skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the worst thing that can happen? Insurance companies would love to have access to your social network data -- there is already strong research data showing a correlation between your friends and various risk factors. We can assume that governments already have access to the data, but there is a gradual drift to making this available to other corporate entities. We have the most to fear from commercial entities here.

Now, one could argue that through financial records and other online records, anyone from a private investigator on up would be able to determine everything about me given enough time. I grant this is probably true. The downside by sharing is that every large entity will know everything about me, with minimal effort.

I won't agree to share my information merely to gain a convenient service, in return for the data being mined. This sharing lowers the bar required for corporations to intrude into our identities, into who we are. And it's being performed en masse. In a sense, we're merely data points.
grr...ty
Better 100 guilty men go free than for an innocent man be jailed

I can't agree with that. I don't feel I can comment on imprisoned for life, but I would go to prison myself for 5 years if that was the price of locking up 100 dangerous criminals for a similar 5 years, assuming they committed relatively serious crimes.

I know the moral high ground is never convict an innocent no matter what the cost, but I personally suspect releasing 100 guilty men poses a huge potential for harm, and I'm kind of a utilitarian.
Ninite-solve-tedious-install-problems
Are there any plans to open source any of the code?
If there's already a built platform and some traction, wouldn't it be better to sell it to someone who would/could continue to grow the service (assuming that someone exists)?

"Flipping the site" might sound cheap, but I imagine the users would be better of with a service that may have a future instead of the one that doesn't (and at least a longer data retention period for their data), and the founders might somewhat recoup their time/money/energy expenses.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a beta Djangy user, nor have I been using other similar services yet, but I am a Django user and find those really interesting).
There's a bit more info in one of the articles he linked to. Specifically, in the HufPo piece (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tonya-plank/meet-mega-bestsell...) she's quoted as saying:

"AH: As of Tuesday, January 04, 2011 at 9 PM, I've sold over 185,000 books since April 15, 2010."
+1 for mgkimsal. when will businesses learn that developer products (APIs, Appstores, etc) need QA and Ops support and SLAs and regression testing before release -- just like any other product they would put out there?
On a tangent, that was a horrible movie that missed its own point. I also watched it on the plane, I wish I hadn't.
DDD - Diagram Driven Design
The post states, in a pretty clear manner, that nothing really went wrong, they'd just rather do something else than run with this for years and deal with the investment headaches it'd inevitably produce.

I think what they just did was awesome. Do what makes you happy, striving for money is utterly pointless in the end.
I'm more surprised at the in two years you will be reading techcrunch than the apple part.

Snark aside I wonder what the karma limit to flag is now.
It needs a column showing how many people reach each level.
I get the frustration. I really do and I apologize for any bump like this. I'm the founder of those old textdrive "share hosting" servers (they really have nothing to do with Joyent's current product line). These servers are ~6 years old and they're largely populated by "lifetime" customers who have tricked out various bits of their accounts enough that an automated migration has been basically impossible. We've been telling everyone for 3 years to really get off of them, we've been offering free upgrades for 4 years, including you btw, you got a free upgrade back in Nov 2007, and there's even support tickets detailing it (which you've participated on). So now we're piecing together everything that was left but those good ole FreeBSD UFS file systems take awhile.
Yep I posted a blurb on it yesterday too:
http://mybadcomputer.com/blog1.php/2011/02/26/google-search-...
On what basis should Apple be forced to provide a DHCPv6 client as part of their OS? They have 10% of the market, and the number of IPv6 users I imagine is going to be a niche within their niche.

I appreciate that DHCPv6 support may be useful for some apple customers, but in the grand scheme of things it's probably in a minority, perhaps best served by the app store.

I also like the idea of references to 'religious nuts' being tied to apple users, not all but specifically of the fanboy type.

In short, I find the statement poetic. The value it adds is humour. You might not agree as humour is subjective, but it works for me.
This is awesome. I'd love to add color generation options.

Here's my favorite so far:

http://demoseen.com/langton.html#*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/....

[EDIT: and its cousin: http://demoseen.com/langton.html#*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/....+-+... ]
We never pressured anyone to repurchase anything. And switching from a shared hosting product from 2004 to a VPS at Linode. Makes sense but it's not a side-grade.
I think it all boils down to levels of tech-savvyness. My mother wouldn't know where to start with a VNC what-you-ma-call-it, but by clicking a button that says "See your desktop and files" makes Apple awesome.

