skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't forget they have an OS as well, even if they were doing it today, how could we know? Who knows if they are doing it covertly under the guise of windows updates.

Disclaimer: I don't actually believe they do.
I thought the point of git was that it was decentralised. So even if the server died, he wouldn't lose anything would he?

You can also stick a git repo on top of Dropbox... There are several articles about how to do this if you do a quick google.
Who is Wubi (is that a meme ?)
It's for the best I'm sure. Opera was enormously buggy on my PPC laptop anyway, to the point of being pointless to try and use. But it remains the best browser around on every other computer I use, so consolidation of effort seems like an appropriate decision.
The funny thing about all this is that since the beginning of the internet, no data privacy issues were ever raised, and that at some point (i may be wrong, but symbolically i would say it started when facebook became really huge) it became a real topic. Coincidentally, facebook becoming huge marked the moment when everybody started to use their real names instead of nicknames. Maybe it's time to do the math, and start wondering if using your real name for every post, every comment, every little lolcat action you take online is really worth signing it with your real name. Returning to nicknames for most of your online appearances would probably render Mr Schmidt's point moot
My HTC Incredible just prompted me to update to Froyo this morning...
I think the fact that they were not anonymous tremendously helped the credibility of wikileaks.

That that backfires now is not a reason to say it was bad of them to do this in the first place.

Also, there is nobody guilty until they've been proven guilty.

If this is a smear job and it comes out as such in the longer term then wikileaks stature will only grow, if it isn't and Assange steps down I don't doubt that the next person to take his place will know that he/she is living in a glass box and needs to act accordingly.

wikileaks > Julian Assange.
FWIW, when he asked my permission, he told me about the charge and I was supportive of it (though worried about the reduced reader numbers more than anything ;-))
yes. these sorts of things need to be examined... this is a lot of why running an abuse desk is so difficult, because you /will/ get bogus claims. Most claims are fairly obviously legitimate. A few are obviously bogus, and a few really are questionable. It takes skill to know the difference, and mistakes are obviously quite bad for your reputation.
Girls must browse through arbitrary, unstandardized sizes and try on a range of jeans from size 2-4, for example, to find ones that fit right.

That's simply not true. Yes, there are a few brands that make everything in their own sizes but most denim manufacturers make jeans by waist size. Go to saks.com and check out their denim shop. Not a single brand sized by 2-4 as you say... everything sized by actual waist in inches. The others (Gap, J Crew, whatever) have repeat shoppers who know their sizes in that particular maker so it's not at all confusing or "broken".
I think the source of advice is key. It seems to me that there are a lot of 'startup experts' that don't have so much startup success.

This is my principle on advice: If the advice comes from someone that has achieved a lot in the area I am interested in, I take careful heed. If not, not so much. :)

My corollary principle on advice: Never take advice on something from someone that has not achieved a measure of success in that area.
ah, thanks! So it's the incremental improvement of a Harvard vs. a Cornell, or even a (gasp!) non-ivy. That makes sense, i suppose. I think I got confused because, as you acknowledge,

"We might not be the best analyst, the best client
negotiator, or the best excel wrangler,"

which suggests that they are not actually experts, right? I.e., school-choice and performance/ability are already divergent, but that's really not the point of the school.

So i guess, compared what some of the other posters here are saying, if you didn't go to a top-flight school, then you actually don't have a chance to get into these places, right?
There's probably money in that. Imagine a service that would allow me to eradicate bits of my past. Could be handy.
And do you?
How to negotiate a royalty based deal?
Hi Guys,

Through out the past year I have designed a control system that is luckily enough very sought after. One of the companies I am currently in discussions with have proposed a royalty based agreement and they want to use my system with one of their existing customers.

I need some urgent advice on how to best negotiate such a deal, what are the industry norm rates, is there anyway I can ask for some payment up front, plus any other advice you guys can think of...

Thanks in advance!
I made a small search on youtube to see some videos related to turning a sphere inside out.
Please have a look at this gem : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_w4HYXuo9M#
Especially the snelpiller's comment
> That product was probably ahead of its time, it's not fully in the cloud and it's not free.

> The key enabling factor […] is a secure way to grant temporary access to […] your email to trusted developers out in the larger ecosystem […] - all without ever giving them your precious email password.

> The sky's the limit when you can quickly process huge stores of your own personal data, though.

Am I the only one that find that downright scary? Who wants a future in which several (not just one) profitable companies can access your e-mail and analysing it blazing fast? That may be a dream for some, but for me that's an Orwellian nightmare.

Here's a reminder, for the few that haven't seen it yet: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom-clou...
I agree and disagree with you in equal measures. Paying github is no protection against github messing up, in the end you are still responsible for your data and any subsequent loss will be your problem, regardless of the cause of the loss.

