skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Competitors were stamped out one by one (see Lotus, Word Perfect, Netscape, Real Networks) along Microsoft’s journey to capture eyeballs and entire software budgets."

Microsoft didn't stamp out WordPerfect. It was a brilliant company with amazing customer service which was acquired, gutted, and lives on as a rusting hulk. The same was the fate of Lotus - corporate customers could still purchase the 1990's Lotus Suite from IBM a couple of years ago.

I guess a case could be made about RealNetworks, but it would need to explain away the relevance of iTunes and Youtube to the space and explain how Windows Media player was the real force in the space.

Netscape is of course emotionally charged. My opinion is that its multi-billion dollar sale to AOL aligns its story more closely with that of WordPerfect and Lotus, than David and Goliath.
What if structural separation and a wholesale bandwidth model could reduce that price? What if smart radios and eliminating bandwidth "ownership" could reduce it even more?

Those are examples of designed markets, even though there are accompanying technologies, as is the current mobile telephony business. Now guess who stands in the way of implementing those changes?
We use LibreOffice and Outlook 2010.
Randomly Generated Product Back Labels
Not everything has to have a benefit. This is an extremely entertaining project, something OP worked on over several weekends because it was something he wanted to see exist. No need to get all high and mighty about purpose and benefit.
It is the case that every comment is copyrighted by its original author. This is actually a big deal, because it is not entirely clear that (for example) someone is allowed to republish a comment thread in an altered form (like a book or magazine) without individually clearing the copyright to every comment.

You can do so if it is "fair use", for purposes such as criticism or education, but some reproductions are not "fair", and yet would still be quite useful.

Getting permission to reproduce a comment is often not that difficult – they have little commercial value once they've been posted online for free by their author, and they were presumably intended to be promulgated to a worldwide audience – provided the commenter is alive, has a contact address posted, and responds to that contact address. Unfortunately, none of these things are true in the long run, and the bitrot sets in surprisingly quickly.

(It would be fun, for values of "fun" used by actuaries, to figure out how many comments a thread needs to have and how old it needs to be in order to have a greater than 50% chance of one of the commenters being deceased. If only I didn't have to get back to work.)

If an author dies the right to manage her copyrights passes to her heirs. If you are incredibly lucky the author took the trouble to explicitly name a "literary executor" in a will, and that executor will be a single person who has been informed of the author's wishes and is happy to play ball. Most of the time we are not so lucky. The copyrights of many famous authors are firmly in the hands of their worst enemies. The rights to other works are distributed among a score of descendants and will probably never be sorted out.

This is why copyrights need to expire in a reasonable time. Unfortunately, they no longer do.
Economists Advise Nation’s Poor To Invent The Next Facebook
google for leaf sweeper. I find mine to be much quicker than either a leaf blower or a rake, and much easier to use than a rake. For those too lazy to google its a human powered street sweeper that dumps whatever it sweeps up into a perhaps 9 cubic foot cloth bucket, then you dump the bin when it gets full. For $150 you can buy one that will fall apart in a year, or for $200 you can buy one that apparently will last a lifetime (so far). As an exercise it's pretty weak, rates as a bit less than walking up a hill, but probably more than hiking level with a backpack. If you're strong and talented enough you can push it one handed while talking on the phone or whatever. Its basically silent, a laptop like "whirr" from the sweeping brushes. On a good one you can adjust the brush height such that it sweeps bare air accomplishing nothing, or digs into the dirt with extreme effort, or ideally somewhere in between. With a bad one you adjust it by varying the height you hold the handle, which must be incredibly unergonomic.

In the long run the solution to hatred of maintenance of deciduous trees is a chainsaw and an evergreen sapling, but I digress. There are people trapped in prisons, err, I mean overactive homeowners associations, who have to do exactly what the warden says exactly when the warden tells them to do it, but they were dumb enough to pay a huge quantity of money to give up their freedom, so serves them right.
Also trying to playing multiple roles sometimes doesn't work - while I can do dev and probably qa, no way I can do gfx or level design. It's just a waste of time.
It looks cute, but the biggest frustration was trying to click on a thumbnail to see the full sized image, only for the image to have changed in the meantime.

I kept half-seeing interesting images, but being unable to see them fully because my mousing was too slow.
This is the beginning of the predictable blowback from the tactics against The Guardian.

Everyone within the United States press is now starting to realize that they could be potential targets in future leak prosecutions. Watch as they push back, hard.
What would make the DC map even more interesting would be to watch it over time as more "blue" moves into those "green" areas around Columbia Heights, Petworth, Shaw etc.
List of Ig nobel prize winners
If people taped a piece of cardboard in front of the ad on their monitor, is that stealing as well?
I wonder how many lists the person who searched for that lot is now on?
Similar to what I wrote a week ago: http://greenido.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/yahoo-finance-api-w...
:)
I don't think anything will change even if/when iOS has 90%+ of the market share. Thing are going to remain the same, and Apple will get what it wants.
They do, unfortunately. Not for everybody, but randomly selected (I guess 1 in 1000 or fewer) and when singled out, it's a requirement. I'm white and british, so you can't call it profiling either..

