skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Full disclosure: I'm an American attending Beijing Normal University, but I have friends (both foreign and Chinese) at Tsinghua and Beida (Beijing University).

I'll agree with you that most people, everywhere, are incurious. That's not a China problem, it's a human problem. It's particularly striking, though, at schools like Beida, Tsinghua, and BNU.

The students at those schools are, quite literally, the best and the brightest that China has to offer. The selectivity for those schools is astounding, and your exam scores have to be off the charts. EVERYBODY wants to attend those schools, so every person at those schools had to beat out tens of thousands of competitors. They're wicked smart, definitely smarter than me and probably smarter than you. Driven, too. Think MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Harvard, and then turn it up a notch.

Despite the aggressive intellect of these students, I often get a feeling of... intellectual passiveness. I've got to be careful here, because I don't want to give the impression that people here are stupid or inferior. They're not. It's just that in conversation I often feel like I'm talking to someone who's never properly learned how to question things. That's surprising, especially when I'm talking to someone who is obviously both brilliant and ambitious.

There's always exceptions, and the cream will always naturally rise to the top. I'm sure people can produce a ton of counter-examples. Things are also (slowly) changing, as the internet is producing a new and vibrant intellectual forum. However, I think that any intellectual "spark" still has to be self-produced. The Chinese educational system is hostile to it, even at the higher levels.
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Don't let clients anywhere near their own domains and hosting.

Before you know it, you're drenched in trouble, trying to get some hack-cheap-registrar to unlock domains or whatever, while the client is desperate because his e-mail doesn't work, or figuring out why the website broke, only to find out the boss's nephew tried to install a BT tracker on the site, and by the way, no, he doesn't have a backup, didn't you take care of that?

Get a small VPS at SliceHost and host the sites yourself. Forward their e-mail to GMail accounts, or setup apps for your domain. Charge $20 a month, paid a year in advance. One billing round a year, if it takes you more than half a morning, you're doing it wrong.

The only point of contact the client has is you, the only bill he gets is from you, and you're pretty soon pocketing a few $100 a month simply by not screwing up the server.
That font looks horrible from 6pt upwards.
I'll stick with triskweline, thank you.
A non-evil social network would have to be distributed and based on open protocols: you could be @facebook.com but could interact with people on other networks so that users would have choice. They could even have their own server.

The net and the web were built like that, but now why are we building "jails" within the compelling interactivity of the "web 2.0"?

There are numerous interesting protocols to build upon (openid, the extensible XMPP..., etc..), and startups should use them and respect their users data. Concerning social networks there seem to be some alternatives (Elgg, OpenSocial APIs) but could a startup build something more open and still profitable on those?
Is he/his opinions that bad to issue a warning ? Just wondering, as I did read his book "The World Is Flat" and found it interesting

Edit: not trying to put you down, just wondering, that's all :)
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there is a startup doing exactly this. It's called Kachingle.

Terrible article explaining the concept: http://cli.gs/7RYV81

Essentially: You pay Kachingle a monthly retainer [$5 default] -- as you browse sites [in your web browser] you'll see Kachingle "medallions" that you can click, and give the site a tip for the article. You can also setup monthly retainers, so every month you give $2.50 to NYTimes via Kachingle.
Ask HN: What agreements and legal structures should you have in place for a startup?
I've just got involved in a new startup and been offered a founder's stake. There are only 2 of us, she is based in the US, I'm in the UK.

Just wondering whether to form a company straight away, or wait until some point before launch. I guess the 2 most important things are to protect ip, and ensure I get my stake in the future.

Any advice on this?
How do any of these even remotely relate to file sharing? I think the media industry has learned that once something has been torrented, there's no way to go lock it up again. That's kind of the point.
Facebook wants not to be sued if someone's boss sees something they shouldn't and fires that someone. That's the real reason for this policy. By uploading content to FB you absolve them of responsibility for whom they show it to.

Seriously, you think a million bad cameraphone pictures of people getting drunk are worth $15Bn?
I use CherryPy too, but it runs behind nginx. ( http://www.nairalist.com/ )
This is very true, even for someone in a relationship and bringing in steady income. I freelanced all of 2005 and had both, yet some of my fondest memories come from working at a cheese shop the second half of the year. I figured it'd get me out of the house and I'd learn more about something I already loved, what I didn't expect is that I also made some great new friends and also had a renewed fire for my way-opposite-of-retail web gigs. The first half was lonely as hell!

