skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I think about it now, it seems to me that the author is into something here. Everyone cries that this is attack of the freedom of expression, while it is actually not. It is just an attack to automated content hosting like Youtube.

Really, what would happen if content providers will be held liable for uploaded content? The megasites like Youtube couldn't legally exist. And the author argues that this is maybe not a bad thing, which is quite a fresh view of the issue.

Let's use this analogy. Imagine someone was able to build automated mega pub, where anyone could come and buy beer from robot innkeeper. But the pub would be such huge, that it won't be humanly possible to check if everyone was legally allowed to drink alcohol. So the owner would say: We have so much customers that it is not within our means to check if everyone is of 18+ age. So let's anyone go in and drink beer, and if we are notified that someone is underage, we will promptly kick him off. But we are not liable, since there should be a freedom to drink beer. So what do you think - would such a pub be allowed to exists in a real world? So then, why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone can do illegal things anonymously there? (Of course that was just a reasoning exercise, I am not advocating Youtube ban here. ;-)) But overall, I tend to agree with the author, good article.
This is a little off -- it's presuming that you only get a PhD to teach.

I'm on mine to do a better job in industry. And I'm not alone where I work, not by a long shot.
Registration Open for Ignite RailsConf
No, I'm saying it's highly unlikely that the "king" is going to shut down the "feudal lord" and then let me, the "peasant," do whatever I want to.
Big entities are still good on the web, see wikipedia, openstreetmap and yes, even youtube, liveleak or twitter/identi.ca (iran, scandals etc).

This case could also help many torrent sites to survive http://torrentfreak.com/can-google-secure-a-safe-haven-for-b... . Where I live there is no netflix, no itunes, no hulu. And most people wouldn't have the money for those anyway. So torrent sites play a great role in democratizing culture (good and bad culture I know).
Ask HN: Review my eBay/Google maps mashup inspired by HN
This is exactly why I find running your own mail server does not pay off. Fighting spam is a full-time job and should not be taken lightly. Even large enterprises move the majority of their e-mail hosting to cheap providers like Google. (Unless some other company threatens to stop giving you their business if you go that route)
The idea for this site came from a comment from yannis on my prior HN submission for townflier.com. Sadly eBay sent me a form letter rejection for the affiliate network but I like the way the site turned out so I'm launching it anyway to see if anyone else finds it useful.
The Best Global Brands of 2009
I followed http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html with moderate success. I'm a PHP programmer by trade, and that guide was easy enough for me to understand. As far as 2.3 vs 3.0, I don't know enough about RoR to weigh in.
And I'm 110% behind that effort -- but on its own merits, not as an upshot of "the old regime" losing safe harbor protections.
I completely agree, but getting divorced is something in your control. The weather is something you can control. Your health is something you can control, to an extent.
Enable Passenger (mod_rails) on your Dreamhost account, then you can just upload Rails applications (or other Rack apps like Sinatra) to a directory and they will run:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Passenger

I would skip CGI if your goal is to learn a framework like Rails. If you want to write a simple one-file web app in Ruby, check out Sinatra. But if you have some existing CGI scripts that you want to run, you can add the +ExecCGI option as described in http://wiki.dreamhost.com/CGI
You shouldn't be able to do whatever you want. Unless you only want to do good things. Law isn't perfect but it is meant to be applied impartially.
The rule of thumb I'd heard for when you're no longer a Noogler is when your Noogler balloon stops flying. (You're given a helium-filled mylar balloon with a Google happy face when you start; mine lasted about 5 months). That's almost always after when you've been there longer than 1% of the staff. I joined in January 09 when everyone thought the world was ending and the word on the street was "hiring freeze", so it was only a few percent in my case. But for someone who joined in say, 2005 and whose Noogler balloon lasted a while (I've heard of them flying for up to a year), it might've been up to 50% of the staff.
Web Laureate Classic: "Spokeo: Creepy Oh"
21st Century Breakdown
Which supplements really work? An interactive guide to evidence.
Interesting and obvious in retrospect. The direct mail industry has been using these techniques for years, with lots of research backing them up.

Full disclosure: in my student days I used to work for a direct mail company, not as a programmer but as a general layout and graphics guy. They weren't mail spammers per se, they specialized in hospital funding drives, or did mail followups on people who were on prescription drugs, to remind them to keep renewing.

Anyway these letters were tested just as carefully as we do today (only an A/B test involved actually printing and mailing stuff). The "Yes! I want to know more about $FOO" format may seem cheesy but it was a proven winner.

You would think people might get tired of it, but they believed that their targets were instead "trained" to respond to these sorts of appeals. That's literally what I was told, when I suggested they try something different.

