skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This list of the world's oldest companies may also be of interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Remarkable to see companies that have lasted more than 1,000 years! And sad to see that Kongo Gumi - a Japanese construction compnay - shut down in 2006, after being founded in 578 CE.
No, I don't.

But these people don't live in a western society. They don't share our cultural beliefs of what is good or civilized. They live by a whole different set of rules and conventions. We can't just go there, impose our vastly superior beliefs upon them with the argument that it's for their best because WE believe that.

Have you ever travelled to another continent? If you're American or from Western Europe, try going to Japan. Or somewhere in Africa, off the beaten path. You're likely to experience a culture shock, right? You can do two things. You can think 'I can't believe these fucktards, why the hell would they want to live like this, now where's the nearest Motel 6' or you can accept the fact that their culture is just different. I'm not speaking in terms of better or worse, just different.

They don't need our help and they don't want our help. We have showed time after time that 'helping savages' does not work. Native Americans? Unless you think the inabriated guy with the poncho selling roadside flatbread is actually happier than his ancestors, it's hard to argue we did a good job helping them. Numerous tribes in South America now have to deal with alcoholism, crime, murder. The ones that don't are just smart enough to evade us.

Ask yourself this: should we contact these people if we were certain that our contacting them would lead to their loss of culture, and most likely would wipe them away? Do you think that, despite ALL the times where we screwed up entire tribes, this time it will be different? Why is it our responsibility anyway to 'help' them, even against their will?
I've been using fastmail for two or three years, not sure. They're a very good service for a surprisingly small amount of money.

I see anywhere from zero to two spams in my inbox per day. I just move them over to my learn spam folder.

I just checked, and I have 270 spam messages in my junk folder since July 1.

I use their https web interface at work, not bad, nothing special. I use thunderbird over imap at home.

So in exchange for about $10 or $20 per year (depends on your service level), and the occasional need to tell fastmail "this message is spam, remember that for similar messages," I get an excellent imap service that is not gmail and not google. I'm a customer, not a product, and I'm very happy.

EDIT: corrected how many junk I have. It's 270 since July 1. It's about 1000 since June 22. They delete junk after awhile. I just combed through the 1000 and moved 9 into the "this is not junk, remember that" folder.
It has been some time since we have had an incident this disruptive for our customers. Looking forward to delivering that investigation summary to you as soon as we feel we got it right.
For one, we don't know enough about their quality of life to say anything about it. I would assume they have a better quality of life than the majority of the planet, in particular it is likely to be better than the majority of urban dwellers and subsistence farmers in the 3rd world.

If you wanted to give them the quality of life enjoyed in the nicer parts of the US or Europe you would have to provide all those amenities for them, and it is in any case unlikely that they would appreciate them the same way that you do.

The only likely benefit that "we" could provide would be medical care for infections or easily treated disorders. That would have to be balanced with the high likelihood that contacting and attempting to integrate them would actually kill most of them. Anything else is a egocentric view of what is good for mankind.
Startup Dirty Laundry: Conflicts That Kill Partnerships [infographic]
I don't understand why this was posted to hacker news, even after a translation was provided. Can someone explain?
FBI: Stalker terrorized Harry Potter fan author for years
Because of the conditions, or because of how far removed their lifestyle is from western societal norms?

What if the tribe decided our children were being severely mistreated with glowing distraction screens, processed corn sugar, helicopter parenting, etc.? Surely you'd let them take our kids away.
Always appreciate your support Josh. much work to do before this incident is resolved fully.
Selling Backwards…Turning An App Dud Into A Stud
Gambling and addictive drugs are regulated because, ultimately, they rely on a clear failure mode in cognition. Collapse the action-reward feedback loop and you run the risk of losing a productive member of society. It passes from internally negative to a proper externality. Governments are interested in the latter.

