skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder who Seneca thought was carefully arranging the universe so that everyone would had enough time if only they had used it properly. They didn't have monotheism back then, did they? Or maybe Seneca was just naturally the sort of person who rationalized things easily, and imagined a fairer universe without anyone in particular making it fair.

Anyway, props to the people Seneca was disagreeing with, who managed to be more honest with themselves about the unfairness of the universe and how easily it could have been improved than Seneca and many other modern rationalizers.

http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified

http://lesswrong.com/lw/uk/beyond_the_reach_of_god/
I have read that Cassandra needs good IO performance to do well. So I am wondering what type of performance you guys are getting on EC2 and what are the sort of things you have done specifically in regards to it (like RAID).

We are looking into Cassandra for thecadmus.com and any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
> We are part of of a Cosmic Whole

Bet you Seneca never said that. It's a highly evolved modern form of nonsense.
Definitely agree that it doesn't look like a shop. Checkout my friends dropshipped-powered site http://seriouslyscuba.com - also inspired by Tim Ferriss' muse concept. If I were you I would quickly move away from wp-commerce into a real e-commerce solution (seriouslyscuba is on shopify by the way, so I guess you'd have to justify spending money on their high fees to go that route). The design looks good overall, I guess to me, its just that wordpress doesn't make for a good e-commerce solution. I'd hide the Categories block, RSS links, 'Comments are closed' text, i.e. anything that makes it looks like a blog-converted-to-store. Good luck nonetheless.
CouchDB is an MVCC document store, it isn't concerned with scaling the way Cassandra, HBase and Voldemort are. This is a pretty good overview of the landscape http://www.vineetgupta.com/2010/01/nosql-databases-part-1-la...
Got it, messing with it now :) There a neat way to use emacs with it?
It's a nitpick, and it might be just me, but I find "business student" a slightly misleading way to identify yourself as an undergraduate business major.

EDIT: Also, if I was interviewing you, I would push you pretty hard on some of your "interests". Quantum physics? Awesome demonstration of well-roundedness if true, but... could you walk me through (e.g.) the time-independent Schrodinger equation?

FURTHER EDIT: I think there are a couple punctuation issues in this sentence: "I have held an interest in marketing since high school when I founded my cities first youth filmmaker’s festival." I know these are all minor points, but I'm hoping you'll find them helpful.
"... I really liked Mixergy. I turned lots of people onto it. When you decided (almost out of the blue) to turn it into a strictly money making venture for yourself I felt burned. I thought you were following in the footsteps of Charlie Rose's interviews, Paul Graham's essays, or one of the dozens of great Podcasts that exist. Something fairly altruistic that may generate money for you, but not as its primary goal. ..."

I agree with you about charging but these things cost. Plus Andrew is in this to make something users want (and can pay for). My own view is the way Mixergy set up now, you can view the latest for free but historical views cost. Here is a question though. It's related to startups and converting users from free to paying.

Do you think Andrew would benefit from a freemium approach where users have some, but limited access before payment is required? (more than now?) Or would some sort of token, voucher for HN followers be enough to avoiding negative early adopters?
Um, isn't it the case that all this suggests is that some of the incidents were operator error? And didn't we assume that all along? It clearly isn't happening to most drivers. Or even many. Or even a remotely significant sampling of drivers. That's not the point.
The Normalised Compression Distance stuff was neat, I hadn't seen that before. Thanks!
"They didn't have monotheism back then, did they?"

AD 50?
Not sure yet. I'd imagine LLC down the road for it's tax advantages, but I'd have to look in to it more later. In other words... I'm not incorporating until I have to.

Also for the images - they're links to particular articles. Do you really think they'll have a problem for linking like that?
My favorite cheap PHP host is Bluehost. I like everything about them except that they ask for passwords over the phone, and mention that every time I talk to them. Not only is a secure password a pain to say over the phone ("amersand backslash carrot capital-H comma...") but I don't like the idea of a disgruntled employee trying out the same password on my email accounts, even if I don't use the same password.
I want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. It seems like the Toyota defects are not defects but isolated incidents, which the US congress has exploited to get back to a Japanese corporation that created devastation for the entire US auto industry.
30% discount Dell Studio 15 battery - $72.99 : Free Shipping to wordwide
Decentralized video sharing should look to blogs for inspiration
Okay, good advice. I am really just bootstrapping here, trying to get up and running and working as soon as possible, for as little as possible... Perhaps I'll switch over to a more serious e-commerce solution once I build up the business a little, with the intention of looking for a better "store-like" theme in the mean time.
The singularity is nearerer...
I've been a Slashdotter for 12 years and in the last year or two my visits have fallen to once or twice a week. The issue isn't what this guy raises though.. it's just that they're so far behind on everything. Hacker News and Reddit have basically supplanted Slashdot for covering the same stuff with similar audiences but a lot quicker. Slashdot is frequently days or weeks behind on its beat.

