skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had battery life of over 4 hours consistently on my MacBook Pro. Most of the time I was running around 5 hours or so. This was with wireless turned off and the backlight dimmed a bit but it wasn't unreasonable. I wasn't watching movies though, just hacking in Emacs.
Anyone read "You Could Win Your Very Own Company!" as a bubble indicator?
When you see the term "living wage" in an article you can stop reading. I would make an exception to this: You may continue reading if a definition of "living wage" is given, but no definition has ever been given, to my knowledge.

A company's obligations are 1) To obey the law and 2) Meet the demands of the stockholders. That's it.
We offered a free product until we could justify charging. More importantly a high profile blogger took notice and spread the word, and we had also optimized our site for search engine visibility.
Yeah the CEO, and any significant shareholders (read co-founders and first 100 employees).
Nope.

If it were really compelling, I'd turn on the user-agent switcher plugin and pretend to be running IE. ;-)

If you absolutely must target a proprietary platform, make it Flash.
This gives me the chills quite a bit. I suppose there's a chance at some fortuitous fame here - but only if this thing is a success at all. I'd hate to blow an opportunity with an idea I had on something weird like this - why not just go a more traditional route? This seems more risky than rewarding - but that's just my at-a-glance impression.
I hate to say it (I'm the last one to point and say "look! a bubble!") but that does strike me as irrational exuberance...
Is it a light bulb? Is it a Yonic symbol? Is Yonic the opposite of Phallic?
Consider flying on American Airlines, they offer AC on nearly every flight. Or surrender the few hours to delightful idleness (I fly infrequently enough for this to be my strong preference).
I don't know if this bothers anyone else as much as it bothers me, but Obama and Clinton aren't the only remaining democrats. Mike Gravel is still in this, despite the incredibly disrespectful treatment he's taken from the media.
Learned your lesson?
I think most people will skip the step of buying the physics card and just wait for it to be integrated into the GPU. It will be an interesting marriage, though, since the Nvidia and Ageia architectures have some significant differences.
no. i don't have IE and i never intend on installing it.
I'd have to install Windows or buy a Mac. And it would take a lot to make me do that.
microsoft/yahoo
The SSD should give slightly longer battery life, though probably only 10-20 minutes. Power consumption difference is about 2 watts vs 0.5 (the battery is 37 watt hour).

I'm disappointed too - I thought that everyone was crazy for attacking it in the way they did (soldered RAM, one USB port, no optical drive, pricey etc), but this really does make it unviable. Oh well, maybe Air rev 2 will fix it.
A different kind of Arc challenge: a quest for a true 100 year language
I don't like submitting links to my own site. I was going to write this as a new post here but it soon became unwieldy so with a bit more editing I posted it on my blog. I'm curious to see what you think.
CVSDude to Grease oDesk's Outsourcing Wheels
Ask YC: Feedback on my startup
Please take a look at my startup from two different angles: 1. You're a college student who has just been told to go to cocunderground.com for your textbooks. COC is the name of your college (College of the Canyons is the school's actual name). You have no other information. (I want to simulate a potential user's actual experience. Feel free to register too! Just put YC at the beginning of your name or username and I'll remove you after a week.)

2. You're yourself and evaluating the site's concept, navigation, ease of use, aesthetics, everything.

Let me know what you think. Thanks!
They moved to California and work for Facebook
They are somewhat different, and I suspect the Ageia PhysX line as it is now will be discontinued. It's not exactly been selling like crazy, and I suspect nVidia are buying them out for the software, not the hardware side.

If you look at benchmarks, SLI isn't exactly what they make it out to be: it scales very badly in many games, presumably because of render-to-texture and vertex feedback rendering, which either have to be duplicated or copied between the cards.

