skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its not for everyone, but bearing in mind this was created in 2006 it shows a very progressive thought - especially when you think on how Facebook looked back then.

I disagree that "move(ing) your eyes left to right to read this is a readability issue"... well, the basic action of reading (for most languages such as English) is to do exactly that.
Ritalin boosts learning by increasing brain plasticity?
If they want to offer Drizzle to customers, they probably need something like FathomDB. Considering that they're already collaborating, I could see them acquiring FathomDB sometime soon.
The "assume Big Brother is watching" advice seems to be good in all cases. If the startup doesn't succeed, then you need the day job and don't want to be found out and lose it. (Your company is not likely to think "startup" when they see "strange activity", but rather "interviewing elsewhere"; that, however, will get you just as fired in a lot of places.)
Basic "white hat" SEO is two things:

1: Making sure your site is visible to search engines. Make sure there are meta-tags, that navigation, headers and text is text, not images or flash. Have a sitemap. Make sure links to pages contain a good description of what's on the page.

2: Making sure someone's linking to your site. Pitch to blogs to get them to talk about and link to your site. Comment on blogs, putting your website in the "website" field. Have good content that people will want to come to and share - the best way to be visible is for get other people to do your promotion for you.

The reason it should be a niche, is that when there isn't too many people writing a website, it's easier to rank high for a search term. If you picked generic technology news, you'd be hard pressed to break page 10 on Google. If make a good site about how to grow your own organic hamster food, you could make page one with little effort. Picking the niche is as much basic SEO as the technical stuff for this "trick".

Finally, TANSTAAFL.
Sounds like a problem that could be solved. It's not all bacteria and viruses that need to be killed completely, it's mostly MRSA that is the problem. That probably doesn't live in moisturizing lotions; and once you've removed it from your hands, it's not going to come back until your touch it again.

Also, what about just wearing rubber gloves?
http://xkcd.com/627/
they said the same things about auto-pilot and its interaction with ground control years ago.
Mediagazer is to Media as Techmeme is to Tech
Ask HN: How much is a link to my app worth? 
I just got featured on killerstartups.com, now I have people actively vying for my wallet. Some sites offer to write a review for a fee (read sell a link). Most are relatively low page rank ~PR2.

Has anyone bought links this way, and did anything good come of it?
The search issue is almost definitely a non issue, and an oversight on the part of iA. Just moving it to the top placement in the left hand column would give it almost the same placement it has on the real Facebook today.
Google Gesture Search out for Android 2.x
I can sympathize with the author's lack of understanding of people's fear of breaking things, especially of those that are tech-related. Take computers for instance. It seems that to the average Joe, they're magical black boxes; they put in passwords, discs, and mouse clicks, and out come YouTube videos and tax returns. To this person, if they don't click on the right series of "OK" buttons, they can put the computer in a permanent state of hopelessness from which it can never recover. It's like they're in some finite state machine with no idea what states the state transitions take them to. To someone in the know, they can be sure that any state in the FSM they go to was intended to be visited in that manner, and they can surely get back to the state they came from by simply exploring. But to Average Joe, the next state could lead him off a cliff or set his pants on fire. This "fear" of exploring could simply be the manifestation of a deep-seated misunderstanding of the concept of software in general. It's really no different than the kettle corn, despite its apparent complexity; it just looks prettier and makes different noises.
3. You can't afford to hire three developers to add features and bugs.

I got a kick out of that one - Everybody know that only big businesses can afford to hire developers to add bugs.
Every time a state has passed such a law Amazon has shut down their Associates program in that state with the exception of New York, which may be a special case due to all the media in it or maybe its size.

California is probably up next, which might clarify how much it's the latter.
please accept my apologies for a non-substantive comment.
This is getting a little silly I agree. I guess the SEOs are not going to stop so we're all going to have to suffer as they create spam pages in Mahalo and then point to them and say "Calacanis allows spam!"

Update:

1. Did we have show short pages in Mahalo? Yes.

2. How did they get there? Our users start topic pages and don't finish them.

3. Were they getting traffic? Not really... like < 6% of our traffic was from short pages. We know this because we've not deleted them or greatly improved them.

4. Why does this keep coming up with the SEOs? Because I called SEO bullsh#$t back in 2005 when someone asked me at a conference why Engadget and Joystiq were doing so well with SEO.

5. Do you still think SEO is bullshit? No, I don't. Back then I didn't know what SEO was and assumed it was spamming google so I said, "oh, that's bs." This was true at the time. At Weblogs Inc. we did zero SEO and we had amazing search traffic. Why? Well, it was later explained to me that we made a lot of content (20 posts a day across 50 blogs = a lot of posts), we got a lot of comments on them and we used keywords in the titles of the posts before anyone else used them. Today's I don't think SEO is BS. I think SEO is an essential part of building any startup just like building a viral loop, doing PR or hiring great people.

