skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About half way through, I was thinking I'd like to read a debate between him and Tim Ferriss. Then:

"Q. What do you think of “The 4-Hour Workweek” [a best-selling book by Timothy Ferriss]?

A. Oh, forget it. I haven’t even read it yet. I don’t want to die of laughter."

Of course, this is also a man who:

"I semi-retired for about five years and that was probably something I won’t do again. They’re going to carry me out of here in my shoes."

Meanwhile, Tim Ferriss is traveling the world, not thinking much about money, learning languages, winning dance and fighting competitions, etc. If I were a small business owner, Ferriss' end results would appeal to me much more.

This was also a classic exchange:

"Q. You say, “Love your business more than your family.” What does your wife think of that?

...

Q. How many times have you been married?

A. This is my third marriage."

No comment necessary.
There's a nice consistency in doing it that way--it's very easy to think of cat as turning an "inert" file into a stream of data, each program as a function that applies a transformation to a stream with a particular kind of content, and the pipe as function composition (given compatible stream content). A very comfortable programming-like perspective, at least to me. (Pop quiz: What programming idiom closely resembles this "repackage content and apply sequential transformations" approach?)
Masses of Facebook users confuse Read Write Web blog for Facebook
Sounds to me like this guy has created a fantastically shitty place to work, and an equally shitty company to do business with. You can't get away with abusive behavior towards employees and vendors and expect to keep the good ones around - anyone that's worth the money has far too many options to put up with cheapskate asshats like this. If you treat everyone like shit, don't act surprised when only shitty people continue to work with you.

When a client starts dicking around with payments for work already provided and doesn't have a really good reason (yes, occasionally things happen and it's okay to be a little flexible if you're convinced it's on the level), my rate for future work doubles, and if that means that projects go elsewhere, so be it. Fighting over payments is possibly the most unpleasant aspect of providing services to companies, and I'd generally rather pass up the work than get into those fights.

Don't follow this guy's example - you're not important enough to afford to be this abusive, and frankly, neither is he.
A cornucopia of evidence
Motorola Devour to launch February 25th
People at khabrein.info also had some fun, then.
This comment thread makes me realize why phishing is so prevalent.
A Greek crisis is coming to America
Rather than "interests", you might be able to mine common fan pages via FB...
An interesting premise, but the real meat is unnecessarily delayed, I feel.
Is The City-ularity Near?
Twitter Hires Pixar Financial Chief, Preps for More Profitability
I went to checkout prmanna, and was turned off by the lack of design and the slowness. You mentioned in another comment you enabled caching, however, I don't see enough on the front page to require caching at all...Toss this comment aside if you are just testing the waters on a personal machine or something.

On a kinda of related note, I looked around and saw your other site, mightybrand, which caught my interest. However, it takes alot of trust to giveup a credit card before you ever see the product you might end up purchasing. I'd recommend you allow free trials without a credit card, and then once someone is hooked or reliant on the product, cripple the account and ask for money. At least this lets people try it! I walked away from the signup form the moment a credit card was requested. Don't follow this example with your prmanna site, if you do decide to go paid with it.
Rankmaniac 2010: Game With A Purpose (GWAP)
I would say if you had launched this 3 weeks ago, I'd deem you kind of the hill. But in light of HARO's relaunch, I think I'd drop/halt development until you decide what features make you different & better than the new incarnation of HARO.

As far as "something else I could use it for", what if you opened it up a bit and let people create their own lists? Then communities (both physical and virtual) could spawn their own lists and people of all walks of life could assume the role of journalist and/or source.
Sorry I missed your response. Many years ago I used Nokia 5110 and 6210 phones to do this. All that was needed was a serial cable, a list of the relevant AT commands and some Perl. Google should be able to fill in the gaps on how to do this, but if not just drop me an email (listed in my profile).
this will forever be up to the content producers rather than some centralized service. when artists make it easy for me to buy stuff from them I will often pay them rather than search for their stuff for free.
Privacy Fail: Google Buzz Follower Fix
Already discussed in this thread from HN main page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039
This article almost reads like a list of stuff NOT to do, in my opinion.

Of course, I am more of the "build something lasting, and of quality, and get on with your life" school than the "money over everything I'm going to die here at work" type.

I would not want to work for, with, against, near, or around this guy. He advocates CHEATING his vendors, to force them to basically give you money. Well, I suppose it would only be fair to not pay his company, right?

Anyone else have any feelings other than general disgust at the idea of working with this guy?
The goal is to reach your optimal profit point; where an increase in expenditures would result in a decrease of overall profits. For adsense, this requires careful/constant measurement/iteration.

More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization#Marginal_co...

Good article for the adsense illiterate though.
Thanks. I realized post-submit that I'd copied a "page 2" URL for that post...
Seriously?

You failed at that?

