skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what else has a great design on a plane? The turbofan engines. In fact, give me a blueprint for a 757 and I can probably find 50,000 things with better design than the bathroom lock. I have a special fondness for the RAT:

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

and if I had to choose between the bathroom lock and this set of technologies,

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

...well, I just don't know. But no one adores the trivial like 37signals. Of course, you say, "They are focusing on user-centric design." Well...in that case, the door-light combination doesn't seem as good as a motion-detector-door-light combination, which would turn ON with motion, stay on when LOCKED, and turn off when UNLOCKED. That didn't take an engineering degree to come up with. Where's my kudos?
Lots of people say that, but the fact remains that no one has ever come up with an explanation of how or why genes would code for modern personalities, or with any evidence that's inconsistent with personalities being largely cultural and changeable with skill.
http://searchyc.com/submissions/by_date/nickb (213 result pages)

http://searchyc.com/comments/by_date/nickb (70+ result pages)
The Security Mindset (engineers vs security professionals)
AT&T CEO says hard to find skilled U.S. workers
The fact that you even dare ask the question of whether humor belongs here means that your whole post itself must be some kind of elaborate joke, and, as I thought everyone here knew god damned well, humor is not tolerated here! Ban Him.
It sounds like you're asking me to repeat exactly the same task that Andreessen and Munger have already attempted -- to show how understanding human misjudgment can be valuable to people in business/entrepreneurship. If they were unable to convince you, I'm not sure I can.
For $0.76 they're also overpaying for the HIT.
Depends on your definition of dying. Casual games are filling the void left by the migration of hardcore games to the console. Albeit a much smaller percentage of sales casual gamers represent roughly 50-60 million people world wide and is expected to grow. I expect independent developers to largely focus on the causal market since the barriers to entry are smaller.

Blizzard can make a game anywhere and so long as they don't compromise their standards it will be a hit.
Fear of housing slump may be seriously overdone
Rubik’s cube proof cut to 25 moves
wow, it's cool. thanks for your link.
ACID3 was broken!
The whole late vs. early thing is a bit of red herring. I think what I actually said was that a surprising number of the best startups only decided to apply at the last minute. But we certainly don't look at applications that come in at the last minute and think "ok, these guys must be good."

It doesn't help to apply late. It doesn't hurt much, either. We do start looking at some of the early applications, and make suggestions about things they could change to improve their prospects. But I doubt by more than 10%. If you're good, it will show, basically.
Update: I did not encounter this problem after installing adblock. maybe some other reason...

I have not installed firefox adblock extension. I will install it later and see if I encounter this problem. Thanks!
We used to redirect competitors (based on their ip addresses) to their own sites when they tried to log into our software.
My biggest complaint about Rails is that it doesn't seem to solve any of the hard problems encountered by serious web developers. Routing is easy, selecting and applying templates is easy, organizing related action handlers into the same file or logical grouping is easy. There's nothing impressive about this, and DHH's arrogance only further frustrates me with Rails' shortcomings.

Flow control on the other hand is hard. Complex web applications are hard because HTTP is basically stateless. If I'm filling out a form and I want to do some multi-step modal flow for selecting an image from a number of galleries and return to the form I was working on then I need continuations or at least closures. Rails doesn't give me anything here, and the Rails answer (AJAX for anything more complicated than 'fetch a row and stuff it in a template based on a sequential integer ID') is still quite unsatisfying. AJAX is wonderful but your application should work whether or not it is available.

Seaside and to a lesser extent Arc and Rhino-In-Spring offer you a lot more, but Seaside and Arc don't seem to have much of a story when it comes to clustering, and Rhino-In-Spring (while beautifully executed) suffers from the same 'over-arching warm embrace' framework syndrome described in the article.

If someone wrote a web framework as a set of high-cohesion, low-coupling components that gave me high level flow control abstractions but got out of the way when all I wanted to do was stuff a row into a template, and furthermore could credibly scale out to a large horizontal cluster they would probably take over the world.

