skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is Apple too powerful?
Don't worry about there being similar concepts. You never know if something like this will pursued beyond a Labs project. The main thing to realize is that if you consistently work on your idea, it does not matter if someone else has a similar product. Being a smaller, more agile developer, you can continue to innovate much faster.

This applies to your ideas being stolen too. Sure, anybody can copy what you have made. But remember, nobody can copy what you haven't even thought of yet. So just keep thinking of cool new things your users can benefit from and make them so you stay ahead of the curve.
Startups Launch, Seeking Riches at TechCrunch50
I second that question. I browsed through some of the articles but fail to see the appeal. Technically it's a nice little trick but usability-wise I can't see myself using this.
Yeah, Dan hasn't touched it much last I saw. I was interested early on as I had spent a bit of time in Django (not a ton) but was more interested in Clojure web dev. But due to it's lack of movement I haven't bothered.

I may take a look at this one but I dunno, I don't have the ties to Rails to give that appeal.
Regarding Refmob:

I like the idea as a solid business to business model.
But couldn't this better be accomplished as a white label application? The focus on twitter and facebook seems like a mistake to me. Not everyones' business has customers on fb and twitter. Also as Tony pointed out, seems unnatural and quite spam-tastic. Combine that with me having to go to refmobs not very attractive (imo) participation site and I just don't see myself allowing my company to be represented like that.

White label, fully brandable, in-site or standalone dead-simple referral management system.

Track and manage referrers, refer-ees, campaigns and analytics.

Now you've got my attention.
He's definitely 'allowed' to say that, but from an investor standpoint, he's not showing very much confidence in his product and the future of his company when he says things like that.
I thought the same thing at the beginning of the v2 release, but the features that were important to me came back quickly. There's something pretty nice about seeing your accounts aggregated in one place and then being able to tag them. Mint did a great job, but I always preferred to have my financial data stored with people I trust, even if sometimes the software was rough around the edges (hey, it's a startup!).
That's just creepy.
John Rawls attempts to create an ethical system based on a uiversal sense of fairness. The problem is that such a system is inherently arbitrary. Who decides what's fair? Treating everyone equally isn't necessarily fair: Forcing everyone to live in the same housing regardless of health issues certainly isn't fair but neither is creating a system that tries to balance individual needs into a sort of universal scale a such a thing doesn't exist.

Furthermore it misses the point that ethics is ultimately an individual issue as it's individuals who make ethical decisions. The moment that you have a bunch of people in clouds planning what the world should be like you've missed the whole point, which is 'what is justice?' which is an entirely different question, but 'How should I behave?' That is, Ethics is not so much the search for a universal code of action, but the search for a principles in human behavior. With this realize that the search is not for a better means of wealth distribution but for the best set of virtues that a man can embody.

Thus the question is not whether Larry Ellison should buy another Yacht or immitate Mother Theresa, but whether he should practice is fortitude or his charity, his temperance or his, decisiveness.

Of course such things as universal codes of ethics come into play here, but they are tangential to the key issues.
As long as you're shipping executable code and not an interpreter or compiler, you should be OK.
It's much much faster than loading and rendering the html, images, and ads on the actual sites.

I can zoom through articles pressing the left/right arrows with no perceptible latency.
By Liskov substitution principle, or with the set view of types, subclasses are always specializations / subsets, unless you're introducing some kind of home-baked type system built on top of the existing type system.

I would classify the parts of OO differently. I think your second and fourth activities are the same, but one models abstract concepts, and the other models concepts of concrete things. I wouldn't bring in code reuse at this level; every practical programming paradigm tries to include code reuse. It's the mechanism that's a distinguishing feature, and the mechanism OO uses is a combination of subtype polymorphism and dynamic dispatch. It's a baked-in version of the function table / union|variant record idiom from procedural programming, and it has a transposed expression in sum types and pattern matching in functional programming: OO limits the addition of new (virtual) methods (on the base) but accepts the creation of new types (even at runtime), while FP limits the creation of new types (in most implementations I've seen) but accepts the addition of new methods (which costs some in discoverability in modern IDEs, and has namespace implications).
once you think you have ethics figured out for sure, you're wrong.

Well then, it seams like we should stop trying. :)
I'd love to learn more about this. Is your company more likely to be acquired by Google if it uses the app engine?

Edit: what's with the downmodding without explanation? Is this reddit now?
I don't know if programming (as opposed to computer science, in the research sense) will ever attain "science" status because we don't stay in one place long enough to be settled. If we were all still writing terminal apps on 80x25 green screens, the science would be pretty well settled on how to do that by now, with recipes for every occurrence that any normal programmer would ever hit readily available, and easy access to people who could do the somewhat harder cases.

