skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A blogging service works on a per-account basis, for them to shut down the whole server instead of just taking down the offending account(s) seems to be pretty excessive, no matter what those accounts have 'done'.

There is some chance they found themselves the unwitting participant in a child pornography distribution network, and that they don't know which accounts are 'the ones', and they've taken everything off-line until they've verified which accounts are bad and which are good.
Never heard of the phrase "tall poppy syndrome" before. Love it.
I read that Iranian-Americans are the most educated immigrants -- or one of the most according to the census. It makes sense that they would be technologically advanced.
Rackspace open sources cloud services platform, NASA gets on board.
Not if they only do it to a small percentage of clients and within common sense. Generally the clause is there, so that they have a legal ground to shut you down without waiting for legal process to catch up (i.e. if legal authorities ask them without providing a warrant, if they get complaints about some questionable content etc.)
Relevant: http://okcancel.com/strips/okcancel20031003.gif

Touch interfaces work well for small, handheld devices. They break down badly for anything larger.
Perhaps the post's author was speaking more personally. It is semiotically ambiguous.
Check out Gigayo in the online banner and advertising space http://www.gigayo.com
What's your take on GO?
If you have questions come join us at irc.freenode.com / #openstack
Thank god for the separation of powers. It is incredible how many rights the Bush presidency attempted to take away from its citizens all in the name of national security. The more I read stuff like this the more it seems that we were heading to a totalitarian government.

Edit: In case anybody wonders why I threw in Bush's name in there is because the Patriot Act, created during his presidency, greatly extended the NSL powers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter
There may be better ways of calculating brightness values for determining true perceptual contrast. Some starting points for the curious:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorspace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIQ

The sample images at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Disadvantages show the difference between various brightness calculations.
No, he is not pitching the product. He's pitching the campaign. The TV show is great. Pitching and advertising are not the same thing and pitching is certainly not about getting people to believe a product can make their lives better, at least not in the most common cases HN readers are likely to encounter. The title 'this is how to pitch a new technology' is fairly silly. I think all of these are either obvious facts or trivial arguments and that's all I've stated and now you're telling me I'm hung up on something that I never even mentioned (startup founders pitching to investors). Now, if you want to draw pitching wisdom from this clip, terrific. But if you want to respond to me, respond to claims I've made instead of ones you said I've made, but didn't.
Wait, so how do I redeem this free manpack? I really could use socks lol
What a great move by rackspace.

That's very impressive, they're essentially risking enabling their competition by doing this and still they've done it.

This actually will allow the development of 'micro clouds', a thing I wrote about a while back because I don't like the centralization issues of clouds for a number of reasons and use cases.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/node/37

Getting rid of vendor lock-in is also fantastic.
Haute couture: Making a loss is the height of fashion
I am skeptical - The host, https://www.burst.net/ Looks like a template monster design with a reseller system, no traffic rank and a nearly empty forum- From a outsider looking in, it looks like a host that is barely in business and likely ran by one guy from his apartment.

Maybe they are over-exaggerating for press? Maybe the server crashed, and they dont want the bad press so did a bogus excuse? Stranger things have happened. But I highly doubt this has even remotely anything to do with "operation in your sites" and is likely related to some issue at burstnet. I wouldnt be surprised if law enforcement isnt even involved.
> Using Erdos as a 'plausible example' of the positive effects of drug use is fallacious, because it's a statistic with N = 1.

Um, a "statistic with N = 1" is exactly what an "example" is.
You hit the nail on the head with your "over two trillion to replace" number: why replace them if they are still working? If expected cost of failures (probability of failure * number of things that could fail * cost of failure) is lower than the cost of replacement, it would be stupid to replace them. I will consider it a resounding success if these old transformers are still transforming away forty _more_ years from now.
On Creativity and Genius
When I move the map the new parts take some time to load. Is it possible to preload some of them? Otherwise, great site.
Out of curiosity: Do I have to install a cron or something to automatically scp my logs to your server? How does that work?
I love Austin. I think it's an awesome city.

Right place at the wrong time I suppose.
Just wasn't happy while I was there.
Are there any valid criticisms to be made of Perl 6 or its process?

Certainly. The failure to have a Perl 6 running on Parrot within a few months of Parrot's inception hurt development immensely. The RFC process demonstrated that the initial idea of a Python 3000 style rearranging of a few external features and some internal structures was not nearly ambitious enough. Rethinking regular expressions into grammars was a huge example of hubris.

My point stands, though: the intent of Perl 6 was never to create a language or runtime or compiler which would gradually succumb to a Perl 7 which would gradually succumb to a Perl 8 and so on. Since the RFC process the intent of Perl 6 has to been to create a Perl which solves the limitations and flaws of Perl 5 and can thrive for the next twenty or more years.

