skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the main challenge will be getting the labels to agree to lala-esque music deals with Apple. Most reports so far say that lala's licensing deals are not transferrable.

That said, Apple really has to do something in this space. I can't imagine that in 3 years Apple's music strategy will be exclusively about buying MP3s via iTunes, and not have any online component at all.
I too was listening to Lala when I heard about this, and I was instantly concerned. The current model that they have going is really good imo, and I feel like it's inevitable that Apple will cannibalize it and merge the functionality into iTunes, so as to exclude its use by non-iTunes users. I'd love for it to remain in a semi-independent kind of position, kind of like where Hulu is (was?). Not to be a hater (I actually like Apple products, even though I don't use them), but has Apple acquired any technology recently that they haven't locked down into their little ecosystem?
Double that. Etherpad and Lala are two of my favorite apps. It'd be really tragic if both died today.
Yehuda didn't simply say that Sinatra failed. What he said was that Sinatra (and other similar projects) failed to achieve a critical mass of support. The reason for this failure was because these projects were trying to do fundamentally different things than what most people were actually doing with Rails at the time, and as a result, they didn't catch on.

This statement was made in comparison to merb, which succeeded in getting more mindshare than the other 'Rails competitors.' This was largely because merb attempted to do much the same things that Rails was trying to do, but to do them in a much better way.

He was indirectly positive about Sinatra throughout his talk, and when covering router changes, kept describing how you could mount Sinatra applications inside of your Rails3 app.

The "prototype sucks comment" was made along with a very tongue-in-cheek "everyone will move to jquery" comment. He was laughing when he said it, and I got the impression that he was simply making a joke as the author of jquery.

He never once said anyone was stupid. Actually, that's not entirely true, he was pretty critical about some of the code found in Rails 2.x. He backed his criticism up by showing the code, and I certainly didn't think he was out of line.
Great suggestions.

1. The ads were too much for sure. When each ad was made it didn't seem too bad, but once all the dancing was on the page at once we knew it wasn't going to work. Unfortunately it was one of the last things we put in before launch (3 days ago). Given all the traffic, we've been focused on making sure everything stayed up an running. Today we put some temporary static ads up while we're redesign them.

2. Not a bad suggestion, but I like being able to bookmark the app. Long term we'd like to be more a competitor to desktop text editors. A bookmark directly to the app that isn't tied to only one share made sense to us, particularly in like a Fluid or Chrome OS type use case.

3. We definitely want to tie in with version control. The challenge is in doing it elegantly without forcing a particular VCS on someone. We've got some ideas on this we want to implement in the future.

Thanks for the feedback.
This is a strange argument. He isn't dodging taxes - the same tax code that pays for roads and tanks also specifically encourages people to give money to charities, by providing legal deductions. That's all he's doing.

The government has a mandate, and the power, to fund itself. The same isn't true of charities.
I initially thought that the black colored article links on the left was a paragraph of text with insane line spacing.
It bothers me a bit too, feels like there's something stuck there. At least this one is a lot more blended in and doesn't stick out as much as others (like ones which aren't even full width).
damnit, upvoted by mistake. apologies.
NPR programs still invite listeners to join them on Second Life, specially Science Friday.
The issue isn't being exposed, it is being overwhelmed.

And yes, there is evidence that many women avoid strongly male-dominated environments. For some of that evidence look at the article that started this discussion: http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html
+1 for filter by location. I like this. It's very straight-forward, no fluff.
I don't mean to imply that these aren't powerful tools in the right hands; the program definitely looks like a well designed tool implementing a good range of modern techniques. Just saying, every time scientists get a new toy like this to play with, we get a whole lot of bad publications with pretty graphs. And don't get me started on the let's-predict-the-stock-market crowd.

No causality for you!
Yeah, just venting frustration, I obviously do care - it bothers me.

And the idea that games have some kind of special power that other things don't have is exactly the kind of bogus thinking I was trying to talk about. Almost EVERY piece of entertainment, especially mass entertainment, is designed to make you love it/spend your money/come back/buy the tshirt/tell your friends/get the happy meal.

Sports are built, and largely exploit, the innate sense of tribalism that our brains have developed. Fiction, whether comics or movies, is designed to make us feel a stronger and purer set of emotions (whether sexuality or comedy or power) than we can readily get at the drop of a hat on a Thursday at 7:30pm. It's a crack shot of an emotion that we want to feel.

