skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's just simply not true - Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) begs to differ.
The more I read the less I know
This is a hard thing to reconcile. As the boss, you are responsible for getting other people into the 'trance' of productivity.

My mantra: The task for the leader of a team project is to work on the team, not the project.

I've actually found it hard to follow that rule while in complete start-up mode, as there aren't enough hands to match the work. The goal, though, is to sacrifice early to generate enough money you can hire the hands you need.
Amazon's offerings dwarf Project Gutenberg to a degree that it's not even worth discussing. The iPod wouldn't have gone anywhere if it could only play out of copyright music. Sure, there are a few dorks out there that would go for it but the vast majority of the public has no interest.
Your concern is legitimate, but I think you can count on one (and probably both) of two things happening to protect you:

(1) Amazon or others will sell replacement devices or software that support the same DRM'd formats, so you will have continuity of access. (For example, since iPhones can also read Kindle books, and presumably Android phones too at some point, there will be multiple reading platforms.)

(2) The progress of time and mores will render the DRM effectively inert, as with all other DRM formats used on popular/mass content.

There is a bit of faith required, but not much -- that one or both of these occur fits a trend as strong as Moore's Law.
Seems to hold for articles with less than 50 votes. Once you're already #1 on HN for more than a few hours there isn't really much extra traffic from staying there longer.
First Windows 7 bug discovered
Within a couple of days of the Windows 7 RC release, there is already a bug been detected giving application failiures
Arrington's argument is not "absurdly stupid", and even if he sounds a bit obsessive on this issue, he has the advantage of being right. Meanwhile, you're Not Even Wrong -- there are many types of bacteria and viruses that are spread by skin contact.

Any virologist or microbiologist will tell you that skin contact is a great way to spread viruses and bacteria. In fact, it's pretty widely assumed that aerosol transmission is mediated via skin contact as well: when you sneeze or cough, the droplets fall to surfaces quickly. Someone else then touches those surfaces, touches their mouth, nose or eyes, and voila -- cold transmission. The same thing happens much more directly via handshakes.

There's a reason that public health people insist that you need to wash your hands after going to the bathroom. Do you sincerely believe that they'd be so worried about it, if there were "relatively few" infections that could be spread by skin contact?

Finally, it really bugs me that your comment is +11, when you spend most of your time insulting Arrington for making a (relatively well-informed) argument, and only a very small amount of time making your own (unproven and incorrect) assertions. If you're going to insult someone for making an argument, at least come to the table armed with something more than the opposite opinion.
I think I was about 7 or 8 and I got a 48k ZX Spectrum. Was my first experience of coding - oh how I miss the old tape loading noise.
I think I was 10, an Apple II+. It wasn't the first thing I used to program (I'd dabbled in LOGO and BASIC before), but it was a surprisingly complete computer. I used it to learn about a lot of different things, such as input from peripherals like a joystick, as well as memory management -- from that damnable "out of memory" error when my overzealous BASIC programs got too big. :)
I invoked Rothbard's Law.

"everyone specializes in what he is worst at"

Chomsky is no exception. For a brilliant linguist, he know little of economics. Chomsky is known to advocate anarcho-syndicalism, which seem to be "democratic"(Which I believe to percisely opposite to the anarchistic etho)
Ask HN: Selling software to local government?
There is a task that my local county government performs on a continuous basis that employs two people full-time. It consists of receiving information printed on 4x6 cards, typing it up, and adding it to a database.

It it a problem that would be easy to solve with a bit of software, and I'd like to write and sell it. I know several people that work for the government in question (and around people that do the task in question), but I don't know how to proceed.

I am a 19-year-old college student. How can I get a contract to create and sell this software? Who is the person to talk to, in general, about this sort of thing?
Jesus... Looks like I'm sticking to laptops + PDFs. From product reviews:

"... if your Kindle 1 breaks or you purchase a Kindle 2 all your Newspaper and Magazine issues will be UNREADABLE on the replacement or new device ..."

Here is one more, seems like committing to electronic formats you're asking for trouble even when upgrading to another version of the same product:

"... I have a tremendous volume of Kindle content (public domain and Amazon). I discovered that I could not directly transfer from my computer backup for Kindle 1 to the new K2 ..."

