skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
your bitching about comment spam has created more comment spam, than my 1 actual comment.

It's a way to track responses. You don't need to do this in other people's threads, because you can go to "threads" link to see who responded to you.

So how about less bitching and more contributing?
Why not extend jQuery with all these functions? Then we can write things like: jQuery.makeArray(document.getElementsByTagName("div")).inject(..)
"This is an interesting idea, but honestly I'd probably end up rear-ending someone if I did it."

Yes, this idea works best for long stretches of road with little traffic. The 45 mile stretch of highway I drive on is isolated.

"However, have you ever tried programming using text-to-speech? It strikes me as an experience that would be maddening."

Try downloading the evaluation version of DNS and give it a spin. I think you'll feel the potential pretty quickly, especially if you try making custom commands. The cumbersome nature of the speech-to-text interface may prove too much, but it's worth a try right?

What is maddening to me is giving up ~2 hours of the most productive time of the day. I was even desperate enough to try programming on a phone (a Peek email device).

"I have thought about taking a voice recorder with me just to dictate ideas though."

I've tried this as well, and it is not ideal. If you have ever sat down to design something and within minutes you abandon the design to start coding, you'll understand. Coding is the low-energy state.
> VC is only a lifestyle business if you do not fundamentally care about being wildly successful

This conclusion could be applied to any profession. Of course, there are earnings multipliers applied to VCs because the pay scale and bets are larger.
New form of entanglement plays with time and energy
@jacquesm have you thought about eventually sharing the recovered data with Archive.org?
Since you are the creator of the story, you could also settle for going to your list of submissions.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vaksel
Paul Maritz on Future of the Cloud (first few mins of the video)
I'm curious as to how you are dealing with potential copyright issues. (Or, for that matter, how archive.org and the like approach these problems.)
It's not surprising; it's frustrating and abusive. I'm not blaming them for acting like a company; I'm blaming the conditions that allow them to become abusive monopolies with no incentive to invest in infrastructure.
Here are the steps I take:

1.

Round up the competition sites. At least 3-5.

2.

Go to:
http://tools.seobook.com/link-tools/backlinks/backlinks.php
and type in each of the competition sites one by one.

3.

See who linked to the competition and try to get a link back from there.
You're confusing completely separate issues.

Executive compensation is the issue of outrageous salaries paid to the CEO and top few individuals in a company. As a culture we've come to forget the the CEO of a public company is generally a caretaker, not an owner. And complications around corporate governance make it hard for shareholders to make their ire felt.

Wall St bonuses is the result of a culture that has arisen among very performance driven people who deal with large sums of money. Because you want them to perform, and can measure performance, you want to reward them for their performance. Which means paying salary, not bonuses. Because they regularly handle large amounts of money you want them to be honest. Which means you need to reward them well enough to make them hard to bribe. This naturally leads to outrageous amounts of compensation, which is largely delivered as bonuses.

So the first issue is a case of widespread poor corporate governance, while the second issue is a very unequal, but economically efficient, way to operate in certain lines of business.
Then everyone would need Old Glory Robot Insurance. Because robots eat your medications!

http://www.robotmarketplace.com/video_oldglory_hi.html
s/VCs/investors/ is also true
The columns remind me of the let's-converge-to-the-classics-in-the-safest-way-possible-because-we-lack-guts-and-imagination in "The Fountainhead", by Ayn Rand.
Looks like a very nice phone indeed. Interface wise though, they're miles off, does not look easy to use in the slightest.

Edit: clarification of point.
Yes, absolutely, we've been going back and forth during the last days of the crawl and sharing seed lists, they had plenty I didn't have and vv.

Now we're going to merge both sets, for technical reasons (they need their data in a specific 'full headers' format) I'll be on the receiving end, then later archive.org will recrawl all of reocities.

Then there is 'textfiles', they also did a crawl and we will share data as well.

In the end we should be able to recover pretty much all of it, including the international sites.
This seals the deal for me, I will be buying a Droid the day they come out. Anyone want to buy a Blackberry Tour? :)
I pretty much agree completely.

The place it normally gets interesting with this approach is where exactly do you put the demark, especially in the FTTN world. Since you are going to most likely want the public utility to own the DSLAMs in areas with low/medium (eg, suburbs) population density, because the area covered by a cabinet is so small (because technologies like VDSL2+ have such a small optimal zone) and rack space in cabinets is normally at a high premium.

You are also going to most likely want the public utility to own the fibre backhaul from the cabinets to a central exchange. Because of port density constraints and the fact that the DSLAM is probably going to need to be managed by the public utility to stop access seekers doing silly things that affect other access seekers customers.

