skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yeah lately I've been thinking more and more about the benefits of a monthly subscription. People tend to be lazy, so even if they stop using a service, they'll continue paying for it, because they are too lazy to cancel. And $10/month just doesn't seem like that much money to most people, and gets lost in the credit card statement. So you are pretty much guaranteed your revenue, even if you completely stop selling.

Compare that to advertising models, where you need to work non-stop just to make sure you sell your ad-space to cover your next month's bills. Or one time fee models(sales/commission), where once again, you need to make sure you continue being on top of the food chain, to make those new sales every single month.

The good thing about monthly billing, is that you tend to keep those customers for a long ass time. So pretty much all you need is time to grow to profitability.

So you can have a very mediocre acquisition rate(lets say 5 new users per day), after a year of sales(@ $10/mo), you are already making $18,250 a month. And since you get paid month-in, month-out, you can spend a ton of money on advertising to continue growing. Because you have a fixed income.
Not so much. Thousands giving <$10 on a public broadcasting platform like twitter is very different than, say, large corporations giving many, many thousands. The latter is pretty common, and about to tank with this economy.

Most people could part with a few bucks without a problem. This kind of tool will help direct that.

Besides, I wanted people to click on the link :-P
A pay-for-play placed article in a minor pub, reflecting the viewpoint of Greg Ness, the VP/Marketing of a virtualization security product. A good example of what you wind up with if you shell out $10k/month for a PR firm.
GM is having trouble meeting payroll (or will be soon). They need to conserve cash. I'm not happy that they've put this plant on hold and do expect a delay of at least a few months for the Volt because of it, but I can understand why they're doing it. They're trying to control their burn rate (of cash). We really need credit markets to free up. Banks need to lend again.
fallacy of the appeal to the majority. the current bank crisis was caused by alan greenspan's credit bubbles. the first one causes the dot com boom, the second caused the housing boom and was used to cover up the first.
Even expert designed and peer reviewed cryptographic standards usually need a couple of versions to get rid of all the holes-big-enough-to-drive-a-van-through. :)
The Affect of Minimum Wage on the Recession
Wish I could take credit for it. The guy who runs the blog has a lot of cool data visualization work.
But thousands already give <$10 to good causes on hugely popular sites like Justgiving or Chipin.
4% were funded by YC.
Love that logo. Good luck!
Totally off the top of my head, and without familiarity with TipJoy:

"Capture the Moment"

My contribution, if any, might be a catch phrase for the idea, whether with regard to a non-profit activity, journalism, or something else. "Capture the moment". We all know that moment, when we are particularly moved. It doesn't last, at least not in intensity. Facilitating a "positive" outcome seems likes a potential business.

My impression is with TipJoy, one can make a small contribution immediately, eliminating the hesitation around picking which worthy causes to contribute to (at the $20, $50, $100, whatever "level"). Also that one can maintain control of contributions by limiting funding of the account and/or by viewing summarized activity there.

Do I have that right?

Finally, just having read a story about print news' continued demise, I'll ask: What about a similar contribution model for good reporting? After a particularly good read, I might be willing to toss are dollar or two in the direction of the author/publisher. I know, micropayments are hardly a new idea. This is another market that TipJoy is after?

Thanks. I'm intrigued now to learn more about TipJoy.
You noticed someone's shoes?

You're not one of us...
s/affect/effect/

I know, you already knew that. But if nothing was said, we would descend into chaos.
Imagine the number of people competing for jobs.
Thanks! I understand the Amazon vulnerability fully, I was just referring to my own web-app development.

It's not an issue though because I don't do the key/value pair splitting as they do.
Examples: SSLv2, RADIUS, DNSSEC, SSH.
Why are you "signing" your data at all? You're doing it wrong. Use SSL to secure the whole transport; use form or HTTP auth to make sure you know who you're talking to.
Stallman sold copies of Emacs for a pretty penny above reproduction costs.

It just so happens that he give the source alongside.

