skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
History can be a fascinating topic of study. If you look back at all the civilizations across the past 4,000 years, particularly those in East Asia, you can trace the downfall to a few major things:

1) Corruption in the government, leads to inefficiency and greed
2) Angry inhabitants, which leads to revolts and overthrowing of governments (caused by #1)

You would think of all things, these two wouldn't be a big deal. You would think most civilizations would fall because there were enemies ready to attack and take them over. But peace could be purchased at a price, giving you time to build your empire and compete. The most powerful force of all, the greed and corruption, has the power to bring a nation to its knees, as it has done in the past.

Take a look at history and let it speak to you. You'll see that the United States is a baby, it's no more than 230 years old. Many civilizations lasted 500 years at a time and made enormous scientific and mathematical contributions, so we're still very "young" by comparison. I feel like we're growing very arrogant and think we can't lose our superpower status. But that type of attitude is like the attitude of a CEO who gets complacent with his startup and no longer pushes for growth or progress. And we all know what happens to those companies.

*Final edit: Just wanted to say that on HN, I understand there's sort of a "don't read politics, it's too Diggish, let's just talk about startups." But I think there's a vast amount of knowledge that can be gained by looking at history and things like politics, as I don't see much difference in trying to run a country and run a company. You have to keep your people happy (both employees and customers), you need to create value, you have to stay competitive. There's a lot of interplay.
Matt, I'm worried about you. I don't think your level of alarm is sufficient. When those buildings do start falling over, you won't be prepared! It basically goes Dow drop -> Earthquake -> Zombies. Those of us who realize that are just trying really hard to help our fellow Americans by posting article after unsubstantiated article with our thoughts on how exactly the world is about to end. Stop undermining this important public service, sir!
New machine prints sheets of light
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125
That is, if you're a traded company. And to parent's parent, that is, if you have investors. It's the assumption that the most noteworthy prize is "$$$" that I think needs to be reconsidered, but that of course depends on who's in the company and what their priorities are.

If what you're doing is significant, I think that at some point profits will be a given if you stay small and nimble.
Web2.0 has you
Roca Wear Outerwear
Today, Rocawear is a dominant lifestyle apparel brand for a wide range of customers, with annual retail sales over $700 million. Inspired by an urban aesthetic rooted in young men`s sportswear, Rocawear has expanded is brand through licensing pacts.
Roca Wear Winterwear
Today, Rocawear is a dominant lifestyle apparel brand for a wide range of customers, with annual retail sales over $700 million. Inspired by an urban aesthetic rooted in young men`s sportswear, Rocawear has expanded is brand through licensing pacts.
I still don't think I feel comfortable about putting money back into the stock markets. Or even into stock markets altogether. The stock market, at least in its current design, is by nature going to go through bubbles.

I'd almost rather take the money and invest it into something I know I have control over, such as a side project or a startup of some sort.
4 Ways to Wring Opportunity from the Chaos
Nanite, looks cool we have built a similar system for requesting and completing jobs, but it would be nice to work on top of a well built and maintained framework.
Wow, I hadn't thought about Zombies. Thanks.
I don't think it's impossible to have fun while still attempting to build a profitable enterprise. Most startuppers I know seem to enjoy the process enough that they would just do another one if their current one tanked. It beats working a job by a long shot.
The Cause of Bubbles =Investment vs Financial Engineering
Focus on yourself
Too many entrepreneurs waste time observing/analyzing the actions of others. In boom times, this creates me-too companies; in bust times, this creates ridiculous hysteria (such as that which we are seeing now). Do your own thing. And quit submitting these stupid link-bait articles.
If videos like Ms. Lenz's are so valuable, why aren't they & others like them being shared at mininova? One glance at the popular file sharing sites should convince anyone that piracy doesn't need the wsj's defense.

