skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, I certainly don't think they're immune to things like antitrust litigation. It's a whole different question whether the antitrust legislation that enables the litigation is itself a good idea. And I definitely don't think Apple won't make mistakes. But my money would certainly be on Apple to know what they're doing over the guy who's criticizing them. Actually, my money literally is on Apple — I'm a stockholder.
Can the President get arrested?
I'm speaking in general.
Sure, good point. When I used 'wrote' I did mean it in the broadest possible sense of his 'authorship' of the business as a whole.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphorical_extension

He may not have written the actual code, but he's definitely the driving force behind the company.
Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel and Turing: four suicidal geniuses
This is a great find. Thanks for posting.
Senduit is the only one I use or recommend. Simple and easy.
Being a "star" has almost nothing to do with being a good person. It's persona. Jobs has a very compelling life story. He approaches his work with the relentless perfectionism and devotion of an artist. He understands the value of theatrics and suspense. He's reclusive and arrogant but also charming. He's simply a more interesting character than Bill Gates who was a rich kid that went to Harvard and got even richer. I admire what he's doing with his money now but it doesn't change the fact that he's a boring character.
Low-end laptops are already pretty cheap (sub-$500), more so due to a threat from the netbook market. High-end laptops will never be cheap, comparatively, because there's more under the hood.
Thanks for requesting clarification. Maybe it's a narrow exception, so I'll just give some examples:

E.g. 1: My product was a good idea for a tool, but a kind of obvious one, and one that any library-developer could implement. Although useful, there was no barrier to entry to protect it (in fact, dozens of people had had the same idea, and implemented it - which I didn't know). That's fatal. There was also a technical problem that I didn't worry about much at first because it was secondary, but it turned out to be a show-stopper: it made the tool just too awkward to use in practice. That's another fatal. I was positive that it was impossible to solve; but, with online suggestions (involving an odd route, and new features in the language), I did solve it. This solution addressed both fatal problems; but at the start, it seemed unimportant, and then impossible to solve.

E.g. 2: The idea of the telephone was an obvious one: talking at a distance. Many people (including Edison) thought it would be really cool, but couldn't see any commercial use for on for it (they had the telegraph already). It would just be a "scientific curiosity". Edison had a go at it before Bell, but it was hard, and he gave up because it seemed a bit pointless to a practical guy like him. In one of the blog links, a way to test demand is suggested: create some google adwords, and see if anyone clicks. If this was done with the telephone, no demand would have been found. For revolutionary ideas, people often don't know they need them until they exist.

Eg 3. There's a story in the Innovator's Dilemma, where a big HDD manufacturer makes a tiny diskdrive (2.5 inch I think) at great expense - but could not find a customer for it anywhere. It turns out that there were uses for it, but unexpected and tiny markets (I think one was a medical app). This was well before the iPod used them, and before notebooks and netbooks used them (I think they're a standard now).

As I said, maybe this is a narrow exception, only applicable to those rare inventions that are revolutionary (and perhaps only some of them), and the PFA approach works great for 99% of business ideas.

I am pro-fact, but unfortunately there is more to the truth than is dreamed of in a philosophy based only on known facts.
It's probably for profit reasons, but I thought it might be because having a 12" netbook in Dell's lineup would be blurring the lines between notebook and netbook too much, potentially confusing consumers. Does anyone else think that a 12" screen on a laptop gives people the idea that this could be their main machine? I've certainly had non-tech-savvy friends ask why they shouldn't just buy a netbook to replace their main machine (it was actually the Dell Mini 12, in one case).

It's probably the profit margin thing, though.
Vitamin D slashes risk of cancers by 77 percent (2007)
I think he's a good moderator.
Gates' early philanthropic donations were primarily to higher-ed institutions. Somewhere along the line he learned that that's among the most regressive, least effective forms of charity, and shifted his focus to the truly poor and needy. That convinced me that he was truly interested in helping others and not just looking for recognition, attention, or improving the MS brand.
What evidence do you have about how common this is?
People are expressing their anger and disappointment, and why shouldn't people have an opinion on Apple censoring the app store?

This is a standard counterargument you hear whenever anyone criticizes someone for something like anger or disappointment. No one is telling them they aren't entitled to their opinion, and I'd go so far as to say it's universally understood in our society that everyone is entitled to their opinion. It's just that when people have opinions that others feel are wrong, and those people criticize the opinion, it's not enough that their opinion is formed because they're angry and disappointed. The very fact that it's an opinion does not mean it's sacrosanct and unassailable — the validity of the opinion is still assessable based on the facts behind it.

My entire point is in fact that the people who form an opinion based on anger and disappointment or a misplaced sense of entitlement, which I feel the OP did, are exactly the kind of people whose opinions are suspect in my mind.
It depends on where you hang out. Some places are better than others, and some are even dominated by women. But in general, I agree. After a disturbing experience or two, I decided anonymity was simply easier than hassle. I suspect a lot of folks take this route.

