skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a pretty good question. I spend most of my time doing client work, so my self-marketing is mostly limited to:

1) Posting code and rants on my blog whenever I feel like it

2) Contributing code to open-source projects that I use

3) Chatting with people at the bar or going to tech mixers (also at the bar)

4) Posting on various websites like HN

I get about 70% of my client work from #3, 25% or so from word of mouth (friends, family, or past clients), and 5% or so from posting online. #1 is mostly just vanity and #2 is out of necessity, but they probably help too without me directly seeing the effects. I've never advertised or gone trolling for clients since I started freelancing.

Also, my company website is terrible and hasn't been updated in about 4 years, but it doesn't seem to matter. I'll get around to it eventually :)

Edit: I forgot to mention giving talks at Ruby groups and Ignite and things like that. I've gotten a couple of clients from that but it's mostly just challenging and fun.
I think it's more accurate to say that it was foiled because of good old police work. An undercover investigation and a sting (plus a large amount of his own stupidity) is what brought the guy in. The embedded RFID stopped the high value chips ($25,000) from being cashed in, but there were still plenty of lower denominations that could have been used.

Interestingly enough, after the heist the Bellagio replaced ALL the chips on the floor with a complete new set. It would have been pretty suspicious when somebody strolled in with $25,000 chips...even without the RFID at that point.
Have you noticed that TVs and computer monitors have all been copying the iPhone too, even before it existed? Black rectangles just make sense for video screens.
Hey, there was a time when most people could get by just fine without even knowing how to read and write.

With the proliferation of computers into every aspect of life, it's not unimaginable for programming to be considered essential knowledge that should be taught in schools.
Ask HN: Lazy web request: Link to HN 2010 daily archive site?
Towards the beginning of 2011 someone posted an awesome daily HN (...and if I'm not mistaken, reddit, and top delicious) archive and search for everything in 2010 and possibly beyond.

I've scoured my delicious bookmarks and history and of course google, but my keyword-fu is failing me :(

Thanks
The benefit to the VPC images is that they can be converted to something VirtualBox understands, and used under OSX and Linux, as well. Still a PITA to have to do that every 6 months, though.
It's something I've been trying to fix lately. It's not only about your online reputation, you should care of your offline reputation as well. I don't mean it in a tricky way, by deceiving people : You should try to provide value for others via your blog, etc... Do some projects, talk about them.

It's important because, as a developer, you usually don't make a lot of connections with others. If you don't do anything your only connections will be your peers and little bit a variety is better. Even if you and I would like to be valued on our technical knowledge, it won't bring you very far. If you don't talk, nobody is gonna to know you.

I use my blog more like a platform to share stuff I made, or thought, or to clear my mind about some idea. It's also something I can point potential employers to when I'll need it. It doesn't really matter if you don't have readers, it'll put your resume apart in most interviews.

Also I added many local folks in my twitter, and it leads me to some meet up that gives connections with new peoples around me. I live in a medium city in the south of france, if I can met people there, you can probably too.
This is a great article full of examples about why IP law has hampered innovation. But it fails to answer a very important question: what should be done by the government to remedy it?

The first and simplest part of lobbying is identifying the problem. The much more challenging part is following up with useful recommendations on what should be done to fix it.

In terms of software patents, should the executive branch propose a bill to forbid them? What would the outcome of that be? How should copyright law be reined in? These are the questions that the next generation of policymakers need to solve and the recommendations we need to be sending to our respective governments.
State senator: South Carolina should create its own currency
> The problem, says our source, is in relation to the "flimsy" hardware keyboard mechanism, which fell short of operator standards.

It surprises me that operators would have such strict standards, given the junk I've seen them try to sell over the years. Maybe they are learning? I'd love to see other designs that have been rejected before hitting the market.
The free market works such that after a product is sold, the seller has no rights it any more. They cannot remotely disable features after the sale.

I agree 100% (unless such special use terms were part of the sale upfront, see pay tv channels).

They cannot dictate what you can and can't do with it.

Not for personal use, no, and I should insist not. However, if I sell you a book I wrote, while you're quite free to read or burn your copy of it, I don't want you to scan copies and widely distribute it.

The PS3 hackers didn't "open source" any of Sony's code, that's ridiculous. Their goal is to bypass it and load their own. They reverse engineered it for the purpose of enabling compatibility with other stuff and extending. This has a long tradition in the US.

If they only took actions for their own personal use I have absolutely no objection. Quite the contrary, I'd encourage it.

