skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fuck the haters. Scribd is awesome because it's a great utility for easily sharing your shitty Word docs and PDFs, and there is obviously demand for it as Scribd and all the Scribd-like knockoff sites each have more users than your worthless websites. Complaining about Scribd putting text in Flash is like complaining about how ugly Myspace pages are: while you were out bitching, a few talented people were out giving the masses what they wanted, no matter how many standards got violated, and will subsequently get paid for it.
Tips for Managing Family Stress Together in An Economic Crisis and Hard Times
The idea of breaking up a problem into manageable mini-steps is the essence of Getting Things Done:

http://www.davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php
I occasionally wish there was a Journal of Negative Results. However, there is a real problem in that it is nearly impossible to properly interpret a negative result. Something might not work because you have a sloppy experimental technique or because you have a typo in the implementation of your algorithm.
My first inclination was the same, but as i read further it became clear that his core argument, under all that chaff, is simply to pick an interesting problem for your new year rather than assuming that a new language for the sake of a new language is in itself a worthwhile problem. new problem for the new year is hard to argue against if you're into that sort of thing & will probably net out the same benefits you're looking for, namely, more learning. that said, his argument has a lot of noise obfuscating a signal that's too general to be strong. meh.
Well, I'm glad it's scribd paying the bandwidth bill to "stream" a 200 byte text file via a 200k flash player, and not me :)
Dividends? Though the quote doesn't actually mention large profits, just large revenues.
In theory, since you cannot buy this hacked copy of OS X it might be a copyright violation since you can't have a license for that copy.

It is possible, however, to buy a legitimate OS X and perform the same patches to get the install image they are using, in which case no copyright violation occurs. Installing shouldn't even be an EULA violation if you're doing it on an "Apple labeled" computer.. so just get an Apple sticker and label it.
And a big 明けましておめでとう for our Japanese contingent.

[I'm currently incurring RIDICULOUS roaming sending the same via cellphone from America to Japan... memo to self, next year dump cellphone address book and then script this. Oh what funny things I do to be socially appropriate :)]
I dont think sticking a sticker of an apple sticker on it makes it "Apple labeled" anymore then a tag saying "rolex" would make a fake rolex from the street a real rolex.
The more browsers that exist, the more stakeholders there will be in HTML 5, and the longer it will take for it to be implemented across the board. And if the process is anything like ECMAScript, it could literally take a decade.

Flash does everything you need for rich media, now. Sorry, but flash is never going away. There's Youtube and advertising networks that will guarantee its ubiquity.
Yes, Scribd has had great success and everyone in the HN community should be happy for them. However, there's a legitimate criticism to the direction Scribd is taking - it's arguably bad for the web.

What is the mission? All documents are created offline, uploaded to Scribd and displayed via iPaper? I think we already have a great framework for distributing text information - HTML (Although Scrib's traffic may indicate otherwise). It's flexible, it's fast, and it can be viewed on any device, it can be indexed easily, etc... Think about how much better nytimes.com is then the New York Times newspaper.

Instead of creating new standards, the industry should be trying to help people create HTML formats as first class objects. With that said, it would be really cool to bring all the books/magazines from the past to the internet (books.google.com).
If they get bought, I'll gladly eat my hat. If they become profitable by sharing documents free, whilst expanding the documents size massively by wrapping it in flash, I'll eat another hat.
Dividends, especially with the current capital gains tax rates, are a wonderful solution. This assumes your investors can be patient enough to receive them.
Lifeline for Renewable Power
We can solve that problem when we get there.

