skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a site has been running for several years and a substantial portion of the ads are illegal and during all that time the site admins have repeatedly refused to remove illegal ads, then yes, the site admins have some responsibility.
This is a common thing to hear at entry-level hourly jobs.
If only you could have tailored your resume for the interviewer...
I understand the dilemma and I definitely believe apparent conflicts of interest should be fully transparent.

With that said, I don't believe that issue is just held to medical schools.

At Florida, all of our faculty's salaries are fully disclosed online. I'm not sure if its a UF thing or a Florida public school thing. Anyways, any student can easily lookup how much a certain faculty member is getting paid as well as where their funds are coming from.

To illustrate a similar ethical dilemma, our group was approached by the military to research explosives detection technologies. My professor is a native German and lived in Germany during WWII, and as a result he is an extreme pacifist. Therefore, we have not taken a dime of military funding because we have no idea how the technology might be used after a transfer. It was a difficult decision because in academia a steady cash flow is hugely important, and the military had deep pockets. Instead, we sought to apply for the more competitive NSF funding because our interests were purely scientific and we wanted to keep it that way.

All graduate students should be cognizant of this subtle detail. In most cases it probably doesn't matter because money is money, but when you present your work you want to appear as unbiased as possible.
I didn't know this was a joke until I read the comments.

Call me jaded.
Upmodded for the most ass-kicking refutation I've seen here in a long time.

Edit: Maybe that's harsh, but one ought to be careful before saying that someone has "no pedigree".
Bloomberg search clones Google c. 2005
Maybe there is room for the ability to make TV shows that are of decent quality more cheaply.

I'm not necessarily talking actors/directors heavy stuff.

Up till now there has been a maxim. If it's on TV, it's making a substantial amount of money. If it's wasn't, it wouldn't be on TV. The result is that the cost of producing TV shows experienced very little downward pressure. There has never been good reason to take advantage of opportunities to make TV shows cheaply. That means there might be things that could have developed that haven't.

What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries.

I imagine there would be patterns that emerge.
I'm not a customer but it seems like you may be able to get that kind of information from them if you are one:

http://www.keynote.com/products/web_performance/index.html
Part of my project requires me to look at how different websites do search. Some websites (ridiculously) don't allow you to access their search without doing a POST (allmusic.com). Other sites do, but tag along 1,000 different GET parameters. For these sites, I usually strip off all the unnecessary stuff and see what happens.

For Bloomberg, this is what I got. It looks like they've cloned Google Search from 2005, bit for bit, and injected their own search results inside of it. Any ideas why?
Using Software to find Drummers who use Click-Tracks
Something with even less fanfare: Apple actually bumped the specs on the MacBook Pro, too.

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/03/03/apple-quietly-bumps-15-m...

256GB SSD options for all MacBooks, and a CPU bump to both the higher-end MacBook Pro configurations for the same price as before.
If you're a Firefox user and savvy about CSS selectors, I recommend the Stylish add-on (http://userstyles.org/). It lets you create blanket tweaks for all sites and specific tweaks for specific sites. And you can turn your tweaks off and on at will. It works even with Javascript turned off. I set colors and fonts and font sizes, adjust column widths, eliminate entire columns, make images semi-transparent so they don't bug me so much, etc.
Index Ventures closes new early-stage €350m Euro fund
I ask whether the comment detracts substantially from the HN community? If the answer is yes, I downvote.

The nice thing about this question is that it implies many derived reasons for a downvote: being mean or insulting; egregious stupidity; being irrelevant; being "clever" without adding real value. And so on. I try to be careful to NOT downvote someone just because I disagree with them.
What you call a bright side of hyper-locality and the "real world," I call a civil war in which religious and sexual minorities will be left without a side and mercilessly slaughtered.
In particular, simply adding the "title" attribute to the HTML "a" tag is enough for many browsers to display a description on mouse-over (i.e. no JavaScript magic required).
I see this has been answered several times already, but I'm not sure it has been laid out plain and simple:

The first $250K any American makes gets taxed at exactly the same rate. For everybody. It's the same for any value -- Bill Gates pays exactly the same tax rate on the first $50K he makes in a year as I do. The rates go up for successively higher values -- your first n dollars may not be taxed at all; then your next n dollars is taxed at a low amount, and successively higher. These bottom rates will not change no matter how much your total income is.

