skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real question here is, who do you recommend as an alternative. Thankfully, the domain name registrar market is not monopolized by GoDaddy, but I have never used anybody else.
" If you don't believe me, just find a liberal arts major and talk for 10mins. He/she will be dumbstruck that you think otherwise. A common example with such people is how Newton's theory was "wrong" and Einstein's theory "corrected" it, clearly showing there's no absolute truth."

What I've often seen is a sort of "convenient relativism" about truth.

I've known people who, for some things, claim there's no real truth, it's all relative, you cannot prove or know anything, etc. (Which makes me wonder how they know you can't know anything, or why, if it's all relative, my belief in an objective universe is not just as valid as any other belief.)

And they'll occasionally toss this charge at matters of science. Yet in their day-today life, they happily take aspirin, ride elevators, use electricity, and put gas in their cars, all with the belief that these things will follow a known and predictably consistent behavior.
See these for reference:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132138

http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=966555

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

Still, Slicehost is certainly one of the best VPS providers.
Makes sense, and cheaper for you. Are you hitting a limit as to the number of API requests you can post? I had someone try it out and I didn't receive a DM, but maybe it was because they put a period after my name.
Well, if you're interested in programming 2d running games like Mario or Canabalt with cocos2d, I'd be interested in a partnership. I have a powerful cross-promotion network to push any game. Also have some funds for purchasing graphics, and have hands for manual labour.

I think the side-scroller market is a good area to be in in games.
There might also be the option of going to graduate school and working on graphics. A language for geometry/scene graphs sounds like a plausible research project.
IMO, your passion is far too broad. You like graphics, programming language design, research, and three other things.

To be brutal, it sounds like what you're in love with is noodling around, with no particular deliverable.

As Jobs said "real artists ship".

My two pieces of advice:

1) keep honing your ideas until you've got something that is:
* bounded
* achievable
* of interest to someone else
...then try to develop and productize that

2) in the mean time, keep the lights on and Ramen cooking by doing some contract work. It's a challenge to keep booked up 40 hrs/week, even if you're trying, so you shouldn't have trouble keeping it down to 20 hrs/week, and working on your passion in the other 20-40.
That, plus they obviously they wouldn't alter or remove all bad reviews. That would be brain-deadeningly obvious.
Officers of the company are the company, legally.

But the cause of Freedom is not best served by holding up "freedom to laugh at retards" as a fundamental right.

Let's not forget that Google is perfectly technologically capable of filtering its content - and we know that because it does it in China.
For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much?
I hate when people downvote decent questions.
This gets said every time Firefox comes up here, so I have to finally ask what I've been confused about for a while: exactly what things are faster that you like so much?

I've used both Firefox and Chrome and all of the things I do more than once a day (open new tabs, close tabs, open new windows) are so fast on both that I can't really tell the difference. Is it stuff like that? Or are there web apps I'm not using that are noticeably faster on Chrome? I'm genuinely curious what I'm missing out on.
Startup Bloom Energy Debuts New Fuel Cell on 60 Minutes [video]
That was a very entertaining read. That blog is going on my reading list for sure.
There is a cognitive dissonance between what students are told by professors about an academic career, and the opportunities available for academic job candidates after having spent several years earning a PhD in their field of choice. I was lucky. I confessed once to an anthropology professor that I was considering switching from CS to anthropology, and he dissuaded me. A linguistics masters student also encouraged me to continue my study of CS. Now at least I enjoy what I do to a certain degree, can feed myself and my family, and can read all the books I want about anthropology and linguistics.
As a kiln user, I'll back up Jason's statements here. Working with it day-to-day, it's not really any different from using the open source version of hg, but the web UI and code reviews are pretty damn cool.
Of course, this is exactly the point - some countries are in fact visualizing alternatives to this sort of free-for-all of 'obnoxious shit' being posted and consumed on the Internet. Why has YouTube been blocked at one time or another in dozens of countries? Say what you will but its not all 'censorship'.

Admittedly, enforcement could be expensive and difficult; so, what? It's a cost benefit analysis for the business; either they can survive under the rules they we can't. And here's the rub that Google knows: if YouTube had to survive under these rules of decency and morality, it probably couldn't survive. So they spend all their time and lawyers fighting any efforts that promote decency and morality.

Someone wondered why I'm posting this point of view while reading this blog, with a new account; it is because I recently had an experience that changed my thinking. I have a 7 year old son that enjoys YouTube, particularly Star Wars videos. A few days ago he was searching for something star wars related and one of the previews that came up has a Brazillian girl giving someone a blowjob - this is on YouTube. Of course, I find this offensive; you cannot allow 7-year olds to type innocent queries into YouTube and be shown videos of women giving blowjobs. Suddenly, YouTube turned from a fun thing to do to a poision to be controlled.

