skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, there is a different between The Cloud and "A very particular kind of privately owned Cloud". Cloud storage or services don't mean you have to rely on private companies to store or syncronize your data. You can run a substancial set of the same services on your own trusted hardware.

Do you need email ? Do not rely on gmail to store your email or you, use your own server, IMAP and a webclient such as roundcube when you are on the go.

Do you need calendaring? Use Ical and a webdav server.

Do you need file synchronization? Use rsync over ssh to your home machine instead of dropbox. (that's exactly what I do to back up my Android phone), do you want that to be completely automated? Call rsync from a crontab.

My last pictures? a gallery on my home server rather than using flikr or facebook.

Do you need to be reachable by phone from overseas? That's very tricky, since you don't control the phone numbering system, but I am doing really well with my home asterisk server, my android SIP phone and a bunch of SIP providers in a several countries. When I want to talk something with my tech savvy friends, I can use Sip 2 Sip directly (not skype).

It's susprising the amount of stuff you can do when you are running your own services on a trusted environment. Just a ssh + screen session is more than enough for me to do most of my daily tasks. In case I get increasingly paranoid of the goverment I could you just ship a box overseas or use a cheap controled VPS on a different country. I may not have freedom of movement (since immigration is definitely not a friction-free act), but my data surely has. I am not saying this is a perfect solution, but definitely it's much better privacy wise.

The only think I lose with this approach is the 'social' aspect of cloud services. People's attention span is short enough to force them to go to my personal services or my blog to check for my personal updates. Facebook success is that it offers a one single place where you can get a glimpse of how are your friends and beloved ones doing. That's why It's so important to invest on open distribution formats (a la RSS) we can trust and control.
I don't want to start another topic, so I'll leave this - an excellent response from a user on Quora on the topic: http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-ex...
Sweet, congrats on the job accept, Alex!

Caltech accepts people who discover their passion for a field very early in life and then excel at basic academics. Some, like myself, fail to take advantage of the academic opportunities and come out much worse than you seem to from CMU. Tech very well would have accepted you, if you had applied, but they would have done it for your demonstrated interest in CS--more likely ACM, since CS at Caltech is an entirely different fish than at other schools--while basically treating your athletics as a null factor. On the other hand, it would have perhaps been a slight negative against you, because athletics took time away from when you could have been volunteering in a local college science lab or hacking some code together. The students who read applications and we who screen them when they apply to sit on that committee are quite serious when it comes to seeking applicants who show a "passion for math and science."
Boys and girls! Set noprocrast to yes to reclaim your lives! ;-)
Now, with everything in the cloud, the decision whether to hand over my personal information is almost entirely out of my hands.

Um, no. When you store your data "in the cloud" (in a non-encrypted format), you have just made the decision to hand over your data to everybody with access to that data. That is everybody from TLA governmental entities that can subpoena "the cloud" owners to the janitor that empties the wastebaskets in the computer room.
One could, in theory, manually create a database of a few million (or way more) websites, and rate the content in each of them (including advertisements - just how the page is showed to the end user). This database could then be used to train algorithms, with genetic fitness based on how close the ratings of the algorithm are to the human ratings of value (note that the algorithms would not be aware of the human value ratings).

A second - perhaps slightly smaller - database could then be used to test the performance of the best algorithms in the "real world," or at least on data which they weren't trained on. This would select against algorithms which are adapted solely for the first database. Content ratings generated algorithmically could then be used to modify the ranking of websites in the results, penalizing websites that seem to have bad content.

I'm not sure how I got here from thinking about sex between search engines; I suppose it's because one way to deal with the evolution would be taking the best few algorithms each time and combining them (which I'm sure that there are issues with). Of course, people far more intelligent than I have certainly had this idea before, and probably figured out why it wouldn't work (or, alternatively, that it would work, which would suggest that someone is now busy implementing it).
To belabor the point, this is an awful, awful pun involving the literary deconstructionist movement mentioned by the previous poster that both Derrida and de Man were members of. My apologies for polluting the internet.
That's awesome, I was going to go with UserVoice for my feedback widget, but I'm gonna have to support a fellow Texas startup and go with you guys now. I'm based in Dallas myself.
Great headline, crappy article. People have been trying to game search engines since a few minutes after they were invented. And other search engines don't appear to be better, or the market share would have shifted by now. It costs nothing to the consumer to switch, and people talk about which websites they like - so if something that is more appealing to Joe Public comes along, it will be noticed. Bing's ascent in the number of searches has not been huge yet. Personally I hope for more than one search superpower in the future.
The button is just a link element with an 'id="yes"', but no href or onClick or anything else.
There's Reddit: http://reddit.com
Thanks!

