skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run a moderately popular browser game. We have over 175k registered users and get millions of requests a day.

Our conversion rates are low, but we've managed to get enough people playing to sustain itself, one full time employee (me!) and a few contract employees.

It's been a lot of fun. If you are passionate about games I highly recommend it since it can definitely be sustainable. Having said that, I'm not sure it's necessary a lucrative path for most people.
30%. Thats, insane. Oh wait, its for the MRI (Matz Ruby Interpreter). Hm, that makes this news for me a tad less interesting because everybody is already running 1.9 (yarv)?

Patching MRI is nice but a switch to 1.9 has more benefits than just speed.
P2P bill could regulate Web browsers, FTP clients
This is basically my job right now.
Notes from DHH's keynote at RailsConf 2009
K-State researcher: Poverty is rooted in US education system
Don't US companies source a lot of parts from overseas? Ford even has plants in Mexico. US and Japanese companies often share designs. The boundary between foreign and domestic is a lot blurrier than it used to be. This point here is mostly about the management of these various companies, not so much their location or operations.

Also, the article mentions specifically that Toyota and Honda use a lot of American-made parts, which are of higher quality than whatever Ford/GM/Chrysler are using (doesn't say where they are getting parts from) and that is a major contributor to the difference.
The Pirate Bay trial just growing pains, look back at 10 years of piracy
Immigration attorney recommendations
i'm looking for recommendations for an immigration attorney...does anyone have good success with one?
Sadly, having been in the mobile industry for the past 6 years, Apple treats its developers much better than any of the previous stores have.
This isn't to say that this kind of behavior is right, it just helps to have a little perspective.
Why? If I want to read my facebook updates in my feedreader instead of hitting up facebook.com.. how does that affect you? Or your privacy? After all, you friended me.
Every time the failure of US car makers come up, somebody blames the CAFE Act, environmental laws, having to deal with government regulation, etc. It turns into a veritable blamestorm.

The problem is that consumer preferences lead to lots of small (and fuel efficient) cars being bought every year; most of them just happen to be made by non-US companies. The profit margin on smaller cars is smaller, as well (luxury cars have the largest profit margin), but I don't believe that Toyota or Honda are losing money on every Corolla or Civic sold. They also seem to be doing OK in meeting fuel economy laws.

The real question is why US automakers don't make competitive small cars. One answer is the cost of labor in the US, but the other answer is that US automakers don't have a compelling process in place that continuously refines a small car until it does what the market wants. Look at the aforementioned Civic, for instance. Its original form came on the market in 1973, and its current larger form in 1996. Even the 70s version had a high build quality and was renowned for its reliability, but every subsequent iteration has, arguably, been refined and worked on to make it more and more palatable to the American market (the European Civics are different, FWIW).

Now look at US car makers. Which small US car has been marketed under the same name since the early 70s and refined every few years, meeting market demand and giving consumers what they want? US auto makers seem obsessed with re-badging and re-marketing their cars every few years, often to cover up memories of unsuccessful or embarrassing prior launches. The worst example is perhaps the Ford Taurus, which sold bucketloads in the full-size sedan segment in the 80s and 90s. So of course Ford took the Taurus out of their segment in '04 and replaced it with a smaller AND a larger sedan (the Fusion and the 500). Imagine Honda discontinuing the Accord next year and replacing it with a larger AND a smaller sedan (rather than making the Accord a bit larger, which they did last year... and five years ago). To nobody's surprise, the 500 flopped and was hastily renamed back to 'Taurus' for the '09/'10 year (there were some technical reasons, too).

Similarly, there are car production plants on US soil that make perfectly good cars, using non-unionized American workers. If you've ever been to, say, Louisville, KY, everybody seems to be driving a Camry.
I am not a fan of socialism. If you want it, go out and get it.

You seem to think that letting fellow members of your society buy food when they are laid off is a waste of your tax money. Maybe it is. The problem is, "non-socialist" countries like the US waste plenty of my tax money. Illegal wars, bridges to nowhere, kickbacks to lobbyist friends, etc. These things cost way more than "socialism", but they don't get the taxpayers any actual benefits. This worries me more (and is more wasteful) than paying a few kids to play video games all day.

If I'm paying taxes, I want to get something out of it. (As an example, think of how much more free the job market would be if everyone had healthcare regardless of their employer. People could change jobs without worry of not being able to get the medical care they need. A freer job market is good for you even if you can afford your own healthcare.)
It took me a long time to embrace the fluid nature of the web

May one hope to see the day when they let go of the "here's a bit of text as an image because you really must see it in this here font" thing ?

Ah, well, it doesn't hurt to ask. Actually, I'm afraid of the upcoming contortions around this.
Ask HN/PG: Possible HN bug?
I've noticed this happening to me the last few days and I am wondering if it's happening to anyone else.. and how to get it fixed.