It's way off at the side, so nobody really knows it's going on. Your only recourse is to take it up with the home office.
On making domain-wise abstractions and data vs business logic
https://github.com/hyperloop/hyperloop

The openhyperloop looks a bit more organized, but we probably don't need two of these. Perhaps some coordination would be good?
Really? Who cares? His opinion is not any more relevant than anyone else.
Don't leave. Fight. They do it because there is no reaction to their actions. Right there when waiting you should have called your attorney. What I would do: tell them they let me go or I call my attorney who'll shortly come and sue them for violating my constitutional rights.
He flew home to the USA but he was processed in Canada? In other words, did he fly into Canada from SE Asia and then immediately drive to the USA? Honestly, that would look a little suspicious to me if I was a customs officer.

I've flown into L.A. and Dallas/Fort-Worth a bunch of times from the Asia Pacific region of the world and never received a glance at any of my visa pages.
http://www.facebook.com/help/216792731707396

"If you already allow people to follow you, people who send friend requests that you ignore, delete or hide will automatically start following you. If you don’t want a specific person to follow you, you can block them at any time."

Well its the feature...
That sounds like pulsatile tinnitus. I have it in my left ear following a bike accident where I hurt my jaw.

Dentist said it might happen, and was nothing to worry about. You get used to it pretty fast.
I'm sorry, but if you try to enter the US with any physical objects that have even the remotest chance of being interpreted as being illegal, or digital storage that isn't encrypted, you're just asking for trouble these days.
Nope. Wikipedia has two entries about a movie named Brazil, one from 1985 and one from 1944. Which one is it :-)?
not sure about everyone else, but the first one i looked for starts with an "n", but it didn't make the list, how come?
Add Support for 80+ Filetypes to your iPhone
i didn't know you could put that on instagram...
Yeah, this is not freedom. It's alright, USA. But stop pretending otherwise.
Neat and unexpected result (for me): It seems like v8's re engine is very good (fastest) for "practically long" strings, (anything up to 256 B - 64 kB, depending on expression).

Possibly measurement error, though, considering JS time in milliseconds and the different test methodology for v8 under a certain number of trials, as compared with other engines?
Rather than leave, the better solution is to force the rights-violators to stop. They are the ones in the wrong, they should be ashamed and shamed.

This reminds me of the NSA recruitment session at the University of Washington (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVIHvbYYxJo) where the NSA agent tried to tell a skeptical student that she should not keep asking embarrassing questions, because even if an NSA job was not right for her, she should not prevent other students from joining the agency. In other words, it's fine to disagree with turning your country into a police state, you don't have to join the secret police, but don't interfere with your fellow citizens who want to profit from joining the police force.

"when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." --Edmund Burke
>“She quickly decided it did not make sense,” the source said. “She liked being loved.”

Quite the sexist smear, especially without supplying any relevant evidence. I suspect her decision was a bit more complicated than that.
I have been searched by borders and customs so many times in Seattle that I think they single put Americans for special treatment. I never come with much in my luggage (I shop in the states since china is expensive), so the searches go,quickly at least.
Could you elaborate on why you believe European countries to have no legal framework for individual liberty? (if I understood your statement correctly)

This is an honest question — I believe things to be exactly the opposite, but I'll correct my belief if I'm wrong.
* This is elementary statistics based on data collected by the FBI. If this problem [..] can't be discussed in an honest fashion due to political organizations which will threaten politicians with boycotts/villification/etc due to their refusal to acknowledge inconvenient truths, then the problem will simply continue.*

These statistics are discussed in an honest fashion, from Saturday mornings in the barber shop to academic works. The problem isn't discussion, the problem is that too many folks don't realize "blacks are overrepresented in crime" is not the same as "most blacks commit crimes" and use those statistics to justify policies like "stop and frisk" and "it's okay to follow a black kid a night because he's wearing a hoodie."

Political Correctness prevents us from collectively helping the predominantly black victims of a large sub-culture of black America that celebrates crime, dehumanizes women and gays, views educational/career achievement as betrayal of black identity, and tolerate men who willingly abandon their families.

This sentence would be equally true without the word "black." Political correctness indeed.
Google/Wikipedia for "Conspicuous Consumption" For this purpose, the louder the leafblower and the longer it takes, the better.
How does this compare with Cheerio? ( see discussion on HN from yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273905 )
Same reason you give trophies to Little League participants - to provide context for the competition. To add something fun that hopefully underscores what is effectively a networking/show-off event.
I have a couple of older relatives who were gentleman's-C athlete types at an Ivy League school. Majored in History or something. Both very successful in banking.

Some things they have in common are: they're both very slow to form an opinion, seldom have an opinion on anything they don't need to have an opinion about, very interested to hear new evidence or arguments about something they do have an interest in, and very gracious about letting you down gently if they do have to win an argument (even if they can be colossal dicks in many other respects). Uninformed people think they're dumb.

tl;dr Roger Sterling is the smartest person on Mad Men.
Why the scarequotes around Starcraft? Is it...not really Starcraft?
Wait, are you saying that the legal system would be improved if people could sue each other over loud music, talking, or babies?

I could be misunderstanding. If not, that sounds insufferable.
Do you happen to know — what happens if you try to decline to enter the full-body-scanners at AMS? Does Schiphol also have a "pat down option" like the TSA offers?

Thinking of other European countries, in the UK, signs at Gatwick say that if you are selected for a full-body scan and decline to use the machine, you will not be allowed to travel.
Japan isn't any more xenophobic than the US.

I've lived seven years in Japan. Even if I were to get Japanese citizenship, I wouldn't identify myself culturally as Japanese (and neither would Japanese think of me as Japanese).

Countries like the US separate cultural identity and citizenship, so having citizenship but still being seen as a foreigner might seem a bit strange at first. On the other hand, if I was to go to the US, there are certain cultural identities I could never have. For instance, as a white guy, I could never be treated as an African American, no matter how much I wanted to be or tried.
Plenty of international flights connect through Canada, like Vancouver on the west coast. Also, most big Canadian airports have American immigration facilities since they have so much traffic to process, quite efficient actually.
Build Single Page Web Apps with Backbone.js, JaxRS, MongoDB, and OpenShift
That seems like a classic example of "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Especially since there are security-circumventing mechanisms developing (private flights) that make heavy use of midrange jets.
I agree, but I think you haven't actually visited the OP's link, where he states:

> "People are sharing thousands of photos with each other every second of every day, everywhere in the world. By tapping into just a fraction of the torrent, it becomes easy to see patterns that range among breaking events, popular trends, cultural attitudes, and individual expression."

Given that that is one of his intentions, I'm trying to give advice on where the OP could further iterate upon his stated goal. If a hacker spends weeks on a cool project, I'd think he deserves some well-intentioned suggestions on how to even better it.
And the "Google copied Apple" trope is such garbage. Danger, Inc. was the innovator here, releasing their first Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick 5 years minus 3 months before the iPhone. Danger co-founder Andy Rubin left them a year later (let's hear it for non-compete unenforceablity in California!) to co-found Android, Inc., which was bought by Google in another couple of years, still 2 years prior to the iPhone's release.

There's no way in hell the first Android phone could have been released 5 quarters after the iPhone without it being long in gestation.
As most people seem to right now, until the past few months I thought of Microsoft as sort of an aging giant. They had gotten lax during their monopoly, and instead of keeping up with the times they're struggling to keep up with more "hip" companies like Google and Apple. And in the public space, this is true -- the average consumer (or the small business/startup rather than the large corporation) these days is more likely to buy an Apple product or a Google product if they can. The average consumer has a better mental image of Apple or Google than Microsoft.

And then I started my job at a large hospital system assisting the guys who do financial analytics, and saw the other side of the industry. Microsoft is still the giant in corporate-level big data analytics and providing solutions for large server farms. Their B.I. stack (SQL Server, reporting software, Sharepoint, and other data analytics software I won't go into right now) is worlds ahead of its competition (and from what I understand can be used interchangably with the other software -- for example you can hook Tableau into SQL Server and use it as a front-end for an SSAS cube). I would have never thought about any of this if I hadn't been at this job, but Microsoft is still a giant in providing software and systems for hospitals, insurance companies, big banks and others in the financial sector -- big companies that need to procsess big data. In addition, as the article states, Microsoft is a leading competitor in providing cloud hosting solutions -- I went to a Microsoft thing to learn about and test Windows Azure, and it's incredibly powerful and so easy to use.

The article kind of hints at this stuff -- that, under Ballmer, Microsoft has actually been successful despite their stock falling and how the general public perceives them. They're not failing, it's just that the people who buy the stock are typically the average consumer who see Microsoft in the light I mentioned above. The stock market isn't always the best indication of a company's success, just an indication of what the people who buy stock think.

This doesn't mean I like Microsoft. I just wanted to point out something I don't think many people pay attention to -- they're still wildly successful, just in a different market segment, and people might not have noticed that if they weren't actually in that market segment. I still prefer not to use their products when I can help it, and I think they could do things much better, and maybe trying to actually compete with Apple and Google and earn the general public's respect back would be a good thing. Maybe their "next era" will do this. But then again, I'm the individual consumer, too.
I hadn't thought about it before you asked, but this would be a perfect way to build up detailed information for biometric databases. You'd then use that with lower-fidelity sources, like video cameras.

You've got head shape, hand shape, height, shoulder width, BMI, and length of every major body segment. From there you can calculate all sorts of ratios to apply to people, and I'd bet you could make a pretty good guess at gait for motion analysis.

A database like this would also be proof against facial surgery; changing bone lengths is harder. So if you get a known terrorist once, you should be able to spot them much more easily in the future. And of course you'd keep the records indefinitely, because you never know who's going to turn out to be a terrorist. Or a drug mule. Or a political protester [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO for the historical version; http://nymag.com/news/features/nypd-demographics-unit-2013-9... for the modern one.
I guess some people do, but I don't think I've ever used backrefs outside of solving puzzles. If I want more-general parsing I reach for a PEG library like LPEG or my own Peglet.
> They even went through his laptop and copied his hard disks.

I may be completely out of line here but why can't he request a lawyer before doing this kind of stuff? Why are they allowed to dig so deep into someone without any evidence of doing something illegal?
Small correction, Byzantium is a linux distro for several architectures with out-of-the-box mesh networking packages/drivers.
If your singular judge of freedom and human rights is the annoyances of the TSA, there is a small chance this enormous decision may solve your concern.

If you have other concerns, you're likely to be sadly disappointed by overt corruption, intolerance, censorship, extreme taxation, or other ways your freedom can be violated.

It's not at all that simple.
There's probably too many places where embedding a full blown video isn't practical - at least not in existing products.
Avatars, emoticons, simple GUI elements (I'm thinking e.g. of a "copy file" dialog) and similar.
One of the issues with advertising or third party advertising networks comes down to security.

They have been and will continue to be the targets for malicious hackers who use them to serve malware to unsuspecting site visitors.

Until those ad networks are properly secured and monitored I will treat them as a security liability.

In many cases site admins go completely overboard with advertising creating a broken user experience. They choice you have then is to vote with your clicks and go elsewhere or attempt to use the site with an ad-blocker.

If any site admin wishes me to go elsewhere they can block users with ad blockers installed. If the site has value then they an ask POLITELY to whitelist their site; which for many sites I do add then to a site wide whitelist.

Assuming your site visitors of being thieves is not only stupid but illogical. If I walk past a billboard with my eyes close should I have them surgically removed because their are an adblocker? If I use a PVR to skip ads on TV am I stealing content? No; I am exercising a choice not to look at your pointless adverts.

The adverts add nothing to my experience of your site; I don't click on them so you won't be making any money from me for displaying them anyway.

Either find some other way to monetize your site (subs, sell merchandise, ask for donations etc) or find something else to do.
Have you engaged with the FNF(http://thefnf.org) guys at all? They've got quite a thing going judging by their mailing list(s).

Also, what are your opinions on Guifi.net?
"She liked being loved" is a probably a quaint (and fairly sexist) euphemism for "She wasn't going along with the plan."

As others have said, the typical corporate-raider plan is to slash costs (i.e., mass layoffs), sell off assets, create the appearance of a turnaround, capture the upside, then jump ship. Mayer was to be a figurehead in this arrangement. Whether she knew about this plan all along, or whether she put the pieces together after arriving, it sounds like she wasn't going for it. Loeb needed short-term profit (to the tune of $1B, it seems), and Mayer didn't want to be stuck holding the bag after the company was strip mined.

You don't climb to Marissa Mayer's position in life being overly concerned about "being loved." The more rational explanation is that her incentives and Loeb's incentives didn't align, so to speak.
"Ow My Balls"
I have also said we should talk more about first principles and less about the policy arguments at first.

Regarding gun control, the first principles at issue are these:

1. Is life more important than liberty or vice versa? (ooh this reverses vs. the abortion issue regarding political lines)

2. Do we trust the government to fully monopolize force? Do we trust the police? the army? Should the government be there primarily to protect us?

3. What are the implications of one interpretatin of the 2nd Amendment on federal power or another?

(I won't go over my view here, except to say it is not a partisan view.)

The reason is that very often we can find common ground over first principles, and this helps with discussing others without putting the other side on the defensive or shaming.
Show HN: Help test out swarm robot control
I had a business colleague who was based elsewhere in Asia for several years. He visited Thailand every few weeks the entire stay. When he returned to the US, immigration gave him the same rundown. When he finally convinced them that he was just a young guy who wanted to have fun, they waved him through with a smile.
I'm sitting here (Detroit suburbs) trying to read this article while the lawn service is outside cutting, trimming, and blowing. Recently I've been looking at houses closer to the city, but considering northern Canada at this point.