Clearly we value this "remix culture" a lot less than we think we're supposed to.
I don't get it. I plug a bigger monitor to my laptop when I'm at my desk. Why the need to detach the laptop screen?
It's in danger of coming out of my Google Reader, I've already got plenty of other sources for startup and tech news in there and I'd rather read the personal blogs of people with interesting opinions than the mass-produced tripe being churned out by TechCrunch at present. TC is wearing out my "J" button and I can't afford another. There's a credit crunch on, you know.
Programming Clojure
Why bother detaching the screen? Close the lid and put it on a dock.
Spot the pattern
I don't know of any for what you're looking for, but a google search of the following yields your result:

George Soros "flash plug-in"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=George+Soros+%22fla...
People are not feeling comfortable with the stock market - it may be a good sign to get back in.

(Disclaimer: As a poor student I do not have enough disposable assets, yet, to practise what I preach.)
It's a problem I hit upon during my research in optimization. I do not know whether it has a neat solution. I just have a feeling.
It's not as symmetric as it looks at first. Proving the optimality of the advertised strategy can be done with finite automata.
Tax-code complexity regulating income is bad enough; tax-code complexity regulating speech is a First Amendment nightmare.

The snippet from the article seems to suggest that the nightmare is due to the special sanctity of the First Amendment as compared to the Fourth. Rather, the nightmare comes from the burden of applying such a complex law as the DMCA with the frequency that would be necessary to enforce its provisions. It's the difference between doing your taxes once (or four times) per year vs. applying the DMCA every single time you turn the radio on.

I like my Fourth Amendment, too, thank-you-very-much.

Don't know why I felt compelled to point this all out.
same here. and I know some use there laptop screen as a second monitor. so this is a bad idea on many fronts.
That's what I do now (except for the dock, I just plug everything in) but if I had one of these I could save: (a) on buying a separate keyboard and (b) on desk space.

OK, it's not a huge advantage, but it's neat.

Only downside: unless they're very clever with the design, a brick-keyboard isn't as good to type on as a regular keyboard. But hey, maybe they'll be clever with the design, so it tilts downwards properly.

Hmm, and I just thought of another nice way to use it: on my lap, on the couch, plugged into my big-ass TV.
Learn IIS7: Using FastCGI to Host PHP Applications on IIS 7.0
A detaching laptop screen seems unlikely. The mechanical stresses on the attachment device sound too extreme.

This also sounds like a new series of monitors which Apple probably won't do until they can have LED backlights in the big screens.
"least get a heads-up on a Turkish vacation"

I'd like you to correct that. Cyprus is GREEK! It has been for the past 3000 years.

Welcome to my home country.
Very broadly I agree - but I don't think it's often "me-too" companies because people think "Oh Digg is cool, let's make another Digg."

Rather, I think people always look to RescueTime, or Digg, or Twitter and say to themselves "Hey look, this part of it sucks. I can make this better and make it my own."

In boom times, the competition (Digg/RescueTime/Twitter) is getting lots of funding and praise - so you in turn, marketed to investers as "RescueTime meets X" get funding because the market is already proven.

In bust times, there is culling of the herd, and if you haven't got something to show for yourself, and are very similar to another company - well, everyone prefers winners. So you get less funding, fold, or sold off.

There aren't 10 wannabe Techcrunches because they want to be like Techcrunch. There are 10 wannabes because they believe they have something different that's better.
At least this article tries to point out that there's a significant difference between "real" piracy and "who gives a damn" piracy. One of the biggest problems still remaining today is the fact that all the power is with the recording companies, at least when it comes to music; it's not with the people who actually created the work.

Somehow, I doubt Prince would care that some baby is dancing to a grainy recording of one of his songs. Except for Metallica, I can't really think of an artist or band who would give a damn. These days many artists are releasing their work online for free or for... whatever you want to pay! The money is in live shows and the same people who go to live shows are generally the people who will pay for an album regardless of cost.

I buy a possibly excessive amount of music. I also still pirate music on rare occasions where a band or artist is new to me and I want to see if those two songs I heard on Pandora were a fluke or they really are that awesome before buying a whole album (or discography, if it comes to that).

