skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I enjoyed this article and because I know David reads this I wanted to suggest the book "Human Action" by Ludwig von Mises. It seems like his discussion of profits in that book might be pretty interesting with your line of thought.

I saw in an interview that John Mackey of Whole Foods got a lot out of reading it for what's that worth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action
Google, don't politicalize yourself — China's official news agency
IPad's iBookstore App should play nice with Project Gutenberg
depending on scale, your method might end up being better. It all comes down to a trade-off of effort. Will investing a bunch of time building infrastructure now help you in the long run or can you wait 1-2 years before you build that infrastructure?

For a startup that doesn't yet know if they're going to make it big or not, it may well be worth it to delay the infrastructure and just put some heart behind it :)
> Problem is, people expect things to be free.

Businesses don't.

> By restricting yourself only to people willing to pay money, you've cut out most of the internet population.

No, you've cut out freeloaders who expect something for nothing, people you generally don't want anyway. This isn't cutting people out, it's filtering out bad prospects. People who want stuff free are the worst customers, I'd much prefer those who are willing to pay for something they find valuable to them. You can avoid a lot of scaling problems by only focusing on paying customers and there's no shortage of paying customers if you build something of real value.
Then that text has to be localized.

The real trick would be to have a very long piece of wide bright orange polypropylene ribbon attached to the pull-ring on the pin. Long enough that you'd want instinctively to pull it out so that it won't be in your way, long enough that you can't just tuck it in anywhere and pretend that it's supposed to be there. Just out-ugly the idiots.
The second * has nothing to do with type-casting -- it is part of the type identification. The operator performing the typecast is the pair of parentheses.

Consider: int and int * are two different types. So typecasting to int when you really mean int * is completely different.
The interface hardly matters. I apologize for thinking about this too hard.
I can't claim credit for the idea, but I think that the 'paper tag' (like you might find on clothing in a store) with the appropriate instruction.

It's cheap, it will annoy people until they remove it, and it's fairly obviously a sign that it needs removing.
To be fair, you can easily do the same with any number of other search engines (e.g. Yahoo). In fact, the original metric that you've proposed isn't very useful because the same search terms mean different things in different languages. For instance, in China the Tiananmen Square protests are called the "June Fourth Incident" (literally: 六四事件) so comparing a search for an English phrase with the same phrase on google.cn might not be meaningful.

If you really just want to know what topics are being censored, there are a number of human rights organizations and non-profits that track such things.
For anyone wondering why this was posted now, version 2.3 was released today.
I mean the people. You might know 3/4 of Chinese people are farmers. Most of them are poorly educated. They usually work hard for a living and don't use google's services at all. You won't hear the voice from them. But they are the majority of China.
Yes, I took it for several days and developed an annoying headache/feeling. It did not, at all, improve cognitive function. In my case it impaired it.

YMMV of course.

I've had far better luck with fish oil (Omega-3 supplements), taken every morning with earl grey tea. The fish oil helps me concentrate, while the tea releases caffeine more slowly than coffee does, preventing jitteriness and extending its duration.
Snippets 1.0 Brings Powerful Snippet Management to the Mac
That's what I do. I persist python objects into s-expressions using a c-extension module then parse and un-persist data back to python on the other side. Everyone asks me why I don't just switch to JSON. Well I might one day, I just like S-expression for now and the parser is very small, fast and was easy to implement. I even have references (like Yaml) to persist arbitrary object graphs.
My roommate and I took it for about two months, also supplemented with choline. I didn't notice any improvement. My roommate noticed an improved ability to do mental math, but not enough of an improvement for it to be worth continuing to take.
Send a sample to ASPEX to get scanned by their SEM
Fructose is sweeter. It actually seems the taste of sweet alone triggers an insulin response that causes fat storage. Zero calorie sweeteners have been shown to cause fat gain.
I read all the comments posted here thus far, and the one thing I don't see is a concern that de-duping, if not done AT the filesystem, would be prohibitively slow.

Am I misguided in thinking that it would be? I mean, I suppose if you implemented it on disk at the server level, retrieving the duped blocks there, I think you're adding latency. I suppose I might be looking at it from the wrong perspective, as there just has to be people using S3 for backups only, for which cost probably does make more sense than speed, but I honestly don't know if that's more the exception or the rule.
I found a copy of the text on: http://en.mye.ir/a-new-approach-to-china-an-update/ available from within China.
Ever heard of Napster?
I wrote that wrong, my bad. I was copying from a call-by-value example from memory. Changed the following:

*(int *foo)pointer_param /*changed to*/ *(int*)pointer_param = bar
I've heard that the headache is due to a lack of choline, and that most people should be taking a choline supplement with their racetams.
It seems like PATCH could be implemented as a PUT to a resource that represents the transformation of some other complete resource, allowing you to just PUT the changes as opposed to the whole document.
I tried piracetam, oxiracetam, and aniracetam 2-3 years ago and found them all to be vastly overrated. I knew a few journalism students that used to be heavy coffee drinkers that really liked piracetam+choline though. Piracetam is dirt cheap so you might as well see if you respond, but definitely stop taking it if you don't.

