skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, as a potential user of GAE for a personal side project, I am already paying $9/mo (let's assume) for my standard shared hosting with shell access.

Now, I want to try out GAE. I do so with local / dev appserver and free junk until I get things kind of working and start getting traffic / traction.

I guess the ~good~ point to all this is that if you are going over the free limit (ie: start getting serious traffic) what el goog wants you to do is put on adwords, earn $9/mo and then turn right around and give it back to them for "hosting costs".

Really it just leaves a huge sour taste in people's mouth that this is such a dramatic (and un-warned!) change in pricing for really a monopoly service. Assume that you were heavily invested in GAE / DataStore and have... ohh... 1tb of data or something with them. Where / how else are you going to solve these "impossible" problems that the datastore solves for you?

Much better to not get tied down with google's quirky (yet scalable) model in the first place so at least you have the ability to move between competitive providers instead of getting stuck with a monopoly provider that doesn't know how (socially) to charge people for services.
Scale Fail (part 1)
Any recommendations for an options provider?
Amazon now selling more eBooks than paper books.
How would you compare abiword for doc/docx conversion versus antiword (http://www.winfield.demon.nl/)?

Also, what are the limitations of abiword for doc/docx files?
VCloud Express by Virtacore: Portal Overview [video]
That's the opposite of my understanding; Sandberg and Bostrom discusses this and at least as far as compute resources go, simulating the brain is by far the harder problem.

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/selected_outputs/fohi_publications/b...
Introducing Gametime
Are you thinking of moving to Silicon Valley? Think again
Did you mean to write $12,000 per year there instead of $12,000 per month

Looks obvious that it was just a typo - the parent mentioned $1000 per month per founder, $12000 would obviously be per year.
You know something is old news when even fred wilson is blogging about it.
The air is a whole lot bigger than the ground. Roads are 33 ft wide. The air is - the air! Its miles wide and 3D. It would conceivably be had to collide with another air car if you tried.

Takeoff and landing is the risky time, and that is mitigated by the timing - it takes seconds to land this thing (100 yd airstrip) so you'd have to attempt to land at the same moment as someone else which is in your favor.
Anti-angiogenesis drugs and supplements also show promise in shutting down cancer cells.
Listed at $45 initially.

There will be less Aeron chairs this time.
I have to say, the kind of business you mention (20k/month & autopilot) would likely be my dream 'job'.
Like professional athletes, celebrities or politicians.
>it's hard to know what to infer when comparing a giant, multicultural country with a small, much more homogeneous one such as Singapore.

That's nothing. I remember a few years ago at this forum someone put forward a report that compared the US with a list of contries with the Vatican at the top.
called it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563481

should have put a lot of money on that. I think it will hit $18-20B market cap in no time
You seem to be implying that if a philosophical position has a name, it is not stupid. I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you but that's far from being so.
Astronomer Bennett’s team discovers new class of planets
Using Zaarly, an impromptu Dwollapalooza is held
The display alone looks like it has well over 100 discrete segments. Has to be serial something-or-other.
It's not a 84K airplane it's a 30k car + (84 - 30)K airplane. I bought a vary nice car even though I only drive ~5K miles a year. I could sell my car and add an extra ~800-1000$ a month to be able to fly on the weekends, but paying ~90K + hanger fees and still needing a car is much harder.

PS: Renting an airplane is still a better option if you fly less than 10 hours a month, but IMO there is a nitch for a crappy flying car.
Not sure what you were trying to say here, but using an A&P isn't "fine," it's mandatory, and it's very expensive.

I was trying to say factoring in an A&P wouldn't lead me to believe operational costs would necessarily jump to be prohibitively expensive.

This still misses the point: airplanes are required to get periodic maintenance way more often than car

But you're still missing my point. It's not an airplane :) In other words, I would expect the work and associated costs (including a fully certified A&P) to be quite different on a hot air balloon, let's say with an added engine driven propeller, than on an airplane. The complexity difference is relevant because there is less to go wrong for safety and repair.

I know a lot of people who own small planes...All of these people are upper middle class, so these planes represented major expenses for them.

Yes, but I'd wager those planes are capable of more than 40 mph in the air, and I seriously doubt they would have been bought by under such strenuous expense if they were not. Boats can also represent a source of strained expense, but, like airplanes, they provide recreational function outside the normal cost of living. A person buying this vehicle at 84K with the duplicate function of use as a car, which happens to be capable of 40 mph in the air, is probably going to be richer than upper middle class.

Hey, I'm just an observer looking in at all this. Maybe Maverick LSA hasn't thought your points through, and their project path is flawed. My belief is that it would be workable as a car.
This idea is not new. Macs have had such a device for ages. Among other things, it stores the speaker volume setting (ever notice Macs don't make the boot sound at startup if the volume has been muted?) as well as kernel panic info, which is subsequently relayed to Apple.
That's unreal!