It's just no one talks about it that way. Because it's okay to say, "I want to laugh, I'm going to a comedy instead of actually talking with my friends and engaging with them and telling jokes." Whereas doing the same with a game is somehow horrific.
Doesn't make me want to use the site because I can't read many titles together and decide on what to read

Loads rather slow here too
How to Finish What You Restart
Fair enough. Replace "publicity stunt" with "drama". Stuff being leaked and shady things happening are not new things to happen on TechCrunch by any means.
Acer Timeline 8+ Hour Video Contest: Contest Entry No. 3: Gall
I would expect that, as with generic functions, the dispatching favors the most specific method. Therefore, methods with filters would indeed take precedence over unfiltered methods.
They aren't "successful", just won an ovarian lottery. Skews the data.
I have always liked how Merb was structured. With Rails 3 is there any reason to use Merb for new projects?
IPhone orchestra ready for debut 
A group of US students has created an entire orchestra out of separate iPhone applications.
Well, I say brag. You created a great company that did good things for people. It sold because it was good to a company who was going to use it to keep doing that good. You made a bunch of money that you rightfully deserved and then decided that you didn't need it all. So instead of building yet another monument to ridiculous excess, you made a smart plan to do even more good. Yes, friends, he gets a million bucks a year now. Even after all that. I bet he uses it for good stuff too. Brag Mr. Sivers. You've damn well earned it.
Some people have persistent decisionmaking flaws that make them engage in compulsive, self-destructive behavior. Sometimes these bad decisions cascade in a self-reinforcing cycle -- as with intoxication and intoxicant addictions.

Are these people fair game for however much profit can be extracted as they self-destruct? Should competing firms race to break them first?
I clicked on the link and got the interstitial advertisement page for 15 seconds. It's kind of silly that I need to go through an ad just to see the homepage. I understand that they need to cover their costs with ads, and it's great that they're experimenting to make their site more usable and clear, but Reuters (and other companies that do this... Rotten Tomatoes was particularly bad for a while) need to realize that the first impression is the ad, and not the homepage, and that's a huge turn off to anyone visiting for the first time.
Somewhat sad seeing those familiar brands go down, but seems like a lot of them are from being too complacent and refusing to put in R&D money when everything seems fine and cash is rolling in.
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So far there is only ink spilled -- not blood. ('Blood' would in this case be large legal fees or judgments.)
To be fair Apple doesn't normally acquire products they usually build their own. The only other two acquisitions in recent memory were PA-semi and that maps company neither of which had a directly consumer facing product that I can recall.
Is everything that doesn't run on the local machine called a "cloud" application these days? The use of the word seems to have gotten out of hand to the point where saying something runs "in the cloud" is just synonymous with the term remote sever.
Yes, very annoying. It makes me feel like I'm viewing the site in frames.
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good list, but the gawker media guy doesn't belong on it. Completely different level compared to paypal, Google and Apple
Also, Wave-the-product might just be one client Google releases. If they really want to encourage a "Wave ecosystem," they'll likely pump out multiple clients with different focuses (including, hopefully, a new Wave-the-framework-backed Etherpad.)
Isn't the great thing about consumer GPU processing like Nvidia's Cuda that it's pretty much everywhere, even in consumer devices? So that some research guy can convert his number-crunching code to run in parallel with Cuda right on his own workstation and see if it works.

If it does, then he can later put it up and running on a more efficient server or cluster. But initially he gets to try if X times speed up works for him, without getting any special hardware just to try out.
The API myth
I dunno, seems lately that most of what I hear from the Perl and Python communities consists of "did any of you read these articles you're commenting on?" And, sadly, the answer is no, nobody bothered much with the reading or the comprehension; it's all "LOL PERL 6" and "LOL PYTHON 3 IS JUST LIKE PERL 6" drivel.
"I truly think the command line is going to be one of Bespin's fantastic features"

No offense, but this is why EtherPad just got acquired for 8 figures and BeSpin is on track for obscurity.
Don't forget to throw in general market data, too.
Found this the most interesting part of the article:

> Nevada treats unpaid gambling debt as a criminal matter handled by the District Attorney's bad-checks unit. Most defendants agree to pay the debt through a payment plan before charges are filed, with around 10% tacked on to fund the D.A. unit. Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, prosecutes roughly 200 cases involving gambling debts a month, says Bernie Zadrowski, who runs the bad-checks unit.

