skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Really, if there's not enough bandwidth, just limit the bandwidth. Users will prioritize their traffic themselves.

This, I think. The rest is smoke and mirrors.

And there may be any number of privately developed solutions. E.g. if streaming's a problem in the evening, time-shift some of it to workday/schoolday hours, when that "last mile" to the house is relatively empty. For example, Netflix could have a look at your queue and send the next item or two along in anticipation.

It fits my idea, and the more sensible arguments I've heard, for effective regulation: Paint broadly and without discrimination, and let private enterprise sort out the details within those lines.

The ISP's have become quasi utilities: Many people (in the U.S.) have at most one or two providers to choose from. Therefore, regulation needs to make the playing field for services level within a provider's domain.

Similarly, their prices need to be regulated, as locally and regionally at least they are monopolists, or members of a very limited oligarchy. Most people can't just pick up and move in order to shop for another provider.

I don't know about overall costs, but I recall reading a year or three ago that trunk data costs were halving yearly. As the end user, where is the resulting reduction in cost for my use going? (I'm not seeing it.) To infrastructure, or to excessive enrichment of those who are squeezing me for everything they can get?

If the providers don't like this, well, maybe they shouldn't have spent so much time and effort squeezing out all competition. (Which they've done and continue to do. As one example, just look at their reaction to any attempted municipal provider plan. Then there's the way ILECs fight co-location of equipment and enforcement of e.g. line maintenance SLA's for competing DSL providers. (Fought? I'm not sure how much life this market segment has anymore, anyway.))

EDIT: Well, I see now that Tim's post is addressing wireless connectivity, whereas I mostly addressed experiences in the lined world. I'm suspicious of arguments that the two differ. There were the same howls about capacity, some years ago, with regard to hardline service. And, SBC -- now ATT -- dragged their feet in a quite disgraceful and disgusting fashion in the Chicago area (at least) until the cable companies started to eat their lunch, including voice service. Then, suddenly, they were able to make something happen on the broadband front.

Radios in wireless devices are still -- and increasingly, given technological advances, needlessly -- crippled. Data delivery very hierarchical and without much caching.

Prioritization is just the "easy way out" for the carriers. Tell them to stuff it, and make them work harder to produce some real solutions. If it costs them some money, well, I'd argue that's one thing that profits are for. They've got enough to spare.
Year in review: Quotables
Facebook Data Vulnerable to 3rd Party Access
On a side note, Anyone else surprised that installing seat belts would cost an additional 8000 - 12000 _per_ bus. That just sounds a lot of BS. $170 million per state. LOL.
"I used to believe that most programming and open source communities were meritocracies ..."

People cannot judge you on your merits unless they know you exist and what you've done. Stand up and be counted.

Now, there is the case that some people assign special value to other people by virtue of their being known, and don't bother to find out why someone is known. TV is filled with people who are famous for being famous. Maybe some tech circles are like that, too.

I've had people look to hire me who mention that they were Googling for something or other and my name kept coming up, so they figured I was the person to contact. Far be it from me to to discourage such people :).

But I also know that the bottom line is you have to live up to these people's expectations.
It's safer because kids will misuse seat belts and strangle themselves in a crash rather than be safely absorbed by the seat in front of them.
Totally agree and I plan on focusing on this in the coming year.
Simplest Phones Open to 'SMS of Death'
I agree that pair programming has it's place and can be a positive workflow for some, but for the way I work I just find it extremely intrusive and I easily get a third of what I would get done. I'm a big advocate of peer reviews, but pair programming just takes me out of my workflow and impairs my creativity and performance.
I can't tell if this is a troll or just a misunderstanding, but it's wrong on two counts: Clojure is not purely functional, and side-effects are done more often with monads than STM in Haskell.
CurveDNS: a DNSCurve-capable forwarding name server
IPhone’s Group Messaging in iOS 4
I think you hit the nail on the head of what I'm getting at: "Famous for being famous." I guess I'm wondering if this is starting to happen in OSS and Programming in general?
I think the key points are to align incentives, provide authenticity, and make it opt-in.

Dropbox and Groupon align everyone's incentives by offering benefits to both parties and acquiring customers at a much lower cost than traditional ads. They provide authenticity because the folks referring their friends are genuinely using their products.

Many consumers now frown upon affiliate marketing because they feel taken advantage of--the affiliates say whatever they think you want to hear in order to get you to buy, and some make an awful lot of money doing it.

Plaxo was perceived very negatively because they were inviting their user's contacts without their permission.

The book "The Ultimate Question" contends that asking "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" is the single most important metric you should measure in your business. Thus, if you find that you have to offer too large of an incentive to your customers, you should instead focus on improving your product.

We're building a social referral platform right now with these factors in mind that will make it super easy to run different referral programs and find what's best for your business. We're focusing on eCommerce now, but are getting into SaaS and other services very soon.

