skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you. I'm not calling anyone a coward, but I would certainly feel like one after being robbed. It's a very intrusive, violating event.
Reminds me of children's short stories about Lenin by Mikhail Zoshchenko. (I can't find them in English though, to put this in context for you. Anybody knows if they were translated?)
Doritos Viralocity - Super Caliente
Is not the popularizing of something revolutionary in and of itself? If touchscreen phones were unpopular before the iPhone, doesn't Apple deserve some credit for opening the market?

I'm really not trying to be an Apple apologist, here. They may not have invented the technology, but they sure as hell humanized it.
Hydro Floors
1) provigil or ritalin

2) write out five things you will do tomorrow before you go to bed, then don't do anything until those five things have been checked off
I've had experience with a lot of Coby stuff and I've never been impressed. CD players, stereos, vcrs and the like they are almost always the cheapest option and they do work, that I'll admit but they are cheap.

But I do like this and shoot, I'll give it a shot for $85, why not I can do whatever while I'm watching tv or take it to the kitchen and watch a cooking show while I cook the meal.

Can't get a beagle board for that. it could control a solar panel or lights or a home automation system.

3 usb ports, thats more than my mac book pro.
Open Source Idea Crowdsourcing Platform
You'll care right after Twitter steals your username and gives it to someone else... but by then it will be too late.
That's really my thinking. Since some of the patents in question against HTC are the same patents in question against Nokia, I wonder if the HTC move is just to strengthen the claims against Nokia. If Android is hurt in the process, Apple doesn't care.
The corollary to your statement is that if I have an average, comfortable life, I did not choose it. I simply let myself "fall into" that life. I view this as a negative statement, though perhaps you didn't mean it that way. I chose a comfortable life and worked to achieve it. It didn't just happen to me because I coasted along.
It's actually any domain with the word "bay" that redirects to ebay.com: http://www.crittersbythebay.com for example.
You're right, I never rent from Ebert's page, but that's mainly because I don't read Ebert's page. If I did, and I saw a review of something that looked like I liked it, I'd be fairly likely to click a link to the Amazon rental page if it was visible in the right place, because it would save me a few clicks and searches. Of course, that's irrelevant, because he doesn't have links to the rentals on his page, he has links to the DVDs, and they're not even in view anymore once you've read to the bottom his review. So it's almost exactly as much effort to go through his affiliate link as it would be to search for the movie myself.

If I had to guess, placement alone cuts his revenue from that source by at least a factor of 2 or 3, possibly even a factor of 10 or more.

And Ebert's site is not a content site, it's a review site (a highly respected one, at that). Review sites usually do very well at driving sales compared to other types of sites. That's the main reason there are review sites for all sorts of products on the web. You most certainly do not go to Ebert's site just to read articles on their own merits, you go to find out which movies are worth watching. If he thinks a movie is worth watching, I'd imagine that makes a lot of people watch that movie fairly soon after reading his review, so if that's not converting into sales he's probably got some part of his affiliate strategy wrong in a very bad way.
Methane frozen beneath Arctic seabed destabilising, scientists warn
Right, but her point is that had they (the author and her late husband) actually understood the costs at the time that they were making treatment decisions they might have made different ones. On the other hand, as you note, in a very real sense they'd already paid for the treatment in the form of decades of premiums.
Thanks for the info. I might cash in on my recent TLA earnings soon for an iPad and then ditch it (TLA, not the iPad!).

Did anything else happen around the time of that big drop in revenue that could've explained it? I've seen big fluctuations in my payments over a variety of sites that usually come back to becoming complacent about content, competition becoming stronger, leaking PR through outgoing links, etc.
I don't have a lj account and I'm not ebayed. Both Chrome and FF steadfastly refuses to steal my click.
Totally incorrect. Ok, go ahead and build me a home built storage array with 1TB SATA drives off the shelf. Then, 3 years from now, when one of your drives fails and you don't have any spares, try to find a new one that matches the exact geometry of the existing one.

What's that? You can't buy that exact drive so now your homemade RAID 5 is running in degraded mode and you hope it will stay up long enough to copy your data off onto another system? Sucks to be you, you tried to save a few bucks and got burned.

In the enterprise, we pay big bucks because we want to KNOW that we can call an 800 number and get an exact replacement hard drive, even if they stopped selling them 3 years ago.
You're missing the "pain in my ass" side, which I think is the main reason for consumer unwillingness.

Even if I'd be willing to throw a few cents at a site for content, I don't want to log in to yet another service with yet another username and password to do so; I don't want to click through three pages to authorize a payment; I don't want to do much of anything apart from perhaps clicking "Yes." Most importantly, I don't want to have to create a new account with some random micropayment company that's probably going to be gone in a few months in order to endure any of the other annoyances listed above.

