skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has truly baffled me over the 4-5 years I've been blogging. I just can't determine the thought process that leads to someone becoming personally offended over a blog post they didn't agree with.

And oddly, it happens more on the innocuous posts than ones I'd expect. For instance, I once called XKCD "about as funny as a partial birth abortion" and got a pretty good dialogue going with Randall Munroe. (Maybe I shouldn't be surprised a comic strip author took it in good humor.) Shortly after I wrote an article about why I think Android has a good shot at ending up on more smart phones than OSX and got death threats.
Agreed, both the TED video and her book were amazing. If you are the kind of person that wants your reality expanded, take a look at what she is up to.
Be careful not to rewrite history you have already pushed.

I always use

git rebase --interactive origin/master

That only shows me commits that are local.
An Outsider Gets A Peek Behind The Music Industry's Mindset: Optimism Into Denial
Unless you want to do this full time, put it in a index fund.
I would say there's no obligation, but what is the point of writing otherwise? I've had a couple of times where the resulting dialogue has changed my mind at least partially. For me personally, writing is more an exercise in clarifying and detailing my thought process, so I consider the dialogue one of the most valuable aspects of writing publicly, and well worth deleting a few "you're a douchebag" posts every week. I think that's why Disqus has seen such success, it significantly improves the resulting dialogue.

I probably have thicker skin than most though. A lot of writers have low self-esteem, so might actually be damaged by the insults. I just feel bad for the person who writes a 500 word essay about why I'm an asshole in my comment section, partially because I know he (and it's always a he) must be an extremely unhappy person for that to seem like a valid use of his time, and partially because he spent a half hour writing something that I deleted with one click.
This article sounds more fanboyish than an Apple rumor. (FWIW - I love macs).
Gladwell is a brilliant storyteller. He's got the Ira Glass mojo.

Incidentally, now that I've finagled Gladwell and Glass into the same sentence: Ira Glass's interview on storytelling is not a TED talk. But it should be. Especially part 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE&feature=relat...
Before or after Duke Nukem Forever?
The best they can get is 14% interest, 11% of which needs to be paid in cash. Plus warrants to purchase equity if the company's finances improve?

Who is fooling whom? This company is dead.
Iqbal Quadir on Grameen bank and microfinance:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/iqbal_quadir_says_mobiles...

The talk covers the scaling of capitalism to the "other 80%" and the profound social change that takes place with small capital outlays.
I personally think that the "traditional" venture-backed (ie: having raised $10MM+) web startups are going to find acquisitions less rewarding than what they had hoped for.

By and large, there have not been a lot of successful Web2.0 startups that have gone on to acquisitions, and many of those that have didn't really end as well as people would have expected.

IMO, the current and future wave of web startups is the 3 guys in a basement building out an app and selling it for $3MM-$9MM. Maybe they took a little bit of angel money, maybe they boot-strapped it.

In order for a Web/SaaS company to gain real value, they need to be able to have a super-solid revenue model, with a very low COCA (cost of customer acquisition) and customer support/training cost, and TLV for each customer of 5x-10x+ the COCA and CS costs.
I wonder how this competes and changes (in a good way) dropbox.. or perhaps a acquisition :)
I think it clues you into the president's general thinking. Obama tended to use the word 'nation' and Bush liked the word 'freedom'.

If you didn't know who was speaking and you saw 'health', 'Africa', 'AIDs', you might assume a scientist or doctor is speaking.

And sometimes art is just that, art. It resonates with you or it doesn't.
Enter friend code 117908262 to get a MOB
I thought BSD was a shoe-in for this as well, but if you view source you'll see the hallmarks of ASP.NET (viewstate and control naming), which throws me.
meh, I bought a desktop that shipped with ubuntu. Changing users makes it crash. My keyboard didn't work. Flash works about 80% of the time.

