skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Read about Hershey and Edison :)

Taking a break is a really good idea. Not a long one, but something that makes you clear your head, focus on your body and your health, and starting missing creating cool stuff. If your mind's constantly occupied with day-to-day concerns, you can be overwhelmed and it's hard to regain focus.

If you can afford it, change your scenery a bit and go hiking or get away to a beach for a week, 'til you get bored of it.

What is your goal in making a startup? If you can get a continual sense of reward from accomplishing these things, that'll keep you going :)
PaidContent blog network hires Dow Jones, Yahoo veteran as CEO
Google (ironically) Goes Black In Support Of Earth Hour
What Makes a Good Mobile Application Great
YouTube Feature Tells Video Creators When and Where a Clip Is Being Watched
Apple quietly settles lawsuit over dithered laptop displays
I'm surprised no one brought up column-oriented databases.

When attributes can be added dynamically and/or are have a small value set, column-oriented databases with bitmap indices outperform traditional relational databases.

See MonetDB for an open source, usable column-oriented db with bitmap index support: http://monetdb.nl/

For more kvetching on the topic: http://dynamictyping.org/post/29661699#disqus_thread

I tried to find a public research document with performance comparisons, but to no avail.
MetroPCS Communications to pay $313M for bandwidth block in FCC auction
NASA’s Science Chief Resigns
The thrill of launch
Technology meets Architecture: Tower with Rotating Modular Floors and Horizontal Wind Turbines
Lew - a graphics programming language along the veins of Processing based on Lua
Gallery here:
http://www.4p8.com/lew/gallery.html
Great news
Conkeror Comes Unstuck (keyboard based browsing)
Accept failure and work in small bits. Focus on a very small part of your life and make sure you excel at it: ribbon and cherry on top with a blue medal for tying your shoes.
Take each day one step at a time. It's not easy but you don't have to swallow it all at once.
most college papers are independent and don't receive much (if any) funding from the University they are affiliated with.

helps them remain a bit more objective.
Catcher in the Rye in 140 Character Installments
Peep - an Open Twitter Server
"So if I can offer anyone some advice it's this: forget about FF/Safari/Opera etc. Concentrate on getting IE6/7 support right from the start. Don't wait."

I think everyone would still recommend using a standard compliant browser to shape your early drafts.
Optimistic Entrepreneurs
I don't get how it's suppose to catch any wind. I don't see fans or wings of any sort. is it inbetween the floors?
Job Market 2009 (one view)
Pretty funny if you've ever hired day laborers... :D
Webkit Enabled a Broken SMIL Just to Pass Acid 3
China's Plan to Modify the Weather for the Olympics
I thought this was great. I'd like to echo one of his questions to this community - what are the ways in which you have successfully worked with teams in India? Our QA engineers are great, but the time difference and the lack of domain knowledge caused by rapid turnover is making it impossible for us to capitalize on their abilities. Any advice?
1. Get free YC advice here. Post a link to your built web app. You might get advice from smart hackers, YC-funded founders, and even YC principals.

2. Unless you have a good reason to incorporate now, just get a doing-business-as license (or Massachusetts Business Certificate, or whatever your state calls it). If you get into YC later, they'll want you to incorporate using their documents.

3. Track all your expenses. Startup expenses can help your taxes even years later, whenever you start getting revenue. (I just learned this last week.)

4. Tie your success to the success of existing YC companies. I've integrated with disqus, adpinion, snipshot and clickpass. You show them off; they show you off.

5. Talk about your project with your family. As far as possible, make it something that includes them rather than competing with them. I sat down with two of my kids and showed them how I write web pages. My 10-year-old wants to do the same thing when she gets older. Amusingly, the page I made sitting with them ended up in production, which is OK.

http://ourdoings.com/lemondrops.html
I don’t think they throw out structural information (like adjacency of pixels). Since each pixel corresponds to an independent dimension, the adjacency is still contained in those coordinates: (a,b,...) is not the same as (b,a,...). So, as long as all images have the same dimension, it’s OK. If you had both 100x100 images and 1x10,000 images in the collection, that would mess up everything!

