skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I really, really wish people would stop boiling "Virtual Goods" down to "cute pictures of cats". If it were that simple, there wouldn't be a 9-figure virtual good economy on Facebook today.

It's 8 figures (between $28,500,000 and $43,500,000: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10030354-62.html ), and consists almost entirely of cute pictures of cats (and dogs and hearts and thongs).

> He boils it down to three big categories - Doing More, Building Relationships, and Establishing identity.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook can expand their strategy to include these. I contend that they are not really doing so now - GIF's on a FB wall are not meaningful ways of building or maintaining a relationship, and I pity/dread a world in which they are.

Doing More - Can FB legitimately charge for certain features on their site? I would pay to remove ads, but I can't think of much else. Since they have an free/open apps API, almost any feature they could think to charge for could easily be replaced by a free app, no?

Building Relationships - Again, I think people will soon realize that gifts on walls do not actually provide any tangible relationship value. Are there any services they can provide that do? I can think of one - networking, hooking me up to potential employers, partners, VC's, etc. The problem here is asymmetric power structures: I might pay a little money to meet some local people who share some of my same interests and hobbies, and so might they. However, I'd also pay money to get my name in front of a big VC, but what incentive would the VC have to pay attention and follow up?

Establishing Identity - I'd bet that 90% of users today are happy with the 'identity' that the standard facebook profile gives them, and those who aren't can add apps to augment it. The only niche I see is enabling custom page layouts and designs for paying users, and seeing as how they've held out on this for many years (even with lots of pressure), I don't see it happening anytime soon.

I'd gladly take this a little more seriously if you could come up with some concrete examples of virtual goods FB could provide. Whether you call the current economy of virtual goods "relationship-builders" or "silly," it is currently comprised almost entirely of image-based "gifts." Unless these sites figure out some meaningful ways to augment them, I'd bet this revenue stream turns out to be mostly unsustainable.
Why is it even considered a discrimination against women?
I have lived in Shanghai, and boy do I want to live in this virtual Shanghai (the real one, only for sentimental reasons.)

For me, the best city in China remains Hangzhou, maybe Xiamen :-) the most chill, laid back places in the east of the country (Kunming, Guilin and Hainan Island are all gorgeous)
There's some truth to that, of course. But I don't think apologies should always be issued, in any circumstances. Coddling people is often annoying. It slows things down and keeps people from being direct with one another. Sometimes a fight is actually better. Also, a little bit of confrontation keeps people from raising too many spurious complaints.

Which method works better all depends on the circumstances, I guess.
Ask YC: How does facebook round corners on users' pictures?
My initial guess would be Jscript. Although it could also be done using a transparent image over the users picture
Nope, analogy fail. The meaning is absolutely different. If someone says to you "She took how much of your money?", and you reply "I didn't say she stole my money" that means something completely different than "I didn't say she stole my money". Who the pronoun refers to is completely external to the parsing of the sentence.
The new Zuneberry.

So slim it fits in your inside Armani pocket.

So durable you can run over it with your BMW.

So reliable you can use it in your NetJet.

So obsolete in a year, you can get your management consulting firm employer to get you a new one.
Still wondering how the "underrepresentation" is being measured. Who defines the appropriate percentage of women in technology, so that we can conclude that there are too few of them?

