skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was a great post. It's a very valid point that there are things going on in the world which are just as important as - if not for more important than - M&A around Internet media hubs. Seeing even one media site take a refreshingly honest stance like this warms the heart.

This many years after the 'net bubble burst, you'd think we would have gotten beyond this obsession with net media sites. But sadly, no... this reminds me of a year or two ago, when there was a similar situation involving, aaaah, I don't remember, maybe Facebook or something, and around the same time there was a huge enterprise software deal (IBM bought somebody, or something). Net result: The Facebook (or whoever it was) deal was reported everywhere, all over HN, Reddit, etc. The other deal? Crickets...

Whether all of us want to admit it or not, we do participate in something of an echo chamber here, and anything that comes along now and then and helps tear down those walls, even to a small degree, is a Good Thing.

IOW, there's a much bigger world out there than the world of YC, Twilio, Tumblr, Google, Yahoo, Dropbox, AirBnB, Medium, Apple, 37 Signals, Heroku, Square, Twitter, Facebook, Color, etc.
This is especially relevant at this stage of Tesla. I would guess that there aren't a lot of people wandering through the mall to buy a tesla or making it one stop on their trek through the dealerships. People (right now) are setting out to buy a Tesla. It's also expensive enough to warrant going to one of the already established outlets, even if that involves travel. I doubt not being able to sell physically in North Carolina will really hamper their sales too much.
Skype for Linux 4.2
As long as they didn't EVADE taxes, it's perfectly legal. (And in keeping with their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.)
And this:

> we reporters know that our bread is ultimately buttered by pageviews
these days, even anti-CNN rhetoric generates pageviews for CNN.
Google, Microsoft, GE, etc.

"General Electric Paid No Federal Taxes in 2010"

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/general-electric-paid-federal...

"GE's CEO, Jeff Immelt Heads Obama's Council On Jobs And Competitiveness"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/jeffrey-immelt-coun...

"Former Google Exec Turns Whistleblower On Company’s Tax Avoidance Machinations In The UK"

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/19/former-google-exec-turns-wh...
Summary of the Amazon Web Services AMA
Yahoo Takes Over Times Square
To your latter point, it's certainly possible. You could replace "Ford or GM" with a large 90s computer manufacturer, e.g. HP, but Apple eventually decided they wanted to via Apple stores.
Yes! The mobile address book is the new friend list, and the different social "networks" are mostly apps. Some are platforms, such as Google or Facebook, on which other apps can be built. But you no longer no need to be tied to a platform exclusively.

That said, you still need to build a LOT of stuff for every social app, so it would be nice if there were open source frameworks like Wordpress for blogs.

I make a lot of these points here:
http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...
I fully accept the fact that I'm a tiny blogger with little to no material who probably shouldn't be doing this.

But I'm doing it.
Judging from the comments in here, I seem to be the only person who uses eat24hours.com. I wonder how this merger will affect them?
Headline: "Apple Avoided Billions in Taxes"

Fact: "Investigators have not accused Apple of breaking any laws, and the company is hardly the only American multinational to face scrutiny for using complex corporate structures and tax havens to sidestep taxes."

NY Times going for another Pulitzer.
Thanks. I was planning to update the comparison by providing the total number of icons and unique features provided by each project
> On the other hand, I think the dealership model exists for a reason. There's a racket aspect to it, but would a Ford or GM really want to manage customer sales and showrooms all over the US?

Yeah, that's a great reason for the dealerships to exist, but not one for them to have some sort of legally protected chunk of the market.
" wonder why someone as Chomsky doesn't question the whole Bin Laden story a bit more thorough"

Because he has enough reliable knowledge of the US' operations that he doesn't need to become a conspiracist to explain it all.
Yahoo unveils the new Flickr with one terabyte of free space
Hum, I'll think about it if I hear it from a few more people! :)
In case you haven't heard, having revenue is no longer cool. Having a huge user base on a service that isn't self sustaining is - and people will pay big bucks for those companies!
Warner Bros.' "Media Camp WB" accelerator program announces inaugural class
I don't think he will, and I hope he won't. But Elon tends to be a guy who thinks very long term, and I think he knows the future for Tesla would be much better if they sold their own cars, and never depended on the dealers again. Plus, it's not like he's in a bad position with Tesla right now, and he's desperate.
I have to disagree if only b/c of a differing point of view. As a NYC restaurant consumer and not a restaurant tech provider, this merger is bad for me because it's lowering competition and will most likely just result in me paying higher prices (either directly or indirectly) for delivered food.
"How much is enough?"
"It's not a question of enough, pal. It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another."
Flickr gets new UI, new Android app, 1 TB free space
The hinted solution then is for webshops to provide some form of liability protection for the client.

