skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What about your bank account? In most banks it's just numbers representing money...but it's just 'bits'..right?

You're suggesting that people should rely on copyright to keep their bank from stealing their money, rather than an actual contract with the bank?
Can anyone shed light on this statistic from the press release:

"With 170 million connected users..."

Every article on Skype for the last 3 months has mentioned "600 million accounts". (http://www.google.com/search?q=skype+600+million+accounts) But I can't find an original source for that number; it seems everyone is quoting "industry estimates".

Were the estimates on Skype's userbase wildly wrong, or is a "connected account" somehow different?
It's funny that this comment is in response to someone suggesting a dividend, yet completely ignores the dividend in mentioning the stock price over time.
Or telephones.
Jobs to 2008 MobileMe Team: Why The %&# Doesn’t It Do That?
Report: Apple to Leverage Nuance at NC Data Center for iOS 5
As well as bringing print-like layouts to the web, it also brings the possibility of using HTML & CSS to create content for print (e.g. magazines).

It would be interesting if you could use Dreamweaver to make a website (NMCOT) then use Adobe's CSS regions to apply a print stylesheet to turn it into something for print (e.g. a poster).
Ah well, the same thing all over again. The hacker/cracker distinction is sadly never going to be mitigated, and the press doesn't know/care enough to change the way they report these things. The words hacker and cyber criminal are used interchangeably in this article (and just about any article on this topic). Sad, particularly for those of us who happen to be reading Hacker News.
About.me name rush
I am in no way associated with about.me, I just like it.

So for all HN'ers, don't miss out on the name rush, register at about.me. You may have missed out on the perfect name on twitter, facebook and gmail but things are still wide open at about.me
Why does "European" typically mean the western half of Europe?

It doesn't. Russians are certainly counted as European.

Why does "American" almost always ignore all the non-USA countries on the two 'America' continents?

People from the "United States of America" are described as "Americans". Similarly, people from the Federated Republic of Brazil are described as "Brazilian". Or if you want to talk about continents, people from South America are often described as South Americans.
Best netbook to run Ubuntu?
I have been using a Mac for a long time and love it - but I really want to buy a netbook a.) to get more work done traveling on planes, since my mac pro is 17 inches of awesome b.) to get familiar with other flavors of linux.. i.e. ubuntu. Sadly I remember a time when Dell was pushing Ubuntu on their computers, but I guess times have changed. Any recommendations on which netbook brand / model you have had success running Ubuntu on?
Ask HN: Suggest ways to redeem myself of my poor academic performance
My academic performance has been poor though I have managed to get postgrad (CS) from one of the best (arguably THE best) institute in my country.

My academic performance was poor because I generally spent time doing things that interested me but were not related to the curriculum. I have been working with startups, teaching and mentoring budding coders, involved in several management and team building exercises where I organized and managed events, gathered teams to execute short term projects and so on.

I feel I have gathered considerable expertise in following areas

1. Team building.
2. Managing projects.
3. Web Development.
4. Giving ideas that add significant value to various startups. ( I have testimonials from my clients which they gave me proactively)
5. I love taking risks.

My university culture is to look down upon such skills.

However my confidence takes a blow when I look at my grade cards. They are one of the lowest. I have got AA in all management, software engineering, communication & articulation and programming courses but rest everywhere its the lowest.

Does that mean I am not capable of making significant contribution to the world of research ?
Funny, but financial advisors on acquisitions are just people who want a few percent for doing nothing.
FN LN
Microsoft pays £5.1bn to turn Skype into another Internet Explorer
Microsoft's acquisition of Skype for $8.5 billion becomes official
I was also blocked based on IP.
Want to write in LOGO? There's an app for that
CIO Pay Linked To Graduation Rates, Performance
This is a childish argument based upon an attitude "don't use robots.txt because it interferes with what we do and what we do is aw3s0m3 l337". This attitude is also prevailing in the archiveteam's comments here. I doubt their actions can be taken seriously.

I wonder how this made into 88 votes here on HN..
Microsoft acquires Skype
Ben Horowitz on Microsoft buying Skype
Did Microsoft overpay for Skype? Hell yes — by $4.5 billion
It's a really good question - I made the note elsewhere [1] that I was really surprised at 663 million users, because that would make Skype more popular than Facebook (by measurements of popularity that don't include swearing the calls that start glitching ten minutes in).

170 million I can believe more readily. It could just be the difference between users and registered accounts (I know several people who've set up Skype 4-5 times over the years, using it rarely and then creating a new account on a new machine when they need to use it again).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2531626
Does .nyud.net work for you? http://labs.adobe.com.nyud.net/technologies/cssregions/ If not, here's Bing's cache: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=CSS+Regions+prototype&d... (Google seem to have removed their cache links from SERPs).

Edit: was the page blocked or just the download?
Web scraping etiquette (SO qn)
El Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 142
Did Maria can receive all the explanations of Max's about the cancellation of their wedding plans? ... Watch El Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 142 that reveals the humanity side of Max's was defeated great obsession in his life.
The labels are understandably worried that people will just share their lockers with friends in the same way people shared cassette tapes back in the day.

Of course labels want to double dip as much as they can; they have a dying product after all, it's natural to try and milk it as much as possible.
To be clear, it's not just "when a TEXT/BLOB is included in a sort" that causes on-disk temp tables. One would expect to take a hit when sorting on a TEXT field.

But actually it's much worse than that: you can get on-disk temp tables if you're selecting a TEXT field while doing an ORDER BY or GROUP BY that uses any columns from the second table in a join.
It wasn't a compliment. :)

Erlang has a scheduler which automatically makes intelligent tuning based on dataflow in ways that are realistically impossible for anybody to do managing callbacks by hand. They aren't "magic", they just take into account a fairly simple cost-per-action model ("reductions") and whether a process is active, has messages to process, or is blocking with an empty mailbox.
Interact with the Microsoft Kinect using Javascript
The other side:

* Major label advances an unknown artist a bunch of money.

* Album sells poorly.

* Artist never pays back advance.

* Major label would have been better not making the deal.
iAltair
Some big assumptions there that I'm not so sure about, like emphasis of processing power over battery life. And also treating MacBooks as Apple's main product, while iOS devices appear to be the more important segment.
Erlang Web Server Benchmarking
As a hiring manager this is simply not a big deal. Any employee can leave at any time for any reason. I dont see anything wrong ethically with calling to turn down the original position. If they are truly good people they would recognize that it could be better for your career and be happy for you.

If it isnt truly better for your career, then they will have the opportunity to explain why or sweeten.

The only time I get upset is if someone leaves in the middle of a project without enough notice.
I believe the 170 million refers to the average number of users who connect and use the service every month. The 600+ million is total accounts.
Is the blockchain technology used by bitcoin an invention?
I think you'll find that ubuntu will have plenty of driver support and will work on almost any piece of hardware. If you want to get more familiar with other distro's I'd recommend virtualizing them first (vmware, virtualbox, etc).

If you're interested in a machine tailored to ubuntu, a quick search brings me here:
http://www.system76.com/index.php?cPath=28
What country is that?
It's great to know it's useful, there are still a lot of investment funds to be added, so it might be even better than you think. ;)
Best of luck with "this whole startup thing" if you decide to try it! :)
What I was implying is that a snapshot of the peers in a given torrent is not exactly hard evidence that each of those peers has a 100% downloaded copy of the files. For example, I remember that some torrent clients have a "super-seed" mode, where they appear as a normal peer with less than 100% completion. I know this sounds a bit like "the dog ate my homework" excuse but it sets a bad precedent of what constitutes an infringement - is it downloading a whole copy, uploading a whole copy, or just a part (unusable by itself) of the work?
Do you have a link for the HN submission of it? If there isn't one, could you make one please ;-)

I seem to recall the gist of it; but I couldn't find your submission of it to HN (and faux-submitting it didn't bring up a previous submission).
Software Engineering? Really? As an ex-IBM employee I beg to differ!

Don't get me wrong, I love to hack. At the end of the day, it all depends on how your employer treats you.
I am an audiologist who programs for a living (audio-stuff, obviously). I guess that must make me a really relaxed personality. Only I don't live in the US. Oh well.
So now we've reached the conclusion that marketing in of itself is bullshit? The evolution of marketing has lead us to cause the so called "scum" to exist because of how traditionally effective marketing has been. Now that it's so widespread its becoming increasingly ineffective. Thus, enters the scum, or in other words more creative ways to interrupt your attention.

The techie (or Silicon Valley) view of the economic world, while fruitful, is a very meritocratic. We only believe that cream of the crop always rises to the top. Unfortunately this is not how the world works and the OP's suggestion about self-promotion is evidence of such (read - Jobs v Wozniak). We read stories from Steve Blank and PG about "just make a good product and the rest will follow". While good advice, I can count on my hand the number of products that "suck" that are way more successful than the ones that don't suck. It's the reason SAP, MS, and Oracle still exist.

