skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what a hack! I LIKE this idea! It's neat!

Look at this code I wrote for Project Euler. it checks if a sequence is "palindromic". A "palindromic" sequence reads the same both from left and from right. So the simple idea is to check from the left of the sequence to the middle, and compare each element during the process with ones read from the right. Note here I use Python 2.5 integer division (//) to ensure the index is integer.

Using official Python index syntax, I have to write "s[i] == s[-i-1]" to compare elements on symmetric positions in the sequence.

def ispalindromic(s):
return all(s[i] == s[-i-1] for i in range(len(s)//2))

However, using the "bitwise or" trick proposed above, I just write "s[i] == [s~i]", really neat!

def ispalindromic(s):
return all(s[i] == s[~i] for i in range(len(s)//2))
Mac first to fall in Pwn2Own contest (among Mac, Linux, Vista)
Consider Google maps: e.g., now amateur anthropologists and geographers have located previously unknown archeological sites.

I would expect a great deal of new observational discovery should a desktop microscope become economically viable. And once a phenomenon is observed, minds turns to ways to harness that phenomenon.

It's difficult to harness a supernova since it's so far out there, but anything viewable with a microscope is available _here_ and probably in abundance.
The Humanitarian with the Guillotine
Semantic Web in the news (by Tim Berners-Lee)
Painful metaphor in the title, but great news! Congrats to the Loopt team. I'm sure working with the carriers has been a tough battle.
ReCAPTCHA’s quality is going down?
So if you lived in a world... in which clinical immortality was an unquestioned human right...

ROTFL.

I live in a world where my wife and I had to fight our old insurance company for basic preventive health care. (She tried to have a mammogram in the same year that I had a simple 20-minute physical. Turns out that violated the fine print in our policy, and we had to pay out of pocket.) I'm glad to say that our uninsured, thirtysomething friend just managed to save enough money for his cancer surgery, but others of our friends aren't so lucky. And I live in Massachusetts, where the state has forced insurance companies to sell relatively affordable policies to individual contractors like me. If I lived in a different state, I'd probably be paying over $1000 a month for the privilege of having my claims denied.

So, sure, I'd love for clinical immortality to be possible, and love it even more if it were an "unquestioned human right". But here in the USA I don't even have the "unquestioned right" to effective, existing medical technologies, and that's a more pressing concern.

Meanwhile, would I want to age in a post-Singularity world? Who the hell knows? I don't think you can be immortal and still be recognizably human -- the entire design of humans is predicated on mortality, just as it's predicated on gravity and an oxygen atmosphere and the presence of edible plants and animals. And who knows what the post-human aliens will think?

To the extent that post-singular beings remain human, I think they'll exhibit many of the same self-destructive tendencies that humans do now. I used to be a cancer researcher, and the sight of people lighting cigarettes still makes me angry inside. It feels like they're setting fire to my hard work. But what can you do? To discount the future is part of human nature.

Recommended reading:

On the alienness of the immortal human: William Gibson's Count Zero.

On the psychology of the immortal human: Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is good. The much shorter, ha-ha-only-serious version is the tale of Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged in Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Douglas Adams is one of those guys whose every throwaway joke encapsulates an entire series of philosophical novels.)

On the "unquestioned human right" to immortality: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. You may have to read most of it before it becomes clear what I'm talking about, but keep reading. It's an awesome work.
They’re a waste management company, not a software company.
I agree with you that it isn't especially difficult to learn how to card count, or understand the theory behind it (it is probably very difficult to do it well in a casino, but that's a different issue).

That said, I actually do find it fascinating, mainly because of the history behind it. A lot of discoveries look simple in retrospect, but keep in mind this was a complicated game that was essentially intractable until the advent of supercomputers (early reviews of thousands of hands weren't even enough to get accurate readings on the odds).

It took a math professor from UCLA (Thorpe) with an interest in programming to really get a handle on the odds. We could all write a program to calculate basic strategy odds now, but at the time, it was very, very innovative.

