skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for posting the interview. The last time I read an old interview of Gates - more than 5 years ago, it was a huge belief changer for me.

This was just in time, was wondering how to structure my small company. Has got lots go good pointers.
Shit was wearing away Lincoln's head so they turned off the lights
This is very disappointing. These community sites like reddit and the old Digg are great for finding funny and unusual content, but they are very poor for discovering new content tailored to specific interests. Twitter is barely serviceable for this purpose, but there's also a lot of fluff.

I was projecting my hopes of personalized content discovery onto My News, but it looks hopeless now.
I am now reading The Fourth Paraidgm in which Mark Abbott talks about "A new path for science?" where he says discoveries and teaching will happen at the "edges." I think Khan Academy is a good example.
Khan!
Thanks PureSin, we'll definitely look into that :)
Or in the case of my Samsung Moment, the Radio Interface Layer is flaky and will cause random data lockups. Samsung officially stopped updating the phone back around May (yay, 8 months of support from release date!), so even if I could continue upgrading my OS without their help, nobody will ever fix the hardware driver, it will always randomly lock up.
It sounds like you're defining "SEO" as "The parts of SEO I don't like." Link-building is integral to a campaign like that. If you call it "outreach," that's fine, but there's still a big difference--you can target sites that rank well for your target keywords, which will net you more effective links than you'd otherwise get.
can someone please explain, physically, wtf an internet 'kill switch' is?
I'm not defending the dodgy SEO company but I think a lot of people forget that for a long time buying links was a perfectly "normal" practice and was not penalised by Google (it was a grey area, but at the time - everyone was doing it). Then Google ran an update and lots of sites got penalised for doing it.

In this guys case, it may not even have been an update that did it, but the results of their competition sending a report to Google's web spam team - I've seen this happen to people I've built sites for in the past. It's a morally questionable tactic, but I've seen sites benefit by focusing on bringing their opponents down rather than boosting their own ranking.
1. It's PR. PR via email, but still PR.

2. Maybe it's lame.

3. Rarely successful? Any data there? It has certainly worked for the people I've done it for.

4. PageRank is not the goal. Qualified, revenue-producing traffic is the goal.
There's no such thing as unlimited; they'd probably terminate the account.
I was hoping not to find anybody from reddit here. It figures it's probably their second greatest place of cyber-congregation.
The real downfall of a lot of empires must be administration, I guess, argh!

No really, in Belgium we even have a minister for simplification of administration, I kid you not!
Wouldn't it better go get an intern for this?

Even with a paid intern, for minimum wage, probably even get government tax credits for a new "hire", and still end up ahead.
Very nice advice. I do think its good to test out a person before you offer any thing considerable big, especially when you don't have a lot of history with him.

Moreover, you also have to consider his ability to keep contributing to the company in the long run too, especially if he is going to be a co-founder.

If you are not sure, a minority stake with a slightly discounted (or not) rate should do.

If he shows himself to be very capable for the long run too and you guys hit it off, you can always offer more later.
Thanks! Domain knowledge - but applying this to a mass market feel a bit mind-bending to me.

Of course, it's still problems and knowledge, and so not qualitatively different from those in a specific niche. I guess the misleading thing is that by the time a mass market is mass, they are well-known (or appear to be).
As an example, Youtube was once small. And while the consumers were perhaps (?) easy to understand, the producers (who created the value), were a much smaller group, a more specific kind of person, using specific new tech (mobile phones) with specific problems. And it only later grew into a mass market (though I guess arguably the producers are still "one kind of customer".)
Push email has been around for years [1], in particular MS Exchange has been push based for as long as I can remember. I honestly can't see how it's a beneficial thing either. I find pretty much every single push service to be extremely distracting. Sure IM has its benefits, it's a great way to communicate with your dev team throughout the day. It's also an unbelievably huge distraction. Turn off your push based services and I can just about guarantee a productivity boost.

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_e-mail
What's new in Cassandra 0.6.5
You also have to be pretty confident about your teaching ability to put that stuff up on the internet for everyone to see. I'd like to put some of my lectures online in a year or two, but currently they don't meet the Khan standard.

Regarding research professors, the chair of the department I was a graduate student at once said that your teaching can only hurt your career; it can never help it.
What a coincidence, that's just like everywhere else too. It's like an eternal september or something.
hey, I have a question that is related to the hacker news guidelines. So, I'm considering taking my blog static. You know, it goes with the whole early 90s feel of my website. Also, I'm lazy and maintaining a good comment system is work.

So, I was thinking, I'd submit every blog post here, and basically say "go to [link to hn story] to comment" (I could also do a ssi include of the hn story comments, but I would be less in the clear from a copyright perspective there, and it'd open me to worrying about things like cross site scripting, which is one of the things I wanted to avoid by going static anyhow, and users would still need to click the link to comment.)

