skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yeah, there's no reason to burn bridges. I know I often take a loss when I want to fire a customer (this is a lot easier for me, as it is a product business, I'm not getting paid by the hour.) and I'm pretty up front about what I provide (E.g. I'm not really, ah, 'full service') so it's pretty easy to pass off the customers requiring more help on the competition. For me, this is one of the primary reasons why I like being a product business so much more than contracting or being an employee.

"Here are the things I can do for you" - and if you want something else, the extent of my responsibility is to give you a refund and a recommendation.

I still work to develop new features, but nobody gets particularly mad at me if I flake out and don't get them done within my estimated time frame, not like contracting where if I don't get the thing done on time, sometimes months of my time become valueless to the client.

It was harder when I was primarily a contractor. Man, I was a horrible contractor. Giving away half a months work is much more painful than refunding someone for a fairly high margin product.
I hope they gave Google.cn employees a chance to resign. Ideally, a month or two ago.
Apple is building a bookstore, analogous to the iTunes
music store.

Does not matter. Apple has ITMS bet they never did try to stop anyone loading iPods with the music no matter what source of that music was. Same will be true for iPad — it does not matter where content comes from, as long as it helps to sell more hardware.
Synchronize Passwords across machines using Tonido WebsharePro
I've had luck applying to positions that were looking for more senior devs but was something I was interested in. My current job came that way. Looking for someone with 7 years, I had 3, but I also had built projects in the same space and was actually a really good fit. Fresh out of school I got an interview the same way for a small company looking for 10+ years experience.

Just say "hey, this is me, this is what I've worked on that you'd be interested in, I'd like to interview. If not, hold on to my resume"
Workers of the Future
Note: you must use Intel VT or AMD-V enabled CPUs for this. Opterons that have only 3 digits in their model number won't work (such as 275, 880, etc), those with 4 digits (2220, 8218, etc) will.

(edit: looks like non-Windows guest OSes can only be allocated 1 virtual CPU; for me that is a deal-killer.)
Let's say insurance is $400/mo. If my insurance application can never be denied, why would I pay $400/mo when I don't need it?

I would wait until I was sick or injured, then buy insurance.

If you force insurance companies to always provide insurance, then you have to force everyone else to always buy insurance. Or the math won't work.
I'm a college student in Shanghai, and my classmates and friends' attitude towards the party is almost opposite to what you said, I'm afraid.

As to what other people say in Xiaonei, which is a site I'll visit everyday, many people there are complaining about the network censorship in China. On the other side, it's also a site censored by the government, which means users' comments, blogs and updates will soon be deleted if they contain illegal keywords. It doesn't allow free speech at all. So what you see may not represent the majority.

On the other hand, many of us has access to twitter, using SSH tunnel/API/proxy or something else to jump over the wall. And what you see on twitter may differ greatly on what you see in Xiaonei. Sorry for my poor English :P
I was going to say the same thing regarding sous-vide, but according to Wikipedia, sous-vide was originally invented in 1799, well before microwaves or 3D printing. While it was "rediscovered" more recently, I'd give the authors the benefit of the doubt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous_vide
Can anyone else not hear Jessica's audio?
Isn't it a little scary to search this stuff in China?
One of the biggest keys to the technique is the headlining. If you look at a typical geek blog post or article, you'll get a title, then perhaps a few subheads with paragraphs of text in between.

In these long sales letters, you get perhaps 10-30 different "headlines" all the way through the piece that, on their own, attempt to sell the product. These pieces are ridiculously easy to scan and use either positive, targeted language, keep asking questions (a key tactic), or allude to interesting things within the rest of the content or in the actual product.

Examples from the SEOMoz page:

"When eBay, Disney and Marriott need SEO help,
here's what they do..." (you want to know what that is now, right?)

Boost your website’s rankings within 30 days–Guaranteed (Hmm.. these guys look legit and they're making that claim? They must have something serious going on.)

We’ll give you the tools you need to quickly boost the website rankings for any website – on demand. (Speaks for itself. This is one helluva promise.)

Every month, ask your burning questions to our team – and get prompt expert replies (So even if I don't understand the product, I can ask about it and know these guys are keen to give me a response.)

Plus, get these 8 must-have SEOmoz PRO guides—worth over $250 (A classic dirimens copulatio. Learn more about this at http://www.copyblogger.com/but-wait-theres-more/ - they've already convinced you the product is cool but now they're piling up the perceived value so they can gently hit you with the price..)
Palm sells GSM phones outside of the US, and just announced that they'll be coming to AT&T later this year.
Spacewar! made #9, Tetris #2.

One-page format: http://www.v3.co.uk/articles/print/2259867
While your conclusion was a bit silly, I still thought your comment was pretty insightful.
How Addicted to Social Media Are YOU?
I'm watching the live feed now, but unfortunately the audio is borked and Jessica is muted. Since I can't read lips, I'll have to hope this is fixed when it's put up later.

