skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might be better to cripple the site rather than kill it. If all of Mahalo's pages disappeared you can be sure they would return en masse when they found the workaround for the filter. Blocking chunks of their content might make finding the workaround harder and may ultimately force them (or any other low quality site) to up the quality - yeah, I know I am deluding myself.
I believe it is always worthwhile to learn new technologies. You don't need to become an expert but the exposure to new things provides new ways of looking at and solving problems.
While in theory, I support the massive potential for new media to democratize journalism, right now we're at a point where the standards are simply not yet in place. Bloggers and online journalists are the cowboy coders of the early days of the web. A necessary transition, but sweet Jesus, can the results be ugly most of the time.
Techcrunch is what I imagine it would be like if Perez Hilton blogged about technology.
Thanks man! Highly appreciated! Yeah, we've been keeping an eye on Garage48 and Alex has been keeping us up to date :D This is my own opinion but it would be really cool :) The more the merrier! :D
That's awesome. The way it's described, that's something most of us have run into in our careers, and it makes Eric sound like a real person.
Absolutely. Also, publishing in the New Yorker is considered a pinacle of achievement for writers. They attract the best talent.
The other relevant section is also from part 2 of the GPL v2, In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.

Neither section implies that including only a little GPL v2 code within your project is OK.
Unfortunately, Internet journalism has become primarily about speed -- so the fastest to report or even speculate wins on aggregation services -- thus the lions share of the traffic.
It wasn't coupons, but a coupon business model.
I seriously doubt that's what the payload is.
I'm trying http://fuelphp.com/ these days, also new, from ex-codeigniter, ex-kohana dudes. In other words, they've learnt some lessons from the other ones. Not bad so far.
The discoverer of the vulnerability also wrote a blog post about it.

Blog post: http://daverecycles.com/post/2858880862/heroku-hacked-dissec...

HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128175

Disclaimer: I know David E. Chen personally from college.
Incredible. Now they charge you for NOT using your phone.
> Oracle is screwing up bad with the JCP and it's going to hurt Java

i was far from all this politics, but made a few google searches - is this about ASF leaving JCP? then, as far as i understood, these issues are all related, to Harmony, suing etc.

so maybe Java wouldn't be hurt? just specs would be changed more tyrannically...

(java my favorite language, don't make me sad :)
This also is a pretty good idea. I know django supports plugins. I've written some for my site.
Enough cannot be said about "willful ignorance". There seems to be a trend in many articles that say "follow the analytics and the revenues will follow," as if by magic, if you make decisions solely on what the numbers are telling you, that you have to change your code/design.

Particularly consumer enterprises, people simply do not know what they like, or at least cannot articulate it. There is so much noise in consumer data that everything has to be taken with a grain of salt.
How much is Oracle suing Google for? If Oracle can get anywhere near $5.6 Billion from suing Google this could end up being one of the biggest tech blunders since AOL/TW.
Calacanis to McClure: "I'll see your 500startups, and raise you 500seedAccelerators."
I would say Groupon is better known outside of tech circles than in. Most non-techies I talk to say "Oh, Groupon, it's so great and I love it!" Most techies say something like "Meh, nothing innovative, no defenses, it's a fad."

[Disclaimer: I work for Groupon and live in Chicago]
You forgot: (childish question)
I think there might be something else at work here: our rising expectations of how search engines should work.

In years past, Google's results were measurably less relevant than they are today. In the time between "then" and "now", we're grown more accustomed to high quality, fast, relevant results. I think this makes it seem like small problems in search are bigger than they are.

It would be great if there was a "Google of 2004" to test this side by side, but I don't think that is possible. :)
Ask HN: Devs, how do you view the role of testers in the development process?
The company I work for develops software, hardware and firmware for audio and video conferencing markets. I work in the testing department checking and debugging these products before they go to market. I view my role as a bit adversarial, but with a view to producing the best possible product. I'd like to get some insight on how developers see a role like mine in the development process.
The Internet Browsing Cops
As Rummble’s CEO is ousted, the story of a European startup unravels
Excited about fist stable release.. Can't wait!!!
I have a feeling they're doing things entirely incorrectly.