Those types of effects are getting more common not less, so I suspect it'll become commonplace for games to do physics calculations on one GPU and the actual rendering on the other. Right now, driver support for this kind of thing isn't great, and nVidia don't have their own physics engine.
Decent concept and execution but you may want to change the name, so it's less let's just say... confusing

cocunderground ~= backstreet ~= hole in the wall

o yeah you may want to check out your competition: http://pazap.com/

It doesn't seem open anymore but this guy had a pretty cool ui for a college text book search site
Linus Torvalds calls OS X's file-system "utter crap"
Actually, I've never had a hard drive fail. I've always wanted to upgrade before it happened.

I recently got my hands on a Drobo for free. It is awesome. Literally a black box for storage, will scale well as disks get faster, and I'll always be buying disks at the optimal $/GB. The time saved in not thinking about it is awesome.

www.drobo.com
Yes I know what you mean! But,submit anyway and to anywhere...

I submitted to Y, but received the no, yet I submitted to other well known events(TC40 & a NY event) and was accepted.

Y would be cool for this lone entrepreneur just for the sole fact of being around like minded individuals!

To the poster thanks for posting this great resource!
Yahoo employees collectively forfeited that right when they "cashed out" of their holdings, and sold their stakes to outsiders in sufficient quantities to let those outsiders control their destiny.

As a normal non-employee shareholder of Yahoo, I am pissed off at the value destruction Yahoo has done, so it is well within my rights to demand that they accept this too-good-to-pass-up offer.

They cannot have their cake and eat it too - they wanted the liquidity and the exit, and now they cannot whine.

(Yes, most current employees never participated in the bonanza, but they did join a company where former employees had the bonanza and then jumped ship - who asked them to join such a diluted company, if they wanted to be in control of their own destiny?)

Same applies to start-ups here: if you sell yourself, don't later claim that the new owner did this or that. If you want to control your destiny, stay private or at least majority private. Of course that contradicts the quest for exit that motivates so many here, ...
The example I like to bring up: have you seen the people that shop for huge TVs at best buy? Their problem is not lack of "living wage".

No one ever brings up the fact that a marginal decrease in rate of GDP growth will leave people significantly poorer a generation down the line.

But measures of poverty aren't really designed to be reasonable. Everyone alive today is much more wealthy than the vast majority of people to have ever lived. Some definitions are relative: the bottom quintile.

If you define poverty as a percentage of the whole, unchanging, then you have defined an intractable problem. I suppose that is the point for bureaucrats and perpetual activists.
That's as simplistic as arguing a startup should go for the largest market it can. Focus is worth a lot.
OK... so this functions well as a demonstration of something you built, for applying to YC or a job at another startup. And free book exchange sites are definitely good for the community of students.

But the word startup implies a business that can scale rapidly. You've got a nice project here... I wish you the best of luck in expanding this to every college in the nation, but it's going to be hard as hell. Even then, your only way of making money is advertising and it takes a whole lot of users to make decent money advertising. And college students as an audience don't exactly attract high CPMs either.
Doesn't an external battery make something designed to be small kinda pointless?

I wonder what kind of ultra portable could be made that was a simple unix box with a black & white display and no graphics. It would need to have cell-network access, which is another thing lots of people are upset that the Air doesn't have.

Apple basically told everyone: we fit it in an iphone, but we couldn't fit it in something 10 times the size.
Are there any recommended free or pay affiliate marketing scripts/apps/services?
Hey everyone,

I'd like to set up affiliate marketing for my site and don't have much of a desire to code it myself. I know there are a number of pay solutions out here for it, but the keyword affiliate marketing is consumed by get rich quick types and it's really tough to navigate the noise.

Any suggestions, either for a third party service or something I can host myself?

Thanks,
Kevin
So the pattern over many threads is:

1) article says something dumb

2) i say so briefly. i can't very well always explain in detail when no one has even expressed interest

3) someone espouses some dumb and imprecise theory in reply, that vaguely sounds right

4) i point out a reason it's wrong (in this case, there was the "how many?" question which is a full refutation)

and then 5:

the first comment is downmodded for lack of detail

and the further detail is too nested, and too technical/precise/doesn't have the "sounds nice" feel to it. and still i keep it brief because the person didn't show interest in learning.

for another example of the kind of followup i mean, something like "arguments from the authority of experience are invalid" or "correlation is not causation". these get downmodded. presumably b/c they are unhelpful or everyone knows them. except, they are true, and people violate them all the time.

anyway, does anyone know the solution?
Uh, that's not quite the whole quote...

