skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My mother, father, brothers and friends in 3 countries all have skype running most days. Skype have my credit card so I always have skype-to-phone available (I use it mostly to find my cell). It's been that way for me for about 7 years. That means I have skype running and I use it every day (but I only spend about $20 per year). It's not loyalty, but network effects and momentum count for something too.

Not sure that adds up to $7b (I dunno how to evaluate anything that big), but it is something. I'm sure this has a big chance of being useless, but it also has a chance of being helpful.

If in 2 years (assuming skype can keep it's usebase) every windows pc tablet & phone is connected to skype by default, it could be strenthened. If skype integrates in some significantly useful way with outlook/exchange (scheduling calls, confirming meetings, emailing chat sessions, synching contacts) it could help strengthen the corporate MS position (the real cash cow).

Like many decisions, it's not the decision itself that is most important, it's the subsequent actions, the execution. That said, a 1m phone giveaway would be epic. MS have money to burn and big fish to catch. Burn. Catch.
It's not about that. Explicitly so. Did you read the thread you're responding to?
I don't think they've ever done that before... why would the do that now?
robots.txt is simple and effective.

I do not want certain bots, especially so-called "archives" to automatically download all my content. And that's what robots.txt is for and works well.

The article is just stupid, sorry. There is not one real knowledgable argument.
Do You Suffer From The Asian Lemming syndrome?
One of the issues is that "we" as internet community tend to protest online, for instance by blocking a site (DDOS) or sending tweets to politicians.

Europe doesn't realise this and might mistake the lack of angry people in the streets for "not caring" or "no problem", while complaining about "hackers" taking down web sites.

I'm afraid that there are only two options, either this gets blocked by the European Human Rights Court (article 10, freedom of speech) or we are going to get into a situation where we're China: internet filter plus many many tools to circumvent it.

I guess it's our first response to develop the latter and claim "we'll just use Tor / Freenet / VPN" but IMHO preventing the instatement of a filter in the first place would be a more noble struggle.
Important notice for free software supporters using Gmail
Has this not been submitted to HN many times before?
Manufacturing Training
UT Knoxville's Manufacturing Leadership Training Program "Leadership Success for Manufacturing Site Leaders" where you can develop your Leadership Skills.
Boy takes swing at US patents (2002)
Maybe this time MS bought the rights to read the frickin' code.
> So what REST really boils down to, versus the next best thing, is creating file types instead of protocols/APIs.

And hypermedia as the application state driver. That's actually the main component of a restful API, though the one most often missed.

> It seems to solve an entirely different problem than an API: REST is for public standards, not proprietary services.

Why could you not use REST for proprietary services?
How to convert MKV to FCE with MKV to FCE Converter for Mac?
My estimation is that skype makes enough money to be a fairly profitable company with it's business model (<$1b per year revenue, small or negative profits most years) if that is the goal but, it probably doesn't merit $7b.

MS will need to get more value out of skype than current skype out call revenues. They're probably planning something else.
If I were willing to discuss any of the details of my friend's case, I wouldn't be purposely obtuse.

The takeaway from that was only supposed to be that while I won't tell anybody that their friendship may not (edit: I meant, "won't") work as a business partnership -- even if they've done it before -- in my experience, even strong friendships aren't invincible, and they can collapse quickly over issues you've never imagined. So, when it comes to business, treat it like business.
Valuation currency does not make much difference. As an example, Ebay stock tends to fluctuate with the eur2usd rate.
Django VS Tomcat; A productivity perspective I
It seems so, this time:

http://about.skype.com/2009/11/joltid_settlement.html

"eBay Inc. and Silver Lake Investor Group Settle Skype Litigation with Joltid Limited"
If you're a bot author who knowingly violates my site policy I'd rather you didn't communicate with my web server at all.

Quite. My robots.txt reads:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /scratch/

I do not believe, as the archiveteam.org seem to think I do, that I have either stopped bots interfering with CGI scripts or spidering semi-private, temporary content. Indeed, my server logs show clearly enough that bots do these things all the time. Instead, the bot has violated my site's policy and its IP address will be considered for an iptables ban. It is a matter of which bots I consider fair game for rough treatment.

This is a common attitude to robots.txt, I think, and it does not reflect well on archiveteam.org's competence that they seem to be unaware of it.
Compare pg_dump and gzip compression
Why that 'rare' Chinese tea you're drinking isn't rare at all.
Why are you replying that to me? My comment revealed no value judgement one way or the other about any version of Skype, it was just a joke.
I've queried Google for an old submission of GCU on HN, and the top comment of the first found submission[0] (which is 250 days old) is by you complaining that GCU has been submitted many times before. What a coincidence :)

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1654440
"Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and J.P.Morgan Chase & Co. advised Skype on the deal, according to people familiar with the matter. Microsoft is not using any financial advisers for the deal, the people added."

I see. That makes the 8.5 billion (price + debt) make more sense.
Okay, I meant JavaScript Object, not JSON object. And I'm not saying this is by any means usable, it's just a way to represent memory locations using JavaScript's Object and I encourage people to do these kind of experiments using high-level languages.
Microsoft Antitrust Oversight to End in May
You also don't need Johnson and Johnson baby soap to wash your baby. Any soap would do.
he specifically said working code. the software actualized by code DOES speak for itself to anyone capable of using it. self promotion is bullshit.
That's one of the other "mistakes" according to cognitive therapy: all-or-nothing thinking. I'm glad it's working for you. I think the key word in your comment is "learning". Like almost everything, the way we think is a result of habit and that's good and bad news. Bad because habits are difficult to change, but good because they can be changed.

Cognitive therapy isn't just for for people experiencing difficulties, I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in self improvement. Hackers especially I think would find it interesting because it's almost like a set of hacks for your mind. Two books in particular I'd recommend to anyone who might be interested:

- "Feeling Good: the new mood therapy" by David Burns

- "The guide to rational living" by Albert Ellis

Somewhere on the web there's also a fascinating video of a talk between the Dalai Lama and Aaron T Beck (considered to be one of the founding fathers of cognitive therapy along with Albert Ellis). It's surprising how similar cognitive therapy is to some types of Buddhist meditation
They went into politics.
the Archive Team are bloody-minded about preserving information

They won't do a good job of that if they encourage too many people to make IP blocks of their machines.
Thanks, but there's nothing wrong with my memory. That only puts a fine point on my comment: how many times does GCU have to be submitted before everyone here "gets it"?
"Social skills are not bullshit; they are intelligence just like everything else. The fact that you only know how to do math does not show that you are intelligent; it only shows that you are specialized. The fact that women prefer men who are good at socializing is, ironically, direct Darwinian selection for intelligence."

You know, I'm tired of smart people apologizing that they're good at math/programming/physics/whatever. True, the fact that you are a math pro shows that you are specialized, but by being able to understand and achieve in this field you showed intelligence. I would define intelligence as the potential of acquiring new skills. "Soft" skills can be learned through books and experiment (i.e. reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, doing a salesmen course, etc.). The fact one didn't "learn" it and shows some seemingly innate ability just shows that s/he either learned unconsciously through imitation or through a lot of experimentation in his/her youth. Life xp and observation just led me to agree with what's presented by pg in http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html .

p.s. I'm also tired of this meme that women having some weird darwinian developed methods unlike men for processing relationships. While it may be true on some level people are making too much of it. They are ordinary persons. Just imagine a person that about half of the population is being aggressively nice to her since she's 14. Extrapolate and the rest follows.

edit: you can't imitate math. you can't imitate programming. being around people who are good at these (i.e. raised by a couple of professors) might give you some good learning stamina and people to consult with, but you still have to develop an internal understanding. Soft skill are different in that regard - you can make great strides by just imitating people who you think are appealing/confident/good communicators (to a degree). You might not understand why it works, but it will work.
The great things about 'robots.txt' are (1) it's the simplest thing that could possibly work; and (2) the default assumption in the absence of webmaster effort is 'allow'.

(2) is immensely valuable. Without it, search engines and the largest archive of web content, the Internet Archive (where I work on web archiving), could not exist at their current scales, as a practical matter.

There's a place for ArchiveTeam's style of in-your-face, adversarial archiving... but if it were the dominant approach, the backlash from publishers and the law could result in prevailing conventions that are much worse than robots.txt, such as a default-deny/always-ask-permission-first regime. Search and archiving activities would have to be surreptitious, or limited to those with much deeper pockets for obscuring their actions, requesting/buying permission, or legal defenses.

So, Jason, be careful what you wish for.
that's what robots.txt is for and works well

Robots.txt doesn't stop anyone doing anything, it is simply a policy. Bots either respect it or they do not. Archiveteam.org have indicated that they wish to join the side of the spammers and incompetent spider authors.
ICQ was mainly purchased/sought-after for their instant messaging patent: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/business/u-s-awards-icq...

