skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the reason is simpler - there is little evolutionary pressure. Coming from an ISV background, you will see that better designed user interfaces almost always sell better. Complicated or difficult to understand user interfaces will sell worse. So there is some type of pressure in commercial software to go for somewhat better user interfaces.

This pressure does not exist for open source software in the most case. If the people who are involved in the project find that it solves their needs, they don't see any need to modify it to fit the needs of new users. So the interface stagnates at what the core contributors are familiar with.
50c eCPM is definitely not bad on FB (of course, it depends on a lot of factors :p)

Which ad network do you use?
Is there an option to hide the panel on the right? I prefer the classic single-pane style.

(Warning to devs: outliner users are finicky, finicky bastards.)
The article left me with a few "Facebook apps"-newbie questions. Hope someone here will be able to answer.

1. How are Facebook apps monetized? Advertising?

2. What do applications use the collected user data for? I once saw a description of the kind of access an application gets to the user's data, and it seemed a bit daunting.
Silicon Valley VCs don't want Obama's money, think Google is passe
Do you have any stovetop steamers you recommend?
Indeed. Another question worth noting is, how many people are watching? The ratio of consumers to producers is big -- the fact that YouTube has people to watch all the content produced on it is what's remarkable about it.
I have a hard time working out if this is a national embarrassment or just the judicial system's way of slowly finding the correct people to compile the code.
Try reading A Journey Through Genius:

http://www.amazon.com/Journey-through-Genius-Theorems-Mathem...

The read part is _great_, and it gets you to do math in a way that flows pretty easily from the reading.
I'm going to stick to this date/time as our last meetup was a logistical nightmare since we switched the timing/place a few times (for a bunch of different reasons, most notably the crappy weather).

Right now, we're at 21 RSVPs.
Awesome! We're going to be holding these Hacker & Founder meetups in NYC the second to last Thursday of every month.
You can do whatever you feel like on it, whereas the Airport Express is just a router and music streaming device.
never, ever, ever, ever talk to the cops.

this video may have been linked here earlier but please watch it in its entirety. very important to know your right (us citizens).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865
Wow. Definitely food for thought. Thanks for posting.
A Portable (RIS) / (WDS) Server
I think we should focus more on why people end up in poverty than trying to "make them not poor". Prevention is likely to be more effective than correction. Things like living wages and abandoning local funding of schools would probably help.
Cool Ad: Rube Goldberg machine destroys Dutch department store
Yep, context is key. I recall reading that Amazon found placing the "This is recommended because you bought book X" actually reassured their customers a lot. It seems like people prefer recommendation algorithms they can understand, rather than complex ones that may be more accurate.
If you eliminate performance reviews altogether, and issues rewards as team rewards, why would top performers (the ones who might regularly bank 7-15% raises instead of 2-4% raises) stay with your company for the rock-steady, everyone-gets-5% return, when they can go somewhere else and make meaningfully more money?

It seems that the socialist (not tarring, just naming) approach to granting team raises is a powerful attraction to low performers.

In a small startup, with relatively little money to throw around, it probably doesn't matter and eliminating them may actually be a net win. Once the company reaches the 500+ person mark, failing to recognize ($$) individual achievement just demotivates and chases away those who would be your stars.
Apple bans an iPhone e-reader because it provides access to the Kama Sutra
While I'm sure windmill makers are lobbying as hard as they can, can you honestly be concerned about them given their fossil fuel position like coal, oil, natural gas, and car companies?
More useful information here: http://torrentfreak.com/biased-pirate-bay-judge-judged-by-mo...

"[...] the appeal court sent out a press release today in which they announce that Ihrfelt has been taken off the case. She has been replaced by three new judges from a separate division of the court."

"[...] one of the replacements, Anders Eka, is connected to the The Stockholm Center for Commercial law, together with movie industry lawyers Monique Wasted and Peter Danowsky who represented the music industry in the Pirate Bay trial."

What is going on here? I'm really surprised that after two such issues they are not checking each and every judge and his family just to prove they're not setting up the trial... This just makes the Pirate Party stronger every day. How many positions will they get if this circus continues? 2? 3?
There's also Songbird http://getsongbird.com/ which though early and a bit bloaty has a interesting featureset over iTunes.
Read the article, didn't like it.

How can I comment that it's stupid to lease a sofa when you have to scrounge food for your family, without getting lynched by the "you don't know what it's like you evil smug lucky middle class brat" crowd?

It's a suboptimal choice. Maybe a stupid choice (BUT POOR PEOPLE AREN'T STUPID).

You could go on the bus to the cheaper shop and buy two lots of food while your friend does two lots of washing at the laundromat (BUT IT'S EASY FOR YOU TO SAY YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE)

You could pool your money and get a washing machine between several people and free up a lot of time (BUT THAT'S NOT AN OPTION, DON'T YOU SEE?)