I can't say I remember the telephone incident, but I agree with your sentiments on that entirely.
Speed up Your Mail Server with a Caching-Nameserver
Yeah it's pretty sick, isn't it?

Still they're not convincing anyone and are just making themselves look sleazy in the process. They ought to remember that in just a few years these kids are going to be: A. downloading stuff, B. very cynical about authority, and C. spending lots of money.

Nick and Disney are increasingly uncool in our house. Youtube and anime are taking up all the screen time these days.
I believe the writer has his information mixed up. Bellagio doesn't have RFIDs in the lower denominational chips. It's rumored to be in the $5,000 chips and above. Newer properties like the Wynn hotel put RFIDs in all their chips because they're the ones who have the play tracking tables he wrote about.

He wasn't caught because of the RFIDs in the chips, he was caught because he was trying to sell the $25,000 chips. In fact, he was gambling with the smaller chips and lost over $100,000. If those had the RFIDs in them, they would have caught him sooner. Instead he should have kept all the smaller chips and thrown the larger ones into a river and forgotten about them. It would have still been a nice haul.
The answer is probably not to get rid of all protection of IP though. I think a change to the law to prevent obvious patent trolls would be beneficial on the other hand.
Apple never made a netbook because the profit margins weren't good enough, and tech media geeks, even if they weren't all Apple fans, would still probably spend 5 times as much on their laptop because they're often geeks who travel a great deal on business. So online buzz was limited to actual customers.

This led to the strange spectacle of Apple pundits fainting at the ability to watch Youtube in bed on their iPads, which ordinary poor folk had been doing for years with much loved netbooks.

If you notice extreme negativity to netbooks online, it's usually coming from Apple-centric folk dealing with the cognitive dissonance of Apple openly and clearly sacrificing their customer's utility for profits. People who use them seem to love them. (See also the love for the MacBook Air, summed up by this comic: http://classicfun.ws/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Bill-Gates-a...)
Yes ePub is open. But Apple's DRM is not an open standard. I assume they are adding DRM to content sold thru their book store?
The only time I've ever tried to convert one of the VPC images, the guest OS decided that my hardware had changed too much and demanded that I reactivate it. Unfortunately, activation isn't available for these images, and the image became unusable. What's your trick?
If Google follows its internal policies it will have to fire him. (err let him go) And while I agree that he did it on his "own time" as you will recall all of the news reports pegged him as a "Google Executive" which certainly gives the impression that its Google sanctioned (which it wasn't according to the article). I've been on both sides of this question at various times in my career and it really requires the employee to decide which is more important to them and then to dedicate themselves to that and step away from the other. I think Wael made his choice, and I admire him for it.

(I find that he keeps getting demoted too, he started out in charge of everything in the middle east and now he is down to a mere product manager :-)
From the comments over there:

"This is nonsense, they didn't catch him by using RFID chips, they caught him with police work. He was an idiot, and told anyone that would listen that he had the chips. People came forward, a sting buy was set up, he was arrested after selling them to undercover LEOs. Read the police report, there is no mention of RFID chips.

Police Report: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://media.lasvegassun....

This is just marketing by a company that is trying to sell the technology to other casinos."
The book "Here's Looking at Euclid" (entitled "Alex's adventures in Numberland" in the UK) by Alex Bellos documents a conversation with Pierre Pica, currently investigating the Pirahã in the Amazon, a tribe that apparently has no interest in counting, and appear not to be able to count accurately:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210392

Copyright seems to have expired on the excerpt that was in the Guardian, but it's pretty well discussed in this recent book.

You can find much of Pica's work on-line if you choose. Here is one reference:

http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/319.htm

In short, I'm unconvinced that this is sheer and pure "churnalism," or that the Amazonian tribe that cannot count" really has been refuted.

ADDED IN EDIT:

Alex's book is here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/0747597162#reader-link

and you can click on the "Search Inside" at left and search for "Pica."
Sadly it doesn't seem to run under Wine.
Canadian Telcoms STTS: "MPs usage-based billing is needed" BullShit
Four months now, and Microsoft recently made changes to the activation code such that if it can detect you're not running in VirtualPC (on Windows, natch), then it disables itself. I've tried multiple avenues of converting the latest timebomb (came out a couple of weeks ago) to both VirtualBox and VMware and have been completely unsuccessful.
I think the subtext here is that academic culture should become more like OSS culture, where your reputation is built on the content of your commits rather than just having your name on a project somewhere.
This is a poor analogy. Pandora isn't paying music fees once to listen to the songs in their office, they are paying recurring fees because they then redistribute that music to others in a streaming fashion.
I'm not getting any web seed activity. I'm guessing it might be due to the seeds linking to /spoon/ie6.exe/ etc, with the last slash included, which doesn't go anywhere if you visit it with a browser. Know of a way to edit the file?
These are not secret integers. In particular they are 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2 as tweeted by the spokesperson of Sony himself: http://twitpic.com/3xwe6h
Does anyone know which places with relatively developed economies have the weakest IP laws? I would guess Hong Kong, Singapore, or China but I don't really know.

