skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're making a mistake: ebooks have a much higher value, overall, than photo licensing. You just need to learn more about it.

And investing more time into monetizing with ads is a waste.

I recommend two resources for you: Desperate Buyers Only and How to Launch the Out of Your Ebook.

(For the record, I made $40k off my last ebook.)
the sad part it, it seems as though this spill is getting comparatively little attention compared to other disasters. Hell, this will probably much more damaging than Katrina in the long term, but the difference in the levels of conversation are staggering.
Bzzt!

Django 1.1.2 released. Very odd timing of this blog post since the actual 1.2 is expected today.
Data: Social Media & SEO
http://inventwithpython.com/
I think understanding Lisp is super valuable for any programmer if only so you can see and appreciate the Lisp like abilities of other languages.
An alternative possibility is that evidence of "reasonable" behaviour would be heard on a case by case basis in court, and case law would start to show the minimum standards expected. Some practices may be more hype than substance, and anyone alleging a problem because something was not done would presumably have to justify why that action should have been taken. On the other hand, I think you would find a lot of consensus and evidence-based argument in some areas of security, and there is really no excuse for not following those practices if you're in the business of managing sensitive data.
Oracle Campus Relations
Comment parsing appended the closing angle bracket to the URL. Here's what was meant: http://clojure.bighugh.com/
I think Google with YouTube has already attempted to monetize the "pay attention to me" phenomenon. Then there's Wordpress and a host of other blogging services. However, I have to agree, pay-attention-to-me-as-a-service is a good business model if you do it right.
It's like everyone gets an advanced optimizer for Christmas! Yay!
Some brilliant dating sites monetize by creating an attention economy.

Fubar.com comes to mind. We tried to emulate some of this for Friends for Sale.
Will do. Thanks for taking a look.
65,000 Android Phones Shipped Daily
The competition in the smartphone market is most definitely heating up. While most people, or at least most geeks (let’s be honest, chances are you are one) hear constantly about iPhone sales and Apple’s increased dominance in this space, the truth is Apple is not even close to Nokia or RIM when it comes to phones sold globally.
Well, first, most of the ranting on both sides is specious and fallacious. One of the lines in all this grandstanding, though, is pretty funny. This isn't dialectical interrogation of Truth going on here.

Second, it's not fallacious if the point of the discussion is to explore what makes success. The criticism is, "You're not a revolution." Jobs' point is: OK, so show me what is.

Lastly, to the extend this is a debate, Jobs beasted him on that question: Apple created app warehousing that seems to work. Having seen the collapse of such models in the past, and seeing so many people scramble to get on the gravy-train, I'd say the shift is pretty revolutionary.
Not entirely related, but did anyone ever find out what happened to nickb? All of a sudden he seemingly just dropped off the earth.
Next time one of your developers says that they think a feature is a bad idea because they "don't understand the use-case" make them do tech support for a week.
> pet peeve: civilization games have almost nothing to do with even the standard historical interpretation of how technology developed and affected society.

Care to elaborate?
Maybe I'm missing something here but it seems that lately it has been pretty popular to post other peoples e-mail conversations (see the whole TechCrunch vs. Fortune post a while back). I'm starting to think you shouldn't e-mail anyone who runs a major tech blog unless you want to see it made public.
You want to make web and software development? Fine. code up some a/b tests for the page, work on some ppc optimization, look for ways to capture email and advertise on there.

It's not sexy. At all. But if it works, then you can focus on stuff you really want to do.
yes, woops.
It's definitely an important quote. It goes pretty well with the whole "freedom from porn" and "no one is forcing you to use iPad or develop for it" attitude. It shows how good Jobs is at sophistry.

I don't need to be able to build cars to recognize that something's wrong with mine. I also don't need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to spot one company trying to muscle another out of a market. So much about criticizing other people's work and belittling their motivations.
It's pretty easy to not take a call. I would praise his stones a lot more if he had taken Steve's call.
git stash drop

git gc

oopsie data loss.
It is about what he did in hg, except in hg it is one command.
I banned Infoworld a while ago because so many users complained about the low quality of their articles.
JRuby upgrade features Java accommodations
It auto-deads, I tried submitting it too and the kill is instantaneous, so infoworld.com is on the blacklist.
Not really. I'm pretty sure Disney keeps their theme parks as porn-free as they can. I bet Target, Walmart, and Toys-R-Us do a pretty good job of keeping their stores porn-free. The App Store isn't doing anything that brick-and-mortar businesses haven't been doing for a long time.
Agreed.

Worse still is the fact that since the oil companies run america, this will get swept under the rug. The ecological and economical damage will last for more than half a century. And there are hundreds of these things scattered along the now-trashed Gulf coast.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342370
OpenBook website reveals highly personal Facebook status updates of millions
People may enter these contests to get noticed. I need funding, and a contest is one (lame) way to try to attract attention. Steve Blank's idea about "business model" contests is too little too late - contestants have already executed, are getting their attention another way, and probably are way too busy to bother with contests.
Thank you. I'll be sure to get mentioned in more reputable publications in future.