So github can be a part of a backup strategy but it isn't a strategy by itself.

Likewise, there are plenty of parties that wouldn't dream of storing their data in a third party repository, it could be compromised, there are at least 'n' github employees that now have access to your data etc.

So there is a need for both options, one where you outsource your headache to github and keep a couple of local copies just in case, another where you do have your own repository that you control with the associated backup mechanisms and a number of off-site copies.

Fortunately github makes it easy to do the former and git itself can make it (relatively) easy to do the latter.

For plenty of people the first is enough. For me it wouldn't work, so I'm really happy this got posted.
I'd say mockumentary. Highly enjoyable, but if you actually want to learn how to squat properly, then Craig Weller has some advice in "The Third-World Squat" (http://www.t-nation.com/portal_includes/articles/2007/07-210...).
Is the iDataCenter Ready for its Close Up?
Difference is actually 20,926. Leap years account for 21,600. There is still 326 seconds to find.

I really wonder how google counts them.
I'm all for a contrary point of view, but it would be nice to see you give some reasoning. I have heard some good things about Erlang, but the syntax isn't exactly luring me in. Why would I look at Erlang when I could get good concurrency and bajillions of Java libraries with Clojure?
As the author, I can respond to this:

Given the decentralised nature of Git, having continuous backups becomes less important unless all my computers (including the server) fail at once.

But yes, backups are important, and they are done.
If wikileaks should be allowed to leak state secrets then why should some jokes be taboo?
It just goes to show that a pretty landing page is not all that necessary. Functionality and usefulness are more important than web 2.0 glitz and glamor. You think tarsnap's website is ugly now? You should have seen it at the beginning.

I wish more HN startups would realize that. Almost all of the 'review my startup' posts are just a single page with an email signup form you fill out to be notified when the app will be ready.
The Third-World Squat
It's be cause a year is about 365.24 days. That means every 4 years we add a day, but that actually overcompensates, so every hundred years or so we skip a leap year:

Years that are evenly divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they are also evenly divisible by 400, in which case they are leap years.[1][2] For example, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Similarly, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2500, 2600, 2700, 2900 and 3000 will not be leap years, but 2400 and 2800 will be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year
Ask HN: Writing a master thesis about freemium, need some ideas
The last few years the freemium business model has been talked about and used extensively, but lately companies such as Ning, 37signals, Get Satisfaction and others have started to play down (or remove) their free offering. At the same time, as far as I can see, there have been little mention of this business model in academic articles.

Sachin Rechi (http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2010/02/16/freemium-design-pattern-scale-pricing-with-customer-success) wrote: "I believe we are still early in our understanding of [freemium] models and to date most of the available analysis has been limited to anecdotal evidence, one-off case studies, tips & tricks, and a few early overviews of what’s been tried."

Here are some of the blog posts that inspired me to want to write about freemium: http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/04/is-the-freemium-model-still-viable-for-startups.php, http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2284-eyeballs-still-dont-pay-the-bills, http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/10/17/freemium-is-not-a-business-model

I haven't specifically pinpointed my hypothesis or, generally, what I want to answer in the thesis, so I hope any of you have some interesting ideas as to a possible direction. I just know that I have a keen interest in business models, and want to better understand the how's and why's of the freemium model.

So, dear HN, do you have any ideas, thoughts, examples or articles?
The Origins of abc: Where Does Our Alphabet Come From?
I want to be known as a trustworthy, reliable father; a fun-loving, somewhat reckless friend, and a knowledgeable leader to my colleagues. However, I have no way to separate not only my past, present and future as Gibson suggests but also the different people that I want to be known as right now.

Guess what: there never was such a way, in real life, either.

Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues' children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend" may start telling stories about you.

Controlling your reputation is hard. Keeping different segments of your life from coming into contact with each other is hard. Keeping secrets is hard.

Google and Facebook change the medium, but they don't fundamentally change the rules.
Take a look at your shins. Mine have a significant negative camber, curving out to about 10-15 degrees. Because this puts my feet a few inches forward of a normal person's, I can't rest in a squat; I have to actively lean way forward.

If your shins are normal, though, just work on the leg strength to control your descent, and the ankle forward flexibility required to shift your center of gravity the inch or so foward to compensate for going from the balls of your feet to the whole foot.
I spent a few month in Turkey, and I never did spoil anything.

For public toilets, I actually preferred the squatting version: You do not have to touch them. Just remember to bring your own toilet paper.
Or, use gitosis and be able to control your repositories and access to them much, much easier: http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-e...
As long as the 'venture' is not in the black (and I can't believe that's already the case, given the amount of time and money sunk in the previous issues) I can't see a problem.

