skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was tempted to comment 'this isn't news to any of us', but it is a good summary of what Markdown does and what dialects there are.

Unfortunately, it doesn't mention that Gruber basically abandoned Markdown and let it linger for months on end, only to come back complaining about the new dialects that sprung up in his absence. The project has no 'leadership' and no project homepage for people to participate, which is unfortunate, because Markdown is pretty useful.

The github (and stackoverflow) dialect of Markdown have potential to become the new main dialects though, through the power of git(hub) alone... here's hope.
Create a handful of super specific and efficient web apps that have a low monthly fee to use and have a good potential for a user base. Target internet marketing or SEO type apps that help automate things if you want a niche suggestion. Use the income and knowledge gained to step away from whatever obligations you currently have and move onto bigger projects while spending a few hours a week making sure the other smaller projects continue to run smoothly.

EDIT: Spelling mistake in first sentence...
twitter seems like it could be useful for this:

"At purgatory, snow is AWESOME!"

"park city snow is SHIT today!"

"ahhh #snowbowl, when are you going to get freaking snow machines already!"

etc. etc.
I didnt...
During the signup process it wasn't particularly obvious that I had to choose an account type. After I clicked continue my account seemed to be properly created however I couldn't continue through the registration process on screen because both my email and username were now taken.

On the bright side I love the idea, I wish I had then when I had to wait on hold with United for 1 1/2 hours over Christmas.
At least in southern California, most to nearly all billboard ads are positioned along freeways. LA being an exception where you can throw an ad onto just about _anything_ anywhere.
You are right, of course, and I should have said "The singular of anecdotes isn't data, either" - the nexus reports obviously have a bunch of anecdotal "evidence" behind them :)
They mention having a "global" password that allows access to any user account. I've thought about doing this in the past, as a means of troubleshooting user support requests, but haven't implemented it on any sites.

Are there better ways of doing this, rather than having a global admin backdoor password? Is there a recommended "best practice" for logging in as a user, to see what they see when they use the app? I get a decent number of support requests where the user is seeing something in particular, and my being able to see it would be useful. At the same time, there's a pretty serious risk that's opened up by having this in place.

Anyone have any thoughts / suggestions?
I had the same experience with the signup process.
Expectations of news consumption is wrong
Also, with newer phones, including the Nokia E72, E75, and the Motorola Milestone, there is absolutely no problem when switching over. Data connections don't drop a bit, voice isn't lagging or anything. I wonder if these people actually experience problems or whether they just sit and stare at their status bar icons.
The thing is, I need those database results -- I can't do anything else until I have them.

You could start requesting the database results for a user that is now waiting in the tcp connect queue, cutting latency significantly.

Most people handle this with load balancing between processes, but your blocked-for-DB-results-process is sitting idle using system resources, like memory.

If you only have one user using your site at a time, then this isn't a concern. But for everyone else, blocked processes are wasteful.

but require too much fiddling when doing traditional stateless web work

Well, yeah, because you don't have threads. When you do, everything is handled by libraries for you; you can think you're blocking, but actually not block the process.
That's a good point. Let me see what I can do. The catch is that HN is case sensitive as well.

works: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SapphireSun

doesn't work: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sapphiresun
I don't see how "a reason to distribute it" is necessary. What if I just choose a completely random integer with 2000 digits and host it? I don't have any reason to do so, and it's certainly not illegal. Then someone comes along and generates a program that's equivalent to that number, or some digital media rights developer happens to use that number as a key for encrypting some copyrighted media. Does my original act of hosting suddenly become illegal, because I had no good reason to host the number in the first place?
How am I trolling?
I guess "Come work for Macrovision!" didn't have the geek appeal they were seeking.
You could just put your name on your about page. That's what a lot of people do.
It should. They have awesome fun problems to solve.
The Moose version just complicates it beyond necessity. That's true of plenty of real-world programs, too.

Learn what object-oriented programming is, then come back and tell us what you think.
I think this is inaccurate. _why conceals his identity behind a handle, and few people think of him as a loser. It's not about whether you use a handle or your real name -- it's about what you do with it.
I'm sure they do, but solving those problems is a means to an end considered evil (or at least unethical) by many hackers.
Firm To Drop Database Web Server 0 Days
Why I Do All This Walking ... (by Nassim Taleb)
Documents refute TSA privacy claims on body scanners, group says
Bonus points for building a bot to vote over and over and over again!
We're working on the logo. It'll be up, well above the fold, soon enough.

Thanks. We like the name too.
>Sure, but where do I start? Do I start making Iphone apps, or become a freelance coder, or try to invent the next twitter? Or do all 3 at once? I'm at the start of the learning curve here.

Building a service that sells subscriptions for $9 a month. 1000 users and you already have a good salary. Twitter, Facebook or Google are exceptions. Few startups succeed that way. But a web service, microISV... succeed if you work them the way it should.

>Why dont you like it?

It's a very bad career (terrible). Trust me on this. Lot of informations to put in your head and really nothing exciting about it. It's my opinion; you'll remember it if you happen to choose this career.
From the article: "Let me explain. If you consider your diet and exercise as a simple energy deficits/excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links. Your food intake becomes the equivalent of filling up the tank of your new
BMW. If on the other hand you look at food and exercise as activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades and nonlinearities from network effects, and with recursive links, then welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan. Both food and workout provide your body with information about stressor in the environment. As I have been saying throught, informational randomness is from Extremistan. Medicine fell into the trap of using simple thermodynamics with the same physics-envy and with the same mentality and the same tools as economists did when they looked at the economy as a web of simple links. And both are complex systems."
We've already had a few of those complaints. We will rework the language to make the Blackberry requirement more obvious.
Pic + wifi (Microchip buys ZeroG)
I like my company. I don't know if they feel the same way about me.

One newer participant whose posts make me think "I wish I had posted that" doesn't show up on my list of associated participants. But I show up on his. Maybe that is because of the karma setting in the default operation of the search. Interesting.
>>I study medicine (because my parents want me too and I have no other choices). As someone who study medicine, I'll advice you: DON'T FOLLOW THIS CAREER.
>Why dont you like it?

I, too, am curious.

*Edit: Can you please give more detail than you did below?
How a venture capitalist started earning money on the side
The Twitter feed is a brilliant touch.
For something like this, you might want a "Privacy" link. I also tend to put much more stock in sites with an "About" page -- not sure if that's universal. The black bar along the top is a fine place for these links, and I don't think adding them would detract from the site's usability.
Repeat showing to the same shows (MythBusters, etc) -- although I don't think that necessarily implies the same people. In fact, it seems impossible to control whether to show it multiple times in a single 30-min slot, etc.
My credit union (Coast Capital) and telco (Telus) both do this.
Dave McClure To Launch Early Stage Venture Fund
Dammit. Stuff like this is exactly what is going to destroy the app market for the Android.

Who's going to download anything if they hear this can even happen?

Most developers complain about the Apple iPhone approval process, but they don't realize how much it really HELPS them.

Consumer confidence keeps people buying mobile apps, and with the iPhone, nobody even thinks twice about it because we have the added comfort of knowing Apple stomps out the bad stuff - usually before we ever see it.
Why I use Haskell? The big question
> You could start requesting the database results for a user that is now waiting in the tcp connect queue, cutting latency significantly.

That's already how it works. If one process is blocked waiting for results, another process will get it's turn. Apache is one process per HTTP connection (when not running threaded).

> but your blocked-for-DB-results-process is sitting idle using system resources, like memory.

Either way it will need to use system resources. I can't throw away the resources of the user waiting for results, I need that once the results come in! Processes really don't take up that much memory and typically you're reusing a small number of them over and over anyway.

> If you only have one user using your site at a time, then this isn't a concern.

If somebody is blocked then someone else's request gets a turn at the CPU. Blocking a single process is completely inconsequential to multi-process web server serving multiple users.
That's kind of like saying you'd never work for MSFT or Apple because both create DRM. If you're that kind of absolutist, yes, you don't want to work there. But Rovi is a big company and the Blu-ray content protection system is quite interesting.

The ultimate equilibrium they will achieve if they do their job properly is that discs will not be rippable when they first come out, but after a couple months will get cracked. In that time period, the studio makes 90% of their lost revenue and you still have the ability to make backups after a delay. BD+ has had its ups and downs, but I think it has the potential to achieve this. It's more than you can say for most DRM systems.

Disclaimer: I am a co-designer of BD+.
PushButton Tutorial Series - Killing Enemies
I just realized I have paid no attention at all to anyone's name. I know my brother's name when I see it, but that's it. Now I'm wondering if I am liked. Probably not >.<
Also, I would differ with the Ren & Stimpy guy in advising you not to trace stuff. Copying master art is good practice, but do it with your own eye rather than by tracing.

Unless it was mentioned twice, he said to draw your copy by eye on tracing paper, then if you compare it by laying over the original you should mark the differences (eg eyes too large, whatever) then redraw and check again.
The results were not influenced in any way by Rackspace Inc.

Yea. Right.

Rackspace just loves to pay for random pseudo-benchmarks.
It's their way to give something back to the community.
Or something.
The most important hint is to realize it is encrypted, not a math equation.
Nostra who?
>Building a service that sells subscriptions for $9 a month. 1000 users and you already have a good salary. Twitter, Facebook or Google are exceptions. Few startups succeed that way. But a web service, microISV... succeed if you work them the way it should.

