skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any good books/seminars/videos/blogs that you would recommend for getting a handle on organic SEO and evergreen content?
Wasn't quite sure who this article was aimed at. Started off with updates that might interest an Ubuntu follower but finished with comment seemingly aimed at the new Linux user; that "you should try it because it's free".
There is an article on slate.com about CAPTCHAs http://www.slate.com/id/2216837/
(submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579051 )
Sorry reading that post again, it was a little elitist. We've had a lot of trouble using services like Craigslist and I thought that the same type of people would be on Mechanical Turk
Paging Colin Percival (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cperciva ) and tarsnap ( http://www.daemonology.net/blog/ ) to the white courtesy phone.

(Guy's too polite to come toot his own horn here.) Might fit your use case, if you're willing to trade shine for price-efficiency.
Planet on the Brink - A Report on Climate Change: a Systems View
I've always thought that I'll make a life after I make a living. My day to day isn't all that rough but I've got a long way to go before I can really relax.
Having studied in Portugal, Sweden and UK (London), I'd say Sweden fits your requirements pretty well.

There are no tuition fees, and the level of the universities is pretty good. In technology you might want to look into KTH - Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan - which is great.

Student housing is pretty cheap: I paid less than $400/month for a student ensuite room with shared kitchen, and 10/10Mbps internet ( www.sssb.se ).

I'm sure if you look around you'll find people praising the swedish education system etc.. But as a foreigner I must warn you that it's pretty tough to get a job; speaking swedish will help a lot!

Everybody speaks english and they usually have good programmes to learn swedish. Furthermore I'm sure you'd be able to find Masters programmes in english.

Good luck!
Windows 7 RC to be announced publicly on May 5th
This time Microsoft have a set date for the release of Windows 7 RC, so it will not be belated!

Microsoft Partners has been renovated and now states that Windows 7 Release Candidate will announced to the community on May 5th 2009, which is only 10 days away! However, the benefit for you MSDN and Technet subscribers is that you can download it right now!

In addition to the release date, I think it could still be another dream for it to be unveiled in May, backed up by the evidence from last months Microsoft news or alternatively this date could be just a hint that the operating system will be here in the near future...
Okay, thanks for the insight. Although I'm still wondering what volumes of messages you are pushing to get a 1cent/message rate. Last time I checked even large scale contracts (>10k messages/day) would be billed at least five times that amount. Plus fixed fees...
SEO is a deep, deep field though, so this question is close to "Do you know any resources about programming?"

I spend a lot of time talking about my particular take on it on my blog, although I don't have a good entry point for you there... Hmm, I guess this post from 2007 is the first big one about it.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/10/21/developing-linkbait-for-...

Things have changed since then -- the content site that I developed for that project was merged into my main site, its gotten a lot bigger, the ROI is no longer prospective, and the overwhelming majority of the manual labor is automated or outsourced.

The best two free SEO resources I know of are SEOmoz.org and seobook.com. They probably taught me most of what I know on the subject. (Both also have paid portions. I pay for SEOMoz, which is mostly tools. I used to pay for SEOBook, which is mostly for forum access to people who know what they're doing. I no longer pay for that because they made me a mod, greatly bringing down the average quality of the moderating staff.)
Ask HN: Inexpensive 800 number solutions like Twilio?
I'm looking at twilio for an 800 number solution currently. I would also consider easy to configure voice mailboxes with 800 numbers.

Can anyone here give me their experience with twilio? For people with 800 numbers, do you find it helps with credibility? If you have any other recommendations for this type of service, I'm all ears.
And since you can't argue scientifically with someone who has decades of experience in the field, you're playing with semantics, aren't you?
Yeah that is true and addition to what you said arctic oil reserves would also be more accessible. But I still think that the damages to coastal economies such as the Netherlands from flooding would outweigh the benefits.

My main point though was that the reasoning that the guy was using, a single example of anecdotal evidence, made me a little uncomfortable. Aside from that I think the other points he made were thoughtful.
ten days is hardly a sample.
Maybe people who care enough to use a desktop mail client just have better ways to organize their stuff?

This is what's so perplexing about this argument, and I'm clearly not articulating what I think matters here, unless I'm just getting downmodded for my opinion. Because I care enough to use a desktop mail client, and also dislike top-posting in most cases, and am pretty anal about filing. But conversation view is a great help with all of these areas, and they're where I most keenly feel its absence.

And -- if we can set Tofu aside for a moment as a social problem -- I don't see that adding conversations would detract from the email client experience in any way. Sure GMail did it in a polarising use-it-or-leave fashion, but as an optional extra it makes a great deal of sense to me.