On my thinkpad, which I installed myself, suspend only works if I disabled the nvidea drivers. It really isn't great yet.
I got a lot of scathing criticism when I shifted my marching band web game away from competition and more toward a creative sandbox approach. People said my reasons were insulting, that there was no reason to use the site anymore, and that I was being utopian.

It was a rough period, but I stuck to it because it's something I believe in. Thankfully, in the end, the community became more positive and supportive of each other, the user-created content has improved a lot, and registrations keep climbing.

I've thought about writing an essay or two about the effects of competition on creativity and education in the arts. It will probably draw even more hate from the die-hard competition crowd, but I think it's important, and I have a pretty unique perspective on it.
Hodgman, hands down. But that's because I'm a sucker for great stories.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/john_hodgman_s_brief_digr...
When in doubt, Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad theory probably applies: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
This was put up by a web development shop in Minneapolis. It is their "now hiring" page.
You have to give some points to his speech-writer magicians.

I don't know who wrote this speech, but that person is very good at getting the points across that his administration wanted the people to hear -- but could also could hear Obama speaking.

But you are right -- this will go down in history as a historic and elegant speech.
I would like to see a "profile" style portal which can be linked to any relevant Federal programs I am involved with, from Social Security to my tax burdens with the IRS.

Primarily I would like this to be a single-service type situation where I can choose to go paperless and conduct all correspondence electronically (if I still need to send in the occasional signature such as you do when you e-file your tax returns, so be it). I'd like to see timeline or email based metaphor for interacting with this correspondence. It should include IRS, passport, immigration, the entitlement programs, the VA, whatever your interactions with the fed cover, it should cover.

There is no reason this couldn't share authentication with my state & municipal governments as well. I would like to see a seamless portal for interaction with government at all levels, while each level retains their own autonomy of implementation. If this is 10 years out on the timeline, that is fine, but I do want to see progress made. Start small if you must, but start.
What is the big deal about keeping a clean history?

It's always seemed so much effort than it's worth.

Besides, isn't it better to keep a history of what actually happened? Something about being doomed to repeat it comes to mind...
"You are using these services (the playing of music in this case) without paying for it, you are stealing their services. And in that case, it could be argued that 17k downloads equals 17k counts of theft."

Following that logic, I've just robbed Beethoven's corpse by listening to Moonlight Sonata.

This line of argument fails because using information doesn't prevent others from doing the same.
Humans are "natural-born cyborgs," and the Internet is our giant "extended mind."
"Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of." I think most of the article could have been compressed into this.

It opens up a useful business model for companies to get into a person's "cloud" and back things up for them, either into another cloud or into some hard model (DVD).

But then again, nobody thinks about backups until they really need one.
What exactly are you considering to be the seven themes and is that good or bad?

The site is farely new. Traffic has yet to increase and the plan is to eventually have the posts and comments all be from members on the site.

The slow loading and visual artifacts are being worked on by my partner.

There should be content in the StudyBreak. It's some games people can play while on the site. I am actually considering removing that.

Dean of Students is also the webmaster.
The difference I was trying to point out is that Emacs is always in "insert mode" in the vi sense. In vi normal mode, many commands don't require modifier keys.

Vim has syntax-aware navigation, too. And what Emacs calls "modes", Vim calls syntax/filetype plugins.
Which is to say: We'd all be better people if, whenever we typed the phrase nothing personal, Clippy popped up on the screen with a message: "I see you're writing something that might be better left unsaid. Would you like to get some sleep before continuing?"
I still don't get what "nation" vs. "freedom" tells me.
Before we worry about an API, how about some decent blogs?
Interesting Bridge, New Construction
Leeuwarden Bridge in Dutch
Agreed. Part of what I'm wondering is how viable the venture model is when the amount of revenue a category can generate gets quickly reduced from a free competitor that can operate at a fraction of the cost.

That's why I mentioned PlentOfFish. Probably not the best example, but if they are doing $10m as one of the leaders in the category, that doesn't spell a great future for others in the classified dating model. There are only so many of those major categories (like jobs, autos, dating) available.

