skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Let’s say it takes an extremely unscientific average of 15 minutes to research, write, edit, and publish this kind of article; that’s 15,000 minutes or 250 hours of human capital that I mobilized by sitting here and moving my hands a bit on a Sunday evening."

This quote sums up why the tech news business can be such a miserable grind for writers (people burn out all the time), and why online news will never make the kind of money that print did. The fact that the tech news scene can afford to throw ~250 man-hours (though it was way more if you count the time spent prepping & promoting the posts, not just writing) at a trivial hoax like this is indicative of three things:

1. The barrier to entry for all of this is pretty low. If you can type and you have some hustle, then you, too, can help fill the internet with ~300-word stories about the latest (fake) phone. And because the barrier to entry is so low...
2. ...Talent is relatively cheap, so sites can afford to pay writers and editors to chase nonsense like this. And because talent is so cheap....
3. ...Talent is desperate, because the only way you advance in the business is to get your name at the top of the pageviews leaderboard again and again. So you'll literally cover anything if it will get hits.

All of the above leads to a massive glut of words and, ultimately, ad inventory in the tech news space. You don't have to have a Nobel Prize in econ to see what this miserable dynamic means for publishers' bottom lines.

Seriously, the real news in this hoax isn't the power of the Internet to "mobilize human capital" -- it's the power of the Internet to boost the supply of said capital to the point where it's just not worth anything close to what it used to be.
6 Cool Image Captions With CSS3
Yeah, not really. Basic statements (arithmetic no less) exploded into an unreadable mess is not reasonable.
It seems you missed the irony that being a successful entrepreneur doesn't automatically make one a successful writer. I wasn't criticizing the OP's accomplishments, but his way of expressing them.
By your reasoning, Steve Jobs' business successes would have automatically made him a nice person to know, and/or a persuasive writer. But it seems those corollaries are false -- and the first I know to be false from personal experience.

That's not at all what I was saying. The irony I was referring to was that this particular author became a successful entrepreneur by doing things differently. They then wrote an article explaining the things they did differently to be successful. The article itself became quite successful (as seen by the support it received on HN, Twitter, etc), in part thanks to the fact that it too was different ("90 points" vs the hundred "top 10" posts I see in blogs every week). And then to get the suggestion that they could be more successful if they were to follow the trend that everyone else does, seems to miss the point entirely.

I was referring to the fact that the article was actually quite poetic in the way it described how to be successful by doing things differently, in a way that was quite different for such an article. The very thing that helped make this article successful was in how it was different than the mainstream top-10 articles.

The suggestion that it instead be formatted the same as every other article in order to be more successful, would have made it stand out less and be easily forgotten. In the author's and most readers' opinions, that suggestion would have likely made it less successful. And that is the definition of irony.
Apple breaks ground on massive Oregon data center
I'm starting a newsletter... what kind of questions do you have about design? 
Here's a link to the page: www.startup-designer.com but I'm more interested in learning about what exactly is a point of interest regarding great design for people looking to start a company with no design experience? Also what is something you entrepreneurs feel you should be doing but aren't?
>> And ideally, everyone should be in the executing group. There shouldn't ever be an "idea" person.

Agree 100%. Instead of an "idea" person, opt for a "business" person. A "business" person can do the idea person's job and several more. That means he can bring much more value to the table in a startup.
It's not that simple.

Texas and California ensure that the majority of textbooks are just bland, period.

Those are big dog, major-population states that adopt textbooks at the state level (most states make textbook decisions at the school district level, others do use state-level adoption, but don't have enough population to have much market clout).

To sell well, a K-12 text has to a) not offend Texas and b) not offend California. Good luck with that.
Full Show 10/18/12: Vote for Romney...or else
I'm a member of the TextMarks team, for what it's worth. My perspective, like many participants in this discussion, is that the SMS space is very crowded. That said, if you're looking for a good API--which is what Twilio is all about--- the competition is actually pretty small. Plivo is good. Trumpia and Eztexting are okay too, but probably aren't as stable, fast, and well supported as TextMarks, Twilio and Plivo. That's kind of the bottom line, in my view. Best of luck with your project.
Yes, you are exposed to radiation while flying -- significantly more than when passing through body scanners -- but it's not a risk with no benefit: you're flying. Body scanners, on the other hand, are a risk (I'll grant, a tiny one) with absolutely no reward as they do nothing to actually increase the security of flights.

We take risks every day and that's completely okay as long as the benefits make up for it. I'll take a 0.1% chance of dying for a million dollars, but I won't take it for a sandwich; I'll take a bit of radiation to fly, but not because of a half-assed security mechanism.
Couldn't phishers just start having their fake forms send the current form content via ajax every time a new character is typed, rather than only on submit?
It's one thing to say that programmers (and everyone, really) should have a hobby outside of work. This is a laundry list of vague ideas - 'Startup' is not a skill - that the author insists every person who programs for a living should be interested in.

