skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... Why post an article from a year-and-a-half ago? ..."

Self preservation is one. [0]

One of the places mentioned is about 500Km north of me. [1] Here's a question for you. Aboriginals were first spotted at "Quandamooka" as Cpt. Cook sailed up the east coast of Australia in 1770. What did the locals do right that we are doing wrong? How did they manage to maintain the habitat for probably the 6K years the bay has existed and we (Australians) managed to bugger it up in less than 100 years?

"... This link has made the rounds of Reddit ..."

Since when has reddit been the bastion of informed comment?

[0] http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s743310.htm

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moreton_Bay
Not only that, but the founders tried to turn it into something huge and failed.
Calais: Reuters' open semantic content annotation API
cough cough ..yc is for programmers and sit...cough sites...
. . . programs in Arc?

Does anyone seriously think they're going to win hearts and minds by spamming a Hacker News website with a Wall Street Journal hagiography?

And please, no twisted logic about how Obama's the hacker's candidate.
Don Knuth Finally Sells Out
EFF, Creative Commons Offer Developers Free Access to 2m Pages of Legal Documents
Plenty of nerds are angel investors. Generally VC's are big funds of other peoples money and their job, or the firms, is in large part selling their fund to investors - I think geeks generally want make to their own companies if they don't have money or invest in other companies if they do.
Taking this further, can these answers be processed further to build an encyclopedia (without the explicit questions)? Would that be a good way to build an encyclopedia?
Fair enough, but this is / was a controlled experiment. The codebase did not change, the method through which the cached content was served did. Hence the textured cube argument is not the best analogy here, I think. :)

Having said that, I agree -- there is a lot of other variables out there, and they should not be swept under the rug.
We’re Finished (Almost) Facebook
...but she does program in Arc!
I'm constantly taking advantage of this on News.YC.
heh, is there more to the punchline than the obvious?
The discussion here goes to show how valuations are still stretched. In any "normal" times (i.e exclude late 90's bubble and the mini-bubblet of the last couple of years), valuations like 3-4x revenue would be considered perfectly reasonable, for a relatively mature yet risky play like this (risk because the audience could get bored and leave, as seems to be already happening).

After a prolonged downturn (Japan anyone?) we wouldn't be arguing whether 3-4x revenue is too low. We would be surprised any deal at all got done.
Check out the movie "The Prestige" (http://imdb.com/title/tt0482571/), which (among other things) features David Bowie as Tesla during his time in Colorado Springs.
Addresses legibility issues with the menu bar with an option to turn off transparency in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences.

Yes! Finally.
How To Go Slow
The point of the textured cube analogy was that if you don't consider the context of the benchmark, the numbers aren't useful.

The kid doesn't realize that if texturing a cube brings a framerate down from 1200 to 800 fps, is as significant as going down from 62 fps down to 60. Even though that is only a 2 fps difference.

A 400% performance gain is a constant performance improvement. I don't think a system like nginx + memcached have linear performance benefits in the first place.
Winning friends and influencing US legislators, Huawei edition
Trance can get me in to the zone faster than anything else out there, music or otherwise. Granted, I prefer progressive to psy, but everyone has his own preference.
on slicehost 256mb ram, running erlang + yaws . nice documentation, setup. but off late have have to do couple of server restarts , coz of what seems like to be unscheduled reboots . need to investigate. so helps a lot to have a service like monitorus etc that pings u via mail when the server down,etc.
It doubt he's using a preview of the real SDK, he's probably using the hacked SDK.
What control panel are you using with it? I would switch to Litespeed if i could keep using Virtualmin...
The Teacher Who Couldn't Read
Obviously you've never been to high school.
I know this isn't the case at my Architecture firm. When we do get paper in the office (snail mail, etc), we scan it (pdf) into our system and put the original in a box in sequential order for easy retrieval later if we need it. That is the last time the original usually sees the light of day. We typically work with pdf files with clients for invoicing and for presentations. In the past we'd have sent out prints, now a pdf file is all we need. The main time we are forced to use actual paper is to comply with government regulations and permitting etc. But effectively, we are paperless and radically more efficient because of it. (Architecture firm)
Won't it make life unbearably painful for you now?
This sounds like http://www.ehow.com/
Oh I didn't realize that only "involving at least one additional person" type sex counted.
Sure but the insides of the earth keep changing right...
My TopLevel Said
> (eql (not open-source) nil)