A word about 'censorship' and 'freedoms' - like Italy, I'm just not buying it. Freedoms on the Internet are exchanged; you may allow YouTube the freedom to stream pornography or violence into every household but then the householders (like myself) have their freedoms restricted by having to contend with these sort of things. And when you have a family-oriented culture like China or maybe Italy that has some culture to preserve and they say 'you're guilty of a crime in this country because you violated our moral or ethical values' then in my opinion you must respect their decision, much more so than a huge corporation solely out to make money. I have been in IT for 16 years and I am simply flattened by individuals who use these technologies every day, and fail to see, acknowledge, or support any sort of curbing of these items when it impacts other important, indeed almost fundamental, values that allow society to operate at all.
The real revolution in Africa happenned when it opened up to the world. Africa has always been completely isolated from the rest of the world till very recently. Recently, cellphones arrived, internet arrived, equal access to the information on par with the Western countries arrived.

And the results are impressive: most of the wars have ended, the age of coups is over, african professionals are going back, business is now being done with countries from everywhere.

Africa is not yet a good investment opportunity, but it is the best market for physical goods at the moment.
As an artist, I can offer a third option: don't try to make money doing what you love.

I laid out a budget that would keep me alive --- food, shelter, etc. Essentially, what it would take to be personally ramen-profitable.

Then I made a budget of what it would take, minimally, to keep me doing what I think is important.

I added them together, then looked for a job that wouldn't exhaust me, and would leave me with that much money. For me, that amount is below the poverty line --- so it's not that hard to find a fast-food job that will keep me above my personal happiness line without wasting too much of my energy. And when I sell some of my art, that money is bonus.

I think that if you've discovered the contribution you want to make to society, and if society isn't willing to pay you for it, then don't, for the love of god, cave in! Just give society something that it wants (burgers flipped) and leave your mind and body available for what you know is important.

And if something better comes along, you have no reason to regret leaving your job. You can always get another just like it.

[edit] If tjic is right, and he might be, then I am wrong. If you're going to do what I just said, be sure that the product of your passion will be worth removing your talents from the market.
This looks good from an overall why you should learn it point of view and also to help you with the lingo that you should know:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-guide-to-versio...

For IT people you should have your /etc/* files under revision control to track any changes and easily roll back changes that break your system. I actually think there are some tools that are specifically for this purpose and not the general purpose SVN/git/hg variety but I cannot think of them off the top of my head.
Correct. If having user service passwords stored in our database bothers you, log into a shell account and change the password with "passwd". We'll pick up the new password hash on our next user config and store the password internally as "changedbypasswd".

You can also view MySQL user passwords by clicking on the username in the panel (https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=goodies.mysql). This shouldn't be a big deal, though, as you have to store the passwords in the clear in config files anyway.
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #14 -- VALGOL

VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the
industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y*KNOW.
Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and =TOTALLY operators. Other
operators include the "California booleans", AX and NOWAY. Loops are
accomplished with the FOR SURE construct. A simple example:

LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START
IF PIZZA	=LIKE BITCHEN AND
GUY	=LIKE TUBULAR AND
VALLEY GIRL	=LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2
THEN
FOR I =LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100
DO*WAH - (DITTY**2); BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT)
SURE
LIKE, BAG THIS PROGRAM; REALLY; LIKE TOTALLY(Y*KNOW); IM*SURE
GOTO THE MALL

VALGOL is also characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For
example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the
message GAG ME WITH A SPOON! A successful compile may be termed MAXIMALLY
AWESOME!
There's three possibilities here:

1. They always intended to add the new 'explicit' category, and the recent 'adult' app purge was a stupid and ham-handed way to force developers to change over.
2. They are rapidly back-pedaling after seeing the hue and cry that arose from the app purge.
3. They're not going to do it, and this is just a trap for unwary porn peddlers.

Personally I think #2 is the most likely, but none of these are particularly flattering for Apple. At the root of it, they were either being malicious, stupid, or some mixture of both.

Plus, no matter which one it is, Apple owes an apology to the developers that had their apps pulled. Suddenly pulling the rug out from under your developers is a bad business practice, no matter who those developers are.
Good stuff. For those who haven't seen them, the Periodic Table of Videos (http://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos#p/u/17/pPdevJTGAY...) are entertaining.
Having passion is not enough, you should work something.

I love philosophy and wants to do some free mind thinking, but I couldn't do it all the time. I just take few hours each month, I like playing with Dog, it takes few other hours also.

So do whatever thing you like, there's no problem with it. If you don't want to get a 9-5 job, that's Okay, work as a freelance.

You can make a lot building apps for iphone, software for windows and services for the web. This will make you busy and you'll work on things you love since it's you who decide which thing to build/code and you are taking %100 profit from it (and it's yours!! yay)

In your free time (will depend on your earnings), you can either build the next big thing (startup) if your dream is to become a millionaire, or just spend time studying gravity and other things you may love.
Worrying about scalability and acquisition is not prudent at this stage, it's a waste of time IMO. Odds are that nobody will use your CMS.

