skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason is likely their experience with IE. They took so much flak destroying Netscape that it's just cheaper and less stress to buy the market leader and get on with it.

In terms of 'why', this is just the easiest way to integrate telephony with their own operating system in a way that leverages the network effect. Soon, any app which runs on Windows could just use the Skype Service. Mac/iPhone/Linux will only have bolt-on app integration with the market leader, or have to develop their own from scratch. And Microsoft will slap some very serious marketing behind this. Maybe Windows phones automatically use Skype when you call other Skype users and they're online, saving costs. Or MS could integrate it into business services, taking over internal phone networks. Maybe they have thought of a use I haven't in my 5 minutes of thinking :)
According to government statistics, Asians make more money than anyone else, so what he means is probably "make it easier for white people".

Notice how he said how this is a "white country" and that we need to "stop letting people in"?

Typical racist blather barely disguised as pseudo-intellectual nonsense.
This is composed from equals parts of insight and daftness, though not entirely for the right reason.

The daftness: maybe the claim is true that robots.txt was only a stop-gap measure back when web servers sucked, however the de facto modern use for it goes far beyond that, and ignoring that standard is likely to piss off lots of people.

The insight: for crawlers, relying on robots.txt to prevent getting stuck indexing infinite hierarchies of data is a bad idea. It should be able to figure that much out for itself, so it doesn't explode when faced with sites that don't exclude such hierarchies using robots.txt.

For servers, relying on a client hint to ensure reliability is daft. It should have some form of rate limiting built in, as that's the only sensible design. This seems the only marginally sensible use of robots.txt from a server standpoint. Using it for any form of security (e.g. preventing DB scraping) is daft, and a more robust mechanism should be employed there too.
I think Robert Greene has some interesting things to say about this ("48 Laws of Power" for example).

(I hope I'm properly representing some of his thoughts here)

Clearly #1 and #2 are ideal. Clearly #3 is not (however there can be a healthy and superior balance between #1/#2 and #3). But clearly #3 exists, just as #1 and #2, and WILL ALWAYS EXIST. Power can be achieved through any of the 3 means, and it's up to each individual to choose their own path. What "geeks" (among many others) tend to do is close their eyes to the fact that this power struggle exists, and decide to not play any game at all. This leads to an endless frustration and mounds of material for whining.

Note: I believe it is very unfortunate that most marketing exists and how ubiquitous it is.
Did you get to one of the parts of the article where they talked about the classes to learn soft skills? It's a few pages in. It is true they don't learn it out of a book, though, it's much more like a tutoring session, followed by a practical.
He did, but that’s the last we’ve heard of it as of yet [last I heard it discussed]. I doubt they killed it forever though, it’s not like Apple to make a false announcement (vaporware); it is like Apple to de-prioritize the speed of open sourcing that stack over developing/improving/iterating their own implementation and/or iOS ecosystem as a whole.
I've heard that Magento's performance is also a big problem, mostly due to the bloated ZF.
From a few days ago: "Russian tycoon buys Warner Music for $3.3bn" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2521442
Presumably if the passwords are hashed they have no way of telling you your password. They can only reset it.

So yes, generally if they send you the password then that means they store it in plain text. While it isn't always that hard to crack a password hash, it is unlikely that Amtrak went through that length to retrieve the password.
When you look at Microsoft's acquisition history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

There aren't many very large brand name "statement" acquisitions there. Most are small companies you've probably never heard of. I think this Skype acquisition is a clear message that Microsoft is playing hardball now.
Batshit insane, got it.
Well there goes any chance of an update to their Linux port :-)
Lao Tzu was a Taoist. "zen" refers to Zen Buddhism. The two are completely different things.
MS and FB are practically the same ethics-wise to me. I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts on this.
"With $7B they should have just given away about 15 million Windows Mobile phones in the form of an epic PR stunt."

This instantly reminds me of the CueCat [1], which Wired sent out to half a million subscribers. I admit, a phone (even a WP7 one) could be a million times more useful than a CueCat ;-)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuecat
[2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html
I don't doubt they are launching this but I'm surprised Google is launching such a consumer-facing product at a developer conference. Perhaps there is a developer/API angle but I doubt it.

It would be like Steve Jobs launching a new version of iWork at WWDC. Sure, it's great, but it doesn't have any impact on developers.
OK, wait.

If the data has value to the user, shouldn't the user be paying the host for the cost of making that data available (or perhaps considerably more, if it has a lot of value to the user)?
Here's a concrete example of a site not worth archiving - back in the early days of the web (1994?) a friend of mine wrote a 4 function calculator. Each button was a hyperlink, so "34-12" meant going to the pages "?", "?3", "?34", "?34-", "?34-1", and "?34-12". That's an infinite number of web pages which should not be indexed.
I don't understand. AOL bought ICQ for 400M, got patent exclusivity to IM for some time, sold a bazillion ad dollars during the dotcom boom through the ICQ client, and then sold the company recently for 200M. I am sure AOL came out ahead on that deal. What is an ICQ moment?
"It's Wave for bands! It's invite only, so first all the bass players will get their parts up for download. They'll be able to invite 5 other bass players or drummers each. We'll add guitars, keys, and vocals once we've gained traction as the worlds best bass line download site! If we don't get enough users downloading bass lines, we'll close the project down and have the engineers behind it defect to Facebook..."
Yup, it became 'Microsoft live sync', oh... what does that do? Lets you share your folders!
I also liked jwz's response farther down to criticism about selling out: "Brendan's house and my nightclub thank us for selling out early and often."
Also no data, but my perception being in the Bay Area startup world is that Asian engineers are way underrepresented in comparison to their numbers in my CS programs (both undergrad and grad). This goes for both Chinese and Indian engineers. I always got the impression that Asian engineers tend to prefer larger companies like Oracle etc.
Sony is perhaps the front runner in this, given its large movie studio and music label, but it's not clear that owning these businesses has been a great boon for Sony's electronics or software.

One can also look at the not-that-long-ago "merger" of AOL with Time Warner as another example of a media/tech marriage where the supposed synergy was vastly exaggerated.

I'm not sure I see any reason for another major tech company to leap in to buying huge legacy businesses given the lessons learned by their competitors.
I agree, but you forgot one thing they'll undoubtely do: they'll change the underlying protocol, so that existing Mac and Linux clients will not work with the Skype network anymore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
anecdotally, i was blacklisted by a certain fortune 100 company because i had turned down a face to face set of interviews in the 4th round the night before. they were really pissed off, for whatever reason, i politely told them that i wasn't interested in the position any longer and that i would have to cancel the interview. i think 15 hour notice is sufficient.

anyway, the reason why i knew i was blacklisted was because i was interviewing for a post with that same company in another region several months (~6) later and as soon as the headhunter put me through to hr, they stopped all communications, no details given.

fwiw you should never burn bridges, but in this case, over time i found that this company was the complete anti-thesis of the type of company that i would want to work for and i thank their hr for donning light on that through their utter ineptitude and incompetence, not because they blacklisted me, but because they were so ridiculously disorganized. the facts: hr could not identify the exact title and position that i was interviewing for correctly, several times i would be interviewing for position x (told by hr, job description in hand), only to figure out that the interviewer was looking for position y and was considering me for position y (which was with the same division, but a different role). when doing a phone interview with the vp of the region, he didn't successfully make it until our 3rd attempt (across 3 differently scheduled days) at a conference call, various reasons which i think were ridiculous: laptop was having problems so he couldn't access the conference call number from his calendar, second time was more forgivable that something important had come up, but i was not given advanced notice, only told after waiting in the conference call for 20 minutes and after 3 emails to hr to figure out why the guy was late.

but to come back to your point, you had gone a bit further than i by accepting an offer, i'm assuming signed a contract, and only weeks later you turned them down. while i agree with some of the posts that that's life, that the company had failed to provide you with a fair valuation/compensation package, but at the same time, i doubt the original company was looking to low-ball you, that's quite possibly what they could pay you given their salary ranges. you did the right thing by not trying to
re-negotiate with the first company, that would be completely disrespectful.

i highly suggest trying to bridge this relationship with the first company, tell them your intent clearly, that you're retracting your acceptance, but be prepared to answer because they will ask why. personally i usually give the truth, but that's up to you. remember, you want to treat people how you expect to be treated.

and overall, let this be a lesson learned, given that i realize the job market is not in the best shape, but i believe that you were a bit eager to take on the first company's offer. a little restraint and negotiation could let you to stretch that offer while not accepting and looking for something else that's more fitting.
Perhaps the Mac version won't stagnate? Maybe Microsoft will update it like it does other Mac software like Office.
Skype 5.1 for Mac, is not.
Part of what astonishes me is why people should feel "ashamed" or even "bothered" that they have a different cultural background. I am an immigrant, so what? Why should I or anyone else take offense to that?
"That fact alone is pointless without knowing how many Asian dance crews have entered. Like I said, most will never buck the trend and go against the grain - especially in such a dramatic way as pursuing dance and popular music."

That's specious reasoning, simply because if you're going to accept foremost the idea that all Asian kids are going to MIT and/or studying CS and pre-Med and doing almost nothing else, then it only stands to reason that a preponderance of them are not going to be pursuing dance and pop music in any significant number. Or, at least, that's what you claim.

Speaking of Pop music, in 2010, the Far East Movement had the #1 pop song in the country for a month. Bruno Mars is Filipino, and has had 3 of his songs in the top 10 songs.

