skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The conclusions are interesting, although I think they give government intervention way too much credit. If other product lines are any indication, people can become pretty content pretty quickly; they may not demand more even if they might achieve it. I suppose life is just too short and people move on to more pressing concerns. If tomorrow all TVs in the world stopped working and shows could only be watched online, I think customers' attentions would shift and demand for high speed would see a new life. That's just the way these things work.

Incidentally, I hate the use of the term "Republican led FCC" in this article when "FCC" would have sufficed. I'm no Republican, but these kinds of loaded phrases invite ad hominem arguments. Readers should be able to learn about the actions of an organization such as the FCC and judge them as good or bad based on relevant facts.
I too had been using MS Word for years to write the various articles and reviews that I do. But for my last article (http://www.smallcloudbuilder.com/apps/articles/410-crossing-...) I switched over to Google Docs. For my use, it worked fine. The feature I missed most was the live word count that like the author, I had come to depend on when writing articles of a designated length. Google, are you listening? :-)
Ask HN: Getting started with adwords (my perfectionism is killing me)
Hi guys,

I know this has been asked a lot but I've not yet found a good beginners guide to getting started with my first adwords campaign to drive some PPC traffic to a product landing page.

Does anyone know of one that is pretty close to best practice and will do a good job of ensuring I don't waste too much money?

So far I've just discovered lots of tidbits and keyword search generation tools all over the place but not one good beginners guide that fills me with confidence.

My perfectionism is often a barrier to me starting something and the threat of wasting money on adwords is being particularly troublesome.
It seems a variation of this well-known illusion:
http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/images/illusions/pinkdots.gif
An inconsistently in this report that bothers me is that it cites an LAPD policy; but the article is about LBPD. Why would an LAPD special order apply to police in an adjacent city in the same county?
Namoro na Boa
What to look for in employee share deal/equity arrangement?
We have recently completed a 3 month trial (as consultants/devops) with a startup who had raised around $1 million before we got on board (valuing the company at around $2.5 million).

We are happy working together and have been in discussions as to our compensation and have come to the number of between 3% and 8% of the company as a fair figure for our contribution.

The one thought I have is how does this work if they raise more money - everyone will get diluted - which is fair enough. If they raise another $2.5 million, I guess we get half of what we initially agreed on. Is this correct?

Has anyone got any other recommendations for things to look out for? (I'm most worried about the Skype type thing, where they end up with nothing).

We will see a lawyer to get this drawn up properly but we are kind of in the middle of nowhere and lawyers here may not have a good understanding of this kind of thing.
They want to help the people. OK.
Then they publish their user data (including passwords) to demonstrate their childish pride. NOT OK.
The hacker children don't do it right. They don't understand that their own quality of life is still depending on the very existing government and institutions that are existing.
They don't dare to cherish what exists and it seems that they want to rush into a new war. But they are trapped in the net that they didn't create.
Interesting question. My take would be that you need to toe the line between building something quick and dirty, and building something that can scale. If you can't get the features right then scaling is a non issue. If you do get them right, the nature of this type of business is that it will grow quickly - whether you like it or not. So you have to be able to add scale quickly or it can fall apart due to unavailability (people often attribute friendster with this outcome). These might be the hardest businesses to start, because in addition to cracking the chicken/egg problem, you have to steer a fine line between development speed and scalability.
It's amazing how inefficient good intentions can be sometimes
Creatine Monohydrate
I used to do this. I could write at 4am with no lights on and I wouldn't get eye strain. Now I'm married and there's much less application for being able to write in the wee hours.
9th para:

DISCERN was just as eager to adopt the life of a crime boss named Vito
or to thrust its assigned identity onto another character.
Love it. He had me at: "Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden."

Could have walked into the sunset right there. But I understand his need to fully skewer MSFT.
Oh wow, thanks for this one. Immediately noticed a reduction in eyestrain. If you're found the GUI buggy (as I did), try the command line interface (xflux). The CLI app works fine for me.
Naruto Shippuden Episode 225
Naruto Shippuden Episode 225 English subbed entitle "The Cursed Ghost Ship!" will be released on Thursday (August 18, 2011) Naruto Shippuden 225 Preview-Eng Sub It is said that it appears on fpggy night such as this Guiding the souls of the dead led in by crows... a large devil fire lighting the top of its
More like "See, I was able to enter your house. Now I'm going to mail a copy of the key to thousands if not millions of people. Oh, and since you probably use the same key for your house, office, and car, they'll also have access to those. But it's not my fault. It's the government's."

...but I get your point. :-)
You seem to think that the trouble you have reading some of this code reflects something inherent in the language (either it's too "smart" for you or simply too weird), but I would suggest the only thing it necessarily reflects is something about you — namely, that you have more experience in some areas than others.

