skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
same thing I do when the economy enters a boom period.
It would be helpful if he would actually explain how this meltdown would occur, rather than just yelling about how crazy terrible it will be. I personally know little about derivatives and how they work, other than they seem to be a way to securitize a bet on a non-equity occurrence ... like the Giants winning the Superbowl or a storm killing the Florida orange crop.
Job Loyalty in Valley? Not Unless You're Retired
swombat probably meant that America is the biggest single market in the world (measured in purchasing power, not number of people). Even if that isn't strictly true (I'm not sure if, say, China is actually bigger), America is surely the largest accessible market for most American startups.
Well, if you were from the country most commonly known as "Mexico" you would really be from "The United States of Mexico". Therefore it makes more sense to call you a Mexican than an American.
Google officially acquires DoubleClick
and does anybody have numbers on coverage in news.yc?
Hi Spif. Clickpass is a single-sign-on service. It's built on the OpenID protocol.
Very interesting. I actually built something like this myself (I was going to call it satchl) and I eventually stopped after looking long and hard at the online storage market and deciding that it wasn't worth the effort.

What convinced dropbox that they could do better?
One benefit of a study showing that one monitor configuration is better than another is that it encourages people with the worse configuration to buy new monitors.

Another benefit is an article on the CIO website featuring an illustration of an NEC monitor as an example of widescreen monitors.

...Which is not necessarily a reason to bias results in one direction or another, but it is a reason to emphasize the results enough to be statistically significant and hence reportable.
The thing I really enjoy about VirtualBox is that it just works. I have been using it to run XP under a linux host for things like Skype, and it's really nice not to have to fight with configs and such. Hopefully Sun lets them keep the same ethos after the acquisition.
we've got a new screencast up too, which isn't linked to from the tc article:

http://getdropbox.com/screencast

shameless reddit/digg plug:

http://reddit.com/info/6boh3/comments/

http://digg.com/software/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_MIT...
Ruby + Google Sitemaps == Easy way to get the google love you deserve
I'd really like someone to explain Banach-Tarski to me in some way that I can sort of understand. I understand it has to do with AOC, which seems totally reasonable, and then I'm lost.

Also, I have trouble with "incrementally" understanding this. I can understand that the limit of 1/n (n->INF) is 0, because even with large finite numbers we're getting close to 0, but no matter how many times I cut up an orange I detect no Banach-Tarski strangeness.
Beautiful origami from a leading theorist of origami math.
I tried an ad once (ok maybe twice!) and it was useless. What has worked for me to raise money is through networking. Find someone or a company that is aligned with your interest but is not-technical and sell them on your idea. I have done that before with success. Essentially they partner with you providing you the resources you need to make your product and they benefit in a real way when it starts to produce an income.
sympy 0.5.13 released
It was just an observation. I think it is even better that it was a coincidence. As the saying goes: "the harder you work, the luckier you get".

But even if it wasn't, I couldn't say that there was something unethical or shady about it. Sorry if it seemed that I was implying something like that. It was far from my intention.
Thanks :) I was hoping someone would whip something up.
A CC license for mashups: "... They're graphics, you can't use traditional software licensing rules"
Valve: "Integrating Narrative and Design: A Portal Post-Mortem," GDC, February 2008. Slides [pdf]
I can't directly answer your question I have only used shared hosting, dedicated servers, and EC2.

However, I would say that EC2 is actually not that expensive compared to the others. I've been using it for my latest project and really like it. The cost is only about $75 a month and it behaves just like my dedicated servers (but it has more RAM!). That's coffee money.

Also, you will eventually leave the "development stage" and finding a place where you can easily (and without great expense) move to a larger VH will save you money in the long run, too.
I really like this... well done! Any chance for an invite?
nice, a patent troll ranking for the US
Thanks, I did get that part :-)
I'm wondering though why this would be a success where MS passport failed. Because it's not evil? Is usability the only left that hampers uptake of openID?
Funny I was doing the same... I think that alone suggests that the marketplace isn't filling every need.