I mean, seriously, consider the other remotely similar forms of digital conversation we have, like instant messaging. Imagine that an IM client forced you to look in a separate place to see what you'd said, and only showed you a single post from your correspondent at once. It's ludicrous. Similarly, compare the iPhone's (or any other threaded) SMS app to the old standard of single-text-at-a-time. There's simply no comparison.

So, no, I don't think it's that "people who care" have better ways, though I strongly suspect they believe they do. Oh well. Perhaps a GMail API will come along eventually.
Re: typing speed, I hear that argument a lot, and I agree that it makes sense when talking about programming. However, if you can't type fast, you can't use a command line effectively, and you're going to spend a lot of time pointing and clicking.
The plural of anecdote is not data. And that's what this article presented: don't be afraid of global warming because I could tell you stories about how it's not so bad.

There are many problems the author unfortunately omits. Arctic sea shelves collapse? The ocean rises and millions if not billions may be displaced. How's that for an anecdote.
I think they are mostly used as external storage, sometimes backed by spindles as a very fast SAN.

If you need huge amounts of local RAM then I think you're in the realm of the IBM zSeries and other mainframe devices. Nice stuff indeed, when you have the spare change...
We get a lot of customers through SEO as well.

Start with the easy stuff like a) creating keyword-laden browser titles for all your pages, b) having good text content in your pages (especially stuff like your "about" page(s), c) linking to your site from any other web properties you own (personal blog, etc.), d) make sure the links have good anchor text, and e) blogging.

When you blog, take time to write good content–and make sure your post titles have keywords in them (keywords in header tags help).

You might consider an SEOmoz subscription just for a month or two. Go through all their articles and you'll learn a lot.
Let me send a URL and retrieve the unique news story that it's a part of, or perhaps multiple news stories with confidence intervals.

I don't know of a single API that currently does this.
With Kindle, Can You Tell It’s Proust?
Thank you so much, I will dive right into this.
Using Python would have the same problems as using Perl, wouldn't it?
Is that a troll? Do you really want to start a debate about the definition of reasonable?

The author expressed some very clear ideas. Are you trying to suppress them?
Riposte:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2009/04/murray-darli...
Python + Google App Engine
It is difficult to be invited into any country without having work arranged in advance. The fact that you do not have academic credentials will only make immigration more difficult. But, it is possible a degree from any university in Tunisa will not be valued in more developed countries anyway.

One solution is joining the French Foreign Legion. The minimum term of enlistment is five years and French/EU citizenship is granted after three years. During this time you should be able to afford a distance learning program at a respected university. Perhaps you will even have time to complete a graduate degree as well. So, in the end, you should be very well qualified to work anywhere in Europe. Of course there is a downside, you will probably have to spend a lot of time killing Afghans.

You may also try to reach out to companies outside of Tunisia to find freelance work.

My friend and I have a surplus of freelance work and are looking for partners to help out. Please send me an email if you are interested.

Follow this link to find my email address:
http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01QCF-3vk15elpXb_LrAP02Q==...
Except if you're in academia, where your success is dependent on putting in all available time but you don't actually make money on it...
Is Ruby hosting that expensive? I've seen hosters that do it under five bucks a month (like http://www.hostingrails.com/ ).
"Do you really want to start a debate about the definition of reasonable?"

Yes, I do. What is it that makes an article espousing a middle-of-the-road position on global warming reasonable, but an article that espouses taking immediate action to enact a carbon cap unreasonable?

Or are we expected to believe that the best course of action is the one that seems reasonable, whatever that means.
It's funny, but when I read this I kept thinking the author was a nut job with an agenda.

"Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate." Talk about a vague attack. It does not even say they actually exaggerate only some people feel it might be a good idea.

Whenever I hear someone discussing an issue like global worming without using any data I dismiss them. We could probably cut our emissions in half over 20 years with a with a CO2 tax around 1 cent per gallon of gas. Suggesting the only way to deal with the problem is wrecking our economy is just as insane as suggesting global worming is going to end life on earth. However, sounding like your taking the middle road does not make your analysis correct.
That's kind of at the core of my point. If you "embrace/extend" the Twitter API, you have this entire ecosystem of developers that only have to switch an API key/URL and their tools can work with your system, utilizing whatever new features you provide on top of the "vanilla" Twitter API.

The larger the developer ecosystem gets, the more appealing it is to make the switch as easy as possible for them.
Thanks for finding that! Yes, the law as written seems quite reasonable. It's encouraging to find anti-drug laws that limit themselves to addressing a particular angle of particular problem.
Just out of curiosity, how do you compare those 2 items( Benefits to global trade/oil reserves vs damage to the Netherlands)? Do you have some expertise in the area, or is that just a hunch?
I don't find this suprising. There's always been a spectrum of human behavior. HN readers are one side, these folks are the other and there are tons of people in between. Nothing wrong with it.

