skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some tidbits from the registration statement:

1. 90 million registered members worldwide. 2 million registered groups. 65 million unique monthly visitors. 5.5 billion page views in December, 2010.

2. $160 million in revenues during Q1-Q3 2010 (already doubling 2009 numbers).

3. Company is currently profitable.

4. Class A stock being offered to public. All key insiders (founders) hold Class B, which has a 10x voting advantage over the A. Preferred holders will convert into B at the time of the offering, thus also having a 10x voting advantage over the public shareholders. As with Google, the insider group will have firm control of the company even after the offering.

5. Offering will be from newly issued shares of the company and also from piggy-back sales by certain preferred investors.

For anyone interested, the S-1 registration statement is here: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271024/0001193125110...
I'm always a little skeptical of these reports (having spent time in China and having had the internet not go down when everyone claimed there was going to be TianAnMen 2 or something) so I tried to do a little digging and the following egyptian websites are completely blacked from outside of Egypt out as of 4PM PST:

http://www.cbe.org.eg/

http://www.toyotaegypt.com.eg/

http://www.egypo.gov.eg/

http://icdlegypt.gov.eg/

http://www.tpegypt.gov.eg/

http://www.egypt.gov.eg/

http://www.sis.gov.eg/

I was just googling "egypt eg" and so some of these are government sites but others are commercial sites.

With respect to access in a hotel - in a lot of these countries that have any sort of censorship, hotel's will have a separate line out of the country via fiber or maybe even satellite. That could be what is going on here too.
Heaven forbid you were a woman or black back then.

Furthermore, if you don't want to take advantage of regulations and consumer protections, you're more than welcome to raise your own damn pigs and build your own lamps in your home workshop.
Google in particular absolutely does not allow automated search queries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 ?
Verizon Acquires Terremark and its Enterprise Cloud for $1.4 Billion
Don't count the chickens until it leaks anything credible.
OpenLeaks has far to go before it can be taken seriously. And big shoes to fill, with WL and cryptome still playing ...
I didn't know that, can you point to a ref doc for this?

thanks!
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

The problem with building enterprise (highly-domain specific business) software is that to start, you need to know that a problem exists.

You won't find this information on the Internet or even in books. You need someone with very deep domain knowledge and the insight to recognize that a problem exists, that it has a possible solution, and that the solution has a larger market it can be sold to. The people who know all that, and are willing to take a risk and start a company around it are rare. If you're a programmer, find and work with them.
Thanks! I want to know what you think of "murder" though. Why isn't it the same (or is it)? I feel like someone whose dad was murdered would be offended by the same principle.
This is cool idea, Dan. One possible feature I could see added-on that would improve this would be to have a alert sent if the receiver stops opening the emails for x number of days.

Just a thought and gl!

Magnus
A really great book [1] which details how Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski exploited a lot of these human errors and managed to keep up with the changes of the Enigma machine.

[1] If you can find it somewhere for a fair price, http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-German-Machine-Foreign-intellig...
This is a great idea. I feel like it would be better served if the different intervals between "readings" were longer... I'm more inclined to read a chapter about something in a book than I am to read seven pages at three different times. Maybe send half of a chapter at a time on Friday then the rest on Sunday evening.
Why is having a job a good thing?
"...Google, Bing, Blekko and other big players access..."

Wait, since when was Blekko big? Also, why has every article about search engines recently ended up talking about DDG? :p
As a 6th grader, I used to whip out my Swiss army knife to sharpen pencils in class, and as a young-adult I would pack that same knife onto airplanes.

Industry isn't the only thing that's more and more regulated anymore.
How are they counting people with rich parents who started their own business? As having inherited their fortune or as entrepreneurs?
If you're on a Java stack, use DbUnit; furthermore, the combo of Spring Test & DbUnit, and staying away from putting too much logic in stored procedures / triggers means you can unit test against the database fairly well -- leaving zero side effects, and with speed/efficiency. I wrote up a blog entry on the technique I use: http://zenoconsulting.wikidot.com/blog:8
It sounds like your most of your complaints are with the .Net platform, library layout, and the compiler.

For what it's worth, I've always found Microsoft APIs to vary profoundly in terms of usability and (especially) documentation. And MSDN hasn't been directly useful to me since the VS 6.0 days.

Can you give me an example of an editor with better text column editing? I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
Looks like a sick idea dan.
How can I limit access to my website
I am currently working on my website. At this stage I dont want people to access it except for the developers, Is there a way to do it.
The iPad brought eBooks to ~8 million people within the past year. I may not be an Apple fanboy (I'm a PC), but the iPad is making eBooks much more common. To be clear, I'm not talking about iBooks, I'm talking about the iPad as a reading device.
FBI Knocks Down 40 Doors in Probe of Pro-Wikileaks Attackers
Ask HN: Review my idea for discovering interesting content.
I've written a web site prototype to test if I could improve upon current methods of discovering interesting content (ex. stumbleupon, reddit) by developing an interface focused on people sharing their interests with each other.