A supplement that's great for overall health with lots of research is Alpha Lipoic Acid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_lipoic_acid). I find it helps me concentrate for longer periods of time and acts as a mild mood stabilizer.
[Google] must follow Chinese law and international custom, and responsibly handle the aftermath

Momma always told me, "Pick your battles." I am not sure this is the right battle to be picking. The Chinese don't play around. They recently executed a British national for drug crimes: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,669573,00.... They sentenced a corrupt business woman to death: http://www.mainjustice.com/2009/12/18/china-to-execute-woman... According to that same article they also execute for tax evasion. Also, the food safety guy for taking bribes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6286698.stm

I'm no fan of Google and I hope my bias isn't clouding my rationale here, but I'm not really sure this is the right battle to pick. China isn't Microsoft. They aren't Apple. China is a sovereign nation with laws that should be respected. If you don't respect their laws, don't do business there. Can it be any simpler than that? Is there a moral justification for Google's behavior that I'm missing?

I can't help but think our government's wishy-washy attitude toward the enforcement of law has convinced our business leaders that they are above it. In many ways, they are above the law in the U.S., but not in China.

Google has unfairly threatened the lives and freedom of their employees in China. There's no bluffing in a game like this. Even rationally speaking, I think it's quite irresponsible of Google to do this.

If Google thinks they are going to change Chinese society or Chinese law or get away with behavior like this, they're delusional.

I'd like to suggest a book for Google executives, it's called Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands http://www.kissboworshakehands.com/2004GTC/index.html
You're implying that it's written in the first person, but you're missing the gif of the entrepreneur character's signature at the bottom right above the paypal button :)
Towards Seed Tuition, Not Seed Investment for Startups
I've never heard of executable registry entries, and google is failing me when I try to find them. Can you link me to something about them?
While I completely agree that JPG is the wrong choice for what is essentially a 2-color graphic, what about that makes it shady?
De-duplication and replication are complements. The more you can de-duplicate, the better and cheaper you can make your replication. If you know your data is highly redundant (for example, you are backing up all the files on thousands of desktops created with a standard disk image), de-duping will allow you to dramatically improve the replication (perhaps replicated 4x between two data centers nearly in real time, instead of copied to a single RAID-10 array in one data center on a nightly basis).

If you don't de-dupe your data before you replicate it, then you end up storing redundant data in a way where the redundancy is totally unhelpful (in fact, hurtful) to you. So, you can look at de-duping as the process of converting hurtful redundancy into helpful redundancy.
So would this compete against the likes of notifo (the YC company)?
Hold on a minute. The trade imbalance between the U.S. and China is the argument for Yuan revaluation and it still exists the last time I looked. China's Deficit is probably
due to the amount of raw materials being exported to China
from the likes of Australia and others. I have read that so
much raw copper sits in China's warehouse there is talk of a price crash in that market. So needs more investigation is my take.
Innovation contests should reward products not ideas
I didn't notice any improvement on piracetam. The only things that I'm sure change my mental state are caffeine and modafinil. I highly recommend modafinil (brand name Provigil). It helps me concentrate, especially if I didn't get enough sleep the night before.
I think I read that as well, but decided against it because the literature wasn't convincing enough (i.e., hearsay on forum posts), and I wasn't thrilled with ingesting, and possibly becoming dependent on so many substances.
Other brands of monitors I've used (Samsung, Dell) simply have an adjustment system that doesn't require a locking pin. The best solution is probably to just move away from that design which might be mechanically valid but doesn't seem to be obvious to the consumer. Other companies ship the base not attached to the display which requires more user setup but is also more obvious. I can't really think of any plus sides to using the pin at all. Ignoring that and looking at the problem objectively I'd guess most people don't need a manual or even a "quick start" guide to connect a monitor and completely ignore it. Just put a big 8x11 sized sheet of paper over the front of the display that simply says "READ FIRST: REMOVE BLUE PIN" so it's impossible to ignore. Even if you quickly glance at it while ripping into the packaging you have time to process the information without the added clutter of teaching people how to plugin a power cable or press the ON button.
The SOAP tragedy was my first thought. In 2000, SOAP was just coming out and I had written an XML to Javabean mapper based on reflection that was much more lean and with much higher throughput than SOAP. At that time, Microsoft was the biggest SOAP proponent and was pushing it very hard.

I thought it was bloated and unnecessarily complicated to integrate and conform to, so we skipped on it. I suspect most will skip on oData too unless it is simplified. It's an architect's abstract dream and I think some people need to wake up.