That being said, my advice is to get something up and running now and fail fast. I'm not a 37signals fanboy, but I think you should read: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php

Your problem right now is to figure out what customers want. You need a product up and running. If you have a (good) HTML/CSS/JS/PHP developer on board who knows Drupal, he can probably get a Drupal+CCK prototype of your customized CMS up and running in a couple weeks, if not days. Who cares if Drupal isn't your long term solution? It just doesn't matter.
That's right! You can't even ride it!! And just you try playing segway polo on it!!!! Useless!!!!!! ;)
can people not downvote genuine questions below 0, this was not trolling, downvoting is not for general disagreement.

xul which is used by firefox to render the ui, while being really easy to use and modify, is incredibly slow, firefoxs renderer is also a little slower, but I think most of it is on the responsiveness in the ui, most people attribute this to the different javascript engines but actually they are very similiar in speed.
Chrome is significantly faster on a resource-limited computer. I use it on my EeePC for that reason. On more powerful computers I don't notice enough of a difference to feel the need to switch.
I use AppEngine, Heroku, and Amazon AWS often - for me, the very rare outages are just noise.

Seriously, sometimes (not often but it happens) my bank's web portal, my health insurance's web portal, etc. are down -- not the end of the world, just wait a while and try again.

Web portal outages are not life threatening. I am willing to trade very rare outages for ease of use and inexpensive deployment platforms.

Q: how many people here have businesses where a few hours a month of your web portal outages (if that) seriously affect your bottom line profitability?
Ask HN: Review my dispoable email & spam tracking app
That's not snobbery, it's simple (but understandable) inaccuracy. Most people don't know that "Prof" is a job title, "Dr" is a qualification (specifically a degree). You can be either without the other - I know a Prof without a doctorate.

It's akin to confusing a linguist with a polyglot, a top-level accountant with a research mathematician, or someone who writes HTML with someone who programs in Python. They are simply different. Not getting it right is either a mistake, or a demonstration of lack of knowledge of the difference.

EDIT: Added the first parenthetical clause.
Ask HN: Good (computer) networking books?
Hacker News,

I have a fairly decent ad hoc knowledge of various network protocols which I would really like to coalesce into a thorough understanding of the common implementations of at least layer 4 and down in the OSI model. Is there a concise, thorough, and clear book (or group of books) that I could read to help me attain this goal? I'd consider something with the writing style of K&R to be ideal.
You usually wait for the person to move over on their own. If they don't, you flash your headlamps once or twice.

I'm not talking about speeding up to someone's car within 2 feet of their bumper and flashing your headlamps on and off constantly for 5 minutes before giving up and passing on the right.
I don't use windows much but msysgit is good. I was pleasantly surprised with it. The GUI is a bit fractured in terms of what it can do but the command line is competent.

For a commercial product that needs to be integrated in the windows world like kiln I would have made the same decision that Joel did. (Though I prefer git overall)
thanks for mentioning BSA :) I own/run BSA and would be happy to answer any additional questions people have, if interested (not looking to hijack this thread, just offering to explain more about BSA if people have questions).
Productivity Showdown: Python/Django vs C#/ASP.NET
It's not just that it's a lot of energy, but also that it's being released all at once, and into just 200g of matter. It's not all heat energy, either; an uncomfortably large portion of the energy is released as an explosion!
This is a bill that proposes to give US venture capitalists the overt ability to terminate the residency status of founders and their families.

Not only do you have to get sponsored by an effectively arbitrary class of financiers (it is possible that Warren Buffet wouldn't qualify under these terms, depending on whether he has personally made 2 equity investments last year), but even if your company creates 10 US jobs and is cash-flow-positive, if you don't raise $1MM in capital or make $1MM in revenue, you're out.
Everyone is a "volunteer reviewer" on Yelp. That's how the site works. If Yelp actually told this guy to stop writing reviews, he should post the email and it would be #1 on Hacker News, etc.
This has gotten so much more advanced since the days of the Firefox plugin. I just installed it, and I have to admit, getting rid of all the UI cruft that adorns normal browsers is really a welcome change. I know Emacs pretty well, so using it comes naturally. Thanks for posting this; I'd written off the extension version, but the XULRunner based version is fabulous.
We don't. Well we do

I agree... :) it would be nice for all of us to be able to "publish" ourselves... but for the most part, even if we did have better low-power home servers and enough bandwidth to serve the content, most people won't be able / willing to set it up. So, I think in general, the mass-public will be stuck with the Bloggers and YouTubes of the world.
Yes, but what's important is the rate. Power is the measure of calories per hour (or joules per second). Fat (and food in general) is extremely energy dense, but that energy can only be released relatively slowly.