No, there isn't a clear categorisation rule to say what's exploitative and what's just people who need to take responsibility for their own actions. That's because the world is fuzzy and isn't made of syllogisms.
Buy 10 BTC at btc-e.com for 831.66 USD

Sell on MtGox for 591.18 GBP = 901.73 USD (my account is set to GBP)

That's 70.07 USD profit from 10 BTC, or ~$7 USD per bitcoin traded.

Seems like a good opportunity. The problem is you can't cycle your money quickly, it takes time to sell bitcoin for cash and withdraw it ready for the next cycle.

But I mean there's the potential to make ~8% on each cycle. Buying, transfering and selling should also be a fairly quick process so you're not exposing yourself too much.

I think as soon as instant cash deposit/withdrawls are available through various exchanges these gaps will close up pretty fast.
Italians (well, many of them) can use this localised version, "SAAS: Soccmel As A Service": http://soccmel.taldeg.me/
This sums up the problem pretty well, I feel.

http://cdn.front.moveon.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/media...
San Francisco Rent is Damn High
I block ads, but I have a subscription on LWN. Probably would have done the same on h-online if their comment section would be a bit more integrated. I've been reading this site for various years, the reporting is pretty good.
High resolution screen on the iPad 3 was great. That was one important spec.
Wow, impressive list.

And founding a brewery in the 1400ies was really a good idea.
You can disable all the tabs and return to your normal inbox.
Borges had a great short story about the logical extreme of this: http://www.srs-pr.com/literature/borges-funes.pdf .
I looked at Fastmail recently, but then I saw the Opera logo and hesitated. I want to know what would happen to them if Opera cannot maintain profitability. I'd like to know my mail provider is going to stick around a while.
Two other options are selling the company or an IPO.
GitHub is "experiencing major service outages"
Ask HN: which linux is better for web devs?
I have decided to move from Windows to Linux after facing issues with many tools like Yeoman. previously i worked on Ubuntu. But heard about LinuxMint from a friend so which is better?
Use something like this:

http://hugeurl.com/
I wonder at what point the ads appear to have come from one of your legitimate contacts.

PS isn't faceboob already doing this?
That is true for most cases, but when shareholders and business come into the picture, the honest developers don't get a look in. It's shut up or don't get paid.

If Google lost 25% of its free userbase and converted only 10% of that 25% into Google Apps customers, and left the other 75% with advertising clicks it's a win situation for the business and shareholders.

Google is not immune to capitalism or business mantra unfortunately.

For reference, as an idealist and a bit of a Marxist, I'm not a fan of this but it's the way it is at the moment.
The item you've requested is not currently available in the Colombian store.
Cancellation of Internal Quantum Noise of an Amplifier by Quantum Correlation
It's a good question. As our service is delivered through a utility pricing model, most of our API requests are billing events - each call, text message or recording ends up having a debit to the account balance associated with it. As you can imagine then, our auto-recharge feature could be called any moment to make sure the balance doesn't run out.

That said, we do have the monitoring you describe in place which is how we were alerted to the incident and limited the damage to 1.4% of the account base.
Yeah, Apple doesn't support IMAP-IDLE which is a drag, so push is out. And you're right, there's no calendar. I also hear LDAP is read-only on devices, so you can't add to your Fastmail address book from your iPhone.

I personally don't use any of those things anyway but I can definitely understand why that would be a dealbreaker for a lot of people. It's great for email and the webmail interface got way better recently. Their blog is also pretty neat, they go into a fair bit of technical detail about new features and how they solved certain bugs: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-tab-communication-u...
> Weigh the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get from the revenue resulting from that advertising.

I'm kind of assuming that every company doing advertising is continually making that calculation, and deciding that it does come out in their favour. Otherwise we wouldn't see nearly so much advertising.
How is this an interesting news ?

