skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a pretty good article. I think it's pretty amusing that Mary Lou gets all the credit for inventing netbooks — from my limited knowledge of the field, not totally unfair, but a little exaggerated, maybe. After today's item from Norvig, though (http://norvig.com/fact-check.html) I wonder how much of the article is fabricated.

Basically it asserts that netbooks are a disruptive innovation that has already changed everything in the industry, that they're useless without a network connection, and that they are sufficient and will wipe out traditional computers except for high-end and server purposes. Plausible. Also it makes the story very engaging.
it is the high degree of division of labor that gives society enough surplus man-hours to drive creative and scientific endeavors.
Who needs power? Gamers and people who do graphics or video work? Barely anyone needs a machine that's "powerful" by today's standards.

I'm pretty sure I peg my CPU and fill RAM a lot more than the representative user. If I'm perfectly happy with my six year old desktop and my Acer netbook, then I strongly suspect the mass of normal users are not looking for more power.

I think the need for more powerful mass market laptops and desktops was met with the hardware of four years ago. People want reliability (or cheap and disposable) and battery life. They want lean, snappy software.
Browser-based ‘Quake Live’ public beta today
You could make it very onerous to move around the site even if you're logged in. For example, after every few links you follow you have to pass another Turing test. That would be completely unreasonable though.

I think once a user is logged into your site, you'd have an extremely hard time defeating this sort of behavior without degrading the quality of user interaction or treading on legitimate use of your site. You may be able to defeat egregious abuses, such as scraping entire photo galleries in seconds, but even that can be defeated by a script that randomizes requests/times between requests.
There is nothing magic about web browsers, telent to port 80 at www.google.com and with a simple get request they will spit back their website. You can make it a little harder to do this stuff but a packet sniffer is always going to let you pretend to be any software you want unless they are using encryption. Also because Firefox is open source you can't prevent people from scripting using it anyway.

PS: I recommend all aspiring coders to telent to www.google.com at least once just to feel the magic.
Why Are Humans Long-Lived?
I actually do (www.rescuetime.com: 4m 26s hackernews today until now). It was really impressive how little I worked until I started to trace it.
Going at art in this way is backwards from the direction that children need to be taught. Not everyone is a potential scientist, or businessman...What about children who are born to be dancers? Or musicians? With this mind set, the arts will slowly degrade as children are shunned away from them due to an assumed "lack of money" in the business.
Agreed, there's nothing here that couldn't have been done 5 years ago with perl and CPAN. But, I think this post is relevant for two big reasons:

1. Sinatra and Rack are amazing lightweight alternatives (especially for web services) compared to the giantness that is Rails.

2. Rack::Cache is seriously awesome (http://tomayko.com/src/rack-cache/) and deserves more attention...
Seems to me this is just saying: log in via the browser (with the right password), then use the generated cookie with the scraping code. You can also do that with wget --load-cookies
You're still technically logging in by providing the copied cookie. I don't see any difference here.

Or say the title should be changed to "How to scrape your data from your sites that require login"
I think what they miss about netbooks, it is that in America they are really secondary computers. Maybe I am wrong, but I think that most netbooks are primary computers. Great devices, but you often still need another device.
Why Great Companies Get Started in the Downturns
Well done and good luck, but it is hard to believe this library will change the dynamic for GData.

I tried searching, but for the life of me, I cannot find an actual web application or a service that is based on GData.

Yes, there are all kinds of importers from Google account that lets a 3rd party service spam your friends with invites. But is this the only use-case Google is trying to support? You'd think that they really do want developers to build on their platform, no? If so, why isn't there a more pick-up?
"I had ... another guy who had "HTTP" listed on his resume and didn't even know what an HTTP verb was."

