skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is exactly what puzzles me. I live in Minnesota and there is a TON of cheap land out there.

Seasteading is not about cheap real-estate. It is about reducing the barrier to exit, in order to encourage healthy competition between nations for customers (e.g. citizens). http://www.seasteading.org/stay-in-touch/press-releases/intr...

"The world needs a new model of politics where a diverse ecosystem of providers offers a variety of institutions that evolve to serve their citizens. The open oceans, Earth's last frontier, are the ideal place to nurture this vision of a better world. By making it safe and affordable to settle this frontier, we will give people the freedom to choose the government they want instead of being stuck with the government they get.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aseasteading.org+monopo...

The Industry of Government

Think of government as an industry. Citizens pay taxes, for which they receive government services. Each government has a monopoly over one geographic area, but citizens can switch providers by moving to other countries. This industry has two main features that make it horribly uncompetitive.

❑ High cost of switching providers:

The first is the cost of switching providers. Because of the geographic monopoly, in order to change governments, you have to change countries. That means you have to leave your job, sell your house, pack your possessions, leave your friends, apply for new citizenship, get a new job, buy a new house, and so foth. This cost is enormous compared to any other service provider switch (cell phones, car insurance, even employers). Because of this people are unlikely to do it very often. For it to be worthwhile to move, the difference to an individual between two governments must be higher than this huge cost. This dramatically reduces market feedback for providers of government services. So its natural for govts to exploit the current customer base, because of this huge barrier keeping them from leaving.
The term "self-reflection" dates back to 1652, so why change it?

I'm saying it shouldn't have been used in the first place. It's an awkward, confusing metaphor. Programs aren't "reflecting", because "self-reflection" is something that only a sentient creature can perform. Programs currently have no concept of "self". I'd say "reflection" is less accurate than "type information", which covers at least 95% of use cases, if not more.

I don't think concepts should be misnamed at the expense of accuracy.

Neither do I. Also, all else being equal, less metaphors are better.
If you look at the Platform as a Service space, a lot of development work is done automatically. For example, upload a spreadsheet and the data persistence layer is inferred from the data itself, no need to manually create the tables, the pojos, etc. Just drag and drop.

On top of that, all the security is built in. Email notifications, built in. All this in addition to the scalability of the cloud infrastructure. No need to build in clustering, failover, etc -- all handled automagically.
I tend to buy software and services in that price range by the year for both myself and clients. Expensing or invoicing a small monthly charge is too much hassle. Note, however, I am more hassle sensitive than price sensitive. I am also somewhat resistant to automatic charges, but that is probably just me. OTOH Neflix goes quite well with a small monthly charge. Maybe the yearly charge for them is a barrier.

Your charge is so small that I suspect the recurring charge will generate a lot more money than a one-time charge or the lifetime charge.
I think this issue is a great example of something. We defend what we are used to. Desperately.

When we see a 2-4 yr difference in either direction over what we allow our kids to do, we are generally appalled. "He's 15 & can't take a bus!?" "She let an 11 yr old take the train herself!?"

An interesting trend I've seen between myself & my brother (12 yrs Junior) is that he & his friends seem to have slightly less desire for freedom. Sure they are annoyed when they're limited, but it comes up less frequently. I think a lot of it comes down to video games, internet & such. What they do with friends, it's mostly at home. We were never home at 10-15 yrs. Nothing to do at home. So most days we went out with friends. We naturally hit more resistance from parents who had a harder time tracking where we were. It also highlighted who had more or less freedom. Our parents got used to us being 'gone' as 11 year olds. Now it feels like kids are at one house or another, easier to track. Cell Phones help. In my particular world, I think many things have moved 2-3 years older.

When I was a child, I lived in the US. We had no freedom at all. One reason was crime rates, particularly random crime rates which are the thing that really contributes to your feeling of safety. Another major factor was geography. Couldn't walk anywhere in those sprawling US cities. Kids had to be driven to school. Friends lived far away, etc.
> And, what are the odds that your team is as good as Amazon's?

S3 was down unscheduled more in 2008 than we were. (I only know about their major published widely outages, and know about all of ours that lasted more than 15 seconds.)

I realize that's not a perfect indicator, maybe it was an especially bad year for S3/good year for us, nor is their app apples-to-apples against ours, but one of the primary reasons we CAN'T afford to go even to S3 for "cheap" file storage is that it represents a serial reliability problem: both "them" and "us" have to be up for us to make money.

