skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a couple of other services which are more "client-suitable" and have a few more options:

* http://dummyimage.com/
* http://placehold.it/

The most useful thing to come out of this post for me is the knowledge of dummyimages.com, and specifically the aliases for the IAB standard ad sizes such as http://dummyimage.com/leaderboard/E/C. Great work by Russell Heimlich on that site, and the source code is MIT too if you want to run it locally.
That would avoid caching, an option would be an optional suffix like placekitten.com/200/100/2
As an upgrader to mixed grill, I agree. I moved and I've been happy. I assume at some point I'll be asked to move again from the shared smart machines as they currently exist (which, as near as I can tell, are identical to the shared accelerators), and I'm cool with that.

But because you (Jason) appear to be actively monitoring this thread, I'm going to make a suggestion:

E-mail everyone on the old BSD textdrive servers and tell them that they really should migrate.

Tell the month-to-month customers that you're end-of-lifing that product and on February 29th of 2012 (because nothing ever happens on Feb 29th) it will no longer be there. If you like, offer them whatever account is similar to the one they're on with a 50% discount 1 year discount if they take you up on it in the next month, 25% the three months following that and 10% up to the 29th.

For the VC customers just tell it how it is. You will continue to support the systems for however long you need to, but the newer stuff is just better. You appreciate their trust in your company etc. but they will probably be happier with the shinier stuff if they migrate.

Then follow up every couple of months with another e-mail. You could even make it interesting and say what percentage of VCs have migrated, what cool new stuff is available to those who have moved etc. (though if you do that, I'd like to receive those e-mails too).

If you want to incentivize the move for the stragglers, go ahead, their bitching pisses me off anyway and if you can get them to move and STFU by offering them something I didn't get, that's fine by me.

But most importantly send an e-mail. Don't post on the forum, or on the blog, or the wiki. I know that the forum, RSS feeds and blog are how Joyent likes to communicate but e-mail goes into my inbox. If I don't pay attention to it I'm the only one to blame.

If two or three years down the line people still haven't migrated. EOL the BSD servers. I'm pretty confident the "lifetime" I paid for was for lifetime of hosting with particular storage, server access, and bandwidth levels, not lifetime of hosting on a single machine with a particular OS. I could be wrong, but I think it's reasonable to assume that your hosting provider will change technologies as time progresses. I also am happy if they keep on giving me higher quality service with no reoccurring fees.
One thing that I envy and I'm missing in my professional life is such a vibrant ecosystem and startup scene in where I live.

It's obvious that when you put two talented people together, they create value of 110% * (1 + 1). But when you mix so many of them, the multiplier starts hitting the sky. I've seen so many talents with great potential who already been kind of rockstars in their environments, but who could get so much better if they had such a great community in their city/country.
I appreciated this post. Yes, it was a bit self-obsessed, but I found value in reading about someone else working through similar issues. Constantly reading about, "how I made x successful" can increase personal frustration and push vicious cycles further.

Ignore distraction. My natural tendency is to idea hop to the next shiny object _real_ fast. I want to know about everything and I can't help but listen in on interesting conversations. I read links that really shouldn't interest me at all.

I think that's the universal bane of the software guy right now. We want to take in everything to stay up-to-date and at the edge, but by doing so we actually let our skills (technical and time-management) slide.
Gameduino: an Arduino game adapter
I think that it is correct to question whether this should be the top submission though.
http://goo.gl/ouBta . Would this work though?
An Interview With Bernie Madoff
If the first user waits 2 seconds per response and the millionth user waits 2 seconds per response, that does indeed meet one definition of scaling. The problem is you aren’t going to find a million users willing to wait that long. So why punish the first user?
Personally, I've found Flash crashes every browser on my Mac including Firefox.
Flash is more than a browser plugin; Flash brings a mature developer ecosystem (developers, designers, Adobe and third-party tools).
Facebook Shares 6x As Valuable As Twitter (for traffic)
Great reply. Square, BankSimple, and Verisign is def. doing great things from the perspective of mobile payments. I'm thinking more from the finance perspective of credit. Silicon Valley has never let regulations get in the way of creating a disruptive model that is better for people.
thorium based cycle provides no viable weaponisation path - thus nobody really cares about its development. After overcoming all the technological and political hurdles you'll be left with energy producing device only. Compare with regular nuclear development - energy plus the other stuff, even for the reactors which supposedly aren't that usable for the other stuff :)
Zaarly turning ecommerce on its head, set to launch at SXSW
Tweeting a link seems like a good example of a "common sense use of the website" that could bring it to its knees if some queries take 30+ seconds to complete.
Having been a Flash developer and now an iOS developer, I find most of these opinion pieces to be agenda driven. Apple's camp doesn't care or what to know the gritty facts pro-Adobe, and pro-Adobe/Flash users think Steve Jobs is a dictator.