I really love the S3 peice... should allow them to keep prices way down and stay profitable.
"Out of the Labrynth: Setting mathematics free" is a great book which touches on these issues in more detail. It is written by creators of the Math Circle idea of teaching children math (www.themathcircle.org).
It's a problem mainly of ignorance. Both with regards to requiring zip and state and also with the whole liability problem.

The liability issue is only a problem for a few types of businesses, in particularly financial.

You may offend or break laws (such as EU privacy laws), but it really doesn't matter if you're a US company without offices in an EU jurisdiction as they don't have jurisdiction over you, no matter what they say.

It is very easy to make a signup form internationally compliant. You just have to do zip/postalcode, state/province/region. Also don't make any of the address fields required unless you need them for shipping purposes.
Employee Referral Bonus Jackpots: 15 Companies with Awesome New-Hire Incentives
Congrats guys, I have 2 requests:

1) Get a Linux version out, it shouldn't take too long as you developed the thing using Python (not sure what OS specific bindings you have)

2) Add support for LAN connections, when two boxes sit on the same LAN there is no reason for them to wait for S3 to be updated, get the update done locally and then propagate to S3, this will save you bandwidth and shorten latency.
Everytime I Think About You I Multitouch My Cell
ditto on #1. What women sometimes view as happy coincidences in romantic fate is actually the work of meticulous planning on part of the guy.
Hostility Has Its Rewards: Hostile Acquisitions in SV
Join the News.YC group on Chatterous
http://www.chatterous.com/landing/hnyc/

Passcode: hcker

Join the Hacker News group on Chatterous for a live chat. For best experience use GTalk.
Also, would be great a better interfase for BlackBerries! :)
Nerdfotainment
the article lists 15 companies that give "fat bonuses" for employee referrals. many of those 15 companies give less than $1000. How is that a "fat bonus"?

Bonuses need to be up and above $1000 to be "fat".
We just realized some folks around here might be itching to see what's up, too. Have at it! (50 invites for folks here)

http://getdropbox.com/beta/yc50
How do YC companies get on TC so easily?
What I wanted to do with satchl was provided the ability to drag and drop files onto a drive/mount point which would also appear as a web page (a 'desktop' if you like). There would be a couple of versions of the desktop available: a public one and a private one with a single password for making changes. I was targetting a family that needs to share files across the world, or a small company. I had fun writing all the Ajax stuff for the virtual desktop...
Credit Crunch Hits Start-ups
The invite link in the article worked for me.
I just tried this on my phone. It looks really really good. (Much better than you would expect if you just clicked on the link in Firefox.) Great job!
Help Fund A Ruby Developer To Work On Open Source For 6 Months
Web programmers can actually completely ignore the lion's share of the complexity represented in this diagram.

This concerns only web server implementors... and even then, a lot of web servers simply don't need to support the full set of operations.
Here's an example of how these gyrations affect municipal bond investments: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/our-run-in-with.html

Another example is Comerica's apparent misstep with its money market funds: http://venturebeat.com/2008/03/11/credit-crunch-hits-start-u...

You'll start seeing more stories like these.
Awesome, thank you. Has news.YC got an api yet or is this done by scrapping?
AdSense the product and technology (content targetting) predates the acquisition, which is why the press release is titled, "New Technologies and Engineering Team Complement Google's Content Targeted Advertising Programs". AdSense the trademark may have come from AS, but that's not very relevant.

I'm guessing that the "intern" that you are referring to is Salar: http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#salar
He was maybe the 10th employee of Google.
Boot$trapping: ‘Spend it’ Like Dell & Newmark
Taffy: A database in JavaScript
lol reminds me of the last big engineering company I worked for that gave 400$ patent bonuses to employees that got patents accepted.

