skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While Galloway may or may not be an "arrogant a-hole", I can understand him snapping. (small rant:)

On my master's there are a few people who regularly show up halfway into lectures (leaving the doors swinging and banging), leave work that requires genuine understanding and insight until the last possible second and just generally seem confused by everything. They're intelligent folk, but I don't understand the lack of application at this stage. Why bother coming? It's not like they're starting businesses or fighting crime at night.

I used to be a sloppy student at undergraduate, but for a postgrad degree there's just no point being there unless you want to attack your subject like a rabid dog. Nobody will save you at this point. Nobody cares if you fail.
I agree with this, but I frame it differently:

You're going to make a lot of stuff. Some you will give away, some you will charge for.
You pretty much HAVE to give _some_ stuff away not because we live in a post-Napster, open source apocalypse where everybody expects things to be free, but just because you need something to get people to give your idea/song/software a chance.

As I have a lot of friends in bands, I often come back to music: "You will make a lot of music. You will probably give most of your recordings away, with the exception of special packages now and then. You will probably almost always charge for your live performances, with the exception of a few special occasions. You will regularly make some thing related to your art and charge for it (screen-printed posters, sweathshirts, etc.)"

People who make any kind of intellectual property can basically put it in one of two buckets:

* stuff i will charge for

* stuff i won't charge for, but is used to attract attention/keep people feeling involved

The difference between the two isn't arbitrary, but it isn't exactly based on qualitative difference. It's mostly based on distribution, limitations of medium, and a stuff like that. You'll probably tend to give away stuff that's easy to pass around, and charge for stuff that's not. Not in a piracy-centric mindset, just thinking mostly of friction, etc. It's entirely possible the thing you charge for doesn't take more work to do than the things you don't charge for.
The Panic Status Board
Thank you for saying this for me.

I knew he was off the rails as soon as he indicated that my claims were based on an assumption of duration of employment. That statement only makes sense if you use the same model that the parent used, in which the only value captured is the worker's salary.
I will upload more pictures very soon, i am waiting to meet with the factory to buy the prototype i have ordered weeks ago, but the chinese holidays slowed down business here. Thanks a lot again. Alberto

Ouch. So its still in its joojoo phase. Ok, criticism numero uno: You should absolutely not "presell" these things. You should not look like you're within a hundred miles of taking money before you've got crates of them sitting on a shelf ready to ship tomorrow. Apple can get away with this kind of thing because they have a track record of delivering on time. For everyone else, its a "close browser, c-ya, not coming back until everyone I know has bought one, received it and raved about it" event.

If you responded, in thought, to this with even a tiny bit of "but I need the money from presales to pay the manufactures to get the fist shipment going", hang it up, you're just about certain not to make it in the hardware business.

Sorry to sound harsh, but I've been on this train before.
Raising Money for a Startup [YouTube - KhanAcademy]
Amazon cuts ties with Colorado Affiliates, without notice
Dan Nocera: Personalized Energy
It would be better if you explained in a neutral way what you thought was the source of the misunderstanding.
The most important thing I gleaned was that next time I'm arrested in New Mexico, I'll try to be very, very, clear, that I'm a non-smoker.

I only read 1/4 of it, but definitely enjoyed the read :)
Maybe I'm odd, but I am actually rather afraid of breaking software, at least at the system-level. I'm not at all afraid of writing software, or breaking apps, but I really don't like my entire OS being borked, and I try to avoid poking at it for fear that it will become so.

This is mostly from experience of things actually breaking in hard to fix ways if you poke them the wrong way. Back when I used Windows mainly, I probably reinstalled 4 or 5 times because of something somehow being screwed up and there being no apparent way to fix it that was easier than just reformatting.

Linux tends to give you more diagnostic information (you can google for error messages), and I've never had to outright reformat/reinstall, but it can still be a real hassle if you screw up your system. Early in my Linux-using days (circa 2002), my Debian installation somehow managed to get apt into an inconsistent state that required a lot of manual fixing to repair. And I'm still somewhat afraid of upgrading anything in the kernel/modules/X.org/videodrivers bundle, because I've more than once ended up with hours of debugging after an upgrade resulted in stuff not working together (this was worse before Debian improved its process for handling binary video drivers within the apt framework).
Yep sorry that's what I meant
As an ecommerce guy, I can't help but point out a few quirks on the online store:

* Tab index on /n/MyAccount/newshipping-addresses.php is way off. Try tabbing through the form.

* The JavaScript alerts when you do something CORRECT are very nonstandard. JavaScript modal dialogs are commonly reserved for client-side ERRORS, not after you submit a form correctly.
So, SFTP support then?
I call bullshit. Have you actually ever had someone clone your site or tried to protect against it this way? I am all ears for your story... I have never heard of anything like that.