That said, its discussion and moderation system is still one of the best out there.
It sounded to me that they just went in on it with the guy from Kansas. They bought it for however much, and NPR chipped in $1000, which is why they say if they keep getting ~$140 monthly payments through to November, they'd break even.
No, unless you're assuming that only old people are capable of operator error.

This suggests that 'sudden acceleration' is biased towards old people, and we know that operator error of the wrong-pedal type is as well. It doesn't suggest that only cases involving old people could be operator error.
If the person suffers from some form of epilepsy, could drop in a state of unconsciousness. From there should be easy to just recreate a similar environment to the previous one (if you find yourself, in a credible place full of zombies, with a gun, you will shoot, instinct).

Video games, offer a good immersion in the story, if played long enough (think of the current military training).

Though, the people in the video linked are just actors (and bad ones). Considered the complexity of organization, I was disappointed in the end: just touch the actor head with his hands, and the actor 'magically' (instantly) calm down, and return to the previous state.
mhm, but those are GPS receivers only. SFE sells the 'ubertracker' for $325 which is GPS + GSM. You could also whack together a super-cheap prepaid phone ala http://instamapper.com
This page must have been written a decade ago, with references to Katz & Quake 3.

Even as a water cooler / linkdump, /.'s been supplanted. Why post this now?
That's like asking "What's wrong with pepperoni pizza?" Nothing's wrong with it, but I like lots of pizzas.
I read that book a long time ago.

I always found it interesting how he was constantly in fear of getting ripped off by the government, and moreover, how the North Korean people he worked with never really talked to him about how they felt.

I found the story about the girl who was impregnated by an African student and forced to have an abortion to be incredibly fascinating.
OMGHowMuchTimeLeftForYCDecision
Can you (or someone) explain what Tim Ferris' muse concept is?
Welcome to Windows Live
Way to insult Tim Ferris. I found his book very detailed and number oriented--opposite of this blog post.
Cool stuff. He obviously said it wasn't intended for production, but the major issue that comes to mind is SEO since engines won't see the text as actual text. Really cool proof of concept though.
Alternative Hypothesis: The Toyota vehicles with this defect are the more expensive brands which typically are purchased more often by the elderly.

Younger people are driving 98 Honda Civics, etc...not 2007-2010 Camrys, so they would be expected to make a smaller part of the population.

With that said, my gut does tend to find the age-pattern of people experiencing unintended acceleration to be worth following up...
Not being able to select/copy text is pretty annoying too.
- There is nothing evil in nature. The only evil is moral evil in humans. Realising this makes a person serene and free, the only thing that counts is the purity of your own conscience.

What about natural disasters and diseases? I would call earthquakes and smallpox evil. They've killed more people than people have. If you want to play games with definition and only count things as evil if they intend to do harm, well then I'd still say they're bad and I would prefer we fixed them.
I don't see anything revolutionary about this app at all. All the features shown can already be accomplished by the iphone.
I challenge you to offer valid alternatives instead of just challenging him to do it. And what does being wealthy have to do with anything? He has the same right to choose this business model as someone living on Kraft Dinner.

"Why are you trying to make money from Mixergy?" Why not??? He's not running a charity. His business, his work, his content, his right to try to monetize it.

You're calling his business model 20th century. Feel free to offer some 21st century alternatives.

A lot of "I want your content and I want you to keep working on it, but I don't want to pay you for it, so find another way to make money" comments flowing in this thread without many good ideas to help him do it differently.
First off, Rackspace's cloud services has totally different CS staff than their managed hosting services. I'm a managed customer and this has never happened. In fact, I had to deal with their cloud CS people regarding a DNS issue and got the run around.

Anyway, the managed folks ask for your portal password and a challenge question (high school mascot). In the 4 years I've used them, they have never asked for a root password to one of my boxes.

And, BTW, Softlayer does ask for your machine's root password in their support ticket form.
This is Rackspace Cloud, not to be confused with Rackspace's many other offerings.

And if you're running code on someone else's hardware then they pretty much implicitly have access to all your stuff, password or not.
An interesting contrast: One of the Windows Experience Principles introduced for Windows 7 is "Change is bad, unless it's great."
One on One: Andrey Ternovskiy, Creator of Chatroulette
Don't you mean Saturday, March 13? :)
I can always count on Slashdot for hyperbole and misunderstanding. They are the Fox News of the tech world.
its where you build something that can make you money after setting it up, with little or no extra work involved. if more work is involved, it can be done by hiring someone cheaply (in another country more-than-likely) so you can focus your time on things you would rather do, while having the muse continue to work for you.
I enjoyed fragmented in my teenages but I don't understand why and how I actually hate it in my twenties :).