And solution could be simple - odometer tax, paid at the emission control.
Michael Steil's excellent C64 talk at 25C3
There are neither 4 nor 3 possibilities: it was given that one child is a girl. So it's either GB or GG. 50% FTW.
The video of the talk --- recommended! --- is at http://www.pagetable.com/?p=53.
The cause of the Zune leap year bug has been isolated to a Freescale date routine
That's very unorthodox. Thanks for sharing.
"and their Objective-J model is better for making applications (vs. web pages with ajax) "

I'm sorry but adding an abstraction layer on top of javascript doesn't make it better then javascript.
Not just those drugs that many deem recreational. I know my perceptions change rather dramatically when I'm hungry vs. satiated, tired vs. rested, happy vs. sad, listening to music vs. listening to waves, in love vs. alone, etc., etc. etc.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. - William Blake
Especially if there's no mid-term liquidity event to hasten a startup's ability to actually pay a dividend.
The solution is to "wait until tomorrow".

Quite embarrassing... but thankfully benign.

http://zuneinsider.com/archive/2008/12/31/30gb-zune-issues-o...
I think the point is the thought - in some areas and in some circles - to when a member of intelligentsia says "I have a start-up" is bewilderment: hence the "why didn't you go to college?" follow up question.

The assumption is that if starting/running businesses isn't what people with an education do, unless they have no other choice. The "default" thing for them is to climb the corporate ladder.

pg talked about this in his "high-res society": http://www.paulgraham.com/highres.html

In a way I could see where this idea comes from: if you lack a college degree (or have one but not from a top-tier school and not with top grades) you're still locked out of some opportunities. The only way to a high ranking position in some companies is to enter as a "college hire" and advanced through the ranks (senior positions are seldom open to outside applicants and there is fear that an experienced applicant will be bored/unmotivated at a junior or entry-level position; academic record is seen as the "best" indication of potential success for a junior applicant). So for those without a college education, often the only way to a senior position is through start-ups.

What doesn't follow - any more - is that for those with an education the only way to a senior position is through a big company. It's still a way (there are lots of smart people at places such as Google, IBM, Amazon, Yahoo), but no longer the only reliable option. Even those at big companies no longer stay with the same big company: "job-hopping" is pretty common for advancement (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse - seeing less competent employees but with higher salaries due to greater negotiating leverage - can be de-motivating for employees who are uninterested in job hopping themselves).

The only way that this assumption is still slightly true is that only big companies offer the chance to work on certain classes of problems that start-ups can not tackle - but here's hope that this will change (and there are indication it is changing).
Its so irreverent it hurts. Upvote for balls.
Bugs happen. The root cause of this disaster is an incomplete test plan.
The Wii/GameCube one definitely is based on the PowerPC designs - I hadn't heard that about the 360 chip. Lo and behold, you're right: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfxbox/?...
Patent Vigilantes: taking the fight to the bad guys' turf
Microsoft Forgets Leap Year, Media Players Freeze
but then, you'd require that startups are profitable, right from their first years, which is hardly the case
Video available via BitTorrent as well. Much faster: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4611622/25c3_Tag4-Saal1-Slot...

It's quite impressive due to the timing involved. It takes approx 2 days to compute the collision. They need to pick an exact time (to the second) that they will request the cert after the collision is computed, and the exact serial number that the CA will issue. They can monitor and increment the serial number as the target time approaches by buying more certs.
I was reading the interview and then happened to check his blog. That is how I came across his latest blog entry and posted it here.
My wife and I are just about to cancel our cable in favor of Netflix (both DVD and streaming) + the odd Bittorrent to fill in the gaps while TV gets its act together. Saving $50 a month pays back an XBox 360 pretty quick (plus I asked for cash this Christmas to defray this expense).

I've been gunning to cancel cable for about two years now, without blowing a wad to do it (ideally I want to come out ahead within a year); early adopters who don't want to spend a ton should start looking at what they actually use the TV for, consider what they watch and where they can find it, and start running the math. Now if I could just get some sort of decent fiber-based internet...
Kenneth Burke, personal supply-chains, and Mao now
i'd also say the developer who did this will be in the 17% of MS staff layed off next month.
Where do you find that knowledge?
Dabbleboard Pro now available
http://www.dabbleboard.com/pro

We'll be sending the mass email soon, but I wanted to tell you all first. (Dabbleboard had also launched on HN first.) We'd appreciate any feedback about free versus Pro differentiation, pricing, promotion, or anything else.

