skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The more words the story is the more the author gets paid or it had to be a certain number of words in the first place I suppose.

I liked the story, it seems this guy would have been successful and not in trouble if he had stayed away from promoting and manipulating penny stocks.

It is the basic story

1. He made something himself with almost no money
2. He borrowed enough to make some to sell
3. He sold them himself
4. People liked his product
5. He went on to expand and make more shoe products.
6. His company became large and successful

Only the bad part

7. His past actions came back to screw up his present success.
Trac and Subversion screencast: 20min to productivity
I was actually interested in the story, too, that is why it annoyed me that they made it so hard to read.

So what where his past actions? Is he really innocent? If so, how come he might still be sent to jail?
The two people that handled his IPO were a pump and dump firm. They are being prosecuted and they are testifying against everyone they know to try and save themselves. They claim that Steve Madden knew that his IPO was being manipulated and that he was guaranteed profit, even if the stock tanked. Steve Madden says he thought it was all legit.

It seems like Steve Madden, at the very least, unknowingly enabled these criminals, but it sounds like he will get off because the two testifying against him are incredibly unreliable witnesses.

EDIT: Didn't check the date. He pled guilty and went to jail.
It's difficult to prevent spam because there is plenty of money to be made from spam and as long as there is lots of money to be made the spammers will get VERY creative.
I've had a great time reading this.
Thanks for the summary ;-)
You make a really good point.

I think one advantage a package management system has is unified updates. The down side is that could cause problems when configuration file formats change. Gentoo tries to handle this by managing all config files in CVS, so you can diff different versions and merge them. Luckily, in reality, config file formats don't change all that often.
yeah, of your family.
If I read this correctly the article states the message on the apple website is incorrect and the credit can be used on iTunes.
According to the film, Cantor had mental problems even before he dove into serious math - voices in his head, etc.

Turing: from the psychiatry standpoint homosexuality is a pathology too, and again, he had homosexual affairs before he started working on the problems that made him famous.

Which means, we may be confusing cause and effect here.
The "battle between Al Gore and George W. Bush"?

How old is this? Where the hell are the dates on these articles?
I always wondered how some software companies can get established names to test their beta software in production environment. For all I know, managers at big companies are rather conservative about their choice of tools. Does anyone know how this usually works? Do they send sales people to convince the managers? Do they pay the testers, or is it the other way around?
> Gentoo tries to handle this by managing all config files in CVS, so you can diff different versions and merge them.

Am I missing something? I wish it did this, but unless something has changed recently it just gives you a tool for merging updates in (and doesn't store old revisions).
> from the psychiatry standpoint homosexuality is a pathology too

But what the fuck isn't?
Calculating valuation when using web-service back-end?
All,

For the YC funding application, I'm having difficulty determining valuation. The reason being that the back-end would use web-services for computing/storage (yeah, they do more than sell books :-)

Should I do an estimate based on an ideal system running at 100% processing usage? This may seem appropriate for a system that produces widgets, but mine mainly deals with running queries.

Thank you for your help!
NoMoreSnow
At least six years old - as it happens, he was convicted, and sentenced to almost 4 years in jail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Madden
> even if things go badly for Madden

They kind of did...
It makes finding packages easier, it makes updating them much easier and it makes removing them reliable.

It's not just about space; say somebody finds a security exploit in a widely-used library. How many copies of (eg.) libpng do you have on your system? Can you depend on every program that uses it to put out an update?
Now they just need to prove an algorithm for optimal style.
And he managed to continue getting paid in jail:
http://www.slate.com/?id=2064214
Alternative Online Business Models
after the end of a very hard week at my 9-5 temporary-till-i-can-be-my-own-boss job, this puts a smile on my face.
I wouldn't. There are many flaws in this book, but the main one is he gets facts wrong, both biographical and mathematical. For example, he writes that Turing died of a lab accident when in fact he committed suicide. He also tries to define consistency for all formal systems, and does so with outlandish philosophy involving "all possible universes". In fact, consistency (or inconsistency) is a property only of formal systems based on propositional logic--a subset of all formal systems--and it's easy to define mathematically. I can only imagine how many inaccuracies are in it that I wasn't able to spot.
So you sell this on the federal level, to let the DoE make sure the state level schools are honest. What's even better, you can charge a lot more because the DoE has a bigger budget.
Someone who is absolutely free of neuroses is useless. Maybe that's what the story in OP about.
If you liked that, this is the only other "intellectual" type article about upper class drug use/abuse I've seen.

http://www.westword.com/2003-09-04/news/72-hour-party-people...
I thought the program communicated the material extremely well and I would definitely encourage others to watch it. I did feel it was a tad melodramatic but then again because the subject matter is so significant it could be in danger of being under-sold.
I don't know if we should be happy; according to Groklaw the bankruptcy filing will put the Novell and IBM lawsuits on hold, moving SCO's day of reckoning even further into the future.
Carnegie Mellon Red team (of DARPA Grand Challenge fame) to enter Google moon landing competition
> The trick is that advertisement is expensive

Dating keywords are bid up, way, way up.