It is a bit disconcerting though.
Cloud-bursting and the Database
How do you keep yourself hungry? I've hit a point where life is very comfortable and I don't need to worry about the immediate finances or food or shelter. I've become lazy. I'm certainly not as motivated/hungry as when I was fresh out of uni and broke.
> I don't need to be able to build cars to recognize that something's wrong with mine. I also don't need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to spot one company trying to muscle another out of a market. So much about criticizing other people's work and belittling their motivations.

Actually, I disagree. I think you run the risk of missing important details if you're doing an untrained analysis.

For instance, a layman might say - "Look how busy Amazon.com is - it could be so prettier with a more minimalistic interface!" They might not realize that Amazon are fanatical about split testing to get things to a minute detail. Amazon is a busy site, but it does what it's trying to do remarkably well. Someone untrained in web design could say "I don't need to be a web designer to spot an ugly website that's too busy." But they'd be looking at it entirely the wrong way.
Django 1.1.2 (bugfix release)
Yet the very phrase "its academic" labels something that will have no effect on the real outcome; its only something to talk and write about.
37signals (and many here, I suspect [myself included]) believe differently: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse
The Revenue Limits of Tax and Spend
My favorite: callipygean
Building Battle Bots with Clojure
Oh yeah, the doublespeak is definitely grand, too. But Tate's rambling responses fall short in comparison to Jobs' eloquence.

Look: most people want something mostly simple and mostly worry-free and mostly nice-looking. Apple thinks the best way to deliver that is to present apps using their approach. The increased competition they face means their ideas are being tested, and we'll find out who wins.

For instance, the iPhone OS fragmentation is an additional hit to what had been a very clean development space. That, the closed approach to app approval, and other constraints make it less attractive to develop in that space. But ultimately, saying, "I don't like how you run your app store" is all fine and good: don't develop there. But absent an equally successful alternative, it's a bit early to call the game against Apple.
It's squashing our hopes that in this brave new world of the global internet things could be different than they have been.
This is a well-made point, and one that doesn't get emphasized nearly enough, especially now that Kathy Sierra isn't publishing.

Tech support (and other customer support) is, in a huge part, your customers educating you about how your service is working and how your product is used. And if you have to go out and ask them, you don't get nearly as honest and clear information as when they can contact you at the point where they get frustrated, as difficult as that can be to deal with.
Karma system for submissions and comments is already using it to some extent.
Yeah, because being gunned down in an alleyway is much better than being indicted on counts of grand larceny and trade secret appropriation. Geez, have some perspective!!
Ahem... I would actually like to read it, just not to comment it... Whatever I keep doing it :)
> Since when do programmers have to do the whole starving artist routine to get respect?

Having money lets you rest on your laurels. They could live off of that money with no work on the project for two years, more if they moved somewhere cheaper.

Would you work harder if you had two years' living expenses in the bank, or if you had to make enough sales to pay rent in two weeks?

> and their massive student debt.

As someone in this position, the answer is easy: deferment. It's really easy when you're making next to no money.
"Having visited New Orleans after Katrina, you could not escape the feeling that neglect, and dereliction of duty of our elected officials displayed before, during, and after the event. Strong words came to mind at the time, something akin to treason, but time has passed, and we move on to other issues."

That's the understatement of the decade. New Orleans was a deathtrap, and a large part of the damage was self-inflicted.

The city sank itself by drawing water out of the aquifer below (which gradually leeched out the dissolved limestone, a bit like the sinkholes in Florida, but not as dramatic). The barrier islands that the locals have been callously destroying, mostly by ripping out the vegetation ("weeds") that held them together used to protect the coastline from the massive storm surges that come along with the bigger hurricanes pretty much every summer.

To top things off, the levies weren't built to spec -- the Army Corps of Engineers cut corners, as usual, not driving the supports in deep enough to anchor them into solid ground. So they drifted under hydraulic pressure from the canals, and eventually started to leak, since they were anchored in soggy earth. In spite of complaints about flooding from the leaking levies, no one bothered to examine and/or repair them.

On top of that, the way that they've screwed up the Mississippi's outflow gives it only one place to go when it floods: New Orleans. Which, being below Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi, AND the Gulf, leaves the water with no way out.

So the only thing that kept the 3 major bodies of water out of the city were the levies that were poorly built and unmaintained.

That's not just neglect, it's bordering on suicide.
Post-WWII, "Whether rates are high or low, evidence shows our tax system won't collect more than 20% of GDP."

