skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always wondered why almost all(relatively speaking) affiliate marketers use long pages - Sales pages. Now I know why.
I'm glad you like it :)

Note: I am a college student
The practical problem here is that, in a lot of industries, clients talk, even when they're supposed to be in competition with each other. Getting rid of the problem client isn't what's hard; getting rid of them without losing others is the problem.
Results appear to be uncensored on the hk site:

http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q...
If they make a ton of money, then it might encourage competition. If they don't make any money, then it might be embarrassing.
Make celebrity cooks take on school lunch
I absolutely agree, but the haskell guys have not quite gotten it complete. I envision mathematicians a-plenty installing ubuntu because it's "programmy" and then giving up installing the haskell platform because they don't know what compiling is or why they need all those "X-dev" packages.

I for one know a few math guys that absolutely love haskell when I show it to them (more so when I talk about category theory and types :-), but would just get distracted if I asked them to run console commands in order to install it, which is a terrible shame because they totally get it on my system once everything's installed and set up.
Maybe I'll integrate some social networking features and location awareness. I could easily capture a percentage of the iPhone's market share with that kind of innovation.
I'd like to add that good editing can make or break the copy, no matter who it's targeted at.

Their != they're != there
Your != you're
Then != than
Of != have
No Really: Microsoft giving away Windows Image with redistribution allowed
No tricks. Microsoft is giving away Windows Server 2008. And you can even redistribute the image.
A new approach to China: an update
Among many other things, I thought it was interesting to 'anchor' the fashion vertical around $40CPM as a comparison to LinkedIn (business/recruiting vertical), reportedly around $80CPM.
What that means is that people in China will still not be able to see unfiltered results as the Chinese Hong Kong version is blocked from the mainland. Google Hong Kong is uncensored just like most of the world.
Cars, drivers, traffic lights, signs to cooperate proactively
Not iterate - build on. And immigration reform is somewhere between health care and abortion on the "politically charged" spectrum, so a perfect, sensible solution wasn't coming anytime soon.
Google.cn now redirects to google.com.hk
Google.com does as well, when I visit it from a Beijing IP address.
We The Media – A quick timeline on the collapse of Cash Gordon
I think it was either Hal Abelson or Jerry Sussman in one of the SICP lectures. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
Read Paul Graham's essays.
Sure, It takes a person called zavulon to defend the bad guys ;)

The Watch series comes highly recommended though. Very fascinating series, interesting concepts, nice writing style. (also, the movies are o.k. as well. They get much better when you watch them a second time, as you see a whole lot more clues)
Wait for it ... http://packages.debian.org/sid/haskell-platform

The single .deb install. Ubuntu will pick it up shortly.
I'm curious how long I'll be able to access google.com.hk from my Beijing apartment.
Online Privacy : Who made it disappear
http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&safe=strict&...

is now filtered for me (it wasn't a few days ago), but by my ISP, not by Google.
China service availability Status: http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

A new approach to China: an update: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china...
Smashing Magazine - bold revenue move
Looks like for a brief period of time they redirected all of their traffic to an advert for their new e-book.
Seemed to have annoyed a few people by doing it and they've put it back.

I can understand sites like this needing to make money, and I love the articles on there, but redirecting all traffic seems a bit of an extreme solution to a revenue problem?

What do you guys think?
I'm not sure if this is new, but Google has a page with availability details from China:

http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en
Amen! I had one exactly like that.
Both of those urls are blocked to me ("Connection was reset").
Amazon Kindle preps iPad app
Others have commented on this already, but this reminds me a lot of the charts I'd make for the first couple weeks of high school when I had new classes and couldn't remember my schedule. I think this is more suited for that kind of scheduling than something more corporate. It's just enough space to help you remember that English is at 10:45.

This would also be a good template for convention-goers to use to plan which events they'd like to go to. I can easily imagine this being a rip-out page in a convention pamphlet.
"It's entirely legal ... We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision"

Not much of a leg to stand on. I wouldn't want to be a Google employee in China right now.
Seattle: 'Riskiest' cybercrime city
You bring up some interesting points.

I'd argue that the much maligned concept of "corporate personhood" is designed to solve the problem of individuals having short (and finite) time horizons for making cost/benefit calculations.

Similarly, patent law offers a tradeoff between unfettered innovation monopoly by offering a limited, short-term monopoly on exploiting new ideas. Consider briefly the FDA approval process and a profit-seeking scientist developing a pharmaceutical. The scientist has a 20 year time horizon to maximize profits, so she has a huge incentive to do R&D and to launch the product. Meanwhile the FDA regulator collects the same salary whether he approves or delays approval of a drug, yet he stands to be fired and disgraced if the drug he approved causes harm. If he's overly cautious in order to keep his job, society suffers profoundly.

