skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's interesting. However, presumably the consequences of censorship on the censored individual can be equally detrimental whether it is perpetrated by the state or an individual/corporate entity?

For example, what happens if a company makes a product with a flaw that is literally killing people. Are they justified in removing a post from their web site forum that points this out? By your argument, in law, the answer is 'yes', but how does a user of product X feel about this?
As far as I am aware automatically scalable infrastructure is not something that was available until recently, nor is it subsumed by the 'net/web' designation. There is more to it than the web. Have I missed something?
> Some of you might ask, "Why would anyone pay money for a game that looks like that?" The answer is, "I don't know, but they do."

Some people really enjoy gameplay a lot more than pretty pictures.
We've built a webgame (a tennis manager game: http://rockingrackets.com/) where our website didn't even had a decent layout for the first six months after making the website public, but a lot of people were playing it because of the game play.

We're not breaking even on the time part yet, but our other costs were covered after only two months. Currently we're close to being feature complete, after which we'll fix bugs and refactor some code for a short period. After that, we'll be moving the game into a maintenance mode and we'll start developing a new game.

Rocking Rackets' expected shelve life is long enough to cover our time investment quite well even at the current rate of making money. The game is still growing though...
I think the other important point is that censorship of the net like this isn't something that will stop people visiting websites. It's easy enough to just get the content another way.

So the censorship will have pretty much no effect, apart from negative PR.
Hacker: Woz was the 'original' hacker. News: He's on TV doing something that no other 'hacker' has done and survived.
What is the status of OpenTextBook? It looks to be fading out - latest post is 6 months old.
Maciej Ceglowski: Andrew Ross Sorkin Explains
Did you do it part time or was it your main job?
Any details on what you are doing? Anything I can do to help?
I Googled a bit and the "underachiever method" seems to be

1.) Pick niche

2.) Put up survey finding out what questions people most want answered in niche.

3.) Use Adwords to bring people to survey.

4.) After you've collected results, write eBook that answers questions most asked.

5.) Sell eBook

6.) Profit!!! :)

Do you have experience with this method, Peter? Does this actually work? It seems that the recommended sample size of the survey I saw (50-100 responses) would be too small.

Also, how could you be sure that just because people say they want answers to these problems that they'd be willing to pay to get them?

I'm fascinated by this whole info-marketing thing in that I can't believe it actually works yet a lot of folks seem to be doing it profitably. I'd be interested in any insight you have on this.
Wall Street Accelerates Options Analysis With GPU
Optical amplifiers, wireless technology may help overcome rural broadband challenge
Not only that... but a man in a lawnchair at 16K feet... with a GUN.

hahahaha
Wait a minute, didn't they install Linux on a potato? Potato is much smaller than this black box!
Take a look at the pictures http://www.bbspot.com/News/2008/12/linux-on-a-potato.html
Solaris is way better than AIX, and a Power port is half done (historically there were a Power version).
I don't know really, but IBM could choose to drop linux or, my hope, merge solaris and linux... this would be terrific, if backed by a behemoth like big blue.
Startups: The Early Stage
I can use alternative shells 'til the cows come home, but until everybody else that I work with abandons cmd.exe it's not going to be all that useful. For now I'm stuck with bad cmd scripts and python (which I love).
Thanks! So you migrate to a new slice each year? Good to know I don't need any linux admin prior knowledge, but it sounds like this is just right for me. Hoping to learn a lot from the experience.
Smart move. One of IBM's core competencies is hardware (assembly); one of Sun's core competencies is software (esp. virtual space software) and innovation.

The danger, of course, would be in losing that innovation when/if the acquisition occurs. If IBM does end up acquiring Sun, it would probably be a good idea to let it maintain as much independence as possible. There seems to be an inverse relationship between size of an organization and its ability to adapt and innovate.
Yes. Gladwell likes to describe his books as intellectual adventure stories. I thought he finally delivered on the promise in Outliers.

The chapter about why commercial airliners crash was actually kind of gripping.

The chapter about how a moment of "evil" led to the destiny of his family changing was actually kind of moving.
"Which Starbucks can I find him working at then?"

This year, appearing in his 4th feature film at the ripe old age of 20. Now playing in Chicago theatre. Acting since the age of 8. Yes, you've seen his films. (Did you see me, too?)
There is a whole vendor ecosystem around high-end SPARC/Solaris systems, especially in financial services and telcos. It could take a number of years for these corporations to move onto IBM gear if that was the key.

Dropping SPARC completely would be foolish, better just rebrand everything to IBM and take it from there.

Think Compaq, now think Sun.
Here are the actual test stats... http://rakudo.org/status

BTW... "half way complete" != "passes half of the tests". I would have thought the hard stuff was done first ;-)
Their weather is fantastic in the summer months due to the great lakes. Lots of fishing/hunting/hiking nearby if you're in to that. Casinos, Canada (i.e. more casinos, plus legal underage drinking) a number of other cities are all nearby. Hockey worth watching, other major sports that are easy to get tickets to.

Might not be a bad place for a cheap summer home.
Count me in. I won't live there, but I only live about 2.5 hours away, and could quite trivially afford a 2nd home there.
PC sales rise, Mac sales decline. Blame marketing?
Thanks for your comment.

It's much more than a set of links. Links are just a list of independent items with no relation between them. You'll notice that there is a relation between the different pearls in this map, that there is the perspective of a VC and the one of an entrepreneurs, or that of a VC that likes exec. summary and another one that doesn't. In other words, this map is not a random "set of articles" but a story of the different dimensions and opinions on the VC funding process. You may not have noticed it but by organizing the map in the way I did, I've basically guided you through the web on this topic and by doing so I've put forward certain ideas and not others.

Now, that being said, to be able to easily manipulate these pearls and create maps, flash is required. You can record and turn your navigation into a map, drag&drop pearls, erase them, switch orders, write comments, change titles, indicate crossings, etc. And without flash, it's not possible. The power of a map is way way way bigger than that of a list: to you use the yellow pages to find your way in a city or do you use a map?

In addition, Pearltrees allows you to see other maps that cross my map on VC funding overall process and approach. In this case there are none (at the moment) but if there were you would see a yellow circle to indicate that an other map is crossing this map. You can then basically navigate from map to map, from gudie to guide and you will discover an entirely new, humanly edited web.
Could not disagree more.

Woz is a hero for his hacking, not for his obsession with practical jokes. The least of all things he could be admired for includes, murder, punching babies, and dancing with the stars.

Being in the spotlight, for no reason or for a shitty reason, is not to be voted up.

But then again, that's must my opinion.
Interesting read - I was wondering myself [1] how to get into that field, it seems so unlikely that one can make money in that space (even only enough to make a modest living out of it).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521475
I know people who've worked in admissions at a surprisingly large number of colleges-- private and public, universities and liberal arts colleges, elite and average-- and they've all indicated the importance of yield.

Names of the colleges, please? The great majority of colleges have yields well below 50 percent,

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection...

so the great majority of colleges are already accustomed to admitting a majority of students who will NOT enroll at one of the colleges that admitted them.

Your comment would be much more informative if we had some idea exactly which colleges you are talking about, and which persons affiliated with each college you have spoke to, and how recently.
YouTube embeds considered illegal in Latvia
The joy (and hazards) of watching YouTube on TV
I grew up in Detroit (suburbs) and plan to spend a little time there between relocating.

My cousin opened a restaurant by the old Tiger stadium and he is doing well. He DJs too and loves the Detroit scene. It has its own culture. Between Detroit, Windsor, and the Detroit suburbs there is a lot to do.

I grew up in Royal Oak, MI which is where the young professionals are settling now. We have a good downtown with decent night life, a lot of restaurants, boutique clothes stores, and good coffee shops. The winter weather isn't that bad. If you want bad--try upstate NY or upper MI.

My only complaints:

1. You need a car. No matter where you live expect to drive everywhere you go. I live downtown in Syracuse, NY and love walking to most places.

2. There are parks and such in the suburbs but the majority of lakes (aside from the great lakes) were sold off to the highest bidder. I really admire the twin cities in MN where someone decided to turn their beautiful lakes into public parks. When comparing MI to MN, I really feel like someone sold out the MI people.
This episode of Skeptoid - http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4036 - discusses this very video and concludes that what we're actually seeing in the video is water vapour (since mercury vapour is much heavier than air, why is it rising in the video?).
Not quite.

What it means is Parrot now has a stable API for language developers.... http://perlbuzz.com/2008/11/parrot-10-will-be-out-in-march-2...

Its looks like Rakudo 1.0 (Perl6 on Parrot) is earmarked for next year... 10 years earlier than you feared ;-)
This article quotes the acquisition at around $6.5 billion(http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52H1GS20090318). StorageTek acquisition was $4.1 billion(http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/01/HNsunstortekcomple...) and MySql AB acquisition was around $1 billion. That makes $5 billion. So is rest of the Sun worth $1.5 billion? Clearly, it seems that these acquisitions have decreased Sun's valuation, rather than increasing it. Also, I didn't see any point in buying MySql AB for $1 billion.
ZFS - you'd hope they would set it free! Linux Kernel inclusion ftw!
AMD has a market cap of 1.70B, they could fold that in too.
It looks like you are the "designer" on your team. It also looks like you have an amazing background in software development, program management and entrepreneurship. That's the kind of designer you want as a cofounder ;)

As you say, design is a lot more than some paint and a logo. Interaction design, information architecture... are all VERY important at the early stages. I do think the early devs should have this as a skillset though (much as you do) opposed to cofounding with a straight up interaction designer (no matter how good they are).

