skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
# The 'be good' concept also comes up when we design our products. ... We will make it possible for you to get your e-mail out of Gmail if you ever want to.

I'd like to see this applied to Google Analytics, which is nice but has no way to export any data. I'd also like a way to delete all the junk Google has on me like logs of my searches.

I guess I'd believe that "be good" was some kind of important principle to Google if they acted any different than any other company: use personal data for customer lock-in and to reuse/resell/mine elsewhere; give a small escape hatch to only those few services people complain loudest about.
Yes. I have the same issue completely. :)
it shocks me that skype, being all its worth- does not have an iphone application yet.
This issue is also tied into how we're praised as kids:

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/02/the_power_of_praise.ht...

You were probably told you were really smart and so you tended to believe it. Better to praise the results than make blanket statements about the kid.
Misread the title at first, thinking Tim O'Reilly was the biggest ponzi scheme of them all.
Poor impulse control underlies many self-destructive behaviors. I'd say that the excuses are just a symptom of poor impulse control.
Try starting with IRC. irc.freenode.net channel #metatokyo
aka Discipline.
Download And Convert Youtube Videos Without Any Software Or Plugin
To download any video on Youtube without any software or plugin, just add this at the begin (after www) of the link: kick
This and the NASA piece both talk about how all software should always be better, and the comments all have a resounding "here, here!" agreeing quality to them. But no one mentions that there is a cost to higher quality software. The system is the way is because people have made it work this way.

Software will continue to be bad as long as clients accept bad software. Companies will continue to buy bad software as long as they don't know where to find demonstrably better software.
newLisp is a Lisp-like, general-purpose scripting language
Peacekeeping
Just gave the author a point. What's the exchange rate between whuffie and Hacker News points? How many get you a cup of coffee?
basically what we have is 2 stages. the first stage investing in speculative value of the company (investment) and the second stage investing in the speculative profitability of the company (public trading)

there really isn't a clear cut middle ground, all investments desire the profitable return. unless you can define what determines value for the middle stage investor, you're going to have a hard time gaining traction for this initiative.
AT&T data network down in North East US
It ain't pretty, but:

require 'mechanize'

class Tinyurl
def self.make_tiny(big_url)
url = "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=#{big_url}"
agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari'
results = agent.get(url)
return results.body
end

def self.test(base="http://www.google.com?q=sanjay", iterations = 10)
t=Time.now
(0..iterations).to_a.each do |i|
puts make_tiny("#{base}#{i}:#{rand(100000000)}")
end
puts Time.now-t
end
end

Tinyurl.test
Don't think it's gonna change anytime soon. Contrary of other professions we don't really have a blueprint to create good software and estimate it. We can't even decide which is the better paradigm or software methodology to create something...
Ah yes, sorry for not stating the puzzle correctly. That happened when it was explained to me the first time too and I forgot how annoying it is.
Are there others that should be tested?
I disagree. While I am certainly sad personally that Steve Jobs is not doing well health-wise, I think that his behavior is directly responsible for the uproar about his health.

From any number of articles that I have read, Steve has set up his company to be centered around him. As CEO, he gets involved in minute decisions regarding the design or function of a product. I've seen his management style described as "controlling" or "micromanageing" a number of times. He has created a public persona of the hipster CEO dressed in black who presents every year to throngs of amazed people, "Oh, and one more thing...".

So, when he creates himself to be a single point of failure, his health becomes a big news. He should have figured this out 4 years ago when he was trying to cure his cancer homeopathically, and his board of directors had an intervention with him to get him to go to the doctor.

Media companies have a similar systems when they work with stars. When the success of a multimillion dollar organization depends heavily a single person's performance or health, you better believe that that person's health has a very large insurance policy. And, there's a lot of tabloid interest in that person's health. Just ask Oprah.
ASK HN: Any TOS or privacy policy in japanese I could use?
Hi, I'm currently starting a website for the japanese market and while I can speak a bit japanese, I definitely don't have the level to write in legalese and I would like to avoid spending a lot of money on a lawyer...

So if anybody knows of some Terms of service under a creative commons license like the ones from wordpress that I can use, I'd be very grateful.
There are some good points here: it certainly seems the growth of derivative financial products, and the whole financial sector, has outpaced what the "concrete" economy can support. But the claim that the Earth is full? Absurd.

Clearly, we have some serious environmental limitations. CO2 emissions, rainforests, overpopulation, etc. But this Earth is wonderfully well-stocked with potential sources of energy and other resources. We haven't figured out how to use all of them yet, but over time, new inventions and discoveries tend to expose them. The same process also helps us improve the value of resources we already have, like people and (until recently :) capital.

