skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The professor probably knows, and probably doesn't care. Your prof is probably a guy much like you, who just wants to get back to his research (or his startup).
Do you have a reference that this is the cause?

In any case, the future of ads is seamless integration with a site so that you have no idea it's an ad at all before you click it.
It does target to the user based on your searches and other things (assuming you're cookied). It just doesn't ask for explicit input from the user which is counter to the "google way" of abstracting that kind of control away from the user.
Do you think if you were explicitly asked for what ads you would like to see that you would pay more attention to those ads?
if you're willing to pay up to $50 why not upgrade to a mediatemple (dv) VPS?
Your dad is president of EDF? Wow, you really never know who you'll find on Hacker News! BTW, that's a nice looking book that's now on my Wish List.

I know for sure that cap-and-trade is better than tech requirements or per-company caps. I'm one of the biggest fans of environmental capitalism around (see http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/worlds-best-primer... and http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-ecology-of-com...), but that still doesn't explain why cap-and-trade is better than a carbon tax. Is the concern that the tax will be too low and not result in an absolute reduction in emissions? Or that the revenue collected will be used inappropriately (ie not to offset the damage caused by the pollution)? That was more what I was looking for.
I feel like this particular piece of advice should be post-fixed with "... but don't be stupid!"

In particular, keep an eye out for n^2 loops and the like. Watch for shard-jumping queries. Easy stuff like that can go a long way.
Thanks for the reply, avinashv--I almost took the article at face value. I should know by now to be wary of "Top n Xs" articles. Good to have both sides, anyhow.

George Saunders has a great study of Dubai in his essay collection, the Braindead Megaphone. He mostly focuses on the exaggerated class division between guest workers and the rich natives. The book is worth picking up for the other essays, too, but certainly if you're interested in an intelligent Western perspective on Dubai. He was there as a tourist and journalist, not a resident, though.
Someone should take the items on the list and put them on a poster entitled "Why you should avoid IT at all costs" and put them up in university computer science departments.

It might also make a great ad for YC.
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/11/accidental-clicks-fade-i...

A large % of the traffic to adsense was accidental clicking, a large amount of effort was expended on tricking users into accidently clicking on those links by making them look like they were same-site links. Of course that became a TOS violation.

On a CPM basis I can see some value in having a brand associated with a flash game, or having websites sponsored by something. I think you're trying to build a faster horse. Sites that turn margins and backgrounds into advertising, which exist, are more likely to gain traction than another "pin the tail on the donkey" "click here to shoot the monkey" flash/js ad.

Of course this would be far better addressed by someone from AdPinion.com as their entire business model appears to rely on giving people the ability to view more relevant ads.
S3 is pay per use, but it's for static data hosting. EC2 is pay-per-use virtual machines, but it's at the granularity of machines. If you need a bunch of real, or real-looking servers, that's good, but it's too expensive if what you need is shared hosting.

S3 is cheaper than NFSN, so if you have lots of big files, you can host www.example.com on NFSN and point media.example.com to S3.

(Grain of salt: I haven't used EC2.)
more like Adobe's near monopoly on streaming video isn't suitable for Apple
At the day job: Ubuntu with Gnome, vim.

At home working on startup/contract work:
Macbook running OS X 10.5.whatever the latest, vim, sometimes emacs or aquamacs if I'm messing around with scheme.
It's fine that Flash for regular computers and Flash Lite aren't suitable. All that means is that Adobe and Apple should have been working on a "middle ground" version over the last 1+ year. They should be announcing the release now -- those lazy bastards.
On the face of it, this would look like a very bad deal. But I feel there must be more to it.