These guys spent a ton of time researching and came up with amazing original stuff and then got 400$ pre-tax as their bonus. I don't see how they put up with that...
Identical twins do not have identical DNA
great work guys - YC is rockin' the valley as usual :)
Nice use of the AACS key in your screen cast :-)
What type of tests do you guys maintain for news.yc other than the live deployment? Did this hiccup result in something like an account creation stress test being added to an automated test suite?
Because Michael Arrington is in love with Paul Graham.

It's a secret affair, of course.
no more invites there - any chance of me getting an invite as well?

looks like a great concept.
Guy Kawasaki Formally Launches Alltop. Wow, It’s Bad.
Worst unionized teacher contest - winners offered $10K to quit
Last October, about 1400 visits spread over 3 days (half of it on the first day).

Obviously it varies based on a number of factors (I'm sure an YC start-up launch announcement gets a lot more clicks, for example).
How's that related to you costs? The primary expense has always been the cost of talent and "cost of sales". Employees time and marketing/advertising. Paul assumes that programmers will work for free (or for very little) because they're founders, but doesn't address the other big one. Well, he saves a ton of money on free YC-backed PR, but even his model breaks down if you need more than 2-4 programmers to deliver even a prototype, or if your idea/business depend heavily on graphics designers or rely on complex distribution channels (even within the web).

In fact if you way back, there was another time when a couple of guys in a garage could do it all. Gates and Allen did it. Jobs and Woz did it. In history of personal computing there was always one or two guys who did it first without bunch of money: nearly every piece of traditional desktop application has that guy. Equipment and infrastructure costs have never been prohibitive since the invention of a PC.

As web applications grow the history will repeat itself: instead of two guys building it you'll need 20, just like it did with desktop software and games. There are only brief windows of opportunity for a "little guy" and they only come some major breakthrough in technology comes along.
he he, yes absolutely...

My point is not to downgrade American companies, it's more that I'm perplexed why some of them are content with such a small share of the global market. If an European startup can do it, then it seems like it is not an issue of it being too hard or too expensive.
Ok, this seriously rocks. Thanks Ashwin!

I'd like to make an iPhone interface for Disqus in the near future. Any pointers to nice resources?
I enjoy this kind of thoughtful exposition on teaching methods in mathematics; I’ve read several here over the last few days.

This kind of essay attempts to answer the question “How should math be taught?” or at least “How can math be taught better?”. However, another question always weighs heavier on my mind: “How should the process of teaching be designed in order to give incentive for teachers to use the best instruction methods available?” After all, I doubt that Minsky’s ideas will be adopted nationwide by the NEA, for all their merit.

It would be shortsighted to lobby for a new curriculum or for a few idealistic young folks to enter the teaching profession to implement these ideas. Long term improvement can only be gained by addressing the incentives facing those in control of the teaching process.

Technology gives students an additional source of instruction that they did not have before. It may be that society uses technology to route around the stagnant educational bureaucracy like a body routing nerve signals around a brain lesion. Minsky is involved in this technological solution, and it may ultimately prove to be the fastest moving and most effective method of change. Thousands of students will read articles like Minsky’s on the internet, and they will know that there are better things waiting for them after government school.

Also, I am a strong supporter of school choice. For their faults, the incentives faced by instructors in a market are an order of magnitude better than the incentives faced by instructors in a modern school bureaucracy.I would rather have educators competing to please their ultimate customers than have them competing for a higher bureaucrat’s favor.

However, I rarely find smart people willing to grapple with this higher-order problem unless they have a background in economics. Geeks need to learn that they can’t hack society unless they understand and comprehend the structures surrounding the problem that they wish to solve.
Internet Fanboyism at the SXSW Interactive Conference (comic)
heh, not hacker news. more 'design news'
I used Joe Hewitt's excellent iUI library as the base, although hacked it quite extensively. Also, prototype.js is always a time saver.