If the website is buggy (like a leaking pipe), its the webshops fault and reponsibility to fix. If personal information was leaked thanks to bugs in the website (ie, the leaky pipe caused a flooding), then again the webshop is responsible.

If a customer know that they are not responsible to maintain the website security and protection of data records from customers, then I suspect many would be willing to pay quite nicely for not being "on the hook" if something goes wrong.

To make that economical possible for the webshop, we might need to utilize regulations. With plumbers, they are forced to be liable, so everyone is competing with that assumption. It is always part of the price, and they don't have to compete with non-liable plumbers that can undercut the price.
I wish politicians who talk about this would factor in some accountability on their part. The fact is, the companies are doing it because the politicians wrote the laws that allowed it. They should be saying "We allowed company X to avoid billions in tax through our moronic actions" not "Company X avoided billions in tax".
I know your joking, but I feel like this is an important thing that's often lost on people. The other day I got in a bit of an argument on oDesk because I turned around a job too quickly. The guy didn't think it was worth the price we agreed upon. I had to explain that that wasn't a 15 minute fix, that was years of studying in university, and years of trial and error, and hard won experience to know how to solve his problem in 15 minutes.

He stiffed me in the end...
The fun high-impact stuff rarely drives the customer's bottom line.
We're moving towards a future in which "working" will be an optional activity.

If you can get enough farms/factories producing the widgets of everyday life essentially for the sum of the input commodity costs, energy costs, and some small overhead (and the free market/technology relentlessly drives overhead towards 0), you wind up being able to take care of everyone-- but you don't take care of everyone with jobs. You take care of the people by enabling them to not worry about the basics of life. You remove the survival problem from the game, and allow people to choose between living little or thriving through voluntary creative pursuits. Some people will certainly focus on the creative pursuits, and generate wealth that enables them to thrive instead of merely survive. But I have a feeling that a bunch of people will focus on their tennis game instead (which is fine with me).

I don't think most people yet realize that this sort of model is coming into humanity's reach. Most people are looking for ways to recreate the solutions of the past. But that's a horrible idea-- the past had problems because the solutions of the past create problems. We're almost on the verge of a technological/humanistic revolution in which everything will be changeable. But things won't change if we keep recreating the past (or, more accurately, if our ancient social structures keep trying to maintain control of the population by merely tweaking what are actually completely obsolete mechanisms).

I hope we can overcome the status quo and turn this world into a true utopia, instead of letting it continue to become yet another of the countless possible dystopias that are outlined by science fiction and other speculative fiction, and which have constituted the dystopian reality that most people ever born here have had to live through.

I'm very optimistic-- I think the hard part is mostly behind us. The social power structures (the institutions that use money, violence, and killing to control people) have not routinely killed scientist and engineer society-changers for probably several hundred years, at least in the West. Money is still used to this day-- e.g. the VCs (and other financial industry and government people) hold the capital-- not some science/engineering/humanist foundation headed by scientists/engineers/humanists. I think it's possible to work within these constraints though, and to have a significant impact.
The purchase of Tumblr by Yahoo is far more relevant to the majority of readers than Warner Chilcott.

I agree that the Tumblr news at least seems more important to a lot of people, and I'll add that perception is not always reality. Just because we've all heard of Tumblr and maybe even use Tumblr, doesn't actually mean that Tumblr is particularly important.
I guess it's a bigger deal for the media with Apple because it makes the most profit of all those companies dodging taxes.
"All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless."

This is news?

[Upon reading the comments, apparently it is.]
Flickr Redesign
> generating good content for free

They are not generating it for free. They sell themes at $50 pop to at least 100 people. They make their $5,000. They also charge $100/hr for support.

> those 1000s of lines of code exist just so that the end user doesn't have to mess with the

Until things break. The developer goes away, etc.

> Do people really pay 1000 to adjust a word press theme?

Depends on what level of adjustment. If I charge them $1000 they will get $1,000 worth of services. But I am not willing to engage a client unless they are at least willing to spend that much. Not worth my time.
Were you thinking something along the lines of helping people find events they're interested in? Sounds like a space that many startups have come and gone through, but one that they have yet to find success in.
I think the most valuable thing this is pointing out is that the nature of the problem is shifting to an integration challenge - how to hook together the 5 or 6 services that I will need to get everything up and running. Most web driven businesses are going to need some combination of different technologies at some point - the people who can orchestrate that well are in a good position.
If you find out, let me know. I can tell you where the infosec / security researcher types are, but not where the startup people are.

