skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look at the byline: Ashlee Vance. It should matter that the masthead is NYT, but the byline matters much more. Ashlee has a rep for this kind of stuff, across numerous mastheads.

(Sorry to "play the person, not the ball", but it's the writer's behaviour that is the crux of Tim's complaint, and knowing the byline is an important part of how we comprehend acts of journalism.)
it also happened with soapier...

http://soapier.com/reddit_soap.htm
The "tortured academic" motif is especially problematic; academics are mostly employed to expand the sum total of all world knowledge, but it's often supremely frustrating.
That wouldn't be a corollary, as it doesn't follow readily from the point he made.
This is much harder to stomach when 18 hours is 18 weeks or 18 months. It's still just as true though.
y'see, thats why i got myself a pick and place! :)

(http://www.ladyada.net/wiki/mdcpickandplace)

its great for the "first 1000 or so" - if something gets popular i can send it off for manufacture - but only because i can bridge manufacture thru the never-ending-leadtimes. having trouble getting a fantastic oven tho. the apsgold's look nice but we dont have 220 :( had great luck with some common reflow plates if you can deal with single sided
I hope they don't class Costa Rican coffee as a class A
The copyright reads "Rachel Bracha". Probably a picture taken by his wife or daughter.

Terrible choice nevertheless.
I guess the interesting question is: How are the Cow Paths on your website/product/technology/industry/etc changing? And why?
The accepted method is to log it into a patent notebook (bound book with numbered pages), and get it co-signed by someone knowledgeable enough to testify in court about the content. Signature should say 'read and understood'.
This book makes good reading:
Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War

A much better way to establish priority is to file a provisional patent, good for a year.

The book "Patent it yourself" makes good reading - not as good as working with a patent attorney, but a lot cheaper.
quietyoutube.com

There just isn't much to it. I'll add a bookmarklet when I get around to it.
I'm intrigued by ur feature MVP. As a simple marketing/analytics tool for bloggers, this would help figure out the most popular keywords on site versus off site search SEO. BUILD IT AND I WILL COME! :)
I disagree. There are a lot of clients who are just stupid, obnoxious and/or irrational - it's a personality trait, and there's not much you can do about it. I've worked with fantastic clients who know nothing about the web, and idiots who know a lot (they're usually the worst).

To the original poster - you have your payment. It might be tempting to go psycho, but an easier way is just politely refuse to do any more work for her. If she asks why, then be up front and tell her that you've put in 20+ hours work for only $100. You'll find out either way whether you want to do any business for her again. Some bridges are made to be burned!

If it's any consolation, she's probably making her future web developer's life a misery right now.
Successful companies succeed by picking their competition carefully. You want to compete with firms that either don't know or don't care about your customers' use case, so that you can bring more resources to bear on this particular problem than they can.

Altavista was a search company, but in the late 90s, they didn't particularly care about search. If they did, they could easily have copied PageRank (which was published, and the patent is owned by Stanford anyway) and search ads (which were done by Overture before Google) and done as well as Google did. They didn't realize that it was a threat until Google started making serious inroads in the early 2000s, though, and by then it was too late. (Interestingly, both of the founders of Altavista ended up working at Google.)
Not much, really, the benefits of intrinsic support for concurrency in languages are very overhyped.

Java is a great illustration: it has syntactically close to no support for concurrency (synchronized, pretty much) but it has been able to keep up with today's concurrency challenges by the simple virtue of its libraries (java.util.concurrent is very, very powerful) and ingenuity of its developers.

The amount of concurrent Java that powers major web sites and other places that we don't even know of is simply staggering.
Not unless you have multi-disk striping, also known as RAID 0.
Somebody wrote up a few paragraphs; it was mostly a joke. The link you're commenting on gave information on said product work so I don't really understand the hostility.
Hmmm feature... not really.

I did have a website that pulled multiple RSS feeds (thousands) and then parsed each entry matching it to others that it had seen before. It could then show you what was popular at any moment on the web, with the ability to see what the article was linked to, and what they were linked to. It showed some interesting things like how a website was effected by something happening on the world stage.

The idea was you could find what was hot on the web at any one time. Nobody really showed any interest in it though.

Reason... I didnt want to pony up the money to put a live version on the web due to not knowing how the producers of the RSS feeds would fee. So there was never anything more then a demo concept.
To be sympathetic to a group that I (and others) have been giving alot of flack (deserved or undeserved), I am personally still working through a backlog of 200 user questions/suggestions. If you don't stay on top of them, they can pile up. Catching back up when you get behind is difficult without sounding canned, and I understand the pain.

However, it's definitely a good sign for your company that you have identified a pain point of enough severity that you generate this much talk and correspondence. Believe me, even when all the correspondence is praise and appreciated suggestions, staying on top of them is difficult!
It's not an e-reader but you sure can read on it. And when you're done reading you can watch something. Or listen to music. Or play a game.

