skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a comment on why I think articles like this one are silly, but remembered Fake Steve did a much better job here:

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-a...

For example, from this Atlantic article:

"Microsoft never got its collective head into competing against the simple and free stuff available on the Web."

Fake Steve:

"They're starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business."
Does anyone else think it's odd that Microsoft's 404 page now redirects to Bing, using the path members as search terms? And if they were going to do that, why didn't they filter obvious stop words like "mspx"
http://www.microsoft.com/france/businessproductivity/default...
This discussion may be Reddit-worthy... more Hacker-Newsish topics: is this an appropriate way to handle 404s and is this an appropriate way to handle internationalization.
Yes, it is against their terms of service and I'm sure they enforce it. They now market their storage as "Unlimited + xGB" where the x GB is the amount of space you're allowed to use as personal backup space (currently 50GB).

http://www.dreamhost.com/unlimited.html
I'm not sure if tumblr and twitter are substitutes. For me, they're compliments - I put on tumblr ideas I can't express in 140 characters.
Let's take an example of which I do boycott.

I boycott Rockstar energy drinks. I do so because the owners of the company actively contribute to causes that are anti-gay, and the founder is a man who has said all sorts of vile things about LGBT people and their community, and the company is held by his family (though they have publicly disavowed current official affiliation -- it's his son and wife, for crying out loud!)

Why in the world would I give money to them? Or Hyatt, who would use my hotel money to fund a ballot measure to demote me to second class citizenry?

And if they feel as strongly about health care as I do about LGBT issues, that's what informed capitalism is about.
> “Most of the emphasis within the company is on the next couple of years, and we tend not to think about longer than that,” says Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research.

Does anyone else, after having read this article, find that it isn't really about what the title suggests? There's no direct admission or direct quote from anyone at Google about what scares them.

The closest this article comes to telling us what scares Google is extrapolating that Google's slightly different method of developing products (fail fast, fail often) is a sign that they're scared. It's quite a stretch.

The Atlantic may be a venerable publication, but the title on this one sure looks like linkbait to me.
Ask HN: Anyone using Compass CSS framework?
I started using it recently and found it to be great for code maintenance and sharing design patterns among projects. Wondering if others use it too. If so, please give feedback on your experience.
Dreamhost now has special "backup accounts" and seem to automatically patrol accounts for "abuse" outside of this provisioned space. They give 50gb for free, and then charge 10 cents/gb/mo beyond that.

It's not bad but a far cry from "unlimited." Still, it seems to work fine for rsyncing "small" backups.
Umm excuse me? Apple hardware, sofware and especially the iPhone are outrageously closed and anti-competitive. Apple has already begun chipping their own accessories such that third party ones are no longer allowed. None of my iPod accessories (wall charger, car charger, firewire cable) work with my iPhone, so I will have to buy all new ones. Also include the other obligatory examples as the palm pre fiasco.

I found this article to be a little over the top, but strangely true. It was a good read.
This seems semi-useless to twitter. I mean, between URL-shorteners and the fact that this method likely doesn't work with apps that use the API, I'd be surprised if Twitter's getting any meaningful data out of this.
The typical solution to that situation is more like "Wait 30 seconds. The person who just pulled in front of you catches up to the car in front of him, and moves out of the lane to get around."

In the rare situations where this doesn't happen, I usually have a longer space than I actually need, so I just eat the difference.
Google will be dethroned only by superior search or by a combination of search and inference from the search. In fact, Google or its replacement is the most likely contender for the originator of the first true GAI. Jonathan Baron, in "Thinking and Deciding", views nearly all thinking, decision making, creative, and other mental processes as variations on a combination of search and inference. I haven't finished the book, but in what I have read so far he makes a pretty good case.
Mr. T's Guide to Safe Driving
For that, Google needs the Twitter fire hose. I am not sure if Twitter would be willing to offer that to Google at this time.
They're a search company.

They're an advertising company, which happens to own a search engine.

(30% of their revenues come from advertising on sites not owned by Google. By way of comparison, that is ten times what Google makes from every revenue source other than advertising. See their 2008 Annual Report if you don't trust my math.)
I used to throw out numbers and almost always underbid. These days I ask for the budget, figure out how many hours that comes out to, and tell them what they get. I never give a number before the potential client tells me what they can spend. They know what they can afford so why play games?
I have no idea if it's really encrypting the backup

Unless you look at source code, you'll never know if a backup service is encrypting your backups or not. At least with tarsnap you have the option of reading the source code to verify that tarsnap does what I say it does. :-)

... and I have no idea if it's making a backup in the first place.

tarsnap --list-archives, tarsnap -t, and tarsnap -x are your friends. The ultimate test of whether a backup was created -- for any backup system -- is "can I get my data back".
I left a Thecus box sitting attached to a net connection at my parents' place which tells dyndns.org where it is. Once a day my Mac Mini rsyncs to it. Inexpensive and hacker-simple.
Good riddance to bad censorship.
I was planning to wait until the link drops off the front page since people are still taking the survey. I think I'll take the other posters advice however, and let everyone see the summary now.
absolutely fantastic! Thank you blhack - just what I needed - Hilarious!
What do others do about this?