If you claim that government is better than private industry at solving these sorts of problems, you are making the rather strong claim that the incentives of the FDA burocrat are broadly superior to the incentives of the R&D scientist.

It follows that you would believe that if all R&D scientists were paid a fixed salary and stood to gain nothing for finding a breakthrough drug but stood to be humiliated and disgraced if any unforeseen consequences of a discovery occur, society would be significantly better of.

I think that's a fairly sweeping claim to make, and I'm curious if you could elaborate.

Also, with respect to the automotive pensions, I think you'd be well advised to review this history of the PBGC (pension benefit guarantee corporation). It is a government entity tasked with offering pension insurance for workers in the event that the firm fails. Surprisingly, both unions AND corporate interests lobbied congress to decrease the premiums firms would pay into the PBGC. The result is that the PBGC is not actuarially sound and that if a few major US firms failed the PBGC would go belly up.

Why did this happen? Corporate interests understand that once the government provides a safety net, so long as they were compliant they have nothing to lose (plus, if the firm failed then it's game over anyway). Unions focused on increasing the current allocation of benefits and didn't worry about the future... after all they "won" improved pensions for workers and were pleased when firms could dedicate the extra cash (saved by having artificially low risk premiums) to other forms of compensation, etc. So in this case the government clearly acts on the whim of interested parties and utterly fails to protect citizens (even though doing so is a trivial matter of actuarial calculations and collection of a premium!).

So I would be curious to read your elaboration based on these points of rebuttal.
I learned about that type of client the hard way. She was the poster girl for a bad client, and I finally got rid of her by pricing her out. It was a big lesson, and I will never make the mistake of giving such a client the benefit of the doubt for a couple of months again. Ha! I was burned out for months after that nightmare.

Be on the lookout for such clients and cut your losses early fellows, it is simply not worth it unless the client in question is paying three times your rate, which bad clients never do anyway . . .
Night watch is a decent series, but I found his "Deep" series more entertaining....maybe because it has to do more with hackers and virtual reality.

No idea if it got translated to english.
Start-me-up, video: the making of a gay startup
Night Time Single by SHEMWELL, Tyler on MP3 and WAV at Juno Download
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211055
So is Kobo ... http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/kobo-e-reader-first-o...
A Leo Strauss-style variation of the argument is here:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/05...
IMO, the most valuable thing to come out of all of this is the China apps status dashboard:

http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

tells us what China is currently allowing, blocking, or partially blocking.
Shameless plug, I built an open source version of stackexchange with some friends: http://shapado.com
In some ways I can't believe they actually did it.
that's true, but in my opinion it's better than constantly caving in to censorship
I feel like a good percentage of the stuff you find in today's supermarket can be made from printable goo. Consider the frozen foods aisle. Industrial plants often reconstitute ingredients to make fairly normal looking piece of "food." Frozen chicken, for example. Why is always the same shape? This device just brings the technology into the home.
I retract my previous statement. Haskell people are wonderful creatures.
Information Narratives: Why your kids wont read as much about WWI as you did.
I probably got downvoted because people thought the last part of my comment was unnecessary. If that's the case then I'm willing to take my lumps without regret. My experience as a web designer for 15 years and being thoroughly unimpressed with Nielsen during the entire tenure of useit.com certainly will have a tendency to come out a bit sideways from time to time.
You're right, salt just protects against rainbow tables, my mistake. Increasing the cost so that a single brute-force attack would take a few years/decades is actually fine. I don't see why it would then be "too simple to get the SSNs", given that you're using a different salt with each.

Here's another idea: Use a secret salt, similar to AWS's secret id. Make it long enough that it would pretty much impossible to brute-force (do the calculations). Does that seem like a workable solution? Of course, if the "secret" isn't secure, then well, you're in trouble, and if the secret is in your code in plaintext... Yeah, it's an uphill battle. I'm sure someone more experienced than me here can provide some solution.
Setting the pace: How games keep us engaged
No, it's not blocked (yet) - but queries with certain keywords are being filtered as they always have. It appears the keyword filtering is now more severe, as I've mentioned elsewhere.
This is really a remarkable site. How is it that I hadn't heard of it before now? None of the women I Follow on Twitter have ever mentioned it.
Just want to say thanks for doing such a fantastic job with Urban Airship. We're using it for our app and it's proven to be extremely valuable and has saved us loads of time, we'll have no problem paying when we exceed our usage. :) Really looking forward to implementing AirMail too, can we sign up for early access anywhere?