I like the ajax upload.... very simple

fancyupload uses flash.... unless you are Facebook or a government website, I'd avoid all that fancy stuff and keep it simple for the future!
Glad to see you guys coming back to Texas. We definitely need a larger startup community out here.
Blog posts linking to another article are fine if it includes an actual opinion on the piece and adds to the discussion.

A post about a post, that just quotes it and links it, doesn't add anything, so I see no real reason to not link directly to the source?

(Not having a go at you, just explaining why I think the source was more relevant in this case).
Rush: the ruby shell
Podcast Interview of Maciej (from Pinboard.in)
Ctrl-Shift consistently works for me iff I press and hold Shift before Ctrl.

(Fedora 14, FF 3.6.13)
What the author is saying, as I understand it, is that Google needs a way to mix up their algo's so they aren't easily "gamed" by scammers and spammers.

The question is not whether Google is doing this actively but how fast and decisively they do this as well as what specific issue they deem as priority to address.

Google's algo, as I understand it, is an array of knobs that are turned up and down to increase or decrease impact of various factors such as domain age, incoming links, quality of content, etc. Google is always adjusting these knobs and adding/removing knobs. The goals of adjusting these knobs are obviously only known by Googlers but what is clear to many is that the sole object of adjusting these knobs in not to make the results pages more relevant. Don't get me wrong... they definitely care about relevancy (or they wouldn't have the trust of millions) but they are a public company with obligations to meet so they must take many factors into account when making adjustments.

The point? The sex (aka variation over time) that the author refers to will likely come from adjusting existing knobs and introducing new knobs such as social authority, locality, etc... but it doesn't necessarily mean that problems of relevance as we see it will get fixed through these variations. Google will take into account a number of factors when deciding what problems they want to solve and to what extend.

</rambling>
When you "don't get it" do you mean for yourself, or for the market? If the former, you can stop reading, because for someone already up on EC2 and devops it doesn't make sense to insert a middle man. If it's the later, here's more to consider.

I think you misunderstanding may step from underestimating the time needed to make the right choice on an EC2 Cloud vs. Slicehost VM vs. Rackspace vs. Shared hosting vs. That guy with the space space in his rack for a PHP application.

For someone not up on EC2 they need to research what the difference between a Standard On-Demand Instance, Micro On-Demand Instance, High-Memory On-Demand Instance, High-CPU On-Demand Instance, Cluster Compute Instance, and Cluster GPU Instance is, and then decide which type of VM they need within that sub-group for their app.

Then they need to figure out where their application touches/stores items on the file system, and decide how they're going to restore that whenever they spawn/restart another EC2 instance. (file uploads, avatar image uploads, etc.) Lots of PHP applications make an assumption about about a readable/writable persistant file system (which, coincidentally, is why shared hosting is such a successful attack vector). The is where PHPFog having the Drupal and Wordpress installs come in handy, the implication there being they've solved that for you.

To get familiar with the EC2 infrastructure to make these choices, they need to make a $63/month investment or pony up the $227.50. Minor, but expensive enough that it creates inertia. If PHPFog gets their pricing right, or they have a compelling marketing pitch that this really is turn-key, they can capture a lot of mindshare right now, and possibly be a disruptive player in a segment of the shared hosting market that's been static for a long time.

None of the above is hard for a technically competent individual, it just takes time. It's plumbing, and (this is the important part), in the world of a PHP developer it's the sort of plumbing that up-till-now can be handled by a reliable shared host, or for larger companies/teams/apps, server operations folks who don't do application programming. That's why there's a lack of EC2 knowledge even among competent profesional PHP folks.

Add in all the people just using Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla/Magento/etc who aren't technically competent and you have a another market segment PHPFog could serve.

Are we looking at a $212 acquisition for PHPFog? Probably not. But that doesn't mean they can't be a successful company, or that they can't use a cash infusion to get the tedious-yet-requiring-a-brain work for getting default installations for all the popular PHP applications running.
This system and our current system face the same fundamental issue: how do you determine that a student has 'leveled up'? If what gives you 'experience' is flawed, it won't really matter whether a student is getting a level or a letter grade.

Also, if you want to encourage students to try stuff multiple times, you'd have to make sure 'not leveling up' doesn't equate to 'staying back a grade'. Students won't be encouraged to really learn what they need to, but just to get through things as quickly as possible, because Harvard only accepts people who are level 10 in math and science.
Excellent response. Well balanced and honest.
Academics at Caltech means research. You don't get grades on independent discovery, you get peer-review :)
If you look at the chart, you'll notice the 3rd feature didn't affect our sales much at all. We've pushed out 12 major feature updates since launch and I believe that had an impact on our sales as people can feel confident that we stand by our product.
The point about turning out a generation of clones is spot on, and ultimately the cruelest irony of the whole thing. The best way to get into an elite college is by standing out as an individual; the colleges asian parents desperately want their kids to attend deal with the "asian clone" thing by rejecting the lot of them. The asian kid with a 1560 SAT and state violin awards (probably) isn't getting into Harvard, but if he had substituted kicking field goals for every minute he practiced violin...
Dan Lyons: My talk with a left-wing hack
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost sounds like a rudimentary AES-type encryption when they describe how he broke it into a grid and then jumbled the lines. I'm no cryptographer, but the description of this compared to AES encryption seemed remarkably close.

