skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really needs to be the size of a legal pad, use a stylus, abusable like a legal pad (very durable), WiFi, maybe e-paper for output. Nothing should slide, fold or twist--just a slab of input/computation/output. almost completely sealed, it should easily survive a coffee spill.

bonus points for something like ultravnc support so it can just be an extension of your desktop display.
I have not used Amazon's client, typically, client downloads are used to give you a lot more control (pause, resume), and to do optimizations between the client (e.g. multiple http connections) and the server (this could be amazon S3 or a CDN).
I'd reccomend passing on at least this round of Ycombinator.

Your family's welfare has to come first- Not only is there the loss of income to think about, but health insurance.

Instead, I'd suggest spending the next 6 months living below your means, and putting the money aside. You don't need much, but enough to comfortably live on for a few months, supporting your family.

Price out private health insurance- This is cheaper in regulated states such as Massachusetts, but your situation and location will vary.

After you have a few months salary put aside, then you'll be in a stronger position to take time away from a job to start a company.
Off topic: Why does "The Crimson" have google ads? With its 600 billion dollar endowment, couldn't Harvard do without?
Omnisio (YC Winter 08) launches
Great story. I hope that parting words about buying Porsche's was said as a joke.

It's great that the owners achieved the outcome they desired, very positive; however I also think it's important to keep in mind that it will take some time for the buyer to realize value from the acquisition. In my opinion that should be the metric of success, did the acquired company create value, not for the previous owners/investors through an acquisition, but for the current and future customers through it's operations. I think sometimes the idea the companies should create value-added as an ongoing entity gets lost in the discussion about the company's stock creating a return for the investors/owners.
The only site that I used that and reminds me of HN is Perlmonks(.org). It never had any commercial ambitions and the quality has been maintained for a decade. There's tons of lessons to be learned from it. They use blind voting, have user levels, and the higher level users moderate. The community there is unbelievably awesome and it has a very similar feel to this site.

http://perlmonks.org/?node=PerlMonks%20FAQ
Concurrency and Python
Have you considered illegally downloading your music instead?
About that last statistic, that's WAYY off, at least on my site. I have more people use IE 8 than IE 5.5. (Which isn't a lot, IE8 has 40 hits of 60,000.) My Safari is around 5%.
Updated the post. I'm kinda surprised that is what the comments focused on -- whoops.
I'm not in favor of taking such an idea, and trying to mainstream it by slapping the name of something we use everyday and trying to make it worth something.
Huh, so it is, but why no auto discovery? Paulgraham.com is also oddly lacking in the RSS department.
Amen. My hope is that computers will become more and more "unitary", for lack of a better term. That is to say they'll become simpler in use, even while they're becoming more flexible and powerful in effect.

Basically I'm hoping that computers become better tools and not just better computers.
A molecule closely related to an amino acid has been detected in space for the first time
100 best places to live and launch your own company
Be Innovative or Slowly Fade Into Extinction
Hack to the Future
The Founding of Cygnus Solutions (Michael Tiemann)
Why would that be a joke?
seriously guys...this is just awesome!
Interesting post. My wife and kids have been doing this on their own, without any instruction, and despite my efforts to show them how to directly enter a URL in the address field. It just seems that it's easier for them to remember a search mnemonic than a URL.
A Lion Uncaged - Damn it Feels Good to be a Hacker
Are the MP3s available as a web service? It would be cool if there was a kind of wholesaler for MP3s, so that competition for the best shopping experience could arise.
I knew I wasn't the only one thinking of Office Space when reading that essay.

That said, I think there's been enough news.yc posts about the essay. Can we please move on?
Pssh we won't use laptops in 2015, we'll all have microprocessors embedded in our brains!
This is because businesses learned painfully over many years that the relational model is the simplest way for them to store the data relevant to what they do in a way that is accessible to all of their IT systems that they have or that they might want to build. Relational databases, as they are currently implemented, might be getting long in the tooth now:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2500

However, given the relational model's foundation in set theory and predicate logic, it seems you'd be hard pressed to replace it with something else that can offer the same data integrity guarantees.
Could anybody explain the term "on base" for the Non-US readers who don't know baseball?
Ask YC: Anyone use google document? or any similar website of same feature?
http://docs.google.com can offer making of pdf file on the fly for any spread sheet or word like features. Problem is it takes quite A WHILE to save or update the file.

So it would be a great if u guys can direct me some other sites with those features. thx...
OK, maybe I should have been more specific. Somehow that article really annoyed me: "code is only worth 0.83$, because I can code a for loop in 30 seconds". Hm, not very convincing. "Code is worthless once the original programmers are gone" - just a claim, without any statistical backing. Personally I think it is conceivable to actually dig through somebody elses sourcecode and understand it.

