skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
USA Corporate Identity Design, USA Graphic Designing, Stationery Designs - Ennovate Group 
Offer USA Corporate Identity Design, USA Graphic Designing, Stationery Designs, Business Logos, Corporate Stationery Designs, Business Brand Designing and Corporate Flash Presentations Ennovate Group Inc.
WebVisum - CAPTCHA solver add-on for Firefox
You cannot patent an idea. You can only patent a method for implementation.

I blame Slashdot for the almost total ignorance of what a patent actually is in the tech community.
Windows is a great platform for Open Source development. Microsoft has welcomed open source software to their platform (after all, free software is a good way to get people to use your paid OS) and has made it pretty easy (despite the closed-source nature of the platform itself) for developers to embrace Windows as an alternative open-source platform.

It's not as surprising as it seems - given that Windows is the world's most popular OS, it makes sense that famous open source projects like Firefox have great portions of their userbase firmly planted in the Windows world.

However, I am puzzled as to the author's choice of software for that list.... None of the 20 products he mentions would have made it to my top 100 list of greatest open source software for Windows.
When editing a post, pressing <tab> from within the text-input box changes the focus to the "Help" link instead of the "Submit" button. Can this please be changed, because it's slightly disconcerting and not <strike>user</strike> hacker-friendly?
Voyager Spacecraft Reveals Solar System Edge
"meant"
I think the key in my statement was easy copying. The inability to copy and paste clearly frustrates people, seeing as its the number one complaint against Scribd. But thanks for the sarcasm. ;)
Check the following out:
http://rankedindex.com/yc

http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2007/04/y-combinators-portfolio....
YouTube's business model:

1. Get venture capital

2. Get popular by distributing copyrighted content on massive scale.

3. Don't remove copyrighted content when asked to by holder.

4. Get more venture capital

5. Attract attention from large copyright holders. Remove their content, but only by explicit request. Know that the same content will be uploaded the day after you remove it.

6. Keep growing by distributing copyrighted content.

7. Get bought for an insane amount by Google

8. Stay a seperate legal entity because uh... you know. The whole business model is shady.

Makes perfect sense to go after the users. After all, they don't have VC money to defend themselves with.
I am not disappointed after having seen the website. I expected a fail in the security department. You can't really "self destruct" a message on the medium of a computer unless you have what amounts to some form of DRM.
No, I was expecting to get flamed because the discussion was political (enough), offensive (to somebody, surely), and not about startups or Google or Lisp. "Flamed" was hyperbolic. But I'm glad I was wrong.
Whereas I think the greying out is not merely funny, but also useful and elegant.

But I don't make a habit of reading downmodded comments. Life is too short. So I'm not one to comment on their legibility.
Notice that much under the rubric of "SEO" is perfectly legitimate:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

* Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
* Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
* Content development
* Managing online business development campaigns
* Keyword research
* SEO training
SEO has struck me as something that should be straightforward but seems to be black magic.

There's a lot to do, from the URL, to keyword frequency to use of header tags to if you should have a unique IP and how long your domain is registered for -- and that's before you even leave your own site. A brilliant hacker can write a useful, scalable app that has little to no internal SEO and get fewer visitors as a result.

Then there's all the little games people play to get links: begging for them, paying for them, press releases, "do follow" comments on blogs, and the dreaded DMOZ. It's a drain on a small company that probably just wants to build a better application.
Yes, someone buried the lede here.
This is just a little game we're all playing: popularity in high school...

I used to tell myself that high school popularity was just a silly game. Then I grew older, the web was invented, and I got to read the stories of geeks whose unpopularity in school led to them being beaten with bicycle chains in the parking lot.

Never underestimate the power of social dynamics. When humans play a "little game", that game can become real.
It's harder to understand why someone should withhold their personal opinion, simply because they were later to vote.

That's the way things already work in the real world. One is less likely to complain about something when a lot of other people have already complained about it. It's considered "beating a dead horse."
How big is the addressable market? What you just described sounds pretty small.

"...still some people we've talked to who aren't entirely happy with it" This sounds like people that are slightly annoyed, and not really displeased enough to switch over to something else.
There is a surprisingly large amount of copyrighted content on YouTube and Google Video.

If I search for something, and find it, and watch it once, am I really the one they should be going after??

After all, Google is the one with the BILLIONS of dollars.. and they are the ones hosting the content to begin with.