PHP is based on C. It is not based on Forth. Thus, if you only know PHP, C code will be more immediately clear to you than Forth code.

There are some things that make languages easier or harder to read in absolute terms, but when you're brand new, similarity to what you already know pretty much dominates everything else. Similarly, English speakers tend to find Spanish easier than Russian or Chinese.
How To Launch Your Startup By The Founder Of About.me
if he's so angry at intuit, why did he give them more of his money? there are plenty of alternatives out there that work on a mac and can download OFX transaction data; ibank and gnucash being two off the top of my head.

back in 2005, i spent $200 on quickbooks basic to do invoicing for my software business. i had a dedicated windows machine just to run the software, and it was terrible. the interface was confusing, it wouldn't do what i needed it to, and it had a ton of things that i didn't need. worst of all, i was constantly bombarded with messages in the application advertising intuit's other products and services like check printing, payroll, and online data backup. at one point i needed to prepare an estimate, only to get a popup message telling me the $200 version i just bought didn't have that feature, but that i could easily spend more money and upgrade to a better version.

at that point i gave up and made my own web-based billing system (http://corduroysite.com) to do what i needed, and then turned it into a SaaS.
It seems like there is a pretty big assumption here, not supported in any significant way. I don't see much evidence that there aren't big ideas being made right now. Not all big ideas make waves right away, for one. And some big ideas might not be obvious to everyone paying attention. How do you define it even? Audience? This post did little in that regard.

Also, who says we don't have and discuss big ideas in social media? http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jitk9/how_the_fuc...
Sell to both. I'd put them up in my backyard before parties, etc.
This is obviously an attempt at a smart or funny remark. :)

But for arguments sake, lets take a serious approach to it:
How would it work, getting back those two minutes? Would it be adding two more minutes to your total life span? If so, how would that be justifiable because those two minutes you add, might be worse than the experience of reading this. If you wouldn't just add two more minutes to your total life span how would you do it? It's hard to convert time value... I can't pay you for your time because that doesn't mean it'll reimburse what "you spent".
I could perhaps waste 2 minutes of my life but that doesn't give them to you...
Tsunamis - How n Why
The Good Doctor has been dead for decades, unfortunately. If you want to learn more about him, you can read his (amazing) two-volume autobiography, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt.
Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes they are very big.
Funny timing for this - a few hours ago, I decided I needed more of a minimal word processor (although I'm not going as far to delete Word.) I stumbled across WriteMonkey (http://writemonkey.com/) and so far, I love it.

Note: this only runs on Windows
Startups in SOMA Directory: Submit Yours
I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. That mentality seems to fly in the face of just about every observation one can make. It seems obvious that in general, smarter people tend to get ahead. Of course there are many counter examples, but overall the trend seems obvious. Why is it everyone must apologize, make excuses for, or somehow downplay their own intelligence? Maybe it's just a ploy to be able to say "IQ tests and school exams far easier than they should be" without coming off as boasting?
Find a mentor. If you're serious, and not just 'going through a phase', you'll need people to spur you on with this. Find some organisations you admire, eg kiva, and email the founders to see if they'd mentor you or if they could recommend anyone.

Some friends and I have been going through these issues lately, and we're desperately trying to find out how we can change the world. Here's what we've come up with:

* Do what you can now. Start small. eg Don't put it off until "one day when i'm rich".
* Work with what's in your hands, in your sphere of influence. If nothing is in your hands right now, you can change yourself.
* Find friends who are of the same mind, and spur each other on.
* Read LOTS. Grow yourself. Read about leadership. That's the starting point. Start by reading seth godin, i'd recommend.
* Change the world for the better in one small way every day.
* Learn how to take initiative, start things, and complete them.
http://www.sussex.police.uk/advice-and-support/victim-and-wi...
Matriux - Pentest distro released
Apparently Steve Brust writes using emacs.

http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-em...
Ironically but not unreasonably, since if silence were an indicator that you wished never to speak, people who wanted to talk would never reach that point.

(In the UK there is no such thing as the right to remain silent, unless you are in a situation in which you are denied access to legal advice (rare). In all other situations your solicitor will instruct you to say 'no comment' to any question the police asks you. Funny how it differs.)
He's trying to find a career for himself that will be interesting and be able to support himself and his family. But once he gets into programming I think he'll discover the creativity that comes with it. Thank you for taking your time to answer my question.
I think Frank Herbert had a point when he wrote that it isn't so much that having power corrupts, as the sort of people who seek power in the first place.
Right. But also, we wouldn't be a bacteria in the stomach contributing to the well being. We seem more like a virus. Or maybe I'm just thinking in a too short time span.
Ubuntu. I got a bit further in FireFox by following the instructions below, but it seems it still won't work until FF6.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-enable-webgl-on-firefox-4.ht...
Telco's don't usually advertise "naked DSL." If you search hard enough it's out there.
Part of what makes this particular defection so egregious, I think, is that he didn't just take the value in the card for his own use. Doing that might almost be understandable, at least if the person doing it had (a) no better income options, (b) few personal scruples. But going to the trouble of taking the money just to piss it away on some random charity does not constitute, as you say, "getting a high per-hour return" on one's effort. In exchange for destroying $650, all Sam got is the warm fuzzy of knowing he's "done something nice" in giving to charity. Offset with the cold pricklies of knowing he's "done something rotten" in stealing money from others for a use the donors didn't intend, it's at best a wash. He inflicted a cost of $650 on others without them or him receiving any compensating benefit!

