skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like a new law for social networking integration
Moral clarity about crime? I didn't see anything clearing my morals in the article. Yes, it was illegal (and probably should be so too) to sell/buy stolen prototype, but illegal and (morally) wrong are completely different things in my book. I my mind, the scales are tipping on the "morally good" side in this case, but I also think that Gizmondo should accept the quite predictable consequences.
Ask HN: How to monetize & market Get In Anyway
Hey guys (and the few girls on here too), Similar to the Fat Ninja Hot Sauce, my startup is also a little different from those normally submitted on here. I'm selling a physical product - my 'Get In Anyway' (GIA) guide. It's a step-by-step guide on how anyone can earn a Harvard degree, taking mostly online classes, and for about the same tuition as your state school.
Initially, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity for myself. But after realizing how few people were aware of this degree-seeking program, I decided to take it upon myself to let would-be students know that they have a second shot at education from a prestigious institution.

I decided to go physical to circumvent any and all piracy issues. Currently, I have everything setup to print/bind at FedEx office and ship via USPS to every country that ClickBank (CB) supports. Oh yea, I was recently approved as a CB vendor. And, yes, they now accept physical products. I also have an Amazon payments button commented out on my pages. But I recently noticed it's still showing up on some browsers. Anyway, back to monetization & marketing...

One monetization option I'm considering in lieu of selling a physical book is lead generation. i.e., I'd make the contents of the guide available (section by section) online and generate leads for relevant offers.

This article made lead generation appear wonderfully lucrative: http://blog.mediadroit.com/2009/11/14/what-is-the-ideal-way-to-monetize-lead-generation/

And on marketing, I'm wide open to suggestions. Although I'd love to hear something crazy with the potential to put GIA on the map.

So I'd love to hear your ideas as to how you think I should monetize & market this guide.

This is my site: http://www.getinanyway.com

Thanks!

P.S. I submitted this in the afternoon to see if that made a difference in the response I get.
Many faculty "expressed concerns that our campus’s commitment to protecting the
privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the
appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the
near future,” the letter said.

So, it's a decision made based on FUD. Sounds like that's going to work out awesomely for them.

Looks like they just want to move things back in-house for perceived control. That reminds me of a story about a major directory server at Georgia Tech going down regularly. The hard drive inside kept crashing on a regular basis. They restored backups, reinstalled software from scratch, and even replaced the hardware several times. It kept crashing until one day when a tech was out in the server room to restore it one more time. He found a technician working in the ceiling above on some sort of HVAC system. Below him was the server pulled out of the rack partially. The technician had been stepping on the combination of his ladder and the server itself to reach the unit he was working on.

So, yeah, on-campus servers are way more secure than scary Google servers in the mysterious "cloud"...
You are right.. but it is always worth to try as it may boost serps a little...
Hilarious!

Such irony. We respect how challenging it is to build one page that works the same in every browser as the technology advances and customer expectations rise.

Then what's stopping them from including IE6,7 and 8 in their "tests" and fixing this whole mess they created in the beginning. They act like those previous products aren't their responsibility... fucking joke
It's nice to see an honest article on this topic. I've run across more than one that has journal publishers insinuating that article authors are uncomfortable with open access, which, in my experience, is nonsense.

One paragraph is a little odd, however:

> If the bill is passed, any agency that hands out more than $100 million in grants would need to set up a method for grant recipients to send in publications in electronic form within six months of their appearing in print. That's a tighter schedule than called for by the NIH rules, which stipulate a year following publication. The submission could either be the final document sent in to the academic journal or, if the journal permits, the fully formatted version that is published online following typesetting.

That "six months" is hardly a strict requirement. It would not be at all inconvenient to have the submission required before the article appears in print; whatever got sent to the journal just gets sent to the funding agency, too.

Also, what's this about "the fully formatted version that is published online following typesetting"? Does the writer think we send in handwritten manuscripts that the journals type in and format for us? That went out 20+ years ago. Now, in math and the physical sciences, at least, submissions in LaTeX format are standard; usually, most of the "typesetting" is finished before the journal sees anything. (Possibly it's different in other disciplines, though.)
Personal genomics leads to unnecessary medical follow-ups
> I wish I was kidding about this one, a fear that our data could be hosted on a Google server in a country with questionable human rights laws

Was that in UK by any chance? If so, take a look at Data Protection Act - especially this:

Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

If you want to be ok with the law, basically you cannot store your emails (which at some point will definitely contain personal data) in an unknown location. Gmail storage qualifies as an unknown location for all we know.
What about the older versions of firefox, opera, etc...