The OP does now YC, know the culture here, understands valuations. Why does he/she even consider selling for 3-4x earnings (i.e profit, not revenue). There must be something about the business ...
Well I don't want to speak for him, but I think the general advantage of cap-and-trade is that it makes it profitable for entrepreneurs to innovate. When you give money to the government it basically gets stolen, whereas under cap-and-trade the money goes directly the entrepreneurs who come up with the solutions. The book is actually all about the policies that most help entrepreneurs. To quote from the introduction:

"A level playing field. That is what these venture capitalists and innovators require-- not assurances of profits but enough of a fighting chance to make the huge risks they are taking reasonable. Many still will not succeed. Those who do will need enormous ingenuity and doggedness to make their inventions work at a marketable price."

I think most news.yc readers would actually love the book.
find a project you like, look up their bugzilla/Trac/whatever and find bugs you can fix. submit patches. (if it's a large bug, you may want to ping the project's mailing list to make sure someone else doesn't already have work underway for it).
Ask YC: Microsoft Software Licensing for consulting?
I've been consulting for a few years and always used the company's licenses for work purposes.

Now I'm on my own and need legit licenses for VS.NET and SQL Server.

Basically I'm finding I either have got MSDN ($1,200) or Empower ($375/year for 2 years). Technet is eval only and Action Pack doesn't have VS.NET.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? I think I'm going to go with the Empower for a couple years and then hopefully one of my side projects will have taken off so I won't have to sweat the $$$ :)

PS: and for those "VIM FTW" or whatever, please don't bother, I dual boot like the rest of you, but Uncle Bill pays the bills really well while I work on other stuff.
This is weird I was just looking into this yesterday and seemed to miss them releasing the API.

The other options I was looking at was
A.) doing it ourselves.
B.) using libgmailer or some other OS API
C.) using octazen.com.

The octazen approach seems to take the least amount of time, which is important in this situation. The problem I was having with the octazen demo is that it was breaking on gmail accounts. When I asked their tech support what was going on they seemed to not know about the issue and asked me to try again. I bet it doesn't work because google changed their calls when they released the API. Now we at least have another option if we decide to go with A or hack up B or C.
Think about whipping up a quick Facebook app and getting a free Facebook accelerator from Joyent. They are free for an year and you can host other stuff on it. Wicked fast and run on Solaris (which can be a bitch in the beginning if you are used to the Linux environment, but they have Webmin, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Apache, LightHTTPd, etc. preinstalled).

http://joyent.com/developers/facebook/
Java or Scala, Linux.
Kapow: Web Scraping Goes Legit?
if you're not going to learn anything, why bother with school?
http://x.aim.com/laim
Good post. On my personal project I am always tempted to add pointless scaling/generalizing stuff. Shades of "worse is better"...
Style Guide For Online Hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee
There's two items that should be followed much more often:

Always use heading levels in order, with one heading level 1 at the top of the document, and if necessary several level 2 headings, and then if necessary several level 3 headings under each level 2 heading. If you don't like the way heading level 2 is formatted, fix it on your client, don't just skip to heading level 3. -- http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/All.html

Don't refer in your text to facets of particular browsers. Asking someone to "click here" won't make sense without a mouse, just as asking someone to "select a link by number" will betray the fact that you were using the line mode browser. Just leave a link. The instructions get boring as the user will normally know how to select a link. -- http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/All.html
And you've just described a whole industry called "self help."
In Ann Arbor, we have U of M. Mostly business students, but the hackers I know hang out in their offices (or home offices). If I had to pick a place where I'd be most likely to run into them, It'd be Zimmerman's Cafe.

Since 3 of the 5 people here are in Atlanta, I'll just go ahead and ask. Would you guys be interested in meeting for coffee or something the weekend of April 11-15? I'll be in Atlanta for a national marketing competition.
Should We Assume There Is No Privacy Online? Have Widgets Killed Privacy?
Manage Downtime Risk by Connecting Multiple Data Centers into a Secure Virtual LAN
Very interesting. Does any one have any suggestions to interest an 11 year old about Math?
I'm pretty skeptical about most shared hosts, so I set up my own hosting environment. I host my own sites via a data center in Santa Clara, and a few other people's, as well. Feel free to get in touch.
webfaction has served some of my friends well.
If you're good at python, the One Laptop per Child project is a good place to look. I've been developing a few applications with some friends for a branch of the program that we're starting in a local school system. The os for the XO laptop (called Sugar) is almost entirely written in python. The people on their IRC channel are usually pretty nice and helpful.
Are You Ready to Feel Your Computer Graphics?
Perhaps one of the reasons that you haven't been able to drum up interest is because you won't share what it is. If you indeed have this great knowledge and insight that no one can replicate, then there should be absolutely nothing holding you back from telling us what this idea or field is. This would really allow us to help you in a way that is meaningful.

