skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They try their best to make you feel like a real asshole for walking away, though, especially if they took you for a test drive and everything. I think a lot of people just don't have the "jerk DNA" to do that. They prey on people's basic politeness.

While, like the author, I can feel some sympathy for the individual salespeople, the industry as a whole is just awful and I can't wait to see it die. It's coasting on pure momentum now but the minute people can reliably buy a car elsewhere, like they would buy any other major item, sayonara dealers.

I just wish I could go to the Car Shop and buy a car the same way I go to a department store and buy a TV. I can look at all the models from all the different brands. They all have a sticker on them with the best price. I choose one, pay for it, and leave. That's all I want! The dealer system adds no value for me at all - in fact it makes the whole experience worse, and then rips you off in the bargain. I just can't stand them.
If you are willing to run an experiment, I can probably help you increase your conversion rate on your contact form. Email me if you are interested and if successful we can post the results here of the changes.
For Python there is also the excellent http://www.goldb.org/ystockquote.html
This is great news. If you can teach the great unwashed blogging masses the difference between "there", "their" and "they're" you'll be doing the English language a great service too! ;-)
I think a more fundamental reason is that RSSCloud solves the problem "I used to use RSS to read articles, but the 15 minute delay between the article being posted and me being able to skim it in my RSS reader was unacceptable" and that this is a problem real people do not have.
Rackspace Cloud: XSS to Root
Author again: #3 is the reason they didn't do this ages ago. Now that they comprise a quarter of all music being sold, there's simply no way for the labels to walk. Even if they all agreed to, one could stay and reap the profits. If they managed to split all at once they risk being caught as a cartel (but they never could pull it off).

Apple essentially owns the most valuable market they exist in. They can't walk.

Read the article.
Timetric on cleaning up data for news
Regarding name-checking of Popper vs. Kuhn:

Kuhn and Popper both make interesting observations about the development of science. However, Popper's observations are more directly applicable to the task of actually doing science. He gives a useful framework for developing and testing theories, where Kuhn's work has more to say about how theories become widely accepted. So Popper appeals to the pragmatism of most hackers.

Kuhn is also, sadly, very popular with crackpots. Almost any fringe scientist will eagerly explain to you that his ideas represent "a new paradigm", and that those who doubt him are simply trapped in old ways of thinking. So a desire to avoid guilt by association probably also plays into it.

That's my take on it anyway. (I know it's kind of a tangent, but it seemed like an interesting thing to think through).
Overall, I think the survey needs a bit more polish. Add another option each for Q4 ("less than monthly") and Q5 ("None"). Possibly have Q5 allow more than one answer. Perhaps rephrase Q7 to "How long do your branches typically last?" if that is really what you're asking.

I also agree with the others that the survey really could have fit on a single page.
Not quite. It's a problem they don't have any more. If RSSCloud had been supported from the start, I doubt Twitter would have been invented, because everyone would have just "microblogged" from their actual blogs in realtime.
Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch As Troops Blog
Legal Documents For Your Startup
Bypassing Sprint Activation on a Palm Pre
For most bank robbers, the "women" are the guys they share a cell with. I'll take the billionaire option over that.
I think the problem it really solves is the Twitter problem rather than the RSS reader one. That is, if RSSCloud works as advertised, implementing a Twitter-scale infrastructure becomes pretty simple.

The article raises important issues re scaling, though I'd expect Wordpress and Winer are aware of them. I guess it remains to see if they are (and if Twitter-like apps are something people actually want)
iTunes for digital mass distribution, social music apps for viral marketing: the time is nigh for self distribution through Apple to happen!
The proposal never made sense. Most people don't use desktop feed readers and even if they did this solution wouldn't be scalable (as Cadenhead mentioned). Google Reader knows when you update your feed because you already ping Google. In my experience they are grabbing the feed in a few seconds anyway--it's up to them to show this to users in real time if they want to but there is nothing stopping them.

It seems like Dave wants to continue using his out dated desktop software (the OPML Editor) to view feeds in a manner much better suited for a hosted product. That might be great for him, but I'd rather not change publishing on the internet so his decades old software can keep pace with Google Reader.
What McKinsey’s Study Means for Entrepreneurs, Executives, and Agencies
How To Create Deep Customer Loyalty
> They have already managed, apparently without waking the slumbering record industry, to sneak in and take over control of distribution

