skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also like the cleaner instruction set. It may make compiler writer lives easier, render better optimization strategies, among other things.
Things startups do and don't need
Produces too much waste and it doesn't take that long to mix the batter yourself.
That's what I meant when I said less shitty - but still shitty.

More often than not, when I want to share a file with someone, I want to share a file, not the whole folder, and certainly not a specific folder. With OSX's file sharing you have to manually drag your file into the shared folder (assuming you've enabled it) - and unless you want anyone to be able to access it willy-nilly, you're going to have to password it (possibly resulting in creating a new account on your machine). Sound fun yet?

At least it beats Windows - Windows file sharing is equally convoluted, and on top of it will fail to connect in almost every single networking environment I've ever tried it in. So on top of being hard to use, it just doesn't WORK.

The solution is so convoluted, and fits the standard use case so poorly, that it may as well not exist at all. IMHO the bar to beat is the memory stick - if I can share a file with someone in the room for less effort than copying it onto a USB stick, we've won.
>The unmurdered headline would be,−

> It's pancakes in a can, and it has made $15 million.

How does this address #2: The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is".
The sort mode is map-reduce style, but the overall idea was to put data sequentially on disk before you process it.
htmlized http://google.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Flib.store.ya...

danger: possible syntax loss
I like that you ask for "Great books you read in 2009," as opposed to great books published in 2009, as so many newspapers do. The question as you formulate it will probably lead to more of the same books popping up over and over again, but that's probably okay.

I actually wrote about the topic here: http://jseliger.com/2009/12/27/the-years-best-in-reading-not... . Of the books on the list, I'd say that Daniel Gilbert's _Stumbling on Happiness_ and Lev Grossman's _The Magicians_ were my favorite. Both might not qualify as "great," but they both moved me and made me think, which few books accomplish.
Surely you can comprehend that people might want to make transactions related to securities, current accounts, and any other store of value/assets?
My favorite swing and miss:

Prediction #3: Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.

More or less a hit on the prevalence of gyms, total miss on the ramifications!
The Nature of the Firm
Nice collection, didn't even know people were doing this work. My idea of a perfect embedded hobbyist OS would be much akin to apple I with an embedded scripting environment and easy access to hardware. Not BASIC though, but False (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FALSE) or the False variant DUP.
I like how you call yourself a grammar nazi, cite the old (and wrong) definition of a sentence as something with a subject and verb, but then say that "it is pancakes" is not a sentence. Why not? It's got a subject -- it -- and it's got a verb -- is.

Further, English has subject-verb agreement not subject-object agreement or verb-object agreement, hence "it is pancakes" is completely fine. Sure there maybe be some semantic anomalies, what with the singularity of the subject, the plurality of the object, and the copula which provides some sense of equivalence between them, but that's entirely a semantic issue and not a grammatical one.

Further further, setting off non-sentences by periods is common practice. You may not like it, but everyone else accepts it. You're just an idiot.

Further further further, "it's" is completely acceptable English, and isn't an official contraction only because there ARE no official contractions -- unlike French, with its (wholly impotent) French Academy, there is no authority on English, and thus no such thing as official English. The best we can do (as if we should care) is to reference the great authors of English literature (whoever they may be) and if you go by them, then you're most certainly wrong.

Further further further further, it's not your language, it's everyones, and I think the headline is fine; and they're not abusing it, they're using it in a completely standard fashion.

</actual linguist>
OH IRONY
You could first try the ANY query (which won't return all records though) and then a whois query on failed ones to be sure. Combined with some smart caching and affiliate/click tracking (to see if a new domain gets registered).
I would agree being a Brit living in USA. But they sell a ton of spray cheese here... ^_^
Eyeglasses for Shooting and Hunting
I think you are taking my posts the wrong way. I am not an animal activist, and I am fine with the idea of selective breeding (and of course dissection). We humans as a race probably not have survived (or gotten to our current) without domesticating plants and animals. (I'm not talking out of my ass -I've had to research this topic extensively in the past for school.) It's a process well worth doing and I would be happy to buy a fish that glowed in the dark while in a tank of bioluminescent dinoflagellates ect. ect.