On a related note, I remember seeing an old HN thread about a guy that got rich from some startup and then worked at McDonald's for a year to reboot his perspective, taking notes the whole way. Anyone remember this one?
UNIX is a proprietary operating system (not a kernel) and GNU aims to be quite the opposite, hence that acronym (GNU is Not UNIX). As for the decision to leave the kernel at last, well just give a look at how long is it taking for HURD to be completed... also I am guessing he needed other stuff to be created first (compiler, etc)
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Don't confuse unix (which doesn't really mean anything, it's just a general set of philosophies of how an operating system should be structured) with Unix(tm) which is a wholly owned trademark and a set of technical standards to which a unix must conform if it is to be a Unix(tm). Linux for example is not a Unix(tm) (OSX is).

The simple answer is that the hardware available at the time wasn't up to getting a useful level of performance out of the HURD microkernel architecture and so he gave up. HURD still isn't any closer to being a production kernel.
I think the parallel to scientific hypothesis is an accurate description of entrepreneurship. It is the process that I teach in my undergraduate course, without identifying it. My only caution is that focusing on the future of the market can lead one to focus on product features and not customer needs. Customer need drives the market and gives one the basis for the evolving market.
Related: Steven Levitt's TED talk, "Why do crack dealers still live with their moms?" shows some real world stats about drug dealers.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_cr...

As for the BBC article, I found it inspirational that it referenced The Wire and Stringer Bell's attempted self-transformation. It gives me hope for a different outcome in real life than Bell's fate in the series.
I never said that, or more accurately, the sarcasm about them being a media company didn't come through in my sentence.

There is also the element of trust. What you describe is a sensible thing to protect against, but I have that gut feeling that the new policy is covering a new approach FB may take. Something feels wrong with having this wording of this policy, so I mistrust the intentions behind this new policy until evidence to the contrary emerges. I'm not holding my breath.
I love the Bitstream Vera family. Of note, is that the letter proportions are such that you can set the font size a point or two smaller than other fonts and still keep great legibility.

You can also do that with Lucida.
Mathematics: The only true universal language
HN: review my (non-profit) startup: Buy It Like You Mean It
I've been down this road before and I agree with everything said here. Just to clarify something, I think mseebach meant that you should charge $20/month for yourself - and have the company pay for the Slicehost account. The smallest slice on SH is $20/mo so if you don't do that you won't be getting any compensation.
Reading again about "Locus of control" and putting that into the context that you have further provided, I think this is still a question of attitude, and your comments remain unhelpful at best, and at worst are actively misleading.

Viewing the customer as a part of my toolset does not make them internal. A defining feature of my toolset is that it is under my control. The customers I have are not under my control.

Viewing the way I generate my customer base from the collection of potential customers is largely under my control, but that is not the same thing. My customer base is more under my control, but is still not part of my toolset.

I have control over what I produce, and viewing what I produce as a mechanism for selecting customers is useful. Realising, and explicitly using, the fact that what I produce will implicitly determine the customers I get is valuable.

This is not achieved by viewing customers as part of the toolset.
Well, it's a natural power grab. If you can grab it, why not: who knows what financial benefits may appear later.

Some day a 21st Century "Diary of Ann Frank" might start with notes made on FB. Won't FB want to take advantage of print/advert/movie rights. $$$

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
they may want it and they may claim they've got it but I highly doubt it would fly. The manufacturer of the paper you write on does not get to claim copyright, you do.
well, for one the pirate bay gives you a nice list of the infringers, you could simply go after them.

And if that is not feasible or legal that does not make the pirate bay illegal, it just means you have a real problem.
If you have no presence in the US, you'll need to fill in W8BEN forms (available online) to avoid being taxed by both UK & US. There are other considerations too, as you mention, but I'm not familiar enough with them to advise. Hope that helps.
Crack dealers are entrepreneurs. I might have some concern about being a VC for one of their startups, however.

