skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came here to post just that. I drift in and out of Mac fandom, but the text in that ad is inspirational every time.

Also, has any other ad anywhere ever done a better job of defining a culture (at least an aspirational one)?
Ask HN: where do I find newspaper circulation figures?
Where do I find the circulation figures for the top five newspapers in the top twenty countries?

For the past week I have been unsuccessfully searching for the circulation numbers on the top five newspapers in the G20. Circulation figures are tremendously important to the media industry. They are a principal determinant of advertising rates and last week there were many reports on the quarterly circulation figures falling for the top five US newspapers.

Are there any publically-available services that provide this kind of industry-level data? Would this kind of thing be an interesting counterpart to wikipedia, think a community-driven forrestor research?
Right. People don't understand conditional probability.
Hacker Dojo is probably ideal. I hate having "real" discussions at Blue Chalk. It's decently quiet around 1pm, but it gets pretty loud around 5pm and later. So unless you guys hold it at a decently quiet venue, i probably won't bother attending.
Except it's not always the right choice. How many times do you have to go out and regret it before learning to say no?
Google allows kids to get treats
Does this chart know they are fit?
Exactly. They weren't told they must open the envelope. The last team figured this out and (presumably) timed it so that their 2 hours coincided with the 3 minute presentation time.
Fiscal support services for independent artists
This is nonsense. Is any of it supposed to add insight to any of these software development issues? It's barely even defined what their position is. It is a vague, amateurish rehash of some of the currently popular thoughts discussed among many of the more insightful people in our industry (who are also much better writers).
see I don't know why people hate on {perl,awk,sed}. To me, these are the best tools available for data munging and they're just too damn convenient. However, I always get the feeling that my efficiency takes a hit when I try to be too clever.
If I take a job as a hit man, and I always manage to kill my targets I am also making my customers happy, but I would hardly claim that I was being ethical.

{edit} To expand on that, the legality of what is being done doesn't matter either. There are many unethical things that are still legal (e.g. patent trolls, large companies burying competition through using the legal system as a money drain, suing someone for defamation/slander just to shut them up about something that is true but you don't want anyone to know about, etc).

And it wasn't 'above the board' either, because it's not like they told the restaurant what they were doing. If I call ahead and book a table for two that I have no intention of using unless I can scalp/pawn it off on someone else, how am I being ethical by lying to the restaurant? {/edit}
Why not take ALL the reservations, and then force EVERY customer that wants to eat there to buy them from you?

Because you're fucking up the social contract that restaurants have with their customers.
It will come, eventually. But probably not in the form you expect.
I don't know about the rest of the web, but I don't use persistant cookies. I'd always see the 'newbie' stuff.

Most sites I've seen tend to put newbie stuff on separate pages. To seem especially friendly you could use an easy-to-spot greeting/more info link-area - NEW HERE? - 'above the fold' without dedicating a lot of front-page space.
5 great business books to read
"Breaking rules isn't what caused the recent wall street collapse it was a lack of looking ahead at consequences of actions."

Not really. All the people who caused the problem are still employed and still rich. So for those entrepreneurs, they are still succeeding. It is the USA public who are failing at being entrepreneurs, not Wall Street.
eating more? Now, that's something I'm really good at.
Google Wave is not in beta. It's in public preview. Right now they're not interested in being useful to you or any other user; they're still building and designing the damn thing. The only reason they let you on is so they have a bunch of new user activity to process.

The very fact that people are complaining that it's disappointing means that Google is doing just fine. It might be disappointing to you, the eager early adopter, but it's not stupid on their part. The very fact that you want to have all your friends come use it (I do too) means that whenever Google does decide to open the tap, they will have all the users they want.

The network effect is crucial for getting a new communications tool off the ground. And as soon as Google wants to take advantage of the network effect, they'll give you and me some more invitations and I assure you, we won't have any problem finding folks to accept. In the meantime, we're still playing in Google's sandbox.

