skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a ridiculous article. The majority shareholder votes in the board, who makes all the big decisions, and indirectly makes all the minor decisions because they vote in the executive team. Without majority ownership, a founder can go from being Chairman/CEO and running all aspects of the business to being banned from the premises and prevented from working in the industry or talking to the press. I've seen it happen.

Not all founder-investor relationships are hostile, and the founder isn't always right. But to suggest majority ownership is irrelevant is ludicrous.
Every day in SF.
I have suffered a similar fate. Back in 1998 I had to translate the shipping cost calculation of a huge brick-and-mortar store in Brazil written in FoxPro - it was the _only_ documentation on how to calculate it they had and finally I gave up on understanding it and made a line-by-line translation for their web store.

It ran for about five years, until the company went bankrupt.
Until there's a fully public timeline and full search capability like twitter, this news is mediocre at best.

The problem is, Facebook can probably never do this. Most people have their profiles quarantined off. If for some reason facebook ever over-rode those settings and made their stuff public, a true public outcry would occur.

If facebook somehow DOES open full search capability like twitter search/open public timeline, then wow, we're in for something entirely new. The data there and possibilities make me feel like a kid in a candy store.
That's what I gather. I think for the consumer, they want most things to be free -- and if they're not free, there's always going to be a crack/keygen available for download.
It's certainly rare among /b/tards. On most of 4chan, /b/ is considered a bit like a cesspit of potty humor and dumb discussion.

You'll find a lot more hackers (certainly more than 0.001%) on /jp/ (which has many game translators, ressource hackers and even visual novel programmers) and the textboard /prog/, among others. And I'm talking about hackers in the HN meaning of the word, not activists or website defacers.
"First, vocal and influential Ruby developers talk about this"

They sure do:

http://twitter.com/d2h/status/1631034662

http://twitter.com/d2h/status/1631100714

http://twitter.com/_why/status/1631313721

http://twitter.com/d2h/status/1631342976

http://twitter.com/_why/status/1631504321

why has a point.

There's plenty of evidence that DHH and some other prominent ruby developers simply don't care at all about people having different perspectives, and they certainly don't respect it. These guys want to use their work in software at a platform for their little personal identities. The "community" is absolutely not welcoming; it's actually outright exclusionary. They don't care, and they don't even pretend to care.

I primary work with ruby and have for a few years now. I'd like to continue to do so. But I'm frequently discouraged by the fact that involvement with the community means dealing with people who are simply not nice people.
My understanding was the original Enigma code was cracked because we received photographs of it's inner workings from 2 polish mathematicians. Who showed up in England having worked out how to decode the messages. Alan Turing refined their work, designed a system to do the math, and helped keep up with the Germans who changed the Enigma's design, but I don't think he really deserves the credit for "cracking the code."
I am not sure how much TV costs, but HN and Slashdot must give a quite impressive number...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism
Sure, breakthroughs are always possible, and more pieces of information are linked to each other and so on. I'm not saying it's not possible that someone has a good idea tomorrow that changes everything.

But no, ideas don't cross pollinate. It's individuals who cross pollinate ideas in their heads and there's a limit to how much information a person can possibly juggle in her head.

It's that creative process that we don't really understand yet which is the bottleneck. No amount of linked information will be able to somehow supercharge our coginitive capacity. Sometimes just having time to think without interruption is more important than more information.

