skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
<wishful thinking> How I wish I could save my docs in Dropbox and edit them later on Google Docs </wishful thinking>
Ask HN: Tips for publishing an Ebook
Short Version: I've nearly finished my first book and would love to hear first time tips for publishing/layout/marketing :)

Long Version: I'm about 2/3rds of the way through completing my first book (synopsis below) and am now reading through as much material as I can regarding publishing it. The plan is to go with an Ebook for now and publish a hard copy later if there is demand.

I know a few people here have published their own books so is there any advice you can give to help out?

Specific things I am still undecided on:

- Where to publish (i.e. self publish or try for an online publishing house)

- Tips on format and layout? I have a very basic layout in PDF at the moment but the design isn't stellar - any cheap services to improve that?

- Advertising, any tips? I have a target market in mind (computer forensics) but also it should be a good general reading book for anyone.

- Pricing. It's going to top out at about 150 pages - so my thinking currently is about $9.99

- Are lite versions a good idea? I've considered paring down a lot of the technical info and producing around 70 pages for "joe public" type readers. But I'm unconvinced there is a market there.

And for context here is the book details:

Tentative Title: What does your computer know about you?

Synopsis: Your computer knows a surprising amount of detail about you. Find out all the different ways a computer stores information about your activities, ways to find it and ways to stop it. (aka the book I wish existed when I came into computer forensics)

The written-in-10-minutes-for-this-post introduction gives a little more detail: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6026865/Book-Introduction.txt

I have read a load of information so far but first hand accounts are always useful :)
If this is the fabled Zune phone, I'm extremely disappointed. I'm not sure what they mean by "social slant." Maybe they mean it's a great conversation starter. Imagine busting it out at a bar, people wouldn't be able to resist commenting on how ugly it is.
So as long as all big companies in a particular sector waste X on consultants, that's fine for the shareholder.

That's incorrect. As a shareholder, I can sell my stock and reinvest the proceeds into a company in a whole different industry. Thus, companies must compete for shareholders.
How to create Imaginary Photo Manipulation Tutorial
Photo Manipulation is being used in all kinds of fields like Advertising, Poster designing in order to express a theme or an emotion. This tutorial covers some basic concepts of image manipulation and also about depth of field using Adobe Photoshop.
Do you know if that price is there just for the anchoring effects (like the article discussed on hn last week)? Or do people actually pay $12k for vs?
Eclipse 3.4 is notable slower than VS2010 on my computer.
Furthermore, I can see browsers detecting this type of behavior and prompting the user about it.

If a browser sees an encoded URL in the query string, and then gets a location header to go to that URL, and that URL is not on the same domain, it would prompt the user that you are leaving that domain.

I can't see many sites that are legitimate, and use redirection techniques that meet all of my criteria.
Mobile device maker Palm Inc. said to be urgently seeking a buyer
The improved collaboration capabilities sounded very useful to me, and it's kind of a "killer feature" for us.

We were just today discussing at work whether to use Google Docs because Excel is lacking in that category, and we don't want to use SharePoint (there are deeper problems than that, but well, Google docs would be a start).
Apple is starting to feel like Microsoft. They're trying to compete everywhere instead of focusing on their core competencies.
Stop anthropomorphising your computer. If your RAM, disk, and CPU let certain software perform as fast as necessary, any "bloat" you are asribing to things is purely psychological, philosophical, or due to something else like poor UI design. Traditionally, "bloat" means that there is too much memory-resident tools or features such that their cumulative effect, while negligable in separation, becomes daunting for your machine to handle, resulting in a sluggish user experience.

So, "bloat" is relative to your machine. What's "bloated" today is not going to be bloated 5-10 years from now, and vice versa. If this isn't what you're talking about, you're using the wrong word.
Nope. MSBUILD and all the new compilers ship with the Windows 7.1 SDK:

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/archive/2010/04/07/coming-s...
A powerful IDE that ensures quality code

Isn't that awesome?
The states where workers work less seem to be on the colder climate zones; it could be that workers in the north just have less time to get things done climatically speaking; after all, if you work on the road, you have to take in account of day light and frosty conditions into effect.

As about the indoor ones, they probably want to get home early thanks to the shorter daylight?
Here's a great one that converts between color modes, lets you step up or down mathematical increments by clicking, and gives you a full-window preview while you work. I use it all the time.

http://www.drpeterjones.com/colorcalc/
Looking at their "app store" it looks like exactly what it sounds like. Web Crawling. You don't need a nefarious goal to go out and crawl, it just seems rather inaccessible to the common person.

While it would require quite a bit more structure than this, imagine an "application" which would take a keyword/topic, and start crawling the web, looking for links mentioning it. Pages involving that topic/keyword would be ranked higher, as would their children. Basically, a reverse PageRank. No, it isn't the way things are done right now, but it could/does have a place, however obscure it might be.
Microsoft 'KIN' phone
HN feature request - javascript to detect +1 (and other common ones) and give the user the instructions above before allowing them to submit.
Innovative three wheel motorcycle
http://www.newstilt.com/ brings me to an App failed to start/Ruby error page.
25 (really) beautiful digitally created CG girl’s collection
Ask HN: Should I move to the valley?
I'm stuck in a rut with a great idea(I hope) with out someone capable of building it. Should i move to the Valley for a while to find a tech cofounder?
1) The glowing apple is highly aesthetic, unlike most of those fugly stickers.

2) The product is designed with the logo in mind. It's not an afterthought. It's part of the product's design.

3) Most laptops of other brands carry the brand of the laptop maker in a prominent place too. E.g. Dell laptops: http://www.treehugger.com/pink-dell-laptop.jpg HP laptops: http://www.laptopsarena.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/hp-bu... Sony laptop lid: http://regmedia.co.uk/2007/08/07/sony_tz11_1.jpg

4) In addition, most other brands of laptop also repeat that brand name inside the laptop, after you open the lid. The only brand I can see on my MBP once I open the lid is "Macbook Pro" in discreet silver letters under the screen. There's not even any noticeable writing underneath the laptop. Nor does it even say "Apple" explicitly anywhere.

5) In addition to all this branding from the laptop manufacturer (which exists on the macbook pro too, though it's easily argued that the apple branding is way more tasteful than most other brands), on top of that they also stick god damned "Intel Inside" and "Windows Vista ready" and god knows what other stickers.

Claiming that somehow the Macbook Pro is inferior because it has no removable stickers is completely stupid.

If you want a laptop that's largely free of stupid logos and stickers, get a Mac.
It broke the back button for me.

Why is the kerning so bad?

I don't have an unusual setup (Firefox 3.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.5).
Fair call though the point I am largely making is that few that use both would put C# and Java in the same boat anymore. Would love to see some good examples if you have some though on the more general point you are making.
Full disclosure: my cousin made the video and I think it's a neat hack.
That's cool but useless when using Sass http://sass-lang.com/
Twenty-plus years ago I wrote a complete blackjack game in a spreadsheet, all using 1-2-3 "slash" macro commands (not VBA or anything like that). It even did insurance and doubling-down. I was part of the team testing the product, and each of us on the test team built a different casino game -- one guy did craps, and found a bug in the random number generator.

Once you get your brain around the paradigm, it can be a powerful tool.
Ask HN: Summer roommate in the Bay Area?
I realize it might be a little late for me to post this, but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway. Apparently, the hacker house has already filled up.

I'm a 21 year old college student, interning this summer at Apple, and I'd like to get a place in the area (preferably SF or Palo Alto) with one or two other people with similar interests. Or, if you're subletting your apartment, that also works. I'm going to be around from June to August. Respond to me here, or by e-mail (address in profile). I'm a nice person! Really.

Feel free to use this thread if you're also looking for housing
This is not new. Various 'recognized' websites have redirect urls that are not protected. Once the redirect is complete the site it properly identified.

If you have to be afraid of what links you click on you are running the wrong software.
Nah, they're buying Flash, therefore it's better to remind them how badly it sucks when something important to them can't be done without Flash.
The 'spot' seems like an interesting piece of ui. I'm interested to see how effective it is in real world use.

It also reminds me of the courier video, where users could clip out random parts of a webpage.

edit: here's more of the ui, if anyone is interested:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/microsoft-kin-ui-walkthro...
Less cry, more point and laugh?
Good luck! ...Your link currently bombs when I try to use it! :(
Ask HN: benefits to trying to define a data standard?
My co-founder and I are working on a new startup (YC rejection, natch) targeted at a specific vertical and helping them with mobile/location services.

The thought crossed my mind of defining/managing a "data standard" for what we're doing. Think something along the lines of MLS data, iCal, rss, etc. We would define the standard, use it in our apps, and other companies would as well. Obviously, the strategy would be to increase exposure and make it easier for mobile apps to integrate or aggregate data.

Any thoughts on this? Good strategy or waste of time? How to approach defining such a "standard"?
Say where it is sending you, not just where it's not sending you.
10 K+ per month is not unusual, and depending on his contract they may have to 'buy you out' (for instance, after three months they might have signed a years contract with you including the first three months).

So the severance could be anywhere from $5K up to a very substantial amount of money. The fact that they're willing to pay another $16K just for signing an NDA suggests it was a pretty high salary.
Didn't Microsoft buy the word "Social" a few years ago? Now it means whatever they want it to mean. Welcome to the Social.

Maybe their BRAND UNVEIL can educate you about why this is the most important thing ever: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/04/msft-p...