Which is now owned by DST the same large investors in Facebook and Zynga.
MySQL Text vs. Varchar Performance
One key difference is there's probably a higher proportion of people actively trying to kill or compromise the Israeli than the non-Israeli!
are you confusing archive.org and archiveteam?
“Listen,” he told Hong, “I’m going to be honest with you. My generation came to this country because we wanted better for you kids. We did the best we could, leaving our homes and going to graduate school not speaking much English. If you take this job, you are just going to hit the same ceiling we did. They just see me as an Asian Ph.D., never management potential. You are going to get a job offer, but don’t take it. Your generation has to go farther than we did, otherwise we did everything for nothing.”
"Find a 40-hour/week opportunity"

Ah great. I'll ride my unicorn to work every day.
>> ebay never figured out how to monetize it

Some ppl in and around ebay monetized the buying and the selling big big time.
I spotted a few typos in there. Also some lining up issues and spacing issues. Glad more content is being produced about Node though, can't get enough.
If you load someones twitter page without javascript the link to the rss feed is still presented in the usual way. ie, loading up this page: http://twitter.com/BBC with javascript turned off makes an rss icon appear in the address bar (in opera). And in the source we see:

* <link rel="alternate" href="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/19701628.rss title="BBC's Tweets" type="application/rss+xml" />

* <link rel="alternate" href="http://twitter.com/favorites/19701628.rss title="BBC's Favorites" type="application/rss+xml" />
It wasn't meant to be a snarky comment; sorry if it came over like one.

searchyc.com[0] yields a lot of results, so you're definitely right with your statement.

I think we have to take into account that the number of HN users has probably grown quite a lot during the last year or two, so a link that you already know because you saw it on the frontpage may be new for the one or other user. Hence, I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see more dupe links of this kind on the frontpage.

[0] http://searchyc.com/google+code+university
Someone answered that question in the old post too by saying that every 6 months doesn't hurt. People will stop upvoting if they think it's old news. Lots of stories get resubmitted on HN. The audience is probably growing. Lots of new people weren't here 250 days ago?
Google Reportedly Launching Online Music Locker Service
mpls?
Christopher Ryan [1] denies this.

So which of my down voted post above was bullshit? I'd like to learn.

[2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201103/steven-p...
Hey guys, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2047175
The link goes to "Database Error - Error establishing a database connection" which is kind of interesting, given the subject of this thread.
reading this is like "when news isn't news"
The European Startup Map
Go Click Cash Review
Go Click Cash Review
Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion in Cash
Special ALT Characters
I found the last two sentences to be the most telling part of the whole piece:

>>There is something salutary in that proud defiance. And though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.<<

Degrees and certifications certainly don't make you interesting. But neither does wallowing in your own self-pity while yelling "fuck the system".

Passion makes people interesting. It doesn't matter if you're passionate about making pork buns or writing code. Huang (pork bun guy) sure sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than the author does. The best way to find your passion is to get out there and do things. Set goals. Accomplish them. If you focus on being miserable and espousing things like "fuck humility and hard work", how the hell are you ever going to be passionate about anything. And, so, how the hell are you ever going to be interesting?

Yang makes some decent points about Asian culture, but his idea that he's somehow the squeaky wheel or the loudest duck is laughable. He's the miserable whiny guy who everyone ignores, who decidedly isn't interesting. Guys like Tony Hsieh, the guys who don't shut up until they accomplish their goals, they're the only ones who ever get any grease.
>I'm just explaining why the rationale specific to IRC doesn't make much sense.
I was a little surprised, but then talking to people on the phone is much more well- so more likely to get immediate inter-generational and mainstream acceptance than social networking. Facebook is only just gaining mainstream adoption, albeit at a very fast rate.
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Though in terms of your average joe, no one seems to know about ICQ anymore. Those that do seem to remember it as something of the past (remember those days when we all chatted on ICQ?). Ironically though in Australia it was MSN that took over the market from ICQ. I guess because so many people had a hotmail account and the client came with their computer. Now if only people would switch so quickly to Jabber/XMPP as they did then, though I guess it would help if a popular phone manufacturer would do this by default.
News for the rant
Everything you wanted to say but hesitated to. Implicitlife.com, your own micro-blog for ranting, venting and raving. Get if off your chest with no bloodshed. Vent,Rant, Judge
Ask HN: 3 hours away from getting the fiber optic 100Mb symmetrical at home
A technician is coming in 3 hours to install the optical fiber at my home. I'am very geeky, this is going to be a 100Mb/s line, symmetrical!
I plan to install my NAS on it as well as a VPN to access all my medias from wherever I am.

But is there anything you would do if you had this? Maybe I'm missing some great idea on how to have fun with that. Any idea HNers?
List of logical fallacies
I thought it's more for Chrome as a brand, and as a vision. It relates to both Chrome as a browser and ChromeOS as a system. Generally users don't understand and don't need to understand the difference.