Anyhow, a friend of mine who isn't a hn user thought that spamming up hn with every blog post I wrote would be, well, spammish. My thought is that hn seems to be mostly okay with that sort of thing.

I'd like to get some feedback from others on this idea.
It's a guy in a suit with a DHS badge who shows up at your door and says "you need to drop off the Net right now or the terrorists will win". Or maybe it's a phone call, but over the phone it's hard to tell real cops from Elbonian pranksters.

Edit: I'm not joking; this is my understanding of how the system is supposed to work.
I'm not a startup founder (yet). If I start a company it will have paying customers, not "users", so I wouldn't have that dilemma.
Oracle releases Sun-RPC in Glibc under BSD license
ASk HN : How would you plan the smart way
Hi All! I have been reading all exciting stuff about start ups. To be honest I am not the best CS geek given the fact that i didn't take my courses seriously in school and not the best in coding. All these can be over come by practice. Since I am on visa I really don't have that much flexibility in terms of what I choose to work and where I work.Right now the stuff i don't enjoy a bit.More than money, I want to make something that really helpful to common people.My past interest were serious gaming and environmental issues.So my question to people of hacker community : Given my student visa status, still waiting to get job visa (down votes expected :)) how should I plan my career ,so I can have my own product rolling down the line 5 years(Its just a dummy time frame I have in my mind). Also would appreciate if any body who has been successful to pull it off in spite off huge odds they had, give inspiring stories.
I tend to agree with 'points', so I'll offer my explanation: Doing expensive one-day workshops might be a great way to make money, but it might be damaging to your brand.

To me, it shows that the you are doing everything you can to wring maximum profit out of your existing infrastructure rather than concentrating on improving your core product. It has the same feel as a hot experimental band deciding to license their songs for fast-food commercials --- perhaps a good choice financially, but potentially bad for your image. It has a smell of desperation and greed.

As to the 'scammy' part, I'm guessing[1] that not many people are paying for these sessions of out pocket. Rather, they convince their employer to pay, and that it's worth it. This presents a conflict of interest if the turns out to be not worth the money. When your boss asks you if the company's $1000 was well spent, and it was your idea to go, one might feel compelled to say 'yes' and even to go again the following year regardless of any price increases.

This said, we'll probably be considering such strategies in the future. I have a food business, and while there is no way we could charge $1000/seat, there probably are some things we could do to boost the bottom line.

[1] Jason responds below to point out that most of they are paying directly. I'm surprised, but presume he's right!
> I can sympathize completely with your viewpoint, but in my experience it is a minority one.

It's much more common in C and descendants, which saw widespread use before the rise of the Internet.
I would argue this already being taken advantage of (though 'exploited' seems a bit strong). There are pages such as this one: http://www.facebook.com/pages/96-percent-of-people-cant-figu... that require the user to 'like' it before they can see whatever it is.

It would be interesting to see what sectors are targeting this new spam avenue. Facebook's anti-spam approach is largely effective though -- as a centralised service they have a lot of behaviour metrics to characterise misbehaviour.
I consider it spammish too (there's my feedback.) But my observation is that there are a ton of people who link their own blog posts all the time, and if the blog posts are of an OK quality, everyone here seems to be fine with it.
It's too bad the article doesn't include more numbers on accuracy - it would be interesting to see if there's a big difference between the ruling of the on-court judges and the camera system.

It'd also be interesting to know how often close calls happen on important points, and how often those are challenged. My guess would be that challenges are almost always used when the point matters, and the low challenge rate is because most controversial calls happen in routine situations like 40-love.
In the Windows 3.0 and 3.1 days, they didn't. Almost all the PC manufacturers used to include extensively customized desktop UI's. And man were they awful.

Edit: Here's a link to screenshots for the custom UI shell that Packard Bell used to ship with Win3.1 and Win95. Prepare for the horror! :-) http://toastytech.com/guis/pbnav35.html
This was obvious during the conversion of random lists and groups into data-ized Like graphs. They made it known this was possible. That's why I saw the blip from Futurama when they post a clip from their new episode, etc...

It's intended, and for all intents and purposes, desired. If you don't want to see the New Items from a band/artist/website, don't like it.

Not sure what was expected.
I think a lot of people don't realise this at all.

It's a random website, it's not the facebook page.

The whole like thing is a massive security and privacy disaster waiting to happen.
Tell HN: How we optimized our sales funnel using customer feedback
You should have said something that day when some guy at #clojure threw a hissy-fit because I told him not to camelCase Lisp code.
> I doubt he wants to force other people to change their habits so that he can get information faster.

I think that's exactly what he's going for. Why else would you make email "realtime".
> By realtime the autor means that it would pop up like an IM/SMS. I'm not so sure I'm convinced that emails popping up like IMs is a good idea.

