skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article has nothing to do with the title, and their point is that an internet business needs a business model. I would like the 5 minutes I took to read it back. Thank you.
Anyone with an inquiring mind should pursue their own learning where their curiosity takes them. What is a "worthwhile endeavor" is difficult to judge at the outset.

I would trust your own instincts and internal compass: if you are learning new things and feel "flow" when you spend time on this side project, keep at it. It will have some kind of impact.

One good article worth reading is Peter Drucker’s "Managing Oneself" (available here http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Oneself-Harvard-Business-Clas... and a little Googling may turn up other versions as well) where he stresses the importance of learning how you learn.

One good book on this is "The Three Boxes of Life" by Richard Nelson Bolles http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/091366858... which covers life work planning: the three boxes are education, work, retirement (play).

In my own case I have always been a connector and cross-fertilizer, trying to apply insights from one field or area to another, sometimes where they hadn’t been considered before. There are many narrow specialists out there, you should absolutely feel free to follow your Muse as long as you are learning.
Bring Your Questions for Lawrence Lessig (Freakonomics Blog)
Welcome To The "Dark Side" Marc and Ben
You can write a book or a game based on this, and stick a reference to this google maps thingie as part of the plot. That would be slick.
It seems like the issues described there can be dealt with in Git by dividing things up into submodules, if submodules work well. (I haven't used them much.) They also only seem to apply to really big projects — dozens of contributors, and dozens of gigabytes to terabytes.
I'm interested in how many paid registrations posting here on HN resulted in. It seems like a pretty positive response here and a great tool! Great work!
Yeah, you'd think somebody at Intuit would have read it.

But, even with the knowledge of the problem, seeing it in your own industry, and recognizing it when you're facing it and before it's too late, seems to be almost impossible. I suspect Intuit are beginning to get a feel for the weight of the problem they face, but I suspect their solution will be ill-conceived. They'll keep chugging away on "integrating" their desktop product with their web product, finding "synergy", and providing "more value" to their existing customer base...all the while that customer base flakes off bit by bit and lands right on Mint's plate. By the time Quicken has a credible web-based version, Mint will already be a more capable product and Intuit will be milking their tiny market share into the grave (there will probably also be a lawsuit or two, which they will lose).
"talking armies of Indians and Eastern Europeans"

The problem with Reddit is the army of intolerant atheists and the anti-GOP circle jerk. If you just take a look at the front page you will see that this is true. American politics is really not that interesting after the 10th GOP bashing blog-spam article.
All SCM tools will frustrate anyone migrating from one to another. I've done migrations among most of the major commercial SCM tools and had to write training documentation for developers.

You do have to realize that if the underlying model for version control is different, then commands and terms will be different even if they share the same name like "checkout." And what you think you can or want to do might not be what you really should do.

So expect some initial frustrations and a lot of referencing of the man pages, documentation, blogs. You're going to have to unlearn a lot of behaviors that may be second nature to you. But at the end, you'll get a much better appreciation of what each tool gets right and an understanding of their limitations.
I came to post this very same thing.
Bill To Re-Legalize Internet Poker Coming 'In The Next Month'
Too bad they're creating a service for a declining industry :\
Last time I used them, none of the following Unixes had a /proc filesystem: FreeBSD, NetBSD, IRIX, AIX, Ultrix, SunOS 4, MacOS X, NeXTStep. The only Unixes I do know of that have it are Solaris (SunOS 5), Linux, and Plan 9, which isn't really Unix.
Your (presumably) laptop adjusts light level only, not color "warmth". As for photo-editing, you probably don't want a service playing with your colors.
Because I've never heard of Yodlee. I assume most folks haven't either...Mint isn't exactly a household name, but they've obviously done a better job marketing themselves to consumers than Yodlee.
You may be thinking of Octave, not R. Unfortunately I don't know enough about Octave vs. R (or Matlab vs. S-PLUS) to comment on the similarities and differences.
thank you for this summary. i was about to quip about how my blog pays my rent..
sorry you had such a hard time leaving feedback. we've been having sporadic issues with getsatisfaction lately. feel free to email any feedback directly to us at info[at]tripeedo[dot]com.

