num1

You are, of course, correct that upvotes do not "define" what belongs in this community. However if you will not accept that evidence, look at the other comments in this thread.

I see people having fun and satisfying their creative curiosity by making and building upon jokes inspired by this link. Links which link intellect and curiosity are quite often posted to HN.

To answer your question on what have I really learned... well that's not a question you want to start asking. I can point out quite a few articles that don't belong upon HN when held against that criteria. Take for example almost everything related to the NYT. I usually don't click on those and just wait for the blog post that explains the same thing with more information and less filler.

As for another argument that you will find quite easy to strike down, this is not somewhere where I go do to market research, it is somewhere where I go to entertain myself and find things, preferably about hacking, that I may read. This link does a brilliant job of being related to hacking while also being entertaining.

According to the official FAQ (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) on-topic is defined as: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Now I personally am a hacker (we'll leave the good for others to argue) and I find this interesting, if not rather humorous. This post currently has 51 points, meaning at least 50 other people also considered it interesting. If that's not strong evidence that this link belongs here please explain what is.

As a big fan of Google Wave, I like this idea a lot. Although if I remember correctly it had huge performance issues with waves that had many concurrent users. That might take a little too much tweaking to fix for it to be worth it.

I completely agree with graceyang that the community is the important part. While it would be nice to have a custom tool, that adds months to the startup process full of debating how the tool should be made and what it should do.

Dance mode made my day. Well played.

I stand corrected. Sorry for the argumentative tone of my comment and thank you for your polite responses.

I'm not sure I believe that this was posted by an innocent bystander. Marvin85 appears to have been created for the sole purpose of posting to HN, it's only submission and comment both belong to this thread (although I can't explain how old it is, 220 days). I'll buy that a staff member (tomazstolfa) happened to be watching HN and was able to respond within minutes, but that's dubious, presumably there are more important things for a startup to be doing. My real concern is that the link given here is an invitation link, and not the real homepage of vox.io . I'd assume that normal invitation links only work for a single user, and this one appears to be able to absorb quite a few people, I was able to sign on without any hiccups.

Now there's nothing wrong with plugging yourself on HN, if you've created a useful or interesting service people are glad to pay attention to and, more importantly, discuss you. However misrepresentation is not something that I think I can endorse.

With all that said, I like the idea of vox.io . I think I'm going to stick to my unhappy combination of google voice and skype for now though. vox.io doesn't seem to provide me anything I don't already have except shady marketing techniques.

Is there some deep analogy that I'm missing, or is he just giving an example of how to analyze things?

Why does every conversations about smartphones end up with an argument between Apple and Android? A) There are more than two options (you can't predict the future) B) That's completely unrelated to the article. Yes he mentioned an android phone as an example, but this kind of growth will be universal. People have learned that fighting over vi and emacs is pointless, please learn the same lesson here, your opinion doesn't please everybody.

I like this suggestion. Obtain dropbox-like features by leveraging dropbox.

Lookup Off-The-Record messaging. Doesn't cover the kind of log encryption you're asking about, but it's what you want (instead of what you asked for) I think.

I think the lesson to learn here is that free markets require maintenance and defending. A free market is by its very definition the natural state of affairs. In not only the modern industrial state, but every state America has known, we have added regulation upon regulation to the system to the point that the only way to be an entrepreneur is to create a completely new industry because it hasn't been regulated yet. When's the last time you heard of a banking or a farming startup? (And if you mention BankSimple, can't you hear them practically begging for mercy from their regulations in the blog posts they publish?)

We need to wake up and free the market. A lack of regulations (as has been proven) is the only way to avoid abuse of power.

I would personally list patent protections as legislative. There was an article posted to HN recently about patents and what I took away was that they do little to protect someone who isn't a large corporation. I believe this is related to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034262 , patents (in any form not just software but also physical) are just another way to prevent a free market from forming. And libertarianism is based on a firm belief in the free market.

1) Technical advantages are welcomed, just not legislative. 2) Arguing from the perspective of the Cato institute, who are you to place restrictions on the phones carriers sell? The root issue is whether providers have a monopoly or not. But keeping a distinguishing feature just as phones to yourself is just good business. 3) Completely agreed.

This paper (circa 2004) was written from the perspective that internet service is not a monopoly. In this situation the answer is clear; (to a libertarian) government has no business dictating how we should do business.

A large debate within libertarian circles is what to do when monopolies happen. The reflexive answer is no government interference allowed no matter what, the market will figure it out. Obviously in certain situations that doesn't work too well, as far as I know it's still an open question.

