skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very nice when combined with the mandatory TV-licensing fees that the BBC gets. Might as well just cut out the middleman and give your money right to Adobe.

I don't know the details of the streaming algorithm, but if a key is only needed at the beginning, why not setup a web service that lets a real Flash client running in a VM handle starting the stream? A Free player would query this webservice (perhaps multiple times) to get the right keys, and then just stream manually.

Or, just download the TV show off Bittorrent or Usenet instead of getting it legally. (LOL @ anti-piracy measures. Have any ever worked?)
Sorry (see comment below). Couldn't agree more that you should manage your online web presence.
for those really into steve blank material, here's a link to his stanford page with lots of these videos.
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=2...
There are plenty of other data points besides 'dawn of the internet'. Complexity of PC games shot up. Prices shot up. Consoles began to get titles in genres that were traditionally 'PC only'. Also, PC games have always been dead-easy to pirate. It's thoroughly unconvincing to wave your hand at an aggregate sales graph and note a single data point.

And, frankly, none of that matters.
All that matters is that publishers believe DRM can turn would-be pirates into customers. It's a belief that's never been borne out by the data. But still they try.

Whether their cause is noble, or reasonable, or justified is irrelevant. It's their belief that DRM is worth-while that causes DRM. Not piracy. Not sales.
A minute later, at 2:54 p.m., the news was in the Breaking News Twitter feed. Two minutes later, at 2:56 p.m., the New York Times had the news in its Twitter feed, and word of the result buzzed into my phone via the Breaking News app. Three minutes after that, at exactly 2:59 p.m., the NYTimes.com news alert showed up in my email inbox

All of this happened in a span of time shorter than the interval at which most email clients check for new mail. I think the case against NYT here is overstated. And this news was about the outcome of a sporting event which is exactly one bit of information which becomes available at a predictable time. Basically it comes down to who can hit the button faster. When real news happens (a natural disaster, an assassination) it will take at least those few minutes to figure out WTF happened and write it up.
Well, there is only so much context you can give in 140 characters regarding the national importance (to Canada) that the game had and the significance of winning the gold in their national sport.

If you actually cared about who won, you watched the game, and probably knew before Twitter could tell you.
There were a number of sites that were launched shortly after arc came out based on the news.arc code. The arc language and code are under the Artistic License 2.0 [1]. (I admit that I thought they were public domain) See arclanguage.org for more on news.arc and arc the language.

Here are the news.arc sites that I remember:

[newmogul.com] - by nickb was HN for business. I always assumed it was news.arc. Maybe not. Still worth reading up on. There were a number of HNers that used it regularly and were looking for another similar site when it went down.

[pageonetimes.com] - it was HN applied to sports.

[ballerinc.com] - I don't remember what that site specialized in.

All of these were based on the news.arc code. I don't think any of these are still around. But the news.arc code has continued to improve and become more stable so it may be viable option. So if you wanted to set up something for biology or medicine you could use the HN code and just customize it as you see fit. (Oh and put it behind apache, nginx, etc please, I can help just email me or ask over at arclanguage.org)

Good luck. I agree that if you can build the community and figure out how to get rid of bad data - it's a great idea.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
[2] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=7564

EDIT: Formatting ~ Sometimes I wish HN had markdown or textile...
Cool. Do you know anyone there personally? Love to hear a first hand account of what's going on in that scene.
The hemicircles are still too clever by half. We tend to judge the difference in the height of the facing edges, but a hemi that is twice the height of another is actually 4 times the area.

So an 80/20 split will appear to be more like 66/33 if you are not paying attention. On that page there is one stat with a 10/1 ratio, but at first glance it feels more like 4/1 or 5/1.
I actually prefer the videos piecemeal. That allows me to go through the course in small chunks overtime rather than all at once. It also focuses on the content relevant to the lesson and simplifies.

I do agree that there should be biblographical info and the option to view the video in entirety. I put that in as feature request on the site.
I didn't down vote you (I actually up voted you because I felt bad) but I could guess as to why others would.