"What about the really hard cases?" you might ask, and the entire point of my hypothetical is that if we can't do it in 80x25, we don't do it.... and the contrast to the real world where we kept going is exactly my point. So, when will programming finally stabilize enough to become a science? I don't know, but I don't see it even in the long term (30+ years).
At first I thought the point in the Q&A where the Yext front man said "Yeah, I just told you" to PG reflected poor manners.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2163590 - 13:15

Then I went back and I realized that PG was repeatedly probing to figure out which part of this guy's business was most important to him, and he wasn't going for it.

Smart guy.
I don't know why, since I'm not affiliated with Mint in any way.... But this makes me sad :(

Mint.com is such a ..... perfect product for my needs and I have so many bad memories of fighting Quicken in the past that this is such a let-down to me.
Creative Code Overlays 2D Portraits on a 3D Animation
What kind would be useful?
nothing you commit to employees regarding your equity matters

It matters, but as an upper bound rather than a lower bound.

I am aware of one case where the first non-founder employee got options representing less than 0.01% of the company. In other words, a $100 mil exit would be worth less than $10,000 to him. He didn't realize this until years later. To avoid situations like this, as a prospective employee, you should always get the valuation information up front.
This is not impressive at all. From the way Marissa Mayer introduced this at TC50, you'd expect much more.
The less of our brain we must use for data storage, the more we can utilize it for problem solving and creative thinking algorithms. What happens when you can instantly know what everyone else know? What will the hive mind be like?

However, it seems that at some point, if you didn't have enough factual knowledge stored in your head, that you could not fully utilize your creative capacity. Creative thoughts, in my opinion, seem to emerge from the application of one fact or memory or learned principle to another, in order to create new ideas. Perhaps there is an optimal balance between recallable data and creativity.
More discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821204
Success Begins in the Mind
Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence By 2020?
I wonder how well "How's it going Zeus?" would work.
They probably use WebKit to render the HTML to a buffer and then compress it, save to disk.

If you were asking more generally, see this discussion[1] on the WebKit mailing list, and these Qt links[2, 3] that I found in that thread.

[1] http://www.nabble.com/Webkit-capture-web-page-content-API-td...

[2] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/11/03/thumbnail-preview...

[3] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/01/15/capturing-web-pag...
Notice ustream is a paying sponsor of TC50. No coincidence there.
I was hoping this would show something like this:

http://www.heritage.org/research/nationalsecurity/cda06-02.c...
Sure most people don't read these things, but you agree to them when you sign up... http://www.okcupid.com/privacy#obtained
I'm in Adelaide, South Australia UTC+09:30 (although currently UTC+10:30 DST). I voted for UTC+10.
There's some compelling points raised here. The iTunes connection is a bit on the edge of crossing over to being used inappropriately I think.
For some definition of human intelligence, yes. For some, no. Same answer as every other year since the invention of the computer. This is not an interesting question (or article) without providing some reason for why your particular definition of human intelligence (the article doesn't give any definition at all) is the right one to consider.
Ellipses have major and minor radii; in circles, both are the same length.

This is exactly the issue. According to specialization by constraint when an ellipse has equal radii then it is both an ellipse and a circle, therefore a circle isa ellipse, therefore a circle is a subtype of ellipse.

Hence a square isa rectangle. The specialization by constraint argument is that any type system that requires a rectangle to be a subtype of square or both to be subtypes of polygon is inherently broken.

LSP says that if a circle is a subtype of ellipse then it can be used in place of an ellipse. But it can't, so a circle can't be a subtype of ellipse. LSP and specialization by constraint are not compatible.
Thanks. That's the most obvious truism I ever heard.
> Think about that for a minute. "There's a big new market, and we want in." Not, "we're creating something new" or "we can vastly improve this category." Just, "we want a cut."

You know, there were MP3 players before the iPod. Apple improved on the design and usability and coupled their MP3 player with an online store that had buy-in from the music industry, but they were still essentially angling for a cut on an existing market.
LG GW620 with Android
LG GW620 with Android is official and so LG officially enters the market for smartphone operating system with Google to meet the needs of users
Putting aside the live debugger issue, most UNIXes support generating a full kernel core dump that can be used post-facto to debug the panic using the standard debugging tools -- you get full access to the memory contents, machine state, a backtrace, etc.

It's very, very useful when you have a difficult to reproduce problem that only occurs on a small subset of your machines while in production.

Up until relatively recently, Linux had no support for this, and I believe still has no official support. RedHat EL ships a modified system with crash dump support, and other hacked in implementations exist.

When we had Linux machines regularly crashing once every couple weeks in ~2003, we couldn't even get a usable oops out of them -- we just gave up and rebooted them regularly. When we saw the same thing occur on a new FreeBSD release a few years later, we enabled crash dumps and found and fixed the issue immediately.