Another one:

"... Although Amazon says it keeps you content on their server, I found many instances where I could not download my books to my computer because the item THAT I PAID FOR was not available for download to my new Kindle2..."
That sent shivers down my spine. I attended a lecture of his in 2003 in London. On the train there he sat onfront of me, at the time I had no idea who he was, I had never seen or heard of him, but for some reason, I just knew he was going to be talking at the series of lectures I was heading to. Don't ask me how. It was really weird. Anyway, his lecture was fascinating. Truely. For several years after I read his site and learnt incredible things. I hadn't been to the site for a few years and for some reason he popped into my head last weekend and so I went pocking about the site again. Just checked my browser history, it was the 2nd May, the day before he died. The first two lines of a Bob Marley song come to mind "Theres a natural mystic blowing through the air; If you listen carefully now you will hear". I have no doubt there was something special about the Fravia chap. RIP.
Surviving Emacs
I generally agree with you (though "stupid" is a bit harsh)but I have to say this is interesting coming from Michael Arrington. When you watch Movies or TV you find most people suffering from OCD are depicted as...well...insane. But the truth is the same OCD that can ruin their lives is also what makes them a success. Look at Howard Hughes for instance.

Like it or Hate it TechCrunch is the most popular tech blog in existence and there's no doubt a lot of that is due to Arrington's obsessive nature.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying people shouldn't get treatment for OCD. I just think it's important for everyone to realize that, as people, our virtues and our vices are often intertwined. And more importantly every virtue can become a vice if taken to the point of obsession.
Actually, I'd argue that quote is a pretty good description of Henry Rollins's behavior and work ethic. Of course, if you also consider that he started his publishing company while living and working in a tool shed, it might be hard to call him overly professional. And yeah, I get that the Rollins reference is a joke. But I'm a fan of Old Man Hank; I couldn't help but chime in here.

To be honest this rant didn't really inspire me much one way or the other, but the suck.com linkage is definitely worth the read.
P=NP

Come on, at least be an optimist.
Why can't you say "nice article"? Why use the perjorative term "rant"?

If you disagree with something in it, just say so.
nickb = paul graham
Rampant Piracy Will Be The Kindle DX’s Savior
Start donating a ton of money to local politicians.
My cash flow projections.
i bet its not that Google can't...its just that Google doesn't want to do it. I'll be surprised if Wolfram Alpha's niche is more than 1/10 of a percent of Search users
Next time before greeting MA pick your nose ;-)
Reddit is a community, just like FriendFeed. That means making FriendFeed like Reddit doesn't replace Reddit. The people would need to move for that to happen.

FriendFeed, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook are all services I use to get interesting things from people I know. The main difference is the social graph: I know different people in each one.
That there's hope for humanity.
If this proposal passes (which I doubt) I'm going to write a letter to the commissioner, demanding that everyone gets to try washing machines for 60 days and keep a copy of the machine after returning it.
You've missed an important but subtle point. The article points out that the reason this was overlooked is not because Rails isn't profiled but because this behaviour is happening outside the standard rails profiling scope. That is a) why it's not a "relatively-straightforward bug fix", b) why it hadn't been caught already and c) why it is interesting. Actually I take that back, it is a relatively-straightforward bug fix. As with all the best bugs it's finding it that wasn't straightforward.

Properly profiling the full execution path should be an entirely obvious step to take.
Note that I submitted Page 2 of the article. Page 1 was too cluttered, but has interesting comments too.
Massive collaborative fiction will produce the next great novel.
MS praises startup company Reactiongrid for saving $750k using Hyper-V
Run it on MS Word X, then.
Or OOO v3.

And draw any meaningful conclusions from that data.

Better yet, how do I write reliable software that runs on a buggy processor? What do I use to test that the chip I'm making does what it is supposed to every time for all scenarios? It's programmable, after all.

That, I'm sure, you can identify with.
Of course I do, but only because I've experienced life without them and understand that they are not ubiquitous. If there were an infinite supply of clean water and computers I wouldn't really need to cherish them, would I?

Without death, life ceases to have meaning; it ceases to be cherished. You cannot have one without the other as they imply each other.
Thinking you're right about one thing is more than enough.
What Larry Lessig Didn't Get
Computational AI will never get anywhere close to true Intelligence, but Neural Networks might get close.

Even better would be a hardware _and_ software approach, not a brute forcing approach.
You are going to carry around an acorn like device for your iphone so you can swipe your buddy's credit card after you lend him money? And if he has his credit card why wouldn't he just pay for his tickets using the card?

I don't think this product is targeted at peer to peer money transfers for individuals. It's for businesses who want to charge customers. The pizza delivery guy or the taxi driver who, today, copies down your credit card number or "calls it in" for example.
Top JavaScript and Web Performance Presentations on Google Tech Talks
How to make gmail your ultimate productivity tool
Great! Then you should find them and write about them.
"The money is fair enough"

That I feel roughly translates to the "money wasn't what we expected". A lot of acquisitions really boils down to the money factor, no startup will ever reject a good offer, since that's pretty much one of most common exit strategy.