EDIT: Incidentally, as further evidence of the fact that Google is leveraging exactly as much of the network effect as they feel like leveraging: the thing it does where anybody in your GMail contacts is automatically added to your Google Wave contact list is fuckin' brilliant. It's a great way to encourage use, by making sure that as many people as I'm likely to be interested in using Wave with are directly accessible to be contacted, without my even having to say, 'So, did you get a Google Wave invite? Let me know when you're in and we'll chat!'
+1 for WriteRoom. I write all of my blog posts there and then migrate them over to Wordpress. I wrote most of our initial business plan in WriteRoom as well. The biggest lesson: formatting is a distraction. Worry about it only after you've got content.

Generally I'm also a big fan of full-screen things -- I live and die by my full-screen, light-colored-on-black Emacs.app.
Of course, there's subconscious gender bias. In fact, there's conscious gender bias. Girls are naturally born with cooties, which is utterly intolerable.

As far as being discriminated against, I'm not quite sure how to answer that. My investors don't discriminate against me; I discriminate against my investors. They can't be gay or Jewish.
I'd be curious to know the dollar range(not exact price, obviously) these folks charge for the logo design.
Conquer Your Fears, Lose Weight, Be Happy and Feel Great
> the people running the project optimize it for themselves

This is pretty reasonable, if you think about it: it's worth making life nice for the people donating hundreds or thousands of hours of their time to answer questions, as well as for the people who only plan to interact with the system for a couple of questions.

To the OP: Try the http://gmane.org/ NNTP/web mirrors of mailing lists, if you don't want to sign up for them. In particular, reading lists via NNTP from gmane in Thunderbird is pretty nice, with real threaded discussions going back as far as you want, and no need to sign up, etc. (screenshot: http://hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/TextMate/gmane-thunderbird.png)

I really think the main problem is not the concept of mailing lists (and email/nntp) generally, but instead, as you suggest, the software that runs it. Google groups/mailman/etc. are all IMO pretty crappy from both maintainer and user perspectives, but they work well enough that no one's really putting effort into better mailing list software. Likewise, most mail clients are pretty crappy –either unconfigurable or with a difficult learning curve for configuration, with insufficiently easy-to-set-up and insufficiently flexible rule systems, etc. – when you get down to it. I should be able to absolutely instantly (<10 seconds) set up my email client to filter for only replies to my topics or mentions of my name in a particular mailing list (for example), but currently this is an involved process in every mail client I've ever used.

Of course, email is so so so much better for extended technical discussions than any web forum I've seen, that we all stick with it despite its flaws.
The lesson was: don't let funding distract you from identifying the most valuable resources available to you. At worst, the cases you mention break the rules in rather insignificant ways. All three scenarios can quite plausibly be done entirely within the rules as defined, even if they didn't quite make it in reality.

Presumably, there were much less creative solutions that also failed to entirely obey all stipulations. It was an exercise, not a contest.
I don't think you would lose any dignity by asking for a Wave invite.
700 die from swine flu this week
Yes, thanks, I know gmane, it's a pretty good solution.
I love how Canada somehow spends less time eating out than the US but somehow ends up 10% less obese.
Jon Skeet is an MVP Again
Doesn't deserve a downvote. The video is a rickroll.
Mailing lists work exactly because of your complaint - they force you to stick around longer than you would with a webforum or IRC. If the list is good you'll say "yeah, I want to see what else is going on with this project." If you're purely an end-user it's much more frustrating, of course.

My main gripe about mailing lists is that I prefer using digest mode because it loads faster over webmail. But if I use it, it becomes non-trivial to reply to a particular discussion thread.

Really, that isn't a huge gripe, in the grand scheme of things.

As for "good lists" - pretty much any active project with a topic you're interested in will have some discussion.
Actually the lesson was about managing valuable resources, not gaming the system. It was a warning that the system can be distracting and can easily confine your thinking.
Will New Internet Domain Names Change the Web?
Hm, is using tau a standard convention?