You could not spend 25% of your available money on fried chicken instead of food that lasts longer (and is healthier). (What the hell? Fried chicken? Is that paragraph solely there as bait to trap commenters like me?)

Isn't it silly for several people to have $800 cars they can't afford to repair, when together they could have a $2000 car and some spare cash? Well isn't it?

OK, OK, you can't do any of that. You can't do anything. You're not stupid or lazy you just didn't get a break. Yes I am lucky, yes I don't know what it's like. Yes I see it's probably extremely unpleasant. OK then, there's no way out. At all. So does it help that I now feel guilty about it? Not really.

Do you really believe it's possible to have a society almost like ours, but with no poor people? I don't. Not really. No good reasons why not, but it feels impossible. I mean, we can't all be millionaires, can we? Is that different?

So there's Bob. Bob is poor. It can't be OK. because that's something "you can't say" (see PG essay). So it's not OK. But it's not Bob's fault. If there's anything that can happen short of a lottery win that would help Bob, then that would be good. But that must include being able to publicly acknowledge bad choices without condemning them or the reasons for making them.

So is information the answer? You can't see what available options you have. Well hello the internet - information delivery a specialty. Hello HN - information crunching a specialty.

Whoever brought up AKay's quote that "perspective is worth 80 IQ points" in these comments, that rings true.

But I also want it to be true that anybody has the chance of happiness. This includes billions of people born in poor countries. It includes the billions and billions of people who were born and lived more than 50 years ago. In order for this to be the case, then the answer has to be in perspective, not money or sofas or cheap rent or abundant food or "lack of opression by the system" or handouts or community centres or lucky breaks.

Would it be as bad to be poor if I didn't know anything of any alternatives? There is so much poverty and so little luxury when you consider global population. Global population over all history - is wealth and comfortable living really a possible way forward, or just an aberration? A temporary break from a nasty, brutish and short life, for the lucky few?

:(
Cog http://cogx.org/ is a nice reaaaaal simple MP3 player for OS X. I use it for whenever I want to just play one or two tracks from MP3 blogs without adding anything to my large, unwieldy, iTunes Library.
Everyone should read that link to learn how nobody but poor and ex-poor people are allowed to comment on poverty.
This is why everyone's review should include feedback from peers and, where applicable, subordinates.

It's also a good argument for including discussions with your boss's boss in your review, to avoid a poor but politically savvy manager being able to competely filter feedback from everyone below them to the higher-ups who could do something about that poor manager in the middle.
It's Rube, not Rude. Unless you're talking about the machine's actions, and not the name.
"Life at the Bottom" - or how the "shiftless poor" really do exist.
Tech Bubble 2.0!

The company is valued at $625 million its rev: is $55.8m last yr and they had a net loss of $1m.

Q1 they made $366,000 in profit. Let's assume they will make $2m in profits 2009. That puts their forward P/E at 312.5X!!
Stop Worrying about Your Weaknesses
"... but when you browse to steals-your-history.com, your history won't be stolen."

Ah, but you won't know if your history's being stolen, right? The exploit can be hidden from the user's eyes, hidden in an ad, for example, that the site you trust shows you without realizing that ad is hacking your history. Phishing sites, too, of course.

A big problem caused by this elegant hack is that it uses services web users can't easily do without, services that most browser users don't know about (and, ideally, shouldn't need to understand). I guess you're suggesting that a user must be more wary of websites, avoiding unknown ones. Is that what you're suggesting?

It'll be interesting to see what can be tried to remedy the privacy issues caused by this.
Tthe speed of light is starting to impact how fast cores can be. They need to take it into account when routing signals on the core. And it's one reason asynchronous cores work a lot better, since at high hz it's impossible to keep the entire core synchronized.
I'm not allowed to say this, because I'm not poor, but I'm going to break that taboo.

Many people have to walk that far to get clean water. Many people in history had to walk further than that to get to school or work before cars were invented.

I'm not saying you should do it, or should be happy to do it, or even that you can do it. I'm trying to point out that your somewhat defensive retort can be interpreted in the context of a world where it's standard for people to drive many miles to work, or one where people walk many miles to survive. Maybe neither is the best context to consider it.

