skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Fabulous Showman: The Life and Times of P.T. Barnum by Irving Wallace http://www.amazon.com/Fabulous-Showman-Life-Times-Barnum/dp/...

Barnum was masterful at using the media of his day to promote his various business enterprises:

"I am indebted to the press of the United States for almost every dollar which I possess and for every success as an amusement manager which I have ever achieved. The very great popularity which I have attained both at home and abroad I ascribe almost entirely to the liberal and persistent use of the public journals of this country."

A great read for startup people, even though it's a biography of a 19th-century personality. Chock full of timeless advice and quotes, to whit:

"Without promotion something terrible happens... Nothing!"

"Every crowd has a silver lining."

"Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant."

"Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done."

"If I shoot at the sun I may hit a star."
This combined with the recently rolled out SSL termination in the Elastic Load Balancer product (http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/10/elastic-load-balancer-sup...) makes supporting custom domains a cinch.
The real question is whether the Winklevi fooled anyone.
Google spends a few more million, picks up Widevine DRM software firm
There are many many times that I choose not to buy something from a new vendor after going to retailmenot.com and finding no relevant coupons available. There is definitely a value-add there.
In a similar vein I just finished reading "the man who invented the computer" by Jane Smiley. It's mainly about John Atanasoff but it includes other important figures of early computer development such as Turing, Zuse, Mauchly,Eckert, Von Neumann...

Just came but worth buying if you don't know the story of the ABC and it's relationship to ENIAC.
By 9pm most people were out the door apart from most of the department managers who usually stayed until 10pm-ish.

Coming from Japan, I felt this was fairly normal. Long working hours are part of the culture.
Katrina Wallpaper
Pretty tough to code, but I think I have a preliminary prototype:

exit(1);
Do you really need to block/spam people just for following you?

Now, I ALWAYS thrown down the spam-hammer if someone tries to get my attention through spammy @mentions, but never for just following me, especially if they're semi-legitimate (like the OP).
"It is designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other."

Maybe this isn't a big deal, but wouldn't someone who needs a DNS service either already know this or have a developer or IT guy who has explained to them why they need a DNS service?
All those sub-page widgets can be pre-computed and, thus, cached.

The first web request (at worst) should initiate all those, but you shouldn't be fully computing every query, for every section of code on every page you send for each request.
I had Simon draw a monster version of the mascot from my open source project for no other reason than it was fun. For $8 it seems like a bargain for a bit of a laugh.
I have a much much simpler explanation:

By that sort of logic anything and everything you can imagine is real and anything and everything can get to our universe at any time for any reason with any consequence to it's arrival.

Heres the flaw in the logic:

a) There is an infinite number of universes: sure lets accept this.

b) There exists at least 1 santa clause: sure lets accept this. There is infinite universes so therefore what we consider a santa clause could be a roach in another universe.

c) There must exist at least 1 S.C. which can travel between universes and into ours. Lets assume this is not true. Why? Because we have yet to prove that such a thing is currently possible. Lets move away from proving. There are two possibilities here:

Possibility a: It is possible to travel between universes at any time. Which means that by probability there will be at least one santa that wants to travel to our univese to our plannet at this exact time.

Possibility b: It is impossible to travel between universes, and to keep it simple, to our current time and location. Which means that given infinite iterations, the chance that santa is coming this year is zero.

A or B, the rest is faith. In any case I tend to believe B otherwise I am waiting on my unicorn damnit!

TGJ: To disprove you:

a) Santa can store items in his sack which may be actually stored in a way which does not take up 3 dimentional space.

b) Santa might be a roach (see comments above) so he just needs to visit 24 times for a few minutes with his entire immediate family.

c) It is also possible that santa actually take a VERY long time to delivery gifts one at a time. He travels to each house individually and leaves, at which point he time travels to the exact moment of arrival at the previous house, thus he delivers ALL gives simultaneously.
So Facebook would have a staff dedicated to verifying that you are in the picture? How would they handle identical twins?
It's a lot more favorable when you have few domains and many queries. We have many tens-of-millions of queries per month, on only two domains. This would cut 75% off our DNS hosting.
The real tv journalism gets done by PBS's Frontline.
Well, I wrote my own blogging engine (back in 2000 and I'm still using it) and I've gotten my past two jobs because of it (or rather, what I've written for it). So I would say I've gotten my money's worth out of the code. I've also avoided every exploit dujour that seems endemic with popular blogging engines (mainly due to half-thought out features that interact badly).