For some reason, any comment I make is starting off at 0, instead of the usual 1.
It's a big problem. My solution (which amazingly worked, after I unsuccessfully tried several) was to block reddit in the router. Why reddit? Because on HN I saturate reasonably easy. Not so many new posts, and it's harder to absorb the information. Why in the router? Because re-activating it would require a router restart, and some 5 minutes without net. It's not a "one-click" procedure.

Now don't get me wrong. I have nothing against reddit. I've had both interesting conversations there and enjoyed the time I spent on it. But it's way to easy to waste hours per day... so I'm ultimately better without.
For the iPhone App Store, Future Holds Chaos & Opportunity
I think you just get down-voted shortly after posting on some comments. Are you sure it's all comments?
Yeah, but think about how much lower the profit margin on pork would be if the farm owners actually had to clean the shit out of the animal holding areas. Clearly a few cents on every pig carcass is worth killing a few thousand people every couple years, right? "Organic" is just too expensive, and we can just pump the pigs full of drugs anyway.

</very bitter sarcasm>
Forgive me if I'm missing something, I'm not trying to catch you out but I'm curious why you believe that one late night will affect the rest of your week.

Surely a correspondingly early night the next evening will redress things?
You might want to check out Boston Logic (http://www.bostonlogic.com/one.php).
"Reverse engineering" is in this case an euphemism for cracking, in the sense of unprotecting programs. Of course there are also others meanings, like reconstructing the lost code of a program from binaries or looking at its functionality.

Fravia had a radical point of view about cracking and compiled practical information, including how to search for anything in the web, that he loved. There aren't any "papers" that can be cited.

There are thus two reasons why it's difficult to establish his notability. One, that he was in an underground (not to say illegal) field. The other that it happened in the web, I don't say that Wikipedia should do anything, I couldn't care less, But, as a matter of fact, he was indeed well known ten years ago.
That will freak me out as well, but this latest stream of news isn't really related to cloud computing. Facebook apps don't even live on Facebook's servers; it's more about Facebook's users and data.
Because -anyone- can read those updates, and as your friend, I have no idea or control over the fact that you've made my information public.
Where you crossed the line: "Most of them were along the lines of 'Breaking: cure to swine flu found [link to shirt]".

This is spam, black hat, whatever you want to call it.

You got 90% of the buzz machine figured out. Now you need to learn how to play it ethically.

Compare with my version of "0 to AP under a week":
http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/02/27/make-your-way-to-the...

Good Hackers have ethics.
The fact that you want to read updates in your feedreader doesn't affect me at all - I friended you/accepted your friend request, so I'm OK with you seeing what I'm up to on FB.

The problem is that in order to do that, what I've done on FB has to be put in an RSS file available somewhere, and if it's available somewhere, there's nothing to stop someone else (who I haven't consented to see my updates) from adding it to their feedreader. So while you (as someone who respects privacy) may create an RSS feed that's not linked to anywhere and has a name that you wouldn't find randomly, FB can't guarantee that you'd do that, and even if you did, can't guarantee that no one would find it somehow.

Put simply, if there's no authentication within the FB ecosystem to see that data (which there wouldn't be, since you can't create an RSS feed that requires a FB login to poll), they can't police the access controls set up by users.
I'm not sure the Android market is any less saturated. The rough numbers I found show fewer apps per device and a higher attach rate for iPod / iTouch:

iPhone + iPod touch sales: 37,000,000

iTunes Apps: 25,000-35,000

Apps downloaded: 1,000,000,000

Device to App ratio 1,480:1 - 1,057:1

Attach rate: 27

G1 sales: 1,000,000

Android Apps: 2,300

Device to App ratio 434:1

Attach rate: 10-15? (hard to find good data)

http://www.leaderpost.com/Technology/store+BlackBerry+Google...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/163671/ipod_touch_iphone_sale...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/24/most-g1-owners-love-app...
Talldude Networks, LLC. - I'm 6' 10", and really am a "tall dude". After hearing this for years from other people - "man your a tall dude", I thought it was appropriate ;)
Because that feed and its contents can be posted and shared publicly, while people are unlikely share their Facebook logins publicly.

If Facebook let this stand, soon people would be dumping those feeds into public-facing widgets: "What my friends are doing on Facebook right now."
Lamport's version of Paxos does not handle Byzantine failure, but later variations of it manage with an increased number of communication steps and a (n+3f)/2 valid acceptors requirement (where n is the total number of participants and f is the number of faulty participants).
Yes.

Infact, this post itself started at 0!
wish i woulda thought of that
So is blamestorm a noun or a verb?
Designer/Writer Selling Everything She Owns
HN is leechblocked on my Firefox right now. So I'm using Safari.
And "aggressively unknowledgeable" is the phrase of the day.
Phft. Other ebook experiences show that publishers will just insist that ebook prices would be around (or probably more) than the same price as the paper textbooks. Publishers know they have a captured market, so to avoid cannibalization (and fears of loosing the grip on their market) they're not going allow those prices to go down. Even a big retailer like amazon isn't going to make much of a difference, since a larger majority of textbook sales are not from amazon.

