skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"a recent history of being a whipping boy"

This is really what Taiwan is about, a constant reminder of China's past humiliation; it's a big emotional issue for the Chinese. I feel that this is the driving force for everything that China has done recently

yeah I agree though that war for Taiwan is unlikely, since China's real invasion of Taiwan already started years ago. It's just too lucrative for Taiwanese manufacturing businesses to set up shop in China, and they've already been migrating to China en-mass years ago. Add to that Chinese laws forcing many of these Taiwanese businesses to have a cap as to how much money they can transfer outside of China (specifically back to Taiwan) and then you can see the long term problem for Taiwan...
Ummm...actually, TechCrunch may have started as Mike posting stories in his underwear years ago, but it's a thriving startup in its own right today, between TC, Crunchbase, TC50, Crunchgear, etc, etc. I bet the whole mess is worth $50 - 100m.
HubDub (a prediction market) has been doing this for nearly a year:

http://punditwatch.hubdub.com/

TechCrunch's score is a telling 13%.
"Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine."

Why am I not surprised. Translating the original article through the Techcrunch filter in my brain had already produced the mapping "late stage" -> "early stage or not at all".
Let us imagine the doomsday scenario that China and the U.S. go to war. Let us imagine that either one loses a massive number of soldiers, say, 1 million soldiers. Using nuclear weapons would not exactly give one an advantage unless one would be able to destroy 100% of the enemy's decision-making centers in a first attack, which is impossible. Thus, if losing 1 million soldiers is bad, losing 10 million civilians is even worse. An eye for an eye? Shanghai for Los Angeles? Hong Kong for NYC? This is madness.
Reminds me a lot of Sun's sunspots ...
10 skills developers will need in the next five years
so, if you knew someone used that site to generate their password, look at the date the account was created, SHA1 all the times on that date, and dictionary attack it? Just my first guess, I'm not a master programmer or anything.
But still. How will that affect him at all? There are no consequences for him being wrong. He won't lose advertisers. He won't lose RSS readers. He only gains pageviews, mindshare, subscribers and google hits by running this stuff and then updating it later to say it's not true.

I don't have a point here, this just strikes me as a pretty weird situation.
Another example of this(python on embedded system controlling xbees and such) at same price: http://www.digi.com/products/wirelessdropinnetworking/drop-i...
Sorry about that, I checked the box in the settings that reversed function in relation to F11 being pressed. My primary point, that it doesn't make Firefox go full screen, still stands.
What is Dental Dam?
With IBM pushing their own cloud - does this mean I might one day be able to fire up a bunch of 32 thread boxes to do my bidding?

Hey, a guy can dream...
The fuss is that deep-pockets guys like Blackboard can stifle competition by suing the little guys, whose small profits get wiped out by lawyer fees before a court finally throws out the claims.

In other words: the big guys don't have to win (their law suits) to win (wipe out or scare off the competition).
They're interesting, but you have to BUY them to play with them :(
The doomer theory is that modern agriculture is merely an inefficient means of turning oil into food. I don't know how much credence to give this; I'm not an expert.
How JRuby Makes Ruby Fast
They are a publicly traded company and litigating the issue makes business sense for them. For Blackboard to not sue their competitors for infringing on patents they own would not be against stockholder interest.
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Hear, hear! Facebook is really hurting under Zuckerberg's leadership: http://trends.google.com/trends/viz?q=facebook&graph=wee...

Time for a professional CEO to take over and show the kid how it's done!
Mahindra Xylo India: Price, Reviews, Features, Specifications
Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd, the market leader in utility vehicles has done it again! Yes, and this time it's the Mahindra Xylo. Known for delivering ultimate consumer satisfaction, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd has always endeavored to make cars that are engineered around the customer.
Was it really necessary to patent the built-in battery design? That doesn't really seem original enough to warrant a patent.
Ask HN: How Much Should I Pay @THE_REAL_SHAQ For A Retweet?
So what's an objective way to figure this out? He now has +500k followers.
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This claim may not be entirely true. I think people clicked on this link because they couldn't see what it might look like when the dropdown is completely open. This plugin in question shows just the initial state of the dropdown. Whereas pictures of other plugins show how they look after user clicks on it i.e when the dropdown list is completely displayed.
Suppose a person agrees about property rights in general, but believes certain circumstances are extenuating.

None of the quotes you provide argue that he is wrong. Rand could have agreed with him. It simply doesn't say, either way.

One such extenuating circumstance might be this: no harm is done to the property owner. Then if there is a crime, it is a victimless crime. A libertarian like Rand or myself might think in that case it's really none of the property owner's business, since it has no negative effect on him.

Not all downloads are harmless, but some are. Property rights advocates can disagree about how many. The passages you quote don't say where Rand stands on this.
The SIMpill, a small pill bottle with a SIM card
exactly the idea I had for a site.
If Google will make my entire twitstream searchable, then I am all for this even though I expect that Google will stagger Twitter's innovation.

I lose info I need in tweets, and it annoys me.
Tropicana Line's Sales Plunge 20% Post-Rebranding
It probably has to do with the ultimate irrelevance of the information being presented. I read the headline and cared for all of 2 seconds. If you were a respected pundit and you said "Global warming will kill us in a year if we don't all buy electric cars tomorrow", and we all went and bought electric cars, and you were wrong, the consequences would likely be far more severe. Arrington posts unfounded rumors. About the Internet. Eh.
Define "worth" in that context. Do you really think someone would pay that much for it now?
I like how Gawker proposes Marc Andreessen as the replacement, when Andreessen is known for making technically incredible projects that burn out and don't go anywhere. Hire the guy who made Ning, which churns out bland social networks, and make him run Facebook, whose challenge has been to create its own unique identity? Really smart move.

I also like how people keep citing this "1,000,000 person poll" like it's a sign of outright dislike (my friends have all universally settled in, and now are protesting the rumored "pay-for Facebook" cost, which I find funny enough not to get irritated out) rather than a sign of universal love for the site, enough to get mad. I know a lot of protestors that wish kids cared as much about the war as they do about Facebook.

To the people who have been dissing Facebook's recent change, I ask: when was the last time you made a product that had that many passionate users? Because I'm doing cursory thinking, and perhaps Amazon or Apple come to mind, but not many things beyond that. Not even Google has such a level of passion.
total eclipse of the sun. sorry couldn't resist :o)
And if your system is infected here is the removal tool.

http://data2.kaspersky-labs.com:8080/special/KKiller_v3.4.1....
I said something similar on the last Ayn Rand thread, and indeed these threads do start to sound repetitive.

I read literally hundreds of books in school with socialist, feminist, existentialist, collectivist, or fatalist themes. I read exactly one author in all of American literature with the theme that an individual could shape his own destiny and that capitalism (you know, that evil economic system that has sort of created unprecedented global prosperity) is okay. That author is Ayn Rand.

I was an obnoxious Randroid for awhile. But Ayn gave me the ability to stand up for myself intellectually, to question establishment ethics and politics, and to eventually question and reject her. I think that's a valuable experience for a young person to have.

I suppose my parents thought I was a "selfish jerk" when, after reading The Fountainhead, I ginned up the strength to leave the religion that made me depressed and a little suicidal in my youth. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

In my mind, the inventors of the computer revolution did more good for humanity than all the starry-eyed kids going into the Peace Corps or working soup kitchens. How often is a teenager going to hear that? It's certainly against establishment ethics. It's not something that you can safely assert in mixed company. People will label you a sociopath if you state it. But I think it's true.

Is the worldview of myself and Ayn so dangerous that people should be completely shielded from it? If so, watch out for this movie. If it's done right, it's going to fill lots of heads with dangerous ideas.

Personally, I like dangerous ideas. I think we could use more of them. When people's minds are filled with safe ones, the intellectual climate stagnates.

Lastly, to those who say her characters are not believable, I reply that neither were the characters in the movie "300". This isn't Hemmingway. She has her own style. You hate her politics so you're saying she's a bad author. Admit it and we can discuss the real issues.

I've yet to find one person that says "I think Ayn makes some great points, but I really think she writes like crap". Rather, it is usually "Ayn is a hateful and evil person. And besides, her books are total crap. Nobody should ever read her works for any reason."
EFF Bootcamp On User Generated Content and the Law
"Real time search" is a great new buzzphrase, like "social graph", used to make a startup sound important rather than just popular and to therefore justify lofty valuations.

Any information worth having will still be worth having a half hour later when you can find it on real news outlets, professionally written and researched and with more than 140 characters.

This is all predicated on the ridiculous notion that "shit, a plane just crashed in the Hudson, that was freakin awesome" is news. If anything, that very event proved that people crave much more than headlines. They spent a few hours reading about it on Twitter and a few weeks watching about it on CNN.
Of course they don't discuss internet downloading, these essays were published in the 60s, and she died in 82.

What she does mention is "unauthorized reproductions" of which piracy is explicitly. Once something is in the public domain, then it can be freely copied without anyone's permission, but until then, it remains an unauthorized copy.

The movie in question is still protected under copyright.

If you want to talk IP durations, then that's a different discussion altogether. What stands is that your original post advocates the unauthorized copying of a work still under protection of copyright, in this case, of a Warner Bros IP.
China prepares for war against the United States as the obvious power in its region of greatest interest. Maybe the two countries will get along fine. But, to give an example, some people in Japan and some in the United States anticipated the war that didn't start until 1941 ever since the 1890s.
I'd sooner employ wikipedia to the same end.
One thing he doesn't talk about that fits really well is Steven Blank's Customer Development model, which essentially is: don't wait until you've built your product to solicit feedback. Get out there and start talking to your (hypothetical) customers NOW. Show them your internal version, show them mockups, sketch it on the back of a napkin, do whatever you have to do. Don't keep waiting until you have "something to show" before you start getting feedback.
Countries can go to war in all kinds of ways without using nukes, even if adversaries on both sides have nukes. The Vietnam war was a long war between the Soviet Union and China (backers of the north) and the United States (for the south) in which no nuclear weapons were used, but all kinds of other horrific fighting methods were used.
Btw, for comparison, HuffPo raised at a $75m pre-money valuation (announced Dec 1 but negotiated and finalized possibly before the economy went haywaire) and they have about 4x the traffic of TechCrunch.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/huffingtonpost.com+techcrun...

I feel like you're an order of magnitude off there.
Why does google show up with >6M sites and qq with >20M developers?
Haha, man would Doug Bowman be pissed.
Or, at the very least, a trilogy. The book is already divided into three parts, so you have natural breaking points.
You have not addressed the issue of a victimless crime.
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Andreessen is known for making technically incredible projects that burn out and don't go anywhere.

We must be thinking of different Andreessens. The one I'm thinking of founded Netscape (sold for $4.2 billion in 1999), Opsware (sold for $1.6 billion in 2007), and Ning (raised over $100m on $500m+ valuation, and traffic up like 400% YoY).

Now, who knows what will happen with Ning. The fact that investors pumped in $100m certainly doesn't mean that it's a success. But it seems a bit unfair to say that his projects don't go anywhere.
The victim is the copyright holder. Just because someone doesn't wish to buy a movie (book, song, whatever), doesn't give them the authority to copy it.
This is the worst thing that could happen to twitter. Google's brand doesn't have quite the same cachè it used to. Today, it means being bought with no improvements to the service for at least a year after that. Look at Grand Central and Jaiku as examples.
I was taking about Rand's philosophy in general, not just Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.philosophy.tech/msg/8cb6b...
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/ayn-rand.html

The values you describe are good ones for the most part (the devil, as ever, is in the details), but I have little interest in Rand's development of them given what I've about the rest of her work, and the fruits thereof. Maybe that's unfair, but life is short.
Haha, good one. (not being sarcastic, btw)
And in some cases the copyright holder is not harmed in any way.

Do you dispute that? Are you saying in absolutely every case of downloading, the person would otherwise have paid?

Even if you think that's true in every case, you have no evidence that Rand did. I know plenty of free-market libertarians who think its sometimes a victimless crime.
Hah - I had a similar idea, except it wasn't pundits that you measured, it was regular people. You could make predictions, for the future, and people could vote up the "truthfulness" of them as time went by. You'd need some sort of penalty to discourage people from predicting everything under the sun though.

Of course, ideas are cheap...
I'm using my own neurotic definition of "burn out", which is to say "I don't care about anything he's done". I know I'm in disagreement with pretty much the whole world when I call Netscape a complete and awful failure, especially considering I'd say the same about Firefox, so I probably should have used better terminology.
It seems that you already know the solution to your problems, but don't want to do it. NGINX! Nginx may be confusing to people that are long-time apache users, but I actually find it to be easier, once you get the hang of it.

On another note, if you're filling up 50 processes and can't afford better than Slicehost, you should seriously reconsider your business model as it's obviously not working. Another option would be to speed up the execution of whatever code is being executed in those processes.

Final Word:
nginx+FastCGI
Seeing as my traffic for this article has gone x5 over previous "popular" articles on HN with more points in a faster time, I'm pretty sure the word "Sexy" has an impact... :-)
That is true. But it doesn't mean we should grant publicly traded companies immunity. The threat of bad press can be enough to make "doing the right thing" the better business decision.

If public perception is aligned with what is ethically right, it is better business for companies to be ethical. Although ethics is subjective, to me what Blackboard, Inc. is doing is unethical. Since it seems the majority here (and around the web, including current and potential customers) feel the same way, maybe litigating doesn't make so much business sense after all.
Madness tends to happen during wars. Look at the final months of Nazi Germany or Tsarist Russia.
Madness or not, it seems to stop people from going to war in the first place.
John Key at World Class New Zealand -
Carriers were designed for many things, but never for action against a serious opponent like China or even Iran.

Like much of the US military, the carriers were meant to bully weak Soviet satellite states. Today they are used to bully weak states of all persuasions.
It doesn't matter if they were going to pay or not. One needs to have a right to copy something before one can do it, and only the copyright holder has the right to grant that to another. There are no exceptions. If anyone can copy another's work without permission, why have copyright at all? Do you oppose copyright? Does copyright only hold if you were planning on paying in the first place? What would that even mean?