Besides, I think there is something valuable in making tech simple. Generally, the applause for Apple is misplaced under "look at feature/concept X" when it should be placed under "feature/concept X 50% simpler".
What's really interesting about the video is that it makes it shows just how small RIM's screen is. When the guy's hand passes over it, it pretty much covers up the entire screen! This is just kind of weird, because I'm not sure what distance you'd hold this thing at. It looks like it's much too big to be handy as a phone, but not big enough to support an on-screen keyboard like the one on the iPad. Also, the type on the book app they showed seemed way too small to read comfortably (hopefully it'll be adjustable!)
I'd sell the platform and business. There's an increasingly large number of services aimed in this area, so folding into another, being bought by one, or something like that seems better then a total shutdown.

Ep.io, Gondor.io, DjangoZoom, the list is growing daily.
Thanks for pointing that out, it makes a lot of sense.

It'll be interesting to see whether these guys pony up all the 0day before release or wait until the blackhat/defcon after.
Regardless of how many users affected, it's time to reclaim your emails. Have heard horror stories of users locked out and not able to restore just because they don't remember when they created the account or some facts like that.

Good time to download all my emails complete with attachments into a Outlook .pst file. Would just take 4-5 hours for my 2GB of emails. I would never want 99% of my emails but that does not make a strong point not to backup. Any one else know a better way? Backupify is one good option but they're also a cloud provider susceptible to go down any time.
Proving Minesweeper NP-Complete and Making it Behave Like a Computer
He means the video full screen, the page being full screen is not so helpful unless still running at 1024x768.
"no backup is truly a backup until it is tested"

Unfortunately, even that is not enough, in the long run.

You have to periodically retest your backups, and transfer them to new media as they age.

It's also a good idea to store backups off-site (preferably in multiple geographically-dispersed locations).

And, it almost goes without saying that the more frequently you do backups, the less data you'll lose when you actually have to restore from them.

Before long, it's a full time job just to keep the backup system humming along smoothly, testing and retesting backups, and transferring them from old media to new.

Of course, this problem gets a lot harder and more time consuming as the quantity of data you need to backup/restore grows.

I keep reading about the crazy amounts of data generated by projects like the LHC, and my mind boggles at what the challenges in doing backups of that amount of data must be like.
Other things you learn at an elite university:

1. How to greet, stand, dress, and speak in a way that reassures social elites that you are like them and can be trusted.

2. How to mingle with elites without being intimidated.

3. How elites' system of friendship and obligation works -- how to ask for favors, grant favors, and make friends and connections with the elite.

4. What elites value, i.e., how to make yourself useful to them so you can enter into reciprocal relationships with them.

5. How particular systems work that are dominated by the elite. For example, if you go to Harvard, you'll probably pick up a little bit about how the financial industry works, just because that knowledge is in the air there and is of interest to many Harvard students. If you go to Pretty Good State U, you'll get a lot less second-hand knowledge of the financial system and fewer classmates who have a serious or even casual interest in it. I had a girlfriend whose parents were social workers, so I learned a little about that just from listening to her talk. If her parents had been investment bankers or diplomats, I would have learned about that instead. (As it happens, any of those would have been irrelevant to my own interests, so no harm done.)

You won't just get those skills; you'll also get a head start on using them. You'll have the opportunity to meet people with valuable connections and people who will become extremely valuable connections in the future. It might be kind of minor league; you might just call someone up and say, "Hey, I'm looking for an internship in finance, but I don't know where or how to apply. Do you think your dad can tell me what kinds of places to apply to and what they like to hear from applicants?" That isn't exactly Instant Entry Into The Corridors of Power but if your classmate's dad is an executive at Citibank you'll get slightly better advice than you'd get from the career guidance counselor at Pretty Good State U.
Hi. This is Jason Hoffman, Dean's co-founder of Textdrive and current founder at Joyent. If you're worried about your sites on the old Pendrell, then go over to support and take the upgrade that's been offered and migrate off.
This has nothing to do with either performance or stability, but the big header saying "Downlowd link" spells download incorrectly.
From what I've heard, it really sounds like a simple case of not having enough money to sustain themselves. This coupled with the fact that there are lots of competitors out there in terms of building heroku for django.

That said, I know the founders and they're smart people who will do good things even though this didn't work out.
Not comparable for this.
Your thoughts are exactly what I have encountered in the last 10 years.

The author of the article really gives me the impression that he should just really stick to ruby and have his lolz.

C++ is a language, it has slowly evolved over 15+ years, it isn't the prettiest thing. Different people use different parts. Deal with it. If you don't want to work with c++ find a job doing something else.
I've been thinking about color stuff, but just can't come up with how to really do it. However, I think sub-45-degree turning is gonna happen soon. Probably 15-degree to start, and see what can happen there. 45 degree turns do provide some fun stuff, though...