Put another way, the most important feature of Perl 6 is that is provides what Larry always intended of Perl 5: a language which allows you to create your own lexically-scoped dialects as necessary.
Don't forget that people who are looking don't necessarily mean they will commit. Steve Blank liked asking people if they'd use it right away if it was free. It can save you a lot of heartache later.
> No, he is not pitching the product. He's pitching the campaign.

You're insisting there's mutual exclusion where it doesn't exist.

> But if you want to respond to me, respond to claims I've made instead of ones you said I've made, but didn't.

I pretty clearly used the words "you seem", as in, "this is what I think you're thinking." I'm not a mind reader, so I'm forced to make a guess. Based on your other comments, it seemed like a pretty reasonable one to me.

By the way, pitching in its everyday usage just means to sell someone on something, whether it's customers or investors. (Notice how salesmen are often described as making a "sales pitch".) Advertising is a special form of pitching to customers. Pitching in the entrepreneurial sense of talking to a roomful of investors is also a special form of pitching.

This is a YCombinator site, so when someone mentions pitching, there's a good chance they mean talking to a roomful of investors. But a lot of us also talk about pitching to customers.

Either way, I think the clip offers some insight in how to do both, even if it's exaggerated for dramatic effect.
I left a message. I'd like to test you guys out.
This is fascinating. Can you link me to some resources/books/articles where I can learn more? Thanks!
If you are going to down vote me at least explain why.
BurstNET is located very close to where I am. About a year and a half ago I toured their facilities for a colocation project. Upon walking in I was horrified. They rows of tower based servers with their cases ripped off on the wire-frame racks you would find in a home improvement store. After seeing that and hearing they lacked any fire suppression system I respectfully walked away from their bid.
http://instantrimshot.com/
Bankruptcy Law Attorney- To Help You Deal With The Bankruptcy Laws
Bankruptcy law attorney is someone who is an expert in bankruptcy law. Bankruptcy is no longer a do-it-yourself option. With the recent changes in bankruptcy laws, filing for bankruptcy has become a very complicated affair. And that is why you need a bankruptcy law attorney to file and fight your case in a bankruptcy court.
I wanted to do something similar to figure out which of the 256 colours available in my terminal-emulator would be reasonably visible against a black background. I wrote a bash script to answer the question, at the heart of which was this function:

get_luminance_from_color() {
# Return the luminance of a color as a number 0-65535.
local red=$1
local green=$2
local blue=$3

# Colour weights from Wikipedia. Note bash doesn't have floats.
echo $(( (2126 * $red + 7152 * $green + 722 * $blue) / 10000 ))
}

It works like this:

$ get_luminance_from_color 16384 32768 16384
28101

...which is to say, then input is an RGB tuple where each field is 0-65535, and the output is a single integer between 0-65535 representing the luminance. If the luminance is > 32767, it's a light colour, otherwise it's a dark colour.
The tiles or the "data"? Tiles are served over S3 (non-CloudFront).
It sounds a bit risky to put your medical records in the cloud.
But won't everyone say yes to something free?
How about a game that requires that you solve typical programming problems at certain points? addictive most of the time, but then get 5 or 45 seconds to solve a real problem.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1527572
I think you're referring to the belief that it takes 10,000 hours of practice in order to "become a world class expert in anything." This "10,000 hour rule" was made famous by the book Outliers and is primarily based on the research of K. Anders Ericsson. 10,000 hours of practice is often equated to 10 years, though I'm not sure if the book explicitly makes this parallel.
The only question I have is: how does it deal with harsh weather? Especially with offshore setups where storms are frequent, can it handle high winds and strong waves?

Overall it's an incredible step towards innovation in energy, kudos to the entire team.
Yea, it is cool. Until the marketing nuts don't realize it and it goes live because they didn't see Lorem Ipsum.
maybe the fbi thinks terrorists were communicating via blog comments, in a secret code designed to look like spam? as far as 'movie-plot terrorism' goes, i don't think it's too far fetched.
I seem to remember some Batman cartoon where Batman realizes he's in a dream because letters shift around oddly while he's trying to read something.

Indeed, I remember from my own dreams that text and numbers behaves oddly (disappears/changes when you look around).

I've also heard this technique is used by lucid dreamers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream) to figure out that they're dreaming so they can begin to take control of the dream.
Favetop http://www.favetop.com : A social web desktop for saving and sharing favorites. Check it out and let us know what you think.
The former story links to the project page. This story links to an, admittedly brief, article on what is being released and who is involved.
Is miio.com the real facebook killer?
Tims coffee is gross, brown water.
I concur from personal experience which is why I balance my caffeine levels. I found that caffeine helps to get a bunch of small/tedious stuff out of the way and hinders the deep thinking required to the creative/hard work.
That impression is completely wrong.

