skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would additionally add that, while he spent a while talking about one of the positive outcomes for a while at the end, even the tone of that section really points out the utter luck that was involved in a lot of the successes.

It was a horrific day, but a pivotal one for at least the next 40 or so years of history. Had the Allied forces not been able to break into Normandy the outcome of the war was no certain thing, even with the success in Italy.
My assumption would be that he is no longer making thousands per week. I'd imagine there's a somewhat limited market for people interested in an e-book about parrots, at least enough that at some point the market would be saturated.
Actually, that's really not true. A classless society refers to a society which lacks any distinctions of wealth, income, education, culture, or social network.
In the very few places that I've had to deal with a non-compete agreement, I've always been able to get amendments made to the contract that limits the specificity to a more acceptable level. Companies just want to try to protect their property as much as possible.

The conventional wisdom appears to be that non-compete agreements are largely unenforceable, however I'd be careful in using that assumption: No company wants to deal with someone if they feel that person has no regard for contractual agreements to begin with.
I've had every one of my employment or contracting agreements changed. I usually don't strike them completely, I usually modify them to something limited and reasonable. I won't steal inside info. I won't go to work for one of the clients whose project I worked on, etc... Never had a problem as long as I was willing to stand my ground.
They are difficult to enforce in many jurisdictions; and to be enforceable at all they usually have to be limited in scope. That said, yes, they are for suckers, it's a sucker move to ask for one, and a sucker move to accept one.
Ask HN:  What are your priorities in a VPS service?
As some of you noticed a while back[1] I provide virtual private servers using Xen[2].

Right now, the largest problem I see is the interface. Now, I'm running pvgrub, which lets you boot into a read-only image that can mount your virtual disk, so you can upload and download new images, but it is something of a pain in the ass[3].

a bigger interface problem is that it usually takes about half a day for you to get provisioned, but this just requires me to sit down and work on it for a few hours.

Now, I do think I have a reasonably good interface to start, stop and to give the user a console. But I think it is essential to allow users to easily upload and download the contents of their hard drive. I was thinking a mechanism that would allow a user to download a .tar.gz of their file system through a webform or something. (of course, this would require shutting down the guest for a consistent image)

what does hn think? restoring such an image elsewhere would usually require little more than an untar (and fixing /etc/fstab)

the other option is to take a straight dd of the drive; this is far more flexible, as it will preserve your filesystem labels, partitions, and will work with any filesystem you can dream up. The problem is that a dd of a 90GiB disk partition will take a really long time. (partimage-ng and related tools help some, at the cost of complexity.)

Another assumption I make is that most people leave most servers on for a while. more than a week. is that correct?

A further possibility is that my interface is fine, and I should throw all available resources into improving my support response times.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590993

[2]http://prgmr.com/xen/

[3]http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Untarring_a_fresh_OS_image
I don't think they're enforceable in CA.
Sayali Bhagat Wallpapers, Pics, Photo Gallery, Biography, Films
As an experiment, I'm currently cooking my own site (for a different market) using the parrotsecrets.com recipe (as it was described in Robert Cringely's post). If people are still interested in this, I'll make sure to post the results to Hacker News, including all of the relevant data such as anonymized traffic logs, financial results, etc.
I know you say that tongue-in-cheek, but it's a good point. I'd love to see a few samples of sales letters and business proposals that have worked for YC'rs. 'Softer' than term sheets, but it would still be instructional.
Cross-platform sales, distribution, and package/upgrade management. iTunes is on Windows, too.
But people have to realize that the mobile App Store really is for a phone. There's no reason to put the same hoops on apps on a platform that has absolutely no concern for branding, battery life, network usage, etc.
I agree with you 100%

I was just trying to highlight the fact that an OSX app store would be...

1) not mutually exclusive with self-distribution

2) a boon to Apple's OSX ecosystem

3) welcomed with open arms by developers despite the complaining from developers about the issues with the iPhone's App Store processes
Going from his examples, cultural norms can help some blacks outperform other blacks. But it doesn't actually allow blacks to outperform whites. If his examples are representative, the natural variations of the "inspiration" part are actually similar in size to the "perspiration" part of the equation.

Actually it is not possible to prove or disprove that from the data presented (which is not data at all), but one can envisage data that is consistent with his position. For the sake of argument, say Asian-American kids study 20 hours a week, Caucasian kids study 10 hours a week, West Indian origin black kids study 5 hours a week, and African American kids study 3 hours a week. Then both his statements would be correct - performance is related to study hours, not innate talent, and West Indian kids would outperform other black kids but not white kids.