What exactly is 'looking beyond the code'? Can you give an example of a problem where two equally skilled programmers were faced with a problem, and one had an epiphany based on their experience last night at the extreme underwater basket weaving club?
Show HN: Built my resume as an interactive website, version-controlled on Github
I can understand lacking clout to ask for gross, but I have trouble believing that he thought he'd actually get net. When someone like him gets offered net, doesn't he say "look, we both know that 'net' means 'zero', so don't blow smoke up my ass."

ETA: Also, one wonders if relative clout just means asking for a much smaller fraction of gross. Better a tenth of a percent of gross than 10 percent of net.
That's how the university system originally got started, right? :-)
True but harder than it sounds in practice. People (1) fall in love with ideas for long times and (2) are worried about being labelled (or seeing themselves) as quitters.
How is that a bad thing? Source code VMs are easier to secure and as the tooling improves, you don't need to look a the generated JS anymore to debug, it becomes "byte code".
Build a Business, Not an Exit Strategy
On Facebook's UI design
I've never really understood this, what's so hard about "apt-get install xfce" and choosing that from the gdm menu instead of Unity? Why is there an entire secondary project for something that used to be a checkbox choice on Debian and Redhat?
> Yes. But unless our understanding of physics and/or biology is very wrong, they're not dangerous.

Our understanding of the relationship between low-level doses of radiation and cancer is frighteningly incomplete

This is what especially steams me when I talk to "experts" about this. (In quotes because what most doctors know about radiation and cancer is pretty shallow in the grand scheme of things.) It's like all they hear is "someone afraid of radiation" and it's like they can't even comprehend the geometric argument I'm making and then go on to quote data and heuristics based on the wrong energy deposition geometry. Also, they tend to talk about the relationship between cancer and radiation dose as something that's well understood. Well, maybe it is for chest X-rays and other specific situations for which we have lots of data, but this situation is different from those in an interesting way -- one which should bring questions to a scientific mind.

Where the experts have a mental blind spot such that they can't even find or formulate a cogent argument that actually applies to what you're saying, there might be something that needs to be looked into.
Not really, hence native PCIe SSDs. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6371/micron-p320h-pcie-ssd-700...

The hard disk form factor does make hot swapping easier, though.
I believe this is a lesson about consumer testing using actual consumers instead of engineers. Engineers in general suck at UI. I know, because I am one of them, and I am slowly evolving to evaluate things as they are instead of analyzing how an ordinary person would use them.
Apple isn't going to bounce paychecks?
Your reply reminds me of the post-9/11 "get some priorities" troll: http://everything2.com/user/NotBridgetJones/writeups/slashdo...

It's a classic false dichotomy. Specifically, a person can care about both issues simultaniously.

The problem is that we're not producing the radiation in the air -- it's already there. Radiation shielding is heavy and infeasible for use in current airplane technology. It's a very, very hard problem.

BackScatter scanners, in contrast, are optional. They are completely and utterly unnecessary. It's very easy to get rid of them; indeed it would have been easiest and cheapest to never have forced them upon an an unwilling community of travelers.
This is very worrying to me. Not because of the actual ruling itself (which seems fairly unenforceable, unless they're going to get Minnesota-based ISPs to block Coursera), but because of the precedent it sets. What else can states ask their residents not to read or look at? And what are the consequences if they do?

Additionally, while a private resident of Minnesota can happily continue using Coursera (at least for now) without consequence, this could have an impact on Minnesota public schools. If I were a Minnesota public school teacher, I would now be very reluctant to use Coursera in my classroom. All it takes is one student to tell Mommy and Daddy that they got assigned homework from an "illegal website," and there could be a shitstorm. (I realize that Coursera isn't really targeted at school-age kids, but what if it had been Khan Academy?)
The fact that there are sentient actors behind the DDoS _is_ the difference.

You can reliably predict and protect against things like network outages, server failures, full datacenter failures (black mold)--you can directly measure their impact and plan failover paths. A DB server goes out? Whatever! That's why you have a hot backup or two online and ready to go.

What you can't predict is exactly how far a malicious third party will go to hurt you. You can't predict how many dollars they'll spend on their botnet minutes. You don't know if they're going to attack your infrastructure or the DNS. Can buying more bandwidth fix the problem? If so, how much more? And will the attacker simply up the ante when they see that you're recovering? Can filtering requests fix the problem? If so, will the attacker provision different resources to attack you with?

This isn't simply a matter of infrastructure, buying the right equipment, or setting things up "just right" precisely because there is a sentient actor trying to hurt you. It's more like a game of chess.
haha, I've still got the costume..
"Mass" is an overloaded word. Nowadays, when physicists refer to a particle's mass, they are referring to what may more specifically be called its "rest-mass" or "invariant-mass". This is a property fundamental to the particle, much as how charge or spin is. This value never changes, and it is associated with a certain amount of energy (E=mc^2).

"Relativistic-mass" is the other use of "mass", although I prefer to just use the word "energy". As a particle's velocity increases, its relativistic-mass / energy increases as well, but its rest-mass does NOT. So you take mc^2 + the kinetic energy of the particle, and that gives you the total energy of the particle.

The gravitational force is a function of total energy [1]. This is why gravity bends the trajectories of photons (and other bosons) even though these particles have no rest-mass. The gravitational force between two systems is a function of the total energy of each system regardless of whatever kind of stuff makes up the system.

For an example, consider the earth + moon system. If you were to "weigh" this system, and then weigh the earth and moon separately, you would find that the sum of the individual weights is more than the sum of the two body system. This is because of the binding energy between the earth and the moon (which is negative). It is interesting to note that this potential energy is roughly equivalent to the mass of everyone on earth.

[1] Gravity is really unique in this regard. No other force is like it.
I've heard people who are signing deals call net points "monkey points".

Everybody knows they're worthless, but you take what there is.

Having said that, even experienced people might believe that net points would be worth something if a $19 million budget grosses $150 million. Especially on a project with no gross participants.

He might have been able to negotiate performance bonuses, extra money when gross milestones were hit. I've heard of those being a bit more common than gross points.

The bigger the budget, though, the more clout you need to get anything at all. I know of deals where gross points were offered to first timers on sub-million dollar budgets, but when you get up in the 10s of millions, it's a different game.
awesome job! Looks great, just forked :) Also I was looking at the upcoming features list, and I think definitely the pdf functionality would be cool (I'm thinking the fpdf lib - know a better one?). Another idea for a feature would be to give this an REST api for xml, json, and you can then just make an appropriate call to it ( /resume.json, /resume.xml, etc). Again nice!!
Live website: http://cv.philipithomas.com
Well we did make it through last time with much fewer resources...
Jeff Bezos On People Who Are "Right A Lot" vs "Wrong A Lot."
Fantastic looking.
Forked, and going to deal it with myself tomorrow!
No, it isn't. It is not at all racist to acknowledge the physiological differences between different ethnic groups. It is well established that a higher leg-to-torso length ratio correlates with faster sprint times. Conversely, a lower leg-to-torso ratio correlates with faster swimming.

Racism has nothing to do with facts. It is all about promoting hatred based on superficial differences.
if you've got an old computer that you're trying to make useful, it's a lot easier (for most users, who can't config the alt-installer) to just download and burn xubuntu.
I believe the recently announced Wufoo integration does this as well, but it appears this flow is more elegant.
Nice work, it looks really good.

One minor (and I mean really minor) design thought: in the section near the bottom "Selected Projects", there are grey buttons and blue buttons; in the close proximity of the blue buttons, the grey buttons sort of look like they are inactive or disabled, at first. I put my mouse over them and figured out they were indeed active links, but maybe someone non-technical might not do that.
Good point - thanks!

Edit: Site updated - the buttons are now green.
I think IEEE doubles can represent up to 53 bit integers exactly. (Someone here will know if that's true.)
It does economically for storage vendors and will for the next several years.
trade-offs :)

...like horsepower vs torque ! :D
Are you talking about FOXP2? If so, absence of it foremost affects the motor control of speech organs. There also seems to be some effect on the actual brain functions that are usually associated with speech, but it is hard to say if this is really caused by the absence of the gene or by the developmental damage caused by its effects. It always seems tricky to me to pinpoint something as complex as language (and by extension speech) onto a single gene given the multitude of functions that are involved.
> Thermal cameras can help spot indoor pot growers, which is the likely purpose of such a drone.

What about LED grow lights? Also, one could rig a heat pump so that the extra heat would be dumped into a backyard "heated pool." This would probably be undetectable.
If a murder happens in my home and no one notices, is it not a crime?

If fraud occurs at my business and is undetected, is it not a crime?

Politically, I am against drug prohibition. Legalize it all, and demand warrants for non-visible spectrum imagery of homes. But the idea that a crime isn't a crime if no one notices just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
How to make buildings from the blood of cows
Couldn’t agree more. This is one of those reasons why I desist have lawyers, media gurus, MBA (just business) as bosses of “Tech” companies.