Indeed. HTTP has methods. Apparently certainly proprietary software has "verbs".
This is brilliant. I sent it to my friend who's running one of the campaigns. (No, I'm not telling you which one.)
I don't know yet! I'm still exploring that, while finishing up various academic projects.
The 10 Worst Cities to Raise a Family
The comment about Venezuela is astute -- I wish he had followed that up. Out of a couple dozen venezuelano entrepreneurs and owners I know, only 2 are planning new business (one in tourism and one in PR).

The rest are desperate to cash their chips and get around the capital export controls. Five or six have moved out of the country entirely. (Every time a bell rings and angel gets its wings. Every time Chávez sneezes a condo agent in Miami gets a commission)

Forget the politics of it. If you scare off two generations of business owners, in a few years your economy will be f-u-c-k-e-d.
I've used the analogy which has been previously downvoted, but startups hold a lot of similarities with "the hustle." Not like "do the hustle", but "the hustle."

Anyway, the analogy I like to use is the one where Birdman encourages his listeners to "take straight shots, then pop bottles. flirt with the hood rats, then pop models." You can see this in the typical game of raising funds. At first, you don't know what you're doing and your pitch will probably suck. So it probably doesn't hurt to start with some VCs that you probably would never consider having a serious relationship with (flirt with the hood rats). In other words, why start at the very top of Sand Hill Road?

After a while, you get good at your pitch, your demo starts to look really nice, and so on. Now you're ready to "pop models", or talk to the VCs who you actually would be interested in working with, if the opportunity presented itself.

The video for anyone interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ3I4YY4YJA
This is total rubbish.

Most 'smart phone' have 2" screens but lots of people watch movies and increasingly live sport on mobile phones.

Computer have always be overpowered and under used. In Brazil, they are installing a 385,000 seat Linux system using virtualisation. Each 'normal' PC is shared with up to 5 people and there is no major different in performance.
The article is so hopelessly out of touch with reality that I don't even believe the author has ever been there. This crude and inflexible approach of applying American political jargon to everything regarding drastically different countries and cultures leads either nowhere [good] or to disasters like the one Iraq [bad].

In programming terms the author is bitching about Python's OOP implementation having only programmed C++ for his entire life. Amusing but pointless.

The article comes across as immensely naive, on the border of stupid, to any Russian or anyone who lived there in the 90s. Every sentence in it is just so bizarre and stereotypical beyond funny, I was expecting a next paragraph to start with bears eating alcoholics on the streets and nuclear warheads offered for a bottle of vodka on farmers markets. Yes, it's that retarded.

I'm not even sure if junk like that is more amusing or dangerous: I guess muslims got less lucky - they're just "all terrorists" when viewed through Western glasses people like author seems to wear.
Ha. I didn't tell you about this one did I?

Collin deserves all praise and kudos. He exceeded and improved on my spec at least 5 times.
The Holdren nomination: Obama politicizes science
You didn't, you magnificant bastard. But you covered my ranting on Sunday; I can't complain.
The web 2.0 hall of fame
Now that the web 2.0 era is getting to a close
I believe Calais is pulling the quotes and keywords from the documents.
Who Is Ryan Sit And Why Is EMI Suing Him?
He makes a fair point, but his argument would have been greatly enhanced if he had presented a specific example/redesign to illustrate it. Solving the "how" is the hard part.

Oftentimes, when people keep a point abstract, it's because it doesn't translate as powerfully into the specifics of the real world as the abstract version makes it sound.
Wow. Pretty much the only metric they use to make that list is city-wide graduation rate. By their standards, the best place to raise kids is to home-school them as far as possible from dangerous civilization.

There is much more to raising kids than non-existent crime rates and graduation rates.
Is Russia blind to basic economic principles? Apparently, basic economics would be pretty valuable to the Russian populace as well.

So... what exactly makes you think that Russians need your tutoring on basic economic principles? How much do you read on Russian affairs per week and have you ever spent any time there? Also, I am assuming you're very knowledgeable regarding latest Russian history, from the collapse of USSR to the latest financial crisis, right?