I've started prototyping such a tool, also using Rhino. It adds package management and a few other things to JavaScript 1.7 to make it suitable as a general-purpose programming language (i.e. it makes sense to use it for command line scripts as well as web applications). It also offers, a la carte, a mod_perl like facility that simply invokes your module with the request and response objects and gets out of your way. On top of this there's another layer that takes care of routing, template application, and flow control. This last component is still in the early stages but is coming along nicely. It can serialize continuations and closures out of process and consume them another machine, using techniques borrowed from Rhino-In-Spring, so it can be clustered.

If this is interesting to anyone please let me know, I would love some feedback and help with it. I plan on open-sourcing it once it reaches a level of stability that makes it suitable for production use.
Code is a hypothesis. But some of it might be done. I think I still use some Lisp utilities I wrote in the mid 1980s.
The comments are better than the article -- as one notes, the design is terrible if you're not inclined to step into a tiny, dark room and lock a door behind you (e.g. a toddler who is afraid of the dark). I'm not a cranky toddler, but I've thought that this arrangement was a bit goofy, myself.

My feeling is that a better design would use a motion detector to activate the lights. The combination door lock/light switch design doesn't seem to do much of anything, other than make the door more complicated and expensive.
Our area - a simple tool for a simple task, comments appreciated
Its hard to imagine them being an all windows shop. I've yet to meet a physicist that used windows. They all use linux as far as I've seen. Most math profs I know either use linux or os x. The only people I know who use windows are either in CS or engineering.
Ahh... I knew Git was basically started with that Bitkeeper war, but since I don't really follow linux politics much as I don't use it all that often, I didn't realize that hg was started then as well. They seem very similar in their paradigm shift away from the central repository style of CVS and SVN. Is that a coincidence or was Bitkeeper also in this everything is a branch method?
Good points. I've run into this problem a lot, and generally handle it in one of 2 ways:

1. Make it easy for semi-technical project managers who are not coders to extend the schema. This is the 95% solution for us, and the core of our system.

2. use n-to-n lookup tables or lookup fields that use a second field to determine what you reference. We don't do this a lot, but we do it in a few places where there can be a more or less unbounded set of things that can be referenced. These indeed have problems, so we try to avoid them, especially in high-volume situations.

Then again, note that this solution (a) requires using our framework to be effective (b) has RDMS purists seeing red. So maybe you're right.

Edit: section redacted.
Its polite to quickly google a term you're not familiar with, in case the answer can be easily had without asking.
Question: What Sites Do You Pay For?
A simple open question: what web services do you pay for online?

My answers are:
- Flickr: I have a pro account… $24.95/year.
- eBay: I have sold items on eBay, thus I pay them listing fees and a % of final sale. This has only been a couple dollars over many years of eBay usage.
- Akismet: This is the anti-comment-spam service from Automattic. Based on my level of usage, I don’t have to pay for it, but I do anyway. I’ll likely stop paying for it now that I have switched to Disqus. I believe it was $5/month.
- Dreamhost: They host my blog, in addition to a number of sites and email accounts I manage in a consulting gig for a little income on the side. It costs about $10/month.
- NetFlix: I consider this a web service because the majority of my NetFlix consumption comes through their new online streaming offerings. Cost is $13.99/month.
- Skype: I don’t have a Skype Pro account, but I do pay for SkypeOut minutes. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than getting a landline. I spend about $3/month in SkypeOut calls.

What about you?
I think that we don't mind being "underground" or extremely popular, as long as the quality of the site stays high. The fear is that publicity will bring the childish masses and turn hacker news into another spam playground.
Am i the only one that's sick of this guy?
you either have to modify your schema, or you have created a database that is highly flexible via totally generalized mapping tables, but is not optimized for these kinds of structures

A generalizable mapping schema with tables for edges may not be optimal, but your comparison seems to be a bit of a bait-and-switch. Why compare the optimality of such a schema to a rigid schema instead of comparing it to the optimality of an alternative "graph-based" data store?

