skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might be hard to become a millionaire entrepreneur, but it's not hard to replace a day job with a few niche websites.

Frankly, I believe anyone wasting 8+ hours a day working to make someone else rich should think about changing their life.

It's hard to beat the feeling of looking in your inbox and seeing your daily income report exceeds what you would have made working all day at bigco... Especially when you just spent the whole day pursuing some random hobby, visiting friends and relatives, or maybe just reading a book.
This kind of "I never said that" semantic quibble raises one essential question: Have you stopped beating your elderly mother yet?

Things have implications beyond their explicit claims.
The only thing that needs to be changed is this post getting 33 upvotes. Flagged.
gReader is a really solid 3rd party RSS reader, that I've grown completely accustomed to. I'm not sure I really need / want to switch to the official one now.
I think you are right about how it reflects a different time.

I doubt many average farmers kids made it through to 8th Grade though. Anyone who was taking the 8th Grade exam was probably reasonably wealthy, looking to continue studying, and take on a profession of some kind.
"Although Nook Color won’t support Flash at launch"

I see, thanks.
I've donated to OpenBSD, which is my favorite of the BSDs.
All thing being equal, sure, but I think it's obvious that Joe Lieberman calling for a site to be taken down is considerably different than you or I saying the same thing.

Being a member of the most powerful people in the most powerful country in the world always affords you powers not directly enumerated in the constitution.
I hope the Barbra Streisand Effect happens here.

I love Kik; it is a brilliantly simple app that I use everyday and I would certainly be happy if more of my friends used it.
Sure, I totally agree. But going the other way is much less practical/pleasant. hg-git is one of the things Github has going for it.
Beautiful analogy! To mote it further: Boring but literate things like accountancy have a bigger impact an the real world than poetry.
most people on this site are younger...when you are 22-25, you can afford to invest 2-3 years into chasing a dream.

Pretty much everyone does it, you have the people in the band waiting to get big, you have people with liberal arts majors trying to find a job in their field, you have people back packing through Europe...it's just the rebellious phase of trying to avoid being a cog in the machine.

Eventually(28-30) people either succeed or fail, and if they fail, they go get that life sucking corporate job and settle for a life of mediocrity.

I do find that HN tends to focus way too much on overnight success, most people jump from one idea to the next waiting for that instant homerun.
The claim at the top that they're saying is "false" is: "An 1895 graduation examination for public school students demonstrates a shocking decline in educational standards", a claim that's usually attached to this document when it's being forwarded around the internet. It's true that this post doesn't make that claim, but I posted the Snopes link just to try to head off the conversation from going in that direction. My comment would have been much better if I'd added more than just the link, though.
Oscar Swartz[1] is the man behind Bahnhof, the Swedish company that Wikileaks are using for their infrastructure needs. Oscar is a man of principle and would never sell out to the establishment the way Amazon did.

There's acutally a bunch of swedes that are standing up for the internet as we know it. Among them the guys over at the pirate bay. What's cool about this is that when you have people being activists in their own ways, for a certain cause, things tend to work out.

There's been a lot of news coverage on these things in Sweden and people got really upset when an internet surveillance bill was passed in the swedish parliament.
So we've figured it out in Sweden, but we can't do it alone. Most of the internet-hostile bills in Sweden are a result of EU policies, there needs to be a wider movement in Europe.

Also, people like Joe Lieberman have to be stopped, first "the internet kill switch" and now this? Come on, give me a break. These people are taking it too far.

[1] = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Swartz
Snopes' notes suggest that the exam was first printed in the Salina Journal. Their website includes this page, which includes some more backstory, as well as answers: http://www.salina.com/1895test/
But these leaks might make him look bad, and that hurts the next re-election.

Welcome to Amerika, where anyone who speaks out against you is branded a terrorist. (I have downmodded this exact comment a number of times, because I never thought it was really true. But this time, that's exactly what's happening! There is a well-established legal precedent in the US that you can publish anything that has been leaked, regardless of how you got that information. The person who leaked it gets in trouble, not the person who tells everyone about it. But now... we want to throw away our freedoms and call wikileaks a "terrorist organization". What the fuck? Terrorists fly airplanes full of people into buildings full of people. This is a collection of documents that say China hacked Google. NOT THE SAME AT ALL!)

</rant>
Traditional assignment considered harmful [pdf]
If this is Hacker News, why is there no similar-story clustering algorithm (among other things)?
Note that starting with the torch bb's have a webkit browser.
> Sure some of you will succeed with their ideas, but most will just become depressed after realizing how they spend their LIFE.