One minor issue I've experienced is that push notifications sometimes never make it to the phone -- since UA/Apple doesn't return deliverability or system status, there's an inexplainable black hole and this is important given the nature of our app and potential consequences for failing to receive a notice.

I assume this type of integrity is related to why you've released AirMail? Is the deliverability failure largely an issue w/ Apple's push/queue system or UA's?
What happens when your ISP filters it? Do you see a "Connection Reset" page, or do they actually modify the HTML returned?
Step away from the computer.

Go outside

Look at the sky

Breathe in the air.

Realize this is not real ......
Great article, and a good moral.

It does fail lesson #1 of journalism though: put the important bits at the beginning, not the end. It was tedious to read through a history I already knew.
Seriously. It would be nice to see a widget like this that anyone could throw up on their site or blog. Problem would be getting the update -- you'd have to have a server in China pinging all the participating sites, I suppose.

This could be a very nice way for the web to passively protest China's censorship: put a strip at the top of your blog that displays whether or not your blog is readable in China at the moment. Even if the Chinese couldn't see it, plenty of people outside of China would, raising awareness of the problem and putting pressure on China.
That's actually brilliant. They're both complying with the letter of the law and forcing the Chinese government to actively shut them down. I hope all their non-Chinese employees have exited the country...
For all the rights and wrongs of such a decision; kudos to them for going through with their threat.
Pretty frightening that they need to reiterate this (they mentioned this in the original announcement):
Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.
The last paragraph says a lot between the lines. "Please don't put our employees in jail."
Interview with Magnus Carlsen, the current #1 chess player
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/the_five...

Ezra Klein knows what he's talking about (though he is coming from a pro-reform standpoint).
Free PDF: Graph Theory, by Reinhard Diestel
I appreciated the self-referential nature of the page.

1. We created a web page long enough to tell the story

2. We infused the headline with curiosity rather than overt "buy me" language

5. We augmented the message with video

Et cetera.

If it works for SEOmoz and CRE...

Awesome marketing and meta-marketing.
And all this time analysts were saying Google would stand down from its principles on this matter. I quite like this page: http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en as well as the general tenor of these actions.
Yes. The $1 one month trial is automatically followed (the negative option part) by a monthly $79 charge (the rebill part) unless the user cancels by the 29th day of the trial.

A (usually large) proportion of customers will be confused and unintentionally pay for at least one month of full priced service: perhaps they don't understand they need to cancel before the 30th day, perhaps they forget to cancel, perhaps they try to cancel and fail.

There is a more honest alternative. Amazon Prime requires user input after the trial before their first $79 subscription charge is made. This is called positive option billing.
Auto Transport Companies
That's the way it should be when thinking about car shipping. A good auto transport company will get your vehicle where it needs to go whether it's across town or across the country and for that you can count on National Transport LLC. Our auto shipping services go well beyond the scope of what you would expect from your average car transport companies.
so if an entrepreneur signs up, (s)he's got a 90% chance of being sent home? I wouldn't like those odds.
The early days here produced some of the most interesting and informative conversations I've run across online. Signal to noise ratio was particularly high, as were mutual respect and consideration.
The pressure to publish is so high, promotions et cetera all rely on it. Putting together large datasets can be can be costly and time consuming and the hope is often to get a few publications out of it. I think citations need to acknowledge datasets more, as do promotions otherwise people will have large incentives to "silo" vertically and not share. A big issue that has no excuse is public access to journals though. It's amazing that the public pays for the research and then pays for it again and again in every library's subscription to the vampire publishing houses who do nothing other than distribute a few hardcopies that nobody reads and then gatekeep the pdfs (the editing and review is all done by academics, so it's just copy and typesetting that's commanding this huge price). Maths, physics and comp sci are some of the better disciplines (masters of LaTeX) for making things available online, but everywhere else it's horrible.
Connection reset... same as I get with blogspot, wordpress, facebook, twitter, etc.
Maps of safe houses? That sounds incredibly irresponsible, fine way to get operatives killed.
Source report: http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=...
Skipfish also runs a few checks against external libs - like Google Analytics javascript for example.
There are more potential connections in between neurons in the human brain than there are atoms in the universe.

Or at least that is the way I heard it.
Re: the wrench by Google docs. Google spreadsheets are blocked here, but not the rest of the service as far as I can tell. Why? One can only ponder what goes on in the censors' heads.
My main fear is that China will use this opportunity, as the Chinese proverb goes: "kill the rooster to warn the monkey" - i.e., arrest/charge a few higher-level Google China people (Chinese citizens, they won't touch Americans).