But if it were to ever make serious money I would assume that the people that put the magazine together would go for a revenue share model with their authors.

I knew that it was going to be a 'for pay' issue because there was a HN thread on it here but I can see how that would take you aback if you didn't realize it.

Still, it's not as if this issue is all of a sudden making the project huge money, more likely is that it will go a little bit towards reducing the start-up costs.
Also note that 1 month in days is 30.4368499.

There simply isn't a good way to convert between labels for specific periods of time and units for measuring the passing of time. The problem is that language and common usage don't make much of a distinction between the two. If you ask people how long a day is, they'll tell you 24 hours. Even Google will tell you that, but it isn't true. A day is usually 24 hours. DST and leap seconds can both change the length of a day though. So a day isn't a unit for measuring time at all. It's a name for a certain period of time. Leap seconds can even mess with terms that seem bulletproof like "hour" or "minute". When there's a leap second, one minute of the year becomes 61 seconds, and the corresponding hour becomes 3601 seconds.

The only unit of time you can reliably work with is the second (and metric derivations thereof, like millisecond).
It is possible to maintain a sense of humor and joke about something without actually condoning it.
PS3 open source jailbreak PSGroove released
I just submitted an article that deals with the matter (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652595). The short version: Practice. Hold onto something at first, if you can't keep your balance.

(I do recommend dry practice.)
So you're telling you wouldn't mind someone watching every single mouse click and every word you type on a website without your consent?
Repairing fire damage
Fire damage can be an extreme hardship on physical assets and emotional well being.To clean up the home environment and heal from the trauma left by the fire damage there are many services.For more details please visit the website.http://www.disaster-911.com/home.html
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...

"We talk AND we listen.
We're big fans of transparency and feedback. Technology works so much better combined with a bit of humanity."
No one said they weren't allowed to make the jokes.
What makes you think that? He said 'book', to me that means 'stack of paper with a binding'. E-book would have been a pdf.
Startup Incubator TechStars Invades New York City
What exactly about this suggestion for colonizing Mars has been falling on "deaf" ears, who's been suggesting that we "improve [the] environment by force" on Mars?

The few plans I've seen involve trying to terraform Mars slowly by introducing something like genetically modified high-altitude lichen and going from there. Of course in the process of doing so we'd use the organisms that work, not "force" the things we wish would work.

The challenges of terraforming Mars will be very different than dropping a few trees on Ascension Island, which is what the Royal Navy did.

As an aside, I recommend the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson for an overview of how Mars might be incrementally terraformed through that method.
Are you imaginining standing on the seat, standing on the rim, or standing on the ground in a martial arts horse stance? Because I can see significant possible problems with all of these. (technically, problems with the last would be due to "lack of muscle conditioning," but not many people are conditioned well enough to stay in a horse stance for long).
Deep squatting is good for the knees.

I do it as a weight lifting exercise three times a week. Please squat below parallel (i.e. hip below knees, the bone in your leg should be below parallel to the ground). High squatting above parallel can wreck your knees.
Technology startups? You are so in the wrong business.
Git makes it trivial to replicate your repos to more than one directory, no matter where those directories are located.

Whether or not this makes you "decentralized" depends on where your directories live. Two machines in the same location? Not decentralized.
Please substantiate the claim "The concern is that too many would immediately declare bankruptcy after finishing their education".
In 18 months when you need to a clients project gets deleted and you and find the server version destroyed... well...

Might sound unlikely but it happens.
The problem is, there are people who especially want to connect the different fronts you have right now, and are potentially willing to pay a large amount for it (for example, employers and possible mates), while your teenage exploits are not really interesting.
Most obviously, if you want to run one of Oracle's layered applications (e.g supply chain management or whatever). Sure you probably could beat it into running on Postgres but why would you?

Oracle (the database) is meant to be the integration point for Oracle (everything else). If you aren't running any of Oracle's other products, then it boils down to a pure technical decision - do you need feature X? Is it cheaper to buy it or build it? For example do you use OpenFiler or buy VVM or use ASM that comes with Oracle since you need a database anyway? Or maybe you have exotic spatial data needs. Or you want virtual private database/label security (http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/RLS - Oracle has had this for years, the Postgres guys are still talking about it, the MySQL camp don't even know that there is such a thing).