While Hi-Lo and other counting systems seem pretty simple, I think it was a stroke of genius to think of this the first time. And it was another stroke of genius to use a programming language to determine exactly when the count turned the expected return in favor of the player. Add in statistical systems for bankroll management (ie., how do you use a small but positive expected return into a 99% chance of making money while keeping bankroll growth as high as possible), and you have some real sophistication considering that it hadn't been done before.

The people who did this the first time were brilliant, and personally, I think it is pretty fascinating.
I think it's much harder to gain traction than it is to find an appropriate business model, and thus it's far more important to focus on traction first and then nail down the business model once you know you have a product that people find engaging.

Think about it this way: you can have the smartest business model in the world that maximizes the value of your users, but if no one uses your service then you'll make zero money and be totally irrelevant. By contrast, if you have a a service that people love and becomes a part of their daily usage, but you don't have a business model yet, this is a much easier problem to solve.

Attention is most important currency.
Is Merger Advice Worth the Price?
As someone who is trying to hire a really good Perl programmer right now, I can almost guarantee you they will (if they're actually as good as the ad promises). I'm more worried about competing with the other offers I expect they'll get.
You can see several sample games in the youtube videos on that page.

Because it's a social game (i.e., you can't play alone), registering is more of a quality control than anything, like news.ycombinator, for example. Registration is extremely minimal (email address only required).
I didn't even know such a thing existed...thanks for the tip!
Always write your code as if the person who will maintain it is a deranged ax murderer who knows where you live
Old habits die hard. My apologies.
I wanted to buy one, but in the end decided that if I buy one I'll devote too much time to it, time that I really need to spend on my startup.
Extrapolating from your point #2, would you say you'd better work on search or on advertisement at Google?
From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

health maintenance organization (abbr.: HMO)

a health insurance organization to which subscribers pay a predetermined fee in return for a range of medical services from physicians and healthcare workers registered with the organization.
Applied Mergers and Acquisitions by Robert Bruner
If I started a service which gave away free cases of beer, I'd have insane 'traction' with a product hundreds of millions of people would find engaging. Like Pets.com, WebVan and the other "we'll make it up on volume" disasters, my service would be loved by everyone but it wouldn't be a good business.

It seems the lessons of the first dot.com bubble have already been forgotten. A business needs to have a clear path to profitability or else it's going to be left without a seat when the music finally stops; and the music always stops.
Thanks for this. Any tips on where to stay thats affordable, but nice.
Actually it was slightly lower this year. 1108 vs around 1200 last year. We hate rejecting people, and since we always have more applicants than there are seats for, we deliberately made little effort to promote it. We didn't ask Techcrunch to write about it, and I even took the links off my site several days before the deadline.

Because there was so little marketing, the quality of the average applicant was extremely high. 90% were pretty solid hackers.
This is pretty schmaltzy. Nice, if true.
What is new in PHP 5.3
The lesson of the Bubble is not that you have to know right away how to make money from users, but that you shouldn't pay a lot to acquire them. If an additional user costs you nothing more than a few cents a month of server and bandwidth, you can safely just grow.

Google didn't have their business model figured out when they started, and they seem to have done ok.
It's often hard to convince people to pay for something that was previously free. So you have fewer options if you start out without a business plan.

Additionally, a revenue scheme isn't just something that you tack on later. Your options are narrowed further if your technology plan is implemented before you think about sustaining it.
Remember Snood? Iminlikewithyou's new 'Dinglepop' looks better.
MacBook Air hacked in security contest
Kitchen Sync concept, cookbook meets computer
10 Greatest Stolen Ideas In The Web
> what a hack! I LIKE this idea! It's neat!

Thanks, it means a lot...
"VCs, for example, aren't really interested because we don't need very much money"

Not quite. Actually VC's normally won't fund a company unless they do have something that is working. So assuming that your game is worth paying for or the site can be monetized, talking to VC's wouldn't be a bad idea.