I've thought pi is horrible... and adopted using a loopy pi as 2pi. I loop the first vertical line over the horizontal, right, and then make it the horizontal, and so on. If that makes any sense.

I'm thinking of making a LaTeX package containing it... (and also some other personal conventions)

Also, to strengthen your point, 2pi makes the radian system a lot more natural.
I was using 64-bit processors and OSs a couple years before Intel shipped IA64. Try to google SPARC and MIPS.

What AMD did was to extend the x86 ISA with a handful extra registers and double the size of all of them. This allowed x86 to survive until these days, slowed down the migration towards 64-bit computing and confined much better architectures to specific niches.

No, I will not thank AMD for that.
Maybe that's how he started with $10,000 and built a $800,000 company in only 10 months. Dude's like a customer service (and marketing) machine.

I argued with a friend the other day that his success was just a perfect storm of such things as "great idea", "great implementation", "lucky timing", and a few other things.

But on reflection, and talking it out, we came to the conclusion that his obsessive attention to customer service and business transparency where the true multiplier that basically got him to the freedom line in less than a year instead of the 5 years it should have taken him.
NYT's First 5,000 Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud
While it's true that procuring material/financial support from a man isn't the necessity it used to be for women, I would suggest they are still hard-wired, to an extent, as well as socially conditioned to be attracted to men with available resources (also consider the increasingly popular belief that an acceptable lifestyle requires two incomes.) Keep in mind, too, that emotional support is likely considered by women more important than it used to be. They are less likely today to be satisfied with a man who just goes to work everyday and is then distant and uninvolved in domestic life. This is another reason for women to be selective of their mate for what he can provide (rather than just who he is,) despite their opportunity to be financially self-sufficient.
XML or S-expressions?
Hints of Missed Chance to Pursue Galleon Case
Why would I want to intentionally deprive my brain of oxygen for more than a few seconds? Programming's already hard enough.
Retention is a very good reason to do so; replacing someone good is always hard (and expensive) in terms of hiring and ramp-up times. If you don't adjust your employees' salaries to reduce the incentive to job-hop in order to get a raise, you're basically asking your best employees to leave.
Writing to Learn
In theory it's not always the right choice.

But in practice, choosing to be social instead of skulking around on the internet or watching TV by myself at home has turned out to be the right choice 100% of the time.
> I really think the main problem is not the concept of mailing lists (and email/nntp) generally, but instead, as you suggest, the software that runs it.

Making email better is undervalued. Love to see startups help extend it.
Wow, I never would have thought but my girlfriend just said the exact same thing. She doesn't like looking at feet and thinks they're gross.
Why is Apple treading water with the Apple TV?
I of course have a copy of Strunk and White somewhere around my house. But I use other resources for careful editing. I appreciate the HN participant who first brought my attention to Pullum's article on Strunk and White,

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...

which does much to explain why I don't follow Strunk and White point by point when doing careful editing.

Link to HN thread about Pullum's article, including suggestions of sources of better writing advice:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557618
That's definitely what has me interested; we have the standard MySQL + memcache (plus svn, to make things interesting) stack, and the idea of of nonvolatile "shortcut" around MySQL built into our cacheing system is very appealing.
EWD32: Meditations on Advanced Programming
We're running about 90 terabytes of mogile storage containing 20-30 million files and haven't had any problems at all. If we do, the plan is to shard them along the same lines as our database sharding. I don't know of any other products apart from S3 that could have made our file hosting as stress free as it is. What kind of scaling problems have you had?
Woah, are you calling Joel Spolsky insightful? Ahahahahahaaha.
Hello-Wien Linux live-cd for console users released
What bearing does that have on the current discussion? Are you implying the H1N1 vaccine was rushed? Neither the seasonal nor H1N1 vaccines were particularly "rushed," anymore than they usually are. We were lucky with the H1N1 being easy to predict, which is why we have a fair amount of it.