Or is this just a case where a big corporation like Viacom is going to try to go after a bunch of nobodys like me because it is easier to scare us with big lawsuits and the threat of owing them hundreds of thousands of dollars.. all because I watched a couple clips of Jon Stewart on YouTube?
Kevin Rose, Mark Cuban, Craig Newmark get Spore creatures
Readers might be interested in Nicholas Nassim Taleb's paper
"Why We Have Never Used the Black-Scholes-Merton Option Pricing Formula" available at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1012075

from the abstract:

"we have historical evidence that

1) Black, Scholes and Merton did not invent any formula, just found an argument to make a well known (and used) formula compatible with the economics establishment, by removing the "risk" parameter through "dynamic hedging",

2) Option traders use (and evidently have used since 1902) heuristics and tricks more compatible with the previous versions of the formula of Louis Bachelier and Edward O. Thorp (that allow a broad choice of probability distributions) and removed the risk parameter by using put-call parity.

3) Option traders did not use formulas after 1973 but continued their bottom-up heuristics.

The Bachelier-Thorp approach is more robust (among other things) to the high impact rare event. The paper draws on historical trading methods and 19th and early 20th century references ignored by the finance literature. It is time to stop calling the formula by the wrong name."

An excellent summation of Taleb's critique is "Whither Black-Scholes?""

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/07/black-scholes-options-oped-...
Rules to Keep Your Skin in Wall Street Massacre
I end up having to highlight the text to read it.

Perhaps this is related to the gamma of your monitor? I understand that Macs use a different gamma (1.8) than PCs (2.2), which would make bright tones calibrated for a PC less distinguishable on a Mac. I'm using a PC, and I have yet to see a comment I needed to highlight to read.
Agree with both of these comments.

I want to feel involved. Plus, if I'm using a website to the extent that I'm going to want a username and password I pretty much expect that I may have to fill out more information upon registration so it is not as bothersome.

It also depends on what your website offers. If you are selling products (like ebay), instant gratification also comes into the picture. Whenever I'm shopping online and go to "checkout" I'm much more satisfied when I my information is already in the system and I can checkout with a few clicks, rather than having to enter all the information, etc. before I can actually purchase my product.

Re: your reference to Craiglist, sometimes I wish I did have an account with Craigslist so I could see my selling/buying history or have my email address or phone number stored.

Again though, depends on what your website is offering...
The Website Is Down (is this what you programmers do all day?)
I don't understand. What exactly does create strong bias?
Campuses getting less political as '60s professors retire
haha, this is great. Not that I'm doing to move my super-secret chocolate smuggling ring over to it or anything, but you know, when I need to send my ATM pin or something to someone it should be ok.
Meet ratproxy, Google's passive web security assessment tool
All it does is search. There usually isn't much money in that...
Michael Rabin Quotes
Digital Nomads Rising
On the boingboing dustup
Discontinuation of Google Browser Sync
Karma isn't a function of usefulness to the community, it's a function of time spent on the site, broadly speaking. As such, I suspect that those that have the most experience with startups on average tend to be below the mean in the karma pool. Thus giving those with the most karma an additional boost in shaping the site dynamics would push the site further in the direction of "fans of startups" as opposed to "people working on startups".
I think hackers hate SEO because someone can have a crappy site which outranks the hacker's awesome, perfectly programmed site. And thats irritating.

But like some people mentioned, there are a lot of SEO tips that people should be aware of, and quite a lot that programmers should be aware of if they're going to program a good site. Some simple programming choices in the beginning can make a big difference to your site's ranking, so if you're not aware of what those are, then you're not being a good programmer. Check out http://www.netconcepts.com/tag/case-studies
What about the rest of us who were blessed with not being born in the USA? Should i be worried that some ninja cop will brake in my home and take my pc and sue me for watching youtube? It all sound ridiculous.
Check out the book "Buzzmarketing" - it's great. By Mark Hughes, who renamed Halfway, Oregon to Half.com, Oregon
I think the reason you are shy is because you take things way too seriously. Work on that and the shyness will disappear by itself.
Map Reduce implemented over HTTP
I'm still learning more commands, actually. h j k l w b { and } are some good ones to start with, and then once you find yourself using those all the time, you can pull out a vim cheat sheat and learn some more, like e ( ) # and *, and so on...

I have not yet found a language that doesn't have a vim mode, at least in my Gentoo installation. This includes HTML, CSS, Lisp, C, Python, Xorg.conf, various Gentoo system files, httpd.conf, and anything else I've seen.
Or fans of PG. Anything he posts automatically gets double digits of upvotes in minutes.
Rankedindex would be pretty handy if it sorted numeric columns by their numeric rather than ascii value. 900 < 8000
I think lawsuits against viewers is purely speculation by TechCrunch. IANAL, but I think pinning a copyright violation on a viewer would be very difficult, because the viewer is in a poor position to know the legality of a given clip -- especially prior to downloading it -- which implies that the uploader, not the downloader, is responsible for any violation. I'd guess this is why to date the RIAA and MPAA have only gone after P2P uploaders and BitTorrent users (where each user is both an uploader and downloader).