Happy new year!
Strong Opinions, Loosely Held
Happy New 1984
There are real current efforts to create such publications. This is quite relevant in pharmacology and other areas where biostatistics is applied, since there are often fewer incentives to publish the results of, say, a drug trial that fails to find a significant effect.

Hence, The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine (yes, it is actually called that): http://www.jnrbm.com/
Party Time - Solar Power from Metallised Balloons
they should add the option to add a surcharge. This way people can make some money off their data.
Flash simulation of the Enigma cipher machine with visualization of the permutations
We witnessed this as well and a similar, but much shorter trend over Thanksgiving. I would guess it's due to people dealing with holiday stuff and not being at work. My parents still don't believe me that most people don't do anything at work for significant chunks of the day (or in some cases all day).

Traffic is usually best for TicketStumbler Tuesday - Thursday and worst on Saturday & Sunday.
List of top iPhone apps
I shared an apartment with three jazz musicians at one point, and I was amazed at how dedicated they all were. One of them has now become a semi-star on the Jazz scene - but it didn't come cheap. On a normal day he would get up at eight, go to school, then head straight for some training session when he finished. After a quick dinner he would go out and play one or two jobs. On weekends he played 4 or 5 jobs and did some jam sessions or did recordings.

Being a jazz musician may sound like a cozy job, but to get anywhere it takes an 80 hour work week.
We don't have the payment system setup for discount codes yet, but send me an email if you're interested, and I'll send you an HN-only promo code when the system can accept it.
If you can't learn something from a job, then what have we all been putting on our resumes? Some things fall under (questionably enforceable) non-competes, and some things don't. If you learn how to run a purchasing department at K-Mart, does that mean you can't use the knowledge you gained to run the purchasing department at Target? What qualifies as "infrastructure and intelligence"?
I'm getting leery of this pricing scheme, and wish there was an pay-as-you-go option; what keeps happening to us with ASP products like this is:

* it sounds great in week 1,

* so we shell out (say) $30/mo for it,

* life intervenes in week 2,

* we've totally lost our groove with the product,

* we forget about it for 2-3 months,

* and the next time we notice it is when we notice the invoices ---

* --- which don't look so cheap anymore, since we haven't been using the product.

Private shared whiteboards, an awesome idea; I wish I could just pay per whiteboard or something.
Congratulations, zhyder!

I know that this has been a work in progress for a while. It's good to see you roll out the premium version. I hope it takes off.
Have new content daily/weekly has been huge for us especially as organic traffic is concerned.
Not alone: how fluidinfo is organised
Well don't blame him so much, 8 people upvoted it so far.
A price per drawing (or even a price per minute, since we encourage unlimited drawings) might make things more complicated for people too tho. As a user, I think I'd go mad constantly doing the math for how many cents the next few minutes are costing me.

Dabbleboard is not really meant to be something you'd use just once. If it's not something people would use regularly, then we probably just need to improve it further.
That is because some corporate email systems block attached image files.
This seems to me to be more of a descent into wankery than anything else. The one constant of our industry is that language platforms seem to have a 5-9 year popularity-span. Google pushes Python, Java eclipsed C++ for a huge portion of the market, C++ has now supplanted C in many places. (Please note that I know there are outliers in this and it's not an absolute rule! Objective-C, for example, hasn't gone away.)

I enjoy new problems and domains too. It's great to dive into a new subject, and often very valuable. But the reason people say, "Learn a new language ever <time increment>" is because you're not just tackling a new domain, you're talking a new way of understanding domains. This kind of meta-exercise is invaluable, in my opinion.
Kudos on the cool project and +1 for the New Years launch time.
You can add a surcharge using Amazon DevPay. I'll write a blog post about this in the next couple of days!
Bet there's a developer somewhere having a really shitty New Years eve right now...
Wow, I guess I completely missed Dabbleboard to begin with, but it looks pretty sweet! Kudos on creating a product -- and actually having a way to monetize it ;)
This is similar to comments I've heard from profs in the CS area. It's probably cultural. We still have the students that break their backs to be the best, but the majority have been indoctrinated in this "everyone's a winner" mentality.
Some interesting end of semester remarks from a CS professor:

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-1...