As we know from linear algebra, if a collection is linearly dependent, you can find a subcollection that adds up to 0! In other words, everything cancels out and you end up with a blank photo. Is it possible? If the dimension is too low (the images are small), yes. If the collection is large (a lot of images), maybe. What if it is small? (It is in fact!) In a very extreme case you may need the negative for each image to cancel it: same shape with dark vs. light hair, skin, eyes, teeth (?). Interesting stuff...
Exactly - its between the floors. I think this is one of the most innovate overall building technology developments I've ever seen. They invented a way to create partial floor modules that are lifted to the very top of the building first and then filled in on the way down, a way to rotate the floors, a way to have horizontal tubines between the floors that create enough power for 10 towers - simply amazing.
From Oxford to Silicon Valley, part six
Look's like the Apple is going this way. Their iphone technology is exactly what you need for a full screen laptop. To make a device like this really work, both the hardware and software have to be re-designed. You cannot simply stick OSX or Vista on it and expect a good user experience.

Notably, the use of a stylus is very unnecessary. And IMHO, this is more like the laptop of 2010 or 2012 and it will be coming out from 1 infinity loop.
The Ning Content Store: Ning's highly scalable, object-oriented storage system
Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites
Hey - I'm the article author. :) And we did have some successes working w/ the Indian team, but they were with very specialized, specific components of the application that could be easily spec'd out.

For example, we had to write a daemon that would interface with a national wireless carrier's network to provision new services using XML requests over sockets. The XML had a DTD and examples of requests and responses. We had one engineer in the U.S. writing the specs and doing some development (he split his time with other projects), one QA person in the U.S., and two to three developers in India. That project went a lot more smoothly, because

- There wasn't a lot of domain knowledge required.

- The Specs were well documented.

- The team working on the project was small.

So I think it's critically important to pick which projects are outsourced very carefully.
How to combat "Trojan Inside"
Ok, the one that mounts on your steering wheel is a HORRIBLE E idea!! Well, at least 'til we get cars that drive themselves.
Comcast won't throttle BitTorrent anymore, will throttle heavy downloaders
YouTube Now Offering Video Statistics
Why not use some free library to thesaurasize your product DB and then collect on those mechanical turk payouts yourself?

Bankrupt them. :)
It always has confused me as to why ISPs and Universities have been so persistent about throttling protocols instead of just regulating bandwidth.

Quality is generally completely unaffected for other services as long as you don't saturate your upload bandwidth on DSL.
What that man does is not domain squatting. He was wise enough to invest into (now) very valuable domain names, which he plans to develop.
It might have been more effective to redirect them to a randomly chosen product description from a set of, say, fifty. They'd likely have wasted a lot of Turk time rewording those fifty descriptions before realizing what was going on.
Benefiting from the technologies of their acquiror at last?
Does this mean emails sent from EC2 will not be automatically marked as spam? (right now I think Hotmail marks all EC2 emails as spam). I read that reverse DNS and PTR records are needed to accomplish this. So, this solves just half the problem?

I am asking these as exploratory questions... I don't really have a good grasp on what I am talking about. Please point me to resources.

BTW, do you know of any sample Python code that is used to act on incoming emails in the server?
Code you wrote yourself, especially generic libraries will always be useful for you as long as you use it on a periodic basis. I have some C++ code I wrote back when I was 13 in my first courses in college which is part of my current startup codebase.

