skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you absolutely KNEW that someone had HIV and they spit (say) into your mouth, wouldn't you worry about it at least a little bit? Even though you know it's silly?

I think most humans are irrationally fearful about things like HIV.
The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time
To be fair, the Pirate Bay is almost exclusively tracking pirated software. It's also unfair to compare tapes and radio to the mass distribution and indexing ability of the Internet.
My in-dash unit does this. It works great for tunnels and parking garages.
Not as many people would pay for Twitter as you seem to think.

Where are they going to go? Back to email, IRC, or Blogspot? I doubt it. To Twitter's cheaper competitors? How are they going to stay in business?

Rather than just die, Twitter will monetize. Though I doubt that they would monetize by simply charging people to read Tweets. That's much too blunt. There are more subtle methods of throttling the free-account users and thereby encouraging them to pay: limit the outgoing tweet rate, limit the rate of direct messaging, limit the number of followers or followees, lower the number of allowed characters by five for each successive tweet that you write on a given day...

Here's an idea: charge for low latency. If you're on the free plan at Twitter you can make as many tweets as you like and they will be sent to your followers and posted to the public site... eventually. Within, say, 2 hours (or 4 hours, or 8 hours). But if you want instant Tweeting you've got to buy a (fairly cheap) subscription.

Any such change will cause an uproar, so Twitter won't do it unless they have to. But if they have to, I expect they will. They're not just going to fold up and die.
The part about the kitten isn't directly relevant to the pirate bay, I'll give you that. Though I look at the cartoon as more of an over all social commentary about our current state of affairs; not "this is our situation."

All too often the copyright lawyers said DMCA takedowns against just such videos. Heck they've sent takedowns to youtube because a person was singing copy written music (cough viacom cough).

As someone already said and I'm sure many others will agree, the current system is broken.

The internet allows for piracy at a scale that far surpasses the scale of sharing tapes among friends, but it's not going away and need to be capitalized on. It's a dirt cheap distribution method that should be used to it's fullest potential.

The argument that a pirated copy equals a lost sale is total bunk. I would have bought maybe 1% of what I've downloaded. Why? Cause the other 99% is crap. And I don't know that until I've heard it. I don't hear it until I download it. The radios are owned and controlled so that the one good song on the whole album is played, and the rest isn't.

If someone can find it I'd be grateful, but WIRED had a chart in an article sometime about 2004 showing that: average length of song is trending down, number of songs per album trending down, number of new artists trending down, number of albums per artist trending down, cost per album trending up, piracy trending up, and sales trending down. So yeah, it must be solely the fault of the internet and those dirty pirates that the music business is slowly falling.....
If you have a team full of idiots, revision control is not your highest priority.
Pray tell me, what are these root issues you speak of? I'm mostly in agreement with vaksel. I don't see how the copyright system has anything to do with how the MPAA/RIAA tries to enforce it's copyright upon meaningless things like dancing videos of babies.

Which by the way happened http://www.switched.com/2008/08/21/dancing-baby-lawsuit-turn...
I agree, which is also why I think this spectrial was a mishap to begin with. They should have not attacked torrenting in general, they needed to attack the fact that Pirate Bay did nothing to remove torrents even by request. They also needed to show that Pirate Bay tracks almost exclusively pirated software/movies/music.

They went after the wrong thing, because torrenting isn't inherently bad. It's only bad if people use it in the wrong way. Which, granted, happens a lot.
AMEX Offering Members $300 To Cancel Accounts
I've always found statements like this baffling. In my school there was very little picking on. The kids who did one thing did their thing, the other kids did the other. The whole era of bullying disappeared when we all turned 14 or so.

Mike is running a start-up. I can respect that. He sacrifices a lot of quality to be the first man on the scene: I don't like that, but I'm impressed as hell at his track record. He has a history of being a socialite and a bit of a jerk, neither of which I like, but at the same time that doesn't make him a bad person, just a person period.

I spent my high school life fiddling with computers, writing, and talking to teachers, and I had incidents of bullying myself. The whole "picked-on pickers-on" idea is a false dichotomy.
People still care about Facebook? Why?
Five words: Passwords in the browser cache
Where are they going to go? Back to email, IRC, or Blogspot? I doubt it. To Twitter's cheaper competitors? How are they going to stay in business?

I actually don't use Twitter at all because for me Tumblr does far more, and it does it more effectively. (Tumblr actually has a Twitter client now.) There are a lot of other companies that do what Twitter does. Friendfeed, Jaiku are the two that come fastest to mind.