While I would prefer to have more female colleagues, I don't believe men and women can be compared just like that.
Zynga and Facebook accounted for over $80 M in virtual goods in 2008 between the two of them. The revenue numbers from payment processors (Gambit, Spare Change, etc) easily account for the rest.
well, you can use 'ESC + v' with "vi" editing mode, and I've never found an equivalent way to use $EDITOR on your command line if you're using "emacs" editing mode.
What I learned in university was that "P implies Q" is always true if P is false. Therefore, I upmod your post for truth.
I know! It's like thinking that Ducati competes with Amtrak. Sure their products have similar objectives, but their function, specs, market, etc are completely different.
They use the CSS Sprite technique to overlay a certain portion of this image http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/images/ui/UIRoundedImage.png on top of your picture. It's hard to see in the browser but above the blue rounded corner mask there is a white corner mask.
Poll: How many homeschoolers/unschoolers here? When did you start?
Considering homeschooling for my kids (4 and 7) when we move to Virginia. We have the best in the city of New Orleans and getting to the same level in Virginia seems prohibitive. My wife and I are deep in the research phase, reading, talking with people, conference in June, etc. Would like to get a sense of how many did it, and if you would share your thoughts, I'd appreciate it.
home schooled all the way
Started homeschool/unschool some time in primary school
Started homeschool/unschool some time in middle school
Started homeschool/unschool some time in high school
Started some college program in high school
That's so sad. Again. x3. ^15.
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/images/ui/UIRoundedImage.png

They overlay that image on top.
Microsoft and Verizon reportedly cooking up an iPhone competitor
Personally I consider the fact that a random downloaded game run, by default, could delete all your personal data a pretty big security flaw that can be dealt with at the kernel level.

So we have different meanings of security flaw. Probably because you are thinking of the security of a website, where I am more interested in securing the average users PC.
So as I said, there is not a 9 figure virtual goods economy on Facebook today.
"pfft air one reporting heavy traffic pfft"
The navigation system in my car has logos for the brand of gas station it has on the map. A good way to monetize the map as well as help people who have cards/accounts with particular gas companies.
cool - is this an expansion of your SocialFeet facebook app?
Two paths spring to mind;

1) If you're sublimely self confident and prepared to deal with the intense difficulty of this option, just leave. Strike out completely on your own, hit the garage, make the Next Big Thing(tm).

2) Kill all the pieces of yourself that make you an anomaly amongst your peers. Drug yourself out, develop an addiction to something that will numb your mind and dull the ennui of the existence you find yourself in. In short, destroy every piece of you that makes it uncomfortable for you to go with the flow.

The world is pulling you down because the world is, as often mentioned here, not designed for people like us. Your solution will be to address this discrepancy in some fashion. It is orders of magnitude easier to change yourself than it is to change the world, and I say this in full knowledge of how utterly stupendously hard it really is to change yourself, especially in this way that you know to be deeply wrong.

I'll spend the rest of my life in obscurity changing the broken things in the world before I spend an hour on my knees trying to figure out how to fit in, but this is not anywhere near as heroic as it sounds. Simply, this is because I am stupid and stubborn, and probably if I were less so (and maybe you are?) I would be able to see this path for the folly it is. Leave the hard stuff to the martyrs and spend your life in dull throbbing comfort in some easy and meaningless pursuit like law or politics, and snort cocaine off hookers for the occasional buzz.

Alas, some of us are simply not this way constructed.

Good luck.
Your Jewish friend, for example, has given a very good reason for why jokes about Jews by non-Jews are generally offensive

By way of conversation, not argument, I will share that at the time, her explanation was unsatisfying. I felt that she was saying "You Can't Say That" arbitrarily. Why was it ok for one person to tell that joke and not another? I didn't feel she was explaining the reasoning behind the rule, just telling me the rule.

But time has passed, and now I understand that a joke about cultural stereotypes often means one thing when told by an outsider, another thing when told by an insider to an outsider, and a third thing when told by an insider to another insider.

And of course, outsiders are sometimes oblivious to the nuances.
We educate at home (not "homeschool"--that implies schooling at home, and re-creating school at home is definitely not our goal), starting from the very beginning, all the way through high school.

We have 8 ranging from 25 down to 8, so it's still a big work in progress. ;-)

Some of our older kids have gone to (very demanding) colleges, others couldn't be bothered. Depends a lot on the person and his life goals and interests, of course.
Happy Birthday Opera: The Innovative Web Browser Turns 15
i was homeschooled for a year in middle school as my family made the transition from private to public schools. the year of homeschooling allowed my parents to save some more money for a down payment on a house with good public schools. my brother was homeschooled at the same time - he is three years younger than me - for grade school.

