skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The $100 price point predicted in 3-5 years should enable other "personalized medicine" practices that are gated by the current high price. It would also allow the genomic data to be tracked in new longitudinal health studies. Implications for software hackers: big opportunities in analytic offerings once these new tests vastly increase the amount of genomic data available.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVXiG6oy5eo

"I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot... and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life."

In my experience, the best athletes have a spooky accurate memory of failure... post-game. They figure out what went wrong, every time it went wrong, even if the overall result was success. So it is not amnesia, it is just a failure to influence their present action.
Implications Of How A VC Is Funded: Family Office
On Gentoo, where compiling occurs nearly every time a program is installed, one common method used to speed up compiling is to use the -pipe option to gcc as well as to mount memory onto /var/tmp/portate (the location where files are written before actually being installed). These two measures alone can speed up compile times dramatically, as the disk is never touched in the middle of compiles. Instead, the only time reads occur is as the source is read in, and writes only occur when the final binaries, libraries, and configuration files are installed to their homes on the file system.

If your source files are located contiguously on the hard drive [1] and writes are cached to occur in big blocks, while also using some compile-in-memory techniques like those outlined above, I imagine compile times would not vary much on flash-disk MBAs as compared to those with conventional laptop drives.

[1] This could be accomplished by keeping your project in a compressed file and loopback-mounting it to your project's working directory.
The biggest concern for techcrunch should be the quality of the comments there, not here.

They are mean spirited and often wrong.

I think you should continue to promote any site you like. Hacker News needs to deal with this eventually, and the average TechCrunch reader (not commenter) is probably better than the average blog reader.
Off-Goal Targeting
You're right -- I don't. That's why I asked about it. :)
To shamelessly copy from a comment I left elsewhere:

I'll mod something up if it's on-topic, well thought-out, and I agree with it. I'll only mod something down if it's blatantly off topic and rude/trollish. If I simply don't agree with what they said, but they said it in useful way, I'll just leave it be.

I'm all about modding the people who post goatse links down into negative oblivion, but I think it kind of stifles discussion if you downmod simply because you don't happen to agree. Instead of dog-piling someone for a dissenting opinion, take the extra 30 seconds to write a response. It'll enrich the discussion.

And I'll add that I upmod comments that are below -1 if they aren't trollish. If that marginalizes me somehow, who cares. I'd rather people not get their karma destroyed just because they have a minority opinion. Go destroy trolls instead.
If you don't want to do pure research for more than a few years, don't bother with a PhD. Building real things is more valuable. If you happen to be researching something very related to the real world, like some farm robot or robo soccer, you can trust a PhD will demand enough practical and operational skills to be useful even if you don't continue doing research.

Big defense projects are very, very different than SBIRs and STTRs.

Most importantly: you don't need permission to do cool work. It would be better to add a semester and do research than to just do coursework. I can't stress this enough.
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Winston Churchill

Exercise and a break from the computer are both a good idea. I think you have to reflect on what happened but with some emotional distance. Remembering Thurber's observation that "humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility" you should write down your lessons learned once you can laugh about it (at least a little) so that you are not just re-opening wounds. Some amount of lateral drift (reading books, seeing folks you've neglected as your firm was failing, etc..) can also give you perspective on what to do differently next time. I had a painful failure about a decade ago and concluded "I am through with being an entrepreneur." After five years at a big company I realized that I had mis-assessed and that I couldn't help being an entrepreneur. Failing at a startup doesn't mean you should give up being an entrepreneur, but you should get some perspective on how to make "new mistakes" the next time out.
In my experience, this depends a lot on the project. Often, with new ideas, new uses will come up once the 'opinion leaders' get their hands on something real. Then, the requirements, in fact, do change (if you're smart).
Votes aren't meant to signal that a comment is polite or reasonable, ask yourself was the comment worth the time it took you to read it. Upmod if it was, Downmod if it wasn't.

The idea is for the community to collaboratively filter the submissions and comments so the content that is worth reading bubbles to the top, and the trash goes down to the bottom. That's it.
While it is hard to give a personalized advice on coping with a depression, you still can benefit from the failure. As others said - learn from it.

Specifically, if you are doing something that you have a little experience with (like, say, starting a business), it is generally a good idea NOT to assume it will work out. Better yet, treat as a wild card experiment with a great risk of failure. Approach it as something that you are trying out and using to learn what works and what does not. Very few people can succeed on unfamiliar grounds and it is almost always a matter of luck. Far more people succeed through trial and error. So learn from the mistakes and try again.
Yes!!! I've been working on this recently and would love to start a conversation on the topic...