Maybe we should just invent something new.
Congratulations Marco, to you and your team. Your writeup is great to read-- the history and growth of Tumblr firsthand. I'm excited to see what you all build.
It might be better for companies not to have such press about their mergers or at least I don't see how it is any advantage for the short term blip media coverage of these kind of events provide. And if you are a value investor, having less noise around the price of a share due to short term media coverage of big events might be an advantage as well.
'twas a bit of a play on confusing the go game with the go language and the typical comments that arise in the go language discussions.
A better, brighter Flickr
If you want to stop something you think is linkbait, be smart, don't link to it.
The Tumblr merger is uninteresting, as two sluggish and unexciting tech companies merging usually results in one even bigger and more sluggish tech company. After some straightforward cost cutting it will be business as usual. Yawn.
This article sounds like someone with basically no real-world experience quoting a professor (possibly) out of context (because, christ, what an asshole as a CFO) and over-simplifying an actual problem to make such an extremely obvious point it should probably go without saying.

I'd love an actual discussion about dealing with late-paying clients. This article contributes nothing. In fact, it makes the claim that not paying your bills on time is just fine! As long as the person you owe isn't constantly pestering you about it, hold on to that cash! Suckers! Sorry: That's not just fine and if you consistently do it, you're going to earn a nice reputation as someone who's a pain-in-the-ass to work for because extracting payment takes forever. It's not up to the person you hired to bug the shit out of you until you decide to grace them with payment for their work.

As far as advertising Hourglass and the FREE GUIDE that's plastered all over that page... More harm than good. Because they clearly have a very amateur view of how business works.
Devastating tornado hits Moore, OK
Live feed here: http://kfor.com/on-air/live-streaming/
Tax avoidance is legal by definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance

I don't see the headline as inaccurate at all; if anything, I figured that it is common knowledge that Apple intentionally avoids billions in taxes.
Breaking News: 300 million americans avoided paying the maximum amount of tax possible through legal deductions because they also like to keep as much of their money as possible.

/shocker
Flickr Redesigned
There are also people in the third world that will apparently do it for $5/hr until what you get are shit results that are an embarrassment to look at.
I opened a company two years ago devoted to solving this problem in particular. But more generally, we aim to disrupt social networks and dating sites, and group deals, by making something that is USEFUL to people's social lives.
This is the most eloquent way of putting this I've seen. Well said, my friend.
Thought Google Glass is dorky? Check out the early prototypes
Flickr Gets A Huge Revamp with 1TB of free storage
Ever since the Jaron Lanier interview the other day, I can't get this idea of tech destroying jobs out of my head. The comparison between the relative value and number of employees between Kodak and Instagram was a stark (if cherry-picked) example of how the new tech economy concentrates wealth to an almost monarchic extreme.

Now obviously efficiency should on balance be good—automation should free people for higher pursuits—but when you look at the objective reality of what the democratization of distribution has really done for people, you see that despite being free from greedy middle-men sucking up all the value, it's tremendously difficult to actually make a living from the easy distribution we enjoy in the YouTube era. Technologists can still become millionaires relatively easily, but only by aggregating the effort of literally millions. The most elite social media celebrities are earning low six figures and there aren't very many of them.

I still believe in the idea that value is not necessarily always reflected in cash money, and that a lot of the automation that computers produce can help everyone, but as the privileged few I think we owe it the world to give some consideration to destitute and unemployable. Moving towards in the direction of socialist policy where a minimum standard of living is guaranteed is probably the right thing to do if automation is driving the economy, but at the same time I don't think it's a panacea, because people want to work and feel useful, and even if the minimum standard of living is acceptable, the poor will still be resentful if their is an intellectual thought-worker class above them.

All of this has me really questioning how and where I want to apply my skills for the remainder of my career.
Money can't buy press like this. Suddenly Elon Musk is the underdog fighting the vested interests that be and Tesla is the little engine that could.
Hi, original article author here. Thanks for the great comments and feedback. I just appended my post to say:

I probably should have used a question mark in my post title instead of an asterisk. I don't claim to know the future and I get that I'm talking about an industry and an area of tech that's unpredictable. I've no need to be "right" about this and am just glad to have started some conversations.

I probably also should have referred to something like "generalist retail website development for the masses" instead of just "website development." One part of my current company that is still going strong is a business unit that's performing hundreds of hours per month of custom software development, database management and consulting for a client pioneering a unique problem space where no off-the-shelf tool is going to do the trick. We just had challenges replicating that scale of project within our company, but that's been more about roadblocks to growing the way we wanted to than it has to do with the nature of the industry overall. I fully agree with the commenters who note that at the higher end of client and project requirements when it comes to creativity and complexity, there's still a great need for professional service providers with a broad range of experience and deep knowledge. As I tried to say in my post, I think the folks working with bigger budget clients and projects will have plenty of work for the foreseeable future, even if under a different name from "website developers."