When we price it out, the 3-year fully burdened cost of our in-house storage vs S3 pricing is about a wash. (It's 5-10% in favor of in-house, but I'm sure we're not perfectly fairly accounting for all the tiny costs [someone has to file purchase orders, do shipping/receiving, calculate depreciation and file tickets to let EMC techs into our DCs to replace failed drives, etc, etc] in our model, but that is after accounting for the IT team dedicated to storage and the on-call rotation portion allocated to storage.)

If we were a lot smaller, it would be a no-brainer to try to use cloud services where it made sense, but as Tom said and anamax clarified, once you're at scale and have access to good IT staff in-house, the cloud offerings are not particularly compelling cost-savings measures.

(Edit: I should perhaps clarify. We do use S3 now, in production, for one of our offerings that is not core to our business, and one for which an arbitrary 8 hours of downtime would not present a problem. We also built two years ago the ability to overflow our bulk/cold image uploads to S3 if we run out of space on our in-house storage. Here again, if we suddenly find ourselves having substantial unforecast demand, it's better to go out to a third party than to turn customers away because the disk is full.

99.90% is >>> 0.00%. :) )
Since, in my opinion, the users of a website determine it's success; most of the things you mention seem irrelevant or otherwise disputable. Do you have any proof to back up your claims that DIV based pages are better indexed by search engines or increasingly cashed as compared to table based layouts?

And usability and accessibility, come on! How is a DIV based page more accessible (what do you mean by this anyway?) or more usable then a tabled layout from the users point of view?
Really? Come on.

I'm certainly guessing here, but it seems pretty common sense. Ask 100 embryonic startups who are considering this path which investment entity would be their first choice and what do you think you'd learn? I think you'd learn that (if they'd done their homework) they'd pick the one with the longest track record, the best PR, the biggest demo day, the most competitive program (as measured by application-to-acceptance) and the most founders who got rich. YC wins on all of those fronts.

Even if your regional theory holds (it probably does for a meaningful percentage of startup, but plenty are willing to relocate), wouldn't you assume that the bay area has WAY more qualifying software startups who'd be interest in such things and thus (mathematically) would attract more good ones?
Hey - before answering the specific questions, I'd take a step back and say that the ultimate judge on web services like outbrain should be the user, not the court (assuming the service is legal, and I believe that both linking and framing are perfectly legal). I think outbrain offers great value to all 3 stakeholders - the reader, the blogger installing us, and the site receiving traffic - and so I hope these stakeholders keep us honest and let us know if we're doing anything that's distasteful in their mind. If you search for references about outbrain on the web you'll find that they are all very positive.

Specifically -
1) We do not request the content creator's permission, and don't think we need to. The content we link to is published publicly, and linking to it is perfectly legal. As I mentioned before, we'll gladly block links to any site that's not interested in them promptly after getting a take-down request.
(BTW - why would you expect services like outbrain to ask for upfront linking permission, but not from say Google?)

2) I think what you said is reasonable... we're in business for providing a great product and getting people to use it. I think that is fine.
As for the crawling - our crawler respects your robots.txt settings, so if you wish to prevent us from indexing your site you can easily do so.

4) Our business model will likely evolve around advertising, though the frame will probably not play a major role on that. As I said above - we hope our bloggers and readers keep us honest and let us know as soon as we breach their respect of our product. Our users' loyalty is paramount to us, and we would not breach that trust too easily...

5) Any solution other than framing would require us to pull the target page and insert our code into it. That is something we would not do because that really is distasteful - for example, it would affect the site's ability to properly serve and count their ads.

Bottom line - a frame is far from perfect - I agree with you about that - but I don't think it's inherently evil if used with some care.
Top 5 Ways To Make Money Online Via Blogging
Most, if not all, of the visitors that read my article on this blog are bloggers that are interested in making money online. I started my first blog with absolutely no intention to monetize it. However, as I got more interested into blogging, I started to explore my option and different ways of monetizing a blog. I started visiting popular blogs like ProBlogger and others to see how the hell they were making money by just writing in an online journal!
Am I the only person who finds CSS easier to write and easier to wrap your head around? I don't think I could go back to tables without a significant effort in changing the way I do things. CSS has just become natural. Maybe the author just needs more experience or practice.
First, http://shouldiusetablesforlayout.com/ for the idealist in me.

Second, http://giveupandusetables.com/ for practicality.
Inlining styles can be a good way to boost performance for webpages that tend to be viewed once and left, like Google or Yahoo's home page.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

It seems as if having external CSS is only good for scalability due to caching. If you knew a page wasn't going to be revisited, you would inline it to save an extra http request.
Nope, doesn't sounds like the tone of the article to me. It seems he merely states it makes no sense to rigidly hang on to "being one of the cool guys" and spend hours, if not days, getting your layout done using only DIVs.
Terrific line:

Note, however, I am more hassle sensitive than price sensitive.
Really? Cmon really?

