skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found it useful. Better to get another few data points than nothing. They even mentioned themselves that the rates were quite variable.
Solving the upcoming water problems is a wholly political problem

Agreed, but effective politics is a rigorous Machiavellian exercise. Perhaps political science majors would be useful, but again, theology and what not brings nothing to the table.
I've stayed away from the "Is Swine Flu HN Material or Not" debate, mostly because those things run on ad infinitum.

I posted this article because it hints of possible future travel restrictions, and I think that's a business item worthy of interest for startups. Especially those that may need to travel in the next few months (like mine).

What the restrictions are based on in not germane to the reason I posted.

Having said that, I could make a good case that Swine Flu and the policy and reaction around it very much is hacker related. It goes to lots of interesting issues: social sites as conveyors of news, acting on imperfect information (which all startups must do), opportunities for working in the space created by the excitement over the story, hype or not.

We can agree to disagree. I'm moving from "who cares?" to "this is an interesting social phenomenon" -- none of that has anything to do with the underlying story. I hope I don't move to "This has personal implications" but we all know that a pandemic is coming sooner or later anyway. It's not like it's going to arrive with a big neon sign and a marching band. Whenever it occurs, the first stages will be full of hype, misinformation, and news-hawking. Just like this.
Related question: what do people use for active remote collaboration, where you want to interact with someone else's screen?

I was on a team with people located in several places around the US, and my boss wanted us to try pair programming. We tried VNC for a day or two, and after having huge issues with it, we just scrapped pair programming altogether. Are there better solutions out there?
If people are willing to pay more not to see ads than publishers receive for showing them ads, then it should be feasible for people to pay not to see ads and for publishers still to get paid.

And people who would rather see ads can continue to see ads.

I don't see that this is cheating or unethical in any way.
The power of the consumer is the choice to support the vendor they identify with. Spoiler alert: each content host, vendor, business has an agenda, it's just a matter of how quickly you can identify it.

And please - hold it against a business for trying to add additional revenue? How's your balance sheet?
>Solving the upcoming water problems is a wholly political problem and not one of engineering

I'm not sure I understand this. Maybe in the sense that if there was peace among nations it would easier to apply the engineering solutions that would solve the water problem?

Even so, directing more resources to water engineering research can be reasonably expected to result in some useful solutions. Few will claim that strengthening political science depts would yield more world peace.

(BTW, the 2nd article contains Reddit-level nonsense. That it is published by academics - I assume? - says more about academia than its subject matter)
Interesting stuff to think about.

Just like in zombie movies, it's your fellow human beings you've got to watch out for in such situations, a flu pandemic is just a backdrop to watch the human drama unfold against.
It's disingenuous. You presented it as fact, and then admitted in a parenthetical that it was not.
Large buildings(the ones who spend large amounts of money on HVAC related energy consumption) are already putting up a shadow electricity meter which counts the pulses. The data is then read using a LonWorks(wired)/Zigbee (wireless) meters which have web/SOAP interface.

If Wattvision can come up with sub $100 equipment, then this will get interesting.
Android attack continues: Skytone Netbook to cost $250
Samsung i7500 announced - the first non-HTC Android phone
You might be able to get something going if you release it as open source. I'm sure there are examples of successful open source companies in comparable sectors.
I think Time decided it was easier to let him be awarded the win then to award it to someone with less votes.

By doing so, Time has probably averted negative hacking, social engineering campaigns against their many web properties (e.g. How can 4chan's followers argue with the results?) It is a bit, tongue-in-cheek, though - they obviously did not drum it up (in the announcement) - as if someone like Obama had one.
Imo.im supporting Skype and Introducing Voice, Video Capability On All Networks
That's not an acknowledgement - that's a pitiful attempt to deny that the data they have is worthless, and that they damn-well know it.

And then there's apologists such as yourself - trying to tell me that actually Time did 'detect and extinguish' the hack attempts as they claim, but that real users still voted the same way as the disabled hack had attempted to. Purlease. Did they also manage the additional, 20 character message organically too?
I almost always hover over links on HN to check the URL. (google.com) is often code.google.com, and I knew without knowing that googlepages.com had to be something like whatever.blogger.com or some such like nopassrecover said.
You mean that they're gambling with the taxpayers' money. I guess that must mean that we are all crazy.
Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don't want to
"So what’s going on here? Why are paychecks heading for the stratosphere again?"

Is he kidding? Could it rhyme with fail rout? If someone's buying mistakes, we'll get more mistakes.
Mibbit feels pretty durned fast to me, for a rich web-app.
How we can learn from a baby's brain
TV Relieves Loneliness
Maybe it happens, but all the stories I've ever heard are of the form "we tried to sell it, but no one would buy it. So we created the business ourselves, and here we are $X billions later".