No matter what side you sit on, make sure your argument is beyond skin-deep. It's common to see an Apple zealot post about Flash as a proprietary sand trap, while they are essentially using entirely proprietary, closed software to do so. The Flash camp isn't much better, claiming a mishmash of mobile efforts as ready to ship - and we've yet to see something stable come forth.
Or maybe ATT supports him because they like his position on the topic?
> it probably is not a good idea to use email (of any form) as long term storage.

For hotmail or yahoo mail, I agree--but one of Gmail's founding principles is never having to delete an email--they say so in as many words. If it's not a good idea to use them for long-term storage of emails, they've failed (although having anything truly important in only one place does seem like an egg basket failure).
The flip-side is that anyone who needs to do reporting, aggregation, etc. is going to spend a lot of time reinventing stock behaviour while their competitors focus on building new features. Those competitors are more likely to get to the point where they have the relative luxury of deciding how to handle large numbers of users because they actually have them.
That's the point--it shouldn't take much effort. It's a simple problem made difficult by poor syntax and metaphors.

I do understand CSS. I've created plenty of fairly complex layouts with it. That's what allows me to judge it as inferior to other layout models I've used.

Why shouldn't it work the way people assume? I see very little benefit for this trade-off, except perhaps for the salaries of CSS gurus.
Buy one. Get a free one. It doesn't matter if it's pretty, just get one to get started. Use 99designs.com and crowdsource it.

Best of luck in your endeavor. But the #1 skill that you need to launch a startup is resourcefulness. If you're having trouble doing the most basic of tasks (finding a layout for your site), then you may want to look for a cofounder with some complementary skills, so that you don't have to reach for the basics.

Whether you go solo or in pairs, you should try working at the skill of being resourceful. Take this as your first test: how quickly/cheaply can you get a skeleton site up?
What a recursive failure to read the story. You accuse others of down-voting for not reading the story, and yet you seem also to have not read the story.

The author admits to having not read the ToS completely. His issue (and the title of his post) is that Wolfram actively enforcing a ToS limiting use except by a human+web browser just doesn't get the internet. And that, my friend, is true no matter how you slice it.

Prohibiting links with search queries embedded in them is anti- the philosophy of the internet. It may work for a top-heavy, externally funded project like Wolfram (who's bread and butter is a desktop app), but would cause a massive failure for a web app trying to turn a profit.
Currently the DE API doesn't have the concept of things decaying over time (though there are some kludgy work-arounds that a couple folks are using), but we've got a customer of some significance that specifically needs that feature, so it'll probably make its way to the API in short order.

I've thought about nudging pg to see if he'd let me goof around with the actual data some, but I've been worried that it could turn into a distraction.

Beyond that there are a couple interesting things:

• I have some half-nuanced thoughts on the interaction between personalized news and communities, notably that I'm not sure that people want personalized news, though they often think they do. A lot of the function of news is to facilitate "informedness" which breaks down if parts of a community are reading different things.