> "I don't think they're equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system," he said. "(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary."
Good catch. What an annoying, attention seeking, karma whoring title. What's next, 100 Ron Paul stories? :(
Google and Microsoft Take Up Battle Stations
Yeah, to piggyback here, you'll never make money on a college book exchange site. I tried it. Tons of other people have, too. It's even made "bad business idea" lists: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat-boy-...
There is no solution. In the long run, this will discourage you from posting.
If you went to the trouble of writing it, why not post it, if it's on topic? The worst that can happen is that it's ignored.
Thanks Brain. I am a big fan of RescueTime and I totally see how it could retain 50%(which is extremely good) users from the initial boost it got from techcrunch.

However unlike RescueTime which attracts a very high daily active users, we have a product discover & research site http://www.reviewgist.com. We would definitely work on to improve the engagement levels and plan it before we do PR but as you see the predominant traffic would be consumers and we would still have to deduce alternative sources.
In the short run, too :)

Do you know anywhere better to post? (I have some places, but not enough.)

Edit:

I do think there are (multiple) solutions. One involves using rhetorical devices so the other person looks bad. But I don't like to do that.

You can also use humor or sarcasm to get more people to agree with you. But that kind of agreement is different than understanding.

You can also get some sort of authority (PhD and published books, say) and then people are more inclined to ask about what you know instead of being extremely confident they know best. But that's a lot of trouble just to impress silly people.

And I could go on with other imperfect solutions. But anyway, I am optimistic that there is a good solution to be found.
Blog Radio for the iPhone and iPod Touch
Retool it to porn and you may have yourself a viable web business. Otherwise? Nice portfolio app.
I'm not sure if they stay or not, but if they like your site well enough, they might give you their email address, and allow you to email updates regarding changes to your site.

I'm not saying it's a sure-fire way to get permanent users. I'm just saying that it's a cheap way to get a couple thousand users to hit your site. Whether they stay or not... Doesn't that depend on if they like what they see, not on how they got there in the first place?
yes the file system is a worry. But that headline is totally wrong.
They got the gradients on the web 2.0 buttons wrong. They're not one of us.
Do not buy this Point of Sale system. Do not be fooled they do not provide anything in terms of support or an actual working product. It is beta .asp programming at best! I have been putting up with there crap for over 4 years and can not wait until someone steps up to produce a working product that can provide real time inventory on a web site as well.. Support is NON existent at best!!

This is the biggest "web based POS scam ever" they suck. I am just to lay and do not have the time to write something better right now. EffortlessE is GARBAGE!!!
I liked the nifty drop down menus!!
You will love this to! Looks like the are begging now?

"A company with three years of profitable operations needs funding for Nationwide Launch.
Posted By:	Ray Hayes
Company:	effortlessE
Category:	Funding Needed
Location:	San Diego, CA (United States)
Post Date:	8/9/2007 12:32:01 AM
effortlessE is a web based retail solution provider, including Point of Sale, ecommerce, credit card processing and custom solutions.

effortlessE LLC (effortlessE) is a Business-to-Business (B2B) application service provider (ASP) supplying turn-key retail and eCommerce solutions based upon the latest technology and utilizing web-based applications. With state-of-the-art software and hardware in our 24x7 computing facility, effortlessE also offers web hosting, web development, live chat, and custom web-based platform development.

