skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs isn't actively trying to HURT others through illegal and unethical business practices. Gates' company has been found guilty of this a number of times.

Steve just makes his products and if someone wants to play in his sandbox they play by his rules. He may be a dick to work with, but he isn't actively hurting others.

And no, I wouldn't say making some donations - no matter the amount, makes up for past actions.
Steve Jobs seems to have a knack for correctly recognizing what most people will find beautiful, and making it happen :/ I don't really care if he's a jerk or not, and I don't really find the article convincing TBH.

Bill Gates has done more to hold back progress of software than anyone else. Giving some money to charity doesn't really suddenly make things fine again.
"The reason there are no angry or stressed old people is that they're all dead."

I'm not so sure of this. My grandmother lived to the ripe old age of 92, yet for the last 25ish years of her life was depressed, lethargic, and generally a drain on everyone around her. Similarly, my dad is now 70 and has been sure that the world is about to end for the last 15 years.

Makes me a little depressed to think that genetically speaking, I'll probably live a long and unhappy life. :-)

I think it's more that depressed old people tend not to get off the couch, i.e. you won't see them at senior centers, they don't participate in studies, and you will generally have little cause to interact with them.
Hats off to the 20 women on HN. You're the exception to many dumb societal rules.
Brilliant article. Microsoft would be crucified if it engaged in the same stuff that Apple does.
I usually don't worry about it too much unless they're busy, and I feel like I'm taking up space, but I ordinarily order at least a 'premium' coffee and something to munch on while I work, and I agree with the 1 coffee per hour rule.

If you can't keep up, or aren't thirsty, you can buy a coffee 'for the house', which basically equates to just giving them money. If you're trying to make friends, or the cashier or barista is cute, you can buy them a drink too. You'll probably be looked at funny (since I'm guessing their drinks are free,) but life's full of weirdos. Might as well be one. ;-)
just a heads up: on the about page this sentence ->
Our mission from the onset has been to seamlessly connecting teachers, students, and parents through the Internet.

should be "to seamlessly connect..." ?
Load was very slow with lots of requests from some cafe on haight. Other sites load fine here. Design is OK but elements that I actually interact with should attract my attention more, rather than the background. Navigation in the site is slow. Categorization of essays is limited and needs work. Blurbs about anti-cheating and copyright seem silly, that seems obviously the purpose of the site and regardless of intent will be the primary use, hopefully not in the exact words. Overall, it feels unpolished but with a lot of potential.
Why do you need deals to sync music to a device? Feel free to shop at Amazon for music, or rip your CDs, or use music that you've bought on the iTMS.

It is not about a music store, it is about the freedom to sync your music with any device. Which is a much simpler problem.
These ideas posted a week ago on HN http://al3x.net/2009/07/31/two-unfinished-ideas.html

Good stuff
"Apple doesn't have any responsibility to the people who buy them"

I beg to differ; I believe any company providing a service or a good has an obligation to its customers. Granted that Apple can afford to ride the high horse at the moment because of its refinement and early adoption of multi-touch, but a draconian control over something like the iPhone will not fare well for Apple in the long term. Sooner or later litigators will compare this amount of control on an ever increasing popular device with the Microsoft-IE case and anti-competitive suits are likely to follow.

Competition will catch on in the iPhone's case, and people will look for alternatives when multi-touch based devices with similar UX and more liberal standards become available.
As much as I want the above fixed, I'm really, really tired of seeing the same tired, old problems listed on HN without a proper solution that doesn't involve the words "boycott" or "jailbreak". (And if there isn't such a solution, I could do with a lot less whining.)

How about "whining where people will read it" until it hurts Apple's brand more than anti-competitive practices help them?
I think happiness is generally linked to independence too. When you're a teen, you're generally forced to do what your parents wish and as you get older your independence (again generally) increases.

When you're in your 20's you're stepping into complete independence, the adapting can be stressful and for most people you budget isn't exactly large. When you're in your 30's you have full independence, at least until you have children.

When you're finally in your 50's, your kids have probably moved out or fully take care of themselves, your budget is quite spacious now there's likely only 2 people in your household. You now get to do pretty much what you want when you want and the money you used to spend on kids can now either be spent on vacations or luxuries and hobbies you rarely got to indulge in when you was 20/30.
Django at Mixpanel.
Starbucks does this, in Canada at least. The gift card (or whatever it is) costs $5 and you get 2 hours of Wifi with it. The trick to circumvent, though, is to use the $5 card to purchase another $5 card. Now you have your original scenario, but four hours of Wifi.
Try explaining tech stuff to tech-illiterate people. The road analogy has come in useful many times when explaining the ethics of vulnerability research and related security matters.
Chrome for Mac: more usable than ever.
What exactly is Apple doing to stop anyone from creating an MP3 player, store and desktop software? Why are other companies entitled to access iTunes? Is it Apple's fault that the Zune isn't more successful?