When they talk about raising the tax rate for people that make more than a certain value, they are talking only about taxes on the money OVER that value. So only your 250001st dollar gets taxed at the higher rate -- as will every other dollar you make on top of that. The tax rate for the rest of your money will not change at all.
Thanks for seeing the point, which was that beyond a certain stage a website should not be able to maintain an "impartial" stance.

Your list will not look shocking any more if you add a line
for the respective sentences:

Pirate bay : Assassin Bay

slap on the wrist : 15 years (1)

(1) if the admins provably and repeatedly have refused to remove .target files.
You edited to include the link to the JS, but here's my reading of it:

1) It pulls out content in <p> tags (presumably those are the ones with data you want).

2) It rewrites double line breaks as paragraph breaks (in case the site isn't as semantic as it should be).

3) In order to pick the "main content" container, it looks for the container elm with the most <p>s inside.

4) It filters the "main content" to remove stuff that looks like trash. Filters include having too much non-<p> content, having too few commas, and too few words.

5) It rips out all of the HTML on the page and puts its own in, which also pulls together the user's selected style info. This is the sketchy step. I think an overlay might've been more appropriate here, but the comments imply the author had some difficulty there.
Here is the real paper:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Elsevier will charge $31.50 to see the same thing.
The paper for free, instead of $31.50:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Starting Up In A Downturn - 10 Reasons To Start A Company In An Economic Downturn
Crunchbase fails me again:
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/adeo-ressi
Teaching startup entrepreneurs how to create/run a business is a waste of time. Entrepreneurs only need to identify markets and build products they believe will generate interest, and can be monetize beyond the break even point.

What are you going to teach them? How to pitch?

The value of an incubator is not the lessons on how to incorporate or how to close a deal. The value is the network. Your incubator must be connected with VCs, the Media and more importantly Buyers.

Everything the entrepreneur will pick up as he goes. Also most of the things that apply to all startups (accounting, payroll, incorporation), they should simply outsource it and focus on building a product.

Bring me money. Bring me buyers. Bring me customers. Bring me Media attention. The rest we got it. Spending 8 hours a week learning how to create a great powerpoint presentation is not an entrepreneur's business. When you get to the point where you need to learn these things, you go hire yourself an MBA.

Just my 2 cents. That being said, I wish he helps startups launch.
hey good thinking! thanks
I don't hate Lisp but I do agree that in those days limited stack depth was a problem. I don't know if this is an accurate assessment of Lisp but I think of pure Lisp as language where all of the data is stored entirely in the call stack. In other words it's just functions and arguments piled up in a stack. Is that right?
Thanks, had a brainfart and forgot I could just read the code ;)
die hard ASM fan hates higher level languages, news at 11.

is it me or is HN getting worse by the day?
Sounds like a construction worker enrolling in an architecture class. It would be baffling. The author doesn't seem to acknowledge the value of processes abstracted from laying bricks. My guess is that he hasn't faced many ad-hoc buildings.
3) Live television is nearly non-existent online.

Hopefully IPv6 and global multicast should solve this once we finally rid ourself of this ancient thing called IPv4.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Becoming a Better Programmer through Dynamic Typing
Why would someone lookup a value in a property list when you could write a simple routine in Macro-11 that would find the value in a table?

Why indeed! I'm glad Lisp is finally dead so that we can all go back to writing assembler code optimised for the cycle allocations of a specific cpu. If only we could get back all the time wasted writing all that silly code with all those silly parentheses!
It's you. This is satire.
The problem is getting together the budget to make a good TV show.