1) this is for Hackintoshes (should be in the title here, but isn't), and it uses a 10.6.2 hackintosh distribution, not your standard install disks.

2) they're using CopyCatX, a drive duplicator, instead of the disk utility. Does this matter?

3) CopyCatX is a $60 piece of software, though it shows it in what appears to be the disk image containing the portable 10.6.2 image... I wonder if this could be construed as supporting piracy.

4) If you're running on Mac hardware, you can just install to an external drive of any type, or image your drive to another, and it all works happily. CopyCatX isn't necessary there, why would it be necessary for copying a disk image in another case? It's an image.
Achieving zero bias is among the most difficult things to write in journalism, even in something as seemingly binary as technology. A bigger question might be "was the answer any different than what you imagined it would be?"

Even if journalism is far from objective, I think people are good at making inferences as to what really happened in the articles they read (at least in this crowd).
It wouldn't be if it was Tech Crunch or Mashable, but it's The New Yorker and they have real reporters, editors, fact checkers and standards.
>The alternative, and very likely real reason for the suit, is that Oracle actually cares about its intellectual property and would prefer that Google not do what they will with it.

I think it's far more likely that Oracle has seen a way to get a slice of the Android pie, and the rapidly growing long-term revenue stream that it likely represents.
Here's one possible solution (appropriately enough from LH itself):

http://lifehacker.com/344188/get-only-the-posts-you-want-fro...

I would suggest subscribing to the type of posts you like the most by tag.

My recommendations for tags would be:

#hivefive/ #hivefivefollowup

#feature

#downloads (you can specify which OS, see link above)

#featuredworkspace (I like them, you may not)

#featureddesktop (again, I like them)

#howto

#diy

There are more I can't think of right now. I definitely agree that the overall quality of LH has declined, however HN and LH are still my number one and number two sources of tech information on the web and I typically check both multiple times a day. Some of the best tips and software I use comes from LH - Dropbox tweaks, XBMC, CCleaner, BitTorrent tips, Launchy and many, many more. Check out their recommended bundles of apps also available for Windows, Mac and Linux, e.g:

http://lifehacker.com/5562864/lifehacker-pack-for-mac-our-es...

http://lifehacker.com/5713510/most-popular-free-mac-download...
There has been a surge of links to public Google docs lately, and they have all been A+; it's like for some reason, if we write things down in a document instead of a blog, it becomes instantly more valuable. Keep it coming!
Hacking News January 2011 1st edition
Textgrounder: A system for connecting language to space and time
Agreed. My ideal search engine wouldn't require real websites to play in the SEO arms-race to beat out the junk sites.
My experience is the exact opposite: I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search results in the last few months. It feels like it increases when I accidentally click a clone site.

This happens for more than StackOverflow clones. Mailing lists, Linux man-pages, FAQs, published Linux articles, etc. all have clone pages that are obvious link farms (sometimes they even include ads that attempt to harm my computer) that rank higher than the "official" (or at least less-noisey) pages.

Ideally, I'd like to completely remove domains from result as has been discussed elsewhere on HN. Hopefully this upcoming push for social networking that Google has will reintroduce a better-implemented "SearchWiki" feature...
Perhaps Google used that $6B to buy 600M $20 Amazon gift cards from Living Social? Just to spite Groupon. 100% profit! :)
The Legality of the Certificate Authority Trust Model
read through some of the wiki. Guess I'll jump into the irc channel this weekend and ask questions as I go?
Will people assign specific test/task to me or do I just pick a few?
Better Product Doesn't Matter
Ask HN: Pharmaceutical BigCo wants to acquire my iPad app. Advice?
Hey HN, throwaway account here.

My partner and I created an iPad app and it's been pretty successful (especially considering it was only a 4 week investment). The app is in the top 100 US & China, covered by NYT, ABC, Gizmodo, etc.

