skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They are already going way above and beyond by extending their deadline to the end of January. They have the capacity to be much ruder about it.

Hotlinking like this has been a well known web evil for well over a decade. That people still do it and just hope for the best is indicative of extraordinary laziness and selfishness.
Boredom Enthusiasts Discover the Pleasures of Understimulation
I somewhat like Twitter. I avoided it for a long time but I've come to enjoy and accept it. Facebook, on the other hand, is one of the worst entities in the entire world.
Ask HN: Alloy Specification Language experience
I randomly found out about the "Alloy specification language".
Basically it's an easy to use specification language which allows the developer to encode
the logic of a piece of software and then test and debug this logic thus theoretically reducing the development and debugging time.
I found the idea really intriguing so I was wondering
if anyone here has used it for any of their projects and if so what do they think about it.

Links:

http://alloy.mit.edu/community

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alloy_(specification_language)
I was under the impression that they refunded most (all?) pre-order money?
In 2009 Wikipedia ran into a similar problem with the National Portrait Gallery: http://www.examiner.com/museum-in-san-francisco/internet-101..., here's what Wikipedia has to say about the C&D letter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_copyr.... Someone figured out how the gallery's image servers worked and downloaded originals (normally you were allowed to see only low-res copies). As of today, they are still on Wikipedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:National_Portrait...)

My recommendations are:

* Build a nice website, but don't put too much time into it (~a weekend perhaps) and put the images online

* Make sure you give proper reference as to original source of the images

* Try to contact someone from Hockliffe Collection (but don't try too hard), as rmah says this is the polite thing to do. Document your effort on a blog for all to see.

* Don't feel squeamish about asking for donations to cover server expenses, etc. In fact, I would definitely go this route rather than putting ads on the page.

* If someone sends a C&D, contact Wikipedia guys and see if they can help. Generally the threat of negative publicity is enough for the institutions to back down.

They may still be able to shut you off, after all you don't have the clout of Wikipedia. But still, I think the utility you'll provide to the general public far outweighs any risk.
Because 301'ing provides little or no incentive for the offenders to do the right thing. Also it doesn't stop the excess traffic, it just reduces it.
Congratulations man! I remember back to the days when you made the flash for this: http://seethewall.com :) :)

You have come a long way.

Now listen -- I know how much you hated high school, but college is the time when you make all the social connections that will last you for the next 10 years! (And some of them, well, a lifetime.) It is probably where you are going to meet the people who will help you meet your wife. Well, maybe not directly, but she'll definitely get a sense of your social group when your friends are making her have a great time and regaling her with their crazy stories about you. And so ....

REMEMBER

Do not treat college as a preparation for a lifetime of serfdom. Instead, treat college as a social opportunity! Oh and one more thing -- do your studying done early and go out :)
reading this quote:

"When you're in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. "

gave me some immediate deja vu. pg quoted jobs jobs in 'how to make wealth', one of the better essays that made it into his book.

"Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees. I agree. If anything, it's more like the first five"
Seems to me they could do this in Flash and support things that are not Windows. I don't feel like rebooting to try this, even though I'm sure it's a cool example of face tracking.
Central China starts building supercomputing center
hey mark I'm glad you designed avecora front page now - explains very well what it does and I support it

I like that idea so much that actually I have been working on a social network doing just that. And it's gonna come out before 2013 :P Sorry :) Better hurry up!
You're attributing malice to something which could be attributed to ignorance. A common error.

They could just break all those sites without giving them personalised warnings, yes. And they would also be completely entitled to yes. But for the small amount of effort needed, why not try to minimise the damage.
Agreed 100%.

yuvipanda, seriously, the last thing I want to do is make other (young or old) people feel like they're inadequate... some of these that I used to call 'startups' are basically half-baked MVPs with marketing on top. Don't sell yourself short dude.
Definitely Rails 3 for me. I've started taking it more seriously and developing with it professionally.
More activity surrounding Python at the expense of PHP would be a good thing.
I can confirm this with experience! Well, not the every one of his styles in a year part... but at vainer points in my life done the "go mountain-man" approach, followed by many rapid changes in style (one every week for months one year).

I still use the basic technique when switching from a clean state to a bearded state - it si much easier to shape a beard than grow a shaped beard.

Advanced variations on the technique do exist however. I recently went from a van-dyke to what the article calls "the hollywood". However, to appropriately do this I needed to grow out the jaw portion of the beard. So to do this had to take it in phases:

1. stubble out for 2 weeks to get enough base

2. shave to a pattern similar to what the article calls "Rap Industry Standard", but with thicker lines and a full van-dyke at the mouth end.

3. Let it fill in towards the front, keeping the line from sideburns to jaw trimmed short. Also slowly widen the jawline part near the goatee -- a triangle will eventually form.