This is actually a problem I'm working on now which I'll be applying to YC with as soon as I figure out if I can pull it off.

I was ranting in #startups on freenode the other day about the cost of production being the thing that needs to change for the game to change. I've got a thought on how to do that, but it just requires a little time to see if its possible or still just a theory.
I'm pretty sure the title is tongue in cheek, and would be more accurately rendered as "I hated lisp when I first had to learn it", considering e.g. the name of the blog, and posts like these with considerable lispy content.

http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/01/day-4-part-1.html

I hate explaining a joke as much as anyone but it seems that it's gone over some heads.
Yes, but I understood that tptacek's point was that we shouldn't try to keep up appearances here. (Which is not what you are doing, but other people are.)
Note to people writing a lengthy, angry reply: this article, and this comment, are both satire.

Check the other posts on the blog. It's a lisp blog.
Being to select the chunk of text you interested would probably solve this issue. I wonder how Readability "selects" the "relevant" part of the page. Maybe it is just a smart heuristic about what the user want ;)

Come from HN => must be a PG fan => Just display "PAUL GRAHAM" => Go back to HN and vote

Reloading the page 'disable' the service, even if it is far from ideal.

I really like it though. I was looking for something similar for years.
I'm surprised no one has picked up on this yet: families who make $249,999 may actually pay far fewer taxes than families making $250,000. Why? Capital gains taxes, which Bush set to 15%. Obama will increase this tax to 20% for families making >= $250,000 (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jd7Vs2tjPA...). Also, all sorts of other possible deductions would be removed.

Wealthy families often make much of their money from investing, so a 5% capital gains tax increase can be pretty significant.
Brilliant. I love the fact that it doesn't really change the look of my blog very much ( http://www.danieltenner.com - once you're inside an article, applying readability with medium margins, newspaper look, large font, only gets rid of the red background and the image, that's all)
And it's all because of those damn kids and their recordable cassette tapes.
Google CEO: Twitter a "poor man's email system"
I guess it's nice to have it as a web service, but: print to file, save as postscript, run ps2pdf and you're done. Let the browser render it and you'll be assured it's correct.

It should be really easy to add an option to firefox to do print to postscript right from the command line.
Dear Sirs:

We have studied your project description and we will develop your website with unique and eye-catching style in functions , and in look . as we have designed so many sites ,so we are sure that we would provide the best solution for your needs. We have enough expertise in asp ,.net, sql, flash, multimedia , e-commerce, java, ajax, etc.

We can give you a package of $125.00 if you take a decision within this week. Rest assured of full satisfaction for which we would strive We do not merely speak of satisfaction... we assure escorted delivery of satisfaction with "EXCELLENCE".

We have already pitched for your valued business. We would appreciate if you could provide us your contact details.

We look forward to working together with you on this project.

[taken from an actual proposal i've received on elance]
The same logic says that I should be able to strip the DRM off a movie I download from iTunes and share it to the world as a torrent; after all, it's my computer, and I'm the user, and I'm the one in control.
Here's my guess:

Just like people make custom, amateur soft-subs these days for both pirate and legit DVDs, a file-format for reprogrammable program time-lines would be invented pretty quickly basically editing out the ads runtime.

I'm not going to say I could make it in five minutes, but it should be pretty trivial to implement a plugin for this kind of thing. Heck, base it on Avisynth and on the Win32-platform you already have 99% of the groundwork done for you.

These custom time-lines would probably be indexed, by show, season and episode, with direct links to the legal torrent all at one place.

And I doubt anyone would be able to argue that files denoting time-lines could in any way be illegal.
Isn't that just relative utility? I'm not sure what that has to do with marginal tax rates.
You're generally right on #2 and #3. Even the biggest IP transit networks in the world only have capacity on the order of a few terabits per second (or a few million simultaneous video streams).