The Postlude section is especially relevant.
A lot of things that are great ideas that deserve continuous use are not instantaneously adopted by your customers; until they're adopted fully, the sponsor at those customers has to deal with the risk that they're requesting budget for something nobody's going to use.

But, not criticizing; just giving a data point.
Israel uses YouTube, Twitter to share its point of view
Why doesn't it make any sense? That post mentions that a large number of HUGE business customers are going away (bankrupt financial firms, mergers, etc). Revenue is going down. Does MSFT need 90,000 to do what they need to do to grow/succeed?

That post is interesting, but internal memos of managers saying, "No layoffs!" isn't very reliable. That's EXACTLY what they would be saying if there WERE going to be layoffs to keep people engaged, working hard, and NOT stealing IP.

I'm not saying there are going to be layoffs, but off the cuff I imagine it'd be a pretty good idea. Trim the fat.
I think dividends are interesting for certain classes of startups, particularly during downturns. In boom periods, VCs follow the "dumping" principle. Dump your product for free to as many users as possible to get market share and drown out competitors with a lessor war chest. In a downturn, there should be less of this and more opportunity for businesses to focus on traditional evolution; i.e. getting to profits.

Perhaps we need a new class of VC to accomplish this. Invest in sizes more like an angel but with clear nearer-term profit agenda.
Awesome! :) His blog is always worth a look.
As Trade Slows, China Rethinks Its Growth Strategy
More illustratively, I'd say he's more saying "go to France, then learn French as you go" versus the common programmer course of "learn French then never go there".

Learning Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, etc, can be interesting on its own, but if you instead try to achieve something or learn about a subject area where Haskell, Erlang, or Lisp are strong, it's a far better way of learning. Go to France and then learn French.
This really should be a per-whiteboard, not "x amount of people".
I think the most meaningful "asset" for a newco is "customers willing to pay for a product or service". For most Internet startups, the tech isn't that novel or patentable.

I do not think you need an open exchange to give returns to your investors: "Think Simple".
There is no such thing as a complete test plan.
"But shifting toward a greater reliance on domestic demand is not easy. Chinese households have one of the world’s highest savings rates because the country’s social safety net is in tatters, with families receiving scant government help with education costs, medical care and retirement; the average hospital stay costs the equivalent of two years’ wages for the average Chinese worker."
I was going to buy this book until I came across this very poor review of it on http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1BLJZBGOHH7F9/ref=cm_cr_pr_v...

I figured http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php might be a better alternative source to learn iPhone development from - or at least provide a learning environment thats more engaging than a book. It's free also.
Maybe that's because, from what I see, very few startups are EVER profitable. They just get pumped and dumped.
I know you're not criticizing, and I appreciate the feedback :). I'm hoping these would help with reducing the risk:
1. (Uncrippled) Free version
2. Ease of upgrade/downgrade/cancellation
3. 30-day-free-trial (not yet available) on the Pro versions

The above is pretty standard faire among freemium apps. What makes Dabbleboard different from Basecamp et al (apart from 37s's incredible brand)?
That's still a point of legal contention.

In any case, it's perfectly legal for you to buy a cheap watch and put a Rolex sticker on it as long as you don't sell it on as a "genuine" Rolex.

