skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can only comment that in Thailand it is super easy to find accommodation in the island, at least off-season. We could just walk around and just run into places that were very affordable. We found clean hotel rooms, small cottages right at the beach and nicer bungalows a bit farther inland all for $10-$20 per night. I imagine with more knowledge of our options we could have had even nicer places for the price. One thing I learned is that the 3G Internet connectivity advertised does not actually work in any usable way at least in Koh Samui / Koh Tao / Koh Phangan where we tried it, and had to rely on wifi. It was kind of a fun pastime to try to find places to stay in by scanning for wifi spots and walk to the direction where it gets stronger.
New experiences are always more vivid. The more unusual it is to your previous experience the move vivid it becomes in your mind.

Take for instance travel. Driving someplace new you're more alert about the course since you don't know what to expect. Once you've repeated it a few times or hundreds of times, like say driving to work, it becomes predictable. As long as traffic is moving along at a decent pace, you're perfectly oblivious to the passage of time.

Now take skydiving or bungee jumping for the first time as another example. You may free fall for 5-30 seconds, but the adrenaline pumping in your brain makes it seem like slow motion. You remember every vivid detail. After 1000 jumps it's nothing near the vividness of the first 10.

The only lesson I've been able to draw from this is that if you want life to slow down you have to live it and experience new things.
Study finds hardcore music fans 10 times more likely to pirate music.
Twitter, WordPress execs in Iraq to help country use new media
I stopped reading at "We specialise in Microsoft platforms".
This is a good reason to learn to love traveling: you're always doing and seeing new things.
In what world does a product that generates $10k/mo have a lifetime value of $400k? I'd think if a business was attractive enough to be purchased they would expect more than a 40 month lifespan.
Blue Gene/P's new GPU turns it into a visual powerhouse
Since viruses are not a problem on the Mac, does this mean piracy is more of a problem?
Without viruses to scare away users from pirated software, one would expect higher piracy rates on the Mac. Is this so?
NY Times Company Reports 2009 First-Quarter Results
I like the simplicity of the concept, however, it would be very helpful to provide a Javascript widget (a la UserVoice). As well, having the ability for the user to choose (or change) the given URL to be more readable would be a plus.
"452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income."

Yep, I was surprised to see a number that large for "primary source of income." I can believe that 20 million people tried blogging one or two posts then gave up, but half a million people making their living this way is a significant occupation.
Oracle buys integration challenge along with Sun
That's common sense. Careful: Common sense does not always hold up in science.
Everytime I hear about a 60 year old losing their 401(k) because of the stock market crash I refuse to feel for them. Why were they so equity-heavy at that age when having cash/fixed income assets would be safer? They either didn't know or didn't care but either way it was their money to control and they didn't.
Show me the user agent and IP address of the user.
Digg buries Microsoft ad contract
What part was dismissive? I didn't get that sense at all. If anything, he seemed to be acknowledging that blogging is rapidly eclipsing his profession.

It is true that a journalist can blog his stories, but I doubt that a significant amount of blogging is original reporting. The vast majority is probably opinion or analysis of one sort or another.
Sarcasm is not the virtue at HN, as I see.
No offence meant edw519, but i thought it might be good to reproduce their entire text here, so that people like me who often read comments first might get a better picture.

It’s got to be software aimed at software developers or sysadmins.
We specialise in Microsoft platforms, but will consider others too.
LOLapps: The Biggest Facebook App Builder You Never Heard Of
That's not something to brag about.
Storing students' papers for plagiarism detection is 'Fair Use'
Amateurs and iPhone app development
> In the case where all the earth's mass is concentrated at the center, a point mass starting on the surface of the Earth would just go to the center and stay there.

Why? That would violate conservation of energy, wouldn't it?

In a naive model of a point mass you'd get a singularity at the center. But using standard techniques (e.g. numeric pertubation, or Lebesgue integration) one gets an objects that swings back and forth like in the other scenarios.
Well, to be fair, in this case a "full recovery" is relative, but still good to hear.
A Digg bait title indicates that the author is more interested in getting page views than in writing a good article, at least that's what it means to me.
Cyberdyne Ready to Mass Produce Cyborgs
Some problems and solutions for compiling Ruby
I am skeptical of the numbers in this article. I'd like to see the data that's backing this up, and how it's gathered.
> Researchers found that those who downloaded "free" music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music.

So if you download the iTunes free track of the week, you're 10 times more likely to pay for music.
I didn't say "But no study has ever shown that!" but did ask "Has any study ever shown that? I would like to know the answer (and am too lazy to Google it)."

I appreciate you posting this to Hacker News, answering the question (even if not specifically for my benefit). Thanks!
"I was at my doctor the other day, and my doctor said to me, ‘You know, I like that when I leave the office, I leave.’ I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money. If they keep compensation capped, I don’t know how the deals get done. They’re taking Wall Street and throwing it in the East River.”