Now a BigCo Pharmaceutical is asking to buy the app (not the company), code and all. They want to rebrand it and re-release it as one of their products.

We are an LLC, but we didn't take any funding, so we don't have any "advisors" as such. We're technicians, not lawyers, and we are more or less clueless on the best way to go about negotiating (and closing) this deal.

What advice can you give us on negotiating? Are there any HNers out there that have been through this sort of mini-acquisition before that are willing to reach out to us? (please comment and I'll ping you via my normal account). Have any good links to read?

A few details you might want to know:

* Our app's revenue was <$10k in the last 30 days, but it hasn't been out very long.

* We've been getting a good deal of press, but we don't think it will last. Now is probably a good time to exit.

* We'd love to sell. We're not that emotionally invested into the product; this app isn't our life passion (it was actually started as joke)

We'd be grateful for any advice you have for us.

P.S.
Just finished reading:

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1985552

[2] http://www.davidgcohen.com/2010/06/18/you-have-acquisition-interest-now-what/

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639523

[4] http://giffconstable.com/2010/11/selling-your-company-some-core-questions/

[5] http://www.seattle20.com/tv/clip/StartupDay-2010-Exit-Strategies-for-Startups-by-Hadi-Partovi.aspx

Thanks!
Google cannot escape their fundamental conflict of interest: they make money by selling web traffic to advertisers, then buying that traffic back at discounted rates and re-selling it again, over and over. None of their revenue comes directly from search, though search is their primary source of raw traffic. Their search results don't have to be good, they just have to be good enough to sustain traffic. And right now there are so many people who reflexively use Google out of habit that their results could deteriorate substantially (and many would argue already have) before it impacts their shell-game revenue stream.
Final Jeopardy: Can a Machine Think?
The one sentence answer is that Google is no longer the top dog, and he doesn't seem to have the steam to weather through the storm. I feel like after the whole Google/Verizon deal, the writing was on the wall.
Jason, in your newsletter in November you said:

As these programs have expanded, I’ve found that the level of intensity and savvy of the founders has come down a notch. Basically, there are a lot of open seats in these programs, so some of the B-level students are getting in.

With the addition of more programs will come the placement of C-level founders, which are basically in the category of “not fundable.”

So with that said, what's the point of starting 500 accelerators when only the about the top 5 matter. I understand the education aspect, but with 500 accelerators the majority of the "mentors" will just be wantrapreneurs.
How do you interpret the backlash from the users recently ? In your eyes, have we become more used to "perfect" results, or are the fewer bad results left more insidious and thus more harmful (despite the overall level of quality being higher) ?

Personally I tend to find what I'm looking for by adding a few more words, but in the case of reviews and tech stuff it doesn't always work and I often have to rewrite my query one or more times to get something valuable.
I have 8 servers running distcc for my compilation chores, however none of them has more than 8 GB of RAM. IIRC I had no problem compiling firefox with my puny workstation. Chrome is as nasty as OOo :)
http://www.google.com/search?q=delayed_job+delay+priority...

Stackoverflow comes in at number 8 while clones are 6 and 10
Just a FYI I changed the script to install Ruby to /usr/local thanks to some input from a Github user. Also people are forking it and setting it up to install RVM so feel free to check those out as well!
Google is probably right to not go down the hard-coding path. Hard coding the offenders doesn't work. You block a domain, they changes names. You block an IP, they switch to AWS so that your choice is to block all of AWS or not block them.
Problem is, search space is too big

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html [Section: 'Problems']

( embarrassed to admit I probably have a complete cross reference of his essays in my brain :) )
(1) always be skeptical of any "free energy" device that requires energy input, (2) calorimetry is hard, particularly when phase changes are involved.

Joe Newman showed up my undergrad institution with his "Miracle Motor" which, with some instruments, would appear to send power back into the grid. Of course, it wouldn't run if it wasn't plugged into a power source.

