skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The needless "beta" limits how many people I can converse with using Google Wave - the invitations don't propagate soon enough to hold my interest.

Google wave = Jabber Client + glorified logging
>> "is to educate kids to get all this violence under control."

I'd replace 'kids' with 'society' there. You can't really go around the world waging war with countries, bombing the hell out of them, and then act surprised when kids copy.

Also specifically America really needs to get rid of so much war/military/gun ownership etc and become a bit more grown up as a nation IMHO. Maybe spend some of those billions on health care?
A great (and now tragic) story of one man's vision to take on the world, create a great product, become absorbed into a gigantic corporation and then cast aside when times get tough.
The brand, not the man.
I totally get it now. Most of my sites are already using only one vendor per "need," so I didn't get the use case. Now it's clear.
The Associated Press: Google to launch Google Editions platform
Many system administrators are stubborn out of nature.

Yes, especially at my university it would seem. No one is able to log into 10% of the lab computers since these computers display a "you are not authorized" message. I tried reporting this to the administrator twice and each time he said that I couldn't have been a real student, and I must have snuck into the lab some how. He refuses to deal with the real problem.
Greek maths comic is surprise bestseller
Linux is a kernel, GNU/Linux is a server operating system. It's all based on UNIX and no amount of hacky patching can make it a coherent and integrated desktop system. It'll always have some shitty spot that ruins the experience somewhere.

Things like Haiku are the future.
Maybe he has a Lisp?!
I agree, the stated benefit of I don't have to give my details, is not just confusing but plain wrong. Checks leak as much if not more information. I was replying the parent post of why checks do have some value.

The laws for check fraud are different than credit fraud and the like. In most cases (each U.S. state is different), check fraud laws are old and quite strict. These laws have statutory obligations to fulfill to enable criminal prosecution. These requirements in turn force law enforcement and banks to take action. This may not always happen, but there is a framework for pushing it to happen.
If I had the money, I'd pay the trillion dollars it would take to fly to Mars (and not die on the way) just to get a view like that, not to mention being on a planet with two visible moons.
I use internet banking. Which costs me nothing. Log on to my bank's website, give it a branch number and acct number for the recipient, and a value - hit pay.
I think that in part it is the fact that Apple managed to successfully re-invent itself and that plenty of people are seeing Steve Jobs as 'larger than life', a person to emulate. There is something of a cult about Apple.

I have an iMac here, it's just another computer to me, I couldn't care less about the people that run the company that produces it, if it works it's great, if it doesn't I try to fix it, just like with any other piece of digital hardware.

But whenever people visit here (not frequently), ever since I got it out of storage the first thing is: Wow, you are a mac user. Somehow my much more powerful linux box that actually earns me my bread & butter never ever gets that sort of a response.

It could be that it is the striking design, or the fantastic software, I don't know. The design is 'ok', less cluttered than most pcs, but actually not all that different from say an 80's era all-in-one machine. The software is ok, but not all that much better (if at all) than a well set up linux desktop.

It's a weird phenomenon. I hope for all those working at Apple that Steve Jobs will be able to transfer the reigns to someone else without Apple taking a nosedive, it certainly looks as though his personal involvement is what makes Apple go. It's a great short term strategy to make your company a cult of personality, but if something happens to that person, or if they retire it remains to be seen what will survive of that.
App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App.
My guess is Zynga. At first it was Etsy, but Zynga is already raking in the revenue BIG time and could go public soon. Etsy seems to be doing very well, but Zynga seems a more surefire bet. They were also in early on Etsy and the deal terms were most likely more lucrative for USV. Zynga though had Mark Pincus involved, good amount of other investors,etc, so I could see a 10% stake.
As someone who's overseeing a rather huge implementation of SharePoint 2007 - and as a former user of Confluence - I have to say that SharePoint does pretty much what Confluence does (wiki, document sharing and versioning, calendaring) except that SharePoint has far more overhead. SP setup and deployment is highly complex, and it's very difficult for most users to fathom, requiring hours of training. SharePoint does have some unique capabilities (e.g. Office Suite integration - as long as you're on Windows using IE - and only half of my audience meet that requirement), but overall Confluence wins hands down IMHO.
That's a really good point actually. Kids merely emulate what they see the adults do anyway.
Somewhat bittersweet to front-page Hacker News with a video about how we failed! Feel free to comment here if anyone wants to ask more questions of (or lampoon) me.
Top open source apps for Apple Mac OS
I've experienced that very limitation from people when it comes to online document editing and maintenance. However, my experience with how those kinds of people use Sharepoint is still compatible with Googledocs: create a document with Word or Excel, then upload it into shared storage where the document goes to die because they never edit or use the document again. Google docs supports this workflow, uploading a Microsoft Office document which gets converted. Now that I think about it, can you upload a document to replace the one that is currently there in GD? I'll have to test that. That would negate the I-can-only-learn-one-thing-and-that-one-thing-was-microsoft-office mentality.
I have a private web spider that's been following the top 1,000 web sites by traffic (plus the Fortune 1000) and the problem is that for the big ones they've got many, many tags like this per page.
Why Your WordPress Theme Is Not Showing Up
This tutorial deals with a common problem of WordPress displaying only text with no theme or images. The solution to this problem is documented within the tutorial.
I think it's more to do with the fact that Marc is now on almost every other board of Silicone Valley, while some of his blog posts were very critical about Corporate America, in my opinion ;)
It's easy to forget the hard work when you're successful. This is why so many successful people can't understand others' lack of success.