Granted, an extensible schema will be slow to query/etc. What makes you say that you can achieve better efficiency using a non-RDBMS approach? (Not that you can't, but I didn't see your argument to that effect. I'd say that without such an argument, the optimality/speed point is unsignificant.)
Interesting transition he has made, from this:
"If you’re gonna be a good businessman, really what it’s about, is finding situations where people win. It’s not about tricking people into doing stuff, it’s not about being a hardass. It’s about being comfortable and working in your pajamas, because that’s gonna end up being what’s best for everyone.”

To this:
"Really we try to embrace communication between people so they can communicate and communicate between each other. It's a social utility for communication." (at SXSWi)
Modern personalties?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments#Historical_De...
So both the WebKit team and Opera team got a 100% on ACID3. So What?
My biggest problem isn't standards compliance from Opera, WebKit/Safari, or even Firefox. The biggest thorn in my side has ALWAYS been Internet Explorer. IE8 looks great, and even IE7 is barely tolerable. I run a small gamer-heavy website, which usually means that they're up to date on technology. I still have 25% of all web hits come from IE6.

Also, congrats to the Opera and WebKit team for 100/100 on ACID3! :D Check out the WebKit Blog for celebration! (http://webkit.org/blog/)
**MICHAEL JACKSON’S (THE KING OF POP) NEW BOOK JUST ADDED**
They need to get vunk'd or if you're extra mean throw some 2G,1C their way.
Adobe Unveils Webtop Version of Photoshop. Picnik Is Not Scared.
Amazon #2 in digital music sales
People think and act very differently than they used to.
Meet the laptop you'll use in 2015
As someone who buys a LOT of music, Amazon's DRM-free .mp3s are what finally got me to switch to digital music for most of my purchases. It's awesome to be able to buy a single I like, or an album from an artist I'm not familiar with yet without having to go out and lay down $15+ for a CD.

I WOULD prefer it if the downloads were direct (they use a client downloader that you have to install on your machine), but I'm still pretty impressed with the offering.

And it's nice to see the major labels starting to really come around to digital sales.
Mozilla: Acid3 is basically worthless
Largely biological, not entirely. Your philosophy or outlook can certainly have an effect on your personality, but from what I've seen different environments and ideologies just create variations on a biological theme.
Maybe a technical identity required to start a web software startup peak in one's late 20's because good technology perpetually abstracts itself irrelevant, but an interpersonal business skills continue to improve as one builds a professional network and earns experience.

Given this hypothesis, it would be best to be an engineer in one's 20's and then transition to a more strategic business identity in one's 30's and beyond.

This fits your new YC founder profile.
WebKit first to 100/100 on Acid3: And you can try it yourself
You've seen themes in people. But have you seen evidence these themes are not caused by culture? Do you have an argument that they couldn't be? That it's unlikely?
If you do that (create a customerinvoice rel table) you still have to change your data model every time you want to track a different kind of relationship. We've just converted to a generic relationship table (subject relation object) to handle any kind of relationship, so we no longer need to keep adding tables and changing data models. This is beyond a huge time saver.
I've seen this at the top of reddit too. While somethings might seem worthless, others really have to be done. Especially CSS3. Have you ever had to programmatically handle odd/even classes? :odd, :even, and :nth-child selectors are a god send!

The problem is that everybody has their own things they want from the ACID3 test. I know a lot of friends who would kill for better SVN support. The reason it has a lot of weird crap is so that everybody can move forward. AJAX originated as a hack to IE's XMLHttpRequest, who knows what weird technology might be next?
The article is worthless: not a single sentence of the first 5 paragraphs of the blog post makes sense when examined critically. The author does not understand relational databases nor how flexible they are. In fact I'm fairly certain he understands neither OOP, nor RDBMS, nor the Semantic Web (of which I am no proponent) well if at all.