The other aspect about writing your own blogging engine (if you can) is that you control every feature that goes in and are not dependent upon a third party to implement (or not). Besides, it's a learning experience.

I'm not saying that everyone should write their own blog engine, but to say that no one should because it's a waste of time is just as bad in the other direction.
Meh - A new web-app that promises to save you time after sales
The original source of the image (http://www.verysmallarray.com/?p=1056) was submitted 12 hours ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1971974).

This is one thing about HN that has annoyed me. If a submission doesn't get voted up quickly, it will never get on the front page. After that, there's a big incentive to submit links that mirror the original content.

Instead of counting the number of votes since submission, it might be better to count the number of votes in the past hour or so. That would make a link submitted long ago jump up in ranking if it was resubmitted or upvoted recently.
You make an important point, but public named negative reviews are common in the field of writing fiction. Then apparently, the social setup that writers live in is different from the academic setup where public negative reviews may have "political" consequences for your career.

Any comments on that? Is there something that the academic world can borrow from the writers' world to remove the discouraging influences you mention? I haven't thought through this since I don't know much about a writer's world.
Depends on your aim. If you are voting with your wallet and you want Amazon to know why, then spamming these threads doesn't do a lot of good. If you are boycotting and you want to recruit others to do so, then spamming these treads does do a lot of good (for you, the boycotter), but in the end it is a solicitation.
What exactly was the violation of the ToS again? Honest question, I really don't know.

At any rate, I'd amend your "if you don't violate the ToS" to "if you don't attract a phone call from a cranky old senator's office", since that's what seems to have prompted the action.
if anyone is wondering about the name, 53 is the port that dns operates over.
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The benefit is simple, rather than buy one or two of our components you can get ALL of the components for that particular platform for less than the price of two components - it's simple, we want you to sample and be impressed by all of our file format processing components.
> Does facebook?

No.
Preventative medicine may do a lot to prolong life and improve the quality of life if properly applied. It's interaction with insurance companies objectives or Medicare reimbursement policies may not always yield the results that you assert.You should make a distinction between insurance to cover catastrophic events and it's use to enforce a variety of social and political objectives. The former involves a certain amount of moral hazard, the latter considerably more.
just learn web framework django(http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/intro/overview/) and use diveintopython(http://diveintopython.org/) as reference :)

all the best.
Can they not do that after the domain expires while it's still in the pending delete phase?
> and Zuckerberg is on the level of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates now

He really isn't. Jobs and Gates brought PC's to the masses, nothing Zuck has done is on that level, not even close.
I wonder how long their software deployment process takes. I do not see this change, nor do I see an option to switch to this change.
For anyone thinking about joining a startup : be very, very careful before you accept a job offer. The main thing to consider is that you'll be working very closely with just a few people (from 2 to a dozen) for the foreseeable future. You'll have to really like these people as you'll be spending an awful lot of time with them.

When I was interviewing last, I was a lot more concerned with what the teams I met were producing than their culture, or how they interacted with each other. Long story short, I ended up working for a company with 10 employees, but I had never felt more alone in my entire life. Small things I took for granted at other jobs like eating lunch with people, sharing jokes, or any type of bonding felt near impossible.

I don't want to discourage anyone from working at a startup, but I feel it is very important that you consider the reality of working in that environment for a considerable amount of time.
Does GreenPeace, the Red Cross, the Peace Corps, the US Government, the United Nations, get a 60 minutes interview when they redo their page?
Your line of code is so long it's causing this Hacker News comments page to have horizontal scrolling! I've never seen that before. :)

In case you didn't know, HN will format code if you prefix it with two spaces like this:

document.querySelectorAll('textarea, select, input:not([type="' + notAllowed.join('"]):not([type="') + '"])') (results in `textarea, select, input:not([type="checkbox"]):not([type="radio"]):not([type="file"]):not([type="submit"]):not([type="image"]):not([type="reset"]):not([type="button"]))`)

It can preserve indentation too:

document.querySelectorAll(
'textarea, select, input:not([type="'
+ notAllowed.join('"]):not([type="')
+ '"])')
Interesting times when people are targeted because of their intelligence in a given matter
So it's interesting that this only works because state names are being used as adjectives in the auto-completed phrases, and in English the adjective comes before the noun. That got me thinking about how auto-complete must function differently for languages where the word order is reversed. Can any HNers who routinely search in such languages give insight into how the differences affect usability?
All of your problems can be solved by exploiting parallelism. If you shard Santa into 1M Santalets, then each Santalet has 1000 seconds to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, etc. If we exploit locality, we could even cut the trip down to a mere 75.5 miles. This is more than adequate for a poky 15 mph reindeer to cover in one night, even given time for eggnog. They payload would also be reduced to a mere 642 pounds. A team of eight reindeerlets could easily handle this.
This is crazy if it's true. Is there any corroborating story from a (I hate to put it this way) more mainstream/trusted source? I'm not sure about this Debka. There's some spelling errors and I've never heard of them.
Well, having Ruby in the name doesn't mean we have to work in ruby right :) ? We work heavily in Lisp and PHP at the moment, but we're always open to exploring other technologies based on what the requirements are for a particular product. But right now, its all Lisp and PHP!
I'm the same as you, and have a few hundred domains that I use with DNS Made Easy. I had just started looking for an alternative to them to try to lower our costs, so I was excited to see this until I saw the price. This will work well for people with a few domains that receive a large number of queries. Anyone know a cheaper alternative to DNS Made Easy?
Even more important, you won't need to solve that pesky captcha each time you wish to log in!
Don't Be an Ass About Airport Security
This reminds me that California has approved construction of a section of high speed rail too.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-high-speed-route-201...

Hard to evaluate the cost/benefit of high speed rail since the costs are obvious while the benefits are delayed and not as obvious. It would be really cool to get from SF to LA in 2-3 hours though.
I worked at a smaller startup recently and it was fairly competitive as far as jobs at other businesses in the area. I wasn't making as much as my friends at Apple, VMWare, or Google, but I made enough to live comfortably and had stock options that would have started me towards "F-U money" had they gone public.

However, that might have something to do with their business model performing very well, and the business being profitable earlier than expected. It all depends.
I don't know how reliable a source "DEBKAfile" is, but just in general, it makes me very uncomfortable that civilian scientists may possibly now be considered legitimate targets for assassination or kidnapping by the US, Israel or others.
I walked my mom, who lives in MN, through the process of switching her iMac over to Google's DNS servers: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html#setu...

Worked like a charm.
Bewafa
"The line is due to open in 2012 and will halve the current travel time between the capital Beijing and Shanghai to five hours."

In the meantime, CA is spending billions to build a 54-mile high speed rail segment from Madera to Corcoran - aka the "train to nowhere".
I found this through Michael Anissimov's blog http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/12/best-...

>Here’s the best productivity blog I’ve found yet, via Patri Friedman.
FTA: "The plans are still in the exploratory stage and Yahoo has not been contacted, the sources said. The plans are also fraught with complications involving myriad moving pieces."

In other words: we're just making sh1t up to get pageviews!
How long do you spend, on the average day, using those websites?
If you could prove to me that hundreds of millions of people interacted either any of those web sites (or even all of those websites) in a meaningful way on a regular basis, I would buy your argument.

Facebook has done a lot of redesigns, this is just a redesign that acts as a suitably rich metaphor for highlighting what the "new social web" is all about, or at least what part of the "new social web" is about at a level with which people can follow along.
If you post public-domain material to your site, you don't "own, or otherwise control all the rights" to it. There is no jurisprudence that says posting public-domain material isn't exactly what Wikileaks did. (People with security clearance have been successfully prosecuted for publicly leaking/publishing classified information; no recipient lacking security clearance ever has)

If the rest of the TOS is full of stuff like that, it would be doubtful it would even be possible to run a significant site without in some way violating the TOS. According to that TOS, one user-submitted comment of copyrighted content and your website could immediately be permanently pulled, even if you took the comment down as fast as humanly possible.
Completely ignores fookyong's point. Do any of the sites you mentioned have 250+ million people using it every day?
Why do you hate to put it that way? Just because people (here at least) don't trust the Main Stream Media(tm) doesn't mean that the word 'mainstream' becomes devalued. Just because people can get their news from bloggers doesn't mean that you must blindly accept anything that any random person (or group) puts on the internet. Trust and reliability count for something.
The violation was cited as being that Wikileaks does not own the content they posted.
WikiLeaks and the Perils of Oversharing
If you're a senior in college right now, the best advice I can give you is to take an idea you have (even if it's not your best) and try to execute it. Even if you don't ever launch, you'll learn a lot about starting a business and getting from the initial idea phase, to design, to launching, to (hopefully) making money. That sort of knowledge is invaluable.