Something can be "Apple labeled" but not a genuine Apple product. "Apple manufactured" would have made more sense.
Applications for Colleges Clog System
Rob Killion, executive director of the Common Application, played down the delays and said the site had been running some upgrades in anticipation of a flood of applications. "That process briefly slowed the system down a bit and perhaps even caused a 'timeout' error for some users," Mr. Killion wrote. More than a million high school seniors use the Common Application. Last year, the organization said that more than 171,000 applications were filed in the 72 hours from Dec. 30 through Jan. 1., 75,000 of them on Dec. 31.
Factually inaccurate. The computer described is not a Mac.
One of Dabbleboard's unique features is the personal library. We want to encourage users to save stuff to reuse later, and charging per drawing would go against that.
> * it sounds great in week 1,
> * so we shell out (say) $30/mo for it,
> ...
> * we forget about it for 2-3 months

The harsh reality is that if it wasn't for people forgetting/ignoring monthly subscription charges ASPs would be significantly less profitable. I think the pay as you go model can be even more profitable for certain services, but not for most ASPs.
apt and KDE 4 both run on Mac OS X.
I have exactly the same problem with Basecamp, which you can take in one of two ways:

(1) "having the same issues as 37signals is one of those good problems to have"

(2) "if this causes problems even for Basecamp prospects, maybe there's an issue with the model"

We bought Basecamp a while ago, and while we haven't chucked it yet, we're not happy with the purchase, and knowing that we're dropping money on it every month doesn't make us more forgiving.

Maybe you could do risk-free one month trial thing?
ON THE OTHER HAND

Maybe (in all seriousness) people like us are just the wrong customers for you at this moment, and there's 5,000 companies who will be less high-maintenance, and you should just write us off.
What does the author mean by, "People are only an hour away from registering online for a new business."?
s/forget/aren't psychologically equipped/g

Like the gym memberships, eh.
Yes he was motivated by money, but in the same way that you're motivated by food. It's important for accomplishing your goals, but there are more important things.
Yep, I don't expect you (and other HNers) to be the right customers, but you're the best feedback-ers!
Career Toolkits
This site has tons of information on different careers and schools. Can learn about salaries and career requirements ... check it out!
Update Twitter, Doogie Howser M.D. Style
Then instead of sending an email, just append a bit of text in a text file. Separate those bits with a few blank lines and a "----" or something.

Keep a text file for each month, or week. Keep a directory for each year.

If your wife has something to add, have her either add to the text file herself, or else have her just type it up in gedit and you'll take care of moving the text.

Putting every little thing about your kid's life into emails is a recipe for disaster. Google will know more about him than anyone should know about anyone. That's obscene. Really. If you don't believe me, email Bruce Schneier or somebody and ask what they think.

And, besides, if you did email every single little thing to him, could you imagine the headache of looking through all those emails? I know from experience how difficult it is to clean out my inbox. Could you imagine a whole childhood of them?
Link directly to service: http://www.twoogie.com/
It isn't much of an aptitude test in this case.
I tried learning Objective-J when it first came out. It was nice and all but I couldn't shake the feeling of uneasiness that I could be writing this app in Javascript + jQuery.
Petition on Digg to remove power users has 19000+ Diggs
stop reading huge lists and go fucking make something
The Enigma was a very advanced cipher at the time, even though it was eventually broken. Not that long ago, if you think about it. Which makes you wonder if a slightly more advanced civilization can visualize and take apart MD5, SHA-1 and AES just as easily as we can the Enigma.
This behavior is at least partially derivative of the Internet startup culture of "get-rich-quick fail-fast". It does tend to breed unmerited arrogance. This too will pass. 2009 will be a great corrector of this culture.
30gb zune issues -- official update
As italians say, "se non è vero, è ben trovato". ("Even if it is not true, it is well conceived")
You might want to swap the "Not a registered user? Sign Up" with "Already a registered user? Login". Depending on how people get in there. Or maybe there's an even better solution that handles both scenarios better...not sure.

I think the /pro page is overly verbose. But you could probably keep all the same info if you organized it better. You almost can't spend too much time on this page because any improvement is going to result in significantly increased revenue over time. http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1496-design-decisions-the...