skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, cool.

Kudos for the authenticity; it's no doubt harder to keep it real as the company gets bigger and has to avoid saying controversial things.
Lighter laptops move to flash-based drives
White Collar Crime exposed by an insider: http://smartstartup.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/business-b...
> What does it matter if they don't consider themselves gay?

They might be bisexual. The be trans-something. They might have other problems that make the sex and gender of their sex partners irrelevant:
http://www1.villagevoice.com/people/0804,savage,78927,24.htm...

There is a good answer to your question having to do with the semiotics of sex and gender which is practical, smart, and important in day-to-day life (even if the people who wrote it all want to dig up the remains of Jacques Derrida so they can stare at his navel some more). I'm not going post it here because you probably don't want to read it, but you should know that the people who look down their noses at you for saying stuff like this aren't just doing it because of some feel-good PC nonsense.
It surprises me that people didn't know about these lectures already (of course I realize there's always a first time). They are considered classic and anyone interested in lisp (and programming in general) should watch them.
Heatmap of your Keystrokes
Imagine being unprivileged enough to be born in a third-world country and not even have a chance to pay your application fee for higher education. If you're bright enough and have Internet access you can still learn from the best and maybe prepare yourself and earn a scholarship in the future.
Eval in Lisp is half a page. That's not a lot of material. If you further discount machine language, the only thing left for a compiler/interpreter to do is handle eccentricities in language syntax. This is rote and arbitrary application of data structures. Rarely do I find it edifying to "undo" complexity that someone else has added, at whim, to computation.
What? Girls can't care about Sun buying MySQL?
Does 23andMe or anyone else in the space bundle testing for this gene in their larger/more-expensive packages?
I found source code of IronPython very easy to understand and modify. Check it out, it's written in clean C#.
For now, it is for information purposes only -- to satisfy curiosity. The state of the current research into CCR5 delta 32 doesn't allow for treatment decisions to be made -- it is known that CCR5 delta32 slows down the progression of HIV to AIDS, but you can't adjust medication dosage based on this. Similarly, scientists have concluded that individuals with CCR5 delta 32 in high risk populations are less likely to have HIV. But that study is based on an after the fact study of the group. It would be irresponsible for us to encourage unprotected sex and foolish for anyone to make a decision like that.

So what problem are we solving? I'm not sure that there is a real problem here, beyond a lack of genetic testing services. We're offering a service providing information and some people are more curious than others about this particular information.
the contribution percentages may be different here b/c we have a lot of the kind of people who take initiative, aren't afraid to put their ideas forward, know how to create user accounts, and have stuff to say.
I have ideas that I wish someone did, just so I could buy their product and solve problems that annoy me. I used to see new stuff and say to myself, "I thought of that, why didn't I do it?" Now I say, "I knew there had to be something like this out there. Awesome; I'll buy it."
Kudlow had a response to this:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWI5ZDVjODBkZDI2YWM...

Excerpt:

It appears Gates is ignoring the global spread of free-market capitalism that has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of people up from poverty and into the middle class over the last decade or so. Think China. Think India. Think Eastern Europe (and maybe even France under Sarkozy). Gates wants business leaders to dedicate more time to fighting poverty. But the reality is that economic freedom is the best path to prosperity. Period.

The Heritage/WSJ 2008 Index of Economic Freedom clearly shows that free-market countries are prospering mightily. Per capita GDP is closely related to, and positively correlated with, market economies. The fact is that free-market economics is spreading like wildfire. State socialism is on the decline. Unsurprisingly, the study also shows that the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We're talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, and others.
But instead, let's say we start off by hopping ahead 5 positions and instead look for the "s" at the end of "pen1s". Of course we don't find it, but then instead of checking the next spot, we again skip ahead 5 and look for "s". In fact, because we'll get zero matches, we can skip ahead 5 each time.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
^ ^ ^ ....
s? s? s? ...

if we don't find the 's' in any of those positions, that immediately rules out the possibility that "pen1s" precedes it.

So instead of 1000 comparisons - we only do 200 !

Uhhh, no... consider the string to be searched:

Xpen1sXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
^ ^ ^ ....
s? s? s? ...

Obviously you can't just skip 5 characters just because there's no "s" at position 5. The Boyer-Moore algorithm says you can skip those 5 characters because there's no X in the target string.
This is something that we've discussed.

Actually, we've left the site looking "barebones" as an explicit design decision. People can be put-off by something "too slick," especially when you position yourself as a simple, single-product company, and especially in the research/academic world.

But you are right, too.

We are working on other brands with more premium product which we will release soon. The designs of these sites will reflect the more premium brand.

Email rms for more information if you're interested, he's our news.yc baron.
Be careful with this. I tried three different urls:

close static file: 750 fetches/sec, openload shows 800.
php output: big stream of errors about byte count wrong
other php site: 37 fetches/sec, openload does 135.