One example of this is Google. VC's would not have talked to Google if all the founders had was, "Hey we've got this great idea, and this is how it will work, and this is why it's so cool." Instead they said, "Here, try it."

Even then, you'll have to talk to 100 VC's before you get funding. Are you ready for some hard core rejection?
I became an internet hundredaire!
Gauging Age of Universe Becomes More Precise (Universe is 13.73 billion years old)
Spam Header
Read some relevant info on spam email headers
An article I found about interpreting email headers and how to avoid spam emails judging by email headers
Only one down-vote a week? If you reduce the frequency like that, then that's just another way of weakening down-voting, which is what reddit seemingly did to their downvotes.
Email Delivery Codes: Errors
Read an article about the significance of email delivery errors and to find out why your emails didn’t reach their destination
"I loved that I couldn't take the Auctomatics to a bar for a company meeting."
ABC News: The Rebirth of Buses: N.Y. to D.C. for $1
This has been down-modded twice now. That's fine, but care to explain why?

Edit: downmodding someone asking for clarification is just being a jerk.
There are so many examples of popular free services that could not make the jump and had to shut down: Friendster, Napster, PubSub, Lycos, AltaVista come to mind immediately, but there are many more examples.

And if you count revenue-less firms that got acquired (and were saved from having to figure it out later), the list is even longer.
Finding Your Own Health Insurance
FTA: "If there is one thing more valuable than eyeballs it is data. If your system collects information that you can reasonably package into trend data, you have a great source of additional income."

Am I the only one who finds this suggestion an apalling way to go about making money? It seems that if your startup is doing this, it deserves to go out of business.
http://alexa.com

http://compete.com
We are. Joyent is currently our largest provider. RimuHosting has just agreed to offer it (it'll show up in their shopping pages in the next couple of weeks). GridZones offers Virtualmin. There are quite a few others.

We'd love to have SliceHost on board. Next time you're talking to them, mention our name. It eases the conversation when we approach new hosts if they've been hearing about us from their customers (most know us from Webmin, but often don't grok what the difference between the two products).
PostgreSQL at Skype
Microsoft brand in sharp decline
pg's instinct that Loopt is the biggest YC success story so far looks to have been spot on. (I think there are a couple of others that could catch up, though.)
Spain has already a music tax. They just assume that every DVD-R, CD-R, Hard Drive, iPod, etc. will be used to store "pirated" music so they charged them accordingly.
US students, alumni to get legal P2P
It's for backup; the latency is mostly irrelevant. Tahoe sounds cool, but I think it's a stretch to call it a filesystem.
I agree with slim, you definitely need to give people a better idea of what to expect out of the game. Watching videos is too time consuming for many people if they have no idea if they'll be interested (it takes minutes). In comparison, scanning a web page takes seconds.

Good luck with the game.
New Wave of Programming Languages is on the Way Over the Next 5 Years
Human noses 'can detect danger'
So where's that Web video shakeout?
I believe the point is that GOOG is priced on the assumption of continued exponential growth, not a market that is maturing already.
To be fair, 99% of the time I'm not looking for innovation in my hospital stay.
AT&T Develops iTunes-like Web Browser
Sharp Announces Launch Of 922SH Phone For Bloggers In Japan
Google is a black swan; modeling yourself on an extreme probabilistic event is not realistic.
Can someone elaborate more on product advice from YC (an example would be sweet)?

