skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a US government institution, sure. Arguing about that (or focusing on it) misses the real point about how they're different from a lot of government agencies, which has everything to do with why they're acting grabby about IP like a business.

As the Wikipedia article notes, since 1971 it's been a corporation-like independent agency that's essentially unsupported by taxes. Since then it was supposed to operate in the black and it did for a long time, until it got hit by increased competition in traditional delivery services, digital communications... and the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (which both keeps it from offering new "non-postal" services and gives it new obligations like prefunding healthcare obligations 75 years into the future).

I don't think treating zip or other geoinfo they've got as proprietary is a great idea, because it could be used to create a lot of value if it was let out on its own. But the value it has makes it a potential revenue source, and given the obligations and limited options they have, I can understand why they feel like they'd have to capture some of the value they've created.
I wouldn't say barely did one ;) http://www.followsteph.com/2013/08/07/landlordmax-2012-2013-...
Mass mail couldn't be any easier. You don't need addresses to do it at all. You just drop off stacks of mail at the post office, each carrier takes a whole stack, and it's delivered to every mailbox on selected routes. It's called Every Door Direct Mail, a USPS service. Mailers pay by how many addresses are in a carrier's route.

https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm
Unlock your Mac without typing a thing
You'd need thousands of those button sources to make a lethal dose of Po-210.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/po...

> They are typically in a form that, if ingested, would pose no health problem, and the radiation is so small that they do not pose a hazard even if the polonium were to be absorbed. It would take 30,000 of these exempt quantities to represent the 3-millicurie fatal dose estimate.

Button sources are typically of the size where you wouldn't mind letting undergrads gnaw on them during their physics labs. The worst they could do is choke.
There is a like button. Plus I just accidentally Kudos'ed that post because I had no idea how the button worked and didnt move my mouse away fast enough! Now I can't unkudos it. Oh well, that's life!
I'd love to follow your journey of marketing your product.

If you intend to go hard on marketing this app and exploring ways to do that, can you put up an email form, so I know when your next blog post is?!
None, as neither will be producing hardware it looks like. Microsoft is going after handset makers, not Google.
... would you say the same about the Library of Alexandria? What would you have suggested they do? Not kept a library?

You should play some poker. It'll give a healthy respect for how much odds can affect outcomes. Shocking situations will happen, but half the time you'll be the one doing the shocking. Often you can win with just a pair of 8's. Based on your attitude, it seems like you'd always choose to fold if you were only holding 8 8, but in reality it's sometimes worth it to call.

Your expected value by not playing at all, though, is zero. Meaning you won't lose, but you won't win either. This only makes sense when you're satisfied with your environment as it exists today.

I wouldn't be satisfied without the internet archive. It serves a vital function. They may be gambling against natural disasters, but you know what? They're still winning. And by choosing to play, they've improved our world a bit. We should be grateful, not scornful.
AWS Updates Its Elastic MapReduce Console For Exploring Large Amounts Of Data
You can easily support old Android versions with compatibility libraries, and get most of the features of the latest os.

IE6 will never support ES5 or CSS3.

A 2.1 Android device can support fragments and action bars via libraries.

Comparing the two is just dishonest. Furthermore Android doesnt run on web standards like HTML or CSS.

If you want to compare things then compare the fact that Microsoft dont allow XP users to upgrade IE to the latest version , whereas Google provides compatibility libraries for old devices to use the latest APIs.
2 factor authentication for everyone
You are a bit confused. When Microsoft sued Barnes and Noble, the patents they were suing over were disclosed in their public court filings. Over a dozen were identified [1].

[1] http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/070611-microsoft-andro...
So what you're saying is that without domain knowledge you can make an accurate allocation decision ?

No, that's not what I'm saying. Did you see the bit where I said attentive listening was also very important? I don't see any point in continuing this conversation since you seem more interested in ranting.
Nice. So one of the things that happened to me when I came to the Bay Area was I was working at Intel and I had to talk to a lot of marketing folks (who were talking to 'the public' about Intel's chips). I realized I didn't have a clue what they did.

I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one at Sun which was effectively a 'technical marketing engineer' although at the time I joined the marketing folks just needed an engineer to translate what the competition was doing into something they could argue about. I too was amazed at how much more complex it was than my simplistic assumptions had been. I moved over into the kernel group later (they too had offered me a spot when I had interviewed) and have been pure engineering ever since but never forgot the lessons of that time.

Things I learned,

1) Marketing is not sales - Sales is the process by which you convince someone with money to give it to you in exchange for a good or service. Marketing is the thing that happens before that which informs you why you might want to talk to a sales guy. A guy marketing a car will tell you that the car has the highest safety rating ever, the guy selling the car will tell you if you write a check right now he will take an additional $1,500 off the sticker price.