Freedom 0-4 does not say you cannot sell your product.
Motorola RAZR (TM) Black
Perfect for a phone with an active lifestyle! The SkinTight case and holster provides rubberized protection and transportation for your RAZR phone. Soft rubbery feel gives great protection and grip to your phone. Deluxe Swivel Holster clips on to your belt or waistband so you can carry your phone hands free.
Marketing spam is marketing spam.
Think how many offspring you could spawn in a thousand years.
World Coal Reserves Could Be Much Smaller than Previously Thought
VMware has real security? I do not think that everyone agrees:

http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Virtualization_Security

On a side note, Google has tried to hire Theo de Raadt. Perhaps they wanted him to work on this project.
Charlie Munger: Art of Stock Picking
Hydrogen is far less efficient than battery tech so I don't see an advantages as far a a daily car. As to gas vs electric moters an electric car can have a two gear transmission without sacrificing significant efficiency where gas engines need a much smaller RPM range to keep em happy and at peek power output. At the high end HP and cooling are significantly less of an issue with electric and with a fast battery swap system they can even be fueled faster than gas powered cars. But the real advantage is how much you can mold the car's balance and weight vs gas. Not to mention the traction advantages when each wheel can have power rapidly applied independently.

PS: For now electric cars only have about 1/5 the energy storage vs. a full tank of gas, but in every other way they win and gas has a fixed energy storage limit where battery's keep getting better.
PhDs and Anna University - what is their secret?
This article was spot on until the author said that airplanes would never fly solo.

Is he crazy? Of course ALL airplanes will eventually fly solo, and some already do - like the drones we send to kill militants in Pakistan.

And it will be a better world when airplanes, surgery, tollbooths, and many other things are done by computers.
A Boston-Sized Population Joins Facebook Each Day
I'm curious: How are your users using it differently than intended?
The snow on saltlicklabs.com makes both of my cores hit 50%. Kinda impolite.
There really isn't an established micropayments player, and there isn't really an established social giving engine. Both are innovations in Tipjoy.
Singapore had no resources other than the brains of its people; they were the underclass who were booted out of Malaysia with just the shirts on their backs.
...WEP, Kerberos, GSM, PPTP
Did they fail to hire him?
Tips for IIT JEE
Using Twitter (Via the Cloud) As a Human-Powered, Second Stage SIEM & IPS
BBC releases Adobe AIR-based cross-platform iPlayer
We use a PS3 cluster for Cell related research. It's absurdly cheap for a research machine. We use it for research in system software and programming techniques for Cell. But it has serious drawbacks if you want to use it to actually crunch your numbers for you:

- 256 MB RAM

- Only 6 SPEs are available. One is disabled for a higher yield on the chips, and one is reserved for the game OS

- Hypervisor. You don't actually have direct access to the hardware. If you did, what would prevent people from putting out unlicensed PS3 games that just ran on Linux? The hypervisor prevents you from accessing the videocard (and it's memory) and the onboard sensors and performance counters.
did anyone actually buy the breakup assistant thing?
And $10/month just doesn't seem like that much money to most people, and gets lost in the credit card statement. So you are pretty much guaranteed your revenue, even if you completely stop selling.

I think this is OK as long as you're upfront with the customer about the reoccurring payment. If you try to slip it past them, they will notice, will want their money back and will leave with a sour taste in their mouth.
They never got WEP or PPTP right. ;)
so says the person with 5 karma points. it's a pretty insightful presentation, one which I have no financial or equity stake in.
I guess it depends on the relative 'recent memory' ;) I was born in '75 and remember the Reagan era well. Whether you liked him or not - he impressively wrote nearly all his own speeches, at least until his later White House years. He spent many years employed as a spokesman for GE and typically wrote all of his speeches by hand on yellow legal pads.

An interesting sidenote - during his first campaigns, his opponents tried to damage him by saying all he knew how to do was make prepared speeches since he was a clueless actor from Hollywood. To combat that impression, he started making his appearances almost entirely Q&A so audiences could see he had his stuff down and could handle any questions placed to him.