Pageviews isn't something that works consistently across apps. For example, let's look at WarBook and Scrabbulous. Scrabbulous is killing WarBook in installs and Daily Actives, but probably sees significantly less pageviews than WarBook.

My current thinking is an attempt to measure the virality of a given app, basing my thoughts around the Net Promoter score ("Would you recommend this to a friend?"). This can be assessed easily if you're working with paid media. Your click-thru to install can be compared against total installs, inferring your social install number.

If we can measure this number against Daily Actives versus time we could potentially ascertain the longevity of this app (are users installing, passing it on and then never playing again? or do they play for a month or two? forever?).

Thoughts, feedback, comments?
Event Stream - Carsonified’s new web app
Well it does not look like we hit anything close to a critical mass.

I suppose the HN demographic has grown to the point where it is difficult to get one of these types of articles on the front page.

If anyone is still looking for something, remember there is a super happy dev house on saturday.
Twitter's Monetization Conundrum
My little online color tool. Hope this is helpful.
There's actually a neat little psychology hack that you can use. If you comment with "why did this get voted down" it will inevitably be voted up.

I tried it a few times and it seems to work. Just don't do it unless you really think it is an unfair downmodding, since it doesn't add much to the conversation.
Anything Could Happen
Motorola insider talks about fall of technology icon
California freefall: Home prices fell 26% in February
Making Ruby's PStore reaaaally fast (and stable)
there's always the reddit effect. reddit gets popular, gets bought out by corporate swine, becomes a tabloid full of duplicate articles and complete wastes of time. at least this community is still populated by more thinkers than stinkers. well, except for me.
The letter attached to this article is one of the hardest hitting letters I've ever read and makes for a good read.
I think this much of your post:
ask yourself was the comment worth the time it took you to read it. Upmod if it was, Downmod if it wasn't
could/should be part of a HN Instruction Manual.
Try faking a Google News referer. But it's just another gee-whiz CUDA/Tesla article; try these links instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html
Twitter Dominates the Lifestream
Thanks for the feedback. Looks like the site needs better introductory material. The initial screen that you see was intended to give the user a preview of the site, then when they try to rate any show, they are redirected to the sign up page.

A demo account wouldn't work for the service because the personalized recommendations would not work well if many different users were using the same account (it would be a strange person). The site allows different users to have their own accounts, then compare how the recommendations would be different if you wanted to watch a show with users x, y, and z by running an algorithm to determine what shows you would like together (or seperately).
When an expert ignores a new technology that's not relevant to him, sure, that makes sense. But when an expert responds snidely and defensively to a new technology, he apparently doesn't think it's irrelevant.
very cool.. you consider adding features to let me download a stylesheet and maybe some preconfigured "skins"/"themes" instead of hacing to reconfigure 5 colors, just select one skin and have it being configured to set all 5 colors.
While it isn't exactly what you describe, I found this to be rather interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495
I like where you are going, trying to define the role of the "connections" an app has vs page views. Do you think there are differences in the value of a given network? For example with the Myspace container you can only show ads in the "canvas" view which is a secondary view to the top views.

How can we define time I wonder? this seems like its potentially misleading, as a flash game may get more time but I'm not engaging in an act of connection to an ad or other revenue opp.

Churn is really important, like the cell phone co's its key to know how long you can maintain a users mindshare.
This definitely fits into the "make it too boring for 14 year olds" category.
Emerging economies are better at adopting new technologies than at putting them into widespread use
>>> An open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English

Text is not likely to be stupid.

CLASSIFY succeeds; success probability: 0.5043 pR: 0.0075
Best match to file #0 (/home/sfp/code/nonstupid_cor.css) prob: 0.5043 pR: 0.0075
Yah - except you can easily (and cheaply) upgrade the PB to a 72K RPM drive, something not possible with the MBA - given it's 1.8" form factor.

I would suspect, with an upgraded drive, a 1.5Ghz PB would be more responsive opening applications & starting, while the MBA might be able to handle more simultaneous apps running, due to the 2GB ram and faster processor.
If we give up relational databases in favor of a graph model, I'm sure we'll have piles of blog posts complaining about the sacrifices made in that switch. That said, the relational database is ancient technology that was built for an entirely different purpose than for what it's used today, so I eagerly anticipate a revision.
Pixar has the same bottleneck problem they had at Disney during their feature era - there were "nine old men" established as the (supervising) animators and hardly any room for anyone else. Just like Pixar may have no room to let Doug Sweetland direct a fantastic movie, John Hubley saw limited opportunity at Disney, so he founded the animation startup UPA.

Anyway, it brings up the issue of what I'm going to call superlearning environments. The kind of places that become legendary because of the seemingly unbelievable concentration of talent. For animation, the late-70's Disney training program. For 3D graphics, anywhere Ed Catmull has been. For console games, I'd actually say Virgin Interactive Entertainment, which none of you have heard of.