The hardest part about the iPhone app, I felt, was just reducing clutter.
No API, just plain old lib-www-perl :)
Is there a good alternative? Anyone have any experiences ?
Theres a series of articles on A List Apart: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/putyourcontentinmypocket

Also check out iui, which makes getting an iPhone site up and running real easy and fast.
In the case of the multiplication tables, Minsky missed an opportunity to point out to the child that the product (a x b) of any two numbers in the multiplication table can also be obtained by _counting_ the number of items in the multiplication table bound by the rectangle of height a and of width b. That would have provided additional motivation and insight into solving other problems (e.g., area).
A good idea: an index of RSS feeds cataloged by subject and selected by an editor with good taste. (The recommendation engines and delicious just can't substitute for an editor.)

Too bad this site isn't about RSS feeds and it isn't discerning enough.
great writeup -- congrats peter and immad!
I think there is something more insidious at work here. Well, perhaps not Insidious, but it's not about companies trying to exclude people, at least not in large. In honesty I think there are two culprits.

1) Stupid Developers. There are lots of developers out there who are lazy and stupid in the bad way. They just go with what they know and don't even begin to consider a larger audience. Think of all the uber-limited lists of job field boxes, of the limited gender-identity options on sites, of the idiocy of requiring an address for registration to a newspapers comments in the first place!

2) Ignorant or unthinking management. People who make the developers require all that stupid information in the first place. They do it because they don't really understand that they're actively deterring business. It's a problem with business models all over. Business leaders often don't realize that they're making it hard for their customers, and that makes their customers unlikely to be customers for long. If someone would sit them down and explain to them the horrors of interface friction, and truly make them understand, I think things could get better quickly.
I wouldn't describe the site so harshly, but a little bit of the human touch would make a big improvement.

Right now you have 40 or so links on the home page, each one leading to a sub-site with 50 sections or so, totaling ~300 links that look awfully machine-generated (scraped from RSS feeds?).

When browsing a magazine rack each cover is a little work of (usually bad) art. The title tags in an RSS feed are nothing like that -- maybe RSS feeds should be more magazine cover-like?
how is a random selection of links from categorized topics from Hacker News, or Digg, or Reddit, thrown on one page any different?

this seems like a big waste of mind-ffff-space to me.
U.S. In-flight Broadband Is A-gogo by Spring
Utu: Zed Shaw's replacement for http
Starling — Unicode string library for Erlang
At the risk of getting grabbed by the MPAA...I want to use a system like this to globally access my media archive, which includes all my legitimately acquired games and music, but also a decent amount of pirated material. Obviously storing copyrighted material without a license on a server in other people's control is a very bad idea. This would be a very useful thing to do though; maybe in a different world where the copyright system has been reformed... I often find myself at a friend's house wanting to see some movie I have on my disk, but I never bother to bring my portable HD unless it's planned.

I have about..50 gigabytes of images of games that I own, i think? Having access to those anywhere would be really nice. I would run my private server to do this kind of thing anyway, but this networking solution would make things a lot easier. However, I wouldn't want anyone to instigate a raid based on what to the casual observer seems like a fat load of illegally acquired copyrighted material. This would be a problem even if I only uploaded what I own.

And then there's the problem of storage cost, 1.5$/10GB/month turns into a considerable number very quickly. So I suppose you intend this kind of thing for the small stuff; images, documents, small-to-medium music collections etc.?
Matrix: Simulating the World with cellular automata
For me, the whole idea of openID is flawed from the start. Why would I want one point of failure? Why would I want to use the same login details for every site I go to? That's kind of a very bad idea.

Sorry, but the whole openID thing seems like tech people making tech things that they think are technically impressive. Rather than things that are useful or solve problems for the average Joe.

There are enough password reminder/generator addons/programs etc, and most browsers have such functionality these days.

Am I missing something?
This looks awesome. What are you using to do version control on the backend?
Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype
Marketing in the US:

"Ebooks for sale." If you live in the same state as our office, pay sales tax, otherwise tax free.

Marketing in the EU:

"Ebooks for sale."