The other trend is that advertising just doesn't pay the bills, even in mass amounts. I'm familiar with a handful of private companies that are doing millions of uniques per month and can't even pay a modest staff and support cost to stay afloat. The idea in the past was that with enough traffic the ad dollars would pay for free, but even that's not entirely working.
No clue what this company does -- but I really dislike the word 'nerd'. To me, a nerd is someone that is socially challenged to the point that people tend to look down on him.

Obviously, I prefer 'hacker'. Even if the rest of society doesn't quite get the term yet, I think it's a more elegant way of describing our class of folks. We may be socially challenged at times, but we are insanely driven and passionate.
Twitter just passed digg in traffic, at least according to hitwise
Buying a domain anonymously is not really that hard if you're in that business. Use a stolen credit card + proxy chain + free wifi access point and you should be pretty much untraceable. Then you just add multiple dns to a bunch of compromised servers and serve the payload.
Linux saga: Girl drops out of school over Ubuntu
Developing cross-platform Web apps for smartphones
Synaptics’ Francis Lee on the magic of touch
Generally speaking, these schemes are not illegal.
Twitter sees massive usage and some delays, but stays up for Obama’s inauguration
I realize that this isn't the same schema that launched MediaWiki. Its retained focus and ability to sustain growth without sprawl tells me that the schema was well thought out.
Incidentally, Lietaer's website is http://www.transaction.net/
Ask HN: reliable list of top 10,000 websites by traffic?
There's the Alexa top 10,000 list which isn't really known as an accurate list. I occasionally use Compete.com's free site comparison tool but there's no top 10,000 list freely available. Can anyone recommend a free top 10k list?
???

The hard drive in my MacBook died, so I can't use Word. I'm dropping out of school. Apple is the reason I'm dropping out of school.

This story just doesn't make sense to me. I agree that Ubuntu can be daunting, maybe there's not enough of a "welcoming committee" for new users, but.. c'mon. Her school didn't have a computer lab? Worst case scenario, she could have BOUGHT another computer.
That was from the old robots.txt from the Bush admin, not Obama.
Will anyone be running Vista 18 months from now?
Sure, and it means we get to take part in profit sharing, or in this case debt sharing.
Big Government, not Big Media, Threatens Free Speech
The product they are using to make this plastic is a byproduct of making paper. This does not necessarily mean more deforestation, just that paper-making will now generate other useful products.
Law. Location. I want to search what the Law says about the keywords/phrase I submit. This way next time a cop is trying to bs me, I can pull the phone, and double check what's the law in regards to it.
Agree completely. I'm inspired every time I watch it.
At the bottom of the page: "The White House. President George W. Bush."

Someone should get on that. :D
I take it she's never heard of a public library either.
Due to the fact that this new plastic is made out of wood, I am curious to what extent it behaves as wood when burned. Will it melt, or will it go straight to combustion. In the case that it does burn, will it burn as clean as wood, or does it generate harmful gasses?
I agree, but why do they do that?
geez--I'm running fedora 9 on an hp laptop. It's a Vista dual-boot rig. Everything works but suspend on closing the lid.

I don't use the Vista side much, but my wife uses a very expensive Sony with vista biz premium on it. Her suspend also (sometimes) crashes. She can't print from our XP home network (I can). She paid for adobe acrobat professional and it never worked on her box.

Of course, fedora 10 is out now and the thought of upgrading gives me the cold sweats...
Google wants data. The more data Google has the more money it makes. That's how their business scales (so far).

When there isn't a way to get the information they create the market, e.g., Android. When there is, they use that, e.g., OpenSocial.