They just don’t have it in them to jump in and out of situations to think through the most trivial of problems from multiple angles. They don’t know in “5 seconds” if something can be done or if it’s complicated. It’s often a rush to tackle competition or cutting out the oxygen and “do whatever it takes”. Ordering subordinates to “deliver” in 3 weeks.

This is precisely the reason why I love someone like Larry Page or Sergey running Google. They just knew that recruiting Urs Holzle to build world class infrastructure early on was worth it.

A lifetime of learning to take noise in & conclude on the one signal that’s worth it.
Is there any effect on taxes?

Yes, the shell company makes $0 thanks to phantom expenses, but the main company gets all that money and that is profit.

So the shell has 0 tax liability and the main company faces all the tax liability.

It may screw the crew, but it doesn't matter for tax reasons. Correct?
Also, to anyone who forks this and decides to use, you might want to remove the authors original google analytics!
Not ideas. Belief. There are tons of good ideas that you dismiss. There are tons of shitty ideas that you act upon. The difference is that one will call out to you and say "Make me happen" when the others don't, regardless of how many rational arguments exist for picking one or the other.

Develop healthy beliefs so that you can believe in healthy ideas.
Ya, wufoo does it too. But my app is free :) and in the near future will have useful analytics and CSS customization, etc for pro users.
Did you release this (blog says oct 15th)?
You can visit the app directly here: https://spacebox.io
Don't write your own JSON parser, please
I'm sure it will be shot at. Shooting something down is pretty hard.
So someone's article is just a rephrasing of a Wikipedia article plus some specifics?
I'm surprised using some sort of hybrid gross/net points isn't more common. Like 5% of gross over $100M. Studio doesn't lose if the movie isnt a hit, and the employee can't get screwed by creative accounting.
"Google may be on its way out as the dominant player in search, according to one analyst"
"Quarterly earnings, CPC blabla"

The article makes it sounds like that because Google's quarterly earnings decrease they're going to lose their market leadership.

The truth is: Users do not give a damn. Just because Google's making less money of them they're not going to use Bing. A company is not going to vanish because of that. A company vanishes when the company either is insolvent or their last user leaves.

When do people realize that success != stocks and stocks != userbase != CPC and so on
Your design is veeeeery attractive. In fact, it was the one that stood out the most to me when I first looked through the entries.
I'd love to "borrow" your mediocre designer
I cringe every time a movie or event is reported as having "made" its gross ticket sales number. Typically 1/2 off the top goes to theaters themselves, and then all these accounting games begin. Maybe the top line is the only relatively non-fictional number but they could at least report it for what it is: ticket sales.
> I'm not fond of these "should" articles. I'd like to acknowledge the programming specialists out there and the 9-5 programmers. The "should" means that if you're not doing these things, then you're doing something wrong. (That's not even the connotation of "should", that's the literal meaning.)

I would like a word -- and perhaps it exists already and it just eludes me at the moment -- which is a milder version of should. A word that means "Your life would probably be improved by doing these things, even though what you're doing now may also be good."

If we had such a word, it would make it easier to have "You should" conversations without people becoming offended. Our world may be great, but I think that a world with a word like that would be a little bit better.
Alternatively you can probably crash an RC plane or something into it
I set up my resume[1] with PDF exports using Docverter. It takes Markdown or HTML and turns it into PDFs and Word docs.

[1]: http://www.bugsplat.info/resume.html

(Disclaimer: I also built Docverter)
Github can easily afford to use someone like Prolexic. And they should.

When you say things like "And it's all dependent on attackers not getting the IP of your actual servers" this makes me wonder how much you understand the subject matter. There are many, many options.
Good point - I just added that to the "Building Your Own" section of the Readme.
+1 on this. I thought it didn't work at all since I was using the Num pad for the phone number then realized numeric keys work.
A liberal paraphrase might boil down to the old adage:

Don't make a bet you can't afford to lose

Back in the day, people presumably "bet the farm" on XYZ shady investment. Since the farm was all they had, it was a bet they could not afford to lose. But obviously 9/10 startups fail to be great investments. So, as public policy, the Gov't didn't want 9/10 farmers to go bankrupt. a Rich guy will a $$$ minimum assets can still lose a "farm" and have something left (ie, diversification).

Becuase the rich guy can (in theory) have scope for more investments (experience) and/or to pay advisors (expertise), they are seperated out. Note that there are lot of unsophisticated rich people and/or investors in certain areas that have varying levels of sophistication (empirically). But with the privelege of wealth come the obligation to realize caveat emptor, vis-a-vis public policy.
I was hoping this would be the outcome. I could not believe that anyone would seriously try and enforce this statute.

As a Minnesotan I still suffer the shame of electing Jesse Ventura, but at least we're not the state that said "no" to free education - yet.