They enter their business training already well-trained in hiding profits, exterminating rivals, and corrupting officials. Will it be "working for you" to have them rise to the top of businesses such as banking? Or will that just leave us with the current status quo?
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This "essay" is NOT about Facebook. It's about old fogies (OFs). Lev Grossman must have been on-deadline and so chose the easy road of pander to the OFs/baby-boomers' diet for fluff news - OFs who too often see shallow FaceTwitting life as the sole domain of gen-X-Y-Z. The more things change...
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The thing all those interesting protocols have in common is that they mean absolutely nothing to 99% of people who joined Facebook because that's where their friends were, that's where photos are tagged and event invites are sent from.
If they use a base based (no pun intended) number system at all.
G-7 musings
Using a far future expires header
How-to on improving site performance with a far future expires header. Also covers "cache busting"
Once this law is in effect, you ought to be able to DoS the lawmakers by just (frivolously) claiming they were infringing copyright. If different people keep doing this (DDoS effectively) this could be kept up for a while. I suspect there's a danger of having to cover costs/damages if they investigate the case and it turns out there was never any infringement, but incorrectly claiming copyright infringement is hardly going to be a criminal offense.
From the Ycombinator FAQ:

"Don't incorporate, though, if you can avoid it. Especially as an LLC. It's much more complicated for us to deal with existing paperwork than to start from scratch."

And as a personal note, I've found the same logistically - tinker together with friends on a project, see how you gel together, then worry about forming a company later.

There's also a contract that might help if one of you originally came up with the idea and recruited the other - you can create one that says basically that all the ideas and work belong to one person, the idea originator, but that they all transfer to whatever company you guys form if you actually get around to forming one.

I have zero legal experience, so take it for what it's worth, this isn't advice either way.
O'Reilly book on Palm Pre's WebOS - First draft released.
Industry Pitching Cellphones as a Teaching Tool
That FAQ is for people who want to apply to YC! I don't see that in the guy's message, above.
"now why are we building "jails" within the compelling interactivity of the "web 2.0"?"

Usability. Take a look at the Yahoo research on OpenID for an example of just one standard:

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/10/open_id_res...

Asking why people are flooding Facebook is a great question, one that often doesn't get asked by geeks, probably because we assume the problem is simple human flocking behavior and people herding towards where the rest of their friends hang out. Nope, that's a necessary but insufficient condition - why did that crowd form in the first place? Just try using myspace for a day and it's painfully obvious.
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I'm not sure whether that foot massage thing works out quite as well before you're a billionaire of world fame - but I think I'll give it a shot in my next investor meeting regardless.
Use IBP (Sorry, Windows-only) to track rankings of of search rankings for keywords: http://www.Axandra.com/go.to/kaiser/4 You can automate this, so it generates lists of rankings/keywords/searchengines regularly. No, it's not free, but it's worth the price as it saves _lots_ of time.
No, I meant charge $20 for everything from the client, and host them all on the same slice. A 256 vps easily hosts 10s of low traffic sites. Local business usually means mostly static, and on the scale of dozens of visits a week.
I've been browsing for a couple of minutes and it took a while to understand what the site does. You should have a couple of sentences explaining it.

I also don't like the UI, you have 3 areas for navigation (left, right, top)... do you need that? You need to think about the site from your users perspective, a lot of the links are obvious to you because you made the site but won't be obvious to the user. You need to work through some use cases.

Also, those register and login buttons make your site look unprofessional. There's nothing wrong with just having text links.
It is not very difficult task to ask google search about how many key-developers receives their paychecks from RedHat and IBM and how many of them contributing to Fedora project.
Then you can try to figure out how many installations of RHEL around, in the worlds biggest datacenters and then which distro amazon or google uses.
Then you can take a look on RedHat's revenue.
At last, if you're really curious, you can download .src.rpm of the latest CentOS kernel and take a look to the patches.
and very last hint: Oracle. DB2.
runing the rpmbuild --rebuild command on a Fedora's .src.rpm is not a rocket science.
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Like the idea, but I find the site cluttered. A graphic a la this one might help:

http://barcoo.de/

I'd cut out all the cruft at the top, de-focus the sidebars, all that jazz -- and just have people land on the page and see what it is you do and how it works.
What an excellent piece of documentation on why you should not roll your own build system.

"because I can" is right next to the reasons the author gives:

"Why don’t you just hack GNU make itself?

There are some improvements we’re interested in doing which just aren’t possible within a C codebase:

* implementing rules directly in Python
* Condensing multiple invocations of make into a single process

. Python is also about a zillion times easier to hack quickly."

What a totally pointless exercise, if anything he should have spent the time to make the build process less dependent on other packages, not more.

Same with javas 'ant', why on earth does everybody and their brother feel the need to reinvent the wheel.

If you're going to roll out some package try to keep your dependencies to the absolute minimum.
How to set up multiple monitors on a Macbook
Very starship troopers-y..
The idea of make and sell trend and analytical reports is on the surface. At least they and google did it for 'internal' use.
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Davidw is right, I'm not going for YC.