Hence Reagan's 'presidential nickname' the 'Great Communicator'.

Fortunately Obama has 'Great Communicator' skills as well - it's certainly a lot more fun to have a president that can speak well ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan
Hmm.. can I get a hacked version that masks my country of origin so it appears I'm in the U.K. Anyone? Anyone? Ok, that would be illegal, but still, there are some great shows on the BBC, and international licensing agreements are holding me back from watching them. Boo.
You're completely misrepresenting what I said. I'm not telling you "Hey, use this like you'd use Photoshop." I'm telling you "Click the link before you start trashing the thing." Aviary's people are pretty forthcoming about their product. They aim for hobbyists, not professionals. They've repeatedly said that they're not a Photoshop clone and that they don't expect to ever be as powerful as Photoshop. Rather, they aim to offer some of the most oft-used Photoshop techniques - including some that no other service online offers - and they do a damn good job at it.

When I say that something "works like Photoshop online," I expect people will understand that I mean "works with layers, allows for subtle image manipulation, churns out fairly high-quality images." Of course it's not literally Photoshop. But it does a lot of very neat stuff.

Oh, yeah, forgot to add. They're not "just a photoshop clone", they're nowhere near Photoshop 1.0 clone.

Again: way to utterly disregard what I said. They offer a lot of tools, and all their tools are damn impressive considering they're designed to run online. Yeah, you can ignore that and say that I'm a fuck-up because I used the word Photoshop when submitting. Or, you could cut with the ranting, because on Hacker News people usually respond well to polite, civil discourse, and look at it for what it is, which is a pretty impressive offering. I think Peacock, the procedural generator, is actually more impressive than Phoenix, which is the raster editor.

there is only one online app I can use

No. There's only one you do use. If you need a calendar, there are impressive online alternatives. If you want a to-do list, the same. RSS reading: online alternatives that work better in some ways than desktop clients. Word processors and slide editors: Buzzword and 280Slides. Gmail's good, yeah, but frankly, Mail.app is better than it in every way that matters to me, and so your offering Gmail as the "only offline app" is just empty posturing.

How about we drop this: you can apologize for being a dick when you didn't have to be, and I'll apologize for using the name "Photoshop" in vain. Because this is a much better site than this snipefest would let on, and we could both be wasting our time much more efficiently. Peace?
Is there a way to do this anonymously?
Not really, no. Amazon screwed up on a well-known widely-understood rule; there aren't 40 different sides of the road involved with "hash collisions are bad".

Similarly, the one cryptographic complaint I have about OpenSSL (as opposed to non-cryptographic security bugs) is their lack of attention to side channels, and the same applies here -- we KNOW that side channels are bad. The fact that the OpenSSL developers haven't made any systematic attempt to prevent them doesn't mean that cryptography is hard; it just means that the OpenSSL developers are careless.
Hg isn't better than X, as it makes a crap display server.
Computer Failure Closes Toronto Exchange
Were it to do so, it would undermine what it means to be human.

They oppose the idea of life extension and anti-ageing research on ethical, moral and ecological grounds.

the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual

Seriously, if you think that dying will give meaning to your life, go ahead and do it. No one's stopping you.
Still makes a crap display server.
Could also have something to do with the combination fade fx.

I use the Schiller snow if you're interested... http://www.schillmania.com/projects/snowstorm
Not true; in KeyKOS, for example, the shell had full access to all the files the user had access to, because that is where the user held the keys of their directories. In CapDesk the window system has the same role. In general you need to be able to run "utility" programs like the tmp-remover in the example.