For many of us, the journey is at least as important as the destination. If you enjoy the journey it's not really depressing not to succeed.
http://gaddbiwdftapglkq.tor2web.com/wiki/Wikileaks is down.
I continue to disagree with that concept. Mac OS X would not suddenly become better for normal users if Apple ripped out Terminal.app and forbade anything that replaced its functionality.
Surely it is more important what it is used for, rather than anything else.
... and, in my experience, followed up with a comment about how "obviously shoveling money at the department of education doesn't fix anything."
I am not an entrepreneur, I am a professional working for the man. I love HN because it is one of the smartest online communities I know of. I like learning from smart people.
Nah, BitTorrent is fine for this sort of thing. It's much more illegal to distribute a new movie than it is to distribute a bunch of now-public government documents.
Good suggestion!

And $3 per article can also add up, if you have a scalable solution.
True, but why do we always, always, always have to turn everything into a race issue. I'm tired of "he's white" being the first thing anyone mentions.

Forget about hard work or good ideas...it's all about being white right?
I see it only on Page 2 an hour later. You were probably on the trailing end of the rollout.
More specifically, this is a test heavily based on facts. Nothing wrong with that. Knowing and retaining facts is important to life. Even if you have Google.

But the relevance of facts is based on context, and will change through time. Many of the facts tested for just aren't relevant in today's life. It's likely several of these weren't even relevant back in 1895 and were just added because 'they were always asked' or something.
"pocket exception," also trendiest phone (phones are fashion accessories as well as devices)
Our tax dollars at work. And people complain about healthcare being too expensive...
How to create temperatures below absolute zero
"I wouldn't be surprised if by playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could even replace the bathroom scale."

I'd be surprised. Very, very, very surprised.
I'm guessing because pg does it in his spare time. Maybe he should take YC funding and really kick this thing into high gear.
The stuff hosted by wikileaks is not illegal. A lot of people would like it to be, but it is not. There have been a number of articles yesterday going into this in great depth.
Yes. Looks like Tropo focuses more on language APIs, twilio seems to be pushing it's XML/JSON over HTTP, though it also has some langauage APIs that wrap the web stuff.

Though keep in mind, Voxeo's been around for a while. It's probably more accurate to say Twilio is a competitor to them.
Jobs may be a perfectionist, but he is ultimately just the CEO. As such, he's an agent to the true owners (shareholders). His laser sharp focus on design has been extremely profitable and thus his interests are aligned with those of shareholders. When these interests get out of sync, see ya Steve.

Its hard to imagine now but there will be Apple without their fearless leader one day. They are a profit seeking venture like any other--brilliant marketing has people convinced otherwise.
This always makes me think of Isaac Asimov's classic essay, "Forget It!" in which he gets a hold of a hundred-year-old math textbook and writes about what's in there that isn't taught anymore. (A lot of stuff about computation using long-forgotten English units of measurement, for one.)

Anyone know if it's online? I have a print copy, but I can't find anything with a quick Googling.
Brilliant - thanks - I've now added that to them all.

But I'm giving up now - I need some sleep.
Article that touches on some of this: http://www.slate.com/id/2273197/
That's lovely. <Goes back to using FeedR>
per resolver.

Think about how much bandwidth is used every day for downloading porn. Use 1% of that for poisoning DNS, and DNS points wherever the poisoners want it to.
Chromium Blog: Rolling out a sandbox for Adobe Flash Player
Ask HN: Where's the beef--er--Search?
I'm probably being really dense here. Where is the search? I'm trying to look up community sentiment on a vendor, Chargify. Is there a simple text lookup, hash, some input field I'm not activating/seeing?
Attention shoppers: there's a new Foursquare mayor at this goddamn Safeway.
You don't have to use Microsoft if you don't want to either -- just don't work somewhere that requires MS products. Do you suppose that there aren't companies where using Apple products is required? There are.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM...

Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft...

Nobody ever got fired for choosing RIM...

Notice a pattern? Taking the "safe" bet is fine for a while, but nothing stays the same forever. Businesses who take advantage of new technologies gain an advantage, not only in the technology department, but in the staffing department. Smart, driven employees want to work at a place where the tools are interesting and current. Burying your head in the sand and reciting, "business users don't care about apps", is about as wrong-headed as sticking to the AS400 platform for new development in the nineties.
As a "sort of" haskell programmer recently I admit I found it quite funny.
If I remember correctly I was tested on stuff that is just as hard or harder at the end of 8th grade. Maybe with less rote memorization and more thinking, more opportunity to demonstrate that I actually understood everything [0].

Consider also that they talked about all those things prior to the exam. Could you pass it right now? Maybe not. Could you pass it after a few weeks learning about the material? With flying colors.

It’s interesting to read the questions but certainly not at all indicative of any developments in the educational system. You need statistics and creative social scientists to find out something about that.

