skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They may not want automated downloads, but that robots.txt is in the wrong place. The standard only provides for robots.txt to be found and respected at the root (/robots.txt), not any subdirectory-lookalike path (/arcs/robots.txt).
Three small things that demonstrates how Bezos is an unique leader:

1) "we presented the paper to bezos" -- Wow, engineers have direct access to the CEO.

2) "we presented the paper to bezos (he doesn't do slides)" -- Wow, a CEO that actually has some attention span

3) "we presented the paper to bezos (he doesn't do slides), he liked a lot of it" -- Wow, a CEO who actually understands technology
Yep, looks like it was a lack of money in circulation that caused the problem:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?chart_type=li...
Choosing a closed source development platform specifically for web app development generally isn't going to increase the difficulty involved in reverse engineering all or part of your feature set so it makes sense to go with a framework that is well supported and works well with your infrastructure & current workflow.
Ask HN: Anyone want to help clone election.twitter.com for a local election?
I run a local news site in Chicago. There's an election happening in our area to replace Rahm Emmanuel in Congress (he left to join Obama's team). Twitter's Election.Twitter.com page was terrific for letting you see what people were saying about the candidates during the presidential election.

I'd like to more or less clone it for this local election, i.e. create a web app that lets you see what people on twitter are saying about the candidates using a tabbed interface.

I can take care of the design/CSS, hosting and can promote the heck out of it to the local and national media, which will lap this up like maple syrup.

The person helping would get glory, a prominent backlink and bio at the top of the app and the rush of helping make a contentious election easier to stay on top of.

I can cludge something together on my own no problem, but if there's anyone out there looking for a fun, quick project that will get press coverage, I'd love to work with that person.
Ask HN: Have a Product idea (H/w) Best way to start?
I have an idea for a hardware product. It would ideally be great for someone like Belkin to make as an accessory. But i dont know if its the right thing to do to give the idea out. Ideally i would like to produce it on my own. But i do not have any experience in field. since it would involve writing s/w for the device plus getting the Prototype ready.
Also found out that prototypes are pretty expensive.
So basically need advise to either drop the idea to someone or Launch on my own if feasable.
Great advice for small businesses right now...
IT does, I see Copenhagen.

Very clever little detail.
Surprising that Ireland where their European headquarters are located is not among countries where latitude can be used, though it is the same way with twitter. I don't suppose anyone knows the reason?
Multi-Channel Pre-Flighting Content for Publishing
I know that in my mind. That's why I call it a syndrome - it is irrational. Without others, you make worse decisions because they work immediately.
India's $10 laptop: Psyche
Interested in your project. Care to share any details? E-mail in profile
It was painful to look at.
I'm not exactly a hacker but I'd love to come hang out and chat.
Hacker news is about hacking anything, not just code.
'Broad' crawl means roughly, "I'm interested in the whole web, let the crawler follow links everywhere." Even starting with a small seed set, such crawls quickly expand to touch hundreds of thousands or millions of sites.

Even as a fairly large operation, you're might to be happy with a representative/well-linked set of 10 million, 100 million, 1 billion, etc. URLs -- which is only a subset of the whole web, hence a 'survey'.

A constrasting kind of crawl would be to focus on some smaller set of sites/domains you want to crawl as deeply and completely as possible. You might invest weeks or many months to get these deeply in a gradual, polite manner.
I would like to see the bullet-proof contract.
Carbon emacs package (latest) Aquamacs is unstable at least the last time I used it. Anything.el makes emacs feel like quicksilver (which is AMAZING!!!). I use redshank (hacked version for scheme) + quack.el + paredit.el for my main environment. I have been trying to use darcs and the wiki page for notes but I haven't gotten into it.
This is why you choose what to upvote and what not to upvote. Just don't vote this up. This is the exact reason that mechanism is in place.
I agree that it is nonsense.

If hoarding leads to an irrationally priced money, rational people will quickly realize this and exchange their money for other alternatives that have become favorably priced.

Once this tipping point is reached, others will realize that they were overvaluing their money and the pendulum will swing back.
Why We Need a War on Aging
The fact that after a certain amount of snow depth, you have to use your back to lift and throw the snow.

I was doing some Googling on this out of curiosity and ran into this...http://www.wovel.com which I feel like I've seen before but didn't really understand the advantage. Without seeing the video of it in use, it looks just like a shovel attached to a wheel. But the wheel gives you different leverage points so that you can use your body weight to throw the snow. That wasn't obvious without seeing the video.
I would never wait for someone to begin executing on an idea, the search could be very long and hard.

If you can get things up and running perhaps you could take a few early employees on and not need a cofounder.

I actually was in that situation a few years back - I was working on various ideas but nobody I knew had enough interest to give it a full effort. So, I worked a little bit with a few people, but mostly alone, and built stuff.