I'm certain Twitter won't die, because there are a lot of options open to them. Monetization directly is not their best option, though. They've been free for too long for that to easily work.
By a group of users? You mean the people you are following? From the page posted:

Getting your friend's status

When users you follow update their status, it will
be sent to the channel as a message from them.
@replies are also sent to the channel as messages.
The diff seems to be that Americans take a group's name as a synecdoche while Brits apparently think of it as a plural noun.

Would the British rendition be "U2 say it will" or "U2 say they will"?
For about 175,000,000 reasons.
To be fair, the quote isn't all that wrong. If you know enough to recognize the problems, you probably aren't getting much from the article anyway.
I think the model its pretty good, one of the most effective ways of advertising is the internet.

But I think Google will grow weaker everyday because of competition (But that can take more than 20 years).

IMHO the fact that Yahoo had missed so bad on web ads is one of the biggest failures in business history.
I really want to see what Techcrunch says.

While this is terribly unprofessional, Techcruch had it coming to them.
Interesting to read this in the historical context (1998). e.g. ... and with Microsoft's financial muscle, Hotmail's juggernaut appears unstoppable.
http://www.npg.org/facts/us_imm_decade.htm [<--illegals are not included]

Around 1900 most of the immigrants came from Europe. Increasingly, this was Eastern and Southern Europe. Resistance started increasing, at one extreme by the KKK, but in a general sense throughout the population. Policies changed, the depression hit, and it dropped. 1965 came and the closet Marxists were in charge. Ted Kennedy sponsored new legislation:

"Out of deference to the critics, I want to comment on … what the bill will not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S.500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. Thirdly, the bill will not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with contagious disease or serious mental illness. As I noted a moment ago, no immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge … the charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage."(Senate Part 1, Book 1, pp. 1-3)

If a Senator mentioned the importance of ethnic mix today, he'd be strung up by his balls. But even Teddy did it in 1965--things have changed utterly. At any rate, every single word was a total falsehood. The above quote has the greatest concentration of mendacity that I've ever read.

Look at the numbers in the link above. The United States is being turned into a different country, a Latin American country, an Asian country, an African country all at once, many, many times faster than it turned European after 1492.

Obviously, some people have reason to be happy about this, but drop the bullshit. Policy is not guided by "populist racial attitudes". If it was, the immigration level would be NEGATIVE six million/decade. Numbers don't lie.
Django 1.1 alpha 1 released
Microsoft Quells Severance Firestorm, Lets Ex-Employees Keep Their Cash
Web of trust for scientific peer review
I totally agree. I feel that if something is important, than the message should not be only available to people who can afford to read/hear the message, but should be readily available for anyone who is willing to learn. Whenever I read a great book, or hear a great song, I try to promote it as much as possible because I think that it is important that the artist's message is heard and understood by as many people as possible. Some of my favourite 'artists' (such as Franz Kafka and Carl Sagan) held day jobs in professional/scientific fields. I realize that their material is copyrighted, but my point is that art and learning/the spreading of ideas should be done for the sake of art itself or learning itself, not for the sake of profit. I chose those two as examples because they made their living (for the most part) by working at their day jobs, and created their art because they wanted to deliver a message, not because they wanted to get rich.
Think of it from Apple's point of view. Right now, you're leagues ahead of the competition feature-wise. You have all the publicity. Your competitor launched an OS that got mocked for ripping off of you, then got criticized for breaking in a lot of really simple, stupid ways. Meanwhile, your last release added an enormous heap of features, unified all of your various features under a single, ultrasimplistic interface.

The smart move isn't expansion. Apple covers more space than any other company and any other out-of-the-box operating system. Now they're ahead, and they can spend time working on the little details, emphasizing perfectionism. They can slim down and make things faster and more enjoyable. They could add more features, but right now why bother?

When you look at the things Snow Leopard is adding you get a good idea of Apple's plan. They're rumored to be making Quicktime Pro free, which means suddenly it becomes as powerful as Preview (which is an incredible, overlooked application). They're possibly adding support for other video codecs out-of-the-box, which means they're doing the one thing Quicktime ought to have done from the beginning.

Meanwhile, this new Stacks view gives them spatial navigation from the Dock with an Apple twist, which is excellent. I used a stack that used the list view for navigation and gave up on it because it was too ugly and didn't let me drag. Now, you can browse your computer with a single click on your Dock if you want to. That's excellent. It begins to provide an alternative to the Finder, and while it's not solving the real problems, it solves the main one of "let me get to my stuff quickly and attractively".