Exactly. I think the ideal situation would be for IM and SMS be integrated (or just have one win out) and for your IM/SMS messanger be integrated into your email inbox. Then, have an option to be either "available" or "not available" for IM/SMS. IM/SMSs sent when you're not available would show up like email in an inbox.

This is basically what google is doing with gmail and gchat. The only problem right now is that I can't do gchat on my cell phone. Also, the SMS/IM standard has to be as open as the email standard, where I can contact everyone.
I agree. Most information doesn't need to be learned in realtime, just made available in realtime. If you need data, you should be able to find it. If you don't need it, it shouldn't command your valuable attention.

Email lets each participant manage their attention according to their priorities. If you're arm-deep in refactoring a class hierarchy, you don't want me to call, especially if I just want to blather about hockey. Email also feels more scalable than instant messenger - I asynchronously communicate with more than a dozen people every few hours with email, but IMing or texting starts to feel overwhelming at n >= 5
True, but meeting events can have optional parameters. Location sharing could be added.

[x] Share my location with other attendees during this event.
Twitter Ending Basic Auth Support At 8 AM PT
Ask HN: Cool intro videos for your startup's landing page?
I figured this would be a good place to ask. Does anyone have any recommendations for flash design shops or individuals who specialize in video intros for a website's product or web app?

The video intro on the Dropbox site would be an example of a great video intro and the kind I'm looking for.
America On $195 A Week
If a customer spends 90% of their time in service specific apps and iAds are the preferred ad platform for free apps, then Google is losing a chunk of their revenue stream. Heck, if a person buys the apps without advertising that further eats into revenue.

I get the feeling "there is an app for that" means that people have internalized getting an app instead of using the web for services where an app is available.
A place for children's book authors to do 'readings' of their books online.
Ah I didn't see that-- just saw the generated code. Nice. You might want to add that to step 3 on the homepage, and have the button say "download code and images".
You couldn't be more wrong. Reddit's subreddit feature is it's best, most underutilized, and most ignored feature -- especially by its side seat critics.

(edit, it's/its)
Dell has a big enterprise sales force. How long before they start pushing some "all-in-one" purchases that bring this phone (or the next version) to the enterprise?
I have to admit, I hate seeing SEO posts submitted here. Not because I don't like them, but because of the ignorance so many of you show towards any use or mention of SEO.

SEO isn't bad, Google themself has an SEO guide they released for webmasters. Building links is not a bad thing, Google created the entire link building game by relying on them for determining ranking.

Some of you need to step down from your damn pedestal and realize that marketing makes money. No one is going to link to your site if they don't know it exists. Link building and SEO is not illegal, and is a very valid way to make money.

I would imagine the vast majority of you have nowhere near enough experience to even comment on the use of SEO as opposed to when it comes to something like another Haskell VS. OCaml post.

EDIT: for misuse of a word
I continue to find this funny as digg users file into other sites, reddit included, and talk about how great it is compared to digg, how happy they are that they "switched".

Number one, digg's story quality tanked during version 2 and the comments went along with it. Version 3 brought an even more broken commenting system, and more of the same run of the mill storieds. Version 3 also brought in some ridiculous lag, that for whatever reason, managed to post articles from Engadget, reddit, etc days later. Digg was the place to get tech news. With version 3, it was the place to get reddit's news from 3 days ago.

Now with Version 4 there are auto submitted "publisher" stories. This is what's causing people to jump ship? Frankly, if that's the reason they're leaving digg, I hope they stay away from the social news sites I'm on.
Oxford English Dictionary Could Go Out Of Print Thanks To Internet
It's a term used to scare people. There won't actually be a physical switch to kill the internet.

If anything, it will be the authority to disconnect portions of the net. Probably by asking ISPs to cooperate.
Thanks for the excellent essay. The only thing I can add is some illustrating pictures etc. of sidewalks to nowhere or one replaced after only 5 years: http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/search?q=sidewalk

That said, my family and I have used CCC infrastructure out in the west in times past. Good investment? Don't know, we were vacationing.

A relevant example this many decades in the future? I seriously doubt it, as you note in your comment on dregs. Which is I gather a lot of what happened in Japan in the last two decades: they've now got some really super-duper infrastructure all over for a steadily aging and decreasing population (peaked in 2006 and is now accelerating downwards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Populatio...).
The Collapsing Sun: Is the Sun Dying as We Watch?
At least one friend of mine was really bummed when he heard this.
How did he know what guns and swords are? There are plenty of outside influences that could pass on societal gender norms even if the parents avoid doing so.