His motor worked a lot like the old spark-gap radio transmitters, and would send an pulse of wideband RF energy back into the line, which would of course totally screw up clip-on inductive power meters and many other instruments.

Funny, the motor needed about 10 kilovolts to work, and was normally powered through a neon sign transformer. I jokingly suggested that we put 100 car batteries in series to power it, and a potential investor said, "Great, let's go to Ace Hardware."

I cobbled up a circuit in the lab that would screw up power meters in the same way and made the [measured] statement that "conventional power meters don't accurately record the performance of the motor"

The senior lab tech in the EE department came under Newman's spell and didn't show up for work the next day. A friend of mine who worked for him and I were looking for him all over town, and one day a hippie asked me "Have you ever heard of gyro power?" Well, it turned out that he'd set up a makeshift lab in the garage of a drug house, funded by a consortium of real estate investors from Albuquerque.

My friend and I showed up loaded for bear, equipped with measurement gear, surveillance equipment, and burglar's tools. (We figured if we nicked the motor, Newman would think the CIA took it) It turned out the head hippie was home, and he invited us into the garage to check out the lab. They had a big lathe they rented for turning coils, and some measurement equipment from the E.E. department, but Newman was sleeping with the motor in his hotel room.

The investors lost interest and Newman blew out of town, but the lab tech had been changed by the experience. He used to listen to good music, like Jeff Beck, but afterwards he only listened to bad Christian Rock. He got paranoid, thought people were trying to run him over when he was walking on the road, and thought he got attacked by the president of the school's dog. He quit his job about two months later and went to Mississippi to study at the foot of the great man.

It was a loss of a damn good lab tech.
Thanks, we spent a lot of time working on getting the tone right. There are multiple elements - voice over, music, color, illustration, script - so the trickiest part was bringing them all together in a way that felt genuine and honest.
I'm pretty sure drugstore.com is legit:

http://www.drugstore.com/pharmacy/drugindex/rxsearch.asp?sea...
What DOES the term PC imply? I don't mean to try to get at a sensible a priori definition of "PC" - I'm aware that as far as the world is concerned they're just branding terms used by Apple. But where the delineation is obvious when we're considering nothing except Windows and Mac OS, it gets greyer when we consider Linux, BSD and so on. Could I have some hardware custom built, and write my own operating system for it, and call it a personal computer that's not a PC, or does only Apple have that power?
Some comments & questions from someone who's worked on something similar:

-What's extglob used here for? I don't see any regexes.

-What are libffi-dev and libyaml-dev for? I assume some common gems depend on them. If so, which? (I'm just getting into Rails.)

-Git in the Maverick repos is old (1.7.1, which was released in April). Installing it from source is probably a better idea.

-You should probably use RVM to install Ruby, since its 1.9.2-head target won't require you to keep updating your script with 1.9.2's patchlevel.

-In my rails3.sh (which I should really publish), I didn't need to `gem install bundler` in order for `bundle install` to work. Probably because `rails` depends on `bundler`.

-That sudo check is neat, and I'd like to lift it; what's this script's license?
It always fascinates me that nobody ever brings up regular expression in these kinds of discussions.

Spammers literally sit around all day figuring out ways to deliver more spam, I'm fairly certain they've spent the 30 minutes it takes to craft a regular expression to harvest the easy 80% of these 'obfuscated' e-mails.
Type walmart.cm into your browser and amazon.com pops up?
Thought this was interesting.. a little cyber-squatting by Amazon? Are there any other unusual re-directs out there?
Google does a fair bit of language and VM research - Go language, Python/LLVM and I think having Java in their pockets would give them a good amount of leverage - they don't have to rely on Oracle providing a updated JVM under favorable licensing terms for example - lot of Google Enterprise stuff is Java based. If tomorrow Oracle decides to go OpenSolaris route for OpenJDK - that would be bad for Google as they don't have their own "Java" VM.