The problem I have is with the civil rights activists, so if you get a chance to re-read my posts, please consider that.
My 7 year old cousin LOVES these. Every Sunday morning she gets to help dad make pancakes for the family.
It's true that news headlines obey their own little grammatical rules. Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) has mentioned this a number of times. Tho noone in the field really cares about it, because its not all the relevant to language on the whole.
Congratulations to our first customer! Since my post on HN we had 612 hits on moniker.com, with 1 conversion for $0.31 commission. I also spent $1.60 today for 22.43 CPU hours on Google App Engine. Almost all of the 17k requests today were AJAX queries for domain searches.
Thanks everyone for your comments, they have been very useful!
How Not To Promote Your New Startup
(The title isn't mine, it's Janey Lee's from Twitter, but it fits and so I kept it).
Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman
It's so refreshing and simplifying to look at what people need - what is actually useful and helpful to them - rather than what is technically "cool" at the moment.
Pan-Mass Challenge? PubMeb Central?
Fail for not having them viewable in an easy format.
Hell yeah: Stumbling on Happiness is one of my favorite books I've ever read in my life. It profoundly changed the way I look at the world, and how I make decisions about what to do. I really like your essay about it! As you say: it "ought to be required reading for those who are alive"

http://jseliger.com/2009/04/23/stumbling-on-happiness-—-dani...
At first I thought after reading the beginning of the post and this:

1. Set goals
2. Keep a plant alive

"Well. This looks like a bunch of useless skills" However, as I read down it made me appreciate a lot of what I do and actually should learn to do.

So- you earned my up-vote. Nice post.
Random access is always slower than linear reading. Even if you aren't going to disk, you can avoid blowing out the processor cache and having to get from main system memory. Ram is a cache, and L2 is a cache, &c. What you are doing is pretty normal "old-school" unix programming.
Ya, I got excited and tried to buy magic.com too :(
I use freshdrop.net too. There are a lot of domain names on there so here's a good filter:

* exclude all but .com
* exclude hyphens and numbers
* set char limit to 12
* click "Geo" at the top of the page

results right now: tipolo.com, treeville.com, umoru.com, etc
>"Democratically controlled music system"

Please, no. How about headphones?
"I Hoped You Would Fail"
Ed Catmull on Surfacing Failures / Remaining Original at Pixar [2007] [video]
They need heating, but not air conditioning? We can guess the type of climate this person lives in...
Purely a fluff list posting, contains no insight or explanation.
The most useful packages in Go
Ah. That's what I meant to say (in my post)-I didn't like fact it didn't help me accomplish the goals. I did an awful job at saying it.
You certainly don't need google docs, and you certainly do need IE, if only for testing.
I had a similar idea to this a while back. But instead of mapping URLs to transactions, you would map URLs to a fixed denomination of currency.

So, for example, the URL http://eepay.com/usd/10/agh38hj3 would represent a $10 USD note, payable by the entity that issued it.

Ownership of a particular currency "note" would be handled via a private key. In other words, the individual in possession of a private key for a given URL would be considered the "owner" of that note. With that private key, one could either redeem the currency in question or transfer ownership to someone else. Transfer of ownership would be handled via a secure handshake, in which the new owner of the note is given a new private key, which can then be verified.

Obviously this is all very low level, so actual transactions would abstract away most of this.

The advantage of this type of currency would be that it is anonymous and doesn't require a whole lot of verification information for every little purchase. This would make it ideal for microtransactions, or for transactions where you wouldn't want to reveal your identity.

The disadvantage is that it would be a challenge to keep private keys secure. Another obvious disadvantage is that such currency would only be successful if it was backed by a highly trusted institution. There are other challenges and disadvantages to be sure.
But the phonograph was around for 20 years or so. So there was some information storage, just not the concept of mass reproduction and distribution.
You need better moderation of the suggestion feature along the right. I doubt you want it saying random garble and things like "gay hot lesbians."
If you're anything like me, you'd also have graduated at around 30.
I agree that a graduated hierarchical system is best. A good model for designers would be the techniques used by modern game designers. Most modern games are extremely complex and have a graduated system in which you master one aspect before moving on to the next. If learning a program or OS can be done in a similar manner to learning a video game it might work.

Personally I think the solution to the "hierarchical" problem is search. Apple has done a great job with the Spotlight tool. A similar "search" based function launcher might work well to provide access to features that beginning users don't care about but advanced users want.
Wow. Pratt's obsession with Kickstarter "ripping off" Fundable is especially silly considering that both are essentially variants of Kelsey and Schneier's Street Performer Protocol, published in 1998 [1]. (That paper is not even the first instance of the basic idea, just one of the most well-known.)

Edited to add: I'd be really interested to see one of these sites implement the Rational Street Performer Protocol [2], which essentially means that each donor pledges matching funds ("I'll donate $X for every $Y that anyone else pledges, up to a maximum of $Z"). This gives individuals a stronger incentive to pledge more; the hard part is coming up with a simple explanation that first-time users will understand.