The only thing that did bug me is the obvious attitude from the people interviewed. I don't have any problem with how they live their life but let's be honest: Their zealots. People who feel the need to expel technology because they don't think themselves capable of moderation.

That's fine. We live in a free country. But it is a weakness. Not something that justifies their "proud to the point of smug" attitude.
What specific problems are lots of programmers solving over and over again?
I'm working on a web based medical billing code search engine for my software start-up that will let users search for ICD-9 (and related ICD-10, clinical codes) medical codes used in medical diagnoses and medical billing.<p>The problem with building the data files for the search is that the Center for Disease Control only releases the file in .rtf Rich Text Format files that are ok for printing and reading, but difficult to programatically load into a database.<p>There are a few existing ICD-9 search engines out there and I know dozens of other programming teams have tackled this problem for every crappy practice management system on the market. But due to the nature of the field things are very closed and no one has released their data publicly or released code to parse these .rtf files or a repository for the data. The reason is that each company sees the X amount of hours they put into parsing these files into database data as a barrier to entry for competitors.<p>What other types of specific programming problems due programmers keep solving over and over again, and how do you break the vicious cycle and be the first person to release data or a solution? Or is it ever worth breaking this cycle and releasing your solution and making it easier for competitors? How do you profit or benefit from releasing a solution for a problem like this?
>"Mostly free e-books from the Gutenberg Project. Descartes' "Meditations" are some heavy shiznit."

Why wound a perfectly good read with words like "shiznit"?
FTA: A small group of people are reacting to what is overload

You mean overreacting. If you want to eschew owning a microwave or an iPod because you truly enjoy cooking and the sound of your LPs–great. But if you're doing it just to be a contrarian or lead the next hipster movement, you're no better than people who are slaves to gadgets IMO.

The key is balance, not prohibition. I didn't have cable TV for most of my twenties. Then I realized how much I missed watching baseball games. Now we have cable–I'm not a slave to it and neither are my kids.

Have fun listening to your turntable on the subway ...
Cute, but without centralized command and control, or at least some sort of efficient communications, there's the potential to heightened vulnerability to deception.

What if the successful attack opportunities are actually honeypots set up by the adversary? Without a centralized command and control, there is no one with a global viewpoint to do the fact-checking and correlation that could reveal this.

Also, open source development depends on open and efficient communications. The adversaries can download your releases and and browse your code repository. It's an outside legal framework that protects OS from being co-opted by proprietary actors. Also, very often with Open Source, it doesn't matter if the adversary knows everything you do. Their culture and their legacy code base prevent them from exploiting any advantage the information could give them. In the case of terrorism, these are not barriers. While mainstream culture of the enemy might object, the enemy intelligence services will have no compunctions. There is also no "operating system" for intelligence information.

Lastly, Divide and Conquer has always been one of the best strategies of the imperialists. Distributed cells come pre-divided! Witness the internecine fighting of the various offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. (Who are the intellectual forebears of Al Quaeda.)

The one thing you don't want to do: be the "Big Bad Enemy" that everyone must unite to oppose. At least, don't do it too soon. Wear them down by playing one side against the other and take them down piecemeal, until they realize they must unite to win. (And by then, it's too late and you have them conveniently all in one place. Ref: Julius Caesar in Gaul.)
The several orders of magnitude difference between the value of stuff built near sea level vs the cost of global trade suggest one will not pay for the other. But there are more in depth analysis out there.
> getting more involved in the business side of things sooner

Yes times one thousand.
What about when people use technology periodically, but neither obsessively immerse themselves in it nor make a point of eschewing it whenever possible? There's a middle path here, using cell phones, e-mail, etc. without getting obsessed with them, but ... it doesn't make for very exciting news, I guess. (Granted, many examples later on, padding the article, are hardly extreme: deciding Facebook isn't worth the time, not replacing an iPod, etc.)

It also reminds me of an article I read about the Amish, and their careful scrutiny of modern tech, and rationalizations for which they felt were a net positive: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/02/amish_hackers...
Thanks for the info. I did not know about hostingrails.
I don't think you should dismiss a language so fast for hosting reasons. Yes, they are a thing to consider, but "The Thing"?

We offer all our clients hosting on our slicehost server, for at least a year free (so far we haven't bothered to ask after a year either). It's clean, fast, cheap, and lets you do development and updates much faster. No system administration to speak of (long live apt-get).
You might want to have a look at haXe - a language that compiles to multiple backends including PHP, Javascript and Flash. It's not my favorite language by a long shot, but it's not PHP.
Humanity has frequently built dams/drainage systems for several orders of magnitude less money than the value of the items protected by the dam/ drainage systems.
Nice! Why not run a more striped down version of Linux for that clojure environment? Ubuntu is pretty fast, but it still uses a lot of RAM compared to, say, puppy linux.
The future of free and open source support models (hacker's cooperative)
Well, at least you called it CO2. One point up for using it's actual name, instead of that dirty word, "carbon" that has caught on so strongly lately.

