skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This gets to the root of the issue. Corporations have the rights of people but none of the responsibilities and few and weaker penalties for doing wrong.

They "buy" politicians and their money and power provide huge voices with which to drown out views they do not like.

Can't die, don't go to jail, hard to regulate, suing them just gets rid of some of the employees/executives the corp goes back to doing whatever it can get away with. Bankruptcy is rarely fatal
Street Legal Jet Powered Beetle (2006)
My thoughts exactly. Another possibility is that this was some decision that someone made at Apple without Steve Jobs' 'permission' or 'guidance' while he was on leave and this new response is Steve trying to reverse what he thinks is a bad decision without making look like the company: (1) 100% relies on him for its success (i.e. without him they would fall apart) and/or (2) doesn't know what the hell it's doing.
When the front page of www.perl.org says "Latest Version: 5.10.1," you can't just blame other people for being confused about whether Perl 6 is released or usable.

Look at http://perl.org/ and then compare it to http://python.org/ or http://ruby-lang.org/ (two other languages that are going through big backward-incompatible platform transitions). Consider how someone who isn't following the development process is supposed to find out about and download Perl 6 (versus Python 3 or Ruby 1.9).
I'm guessing AT&T's loss would be in allowing a toehold on number portability. Your current choice is: work hard to get sucky_cell_provider_X move your number to sucky_cell_provider_Y. The process isn't transparent to most consumers. Google comes in as proving a free value add service that also aids the process of number portability. Once this happens to a large enough user base, there should be losses and price pressure to the provider as there becomes more options for the consumer. This route is not what AT&T or any provider wants.
Harness the Power of Freemium
I don't think that's related to the Google Voice issue. In fact, if anything I'd think it runs contrary to that investigation. The FCC investigates shared board members to prevent companies from unfairly collaborating. In this case it's a case of the two companies in question being opposed to each other. So it's a completely different issue.
I read a little while ago that pink used to be for boys, and blue for girls — the idea being that pink was more fiery, with pastel blue being calmer and more feminine.

This changed sometime in the early 20th century.

The source was some parenting/manners/etiquette book from 190x.
Or you can find out whom you are gonna join when you get there :p
I talk like that because one of my first assignment in College when learning C was exactly a program to calculate change. And the inherent floating point erro causes the said 0.01 difference. I was fresh into C, third, maybe fourth class. You can be sure that no one had the least idea why that happened. Obviously, we all took the easy way out, used integers multiplied by 100 to work around it, but you couldn't expect me to figure out by myself WHY that was happening. This error, and the explanation of why it happened was the introduction to floating point class that we had after we saw it happen. It is just one of those things that you have to see working to understand (like recursion and pointers).

I am always impressed to see how experienced people take a lot of knowledge for granted from others. It is not like you have never 'left shit behind' in your career. I would even daresay that if you pick the code you made six months ago, you will see that it could be improved in a lot of ways. Not because you wanted but because you didn't know better, mostly. This is pratically an axiom in the life of a coder.

Please don't use "experience" as an excuse to diss the hardships of others. We were all there one day.
I think craigslist would offer a better experience if it had user ratings, but that would definitely cut down usage, because anonymity is a big draw.
http://glunote.com

It was fun to build and gave me a good look at Twitter oAuth and the APIs but I doubt it'll take it any further than it is already.
I do use it on a fairly regular basis, as I'm kind of forgetful, and it does work pretty well so who knows.
Why those annoying menus are here to stay
Are you people freakishly proportioned? Affordable well cut brands abound. I think you're really just justifying your foppish clothing budgets.
It's nice to see a company with that kind of valuation and user base not just blowing cash on Super Bowl ads (I'm looking at you, Pets.com).
Yes, I know this isn't Slashdot, where it is allowed to occasionally to make a pun or poke fun at something. If you knew me you would not react so strongly, but of course, it is unlikely that you would know me.

