thecoffman

Of course you're well within your rights to remove the content from Dropbox itself as it violates your TOS - I think most people are objecting not to that, but to you requesting that copies of the source be removed from third party sites like github.

The attempt to quash knowledge is the offensive part - not the enforcing of your TOS. At least that's my 2 cents.

I can see why Dropbox would be upset about the existence of such a thing, but trying to force people to take it down seems incredibly foolish. The whole issue will garner them negative publicity and people will see it anyways thanks to the Streisand effect.

I had actually missed the original post, but now thanks to their takedown attempts I've downloaded a copy for myself as its very interesting.

Since the failure of Wave, does it seem to anyone else the Google has been copying rather than innovating nowadays? Buzz was a copy of Twitter, this is a copy of Groupon, +1 is a copy of Facebook's like button etc...

I'd like to see more innovation and less parroting coming out of them. I don't want my search results to be social - I want them to be relevant and spam free. If they really feel like going "social" is the way to deliver those results, then cool - go with it - but don't just copy what another company is doing. Personally I feel like they're good at algorithmic and engineering solutions to problems and not good at social - why not stick with what you excel at?

Site appears to be down - anyone snag a cache? Looks like google didn't

I think your final point is the most valuable takeaway here. That's usually the biggest differentiator to me between "good" and "great" developers. The good ones are usually passionate about a particular technology and know it like the back of their hand.

The great ones approach things from a the perspective of "what is the correct tool for this job." They're not firmly in the Ruby, Python, Java, or .NET camp - they approach each technology as a tool in a larger tool belt and bring out the appropriate one for the task at hand. These people also tend to keep up on the latest and greatest - much like people who collect and maintain a garage full of physical tools - great programmers generally maintain a mental library of great programming tools (languages, libraries, frameworks).

Partisan allegiance to any one specific technology rarely indicates overall mastery of the field - at least in my experience.

There are obviously plenty of exceptions to what I've said - but this has been my general observation.

Far too small of a sample set to make a conclusion but on my personal blog Google beats Bing 2:1 in incoming traffic over the past three months. That actually corresponds roughly with a 70/30 split which would seem to corroborate the story However, my blog has far too few pages and way too little traffic to represent anything approaching a reasonable sample size.

Thanks for the clarification!

Why does it need location permission to display the camera roll? I don't want to give it location permission...

I thought their April Fools pranks were a little lacking this year- I guess that's why. They were saving their best one for today.

I've run into this same issue - trying to hack on a side project to accept payments and I don't have $100's / month to pay fees on a real payment processor like braintree or authorize.net - nor do I want to bother with a merchant account for a project I'm spending an hour or two a week on. You can go with Paypal or Google Checkout but both seem less-than-professional in my opinion. You're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

What I'd love to see is something like Square - but for online payments. I can link square to my normal bank account, there's no monthly fee, no merchant account to deal with, etc - just a per transaction fee.

Online payments are a nightmare for a small bootstrapped side project, and in least in my research there's no good solution.

Awesome, I'd also love that

What are you using for the summaries? Is it algorithmic or human? Perhaps mturk or similar?

Ya, there's actually a kickstarter project for technology much like this. (watch the video if you're curious) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/816924031/unlogo-the-cor...

In my ideal world I wouldn't need to futz with "e-signatures" or any sort of visual representation of my signature. I fail to see what's wrong with standard public key encryption - why can't I sign a document the same way I sign an email - with my keypair.

When it came time to renew my lease for my St. Louis apartment, but I was still in San Francsico, I had to do exactly what is described in this article. Sign a blank paper, photograph my signature, paste the photo into the PDF on the signature line, and send it back via eFax. How dumb is that? Its not secure in any way, and there's absolutely ZERO proof that it came from me. On the other hand if I sign it with my private key, there may not be a pretty handwritten copy of my name on the line - but there's fairly strong proof that I am the one that actually submitted the form.

Maybe there needs to be a fancy GUI on top of all of it that somehow links PGP signatures to images of handwritten signatures to satisfy people that are fixated on them, but to me, electronically signing documents with an honest-to-god handwritten signature is something that needs to die: yesterday.

How are those contradictory?

There's a huge financial incentive for discovering the next big thing precisely because carbon based fuels will not always be cheapest - One leads into to the other.

Also - if you surround text with asterisks you'll get italics.

