skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was about the broader issues illuminated by an AGIS/Conxion peering conflict that prevented a number of people from accessing his web site in October 1997.

I didn't want it published "as is" since it wasn't written for public consumption. There were personal details that detracted from the message, adjustments I wanted to tone down some of the rhetoric and some people (sources) who I referred to who needed better credit and/or real links.

I didn't say it was private, but in some of it I was "talking" directly to him. And it was certainly netiquette at the time that email was by default private; he said that was "crap", that he'd gone over this issue "countless times", that "off the record" was a privilege that had to be negotiated ahead of time and that he was "being very generous" in offering to delete it.

That message from him left a rather bad taste in my mouth.

My email was in response this public posting on his blog, start with the 4th paragraph of this page: http://www.scripting.com/1997/10/16.html

It wasn't abusive, although it was harsh on some bad players of the era, like UUNET, e.g. their actions prompted the editor of Boardwatch to commission a cover depicting the head of UUNET planting blue barrels of ANFO in MAE-East and I think MAE-West, referring to the OK City bombing a couple of years earlier.

The general issue of the day as I put it in my email:

"[T]he ISPs that are refusing to peer with others on equal terms are basically no longer offering Internet connectivity, but are instead offering a private network that happens to be connected to parts of the Internet. As I like to describe it, their unique selling proposition is "sign up with us, and we'll connect you to a steadily smaller portion of the Internet"."

UUNET's dominance at that time allowed them to play this sort of game and we still see it occasionally when a low cost provider irritates another. The end result of these power plays as I said at the time was "paying customers of the disconnecting ISP demand full connectivity or take their business elsewhere", although obviously that was a lot easier in the dialup era.
Ah my mistake, thanks. Makes sense then that one offs are the most valuable (lowest competition, latches on to a real one)
Use The Two-Tab Rule To Stay Focused
Every time I read this story, I feel upset when I think about how many people tell me I'm "good with the command line."

Maybe someday I'll ascend to UNIX godhood... I know that I'd have been screwed in this situation.
Data porn: Drinking the recession away
Mind Over Meds
The recent TV contract for NCAA basketball is $10.8 Billion over 14 years.

http://chronicle.com/article/NCAA-Signs-108-Billion-Deal/652...

The Rose Bowl (one college football game) alone is $300 Million over eight years.

Basically basketball and football subsidize the other sports. Shift that funding into academics and you lose the other sports.
How pricing plans evolved over time for a SaaS startup
Thanks for the feedback! I'm a huge, huge fan of Grasshoper.

I have a quick question for you. We can make the service cheap, but credit card transaction fees get expensive. If it were available, would you be willing to pre-charge your account with $5 or $10? What would be your ideal cost for faxing?
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...
> Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund.

Citation or definitions needed.

For example, while Stanford is elite in some ways, it isn't a sports school. However, its "big athletic programs" (football, basketball, baseball, and possibly tennis) are more than self-supporting via directed donations and tickets.

The profits are used to fund less lucrative sports.

Yes, including the newish football stadium.
> It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now.

Sadly, you're probably right about this. Sports seem to have become so ingrained in the popular paradigm of what you do at a university that it would be impossible to change. Oh well.
Hawking: Aliens may pose risks to Earth
There will likely be another Startup School in the fall. http://startupschool.org/
On POSIX systems, you can accomplish this with setjmp() and longjmp() calls. That has the benefit of being portable across different architectures.
I was expecting to read something on interpreters, jit, or virtual machines.
Ask HN : Should I serve files from GitHub?
I'm writing a javascript library and I want people to have an easy access to it. Is it wrong to suggest to use GitHub as the file server? I assume they are under CDN but I don't know how to be sure. I also assume that it's not against their policy but I didn't find that information.

The idea comes from : http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery#CDN_Hosted_jQuery
I think the real problem is that Mark Zuckerberg has the opposite belief, and thinks everything should be shared with everybody.

What I don't get is, why doesn't somebody just build an alternative to facebook which treats your data as private and not public. Then you could have the people still on facebook install an app to allow the secure-book people (or whatever) interact with their data so everybody can be friends across platforms. And maybe another app for vice-versa usage. bada bing bada boom.
> If Impressions or Maxis decided to start writing enterprise software, they'd probably dominate the market within a couple of years.

Yes, if the enterprise software makers would compete on their software. They seem to compete more on having better sales teams.
Lightning Fast A/B Testing Twitter Style (video)
Uncommon Interview: Howard Mann puts the fun back in business
What Can Cricket Data Tell Us About Labor Luck?
Connect above the noise:changes in communication in social media age (video)
Well, you certainly convinced me to download with this comment :]
Am I the only one who doesn't find it funny? Not because I don't think jokes should be made about the situation, but rather because I think those particular jokes aren't very good.
Publiyou: Publishing for the iPad as simple as 1-2-3
Vested interests that have control. By removing voluntary interaction and replacing it with decree by fiat old incentive structures are calcified.

To fix this situation:

1. Remove all government funding
2. Remove all guarantees on student aid

Then students would be forced to do some economic analysis on what they think is worth it. They would care significantly more about he value proposition. By removing guarantees on student aid institutions would have a vested interest in creating the highest quality graduates or else it would become difficult for future students to receive loans.
I've always wondered if it might make sense to hive off college sports into "minor leagues", wholly owned (at least initially) by universities. They get to keep their revenue stream, and could actually hire players for their market rates. I guess it wouldn't have the emotional attachment or something like that that I don't really get about college sports.
Mahalo are worse off. There are plenty of people out there - me included - who neither knew much nor cared much about Mahalo but may have considered working there had an opportunity arisen. I wouldn't work there now though. That might not give Jason any sleepless nights, but I bet many better developers than I have watched this play out with great distaste and resolved never to put themselves in the way of the people involved.
Schools don't have a funding problem. Look at the massive building campaigns they embarked on -- money is not the problem.
Certain sports are a profit center for certain schools. Football at U-Texas, yes. Football or rowing at Rutgers, no.

They receive a disproportionate focus even when they are not. The main reason is academic politics: a physics professor is busy doing research, while the athletic department has time for lobbying.
Most users don't know what a browser is, yet right now or very soon (depending on which numbers you read) most users will be using a browser other than Internet Explorer. Isn't that a bit of a paradox given the pre-installation of IE?

I also find it interesting that your example of what users do is that they click the button that takes them to google.
PNG is extremely good at compressing certain kinds of gradients.

Linear gradients get compressed nearly as well as large areas of flat color. More complicated images, of course, are more difficult to optimize.

Basically, you cannot typically create PNG-optimized graphics automatically (yet). There are a lot of things you can do pre-save to help the compression techniques (and when they won't work, use another format and stitch the two together - at the cost of another HTTP request).

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/15/clever-png-optimi... is a pretty good outline of it.
The Case for Git Rebase
"Also when you downsampled the images, whatever program you used was not very good"

Given that it's turnkeylinux, I think it's a safe bet that they were using Gimp.

Which completely explains the low quality of the output.
Haha. With some VC cash in the pocket, we could really run fast with this. But, something tells me this isn't up their alley :)
Does "5 times cheaper" equate to "1/5 the cost"?
I think my chuckling might be disturbing my office mate.
"That's a coincidence because I sell other people's belongings"

Well put.
Depends on the school. One thing about speaking in absolutes is that you're guaranteed to be some % wrong.

Harvard doesn't have a funding problem. Many universities do right now, though, including nearly all public schools due to the state budget crunch.
It is ill-regard of the system, not disregard of the work.
interesting article, unfortunately, the title is misleading, but maybe it's just me.
All true, but that's not what hga asked :-)
Compose Electronic Music, Right in Your Browser
Rands in Repose: The Twinge
clj-html - http://github.com/mmcgrana/clj-html

which is deprecated by

hiccup - http://github.com/weavejester/hiccup

though the latter has pretty lame examples
I think what I love best about my Palm Pre is that I never have to plug it in to anything, ever. There's a great podcast app that I use twice a day on average, similar to the one Apple infamously rejected, that lets me download them over wifi via RSS, or stream them over EVDO if it pops up when I'm already out and about. Zumodrive's new app means I can stream my entire music library. The Touchstone means I don't even have to plug it in to charge.

I think Apple will figure this out and add it to the device themselves eventually. Cords suck.
This reads more of a guide on why it is good to avoid gradients.
i found the punchline to the first one pretty amusing
Also it could be that people who misspell these terms are easier to monetize.
Several things. You ramble on about an insane version of the origins of the term Ponzi scheme. I asked what quantity you were taking a quantity of, you explain that in fact you meant to allude to Speed. You could have said revenue or costumers buying adds (which you eventually do).

You imagine that Ponzi schemes are only of interest to econ students, but as the other poster said many people have been taken by the schemes and it is in no ones interest to have that happen.
At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future. Think of the many anecdotal home school success stories. (Of course there are also home school disasters.) This would be so disruptive to the current education and government institutions that I don't see it coming about soon. Primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities can still be education providers, but they would have to radically shift how they function.
Thanks for the advice. The monthly fees kept me from online faxing for a long time.

-Definitely. For payment, we were thinking of pay pal, amazon, and google checkout.

-Email-to-fax feature. Great to hear. That's one of the features we have listed. We're just waited for comments like this one to implement it.