However, "bandwidth" isn't really what matters. It's the last mile connection to end users. Big CDN's like Akamai have this figured out and can pump millions of simultaneous live streams directly into end user networks without congesting any internet backbones.

It turns out that the main reasons we aren't all watching TV online right now is that big TV networks 1) are afraid of cannibalizing their existing revenue streams, and 2) think it costs a lot money. Neither of these are strictly misconceptions, but they aren't nearly as true as they were even a year ago.

Justin.tv has developed technology and infrastructure that brings the cost of distributing live video below the cost of serving static video, so I guess that makes it all about the revenue streams. It should be interesting to see what happens to this space in the next couple of years.
I love Thomas.

This article does a good job of getting you motivated to try something, but I think it forgets the "think" part. Of course you need to get out and do it, but you also need to consider what you are doing.

Don't cause confusion and delay while doing so, but make sure you think.
I think meanness in service to a larger cause, ie a site's quality, as opposed to just an arguing tactic, is a good thing. I used to hang out at K5 (when it had traffic) where one finds that meanness to dummies is quite effective at shutting them up. Shutting up dummies is the #1 thing to preserve a site's quality. High quality comments is a fragile thing, imo too rare to ruin with squeamishness about people's feelings. There's a threshold of tolerating bad comments past which you can't do anything anymore (eg, Reddit).
I wish them luck, but I don't think selling ads on a weather site will be easy, especially without a massive amount of traffic. What types of ads will be relevant? Those for umbrellas? Maybe products for storm chasers or meteorologists? These types of businesses are probably not in the habit of buying internet ads, and if they give it a shot, it likely won't convert.

Looking at other weather websites, the ads are generic and untargeted. Basically massive brand campaigns for prescription drugs, insurance, etc. Weather is likely a poor monetizing niche and these advertisers buy massive amounts of remnant inventory.
UPDATE: I went through the process to signup since they are offering 90 days free, and was presented with multiple Apache/Tomcat errors halfway through the process. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence -- I stopped right away. Giving my social security number to a website that is having server failure? Bad idea.

This is an important lesson: even if it is beta, you are opening your doors to people. If you mess it up, they are less likely to trust you, permanently.
This is what every sane web designer should do. I made this decision many years ago for a web based task manager I built with Ruby on Rails (43actions.com), and have never looked back.

Sure I got _a lot_ of negative comments for it (and still do), but in this particular case I definitely put my own sanity way ahead of the larger (but dwindling) market share.

Sorry to now be a bit inflammatory (this single question is one that boils my blood every time), but put simply IE sucks ass! IT SUCKS ASS! I _HATE_ IE. MICROSOFT HAS _ZERO TASTE_ (thanks Steve Jobs for that very early insight). Ok, enough said. Sorry.
I assume he realizes that anything of the form "poor man's x" is extremely dangerous. Microcomputers were once the poor man's computer, video the poor man's film, etc.
Is there a video equivalent of last.fm? With a place where people could share their watchlists, and a good source of video material (whether based on Bittorrent or iTunes, or both), we could easily forget TV broadcasting in a few years.
Finally a Mini with 4G of RAM! I'll hold off until Snow Leopard, though.
Maybe TV lost, but Hulu is owned by NBC and Fox, and Hulu seems to be doing a pretty good job. So perhaps the TV networks are a bit more on top of this transition than the music companies were.
There are stop overs and other accumulated delays. In some cases (depending on the route you end up with) there are additional security checkpoints.

For instance, JFK to Nagoya (Japan) to Manila means arriving early at JFK, going through security, then flying to Nagoya, where you again have to go through security and then wait 2-3 hours, then on to Manila. Remember, delays accumulate.
Does this mean that typical cable (e.g. comcast) or fiber (e.g. FiOS) networks have more bandwidth than the internet? Or is this just a multicast vs unicast thing?
I just did my taxes Saturday night, so here is real experience, not theory. My household income is near the point of this discontinuity.

Last year, my wife and I made $X more than the previous year. The end result on our taxes was that we paid about (0.75)X more in taxes. This was due primarily (as the account explained to us) to a combination of increasing hit due to AMT as well as declining mortgage interest deduction as we approach the end of our mortgage.

With an apparent marginal tax rate of 75%, what's the point of working harder? And, in fact, if I can stand to lose, say $1,000 in income in order to buy myself $4,000 worth of "life", that seems like a good investment.
"Ultimately, university is supposed to train you for life, not for a job." -- wonderful
"Facebook killed TV"

Can someone explain that line to me? I don't see facebook mentioned anywhere else.

I generally consider myself pretty on top of ways to watch TV on my computer (I've been doing the RSS bit torrent thing pretty much since it's been possible), but I have never seen any common thread between facebook and tv. "Internet killed TV" I can agree with.
Sounds like a HN geek enrolling in an irony class. It would be baffling. Try reading the article slower :-)
I also noticed on Blogger pages (I just read the 'I hate lisp' post on the front page) it only shows the comments, which is totally useless.
Yes, losing 'utter dominance' is the same as 'lost' when it's a game of monopolies. The internet has become a viable competitor to the TV networks, which makes this an entirely different game than a few years ago.
Some of these numbers aren't quite right - USA scores at "best possible" for employing workers, when hiring foreigners is a dreadful pain in the neck, you have to deal with withholding/payroll taxes/unemployment insurance, and there's differences in 50 states' employment codes you need to be aware of and get in line with. Then you have union codes, labor codes that are sometimes arbitrary (x person has a legally mandated break every y hours, even if they don't want it, and the company is fined if the employee isn't forced to take it - yet a virtually equivalent job might have no such codes/requirements).

America's a nice place to live, and certainly there's a lot of liberty here, but however they defined their criteria of how easy it is to employ people, it doesn't accurately reflect that America is not, in fact, the easiest place in the world to employ people.
Get VS.NET, and suddenly IE has the best script debugging around. Firebug rocks and all, but VS.NET will drop you into a breakpoint will a full call stack, watch, step thru, etc. It's a proper debugger.

And yeah, it takes about the same level of effort to develop against IE as it does against FF. The advantage is that your stuff generally then works right in Firefox first try.
You have to heap-allocate data sometimes, too. There's nothing special about Lisp in this respect. I mean, why wouldn't you have to use a heap?
The main point he seems to be making is that LISP is terribly inefficient from an early 80s point of view because there's an abstraction layer between LISP code and the CPU.

These days of course that's a moot point, as almost all day-to-day code is implemented in a language that has such a layer. Ruby has a VM with multiple implementations, Java has JVMs, C# has the Microsoft dotNet runtime and Mono, etc.

I can't really tell whether or not this post is supposed to be funny but I'm guessing that the only reason this made the front page is because of the polarizing title.
Google: M&A 'inactive', waiting for prices to drop
Sweet! I got a mini back in Nov when I went freelance and I've been thinking of getting another, because they're so cheap that you can have a second just as a backup. This pushes me over the fence into actually getting one, can't wait.
On some level Google was, for me, a poor man's internet. My initial use of it for months was for the cached pages which would actually load on my terrible Packard Bell with dial-up in 2000.
Samsung Omnia HD Themes: Dark Glamour
I don't think he's being disparaging, but it was definitely an interesting choice of words
and then create a mashup to combine the profiles from all of the various niche sites into one, so it actually has enough users to be effective.
No mention of killing Sarbanes-Oxley, which responsible of moving almost all the of the IPO market out of the country.

If venture capital is so reluctant to invest, then lower the barriers of bringing a company public.
There is a difference between socialism and nazism. I'm not sure if they teach that properly in the good 'ol US of A, but I assure you this is a fact.
Only if the down-modder is actually correct. Some of the more sarcastic ones are usually wrong.