If you only want to read then the Kindle and Nook are great devices. As always it's entirely subjective and depends on what you personally want from the device (and how much you want to spend).
http://wunbar.com

Quick and simple to make, thought I could make some money on referral fees, but went nowhere.

Failure, I suppose: browsers can do the same thing, with a little setup; and, more importantly, people seem to have a preference to navigate to each of these sites and search them directly.
Usually when people complain about misquoting, the misquoted facts aren't true or they make the quotee sound crazy/evil. In this case, though, it's the exact opposite:

“Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge software developers.”

"These [partner] software developers and technicians have bet their careers on Microsoft and largely benefited from that choice. In addition, they have helped keep Microsoft relevant during the various ups and downs in the technology market."

"And so the technology-minded people coming out of college have started learning their craft on free software and betting their careers on non-Microsoft wares."

True, true, and true. It seems odd they'd put O'Reilly's name against them if he didn't say that, though, because almost any decent software developer nowadays would readily trumpet the above facts. I'm guessing the reporter made a serious error in their notes and that the quotes have only been accidentally tied to O'Reilly.
Is it free to use? e.g. can you use it on the free blogs provided by wordpress?
Actually this is a feature I was missing. I like your implementation, thanks!!
Did they lock the account similar to some of the paypal horror stories we have seen float around? If so, that's another strike for paypal and a reason to motivate everyone to avoid them like the plague.
I like this idea a lot, except knowing me, I'd clear my cookies and cache and just read HN not logged in until I could login.

Maybe a way to get around this is to remove the links (not the text of the links, but the link functionality itself) unless you have an account and are logged in.

I guess in the end, if you don't have the self-control needed not to throw away your time reading about things (instead of doing things), you probably aren't going to benefit from being blocked from HN. You'll find something else equally unproductive to fill that hole.
Oracle Berkeley DB - $5,800.00 per processor
After you did $100 of work, you should have asked for full payment. Upon her refusal to pay you, you should have declined to do anything further for her. This street appears to go two ways, though I can certainly sympathize with you.
Did you confirm the charge was never returned? That's how the $1 authentication charge works on our new store; we charge $1 and if the full amount isn't settled within a couple weeks the $1 is returned and we're charged a small fee (so pre-orders actually cost us money). If that's not the case, it's probably a fluke.
It was interesting to note that Mr. O'Reilly was careful to not say that he necessarily disagreed with most of the quotes, just that he didn't say them literally. That makes sense. Because on one hand I think the man is smart enough to see the state of play in the industry (where I think most would agree that Linux/Apple/Google/Amazon ecosystem software are more popular with startups than Microsoft), while at the same time smart enough to realize he's the head of arguably the biggest and most influential computer book publisher, and a big slice of the tech actually used in businesses is in the Microsoft camp -- so it's in his best interest to stay in their good graces as a publisher.
Not at all I imagine. Doesn't seem to use e-ink / electronic paper, just dual LCDs. Not available yet either, looks like they just have prototypes so far.

Cool device though. If/when it ships it looks like it would satisfy most who were interested in Microsoft Courier.
Ask HN: Help me fix your backups
Some of this may be explained by Google Checkout limitations. In some countries, developers simply aren't allowed to submit paid market apps (but free ones are fine).
Two years ago I really would have love this firefox and I'd have talk to everyone about it. However, now that I'm used to chrome, it kind of look "big" and "sad". Maybe it's the brown/gray color at the top and the fact that when I type g it doesn't automatically complete for gmail.com or n for news.ycomb... and that tab aren't as movable as chrome.
I'm sure HN is a huge time sink for you, but I don't believe that, taken as a whole, moderating and interacting here is a low value activity for you. I suspect HN is a very important marketing tool for YC.

That said, I wish you'd spend a bit more time refining Arc. We could use better debugging tools. I'd love to be able to look at the stack when I get an error, for example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
Don Knuth : An earthshaking anouncement
Great idea. Execution looks solid, feature set is solid. Now go sell, sell, sell.

My thought: your target market likely maintains both a nice printed menu and potentially a leaner "take-out" menu. The reason for the PDF menu is (I'm guessing) that's what they got back from their designer for the printer, and it's going onto good stock, getting laminated, etc.