T

>
http://bhaskervk.com/opml/
It's probably one of the best posts about VCs. Very few people understand the Ivy leaguish, closed nature of the VC old boys network.
It's Charisma, Stupid
A Survey of Super Tuesday Infographics
"his recommendations at the end seem in tune with some of the ideas behind YC"

My thoughts exactly. Sure hope the YC guys become rich enough to fund people beyond a couple of months. Right now their main value seems to be in the connections they create for you.
Perhaps your judgement with age is the thing which has changed, you haven't even proposed why the latter argument is invalid?

How can you argue that Outlook without Xobni is better than Outlook with Xobni. Outlook is so bad that any minor improvement which changes the user experience of a product which hasn't changed in 10 years is a positive one.

Obviously we aren't talking about the magnitude of the positive change which will increase as xobni improves its product. Surely its existence is sufficient to warrant the acceptance that its a step in the right direction.

I would conjecture you don't even use xobni, or for that matter outlook ;)
don't think so. an old comic most likely. I would think that would be more Djikstra selling out then Knuth.
First Ever Ubuntu Developer Week
Strike Update: When Are My Favorite Shows Coming Back?
The one problem with the theory I see is that it's easy to choose which candidate is more charismatic after they've won.

So, PG - put your money where your mouth is. Who's the most charismatic candidate this time?
Google hijacking 404 error pages
You're right.

His MobileTwitterific site says he's using the toolchain from the iPhone Dev Wiki. I incorrectly assumed that the headline (taken from reddit) was true since the article seemed so detailed.
Top 50 Mac Terminal Commands
Passes my test of usefulness: Camel ~ http://www.supercook.com/show_dish.asp?l=http://www.recipeza...
I want the fonts.
Last year they converted to a C Corp so they can't really pay themselves through the same way anymore.

http://james.hotornot.com/2007/02/on-having-balls-part-ii-st...
What Charisma Is
What I want from a programming language
Also, "What Charisma Is"

http://www.paulgraham.com/recharisma.html
My first impression was that you were doing a lot of work to explain every single exception or near-exception to your theory.

The case of Gore winning the popular vote is probably the most damaging. I'd consider downgrading the claim to "As video becomes more prevalent, charisma is an increasingly powerful factor."

If you really believe your theory, you should buy Obama for president on Intrade. In fact, you should have bought Obama back when he was trading at 30%, which would make the advance predictive powers of the theory more impressive. How much does hindsight play a role in deciding which candidate was more "charismatic"?
Oops, didn't notice original post was from 2004.

Still, claims to be able to predict elections are a lot more impressive when the person makes a bet on Intrade and then cashes in on it. Money, meet mouth; mouth, meet money.
there's an obama sticker on his homepage
Seems obvious to me. Obama by 100 miles. Bill Clinton is even more charismatic, but Hilary alone is not even in the same league. McCain isn't either.
I've had a linode for a couple of years. I love it.
I'm very low load, so I'm not sure how my account would hold up with any real traffic.

One thing I love about linode is that you get upgrades almost seamlessly. I rarely ever need to log into the main page, so when I do I end up find out out that my ram and available storage has increased. Since I started I think my storage has gone from 2g to 10g, and memory from I think 64m to 360m. (you have to grow your partition or create a partition to use the extra space, which is a small amount of downtime. It looks like using the extra memory requires a reboot, as I still only have 251864 kB, which suggests the 360m upgrade was within the last 171 days.)