Setting up a sitemap is usually just a placebo for finicky webmasters, and it's a waste of time to boot. The biggest sin at a start-up is wasting time, and this easily qualifies.

The only time you want a sitemap is when you don't have a text front-end, and even then, you are way better off mimicking your JavaScript with a text layer for the search engines that implementing some sitemap.

Even submitting a page in a sitemap doesn't ensure it gets crawled, and it certainly won't get crawled if you have a large site and don't set up your sitemap just right.
Why your company should be distributed
These two people deserve each other. sighs
You're right that it's not a binary thing. Those seem like the two most likely outcomes to me.
It's too late for that. DRM was invented as a result of rampant piracy. You should be blaming the pirates rather than the company using it.

People were sharing programs long before p2p became popular. Only difference in recent years to accessibility to the copying mechanisms. Blame it on the Internet taking off and creating a world where bits are no longer a scarcity, where purchasing a physical media containing those bits is becoming legacy. With the Internet making it easy for anyone to copy anything suddenly those that made those physical copies weren't needed as much. Certainly their value has been questioned.

DRM became widespread as a way for the content distributors to maintain their status quo without having to change their business model in any way.
Setting out to design an iPad app is a strange experience... we've always been used to having some constraints -- a window sized to just the size you need plus a title bar at the top, a menu bar either on the window or at the top of the screen, a Start menu or Dock at the bottom of the screen, etc. With the iPad it's more like "Hello, big blank canvas. How am I gonna fill you up?"
"Being a paying customer doesn't grant an entitlement to be obnoxious while on someone else's property and I can't fathom why you think it would."

Straw man. Lame.
They aren't customers, they are students. You can't fail customers.
That would certainly suggest that I'm wrong, at least about how long shopping has been common. But I still don't think it happened everywhere (at least it didn't at my school).
Well, come and join us in the gray world, here :)

The bill is a whole lot of things and none of them are black and white -- quantifying them in a way that's more educational than "they're gonna start death panels", "socialism", blah blah is difficult and Obama clearly feels he stands to gain from public education here.

For example, the stimulus was 40% tax cuts. Now, given that 99% of the republican party voted against it and called it socialism or whatever, you probably wouldn't think that. But it's true. Education helps, when you've made an honest effort at good policy. It's not just propaganda.
You say this like you think "A" students are the important ones.
He's the head of a hedge fund which owns 4.9% of the New York Times. He originally made his money founding, and selling, Red Envelope.

See also: http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/01/31/Scot...
In my experience, these people never actually disrupt the class, only the professor. I don't know why you used an analogy of cell-phone usage; the much more obvious analogue is people who come in half-way through a movie. Do we kick them out? Do you, personally, even get annoyed by such people, or do you just wave it off?
Apparently the Colorado legislature tried to force Amazon to start charging sales tax to Colorado residents since it had affiliates that operated out of Colorado.

The Colorado law is bad and so is Amazon's handling of the situation (closing accounts on the same day they sent out the email notice).
Personally, I'm really amazed that some people, both below and in comments to that article, are finding themselves siding with the student.

IMO the prof's email was excellent. He conveyed his point across very nicely without showing even a small hint of irritation or annoyance.

The part copied below, for me, really sums it up. This student is an immature jackass and s/he really needs growing up. S/he first made a mistake and then had the audacity of justifying his/her action. Personally I would hate to have a person like that in my team.

Quoted part: Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15-20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.

To the folks who are siding with the student: Find out who s/he was, hire him/her and then lets see what your reaction is when the moron walks in late to meetings, customer calls, doesn't deliver on time etc. and then when you fire him/her, sues you..
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1176039
Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide [video]
That's a good addition to what I said above. As a teacher, I'd be absolutely delighted to help students choose between classes, even if my classes weren't in the running. It's the, "I spent hours preparing this lecture, and now you are walking out in the middle of it," that I don't like.
In order to be humble, you must learn to accept humiliation. - Mother Teresa
This is an important point and from a usability/efficiency point-of-view the iPhone apps will have problems in scaling up (even with increase resolution). Think about how inefficient a direct port of the weather app would be on the iPad. Also I believe the screen size is not proportional in the iPhone as compared with the iPad which will create additional porting problems.

This does represent an opportunity (or potential problem) as certain apps will need to be re-designed for use on the iPad. There is a potential for a number of apps to take over the market with reengineered designs made for the iPad.
Have the goal posts moved again Jason?

i'm also getting a list of every page under 300 words and having the page managers build them out in 30 days or deleting them.

from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143512

or

we're removing (or building out) any page in our system created by our users with under 200 words of original content. This will take a couple of weeks but it's tarted.

from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144174

and now 100 words?
The problem is that they had no mental frame of reference from which to understand the importance of avoiding heat, light, and copper. Therefore even if they performed experiments and discovered the truth, they would have no theory to tell them that taking the obvious next step was a bad idea.

