skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well said. Reminds me of Google's recent investment in power:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870485490457464...

Seems more strategic than humanitarian, though mainstream reporters rarely seem to see through it. That said, I like and admire a lot of what Googles does. And I think they have a lot of good intentions.

It's just that when you try to pass off your actions as humanitarian, when really that is not the whole story, it always comes back to bite you in the end (simply because any type of duplicity adds entropy into the system). Pulling out of China and missing those huge opportunities, financially and morally, is an example of something that might trip them up in the long run.
为什么美国不来个反GFW项目
你禁止国内访问外网的某些网站，
那我也以其人之道还治其人之身
把关键网站也对中国封掉，比如科技IEEE，教育，医疗等著名网站，把中国真正变成一个局域网。那时候详细国内的网民该疯了
Wow, this is the conspiracy theory right here: Google already knows that "glasnost" is coming to China sometime soon though their own sources and tries to capitalize on it by doing preemptive strike and playing for the right party in advance.

To continue economic growth eventually freedom of speech and some civil liberties would have to be adopted. Ironically, if it happens any time soon it will feed conspiracy theorists forever.
Eventually I'll release the whole dataset.
It's long, so for those who don't have the time to watch it, basically, everything you say can be used against you--even from a cop's "hazy" testimony.

I might have missed some other things, but that's what I got from it when I watched it several months back.
Aren't you working with them because you have something they want?
Do you have an extraordinary ability to take a company on 1 trajectory and steepen and accelerate it upward?

Can you spot a winner, or spot something you can make a winner?

Go and approach some companies and people that appeal to You.
It wouldn't make much difference actually, apart from greatly complicating the matching up of the Y axis.

The bigger issue is the fact that this is just everything that is posted and not flagged, so it is if you wish a view of the 'new' page, it has nothing to do with the 'home' page, I'll try to address that tomorrow.

As for the labelling and clustering, that was based on keywords in the title from a fair sized sample, and from the urls the links pointed to.

What I am specifically searching for is larger trends, smaller trends would be very difficult to catch using this method.

I'm actually quite surprised how even the graphs come out over the longer term, I would have expected more variation in the submissions.

So if there is a problem at this point in time I would conclude that the problem is not in the submissions, they seem to have roughly the same subjects over the long term as they did in the beginning, with the exception of a shift of focus away from 'startups' in the first year or so of operation.

I think that has to do with an influx of programmers / people interested in technology in general whereas originally most of the people on news.yc were active in the startup scene.
The caveat here is that since they are looking for pre-revenue startups they are basically using the process as a short-circuited recruiting/hiring system. You are not going to get big money out of the deal because you have nothing that they want to pay for other than your future labor: the "acquisition price" is your hiring bonus.
Aside from the built in stuff like email, calendar, contacts and maps with the traffic view I use the following every day:
shuffle as my to do list, and
StreamFurious (free version) for streaming audio.

The TripIt and Yelp apps were useful on my recent vacation.
Nothing, as long as it's the same person saying it.
I'm not arguing against what the iPhone did, but rather what it could do. While its introduction was revolutionary in making mobile development open, that doesn't mean it's ideal. We've reached a local maxima, but Android is most certainly an improvement in terms of openness.
Why wouldn't they pay the extra $60k/year to do the platinum level? 60k is nothing, and right now they're being cheaper than Google and MSFT, which doesn't look too great.

The only thing that really comes to mind is that in a year they can get more good press from "Facebook upgrades to platinum Apache sponsorship"
I'm going to preempt any complaints about this being a repost and say that this is information that everyone should know, and that it's a good thing if this gets reposted every so often as long as it reaches new people each time.
Weekend hack: outline grep
I think USA can also start a project "Anti-GFW",banned famous web site against China, for example: technology,education,medical,etc. make China a really internal network. I think Chinese people will be mad against the government of China then.
Please read the article to the end: "We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.". So no, they aren't willing to censor more. Wether they have more market share is an entirely different matter. It's about the decision to pull out of China. This could be the right or the wrong decision, only the future knows, but the decision has a big symbolic significance, that's what everyone is astonished about.
Part 2 of visualizing logfiles with MongoDB, MapReduce, Ruby & Flot
I hadn't heard of North Face till this. OTOH now I also know of South Butt.

Free publicity for all. Makes me wonder if the Streisand Effect is something that some companies actually strive towards.
What gave you the impression that their investment in power was humanitarian? Where did Google claim that their decision in investing in green power was altruistic?

Read Google interview here regarding investment on green power: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/qa-googles-gree...

They are very upfront about this being an investment in R&D where the primary focus will be to be carbon neutral for their data-centers and offices, which might lead to other business opportunity.