I've been using mechanical turk to recommend me content, and I've gotten pretty good results. I was hoping if some people could provide feedback as to whether you think it would introduce more interesting content than current sites.

I apologize if the UI is a little rough.

Thanks!

You can login with a demo account:

URL: http://www.blazingrails.com/login

Username: hn

Password: 1234

Or sign up for a normal account:

URL: http://www.blazingrails.com/signup/
In Tunisia, it's not Internet that made the revolution success, but SMS. First, everyone has a mobile phone (even the poor). Second, you receive the message and read it instantly wherever you are. (You should guess it, few people here have smart phones). Third, there is more commitment that you go to the street.

For those interested in the Tunisian revolution: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12302232

I think that's quite an achievement. Because the Ministry of Interior is the hand of terror of the ancient regime and there should be no other armed forces.

The turning point didn't happen in 14 January when Ben Ali escaped, but is beginning today, when the government is losing its' power.

I'm, now, waiting for the election and I'm going to support my nominee may be by designing his website, through Facebook and some other influence.

If change has really come, and a new president was elected, I'm going to write a detailed report about the revolution. You can trust this one, because it has the truth. It's from someone that lived in this revolution, that knows the ins and outs of the country.

Most of the articles and reports that you'll find here and there are full of bullshit.
http://www.apacheweek.com/features/userauth
This has been discussed extensively on Server Fault: http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-na...
I don't blame them for doing this. They are trying to protect their assets (questions and answers). However, this is not a good move for two reasons:

1. Honoring robots.txt is optional, so this doesn't actually offer any form of asset protection.

2. They are losing serious amounts of exposure that they would reap if they'd lift this restriction so that smaller engines can find them.
Are recent college graduates and everyone younger than them an insignificant fraction?
its worth mentioning that mac homebrew already has a formula for installing this, and it builds and runs without a hitch.
Thanks, this is a great idea and will help a lot. I guess it still comes down to realising you can't read everything and prioritizing how you spend your time.

Didn't realise Instapaper worked with Kindle. Awesome. I don't think think Google reader works/syncs with Kindle?
This is indeed a disturbing, oligopolistic trend.

Craiglist policy of specifically disallowing only classified search engines should look kinder in retrospect.

It is reasonable to block sites which aim to merely re-frame your content within a "search" parameter. But that kind of thing can be dealt with terms of service.

The problem is that it takes time to actively filter against offenders.
What percentage of entrepreneurs are poor or middle-class?

Market economies aren't made up of millionaires and billionaires only.
I think of exercising as a necessity in my life and make time for it as such; similar to how you're able to brush your teeth everyday - make time for it. Prioritize it and don't compromise - I promise as you get into the routine it gets easier.

I also can't wake up early (I've tried morning workouts too), I used to work out immediately after work. Find a gym close to work, it will help avoid the traffic from your commute home. I now work out at lunch, typically it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes (don't forget to shower or your coworkers will hate you).

You might also be able to motivate yourself with Jerry Seinfeld's "Don't Break the Chain" method: http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...

Strive for 5 days a week (this makes it easy to workout on work days and frees up your weekends), I like to do them in order but balance them as you choose. If you miss a day don't stress, just don't let it break your stride. Also, ease into it, don't try to "hulk-out" your first week and go crazy.. you don't have to prove anything to anyone, remember: you're doing this for yourself. (It's also okay to ask people in the gym for suggestions, advice, and for help - most people don't mind).

Hope this helps!
Speaking from experience, this is why robots.txt files don't work; they've become anti-competitive in nature. If you actually build code to obey them you get locked out of actual sites, while the real scrapers you don't want don't listen to robots.txt anyways.

If a site really doesn't want you there, they can block you at the IP/User-Agent level, which is what Quora will end up doing.
In a similar vein, shell-fm[1] is a command line client for last.fm streaming. Supports remote control, too (IIRC it uses a socket whereas pianobar uses a named pipe).

[1]: http://nex.scrapping.cc/shell-fm/
100% of the population are entrepreneurs, but most of them don't know it and have delegated the running of their business to someone else under very tax-inefficient and unprofitable deals.
Here we go loopty loop - why are loops hard for programming students?
That probably isn't a valid test. Sites tend to special-case for ie6. Your browser is probably expected to correctly implement modern features.
It's amazing what US funding can do for a government, isn't it?
Just a friendly heads-up that everyone should help spread the word for people in Egypt (and anywhere else with blocked/censored Internet) to download and start using AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield as soon as possible. I've even started using it here in the States for maximum online security.
When you lower and raise the weight slowly, you require less force to overcome inertia. This means you can lift more for the same amount of muscle fibre recruitment.

