motivate you.
Plainview is a Mac app. By default, F11 is an Expose keyboard shortcut on OS X, it sends all windows to the nearest screen edge and shows the desktop. However, even when you remap the Expose key to be triggered by a separate key, Firefox still doesn't go into full screen on Mac when you hit it. Not without a plugin at least.

And since its a Mac app, IE7 isn't a real option (short of virtualizing, Wine/Darwine or not running OS X on the Mac)