[0] I personally don’t like rote memorization. I recognize that rote memorization can sometimes be useful – I don’t need a calculator for simple multiplications – but I would much rather just understand something and develop from that understanding a clear picture of which facts are important enough to memorize.
It would be great if you could keep the debate civil. Mr. Lieberman is not just anybody. He is an official of the state with the power to hurt Amazon's business interests in many ways that are not available to a school janitor. But instead of using the great legal and legislative powers and resources he has, he chose to use his personal influence to suppress information he doesn't like.
Calling the iPhone an iPad mini (or iPad nano) is a common joke as well.
I'd be curious to see HN's stats.
Beautiful Young Minds: A tale of the International Math Olympiad (videos/2006)
"But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials,"

Good one Google.
I suspect the percentage of GDP from agriculture (and related industries) in 1895 was a fair bit higher than it is today.
I think this is worth keeping in mind for perspective. Especially youngsters -- anyone under 25 -- should keep in mind that the lifestyle glorified here is just one option, and the obsession with it is entirely because of the dramatic success and riches that people have obtained through internet and other technical entrepreneurship in the last couple of decades. Rewind fifteen years, and people were not obsessed with this route. Fast-forward fifteen years and you will probably find the same thing. The fervor surrounding entrepreneurship is because some of the biggest movers and shakers in computing in the last twenty years, and certainly the ones who have been most rewarded with fame and riches, have been entrepreneurs.

Personally, as someone who grew up glorifying and obsessing about academia the same way people here focus on entrepreneurship, I have that perspective built-in. Or rather, HN itself provides the perspective by reminding me that different people get worked up over different things, and there's no single dream mandated for everybody. But even I'm vulnerable to "startup envy," despite never actually finding anything about it appealing except for the prospect of vast riches and everyone on HN thinking I'm really smart.

Also, I think the focus on entrepreneurship distorts discussion about topics that aren't directly related to entrepreneurship, but that's another story and not much of a complaint -- it's natural for discussion in any forum to be influenced by the primary focus of people who frequent it.
...and paraphrasing William Gibson's "...the street finds its own uses for things" ("Burning Chrome" 1982).
The real miracle is that this teacher built a computer for her students to take an English test on in 1895!
To watch an action movie with others I'd put it on the big screen and turn up the surround sound. Watching a history/science documentary by myself I prefer the iPad.

YMMV
If that teacher doesn't explain it, but there are such questions on a test, it certainly would have an impact on whether or not you could pass the 8th grade.

In either case, it does have an effect on whether you know what elementary sounds are. If you missed out on a lot of such mere knowledge, you may also grow up without understanding that the world, and the powers of human beings, can be analyzed in that way. This is likely to have an effect on whether you can analyze at all.
I hope that the Wikileaks dumps have a similar effect of making people more forgiving and less likely to be offended. Diplomatic relationships shouldn't hinge on the use of a single wrong adjective in a thousand word conversation.
Title courtesy of McSweeney's tweet. http://twitter.com/mcsweeneysbooks/status/10081967261351936
Ask HN: Reputable SEO companies?
I get spammed by SEO companies all the time, but Google search is essentially the crown jewel of a business these days, and there is no way I'd risk an SEO company I don't trust. Who has experience with good white hat SEO companies that they can recommend?
Fellow game developer here. I can't wait for "gamification" to die. It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what games are and can be. To make it more annoying, in practice, it often seems to be accompanied by a disrespect for the users.

I'm not saying artificial rewards systems are without any merit (e.g. check out the way people react to karma scores in places like HN), but I've seen no indication that this new buzzword has provoked any sort of actual intellectual interest in this stuff -- more just a race to add badges to everything.

Edit: And there's the downvote for raining on the parade! Shocking.
The Snopes page gives no evidence that it's fake because the snopes never makes the claim that it's fake.

Read the actual 'claim' statment. The claim is that the exam demonstrates a decline in education, not that the exam is real.
For some context, during the Mathletes thread here on HN, someone mentioned this movie, which I hadn't heard of. I found it online (in four parts), and I found it to be a very compelling story.
It's a little unclear to me. The problem is with "the company offering the reward" language. I took that to mean the company that presents the reward for the signups, but you're saying it's the company actually offering the deal, e.g. Amazon. That makes more sense. So that company not only offers their reward but also pays $5 to Reward Level?
This scenario is where my previously discussed startup idea would do really well - if someone could pull it off -
http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dolla...

A completely distributed web host, hosted on people's machines. A lot more difficult to shut down (although, I guess if enough government pressure was put on some local chokepoint, it could be a problem). But if it was designed in such a way, as to mitigate these issues - it could be very powerful....imho that is :)
Homeless to entrepreneur
Also, it's more or equally probable to win the lottery, casino, poker?

One of those is not like the others. In the long run poker is almost entirely a game of skill.
It was never, ever about money:
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/i_want_to_put_a_ding_in_the_...
boo proprietary data!
Statement mailed with finance charges attached. Phone calls to accounts payable to ask where payment is. Phone calls to your contact making sure everything was delivered and acceptable - you're just trying to determine why payment has been delayed.