I think the likelyhood for breakthrough ideas is largely a function of the number of people working on hard problems. I'm not sure how fast that rate rises. Not very fast I would think. And the second derivative may very well be zero.
There's research suggesting that phoneme patterns are not arbitrary. Have a look at Theo Vennemann (Berkeley, Munich) and his work on syllabic structure -- I recall some very interesting stuff from the latter '80's.
My daughter is four and has an insatiable appetite for learning. Whether we ever structure her learning into a curriculum is TBD. She already reads at a 8-10 yr old level, and asks me questions that force us to open up wikipedia on my iPhone for late night tutoring sessions before she goes to bed. She loves it, I love it. What could be better?
$.02 worth. If you can target your software or marketing towards a vertical, the relevant magazines and industry associations are starving for articles. You can get free marketing from how to articles targeting a vertical. Then rewrite it for another vertical. A possible idea is how an existing customer is using your product. Better than brochureware.
Rails *is* Still a Ghetto
If you enjoyed this article, check out the book _The_Language_Instinct_ by Steven Pinker, which is all about the cognitive basis behind language.

He has a good followup that I haven't quite gotten through yet, called _The_Stuff_of_Thought_ that's a bit more about how rules of language serve as clues to how the brain processes information.

A couple of his other books are less related to language, but equally good: _The_Blank_Slate_ and _How_the_Mind_Works_.

They're all pretty accessible (certainly to a crowd like the one that reads HN), if not exactly light reading.
This isn't a Warez approval site so stealing it is not an option. Therefore your choices to install Leopard for free are: Find someone willing to fund your purchase of Leopard.
Do you have children? The 'made to understand that learning is very very interesting' thing is entirely unnecessary.

My daughter doesn't stay bored for long because she's curious about everything (essentially killing your TV helps too).
If you are a sci fi fan, you might enjoy David Brin's "Earth". Such devices feature prominently in some parts of the story. A good read, regardless.
Wouldn't that kind of situation foster hyperspecialization? Real, true insight is the result of a degree of expertise plus a smattering of general knowledge. Not that public schools necessary provide that kind of education. Nor do so-called "liberal arts" schools for that matter--rather, they seem to serve as a dumping ground for the innumerate.
Droste Effect with Mathematica
This is the kind of thing that should be picked up by statistical parsers which presumably use patterns like this to choose the "correct" parse of a sentence from the multitude of possibilities. Of course it is more meaningful when a human points it out.

The "Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose" hierarchy should enable inferences about the meaning of words which have never been seen before. It would be really interesting to see if someone could construct something like wordnet from inferences based on patterns like this.
There is absolutely no proven market for a 'tablet PC'. None whatsoever. Despite them being available for years in various forms.
The Seinfeld degree!
My point exactly.

If I have to fiddle with macports, install my own emacs and live with the Java Apple wants me to have, I would rather just buy a cheap core 2 duo notebook or a netbook and put Linux on it. The only reason to buy a Mac is if you need iTunes, Adobe stuff and Office and don't want to run Linux.

Or if you are developing for Mac (in which case it would be rather dumb to use anything else)
I wonder if they going to become a new establishment

What? 4chan? No way. Some guys were bored, the poll wasn't really hard to hack, so they had some fun patching some tools together and playing with it. What they did doesn't require any kind of social influence or networking... it's just a bunch of bored people on an IRC channel somewhere. Most of which can't program.

4chan has no ideology, or if you prefer, thousands of conflicting ideologies. The visual novel fans (/jp/) despise most anime fans (/a/), the anime fans have no respect for the fitness and fashion fans (/fit/,/fa/), etc. /b/ is bigger but still a huge mess.
I use weather.gov for forecasts. What would be great is to have alerts if weather falls below or above temp thresholds,forecast for rains increases or other changes which would affect my plans for the day or week.
"showdead" should allow me to follow links in killed submissions. Right now I can see the title of the dead links, but there is nothing I can click on to actually go to the page which was originally linked.
How is TrialPay working out for you?
I recently came across http://notalwaysright.com/

You may have a story or three for them, just for therapeutic purposes.

(Haven't the faintest idea if the site's stories are legit or ghostwritten - some do seem a stretch.)
A lot of sites use the code behind linkrap(the linkrap.com site itself hasn't been touched in months).