Linus is intelligent, but his oft-unchecked arrogance begets some particularly unfortunate foolishness.
Hurting cows - I just wanted to point out that if you love having cows around, you might be in for a surprise.

I suppose that might be a useful thing to point out if there were anyone on the planet who became a vegetarian to maximize the cow population, regardless of the consequences.

Who are you arguing against?
Human intelligence can't exist outside of humans. We have a unique brain structure, allowing us to do what we do. But if we put our brain in a robot, it wouldn't work unless you built the robot in such a way that it believes it is human. Only then can you have an artificial human intelligence. The robot needs to be able to connect with humans on a meaningful level. This would be difficult if everyone just stared at the funny looking robot trying to act human.

I think rather than creating Skynet, we're going to start upgrading our own hardware; adding robots to ourselves until there is no human left. I think with this practice, the new AI would be compassionate towards humans.

Then again I also think about how teenagers hate their parents. Would a super-intelligent being come to loathe their parents (us)? I like to think that a super intelligence would understand that violence doesn't solve anything. But then again, that's why we have Sci-fi -- as a kind of list of things to make sure they don't happen.

Humans are no longer king of the hill. Evolve or perish.
The intellectual arrogance in this post is nauseating. It is extremely rare that a 22 year-old is qualified to speak so authoritatively on such a deep topic as ethics, and this post demonstrates that Aaron Swartz is not one of them.

1) I've never seen a more clear example of Nietzsche's "inversion of values." I'm not a libertarian, but this is straight out of Ayn Rand - the good, the strong, the responsible, owe a moral debt to the weakest, poorest, least able people in the world -- regardless of how they came to find themselves in such a parlous state.

2) Like any totalitarian ideology, it complete ignores the reality of human nature. Instead, it attempts to conform reality to simple, preconceived theories and assumptions. In this case, the assumption is that all humans are equal autonomous individuals, and the theory is that disparate individual or national outcomes are caused by the strong oppressing the weak. It ignores that a community's, society's, or nation's character is an expression of the collective nature of the people who compose it. It ignores the interlocking responsibilities - both wanted and unwanted, asked and unasked - that enable society to work.

3) His entire system of "ethics" is based upon making oneself feel superior to others. It completely ignores the problem of incentives, as Tichy mentioned - what happens when you apply Kant's Categorical Imperative to these prescriptions? There is literally no incentive to do anything productive, because a more-moral person is probably going to unilaterally decide that you, as a filthy kulak, are not morally worthy of possessing the fruits of your labor.

Truly a repugnant philosophy.
No, simply that if you approach ethics from the standpoint of trying to find the "ultimate truth," you are doing it wrong. If you approach it from the view that ethical dilemmas don't have one right answer and that human society is inherently "fuzzy," real progress can be made.
It's not an upper bound either. One company granted me significantly more upside when it exited than I "officially" had. Depending on the dynamics of an acquisition, incentive packages may completely rewrite the upper bound too.
Mirrored from Google's cache: http://jottit.com/qykre/
403 Forbidden

Damn. Did I miss it?
I want to create an open source hacker's lab. A place funded on the open-source philosophy (socialism, if you will). If the lab needs some equipment or parts, then someone buys a bunch and lets others use it, or people split the cost or something. Ideally, it would have a chemistry set and a bunch of sensors and electronics. Maybe a CNC machine or particle accelerator =) ... essentially, a mad scientist's lab.

Anyway, let it evolve into a place to do scientific experiments while being able to access the knowledge to understand the experiments. Ultimately, it would become a community powered educational system, able to rival universities in educational quality.

And if it turns out that no one in the area thinks an open-source building is a good idea, then it will rot on sourceforge like so many other projects.
I am a big fan of Mono but you can also use C++ on the iPhone when compiling to g++ with one Obj-C wrapper. That is currently the most productive because of all the existing code that can be ported. Obj-C you can only use on the iPhone and Cocoa really which is a platform lock. With Mono the sky is the limit but it is still not directly native like C++. For mobile and especially mobile games, native is winning.
Isn't Google "Flip" enough? Why would they add "Fast" to the name?
Why Facebook will never be Twitter
I started with a single hunchentoot instance running on SBCL on Win32 and I still hack on it about 16 hours a day. I deploy on a 30-instance hunchentoot farm with 4 lighttpds sittin on front of them.

Hunchentoot could either be a single-instance, one thread per request simpleton, or, given its flexible and well thoughtout architecture, an httpd development framework. The requests per second could also vary; the stock configuration is about 80r/s, but I am squeezing well over 2kr/s out of it. I have been tweaking it for the last 7 months or so and it just keeps getting better.
Yikes! If your UI is what's surprising people, then I would generally consider that a bad thing. By their definition, a surprising UI is bad. (Obviously there are exceptions but they're very very rare.)
Leave me alone Can’t you see I’m learning your language?
No?