Send us a note at hello _at_ curebit.com if you're interested in piloting with us.
Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen tries again with patent megasuit
because .. fuck it?
I first started typing out programs from books and magazines into my ZX Spectrum when I was about 6.
Oh yes. 7th grade lines on the Apple IIe:

10 FOR I = 1 to 100
20 PRINT "I WILL NOT SPEAK OUT OF TURN IN CLASS. I WILL FOLLOW CLASS RULES"
30 NEXT I

"That is fantastic that you can type all of that out on your typewrite Michael. Well done."
(The concept of Dot Matrix wasn't even well known initially and perhaps bad lenses).
1 is just a particular variety of 2.

(By the way, you've just restated the efficient markets hypothesis.)
The Hot Girl Effect and Networking
Did you read the Mea Culpa? Unless Mr. Winter is lying, Zak's question still stands. It seems like there is a potential for injustice when the reviews are held in secret like they were. All Google put forth was that there was a risk of generating invalid [click] activity.

As one who, like you, pays for that invalid activity I am glad to see Google do what they can to stem it.

But it gets very serious in my mind when they can also take the cash from the account. They should be required to show explicitly their justification. If that means that their business has to change because their algorithms are exposed, so be it. What they are doing does not seem to be a fair business practice to me, and I worry about the precedent they are being allowed to set.
I can not agree. There is an enormous difference between click-farming and a courteous 'please support this site by considering the fine offerings of my advertisers.' Also, to cut off all his YouTube income because of a misreading of his pitch on a tiny subscription-driven site is BS - there's no sign that he abused YouTube in any way.

I appreciate that a more responsive feedback loop can be exploited by bad guys as easily as it can support good guys, but the approach Google has taken creates a greater incentive for the guy to pull his old material and create a new online identity than it does for him to correct the minor flaw in his marketing. It's easy to say 'don't ever encourage users to click on ads,' but half the appeal of niche sites like this to members is being able to have conversational contact with an individual whose work is especially admirable, or through which the member can live vicariously.

What's happening here is that a legitimate honest business model (subscriber sales for niche content, with a minor secondary revenue stream from ads) is being punished because of Google's inability to differentiate it from a dishonest business model. The huge fear you describe is a reflection of both the asymmetry between Google and the small advertiser, and of the difficulty in understanding exactly what behavior is in or out. Not everyone finds those contracts easy to read or understand, and Google is actually raising barriers to entry if it enforces them too rigidly and giving greater incentive to the black hats than the white hats. I strongly suspect that this is a limiting factor on Google's own revenue, which is stuck on a local maximum because Google itself is has a much lower tolerance for information asymmetry than it demands of its content providers.
" if you find yourself around a better class of people, you may notice that they're not Ruby developers."

Comments like that say more about you than about Ruby developers, winking punctuation or not.
I had to convince a former bosses boss of mine that this was the proper setup. He had setup the network when the company was tiny and explaining what needed to be changed when we grew to more than 10 times the users and 20 times the wifi devices was a lesson in convincing a brick wall. Getting all the best practices collected was not an easy task.
You've managed to stumble across Hacker News meme #17.
From what I can see, a lot of the startups in China are just copying ideas and products that have gained traction here in the US. Look at youku.com and tudou.com, major video sharing sites in China, they seem very similar to youtube.com in layout, social network etc. Then look at baidu.com, the major search engine in China. Wow does that homepage remind you of some other search site? Hmmmm.

I am not trying to say that Chinese startups don't have good ideas. But why do they have to blatantly copy US startups that are successful? Obviously, startups inspire each other, but I will posit that what is lacking in China to a certain extent is:

1. Creativity, which leads to a strong tendency to generate knock-offs of Western companies or products. This includes both software and hardware.
2. Openess or ability for people with good ideas to step forward and actuate them. The Chinese educational system is segmented and once you are on a certain path there is not really the ability to change or reinvent oneself as easily as in the West.

Look at Twitter, Apple, and many of the other companies at the forefront of tech and business. The leaders and visionaries behind these companies were not necessarily formally trained in what they are doing cause who can be trained to be a trendsetter! No way. There can only be the right environment for innovation which needs creativity, access to resources, and lots of hard work.

I speak as someone trained in the US in philosophy and politics but learned software development as an afterthought and am building companies and products. Someone like me could not exist in China and to a lesser extent in India due to their narrow-minded educational systems.

I wish founders and developers across the world the best of luck in their endeavors, but know that me and my non-traditional founder compatriots here in the US will compete with you and compete hard!
I see lots of discussion prompted by stcredzero's comment (11 replies, including this one and the 2 deleted ones). How again did it not further the discussion?
I actually took a summer school course in Basic using Apple 2 when I was six. Learned C at 15 on my Amiga 500 and starting getting paid at 16.
Why firms leave California
It is obvious to you and me that a 6% CTR is supernaturally high, at least in my experience.