• I'm not sure that the upvote density on HN is actually high enough to drive personalization. There aren't very many upvotes in aggregate. I only upvote a few things per week, really and the frontpage is really only the sum of < 1000 votes in a community of tens of thousands of people. It's unclear to me that people upvote things enough for there to be enough overlap to do reasonable personalization.
I have been using my iPhone for years and my iPad for one year. I honestly can’t remember the last time I went to a Web site that wouldn’t load because I didn’t have Flash installed.

This seems self-selecting. I use Flashblock with win and lin desktops and are constantly coming across sites "missing bits" or "missing everything" because of blocked flash. Half the time this is advertising - I love my Flashblock - but there's a lot of content blocked as well,
Yes. You've clearly shown you have good intent towards the HN community (your research recently on 'New' upvotes, your dupe detector work, generally being a good poster, etc). I'm interested to see what you'll do with it, and certainly willing to send them once you provide some sort of instructions how you'd like to receive them.

Also, it'd be interesting if there was an option to make our saved stories public a la reddit. I don't think voting rings are much of a concern at HN, at least as far as I can see.
FYI, in this case, HN hung on me and it ended up double-posted, so I deleted the duplicate.
To underscore the weirness of the Android Markeplace, when you search for chomp, the actual app with the name of "Chomp" appears under about 6 or 7 versions of some game called "Hungry Shark"
If it's in the government's interest to sell these properties, the important thing politically might be to sell it as quickly as possible rather than wait to get the best possible deal. Trying to "get the best price it can" might be a false economy, letting the best be the enemy of the good. In the best case it adds delay, in the worst case fighting over the terms might prevent the deal from going through.

In other words, "Don't let the best be the enemy of the good."
If it was simply a control issue then that wouldn't that imply that people should be as scared to take the bus or the train as they are flying in a plane?

I don't doubt that there's a component of control involved, but I expect that the whole "we're flying in the sky and if anything goes wrong we're all dead" has a bigger part to play where fear is concerned.
Been working on the API improvements for this for quite a while now. If there are any questions I can answer, I'll tell you whatever I can.

(edit: in case it's not obvious, I work for NVIDIA on CUDA)
"no practical text-to-speech"

Huh? How do you figure? I use text-to-speech all the time and besides sounding distinctly robotic, it works extremely well. And the current state-of-the-art stuff is damn near as good as HAL9000.

EDIT: and we do have practical home robots, they're called roombas and programmable microwaves. They just don't look like something out of the Jetsons, and we've seen the technology improve over time, so we don't think of it as anything special.
A sufficiently hosed system may not even boot. Under normal circumstances, however, you have a full set of shells, depending on how... feature-rich is the OS you are using.
How do you turn on showdead? Does this require more karma than I have?
I made a 2D mmo for Android using Erlang.
Dev blog: http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/
Website: http://solrpg.com

Admittedly though, I used mnesia and ets for shared state data.
Caching exists.
You can download Adobe's AS3 docs (the flash.display3D package, in particular) here:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Player_Incubator#...

"Mere mortal" developers probably will probably use the Molehill APIs through one of the many 3D frameworks for Flash:

http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2810
Why Apple Must Fail For Anyone Else To Win
I agree. The free market and competition have created more value than any other tool in human history and it's absolutely the best tool for this job. There seems to be a common misconception that free markets will arise naturally and any government involvement will jeopordize them. In reality, government is the method that a capitalist society must use to ensure that no resources are undervalued; that the system is truly generating value, not just moving it from one place to another at a loss. In the case of energy, the role of goverment should be to determine the immediate value and future costs fossil fuel energy production.

In practice of course, goverment is too heavily influenced by those who currently happen to have the most resources. As a result, they are incapable of correctly evaluating the true value of immediate energy output versus future greenhouse gas levels. It makes the question of how to solve the energy problem moot, because there's no way to implement that solution under the current political conditions.
The Corporate Pursuit of Happiness
First, I'd remove the ads you've got right now and concentrate on gaining additional users. When I visited the page, it was running a banner for Netflix, a banner for Bathroom Vanities and text links to Bathroom and Bathroom Show Room. None of those are relevant and I doubt you'll make a significant amount of money from them. As for which ads to use? It's hard to say yet but I agree with true_religion that CPA is probably the way to go with this niche, just don't make it more prominent than your content.
Keep in mind many popular sites assume desktop users have Flash and mobile users don’t.