Getting people to upload their whole hard drive to Google would be a huge deal for the company.
Someone who couldn't overcome this hurdle may not be prepared for the rigors of college, let alone an average day...
hi, i think i have found a way how to make alot of cash on imob by doing nothing, all you have to do is wait for it to lag this means all your stats go to - somthing, when it does quit the app then get it again but make sure you turn the ipod off before getting the app back, it has worked for me 3 times and i now have $9012657700 and im a level 8, i have told all my mates and they have done the same and got the extra bit of cash.
From PHP to ASP.net: Obama's Peaceful Transition of Power
While not technically illegal, (here and now) the article mentions several historical instances of the creations of such systems and their subsequent abolitions by central banks and governments.

In any case, the tax issue is a hairy problem that has to be dealt with whenever these systems are set up. They will not be allowed to exist tax free.
How genuine are the 'Genuine Online Money' gigs?
So, does it strike anyone else as the first time "I'm X" makes any sense? You can't be Mac or Windows...because Apple and Microsoft will sic a pack of highly trained attack lawyers on you, if you try. But with Linux you really can be a part of it. Anyone who has ever helped someone on a mailing list is Linux (where "Linux" is as good a mascot for the overall Open Source experience as anything). Anyone who has submitted a patch to their favorite project is Linux. Anyone who has burned a copy of a Ubuntu or Fedora or CentOS or Debian for a friend to try out is Linux.

There are many things you can say about Linux that aren't flattering (m0nty covered them sufficiently already, and though I disagree with many of them, or feel like it's unfair without following up with, "Of course, both Mac and Windows also have an equal or greater number of seriously irritating quirks and flaws, but I already know how to work around those so I don't complain about it."), but Linux is a community, a movement, and a set of freedoms and capabilities that Apple and Microsoft simply can't deliver on. Linux and Open Source is so vastly over-powering in that regard, that it's...umm...I dunno...astonishing to me that so many folks focus on the little nits (without actually doing anything to fix them--since with Linux, you actually have that power). If Linux were less capable than the alternatives, I would understand it better...but there are so many things I do in Linux every day, that would be impossible, require a huge investment in third party tools, or otherwise simply not be as nice on Windows or Mac OS X.
please we just went through eight years of a jackass running the show like it was something out of his garage.

the US govt is not a startup. the constitution informs us how to govern the country, not 37signals. i expect obama to follow the constitution, unlike bush
There was a post about him here a few weeks ago http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/fashion/20speechwriter.htm...
This isn't a TED talk but it might as well be. I found it quite inspiring:

Shai Agassi talking about his company Betterplace:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPEwJfSaYmY

(Just try to ignore Tim O'Reilly's annoying, negative presence and useless attempts to upstage his guest)
These are all mentioned in the thread the description links to, but I think it's worth pointing theme out as highlights.

Aubrey De Gray on aging
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_ca...

Jeff Hawkins on AI
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain...

Neil Gershenfeld on Fab Labs
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_l...

Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_techn...
You should try publishing under a different name next time and see what the response is. It would be an interesting experiment.
Google To End Newspaper Ad Sales - Print Ads To Close Feb 28
"The service has the potential to eclipse even Gmail, Google's second best-known product after their google.com search engine."

YouTube?
Yet? It's been a few decades now, and all they've done is cement themselves more firmly in the "hacking == illegal" frame of thought.

At some point you just have to give up and accept the dichotomy of the term...
Christ, the linkbait. The "downfall" of Apple is a (hypothetical) shortfall in its stock price because their accounting isn't dubious enough.

Okay, that last bit might be unfair, since I'm no accountant and I wouldn't recognize a massive accounting controversy if it fell on my head. But it seems to me like this is an article debating whether Apple is merely as healthy as it looks or even healthier than it looks.
There doesn't seem to be any content in that article other than rampant speculation.
probably all the hacks to make many browsers work /joke/
"What is our place in the cosmos?"

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_deutsch_on_our_plac...

My favorite, too.
You're right - especially about 4 - but the absoluteness is in practice: your solutions to 2 and 4 require a critical mass of people to understand the data being modelled (and thus - or perhaps the other way around - the processes creating/manipulating the data) and this is so rare as to be effectively non-existent.
Venture capital plummets 71 percent ($11.7b in 4Q 2007 to $3.4b in 4Q 2008)
Thank god, he didn't say "hope" and "change" that much...
Something like this?

