skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's nothing wrong with a rant, although I would have liked a longer one with more substance.

I think there are a lot of other factors involved that contribute to the corporate IT stench, like the true motivations of IT management, bad programmers, and good programmers.

I often feel I could/should write some blog posts about this kind of stuff.
But apple ads are "I'm a Mac", not "I'm runninx OS X" so they don't care either.
Anyone know of a GSM cell phone that can be configured to ring only when the incoming call is from a number in the phone's address book?

'Twould have eliminated the need for the OP (Dave Gorman) to change his phone number
No, but game theory is. Splitting the bill without tediously adding up everybody's items and without everybody paying for the single gourmet's dessert is a mechanism design problem.
Can a Synthetic Tree Beat the Real Thing?
QuestBridge Data Associate Sought
It's included with Chrome now.
On the contrary, I think it's all about eBay has long been a market for new goods, instead of the used stuff that the original idea was based off of. Auctions just aren't a very good means to sell new goods.

Go search for any product you like on eBay - the overwhelming majority of the results are new items, from large-scale eBay dealers, using the Buy-it-now feature instead of real auctioning.

In this case eBay has simply become another webstore - and Amazon has had third-party sellers for quite some time also. As a webstore, Amazon's brand name is considerably more powerful than eBay. Not to mention Amazon takes payment on your behalf as a trusted entity - which is more than can be said for the money order and PayPal-based payment system of eBay.

Oh, also, so many eBay listings lowball the selling price and then destroy you on shipping. This is the primary reason why I stopped using the service - it was too much work having to figure out exactly how much it would cost to get it shipped to me. Amazon third-party sellers are locked to certain shipping rates.
Social Networking's "Naked" Truth
Not necessarily true:

In Buyology [1], the author claims that sexual ads cause the person seeing the ad to remember the sex object and forget whatever was being advertised.

Of course, if you're advertising porn, then a picture of some boobs is probably a good way to get people to click through. But most people aren't advertising porn.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Buyology-Truth-Lies-About-Why/dp/03855...
Setting your company’s valuation
To me, in the context of mobile websites, it provides an answer/option to providing localized content. Given you have/want localized content/filtering of course.

Where up until now, the first answer to 'You want GPS location?' would have been 'You'll need a native app.', it's now possible to just built a webapp instead.

At least for requests that came our way for building native apps for the iPhone, the most requested feature was 'ZOMG, make it localizable!', where the rest would be just pulling data from a server.

Now, my option is to just built a mobile webapp that can use the lat/lng without much fuss (still needs to degrade gracefully in case of older phones/browsers of course).
On top of not really seeming to help kids learn anything, these toys certainly push some gender stereotypes. What if a girl wants a penguin that shoots rockets and kicks soccer balls, or a boy wants a gorilla that hugs?

Call me when the robots let the kids program them.
Not if you factor in the amount of code necessary for ACID transactions, etc. If you make an informed decision that you don't need that level of consistency, sure, but it's probably reasonable to be overly cautious with data by default.

(If you're going to the database and back for every page view, you could probably be using caching more effectively, e.g. memcached.)
Wii Motionplus accessory
Wii Motion Plus provides 1:1 real-time tracking to the Wii remote. Motion Plus detects minute orientation changes to yields best gaming experience for Sports Resort. Sports resort has over a dozen mini-games: - Sword play, Disc dog, Power cruising, Archery, Basketball, table tennis and golf.
Google CEO resisted Chrome initially
Yeah for cross-browser handling it's very nice but like any abstraction it's nice to know how it works for those times you have to get down and fix some leaking problem.
I respect your faith in the general populace but I doubt that they'll become more savvy. Easy usage beats savvy computer practice on any day. Look at Facebook usage and the astounding amount of personal information that people reveal (especially the latest most tech savvy generation).
Trust is ultimately about the expectation of rewards
It's how the London scene was when I was working out there in 2000-2001. If it wasn't a problem then, it probably isn't a problem now. I got a definite sense of "work hard and play hard... but first work hard" when I was there.
We bought through RedFin about a year ago. The $$$ refund makes it all worth it.
the 12-18 crowd stormed in like bulls in a china shop posting sexually explicit pictures, profanity, etc. which created a whole new slew of headaches. It's a valuable/lucrative audience, but you need a fair amount of policework to prevent things from getting out of control...

One of the fellows at SmugMug has blogged about the "free" question, and pointed out this particular problem with "free". When it's free, you capture a part of the market that most wants anonymity and no recourse for their bad, possibly illegal, behavior. 12-18 year olds exchanging sexually explicit pictures via your service is a problem of epic proportions. Stopping it could very easily become your full-time job (and the full-time job of a dozen more people).

