skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So The Fates have decided the outcome. The only thing left to do is see how long Facebook's demise will take.

It will be very interesting to see the outcome. I don't think Facebook will fade away, AOL style, however some form comparison will be useful to try and divine whether the factors that govern such sites have changed in the past few years - particularly since Facebook's users are more global than perhaps AOL's were.
Ariana Huffington was in an episode of Family Guy as a panelist on a fake episode of Bill Maher's show.

That either means she's jumped the shark or is a rising star.
Anyone interested in this should read "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach

It's an enlightening, bewildering and very funny book about such things.
Looks like netvibes.com to me ..
"Love it or hate it, I guess I was right when I said you need to jump back into Facebook." Well I guess he was wrong twice.
"so they re-direct the .com to Facebook. Scary." How is this scary? They will never do this. Branding is very important for large companies. You cannot afford letting people think about Facebook when instead they should think about Doritos. They just use Facebook so people can easily find there corporate website. But as csomar points out: it will only last a minute.

QR-codes are the new hyperlinks.
I'll tell you why most iPad apps surpass web apps in both usability and design: they're easier to make and it's easier to make money off of them.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The author does seem to miss the point that this is really only about brand engagement.
I do not know anyone who would even consider /buying/ doritos from facebook (or online at all I suppose), but may have an interest in letting others know how much they like it. This is what a majority of product based companies are looking for in their website, so a low cost website with incredible traffic potential is an easy choice over creating a completely unique site.

Unless facebook releases a vending front, like amazon marketplace, that would allow small companies to easily sell goods through facebook itself.
> Companies now are looking for more fans because it means for them more coverage. The news they publish on their page will show up on the user page. But what will happen if all of the companies that exist in earth and other parts of the universe advertise heavily on Facebook?

Users will get sick of being stuffed like a goose. Fast.
how could I earn money from website??
For the record, that form of statement ("no, you don't need X") cuts both ways, and therefore whether or not I agree that PostgreSQL needs query hints, this argument of comparison bothers me: you could use the same argument for "No, you don't need the ability to violate referential integrity! Your system is broken if it violates declared foreign key constraints!", which is to me a very correct (and "very PostgreSQL") statement to make about how horrible it is that MySQL /added a feature/ that turns off foreign key constraint checks in a way that leaves your data in an incosistent state due to the same kind of pressure from DBAs who weren't really thinking about the long term consequences. Put differently: you stripped away all of the reasoning and are now comparing the lexical syntax of a conclusion and trying to claim that this means two situations are alike, which is actively misleading to your readers and yourself.
Review: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560Ti – full HD gaming in a budget-friendly package
Nice design. Well thought out. Although in the image provided, too much screen real estate is taken taken away from the actual RSS content, in my opinion.

Just not sure what the benefit is for the developer.
Here's a formula for success:

1 - Figure out what tech the hardcore technorati snubs.
2 - Note the subset of this which has mainstream traction.
3 - Implement something with value (while the techie snobs
look on in disdain)
4 - Succeed

Who has used this strategy? YouTube. (Which is why I couldn't say "Profit.")
you should be pro in writing mate
Linkbait blogpost to stir the pot. The blogger writes about his experience watching the Doritos Super Bowl ad having a facebook link at the end and how it was an epiphany or something about Facebook being "the Internet." With only 3 short paragraphs and an embedded video with the ad in question.

Don't waste your time.
Your "old world", western Europe, is an outlier. Head out into the middle of nowhere in northern Norway and see how your Facebook works.
I'd predict Facebook will move to head that off by throttling fan page feeds for [non-paying] fan page owners.
> Show me another widespread technology that exists since the late 1800s and that has not been completely replaced by another technology.

There have got to be hundreds.