There are a few different business models at work.
I spend far less time watching TV than browsing HN submissions and comment threads.
I think there should be a management degree where you actually start a small business. I am not thinking just about an assignment for one semester; the whole purpose of the degree would be to end up with a real small business.
Internet Users in Developing Countries Drag on Sites’ Profits
It's interesting, but what's unclear from that post is why she didn't direct funds toward projects with an optimized (chance of success x potential payoff). Lack of expertise with the subject area? Sabotaging of her efforts by paid-off colleagues? A desire to fit in?
Cleverly omitted are other actual facts that other people can use to reach conclusions other than your own.

Maybe an adversarial method would be a better way of addressing these issues in practice, but only when we're responsible enough to read both sides.

Also, it's intellectually dishonest to pick your conclusions first and find the facts later. Even if CATO finds good facts (I'm sure they do), there is most definitely something "wrong with" them.
Well since government is a monopoly, they should be able to give them some good advice
Now we are seeing the clueless wannbe, 3rd-time around "Why Developers are Switching to Mac" articles. I think this is analogous to your mother joining Facebook and "When taxi drivers are giving stock tips, it's time to sell."
The fb air application doesn't add nothing to the user interaction. It looks like chrome application I have for fb... I can't distinguish them!
I didn't mean that as a criticism of the article, I just didn't notice that was the actual title of it.
There are technical paths that contain solutions, but you gotta give a little, take a little. This is not a technical nor bandwidth problem as much as it's a intellectual property problem, mainly the fact that it's still stuck in the pre-Internet age. Technically the solutions are already on track, mainly P2P technologies such as bittorrent used for content delivery.

So don't weep for these companies too much. They and big content still just hasn't brought their ranching up to date. This NY Times article is very incomplete regarding the full scope of the issue, and way too quickly jumps to lamenting that the Internet is a failure after all (all that global village talk).

Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions!
Hmm... I hate to be the grumpy one, but is this really Hacker News material? I mean, wow, free textures. What's next? Free icons? Free clipart? Free javascript snippets?
Only if by Western you mean "the U.S. and Japan."

Canada, Europe and the rest of the Western world has a deep understanding of the limitations of Capitalism, and the word Socialism can be said without it being confused with Communism.
That said, I personally like that these stupid and outdated IP controls help spur diversity. Every time a copyright lawyer farts, a new indie band is born.
It is just a rip/copy of http://www.umbrellatoday.com/

Which is a site developed by the Thought Bot folks and used as an example during their rails trainings.

http://www.thoughtbot.com/services/training
EarthBrowser is awesome. I looked at it not too long ago and thought it was very impressive.
From the notes:

"Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago."

I'd love to see current numbers so we can spot the trend
How can you have an article titled "What Killed Pontiac?" and not mention the Aztek. Easily the ugliest car ever built.
Not true, Apple breaks core features in minor security releases all the time. Most recently, they broke the system Perl. I don't use OS X for anything important anymore (only for watching videos on my TV), but back when I did use a Mac for work, things randomly broke for no reason all the time. (That doesn't even include the nightmare that is ports / fink / whatever, required to get modern versions of UNIX programs.) I use Debian unstable now, and it is a lot more reliable than OS X, for me anyway.

Also, the whole getting wifi to work thing is mostly solved now. All the wireless cards are Intel, and Intel pours a lot of money into making them work really well with Linux. So you pop in your Ubuntu or Moblin CD, install, and right click the little icon, just like on any other OS.

Basically, OS X sucks, Linux sucks, and Windows sucks. So there is no real reason to get super-excited about any of them -- they are all basically the same, with Linux marginally better in a few cases.
Introducing VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner
Close, but drop the No button.
And I seriously think I should get some karma love for that saying. Damn that's good.
The point that he is making is not that management consulting is useless, but the framework for teaching is ineffective. As he says, "What they don’t seem to teach you in business school is that “the five forces” and “the seven Cs” and every other generic framework for problem solving are heuristics: they can lead you to solutions, but they cannot make you think."