I'm not sure which is right, but the 37 vs. 135 could easily lead you astray. This run is 10-13% cpu load on the local machine so it is likely not a saturation problem.

Not that I'm recommending openload, it could use some help, but it is useful to compare.
Leaked Screen Shots Of Windows 7
I've used this in the past. Just note that it only works well if you test it from one colo'd box to your server. Testing locally on your own internet connection doesn't do much - you need a fat pipe.

However this is just HTTP load.. if you have JS running and making database calls after page load I don't think this will help your testing methods.
Here's a service that gives an alternate take -- though also with dubious, thin info, and only on 'http://ycombinator.com' not 'http://news.ycombinator.com':

http://adlab.msn.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx
In this case, the site is all about doing a better job dealing with people.

In general, putting faces on a website is just a way of taking advantage of the fact that people are drawn to and like faces. It's a more subtle version of using female models to sell cars, or watches, or shoes, etc.

Besides, who wants to be the "faceless" hosting provider?
Leaving aside the doubtful utility of this test you really must provide some information about who is behind this company, what techniques will you use to perform the test? What expertise do you have in molecular diagnostics? How do potential customers know that you are not simply taking the money and sending out random results?
Would he still be a "rogue" if he made the bank $7 billion?
Gates Argues That A New Form Of Capitalism Can Save The World
This is quite cool, but would be even better if the opacity of the key matched the opacity of the overlays on the keys.
No, 23andMe only tests for SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) and this is a 32 base pair deletion.
He's probably demonstrating that you lose X% of people at each step. Simple conversion funnel math, with the effect that improving any step in the pipeline improves your overall yield (and the more steps there are, the more people you lose).
Your secret that it took 20 developers to make an online todo list for yourself with no plans to make money?
It was a theoretical question to say I don't think the above categories are appropriate...
i have my browser configured not to send referrers.
Bookmarklet adds better Tab support to iphone
It's entertaining to watch them.
Barebones is nice, but it looks like a spam site or a template of some sort. It actually reduces customer confidence in that case.

Are you trying to follow the 23andme model, but only testing for a single gene?
Obie Fernandez: What's This Crap About a Ruby Backlash?
Doesn't google have a really nice API that you can use to make the process mostly transparent?
Granted this is not something most people probably would expect when they go for a checkup, but have you considered some kind of kit dentists could use or offer?
I know I got lazy! You can certainly edit the utilitie's code if it bothers you too much.

Someone else also suggested I use a color gradient. I can't figure out how though.
So what's to stop an attacker from downloading an old version of flash?
Me too. holds out dollar
Great article. Great GREAT article. IMO, you should avoid TechCrunch like the plague until you can prove that you can turn organic traffic into users.

Am I missing something on Scribd? How the heck do you download a document?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/1461192/Cohort-Analysis

Maybe I need to get more coffee.
He could start by not sabotaging the One Laptop Per Child project.
Although Steve Yegge brings up a lot of interesting points, he's bad at explaining them.

Learning about compilers and programming languages is important because of the principles inherent in building them, which average programmers never completely get.

In my opinion, these principles are:

1) Code is data, and data can be code.

2) The only sensible way to deal with unmanageably-large amounts of code is by creating a language (whether this be an API, a protocol, a DSL, or a Turing-complete programming language) to communicate with.

3) Many classes of problems can be thought of as a transformation of a data-structure in one language to an "equivalent" data-structure in another language, which at its core, is all a compiler does.
I have a few ideas on hold until I meet the right people. I'm not really worred about the real YC crowd because they should all be too busy on their own startup stuff (and if they aren't then they should be -- get back to work!). But if I spill the beans here chances are some bright Googler watching this list could pick it up as their 20% time project and I'd rather not have that happen just yet.
Hasn't all that become obsolete with XML and XSLT? (Kidding...)
That document is missing the set of download links that would normally be between "Share" and "Favorite This".

Maybe there is a flag an uploader can check to not allow download?
I've read Don't Make Me Think. A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.

Awesome book.
Cool.

As for the physical heatmap, I'm showing wear on my control key and "e" key.
You're probably beyond this, but just in case I'd recommend being 100% comfortable with everything in this book before moving on to the dragon book.

The Practice of Programming: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/toc.html
I think that observing is certainly a key to innovation, but not the only one. Equally important is the ability to quickly discard your proposed solutions.

I often find myself thinking about trivial problems and the solutions to them. Not a day will go by without thinking up at least a dozen solutions to all sorts of problems, ranging from how to make a better modding system for websites (which was recently discussed here) to how to shorten the lines in my local supermarket without using more resources. The solutions that I gin up are for the most part totally ridiculous or undoable - but that's fine, as long as I have the good sense to discard them quickly and think of another one. After a while you become quite good at it, and can come up with a dozen ideas to a given problem, think all of them through, discard the ones that won't work and iterate on the ones that might in a few minutes.