I'm an F1 fan but even that surprised me.
You couldn't have actually put a lot of money on it (unless you bet one of your friends, or in the unlikely case that you or your family member works for LinkedIn). The trick with IPOs is that even if you had the shares earlier, you couldn't sell them today because of the six month lockup period. The only way for you to get in would be right now at ~$80.
oh my, this is useful. Linux has lagged on crash dumps for many years; lacking a standardized way of dealing with dumps. For years, *BSD has had a much better and standard (though still imperfect) way of dealing with crash dumps.
LinkedIn’s I.P.O.: Party Like It’s 1999?
How startup Housefed is trying to become the AirBnB for food
Shouldn't you be elated? If this is a repeat, just do what you wished you had done the first time around and Step 3. Profit!
Don't blog about it, just apply to companies you want to work for.
Things You Could Buy for $4B Instead of LinkedIn
My first impulse was to lash back and defend libraries because of my incurable fondness for them and for paper books. But on some reflection I realise that this is like a spoken language going extinct - theres not much that can be done except translate the wisdom into the current lingua franca. So it might be nice to examine the things that libraries great and try to replicate them in future digital offerings. My list includes - universal access, a release valve from copyright where the people can access copyrighted works, availability of a friendly guide, different repositories that are curated for specialised subjects (like a tech library, arts library etc), good discoverability of books you dont know about, books classified by subject. Lastly libraries seem to be a great example of how infringement does not destroy industries so people building digital systems might do well to create some gaps through which knowledge can flow freely.
Wheel Disks
I love the level of paranoia. The transparent message of these documents is that its possible for The Enemy to exploit everything on your system. "Disable your laptop camera. Disable your computer's audio input."

For the NSA and other top secret uses this makes good sense.
A Beginner’s Guide to PPC: Finding Keywords
I think flying cars will eventually be commonplace, but when they are they will be piloted by AIs.
I use bitcoin and I jailbreak my iPhone.
Sed one-liners
"Use a bios password" ... and don't reboot your server when running in a remote server room?
Latest NPR Planet Money podcast episode was about bubbles, they interviewed a university professor that was running experiments on his students. They had a fake stock market with only one stock on it that would have a random dividend of either $0 or $2, so $1 on average. Students were given money to invest in the stock market. Running this experiment apparently over multiple courses, even in this small market there would be bubbles.

He brought up one such bubble in a lecture in front of the students, explaining to them that their investment made no sense considering the average dividend. He expected this explanation to crush the bubble since now everyone was aware of it. What happened instead was students going "wow, a bubble, I must get in on it!" and the stock just going even higher.
Yeah, twitter experience could be really painful sometimes. That's why I asked is it worth to work on the problem. But I didn't know that twitter guys answered the question few months ago in their TOS.
Ask HN: How do you compensate your users for downtime
Hi, I've been wondering, in situations such as the recent AWS outage, what would be the proper way to compensate users for the downtime, specifically in case of apps charging monthly or annually?

Also what would be the minimum amount of downtime at which you would choose to compensate users? Few minutes, hours, days?
Love Dribbble for stuff like this:
http://dribbble.com/search?q=admin&x=0&y=0
Might be a nice time to short, that is if there is someone willing to be on the other side of that trade.
Sadly, it's not new. I first heard people selling enterprise software (read: SAP, Oracle, etc.) use "spend" instead of "spending" over 10 years ago. It still drives me crazy to hear it today. When they say "spend"... I keep screaming in my head "... ing! spend...ing!"
Big agencies with many Windows workstations already use Microsoft SMS or System Center (I believe that's what its called now) to deploy software over the network. How do you differentiate?
The Twitter OAuth page can't even be scrolled on the WP7 browser.It loads a fuckload of JS. For a page with 2 textboxes and 2 buttons. The Twitter guys are clowns....
The big problem with mmap seems to be handling I/O errors. The most transparent uses of mmap are for executables. Failing to page in part of the program can probably reasonably result in a crash. But what of a server process handling a pile of different data on unreliable disks? Destroying the entire process on a single I/O error isn't ideal.

On Windows it seems like the best way to handle these errors is by either embedding SEH into the surrounding code or adding a vectored exception handler globally. On Unix, you have to set a SIGBUS signal handler. But then, mmap is apparently not guaranteed to be async-signal-safe if you want to remap a zero page over the broken one, and longjmp out of a signal handler is its own pile of potatoes; both seem to work on various modern Unixoids, but I haven't been able to find documentation saying that they'll continue to work. And with longjmp, or on Windows (where you can't remap pages over other pages directly, that I know of), any surrounding code that accesses the map needs to be abortable all the way up to a suitable error point rather than just having to handle bogus values. Much code assumes that a simple memory access will not cause a recoverable exception that may result in reëntering the code later.