It's going to be a slow road.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Referen...

the javascript string match () method will get you most of the way there.
Do you have a link to the Prototype one? That would be very useful for a project I'm working on.
> That format may be printer-friendly, but it is significantly less readable on-screen. The text fills the browser window, making each line far too long to read comfortably.

Best of both worlds: Open the "printer friendly" version of an article and execute the readability javascript bookmarklet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
"Another destructive and common stereotype held by teachers is that parents of poor children do not care about their education," Taylor said. "They cite parents' lack of involvement or attendance as a reason. However, they fail to understand that poor parents love and care about their children and their education just as every parent does, and that their lack of involvement or attendance may be due to working several jobs, unreliable transportation or numerous other factors."

This is probably the best part of the submitted article. I agree that many teachers think too little of many of the poor families that they supposedly serve.
On the internet, you just have to publish stuff (even private stuff) with discretion. Noone (not even mighty Facebook) can stop someone/'friend' from doing a cut-and-paste of your stuff to a public place. Email has existed many years without any privacy policy, and its largely based on trust and human discretion.
One thing missed here is http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/gms-problems-are-50-y... which is pretty convincing. A very good book on the auto industry is Halbestram's "The Reckoning".
Interesting. Living in Chicago, I certainly knew of them in the '80s. Didn't they do some mail order then?
I agree with that point, and perhaps I was a little callous in my original (grandparent) comment. The demand for workers is often very inelastic because it requires someone to figure out new ways to add value that requires workers.
Ask HN: Has anyone here experienced tolerance with Modafinil?
After a day of 200mg(single dose), I cant take it after a week again, because it has no effect. How does it work for you? Any recommendations? Why would you think I am developing this tolerance so fast?
As a person that only buys American made cars. The "Made in America" reliance had allowed the industry to escape improving the quality of their products for some time. Fortunately for the automakers the NASCAR viewership will always buy American as most drive American trucks which are superior over the competition.

The issue is now even though the quality has improved, it is hard to get the higher paid individual and foreign born consumers (which their are lots) to buy a US cars.
The Wisdom of Community
Ask HN: Should I care to support IE6?
According to the latest browser statistics (link below), the IE6 has a 17.1 market share. How many of those folks may care about the Web2.0 platform we are writing? May be about a fifth? So overall for those 2-3% of the entire market, is it worth spending your valuable cycle, which you would rather spend on features of your site. (also save on Tylenol expenses)
Browser statistics link: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
It might have been true back when I was still living in NY (around '92) when it was just a small store, but I don't think it's true anymore.
> everybody is already running 1.9 (yarv)?

Nope, no more so than everybody is already running Python 3.

It's only for pthread linkage, anyway; it's avoiding a 30% performance loss, not giving everyone a 30% performance gain.
The Problems with a Hackintosh Netbook, Six Months Out
I'm not yet convinced organic is more expensive. I mean clearly all the products currently on the market are.

But that's because they're from small production or the very few that aren't can still get away with charging that much, so they'll charge that much.

But I think the large scale ago biz sort of backed into industrialized farming. When pesticides were still new and everything was susceptible to them, they worked like magic.

But over time, pests have become resistant, soils have started to form hard pan, affluent consumers are turning away.

What would happen if you practiced organic farming on a grand scale? Would it still be much more expensive or just marginally more expensive?
How do you determine if you can break into X and make money?

- Is there anything that really sucks about X?
- Do lots of people want to do X anyways?

Your answer is the AND of these two!
My dad's mortgage payment is less than my rent payment. But I suppose if you assume living in an overpriced California suburb, then yes, it is hard to do.
Do you really need $5k to bootstrap a business?
So that begs the question (sorry, couldn't resist the reddit flamebait :), can launching a site be done for less than $5k (assuming development and design costs are not included). The question comes from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594363.

I'm in the process of building an iPhone app with an online presence. The iPhone app does data gathering; the web site does visualization of the data.

I'm bootstrapping this at the moment and, frankly, don't have much in the pocketbook to apply. Is it possible to bootstrap something for an order of magnitude less?
Everything on WP is supposed to be verifiable. It's an ironclad rule. That's not to say it's consistently applied, but it does mean anybody can select a piece of unverifiable content on the WP and zap it if it isn't sourced.

So if it's hard to establish notability in a verifiable way because he's underground and online, it's probably not worth the trouble to fight to keep the article in the WP; it's not appropriate for the encyclopedia.
Terrible idea if you're like me and have calibrated your monitor and now can detect minute changes in the color temperature. :-)

Turn down brightness and/or contrast if you like, but don't mess with the color.
Plot: The author tries to convince Rails is the web version of Access.