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the-con...
What I find interesting is that no single word jumps out as much as "freedom" for Bush or "government" for Reagan or "new" for Clinton. This is consistent with what you are saying, Obama is not trying to drive home a single word or concept to "brand" his Presidency, he is actually explaining where he thinks the country is and where it needs to go.

My favorite part was the line about "putting aside childish things." It was a short but powerful dig at the last two decades (at least) of partisan politics. Grow up, get past the childish name calling, and get to work on solutions to our considerable problems.
To me, this is just a poor decision made hastily by a single student who apparently wasn't patient enough to sort out some computer issues. I think there are different options to consider - Asking for help at a computer lab at the college (it was a Technical College, after all), calling Verizon to help out with her Internet connection, even going to illegal route and getting a pirated version of Windows (not that I'm supporting that kind of activity). To me there's something more to this story than what's reported.
Do you actually get paid to click?
Guys: you're missing the point. The point is not about the original article, the point is that the media leveraged the first reddit/slashdot/whatever to do a follow-on: a spectacle article on Linux users who took the bait and flamed some girl. The fact that it's a girl is absolutely paramount. They caught geeks in a trap, a trap the geeks knew was there and they were happy to jump into.

Geeks need to figure out how to reach out to people and be nice.

Somebody could make a ton of money with a start-up for geeks to help non-geeks. Get a little client app, a splash screen for every distro who will take it: GetGeek@boot. Like people who volunteer to burn free live-cds, but instead, volunteer help. Encourage geeks to volunteer their favorite communication methods through a website, sync it to free time on their calendars, especially phone, then let people call in to a central number and route the calls to available geeks. Collaborate with online communities to give contributing geeks extra karma. 10 points for taking the call, 50 points for positive review by the non-geek. -10,000 points to any geek who calls in and asks for help with a server. :-)

That would be one way to get people to try Linux.

Meanwhile, Dell is probably wondering whether to pull the whole product line. Who knows, maybe the whole thing was a Microsoft stunt.

Maybe it was an Ubuntu stunt to test Dell's loyalty. Who knows.

I do kind of like the GetGeek@Boot idea, though. It would also motivate geeks to increase the accuracy of their schedules.
It is certainly true that IRC is the leading group chat system for hackers.
quantcast directly measures digg at 11.7M us, 23.7M global

quantcast estimates twitter at 2.7M us.

Summary from Techcrunch: "I don’t buy the Hitwise numbers. Do you?"
This is a great and semi-metaphorical comparison (woohoo transparency!), but to be fair, the Obama administration hasn't done anything yet, so there isn't even anything to hide at this point.
The one by Philip Zimbardo:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_ps...

He talks about good and evil, about his famous Stanford prison experiment, about Abu Ghraib, about heroes and villains. Very emotional, very expiring and thought-provoking.
why did the techcrunch author even bother to post this?
The preferred type of rhetoric?
think that would fall under a couple names; Evil, Extortion. I believe sites exist that mirror big sites that may go down - also google cache is a decent repository for things.

*I know it was a joke etc, just making some point(s)
Barry Schartz on the Paradox of Choice.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_par...

To paraphrase his talk:
There is an "official dogma" that more choice equals more happiness.
In reality, we have gone too far, and now more choice induces:
1. paralysis (you have so many choices that you give up and don't choose anything),
2. regret (if what you choose isn't perfect, you can only blame yourself),
3. high expectations and the impossibility to be pleasantly surprised.
The White House on Twitter - Another Transition
They exist here and now and are generally counted either as income from a tax perspective, or tax free, depending on the system and the country.
I doubt even that would have been necessary. A quick call to Dell explaining she hadn't realised her laptop would come with an unfamiliar OS when she tried to save a few dollars and could she please switch to what she is used to would probably have solved it.
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