But I think you mistake my comment as meant to ride in on my high horse and look down on all the "waste". I actually think there is tremendous potential in the breadth and the reach of the new computing platforms which offers nearly "unlimited" server capacity and access out in the periphery using anything from mobile phones to your average computer. We have barely started to scratch on the surface on the fun and the utility (if I dare say so) which this will offer us.

But now I will go and toss and turn in my bed, worrying about all that waste! ;)
Why? In my experience, OO Excel has similar capabilities, although OO probably trails in the presentation features to powerpoint.
Re: Fisheye Editor - have you seen Dasher? A Bayesian Fisheye Input method. :-)
> AT&T already allows Google Voice on other phones.

I'm not too 'up' on the state of cellphones on AT&Ts network, but how many of these cellphones even give AT&T the ability to ban a specific app?

How many of these phones allow their owners to install apps from a 3rd party (i.e. an 'app store' is not the only source of software)? I'm not saying that AT&T is at fault here, but the argument that AT&T has other phones that they 'allow' to use Google Voice on, is a bit far from the truth (i.e. iPhone is one of the only phones that AT&T would have the ability to 'ban' an app on).

> They just can't imagine that their poor little underdog Apple would limit competition on their device.

That's not necessarily the case. There are a lot of people that are part of this 'discussion' (I'm not talking just the discussion on Hacker News) who hate both Apple and AT&T. Some people want to see this as proof that both companies are evil. Please don't get bend out of shape over the Apple apologists. Though they are loud, they are a minority.
P.S. I just realized another thing: Intuit might have got the shit kicked out of it by Mint (to borrow a phrase from the 37signals post), but it's safe to assume that most people at Intuit who competed directly against Mint still think they were right and Mint was wrong. About everything. Or at least 90% of everything. Mint got lucky, got better press because of its upstart cool factor, whatever. And the Intuit guys are determined to prove they were right by forcing Mint to do things the "right" way.
"The U.S. doesn't have an official language."

Not an official one, sure, but we can all agree it's an important language. Bordering essential.

As for the courtesy part, I always try to become minimally functional in the language and customs of the country I happen to be.
Even when a startup seems to be doing very well, and is able to attract new rounds on favorable valuations, the insiders may be able to discern weaknesses such as weak or quarrelling founders, VCs with defocusing aspirations, or strategies with limited term potential (e.g., reliance on a third party such as Yodlee for critical technology). This means that chances of continuing success are lower than appears to outsiders, and the insiders are wise to sell at the temporarily favorable valuations. The VCs can be easily convinced to agree merely by frank discussion of the weaknesses, but both the founders and the VCs are motivated to claim that the sale was best for everyone, and to have the initial transition or work-out go smoothly. Once the money is in the bank and any hold-backs are settled and released, there is time to drift away from the acquirer.
Google Earth + Augmented Reality = Incredible
This is what any industry doesn't want. With Google providing a 'front-end' to your telephone service the actual providers like AT&T become a commodity. No industry wants their product to become a commodity.
After I learned Java (huge upgrade from QBasic btw) when I was a sophomore in high school in 2003, I built an online storefront application. Cute maybe? But, after infinite feature creep (not that I knew what that was at the time), I ended up trying to build what was effectively Viaweb (not that I knew what that was at the time).

Predictably, this was a disaster.

In retrospect, I do not recommend Viaweb as an introductory Hello World web app. (I also do not recommend Java web programming in general.)
Silicon Valley does have some of the most beautiful, innovative office parks in the world. They're huge and isolated, however. Maybe the combination of strict zoning and ubiquitous automobiles aggregates retail into malls and strip malls, commercial into office parks, industrial into warehouse districts, etc.? Regardless, it's produced a grand, metropolitan brutalism of inhuman scale, navigable only by automobile, with the humane portions grandfathered-in between the cracks and targeted for extinction by city-planners, bureaucrats, and real estate developers.
I think a hybrid text input with a menu and autocomplete is the best option in most situations, its something that really needs to be provided by browsers/html, filtering happens incredibly easily, you can still force the user to pick precise options, but you dont have to.
Skype-Joost Licensing Drama Déjà Vu for Friis & Zennström
Huh. It sounds like you're doing a lot of interesting stats work (especially looking at the analysis stuff a little more), I'd be rather interested in hearing a little more about what is going on behind on the server side of things.