I've been working on a rather ambitious piece of software and I'm definitely worried that I'll get sued into oblivion over some minor user interface feature before I ever really make any money off it. I've lived all my life in the U.S. but would entertain the idea of leaving.

In fact if I'm going to leave my home town I feel like I might as well go someplace more exotic than Silicon Valley or New York. IP laws and other business concerns would definitely be an important criteria if I got serious about it.
You can get any content onto an iPod, but you can't take the DRM-protected content bought thru iTunes anywhere else, including streaming with Slimserver, etc. And people now presumably have a large collection of content that is managed the iTunes-way, with a significant subset that is DRM protected. Meaning you're locked to Apple's devices.
Imagine this scenario. Peak traffic time in the day and site goes down because of a deployment, an investor sees it and threatens to pull money out. Ad networks that you work with actually see a report where during peak hours their advertisements weren't served, causes of major trouble. I work for one of the biggest sites in my region and take my word for it, uptime is essential and not something left to chance or gods.

Continuous deployments ensure delivery of features and turn around time fast enough for a changing business model of startup and can't be stopped either.

So uptime and continuous deployment model has to happen at the same time.

Deployments should always be automated and revertable. If you think you can run a healthy startup with just about adequate mistakes perhaps you got an easier place to work at :)
Jolicloud – a web standards based OS
Waiting Is Death
Brain-zapping 'thinking cap' just might work
I recognized the scientist shown in this article's main picture from BBC "The Boy With The Incredible Brain" which is fully available on google video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4913196365903075662
You're saying that American tech innovation will blossom when we finally become free to use our ideas from 20 years ago? That infringement lawsuits (and the expense of defending against them) will begin to decrease in 2015?

Keep in mind that China can turn out a new model of cell phone in a few weeks at this point.
My startup hasn't launched a website yet (we've very, very young). When we do, there will be a blog where we post the nastiest challenges our team has faced, and the solutions we devised. The work we're doing is highly technical, but there's also a strong artistic component, so we'll have a broad range of topics that should be accessible to many. Ideally, by exposing our struggles and how we've overcome them, we'll be benefitting others who face similar woes, and opening up the discussion to include their solutions. Ultimately, I feel that the best promotion will come from creating value for others, especially if we can get our blog's readers to offer value of their own.

On a personal level, I engage in other projects in other industries (music, web comics, computer animation) and use my communities there to cultivate interest in my startup.
"Are titles being chosen simply to maximize click rates?"

I was under the impression that the editors usually choose four or five different titles, and then after the first few thousand impressions the software chooses the one that does the best to become the permanent title.

Apropos of this, a cool hack is that the more days in a row you click on an item in Amazon the cheaper it gets. So if you want to save an extra 10% on something, just click it once a day for a week or so until the price goes down. (After a certain point though it starts going back up again, so you have to time it right.)
there was previously some discussion and speculation about these chips on hn, when the story was originally reported

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2023413
much of vivek's criticism focuses on how to optimize the Startup Visa bill. however, left unspoken is how to construct a bill such that opponents will allow it to pass. we spent over a year consulting a variety of folks on this issue (including vivek, who at the time offered much less feedback and a lot more support than recently when he appears to have had a change of heart).

while his feedback may be relevant, unfortunately it's not very helpful AFTER we have spent so much time getting bipartisan support for the current bill. in fact his rather late critiques may actually reduce the chance for ANY kind of bill to pass.

any bill we put together is best constructed with awareness of opponents, and an eye to compromise on getting SOMETHING done quickly, rather than nothing. we can always modify & improve, but if we miss the chance to pass a bill, thousands of startups will again he stuck waiting to create their businesses and jobs.

again I'm extremely frustrated vivek waited a year to voice his opinions, well after we asked for his input (and actually got it) and support (which he gave, and now is withdrawing).

if not for his "fixing", we might already be able to get the bill to the floor for a vote.
I'd also be surprised if 2/10 startup founders raise money. That's why I added the qualification "successful."