The tip speed is what counts, the key governing factor is called the 'tip-speed-ratio', the apparent wind speed (as seen by the tips of the rotor) versus the real wind speed (as seen by an observer relative to the ground).

Almost all windmills that want to be efficient have design TSRs somewhere between 6 and 8, and consequently, in a given wind they all travel about as fast at the tips.

The design constraints are the speed of sound and the forces on the blade root as well as the tendency of the blade to start fluttering.

It has absolutely nothing to do with birds. Birds will fly in to a stationary building just as easily as they'll fly in to windmills, it's rare but it does happen every now and then.

The larger a windmill, the slower the blades will rotate.

The reason why they are so large is because the power harvested by a windmill goes up with the square of the rotor diameter, many small windmills are more costly to maintain and operate than a single larger one. Right now the sweet spot is somewhere around 2MW and 80 meter rotors for best $/W.
Buy a domain ($8), create a new website at weebly.com (free), and build a few pages describing your product, benefits and add an order page for however much you want to sell it for. Don't capture any billing details and say that you're in Beta and anticipate to launch later.

Buy $500 worth of adwords to drive traffic to your site for a week. See how many conversions you'd make theoretically based on the users who pass the order page.

From there you'll know if it's a profitable idea or not.
Ask HN: Is there a license like GPL for data?
I am interested in the creation of some publicly created and publicly available datasets. Can anyone tell me if there is a license out there already in existence that would be to data as the GPL is to software? Thanks in advance!
Ermm, you can still easily target college students because they add their colleges to their Facebook network. Users tag their interests, music they listen to, books they read.

From a business stand point, I really can't see how you could say facebook made a colossal mistake by opening to the world. It made them rich and one of the most powerful websites on the Internet.
Actually you just run syslog-ng or rsyslog and point them at our servers by changing a few lines in your config file. If you need to monitor a file which isn't feeding into syslog, it's just a few extra steps.

For most of the AMIs on Amazon, you'll have one or the other of these services already installed on your machine. It takes about 2 minutes to set up the configuration.
Why was this posted on HN? We really need a new HN.
I'm familiar with the model, I'll probably do it. Except for the $500 part. EEK, thats a lot of money for an experiment.
While I'm running on AWS I strongly support a push for interoperability and freedom from lockin. We'll just have to see what kind of adoption this project gets.
Damn--it's been so long since I looked at it, I'd forgotten I hadn't updated it.

Yes, the old signals are crap. I REALLY have to update that section (which, in my defense, was written about 15 years ago.)
If something is on the homepage already, and from the horses' mouth at that why submit it again ?

You could simply add the TC link in the original posting couldn't you ?
I already signed up and I like what I see. It may not kill facebook (yet) but it will take a huge share from them for sure.

Those who don't like FB will pack and move, and will be making a lot of noise.
Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview
Misleading title. Does not contain any 'story'.
that link doesn't work so well, try this one.
http://miio.com/

the 'groups' page isn't exactly enticing as there is very little content http://miio.com/tabs/groups

So in short, no miio isn't a facebook killer yet. not even close.

Facebook is the facebook killer. I'm convinced that they are smart enough to keep killing off their own initiatives in order to make huge headway in new areas. For example, moving from the 'platform' being inside the walled garden to the entire internet being a part of the platform with single sign-on, and like buttons.

With the way businesses are jumping into facebook fan pages, I think they may just be taking a bite out of twitter, and geo-tagged updates may slow the progress of foursquare, gowalla, etal.

Really? did you think miio was going to kill all that? if so, how?
I wouldn’t call that a paradox. Two opposing forces don’t make a paradox. It’s merely a balance, or a sliding scale, or a tradeoff (between high-risk, low-return and low-risk, high-return). That seems to be a very common and obvious trade-off in life, and I didn’t find anything new in this post’s brief examination of it.
you are the same person who posted this originally. Are you affiliated with miio?
What about the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html

IANAL, but this seems to be at least close to what you are looking for. I do not know exactly what constitutes the difference between a "document" and a "data set" (outside of the physical format"), but I would think that the license could apply to any data set printed on paper, so it could also apply to one in digital format.
I attended the design summit, and I believe this is going to be a really big deal.