4. Using a razor, disconnect the sideburns and properly shape the rest.
Top 100 BitTorrent searches in 2010
A Snapshot of Facebook in 2010
I know a guy who's really, really into football. Watches hours of games every other night or so, has a "fantasy" team that he's constantly fretting over and checking online stats for, etc.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that distinguishes this obsession from a WoW habit is that more people like to watch football, so it's accepted.

People who get seriously addicted to WoW are usually either looking for any escape from reality, or they have the type of personality which tends to get addicted to something, whether it's online games, math puzzles, tracking railroad schedules, or whatever. There's no question that these people might act in unhealthy ways, but WoW is the symptom of their problems, not the cause.

(disclosure: I used to play WoW regularly)
Happy New Year HN
2010 was pretty good but 2011 will be great! I wish you all the best - it's the best community I've ever seen in my life.
Never doubt the laziness of people, especially other developers.

I'm actually more surprised that the site didn't either use Google's API to host the download, or provide a hotlink button right there.
Ha, I love that part about it though. Maybe making the 10 million is already predestined in his head. The hard part now is figuring out how to spend it. Probably something Napoleon Hill would be proud of.
original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054847
Also noteworthy: the type of girls I meet when bearded are of a very different type than the type I meet when not bearded. (not better or worse, just a whole different experience)
Particularly when I keep my beard tuned to "vaguely edgy".

Of course you'll have to learn to put up with lots of looks of disapproval, and old ladies holding their purses tighter around you, but that is worth it in its own right too.
Laser Projector via Audio Hardware
You're describing Minecraft (single player), though the exploration is landscape only -- not much else to find.
I have been playing WoW for 4 years, now off and on. My co-workers at the time, some of whom are still my co-workers at a different job, got me into it.

I have found that a good way to moderate my play is to refuse to make appointments to play with others at a specific time. This effectively keeps you from hardcore raiding, and minimizes real-world conflicts around the game (affectionately referred to as "wife-aggro"). Eventually, I get pretty much capped on gear and stats, get bored, and set the game aside until there is new content. (Yes, I am playing Cataclysm after a hiatus in the Fall).

I am 44, and pretty much in the best shape of my life, because my attitude is that I'd MUCH rather have skis, snowshoes, hiking boots, or Five Fingers attached to my feet, than a game keyboard under my fingertips. I have never been to a gym.

I don't have as many side projects as before WoW, but I try to make sure I'm getting that out of my system at work now: making interesting things out of interesting technologies.
Fantasic write up. I don't know if anyone has seen "Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" (pretty good - I enjoyed it), but there is a part where the heroes enter a casino. Everything you could wish for was there and so nobody left. And it was a trap -- it's sole reason was to entrap people so they never did anything with their lives. Your description made me think of WoW in that way. I'm sure WoW's intentions aren't evil (they just want your money!) but the outcome is the same.
He's confusing "physical" minimalism (having less physical stuff) with asceticism (getting by with less/being exposed to less). He starts to draw this distinction, but for some reason he doesn't quite understand it. His entire argument falls apart as a result.

The cool thing about "physical minimalism" in the digital age is that my stuff is digital -- I can have access to a huge variety of things, only when I need them. I can have innumerable movies, on demand, whenever I want them. Compare to 20 years ago, when I would have to actually own these physical VHS tapes (and they would presumably be more difficult to navigate/organize).

This is important for his notion of creativity, too. Digitizing things lets you more easily access a larger body of objects. If da Vinci had a computer, he'd probably digitize a lot of his stuff too -- it would allow him to be exposed to more things, more easily. Plus, he'd be able to travel more easily, and new experiences are a HUGE part of creative thinking.
Malice? As quaint as that saying is, malice plays no part in this discussion.

I'm attributing laziness, which is quite removed from malice. People using jquery should be evolved enough to know what CDNs are, and the dangers of hotlinking (which is as simple as "jQuery decided to reorganize their site, and now a thousand sites are broken").
Java Applet Distributes Trojan via Downloader Injection
It used to be 200, and was increased a few weeks ago (to 500, I think). I'm at 338 and can no longer downvote.
It's amazing how many successful business types like SJ or PG recognize that people are the most important thing, and still the majority of high level managers view people as completely interchangeable cogs.
> On the other hand, it's only a logical fallacy if it fouls an argument.
...
> It's part of an explanation for why he won't do something

ergo it's an appeal to authority or at the very least an appeal to tradition/precedent (or I suppose even lesser a non sequitur)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition

either way, it's a fascinatingly shoddy, and unnecessary, argument that severely detracts from the otherwise fine argument. A simple, "this paper represents basic security research. We believe censoring basic research is wrong and harmful. Therefore we will not censor this research." would have done.
Gonna throw this one out there:

Pittsburgh. It's cheap (REALLY cheap) compared to most cities and has a large talent pool of college kids (Carnegie Mellon and Pitt). Not the most exciting place to live, but for starting a company, it's probably one of the better choices. Less distractions + bad weather = lots of work gets done.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus Latest Version download
You mean, like a pad computer as suggested by Wieser in the 90s?