I use flashblock, too, and see “missing bits” frequently as well — but on my iPhone, this is indeed relatively rare. Does it happen? Yeah, but in the literal sense, I can’t remember the last time it did.

Anyway — flagged this article, it’s not HN caliber and nothing more than fanboy shouting at this point.
Ruby on Ales 2011 - Speakers Announced
That link tells you absolutely nothing, since there is no way to distinguish between 'John Boehner has this stance because AT&T is his biggest contributor' and 'AT&T is John Boehner's biggest contributor because he has this stance.'

I certainly contribute to causes I support, and if I were an American, I'd contribute to politicians whose causes I support. I would happily contribute money on behalf of my business to a politican who supported causes friendly to my business. There's no impropriety in that, on my part or the politician's.
Was the company externally funded? If so, try and investigate the profiles of angles/investors who (financially) backed the startup. This often 'tells the tale'.

If the startup is backed by someone (whether an individual or other entity) with a 'proven' track record, it is probably worth sticking it out a little longer.

Hope that answers your question.

- HTH
Its awesome but there is only one feature I request: Add an ability to send arbitrary parameters at the end which will be used in the uniqueness calculation to generate a unique photo. This way I can have 10 identical kitten photo sizes next to each other each with a different picture for 10x the cuteness.
Cool idea!

My co-founder and I used to use pictures of Olivia Wilde as placeholders. It started with just one and then became a sort of tradition.

Kittens are cool too, though.
I agree with many of your points... I just can't see Apple holding onto the 13"...

* The Air will get faster

* The wieght of the 15" will get lighter (improvements in battery & screen tech)

I am set with my 13" too and I believe that, when I get an SSD in, it will definitely have even more years left.

I'm just suggesting where Apple might be going and what gives me that indication. And which side of the fence I would fall on _if_ it happens.
As someone who's a) moving to SF in 3 months and b) looking for a job there, this post was encouraging.

I've heard a lot of buzz about SF in the last two months or so, not sure if it's because I'm moving there (and so I stumble on Bay Area news more often) or because the hiring scene is generating more interest.

Anyone have concrete insight?
Here are some examples of pages created with Unbounce - http://unbounce.com/category/landing-page-examples/built-usi...

More examples will be put up soon.
Searching in the various app stores feels like the time before Google came to web search. You type your query into each of several OK search apps and see what happens.

MLB just released it's annual application: MLB.com At Bat 11. Say I don't recall what the name is and I type MLB into the search:

Chomp:
1. ESPN ScoreCenter
2. SportsTap
3. MLB Wallpapers
4. Sports News Center
5. 6-4-3 Baseball
6. Game On
7. MLB.com At Bat 11

Android Market:
(it suggests "mlb at bat 2010" as I type, but I ignore and hit search)
1. MLB.com At Bat 11
2. MLB.com At Bat Lite
3. Major Pro Baseball News
4. Baseball Superstars(R)
5. NYY Baseball News
6. ESPN ScoreCenter
7. Major League Baseball

AppBrain
1. MLB.com At Bat Lite
2. MLB.com At Bat 11
3. MLB Wallpapers
4. MLB News
5. NiX Reader for MLB
6. MLB Wallpaper
7. MLB Mobile
....
31. ESPN Score Center - This only appears after several apps with fewer than 500, 100, and 50 downloads.

iOS App Store (on an iPad)
(typing in MLB brings up mlb.com at bat lite, mlb.com, mlb.com at bat lite 11 as the first three suggested searches, again I ignored it and searched just MLB). Obviously,these results will be different than Android, but for comparison:
1. MLB.com At Bat 11 for iPad
2. SportsTap
3. NBC Sports Talk for iPad
4. Major League Kickball 2010 (?)
5. Baseball Gameplan with Jason Giambi
6. Major League Kickball Home Run Derby HD

While I haven't found the Android Market search to be the best in every instance, here it cleans up against the competition. By all means, bring on Chomp. Searching the iOS App Store is miserable and random at times (see 2 kickball apps in the first 6 displayed) , and with Android the results are inconsistent at best.
Yes that's a good point. I edited my comment before I saw your reply and once after I saw your reply.