Edit: Just made a small change that will make things look prettier, though. If you have the command string XYZW, the command string XYZWXYZW is 100% equivalent, except for the shading (due to the cell values looping around). So when you put in a command string, it's automagickly extended to > 64 bytes now, guaranteeing smooth shading.
This is correct. We've been offering upgrades to newer stuff. You just need to contact support.
Here's an excerpt from an interview with the author:

"TP: Do you have any "training" as a writer? Did you take any workshops or college classes?

AH: I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago."
Google Appstatus: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1
The way to make the pain stop

No, the way to make the pain stop (and when I say pain, I mean hours and hours of downtime) is to work with a real managed hosting vendor that cares about your servers and your business, and to move your mission critical software off of commodity shared servers where it will get lost in a sea of customers, none of whom have an account executive, a sales representative, or assigned engineers who understands your stack from top to bottom.

Cloud services are great for some things like elastic computing power and rapid prototyping, but having my business' front door hosted on a service where I can't even call someone up in case of trouble seems like absolute craziness. I mean, how would you even implement a disaster recovery/business continuity solution when all the damn servers are in one building?
In [time frame] [group] [activity] [subject of activity] [from/on/with/at] [currently popular gadget or service]

[author]

[pretty graph]

[tenuous link between data and projection]
I try to stop reading techcrunch, but I tend to fall because of links posted here.
In topic, he won't consider linux + android trend at all
It's a power thing. Developers will (grudgingly) share power with equal or better programmers than themselves, but the gnu version of the open source movement is explicitly designed to put all the power into the programmers hands, and any non-programmers should "just learn to program".

The are two other things that programmers tend to do:

(1) we hate redundancy

(2) if something is obvious to a programmer, he thinks it is obvious to everyone else that that is the way it should be done (despite a simple survey of his peers revealing probably 4-6 different ways of achieving exactly the same result).

Programmers believe that their way is better than everyone else's and that it is intuitive as well (well, it was 'intuitive' to one guy on the team (ie me), and I'm 'smart' so that must be the best and most intuitive way of doing it, right?)

Unfortunately, good UI design has enormous amounts of redundancy built into it, and that if there is only one way of doing something, it is actually anti-intuitive. A design where the user can try 3 things out and the third one works will be hailed as a paragon of intuitiveness. One where it takes 10-20 tries to get the magic combination will be viewed as having a horrible UI.

There is also a relationship between how easy it is to do simple things and how the user perceives the UI. Programs which make it hard (ie go read a couple of hundred man pages in order to figure out the flags you need) even to do simple things are viewed as bad, even if it turns out that the same amount of difficulty can also achieve amazingly difficult things.

Basically what it boils down to is that in order to fix the design of an open source project, you would essentially have to fork it. And having forked it and fixed it, the high priests of the programmer cult will despise your efforts because there is too much redundancy.
There is still a large gap in this market. Looking just at Python, none of the 5-6 cloud hosting providers have even launched into public beta.

I've signed up for at least four, and finally got into one -- just to find that it was like pulling teeth compared to Heroku.
Very impressed with Microsoft's 35 languages when compared to Ubuntu's 39 complete and 192 partially supported:
http://people.ubuntu.com/~dpm/ubuntu-10.10-translation-stats...
You must have been working on really shitty teams. Design is not merely subjective. It is measurable and in fact the subject of many A/B tests. Often involving designers. Who does not believe they got it right the first time, or they wouldn't be doing A/B testing.
It'd be a hell of a lot easier for the rest of us to deal with if you upload it to a more collaborative code hosting site instead (GitHub being the prominent example). Even Google Code wouldn't be bad, though; SourceForge is dead and gone.
We do have a strong SLA for our IaaS and PaaS offerings. But this thread is about a 6 year shared hosting product, that we've grandfather'ed in and he doesn't even have to pay for anymore. There's nothing to refund.
Check out http://electronics.stackexchange.com/ – formerly called ChipHacker.
Would you please opensource the code?

It will help the python/django community a lot.
Dave, too bad it didn't work out. I really wanted to try it! Good luck, I look forward to your next product.
If you're on an old textdrive server, then you need to move, like we've been saying.
And there's no reason that you needed to pay additional unless you bought a different product.
The core point makes sense, although I don't think there is a clear line between 'rule' and 'exception'; instead, the influence of companies probably follows something like a power law on metrics like 'how many people recognise the brand' - there are a few heavy hitters like Facebook, and a long tail of much less recognised companies.

I don't agree with their analysis that there is no bubble in Facebook's valuation because Facebook has revenue; you can't look at one company in isolation and say 'they aren't part of a bubble', you need to look at the big picture. Facebook has value because it has a lot of users and information on those users, and can use the information to target ads at those users. As pg has pointed out before, the 2000 dot-com bubble also had players like Yahoo bringing in high advertising revenues. Advertising revenues are much lower now compared to then on a CPC or CPM basis, but, especially for some targeted users / keywords, are still very high, and companies using them probably make a loss paid for from capital unless they have very high LPVs for customers, or from advertising revenue.

In other words, advertising revenue is largely hot air circulating inside the bubble, and VC capital and cross-subsidisation from other areas pays to inject into the bubble. Some companies operate entirely in the bubble - they receive large amounts of bubble advertising revenue and reinject into the bubble by spending it on advertising, to cannibalise someone else's bubble revenue. Bubbles aren't stable - as soon as investors lose confidence in the market, investment will slow down, so there will be less advertising spend, which will reduce both direct and indirect advertising revenue and reduce confidence further.
There's a reason why people tend to discount anonymous sources, especially when there is no additional content or evidence.

In this case we have an anonymous source, giving one side of a story (this "reporter" doesn't even appear to attempt to validate this story with the "curator" or anyone else), and already comes from a publication that is generally known for sloppy work and biased reporting.

IOW, you have every right to draw conclusions even on the basis of zero information -- and that would be slightly better than what you've done here.
Why is git named git?
Yes - for example I'd love to keep up my tech writing and marcomm skills by contributing to open source projects, but I have no idea where to start.
If it was a couple of years ago and for large quantities of bandwidth, then you would have been talking to me. We didn't have "sales people" a couple of years back. And I would have said "No" because we weren't in the business of selling "large quantities of bandwidth"
Offering a transition from FreeBSD to Solaris that requires the effort of the customer is not free. Asking a customer who knows FreeBSD to take on administration of a Solaris virtual server for your convenience is not reasonable.

You are offering an unacceptable level of service to customers who have supported and recommended you from your early days. You were paid in advance for a lifetime of service. I took you on your word and offered lifetime hosting to friends with small websites for small businesses. If you can't make good on your agreements, I will eat the cost of moving these sites to Rackspace Cloud. I can't risk another 54 hours of downtime.

With proper backups and a fresh server it should not take 54 hours to get back online.
Cisne Negro: Película da señales que arrasará con el Oscar
To me, the acid test is that if you haven't formed a separate legal entity for this site then it's not a startup. Of course, someone can do this for their weekend project of building a lemonade stand so perhaps it's best said that it's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Also incorrect. "About 4 years ago" we always did >99.99% uptimes even on the old textdrive stuff. I'd be happy to show all the old stats and graphs, we still have them.
Valued at $4.5BN? So much for Lou Kerner at Wedbush "America's top social media analyst" [1] saying twitter was valuing itself internally at $8BN-$10BN.

Anything to get some press I guess.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/twitter-valu...
12 steps to 12 zeros (worldtize.com)
From oil to drugs and everything in-between, no entrepreneur has capitalized on the Worlds most profitable audience, why? Are you unsure it exists, does that extreme wealth seem out of range or unrealistic to you? If you have any interest in learning the truth about how to make "THE BIG BUCKS," email me, I need a good programmer, I'm currently trading knowledge and a map to the biggest pot-o-gold you ever seen, in return for use of a skill I don't posses. The 12 zeros are real, thank you - GTV

Gstacks00@aol.com (zero, zero)
Thank you, we actually take our support very seriously and we're pretty accessible. He's talking about a different product than what you have.
lame --preset extreme
He's currently at "free", so get any more aggressive than that.
obviously :)
Where do you live? I can't even conceive of something like that happening here in Phoenix, AZ.

Seriously, until I started reading stories like this on the Internet, I thought people were needlessly indulging in fake drama when they talked about racism.
"The best-designed projects have one designer, or a small group of designers working together closely. This doesn't work well with open source at all."

This is a pretty important point that gets overlooked. I think designers can help make something more intuitive and generally more readible but if we're talking about a cohesive person, it usually has to come from one person with a vision for the project.
I've been really looking for good alternatives to Google Apps recently - ideally, self-hosted with backup (highly encrypted) to S3 or such.
I'd use my server for this, but I've yet to find an email interface which even approaches Hotmail, let alone Gmail. I've been considering doing a clone of part of the gmail interface, but need time to read up on making sure email is less likely to go to spam.