Battery power is also a factor that comes into play here. These devices are "always on" for days at a time. Powering down isn't really the issue so much as leaving your perception. You can forget about them ("turn them off") and when you start using them a day or two later they come on in an instant.

When it comes to a laptop you can't necessarily leave it and come back, you have to be cognizant of how long it's been standing by or hibernating or whatnot.

I see Instant On and Crash-Only Programs as being two very similar goals. Sure one is about turning on and one is about turning off, but both of them exist because we're attempting to fight the problem of complex software. It'd be interesting to see if making a program crash-only (not relying on data structures which can become corrupt) leads to noticeable boot speed improvements. The published literature on crash-proof software seems to think so.

I've always wondered how we have created the system within which we find ourselves. It is possible for someone to write this well about an argument and obviously be in the right. But somehow, their argument will either be completely ignored or rebutted with a comment that doesn't properly argue the article. The injust law will then be passed regardless.

I'm talking in generalizations and not about this issue specifically. However it is a recurring theme that some invasive law will be proposed, and reasonable people reasonably argue why it shouldn't pass, and it passes anyway. How have we allowed this to happen?

For reference, the program he is referring to can be found here. http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductD...

I love how that in bold blue letters the page says:

"The immediate bank deposit of $1 coins ordered through this Program does not result in their introduction into circulation and, therefore, does not comply with the intended purpose of the Program."

And now that these are published you can rest assured that they will never be used in a Google interview again.

I am continually amazed at the quality of Google Translate. That translation was incredibly readable with maybe two or three errors. This used to be black magic just a few years ago!

I'm sitting a little confused here. The WHOIS for torrent-finder.com lists an address in Egypt. But comments that I've seen so far express anger, but are explicitly tempered by the fact that this is happening within the US and we haven't crossed any lines yet. Didn't we just cross lines?

Did the author or this article even read netflix's statement? There was no "lamentation" of the fragmentation of the Android market. Because Android doesn't enforce a DRM model on every android handset Netflix is going to be working with individual manufacturers to try to bring DRM to as many phones as possible.

When I read "Netflix on Android" it seemed more like an apology to me. Netflix was saying we're sorry that we're going to fragment the market and confuse people, but this is the only way. They mentioned nothing about any fragmentation that already exists.

I know exactly what you mean. I have spend enough years interacting with people from Turkey that I no longer recognize any kind of Turkish accent.

Seems to be correct so far, 32.

Scratch my earlier comment. As found in the article:

" The scientific literature has provided clear evidence that the ORE [other race effect] and the popular belief that OR faces all look alike are not accounted for by the paucity of anthropometric variations in OR [other race] faces, but by a genuine lack of expertise. Although this theoretical explanation has been supported by numerous behavioral (for a review, see ref. 2), computational (e.g., refs. 3–5) and neuroimaging (6–15) studies on the ORE... "

so yes, it is because we are used to seeing faces from our own race. And no, the researchers are not implying this is a genetic phenomenon.

There is no implication at all that this is a genetic phenomenon. The research simply states that we are better at recognizing people within our race than outside of our race. From the point of the experiment both genetics and "what we're used to" are equally valid ways of explaining this effect. And neither the article nor the research attempted to put forth either.

I keep coming up with this idea once every month or so, and I always get stuck on the problem of compatibility. What would be great, is if there did not need to be a physical connection between the tablet and phone. I'm thinking of a protocol (using Bluetooth 3.0?) that essentially lets the tablet ssh into your phone and forwards keystrokes/audio/video across. The protocol, or course, would be open source allowing your tablet to connect to any brand of {phone,computer,home automation system}.

This reminds me of the mixup a few months ago where a site other than Facebook was the top Google result for "facebook login" http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login.

I find it rather depressing that while we've built up all these layers of abstraction there are still people who don't understand what the address bar is.

Hmm, I was content to show agreement simply by up-voting your comment, then I realized that was an anonymous action. So publicly, +1 to your comment, you hit it right on the nail.

I had a similar experience. I was a strong contender for the US West amateur championship for a few years. But once I got good enough to spend most of my thinking time on positional concerns things stopped being a game and started being a huge database to memorize. I would spend my free time analyzing my games for weaknesses in my strategy, and practiced speed problem solving using giant books of tactical problems. Everybody serious about chess hits the point of diminishing returns per unit of studying, and I believe that the "good" players are the people who can ignore the impossibility of their task and keep studying anyway. There are probably better solutions to the problem of diminishing returns than quitting cold turkey, (the solution I chose) but I'm convinced my experiences with chess have made me a much better programmer. Looking ahead at the consequences of my actions, being able to look for oddball solutions to impossible situations, never giving up, and occasionally memorizing established solutions are all things I'm appreciative to chess for teaching me.