So, maybe we should be paying close attention to those crappy cards that fall out of magazines?
This reminds me of the position a very good friend of mine tends to defend, that we'd all be better off if we lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles. None of the stresses of the modern world to constrain us, no sitting at a desk for most of the day, no growth hormones in our food, no complex economy founded on unrealistic debt, no unavoidable, unsustainable network of high-volume petroleum combustion to poison our rivers and lungs.

Despite his having a couple of degrees in anthropology and talking about this long before Avatar was ever in theaters... I remain unconvinced. Even without all the mundane problems of modern life, most of us in the developed world don't have to worry about our immediate survival on a day-to-day basis. Society may have made an enormous number of tradeoffs to get to where we are, but I still have to call it a net positive.

That's kind of how I feel about this article.
Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?
When you are in the "Flow", you don't have to worry about distractions, because you don't want to be distracted. So the real issue is how to get into the flow.
Some comments add interesting info and perspective. I appreciated #38, which starts off:

Until you’ve been in Shenzhen (where I live) you probably can’t imagine [...]

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/02/19/what-you-get-when-yo...
Suggestion on hosting service for Java/J2EE based Website
Which is the recommended hosting service Java/J2EE based web site.
It dramatically increases your chances of being hired by the wrong people. I don't think it could possibly dramatically increase your chances of being hired somewhere really awesome. (Because if hiring decisions were affected by dress that much, you wouldn't have really awesome coworkers).

Dressing up can be a signal that someone is desperate for work. And failure to dress up can indicate confidence and other options.

The point is it can be a positive or negative sign, depending on various things.
I hugged my sparc box after reading this. sniff
So you're saying you're not willing to "imagine"? :)

If it weren't for Alan Kay we'd be all using DOS prompts on our iPhones (oh wait… :) and that was in the early 70s.
What's good about the Internet is that it's global. That means that if one country or one group of countries tries to censor something, the host can always be moved elsewhere. Since we have things like Tor now, censoring the Internet itself is not possible; you can only go after individual violators. And if those are outside of the law, you just have to deal with them -- nothing can be done to stop it.

On that note, clearly we should just launch a satellite that beams youtube videos to everyone. Since shooting down a satellite is illegal under various international laws, this should be a safe place to host your autotuned lolcats.
Summary:

1) "Hating facism is too cliche"

2) "waaahhhh-big-evil-corporations"

3) "I miss animated GIFs and rainbow borders, grandma needs to handcraft an impossible-to-find-pre-web1pointOh site for her cat videos and not use EvilTube. Will be way cool."
How many surnames would it take to cover half the U.S. population?
You don't want to hire me. And I don't want to work for you.

You should be glad that I'm willing to signal in such a way that we find that out quickly, instead of pretending I think more like you and possibly getting hired even though I'd be a bad fit working for you.
> Without optimizing your applications, Flash or otherwise, they can perform badly on any platform this is 101 for any software developer.

Don't the two paragraphs following that quote pretty much gut Adobe's standard pitch? That we need Flash on mobile devices so we can access content that already exists on the web?

Their own evangelists are (rightly) recommending that anyone serious about a mobile product needs to design and test for those devices and that simply pointing a touch-based mobile at an flv designed for PCs with keyboards and mice is not going to work.

But that being the case, why isn't the argument for Flash about its comparative advantages vs per-device apps, HTML5, etc?

It's not as if there isn't a compelling and rational case to be made there.
Where the fuck were the gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap when I was there? I didn't want to move to Boston... And it's baseball season, to boot. :(
> He offered to give me a call every Sunday for a year for advice and moral support if I promised to go it alone for one year, build my own tech (tricky considering I'm a decent designer but not a backend guy), and not take any money from anyone.

sounds like a great guy, really good of him.
Automate SSH key authorization with Rye
Seems to be mostly Ubuntu, but I've met quite a few Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, and other distro users from Google. There is no law about what OS engineers can use within Google, but they do have their own Ubuntu repository and such setup for distributing internally developed software and a custom Ubuntu install. Their server infrastructure, last I heard, was on an old bastardized Fedora version, but that was a couple of years ago; and it's probably not something they talk about with much specificity or frequency.
I think the education process is too long. Schools benefit from long education so the time a student can get to do "real research" is put further and further in the future.
A Moore's Law for Genetics
Well at least it's horizontally scalable.
Could you elaborate on your experiences of building out an ad sales program/team?

How much traffic did you have when you started selling ads? What type of CPM are you able to see?

The reason I ask is that I run a niche community site that gets a decent amount of pageviews but I'm not sure how much I could make by selling ads against it.
If I'm looking at on-time stats to see if they should have a bearing on which airline I fly, I care a whole lot about the definition of "on-time." I don't care about being 15-30 minutes late, but I do care about not being 2 hours late.