I'm intrigued because it always occured to me that you were a particularly fastidious person (with all due respect).

I often come accross issues that would seem for all the world to be a pointless artifact of an accepted convention. If this accepted convention is an acquired trait and one learns exclusivly from a limited meduim (irc frustrates me), I find it very curious that they persist as they sometimes act as a difficult barrier for a thorough understanding. This xargs thing, though I know almost nothing about it, seems to parallel similar problems I've encountered and I for one would be interested to hear your take on this (and HN in general).

Or just some food for thought for your next blog post maybe?
A lot of comments here seem to focus on how to use it to replace payments for an industry (like music) or to replace the subscription model for a webapp, and maybe that is a bit far-fetched but I can see a huge use in this for low-level stuff.

If I Google a programming exception and get an answer from a blog I can show them some love. I create a lot of small websites used by friends and people from school or some other social context and I can very well see myself sticking that button on all of them to help me buy an extra beer this weekend.

If it grows enough it might be able to fund some "real" stuff, but I don't think it should be put in that context from the get-go.
Spot on. The street looks quarter to quarter. Looking ahead for the next big thing is next to impossible for that mindset. This is where google got it right in setting up two classes of shares to keep wall street from messing up the big plans.
Introducing status.github.com
How Social Gaming is Improving Education
Why didn't he just end the interview right there?...
I think curiosity dies out for two reasons. The first is plain ol' brain chemistry. Secondly, when people get older and they sit down at a computer, they do so to get stuff done. When a kid sits down at a machine they explore without expectation of themselves. Adults have the expectation that - what they want to get done - will get done - and in a reasonable amount of time. However, some things do take more than a "reasonable amount of time", and frustration mounts because of this expectation. Soon, learning new things becomes associated with frustration. So relax a little, and explore a lot. Then read the docs. Or read the docs - and then explore. Just don't expect to be productive in the New-Software-Product in 2 hours.
His tough guy stance moved from being somewhat intriguing to laughable once I got to his comments about family and the subsequent admission of being married three times. The guy is not without his points, but he's definitely overstepped himself I think.
MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta Steps Down
Yes there is. If my company is not going to make any money from someone surfing on an iPhone, it will cost me money to test and make compatible, but I will realize no revenue from it.

The ad extremum argument might be, "yes, there IS a business case for only supporting IE 6."

Note - I'm a web dev and I try to code to standards, and test in the big 5 browsers. Sorry, I just don't have time or the need to make sure my site runs perfectly, everywhere (although I think better compatibility reflects better code, generally)
Wasn't the XBox hardware pretty much sold at cost to sell their games for their own platform? How many recent games does Microsoft have for the PS or Nintendo?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Myra-Cooper/100000171960096

This was the first profile I clicked on. I am speechless.
> something is wrong.

Yes, something is wrong, but in this case I wouldn't blame the website.
For your convenience here are continuations of the interview. The last two answer comment questions.

http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/talking-to-t...
http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/the-umbrella...
http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the-umbrella...
Well, the past 15 years have been about increasing the amount of data a person sees. Then it was about producing content yourself. Then it was about social networking, then producing content on those networks.

I think the search engines that are trying the social graph approach to ranking might be onto something. Using all my friends to refine my searches has some serious potential.

So, I'd say that I think the next big thing is filtering that firehose of data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

The next big thing might be some way to actually use the internet for something productive. Crazy talk, I know.
Two words: Opt in. Opt in to participating. Especially opt in to making previously private data public.

Opt in is the acceptable choice to pose to users. NOT opt out.

Bah.
The delays and bugs importing tweets, I think, will sort themselves out as it matures.

One really powerful thing I see is that it could serve as a mechanism to join the various microblogging (and, really, blogging as well) platforms into a page that I'm already going to have a tab open for.

I like having it in my gmail, that's for sure.
Like all postmodern authoritarian governments, theirs is based on the idea that in exchange for sacrificing freedom and autonomy, the population will get very rich -- so if they don't deliver on the wealth, they'll face a great deal of restiveness.

Mybe you're right but, I think that the reason most people think this is because they are disgusted with the Chinese system and therefore are quick to conclude that it is bad and failing in every other way. It is less table, for example.

The truth is that any system that fails to provide growth, internal peace or fails to meet expectations is probably at risk. Looking far enough into the future (say, 50 years), any system is at risk.
I have to suspect they will increase privacy controls shortly. Remember, this has only been out for 24 hours.

Plus, I trust google more than facebook (I think). You hear what Zuck said? (This is paraphrased): "If we built facebook today I would probably make everything public by default. People need to get over their information being out in the public."
Business Advice In Three Words
How many people here use GAE? Any pros/cons in your practice?
Low IQ among strongest predictors of cardiovascular disease
I speak only for my startup, but we are honestly so busy and broke that it would be difficult for us to allocate resources (even if it's just mind share) for something like this. We've chosen to focus on the product experience, as we solve a major pain in the industry, so customers thank us w/o little pins that cost us money and get thrown away.