I find the quotes from their event hilarious:
"So, this social generation really does have a point of view. They think it, they do it, and they have a mantra for it."
"We came up with this concept of friends, friends, and friends."

Maybe I'm waaay too old to know what "kids these days" are up to, but if everybody under the age of 22 is all about FRIENDS FRIENDS FRIENDS then the world will soon collapse. No new work will get done. We'll be idiocracy within twenty years where everybody exists solely to click ads. It's ads and vapid social media consultants all the way down.
Phones with a social slant have been around since the 1870's.
I'm dubious. There are a couple other factors:

1. Coastal cities have high costs of living; the top-right of the graph is dominated by coastal states with big cities; the bottom-left is dominated by landlocked, low cost-of-living places.
2. Wouldn't immigrants go places with high hourly wages? If you move in with your folks in New York or SF, why would you go to North Dakota?

It sounds like the cause and effect relationship goes both ways: immigrants move to high-wage places, and the presence of all those ambitious, extra-hard-working folks causes economic growth and higher wages. But it's conceivable that one of those relationships could reduce wages, instead; one could easily read this as a graph demonstrating that every time you get high wages, you have this almost Malthusian influx of immigrants.

Immigration has definitely raised my standard of living, though; the company I work for was founded by an immigrant.
Escapism and experience chasing.

The experiences become a lot less profound for the frequent users, and they themselves also become a lot more messed up. The truth is that if you have a psychedelic experience every Friday night, it's not nearly as interesting.

With spiritual practice, you gain a sort of humility and perspective along the way. It's not only about experiences, but also community and morality. For people who use the drugs to get the experiences, but don't grow in the other dimensions, it just leads to nihilism once the novelty wears off. Acidheads' lives become empty and there's little benefit in exploring an empty mind.

Some people use LSD as a party drug, and I think this results in a lot of the bad trips. It's dangerous as well as idiotic, and indicates that a person is missing the point if you ask me, but the behavior exists.

My memory of LSD was that the first 8 hours were mind-blowing and amazing (and not particularly scary) but the last 4 were a bit unpleasant, like I had an itch in my mind I couldn't scratch (but not as bad as a bad trip or a panic attack). I dropped at 3:40 pm, peaked at 6, and started getting tired of the whole endeavor by midnight. At 1:30 am I was trying desperately to get to sleep (impossible on LSD) and annoyed that my mind kept playing tricks on itself. Thankfully, my girlfriend (at the time) was there to reassure me that this was normal and would end.

I've often thought, though, that the intensity of LSD and mushrooms is related to the duration of time one is in a psychedelic/meditative state (when psychedelics are not used in a meditative state, they're wasted). I bet that if I had the focus to meditate for 6 hours, it'd be as powerful of an experience (or moreso) than a shrooms trip; same with 12 hours viz. LSD.
It may suffice to point out in the comments that it redirects to http://securitytube.net/Social-Engineering-Attacks-using-Sim... . (As of this posting nobody else has posted this yet.)

Also, despite having "video" in the URL, the text says all you need to know. I don't think very many people around here will have a hard time figuring out how this happened. I don't need a video.
Interesting story, but the 'LOL nerds' tone - in a magazine that is nominally about science, no less - is part of the problem.

Of course PopSci these days seems to be more about marketing gadgets and personal grooming products so you can go on a date with one of those hot lady scientists than about fostering scientific knowledge among its readers. Maybe it was always like that. I used to read Scientific American but that publication went into the toilet a decade ago.
This is a common exploit. So common that it's #8 on the 2010 OWASP top 10 most critical web application security risks: "Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards".

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Projec...

Every web app developer should review these vulnerabilities before releasing their code to the world.
It also breaks scrolling with the scroll wheel.

It's almost as if they are trying to prove Jobs was right when he said code written non-natively sucks. (In this case, native would be HTML + Javascript).
https://www.google.com/accounts/CheckCookie?continue=http%3A...

This link looks like it's from google.com but it's not.

Incidentally I think this only works if you're currently signed in to a Google account, oh yeah it's bouncing from an HTTPS address as well.
Newstilt
Best Hacking Softwares_ 1000sw(Free download)
I wonder how many sites have a similar redirect feature for post-login pages instead of outbound click tracking. This feature makes it easy to login from any page, and immediately return to the page upon success. How many sites don't validate the full url before redirecting? Scary thought...
Short version: never published but built two PhD PDFs directly and helped friends do so. Use LaTeX.

Long answer: I've researched this for my own publishing dreams a while back. When you have a PDF you're happy with (again, LaTeX is your friend), you can use any one of several digital sales routes. If you're planning (hoping) to publish in print, use a service that also generates the ISBN for you. From memory, Amazon does this automatically and LuLu provides it as an extra for-pay function.

Also consider self-hosting the download. Briefly: set up a secure area on a website that people are granted access to after they pay. The download is protected that way, plus you can use this to provide errata and build a private community around the book (e.g. using a forum).