Which brings us back to the analogy: A committed vandal could easily do $130/hour worth of damage to random companies or people with minimal risk - if, as Sam did, they had no intent of personally profitting from it. That's what Sam was: a vandal, more than a thief. Like the teen who throws a rock through a window when nobody is watching or destroys bathroom fixtures.

An awful lot of what makes civilization work is our tacit agreement to the code immortalized by Wil Wheaton: "don't be a dick." The fact that you can do something nasty and damaging to other people doesn't mean you should. The fact that in some circumstance it's particularly easy to steal from others doesn't give you a moral obligation to do so; quite the reverse.

Some people are very trusting. They might leave doors unlocked or purses unguarded. They choose to go out in public without armed guards and trust that a random stranger on the street isn't going to be a mugger or rapist or kidnapper.

When somebody who is especially trusting gets taken advantage of by someone unscrupulous, people generally find that especially worthy of criticism. The first thing we think of isn't to blame the victim for being too trusting, but to blame the scammer or thief for taking unfair advantage of trust.
Awesome links, thanks for the info!
Word is still a great Word processor. It actually has a full screen mode that eliminates all the distractions just as the programs used by the author. Word's biggest problem is that all its power increases its complexity and there really isn't a good user manual or resource to train people. I find that most people that switch to something like GoogleDocs don't use the advanced features of Word and probably would have been just as happy using WordPad.
In other words:

If you want to be a good writer, concentrate on your craft instead of your tools.
Warning: this demo crashed my integrated graphics driver about 15 seconds in. YMMV.
Oh, right.

Reading that at first I thought the writer had completely mixed up schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders. Something that is not uncommon at all in the media and pop culture.
I was going to suggest this. Religious themes and issues of learning curve aside, I find emacs is the perfect text-editor for my needs. (Emphasis on my needs).

I have disabled the scrollbar, menubar, and toolbar. Full screen it and you have black and white. Nothing else. Combine that with some really great text manipulation features/shorcuts and you have an awesome text editor for anything you want.

And it can even do spell-checking and all that other fancy stuff.

As for the whole "what about sending documents to non techies" issue: It doesn't seem to apply for this article since he can write the whole thing in emacs and then send the final copy to his editor after copying and pasting into Word.
Yeah, I can understand how it makes implementors' lives easier... I just like it when they deal with annoying stuff so that I don't have to :)

I know people don't use mutable __proto__ for anything useful, but it does enable some neat tricks. Personally I wish implementors would embrace it and optimize for it rather than trying to make it go away.

As for the "prototype for" operator... that's disgusting.
Wow, thank you for putting so much effort into your response, I will pass it along to my brother.
Bait taken. What exactly has the FCC done recently (seeing as how it's a gov't agency) to protect the interest of consumers?
How so? You can open Word docs in LibreOffice and save them as well...
was impressed as well. a very nice work.
Yeah, I agree that learning Python would be a good first step. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Latin American megacities risk becoming a drag on growth
:)
I`m in...you must now waste 2 minutes of your life. I agree that this doesn`t get me back my 2 minutes, but it does give me something else, something I can`t quite put my finger on. Let me know what you did!
Email me hnshah at g mail dot com ... I've got several links for you.
Patents may or may not be a problem in the software industry, but in the rest of the economy they're generally a beneficial thing.

The Patents on Back Rack and Safety Rack products mean they're produced in a plant in Oakville, Ontario plant, not produced in China or South Korea. They have cheap competitors, but trademark and a patented design mean they're the ones used by companies.

People need to look a little wider than their narrow little hole in the dirt when they start saying we should abandon entire systems that have helped support the little guy with a good idea in almost every industry in the existence except software.
Kill Math using Data Visualization
It's harder for the officer to lie and say that you said something when you refused to say anything.

It's easier to just "slip" something in a conversation if you're talking to him in the first place.
This might be taking a step back toward fluff from programs like WriteRoom, but I really like typing up blog posts with OmmWriter: http://www.ommwriter.com/en/

It's just relaxing.