I mean like a kids computer, and a socially acceptable computer, as I said so. The physical form factor isn't what's new, the implementation, software, use cases, and the whole experience is what's new.

By anyone you mean analysts, right?

By anyone, I mean everyone who I've shown an iPad to. Most people don't get it, initially, but after a few minutes of playing with it, seeing their kids play with it, watching funny youtube videos together etc, everyone basically admits they didn't think it would be as good as it is.
For people, like me, who are into living cheap and who don't really care about how far away they are from VC's/Angels/etc I'd suggest you visit:

* Bangkok - you can find hotels starting at $10/night and probably cheaper in other places around Thailand...I'd suggest you check out the "remote" places near the ocean, I hear it's much cheaper.

* Budapest - great city; cheap to live in, people seem pretty nice .. especially women from South East Europe.

* Istanbul - Greaat culture; the people are soooo nice, crime rates are really low...I remember when I visited and went to eat at a local restaurant the owner was very nice, we had a nice chat, he asked where I was from..and soon after as I asked for the check, he said no no no, please, please, it's taken care of. I'm not saying everyone there is like that, but it semeed to me that almost everyone was so welcoming.

I'm going to be moving and living in a few cities, if you'd like to talk more, ping me(hajrice@gmail.com), I'd be glad to talk more.

Good luck!
"Stating the facts makes it all seem far less dramatic, doesn't it?"

I don't believe that I have stated any fictions if that's what your last remark implies.

I had a look at the wiki page you linked to.

Most of those 27 countries ahead of the Netherlands are negligible in terms of size, vatican City, Guernsey, Monaco, St Martin?

There are some sizeable countries but I don't believe being able to report a population density lower than, say, Bangladesh, is a cause for celebration.

As for living in a country with a population density of over 7000 per sq km, it is not something to be aspired to.
Yes, I know a ton of people that learned to program writing and hacking add-ons. WoW has a very powerful add-on system based on LUA. A number of folks that write those add-ons that make a great living doing so.
I guarantee that some people are using the wrong URLs because they received bad advice, or copied from code they shouldn't have, or were simply told by somebody that they could link to the version on jquery.com, so did.

These people don't need punishing, they need educating. I find the whole "fuck em, it's their fault" attitude to be very childish.
Google Helps Seized BitTorrent Site to Regain Lost Traffic
On experiences and creativity:

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/oct2010/sb20101...

>>>>>>>
Psychologists have spent years trying to discover the answer to the question: "What makes innovators different?" In one of the most thorough examinations of the subject, Harvard researchers spent six years and interviewed 3,000 executives to find out. According to the Harvard research, the No.1 skill that separates innovators from noncreative professionals is "associating"—the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. The three-year Harvard research project confirms what Jobs told a reporter 15 years earlier: "Creativity is just connecting things."

This notion of making creative associations through seeking out new experiences is worth exploring more closely, as it plays a significant role in the way Steve Jobs has generated one innovative product after another, and another, and another. Jobs is a classic iconoclast, one who aggressively seeks out, attacks, and overthrows conventional ideas. And iconoclasts, especially the successful ones, have an "affinity for new experiences," according to esteemed Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns.
>>>>>>
> 4. Giving out advice to deluded hopefuls who want to have a site about nothing and to be paid for zero productivity and not work a day more of their lives than they have to.

Chris -

1. You've replied seventeen times to this thread, pretty much all negative and nasty. 17.

2. Now you're taking screenshots and drawing on them in a thread no one's looking any more. We're getting into borderline stalking territory.

3. You've apparently never read beyond a surface reading of my site, where I've always advocated really hard work and doing more through doing right by and serving other people.

4. I've achieved pretty high levels of professional success, mastery in hobbies/skills/disciplines, and other things. But hell, even if I hadn't, it still wouldn't put you in a position to

5. Please stop your borderline stalking. You're at 17 replies already here, and it's honestly getting to the point where it's scaring me. There's lots of important things in the world you could be working on, building, fixing, or improving - there's no possible way this is worth the entire hours of your life you've spent here.
Unless jquery.com itself uses Google's CDN (which it already is for some of its javascript)
Read only the Zadie Smith one, thought it was a crock.
I would! (switching to Cute Overload).
Which Linux distro is most suited to a web developer?
Is running a Linux distribution a viable alternative to the Windows/OSX? And if so, which distro is most suited to the web developer?
"I guarantee that some people are using the wrong URLs because they received bad advice, or copied from code they shouldn't have, or were simply told by somebody that they could link to the version on jquery.com, so did."