Because my comment isn't clear. This is not an interesting news. A link to the twitter status or the github status (https://status.github.com/messages) would be relevant in that case. not just some link to a third party telling us it's down. Yeah thank you. I could have notice it on my own....
House panel approves cutting NASA spending by $1.1 billion
Can you clarify exactly what your experience is?
There is a difference between a service monetized by Ads, and a service which tries to trick you into clicking on Ads.
Fastmail has been around since 1999, I think it's going to be okay.
It was one of the most dramatic and relevant facts in recent Italy's history. Probably (since the spread of mafia around the world) this have also affected other countries. I just thought this would have been relevant also for hackers, even if this is isn't strictly technical.

I decided to post this after having seen many interesting stories from the New Yorker or links to wikipedia pages which were strictly technical, but (IMHO) relevant also for hackers.

If I broke any convention on HN (like the non relevant questions of SO), just let me know.
Very glad you found the stashboard useful during the incident. This is actually one of my favorite open source projects of ours.

If you would like a similar service for your company, check it out here: http://www.stashboard.org
Good feedback. Thank you.
@githubstatus: Working with our upstream providers to mitigate a rather large DDoS at the moment.
Because it just brought a lot of people's work to a screeching halt. People who are massively represented here on HN.
And if I was still able to flag submissions, I'd flag it.
Probably because they said they are under a large ddos attack? :-?

I wonder why would someone do something like this? It's not like github is evil or anything... it's just a really cool and useful tool for coders. It helped a lot of people better their skills and knowledge. Why would someone attack it? (I am genuinely interested in this as I can't think of a reason someone would do something like this)
Well, this brought me here.
Appreciate the feedback. Will get it fixed.
https://status.github.com/messages is a better place to keep up with news like that.
It's the main hosting service for most developers' source code and a large part of how many open source projects organize, communicate and work.

I guess that makes it a tiny bit more relevant than yet another post about how some mediocre entrepreneur thinks we should all live our lives.
many people on HN will also find it useful to know that github is down for everyone (rather than just them)
Cloning? I think we know Musk's next venture...
I personally prefer Ubuntu, my brother uses Linux Mint. I haven't found much difference between the two in terms of workflow, but Linux Mint does keep the Linux ethos more closer to it's heart than Ubuntu does, as Ubuntu has taken the direction of trying to create an easy-to-use-for-the-non-technical OS that can serve as a replacement for the likes of Windows/Mac (while not quite exactly there just yet).
Because tragically, most people have all their eggs in one github shaped basket.

Git on it's own doesn't suffer from the issue of scary downtime (occasionally repo corruption...), but people have bought deeply into the value-added ecosystem that github throws over the top of it.

It's a show-stopper for them.
It's not, really. But I assume a good number of us have jobs that depend on it, and out of the big sites out there they are out quite frequent. And then like past threads this one will fill up with people proclaiming they're done with Github and having enough of their shit and looking for alternatives...
I'm not sure if people realize (in general) how difficult online courses are in general, compared to in person classes. Not everyone is an aspiring hacker who is smart and disciplined and posts on HN. Online classes have long been shown to be more difficult than their in person counterparts.
No they dont. The link just says, github is down, nothing else, an interesting news would be a link to the twitter post.
Yahoo Marissa Mayer’s workers get paroled
They are a counter-example: you are not the customer (you aren't paying for it), but you also are not the product.
Damnit, I read "NSA" and I thought "excellent idea". Then I reread the title and noticed that extra "A" and then I thought "take a billion from the NSA".
But I don't think that's going to happen. :(
It crashes Chrome on the iPad.
I don't mean to say that the theories are correct, but that there should be a reason why something is the way it is. Including social. That is something that evolved too. How else could it exist? I also think not everyone must have evolved the same way. Separate for thousands of years, some people MUST be different, right?
You can also play arbitrage between altcoins (BTC to LTC, or LTC to XMP, or any other). On Vircurex, Cryptsy, BTC-e, etc.

Even with liquidity being lower you can see them being rather close on the different exchanges.
Right in the middle of a deploy for us! Thankfully we're getting enterprise so hopefully this is last time a DDoS messes with our productivity.
I'm letting them occupy a piece of my screen real estate and grab a share of my personal attention every day. I consider that a form of payment.

Now they're coming up with this massive price hike, putting us in a position to choose between accepting a higher price and spending a lot of time moving our data elsewhere. Many people don't even know how to move existing email to a different provider.

So this is definitely something we can legitimately complain about.
GH O O O * - + x H SSWA İLE GÖKLER GÜLÜMSÜYOR
Are code contributions welcome? If so, is there a repository I can send a patch to?
The first company with shares appears to be Stora Enso[1], and it's also claimed by some to be the first corporation.

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16611040
Name collision!

I've been telling people to do me a service and fuck off for years!
I tried but it was too much effort.

All the api's are unreliable, it's hard to tell if your order went through, if it did you have no idea how long it will actually take.

Then, once you've run out of money on one of the sites you have to go through the expensive and lengthy process to get more on, and you have to go through the same again to actually withdraw. It ends up just not being worth the time
Consider pornography:
+ Huge industry
+ An illusionary experience which brings joy
+ Prays on man's desires and drives and the inclination of man to give in to them
Wouldn't it be a good idea for Github to set up a video + sound stream from their office when these things occur? I for one would watch. Can't really work anyway (at least that's what I persuade myself to think).
Ok, will look into it. Works fine for me Chrome on iPhone -- don't have an iPad to test with. Thanks for the feedback.
Crowd-Sourcing Bug Detection with Betas, Bounties and Bashes
That might not actually work, seeing as how Detroit already has a population problem and higher taxes will probably force even more of them out, leading to flat or lower overall revenue.
Depends on the server you will use. If its DebianLinux Mint LMDE is nice and if you use Ubuntu then, Ubuntu.
I have some of my code on GitHub and some on Bitbucket (for the free private repos), all of my code on my Dropbox and it's synced to 4 different machines.

However, the library I'm working with is hosted on GitHub, their doxygen is on GitHub, their wiki is on GitHub, and I don't have a local version of either of those, which is now pretty annoying.
Unfortunately I bought into this "thinkpads just work with linux" hype and got a thinkpad - only to discover that the wifi frequently craps out because linux doesn't support well whatever intel wifi thing it comes with, and of late hibernate/suspend is broken too. It really doesn't seem like linux will ever change.
Votes decide that, not you.
And why can't you flag it? Is there a quota or something?
I agree. I have a really bad memory but I can easily "listen" to a song I have heard a few times and I can hear several instruments, not only one. I think that this is just because I'm a musician.
An interesting example of how journalists play telephone, but let's not distract ourselves by questioning the volume of data they intercept from the problematic fact that they do this at all.

What would worry me is a chain of citations where the pertinent facts changed (e.g. "celebrity X has the potential for Y" -> "X did Y"). This happens too, as you sometimes find in issues of Private Eye.
My intuition would be that status.service.com is not a useful place to look if service.com is down...

edit that's not supposed to be as snarkey as it sounds reading it back :-)

edit again The reason for this intuition is that I assume that not being able to reach service.com could indicate a DNS problem. Possibly from the comments below I need to go and read a DNS book :-)
How can we become more like Iain Banks' Culture?
I think the high tech his article is talking about is a few orders of magnitude greater than the imagination and thoughts of the comments mentioned so far. Think of technology that assemble from dust, factory probes that can detect elements and generate children from the bare elements in interstellar space. Or technology that could create and collapse Stars.
Good luck transferring USD to BTC-e, and good luck getting a wire through from Mt.Gox afterwards.
RunKeeper Redesigns One of its Best Features
And this has much better documentation than many APIs I have to use!
Why would someone go to all the trouble of making a botnet, then DDoSing GitHub ffs.
Gambling and addictive drugs are regulated because, ultimately, they rely on a clear failure mode in cognition.