[Of course we are grossly oversiplifying, the suggestion is that wider cultural norms such like intactness of families are the contributor, not just study hours].

I don't know whether he is right or not, but it's not possible to decide he is wrong by the fact that are included just in that article.
The picture of a toy troll indicates to me, as does the text, that you don't know what trolling is. Here is the appropriate metaphor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(angling)
In some states, Calif included, they are practically unenforceable (except for perhaps the sale of a business).
This is pretty common...internet marketers are constantly testing new things. In this case, he's switched to a squeeze page that hypes a free e-course. If you sign up for it, you get setup in his Aweber autoresponder and you'll get the free e-course (hopefully) along with offers for the product he's selling. He may just have switched to test the overall conversion rate through the whole pipeline and see if it's higher. Often it'll better to hook people with a free offer and build trust over time, selling them multiple products, rather than trying to convert cold traffic to a sale up-front.

Also, I just want to point out that he's likely never made $400k in annual profit from this. Not only was Cringely's estimate based on the $79 price that gets cut in half for a lot of the orders, but a lot of these guys give their affiliates 50 - 75%, plus he's probably paying for a lot of paid traffic. That said, if he's selling 10-15 of these per day, he's probably doing well, especially if he has premium products that he upsells people to.

Lots of lessons here for the HN crowd, IMO.
Great idea, it would be interesting to see how the various big name apple geeks like Gruber's predictions actually pan out. The last few years is all I've followed him so I don't doubt he was more off in the past.
Politics. The political left is the faction of academia. As institutions, the universities and the teachers unions wish to reallocate money to education spending [1]. To do so, they must simultaneously get people to believe two things: 1) that scholastic achievement is extremely important and 2) that everyone can achieve any scholastic goal. Conversely, those on the right wish to debunk #2 so that politicians will stop reallocating money to academia, and instead allocate it to their favored causes.

Scholastic achievement is closely related to tested IQ. The SAT is a not-so-thinly veiled IQ test. Every American is taught by the educational establishment that both scholastic achievement and the SAT are very important to our future. For the first twenty-two years of our life, we get graded continuously on scholastics, but rarely on character. In all, we are raised to be obsessed about IQ, and we are caught in the midst of a political battle where trillions of dollars are at stake.

[1] Note - I do not impute cynical intent to the actual individuals comprising the educational institutions. Institutions promote themselves via selection effects. True believers who believe what's good for Harvard is good for the country will fill the ranks of Harvard and enter leadership positions. Cynics will find jobs elsewhere. Thus an institution will fill with people who sincerely believe in promoting the institution, whether or not the institution actually is doing any good. Thus the actions of an institution as a whole can be self-serving at the harm of the whole, while the individuals comprising it are sincere. Other institutions besides academia have the same effect, see for instance, the 16th Century Catholic Church.
I am confused as to how a "tech" site such as t/c doesn't have any sort of community comment moderation features. It makes sense to let your readers vote down the trollish comments.

On slashdot and reddit and even on digg, if you set your comment threshold to +5, what's left behind is pretty good conversation. On HN, trollish comments are grayed out almost immediately. What's most disappointing is that slashdot has had a comment karma system since '97.

Instead of complaining about the trolls, I'd prefer if they actually did something about it.
I really doubt it. People are still buying parrots, so there's always new folks to sell to.

Also, he's almost certainly never made thousands per week in profit from this. Affiliates and PPC eat up profits pretty quickly.
I feel like this change on the information products "flagship" kind of invalidates the whole business model. (Maybe I'm just freaking out though)
I would really love to hear more about this. What phase are you in?

Are any other HN folks experimenting with this after reading the original ParrotSecrets story?
Yes especially since he starts of bemoaning the difference in intellectual attitudes between Anglosaxons and other countries - failing to note that Dr Spock was widely translated and read worldwide. He also misrepresents what Dr Spock said, which given the social climate at the time was actually a useful addition to the childreading debate.