-Per-page model.
--->Out of curiosity, how much would you or other people be willing to pay per page?
Some thoughts:

1. In 2010, if you want to be truly educated, you have to do the work on your own. This was probably always true. Going to a great college helps, but it's a 20 or 50 percent improvement on the use of your time, and only if you use the time to learn: the opportunities are amazing, but no one requires that you take them, and many students don't. You can learn a lot more with the Internet and a library card than by completing what minimal work is required to pass through higher education.

2. Related to (1), the biggest benefit "college" offers to a person's education is that it allows "traditional" (read: well enough off to do college "correctly"-- residentially and in a four-year block without employment on the real economy) students to spend a substantial portion of their life with a very high degree of freedom without any non-educational work to do. Some students would be better served with $200,000 to spend as they wish, and an excuse to take four years off and do as they want... but that's not socially acceptable.

3. Our society has a disastrously mixed attitude on whether to invest in culture and refinement. Generally, we don't, and the result is an America that is hypercommercialized and ugly, with very few cultural achievements and a "high art" scene full of nouveau-riche charlatans. Tenured professorships aren't too numerous and overpaid, but the reverse is true. Although universities have a huge problem with bloat, professor salary is not the source of the problem. My major reason for hating what academia has become is that the universities are raising tuitions while slashing academic jobs: one or the other could be acceptable (leaner, cheaper universities; or rising costs for better quality) but the combination of both is intolerable.

We invest heavily in the trappings of culture, but essentially ignore it otherwise. This is why the people who contribute most to culture (artists, writers, teachers) find their contributions undervalued, and most professors are encouraged to treat their teaching as commodity grunt work.

4. Universal higher education got its steam from its relatively broad-based support across the political spectrum. The Left (which has been irrelevant since the '70s in the US) believes that bringing the proletariat into college will turn them into rebels, primed to fight back against capitalism (which hasn't happened). The centrists and conservatives (US Democratic Party) believes that making college more accessible will increase social and economic equality (which hasn't happened). The right wing likes universal higher education because their corporations get a sorting mechanism whose costs are paid by someone else (the public, and the people being sorted). Of those three "parties", the right wing is the only one to actually have gotten what they wanted out of it.

Only in the midst of a massive recession are we beginning to realize that this movement was mistaken.
Where are all the Apple and Erlang stories?
This blog has several neat entries. I also liked "Image Approximation with Genetically Selected Cosines": http://nklein.com/2009/10/image-approximation-with-genetical...
The last line of the blog post "Remember that I'm in the parody business and not the truth business." was the funniest part. Otherwise I got the same amount of boredom from the comic as I did from iPhone-gate.
Kinda ruined it when he has to explain it.

Way too literal in the first place, should have made some kind of parallel.
Thanks.

Yes. that's definitely something I want to do. I was thinking about facebook/twitter login and then save your data in DB.
Vote for Your Favorite Linux Geek T-Shirt Design
I wrote a post based on the same Apple buy/invest idea (but with much less detail) back on Wednesday. Check it out here:
http://www.dinnertopics.com/business/amusing-apple-anecdote/
Simple mechanical systems that solve interesting problems are far more elegant in my mind than a computerized version. :)
There's currently a 3 hours old story with 13 points in position 27; ie near the bottom of the front page.
Until they get to 32nm like Intel, it's going to make your power meter spin like you are running a hair dryer.

Wait a year for 32nm, then there will also be $100 4-core chips that unlock to 6!
More interesting than the comics (which came off a bit forced to me) is the following:

>I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline. I think the soonest I can get something published is in about a month, perhaps a bit sooner, but I've never tested it.

A month to go from the final draft of a black-and-white, three-panel, line-drawn comic to publication in a daily newspaper. A month!

And people wonder why newspapers are gradually becoming irrelevant.
It guess it just came off as strange to me because it's a stretch in terms of scope. For the comic's history, the jokes have generally implied that Dilbert's unnamed employer produces some kind of sprawling enterprise software, maybe with a consumer version, and to suddenly have them building next-gen smartphones is jarring enough to distract from the gag.

There is something cool about seeing a never-to-be-printed Dilbert strip, though.
True, but it's price/performance that I think most of us are concerned about: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2978/amd-s-12-core-magny-cours...

We're also now in a leapfrogging situation, where year by year this may change. AMD is one process node behind Intel; I'm not sure how to count microarchitectures, but ignoring processor interconnects (which Intel has only just started to address by copying the AMD approach) if you consider Core to be more advanced than K8 and Nehalem more than K10 then AMD is also one microarchitecture behind.
Here's the URL for the background image, if you want to block it: http://catb.org/jargon/graphics/linen2d.jpg
Fine. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295076
Why would you do something like this rather than just using function objects for your generators?

class FunctionObject {
//internal state as member variables
public:
FunctionObject() { /* ... */ }
returnType operator()() { /* Calculate next step */ }
};
This article is about how he redefined "bounce" to not include people that viewed the site for 30 seconds or more.