Wouldn't the users that use an outdated version of Internet Explorer also use an outdated version of an alternative browser, if they had used this browser in the beginning.
Yes, but hopefully more talented...
Google’s Bill Weihl on Data Center Efficiency
Live: Web 2.0 Expo's Launchpad for startups
Blu-ray player firmware update required to view Avatar
The PearPad: A Cautionary Tale for Founders
Oh! I like this! Just tried it here:
http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/blackbird-twitter-q...

I wish it could surround the tweet with a box, to offset it more from a post's text.
That would be a valid comparison if distro maintainers were in the habit of forcing updates of opt-out data-compromising features to your OS.
I'm glad they announced this after all of the privacy nonsense came out, so that I now know to avoid them on moral grounds. It's a pity too, because they're doing some pretty awesome stuff from a technical perspective.
I can tell you that what makes coworking magical is it's ability to connect people and create friendships that would otherwise not happen.

Coworking's weakness is the landlord business model is extremely low margin. In the suggested model in the article, $400 per member X 20 members = $8,000 per month. Now consider the rent of a warehouse downtown, utilities, paying someone to run the place, and buildout. It's a quick way to go out of business.

Now, if the coworking space is run as a loss leader for another business, that's another story.

At Conjunctured our other business is happy hours at Rio Rita's. We haven't found out how to make that profitable yet, but we're gonna' keep trying by god! :p

-Conjunctured Co-Founder
How do you handle the World Trade model where foreign governments have no issue propping up their large industrial companies hit by recessions (companies that would also benefit from the decrease in your countries industrial capacity)?
If the only way for the average person to use the service is to pay for it, that's going to be a very tough hill to climb.
How are they provisioning and managing infrastructure resources? Are they using AWS/EC2 on their back end?
if you wanted to buy the entire company it would
cost you about $240 billion.

To put that in context, for the same amount of money
you could own Newmont Mining Corp. (NYSE: NEM - News),
the world's largest gold-mining company,

And E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. And Kellogg Co.,
And Shrek studio DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc,
And H&R Block Inc. (NYSE: HRB - News),
And The New York Times Co. And Molson Coors Brewing,
And the Estee Lauder Cos Inc. And Tiffany & Co.,
the Hershey Co., Harley-Davidson Inc., Expedia Inc.,
Abercrombie & Fitch Co., American Eagle Outfitters,
Burger King Holdings Inc., CBS Corp., Chipotle
Mexican Grill Inc., Whole Foods Market Inc.,
Starbucks Corp., Netflix Inc., JetBlue Airways Corp.,
NStar, and Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc.

Not even the most ardent Apple fan, I would assume, could believe this is a fair valuation.

[Edited to add list of names that didn't make my original cut and paste.]
Amen. Good time to use this: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
In addition to the Kirkland office in the boonies, Google has an engineering office in Fremont to serve the city folk.
There's a great space in Santa Monica called CoLoft (http://www.coloft.com) that sounds like exactly what you want. Startup weekend was just hosted here this past Saturday.

If anyone is in the area stop by; I've been working here for around 3 weeks and it's been great. Definitely a lot more productive than at home, and the environment, people, and networking is great. Has two conference rooms, a "kitchen area", free organic coffee...
I don't know about others but I find much less old version of Firefox, safari and chrome than IE 6 users access my sites. It seems (this is only a personal observation) that users of these alternative browsers are more likely to update frequently.
"Squinting at the data, it looks like the average rate of growth is about the same immediately before and after the 1970s; if anything the rate of growth is a tiny bit higher since then."

Look at actual wages, which stopped increasing in the early 1970s.

http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2009/9/13/saupload_us...

(This shows household income, which is slightly increasing, but only because more women are in the workforce now than in 1970; personal income is stagnant.)
Well we've seen how overrated Toyota actually has been -- in terms of their safety record etc.
Well, if you do a PostgreSQL one, I would buy it for 4.99 (not a mysql user). I bought an ssh client for my iPhone and that has been great.

good luck!
What are the output codecs and container formats? Is it just me or is this information conspicuously missing?
With Google, I can maybe see your point. But how anybody can argue that Red Hat & Novell's fortunes are not tied to Linux adoption rates, is beyond me.
The Economist and Launchpad
Agree, they should have left only the "$80 value" as anchor price(plus that strange list of suggested prices). Btw, i i remember right the developer of World of Goo already did this, so i guess there is a tested rationale behind the choice to show the average and that list of suggested prices.
If I'm reading the CSS file correctly, it takes whatever font-size your browser thinks is a reasonable default for easy reading, and divides that by two. Good grief.
Fascinating! 'Tis healthy to remember that technology can sometimes be used for intriguingly creative but basically useless purposes, and not just for one week a year in the Nevadan desert.
He actually goes on to list another dozen or so companies; Apple's valuation is all of those combined.
At the very beginning, yes.