That said, using digraph probability to solve it was inspired.
The Top Three Web Technologies on the Internet
Oh, but doesn't that mean you're measuring Hacker News to another popular site?
This is quite possibly the dumbest article about technology I've seen in a mainstream publication.

What Google really needs is a willingness to accept a way higher threshold of false negatives in weeding out content. I'd love to have a "known good" version of Google that risked leaving out some content. Let's start by banning all .info domains along with any that include a hyphen.
Rebasing Merge Commits in Git (a cautionary tale for software teams)
I read this comment, went to look at it, and still clicked on the header just because I couldn't believe it wasn't actually a button.

Calling it "not very good" is a lot nicer than it deserves. It makes no sense to sacrifice functionality for "beauty" in a file upload widget. (And it's not like the rest of it is especially nice looking anyway.)

I'm also really kind of wondering why it's so large. It takes up 258180 pixels by default--that's about a third of my browser window. Unless you're putting this on a page that's meant only for file uploading, it's probably going to take up too much room.

The fact that gigantic, non-functional, unwieldy things like this (and TinyMCE, which happens to have been developed by the same people) are considered the best solutions is one of the reasons I've really come to dislike working with the big open-source CMS's.
I definitely have a case of the CTRL/CMD+N then 'n' and it is just too easy, it is right there in the history.

Code compiling (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), db query taking > .0005ms (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), pondering the change I just made (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), etc etc and on and on.
The catch is this database would need to be kept away from spammers, lest they be able to test their site designs against it directly.
Me too. I'm the founder of a company in Austin that interviewed for YC this winter, but got rejected.

If anyone reading this wants to meet up in Austin, my email's in my profile.
Walter, are you in the Bay Area? If so, you should totally check out our alumni happy hours :)

Hear! Hear! to the 'once a Techer, always a Techer' mentality.

The other key thing about the honor code was the lack of proctored exams. I took most of my frosh ones at 3 am in the student SciFi library (SPECTRE, ftw)
Having a revenue model isn't the same as having revenue. The $25M is a runway until either A) their next financing, or B) the point where they're actual revenue will pay for all the brilliant engineers, other salaries, hardware costs, overhead, marketing, etc. will ensure they have more than $0 in the bank at all times.
Redundant comments are as annoying as repeating yourself in writing.

Redundant comments are as annoying as repeating yourself in writing (and I'm certainly as guilty of it as anyone). But the real point of the comments is to explain the "why", just as the code explains the "how". In your example above, to explain the reason that you've chosen to mix in the modules you're mixing in...
4 Million Vodafone Customers' Personal Details May Have Been Exposed
The Free Software Movement... was never about Free Software
Can anyone throw some light on metafilter? What kind of a community is that?
I don't disagree with you at all. You make a valid argument.

But I guess the point I was trying to make was: As an end user, if I don't have to log onto a website through my browser, I don't consider myself to be ON the web. Instead I'm using a much lightweight service which gives me the same information. I am sure more and more people will resort to apps and widgets to access information online. This will result in a reduction in "website" traffic.

If I'm not mistaken, the controversial Wired article tried to say that users are switching to mobile technology(read apps) because its much sleeker, convenient and less time consuming.

After the Twitter for Mac app, I don't see myself opening my browser and logging onto twitter.com. To me, it seems like an added step to access my twitter feed
i hope so. been following progress since you guys announced it (here? i don't recall). i'd like to see it fit my needs, but it doesn't yet.
As mentioned below, this seems very good http://valums.com/ajax-upload/

I'd be more comfortable styling this to fit my needs than a forced fully blown gizmo
I think he's suggesting a genetic algorithm... Google-style organisms, competing for fewest retried searches, most-different front-page results, etc., that over time merge and split in various ways. Seems pretty similar to some of the tactics Google's already trying to me.
Watch the floods in Brisbane, Australia Live.
No, you cannot use your LinkedIn profile as a resume.

Your LinkedIn profile is not the best way to present yourself to the company. You want to customize your resume for each company to which you apply. Maybe when applying to one company, you emphasize the work you’ve done in Oracle, and to another it’s all about the Linux sysadmin, depending on what the company wants.