We provide a subscription based retail solution to small and medium retailers. We offer a low cost option to more expensive hardware based solutions. We offer an even more amazing savings to multi location and franchising retailers. We also provide a one of a kind real time integration of web and retail operations and sales. This model provides for guaranteed long term recurring revenue for effortlessE while our competitors have to rely on new sales for 100% of their revenue."
Ask YC: How to evaluate a potential ad network partner?
Hi, I am in early stage discussions with a potential ad network partner. I would really appreciate if anyone could give me tips on what we should look for, the right questions to ask etc.
Silicon Valley after a Microsoft/Yahoo merger: a contrarian view
What's wrong with the file system?
Tosser
This topic could be the basis of a great master thesis or paper. To what extent is a programming language and a framework useful for golf programming, ie as few lines of code as possible.
if the title's quote was what Torvalds actually said, this would be the funniest news post of the week
If I say something short meant to be funny and I get immediately downmodded, I usually delete the post, rather than sit around and wait for it to get downmodded more. In my case, anyways, the secret to karma is volume. If you keep posting a lot, you get upmodded more than downmodded.

I know nowhere better to post. Maybe www.well.com?
Yahoo running out of options
This guy is right! Im amazed I thought you all here were smart, it took me 60 seconds to figure it. And im a dumb arse who uses LAMP.
I don't want karma, I want to persuade people of good ideas. I only care about downmods in that they give information about how people are reacting, and I need positive reactions to persuade people.

I learn more about how people act if I don't delete my posts. For example, I can see that they are happy to mass downmod without ever giving a good reason. Now I have lots of evidence :)

I think they somehow feel that because the site allows downmods, and makes my post turn grey in response, that somehow makes their take more legitimate. It reminds me of how people feel bad if you say they are dumb (or whatever else), and expect you to do the same if they say you are dumb. The issue foremost in their minds is not whether good reasons were given, but something else, I think about legitimacy. Statements not put down are legit in that sense. Which is why when people insult you, "you have not given evidence for your claim" is no good in terms of persuading a group (this seems to acknowledge the issue is up for debate -- ie, grant it legitimacy), and a counter-insult works well (which evens the score).

Will try well.com
I am not certain what this new challenge is trying to achieve. The Arc challenge serves an immediate purpose: getting people to investigate Arc (and perhaps to ease the sniping put-up-or-shut-up style).

Thinking about a 100 year language seems very ivory tower like. I feel like that is something I should do after I create something useful and generate significant wealth.
There's definitely some logic in that, but my gut feeling is that all the 'hullabaloo' surrounding the merger would supersede that effect. Hirings, firings, integrations, strategies, turf wars, technology conflicts, etc... will not be an easy thing to keep under control and out of everyone's way in order to let them concentrate clearly on the future. If they manage to, then what you're saying will come into effect.
DNA Is Blueprint, Contractor And Construction Worker For New Structures
Ask YC: Convert Text To Audio (Blog To Podcast)
Please help to estimate:

There is a web service allows you to convert text (or feed) to audio and to deliver it to you in convenient format and time.

How much you are ready to pay
... for conversion custom text into audio?
... for dubbed in of popular blog ?

Please estimate amount of blogs (or texts) you need to dub in.
Microsoft bid is better than stagnating, say Yahoo insiders
Microsoft may borrow money for Yahoo deal
Implement Arc, eh. Maybe you'll go first?
Having a hard-drive fail is a great experience. Only then will you forever change your habits on backup policies, redundancy and fail over.

Only the loss of something really value-able gives you that.
Excellent answer to "Take the Arc test" challenge -- framework in 9 lines of code
The Nerd Factor Is Huge
Three Rules for Database Work
Ask YC: Recommend a hosting company.
Simple request. I will be launching my site in a couple days, but i need a reliable host.

Looking to spend between $50-$150 a month. Needs to scale up easily. Has to be able to survive Digg and Techcrunch (wishful thinking). Will be severing images mostly.

Trying to avoid amazon.
How many went to MIT/Stanford?
"Steele and Sussman tried to start over when they first began working on Scheme, but they seem to have been practically the only ones. And they made, at least from the point of view of brevity/power, some serious mistakes early on."

So what mistakes did they make?
I found this very interesting, especially the beginning about software patents, where he compares the situation with cold war (big companies) and terrorists (patent trolls), and later what he concedes about innovation and open source.
What lesson?
avoid amazon ec2 and s3
joyent uses solaris so a pain
I think you got it backwards.

Yes, absolutely focus is essential. But once you decide what to make you want as many customers as possible. And that obviously includes not turning away half of your customers at the door.

Which is what you do if you don't support IE. Unless of course you have chosen a niche where 95% of your users use firefox. I have yet to see the stats for such a site.
try to use a colo or a fedora linux host
[sardonic remark]

Slow news day?
100 Things to do with Google Maps Mashups
1) site:news.ycombinator.com hosting - its been discussed before, fairly recently too, if I recall.

2) Layered Tech has been a good place for me.
Were the code savings due to the change of language or the rewrite itself? My experience with PHP and Ruby leads me to believe that basically anything Rails does can be done on the LAMP stack assuming you have the discipline.
How much of the blog(s) are you dubbing? Is there a time cutoff? I could only imagine using this on a regular basis for a daily commute, and occaisional for long travel trips.

So, as an example, I have a 45 min commute either way, so I can listen to up to 1.5 hours of blog posting. Let's assume 1 min per short post, or 5-10 mins per long post. So I could listen to up to 9-10 long posts or up to 90 short posts.

Also, there are other factors such as adverts, voice tone, etc. If you are reading an advert in between each short post and it all sounds like Stephen Hawking, then I don't think I'll listen to many of those posts at all. If I'm listening to advert-free material, maybe I could see myself paying for a rate like iTunes; 0.99$ for 15-20 minute chunks?

The other problem with this is that many blog posts are like news; their value will deteriorate over time. So, up-to-date blog posts will be worth the 0.99$, but day-old or week-old posts will be worth less.

Just my two cents, T.
Color for coders
The name "call-with-current-continuation"?

(well, actually it didn't appear until RRRS ...)
User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly
> Thinking about a 100 year language seems very ivory tower like.

Agreed. I'd rather have something 'pretty good' right now, and worry about the future later. This industry changes too quickly to do something like worry about 100 years in the future.

> I feel like that is something I should do after I create something useful and generate significant wealth.

Disagree, and I think a truly great version of Arc is the opportunity cost of Viaweb and YCombinator. I think to create a truly great language, you have to really focus on your language, and probably start, if not in your 20ies, by around 30. I think that perhaps that ship has sailed for PG and Arc, although I'd be happy to be proven wrong. I think though, that YC is in some ways a bigger and better hack than Arc, and am glad he's done it - there are plenty of people to work on new languages (there are so many that the cost is essentially 0, for something that is not an easy project), but far fewer people in a position to do something like YC as successfully as PG has.
You may be better off serving images off Amazon S3.

As to hosting providers, I have 4 years good experience with
openhosting.com -- they provide virtual servers with root access etc, pay-as-you scale (starting $20 a month, then growing as your RAM /CPU/Disk/bandwidth grows). Another plus is that they sit on a very thick pipe.
Microsoft releases Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing
We plan to jack some bandwidth from flickr and other photo sharing sites (legally). Amazon EC2 seems like a great option, but have issues with reliability and SQL.
Five most overlooked open source vulnerabilities
SearchYC Presents: Best of Hacker News
Apple among those considering rival bid for Yahoo?
Good stuff - thanks a lot.

So is the search algorithm implemented in arc ? ;-)
Softlayer.
I like amazon.
I also like slicehost.
www.intuix.com is small but good too.
From experience I would suggest you to get a VPS (with 512mb-1gb RAM) to start with, and then move to a dedicated server if the need arises. You'll find a lot of VPS offers and discussions at the WebHostingTalk forums ( http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=103 and http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104 )
I wish I were more eloquent so I could state my opinions clearly. 'Writing a language' might be a component of creating a product. Language theology (sorry... hopefully you get what I mean, is there a word for this?) appears to me to be the worst kind of procrastination - the one where you think you are working but you really aren't.
XRefresh - browser refresh automation for web developers