skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have DreamHost account, you already have unlimited bandwidth and storage, what's the point of getting another one?

Also, read their definition of unlimited: http://dreamhost.com/unlimited.html
"But these options aren’t conducive to sharing content that you’ve discovered on the web, as they don’t allow your to embed them in your blogs and websites."

False. The Google Book Search API allows you to do precisely that: http://code.google.com/apis/books/

Scribd allows user uploads though, and that seems to be their biggest differentiator right now.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or not (the general tone of your comments in the past seems to suggest a general negative attitude), but I thought I'd address some of your points.

Let me tell you this, now you and every small time director wannabe is making a zombie movie.

Actually, I'm merely investigating the possibility of exploring the zombie theme. I'm putting together a digital animation startup and I'm looking at various genre's that, from a technical standpoint, can be done with a smallish team size for the first project.

Zombies aren't hard to create models for (random human generator like makehuman, appropriate skintones, add gore) and animating them can be keyframed fairly efficiently with scripts, followed by the breakdowns and finally the inbetweens can be interpolated by the computer. Then theres adjusting movements with bezier curves to get realistic arcs happening in movement to really sell it.

Zombies in general also don't need voice actors, which is another gain, as that means less voice talent. Ideally I'm investigating using inhouse talent to start out with, and morphing voices with various VST plugins to keep the costs low.

What this means is that we can get more done (using a nearly infinite set of zombies) with relatively few people animating the series over time.

Why do people do this? Cause it's cheap?

Probably, yeah... why spend money that you don't need too? Also I think that in general, people either love zombie movies or they despise them.

PG advocates finding a small group of users that LOVE your content and expand. This ethos seems to fit this genre.

If you want to make a movie

Actually I have no intention of making a movie. I'm planning on more episodic content that will be distributed via the web to start out with.

Since the whole studio model is being built on a shoestring budget, utilising open source software and different film-making techniques I'm taking a lot of PG's advice on board and treating this as a tech startup. That is what a 3D animation studio partially is, a blending of art and computer science.

As a result I think the zombie genre can adopt some of those "hacker values" for boot strapping a startup. For example, Iteration. If we don't like a character, or he's not resonating well with the audience... we can quite literally kill him off. If we take it too far, we can quite conceivably bring them back in some form.

The genre is flexible to the low capital studio concept, rather than a "wannabe director wants to make a zombie movie"

I'm sick to death of zombie movies (and never liked them in the first place).

See my point about its either something you love or something you dont. It has the potential to make a decent starting point.

my son is a professional actor

Which Starbucks can I find him working at then?
Solid, but you missed the enormous influence of yield optimization, especially among the Ivy League colleges that use sophisticated models to predict yield.

Colleges care intensely about yield, for two reasons. The first is that it reduces uncertainty in the composition of the incoming class. The second is that it's how, internally, undergraduate admissions offices measure their colleges' relative prestige. Harvard doesn't especially care if it shows up as #4 vs. #1 in US News's capricious rankings one year, but if Harvard loses to Yale in cross-admissions, there'll be hell to pay for the Harvard admissions office. Yield numbers are the "bottom line" regarding how good a job the admissions office has done.

Yield optimization plays a huge role in the process. Harvard, for example, aims for an 80% yield rate and generally rejects any applicant for whom it estimates a lower-than-70% chance of attending, regardless of qualifications (my boss at a prior job knew a former Harvard admissions officer). The "yield probability" is based on a number of factors, but mostly number of campus visits and interviews, in addition to the other schools to which the student applied.

Anyone who really wants to attend a selective school has to clear the yield bar by showing a higher-than-baseline likelihood of attending. Harvard doesn't have a 75% yield rate only because of its prestige and the quality of its program-- although those are obviously very important factors-- but also because it's extremely good at selecting people who will attend.
Play Left 4 Dead. Great "feel" of being stuck in with the zombies. 28 Days Later is better in feel. I Am Legend isn't terrible.
I think seeking references for programmers is oxymoron. Instead, I always ask the candidate to tell me something he invented in programming that I cannot google.
Ask HN: Poll function
When voting for the zombie movie poll --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521008

I found that I could vote both yes and no. Is this a bug or a feature?
Hacker: an enthusiastic home computer hobbyist; News: Information about recent events or happenings, especially as reported by newspapers, periodicals, radio, or television.
So who is a better bet, from an admission's office's perspective, a kid from a poor background or a kid from a very wealthy background, assuming their grades, quality of high school education, test scores, et al are identical? (I'm assuming that the main concern is the student's academic performance in college, NOT his career afterward; obviously, the rich kid will pwn in that aspect.)

I would bet on the poor kid, because he's likely to have higher "g", to so speak. Are you arguing that the rich kid is the better bet, because his advantaged background will continue to pay off in a way that's underrated by the standardized tests and grades?
How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign
Woz also survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, both terror attacks in Bali, and Erlang Day at Hacker News.

