skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the awesome and detailed reply. I will certainly put all your suggestions in practice.

I am more a security type of person (and unix guy) and that's why I tried to keep the page simple, but I guess I left it too simple :)

Btw, did you get a chance to register and look at the application internally? I would love some feedback from there too.

thanks
Never experienced it myself (with my site/business) but i have observed it a little.

My (humble) suggestion: Your product/service/business is likely to thrive (you've already said your T&C has 'evolved' since their copy) and given the ever-changing properties of this tech sphere - change rapidly! Design/aesthetics/marketing material and the like are great, but it's your customer service that's going to keep business - so focus on that. If you update your site design and it’s copied again, dont worry. Like you said: it must be good right? The value you offer to your customers is you - your service, your passion and your values. That can’t really be copied - well, not effectively. Focus on the things that matter. Sure it might hurt to be stolen from, but rise above. Your customers will notice.
Apropos P2P: Ever heard of Wuala?
Jobs Classifieds India, Employment Classifieds
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Samsung I 70 Digital Camera
Samsung announced the launch of the 7.2 Megapixel i70, featuring 3x zoom and a large 3.0-inch LCD. The premium Samsung i70 digital compact camera features an innovative sliding cover which, when opened, reveals the intuitive 9-button User Interface.
Clojure: Challenge your Java assumptions
At work: custom web server hiding behind a lighttpd reverse proxy. I'm not entirely happy with either part of this, although it's more the fault of the back end and all its legacy c++ issues. I'd consider switching to nginx on the front end if I could be sure it wasn't going to interfere with our e-mail setup.

Personal server: thttpd. It could log cgi scripts better. Otherwise I'm happy with it.

Laptops: thttpd, sending all requests for localhost to a cgi script. If I could persuade it to log cgi errors, it would be perfect.
VFX engineer on why Star Trek ain't IMAX
This comment is particularly enlightening:

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/05/08/vfx-engineer-on-why...
Quantum physics and data replication on data centers
It's already here:

http://luckycal.com

I will write to Scott today.
Prime Numbers and the Benford’s Law
Revolution OS Movie Review
My review of the computer documentary Revolution OS!
Ask HN: The Hacker News effect
There was a question asked a while ago if Slashdot was as popular as it was a few years ago and it made me think: does Hacker News have its own "effect"? I.e. if you link to something is it the same as the digg/slashdot effect?
Original news article: "New Pattern Found in Prime Numbers" - http://www.physorg.com/news160994102.html

Paper: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0811/0811.3302v1.pdf
SO == StackOverflow
You are probably right. They probably just want it shut down because they don't want to invest the time and energy to determine whether or not the app is more beneficial than not.

However, I have found that it is quite easy to convince a university administration to listen to your concerns when you engage them positively. I would ask to schedule a meeting with the Chancellor (or someone who would have the power to overturn the decision) and give a positive, optimistic presentation on how the service could reduce the load on the registration system and how you would be willing to work with them to ensure that it will have minimal impact on the service. You might be surprised how seriously they will take your proposal.
Interview with AMD Java Labs
Of course, what is a "regular job"? I started my own company the first time because I was tired of working for idiots. Of course, not everyone I worked for was an idiot, but enough of them poisoned my daily life that I thought I would do better without them. I did.

Now I start companies to "do stuff that matters" and all the ideas I have had just don't seem to fit into a regular company. I find it easier to create something new and attract investors than to find the right company to support me doing what needs to get done.
The SPOT gps has satellite coverage over the majority of the world and can email your friends and family google maps links periodically. There's another bolt on service somewhere that twitters it too, I think based on having the service as one of the email recipients.

http://www.findmespot.eu/en/explorespot/index.php?cid=112
I think, that textbooks are "junk" knowlege products. It's good when you start to study something, but not when you have a big knowlege backpack.

Think again.
You are living the dream!
There's a PDF link at the very top of the page. Is it more readable for you that way?
+1 for life jacket. We lose too many good people at sea who would have been safe if they were wearing one. They are very comfortable and convenient to wear now, so there's no reason to not wear it.

But then, part of my mission as a volunteer is to rant about this...
http://www.usps.org/localusps/marblehead/
In my opinion, the best thing about HN is the community.

The insights in to the thought process of some of the smartest people around, and sharing of experience and knowledge, helps in overall intellectual growth. Hopefully, this would help in having a net positive impact in some ways in the respective spheres of influence of the people here.