What about TV? I pirate TV shows constantly. I pay for cable; I consider that good enough to justify not wasting 1/3 of my life watching commercials for shit I couldn't care less about; when I browse the Internet I don't have to wait for an ad to finish playing before reading whatever I went to the site for. If more TV shows were available for purchasable download, were priced less ridiculously (why should I pay $80 for the whole season 1 ep at a time when the DVD set is $40?), and were always WS HD, I would stop doing it. When I really like a show I buy it on DVD. Movies are essentially the same deal, except replace commercials with "it costs money just to find out if it's worth watching in the first place."

As far as I'm concerned, piracy is such a big thing now only because it's finally possible to pirate this stuff. Society hasn't changed significantly. There's no secret plot. People are just slowly realizing that they don't have to waste time and money just to find out if they find something entertaining or good enough to warrant their time and money. Sure, there are people who are going to pirate everything and never buy it, but those same people had shoe boxes full of tapes they recorded off the radio. Who cares? It's an insignificant minority. If the record and movie companies are failing it's because people have decided that their products aren't worthy of immediate purchase... then they download them and realize they're not worthy of purchase, period.
Bush: ...your meatballs. They're yummie.
I'm not expecting this to actually happen... but I would instantly buy a Mac laptop that let me physically separate the screen and the keyboard while continuing to use them both. Then I could set the screen up on a portable stand at approximately the right height and distance while the keyboard lived closer to me and lower down, perhaps even in my lap.

Right now the best I can do is to carry an external keyboard. But it's a pain to have to tote around redundant hardware. Of course, it's also a pain to be in pain after spending too much time using an un-ergonomic laptop.
No prob. Just remember, shoot them in the head, okay? Otherwise, you'll just embarrass yourself. After careful analysis of various sciences I have determined we have 17-19.5 days to prepare for Zombie Judgement Day. Don't fuck this up.
Point and Match, sir!
Doesn't this still require me to transfer to the arrow keys for simple movements? I much prefer hjkl, but I could be missing something here.
The only company he's currently funding that I recognized was the Huffington Post. The rest were all like "Craolp: Leverages social media across dashboards of other venture backed entrepreneurial demo- and geographically-targeted advertizing startups."
Microsoft’s new ‘M’ programming language
Sneaky. Almost did not notice the plug. What about revenue ? Without a revenue mechanism, it's not a bussiness, it's a hobby.
* Sounds clunky, and overspecialized.
* Awkwardly splits the product (display/no display).
* Competes with the low-end Macbook, while being a lower-margin product.
* Can't imagine a design for this that isn't ugly.

Very Un-Apple. Jobs isn't going to follow up the iPhone 3G with this, aptly described, 'brick'.
I think this blog thing might be getting to Matt Maroon's head.
Thanks for getting back to me. How do nanite and Vertebra relate to each other?
How much can you afford?
That's not a defence of piracy, it's a very reasonable argument that a subset of what we today call pirates, aren't.
And I should have be proofread ;)

s/have be/be/g
I'm strictly a Python guy myself. If it were me, I'd try to reach out to various programming communities and see what the demand is for different languages. Personally, I will never have a use for anything that requires me to use Ruby, but I'm just one guy; maybe the Ruby/Rails communities have the biggest desire for this type of service. I am switching over to GitHub, though ;)
I thought most VCs refer to start-ups/companies as "deals" ;)

I'd much rather be called a "deal" than a "project" -- the former implies that someone's investing in your start-up; the latter is just demeaning.
For vim, I meant. I use gvim on Gnome, where switching Ctrl and Caps is trivial. Dunno about TextMate's movements -- I assumed C-n, C-p, C-f, C-b etc. worked there, so with a conveniently placed Ctrl key you could still navigate without the arrow keys.
Even more interesting, there are now some compiler optimization algorithms which can theoretically do some of this stuff automatically. Look up incrementalization on citeseerx etc...
Umm... LaTeX >>> WYSIWYG document editors.
Better yet, transmitting the video output to your TV.
I actually just removed it from my Google Reader a few hours ago. Got sick of filtering out all the noise and figured all the good stuff will float to the front page of HN anyways.
Probably not 0 is it?
It certainly seems to me that any great creative person has borrowed ideas liberally from the people around them. It's good to be a student of your art. Don't you think that a great inventor like Thomas Edison was very aware of what all of his contemporaries were doing?