I suspect the only people who will choose oData are the business managers running budget legitimizing projects.
It's not about aligning with certain politics (!= policies).

It's about something higher, about human rights.China should not be giving any lessons to anyone about this kind of stuff.

I guess China fears that Google's movement will start a pattern of western tech/internet companies leaving China.

Would Chinese companies be able to fill the void leave behind be those companies? I'm not sure.

We are about to watch a game of victimhood (sorry, not sure if that's the word) played by the Chinese Govt. Let's see how that works.
Just made it my new home page!
Choline is a natural compound, you can get it by eating eggs. Most people take it as a supplement the same time
with piracetam, you can buy them combined as well. It's definitely discussed in research as well as forums:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7301036
"The results of these studies demonstrate that the effects of combining choline and piracetam are quite different than those obtained with either drug alone"
Science cannot answer metaphysical questions, so ethics is entirely outside its scope.
Why don't you actually read my comment? I said that old people with no achievements aren't going to suddenly become great entrepreneurs.

Jimmy Wales - extremely successful options and futures trader

Steve Jobs - I forget what company he was involved with before NeXT, but I think it was pretty big

Jeff Bezos - one of the top people at D.E. Shaw, right under Shaw himself

John McCarthy - programming languages don't really count as entrepreneurship, but I'm sure you could find many examples of old people creating languages

Marc Benioff - youngest VP in Oracle history

David Winer - I really have no idea what UserLand is

Larry Ellison - ok, fine. I guess if you're trying to make
Oracle, it's ok to be old. I don't mean that as a slight to Oracle, but I don't think Oracle's story applies to web startups.

PG - I didn't say anything about old people not being able to become investors
Not relevant to the "hiring process" discussion, but I think the idea that:

Claude Shannon didn't have to satisfy any customers. He could spend years developing a theory, whose practical value was only clear after it was sufficiently developed

is historically wrong; certainly reading the wikipedia page on Shannon makes it sound like he developed his ideas while doing quite practical work during WW II.

Someone please correct me if my impression is incorrect.
You don't have to search google.com in English, you can use the exact same search phrase in either language, and if you go over the first 100 pages of results you can get quite a good list even with imprecise search phrases.
Unix recovery legend
It's called contributory infringement.

If I supply you with tailored parts necessary to perform/make a patented invention then that's contributory infringement.

In the US Findlaw says:

"Contributory infringement occurs when a party supplies a direct infringer with a part that has no substantial non-infringing use. Literal infringement exists if there is a direct correspondence between the words in the patent claims and the infringing device."

http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/patent/enforce-patent/paten...
This analysis is flawed.

1) most data in the cloud is going to be proprietary. How much is GE's internal factory data going to overlap with Starbucks' financials?

2) You would need global access at the byte level to truly dedupe systems. So the 50 biggest companies on S3 are giving some random company read access to all their data? And allowing them to compare it to all the data of their competitors?

3) And to do what? to save a few percent max in storage costs on S3? That's not going to dominate your cost structure by a longshot.

Outside of a web crawl I doubt there is that much redundancy.

The only one who can dedupe at scale and with trust would be Amazon themselves, and they would only do it if it weren't a huge headache to keep track of.
That seems to break the REST metaphor of nouns and verbs, at least it strains it. I mean sure, a noun of "transmogrifier" is fine, and if you put something in there, it can be reasonably expected to undergo transmogrification. However, just allowing a "change it" verb on a resource seems a bit more direct.
Now I know you're trolling. Good day.
...made possible using OpenStreetMap data.
Thanks for the pubmed link, didn't see that.

As far as choline goes, I eat an egg every day, and get my vitamins and minerals from fresh fruits, veggies and legumes. Just as you can obtain Vitamin-C or choline from a supplement, so too can you obtain them from natural sources. From what I understand of nutrition, the natural sources deliver the same nutrients in ways that our bodies can metabolize better.

I'm open to trying piracetam again, but it just doesn't seem all that significant to justify even the extra cost of buying it (and the supplements) and becoming dependent on it. If someone here actually does think it's worth it, I'd be very interested in hearing from you, provided you don't own a nootropics business.
I imagine the rationale was something like: how do we indicate that types are references to memory? Let's be concise and use the asterisk after the type of the memory.

How do we dereference an address? Since it only makes sense that types with an asterisk will be dereferenced, let's use an asterisk like we did in the type declaration. There, we have uniformity.

Oh wait, f-. What about if we want the address of something on the stack? Oh, maybe use the ampersand, and then that returns a pointer just like a pointer to something on the heap. Awesome! Let's even extend that ampersand to return the address of anything. Dereferenced pointers. What have you.

And yet, it's not completely symmetrical. Hence, pointers not being completely intuitive.

In addition, the ampersand as 'reference' is another completely unrelated syntax convenience. Which of course makes the language even slightly less symmetrical.