Unpaid gambling debts seems like it'd be a civil matter to me - pretty crazy that it's criminal, and defendants pay an additional 10% to the state on top of it.
I actually liked the interface except for the header part(specifically the purple-ish colors) and the font rendering (just a disaster). But you're right, it is snail-like slow when loading. Initially I thought it was because it's loading a bunch of users' info and thumbnails (I can scroll down for quite a while), but some people here are saying it loads fine for them, so it might be browser specific. It's also sort of "glitchy." Nonetheless, it's a neat idea.
Thanks for replying. Can you tell me if what I was worried about is likely to happen? Will there be a big reshuffling of web traffic due to Bing returning results that differ from Yahoo's current results?
I have not had a chance to play around with it much and I'm not sure about embedding (it's late, I must be off to bed!), but take a look at Amy Editor: http://www.amyeditor.com/

Edit: Here is a screencast of it in action: http://www.amyeditor.com/screencasts/collaboration1.mov
Given that Michael Arrington was a lawyer it would surprise me a lot if they don't have any contracts.
Well, to be fair, as a free user, you have no relevance to big checks for them, either :-)
Ask HN: A site that allows you to create programs other people ask for?
For example, I need an app that does this and this, but I don't know how to code. I would go to this website and post it saying what I want. Then a programmer could come along and fill that order.

I think it would be a good place for ideas as well as good inspiration for some projects.

Anyone know of such a place?
The rise and fall of MySpace
Nutrients for better thinking (google tech talk)
I wonder what kind of problems TechCrunch is going to face suing a company in Singapore... The laws in Singapore might be very different and Fusion Garage might be favorable since it's a local company. At best they can sue distributors of CrunchPad in USA, but Fusion Garage could just target Asia and Europe.
What is google
Being nitpicky for a second:

There is a different between something being "in the cloud" and "on a server", the difference being that if your stuff is just on a remote server, you could go to wherever it is, point to it, and say "that's where my stuff is". With cloud apps, your data / service is always available by the same means, but its physical location / method of distribution may have changed an indefinite number of times without you ever noticing. It's just like shared hosting, where your server state is continuously preserved, even though you're not actually hitting the same box.

That, said the term "cloud" is beaten to death, not because it's inaccurate, but because grid / distributed computing is now the norm rather than the exception when dealing with web apps.
I think the better question is what does this solve that email doesn't? You can already sort notifications into different inboxes with a decent client. Now, true, you can't have your client take specific actions based on, but that doesn't mean clients can't support it as is. Simply add a feature to a mail client that allows you to enter in certain criteria for titles and take that action. I'm not really sure how this would be any different.

I think a better solution is the one a poster made above. Have a single email address for notifications and some web or desktop app that takes care of those. If it's web based with an API or allows plugins, you can build something that plugs into that and do everything that the author is suggesting.

I'm just generally against mucking with standards when a solution can already be implemented.
More like 12 tips on how to be a poser.
It seems I had had the history enabled, at least partially.

I looked at my history and it's pretty fucking scary. Even for myself. And I don't mean porn sites or anything, it's just that pretty much anything I had thought in the last few days was there, nicely listed and visible should I choose to return to those thoughts.

I cleared the whole history and Google said it also made the history paused for me until I manually resume it. I'm glad it offered that option by default.

But I still suspect they're there somewhere.
and also, somewhat ironically in this case, iTunes
you are presenting way too much useless information on the homepage.

The list is useless from user perspective. It's just a list of names and photos. Doesn't tell you anything about the person's experience without clicking the "view description" link

I think a much better approach would be to let users create a custom subject, to describe their idea. You can still display name + photo in user description, but there is no reason for them to be in results.
I have this idea, just need someone else to to do all the work for 10% share, really it should be easy so if you can't do it in a few hours I'll find someone else.
Good encyclopedias are written by large numbers of individual contributors with expertise in specialized fields, who barely get paid for their efforts, most of the money from encyclopedias going to pay for the organization, compilation, editing, etc. It turns out that the latter can now be much more effectively decentralized than ever before, and contributors no longer need to be explicitly recruited. (which is certainly not to say that Wikipedia isn’t dramatically different from other encyclopedias)

Dictionaries are still compiled by experienced lexicographers.