So, either alot of them are pursuing dance and pop music in significant numbers, or Asians are so talented in either that they simply will themselves to greatness even though there are so few in pursuit of it. They simply excel in spite of themselves and in their cultural vacuum of tigers and testing.
FaceTime is a gimmick that few people actually use use.

Do you have any data to support this assertion?
New Tools to Help IPhone, Android Developers Build on Azure
This may be a dumb move from a legal perspective. Court cases have alluded that robots.txt files may count as technological measures in DMCA cases[1]. Granted, that's far from guaranteed. But I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to go to court over it.

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070819090725314&#...
The same thing applies to "Mexicans".. it infuriates my South American friends:)
Surely, you are not aware what is a better user experience.
Are you really suggesting that similar pieces haven't been written by African Americans? To my mind, the first several paragraphs were practically an homage to Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man." And Yang mentions Baldwin by name.

It seems to me that when those authors were writing (and earlier poets like Langston Hughes), the problems of assimilation and alienation were both more apparent (as in "WTF!!!") and at the same time more vague (as in "WTF???"). It demanded the attention of artists. It was the same era that included the most creative period in the development of Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement itself. I wonder if Asian-Americans find themselves at something of a similar juncture.

Ultimately, and unfortunately, I think the direction of African-American cultural identity ended up following in the direction Yang has set for himself. Yang says:

"The first step toward self-reform is to admit your deficiencies. Though my early adulthood has been a protracted education in them, I do not admit mine. I’m fine. It’s the rest of you who have a problem. Fuck all y’all."

He's obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek here, since earlier he wondered if his "defiance is just delusional, self-glorifying bullshit that artists have always told themselves to compensate for their poverty and powerlessness." I'm sure he's (ironically) comparing himself to African Americans (otherwise, why the black vernacular "Fuck all y'all"?).

Something he touches on but doesn't really flesh-out is the problem with defining yourself in the negative -- that is, defining yourself in terms of things you won't do because you've already established a social identity where you aren't that thing. When he says "I love this hard and unyielding part of myself more than any other reward the world has to offer a newly brightened and ingratiating demeanor, and I will bear any costs associated with it," I hear the the constant refrain in the African-American community to "keep it real", where what this really means is "don't range widely." And incidentally, this is also recognized by African-Americans -- see Dave Chappelle's sketch "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong."

(btw, I'm an African American software engineer, so issues of race and culture are unavoidably fascinating to me)
Yep. Any non-root tethering app should just show the encrypted tunnel as a connection originating from the device itself. Just make sure that DNS requests don't leak when using an SSH tunnel. In fact, a simple port-forwarding app is all that's really necessary for most tunnel cases.

All of this makes a $6-$8/mo SSH/VPN privacy service (e.g., cotse.net) rather intriguing.
I think you proved my point. There's a 3rd option - they could be using a symmetric-key algorithm. This would make it trivial to decrypt for Amtrak - while difficult for anyone else to decrypt.

The problem with this, and why people don't view it as much better than plain text, is because it's a single point of failure - and if your DB has been compromised, your secret keys (in a config or in source) probably isn't too far behind.
Really interesting reading that Joel on Software now. Had me thinking of the Jimmy Fallon skit where someone held up a QR code in the background that I scanned with my phone, opened in mobile youtube, and I was watching more content.
There really isn't anything better on Linux, sadly. I wrote a longer comment about this a few days ago, but the gist is that Skype is the only semi-reliable video chat/SIP client for Linux, even factoring in serious neglect from Skype Inc. for the platform.

This acquisition probably is the final nail in the coffin for Skype's hypothetical open-source Linux client.

I don't have high hopes at all that alternate versions of Skype will be kept up very long. Everything Microsoft does eventually leads back to Windows or Office.
I hate to say this here, but msuster is the one VC out there who really knows how things work and talks straight -- and the one I'd really want to go to bat for me. There is no sugar coating or extra idealism, but he's not limited to just software stuff either. In fact, I'd argue that makes him a better investor since he understands other industries -- and many of the dynamics in software are no different than other places.

To the specifics: I think when you are hacking on something large you need external motivation. Since the YCombinator model is to start with little upfront investment until you are "ramen profitable" you basically end up with a couple of people in a room hacking on something until it is presumably worth something (of course, valuations are notoriously difficult in software -- esp. social software). Since people don't get a lot done on their own, the purpose of a co-founder is for the motivational factor. If you were an uber-hacker (e.g. Drew Houston comes to mind) probably you don't need anyone else. You can build a functional prototype, get investment, hire, etc.

There is also the problem of the "idea." Although there are lots of loosy goosy "idea" people, there are also a fair number of talented hackers without any practical ideas -- and you really need to have a practical idea to have a startup. While personally I think you are usually better focusing on a problem domain where you have experience and there is a clear need, there are certainly cases where a hacker needs a co-founder simply to provide that interface layer between code and real life. As an example, anyone who has been in the industry for awhile will note just how terrible at design many otherwise very talented programmers are.

