skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blatant Self Promotion: I'm one of the founders of SuperBytes.net we are obviously much smaller then Linode and Slicehost etc. but we strive to have a high level of customer service.
Would be happy to give some HN peeps a discount, just shoot me an email
matt@kerplunc.com
"especially in colder months when any heat from the flames that escapes around the side of the kettle will warm the room, reducing the burden on the central heating system"

this article is nonsense. Excess heat from an electric heater is going to warm the ambient air just the same as a gas burner will.
Two separate +1 's to prgmr.com for a work(1G) and personal server(0.5G) respectively. PVGRUB on their new servers lets you boot updated/patched linux kernels without any control panel pick+click from a preset list(AFAIK Slicehost uses that method). More power to the sysadmins.
The founder/boss/leadSysadmin is user lsc on news.yc
Wow, you are a machine! It's like you are one of those pro-bloggers who are determined to write something new every day, except your posts contain genuine insight. Respect!
I understand the sentiment, but I think this over-simplifies things a bit. Often to really appreciate a good idea you need context. Also, often things that seem like good ideas turn out to be bad ideas given context. 217 pages of context is probably excessive on average, but really, sometimes it takes years to appreciate the reason certain things are good ideas or bad ideas.

The idea of context is especially important when presenting your ideas to smart audiences like HN. The reason? Smart people are generally skeptics, and will be quick to dismiss ideas unless you preemptively blow holes through the low hanging counter-arguments that are evident to anyone with some basic domain knowledge. I've seen this time and time again, where readers naturally assume their obvious counter-argument wasn't considered by the original poster -- when it actually was but the poster assumed that they were going to be assumed to have thought of it :) This usually isn't how it works, and results in pages of back-and-forth arguments that could have been skipped with some better context presented up-front.

Edit: The irony on this comment is not lost on me :)
Grooveshark (www.grooveshark.com) is an excellent example of a way to take something that is free and monetize it in one form or another. VIP accounts and advertising work for the site, and the record labels still can earn money from it so they might be happy.

Someone always pays, though... it simply may not be the end user.
For a book review, he didn't talk about the book much. Most of the article seemed like a rehash of Google's history from the author's memory.
I graduated with a CS degree from a random not-in-California university.

It depends on the development environment of the company. I did a lot of systems programming and eventually earned the attention of a company that did hire me. They use mostly C++ on Linux for an enterprise application now SaaS situation.

Just practice and do stuff on your own, I guess.
Yes, certainly. But if you compare two products made in the same country/area they nearly always have about the same pollution load, so price is an excellent way to compare them.

"bulk freight" being a problem is not correct. Bulk freight is probably the best way to ship something, and any energy cost is contained in the final products price.
I really enjoy your blog posts. You have the ability to distill your ideas down to the essential concepts and communicate them very clearly. You also always seem to have the right proportions of confidence and humility, which is a rare find on the interwebs.
"ask for paper bags at the store"

Actually don't. Paper bags are MUCH worse for the environment than plastic. Paper bags are not just an example of a waste of effort, but actually have negative value! (Reusable is good of course, and on that note plastic is much easier to reuse as a trash bag than paper, but even if you don't, plastic is better.)
One thing that seems to be missing in the discussion of real-time feeds and other such technologies is any analysis of concentration of power associated with using hubs and superdistribution points. Any centralized distribution point is vulnerable to malicious filtering and political pressure.

Real-time updates are a very good idea, but we haven't yet reached the point where anyone can run a PUbSubHubbub hub, without some fairly capable technical assistance.
So your response is tl;dnw ?
I'm still puzzle by the argument that "Google makes money from other people's content".

Don't these content producers realize that there's probably more than half their traffic coming from Google? Google helps people find their stuff. How is that bad?
"I did't find it funny, insightful or engaging"

The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it.
I love having the articles here and the discussions that arise around them! Usually when I need some sort of inspiration or something to keep me grounded, I'll check out articles on your site. These tw hit home hard: http://sivers.org/hellyeah and http://sivers.org/notwork .
Not true.

In every country where people might listen to this idea, population shrinkage is a bigger problem than population growth.

The net value of a human to society is positive not negative.

The problems of overpopulation is a myth.
I'd say that's an edge case, but still - sites that don't support OpenID would require you to create login. This method basically asks you to create that login with Google instead, is more secure than most of these sites.
Device spells doom for superbugs
I've always been put off by the impression that the semantics of Perl consists mostly of edge cases. For example, the discussion of error handling here:

http://www.yosefk.com/blog/what-makes-cover-up-preferable-to...
For posterity: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963341
loads super fast, which is a plus. nice design. i like the radius option too.
Well, technically, nothing prevents every publisher from running their own hub (we host some at Superfeedr).