BTW thumbs up for real life social engineering :).
Given how consistently they have famine over there, they must have trouble fattening up his body doubles enough.
The story on NPR where the highway patrol officer is doing 90MPH for several minutes next to the guy who's trying to pry up the gas pedal with one hand while controlling the car with the other doesn't sound too much like someone getting the wrong pedal.

Maybe a bunch of these cases are just the ambient stupidity that we've always had. That doesn't mean there's nothing to the story.
Cool. Definitely promote your top-product on the front page so people can add to cart with one click instead of having to navigate over to the store page. If you do want to use a content management system for a storefront, perhaps check out Ubertcart and the fusion theme (is what I think I used). You can see a test site I created at http://c2c.infusedindustries.com - but if you haven't used Drupal before, it can be a timesink to learn.
I'm intrigued by this response because, as others have mentioned, there is nothing inherently wrong with charging for content. People do it all of the time. We all need to make a living somehow, right?

I think one mistake that may have been made in this case, and others may disagree with me, is that there was (as far as I know) no disclaimer about the content not being free forever. I think some people stumble upon a resource like Mixergy, see it's free, and get used to it being free. And once the owner of the content decides to start charging for access, it feels as though something has been taken away.

While I realize that it probably isn't rational to think that way, I think that many people do engage in that kind of thought process. And I wonder if Andrew would still have received this kind of response if he had let his users know up front that he had intended to eventually switch to a pay-for-viewing model.
Reminds me of an incident I had with my account at NeSol some years ago. I used to get promotional cards in the mail from them, always in pairs, one addressed to my login account name and the other addressed to my password. It seemed inconceivable and I could never get them to actually believe me, even with scanned proof.

No matter the policy or level of security behind internal tools, it still potentially can leave more room for such errors.
You can copy the text. It just doesn't have the outline to show you what's selected. Which is quite annoying, yes.
yeah, remember me to fire that developer
So it's time to actually read some Seneca instead of betting on your prejudice. I think I've read most of his work, and while I can't remember anything specially about this, as it was a well-known part of the stoic's cosmovision, from bits of information here and there, you can actually see this clearly.
I second your hypothesis. The data definitely needs to be normalized by the population distribution of Toyota cars under question. First, I wouldn't call 55 year-olds as "old people" who are so senile as to mistake pedals. Second, assuming her data is accurate (a risky assumption judging from the informal tone of the post and total lack of rigor), what if the age-unknown group is included with, say, the 30 year-old group (could be, since the ages are unknown), the conclusion then seems so much weaker.

I have noticed that many bloggers and journalists have come to Toyota's aid recently. As another conspiracy theory, could this be somewhat fueled by Toyota's PR?
Google.com - Hack3r version
Young drivers are expected to make mistakes, older drivers aren't expected to make mistakes. This unfairly biases error towards manufacturer.

I frequently seeing older drivers failing to signal and many other basic errors expected from an inexperienced driver, so why wouldn't the odd driver catch the gas instead of the break, maybe cause their seat got rearranged or whatever.

A young driver having this problem will be suspected of operator error, the first assumption for an older driver should be operator error. A dual-standard creates errors.
FasList wins Readers Choice Award on About.com
Google Street View bears the reactionary wrath of the UK tabloid media
Could you cite an example of exaggeration? Are Chinese citizens free to access any information on the internet?
Is Jessica Simpson the next Marilyn Monroe
> The difference between Seneca and us is that we can toil to turn money into additional years of life

No, we can not; we can't even undo the damage caused by the diseases of affluence, and this hyped and religious belief in salvation by the science would make the most primitive polytheist laugh.
It would be interesting to find out the computer literacy
of those people involved. For a non computer literate person,
having a computer take over for even a second I would think would scare them in doing all sorts of things.
Ask HN: Ideas to monetize my site?
So, I keep reading stories and blog posts about people that have four-hour workweek inspired income coming in from a variety of landing pages or other sites (that sell ebooks, etc.) without doing much work.

Well, I have a site - www.fiwishop.com - that I started long ago (in 2003 to be exact) when I first stumbled across the power of the interwebs and user-generated content. I realized that when people go to websites to look at pictures of events, they are really looking for pictures of themselves so I setup a site that allowed a small niche (Jamaicans specifically - because I am Jamaican) to upload their own photos. This was early 2003, so pre-facebook, flickr, myspace, youTube, etc.

Anyway, the initial feedback I got was very positive and I saw a surge in traffic with nothing but word of mouth. However, I had used an off-the-shelf script and at the time didn't know any programming so couldn't grow the site more than what I initially put up.

I decided to throw a games section there just to see what happens. I went to college and eventually the site got neglected, I did nothing, but for some reason the traffic for the games section would not go away.

I literally have not updated the site in about 2 - 3 years (the forums, the photo gallery, nothing). The most I have done was changed the home page about 6 months ago to add that survey.io link.