But of course. This is exactly what ojbyrne said at the beginning of the thread: "parents underestimating the influence of society vs their own influence".
Sigh, let us think about this: could it be that players just don't see any more challenge-able balls? I mean if someone already averages about 30% per challenge for their existing challenges, it is unlikely that any additional challenges will be worthy at all.
And he didn't even have the decency to use his real name. (That or no one has ever mentioned him on the Internet ever.)
The coming Oauthcalypse
You will be excluding iPad and iPhone users but you probably know that already.
Can't check from here, but this looks like a duplicate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492835

Many, many comments there.
I think the problem you're having on this discussion is that there is no set in stone definition of SEO.

Some people consider driving traffic to your site to be a part of SEO, you don't.
So, where's nickb?

Oh, and Erlang, Erlang, Erlang.

That is all.
In the guys defense, he's not exactly Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He runs a freaking flower shop. SEO isn't exactly a 'core-copentency'. I don't think it was unreasonable for him to assume that the business' he hired to do SEO were operating in a legal and ethical manner.
How about doing it the other way around? How much value do you think a certain feature is worth? How much time should you spend producing that feature, as relative to its value? Then, figure out a way to ship a viable implementation in that amount of time.

There are many techniques for estimating how long software development tasks will take primarily because they all suck. Estimating takes time, and is almost always wrong. Some people even advocate figuring out how off your estimates are, to improve your future estimates, so you can be a better estimator. What?

I think it's best to stop estimating and start shipping.
I really hope this is it. I hope that this is global thermonuclear war. There are definitely games afoot, I find it peculiar that in the course of a few days a few of the last generations player are suing the new kids on the block. I really hope that they all open their patent war chest and have it all out and when the smoke clears, the carnage and economic damage is done the world realizes that software patents do not achieve their goal.
Thanks, I appreciate that and might do it, though I don't yet feel I have more than my write up of 2 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1508379
Exactly, I don't remember techcrunch ever announcing that they would launch at $499. The whole vision of the product was being sub $300.
Skype chat on the iPhone is like this(though sometimes delayed based on load I guess) and for the most part fast to send you push notifications. With the backgrounding it is available for a few hours of inactivity before needing to re login.

Edit: wow the ipad messed up my sentence.
did some minor polishing, removed the blacks :p.
ok it's back now!
mrtron, start-up you say? Toronto you say? Do you ever hit StartupDrinks?
thanks.. changed the title.
I would not only LOVE something like this, but I'd also like to be able to subscribe to the page updates (so I can read followup / interesting comments in a thread).

I think I can do the latter with the RSS feed, but just haven't set it up.
Austrian economics is heavily into modeling, even though they don't usually call it that. In fact, its immersion in the ontological, methodological and epistemological issues around economics (and some nearby social sciences) is in many aspects unique in comparison with the more mainstream approaches.

The thing is, most "Austrians" traditionally avoid conventional mathematical models, as well as formal notations, preferring to use plain textual reasoning. In some aspects it's good: they do not limit themselves only to what is easily rendered to math (correlations go well with maths, causal relations not so well (but perhaps manageable), formalizing teleological reasoning about human choice-making is much harder).

In other aspects, the lack of formal notations is really bad: most modern economists have mathematical, not philosophical training, and to an unaccustomed eye the Austrian texts actually do look like non-sensical hand-waving. It takes quite some studying to see the actual rigorous structure and careful choice of terms behind those walls of text -- and I won't go into why there aren't that many incentives for most people to study those kinds of books.

I actually think Austrians would gain a lot from adopting more formal notations (perhaps not of the kind adopted by mainstream nowadays). After all, Hayek himself have failed to finish his own book on the theory of capital (which is one of the distinctive concepts in the Austrian economics), because of the sheer complexity of it. Keeping rigor and precision without the formal language is really hard; and formalized representations might be better suited for independent review and verification.

However, in case of economics, the problem domain doesn't lend itself for easy formalization.

> Does Austrian economics make an testable predictions? Is it based on empirical data?

These are some hard questions about Austrians that pop up quite often. It's true that at its heart much of Austrian economics is based on deductive reasoning from a priori assumptions (the correct analogy, they say, is mathematics, not physics). Theories do not follow from the facts; instead, the observed facts are explained on the basis of the theories we find reasonable, and the best theories are those that provide the best (i.e., the simplest and the most general) explanations. This is not really a uniquely Austrian approach, but I believe it's a good way to approach their research.

However, there's not a single strong view on apriorism even within the Austrian school. Mises indeed was quite a radical a-prioist. Hayek and Menger much less so -- and that, I believe, for a good reason.
You're clearly in a different business to mine. Someone comes and asks me how much a feature will cost I'd damn well better be a good estimator, because it's usually a fixed price contract for someone with flow-down penalty clauses.

In short, sometimes estimation matters. Knowing when it does and doesn't matter is a different question and a different skill. Perhaps for you it never matters, but before you diss someone as heavily as you just did, I suggest you consider that some people have different circumstances than yours.
Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds