skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I highly suggest http://half.com

I've sold many books using it. I usually don't buy textbooks unless I have to. My university library provides course reserved textbook rentals for free so anytime I need a book I just go to the library and study.
That's why I try to keep our dependence on adsense to a minimum.
In some parts of Academia this would require no change at all. Our lab is all Linux or Apple.
They drank Flavor Aid, not Kool Aid.
I recommend the book "A Crime so Monstrous" for people interested in learning more on this subject.
I would really like to see some statistics about online press because it is not clear for me at the moment if people are moving online or just simply stopping to read. If it is the latter, we have a huge problem.

I've got this question after reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
Dan was always great at making everybody feel like his friend -- the crazy part is that he was pretty much always sincere about it!

He was definitely the reason we met you in the first place (hell, he's the reason I know a lot of people) and I'm sorry you're now stuck with the short end of the stick, as far as TS founders go :(
What I find interesting is how incredibly easy it is to do this. I use Microsoft products maybe once or twice a month, almost exclusively for testing (or opening up the occasional Excel file, but that's just because I haven't yet bothered to install OpenOffice on my Mac). I don't even go out of my way to avoid Microsoft software, their products simply don't provide anything that I need.
And from what I remember, they made a ludicrous amount of money on that PDF.
Having not used any MS software for years outside of work and occasional troubleshooting for friends, this just doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose, but for someone who could even consider doing this (i.e., no vital Windows-only applications, no PC gaming, etc.), I can't imagine it making much of a difference. If my day job didn't involve .NET, I'd never touch MS software and wouldn't really notice. The only practical difference to me is remembering whether to type "ls" or "dir" and that installing/upgrading software on Ubuntu is easier and requires less rebooting.

Okay, on second though, this is sounding like I'm bashing him, which is absolutely not the case. His previous 30-day challenges involved substantial lifestyle adjustments, with non-trivial time commitments and the whole 30-day challenge concept is awesome. It's just that compared to previous challenges, "use Ubuntu" seems not very ambitious.

Is it just that I've gotten unusually lucky in my experiences with Ubuntu or something?
They said they moved their servers to 3 availabilty zones and still had the same problems. What's the probably of having the same attack in 3 zones on a subnet you are randomly assigned to?

Besides, firing would definitely be a little harsh. Everybody deserves a 2nd chance.
Why dumb toys make kids smarter
Thanks for that link, nice to see it worked out so well. I have a zephyr recumbent, which is very hard to ride with any amount of relaxation, I'm now wondering what the reason is that recumbents are as a rule designed with straight front forks.
About 12 years ago, when I was still fairly new to linux, I screwed up enough to require a reformat of the HD. I discovered afterward that my backups couldn't be read, the last 3 MONTHS worth of backups. I still don't know what was wrong, I was just making tarballs of my home directory. Always check occasionally to make sure your backups are actually readable.
"... Challenge for November: No Google Software. ..."

That is a challenge. My blog is on appengine, I prototype appengine, groups, search. Have to think about that one.
Actually, that was my conclusion also.
Especially when it's not a crime, just a mistake.
Thin vs. Unicorn
PG, can we keep this story on the home page for some time? I would hate to see this discussion pushed down.
There's what appears to be an excellent discussion here in the comments, from people grappling with the consequences of depression and other difficult mental states — people talking about their struggles and the issues that have come up for them. This is exactly the kind of discussion that can help people who are dealing with these issues themselves, and prevent tragedies like Dan's suicide.

But these posts have been [dead]ed by some administrator.

Whoever deleted those posts bears the responsibility for the next YC founder suicide, a tragedy which may happen this year, or next year, or five years from now. This person should be stripped of their administrator bit and publicly chastised for their misbehavior.
Not just in IT either. Any time you are doing anything you might need or want to refer back to, TAKE NOTES.

"Someone who wants to appear clever relies on memory, someone who wants to get things done writes things down."
The writer of the blog post wasn't the poster of the article.
Startups flock to Twitter
Startup Bootcamp: October 12th at MIT with many YC speakers
Ask HN: Hackers that perform/love stand-up comedy?
I've been a little curious lately if there are others of you out there that love stand-up comedy like I do? I've been trying to write more and more lately when I get a chance between school and work. Hopefully I'll get the courage to do an open mic in the next month or so.

What about the rest of you? Do you perform, have the ambition to, and where does that fit in with your work/startup life? And who are your favorite comedians?
Not sure about that. When I see the word 'sale' and 'exit' together in one sentence only to find out after a lot of digging that we're talking about a < $50K deal its painting a bad situation as a win-win.