A tweet is not news. So to say "the NYT is no longer the formost producer of breaking news" comes across kind of obnoxious to those not drinking the Twitter kool-aid. I mean, I've been able to get sports scores texted to my phone for at least a decade now but I don't recall anyone saying "text messaging had replaced news organizations as the foremost producer of breaking news"

Beyond that, and this is one of my own personal pet peeves, Twitter doesn't "report news" well. Sure a sports score is easy but on everything else it doesn't really shine.

See here: http://tomstechblog.com/post/2008/05/Twitter-News-Short2c-In...

And here: http://tomstechblog.com/post/Twitter-and-the-Earthquake.aspx

And here: http://tomstechblog.com/post/Twitter-Again-Really!!.aspx

(I have MUCH more but decided to stop at 3)
A rather pointless action considering that they host DRM-free H.264 versions of the same videos that are trivially downloadable (they're used on the iPhone site).
On the other hand, I bet google's CDN has better uptime than your server does.
"You would take, say, $1200 (a very high estimate) and call it a day?"

$1200 what? You're missing a time element there. I assume "per month". I've lived on less than that before, with some comfort, and I was working, too! If I get to assume health care (not unreasonable in the world we're hypothesizing) and don't forget that I'm not working and I'm not worrying about working either, then yeah, that sounds like a pretty good deal for a single guy with no family.

And by the time we kick this into gear, society may well be able to afford more than that. We're not talking today's society (which already has unsustainable levels of social obligation), we're talking a 20-30 year minimum future society. Or at least I am, since I'm actually talking about the real possibility, not a hypothetical parallel universe where it exists today.
What about the tens of thousands of people at the game?
Benefits of studying your own code
I don't see that as a huge advantage for a few reasons:

1. We're mostly talking about startup (restart, etc...), not shutdown. You can still write your own start script and that's all I've found myself caring about most of the time.

2. Writing a shutdown script is still plenty possible, though in the worst case, you may need an adaptor (and only one of these needs to exist for all apps).

3. Processes that don't handle TERM signals properly should have bugs filed against them to do so.

To be honest, the software that's the biggest pain for me to deal with right now is one that requires a gentle shutdown. I can't always give it one, and my system sometimes crashes and can require a painful recovery.

I'm becoming more of a fan of crash-only software every day for this reason.
Twitter list of seed stage accelerator programs
Wow, this definitely has great value and will potentially do very well. I currently work part-time as a developer for an online school that launched last year. We have a niche market to which we offer specific courses which are needed for certification in their field. We did very well in terms of revenue the first year.

I’m assuming they will make their money by allowing teachers to charge for certain courses in return they’ll get a percentage. In other words, they’ll be a middleman.

SocratED certainly has a great advantage since their audience will not just pertain to a type of student, but rather anyone who wants to teach or learn. For example where I work now our flow chart is service->student, but with SocratED it’s service->teacher->student where (->) represents cash flow.

I also must add, love the UI, very clean and simple.
Thanks. I didn't know about that speech. Here's the whole thing...

http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html
Ah, don't we wish. There's this thing called an "Axiom" that is, ruefully, generally, arbitrary. Definitions, too.

e.g. Some say the set of natural numbers contain 0, some say it doesn't.

Granted, the kind of math being discussed here isn't open to much interpretation, but I thought I'd note it.
tl;dr: Get rid of your TV, turn off your gadgets, and exercise.

I was hoping for something profound and specific for designers/software engineers.
"and thought that Goldman was an example of the former"

Clearly you didn't see where the AIG bailout money went to at the time, courtesy of then U.S. Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Not sure if this is what strlen had in mind, but it is plausible that a couple of founders have about 15-20% of the company each after an A round of VC and some angel investment. That would explain $2-4m (each) post-tax.
Enavlion Hotel website - Thessaloniki
Yes, and if you run a cluster long enough you WILL suffer unplanned power loss. Usually due to human error of one sort or another. It's basically impossible to eliminate entirely.
Caffeine Pills vs Coffee 
I have a terrible addiction to coffee, I drink at least 5+ cups a day and get terrible headaches if I don't drink coffee for even a day.