Public opinion in China re: Google is very, very much sided with the Chinese government - people in general believe Google to be bullies pushing their American-style beliefs down their throats, and the people I've spoken to almost unanimously think that it's about damned time Google left China.

If a few key people are arrested/charged for conspiring to violate the law, it would be a major PR victory for the PRC domestically ("government stands up to Western bullying tactics, no safe refuge for collaborators" and the such), not to mention potentially warding off other companies trying to make the same stand.

Interesting times.
Looking at the article more carefully, it actually seems to me that these two ideas aren't just not synergistic, but are actually antagonistic. It says you can either buy job application credits, or earn them by farting around with your profile and sending messages. As an employer, I think I'd much rather hear from someone who bought some credits to apply than from someone who got their credits by spending a lot of time on facebook. The social networking angle makes the pay to apply angle less valuable, I think.
Hentaigirlz.com
So did anybody like, you know, get hired?
Sfondi desktop in HD
Some things I used to be able to search for on google.cn, but are now filtered by my ISP (via connection reset):

http://www.google.com.hk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8... (6/4)

http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q... (Tian'anmen 1989)

I'm sure a native Chinese can give a better list. Superficially at least, it looks like ISP level censorship has gotten worse.
Well, it was pretty obvious the polls weren't going to be on the dot, but I was expecting consumers to claim to be willing to pay Y, but in reality only pay X, where X < Y.

I never expected X = 0.
I agree with all your explicit points, and I realize that graph is a very crude indicator.

Also, I agree with the implicit point I think you are making, which is that this reform really does nothing to address these issues. (Although I would also say that I'm fine paying for the drug development. We shouldn't stop doing something that benefits us just because others can take advantage.)

So yeah, I really don't have a rebuttal because I agree with you. I wanted much more out of reform, but at this point I'm happy with anything that might get us a bit closer, especially if it makes it easier to reform in the future (which may be wishful thinking).
Awesome, thanks for using UA!

At the bottom of http://urbanairship.com/products/airmail/ , there's a signup form - we'll be emailing that list first with early access. Or, you can email me ( michael@urbanairship.com ) and I can get you on the list.

Apple's push service has a few quirks - in addition to connectivity issues (which can definitely be numerous - thanks AT&T!), there's also a problem when passing along a development device token to a production server. They'll silently drop the connection and we won't know until the TCP window size fills up that this happened - in other words, messages can be lost. There's a feature we've implemented called push debug mode that will watch for this, but it will slow down broadcasts or large sends. We recommend having this on during testing and are working on a more automated solution. So, you could try that.

But, in general, yes, issues like this were some of the initial inspiration behind AirMail - we tried as much as possible to talk to our customers and get feedback and the product naturally grew out of hearing what they wanted.
If I search for a programming tip and find it through Google, I might bookmark it or use bit.ly to tweet it. If I have to scroll down past a bunch of garbage that is trying to fool me into paying for the tip, I am not going to bookmark it or share it. If I lose my mind and share it and I immediately get 500 emails telling me that when they go to the site they don't see the tip (because they didn't go through GOOG), I am goingto have a lot of egg on my face.

If I do the same search in Bing and I get stack overflow, I'm a happy man. How often does that have to happen before I bail on using GOOG?

I don't think of this as privileging Google users, I think of it as creating a nasty time bomb when users discover that they can't share or save their results.
ESA - Observing the Earth - Earth from Space: Baltic sea ice
It's not genocide. It's based on a conscious religious decision, not innate genetics.
What does health care reform mean for startups and VCs?
I don't think there have been any hires finalized yet, but there have definitely been a lot of follow up interviews. I'll try to post as we hear about hiring successes on the site.
I'm unsure if you are comparing apples to apples on the pricing as it looks like SecureTrading is a UK only provider. The UK and the U.S. have entirely different credit card processing fee structures. The wholesale rates, known as interchange, in the UK are lower and are structured differently. So a direct comparison is not applicable. I was specifically referring to U.S. providers.

In terms of your other comment regarding scaremongering, that is not our intent. We're just trying to raise awareness of hidden fees in the industry. We see it all day every day in competitor proposals. Credit card pricing is inherently complex and difficult to present to merchants. We've tried to simplify the complexity of pricing and buying merchant services by posting our pricing online and not hiding any fees. We try to raise awareness because at times it feels like we're the only provider out there that doesn't hide fees. I am sure that there are other providers that do not hide fees or present them in a way that hinders a merchant from properly understanding rates they'll pay - we just rarely ever see it.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 appears to be a no-gui virtualization host (hypervisor). There's a feature chart here that alludes to an unclear licensing issue with "guest virtualization rights". [1]

The downloadable image is 1.5 GB.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx