skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good work imagining! Now go make something! Building tools for the personal web is no harder than writing a Hacker News clone. It just requires more imagination.
Tell HN: $1.17 domain names from GoDaddy
It was a tough choice - make the thing run in IE, or spend more time improving the UI for everyone else. In the end I went with the later. I figured most of our audience wouldn't be using IE, and if they were, they probably had Chrome Frame installed. If you're one of the unlucky few who can't run Chrome Frame for whatever reason, sorry!
I think he's for safe harbor. But he's making a critique of the knee-jerk reaction that the blogosphere is having.

Censoring YouTube is a blow against free speech. Generally we should prefer YouTube to the government here. However the interests of free speech and YouTube are not identical either. They may resist government censorship, but they also censor content for their own purposes.

The ideal of free speech, in his view, is not that we have giant private sharing infrastructures (or even competition among them). In his ideal world, there would be common sharing / hosting / backup infrastructure, so distributed and fine grained that it would be simply everywhere.
Stealthy Knowmore Loads Up On Talent To Silence The Social Noise Problem
Yeah, I did (with the help here and there from a few people where I work). Glad you like it. Took a stock image for the background built a simple design and focused on making it usable. Everyone I speak to with 300+ following seems to have an issue managing people they follow. Decided to do something about it.
One very useful trick is to use www.dnswl.org (a DNS whitelist) before greylisting. It lets trustworthy mail servers right through, which almost negates the downside of greylisting (delayed mail).
Why the estimate? If you follow the links on the wikipedia page to the US census site, they have the data just sitting there. There is a big CSV file with the 150436 most common names. They even have a field with cumulative number of occurrences per 100,000.

Number of surnames it takes to get 50% of the US population: 2182

The 2182nd surname: JERNIGAN
If you want Acme or Sam, the best course is to install plan9port. It's easy and you get the most modern version of the editors. Wily is not very usable, so I recommend avoiding it. The sam that comes in the debian repository is a very old-school black and white version, which works fine, but the plan9ports version has very nice colors and fonts.
I have no information specific to Citi but I doubt very much that any bank manager/supervisor is in a position to do anything about a decision made by the Compliance office. Compliance is a big gorilla in a financial services org -- they're responsible for keeping the company out of legal trouble. That includes making sure SarbOx, the Patriot Act and other regulations are followed to the letter. Most of the rules they enforce have significant financial/legal consequences so their decisions get a lot of deference. And the nature of compliance actions, which are often triggered by things like suspected money laundering or fraud, means front-line employees are unlikely to have any detailed information about the reasoning behind them, beyond a brief note on the account from the compliance office, which reveals no more than the barest minimum of information (the folks Fabulis talked to were probably all giving the same response because they were probably all reading the same compliance-office note on the account).

All of this makes a lot of operational sense -- missing a legitimate compliance violation costs the firm more than cleaning up after the occasional false positive, as long as those false positives stay occasional. But the downside is that one stupid decision by one stupid employee in the compliance office can take some serious effort to unravel. The legit complaints have to bubble up through all the deadbeat dads bitching about having their child support payments garnished...
I think it becomes most useful if you have an auto-follow back on your account and 200+ following. It starts to become difficult to get much utility from your twitter stream at that point.

I'm interested - what metrics would you want for choosing who to unfollow?
Direct link: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplem...

Interesting, but not very comprehensive. A number of supplements that I've found relevant to recommend to friends, including GABA, 5-HTP and levodopa are absent from the graphic (or did I miss them?).

It's also problematic that some of the conditions indicated are very general. There are many possible biochemical causes for depression or insomnia, and a treatment that works for one might have no effect on another.
How do you make sure that people are only posting news from Chicago?
> The difference is that YouTube profits from the videos, EC2 rents generic capacity to someone who could choose to profit from them.

So profit = bad? Do you think that Amazon runs EC2 as a pro-bono effort?

Amazon YouTube
------ -------
Rents Generic Space Rents specific space (videos-only)
Charges Rental Fees Free rent
Provides a minimal API Provides a nice web front-end tailor to specific space
Profits from rental fees Profits from adverts in/around the videos

Please explain the huge difference here and how the law should differentiate between one service and another. Is the major difference here that YouTube uses advertising to turn a profit rather than rental fees? Is that really what makes them deserving of losing safe-harbor? Do the GeoCities-type hosting services also fall into this niche because they monetize through advertising rather than fee-collection?

[Note: I've never used EC2 so I don't know what they provide other than a low-level (and maybe a high-level) API into their space]

{edit}
Some more points:

* If you don't like that fact that YouTube does not rent generic space and rents space specifically for videos, then how do you rectify more to-the-metal type services that rent space specifically for video, or music distribution, but still profit from rental fees (instead of ads)? Do they qualify the same as YouTube because they are not providing 'generic space?'

* Do you not like that Google possibly profits more from popular videos than from unpopular videos (i.e. you don't like that they profit more or less based on the content of the video)? If this is the case, how is it any different than Amazon EC2 profiting more from someone that serves large files that such up copious amounts of bandwidth if they get to be popular/highly downloaded?
{/edit}
"you'd never catch these first world people getting their water supply from a 10' deep hole in their backyard - they're totally in favor of chlorine, municipal water, and more."

Wells are actually pretty common in the US. It depends on the water table and population density of an area.
Adobe make the tools for creating Flash content. Not the only tools, I know, but the most widely used and supported tools. They also control the player, meaning new features added to the player will appear in Adobe tools first.

They'll adapt their tools to output HTML5, sure, just like Illustrator outputs SVG. They lose the control that they had with the Flash platform, though.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Funny, I didn't remember the "boards did shrink" line.

The Economist carries well the anglo-saxonic tradition of pinching titles from the KJV or any other bit of half-decent poetry. I think I'll pinch the big data phrase ...

(search saver: http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Rime_Ancient_M... )
The whole concept of "real UNIX" has been discontinued; workstations are just a symptom.

(Or as the kids say, "Unix? Is that like Linux?")
Why are So Many Android Owners Male?
No, because it doesn't require Chrome. It requires a modern browser. Firefox works. Chrome and Chromium work. Safari works. Opera works. Epiphany works. Konqueror probably works.

IE, as a platform, simply hasn't maintained parity with the state of the web. It doesn't make sense for a small team to hobble their product or expend undue effort for the sake of one laggard.

And hey, you don't even have to give up IE! Drop in one plugin and everything works, transparently.
Attention is a limited resource, but some people have more of it than others. Paying attention to how you dress is a signal that you're generally attentive, just as driving a nice car is a way to show that you have lots of money--even though you spent a bunch of it on a car.
I'm not seeing it at all. What exactly does it tell us in this case?
Your missing the point, if every Linux Kernel cost 1cent due to patent issues many people would still use it. The option to switch to a "free" BSD Kernel would cause many people to use that for new systems. However, the value of a Kernel is increased by the other systems that connect to it. So if you had 10k systems and you could keep using them with zero transition costs for 100$ most company's would do so. The fact the Kernel cost's nothing does not mean it's value is zero.
Thus far it's been security-via-obscurity plus aggressive moderation.
That has everything to do with connections (e.g. accidents of history, in many cases before many of us were born) and nothing to do with personal merit.
Don't care much about the data itself but the use of Google Docs as a data source in combination with whatever flash library they're using for the visualization is an interesting approach. Too bad there aren't more details on how they're reading from Google Docs. My guess is it's a Flex graphing library. Anyone recognize it?
How much time do you spend on moderation? Seems like it would be a lot of work. Problems with spam?
Today the fastest possible machine that given amount of money can buy is an x86 PC. The cost of the backwards compatibility crap is more than subsidized by the huge economy of scale. Removing DOS/Windows support would actually cost money and would make no performance difference.
An antiquated version of the printer vending machine existed via the grocery store copy machine - .10 per copy.

Appears Kinkos has done a better job of remaining flexible with their business model than the blockbusters and video stores of the world by accommodating remote printing.
It is confusing that "Evidence", which is the label of the y axis, is graphically presented in the same way as the values on the y axis ("Strong", "Good", "Promising", "Conflicting").
I despise the "follow them if they're following you" mentality. It's identical to having 10k "friends" on Facebook / MySpace. If they don't enrich your life, are they really worth following? Is it just more noise?

It's one of the reasons I tend to like Twitter. I only get info I request, nothing gets pushed to me that I'm not interested in (a la FB's feed). I follow who I want because I want, and I don't want them to follow me if they're only interested in their following count.
You can get an advanced degree in 'creation science' too: http://www.nwcreation.net/colleges.html
I knew I had seen this style on an app somewhere around here. Great work, I personally find these forms to be very intuitive. The only suggestion I have for Thymer is for the "re-type password" field. Your prompt there could certainly confuse some users.
When I was working in the U.S. I was surprised to see the great variety of surnames. I looked at the directory and there were about 200 engineers in the building. There was not a single repeated surname. It was interesting the great variety of origins. (e.g Polish, German, Spanish, Arab, Indian, etc, etc.)
On the other hand a lot of people had the same names. (John, Mike, Dave) Here in Latin America is different, many people share the same family names, but we have more variety of first names.
For our small software company's email, we use Google's Postini service that runs $12/mail account/year. Emails are routed to Postini which filters the spam and then passes the good messages on to our mail server. It was pretty straight forward to setup by updating DNS and configuring the Postini account. I don't recall having do do anything special on the mail server or mail clients, but it has been a while.
Mining "perfectly" only matters against top-level competition. Otherwise, just pointing a decent number of harvesters toward the resources (SC) or setting workers on auto (Civ) is good enough. So you have it exactly backwards; mining efficiency doesn't matter much to newbies.