It means that a startup has basically failed, that there may be some technology that can be recycled or that the founder has enough street creds that they can convert their failed startup into a signing bonus and call it an acquisition.
Above I mentioned that I am trying to perform, and have been putting it off for about a year and a half... but here are some of my current favorites:

Louis C.K.
Zack Galifianakis
David Cross
Patton Oswalt
Daniel Tosh

And all of the "alternative" comedians who, I guess, are now becoming mainstream.
Myspace was originally written in Coldfusion, they ported to ASP.NET and the current system handles 1.5 Billion page views per day and up to 2.3 million concurrent users (source: MIX Conference 2006 http://www.andreas-kraus.net/blog/handling-15-billion-page-v...)
compare with the dow:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI#chart1:symbol=^dji;r...
>If people are forced to pay for online news, they're more likely to switch back to print.

You have a great point there. Rupert Murdoch has a true love for the printed newspaper.
I stopped reading after he mentioned "pwn-some Web app". Jesus wept.
The original IBM Thinkpad
My money's still on internet
This comment republishing feature is annoying -- I do not give anyone permission to copy my work here to other sites. The use of the Y Combinator logo is also suspect; I do not speak for YC when I post here (or ever), so I am not sure why my comments would have a YC logo on them.

Anyway, commenting on the actual content... I guess the algorithm builds 3D models of structures from the photo. Initially, I thought it would generate something like Street View. It seems possible to use the 3d dot model in addition to the photos to create a "photorealistic" virtual world -- has anyone done this? (This article is very low on details.)
Looking at the people around me my guess would be moving online at the expense of periodicals and TV.

That's a very limited sample though. I used to be an avid newspaper and periodicals reader, 3 subscriptions to monthlies (nature, Scientific American and the Lancet) and a newspaper were paid for, then reading every other publication I could get my hands on.

Now it's all internet.

My other friends and family are much the same. In a shopping center a while ago I was offered something like 6 months free on a newspaper subscription. I said no thanks and the person was like 'what do you want, what does it make to get you to accept' and I said I don't think it can be done.

Even if its free I still have to get rid of the things every couple of weeks, and they harm the environment. I do buy books on paper though, there's something about curling up in a corner with a book that a computer can't give me (yet).
Search: I can use Bing or Yahoo, no problem here.

Mail: gmail is integrated deeply into my workflow. Hard to live without it.

Money: Adsense pays for my hosting bill so can't drop them, besides there is no worthy competitor with Adsense (for small blogs)

Analytics: Google's product is great and free but i would be very happy to try some alternative.

Docs: don't use google docs a lot. Not important.

Calendar: I have too few plans/appointments so a calendar is useless :-p
Like most decisions, choosing your datastore is all about deciding which trade offs are best for you. For a great many of those situations, it will be SQL, but for some others it will not. But each way comes with compromises.
My boyfriend is a YC founder. After the class of S08 met for the first time, I anxiously awaited his phone call to see how it went. When he called, what was the first thing I heard about...pg...no...Dan Haubert. I heard how he had crazy courage. Then I met him and discovered his gentle heart. Dan, you will be greatly missed.
We (GitHub) were DDoS'd the other week when members of an open source project hosted on the site got upset at the other members and wanted to make the entire ecosystem around the project suffer. Not saying that's what happened to BitBucket, but it could be a similar reason.

Talking with Sourceforge, it sounds stuff like this happens fairly regularly. It's one of the disadvantages of running a site that has members capable of doing this stuff.
Native Client in Chrome: Google flexes Web muscle
منتجات موزيلا | الأمن
Why?

Or, perhapse "Why is that obvious / why is it a necessity?"

If humanity expands into space, there is absolutely no reason for the population to ever stop growing. Space contains more energy, more living space, and more resources than we could possibly use.(1)

In fact, give the release of resource constraints, there are good arguments to keep growing--"given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" applies to more than just software. More people is a good thing.

(1) For a really good treatment on this, read Professor John S. Lewis's _Mining the Sky_ http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids-Planets/dp...
What a load of waffle. You still get to write documents, do spreadsheets, you just use different products to do it. Products that have some advantages, and disadvantages.

It is more like changing your brand of cigarette.

Clearly not a follower of logic, are you?
If your aim is to communicate ideas and not simply to offend, then it's a good thing to be willing to accept offending people with the ideas you express (e.g. disagreement, criticism, heresy). However, it's a bad thing for communication to offend people with things that aren't ancillary to those ideas, you fucking retard.

See what I mean?
"The problem with this strategy is, of course, that while News Corporation can certainly strongarm lesser corps into following their actions lock-step, it's notoriously harder to convince a ragtag band of hacker journalists with a wifi card, laptop and camcorder as their biggest overheads to follow suite - they've less to lose, and less for Murdoch to threaten."

The "rag-tag band of hacker journalists" is a silly bit of romanticized fiction. Even if a few "rag-tag" journalists exist, and even if they manage to produce hard news in some semi-legitimate form, they've got to feed their families, too. Real reporters have full-time jobs. They can't do it for free.

One of my biggest pet peeves with the technology industry is that highly paid programmers -- intellectual property professionals! -- act as though content is just some sort of data stream that springs fully formed from the earth's core. They seem to believe that they're entitled free access to this content, and that the "dinosaur" industry of "old media" is doomed to failure because of the overwhelming success of their brilliant new business insights (namely: people like getting stuff for free). In order to believe this myth, however, you need to completely disregard the fact that the rotting corpse of the "old media" is the fuel that keeps the new media going.

Someday soon we're going to reach the end-game: ad-blocking will become ubiquitous in browsers, and this long, strange nightmare of "free" content and "zero marginal costs" will have to yield to the simple reality that content costs money to produce. We've got to stop investing in the childish notion that we can all become bazillionaires by aggregating other people's hard work with a comment thread.
The fact that you are already bringing up all your expertise on redundancy shows that you can think about this better than others and probably give an answer that fits this requirement well.

Unless we completely reinterpret the requirements (as per your suggestion), (s)he really can't. It is impossible to meet the requirement "Architected never to go down."

What actually confuses me more than anything is how wildly the strength of the writer's connection to reality varies. I mean, two of the "requirements" are:

# Architected to never go down

and

# Employs security features

The first is impossible. The second is trivial. All software employs some sort of security feature - the alternative is for the software to be perfectly insecure.

Eh, I dunno.
You're highlighting the throwaway line about 20 years ago at the end of a lengthy and impressive resume. I appreciate that you disagree with him, but that seems like a cheap shot.
The newspaper industry has gotten itself into an interesting predicament.

The reason nobody wants to pay for news online is that they are used to it being free, and that it is so easy to go to a competing newssite if one starts charging. But history shows that people are willing to pay for news - millions have done so for many years via subscriptions and newsstand sales. If all online newssources cost money I'm certain millions would start paying, I know I would. But if only a few started charging I would simply switch to a competing free source. If NY times started charging money I would switch to NY Post.

It's classical game theory - if everyone agrees to charge the industry will be much better off, but if there are a few defectors they will get all the eyeballs and marketshare.

I wrote about it some time ago http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/03/online-news-and-prisoner...
Vreebit: social networking, by no toad
Actually, you're right. One of my favorite webcomic writers has been toiling away in advertising for many years, and now he's finally abandoning all his writing side projects to focus on his novel. It would have been pretty irresponsible of him to do that without a financial cushion from doing advertising, since he has a family. And he need to practice on his free side projects first before producing a novel anyway.
I'm not exactly sure what point you are trying to make with your reply, but let me try to respond the best I can...

Facebook has barely reached cash flow positive, and that only means more money is coming in rather than going out [only stating it for argumentative purposes, I know you understand what it means, of course haha]. So until they are [consistently] making enough revenue to cover part of their $700+ million in VC funding, I won't use them as a successful example. Facebook has plenty of potential, but I have my doubts about how much they can grow in terms of revenue. I believe that their user numbers will continue to grow, but I'm not sure that each user is as valuable for them as for Google. Until they change user behavior and intent significantly, I don't foresee Facebook creating a global marketplace on the scale that Google has.

In regard to business school, which I am in a form of... I do not believe that we are prepared by attending business school to execute, like you stated. We execute by being acutely aware of the circumstances and understanding the situation, which is attained outside of the classroom by seeing and doing. But overall... I am not quite sure what point you meant to make with that section of your reply.

And I agree, picking a business model is in exactly the same realm as deciding what framework/language/database/etc to use. There is definitely NOT a one-size-fits-all business model. The best managers are aware of the options, like you said, but I do not believe that they are necessarily learned in business school. Understanding how Facebook/Twitter got to where they are today, and trying to speculate where they will be in the future is the kind of thing that prepares you to make the right decision in regard to your own business.
I like reading the most top-rated reviews first, kind of like going for the top-rated comments on HN first. Amazon review voters are pretty good at voting mostly for the well-written, balanced reviews. The top-rated review got 458 of 486 votes for being helpful and gave the book four out of five stars. I wouldn't be afraid of it.
I managed to get through the whole thing - and he does make some very good points. Suffice to say though, I would not let this man anywhere near a PR machine anytime soon.

There are ways to express your point and influence people - dropping f-bombs like you just got into middle school is generally not one of them.
I've been suspicious of Murdoch's motivations in the past (vis a vis the particular bias of Fox News) but this for-pay initiative seems like a testable proposition.

If Murdoch can decide, one day, to charge for "news," and if this sentiment is echoed all over, and if it turns into implementation, then it will serve as yet another example of consolidated, command-and-control media. It's one thing to enable an "echo chamber" where dozens of media voices repeat what the others are saying, but changing the business structure of the medium itself will be another thing entirely.

Like some other commenters here, I would like to believe that the sheer numbers involved in the amateur news-generating population would cause Murdoch's strategy to be impossible... and yet, I've witnessed other "impossible" things seemingly happen according to Murdoch's will.
Is anyone else tempted to start giving them some ridiculous suggestions, give plausible-to-non-coder explanations and see if they can successfully refute them?
Y!'s analytics are neat.
I've just started learning Lisp and I find Arc fun. Hence, the suggestion. There are some nice people like coconutrandom, CatDancer, palsecam, zck and conanite who are active and helpful on the forum e.g. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10554. The unofficial code repository Anarki is pretty good too.

People are doing some cool stuff - http://arcfn.com/labels/arduino.html

What's not to like?
I think this article ultimately give devastating critique of that kind of thinking: ... the news business, supported for a hundred years by advertising, whose core skill has been selling advertising, believes it must right away, this second, re-create itself with a new business model where advertising is just the cream on top and where it’s the consumer who pays the true cost of newsgathering.
History of Django's Popularity w/ responses from Alex Martelli and James Bennet
I'd say that getting caught up in a stupid craze is one of the most important learning experiences that a kid can have. One day everybody suddenly starts talking about a new thing, and it seems like it's going to be around forever, so you put all your pocket money into getting as much of it as possible. Then, a few months later everybody starts talking about some other new thing and you're left with no money and a whole lot of stuff which you now realize was worthless all along. Suffer that a few times in childhood and you'll be more immune to it in later life. Spend $30 on football cards when you're eight and you'll be less likely to spend $500,000 on suddenly-inflated real estate when you're 35.

The lesson doesn't work if your parents actually buy you the cards (rather than giving you pocket money and watching with bemused tolerance as you spend it all on slips of cardboard), though, like this kid's parents apparently did.
Bad analogy. It is actually easier to quit smoking cold turkey than gradually. The reason is that a nicotine addiction comes back every time you smoke a cigarette. So if you've just tried to limit your smoking, then you are constantly in the position of craving a cigarette with a recently re-established addiction. You're drawing out the pain. By contrast when you quit cold turkey you have a rough time until the addiction fades, but then it is over.
Makes you wonder what is easy to change. Apart from search, it's all difficult to swap over. In many ways, more difficult then office software or even an OS.

We're getting there.
I think on the internet you have to separate the message from the delivery regardless of the source, this author seems to be making a pretty good effort at making that harder.

That said, I can see the humor in answering a post with a very provocative title in an even more provocative way.

It's just that I think that delivering the message is more important than the 'lol' factor, and maybe in this case the message is important enough that it would have been better served by some more moderate language.

Sure, we're all adults and so on, I'm no shrinking violet myself but I would think twice before writing like that. It's simply not conducive to getting your point across.

And, that's a fact, the points are pretty good. Even if Jason Frieds original article gets misrepresented a bit.

Jason brought that on himself by making his point in a vacuum, after all he had no idea of the backstory, so he shouldn't have used it as the main point of support for his argument.

The trouble now is that Jasons original argument is threatened to be lost because of that, and that's a pity because it too had merit.
I don't know -- but my guess is that Nickb is out of town and away from the internet and news.arc (particularly the older version that newmogul is running) is known to crash periodically and require a reboot.
Twitter may come and go, but newspapers are here to stay
"""It is not, what’s more, merely that Murdoch objects to people reading his news for free online; it’s that he objects to—or seems truly puzzled by—what newspapers have become online. You get a dreadful harrumph when you talk to Murdoch about user-created content, or even simple linking to other sites. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t want it.

Every conversation I’ve had with him about the new news, about the fundamental change in how people get their news—that users go through Google to find their news rather than to a specific paper—earned me a walleyed stare."""

Is this some sort of joke?
A more eye-opening challenge would be: no free-open source software for a month, no services using open source software (no sites running on an open source OS or server etc.) and no operating systems which are even partly open source (so no OSX either).

Another less radical but still quite interesting variant would allow using open source licensed software (BSD, Apache etc.) but no free software (GPL, LGPL etc.).
The current value of Twitter is not in it’s technology, it’s in it’s userbase. You could write a better engine to do what they do, but you can’t convince enough people to use it.
Your suggestion to decentralize essentially has them giving credibility to external sites (who licence their engine) at a cost of what they value most (their users). Once I’m buying t-server from them, a new startup can compete on features..

I’m sure there are lots of good ways for Twitter to make money, but I don’t think that diluting their user base is one of them..