As far as, jump in 'popularity' index goes for any idea/site that gets covered here, i would daresay HN hasn't yet reached digg/slashdot proportion. And it might never happen as well, given that the focus is to keep it targeted at a specific niche.

p.s. Standing and admiring oneself in the mirror for a long time is generally not advisable. :-)
Wow, what? Automatic pass-phrase inputting? Isn't that just ssh-copy-id? Why not use something that's already there?
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'Out at sea' past a 50 mile line, communication is very slow and very expensive. Some exceptions, there is free email with a ham license, non-commercial and certainly no images, A single sideband HF transceiver and modem is 1-2k$, think 9600 baud in optimum conditions. Within a mile of the shore of any industrialized nation, standard wifi is supposed to be pretty available. The boat in the picture is not getting too far offshore with one neophyte and one cat.
I have often wondered if there are decent web sites for knitting patterns and stuff like that, or if it is all mostly print magazines.
>The real shocker, IMO, is that most people don't want to know what's really going on. They actively resist getting roused from their peaceful slumber.

I would say the opposite is true. Chomsky touches on this subject here (and on other articles on this website) and can explain it a lot better than I can.

http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm
Fine. That which is important shouldn't be fragile enough to need cherishing.
It appears that is exactly what the author (Pinch Media, http://www.pinchmedia.com/) offers. At the end of the slides it mentions that they offer these analytics when you sign up for their service.
Skip at least the first five minutes. There's zero content. I gave up watching then so YMMV on the sixth minute onwards.
Critical Mass, The Road, and a new wave of graphic nuke porn.
You can do list comprehensions in JS now??
You don't cherish things like clean water and computers?
What are the rules about anchoring off the coast? Can you just drop anchor wherever you want, as long as it's not in a shipping lane or something?
I'm dreaming of living on a boat, but apparently harbours charge quite a lot if you're just visiting for a few days. It sounds romantic to just sail to a quiet spot and stay at sea or in a natural harbour until supplies run out.
Strangely enough I haven't found a good information source for this kind of idea, possibly because I'm a noob and it's a crazy one :)
How sad. I learned so much about searching the web from him. I always found his web site painful to use but the time spent there was very rewarding.
The hardest bugs are those where your mental model of the situation is just wrong, so you can't see the problem at all : B. Kernighan
(Just a rant here:-) but won't the next industry changing payment service be true micro-payments?
A lot of people who do this type of thing blog about it. There might be a better one now, but I used to use this repo of links to peruse:
http://cruisenews.net/
One of my favorite links from there was
http://www.katiekat.net/
by an engineer who detailed how he hacked his cat for cruising. I also like the way he renders his experiences.
NBA picks and sport betting picks
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Here's my question, why aren't we designing interfaces like this? It's 2009 now, and I don't see things changing in the next few years.

I've spent the best part of the day mulling over this question (it's evening here now), and the best I can come up with, it that it's hard.

With desktop apps, which is where most of my experience lies, there's simply no easy way to do much of what he's suggesting. Putting a few radio buttons and drop-down lists on a form is simple, but to create something like the flight schedule http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/p/flight_redesign.png is not.

Why is this? Is it because it really is too hard to do this on an individual basis? Are our expectations too low? Is it lack of exposure to ideas like this? In short, why are we still displaying choices pretty much the same way we have been for the last 30 years?
This is a few months(?) old now. See this presentation from AdWhirl with different conclusions about ad revenue on the iPhone: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15007502/Adwhirl-iPhone-Advertisin...
I hope it doesn't. I never liked Slashdot's "personality" with the constant bickering, fanboys, and general surliness of most of the comments. HN is filled with intelligent, thoughtful people and the noise it kept to a minimum. This would be hard to maintain in a community the size of Slashdot. The future is uncertain, but I think pg's philosophy of this site will help to keep it civil as long as humanly possible.
A full-on hn'ing is about 5k visitors. Not enough to trouble any decent server.

However, most of that traffic is high quality, and provides insightful comments.

If I have to choose between a Slashdotting (100k+ visitors of extremely variable quality) and an HN'ing, I'll generally choose the latter - although being slashdotted is pretty good for your pagerank too.
As a rule of thumb, every 10 votes a submission has is worth about 1,000 pageviews on the linked-to site. There are a bunch of mediating variables though.
Make it beautiful even if you are just hacking together a quick spike.
SO is for programming questions. They try to keep "administration" questions (which this, oddly, sort of is) to a minimum.
Since 1.8: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_comprehension#Javascript_1...

It will probably be a long time before 1.8 is supported by all browsers.
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What Killed Smalltalk: My Balls
There isn't much you can do to stop others from copying your work. The only thing that you can do however is to execute better than them... Stay focused and execute better.
Thanks, grabbed a copy of the first book on Amazon and bookmarked the second.
Most software is awful, not just enterprise software.