Also, I dunno about anyone else, but changing a kid's diaper feels like work.
I doubt solving a puzzle is a good idea for the conversation rate.
It would be interesting to see some A/B testing results...
I don't know if this has anything to do with Apple Marketing. A lot of this has to do with a very slow news cycle in the tech industry.

As proof I offer up the CrunchPad. TechCrunch is just the opposite of Apple, they've never released a hardware device at all. Yet the CrunchPad is getting mentions in the NY Times even though we know only slightly more about it than we do about Apple's tablet.

So I think a lot of the hype is because nothing's going on right now and the tablet form factor has caught the tech world's interest.
I wouldn't say it doesn't have value though. Bring that code with you to any of your interviews. If they ask you about coding, offer to leave a hard or soft copy with them. Interviews in the software world are such a pain in the ass because people cannot easily judge how good a software engineer you are. Every method you have to help your interviewers see that can help.
Please don't confuse this with an issue of what I want. It's just what I think the name implies.

"Backwards compatible" implies, to me, that if I take out the new features from the language, I'm left with legal code in the original language. This is markedly different than being able to call one language from another. I can call Fortran code from C, and I would never characterize Fortran and C as "backwards compatible."

One is about source code compatibility. The other is about object code compatibility.
I'm anxiously awaiting GoogleDresser, so I can find those missing socks and one of my favorite t-shirts.
It only seems weird because we are used to scenes where the sun's rays are roughly parallel. In this picture, the sun represents a point light source, so the objects are lit from different directions.

(Think of balls suspended in space around a lightbulb. The balls on the far side of the bulb from you will appear lit from the front, while the balls on the near side will appear lit from the back, and those between, from the side.)
I agree about cycles...

>> "and the tablet form factor has caught the tech world's interest."

..like it did years ago. The thing was though no one bought them.

Is the Crunchpad still being developed? Seems they have gone eerily quiet about it now. The cynic in me would say that if they have decided it's not a good idea, TC can always spin it as "We forced Apples hand and made them come up with a tablet, by announcing the Crunchpad".
Maidenform Women's Flirty Boyshort
It was originally the one dated October 14th, but things have now changed dramatically with the BCA defaming Simon Singh.

As with all legal proceedings there is a lot going on.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=simon+singh+chiropractors+l...
The Shopping Mall Startup
I'm responding purely to the title, here, because the meat of the article dealt with a slightly different situation than I have experience with.

After my last attempt at building a product, I'm going to be very careful to keep customers at arms length in the early stages. I fell into a trap where I had one big customer who was paying a disproportionate amount of my bills, and getting to close to them kept me from getting close to other customers (or potential customers). At some point, I effectively turned into an employee who just so happened to be paid as a vendor.

This seems like a natural trap to fall into when trying to bootstrap something. It's awfully hard to turn down revenue, making it easy to become basically a consultant to one particular master.
I don't think she's fishing for credit.
Nor do I. My point is not that she wants credit but that Cano should acknowledge that his input into the piece he produced was limited to a small alteration. In the quote in the original artists post:

"José-María Cano generously offered this painting to Vaclav Havel as a gift for Barack Obama", said Leos Valka, director of DOX, Centre for Contemporary art in Holesovice, Prague.

The Director should have said "Cano offered this painting which he duplicated from an original work by Ms Novak in the WSJ ...". It's not that she demands the credit, it should be given.
Like the other reply said, not every organization does bonuses. My BigCorp, being in retail, only does bonuses as profit-sharing, based on total company performance.