The problem (and I see this in technical management as well as in the business world) is that a good manager can think themselves out of the situation without gimmicks or formal training; whereas a bad manager does not become a good one with all the MBAs and training courses in the world.

The other great point he makes, that confirms my own impression, is: "If it’s reminiscent of the kind of toothless wisdom offered in self-help literature, that’s because management theory is mostly a subgenre of self-help. Which isn’t to say it’s completely useless."

I think that is exactly right. Yes there are some people that will derive some benefit from reading a self-help book, but it rarely provides a lasting benefit and is no substitute for an intelligent and mature reflection on your problems.
General Electric Develops a 500GB Optical Disc
Why would it be wrong to consider that the meta is the description of the resource being provided?

If the purpose of the meta attribute is to provide a description of the resource being presented, a description of the person behind the messages is much better than a description of the service.
Condé Nast to shut Portfolio magazine
When Admen Play Venture Capitalists
I buy Macs because they work fine and I can afford them and I spent far too many years of my life dicking around with Linux on the desktop when it clearly belongs in the datacenter.

I don't use Windows because it isn't Unix, not even if you use Cygwin and squint and tilt your head sideways.
If Twitter came out with its own URL shortening service (or would just buy bit.ly already), I'm sure the number of URL shortening services being 'launched' every day would drop significantly.
Multicore version of bzip2 compression utility
>> "Apple breaks core features in minor security releases all the time."

I've used OS X for 2 1/2 years now, and can't remember anything breaking :/

Before that I used linux on the desktop for maybe 8 years, and things broke every week. (Redhat, mandrake, gentoo, ubuntu)
I'm not sure that I agree with the notion that "layered" adjectives don't require commas. "His battered old canvas fishing hat" certainly seems as though it could use a pause. But then, I tend to think of commas
as as indicators of verbal pacing more than strict grammatical constructs.
Who has a massive server farm?
Computes enough to keep countries warm?
Goo-gle, goo-gle!

Who has a massive data store?
of websites, books and maps and more?
Goo-gle, goo-gle!

Who hired Norvig as technical lead?
Has rooms of genius PhDs?

Whose statistical translation is leagues ahead?
Whose voice recognition will leave Dragon dead?

Who reserves permission to train on your mail?
Knows who said what in the worldwide news?
Keeps most of their work hidden under a veil?
Their every feature gets 'ahhs' and 'oohs'?

Goo-gle, goo-gle!

(Ahem - http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/thesimpsons/stonecuttersanthem.htm )

Well, I can tell you; that isn't happening

Sure, says the guy posting under the name of a sentient computer! :)
Same idea: http://www.ok-cancel.com/archives/link/2004/09/google-answer...

Guy's blog, named "Ok/Cancel", has a story about Google, and thus comes up first for the search of "Cancel Google". He gets inundated with comments from people trying to "cancel" google.
It would be easy enough to add a "make public" checkbox. And instead of just having add as friend, add a "follow" button. the hard part is getting 200m users, they already did that. The really part part is making money and well that's still TBA.
(Redhat, mandrake, gentoo, ubuntu)

Well there's your problem :)

Try Debian stable, and let me know if it ever breaks. (Debian unstable definitely does break, but not very often, and it's usually easy to fix. It works for me.)
Easy Ajax with JQuery
I know its a bit trendy, but I am making a living off of iPhone apps. I don't have any smash hits but have been maintaining a fairly consistent income since I published my first app last December. Right now I am trying to ramp up the number of apps I have and my goal is to match my previous salary at a "hot, young internet startup" in the valley (which is in the throws of death, i think)

This was my first experience selling software, I was always a research oriented, backend sort of guy... usually a few abstractions away from the actual product. So I had to think about a lot of new things, but it was really fun. I wasn't used to thinking about where buttons should go or how the UI flow for creating a new game. And I certainly wasn't used to responding to user feedback. The first version of my first game was pretty buggy and people complained and there was my name next to it in the app store. Not something I was used to. But now I most of the emails I get tell me how much they like the program and as much as I like to say I hate people, it feels pretty good.