Another observation I'd like to point out is that in 6 years, you could have learned to program and done it yourself. I've learned to program and started 3 companies in the past 4 years.

So, my question for you is, do you really believe in this idea enough to do what it takes to make it happen? If not, then go to IBM and milk what you can of it.
Each one of us works differently, but I would say this probably depends more on your momentum at the present time. If you find that your productivity remains high, then you probably should push through the final week. However, if you've seen a precipitous drop in your ability to get work done, then you should take a break. Why not start with taking 2-3 days off? If you still don't feel like that was enough, then extend it up to 7 or more days as required. Good luck!
Using Microsoft Excel as a 3D Game Engine
Apple iPhone SDK Event: iFund - $100 Million for iPhone Devs
I use the hell out of your site and I am stoked that it sounds like you will be around for some time.
Congratulations.
Dell Inspiron + Ubuntu + vim + Python/PyQt/Django/RoR/MySQL
Is this a PR hit?

From the article: Leave a comment or trackback on ReadWriteWeb and be in to win a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.
And keep a list of potential problems that won't scale.

'Hey we serialize a list of ALL users for this...that won't scale!'
I do learn a lot. The assignments and exams force me to learn thing that I otherwise wouldn't have learned. I do learn, but the value for me is in the lecture notes and assignments rather than the lectures.
NFS was exactly who I was going to say. They're awesome. Plus you can run Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, OCaml, etc via CGI to play around with :)
> Interestingly, nonlocal was part of Converge before it was proposed for Python 3000

Ah! That's interesting.
"Open AIM" not really very open
Textmate + OS X
awesome! i'd love to hear what you think we should do with the site. (andres@octopart.com)
CMU team builds robotic snake
This article is fundamentally mistaken. Most of these
weren't increases in anyone's bottom line, but merely
converting one form of asset to another.
I never go to class. I work on my startup pretty much around the clock and then scramble right before a lab to get it done. When it comes time for midterms I have to sacrifice a few hours the night before each one to try and get through the material I've missed and not fail.

At the end of the day I can't wait till I graduate so I can throw myself into my startup 24x7. The one thing I've learned though is that during school you normally spend more time worrying about what's coming up next than actually working on it. So by pushing everything to the last minute I don't have a choice but to work efficiently to get things done.

It is very frustrating to not be working on my startup all the time - funny I never feel the same way about not putting 100% into school. I guess I know what I want to do when I graduate in two months ;)
The Essential Guide to Network Neutrality
There are a few misleading poll numbers in there (of 75% of men whose wife works, only 5% want the wife to stay home - duh, they prob talked about that before they got married plus they're used to 2 salaries), but overall a good article.

My wife stays home with our kids, but we decided before we got married that this was how we wanted it to be. It makes the startup road harder (3 people besides me depending on a paycheck) but the fact that I'm well paid in computing (say, as much as a school teacher and journalist put together) makes it possible. And I do my fair share of chores around the house too!
I get paid to write code all day (writing a fair amount of one-off data munging scripts in the spirit of web scraping) and I have no clue what their product actually does, even after looking at their website.
Thnx, very good analysis. Appreciate it.
Why Internet Explorer 8 still Sucks Balls
I was trying to load linux.com and it tells you microsoft’s feeling towards open source software by the way it was loading the website
The trouble with Steve Jobs: HE'S A DOUCHEBAG
Yeah, I was also wondering how much of it was strategic positioning on the part of Jobs. It's probably a little bit of both. iPhone, while packs a punch for its size is still not a 1GHz+ machine (600MHz, if I remember correctly) that you can waste cycles on. The "up to par"-ness probably was stated to buy Apple some time to see if they can do better to circumvent it.
Linux + gvim + gnome-terminal @ 1920x1200 15" laptop.
From the article: Load up Fred Wilson's blog. He has about 50 widgets on the page. How can a person easily figure out what the privacy policy looks like for the entire site (blog + widgets)? Who knows what any of those widgets are tracking about us, right? Should we even care?