And if you're in a library on Unix, good luck getting permission from the main process to alter signal handlers. The hook mechanism isn't as rich as that in Windows, so with the exception of large application framework libraries that are expected to take over the process anyway, it's an invasive and possibly irreversible activity.

This is all sad, because I love the idea of mmap. I was tinkering with a C library for accessing certain kinds of files, and I want to do it with all mmap, but I'm not sure I can overcome the I/O error problem adequately. (The blocking and address space problems are not too bad here; they impact performance and capacity, but not correctness.)
These have been around for years and years. I remember reading one for windows 2000 and NT.
Yep, here is an example:

http://jsfiddle.net/CYzFH/
People play roulette even though it's easy to calculate the casino's advantage.
A response to Eric Schmidt on DNS blocking laws
This is exactly the kind of library that WILL endure after this round's budget threats (and there have always been threats). The role of the librarian drastically changes as the population becomes much more information literate, but the role of the library as a community center in American life won't be shaken.
Interestingly, my bias has always been that hardware de-dup (if available) would always be preferable to software de-dup like ZFS's own internal implementation, for performance reasons. Not so, apparently.
Everyone can have great ideas but its all about execution and the team. Through my experience when speaking with Angel investors and other people with money, they want to see some traction. They want users and to prove that it works and that people will use your baby. You will need to build a revenue model on projections based off your current traction. Hope this helps.
You should also consider 'pandoc', written in Haskell, for converting between markup formats: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

I am curious for more details about why Tika wasn't good enough. Please explain.
I think several of your anti-anonymity examples are flawed. For example, if voting in elections were truly anonymous, anyone could vote many times over. In practice, they know very well who has voted, as they must to make sure the election is properly conducted. What they can't do is associate how someone voted with that person.

(Except that actually they often can, because in many electoral systems the ballot papers are numbered and they can in theory figure out who got which paper. You are protected in this case only by the separation of the electoral register-ballot paper index from the ballot paper-vote cast connection, making it another excellent example of how sharing limited data with independent parties can be fine but combining that data in the hands of a single party can have unintended consequences.)
Suppose there is a tech/social web bubble, is there anything anyone would advise for starting your own startups? E.g:
stick with the day job;
bootstrap rather than take money;
postpone and launch in 2 years;
get in fast while the hype is still there?

Any startup survivors from the last one wish they'd done things differently?
Kendinizievinizdehissetmeyeceksiniz
Responsive images using CSS3
I think Options won't be available until May 27th so that they can count the # of actual shareholders, etc.
Researcher Files FTC Complaint Against Dropbox
Google vows to fight antipiracy bill even if passed
Presumably when they close down the libraries the librarians don't turn to a life of crime (though they may already be torrenting ebooks as if people should be able to read for free).
Apple causes ‘religious’ reaction in brains of fans, say neuroscientists
Yes, this story is amazing. He came to speak at my university with some of the members of the tribe, one of whom was in LOVE with flying. He couldn't speak English, read, etc. but he was apparently a pretty good pilot. By the way, this same guy was one of those in the group that killed his father. Amazing stuff.
If* LinkedIn becomes a key part of most companies' recruiting process, then it's undervalued.

(* Yeah yeah, right now it's not)
I watch F1 regularly, but to hear him speak of getting a gain of "tenths of a second" as a huge thing is still astonishing to me.
Must be a frustrating life. Specially speaking as a software developer, where we're getting a free doubling of the speed every 18 months. I'm sure Moore's Law will run out at some point, but I can never quite appreciate exactly how much that helps us. The helps give a little perspective.
If you read the IPO Filing with SEC, LinkedIn is pouring a lot of there revenue back into company in the form of research and development.
Chrome 13 Adds Option To Kill URL Bar
You should use a bios password to stop bios settings being changed. I doubt they mean at boot.
>>*"they just raised $660 million dollars out of the gate in this IPO"

No, that's not how it works.

LinkedIn priced their IPO at $45/share, meaning they raised $352.8 million. The share price right now has no impact on how much money they raised.
For me this is a testament to intangible media. Items that you own but that require no space or attention (physical items need to be rearranged on occasion, dusted, etc...)

I often find myself buying books I want to read in the future simply because it's only $10-$25 and I don't want to forget about them (I never liked the wish lists for whatever reason). Which is easy to do since there's no penalty in space (either disk or physical)

I also find myself buying more from Amazon because I don't have to wait for shipping (and Kindle delivery actually makes getting the book faster than if I drove to the local Barnes and Noble)

So for me the Kindle has shifted my book purchasing to e-books but it has also dramatically increased the amount I spend on books from Amazon.
Startups let you rent out your ride by the hour
Following up on someone's suggestion to make a Google Group, why not make it a group on RiseUp? https://we.riseup.net/

Yes yes I know, it's an activist social network, but the software that runs it is pretty cool. It's called Crabgrass, http://crabgrass.riseuplabs.org/

and it's a nifty social networking tool. The thing that might be useful for your site is that it has wikis and discussion forums and task-lists built-in. Another nifty thing is that you can have networks of groups. So you can organize projects based on things like whether it was for a CodeJam or a weekend Hackathon or whatever.
tl;dr: Don't take security advice from organizations whose job is spying on you.