I think home school is fine for primary school. once you get into middle and high school i am not as supportive. this may have been only my experience but i learn best when interacting with others - showing others what i learned and learning from others mistakes. this becomes more significant during middle school/high school as this is when more group tasks are assigned.
He isn't at the top of his industry but he seems to be growing:

May 1, 2007
Movin’ on Up

The latest issue of Promotional Marketing Magazine-an independent publication dealing with the Promotional Products industry-listed the Top 50 Distributors in America. Just a few years ago, the Cavanaugh Marketing Network was ranked around 75th. In the latest rankings, Cavanaugh has climbed to # 34 the highest ranking of any promotional products agency in Pittsburgh.

http://www.cavanaugh.com/news.php
Technically, there's an eighth:

I didn't say she stole my money -- I said that person did, but he's a man.
Samsung's Luscious Laptop Puts Nebbish Netbooks to Shame
Billion-Dollar Baby: We Drive the Chevrolet Volt
Well, uh, where's the avian flu (late years' scare)?
My wife and I have been homeschooling in Virginia for the last six years or so.

Feel free to drop me an email if there's anything I can do to help.
What do you mean? I have never heard of "avian flu". The last bigger scare I remember was SARS.

Maybe the current "scare" is all backed by the makers of Tamiflu, who earn lots of money by now. Possible - just saying that another pandemic could be possible, too. There are lots of diseases that medicine can't handle yet (HIV?).
just imagine Los Angeles after widespread adoption of electric bikes...

... nah, neither could I.
Key paragraph

What baffles me about all of this is how people are choosing to cut their spending. I can appreciate reducing office space or negotiating a lower lease rate. I similarly understand reducing staff members or entertaining job sharing options. What I can’t quite grasp, however, is this tendency to narrow the pipe for incoming sales. When you aren’t getting dates, you don’t go home and watch re-runs of Matlock; you get out of the house and meet people.
Indeed. YMMV! :)
How to improve your emails
Ask HN: changing my site's domain name
I have foo.com and Foo Inc. wants me to change it to phoo.com because of a trademark infringement. I want to go ahead and do it. Have any of you had to change a domain name on an existing site? What's the cleanest way to do it? A cheatsheet or any list of gotchas would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Excellent summary and commentary for the rest of us who weren't there. Thanks so much for posting it.
Amusingly, the first comment on the story is by some guy confused by the author's use of the word "hacker".
I don't have a quick-and-dirty answer for you, but look into early tech companies that grew outside of Silicon Valley. The prime example here is Microsoft, which started in Albuquerque (a tech hub at the time) and moved to Seattle (not a tech hub at the time). Bill Gates is the first person that comes to mind in terms of being 'relentlessly resourceful,' as this move was for the intention of being closer to home, not for business reasons, AFAIK.
I took it as it was meant. My colleague doubted the basic assertion, so I was providing an example of each - it wasn't intended to be comprehensive :)
> First, it does not look native

I don't think this point stands, or at least it doesn't in the way you think it does.

Flash has two text rendering modes: native, and embedded. Native uses the system API and follows your system options, like when deciding on how to antialias. Embedded uses the embedded fonts with the antialiasing method the developer chooses. Many developers pick the latter because they want to know exactly how text will work on all platforms.

It's up to the developer to select which method to use. And the new flash.text.engine.* API make both a lot more powerful.

> Second, copy-paste, as others have pointed out, is a problem (...) enough apps out there fail to enable it properly

Like the first one, this becomes a developer choice, not a platform problem. It's not that "it can be done", it's that it's easy. People who don't do it, don't do it because it's the option they've picked, not because it's difficult or anything.

Your third point totally stands as having a separate DOM kills the user's control over the content and its form. But point 1 and 2 are due to conscious developer decisions and not the technology.
What kind of discrimination is there against women, in your opinion. Serious question - I am not sure if men actually have the better deal in our world...

Not claiming that there is no discrimination against women, but I also don't think it is obvious that there is. I highly doubt discrimination is the reason behind the low numbers of women in tech, for example.
Very nice. Particularly since it gives me insight into what lots of people are yelling about.