I find the attitude displayed in this article to be disgusting. There are many things that I'd like to see changed. I have no right to demand that private companies do what I want. I do have the option of not buying their products.

In addition, the average person that uses Apple's products simply doesn't give a shit about any of this. The numerous non-geeks I know that own Apple products never mention any of these issues.
Checkout the link to the video it shows some rendered pages scrolling.

Edit: I didn't take the photo, just got it from someone who had the device and took a minute to try loading it for me.
I love board meetings. Oh man, do I ever. Top five board meetings -- readeeee, Go! How can I even choose? They're all so great! Sometimes I just sit and think about board meetings; About the board, and how they meet. There's no board like a meeting board, 'swhat I always say. Board meetings are the best!

Ahem. Sorry about that. Something about the title ...
I regularly visit the "new" page in attempt to upvote stories (sometimes flag them) I feel will make the home page a better place. I encourage other to do the same.
Looking at the site, I have no doubts that you are doing well.

Very nice, I congratulate you. You have found a niche, and your execution is top notch.
Yeah. I am at the Hacker Dojo here in mountain view right now. http://hackerdojo.pbworks.com/ - it's shaping up to be pretty nice.
Scaling up a Quantum Computer
"Markus" from Ikea
Although I'm not a huge fan of Paul Carr, he did work for the Guardian, and now for the Telegraph, so I wouldn't judge him by TC association alone.
This seems like really poor journalism to me. While it does sound like Arrington lost the libel case, I believe it was a default judgment since Arrington didn't defend himself, while this article makes it sound like the court ruled that he was guilty as accused. Also, it doesn't sound like the court has awarded any damages yet, so I doubt he's currently at any risk of being arrested for failure to pay.
Again, I would ask, who exactly are you to be speaking in absolutes like that about what will and will not happen? Apple is a massive company with tons of brilliant people — do you really think they aren't considering every conceivable angle, never mind the obvious ones that you, sitting there in your armchair, can toss out off the top of your head? Do you honestly think that they're just completely oblivious to the trade-offs and the possibility of antitrust litigation is somehow going to blindside them? They're taking calculated risks.

Also, there is a difference between a company acting as though they have a responsibility to the consumer, or choosing to have a responsibility as a voluntary matter of principal, for public relations purposes; and whether a company actually does have a responsibility in fact or not. There is also a difference between whether you think they should have a responsibility or not and whether they actually do. You obviously think they should have a responsibility, but I still think that they don't as an objective matter of fact.

I'm not trying to be belligerent, although it probably seems that way — it's just that exactly what I'm saying is that I think too many people wishfully demand the recognition of rights they don't have from companies like Apple, and similarly impose responsibilities that don't exist onto them.
This happens in JVM languages as well. Most optimizing compilers will do things differently depending on what happens elsewhere in a function, even if it's "dead code" (and especially if it's dead code that the compiler is too stupid to realize is dead).

Granted this usually only affects runtime speed, but in some circumstances things can get worse (multithreaded programs are particularly susceptible to such optimizations, especially if they're not written correctly - yes, the real problem may be that you've written your code wrong, but there are very real situations where the presence of dead code can change the optimization path taken enough so that it either works or doesn't, which is a very real effect).

And that's even before we take into account compiler bugs, which just make things worse.
Despite the laughability of some parts of the article I think Calacanis nearly hits on something interesting with regard to Apple, Microsoft, antitrust, and the difference between a computer and a mobile phone.

As the iPhone becomes closer and closer to a full-blown 'computer', at what point do the EU authorities, who sanctioned Microsoft for simply _including_ a browser with its OS, go after Apple for not allowing any browser other than Apple's own? When does the degree of separation become too small to be considered relevant? I'd be surprised if there wasn't an antitrust inquiry into Apple's practices with Mobile Safari in the next couple years if things don't change.

Furthermore, what will users come to expect when the hardware of their phone is functionally indistinguishable from their laptop besides the fact that they can put it in their pocket? Will the software restrictions so readily accepted for mobile devices be accepted on PCs? Of course, the PC and mobile phone industries have evolved from completely different places, but I think there will be a point where users will come to expect the same from their home and mobile computers. Where will the expectation line be drawn?
Herman Miller Mirra

I prefer it over the Aeron and any other chair I've sat in.
"Chrome for the Mac, or Chromium as its officially known" I thought Chromium was the unstable constantly evolving version, while Chrome was packaged up nicely and given to the end user?