Every now and then a developer community bubbles over with complaints about RDBMS and gets some attention. Most support is from people who, like the author, understand OOP to a certain degree but don't understand RDBMS.

And time after time predictions of the death of the relational database model prove wrong: RDBMS usage only increases. The relational database model supplanted the network database model (which corresponds to the "graph databases" the author speaks of) for good reasons.

Nothing to see here: keep moving folks.
You're sick of the PR creation. This is an old article, and seems pretty authentic. Lots of interesting stuff.
I've been through the Google interview process [I'm not going to blog about it with any sour grapes, I'll try again for a different position later.], and I realized afterwards that it was a lot like map-reduce. You're being thrown through a bunch of interviews by different people (the map phase) who then forward their reports to their hiring committee (the reduce phase). Every interviewer is seeking to do a similar kind of analysis on you: are you worthy of hiring? Then they gather it all together and grind the sausage. They probably interview thousands of people to harvest enough talent to fuel their progress, unlike other organizations that only hire to fill known needs.

They don't tell you why they approve/reject, but I imagine that they probably have a similar process on the other side if you are hired with regards to the package you're offered. Very likely, they'll seek to optimize the right amount to give you.

And yes, I do think they're probably missing out some great talent, because not everyone can scribble it out on a white board on-the-spot. But you have to be able to communicate effectively to get anywhere, even in Google.
I posted this elsewhere (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147553), but I'll post it here too:

My biggest problem isn't standards compliance from Opera, WebKit/Safari, or even Firefox. The biggest thorn in my side has ALWAYS been Internet Explorer. IE8 looks great, and even IE7 is barely tolerable. I run a small gamer-heavy website, which usually means that they're up to date on technology. I still have 25% of all web hits come from IE6.
eBay listing fees. Web hosting service. I've been a paying user of photo.net in the past, but don't use the site much any more.
You can. Definitely. In fact, I've implemented this a few times (most recently last week); some for specific problems, some for more generic graph support.

In a nutshell:

The problem with RDBMS approaches is that the good ones assume you can pack your complex logic into a monster query or stored procedure and let the query optimizer do its thing. But if you're implementing an attribute-value system or graph traversal on top of an SQL database, you end up generating a ginormous number of queries just to do some basic traversal. You could potentially wrap those into a stored procedure that was doing selects into a temporary table, but that's not really the sort of thing that most query optimizers go to town on.

On the other hand, there are a number of systems out there that either attempt to be full object oriented databases, or object relational mappings, or RDF based stores, but the current off of the shelf ones tend to perform poorly since they're not very mature (and I get the feeling are more focused on just being able to conveniently store stuff, not actually hitting it very hard).

When I first started looking at the sort of problems that Hank's addressing (in a series of talks I did in 2004 titled "Beyond Hierarchical Interfaces") I naïvely thought that you could do everything with an SQL backend, tried and failed. I could blab on about the sort of indexing that you need for these sorts of storage, but I'll duck out for now.

Edit: Just one example of where I've done this, if anyone cares, was replacing the old SQL backend with a dynamic (schema-less) attribute-value system and basic query language, for my current job: http://grunge-nouveau.net/Kore.mp4
It's strange I have no problem here with FF3 beta 4.
Now, I may be pretty naive here, but if you're doing full on graph traversal, why not just extract the full graph from the database and traverse it in memory on your own terms instead of leaving it to large unoptimized traversal queries?
I was wondering where I had seen Adam D'Angelo's face before. I just realized he used to be competitor on topcoder. He was pretty good, too.

Also; it's funny -- I had this image of Zuckerberg being quite devious and calculating. Now it feels like he's a lot like us.
meatspin.com

Always good for laffs when the boss walks by
A good article, but it's only half of the story.
Funny, that's what my users want, and the only object I use to give it to 'em is a CSV parser that happens to have an output method (which works really well).