These kind of environments are hard to discover unless you happen upon them and are blown away by the level of talent involved. But YC is most fascinating to me because it's a continuing (although periodic) experiment in creating one of these environments that's freestanding.

And this kind of environment is exactly what you don't get in a lonely startup. I know this all too well -- it's great to spend time with your co-founders, but I'd always worked with people significantly smarter and wiser than myself and it is absolutely the number one thing I miss.
2 million cash

3 million stock

Not sure about the founder split
Your suggestion has been added to my feature requests list:) And thanks for your kind words.
Anything could happen (on Ev Williams)
Take a break. Go for a jog. One technique which has worked form me is looking at a brand new problem and coding for it.

I would also recommend reading:
* blog.pmarca.com
* Founders At Work
* Startup by Jerry Kaplan (old tome but a good read)
* Bhagvad Gita, an ancient Hindu scripture which talks about work, victory, defeat (I can lend you a copy)
Gonna miss seeing the guys at events here in the valley, but good for them. I'm surprised it took this long for someone to snap them up.
Nice Tower! Who’s Your Architect?
Oh hell no! The last time I posted something inspirational here, somebody sent it to the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list, and in a couple hours it went from "inspirational Roosevelt quote" to "Teddy killed Indians" to "well Jefferson owned slaves" to "early philosophers were child molesters" to "why don't you go quote Hitler then" to "I'm glad my ancestors didn't kill any Indians" to "I looked up your family name on Wikipedia and your ancestors murdered Indians too".
I follow exactly your model.

Downmodding to express disagreement will result in unhealthy group-think.
For example, imagine starting out with a contact list. Some months later, you add a restaurants list. Some months later again, you decide it would be great to be able to capture, for each contact, what their favorite restaurants are. Ideally one would want to just establish a “favorite” relationship between a restaurant and a contact without changing the restaurant structure or the contact structure.

Let's look at this example in a relational database. Personally, I've never even implemented a database, but I did take one class on relational databases. The way I learned it, the contacts would be one table and the restaurants would be another table. A third table, let's call it "FavoriteRestaurant" would have two columns [1]: a foreign key to an entry in the Contacts table and a foreign key to an entry in the Restaurants table. The primary key in this table would have to be the contacts column, since restaurants would appear more than once. If each person can appear in the FavoriteRestaurant table more than once (multiple favorite restaurants), then both columns would have to serve as the primary key.

Thus, we have managed to effectively utilize a relational database to express a new relationship, without ever changing the original data. The author said:

Most relational databases actually have an upper limit on the types of objects, typically referred to as tables, which can be handled. Too many tables in a database schema is considered bad design.

If that is indeed the case, that is where the problems lies. I am far from being a champion of relational databases, but it seems to me like a lot of people don't think critically about how best to store the information in their databases. More tables, in my mind, is a good thing.

[1] The number of columns would actually be equivalent to the sum of the number of items in the primary keys of both the Contacts and Restaurants tables. With unique identifiers (SSNs and vendor IDs, for example), of course, this would indeed be two columns.
Using CSS and Mootools to simulate Flash horizontal navigation effect
we'll still be around, we're going to be splitting our time betweeen the valley and vacouver rather than moving there permanently.

we structured the deal in a way that keeps our US visas intact exactly for that purpose.
Give credit where it is due. You're an excellent salesman. Working on pitches for Demo Day helps the startups express clearly what they're working on. But, to the ear accustomed to your style, you can literally hear PG talking in other presentations.

That isn't cultish. That is taking good advice. YC is largely about giving good advice and putting people together.

This is nothing like the cultish following your essays and sometimes this community gets.

Remember the drama around the applications on this site last time? People took that way to seriously. And each of your essays spawns dozens of comments equivalent to "zomg, smartest thing evar".

But these two negative facets of this community don't actually make it into the YC program. That means you're choosing well, I suppose.

I firmly believe the #1 reason YC is good is the quality of the other founders and the alumni founders network.
The author is misinformed in many ways. To pick an easy example, he says that "the relationship between objects is built into the objects", and as an example cites, "An invoice knows as part of its structure, who the customer is. That pointer to the customer is stored in the invoice."

But that doesn't have to be the case at all. It's common (in general, maybe not with customers and invoices) to store the relationship in a third table, say "customerinvoice", that has customerid and invoiceid fields.
"Cover Flow" searching - a few beta invites available.
The author is confusing the term "relational databases" with the implementations of relational database systems that he has encountered.

That's like looking at a bad Python program and saying, "Python sucks," or like saying, "I've never seen a car go more than 10 miles without breaking down; therefore cars are not reliable transportation."

You can store just about anything in a RDBMS pretty much any way you want. You're limited only by your own skill and imagination and the particular limitations of your vendor's implementation.

A better title would have been, "Here We Go Again: The Death of the Relational Database Prematurely Announced."
I met the founders at eBay live, congratulations on a job well done :)
A third table, let's call it "FavoriteRestaurant" would have two columns [1]: a foreign key to an entry in the Contacts table and a foreign key to an entry in the Restaurants table.

Yup, you could definitely express a new relationship that way. I think the point is that adding join tables like that has traditionally been considered an anti-pattern for relational databases because it increases duplication and denormalizes the data, thus working against the supposed performance gains and data integrity protection from using the RDBMS in the first place. If this is wrong, please do correct me.

One major difference I've noticed between document/graph-oriented databases and relational ones is that they embrace denormalization and even optimize for it insofar as that's possible.
He's got a point, but Peter Naur said it better in Programming as Theory Building.

http://www.zafar.se/bkz/Articles/NaurProgrammingTheory
Sanity Checks For Young Entrepreneurs
Plenty Of Yahoos, But They Don't Come Cheap
I totally see what you mean, and technology has brought the formerly impossible into the reach of millions.

Technically, however, the absolute cheapest way to get there is to borrow a bike and some camping gear and start pedaling, and the absolute fastest way is to hop into your own private jet waiting in your backyard. The first is waaaay too time-consuming for most people to consider reasonable, and the latter is too expensive for most people to attain. Commercial air travel is the best compromise between the two.

The problem with most clients is that they want a private jet at borrowed bicycle prices.
"Most relational databases actually have an upper limit on the types of objects, typically referred to as tables, which can be handled. Too many tables in a database schema is considered bad design."

By whom? The number of tables in the schema should be what the app calls for, no more, no less. That's like saying, "Too many lines of code in a program is considered bad programming."

I don't know what implementation's OP has seen, but GOOD RDBMS's are limited only by hardware.

Personally, I have occasionally encountered apps whose best approach was not RDBMS, but I have never run in to a data problem that couldn't be handled by a RDBMS.
"Looking up the big speech the Galt character gives in Atlas Shrugged, it's amazing how much of it relates. This paragraph in particular reads like it could have been pg's battle cry against soul-sucking faceless corporations..."

Slurp slurp slurp. This is just more hero worship!

Incidentally, Atlas Shrugged isn't any more literary-minded than Fight Club -- it's just more pretentious.
And our website has a new look and new content, so feedback on that would be great.
"Now, along comes the semantic web just in time to make us all feel really dumb again."

This happens to me almost daily, and I love every minute of it...
I meant bad in the economic sense, where no one is better off. The spammer is certainly better off for his work even if everyone else is worse off.
End-to-End Arguments in System Design
I taught him how to program in Perl, and when I left he was working as a Perl coder for a public television station. He also got married to a very interesting and quirky woman, so don't count crazy antics out.
"The problem with most clients is that they want a private jet at borrowed bicycle prices."

Not my clients. At least not for long.

You bring up extreme outlying cases that are beyond the scope of my example. (How's that for hand waving?)

OTOH, what if you could find a way to satisfy those "unreasonable" customer demands? How much further ahead of your competition would you be?
Ten Days: The Story of My Meditation Retreat
Goodness no! Internet usage is rising, and since browsers are helpful enough to add "www." and ".com" if you type a word in the address bar, common word domains like perfume.com, candy.com, etc are extremely valuable because people find them on their own. Most people aren't that savvy and they don't know the difference between the search bar, the address bar, or the bajillion toolbars they have installed.

The supply/demand equation you need to look at is: supply of common english words is fixed while internet usage is increasing. People aren't looking for business.com, they think they're searching for business.
More Questions Than Answers About OpenSocial
They intense and worthwhile. I did my first one back in high school.

http://novemberfive.blogspot.com/2007/11/ten-days-story-of-m...
A good domain = lots of free traffic. No marketing, spending on adsense, etc required. It is a very valuable asset.
Tony's been pushing his writing to quote a lot of sites lately and they're pretty darn good too. Good luck with getting more traction with RescueTime.
is there a domain-name generator out there that says "Enter a Number" . . . "Now Enter a Noun" . . . "Create Domain!"
Think about it this way : You got about 10-20% of the total and about (70-80% of the grunt) work done for your next startup. :)

You have your servers, source code repository, development environment, bug/feature tracking stuff and all that ready. Heck, you might even have got the logging in, authentication, monitoring and all that done as well.

I would go so far as to say : Everyone should do a dummy startup just to get all the above straightened out. :)
How Friendfeed Could Dwarf Facebook and Twitter