With caffeine pills I can control the amount and dose of caffeine I consume and I don't get any of the acidity or discoloring of my teeth.

I've done a lot of research online and come to the conclusion that there is not much difference of caffeine pills vs coffee (in equivalent doses of course). But I was wondering what do you think? Especially from people who have taken caffeine pills for an extended period of time.
Rarely is a person screwed by a controversial axiom.
We need more engineers to be politician instead of lawyers. Engineers build and lawyers redistribute.
We practice by hitting high up on the inner thigh. I recommend (and do) wear a cup.
> I suspect that this completely defeats the purpose of pre-allocating space.

There are two reasons to preallocate. One is so that you can get by with fdatasync rather than full fsync (that is, you don't have to sync file metadata as well, which is usually an extra seek; file length is the most commonly changed part of "metadata").

The other is to use mmap, since you can't change the size of an mmap'd file. This is the only part that mongodb cares about, since they never fsync.

There may be reasons to mmap a sparse file but I can't think of any.
When I said low 6 figures, I meant very low. We don't usually keep more than $150,000 (and it varies between $60K and $150K as things cycle) in "accessible cash". This is, for us, funds used to purchase a new vehicle, or deal with some around the house issues, or move to a new investment opportunity.

This is just an amount that, for our purposes, is enough to cover most random unanticipated issues without keeping too much money uninvested.
Definitions have nothing to do with truth, they serve only to clarify communication by establishing a common language; and mathematics as a whole makes no claim regarding the truth of axioms, only what a set of axioms do and do not entail.

There may be disagreements in matters of taste as to what Choice of axioms (har har, little joke there) one makes, but given a basis of axioms to work from--rarely more than a handful--the rest is, for most purposes, not at all open to interpretation.
FYI Yahoo still maintain their own CDN for YUI which has additional features such as submodule selection, so you can roll a package that fits you, and we'll host it.

Disclaimer: I work for Y!
pretty cool, a tool I have been using for quite some time that I find incredible useful is http://visor.binaryage.com/ . Not quite the same thing, but still awesome.
Cherokee also tries to use HTTP 1.1 keepalive to upstream processes. NGiNX uses HTTP 1.0. I doubt this matters in most use cases however.
Getting started with Node.js on Ubuntu 9.10 in about 5 minutes
Google gone mad
I was trying to sign into my adwords account and couldn't and after repeatedly trying, this is what google had for me.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Patzer?  A VC Perspective
I am looking for folks that love to code like I do. I primarily use Python right now but, it is just a tool and I think using whatever tool is best for the job is the way to go. I am more concerned with finding people I can trust and get along with / enjoy being around. I have no problem learning a new technology if it means creating a great product. E.g. if the rest of the team believed Ruby or Clojure would give us an advantage I would pick up a few books and go into a cave for a couple weeks and learn to use it. This philosophy has served me well in the past and allowed me to do things that my competitors (and leadership) thought impossible.

The idea I am most excited about involves solving the problem of finding something to do on any giving day. As an example I moved to San Diego and have to look in a dozen different places to find out what is going on in my area. Often I miss something I would be interested in because I didn't know how to find out about it. So aggregating and presenting that information in a simple way that is easy to search would be of great value to me.
First Round Capital launches their news feed
I like that tool too. I could see them being complementary.
The World Cup Goes High-Tech
So, as you can see, Cherokee is the fastest and best designed among the modern web servers.

How does this statement hold up against YAWS?
"Too many errors on one line (make fewer)"
I run Cherokee at my company, and have found it fast / secure and rarely do I ever use the graphical admin.

For reference I have roughly 4000 servers running it at any given time.
Great way to show how copyright is actually stiffing innovation and economy.... big times...