This is pretty much the only reason Apple is getting away with selling stuff on the iPhone - you have to be associated with an iTunes account to use the phone, and all you need to do is punch in your password when it comes time to purchase. Since the same amount of annoyance comes at you whether you download free or paid apps (a brilliant design decision, by the way - there's really no need for them to force you to put in your password to authorize a "purchase" of something that's free since they're not charging you anyways, but setting up that equivalence between free and paid apps is useful to them), you can actually decide between the two on the basis of price rather than annoyance.
Interesting choice of engine, a turbo fed into a carburetor.
Sorry, product was a poor choice of words. I meant technology choice, as you pointed out.
Oops accidentally upvoted you. I know it's not as polite as pointing when you accidentally downvote someone, but your series of posts just seems so unrealistic, dangerous and immature that I didn't want to endorse it.
We've deleted or noindex almost every short content page (stub).

People can't create stubs any more.

The issue is resolved and after our analysis the short pages were 6% of our traffic. we deleted them or expand their content and it looks like we will be even on a traffic basis after doing this.

lesson learned? short pages only hurt you and are a waste of time since google is smart enough to not rank them (at least not well).

Look at our homepage and you'll see our new standard is 300 original words or delete/noindex the page.
But the end result of that tiling example (and I have a lot of smaller clients that are in that sort of position) is that the blog spam and MFA sites dominate, while the small players with a legitimate, physical business struggle to get attention. Who links to tilers because they're interesting?
I think it is incredibly stupid to collapse practice to standard before it is ready. It calcifies and damages innovation.
Because CS101 should teach you about basic programming techniques, like how to open a file for reading or writing. In order to understand how to open a file, you need to have a basic understanding of how permissions work. In order to understand how permissions work, you need to understand how mode bits work.

This is really basic stuff, but I'm not surprised that most developers think it is beneath them. "That's sysadmin stuff; I don't need to learn that." These are usually the same developers that think chmod 777 is a fix.
Um. No, that's likely per month. I work for an online backup provider; the industry price is up to about $5 per gigabyte month. I don't know our price list, but I'm also comfortable saying that rate based on looking for an online backup provider myself.
They're using scare quotes to indicate a paraphrase.
Related to the transaction costs problem: where are the bottlenecks here? I don't know myself (I assume the old farty banks and credit card companies just won't reduce their transaction fees, but I could be wrong). It shouldn't be that costly to do the bit shuffling that a couple cent transaction would require (hell, serving up the damn page probably requires hundreds of times more computational resources than the transaction would take), so why isn't anyone able to offer such services at an appropriate price?

You'd think Paypal, or Google, or someone would have enough clout to work out some deal with the credit card companies so that micropayments could be dealt with through pure percent-of-transaction fees (relatively high ones, even) instead of having fixed floors on the transaction costs...
Uhm, you're aware that link has "ebay.com" as the last 8 characters of the domain, right?
Aye, you cannot sell your games anymore. But i'm still a Steam fan, probably cause i'm older and not as skint as I once was.
There are a couple of reasons that isn't a valid conclusion.

First the value of prototyping was reduced by the length of the contest (as opposed to the contest being 48 hours) and by the fact the forum members provided some good strategies to the winner so he did not have to uncover them himself.

Second it turned out one of the most effective algorithms involved brute-force, an area which C/C++ excels at.

Actually it is surprising Haskell, Scheme, and Python ended up in the top 10% at all, I would like to see how they did it.
Absolutely agree. But the goal of this essay was to lay a foundation for designers and writers to start thinking about content, form and context. I tried my hardest to keep it concise while still touching on all fundamental points. Which was tough because this is such a fun topic. The original piece was almost double the current length.

> Yes, iPad will allow to display the formless content into different layouts, but that's hardly impressive...any e-book reader should be able to do that soon.

Sure, however the important point is that this is the first device to do this and be of a form factor we will want to spend intimate reading time with. None of the individual technologies in the iPad are unique, but the combination in this form factor, wrapped in Apple's well-considered OS/interface is. This is most definitely not trivial. I'm sure (and very much hope) that Amazon, et al follow up with similarly great devices. The more competition the better our experience (one hopes) as readers.
Not really, but it's always a possibility. I did discover, however, using a very short lived trick ( http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/01/hyves-subdomain-trick... ) that it was definitely penalized by Google, as was the only other site I ran TLA on (but which has continued to have excellent rankings despite a continuing PageRank hit - 4000 visitors a day from Google to a PR 7 penalized to PR 3 is OK in my book!)