[1]: http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html

[2]: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/rspp
That's not really AI since the person generated all the knowledge and the bot just copies it. That's like Deep Blue beating Kasparov using a bunch of lookup tables based on the best chess masters. At that point, Big Blue isn't really playing, Kasparov is just playing against a bunch of chess masters.
You're right. At some point I'm going to start using http://getsatisfaction.com/ or think about moderation/filtering. But for now I really like the direct feedback from users, so I'm going to delete bogus entries manually from time to time.
Or is it "Dr. Kai-Fu"? That's the question I'm asking... how can I tell if my correspondent has already swapped his names in the belief that he's following the Western custom?
Would you happen to know why the Austin police were after the company? Sounds like a messy soap opera, but I'm curious about what went so wrong.
I wish the author had been more specific about how Maven had failed him, especially regarding the "convoluted hackery" he mentions with the pom file...

So far, I haven't had much trouble with Maven. I've only done fairly straightforward web programming, with Spring, Struts 2, and Hibernate. It was a hassle to get it all set up, but I blame Spring for that, not Maven. The conventions seem to work very well, since you can just follow a standard directory structure.

I've found it particularly easy to use mvn war:war to create a war file, which is why I wish the author had elaborated a bit on why he needed to "reconfigure the conventions".

I have no argument with the author's preference for rake (and rails, for that matter), which is a far more pleasant environment than maven, spring, struts 2 (or something else), and hibernate, but of all this, Maven (I'm talking about Maven 2 here) was by far the most pleasant part of the stack for me.

One last thing - I promise I'm not being glib, feigning misunderstanding where I actually disagree. I'm pretty sure the author is a good programmer who has a legitimate gripe, and all I've done is basic CRUD programming with the stack I mentioned... but I definitely would like to hear some details.
You're awesome and I'm looking forward to everything else you might write about linguistics on HN, but I'm not going to be the only person on Hacker News to tell you not to call people "idiots" on our comment threads.
Sounds like Pratt is framing it as his partner making it up as a scare tactic to try and acquire his portion of the company.
#2 ... He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present

I didn't like mortality rates were that bad in 1900 USA.
This topic is a few days old, but for the record. Yes patents:
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/commentary/circuitcourt/20...
...and by other means:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/08/injunction-requ/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/atm-vendor-halts-ta...
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/07/fbi_arres...
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/07/45298
A difference of plus or minus 50 deaths doesn't seem like enough to be a trend. It could just be chance.

That said the full paper is much more interesting than the brief example in the submitted link:

http://www.bus.umich.edu/OTPR/WP2001-3paper.pdf
I would be supremely interested to see a Nate Silver style analysis of deaths of wealthy persons during 2010, to see if there is a statistically significant jump.

Personally speaking, I'm split on my opinion of the estate tax. On one hand, it helps fulfill the mostly empty promise of a true meritocracy. But considering the various horrors associated with the spending of taxpayer money, I'm fully sympathetic with those who are opposed to the tax.

The estate tax would likely be more acceptable if the deceased were able to provide some amount of direction in their wills about the use of the collected tax revenue, but I suppose that would open up a whole can of worms.
Something is wrong with a society that needs shortcuts to make pancake batter. It takes less than 5 minutes --- and even less time if you take just a few minutes to premix the dry ingredients ahead of time.

I 100% believe this product adds value to people's lives, but I'm also pretty confident that that's because people are terrified to learn how to cook.
You deal with it the same way you do in real life. You don't do business with them. If I only trust dollars I can stick to dollars. But if I trust Brooklyn Greenbacks or the BACE, then I can use them. Not sure how this is related to the protocol as any paper currency has this issue also.
It was a great sob story until he tried to promote his wireless thing at the end... Then I just had to laugh.
how about not using a mechanical disk.

solid state seeks are like 10 or 50 times faster.
You need Microsoft products if your company sells to medium/large businesses.

You need business cards if you do direct sales or consulting.

You need air conditioning, perhaps more than heat, pretty much everywhere in the US.
My favorite book of 2009 was The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki:

http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/12/critical-analys...

The book shows how groups can work together to do great things. It also shows why some groups fail miserably. Overall I found it very helpful and enlightening in that it helped my understanding of group dynamics and how to take advantage of the full power of groups.
If I hadn't read Rand, comments like this one would make me want to, just to see how she managed to piss so many hipsters off.
I respectfully would swap "Need: Beer on Fridays" with "Don't Need: Aeron chairs." If my back is killing me because of crappy chairs, no amount of beer is going to stop me from finding a new job.
Sensationalist? Hardly. Since it was only through his WoW gameplay that they managed to track him down, the headline was entirely factual and relevant.
Both Grimus and Midnight's Children are great. The Satanic Verses is worth a read but not before the first two IMO.
Is there a list of websites that provide services based on the street performer protocol (or something similar)? I like the whole escrow release idea, kind of how Blender was made open source.
To improve my signup rate I took the leap of faith of making the sign form have four fields: name, email, and two password fields. I don't even require an image verification.