One thing that will annoy you and may become a serious cost: people pay, download the PDF, and then reverse the charge under your money back policy (and yes you're likely to need one). From reports I read, this is a bigger problem for expensive ebooks (like $100) not your price point. Still...

Build a blog dedicated to the book. Post interesting relevant articles so you get links and establish yourself as an authority. It's also one heck of a lead gen channel.

Good luck!
Is grit more valuable to success than intelligence?
If confirmed, this will cause major damage to the company's reputation. Atlassian is supposed to "get it". Apparently they don't. Very disappointing.
I disagree. If there were more/better mobile sites, you wouldn't have to use so many apps for things that are essentially website functionality. Plus they save money if you are not on an unlimited plan. I do hate when they scrape functionality, the way I can not add an attachment on a mobile version of gmail so I have to use the html one.
I don't think this is the Zune phone. It's more like the Windows Phone equivalent of the Motorola BackFlip: not quite a smart phone, but higher on the foodchain that a text+call only phone. It's designed for social stuff[1], and just social stuff (no third-party apps, no flash, no silverlight). Not surprising when you consider that it was designed by the folks who made the SideKick, I guess. Apparently some people want a phone that isn't a computer, but is really just a social networking assistant. Wouldn't do it for me, but it seems like it's a niche that companies are interested in competing over.

[1]: Where "social stuff" also means Facebook, Twitter, and email, instead of just text and calling.
A three month experiment defining a Utrecht media lab
2 new mobile phone from Microsoft
The redirect I found on https://www.google.com seems like it did have a whitelist. Luckily youtube.com was on the whitelist, so I could re-use the exploit from there. So even whitelists aren't totally safe (and YouTube isn't using the redirect for known friendly sites - seems to be more for tracking purposes).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1259844 for the google.com URL
Mouseless Monday #1 - Vimium on Google Chrome
That would be cool. There is an extensive GDocs API [1] and you could probably hack something together for Dropbox [2] (till the proper API is released....).

It's a possibility.

1. http://code.google.com/apis/documents/overview.html
2. http://github.com/tvongaza/DropBox
At some point you will have to define exactly what you include as "People."
I can't bear to use MonoDevelop because of the forest of unpleasant non-native UI in your face at all times.

I'm an ungrateful sod, I know..
Thanks for the comment - we do have plans to monetize it, but not until we can achieve some scale. For now it's for fun.
memeoconnect.com seems pretty close to that functionality though I haven't tried it myself
Full & Free Downloads
So it is important to also check the URL in your address bar _after_ you click, as well. This trick won’t be able to fake that.
A Simple CSS Sandbox
The old woman is a normal layperson. If the monk wanted her to act in a more enlightened way, he should have taught her how!

She's also justifiably angry. She just realized that she spent the fruits of her own decades of toil to cure a stranger's suffering, and that because of the monk's irresponsibility, the wisdom gained will die with him, and do nothing to ease humanity's suffering.

Even if she intended spend her money to help just one person, the money would be better spent on someone who is still capable of suffering.

And if the old monk hasn't actually attained enlightenment yet, then the money would be better spent on a less experienced monk much further from enlightenment, if he shows the signs of compassion that indicate that the wisdom he gains will be used to help mankind.

Why doesn't she "take it lightly", in a Zen sort of way?...

Zen isn't about taking things lightly. It's about figuring out what's important, and what's not worth worrying about. (Among other things).

Because of its roots in Mahayana Buddhism, helping everyone attain enlightenment and free themselves from suffering is very important.

And because Zen is largely agnostic towards the supernatural, including reincarnation, there is the idea that you probably only have one lifetime to (a) achieve enlightenment, and (b) help others to achieve enlightenment or at least mitigate their suffering.

So helping everyone attain enlightenment is not to save them from mythical torment in the Naraka hells, nor from the cycle of reincarnation, but rather to stop the recurring cycles of human suffering on Earth—to eventually make enlightenment available to every living person.

Story 6 is also an allusion to the parable of the burning house, which is about a father (an adult, representing someone who is enlightened) figuring out how to get his small children to drop their games and come running outside before the house burns down.

This is especially poignant in Zen, because if you attain enlightenment but do nothing to help ease the suffering of others, or at least transmit your understanding to someone who can, you have wasted your life, every minute of which is precious and irrecoverable. And hoarding enlightenment for yourself is very much like dying peacefully in your sleep while letting others burn to death.

In story 6, the monk has escaped the figurative burning house (overcoming his own suffering by attaining enlightenment in his lifetime), but has not done anything to rescue the children inside (ordinary laypeople who still suffer).

The old woman takes revenge by reversing the situation, in a more literal sense. Don't assume that the monk was outside the hut when it burned. >:)