That doesn't necessarily mean the author of the utility programs has to be able to send updates without your approval, or that they need to be able to receive communications from their utility program, or that you can't delegate your approval of application updates to a third party who vets the code, or that the utilities can't be small and clear enough that you don't have any doubt about what they're doing, or that all programs need to have full access to your files, or that you can't store your files somewhere where you can roll back undesired deletions.
I don't see why I cant treat installing apps like I do updating files in SVN. I can have branches and merge them and if the changes are independent I can even undo changes without upsetting the whole system. As to updating shared files HDD space is cheep, outside of a few huge media files I could keep every file I have ever updated in every state it's ever been on my hard drive and still have room to spare. But, this is starting to turn into a rant so let me just say I want an OS designed around today's hardware not assumptions from the era of single core CPU's and sub megabyte hard disk drives.

PS: Most OS already try and split USER data from installation data just limit updates to installation files to installers which are carefully managed. Changing the windows uninstaller from independent applications to a branching tree would not be hard for most people to understand.
In Their Search for Help, Fairfax Schools Find Google
Sinatra: Links and Resources For A Quicker, Easier Way to Build Webapps
Eigenfactor is very cool (as is Carl) and allows you to do stuff like this

http://plindenbaum.blogspot.com/2008/06/pubmed-impact-factor...

Wish it were more mainstream since there are a lot of interesting possibilities.
actually they did cover it, and said that even if its a pain in the ass...is it really that much more complicated than drilling for oil.

+ the whole infrastructure thing is BS, it can be just as graduate, because the gas stations can upgrade 1 pump at a time, as the demand grows
Dean Kamen had a really cool water purifier. I wonder if it'll ever hit the streets. And how it competes with this solution.
Well, when we originally built the site it was "suppose" to be a fun way to put your relationship on the internet chopping block. As of late, people use it for all sorts of relationship advice, and many times it has nothing to do with breaking up.

I love that it's being used this way and not going to try anything to reshape or stop it. It's helping us re-prioritize features, and giving the site a direction for the future.
This article is really terrible. It spends half of the article before mentioning the actual contribution of Native Client, which is that it securely sandboxes C programs with little effort on the programmer's part, confuses source code analysis with object code analysis, talks about memory virtualization for security as if it had been invented in 2008 instead of ~1965 (and as if it weren't already a feature of every mainstream OS), glosses over the API differences and the difficulty of designing a secure OS API, and confuses Intel (one ARM licensee) with ARM.

In summary, it is an unreliable article written by someone without a clue.
Have you lived for 12K US a year in the American south? Or even tried to support kids on that? Just trying to make it on 16k in the Bay Area is a struggle, and it's only myself to feed.

I think you touch on an important point: the poor have access to a better life, or at least more choices, than many in the past could dream of. I don't believe that means that they actually do live a life of luxury: they are far less in control of their lives, are almost compelled to do meaningless work to sustain themselves, and the consumer choices they have often trap rather than fulfill them.
Basically, this is a matter of syntax and not a change in the behavior of the datastore or its queries. This is probably a good thing as most people are used to SQL-like instructions, but it isn't going to allow you to do things you couldn't before.
Yes. Mostly they are used as pranks against people, but a few serious ones here and there. You can monetize anything if you have a brand. My gf manages this service, and it's mostly for the press.
There would probably be laws against that. If people were immortal, perhaps the law would say every two humans can have one child between them; that way population could only double once.
Add Dynamic RSS Feed Signatures To Gmail Easily
I'll think of something.
What if no application could delete files?

I don't mind a program flagging them as unimportant but if I have enough space to restore any file deleted in the last month what's the problem? Toss in a wizard to restore things to before I installed that program and it becomes harder to damage the system. Heck, add a pop up if the OS wants to destroy a file that was marked as unimportant in the last month and it's going to become hard to damage the system like that. You can even treat updates like deletes where the OS protects the old state for a week / month / year.
Oh, Hacker News is for news?
Congratulations are due for a company that helped tip me off to two rocking nights!
Very true.