Very weak article, wondering how O'Reilly can afford this.
(domainpigeon appears to be down?)
Why do you only buy American cars? Do you only buy clothes made in America, too?
I got it to run in VMWare. Well, boot anyway, right out of the "box." There wasn't sound or any peripherals support, but there was enough working to play.
This is an inflammatory and unsupported argument, unbecoming of Hacker News. I'll argue that you appear not to understand how WP works (individual admins can't "censor" anything, decisions to remove content can be made by any user, not just admins, and there are numerous procedural protectiosn along the way), and that you've chosen to frame your argument in terms of personal attacks rather than meaningful assertions about how the encyclopedia works.

Where am I wrong? If I'm not, why should you be taken seriously about this subject?
> people are unlikely share their Facebook logins publicly.

So says you. And yet, people put their logins into random websites every day. Twitter logins especially!
Sony Ericsson P990i Unlocked
Sony Ericsson P990i let you gets sense the great feeling of enjoying music in handset still take note. Its music entertainer facilitates you toward playing different tracks. It has 60 MB of internal memory and 128 MB of flash with 64 MB of Ram.
hate to break it to you but politics=coercion and capitalism=exploitation

it is our wisdom, good will and such that pushes politics to be less coercive and capitalism to be less exploitative while getting by but to be very successful at either requires the opposite.

which is all to say, the fundamental architectures of our societies are designed against us.

let me know if you find a solution :)
...and we're redditing!
You have no idea if a fifth of IE6 users will use your products: for all you know they could all use it.

My advice: support IE6 entirely, launch, iterate, then once you have users (= market) then make the choice to scale back IE6 development.

As a young startup you'll have plenty of reasons why users won't stick - don't make browser support (eg, something you can fix and are aware of) another reason.
The problem with the flu virus situation is not the fact that the pigs are fed drugs (that's a different ballgame..) but instead that they are kept housed so closely together that diseases can spread really fast. In the same way that you are more likely to catch a cold if you are sitting in a subway car full of infected people, versus standing in a field.

Whether pigs are raised organically or not doesn't matter at all – the virus can still take hold easily.

What's important is whether you raise the animals free range or factory-style (or in between..), and that sick animals are monitored and isolated ASAP.

The less animals to get infected, the less mutations there will be.
Actually, a lot of organic produce comes from large farms, run by big companies. Because they saw profit in it, so moved into the market.

The problem is that fruits and vegetables are smaller, they get affected by pests and diseases more frequently, decreasing yields. They take up more time and more space in fields.

This means that the price has to be jacked up, unfortunately.
when creating a brand i'm always inventing a new word, a new name.

it's the best part of the whole venture, it takes time, lot of dreaming and skipping to the real word but the final feeling is fantastic: cathaia, smuff, kobi, mushka ...

all names have the story of the business behind them + made to be remembered immediately in their context:

cathaia was an ai r&d company, smuff is a gadget & gizmo webshop, kobi is personal finances and mushka is a private fashion store
It is, albeit indirectly. Parent is contending that cloud-style services are deposing desktop (traditionally MS-dominated) technologies. It's expected that desktop apps be controlled fully by users, while web applications are controlled by the site administrator.
Vietnam Travel Guide Online 24/7 Son La, the pearl of North-western Vietnam
Searching for "install IE8" on MSFT vs GOOG
On live search, the first 3 search titles are : "Don't install IE8, Is it time to install IE8?, and Cannot Install IE8"

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=install+IE8

on GOOG, the first result is "Internet Explorer 8: Home page"

http://www.google.com/search?q=install+IE8

Interesting, I must say.
If it's easy, dedicate a little code to give them a reasonable experience. But any substantial effort in that arena would be a waste of time: Focus instead on creating a great product that will bring forth a few more people who use updated browsers.
There are already a couple of these out for jQuery, but this gets a bump for being the cleanest implementation I've seen.
On the other hand, I would think that one of the reasons that modern organic products are so inexpensive is because of easy substitution with plentiful, non-organic alternatives. If food production were to become all-organic, I would think the resulting shrinking supply would make food much more expensive.

I'm not an expert, but I would estimate that there's at least one order of magnitude difference in yield per acre between the much maligned "factory farming" and less dense production methods. If there is only one order of magnitude, that's the difference between almost everyone being able to afford meat, and almost nobody.

The grandparent commenter fails to address possible reasonable objections to his strident opinion. I'm assuming it's easier to heap sarcasm upon an already disfavored group - big corporations - and reap the resulting karma.
Windows-only UI nightmare?
You may care to read the opinion in the article linked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591102

[Oracle office stuff] did one thing better than any competitive product I knew of: it stored everything as rows in the standard database
ok good to know. I'm going to take another look.