After signup the user is directed to their account panel on which they can fill out any extra details that they may want to provide.
I really wish that he blogged every week.
That makes sense. In the meantime it must be frustrating that there are so many irresponsible people who make more work for you.
This is a great talk and I recommend you watch it. Here are the cliff notes.

- Constantly review

- People and how they function are more important than ideas; ideas come as a result

- Do not let success mask problems, do deep assessments

- Organizations fall over by default, slowly enough that you don't notice it

- Everything you do has to be original, you can't repeat yourself, dig deeper, you're always missing something important

What strikes me is how they've internalized successive originality in each project. The latter half of their repetoire is something new in animation: Wall*E, Ratatouille, The Incredibles.
Dont require password confirmation if you have an email.. they can always use the lost/forgot password feature.
Give spray cheese a chance. Put it on a hot dog !
Hot startups to watch in 2010 - Scoble
I cannot tell you how painful it is to watch 5 assholes take your idea and run with it and not even give you credit. I hate all 5 of them for that. If I see them, I may punch each one of them in the face. If you have never started your own company and then had someone else steal the credit for what you worked hard to develop, you don't understand.

yikes, sounds like entrepreneurship really doesn't suit John.
Horrible chart junk, but credible domain ( http://www.nsf.gov/news/speeches/colwell/rc02_asm_keynote/sl... ) puts life expectancy in 1900 around 45 years.
i roughly agreed except certain items like the beer and music sound juvenile and clearly are not needed for a startup. i would add something like oh say, call me crazy, but I dunno a business model, and understanding how long your runway is. and while you don't need a formal vacation policy, i'd say that you need some understanding of who contributes what, roughly how much, and when. That's way more important than "sunny offices", windows that open, etc.
I think you're right that in principle one can make a maven build deterministic, but in practice I have yet to see it done. Of course, that could just be a statement about the crowd I hang out with, but I think there are more fundamental problems. Wouldn't you have to specify explicit version numbers for not only your immediate dependencies, but also all transitive dependencies? Not that that's necessarily a bad thing in itself--regardless of what build system you use, if you want a reproducible build, one way or another you have to specify particular versions of all dependencies. But if you have to provide a configuration file that explicitly lists all direct and indirect dependencies, then what's the point of all the sophisticated transitive dependency management functionality we hear so much about?

Also, you didn't address the gp's complaint that the build tool will spontaneously update not only the project dependencies, but also itself. Some maven plugin developer out there can release a new version, and a project that compiled fine yesterday suddenly won't compile anymore. I'm sure there's a way to force it to use particular versions of the plugins as well, but by the time you explicitly list every transitive dependency and every plugin used in every phase of the lifecycle, you've got a really big configuration file, especially for a tool whose motto is "convention over configuration." Not to mention that if you accidentally forget to specify a version number for one of these potentially dozens of packages, maven will happily default to using the latest version, which makes your build secretly nondeterministic.
Very true. I could probably remove the second password field without any loss.
Tom Silver, senior vice president for North America at Dice Holdings Inc is quoted in the article:

"Demand is growing for people who know specialized programming languages like Ruby on Rails and AJAX"

So clearly clueful recruitment is not a skill in demand.
From the article:

All it took was 5 super-connected people at Kickstarter (especially Andy Baio) to take a concept we worked hard to refine, tweak it with Amazon Payments, and then take credit. You could say that that's capitalism, but I still think you should acknowledge people that you take inspiration from.

The thing is being well connected does matter. And I wouldn't say that's just calling it capitalism. Further, getting an idea off the ground is hard regardless of how well you are connected and how good the idea is. The fact that Facebook is "the" social networking site shows that one idea can become successful while earlier attempts fall by the wayside. It happens everyday. Perhaps Kickstarter will be wildly successful, or perhaps not, but the connectedness of the founders is only one part of Kickstarter's rise.

To the issue of giving credit where credit is due. If Kickstarter did not use the author's code or his/her own works, then the author deserves no explicit named credit. Just as Google deserved no explicit named credit from Microsoft when it released Bing. Not to mention the other possible legal ramifications if Kickstarter came forward and publicly acknowledged their idea was based on Fundable's.
agreed. if company provides an office, providing great chairs goes a long way to increasing health and morale, and it's a company asset that can be reused by various employees, etc. beer is relatively cheap, a consumable, not an asset, and adults expect to buy beer on their own dime and time, if at all. chairs are a business tool, beer is not. do you need Aerons at launch? no. but that's a more substantive benefit for your employees that beer.
Namebench: Google’s 20% Project To Find The Fastest DNS Server
Lots of hate for kickstarter.

Pledgebank has been doing this since 04 at least. I run petitionspot so I have been watching sites like this and they just didnt do a good job. Just look at thepoint.com ( now groupon ) - They tore it up because they did a good job. They were in chicago, not the valley.
Computer Vision Video Lectures