Maybe that's the problem. Maybe if people weren't compensated so disproportionately, and if there wasn't so much pressure for short term profits, they'd concentrate on doing deals that were more in line with economic fundamentals rather than instinct.
He's talking about distributed key-value stores (aka distributed hash tables).
Not all sugars are created equal
"Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers ..."

There is absolutely no way that this is true. They say that "452,000 [use blogging] as their primary source of income." I would be very surprised to find less than half a million programers are working in the US.
Subject to liquidity constraints. If you have a product that has regular payments from a customer, and customers stay customers for a long time, creating a high lifetime value, then it is likely that there are many marketing activities that exceed lifetime value but will take six months or more to break even. Some marketing activities have the above characteristic but require a sizable minimum investment, such as ad campaigns. This limits your ability to implement them.

This constraint doesn't apply to public (or large) companies who can raise whatever money they need if they have a high value marketing activity to invest in.

I would also add that many people don't necessarily have the operating history to know what lifetime value is, so they begin making assumptions, and the assumptions are almost always too optimistic. This can lead to excessive marketing.
J.J. Abrams on the Magic of Mystery
Sorry for the exaggeration, but it wasn't just aimed at your comment. The idea that piracy can in many circumstances increases sales is opposed religiously by some (and not just those in the content industry), so those type of comments pop up over and over again that I was parodying. Wasn't trying to single you out. :-) I want to know the real evidence and answers as well, at least to the best ability we humans have to gather them.
Twitter's Answer to Facebook Connect
Talk about putting all your eggs in the internet advertising basket. Remember the last time that market collapsed?

It was not pretty...
It all depends on how much of that is profit.
I'd second all these suggestions, but especially the one about floating left/right. On a widescreen monitor they are so far apart as to be hard to line up.
Google is planning to ShutDown Video Unit Ad. Prog.?
I think the most interesting part of this is the sentiment of trust that is claimed to be essential for a community to thrive. You have to trust your moderators and they have to trust themselves to act accordingly, or your community is at risk.

I see this exact same pattern in every startup I've been in. Everyone has to trust one another to do the Right Thing (at least to the limits of their ability), to Work Hard and Preserve The Culture. You hear these phrases a lot, but it is very obvious when a startup gets the ideas and has a staff that can still be productive when not hounded and driven back to their desks. Even the moderation aspect is reflected in the way startups tend to do recruiting. In small groups, if even one person objects to a new hire, then they should be out. And if you ever question that objection, you're creating a huge potential problem in the future.

Someone should go grab an anthropologist and ask them if this has any relation to humanity's tribal cultures in history. I bet the answer would be really fascinating and informative. :)
wait- viruses scare people away from pirated software on windows? my practical experience doesn't jive with that axiom of your question.
Can you cut information security in hard times (and survive)?
"The ceremony of object wrappers doesn’t carry its weight."

This nails it. I find so much of my programming now is shoving data into objects, only to almost immediately pull it out again into JSON, XML, HTML templates, or relational databases (in both directions). Most of the code in these "objects" are just getters, setters and member declarations, with very little in the way of actual logic. There is little point in having objects at all for this kind of programming, as opposed to a map, struct, or type class of some sort.
How to be memorable at any conference or event
In the last few months, I've been to Angelconf, Demo Day, Codecon, and now off to Adtech. I liked this post because I used to just go to conferences and "see what happened." But, when I go with an idea of what I want to get out of it (whether it's meeting a particular person, etc.), the results are far more powerful.
The article is about making things go viral. The real irony would be if the author didn't do all he could to make the article go viral.
I would like to tell the Pirate Bay the same thing everybody has told us for the past 10 years. They should go out and find a new business model, one that doesn’t involve profiting from stolen property…What everybody who steals music should realize is that e-looting is not a victimless crime. Everyone who does it is hurting themselves. They are killing the music.

I wish the author of the article had addressed this quote more directly. "E-looting" is in no way "killing the music". It's not a crime, anymore than singing a familiar melody (that's under copyright) is an e-looting crime.

At least in the US, copyright law is unconstitutional. Read the copyright clause: there's no mention of treating the intangible as "property", nor is there granted the right to transfer "ownership". Far from it. Read Jefferson's letters on the subject, and you'd find he was very much on the side of the "pirates".