Just because you have a wrong interpretation of actual events, doesn't make them wrong.
Sounds like a business opportunity.
While I have no doubt that elements of this are true and certainly can't argue with the basic premise, it casts a disturbing level of doubt on the meaning and practical viability of the concepts of:

1. Presumption of innocence until proven guilty;

2. Proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; since when is the lack of a logical impossibility that someone may have done something sufficient to obtain a conviction?

3. Witness credibility; it seems like a witness that "cannot clearly recall" what someone said but speculates as to its exact content anyhow cannot be taken seriously, and is editorialising answers;

4. Hearsay - if statements made by police in favour of the defendant are hearsay, why are not statements of similar nature and anatomy (e.g. structurally similar claim, but opposite conclusion) made in support of the prosecution not also to be struck as objectionable hearsay?
This is:

- (a) Not hacker news
- (b) Very old
- (c) Has been posted here in comment threads many times
- (d) Quite possibly crap *

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723043
Google Just Says No To China: Ending Censorship, Due To Gmail Attack
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/18/100118fa_fact_...

If you are a paying digital subscriber, you will be able to access the article. Don't know if you can share the full article online without it.
Significant Differences Between IP and Traditional Phones
To place a long-distance call on an IP phone, dial 8 + 1 + area code + 7-digit phone number. After the tone, enter your 6-digit authcode.
Can you describe the Swedish process ?
天朝的堕落！！
That would have to include some points threshold, lots of spam gets flagged as well.

The biggest indicator of something being 'populist' but not 'HN' is when it gets killed after receiving more than 10 upvotes.
Ruby-NG: Code of Horror
google's listen is fantastic for driving down the freeway! searchable and queueable podcasts that you can save locally for when you have no cell service. Not sure how many can be queued up and cached, but I've done two no problem.

Also, you'll want a task killer app, since you'll find that apps never "go away" until the system runs out of memory causing android to take over and kill some programs. My favourite so far is "Taskpanel". Additionally, for recording a GPS track, use "My Tracks" which is simple and enjoyable enough to use, lets you email the file to yourself when done.

"gpsstatus" is fantastic - the must have for a tinkerer! Also usable as a level, so no need to get one of the trillion level applications.

Believe it or not, the flashlight apps are very handy to have on the desktop, as they keep the phone from sleeping/dimming too soon.

HANDS DOWN the best application if you do any amount of texting or MMS, is 'handcent sms'. It is a fantastic program, and one of the nicest Android programs I have used. Can't praise this enough!

For twitter, 'twidroid' is my favourite. I don't do too much twittering, so am not sure the competition, but this one is speedy, feature filled and never bogs down my phone. You'll find that isn't always the case with android apps, so twidroid gets a nod for this (as well as handcent, it is rock solid).

If you use ampache at all, my buddy Kevin created an android app to stream from your ampache server. It's called 'amdroid' and is pretty decent. It's definitely a work in progress but it's fully functional.

'phonalyzer' is cool for seeing stats on your phone usage. Much better than any carrier specific graph on a webpage, and it's small enough to not worry about having it installed and taking up space. It's definitely what I call a "toilet" app, because that is about when I use it, however, it's nice to know my usage here and there! I guess that is praise, because it means I don't have to spend hardly any time using the app to get benefits from it.

depending on the android version/carrier/handset manufacturer, you may want to install 'spare parts'. It's a few more settings not found in the settings menu, but I think this only supplements handsets running android 1.5, but I am not sure off top of my head.

Finally, root your phone and install 'wireless tether for root users'. I kid you not, it's the most useful app i've used. You can't find it in the market, but a simple google search will get it for you, and you can just click the link from the android browser to install it. It has access control lists, WEP (better than nothing) and multiple concurrent client support. I love this application, but of course, use at your own risk as you have to root your phone to use it (not a problem for most handsets), and you may run up data charges fast if you don't have unlimited.

That's my main list, anything else has been tinkering. These have been installed/reinstalled on my phone since I have had an Android device.
According to GiagOm “if the Chinese government bans the search giant, then Google could be walking away from about $600 million in 2010 revenues.”

http://gigaom.com/2010/01/12/how-much-will-it-cost-google-to...
Few people take a stand for human rights.

Fewer corporations take the stand.

Kudos Google.
Lowering Cholesterol Naturally Is The Safe Way
What is standard nettiquette? Cluttering a site used by hundreds of people to ask an admin question to an admin? Yes the poster said he doesn't want to clutter his inbox, but regardless of want isn't that the right place for his question?

I know pg is PG, but that doesn't seem relevant to this.
Interesting. Some quantitative proof to support comment rule #7.
I think you meant "Learn a new programming language in 2010" since Haskell is on that list. I cannot imagine learning Haskell to any "useful" degree in anything less than 3 months.
I don't get what he mean with 'sporadic', it looks to me more like 'systemic' would be the applicable word.
Some spikes but nothing too bad. Did the www.google.com hostname resolve to the same host over that whole period ?
So what this means is that all searches to Baidu are most likely government monitored.

I remember watching a Frontline documentary about China in the 2000s. It profiled one guy who kept on moving to more egregiously luxurious apartments, as his government contracts grew (he ran an advertising agency and as the Frontline series had concluded he had landed a major contract for Beijing 2008 and was moving into the penthouse of an elite residence.)
I'm not quite ready to draw that conclusion, more work needs to be done for that. Stay tuned :)
Where did you read that?
I thought it was something like that, but not having the proper instrument may have thwarted my rather amateurish attempts to do the same with other wind instruments.
Damn, I downvoted you by accident (pg should really make it so that you can undo votes, the arrows are right next to each other). I wanted to upvote you because I'm grateful that it got reposted as this is the first time I've seen this excellent video.
High School Q&A board opening tonight
One of the difficult areas for high school students trying to self-teach is to move past the "teach yourself programming" books and into actual software development; the books and discussions aimed at software development are usually geared towards practicing programmers or university students. Towards that end, I have launched the programming2 community on Dreamwidth.org, a webspace where high school students can feel comfortable asking learner questions/discussions and getting responses. Programming2 is about the next step past simply learning how to code.
Any idea why Chrome>String is such an outlier? I would have imagined quite the opposite from Chrome actually.
That interview isn't bad. But take the first sentence of this article:

'Google Inc (GOOG.O) has asked the main U.S. energy regulator for authority to trade electricity in the wholesale market, which will make it easier for the Internet search giant to obtain renewable energy to power its huge data centers as part of its green initiative.'

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN086928720100108?type=mar...

Most other articles in Google News under the heading for 'google power' begin similarly.

http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&cf=all&...

A more factual, 'actual events'-oriented article might begin:

'Google Inc (GOOG.O) has asked the main U.S. energy regulator for authority to trade electricity in the wholesale market, which will make it easier for the Internet search giant to obtain cheap energy.'

I.e., real reporting shouldn't be about what Google 'plans' to do, or how good their intentions are. Real reporting is -- what have they done? What they've done is apply for status as a wholesale trader of energy so that they can get energy more cheaply.

Maybe they have good intentions with green energy, maybe they have good intentions in China. But it's easy to confuse their intentions and miss what actually has been done.

Though on the other hand, perhaps you're correct. Perhaps Google makes no claims to be 'humanitarian' or 'altruistic' etc. But by trying to pass the thing off as 'green' and 'carbon-neutral', it's easy to give them a free pass, i.e., some sort of unique status that will allow them to get energy more cheaply than everyone else.
Google’s China move: don’t be played
The Product Group, New Year, New Opportunities & Thanks All Around
I think gmail's attach is pretty basic. Just like any other mail program.
Start-Up Gambles With Free Texting in India
+1

*(a) Hmm, I think you're right. And I share the general fear
this forum will become too general, and am not a fan of acrobatics
to define every post as 'for hackers'.
So I will delete this
posting. I hope you've flagged it.
(b) Age of content doesn't directly matter, so much as relevancy.
I believe this talk is still relevant... but not to HN.
(c) I only saw it recently.
(d) Maybe somewhat, I'd like to hear grellas thoughts on it. It was
certainly entertaining.

edit: Ah, it was killed by the time I went to delete it.
Google can be an exit strategy for entrepreneurs.
While I am glad the author has liberated himself from the emotional distress of cancer through blind optimism, he has shown himself to be a blithering ignoramus in matters oncological.

I certainly hope that his prognostications for 2030 carry a hint of truth, but they seem to suggest that one type of neoplasm in a single body of tissue is like another - e.g. all brain tumours are magically alike, treatable by the same means! Nothing could be further from the truth. It is difficult to suppose that the treatment of such a thing is going to be a mere outpatient clinical procedure with a high success rate and few side effects.

It is precisely because cancers are a broad category of runaway cellular processes (united only by their invasiveness and lack of negative feedback into the growth process) that are highly distinct in every which way that the concept of a "cure" for "cancer" as such is an absurd one to anyone who has the slightest clue about how cancers operate.

It does seem that targeted therapy is the most successful avenue to pursue, but I don't think the author has any idea of the sheer amount of even the most common and relatively simple "targets." I think he's imagining that there are a dozen, maybe two; liver cancer is cured one way, brain cancer another way, retinal blastomas another way, prostate cancer yet another way... that's just not how it works. Each one of those corpuses of tissue can develop many kinds of tumours, and some of them can develop practically innumerable kinds.

But hey, far it be from me to rain on anybody's parade - I'm not an oncologist, and have no life sciences background. Let's hope I'm wrong viz. my opening sentence and that I'm just a pretentious, know-it-all twit, and that he's right.
self-update: there's apparently some plugin development kit that will allow OpenGL ES access.

"We have been working closely with a handful of partners as we refine the PDK's design and initial implementation, but we'll be expanding soon. A public beta release of the PDK is scheduled to be available to all webOS developers in March, followed by an official release in the first half of 2010."
Something special must have been happening, because right now a train ticket from Chicago to St. Louis leaving in 12 hours is $65. If you can wait until 7:00 pm, it's only $23.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049430

I can't help but wonder if you wrote that yourself or not.
Exactly. Google is a publicly held corporation, the board is required by law to operate in the best interests of Google.

If keeping Google.cn would make Google a more profitable business, they would keep it. Granted the board can justify just about anything it does so it is not out of the realm of possibility that this is strictly based on morals. It just isn't likely.
Rahul Google - Goglogo Search
Flashy Graphs Sans Flash
I really recommend you to get the Readability bookmarklet from Arc90: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

I don't use it that often, but when I do, it works great!
The Google.cn Decision Is Definitely Not About IP
Ask HN: Payment systems?
I need to implement a three-party transaction model, where I will facilitate payment between a buyer and a merchant and charge a fee to process the transaction. I am neither the buyer nor the merchant, say I am the developer who hosts the merchant’s product. Which payment gateway has APIs to support this payment system?
No. You think tax preparers are specifically the ones keeping the current tax regime in place?

No. It's Congress. We will never have a simplified tax code, ever. Not a flat tax, not a fair tax, not a VAT, nothing.

Because Congress will never give up the power to give and take tax breaks. It's the power to give tax breaks and pork that keeps the pig-trough filled to overflowing.
Amazon Flexible Payment
Microsoft: "Android is free like a puppy"
Skydrive explorer [http://skydriveexplorer.com/index.php] offers integration with Windows Explorer
Budget ecommerce hosting with cirtex web hosting
No suggestion was made that all forms of cancer are the same. But to the best of my knowledge, all cancers have distinctive cancer cell surface chemistry - which may vary somewhat between individual genotypes, but is generally similar for clades of cancers between individuals. In the targeted paradigm, cancer research is a matter of identifying that chemistry, and then programming your hunter-killers to that scent.

These two jobs - (a) take an individual's cancer biopsy and identify its signature, or match it to an established library of signatures and (b) construct a homing mechanism for that signature - are core competencies for today's cutting edge biotechnology.

There are many, many examples from the past few years of researchers doing exactly what you scoff at in the laboratory, for specific cancers in laboratory animals.

In summary: one technology platform, many different implementations, a large library of cancer signatures built from the results of individual therapies.
I would suggest less capitalization in the title, it makes the place feel like AOL :)

If you wish to facilitate the payment then you need to become an IPSP. The specific thing to look for is what it takes to become PCI certified. You will need to hook up with a gateway (such as FirstData or PaySquare) to get your charges processed.

Imho you are on the wrong path and would do better to simply apply to an existing IPSP as a customer and get a merchant account. That way you sidestep all the things that have to do with certification, you only need to pass the merchant accreditation, which is a whole lot easier and less costly.

Examples of IPSPs that you could apply to are epoch, ccbill and vxsbill.

Good Luck.
No going through security... until a terrorist attack by "The Train Bomber" grips the nation.
One of the guys I went to grad school with a was just an obsessive worker. He was the kind of person who could not sleep if a problem was left unsolved. I remember thinking that it would take more effort for him to work as (relatively) little as I did, than for me to work as hard as he did. He also finished a couple years earlier than most of the people we started with...
Does not allow third party processing, which is what he is asking for:

> I will facilitate payment between a buyer and a merchant and charge a fee to process the transaction.

So his customers could apply to FPS but he can not do that unless he is the merchant.

Amazon does not allow that because they want to sit in that chair and do not want the 'real' merchants to sit at arms length.

I believe that Paypal does allow you to do this, iirc that's the reason etsy chose them for their financial needs.

Paypal is very finicky to deal with though, especially if you hold money in your account that is intended for third parties.

And if your account would ever be blocked then you would be in serious trouble with your merchants.