Also, no 1Password support yet, however, once it gets that, I'm switching.
I agree with this - I customize all my keybindings if they are two arcane or uncomfortable. Combining this with a fanatical preference to always use my own computers (why wouldn't I? - I spent so much time customizing it!) makes me efficient and productive.
Sweet. Totally agree.
Men and women are not equal and never will be.
The music store is a very large part of iTunes for lots of users. Without it you are giving only a partial experience, with it you are effectively advertising the rest of iTunes as well and so undercutting your own offering.
You can say a similar thing when government legislates your business as illegal. Large amount of regulators can be very opaque, and you only find out after the fact a month or two after you've started business.
I thought it was kinda interesting. Do any other languages do this?
Checking to see if a headline accurately reflects the article is a poor decision procedure for detecting the presence or absence of spin. The most you can say, when they match, is that the headline and the article might have similar spin.

But no need to presume, the article is right there. It makes no statement at all about the Microsoft's motivations, let alone the sincerity of them.

The phrase "in earnest", on the other hand, asserts a frame for interpreting the event - the same function served by the word "derailing" in the HN headline. Interpretive frames are the very essence of spin.
"This is important, but not for the reasons you think."

I was speaking to developers who want to treat HTML5 today as a proper standard, and push out Web sites with HTML5 features, while the spec is still under development.

But I think the tactic there is that if enough sites are using a common set of non-standard features supported by FF, Opera, etc, but not IE.whatver, then users of IE.whatever will eventually push Microsoft to implement these features.

I realize that part of getting a usable standard in place is to first put possible usable standards into action, but it's reasonable to wonder if every feature people decide to push for or to act on should or will make the final cut.

I hardly expect Microsoft to act out of altruism, (nor do I expect that of Google), but I also don't assume every question raised by Microsoft is done for malicious reasons.
Your 30s, your adulthood, for the wast majority of us, you're finally coming to terms with the fact that you will NOT be just like James Bond, or Michal Jordan, or Michal Jackson, that you will in fact be perfectly ordinary.

Fuck that. Your life is what you make it. If you want an ordinary life, make ordinary life choices. But if you want something more, it's not like it's impossible.

I mean, come on, living an extraordinary life is why many of us on HN are starting companies, right?
That's very true. The lawsuit that got swept under the carpet should have gone through and it probably would have led to some serious sanctions against ms. There is no way that Gates would have been able to deny knowledge of all the stuff they were doing that was clearly illegal.

Earlier today there was a thread about possible tainting of the bing serps by microsoft, one of their employees did his very best to make it clear that they have changed their attitude. I salute the man for his upright position on this, if everybody there would be like that it would be a different story altogether, but it is going to be a long long time before I'm going to give microsoft the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this.

The road behind is literally littered with the corpses of companies that came under the tank, and a good portion of those did not do anything to deserve the treatment they got.
Sorry to call you out, but your directly quantified Quantcast results show you at less than 1k uniques per day.

There are a LOT of Django sites out there with considerably more traffic and it misrepresents the size of the Django community to suggest that, "one of the biggest Django sites" is only serving a few hundred hits a day.
Python: Double or single quotes?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but here is why other companies are entitled to access iTunes:

Think back to the Windows and IE antitrust legal battles. iTunes is similar to the Windows monopoly. It's the biggest platform for buying music online. According to antitrust laws, it is illegal for Apple to leverage that monopoly against competitors.

That said, Apple made a big investment into the whole iTunes infrastructure and has put a ton of work into negotiating with record labels to get all that music in the store. They did all that for basically no direct reward; they make almost no money off iTunes. They did it to support their iPod business. It seems a little unfair for other MP3 player manufacturers to expect all the benefits of using that infrastructure without the investment. The $1-$5 per device that the article suggests is not nearly enough. Apple makes hundreds of dollars off each device they sell which use the iTunes music store.
PyGame - Parallax Scrolling in 2D games
It's "should have"; the contraction is "should've".
... In the title. If swearing bothers you I doubt you'd click a link with a swear word in the title. NSFW is the name of the column.
Rue Metalanguage: Thue + Regex
Presumably this is newsworthy because everyone assumes building Tetris in Haskell is harder than in an imperative/OO language. This is a good thing because it proves that it's not.
I like it but I have some concerns for you.

How will you monetize? Freemium?

How will you scale? It looks like you two are personally reading essays to approve/disapprove them but how will you scale if you're receiving 100 essays a day? To reach real scalability, I think you will need to crowd source the approval process with a karma system.
Does anyone have a link for a guide on how to set up sshd in the most secure fashion? (i.e. the contents of the sshd_config file)
I don't think the 'simple inclusion' of a browser was what got microsoft to be shot down in the EU. The main reason was their efforts to suppress competing browsers, by software measures in their OS and by backroom dealmaking.