Just because you wrote a song doesn't mean I can't sing it. I can't imagine who died and told these guys that they deserved big cash for songs, but it's not true.
Not all people. But probably many of them.
In the last few months, I've been to Angelconf, Demo Day, Codecon, and now off to Adtech. I liked this post because I used to just go to conferences and "see what happened." But, when I go with an idea of what I want to get out of it (whether it's meeting a particular person, etc.), the results are far more powerful.
Careful using the word "vote" and "mean" in the same sentence on Hacker News. =)
J.J. gave a TED talk on the same subject a while ago: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.ht...
This was such an awesome issue, they should really strive to make every issue this interactive and thought provoking. I spent 3 hours on a plane thumbing through it looking for connections and solving some of the puzzles. Really exciting stuff and look forward to more in the future.
Stop Users From Changing Information
Good point about the liquidity restraint.

I hear banks aren't that friendly nowadays.
Setting The Tab Order
110 Supreme Court Justices seated since the Copyright Clause was enacted along with the Constitution in 1787, versus Kubrick from Hacker News. I wonder who's right about whether copyright law is constitutional.
I think I honestly prefered the tables, despite their flaws - although he makes some good points. Maybe it just takes some getting used to.
Thanks for the info–I'll be in touch.
MargaretWertheim_2009
The worst thing in the world is working with code written by an inexperienced programmer who thinks he has to use OO everywhere for everything.

Same goes for table normalization.

One of the greatest things about experience is that you know when you should use the "proper" way of doing things and when you should make things work faster/better/more directly.
5 Winners Teach Us How to Learn From Failure
Scientists find lightest exoplanet yet
The circles look very noisy at first, but it's an interesting approach. I found the full article more interesting: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/circos/?Visualizing_Tabular_Data
No offense taken.

I stand by my original comment.

If they specialize in Microsoft, that's all I need to know. I'm not interested, no matter what they have to say after the "but".
2003-era Nokia phones used for mobile Transaction Authentication Number hack?
Is this anything other than the utter tripe that the first paragraph would suggest?
Hmm, unless I'm going crazy here, we get the differential equation

x'' = -(x^-2)

x = (kt)^(2/3)(with k = (2/9)^(-3/2), not that it matters) seems to be a solution?

I guess that doesn't help with the singularity, but neither does looking at energy (since you have infinite kinetic energy at the center and infinite potential energy everywhere else.)
The original article, an autotranslation, was actually more informative than this, and included the gem of a detail that the survey used deliberately avoided wording that suggested "illegal" downloading.

In other words, this survey uncovered the shocking fact that people who had downloaded music were 10x more likely to pay to download music than people who never downloaded at all.
Would You Like To Send Your Friends Some Ads? SocialTwist Sure Hopes So.
Sorry, I wasn't commenting to say your post wasn't HN material it is. More of a commentary on the repeated findings and studies that come and say the same thing.
A lot of businesses use Microsoft platforms, and make a hell of a lot of money doing so.

Not to mention that Microsoft has come a long, long way since VB6 -- C# is a respectable language, ASP.NET MVC works pretty damn well (it powers Stack Overflow), and many of their lightweight dev products (SQL Server Express) are free-as-in-beer.

I may be a Unix guy, but I've still got a healthy amount of respect for what you can do on the Windows platform, even though it's not as 'cool' as an iPhone, Rails, or whatever-else-is-popular-right-now.
What have parallel universes got to do with the linked article?
I like the idea, it's like uservoice, getsatisfaction etc only really really simple.

My only complaint is the fact you've called it 'dropbox' most people associate that word with a file storage/sharing device (such as getdropbox.com or the OSX dropbox).

Perhaps 'comment box' would be more appropriate?

Also, you may want to add some flood control - I was able to bombard my test account with all manner of crap ;)
It's impossible to extract the deportation thing from the debate. If immigrants were working on a level playing field with natives, this would just be about xenophobia and protectionism. But they aren't. They work under unfair terms that depress their wages and, by extension, the wages of the entire field.

It's not simply that a Bulgarian or Thai developer will do the same job for less money; it's that the system is rigged so that they essentially have to work for less money.
Marc Andreessen Wants $250 Million For VC Fund
Fortunately you don't have the power to get people dragged out into the street and shot.
Microsoft software: That's where some money is. Especially on the Desktop.
Depends on the discount rate you apply. If I was producing a SQLServer backup product, I would apply a very high discount rate to projected cash flows because Microsoft might add a button and unknowingly halve my revenue. Or, some open source project might provide sufficient value for some would-be customers. It's like this to some degree for just about any product, software or not.

Also, I read "lifetime value" to mean NPV of revenue, not positive cash flows.
I haven't bit torrented any music or movies in a long time. Last week I really wanted to see the sequel to a documentary I had just viewed on Youtube. Its not available on Youtube, so I went to find it for purchase online. Its not on iTunes or anywhere else for purchase.