Can't the record labels just jack up prices for iTunes?
While acknowledging your quip for what it is, I would argue that monetizing a portfolio of patents that were legally acquired (either 1st or 3rd party) while capturing profit due to inefficiencies in the system is no different than what a typical hedge fund manager does so I don't see the problem. Inventors are able to bring liquidity to their otherwise illiquid patents and LPs get a return.
Turn customers into partners....The art of selling is allowing your customer to feel like you ARE NOT selling and instead partnering for the common cause of whatever it is that you are developing.....
Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans
Making things that are beautiful, fun, and other people enjoy. Currently I'm making a game and taking my time with the artwork, sounds etc to make it as enjoyable as possible.
News Dots: An interactive map of how every story in the news is related
After all these years I found the reason I flunked out of college.. the desks...
Neat. I'm not familiar enough with typeflow analysis to know how practical it is. Can it handle polymorphic functions, e.g., map? What about dependent functions (just kidding)? Is there a way to annotate functions so Pyntch will give a specific type?
I don't agree with the general thrust of this post, but first, some nitpicking:

"Because in the end, all a label really does is market, distribute, and schedule tours."

No actually. For starters, touring is generally handled by the artists and their managers. Up till now, it's been uncommon to have labels involved -- although this is changing as we see majors scrabble for more money.

The author is also forgetting the actual production of the music. A label generally fronts the money for a producer, engineer and studio time. Not to mention the mastering required for distribution.

This isn't to say labels are the only avenue for funding recording, but it is one important thing that they do and that the imaginary Apple label won't.

"Digital music has reached an audience where this makes sense. 25% of all music sold in the US (physical and digital) is sold through iTunes."

That's impressive, but 25% still means there are a lot of other retailers shifting music. I can't imagine artists -- especially independent ones -- limiting themselves to just that chunk of the market. The only way around that is if Apple starts distributing music through other retailers. Not likely in my opinion.

"They’ve been hiring H&R types and artist relation managers."

A few AR and HR hires does not translate into the kind of marketing needed to support thousands of individual artists. If they did start a label, Apple may forego this, but a few hires is not evidence enough.

We should not underestimate the importance of _individualised_ marketing for artists. I have a hard time seeing Apple doing this.

"Why Jay-Z? Well, Jay-Z isn’t really on a major label."

He does run a label though. I don't think he wants to cut himself out of the loop by helping Apple launch a label.

One of the major roles a label has is to editorialise. They hunt for and preen artists. They pay for recording, they tailor the marketing and distribute the music. How can Apple do this on a large scale? If they can't do it on a large scale, why would they bother?

Is it open to all artists or are they going to pick and choose? Pick and choose means limiting the scale of the operation. Making it open risks having Apple associated with music and ideas that conflict with their tightly controlled marketing. Retail is just retail, but being a label means "blessing" the content. I can't see Apple wanting to lose that control.

I really don't think the author understands how music gets produced and sold. I know it's popular to underplay the role of a label and simply conflate them with distribution, but in reality it's more complex. Some labels are arguably leeches and some work really hard to make their artists successful. Irregardless, they're not easily replaced by some monolithic Apple label.
No. One gold coin bought a good suit of men's clothing in 1500 and will buy a good suit of men's clothing today. That's all you can do. Everything else went to seed.
As a lefty, I hope that people don't read that website and think we're all melodramatic crybabies! Lots of things in life are a little bit harder when you're left handed, fortunately we were granted extra brains to help deal with it.

Three of the last four US presidents were left handed. Is that some kind of institutionalized discrimination against right-handed politicians?
This implies that you can, sitting at a table with a pint, come up with the key patentable ideas for the 40 hour batteries. The odds rather favor the people building batteries in earnest, don't they?
Amazon didn't just patent an idea. They patented an extremely effective embodiment of that idea. One-click wasn't a pint-glass-and-bar-napkin patent.
Yeah, I mean, just look at all the evil Bill Gates has wrought upon the earth since he left.
Hi, What is your email id? I couldn't find in your profile.
As I understand it --- as in, what I've managed to retain from multi-hour conversations with IP lawyers trying to sell me services --- that's not actually how it works.

(a) if your broad claims and best-known-mode are insufficient to instruct someone as to how to build a battery, your patent won't matter, and

(b) just because you patent a 40-hour-battery concept doesn't mean you've patented the concept of a 40-hour battery. Every aspect of battery design that you didn't document and claim in your patent is itself patentable. You can patent technology that you yourself cannot build because of other overlapping patents.
It's surprisingly hard to become a patent lawyer, isn't it? You need an engineering degree and a law degree and industry experience, right?
This guy's about four months too late, and despite what he infers all the known tethering workarounds have been patched in 3.1.
A quick test on the demo to make some text bold and italic revealed this in the source code:

<span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Test</span><br />

Inline styles, really? What happened to <strong> and <em> tags?
$6,900 per panel adds up to about $3 million per lane-mile.

