skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the '70s, telefax probably was thought of as a revolutionary communications technology because of its relative instancy.

Think of Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author who eventually won the Nobel prize. Once he lost favor of the ruling party, the KGB started confiscating his manuscripts.

His master work, the Gulag Archipelago, consisted of seven parts that he never saw together because the pages were hidden at his friends' places. The book was smuggled in pieces to France to be assembled and printed there.

That was little more than 40 years ago. In that environment, the ability to transmit book pages and images over a telephone wire must have seemed like a remarkable improvement compared to spending years hiding manuscripts in the hope of eventually being able to get them out through someone.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a caricature.
I am not sure whether it was deliberate but "Hacker News" was originally called "Startup News".
Isn't there a direct contradiction between not participating and "finding a good bet and raking it in"?

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure "not participating" works anymore. The last bust was not paid for by people gullible enough to buy into it, but by government debt. In the long run that means it will be paid for at least in part by inflation (which again hits people with savings).
Twelve Sites That Will Put You to Work Now
Ask HN: Why is raising capital so important?
I've done a bit of googling on the subject but nothing really definitively answers the question. I've also seen a few similar posts here... but nothing hit the nail on the head. And to clarify, by capital, I mean money from investors.

I'm 23 and working on my first startup. Naturally I've gravitated to HN, and a central theme I've noticed is funding, funding, funding!

So... why?

The top two reasons that come to mind are the ability to advertise your product (which can cost a considerable amount of money, depending on your market) and sustenance (ranging from processing power to food, shelter, and office space). I'm sure it also helps that I'm "technical"... so I don't have to pay anyone else in that respect. And I'm also sure having a good team (employees) increases your chances of getting a product out the door in a timely manner... but there's a lot of overhead involved in that too - from the hiring process to bureaucratic organization.

To me... there's much more value in learning how to provide for yourself. I tend to relate investors to rich parents who give their children everything they want - and as a result, a lot of the time, these children are relatively ill-equipped for the real world. (Although, I can see how investments would greatly benefit someone who has already knows the ropes from bootstrapping their own startup.)

I feel like, in the long run, it would be much better to build a business from the ground up - on my own. It would force me to make the best possible financial decisions and get really creative with the marketing process. There's no way I would learn all of these important aspects to running an efficient, profitable business if I were given a million dollar shortcut.

HN... what is it really about? Bragging rights? For what do you really use all that money?
Mechanical Serfdom Is Just That
That's the only reason why I don't use Spaces. It drives me nuts when I switch applications with alt+tab and get jumped to another space.
My own random thoughts/opinions on various things touched on in the article:

When working on any API, it's often useful to show it to someone who will likely be using it. Getting a second opinion will help you quickly determine where it needs improvement. It's best to do this early on, lest you need to start over.

If you're doing a lot of disk access and you have control over it, try to make your reads/writes as large and sequential as possible. This can make a huge difference if you're disk-bound.

For choosing a worker count in a threaded queue, the number of hardware threads[1] on the system would be reasonable. However, if the workers are doing frequent disk reads/writes it may actually end up being better to reduce the number of workers to reduce thrashing, though in a perfect world the disk firmware would help negate this (is that the case these days?).

I generally just worry about documenting outward facing APIs and any parts of the code that are inherently dense or otherwise require background information. More docs can't hurt, but I've found that things change quickly enough that immaculate docs are often out of date shortly after their completion. On that note, I also like to keep docs as close to the code as possible, so that it's easier to keep them up to date when the code is being changed.

Something I picked up recently that I yet don't do as often as I should is to design each module as though it were an independent library with its own API, to the point that a working application could be written against that API. At the time this mode of thinking sounded extreme, but I've recently been trying it and it's turned out to be quite useful for enforcing module boundaries and allowing easy testing.

[1] boost::thread::hardware_concurrency()
How IKEA is structured to minimize tax and maximize control
Sure, it feels great when it's in bubble phase, which is kind of the whole point.

I was in Ireland just before the last bust and all my cousins and aunts would be dispensing pearls of wisdom such as "you never lose on the housing market in Ireland", and "My house is worth 700K. I'm RICH!".