I used a variety of virtual hosts before linode, with mixed results.

I haven't regretted going with linode for one moment. Period.
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Those assessments of charisma are pretty generally agreed upon.

This time it looks like Obama, but I can't say for sure because I never watch TV. I've only seen about 20 seconds of him, in a clip on YouTube.

Hilary Clinton reminds me a lot of Nixon II. She has that same forced smile of someone who's naturally a behind the scenes operator, but who realizes you have to seem friendly to get elected.
Nice catch. I didn't notice that. However, maybe PG just likes Obama - you can support a candidate that you don't think is certain (or even likely) to win.

* No longer relevant given PG's response
I said charisma wins elections, not primaries. Primaries are a different matter. Dealmaking seems to count for a lot. That's why they sometimes produce candidates that are so shockingly unelectable, like Mondale.
"Well, Perl/Ruby/PHP don't run persistently on the server."

Depends on the server. It's hard to find a Ruby webapp that runs non-persistently.
Hi TipJoy! Great concept! I was thinking about similar ideas, but didn't come up with two of your clever solutions: aggregation of micropayments to increase efficiency, and giftcards to avoid regulation. But I didn't want to give up on it, because I thought it would be good for the world. I'm glad to see you guys have already built it, and I'm very impressed with the execution!

I might make a suggestion though. While Amazon is great, I'd like to think, or home, at a few people getting tips would be basically able to live off them for a time, and that means they'd need to either get cash, or be able to use tips to pay for living expenses. It might be troublesome to get a deal, but I'd love to see grocery stores as a source of giftcards.

Many thanks, and a hearty congratulations, Kirigins!
We could recalculate the "interference infrastructure" every couple seconds... Remember that we don't need 100% accuracy also; TCP/IP layers reliability on top of unreliability.
Also, an electromagnetic wave is not current, the bulk of which actually travels many many orders of magnitude slower.
How to handle incoming emails in Rails RESTfully
My hunch is that it's down to cache invalidation logic. It's easier for the app to know when a single memcached entry needs to be invalidated than for the SQL engine, which perhaps tends to be conservative in what it can cache.

(e.g. MySQL query cache is flushed if a single write happens to the table, so all your users will be dumped out of that cache whenever any row is updated.)

Hence you get a better hit-rate with memcached. Perhaps it is also simply easier to tune memcached than most db memory caches.

I benched "retrieve data and instantiate object" on a couple of different, unloaded, systems and a simple select-and-instantiate-from-mysql was a bit faster than the memcached equivalent. I didn't measure CPU usage server-side though, so under load things might be different.
Well how would you prove it? Just list who was running & pick the most charismatic? There must be many factors to control for, eg incumbency & apportionment. We can do a real study or we can sit around talking till the data comes in.
Re: gore see footnote [2]. Very smooth reply.
This one might be the greatest: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Never more shall I be bored during the installation of Debian. Combined with the glamorous features of 0verkill (http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~brain/0verkill/) I will soon be able to get completely rid of X11.

No more shall I be dependent on Nvidias buggy drivers. Buggy, woggy, woo!
Perhaps this is a case where Google uses its position in advertising to achieve domination in other markets. Domain sales just can't be enough, and funding is not a long-term way maintain business.

I do think they are a nice acquisition target for Yahoo or Microsoft, though - both having their own ad networks and no similar offering, it makes a lot of sense for them to buy Weebly and integrate it with their advertising platforms.
Color Pencils Reviewed
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113864