While I appreciate the sentiment, I consider "bounces" to be a lack of up-sell. My stats give me a "bounce" rate as well as the average time spent on that page for new visitors, so I can already see both of the stats he's referring to. They are just useful for different things.
LifeSaver Lessons
College is different. You’re paying up-front for professors you’ve never met and degree programs you probably haven’t even chosen yet

A little initiative, and this doesn't have to be the case.
To give people a rough idea, the 1055T X6 scores 5960 points on average in the PassMark benchmark while the i7 980X scores 10165.

As always, benchmarks are not useful for deciding how your application will perform on a certain CPU and you should do some tests for yourself, but considering the huge difference in this synthetic benchmark, I'd say some people would be willing to pay difference.
Keyonary+ - The Shortcut finder
How Will Quantum Computing Affect Finance?
But there's a big difference between publishing an event page with a list of people attending, and publishing a list of events that you attended.

Not really...

In other news, that tool he made (http://zesty.ca/facebook/) is pretty neat.
Should an entrepreneur be a sole proprietor?
Top Financial Reform Hit List
Take a moment to marvel at the fact that I didn't need to add anything to the story as it has been told in the media. All it really needed was Wally.

That's all a lot of things need... Half his genius seems to be simply applying Wally to the right circumstances.
Also interesting to note that there are 50 stories on the front page instead of 30. Was loading 20 more stories really that inefficient that this had to be dropped?
I think what he was trying to say is that he has a 1 month worth of comics done that are waiting to be published, and if he would sent a new one it would get it's turn in one month ...
Because keeping the internal state implicitly (in loops, etc) can make the code much cleaner. See, e.g., http://wiki.python.org/moin/Generators
UK Government Protection For Loch Ness ‘monster’ (1933)
Yeah, looking at those starting salaries Vs Cost of Living, Rice actually looks much more impressive than the Ivy's
A long time ago I turned from effective use of the Internet into a consuming mood. Consuming information. “Enough is enough” doesn't play any role on the Internet. You will never consume enough information and there's always something new to discover. Most of the time the information you read will not add anything to your knowledge, or your productivity. Don't blame the Internet, understand that it is all your fault. If you are a person who likes to procrastinate, prefer to read than to act, you will easily fell in the traps of the Internets. Personally these are my solutions to handle the problem;

If you think something is an interesting read, skim it(or in other words, scan it for useful information), bookmark it for later. And probably you will never spent a lot of time on the article . And if a need for this article pops in your head, you can easily find it back.

Never use on-line documentation for studying or as a reference when doing something productive on the computer. Always download the necessary files (pdfs online) beforehand.
Prepare you for your task, collect the information on line but when starting the task: just switch of the Internet, even better don't have any physical connection with the web.

I love a minimalistic desktop, remove the webbrowsers' icons on your desktop or any menu panel. Just start your browser with a keyboard shortcut. The inviting sweet internet entrances, which you're conditioned to press when you want to avoid a task or need an information kick are gone. Recondition yourself when using the new shortcuts: Think about the purpose you want to use the web and what time you want to spent on that task.

You never spent time a lot of time consuming useful information, because you will directly apply this information to anything productive. With the Internet, you find the stuff you want in a glance. The problem is information you're consuming, the interesting stuff you want to read, all the stuff what's coming in an endless stream.

Don't read any opinionated stuff published on an obscure web blog written by an obscure person without any (productive) accomplishments. Probably you won't miss anything useful.

Just check your favorite websites daily, preferably weekly. Try to optimize the interval between visits. If you follow some interesting people or blogs, which doesn't publish daily, just subscribe to the feed using your email.

Allow yourself time on the Internet to do and read anything you like,after work and just set yourself a time limit. Because overall for me the internet is a great discovery mechanism, which increases my productivity. But do it consciously.

Most of the time I don't use the Internet dominantly when I'm sitting beyond my screen. I always need it for something I want to do.

PS I only use Facebook is an interactive address book, twitter to follow some interesting persons and Gtalk/AOl for colleagues, when working on a project.
w00t, awesome stuff in this RC guys :)
So you know FB doesn't solicit funds or provide them

Facebook does, in fact, solicit funds -- from advertisers, and from users who want to send virtual gifts to their friends.

but you expected proof that FB was literally a ponzi scheme in the article?

No, I expected some argument to that effect.

Libel is written defamation, as opposed to slander which is for transitory statements.

No, defamation is one of the conditions for libel, but there are others: falsity and malicious intent being the most important.

I disagree that it's clearly defamation.

Allegations of criminal conduct are among the clearest categories of defamation.

Shrug indeed.