I'm not too familiar with CALEA but it seems to be an example of the phenomenon I was describing. It began as a way for law enforcement to monitor VOIP but expanded in 10 years to cover all internet traffic.
> By default? Windows (heh)

This is neither serious nor modern, nor particularly operating :-P

> And most Unix servers don't come with bash by default

Most Unix systems are either Mac, Linux or BSD boxes, all of them provide bash (it may be a tiny little bit more complicated under BSDs). I will risk saying the list of recent Unixes (as in "with versions published in the last 5 years") that don't provide bash is limited to 3 items.

Perhaps four. IRIX 6.5.30 was launched in late 2006.

edit: maybe five. Tru64 had a launch (patches) in 2010. Guess I should have said "major version"...
I don’t know, if you dropped those pages then they could be read by those who ride shorter animals.
"But queries shouldn't ever take 30 seconds". Ok then.
System on Chip Toolkit
Wow... who knew that JJ Allaire, maker of (among other things) the ColdFusion web development system, also liked playing with R? http://www.rstudio.org/docs/about
I dunno man. I need placeholders, but there was something missing... But I love kittens even more, so the choice was obvious. This just made my site mid-design look exponentially cuter (meow).
Perhaps a good model here is that Boehner's position and ATT's support are dynamically coupled ... each causes and maintains the other.

Kinda makes it tricky to assign blame (which is fortunate, for Boehner).
"Mr. Linux" Linus Torvalds goes Hollywood for the Oscars
I don't understand how an incorrect assumption can be used as a criticism? Just because you assume something, isn't going to make it true.

The problems you might want to solve may be simple - but problems that others might want to solve might be more complex. It's not perfect, but CSS actually works reasonably well in a variety of situations.

My main concerns were based around browser inconsistencies, but things are much better in 2011 (compared to 2005).

There's a strong meme that reinforces the idea that 'CSS is rubbish' - but I think it's actually counter-intuitive to spread it. Basically, all we end up with are a lot of grumbling people who believe it's not worth learning - and don't.
> They're not libertarian, they're movement conservatives.

They've donated at least $20 million to the ACLU to fight the Patriot Act. They support the Cato institute. One of them ran for president on the Libertarian ticket.

The Koch family isn't unified in its views; collectively the group does support some "movement conservative" causes. For that matter, they've supported a few democrats and democrat-favored causes. But "libertarian" actually fits pretty well if you need an overall label.
I'd be interested in discussing this more. The quick answer is that it's 1st) a way to share what you're reading 2nd) a way to find others to work with.

The CV aspect is fairly unique to this sort of site, which is why I think it gets so much attention in these discussions. But as you can see it is a smaller aspect to the site compared to posts, questions, and even profiles.

The CV feature is rooted in this desire I had to host my resume, shown in its original formatting, on a clean, uncluttered page with stats showing me how many views it gets, by whom, and from where. I can share it with a simple link to anyone interested in seeing it and actually know with some certainty if they looked at it.
I'm not really sure how net-neutrality (status quo) is supposed to be a "heavy-handed regulation". While a bunch of new regulation that ensures a heavily controlled and regulated and multi-tiered internet is not.
There should be a setting in your profile.

I'm not sure if it requires karma.
RiderOfGiraffes,

Since it's you, I'll definitely send this data.

It just has been my observation that you actively scan the new page here, and comment/upvote first on a lot of deserving posts that otherwise would sink without a trace. (Unless you have already written a bot for this purpose :-))

So it's a good time to say - Thank you. Just let us know in which format you need this data.

p.s. I do remember you working on a dup detector bot as well a while ago.
Nope, they're just dead.
s/cables/infrastructure/g
Wow. The HN interface sure keeps its features carefully hidden.