Given the amount of equity a cofounder gets it I would tend to look for people who could be 100% utilized (working all the time to get the company up and running). It can be hard to keep a full time designer busy unless you have a team of devs pumping stuff out for them to craft.
That's along the same lines, but my friend thought that IBM's strategy was to eliminate much of the profit potential of what Sun was developing in the Java (software) space by commoditizing it. (Joel points out that with Java, Sun is commoditizing its own hardware.)

This brings to mind Apple. Software, Design, and Integration are what distinguish Apple Computer, allowing them to charge a markup above the commodity level. The hardware is largely commodity hardware, except for the fact that it's slickly designed in a way that Apple's competitors have some difficulty matching, and that it's (supposedly) the only hardware that can run OS X. Various Hackintoshes testify to the true commodity nature of Apple hardware.

I've been predicting that someone is going to enter the low cost space and offer a truly integrated software/hardware experience based on Linux. I'm wondering if Apple is planning to do just that.
Fake: Top lista najvecih hakera svih vremena - RUR Industries Forums
Programmer from Finland has lost finger replaced with USB drive
The name of the magazine is "The Robosexual." I'm aiming it to be about the lifestyle of the modern geek. It's a blend of GQ, Seed, Cargo (a great, defunct magazine), Wired, and Smart Money.

It's not going to be your father's traditional magazine, there's a subscriber/user interaction thing that I'm working on that is being a pain in the butt. Once we get that done, we're going to launch the website and that'll lead to the print magazine.
That's not a bad thing for a sufficiently well designed test. Here are examples of decent tests which I taught to. "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical.

http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aF...

http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFin...

http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aF...
That's been true of every other architecture that was inexorably marginalized by x86. You're right that IBM isn't going to unceremoniously drop it. But it's dead, and good riddance.
I was a student: I did it entirely as a hobby, and I didn't do it particularly well. My advice comes not so much from learning how to develop a good game (in the time I thought of myself as a developer, I made nothing above "bad"), but more from playing lots and lots of indie games, and trying to figure out which ones were standing out the most in my mind.

Polish is tricky, but generally it entails playing over a game again and again trying to make things perfect. This showed up most in RPG development: when the battle system in every game is the same, you learn that what matters isn't your system, but rather how you manage to use that system to constantly grasp attention. (In fact, if you ever have time to develop games without worrying about it for money, I'd suggest you download a standard RPG development kit: that'll teach you how to make addictive games despite having almost no control over your basic systems. That way, when you begin making your own games, you'll have a feel for what's going to get at people and what they'll ignore as "yet another game system".
Why is that a win? Roughly the same group of people are involved in BSD.
I suspect you could have made Xen (on the high end) or Jails (on the low end) equally as powerful. I'm not a fan of Zones, and of all the Solaris innovations of the past couple years, I think Zones have the least staying power.
I defer to your knowledge of what your friends said about admissions at their school. I can only speak to my own experience at a single, Ivy League school where we did not once use yield considerations to make a decision.

I could put on my Ivy League snob hat at this point and wonder aloud if maybe schools that aren't Princeton don't have the luxury of being able to make decisions without thinking about yield. That's quite possible. But again, unless you have direct evidence, you're just relying on rumors and what you'd like to think about the process, which is in part why things get so messy with admissions.

To the blind man, the different parts of the elephant all feel like different animals. All I'm asking is that you concede that you're blind in this situation.

To point #2: I don't see anything that contradicts what I said. Most college admission consultants have not actually voted on kids as officers at elite schools. Therefore they invent a system that seems to deliver results in some way. They're selling a product they only partly understand under the pretense that they completely understand it.

What I'm arguing is that no one completely understands it.
On the flipside, if you want to be great at physics or math, and you are older than 30, you probably missed your chance. Better luck next life.
"Elaborate" does seem like the right word here.
Yep. They prorate charges, so firing up an extra slice for a couple of days will only cost a few dollars.
IBM and Microsoft have taken two different tracks. IBM is trying to everything except custom software development and support contracts because those are the most profitable short-term. They give away low-quality software that is difficult to use and missing important features; then they charge every user the full cost of fixing these problems. Basically, IBM wants you to rent expensive people to run your free software.

Microsoft is trying to make custom software development and support contracts unnecessary by selling quality, feature-full software. I'm sure lots of people want to say something snarky about Microsoft's actual software quality, but at least recognize that it is the plan. Basically, Microsoft wants you to buy software that ends up being much cheaper than renting people. Ultimately, they want you to computing appliances that are powered by their software and which don't require any maintenance or custom coding.

By the way, there is nothing slick about Eclipse. I am using it every day to write S60 applications and I hate it. I am using IntelliJ IDEA 5.1 (three or four years old, three major versions behind) and IntelliJ is much, much better.
I cannot think of a government agency less capable of conducting a proper security audit than the FTC. This is like expecting the Better Business Bureau to do penetration testing.

The widespread use of Google services and the relative lack of vulnerabilities speaks louder than any FTC funded research ever could.
Sounds good, but at this point I take any Perl 6 date projections with a big fat salt lick.

Years ago, I slacked on updating my 2nd edition Camel Book to 3rd edition, figuring that I would just wait for the Perl 6 version. Ten years ago. The book is not in very good shape these days.
Say what you will about Java-the-language, especially after the world has moved on to higher-level languages, but it's hard to deny the extent to which Java has been a force for good in enterprise software development. The de facto standard for companies that didn't adopt Java? C++.
U600 Insert Sim Problem Ways
Paying for hackernews frontpage links, now?
This is as much a war as Dell vs. Apple is - i.e. not at all, and it's misleading to frame it as as such. This is not a "winner takes all" scenario: it's two competing products in a single marketplace where getting a small fraction of sales in the market should be considered a great success.

Additionally, the Pre, in my eyes, appeals more directly to the Blackberry market than the iPhone one.
Can someone explain to me --- and I never even play games (Hacker News is my computer game), let alone write them --- why any indie game developer would sink $120k into a title and not design it so they could collect recurring revenue from online multiplayer subscriptions?
Interesting. Another nice choice for serving static content is rumored to be thttpd. It lacks any kind of FastCGI support though (it's in the proprietary,premium version).
Has anyone had any experiences of thttpd versus nginx?
I hope you're aware of sIFR speed issues when you're replacing multiple different instances of text. It dramatically slows down the browser. (And when dealing with PDFs, I wouldn't be surprised if on average you had to use 20+ sIFR flash objects.)
for under $100? i don't think they understand how much people have paid for frontpage status on digg/reddit in the past.

as for HN, i suppose it was only a matter of time before someone tried to game the system (if they aren't already).
CDDL is already free. I would love if it were GPLv3, but, again, this wouldn't help Linux a bit.
It's inevitable. The theory is that the algorithmic protection and a little bit of oversight can remove the irrelevant stuff. If someone wants to pay to submit relevant stuff, then I don't see a problem.
Solar lights
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On what kind of system is iPaper better than Adobe Reader 9?

Adobe Reader used to be really slow. But, even on my almost-three-year-old laptop, Adobe Reader 9 if quick.

I honestly don't know why Scribd doesn't do something to improve their product when obviously so many people hate it. Scribd is one of the very, very few things about my computer that still frustrates me.
A lot of google earth imagery is aerial and not from satellites.
JAVA - Can we please have SWT controls built into the standard JRE? Or at least add some new controls to Swing?
Well, how do you know that college such-and-such favors those kinds of applicants? Do you work there to be able to know for sure? How many schools can you work at to know for sure?

You are right to suggest that parents could use help knowing where to apply. That's the service that people wanted more than anything during my brief adventure in consulting. It was also the one that I felt the worst offering. Every school is different. Every school is a little weird. I don't think anyone can tell a kid where he'd be best off going to college.

Sure, you can read up on what the different guide books say and offer an opinion, but it's still a shot in the dark.

My advice to kids is always to go visit and see if they could see themselves hanging out on campus there. When I was in high school I visited about 20 colleges with my family. They all looked nice, but none of them inspired my imagination. When I visited Princeton, after I was admitted, I got the sense of a place full of people much, much smarter than myself. I felt like I'd somehow been invited to Hogwarts or the Jedi Academy. That sense of disbelief was what cemented my decision. I figure that's as good as method of picking a school as any.
If you use Google Custom Search, you can get indexing on demand.

Also, if you use sitemaps correctly Google will update your content in its main index pretty quickly.
"Microsoft can really do without riling up the open-source crazies"

Not biased at all.
1. Developing multilayer games requires more work than developing single player games. You have to look at the cost/profit ratios, not just the profit.

2. The work can be qualitatively different - multilayer games are not designed the same way as single payer ones, you have a whole new can of worms to worry about.

3. Maybe he likes single player games (or making them) better than multilayer ones.

as a side note - 120k usd is not that much money, considering most of that money is the author's salary.
Real IT Episode 4, Colos And Testing