At the same time, they're refining their applications. iMovie gets the features that 08 lost. iPhoto increases its consumer focus. GarageBand's big new thing isn't the lessons but the refined interface, which has made it one of my favorite OS X applications. Pages gets fullscreen mode, Keynote gets themes, Numbers gets extensibility.

They've got a huge featureset. Now they can focus on making it all elegant and streamlined, even more so than it is now. I'm very excited for this release for that reason. I suspect it'll be a delight to use.
"The parser now understands `|&' as a synonym for `2>&1 |', which redirects the standard error for a command through a pipe."

This is kinda nice, and continues the tradition of taking the best features of tcsh.
I wonder what it is valued at today?
Finder's being ported to Cocoa might be a sign that Apple's looking to fix things? I hope so.

I haven't noticed recently because now I use Quicksilver to browse everything, and it's incredibly more efficient. I wish Apple would just make Quicksilver a built-in feature of their OS.
The vast majority of people looking at that claim probably wouldn't include mobile devices in Internet viewers anyway. What kind of Flash content producer would say "oh, it's Flash, so it has high penetration among mobile devices, good"? If you want to reach mobile devices, you target them. It's implicit that we're talking about desktops here.
To be more concise: When using Hotmail in 1997 on a college machine, I found that the cache contained people's Hotmail passwords. That's not a sign of genius.
This post is pretty informative. I also wanted to point out that Gregg Pollack and New Relic have been putting up videos in a 13-part series on the topic of scaling Rails.

http://railslab.newrelic.com/

Although the videos offer this information, along with 'live' examples so you can see what's going on with the different cachine mechanisms, I like having something written that I can use as a reference. This blog post is perfect for that.
I Don’t Want To Live in a Post-Apocalyptic World
Wow, that is one bogus looking article.
PyBrain: Machine Learning Toolkit for Python
This is true. Regardless of our opinions of Facebook, it has been able to find its way into the daily workflow of the lives of an exponential number of people. This makes it a huge asset to many parties.
I love that Sussman story.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe," Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

If you ever hear Sussman tell it, he'll claim Minsky actually told him "Randomly wired, it will have preconceptions--you just won't know what they are."
Actually, the less talented a team is, the more important I'd say VCS would be. Idiots is one thing - but mediocre programmers I'd love to have on VCS of any kind (VCS in my mind excludes things like VSS). It means that when someone blows something up, you can (at least in theory) undig the hole.
Well, no, not exactly. I don't want to run an IRCd. I want it to output to a specific channel on a public network. I think I've found something, just haven't played with it yet.
Indeed, my mom's 2004 lexus's builtin GPS will automatically recalc the route as you do whatever you want.

There are very few features to differentiate GPS systems. The chipsets themselves have become pretty good, and the good ones aren't terribly expensive. Instead vendors have to find other ways to do it. Inevitably that's going to be finding really irritating ways to make people want a higher-up model.

On another note, I really should get her a new maps DVD..
agree 100%! i tend to shoot the blog owner an email when i see this.
The fact of the matter is that numbers speak. Facebook is my identity on the web, and I bet it is yours too. It is too late to turn back. Unless they do something 10x worse than Beacon, I'm not leaving, and I doubt you will either.

I'm afraid they control your web identity. You know what though, I'm okay with it. It makes my life easier.
> some people have reason to be happy about this

Obviously not you, LOL.
Technically the first 3 lines have all five languages.
BBC Book List Meme Made Up
Google apologizes after asking foundation to withdraw funding to Consumer Watchdog
Is this posting an example of your new approach to hiring? :) You're communicating the skills you require in a pretty standard way.
For posterity (hopefully this link will last longer than the front page), here’s what was on it:

http://static.thepiratebay.org/doodles/cartoonish.gif
> Many of them have deemed this to be a huge PR misstep, but it’s likely that Microsoft PR never even knew about the letter in the first place
"How dare you"... sounds like something a woman would say
Ask HN: That AJAX-based SQL editor...
I hate to submit a question like this, but not too long ago, someone released a tool they made. It was a site where you could drag around database tables, add columns manually, et cetera, all with AJAX.

Does anyone have the link?
Social Web Q&A with Google’s Kevin Marks
Automatically backup mysql database to Amazon S3 using django (Python) script
I don't really get why people would want to come to the US. Your taxes buy you nearly nothing; you are own your own for education and healthcare. There is no public transportation.

