skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was always very religious about backing up my music purchases, and generally removing the DRM, but had never done so with eBooks.

Your comment (and this article) just inspired me to figure out how to do this, and backup all me eBooks in a DRM-free format. Turns out, it was pretty painless.
A friend has created this and is nervous about feedback. It is, however, fantastic to spread interesting, secret gossip or share information. Please try it out and feed back.
A somewhat non-technical explantion behind the creation of RoboHash
This thing is so great. The solution is so easy. I wish top-heavy, Web-based CMS people would take a hint.
The Future of Foxconn: Problems
People I don’t want to date: Anyone who gets hung up on arbitrary definitions and is ignorant of other cultures.

That questions seems to be a pretty good filter, just not for the reasons he thinks it is.

(As I child – not in school but before – I learned that there are five continents: Africa, Australia, America, Asia, Europe. I don’t think I was ever told in school how many continents there are. All we were told were names of certain landmasses to make sure we are all talking about the same thing when saying America, Antarctica, South America or Eurasia. Why bother counting them? That doesn’t even make sense.)
Yes, you should.

How:

1. You are in the EU, so the easiest way regarding entry requirements is to stay within the EU. The hottest tech hub is currently Berlin, the demand for good rails developers is huge. If your are an experienced Rails/iOS dev you get 600-800 EUR per day, Rails beginners get 250-400 EUR depending on the project and their negotiation skills. Berlin is very cheap to live, it's easy to find accommodation and it's very international -- people are very open. You get along with English, you don't need to learn German. Compared to London Berlin is MUCH cheaper and definitely more fun. Better infrastructure, higher accommodation quality for less money and the startup scene is MUCH more vibrant and alive than in London. Now is the right time to come over.

2. You could also work from Portugal remotely BUT first you should come over, be here for some time to make connections, to start projects and when people know you and got used to you, you can easily move back to Portugal, still pursue projects in Berlin, work via Skype, Campfire, Mail, Github, etc. with similar day rates.

If you interested in moving to Berlin and if you are passionate about building great software, I’d love to talk with you. If you don’t how to come and to live in Berlin yet, I could help fix that. Leave me a mail: nelpace (at) gmail (dot) com

Anyone else who is interested to come to Berlin and to get an easy entry to Berlin's startup and dev community can contact me as well.
> 2011 - Text me immediately if you say a line anywhere.

Wow. I'm getting flashbacks to growing up in Soviet Russia. The irony is hilarious.
The fall of the iconic SF Yahoo billboard seems to have done some major foreshadowing-- it really does look like it's an end of an era for Yahoo.
I'm not expecting Amazon to hand out money to developers. But, as a developer* , I don't want to put myself in a situation where my work (that I would have otherwise charged for) is being given away for free.

Conversely, as a user, if there aren't quality free apps in the amazon store, why would I use it in the first place? I can get the same content from the built-in Market.

So, from both a developer and user standpoint I see no reason why Amazon should "take over Android app distribution".

* Hypothetical, I don't develop for mobile at this time.
They haven't officially discontinued anything.
> The high school production of King Lear has nothing to do with your cell phone, either. But you should still turn the damn thing off.

Nope. You should simply set the ringer to silent.
Actually, you can, with sparse checkouts. They've been in since git 1.7, if I remember correctly. It's not very user friendly yet, and you do retain the entire path from the repository root. See for example here: http://vmiklos.hu/blog/sparse-checkout-example-in-git-1-7
Well, what is more likely: That people are answering the question that way because they are wise-cracking or just because they are stupid?
Cash yield doesn't tell the whole story for startup companies, in some cases it doesn't even factor into the equation. YouTube is a perfect example back when they had a monopoly on online video, were growing at 100% a year and were using up their cash at an incredible speed.

A pure cashflow analysis would indicate that YouTube was worthless. But if YouTube stock had been offered on the market at this point, you can be certain that it would have been given a considerable positive value. This is due to the chance that the company would become profitable or make a large exit in the future. You need to also take future revenues (or a chance of future revenues) into account when making a guess at the market value of a company.
This:

"The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - is relatively unattractive to most advertisers.

"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.

Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.

I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah.
If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.

Condé Nast isn't built to do this."

Via - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628
The compiled Javascript is an abomination.
A Google News layout would be great and yes that would be more useful. It's just that the implementation is beyond my current skill level.
-
1. Feeds under the site url. Agreed additional design is needed as well as more metadata displayed.