Edit: It's fixed.
It is possible the Chinese government will only partially block google.com.hk. This it how it has often worked with Wikipedia. You can browse the site, but as soon as any forbidden phrase is passed over the TCP connection it is cut. Then all access to the site from your IP is blocked for a while. This makes the service very intermittent, and makes it difficult for users to distinguish between censorship and overloaded servers. There is also the question of what will happen to the google.cn domain, as all websites in China are required to have an ICP license from a government agency.
Ask HN: the risks of blocking IPs
So, I am seeing some obvious bots and exploits hitting my server. They don't pose an immediate problem yet -- they mostly get 404s as they search for known exploits.

My instinct is to block the IP addresses, but I am concerned that it might have the effect of blocking legitimate customers. Maybe the abuser is sitting in a Starbucks, for example, and I wouldn't want to ban the people at the next table. Ditto for a corporate firewall.

What has your experience been? Is blocking IPs a bit too brute-force? Has it ever caused a customer complaint?

Thanks. - Matt
This looks very nice. I especially like it being a library so users are still taken to the relevant app. I have thought of adding a history of notifications to my app but was hoping apple would do this before long and didn't want to duplicate effort. I wonder if they will add this as it is a gaping hole in the functionality they provide.

I would love to add AirMail but as I send about 200,000 notifications a day with about $300/month of revenue there is no way I can afford your service.
The suits at Palm have changed in the past 2 years.
Tighten the freemium model?
But... Did they cancel the event, or didn't they? I'm confused there. Maybe they just forbid the organizers to go ahead. Maybe they really did cancel it.
While earning my undergraduate degree in CS/Math there was not a single course in the CS department that had anything to do with databases. I had to teach myself. The MIS department had one course that taught some rudimentary stuff using Access. This was 1996-2000. Has it changed since? By that I mean is it still common to go to university for CS and not be offered any courses that teach the basics of RDBMS (or NoSQL)?
gen·o·cide /ˈdʒɛnəˌsaɪd/

–noun

the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/genocide
It's back on!
Amazon looses if backlit screens beat the kindle and other e-ink screens. People don't read voluminous quantities on a backlit screen; it's hard on the eyes. Amazon will sell more books if the main platform has an e-ink screen, because people will read less if they are using a backlit screen- imho. (this is if we hold the user base constant across devices)

It's true, it's not a total loss if the iPad dominates yet the kindle app is popular, but it's not the ideal scenario.
wait, SE results > EE results > nothing. on EE, you can just scroll to the bottom to see the answers; what's the big deal?
right, but if/when they take VC funding they start down a path leading to loss of control, and a future CEO may lock future contributions.
I'd like to hear from Arash too.
Hi,

I have decades of experience with old style AI and a decade of the new kind :-). I specialize in language understanding algorithms and near-pefect sentiment analysis is something I expect we'll be able to do eventually using the methods I've invented.

The top level bit to worry about is whether you are attempting to re-do something that is already known not to work. Litmus tests: Are you using models of language such as grammars that are explicitly programmed in? Is your system specific to a single language so that switching to another would require complete re-coding? Do you employ linguists? If you answer yes to these, then you are in trouble.

I discussed how to get a modern AI education in an early blog entry at http://monicasmind.com

I propose a shift in direction of AI research in the second video at http://videos.syntience.com and explain why that's needed in the first one. Three more videos discuss details.

I have a theory/motivational site (6 pages or so) at http://artificial-intuition.com

I'm available for high level consultation on these issues. I worked at Google (I quit 2006) and although I cannot talk about what they do, I certainly will have an idea about what will be required to outperform them, both short term and long term.

If anyone wants to support Syntience Inc. in our effort to get true understanding to computers, please get in touch.

- Monica Anderson
http://syntience.com
I always ban IPs. If they are bots, they are highly unlikely to be real visitors too sharing those ip addresses.

Ban the IPs temporarily, say, a month, and put a message in your '403 forbidden access error page' saying sorry: "your ip is blocked because of weird-things-happening-from-your-ip, if you are a customer you should check for trojans or virus on your computer and send us an email"
Tasteless.
Well, first of all I'll take offense to The Sith were not a people.

Who gave you the right to decide who is people and who is vermin (or whatever you mean by that statement).

Secondly, who gives you the right to decide who lives and who dies. That is a very slippery slope and similar arguments have been used since as long as humans have been on this planet to prosecute and terminate whoever didn't agree with the majority.

Edit: According to some replies below I seem to have misunderstood the above objection as the claim is that Sith were not "a people" as in were not a group/race/etc. but more like 1-2 persons who were terminated. If that is the case, I formally withdraw my above objection, else it still stands.
Wow, I must be behind the times. Microsoft have a headless server? Windows as a hypervisor?

Thank you for posting this, as this is news to me.
I knew almost nothing about Friendster and I found the article captivating. Maybe you already knew the important bits?
But I don't think it's an issue of socioeconomic status. My point in mentioning my business was that I need to understand my demographic very thoroughly (I work 7 days a week catering to their needs). Many of my customers have studied abroad and most of them work in the Central Business District here for large multinational corporations. My demographic also includes students at elite Chinese universities like Beida and Qinghua. And I have yet to encounter what you are describing among them. Maybe the closest is one guy who wanted to climb the CCP ranks to change all the problems he saw with the current system.
This phenomenon hit me hard when I was learning to play Poker back in the day.
He hasn't, as you can readily see by checking his submissions. He does seem to have a bit of a bias toward green energy, though.
Kind of neat, but I could create my own version quickly with open source (http://code.stanziq.com/speeqe/).
Your website is fantastic. Who designed it?
How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400%
So I can run windows as a headless baselayer to virtualize paid for copies of windows.
Rather than using Linux or the built in Xen hypervisor.

<shrugs>
Germany warns against use of Firefox browser due to security issues
Speed is definitely part of the appeal. Perhaps more important though is the degree to which static typing might reduce errors and make code more readable and maintainable. I haven't done enough coding in languages like Haskell yet to decide if static types do in fact help in either respect but I think those things might actually be more valuable to me than raw performance.
It's kinda funny and clever. It will fall down if they do it consistently.

People who want to attend these kinds of events will begin to know that the "event canceled" stickers have been put up by the government and are false information. Presumably the stickers will look the same, and also who goes and bothered to put up "canceled" stickers if they genuinely are canceled?

It may even become a cachet - "dude, our event got stickered as 'canceled' by the government" etc.
Yeah, but isn't the other extreme (cold-blooded, heart of stone) just as dangerous or even more so?

What's stopping us from killing our neighbors even when instincts of self-preservation kick in?

I mean, while watching documentaries on serial-murderers, it's always baffling noticing how disconnected with their victims or other human beings they are or how little regret they have.

I think moral standards are highly interconnected with feelings, and that's why it seemed weird to me.
Thanks!

Metalab ( http://metalabdesign.com/ ) did our initial site and identity, then we got our friends Refresh Media ( http://refreshmedia.com/ ) to revamp it to its current state. Cannot recommend both of them enough.
I think the most interesting part of this idea is the ability to individually control the cooking and cooling of the smallest portions of the creation, so that (for example) you could have a perfect, tightly-spaced grid of frozen ice cream and fully-cooked cake, and other never-before-experienced texture and flavor combinations.
If you want to run non-windows guest OS's then why us Windows as the host/hypervisor?
No, nothing. I personally use a heavy ink pen that bleeds through normal paper however.
Appbackr, Finance your app - Wholesale digital marketplace
I have experienced cases where simply recompiling with a new GHC speeds up my program 5x. I've also experienced cases where I had to take perfectly readable code and turn it into something ugly--but not to the extent that it is done in the Haskell code on the language shootout.

I would prefer to have the language shootout revert back to idiomatic versions of the programs, and then look at how we can optimize those idiomatic programs automatically in the same way that good SQL implementations optimize SQL queries.
"a people", not "people". There's an important difference!
“Atmos Inside": EMC’s Grand Plan to Unify Public and Private Clouds
It'd be fantastic if there was a way to integrate firebug with the actual .sass/.css files, so I can make my adjustments, see them instantly, and press save if I like them.

It would stop me having to context-switch between my browser with firebug, and TextMate.

I can't imagine it being terribly difficult to do this, but what do I know?
http://di.fm usually the trance channel
A little I guess, but I'm an American, so I feel somewhat safer. Also, everything I know about my adopted homeland tells me that you only really get in trouble if you're agitating vocally for serious political change (something I don't really care about).
No one is saying it IS real. What's wrong with using fiction to explore facets of reality? It's an idea that the entire category of "the arts" is based upon.
Along the sames line, if there is a variation, then write it down as the norms or minimums, at a minimum, they will be able to do 3 out of this 6 things, etc.
The noob defense is a classic, thanks for using it on me. You should realize that many people, including myself, have more than one account.

Can you tell me specifically how you think this is interesting to hackers, outside of what it means to startup founders and potential startup founders? Many US bills affect "hackers", that doesn't mean we should discuss them.
It's official, ESRI is pronounced "ezree"
Profits = Freedom
Haha, all the images on Wikipedia are also filtered and my assumption for the reason was pretty similar to what you just suggested.
Simple way to defeat that is to just come up with a bunch of different sticker designs.