(But oh yeah, there's a tax break for buying a new car, but not one for using your bicycle every damn day. God bless America!)

Anyway, I would appreciate it if Europe made it easier to migrate there.
175M people that don't click ads, and have no money.
This is a really interesting Q&A about OpenSocial. We're trying to decide right now if we want to integrate it into our project, http://konnect.me, but I am not sure it is gaining the traction.

Facebook not being on board the OpenSocial bandwagon is unfortunate. Things would be much better for the industry if they weren't doing their own proprietary thing with Facebook Connect. Of course, if I was in their position, I'd probably do the same thing.
I bet it is yours too.

I do have a Facebook profile... but I visit the site maybe once every three months, and all the data is the fake data I put in 4 years ago. My real identity is this thing called a "web page" that is the first Google result for my name.
I'd love to see the numbers to back this up. Gotta love that a company is essentially bribing its customers to quit. They must be pretty bad to justify the $300 bribe.
The Internet Likes Monopolies
Django 1.1 a1 release notes
You know after the huge gap between 0.96 and 1.0, I was a bit sceptical about their roadmap, but seeing this I am becoming a rebeliever!
I dunno if this is such great news or not. Reading the article, it said that this antibody appeared in concert with autoantibodies. The price of having them might mean that you get an autoimmune disease instead of AIDS. Not fun in either case (although probably a step up).

Of course, the researchers might just isolate the part of the protein that makes it work and figure out more stuff.
Perhaps happy days are ahead.
HN FOWA Miami Meetup
Just realized the FOWA conference is tomorrow, and some HN users might be in town. If you are, comment here and let's try to organize to meetup at the after party at Nikki Beach. We can also work on an "after after party" :-).
Nudist On The Lateshift is a great book by Po Bronson about the making and selling of Hotmail. It was pretty inspirational for me.
I'd like a meetup!

Twitter: @bunsen
Fixing public education, the last great monopoly, should be left to the capitalist
I think "$('#my-page-area')" is #6 actually (doing a CSS-style selector probably via jQuery or something)

I'm not sure that it's "how not to do web development", but it's certainly "this is common: what's a better way?".
Was it WWW SQL Designer: http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/demo/?keyword=default

Also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476028
Scan it, ship it off to your outsourced art talent, tell them what sort of deliverable you need, and let them worry about how they accomplish it. They're the professionals, after all.

(Outsourced artistic talent is very, very cheap. Find somebody you like on one of the sites, develop a working relationship, bring them work on a regular basis. Its a win for you and a win for them: you don't waste your super-valuable time doing low-value-added tasks, they don't have J. Clueless Client asking for 15 revisions and then dickering around with actually paying them for services rendered.)
See _Founders_At_Work_ pp. 17-29, if you're interested in a longer version.
While users aren't everything, I find it hard to believe that a site with 70 million uniques in the US alone will collapse. However, as a company, it will likely have to contract.
The Twenty Five Most Valuable Blogs (2009)
"Mr. Kritzman devised an elaborate method to take such contingencies into account." -- Markov chain Monte Carlo maybe?
I've a friend who is paranoid about his online identity and always gives fake data to websites. Recently he was ranting that some online car insurance thing gave him an awful quote, much worse than his present deal. Hmm, could that be because his fake identity had no credit history...?

The benefits of a coherent identity on and offline are only going to get more compelling.
That is a defensive line of thinking.

False modesty is not the opposite of arrogance. Arrogance is not defined as that thing which makes someone more likely to speak up when something is wrong.

Arrogance (or modesty for that matter) is more to do with the mind then the mouth. By most people's definition, arrogance is a sort of emotional weakness that impairs judgement in various ways. Very few people who use the term equate it with outward honesty. The contrary, many would probably equate it with inward dishonesty.

I am not accusing you of arrogance myself. I do agree that many of those things that people use to diagnose arrogance might actually indicate steadfastness, confidence, straightforward honesty or some other mostly positive attribute. But as the argument turns in on itself, people's ability to diagnose each others' emotions is actually fairly evolved. Failure to recognise the possibility that they might have a point, might be..arrogant.
If you can get ahold of the New Yorker article Norvig cites, I highly recommend it.
real 64 bit addressing: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/08/26/road_to_mac_os...
same goes for movies too, most of them nowadays barely go longer than 1:30.