Those were aggravating factors and fairly big ones.

And really, all things considered, giving the users a choice is not such a big penalty. Then there is the fine of course, but I think the height of it was to some extent due to microsofts game playing with the EU courts.
I'd take HTML over these big sparse PDFs
Django if I use a framework, but usually straight python or perl CGI.

I'm assuming you meant "webapps".
The average laptop today pulls in far more than 50w. If everyone was using a net book with a fully charged battery is's one thing, but while charging I have measured up to 200w from a "gaming" laptop. Plus you need to double the energy costs as they guy sitting there and his laptop both increase cooling costs.

Rerun the numbers and you can easily get 500+$ / month in energy costs from people just sitting there using a laptop.
Rails at one; we're looking into liftweb/scala at the other.

We see the robustness of the jvm as a lot more useful at the latter- and scala seems like a good fit (better than java itself, or ruby for that matter) for the kind of datamining we're going to do. Granted, C would likely be much faster, but the ability to include third party java packages and the amount of boilerplate needed for C turned us off to that. Add in a good web framework like Lift, and we don't see the need to fracture our server-side apps into many different languages.
oh thank god please please PLEASE kill blackboard
I always thought the grammar police had weekends off.
apologies, didn't explain myself clearly - corrected.
Rolled our own in Python.

EDIT: I should mention that CherryPy is at its heart. We love CherryPy. And our chat backend uses a secret sauce Python async framework that might or might not be open sourced very soon...
Adaptive Websites
seems like an overreaction on the twitblogs part
There is also a dev-channel. Your installation is on the edge and with automatic updates so you don't have to manually check for nightly builds.

Link: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel
The site looks great and I think it's a great idea.

Here's one small visual bug you can fix: you suffer from the Safari PNG gamma problem (http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/). In short, a PNG of a certain RGB color will not match up with that same RGB CSS color in Safari. The easiest solution is to use a 1px by 1px image for your background instead of specifying it as a color in CSS.

Good luck!
Overall, I like the design of the site. First thing I noticed was the "what is uberessay" block of text on the left column. I think the way you've written the text is a great attention getter.

The biggest issue I have with the usability of the site is navigation and scoping problems.

Front page:

I like the essay gallery but there is no title associated with it. Are these the most recently added? Today's featured? As it stands now, I did not even realize they were essays, until I clicked on one. Could have been a picture, or user profile? who knows?

Navigation:

There is no way clear signifier as to what page you are on. You have nice little triangles on hover, but not on "selected".

The top black navigation bar is fine: Top level pages.
But the second red navigation is a bit unintuitive. I assumed these links were sub-links of the top black navigation sections, but they are not. The red bar seems to contain article navigation.

So Black = Main Site Navigation, Red = Article Navigation.

I guess the placement as they are now is OK, but still seems like the red bar is a sub-set of the black bar. Perhaps adding Description titles to the red bar would help
"Browse Articles ->"

Scope:

Similar to the article browsing bar, I think your website has some scoping problems.

For example the right tabbed column listing about, recent esssay, recent comments, etc is part of the article browsing functionality, which is also the red nav bar's job. The right column is also global. Something that confuses me. When I am navigating to a specific article, I see that it shows up under the red nav bar. There is a CLEAR division between what is the top header part of the site, and what is the article space. But then ... within the articles flesh colored space, there's the global article browser tabs. I assume that these tabs should be article specific. In other words I expect the scope of everything on an article page to be relative to that page. Or at least that category.

I think users need to have an implicit sense of "where I am at" within your website. Ideally when I'm browsing articles, everything should be related to my article browsing task. Then clicking on an article should refine the scope; still browsing articles, but now a subset of articles, i.e the category that the article belongs to, its publisher, etc. "Other articles by this author". "other articles from this category"

You are fine with leaving the main stuff where it is, but just be clear on the scope then. Add headers to things.
Also the "about us" tab does not belong on that right column, imo.

Scope!

The layout does indeed look organized though. Good job on the design. It's more a matter of being functionally organized.

As for content, I'll browse around a bit and maybe add a new comment.

Best of luck!
>without a proper solution that doesn't involve the words "boycott" or "jailbreak"

Why not buy a different phone, perhaps one that does what you want?
Django here too...
I think most people start companies to gain freedom and independence. Money does not automatically make you extraordinary, millionaires are fairly ordinary.
Mistaking Invention for Innovation
I agree, but the thing is: some people's soul gender is different from their born body gender.
It is actually less usable than it was two weeks ago. Sometime last week (or the week before that) flash was enabled by default in chrome for mac though the flash support was highly unstable. I don't mind flash being unusable but since the plugin support is so premature it often crashes or starts utilizing 100% cpu