This is the official line; it's not the real reason. The real reason has a lot more to do with racism (in the case of drugs), cronyism, pork-barrel politics and protectionism.
Book banning online could become easier as governments get more control over the Internet. (at least for the masses)
OVH CEO suggests github engages in PRISM like methods
Where are these attacks coming from? Or is it just failure to keep up with increased client traffic?

I've noticed recently how frequently there are service issues with Github, many times service has been disrupted because of DDoS attacks and similar malicious activity.
My intuition is that it is. I didn't know github was really down, but had problem accessing it. Went to status.github.com and got the results, not really knowing if the address existed or not (just guessed).

These sites are often hosted away from the main service, and thus available even when problems occur.
A nice reminder not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Most services run their `status` service on a different server entirely. It's the only possible way it could ever make sense.
Informed decisions are inside our rational
[and egocentric] limitations, so in this case not take those decisions very seriously.
Pretty sure the [L]GPLv2 is okay with this. For instance, say you have a Motorola Milestone. Motorola provides the changes they made to Linux, as they are required to, but you can't actually build a new kernel and put it on the phone; the Milestone's bootloader protection was never broken.
New vulnerability found in Java 7 opens door to 10-year-old attack
Very true. This is a major irritation. I rather like Golang because of stuff like this as you can run your own local documentation server and stuff. It's just a neat self-contained package.
Why this kind of links get always promoted? What's the point?
Genuine question.
* Childhood diseases

* Stillborn children

* Murder

* Rape

Good point. Since in joining modern society they'd be missing out on those things those things that no longer ever occur, a fair trade would be to introduce them to consumerism and all of the lovely, healthy, meaningful things that includes.
Cute. But now you're on the hook to maintain it, and I can already see the abuse you'll have to take from your target demographic whenever this goes down.
Ask HN: Any lone tech founders who want to pool support over a holiday?
I'm a lone technical founder. I have been running a SAAS app for just over a year and have a number of paid customers, most of whom do not require much customer service after a week or two of using the site.

The problem with being a lone founder is that it makes it really hard to go on holiday for only a few days without guaranteed internet access for fear of something catastrophic happening and not being able to do anything about it.

Are there any other people out there like me? We could pool resources and watch over each others servers for that one week when you might not be able to get access to internet?

I'm based in London.
Igloo 1.1.0 released
Actually, I've always checked status.service to see if Github is up, it must be hosted on a separate server.
It's a nice reminder not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Ask HN: Save Github: Improve Github's availability
Github is down again, suffering from a DDOS. Github has a huge talent pool, what would you suggest Github do in order to improve availability of the service?

If these outages continue, more developers will continue to leave the platform. Save Github, help them scale, and deal with availability issues.
If you joined Gmail when it was new and on an invite-only basis, you'd know just how much worse things has gotten.

Back then Gmail was better than everything else. Now it's an abomination which makes me want to jump ship.
>members of a hunter-gatherer tribe that has lived on the island for 65,000 years.

>It's estimated the the 28-square-mile island (slightly larger than Manhattan) is capable of supporting as many as 400 hunter-gatherers, but no one knows how many people live there.

Did anyone else read that and think "That is a lot of inbreeding."?
Do you wanna be a Javascript Expert?
WhatTheBit: Google fired 5,383 Motorola Mobility employees in Q2
Not much social unrest in the past 50 years in all developed countries where inequalities have been growing when everyone gets richer.

And wealth is not a Lake. It does not run dry. You can create wealth. If wealth could not be created we would be super poor by now with 7 billion people on the planet compared to 100 years ago. But it's the exact opposite, we are hundred time richer than 100 years ago.

When everyone earns a little more than before over time, there's not so much cause for social unrest. Countries with growing economies tend to be more stable and peaceful Revolutions occur when people get poorer and lose hope for a better future.
https://status.github.com/

Interestingly while the message at top indicates the DDOS issue the availabilities all show "Normal" for me.
The art of writing good comments in your code