skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want to present at SXSW. I couldn't tell you precisely why, I just think it's a great conference and I love to share knowledge. The free badge wouldn't hurt.

ROADBLOCK: honing in on a subject. I can only submit one proposal (which is due tomorrow), or, hope to get picked for someone else's panel. Here are potential panel ideas:

- Website Optimization Basics: I wrote a post a few months back that was popular on HN, about how I reduced page load time by 75% (http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/wordpress-optimization-drea...). I would boil down the technical jargon to simple language. It would be a dual presentation with the engineer that gave me most of the advice I used.

- Reverse-Engineering Visual Design: I would explain some of the classic principles and methods that designers use to make the decisions they do when designing for the web. I presented on this at BarCamp Chicago a couple of years ago (http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-the-coders-mind-...), so I have something to start with, but it still needs more juice.

- Everything You Already Know About SEO: the basics of SEO are stupidly simple, and widely known, but there are many misconceptions and unknowns. I would condense and explain all of the best practices and things that we do know about SEO, and how to use them to grow your business.

- How to Get a Date Online: I have an alter-ego through which I give online dating tips (http://onlinedatingmatchmaker.com). I would talk about how to best represent the interesting aspects about yourself, present communication techniques for opening with matches and securing dates, and present data from studies that suggest provocative things, such as why you should lie on your online dating profile (http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/lie-online-dating-prof...). I actually got a personal message from Hugh Forrest only minutes after submitting this presentation idea last year - about how much he liked the idea - but I guess it didn't make it through the selection process.

Another ROADBLOCK is my relative lack of speaking experience. I find it hard to get motivated about smaller speaking opportunities like BarCamp or Peca Kucha, so I'm not sure where to find mid-level speaking opps to hone my chops.

A BOTTLENECK is my relative lack of notoriety, or having a "thing." As you can see a variety of topics interest me, but I can't yet be thought of as "the four-hour workweek guy" or "the personal finance guy"

Any advice, or opinions on which panel I should propose, would be appreciated! Thanks - I love this thread!
Weev is a troll.

Phelps is one of the greatest trolls of all time -- he started as a civil rights attorney 50 years ago, but his more recent shtick is to do provocative shit to get his civil rights violated so that he can sue. The infatuation is obvious.
I know I am oversimplifying this and it could be my inherent cheapness speaking but whenever I hear about a service where I need to pay someone to give other people my money, I back away slowly and then run. So perhaps I'm not targeted user, but I do think that if there are people who would use this, we'd probably seem more thought, time, and effort go into blog posts if people felt that they would receive something more tangible than a nice comment.
Yes it did increase the risk.

Before the green revolution there were a lot of very different wheat varieties around the world. In fact, if my memory is correct, during the selective breeding for high yields one of the breakthroughs came from a thick and sturdy stalked dwarf wheat from Japan. The stalk genes it had produced a stalk strong enough to carry the new large yields.

The point being, we used to have a large variety of geno and phenotype around the world, and now we don't.
Internet investment's new champions: The emerging online giants
Thanks, that was an excellent article.
This is a pretty rosy view considering that AFAIK basic HA tasks like taking over an IP address from a failed machine is much slower in the cloud. And let's hope your HA software doesn't want to use multicast...
Clearly you haven't been to NYC.

You can easily find yourself in a situation that its somewhat difficult to find somewhere to pee. Most stores don't have a public places, food serving places might (but not for someone off the street) and they also might not. Most office buildings have security at the front.
Video Prison: Why Patents Might Threaten Free Online Video
Companies brace for end of cheap made-in-China era
A detail I forgot to mention was that he reasoned I would be able to command a higher salary should I fail, which would presumably cancel out the lost wages.
This doesn't strike me as very useful advice, sorry. Taken at face value, you're saying my wife and I need to stop sleeping, and I need to quit my job. The number may be high, but I already know it's not 100%
Ask HN: where's the 'VAT computation' SAAS service ?
Is there somewhere a simple REST-based service able to compute the VAT for an order, based on the seller country, buyer country, order type ?
I feel like you'd have to buy really nice pencils and rubber bands to match the general aesthetic of the iPad.
Is CTR actually clicking the ad and going to the advertiser's webpage or just interacting with the ad? If it's just like normal CTR, I don't see how iAds could result in a better performance. Maybe people like to play the mini-games, but no one would click through just because they liked the interactive aspect. The only reason to click through would either be curiosity or actual interest. Sure there's one developer who earned a jackpot, but what's the average payout for developers using iAds?
The Social Network Teaser B
Ignoring upfront cost of the servers

Assuming perfectly spherical cows..

Actually, I agree with you, being the sysadmin you mention. Unfortunately, the up-front cost seems to be a barrier to many a startup founder. To me, this suggests a lack of good leasing options, though it could be that's because it's not worth making a business out of it.