Now, I am a long-time Oracle user, and even I say, unless you know and can say specifically why you need Oracle, then you should use Postgres or SAP/DB (or in place of Oracle XE, maybe even SQLite). But if you do need it, then it's Oracle or DB/2, choose your poison.
Writing a Compiler in 24 Small Steps [pdf]
It's a rather neat installer for Ubuntu that installs Linux on top of a working Windows system - allowing you to dual boot. The Windows install remains intact.

http://wubi-installer.org/
Yes. But sliverstorm wasn't saying that they go through an intermediate ball-of-foot-squatting.

By the way, practice makes perfect in squatting as in every thing else.
Medallions serve to limit who is allowed to provide the service. There is no need for this limitation in order to ensure honest service.

For example, cabs could earn (and risk losing) a "Good Cabdriving Seal". There's no need for the quantity of such seals to be artificially limited: they could be unlimited, but only awarded to those that prove worthy.

And while we're at it, the agency doing the certification need not be a government agency at all. Why not Good Housekeeping, or Underwriters Laboratories, or Better Business Bureau?
There are services that purport to do that, at least on the web. I think the term is 'reputation management'.
Not really. Most people use the same username or a slight variation thereof for everything they do online. If I read a LiveJournal post you write, I can probably Google your username and discover 90% of your contributions to the web instantly. From all that data I can probably learn enough about you to be scary (where you live, who you hang out with, hobbies, past relationships...), and Google itself could learn basically anything.

Of course all of this varies person to person, but it's already known to be an effective heuristic by the password-stealing community. Point being: we live in a time of powerful data mining algorithms, and they're only going to get better. Anonymity does not come easy.
Yes. But the loss of flexibility does not come automatically with age. If you keep moving, you will keep your flexibility. And you can get it back with practice.
it could also happen that github loses data and it's hard to valuate the exact likelihood of you accidentally deleting two repos or github losing a fileserver and its backup.

Also, if github is down or your repo with them is corrupted, you have to go through their support. If your own server has a problem you can fix it instantly.

I'm not convinced that reliability is the correct reason to go GitHub. Features: Yes. Reliability: Not necessarily.
I like their idea of making the area where they have ads occasionally show something else that might be of interest to persuade people to look even when there are ads.
The rim. The seat, provided it is solidly built and attached. Anecdotally I feel quite stable either way.

Edit: the trick to perching on various narrow surfaces, for me, is to have the heel on one side an the ball of the foot on the other. "Gripping" as it were.
It's customary to remove your shoes in at least Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. British people are strange. They keep their shoes on.
link to google maps
http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=-7.943126,-14.364...
Speak Up for SAY: Mattel suing Special Needs Toy Company
The Press Release - Reloaded: The Three Reasons Why
And then it dies - http://card.ly
The loan is the asset, both in cases of student loans and mortgages.
Hah! tptacek: are you adding this to your list of data points?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639443
If all your computers are in a single location, it's not decentralized in cases of fire, flood, earthquake, or other natural disasters...
I would mark your 'at some point' as pretty early on in the life of the WWW. When web bugs were first introduced (1995? 1997?), there was a huge hew & cry, much along the lines of what we see on HN every time Facebook does something stupid with their privacy settings. The difference is that web bugs was one of the first times some of the implications of the connectedness of the web started to break through the initial excitement/confusion about this (then) brand new thing. Now nobody blinks about web bugs (excepting that big report a while back - Wash Post? - about just how many of the things many sites use - but I don't think that report was new info to anyone involved in the tech side of the web).
It might just be my reading of it but Yes, nothing like rape for a good chuckle. conveys disapproval to me.
Only the government has authority to do something to the cab driver, though. The Better Business Bureau can't tell you to stop driving your cab.

The medaillion system is weird, but it works in new york.

The people who think that the invisible hand of the market would improve cab service are awesomely naive. The reason why cabs aren't fucked up in NYC is because of all the regulations, which can only be enforced because the cabbies have something to lose (the mediallion). If there was no government interference, cabs still wouldn't take credit cards, they wouldn't pick up non-white people, they wouldn't drive you to Brooklyn, they would form their own cabal and eventually rip out their meters and just make up whatever price they wanted to charge you, once you got there.
Is it staged? Mine hasn't been. Actually how would I know?
As mentioned by cdr, "Gitolite" is a spiritual successor to gitosis, and has a lot improvements and new features in management, permissions, and setup.
So it's an atheist trolling Christians?
Aside from RSS feeds, I personally haven't found an affordable (ie free) option. Looks like screen scraping has been the MO of many travel sites (mine included).
> Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues' children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend" may start telling stories about you.

There is a difference between what your reckless friend might spill out when he is drunk and having a permanent record which anyone can have access to at will (with little effort).
Yeah I guess I missed the "virtual worlds" part and focused on "startups" part
Arbitration is not what it used to be: now often a quasi-litigation mess
This... is amazing.