skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And what's to say Stack Overflow won't become like EE some day, and start holding answers hostage?

At worst they could only hold new answers hostage. All of the existing questions and answers, every single one of them, is licensed under cc-wiki and is made available to the public via data dumps on bittorrent. You can quite literally download all of the question and answer data for all of Stack Overflow, if they turn evil you can host your own site with all of the old data, or someone else could. The latest data dump was 11 days ago: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/cc-wiki-dump/
How to find your seed investor: It's all about the relationships
Hey Googlers on HN, I live in China and access Gmail from my local connection. Where is my Gmail data located?
Oh, yeah - that what I meant - fraudulent.
Delebirately make a bad research/sensationalist research to get publicity, so necessary in academic world.
The problem with this idea is that people who hang concert posters don't sticker them when there are date changes. People are just going to ignore the stickers.

Concert posters aren't a lead generation mechanism. They're awareness marketing. The point of concert posters is to get you to go to a website to buy tickets. They don't need correct information.
Ask HN: Help For Clojure Addiction
I have recently been playing with Clojure for personal projects. It is quite addictive. Also I am shocked by its leverage and how productive I am in it.

Now at work (Java and C++) I am constantly thinking of ways of getting my next Clojure fix.

How should I solve this problem? The problem is that I would rather program in Clojure than anything else. Here are some ideas and issues with them.

1. Switch jobs. Except that most of the jobs on Craigslist (SF Bay) that mention Clojure list it with five other buzz words. It sounds like interview bait. There is no guarantee there will be Clojure on the job.

2. Ask my company to use Clojure. I suspect they will not be open to this because they have a mob of Java programmers who won't understand the code. They rejected another person's request to use Scala a few months ago. Still worth a shot. But I can see the PHB eyes glazing over.

3. Create a web-based start-up using Clojure. Despite Clojure's productivity this will take some time. This is the path I am working on right now. But it seems like such a long slog.

Ideas?
If you block IPs, try to be as specific as possible. There was a popular site I couldn't reach for months from my home connection, but full of info I liked. I finally emailed the owner from work and found out that he had blocked my entire class B (xxx.xxx) range due to spamming. This has happened more than once, unfortunately.

My rule of thumb is to block small first, then wider based on the registrant of that IP. Russia and China seem to have the most spam-bots running (or at least the most aggressive), but as long as you block at the xxx.xxx.xxx level, you shouldn't impact actual users very much.

Like barredo said though, include some information on your 403 page.
How to Break Up with Firefox
Confession time: Somewhere down the back of my T-shirt drawer there's a black tee with a red dinosaur and the word Mozilla in blocky soviet-industrial type. It's from a time when Firefox was young and easy and free, and we were in love. Ah, Firefox. Whatever happened to us?
Inbox Zero: Don't Believe The Hype
There are two definitions of a bubble you can look at the current value and say the point where the market started to over value the winners at which point dell, Microsoft, and Cisco where not in a bubble prior to 1997 and it only lasted around 2-4 years.

Or you can look at the bubble from the point where explosive growth started around 1998-1990 and died in 2000.

PS: Looking only at winners distorts the picture, so while MSFT was still undervalued (relative to its current dividend adjusted price) in 1996 there were also plenty of overvalued stocks in 1996 that tanked.
I know how you feel James. I've been bashing away with Gambit for the last 18 months and whilst it's a great Scheme there's just too much missing. I wanted to build web apps, first there was no CGI library - luckily Black Hole came along, then there was no database library so I ended up writing a pure Scheme MySQL library because you couldn't call out to C without stopping all of your Gambit threads.

As a bare minimum, it needs proper modules, it needs to be properly multithreaded and it needs more than about 6 people on the planet writing libraries for it.