I mean they say "it does not seem sensible to force those universities who already have a system providing very effective action against copyright infringement to abandon it and replace it with an alternative".
How about this law forcing _everyone else_ to abandon their way of doing things and to adopt such an "effective action" (which is definitely expensive, if it's anywhere near "effective" - I doubt it will ever be)?
I'm not sure this author has actually spent any amount of time on Chatroulette. The article reads as a list of video stats glued together with some exposition about the magic of the internet.

The average Chatroulette connection lasts, in my experience, roughly three seconds. If anyone started the "video conferencing boom," it was Skype and Apple, with iChat.
I've had luck at both 99 designs, as well as the older, Design Outpost.
Everyone who didn't vote for them should also do so. Aside from the fact that they don't know who voted how, a possible swing voter's opinion matters more than that of a loyal party member.
I use LaunchBar more than I use the Dock: http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
After giving money to angels + seed funding + possibly series-A VC funding, having an employee option pool (especially if "employees" include non-founder CFO/CEO/COO) and a second co-founder, you can expect at max 20% percent (usually of common stock, vested with over time). Add to that taxes and (if you took series A or serious seed funding) liquidation preferences and 10% return sounds fairly generous.
Freemium.
Ohio lawsuit another sign of Microsoft's proxy war against Google
“Every Moment Counts”
Every startup hub needs three heroes: an investor, an entrepreneur, and a political advocate.

Silicon Valley has 2/3 (investor and entrepreneur) and so does New York (investor and mayor).

What other cities have good combinations?
This is an awesome take on the VC game. I imagine it's not the only opinion, however. The metaphor he sets up with regards to customers and shareholders could also be twisted (and I'm sure is, by some VCs) to a more hierarchical idea in which the VC needs to answer to the shareholders. Some VCs may even want to stretch that notion further and say that the startup is answerable to the VC.

I think this is a less accurate analogy, but I could certainly see it giving rise to the idea of "the Patzer" as something less like a business decision and something more like a sin against the VC.
it may not be profound, but it is quite refreshing. quite simple really - don't let people interrupt you, and do your f'ing work.

designers and developers are no different than anyone else in terms of focus.
CakePHP 1.3-RC1 freshly sliced
Meh, just grab http://github.com/threedaymonk/iplayer-dl and then download anything from iPlayer that you want in an open(ish) format (MPEG 4 or MP3).
A lot of people seem to think that simply being reasonably fluent in two languages is sufficient to be a translator. It isn't, unless your standards are incredibly low. Translating is a skill, and if you entrust it to random people, expect random results.
Great idea if executed on the same level as HN.
Design Blunders of Google Maps, Bing Maps
I'll ask a Cleveland Indian next time I see one of them...
Breizh Entropy Congress: less than two weeks before deadline
As ascension posts go, this is pretty mundane; a fairly normal first ascension. Don't get me wrong--it's an enjoyable read--but it misses out on what makes Nethack a truly unique gaming experience. Nethack is fundamentally a hacker game. It's about exploiting the rules, exploiting the programming in order to solve unreasonably difficult problems in creative ways.