If Google's algorithms are so great as to detect AdSense "cheaters," why don't they just throttle down the CPC for "cheaters" down to 1 cent (or less)?

I think we're basically discovering that Google is defending their immature AdSense algorithms by banning users rather than adapting to different behaviors.
What can this do for me that I can't do myself with wget + cron?
Correct, and it's quite possible that Google is undermining its own interests by presenting such incentives.
FTA: "Munaut demonstrated the way in which GSM . . . allows anyone to determine a subscriber’s current location with a simple Internet query, to the level of city or general rural area."

Is he talking about reverse IP lookup?
Me: This is random belligerence
Cleverbot: Yep yep, pretty much.
The first Play Framework Book, at last
virii

OT, but please: viruses. In Latin, 'virus' is like 'sand': it has no plural (and if it would've had a plural, it would've been 'viri').

http://stason.org/TULARC/security/computer-virus/14-Is-it-vi...
I agree with your point that economics knows no national boundaries.

> _international economic theory, trade theory specifically_

Do you have any good resources for this? Preferably free? Trying to expand my brain here ;)
In my work environment I find "pair programming" to be useful the 5% of the time someone is working on a Hard Problem. Most time during the work day is UI tuning, debugging, and generic implementation of straightforward features.

Pair programming doesn't need to be a policy because it precipitates naturally out of someone asking for help on a Hard Problem. That 5% of the time you're working through a tasks key algorithm, or discovering the best User Interaction for a complex feature.

I find Pair Programming to be a important sounding label for something which is actually quite mundane. It's called working together™.

It's a waste of my time to sit and watch someone implement the 95% of software that is mundane.
Boom!

http://gigaom.com/2010/12/28/how-to-charm-a-vc-into-mentorin...
Lack of security.
I would hate for HN to become a "General News" site. There are plenty of places I can go to get "General News". I come to HN because it provides the exact type of articles I believe we all come here to find. This is the only site I check multiple times per day, and it's because I know there's no messing around. Quite often I'll read, or at least skim, 80% of the articles on the front page.

Let Digg do it's own thing. HN is a niche news site for a niche group.
I'm beginning to wonder if it'd make sense to reset to 70% for say anything from 49.99 and up. Fiction books aren't likely to go after that price range, but educational/informative books can be reasonably priced there, working mostly like things do now while still letting amazon try to keep fiction priced at impulse purchase prices.
These are some of the most absurdly vague patents I've ever heard. Very, very bad form.
I dip in to HN regularly because some interesting articles pop up, but I find the site design to be soulless and depressing.
Magic the Gathering Designer Talks Industrial Design, Apple, and Game Mechanics
From what I've heard, doesn't that directly imply hungry? ;)
If I may inquire, what did you startup produce?
You want customers to think about your brand, and to do that you want to give them every exposure you can. You might end up with magazine adds, outdoor adds, or t-shirts, all of which can be strong marketing tools.

Putting your logo offline makes your brand seem more concrete, it helps pull you out of the pure virtual realm so that customers can relate to you better.
> It's extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life.

I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. One day, I woke up to hear her screaming. She's very old and has weak bones. One day, her leg just snapped in half under her.

Maybe it is dehumanizing or something not to lose your mind just because your own Grandmother is on the floor screaming, lying in a huge pool of her own blood. But I had to do first aid. I had to get the paramedics.

I was the only person there and if I had gone to pieces, she would have died. She's fine now, though. We got her good care. She can even walk again.
And another 1,200 more deaths than expected in the three months following 9/11: http://ur.umich.edu/0405/Nov22_04/09.shtml

Or that backscatter X-ray machines odds of giving you cancer are roughly equal to those of dying in a terrorist attack: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-...
glad you expected the response -- you're a classic troll; complete with creating a dummy account, the opening line
stating a stupidly absurd negative comment, and the closing
line with the insinuation that the devs go through all the
pain of running a project for their own edification
On my dayjob we did some experiments on wether or not it was economically viable. So we tried classical programming and pair programming. We found that classical programming was more productive, but not twice as productive. However there were a lot less bugs found after an iteration of pair programming. When we factored that in, pair programming did end up being the better choice.
While I agree on all OSes being exploitable and therefore on despicable "smug Unix weenie attitude", I still think that while *nix were just exploitable, Windows "welcomed" viruses (think about ActiveX, autorun, administrative privileges by default and such).

There is a misunderstanding about updates. I was not saying that Windows is less updated, I was saying its security holes remain exploitable for a longer time, if they get fixed at all. Compare Windows XP (read section "Most Critical Unpatched"):

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/22/?task=statistics_20...

with Ubuntu Linux (again, read section "Most Critical Unpatched"):

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/18611/?task=statistics...
By that logic, if I were to create a video, it is in my interest to spread that video to as many video hosting providers as possible, and charge each of them.

