skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do file sharing sites generate money?
specially those without ads.

My guess is they generate money by trying to get subscribers and using ads heavily.

But there are so many programs available to skip the page and automatically download (JDownloader, for instance), that I fail to see if they are really getting money.

Also, I'd love to know if anyone has real figures.
I've noticed software download sites are starting to use torrents, too. That's actually pretty smart of them, because it would save a lot of money with hosting and bandwidth. I'm surprised they didn't do it earlier.
The relevant paper, "Skip Lists: A Probabilistic
Alternative to Balanced Trees": http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.117...
New York Post website blocks iPad Safari users to force app.
URL shorteners are dead. Long live URL shorteners
>This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.

The "firm grasp" number seems really low, but it could certainly be changed by what that term means. As far as Brown v. Board, that number seems so low that I'm tempted to disbelieve it. Anyone have a link to the report?
I wrote something like this using inotify. I was pretty damn proud to have made something that only works on Linux :)
Are The Economist and The Wall Street Journal in on the scam? Or did they get suckered in by the posts to HN, too?
.EDU was created at the same time as .COM, in January 1985. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu#History

Before then, universities that were on the ARPANET (those with research funded by the Defense Department) were under the .ARPA domain.
> Investors, should they become aware of your situation

Morality aside just for the moment, as I'm not saying I would, but: is it illegal to withhold from investors information about my personal finances?
"It is not necessary to own a domain to connect a node to the Internet."

Wow, really? I've managed to pick up a few facts while writing scripts for webpages and connecting my home PC to the information superhighway for all these years, but I must have missed that one. I guess you learn something new every day! Tell me: have you seen the place where the tubes are connected? Are there lots of valves?

Ahem.

The question is: why did symbolics feel the need to register a domain long before the web, and months before any of the other major players? It seems remarkably prescient, and I'm wondering why they registered it, despite the fact that it (obviously) wasn't mandatory.
Maybe, but if the numbers really are so low for a relatively constrained topic like the 500 year history of one nation, expanding the scope to the entirety of human history seems like it's going to have even less impact.
The "inter" in "internet" designated a way to route among disparate networks.

There were many network stacks back in the 1970s and 1980s, and even into the 1990s. uucp/uucpnet. Fido. DECnet. OSI. X.25.

It wasn't at all clear which one would become the dominant technology, and (for a while in the early 1990s) it arguably ended up being between IP and OSI networking.

Back then, path routing could be explicitly required, and you needed to know about the old SMTP % email syntax, and particularly about the routes to well-known hosts. Such as decvax. You really didn't have domains, you had bang-paths.

Trivia: ftp is older than IP.
I'm glad at least someone liked those. It was hard to tell from the stage. I imagine people were a bit more subdued given the late hour of the day. At least, that is what I hope!
One more reason why the patent system is severely abused. Whoever is behind this probably looked specifically for something they can use against BitTorrent in the patent database.

This reminds me why you should never trust politicians when they say about a new bill: "Oh, but the law is not intended to be used like that", but then don't specifically add in the bill how it can and can't be used, and prefer it leave it more generic.

It's something they said about the new streaming bill that can criminalize lone bloggers the put embedded Youtube videos that violate copyright on their sites.
If the search terms had dropped the post from page 1 to page 2 then no big deal, but there seems to be more to it than that. Terms that were frequently bringing visitors aren't now showing up anywhere near where near where things were before.

The general tone of feedback seems to be that this is normal, nothing interesting to see, move along. I was just hoping for a better explanation than that.
I found one of these and notified the IT manager of the company. It wasn't hard to get them on the phone. Then I got free stuff and many thanks in return, plus warm fuzzies.
Well, one of the ways we try to stay lean is by using new technologies that solve problems so we didn't have to. I guess this was a nice side effect.
I guess I'll wait to sign up until a user refers me to your website. As it stands, I read your article and then visited your site; I was curious about what kind of service could get away with not describing what they do.

I think relying solely on a positive k-factor is a bad customer acquisition model. Everyone wants their business to grow virally but the reality is that the reason turntable.fm grew quickly is not because of their lack of a homepage, it's because the service lends itself to virality.

I do, however, agree that you should focus on building an awesome thing that people want to use, but if you're serious about building a business you should be serious about broadening your customer acquisition channels.
Top Women of 2011
Top Mozilla Firefox Add-ons
Restaurants have windows and post their menus. Walk-in traffic is not a segment you want to alienate.
Interesting and valid points. My point is that the SkipList algorithms are, using the assumed primitives, logarithmic. Your point is that in Python the assumptions about the primitives may not be valid and need to be tested.