I removed TLA from sites I really cared about around a year ago. I have it on one still but bizarrely all but one advertiser dropped from it last month (after being on it for 2 years!) so I'll probably cancel my TLA account entirely soon.
Update on annihilation of Computational Linguistics at King's College, London
Guide: Git for the lazy (For anyone not yet using git)
How “Did” Tiger Woods Define Perfection for Me
one kinda like chat roulette
http://www.camnect.com
Oh please. The guy built a billion dollar business good for him. However, that's not a reason to deify the guy. He is just a man with failings and idiosyncrasies like you or I. He should not be treated like a a deity who came down from on high to hand us social networking.
How to remove security from PDF
Many authors like setting password to their PDF files to protect them from editing, printing, or copying. It may be bothersome when you really want to use some content of the PDF. So you may wonder how to remove security from PDF, if so, this tutorial is very helpful to you.
unfortunately the 10,000,000,000 tweet was private.
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/10000000000.xml
Advice. Review early. Review often. Don't review for too long at a time. If you've done it right you won't need to study for the exam.

The key to math is that it builds on itself. If you miss one thing early on, you may not notice then but you'll get killed later. So you need to not just learn the facts, you need to internalize them. Luckily internalizing them is not that time consuming, but it does require being exposed to the same idea multiple times over a period of time.

One thing that I did, for instance, was routinely attempted to prove random theorems from scratch. Any time I failed I tried to figure it out. If I had to I went to the book, but I would mark it down as something I had to review again not too much later.

I figured that if I could write down a proof of the product rule from scratch, I could probably remember the rule. I was right. And not only did I remember the rule, but when I took differential equations a couple of years later I was the only person in my class who could recite off all of the definitions from memory.
One that's not mentioned, that I found quite useful, is http://github.com/astrails/safe
Could have been a caching issue. The link is no longer broken for me.
IMO, the bulk of the vitriol comes from two issues (not that I think much of it is sound):

- Multiple claims of outright dishonest behavior and undue credit-taking entitlement from his co-founders (even prior to the lawsuits)

- His extremely privileged background. Given his family's political connections, wealth, ivy-league legacy, and prep-school pedigree, he risked very little (compared to most entrepreneurs) when giving a pre-undergrad start-up a go.
Dang. I should have submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167649 rather than just including the link in a reply that got ignored.
A Less-Random Generator - McArthur GFX
See, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

From the deletion discussion: "Previous AfD was a trainwreck due to offsite activism."

Translation: People from the "rest of the internet" stepped in to clarify how important they thought the article was, so they decided to declare the discussion invalid.
I thought it was quite fitting.
Raising $1,000,000 With No Business Plan + No Financial Projections
This is interesting because it shows how fast a rumor can take hold on the internet nowadays. A law professor jokes about something in class, and in less than an hour it's on several major news sites.

Now if only I could make my product's PR so compelling = )
Ask HN: Good framework for integrating IM into application
Would like advice/pointers related to integrating instant messaging into my application. Gtalk through the AppEngine is my current frontrunner -- but does anyone suggest otherwise?
Seriously? No credible alternative? CDs are a credible alternative. Seriously. Not to mention any number of music managers, archos, sony, zune etc.

I mean, they might SUCK, but some people think cars that aren't beemers SUCK, it's hyperbole to say that sony isn't credible.

You can buy a sony product, download mp3s from amazon and listen to music.

What makes that not a credible alternative?
I work for them. I don't know the specifics as I don't have anything to do with the DRM, but I believe that the general idea is similar to what NateLawson says above.
Are there implications for Ycombinator's approach to incubating startups? Tony's current perspective seems to have shifted considerably from when he graduated from the program:

"I think there’s a lot of built-in contempt for PR and marketing among
entrepreneurs (especially hacker-flavored entrepreneurs).
We’ve all been in companies with fat communications budgets wasted
by blow-hard marketeers, so many of us have dismissed the profession
altogether. We’re so entranced by the concept that just building
something people want[1] will win the day. I remember cheering the
first time I read the quote, "marketing is a tax you pay for being
unremarkable[2]". I remember reading a statement on Hacker News that
said, "my code speaks for itself[3]". Two years ago, I would’ve said,
"Right on, brother! Preach it!"

But my mindset has shifted about 180 degrees over the past few years.
I now believe that how you say something is at least as important
as what you’ve built."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/Thor/geek-squad-marketing-is-a-tax...

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474313
How many million users counts as ready?
Isn't there enough automatic duplication of content on the web already? I hate looking for a blog post and having to sift through a load of horrible feed powered link farms - can't wait to be spammed from yet more angles.
"If you are a fan of HAML but forced to use standard HTML in your projects this plug-in might make you a bit happier."

Sounds great to me.
This is why you go out and work in cafes a few times a week .. or if you can afford it, rent out a co-working space, which is probably the best idea due to the ability to talk with many other like-minded people
Yes. Load balancers have 'site level' load balancing, sometimes called 'Global Server Load Balancing' or something similar.