we'll also fix the frankfurt issue. thanks for the tip. :)
One thing I've never understood is the confirmation dialogue you get when closing an application. Of course I want to save the document! The only time wouldn't want to save my changes is when I want to revert all the changes I made this session. I already have a perfectly good button for that the, undo button. (at least in a perfect world).
Well I think the rails community is adaptable (eg its embrace of merb).

Whilst Zed's rant uncovered the unholy origins of rails sudden "grass roots" popularity - things have changed a lot since then. The community is healthy, you can get things done without a lot of fuss. Its useful.

But yes, ruby != rails, and it will continue on its own path.
This article is bad and silly. :( I don't know why CNN is publishing some dude's inane diary.

The author assumes that using Facebook and using Facebook obsessively are the same thing; he complains that after using a computer at work all day, he doesn't want to use one all night, and that he doesn't see the need to update everyone about the minor details in his life, and that these are why he detests Facebook. The author seemingly doesn't realize that Facebook does not force you to input every minor detail of your life nor does it force you to spend your entire evenings in the perusal of its pages. When one checks Facebook merely periodically, and rarely updates, there are times when it comes in mighty handy, and it's silly for this man to write the whole service off to everyone else because he doesn't believe that anyone can use Facebook moderately (for the record, I log in to check things about twice a week and update my profile about twice a year).

Even less sensibly, the author also hates Facebook because he doesn't see an immediately obvious plan for profitability. This is a really weird reason to hate something that you hold no financial interest in (and the author clearly has none in Facebook). If dude thinks that Facebook's operations will continually yield negative cash flow, that's even more reason to _enjoy it while it lasts_. Seriously.
It would be brilliant if they've already secretly signed a deal to buy. If they are just planning on buying, then this would just drive up the price they have to pay Mint's shareholders.
A very useful link there. Quite pragmatic. It tells us that Subversion's experts believe its future lies in:

- "Huge projects where putting all the current source code on everyone's machine is infeasible."

- systems with very complicated permission schemes where "you just plain aren't allowed to give everyone all the data"

- "organizations whose users need to interact with repositories in complex ways... These things are probably most useful to the corporate world, and to governmental and military organizations." [Karl Fogel]

So, if you recognize yourself in any of those groups, learn SVN. But otherwise I'd start with git. You can pick up the necessary rudiments of SVN (or, god help me, CVS) later when you need them.
Okay, actually ran your service against our beta site. The only (minor) complaint that I have is that when I initiate a test there is a long delay before I get to the page that is monitoring the test itself.

I assume there is a setup process that is happening behind the scenes that is taking some time, but it left my finger itching to hit the 'refresh' button while I was waiting for this to complete. If it were possible to have some kind of ajax-y thing telling me what is going on here that would be great.

Otherwise I was very pleased with your service. I am definitely going to sign my company up for it, as I can see it being invaluable for tweaking the performance of our site.

As far as suggestions, it would be great if there was some way to work in extended metrics into the load testing. E.g. allow pre/post-test hooks between each test run that allowed me to associate arbitrary data such as load averages, memory usage, etc.
Neither. Learn bzr. It's much easier than either Git or SVN.
Huge in Australia - Our iPhone Game Stats & Question?
As per an earlier post, we released an iPhone game called "Rainbow Ninja" which is a brain-training game.

We did this for fun and to learn the development process.

We released it roughly 6 weeks ago.

At first we priced it at $1.99 price point.

We sold over 100 units on day one.

~50 on day 2

~Dropped to 30 for a week or so.

Then down to consistently selling 10 copies a day.

We decided about 2 weeks in to see what would happen if we gave it away for free.