I am in a similar boat with a small advertising budget, for the past 2 years I have been using www.adbrite.com. At first it takes spending some time getting ads on sites to determine if they could drive the right traffic but now I am saving a huge sum over what I was spending on Google ads. My marketing budget is really low, about $2 a day so I am really serious about getting the right traffic instead of junk traffic.
New Yorker isn't a newspaper, it's in between a digest and a magazine.
Mash - Yahoo's new social network.
Please, whatever you do, don't host the video on YouTube. (Ahem, Wesabe.) To me, nothing says "I love compression artifacts" and "I can't afford to host my own site" more than YouTube.

As for software, check out these (which I have not used):
http://www.varasoftware.com/products/wirecast/
http://www.adobe.com/products/visualcommunicator/

I liked the idea of Snapz Pro until I discovered how difficult it is to edit footage losslessly. For our last screencast at the office I think we used Camtasia.
My guess is that Google never wanted to build a wireless network; instead they want a telco (who already has towers) to be tricked/forced to build a network that suits Google.
They are still on book #79, "Mystery of the Sacred Stones", in the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

Science marches on...
Get A Yahoo Mash Invitation At InviteShare
I actually know a guy who voted for him because he looked like 'He had a lot of composure.'
Oops, I keep forgeting this is not part of portage. This is done so often that it should really be made a sensible default for any mainstream distribution.
This is a key point.

Building stuff is easy. The difficulty lies in evaluating what you build.
I get pissed when people break permalinks.
The Biggest Ever BitTorrent Leak: MediaDefender Internal Emails Go Public
Have you ever ignored your gut and not regretted it?
Correction to title: China emerges as leader in botched hacks.
Facebook suicide: the end of a virtual life
Company Demos Personal Aircraft, Future Jetpack
This is not a stunning theory result, but a joke. It's not a real paper.
ok i meant rock bottom
Does anyone else love to read StartUp blogs?
I find they give better advice, than the entrepreneur blogs.

I like Octopart's blog, and some one others.
Feel free to name your favs.
The human programmer
> a vegetarian/vegan diet has been shown in almost every study to be a more healthful diet in every respect

Vegetarians have a higher death rate than meat eaters of the same socio-economic class at all ages.

Every study that looks at actual disease and death rates, and not assumed correlates like cholesterol, has found health benefits from high animal fat intake.

> heart disease, cancer and strokes, though. Those illnesses are linked to higher consumption of meat (Paleo-coronary, anyone?), dairy

Population studies show decreasing rates of heart disease and cancer with increased dairy and meat consumption. Look at post-war Europe and Japan.
Critique of DHH philosophy: "37signals' products tend to be so "opinionated" as to be anti-user"
A lot of schizophrenia apparently comes from cat shit. google toxoplasmosis. So maybe it would be hard to find in cat-less cultures.
I watched the first few minutes of this a while ago. They were making unrealistic Faustian analogies, and it came off as unpleasantly dishonest.

I would contend that no one has ever been driven crazy by thinking about mathematics. We like to think that sort of thing, but the branch of science involved is almost always chemistry...
An Overview of Video Editing on Linux
A lot of these primitivists extolling stone age culture tribes praise their perfect health without mentioning the infanticide. Many (most?) stone-age technology tribes kill unhealthy infants. They have a definition of life that begins at age one. It would be impossible to isolate this effect from diet.
You raise a great point, but consider a different viewpoint.

epidemiological studies are based on complex systems, systems with many variables and non-linearities. Atoms are a lot simpler (ha!) Here's what I think is going on: a hot paper comes out, presenting an interesting theory. People either like or don't like the theory based on preconceived notions, look at their data, plot every permutation of Xi versus Xj and publish the "juiciest plot."

Ok, it sounds like I'm saying that the "scientific method" has broken down. I'm not, the preconceived notion is subtle, difficult, and hard to eradicate! So, people aren't starting with simple and building up. Not because they don't want to, but because they can't.
Ayn Rand's Literature of Capitalism
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, AKA Medicine Recapitulates the Incompleteness Theorem Seventy Years On
Well, the reason why it applies to entreprenuers but not employees is because a successful entreprenuer can presumably quit after their first success.

I think the term is appropriate and descriptive if it's used in the context of someone who's successful and doesn't have to go back and do it again but does anyway. That tells you something.