As far as working on complexity, and explanation of what probabilistic predictions are would probably help a lot of people. It wouldn't surprise me if you get a lot of unhappy people come Spring who said "BUT! You said I would get in, and I didn't!" While it would be nice to think that anyone looking at going to college is going to have a basic understanding of probability, you can't just assume that. I would also highlight the "Top Action Items" a little more, you have to dig for it a little bit. Especially for Juniors (right now) or Sophomores (come spring), they have plenty of time to bring up grades and/or retake the SAT/ACT several times to bring things up. An aggregate "Adding X to your SAT score raises your chances of admission by Y%" on the college matches page would be good. It doesn't help current seniors, but it will help those planning ahead a little bit.

Oh, and you're right. It brought my score up roughly 200 points in all the areas, to more around where I would expect it to be.
The pair of jeans I'm wearing right now cost me $70. $45 on sale and $25 for the alteration. It fits perfectly as a result, and certainly a lot better than its store bought state - which was acceptable but not good.

I don't think this qualifies as "foppish" clothing budget. I don't think I've ever even bought a shirt over $100 - like I said, I'm not fashionista. I'd rather pay to get mid-end clothing right as opposed to go for the luxuriantly expensive stuff.

Also, "well cut" is a very large gradient. Yes, you can buy a vest from a store that fits decently without any alterations whatsoever - but that's also a long way from fitting you like a glove. The point I was communicating is: if you know and have a regular tailor, you can get the absolute perfect fit from factory wares without much extra expense.

The extra bit of fit has a lot of profound effects that are well worth the minimal amount of money you're spending on it. The clothes become yours. They're not a "size 10" or whatever, they're fit for you. All the minor bits that aren't quite right are made right, and even untrained eyes can tell the difference. Given how little it costs I really don't see a reason not to do it.
Intel, T-Systems Create Lab to Build Data Center of the Future
This story is not about "the man behind Tetris" and I am dubious of several of the claims made.

"Henk didn't invent Tetris, but he's the entrepreneur who went into the Soviet Union to win the rights to the game, and he's the man who made it a world-wide phenomenon"

The three statements above are true, dubious and false in that order.
"The Nest" tv - Bing
meh. ls -l works just fine ;)
I've been contemplating clicktale all week. Had to click on that headline...wish the article elaborated on some of the ways they used the heatmaps, user movies, etc to influence their design decisions.

Anyone else have experience with Clicktale or CrazyEgg? Do you find it useful for improving your visitor conversion rates?
That's a good question. OK, I certainly don't think that corporations should have any additional rights beyond those of partnerships, clubs etc. If that's the law, then it needs to be changed.

But now I'm confused as to what the actual law is. Let me put this all together... corporations have the right to free speech, and somehow this extends to the right to make political donations. On the other hand, individuals have the right to free speech, yet individuals are severely restricted in the amount and kind of political donations they can make thanks to McCain-Feingold. If the right to make political donations is considered part of the right to free speech then how can McCain-Feingold be constitutional at all?
A domain-specific language for describing music at a higher level of abstraction.

http://svn.wonderwarp.com/tuplet/

Decided to work on something profitable instead.
Actually, it's not really Firefox that has problems. It's mostly just that random crap stops working with Flash. Sound, in particular, just stops working after a day or two.

I actually had a lot more problems with the nspluginwrapper and 32-bit Flash in a 64 bit Firefox (black box after one or two uses of Flash) than I do with the 64-bit Flash build.