I've since switched to Haskell which has proper modules, proper multithreading and lots of libraries and may even be a better language than Scheme - if I could only understand what a monad is :-)
So, what I'd want to do is find a couple acts I really hate, make a bunch of fake posters about their show, and get their "events cancelled".
How Entrepreneurs Can Make Better Use of Email
Here is a screenshot:
http://www.laigaogao.cn/index.php/archives/3367
First, I am aware of that and was not discussing that part- the holding user base equal bit

Second, I suspect even the casual readers would read less.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Seriously&...
There are nearly 1,800 apps available for download on my Pre. It is not 100,000 but it is not small either. From what I have seen the vast majority of the 100,000 iPhone apps are spam apps (useless or glorified rss readers), but even if only 5% of the apps not spam, 5,000 quality apps is a good thing to have. Palm's 1,800 is more than Windows Mobile Marketplace.
Sadly, you are being downvoted, though I think questioning things is "the hacker way". It is one thing to just yell "freedom" and quite another to actually analyze things.

Personally, the speed with which the US government issued a statement last time this story surfaced really surprised me, and makes one wonder how close the relationship between big corporations and the government really is.
Since phone companies all have 30 day return policies, get WebOS first. If the hardware isn't an issue for you, keep it. You can get another phone if it is.
Most employees can resign at any time they wish. Not sure why Google would need to explicitly "give them a chance". Am I missing something obvious?
Christian Bök to encode poem in bacteria's DNA
I'm not sure about that.

People who get the kindle are more likely to read a lot, whereas people who get the ipad (as opposed to the kindle) are more likely to read fairly casually. (You get the ipad because you want the internet and all of the games/apps).

I'm not really sure that it holds that people will read less on their backlit device than on a normal kindle. I'm a software developer and I spend all day staring at a computer screen (8+ hours). I take periodic breaks, and yes, it is bad on my eyes, but the back-lighting of the screen isn't enough to stop me from doing it (I only really notice at my yearly optometrist appointment).

If the iPad app allowed you to pick some mellower colors for the text/background, that would probably go a long way towards making the device usable. Black on Grey (or dkgreen on black!) is a lot easier to look at prolonged than black on white, for example.
It depends on a wide variety of factors. (And, in general, the more willing someone is to offer you a no-questions-asked quote, the more likely it is that their writing is, well, a commodity.) If I were bidding on something like that, I'd want to know:

* Whether it requires any special industry/technical knowledge.

* Who your audience is.

* Whether the page is designed to convert, or just informational.

* Your future content needs.

I've charged as little as $50 for that kind of writing (to an audience of laypeople, as part of a larger project, with no effort to sell) or as much as $500 (selling a to a narrowly-targeted audience acquired through PPC spending, as part of a one-time project).

I do write this kind of thing, by the way; email address is in the profile.
Finance.google.ca now redirects to http://www.google.com/finance?gl=cn
WTF? google's canadian finance site redirects to china's site
Only on the web is completely stone sober run of the mill stock business advice considered revolutionary and "out there". 37signals' advice is pretty straightforward: build something worthwhile, charge money for it, make a profit, grow based on your profit not on some hypothetical ideal, etc. Mundane business advice in any other industry.
When I was in high school, I frequently got home at 7:00pm or later. Or else, I got home at 3:00 and then had to go back for rehearsal or practice by 5:30.

The time I did have free would be broken up by changing clothes and eating dinner (making it if parents weren't home) and taking a dump.

I've now been working at a company for 3 years where hours have been flexible (core 10am-4pm). I use an alarm clock once a week (a 7:00 AM meeting on wednesday) which I only need about half the time. Yes, sometimes I have sleeping problems and I can trace them directly to choices and habits (often, though, they are really hard choices-- eg spend time with girlfriend or not). But it's still enormously easier to avoid chronic tiredness when you don't get stuck in a bad-sleep cycle where you can't fall asleep at night and get forced out of bed every morning before the sun comes up.
Those outcomes after bookmark/shorten/share are inconvenient.

But are you more angry at ExEx or at Google? Most people in this thread have retaliated against ExEx, not Google.

And, are these frustrating outcomes inconvenient enough for you to actually switch away from Google? Or to do other things that help Google?

If instead you search again to access the answer or find an alternate source -- net win for Google!

If you are driven to use Google Web History, Google Bookmarks, Google Reader, or Google Buzz to bookmark/shorten/share -- net win for Google!

If initially including the 'time bomb' ExEx result, as decepulative as it was in the long run, prevented you from trying another service on your first search -- net win for Google!

By advantaging the use of Google search (and services) over all other link-discovery mechanisms, ExEx is doing Google a small service. The same paradox applies with the legions of SEO-pablum and Made-For-AdSense sites. Google doesn't want them if they totally destroy the user experience, but if they marginally force a few more search refinements, and result in a few longer sessions viewing more Google AdWords/AdSense, the net economic incentives are for
Google to tolerate them, and rationalize their existence.

I wonder if in the domain where we pay the price with our attention, Google search is a little like a 'Giffen Good'. That is, a good whose consumption goes up as it becomes more costly -- because there are no easy substitutes, and it depletes our overall budget so much that other expenditures are crowded-out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good
The Robocar Babysitter and revolutions in child-watching | Brad Ideas
The default music playing app is much better on the iPhone. Other than that you can get videos from Youtube and break.com. You can play music in the background with Pandora, Grooveshark, Slacker Radio, or Radio Time. You can upload photos and video to Youtube, Facebook, Flickr.

As for a flexibility, look at the WebOS hacking community. WebOS is running on a Linux that isn't very far away from stock (closer than Android for sure). Just last week they got the QT framework running on it.
So, Shadows and Vorlons?
Sorry about that - normally I edit that kind of thing out, but somehow I missed it this time.
Is that just a practical decision, based on the fact that users who visit with a DuckDuckGo referrer don't see the meat of the answer? (If ExEx treated DDG visitors the same as Google visitors -- showing the answer after a long scroll barrier -- then what?)
Well, if you're using int where you mean size_t, that's your bug -- not the binary search.
I still remember globalization training back at Microsoft. The short version was, "Take this stuff seriously. A few years ago, somebody left the string Taiwan in a product and China detained & questioned a bunch of unrelated employees who just happened to be in-country." Of course, the world was a different place ~2002.

http://bit.ly/b5ocjf
IPhone is gobbling up PSP and Nintendo portable gaming revenue
would they be breaking any international laws?

This is a nebulous concept, since there's really no higher authority to act as judge for something like this.

There exist international treaties, but those are pacts between governments. They're not enforceable in the way this would require -- if you break them, the worst that's going to happen is "sanctions".

But more importantly, Google is a private entity. They don't have any treaty with the Chinese government. So what is it that would constrain them?
Unless Google has closer ties to the government than I was aware of, they don't necessarily have that power.
X != 0

lim($price -> 0) [ c * $price ] = X

(Consider values less than $0.01 to be legal)

You're essentially right, but not quite.

P.S. make sure if you make your product more 'green' people are aware of this. If it's not clear, people may not understand why the price is higher, and when presented with two goods you believe are completely equal you will naturally choose the cheaper one.
This can only make the fast food industry even faster and more inhumane. And how do you suppose such a machine is supposed to handle meats and vegetables? Even more processed food here we come. I'm usually not one to be anti-tech, but this is one big step towards the goo-drinkers of Wall-E and the fine dining from the film Brazil.
The Kindle software is absolutely awful. It's slow - you can list 4 bookmarks and it takes 20 seconds, and the same goes for substring search (buggy AND slow). Also, the system has a 534MHZ CPU but because it's Java running on top of Linux, it's a dog. I only got one for the screen and because it lets you upload a book in open formats (unlike the Sony and Nook devices).

As a point of interest, I wrote a text ebook reader for my Psion 3/5 which was written in OPL and reformatted text automatically. Interesting, because it ran faster than the Kindle can on a 8 or 12 MHZ CPU with very little memory.