I've seen Mark Cuban say something to this effect several times over the last few months: "You should know more about your market than anyone." We analyze other startups because in order to really make a change, you have to understand your environment and how things work.
One thing that bothers me about news.yc is a certain disposition towards a cargo cult mentality. Maybe that's not quite as prevalent anymore, but if it's being replaced by gossip (the other half of "wasting time observing/analyzing the actions of others"), that's not an improvement.

That being said, there's value in being aware of what's happening around you. I "do my own thing" when I'm not reading or posting on news.yc. If I'm spending time here, then I'm obviously not spending it working on my own thing. A "social news" site would end up pretty quiet and lonely without ever talking about other people.

Then again... how does the quote go? "Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people."
Isn't Cyprus the most heavily militarized land in the world, being contested by the turks, greeks, and locals?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprus

"The island is de facto partitioned into four main parts:[4]

* the area under the effective control of the Republic of Cyprus, in the south of the island;
* the Turkish-occupied area in the north,[5] calling itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (recognized only by Turkey);
* the United Nations-controlled Green Line, separating the two; and
* two British Sovereign Base Areas (Akrotiri and Dhekelia).[6]"
Agreed. My first reaction was to post here that this guy is nothing but a script kiddie.

Glad to know someone beat me to the punch.
Very cool. Thanks for mentioning that.
Unfortunately, like you said the 37% is occupied since the 1974 invasion. Greek-Cypriots were raped and forced out of their homes and their land and they are 80% of the population.

Cyprus won its independece in 1960 from the British (who have been on the island since late 18th century).

The Turks came to the island for the first time on 15th century.

The history of the island is totally Greek so if someone is going to refer to the island then at least should do it correctly cause otherwise is only doing propaganda and helping the wrong information to be known.

Attempts are made that the political situation is resolved but I am not very optimistic.
Welsh wizard warns of hard times in the Valley
Ohhh, duh. Yes. I never did the Ctrl/Caps switch though that is quite clever. I learned from the beginning to use Ctrl-[ instead of Esc, too.
Ask YC: Your thoughts on this micropayments idea?
For site owner: sign up for micro payments service like an ad network, but the pay goes the other way -- you get paid $X CPM, and in exchange, you may not show other ads on the page.

For browser: You have an account with the ad/micropayment network and instead of seeing ads, your money goes to the content creator of the site.

The ad networks already have deals with content sites, and people generally want to support the content they like. You could have "premium" content that is behind a simple click-through gateway that authorizes a higher payment (but with some cap so the fraud liability is small.)

Better improvement would be to allow interop between potential micro payment networks, and handle it all transparently for the user.

Benefit to the user: history of all the ad-free content they have seen, supporting their content providers. Benefit to the content owner: higher CPMs.
The Interaktion Equation
Oh like this story you mean? Thanks for bringing this to HN btw.
Profit Maximization V. Survival Maximization
It's an article about lossless audio codecs.

I discovered FLAC thanks to a fellow file sharer. When I can't find it in FLAC, I buy the CD, usually from Discogs.com or Amazon. I'll never go back to MP3, except for rarities I can't buy or get FLACced.

The only problem is I don't know how FLAC works, but that's not very important to enjoy the music.
github.com is definitely not accessible in China.
To fix put this in your /etc/hosts

65.74.177.129 github.com
65.74.177.129 www.github.com

The china firewall is complex. In this case, github.com isn't actually blocked in the strict sense. Its just that the DNS for some or all of China's DNS servers doesn't have the correct records. If it were truly blocked, even using the correct IP won't get you there.