6. Are you sorry to the SEO community for hurting their feelings. Yes, I'm really really sorry.

7. I found a page that has no content on it? yes, that will happen from time to time... when we find them we delete, redirect or expand them. These will be in the < 1% of our corpus range. If you do find one email me jason at mahalo.com.

8. don't you have tools to do that? yes and no. we're building them. we need to balance turning off pages people are planning on building out vs. ones that are abandoned. So, you will see nofollow on pages with no content, and no follow on pages with < 100 words if they are older than X day, etc. This is all being built now.

That's it... there is nothing bad going on here. We're good people doing good work. Hundreds of people are making real money to take care of their families at Mahalo and I wish you guys would stop attacking them.

If you're pissed at me take it out on me, leave Mahalo out of it.

.... or don't. Who cares. This is so biased and absurd right now I don't think any is really taking it seriously any more. Aaron had a handful of good points last month, but now folks are just doing this to linkbait for their SEO sites.

great... trust me, this is making my experience reading HN annoying too. If HN wants to filter out "calacanis" and "mahalo" from HN i'm all for it. Clearly the system here is being abused.
Pirate Radio
My concern with asking "How can ads not suck?" is the limitation of the answer. If I take one step back from the question, my view of the problem shifts and the potential solutions grow. Your concern isn't about ads and ad-blockers, it's about generating revenue from a site. You think that ad-blockers are affecting your revenue. They aren't. How you're advertising is affecting your revenue.

I'd start with the question "How can I generate revenue without using ads?" Others may have better questions.
All this means is that the insurance companies spend most of the money they take in. They could hire x more employees and then they wouldn't be profitable at all. That doesn't mean they are tirelessly working to save you money, it just means they aren't profitable. I wouldn't read too far into this data.
is this account some sort of experiment to see what happens if you post blog-spam content to HN?
I've used this a lot, probably the only tool to visualize large graphs without just coding something yourself.
http://lucacardelli.name/indexArtifacts.html (click on fonts)
Linux Game Publishing introduces DRM - Ubi take note
You're conflating Google's caring about the alleged practice and the public's perception of the practice.

If people are qualitatively unhappy with search results, Google will care. These posts serve to highlight that displeasure.
Alfred App
What's the ownership situation before either co-founder's shares vest?
Hiya Mitchell -- Sweet-looking project. What sort of effort would be required to use a Windows-based VM?

(Would you even recommend using Vagrant with Windows VMs, or is there any alternative I should look at? I'd like to automate my currently manual provisioning for various windows-based consulting work I do, but also set up VM-based continuous integration for some cross-platform software I'm writing.)
Also, just relax and have a beer at the This Week in Startups party at SXSW.... life is too short to be so angry/upset about nothing!

RSVP here
www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=342222228076&ref=mf

I'm not the worst guy in the world... you'll actually have a good time.
On the top right of your meeting page are Print and PDF links. When you click the Print link you can customize the output, so you can choose to print the agenda or the minutes, or both. Also, on the bottom of the page is a link to add action items.

I'm happy to follow up more if you have any questions. Just shoot us an email at contact@meetingmix.com.
The fatal flaw of this logic is that the 3+ hour rule is not about JetBlue, JFK, or flight operations. It's about passengers. Plain and simple. Should passengers have to sit on the plane for more than 3-hours without going anywhere? If the answer is "no", then abide by the rule. if the answer is "yes, sometimes", then get rid of the rule entirely.

I'm guessing that JetBlue thinks the answer is "yes, sometimes". They're a low-cost operator. Turning the plane around is expensive, and the cost, I'm sure, is entirely on the operator.

This is a problem only because ATC can't tell one hour ahead of time if the expected wait-time is 30 minutes or 3+ hours.
I print long texts to read from real paper as I find that much more enjoyable. I also have a much better understanding then.

Part of this is often getting really annoyed by either non-existing print stylesheets or those filled with ads or unnecessary whitespace. Thankfully Opera makes it easy to rewrite those if you know a bit HTML (view source -> apply).

I keep track of articles to read simply with a bookmark folder.
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

I think that's a pretty large discrepancy to not include in the study.

At the end of the article, state and city salaries are also mentioned. Again, a false comparison since it is on straight salary without mention of guaranteed pension and other benefits (eg. MEA members not paying SS).
Bill Wyman's _Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing_ may fit the bill:

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reaso...

Some people liked the news, sure; most thought they were paying for it. And some papers spent more money on news than they had to. But the papers weren’t selling the news. They were selling ads and charging a lot of money for them because of one thing only: They held an informal monopoly on a societal convention whereby they deposited those ads—around which they wrapped some reporting, some of it serious, some of it fluff—on subscribers’ driveways.