It's, admittedly, gotten a lot better over the years, and the 64-bit troubles really only lasted for about 1.5 years (between the time when I moved to 64 bit OS and Adobe released a mostly working 64 bit Flash build; I used a 32 bit Firefox for most of that time). But, it's still pretty common for Flash to cause issues. Going to full screen mode would instantly kill Firefox until just a few weeks ago...and even now, there's no real point to going full screen since it'll be choppy and sluggish, anyway. (And it can't just be the scheduler or the video drivers, since VLC and other media players can do high def full screen without issue.)
She's a lot more mad about it than I am.
Aaron is now the lead on the Quicken Online product at Intuit. He'll have to work there for 2 years (or possibly 3 or 4) in fully vest in this exit and unlock his golden handcuffs. So, yes, he has FU money on paper. But, he's got another couple years of working for "the man" first.
wait a second - the Digital Millennium _Copyright_ Act is enforceable for issues with the US Patent and Trademark office?

All the same, your story is simultaneously cool and a shame. Good luck getting it back online!
- a rating system for ex husbands and ex wives (exs4all)

- a search engine (noseo)

- an operating system called younite (unix + dynamite ;) )

I'm not proud of any of these but they were fun to build at the time, even if the projects went nowhere I learned a lot from them. The search engine was done using 'leo', a literate programming editor. That alone was worth the experience.
Where's the extra money? You say they're good, so they must get good rates from their clients. But if they're paying less than market, why is that? Where's the extra money going? Are they not charging enough? Do they have a founder that's raking it in? Are they just dedicating a lot of time to stuff that doesn't necessarily generate income?
Plate Clouds / Alien spacecraft hidden in plain sight?
You and idm both make good arguments, they don't seem exactly the same. Both are reasonable. I'll throw in a third. Although "Being arbitrary and protective about what products you allow people to build onto your own products is not inherently a restraint of trade", perhaps some forms of it should be. Do we have to wait for a form of monopoly control that fits the DoJ's intervention before we fix things that may obviously be broken? DMCA protections aside, maybe its time our gov does take a stand on companies precluding us from doing what we want with something after we purchase it.

Your set-top box perhaps only should be protected if modifying it could cause serious harm to the core service provided, a service that is supposed to be neutral in what it carries. That narrow protection (if it even applies to your set-top box) should most certainly not apply to value-added user apps on a pocket computer.

If a role of government is to ensure economic growth, is it wise to use Apply as the foothold case to create rules to disallow this level of protectionism? Would the PC market have created the level of economic growth it did if IBM had controlled what software could be installed? Is it acceptable in terms of economic potential that simply because companies have the means to control such distribution now that they be allowed to?
[Postman's] Diary
Out of curiosity: What places have you been going now that you're looking for clothes? I'm where you were last year, and am a bit clueless as to where to purchase things. (Hopefully this isn't too much of a conversational tangent.)
They say it's small, but if this thing was coming after you, you could kiss your ass goodbye.
> how many of these cellphones even give AT&T the ability to ban a specific app?

If AT&T wanted to block Google Voice, they could easily do it from the network level.

> iPhone is one of the only phones that AT&T would have the ability to 'ban' an app on

The assumption here is that AT&T some measure of control but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. Wasn't the entire deal with AT&T that Apple maintains all the control? That's why there isn't a T-mobile iPhone instead. We know of the contract stipulation from AT&T that requires Apple prevent high-traffic applications and VoIP but that seems to be it. Apple seems to more than willing to take all the responsibility -- why should anyone assume differently?
I did the numbers a few months ago just out of curiosity.

If you're buying TIPS (which returned 2% above CPI) and want 50 years of stipend out of your capital, you can get a 3.6% return above inflation.

As in, $1m should get you $36k/year for the next 50 years, leaving you with nothing at that point.
KeepF---ingThatChicken.Com Domain Acquired
Just to be clear to the readers, putting the token in the session has the same vulnerability. If you're going to use a token, put it in the form.
I've said this before, but I like to help the user fill out the form. Autocomplete is definitely the way to go. Also, if I put in a zip code, you can fill in the country, state, and give me suggestions for the city.
The price isn't announced yet, so it's dumb to make pronouncements based on a rumoured price point. I've also heard rumours of prices as low as $30K, at which point it becomes pretty compelling.