Typical rural highway costs for new highway are $3 - $9 million per lane-mile, with urban highways costing $5 - $20 million per lane-mile. (per http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/documents/whatwedo/po...)

The estimated 7.6 kwh per day per panel mentioned in the article, if you assume it gets that every day, adds up to 3.344 mwh per lane-mile, which at average US retail electric rates, adds up to $120,000 per lane-mile per year. According to their website, these panels will supposedly be designed to last 21 years, vs. the 7 typical for asphalt roadways. That would bring the lifetime electricity production per lane-mile up to $2.5 million. (not accounting for inflation nor electric price changes over 21 years)

Frankly, I find their 21 year projected life absurd, but then again I live in a state with yearly freeze-thaw cycles shortening the life of roadways. Other than that, it seems like if they could meet their claims, it would be financially feasible to build roads using this stuff.
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The banks that paid the highest rates for CDs were the first to collapse. The more money you have, the harder it becomes to get a good return.

If you save right now, you barely get any interest and that you do get is taxed by the IRS and inflation.
The vitriol on my part was due to the Winerian aspect -- the man has a long history of fucking up everything he touches technically, and vindictively fucking over anyone less than sycophantic. Run away.

APP doesn't see much use in Wordpress because nobody uses desktop blogging clients anymore. However, it is widely implemented on both sides (even Microsoft!), something that will never be true for <cloud>.

'RSSCloud' is inelegant, idiotically-designed (he thinks traditional SOAP posted to a resourcey URL is REST!), doesn't help centralized aggregators scale, doesn't work with NATed clients, and worst of all it was specced/never-implemented/forgotten by Dave Winer 8 years ago. At least you were smart enough not to use rpc.rsscloud.org -- Winer can't be trusted to host anything for anyone (eg: weblogs.com).

Google, Bloglines, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. will never implement it. The only people <cloud> could possibly help would be the few running their own server-side aggregators. Implementing PubSubHubBub would actually help people -- doing this just feeds Winer's ego (and thus pumps up the drama).

Why the hell were you still serving duplicate RSS2 at all anyway? The only extant feedreaders that don't grok Atom were written by Winer (and he's the only user left!).
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Do we have a lack of unused space, which isn't crossed every day by tons of heavy cars? If we're going to build these panels, there's no need to build them in distant places that often get damaged, like highways - better put them in unused land near a city to minimize power transportation costs.
I have an extremely effective embodiment of brushing my teeth, but you don't see me running off to the patent office to keep other people from brushing my teeth that way.

Of course, if I could brush my teeth on the Internet, I can see how that might be different.
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While acknowledging your quip for what it is, I would argue that monetizing a portfolio of patents that were legally acquired (either 1st or 3rd party) while capturing profit due to inefficiencies in the system is no different than what a typical hedge fund manager does so I don't see the problem.

Ideas are not fungible. Consequently they are not supposed to be treated as currency, as commodities, or otherwise as subjects for speculation, except to the extent that doing so "promotes progress in the useful arts and sciences," according to the US Constitution.

When someone shows me how Myrhvold's efforts do that, I'll reconsider the argument.
The site's "mobile optimized" version awesomely prevents iPhones from reading it. Here's the cached version.

http://74.125.155.132/search?oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=cache%...
Man, I was sure I was going to have a shot at some of this money by helping you get it out of Nigeria.
>> ... making everything easy to change makes the entire system very complex ...

I have to agree with that, but then no architectural insight means having to reimplement at the most inconvenient time. I think making everything overly modular makes it too complex, but that is not the same as making change a=easy.
> Like every other nixy package, type sudo ./configure, sudo make, and sudo make install to get it cooking.

Arg. You don't need root/sudo to run './configure' or 'make.' You just need it for 'make install' so that you can install it to /usr/ or /usr/local. And you don't even need it for 'make install' if you are installing to a directory that you have rights to (e.g. PREFIX=~ or PREFIX=~/local). Copious usage of sudo seems to abound nowadays.

[Note: disregard this if you do something like wget/unpack all your sources files into someplace like /usr/src]
In the modern patent business, the "odds" favor the first party to encounter a particular problem in their field of art. If you're lucky enough to encounter a problem first, you can patent the first obvious solution(s) that come to mind, and effectively own the field later.