Wyman is a long-time arts journalist and editor. He's also the author of one of my favorite bits on San Francisco:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/11/03/sf/index.html
Tell HN: Gaia GPS for Android in the making - beta testers needed
Shan Zhai: Yesterday's Pirates, Tommorow's Industry Leaders
The second and third columns provide a lot of collapsible space depending on the browser width, no?
The various "actions" which build up the behavior of the various Vagrant commands are tightly tied to a unix-based VM at the moment (see [1] for an example at the bottom).

John and I have discussed this and we're trying to figure out a way to pull out this logic so its specific to each box, so windows VMs would be possible.

That being said, assuming a windows VM has SSH, a quick hack would be to modify these actions to run the proper commands and it should work fine.

[1]: http://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/lib/vagrant/...
I've been using this as a Quicksilver replacement for a few days now. I love its simplicity, and how it always seems to stay up-to-date with every app I have installed, whereas Quicksilver would only scan every few minutes for new applications.
Can you give a breakdown of your expenses? Is it 40% salary, 30% server costs, 10% miscellaneous costs?
If you're willing to make a few hundred thousand people have more trouble finding what they're looking for by landing them on your stub pages, just for your personal gain, does that make you the best guy in the world?
Small? I think you mean to say this field is about study of matter at smaller scale? nanotechnology is not small field in fact, its exact opposite; its an interdisciplinary science which involves maths,physics,chemistry and biology. Check out this map of science http://seadragon.com/view/4rn and you will know how big nanotechnology is :)
Wouldn't it therefore make sense to have a PO Box in another state, then set yourself up again with Amazon? You are close to either Kansas, New Mexico, or Wyoming, depending on where you are in CO...
Give this seamless integration with Front Row. (In the UI but have it be a modular add-on install.)
I highly recommend reading this short piece. Even though the profit margin is so small for Health Insurance Companies, “the better measurement is not profit, but return on invested capital (ROIC). ”
One more line from the article: “If I had a business that consisted of people giving me $100 bills and me paying them back $96, it would be silly to describe that as a very low-profit industry.”

Source: The Economist

Link to Article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/03/he...
Follow-up to “The mathematics behind Hadoop-based systems”
My experience with Steam on windows has not been entirely pleasant. Granted, the poor user interface, and the endless amount of intrusion into the startup and gaming process can quickly be forgiven in light of the fact that I got one of the most entertaining games I've ever played through Steam: Portal.

Still, as someone who really doesn't want to have to own a high-end windows box for the sole purpose of gaming, this announcement make me (cautiously?) optimistic.
I Quit Programming to Travel
Jason, you are actually full of crap. For starters, you are mistaken, or pretending not to know, as to why this keeps happening to you. You brought this on yourself, and on Mahalo.com, by unsubtle spamming and boasting about it, and then being rude to boot. You can whine all you want about the perceived injustice of people calling you on your crap, but the fact remains it is your actions that are getting called out, nothing more and nothing less.

This isn't about a small handful of pages that don't have content on them, and if you read the posts you were rebutting instead of trying so damn hard to make yourself sound better then you might actually have information you could use to improve your site.

The vast majority of the pages on Mahalo are empty pages devoid of human generated content. It is not like I am straining my ass off to find them, either. Click on this link, scroll down the page, click through to 20-30 pages (the ones with all lower case titles demonstrate what I am talking about most often, focus on those), and LOOK AT YOUR WEBSITE:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...

In order to appease Matt Cutts, who gave you the courtesy of warning you instead of banning you outright, you did in fact add noindex to all of those pages. 1 day later, after he saw that it was there, you removed it again.

Pretending not to know what is being talked about and making shit up in an attempt to garner pity for being picked on is not helping your cause any.
I also like to tell people what basic SEO is not:

1. SEO is not keyword frequency. Although the page you are optimizing needs to contain the search term you are trying to rank for it shouldn't be saturated with that term. The first four words of the <title> tag, the <h1> tag and maybe an <img> alt attribute are a few good places to put a good keyword.

2. More links isn't necessarily better. A couple good links from one or two good pages can really boost your rankings more than a lot of links from unimportant websites.

3. Meta tags won't help a page rank higher. The <meta name="keywords"/> and <meta name="description"/> tags aren't used as ranking factors but it's good to include them because they do signal "about-ness" to an engine.

Some things that might hurt your SEO are frequent server downtime and site inaccessibility, cloaking by user agent, links from spammy domains and acquiring links from known "link sellers".