I know you've said you've already halted free distribution. I just wanted to point out that this one is a well-known problem with free, and if you don't have good, automated, methods for dealing with it, it can be a huge resource drain.
Privacy: your biggest user experience challenge
He's also said that he hopes it will mean spammers end up better at targeting so that there will be less shit flowing overall.
'et all' refers to the other players in cellular service, so the question restated is "Why can't AT&T and other providers get it?"

I do agree with what you say about AT&T's sins being 'forgiven' by offering the iPhone, but that is a function of a market monopoly. I have an iPhone and I use it on AT&T. Coverage is decent in my area including 3G, and I don't mind the price. That said, if Apple offered the phone through multiple carriers then the consumers would be in a better spot because they could choose which carrier to sign with.
You can bet paid accounts will be tied to credit cards, and no one will be sharing. More likely, people would just cut and paste the article.

The main problem is, nobody will find the article in the first place, because no one will subscribe to read it.
Location based chat is a feature, not a company (let alone an app). Eventually, location features will be integrated into regular sms, mms, facebook, whatever and they will wipe your clock. Just think about paid email vs. gmail or quicksilver vs. spotlight, list is long.

Do contract work to float yourself. And charge for your app. Integrate with Twitter, Facebook chat, etc. OK, I'm done my rant, sorry.
Online Radio Still Doomed
Facebook, MySpace: A race/class divide?
After Yucca Mountain: How to store US nuclear waste
He was probably facetiously referring to the fact that "Top [0-9]+" lists are a well-known variety of linkbait that tend to do well on sites like Digg and reddit.
Colors are dull, use vibrant colors to appeal the younger generation.
Lunascape. Now with: Choose your own rendering engine
Thanks, Joe. Again, the behavior of this age group is very concerning to me. I'm 26 and don't remember these problems with AIM when that was in its heyday. Or maybe I'm just clueless. Even with services like Loopt, I've heard complaints that these projects attract this type of lewd behavior.
This snippet uses the new navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition() feature in Firefox 3.5

You will be redirected to Google Maps if you click the folowing link:

(You must click "share location" when prompted by the browser, you know, privacy concerns)

javascript:navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position){window.location.href="http://maps.google.com/?ll="+position.coords.latitude+","+position.coords.longitude;});

Drop it in your bookmarks toolbar and presto!

Or get it from here http://mylittlehacks.appspot.com/geolocation
In praise of partial explanation and flowcharts
Their game is a Flash-based Civilization clone with a twist. They are clearly not targeting the average internet user - if they wanted to they would've done it like Playfish and not create games based on medieval Europe.

e.g. Two of the most popular games on Facebook right now involve running your own restaurant or running your own cartoony farm. This is the kind of thing that would hook mainstream users. Knights and ladies of the realm do not.
Out of curiosity, is there a reason why 'enableHighAccuracy' property isn't set to true for android?
Google Adds More Images to Local Search Results
I wish there were some way to simply make it illegal to send emails to someone's contact list, no matter how many "yes, it's ok" check-boxes they click.

I lay some of the blame at the big-boys' feet (Facebook and friends) for getting users accustomed to this kind of behavior. Now people are so used to giving out their email credentials that they never stop to think that it's ALWAYS a bad idea.
I guess this brings up the question of whether "geek" and "hacker" are synonymous. In my head the difference is that a "hacker" focuses his/her intelligence and interests to more productive ends, while "geek" is the superset of people who are particularly interested in technology.
Here's how I've always looked at it. It's retarded to think a startup cannot succeed anywhere. You can do ALL the things you need from the middle of Iowa, and still kill it. Here's what you're NOT given in Iowa? All the opportunities and resources you COULD have. By being in Silicon Valley, you have the maximum amount of opportunity and resources to succeed. Think of it like playing a video game: sure you could win with the basic pistol they give you, but it's probably best to face the game boss with a rocket launcher.

The other main question is scaling a company. If you're doing the typical venture back startup thing, then scaling is a huge issue. You need access to capital and talent to the point you can grow the company from 3=>30=>300 people. That's hard to do, especially on the engineering side outside of most startup hotbeds. If you're in a crappy city for a startup, think right now if you could go recruit 50 of the brightest engineers in the next 18 months there.

So in short a) you don't need to be in the valley to succeed, at least in the short term b) the valley can give you the maximum opportunities c) think about how the current city you're in can help you scale the startup when (or if) it needs to grow heavily, but don't think about it too soon.
"I would not see health care as a safe industry right now"

In the longer term it will be a safe career move to enter this market though. With the sheer volume of baby boomers reaching retirment, the amount of national spending on healthcare is going to sky rocket regardless of any reforms that go through. This of course assumes that the recession doesn't turn into a depression forcing the government to feed the population with soylent green.
Their target audience is probably

a)	Male

b)	Bored

c)	Not so jaded that they won't click on ads or try something new

d)	Interested in rts gaming

So yeah, that’s how you reel in that audience. You control for their interest in gaming by placing the ads on gaming sites.