One thing that has stung me about Rails is the conceit; if you have a requirement that runs against the grain, Rails developers seem to have no problem in saying "that's stupid; you shouldn't want that."
FriendFeed Blog: Simple Update Protocol: Update
The problem isn't the computer models. It's the models that investment houses have been using generally. Telling a computer to do a workflow doesn't change the outcome. If it's a good workflow, it's a good workflow.

The problem is that many investment houses simply used bad quantitative data to evaluate their investments. Whether a computer generates that or a human calculates and writes it down doesn't change things.

I'm a big fan of trying new models with computers. Google does it all the time. However, when Google is doing it, the worst case is that the utility of your search results goes down.
A list of his predictions and some analysis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Raymond_Kur...
I have been interacting with the merb community for over a year and have never had a negative experience interacting with anyone (google groups, IRC, etc). I really can't speak for the Rails community. I dumped Rails for tech reasons not community ones.
And don't worry about the "ruby assholes", good talent with the right attitude is available. I know quite a few if you need some recommendations.
Late to the game here, but I have to recommend Komodo Edit for your IDE - I've been using it for about a year now and it's just so solid. I've tried others (most recently Netbeans PHP, which is a CLOSE contender), but they just don't do things that Komodo does that I've grown very accustomed to.
Hackers wanted for $200k MIT Clean Energy Prize
You guys are putting Dr Phill out of business :) Great job.
What's funny about that? It's a real issue and the first thing I thought of when I head them say "native x86". Consider that there are also netbooks that have ARM architecture as well (unless I'm mistaken).

Or are you referring to only the last 3 words? Intel's ARM chips?
When Valleywag (Owen) published an unsubstantiated rumor that Matt Mullenweg was cheating on Glenda, that wasn't lack of class. That was malicious disregard for the truth, unless Owen knew it was false, in which case it was outright lying. Integrity excludes malicious disregard for the truth.
Regardless of lifespan we are going to move into a post scarcity economy, where wealth won't mean what it does today. We must do it because we can already see the decline of extracted resources like oil and minerals. We will do it because we can. The internet has enabled telecommuting. Telecommuting enables the move to smaller communities where housing is cheaper. As robots get more capable they will take over the manufacturing base.

I think we are closer to a post scarcity economy than we realize. The biggest big ticket item is housing. The biggest item in the cost of housing in sub/urban areas is land. If we disperse to small towns, the cost of land goes down. If housing were really low cost and we telecommuted, maybe 10 or 20 hours of work per week would meet our needs. Suppose we adopted a Peace Corps/Habitat for Humanity model. After school/college a person spent 3 years building housing, including their own? Maybe all he has to mortgage is the land and materials. Maybe not even that.

Add other ideas like a robot taxi service, 3D copying machines, reasonable health care; and the need for much of the need for the credit economy would disappear. I don't view this as a socialist utopia, more a natural evolution of our current market economy. It still has lots of room for entrepreneurs (less for VCs), volunteers, and open source whatever.
Pixastic: JavaScript Image Manipulation Library
That's an interesting criticism of OpenSSL. Do you know of a general purpose cryptographic library that has done a better job than OpenSSL at hardening against side-channel attacks?

By default, OpenSSL has: RSA blinding, constant time montgomery multiplication, careful review and correction of the conditional branches which were attacked in that amazing series of branch prediction papers.

Doesn't seem to me that OpenSSL developers are careless and indifferent about side-channel attacks.
I'm the new lead organizer. I want hackers to submit business plans - Clean Energy doesn't just mean solar and wind turbines. How can I reach out to them?

Also, our website needs some love - are you passionate about our energy challenge and want to volunteer your skills?
I remember a study that found that the average lifespan for immortals would be 2500 years because of fatal accidents.
the default stack is all most people will need. you can go from there to slim it down or replace pieces. merb is mostly a turn-key full stack like rails in terms of instant productivity.
I don't see a connection. You're saying that the only people capable of constructing a functioning society are us Europeans? I really hope I'm reading you wrong.
How does the fact that the typical mistakes are well-known and predictable damage my argument?
More likely than I am to stop being dead.