I have an election in my part of the world this weekend. My prediction: Woz will survive that too.
I had discussed this with a reporter from Bloomberg a while back, who challenged me to buy one of these houses and see what happened; if I didn't live in an amazing place, I would definitely be doing this right now, for the exact reason that is alluded to in this article. As artists have been priced out of New York, Paris, and most of the other usual spots where they were able to congregate and cheaply live/create, there's been a real need for a new urban home; Berlin kinda does this in Europe, but we haven't really seen any particular place carry on the baton from New York here in the US. Detroit may very well become that city!
> So, ultimately, these kinds of contracts are bad. They need to be regulated in the same way that banks are regulated and for the same reasons.

And they were, by several US govt agencies. (Since these contracts were used for banking purposes, specifically securing assets, banking regulators were involved. Insurance regulators were involved. The SEC too.) Yes, this includes the London groups.

I am confused about how foreign banks got stung, what with all their superior regulation and all.
SEO Traffic Spider | Search Engine Optimization 
Search engine optimization is the activity of improving the volume and quality of real time traffic to web pages or whole sites from search engines through natural search results for targeted keywords ...
That's because it's not a GA, as far as I can tell, it's just a hill-climbing algorithm. That's not to say it isn't cool, but it's not GA.

There are also a bunch of articles out there confusing GA and A/B testing.

Hrmph! </curmudgeon>
Haven't there been recurrent musings on Hacker News about getting a bunch of friends together and buying up a whole city block in Detroit? Most of us could easily afford it, free and clear.

I'd totally be in if Google would open a Detroit office. ;-)

I predict that this is what'll happen with a lot of the rust belt cities: as prices drop low enough, people will move in and the city will be transformed into something no longer so rusty. Kinda like how Boston reinvented itself with high-tech after all the textile mills moved south in the 40s and 50s.
My C is really weak (I'm a Ruby guy) but here's the best I can do.

Two things make this work: 1, in C, an array can be treated like a pointer that points to the first element of the array. 2, pointers have a subscript notation.

That is, for a pointer p, p[i] is the same is * (p + i). (where pointer addition goes by sizeof the thing pointed to).

So, a[5] is really * (a + 5) ... and 5[a] is * (5 + a). Same thing, although 5[a] looks really weird and will make people hate you if you use it.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/append-c.html was helpful in reminding me of the specifics, since I couldn't find my K&R.
Elite colleges can't ignore kids who might go on to run the free world someday.

They could try to fight the current world order, though, instead of admitting some Skull and Bones cocksuckers who go on to destroy the country and world economy. They could show a lot more spine on that one.
Avoid the jet stream and trade winds. Specifically launch in the "Horse latitudes", and wait for a calm day. The very southern tip of spain is located in the horse latitudes.
Rails 2.2.2 Chicken and Egg Migrations Headache
Ahhh, finally, a question on HN I can answer!

Firstly, I'm a huge fan of the zombie apocalypse.

-So, why do I like it?

I love the genre because, by far and large, because it creates a reality that works very counter-intuitively. Sure, zombies are a threat, but bigger picture, they're just a background concern compared to the threat that other people present, and that's where the meat of good zombie apocalypse media resides: human interaction.

The scenario allows for an accelerated skewing of human interaction that extends not to just distrust of strangers, but absolute loyalty to anyone that's proven their trust. Anyone showing slight signs of mental instability is now a huge threat to your livelihood, and anyone not pulling their weight may have be killed or left for dead (which is effectively killing them yourself.) What, in our world, are the slightest of concerns, become large factors in a zombie infested world.

-Favorite zombie media?
Night of the Living Dead (which is public domain and free at
http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead
http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead_dvd
And Romero's others (Dawn, Day, Land, just not Diary.)
Shaughn of the Dead,
Zombi II (Shark v Zombie; how can you go wrong there? Otherwise blah)
28 Days Later (Yeah, yeah, whatever. Listen to the commentary. They know it's a zombie flick.)
and the UK show Dead Set was worth watching too.

Most other zombie flicks just aren't that good.

The comic The Walking Dead is without a doubt some of the best zombie media out there (I collect it in TPBs, and need to grab the latest.)

Max Brooks' books World War Z (interview-like retelling of the Zombie War with veterans,) and Zombie Survival Guide (Almost like a 'for Dummies' book) are must-reads.

And the game Urban Dead http://www.urbandead.com is pretty fun initially as well, but didn't have a ood 'end-game' when I was playing. Now it all looks relatively safe: http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Suburb (map)

-As for anything else I'd add...