Calling it "rushed" in any way that significantly increases the vaccine's risk factors seems to be unsupported, accordig to the experts I've heardtalk on the subject.
Ask HN: Life insurance?
I saw a few threads on here about health insurance for entrepreneurs, but didn't see any on life insurance. Any advice on that? Is it necessity for a late-20s generally healthy single male? I'm trying to calculate my total costs, strongly considering leaving my job, and any advice would be much appreciated!
These two services behave so differently, it's hard to do a real cost breakdown. It depends on your app. Here are some issues with comparisons between EY and Heroku (I'm leaving Joyent out because I have no experience with them):

1. There's no reason to believe that 6 mongrels on an EY small EC2 instance == 6 thins on whatever EC2 size Heroku is using. They need to be benchmarked.

2. DB Performance needs to be benchmarked. EY uses MySQL, Heroku uses Postgres or Amazon RDS (MySQL). I've heard that their postgres db is substantially faster than RDS.

3. Heroku gives you varnish, and it doesn't cost you any dynos. If you can use cache control headers, varnish is your friend. On EY you'll likely use Rack::Cache, which is fine, but it hits a mongrel. Heroku also does gzip and SSL before it hits your server, also saving you cycles.

4. App server redundancy with EY is expensive since you need a whole other small EC2 instance, with Heroku all your dynos are spread out.

5. If you want instant database failover (using MySQL replication), this is a extremely easy on EY, with Heroku it takes more work, you have to launch your own RDS instances. Of course, a small RDS instance is only $80/mo, beating EY and Heroku's DB offerings on price. RDS will have replication soon, probably at a lower price than EY. Of course, neither EY and Heroku haven't to my knowledge announced plans to drop their prices in November when amazon drops their EC2 prices by 15%. This would make both more competitive vs RDS.

6. EY likely has a better economy of scale, a 5ECU EY instance ($197 vs $125 for a 1ECU small) is probably more cost effective for CPU heavy requests than Heroku Dynos.

7. EY support ain't free. Keep in mind that EY support and monitoring are only there if you pay major extra $ on top of your infrastructure. It can easily nearly double your costs depending on your plan.

The cost of either one really will vary depending on which features you use heavily.
Team 4 phoned a rich family member and got him to donate $1000 to their effort.
... but those who need it wouldn't take it.
I'm writing a blog post.
I'm going to entitle it "Set Yourself On Fire".
It's gonna be all about how warm it is when you set yourself on fire.

Seriously though, isn't there a difference between taking a risk and taking a risk that might pay off? If you're going to make yourself uncomfortable don't do it on blind faith, have a reason for it.
"It doesn't help that the most popular software (Mailman/Pipermail) is mediocre."

Sounds like a business opportunity.
is hilarious?
I think that list misses one very important book: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. The people who are most successful in business understand people, and that's what this book teaches. Understanding people and being good at interacting with people will take you a lot further in business than reading about why our economy failed.
Making Privacy Policies not Suck
Things Google has taught us
Real estate lebanon | lands in lebanon
Search for Real Estate in Lebanon: Villa, Appartment, Houses, Land, Office,Chalet, Cabin ...
Metadata in State Documents Is Public Record, Court Rules
If you have no dependents then you don't necessarily have a need for life insurance. I never bought life insurance until I was ready to have a child, and I think that was the correct decision for me.

If you have any near-term plans to get married or have children, then buying term life insurance now might make sense. It's cheaper to buy when you're younger, but on the other hand you don't want to pay for several years of insurance that you don't end up needing.
Whenever I see CouchDB my dyslexia sees DoucheBag.

Related: apologies for my tourette's.
Where does e come into this specifically? That is, why does 5^(i*pi) have an imaginary part?
Profil de sexyamour - Skyrock.com
The claims read a lot like a system described in a Tom Clancy novel published in the late 80s.