I'm several years out of university myself and just now getting a few of my side projects to that point. It's exciting, but I can't help but worry that I'm behind the curve. Tinkering and design comes fairly naturally to me, but everything else that goes with entrepreneurship ... not so much.
It was somewhat craven of them, on the other hand; I can see it from their point of view Senator Lieberman can make life very difficult for them vis-a-vis local sales tax charged on goods sold across state lines. In my mind Amazon is reacting in a way that protects their short-term interests but they do not realize that they have now given a clear signal that they will cave to pressure.
take your pick, http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&...
Infinite recursion!
I think its ironic that you defend all these perks and team strengthening outings yet you scoff many times at the idea that people looking for balance are not right for your teams, and you insinuate they are weak.

What these outings and perks provide is a certain level of balance.

Additionally, I think that one can find so much inspiration for innovation in areas that are totally unrelated to the tech magic they may focus on at work.

I find inspiration and ideas in the most amazing places, almost all of which come from talking to non-technical people about what it is they do and seeing amazing opportunity to change the way they work, fill a void in an industry or create something based on a need.

limiting your feedback loop to your small, albeit talented pool of resources, is still a limited feedback loop.

Jason, I have a challenge for you: Have some team, or staff of at least five people take a vacation off-grid: NO (Smart)phone, NO email, NO Internet at all - get them all a moleskin notebook and 5 days of staying out of the office, but out of their homes with no access to the online world and challenge them to come back with some ideas that were formulated from their talking to, interacting with and observing the world around them. (They can use voice-phone only for family)

They need journal the week by hand - and none can interact with eachother.

Have them return with the goal of a list of goals/ideas/opportunities.

I think this would reveal a lot about the team and your work ethos.
Simply put, what mcdavis said. GitHub also has a history of being communicative during issues; not to mention near-instantaneous fixes of problems (anybody remember how unbelievably quickly they re-architected their entire site to deal with the scaling and speed problems that had barely started to surface? how about the lack of speed issues since?) as opposed to these things I’m hearing of people seeing the same, obvious, bugs over the last two years or so.
> I think Wikileaks is hoping that over time, the repetitive anger at them becomes boring, whilst the corruption they uncover becomes the more interesting part of the story.

I appreciate that you probably hadn't seen it when you wrote the parent post, but it appears that the big Wikileaks story for today is a list of facilities that are considered critical to US security.

I'm not sure I see any corruption exposed, or any other public interest for that matter, in publishing such information openly. How can this possibly do anything except make it easier for the bad guys to cause significant damage?

If they carry on in this direction, releasing ever more sensitive information that really might have national security implications, then I can only see any public support they have deteriorating and the arguments of governments that some information must be kept secret for national security reasons being strengthened.

The end result will probably be a terrible disappointment for conspiracy theorists, reassurance to many people that most of our governments are not in fact secretly planning world domination and merely make mistakes from time to time, and a new era of locking down anything that might be considered even remotely sensitive within governments to the extent that we might even see changes in the laws that currently protect whistle-blowing that is genuinely in the public interest.

It would be an ironic, and unwelcome, legacy for Wikileaks if its big campaign ultimately resulted in more people believing in arbitrary government secrecy and tighter controls on free speech just in case anyone else as irresponsible comes along in future.
If you're a scientist working on weapons systems (which is a debatable claim in this instance), you're not a civilian.
[if] one user-submitted comment of copyrighted content and your website could immediately be permanently pulled, even if you took the comment down as fast as humanly possible.

Does that sound credible to you? Does that seem like a reasonable comparison? I'm done arguing about WL on a thread about a new Amazon web service now.
Right, except Wikileaks did not violate the TOS. Classified material cannot, by law, be copyrighted. Once leaked, it is public domain. Amazon's claim otherwise was completely disingenuous and dishonest.
Unladen Follow (a tool to cut the fat out of your Twitter stream)
Right. My point is as an advertiser, I have to lay out money with the hopes of making more back (ROI). With the groupon model, I don't have to lay out any money to "advertise" and I pay for the ads once I get paid.
Could we link to a larger version of the image please?
to get covered by TV you don't just have to be a big organization, you have to have a story.

as another commenter said,

"this is just a redesign that acts as a suitably rich metaphor for highlighting what the "new social web" is all about"

that creates a narrative that 60-minutes can get behind and milk, for eyeballs, fun and profit.

if the Red Cross poured millions of dollars into an entirely new online strategy that had a strong TV-friendly narrative ("the future of donations is social" or what have you), I'm sure they would be attractive to 60-minutes too. That's only part of the equation though, you need a hot PR team in place who can reach out to major channels like this and pitch the story right. You don't get on TV just by existing.
Totally agreed. Using Amazon services for anything that involves content that could potentially offend the government of any country looks pretty risky right about now.