Then I got lucky and reconnected with someone I went to university with things seemed to click pretty well.

(yes, that does sound strangely close to a 'how we met' story at a wedding...)
What could Facebook do to increase its digital goods revenue - increase Means. 2/3
It is an awesome paper, but it doesn't appear to be your primary source --- which you haven't yet cited (it's "Babysitting the Economy", Krugman in Slate from '98, about the Asian crisis).

For example, unlike Krugman, the original paper doesn't state that the co-op is mostly lawmakers and lawyers (only that lawyers drafted the bylaws); unlike your post and Krugman's article, the paper also doesn't talk about legislation.

More importantly, the paper's thesis isn't Krugman's thesis, or yours. The paper seems to be making the point that the implicit economies that develop from social interactions are often destined to flail because people don't recognize them as economies, and insist on applying moral reasoning to technical problems.

But your thesis --- and Krugman's --- is different. Obviously, we recognize The Economy as an economy. So what Krugman is saying is that this story illustrates something about how to resolve a depression.

Which it very well might. It's not like I'm going to question Krugman on it.

(You did cite Krugman's anthology book, which I haven't read but might contain this article).
Alert! There is very little usable-data in your iTunes.
We haven't been able to build a complete mix-tape, and will not be able to until you either:
a) play songs you enjoy (to increase 'Play Count')
b) or, use iTunes' star-ratings features...
The point of the cloud is that it is automated and the development costs are negligible after being amortized over so many servers. If EC2's largest cost is salary then either they haven't reached sufficient scale yet or they're somehow doing it wrong.
Abundant supplies of fossil fuel's are in use because they are cheep. Zero technological advances are required to provide a stable food supply for 20 billion people. It's actualy difficut to find the maximum stable food supply with current technology over the long term.

For example: "there are 1.3 billion cattle in the world today"

Now some of them are a net food source because they feed in areas that humans can't. But, effectively feeding cows costs the world well over 1 billion humans worth of food.

Topsoil does not actually get destroyed. Rivers just deposit it as silt which can be recovered.

etc.
I don't think how easily someone can duplicate your site is a reason for concern. If they can duplicate it in a weekend, you probably don't have much of IP value. If the proprietary system makes it easier to develop, then it may be of some value. If it makes it harder to develop, then you have shot yourself in the foot twice.

Someone trying to reverse engineer your site probably wouldn't use anything of yours. They would start fresh with their own set of tools.

I am pretty much biased towards open source, because it's cheaper, evolves faster, and you can mix and match.
Very roughly:

(1) Add a scope rule that throws out discovered URIs with popular non-textual extensions (.gif, .jpe?g, .mp3, etc.) before they are even queued.

(2) Add a 'mid-fetch' rule to FetchHTTP module that early-cancels any fetches with unwanted MIME types. (These rules run after HTTP headers are available.)

(3) add a processor rule to whatever is writing your content to disk (usually ARCWriterProcessor) that skips writing results (such as the early-cancelled non-textual results above) of unwanted MIME types.

Followup questions should go to the Heritrix project discussion list, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/archive-crawler/ .
It might help if we had some ballpark estimate of what the product was. Is it a computer accessory? An router of some sort? A wireless device? A new kind of computer?

If it's fairly simple, you could probably get away with just buying and assembling the parts to make a rough prototype, and using some free-software (ie, linux kernel) for the initial firmware.

Once you've got the proof of concept going, you should be able to get some funding for the project and hire the folks you need.
Local backups and a few offsite backups, too. Recently paranoia has hit, and I'm planning on storing everything that I hold dear in at least two online locations and two local ones.
My startup makes jellyfish aquariums
Thanks to the immortal jellyfish and the mortal will smith for the recent jellyfish plugs...

My startup breeds jellyfish and makes specialized aquariums for displaying them.

www.jellyfishart.com

The first jellyfish exhibits opened in public aquariums in the 90s and scientists have been making achievements in breeding and displaying jellies since then. The exhibits are hugely popular and now jellyfish are found in virtually every public aquarium. Jellyfish Art uses proprietary tank designs and new breeding techniques to commercialize jellyfish aquariums with the same success they have achieved in public venues.

We started last year by making large custom aquariums, but we're building a website now to launch a line of plug-and-play desktop tanks.

Staring at a jellyfish tank beats staring at a computer screen I promise
I agree. I thought the vagina hacking story last week was out of place. Maybe we should discust this story too http://is.gd/ilUX Breast Hacking. All of these shoule net the person like myself a lower karma some how preferable with some kind of number system

Like this tweet

lelafin Yay! 105% on my first math test of the semester! ...and where is today's snow???
Wed, Feb 04 09:46:23 from web

Snow!
No it doesn't. Compass can not magically change the rules of CSS. If CSS can't do it, Compass can't either.
Why give interviewees toy problems? Give them real problems. There are plenty at all levels of abstraction.
Announcing Our Next TechCrunch Roundtable: Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?
I think there's a good general rule when it comes to this "build v buy" decision, no matter if the price of the software you're considering to buy is 0 or 10 million:

The thing that is at the core of your product you must build yourself. Otherwise you're always going to be hampered in your effort to make it excellent. The problem is not that others can copy it, the problem is that your product is going to be shit, regardless of whether or not it is copied.

Everything that is not at the center of your product you must buy, as building it will only distract from what you actually need to do.

I know this is very general, but I don't know much about you or your ideas. I'll still try make this more concrete:

If your product is software or a service that depends on the quality of software, then don't touch CMSs. Build from scratch (not including the operating system)!

If you are a teacher or a tax advisor who creates great content for his clients, just set up and customise your joomla and publish your stuff there. Don't bother to build software!
I remember hearing an interview on NPR where a stamp collector calculated the cost of a stamp at ~30,000$ per time he actually looked at it in his vault. For you or me that might seem stupid, but once you have more income than you can reasonably spend in your lifetime numbers below a million stop being meaningful.

Or as a factory worker in china might say you spent 7.50$ on a cup of coffee?
Doesn't matter would great to have you come out.
I like the idea and would be interested in a desktop tank (assuming care and feeding isn't expensive or time consuming). You might consider updating your website to include some information for potential customers, like what kinds of jellyfish are available, what's involved in taking care of one, average lifespan, special concerns, etc.
Check out this podcast. http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/01/roberts_and_han.htm... about different viewpoints in economics, and economists talking about how much they know and don't know.
reminds me of this story:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31267
Well you can call it a netbook it acts as an accessory to a primary device. So i doubt that it can be assembled easily. :)
fossil water is not an issue - aquifers are constantly replenished with rainwater (and manual recharging via pumping treated water back into the aquifer...a debatable idea). At least that's the case in the mid- and north-west. Coastal and dryish states may vary. I seem to remember seeing somewhere that Los Angeles was putting an evaporative water purification plant in, which would give the aquifers in that area a rest.

fossil fuel, however, is still an issue.
I think puzzles are fun. I mean, my background is in math, the whole art of which is basically one big ladder of puzzles.

What I don't think puzzles can tell you is whether the person you're talking with can ship quality software that solves real problems.
Google & The Big Ideas
Adding features at customer request degrades nearly anything. The requests usually add very little but clutter at the expense of a clean design. You should consider customer requests as you evolve your site, but don't be driven by them or by your own inclination to add features. Think of all the baggage in MS Word or the W3C specifications.
If you can purchase a proprietary solution, so can the competitor. In terms of competition, I think you're better off focusing on end product value rather than obfuscation. Obfuscation may make it more difficult to duplicate your effort, but it also may make further effort more difficult, hurting the product in the long run. Adding value not only give more for competition to duplicate, but also allows you to charge more and garner more customers.
Lose the splash screen and the "enter" link.

I already typed in the URL, of COURSE I want to enter!

You've only got one goal with people visiting the website: get them to buy one.

With your website, what's my next action as a customer?

It should be "enter my credit card, click submit".

I can forgive you for not having an ecommerce solution set up yet, but failing that, what's my next action?

To get on your mailing list, so you can pitch me with interesting articles, discounts, etc.

...but you're not collecting email addresses.

Well, failing that, I guess it's to call you on the phone.

What's your phone number?

It's the absolute last thing on the page, in the smallest font on the entire page.

"Call Us (415)-810-3343"

should not be a footnote: it should be the POINT of your website.

(at least until you can get a mailing list set up, or better yet, an ecommerce solution).
People started worrying about preserving HN culture about 6 months in. It's one of the constants of the site. Which is not to say there's nothing to worry about. Just that people worrying is not necessarily a sign there is.

There's no separate fork of HN. Rtm never posted, and you can easily test your statement about Tlb:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tlb
A few things for context:

1) This came up b/c somebody else publicly described the author as the inventor of EC2, which created some unintended blowback;

2) The author is well-known in the ops community and still close to a number of people at Amazon, and has no personal or professional interest in hurting those relationships.
Where's the bloat? As mentioned a couple comments up, you can have Sass render the css into a single line CSS file for production. And you render it once, and cache it forever. Same overhead as a css file, maybe even less, because it's auto-minified for you...
All of those are true. The lack of powerpoint at Amazon is not a myth - docs are the order of the day. This is more good than bad, but has some of both.
So, something like a mobile terminal to a desktop or similar? I'd probably buy a netbook and modify it accordingly then. It won't be cheap or easy, but you should only need one prototype. If it's a good product, it should be worth the expense.
Yeah, I thought, "Shit, that guy looks like he's at my house!"
Yeah, I'm probably going to limit negative scores. It's nasty to see people piling on. And seeing nasty things tends to make people nastier.
I just love the idea!!