2) Marketing is about perception, and perception is personal. The job of a marketeer is to communicate an idea so that you can see it and perceive it the same way the marketeer does. That requires that you first discover the perceptual language of the target, then translate the message into that perceptual language, communicate it, and then test again for understanding. Marketing a car that smells like bacon to a vegetarian just doesn't work. If the biggest chunk of car buyers are vegetarians, and your car consistently smells of bacon, you need to translate that into something positive somehow. Not simple :-).

3) Marketing is ubiquitous - one of the interesting conversations with my daughter as a teen about what to wear, your clothes give others an impression of you, you cannot prevent that, all you can do is control it. People are constantly taking these bits of information in and reasoning about them consciously and unconsciously. To be successful you have to have influence over as many of those information channels as possible. Getting that influence can be tricky.

Basically, it isn't as easy as it looks like it should be was my conclusion.
Reason dev-ing a software is not that hard = computer is consistent and feedback is instantaneous.

Reason marketing is effing hard (for us programmers) = human is fickle and feedback is sporadic.
My mega-size company is still in the process of moving from XP to Windows 7. So, our 'new' browser is IE9.
They do have a public API http://hypem.com/playlist/popular/3day/json/1/data.js. Though if you want access to the mp3 url's you need an API key. We've worked closely with them to make this happen.
You can use this tool to search for anyone's insights not just your own ... the tool deals only with public data that is available on twitter.

Also the cache part, is only temporary for saving on computation and power (being more green). But again, its public data so anyone can do a search on your account or anyone else's, that is not set to private.
Possibly more than Microsoft earns from Windows Phone.
Sorry wrong site. Have updated link!
We actually do not charge an additional commission with our Business Plan, priced at $29/mo, and we integrate with Stripe, PayPal, Authorize, and others to come.

Making things as intuitive as possible is something we lose sleep over. Check out our demo video and let me know what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnqEB0XxAbM
And WTFPL which you are using is the level 5 of foul language, and the death sentence to software names.

See, I can also use offensive language to describe a license. Doesn't that make for a nice conversation here on HN?
I have two pieces of relevant experience. Firstly I hit my head on the side when I was about 16 on a bike with no helmet, in a slow speed accident. I had unpleasent concussion, about 10 minutes of retrograde amnesia and 5 minutes or so of post traumatic amnesia. Some weird vomiting symptom about 3 days into recovery which would have been cause for serious concern if it repeated itself. I think I was off school for a whole week.

I passed through high school with my usual marks (top end of the middle), and onto an undistinguished but advanced university education. Another friend was involved in a human versus baseball bat assault (skull fracture I think) around the same time and had big problems for a few years.

I also worked in brain injury rehab for 4 years or so in my mid 20s. During that time I would have interacted with hundreds of patients with severe traumatic brain injuries. During that time I saw one paitent with a bike related TBI. Bike at full speed versus cow. I don't remember if he was wearing a helmet but his potential as a person was dramatically reduced, although nothing easy to observe casually.

I used to be for compulsory bike helmet laws. These days I think the indirect risks of a reduced number of cyclists on the road (as evidenced by the australian experience) outweigh the direct risks of a small number of TBIs. I wear a helmet when I have longer distances to travel, or need to make use of dangerous main roads (I tend to cycle on wide underutilised sidewalks where possible). For short distances I don't wear a helmet. It's a risk, but a small one.
Google has this thing which lets you essentially choose a location (and browser) and run a test with output from the page speed addon: http://www.webpagetest.org/

I'm using Cloudfront with the origin option for a subset of our users. I've found a few clients with so restrictive or broken firewall rules that I had to add an option to default to getting the files from the source if users come from network X or Y. While cloudfront lets you download the log files, you get one S3 object per edge location per 15 minutes or something like that, so 1000s per day, which made things difficult to troubleshoot (I suspect the problem with one user was partial cache due to Apache's deflate sending responses as chunked encoding as default and Amazon's origin spider sometime dropping such connections).
Like Dan said, we think that mixing a very intuitive CMS with a powerful eCommerce platform is really compelling.

We compare really well to Shopify on a feature basis, but have some other cool things, like secure checkout on your own domain, faceted search (e.g. http://www.dangshades.com/apps/search?q=polarized) and an amazing mobile checkout.
Even if server-side tracking is as effective as cookie tracking (and I would argue it will not be), there’s a difference between the site tracking me, and the site enlisting my browser to aid it in tracking me. If I am to be tracked, let the site do so by expending its own cycles and storage, not mine.
Exploiting Internet Explorer 11 64-bit on Windows 8.1 Preview
That's a strange example of opportunity cost, especially in the context of college.