Which suggests that an increase in tax revenues will require a change in the post-WWII system, e.g. a VAT tax.
Sophisticated users make stupid mistakes all the time. They misread output, get confused about the context in which they're operating, etc. Human beings are not machines. You cannot assume that just because a user is sophisticated, they will not make mistakes that lead to data loss. Even the best drivers still have accidents.
The tool's great! Let's hope you have not collected all my data when I ran it.

I also checked out this link on your homepage: http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/109538/7-things...

It says leaving your full birth date is not recommended (identity theft). So I went to the info page and clicked "edit information" but instead of having edit boxes on the Info page facebook recommends me to convert are my movies, music, colleges itc. into a pages (so they can track it better.. or make it more unified?). It's very hard to navigate away from that page (for a normal user anyway) and when you select nothing and click save they threaten you there's going to be none of the information in those sections on your profile (wow! now I'm scared!). Seriously --- it's becoming worse and worse, how can they be so disrespectful to their users, how can they not fear losing them??
At least these words aren't used in colloquial English. Physics has the problem that it tries to describe many things in terms of fairly regular words like energy and wave, when they really aren't quite the same as the non-physics use of those words. It has been the source of much undergraduate confusion over the centuries.

A problem with using esoteric terms is that it can be hard to find two people who have the exact same definition of them, and different fields will have different definitions for the same term. They also raise the barrier to entry when there is a full vocabulary to learn in addition to new meanings.

I'm not sure if we should keep overloading terms or try to come up with new silly words for everything. I'm not sure what to think of functors, but in my head they are always homomorphisms.
No, but not for lack of trying. Never got a response, but I believe someone else mentioned that they confirmed that he was ok, I just can't find the reference.

The phone number in the newmogul.com registration is answered by someone that says there is no 'nick' there.

What's the proper etiquette for signing off from a website anyway? Is there some kind of moral obligation to announce your departure? I'm sure plenty of people leave HN daily (and plenty arrive), surely if everybody would say 'bye' every time they leave it would get pretty messy.

But for long time contributors it might make sense, or at least an update in your profile or so...
Tell HN: Microsoft Office Live doesn't know India have odd +5.30 timezone
After almost year (as I do once in year), I have opened hotmail and out of curiosity clicked Office live link, it asked me to register and pick timezone. But worldwide service from such big company which have development centers in India doesn't offer me my timezone. Stupid!
There are more than a few arguments that say more funding does hurt their chances of success.
Why even have a word for it? I understand the emotional idea that programming can be an art, but it doesn't change the generally understood definition of art.

I could just as well be melodramatic like that kid in American Beauty and go on about how a plastic bag being blown about by the wind is the most beautiful thing ever. I could suggest the same about the way some skillful janitor moves his mop about the floor. Just because I get emotional about it doesn't change the definition of art.
> As was pointed out the last couple times this article was posted, this is an ad hominem fallacy.

Not ad hominem - it was a "by the way..." in a private email after a long exchange explaining his motivations and position first. And I think it's a fair criticism - I believe in looking at the messenger as well as the message. It probably should be 95% message and 5% messenger, but you ought to take criticism a lot seriously from people who are out doing important stuff in your field, and slightly less seriously from people who never have.

So I wouldn't call it ad hominem. It is quite blunt, though. I don't know, I'm not normally a Steve Jobs fan, but I liked that quote myself.
This comment is entirely out of context. I'm from Idaho as well and I thought I would say hello.
I'm not sure they are using Reddit as a reference for the correct way to scale.
I can't speak for Google's system, but with the system I had envisioned "merge" time would have been proportional to the amount of patches diverged, which would always have been tiny. The common case is that you go to apply another user's patch and it applies cleanly. You have to be ready for conflicts but they will generally be rare, even if your latency is fairly large. Remember you actually have to be stomping directly on top of another user's work for the patch to have a problem; possible, certainly, would occur in practice, but not normal.

(Careful design of the patch commutation algorithms could further reduce the problems you face, this and "pasting in a huge swathe of text" being the two basic "huge" operations available to a user in realtime. Imagine one user highlights a huge swathe of text and deletes it while another is trying to add a character or two. Normally this could be a conflict, but depending on how you represent the delete, you might be able to make it so the delete simply eats all further edits to the deleted text. In fact in my system this was actually a major problem due to some other issues (in my system you could limit your visible scope down to, say, a specific "chapter" and then I have a UI problem if that entire chapter gets deleted), but this wouldn't affect Google Wave anywhere near as badly, unless it also has narrowing available.)
Here's another cool list, very similar; the standard on this list is, "words so interesting that David Foster Wallace circled them in his dictionary":

http://www.slate.com/id/2250784

(Teaser: conchoidal, corvee, demulcent, exergue, gramnvirous, etc etc etc).
Top 5 android/mobile news websites
Unless it's no-strings-attached funding like Kickstarter, it can absolutely hurt their chances of success and of personally reaping the benefits of success.
OT is not patch theory. Google already had a patch-based approach (currently used in Bespin): http://code.google.com/p/google-mobwrite/, which was replaced with OT.
No diffing algorithms are used, even for producing the operations (which is probably why they're not using `contenteditable`)

Wave does allow offline interaction, and their OT algorithm is optimized for speed (for example, for the execution of possibly hundreds of buffered operations). The tradeoff is the requirement for an acknowledgement from the server after sending each operation or batch of operations.