I understand you don't have to worry about hardware issues

I've always found this assertion to be misleading at best. One still suffers the consequences of hardware failure (both inherent and human error), yet one has very little, if any, ability to prevent them. You're at the mercy of the providers.

It just doesn't make sense outside of well funded startups or established businesses.

I'm not sure it makes sense inside them, either. I've found that the break-even point for buying versus cloud is consistently around 10 months. The rule of thumb for when the transition from cloud to colo makes sense for a startup that doesn't yet have any of their own hardware is about $10k/mo, assuming they're growing at a rapid clip.

The only situation where it would make sense is compute-heavy (but light on memory and I/O) loads that peak much higher than the average. I have yet to encounter such a one, since it's tough to meet the parenthetical requirement, thereby bypassing the Deutsch distributed computing fallacies.
1) My first reaction to the site was text overload. It feels really cluttered. I'm not a designer so I probably don't have the most specific suggestions, but I would say that there's too many colors and font sizes. The clutter also sharply contrasts with the "clean" white background and styling.

2) If I wanted to microblog or share links, I'm not sure why I should use this rather than Twitter, Tumblr or Posterous?
what's the incentive to set it up in the first place if you're not a content creator?
Non content creators will mentally file it in their 'something virtuous to do when I have enough money' aka never_never.
The content creators who end up being net donors will stop because their motivation was to make money not give it.
This scheme and the optimism surrounding it sounds like a throwback to the internet bubble.
If an egg from Woman A gets fertilized and implanted into Woman B, then one lesbian can be carrying her lesbian partner's baby.

It would be difficult to find one who would agree to this arrangement, though.
"A healthy concept of self-esteem will allow you to switch between high-status and low-status roles as necessary; insecurity should not prevent you from taking on a high or low-status role, whether in the theater or real life. Well, according to the Bard, they’re the same thing."

I assume he's talking about Shakespeare? To what is he referring?
I like this professional theme you already have:

http://duckduckgo.com/?v=c&q=professional
This is so depressing.

I have to say, the replies from engineers who have spent some time figuring out how the patent system works have been enlightening and interesting to read.

But none of this matters unless a well funded group (maybe the EFF, maybe some businesses who want to challenge this patent) decides to pick up the cause and fight. There is no way a programmer who coded something in a weekend and put it on his blog is going to be able to go up against a well funded patent holder.

The merits are irrelevant, seriously irrelevant.

This is what depresses me so much about the US legal system. While the law around software patents is absurd, the problem isn't really that software patents exist per se (1), it's that stupid patents are granted and that it is brutally expensive in terms of time and money to fight them.

(1) I do consider software patents to be a failed experiment. Sometimes the implementation is so bad that we can say "tried it, didn't work" even if in theory it could have been done better.
Pretty please describe an anecdote showing how bad-ass and awesome Rich and Bill are.

Thanks, in advance.
To-do app + RPG = EpicWin
Let's ask ourselves why hovering to expose interface elements is so very prevalent in web interfaces, when it's all but absent in native computer software. The answer is that classic web interfaces are static rendered pages spruced up with some CSS and javascript interactivity patches, while native software is dynamically interactive. As web apps move to being AJAX-y or HTML5 interactive javascript experiences instead of a collection of static pages, then the interface conventions of native software will become more prevalent. When you want to edit something in a list, you hit the 'edit' button, and your whole interface goes into 'edit' mode. No more needing to patch fake interactivity onto a static canvas. No more worrying about users being afraid to click on a link or button, for fear of not making it back to their current status, or of being lost while they wait for new content to load. The interactive nature of emerging web standards renders the lack of hovering irrelevant. Current interfaces were all going out the window anyway; touch devices just bring the problem to the forefront.
If anyone wants to discuss startup ideas around schools and school choice please let me know.
Goal: Moving to Lapland.

Roadblock: There are no job opportunities for a software developer in that area.
With a capacitive device, it's possible to detect things like fingers some distance away from the surface, but the signal is so noisy that you get a lot of false positives.

The endpoint of all this stuff seems to be the Minority Report UI (http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit...) or Kinect, where the computer is detecting what you're doing with your body in a holistic way; it can infer intent, rather than measuring specific points of data without knowledge of where they came from.

Of course, that requires bigger and more expensive sensors than you're likely to find in a $499 device today.
I think Flattr (or something like it) has the potential to create a competitive economic system for digital goods. Traditionally, if you produce something of value, people will pay for it, and the content creator is rewarded. That model doesn't work well for digital goods, since they're nonrival (if you have an mp3, I can have it as well, with no loss to you) and nonexcludable (you can't stop people having the good, because you can't stop people copying bits).