If the money was really "fair enough", then this question wouldn't have been posted in the first place. So in their case, it's a matter of weighing the offer vs what they think their startup is worth at this point. So again negotiation 101, never accept the first accept, reply with a counter offer with a price that you feel is "fair enough". If they did not take your counter offer, no harm done, you just keep bootstrapping.
I was 17 1/2. It was 1979, it was a TRS-80 with a whole 16KB of memory and a Z80 running at 1.77 MHz.

After two months I got fed up with how slow it was and wrote a compiler. It was written in BASIC and compiled itself. In the 16KB I fitted the BASIC source, two copies of the compiled version, and the tape saving program.

I think the compiler was 3810 bytes ...
In my opinion, the Kindle is not as useful as an eBook reader (due to DRM, etc), as it is a text-based web browser with free Internet access:

http://tinyapps.org/weblog/misc/200904300700_kindle_free_web...
You can listen to podcasts of Chomsky. His live talks help put this quote into context. He speaks often at Universities. Some of the questions he fields are kind of sad, and Chomsky is quite civil to the kids that basically want him to refute his own positions. If, on the other hand, you listen to his debate with Richard Perl, for example, you hear his opponent, clearly a public intellectual and a capable debater, take positions like: "we were right to blockade, bomb and terrorize. It is and was in the national interest." Does this help with perspective?
I think an example like this can be to the point without being or becoming a tautology, though it is close. The kids sometimes don't seem to have benefitted from their embarrassment of riches in the field of education....
They seemed to sell quite a bit of shrink-wrapped software for designing knitting patterns and such on CD-ROMs a few years ago. Presumably that's moved to the web now?
Something to think about: when transmitting germs via handshakes, the bugs might in fact be features. [har, har]

Assume that you only shake hands with people with no visible symptoms, and that the very sickest people do manage to segregate themselves (and their sneezes/coughs) moreso than the mildly sick. Then, the strains you're picking up are the weakest ones. Getting mild versions of infections helps calibrate and train the immune system... often protecting against worse cousins of the same bugs. People passing along mild bugs are doing you -- and your 'herd' -- a favor.

(This is a version of the 'hygeine hypothesis' scaled up to adults, social conventions, and societies/herd-immunities.)
Do you know what percentage of startups bought by big corporations turn out failures? Probably a much higher number than those that end up successfully making tens of millions of dollars.

These guys need advice from a seasoned software entrepreneur (or two) what their particular chances might be,, not from the "peanut gallery" on SlashDot.

There's probably a 75% chance they should in the words of one commenter "take the money and run".
I completely agree with you. Lets think of a few things which are also medieval or even older! Well there is farming, should probably stop that, oh and preserving food, should probably stop that too.

What the author seems to have completely missed is the social bonding and the shear volume of information one can share in that second or two of holding hands.
But we don't want to be fucked, so goto(parent.parent)
The article is a puerile rant; it borders on incoherent, lacks any rational supporting argument, and does little to convince the reader besides advancing emotional declarations.

"The only question is, how big a dick move was it?"

"It's only a good thing for people who fuck up a lot."
That unwavering respect for individual liberty and personal sovereignty is superior to all other systems by which man can relate to man.

That no end can be moral if the means to that end require using violence and force against a peaceful individual who has not aggressed against his neighbor.

That a free society is a strong and secure society.

That only freedom can breed sustained innovation and growth.
But I still think that the number of feeds for a free user is ridiculously low.

I think that you should double it even if it means reducing the refresh rate for all feeds (or maybe having a "normal" refresh rate for the ten first feeds and a "lower" refresh rate for the other ones)

Edit: And you don't have to tell the users about it.
String interpolation in shell, Python etc; and format specification in C-style printf.
Kindle DX can handle them natively; On K2, they have to be converted first, a service which Amazon provides.
Aside from the fact that you're isolating a quote out of context, I think you're wrong. I won't speak for Mr. Chomsky, but personally, I don't get angry with people because I'm pretty sure I'm right about everything (I know I'm not), but because I'm pretty sure that they're wrong. It's a very different reason, and I think it is wholly legitimate to be upset by people who are insistent about their ignorance and stupidity.
Good question. Note by "entrepreneurial endeavors" I meant start-ups, and not mom/pop "home businesses." Companies which plan to scale to a reasonable size (20-1000+ employees), essentially.

I've come to that perception from economic classes I took in college, and from general observation of start-ups. This is a good article which elaborates on entrepreneurial differences between the U.S. and Europe, citing economic, government, and social differences, among other things:

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?sto...

Noteworthy quote: "And far fewer start-ups in those countries become big businesses. Janez Potocnik, the EU commissioner for science and research, points out that only 5% of European companies created from scratch since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest EU companies by market capitalisation. The equivalent figure for America is 22%."

It's not that doing a start-up in Europe means you're doomed. There's just less of them which make it big.

Also, "Europe" encompasses a bunch of different nations with different attitudes and laws. The U.K. is much different than Finland, or Denmark, etc... So bunching them all together as I did isn't entirely fair.