The question is would these tools be useful for someone else? Would these utilities make other programmers more productive? Would someone pay you to buy your code? (except for its didactic/historic/collector value)

I see "On LISP" goes for about 200$ on Amazon despite the fact that you published it as a free pdf.
Yes. The ones I still use are now part of Arc.
Buying up vast amounts of prime real estate in an extremely overcrowded town and then wasting the property just to earn pennies a day while others desperately need it is not squatting either, huh?
you should've forced them to redirect always to the same product, if they were directly linking to products from the turk. that way, the person paying would be getting hundreds of one product description.
Creating a startup in the U.S.
I am currently working with 2 friends on an online venture. Each of us have jobs and we only work on our project in the weekends and some week-nights if we can get home before 10pm. We dream about pursuing our project full-time and we have thought a lot about applying to YC and other similar programs.

The problem is that two of us are not American citizens or permanent residents. We require visas to remain here legally. We would like to stay and work together but this is not possible without a visa. At the same time, we really don't see our project getting anywhere unless we pursue it full-time. I was wondering if anyone else has/had this problem when creating their venture. Are there ways to get around it so we can apply to programs like YC?
It's not necessarily your fault. It's very common for comments to focus on a side point and miss the core of a post. Happens to me all the time.
Study shows the upside of anger
Good read. I don't think I could have passed up that many offers.
Internet, phone, cable firms look at national wireless network (Google and Intel)
Who's bad? Chimps figure it out by observation
I wish. :) It's a former login, as I'm sure is true of the above list. But not all famous logins are monograms; billg comes to mind...

Monogram logins seem to be an artifact of some computer science departments (and other small, unix-y operations), which may be why so many hackers are known by them.
Great story. Lots of examples of things you can do until your angel arrives.
hurting
God bless him; those pills are exactly what will kill him.

The singularity is coming, but Moore's law won't have much to do with it. I remember seeing a few-days-old kitten and for the first time in its little life, it saw a dog. It hissed.

We already have the equivalent computing power of a kitten's brain. What we don't have is the software that can recognize a dog without having ever seen one before.
the domains were bought almost 10 years ago. Geoff has only just joined and immediately
y stopped the trading/squatting and started putting together a team to build products that leverage the domains. Hence the re-branding.
drink heavily for three weeks while watching lots of TV. At end of third week go to the gym, get on a treadmill and think about what your next business will be. Come up with idea, get off treadmill and run with it.
Opera passes the acid3 test with 100%
That was fast. First browser that does, AFAIK.
Maybe they should have shown a picture of a clever looking mobile phone. Will people even bother with a laptop in 7 years if the have a slick Android/iPhone/etc device?
It would be very hard to argue that the singularity won't arrive eventually, provided humans survive long enough. It's just the date that's tough to predict. Sure, computing power has been growing exponentially, but as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future results", and there are so many other variables aside from raw processing speed.
You might google site:news.ycombinator.com , because you guys aren't the first nor the last to have this problem.
Add your own buttons to Picasa, upload photos all over the Web
This thread might be useful if you are looking into getting a visa. My co-founder and I are looking at these options right now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115590

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html << also, you only need to be able to come to the US for the 3 months to be able to participate in YC. so my advice is apply and begin looking at your visa options. if you get in and have your visa already sorted out by the time you get to the states I imagine it will make it easier when you look to raise more money, stick around, etc.
Paper airplane to fly from space to Earth
What we don't have is the software that can recognize a dog without having ever seen one before.

Sure we do.

...................

Anyway, there is a problem with the notion of super-intelligent robots. Without getting too much into it, suffice to say that robots will be forced to subscribe to the same survival-of-the-fittest constraints that humans have. When you observe the human species, it might seem strange that there are so many people who enjoy rap music and nascar, and so few who enjoy calculating derivatives in their heads. But nature (read: survival of the fittest) has only portioned out a comparatively small number of superintelligent people in the world, for a reason. It will presumably do the same for robots.

That is, when robots are manufacturing themselves, a moderately intelligent "thug" robot, or "drone" robot, or "worker" robot, or "leech" robot will have certain advantages over a "sit and design better competitors for myself" robot.
I sometimes use FMC Block Diagrams and Petri Nets in order to communicate my ideas. FMC is even more high-level than UML, but designed to be easier to grok for non-hackers.

http://www.fmc-modeling.org/quick-intro
Great post! That rush of adrenaline probably already makes it worth creating your own startup.