Witness for example Scott's ability to demonstrate that seal meat prevented scurvy, and his inability to realize that trying to preserve it by boiling it wouldn't work.
DropZap has a new look and iPhone version has a split-screen 2 player mode.
very close (in my opinion). it's the opposite of the ad problem. while lots and lots of people were arguing about how to make ads suck less, I was writing an ad entertaining enough, and with enough of an actual point, that people would tell each other to read it. that's the solution: ads that don't suck, and not only don't suck, but are so far from sucking that ten or twenty years ago, they would have been books, magazines, or articles unto themselves, and would have sold as products in their own right.

I mean seriously, if you decided not to buy my video, but you still went and took this philosophy of "create stuff and get it to people" as a guiding principle for your career, it would improve.

the ad debate was hilarious to me because it was all going on while I was writing this thing. this isn't the solution to the ad problem, it's the antithesis. at one end you have people who make premium content, and host ads nobody wants to see, complaining that nobody wants to see their ads. on the other, you have one blogger, on his own, in his boxers, giggling at home and writing an epic ad which people are going to post on Hacker News for free without any action on his part.

the answer to the ad problem is don't even have an ad problem. just skip the whole thing. if you do business a different way, where all your marketing is about giving away stuff worth getting, you'll never have to care about an ad problem in your life.
My experience at superbowl parties is that there are usually a few people who sit through the game without displaying any interest in it (usually opting for an alternate activity like chatting, reading a book, or ogling the nearest baby), but perk up every time a commercial comes on. Based on how common that behavior has been, I'd estimate the number to be "in the millions", and I would parse the behavior as "no interest, watched for commercials". YMMV.

"would the phenomenon of Superbowl commercials even exist"

Unlikely. But the fact that the phenomenon does exist demonstrates that people ARE interested in advertising under certain circumstances.

The internet is fundamentally different, but people are fundamentally the same. The problem here is not "people hate ads", it's "people hate ads of the sort that are common on the internet, they hate them enough to seek technological solutions to block them, and the technological solutions are often applied in such a way as to block all ads indiscriminately."

The problem isn't with "advertising" as a whole. It's with advertising as it's currently done on the internet.
First thing I'm going to do with the iPad is put a wikipedia archive on it. There's an iPhone app called Encyclopedia that costs a few dollars but lets you download a complete 2.5gb page dump of Wikipedia onto your iPhone for offline browsing. I'm wondering how this app will look on the iPad - huge, blown up text? Or just broader lines? Of course, a native iPad version/equivalent will be released sooner or later.
You can also get a good sense of that factor by asking any person who has ever taken a class from that professor. This achieves the same objective, with a little more work and a little less rudeness from you (or whoever it is in this situation).
Yes, this is it. If you host your blog on blog.mydomain.com your main site won't receive the full benefit of the inbound links.

Side note: sometimes this is desired. For instance, one domain can only occupy 2 slots in a SERP, but each subdomain can take 2 more slots. So in theory, you could take up an entire results page with your main domain and 4 subdomains.
Ok, although IANASS (not a social scientist) (edited to add: and sorry anamax for the uncivil tone, long day):

Economic activity has benefits for society at large -- we get stuff out of it, and there's a feedback loop where more people with money in their pocket means more demand, which means more people employed, which means money in their pocket, etc.

Recessions are when the economy gets out of balance (historically inventory oversupply, more recently it tends to be financial meltdowns) and that feedback loop goes negative -- less money in pocket, so less spending, so less production.

Counter-cyclical spending is, according to economic theory, the one point in the cycle where the government should be encouraged to spend money like they're in vegas, up 50k and hanging at the strip club. Breaking this negative feedback loop is priority #1 -- debt can be paid back later, and if you've been breaking out your counter-cyclical toolkit, you've already lowered interest rates to near-zero so this is really cheap debt, 1% interest or lower -- if you produce any return at all, you've got a win in addition to the counter-cyclical effects.