Please, we all came to here to escape individuals like yourself.
They took him before a public prosecutor for a deposition. It doesn't say he was charged, but it sounds like he was detained. May "arrested" was too strong, but it certainly wasn't something that could be laughed off.
My possible startup idea on the web/speech was to have a bookmarklet that would send the URL of the page you are on to my service, it would check for recordings of that page, and if any were found embed a flash player in the page so you could hear the text.

If not, you could record something and send it in. It would be a web2 site in the sense that other people would do most of the work ;)

However, I forsee more problems than really useful features, including: checking for accuracy and verbal abuse hidden in submitted recordings, the sheer amount of stuff on the internet making it unlikely that you'd find what you're looking for, and the fact that really (near)blind people would already have screen readers and embedded flash wont help too much, and comments on blogs wouldn't be a good fit for it.
Did you, by any change, invest any money in "semantically correct" web development? Take a chill pill...
A well written and compelling argument. Way above the average CSS/Table rant for sure.
Tables should be used sparingly, but there's also cost/benefit to using them. Development time is lower and cross-browser compatibility is increased. The only really bad thing that I've seen about using them is that they can increase rendering time.
I'm very wary of people who cling to principles as if they're sacred truths that shall never be broken. I think these sorts of things serve better as guiding principles.
Yes, it is considered normal for a Japanese child in elementary school to get themselves to and from school.

For the first few years they typically travel in gigantic groups with an adult chaperone -- think of it like meeting your schoolbus at the corner, except the bus is a bunch of people walking together. After that, they'll mostly be biking to school alone or in small groups.

Factors which make this more common than the U.S: hyper-secure streets, availability of public transportation (it isn't unusual in my neck of the woods for home and school to be separated by a 30 minute train ride), hyper-secure public transportation, and a good lump of inertia. (How many institutions like that really change, when you think about it. The U.S. still has a summer vacation so that kids can help Mom and Dad on the farm, for Pete's sake.)
From a strictly architectural viewpoint, the concept design has a serious flaw. Note that in the inboard units have only windows that look directly at the windows of the inboard unit on the other side. I can't imagine someone taking the risk to live on the ocean, and for a view, can only see in the window of their neighbor. The design definitely needs improvement :)
The article's argument would carry more weight if the author gave an example using tables where he changes the order without affecting the layout.

The whole point of the argument is to show that if you change the order with the CSS version, things move around. Then he goes on to show a static table. What the article really proves is that tables are not better than CSS. And CSS can do millions of things that tables can't (I'm not trying to start a troll on that topic). So I'll stick with CSS, thanks.

There is one valid point in the argument: improving CSS so that you can position elements in relation to each other by name would help. So I could say that the DIV element called "left" should be on the left of the "center" element. Right now, relative order is based on the order in the HTML source.
Change We Can Profit From: A start-up inspired by Barack Obama
What urban America got for its subsidy was the food you claim can be raised in urban areas and the transportation infrastructure to move materials where needed. Yeah, we'll just level midtown Manhattan to raise 100 acres of corn. It'd be cheaper to just eat dollar bills.

What's literally possible and what's economically and logistically feasible are not necessarily the same.
When I read the title, my first thought was "wtf is that dumb bitch thinking now". I should stop reading digg altogether. XD
Tdavis is an ok guy, though he did kind of lose it in that last comment.
I worked in PR at a boutique agency between 2004-2006. We charged clients between $5000-$15000 per month, billing at about $100/hour.

With this kind of service, the agency will define your target media and create a media list, create messaging and operational strategy, call reporters and pitch stories about you, and report to you on the stories that are placed about you.

You might also get services like media training for interviews, ghost-writing of articles to place in magazines, research on competitors media placements, and maybe even something like a PR emergency plan if you are a large business or in a business with high media risk.
Students call the space station with home-built radio
Men's Comebacks to Women's Comebacks
Consider your passions and your skills and try to focus on projects at the intersection of the two.
He makes a great point. Besides, your tables will work on more browsers than the CSS layouts.
Google is now officially evil
<http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=64de7d408b32e021&hl=en&fid=64de7d408b32e021000461f9a382cc7a>
A spam storm of SMS replies from the google SMS service is driving people crazy, not to mention running up their cell bills and google is doing nothing to stop it.
You do, in a way. Only you lose real-life karma through diminished possibility for success :)

The procrast thing always seemed insanely odd to me. It's trivial to override and it seems like a diet plan akin to writing "don't eat me" on all the junk food in your house.