I'm sure there's selection bias, in that I don't hear about the people who tried to create a business but failed; and I don't hear about the people who did successfully sell it (because the software is absorbed into the acquirer and rebranded). The closest is the small software companies bought by Sun, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Oracle and so on. But they always seem to buy the company; and the company always seems to have customers. There could be exceptions, but I know of none.

(1). System: No one buys software. They buy solutions to their problems - especially in the enterprise. That is, a "whole product": integration, support, maintenance, documentation, training, interoperability and so on. You might say they buy a "system". This partly explains why some enterprise software products can appear pretty crap. It's because the product itself isn't particularly critical - it's just a factor.

(2). Users: If you don't have users, how do you know it is usable in practice? Does it interoperate with their other systems? How does it cope with real world loads? Fred Brooks said that more users find more bugs. Will the very first user encounter a few show-stoppers? (Sorry to be so negative - maybe you have done many of these things; but without users, it's impossible). In a way, it is much easier to start with an absurdly trivial program, and grow it with a community of users (or customers). That's how most (not all) successful software seems to be built.

(3). Exception: If you aimed at plug-compatibility, so that your software can more-or-less invisibly and silently slot into an existing role, and it also is better by objective measures (such as speed, memory use, accuracy, reliability), and these improvements matter to at least some customers, then you might be able to sell it. For example, Sun publishes many of its specifications as standards, to deliberately create a marketplace for implementors like yourselves. If you pass the compatibility suite, it's a start (but the buyer would still need to be able to extend it themselves, support it, fix bugs and so on - the system again).

As someone else said: If you are exhausted, please take a break before making any decisions. It's impossible to see opportunities when you are too tired. Note that I don't know anything about what you've actually done, or your actual opportunities - so there may be many ways around them.

Could you elaborate on "beats most commercial offerings in its field"?

Disclaimer: although I've written software and sold several licenses for it, a few to the enterprise, I haven't sold a company (or the software in the way you mean).
Interesting that it supports Skype, which is the only protocol in the list that doesn't have third party clients (afaik; if I'm mistaken, please correct me).

That'd mean they either partnered with Skype (which would be a first, so I don't think it's likely), or are using Skype client API and rerouting audio from/to it. That's quite a feat, especially if they can manage that in a scalable (wrt the number of users) manner.
Best thing about Morse Code is that the length of the code for each letter is inversely proportional to its frequency in the English language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#Development_and_hist...
"All exponential growth comes to an end eventually."

Perhaps. But it may be that this limit is very far in the future.

Technological progress relies on matter to store information and to built tools, and energy to apply those tools to accumulate information. There is a lot of matter and energy in the Universe, so much so that even were we to continue at our current rate of progress, we wouldn't hit these known physical limits for a considerable span of time.

There may, of course, be more subtle limits we are currently unaware of, but I'm inclined to believe that technological progress will continue at an accelerating rate for a very long span of time.
"'We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children,' writes Gopnik. 'But really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus.'"

That's a useful distinction. I remember reading somewhere (and I suppose that robg, the submitter here, is familiar with the professional research literature on this subject) that the human brain has HUGE processing and storage capacity, and the human sensory systems have enormous sensory capacity, and the role of attention is to decide which subset of the enormous amount of sensory information taken in minute-by-minute goes along the (comparatively) narrow-bandwidth pathway from sensory organs to the brain. A big part of learning while growing up is learning what to attend to, and practicing making the most expedient direction of attention habitual.

Thanks for posting the interesting article.
Summary: I do not like the fact that pay at investment banks for those who have not been fired is similar to 2007 levels. I shall neglect to mention that between half and three quarters of the people who used to work at these banks no longer do so.

Given that banking's outsize paypackets are a product of the post 80's era, why are they returning after the biggest financial crisis in more than 60 years? Apparently it's as a reward for financial innovation.

Bernanke's examples of good pieces of financial innovation, not so hot, huh?
(1)Credit cards - not very new
(2)Overdraft protection
(3)Subprime loans

No problem with people spening their money as they please, but the banks aren't private. Between nationalisations, guarantees and regulation the financial sector should be acting like public utilities.
Desktop Linux: Why it may have lost its chance
There's a fairly easy way out of the tax. Don't have a TV in the UK. You then don't have to pay it but you can still enjoy the BBC.

Specifically, you can use all their services including the iPlayer as long as you don't use the iPlayer to watch a program as it's being broadcast.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/01/iplayer_does_...