* * *

Incidentally, does anyone know of a good online thesaurus, now that thesaurus.com is no longer using decent source material (after being hit with a lawsuit for essentially stealing it). All the ones online seem to use Roget’s II, which is vastly inferior to the original Roget’s.
I tried "the" first, and then "friend".

It looks like it's generated from statistics plus a language model plus the contents of the web (possibly and/or google books).

If that's the goal it looks like they're doing some great work. If being a dictionary is the goal it looks like there are currently better solutions.

However a) give it a few years and b) if they're able to extract that amount of information from their corpus, just imagine how that could be applied to a search engine - I get the feeling that they're showing their hand a little in their progress on the natural language processing front.

If that's so then I can't wait to see them apply it to search.
Yes, that sure made a bad impression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

(yes, not too many, especially since 2002, though I think the list is somewhat incomplete)
A lot of businesses make their money by making it as easy as possible or those people to make these sorts of bad decisions. Video poker in bars?
Actually, I am interested to know how much does it cost to get a hardware PROTOTYPE built.
Say, if I have a really cool idea about a new 3g device , how much would it cost me to get it prototyped - what happens to the intellectual property rights in that case. Is it shared ownership or do I own all IP ?

Anybody have any idea about pricepoints...
I found it interesting that the wynn decided that he was on a self destructive path and decided to ban him from their casino:

> In 2006, Mr. Watanabe resided primarily at Wynn Resorts' Wynn Las Vegas casino. But, he says, his heavy betting drew the attention of Chief Executive Steve Wynn. After meeting with him in June 2007, Mr. Wynn concluded that he was a compulsive gambler and alcoholic, and barred him from the casino, according to a letter to the Nevada Gaming Control Board drafted by Mr. Watanabe's attorney, Pierce O'Donnell.

> Ms. Jones, the Harrah's vice president, says, "It was not our understanding that he was kicked out of Wynn because of problem gambling."

Whereas at Caesars:

>Mr. Kunder and Mr. Deleon say they both voiced concerns to managers that Mr. Watanabe was too intoxicated, and were told not to get involved. "Nobody wanted to be the one to cut him off," Mr. Kunder says. "We were afraid of what upper management would do if he left because of our actions."

I think that its the moral responsibility for any company to not sell products that harm their customers; they should refuse to do business with those who are throwing their life away. Now this is not a legal responsibility, but merely doing what is ethical.

For instance:
1. Bar or Package Store that refuses to sell alcohol to alcoholics
2. McDonalds refuses to sell unhealthy foods to the morbidly obese
3. Firearm dealer refuses to sell weapons to the suicidal.

Also, can credit be extended to an intoxicated person? Do they have footage of when the credit was extended?
You know me so well :)

I really do hope they're successful in taming Wave's UI complexity and making it actually useful for writing documents collaboratively. Right now Wave is geared towards adding commentary (which it does well), but that isn't very useful if you don't already have a mostly-complete document to mark up. Even with just one editor Wave can be really obnoxious if you try to write something more than a paragraph in one blurb -- it could really use an Etherpad mode!

As someone who's bet on Appjet before, what odds would you give of them pulling that off at Google? By tearing down Etherpad, they've clearly gone all in, but there's a substantial team on multiple continents working on Wave, and they're already set in some rather weird ways that the Appjet guys would have to reform significantly.

Do you understand how their users would be at least apprehensive about this? I should have bought a private copy when I had the chance...

I do have faith that they'll make a splash on the Wave team, but I doubt that they'll be able to fix Wave so that it's a good Etherpad replacement in the next three months.
Building Blackwater: Erik Prince
I don't know about that. Three years ago, my entire programming career had been spent in Swing apps and utility scripting. I only started on Rails to be able to sell my Swing app better, and only started to get into SQL, Javascript, and all the rest of the rabbit hole as my business (and day job) required me to. Thats, hmm, about 7 kilo-hours as an upper bound if you assume that all of my day job and business time goes into web programming, which is very, very far from the case.
Your question presupposes that the search results from a given search engine tend to remain static over time, but they're actually in constant flux. All the major search engines make frequent tweaks (sometimes small, sometimes large) to their ranking algorithms, and indexes are updated endlessly around the clock with new and changing content.

I don't think there's anything to worry about.