Perhaps cookie settings are too promiscuous? However, I'm not sure how you'd change the default behaviour in a way which doesn't break a large number of websites and/or confuse a large number of non-technical users.
Sure, even if you accept that $Ts have gone missing (not sure if I believe that they're missing, just poorly allocated to overpricing defense contractors), it would have to go to many, many people. I think it would be impossible to hide in America. It is a good point about Putin though. He's probably the only person I can think of in the world who could pull it off. Still, if the main source of wealth is oil, then it would be hard to hide from the world market, and essentially useless without including the world oil market. Same with any other natural resource - how would you hide 600M barrels of oil ($60B worth at current market price)? Or a mine with that many diamonds? Or a company with that much revenue?

It still doesn't answer the other question, why hide all that money? If you've got the billions, why not show them off? Or if you can't enjoy them, why bother embezzling them?
Here's a great site that pings and monitors shared hosting accounts. Price isn't really a correlating factor.

http://www.realmetrics.com/r/shared-hosting
Windows: VS 2005.NET, ActiveState (Python and Ruby), notepad++
Ubuntu: Gnome, gedit, RoR, Spidermonkey
Ugh, this brings back (bad) memories: I was working for a European client which brought in a consultant using this model.

After he told us how many bugs he was going to expect, we replied that we'll make sure to have at least one more than that (he didn't think it was funny).
Steve Blank advocates this approach in his book (http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...), though he doesn't call it "vaporware".
True, in practice if the carbon tax was used as a revenue source (or even revenue neutral - basically letting you cut taxes somewhere else), then the incentive would be to make it too low to be either a good pollution deterrent or an entrepreneurial incentive. Sort of like how the gas tax is in the US. In European countries (Japan too?), the gas tax is 10-20x as high was here and their auto and energy industries are very different because of that.

If the carbon tax was high enough (possibly higher than the amount that would maximize taxes collected) and the collected money was used to mitigate environmental impacts, then the tax would be better. Make it really high and the incentive to invent technology rather than pay the tax is still there. However, that's a lot of things to screw up so maybe the cap-and-trade is better in practice.

And I agree that environmental entrepreneurism of the sort mentioned in that book and my blog posts I linked to would be very interesting to many ycnews readers.
Python AJAX Server
He is now the worlds youngest billionaire
Not that I can get through now. That guy's site is broken.

But I had the same problem as you a few years back when some friends were evaluating their product and asked me to look into it. IIRC they let you mix and match chunks of web content in one place. Good for large corporate intranets and maybe porn sites. That's about it I think.
The Touch Fighter game looks awesome! The Dev Tools also look really well thought out.
Yeah. http://codepad.org/GH5l8Dgl :)
Continuing your analogy, there are plenty of people out there who would start their trucking business by buying more than one truck and then trying to find people to drive them and things to move.

The great thing about the 37signals blog is that it is reminds us to keep things simple. Don't over complicate things just because we can. I think there are times when all of us can benefit from having this spelled out to us.
I'd agree, it has a feel of an ulterior motive on behalf of Jobs. However Flash is awful, I haven't noticed a marked improvement in 5 years. The only reason flash keeps working is because processor power is improving on par with Flashes impotence.

I'm not surprised in the slightest that the iPhone can't handle flash, because my old 2GHz machine struggled with larger files. My current laptop can render 1080p, yet in flash it can barely manage the 'large' setting on some streaming videos.