For example, look at the unemployment rate, and click Alaska (where I live) & California (where half the web seems to think that everyone lives).

We see that employment in AK is highly cyclic with a yearly cycle, that there isn't a whole lot of variation otherwise, and that current unemployment is a tad high, but not outlandishly so, and not the highest in the last 20 years.

On the other hand, unemployment in CA in not very cyclic, has significant variation on a scale of 5-10 years, and has recently gone shooting up to the highest level in 20 years.

So perhaps both sides can understand each other a little better.

P.S. Also compare California and Wyoming. And then stop wondering why some of the people in Wyoming don't seem worried.
Electrical Engineering: Signal Processing & Control Systems. I am also interested in Information Theory and Estimation Theory.
Why is this being voted down? That was the cheat.
Awesome. And there are plenty more cities linked from the frontpage (just hover over blue links in two rows):

http://edushi.com

For example:

http://beijing.edushi.com

http://hongkong.edushi.com

Some even have tiny animations - cars, balloons, zeppelins, helicopters, fireworks, flying houses:

http://guangzhou.edushi.com

http://xiamen.edushi.com

http://sz.edushi.com

http://dalian.edushi.com

http://www.3dyiwu.com

It seems like balloons and zeppelins are actually carrying banner ads (I don't speak Chinese).

------

Edit: I found the company that did it - Aladdin Information & Technology - with some English explanations:

"Aladdin has a dedicated staff of 400 focused on delivering 2D maps to creation of 3D models."

http://www.aladdincn.com/en/Cooperation.html
Well then, if you didn't believe these things, then why did you write them?

What amazes me about you is that, despite all this ranting against nerds you feel slighted you, you are actually behaving exactly the way you claim they do.

Let's pull from your twitter:

"It took all of a few hours for me to fall out of love with Hacker News. Nerds suck."

Alright, so you wrote an inflammatory piece, people on HN fairly directly, clearly, and politely (given the topic) responded, and you react by playing the victim.

I mean, do you even read what you write Rory? You basically just did exactly what you were claiming nerds do. You acted in a fowl mean spirited way, and then proceeded to get your ass kicked, and then claimed it was all the nerds fault for attacking you.
Trademarks are per area of commerce, not absolute.

McDonalds can stop you from running a McDonald's Hotdog Shop, but they can't stop you from running McDonald's Plumbing.

Before you capitulate - is Foo a very obscure word, or is it fairly common?

Are you blatantly cybersquatting?

Are you using the site for anything?

If so, is you area of commerce overlapping with Foo Inc.'s?

Is Foo Inc. willing to buy the domain off you?
Don't be bitter, you'll soon learn there's much more to life than re-configuring your window manager and X server's config file over and over again.

I promise.
Google bans ads on a lot of controversial keywords
Also for Hong Kong - http://hongkong.edushi.com/
Google Begins to Make Public Data Searchable
Jon Kleinberg Named Recipient of the 2008 ACM-Infosys award
> you have been doing it the wrong way.

You ever stand behind a door because you were afraid the modelines in your XFree86 config file were going to blow up your monitor?

Uphill both ways in the snow, etc.
A Nice Guy Who Finished First - Words Of Wisdom From Barrie Bergman
Unlike the "buffalo" one, this sentence is at least parseable.
Binding Scope in JavaScript Functions
Baltimore has a master plan for bike lanes: http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/government/planning/bikeplan.p...

And Baltimore has a bicycle club:
http://www.baltobikeclub.org/

The club is probably an advocate for the bike lanes. Lend your support and I'm sure you'll get your better commuting conditions.
There was no easy to use Unix in '96
I think innovations in search will be largely about interface and about relevance. It's not who has the most, or the best data, because it's not really that much of a technical challenge to build a big search index anymore. So, I think that Wolfram could be on the right track, because this seems to try and expose data that Google doesn't, in ways it doesn't.