Downloads immediately jumped to the 500 a day range for days 1 - 5.

That has built consistently to over 5,000 downloads per day. The game is on page 3 in the USA popularity for puzzle games.

But what's NUTS is that 3000+ a day of those 5000 are coming from Australia.

I can't find a tool to see the AUS store to see if we're featured or something, can't find any mention on websites etc.

So - throwing it out there - anybody have a similar experience or know how to figure this out?

If Australian's love the game we want to leverage that and promote!

Thanks in advance -
This could be a line in a robots.txt:

Allow-Stress-Testing: *

The default would be to not allow stress testing of any resources.
This guy is trolling. Please to not feed him.
on another note... why is google ocean the 5th search result on google?
I suspect that the shareholders, by and large, are pretty happy with the "owning" part; I am guessing that it's your Senior Vice President of Polaroid for Organic Chemistry Research you have to worry about.
Losing a ton of money right now looking for the next contract (1 month+ now). I can get an employee job in days, but at half the income of independent. Nevertheless, that's what I am interviewing for these days as nothing is appearing down the pipe.

It used to be you just showed up at any given agency and you'd be in a client's office on Monday.
Tor project refutes Black Hat talk a day before it happens
If you define it more generally:

younger_person >= (older_person / 2) + 7

it has the added advantage that it proscribes anyone younger than 14 ever having sex (with anyone of any age) since the inequality could never be satisfied.

For example if the older person was 12, then the younger person would have to be at least 13, which is impossible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_your_age_plus_seven
Ask HN: Good app to rip html of (my own) website.
Hi,

I am looking for an app on Mac OSX (or Web Based) that can rip a my own ROR site to use to experiment on CSS and layout. Can't seem to find a good, free tool, any suggestions?
Please never do that again, you'll only encourage them. Nobody (except you, I guess) wants to see or click on ads while they're reading up on their friends lives. And honestly, fb ads are pretty terribly awful.

You've never seen ads you want to click on Google? Even when you're searching for things to buy?
You want something that goes beyond 'view source'? I have no idea what you're asking for.
Decision by Vetocracy
Declining yes... Billions of dollars still? yes. Potential to possibly help an entire industry? absolutely.
yeah, just instead of doing view source on 30 pages, do all of them at once.
Yep, it only takes a second to do, too. Definitely consider this strategy.
http://www.httrack.com/

Note this will rewrite links to be local -- matters what you're trying to do.
I think part of the point was to recognise if you are being the bad apple, and changing attitude, thereby "getting rid of the bad apple".

Certainly seems consistent with what I have experienced (I see myself falling into the "depressive" dysfunction from time to time, and I know plenty of people who could be #2).
Genuine question: what's the practical difference between the investments that he was doing as an angel, compared to the VC fund-to-be?

Was he, as an angel investor, doing any deal below the 100k-500k range?
Hm... $500k per deal still sounds more like angel investment than VC. Although, Tumblr's series A was 750k. This has been an ongoing trend but it looks like the boundaries between the size of angel and VC investment is beginning to blur as startups become scrapppier and stop looking for too much outside investment.

I wonder if this means it's going to become easier to raise money.
wget -r

:-\
yeah, as everyone else said: wget -r http://url
My answer is to check out sites like GetSatisfaction and Uservoice.com.
As for the trolls, we have a karma point system in place.
I just want my filesystem to be categorical instead of hierarchical. Maybe some use of metadata types would make it easier to avoid collisions too?

Example. My "The Battle of Evermore" mp3 could live in the following typed categories:

"FileHash:blahblablahblah"
"iNode: blahblahblah"
"Title: The Battle of Evermore"
"Artist:Led Zeppelin"
"Album:Led Zeppelin IV"
"Collection:Project: LotR RotK Music Video"
"Playlist:Music: Swordfightin' Songs"

etc etc

Is that so wrong? If you use a rigorous enough metadata type system, you could program it too!
That would probably be easier to search for...
Mobile Industry Unites to Drive Universal Charging Solution for Mobile Phones
If there are bad apples in a team, they deserve some kind of presumption of innocence. The manager should at least try to find out what's wrong. I've seen bad apples who were frustrated because they weren't listened to, and they did have good ideas which they could explain. In those particular cases I did not witness how this situation developed, but I have no doubt that bad management can produce bad apples.