Possibly illegal in France (do laws against free shipping apply to ebooks?).

Some ebooks are not legal in some states, e.g. nazi-related books in Germany.

Maybe I forgot a few other problems. Time to hire 27 lawyers to find out.
$30.
My first thought on seeing this headline: "Oh, this is going to be about why Applescript totally sucks."

And, sure enough, there's Applescript halfway down the essay, as an example of a classic antipattern in DSL design: the "Oh, if I make it read like English it'll be really easy to write with it" antipattern.

When I look at Applescript I can't believe that there are people in the world who think that Lisp is hard to learn.

I liked RSpec when I tried it, but I have to admit that PragDave has a point: it is right on the hairy edge of being too cute with the English syntax. It took me some time to learn to write it properly.
I have my office on my boat.

As long as it's near the sea I'ts mobile :-)
I'm still waiting for arclanguage.org...
Thank you! If you guys can pull off the "Just Works" (and I think you have; I haven't had a chance to play with my beta yet) this has great mass market potential in my opinion.

For example, I'm working on some code with my cousin; we have Subversion etc.; but his PC is the host and we're never on our PC's synchronously so using Dropbox could solve that problem. Also, my folks manage a large apartment complex and they have files they share across multiple PCs at work and at home, I think DropBox would be simple enough for them to use without causing me stress as the de facto family IT guy.
accounts shouldn't be linked to e-mail addresses at login
Perhaps you could create a designation for sponsored reviews and request that companies provide reviews to seed their profiles. The key is clearly denoting them as "sponsored."
That fact that I have seen this twice from two different sources in two days makes me think of one word... Submarine!

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Wow, I forgot all about this after getting pumped about Dropbox (along with everyone else here) last spring:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Powerset releases HBase - Open source version of Google's BigTable
That's why not all duplicate submissions are bad. Sometimes Submission A is what drives people to seek out and post New and Improved Submission B.

Of course, if news stories would link to the freakin' primary sources, already, instead of acting like it's still 1972 and hypertext hasn't been invented yet, we might not have to dig quite so deeply.

(Of course, half the time the primary sources are proprietary dead-trees publications, so it's not always the fault of the journalists...)
1. 99% of people use the same login details on every site they go to anyways. That's not likely to change. For those people OpenID is actually more secure, since their password is only ever exposed to one site.

2. Your email address is already a single point of failure for any sites with a "Forgot my password" function.

IMO an OP can be made secure enough that the benefits of OpenID outweigh the severity of a possible breach (at least for non-critical transactions).
To provide an opposing anecdote, our startup literally got direct contacts/calls from VCs specifically due to our coverage on TechCrunch.

We had been front page on Digg and that got us a crazy number of uniques, but the initial VC interest did not start until we were on TechCrunch and Lifehacker a week or two later.
What's the username?
You should create an account.
Double points for TPS Report and Pets.com exec summary in the screencast - brilliant
...

I don't know if the article's right or not, but...

I couldn't get over the figure...$516 trillion is...a lot of money. I thought the total wealth was closer to $125 trillion...wow. Of course, there are issues with how you count this money, and whether it's real or not, but, damn, 516 trillion...that's almost a quadrillion.

516,000,000,000,000.

5.16 x 10^14

Damn.

Of course, I'm sure we'd all give a quadrillion quadrillion for two seconds of joy.
I honestly have a difficult time understanding the AC paradoxes, too. I recognize that it's totally necessary for many things (i.e. multidimensional integrals) and when it's consistent with a logical conclusion I have little trouble "seeing" it. Otherwise, though, not so much.

I think it's interesting to see the connection between the AC and the Law of Excluded Middle which also causes paradoxical issues from time to time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice#Law_of_the_excl...
I believe Bram Cohen said something along the lines of "Programmers don't take vacations any more. They just wait until their current company implodes, and then take a little time off before finding a new one."
They entirely nailed it. Excellent job.
Middle America Rejects Wal-Mart Linux Experiment