It's especially interesting to me that the standard large body of work on algorithmic complexity is assumed by many to be getting less and less relevant as other issues come into play. Issues such as memory access time, where it now matters if something is in cache or not, and if so, which cache. Issues such as whether your machine will stop completely at some inconvenient moment to perform a GC when you least expect or desire it. Issues such as whether your language is in fact caching stuff in hash tables, and so what appears in your code to be linear, isn't.

And so on.

More and more it seems necessary to resort to experiment and tests to see what happens, rather than being able to determine things for sure and definite via analysis.

Exciting times, but slightly disappointing.
People use webapps because they provide some kind of value to them. Housefed.com doesn't tell me what value it provides, so why would I waste my time creating a new password and a new spam-email on absolutely pure unfounded speculation? I actually have negative sentiment towards it now for appearing so arrogant as to think it doesn't have to explain itself.

Really, how does having an explanation hurt? You have nothing backing up your over-the-top linkbait claims in your post.
'no data available', but as I said I don't especially care about SEO, so I didn't have the tools configured.
The paper can be found here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guyb/papers/Ble93.pdf

(Don't be thrown by the typo in the first example. Correct output should be: [3 4 11 11 15 16 22 25] )
>Gömböcs are not much to look at, and seem like they could be children's toys. Don't try to buy one, though. They're actually upwards of a thousand dollars each. They may look like they were knocked together in a toy shop, but the different angles and proportions have to be measured to within ten microns – one tenth of the thickness of a human hair - to make the shape work. So it's unlikely anyone will get to use one as a paperweight.

Sounds like the best reason to makerbot these things.
Design is more than a nice little picture, you can just have text on a page and you still design. Many people that don't know about design think its about images, it's usability, it's brand, it's feel, it's your damn company!! :)
Sega? I honestly didn't think they were still around.
I am suprised we dont make ships with this general shape.
I am surprised we dont make ships with this general shape.
Enjoy Reading - An extension for old Readability
fast and convenient... a firefox entension that is based on the old readability code... works without fetching any javascript from server and hence quite instantaneous in converting pages...
You honestly think they didn't consider this in designing the feature? I'm sure they've accounted for it.
Google Could Lose Up To $6.1 Billion In Oracle Patent Lawsuit Over Android
Let us know how it works for you. My experience, you have left a huge obstacle between me and signing up: my lack of willingness to disclose information without knowing what I am getting in return.
Quote Roller - new startup that saves a bunch of time on proposals
Hey folks, we just released a major update for www.quoteroller.com
Quote roller helps to create and send proposals, contracts, agreements in seconds.
What do u think?
These data breaches are getting to the point where I am expecting politicians to start getting involved.
How Does Twitter Grader Calculate Twitter Rankings?
Social Media Guru Wanted
We are expanding. We need quality experienced e commerce experts to work with our clients as independent contractors.
Send resume to mpb910@gmail.com
Thanks for the feedback, michael_dorfman. From my narrow professional viewpoint, it'd be lovely if no one ever signed a contract without consulting an experienced lawyer who had expertise in the specific field :-) The reality is otherwise (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). I wrote the book in part because many, many people sign contracts:

- without consulting a lawyer at all (not every contract needs legal review); and/or

- in consultation with a lawyer who doesn't have quite the level of experience and tacit knowledge that might be desired.

The book isn't intended as a substitute for a detailed legal review. It's more akin to a checklist that reminds a doctor to do the obvious, basic stuff like washing your hands before examining a patient.
Here's the National Assessment of Educational Progess, "The Nation's Report Card: U.S. History 2010" which is the basis for the article.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.a...
Glad to hear that. I'm just about to start creating a site using Pyramid. I've spent a lot of time evaluating frameworks and this one just seems to fit with the way we like to work
I can see possibilities of simulating a Gomboc surface on the back of a four-legged robot. However, the robot will either need small "legs" or some servo's to bring the "legs" inside the body (like a turtle) to correct its position
Making money with iAds? Not so easy
I think he got it totally wrong with his unscientific estimation of rails and django with google trends. What has google trends to say here? Dislike.
You're actually killing part of your virality, because part of how word-of-mouth works is when you hear about something offhand. You aren't always being directly pitched, and you don't always have a chance to press for specifics. For example, if a service is mentioned in someone's Twitter feed, or if I hear that one of my competitors, enemies, or heroes is using it, then I might have no idea what it is for and no better way of finding out than going to the home page. In that case what's standing between me and signing up is ignorance, and you're leaving that barrier in place. There's nobody out there so similar to me that it's worth my while to sign up for any web site they use, but there are a lot of people out there with enough taste and intelligence that if they use your service AND I'm interested in the same kind of service, then I'll sign up.
Lots of limitations. We went with rackspace cloud. The startup is www.quoteroller.com
Please don't whine about downvotes.