2. I do like grouping by categories and tags but only in addition to source. I like source because the sites do have very unique voices and posting agendas. For example, Deadline presents information they think people working in the entertainment industry would enjoy. On the other side Slashfilm caters more to casual movie fans.

3. All good ideas, thank you. Anyone want to help with design?

4. Yes, the "AddThis" widget hasn't helped much. A more robust social integration is something I'm currently planning out.

5. All great ideas, but again not sure how to technically implement. I'm aware how some of the better aggs do it with linking and human curation.

Thanks again all good stuff!
I have a first-generation WiFi-only Nook. I have never registered it with B&N and have it permanently in airplane mode (i.e. WiFi disabled). For over a year I used it only for DRM-free EPUB (mainly O'Reilly e-books).

Last week I finally broke down and bought a DRM book from B&N's website. It let me download an encrypted EPUB file, which I transferred to my Nook over USB. Without having to enable WiFi or register my Nook, I was able to open and read the EPUB just by entering my name and the credit card number used to purchase the book. (By the way, I only had to do this once.)

It still sucks because it's DRM, but I'm reasonably confident that with this setup, B&N can't remotely kill my books, and it should keep working even if B&N goes bust. You might want to consider it.
"the syntax" and "where you explicitly tell the compiler" are the exact same thing. Syntax is, fundamentally, instructions to the compiler.

Some languages don't contain instructions that can instruct the compiler to loop or recurse (C, assembly, brainfuck). Some languages contain a sub-language or meta-language which can instruct the compiler to recurse (java, C++). Some languages use their native syntax to instruct the compiler, making looping or recursion trivial (Perl, Lisp).
This is great, it's similar to Flash's display list. I actually think a display list should be part of the canvas spec. There's really no reason to have a bunch of competing display list libs and it could be optimized if it was part of the browser.
Ask HN: Review my new email marketing startup, redcappi.com
RedCappi was launched privately about 2 months back, and publicly just 2 weeks ago.

I am an entrepreneur who believes that email marketing can be simplified and stripped down to the basics for the average small to medium sized business operator. Our platform offers an uncomplicated DIY drag-and-drop technology for email creation.

Please feel free to signup at www.redcappi.com and check out our software, particularly the ease in which you can create an email campaign.

Mahalo :)
That all depends on exactly what popped into my head. Let's say it's a pretty obvious idea that's almost fully formed, like "let's wrap a web form around OpenSSL so the support techs can make certificate requests". That comes together as a couple of blocks in my head.

One block is "have a basic FORM as the UI" - basic HTML, no big deal, easily done. The second block is "have something to handle the incoming POST data" - libraries I had already written, so again, no big deal.

The third block was "somehow pass it to OpenSSL and get back the data". This is where all of the unknowns lurked. I had to actually play with it to see if it had a reasonable way to be controlled by another program. It turned out that it could be done without too much trouble, and with that known, the third block was considered possible.

Finally, the fourth block would be to take the results and render them on the page returned by the POST handler. That's just a bit of HTML and other CGI magic - easy enough.

When the idea first comes to me, 1, 2, and 4 are fully-formed in my head, and 3 needs elaboration. A few minutes of poking on 3 convinces me it's possible, and thus with everything seeming reasonable, I start in on it.

Total time elapsed from "hey, we need this" to "hey you, try this thing I just wrote" was about 25 minutes. I only know this because it happened with a nicely timestamped chat log, and I worked backwards to figure it out.

That's not quite an answer to "how long until first line of code", but it does give you a window: under 30 minutes, if it's a situation like this.

As for the tools, back then: C, pico/nano, home-brewed CGI helper libraries, Linux, Apache.

These days, it's the same, only with (a specific subset of) C++ in place of C. I can elaborate on which bits if you really care. Use whatever language works for you.

Workflow is basically this: open two xterms or similar. Open an editor in the top one, write code. Open bottom one, use it to "make && ./prog". Open other windows as necessary for research or experimentation (like fiddling with the OpenSSL stdin hookup, reading man pages, etc).

The whole workspace (fluxbox) is nothing but terminals. Browsers and other stuff go off to another workspace. My chat window stays on another screen/system, and is sometimes hidden when uninterrupted cycles are needed for a short burst.

Hope this helps.
"Those of you who rail about the evils of advertising in general, or this technique in particular, are entitled to your opinions, but do please aim your rage at the appropriate target: Google."