Personally, the phone call to accounts payable usually works. If not, the phone call to your client contact usually gets it resolved.

Refusal to do more work until past invoices are paid or mentioning that you've got to postpone development on their project for other paying clients (this can backfire).

We also have an automated system that sends out reminders - our response is usually, yes that is an automated process, but, while you're on the phone....
So can I essentially destroy my competitors search rankings by getting enough people to disparage them on the Internet now?
I was really hoping for a widget to be included with this.

Are there any third party readers that include that functionality?
Not at all! For the reason that google explained on the blog, it is a dumb response to remove or penalize this particular company in the wake of the media froth. The admirable and responsible thing to do is to figure out how to make the thing work better in general to cover the hundreds or thousands of similar cases not in the New York Times.

This issue is complex and I don't have great overall answers. It isn't clear how search results should bias based on sentiment. (That's discussed on the blog and here.) One thing I am sure of is that I respect discovering a result they consider bad and looking at the algorithms that caused the result and I don't respect deciding that you got egg on your face for the results of your algorithm in this case and jiggering the results.

Of course, we don't know that Bing didn't come up with algorithmic improvements, but the comment you're replying to isn't refuted in any way by the fact that the result has disappeared (or greatly diminished) in Bing. To the contrary, in addition to my bias to agree with the OP on Google / Bing, when one company says, "We've taken a look, made small improvements already that have some impact, and we're looking to make more" and the search result simply disappears in the other case, I'm inclined to take that as specific evidence of the former doing the better job.
I'll give you nice counter-rant. Downvote if you like, but somebody needs to put what you said in context, so I'll play American Joe Sixpack for that purpose.

What did you expect? Did you honestly think you could dump years of State Department cables on the internet and what? Somebody would come give wikileaks an award? They'd win the Nobel Peace Prize? (yikes, that still might happen)

This is not wikileaks reporting that the war is going badly, ie making a point that we are being lied to by showing the lies. This isn't honorable. If you'll remember, when the Pentagon Papers happened the leaker was fully willing to take whatever punishment came to him. As he should have.

This isn't that, either.

This is some asshole with a computer connection hooking up with somebody else with a grievance and destroying billions of dollars of my collective property. His stated mission is to destroy the structure of my country by making it impossible for various nodes of the country to communicate with each other.

No amount of ranting is going to make an anarchist into a superhero. We need leaks for society to function, not crazy self-centered promoters bent on single-handedly redesigning our way of life.

</rant> (wink)

On a more serious note, I told you guys when this happened that there aren't actions without reactions. If Assange is just getting started? Well the other side is just getting started too. Expect more of this.
I'd know almost nothing about software security if it weren't for this site. That's not a waste of time.

As to pushing people to become entrepreneurs: only extremely lightly, I think. Heck, I doubt if even 10% of the articles on here, much less the higher-ranked ones, have anything to do with entrepreneurship. There are a lot of people here with experience in it though, so of course discussions of such will be tainted with their knowledge. But that's what you get in a community.
searchyc.com or the search link at the bottom of every page on this site
Running Out of Inspiration, Time to Watch TV
If your comment said "this link will teach you to ease your social interactions by guiding you through aligning your natural vibrations" you'd be downvoted for woo.
Boston, MA

MDT Advisers – We’re a small quant investing shop working with machine learning, financial analysis, and the hardest dataset in the world. We’ve got two main types of positions that we’re hiring for: a dedicated developer position, and a general analyst position that’s about 60% programming and 40% financial and statistical analysis -- http://www.mdtadvisers.com/careers/qea.jsp . The people, problems, and pay are good, and we aim for good work-life balance(e.g. no 60 hour weeks).

You can email me at jlewicke@mdtadvisers.com with any questions you have.
We still do this in English; consider "Free software" versus "free software". The first means "libre", the second means "zero cost".

It's not an issue of importance but of making a generic word into one with specific meaning.
Can I select the type of offers that can appear on my site? for example, financial products/services
Is there an official way to mirror wikileaks data, just to help in the event the public internet presence (they're also available on .onion, iirc) is somehow taken down? I have the cryptic "insurance.aes256" file from earlier this year, but is there any way normal users can help back up readble parts of wikileaks?
Yes, in English many nouns used to be capitalized but are not today.

(And speaking of capitalization, I can't beleive Deletionpedia has a whole page about whether "Internet" should be capitalized or not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_capitalization_convent... )
That would be reddit.
Bad code smells - A Taxonomy
Given that github is already completely free for public repositories, I think they already have a suitable test drive offering.
It would take maybe 3 days for someone to come up with an algorithm, implement it and send it to pg ready-for-use. All he has to do is ask.
The Emacs 30 Day Challenge