As supply of carbon based fuels dwindles, their price will go up. The fact that carbon based fuels are currently cheaper than any alternative backs my argument. As soon as they aren't cheaper - the market will shift.

I do see where you're coming from - and I tentatively agree except on two points

if there is zero financial incentive to help out the Earth

I would argue that there's a HUGE financial incentive. The company/person that comes up with the "next big thing" in fuel sources is going to be incomprehensibly wealthy - I think that much is clear.

and it's cheaper to keep doing it

I think supply and demand almost guarantees that it will not always been cheaper. Maybe not on an acceptable timeline, but, its obvious that at some point it will become prohibitively expensive to continue to use fossil fuels.

I also feel like your rich people reference is sort of a catch-all FUD argument. Oh no, those terrible rich people are causing all the problems. There are plenty of people on this very forum that are probably rich by most standards. Surprisingly, that doesn't make them faceless evil monsters.

I'm surprised to see the comments here are overwhelmingly positive. Usually I feel like the hacker community tends to have a somewhat libertarian bent in a lot of ways, but I guess not here? I don't particularly understand why the government needs to step in and do this. If we've reached the peak oil inflection point by that time as some of the commenters here have speculated, would that not force essentially the same action anyways by driving the price of gas sky high? Additionally, it would provide a gigantic monetary incentive for whichever companies want to pursue alternative fuel sources. To me this seems to be something that will be sorted out by the market in time, rather than forced at the barrel of a government gun.

This is awesome! I recently moved my blog from wordpress to jekyll and had to figure most of this stuff out on my own. The hacker in me enjoyed it - but it sure would have been nice to have such a good reference at the time!

Obvious in retrospect. Thanks!

I would like a robust (official) API for HN before tags, I think it would have more direct uses.

I'm aware of the existing solutions such as the ruby gem or http://api.ihackernews.com/ but functionality is fairly limited, and it would be nice not to have to resort to just scraping it.

What happens if you receive a call mid flight? That seems like asking for trouble. Looks like an awesome device otherwise though!

That's a very good question, it may have to do with time of day or overall business of HN at the time the story peaked. For instance - my story held that position for that long with a little over 100 votes IIRC whereas the submission in this story has well over 200. Naturally one would expect the 200 vote submission to get more traffic despite having a similar frontpage lifespan. It seems as if position isn't the only determining factor in pageviews, time of day is also significant.

All of this is fairly obvious when you think about it, but nice to see data to back it up.

This seems pretty much in line with my own numbers. I had a post get to the front page for about ~36 hours and held one of the top few spots for a couple hours.

Over approximately 48 hours, I got ~35k uniques, approximately 18k were from Hacker News directly, with the bulk of the remainder coming from Twitter. Many of those twitter referrals came from people RTing HN aggregator feeds and the like though, so in reality probably more than that 18k number can be attributed to Hacker News.

The quote is taken directly from the article: in fact, it shouldn't even be available

Avoiding checkpoints if you're sober and don't want the inconvenience of waiting in line at a checkpoint for one. Also see the explanations of other people in this thread describing how announcing the locations of the checkpoints ahead of time can be more effective.

While I certainly don't condone driving while impaired - I feel like the government trying to outright ban legal technologies that allow citizens to avoid government authority sets a dangerous precedent.

this technology should not be promoted to your customers--in fact, it shouldn't even be available.

It shouldn't even be available? That sounds sketchy to me. I know slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but if this line of reasoning holds, couldn't you say the same thing about encryption? It enables people who wish to engage in illegal activities to avoid government authority and thus, shouldn't even be available? Scary.

Any way we could get this on a tshirt? I'd buy one.

Apologies for the lousy title - tough to fit the whole premise into 80 characters.

Well, there are subreddits for any particular political persuasion you may have - most of them have better discussion than the general /r/politics. There's /r/programming, but its a little light on content sometimes so I prefer:

/r/systems

/r/machinelearning

/r/netsec

/r/compscipapers

/r/coding

/r/compsci

/r/linux

/r/opensource

/r/csbooks

for the hacker part of me. There are also all sorts of other ones for any interests you might have - hard sciences, soft sciences, food, photography, sports, fantasy sports anything you'd like. Heres a spreadsheet with some other subreddits - its not nearly comprehensive, but it gives you an idea of what's out there.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=ttpCnxB3rD...