The reason most software is awful is the same reason most text books are awful. They are hard to write and worth a lot of money. This is a big incentive for people who don't know what they are doing to act like they know what they are doing so they can have a piece of that big pie.

So, instead of learning how to code, or learning the material behind the text book, those who know nothing, instead focus on politics to move their product.

If you want to read more about how awful the text book industry is, check out Mel and Norma Gabler from Texas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_and_Norma_Gabler

Those two insert their personal agendas, political, religious, socio-economic, etc... into nearly every text book bought for students in Texas.
How to Pick the People You Work With
Dyson's quote said, "Smeed interpreted his law as a law of human nature."

If this is true, then this formula should appear outside the world of driving. Has it been applied anywhere else? I did a quick search and found nothing.

I wonder if it applies to flying, rail travel, employment related fatalities, medical related fatalities, etc...
You're answering your own question : it's hard to get out of the default elements available to us (checkbox, textbox, etc). They're so fast and easy to use that we don't think about better solutions.

But there's something else not mentionned in the article. It's the lack of "innovative users". When people are confronted to a new interface without checkboxes and textboxes, they are afraid and they don't know what to do. We are to blame for that situation because we overuse these elements in all of our applications.
Nice rant. Haven't seen the presentation so I can't comment on that. But it sure is a nice rant.
It's funny because the media industry blames the internet, and therefore, coders and hackers, for their downfall with not very nice language all the time...

and now they are begging us to save them from their death...

Life is funny.
Ask HN: Good books on the nuts and bolts of starting up
I'm looking for good books on the nuts and bolts of starting up. Ideally I prefer things written by someone who has done it a few times. I'm looking for really practical advice rather than something like Founders at Work (good, but not what I'm after).

Topics like hiring sales people, how fast to grow headcount, how to structure options, etc. Book suggestions devoted to individual topics are also welcome.
Danica McKeller (Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years (great show)) wrote a math book for girls. She's a hot movie star that's doing something.

Read more:
http://www.tvsquad.com/2006/07/14/winnie-cooper-hottest-math...
You can try to identify it with "What the Font":

http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
Google, Apple, Microsoft knuckle under to telcos
The public decides if it is a Google Killer, not the software maker. People will use your software in ways you never imagined. The makers of one of the slide show websites said she was really shocked when Preachers became their most popular demographic of users -- they were uploading their sermons, who would have guessed that?

That being said, most people who go to Google aren't looking for the kinds of answers Wolfram Alpha provides, so I doubt it will kill google, though if it gets out of Wolfram's control it could begin putting out the kinds of results googlers want.

You never know.
"Worse Is Better" again? =)
A cat = a sailing boat. At first I thought he hacked his cat (pet). After all, I wouldn't see it as a given that a cat would feel at home on a relatively small sailing boat? But there is the concept of a "ship's cat", so maybe not impossible to have pets.
Thanks a lot for all your great feedback guys! You are all right too! I crunched the realist numbers and assuming I can get 1/10th of a percent of my visitors to buy one of my software products at an average price of $10 than I will make lots more than using an ad program with a 4%CTR and a heck of a lot more than an ad program doing cpm!
What are the Best Antivirus Programs? | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
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You could probably find a lot of people who would work cheap if you didn't limit your labor pool to Canadians. Working off-planet would arguably be no worse than doing construction in Dubai in 125 degree heat, and poor people from India do that for a lot less.
Conversations on IM- Rant
This is about a huge pet peeve of mine- and I know alot of other people. About people not treating conversations over IM as a real conversation.
He is a huge presence on comp.lang.lisp . Not sure about his prowess as a programmer however.
Locks keep out the honest people.
I think the reason we're still putting combo boxes and radio buttons on things we call "forms" is a chicken and egg problem. We have the form building tools, so we use the form building tools. Because we're using them, people make them. And the trend continues.

I have a project coming up at my university where I will be designing a simple online game creation utility. I've been thinking long and hard about what kinds of interfaces this would require. All I know so far is I will not make it 'wizard' or 'form' based.
Noam Chomsky: Education is Ignorance (1995)
Properly not - servers are so much faster now than they where back when /. ruled. It is unlikely that we will ever see the slashdot effect again unless somebody submit a geocites page.
Answer: Credit cards enable the user to live beyond his or her means and cash does not.
Don´t Sell. Money is not the best reason to sell. You guys have to achieve your best, it´s far important than money. So if you feel that you wont reach your best selling, stay far from they.
It's a lot harder than it looks, actually.