Also, we even encourage publishers and subscribers to both publish to several hubs and subscribe to several hubs as well, so that they can avoid any bottleneck or reliance to a single hub. The only 'burden' on their side is to deal with de-duplication, but that's quite easy.
Against Camel Case
An online bibliographical supplement: http://www.steamthing.com/2009/11/the-kneecapping-of-interca...
I watched the video review/litl CEO interview on techcrunch a while ago.

Honestly I think it's pretty useless.

That channel thing doesn't make any sense (or at least I'm sure nobody is really going to use it)

The litl is pretty much good only to browse the web but $699 just to browse the web is pretty expensive.

Your money will be better spent on a netbook that cost half the price and is two times more reliable.
We've done that by using RPX (https://rpxnow.com/). It's awesome - users with Google/Facebook/Twitter/Yahoo accounts don't have to remember their URL and more savy users can use whatever OpenID they want.
Pretty, but hideously expensive for what it does. I would pay US$ 200 at most.

Reminds me too much the Palm Foleo for me to bet on its future.
Ask HN: What is your startup's hiring strategy?
I've been confounded by the large number of articles on hiring first employees for startups indexed all over Google. There is a massive number of greatly different strategies for picking prospective employees with the right traits (work ethic, experience, interest level, compensation expectations).

So, HN, what is your team's hiring strategy? Does domain knowledge or experience trump a great attitude or the ability to be a great team player? Do you emphasize a 'culture fit' for new employees?
This is exactly the reasons why I was offered a job at a local startup. I did a presentation at a local open source mini conference on some software I've been working on. Since then they have been tracking my commits, comments & how I interacted with others online. One month later I'm working for them. It's not just code, but how well you communicate with others that matters to startups.
This debate comes up often here, but one point that always seems to get left out is that a PhD affords you time for your ideas and skills to mature.

I currently have the unique opportunity to work for a startup while also working on my PhD. I can say without a doubt that a PhD does provide its benefits in some scenarios--that is, you can tailor your PhD research to benefit your startup or vice versa.

For example, I am currently a PhD student studying how to implement Machine Learning algorithms to materials characterization. I often use the same algorithms in R&D work for our startup doing music recommendations and user analytics. Working for a rapidly growing startup helps me see the real world implications of my research, and helps me further understand the benefits or disadvantages of using them.

Another great side benefit of working for a startup is that I have learned how to be more efficient. By learning VIM and unix commands I can do data analysis 1000x quicker on my experimental work than other scientists in my department, just because they are busy fooling around with MS Excel/Origin/LabView.
I'd venture to guess that you are already better than most CS graduates. I'd rather hire someone like you, who has hobbies and interests that directly reinforce his job skills, than a a straight A student that thinks programming is just a job.

Whatever remains for you to learn, you'll get it from experience and interactions with other developers, not by sitting on the fence.
An important factor he's missing is Microsoft's GUI for installing apps- instead of targeting developers exclusively, like GAE, from what I've heard you can just go click 'install wordpress' on Azure and get your own little blog set up.

The combination of a start easy enough for the layman combined with a reasonable upgrade path could really be an important thing for them.
Let's say an author were to self-publish digitally with Amazon, and thus forgo all non-Kindle sales, but maintain the same volume of Kindle sales as they would get with a publisher.

$PUNDIT is making the classic mistake of confusing publishing with bookselling.

Amazon isn't a publisher, they're a bookstore -- a bookstore with infinite (virtual) shelf-space. They're in the business of renting shelf-space to merchants.

Publishers, contrary to first impressions, are not printers of books. (None of my publishers -- Ace, Orbit, Tor: companies you may have heard of -- own printing presses: they outsourced that side of the business decades ago.) Publishers are in the business of acquiring IP, getting it polished up to publication standard, and feeding it into a supply chain. Booksellers (such as Amazon) are just the final step on the chain before the final consumers (who feed the beast with money). And what it takes to make a profit in this business is a combination of (a) taking raw product and turning it into a package, and (b) knowing how to market it effectively.

The assumption implicit in this article is that if you want to self-publish and focus on Amazon's customer base, you can get the same results as if you go through a mainstream publisher who is also servicing the bricks'n'mortar stores. But the marketing push that goes into selling books through bricks'n'mortar also goes into raising your visibility above the parapet among Amazon's clientelle. News about which books are good spreads largely through word of mouth and review columns, and Amazon is to some extent capitalizing off marketing activity aimed at other outlets. The Kindle store prices books below the paper editions deliberately to divert sales into its walled garden; I'm pretty certain that if Bezos sold books via Kindle for the same price as he does on paper, sales would drop significantly. And if you market a book solely at Kindle owners, you'll only get reviews and word-of-mouth mojo from Kindle owners.

(Dammit, typing into a seven-line text box is so 1980s!)

Anyway, to summarize: If you self-publish, whether in electronic form or on paper, you'll get nowhere unless you understand how book marketing and the book supply chain works. The Kindle store is not a marketing tool, it's merely a delivery/fulfillment vector, and it doesn't get you around the need to market your book. The high-selling Kindle books may very well be boosted by the positive externalities generated by publishers' marketing activities aimed at increasing sales through other channels. In other words: don't believe the hype!
No you couldn't. Instead you would doom billions to death and starvation, because during the transition time you need young people to support the old.

And who exactly would operate this "everlasting eden"?

Just about every single technology we have only exists because there are so many people in the world, which makes the cost of the item bearable.
Linux Server at Home - Serve Yourself
I hear they also have a great Artists product (artists.grooveshark.com) that provides real-time analytics to artists so they can tour and promote their music more efficiently :)
OpenID solves a problem I don't have using an approach I don't want with a troubling restriction (no functional revocation) and all while ignoring better solutions (password keepers) that are already available.

And the "don't delegate to somebody you don't trust" model? Even the most trustworthy of companies can implode and reboot and sell off all sorts of data on their users.

Sure, I can delegate. Not.

I have my own OpenID server. I don't use it.
Is your username meant as a recursive joke?
I totally agree. Like Einstein's "simple as possible, but not simpler" - it's a challenge to present an idea so succinctly that people actually read it, but not too succinctly to where it's not convincing.

Though maybe the counter-arguments are best dealt with separately - being a separate idea - like the following day saying, "Now let's take the opposite view."?

Context built gradually instead of trying to do it all at once?
Ignore that man behind the curtain.
A good point- no matter how high quality it is, without enough advertising to establish a premium brand, hardly anyone will be willing to pay a premium price.
Thanks to stackoverflow...
Mavericks at Work (Part 1)
Free Indidginus Album
Free album if you subscribe to my mailing list!
Yeah using footnotes can work, too (PG style.)
Go Interfaces, by one of the Go authors
The Microsoft Security Update Guide
Okasaki has a lot about skew binary numbers (and other strange systems) in his "Purely Functionaly Data Structures". Linked lists are basically equivalent to unary. Fibonacci number systems are also useful. You can also use `redundant ternary' and much more.

Even partial differentiation of (algebraic) data structures is a useful operation. It corresponds to looking at data structures with `holes' in them. The functional people call them zippers.
That explains the blogs (and, well, a large part of the media) but doesn't answer the phenomenon of language wars.
Funny, I was about to say that if he can't figure it out for himself, he probably shouldn't do PhD.
Yeah, for $700 you'd get a pretty decent laptop. One can do everything the litl can and more.
Thanks!

Very conscious decision made 6 months ago, when I realized that writing these little articles was doing more for me than learning Haskell, going to conferences, or just about anything else.

I've met more brilliant people because of something I've written than because of any conference or party I've attended.

So I re-prioritized to make writing 2nd priority (1st is still my new company), instead of letting them fall to last priority. It means waking up earlier or staying up later, or saying no to many other things, but it's worth it.
I heard that Ph.D.s are very important in chemistry, too.

> Anyone can do a startup, very few people finish a Ph.D.

A lot of people can start a Ph.D. I do not know how many people `finish' a startup.
Once you've started it's generally OK to take a year off, however if you turn to down an acceptance most places make you start from square one. So as such it might be a good idea to take the PhD position, do that for a year, and then re-consider.
So taking both advises - sit at home and play computer games?
Well, judging from the pictures in the background, litl targets a more wealthy audience than the yc crowd.

Regardless of what you find appropriate, there are people, that spend 100000$ on,say, a home stereo without blinking an eye.

Designed products, that do not hit the mainstream, still has a market. If you doubt it, try sneaking in at DCOTA and find any item under <$5000 ?
That was not my reading of The Long Tail at all. Anderson didn't argue that the zipf distribution was going away; rather, he argued that with collapsing inventory and transactions costs, it is now possible to make money selling a large number of individually-marginal items as well as a few blockbusters.
I guess in the case of a blog post the context comes from a linked news article or similar.

Btw, didn't read your 2nd para :-)
This Is Your Brain On Jazz: Researchers Use MRI To Study Spontaneity, Creativity
Difference Between Gossip and Rumor
How so?

Google is making money from people's content. The people making the content might be making some money, too, but Google is making much more. The content producers are all using....Google Adsense, to try and turn Google traffic into money. And Google has relentlessly "smart-priced" its adsense payouts down into oblivion. So Google's scooping up content to power its index, sending people to these sites, where they click on ads that pay Google an advantageous share of the wealth. Sounds like they're making money off people's content.
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The first paragraph should have listed some of the page numbers as I don't have the book so I didn't know what he was talking about.
Sure, but how many 60W bulbs on the ceiling are required to raise the temperature in a room 1 degree.