Edit: The site makes it look like it's only for iPad at first glance, but it's also available for Mac/PC
This submission appears to be spam and should be flagged.

I don't see any way to do so myself, possibly due to not having enough karma.
I read somewhere that I ought to comment on these links, which is a shame because most of them speak so well for themselves. Does truth need comments, opinions? I'm sure I'll warm up to all this, but sometimes an unfiltered observation is a good way to start.
Need a freecycle like website for this. I have at least 1 that I would be interested in parting with.
Well, in that case we'll need a common ground of which we can say what wasting time is. ;)
Top Business & Investing books of 2011
Restlet is a server framework.

I think the parent poster is looking for a client API that is nicer to use than java.net.Url and/or the various versions of HTTPClient
Didn't they fail because they were too proud to copy Reddit's subreddit structure the week after Reddit pushed it live?
Intessa: Zeroconf clients for HTTP APIs in Python.
Ask HN: At what point is it best to create a business entity?
I've noticed some say it's the last thing they do as r&d is worked on, while others seem to have a catch-all company entity LLC to do contract work under. I guess I'm looking at examples of the ways people decide to approach the business side of things at an early level.

I like the concept of having a legal entity to work under- something that I can have on a card to give out. But that's mostly for side work I would do. Is there anything bad about doing that that I might not have thought about?
They didn't just choose anyplace, though. They specifically chose the mybart site because of the BART's recent actions. They even say this on the page. That is very different.
Alright, being serious for a second. I really didn`t understand a lot of what you were talking about. I agree that the supermarket is not always the easiest place to navigate, sometimes the employees are not helpful, and yes, the products and prices can be confusing.

But then I starting thinking about all the hungry people in Africa. Think about it. People are absolutely starving to death, and we get all our food delivered to a centralized location where we can browse an endless number of products and walk away with a mountain of food. And the prices are not bad. On average, we only spend about 10% of our income on food. That`s nothing!
Show HN: Unsend email. A simple way to retract sent mail.
Honda unveils powered unicycle concept "Personal Mobility Prototype"
top werk fella.
I think this comment said it best:

I think it's important to maintain a distinction between the syntax needed to actively do math, and that needed to passively visualize it. Of course these types of visualizations are great, but people aren't going to be solving differential equations on their iPads anytime soon...

It's a tall drink of water to say you're going to 'kill math' if really, all that is happening is a divergence from the so-called 'interface'. I think that interface is vastly more relevant than visualizations when it comes to understanding how to think an equation through, and just as importantly understand why arriving at a certain answer matters.

I'm not sure I'm too thrilled about this idea, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding it.

Also: From the ideator's own blog (http://worrydream.com/KillMath/):

analyzing a differential equation without exploring it in phase space was like analyzing a piece of sheet music without actually hearing it.

Terrible analogy, since most musicians do this all the time. It's called sight reading, and it's a very valuable skill to have. (citation: former concert trombone player)
You need to make sure you have near 100% uptime. If someone is using this as a PoS and it's down, they will lose money. You may also need to get some sort of insurance.
> if he's so angry at intuit, why did he give them more of his money?

Because he's just trying to get some shit done in the short term.

I use GnuCash for my business accounting. It is very painful software. And I run it on my Win 7 virtual machine because the OS X support stinks -- and that kind of musical OS chairs is one thing he is trying to avoid.
There's a common misconception in this article that non-profit means non-revenue. A non-profit organization can still charge for goods and services. The difference between a non-profit and a for-profit, is that a non-profit must invest all surplus revenue directly back into the company.
China tablet PC will have a good market in world 
Differentiation undoubtedly is the China tablet PC manufacturers’ one of the key issues waiting to be solved. Looking at the current tablet market, from product appearance to the hardware configuration, and to the core application, homogeneity is very serious. In a number of tablet PC products, people almost do not prior pay much attention the performance before buy, the brand has become the driving force to direct Purchase. Brand charm over amplified to cover the product itself light, and product differentiation, it is this beam "Light of Science." we should have seen.
I need to try out the linux version of flux, but the mac version is seriously awesome.

Has helped fix me off of getting off the computer at night with the color/gamma changes.
I'm not sure how your post or the one above it invalidates anything. For writers, managing plot, keeping tidbits and scraps, being able to quickly organize, link, and search, it's pretty damn helpful.

Tools don't substitute for skill, but skill with the wrong tools is wasted.
How To Break Your Daily Caffeine Habit And Use Coffee Strategically
Gold text on black background is very, very readable and easy on the eyes.

It's been my standard for well over a decade. Preferable even to green-on-black.

The only downside is that a colorized 'ls' output is typically difficult to read (the blues used for directories are typically too dark).
Going Crazy: If your throat was itching or tickling rub your ears