Why "intellectually dishonest"? What does that even mean? If somebody argues a point that you don't agree with, it's "intellectually dishonest"?

You've already defined the game so much to your benefit, and we're playing it to your rules. When you ignore water vapor, we let you. When you ignore what everybody knows, that the climate is warming regardless of human contribution, in the endless climate cycle that's 4 billion years old, we let you. You've defined the game to be, humans are causing extra global warming (you leave out the 'extra') and we let you. We've handicapped ourselves quite severely in this 'debate', so that you'll at least play with us. That you take advantage of this handicapping with not even a "thank you" is what is intellectually dishonest.

So, this author makes the claim that there may be benefits to warmer climate. He's playing your game. He's bowing to your religion, by saying the words "warmer climate". But you're not happy. It's intellectually dishonest.

Every action has costs and benefits. Obviously there would be benefits from a warmer climate. It's intellectually dishonest for you to claim otherwise. Do they outweigh the costs? I honestly don't know. We're a global community, right? A longer growing season in the temperate latitudes vs a shorter growing season in the tropical. Does this result in more food or less? I don't know (although I suspect it does). More people running their AC in the south vs less people running their heaters in the north. Is this a power savings or a power sink? (I suspect this ones goes to you, as heating is more efficient than cooling). There's a ton of analysis that could be done here, before you know the answer to this question. For you to just say "intellectually dishonest" without considering any of it is perhaps a result of your bias.
No offense but I think you're missing the point. The author is not trying to paint an all-positive view of Global Warming he's trying to counter the arguments that claim it will be the end of the world.

The problem with GW right now is it's a political football. The left wants to paint the right as irresponsible so they make catastrophic predictions. The right wants to paint the left as alarmist so they deny it outright.

As far as I can tell this article, in a very HN way, is just trying to lead people who have bought the hysteria back into a rational mindset by showing the reader another side exists.
Dropbox could definitely have my business there and be price competitive if they offered say 250 gigs for under $100 a year.

Amazon S3 (some consider it wholesale) would cost you 3 times that, and that's not even considering in/out bandwidth charges or Dropbox's nifty client and version history (which lets you, for instance, restore "deleted" files).
Dreamhost is cheap and has shell, perl, ruby, and php.
No, the most intellectually dishonest argument you can imagine is to claim something is maximally intellectually dishonest when you know full well it is not, because you are being dishonest about the very nature of intellectual dishonesty.
Yes, Looks Do Matter
I think he could've said that better. IMO,the point he was trying to make with the Erik the Red stuff is that climate change tends top open doors as much as it closes them. The megafauna that went extinct made room for other species. Warming can be disastrous for some latitudes and a boon for others. He wasn't saying that warming is a wonderful thing-- he was saying that it's more complex than that, and pointing out one example.
Pirate Bay lawyer calls for retrial
We're talking about a very complex problem here, and jumping to conclusions based on unreliable computer simulations and mass hysteria promoted by the media is, indeed, unreasonable.
Yes i tried them. That's why i mentioned "_reliable_ webhost" ;) . But yes, some websites could be hosted with them, it's just not good enough when we need something to be 100% uptime.
in my mind the character used words like that sarcastically
Business education - more or less?
I think that it's Exactly what i was looking for! Thanks a lot. I will definitely look at it! :)
Ask HN: Will social networking sites flourish/languish during this great depression
I wonder if with the economy getting worse and worse, and 15%-20% unemployment coming to everywhere, how it will affect social networking sites (myspace, twitter, facebook). will people spend more time online, because they can't afford to do anything else? will people spend less time online, and instead hang out more with friends/family in real life, because eventually everybody's twitter becomes mundane (no exciting news to share, because of economy)?
Look for webfaction as a hosting provider. It's cheap and you have lots more options than just PHP. Plus you get shell access. You can even set up your own apache instance.

Other than that, don't worry too much about the language. Find something you like and stick to it. Just remember to always learn new things and don't get set in your ways.
Interesting. I'll have to look into that. Thanks.
http://www.bluehost.com

I personally use it for PHP, but it supports Ruby/RoR, it's cheap, and I've never had any problems with it.
Plus, using things other than PHP is still pretty difficult with dreamhost.
I'm surprised that they scuttle these boats after a single trip. I realise that they cost a small percentage of the cargo but it still seems wasteful.