Nice tips, certainly some things to consider when launching. But in the end you can probably never be prepared enough. But where would the fun be?
He never gave a reason? Does anybody know anything more?
How can you say the pills are dangerous without knowing what they are?
Interesting, but I think he's way too late to that party.

These short, generic domain names (like perfume.com) had some value 10 years ago, when Internet search was still much more of a chaotic crapshoot.

Today, you could practically run a thriving ecommerce site from just a static IP if you spent a little bit of time on SEO. People go to google, type in "perfume" or "buy perfume" and go off to either the text-ad sites, or the top organic results.

Users have been trained on the idea that "domain guessing" is hopeless, and more than likely to land you on a pr0n site or ad site (like those domains are currently configured).

Also, for many of these e-commerce related sites, there is a large percentage of people who are looking to buy perfume+something else. If your site is so tightly optimized around 1 product class, I think you'll lose a lot of business to people who want to buy 3 products from 1 vendor, not 3 products from 3 vendors.

IMO, the majority of these domain squatters have so thoroughly skewed or ruined how people find products of interest that they have no hope of suddenly turning things around by turning these domains into what they should have done from the beginning.
I can't help noticing that while we are making these exponential advances in technology, we are also using exponential amounts of our limited supplies of cheap resources -- things like oil, coal, copper, gold, and helium. I sure hope Kurzweil gets his singularity before any of these limiting factors kick in, or it could put a nasty kink in his graph.
I'm sure we'll see a few of these ideas - some may even become common, but in 2015, my laptop will still be a clamshell design. The clamshell design provides a proper keyboard with proper tactile feedback, a palm rest and an easily adjustable display. It's stable sitting on a lap, and closes up to protect the screen and keyboard from damage, or simply getting dirty.

I'll be using said laptop to write code in a variant of a programming language invented in 1958 using a variant of an editor invented in the '70s. My car will still have a steering wheel and be rear wheel drive. Some things just work until a truly disruptive technology comes along and completely changes the game. The clamshell laptop is one of those things, and I don't see anything truly disruptive in this article.
Adobe Photoshop Express goes free
Flickr and Facebook allow you to share photos online, and desktop programs like Picasa, iPhoto and Photoshop Elements let you make the pictures look good before you upload. But starting today with its new Photoshop Express site, Adobe is putting the two together.

After signing up for the free site at www.photoshop.com/express, members can upload their images and then edit them with Adobe’s simplified set of point-and-click controls for red-eye removal, cropping, exposure, saturation and other functions. Users can group images into Web albums and post them to popular social networking sites, all from within Photoshop Express.
Bug Labs sells out of first batch of open-source mobile devices
It wouldn't surprise me if someone inside Amazon was working on a full relational database appliance as well.
I was thrilled last night when I got clickpass integrated into ourdoings.com. I still have some work to do to be friendly to OpenID in general.

I'm a little bummed I won't be able to watch them live when they go on justin.tv today. Hopefully I'll be able to catch the recording later.
Doubtful. Object oriented models mirror the real world far more than normalized relational data.

So then ... maybe its relational dogma that is the problem. People are realizing that it is the source of the object-relational impedance mismatch, and is what needs to change.
So the conclusion is to either not do it for years or make a sham marriage. I have no idea how someone could be unsatisfied by this previous advice:)

It really does seem to be a rather mysterious process if you're this far out of the norm though. I'm sure every additional datapoint will help.
OMG!!!! I think there was a "Daily WTF" about this design!!! LOL!!!
Tiny Firms Offer Big Computing Services
From an internal e-mail ('someone'@smd.nasa.gov):

"Today Alan Stern announced that he had resigned his position as AA. In his talk to the Science Mission Directorate he said that the management issues were about cost control and that he did not see a way for him to do what needs to be done. He didn't go into details. Evidently there are extremely strong opinions about all this. ... Staff reaction to the resignation was I think a bit of a shock and a great sense of loss. Alan brought a breath of fresh air and a new spirit to the organization that was a lot of fun for me to share."