This reminds me of when Michael Dell, in a typical naive Western manner asked Putin what western computer/software companies can do to "help out", and he got back the only answer this question deserved. Look it up on Youtube.
It's the quake3 engine turned into an ActiveX plugin. Looks like fun, but no mac version yet :(
Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed
How things change. Not so many years ago SF was a nightmare for single women, thanks to the city's disproportionate number of gay men. I'm guessing things have evened up a lot.
You can go beyond quotas now on Google AppEngine
I'm not disagreeing with you, but can you just mention specifically what you didn't like about his analysis (and I'm using the term 'analysis' very loosely)?

Refuting an authors point with a fairly lengthy reply that doesn't address a single specific point of his is just as useless, albeit not as dangerous, as a over-generalized analysis piece.
It is a bit long at over an hour but it is great to hear a success story coming after a couple initial failures to connect with who they thought their customer would be. Anyone is allowed to run an A/B test at any time - he says the difference in a product meeting where someone has actual data vs. typical meetings where people are trying to sell their idea feels like breathing oxygen. They ship code 50 times a day - and not just hacking, they have automated regression testing to maintain reliability. All new engineering hires ship code their first day.
But, if the site is using only HTTP and cookies, there's no reason not to first make a request to the login page with the username/password and retrieve the cookie via the "cookie" header that comes back... Did I totally misread the article, or was it just dumb?
Just to clarify: The judge rule that ISPs are not required to demand a warrant. Police can't walk into an ISP's head office and demand log files -- but they can ask politely and the ISP can choose to cooperate (or, of course, they can choose not to cooperate).

This is, of course, different from the situation with wiretaps, where it is illegal for a phone company to allow police to install a wiretap if the police don't have a warrant.
The Windows 7/Mac OSX example is absurd, but there are plenty of genuine instances where Microsoft emulated and enhanced an existing product, and ended up as the market leader-- Word followed WordPerfect and WordStar, Excel followed Lotus 1-2-3, and IE followed Netscape.

The more interesting (and difficult) question is to what degree their overcoming the lack of first-mover-advantage was due to a superior product, and what degree was due to leveraging their strength in the OS arena.
Link dead. Fortunately computerworld derived from it...

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...

All of free is still there, but if you want more...

$0.10 per CPU hour[1]

$0.10 per gigabyte transferred in

$0.12 per gigabyte transferred out

$0.15 per gigabyte stored per month

$1.00 to be able to send 10k emails per day instead of 2k

There follows some confusing discussion of reducing free quotas and doubling the free storage quota. I think what they are getting at is tuning so a well written app will fit snugly in the quotas at 5M page views per month.

[1] pg, can I please have some sort of UL or OL formatting? I promise to still try to write literately, but I like lists too.
Note that they'll also be reducing the free bandwidth and CPU-time quotas. Bandwidth goes to 1GB in/out per day and CPU to 6.5 hours / day
Pass. I've read the papers, I've seen the demo, but I haven't implemented it myself. I also read it here, but I've seen it before. It looks like it should work, but YMMV.

As always, you might need to spend some time understanding what it does and how it works before relying on it.
What It Means to be an Entrepreneur
The source code is still 55 characters too many for a tweet.
You can't forget that they mention playgrounds.
I inadvertently took an economics class in college.

How do you inadvertently take an economics class? Did you accidentally wander into the wrong room?
A lot of scraping frameworks will handle it for you, too. It's even the front page example code @ http://jwebunit.sourceforge.net/

I think most people are reacting to the title... I for example thought it was a security posting.
Currently users are allotted 46.30 CPU hours and 10GB of bandwidth

Thats a hell of a downgrade.
Great pic, shame you didn't include an Office product with the ribbon showing.
LG VX5500 Verizon
LG has presented one of the best phone of the session with some more updated applications and allows you to do all the jobs regarding wireless technology.
"Firefox is open source you can't prevent people from scripting using it"

There are frameworks for doing that already, check out Selenium: http://seleniumhq.org/
Agreed, this more of a "how to scrape data from sites you can log into". It's not even a very useful example at that.