But the site is confusing. Kill the splash page. Put a call to action - nobody will know that you're actually selling something - it looks more like a fun little site showing off jellyfish in aquariums. And although it's great that you have videos, I would suggest you also put yourself in them with real tanks - and show your passion for what you're doing.
There's discussion? I just read the links.
Wtf: Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquito Swarm
Good idea. I just doubled the karma threshold for downvoting (to 100).
I agree with that for sure. Also, this photo has a problem:

http://www.jellyfishart.com/cyltank.jpg

There's a guy in it.
Things that make me think a site is too slow are staring at a blank screen while waiting for doubleclick and trying to find the skip button for an intro ad. A site should display its content first and then fill in the ads later. Engage your users while all the clutter catches up.
Hey, this sounds interesting.

send me an email: collintmiller@gmail.com if you want to talk about this.
The main goal being getting money circulating again?

But why should that be a main goal? Why have money changing hands for the sake of changing hands? Isn't money just a medium of exchange -- a go-between, a currency -- used to convert one type of good into another? We don't just want money to circulate, we want money to circulate purposefully -- in transactions on the free market.

I still don't see how burying money and having miners dig it up helps anything. It doesn't create value. Those miners could do other, more productive things instead.
I've been working on something very much like this for the last couple days. Stay tuned.
Vis-à-vis the nature of technological innovation:

I have this crazy notion that more is more.

In other words, the reason the valley is first in .com and other tech innovation is because it has the most resources, in terms of people, funding, etc, working on that.

So the best way to speed up innovation is to do everything you can to get more people working on innovation.

That could include lobbying, or educating yourself, or teaching, etc.
Bill Gates unleashes mosquitoes on TED conference
tjic is correct. This is your storefront, or at least one of them. The fewer steps in becoming a customer, the better.

You look like a small outfit, so you may only be able to handle so many orders at a time, but it's better to turn down customers than beg for new ones.
Ask HN: BrightKite/Loopt/etc Developers? Your take on Google Latitude?
I'm curious how employees (and stakeholders) of a small web application (well, small relative to Google) react when a larger company decides to compete in their space. Also, what are your opinions of the service? What could they do better? What weaknesses in your service have been exposed by Latitude? Do you view it as real competition?
E-mail sent. Thanks.
Some things I would like to know:

- Your price for the tanks

- More info on the tanks. Dimensions etc.

- Market prices for Jellyfish (or your prices, since you sell them right?)

- Some links or even self-hosted information and guides about owning Jellyfish and tank maintenance.
Bill Clementson has a nice write up on his setup that has more to do with how not to get hurt using Emacs that I have found very helpful. Not necessarily specific to OS X, but he has a few suggestions that seem helpful for OS X (like making the right apple key your meta key):

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/041024.html

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/041029.html

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060116.html

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060131.html
Isn't it illegal in the US to use IQ testing when interviewing candidates?

If so, then I think these puzzles are just a way to get around this law.

The job may not involve much puzzle-like thinking, but it never hurts to have high IQ employees.
Ask HN: I'm worried about us...
Dear Hacker News Members,

Lately there has been an amazing rise in the number of "our community is dieing" posts that make us appear to be a bunch of up-tight, self righteous, pretentious assholes.

I've been around for just under two years, so definitely not the oldest member here, but not new either. I'm set in my ways - the content is good, the discussions are better. But, newer members/visitors may see all of these "omg, where is my community going" posts and think, "they sure don't like new members here."

This is what happened to the QuakeWorld Team Fortress community - a community I was deeply involved in for more than 9 years. After the release of Team Fortress Classic, the QWTF and MegaTF communities took an elitist outlook on the game. "We're the diehards, we've been here from the beginning, we're better than you." Guess what - it killed our community. We couldn't attract new players, we began to stagnate, we became bored, and eventually our community died.

So, please, stop with the "where is the old HN" posts, or the "my comments aren't getting the same upvoting they used to" discussions. You're just clouding the quality content on this site and portraying an elitist facade that will eventually lead to the destruction of the community. Members don't stay forever - the only way for a community to continue is to maintain a positive incoming/outgoing ratio.
Insight #0: We're not all in the same room; instead of broadcasting a post, use our previous voting preferences to route posts to us.

#1: We read what other people like us read; spread the workload of evaluating new posts amongst the people clusters. As posts gain traction in one group, show to other nearby groups.

Anything wrong with this other than compute time and assuming that the solution costs less than our current social costs (say this was done secretly, is it pareto optimal if the troll doesn't know others don't read their posts?)?