Why are techies like this? I believe its because we are extremely analytical pattern hunters - we hate replication and deficiencies. Marketing to us represents an inefficiency in the system because it doesn't represent 1 or 0.
We are targeting small and medium marketing agencies, design shops, webdev shops and other professional services companies that have many projects at the same time.
If you look at the SEC IPO filing[1], the most recent numbers (Dec 2010) are as follows:

* 663M registered accounts

* 145M connected users

* 8M paying users

The 170M number is the most recent update of the 145M connected users number. They define 'connected users' as active within a financial quarter

I have spent the past few hours reading through the SEC filing. Skype is still growing very strongly[3], especially in the key metrics of active (connected) users and paying users (both up 30%)

I think this is a great deal and will work out as well for Microsoft as PayPal did for eBay. See my comment in the other thread about that[2]

As I mentioned in that thread, Skype is not profitable only because they wrote down assets and acquisition costs to the tune of over $350M. Within Microsoft it will profit near $500M this year (my back-of-the-napkin sums by projecting out the old revenue figures with the new growth figures). A PE of 17-19 is not a bad buy, considering the strength of the brand and the large user base.

Skype is probably the largest non-browser web/net application, and likely the second largest social graph after Facebook.

What will be interesting now is the question of if Microsoft will work with Facebook on Skype, or use it as a platform to compete with Facebook.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1498209/0001193125110...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2531885

[3] From their filing: "We have significantly increased both our free and paying users, growing our average monthly connected users by 38% and average monthly paying users by 19%, from the three months ended December 31, 2009 to the three months ended December 31, 2010."
The actual list: http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/10-least-stressful-jobs...

I wonder how their "stress rank" is calculated...
This. I wasn't here 250 days ago and I'm always glad to find another solid programming resource. I wasn't the first and surely won't be the last.

Besides, this type of link isn't necessarily a "news" story that will become outdated.
Any job that makes it easy to take work home, and/or has real customers, and/or involves several teams that you might block can be very stressful if you let it.
Why is it that I like Skype less on the other side of this announcement? It's not that I'm anti-MSFT; I just like communications software like Skype to be vendor neutral, competing on innovation and working to keep as many platforms + devices as possible at parity. I don't want someone to use Skype as leverage to try to get me to switch platforms. I'm more likely to drop Skype and be left looking for an alternative.
From the closing piece of advice:

No matter where you are, make sure you're always growing on a personal level. Never sacrifice your personal growth for some "I'll make it if I only throw everything into it" martyrdom delusion. Successful people start successful businesses, and successful people are always growing.

As someone who is nearly 30, and still ridiculously confused about what I want out of life - does the above hold even if you abandon one form of personal growth for another?
Facemash for Facebook
Recently when I started to outsource work I noticed everyone had Skype and wanted to use Skype. Skype is the no1 general platform for reliable business communications today. I got amazed myself how many actually use Skype in this sector.

Skype is the new msn for voice chat and has been for quite a while. One of the reasons Skype is so attractive for businesses is the encryption methods it uses. I know the governments are annoyed by Skypes encryption due to they cannot listen and spy on those talking there.
تحميل فيلم 365 يوم سعادة 
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I have to agree. We get paid very well to play on computers all day; something most of us would be doing anyways. Don't confuse this with the job of running a startup though.
Facebook has 650M active users. They always measure and cite active users, to their credit they do not fudge around with the numbers in their PR

Skype is 170M active (quarterly, Facebook is monthly), and 680M total registered.

A lot more people have given Skype their payment details than have Facebook - which results in Skype monetizing a lot better (but still not awesome monetization - yet, but it is improving).

Edit: Facebook has never published total registered, see

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

It is difficult to apples v apples with skype + facebook since their methodologies vary, but it seems that the fb active user base is ~3x Skype
> Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

I don't personnaly use Skype for various reasons, but for the people who do, let's hope that's true.
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Does that mean I am not capable of making significant contribution to the world of research?

No, it does not, but it does mean that there are few open doors for you to make contributions to research, and it likely means that it will be hard for you to get up to speed on the current literature, something necessary to make a useful contribution in any scientific field.

The list of what you think you are good at does not suggest to me that you would be particularly happy in a research environment. Why do you want to do research?

It is possible to come back to university from industry, and I am aware of people who have done good Phds that were grounded in their experience of non-academic problems. One of them had started his Phd with the intention of doing pure research for its high intellectual challenge but realised after less than a year that this motivated him less than he had thought and switched to research relevant to his previous job experience.
The original message said that "MS and FB are practically the same ethics-wise to me".
In that context I replied that income sources are a much better predictor of company behaviour than so-called company ethics.

You can look at a company and try to analyze its decisions from an ethical point of view, but that is just using a convenient and familiar simplification to understand a complex entity. One can say that a company is "good" or "bad" or "immoral", one could even say that it has goals and ambitions as someone mentioned earlier, but how useful is this really in trying to understand that company and in predictiing its actions?
In my eyes this is Facebook's missed opportunity. Facebook is a sufficiently powerful brand to be able to negotiate exclusive deals with operators around the world to launch a VOIP phone relying on flat rate data only, replacing the address book with a subset of your social graph and SMS with Facebook Messaging. Such a move could have been very disruptive towards voice phone operators if paired with 170M desktop clients and the Skype protocol.