Let's be clear - I'm not at all railing on the evils of advertising. I'm as much of a marketer as I am a product designer and programmer.

Google does not put faked user-generated content (review stars) next to their ads. This is functionally equivalent to me putting an ad on Facebook with the text "5 of your friends like this" embedded in the image. It's a deceptive lie aimed at blindly increasing CTR without regard to click quality. I would be 100x happier with the ad if he had simply left out the stars.
I don't understand who still sees ads. It's apparently a huge majority of Internet users, but I don't understand where they come from.

I often set up computers for family and friends and installing AdBlock is one of the first things I do.

Who is computer-savvy enough to buy and install their own computer, and yet not computer-savvy enough to get AdBlock?

Or do (most) people actually like ads?
I don't know how to get any good data on this, but I think saying "Google's bread is buttered by <undesirables> ..." is at least accidentally misleading. Google supports a tremendously diverse ad ecosystem, some of which is questionable. However, at least in my experience, very few of my search queries involve such ads. The perception (if not provable fact) that they're mostly a class act is a big part of their enduring brand value.

Of course, it's possible that the "typical" user gets a much larger fraction of "scam ads" than I do. I don't know how to evaluate this empirically without knowing something about the overall query distribution.

Still, at least for my search patterns, there is a very large difference between AdWords and "scam filled advertising". This is in sharp distinction to my average experience on, say, Facebook (never mind other fairly mainstream web behaviors like gaming forums).
Group buying in South Africa? …it works
Have a look at collections on

1. http://patterntap.com and

2. http://dribbble.com
been using xmonad for a couple of years. config is so minimal that it makes it vey simple to replicate the exact same environment on all my machines (laptops and desktops), with no ties to the underlying linux distribution.
I'm arguing that it isn't a strong analogy, not that it isn't an invalid analogy.

Fundamentally, people expect to be able to reach me by phone, and there are times when I want to be reached. I can even tell me phone to only allow a short list of numbers to make my phone ring.

On the other hand, going to a web site means I want something from them, and their analytics are part of what they take as compensation.

You argue, I believe, that "going to the mall" becomes similar to "going to a web site." By picking up my prescription at the mall pharmacy, I implicitly grant the mall and (I presume) other stores in the mall knowledge about where I go. I suppose the same would apply if my hypothetical daughter went to a Planned Parenthood office in a shopping center.

And in some sense, you are right. They already track us, with cameras, with staff, and even with consultant anthropologists. The issues are: how much tracking is appropriate ("retail vs. wholesale surveillance" as Schneier terms it). What are the social tradeoffs, especially when there might be no real alternative to using one of the stores in the mall. (And why do so many stores ban photography while asserting the right to photograph us?)

But they don't track us with the devices we use to contact others, who have nothing to do with the store. That would be (to use yet another analogy) like a web site asking you to install a plug-in "for great discounts!!!" but which also tracks all others sites you visit? (Presume that that tracking is mentioned in the fine print.)

In your analogy, is "the mall" really like "a web site" or like a "web hosting company"? I go to a mall to visit stores, and don't care so much about the mall itself. So "the mall" would be the "web hosting company", and the individual stores correspond to a web site? As someone who has a hosted web site, I would be uncomfortable if my hosting company started doing per-person/per-page traffic analysis other than what I've set up for my own use, and would really not like it if they shared that information with other web sites also hosted by the same company.

Of course, some hosting sites might do this, but in the physical world it's harder for a store to leave the mall if it feels like the mall is doing the wrong thing.

So while you can make the analogy, it doesn't feel like a strong one. Why not just argue this case without analogies?
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Sneaking up on the forge problem
The problem is that unless you saw this news story, you wouldn't know until you showed up to the mall.

It's akin to placing the EULA into a sealed box, and writing on the box: "By opening this box, you agree to the terms of the EULA inside this box."
It is a broad rule and I gave on the article because I could not see any of the image. I was about to white list the site when I realized that using Ad Block Plus and NoScript for years has resulted in me experiencing a significantly different Internet.

So much of SEO simply does not apply to people like me.

But in fact I do spend a lot of money on-line, but the I spend on content. Even if it's a funny shirt from a web comic, something trivial and designed to have shallow commercial appeal, it is still content.

So there's things that are hard to distinguish from content, and then there's things that are real content which you can buy.

And NoScript and Ad block have never kept me from the latter.