I wonder if such articles are just written for "karma whoring", or if they really express a heartfelt concern of the author.
This is a repost.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147559
Next time they will not link directly to you but redirect through something. Or simply copy-and-paste your content into the job description. It's a waste of time trying to fight this...
Overclocking an OLPC XO Laptop CPU
I don't think "semantic web" makes for a database. What a database provides is fast access to the data, with indexes and stuff. You will still need to process the semantic web to make it accessible in a fast way.
checkt out voteforme.com, the new web service that relieves users of their voting hassles. With it's sophisticated, patentet formula, voteforme figures out how you would have voted and does it for you.
Flash Ruby VM + JS Ruby Compiler = HotRuby (try the Box2DFlashAS3 demo)
Just curious, how do they plan to make money?
Those who live by the gun, die by the gun.
The world is not in panic because of the US housing market. The world is in panic because of the falling dollar and inflation.
Exactly. It's a bit like Blub in the database space. Sure, you can do anything in a relational database, but there are certain problems that are better handled other ways.

Relational databases have been optimised to do a certain task very well: retrieve information very rapidly from a large dataset, that has well-defined, relatively static, relationships between entities. They were designed for things such as storing government census data, tracking customer details for very large corporations, insurance data etc etc. You may like to think of relational databases as being the C equivalent in the database space: relatively low-level, fast.

But there is a new type of database out there. It is more human in it's scale, with tables that might only have thousands, rather than millions, of entries. But the data has very fluid relationships between entities: Hank's example in the comments here about wanting to track a contact's favourite restaurant is a classic example. We might also want to track the contact's favourite film, their car model, and where they last went for their holidays. A bit later we may also consider it really important to know what brand of dishwashing detergent they use.

This sort of problem is not well handled by relational databases. They aren't optimised for it. They are optimised for speed over large datasets with static relationships. To get fluid relationships, you need to use join tables, which have a large size cost, and which degrade the reliability of the database.
But speed is not typically a problem for these types of problems. There are lots and lots of small tables, instead of a few large tables. Manually examining every item in the table to find one that matches your criteria is not necessarily a prohibitively expensive operation.

Thinking about this kind of problem from a Rails perspective, for example, you might decide to modify ActiveRecord such that its has_one, belongs_to style declarators, instead of working on static fields in a table, instead attack one table for the object, containing a bunch of tuples that look like {"relationship_name", table_id, [item_id1, item_id2,...]} Operations on the relationships between objects modifies this table, rather than the actual tables that contain object information. As such, the structure of links between tables becomes just another table. It wouldn't be as fast as a relational database, but for this type of task, it is far better suited, as it would be far more expressive - a new relationship between objects can be created just by inserting a new row into the table, and is hence modifiable programatically. It's the lisp of the database world.
Sigh. Just more of the elitist ethic so pervasive in the hacker community.
Someone should implement an algorithm that demotes anything by Randall Munroe.
We are considering several ideas, but think about this: with all the additional data we have about videos (comments, tagged people/highlights, synchronized slides, and metadata about individual clips in a compilation) we can better place mid-roll video ads.

The ability to sync video + PPT is also useful for corporate training and online university courses etc.

In the end we are only 5 months old and still figuring stuff out :)

Ryan
I've been using eMusic for years, and absolutely love it (I think it was #2 for quite a while). But now that Amazon offers DRM-free MP3s that I can play on my Linux boxes, I'll use it for major label stuff that I can't get from eMusic. It's pretty rare that I have the urge for mainstream stuff...but it does happen. Their prices are reasonable, as well. Nothing to complain about, actually.

But, I certainly won't be letting my eMusic subscription lapse.
When you say that the signal to noise ratio has increased, do you really mean that there's more signal? or did you mean that it's decreased? Not nit-picking, just trying to understand.
As others have noted, the problem was always going to have to be solved at some point. So no, TechCrunch should not modify its current behaviour.

I have my own theory for how to solve this problem. You start off by putting on a filter - all comments with less than 5 points are hidden from users unless they specifically ask for them to be seen.

Each post, when first posted, automatically has a +5 modifier, so it gets seen. But a post is reduced by one point after 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 hours. If you have received a few positive votes, your comment will stay up, but if others feel that it is repetitive, or doesn't have any interesting comment, it will disappear after a while.

Those time values may need to change dynamically to be more rapid for heavy traffic threads.

The other thing to fix it is to really encourage people to actually give votes for EVERY post that they find worthwhile. This imncreases the amount of feedback in the system. Perhaps there should be a quick three to four sentence guide to voting at the top of every YC News page?

Anyway, that's what I came up with after many years of frustration with slashdot...
Okay, at first, I thought nice spin! He has a good point!

But then I remmembered Cpan! Okay, so moral is if you document your code create useful libraries you can save a lot of code from turning useless

I can also see, that in most work places expecially in IT departments of non IT organizations many still don't use a single repository for their code or document their code and projects, this is why many code just die when the employee who wrote it leave
e1ven is spot on. You can't screw around starting a business with indeterminate revenue potential if you have dependents. You need to have a years worth of frugal living expenses in the bank (including paying for health insurance out of pocket) before taking that kind of risk.

Work on your business part-time, or put in some extra hours at work to increase your rate of saving for the eventual day when you can quit. It is possible to build a business part-time. It's harder, the odds are stacked even higher against you, and you get a lot less done. But you get to keep your family fed and your health/retirement benefits in place and working for you.

pg covered this in his "Why not start a startup" talk. Every reason except "you have a family to support" he debunks. This is the one that can't be debunked, because starting a business is not guaranteed. It could take months or even years to start seeing revenue, if you ever see revenue. A few grand from YC only makes a few months difference, tops, in the "when do I run out of money" equation. If you aren't already quite confident you have the money in the bank to last until you can make your business pay or at least be sure it's not going to and you can feel good about going to work at a regular job, you aren't in a position to take that risk.
Don't bother detecting motion in the space in the room--just attach an accelerometer to the door. It's not going to be touched unless someone's coming in, and they'll usually start to close it before they step inside. That is, if it is closed by default. Open by default might be harder.
They all sound like good things to me. I guess that makes syncing things with video your key weapon. Just a suggestion, why not just have comments under the video, scrolling up in sync, because most of the comments don't need to be on the video itself.
> bonus points for something like ultravnc support so it can just be an extension of your desktop display.

I'm waiting for the day when just setting two tablet-like devices near one another makes them into one, larger screen. They could even snap into one another to form one huge, seamless slab. Of course, you'd need something a little more advanced than even remote X server/client sessions to get it to work, because someone might want to "tear off" an application in one corner and take it with them to the bathroom, behind a lead wall for some reason.
I'm not sure I buy this. I think the best hackers (perhaps not the same as engineers) have a certain mindset that doesn't go away. The oldest working developer I've ever worked with also happens to be the fellow that turned me on to Ruby AND Lua, when nobody on Reddit was talking about them (actually before reddit existed) and nobody else in the office was tinkering with them. He just had a roving interest in technology and loved to play with new stuff. But certainly even the nerdiest of sorts learns that there are some problems that can't be solved with code--and that does make a big difference in how one approaches running a business.
Internet Infrastructure Economics: Top Ten things
7 Blogging Statistics Rules - There is Life After Page Views
(Slightly off topic)

Any heavy flash video just crashes my browser (This app did). Really irritating :/ (MacBook, firefox 2.0.0.12 defaults)
Is this just me, or a known issue with flash right now?
Amazon EC2 gets static IPs.
Ask: Focus on hard features or benefits and broad goals for YC application?
I don't think this question has ever been answered. Since you only look at the demo of the most promising teams, perhaps your priority is on long term goals?

PG and team, what do you prefer?
It's about damned time. They've been trying to pretend EC2 is for utility computing...like running large distributed apps for a short period of time. But nobody is using it for that...people want Amazon's network and a cheap way to scale from zero to huge for websites. Now that they've finally embraced that, if they'll just resolve the reliability issues, EC2 will be a fantastic hosting option.
(It's a joke. I read the book, and the Galt speech goes on and on and on, like some of Yegge's writing)
> Can we please move on?

I wish. But the next weekly angry rant/controversy isn't here yet for people to get excited over.
Skype to phone girlfriend. My own servers. If a friend launches a paid service, I'll usually try it out. Used to do usenet.

For non-tangibles, I usually only pay when I'm getting a personal service through the internet.

Being persistently broke though, I'm probably a bad datapoint.
Amazon CTO: "On the Road to Highly Available EC2 Applications"
The biggest regret in life will be passing on the very few opportunities we are lucky enough to have. The advice of waiting 6 more months or just giving up because of what's outside of your control rubs me as something bordering on: You cannot do [dream] because you are just a [class|race].

And has anyone considered the cost of maintaining your ability once you've settled into the corporate world? Go for it while at the top of your game, if possible.
Lots of people actually do use EC2 for utility computing, often powered by Hadoop. Most of these folks aren't especially vocal about what they do, but there's data mining on a large scale, drug discovery, and similar stuff happening inside.
I still think they need to resolve the disappearing disk issue, or continue to work on database type things like SimpleDB for persistent storage. Something using an actual relational DB like Postgres would be even better.
The Prize by Daniel Yergin is another great book that totally demolished all assumptions I'd had of what a "successful businessperson" looked like. It's a history of the oil industry, and I was riveted by how colorful and different the various major personalities were.
Lifeless commercial spaces turned into bastions of creativity
What about foreign users? When I add a comment, the US keyboard map is used!
We are working to fix that soon. Thanks for the report.
-Simon
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
In before proxy.
i think placing comments on the video's itself is pretty annoying. perhaps you can do it on a scrolling sidebar or something ?
This is amazing. I am in the process of deploying my webapp, and was considering slicehost due to the static ip's issue.