Can you give me some examples of Micro-ISVs?
I spent years during my first time in college learning affiliate marketing, (at the same time I learned my degree) which sounds similar, and I became an expert in Adwords, marketing, keywords, niche research etc, but I could only ever break even. It was extremely frustrating to spend so much time at it and eventually having to give up.

On Medicine again, I quite like the idea of helping people, such as in a charity like Doctors Without Borders, but it's just a dream right now. To each his own I guess.
The most efficient way is wrong
Processes really don't take up that much memory and typically you're reusing a small number of them over and over anyway.

They take up several orders of magnitude more memory than lightweight threads. I did some benchmarks a few months ago showing this; check searchyc if you care. Edit: here you are: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794409

Anyway, when you start thinking about "web applications" instead of "web pages", lightweight threads make a lot more sense. And, you'll find that treating a web application like it's just a bunch of web pages leads to many problems down the road. (Performance is the least of your worries.)

Finally, "I definitely don't need to know about this abstraction because my favorite language doesn't have it" is dangerous thinking.
Does moving the karma slider to the right look for people with low karma, or does it ignore karma? I want the option to ignore karma.
A few weeks ago, I tried searching through old threads to find where PG had an archive of old comments and server stats. Does anybody have link(s)? Thanks in advance. (This post is meta enough that it's probably as good a time as any.)

I'm guessing either such a corpus was used here, or it's based on a cache of recent comments.
"Almost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls."

That quote astonished me, I never really knew the extent of the problem.
It might be a better idea to make a at least a specification/business plan first without quitting since it will force you to really think through the idea. There are always facets you may have missed that could kill it (or convince you even more). If you decide to take a leap... you have a spec!
Sounds like he/she was really just trying to dumb it down for the interviewer, someone who didn't understand what "eyeball-tracking" was or thought that Facebook's servers were hosted in their offices.
“I Sleep Two Hours Per Day”- Week Two
It's probably just because I don't go to Stanford or Harvard, but I think it's silly and diversity-lacking to have almost all your hires come from those two schools. Good CS students can come from elsewhere, though they are probably a bit harder to sift out.
This is great; I appreciate your thoughts. Picked up the book at the local library.
Amen.

Rackspace knows that very well, wonder why they didn't tell the author to use EBS for the comparison. Oh wait, I might have an idea...

Anyways, as usual, don't trust any benchmark that you haven't faked yourself. This one, just like all other rackspace/ec2 comparisons that you see cropping up these days, was paid for by Rackspace and obviously tweaked to produce their desired outcome.

Ironically they even point out the flaw in their setup by showing how the CPUs on the EC2 instances are not fully utilized.

Guess what that means? It means the test was I/O bound.

I'd be curious to see the test repeated, but this time with a RAID10 over a couple EBS volumes. Not sure Rackspace will pay for that one, though...
Ask HN: How long did it take you to get ramen profitable?
I had set a goal to be ramen profitable by the New Year. I'm not as of yet, but still happy with the progress I've made.

That said, I'm curious. What is a fair goal to set? How long did it take you?
Ah rms right there in my list... how did I go so wrong... :)
Someone at Apple is feeling vindicated right now.
Am I missing something or does this not work for the majority of us who are casual commentators on here?
Mr. Tracy's library
Who makes a living compiling a Linux kernel? Perhaps web comparison benchmarks weren't selected because they weren't favorable to Rackspace?

Do they feel their cloud offerings are inferior to Amazon's?
I am -not- a girl... (speaking of diversity). re: when flash fails "Hey Girl! You need flash..."
Excellent question. Middle ignores karma in the quantitative ranking. Far to the right gets lower karma users. Users who consistently get almost all 1s and/or negative points are separately filtered out since they generally don't make for interesting recommendations. Users who sometimes have negative comment scores but also make lots of 2+ comments are included (these users are rare but are arguably the most interesting).
hrm, I seem to have gotten tptacek as my top result, if the results are so ordered.

Id say thats a good thing. In general the whole list is people I would happen to be even somewhat similar to.
I have to disagree with esr on this.

Using a handle is different from being anonymous. Personally I don't really care if the person I'm communicating with is calling themselves john or w4r3zd00d. What I care about is the communication itself and the consistency of the other party.

I regularly converse with people who use an alias and if you participate in discussions around here, you do too.

Use a handle, don't use a handle, I don't care.

Be anonymous and troll, attack people or spew hatred and .. well, I won't care either - my mental filter will just drop you like martian packets.
I commend you on an elegant UI. Would you mind explaining a bit how exactly you anticipate using voting relationship histories in future revisions? Also, am I correct in assuming that there is some sort of distance function involved in computing 'similarity'?
they wont go for the ads, but they will def see them...
I'd make it a little more clear in the video that you get a call back when Lucy gets a person. That's what I assumed would happen, but I had to dig to actually confirm it. Just add something to the last sentence of the video. "And Lucy does the waiting for you" ... "calling you back when she gets a human". Something along those lines.

Also, just wondering, what VoIP service/whatever are you using?
Ideally people would have used/shown interest in a reasonable spectrum of languages. And most tools in common use (common being the key word !) really should only take an afternoon to learn enough to get something done, however small. I am not sure why more interviews aren't done like that, but I guess hard to scale.
The more you try to become a Hacker, the less you are one.
I have a "login as this user" link in my admin panel. Once I click it, I see what they see. The only downside is that I have to log out and log back in to get back to my admin account, but I usually keep myself logged in in firefox and do the testing in IE, so this isn't that big of a deal.
http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=auston...
Maybe this will make up for the talking Barbie that said "Math class is hard". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie
Interesting. After the obligatory vanity search I tried searching for people I know have different (more technical, less startup/strategy(marketing) taste than me. And it seems to work quite well. I have nothing in common with those guys :-)

For instance the top pick for tptacek is cperciva, which seems natural. Doesn't work the other way around though, so there's still some work to be done...
Quite flattering - no matter what I set the sliders to, the names I recognize are people I respect.

I think that only really says something about HN, not about my comments :)
I got quite a few people I respect (mixmax, edw519, mattmaroon) and one I consider a personal friend, dennykmiu.

Neat little utility, thanks.
It probably needs more data points.
Google Results 1 - 10 of about 3,340,000 for better internet bureau
This is interesting, thanks for pointing this out. The top result is actually getting filtered out from the displayed results (don't ask). spolsky is going from being the second result, to the first result, to the second result in your examples.
Me, presumably.
+1'ing the clean design. Looks great, but I think you should add a couple more pages (unless I'm missing them) to give people more to view before they make that 'sign-up or leave' decision. Even just showing a closer screenshot (I love to see real data rather than a small screenshot - helps me imagine how I might use a service personally) and explaining how it corrects OCRed text, etc.

Might be interesting to try and work in something to find out why people aren't interested in signing up also: don't have a Blackberry, don't understand the benefits, don't need this and just looking around, etc.
For the example given? Nonsense.

It's very difficult to choose good examples for programming tutorials. In this case, the example was too small and self-contained to support modern Perl practices intended to help manage programs of hundreds of lines or more.
Searchable index of all job openings from any Y Combinator startup
Thanks for the feedback, you bring up a very interesting point: reciprocity. If I am closer to you than anyone else, does it follow that you are closer to me than anybody else? I'm not sure the right answer to that is yes ...
I voted architect. Or does the title suggest I'm not entitled to make my own choice?
Damnit, I spent last week thinking about how something like this could be implemented technically and if there was any way to turn it into a business.

Congrats lucyphone!
Tell HN: My day job is just as intensive as a startup
I'm an analyst programmer working for Accenture in the UK.

Working for Accenture is like founding a startup. You go to bed thinking about your project, you wake up thinking about your project and you spend 12 hours a day working on your project, the other 12 hours you spend filling in paper work.

Only difference? There is no chance of a massive pay off.

That is all.
T-Mobile in the US too.
Cooney Prizes for Innovation in Children's Learning
An opportunity to win cash prize, pitch to a distinguished jury at E3 2010, and ongoing business planning support
What is the basis for claiming programmers are musically talented? I know a number of very talented musicians and a number of very talented programmers, but the overlap between the two is pretty close to zero. Sure I know programmers who can string together a few chords and musicians who can hack together a website in php, but I've never seen anything to make me think that the overlap between programming and playing a musical instrument is any larger or more significant than the overlap between any other profession and playing a musical instrument.
I finally found a great space heater
Apply to the Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children’s Learning
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is accepting applications for the inaugural Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children’s Learning, a national competition intended identify, inspire, nurture, and scale breakthrough ideas in children’s digital media and learning. The program will annually award cash prizes and provide ongoing business planning support to innovators in children’s educational media.

The Cooney Center is challenging innovators in two categories: Breakthroughs in Mobile Learning and Breakthroughs in Literacy Learning. Up to five finalists in each category will be invited to pitch their ideas to media industry and education leaders at an event held at this year’s E3 Expo. This year's prizes include $50,000 towards prototype development in the Mobile Learning category and $10,000 and the opportunity to work with Sesame Workshop to turn a literacy idea into a product for national dissemination via Sesame Workshop's revival of the iconic literacy show, The Electric Company.
Obscure pun, it's meant to be flattering.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181868

:-)
Heroku learns the hard way from Amazon EC2 outage
The probability of you doing that without piracy is so vanishingly small as to be irrelevant.