When the paediatricians were telling mothers to formula feed (and formula was awful in those days - sugar and soluble fat mostly, not like today) every 4 hours (no more often, no matter how the baby cries) instead of breastfeeding on demand (as is the current best practice), "ignore the authority and listen to your intuition" was not the worst advice in the world.
It doesn't...the business model is to sell stuff to a niche market. He's still doing that, but he's either determined that getting them on his list and selling to them over time converts higher overall, or he's testing to see if that's the case. I wouldn't be surprised if it does...opt-in rates for cold (but targeted) traffic on squeeze pages like that can be north of 30%, compared to a good sales letter conversion rate of 2-3%. That's a lot of people who have given you permission to send them valuable info and offers for your product(s). Many people won't buy until they have multiple contacts with the offer. Hook them with a free offer, give them value over time, and then sell them your product.
Would anyone be up for designing an actual method to punch people in the face (or some other equivalent action) over the Internet? And requiring that you have it active and targeted at you in order to have your computer on? ;)

Actually, I think the most interesting method of eliminating trolling would be to have a sort of escrow service that takes your money away if people downvote you enough. To put it another way: establish a currency-to-Whuffie exchange. Sort of like buying gold in WoW, except that you don't spend it on weapons to fight monsters, but rather invest it in your own comments.
China to require PCs with software to block sites
I suggest you ponder the rest of that wikipedia article, or since you live in Europe, look at its day-to-day workings for a while. As a fellow European, surely you are aware that in practice the EUP is a punching bag for national governments and widely perceived as a sideshow, which is why nations fight tooth and nail to preserve their commission representation.

Given its inability to propose legislation, it is hamstrung compared to a typical national legislature, not to mention being riven by petty disputes of language nationalism and so forth. With the best of intentions, how is the new Pirate Party member going to bring about a provocative debate on the meaning of copyright and intellectual property when everything has to go through a tabling committee and debates normally impose a 1 minute time limit for speakers. Hell, I'm an ardent europhile and even I think it's politically moribund.

One upside of this, though, is that I ever move back to Europe I'll consider running for a seat...I figure it ought to be relatively easy to get elected given the general public apathy that prevails around euro elections :)
Maybe I took http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html too much to heart, but "holds people accountable for what they say" is rather sinister. I've long since stopped saying anything even slightly controversial without an alias. Isn't there some way of making a reputation valuable enough to build and keep, without tying it to my True Name and hurting my career?
They're the norm in tech companies. I don't think they're really necessary for most employees. But few investors would invest in a startup whose founders hadn't signed noncompetes. Otherwise they'd be investing in air. All the founders could leave and start a new company doing the same thing.
You don't need to make a PDF of this. You just print it out. HTML and the Web are made for paper. The screen is just treated by current GUIs and by the Web as a glorified paper-displaying device.

If you're thinking of sending this to other people, just send them the link and highlight it in someway to attract their attention.
If you do not include any links on the resume, you're treating HTML/theWeb as a glorified paper-creation language.

At least link to the companies you previously worked for!
By the definition of capitalism, we are all pawns of the invisible hand of the market, as much as we are the benefactors.
"3) Order through this pop-window! Don't order off the main website or you will end up paying the normal price of $79.95. Order here, just below for $39.95!"
The word's meaning has expanded beyond the original Usenet sense.
UN announces launch of world’s first tuition-free, online university
The linked article said that GMU was sued for violating its license agreement with EndNote. So, this isn't the same question as whether or not a third party app may read/write MSOffice file formats. If an organization signs a license agreement stating that all users of data aggregated by Product A must access that data via a licensed copy of that product but instead issues some of its employees Product B which reads Product A's data, isn't that a legitimate license violation? I probably wouldn't enter into such an agreement as a customer, but one could conceivably do so. We don't actually know from the article what the case was about or what the judges ruled upon.
Yesterday I received the first 12 pages from the ebook author. I found her on Elance, and I'm paying $800 for 30 pages. Elance was very effective: I received over 30 bids for the project, several of which came from extremely qualified writers (including two PhDs). While I wait for the book to be finished (another 3 weeks), I'll be working on building the site and planning the marketing strategy.

If you'd like to discuss it in-depth, Ryan, feel free to contact me via email or Gtalk.
Techcrunch needs to hire a dedicated community manager, like Boing Boing. The low quality of the Techcrunch comments drag down the perceived quality of the rest of the site.
I transferred from UCLA to NYU between my sophomore and junior year of undergrad. UCLA counts me in its matriculated stats because I graduated from a university, despite leaving.

I already thought at that point that any rankings were bullshit. That kind of manipulation makes anything +/- 10 or maybe 20 positions to be irrelevant. The problem for US News is that everyone already knows a rough ranking, and doesn't need to be told that UCLA & NYU are somewhere in the top 50 but not top 10.
I really can't wait until I can cash in my Hacker News karma. I'm optimistic that the online reputational economy will emerge in the next 5 years.

I'd probably trade my account right now for 15 hours of python uber-hacking or $2000 to the EFF.
I try not to reply to these types of arguments, but two days in a row of dissing postmoderism is a bit much, and so I'll try to defend postmodernism, cause I do think it's worth defending.