(I don't mean to be preachy, but to comment as a means of thinking about your reply. I want reply and discussion, not to be pushing a stupid opinion).
Tsutomu Shimomura of Kevin Mitnick Fame
Does anyone know what happened to this guy? After helping capture Kevin Mitnick in 1995, he seems to have fallen off the face of the planet. Google and wikipedia are no help. I ask hacker news... Does anyone knows where Tsutomu is now and/or what he is up to?
Ask HN:  Who is your role model for startups besides Paul Graham?
For me, I would have to say Austin Meyer, author of X-Plane.
A/B split testing -- which changes really improve your site?
Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar
DocStoc Launches Document Collections
iTunes' biggest problem is that it doesn't even handle library management very well. :)
John Britten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Britten
Be careful. You should either be part of this company or get paid a set fee as a developer. Any other solution isn't stable. A company can't really survive with someone else owning its core IP (Option B), nor would they want to keep paying a perpetual cut for a product that you'll presumably complete/deliver at some point. If you want to go down Option C, take an equity stake.
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb
What We Know About The Apple Tablet So Far
The developer's blog article is worth a read:
http://www.blog.montgomerie.net/whither-eucalyptus
1. Advertising + Virtual Goods (selling "items" or "currency" inside a game for power, pleasure, or status)

2. You can't really "collect" the data. Facebook's Terms state that you can't keep user data for longer than 24 hours. The original idea was that you could use their data to display demographically-relevant ads.
Here's a calender you might be interested in: http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=nycusergroups%40bra...
Definitely the later: people in power get screened and effectively removed, despite the fact they are biased towards powers of the establishment. Where else does it go that way?
As I understand it, it has been an issue and a major reason for actual cores being as small as they are. The time a signal takes to propagate from one section of the core to another is significant.
And when you consider how much longer it takes for you perceive, the light it gets even more ridiculous!
Does World of Warcraft still make money? I thought everyone was on the iPhone all day now ;)
The Next iPhone
Is Apple Developing a $700 Touch-Screen Tablet?
http://www.google.com/search?q=zynga+revenues
These posts are ridiculous. "In other words, the project is very real." No, in other words, this is more of the same speculation that has been buzzing around Apple since the beginning of time. I really don't get why people eat up Apple rumors; they don't matter. The product will come when it comes. No one will actually make decisions based on these rumors, one of their only side-effects is noise in AAPL. As far as I'm concerned, these "highly-reputable sources" are just a clever random number generator.
Matt, the more people think that Facebook apps don't make any money, the happier I think we'll both be. =)
But what is "individual achievement" in a field like software development? In the sort of teams one typically finds in those 500+ person organisations, nothing is truly done by individuals.

Even if a genius developer produces a brilliant implementation of new feature quickly and with a low bug count, someone had the idea for that feature and worked out how it was going to integrate with other features, many people probably wrote a load of other code the feature depends on even if that code didn't itself create the same buzz, people were involved in testing the feature, producing the marketing, and on and on. While everyone might agree that the genius developer had done a good job for the team, how can you say quantitatively and objectively what his contribution was? 10%? 25%? 90%?

In contrast, the success of a project team is generally fairly easy to quantify: divide the cost of running the team by the amount of revenue generated by the projects they produce.

The sad reality is that while serious guru developers may indeed be an order of magnitude more productive than average, and some at the other end of the scale are actually counterproductive, salaries for employees will never realistically reflect this. The bottom-feeders always get more than they deserve, while the top guys will never get credit proportionate to their contribution. After all, this is why many of us get out and go freelance or start our own businesses.

But within that reality, I can't help wondering whether the guys at the top would still rather work with a motivated team than be individually slightly better compensated but surrounding by jealous, bitter colleagues.
They're working on it...

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/sub-rel-mac/
Stories like this make me wonder what a younger Steve Jobs would think of today's Apple.

The company's 1984 ad now seems a bit ironic.
"What We Know About The Apple Tablet So Far" - "Absolutely nothing".

Obviously TechCrunch is just trying to cling to any possible hope of rationalizing its own foray into Tablet hardware.

I really do doubt very much Apple would ever make a tablet. I also very much doubt that tablets will ever really take off - despite being around for years.

I love this bit: "Some app developers have seen underlying code that suggests a larger screen device is on the way."

Woah you mean the OS has support for different screen sizes? Some of which may never exist? That obviously means they're making other devices then.
I assume you're referring to the algorithm change around January/February for allocations. There was a change to the allocation algorithm related to spam weighting - it wasn't an across the board drop from 20 to 12. Allocations actually rose for certain applications.
I shouldn't be the one answering your question. It's a tough one. If the stakes are low and you can follow standard practices and get somebody who knows what he is doing to just check your work, you might get away with it. If the stakes are high, hire a professional. I wish I knew why it is so hard.
Cloud Openness
Next: Apple removes MobileSafari from iPhone because they discovered users could visit pornographic websites.
Maybe the subject itself is not trivial, but her approach was. I think she underestimated how much the average person knows about sex research. This stuff is not taboo: it's a popular topic in mass-circulation magazines, and "Kinsey" was a mainstream, surprisingly bland movie full of big-name actors. She needed to present new information or a unique perspective, and instead she presented a handful of factoids. The pig video was funny, but not particularly thought-provoking.