I'm currently working on an OT implementation that doesn't require ACKs from the server in my spare time, and relies on a vector clock as opposed to a single timestamp. It has higher CPU processing power needs, which is why Wave's algorithm is also more suited to mobile devices[1]

[1] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718949 I believe one of the people involved in this paper is also involved in Wave's OT implementation paper.
What makes you think Fried is losing sleep? Man, after reading the rest of your posts in this thread, you really need to stop and re-evaluate the rationality of your opinions.

37signals is not some machiavellian puppetmaster. Fried posted a simple opinion piece on a hot topic and you immediately start frothing at the mouth like a times square end-of-worlder. Get a grip.
Ask HN: gmail sends all messages to Trash
Anyone experienced something like that?
Effective this weekend, all e-mail messages sent to my gmail account are now automatically forwarded to trash folder. I did experiment with filters a week ago, trying to reduce spam, but some of the senders are specifically marked as never send to spam and it is not helping.
Do they have a business model? YC is not a charity.
I'd be less interested in arguments than seeing hard data that analyzes the correlation between funding and successful outcomes. Money buys you time and resources. Yes, there are famous examples of startups that have burned through scads of cash, and failed, but I think there's a selection bias in those stories; it's less remarkable when a well funded startup succeeds.
Not being trained in something will certainly prevent you from giving an expert opinion on it, but that's not what I was saying.

Someone untrained in web design could also say "I don't like Amazon's look", just like someone who has no idea about why Flash is not allowed on iPad would notice that his favorite casual web game portal is not working on his iPad. Or, to use my simple example, if I don't know jack about car engines (and I don't), I can still tell that somethings wrong if the engine sounds 10x louder than usually or if there's a funny smell coming out from under the hood. There's more than a single step from that to telling my mechanic that "my conbobatron is confusticated".
i sometimes see that also. i looked up and found a j.rockway in my corporate directory and just assumed i was seeing a cached banner of his.
O'Reilly Webcast: How to Build a Lean Startup, Step by Step
I have always thought that the basic rule of email civility was that emails are private unless permission to post publicly is explicitly granted.

I don't think bloggers of any kind have a special exemption, major or minor. It's simple courtesy to ask "May I quote you on this?" I try to remember to do it and I apologize if I've fallen short of this standard. Old-school reporters are usually make it clear when a conversation is "On the record."

If I got an email response from Steve Jobs I would probably want to talk about it, but I wouldn't post it anywhere without asking first. The furthest I would go is to paraphrase it: "He emailed to tell me to take my talk of proprietary platform development being akin to sharecropping and shove it up my USB port."

So what I would say is that lately people have been pretty un-civil about private emails. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed when I see it anywhere, regardless of who is doing the quoting or who is being quoted.
I've found that for new blogs, you are better off concentrating your efforts on Amazon referral links than ads.
Are you affiliated with Diaspora? Did they express an interest in Y Combinator?
Beware, some definitions here are incorrect.

For example, Witzelsucht, which is correctly defined at Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witzelsucht

For people interested, Phonistry maintains some much nicer (longer, etc.) lists. http://phrontistery.info/w.html
Sign Petition to stop Venture Tax
Two of the scans didn't complete for me. Anyone else?
thanks! The scanner definitely does not collect your data, privacy policy pasted below for clarification

------

Our privacy policy is not long:

* we never see your Facebook data

* we never share your personal information

Simple. The scanner operates entirely within your own browser.
I have to agree. After watching the Kickstarter video I was left with a bad impression. I heard a lot of buzzwords and ideas, but utopian ideas like this one just warrant a show and tell. You can't just say you're going to break the mold of the social web, ask for money, get the money, and then do a bunch of photo ops and expect to succeed. There will come a time when everyone who donated will ask, "Where is it?". Of course, the attention span of the Internet is so small, by the time the app comes out it may well have already been forgotten.

Unfortunately, I think this is a case of "I'll believe it when I see it."

Applying to Y Combinator might be good for them, if for no other reason than the support and drive to actually complete the project. Maintaining that level of visibility while getting things done would crush the team, but I think YC could help with that.
Quite right, but expand that to you shouldn't send anything over the Internet unless either:

a) the privacy of it is guaranteed and that guarantee can be legally enforced

or

b) you don't mind it being made public