Now the public utility is also going to need some Ethernet switches to split this out to the various access seekers. Then you have issues of regional backhaul etc...

The issues are different again with the PON (Passive optical networks) family of technologies, but you can pretty much swap DSLAM for POLT, though the customer densities change the economics a bit.

With ISPs handling regional level aggregation and backhaul would probably be the optimal level in my mind at this point in time. But it is becoming interesting what the ISPs role really is anymore, once you take such a large amount of the infrastructure management off their hands. Since it would seem to be in between a traditional consumer ISP and an ISP that purely does transit.
The problem is that Wall St. makes money by taking big risks and passing the losses on to the taxpayers. What would Goldman's profits be without the TARP bailout and the AIG bailout? I suspect Goldman would not have survived.

Of course, the solution is not to regulate pay, but to allow the big banks to fail ( I think the whole too big to fail argument is a lot of hooey, there a lot of ways to allow a bank to fail without causing contagious destruction).
I would expand that to "everyone's needs are different and the domain of 'groupware' is tying the different workflows together globally" - an inherently hard problem.
By subsidizing rural/suburban living we encourage it and thus people waste more time commuting, wasting fuel, increasing traffic, requiring more subsidies (larger roads) and so on.

Interesting that you would pivot from a pro-market position into a social engineering one. Those two usually don't go together.

Look I've paid for the T-1 line to be ran 200 miles so I could have high-speed internet -- and I did this back when you could count the number of T-1s in my area on both hands. So I don't mind only having those who can afford it pay for it.

But I also understand that this country is huge, and spread out. And I don't want to encourage people to live anywhere. If you asked my druthers, I'd want them staying at home in rural America, on fiber, and living more of the agrarian life that the urban one. But that's not the point.

The point is that the community as a whole has a vested interest in infrastructure: roads, power lines, and communication. It's the same argument as national defense: government does really badly at some things, but there are some things that it's the only effective player to pool resources and common interests. That's not a license for socialism, that's just saying that a piece of wire to every home -- phone, power, or internet -- is a political issue much like how many aircraft carriers we need. If we left it up to individuals to decide the response wouldn't be uniform enough, and uniformity is the one requirement that these attributes need to have.

Communication and electric power aren't like pork bellies and automobiles -- they are extensions of our powers as individuals: our power to innovate, collaborate, discover, and create. Hell, it's more like gun ownership than buying pork-chops at the supermarket. They are a hell of a lot more critical than health care or consumer protection.

I'm absolutely for a maximized free market. But the argument here is that limited communication abilities reduces information in the market, stifles innovation, and limits choices. That's why I chose the greater freedom of universal high-speed connectivity -- not as a government bureaucracy, but as government defining the markets so that all the players meet all the needs.
The article says that the JVM sits on top of a micro kernel, so I would assume that that micro kernel would provide a thin layer of abstraction for hardware and IO support such as file-systems. Its an interesting concept if you couple it with something like EC2 where you could throw out a bunch of Java VMs to do massive parallel processing of a data-set.
The same as everybody else, simply ask to have your stuff removed and it will be done, easy as that.

I don't claim copyright over anything but the http://reocities.com/ and http://reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html pages at this point, all the rest is owned by the respective users.

The funny thing is though, that was my question before doing this, and I figured it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, first let's get it done.

Much to my surprise the only mail I've got so far is people that are literally ecstatic that their pages weren't lost and people that send me their backups for inclusion.

Not a single removal request. Though I'm sure that in time that will happen.
These programs tend to screw the middle class, the definition of which is actually pretty low (~50k/yr) I think. Sure if your parents work at McDonald's you will probably get a bunch of grants, but if not you are footing the bill.
Have you considered the ramifications of becoming a replacement for GeoCities, as opposed to just an archive of it?

(Saying "no" to this question isn't a bad thing! Sometimes the most interesting projects are a result of doing something because it's possible, and thinking about what that means later.)
"Seems like a rehash of the broken window fallacy."

Unlike with the broken window fallacy, you're not just breaking a window and creating jobs to create that same window again. The jobs created are actually going to make an entirely different set of products that the market wasn't creating before due to a flaw in the way the market was designed by the people who set it up.

That's also why assigning value to carbon is different than assigning value to restaurants. Because of the way the market was designed we have the roughly the right number of restaurants, but way too much carbon.

The important thing to realize is that the market didn't just happen, it was designed by people, and it can be designed differently. In the same way that we don't allow people to, say, dumb garbage in a public park just because they may want to under some idealized market fantasy, we shouldn't allow people to dump unlimited carbon in the atmosphere either.