I agree though, its use today is something akin to the word 'synergy' or 'web 2.0' - i.e. repeated misuse in inappropriate contexts makes the term dilute to the point where it basically means both everything and nothing at the same time.
I just did a screencast (ironically it's the item just above this one right now- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54774). We pursued your "option 2" initially and ended up doing just the screencast for our homepage demo on jumpbox.com.

I work on a Mac and used iShowU for the capture and edited and produced it in iMovie. Our homepage video is just a quicktime file. For the screencast in the tutorial above I used the Adobe Flash FLV converter to turn it into an flv and wrote a small custom media playback swf to do what you see here-> http://video.jumpbox.com/?app=trac

good luck
sean
I think in most cases companies are willing to trial things in some cases (as long as their risk isn't too much of a problem, or perhaps the gain potential is worth it). So even big bad conservative ones will take a risk occasionally, take a chance on a new player.
Trusting "your" gut is fine and all, but which road do you take when there's multiple people, with differing opinions, involved in the final decision? This is when it's key to lean on people you are able to trust, communicate with and most importantly, forgive, if the situation doesn't work out.
Sure. My gut told me to buy Motorola stock about a year ago. But I decided I'd wait until after I'd bought a new cell phone and use the research from it as a gut check to see whether they were still worth investing in. After that I changed my mind, about both the phones and the stock.

The stock has since fallen nearly 30%.
Mark Pilgrim: The longdesc lottery
Um...citations?

I'm curious if you got these ideas from a certain organization that was started by a long-dead dentist? Your use of the phrase "assumed correlates like cholesterol" made me wonder. I guess you discount the Framingham study (or the few thousand follow-up studies that were published and peer-reviewed) that DO show a strong correlation between dietary cholesterol and heart disease?

I don't have time to post a few thousand citations that contradict your viewpoint right now, so I'll just start by mentioning the Cornell China Study:

The Cornell China Study is considered the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. It is a joint research program between Cornell, Oxford, and the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine. The data was from twenty plus years of research in 65 Chinese counties. It is often cited because of its size, scope, and the fact that there was such a wide range of diet data represented (high meat consumption populations on down to populations with little or no meat consumption, for example.) It found a strong correlation between increasing meat consumption and increasing disease and mortality. It is an interesting study. You should check it out.

American men eat a great deal more meat (10 to 20X in urban areas) than Chinese men, on average. American men also die of heart disease at almost 17 times the rate of Chinese men. This trend holds true, in the aggregate, no matter where or what time period you study. The countries with the highest meat and dairy consumption have the highest rates of cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Even in post-war Europe and Japan. Even accounting for genetic differences.

I don't want to come off as a TOTAL pompous ass, so I'll only cite more studies if you're actually interested or still want to argue with me. I spend between 15 and 20 hours researching nutrition each week, so it is a pet peeve of mine when I hear total BS passed off as truth. Like I said, proper nutrition is the best medicine on earth...even though eating properly is NOT necessarily simple, easy or fun. Wanting steaks and ice cream to be healthy does not make them so.
Designer nitpicking...

There's weak contrast between elements. Your logo, three images, sub-headings and call to action are all nearly the same size (freakin' HUGE). Instead, decide which element is the most important and create a visual funnel down or across the page to and from it. Guide the user, don't yell at them.

The general alignment is off. Using centered text throughout the page makes your eye jump abruptly from one line to the next. I suggest instead left-aligning everything except the images and their sub-headings (Photos, Blogs, Videos). This will make them easier to scan and comprehend.

Finally, use some proximity. The current layout is stating that every element is related when, really, they aren't. Each serves different purposes so separate your content into their own unique spaces.

Hope this helps.
This article references both studies but includes sources.

http://www.westonaprice.org/modernfood/dirty-secrets.html
There is a really good book out right now called "Healthy at 100" by John Robbins that speaks to this very subject. It looks at several cultures that tend to have a larger % of HEALTHY centenarians, such as the Okinawans and Hunzans. It looks at what they eat, how they live, etc. It is good because he acknowledges the self-reporting errors in such studies ("Yeah, dude, I'm 110 years old!") and the impact of physical activity and social bonds on longevity, etc.

John Robbins is biased (toward vegetarianism/veganism), but his bias is based on sound principles (science, self-experience, environmental impact, ethics, etc.) The book is not preachy or anything, though. His other books are also really good. Especially if you're interested in the food industry, animal cruelty, nutrition and disease, etc.