Also, gender anonymity offers an additional freedom: in an age that points out and encourages women engineers and girl gamers, I would like to succeed or fail on my own merits. Anonymity guarantees that I do.

Hence, my current pseudonym, "Dove". It is believably feminine but not particularly so, and is about as non-stealth as I've ever been.
Then why is it not OK for Microsoft to try to force you to use a particular web-browser by pre-installing it with Windows and making it difficult to install others?

Yeah, definitely — I don't necessarily think Microsoft did do anything not OK in that respect.
What sickens me is that it's also the other way around.

If you are a billionaire and give money away in private, you'll be publicly criticized for not giving anything to charities. You're guilty unless proven innocent, so to speak.

Or take somebody like Warren Buffet. For years people had criticized him for ignoring charities, while he was of the opinion that he could put the money to better use by investing it wisely. A few years back he decided to join forces with Gates and signed almost all of his money away to charity. And suddenly, of course, the media flips and applauds his generosity.

The strategy of keeping all the money during your career and giving it away in a lump sum in the end may be a close to optimal solution (because you give away everything you're going to think very carefully about how to make the biggest impact. Otherwise you'll pick a few charities at the end of every year for PR reasons and for tax benefits; that's not going to be optimal.)

To criticize a billionaire when he wastes obscene amounts of money (yachts/private planes) I can understand (although I think they earned those luxuries). To criticize people for investing the money they've made, when there's no reason to assume they're not going to give the same money to charity in the future, well, that's just petty.
people like you will drive a coffee shop out of business.

That is more likely to be true if the shop is full to capacity (e.g. during the lunch rush, etc.). When there is free space, your marginal cost to the coffee shop is just electricity, which isn't that much.

That said, I agree it's only decent to purchase something regularly -- a coffee every 2 hours or some food seems reasonable to me.
Well, most recently and evidently I went out with a girl who helped start a humanitarian organization and in doing so I obtained quite a bit of experience watching and interacting with her and her friends.

Other than that in general, I've observed many occasions where if given the choice between giving or not, the major factor in their decision was whether or not other people would know about it.
I don't think it comes from an inappropriate sense of entitlement at all. I think it comes from a completely appropriate sense of injustice.

In your original comment you suggest it would be better off if we just bought products based on our own opinions without considering what the community thinks of some of the issues. I think we form our opinions with the help of the community. Less opinions just means less information about the purchasing decisions we make which isn't a good thing.
I like the following (may not as cool as some of those listed, but they're great startups and driving real revenue):

1. ZenDesk
2. Freshbooks
3. 99designs
information that is already known is always already taken into account by the futures/stock market.
Werkzeug + Jinja2 + SQLAlchemy + Beaker
High Blood Pressure Causes
Finally a good pool in this subject!

PHP is still strong because of it's stable ecosystem. Django must be at 1st place because of it's power and no-fluff media coverage.

Glad to see Rails in this position inspite the negative hype around it. Also the 37signals approach won supporters in a HN climate determined by PG who has his own philosophy.

Wonder who might be the 'others'? Haskell, Clojure, Erlang and maybe Arc?
Kahney wrote a book in 2008 called "Inside Steve's Brain". It was very complimentary toward Steve, presenting his leadership techniques positively. Good book, and not at all negative as this article might suggest.
yeah, nearly fried my apple laptop, watching cnn video - i noticed: 95 degrees celsius
Incidentally, these answers are mostly not from YC-funded startups, if that's what you meant to ask about.
I don't understand this phenomenon. What company wouldn't take someone who was willing to work for free? Strictly economically, working for $0 should mean that you can choose any company on the planet to work for, as they all have something [marginal] to gain, and nothing to lose (on the provisio that they can't rely on you, because that would potentially cost them money should you fail to be reliable. They'd have to treat you as a truly "redundant" subsystem to their machine, giving you tasks that they've already assigned others to complete in the hope that you'll do them better/faster/whatever-er.)
It's not really true. Rails has it's controversies inside the community andmore attacks comming from outside.

Fortunatelly it's ecosystem grows fast and into the right direction. On posts like which language to learn -- Django or Rails -- one can realize Ruby community is well equipped with tutorials, screencasts, components, news, collaboration, hosting and deployment/tuning tools
You have to login to Google to read this.

Summary: (anon post) Use of "customer development process". We made people think we had a product in development, based on some photoshop screenshots. We changed the "product" based on what we found when were were talking to them. We iterated. We made people sign agreements to try the product. Our product is ugly and has few features.
Interesting idea. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Here's the list of camera domains/IPs http://tlrobinson.net/bigbrother/urls.txt and the paths to the viewer page and MJPEG, respectively:

a.href = baseURL + "ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion&Language=0";
img.src = baseURL + "nphMotionJpeg?Resolution=160x120&Quality=Standard";
New Nokia maemo based tablet surfaces
Job World: Walk-in For HR Executive @ Winpro in Bangalore on 5 - 14Aug 2009
> I assume that the hope

Such a firm connection to reality.