The market is a tool, invented by people, as the most efficient way to distribute resources to those who value them the most. But as a tool, we need to understand how it works, where it breaks down, and how to apply it effectively to create the kind of society we want to live in. We can't just treat it as some kind of religious construct, where it's magically going to write the laws, vaccinate the children, clean up dogshit from the street, etc.

That's why cap-and-trade is so good, because it uses the power of the market to create the kind of society we want to live in. (As opposed to those who argue that we should live in the kind of society the market wants to create, whatever this means, frankly I have no idea and I don't think the people who advocate it have thought it through enough to realize that it literally doesn't make any sense, it's just empty words.)
Interactive Explanation of Trade Rigging
I've lost count of the number of times Zombies came up in our Philosophy of Mind classes. The classic question was always "if consciousness can be entirely reduced to physical phenomena, then isn't the only difference between a zombie and a person that they have different brain states (or a lack of certain ones)?"

That made people very uncomfortable about a lot of things, and really demonstrated the group feeling that consciousness has to be some other substance. A lot of great conversations about verifiability, positivism, philosophy of mind, and naturalism/materialism were started with Zombies.
Understanding (the path to knowledge) might be hierarchical but knowledge in general isn't. Organizing knowledge in hierarchies is a conventional teaching technique, and that has some self-fulfilling qualities: if you teach people in hierarchies, they'll see the world that way.
Firstly, Art is actually a math professor, and dealing with the low standards of incoming students is a major concern. I don't think he is "divorced from the sad state of actual math education today."

But even more, you say:

> ... taught axiomatically, Algebra and Geometry
> ARE interesting in and of themselves

Perhaps to you, but I deal with students for whom this is absolutely not interesting. They're not interested in puzzles, they're not interested in challenges, they're not interested in anything except texting their friends and talking about films, TV, clothes, football, etc. They don't want to be challenged.

I think we all agree that classes in general should be stimulating and interesting, andshould be better tailored to suit the needs of the individuals, but that's the problem. For a given child we don't know what they'll need, and we don't know what they'll like, and every answer will be different.

The problem is "one class fits all" and that's not going to change simply by re-writing the curriculum.
I guess this means that the best way for Universities to advertise is by having an iconic clock tower that is in every animated television show with high-school or college-age protagonists. I think Keio and Waseda are objectively better schools (in Tokyo), but they clearly do not advertise as well as Todai. ;)
Lost in Translation or Why GWT Isn’t the Future of Web Development
I think I must be the only person in the world that likes the default Android UI. This and HTC's interpretation are ugly and unusable in my opinion.

Looks like Verizon also killed off the unlock pattern?
Anatomy of SSDs
BEA LiquidVM has been doing this for several years. Don't know what happened to it after Oracle acquired BEA...
Rails + Google Analytics = easy goal tracking
"Talent" in finance is not equal to raw skill and intelligence. A great deal of an bank employee's value is connections across the finance industry and access to inside information. While there are many highly intelligent people in the world, there are very few who have the requisite experience and domain expertise within different segments of the finance industry to attract millions (possibly billions) of dollars in new business to their company or make a similar amount trading.
A few random clicks brought me this:

http://www.reocities.com/Area51/1997/rants/oj.htm

How could I have known OJ was involved with covering up the moon landing hoax without geocites? I forgot how much fun random readings of goecites could be.

I'm partying like its 1999. Thanks so much for this effort! The epic struggle to save the cities was fascinating. Geek-heroism at its finest.
Tom Foremski had an interesting perspective "GOOG CEO Predicts A Predictable Future Web - Stunning Absence Of Any Real Insights" http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/10/goog...
At that point, you should be complaining about the bailout money (which you've identified as the actual problem), not the bonuses (which you now seem to be claiming are a result of the problem). Arguing against bonuses due to TARP amounts to saying "The mortgage bubble -- propelled by massive government intervention -- has popped. The bailout, another massive government intervention, has had disastrous consequences. The obvious solution is more massive government intervention."

At some point, it has to stop. So I agree -- let the banks fail.
No, it exemplifies what's wrong in the GSA-style procurement system, where the process is deliberately complicated and biased towards a small number of institutionally-accepted contract holders. It has nothing at all to do with the bare concept of an RFP, and does not reflect the nature of RFPs outside of FedGov.
Yes, I did. Not rigorously but sort of back-of-the-envelope. But I'll deal with that when the requests come in, the first stop for me now is to get complete coverage.

Then to couple the content to user accounts and to give a modicum of control back to the real owners of the content.

After that there are two possible avenues, the first one is a site where no new accounts are accepted and you can only remove or update files that are already there (mostly to save people from embarrassment).

The second option would be to open up new account creation, but that's a different kettle of fish. It would require some major development in terms of spam and abuse control and dealing with that. We have some of that for ww.com (nsfw, most of the times it is, but you never know if some 'jerk' is being an ass), so we can use that or expand it.