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
The only thing shown unambiguously was that "that juice did not prevent scurvy". Taking this to reason inductively that "no citrus juice prevents scurvy" is the real problem. They discarded documented evidence and grasped at other straws instead of stepping back and investigating history.
Apple bans iPhone app that measures cell phone radiation
Yes, and Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc don't get to decide if their customers get the heart transplant they so desperately need.

These companies need to be operating as not-for-profits, or coops. Their motivations between decisions should be driven by what's best for their members, NOT what's best for their pocketbooks. No matter whether it's a profit margin of 1% or 10% or 1000%.
First I would like to say that I am only learning Haskell, and have done nothing but toy programs thus far. But the point free style is something that I really do not like about Haskell. It makes code much more complicated for the dubious benefit of saving a couple of keystrokes.

For example, take the code from the article:

This is without point free style:
sum xs = foldr (+) 0 xs

And this is with:
sum = foldr (+) 0

You have saved a total of 4 keystrokes. And made that line of code look really weird and hard to understand.

Thus, now when you look at code you cannot say at first glance how many arguments a function takes. The second line of code looks like sum takes 0 arguments. But you have to look more carefully at the definition of the function, and see that it uses foldr, and know that foldr takes three arguments, but here only two are defined, and then you figure out that someone is using point free style and then you figure out that sum, actually takes one argument that must be a list.

And this of course, is a simple example. Here we have a big clue in that the function is defined with zero arguments, and most functions take at least one argument, therefore the function probably uses the point free notation. But for a more complex and longer function, the point free style can very easily confuse someone reading the code.

So yeah, I think point free style is one of these annoying features of Haskell, that seem to be put in so that users of Haskell can pat themselves on the back and feel like they are very smart. But in the end it does not add much to the language and makes it much less accessible.
I just like point-free style because it leaves me with fewer things to name, and fewer choices to make. Placeholder names like "xs" are just noise. The "x" has no meaning here:

double x = 2*x

So I'd rather write it like this:

double = (2*)

Similarly, there's no need to introduce an arbitrary name like "input" or "numbers" for this function (part of a Project Euler solution):

highestProduct = maximum . map product . concat . map (groupsOf 4)
The thing that struck me about the Ars approach was the reaction to legitimate concerns about security, tracking and so on: "too bad." As in, ads are what they are: the site does not really care whether they are useful to the advertiser nor how they affect the user so long as they get paid. An unfortunate attitude to project, particularly when trying to come up with solutions to this problem could be really beneficial. Not that they have an obligation to care, of course.

They did at least suggest that a monthly subscription might be forthcoming, so something good might come out of it in the end.
I love that the mac is going to be treated as a tier-1 game device by valve and that you don't need to buy both a mac version if you have already purchased the PC version.

This could be the catalyst that the mac world was looking for to be more gamer oriented and not an afterthought.
I'll be right along after I finish writing this reply down

It sounds not at all natural to me. Was it supposed to?
Tawkon Measures The Radiation Spewing From Your iPhone. Apple Bans.
Thoughts on paper are nothing more than footprints in the sand
I agree, Jason at least address the points being discussed..
Good news. Basically, it means Drizzle won't die from lack of internal support from Oracle.
Home Pages Must RULE
What are the legal implications of PleaseRobMe?
Why? So you can select the game with a remote control, and then walk over the the computer to play it?
What Is 'Non-Western' Philosophy?
Atul Gawande, a surgeon and medical writer, notes in his book "Better" that hand sanitizers like Purell have not been found to have a drying effect, despite fears of the contrary.
As the guy who wrote the post linked to above, I should note that in the post itself I describe multiple examples of how to come up with creative and compelling concepts that worked great. I agree that it may be more difficult, but if you read the site, we do explain the "how" regularly...
12 Reasons  to Learn and Use  the vi Editor
They've just released an early version of the new UI, and it's MUCH faster and less intrusive (I think). That said, I can't really say it's all that bad when compared to most any other similar tool. Plus, SteamFriends and other things are just plain amazing for gamers -- frankly I don't know how I used to get by without them.
I already have an account with Earth Class Mail (handy if you don't want to give people your home address if you work from home), so I set up an official business address in Beaverton, Oregon and changed my address via the Associates website.

Oregon doesn't have a sales tax, and I'm paying Colorado income tax on anything I receive, so this should fix the issue while staying on the right side of all applicable laws. Will update if/when I get a response from Amazon regarding my request to reinstate my account.
"users fundamentally don't want the thing they make - ads"

Millions of people who don't care one bit about sports watch the SuperBowl for the ads.

Users fundamentally don't want annoying, content-blocking, misleading, irrelevant, privacy-compromising, browser-slowing ads. A couple of internet ad companies that have gotten away from this model are The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/) and Project Wonderful (http://www.projectwonderful.com/).