You only have two choices. He's saying that the candidate with the most genuine smile is likely to win; past elections are evidence.
Followup: http://www.paulgraham.com/recharisma.html
New Entrepreneurship documentary from Stanford Technology Ventures
Huh? I have seen the same done with rails over and over. Well kind of.
Is this for all 404 pages? If you have a custom 404 page does Google still take over? I certainly don't mind Google removing the plain old 404 default pages (or even better the pages with got 404 trying to locate the 404 page).
Really? You've seen folks running SSH into a server and firing up irb to add a blog post?
I think it would be better put as, "The person who exudes leadership qualities is more likely to succeed." It's well known that the taller of the two presidential candidates usually wins, for example. And here's a great article from The Economist on "Physiognomy and Success":
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
I don't know what it is with people thinking they have a right to control my web experience. From people demanding they be able to show you advertisements (or else you're 'stealing') to this chap demanding that he get to show you his 404. A "right" to control what I see as a result of a status code? It's mind boggling. What my application choses to do with the status codes your server return is my business, not yours.
You can certainly do something similar with other languages under the right constraints. For example you can fire up a copy of your application from the command line (or from within Emacs using IPython mode for example). The difference is that you're not connecting to the same instance as the web server so for example you can't change in memory constructs. But for an applications that uses a database for data storage you can certainly accomplish similar things.
I've yet to meet a "junior" programmer that overly comments code. OTOH I've met a couple of more senior level developers (15-20 years of experience) that absolutely can't live without documentation and comments even when the comments simply reiterate what the code is saying (still not to the level of narrative Steve was suggesting)
Why do I have the feeling "The Project Manager that Couldn't Code" wouldn't sell as many copies?
The internet radio stations I listen to for programming music require each mix (song) to be between 45 and 90 minutes, not fade or do other distracting effects, and a couple other basic rules that make it quite good for programming.
Anyone yet propose an inventory management system that means I don't have to manually enter every trip to Albertson's / HyVee / Piggly Wiggly?
At this level in politics, all candidates have "leadership qualities." Unless there is a large difference in height (5+ inches, which doesn't happen very often), no one is going to notice.

Bush is shorter than both Gore and Kerry. Guess what? He has much more charisma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heights_of_United_State...
I was considering between linode and slicehost. Linode signup process was a big hassle compared to slicehost so I picked slicehost. I've been very satisfied to date (2x 256 and 1x 512 slice)
You mean like "Ten Tips For Getting More Mileage Out Of Your Gotos"?
The RenderJuice virtual render farm ( http://www.cambrianhouse.com/idea/idea-promoter/ideas-id/VlD...) is a very good idea. I was discussing this scenario a few days ago and the current barrier is the rendering software. Open source rendering software is improving and could make a virtual render farm viable within 15 months.
Tex and Knuth
"TeX has an idiosyncratic version numbering system. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. The current version is 3.141592. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. TeX developer Donald Knuth has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to π, at which point all remaining bugs will become permanent features.

In a similar way, the version number of METAFONT asymptotically approaches e."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#Software_versioning_schemes
The book Freakonomics has similar sentiments about charismatic politicians and has supporting evidence.
The next time you're designing the backend for a high-traffic site, I think you should give it another look. As jbert pointed out, the MySQL query cache is emptied every time you make any change to the table, making it pretty useless unless you only ever do selects. And even for the selects, wouldn't you rather select by key from a hashtable in O(1) than select from a btree index in O(log n) at best?
Ask News.YC: Teach for America?
Don't know if this is appropriate for Hacker News. But I'm guessing some of you are in college and thinking about what you're going to do 9 to 5 after you graduate, if you don't go IPO before school ends.

Anyone have experience with Teach for America (www.teachforamerica.org)? Any thoughts about the organization?
I agree with the title of this post, but don't really get what the referenced post is supposed to do in order to help. I think the topic is really interesting and I'd like to know what other hacks are listening to.

I posted "Coding In Flow - Does Music Get You Higher?" on my blog in 2006 on the very same topic listing my favorite music for certain development tasks.

http://codesurgeonblog.com/2006/08/coding-in-flow-does-music...
Interesting idea. But I wonder how much it helps to use a classifier for processing resumes. If you have a high number of resumes to process it makes sense to attempt to automate it. But if the volume you are processing is low enough you might be able to get by with letting people make decisions.