Bubbles are by definition Ponzi schemes, and when they bust someone is going to be left carrying the can. That's usually people who a) Had some money beforehand (or are now massively in debt) and b) aren't the most astute investors.
SMS was shut down at the same time.
A colleague and I started off with Highrise which was great. But we wanted auto email importing, real-time feeds and fast search. We were building an offline-capable web-app at the time and decided to build these features in. It's faster for what we do. I am releasing this as a standalone service. Please let me know if you're interested.
So it appears that every response to my message said that it wasn't lost but would be in 90 days if no one noticed. That is not the definition of 'never loses changes'. The fact of the matter is that someone that doesn't understand the way git works can cause irreversible damage without recourse if not discovered. In many source control systems this is not the case. I still use git on github even with this flaw.
Intrade: "Is there a bull market in brutal Egyptian dictators?"
Can Obama help start up America?
Are folks with other technical backgrounds (say C/UNIX, but interested and motivated to learn) welcome?
Kill The Internet 'Kill Switch'
So now even the geeks are out in the streets?
RubyGems 1.5 is Out (Now Safe to Upgrade with Ruby 1.9)
Or any other reader, really, like the Sony's or the Nook. The Kobo is sold at about the same price as a Nook but is limited in a number of very annoying ways (no book wide search, no way to jump to a particular page etc.)
Wary of Egypt Unrest, China Censors Web
The program makes sense, if they have a decent approach to the university admins and get a following, I see them expanding fairly quickly.
Overachievers with Low Self-Esteem
Upon review of the iTunes Connect EULA in fall 2010, 3rd party in-app purchasing is possible as long as a pre-existing service which requires payments exists prior to the release of an app. For example, Evernote does/did qualify, because its service exists outside of the iOS app. Zoosk app may have this implemented — http://d.pr/oc2F
One practical explanation is that it simply hides the information from "nefarious" elements (e.g., spam bots, etc.) that only have the sophistication to pull low hanging fruit.

Somewhat related: I loaded your profile and then to your linked site[1]. I notice that you don't post your email address anywhere I saw. Is there a reason? I bet it's listed somewhere publicly (and that I could find it if I looked hard enough), but it might feel better to have it somewhat less public.

Privacy issues are tough to compare between people. Each person has a different, often inconsistent, scale. And the metric of choice seems to be how "slimy" something feels.

[1] Also, it may be interesting to note that I actually felt a little uncomfortable even doing that, in order to look for a counterexample to reply to your post with. To me, it felt like it could appear somewhat unnecessary. If it does, I apologize. So it's obvious that my personal scale might be a bit on the touchy side.

edit, formatting
Thanks for the feedback, good points. Let me know if there are any design cues that would make the data easier to digest.

Yes, the active tabs are a little weird -- they literally match the URL that you've gone to, and should be more forgiving. Thanks for pointing it out.
If Apple blocks Kindle, I'm not buying an iPad. Kindle is practically the reason I was going to buy it. iBooks doesn't work for me, because iTunes does not accept credit cards from my country.
I was under the impression that registration did not begin until Feb 7 (http://twitter.com/googleio)

edit Just realized that sounded snippy... not my intention at all. Just trying to clear up any confusion.
The Unearned Follow
New Pricing Plan For Mozy
Tools Never Die. Waddaya mean, Never?
When you think long enough about this whole idea of supporting web content, there are some major requires that arise:

• Support should be direct (whereas ads are indirect)

• People publish all over the Internet, most people don’t own a domain, they have (hosted) Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, GitHub accounts where they publish content, this content _has_ to be supportable.

• You can’t effectively charge someone fees for their acts of voluntary support.

• Voluntary, is voluntary, is no subscription, and is the right to choose!

• Easy to use, low barrier to give, no pulling out the credit card for 25¢.

• Support something while browsing the web and on that web page.

• The mechanism/service you use to support content online can’t be the only winner, consumers and publishers have to be the outright winners!

• The service used _must_ be trustworthy and transparent.

• The service _has_ to work with the Internet, which means it has to work when only given URLs of web pages to support.

So! We actually did this, and built TipTheWeb http://tiptheweb.org/ with all these ideas in mind!

A non-profit that gives 100% of the money tipped by people to the web publisher of the content, non of that fee or cuts crap, 100%. You can support something with TipTheWeb by just giving us a URL to what you want to support and an amount, that's it; no publisher integration required.

We want to provide a positive feedback loop for the web, give publishers a way to know what their followers actually like, give readers/consumers a way to directly support what they truly love online and choose how much they want to give (5¢ — $100 per Tip). We want to encourage publishers to keep it up! Keep their content freely-accessible to everyone <— _this_ is what makes the Internet so great.

The Internet is valuable. Good publishing is hard. Selling content doesn’t work. Advertising is not sufficient. Community-supported web publishing can work!
My school has been primarily blackboard, but some of my classes were actually ported to canvas at the beginning of the spring term.
I have to say canvas is a lot friendlier and actually a joy to use. I dont know if its how my school has Blackboard signed up, but just the fact that I stay authenticated for longer than 10 minutes is a nice step up.

Most of the papers teachers post open up using scribd which is so much easier than dealing with a docx file or pdf.

I think Instructure is taking a step in the right direction, and I hope they can make through all of the crap Blackboard and Universities will give them.
It is very explicitly and obviously against their terms of service if you run a whois from a cli. The first lines returned: "You are not authorized to access or query our Whois database through the use of electronic processes that are high-volume and automated except as reasonably necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations."