We heard some advice from the Digg/flickr guys and they said that it doesn't really matter what you write it in (just as long as code is manageable and your interface usable), just get it out there, and then iterate and optimize (because you'll have to change things later anyway).
That guy rocks. What makes me sad is I just realized I had a chance to hear him speak once and didn't know who he was and I didn't go.
Calm and Rational Discussion of Java
The money quote:

Java is much like a 100-armed monster, who will put 3 of those arms to work to solve your problem if you very carefully tell it how to use the other 97 arms to masturbate itself.
Nice post. Gives some extra glimpses of just a few of the many things that have to be made to happen. Congrats to all.
It's a black swan in the size it grew to, but not in the fact that the founders didn't have the business model figured out when they started. That's more common than not, if you look at recent web startups.
Many of those shut down from causes other than lack of money, though. Lycos and Altavista were killed because Google came along with a better product. Friendster collapsed under the weight of its own scalability problems. Napster was put out of business by the RIAA lawsuit. I'd never heard of PubSub - it looks they did run out of cash, but you could argue that they didn't have traction anyway.

Many of the replacements also started as free services and did just fine. Google went for 4 years before it discovered a revenue model. FaceBook and MySpace are doing just fine (profitable, even) as free services. Kazaa managed to turn a profit until it too was shut down by the RIAA.

The only companies I can think of that managed to get traction and still failed due to lack of revenue were those that deliberately priced their product below cost and had no other differentiators, eg. AllAdvantage.com, WebVan, Kozmo, Pets.com, Value America. This is economically very different from the current crop of web services, though: most Web2.0 sites get revenue over their variable costs (even a $1 CPM still leads to 80% margins over the cost of hosting & bandwidth for any non-video site), and so they can make up their fixed costs in volume. The Web1.0 E-commerce sites were pricing their product below variable costs, so they ended up losing money when they tried to make it up in volume.
It's about expectations: having a popular service does not mean a successful outcome (this is the implication against which I object).
I think Loopt will be able to put mobile networking on the map if they build out their web presence and integration.

That is, as long as they don't have a privacy gaffe. Beacon on FB is one thing, being perceived as spying through people's mobiles is a company killer.
Ambition can and does expand with time, so you have to give it time. Microsoft is a classic example. It started off with an interpreter for BASIC. No one could have said within 20 years later that company would reach the very top of the IT industry.

When I started out, my first objective was to put food on the table, be self-sufficient. I have grown a bit more ambitious since ... :-)
Ev Williams: Do as He Says, and as He Does
FAIL!

I'd love to know the criteria or the background of most of the candidates who were chosen. I'm a little surprised I was rejected.

Someone from YCombinator want to relieve my frustration? I'll admit my application was thin, but no less talented than most.

Maybe looking for a ticket if it's allowed.
I personally think Google 2008 is Yahoo 2000. We will see.
Verizon Wireless adds friend-finding service
YouTube Debuts Viewer Analytics Tool
MacBook Air compromised in 2 minutes for $10,000
I'm not sure about all your points, but think of it this way: companies with revenues can overcome all kinds of technical and managerial gaffes (I'm looking at you, Microsoft).

OTOH, you can produce a popular, well-executed, low cost per user, etc. free service and still fail.
They needed a study?
Is Genius Won by man - Or is it Forced upon him?
UT Students Create Web Company Next Weekend
As the banking industry has shown us, what's good for the industry in the long term is often not what's good for the individuals in charge in the short term....

So I can't entirely say I'm surprised.
Google isn't really about search, it's about data aggregation.

I would say any of the important web applications are also within the group of "core products" that Google "sells", including the upcoming Google Health, GMail, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets - but the main point is to be working on the thing that is what the business is "about".

I would also add that one of the things that has thus far made Google different is that its employees have greater opportunity to add to the core business than do employees at other companies (GMail is a perfect example).
Yup! I'm debating flying/driving down there... you?
If those users still cost more to maintain than a company makes from them, more users aren't going to solve the problem.

Google became successful because they increased per-user revenue, not because they increased the number of users.
The Implications of Technology - Part 1
The Music Tax: Details Of The Plan They Don’t Want You To Know
> Startup: Rogue Wave Software

not to disappoint you but:

"Rogue Wave® Software has been serving the needs of the
developer community for almost two decades"
http://www.roguewave.com/company/history-milestones.php
I'd be very interesting in someday reading about what it took to make these partnerships happen. And what actually comes of them.