It also annoyed me that she kept cracking herself up with lines that weren't all that funny.
"Huge cases are out" if your computer is an appliance. If I need to get in there and swap out drives, motherboards, etc., I'll take the nice big case with room to swing a cat, thank you very much.
If the alternative is fighting off the glitz and the high-pressure sell from companies like Trilogy, I can see why top students from top schools might find starting their own company an attractive alternative.
Not Rube Goldberg, but also cool: http://www.youtube.com/wariolandshakeit2008
What's the line from Dark Knight? Every hero either dies young, or lives long enough to become the villain. The older I get, the more I see that pattern replicated.
This will probably be a good thing for the app in the long run.

- Eventually it will get into the app store

- All the publicity, fovorable reviews, and outrage over it will probably spur quite a few purchases / downloads. Maybe enough to make a top 10 list.
Since the rejection is based on the results of a search, it looks like a deliberate attempt to torpedo the review process - maybe on the basis that they don't want users going to content that isn't monetizable?

Perhaps a good response would be to put apple on the spot by 'complaining' that Safari (or some other iPhone app) gives access to salacious parts of the Bible or some other cultural shibboleth. With cases like these, Apple is setting themselves up for a class action suit or FTC review. Given that people pay for the development tools, these kind of rejections seem like a deliberate restraint of trade.
I don't think it's actually that general, because some of those things are better handled through groups of people rather than on an individual level.

This is a reasonable point. But bear in mind that DBM's original point is subtly different: he effectively said that because it was hard to deal with poverty on an individual level, it would be silly to let government intervene. Your point looks to be different: that non-state groups can do things as well/better than the state. So the generality of my inference is unaffected.
I agree: this problem is small potatoes compared to the entrenched fossil fuel interests, who've effectively dictated national policy for decades.
Great! I have been to the last 3 :)
Specifically as it concerns drug turf or gang related violence, there are significant network effects at work.
=/

I realize it makes far less sense, but I'd love Fridays or weekends a lot more, since that's when I'm usually in NY. None-the-less, I'm happy the NY crowd are getting together.
...you can imaging a dual core Apple Tablet.

Mr. Arrington needs to divert some funds away from the CrunchPad project and hire an editor.
Since the rejection is based on the results of a search, it looks like a deliberate attempt to torpedo the review process - maybe on the basis that they don't want users going to content that isn't monetizable?

Doubt it - I have a reader on my iPhone (Stanza) that can download free eBooks just like this application.

The best word to describe Apple's approval process is Kafkaesque. It's not their rules that are the problem; it is the total internal inconsistency.
Well, on one level, I'm kind of amused by the reviewers attention to detail... On another level, this thing reads like a comedy piece someone would make up about the dangers of censorship.
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ is effectively exactly that. It's a bit pricey, though, and not out yet.
I'll be giving a talk at Yahoo Security Week in June entitled "When Crypto Attacks!" I hope to post slides afterward.

If you find yourself needing to implement crypto, it's likely you can avoid it by thinking about the situation differently. For example, many web developers get seduced into designing their own crypto as a way to push state to the client instead of managing it on the server. This opens up a much wider attack surface on the server application since now every part of that blob needs to be considered malicious. As the saying goes, "... now you have two problems."

The reason all this is so hard is that crypto is fundamentally unsafe. People hear that crypto is strong and confuse that with safe. Crypto can indeed be very strong but is extremely unsafe.

Have you ever tried to clean up from a root private key compromise? I wrote previously (http://rdist.root.org/2009/05/17/the-debian-pgp-disaster-tha...) about how a one-line change in the PRNG had compromised every DSA private key used on Debian/Ubuntu. Not generated, used. The properties of DSA make it such that your private key is directly revealed to any attacker who knows some bits of your PRNG output. I hope that emphasizes how dangerous crypto is, because it is so sensitive to its prerequisites.
I appreciate the joke, but you can have software that sucks whether it's a framework or a less structured library.

In a decent framework, there are usually hooks for lots of stuff, but much of the time you don't use any particular hook because the default behaviour is what you want. In your case, it ought to have been possible to override the vegetarian dish preparation with a version completely of your own creation if you wanted to.

But in any case, there's not that much difference between this and building a project around a specialised library that doesn't have a whole framework: you're still screwed if you discover late in the proceedings that it's got nasty bugs and whoever produces it isn't willing or able to fix them. (If you get to invent another library that conveniently provides the same interfaces and has no bugs to use as a drop-in replacement, I get to pull an interchangeable and bug-free framework out of the same magic hat.)
8. Health care administration will be the fastest-growing sector. (The panelists were so bored by this trend they didn't even discuss it.)

Warning Bells

Information technology venture capitalists didn't "want" to discuss "the fastest-growing sector" which constitutes the transmission, storage, and processing of structured information?
I really want a cheap tablet. I've been looking at laptops with the reversible screens (or whatever you call them), but have been put off a little by the size and weight. People said netbooks were a waste of time too, and that anyone who really wanted a laptop already had one.