Perhaps you can argue against the effectiveness of their countermeasures, but from an legal standpoint, they do not authorize that activity. I take that to mean that they probably implement some technical countermeasures, but I cannot speak to their level of sophistication.
I guess if you're one guy on your own bootstrapping it, it's not terribly important, but if you have a team and you want to be able to pay them, pay for a space to work in, pay for business trips to meet potential customers/related services, then you'll need funds.

It gets more complicated if you need to get specialists -- people for web design, print design, SEO/analytics, PR...
Don’t feel uncomfortable with Facial mole
What do you mean by "chat integration software?" Are you trying to put chat in a website? Do you want a program that combines multiple chat services?
Talking Points Memo Releases Silver, a Redis-backed Database Cacher
Thoughtful - A Startup To Save Men From Giving Bad Gifts on Valentine’s Day
Next Jump Hires a CFO, Looks To Add 100 Engineers In San Francisco
Motorola is airing a lame-ish take on this ad for the super bowl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndhuEUX1kIU
That used to be the case, and was one of the things the USPS used to complain about--- they were legally mandated to deliver to every valid postal address in the U.S., while UPS and FedEx could exclude unprofitable remote areas. It appears both UPS and FedEx now promise delivery to every U.S. address; would be curious to know when that happened. They do, unlike the USPS, levy a surcharge for delivery to areas deemed "remote", though.
>The whole point of an ebook is to read them on multiple devices.

From a publisher's perspective, the point of an ebook is to cut down on manufacturing, storage, shipping, and other costs associated with a physical book. Since publishers own this game, I think we'll start seeing things get played increasingly by their rules as executives catch glimpse of potential savings in an ebook-dominant distribution chain.

And for Apple, it's a mechanism to lock-in, just like iTunes et al. Amazon doesn't have an interest in locking you in, so keeps books free, and has thus far been able to convince publishers that this is appropriate. Publishers may one day decide they can make double the money if people buy an iPad verison and a PC version, so I don't know how likely it is that Amazon will be able to keep that up.
Series seed -documents now available for Finnish startups as well
but that is the case in which yoiu _already have_ the footprint. Parent^2 is talking about the first connection, which is when you validate the fingerprint the first time.
business is business, to suggest it was anything else is silly. It's clear he (Dell) understood this, brands are built on confidence, misplaced or accurate.
Yeah its sounds like Frind in his panic over the active exploitation of the vulnerabilities by other hackers felt like Russo was trying to blackmail him because of his lack of command of the English language.

He was probably trying to communicate that he was looking for a consulting position after finding the exploit trying to be helpful
Google CEO Eric Schmidt searches for book deal
On Myth 3, it depends on the contract, which in turn depends heavily on the state. In some states, an employer can ask you to sign a contract agreeing that anything you invent while employed with them is their property, and in such states, it's very common for employment contracts to do so. In other states, there are legal limits on what kinds of intellectual-property assignment clauses can go in an employment contract. Here's the relevant section of CA's code: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...
Just go for it. Just write the content, don't worry about anything else. If people like it, they'll like it. Nobody can like your content, if you haven't made it.
You can configure git-receive-pack to not allow ref deletes (receive.denyDeletes) or any ref updates which aren't fast-forwards (receive.denyNonFastForwards), which makes this kind of data loss impossible. With Gitolite you can even set this permission per-user per-branch (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite#_main_features) so that the great power is only given to those with the great responsibility to handle it.

Of course, somebody still has to know and care enough to want to tweak the default configuration, and it doesn't help with GitHub for the moment, but I wouldn't be surprised if they added finer-grained branch permissions in future.
So the name's free now? ;)
CloudEdit: A Backbone.js Tutorial with Rails
How To Block Unwanted Phone Calls
Apple can do whatever the heck they want. The market will be the sole judge whether their choices are correct or not.

So far the history is on their side.
Reflogs are a lifesaving Git feature, but I imagine a large proportion of "casual" Git users don't know they exist, not least because a lot of people's Git education comes from poking around the GitHub interface.

It'd be amazing if GitHub began exposing reflogs through the web somehow.
The Cultural Revolution, where tens of millions were persecuted, millions killed, and millions more permanently disabled, was only 30 years ago. I think that a lot of oppression we see in China is from a desire to avoid another such revolution.

Obviously, selfish power grabbing plays a part, as it does in every other human society.
As someone who was suckered in Blackboard backend administration and still haven't managed to get free I decided to give this a spin.

This is my impression after 30 minutes of fumbling with it:

The look for end-users is clean and feels great. Way better than Blackboard for end-users. Canvas seems to promote a more self-service adhoc approach which would be attractive for small installs.

Unfortunately the admin interface seems non-existant.

How do I sanely create and populate thousands of courses?