Having finite money and having to choose what you spend it on is a very simplistic example of opportunity cost.

More applicable to college students and gets at the core of opportunity cost a bit better, I think: "Go to a hackathon/job interview/conference, or go to class?" or, for some students, "go to a party or stay in and study?"
He probably would have received a mild to moderate traumatic brain injury. The common case for a moderate injury is a year or three of recovery, if you're reasonably lucky.
Exactly what I was thinking. There are a gazillion (count 'em) ways to get around this "data product" BS. USDA statistics would work, too.
Oops I meant to say "Arafat poisoning" not "Mossad poisoning" in my original comment. I can no longer edit it. I don't have any solid evidence/source for Israel's involvement, just weird coincidence that they came up on Wikipedia. Purely speculation.
I agree, but I think they remain in use just because most people happen to know their own zip code (from using it in mailing addresses).

There is an alternate system that's completely public-domain, maintained by a proper government agency, and actually intended for spatial division of U.S. territory in a way that's useful for grouping populations: the U.S. Census Bureau's census tracts. However these are somewhat newer (they didn't cover the whole U.S. until the 2000 census), people don't have their own census tract # memorized off the top of their head, and there seems to be less infrastructure & software built to use them outside of GIS people using actual census data.
Yet they are extremely powerful. Whatever their flaws may be, I have worked with your preferred version of templates (C# generics) and, let me tell you, they are inferior in every practical way.
Exactly. Rick Sherlund has a history of saying that Microsoft should be divided up, and Xbox should definitely be spun off [1, 2, 3]. He even said Samsung should take over Xbox division [4].

Even if MS earns $1 Billion from patents that exclude "legitimate" licensing, I think that would be a big number and definitely should be looked into.

[1] - http://www.geekwire.com/2013/sherlund-microsoft-should-consi...

[2] - http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/03/technology/enterprise/micros...

[3] - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-06-03-microsoft-w...

[4] - http://www.examiner.com/article/sherlund-microsoft-needs-to-...
> If the answer to #1 is yes, how does Apple avoid this problem?

For at least what is problem the main money maker for Microsoft's patent licensing, the patent or patents covering aspects of the FAT32 filesystem, Apple escapes liability because Apple does not use FAT32 in iOS. Android does use it (for removable media).
A Baby’s Gaze May Signal Autism, Study Finds
FM synthesis is additive, and it's a fair point you can play .wav files directly on your machine. I have been tying them to external events which was a bit more difficult.
Why is everyone taking these numbers as fact when neither the article nor analyst offer anything to back up these claims?

The people submitting and upvoting stories like this are just as responsible for the shoddy state of tech journalism as these bloggers are.
Number one is backed up by the Australian experience of compulsory helmet laws.

Number two is backed up by the dutch experience (hint, it hasn't always been like that).

I wear a helment when I am unsure of the safety of cycling conditions on my planned route, or on an unknown route. Otherwise I don't.
I ran into this problem a lot when dealing with US-wide 911 service (for VoIP). Companies would just assume that if they have a mailing address for you, you're set, or worst case, go off the ZIP code to determine where to direct calls. Dealing with upstate NY was such a pain due to this.

Unfortunately, I can't see moving away from ZIP codes. The 4-digit extension is too hard for anyone to memorize. If they had just added a 1 or 2 letter extension, you might be able to get people to sometimes know it, and then they could fill a dual-role as a geolocator as well.
Which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all.

If running a postal service that reaches all of the country is a money losing proposition, that's a terrible reason to privatize it, if you think it's in the national benefit to have a postal service.
I've been using Bee for the past week to avoid interacting with Jira's slow interface and it's been absolutely excellent. It's a polished app, and the one bug I encountered was fixed within a day. Just waiting for the trial to finish.
Playing devil's advocate...

By the same measure, should we not be outraged by having to pay postage?

Wouldn't the postal employees that created the Zipcode database be the same class of postal employee that deliver the mail?
California town wants Tesla police cars
Helmets have saved my life not once, but twice. Both times were off road, at slow speeds, doing things that shouldn't have been a big deal. Neither involved any cars, but one resulted in a concussion and the other a severely sprained neck and a root canal. Both helmets were shattered.