One stumbling block might be that it's yet another place to have to maintain their menu/prices. If ChompStack could spit out a simplified take-out menu (or the daily special insert in the menu) they could print, that might reduce some of that effort. Or maybe a "patchfile" they can send off when they update their prices.
Another idea that would make this work even better might be to have any changes in your blocking settings only take effect a week after you make the changes. It's hard to have discipline about settings for right now, but it's easy to have discipline about settings next week.
you could pivot and make it a Mahalo treatment to Mahalo "content". actually, just thinking about that makes my head hurt.
http://www.inmoncif.com Bill Inmon - Data Warehousing
http://www.ralphkimball.com/ Ralph Kimball - Data Warehousing

http://www.tableausoftware.com/ Data Visualization
http://www.edwardtufte.com Edward Tufte - Visual Data
This always frustrates me, if I try 3 different ways to do something of which 2 are dead ends and one works I feel that the 2 dead ends were wasted time because very little of them ended up in the final solution.
What you said about people bear hugging you underwater reminds me of when I was on a swim team and we played a game called "Sharks and Minnows."

The lone shark starts at one end of a 25 meter pool, all the minnows at the other. The coach blows the whistle and all the minnows have to try to reach the other end without getting caught at the surface. Any minnows caught at the surface immediately become sharks. Repeat until there are no minnows.

I wasn't the fastest swimmer, but I could easily hold my breath from one end of the pool to the other, including wrestling underwater with sharks. If Sharks and Minnows were an Olympic sport I would have been competitive. Of course, that was when I was twelve ;-) At this point, I think I'd carefully consider how to approach an obviously drowning person.
It's often a poor investement, but otherwise everyone would be on slashdot, reddit, stackoverflow, some random forum, usenet, a mailing list ... there's possibly millions of bad investments on the web.

The only real solution is to make real work easier - by having a better (more lean) workflow, so starting work is as almost as easy as hitting a HN link.
I was puzzled and looking for a joke until I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis
Okay, my post was quick because I forgot to mention a very important trait for a web developer. You have to learn when to say NO! It takes time to recognize the warning signs though. Once you do, then part of your process from initial contact to getting the client signed on should be to unveil those flags. Again, it's not the fault of the client, ultimately the responsibility lies with the web developer not to get into these situations. In other words, if your business tanks, you can only blame yourself.

You still don't need to burn any bridges though. And turning down future work isn't burning bridges.
To make it indexable you need users to enter in text. Maybe you could have a mini wiki above the search results, where users describe the search they are trying to do or what the search means, or can annotate the search. With your current UI this would be really hard. I feel like the UI is cool on first blush but sort of limits your options as far as experimentation goes.

Just brainstorming here:

- maybe the hook could be: "judge books by their covers"

- the layout is pretty slick but constrains what you can do with the site. Have you considered scrolling down? It could be a differentiator though (your current layout that is).

- When you mouse over a book, have some type of overlay function: star the book, "have you read this book? what did you think?" (leave a comment), share on twitter / facebook (a necessary evil perhaps)

- when you click on a cover, it lightboxes in and has the things listed above

- make it like a reddit, but for covers

- people who searched for x also searched for y
I've experimented with this. If I exhale, I sink. My body fat percentage is somewhere around 20%. I estimate that I need at least 1/3 to 1/2 a lung-full of air to have even neutral buoyancy. I understand that I might be unusual in this.
I know technical solutions are fun, but why not just practicing good ol' fashion self-control?
Interesting instructional video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndbGvjqEweA
Lets hope your phones follow standards ;)
This article describes the difference between "a job" and "being paid to do what you love". This doesn't mean you have to start your own company. It means you need to find a team you enjoy working with where you get to do things each day you where you get to do your best.

For work/life balance, it is about priorities and setting clear expectations with your significant other. If you love working a lot and start dating don't fake a shorter work week, don't fake that you'll make it home every night for dinner at 5pm. For some people, it will be a deal breaker, and for others they'll appreciate the time you do spend together because during that time you'll be happy, fulfilled and fun to be around.

Would you rather have a SO that comes home every night at 5PM and does nothing but complain about how horrible their day was until 9PM or that needs 4 hours to decompress from work or would you rather have somebody that comes home at 9PM happy to see you with a positive attitude?
ouch. i think you just held my brain upside down.
I actually built another site around most of those ideas you just mentioned (but changed the idea to films, as I found they worked better):

http://filmvsfilm.com/

It's basically all user-generated-content, and it actually does rank on Google for a few things, but it's the wrong kind of traffic: People aren't in buying mode, very few visitors actually click through to Amazon and buy something.
Mario later on in the comments references some DVDs that show real life examples of drowning behavior: http://www.pia-enterprises.com/watersafety.html

It really is too bad that with all the web technology today, videos like these are not available for free. Seems like they'd help save some lives if they were.
It sounds cold, but if you are not a trained professional, they are in deep water, and you cannot throw them something, you run the very (very) real risk of having you BOTH drown and die if you try to save them while conscious. In case you didn't read the article, if they get a hand on you they will climb you like a tree and have the strength of a million doses of adrenaline.

What solution do you propose instead?