Seriously, they own the music market because they have the best product around and still do after giving the competition years to catch up.

Apple does not currently own the video market, and I honestly don't expect them to any time soon.

I think that, if anything, it'll encourage innovation because suddenly there's a clear target: "It has to be better than iPod. And not just a little better, way better." Apple's not unbeatable.
Swine flu: Government blames IT pros
They get their information from Yodlee.
No. Real AI is like fusion power. It will arrive in 40 years, for any definition of now. We are barely scratching the surface of our knowledge of the brain. We are orders of magnitude away from its processing power. We dont even have an agreed upon definition of consciousness. Will ever get there? Sure. But first we will see prostheses like vision and augmentation mind computer interfaces.
I like Aaron, but this "accomplish the most overall good" philosophy does not go far beyond what Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians gave us in the 18th century. Utilitarianism was thoughtful, but it left a lot unanswered (like, how do you decide what accomplishes the most good?), and there's been a lot of ethical thought in the intervening 100+ years that Aaron doesn't really reflect here. Imagine if a well-respected philosopher were to start blogging about how awesome ProDOS is...
I don't mean to suggest that users don't. I'm just saying its a bit unnerving.

As a data scientist, one needs to constantly ask themselves ethical questions concerning that data they are working on. Just because it exists, doesn't mean you should munge on it. I know its quite the temptation, because it's what I currently do!

I prefer to create an outlet where users are willingly giving up that information to be analyzed. They can still act according to their interests, but at least they know what will become of their information.
I think a lot of people become vegetarians out of love for animals. Not sure if fading them out of existence is what they have in mind.

Anyway, it was just an example for naive ethics, because meat eating was mentioned in the original article. I sympathize with wanting to do good, but the approach stated falls apart on all accounts in my opinion.
Not to nitpick, but I think you're talking about their icons.
This is a contradiction: "adding robots to ourselves until there is no human left", "the new AI would be compassionate towards humans."

If we use people as the foundation for building AI which eventually abandons all human foundation, then the result would not be human. It's as if you had a car and every day replaced a single part with the part for a different car. In the end, the original car would no longer exist, even though there was, as it were, a continuous camera shot of the transformation.

This is a tangent, I admit, but the contradiction needs resolved.
There is no way in hell AI will "surpass human intelligence" by 2020, using any reasonable interpretation of the sentence. I guess it makes a good headline though.
Apple simply abuses whatever power it has more so than other companies. There's what, 30 million iPhone users out there? 40?

If any of them want to listen to music with legitimate headphones, they have to buy adapters to fit the intentionally-small opening. It's the same for all their proprietary plugs and devices. They exclude other RAM and hardware manufacturers from their desktop, even those that produce better products at a cheaper price.
Thanks for the link.

I don't know how they could succeed without a solution similar to Kylix. And I can't really envisage anything on the subject. Cross platform native apps is too good to be true :) (that is with third party support as abundant in Delphi, else FPC is actually there.)
Good idea ! We need some better way to share email !
She was probably featured in the "new users near you" email okcupid sends out. I imagine it trickled off after that though.
Sometimes it is better not to consider ethics, but instead consider consequences. Sometimes, there are short term bad consequences, then there are consequences that benefits certain groups in the short term, but harm them in the long term. We cannot deny how complex the world is by reducing it to a single ethical axis.

For instance, we can examine the ethics of various religions when faced with peril. You have Christendom, who chose to win through losing; then you have Buddhism with it's history of non-violence, even when faced with the prospect of annihiliation of the religion in Tibet; then you have Islam, where the faithful chose to fight and defend their religion. Each of these approaches have short term and long term consequences. In the short run, violence provides for survival, but in the long run, it justifies further violence.

We have to recognize also that sometimes there are no good choices. Just the mere fact of our existence requires soil to be tilled, destruction of forests for agriculture, altering the environment.

It's always hard to be good.
Agree with you. I see no use for it at all. I'd rather view the headline/snippet approach of Google News, Techmeme, and other sites.
My father has 900+ with Dish Network and he didn't ask for it. It's not unusual for them to require you to buy extra packages if you want one small fringe one. Try getting Arabic channels with Dish and see how much crap comes with it.
I think the parent post was sarcasm.
It's funny. I've heard the whole "iPod made MP3 players usable" argument a few times and I don't buy it. iRiver made a batch of very nice MP3 players, which sold very well in Asia, and had more features and were just as user-friendly as the iPod, if not more so.

So what's the difference? You nailed it by mentioning the online store. iTunes was a unified interface backed by a large company with the ability to purchase new music. The iPods themselves, at first, weren't that special. I'm actually quite amazed with how nice the iPods have continued to get over the years, and with the new Nano they provide a compelling reason to continue buying a standalone music player.