Cars are _a_ problem, not _the_ problem.
Hacking a $5.99 Meditation Fountain
Costs of carrying inventory + employees + several thousands USD/month leasing costs for property

I'd say RedBox provides 80% of the experience; online options provide the rest. However, read the article, as it touches on the reality: the illusion of choice. Almost everyone who goes into a Blockbuster is interested in the same couple of dozen options that the RedBox provides for a fraction of the (business) cost. For the most part, everything else that was in Blockbuster was merely filler.
Can someone explain to me the difference between an inline label and placeholder text?
Sony won the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war with the PS3. That may have been worth it.

Microsoft want to wrest control over your living room from the established consumer electronics companies (such as Sony...), much like Apple and Amazon.
The most difficult part of SEO (and, perhaps tellingly, the part covered only extremely briefly and superficially in the PDF) is getting links from relevant, high-authority sources with relevant anchor text. It's more important than any other factor by a vast margin. Building image sitemaps or optimizing your custom 404 error pages pales in significance by many orders of magnitude. On-site SEO is child's play compared to offsite SEO.

Getting these links ethically is a hard problem to solve, even for a high quality site with unique content.

I don't have much connection with the world of commercial SEO, but I imagine there are people good enough at solving this problem to charge a premium and get good returns for their clients.
The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work.

Please point out what exactly the different conclusions are to that text.
The USPS is often pretty good at getting mis-addressed mail to people anyway, in general.
We certainly have to have physical addressing. (Else, how am I to find your house when you invite me over for a beer?)

I'm only suggesting that we should have a standard way of abstracting over it, such as we do for IP numbers.

Perhaps there should be a protocol like DNS for physical addresses.
The Kale Affect
When I fell sans helmet, I rolled on the ground but my head never contacted the ground because my shoulder was in the way. I still wear a helmet for long distance or traffic rides.
I was always opening an object link in a new tab and then going back and hitting refresh in the main tab with the admin listing. Guess I won't have to do that anymore.
I guess they're going for the "all our IPO communications are tweets on Twitter" thing, but this one seems it would've been a better fit for the company blog (https://blog.twitter.com/company). They could've still tweeted a link to the post. Instead they seem to have tweeted... a screenshot of the post, which doesn't exist in text form.
>There likely are others, but they don't come to mind at the moment.

Chavez
This is amazing. The UI is absolutely gorgeous. A few minor things I noticed:

-Scrolling seems very laggy when scrolling with the mouse wheel, although dragging with the scrollbar seems fine. This only seems to be happening in the Popular (Now), view. This is under 10.9.

-When I favorite songs, they don't show up in the favorite section although they did after relaunching the app.

-It would be nice if when you moused over a song in the list if it scrolled the full song name into view - at the moment they get cut off and you can't see the full name.

-The song list scrollbar on the right is obscured by the controller at the bottom. I like what you've done with having the songs scroll underneath the slightly transparent controller but the scrollbar should really end where the controller starts.

-I don't seem to be getting notifications from the app even though it's listed in the Notifications app list under the Notifications section of System Preferences.
Thank you for responding in a meaningful way. I appreciate it.

> There are ways to make anonymous payments on the net, I can use cash to buy cash-cards in denominations up to $500 that work just like debit cards online, they are even branded with Visa and/or MasterCard.

This still puts you at greater risk of exposure than creating a Gmail account through an anonymizing proxy. Prepaid cards can be traced to where they are purchased, which at least narrows your location geographically, if not the exact location. From there the NSA could probably catch you buying it in person by reviewing CCTV footage.

> The rise of advertising as the primary source of online funding has choked out development of alternative online payment systems in the same way that an invasive species chokes out native species that occupy the same ecological niche. If it weren't for companies like google we wouldn't be in the situation we are now because a lot more work would have gone into the development of alternative payment systems.

I don't really understand this point. You seem to be positing a world where online advertising didn't become the dominant mechanism for making money on the web, but you don't explain how this could come about. Perhaps if "companies like Google" did not exist? But there were advertising companies before Google and there will be long after Google is gone. Advertising is an inextricable part of the global economy. It would take a revolution to change that.

> So instead of each vendor only knowing about the specific transactions they have with you, there exist multiple databases that amalgamate all of your transactions (online and offline) across multiple vendors into one central record that is for sale.

I think this is deeply wrong and I wouldn't be working for Google if I thought we were heading in this direction. It's not my place to comment further on your other assertions about Google.

> So, in short, his claim was so blindered that it really was quite ridiculously naive/ignorant.

I don't see how your argument supports this claim. Nothing you have said would be news to Mike, who has been thinking about all this stuff longer and more deeply than most people. He just has a different perspective to you, that's all.
Why isn't it IE10?
This is what I was looking for, data producers control their own data and manage the app providers to use the data..
Simulating genealogies using charged particles.