It's a strategy Facebook could adopt without Skype, but with the two brands in unison they could rule the market. I don't see Microsoft being able to do the same.
Maybe we need to follow the lessons from another article on the BBC site, and "reclaim the word" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13333013

(Note - not an otherwise Hacker related link)
Everyone really needs to get over this point. No news organization was ever going to use the word cracker. I could see the headline now, "Two Crackers Attack Bank." That wouldn't go over well.
Thanks for the link. Good idea to group the startups by area, this solves the marker overlapping problem. Does it only display the number of startups or can you also list startup details?
There may be alternatives that cover Skype functionality at least partly if you have the skills and nerves to use them (based on SIP or jingle). But for most of the 170 million connected users, including those who use Linux, there is no alternative to Skype if they want the same featureset (im, voip, video, encryption, conference calls,...). Sad but true.
On N900, Skype is just another Telepathy plugin. This means it uses the same UIs and phone book as the GSM phone, Google Talk, SMS etc.
though i must say this is the most terribly written site...
(I'm hoping the poster edits her comment to include a spoiler alert phrase)

Sorry, I no longer have editing powers. Too much time has passed. (I logged in just to do as you asked, I don't normally log in from work.)
It's great that the Marines recognize that besides the ecological advantage, which let's be frank, they probably don't care about at all, solar generators have practical benefits. Their use case is pretty similar to backpackers, mountaineers and marine applications, if I understand it correctly. Well, like backpackers that camp for extended periods in remote places.
How many registered users does FB have in total?
Microsoft Buying Skype in $8.5B Deal
What exactly is the difference between being a Software Engineer and a Computer Programmer?
been working on something along the same lines as this. The rise of the "affective layer" is well on its way...
I should have asterixed that with 'registered'. Updated numbers are out now as part of the msft press release:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2532230

Facebook has 3x active over Skype - but as you mention, while Facebook are straight-up about their numbers, it is still hard to compare because of differing methodologies and different app types
Crowded coupon industry competes for users
GChat is pretty idiot-proof, and platform-independent.
First, he mentions that VARCHARs are stored in-row, and then he wonders why his server's performance goes down when he joins on a VARCHAR(30000)? And uses EXPLAIN as the very last step? I don't quite get it, honestly.
If I remember correctly, Hotmail for still running on BSD many years after the MS acquisition
I'd like to see this explained too. Usually they are interchangeable, but when I see them together I assume by programmer they mean code monkey.
Hopefully Microsoft is swooping in to save Skype from the death-spiral it's been heading towards for the last few years. There really is a lot of room for improvement (software-wise) and I'm going to give MSFT the benefit of the doubt for the moment.
Working offline with Cloud9 on Google Chrome
1. Since eBay sold its controlling stake (they still own an amount of equity in the business) the investors now in control have got the rights to the whole thing where eBay didn't actually buy the rights to some of the code off the founders - this makes quite a difference.

2. The western world is slowly pulling itself out of a recession right now, rather than two years ago when we were on the other side and already sliding down. This will help any good plan to monetise the service further if that is MS's goal (it is probably their secondary goal).

3. Social networking, while already the "big thing" two years ago has grown considerably and is a fertile battleground for the big names. Competing in this market is presumably MS's primary driver for the purchase.

4. Facebook were strongly rumoured to want Skype or something similar to integrate with its current offerings and Google already has Google Talk (though it only has a fraction of the market awareness of Skype). So for MS to compete in that area they would have two choices: put up a big enough offer for Skype to scupper anyone else (particularly facebook, because if they got it MS would be competing against two entrenched brands in the same beast) buying it, or make their own (or buy something else) and have to compete against the entrenched ubiquitous brand in the area (some people talk of making an Internet call as "skyping" someone).

The valuation seems quite a bit high to my untrained eye, but MS buying Skype makes sense and perhaps that is simply the price they had to pay to get it. It isn't like MS is short of a bob or two.
The trick is to get a work and travel visa. Visitors visas in the US can be at most 6 months. Work and travel visas can be extended far longer and they don't actually require you to work. A friend of mine discovered this on accident while work and travelling.
> The hack, which has led to the network being unavailable for over a week, has left observers wondering if a company as vast and seemingly advanced as Sony can get hit, who out there is safe?

Thank you, Dave Lee, for revealing early on in the article that you don't understand the subject matter and that the article won't be worth reading.
Is the PSN network breach really about savvy criminals or more about corner-cutting businesses?
Kill Math