Job performance objectives are overwhelmingly based on overall company performance and department-level performance scores, and individual performance has almost nothing to do with it. And even then the whole salary situation is cloaked in smoke and mirrors and is essentially irrational and adversarial. Your scorecard numbers have nothing to do with it.
I didn't suggest that geeks have a problem with spam. On the contrary, because that problem has been on the geek radar for many years, it is largely resolved. And because most of the other problems have not been on the geek radar, they're not resolved yet.

The problem with email is there is too much of it. Actually damn messages I must read and deal with.

And my point is that Wave can help reduce the clutter and chaos of these messages by presenting them in a more structured, intuitive, and versatile form. So instead of having 50 emails discussing the text for the new homepage, you can have just one Wave.
> giro transfer

that's what we do in EU. never wrote a single check. i'm 28.
>Many people think checks are magically more secure than credit cards.

Yeah but they are not any less secure either. Buy something off amazon give them your credit card details number, expiration date, and security number off the back, and they can charge your credit card how much and whenever they want just the same as a check. Fraudulent activity (at least in the US ) has similar liability and penalty rules.
No, you can't link it to your Steam account. Valve maintains a list of games you can register to your account from a CD key here:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7480-WUS...
Ask HN : Where to find logos of social networks (facebook, twitter, ...)
I often see beautiful high-quality logos of social networks (facebook, twitter and the likes) and I would like to have them for a project. It would be best if they were all the same size and in different size (icon, small, medium, large).
Your problem is not that you were depending too much on customerS. It was that you were depending completely on one customer.

I'm going to be very careful to keep customers at arms length in the early stages

That sounds like a very scary strategy to me. How do you plan to know if your product will be of use once built?

By all means, don't become a consultant to one customer. But you don't have to become a consultant in order to get valuable feedback from multiple customers that are representative of your larger target market.
No, I'm on a desktop that i put together. The 32bit limitation is because I use Ubuntu and there were some reports of misbehaving apps under 64bits....
Chris Bosh’s Legal Victory Over Cybersquatter Liberates 800 Domain Names
I'm fairly sure at this point that Derek is a Dilbert-esque character working in some anonymous cube farm making these posts to make everyone else as miserable as he is.

At least, that's what I need to believe to keep my world view coherent.

No one can be this happy with their job/life, can they?
A good, data-driven, analysis of the relationship between price and customer perception of iPhone applications.
In that case they totally let this story get away from them. All I've heard (and not on tech media outlets either, but on NPR and the like) is that the data was gone forever. They should not have allowed that story to run uncorrected while there was still a chance it could come back.
Apparently I got my fill of Seth Godin's writing when I was ten years old.
The challenge of the Busy beaver
Google images, search for 'small'.

Beware of using other peoples trademarked logos.
The Return of the Vector Processor?
I get so tired of this comment - but I digress. Did you read the article? If so, do you have anything of value to add based on personal experience?

Just curious...
The fight to dominate cloud computing will increase competition and innovation
Slightly off topic: The bag-of-potatoes puzzle could trip some people up.

The stated problem is: “You have a 100 pound bag of potatoes. 99% of the bag is water weight. You leave the bag in the sun for a few hours. Now you bring it in and it is only 98% water weight, due to evaporation. What is the new total weight of the bag of potatoes?”

The first-reaction answer is that the bag now weighs 98 pounds. But originally the bag contained 1 lb of solid, 99 pounds of water. (Let's assume no other liquids than water). After evaporation, you still have 1 lb of solid, but it's now 2% of the total weight. For 1 pound of solid to equal 2% of total weight, the total weight has to be 50 pounds. That means the bag has only 49 pounds of water remaining. (That seems like a lot of evaporation for just a few hours in the sun.)
I have a theory, not specific to the app store, that there is a strong correlation between customers who are extraordinarily price sensitive and pathological customers. This is based on every software vendor I've ever spoken to saying "After we increased our prices, we dealt with a lot less crazy people -- what's up with that?"

Anecdotally, when I increased prices by 20%, I noticed a marked change in the number of... customers with unique understandings of the world. For example: "I think Bingo Card Creator should print holiday cards. Except, not on my printer, on your printer. And you should mail them for me. What do you mean you don't do that, YOU THIEF, don't make me call my husband on you." (You will run into this customer eventually. A refund and apology is the quickest way to preserve your sanity.)