Bit torrent really is often the most convenient way to get music/movies. I want to pay to download this movie, but I can't.
Nor are $80 PDFs on how to raise one's parakeet. But, it's apparently a profitable business. By choosing MS platforms, those users have already signaled that they're willing to pay for software. That's not a bad market to target.
If Oracle-Sun is a cloud play, what was Ellison ranting about?
Here's a decent comp.arch post making the same point (more precisely and accurately than me, but still pretty casually):

http://yarchive.net/comp/register_windows.html
True, but you can also use HTML::Mason as a Catalyst View ;)

http://search.cpan.org/~flora/Catalyst-View-Mason-0.17/
This reminds of of some of the graphs they have in wired. While I'd love to have a table to backup every visualization, I think if you're trying to communicate the data you need to have both. I wish I knew who designs the graphs for wired, I'd follow his work any day.
Time for a new gadget? Advice for smart buyers
The Apple netbook, and the return of Steve Jobs
I really like the design and the logo. Are you a designer? Did you find someone else to work on that? (I'm interested because I'm looking for a way to have a good looking design)
The Cost of Downloading All Those Videos: the data behind metered billing
The premise is beginning to become less and less valid, especially with the recent trojan in pirated copies Photoshop CS4 and iWork '09.
I question the wisdom of pure democracy and majority vote for such decisions as opening and closing articles. As you say, fluff topics appeal to the GCD of the population, and should have plenty of votes to stay open.

One of the things that I liked most about StackOverflow when I started using it was how hard it was to get karma. To get it, you either had to ask good programming questions or give good programming answers. That's not easy to do.

Then I saw a question about office chairs with 50 points on the front page.
Of course, we all know --

Beautiful is better than ugly

but sometimes people forget --

Useful is even better than beautiful
How would a netbook differ from the MacBook Air? I guess what I mean to ask is, what is it about the MacBook Air that disqualifies it from being considered a netbook? Is it just the price?
"That's where some money is."

Not for me.

I don't object to Microsoft because of personal preference. I object because of software quality. Which translates into, "less money for me".

Without exception, every experience I've had with a customer who had Microsoft products on their server has been profoundly negative. I've had to account for things I would never dream of in a "-ux" environment. I have to regularly stop and deal with things normally outside my control. Which slows down progress and diverts attention from the critical path. In addition, these customers "think differently". I can't quite put my finger on it, but they just don't see possibilities they've never experienced.

So when someone says that they specialize in Microsoft, I have only 2 thoughts:

1. Good luck to them.

2. Not interested.
absurd.

How are these practical in any way? I guess I haven't read the manual....

I'll stick to bar/pie for visual representation.
From a marketing standpoint (as well as R&D), this is rational. Common marketing mechanisms for software like this are very segregated -- Hardly any conference interesting to people using Open Source stacks will have much Microsoft content, and vice versa. Blogs, magazines, etc. are all similar in this regard. So, the marginal cost of marketing another developer utility for the MS platform will be much lower than the cost of marketing the first, say, DB2 utility acquired.
A future filled with ebooks
Streaming Amazon Video on Demand to Roku
The comment you responded to was actually quite accurate in it's description of what's been happening in the United States for quite some time. Each industry has taken it's turn at the chopping block and been hollowed out to a shell of it's former self, with the exception of a few "safe" industries -- until now.

The "safe" industries have appeared so due to their proximity to "The Bezzle". Go look that up. Finance, Health Care, Law, Defense, Government; I think those are the major ones. The point being that the outsized flows of capital through these industries has been a direct result of a feedback loop between government-induced market distortion and kickbacks. The large percentage of revenue in these industries which is rarely paid out of pocket (insurance, defense budget, malpractice settlements, etc.) has acted as the veil behind which a culture of flagrant embezzlement and bribery has been easily concealed. Now that the tap is running dry and the wheels are coming off of the lie we've been told for 20 years, us hoi polloi are perceiving The Bezzle for what it really is.

No one got hurt and that is because your country is a rich country and was able to recuperate the bankers losses.

We shall see.
Not so... Viruses are becoming more and more of an issue on Mac's... Not to mention with a good knowledge of PC viruses, then they aren't really an issue.
I found correlations in this to the process of moving (kicking and screaming) from a technical to business development role. No user cares (and no user should care) about the deep underlying "how" something works. They care about what it does for them, and like the article said good aesthetic design is more than just beautiful.
Sun Sparc's future unclear under Oracle
I think the new Newton is going to be Jobs's last hurrah.
Good documentation. There are a lot of really great new languages out there. Clojure is probably one of my favorites but it is very hard for the average developer to put the time in to read source code to figure out how things work. PHP has excellent documentation despite lack a lot in features and I think this has been a large part of its success.
McKinsey Speculates that Cloud Computing May Be More Expensive than Internal IT
likewise.

Now that actual crime-on-the-seas piracy is a going concern, there's even more reason to stop using the term for filesharing.