Additionally, your ad stands out because the gaming sites are clogged with ads for games that involve swords.

Once you’ve got them on your homepage you have the opportunity to show them fullscreen art, shots, animations, etc to actually sell the game.
A good ppt on the media and it's tech phobias
http://pastie.org/541651 (added quotes, and doesn't get link cutoff)

edit: looks like you fixed it :D
I think the negative comments here are reading too deep into this. I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be taken literally.

I upvoted you for the last sentence though.
That's why in a recession, it's a good time to get "funemployed" . . .

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-funemployment4-2009j...
WIMAX blog
WiMAX Discussion Blog, What is WiMAX?, WiMAX Vendors, WiMAX Equipment, WiMAX Setups.
There's a way to set the infix associativity and precedence, isn't there? (I'm rusty at Haskell, it's not my thing.)

You can do typeclass-like overloading in OCaml via its module system, but it isn't really integrated into basic arithmetic, which probably would have been the single most useful place for it. (I just got used to it, but it's definitely a wart.)
Take the rest of the day off
You made it all the way to 84? My attention span aint what it used to be. I was skimming by #4, and tl;dr by the break after 10, and back here to let someone else point out the highlights.
The major downside to Redfin is their service area. I hope they can expand by the time I need them.
Key/Keyring combo is all too easy
But there are still plenty of "lightweight" Windows apps that won't run on Chrome, like Skype.

For anyone who has used a full-featured Windows/Ubuntu netbook, Chrome OS looks like a step backwards. However since few netbooks have been sold, Google may be able to target people who have no preconceived ideas about what a netbook can do.
Reading an article [1] on Facebook and Google gave me some prospective on the value of these social networking sites outside of their own sites.

It mentioned Facebook's idea of using its knowledge of social graphs to power other sites to allow you to connect to friends through them. I'm guessing instead of having apps embedded in Facebook, Facebook would be embedded in the app. It's an interesting idea, which definitely brings a lot of value, but it still lacks a clear revenue stream.

[1] http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/ff_facebookwa...
/me wonders what Terry Chay has to say about this...
I did but no one voted

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=697806
How to make an OS virus-free? It's quite simple actually, make it so difficult and/or useless that it will have no user base whatsoever.

Windows has so many viruses because it's the most popular OS in the world (not the best imho, but that's for another flamewar). Mac OS used to be mostly virus-free until it started rapidly gaining in popularity. Linux as well, though the technical prowess of Linux users is generally MUCH higher so it may just be that potential Linux viruses don't spread as much.
I clicked on some of the earlier ads, out of curiosity, and I was presented with a zero-information sign-up page. Eventually I googled around to find some screenshots of the game, to get some idea of what it was like.

I suspect that the curiosity about what the game is, and the fact that most people won't bother to poke around, might make quite a few people enter their details into the game, so it's probably not all that ineffective.
However, with the number of random flash games on the net, I wouldn't be surprised if making yourself stand out and get more clicks might be worth it even with a lower conversion rate. If you are still reaching your target audience, and a new add opens up an entirely new audience, you don't really care what the conversion rate on the new audience is because you weren't reaching those people to begin with.

Interestingly, going so far in the extreme will probably get them more press than otherwise. I wouldn't have known the name of this game if it weren't for this article.
Here's a twitter clone idea you can steal:

a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: Why are you attempting to make a Twitter clone (today)?
"Get something on the front page of Digg." - I doubt
Yup, these ads really do make them stand out. In the long term the press might be bad, but it's better than no press at all.

Also, yet another online free game with swords doesn't really bring in many clicks. Adding some breasts will bring in people they wouldn't have been reaching otherwise. Even if they have a low conversion rate they are getting customers they wouldn't have otherwise.
The problem is that new people are still joining the internet and will continue to do so in the near future. They need to be protected from this kind of behavior. Some people argue that getting scammed is the only way people will learn, but that's debatable.
Something phishy's going on with George Stephanopoulos's Twitter account.
related: GE's CEO, Jeff Immelt recently argued (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124603518881261729.html) that an American renewal will come from a culture that celebrates invention over consumption.

"Engineering has been underemphasized in this country for a generation. Our high schools fall far short of the mark in science and math. This helps explain why only four percent of American college students have chosen engineering as a profession.

At the same time, American companies must reinvigorate their technical efforts…Technology is what makes people and countries feel wealthy… Technology is also the source of competitive advantage.

An American renewal will be built on technology. GE’s R&D budget has not been cut. And that’s a course of action I’d recommend to every company that wants to get through the economic crisis even stronger than before."
What bothers me about this discussion is the assumption that crappy software people are used to is the only type it's possible to build.

You can write software that deals with reasonable levels of memory corruption when it's operating. As in this will survive if no more than X bits are flipped per second in either the source code or RAM.