Creating a resume is hard work, and it's not something you do only once. It's not a matter of filling in the blanks. Please don't try to take the easy way out. (http://techworklove.com/2011/01/you-cant-take-the-easy-way-t...)
I can't imagine taking the effort to learn and use a new shell. That said, I'm always grateful when people try to end the chicken-egg problem.
5-10 times a day, I have pinned HN to my chrome's most visited list.
I have a daemon that snaps my photo every odd 30 minutes. I was the first thing i built after getting a new laptop with an isight 4 years ago. Should I leave nothing else to the world, there will at least be tens of thousands of crummy jpegs of my face scrunched before a monitor when I die.

Mine are far less cutesy than his because the only indication that a photo is being taken is the little green light activating for a split second. But more authentic i think.
Setup Rails 3 Project
When I was running my completely un-funded zero-revenue startup, college kids would daily send me emails begging me to give them a job doing non-technical BS work, often for free.

Fortunately a non-technical rockstar (who is willing to work for dirt cheap) is substantially easier to find a technical rockstar... I imagine now after "The Social Network" social media startups almost have an entertainment industry-like glamor at the moment, like breaking into the music business or movies. Non-technical people often will work for free or dirt cheap for years to 'make it' in these fields.

Milk it.
Resume-building websites are worse than worthless because they perpetuate the absurd idea that resumes are all about formatting. They are not.

http://techworklove.com/2011/01/resume-building-websites-are...
Of getting stolen? What are basing that on? If you look at Google or Amazon, for example, they have teams of people who's only job it is to secure said data. I don't think the average office can say the same.
Is it really easier to crack SSL or break into Google's data centers (or hack Google's servers) or guess/crack my password or get hired at Google with intention of espionage/theft than it is to break the ground floor window I'm sitting next to and carting off my desktop?

Really?

The only thing that might be easier is for Google or the Government (via subpoena or collaboration) to get access to my data.
just as a follow up to this in case any one is interested I posted a rebuttal to the original post - http://wnx.me/Ku
The game never seems to get more difficult - it's just an endurance thing.
I hope I don't sound too racist or anti-Semite.

Why is it that when a Jewish mother does the same as the Asian mother, no one complains?

I'm a Chinese btw.
One thing I will grant about the original book and the controversy about it ... whatever the publicist got, was worth it.
The "Chinese mother" approach to raising children is based around motivations at the second-highest level of Maslow's hierarchy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Ne...

While this aggressive approach to parenting can be made to sound right on a certain dispassionate level, to some people it just feels intensely wrong in a way that's hard to explain. Why is that?

What happens is that children raised to heavily optimize "Esteem" have a hard time switching gears into "Self-actualization". It's no surprise that the "Chinese mother" disallows her child from starring in the school play. That would be a means of self-expression; it would throw a monkey wrench in the whole works.

I've found many times in life that in order to self-actualize further, I've had to give up things that others praised. I think that in quitting Google and joining a startup (despite her parents' likely disapproval), the author has taken a big step towards self-actualization.
Very fun. The game has just enough aesthetics to make every letter typed satisfying. I could even feel my typing improving over time.

I like the concept of the different ships, but the game doesn't get hard enough fast enough. I played through 30 levels before I got bored and stopped playing. Great potential, I can't wait to see what comes next.
Downvotes! Care to explain why?
That is beautiful! I made a piece that I call "God's Commode"

http://cl.ly/022x3k2M1G3Y0G233e0Y
I wonder if this has anything to do with the very cheap Sandy Bridge line just launched by Intel. $300 for a chip that competes with $1200 chips is pretty tough to beat.
TV installers
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Personally, I hate bash. Besides having syntax which is totally foreign to me, which I forget every after every time I attempt to learn it, it is extremely slow.

Besides that, I like structured data in the form of an object vs parsing everything from text.

However, this really is more of a unix criticism and less a bash criticism.
Extremely well written, and echoes many of the comments in the quora thread (and in my own observations).

There's a logic to it all though, in China for example, there isn't really any reward to be a big risk taker, and the downsides can be huge (social isolation, imprisonment, worse). Success then is to follow directions, do what you are told, and do it with supreme competence.

This is often discussed in terms of the traditional Confucian Academies, and how dedicated studies could lead a peasant into a life of government service and success and pride for his family. But one has to look at what a classical Confucian education entails, literacy for sure -- but it was basically a monumental task of rote memorization.
Unfortunately, Chinese parents who try to replicate this on their American born kids are doomed because they haven't quite gotten the message that those things aren't as valued here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_classics
I was trying to be subtle about it, but the example I used was drawn from a fairly well-known (albeit, I should add, well-written) JS library. My point is that this style of documentation encourages that behavior, perhaps paradoxically because it's so attractive and big hunks of whitespace tend to stand out.
Wow, read the Tweet and say he misspelled "their."

Why would anyone buy a stock that 50 cent recommends? Wow...maybe I should get him to promote my app.