Anyways, I found this extraordinarily inspiring as a single founder YC reject who has been doing reasonably well w/o any YC support.
1) Four of those friends are not technical, and wouldn't know what to do with irssi. The remainder are using laptops that get disconnected a lot.

2) I reboot to Windows to play games. There goes the screen session.

3) Skype on iPhones. Seriously. I ain't screwing around with a phone keyboard and terminal app to SSH in, screen -dR and scroll around just to get back into a chat.
Which is fine as long as you never go offline or reboot.
I remember some anti-spam vigilante code that told legitimate bots to go away with robots.txt, told humans what the game was about, and attacked e-mail address scrapers by presenting an infinite number of fake e-mail addresses.
"Click here for 1000 more e-mail addresses that will never bother a human!".
Seems like focusing on pirates now would be like running a campaign against burglary in 1939 /instead/ of mobilizing against nazi Germany?
>> Would they keep you on the payroll, out of a sense of fairness, if it developed that you were not the best offer? Nope. You'd be shown the door

Yes, in most cases they would, if you turn out to be even (say) 30% as good as they think you were when they made the offer.

There is a lot of inertia involved in getting rid of employees, and most employers keep marginal employees long after it might make sense to get rid of them. Not out of a sense of fairness as much as a desire for a productive work environment for everyone.
I feel like creating a honey pot for bad bots now. Put an exclude line in ROBOTS.TXT and then include that URL in my pages and when a bot hits it anyways, ban the IP.
hasenj > You seem to have a hard time understanding why being an immigrant or not from a majority group might be hard.

While you say you aren't white, do you have any cultural habits that people from White European backgrounds might find abhorrent, disgusting, or icky? Perhaps something that is difficult to explain? Do you want to explain away every cultural practice in a country that you've never been to?

I can think of a million reasons why one would not want to explain or talk about about cultural issues about a country they are originally from (if there is only one country in question). The best way is to avoid letting it become a topic of conversation. This isn't "cowardice", it's avoiding a boring, useless (and potentially offensive) conversation.
The brave Indian lady who fights against worst thing humanity has to offer
Arnold Kim got his MD and even practiced for a while before retiring from medicine to work on Macrumors.com full time.
Yeah, I totally agree on that. I looked into it and there's no way I could port my synthesizer app to android without some big philosophical sacrifices.

This ticket has been open since 2009...
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434
Embarrassing Request
My local DNS server appears to be down, and it seems that I only have the IP address for Hacker News handy at the moment (In my host file, I added a redirect from Reddit to beat the procrastination).

Can someone post the instructions to set up OpenDNS or another DNS service, so I can get back online? I run Ubuntu.

Your help would be much appreciated.
How would you know if the robot is autonomous or not? They could just use a typical browser user-agent and you wouldn't know...
Having never met a person this productive, could this really be possible?
FWIW, MS owns part of Facebook too.
Post is completely right. Especially saying that 50/50 split is a bad idea. I don't have to repeat all the arguments here (as organizer of the co-founders meetup, I get to discuss these at length). If I put my investor hat for a second, saying you split 50/50 is a signal that the leader of the company doesn't have the guts to make painful decisions. So failure is very likely.
Hide the link from users?
I don't use IRC for specific people, if specific people want to speak with me, they can be-bop into mumble, call my phone, IM me, visit me, email me...I'm just explaining why the rationale specific to IRC doesn't make much sense.
Jason Scott, very distinctive voice. Maker of the BBS Documentary, etc. Engaging public speaker too; lots of good examples on his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott_Sadofsky
Tolstoy's Radical Politics
ASLR and DEP, by and large, have nothing to do with the kernel. ASLR is a function of the binary loader and memory allocators, which are in userland. DEP is a function of userland memory protection flags (they're handled on the bare metal by the kernel, but the kernel just sets what it's told to by the userland). I'd put any amount of money down on the table that there is no kernel vulnerability here at all -- if there was one, I assure you that it'd be more than a Chrome vuln.
I'm not a fan of Perl, and I have in fact a great deal more experience with JavaScript, but I don't see a command-line runtime and interface being sufficient to make it prevent Perl from taking over its niche.
PHP Fog respondes to AWS Outage
however the de facto modern use for it goes far beyond that, and ignoring that standard is likely to piss off lots of people

I think they're saying is that their archive is going to ignore it, and your website should just eliminate it.

We'll have to assume that archiveteam.org are by now real experts in guessing which buttons are going to be pissing people off. :-)
Not sure if something has changed, but this has actually been around for some time.

Original announcement: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/golang-nuts/j5e4bNXF8ws/di...