For example I can tell way better than Google's spam filtering software whether an email is spam or ham. The only reason to use filtering in that case is to save me the hassle of having to dismiss 50+ spam messages per day.

The human mind is pretty good at picking up patterns (even without trying) so after a while experienced interviewers start to see what kind of people worked out and what kind of people they hired and later regretted it. I guess using a naive classifier would eliminate some bias towards things like top colleges and years of experience.

The real problem with resumes however is that anyone can put absolutely anything on it. So it's a bad source for training a classifier. It would be interesting however to measure things like the probability of your interviewers making correct decisions, or (if you use standard questions) the correlation between answers to questions and performance (in the event of a hire).

Ultimately I think I agree with Joel that the only proper way to decide if someone is worth hiring is to have a technical discussion with them and see how it goes. Getting a feel for how someone writes code is even more important (but I'm not necessarily sure that putting people on the spot in from of a whiteboard is the best way). After someone has been hired I can usually tell withing several minutes of working with them on real production code whether they were a good addition to the company.
Anyone using the real SDK who posted this kind of article would immediately be sued by Apple. But, more importantly, the kind of people who would have early access to the iPhone SDK just would never write something like this, especially not in their name. Nobody in the mac community wants to make an enemy of Steve Jobs.
That turned out longer than expected. Perhaps I should refactor it and make it into a blog post.
Couldn't they just charge the coffee to your account from the phone (like adding it to a phone bill or linking it to the iTunes account)?
I've been enjoying this capability with Erlang too.
haha, I see what you did there
Great, so stick to your neighborhood coffee shop. As far as I can tell Starbucks has good coffee (but I'm not an expert on coffee) at a reasonable price (quit bitching about price people, if you can't afford it you need a better job) and it's convenient (they're everywhere, many open 24 hours, drive through).

No matter where I travel in the country I can have the exact same coffee made just the way I like it.
I certainly do have a problem in principle. In practice I still use my iphone. Maybe I should blame Apple for deciding to partner with a carrier that uses these kind of tactics.
Absolutely hilarious.
Sounds like a desktop guy running head on into the embedded world. And not even all that tough an embedded situation...GUI, 64 megs, etc...
Why choose Elephant? (CL persistence)
My most local Starbucks is practically empty but the smaller chain coffeeshop across the street and the independent coffeeshop a block away are packed. No one wants to pay for Wi-Fi.
I'm sorry but using databases in Python is not incredibly difficult. Take a look at SQLAlchemy (I've never looked at Storm).
Nice, this is pretty cool! I think this is a pretty unique idea, although I haven't seen much else in this domain. Seems to me like it's genuinely useful also.
musicovery.com is good. I usually listen to electronica, down tempo, negative mood.

The key is listening to music that has vocals and that are more monotonous. Vocals can get distracting.
I think that it's impossible to state firmly (especially in a forum called hacker news :) ) that George Bush Jr beat either Gore or Kerry. This is because electronic voting machines were used to count many of the votes.

Electronic voting machines leave no paper trail which means the results are unverifiable.
Absolutely fascinating; I'll make sure to rearrange my entire lifestyle around this very useful look into the scheduling quirks of VCs. Truly fascinating and worthy of a post.
Invite?
Send me an email, invites are currently closed but I can invite you as soon as they are open again.
ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ.
ಸವಿನುಡಿ ಕನ್ನಡ :)
namaskAra, savinudi kannaDa :)
Msn, Ask.com, Yahoo and Google: where to submit your sitemaps
pandora.com is really good. When coding, I alternate between trance http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh11364865758277320 and mellow hip-hop http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh236914974523469512
How to Change the World: The Cleverest Idea I've Seen In Years
And it doesn't matter anyway. He's talking about adding records to the DB and uploading images, the same things you'd do through a web interface.
Having grown up in the third world, I love stuff like this.

One of my big dreams is to be able to make enough from startups to be able to fund ideas like this.