He's a very interesting guy. He walked away from the Baskin-Robbins fortune to live a simpler and healthier life after his dad and uncle (Robbins and Baskin, respectively) both died of heart disease from eating too much of their own product. His one room, self-built cabin with second-hand furniture was featured on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and it became one of their most requested shows, to everyone's surprise. He's a pretty inspiring guy.
It's mostly that they want to put together an exciting story. They're not going for straight reporting. They're after drama and nuance, so there aren't considerations made for readers who just want the facts.
Why it's hard to communicate clearly in e-mail
I think you've just touched on the most important point of the whole discussion: the best OS for the average user is the one that their friend/relative/lover geek will be happy to fix for beer/home cooked meal/sex.
The social networking craze is becoming more than a little absurd. The TechCrunch preview of Mash doesn't mention anything that doesn't put it firmly in the me-too category. Don'y they understand that catching up to Facebook isn't enough? Launching a social networking site isn't enough. They have to do something qualitatively different than everyone else, or users won't have any reason to load the page. And the Mash platform, which TechCrunch suggests is forthcoming, doesn't qualify. Proprietary social networking platforms are already hugely overhyped with Facebook, so another, less popular one isn't going to make a splash.

That said, who knows what Yahoo has up its sleeve. Answers is good, and Pipes (while not, from what I gather, too incredibly popular) is certainly innovative. So hopefully before too long, they'll do some neat jiu jitsu with Mash.
the ending of a sad story: from linux distro publisher to becoming my favorite patent troll...

at least it had a happy ending
"The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition." -Isaac Asimov
In late stage consumer markets, brand matters more than product
Note that this wasn't Asimov speaking as Asimov, it was a character in Foundation and Empire. http://easygold.cn/library/admin/upload/kehuan/asimov/fdep/f...
The Oldest Business with Six Sigma Quality
Google Proposes International Privacy Standard
This just means that someone will buy their "patents" cheap and start another lawsuit.
Roller Skate Implementation
Someone whose philosophy can be summed up in a Depeche Mode song is probably not the brightest light in the history of western civilization.
Or could it be, in being able to essentialize a message in elevator-pitch fashion, that a person actually really knows what they're talking about?
interactive error-handling

It's pretty good, but the Lisp world has stagnated, and you'll find equivalent (and better stuff) in other environments, like Squeak.
but it can't be, that's why she wrote a number of lengthy books instead of just one song.
Would that John Galt had been able to deliver an elevator pitch, rather than a 90 page rant:-)
Could this be one of those cases where bias comes into play? You remember when trusting your gut worked, but tend to shrug off or forget when it didn't? Humans tend to make errors like that...
Camtasia (www.camtasia.com) is great, plus they have a 30 day demo so you can make sure it does everything you want.

I have only used it for simple purposes but it does much more. Here is a sample I made with it without trying any of it's advanced features

http://www.userlinks.com/groupadmin/groupadmin.html
Many versions of that story have been floating arund the web for a long time...It's clearly straight from a comedian's mind, and was not meant to be taken seriously.
All the Ayn Rand you'll ever need is in Anthem. Much shorter than Atlas Shrugged, and better literature to boot.

I'm a long-time fan, after finding one of her books at a flea market when I was a kid (bought it coincidentally at the same time as Walden Two, a socialist manifesto by B.F. Skinner...one was delightfully rational and rang true while the other's greatest feat of intellectual brilliance was the use of glass dinner plates so you don't have to flip them when washing them to know that both sides are clean), but I'll never re-read the John Galt speech. Atlas was just too long. Ayn clearly never heard of DRY (or assumed her readers were too stupid to understand it the first several times she said it).
That should serve as a reminder to other companies to secure their internal documents, and especially so if they attract a lot of negative attention from hackers around the world.
Well, if I recall they didn't have much to stand on with their patents regarding Linux so I'm not too worried about this.
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are magnificent. To suggest that anyone -not- read them (for the sake of brevity, no less) is to suggest a reader not experience great, life-changing literature. Her objectivist philosophy may be a bit overt in the latter, but never for a second could I sleep well knowing I'd proposed that others -skip- these books.
She just says, "Let me tell you about two studies which were not published."

Where did she learn about these two studies? It doesn't say.

Let me tell you about an unpublished study where rats fed cornflakes were able to live for 100 years...
The Fountainhead was written in 1943. Depeche Mode saw it's first success in 1981. If even one of the best economic minds in 2045 cite Depeche Mode as their influence then you have a point.

2007 - 1943 = 64

1981 + 64 = 2045
We should be explicitly working towards the advancement of human civilization instead of working for rational self-interest.
The way you've phrased that makes it sound as if you're telling people to be irrational.
"Man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress."
-Ayn Rand

Her books make the case that individuals working in their own self interest are the best thing for "human civilization." Disagree if you will, but you'll have a tough time coming up with a definition of "advancement of human civilization" that everyone can agree on. In the end you fight for your own vision of what the world should be and ignore the rest.

Might is right. Ignore that at your own peril. Especially if you're in a startup.
>you'll have a tough time coming up with a definition of "advancement of human civilization" that everyone can agree on

No, I think it's easy, we've got a great way to measure progress. We call it "power." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale