skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nope, it is deliberate. The developer announced on the Business of Software forums that he was sharing it. Some of us around those parts do -- it answers what is far and away the most common question from newbies, provides for some external motivation, and satisfies a little bit of the human urge to know you're not totally alone in the endeavor.
It's not 8 million people.

Each court order lasts for 60 days, for a ping every 3 minutes, which is 28800 per order.

So the 8 million could actually be as low as 278 orders.
Yeah, exactly. I wonder if that's why Fox features so much insane commentary? News is fairly easy to get, even primary sources are easy to get, but a community of like-minded people is still worth something.

I bet people watch Fox because they want to hear the commentary of people who share their political beliefs, not because they want to know what's going on in the world.

Kind of like reading Hacker News for the comments.
Let Murdoch throw his temper tantrum. Google should black-hole every one of his sites.
Back when I was running a service called Feed Digest (which I went on to sell - mostly due to the issue I'm raising here - now known as Feed Informer) this was a common problem. Not just with Craigslist, but with feeds from Google and all over the place. We wouldn't hit a single feed any more than once every 30 minutes but getting whitelisted everywhere was an exhausting task and ensuring you could always get the feeds for your users to reprocess was so difficult that I was heavily turned off of getting into a "man in the middle" situation like that again.
well looking at this data you can tell two things:

business is dying, less and less signups every day and their premium membership is next to zero

hardly numbers, you'd want to shout from the rooftop
He also talked about it here as well http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971498
This post by him seems to be just another version of Theory X & Theory Y (mis)management, with a twist of "child psychology" to fool the subordinates with motivational stuffs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y
Minnesota DWI Mandatory Sentences
Fraud is much less likely here than on PayPal, for example, for multiple reasons:

a- Card present. Chances of fraud when the card is swiped are much lower than when it isn't (for obvious reasons).
b- Signature. This lets you have a basic form of authentication for the user after the fact (oh, didn't make this purchase? Why is this your signature?)
c- Location. Each purchase is tagged with the GPS coordinates from the phone.
d- If need be, pictures. You could always snap a quick photo of the cardholder if the transaction comes up as a serious fraud risk.

Yes, there are still risks of the person skimming your card info, or stealing your CC number another way, but these are risks present in the entire credit card system.

It's certainly much safer than PayPal, and they're doing alright.
Not everyone has the visibility and rabid fanbase of a 50 Cent, so my initial thought would be how one could adapt this aspects of connecting with an audience on a more micro level.

As a respected member of the blogging community, the established, albeit smaller bloggers of the world have a unique opportunitiy to connect with a like-minded audience, and this interaction isn't leveraged enough.
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Why not let HeyZap do the experiment and follow up if it works?
He's done more good through his site and the $$
he generates off his site ... than you, me and the next 100
people who read this combined.

Careful, the right combination of 100 HN readers might throw a monkey wrench in your calculations. =)

Fortunately for you, I contribute little so the next 99 have to play catch up.
See qeorge's comment above - basically, what this really is is a change in Google's cloaking policy for news sites.
Your mileage may very well vary, but I also release most of my business statistics and have for years, so I think I can supply a bit of motivation here.

1) It provides an automatic hook to make people pay attention to you. This is the Purple Cow factor -- its so different than what people expect that it is remarkable in and of itself. I am convinced that a lot of the reason people read my blog in the early days, prior to me having any reputation for saying worthwhile things or writing in an engaging manner, was that "real public sales numbers" were as rare as hen's teeth in the industry.

The kind of people paying attention to your are typically folks in your industry, who are very connected, have blogs and Twitter accounts, link to things they find interesting, do I have to paint you a picture?

2) It costs you nothing. What is the worst that can happen, somebody tries to Xerox your business and outcompete you by being you-er than you are?

3) You know how pg advises people to have a co-founder so they won't feel all alone in the world in the long, long slog that is running a business? Many of us cofounderless wretches have an intense urge coming from the monkey portion of our brains to show off what we've been doing (and I don't mean that in the pejorative sense). What is the point of spending 12 hours over a hot interpreter to solve a one-line bug if you can't lament about it to your buddies? Similarly, when you get the sense of elation at e.g. having two whole customers in one day, you want to share that with somebody, too. Preferably, somebody who understands -- and nobody understands these things better than your peers. (Friends, family, priests, and romantic interests are wonderful things to have in your life, but there is a distinct limit to their tolerance for "Guess what? Guess what? I got X uniques today due to my ongoing SEO efforts!")
i've been thinking about this topic (users, not craigslist) a lot over the past few weeks. thanks.
Acting Class Hollywood - Stuart Rogers Studios
Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair | Reuters
The "qualified investor" bit is going to make sure that Cringely's scheme to advise investors will fall flat on his face and fail.