So maybe that's inspiring.

Or maybe the fact that its noon and I'm typing this from bed with my dogs asleep next to me will inspire you. Although, the freedom to work on my own terms is a blessing and a curse. This has been covered before on HN, but I would say if you have the self discipline, then its more of a blessing.

I have mixed feelings about writing apps because it can be a crapshoot. I don't think you can go into it expecting to write a huge hit, but I also think its one of the best places for an independent software developer. Apple takes care of a lot of the non-development details for you and you can get your app in front of a lot of eyes very quickly.

PS: I will probably go back to work at another startup someday. As much as fun as I'm having, I do miss working with a good team of folks on something that requires EVERYONE's effort. But for now, I am very happy doing what I'm doing.
Because they're all terrible. They're all just small laptops with touch-sensitive screens and a few touch-screen software features. I've been itching for a tablet PC since at least 2003, but I've never bought one because I want one that doesn't suck. (Wait, I did buy a Nokia n800... sigh.) Apple's tablet won't suck, because Apple will 1) put a lot of work into creating a UI that works well with the form factor, and 2) have the guts to cut hardware features if that's what it takes to create a decent product.

Funny, I sound like an Apple fanboy, even though I came here to express my irritation with OSX. Right now, if somebody gave me an iMac, my first impulse would be to install Linux on it, but you just have to look at the non-Apple phones released since the iPhone launched to see that Apple is on a completely different plane when it comes to smaller devices. I can't wait to see what they do with tablets, though perhaps it would hurt their prestige to release a novel product for a small market... they wouldn't be able to keep the hype within reasonable bounds, and expectations wouldn't be met.
So would you say all of that to my face? That was really harsh. I am a person, you know. I get happy and sad and have stupid ideas, just like everyone else.

I was trying to be helpful. I honestly thought it would be. I'm sorry for wasting a few minutes of people's time; trying to provoke an interesting discussion; not meeting your high standards of "worthy" content, and apparently churning out crap. I'm not sure what else to say. But I don't identify with Hacker News anymore, I don't think.
I agree with this. All three operating systems have their flaws, so it basically boils down to preference and ease of development. If you are developing a Windows application, you should develop in Windows; for Apple applications, use OS X; Linux applications, use Linux. One advantage of Apple platforms, which the article mentions, is that that they allow running of all 3 operating systems.
Can I catch this fraudster?
So we have a live wannabe fraud committer who claims to have sent us a check which accidentally overpays for some furniture he is "buying" from us.

Anybody out there have any good ideas how I can do something better than just ignoring this?

Here is the text of his today's email to us:

How are you? I just received the confirmation from the Bank that the payment as been issued out and was mailed by the United Parcel Service. It will be delivered to your address in 1 day from now according to the courier ,but to my greatest surprise the draft was issued out for my monthly pay check $2,000 instead of the actual cost of my purchase .
The Bank claimed that i requested for my monthly pay check to be issued out to you but am very sure i only made a request for the cost of the goods to be made out to your name .This is a terrible mistake and i was just informed about this so please once the check is delivered please take it to your Bank and have it cashed as advised by the accounting officer at the Bank.
You will then deduct the cost of my purchase plus an extra $100 to offset the cost of your run around expenses.The rest of the fund should be sent to my mover via western union the same day you do receive the payment so that my mover can make the trip over for the pick at once. I will need your immediate response via email assuring me that i can trust you to handle this with care and have the remaining fund returned appropriately.I am hearing impaired and will hope that your intentions remains noble though out the duration of this transaction
Opening up a laptop in a coffeeshop is like a peacock spreading its feathers.
So where do you work? Is it:

A) A fantasy land
B) A college computer lab
C) Develop intranet apps for a small company