Just that gore isn't necessarily required, but if you ARE going to do it, well, make it worthwhile. ;)

And feel free to email if you think of any follow-up questions for zombie fans.!
gopher:some.obscure.university.address.edu. It was late 1993.
I prefer to call it 'The Krudd Filter' (after our Prime Minister)
If only 70% of genre movies suck, they are an exeception to Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap).
Anyone try this with Windows 7 Beta 64 bit? To make the regular version work you have to add "--in-process-plugins" to the executable to make it work.
I wonder if the government realizes how much damage they're doing to the country's reputation by ensuring that when the rest of the world thinks of the words "Australia" and "Internet," the next word that follows in most people's minds is "censorship." They're practically marketing themselves as a backwater, in the same way Kansas does every time they try to outlaw evolution.
First, I'll note that what you wrote here somewhat contradicts your original post. Also, HN is comprised of a very small subset of early adopters - namely, the sort who create their own services. This is an absurdly small and misleading sample, even within your stated target.

Second, again -- you're looking at a potential audience of 0.01% (HN-reading zombie-movie-lovers) versus a large, general audience of young viewers who enjoy (and pay for) digital animation content. How does that make sense? You specifically stated that you wanted to do this as a low-cost thing -- thus you can't be making high-quality, specialized content that caters specifically to a dedicated audience of zombie-movie-lovers who would be willing to pay for it... Have you thought out your business plan here?
I've often thought that America's goofy and somewhat unfair admissions system is actually a blessing in disguise.

Most countries have only a handful of excellent colleges, and the vast majority of the bright people end up at a small number of them. This means that it matters a great deal, in these countries, where you went to school.

In the US, partly as a consequence of the silly admissions system, the talent's much more widely spread around. So there are more colleges worth teaching at, and consequently we have 50-100 excellent schools. It also doesn't matter, because of this, nearly as much where one goes to school; it's almost irrelevant after the first job.
Ask HN, Could online textbooks "reasonably" replace print books in high school?
I'm on a parental advisory council for my daughter's high school. At our last meeting we discussed spending $30,000 just to supplement lost or damaged books. There are about 1500 students total. The school has a large supply of computers and very good internet access. I've been able to find various materials online, especially for math and computer topics. Still, I wonder if it would be practical to encourage the entire school to move in that direction. Does anyone here know of an internet site I could use as a resource or, better yet, an example of a school moving to online books?

Thanks
Mənalı Reklam
where did you see that in the wild?
Gentrification, as I've heard it called, has its benefits as well as costs. As artists (or other creative types, like hackers :) move in and beautify a place, demand from professionals goes up and prices skyrocket. Even with the overall real estate market going down, I'm having a heck of a time finding a combined office/apartment at what seems like a reasonable price in my city, which is currently going through a major downtown renovation.

If only Detroit wasn't so cold...
Feature. Many polls aren't binary choices, and this allows for that.
Windows PDF viewing is problematic. Scribd's iPaper eliminates that problem.

Do you use Windows?
Well, that's not really a fair question. Each kid would get looked at one his own. The rich kid might make a great impression. The poor kid might make a great impression. They would never be set side by side for an either/or. It just isn't done that way.

Also, your assumptions are pretty out there.

1. The odds of a poor kid getting the same quality of education as a rich kid are very, very low, especially if you knew just HOW good of an education rich kids in the U.S. can get. The most informative part of my two years in admissions was the week I spent visiting elite boarding schools in New England to meet with students thinking about applying.

My meals and conversations with the students there were astounding. Their teachers all had PhDs. There was not one ugly or overweight kid in any of the schools. The students were years ahead of where I'd been in math and science coming out of a public high school in the Midwest. And they aggressively questioned me about every aspect of Princeton's curriculum and admission process. When I would visit public high schools in the Midwest, the kids rarely, if ever had questions for me. They had no clue what to even ask me about. "Princeton" was just so completely foreign to them. Not so for these kids, who all had friends currently studying there. Many of them had siblings who'd graduated from there already.

So this was a real eye-opener. You can be the best kid in a crappy school, but the fact that you were in a crappy school is going to have an impact in the grand scheme of things. That's why we'd never compare kids across contexts. It just made no sense.

Similarly, the test scores, grades "et all" for the rich kid would probably all be higher.

If there was a "poor kid" who had incredible credentials AND didn't sound like a basket case, then he'd be hotly pursued by every top school in the country. But those kids are very rare, so it's not realistic to pit a student like that against a "rich kid with good grades and scores" which is as common as air in these applicant pools.

If I did have to pick, I'd take the more precocious kid every time. I'd pick the kid who's able to make stuff happen for him. There are poor kids that can do this. There are rich kids that can do this. It's much, much rarer to find a kid from a less privileged background with this mindset though.
"How to generate over $400k in revenue each year", only $299
Only under extreme duress, or when running CAD software. Normally, Linux.
IPhone vs. Palm Pre: It's still war
Perhaps I'm missing something but wasn't the "publishing documents on the internet" problem solved long ago by The World Wide Web? Or is the purpose of Scribd to recreate the magical experience of reading various dead tree formats, even though it doesn't actually do that?
When should you leave your day job to open a start-up?
Google has an Ann Arbor office. Long commute...maybe they have a shuttle.
Yes, good job! It makes sense if this is a basic package and the company plans to scale in the future, but if not then it is hard to distinguish between all of the "offline your files" products. What's worse is if there is convergence (e.g. DropBox expands into the domain of web plugins in order to view/play files anywhere you are).
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500365
Smallest full-featured Linux PC ever?
I think I got you the first time, actually. My point was that humanity might actually be worse off with an internet that is regulated in a totalitarian manner than without an internet.
Algorithm: If ("lower seed's pomeroy ranking" + 0.0085) > "higher seed's pomeroy ranking", the lower seed wins, otherwise the higher seed wins.

http://gist.github.com/80978

Feel free to steal my code

UCLA beats Gonzaga and Memphis beats Louisville, Memphis beats UCLA for title.
Parrot VM v1.0.0 released
For English classes, you can get most of the classics from:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Also, perhaps you can find some ideas from home school curriculums:

http://www.dmoz.org/Reference/Education/K_through_12/Home_Sc...
Sorry man, but you've gotta back this stuff up. If you worked there, then, by all means, let us know. It all sounds good, but is it true?

To your points: I didn't talk about the influence of yield rates because at no point during my two years in admissions was a decision ever made on a kid based on whether or not we thought they'd matriculate to our school. This simply did not happen in my presence, so I didn't speak to it.

Note This is one of the problems I have with college admissions consultants. They charge kids an arm and leg to help them get into elite schools, but few if any of them actually ever admitted kids to elite schools. All they can do is look at the black box, see what goes in, what goes out, and then make educated guesses about why. That's not good enough for the prices they charge.

Unfortunately, most of the folks I know who have worked in admissions are so humbled by the process that they wouldn't think to sell kids on the idea that they could get them into an elite school. I tried it for about 3 weeks during grad school and just couldn't do it. It was too ridiculous. The kids that are going to get in are going to get in. The kids that won't, won't. I could take a big payday to inform kids that they will or won't be admitted, but no one wants that service. They want you to polish them into a winner, even if it's not the case.

So the bad information and the snake-oil salesmen dominate the conversation, folks like these people http://ivywise.com
I vaguely remember using some university's gopher system at a demonstration Internet setup circa 1992-93. That would make me seven or eight years old.

The first url I actually remember would probably be liii.com:8000 as that was the host of a Merc MUD I played on(Barren Realms). I have some recollection of playing on it a few times before we got internet access at home. Now they're at http://www.barrenrealmsmud.com/ and I haven't visited in probably a decade now. Nice that they're still around.

The second early url I remember is crl.com, the dial-up ISP my dad signed up with. We had a shell account on a real Unix box, with a whopping 5mb storage, and we weren't allowed to run SLiRP/TIA so we couldn't emulate a SLIP/PPP connection and use graphical browsers(a sore spot as the Web got increasingly graphical). They moved to business-only services some years later (and we moved on to other ISPs) Now the domain appears to be taken by a drug company. I don't remember what crl stood for, even.

A third good one was ftp.wuarchive.wustl.edu. They had a pretty spiffy anonymous ftp in the early 90s. Apparently it is now "too expensive to push bits to the world."

My predominant memory of the internet before around 1996 was that the Web was only one of several viable systems: email, Usenet, telnet, and ftp were also used by my 8-to-10-year-old self. But as I got older, the Web rapidly took over everything. I was still using dial-up right up until 2003 when I went off to college. And then still used dial-up when home on breaks, until I got a laptop and stole the neighbor's wi-fi. It's funny to think of how much dial-up's user experience grew less tolerable over time.
A couple of years ago you could even have remortgaged it for $100k! Win-win...

Interesting idea, though. Seems to me that as more and more people find themselves able to literally work from anywhere, this will happen more and more often. Why move to the end of the world to live cheaply, when you can just move to a cheap city within your own country and enjoy the same benefits, but with a similar culture?
MySpaceID Gets An Upgrade, But Did It Already Miss The Boat?
Uh, Can you document that?

My impression is Alan Greenspan specifically nixed regulation of CDOs around 1999.

I suppose I am talking about derivatives in general, in fact. Everything I've ever read claimed they were entirely unregulated. I would like to hear if that's not the case.
N95 has TV in some countries. The phones look like ordinary N95s. So do lots of Telstra phones in Australia (which have Foxtel content) and KDDI phones in Japan. They just look like ordinary phones.
Does Detroit still have a decent music scene? I haven't heard anything interesting coming out of Detroit since...the early 90s, I guess. But maybe just missed it.

I'm not planning on staying in the valley forever...might be fun to be involved in reinventing a once great city's downtown.