As for why resource mining / management even exists: from a warfare perspective, because you can only fight as long as you have the tools to fight with. From a gameplay perspective, because acquiring resources provides a major motivation for leaving your secure base, and the cost and risk associated with setting up a secondary base (versus using the same resources for some other objective like attacking an enemy position) provides a major decision point.

Learning the tools -- how to harvest, how to build units, how much your units cost, etc. -- is newbie stuff. The real game is in setting yourself up to win the war through the engagements you choose. The real game is in deciding which resources and technologies to pursue, when and where to engage your enemy with which forces, what risks to take at what time, how to respond to failures, what sacrifices to make for the sake of an objective (intelligence, delaying an enemy, destroying or acquiring something, etc.), recognizing the right time to press an advantage, and so on. It is the stuff of warfare, and the stuff of life. Far from an Excel optimization exercise, it's a rich multi-dimensional decision space with several paths to victory based on numerous factors that can vary from game to game.

That's why my wife and I still play Starcraft after twelve years.
I absolutely agree. This tool doesn't help you increase your signal to noise ratio, which should be the real goal.

That's why I recently built this: http://www.unladenfollow.com/ Unladen Follow suggests people to unfollow based on how noisy they are, not whether they follow you back. It gives you metrics about things like excessive hashtags, links, and so on.
Why Can’t PCs Work More Like iPhones?
Does anyone have much experience with Haskell gui programming? I've noticed there are a bundle of different
gui libraries, and was wondering which is generally considered the best (i) for getting real world stuff done and (ii) in terms of conceptual/theoretical merits, even if they are still a bit rough around the edges in terms of implementation.
That's what interns and crowdsourcing is for. We've got a nifty "bury" feature that lets you hide stories you don't like just like on a lot of these sites.
1. Upsetting, but true. One major virtue of many ancient societies is that they had social checks and balances that put those with talent and intelligence in positions of higher status and more power than those who happened to incidentally have the money. Ours fails in that regard.

2. The founders are not mediocrities. The people who come in later and use social manipulation to control resources they didn't create are the mediocrities.

3. Interesting and reasonable point.
Ask HN: What questions couldn't you answer when browing my new website?
I actually completely agree with your definition of innovation and that's exactly how I think about it.

What I would ask you is, how have you guys innovated with your definition in mind? When I said I saw no innovation I meant that I literally saw a carbon copy of a dozen other products out there. Do you take in mind those other products as part of that refinement cycle you mention? If so, how is yours the next step in refinement and what has changed or become more streamlined?

I understand this may be your goal moving forward, but I still see it as a bit silly to start at the same exact point as a dozen other startups and hope that you'll somehow beat them in a race of iterating and in turn innovating.

Why should I use your product over theirs?
Currently, my most powerful machine is my MacBook, which dual-boots OS X and Windows 7 natively. I probably use them about the same. I run a lot of things in VirtualBox, though. I almost always have an OpenBSD VM up and running, for example. My two lower-powered desktops are running Solaris 10 (Sparc) and Ubuntu Karmic for the time being, but Ubuntu is kind of in the dog house right now. I've had good luck with ArchLinux in a VM, so I may throw that on there soon.
Joel has mentioned a couple times in the past -- I think this started around the time people like Jeff Atwood said he jumped the shark -- (the Wasabi incident; sorry, I'd never be able to find links from Joel on this) that he's written about everything he knows about software development and has run out of things to say.

I'm a little surprised that he will stop speaking and podcasting as well, but it make sense for similar reasons. Bands get tired of doing all their greatest hits all the time, I'm sure it's the same for public speakers.

It will be interesting to see where he goes next. The hg init site is really nice. Perhaps he will focus on larger projects like that. Or maybe he'll focus on vacationing in the Hamptons.

I feel like I've learned a lot for Joel over the years, so bon voyage.
One of the potential advantages of the large UGC platforms like Youtube is as a risk pool. Would it be easier for me to fight off an attempt to censor me, or would it be easier for Google to fight off an attempt to censor their users? Note that I'm not saying these platforms necessarily do perform this function, but many do to at least some extent. The thing that bothers me most about this case is that Google seem to have provided Italian law enforcement with the personal information of the criminals. Could you imagine the outcry that would happen if there were a case where AT&T kept recordings of some one's phone calls and used those recordings to turn that person over to the police after the police somehow discovered that some one(without even knowing who specifically they are looking for) was using an AT&T phone as part of criminal activities? Obviously, most people will accept some amount of wiretapping, but I'd expect fewer people to accept either this hypothetical situation or the situation with Google in Italy.
It's disturbing to think that the pilots spent precious time trying to reboot the flight computers, rather than trying to stabilize the plane using the basic thrust, pitch, roll and yaw controls, maintaining level flight and an open throttle.