Whether it's a big hosting company running a public cloud, a corporate running a private cloud, or a smaller dev/test cloud, they can now all run the same free software stack, and software can move freely between those environments. It's clear this announcement will have ripple effects throughout the entire cloud ecosystem. I hope the project will also boost adoption of cloud-style infrastructures, now that the fear of supplier lock-in is removed.
Adding the TC synopsis of the project posted in another thread for continuity.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/18/openstack-org-rackspace-ope...
When you say GPL, do you mean copy left? You could probably use CC-BY-SA for that, but I'd recommend reading this article by John Wilbanks at Science Commons

http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge/2010/06/open_data_an...

as well as the Panton Principles

http://pantonprinciples.org/

In general, like with certain software tools and libraries a copy left license might not be the best choice, which is part of where John comes from.
Hacker Monthly can now be shipped anywhere in the world
some would and some wouldn't. I think those producing things of lasting value probably would continue. Their lives would be much more difficult though. And that doesn't seem very fair.
Check out http://www.twimpact.com, or their japanese licensee http://twimpact.jp while they are upgrading. It's like Google PageRank for Tweets.
A friend of mine has been doing something similar for a while: http://www.forevermissed.com/
I'm curious about something: is doing a full reprint of the NYT page like this acceptable use? How's the conversion on that blog entry?
GuruFi - http://gurufi.com/ : Service for directly connecting essay editors with clients.

We are still very much an alpha site, but we are bootstrapped and breaking even. We hope to add transparency to an otherwise obscured industry and to generally give people a chance to get writing help from experts.
> Second, you can't really cheat your biology in the long run, because your brain will always compensate for any psychoactive drug you consume.

Not true; this is a common pop-sci myth. Nearly all neurological signal processors have numerous types of inputs and outputs. While it is true that the body usually alters drug sensitivity so as to counteract the drug effect, it simultaneously alters many other signal senders and receivers. (You can read about protein kinases and nuclear receptors, which are famously broad spectrum, to learn more about how complicated things are.)

> If you take a drug that increases the amount of dopamine in your brain, then your brain will decrease its density of dopamine receptors to compensate.

Which, of course, does not mean that the drug effect is magically cancelled out, but rather that the cell becomes less sensitive to sudden bursts of dopamine from its neighbors. The drug might also affect not simply the magnitude of receptor sensitivity, but the rate at which the receptor desensitizes during continued stimulation, as well as the firing pattern of the neuron.

Even the receptors themselves are complicated. Most neurotransmitters are received by a family of several distinct receptor types: stimulating one type may make any imaginable change on the other types. Many receptors are made of several interchangeable subunits: the levels of the subunits can change independently, tuning complex patterns of activity rather than simply compensating for the drug. Many receptors are actually receptor complexes that receive several neurotransmitters at the same time: understanding these is presently a scientific tar pit. (IIRC there are several important dopamine-serotonin receptor complexes. The NMDA receptor complex is famously sensitive to a slew of things.)

> And if you increase the ability of your receptors to bind to dopamine, the amount of dopamine in your brain will decrease.

You might find it enlightening to study the difference between postsynaptic receptors and presynaptic autoreceptors.

> Virtually every longterm study on every pharma drug shows that you are worse off in the long run than if you'd never taken it at all, ...

This is not even remotely true. Many drugs are conclusively proven to be very effective (assuming proper patient selection). Popular stand-bys, like those for inflammation and blood pressure, are popular precisely because they Just Work. For as long as you keep taking them.

The central nervous system drugs work too, although the statistics are less impressive. The main problem is that the available drugs are outnumbered by the brain's possible failure modes, so the efficacy rate tends to lag. A related problem is that the drugs tend to be broad spectrum, so it can be tough to dial up to an effective dose without running into unacceptable side effects.
Yes, it's not just the volume of the noise, it's the nuisance: constant buzzing noises (especially high-frequency ones) are much more annoying than random 'household' noises, even if they are not as loud. I would have thought though that for safety and commercial reasons the wind farms would be built some distance away from population centres.
http://webchiever.com - web achievements

http://inquiryapp.com - faq hosting service
Take a day and make a video pitch. Nothing terribly complicated, just sketch out some things on a whiteboard and provide some narration (even stick figures if you must). Communicate clearly about what the product is, what problem it solves.

Take that video pitch and e-mail it to the 14 forum posters along with a very personalized cover msg. Use that as an intro to start talking one-on-one with them about developing the features.

The "idea" isn't "validated" until you've made a successful exit (or whatever your ultimate goal is). Until then, you need to be talking to customers every day, most of the day, continually validating everything from the featureset to the tagline to the placement of each button.
This idea has been batted around for a while and in fact the biggest risk to getting a project like this aloft will be regulators like the FAA.
$50 then. Adwords is great like that.
One way to set these expectations up front is to think of possible scope changes before the client does -- list those items as "excluded" in your contract or estimate. If the client then decides to add any excluded items, you can raise the price or extend the deadline accordingly.
90% of the works created are crap anyway.
In a World of Online News, Burnout Starts Younger
My own startup: Visual Website Optimizer http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

And, yes, we haven't gotten much press. Proof: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520001
This will not work. It uses too much space and It looks like it will need repairs or at least maintenance all the time.