skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> my GF is one of those educated young people who cant get work.

Can't get work, or won't accept work she considers beneath her, there's a big difference. I'm fairly sure finding a job as a waitress just about anywhere is rather easy.
Shopping is broken (and how to fix it), by Scott Adams
Bobblehead
Bobbleheads are NO LONGER exclusive to celebrities. Now you may order yours! We ship worldwide.
oo, I used to have karma!

Seriously this was my first reaction, as one of the first posters, Google were pwned.

Guess I have to open a new account now.
Sleep helps build long-term memories
Don't forget Flex/AIR that let you develop hybrids for the browser and desktop.

Flash has slowly matured out of the "punch the monkey"/videoplayer/games niche over the last years and the >90% installed userbase is not going anywhere soon.

I despise adobe and the various problems (linux plugin) like the next guy. But still I'm using it for a lot of frontend work - simply because creating a RIA with HTML and Javascript is like peeling your eyes out with a spoon.

HTML5 won't change that fundamentally, at best it's a babystep into a welcome direction.
for shared hosting, yes, there is no excuse for not being redundant. However, if you are renting servers, full redundancy at the server level is quite difficult to achieve. Redundancy is usually better handled at the application layer.
Edit: Actually manufacturing companies in the UK tend to shut down around christmas and new years come to think of it. I guess that counts.
Hulu isn't the best example since the corporate 'partners' are really owners. Still, it's going to be interesting to see if this new organization will buckle to legal threats and pressure.
Or maybe their 'developing' wasn't going so well...
The title on oursignal included: "and goes legal". That worked so well for Napster..
it's an exciting challenge, and i've personally been interested in mobile ever since the iphone was announced.

what i'm working on is a mix between a geo-twitter, digg, and yelp minus the long reviews. i think the important thing is to keep changing your business model if something isn't working. levchin is well known for that type of development cycle, and i'd say we share the same ethos when it comes to the mobile space.
every reasonable co-lo has redundant power and redundant bandwidth. hell, even tiny guys like me have that.

Most co-lo power outages are not due to both incoming power feeds failing; usually it is either human error or failure in the power equipment that is not redundant enough. It happens even at the best data centers.

Most network outages, on the other hand, are caused by human error. it's not very difficult to make your network extremely resilient to upstream failures; Even the smallest ISP is going to have more than one upstream. however, if you give the new guy access to the BGP routers, (or the old guy, when he hasn't had enough sleep) it's not at all difficult to break the whole thing.
at what rackspace can charge, new hardware is nothing. the problem is that if I rent you a server, it's going to be pretty difficult for me to replicate that server to another location without a lot of cooperation from you. the more I screw with your server, well, the more likely I am to break it, too.
Ask HN: Whatever happened to Internet anonymity?
Hi all,

When I was first introduced to the internet some eleven years back, one of the most talked about things about the internet was how people could stop being their real self and could assume completely anonymous identities on the internet.

Newspapers (in India atleast) where abuzz with how anonymity was good and bad and dangerous, and how it was this very same anonymity that was propelling the growth of the internet. The internet was a hot commodity and it was mainly selling due to the unparalleled anonymity it offered (i.e. in forums and chat rooms).

Fast forward to 2008-09, and it seems everything on the internet is about your true identity. OpenID, Google, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Wordpress everyone wants the real you.

Whatever happened to the anonymity of the internet??? Why did people opt for their real identities as against remaining anonymous and doing just about anything they wanted without any fears of community backlashes???
If you've not read his book its worth reading. Made me laugh anyway!
17, Digitizing printed circuit board designs. It was basically tracing with a computerized drafting table.
The Diet Problem: An Application of Linear Programming
McGee Brothers | McGee Brick | Monroe, NC 
McGee Brothers is the largest residential masonry company in the United States and strives to bring professionalism and orderliness in mounting State's economy.
The Fantastic Firefox: Why Mozilla's new browser augurs great things for the Web
What are the differences between this and the searchyc page?
Sony eyes cellphone/game gear hybrid
I think people realised that trust was intrinsically linked to identity (im a big fan of this idea btw).

The idea that you can be anonymous online and say what you like is tied really closely to trolling and rudeness now. I think people have realised that you dont have to be anonymous to be "different" :)

For example I tend to be much more outspoken and forceful online than in real life. And it's not too hard to link places I am like that to a true identity. I like to think that the ability to do so instills a bit more "trustability" in what I have to say.

It's possible to be anonymous online, of course it is, but identity is a warmer and more trustworthy concept than anonymity - and we are all human after all :)
Two questions:

1. Why was this published at all, and:

2. Why is it #2 on Hacker News?

Nothing is more repulsive than a rich person unable to admit that he owes a substantial share of his success to luck. Persistence, drive, and talent are all crucial as well, but there simply isn't enough room at the top for everyone with these traits, which is where the luck factor comes in.
The little start-up that could
I love his book. I read it once a year whether I need to or not.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp...

+1 for "If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it - it’s cheaper in the long run."

I also think of Felix Dennis every time I hear the Pet Shop Boys - he has a great story about that.
Perhaps - though their ste (http://www.peerialism.se) is a bit blank initially there IS some reasonable stuff buried in the pages.

That said from what I can see they seem to be selling off their technology in the very recent past so... maybe a bit of both camps?
StumbleUpon's Exciting Progress
First look: Microsoft Office 2010
duh... FollowMe, MeetMe, VoiceMail, Conference, IVR, etc... Asterisk has been doing all those milestones for a decade now...
I've been interviewing at Adobe (strange but true) -- my interviewer said the shutdowns force people to use up their vacation pay. In CA, when you lay someone off, you have to pay them all their accrued vac. pay, which could add up to several months. The issue is that this is a liability on their books, which can affect their earnings as a public co.

No idea if this is really the reason or just what the top brass say to the worker bees.
Adobe is closed this week (and what that means)
Is Skype bringing us together or destroying boundaries?
It would be great if the "# comments" links had a different a:visited color. Many times I can tell by the title of a link that I have no real interest in reading it, but if it has "30 comments" I think "Hm, I bet someone said something worthwhile in there." But if I read 10 comment threads like that and come back later in the day, I have no visual feedback as to which are truly "unread."
At the press conference they had some vague idea about monetizing search and, with their new protocol, lowering peering costs for ISPs. They also claimed that the file-sharers themselves could get paid for sharing certain files. The investors funding the deal was said to be individuals. It all seems kind of uncertain at this point, but this won't be the last thing we hear about this.

Edit: The deal is not finalized, they still need to confirm funding and get approval at a shareholders' meeting, with the condition that they can use tpb in "an appropriate and legal way".
So because one company failed, all companies will fail?
+1 for "If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it - it’s cheaper in the long run."
Bernie Madoff got off lightly or unfairly persecuted? Some data.
From http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Pirate_Bay_Sold_To_Software_Co... :

Something is very fishy here. I live in Sweden and I checked out this company.

Global Gaming Factory X AB (Ltd, Co.) never registered for "F-skatt", which is a basic permit needed for companies in Sweden to operate under corporate tax laws instead of private laws. Not having this permit usually means that it's a company 1) run under a mother company or 2) that isn't active.

Furthermore, their website consists of this press release and NOTHING ELSE. Their turnover has not gone over $ 750,000 any of the past two years and their total loss for that same time is approx. - $ 2,677,000.

I think this is just TPB playing legal games.
Why microbes are smarter than you thought
PHP 5.3.0 Released
How to Delete your Gmail Account
I expected this to be crap given the title, but ended up being quite entertaining. The only annoyance in the style was that it started with the "everyone can be rich" and then followed with a bunch of stuff that very few people have the constitution to in fact do.
There is a translation of some of the feed on torrentfreak (emphasis added is mine - there may be more to this than meets the eye.)

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-sold-to-software-comp...

Daniel Goldberg:
@ brokep Is this correct? http://bit.ly/1YR0m

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg Yes.

Daniel Goldberg:
@ brokep What a thing! Who gets the money? Who owns the TPB?

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg Foreign company, with demands from our side to finance a fund for internet projects. We get no money.

Daniel Goldberg:
@ brokep Cool. What do you mean internet project? Will you not have to use the money to cover the damages?

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg Internet Project in the form of political activism, etc. TPB changed hands in 2006 already to not be sued.

Daniel Goldberg
@ brokep Congratulations, the scoop! Who is the owner of TPB today?

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg It’s partly why we’ve have been so sure that lawsuits against us is pointless in the end … :-)

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg I do not think that I may say for legal reasons. But they are people we trust. And have conditioned things too..
I think that saying that the author will be biased towards a view of man-made global warming is a bit like saying someone will be biased against the world being flat or that the sun rotates around the earth.
Thanks for the link but FYI, the URL is techDIRT, not techCRUNCH.

Interesting story nonetheless, I'm curious what TPB's exposure will be now that there's a clear monetary gain.
CouchDB PHP library, a call for participation
I'm proud to announce today the first public avaibility of my new project PHP on Couch. The intended goal is to become the reference library of PHP access to a CouchDB server. Do you want to help me building it ? The code is already available on GitHub, some documentation exist, I'm now in need of good ideas, feature requests, bug hunting, to improve the library.
I felt the same. Also, there are some statistical issues with everyone being rich, unless being rich is about absolute numbers, in which case Zimbabweans are all super rich ;-) It boils down to the difference between "everyone" and "anyone" I guess.
The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org
"IE will likely linger for a long time, but at this point it's looking a lot like Novell NetWare ten years ago: still big, but not driving the market."

Sounds like you forget to include the 100 million enterprise desktops locked down to ie by their employers.
If you haven't already seen it, here is a poetic recital he did at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/publisher_felix_dennis_odes_to_vice...

With his poetry, he again aludes to some of the pitfalls of wealth he mentions in the article.
Qui.tw: Tweet Your Location (useful tools review)
Why hasn't anyone developed a plugin for Internet Explorer that loads a modern rendering engine?

That way, getting someone to install an HTML5 compliant browser would be as simple as downloading the Flash plugin.
"Programmers seem to get off on complexity and detail..."
The Pirate Bay Sold, Goes Legal
Downvotes without comment are just lovely. I realize this is not a popular opinion ("OMG, he defends flash!"). But unless you have worked with both HTML/JS and Flash/Flex it'd be great if you could at least add a comment to your vote.
A lot of people use "HTML5" in a very vague manner.

One of the principle goals of HTML5 is to fully reverse-engineer and document some of Internet Explorer's behaviour so that the other browsers can duplicate it (even in failure scenarios). So a fair bit of HTML5 is already implemented by Microsoft whether they like it or not.

Some other aspects of HTML5 have indeed been adopted by Microsoft and implemented in IE8.

http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=trident&eras=All...

What's going to "kill" Flash and Silverlight, is specific parts of HTML5 such as audio, video and canvas tags which Microsoft have no interest in supporting as it's against their business interests. Both the need for a Microsoft desktop OS and Silverlight are called into question by useful web standards.

What will (continue to) happen is people using whatever bits of the standards they can and falling back to some mix of Javascript, Proprietary IE features and/or Flash. This is standard operating practice for any serious web development. How do you think Google can use SVG in it's maps when that's not supported by IE?
It wouldn't really be possible to list his symptoms exhaustively and in terms of the DSM, and have the article be readable by a general audience.
I used to work with a guy that insisted meat didn't count when he was outside the country. He was traveling abroad for business or vacations at least 100 days of the year.
Right Sir. One more to go on that ever-rising pile of my reading list. One of these days, I'm going to quit my job and...
i hope so. i'm looking forwards to a livelier collaborative eco-system of open-source or at least open-api modules made by smaller teams rather than h4444ge corporate efforts. i'm not even sure that the economy of scale is true, but even if it does it only seems to benefit the tip of the iceberg.
10 years seems to be the standard prediction timeframe. The cure for various diseases is always 10 years away, a replacement for oil is always 10 years away, etc.

10 years seems like a long time, but its not. It's certainly not a long time in research fields. And it's usually not long enough to take a new idea to fruition.
How Limelight Networks kept TMZ.com up during massive MJ traffic spike
How to save web page as PDF?
I think you misunderstood; I didn't mean that Silverlight and JavaFX have to work to match as3/flash9, but that HTML 5/JS do.
BREAKING: The Pirate Bay Sold For $7.8 Million
When you say "simple Flash-style animations" did you mean to say "annoying advertisements"?
Awesome! Thanks.

(That link's broken. This should work - http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/publisher_felix_dennis_ode...)
An uniformed rant. Not worth anyone's time reading.
I think it's pretty natural to be angry when so many people are so cluelessly inveighing against something both so harmful and so scientifically obvious.
gluster is one of the more impressive pieces of tech out there, but stability is not their strong suit (yet).

I've also looked at pohmelfs but couldn't get it to work at all.

Glusterfs uses 'fuse', pohmelfs relies on their own kernel component.
The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts
Anybody know who Tamino is? Specifically, I was curious if he has some scientific background.
"I have done a lot of programming."

There are 2 kinds of "a lot of programming":

1. Lots of different technologies and experiences.

2. The same technology and experience over and over again.

I suspect penny is the latter.
Twitter: let the information wash over you
While I have no evidence to support this, I would guess this has to do with the editing process. Comparing this list to http://top.searchyc.com/domains, you see a lot of similar results. The difference is that some of them have quite a lot of results (Techcrunch, Wired), but not nearly as high of a average score.

In fact, it looks like the sites hitting the top of the list for average score are ones that are written by a single author, who has several strong opinions (ZedShaw is a good example). Since Hacker News doesn't allow down voting, it seems that by draw up a commotion, and getting people interested in a semi-controversial idea is what wins votes here.
Ask HN: Is there any one book or resource on search engine development & theory?
I'm working on a search engine for a web application I am developing and realized I really didn't know that much about making search engines. I've taken a bit of AI & Expert Systems in school but never really run into any books specifically on developing search engines. Do any such books exist? If so, recommendations?
The killer paradox of media. For anything to be interesting, it can't delve too deep. Anything in-depth can't be interesting.

And thus the curse: any journalism must follow the pattern of telling anecdotes of one or maybe two representative cases. This lends a personal feel, but gets mired in the trap of "anecdote is not the singular for of data".

Reporting that is engaging is rarely informative, at least to people that already have a working model of the topic.
Elements of a great web business
Web Surve
Survey Software, Web Survey, Online Surveys, and Enterprise Feedback Management solutions from Vovici. Get more feedback and pay less money with Vovici.
Fluent News, new iPhone news reader, spent weeks in App Store limbo
VirtualBox 3.0 Released
HTML5, Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX are all technologies for building apps that run (primarily) in a browser.

AIR isn't one of these, its a wrapper for deploying applications based on Flash or HTML/Javascript as desktop apps.
Web Survey
Survey Software, Web Survey, Online Surveys, and Enterprise Feedback Management solutions from Vovici. Get more feedback and pay less money with Vovici.
New features include guest SMP support, OpenGL 2.0, and experimental Direct3D 8/9 support (for windows guests, obviously...)
Living in CN where *.blogspot.com is blacklisted, it's really, really troublesome. You'd be surprised how much knowledge and opinion is stored there even if it's frequently a little obnoxious.
Article's a bit hyperbole, but I think it might be interesting to HN for its description of the dot.com bubble:

"The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system - one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

"Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share."
There's also absolute wealth: the sense in which virtually all Americans today are rich compared to virtually all Americans in 1900.
"imposing Western ideas of what a workplace looks like is going to reduce opportunities for poor people in China. It's really unpleasant to look at and think about people doing unpleasant work in unpleasant conditions"

That really is the crux of the issue in many regards. The aid programs that I have seen work focus on education and loans for people who wish to better their skills or go into a different field rather than trying to come in and 'fix' the system till it looks like the what we in the western world recognize. At the same time, there are certain conditions that no human should ever have to be exposed to. As anything, it is a balance and I believe both viewpoints are needed for there to be a total solution.

Thank you again for the thoughtful discussion.
Then you'd have to get IE6 users to install the plugin. The fact that they don't bother to upgrade in the first place tells you something.
Agreed. I work with Flash developers, and the way they work is so many light years different from how web programmers work that I wonder how anyone can think it's even comparable to HTML/JS at all.
Homeschooling isn't free.

Your suggestion is basically school-vouchers with no strings attached. For the kids whose parents want them to get an education, they would use that 11k a year to help pay for it - either private schools, tutors, educational materials and food. (If you, like me, went to a public school, then about a third of your food on the weekdays was heavily subsidized by the school system. Normal lunch at my high school cost $1.55 ten years ago - the food I ate cost more than that.)
If you're interested in winning, you will destroy your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in the truth, you will fix their arguments for them to the best of your ability, and then set out to update your position accordingly.

To make an impression on me, don't go looking for easily dismantled arguments. Pick your most formidable intellectual opponents. Try arguing successfully against the best available brand of "denialism" (what a word!) - the blog Climate Audit. For example, explain to me this: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5902 .
And I don't think he has critically thought through the consequences to society. Education takes time and money no matter how you allocate it.
Once I've ditched religion and the whole human comedy got simplified I noticed that. I now seek comfort in the complexity of deep abstraction levels (think LISP, programs writing themselves) of programming. That way I feel less like an ape with a great vocal cord and no fur to myself.
Calculating Consumer Happiness at Any Price
The Puzzle of Spaces That Soothe
The most complete terrain map of the Earth's surface has been published.
An alternative to monkeypatching in Ruby
Ah, in that case I wasted my time reading about how to get rich. I am already rich! :) But if you include all people living in past times wouldn't it be consistent to include all people who will live in the future? Compared to them we might all be very poor and there is no way for anyone to become rich.
The English language is in a period of never-ending flux, so neologisms and compression are acts of making the language more efficient and accessible for any group. It's all about who the target audience is, what you want to communicate, and what will be the most adequate way to communicate with that audience.