Just as an example, he mentions black pudding farming simply as a tactic he's copied from others. But the true spirit of Nethack was when another player and I invented black pudding farming: putting together the tactics and equipment to make it viable in order to solve a specific problem. At a high level of play, one is constantly doing that sort of thing on the spot. Ascension posts by good players commonly introduce completely new tactics.
PingJob - No Vendor jobs just vendor names
PingJob.com a 24 month old online job portal is the first truly Job Portal where job Seeker is in total control of the job seeking experience. All the information about the company are available for free with some revolutionary ideas already appreciated by the job seekers and more to be added in the near future.<p>There are over thousands of Job sites/portals where the distinction is between job seeker and employer. Job Seeker is not informed/equipped or encouraged to participate in the whole process. From Job Search PingJob is committed to transform the effort to Job Research. Various studies have shown that most of the job sites do not in any way educate the job seeker and majority of them are old/filled jobs shown from various RSS Feeds.<p>We want to transform job search to Job Research by :
1. Displaying the past jobs of the clients, Vendors who are trying to fill the opening, the technical environment with the client and all relevant information.
2. Make Job seeker participate in the process in a way that no job site can make it possible ( we want to be for jobs what yelp is for companies)<p>The Major problem faced by the job seeker today is they just don’t know who is hiring as in areas of IT/Finance/Hi-tech and Medical Profession the companies(vendors) jobs outnumber the actual companies that post these jobs.
1. Since going live 3 months back we have a page view of over 3,000 per day.
2. The average time spent by visitors is over 9 minutes.
3, User Participation is increasing with each passing day.
4. Everyday request for the complete report of approved vendor.
5. Clients participation in this process has increased ( point 1-4 source Google Analytics)<p>PingJob.com was born out of the necessity to empower the jobs seeker and with the objective and vision clearly stated support and help came from lot of quarters quickly. We want to empower the employers now by offering them to hire the best recruit at a very low price. Our page views over the last 90 days have exceeded 36,000 and we see a great potential ahead. Google has actively supported us by providing Google Adsense, Google Apps and Google Checkout APIs. We see the whole recruiting industry following this model. After all an informed job seeker is as asset to any Company of the future.<p>1.We want to move from Job Portal to a social platform ( what yelp is to company we want PingJob to be for Jobs)
2. We want to integrate with Apple Apps, Facebook , LinkedIn and Twitter so that the jobseeker is empowered like never before.
We are competing against the traditional Job sites which work on yesteryears models of charging the employer high fees and letting job seekers post resume without offering them any information. There is still an opportunity since there is none available today.<p>1. Hire more Developers in order to integrate Apps(Apple), Facebook , LinkedIn and Twitter .
2. Expand from current set up of 3 servers and improve infrastructure.
3. Expand capability beyond IT markets.
4. Market and advertise PingJob for more visibility
5. Expand to other countries ( Singapore, Canada and India)
I'd love to see a website like this, especially if there's bioinformatics and computational biology there.
I'm not debating that it should (certainly if it's javascript that I'm writing), I've just literally never seen that happen.
That's really awesome, thanks for the link.

One of my best finds so far would be butler: http://www.petermaurer.de/butler/

It's basically quicksilver but with less obscure configuration dialogs and without the crashes (quicksilver would crash a lot on me).
And the x2 (as opposed to x^2) touch.
A lot of these thoughts ultimately come down to selling and dealing with clients, which I find the hardest part of the thing. Can someone share some advice on it, or maybe suggest a couple of books on the matter?
First, you're not addicted to coffee, you are addicted to caffeine. Remember that caffeine is a DRUG.

Second, switching from a diluted caffeine intake (such as coffee or soda) to a pure intake (pills) could lead to you worsening your dependency on caffeine. Think about it: you drink 5+ cups of coffee, but you probably can't drink 10 everyday.... but you CAN pop another handful of caffeine pills quite easily.

If you look to the past, you'll probably see that your caffeine intake has been increasing, but the effects have not been intensifying. That's because your body builds a tolerance to caffeine over time. I used to be super jittery after 3 shots of espresso, but now (after 2 years of heavy consumption of coffee) there's not much effect.

My advice: don't switch to caffeine pills to fix your problems. They'll only make it worse because it will allow you to consume more caffeine in purer form at a faster rate than drinking coffee. As you consume more on a regular basis, your body will build a higher tolerance. You'll find yourself taking more and more caffeine pills to avoid the headaches.

So don't take pills on a regular basis, and start decreasing your coffee intake. I've set my limit to 2 cups of coffee or 2 shots of espresso per day. Drink more water - you'll feel way better than when drinking coffee.

Everything is fine in moderation.
Huge visor fan, couldn't live without it. I have a fullscreen terminal a control-tilde away at all times.
Ever notice it is the guys with indoors, non-science desk jobs who are always pushing science, engineering, and manufacturing on your kids, but not theirs?