But even if you just consider the suing part - this is potentially not just limited to Google but also their OHA members. So if Larry sues everyone in OHA and handset makers couldn't afford to pay what Larry asks - that could end up hurting Android.
This is the most important post in this thread. It looks like they created their own "conformance tests", in some cases using the Java implementation as the baseline. On the scale of concerns, that is somewhere around 0.
Engineers are bad at things they can't measure?
This sounds interesting. Thanks

For others in my boat, who didn't know what exactly pypy was -http://rayli.net/blog/2010/04/what-is-the-purpose-of-pypy/
Low-cost, low-orbit satellites combat wireless shortage worldwide
> and the rapidly growing long-term revenue stream that it likely represents.

Again, they don't need a long-term revenue stream. I'd wager that their revenue stream from Oracle Database and other products, as well as the long-term support contracts for those products, shadows Android in comparison. Bold, I know, but Oracle is widely, widely used in the enterprise sector. The salary for an Oracle DBA alone speaks volumes regarding this.

In your world, Oracle executives sit around and think: boy, we could score a small percentage of that Android market. It pales in comparison to what we can make off of enterprise customers, but that cash flow is definitely worth the negative publicity and community recoil!

Completely ridiculous.

Your comment is merely another angle of repetitive arguments attempting to make Oracle out to be the bad party for suing Google. While I dislike Oracle just as much as the next geek for their treatment of open-source products, they might actually have a point with this lawsuit. That's all I'm saying, and watching my karma swing around wildly for taking the middle ground instead of jumping on the anti-Oracle bandwagon is amusing.
i like techcrunch. they call it a blog, not a newspaper/journalism.

the cited article contains nothing to read, i think the same: google has issues, the leadership changes, nothing strange. sure i'm glad that people say (and print) the same, but sometimes it's interesting to read some contrary, longer or personalized blog post.

and, techcrunch lets me be closer to the Valley while being far overseas
Starbucks: A Lesson in How to do Game Mechanics
First, why is this framework using __autoload? spl_register_autoloader should be used here. Otherwise, other frameworks (like doctrine, zend, etc) can't register their autoloaders.

Second, why require 5.3 and not use namespaces? Should be e.g. Eddy\Controller instead of EddyController.

Third, why so many global functions? Pretty much all of these would be better suited as static functions on a class.

Lastly, why use mysqli? Now whoever uses this has to use mysql. It easily could have been made to use PDO, and should have. There is no reason to use mysqli.

Sorry for the criticism, but there are so many of these out there that new ones pretty much have to be flawless to even matter. This framework just seems to be made by someone who doesn't pay any attention to how other major frameworks and the rest of the community are doing things.
Mine does (see profile).

Gmail does a great job of keeping spam out of my box, but I still have to go through the spam folder occasionally to look for false positives (I get a couple a year), so I'd prefer as little spam in there as possible.

As for obfuscating, I use methods which require the reader to think, not to apply a rule. All the obfuscation methods presented in the superuser answer can be algorithmically beaten. Mine can't. It requires understanding the words I used. That is, unless it gets copied enough times to be recognized as a standard pattern for obfuscation. But if that happens, I can just change it to something else that requires reading and understanding.
Absolutely beautiful, and done in the most tasteful way. This is how you communicate your product, especially for a potentially sensitive cultural issue such as death.
There is no documentation?
No examples?
What this tells me is that there's an opportunity in tech journalism to disrupt the current scene with upstart notions like good editing and good journalism.

The New York Times was such an upstart in it's day with it's revolutionary notion of impartial reporting.
RestBackup is a web service. You can HTTP PUT files to https://us.restbackup.com/ and then HTTP GET them later. The uploaded files are deleted automatically after a specified period of time.

The RestBackup Management API lets you create separate backup accounts for your users. Your app/script/cronjob can back up each user's data from their machine/device to a separate and private account.

Using RestBackup, you can have automatic backups without adding any new servers or equipment. It works for mobile apps, desktop apps, and hosted applications. It also works well for normal file backups.

At the moment, the only way to use RestBackup is with curl or your own program. More client software will be available soon.
Top 12 sales analysis checklist for your business