All automated controls like this should be tested with each input in turn (a) disabled and (b) actively malicious, followed by two inputs disabled / malicious, and perhaps three inputs disabled / malicious - with special attention paid to likely cascading failures. Anything the automated system can't deal with should (a) be detectable through sanity checks and (b) have a reliable human response that pilots are trained in.

My experience in flight is limited to some skydiving and flight simulators. What I know about stalling from lack of thrust in level flight is that the plane seems to pitch downwards and becomes relatively unresponsive to the small adjustments in the elevators that ought to correct this pitch. A stupidly simple feedback system that doesn't know about the impending stall would simply try to counteract the stall by pitching up further and further, until it ends up in a flat stall / spin. The problem being that stall warnings are based on wind speed, which in turn requires an instrument.
I find the fact that so many people decided to create their own "standard libraries", even after so many others were available a strong statement for the fact that one standard would be bad. Obviously, all these people had reasons strong enough not to use the existing tools, wanted something so different, that building it themselves, with all the effort involved, was a better solution.
That means she had other issues. Tabata is difficult but it exhausts you, it does not make you bed-ridden.
Thanks for sharing. I'm surprised the StackOverflow podcast, with its current hosts, lasted as long as it did. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to produce a podcast like theirs.

It also takes a good chunk of time to listen to one, that could be used for other things, even when driving, like listening to an audiobook or music. For that reason, I tended to only listen to the podcast occasionally. I think the one with Steve Yegge as a guest was worth my time, though.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/podcast-25/
So then by this reasoning, YouTube would be ok if they allowed any content and not just videos?
Cool - Every major city should have one of these. Nice Job Man!
Inspired by this post from earlier in the week about FAQs - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146552

1. Visit our site
2. Provide us with 2-4 questions you had and could not answer while browsing our site

This is my website in the sense that I produced a lot of the planning and content. I figure any questions the HN community has about business, Shirlaws, or business coaching would be relevant, so if they're not answered I need to improve the site.
Getting rid of bad teachers
"But as the business matures, I've come to realize that blogging is holding me back."

How so? Does he mean in terms of time commitment. It seems like this a great marketing function, and would continue to be. I certainly would have never heard of Fog Creek without it.
Some have interpreted that way, but it's quite cynical.

I used to do a bunch of W3 standard. People I know on the inside _not_ from Adobe have told me that this was just a procedural question.

This is probably the reason it was done on a private list, to avoid exciting this kind of speculation, which certain people in the WG decided to spark anyway by posting about "secret objections".
His Mercurial tutorial/promotion of Kiln was a great example of how to present dense technical material in a colorful, expressive way. But between the constant drive to squeeze every penny he can out of StackOverflow, first by charging for Careers and now by looking for VC money, and the relentless agenda-pushing of his own products, I feel like I need a shill filter for anything he says.
It reminds me of the "slippery slope" argument, which tries to equate any action in some direction with the worst possible outcome. But it's based on the idea that people cannot make reasonable distinctions along some axis. All grays are equal in their view.
The title is exactly as it is on the story
In my recent trip to India, I found chinese knockoffs of the iPhone selling for about $50-60 in many markets.
That's pretty awesome. What kind of company was it?
This headline is misleading in that Timbl is agreeing that the charter is out of date. He isn't rejecting some proposal from Adobe to banish items from the WG agenda.
Of course I wouldn't ask a customer to FTP me files. They are going to email them to me no matter what. I just want the attachments stripped automatically. As for Procmail. Maybe it will come to that. I use gmail now in order to save all those hours administering my own email server. At least with the client idea, it has a chance to work for a lot of people. I do have my doubts that IMAP can handle stripping an attachment in place however.
Nice little app, I love the humorous and clever "status" updates as it connects to your account.

Some of the metrics I'd like to see would be to highlight my best followers. Would be nice to know who replies to me, and who retweets my stuff. Also would be nice to change the threshold for what is considered a quiet/talkative user.

Assuming I had hundreds of people I follow, knowing the top 10/20/50 that actually connect with me (via DM/reply/RT) would be a nice way of trimming the 'fat'.

A bot detector would be nice as well. Maybe some logic to tell if someone you follow is using an "auto" tweet app or is tweeting the same thing over and over.