The downside is that you will eventually detrain for power production (that is, force over distance over time).

This difference in time -- and therefore power -- is why superheavy Olympic weightlifters can squat 400kg and only snatch 210kg.
Ask HN: How can I help my clients to be better project managers?
I run a small web design company. We have great processes in place, but these processes are constantly being held up or not followed by our clients.

I feel that if we could help to make our clients better at project managment and understand time managment better, then the projects would run much smoother.

Of course I know there will always be little things but can't help but feel things could be better managed.
The real point this guy has is: don't wait for the best idea possible -- just pick something that's promising and start. You probably won't end up doing what you start with anyway, but it's better than just spinning your wheels waiting for inspiration.
They said they were enlightened, but I admit to having my doubts.
When our startup was just getting going, search spiders were an unexpected problem for us.

Our project was a bit odd, in that we had millions of documents available to browse. We wanted them all to be available to search engines, but it was an operational headache to keep that much data moving.

Our normal daily traffic might have been 10,000 users with perhaps 50K page requests. We built our first small web server to handle this load.

We were caught blindsided by the Googlebot, which from day one demanded hundreds of thousands of pages per day. Googlebot offers no option to slow it down, and if you try to slow it down on purpose your search ranking will suffer.

So 90% of our early operational burden was devoted to keeping Googlebot happy. This was an unexpected burden, but it was worth it to be in the Google index, because they sent a lot of traffic our way and kept our fledging startup alive.

But it was definitely not worth it to spend equivalent operational expense to be in marginal search engines that don't refer much traffic. To a site operator, they don't offer any value in exchange for what they demand.

It was very interesting to see the relative volume of requests that we got from Googlebot versus the other crawlers. While Googlebot found us on day one, it took over 3 months before we appeared in Microsoft's index, and even then, they had perhaps only 10% of the coverage of our site when compared to Google.
I went from SL to Olympic weightlifting.

A definite nerd sport -- totally about the elegant union of physics and biology.
Rather than "TV makes people feel lonely", that's more like "Sitcoms make people feel lonely".

Could you not turn the argument around, and say that watching shows like Oz, The Wire or Dexter where the other people definitely aren't having fun makes people feel better?
I'm confused, the title says paperback, but the statistics are mentioning hardcover books. I imagine they sell quite differently.
Edit: Ah, read the amazon quote for more accurate information.
Just the sign-up referral thing is pretty innovative. I referred one person and I'm #26 on the list, so at least 25 people have referred at least one other person? That's not bad.

To be fair, the waiting list with referral incentives was discussed a couple weeks back. It appears that a startup called Forkly started it, and then the infamous hipster popularized it.

Ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2096406
abstraction abstraction abstraction
Why does http://lmgtfy.com/ still exist then?
"Your vendor cannot abandon you" is also true for NetBeans. Isn't the source code out there somewhere?
Also, to keep the demonstrators from coordinating with each other. The late and unlamented Tunisian dictatorship was messing with Facebook because the Tunisian demonstrators (at least some of them) were using it. And at least one of the organizing factions behind the Egyptian demonstrations started out the same way, as a Facebook group: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12290167
Whilst I Was Sleeping: Instagram photos delivered like a newspaper
What's the penalty (if any) for ignoring robots.txt and crawling anyway? Any citations of it being legally enforced via TOS or ASP?
Ask HN: Is it worth paying 36 dollars for Pandora (ad free version)?
Do you use ad free version and do you like it?
The Google TOS: http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS

5.3	You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.
Making Lisp popular - can it be done? (long thread)
Changing definitions in the middle of a conversation is like changing the rules in the middle of a game.
I would expect an article about search engines to mention all the credibly useful search engines. Though I usually use Google, if we remove that as an option my next choice is DDG.
Application Roles and Security Features
Kindle books overtake paperbacks on Amazon
Paper books are going the way of film - though it's about three or four years ahead of the curve that I predicted when I got my first Kindle.

People still use film to take pictures, and people will continue to buy paper books - but as the format improves, the resolution and page changing gets better, and the battery life increases, "Paper Books" will become more an more niche - I think people are going to be absolutely shocked how quickly tablets wipe out the paper textbook market.