Yes, it's slow and expensive to create and operate, but it is also possible. Yet his argument is based on the assumption that you need a virus scanner for some reason. I know it's hard and expensive to create clean systems, but that's a long way from impossible.

PS: What I love about Hacker News is talking with people who understand some things and a far deeper level than I do, and are also willing to listen to a reasonable argument.
I spent a lot of time looking for something akin to "we made the last ad up". And I was shocked to find out that it is real.
Ask HN: Why do people (you) give feedback?
Hi guys,

I'm trying to figure out what makes people that give feedback tick.

As some of you may know, I have started a new website, launchly, that is trying to be a centralized point for new web startups to get feedback on their idea/site/design/etc. I have been getting some feedback from random users but so far I am not seeing the feedback rates that a site like HN gets (and HN isn't even focused on website feedback). I'm getting lots of votes (Digg-style) but the majority of my visitors don't seem to be leaving feedback.

My question to you, then, is why do you leave feedback on the "review my site" posts on HN? What is it that draws you to provide feedback? And on an obviously related note, what WOULD draw you to provide feedback on a site like launchly?

Is there some direct benefit to you that I am missing when you provide feedback here? I provided feedback on sites prior to creating launchly just because I enjoyed it so I guess I assumed that's why others did it but maybe I have missed something obvious.
While 'HealthEdGov' may have been the place to be over the past ten years, it's worth pointing out that that sector is basically a remora- a useful parasite to the shark, but still a parasite.

As a society, we need a stronger 'rest of the economy'.
Don't you notice the depletion of neurotransmitters? It's been a awhile since I played with nootropics, but my understanding of how many cognitive enhancers work is that they stimulate the production of underlying neurotransmitters (norepinephrine, for example).

If you are not providing the body with sufficient raw material (feeding your head, as it were), these transmitters get depleted and no amount of stimulants will help.
I think this is getting more and more common because of so-called "tech" bloggers not fact-checking their stories and generally overhyping social media (twitter/facebook/youtube etc..) because of their relative simplicity compared to something like the intracacies of bandwidth economics.

Unlike traditional journalists (though clearly not the NYT!) these guys don't have black books of knowledgable people to call up and ask on a certain issue.

Social media makes everyone's opinions and views a lot more equal (when really they shouldn't be) and these stories eventually bubble up to traditional media, which have the view that since the whole "blogosphere" is talking about it as fact; it must be fact.
While I ultimately agree with you, I think that the safe conservative option should be the default. By the time peoples' systems are large enough for the performance difference to actually matter (if ever), they will have had plenty of time to get sufficiently informed about the trade-offs involved. The people who are upset because they get crappy performance from MySQL when they don't even know about indexing tables are not qualified to decide whether risking data corruption is worth a performance boost.

In other words, it's premature optimization.
eBay's mantra should be, "make it easy to buy, sell, and trade shit". Unfortunately they lost sight of that a long time ago when they were trying to hard to woo bigger sellers with "Buy it Now" and all the other professional features they built into eBay. Their vision was too vague and looked more like, "build a big, online marketplace". Unfortunately for eBay, Amazon started with this vision and executed it much better.

I don't use eBay anymore because its hard to list an item and deal with all the emails about it. Instead, I buy stuff on Amazon much easier at about the same price without all the aggravation of bidding. If I want to sell something, like a book, I can list it on Amazon and sell it without answering a billion emails and typing up a big description.

Amazon is kicking eBay's ass.
Yeah the 3rd ad onward I thought they were advertising for either a sex fantasy game, a new kind of dating service, or porn. I think advertising like this dilutes your advertising dollars across a broad range of people who are only remotely interested in your product. Sure, they can get a lot of click with boobs, but people clicking on boobs are looking for boobs. If they don't get them, it's ad money wasted. They would probably have more quality leads if they targeted their advertising to paid gaming sites. Those people are already willing to pay for their online games, and are obviously looking for games to play.
Happy Birthday Nikola Tesla: Strange Genius
Social Media: Why it pays to be super awesome to almost everyone online
Let's see: a social network using sleazy spamy user-acqusition techniques; a grandstanding state attorney general, and users who casually share their address books and mail logins with third party sites. Help! There's no one in this story to root for!
This is a next generation laser ranging/image sensor
Books For Designers, Typography Lovers And Freelancers
There’s a lot of books about design, usability, typography, CSS, freelancing and a boat load of other related topics out there. All these books can help make you a better designer and business owner. Here's a list of some of my favorite ones.
I'm sorry to do this, but I can't resist.

Oh shit! Here comes an s!!!
Great article w/ real meat in it, thanks for posting.

“We want to build a profit, create a nest egg, and then take more creative risks with our next game,” he said. “We aren’t under pressure to make the next game into a home run. I have my eye on the future. I want to progress in an intelligent manner, like some of the better independent developers.”