I played with the Cr-48 recently and thought it wouldn't succeed, being at an inconvenient position between my Macbook Pro and iPad. If I sat down at a desk, I'd prefer my MBP either to code, browse the web on my external monitor, or perform other tasks like sorting my photos or music collection. If I wanted to browse the web while in bed or on the couch, I'd use my iPad. Similarly if I wanted to bring something out. The Cr-48 didn't fit in for me. I thought that Google would do better if they focused on making Android for the tablet form factor even better since it seems like that form factor is the winner in the near future.

But perhaps I'm wrong. Watching the video, I realised that maybe putting things on the cloud is how Google envisions Chrome. For casual users, you don't need hardware that has a user-writeable disk for storage or powerful machines. Perhaps there is still a (major) group of users that can do with a laptop form factor, with built-in camera, wifi and/or 3G connectivity that focuses on web applications and websites. The video clearly shows what's possible. It doesn't have to be Gmail. It could well be Facebook. It isn't a toned down netbook, it is a machine that has good connectivity to the cloud with a laptop form factor.

The Cr-48 looks similar to the black Macbook which Apple used to sell. It already looks good. But imagine a version with a Macbook Air design?

Pieces of these are obvious, but put together and you have a story.
How To Write A Mathematics Essay
Writing a mathematics essay is not all that challenging as many students would believe. If students understood the methods required to carry out this type of assignment, they will be able to write successful mathematics essays which will bring in a good grade.
How old were you when you did this? It sound like you were beyond the typical early 20's backpacker age - weren't you the weird old guy around? (I feel like this in many situations already, I'm 31).
Here is another similar book in the works:
http://openglbook.com/
The Archiveteam.org favicon is a hand making a rude gesture. I think that sums up many peoples opinion to this story.

It certainly is an indicator of how seriously you should take this organisation.
Another way of uploading pictures from web apps on iOS devices is using the Picup app:

http://picupapp.com/

[I've played with this, but haven't used it for anything serious so far].
Startups: Personal vs. Professional
Web Editor based on the rendering engine of Firefox
Google Chrome OS almost stable and ready
SEOTOOL | HERRAMIENTA SEO ONLINE PARA COMPROBAR EL RANKING DE TU WEB
This campaign is ridiculous. People don't want to run their own mail server, because Google can do it better. They understand and are willing to sacrifice ownership of their data for the convenience of letting Google manage it. Given this, the difference between using their javascript frontend and an open source mail client is so minimal in comparison I don't even see the point. Gmail's frontend is also much better than Thunderbird or any OSS client's I've ever used.
If someone who provides the ability to violate copyright law can be punished, what about someone who makes weapons, like Glock or Beretta, that can be used for violent crime?
The Young Successful Drop Out – The Most Dangerous Lie in Tech
Young successful college drop outs - A poisonous lie being spread to kids.
Fun T Shirts bedrucken, Lustige Shirts bedrucken, ausgefallene Geschenkidee
I know both totally honest and trustworthy sales people. I also know others that seem trustworthy but actually don't know what they are talking about, lie constantly, yet so far after 10+ years in their respective careers somehow manage to get very far ahead of the game. You may say they are simply effective self-promoters and I should not be envious, but I disagree.

If you don't believe in a product, it is wrong to tell others it is great. If you have no idea how to do something, sure, say "No problem, I'll get right on it", but it is wrong to say "I have done that tons of times".

With products it is fairly easy to see what the truth is:
An advertisement for a product may say it is magical. A reviewer may agree. You try it yourself and find whether it is true or not, for you.

With people in the workforce though, especially in fields where the cause of a particular team's success or failure is quite difficult to quantify, detecting the bullshit artist from the solid player can be extremely difficult.
Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targets 23,000 Defendants
Wow... this is cool. I dig the three viewing options.
To a degree yes it does. But an inability to self-promote will, in most cases, limit your influence/reach. Good example is Chrome/Safari/Firefox/IE - they all do roughly the same things, for most people, there is little difference between them.

Google realises the need to self-promote ... they just released their 'Dear Sophie' ad pitched at a wider audience than just the tech community.

> the software actualized by code DOES speak for itself to anyone capable of using it.

And this is the point that one of the parent posters made - this attitude of 'people should be able to tell how brilliant my code/software is' is really arrogant (the parent posters words, not mine). Your customers/users will almost never be more knowledgable about your software than you are - so by not self-promoting, you will actually be losing customers/influence/users because they will pass on your products if they don't understand the benefit to them. This applies to the most brilliant of customers to the dumbest.
Google to launch online music service
The Journal said Google is likely to announce the service at its annual Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco, adding that the service will operate in a testing mode initially and not be available to the public at large
I saw a few hits from Slurp with Y!/USA IP just 2 days ago in my logs.