I originally predicted (in 2007, when I got my first kindle - a laughable device compared to my K3 (or Ipad+Kindle, for that matter) - that eBooks would overtake Paper books as the most popular format in 2015 - eight years seemed like a reasonable time span based on previous transitions (Vinyl->CD, VHS->DVD). Then three years to pick up the late majority, and finally another three years to reduce paper books to a tiny niche - 2021 would have us all reading books on electrical devices. Given that 2012 looks like it will be the year eBooks become more popular (Give it a full two years after they become the most popular on Amazon), It looks like that prediction was off - pull everything in by about three years. 2018 - The year people will look at you funny if you are reading a paper book.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens to all of our libraries...
lmgtfy just issues a redirect, it doesn't perform a query and return results of its own
not nearly as much as command-t as it will only look for files in the current folder instead of going recursively down all folders
From the article:

"[Quora's] robots.txt file explicitly grants Google, Bing, Blekko and other big players access"

Blekko is a big player? It launched two months ago and it's still in public beta. According to Compete.com [1], it attracts only 120,000 visitors a month.

I'd say that if Blekko is a big player, DuckDuckGo is one too.

[1] http://siteanalytics.compete.com/blekko.com/?metric=uv
I didn't get that from the above quote, but I haven't read Chomsky. I just have quite a bit of problems with people believing that the group is always right compared to the individual, and I got the group vibe from the above. I admit my interpretation could be in error.
There is no penalty, but they can always block the crawler or serve rubbish.
Ask HN: Who to use for email marketing?
I am looking for a new company to use for email marketing as MailChimp had said I am no longer welcome. I have used iContact and ConstantContact with other employers in the past and have no problems with them, I was just curious if there is something better.

Some background on why MailChimp asked me to leave. I run an online store that launched in late October. We have done four campaigns in that time each with a list size of 500, 1000, 3000, and 90,000. Due to our rapid rate of growth every mailing has essentially been a first time send to the list. Unsubscribes and bounces are removed right away. I also understand the laws and that the rates the list saw were just too high. All of our lists track the date/time and IP address to have a proof of signup that they recommend. I even checked with them before the last send knowing I had issues, the person I spoke with said he understood and I should be okay even with the proof. Well I wasn't and I have been asked to leave. I will give props to MailChimp for not billing me this month to help with my transition.

So... with that being said I need a new home for my email marketing need.. what does everyone recommend?
You don't get your results on their site, they redirect you to Google.
If you have homebrew installed, just simply "brew install pianobar".
It also makes people do drugs. Such as frozen pizza.

I wonder what evolutionary psychology has to say about this phenomenon. Why is luxury so goddamn depressing?
he's better off switching to command-t, FuzzyFinder is pretty limited in comparison
Also phones, SMS and Blackberry, http://www.arabist.net/blog/2011/1/28/phones-disrupted-sms-a...
"A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
Trust me, I know the feeling. Everyone around me thinks I'm insane (except my gf, who wants to do it too). Maybe I _am_ insane, but it's a hell of a lot easier to try now than in 10 years.
That is true. Not many people know that after Israel, Egypt is the second largest beneficiary of US foreign aid money.

But I find it hard to judge the decision of the US gov when that deal was cut considering it's been 40 years. And support for the Egyptian communist gov goes back to Eisenhower.
Let us sign up for real accounts would you? This demo account is pretty restrictive. You can put a cap on the number of accounts allowed to be created if you're worried about scale.

On the "Manage Links" page, what do "Run", "Clone", and "Pause" do?

You're right about the UI needing some work, but it's good that you're focusing on getting a prototype working quickly. Now iterate.

You're going to need a big community before someone can waltz in and say "I'm interested in gardening videos about pruning roses, any recommendations?". I'd suggest narrowing your focus to be a tech site similar to how Digg and Reddit started out. That way you'll actually have an audience that can answer requests from one another during the early days. Then later, if you want to broaden your focus, you can become more general. There are a million ways to fuck this up (case in point: Digg), so do it carefully.
Being a sore loser will either make you rich...or crazy
vladik - check out @stammy & @jazzychad @notifo ... two GT guys that moved to the valley in the last couple years (also hang around HN from time-to-time)

btw, go dawgs...
Google reader doesn't work with the Kindle, but Instapaper works really well with Google Reader -- the bookmarklet allows you save articles straight from Google Reader.
Sounds like you haven't used Ubuntu in a few years. As long as you do a little reading before you buy, everything works seamlessly; it's been three years years since I've run into a hardware conflict or had to edit xorg.conf. Things like using my Nexus One as a modem actually works a lot better under Ubuntu than Mac OS X.
You can slow down Googlebot via the Google Webmaster Tools
I love it. If you listen to pandora while working or regularly you will quickly run out of free hours. The downloadable client is also nice as it won't slow down your browser with flash.
Larry Page to Move Google to a Confederacy
Funny you ask. It's far from perfect, but I threw together a quick Go version to entertain myself: http://pastie.org/1504399
I find that it generally works better to have your X server running outside the VM. You'll still want to install X on the VM to satisfy dependencies, but as for actually using it it's easiest to just install xquartz and use xdmcp.