Traffic lights and air brakes, 1868

Four-stroke internal combustion engine, 1876

toilet paper, 1880

Rayon, 1884

Steam turbine, 1884

Gas-powered automobile and motorcycle, 1885

dish-washer, Coca-cola (is that an invention?), 1886

radar, contact lenses, 1887

AC motor/transformer, 1888

cordite, 1889

escalator, 1891

zipper, 1893
Hotel Management Course – a guarantee of success
The World Wide Web isn't an Open Platform
Usability issues with adding search engines to Web browsers
In Ireland the service is much worse than mainland Europe. Also, "anywhere" in your last sentence does not include large parts of: Africa, The middle-east, Asia, Central and South America, large parts of Australia. So, the problem does exist outside of the US.

Ok, Ok, I get that you mean in equivelent non-US places the problem doesn't exist.
I'm still not sold on Clojure because of the syntax aesthetics but this is a surprisingly mature and complete project. Looks like it's been in active development for 8 months now.
> But you are already near to the I/O limit, what happens once you start writing a new file to rewrite the btree? The additional I/O can affect badly the performance of the btree.

I wonder if there are any benchmark that compare append-only + compaction vs. updates in-place (with a free list or something). To me it is not obvious why the second should be less I/O-intensive (for example, in-place does random writes while append-only is sequential).

Also, if persistence is done by checkpointing every n seconds (as far as I understand this will be the default behaviour) part of the compaction can be done in memory before committing the batch of the last n seconds worth of operations. In append-only, this can save a lot of I/O if the operations are on a small set of keys.

I think that Bitcask (http://downloads.basho.com/papers/bitcask-intro.pdf) uses a similar approach, with append-only storage. I would be curious to see a performance comparison with Redis diskstore.
In many cases overseas manual labor is cheaper than automation in the US. When people outsource intermediate parts this looks like an increase in productivity because fewer people in the US used to make the same product for less money. However, if you look at the total man hours to produce a given product it may have significantly increased.

http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2006/12/american_manu...
That's too far from the bike concept and way too expensive.

I may try electrifying my bike, a local guy does this and it looks reasonable. You can see the pictures here:

http://prodavalnik.com/sglobyavam-elektricheski-velosipedi-p...

For the electro-motor, inverter, controls and batteries you pay:

1. 250W motor 36V+ lead-acid battery (3 х 12V 9Ah)- 300 €

2. 250W motor 36V+ lead-acid battery (3 х 12V 14Ah)- 323 €

3. 250W motor 36V+ li-ion battery (36V 10Ah)- 524 €

4. 250W motor 36V+ lithium iron phosphate battery (36V 12Ah)- 633 €

4. 250W motor 36V+ lithium iron phosphate battery (36V 15Ah)- 790 €

5. 500W motor 36V+ lead-acid battery (3 бр.х 12V 9Ah)- 338 €

6. 500W motor 36V+ lead-acid battery (3 бр.х 12V 14Ah)-363 €

7. 500W motor 36V+ lithium iron phosphate battery (36V 12Ah)- 674 €

8. 500W motor 36V+ lithium iron phosphate battery (36V 15Ah)- 830 €

9. 800W motor 48V+ lithium iron phosphate battery (48V 15Ah)- 980 €

10. 1000W motor 48V+ lithium iron phosphate battery (48V 15Ah)- 1025 €

Range is 30-80 km and you can always pedal more. I think this product could be a hit, with a bit better design and manufactured at scale.
Google Reader doesn't seem ugly to me. It does what it's supposed to: let me read feeds without too much clutter. I'd get rid of a bit of junk, but it basically does what it's supposed to, and does it in the real world, when there are times I only want to read certain feeds, when I want to mark stuff as read, and so on and so forth, and so need various buttons and settings.
Similarly, although it looks like a DNS issue. I managed to get to it by adding this to my hosts file:

50.16.215.196 whenshouldivisit.iamdanw.com
The Gamification of the Super Bowl
I like the message he has about IE6/7/8 users when you click on the top node.js+npm+github

The page is broken? Sorry, I spend enough time dealing with IE 6/7/8 at work. Spare time is for fun. If you are using a modern browser though let me know: @blago
Yes, RSS readers need some innovation, but No, the UI in that article isn't the answer. It's pretty horrid (1).

I would hope the new generation of RSS readers would rethink some stuff. And be social, not added-on-later-social like Google Reader.