In the spirit of Atlas Shrugged, I invite you to "check your premises" :)
Yeah, I just wanted to create a site where people can submit articles, blog posts or just any predictions about the future and a maturity date. At the maturity date, you can mark it correct or incorrect.

Only then can you sort out intelligent predictions from noise.
Layman's overview of Amazon's Elastic Map Reduce Service
Jellyvision: Interactive Conversation (click the blue button under nav bar)
Welcome the new player
Jellyvision, makers of the phenomenal You Don't Know Jack games, have apparently been doing the "enterprise" thing for a while. Check out their home page's interactive conversation; I've never heard a more enjoyable sales pitch! The humor, analytics potential, iterative design, and other features are fantastic.
I haven't read any of the literature, but can't both claims be true? Experienced readers may mentally first become aware of whole words or blocks of words, but they could easily just not be aware of the finer-grained eye movements that are going into that perception.
The primary purpose of copyright is so authors/etc can get paid for their work. If something doesn't harm their ability to get paid in any way, then why should they mind it?

It's true that some piracy harms their ability to get paid. And some doesn't. Why are you unwilling to differentiate?

Of course I'm in favor of copyright. And I would never ask an author to sacrifice himself altruistically for the good of humanity. But why should not an author be happy to see people exposed to his ideas, to their benefit, in the cases where it does him no material harm?

Your position seems to be the author is harmed b/c his rights were violated. But the whole point of rights is to protect him from harm, not to provide a platform for him to tell others what to do. I think it's very un-Randian to get intolerant when someone does no demonstrable material harm. Do you think Roark would rather sue people for copyright infringement or make buildings? The best way of life, in the Randian way of thinking, is if you don't like people or their actions, you ignore them as far as possible, and get on with your own life.
For some reason, I just don't see this happening. If I just sold a company to google 5 years ago, why would I want to sell them another? I think it is much more likely they are collaborating on a project.
Regarding buyouts.. I can't recommend enough a vesting period on founders stock. Usually over 3-4 years. Then, if one of you leaves early, you only get a proportional amount of stock compared to your time invested. A lot of people just can't keep up with it in the long haul despite the best of intentions.

I would say if it's your first (or second) time starting a business there is an amazing amount of costly mistakes. You'll survive if you never make one big enough to put you out of business. We should collect stories about our biggest mistakes..
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Motherhood is a gift that has been endowed upon us by nature. However, unfortunately some of us may have problems in attaining motherhood. We can face problems in getting pregnant making us long for a child. Today we can find plenty of information online on how to get pregnant easier and how to get pregnant immediately. Here are some tips on how to use those tips effectively.The first point that you should remember while trying to conceive is not to take all trying to conceive tips indiscriminately.
An interesting read on some of this would be The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I have yet to finish it, but I learned a tremendous amount about corn and petroleum just from the first seven chapters.
Mangoes - The Ideal Fruit For Summers
The king of fruits- Mangoes, are indeed the best antidote for hot summers. Come summers and the refrigerator is laden with various fruits depending on individual choices. Mangoes and melons are by far the best loved fruits. Among Mangoes, the Alphonso variety is a favorite and is considered to be the juiciest of them all.
I was thinking that too. A bitter copy editor must've enjoyed writing that headline.
Its a good way to look at bandwidth if you don't need low latency.
As food gets more expensive, people will have less children. Birth rates are below replacement rates in a lot of countries that keep their population growing mostly by immigration. Or am I missing something?
It might just be me, but it disappoints me a bit to see startups put blogs as a sub-domain of WordPress.com. (WordPress itself is great, but it's much better to use a sub-domain or sub-folder of the primary domain -- for controlling the SEO).

So, I'd advise:
blog.chatterous.com or chatterous.com/blog

It's not that expensive to do (even if you want to host at WordPress.com). Should be standard practice for all YC startups.
But why should not an author be happy to see people exposed to his ideas, to their benefit, in the cases where it does him no material harm?

It's not my place to tell the IP owner what he should or shouldn't do with his property. The copyright holder has ultimate and absolute ownership of their IP, and while I think there would be great benefit in the works of Rand* going public domain, it's not my property to dispose of.

I respect the owners' terms by which their IP is distributed.

What meaning does copyright have if someone can copy something and say "I wasn't going to pay for it anyway"?

* Less so for The Fountainhead movie, as it's honestly not that good, imo. Gary Cooper had admitted (citation needed) that he didn't even understand the courtroom monologue at the end, which accounts for his delivery lacking the proper emotion. It's worth seeing if you're a fan of Rand, but if you want material to chew on, read the book.
How do you know it's more usable? If you asked me to bet, I'd agree with you that RPX would improve our adoption rate. But I also would have bet that expanding our support to include OpenID 2.0 would have helped as well. It didn't. I put this out there partially to see if anyone else was looking at the hard numbers.