This is the same reason why TNT is used for demolition while gasoline is used for engines. Gasoline delivers 15 times the energy of an equal weight of TNT, but TNT's energy release is much more rapid (it can also do so without air, the other big reason for blowing things up with TNT).
professor evaluations weighted somewhat

When universities say teaching is "weighted somewhat" in tenure decisions, it is code for "weighted barely at all". They say this to deflect the (usually valid) criticism that most professors are at best mediocre instructors. In practice, tenure decisions are based overwhelmingly on research. (Incredibly, this is true even at most "liberal arts" colleges.)

In The Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman reprints an essay with a brilliant analysis of academia, including a withering critique of the university system and its misalignment of professor/student incentives. The author of the essay? Adam Smith. (Yes, that Adam Smith.) This is not a new problem.
The Art of the Start (2006)
It certainly smells like #2. The app store is extremely poorly managed. This has all the hallmarks of having been poorly thought through---a snap decision made by some higher ups and then implemented in a very rough fashion by people who blindly obey such orders.

My favorite part of the rejection letter is the closing paragraph, starting: "Thank you for your understanding in this matter." It's quite presumptuous of them to axe my app without any warning whatsoever and then assume they have my "understanding". Insulting, to say the least.
Chinese Currency Reserves Have Limited Uses in a Domestic Crisis or Collapse
I personally know of somebody who had their review deleted on Citysearch. She felt violated. If Citysearch does it, I wouldn't be surprised if their competitors do the same.
Sorry to see you downvoted. Seems like a reasonable question.

For me, Chrome starts and renders my default page faster than Firefox. Noticeably faster.

I'm not sure if, when following a link that one is faster than the other, since server response time is a factor. However, I've had far fewer cases of of frozen pages with Chrome, and have never had all my tabs and browser instances of Chrome get locked up because of one page page. Firefox, on the other hand, is monolithic in that way.

There is one feature of Firefox that is essential for me: invoking firefox from the command line (or a shortcut) starts a new instance.

Chrome seems to (usually) want to find an existing instance and open a new tab. I seriously do not want to have a single browser instance with all my tabs; I prefer to have multiple instances with related tabs.

It's especially annoying when kicking off a link in chrome opens a tab in an instance in some other virtual desktop. :(

OK, Chrome rant over.

Chrome has gotten better about supporting bookmarklets and greasemonkey, key aspects of my Firefox use, and overall memory use is much better for me with Chrome.
The title is a bit misleading :)

The cultofmac post's real title says "Is Apple Preparing To Add An ‘Explicit’ Section To The App Store?" , not that they are going to add one
For now, there is no evidence that Apple plans to do so.
I hope what mseebach is predicting happens, but I do think something will eventually end up happening.

Every week it seems I hear of impossible to enforce laws trying to regulate behavior or thought. (just today, trying to make open source using countries suspect, everyone is probably a federal criminal, etc) Trying to fight technology with regulation (drm, dmca, etc). I hear misleading announcements every morning on my commute saying the police have the right to search me without cause. (They can't unless you agree, yet.)

In the past 10 years things like this seem to be escalating and technology seems to have sped it up. Loosely and with a grain of salt; Content filtering and monitoring lead to tor, unjust laws lead to the EFF and ACLU, censorship of news lead to wikileaks, etc.

People will eventually get radicalized, wont they?

Honestly I probably don't know my history very well, maybe this is just SOP for humanity, a constant back and forth.

Just do us a favor, if something does start happening and you do opt out, don't make it harder on the rest of us. ;-)
UK to introduce "photograph a cop, 10 years in jail" law
How do you get kids interested in science? With chemistry, it's always been to "blow shit up!" Fond memories of my HS chem teacher because of his penchant to do just that. I had way more fun with computers, but chemistry was an option (until organic chemistry in college...shudder).
Bloom Energy makes fuel cell, Google and Ebay are first customers
ok, github here: http://github.com/bluesmoon/404kids
That's why he was laughing at the fact that a company is apparently willing to sell and ship it in kilos.
@ycombinator
An Indepth Look At Twitter Usage
Most people don't assume that this sort of thing could be against a law, since it's a government doing it to them; they just glower and pay the tickets.
By "overt ability to terminate the residency status..." you mean that they can opt to not further invest, right?

I couldn't see anything that gave them the ability to otherwise control the status of the visa holders; but it's possible that I missed some nuance in the bill.

I think the goal is to prevent abuse of loopholes as much as possible - stopping corporations from becoming "investors" in order to circumvent the H1-B hiring caps.

I agree with you about the requirements for continuation being overly lofty though.
Google bosses convicted in Italy over a user video (that shows bullying)
We got @ycombinator.  What do you want to hear about?