How about the reality that regulation caused a lot of the problems?

Start with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Ask whether anyone would be willing to make NINJa loans without a govt guarantee. And, if someone made such loans, ask whether anyone would buy them.

US Govt policy pretty much guaranteed that the mortage industry would take a huge fall. Even now, it's trying to keep people in houses that they can't afford. And, the money is coming from folks who bought what they could afford or rented because they couldn't afford to buy.
I'm sure every hacker here with a latte/cappucino habit has plenty enough Vitamin D and Calcium in their diet to get these benefits.
I'm in VoIP telephony, and utterly unimpressed with the sorts of stuff that shows up in that category in Rentacoder/guru.com, etc. The emphasis tends to be less on "rock star coders" but is equally preposterous:

"I am looking for complete SIP/H.323 interworking solution.

Maximum budget: $500

K THX BAI"

Yeah, right.

EDIT: For those who have no reference frame for a SIP/H.323 gateway, that's something that could easily be a multimillion dollar project for someone like Aricent or Wipro.
> Which was obviously reversed with a good old, "private industry always comes up with the most efficient model, never fails, never commits fraud, and is always perfect" crap that like to get pushed around in government.

The only folks who ever say that do so as above, attributing that belief to others in an attempt to cover up their lack of an actual argument.

Govt is subject to exactly the same failings, with one important difference - it gets to tax and coerce folks and there's even less connection to results.

Even the most corrupt company would have problems keeping Barney Frank around, yet he's still a major player in govt, driving housing policy....
It's easy to pose all macho and righteous on this issue. But there's a reason journalists protect sources; on balance it helps them do their job, even with the reality some sources abuse the confidence to dissemble.

And what happens when Carr mistakenly believes a source lied, burns them, but then discovers the source was telling the truth? The betrayal of confidence and repercussions for the source may be irreversible.

Arrignton made a similar pledge that TC would promise to respect embargoes, but then break them. How many embargoes has TC broken since?
I use both rails and django, and my impression is that although both frameworks were released at roughly the same time, they are both at very different points of the hype curve, with rails pulling out of the Trough of Disillusionment, and django rising to peak hype.
Ask HN: "How to make something people want?"
I've been banging my head against the wall trying to refine my target market. I have "ideas" of who they are, but without a network and/or platform to ask these people, it's all theory. Catch 22.

Are there websites that ask people what they want, in a useful, data gathering way?

My thoughts:

Imagine a site like yelp.com
Users rate and comment on businesses based on category.

Our website would have two primary actions.

1. Producers list current or conceptual ideas/products/services.

2. Users/consumers give their opinion to help shape and refine the listing. "This is what I would want" type comments are encouraged, over simply saying "this sucks". In other words, consumers help producers make their concept not suck.

Use Case:

I would post a listing as a producer in the "internet services" section, listing my project as "powerful in browser website creation and management system". I might define my intended audience, then let users tell me what features I should add and how it might be useful to them.

Perhaps it would be like uservoice, without actually needing to build the product first.
Also user voice requires that you have users. =D

Any similar sites? Any input on the concept?
Google has some combination of your email, calendars, bookmarks, web browser, phone number, payment service, ad service, office suite, and physical phone. All of these make Google one click closer than any competitor. It's game over, at least for now.
Social Media Scene Kids | Social Media Vision
the video is on blip.tv, you can download it there.

http://building43.blip.tv/file/2413059/, see the "files and links" box on the bottom-right of the page.
Curious: Can the ORM inside Kohana be used independently of Kohana itself (i.e. without using the MVC framework)?
Edward Yu Blog
Read articles on life success and coaching by Eddie Yu
I will only suggest that it's a little weird to say that censorship and suppression of competitors is a prerogative of a company when it's not a monopoly, but then once that monopoly line is crossed it's not ok anymore.

IANAL, but this was how post-Bork antitrust law was described to me.

When a small company engages in lock-in/anti-competitive practices, you can't really make the argument that consumers are being hurt, because if that were true, they would just buy the competitor's product. The iPhone, for instance, exists in a smartphone market with multiple players (Blackberry, HTC, Palm, etc), and if consumers decide that Apple has gone too far, they'll simply buy a different phone next time. But if a company had a monopoly (which MSFT had in operating systems during the late 90s), there are no real options for consumers. The company could partake in anti-consumer activities without fear of market retribution. In those cases, the courts usually intervene to ensure consumer protection.
Use "set -u" to treat unset variables as an error when substituting. Use "||" operator to handle errors. My pattern:

an_command || {
error "Cannot execute an_command. Exit code: $?."
return 1
}

Always wrap variables with double quotes, unless you really need to parse variable value by bash. Use arrays, when you need to pass multiple arguments. And so on.
I made a skateboarding game and got a number of little 10 minute coolnesses.
Doesn't halfbakery.com do something along these lines?