But I think not, after the awesome code that Bobbie provided at the end.

If that doesn't work, it's a lot better to quit, after all.
Why Smart People fail at Communicating Ideas
no one can use a bailout. my point was that we all need to be producing goods and services people are willing to pay for or go find something else to do.
Poorly implemented local security does not prove anything about security of Google servers. You cannot draw such conclusions based on this event. For all you know, monkeys are flinging poo everywhere in the Google datacenter holding your Gmail account.

In this case the university had at least the chance to fire the technician / hold him responsible. Good luck holding Google responsible for anything.
The cloud is the future, and it's a general improvement over previous mail servers, but that doesn't mean that it's 100% perfect yet, or that those criticisms are invalid (well, some of them are). Individuals and institutions are well within the bounds of sanity to say that Google's cloud solution doesn't give exactly what they need, and that in turn pushes Google to improve those cloud solutions (or a competitor to address those issues and snipe the sale).
Burning Oil Rig or Awesome Final Fantasy Level?
Microsoft "web technical evangelist" comments about Canvas support in IE9
Have a little mercy. All MS is saying is that they're working to get things right.

All browser vendors crow about the functionality of their beta releases.
that's their business. if they wish to subsidize the production of products so that we pay less, let them. It has never been a path to real success.

all that sort of thing does is build up dependency on the government and an insulation from the actual marketplace. That is more GM's problem than its solution.
Google's New Search Look Officially Rolled Out
This is also amusing: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/235984/the-halting-proble...
C++ Multi-Dimensional Analog Literals
I wish Canonical packaged up launchpad and made it available as an ubuntu package. Ive been watching it for sometime wishing I could use it for my startup, havent had the time to chase the installation instructions down to see if I can build it from source.
Detect A Good Liar By Knowing Their Most Effective Tactics
Siftables - Tactile Computing Blocks
45 Delightful Wood Textured Websites
Ubuntu surprises me often with their amount of patching upstream projects. Somehow, they can't wait for projects to publish stable releases.

A little digging in the package repositories showed, that 2.5% of lynx packages contain svn, git or cvs in their version number. This means, they were either a stable release that was patched with something from the repo or even a complete snapshot from the repo. Debian, for comparison, has only half as many packages with that criteria.
P doesn't detect the paradox. We do. We have intelligence; algorithms follow a prescribed set of rules. No one is sure what, exactly, "intelligence" is, but we can say it's not the same as just an algorithm. We're also not guaranteed to be correct.

Remember that P is a program to detect whether any program halts. It's possible to write a program that can detect if some programs will halt. You just have to constrain what the programs can do to the point that the rules the programs can follow will not be Turing-complete. We could also use machine-learning techniques to try to recognize the structure of infinite-loop programs, but that's not the same as an algorithm that is always correct.
Ask HN: Share encouraging advice
The great John Maeda once said;

"When you're younger, think less and do more; when you're older, do less and think more."

...

"I see a lot of (especially young) people get frozen by the paralysis of indecision. Just start making stuff until something catches." ~Jonathan Harris
The only reason to use an outdated version of, say, Firefox is when your OS isn't supported by the latest version.

Not many people run IRIX these days.

As for IE, it's not trivial to have more than one version of it installed under a single Windows image. That and internal applications that rely on a specific quirky version of IE won't help with keeping your browser up-to-date.
Video: http://propella.blogspot.com/2009/12/wooden-half-adder-video...
Where is the danger of a terrorist attack on a schoolbus currently the greatest? How does that danger there compare to the danger of a traffic crash involving a schoolbus? There should be official statistics on all these issues anywhere where governance hasn't completely broken down.
Funny dude!
Well, they are spelled out, but there is still a lot of unclarity in the execution of these rules. Enough so that some large consumers of contractors make everyone go through another consulting organization.

As an example, the phrase Does the company control or have the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job? seems a bit open to interpretation. Lets say you are a contractor working on a BFE Java or .net application. The project has its source control rules, its status reporting rules, its code convention rules, and all are likely under the control of an employee of the company in question. Sounds like the company has the right to control in this very common case.