Visual design is more art than science still, and even when it can be made fairly rigorous finding people who not only can make a good design but also articulate its logic in a formalizable way is well-nigh impossible; they're out there, but it's a really rare skillset.

What you'd encounter if you started going down the route of implementing something like that in magic ink is that it's easy to make mockups in photoshop, where you have control over design and content-to-display; once you get into the real world you have a world of edge cases to deal with.

On an individual level these are often easy to solve, once you're aware of their existence, but the richer the visual display the more overwhelming the edge cases come in.

Here's a trivial example from that widget: along the left edge you have columns of "fare types" (internet special, refundable, etc.) that have the respective price quotes at the same horizontal level as the itinerary; after the lower left corner they wrap down-and-to-the-right and have definitions of the fare types.

For a single purpose -- airfare -- with a static set of flight types this display system could be made to work, but here's some things to consider:

- you notice how the # of flight types is exactly the right amount to match the height of the price quote section in the lower right corner? how pretty would this layout look if it was a few types too short or too long? There's stuff you could do -- adjust relative font sizes, etc. -- but doing that in an automatic fashion is tricky and invites more edge cases to emerge, and what's worse it might screw with the visual hierarchy (b/c human visual perception of relative font sizes isn't all that precise)

- you notice how the definitions of flight types are all short enough to fit in the available space? what visual idiom ought to be used if there's too much text (there's lots you could opt to do, but you have to pick something and make it work)?

- what is the visual idiom when the # of flights available on that day is just ridiculous (like the east coast "shuttles" which fly on the hour, every hour)? unless you have a giant screen you're going to have to scroll in some fashion, but what kind of scrolling (only the flight panels, the entire screen, etc.?)

These "problems" aren't so much hard algorithmic problems as just decisions that have to be made, and then stuff that has to be made to work.

For limited use -- where most of the requirements and, more importantly, most of the extreme ranges -- are known in advance, it's possible to craft something like this, but to make a general, reusable component for something like this is far harder than it seems at first.

Automating aesthetics will happen at some point, but it's tricky.
CHOMSKY: First of all, I'm usually fuming inside, so what you see on the outside isn't necessarily what's inside. But as far as questions, the only thing I ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating.

Oh, the irony
The author of the question says, "The money is fair enough..."

His question is one of control, not money. The OP wants to control his life and his product.

Truth is, products don't last forever. They require maintenance and support, marketing, infrastructure, pricing, and a whole lot of other things a few guys focused on development aren't thinking about right now.

A lot of cash in the pocket = a lot of time to think.

I'm not saying they should sell, I'm just saying that I don't understand why you are bringing money into it when money wasn't a factor for the author.
I only use my credit card as a payment method. Most online shops don't accept anything but credit card, and sometimes I just don't have enough cash with me and don't want to bother walking to the closest ATM.

Credit cards allow you to loan money but I think that's ridiculous. I don't want to have a debt every time I buy something, I just want to pay immediately, with the money I already have, not with money that I don't have.
I think the author of the question is young and excited and someone with influence has recognized their achievement. The team has probably never been in that situation before, so they've never seen how high one can get on such approval that evaporates tomorrow.
There was another post a while back about living a free life where I also mentioned living on a boat, and I got asked loads of questiong, both the objective part about the life and the hands-on part about how to buy a suitable boat, internet, anchoring, electricity, etc. etc.

I, half-jokingly, wrote that maybe I should write an e-book about it, and got pretty good feedback. So I'm actually gathering material and have written up a table of contents. I don't know whether I'll finish it yet, but I might :-)
Could you describe the interview, I am interviewing with them in a few weeks, Thanks.
Probably started when old cargo ships were swarmed with rats eating the supplies and spreading diseases.

I have read about several people sailing around the world though that have kept cats aboard in more recent times. Robin Lee Graham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Lee_Graham) had several during his voyages, his book Dove is excellent by the way for anyone interested in sailing and exploration.
Just a heads up: Most of this interview is not about education, it's about the history of the corporation, and the history of anti/pro capitalist philosophy.

As for the juicy quote in the title of the post, it's not that elaborated on. (Not because Chomsky is hand-waving, it seems it got muttered as an aside in an interview that was about other stuff.)

This was an interesting interview, but not very satiating for those of us hungry for some meaty critique of education.

(Not that I pour over those posts on HN every day ;D )
Huh, the entire last Q-A pair are on Education...

There's a good amount down there.
I'm as disappointed by gdb's C++ support as anyone, but is it really fair to complain about its lack of support for STL containers? C doesn't have _any_ containers, so there's nothing there for gdb to lack. Either way you have to printf debug, though I can see how the increased compile times make that more tedious.