Kindle also extremely lacks options, like different fonts, text that goes to the edge (no border), no justify on/off (on by default), and so on.

My point is that I can write a better ebook reader than Amazon, on a device with a tiny amount of CPU and memory, and it's shameful that the Kindle software is SO awful.
How very, very sad! He gave us a lecture just two years ago...
here are a few things you can do:

1. instead of blocking, throttle the IPs. Rate limit them to making no more than 1 request every 30 seconds or so. Most script kiddies get fed up if their attack gets painfully slow.

2. if you see a high rate of traffic coming from an IP, quarantine it for say 2-5 minutes (ie, block all traffic from it) and after that time throttle it.

3. If you notice patterns in the IPs, eg, they all come from the same block, then redirect those IPs to a different box (you can set up a VIP to do this). You can do what you want on this box (eg: don't bother opening database connections here), but the main thing is that your primary web server has all its resources available to serving legitimate customers.

4. Never give an attacker any indication that you've noticed their attack. It only makes it more fun for them and they'll persist longer. So, if you see abusive traffic, don't return a 404 or a 403. Just return a regular 200 with a cached version of your regular page.
Unless you're operating dangerous machinery, you don't need as much sleep to work effectively at a warehouse. 6-7 hours and to recover physically and then a couple days off every so often to rest and you'll be fine. You don't have to think much, you just have to be strong and willing to exert effort.

Plus, getting to sleep at night when working a warehouse job is pretty easy, you're usually exhausted when you get home and have nothing to do but eat and sleep.

It's much different than a technical job that requires focus, concentration, inspiration, and mental discipline. Much different from work that requires social interaction with people. The mental states associated with lack of sleep can be disastrous in those environments.
There are millions of web businesses making extremely big profits - from advertising, leadgen, and even a few like 37signals from subscriptions

37s advice about charging is still quite a niche model for the web though. But I'll resist the temptation to start another 'get users to pay' vs 'advertising debate.

Grow based on your profit isn't really 'run of the mill stock business advice' though. Some businesses take time to build. Some require a few years investment. Some can be profitable straight away. One size doesn't fit all.

If you want the lowest risk sure fire way to make money online though, it's certainly "Find a niche" -> "Create useful content" -> "Promote" -> "Monetize through advertising".

The other thing is that in the several autobiographies I've read, people who create really cool stuff - for example Walt Disney, Richard Branson, Duncan Bannatyne... They're always in debt. They're always running from one thing to the next by the skin of their teeth trying to get the next thing financed. Investing all their profit and more into building and growing. But they're also workaholics as well. So what do they know ;)
Rather fluffy article but one point I'd like to raise is that it is odd for a consistently profitable company to avoid debt.

Debt can be a good thing, it can help finance growth or reduce monthly costs to increase cash flow. For the same reasons there could be justifiably good financial reason to get a mortgage even though you could pay for the house in cash, relating to tax benefits and other incentives.

Once you are consistently profitable, or have a high paying job that affords significant personal cash flow, you might be inclined to forgo all debt entirely, but on the other hand once you are in this scenario you are the least likely to default on a debt and have the capacity to take bigger risks by borrowing without ruining either your credit or causing an immense about of stress.

It's great I guess that they don't take the debt approach, but it's not necessarily a positive thing, and I bet I could look at their financial statements and see tons of opportunity to leverage debt that would free up cash flow so they could be making better use of their capital.
Sending and receiving emails with Rails using Google App Engine
How would you prevent the Chinese authorities from learning of the proxy IP addresses and filtering them when you have to tell the general population your IP addresses in order for them to be able to access them.

I think you'd need some sort of software on the end users' computers to make use of distributed search (or at the very least, distributed proxy IP identification).
This is typical of what drives me crazy about 37signals. They say several things that are true but then claim that there's a causal relationship between them.

Take this post.

Premise: Profits = Freedom.