They have the ability to direct users to a new site by changing the DNS 'A' record t IP's at the new site.
Imagine that to read my blog, you had to first sign into your blogger account. And that to read a wikipedia article, you first had to sign into your wikipedia account. And, when you want to read your email from your AOL friends, you have to first sign into your AOL account, but to read your email from GMail friends required first signing into your GMail account. And imagine this was the case everywhere. You could even take this further and imagine that to read techcrunch, you first had to load the techcrunch browser.

To various degrees this is the current state of microblogging services (or whatever you call them). I can't read my friend's facebook updates in google reader. I can't read the boston big picture in twitter. Even if my friends wire up their accounts so that their tweets end up in facebook, my facebook replies don't appear in their twitter stream. It's a big bucket of suckage.

As a user, I don't care about how the electricity gets to my house, but I really really care that all my appliances can use that electricity, not just the ones that PG&E made. So I care that someone else cares about the how and standardizes this. As a publisher, I want to be able to pick my publishing platforms - maybe more than just one (flickr+twitter+blogger) - based on how well their features meet my style. I don't want to have to choose my platform based on where my readers might be. As a reader, I want to pick my reader application(s), like Google Reader, Bloglines, or Facebook, but only have to pick one or two and to pick them based on features and usefulness to me, not based on where the people I'm interested in reading publish their content.

Is ostatus important to this? Maybe not. Are open communication standards important? You betcha.
It has nothing to do with competence for many users. I'm perfectly competent with computers and have all of my files organized just the way I want them. As part of that, I use iTunes because it acts as a good "database-style" front-end to my music and all of the operations I want to do with my songs/collections thereof. Manually organizing files in a hierarchical folder structure isn't the end-all be-all of productivity. I can't imagine what I'd gain from manually organizing all my music and I'd lose a lot of functionality.
It makes plenty of sense to me - currently Facebook, Twitter, etc. control all of your data. Imagine if there were one big web company which controlled all the servers, and you had to create web pages by logging into it. How much less useful would it be? Would as many programmers work on it?

<plug>
I've actually started something similar as a side project, although I'm approaching it from the other end - build a system and then have some sort of spec. The idea is some sort of OpenID/OAuth setup to allow people to friend each other from different servers.

Very, very early days at the moment, so there's no code, but the manifesto is up at http://openf.oarsum.com/
</plug>
Windows Phone 7 Developer Experience [details]
Do you build buildings like that? You certainly do!

Please don't tell me each building project reinvents concrete, or steel girders, or cranes, et cetera, et cetera. These are all technological wonders, and using them means standing on the shoulders of giants.

It just looks different in physical construction.
I don't know firsthand, but to guess:

The problem is not so much the computational resources. It's the other resources, especially the human resources required to deal with exceptional conditions. One common exceptional condition is fraud: Either the buyers will try to cheat you, or the vendors will try to cheat you, or certain buyers and vendors will get together and conspire to cheat you -- by, say, laundering money through your operation, which will be a problem for you when the IRS and the FBI come to audit your books.

Every transaction has a failure rate, and with such tiny transactions it takes a very low failure rate to destroy your margins. If one out of every ten thousand 1 cent transactions is fraudulent, or gets disputed and charged back by the customer, or fails verification, or sets off a fraud warning at someone's bank... and the resulting exception ends up costing more than $10 worth of time and resources to fix, that's 10 percent of the gross.

Here's another random fact: In the USA it now costs 44 cents to mail a first class letter weighing up to 1 ounce. That will typically allow you to mail 4 or 5 sheets of paper. Which means that it costs of order 10 cents just to mail a sheet of paper. One of my double-sided credit card bills seems to hold about 40 transactions, which implies that it costs about one-quarter of a cent just to mail the paper report of a single transaction. If the average transaction is for a couple of cents... the mailing costs to the credit card company are somewhere around 12.5% of the gross.

That's just one random example of a cost that doesn't scale uniformly downwards as transaction size goes down. There are many others. The cost of a transaction just isn't proportional to its size.

Obviously you can mark up a transaction enough to make it worthwhile. But if that markup is very high, your 2-cent-per-article micropayments operation will end up with a huge competitive disadvantage against someone who collects up articles into bundles and then sells the bundles for $1.99 apiece -- or, better yet, an annual payment of $23.99. We call those people publishers and editors.
Also, the money that was spent didn't just go to extending his life. A lot of that money was spent on pharmaceuticals where he was an "early adopter". People like him covering the massive costs of developing those pharmaceuticals are paving the road for the day when they can be available as cheaply as the vaccinations the article talks about.
I read this and started immediately reminiscing of past jobs. No classes in my engineering curriculum prepared me for this so I didn't "get it" when I first started out.

Did your schooling mention this sort of thing? If not, do you think they should?