You seem to be suggesting that leaving my lights on all night has a positive environmental impact since it would significantly affect my furnace use.

I find that rather unintuitive, although possible; hence, citation required.
Dude, I'm in the market for a UK based VPN, but your IPHouse speed test is not responding.
What? You've been programming for 8 years and you think you're not good enough to work as a programmer?

I used to think this way as well. You know what changed? I started doing freelance work and a lot of the first jobs I did was taking over from a crappy programmer. I fixed bugs in their code and had to work with horrible designs.

It's a great confidence boost once you start seeing real code being used and think "I can do this much better."
No mention of intellectual property rights? I was under the impression that if you worked on something original using university facilities, you have effectively given up your rights to anything that you come up with using those facilities. The university owns it all.
I dropped out of university after my first year so I can't comment on academic pursuits with any authority. However, what I can say is that starting a half-decent startup gives you the most incredible ability to hack your lifestyle. This summer I was able to travel to some awesome places to kitesurf (my favourite passtime outside business) whilst working furiously on lots of my ideas. A couple of years ago I would have never thought that possible.
I concur, mixing academia and business life can be a very potent combination. I did do an industrial Ph.D., where I ,according to the plan, did spend half my time at the university and half the time at the company.
It doubled or tripled my network (if not more) and gave me a profound insight into both the limitations/benefits of university thinking and the business life/thinking.
That veganism is "sustainable" is another myth. It requires massive energy subsidies. It's not that long ago in Northern Europe (let alone Canada, Russia, etc) that if you wouldn't use animal products or labour you'd starve or freeze.
I keep seeing all these comments from folks here that they "can't be bothered," that "it's too much trouble," and so on, and I really want to hear an explanation of why.

I mean, if I'm registering at a new website, it seems considerably easier to enter one item -- my OpenID identifier -- and then be immediately verified, rather than go through the "enter email address -> get confirmation email -> click on confirmation link -> choose new password -> hope that the site is compatible with Firefox's password manager so I don't have to enter it every time" treadmill for each site.

So, explain to me, what makes you complain so much about using an OpenID?
No, I read the entire thing. My response was that I don't think the author paused long enough to think fully about the ramifications of computer vision. He got stuck on one type of sensor and didn't seem to fully grasp that its cheap sensors and small powerful processors that are changing how things are done. This just simplifies to the baseline story of the information age. Half the instances of "ccd's" he cited were cmos sensors anyway.
FourSquare Visualization (cool API use)
I was using a monster of a regex for validating URLs in a Ruby (Sinatra) app, and it wasn't even looking in unstructured text). Found it at http://snipplr.com/view/6889/regular-expressions-for-uri-val...

/^(https?):\/\/((?:[a-z0-9.\-]|%[0-9A-F]{2}){3,})(?::(\d+))?((?:\/(?:[a-z0-9\-._~!$&'()+,;=:@]|%[0-9A-F]{2})))(?:\?((?:[a-z0-9\-._~!$&'()+,;=:\/?@]|%[0-9A-F]{2})))?(?:#((?:[a-z0-9\-._~!$&'()+,;=:\/?@]|%[0-9A-F]{2})*))?$/i

Yeah, more involved. Though it parses it into the url parts, and it does work.
I wrote tl;dnw, "too long; did not write"
A more wealthy audience would tend to buy Macs, since Apple is an established premium brand or, lacking good taste, one of those Alienware monstrosities.

There are indeed brands that never hit the mainstream, but each one of them has something behind it, be it history or an outstanding commitment to quality.

Mind you the Palm Foleo I mentioned came out in a time Palm still had some glam associated with it.

This is just a computer.
That article was interesting but the contrast between the paragraphs and the code blocks made my eyes strain way too much. Am I the only one?
Hollywood party crasher's grand slam includes Oscars
Ask HN: Why is Dreamhost so bad? 
I feel there is a lot of hate for dreamhost, but I am boggeled but this.

I pay $119 dollars a year, or roughly $9.00 a month. I manage 64 domains, 20 unix users, 10 control panel users, a couple 100 email users.

I have been with Dreamhost since 2006. My support questions always get answered, and my sites have never been down longer then a couple hours.

So, my questions starts here, for $9 dollars a month , isn't that okay? If you want something to be up %99.999 shouldn't you expect to pay a lot of money?

Why the hate?
Evidence of life on Mars lurks beneath surface of meteorite, Nasa experts claim
Overpopulation is a menace and family planning is the only viable solution.
Two or three billions of healthy, nourished, educated human beings are more than enough to substain our economical, social and scientific structure.
Mobile Movies