When Boost got Loopt they created an entire ad campaign about it. Sprint got Loopt almost a year ago and the only mention on their site is a paragraph in a Word document.

I'd also love to know how long it took Loopt to convince Verizon to let them in. Or maybe I'd hate to know.
Awesome news. Up until today I've been skeptical of PG's exuberance about Loopt, but now they've got it made.
Exactly. The meaning is not to "sell lists" but to use trending statistics you might acquire.

Compete
Quantcast
iTunes Music Store
Amie Street
Alexa

all built models on their data.
Hesse is on my reading list.
The irony is that it sounds like he's working with fairly well-designed Java. Most of the problems he mentions have reasons behind them. Just guessing (I'm not familiar with his codebase), but:

AbstractEditableTableModel extends AbstractTableModel because the TableModel interface contains lots of methods that you really don't want to have to implement from scratch each time, and AbstractTableModel provides defaults. It implements EditableTableModel because clients of an editable table need additional methods, eg. ones to edit the table. It exists in the first place to factor out duplication between GenericTableModel and MultiTableDataModel. Otherwise, if you discovered a bug in common TableModel code, you'd need to fix both of them yourself.

actionPerformed is a method on the ActionListener interface, so you have to name it that if you want to conform to the interface. ActionListener's used all over Java, which may be why actionPerformed is all over his codebase.

I'd bet that isHasDeletePrivilege is called from JSF or another framework that relies on JavaBeans conventions. Boolean accessors need to start with "is" to conform to the naming conventions, yet isDeletePrivilege is misleading. Hence isHasDeletePrivilege. Had it been named hasDeletePrivilege, the framework (which relies on reflection to find methods) wouldn't be able to find it. (Actually, I think they can also start with "get" in many frameworks, but then he'd just be complaining about getHasDeletePrivilege.)

Personally, I'm very happy I left it all behind for Python, where we (generally) don't have this nonsense. But there's method behind the madness, for those experienced in Java.
Pennies contain 2.5 cents of copper - business opportunity?
I would be interested to know what differs the top runners and others. Buzz/Money/Connection?

Is there really first comer advantage in web2.0 ? looks like there isn't.
So if the Auctomatic guys couldn't hack, did they learn how to in SF and did they then find Patrick and John when they were in SF?
The inverse is true too: companies with popular, well-executed, low cost per user free services can overcome all kinds of technical and managerial gaffes (I'm looking at you, MySpace & LiveJournal & PlentyOfFish).

OTOH, you can produce a company with revenues and still fail. (Webvan, Kozmo, Value America, etc.)
Digg isn't "Social Bookmarking". It wasn't stolen and it is very original.
The best insurance when you're self employed is your spouse's :-)

I get medical + dental for $150/month directly from a major provider, which isn't unreasonable. It helps that I'm young and healthy though.
I find this interesting, mainly because personally I'm less hostile towards the company than I was 4-5 years ago. I think that overall, the "evilness" of MS has abated somewhat, and I no longer feel it necessary to scrutinize every action they take to see how it might be screwing over the customer.

I wonder how much of the decline is based on the entertainment side of MS, such as their push of the Xbox platform. Perhaps the business-types see this as MS losing focus from what they care about, software solutions for their companies.
I have to agree - having to sign up before trying it out stinks. Rig up a robot if you must, or allow only eight moves, or have a separate lobby for unregistered users.
You have no idea about the drama that occurs to get placement in a WAP deck. So many stakeholders, so little space, and everyone firmly believes their priority should have top billing. Cutting a deal with ANY telco is a herculean feat.
Activation emails
I recently read something on A List Apart going against sign up forms, but what about activation emails? Are they a big no no, or a useful tool in the fight against bots? Is there any proof that an activation email actually drives away users?