User admin tools are primitive. Where is the ability for the administrator to change a users password? How can I see what classes they are enrolled in, what their roles are, etc? Can the administrator globally disable a user for non-payment without deleting?

How do faculty roll the content from one course into
multiple sections and then roll that content over to a new course next semester? No anti-cheat integration?

Anyway those are the concerns I was able to find in the first 30 minutes.

It looks undeployable here which is a shame. Here is to hoping it gets better soon.

Edit: I just spotted the course copy functionality. Scratch that one off the list. Still not impressed with the central admin tools exposed in the UI. Our faculty would prefer not
having to populate the user lists in their courses, etc.

Edit 2: Thought I'd be done playing with it but not yet. I can't get over how awesome the end-user UI is. As I just sent off to a co-worker: "The end-user UI is stupendously good compared to Blackboard. Stunningly good in comparison. It's like taking the best of Facebook and turning it into an LMS. Hide this from users."

Definitely has my interest.
Several ssh implementations also support using certificates as hostkeys. Of course the ssh client will still need to be configured to trust the issuer but it can help with the 'first-connection-hostkey-fingerprint-verification' problem. In my experience most users will never verify the fingerprint.
OnePageCRM.com
The deferred stuff is the main new goodness:

http://api.jquery.com/category/version/1.5/
This is the best walkthrough for learning Backbone.js that’s been posted to Hacker News yet. (In that I actually feel empowered to go use Backbone to create something, now that I’ve read it). Thanks for posting!
Coming Soon - Oracle Database 11g on Amazon Relational Database Service
The Future of NASA
Freelance SilverLight Developer

We are development company based out of Seattle, currently looking for a freelance Silverlight developer to work with one of our clients on an exciting 2-3 weeks RIA project.

This is a remote position so you are free to work from where ever you are. US and Canada only.

If you are interested, please forward your resume and/or portfolio to freetechzone@gmail.com and we can talk further.
Thanks a lot! I found that there really wasn't any tutorial that went through a working app with a complete server-side backend. So, I wrote one. :)
Mobile Wallet: Cellphone to act as credit card soon
<really, really dumb question>
Hi Thomas, I have checked your profile because I am confused by this whole conversation (I mean the social dynamic of it where you are mostly being downvoted into oblivion -- I have no hope of following the technical points). I can't find the info I want. For the unwashed masses (like myself), can you clarify: Aren't you some kind of security professional?

</really really dumb question>

Thanks in advance.
Part of what makes Backbone hard to learn from a lot of the tutorials that have been posted is that the authors aren’t experienced at it enough to be opinionated, which makes me feel lost. jamesjyu’s tutorial is opinionated about some matters of taste, which is confidence-inspiring.

Backbone itself isn’t all that opinionated: it just offers a bunch of legos to put together however you wish, feeling free to ignore many of the pieces. So it’s easy to feel adrift trying to learn how to use it confidently.
Ask HN: How do you prevent people in a referral system from referring itself?
I have a referral system in my website where I award users for referring people to join my website. I know that IP address can be faked so that can't be used in my use case. Letting the users enter mobile number is to extensive for my system and entering credit card is also very extensive for my system. So is there a service who can track referrers uniquely? Or how can I build one?
Oh come on. How long would it take someone who knew what they were doing to set up SSL? Run Apache on the same machine, listen on 443, and reverse proxy to the arc app. It would take less than 30 minutes to set up.

Fifty bucks worth of work, once, which pays a dividend each and every time a security conscious user visits the site. That's not a waste of time, that's a no-brainer.
Great tutorial but when I see this in the conclusion:

Backbone.js really introduces a new kind of data flow for Rails apps. Instead of data flowing like this:

Rails Model => Rails Controller => Rails View

It now flows like this:

Rails Model => Rails Controller => Backbone Model => Backbone Controller => Backbone View

I get confused. 5 components instead of 3—sweet. Why do I want backbone as part of my rails app? Just to ajax-ify everything? Will it reduce the load on my server?
I strongly recommend listening for the full effect, but here is a rough translation for those who cannot. My apologies on likely misspelling the lady's name. The grammar tries to reflect her speed/pauses/etc:

Hi, this is Monasef from Cairo. I just wanted to let the world know that we have been disconnected from our last point of communications through the Internet .. and there is a strong word going around that we will be again disconnected from mobile phone calls. So I wanted everyone to know, in case we don't get .. in case you don't get any feedback from what's happening tomorrow .. and I didn't want anyone to worry about us.

They did this before ... the only difference is the last time when they did this I was completely freaked out I was so scared they are going to shoot us all and nobody would know about it. This time, I am not scared at all. I see that this .. like I wanna tell them bring it on! - we are excited we are happy we are going to be at Tahrir Square tomorrow, we are going to be huge and we are going to do our march and do our protest .. and Mubarak is going -- out -- <cry of relief/excitement> Be with us! byebye