Pick any non-contrived criterion of startup success you want
(going public, exits over a certain threshold, profits over a certain threshold, winning Crunchies, whatever), count the number with and without investors, and let us know what you find.
From the article (quoting the license agreement):

"however, individual audio loops may not be commercially or otherwise distributed on a standalone basis, nor may they be repackaged in whole or in part as audio samples, sound effects or music beds.”

As I interpret this, it just means that they can't export the audio and try to sell the tracks/samples/effects as tracks/samples/effects. Commercial use is completely appropriate (I think). I am not a lawyer :)
Using scripts and remote execution. "SSH" is merely a transport, it is irrelevant to the general principle.

The idea that Windows can't be scripted hasn't been true since Perl 5's COM module in the 1990s... Haters always hatin'.
The INDECT debate
Did you mean this: http://rrrewind.com/ ?
doesn't your torrent client have the ability to add arbitrary webseeds to any torrent? just use that.
This article makes some big logic jumps...

The fact that they used Apple loops doesn't actually mean they used iMovie. The loops Apple includes with iLife are usable in Garageband and iMovie, yes. However, they also show up as loops in Soundtrack Pro, Apple's pro application. It seems much more likely (being someone in the media field) that they used Final Cut Studio and processed the audio with Soundtrack.
If they charge $14-$15, Apple will get 30% of $14-$15 and Amazon will still get 0% because they have to pay 30% to the publisher. That's even assuming their publishing deal allows them to change the selling price, which it probably doesn't.

There is no way for Amazon's Kindle app (and other similar book selling apps) to continue on iOS under the terms as laid out in the article. Amazon will have to create a web app that functions as a Kindle Reader in order to let their content remain readable on iOS (and that's exactly what I'd start doing now if I were Amazon, if such an app weren't already in development).
Isn't wikipedia supposed to be user created?

That's different from the "pillage and plunder" model you are promoting in your response.
Can you start going to the gym and get stronger than your friends who don't go? No.

Presumably your circle of friends consists of people who are already physically active. Even so, I doubt your assessment concerning strength training. Looking at the people around me, I'm guessing fewer than 5% (not 80%) of them are up to 100 pushups [http://www.hundredpushups.com/]
Yeah, I don't think uTorrent created the urls properly. TPB reports "temporarily disabled" for editing the torrent though :/ I'll bump my seeding cap up a bit to help.
Except it is not true that "current IP laws prevent anything from entering the public domain".
Unfortunately no, though I'm hunting for one that does, and lets me save it.
I guess we won't be seeing Ocean's Fourteen
what should be done by the government to remedy it?

A. Eliminate patents for everything except FDA-regulated drugs.

B. Eliminate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions and strengthen protections for reverse engineering and development of compatible products.
I suppose this is as good a place as any for this rant:

If you go out seeking a specific type of data, it is almost impossible to find it. Multiple times in the past, I've wanted to sanity-check against public results, and gone looking for experimental data. I find plenty of papers, some of which even purport to measure the exact thing I'm interested in, but every single fucking one of them just has a plot. A god damn plot. Give me the data, I can make a god damn plot. I have MATLAB, I have gnuplot, it's no problem. But give me a plot, and I've got to fire up an image editor and count pixels - and of course it's a log-log plot, so I have to convert "pixels over" and "pixels up" to whatever units I actually need.

I'm tired of this shit. I can't read half the papers I see because they're behind a paywall, and when I could read them, none of them included data. If you're an experimental scientist, your prose is probably worthless. I am wading through your entirely passive-voice description of your experimental setup (separate rant...) solely so that I can find some god damn data. Give me a drawing of your experimental setup, a csv of your data, and whatever MATLAB/LabView/Excel kludge you used for any derived quantities, and you can avoid something you obviously don't like (writing - or else you wouldn't do it so badly) and I can avoid something I don't like (reading your writing).

Now that the internet exists, there's no reason not to communicate actual data sets - in the past, you'd have to deliver a phone book to your subscribers if you did that, so this all sort of makes sense in an anachronistic way, but it'd be so much more useful for the scientific community if the funding required "post your data set, drawings of your setup with specs for any instruments, and whatever MATLAB/LabView/Excel you used for any derived quantities" instead of "publish a short paper, it better have plots".

(This doesn't really apply to multi-TB data sets like the author describes - obviously you're going to have to contact the PI and ask him/her to ship you a hard drive)
Social Media Egypt and Social Media: “Revolution 2.0” Roundup