Basically, this is the Peak Oil argument applied to the whole economy. Popular in doom-n-gloom times, unmentioned in the good times. It's a useful extreme to consider, but it is an extreme.
This is an incredibly scary description of how I went through college and high school. Every time someone did better than me I thought "well, they didn't stay up every night of this week doing drugs" or "if I studied I would have done way better" or "I coded a one month assignment in 3 days, so what if I didn't do the extra credit". I managed to still be pretty successful, but now find myself frustrated with the easy choices I made.

It wasn't until I grew up that I realized the value of success and failure (and the necessity of failure in big successes). Unfortunately, now I'm a bit older and some of the benefits of youth are gone, making it tougher to take huge risks, but I am doing it anyway, because I'm so resentful of all the self-handicapping I did throughout my youth.

It's a big part of why I decided to join a startup and leave a cushy big company job (that was actually pretty fun some of the time) - in a startup, you might just fail even if you do a great job, but you're sure to learn a ton. No startup exists without feeling like it's going to die at some point, and I felt like I couldn't push through this self-handicapping without experiencing near failure and pushing through it.
So what is the answer to this problem?

The GRE is a pretty generalized test. Most undergrad programs use either the generic SAT or ACT as their test factor - it's a efficient and useful way to measure a large group of people. The most important prerequisite for most graduate programs is an undergraduate degree in that field. How you performed (as well as the quality of the program you graduated from) is likely the most useful tool, so I can see how the GRE would be downplayed.

In some graduate programs, specifically law and business, what field your undergraduate degree is in isn't that important. I'm guessing this is why the LSAT and GMAT tend to weigh more in admission decisions than the GRE does.
An out-of-date term since before the Internet went "pop." Early on, when the U.S. military was reluctant to allow civilians full access to cryptographic technology, there were still laws on the books limiting consumer e-mail clients and the like to 40-bit encryption. When Moore's Law eventually made this kind of barrier breakable in milliseconds, the laws were changed to allow 128-bit encryption to be "exported." Nowadays, there's no real limit due to most crypto research being driven overseas, although I don't remember if the arbitrary key size limit was finally removed in the U.S. proper.
His suggestions are not realistic. Sad as it sounds, the net negative producing programmers are here to stay. http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-net-neg...
I think Math for Dancers would be an interesting class to take, even if you're majoring in a hard science/math.

Not all people think with only their brain, some people need their body to think. It'd be interesting to see how that actually works from the point of view of someone who math comes to naturally (sans-dancing).
"We haven't figured out how to use all of them yet.."

I would modify this a little with the following: "We haven't figured out how to use all of them yet or we don't want to use all of them yet..." Hero of Alexandria, for all practical purposes, discovered the use of steam power, but because labor was so cheap, it was never pursued.
I, too, found it funny that the article avoids mentioning the well-known "Microsoft tax". In relation to that term, however, the term "Apple tax" might be valid: While it's hard to buy a PC without having to pay for Windows, it's impossible to legally use Mac OSX without having to pay for Apple hardware.
I like it - an OpenKarma standard for karma trading between different sites, maybe with a central exchange and a floating exchange rate. "I'll trade two HN points for one point of your reddit karma".
I was young and opinionated once. I´m old and opinionated now. The only difference is, now I'm right.
Larry Wall got in early and is now fantastically wealthy! You could too, all you have to do is write a programming book and sell it to 10 of your friends.
Oh come on now.

It's like they said in an article I read recently... the world has learned about Ponzi schemes, and now everything is a Ponzi scheme.

At these macro-economic levels, there can be no talk of "Ponzi schemes".

The economy is not an investment vehicle, it's a huge, loose, and fantastic agreement that enables all of us to get far more (in terms of technology, resources, comfort, life expectancy, health, happiness, etc) than we would if we didn't have it. It doesn't exist for its own sake, and it certainly has no need to be a mathematically correct, long-term sustainable, rigorous system designed by a computer scientist.

The capitalist system, with all its problems, is the best system that we have. Who cares that it's not sustainable indefinitely into the future? By the time we get there, things may well have changed so drastically that it becomes completely irrelevant.

A human being is not a sustainable thing either. It overspends its resources instead of maintaining itself in good working condition and eventually dies. Oh shit. We better cancel humanity. It's a Ponzi scheme!

This Ponzi trend is really, really getting ridiculous. Enough with all that crap already! This article is a fancy label placed on a collection of dodgy conclusions drawn from dubious axioms.
Why Net Negative Producing Programmers are Here to Stay-- Despite the Cost
Yes, exactly. As an adult, I realize how and why everything happened the way it did.

But what I still don't understand is how to fix it. How do you radically change yourself, especially when the thing you're trying to change negatively affects your ability to do so?
The earth won't be full until we've turned every available inch of fertile soil into farm land.
And that includes what ever the Dutch can do to to farm on ex-ocean floor.

I'd rather avoid that scenario though.
Luckily as their development continues, birth rates in the developing world are dropping.
I'm fairly hopeful that global population growth will peak within our life times.

Also, growing an economy on the back of a growing population is the easiest way to grow but not the only one.

You can produce more and more valuable things with a static population.
killed has a conotation, but it's still something he did not something he is.

Bob killed, in self defense. vs Bob killed, ted as part of a murderous rampage. Or even.

Bob stood hatchet in hand over the chicken and hesitated.

Bob Killed.

Where Bob is a killer becomes harder to place into an interesting story.
From 1970 to 2008 that graph shows a slow increase in temperatures. If you plot the average every 10 years it's increasing. Was that trying to refute my point?

Anyway, graphs don't help they show people what they want to see. I just want data and then we can break out some statistics.

Second, is that the global average temperature or some local measurement? Because individual local measurements are also meaningless.

Anyway, take global data over 200 years averaged into 10 year blocks and see what best fits the data. Hint: it's probably not linear.
I could be wrong as I'm not that familiar with Ruby, but I imagine to get more meaningful results (not saying that the results will be different), I would run the tests many more times than 10, as well as not printing to stdout inside of your testing loop.
Some more reading around here on HN and checking on other
people's recommendations has led me to this:

http://lifehacker.com/software/feature/practicing-simplified...

This actually matches pretty closely what I started with. My system has evolved a little further, and it seems I deal with more paper, but this is a better summary than I otherwise might write.

These are linked to and form a crucial part of it:

http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/the-art-of-the-d...

http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--empty-your-...

The email advice is especially important to me. I do file things into reference folders, but I have scripts to do the donkey work on that.
I remember discussing with a friend of mine who, at the time, was a recent hiree to Boeing. After a few months(!) of introduction and systems learning, he was tasked with writing a small portion of code. I don't remember the specifics, but it was a very specific task (e.g., "write code to display the fuel level in liters.)

After a day or so, he turned in his code (something like 30 lines) and was chastised for having done too much. "What are you trying to kill people?!?"

Turns out the regular output of their developers was something like 5-10 lines of code per day, and only certain days of the week. Finished products were peer reviewed before being QAd.

At the time, I was just learning early Ruby, and getting used to the concepts of rapid development, and it seemed so strange. Of course, if my webapp breaks, there aren't any lives on the line.
(Disclaimer: I attended four concerts during the Lights in the Sky tour, as mentioned elsewhere) I have a question: Did you really go see them at two shows to support Trent or were you blown away by the quality of show? I'm sure it's a mix of the two, but I'm tempted to think it is more of the latter.
Infrastructure 2.0: Flexibility is Key to Dynamic Infrastructure
This is one of those articles that makes me think that Wired might be worth a subscription.
I use the free version of Twitteriffic which inlines ads with normal tweets occasionally, but the ads are maybe 30% larger in height and not very intrusive.
My understanding is that English Lang & Lit grad students are not studying to be writers. They're studying to be literary critics and English professors. Writers get MFA's in Creative Writing or Journalism.
You could look at Yahoo in the boom years as a Ponzi scheme. They made a lot of money from advertising start ups which was funded in part because Yahoo was making a lot of money. You can say the same thing about most bubles but a true Ponzi scheme runs out of money where after a housing bubble there are a lot of houses even if there are far more than we need.

The secret to macro-economic effects is how they alter the overall efficiency of the economy. Does people overpaying for housing cause damage? Yes, because people build much better houses than they need and people who think they have a lot of money waste a lot more of it. However, the US housing bubble was still fairly minor and it's only really scary because things are still over priced and few living people know how to deal with really hard times.

PS: Money is a signal for wealth creation, but it's not wealth. Forget it and things start to break down.
I recommend reading the entire NY Magazine article they link to.
Mark Guzdial's Amazon Blog: Cautionary Notes for the Rebooting Computing Summit Permalink
I thought of that New York Times piece, too. Yup.

So then you wonder about your parents. Praising the innate intelligence of your kid is kind of like praising your own intelligence. You can't really pass on "hard work" or "effort."
You can export data from Google Analytics pretty easily to CSV or excel.
What will Apple announce at its Macworld swansong?
No, it's nothing like them in implementation. MemcacheDB is like a giant hash table where your app server can figure out where something is based on what the key hashes to. An individual item is stored on one server (no redundancy) and which server it gets written to is a matter of the hash.

Google's BigTable is a single-master, column based storage system with redundancy. That's a huge difference. In fact, there's very little that is similar.

While Amazon hasn't published as much about SimpleDB, it's most definitely not a giant hash table. It's likely either a column store like BigTable/HBase or a document store like CouchDB.

They're completely different tools. MemcacheDB isn't anything like the other two and for scalability purposes it's important to realize why so that you can choose the correct tool for the job.