Needlesss to say, for the last 2 years, I have been averaging about 2000 - 5000 unique visitors, with a relatively low bounce rate (25%), average pageviews of 6.7, avg time on site of 06m:39s.

Last month, 35% of all my traffic came from the keywords "fiwishop games".

I used to have Google Ads on the site, but they would perform poorly, because they were mainly for text content - which I don't have, so I have since removed them.

I am thinking of putting up some HeyZap games - given that that's the most popular part of the site, to gain some additional income - but would love to hear some ideas on other ways I can possibly monetize the site and grow traffic in a meaningful (non-spammy) way. I am not trying to be the next YouTube or Flickr, just want to be able to generate at least a few hundred per month - and scale to more than that if possible.

Thanks much in advance, feel free to ask any additional questions and I will try to get as much feedback as possible.

Edit:

In the last month, these are some of the stats straight from GA:

28,204 Pageviews
18,319 Unique Views
25.37% Bounce Rate

/Flash_Games/New/index.html 6,341	22.48%
/Flash_Games/index.html 5,516	19.56%
/index2.html 2,420	8.58%
/ 2,408	8.54%
/Flash_Games/New/DragRacer.html 1,300	4.61%

Not "major" traffic, by any stretch of the imagination, but at the very least something to start with.

Also note that any suggestions would be able to be integrated with Paypal for me to receive payment.
We all have to admit it. Network is important for one to succeed in business, in addition to raw talent and a great product. I'm not saying you can bypass the second two factors with just a network, but with a strong network, it only helps. Someone can help you introduce the product to the world and someone very smart can give you great advice, if you don't fool yourself into thinking you don't need mentoring from some of the best in the industry. I've learned a great deal by seeking advice from these leaders.
I wasn't completely sold on a MBA before coming to GSB and that's why it took me longer to come than average classmates. I almost didn't come, with the same perspective you may have.
However, having spent 1.5 years here, I think it's really worthwhile even though it used up all my savings prior to business school (yes, it's expensive). I did actually learn valuable lessons from many industry veterans who are sharing their many years of learning with us about sales, marketing, management, finance, entrepreneurship, VC, etc. Believe me, I'm a stronger believer in learning from doing it, as I'm currently building a business while in school. However, the learning and mentoring I receive is phenomenal to complement this and the network is extremely valuable.
I only just saw this via the link to Party #2, but actually found myself reading a cooking related post which is unusual. I enjoyed your writing style.
India billionaires double in 2009
People should really focus their energy into demanding better safety features on all cars instead of getting caught up on one defect. We should also be focusing on getting bad drivers off the road and requiring on-going driver education/testing at least past a certain age. In all this controversy with Toyota I haven't seen much media discussion over why "cheap cars" lack such basic safety features of higher end models including some of these throttle fail-safe systems that would have nullified the Toyota problem.
Well, yeah—that's what it means for something to be "science fiction." SF is fiction that not only feels scientific, but can be expected to hold up to genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry on its concepts and progression. If you didn't write a movie/book/whatever that will stand up to such nerdery, you should really stop calling it sci-fi.
> A better example: a customer loses their drivers license/bank card and a thief finds it calls a bank to do transactions, using the info on the card to verify identity... A bank can only do so much to protect their customers. If someone is willing to leave their info lying around, there isnt much that can be done.

I don't understand this argument at all. Are we talking about customers leaving their information "lying around" or customers entrusting it to Netflix? I entrust my money to a bank: I give it to them. Customers entrust their transaction history to Netflix. Nobody is talking about customers leaking their private information to third parties, we are talking about the equivalent of the bank publishing the customer's driver's license information in a newspaper with their name obscured.

p.s. Now that I've established that I don't think this example is particularly relevant, I will share a story: Several years ago I returned from vacation to find a phone message from my bank. Someone had used what appeared to be my ATM card to withdraw $1,000 from my account while I was in Honduras. Of course I was the victim of some kind of skimming and cloning operation. The bank reimbursed me in full.
why doesn't Netflix have people opt-in to have their data anonymized and used for this purpose?

Selection bias?
Steve Woz was pretty vocal about the Prius thing, I remember seeing a post of his on Slashdot about how the acceleration thing was definitely a repeatable bug somehow related to cruise control.

Fake edit:
Found it, he details it first in a post here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=299...
And then it gets its own discussion here http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/02/1458230/Woz-Cites-Sc...
We might be being a little premature on being on the cusp of a new era. All this technology and science takes time. For example, the war on cancer started almost 40 years ago. We are from a cure. We have so much more to learn before we can really extend life or "cure" death.
Last year I bought devvit.com/net/org for a site I'm working on (has a new name now) and after doing a lot of polling, enough people thought it was too close to risk. Only anecdotal, but devvit is far less similar than rddd.it, and it only takes a mere thought for a trademark holder to try and have a go..