For anyone who wants to scrape sites that require login I'd recomend Python with Twill. That lets you do the whole thing with ease.
Not so many years ago must mean 20 years ago. It's still a sausage fest and has been since 1997.

It's probably still a nightmare for single women. I can't imagine that a dive bar with a mid-range computer programmer is on the list of a woman's dream dates.

On the other hand, SF is better than the rest of Silicon Valley.
And doubling the storage to 1GB
Good enough, because masses will be able to afford it and benefit from it.

This reads like something out of Turgenev. A pair of boots is worth more than the complete works of Shakespeare! Before art, bread!

By contrast, one might ask: Leonardo's procrastinations have more value than the output of how many thousands of sensible, disciplined people?
True, you can use wget as well, but this way you have more control over your code.
That's how it all starts :)
Well, for one, Russia never had a truly market economy that Putin (supposedly) destroyed, let alone a full-fledged democracy which roots Putin supposedly eliminated. That's the crucial moment that many Westerners simply aren't aware of or like to forget about.

I lived there in the 90s. Opening your own small business inevitably meant meeting with local gangs and paying them monthly. If that's the "market economy" Putin destroyed, then nobody is missing it for sure.

Pre-Putin Russia looked very much like a bandit state ruled by a few "influential groups" that Eltsin couldn't control. After USSR collapse, what Russia needed was a massive financial help from the West, similar to what Marshall plan offered Germany after WWII. Instead, they received vast numbers of western scam artists and mostly useless economic advice from IMF and very expensive loans (and the default which followed). That's why remarks like Michael Dell's will always make everybody there laugh and even anger.

For anyone who lived through those times, reading about "Putin destroying democracy and market economy" feels... strange, to say the least. Moreover, the article is filled with pointless exaggerations, like "privatized all oil companies". There are plenty of private energy companies there, just pick up Forbe's billionaire list: what do you think those Russian-looking last names represent?

Russia simply needs more time. Their political scene is interesting but not very practical: tons of small and disorganized democratic parties [always fighting each other], one big pro-government "conservative" one, plus always amusing and relatively numerous communists that are slowly dying off.
All 3rd party javascript is broken. It's simply a fact. 15 years into the Web, still nobody has learned to check their external references before using them. Even google gets it wrong pretty much every single time.

If you really need to use somebody else's script on your site, the only thing you can do to protect yourself is to also add global exception handling to the page.

It would be nice if we could expect giant companies that publish Javascript APIs for a living to actually check that their Javascript works in most standard cases, but that's just not the way it works in the real world.
When I read to the end I found that author proposes a mechanism that is far less convoluted than google's and devoid of this similar problems.

It's better to have less code in your page and more code in google's script - that way they can patch it without me getting involved. As it is now they added the try/catch block (really helps if users run ad-block or some such) but most web admins have not updated their stuff.
bet Atwood loves that. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481579
One of the comments in the article links to another article on how to adjust your mirrors so that you dont have blind spots.

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~gdguo/driving/BlindSpot.htm

I hate the convex mirrors because I cant judge distances backing up in tight spaces.
What if the only reason that you go to the gym (or sleep regularly) is because you've noticed it has a clear impact on your work?
Twill is an option indeed, but this way you don't miss out on the javascript. You can take advantage of all of your browser's features.
50 Jobs, 50 States In A Year? 1 Man Gives It A Try
I love Sinatra. I find it very easy to use. I did a little web service that scraps the usage stats off an ISP page with it and Hpricot. I never had so much fun with Ruby!
Zen computer error messages
For sure, I was responding to the title, it sounded like a security thing.
This may not apply to Leonardo da Vinci, but I'm reminded of M.A. Foster's notion that overcrowding generates bureaucracy. The idea may not be original to him, but he suggested that people erect social or procedural barriers when physical ones are no longer available.