If you're interested in a tool like the App Engine Datastore or SimpleDB, there's HBase, CouchDB, and HyperTable which will all fit the bill.
The pirate's argument is bullshit. Trial software for Mac OS X and Windows is cracked all the time.
Why businesses are embracing Macs
100 iterations instead of 10, removed puts:

TinyURL: 0.43s/req

bit.ly: 0.22s/req

is.gd: 0.05s/req

That's close enough to my original values to not matter. It appears that the time is all spent waiting for the site to return.
I wonder if there is an evolutionary reason for men being more likely to self sabotage?

Fight only when it counts?

Me personally, I'm a touch too competitive.
I often choose not to participate rather then go all out.

For example, I used to play soccer, I jog every day but I have not played soccer in years, and then one day I'm invited to very friendly soccer game during lunch hour.

Cut to maybe 20 minutes before the end of the game, I had already torn damn near every muscle in my legs and my lower back was starting to hurt.
Slow down? Quit the game a bit early, nah push harder.

I'm still recovering.
I understand what you mean, but passing on "hard work" and "effort" would seem to pay greater dividends.
Why I’ve Never Been More Embarrassed for Yahoo
Isn't PageRank a type of Ponzi scheme?
What Yahoo Must Do to Survive
I am single why should I give my money to charity, my will is going to say take it out into the forest and burn it.

Only slightly kidding. A close friend of mine had a trust fund worth a little over 6 million and was looking to inherent a lot more when his grandmother died. He is dead now and imo money really messed up his life.
"If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult to understand?"

One important value words have lies in their discriminatory capabilities; the more exact and fine-toothed your toolset is, the more precisely you can express yourself. Sure, it doesn't matter if you're wearing mittens on your vocabulary for most exchanges -- but it sure is nice to be able to take them off once in a while, and say exactly what you mean.
+5 Insightful, +5 Informative, +5 Interesting.

Logged in to say thank you.
> The end of the x86 architecture has been announced a couple of times now, even by intel itself. (keyword: IA-64) I'd be surprised to see non-x86 chips succeed in the netbook arena. There's a MIPS netbook you can already buy, I don't even know of anyone who has one.

Seeing an article about this now really surprises me, because for the longest time, Macs were the hold-outs against the x86 architecture on personal computers. The first ones used 68k chips, and the late PowerPC systems was introduced with much of the same design characteristics regarding low power consumption, small die size, and potential scalable architecture that MIPS and ARM processors are now attributed to having. It was just that PPC lost the R&D war to Intel... /-:
I agree, and we'll be able to see this directly once the Android App Market starts charging money: the Google market agreement has a provision to allow the customer to get a refund within 48 hours if they don't like the app.

Will we see less piracy of Android apps? Of course not... The pirates will merely find another excuse, or they'll claim that 48 hours isn't enough evaluation time.
I'm also interested in any information about this. I've looked around a little but all of the sites I've found are way unorganized and hard to read.
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Baby boomers are not that old yet. These are the number of people over 75 in 2000 vs 1990. 1990 - 75 = 1915 and before vs 1925 and before.

95 years and over + 34%. Are you suggesting that there was a 34% population boom between around 1885 and 1905?
The 10 Worst Spam Service ISPs
For me the real question is, if this is even a reality if you are trying to run your web based startup. All you hear about is VC, angel funding or complete bootstraping. But, what if you only a smaller sum of money in regular intervals, let's say $3 to 5K, because you feel you can repay this easily due to your business model. I know it would help free up other capital and let you run your business and not give up ownership to VC.
The money quote, from the last page:

"I couldn't figure it out; what is this guy doing? Why doesn't he just go get a job? Then it dawned on me, many years later: Max just likes to hack."
Yeah, you're right. Just pirate it.
> I'm fairly hopeful that global population growth will peak within our life times.

2075, at <10 billion, according to a study that I can't find at the moment...
Directed Edge: a new take on social-filtering technologies [interview, video]
Clearspring Lays Off 20%, President And COO Jay Rappaport Leaving
Jason Fried Interview with The Brilliance
Bandwidth charges are so small relative to the value of data that unless your business plan is "host pirated content for poor college students" (hello, Youtube) you should be able to absorb them easily without needing a loan to do so.

Hosting/bandwidth expenses next to a business which is actually designed to charge money for value are chump change. I could quite literally pay mine for the year with loose change I found around my apartment (I found $250 on Sunday in my annual cleanup but I'll confess I'm just a wee bit pathological about it, and helped by the fact that Japan has very common 100 yen coins).
Fascinating piracy ratio in the article. Approximately 4:1. I assume most cracked apps require jailbroken iPhones. I think it unlikely that the piracy ratio of the author's application reflects the overall ratio of jailbroken iPhones. This suggests that the people pirating apps make up a fairly small percentage of the iPhone owning population. So the script kiddie who cracked the author's app is probably right, and most of the people who used the pirated version would not have bought it in the first place.

Or so I hope. :)
Xobni raises cash from Cisco