So I argue that the rules may be extensive, but they are not very clear.
Google has a UK office, so they have to comply with the law, too.
Hi ripb. Yep, our sales site needs a page that covers this. If you sign up and play around with the API, you'll see this info. At the moment, we do:

Input: just about everything

Output: H.264 video, AAC audio, and MP3 audio, in a MP4 or Flash 9+ container format. Ogg/vorbis/theora are coming soon, as are a few others that we can't talk about yet. We've decided to take the "narrow" approach for now - 99% of the demand that we see is for these five codecs (H.264, AAC, MP3, Theora, Vorbis). If there's anything in particular that you're looking for, let us know.
IDN ccTLDs are Live in the Root
> ... What's next, distributed search engines?

Interesting idea, how might that work?
Google is way bigger than you realize
It's in the US, but that's a fascinating law.

Google actually specifies that they cannot disclose the exact location of one's Google Apps data because it is automatically distributed across three different server farms out of several dozen (or more) potential locations. They also are purposefully vague about disclosing the locations of their data farms, in general. Incidentally, one likely reason for this is security.

I agree that there are some genuine privacy and security concerns about the cloud, but I think most criticisms fall into the unforgivable category of "I don't trust it because I can't see it."

And in this sense, academics refusing to accept the cloud are like academics refusing to accept gravity.
I am pretty sure they prefer to implement features for tests competing browsers fail.
I couldn't figure out if the guy was an employee, contractor, or founder...
I wonder if/when they plan to do something similar on the east coast.
Fossil, DVC with wiki and ticketing developed by sqlite creator Richard Hipp
Bull. Toyota's mistake could have happened to anyone - all of the work relating to individual parts are done by subcontractors, and you would be surprised at how many subcontractors all of the large manufacturers share.

While the problem is certainly inexcusable, the gigantic hate-on that Toyota went through from Congress and the general public is mostly political. The anti-Toyota and andti-import sentiment is largely driven by politicians trying desperately to raise the desirability of American cars by spreading FUD about Japanese ones.
Actually, that gives me a sort of unique idea: An online, wikipedia like proof database with understandable informal proofs with click-to-expand (inline) annotated sections, if you click them, they would expand into proof of less formal claims.

The idea would be that we generally share understanding of obvious axioms (and thus, allow them to be request-able assumptions), and so can enhance readability.
Actually, for the extreme (but sometimes useful) cases, IE9 really shows why the other browsers fail at border-radius: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/19/the-css-corner-a...
Yep, we're AWS at the moment. We're ultimately cloud agnostic, though, and can support other cloud environments (Rackspace Cloud, etc.) as well as our own servers. EC2 is pretty compelling for transcoding, though, because (1) so many people use S3 for video storage and delivery, and (2) Amazon's fastest servers (XL High CPU) are pretty fast - faster than most cloud servers.
+1 for Solr.

We're replacing our text indexing solution with Solr and it's been a phenomenal transition.
Did you hear? The future of the web is social
> If Ubuntu wants wizard-level fixes at short deadlines, they need to hire and retain wizards, and that's that.

Who said they want those? They just don't have the money to pay for such devs, they know it, and that's that. Also who said it was his responsibility? Sounds like a big straw man to me.
"These Romans are crazy"
http://zencoder.com/docs/encoding/#output-formats
My failed startup didn't get a bailout, but two of my ongoing businesses each got $35k at 0%, with a 6 month deferral, which was a pretty good deal.
The Buzz comment makes sense really. If they thought that Google doesn't handle all of its data in a proper way, then there's a reasonable suspicion they don't do it with your mails.

Let's use a hyperbole: If your bank guaranteed you security, while you see robbers taking the cash from their vaults -- would you believe them? Would the situation change if you were told that this vault will not be used to store your money?

If they mentioned it, they might think of it as a symptom of bigger problems with the data handling procedures.
It's nice, but I want a way to get the old look back...
Until most jobs stop requiring diplomas (probably never), college will continue to be job training. It is a win/win for businesses to have the colleges manage the risk of a weak employee as well as training costs.
> then that's not his problem

Who said it was his problem?
Understanding fexprs versus macros (versus functions)
Actually, it's called vaporware. It's related to FUD, but it's not the same.

What they are saying is "don't port your corporate applications that require IE to other browsers and don't standardize on them. Our next version will be much better than theirs and it's just around the corner. We promise".

A couple days ago they announced their Courier tablet was canned. If you remember when it was leaked, the timing of the leak was to coincide with an Apple announcement everybody suspected would be of a tablet computer. The message was "Ours will be much cooler. You don't have to consider buying hardware that doesn't reinforce your dependency on Windows".