Read HN or do not. There is noprocrast.
Yes, but at what age do they move out of their parents' homes?
After reading this all I can think is...

Note to self: Block Italian IP's

How on earth does a case like this get prosecuted?
When I'm presented with a project (by myself or someone else), my thought flow is usually like this:

1, Is this project interesting to me?
I usually trust my gut on this one and what I'm interested on is temporally-variant. I can only apply my self 100% to things I find an interest in.

2, What is the market viability of this project?
I do a bit googling around to see if there are any existing implementations of this product. I try to think of usage scenarios and I will google for communities who might need this product, read about what they have to say and find out more about their needs so that the implementation of the product can be geared towards them.

Even if a product has 0 market-demand, I might still work on it because of step (1) and I simply treat it as a learning experience ( such is the case of kpicturebooth.com ).

3, I work out the logistics
- can I work on this on my own ?
- if the project was presented to me by someone else, what is the team like?
- how long will it take, can I fit it into my school schedule?

If I deem the project infeasible, I might try to work on one part at a time or get people to help me.
Something wrong with iCal
People attack the giant and the giant is Wal-Mart. They are bad because they are golliath.

The truth is, they provide one stop shopping for millions of customers who previously had to drive to many different stores to buy groceries, clothes and other household items -- and gas too!

In this way, not only does wal-mart save customers money, but they also save them time. This is true of Target, et al as well, but my point is that Wal-Mart does good things for a lot of people.
I'll stick with CSS. I've never once had to place CSS items out of order that is a ridiculous statement. There is a place for tables from time to time but once you actually "understand" CSS, life becomes much easier. I think the problem with most people is, they are told to use CSS, but without guidance they might not understand the core and basics.
I have a really tough time with this, and often bounce back and forth between side projects.

Erdos was supposedly really good at helping people pick research problems to work on which would have just the right difficulty given their capabilities. I can't find the exact quote, but it was in the book "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers"

pg had some advice in an essay on high school:
http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

Excerpt:

"Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)"
From the link:

> Hi everyone,

> Thanks for responding so quickly. We are looking into the > issue, and as soon as I have an update, I'll post it
> here. If you don't have an unlimited SMS plan, and
> you're worried about SMS charges, please let your carrier > know about the situation.

> -Zeke

Shit happens.
Ouch. It sounds like something a mom would use to guilt their kid.

".. I spent 36 hours in labor for you, and this is how you treat me!!"
Another one:
http://imagebin.ca/view/UmJ_Midi.html
What happens when you turn it on an you spend too much time on the site? Doesn't load? And isn't the other loophole simple logging out?
Yes, OP's book's claims seem doubtful.

I don't see many unaccompanied 6-year-olds in trains around Tokyo, but then elementary schools are typically within walking distance. It's fairly common to see an older sibling (say, 10~12 y.o.) taking care of a smaller kid.

Anyway, maybe you can find some things that a typical Japanese x-year-old can do that an American x-year-old cannot. That doesn't mean they're "independent" from their parents, though. If anything, I'd say Japanese kids are more dependent on their parents that "Western" kids. Some 6-year-olds still bathe with their parents.
In reply to 3.

If your application changes enough, then isn't it a different app, thereby allowing you to charge for a new feature set?

Seems like ideal price discrimination to me (good for producer/provider).
HOP: A Language for Programming the Web 2.0 (Google Tech Talk by Manuel Serrano)
The Case of the Crashed Phone Call
Mine is ok: http://srtd.org/~yan/Picture%204.png
And "minimal" here doesn't mean something necessarily aimed at power users like fluxbox, ratpoison or awesome.

I've always thought of xfce as a sort of gnome-lite-- it looks just as pretty and has all the gui toolbars and widgets that you would expect, but uses a tiny fraction of the resources. It's a great desktop environment for laptops and older computers.
His argument that you could take expert code and accidentally break it without much effort at all is a pretty sound one. I've designed a lot of stuff in CSS and I'm debating whether it's worth just putting it all in a table and getting it over with.
I tried to use it, got annoyed at the signup form, filled it in with a throwaway email account, then gave up when it expected me to go click a link in the email account before i could use the site.

You should allow use of the site without a login. Just have them log in if they want to save their preferences. Don't make email required. Why would I want to give my email address to a porn site?
shit happens, but responsible companies do something about it, not just say "shit happens"