I pinched that from http://www.nasawatch.com/ , where this and a few other touchy topics are discussed as they unfold.
That's because it is a mysterious process -- so much of it seems to be at the discretion of the USCIS examiner. I think the best advice is to consult an immigration lawyer. Not only because they know about the law (which I find is actually pretty hit and miss) but having a letter from a lawyer included in your application gives you a little more legitimacy.
I'm channeling a pharmacist friend here. Either a pill has no effect (such as Vitamin-C) and just gives you expensive urine, or it has an effect. And if it has an effect, it has a side effect(s). No pharmacist in the world knows what would happen if you mix that many pills, whatever they are, and so, unless most of them are herbal non-drugs, he's taking a big chance, which is exactly what he's trying to avoid. Thus the irony.
Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
Ira Glass, entropy, and software development - (37signals)
LinkedIn And Business Week Partner To Provide Business And Contacts Data
Thanks for the advice....

I don't think I want to go the sham marriage route :-)Perhaps the best thing would be to consult an immigration lawyer. Just wanted to know if anyone has had similar experiences to mine as to attend a program like YC, everything is predicated on being able to remain in the country.
Sure we do.

Really? And we have software that can recognize a cat from a dog (as that kitten can do)? And my face from yours even if I cover my ears (as the kitten will be able to do once it imprints)? I'd like to see that software!

The truth is Kurzweil and others are fooling themselves if they think this is a hardware issue.
Microsoft Announces Silverlight Streaming Ads Pilot on AdCenter
Perhaps not.

No, I believe it makes sense to draw a line. When a person (indeed, even a specialist) claims special insight (including critical insight) of a well-examined problem he is almost always wrong. The physicist John Baez not infrequently encounters cranks who believe they've found errors in relativity theory or quantum mechanics. He has developed a scale for rating cranks:

http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics/msg/5312a801e0785e...;

The OP is wrong in so many ways that it renders his article meaningless. And others have pointed out possible errors (although doing so one must interpret the OP's intentions, a risky endeavor indeed), though certainly not to exhaustion. To add a single specific item of criticism to the fray would only provide yet another handle for the OP or other misled persons to grasp and extend the discussion uselessly.

The human mind can create ideas, phrases, and analogies some of which, upon further examination, are devoid of meaning. Dreaming is an extreme instance wherein most of the ideas later make no sense. However the same thing can happen while fully conscious and is part of the normal creative process.

Mathematics and logic are tools we use for separating empty ideas from useful and meaningful ones. Unfortunately there is no Royal Road to mathematics or logic, nor to relational databases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Road

I have neither the time, nor the inclination, much less the rhetorical skill to enlighten the OP or this group as to the vagaries of databases.

Nor do I view this as a "rhetorical" discussion: rhetoric is concerned with swaying the populace to your side of the argument whether you are correct or not. I am concerned about what is correct rather than what is popular.

I do not doubt the enthusiasm (or frustration) of the OP, however his complaints are poorly-stated, unclear and orginate from an incomplete understanding of logic and relational databases. Many similar complaints have been stated before (often much more clearly and in a form arguable) in more appropriate venues (e.g., Google for "relational vs OOP group:comp.*"), where they have been thrashed about thoroughly by better, and worse, men than me.

It is one thing to register frustration. But it is another to casually question ideas that have withstood the test of time and cast that questioning as serious.

To show that frustration in the development of databases is nothing new see William Kent's "Data and Reality":

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Reality-William-Kent/dp/158500970...
Sweet. A commercial windmill can power around 40 standard houses, so this could work.
So, how can we commercialize this?