It's not unprecedented either. In CPR training, you are taught the Heimlich. You are also taught that you have to ask someone who is choking if they want help (or you will be sued, regardless if you save them). If they say no, they don't want help, you can either leave them to die, do it anyway and get sued for all you are worth (don't count on mercy, the law is 1000% against you), or wait until they pass out and then do it anyway (you are then protected by the Good Samaritan law)
Censoring chatroulette
Will censoring chatroulete "fix" it? Is undesirable content the major reason preventing them from really taking off?
Interesting data, but the interactive graph adds absolutely nothing.
Agreed. But perhaps looking at Tim's business partners is useful in understanding the context of the disavowal.

In my mind, I speculate on two situations, not mutually exclusive. (1) Ashlee really did muff the quote (motivation: lazy, sloppy, or something like it). He really seems like a nice guy, though I can't speak to his habits or prior reporting. Mistakes happen; this isn't the worst error I've seen in a newspaper.

(2) Tim wants to walk back his loose, negative talk (motivation: preserving relationship with Microsoft, including a material one, his co-publishing deal with Microsoft Press). [http://oreilly.com/pub/pr/2413]

Though now that I think of it, Tim probably had the sense not to be quite so nakedly dismissive of a partner so important, and especially one so touchy. Tim does have a great reason to bite his tongue, that's all.
What is so wrong with people laughing at you?
Ask HN: How to do payments between users on my site?
I'm building a site where users will be paying each other, with the site taking a cut out of each transaction. I'm having some trouble deciding on how to handle payment processing and could use some advice. I think there are really two ways to handle these payments.

1) I could accept payment into my own account and credit the users on my own system. I can then pay them when they request a withdrawal.

2) I could split each transaction into two parts, with my cut going into my account and the rest going directly to the user.

The first way seems the most reasonable and seems to be the way most sites do this, but I am scared of essentially storing other people's money in my account (especially after reading stories of Paypal accounts being frozen). I am also unclear about the legal issues of doing either method.

Any tips on how to proceed? Any payment processor recommendations? I am a poor college student, so cost of setup is a major issue for me. Thanks!

Edit: the site is a marketplace, not some type of money-transferring service
What a steal...
Build a small 5 star hotel and never sell it. Hire a good manager to run it for you. You will not worry feeding yourself and your family ever again. And then find out what to do with your life.
pg's HN REPL strikes again :)
Berkeley DB has always (i.e. before being bought by Oracle) been released under a GPL-like license with the option to purchase a commercial licenses for those that don't want to deal with the reciprocity clauses.
Thanks for sharing that site. I was checking out the ten issues he published and they looked promising. I won't be relying 100% on just votes, as I think a lot of articles get skewed (which, by social nature, makes sense for HN), but maybe a happy middle ground compared to foldl.org so that I can keep it going.
The commercial license is only needed if you intend to link against it in a commercial project (they specifically exempt using bindings for a dynamic language from "linking") or buy support. Otherwise, it's free for use in open source (it's compatible with both ASL and GPL) or internal projects.
Wow, that actually seems more sensible than our style. It would save time scanning back to the beginning of the next line, and it would make it harder to end up on the wrong line, since different lines would be going different directions.
They hired him from The Register, home of shock and troll journalism, so I don't know what they were expecting.
As a software development company, all of our code is in a git repository that has a remote on a VPS. Our documents are primarily Google docs. Important docs are checked into git.

Nothing we have locally that is important is not also at some remote location.
I guess it could be interesting for high-quality, real-time video or online games more than downloading a file. Then again, I wonder what the latency is like.
I just finished my thesis about cellular automata. Specifically, I worked on the automatic verification of logical formulas about the behavior of a given automaton.

Here's what that means. Suppose that you have some cellular automaton p, and you're interested in knowing whether p returns to its original state when you run it for a while. For finite grids and specific opening patterns this is an easy question to answer -- in theory -- you just simulate the automaton for long enough. But what about infinite grids? Or what if we wanted to answer a question like "does there exist a configuration of p which returns to its original state after 3 steps?" Or what if the automaton is just too big and too complicated to simulate for a long period of time? The majority of my work was in implementing a way of answering questions such as these (link for the really, really interested reader: http://carnegie-mellon.academia.edu/documents/0107/1998/thes...).

Cellular automata are surprisingly deep, for how simple they are. However, they aren't "a new kind of science" - like most constructs in computer science they are amenable to mathematical treatment.

If you already know a fair amount about CA, here's another good question for you to think about. How can we better classify different types of cellular automata based on their behavior? The usual classification system essentially boils down to choosing one of "it is obvious what this CA does", "you can prove what it does", "you can sort of guess what it does", and "no one has any idea so maybe this is universal". This is clearly unsatisfactory -- any suggestions?