Right now, digital content producers often have to support themselves with advertising, which is usually problematic or impossible. Advertising is kind of like a shitty version of Flattr where you automatically click the Flattr button by simply loading the page, and the amount each person donates per month is the average amount per capita that companies profit due to online advertising. It's a stupid system for a lot of reasons. The one thing it has going for it is that people take part whether they want to or not, by viewing pages and being affected by advertising.

Flattr might make creating digital goods a profitable activity -- and that's a critical to having an efficient economic system.
If you depend on it to pay your rent, you're going to need lots of people to click those buttons - and when lots of people do it you care less about how much each one gives and more about the averages. Flattr should publish "average pay per click" statistics, I suppose.

And I do think that it's an elegant solution that reduces the number of actions required to contribute to things you enjoy to a single click.

[edited to add]

Another way to think about it is that the variable is not the percentage of visitors that are willing to pay X dollars for your content, instead it's the average payment of the visitors that are willing to pay anything for you content.
The security hole was introduced by a Ubuntu-specfic patch to pam.
The pam_motd-legal-notice patch was added in July 2009 due to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/399071
Cloud Computing From 35,000 ft.
The title sounds like: Wear MJ shoes and you'll play like MJ.
Rendering the bullets redundant, no?
And/or don't buy your kid a $300 phone with a $100/month plan. Maybe this just shows how 'old' I am at 27, but I didn't have a cellphone as a kid. In fact I didn't have one until I was 19 and was paying for it myself. My parents didn't have them, and they thought I was crazy for paying $35/month for a Sprint plan.

But I did accumulate a set of 'hidden fees' when I was younger to my parent's phone bill. I was within the monthly limit for our dialup provider, but we were using a 'local long distance' number to dialup, which we were unaware of. Large phone bill that month ensued and it wasn't a fun conversation then either.
Hi, Amber. Thanks for the comment.

1) I tend to agree with you. There is a lot of text, especially on the homepage. We'll work on cleaning that up.

2) Howl is focused on sharing links. I use the services you mentioned, as well as Facebook. And although I can share links on these services, Howl is quite a different experience. Perhaps this is a sign that we need to describe ourselves better.
Ask HN: I need bug reporting/feedback for my web app.  Suggestions?
I'm about to launch a SaaS application and need a bug tracker. The basic requirement is pretty simple: allow users to raise bugs and submit feedback easily from within the app or via email. Easy tracking and workflow processing and possibly some sort of user forum.

In addition - and this is where my research has come a cropper - I'd really like users to have the option of filing a screenshot to their bug report by simply checking a box or clicking a button. Does anything like this exist? If not, what are you thoughts on the existing players (Zendesk, Uservoice, Kampyle, Tender etc) and what they're like to use on a day-to-day basis?
Probably the biggest one was cutting down on the amount of Erlang message passing that it takes to append a batch of data to the end of the db file.

There was also an Erlang configuration change which allowed us to make use of a thread pool for disk-io so that fsyncs didn't block other activity.

Really it was a bunch of tiny things, that all added up. The catalyst was the creation and use of a few highly-concurrent benchmark suites that we could use to identify bottlenecks.
I'm starting to reach this point too. And I can't seem to convince myself to buy fancy (expensive) keyboards - even though I /know/ I should.
Are you just lucky enough to be un-sun-burnable? Or are you doing that hippie thing where you say 'ultraviolet radiation is natural! It can't be bad for me!'?

Also, just a suggestion, I have discovered plain old rubbing alcohol is amazing as deodorant.
"Silence Is Often Misinterpreted, But Never Misquoted."
"...converts them with the aid of sunlight into harmless nitrate"

Genius! As soon as I read the article title, I realized the potential... Just think of all the energy the black road surfaces around the globe absorb!
Odnoklassniki.ru Top Secrets
Massive. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492098
I'll second this; it's a fantastic rush, and a good place to get started. However, you'll want to quickly graduate to HPDE's and other "big boy" forms of racing, once you've gotten your first fix. (Dare I suggest Rally? :)

Look to SCCA (http://www.scca.org/) and NASA (http://www.nasaproracing.com/) for events in your area (both autox and road racing). Also, be sure to look into local model-specific clubs (like BMWCCA, or Mini and Miata clubs); they often hold their own events, as their membership is large enough to sustain it, and are usually quite welcoming of folks of all makes and models at events (although you may find yourself in an "other" class of some kind).

Best of luck to you, but be warned: this is an expensive hobby. :)
LabVIEW is only one of many others I could have named. The three I named are the ones I personally use the most but of course there are many others. Several for programming robots for example.
I'm working on this too.

My general plan goes like this:

2010: Write a book.

2011: Write a good book.

That way I hope to develop the habits required to write huge chunks of material before solving the much harder problem of writing material that doesn't suck.
My online banking really does close between 2 and 6. No joke.