This is why nonobviousness was supposed to be a criterion for granting patents, and why we're all worse off now that the USPTO has effectively abandoned it.
It sounds like you're trying to argue that one-click was as obvious as brushing your teeth. Amazon was far from the first company to take payments over the net --- I remember buying an RSA shirt by keying the ABA and account numbers off a check. But Amazon appears to have been the first company to actually publish an embodiment of one-click shopping. Why's that?
RSSCloud or not -- I do happen to think that we need a push RSS solution -- what really bugs me is the fact that once again, we're inventing different standards to do the exact same thing. As if ATOM vs RSS wasn't enough, now we have RSSCloud + PubsubHubbub to worry about. PSHB already has Google behind it (all of Feedburner feeds support it), so I really fail to see what wordpress won by adopting RSSCloud.

Besides, while Dave is a brilliant guy, PSHB already has a lot more people working on it with open source hub and client implementations (heck, I wrote one for Ruby!).
If the "non-obvious" battery implementation is better, you can build and patent it no matter what me and raganwald come up with at the pub.
Sure, drop me an email. I'll put the word out in our newsletter.
The hash trick is clever. But what happens when you start with 4 versions, then find that one version is worse than the others? Do you have to start the test over? Is there some kind of rebucketing algorithm you use?
ah. thanks.

Yeah. My setup is very bare bones, and you do need a SysAdmin.

I am focusing on creating a flexible and inexpensive system where it is possible to do everything you want to do, before I'm going to spend time making a system that makes it easier to do specific things. For instance, I let you run any paravirtualized kernel you like, and you can change kernels without my help. (well, any kernel that works with pvgrub. I've not gotten OpenSolaris working with PVGRUB, though it seems to work on my systems with PyGRUB. )

Yeah, there are many customers who want an easy web-based control panel, and they are better off with linode or slicehost. There are many of us who prefer the command line, though. Scaling a support organization is very difficult, and it's much cheaper, easier, less stressful and more fun to support people who are willing to figure things out for themselves, so why not target those people, and pass on the savings? I'm ramen profitable now at 600 customers; if I double in size again, I'll be edging into the 'more money than I could hope to make from a salary job' range. So I don't need to target everyone. I'm happy in my niche.

I'm trying to get something together so that you can build images and share them, like you can for ec2. (only I'm trying to do it with kickstart-like systems, rather than with images, which I think mitigates most of the trust issues. Usually kickstart-like systems result in much 'cleaner' systems; systems that are easier to upgrade.)

Personally, I think the biggest weakness of prgmr.com right now is provisioning delay. I need to automate that (and really have no excuse for not doing so before now) as part of that, I need to setup a system where users can do automated 'network installs' of many systems.

As for support, yea most of my competitors have better staff hours and better response times than I do. But then, I think I can say that I'm a little bit more experienced than most front-line tech support people. This is the usual small company/large company tradeoff. (and yes, I sleep about 30 minutes from the data center, but
hey, you have a serial console, so I expect you to be able to figure most things out yourself.)
The proposal has the potential to support pooling of multiple feeds. For example, you can get the updates of thousands of feeds in one request. That saves a lot of bandwidth and processing time. Does that make sense?
I wonder if there's a market for a usb drive that contains webkit, wikipedia, and the ability to transparently download deltas when connected. 4GB USB is <$10, sell for $20, viola!
Ask HN: SEO gems?
i'm collecting a list of the most ingenious sites that are fueled entirely by search. my personal favorites are http://www.retailmenot.com and http://www.whocallsme.com . retailmenot definitely makes more money but whocallsme is hilarious and very useful.
What does a cookbook do for people who don't cook? Perl is a programming language. CPAN is a bunch of Perl libraries. Perl and CPAN don't do anything for non-developers.

[Edit: I see now that the author is saying that there are no significant applications for end-users written in Perl, which is certainly true. I attribute that in part to the difficulty of distributing a reasonably small installer package for a GUI application written in Perl.]
RSSCloud is useless, for increasingly ridiculous reasons:

10e2 It's idiotically-designed
(he thinks traditional SOAP posted to a resourcey URL is REST!)
10e4 It doesn't help centralized aggregators scale at all
10e8 It doesn't work with NATed clients
10e16 It was specced/never-implemented/forgotten by Dave Winer 8 years ago
I didn't explain myself well enough. It's assumed that &th audiences of HN and Techcrunch skew very much towards software startups. Given that, it is wrong to assume this survey bears much weight towards the audience of these sites. Techrunch should have realized this and flagged it before publishing the article.
Not saying I agree with the 'misjudged' comment, but it seems baseless to think that raffi couldn't have held out for more, later.
I do it low tech - by spreadsheet.
Right, there was a HN survey a few days ago using google docs--it had palm trees in the background and everything!
The client would still have to be publicly routeable!
I was introduced to Sumo at RubyHoedown 2009, It looked like a very simple way to get redis or mongodb rolling quickly.