Something like this? http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/09/10/4765/time-f...

(1) I use the words pretty and horrid together on purpose here.
I thought that SMS was initially just a hidden feature that engineers could use to test the phones - validating that control signals were coming through. Some teenagers found it, and discovered that it wasn't billed, and started using it. Then the telcos caught on, and realized that a new product was born.
What did people use before 1880?
> Does this mean that CDMA "phones" never implemented this or is it a protocol issue?

I do not know, I just read recently that CDMA had no segmented SMS (in relation to the CDMA iPhone I believe, but for the life of me I can't remember the source). I just threw it out there in case somebody had the knowledge to infirm or confirm it.

If it was in relation to the CDMA iphone indeed, I'd expect it's either in the baseband or a protocol issue, since GSM iPhone has no issue with segmented SMS (in either production or consumption)
Most electric bikes might not offer much advantage but this one is obviously very compact compared to a normal bike. That is a major advantage to some people.
Since Sonatype's offering is centered around Maven, you should think twice regardless of this issue and then look for something better (gradle or buildr, for example, or the old reliable ant).
I really want that to be true, I want the Internet to be a level playing field where Facebook is just another company; where "Facebook URLs" are a short-lived fad that people will crack jokes about in a few years time. And chances are that you're right! I've got my fingers crossed.

That said, you've got to admit that this is a different phenomena than AOL keywords.

I've seen plenty of brick-and-mortar businesses lately that have a sign up proudly declaring "become our fan at facebook.com/abc", and I'm not even located in the US! I've encountered these signs in Australia and New Zealand, for what it's worth.

In contrast, I don't recall ever seeing a sign up saying "Remember, our AOL keyword is 'abc'" or anything along those lines. The phenomenon is reminiscent but not comparable at all, in my opinion, if only because AOL was lacking the social aspect completely.
No subway out where I live. Plenty of older people use them because of the hills/mountains out here. You can see them on the buses that take bikes, or the non-JR train lines that let you take bikes.
Analysis: Why privacy on the web is basically dead
I think the issue is whether one would even want to attempt to develop certain types of software using languages and environments that were designed to be used in a specific way. PHP would certainly not be one's first choice for developing native Windows desktop applications, for example.
That somewhat depends on what you call a bike. A 1917 dandy horse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy_horse looks much like a bike.

Vs the first pedal-equipped bicycle, developed by Pierre Michaux, Pierre Lallement and the Olivier brothers in the 1860s.
This is neat, but kind of ugly on Opera 11. Mouseover yields a grey block that doesn't conform to the rounded block's boundaries.
jMockups Seeking Alpha Testers for new Website to Mockup Converter
This is great, I can't wait to try it out. I love 960 Grid more than any other CSS framework, and now that there's a mobile release, I'm even more thrilled.
Last.FM for TV Shows
I bet the beefier processor and RAM are just to make android run better.

I have a T-Mobile G2, a rather recent and beefy phone and I mostly don't like using it. My iPad and older iPod Touch are much more pleasant to use.
Ask HN: Its the year 1996
For some reason you just woke up in your body from 1996, but you still have your mind and knowledge from today. How do you exploit this kind turn of events?

If you tried to build the next facebook, would you be able to do it with the technology of the day? There is no asp.net, php doesn't come out until next year, and java is crude. Even if you did build it, the time just might be wrong. The world may not be willing to accept twitter yet.

Lets say you know enough about tech from the day, and you've found an idea who's time it is. Are you physically capable of executing? I am 23 so in 1996 I was still in elementary school. Domains cost $70, and as a kid, thats a lot.
Honest question: are they really easier to make?

I know almost nil about iPad apps. The only thing I know is that they might be coded in Objective-C... which I know nothing about. But I do know about Rails, and I know it's dead simple once you get the hang of it. It took me about 3 or 4 months to get the hang of with no real prior programming experience, and now I could definitely code an app like this in a weekend. That seems pretty damn easy to me.

> it's easier to make money off of them

well, you've got me there :)
You could argue that Norway would be 'Northern Europe', but I guess that is hypocritical.

Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium and England have very good coverage, though.
I'm in the UK and see the same thing all the time. Just this morning I saw an ad for chips with a Facebook page URL at the bottom.

http://www.facebook.com/McCainRusticChips

Chips! On Facebook!
I don't want to start flame war on lisp syntax again, but you may find clojure syntax more usable/readable after installing proper plugins for managing lisp code. Personally (as an emacs user) use highlight-parentheses-mode (each level of nested parens gets a different colour) and paredit (provides closing paren for each new you open, helps with joining/splitting expresions). I know there are also similar plugins for vim and eclipse (I'm not sure about paredit here). I was actually surprised when I started using them how much they help me.
RoboEarth: the world-wide web for robots
Actually I like requests like this (and this one in particular). There's probably a rather large crowd around that follows the 'learning new things makes you smarter' mantra and this is a very neat (small in scope, design already ~done~) idea to (ab)use it as a 'learn yourself some X' project.

I know that I'll brush up my nearly non-existant node.js/jquery skills by creating this, even if it ends up in the bin.
"Yes, we may have helped Tunisia, Egypt. But let us not forget the elephant in the room: Al Jazeera + sat dishes" - http://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/31448923629420544
Actually, pedelecs are getting rather common right here in the EU. In addition to still requiring pedaling oneself, I think most countries restrict the power output somehow; here it's max 250W and turns off at 25km/h. And sure, you probably shouldn't embark on a 100km ride but the batteries are certainly sufficient to last a daily commute, <50km, and are only going to get better.

One thing I, as a racing-type cyclist, suffered from was the feeling that it was somehow “unfair” that people would have assistance cycling, but it's really an entirely different beast: there's cycling, and then there's transportation by means of a bicycle. By all means love your bicycles – I like mine very much – but pedelecs don't really detract anything from you.

A pedelec won't make people lazier, it enables them to use their bike loaded heavier, in worse conditions[1] and with less effort which is important if they aren't terribly fit or don't want to sweat on their way to work. This translates to more people riding. I'd argue that there's enough exercise involved to actually get direct health gains, but even assuming there's not, we still get the benefit of fewer cars on the roads and a better environment for cycling when drivers and politicians are forced to really pay attention to it (it may shock you to know that in many places in the EU, while certainly better than most of the US, cycling life still is a bit dangerous and inconvenient).

[1] The weather in the winter here is such that bike commutes take 50-200% more time than in the summer even when you work twice as hard. I know a few people who run an electric in the winter: the result is that they get to ride at an effort level comparable to that in the summer.
Actually it runs better on my android than in stock Chrome on a reasonable powerful workstation.

I get flicker, slow response and no visible animation between pages in Chrome. Seeing this I expected the worst when trying it on my phone, but there it actually runs quite fine.
I agree. I love the Google Reader UI, which is simple, easy to use, and has keyboard shortcuts.

The only thing I'd like changed is to have "j" take you onto the next item even if said item is in a different feed.
In that case it is more of a motorcycle anyway. Where is the point in cycling if you don't have to use your own muscles to ride?
Leonardo's bike design is a hoax: http://www.cyclepublishing.com/history/leonardo%20da%20vinci...
"Quality is Job 3!"

(For those of you old enough to remember the Ford "quality" commercials.)
Just for reference, an article from the IEEE about RoboEarth: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2188425
It is true - the specific composition of illiquid financial derivatives varies wildly from year to year.

But lets address the question from a different angle. I can't find data going back to 1970, but since 1987, the number of people without insurance has been flat at about 15%.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf

Since the same number of people can afford insurance, but quality has clearly gone up, doesn't that mean insurance is now more affordable?

Though I suppose the composition of that 15% might have changed. Maybe it's more retail clerks, but fewer janitors?
I'd be curious how many vulnerabilities he found that followed those three patterns. $13k is actually a lot to earn from the program (the average payout I've received per accepted vulnerability is ~$666). Regardless, those are some very nice finds. :)
He's wrong about how pedelecs work. If you don't pedal, however, it's not a bike, it's a motorcycle.
6 Time-Tested Applications for Freelance Web Designers
If you work as a freelance web designer or developer, you probably rely on a number of applications to perform daily tasks. From crafting code and pushing pixels to productivity and business management, it’s usually safe to say, “There’s an app for that.”
I would have to add http://www.netvibes.com - i've been using it for years now and it's plain awesome.
From the guidelines:

In Submissions

Please don't do things to make titles stand out,
like using uppercase ...