But, once you understand exactly what it's doing -- and your mind will adapt until it seems completely intuitive -- it is quite concise.

But the trick is that it's not concise like s-expressions. There's no clear symmetry. A lot of C (and even more C++) is simply syntax.
>"support for Flash is also support for H.264"

That's largely irrelevant to the issue at hand being just Adobe trying to grasp the last few straws of universal flash desirability before browsers offer the codecs necessary aside from Flash and Canvas becomes the standard format for online animation.
A PUT is already well-defined, and more importantly, idempotent. Adding PATCH-like behavior would not be repeatable, and would break every HTTP server, client, and proxy out there.
Piracetam has the distinct disadvantage of having to take large doses of it before any noticeable effects. I think one of the more popular tips for it is to mix it in with orange juice to dilute the taste. Coupled with the headaches it can cause, and it's very much a matter of whether or not you can personally elicit any benefits from it.

If not, save yourself a few bucks. If so, have fun~
Any value that you use to look up user information to populate a template is going to expose some information about how your application works, whether it's incremental or a GUID or a hash. There is some value in not having it be incremental in that it's not as easily fuzzable, but spidering the site will still cough up a bunch of valid values for the 'userid' parameter. Even if the form field is hidden.

What are you writing, anyway?
If you treat the document as a collection, you can usually map a url to the particular property that needs updating and accept PUT to that. But that can be a pain if you don't know in advance which particular properties will be updated.

I could also see implementing a server that accepts PUT with a diff format and just apply that patch instead of replacing the document.

Some of it seems well thought out but there are other bits that smell a bit fishy to me

> For example, if the patch document size is larger than the size of the new resource data that would be used in a PUT, then it might make sense to use PUT instead of PATCH.
I would never have found this and appreciate you posting it.

Fascinating, though I hope history will disagree with the message of this piece.
Is modafinil/Provigil available over the counter?
Preceden's been on here a couple of times before for those who haven't seen it:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114834
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157444
This is so obvious as to be trite.

It’s these supposedly crazy things that make me not want to give up 37signals for anything.

I'm guessing a sufficiently large buyout offer will change your mind on that right quick.
Ah ok. I didn't learn of the issue until after Theora was removed, so all I saw were the reasons why neither H.264 nor Theora were in the spec (and the impression that at least one of those had been considered for it).
Why isn't everyone encrypting everything?
It depends on whose counter you're referring to. :-p

But generally, no.
Hacker news directory: search + projects
Ruby Best Practices
I wonder what a carefully designed research study would look like

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

to show that so-called nootropics do anything at all. What would be a good objective test (as contrasted with patient self-report) of better mental function? What treatments are best suited for placebo-controlled trials?

After edit: thanks to another participant for a link to a 1981 study that didn't seem to look at human behavioral outcomes (better memory, etc.) but rather physiological outcomes in an animal model. As the link in this comment

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

notes, it's always a good idea to look for replication of a first published result. Has there been any replication at all of any peer-reviewed result regarding the more common kinds of nootropics?
I think we need a simplified "health temperature" label on all packaged foods to be placed on the front of the packaging. A simple green = good / red = bad label with enough points in-between to convey the differences. Include not only nutritional value, health risks, but also the environmental record of the companies producing the products in the rating. I'd suggest exempting companies that sell less than $X/year worth of product and really focus on the big guys. So if you were an ignorant peson doing their grocery shopping it would be fairly easy to reach for the green labels and it would become apparent that cheaper foods were almost always on the red side. That might spur the grass roots changes in consumption we need to make healthier food cheaper.
Bill Gates Start-Up in Talks on Small Nuclear Reactor
Given the rate of progress of China's internet market and its size, I think we (and they) can bet that, yes, someone will fill any gaps.
An energy start-up backed by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates is in discussions with Toshiba Corp. on developing a small-scale nuclear reactor that would represent a long-term bet to make nuclear power safer and cheaper.

Toshiba said it is in preliminary discussions with TerraPower, a unit of Intellectual Ventures, a patent-holding concern partially funded by Mr. Gates. Intellectual Ventures, based in Bellevue, Wash., is run by a former Microsoft Corp. executive, Nathan Myhrvold.
I couldn't disagree more.

You really think more people would buy a phone unlocked at $650 versus with a two year contract for $150? Keep in mind that you need a plan regardless and that (excepting some new T-Mobile plans) you pay the same monthly cost whether you got a subsidized phone and a plan or not.

(Sure, they could have marketed it better overseas, but I don't think that would have made the difference either.)
I have a playlist of similar stuff labeled "Chill Metal". Bands include: Isis, Arsis, God is an Astronaut, etc. Excellent stuff for coding/studying.
Fish oil helps my mood too.

You may want to be make sure that the fish oil is molecularly distilled to minimize your exposure to mercury and PCBs.