Again, this sort of thing should be adjusted for routes and airports, but depending on your purpose in flying a route (going home, where your parents will pick you up? flying to LAX to catch an intercontinental flight with a tight connection?), a more granular breakdown is important.
oh god, when I saw "CDE" i actually had a flashback. not a pleasant one
Well, it's not sentient, so it isn't registering anything it wasn't already programmed to, and it isn't getting any new commands with all existing C&C routes gone.
Thanks TBL. I knew we could count on you.

Well, you know, Adobe is a company and they have their interests and they pay $60k a year to be a member of the w3c and have their voices heard and they did and the proper procedures were in place and now it's time to move forward with HTML5.

Next thing is we'll see if they were correct on their prediction that it'll take a decade to move on to HTML6.
citi have climbed down - http://blog.fabulis.com/post/411481294/citi-we-said-what
It's definitely banned in the US. There are some "safe ephedra" products which are actually some other stimulant - usually bitter orange.
edited...thanks! :)
The Gender Equation
Just because you don't unit test something doesn't mean you can't test it. This is what integration tests exist for.
There are plenty of Free implementations of H.264.
You're starting at a tricky time. Rails 2.3 is still a great, stable platform and should be sticking around for quite some time.

Rails 3 does have many improvements, but it's still a "beta" in every sense of the word as many of the plugins don't work yet, or require many modifications to work.

I still think just about the best book/introduction to Rails is the Pragmatic Programmer book: http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with... - They don't yet cover Rails 3 yet, but in the meantime you could fill in the gaps with weblog posts and the like. If you get a solid grip on 2.3, you should have no problem adjusting to 3.0 once it becomes final.
Note to self: If you ever publish something in the WSJ, make sure you get all the important stuff into first 2.5 paragraphs, before the paywall comes down and everyone stops reading.
Announcing Ernie 2.0 and 2.1 (GitHub's Erlang RPC Server)
I can imagine very well, I would just rather not have that vision tied up with advocating the elimination of safe-harbor provisions.

By all means, let us all become publishers, hosts, etc. etc. Maybe an enterprising someone can make that easier and more attractive than the current regime. :-)
While I certainly respect the work you're doing, I think there is still a long way to go before the appliance model of serving becomes feasible.

The question, then, should be what do we do in the mean time? Would shutting down the YouTubes of the world actually hasten the advent of server appliances? I'm skeptical.

I also have trouble imagining how new social networking-type applications spread in a world where we have personal servers. The next YouTube/Facebook/Whatever will now have to write their software for a variety of different home servers (and there almost certainly will be a moderate-to-large number of incompatible devices), then convince people to install and correctly configure these apps, update them somewhat regularly to fix security holes, etc. Given the non-zero fraction of people who have trouble simply logging into Facebook, I think we're still a long ways off, and stand to benefit from the rich communities provided by simple, corporate-run networks.
Politically, there is nothing Adobe can do now. TBL has the final say and he has spoken.

Adobe is just doing what is best for their shareholders. Can't blame them really.

Before HTML5, they had more of a monopoly than Microsoft had on the desktops when they were sued. Now Flash has competition with all the browsers. It's a mandate that they all have to do what they've just left to Adobe to handle with Flash.

It'll be an interesting show. I for one am very excited about this because it eliminates a lot of uncertainty about the web as a platform moving forward.
Do you use an iPhone or any Apple products? How about a cable box? Is the software in your coffee maker open source? How about the bios in your PC?
Depends on the industry. If you're getting a PhD in biotech, good industry jobs are only slightly less difficult to land than tenure-track positions. For the big names (Genentech, Amgen, etc.), getting a scientist position is just as hard, if not harder.
Cool, thanks for the followup. I guess I could have phrased it better myself.

My experience was, after investment, we brought in (as cofounders) a really experienced team of marketing professionals (one from a big name, like Oglivy, and another who ran online marketing for a major bank). We had business metrics, we measured progress of focus groups, interviews, surveys, etc. The kind of metrics corporations use to "save money by making cheap mistakes on paper during planning instead of making expensive mistakes in production".

If I had to do it all over again I would have just built the wrong thing, and delayed the cost of finding the product/market fit until I raised more money with that wrong thing. Because metrics against a bright and shiny object, even the wrong object, are perceived as more valuable than metrics that bring you closer to building the right object in the first place.
Building a text editor (Part 1): a wxHaskell tutorial
Ask HN: Transitioning to Linux
Last year I downloaded the Windows RC, and it is about to run out, but I've got a new laptop with Win7 coming in a few weeks, so thought I'd load linux onto the machine currently running Win7 RC.

Any advice about transitioning to Linux?
What distro do you recommend?
I'm a php dev, I do my own design work, I'll need an email client, and the usual tools.
Any advice?
Launching an e-business - 9 hours, 6 beers and $15
5 Reasons Why Landing Pages & Forms are More Valuable than Homepages
Sam Bowles on the Economics and Biology of Altruism [video]
Yup. His friendship has been a big plus through this. Being buddies with his buddies who he's roped in to help from time to time has been another big plus!
Two words: "healthy diet." That's all you need. If you have that, you don't need supplements.
I've worked on a couple of antispam solutions that did something akin to a more intelligent grey listing. Think quality of service meets IP reputation.