I don't have a TV and I live in the UK and the licensing people are aware of this. I do have broadband at home. At first I thought I would watch TV via the iPlayer, but it turns out that I've watched a grand total of one program in the last four months.
You know "waxing" means "growing," not "talking," right?
I have to agree with some of the other comments. Your best bet is to take a break for a little while. Also why don't you actually post links to the software? It would be great for SEO even if you sell the business.
The killer feature for these things is content. You need the ability to draw on a Wikipedia style collaborative project so that you don't end up entering all the standard info (100 most common words in language X, countries/states and capitals etc. etc.)

As far as I'm aware no one has done this yet.
It may be long, but this song makes up for it:
http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/more/kamsingsong/
It’s Official (and Hacked): 4chan Founder Sweeps Time’s Top 100 List
Interesting read. I generally enjoy Steve's writings. Has he ever released any of his code though or does anyone know any project's he's worked on?
Accelerate Your Growth by Learning Quickly from Your Wins and Losses
What's Wrong with Enterprise Software (but also how to fix it)
How Hackers Can Steal Secrets from Reflections
Try DocumentFragment instead:

http://ejohn.org/blog/dom-documentfragments/
http://slayeroffice.com/articles/innerHTML_alternatives/#5c
"Your correspondent thinks Boxee will be one of the most disruptive things to happen to television in ages—and not before time."

Can someone explain this final sentence to me? What does, "-and not before time" mean?
but it is inaccurate to say "God said so in that holy book."

I didn't claim that God said so. I just quoted the science teacher that was interviewed. Go watch the video and wonder why Governments and parents are allowing these kind of morons to teach science.

Moreover my point was not about how to interpret a particular event described in a particular book; far from it. I was expressing outrage at the fact that a science teacher would believe that the Earth is just a few thousand years old, throwing all the science in the dust bin. More importantly he is teaching the same thing to children and is getting away with it.

PS: through the revealed preference of coming into the defense of the book, though I didn't find faults with it, you gave out a lot about why you made the comment. But I'm going to pass over it.
I didn't like Kurzweil's expansionist idea so much. Instead I imagine that the Singularity will hole-up, and become disinterested in the outside universe. There might be lots of real estate - read computing resource - there under all those turtles.
Worm solves Gmail's CAPTCHA, creates fake accounts
I think an adjective, like (e.g.) "poetic", got lost in the editing process. I hate it when that happens.
The slow deterioration of the free web as we know it.
I imagine it was a play on "wax poetic", but then this comment should be about the content of the OP's post, not one upping their spelling.
Engineers will solve these problems. Politicians will define them.
Anybody know of any other good book lists?
Writing serious Perl: The absolute minimum you need to know
He wrote a/an MMORPG in 100000 lines of Java: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvern_(Online_Game)

He also ported Ruby on Rails to Javascript: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html
"I don't think it's obvious that a hack went undetected by Time and gave the vote to Moot. What seems more likely to me is that more people voted for him."

That argument doesn't account for the rest of the hack. We have already had detailed explanations of what they did to 'extinguish' the hack from the hackers, and also how they got around the trivial upgrades to security. That acknowledgement from Time is denial, plain and simple.
http://www.programmingbooks.org/Books_Every_Programmer_Shoul...
The computer has the opposite problem than humans have. It has all the information available instantly but it can't understand the question. Parsing a question can be very quick, the problem is being sure that it was understood correctly. If it was, the answer will be known instantly and the computer should ring. If it wasn't, it shouldn't.

My guess is that the computer will ring either when it knows the answer beyond a certain confidence threshold (faster than a human being can hit a button) or not at all.
There's a plane being escorted by a fighter jet over New York Harbour.
Without a Strong Foundation, You're Doomed
"Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason."
– Oscar Wilde

"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
– Bertrand Russell
Conde Nast shutting down Portfolio magazine
Linus on Linux: The Linus Torvalds Interview Part 2
Presumably a lot of money is going to be spent on the transition - any startups working in this area?
Convincing the Boss to Pay for Developer Training
What I don't understand is why people keep voting up CodingHorror posts: that blog has never been interesting... mostly boring observations of obvious facts, nearly always somehow Windows-centric. Even Barnes&Noble "gets it" by now - their Windows/.NET books have been pushed into the bottom shelves to make up room for Cocoa, Python, Ruby development and Ubuntu books.

Yeah... virtualization. Yeah, good way to run legacy apps, here is a screen shot of how it works, see kidz?
Even when not explicit, ISP data caps still haunt users
Apple found guilty of willful patent infringement
Popular Gaming System May Offer Radiologists An Alternative Way To View Patient Images
(I offer some level of apologies in advance, but this whole thing has touched a chord with me and any attempts to express myself eloquently seem to come up short, so I'm going to just let it out... some foul language may follow... though I'll probably delete this in an hour or so to stem the karma damage)

I really don't want to hear about that crap. Not because i find it taboo, or offensive, or because it is somehow too extreme for my fragile view on the world, but because this kind of crap is mundane, uninspiring, unoriginal and juvenile.