I recently saw a study of innovative people, and what made them innovative. The result was that they didn't have ideas that were particularly great, they simply had many many more of them. And they were quick to discard the ones that would not work.

Another important trait of innovative people is that they have a pretty broad spectrum of knowledge. Often innovation comes from coupling ideas or systems from different fields.

just my two cents ;-)
If you read Derrida, but work in a coffee shop, you are still upper class.
Should be interesting to see how this natural step up from chicagocrime.org evolves, I'm not from the US but the three initial cities have kept me clicking around for a while - reading the team's past interviews / posts I'd expect them to put a lot into EveryBlock, and it seems they have. Can't wait to see what the site is like in a year!
Ever find a runtime bug in your program which turned out ultimately to be a fault in the compiler? Ever have to fix it quickly without help?
From my (limited) knowledge of the financial sector, he would most probably be CEO...

:-)
From the pictures, I was able to discern they may or may not have desks. Though results are inconclusive I can say within a certain amount of margin of error that they may most likely do.
What do you think life is, but a compiler that translates abstract code (genomes) into machine code (living cells)?

Generalizing from what the author says, any information can be streamed into a compiler and then ... the world moves.
You could mark as ugly every word with a non-alphabetic symbol in the middle, weird punctuation, or weird capitalization. Sure, there's like a quadrillion ways of spelling "pe&#960;i$", but how often do those symbols appear in the middle of the words in a ham email? You never tell your friends to mEeT yOu at th3 &4r? Srsly, why even give words with numbers and symbols in them the benefit of the doubt?

There's be few exceptions, including:

emails (email@site.top-level domain)
Myspace names that are annoyingly decorated with symbols (although...)
Serial codes
tokens,
passwords,
technical names (i386, ISO9660)
etc

They might be few enough to make into a dictionary and even allow for common misspellings.

So, first you take all the emails Mailinator gets, you put the ones with weird words in custody, and you let the ones with safe words go by.

The remaining emails will mostly be spam. You can further refine the process by getting the computer to find and replace numbers and symbols with letters.

1 l, i, I,
3 e, E,
4 a, A
$ s, S
&#960; n, r,

etc.

You then get some ambiguity. To take Paul's example, "pen1s" can become "penls" or "penis". You can safely assume it's "penis", or use Bayesian functions to mark it down, or whatever. If you have two weird symbols, (say you have p3n1s) you might get four results. But if the list of possibilities includes bad words, it increases the likelihood the email is spam. Season to taste with Bayesian filtering.

You weight words according to the company they keep, so pretty soon latex gets on the list of words to watch out for, along with "princess" and "offshore."

Finally, you can pluck emails out of the inboxes of users if you find out they're spam after the fact. You would have to figure out how to reconcile ex post facto filtering with user privacy first. In any case, suppose 1,000,000 Mailinator users receive the same email from a porn site, and you notice that the first 1000 users who read it delete it as soon as they see it in their inbox. If the response from the users who see the site goes above a certain threshold of marking it as spam, you pluck it out of the inboxes of users who haven't seen it yet. You can then tell them about it and let them see it if they like, etc. But everyone would benefit from having a few people delete it from the inbox.

Then, you could mark as questionable any email that has more than a certain number of recipients. These are generally spam. Even if they're from people you know, they're generally spam. I hate it when people put me on their mailing list. You can put these emails in a special part of the inbox,, put them in a memo folder instead of the inbox, or something along those lines.

You can then treat email that you're not sure of as second-class email. You can set up the inbox so it's sorted by rank (like a news aggregator) instead of by date. You might combine the two and plot them using two dimensions, like vertical position and color. So a very recent memo goes to the bottom and has a bright color, and an old, personalized email from your friend goes on top, in a darker color.
We've discussed putting how we do the test on the site, but concluded that we were best off not disclosing that information, seeing as no other genetic testing companies explain the techniques they use to do the testing. I guess you could call it a trade secret, even though anyone with experience in the field could figure it out pretty easily.

As for expertise in molecular diagnostics, I've been doing research at a hospital for a couple years now designing and developing tests such as this. Furthermore, most of these techniques are now taught in undergraduate level molecular biology labs.

For the last question, I suppose the same can be said for any company doing genetic testing. It would be unethical to simply take money and send out random results, though this could be a valid concern to some people. Do you have any suggestions on how we can prove the legitimacy of the results?
We've been working on similar stuff using what we learned from our real estate startup, and it's great to see something big in this space. Although having the experience of how hard it is for a startup to pry uncommon information out of government officials, we're not focusing on that aspect!