Thanks for reading.
I'm been working on http://imnosy.com for a while, and thought about that approach, but ran into difficulties when slight variations to the screen were made. Right now, we're using a diff engine. Sieve looks pretty rad though. Will check that out. Fun space :)
Curious: What does the day-and-night-iPhone reference mean?

[Edit: Genuine thanks for the explanation everyone, but boy am I sorry I asked.]
probably some hack to speed scrolling made last year, that now serves the opposite purpose.
Exactly. The fact that that "majority" of "readers" in the US care more about Tumblr means nothing, Tumblr is the farthest away from important when it comes to technology, innovation, and I'll even say communication. It's just another stupid SV deal that guaranteed early investors and VC in Tumblr a nice exit before the wheels fell off that company. Yahoo! has cash and they use it in whatever ways they want.

I'll agree with OP that Yahoo is more relevant to the masses, but we all know the masses are constantly up for Darwin Awards.
The simple fact of the matter is that the (consumer-facing) tech industry is much more sexy than pharma, by virtue of people consciously interacting with tech products on a daily basis. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry these days wants to make a mobile or web app, and it's getting easier for them to do so with each passing year.

In comparison, biotech doesn't have this phenomenon, which makes it a good industry to get into if you know what you're doing.
I assume they are processing the transaction as a refund to the recipient's card? There isn't enough detail to understand what's going on there. This looks like one of those "The investors made us put something up to start building buzz even though it isn't nearly done..." type of things.
I agree with the premise of this article, but I was disappointed to see that none of the suggestions included focusing on web application development instead of website development. I started Brightbit (http://brightbit.com) 2 years ago with 2 other co-founders, and we have always focused 100% on custom web and mobile applications, and have referred 100% of the smaller websites to local CMS/WordPress shops around us who serve them.

With our focus on building more complex high-end web apps and startups, we have had no shortage of work or shrinking margins, and have in fact experienced the exact opposite. We have been raising our rates, and have continued to experience strong growth and have had very happy clients.

Long story short, there is another path away from general web development with pretty good margins if you're willing to learn more and do more programming work instead of frontend theming/customization work.
Apple released their testimony today and it specifically addresses this.

"Apple wants to make clear to the Subcommittee that the Company does not use its Irish subsidiaries or any other entities to engage in the following tax practices that were the focus of the Subcommittee’s September 20, 2012 hearing, entitled Offshore Profit Shifting and the US Tax Code. Specifically, Apple does not move its intellectual property into offshore tax havens and use it to sell products back into the US to avoid US tax, nor does it use revolving loans from CFCs to fund its domestic operations. Apple does not hold money on a Caribbean island, does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands, and does not move any taxable revenue from sales to US customers to other jurisdictions in order to avoid US taxation."
Yes it is great. It has a voice, isn't too dry, and gets me slightly out of the usual tech bubble-like posts I read elsewhere. Plus he often posts reader comments, which are critical and dissenting views of his own posts.
The main difference between classical regression using ordinary least squares (OLS) and robust regression using iterative re-weighted least squares (IRLS) is that with OLS, all observations are given equal weight and with IRLS, observations may or may not be given equal weight. Essentially, IRLS gives outliers and/or influential [1] data points less weight, which may improve the performance of the overall model since these outliers/influential data would otherwise cause assumption violations using classical regression. If there are no outliers, then results from robust and classical regression converge.

I would disagree with SagelyGuru in recommending robust regression for non-statisticians, though I can see where he or she is coming from. With robust regression, you don't have to worry as much about assumptions as with classical regression. But with robust regression, you need to be aware that the underlying analytical method is different and what that means. For example, the standard robust regression implementation in R (i.e, the rlm function in the MASS package) doesn't produce t-statistics or p-values. There're also warnings that especially at lower sample sizes, the standard errors produced by rlm may be unreliable. One recommended way to obtain those p-values would be to get bootstrapped standard error estimates, so that normal-theory approximation would apply.

[1] There are different types of robust estimators (e.g., M, S, MM, etc.) that have different robustness properties.
Attack by Compiler
This is a serious, developing disaster. Best wishes to anyone with family or friends in the area.
I think that sometime in the mid- to late 90s, when there was an explosive land grab on the Web and every Web-based company was a new startup because the Web itself was a new startup, the word startup ended up meaning Web-based company to a lot of people.
Adding to my above, I'd also like to point out that AHK has commands for selecting certain interface elements, which seems like a better solution than hard coding specific locations to click. Just another way to make it a bit cleaner/tidier.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/my-phone/2013/03/dave-mori...