All you can say about bad apples is that they point to a problem. To fire them without asking is shooting the messenger.
How Do You Stay Motivated? - Entrepreneur Poll Results
Sorry to be ignorant, but how can I get the site if it requires a username and password to access? I read the wget documentation, but am unclear about this one. Thanks in advance.
Your problem is that you're focusing on the last ~200 years and only on countries that have successfully managed to avoid their populations outgrowing technological progress.

There have been many societies on this planet, and some of them have collapsed after peaking precisely because of population explosion due to "good times". Isolated collapses of ancient polynesian peoples have been studied particularly well.
The article has everything to do with the title. The point with the business model is also a response to a discussion going on in the blogosphere lately. In that frame of reference the title is calling out pointless negativity of aome other blogger. Without that frame of reference the whole article is the answer to the title: you cannot expect making money without a business model and so on.
Matters what scheme is in use, but see two things in the man pages.

--user / --password

And

--load-cookies

The latter allows you to log in via web browser and then let wget take over.
Facebook's ads aren't intrusive; the pictures are very small and the ads are way off on the side of the page (unless there are some I don't know about due to my content blocker). The only time I even notice them is when something interesting catches my eye.

There are two reasons not to like ads: 1) They are intrusive/distracting; and 2) They show you stuff you don't care about. If Facebook can occasionally show me ads for things I might actually want, and if they can do so in a way that doesn't intrude on my browsing experience, kudos to them.

Edit: Oh, forgot to answer your question. No, I don't think I've ever seen an ad on Google that interested me. I don't really use Google to find things to buy, though.
In my experience, there's a good and bad way to do it. There's a huge difference between bringing up negative points and whining or complaining. My rule was always - If you've got something you've got issue with, propose some action with it.

I found myself breaking the rule and complaining about East Coast weather a lot. So I then amended it to, "I hate this weather. I'm moving to Spain or California in the next year", then I took gradual steps to set myself up for it. Then I went to Barcelona, spent some time there, and now I'm in Los Angeles. "This project seems to be sucking huge manhours - I wonder if there's a way we can outsource the real grindwork here?" --> Very, very cool. "This project seems to be sucking huge manhours. I hate this. This sucks." --> Totally not okay.
The problem with using Twitter for polls is the sample (Twitter users) is very homogenous and very unrepresentative of the target population, that is unless your target population is Twitter users.
I think there's an interesting question here: where does simple communication become marketing? We're talking about a situation where a person A is talking to a person B about some subject S. I think that for this communication to be reasonably described as "A marketing S to B", we need most of these to be true:

1. A stands to gain financially from B liking S;

2. A wants B to like S;

3. A chooses the things they say to B about S with the goal in mind of influencing B to like S — perhaps they emphasize positive aspects of S, downplay or don't mention negative aspects, suppress whatever personal doubts they may have about S, etc.

Now, of course, there are marketing people who would like to claim that any communication between any two people is an instance of "marketing", but that is at odds with they way the term is commonly used, and I think this is because those people are marketing marketing. Usually when something is described as "marketing", three or at least two of the above criteria are true, in the opinion of the speaker.

None of these three items are necessarily true of "having a descriptive title on a Web [sic] site".

Item 3 is often a result of item 2, which is often a result of item 1. Even in the rare case that these relationships don't hold, there's always the temptation to proceed from one to the next.

The thing I want to point out is that item 3 is very much at odds with basic norms of honest discourse, and when people do it, they make it harder for other people to discover the truth about things. When some of the participants in a conversation have an agenda of influencing others' opinions in favor of some issue, it undermines any confidence in conclusions you can draw from the conversation.