Just think... if merely clicking on a link were a copyright violation, Rick Astley would be a billionaire. :)
According to the Amazon Web Services calculator, reproducing this result yourself would cost $118,553.47. That's for 1 TB of data transfer in and 1/10 of that out (presumably one would pull down only sorted indices, not the entire sorted dataset), and 910 Extra Large compute instances for an hour. The price goes up pretty quickly if you spend longer than an hour setting up your many nodes. Obviously feel free to check my assumptions.
Identi.ca - the twitter clone that works
I personally don't want to see Karma become currency. I'm part of a message board that does something like that, and its quality of posters has dropped over the years.
BTW, is there a way to save histories without upvoting them?
Cheer up people, we're in the boston area and we have an extremely hard time finding developers (web and perl), and soon rails. It looks like almost everybody with a clue has a job, or we're incompetent at finding them.
Balance is a good thing. Challenging beliefs is a good thing. Variety in political, social, economic, religious, and personal beliefs is a great thing.
Do you mean snicker? Because the word you have reminds me of words I don't like saying aloud.
Agree with Mystalic. I'm probably more conservative than liberal, but I want people to HAVE choices and be able to think critically, even if they make different choices than I do. This is saddening news.
Interesting concept... I wonder if they let you do blanket investments, similar to investing in index funds?
Michael Lewis is great. I love reading his columns. Thanks for posting this.
There is already software for discovering voting rings.
Perhaps - what about this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173351

Granted I'm on a Macbook, but this is very hard to read for me.
Notice I didn't pick on you but on the sentiment that "all funny is good". The video is already a meme, and I wasn't surprised to see it here.
Human beings are political creatures. So politics suffuses everything. Unfortunately, I've met many people who seem to believe that politics is the foundation to everything. If it weren't widely known and ridiculed, I sometimes wonder if these people think that the Indiana state legislature attempt to make Pi = 3 would've worked!

I think the atmosphere of political contention on campuses sometimes exacerbates this.
Europe’s Mobile 2.0 startups come together
Almost, but it's not only at login that you need user data.

Basically I changed the code that looks up stuff about users (formerly just a hash table in functional position) to call a function that loads a user from disk first if necessary.
Readers would also enjoy the story of LTCM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
"A seminar on great books at Princeton jointly taught by two philosophers, the left-wing Cornel West and the right-wing Robert P. George."

I'd like to hear that.
I agree, I posted the feature request here not too long ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223238
I would argue that SEO, in the context of google, is really an analysis of how to make your site more relevant to the intended audience. This is not a bad thing.
I think there are two factors you need to use to decide for yourself.

One, what would you rather be doing? You're young you have time so you cannot go wrong in either direction.

Two, what opportunities are available to you? Can you go to a really good MBA program? Is there a start up you are going to join that you are passionate about? Are you going to start your own business? If so do you really know what that entails?

So my advice analyze your opportunities, decide what it is you really want to do, but unless you have a killer idea and some people to help both technical, marketing, and business wise don't start your own start up yet.
I don't understand. The article seems to be about faculty becoming more diverse in outlook as older professors retire, unless I am misunderstanding something?
Real programmers can Greenspun Lisp in any language.
Alright, now I have to reshuffle my upcoming hobby projects so I can do one where I can learn lisp in the process, cuz I want me some better sneakers...
Why identi.ca is not a Twitter killer -- blame IRC
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233893
The title was edited, apparently. When I clicked, it said Digg, and the article still has a section on Digg.
I haven't seen anything in Powerset that would augment Microsoft's search enough to make a significant impact on their "battle" with Google, never mind beating them.

Powerset only works on wikipedia, it's a cool application of NLP...but scaling it to a full "semantic" search engine for the entire web is an epic challenge. Is Powerset's search technology really better than Google's? I'm not too sure.

It's a good acquisition for msft, but Google is usually better when it comes to choosing startups to buy that are real winners. I honestly think that Google would have scooped them up sometime over the last 3 years if they really thought they were a threat. Just my hunch.
Do what you love is not "do what you would do if you had infinite money". If I had infinite money I would be heli-skiing every day. That is not monetizeable. I could be a ski instructor for a lot less, but that is not what I want to do. So moving down to one of my interests, robotics, I work for a company doing close to that. Thus I'm happy at work.

I guess by extension if you did what you loved most we'd all be porn stars. It is more about doing something you like.
Facebook/MySpace considered harmful
Interestingly shameless.
Technology Growing Exceedingly | ServiceLive Blog
Yahoo! Property Breakdown and Sum of the Parts
Several reasons.

First - if Microsoft managed to somehow make a more powerful search with PowerSet then they are still lacking in reputation. Rep alone will get a large portion of Google users to stay with them.

Second - People in general don't like Microsoft. Sure they have some great products (don't knock Windows and Office, the world does run on them even though there are other great platforms/editors) but they have lost face due to poor support options and annoying aspects of the interface

Third - Google is not just a search engine.

That's just some of the reasons.
I'm implying that this is a pointless app. I wasn't making a judgment about the scale of delivery, I'm just saying it's completely useless.
If voting is only a 'complaint', sure.

But in a poll or election, there's no general taboo against expressing your redundant opinion. In fact, it's encouraged, to get a complete or representative sample.

And especially when a comment provokes strong opinions, but is already well-expressed, a simple click-vote-with-tally is almost irresistant to people as an outlet. It's quick, it's easy, it doesn't bloat the thread with vertically-expensive 'my thoughts exactly' or 'I couldn't disagree more' one-line replies.

The one downside is that it also affects karma and display position, and thus is likely to generate resentments and competitions. That's what makes it a bit unseemly; 'beating a dead horse' or unneighborly 'piling-on'.

Hence the solution: give people a pure agree/disagree vote separate from mod-up/mod-down.
You must be one of those folks that designs their web site in photoshop and then just uploads the image to the server.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
The EFF link is much better than the TC one:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/court-ruling-will-expos...

"Google correctly argued that “the data should not be disclosed because of the users’ privacy concerns,” citing the VPPA, 18 U.S.C. § 2710. However, the Court dismissed this argument with no analysis, stating “defendants cite no authority barring them from disclosing such information in civil discovery proceedings, and their privacy concerns are speculative.""

Anyone disagree that this is a good reason to stop using Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo Mail/Google Docs/etc?
No, but you can upvote it, and then downvote this comment ;)
You can think of it as a strange and illogical tradition of this particular community if that helps.

Oh, I understand it.

But I suspect it's hopeless, long term, to try to convey that subtle idea as usership grows. The mod-up/mod-down is an 'attractive nuisance' that will always attract agree/disagree piling-on, because you can't untrain people of their expectations of what 'voting'/'polling' means, and it's just so darn easy, when you've only got one bit worth of reaction to a comment, to use a click rather than a reply to express yourself. (It'd even be better for the site, if that one click didn't trigger karma resentments and feelings of censorship.)

A river finds the sea; simple agree/disagree sentiment is flowing into mod-up/mod-down because that's the easiest path for its expression.
Family Fantasy Sports Launches Family-Friendly Fantasy Football
Most startups implicitly disbelieve the efficient market hypothesis, since they'd be able to get the same level of risk by using leverage. Most of them seem to think they might have an edge, in which case the proper criterion is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
Here's an alternative equation: bet on yourself, instead of on whether millions of others will succeed or fail.
If you come to the realization that work in itself isn’t evil, you can stop living your life as a waterfall-planned software project too.

Nothing wrong with "waterfall-planning" if it's done properly. Problem is, it usually isn't.

I understand that sometimes you need to release early and often. This is when you can't conduct proper anaysis. Why not? Because you're trying for a home run building something big and you don't know where your project will take you or who will eventually use it. Like a Web 2.0 or social site.

But for the rest of us, "waterfall-planning" is just another name for the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which is an excellent way to develop systems. But you must conduct analysis first. You must answer the question "what" before you examine the question "how".

Most developers do not know how to do this. How can you tell? When their waterfall phases take too long (more than a month for analysis for most projects). When they say things like, "The user doesn't know what he needs." Yes he does. You just have to keep digging until you know.

Once a good programmer learns how to conduct analysis he becomes a good developer. Then projects become like shooting fish in a barrel. You biggest problem will be convincing your customers that you can do what they think can't be done.
Facebook Gets Blocked in China
Google Talk for iPhone
Absolutely. I have to say I was disappointed by the article though.

This wasn't "how to keep your shirt" - this was "how to keep your shirt if you have the resources to start your own fund. oh, and you'll basically be screwing your investors- so just don't tell them."

I would really like to see some useful investment advice. For the time being I've dumped all my various investments into a fixed return fund (3.3%). But there's got to be something else I can do...
"And Google simply cannot hand this data over without facing a class action lawsuit of staggering proportions."

Is it true, that a company could be hold liable for things they do because a court said they have to?
Though they worked in bond arbitrage and didn't use Black Scholes:)
80 How-To Sites Worth Bookmarking
Toilet Paper Algorithms: I didn't know you had to be a computer scientist to use toilet paper.
The (Unfortunate) Truth About Unicode In Python
I would rather hedge my bets.

Although one might temper one's judgement by reading "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments"
by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University"

http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

Non-pdf URLs at:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Unskilled+and+Unawa...

Should the article apply, one may be doomed!-)