My first thought would be to identify a number of users as neighborhood cops.

I'm sure that will be a workable solution, but we're still a ways away from that.

The next big milestone will be complete coverage, after that we will move to more functionality.

Webcounters, webrings and so on will all be restored as far as possible.
Self-Parking Car from Stanford and Volkswagen
If we adopted broken windows as a policy (rather than a one-off surprise event), you'd be creating jobs making an entirely different set of products that the market wasn't creating before: unbreakable windows, windowless buildings and wall hangings of the outdoors (to make windowless buildings less depressing).

So your argument (if valid) would seem to support equally well an economic benefit from a broken windows policy.

It's possible that a carbon tax might stave off a future disaster, but that's vastly different from creating "the biggest economic boom in US history". That's nonsense. A carbon tax will harm our economy, though perhaps not as much as the predicted disaster to come.

Similarly, a "no dumping garbage" law would also not create an economic boom, even if it is less harmful than garbage filled parks.
Is the LinkedIn Platform Dead?
These "tons of highly intelligent and competent people" will probably not sit down and roll their fingers in either case. Rather, programs like this drains brain power from other sectors of the economy. There is an alternative usage for most resources! ANY new program would not increase our wealth. Building pyramids, for example, is just a waste of resources. Even if it would "create" a great deal of jobs for construction engineers, it would take away resources from _useful_ production.

The increased demand for carbon licenses does not come out of thin air. Someone does pay for it - while reducing other expenses!
You were downvoted because you are intentionally misusing HN. Get a delicious account. I type "g delicious ENT" to bookmark a site with delicious; it couldn't be easier.

I will admit that I agree with your "I can afford to lose the points" sentiment. I always read the -4 and +20 comments first, so when I get downmodded to -4 it means that I get more eyeballs than I would at +1. An occasional joke that gets modded to +60 means that I can afford to troll as often as I like.

</cynical observation>

(Incidentally, you and I have the lowest average post score among the top 30 users. I think I just made a friend :)
I second that. If you are using Java, simply return Collections.unmodifiableList(listObject);
Are you saying that calling out evil is in itself evil?
While pixel density obviously isn't making leaps and bounds, Apple's products are pretty consistently over 100 ppi (not to mention the iphone at 160 ppi):

27-inch new iMac display (2560x1440) - 109 ppi

21.5-inch new iMac display (1920x1080) - 102 ppi

15-inch MacBook Pro (1440x900) - 113 ppi

30-inch Cinema Display (2560x1600) - 101 ppi
You may enjoy this article as it offers an interesting generalization of your thesis:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JK25Dj06.html
Excellent. I wish you well, of course. I'm not a guy who personally believes in intellectual property, so I wasn't trying to cast any aspersions on your project.

I didn't figure that you were claiming copyright over any one else's material. I just wasn't sure that removal after the fact was sufficient to avoid legal troubles for "reproducing" their works without permission.

I expect that the vast majority of the content producers will be pleased to see their works live on. I admit to not having checked out the site itself: are you going to provide them means to keep the pages updated, as well? Under similar terms to their Geocities pages.. whatever those were?
Just be aware that you're not only restricting the size of the projects you take on, but also the selection of clients you have to work with. Some very excellent projects will require competitive proposals for you to get in the door.
It depends on what you want to use it for. I've found that doing exploratory web development in Scheme is really painful.

You are basically on your own, and have to develop everything from scratch. For example, if you want to make a simple get request from the twitter API and examine the results, you've got to be prepared to do a lot of work in extracting it out (unless you are a scheme guru).

If you want to authenticate with OAuth, good luck with that, you'll have to write your own OAuth library from scratch.
An Insiders Look at Startup Weekend
Speed ~ Country_Size appears to be significant.
My favorite so far was this:

Jason Kottke blogged about geocities going down:

http://kottke.org/09/10/walter-millers-home-page

Then someone told him the page was up at reocities and he linked to it, but lamented that one of his favorite pages wasn't up, 'cartoon girls I wanna nail'.

So I got an email from one of his 'fans' if I could restore that page pronto, so I did and mailed him :)

http://www.reocities.com/TelevisionCity/1356/cartoon2.htm
A suggestion: if people request removal, of course remove it from the public-facing archive, but don't completely delete their pages. Keep everything around as a private archive until it's appropriate to release publicly.

Consider letters from the Civil War. Publishing them a few years after the war would have been a gross violation of someone's privacy. But now they are an invaluable primary source historians have for understanding the era.

GeoCities was the web in its infancy. We know what that was like because we remember it, even took part in it. People in 100 years will want insight into that time period as well.