I think that's why so many people hate marketing: it creates a constant temptation to dishonesty, most marketers succumb to it at least a little, and that severely damages the quality of discourse in conversations that contain marketers.
Wow - I just started playing with R a few weeks ago and this is a great resource. Browsing for a neat-looking graph and being able to see the source is awesome!
Guy who (admittedly) doesn't use Facebook hates Facebook. News at 11.

We've seen this before in other forms:

Guy who (admittedly) doesn't use Twitter hates Twitter. News at 11.

Guy who (admittedly) doesn't read blogs hates blogs. News at 11.

yawn
Lan Melica, the City in the desert of graphs.
There are a whole bunch of books, at least:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstri...
Could the journalist not have spoken with someone at Google prior to publication of this article? It's just irresponsible journalism that they clearly did not.
Clicking through to the Karate Kid link, I re-read this:

"1. Randee Heller as Mrs. LaRusso, one of my favorite Hollywood Moms of the '80s (right up there with Mrs. Keaton and Mrs. Bueller). You know, in a five-year span, Randee played Gabe Kaplan's wife in "Fast Break," Ken Reeves' stripper girlfriend in "The White Shadow," and Daniel-San's Mom in "The Karate Kid," and then she was never seen again ... and I guess my point is this: You don't need to work anymore with a résumé like that."

Is there anyone else whose pop culture knowledge is more encylopedic than this guy? Who else has a list of favorite 80s Hollywood Moms and can rattle off their roles on queue? He probably double checked IMDB, but still...
Most people don't understand hierarchical filesystems. I understand that and that's fine. As designers and programmers, we should be enabling those people to have control over and access to their stuff in a way that they can use.

But I do understand hierarchical filesystems, so why would I want to do things the same way as people that don't? I don't use notepad.exe just because vim is too confusing for most people, either.

I installed iTunes once and it took me a couple of confused minutes to figure out that I couldn't play a file in it. First you have to teach the app about all of the music that I might someday want to play, then you can finally choose one of those and play it. But I know where my music files are on the disk and I just want to play them. To use Gruber's analogy, I wanted to type 'print "Hello World"' and it wanted me to start defining includes.

In the same way, I store my information in text files on the disk. They're arranged in a way that makes sense to me. They're searchable, portable, and small. And it works great for me.
German “PearC” Apple clones aim to succeed at the Psystar game
Video of announcement on Charlie Rose:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/andreessen-on-charlie-r...

Fred Wilson welcomes them to the Dark Side:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/welcome-to-the-dark-side-mar...
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.zedshaw.com/
Apparently. I've used their basic services, and found them fine, but given how many "offers" one must click past to get to their CheckOut, I'm too surprised to see spam as a marketing tool they'd employ.
Yes. Context matters. Killing someone in self defense isn't murder.
Read non-important news once a week.

Check your e-mail when you're not working..not all day.
I simply disagree; in my mind a blog has a business model like any other content provider.

A blog has difficulty making money not because businesses won't pay for advertisement, but because it is hard to attract enough eyeballs to get a good payday.

-Jer
> I just want my filesystem to be categorical instead of hierarchical. Maybe some use of metadata types would make it easier to avoid collisions too?

What's weird is that the very first file system the Mac used was very close to this. MFS didn't support true directories; folders were an illusion provided by the Finder. Be OS, I believe, was the closest to your ideal that was ever developed, but it was considered too alien and "late" for it to have ever gotten traction. Just like the automobile got saddled with the internal combustion engine and manual wheel-based control, personal computers got stuck with x86 and hierarchical file systems.
TheRegister = Mainstream Media

=> Link Bait Headlines

Of course anything can be overdone. Generalizations included.

You really need to look at individual situations. Consider one "Osama bin Laden": I'm betting on (and he's banking on) social isolation hugely extending his life expectancy.
No: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=489073