If you look at one of the charts in the article, Denmark/Sweden/Finland all in-line with the U.S. when it comes to venture capital. If you look at Europe as a whole at the bottom of the chart, averaging all nations together, you see a much different picture.
Bit.ly Goes Mainstream: Included as URL Reference in ESPN The Magazine
Chomsky is known to advocate anarcho-syndicalism, which seem to be democratic (Which I believe to percisely opposite to the anarchistic etho)

Um, you know nothing about anarchism. The first person to call himself an anarchist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose most famous line is "property is theft". The first international was made up primarily of communists, led by Marx, and anarchists, led by Bakunin. Bakunin and the anarchists split from the international because they thought Marx's ideas would lead to totalitarianism. Bakunin's famous line is (paraphrasing):

"freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality"

Democratic may be the opposite of what you think of as anarchism, but what you think of as anarchism has no basis in history. You should probably choose a different word.

The anarchists who fought against Franco in the Spanish civil war, and who for a brief moment actually implemented anarchism in the real world, were explicitly anarcho-syndicalists.
"Growing a Business" by Paul Hawken - hands down one of the best books on starting a business I have read.
Don't let yourself be scared away by the release date 1988, the advice in there is timeless.
Lots of the author's advice can still be found in other books on that topic.
http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Business-Paul-Hawken/dp/067167...

You might also think the title sounds "treehuggerish", I found the book not to be like that at all but very inspiring and useful.
The question is - do the readers know what Bit.ly is? Or what to do with it?
Oh well; I liked it, especially the part about "professionalism". There is a place in the dialogue for puerile rants. Some topics deserve nothing else.
I believe complex combination of algorithms can be as intelligent as people other than neural networks.
An alternative business model for the textbook industry (even with rampant piracy):

"... publishers could move to a more sustainable model in which the textbook is priced close to the cost of printing and shipping (say, $20), while all students are charged a reasonable fee (say, $60) for what really matters, which is the content of the textbook, the labs and homework exercises. Other industries already use this model -- think hardware and software, or razors and razor blades."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...
Investment (French) versus Consumerism (Bush Regime)
Asking WHY is a taboo in most of the school education.
The World’s Foremost Consultant on the Future of Publishing
The Science of Difference (Sex Ed.)
Have a feeling P=NP will implode the allure surrounding algorithms, optimization, and computer science in general. :)
> the Coulter niche for a certain audience

Michael Moore is the closest I could come up with. What makes Coulter unique is that she actively tries to offend liberals. I can't really think of anyone famous for trying to offend conservatives (although lots of people have become "almost famous" that way.)
I was 4, dos pc. Space invaders for life.
Ask HN: Best sales books
What's a great crash course into sales? Not Business Development, which I consider to be sales without a quota, but how to sell effectively?
I can't tell whether that would include a "consumer" of free-as-in-beer software.

After reading the link you posted above, it seems that a money-back guarantee would comply with the regulation. That should be easy enough for someone writing free-as-in-beer software to offer :).
The canvas element is great but not for the reasons described in this article. In all of those examples a web developer would be better off saving a static image. This is guaranteed to work in every web browser while the canvas element is not (yet). Also, why create these graphics programmatically on the client-side with each page load? If we are talking about the user customizing the graphics on the client side (graphics with different color schemes for example) then that makes some sense. Otherwise I think this article misses the mark. The canvas element is most useful when you need to generate image content dynamically in RESPONSE to USER INPUT.
And the "customers also bought" section isn't exactly relevant...
We had an Atari 800 as early as I can remember. Eventually we got the fancy-pants external cassette tape drive.

LOGO rocks :)
People already copy games (similar price range) which are 5gb+ nowaways. Downloading a couple mbs of pdf is a no brainer.

Going from 80 to 50 is not a new business model, unless I misunderstood what you said.
Motorola Adventure V750 Verizon
Motorola Adventure V750 are two displays on this cell phone for twice as much efficiency in terms of keeping you updated on the latest texts and calls that your receive. Slim and sleek of the day with this CDMA phone internal 2.2 inch QVGA color display.
It's amusing to see that his prose style is between Atwood and Zed Shaw.

It'd be interesting to study the cross-pollination between bloggers and to chart that.
Sadly, the Aussie govt even issued a "link removal" notice to EFA, who complied by removing their link to a link to an offending site. They may not have deep enough pockets to battle the govt in court.
Plus one for the cat, if they make such a thing...
I wonder if the nature of his work means that he's always shaking hands. I really can't remember the last time I had to shake a stranger's hand. If I had to do it all the time, I'd probably also develop an OCD annoyance about it.
No problem. Richard has sent the request for help on to some people who knew Fravia better than he did.