I don't know what all tarsnap users are doing, but I've heard the following options on several occasions: 1. Give it to a friend. 2. Put it on a USB key. 3. Store it on a different computer. 4. Print it out (recent versions of tarsnap have printable key files).
Link to original paper [PDF]: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/12220512...

I only skimmed it a little, but apparently the control group was asked to write the names down while they were listening to the tape.
Steve Jobs Steals a Liver Transplant From Memphis
Article Rewriter - Free Online Article Marketing Tool. My First GAE
This has reminded me of number 4 from http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos
IANAM (I am not a mechanic) but I've heard that it's bad for an automatic transmission to coast in neutral. Apparently the transmission isn't being lubricated in neutral, there's a risk of overheating, and it can be damaging to shift back into drive at high speeds.

In any case, you're not really saving any gas over coasting in drive or, alternately, setting the cruise control.
I was hoping to find an intelligent rebuttal of Peak Oil, but it reads more like a hatchet job than anything else.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=profit+microsoft+ibm+go...

Microsoft has started brand new billion dollar businesses (TFS, SharePoint) recently --- Google, so far, hasn't shown they can do anything except sell ads.
> Unless you look at source code, you'll never know if a backup service is encrypting your backups or not. At least with tarsnap you have the option of reading the source code to verify that tarsnap does what I say it does. :-)

You could reverse engineer the protocol that other products use. :_) And I'd rather just assume that somebody else has reviewed the source code.
You're ignoring rate of extraction. There could be a trillion barrels of oil in some new non-conventional field, but it doesn't do a lot of good if you can't get more than 2 or 3 mbpd out of it.
I am in the oil business.

When laypeople who don't know the first thing about the hydrocarbons industry start talking about "peak oil", they come off sounding as stupid as when former senator Ted Stevens described the internet as a "series of tubes" that can get clogged up.

The world has sufficient hydrocarbons to last hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And there is no limit to human ingenuity in inventing new technology to economically produce those resources. Any nation, company, or individual that bets on 'peak oil' is doing so on an ideological basis and is going to loose big. Having people who have never set foot on a drill rig babbling on about 'peak oil' is tantamount to someone who doesn't understand computing betting against Moore's Law.

For example: The combination of swell packers for multi-stage fracture stimulation of multi-lateral wells in tight oil and shale gas resource plays, coupled with multi-azimuth 3D seismic for detecting naturally occurring fracture networks,and microseismic for frac job design has completely revolutionized the US hydrocarbons business in the past few years. These are new technologies applied to produce oil and gas resources that used to be considered uneconomic.

Every now and then you hear some talking head warning about how Moore's Law is about to stop scaling. Meanwhile, Intel keeps adding new process technologies to their roadmap. Does the semiconductor industry have the technology in 2009 to build some of these fab's? No. Will the industry invent the technology to build that fab? Yes. It's the same thing with hydrocarbons.

BTW, a lot of the advances in semiconductor process technology are being used to discover new reserves of hydrocarbons. For example, one of the leading applications of NVIDIA's gp-gpu technology is for 3D-Seismic oil and gas exploration.
Our of curiosity, how did you get that picture? Did you take it a few hours ago just for kicks? Or what?

Just curious, since they seem to have changed the pics now.
I was not aware you could do that! Here's the link!

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0J....
Decent marketing tool. Especially when creating different blog posts and doing bookmarking for seo.
My observations are limited to highways in Ontario, Quebec, New York State, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.
Polish Microsoft Ad Racism
Creating a closed product is not anti-competitive behavior, merely consumer-hostile.

Attempting to close others' otherwise open products (e.g. PC hardware) through licensing requirements, which require payment regardless of whether or not ones software is actually installed or not, is anti-competitive behavior.

Granted, this distinction may not be compelling to the average consumer, but I contend it's more relevant to the average hacker.
The answer, I would be led to suppose, is hand-waving about exponential curves along with wishful thinking?
I just found this on the other international Microsoft Amazon website: http://imgur.com/6FmaI.jpg
200 Qantas IT jobs head to IBM
Did Australia's police screw up hacker raid?
"We're hiring a Rails/jQ developer. NYC or Chicago"

Someone should take you up on $120 per hour being low!
Advertising is their revenue model. Dogmatically, Google is a search company. The comparison would be like calling Microsoft an Office Suite company. Sure, that's where a load of their revenue comes from, but it's not what the company is about. Google's positing as an advertising company is a consequence of them being a search company -- just like NBC's position as an advertising company is a result of them being a media company.
Aussie webhost SmartyHost busted for spamming
Microsoft apologizes for race-swap photo incident

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10317763-56.html
It's sufficient to say at some point there will be a next big thing that Google doesn't see. To assume otherwise would be to assume that Google has some special position that's unprecedented in the history of corporations.
I pulled it from reddit (that's not my dropbox it's linking to). The reddit story was linked to an image like this, as opposed to linking to the two sites.

They did change the image on the polish site, but I promise you the link I posted is what it was like a few hours ago.
You need to lookup the hyperbolic decline curves for United States shale gas plays.

With these 'unconventional' plays, the production is front-loaded. For instance, many Haynesville shale natural gas wells will produce as much gas in their first 6 months of life as they will over the next 20 years.

The same goes for the Bakken tight-oil play in Montana.

The 'rate of extraction' in unconventional oil and gas plays is extremely front-loaded. Which is why you see such large location basis price differential around these plays.

In other words, the United States is producing so much natural gas that we're running out of pipelines, storage facilities, and power plants to consume it all.

There is so much natural gas in the United States that the US should be a net energy exporter.

However, the federal government has not approved a single permit for a natgas export terminals in over 40 years.

Import terminals get approval on a regular basis, however.

Meanwhile, we're complaining about our dependence on foreign oil and subsidizing windmills.

Genius.
The Fourier Transform and its Applications (free ebook) [pdf]
I founded SpiderOak in 2006: Zero-knowledge encrypted offsite backup and sync.

It does intensive deduplication across your full data set, keeps historical versions and deleted files for as long as you like and supports all major platforms. You can use the GUI or cmdline/cron/launchd.

2GB free, $10 per 100 GBs up to 1.5 TB, but use the promo code "askhackernews" for a 25% discount, or get a 50% discount automatically with a .edu email address.

We have our own data centers and built a clustering file system specifically for archival storage (colder data), which is why our prices are way under companies that outsource to S3, etc.
The Petabyte Problem
What do prison consultants do?
A game-based approach to question answering services.
To play this game, you would submit rules consisting of query patterns and answers.

Sample rule:

Query pattern: when dawkins OR evolution book
Answer: September 2009.

When a person enters a query (e.g., When will Dawkins' new book be released?), you get back all answers of matching rules ranked in a way that takes into account not only the pattern match relevances but also the number of rules yielding each answer and the reputations of the rule makers.

You would then identify the best answer, which would reward all submitters of rules having that answer and penalize all submitters of rules having other answers.

To help users decide which answer is correct, one could show them the rule patterns so it would be more obvious whether an answer is intended for the query given.

What is the incentive for picking the best answer?

One possibility is to keep track of your question and answer for future reference. Another possibility is to improve future results by rewarding those rule makers who tend to give you answers that you like.

How would players know what users might ask? You could have a ranking of popular query topics for the last hour, day, week, etc. In this way, players could focus on the sorts of questions that are likely to give them more points.

Players would get feedback on how well their rules are doing so that they can try to improve them.
Isn't Wolfram|Alpha the first step along the way here?
Yeah, misleading article title.

I really like Norvig's attitude. When big companies start worrying about how powerful they're going to be in 10 years it's a bad thing. It leads to fear and paranoia, which makes it harder to not be evil.
Tarsnap is probably the most "hackerish", but I use jungledisk and have been quite happy with it.
My beef is more so with Apple's DRM chips installed in their accessories now which has negated all my previously bought Apple and non-Apple accessories, forcing me to purchase new, Apple authorised accessories all over again.

One could defend it as time saving on backwards compatability (like forcing everyone to upgrade to IE8 from IE6 to use a website's "cool" new feature), but I think its as simple as typical Apple money-grubbing.

It's not illegal, it's not exactly unethical, it's just rude.
Continuous Project Planning?
The language a website is written in is insignificant to its success. Outside of AND and OR, it's all syntax anyway.
I don't really think that's the difference. And the official one has screenshots.
We (SpiderOak) had a customer who previously arranged their backups with rotating tarballs, encrypted and daily moved offsite. Trouble was, the crypto keys were only archived _within_ the backup.

Backup is a nuanced problem. There's a good case for outsourcing it to a 3rd party who has the motivation to do constant QA.
I know of a few hackers in Dubai, and at least two HNers. Shoot me an email and I will CC a few people.

Cheers!
If the command line doesn't scare you then http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ may be worth a look. It uses PGP and supports incremental backup to S3.

I'm personally a bit wary about the mass market backup providers like crashplan and such. Sure they all say their binary client will encrypt my data before sending it to them. Sure their GUIs are shiney and much easier than the sharp-edged OSS tools.

But when all my personal, backup-worthy data is at stake then I prefer to know exactly what's going on, even if it initially took a little more work to set it up...
I think the reason tech startups (and web-tech startups in particular) work great with the incubator/YCombinator model is that $10,000 and 3 months gets you somewhere in terms of a beta or an alpha, or a design or something that can get you Angel Investors or SeriesA VCs. Many non-techie businesses don't really have that "alpha" stage until there's a lot more money involved, making 3 months and $10,000 a poor trade for equity from the founder's perspective.

Additionally, tech startups tend to have a serious valuation ramp-up and multiple investment rounds that many other industries don't. So getting in on the ground floor with $10,000 is a worthwhile investment. For a YC-like program to be successful, it has to be in a field with a similar structure.
Step up office exercise with a treadmill desk
Hah! Allow me to introduce you to at least one middle-eastern tech startup founder, yours truly here :-)

Checkout

http://www.startuparabia.com/

http://arabcrunch.com/

And if any other fellow middle-easterners here are starting up there, they should most definitely shoot me an email.
It's important to note that GoDaddy now has an "Express Buy" option right on their homepage now to skip over all the up-sells. They appear to have heard our cries.

I think the author was just using GoDaddy as an example. With the money they have, they could possbily BECOME a registrar. Or, they could piggy back off of a number of APIs available for domain registration.

Still, I do agree that the domain registration route is not the way to go. It's a completely different business model (not that they have one now), but there are a number of other ways they could possibly monetize with such huge numbers.
Jungle Disk. http://www.jungledisk.com/
It's great because it backups to S3 and it's cheap.
Some LEGO machines
Google Earth was bought, not made (they acquired Keyhole, Inc). And I don't think it makes any money for google, at all.

Many huge companies have diversified revenue streams, within a broad industry - like Nestle, General Electric, Proctor and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive.

Google has diversified products, but it doesn't have diversified revenues.

That said, information comprehension is like science in that the more you look, the more there is. Google's mission may have a lot of runway left in it.
Impressive how it does the harakat as well.

patrickas, unless you want to alienate friends and disenchant people, please don't use a national flag to stand for a language. It irks me when I see the British/American flag used to mean "English Language"; just yesterday we were talking about a site that used the Saudi flag to mean "Arabic language".

Either use the letter `Ain ع. Or if you need a flag to fit in with the rest of your icon set, use the flag of the Jami`a alarabia:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Fla...

Good luck, you have a "cool", darling of the media competitor :-(
He knocks them for pandering to their current user base, but when you are a business that grows by word-of-mouth, your current users are your sales-force, so pandering is a MUST. But I completely agree that they could have used their time a little more wisely than to go after the shark/kitty idea.

Maybe they should have spent more time on their API so one of their shark/kitty loving users could have created kitty widgets on their own time.
There's a specific genre, "fat-dumb-slob-married-to-woman-who-always-knows-best", which Family Guy is the pinnacle of (it's an old genre of course, related to the theme of women marrying beneath their status, which has been a major literary device since time immemorial.)
Cool! I thought I was just throwing a random datum out there. I'm not chilean actually, but I've lived here for most of my life.
Makes me think of Drum-Buffer-
Rope from Theory of Constraints. Maybe we need a pull system for roads. There are a few onramps on criminally undersized (due to nimby nutsos) highways in my area where a traffic light limits flow onto the road at busy times- smart. Then the same people put in stoplights at the ends of the offramps, backing traffic up onto the highway.
I don't interact with other developers because I worry that it will pull me toward the middle of the bell curve

This will almost surely be damaging to your career and education. If this means that you are too easily influenced or cannot identify a good influence, then I would focus on improving that in yourself.

Surrounding yourself with intelligent people in a field such as this is incredibly important. You are missing out otherwise.
Ron Conway: Investing in a Down Economy
Ok, the article seems to miss something.

The whole foods ceo is in the newspaper because he is the CEO of whole foods, not because he has all these interesting things to say. Since his ability to push his opinions through the newspaper is predicated on his position at that corporation, he is writing as 'the CEO of whole foods', not merely as a citizen. That they point out who he is adds to this, since not only is he only invited because of his job title, but the newspaper is also using the title to add weight and authority. If the employees of a company offend you the best and really only way to influence them is to stop giving that company your money.

Really, as a practical matter, no CEO of any company should be out there publicly talking about their personal political views. In fact, it is odd that the company didn't have a written policy preventing employees from using their affiliation with the company in this way. If the guy who makes sandwiches started endorsing panini grills, and the ads used the Whole Foods name, they would be shut down. It is just obvious that the sandwich guy can't use the company's trademarks to push his personal agenda, and neither should the CEO be allowed to.
I don't quite follow - are you saying that we won't see a peak for at least several hundred years?