Even if it is $45K I'm not going to deride everyone who wants to spend that kind of money on a fancy high-tech vehicle that under most driving conditions burns hardly any fuel while still being versatile enough to take anywhere as an idiot. Hell, you can spend twice that on a far less versatile Tesla Roadster and still not be an idiot.
I'm not going to say your argument is crazy, but I see the other side of it, which is that companies should be free to build product offerings they way they want to build product offerings.

So in that respect, I have zero problem with Apple locking down the iPhone. It's their show, they should be able to put it on the way they want it to.

Now, AT&T's business practices in preventing arbitrary handset manufacturers from bringing products to market is a problem, especially because they don't compete with any vendor that welcomes free handset innovation. AT&T and its mobile network competitors are colluding to restrain competition.

But I don't buy that we should be making Apple the proxy for that problem just because they managed to break a small crack in that barrier.
What I meant is that being cashflow positive means the new generation of web companies has a successful example to look to.
An 'expensive proxy fight' is still cheaper than the campaigns required to reliably influence an elected government.

What's more, shareholders have many other options for influence. They can buy additional shares directly. They can 'exit' -- move their money elsewhere, empowering an alternate organization that does represent them.

In the comparison between shareholders and voters, it's not clear to me that it's shareholders who have less influence.
Improve to what? Craigslist is ranked 29th in the world. I think the real problem is that we don't know what "improve" really means. Apparently, Craigslist has already improved to be better than all but 28 other websites in the world (and a substantial portion of those are just various Google sites). Why do we think we could do better?
I still prefer the engineer who lights a charcoal grill in 30 seconds with a piece of flaming paper and 4 quarts of liquid oxygen.

http://gizmodo.com/5360234/lighting-a-grill-with-liquid-oxyg...
exactly. Commoditization happens and we should remove some barriers that keep it from happening. I beleive that things becoming commodity and becoming subsumed into our social/economic fabric are critical to evolution.
Wooooosh
...
sound over the head of a software guy reading this.
Design inspiration?
Hi, I was wondering, where do you go for design inspiration?

I usually go here: http://www.cssglance.com/
and http://www.inspirationking.com/
A Big Boom in the Universe of Electronic Books
Can I get a success story for ClickTale or CrazyEgg from someone who doesn't have a straight-up web app? I see how valuable this could be if converting leads to paying customers just meant moving them to a signup form, but my conversion process usually involves a phone call at some point.

I have a blog and a product site, and I register people for downloadable evals. This stuff seems like overkill. Am I wrong?
It's not really arbitrary. It breaks down like this:

1) eBay bought Skype, but agreed to license the core technology the drives Skype. This was a bone-headed move on their part. It's like buying a house, but agreeing to not own the land that it's built on, instead leasing/renting that land from the current owner

2) The founders of Skype decided that they wanted to buy back Skype from eBay, but in response eBay announces that they want to spin off Skype into its own separate company with an IPO.

3) The Skype founders pull the licensing deal for the core of Skype from eBay, then sue them for using Skype tech without a license.

4) eBay decides to sell Skype. No one wants to touch the deal because a ownership of a house is worthless without ownership of the land it's sitting on.

5) The former CEO of Joost has insider knowledge of how the core tech of Skype works because it was also used in Joost. Using the same analogy he basically knows an easy and cheap way to move the house off the land it's currently on so that no one needs to keep paying rent to the land's current owner in order to use the house. In this case, he knows how easy it is/will be to transition Skype to be web-based and get around its current core technology. He uses this knowledge to rally a bunch of investors into making an aggressive bid for Skype.

6) Skype founders sue former CEO of Joost for using insider knowledge that he obtained while he was with the company. (i.e. other investors were at a disadvantage without the same knowledge)
Virtualization's Golden Spike