Or, you could be even more devious. The town council could start putting up fake posters in non-designated spots that would mislead people to believe that something was happening when it wasn't. That way, non-approved locations will become associated with poisoned wells. A random person wouldn't be able to trust flyers in non-approved locations.
No, the point of the stickers is to ruin the effectiveness of illegal postings through disinformation; it has no effect on the event itself. (Although, if enough people think the event is canceled, and no one shows up...)
Sure - it might work well. But isn't it against the law to publicly spread false information that affect someone's business? Whether it's the city, or a random person, I would expect the same rules to apply - and I would expect to get sued if I started putting "cancelled" stickers on all posters. Two wrongs do not make a right...
If you were a 99% Windows shop but wanted a linux-based DNS, mediawiki, subversion or similar server would be one case. (Host mostly Windows guests, but a small number of non-Windows.)
I had some formal technical interviews, some of which i aced and got the job on their account, personally though, the more formal the approach was the less i wanted to work in said company, I often found that rigid hiring structure is a byproduct of a rigid internal structure, rigid top down hierarchies etc... of course the opposite can be true too. All in the balance i guess.
How should a random person know which location is approved and which is not? Sure - bins and other such places are obvious, but I would expect many locations to be just as likely to confuse an average person.
I only send notifications to the paid version of the app. But a one time $1.99 doesn't really map to the on going costs of sending the notifications. I have considered sending notifications to the free users as well as it seams to increase use of the app which should lead to purchases/affiliate commissions.

However a subscription model is probably the way to go of course.
One of the really interesting things that the US military took from this is to make decisions within the opposing force's ODA (Observe-Decide-Act) loop. The theory goes that if you make your decisions within their ODA loop that your actions appear to be random and start to cause analysis paralysis in the enemy force's command structure gaining further advantage for your force.
Pretty sure I remember reading or seeing that there's only ever two Sith at any given time.... that's not even mass-murder let alone genocide?
High-fructose corn syrup is poison, period. Weight gain is minor, bring on the diabeties, heart disease, inflammatory issues. The list goes on and on.

Simple solution is to let market prices dictate cost of sugar, rather than corn subsidies. We're subsidizing one of the greatest health risks of the last and current generation.
I wouldn't have believed this guy until I recently stumbled across it myself. I started MailFinch as a bit of a joke a few months ago (actually, it was partly inspired by Dustin Curtis' snail project as well).

Turns out, people actually liked that story and we're now sending almost 20K pieces a month.
Your English is just fine, essentially indistinguishable from native speakers :)
Some stories are written in newspaper style like you describe. This is written in a storytelling style - much more informative for most of the audience who know very little of friendship.
News flash: using experimental, unstandardized features can be risky, and requires more work on the developer's part.
That would put the ones who didn't resign in even hotter water; it would be seen as, 'you had a chance to get out and you chose to stay? That's even worse.'
I work for one of these consulting companies. If you wan't to write code, steer far away.

Most likely, they'll staff you in some project management role where you're working with the client to manage a team of developers and/or a workstream consisting of individual projects.

If you have experience with scaling applications and IT architecture, you'll be staffed on IT Assessment and Architecture design projects - very likely with a large insurance company looking to consolidate all their various legacy systems.

Also Empire29 is right, to a degree, that these firms aren't thought-leaders. Clients are very risk-adverse and are wary of too new technologies. Plus most of the time their choices are limited to the technologies they've already invested into and/or skillsets among their staff.

Working for one of those firms will however, give you experience and exposure to the business side of things. Some HNers trivialize these areas, but I've found just seeing how a big organization is run - good and the bad - has been pretty useful. Regardless of how talented you are as a hacker, very likely somewhere in your career - be it with Google or at startup - you'll have to engage and interact with the suits and experience with a consulting firm would give you a good background to do so with ease.
It says they have around 200k members. I wonder how many are paid members?

1% of 200k is 2k, times $12 = $24k/month.

I would suspect 1% is low. Probably closer to 5%.

So ~ $100k/month and growing...
I think this is a great warning for those who think that VC funding immediately equals success. Eating your ramen noodles for a while gives you time to get good foundations in place before things start moving too fast.

It made me feel much better about bootstrapping Gridspy
Isn't this the same philosophy people had about the video games industry for a long time?

It's proven that "hardcore" gamers buy a lot more games than casual gamers, and that they are far easier to sell related merchandise and subscription to.

Yet, the success of the Wii has proven that the sheer size of the casual demographic more than makes up for the fact that they buy fewer of your products.

There will always be the hardcore, voracious readers, but I'm not convinced that it's not worthwhile to go after the casual readers who might only read 2-3 books in a whole year.
Could someone please explain to me the frequency of the sentence, "Seriously."? An in joke? I don't get it...
> They all toe the party line something fierce... scary, especially since they're "destined" to be the Chinese leaders of tomorrow :S

You are surprised by this? I'd be surprised if it wasn't like this. It's the party that will be getting them into leadership roles; of course they will support it with everything they have.