The problem with braindead simple things like postgrey is that they are incredibly easy to circumvent and the more attractive a target you are, the quicker the spammers will get around the solution. For instance, if one of the major providers (Yahoo, Hotmail, Verizon, Comcast) were to implement this, spammers would work around it within the hour. If you're low enough on their radar they won't care that they can't get email through to you but as soon as it starts to bother them enough to care, it stops being effective.
Reiki, Energiesysteme, Reikilehrer
Die Reikifreundschaft ist ein Online Portal für alle Reikiinteressierten. Bei über 400 Systemen kann man sich das passende aussuchen zur passenden Zeit und somit seine Entwicklung fördern!
Gosh, I'm willing to imagine ... and yes if it were easy to generate quality content, index-able, search-able and security issues didn't require admin level skills to publish devolving to peer based sharing would be great ...

But the aggregators exist because the content consumers want consistency, ease of discovery and all the admin heavy lifting done for them ...
I think a better example would be an art show. Say someone starts an art show that lets anyone display their work inside. It's a huge art show with tens of thousands of persons setting up their pieces over acres of land. Is the proprietor of the space responsible for picking through the inordinate amount of material brought in, checking that all pieces are owned by the person entering and that none are copies or otherwise unworthy of showing? Is it enough that they kick out artists when they receive reports of ill doing?

Youtube is not a pub selling beer. They are a virtual location that allows any artist to hang their work. They benefit by selling space for advertisements around the booths. When notified of an artist showing an illegal or otherwise unacceptable piece, they remove it. I see this as a perfectly reasonable situation.

The metaphor used in interacting with websites is that of a place. I think the metaphor is a good one.

Hosting a space for other people to use should not make one de facto guilty if others abuse it. One could argue for negligence if they had no reporting system or ignored it. But so far as I have read, this is not the case.
I also want a pony.

Those are all rare qualities individually, together they are more rare. I'd be interested to know which probability is higher: the probability that one has those qualities given that one works closely with technology, or the probability that one has those qualities given that one has an MBA.
I'd recommend Ubuntu. Good software, good community.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! Your wisdom is truly appreciated. We had a discussion with our developer and gave him the opportunity to choose except for GPL frameworks.
Best for shareholders?

It's not like they're making money from flash player. They're making money from content creation tools (i.e. Creative Suite). At this point it may be a bit easier for them to create Flash content but adding HTML5 to that mix should be doable. They are already creating native iphone apps with Flash authoring in CS5 (see http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/)

Content creators will want to create content that is accessible to a wide audience with a good user experience. They will buy the tools that will allow them to do so efficiently. If that means HTML5 then that is where the money is and that is what shareholders will demand Adobe to support (follow the money).

Furthermore HTML5 over Flash makes a good argument for people to buy upgrades to their Content Creation Tools. So there is even more money to be made with HTML5 for Adobe.
Why are you even interviewing candidates that you don't want to have anything to do with? Why don't you just filter those candidates out at some earlier point in the hiring process?
Gif for Working Women, Your Emergency Beauty Kit
The queries are extremely simple (in appendix after references) and, in the absence of indexes, require independent evaluation of all of the rows in the table. This maps extremely well to the CUDA architecture which has hundreds of memory-coupled independent processing elements.

But this isn't anywhere near the typical usage scenario of SQL databases. If it was, scaling databases would be trivial by sharding tables across many servers. In real life, you have indexes and joins, which translate into random access patterns, which do not perform very well on CUDA.
Drink enough coffee and after awhile it stops being effective.
On the other hand, having substantial job experience in an industry helps you identify various pain points and can give you the perspective and wisdom you need to pursue your own venture. If I were a potential customer I would trust a 15-year veteran over a young and inexperienced person when they're selling their "solution" to my problem.
I doubt that anyone would seriously employ a canvas based video player with the advent of the HTML5 video tag. However, your implication that JS can also chew up CPU is valid. I have no defense except to say that the browser vendors have fine grained control over JS, while Flash is an opaque box. For instance, the browser could restrict setTimeout to a lower framerate, which has a different (better) effect than simply limiting the CPU.
Caller ID Android App forced to shut down due to patent threat
I once worked for a for-profit student newspaper that had a non-profit landlord, which existed almost solely to lease space at a discount to the for-profit company and support that for-profit's "educational" mission. It saved thousands annually on property tax, while leaving the for-profit paper completely free to do whatever it wanted.

Editorial endorsements, for example, are a legally murky area for non-profits (though the IRS traditionally lets newspapers slide) but completely fine for for-profits.
You'll be fine.