Is that not precisely what I said? Laziness.

I feel like I'm debating with a tired Hallmark card. Yes, high road and all that. We get it.

Just as you misplaced the malice quote (you were a little too eager to play that one), now you're on about punishment: Who said anything about punishment? Saying "Don't hotlink, but we're giving you 30 days grace" is not remotely "punishment". That you portray it as such is, honestly, outrageous.
IPhonECG case monitors your heart rate
2011 3D Printing Predictions
Maybe Project Gutenberg would like them... Also Amazon or Google Books might be interested in them.
I'm not really angry with them so much as disappointed in myself for believing 'one more week' over and over again. I know intellectually that year-long delays happen a week at a time, and that the best indicator of a project being a year over budget is to slip in the first week, but somehow I turned down my doubt because it was YC.

I have a friend with a hardware startup which has pivoted entirely once, and then has had 1-2 years of delays (on an initial "end of year" shipping schedule, still hasn't shipped).

The $5 pre-order amount didn't really bother me. (I actually ended up deciding the Zeo was better for my needs -- it's fundamentally more intrusive but much more featureful and with their API, potentially fun to hack), so I gave my wakemate to a friend of mine.

My main upset over this is that it reinforces "hardware is hard", which is depressing because I have a hardware product I want to manufacture. I'm going to try to manufacture it in the US (or first world), at least for the initial production run. It's kind of back-burner behind the real startup though, more of a hobby thing.

I'm a bit concerned that YC doesn't work particularly well for hardware startups -- it's not enough money, and hardware is a case where you still do actually need money for things other than staff time. I'd love to see a YC-type incubator for hardware projects which provided value-add on the design for volume production side, parts sourcing, and non-equity financing of production, inventory, and distribution.
How to Prevent a Hangover
>What macros? I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve not yet written a single macro. Partially I tend to think the function version should exist regardless in most cases and partly I work with three other Clojure gurus that can satisfy my macro whims faster than I can state the need. Let’s call it a goal for 2011.

Heh, he hasn't completely grokked macros yet; they should only be written if the goal couldn't be done as a function.
Not very successfully though
Have you seen VimCasts? http://vimcasts.org/
So very interesting is that he still had Google control panel control of Torrent-finder.com even after it had been seized, so he could redirect searches to .info.

This could be an actual issue. What if instead of getting his .com seized, he had sold it. He could then redirect search traffic to another domain even after he doesn't have control over it.

I guess something to think about when you obtain a new domain, make sure you establish control via google's webmaster control panel.
>In the end I got kicked from the guild for doing something I shouldn't have, which was probably the best thing that could've happened.

Ok, now I'm curious. I'm just thinking with 16h/day you're fairly hardcore, guilds must be after ppl like you, no? Why the kick, if you care to elaborate?
> None of us appreciate having our ongoing effort characterized as 'stalled'.

Well TBH I'm not to thrilled that a few lines from a private chat would get splattered over the HN front page without much context either.

> Can't cope with the necessity for prioritization given finite resources? - Sorry.

Said resources are a lot more finite than they could be. There are many capable folks in the community who would be willing to help. I brought this up last year and people seemed eager to help, but the official response was silence:

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

Anyway, keep up the good work; if you at any time decide you don't want to waste time with the boring stuff keep in mind that there are lots of people who can help ease the burden.
They're attempts to phonetically sound out the acronym.

FNMA = Federal National Mortgage Association = "Fannie Mae"

SLMA = Student Loan Marketing Association = "Sallie Mae"
People eat orange because they are hungary and orange taste sweet, in the process though they get vitamin C. Is the fact that they get vitamin C diminished by the fact that they only ate it because it tasted good?

Would orange flavored candy be a sufficient substitute here? I'd say no.
It should be trivial for them to ... send a mailshot out to each ... webmaster address

Well indeed, but even if you ignore the time taken to do WHOIS lookups and presume that they'll go to the right person (e.g. blogs hosted on Wordpress.com) you're still ignoring the serious amount of computing power that it takes to send a significant number of emails.
I think it's very true that most people are overstimulated, but I don't really get how people find a lack of stimulation boring. The things described in the article definitely do not sound interesting, but I can only imagine letting my mind wander off into more interesting/productive territory when confronted by them. The possibility of just wallowing in a lack of interest seems kind of lacking in creativity...
Every Entrepreneur Needs to Start With a Prototype
I don't know what "ascendant time" is, but I'm guessing it's some virtual good whose scarcity is purely artificial, so that the makers of Obsidian Portal don't incur additional costs when it is used.

If I'm right, then these guys are very cleverly making the world a better place.
Avoid using the "latest version" reference. In order to ensure that it's serving the latest version, it serves the script with an extremely short expires header.