It's honestly a lot easier for startups when people don't have to fully engage their imagination to understand your business idea. I know that sounds cynical, but it's just a practical fact. People get more excited when they can quickly relate to something and "start the gears turning" about an idea right away.
Point #4 on this article is solid gold.
Yes, I know. I was just pointing out that he was reaching rather far for some of these steps. I would assume that anyone who has already made it past the filters of wanting the product and having a credit card in the first place is extremely unlikely to not only type the card number in wrong, but to let that defeat them in getting what they want, since they could just type it in correctly when it's declined.
A new 2nd edition of the Dragon Book just came out last summer. Is that one still only of historical interest?
UNIX tips: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits
1) What's to prevent someone else from selling a test for the same thing? Surely, you're not the first to consider a test for this mutation, right?

2) Also, I think you're going to have to be very careful with your copy. You're selling an unapproved genetic test, for which the only real purpose is to give people confidence that they can't be infected by HIV (don't split hairs -- this is how 99% of the population is going to view your service). The medical establishment is going to denounce you without a second thought, and I wouldn't be surprised if an enterprising lawyer tries to make a case against you for encouraging unsafe sex.

3) What are your error rates?

4) Your email input box is overlapping with your bullets under firefox 2 for mac.
Setting up a production Rails server step-by-step
San Francisco. On townsend between 3rd and 4th street
Looks like any other startup office.
This tool only does throughput tests, which are only good for very limited purposes. I am creating a load testing tool at the moment, and I did load test consulting for a number of years. Generally we would start with a throughput test to establish a ceiling on the pipe's fatness and the webserver's max throughput. That's really just step 1, though. After that is the more important stuff.

In a web application, most bottlenecks are at the database and appserver layers as opposed to the webserver. A good load test needs to be fully transactional so you can simulate login/logout, shopping, searching, or whatever real users of your application do. A good load test also needs error detection (content-checking). Without content checking, I've seen demos where a "testing tool" ran, someone unplugged the DB machine, and everything still came up green. From an end-user perspective, a real user would have seen the "data grid" section of the webpage replaced with an error message and the web app was unusable, but the testing tool was happily chugging along, showing green.
How do you process credit cards?
We are going to be processing credit cards for our customers who pay us a monthly fee to be listed on our site. They pay a few $K per month, and the volume of subscribers is pretty low < 10 right now. I just talked to Bank of America and they want to charge us $250 setup fee + $30/mo for Cybersource+Bank of America online merchant account. On top of that is 2.12% for MC/Visa and 3.35% for AMEX/rewards cards.

Has anyone found any other decent options to process cards online?
Someone once told me you're only gay if you fall in love with a man. Having sex doesn't mean anything except you had sex with a man.
Why not 'ab' which you probably have installed already?
Canonical Comet Apps
we are trying to help workaholics like crazy engineers and lawyers remember that they have family, wives, and friends - hence all the work references

its the same crowd that needs to live by '7 habits' and 'never eat alone'...

u pose good questions - as did evveryone else; we have a lot of front page work to do...
Speed drawing of icon persons
"Executives said the trader may not have sought personal gain from the fraudulent deals ... His managers were to leave the bank as well."

maybe, he was the scapegoat, or he was doing something really stupid
I completely agree with point 1 and 2, completely disagree with point 3, 4 and 5.

3 will lead to cheaper medicines in the short run, but much less research in the long run, which is bad for everybody.

4 is mostly a problem for western european countries with high unemployment like France and Germany. It's irrelevant to the world's poor, who don't work in the legal economy anyway.

Environmental policy is not especially harmful to the poor, and whether or not recorded facts genuinely point to a need for it will always be extremely contentious.

I'd add: better legal protection of property in poor countries, and less bureaucracy. A must-read in this area is "The Mystery of Capitalism: Why It Succeeds In The West And Fails Everywhere Else." Major eye-opener!

http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Triumphs-Ev...
The number one thing they look for [Comic]
I would hesitate to share this information. It is easily abused.
185 emails / second seems very slow...
This is the non-blog data companion to http://outside.in/ ?
Digg Offers Help to Traumatized Hard Core Diggers
Lives have been destroyed.
1. There is little to nothing preventing competitors, though I would be surprised if anyone can compete with us on price.

2. I agree. A startup is inherently risky and we are taking every precaution we can.

3. Error rates are effectively 0% as far as the technique goes. The only possibility of error is human error in handling. Our testing procedures are specifically designed to minimize the risk of human error. Furthermore, due to the nature of the testing procedure, any possible errors would result in false negatives, not false positives. In addition, we have a policy of retesting all positive results.

4. Noted, thanks... it does the same thing in Safari also.
"The algorithm has more complexity to it than I've illustrated (like what happens if you encounter an 'e' in one of the hops?) ..."