This could have happened if github.com changed its DNS records and the China DNSs didn't pick it up. This happens sometimes. The only solution I have found is to re-trigger the DNS change so that next time the China DNSs might pick it up. Otherwise, its anyone's guess when the China DNSs might get corrected. How do you re-trigger the change notification from your primary DNS? I'm not expert enough to know how to do this non-destructively. When I've had these problems in the past, I've had to drop the records and re-add them.
Boise gets earliest snow on record
> The criticism is coming from people who don’t understand that the world has changed in the last week and that companies need to change with it.

That's exactly the sort of hyperbole that people get pissed off about.

The world has not changed in the last two weeks. The only things that have changed are the financial markets and the news ticker. I guess if that's your whole world, then the world has changed. But for normal people who look at the world around them, the world is basically the same as it was 6 months ago.
What's Next After Web 2.0
Photography: ALIPR Learns How to Auto-Tag Photos
not really, since nobody used it. I think FB sells ads btw.
This is probably a stupid question, but what does he mean by the last statement: "This is not a time for heroes!" ?
That's the thing that making me nervous. When you have got to a point where you need to periodically restart your processes because they somehow uncontrollably start consuming more memory than they should, something must be failing badly. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
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yeah, that's fine. script kiddies run scripts that other people make. but very few people can say that they took down yahoo. i mean, that's not a typical script kiddie success story, is it?

talk him down all you want, but i remember what it was like when this guy was doing his work (however you want to judge it.) he made headlines. script kiddies don't make headlines, what they do has already been done and automated before them. there was something original to his work, even if he was just using an original combination of scripts. that makes him a hacker, imho.
I sort of disagree, but agree too.

I find it to be a healthy sign that people are receptive to reading and being open to opinions. I'm on a college campus, one of the highest rated entrepreneurship schools in the country, so I take for granted the massive amount of speakers we get. You hear the same message repeated and you start to see patterns.

Focus on yourself is one of those patterns that very successful people talk about.

I just listened to Jimmy John (the guy who started Jimmy John's) talk about how he doesn't read any of the "self-help crap anymore." He says he went through that stage, and he doesn't even think about it anymore. He says all he worries about is "kicking ass and that's about it." But I think that's a stage in our life that is very important where we question how we should think and behave. I think we all go through it, even Jimmy did (although doesn't like to admit it). This is coming from a guy who lost all of his earliest partners in the business and smoked weed. He obviously didn't have it all figured out from the get go.

When you're starting out, I think it's hard to be confident about which way to think. I don't think everyone has the "leadership" gene in their DNA, so they want to learn about the leadership traits, and what makes a good company founder. I've spent years reading through articles and how-to's, and while I think a majority of them are BS because some guy is trying to make a buck by writing the most appealing article, there are some that are worth reading. Ironically, you don't need to know much to be a good leader. You follow all of the basics, the simplest stuff you could think of. But then again, it may be harder for someone new to leadership and startups to know what that means.

And YC News actually does a GOOD JOB of filtering through the crap. I just read a post by Mark Cuban, with one of those small "patterns" that I keep seeing. It's the "there are no easy ways or tricks to be successful" speech, which I've heard time and time again from very successful people.

Yet, you still see contradictory advice given by people who don't know what they're talking about.

And let me tell you why I agree with this post, too. The more you think about things, the less you use your instincts. And your instincts are there to help you survive, they will guide you. After you do so much reading, you don't even think about stuff. It gets ingrained in your head, and you just do, you don't think at a certain point.

Absolutely agree that you should focus on yourself. But don't block out the really good stuff people like Mark Cuban write, saying there's no easy way. You need people to remind you that you have to work hard for what you want, and that also acts as a source of inspiration because they did it and they're doing fine.