Rereading that sounded a little harsh. It's definitely a good idea for some organizations, just not my startup.

OTOH, when I was at engineering school, Microsoft was very popular on campus because they gave out a super sized super ball with a light up inside. Gasp! That made them very popular, even amongst open sourcers.
Oh thanks, I was trying ctrl-enter in the search bar, not the address bar.
Well, Chrome has a ridiculously fast, lightweight browsing engine. I'd attribute that to Apple though, so…
yep. they could have at least supported SASL to have the login info encrypted and then transport the rest of the stream unencrypted, but they did not.
I don't understand this profit model.
You also can't follow a file with grep, but you can with tail. Doing so requires the grep option "--line-buffered", which sacrifices some performance, but not much compared to actually viewing the log data.

tail -f access.log | grep --line-buffered "GET /blog/post "
Sentiment in American (and other places) is cyclical. The populous has high points and low points. The top was just before 9/11 and we're pretty close to the low point (I'd say March did it). March sucked, it was the end of capitalism, guns were being stockpiled, and so on. We're on our way to a new cycle-- assuming you don't believe what zerohedge and reddit say.

America sucks sometimes. We've got deficits, health care problems, and a hijacked government. And yet with all this going around, immigrants are still begging to be let in.

One of the main advantages over China is that we own shit. We have material reserves in lumber, coal, natgas, etc. So when you hear that China's SWF just bought out another mining operation in Africa, it's not because their looking to difersify, it's that they don't have any decent natural resources of their own.

If you need to feel happy, don't read reddit or watch the stock market for a month.
D&D on the Microsoft Surface
They claim they're using DIGEST-MD5, so not quite plaintext, but a broken hash algorithm

http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=16742

http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=16741
It's annoying that once software products become extremely popular, the developers/companies often start adding features in an attempt to be everything for everyone. This in turn makes the software unusable, because the developers are too overloaded to properly maintain their once core business. Eventually it gets replaced by a new product, and the cycle repeats itself.
Well, my guess is that xargs simply does not accept a filename as the argument. This comes from reading the --help and grepping the manpage for "file".

The point was, when I used "cat file |", I knew it was going to work, and it did. When I tried to eliminate the cat by using the program's built-in ability to read a file, I had to read several manpages before determining that it was not possible. All because some tutorial says "cat is useless", when it clearly saved me much more time than the extra CPU time it used.

And if you are actually asking; xargs is just a utility to read command-line-arguments from stdin. `echo -e "foo\nbar" | xargs rm' === `rm foo; rm bar' (or depending on the xargs implementation; `rm foo bar'). It kind of reminds me of a "functor map" operation, where stdin is a functor (of command-line arguments), and command-line programs are functions. (I will now mention that xargs also does "join" on the "results" of the "function", which is very ... monad-like. But "Monads are teh awesome and everything is one" is my second-least-favorite Internet meme, so I will spare you. :)
In this vein, I find it unsurprising that he thinks it's difficult to find talented people.
but basically boil down to cultural risk-averseness.

That's not why Japan fell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble

Also, China may be the start of a new bubble-- there's more rooms being built in CRE than there are people.
Last year, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company around $25 million - about $15 million from Google and $10 million from Microsoft. These two deals were enough to make the company profitable last year.

I assume this is more than just the firehose?
Two more related links showing more:

http://vimeo.com/7132858?hd=1

and

http://vimeo.com/7762030?hd=1
Anyone use this for serious tasks? Issues?
Wait, it's not Tom?
"Site is currently unicorning."

I hope the unicorn does not become the new fail whale.
Brilliant.

I am ashamed to admit that I usually say "apt-get install libfoo.*", wait for the downloads to start, hit Control-c, and then cut-n-paste the package names I actually want onto the command-line.

It sounds bad when I type it out, but it's really not the most horrible thing ever. But your way is definitely like 83x better.
> I know that due to Gmail integration, I'm going to be using it - unlike Twitter or Facebook.

Funny - due to gmail integration, I'll never use it.

It feels to me like an issue of kool-aid. If you accept the assertion that everyone uses gmail, and that everyone loves the gmail interface, and that people keep gmail open all day (or at least check it fairly often), then Google Buzz seems like a great idea - a social network tied into all the services you use every day.

It breaks down when you start breaking those assertions. If you're not in Gmail every day (e.g. if you use an IMAP client), or if you don't like the interface (but you have to use it, e.g. Google Apps), or if you don't use gmail at all, then Google Buzz becomes a huge hassle to use.