But I don't want a web 2.0 bank, I want a bank as boring as you can get it, one that only hires people with absolutely no life, with a plain boring website.

In want that because they are not a new and exciting thing, they are a place that should only ever do one thing: take my money, lend it extremly reliable people and give me an interest in the return.
probably should have. Tend to just write and then press publish, which is certainly not great writing.
Scrubbing atmospheric pollution off with paint on the road is one of the stupidest ideas ever. Do they really think they can clean up such huge volumes of air like this? Some local authorities in London have already wasted a load of money trying to do this. Now the Dutch are at it.
To clarify, I was talking about age 0-3 months specifically. At that age, my kids slept for about 2-3 hours per 4. For the 1-2 they were awake they required attention for most of the time. So 30-50% of your clock time is taken up by the baby. So you don't have half the free time, you have half the total time.
"Traditionally, if you produce something of value, people will pay for it" but if there's better value elsewhere that's where they'll go. In this case the best value of all is FREE ie no flattr account.
A Hustler isnt really a builder - except that they tend to be decent product people who think in terms of "what can I get people passionate about." It becomes the great cycle of the Hacker (Builder) creating something that the Hustler can get people passionate about. Hustler gets people passionate, which leads to new problems and new things to build.
To make something people love.
In many cases it's more efficient precisely for the reasons you mention. Data duplication removes locking and cache coherence penalties. If you structure your program to communicate by message passing over IPC (for example, via a database) you get those benefits, plus possibly more efficient mutual exclusion mechanisms (CAS, tuned MVCC, etc).

Also, don't forget that GC penalties are going to be paid by all threads in a process.
What happens if we manage to kill 91% of the HIV strains? Won't the remaining 9% of the strains continue to spread and mutate? Then we're back to square one.
Did you try mapping caps lock as a control key, like on the Sun keyboards? Before I did this I had trouble with Emacs, but since then it's been perfect for me.
If you haven't already, just swap your CTRL and CAPS lock keys. That makes for a pleasant typing experience.
Nice. I'm not too into DOS, but this definitely is an easier solution than creating a VFS for the job. Thanks for the pointer.
It's really a testament to nature and Darwin's theories that after all the time, effort and money we've been spending on AIDS research, the most successful antibody so far was not created by man, but by his DNA.
Ask PG: Can you publish most interesting parts of ViaWeb?
I want to learn lisp from great master, so can you give to us most interesting pieces of Viaweb's source code?
This is fantastic, but I can only imagine that 91% will become 9.1% within a decade, as the unaffected strains become dominant (just like superbugs).
The phone is $200. Adding an extra line to a FamilyTalk plan is $9.99/month along with a $15/month data plan, bringing the monthly total to $24.99/month. I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers, but they are grossly exaggerated. Furthermore, the article doesn't say anywhere that the author bought his step-child an iPhone.
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. "

William Shakespeare

Full reference here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world%27s_a_stage
But only 10% of the current number of people infected will be infected by that point.
Less people will be infected...
Likewise, 91% of the strains is not necessarily the same as 91% of the people currently living with HIV. Can anyone provide details on what, exactly, this finding does? Do we need to kill 100% of the HIV strains to have a cure? Is there one strain that is the "dangerous" one, and it isn't covered in the 91% number? Will the virus simply mutate new strains?
There's rarely an antibody that kills every possible strain of a disease, illustrated by the fact that there is not an antibody that kills every disease. 91% of HIV strains means we are 91% of the way to complete eradication.

Plus, one of the big problems thus far have been we had NO IDEA how to attack the HIV bodies. Perhaps developing an understanding of this antibody will allow us to gain new understanding, and perhaps in good 'ol engineering tradition we will be able to change this, that, recompile, and cover a few more %. I know it's not that easy, but if you've ever developed code or hardware, having pre-existing, working models makes everything miles and miles easier.
I think given the time and research, that I could probably identify people just through the text that they post (if the text is long enough) based on their recurring syntax, spelling, word choice and grammar fingerprint. Probably won't work for something like tweets which are highly truncated, but for something like an 'anonymous blogger' I probably could.
This is very very true. Golden handcuff.
I've done that, and I don't even use Emacs.
I agree with your points. I've never been a fan of the cloud concept, and am planning on sticking to colocated hardware for what we do.
Interesting opinion. I wish I could believe that on-line gambling would be legalized in the US, but when you see what has happened with seat-belt and helmet laws (neither of which has any contributory effect to the harm of others), you have to believe that there is an accepted viewpoint within the US body politic that the state should act to protect individuals from the consequences of their own actions (current interest in forced mortgage adjustments is another example). Couple that with a powerful industry lobby, and I don't have much hope of any change in the legal status of on-line gaming in the near future.
If you can't buy your investor a beer, don't take their money
It can, however, make the population of people who have HIV much smaller and slow the spread of it down dramatically.