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Additionally, the item seems totally content-free. Am I mistaken? Did I miss something?
Ask HN: What's a reasonable affiliate marketer charge?
We will shortly be launching a b2b service, basically a subscription webapp.

We plan initially to market via a) our investor's high traffic website, and b) with various affiliate networks.

So we can begin negotiating I'm trying to get a feel of what a typical cut (revenue share) might be. For the investor's site we'll do CPA, and I guess the same/equivalent for the affiliates.

The complicating aspect here is that we do not intend to have fixed length subscription contracts. It'll be recurring billing monthly until the customer cancels. At this point we have no idea what the typical length of subscription might be.

Any thoughts on both appropriate deal structures and rev shares much appreciated.

Thanks
I completely agree! And I didn't want to say that pedelecs are a bad thing. My grandfather owns one and it enables him to go cycling with his children and grandchildren. That is awesome!
Thanks! Yeah, you're right about the real estate. I was tired and rushed when I threw the design together (quite the whirlwind of a week/weekend!). RSS could use a whole lot more space, with significantly smaller bookmarks at the top. It's just a concept mockup :)

> Just not sure what the benefit is for the developer.

Enhanced skillset, of course. The best kind of benefits.
80 cols is nice for printing. Also vertical screen real estate is cheap; horizontal is a lot more expensive.
I don't like the design. It wastes precious space for nothing. Helvetireader is nice though: http://helvetireader.com/ or Fever: http://feedafever.com/
Gwern meant the slowest timeframe experience by any of the relevant actors over the period of the loan/investment. Distant stars would be an arbitrary decision easily arbitraged.
The cow example sounds like a formulation of the Gettier problem[1]. Gettier wrote a single paper assailing the Justified True Belief theory of knowledge.

Suppose that you're driving past a field and you see what you believe is a sheep.
It is also true that there is a sheep in the field.
However, what you've actually seen is a rock.
Behind the rock there stands a sheep.
Do you have knowledge that there is a sheep in the field?

This and related problems are a great starting point to a lot of interesting epistemology. I think you would enjoy contextualist epistemic theory. [2]

[1] http://alfanos.org/pdfs/04_issues_philo_fall08/07_gettier.pd...

[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contextualism-epistemology...
I did this too! After the second time I became bored with writing parsers by hand and now I'm trying to write a parser generator instead. It's extraordinarily good fun.
People wiped themselves with writing paper, wool, hemp, seashells, corn cobs, sponges, stones, small wooden planks, moss, snow, and their own hands.

Pretty much anything. Of course some of these methods are still in use today, depending on where you look.
Because cellular providers love massive piles of cash?
Slightly off-topic, but it's a little mind-boggling that they charge 10 cents per message for something that rides on control signals and gets the lowest priority on the network.
I don't know about the bike itself, but the pricing is an excellent innovation. Now I can buy the Brompton of my dreams, secure in the knowledge that I'm getting an amazing bargain.

In other news, it might be time to reread Cialdini. ;)
It reminds me a little of the time when Pixar bought Disney for -$7bn.
In the UK you can combine several texts together seamlessly so this limit is meaningful only with respect to billing, and most plans provide so many free texts that it simply isn't something you think about - is that similar in the US?
Silliest thing is, companies have been linking to their fb pages in their ads like this for at least four years now. In the UK anyway.
I'm guessing the problem is that since you dont know how long users will stay on the monthly contract for, you dont know how much each user , on avg, will make you ergo don't know what to pay affiliates for commission?

Easy solution. Have your commission be a recurring commissions. Basically they get X% of each recurring payment. That way the marketers are trying to target users who will stay on board for a long time (ie. make them more commission).