Results:

Company runs without debt: unrelated to profits. Profitable companies can use debt as a tool, and they cite their lack of credit history as causing a problem! Debt free is not the same as profitable.

We trust our employees: this has everything to do with hiring and nothing to do with profitability. They can offer the benefits they list because they're profitable, but profit doesn't make them trust their employees.

We speak our minds: this is because they have controlling interest in the company, not because they don't have debt. Again, no relation.

This would be confusing as hell for someone that tried to build their business based on the advice in this post.
I never stopped to think this was a regional colloquialism, but I suppose it is..

I used it above to mean "I agree"
What about Google Cache?
A government office which warns when widely used browsers have vulnerabilities – good idea or bad idea? I’m not really all that sure about that.

(But here’s a idea for you: find a way to keep the 4+ browsers I have installed in sync so that I can switch at a moments notice without any problems.)
I'm not talking about social security. If you enroll in a more comprehensive health insurance plan while you are young and healthy, it will pay for expensive treatment when you are older. But by the time you are old and unhealthy, it will probably be too late to upgrade your insurance.

By definition, you can't wait until you're at high risk of requiring expensive treatment before you insure for it.
The Cornucopia system is one of the first genuine attempts we've seen to produce a machine that can make virtually any dish given the right set of instructions. Sure, it's not going to print you a medium rare steak, but it can reliably and replicably build all sorts of elaborate and complex combinations, precisely mixed and temperature-controlled, that would be near impossible to create using any other cooking process.

Every bit of that paragraph is self-contradictory. First it says it can make "virtually any dish," and next it claims it will build "all sorts of elaborate and complex combinations" that are currently "near impossible."

Knowing something about food preparation and 3D printers would tell you that the two processes are quite different. 3D printers use a limited set of ingredients that have very specific attributes. Food is prepared through the use of an astounding variety of ingredients that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with completely different properties, not to mention the tools, and most importantly, brains and hands that are then involved in combining everything together.

I doubt this thing could make a salad much less "virtually any dish."

The way they've described and designed this contraption, I bet it would fail miserably at preparing most of the dishes you'd find in any decent restaurant. Unless this thing takes up the entire counter space and looks like a disfigured Inspector Gadget, I don't think Chefs have much to fear yet. At least not until consumers develop an appetite for "nutritious goop."
"At the present time it seems clear that we are doing more damage than good by teaching math in elementary schools."

An interesting post, but quite a leap of inference, isn't it? Start with, a) One school district once successfully started arithmetic instruction in sixth grade. Go on to b) elementary school teachers in two districts in New Jersey are weak on geometry and the principles of arithmetic. Arrive at c) the statement above.
You should look into xrefresh. It's a really great way to edit in sass and then see the changes in your browser right away.
Daring Fireball: GIF, H.264, and Patents
> This is where you hire a copywriter for your website and he or she fills the pages with cleverly crafted, delightfully delectable prose that oh-so-playfully sing and dance.

Prose is singular. The plural of prose is proses, though it's not frequently used. If you're going to chide authors on style, make sure you've got the grammar correct first. Also as a counterexample, I'd like to point out that woot.com typically exhibits playful prose to great effect. Honestly, I probably visit more for the excellent ad copy than any other reason.
My favorite part of the whole sale page (that this article did not point out), was the cutesy little "Warning!" at the bottom that tells people they are absolutely going to be OVERWHELMED! by the amount of tools and features they're going to get...

I actually first noticed this sales technique in one of those late-night fat-loss commercials where the chick starts out by saying "WARNING: Hydroxycut (or whatever) is only for people who need to lose a serious amount of weight and should not be used by average dieters!"... absolutely brilliant.
One who throws away a $2000 item without even bothering to pull the back cover off and look for something obvious like an inline fuse with a Schottky-diode clamp has already wasted far more than that on their EE education.

Must be nice to have more money than brains. Most of us don't have enough of either.