A very recent example of just why he's not going to be able to do that would be the Rothstein arrest in Florida.

Rothstein claimed that his investment scheme was going to buy up settlement annuities (you've seen the ads on TV: do you have some settlement you'd like to get a lump sum of cash for? from more legitimate companies). He required a minimum of $1,000,000 to invest, and used lots of political contributions to get close to political leader and gain credibility. Rothstein managed to swindle about $1.1 Billion out of suckers before finally getting arrested, although it appears that he went and hid about $200,000,000 in Morocco when he flew there in October.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking-news/v-fullstory/st...

Charging document: http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2009/12/01/12/Rothstein_...

Civil lawsuit filed last month by some of the folks who got swindled: http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2009/11/25/17/Redlined_A...

If desired, I can put a few more links here, because some of what he did was to hire Broward County Sheriff officers to guard him - claiming that people were trying to kill him. And he put a lot of money into getting the current BSO sheriff elected.
You can also kill Safari, Mail and Phone by activating the app, holding Power until the shutdown screen shows, then holding home until the app quits.
Nobleman wants to build world's largest solar park in Bavaria
I say let anarchy in Somalia run it's course. Notarized contracts will need to be drawn. A system of jurisprudence will need to be set up to enforce them. Pretty soon they will arrive to a social contract with a state.
Extracting the iPod Bootloader using the Clickwheel Speaker (2005)
Maybe this isn't as reactive as you think. I noticed just in the last few days CL blocks any listing containing the string "bit.ly" (a net good for CL users). Try creating a post and you will get an error on the screen where you normally solve a captcha.

Maybe your correspondence coincided with a more general security tune-up they decided to roll out on Thanksgiving?
Funny, if it weren't so tragic.
I say let anarchy in Somalia run it's course. Notarized contracts will need to be drawn. A system of jurisprudence will need to be set up to enforce them. Pretty soon they will arrive to a social contract with a state (or something resembling a state backed by the big fish in that pond).
If you want to test a man's character give him power*point
7 rules for effective presentations from slide:ology
I'm sure there's a way around it but is it really worth the effort? Anything important is going to be reported by multiple sources citing the original source in minutes. Niche information from a specific publication will be widely circulated among the various online communities that focus on that niche. The only people effected will be the ones who only have a casual interest -- the ones least likely to sign-up for free access much less pay. Once people get a taste for unlimited free information it's almost impossible to go back.
It would be interesting to see somewhere try this, because I'm sure it would generate very different incentives than regular welfare. Some people will definitely walk out of work permanently and just live off the freebie. Others will use it for a few months to rest between jobs.

This would make the ramen-eating phase of doing a startup much easier, and the same for any creative endeavour that can be done cheaply but takes time. I wonder if there would be an explosion of art?

Unlike with regular welfare, there's a clear feedback loop between the amount of freebie, the number of people "retiring", and the extra tax burden placed on the people still working. At some level of income, this freebie would make working unattractive enough the system would collapse for lack of taxpayers. So there is going to be a continuous fight to keep the level at a sufficient pain point, versus humanitarians who point to the suffering this will cause.
Here's a javascript raytracer: http://www.slimeland.com/raytrace/

Wouldn't be hard to implement the rendering part as WebWorkers.
Linux Laptop Orchestra Gives Debut Performance
I think he's going to get a lot of grief for that (his Lisp hating) here, but it's hard to disagree with "most people (will) struggle with it".

I think the point is that most people will just tell him (me, also) to suck it up and learn it anyway.

Fairs fair.
Ask HN: How many of you have been to a psychiatrist? Did it help?
How many of you have been to a psychiatrist? Did it help?
What other inputs? Sunlight and water? Grass is an efficient way of harvesting solar energy. If you're talking about a growth cycle which doesn't involve animal fertilizer inputs, you've got to have a huge external energy source involved to manufacture fertilizer, so that's a pretty big cost of not raising animals on available pastureland.

That, and don't even get me started on methane emissions, which is a handy way to deflect discussions about CO2, but not a great way to actually do anything productive (look up radiative forcing and the relative atmospheric lifetimes of greenhouse gases).
so how is http://housingmaps.com still allowed?
Win! is HN Fail
The secret to success is failure
Fine, but if you really want to test some of these you need further data. If you're not getting monthly growth in paid users it could be 1) because your conversion rate has tanked, 2) the number of free users has tanked, 3) the number of first time visitors has tanked, and / or 4) your adwords account ran out of money six weeks ago and you weren't measuring it.

Without that data you can try to "get alarmed and act accordingly" all you want, but you won't have any idea where to start.
Or, perhaps he plays the Steve Jobs role--that ultimate arbiter of taste that doesn't let anyone release anything that doesn't meet his sky-high standards.

That'd be interesting.
I think the record companies are spot on - spend your time with the 20% of artists that are making money, ignore the 80% that are not.

The crooked side in this is that the labels outright own rights to the small 80%'s catalogs.

It would be better for everybody if Warner let them out of the pen so that artists could deal with rhapsody, etc themselves.

I doubt that the book-keeping and time spent on uploading, cashing tiny checks, etc would work out to being a positive net gain for the artists.
There's a non-TC version that appears to be the primary source already on the front page.
Ask HN: How do I find a marketing/sales/business guy (university)?
I'm a fairly well-written guy, and I have way more people-skills than the average coder.

Even though we have a few customers on board and I'm getting some great feedback, I have no idea how to get more people in the feedback loop. There's no way the lunch-and-how's-it-going process is going to scale to hundreds of customers. My cofounder and I have sat down and basically have determined that we need to find someone with serious people skills who can go out and talk to potential customers, aggregate feedback, and give us some pulse on how to move forward. Do we need to add feature X? Change the billing process? Change the product? I have no idea, because I can only talk to three customers at once and still keep development moving quickly.

I'm at a (fairly technical/nerdy) university campus and I can't seem to find that guy†. (Our market at the moment is professors/education, so campus is pretty relevant). S/he's not in the CS/math/engineering departments, obviously (my social circles). I'm also decent at literature and music, and know a lot of those people--none of which are really sales-ey.

Short of turning up in the School of Business and saying "So, do you have any decent students?" in a condescending tone I'm not sure what actual, practical steps I can take to find someone who can go find potential customers.

1) Where do the people who are good at marketing/sales/business hang out?

2) How do I tell whether a candidate is any good?

† Or should that guy be finding me / selling himself on me? Am I going about this all wrong?

A) Our test market is our current professors, so finding another student (or someone at least affiliated with the school / nearby) is better than not

B) Yes, I could go take business classes / read books and such (and I've learned a ton this year) but the work involved really deserves a dedicated person.
Gaytes Information Systems Private Ltd - Resources
We can cut down even further from your list. Why carry around a cell phone when your laptop already has a 3G wireless card? When you want to make a phone call, you can just open up your laptop and fire up Skype!

If that sounds like a really cumbersome and painful user experience for many situations in which you currently use your cell phone, people who read really really religiously feel the same way about using a laptop or smartphone instead of a Kindle (or printed media).

The Kindle is and will continue to be a more niche product than laptops or phones. Not many people are serious readers. But for those who are, the user experience on a laptop, netbook, or smartphone can't compare, mostly because of form factor an eyestrain.

That's why I think only a tablet represents a serious threat to disrupt Kindle. Whether it's the mythical Apple tablet or the CrunchPad (RIP) or some other device that is actually built, if they manage to make a device that performs well in brightly-lit conditions, they can probably replace Kindle.

I suspect that in the next decade the average consumer will have three devices: One in a laptop form factor (with most having cheap netbooks running Chrome or another thin-client OS, and some power users having more traditional laptops), a phone, and a tablet or kindle-type device. The tablet or Kindle is ideal for reading and consuming media, the phone perfect for making calls, and the physical keyboard of the laptop necessary to get real work done.

Perhaps you could see some combinations, like a tablet that attaches to or connects wirelessly to a keyboard which eliminates the need for the laptop, or the phone just becoming a wireless headset interfacing with one of the other devices (maybe my opening question wasn't so implausible after all!). Frankly those combinations all sound pretty cumbersome and inelegant, so as long as all three devices are cheap and compact, having all three won't be a big deal.
I talked with a shipping guy a while ago - they are used to paying "fines" of 25K up just to pass through. He also said that they never arm the ships - it would just lead to escalation and he did not want his crews harmed.
Is this really seen as an abomination in the C# community?

My argument for why this is good seems pretty simple:

1) The code that does this isn't that hard to understand

2) All code that uses it becomes much more readable

3) The total of all code in #2 is going to be modified more often by several orders of magnitude than the code in #1
I'm very impressed by the quality of the front page. Instantly I knew what the product was about. The style of the site is very professional. And the information at the bottom of the page is extremely well organized.

I haven't seen a web site that communicates this effectively in a long time. Kudos to the front page designer!
Google Chrome OS. Or, how KDE and GNOME managed to shoot each other dead
My team, DeciNena, will win because we have the best technology, the coolest name, and are cupcake-free.

We are even offering to share some of the prize money with participating team members who don't find a balloon themselves!

http://decinena.com
Totally agreed that data is needed if you want to act. But the metrics should serve as top-level benchmark which tell if things are going well or aren't. If they aren't, investigating why is the case so can only be done using the data.
Are we looking at the same numbers? November was higher than October and December is higher per day so far than November.

Also 3% conversion rate is hardly a bad one and about 1% higher than most people could hope to expect.
It's just a small thing but I think doing a screencast when you're having a cold kind of puts people off. It made me think there was snot on the keyboard.
throwaway account; my normal username is my real name.

My GF of three years is clinically diagnosed with OCD and in the past has suffered from depression (history of emotional and physical abuse). One of her psychiatrists was helpful, the other(s) were not so much.

I went with her at her request on a visit to the helpful one. He basically told her that someone who came to therapy with her obviously cared about her very deeply, and if she had such caring individuals in her life then she had no reason to engage in self-destructive behavior.

Since that time she's been quite stable. Your mileage may vary.
Dotsquares Takes Part in usage & development of Facebook Applications
No one seems to care.
Agreed. More data would be interesting. Have the changes upped the revenue per visitor, or turned more browsers into customers?
Why Chrome OS Is No Threat to Windows
The exact same software that would allow for accurate tracking of the 20% that make money would work for the 80% that don't.

The fact that they can't properly account for the 80% strongly implies that they can't properly account for the 20%.
So, the labels charge the bands for everything they do for them? So why do they then also take 90% of the income?

You get a profit if you make an investment, but if you charge for all your services, you didn't make an investment, so why do you deserve a profit?

But, I guess it works, since people are doing it.
Kudos for the work, but personally I hate the recent crop of games with the social networking ties. I've tried out a few Zynga apps and every time it asks me to post something to my wall about their game, I feel like giving the app a big middle finger because I know what it's trying to do.

I don't mind achievements that award me for doing unique things in-game, but coercing me to tell other people about your game really drives me mad.
I also got through college in 2 years and graduated from Georgia Tech when I was 20. Sometimes, however, I wonder whether I would have retained more of what I learned had I kept a slower pace.
Here's what I don't get about this: the physical
swipe is already obsolete.

You can just type in a credit card number, address, CCV, and expiration date once into say the Apple Store and then buy stuff from them with one click from that point on. The same is true for Amazon and Paypal and lots of other cos. And you can do it on your iPhone today.

So there is no reason why you can't just have a Paypal app
on your iPhone which has two fields: email of the person you want to pay and amount to send. Type that in and everything is done on the server. No hardware dongle or physical proximity needed, you can deploy everything in software.

Starbucks or the like could have a simple mobile web site ordering interface. Maybe use some geolocation to determine when you're in a store, but otherwise use their existing
corp website and ecommerce backend.

Some might argue that the dongle gives more security -- but it's weird that you would want MORE transactional security (physical card swipe) when you can see the person than when they are ordering over the web.

that said...I guess this might have some advantages for
people receiving payments, as a swipe is quicker than getting your customers to input their info. Also might be faster for payers who buy a lot of stuff online from different merchants and don't save their cc info with them. I guess one would have to know how cheap mobile credit card swipers are today.
1. Take out an ad on Craig’s List.

2. Look for someone who has some maturity and a few years experience. Try to interview a few people so as to give yourself some selection.

3. Make sure you supervise this person closely in order to ensure s/he is actually working everyday for a full day.
There must be bands near recouped, that would be but for some dodgy accounting. So while for the author it doesn't really make any difference, there must be artists missing out on actual cash.
I think it's not just pace that is important. Sure we have brilliant people who could do good by going faster, but with the advent of the internet and libraries, there's not much stopping them. Let's not forget about the majority of regular people who aren't getting a good value from the school system.

I would argue that most high school students find their studies meaningless, but not because they are bored by the triviality. They think it's meaningless because they don't comprehend the practicality of it all. They get stuff just to get it done, to avoid getting spanked for bad grades, or to satisfy their ego. So our school system shoves these topics down the students, with the hope that shoving hard enough and enough times will do the trick. But from personal experience, I've found that when I revisit something that I once learned, I usually look it up in reference either from the internet or from a book. The interesting difference is that this time, when I truly comprehend the importance or relevance of it all, I learn it in much less time.

Teaching kids what they aren't ready to learn yet is inefficient. Standardized pace, rigid curriculum impede students from learning what they want, and at their own pace (which will probably always be faster than the standard pace if the student is interested).

This problem extends into university education. I think all students should learn like that, at their own pace, and take some evaluation, not necessarily a test (I have ADHD, so I'm biased against tests), at the end. Then we can have quantifiable knowledge without forcing students to go through a rigid curriculum at a set pace. This hopefully would also mean no more banking on getting into good universities, rejections, and entrance exams determining education worthiness. Education would truly be open and accessible to all.