The main problem I see with your idea is that consumers/users have no benefit or incentive to continually use your site.

They are providing their time and input on something that doesn't exist. People take time to provide input at Yelp because, in return, they can find a good restaurant. People vot on Digg because, in return, they find funny/interesting stories or videos.

You want lay-people to provide you with input but you're giving them nothing in return ... except the possibility that a business they would use could exist in the future.
There are a variety of conditions that usually fall into "intersex", from XY females (who usually identify as female and would typically pick the female option as that's how they typically (again: typically, they're perfectly justified in choosing "other" or "transgender" and arguably justified in choosing "male") prefer to describe themselves) to chimeras (who can be damn near anything) or the like. "Other" could also be someone who has modified their sex, but is not "transgender" or at least not comfortable self-describing that way (androgynes, certain lesbians, etc) or someone who does not fit into the binary gender scheme in general. (If we're talking gender.)

"Transgender" is pretty straightforward.
S.I.M.S
I just received a review of some cool real estate investor training from Greg Clement. This Property launch idea is pretty cool- i plan on doing this with some of my deals.
First, I don't think Jason Calacanis is arguing unequivocally for government intervention, necessarily; he's first and foremost expressing a market preference as a consumer, and is trying to make the case to other consumers to have the same. If the consumers protest Apple's decisions, this situation could, theoretically, be resolved by market pressures alone; in other words, not so much that "the company that produces consumer products must suck my dick" as "the company must bend to the will of what its customers want." In order for that to happen, a larger proportion of consumers have to be better informed about the nature of the restrictions and more assertive about what they ostensibly prefer instead. It's not so much that Apple should be compelled to cater to them legalistically, I think, as that the denominator of everyday technology use tends toward open, interoperable and free. At least, that's the argument Calacanis is making. Whether you agree with it or not, you should give it a fair treatment instead of simply dismissing it as an exhortation toward legal anti-trust action.

Yes, Apple is there to make money from its products and so, Apple looks out for its interests very well. That means the buyers of its products should do their part to look out for theirs.

Having said that, I understand your position perfectly. I came out with a very similar stance as my initial reaction to the whole Google Voice situation, and basically agree with you fundamentally. However, this is a complicated question; both of the extreme positions ("kill the evil Apple now!" vs. "Apple is the vendor, it can do what it wants, and if you don't like it, don't buy it") have certain untenable aspects to most people when carried to their logical conclusion.

Specifically, I think the central ideological premise of competition-related regulation hinges on the fact that the world is too complicated to expect ordinary consumers to intricately understand every nuance of the restrictions, stipulations, caveats, etc. that come with every single product they come into contact with in a variety of areas. Whether you agree with this or not, you have to acknowledge that neither AT&T, nor Windows, nor Apple came to be "monopolies" (in the various ways in which they were/are alleged to be) because every consumer consciously and willfully bought into the consequences of adopting their respective goods/services/platforms/etc.

There are two sides to that argument, of course; the traditional free-market stance is that this is the consumer's own damn problem; if you're going to be lazy and not do your research, you pay the price. The counterpoint is that there is a great deal of social moral consensus around NOT allowing that to happen in other areas of life, which is why a great many consumer protection, disclosure, safety and liability laws exist.

If the roofers were allowed to put large amounts of radioisotopes in your shingles and you just didn't happen to know that this is an issue you should inquire about, you could get badly burned on that in the absence of laws that basically say that they can't knowingly do stuff like that.
"(which is/should be obvious)"

Not always as obvious as you might think! It's the exceptions that are important, here.

Shouldn't your biology actually be more obvious than your gender? I mean, being somewhat of a devil's advocate here.
It's a last resort sort of question for when you're desperate. Monty Pythonian, sure, but that sort of question has really hurt people, unfortunately.
"I would say anyone who does have a major problem with the 5 issues cited in this article should definitely look for another platform instead of constantly whining about it"

And hopefully the people who don't have a problem with the 5 issues cited in the article would stop whining about the people who whine about them ;-)
You have to login to Google to read this.

Sort of.

Oddly enough, if you are not logged into Google at all, you can view Google Groups public content without hitting a login prompt. But if you are logged in to Google in another way -- perhaps in a stale way -- attempting to view public Groups content often triggers a login page, and there's no option to skip it. (Only by completely logging out elsewhere is the path cleared for non-logged-in access.)

A lesson that even at Google, single-sign-on is wonky.