The first problem with postmoderism is it exists across fields. There was a movement in architecture. There was a movement in theatre. If you listed all the fields, you'd notice that they're all creative. That's the other problem, and the one that creates so much confusion for non-creative people. I wouldn't say all scientifically minded (digital thinking) people are not creative, but I'd guess a majority probably aren't. It's those that have problems with it, and this is why people 'that get it' call them 'stupid'. I don't agree that they're stupid, but I do think it's to do with the lack of natural creativity.

From my interpretation, the thing about postmoderism is that it measures the field using what makes that field unique as the variable. Postmodern designers feared that 'creativity' in design was disappearing, as it was the 'creativity' that designers valued, so without it - there was no more design. The postmodern philosophers, who are mostly concerned with humans, came to the same conclusion - humans were disappearing. Without humans, there is no more philosophy.

You also have to remember that these are creative people asking the questions, and creative people cannot be tamed. They love a prank, and if they choose to write, their styles become poetic and humourous. They redefine words as that is what philosophy has been doing since the origins of it. A bunch of drunk greeks sitting around defining concepts like love. Hegel re-defined practically every stylistic word he could find - to be poetic. Philosophy may have branched out into fields like science, but its origins are in human creativity, and that can't be measured by rigorous scientific method. It's art for thinkers. It explores a world that 'does' exist, but science choses to ignore as it has no other option but to. Some people can't accept that, and in this modern culture with modern people on a postmodern trajectory, they lash out, which results in some ridiculous polemics against it.

The big point of postmodernism that needs to be understood is that it is the 'end' of something. The 'end' of design. The 'end' of humans. It doesn't mean those things will cease to exist, but that what made them worthy of our attention was going to 'end'. Tech fields haven't yet hit a point where new ideas stop coming, but there will come a time where the only things coming out are rehashes of twitter or myspace. That's when a genuine postmodernism movement will rise within technology.

The ultimate test of postmoderism is to hand a naturally creative human a book by Baudrillard, and see if they get it. I would guess at least half could interpret a bulk of it.
A more quantitative look at this same thing. Basically saying that people pick what interests them. This is pretty technical, but by some pretty smart people:

http://home.uchicago.edu/~jmshapir/bias.pdf

And, my own experiment with media influence. This counteracts both the master link and the link above. My short experiment has correlation to show that the media has more influence on public perception. Though, this was just a proof-of-concept and not a vetted research project:

http://publicthoughts.com/media-affects-opinion/
Personally I ignore the blatant trolls but I get more and more disheartened by the people who are more or less two-faced.

The kind who spout vitriolic comments about people or products via their online identity, but wouldn't have the guts to say this kind of stuff in person.

I've noticed this a lot lately with comments aimed at Michael Arrington. Many people love to leave anonymous persona comments about how much of an asshole Arrington appears to be, yet I'd wager a significant portion of those wouldn't dare say it to his face.

It really says a lot about a person who hasn't got those kinds of balls.

Disclosure #1: While I do think Michael Arrington can be over the top sometimes, I do find him to be a fairly credible kind of guy.

Disclosure #2: I don't post anonymously, my contact details are in my profile and I would definitely like the opportunity to tell the following people how much I dislike them in person. Paris Hilton, Eddie Mcguire & Dick Cheney.
I thought it was a great article, I just found the introduction a bit incongruous. The title of the piece is "First Wave at Omaha Beach," but all discussion of the first wave is concluded by 40% of the way through.

By the conclusion, which should be wrapping up the thesis of the article, the first wave seems forgotten and those final 13 paragraphs could have been lifted straight from the writings that are critiqued in the introduction.

That's my perspective today. In 1960 this might have been much more of a break from the established narrative, and even fairly shocking.
You know, I submit that lateral transfers are probably one of the highest possible signals there could be. Now, if that was a part of the formula, they schools would game it. So you'd probably have to sit out a year, like players in Div. I sports (all sports, or just revenue generating sports?) have to. Ah, progress.
Recommendations for part-time distance PhD in CS?
There seem to be various options to do part-time PhD studies in Computer Science available; UNISA and Open University being the most obvious.

Does anyone have recommendations or anti-recommendations for institutions that are willing to allow part-time distance students? I'm in the San Francisco bay area but for various tedious reasons need to be employed (on H1B visa) and living in the area full time.
Slashdot, reddit, digg and HN are homebrewed software - TechCrunch is a Wordpress install, a little bit of a different kettle of fish.

But regardless, I think that with a significant number of people who just troll the comments at techcrunch, any kind voting system will just be gamed anyway and in doing so, will dilute it's effectiveness.