I think I'll skip the white listing.
Barack Obama joins Google+
As an aside, the Clay Shirky quote ("Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.") was new to me, but puts the RIAA/MPAA pretty much perfectly into perspective. Not really related to the article, but it clicked as I was reading.
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man, the only satire part is using "sheep". In different circles different jargon is used, though i never heard "sheep". When i was involved for example, the term we used was "horses" - cynical notation for the user's curiosity and the tendency to grant trust easily. (We frequently forget that 9th circle is reserved for ones who betrays the trust. Even when it is just for money and clicks.)
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> 2. Legal change. Right now there is a simple process for signing off intellectual property for contributions which were merged from external contributors (who have not signed a release). That changes with git and becomes more complex. There are solutions, but they require careful planning.

I'm curious as to how exactly you feel git impacts on Legal processes versus the use of svn. I'd expect that the choice of tools and the legal issues surrounded merges made by those tools should be completely orthogonal.
It doesn't matter what it says, it matters what users perceive it to be. It's obviously meant to deceive the users while providing the author (not very) plausible deniability of the deception.
I think we will have to adjust our expectations of privacy as technology changes. Larry Niven was right - technology does change a society's ethics. We always knew we had little privacy in public - we could be photographed, people could notice us and compare notes. But now, technology is making this easy, and it's making it automated.

You can pass all the laws you want, but it would be very difficult to outlaw me placing a camera in my window pointing outward, and sharing that stream with the internet.
But with advertising, the attention transfer is involuntary. The user is always trying to spend their attention on something else, and they aren't getting what they pay for. If attention is currency then advertising is clearly bait-and-switch fraud.
Not Just Another Deals Aggregator
GitHub for Mac 1.1
I still remember the WordPress/Thesis fiasco that involved Twitter, blog comments and Mixergy interviews.
This actually is not a gray area at all. It is specifically against Adsense TOS.

See here under 'encouraging clicks': https://www.google.com/adsense/support/as/bin/answer.py?answ...

Nor is this a new idea. Google addressed this issue back in 2007, and specifically warned publishers not to post images next to ads. I know because I was one of them. Here is a snapshot of my earnings from a site I ran back in 2007. Note the big drop in CTR around Feb 7th.
http://i.imgur.com/Kwbgw.jpg.

In my defense I was a brash 18 y/o at the time, this was a hobby, and I wasn't thinking long term. And ofcourse I did remove the images after Google clarified their TOS.

But at some level, even then, I knew that what I was doing was morally wrong. Technical loophole not withstanding.
Your analogy fails because the relationship is different.

In your example, you're turning off your phone because it's a case of turning off something which makes noise and light at an event where you're not supposed to do distracting things. It's something you do for the benefit of those around you. So there's a reasonable reason to affect your behavior in this case. Also, in social situations like this it is made very obvious that you're expected to not do anything distracting, whatever that is. A bit of small text on a mall map that might not obviously say "we're tracking where you go via your phone signal while you're here" to a layman is not an equivalent cue by any measure.

In the case of needing to turn off your phone to not be tracked by a third party, you're being forced to change your behavior by a service provider who has no good reason (for you or those immediately affected by you) to force this behavioral change.
Kindle customer service was excellent to me too - bottom half of the screen died and Amazon sent out a replacement device immediately, then made arrangements to collect my broken one, at their own expense. Unlike the iTunes store I was able to get through to the right person by following the instructions provided.

Its not too difficult to imagine edge cases where communication between the person taking the phone call and the person able to resolve the situation breaks down; that can happen in any large company. But then getting things resolved also requires good faith on the part of the complainant; filing chargebacks against a reputable company within a month of the problem isn't the best indication of this.
Patrick makes a good point when he points out that people filter out spammy looking ads so blending, more even than relevance, is necessary for click through. The most surefire way to get folks to click on your ads is to put them on Google, but half the folks on Google don't even realize that they are clicking on ads. Spammy text ads really just don't work.

On the other hand, Patrick's ad here blends just a smidgeon too well for my comfort. I didn't realize that it was an ad until Patrick mentioned it in the text. That's saying something because I was expecting it to be an ad. (I'm a little drowsy today so I'm not as sharp as I usually am.) It looked too legit. I'd have given it a yellow border or slightly different color scheme. I think then it would still attract the viewers attention without feeling like a trick when the user clicked on it.
I think the point is that you would pick up a burner at the entrance, and drop it off near the first store you enter. When you exit, you pick up a different burner that someone else picked up. That way, your actual path is not discovered.
Microsoft just can't quit Yahoo