The challenge is providing useful and relevant snapshots of that data to the user. In this area, Google continues to innovate. Maps, images, video, reddit-like search, your name it... Google is always looking for new ways to reveal good data to people. And Google is definitely good at producing relevant searches for people's phrases and words.

Maybe Wolfram's new search engine will have a good interface, and provide relevant results. I certainly wouldn't put it past them, and I doubt this will be a Cuil flame out. Though I do tend to agree with the sentiment that talking about something before it is released is suspicious. A good search engine sells itself.
Top row's got the logo for the site, the city name (Shanghai), a link to change cities (they've most of the major ones in China), then buttons for McDonald's, hospitals, KFC's, banks, car dealerships, and higher education.

The second row says "E address", measure distances, show bookmarks, correct errors, maximize; then there's a drop down called "frequently used places", and print.

On the far right is a search widget with tabs labelled "Address search", bus search, yellow pages, and "E address".

This is a remarkably useful app that I use frequently when I visit major cities. You can easily plot a subway or bus route with it. There are also photos of many buildings and a few 360 degree panoramas. I used it for apartment hunting once and I was astounded by the resemblance of the isometric drawings to the actual buildings. They must have hired a huge team of designers to make all this pixel art.
Maybe it is like starting a family: once you are married, you can move out to the suburbs. You have already found your SO, so you don't need access to the "market" anymore.

So maybe meet your co-founders in a tech hub, then move elsewhere together?
Yes there is overlap and I'd like to go ahead and change it. I guess I should clarify that I am looking for the technical mechanics of going about doing this as efficiently as possible.
We've gone back and forth between homeschooling, private schools in Puerto Rico, and public schools in Indiana. This fall we'll be trying a new combination (a private school in Indiana).

Both school and home education have their strong points. If you have the time to do it, I recommend home education -- you'll never get your kids' childhood back, and there's no time more quality than teaching them all the good parts of the world.

You have to dance a lot harder, to make sure they have plenty of contact with people their own age. It's almost certain that there will be homeschooling groups in your new area in Virginia, so that takes care of that, depending on the vitality of the groups in question. But nowadays, in the States, it's not too hard to find social support networks for homeschoolers.
There still isn't. Unix is hard.
Wolfram/Alpha's demo: Search results meet analytics
Oh, very good. Thanks.
Virtual goods sold on Facebook extend beyond what Facebook themselves sell, because of third-party apps. (Think in-Facebook RPGs where users can real cash to buy items, or flash games where you can use real cash to buy a new gun)
> I think home school is fine for primary school. once you get into middle and high school i am not as supportive.

Interesting. My thoughts are nearly the reverse.

We home-schooled one kid for one year (1st grade [U.S. terminology]), when we had some problems with the public schools, and then put them in public school for all the rest of it. We are considering starting up home-schooling for all of them some time in the middle/high school years, since that is when peer influences can become problematic, and sometimes dangerous.
Quite honestly the only thing I use screen for is detaching programs to run while I am logged out.

I would rather have 10 terminal windows up if I'm simply doing multi tasking on the command line. It totally makes me feel like the guy from swordfish.
I've noticed a lot of electric scooters lately. I'm curious if they're gaining in popularity elsewhere. Because it technically meets the province's definition of a power assisted "e-bike", you get a slow speed scooter without the hassle of licensing and insurance requirements. They allow a lot of freedom because you can legally ride in both bicycle and car lanes, and park almost anywhere. People are also illegally removing the 32km/h regulator (among other hacks), which is difficult for the police to enforce. It's probably a reasonable way to travel if you live downtown and don't need to climb any steep hills. Of course, the government has caught on now, so I expect the game will change when the e-bike pilot program ends this fall.

http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/dandv/vehicle/emerging/e-bi...
There's no way (if there's no offline part)

At least I spent a few minutes here and there since yesterday thinking how it could be secured. Any method I thought was quickly demolished by a few attacks that would work.

But I am open to be corrected! If anyone thought they could have solved this problem, please reply :)