Once you've decided to spend, you've got to decide how. Giving money to people in lump sums (which was in fact about 40% of the bill, the bill was 40% tax cuts) is fast and simple, so it certainly has a place, but keeping people in a job is far more effective because you create externalities. That job is producing something of value to the economy, that person is gaining skills/experience leading to future employability, and assuming that business is ok, their labor might lead to additional job openings at the same company later. These are all sustainable improvements that build on themselves and contribute back towards that positive feedback loop. Just spewing money out to people without any targeting whatsoever can only be a brake on recession -- it doesn't really help lay the foundations for the bounceback.
It'd rarely be the right thing to do, anyway. iPhone apps strongly tend toward drilling down through a hierarchy of list views until hitting a full-screen (including controls along an edge) detail view. iPad apps on the other hand have a flatter hierarchy, very often showing a list view and a detail view (for the selected item from the list view) at the same time. This is why iPad apps are more likely to implement a "real materials" style of interface... they're less explicitly about drilling through hierarchies for data and more about direct manipulation of the entities the app deals with.
It's not as bad as it used to be. I borked my X just last night when I switched graphics cards and fixed it in 10 minutes of googling on my phone. I used to do hours of booting into windows (back in the days when I still dual-booted), searching for stuff, writing it down, rebooting into linux, trying said stuff, rinse and repeat. Either there's a lot more good advice out there or my googling skills got better.
The 50+ decisive students are paying 50+ times more to be interrupted in order to service the indecision of “xxxx”.
What? http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/topics/db/models/#id5
Nobody in America is more mobile than recent college grads. And yet "a number" took jobs with UPS but none apparently thought to move to LA?

Seriously?
It's the facial hair. If Matz and his followers had more facial hair, the Ruby scene would rock. I know he may be doing the best he can, but the fact remains: programming languages are awesome in proportion to the beardiness of their creators and cheerleaders. K&R? Check. Guido? Check. John McCarthy? Check. Wall? Moustache but no beard, so half-sucky but tolerable. Stroustrup? Trimmed down a lot, so good but not truly awesome. The Lua guy? Worse than Matz. Java, PHP, and JavaScript? You can see the faces! The skin!!!11! And let's not forget COBOL, the only language to develop actual estrogen poisoning.

What's the beard coverage fraction at your company?
You mean he learnt that he should avoid this prof at all costs? The student is paying the prof, not the other way around.
Chile Earthquake Moved Entire City 10 Feet to the West
There's a difference between taking risks and being an idiot. This guy could've googled "make kettle corn" and read a page or watched a video and saved himself from a lot of cleaning.
What's the point of nofollowing the Amazon link? I could be wrong, but I believe Google will still look at the link even if it doesn't follow it, and still factor it into the "does this site have too large a proportion of affiliate links?" calculation.
it's only a matter of time before this stops entertaining me so I'm just going to answer this question as completely and totally as I can (before guys like KirinDave start calling me names, etc.).

there is in fact RESEARCH about this. being somebody who really really really wanted to make music for a living, and utterly failed, I went and read as much research as I possibly could. the two most relevant things you should read to fully understand this question are an article in the New York Times on cumulative advantage - google "NYT Timberlake cumulative advantage" - and "The Winner-Take-All Society", an economics book which is a few years old now.

the short answer is: create lots of stuff, at high standards of quality, because how specific assets become popular is very near random. you absolutely cannot predict which assets become popular - not even if you have a track record of huge hits. the economics and social networking elements are the same whether you're talking companies, code, movies, or music. you cannot predict hits. Tom Cruise can't say for sure, DHH can't say for sure, no matter who you are or how at the top of your game you are, it is functionally random. however, having lots of fans makes it much, much more probable, and the best way to get fans is by giving them stuff which is good. so create a lot of assets, get them to as many people as possible, and target a nice high standard of quality. and NEVER be too attached to the success or failure of any particular asset - there's just too much randomness involved for it to be even remotely logical to be taking it personally.
Unfortunately, DropZap doesn't work with the latest dev version of Chrome on Mac and Linux (and possibly also Windows -- I didn't test it). Please use the beta (or earlier dev) version of Chrome or another browser.
Arq packs small files (under 64k) together into "packs"...

Ok, so if you have lots of 64 kB files they're all PUT separately, using 15625 PUTs/GB (i.e., $0.15/GB)? I guess that's not too bad.

The file format is open

Nice! Good to see someone who believes in openness. (How about the source code, so that people can confirm that you're doing what the spec says?)

One thing caught my eye glancing through that document, though: "The name of each blob is its SHA1 hash." That's the SHA1 hash of the encrypted data, right? (If not, it definitely should be!)
You should have an internal dashboard, even if you're not absurdly artsy Mac developers who can afford a flatscreen monitor to showcase it to anybody in the office. You can have v1.0 ground out in an hour or two -- take your MVC framework of choice, make a single page behind authentication, set that as your homepage or etc -- and it will pay dividends for the rest of your business' life.

It is absolutely absurd how much extra value-producing work you'll get done if tasks which routinely take you 10 minutes take 5 minutes and tasks which routinely take you 2 minutes just don't happen.

If you need some inspiration on what to put on it, I have an article on the topic somewhere... Here we go. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard-design-for-met...
Did you check out the Zii Egg?