FFS, the highest voted comment was "draw some pictures", you have to be kidding me, how lame and predictable can a thread like that get? This is HACKER NEWS, maybe the discussion could revolve around that a bit, ya think? How about you try to write some fucking coherent and maintainable Perl? Maybe you can do that on acid...

And did you read the list of questions he was asking? "When I see a shape shift or melt, then reach out and touch it, will I feel the shape that I see, or feel its true form?" Are you fucking kidding me, really? Is there a cute chick with a Velvet Underground t-shirt standing around here somewhere that I'm not seeing?

You want to drop acid? Great, go for it, you have my blessings, but don't post to HN about it pretending you want to take some lame fucking pseudo-scientific approach to it.

This is Hacker News, I don't want to come here and feel like a fly on a wall at an art school scenester coffee shop full of Volvo driving trustafarians. I sure as hell don't want to read an entire thread about someone discovering hallucinogenic drugs for the first time. That discussion has it's place, that place is not here.

Also, just because that story was flagged or moderated or whatever, does not mean that you are some how being persecuted for your "counter-culture" beliefs. All too often someone says something stupid on HN (more often Reddit, but it seems to be happening more here) and they're moderated into oblivion, so they edit their comment claiming that their statement was just too mind blowing for the sheeple to accept, so it unjustly modded into oblivion. The reality is that the sheeple are quite open minded, they just think the comment sucked, was stupid, and deserved being moderated into oblivion.
Yep, this is: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1...
This post strikes the nail on the head for me. I have a Twitter account, but never use it. I have no interest in FaceBook nor do I have a blog. I've never found a compelling reason to be that public with my life.

On the other hand, I was building websites in the mid-90's and can remember the "why do I need a website" questions, and I would always struggle with a compelling answer. I guess I'm on the other side of the coin this time and I never thought to draw the parallels between early websites and early social media.

Got some thinking to do...
Raindrops splash before they hit the ground
The problem of whether the irrigation ditch is dug on your land or your neighbor's land is a political problem. The problem of how the water is priced (heavily subsidized by taxpayers, or with full cost of delivering the water passed on to the consumers) is a political problem. Both of these can also be legal problems. Engineers might enjoy their work better in many cases if they understood more about the constraints on their work imposed by other issues dealt with by other specialists.
Your options are limitless, really but here are a few:

1. Pick a framework to make your PHP work less boring (CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony)

2. Ruby on Rails or Python & Django

3. Slicehost ftw.

These days you can find a cheap host for just about anything except the Microsoft stack and even that you can get for a reasonable price.

If your clients are that cheap, get new clients.
Arguably, there's an element of discrimination here too. Large American and European corporations and governments have plenty of IP addresses. (For a start, have a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IP_address_... ) Whereas countries like India and China are lacking IP addresses. Until the address shortage starts to affect the aforementioned governments and corporations, I doubt we'll see any significant movement.
How Stimulus funds go from Congress's fevered brain to the street
Nice job getting it done so quickly. You have any plans/ideas on how to make money with it?
There's something like that at http://www.paulgraham.com/labels.html
Hm ... A religion professor feels like current university system is useless and antiquated... Perhaps it is really his own field that is useless and antiquated.
Fast (Nanotech) Takeoff: RepRap Rocks
You started a flame war over vendor lock in? What about language lock in? DBMS lock in? Or even the forbidden OS lock in?

I don't care what you use, it has lock in of some kind. Get over it. VS2008, C#/VB.NET, ASP,NET, MSSQL are great tools. That's all these things are: tools. The end product is always the same. If you build something with Ruby you can't go back and fix it with PHP. Lock in? Yep.
I flipped through the presentation and thought the inclusion of the images was immature at best...but you know what? -- big f'ing deal! Just because one guy uses these images as a form of self expression doesn't cast a shadow on the community itself as being culturally a "ghetto".

EDIT: Definitely off-topic, but does anybody have any experience with CouchDB/Rails? If so, what are the pros/cons...
We're all in the same city, but we don't have an office space. So:

- Confluence/Jira for wiki and ticket tracking

- Spark jabber server for chat

- I record demos with Screenflow to share with the other team members

We do meet face to face once a week. We don't have much use for video chat.
For the sake of clarity, could people be less ambiguous when they talk about Wall Street!?! They say "bankers", I think of guys doing M&A and other corporate finance. Most people think of anyone working at an investment bank.

Salaries are at 2007 levels? OK, but who's making the money!? The corporate finance guys? Or the traders? (or both?) There's a huge difference, and the media has not been very informative because bashing all things related to Wall Street sells more than doing good journalism.