I'd love to love Buzz, because I like awesome things, but it seems to me that the Buzz team just assumes everyone loves Gmail as much as Google does, and that's not going to pan out. They might think Buzz will be a draw to Gmail, but in reality Gmail will be a barrier to Buzz.
Well considering that the guys behind Github are Spock fans (I only assume this because of http://www.logicalawesome.com) it is perfectly reasonable. :)
> The cost of the rollout - which will involve physically laying cable to individual homes - he thinks will be somewhere between $3,000 and $8,000 per household.

Curious numbers considering Verizon spends ~$700 per home to connect their fiber network. I don't see Google spending more than 10x than what their closest competitors spend. Especially when they can cherry pick an easy market for the test.

Still, the capital expenditure is offset by revenues coming in. At $50/mo that's $600 in revenue coming in per year for each household. Finance the construction and pay it off with the monthly revenue.

The toughest part by far will be dealing with the existing players. No telecom company is friendly to a new entrant.
Facebook gets every complaint I get and it goes into their ticketing system. This is what they use to investigate potentially abusive apps.
Which is interesting, as Google certainly wants to commoditize operating systems. I'm sure Bing is intended to commoditize Google somehow, but I don't think it's working so far. Microsoft appears to be more in the role described for Sun in Joel's article, of the company trying so hard to sabotage potential competitors that they act against their own interest.

(Not nearly as spectacularly as Sun creating Java to spite Microsoft, and ending up commoditizing their hardware business. But I do not think Bing would look like such a good business strategy without the obsession of beating Google.)
For Google Buzz, Microsoft's SharePoint is a bigger target
New Photos of 9/11 Released
Really? Down to -2 when I post this. I would like to know what is so offensive about my comment.
Then what's the excuse for Japan being so much higher? They've had a lot of wireless access for quite a while, and web browsing on their phones for much longer. If that's taken into account, they should be significantly lower.
He's just following the formula for getting attention. 1. Watch for some news trend 2. Write an inflammatory post 3. Get more followers on Twitter
Well, I'm convinced! No more cons lists for me.

There are other benefits to programming techniques built around general catamorphisms, too! For instance, by abstracting all recursion into the catamorphism framework, the destructor function that does all the heavy lifting can often be easily expressed in a subset of the language that contains only total functions (that is, functions that always produce a valid result in finite time), allowing (comparatively) simple proofs of correctness.

This also pairs well with the mirrored approach of building (potentially infinite) data in an "on demand" manner. Abstracting the corecursion into the anamorphism likewise allows the constructor functions to often be total.

Turing-completeness is overrated!
On the one hand I do think that there is a long way to go in improving the usability of computer applications, and that "computer illiteracy" is to some extent merely a symptom of the fact that user interfaces aren't good enough yet.

On the other hand it would not shock me at all to learn that many of the confused commenters in this case are not just "computer illiterate", but illiterate sensu stricto, unable to (for example) parse the front page of a newspaper. Of course this is not to say that they can't learn - but user interface design can only go so far; at some point education is necessary.
Oh come on guys don't be mean!
That statistic would be more impressive if their download site worked properly. I've been stuck without Flash for a while now because I use Linux on a 64-bit machine, but the Flash 10.1 beta page has only dead links (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/).
Personally, if I type "facebook" into Google I am probably not looking for Facebook itself. I'm aware, though, that that probably puts me in a small minority.
Stop whining? When this guy stops posturing.
String Calculator in Python (special performance by Gary Bernhardt)
There's a difference between fiber to the driveway and fiber to the home itself. I'm guessing the $700 price is fiber to the driveway. Existing players can (and almost always do) run the last few hundred feet over copper even if they call it fiber to the home.

It seems absurd there's such a cost differential, but there you go. If you look at other types of hookups, you'll find they can be equally expensive. Sewer hookups are four digits usually too.

Now we don't know if Google will actually take this approach, but the numbers they quoted aren't completely absurd for some cases. Though I imagine Google has a few neat tricks planned which may upset some long-held assumptions.
All consoles (at least at launch, and for years afterwards) are sold at a loss, with profits made up on the games. The difference for Microsoft is that the XBox division has never made a profit, unlike Sony's or Nintendo's.

Note: the Wii is the only recent exception to this rule that I know of; the hardware has been sold at a profit since day one.
Non-growth (negative growth!) despite significantly more paying users and far more fiber lines than a few years ago? What have they been rolling all that fiber out for, if not to crank up the speed? Oh, wait. To sell the same speed to more people for the same price to make way more money.

I don't buy inefficiency. They're selling it at this speed for this cost because they can, just like cell phone companies. Which from a business standpoint makes perfect sense, but it's at the cost of screwing everyone else. Since significantly better businesses / strategies clearly exist if it's just a sign of business incompetence, why haven't the successful ones, say in Japan or Korea, migrated over here and decimated the market?