I guess we will 'tinker' until the point of release.

Thanks
Lisp's "hardness" is really not being deep into the language and natively breaking problems down in a way that maps to functional languages.

I think that may be a valid argument if you're talking about a mostly-functional dialect of Lisp like Clojure. Common Lisp and Scheme don't really offer any resistance to writing in an imperative style
Thanks for that, I'll check it out.
A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?
Churchill's routine sounds ideal to me. Just have to replace the mail and papers with the Internet equivalent.
The House that Load Balancing Built
How to fake momentum in three easy steps
You are right about associative memory. But the professor asked an easier question: To name one thing.

And yes, I could name at least _one_ thing about programming and computer science as a knee jerk reflex.
To look at the question the other way around: is there any reason he should have started with the kernel?
That's Steve Ballmer on LG's videoconferencing watch, not Dick Tracy
<i>why are we building "jails"</i>

Easier to make money with a walled garden than encouraging agriculture.
Depends. For example you can't trademark 'apple' for fruit. But you can trademark 'apple' for computers.
No, but I'd like to see the link, too.
What works is the mindset behind it.
In Illinois, you pay twice as much for tolls without EZ-Pass; a literal cost of privacy.

And it's getting significantly harder to avoid these kinds of surveillance. You forgot to mention: never have a utility bill, or a mortgage, or a car...

"Do it yourself" is no longer an effective option.
Having recently made use of Clojure to make a simple, multithreaded image processing program[0], I can say the advantages over Python and Ruby are significant. Here's what I got, essentially free by using Clojure:

Processing a directory full of flies using as many threads as there are cores.

No UI-hanging due to long-running callbacks.

Automatic queuing of actions started from the UI

Fast, statically typed primitive operations, but only when I ask for them

Friction-free access to Java's rather sizable collection of libraries

I didn't write any macros, so all of this would have been possible in a language with Clojure's features and a non-Lisp syntax. That said, I have no doubt that if I write a longer program involving Swing, there will be macros involved, and they will save a significant amount of pain.

[0] http://github.com/zakwilson/imagesieve/tree/master
Stallman objected to the fact that software could be sold so he made software that couldn't be sold. I am sure he understood its true value and priced it accordingly.

Create and deliver value. Demand to be paid for it according to its value to the customer. If the customer refuses to pay, find another customer.

Free is as successful as poverty.
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In some countries in Europe (at least in Spain) it isn't a crime to download music or movies, much less to provide links. Another question is if it's illegal (crimes are a specific kind of illegal act). In fact, it isn't illegal at all if there is no money involved. Copyright holders are compensated with a "private tax" on recording media, including SSD.

I don't know about Sweden or Denmark, but anyway I suggest not to jump to conclusions unless you know more about the laws in those countries.
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is the default monospaced font in Ubuntu :)
Buy them a nice suit?
Something I find very useful about reading a site like HN is the little seeds it plants in my mind: I read about some interesting program/ language/ library/ framework/ technique/ theory or whatever, and then, six months later, I find myself needing such a thing and remember, isn't there that thing I read about?

Also, I'll discover something I maybe didn't even know existed and realise that I should learn about it; and so take a mental note to do so. Then, later, when I have the time and inclination to learn about something new, it's there on my list.
Ask HN: How do you manage your learning?
Hi everyone,

I know a lot of articles and discussions have appeared on the art of reading on HN. But I had had this issue for a while now, and was hoping someone out there could help me out.

So for starters, I started to learn Haskell late last year from the Real World Haskell book. Being a new-comer to functional programming its taken me almost a month to read and digest 150 pages or so. Smack in the middle of January I landed a new assignment that involved a host of new (Java) technologies, so I had to drop Haskell for a while to catch up on those. I then had to review a book for a author friend.

This has been a regular cycle. I start something with great enthusiasm, I am thoroughly enjoying myself, only to have hit a situation where I need to drop it to learn something else. I have half a dozen of so books covering management, finance, self-help on my shelf right now, and I see no way of catching up.

I am sure several others out there have the same predicament. I don't have a problem learning, rather I would learn something new everyday. Its just commitments that keep getting in the way.

So the question is how do you manage your learning process? How do you find time to read, learn, digest all the varied interests that catch your eye (be it new languages, frameworks, technologies, other areas of interest, hobbies what-have-you).

Any suggestions will be welcome.
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