Specific to the App Store, I think that Apple is training their customers to become pathological customers. From the perspective of the small software developer, "The cost of this app is less than my information search cost, so I'll just buy this app to see if it does what I want rather than reading about it. Bought. It doesn't do what I want?! SUCKS! YOU FREAKING THIEVES!!!1 ONE STARZ!" is just about the worst possible reaction a customer can have to you. The App Store is training people to think of their software in that sort of disposable fashion, but that means you're entrusting your corporate reputation to a lot of people who have one-click access to LOLZ LAAAAAAAME.
I'll be imprudent:

What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'.
Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and
quality assurance people in its wake.

http://gradha.sdf-eu.org/textos/klingon_programmer.en.html

Heh, this always gets me to laugh. I've been on both sides of this issue though: I worked at a place that shipped code and their version 3 release is shaping up to be what their 1.5 release should have been. But I can also get to the point of paranoia, "I can't release this! it still has bugs!"

Maybe we just need to have a "release determination board" filled with 50% pessimists and 50% optimists. That way, you'd have a huge argument over when to release.

To release is risk, but is risk itself imprudent? I doubt it.
American Mathematics Contest 8
Blacklisted as Malware: a Downside of using Amazon EC2
Redeye VC: Company Math vs VC Math
That's true, but licensing in that sense has nothing to do with something being easy to copy, nor would keep artists who want to create from creating. Licensing for derivitive works should be legally seperate from the artifical restrictions placed on copying/access to an infinitely replicable resource. One has to do with getting credit for your work, the other doesn't; oddly, one of the reasons people share music or obtain it without paying for it is because it is authentic, there is no drive to get knockoff Beatles songs covered by someone else who claims to be the Beatles.
Social Gaming, Beyond the Clones
AcaWiki: Wikipedia for academic research
Right. Specifically:

1. Maybe lower prices lead to lower ratings
2. Maybe lower ratings lead to lower prices
3. Maybe low quality leads to both low ratings and low prices

The article seems to say that #1 is the answer. Although I grant you that if you tell me Widget 1 costs $5 and Widget 2 costs $50, I'd assume that there's a reason for that. And maybe I'd be wrong.
Don't Be Evil Means Don't Be Evil
The next big thing in turning visitors away.
Web 2.0 Winners & Losers
"Hybrid Airship," by teen robotic blimp builders.
That sounds like a very scary strategy to me. How do you plan to know if your product will be of use once built?

Well, you never really know, do you? In many cases, potential customers don't really know either. I basically know what I want, or think I want, and can build that. The goal is to build it quickly, watch people use it, and then adjust based on that.

I knew exactly what my one big customer, my 3 smaller customers, and a few potential customers wanted. I couldn't produce all of that, and erred towards producing what the people who were giving me the most money wanted.

The important goal (for me) is to have some buffer time where earning ze monies isn't a life or death problem, thus giving me the ability to insulate myself a bit from people who can give me money (you know, assuming it makes sense). "Arms length" doesn't mean I don't talk to people, and I don't spend time watching how they work. It means we're not financially linked right away.
Offer HN: Try out my dead simple email reminder tool (enagme.com)
I wrote this tiny app one night in an attempt to remember a friend's birthday. It worked well, and since then I've been using it to remind myself about lots of different things on a day-to-day basis. I figured I'd share it with the HN community to see if anyone else found it useful. Feedback is welcome (either here or via the form).
Elimination of Text Corruption in XML
Pixily bulk-scans your folders full of documents, and hands you back PDFs
Horrific details of Anna Nicole Smith's final days revealed
http://www.enagme.com for clickable link
View and Share PDF's Online in HTML
Would like to see proof that higher ratings are good for revenue, any devs want to share their income/ratings plot?
yeah, i probably am gonna regret that. i wrote the post on my blackberry on the eliptical trainer at the gym and i was sweating hard when i got to that point. probably too much adrenaline.
Wishful thinking.

The correlation between price and perceived quality is very easily explained by the data source. He's only looking at the apps that actually sold!

Free applications can be mediocre and still be widely-downloaded enough to make it into the top 10.

Top-selling paid applications must be of very high quality to sell at all.
Right: either Apple (or someone else's) tablet PC will reinvent computing, or it won't. Making predictions about a product that, as the lede says, "though it doesn't even exist yet," is idiotic. Perhaps not as idiotic as the ginger/it/segway nonsense of the late 90s, but still up there.
Ben Horowitz on micromanagement - Response to Marc Andreessen
The only reason I use checks is to pay my rent. I live in the second floor of a two-story house, where the landlord lives downstairs. He doesn't own any other property, so I'm his only tenant, and he has no electronic methods of receiving money, just cash or checks. Paying with checks is more convenient and secure for me, since walking around New York City with more than $1000 in cash is really not a wise thing to do.

I'm sure my case can't be the only situation where checks are more useful, or the only method of payment.
Interested in beta testing DropZap -- a novel Drop7 variant?