That system was used to discover the source of leaked classified materials. It generated unique versions for each recipient by substituting equivalent text.
Also, if you don't mind paying for stuff, Launchbar is the shit.
Practical composability for trustworthy architectures
That's true, and I totally agree with you. I guess my comment came out wrong. What I meant to say was that I don't see what the problem is for the purposes of the assignment.

Obviously the rules for doing business on Wall Street, where decisions can impact millions of people, and the rules for this business class assignment are going to be different.
Scary SQL Server stuff
That's one of the main things executives bring to the table in a business: connections.
i've been playing salamander wrestling and underwater hockey the past few months. they're great!!! it's like zen meditation breathing exercises. it's also super fun. and yeah, my breathing is improving tons. (water is the awesome)

edit: i just wanted to convey that breathing better, especially in underwater sports, is rewarding and fun. trying hold one's breath a single time for a long time is goofy as other commenters have pointed out.
The article is all gushy and starry eyed about the "printed circuits" and how durable they might be. The metal ink used to print them melts at 140˚F. Your car in the summer can reach 200˚F.

So they're all great and durable until you leave them in your car. Or too close to your oven. Or on top of the coffee maker.
What if it was counted because the teacher thought making the deal was where they made the money, not in the classroom. They made their money in the 2 hours, but delivered their service afterwards, which doesn't contradict her guideline.
How habitable is the Earth?
Mailing lists are a way to collect high volume discussions on a topic in a way that can be quickly scanned and searched. I can route everything through GMail or other mail client, then use a single set of tools to manage my conversations and "tasks" that arise from those conversations. In my case, I've set up my mail clients to let me do most everything without taking my hands off the keyboard, just "shoveling" mail through via shortcuts. I also have mail filters that shunt different lists into different folders for searching later.

Web forums are fine for many people, but they drive me nuts. Too much clicking and too many pageloads, at least for the forums I have seen. This breaks my communication "flow" and leaves me feeling unwilling to spend any more time at the forum. It _is_ true that it is easier to drop in and ask a quick help question in a forum, as you point out, but that doesn't outweigh the fact I usually never want to visit the forum again. More fundamentally, my async store/forward communication happens in my email client, I don't like having to switch to other programs.

Now, don't get me wrong. Mailing list discussions are far from perfect. In particular it's easy for the entire discussion to be hijacked by a few hot topics. (Not necessarily trolls, although that works too.) This inflates volume and drives away people who would otherwise make great contributions. I've seen this repeatedly.

Really what I'd like is something that is to mailman what git was to version control -- a way for me to opt in to different "versions" of a mailing list potentially managed by different people but sharing the same core message flows. Something that would let me avoid needing to keep my own set of killfiles updated for each list all the time.

The Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer sort of tried this, but their focus wasn't on different filters. They never had that many nodes anyway. The other thing I've seen is people self-tagging posts with [<keyword>] in the title, but that is brittle and still requires me to create new filters on the fly.
Oh also, if the project happens to have an IRC channel, those can be excellent places to ask these kinds of one-off questions. Depends on the project of course but instant messaging is pretty good for the quick help kind of thing.
I thought this ICANN decision just opened the way for internationalized TLDs, and that the rest of the domain name was already internationalized. Thanks to anyone who can help clarify this.
I think it's meant as parody, not insighful advice... ;)
Do you really think it's reasonable to compare Wall Street to these lemonade-stand kinds of business school assignments?

I'm starting to think there should be a "Godwin's Law" corollary -- as any discussion thread grows, the probability of comparisons to Wall Street approaches 1.
Speculating is silly unless there's evidence. This isn't for Hacker News.
They also have an open office in what is essentially a warehouse. It must be deafeningly loud.
In general I think the problem is just laziness; the people running the project optimize it for themselves (active participants) rather than their users.

Unless your users are actually contributing money or time (most won't), I'd call that smart, not lazy.
Java is the new C.