Then I took another look on the aws pages, and, hooray: elastic ip's were introduced yesterday!
Well, hungry kids and eviction notices are no picnic either. Ever see "The Pursuit of Happyness"?

The advice was still to work on a startup, but given the situation, to use a different strategy.
The missed opportunity of Acid 3
Am I alone in finding your comment unncessarily unpleasant? Instead of offering unilluminating perjorative rhetoric why don't you provide even one example of why you take issue with the article? Perhaps you're right about it but you give no reason for supposing this to be so. Also, how about letting the well-worn 'move along now' cliche enjoy a well-deserved rest?
Yeah, no problem here either. And I have FlashBlock installed.
What is the affect of this on your Google ranking? Just curious as to how much of your content they are altering. If not much then could it cause your site to be ranked lower due to duplicated content? Just curious on this. I think there are tools that will look for plagarised content online
We've been running 24/7 on EC2/S3 for months now with no downtime - 0 bad experiences so far.
Who cares? It's fun.

Same with pranks at the office. Total waste of time, but huge morale boosters.
Limerick teens sell software firm in multimillion deal
Live Current Media (formerly Communicate.com) acquires Auctomatic
Anatomy of a Project Failure: Corporate Culture and Lessons Learned
I too have instances run for 5-6 months without downtime.

The reliabilty concerns are overstated.
As long as one accounts for the lack of persistent storage, there should not be a problem.
You're introducing unnecessary complexity into the system; instead of the lock, light, and wiring between the two we would have lock, light, motion detector, and wiring between all three. It may be trivial, but ensuring fewer failure points is good design, especially at 30 000 feet.
Lifestreaming apps miss the point
I've had plenty of issues with Flash on Linux. It doesn't typically take down the browser as it used to as plugins are (I think) now run in a separate process on Opera and Firefox. Konqueror can still crash because of Flash. That said, I'm not running the latest version of Flash on Linux because it doesn't even work in anything but Firefox (or presumably anything not Gecko-based).

As far as I can tell, Flash is very stable on Safari on the Mac, there are probably subtleties in the Flash code that cause occasional breakage on non-Webkit browsers.

The whole plugin situation is a travesty anyway. Adobe don't care about anything but IE and Firefox on Windows, so Flash runs like crap on everything else. I suspect Apple paid Adobe to get Flash working properly on Mac OS X + Safari.
Top Ten Marketing Lies & What They Really Mean
Congratulations on the launch!

This seems one of the more tech-heavy startups from this round, at least from the outside. I think this has some real potential given the runaway success of YouTube, etc.

I'm not sure I like the overlay comments, but I suspect the Omnisio guys will work something out. Cut transitions are a little jarring at the moment, but I'm sure that can be fixed for version 1.1. :)

In any case, well done so far!
So when the maintenance people clean the lavatories, do they bring their equipment in and lock the door so they can see or do they cart around their own lights so they can leave the door open and have enough room to work? Or is there an override switch somewhere?
Clickpass slickness
Log in to clickpass and then go to ourdoings.com and click on the log in tab. You can register and/or log in with no additional passwords. Is clickpass slick or what? OpenID now has better-than-normal UI.
Things might not be as bad as assumed on the debt either:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144294
A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could work…
I've been working with Smalltalk, which was Alan Kay's creation. Most implementations are not what he intended -- at one Smalltalk Solutions keynote he excoriated all of us. He said that he never intended Smalltalk to become a programming language. He wanted to create a Montessori toy for the mind. That said, I don't think that Smalltalk as a programming language is that far from what he intended. He just never intended it to stop there.
FriendFeed from the command line
The article didn't mention parallel python, but it's worth a look: http://www.parallelpython.com/
Hacker Super Bowl pits Mac OS vs. Linux, Vista
I know almost no one in their mid twenties or younger who doesn't. The, unsolved, problem is that music worth listening to is few and far between.
obviously it was a joke.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity
Great to see this development but won't they need a huge block of IP addresses to support this?
Ten-Year-Old Makes His Own Aerogels
The accidental discovery of polyethylene
Rare Interview With Inventor of R2-D2
I actually like the comments on the video, reminds me of mystery science theater but with text

well done guys