Sir, I believe you are on to something absolutely brilliant, and will undoubtedly become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.
But Google still needs their sales channel, which is why Bing may be a viable option for this.
In the 80s it was "the Japanese are eating our lunch".
Now it's "the Indians and Chinese are eating our lunch".
In the 30s, it'll be "the Africans are eating our lunch".

Every couple of decades the scare brigade starts clamoring in the US. The US survived the Europeans, the Japanese, etc. eating its lunch; it will survive the Chinese and Indians too.

The US has something that none of its competitors do: a free and open society, where entrepreneurs can flourish.

I have Chinese friends who went back to China and started companies in China; but they made sure that they had kids here first, so that the kids could be American citizens when they grow up. Were it not for the PRC's protectionist policies, many (most?) of the Chinese "success stories" would not have happened.

This is not to say that the US doesn't need to do more. We need to spend more on our universities, our schools and our infrastructure. We need more stress on science and math, and less arguing about "intelligent design". Keep the friggin religion out of our schools, let the kids learn.
Wasn't there a big up a few years ago, where they found that a bunch of cell lines had been contaminated with HeLa?
The united states is not at all open to immigration.

Well, since I'm living with a counterexample right in my own home, I'd certainly expect you to come forward with more evidence than that to back up such a broad assertion. First of all, what example do you have in mind of a country that is much more open to immigration than the United States is? What are the rules on immigration in that country?

More to the point of the submitted article, which is an interesting restatement of the usual views of Vivek Wadhwa, where is the evidence that the United States lacks for visas to be offered to highly inventive, entrepreneurial people from China or from India? What country in the world does better than the United States in bringing in immigrants with those characteristics?

(Yes, I used to be an immigration lawyer, although I have not practiced in that area of law in recent years.)
Don't forget DotCloud... they're like Heroku for all of these.
Me: How old am I?
It: I don't know. how old are you?
Me: 17.
It: You just said you are 24 years old.
Me: What is the applicative order Y combinator?
It: I don't have a phone with apps.
Ti-83 calculator at age 11. Made a casino game and Snake. That exposure lead me towards programming courses in high school and a CompSCi b.s.
I would rather go in the direction of extending JavaScript in the direction of ActionScript 3. I love Action Script and I feel that JavaScript is a bit hacky for RIA (not clean OOP,refactoring is hard) What do you think?
In terms of technical publications, Morgan Kaufman, Prentice Hall and Addison Wesley are far more superior. But O'Reilly has Tim's personal brand behind it, and he has proven himself to be a visionary by betting on Unix early, then noticing the Free Software movement and fully embracing it. Then going on to godfather two editions of the web (bubble.)

Think of O'Reilly as the "Virgin" airlines of Richard Branson, compared to the classics, like British Airways or Lufthansa.

Yes, I too double check the spelling often.
Age 11. The year was 1969. My stepfather was a physicist; he took me to his office on Saturdays and gave me access to an ASR-11 Teletype connected to a GE Mark V timesharing system. My first programs were in Basic and did nothing interesting, of course.
Bay Citizen, a non-profit news startup, blows $5 mil in one year
Paul Allen tries again with (patent) suit against Apple, Google, Facebook
Is this for real? Is there any science to support the anecdotal experience of "the hot girl effect"?
Here's a much better analysis of this phenomenon: http://plus.maths.org/issue51/features/rey/index.html, even deriving a mathematical model.

I think the same kind of thing holds true for attractive ideas as well: For ideas with killer potential, people tend to say "Oh, somebody surely must have implemented it, is looking into it", etc.) and not to push on. Until someone either ignorant of the idealand layout or too dogged to care takes it on and becomes successful. The history of the Valley has many examples of this pattern.
There is also a javascript Dongle Key Generator:

http://www.teknoconsolas.es/usbdongle/usbdongle.html
Delicious in Purgatory
I agree with your dislike for relabeling the mundane, but "pair programming" is used to indicate a specific form of collaboration which includes the the three points mentioned in the post.

The sort of collaboration you're referring to is what I'd call brainstorming. Pairing with someone only for brainstorming purposes would be wasteful.
Rovio Says Apple Will Be Number One for a Long Time
It may. But it doesn't mean its not true. I can be a jerk, and the Ruby community can be irritating. :-)
Do you have any good resources for this? Preferably free? Trying to expand my brain here ;)

http://iang.org/free_banking/david.html

http://www.netmba.com/econ/micro/comparative-advantage/

http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv...

http://www.econ.umn.edu/~lepetyuk/Econ1101/lecture12.pdf

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/pub/international-trade-th...

Searches on "international trade comparative advantage" will turn up some more links, as will combinations of other search terms with the two words "comparative advantage." I hope these links get you started in your admirable efforts at self-education.