I don't know about anyone else. But the NSA is one of the last organizations I'd let give me security advice. I wouldn't put it past them to purposefully omit a pointer or two in the hope that those who follow the guide to the letter not knowing any better will leave a way in. Based on the other comments the advice is banal rubbish. Perhaps this is purposeful.
This becomes an especially cringing realization when considering that a LOT of people are celebrating twitter, facebook and "apps" as the glorious, big and important inventions (almost paradigm shifts) of our time...
I highly doubt that these recommendations are intended for administering developer's workstations.

Also, a number of the recommendations you are railing against here are prefaced with "if possible" and "unless needed". For example, advice is provided on how to configure OpenSSH if it is deemed necessary to be run: "If the system needs to act as an SSH server, then certain changes should be made to the OpenSSH daemon conﬁguration ﬁle"

The point of guides like this is to lock down everything that isn't necessary. As a part of this, it helps to question what services and actions each of your machines really needs. It's not unthinkable that some Linux servers deployed in a network do not need OpenSSH server running.
He said runs on auto pilot.
Anyone find an attempt to install any backdoor? :D
Coming from a business standpoint and a non-developer, Elance has worked for me. Although I prefer not to go offshore and to stay with in the U.S and give back to our country, some developers are really too expensive. I have a startup in Chicago and currently looking for a talented developer. If your interested dmlevi [AT] gmail
"The Best of edw519" is now free. Reverse Happy Birthday
F1 cars also cost a couple million dollars while a Nascar costs around 150k total. Another difference is that F1 cars are electronically limited to 18k RPM (they can easily go to 20k) and they have 7 gears. Nascar cars have 4 gears and top out at 9-10k RPM. There are so many other little details about F1 that make it technically marvelous. There are no vehicles in the world that can top the overall performance of an F1 car. (I'm also a fan, so I'm a little biased)
Japan’s economy slips back into recession
Someone from Apple needs to visit them. Create the iF1 with one button, capacitive touch screen, and GESTURES!
I think foam is the way to go. It's especially great if there are two people in the bed, since it doesn't bounce/move as much, so you don't disturb each other.

I sleep on this: http://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Innovations-12-inch-Memory-Mattr...

Very happy with it. I don't believe there's anything special about a Tempur-Pedic to warrant the ridiculous price tag. Something like this mattress is much, much cheaper, and in my opinion just s good.
> Indeed that's the case. But then you may ask why don't he set it up once for the track and be with it?

A race track is a living thing - the profile of it changes with each lap, with each race and over the course of a race weekend. There is a lot less grip at the beginning of a race weekend, a lot more later on.

The slightest changes in temperature, atmospheric pressure, etc. have a very large bearing on car performance and how the car has to be setup and adjusted for each corner.
New breed of Americans going hungry
Downtown San Diego is currently building a near $200M new central library.

http://www.sandiego.gov/public-library/about-the-library/new...

The plans were created about 5-6 years back and the project was put put on hold for 3 years. Living across the street from the site, pretty much everyone in my neighborhood thought it was going to be scrapped. But some big donors stepped in to help close the funding shortfall.
Dutch Parliament demands net neutrality
Simple and easy are not the same thing. Please stop being lazy and bother to learn the words you are using. It is simple to do, just read the dictionary. This really isn't easy tho, you have to cross reference other words, take time to do so, bother to remember, and so on - lots of effort.
the 'no two ways about it'-ness of your comment struck a chord with me. I was wondering if you had a story?

This is something I've thought about a lot, partially because I feel fortunate in the opportunities in my life presently, so when there's a chance to up and go some place I'm forced to weigh opportunity cost. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to me it sounds like you're saying that the opportunity to work in another country is almost always a greater opportunity?
Health-care expenses to rise 8.5% in 2012: study
As a long-time .NET/Visual Studio developer, I was appalled and suprised by the XCode IDE. I am starting to develop on teh4 Mac and the amount of pain and violence one must endure in that environment helped me understand why some people say 'Apple hates developers'.
well said. I have hired on elance and I always hire "personal bids", the developer or designer that takes the time to read about my vision. Offshore, although cheaper, just mass bids to anything! Quite annoying for a non developer
I would prefer it if the agreement were "the code will be released under the GPL or BSD or MIT licenses and the art will be released under a Creative Commons license". That way there's no arguments later on about commercialization of it because the licenses would allow anyone to commercialize it. So your work helps the world, helps the other person and it helps you if you want to start selling it.