Especially considering that your comment isn't grayed out at all right now.
Well now, you've been talking up Housefed.com to all of us. And I go to the site, and I still have no idea what the hell it does. I'm just hit with an ugly login page, and no incentive to sign up at all.
Right, but beyond that it's not going to go crazy prefetching every URL in your web apps as the user browses around triggering delete or other actions, unless you also put that <link> in?
What does it take to be "outside the community" in your opinion?
"I don't see a reason to do special handling of people who disable javascript in their browsers these days."

Ironically enough, blind people who use screen readers might see a very good reason.
I agree with others. 30k is way too low. Hire a freelancer (15 hrs a week)
Hah, that was my reaction, too: "In other news, Sega still exists!"
This assumes a certain type of user: someone who will signup first and ask questions later. I'm not that type of user. You might think, well it's so easy to signup and play around, who wouldn't do that? But I'm actually a lot more cautious about giving out my email and signup with yet another password.

I like to research the services and products that I'm going to use. If I like your text, price, and screenshots then I'll signup and try your demo. If you have no content, I better have gotten a really good referral otherwise I'm just got going to bother.
Blogspot annoyance
> Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians."

In my opinion, this is probably the biggest problem. History was almost always presented to me as a desiccated list of facts, dates, and sanitized "causes of events" that needed to be memorized so you could pass the test and move on. Few teachers seemed to be able to put any life into the subject, or present the subject as a large single picture instead of tiny disjoint sets of data.

I don't know what approach would have worked best to get a younger me more interested in history. Maybe something in the style of "The Island at the Center of the World" would have worked--I do find that readable and interesting now.
A lot of people here are (rightly) confused by what this is outside the technical (CSS) aspect of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyan_Cat

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nyan-cat-pop-tart-cat

This site has to have crazy music that auto-plays. If it doesn't it would not be Nyan Cat.
I wonder how difficult it would be to write an equation generator for any given line of text.
I saw on slide 7 something called "Harmonizr" -- in the context of the video it seems like an ES.next -> JS compiler, but I can't find any info on it online. Does anyone know anything about this? Or is this just some term that was invented for some tool that takes ES.next features and translates them to today's JS? Right now I'm only familiar with the traceur-compiler when it comes to tasks like that.

Makes me wonder if I should start my next JS project in CoffeeScript or ES.next.
It's amazing how similar Kurzweil's observations about technology are to Stafford Beer's same observations in the early 1970s. Beer even draws an exponential graph and talks about a succession of S-curve shaped technology paradigms.
Ok, so we all read his blog post and checkout his homepage -- which is a lot of referrals but not a lot of signups because none of us have a clue what the service is.
Lulz has a problem with someone else going after Sega, but thinks its all peachy when they're the ones behind the wheel exposing the faults? Either they are jealous or their intentions aren't to force people to take responsibility for poor security.
Safari doesn't display the lock icon on that site either ...

However it seems that it is a CACert signed certificate, so you may download the root certificates and add them to your browser/OS from here: http://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3
It's definitely important. I remember reading an article about a startup that was struggling to get their first users. After following someone's advice and spending a couple of bucks on a ThemeForest design, their sales increased dramatically.

Users are more likely to trust a well designed site.
Why would economics not be a science?
Employees remain weak link with Internet security
True. But, at least for me, it's pretty easy to get distracted in a library or in a park. Plus, I think there's some added benefit in the fact that other people around you are doing the same thing (ie thinking about big/important stuff). You can kind of see the same effect in study groups or even incubators like ycombinator.

If the setting really makes no difference to you, I think the routine is still beneficial. Designating a time, every week (or day, or two weeks), going somewhere, and just thinking about life is a phenomenally beneficial exercise.
Hacker News or Stack Overflow are good examples of very successful sites that have horrible visual design.

Does anyone else actually like the visual design of HN? Besides the endless horizontal text problem, it's very easy to read, and there are no distractingly bad UI elements. Good minimalism, to me.
Which are more or less analogous to what he used for Rails.
Why developers need business people
Does anyone know what the "<(" syntax does:

bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)

I couldn't find documentation (hard to search for as you might imagine). Testing it out, basically that line downloads and executes the bash script stored at https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm . Would like to understand how it works; is it related to the $(command) expansion construct? Why not use "curl -s http://files.redsymbol.net/foo/foo.sh | bash"?
How did BitCoin pivot, though? Seems to me it has been BitCoin from the start, and seems unlikely to change.

Also how is it a scam, if the technology is open? It is exactly clear what BitCoin is and does. Everybody can take the specs and program their own client. Nobody can claim "BitCoin cures cancer" or something that.

Now if the current exchange rate is justified is another question. Also obviously people holding BitCoins are interested in making it more popular, as that is also related to the exchange rate.

I don't think that automatically makes it a scam, though. It is not so different from people invested in Google or Apple (either via stock or via technology usage) are interested in making Google and Apple more popular, as it increases the value of their investment.

Then again, perhaps the whole world is just a scam.
You'd have to recalculate the shape after that, as the interior density is no longer uniform.
History is a relatively easy subject to teach and learn, once everybody agrees on what bits are important and should be taught. A hundred years ago we had this all figured out --we might have had an excessively narrow perspective on history, but at least we all agreed about it.

With the ongoing "death of God", as Nietzsche would put it, all the old certainties have been swept away without anything sensible to replace them. So the history syllabus has become a political battleground for partisans of all sorts of folks to play with. If students are forced to spend weeks at a time studying the dude who invented peanut butter or some dispute over bus seating, is it any wonder that the big picture gets lost?

As a first step, I would split history into two sections: "overall chronology" and "detailed studies". In "overall chronology" we'd study the basic flow of human history over the last five or seven thousand years, trying not to overly stress any particular event or group of people. Picture a giant wall chart with time along the x axis and all the major human civilizations plotted up and down the y, and then we sit down and learn the dates of key events. Start of the Han dynasty. Fall of Constantinople. Founding of Buenos Aires. Not worrying too much about what they mean, though.

In the second, we could pay attention to the details. Individual people, events, what it was like to live at a given time. We could never cover the entire chart at a detailed level, but at least we'd know the details were still there.
One of the main advantages is that you have three months off for Summer vacation. Even if you're working, that's a lot of free time!
9 Notable Tech Flops That Live in Infamy
This is ridiculous. Due to this HN link I visited housefed.com for the first time, having never heard of it before. I guess that was a waste of my time, since I still have no idea what it is.
I still have my Micronta (Radio Shack) logic probe. 22-303. Works like a charm in a quick debug situation.
Yep, and university schedules can also be pretty relaxed.
You're right to be skeptical about the value of skip lists in comparison to other O(log n) type data structures like balanced trees and the like. Skip lists trade ease of implementation for probabilistic bounds, and have some minor cache advantages over balanced binary trees owing to the data structure generally not changing shape all that much, and it's hard to say whether these differences would materialize in Python.

However if I had no O(log n) structures at all and needed to implement some, I'd have to be a maniac to want to do balanced binary trees, which have notoriously delicate balancing algorithms, over skip lists which are very sweet and simple.
Registering a domain name was pretty important if you wanted to be able to send and receive e-mail.
wondering if some sort of encryption system is possible ...
I came to say the same... I take Ishkur's attitude much like I would Yahtzee Croshaw of the escapist...

A lot of snide attitude done in character.
Oh, of course. Not saying it does need justification, but just adding the string of replies about why torrents are not equivalent to piracy.
JMHO but if you aren't going to open the kimono quite a bit wider than that, I don't think you'll get many takers.
iA Writer and App Branding
one could say... backwards.
it's important not to have BAD design. It's not important to have THE BEST design
Shiv - A wrapper over Django
Or, save up and take 9 months off. That's what I did, if my money ran out after 9 months I was prepared to do "urban camping" until I was making enough income to live in some proper digs.

Ironically, the startup never even launched, I ended up moving to San Diego, and building another startup which is successful (6 figures of revenue per month in 8 months).
One Foot Tsunami: After All, We're All Somebody's Father
Hacked Off: Executive Learns From Cyberattack
The way I was taught history (in Australia), it could have used a whole lot more lists of facts and dates.

Case in point: World War One. We spent weeks on that war. But we didn't learn how it started, or how it ended, or exactly who were the belligerents on both sides, or the key battles, or how it was eventually won. Instead we mostly sat around and read about how awful life was in the trenches for the soldiers -- surely important, but not at the expense of actually understanding the war. "It was a stalemate for years, and then we mysteriously won" sums up the picture of the war that we got.
Blackthorn: a 3D game engine in Common Lisp
It's so generic, it pretty much describes every protocol out there which streams media on a network:
1) Flash players - check
2) HTTP streaming on ios using m3u8 files - check
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