The iPhone would be perfect for flash games, but it will never be able to run them because flash is poor for games. They even run slow on my 4GHz laptop; I've even tried the worst ones on a new four-core (~8GHz) and they still run poorly. It astounds me that a large corporation like Adobe can't code performance at all when it would increase the popularity of Flash if it performed better.
At this very minute, they're getting calls from someone in the porn industry.
If Putin 'went public' and sold stock in his entire bundle of assets, it wouldn't get a very high market value compared to earnings, cash flow, replacement cost, etc. Too high a risk of expropriation if someone else takes over.

Buffett and Gates have assets valued at a higher multiple, because the US usually doesn't nationalize stuff.
They're obviously making a run for the enterprise market with all the M$ support! I almost didn't believe it at first!
Yes and with the native Salesforce.com app they are really moving to take on RIM.

The SDK is actually much more impressive than I expected. I didn't expect game support like that.
I believe that in the late 80's, two of the richest were a Colombian coke lord and a Japanese rail and real estate magnate. It's entirely possible that someone out there has quietly bought up a huge fraction of the rentable real estate in Shanghai or Hong Kong, for example, but doesn't want to disclose it. It's similarly possible that someone in Vietnam has stockpiled billions of dollars worth of heroin.

Unlikely, of course.
Maybe you're right that it would be impossible to hide this in America.

I don't like to get all conspiratorial, but have you read 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man'? If half of what Perkins writes is true, then maybe it wouldn't be so hard. He says that there is a parallel economic system in operation that most of us don't know about. If you were part of that world, you probably could flaunt your wealth... you just have to be sure it's hidden from the population at large.
I recommend Powweb to everyone. Reasons why I love them:

- cheap: $7.77/month

- reliable: i've never seen them go down

- advanced developer features: cron, .htaccess, php.ini editing

- really clean user interface (forget using godaddy)

- amazing customer support: call them. they answer first ring. there's no waiting for hours after trying to navigate crappy phone tree systems.

i've used a dozen different shared web hosts over the years and the vast majority of them suck. Powweb really stands apart from the crowd, especially when it comes to advanced features and customer support. When I was doing web design consulting I moved every single one of my clients over to Powweb -- they're that much better.

http://www.powweb.com/join/index.bml?AffID=563885
Link above is dead. Use this, scroll halfway down:

http://paul.kedrosky.com/

Blog refers to this article on MarketWatch:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/kapow-technologies-sec...

If you're like me and wonder what Kapow is, their website is here:

http://www.kapowtech.com/
i think they are enabling the iphone to actually become a 'smart phone' - I know several people who switched from smart to iphones and thought they were missing some things,
They are missing John Paulson ($3 to $4 billion) and John Arnold (possibly). And if they use the cash accounting method they seem to be using, anyone involved in finance is going to look good. A derivatives trader with 100% daily turnover could manage a $1 million portfolio that gave him $250 million in gross cash flow ($1 million in turnover X 250 or so trading days). Terribly flawed.
From my experience living abroad (a couple years in Central Asia), a lot of American expats try to take America with them when they move to a foreign country. Suffice to say, most, like this author, become incredibly cynical as a result. Yes, local culture can be infuriating. And it's true that the hypocrisy of the state can seem more glaring when it's backed by arbitrary religious fiat. But come on-- complaining about local dress, taxi driver hygiene, or the lack of sweet, sweet cable tv?

Yet the author's original message is actually a good one. Life in the US is pretty damn good, and that's why we all pay a premium for it. There's usually a reason why a given place has a lower cost of living-- you pay for it in other ways instead.
> How much of the buyout goes to you?

> How much are you personally making now?

If you get less than two years of salary then declining the offer would be the best option.
vim, kubuntu on a Dell D830, Mercurial

Lately doing Ruby (Ramaze apps) and JRuby (building Swing GUI apps using Monkeybars).

I use Netbeans for some of the JRuby stuff, but do most code editing in vim
Sorry about the link. The site's link functionality took a dive soon after I posted.