Users are delighted that all they have to do is click and their Excel/SAS datasets fill up. They are dumbfounded when I show them the code and it is quite literally 4 lines long, and two of them are MIME headers.

Of course, they don't see the definition of the VIEW, but why should they? ;-)
Indeed. OO is so ill defined anyway. What is documented as OO now I am sure is not what alan kay intended it to be. New popular frameworks like rails don't help either (much) - although its oo-lite - so its not so bad.

still, I am looking forward for an excuse to crack out stuff like arc and walk away from OO for a while (I am allowed to dream).
For the latest data set that I'm working on there are 5 million nodes and 50 million edges, and each one has some meta-data associated with it. :-)
I think it was Bitkeeper's solid decentralized workflow that convinced Linus that VC would even be feasible for kernel development; hg and git were written after people realized that they could no longer do without the features that Bitkeeper had.
> a better design would use a motion detector to activate the lights

but the amount of space available for movement is too small. probably too small to detect with a motion detector ?
Yes, in fact, we applied very very early - just a few weeks after the applications were announced.
i for one _really_ like the lightning conductors built such that the radars on the plane don't get fried during a lightning strike.
All websites eventually die

The sample size is small so far. I can't think of a lot of sites that have tried really hard to avoid becoming lame, even at the expense of growth. Most put growth first.
72 common question during project management audit
72 common question during project management audit
JSnake Snake JavaScript
News.YC has about 2% of Reddit's traffic, so I don't think the Reddits worry much about it. And I don't want the rest, so they don't have much to worry about in the future either.
The 'not the million dollar homepage' for eBay sellers... 
An interesting site for ANYONE who sells stuff on eBay, SponsoredOnline is set to become the worlds biggest FREE tag based eBay items billboard. All you need is your item number and a few carefully selected tags.
The numbers you quote are about votes. I didn't say stuff I wrote wouldn't get upvoted on reddit.

Sigh. I feel like I'm posting on reddit right now. That distinctive "no, what I actually said was" spectral signature of arguing with a troll.
2G, 1C = game over. That's what I would have done.
Perfect, that way he never has to use the same 4 symbols twice.
NYTimes: Synching Just Became a Cinch
that picture forgot the viagra, and the botnet posts.
Are they even offering or looking locally or is this just PR to cover up outsourcing? Their search system only lists 211 positions nationwide.
Ask: I have a built web apps and want to participate with Y combinator. but...
but I can't leave my job for 3 months (I know I may not get accepted, but I need to think ahead) between June and August(I have a big family to support, and i need my "ok" salary to support daily life). I am willing to give up some % of my company for free Y combinator advice.

What can I do? Is it possible ? What options can I have?
I pay for paypal fee. itune, web hosting.
http://whitehouse.gov. I think we're all are being invoiced $80,000 for the last eight years or so. /political-snipe aside, I pay for online web hosting, netflix and little else.
I've seen plenty of graph problems solved easily with relational databases. However a lot of people seem to confuse the issues here (e.g. when they see "relational" they assume a SQL RDBMS).

Can you provide a better explicit reference for what you're calling a "graph database"?
Hank, could you drop me a mail? (One click away from my profile...) I might have some interesting stuff to fling in your general direction in the near future.
Also -- in response to the thought experiment:

For me to "apply Munger's theory of misjudgment in this startup to make it better" would basically entail putting myself in that startup's environment, probing the situation to get a sense of what's going on, and then using all the "mental models" or "thinking tools" I've got (including a lot of stuff about human misjudgments which seem to be really useful and accurate a lot of the time) to understand their situation & think of what could be done in new and better ways.

I don't believe that the best way to solve most problems is by using formulas that are so overcertain of themselves that they presume to be able to solve someone else's problems from a distance, without knowing the details of a situation or interacting in that environment. I believe that details matter, as does close interaction with the environment that sustains your project.