Perhaps procrastination is a similar phenomenon. The workplace is ubiquitous now, if we allow it to be. Do we procrastinate so that our minds have time to recover from these new demands?
More and more websites are adding Turing tests after relatively short intervals of time. I consider that to be a good thing, and there are some good ways to stop/identify spiders. You can check out this site: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/450835/how-do-you-stop-sc... . It shows some pretty good techniques that one can use to defend from spiders.
It's actually the opposite, objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear. In fact they are closer, this is for the passenger side mirrors. Cars always look farther away in it than in the driver side mirror or in the middle rear-view mirror
Story says 5. That's a surprisingly low valuation for doing $5mm in revenue. May be that it's considered to be maxed out...
They are not much better.
What did you thought this will be about? :)
I can't log into gmail with Version 4 Public Beta (5528.16) on mac.
These "broken" firewalls are becoming increasingly common. Besides that, IE8's private browsing mode automatically blocks Google Analytics and similar tracking services (and ad networks?). Look for that to be increasingly common in web browsers that care more about the end user than they care about advertisers.

By the way, what was "broken"? In this case, everything worked out fairly well for everybody except the website owner and Google, who are likely indifferent to the negative result. Google Analytics doesn't provide any functionality to the user so it doesn't matter to him if the script fails to load or not. The page probably loaded a little faster and his web browser is probably using a little less memory. He probably also got to preserve just a little bit more privacy. The IT team that deployed the firewall got paid to do so and plus they can feel good knowing that their firewall is probably blocking some actual XSS attempts. That reduces IT costs for the company. The manufacturer likely got paid a lot of money for the firewall and the sales guy probably made a nice commission on it.
Exactly; the graph analysis was most interesting to me. The current situation is well beyond overloaded, and open to frequent gaming.

One attractive possibility if this took off is that conferences/journals could become less important as publication venues, and blogs etc could have equal weight. A conference provides a forum for meeting people, but I feel that most of the time the value of any venue is perceived solely in terms of its reputation (and hence impact on CV), and as you point out this is no guarantee that your paper has actually been reviewed by someone knowledgeable.
"Is your StartUp rated PG-13?" :-)
From the article:

"In the US, we regard branding and marketing — convincing people what to buy — as core business functions. What Asustek proved is that the companies with real leverage are the ones that actually make desirable products."
Google App Engine Grows Up
Google has added a payment plan to its App Engine, making it a competitor for the professional cloud world for the first time.
The freedom to pursue creative fulfillment is very unusual in human history.

The vast majority of the time it just takes far too much time and energy to survive.

On very rare occasions, people have enough time to create art.
An example I can think of is the native Americans in the pacific north west, before the arrival of Europeans.

The unique combination of:

Seasonal salmon runs - very good calorie rich food that's easy to catch.

A mountainous geography - keeps population reasonably small.

Resulted in a societies that could quickly catch and store enough food for the whole year.

And they ended up with a surplus of time and energy - free time.

Unsurprisingly that led to a staggering amount of art.
Sculpture - totem poles, music, dance, etc.

But again, that's very unusual.
The only other example I can think of is ancient Greece and they had a lot of free time thanks to slavery.

The one entrepreneurial solution to this, that I can think of is robotics.

I already have a dish washer and a roomba, but those only save a few hours a week. To really free up my time I need something that will do my work for me, like a robot that can code in C++.

I just hope the robots don't rebel or something like that.
I think it's very very cool of Google to allow apps in their system for free as long as they stay below a specific threshold.

There is no excuse now not to rapidly prototype apps and throw them out there.
If the book is to be believed then he was a sculpter at heart and didn't actually like painting much. He was indeed commissioned to do the chapel but I unfortunately can't remember whether he did it out of free will or whether he was pressed to do it.