skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Happy Birthday - Thanks to all the contributors!

I'm not sure what I would do without my daily fix of news.YC (take up another hobby?). I find this site engages me, as I start to move from hiding in my cube to getting out of my cube, to startup-land or elsewhere.

(You're right)
http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.htm
Thanks all, looks like I should probably go with Flash to get a little higher %. Will have to balance that against its general suckage and see what I can come up with.
yeah, this is more shared hosting++ than vps++
I agree. This is bullshit. Xerox PARC solved a superset of these compatability problems by 1985. It was called InterScript ( http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=5455 ) and it allows editors to preserve unknown elements within compound documents. This makes downward compatability quite trivial.
Ask YC:SMS Messaging...
I was thinking of writing a small app, that potentially needs SMS notifications [That is, it should send out SMS's, to start with anyways]. I read about SMS Gateway on Wikipedia, and other articles on the web. It seems most recommend http://www.clickatell.com/ as they provide an API, but I was looking for alternatives.

Can anyone provide any direction here? This is a small project on the side for me so I am hoping it won't be too expensive. I honestly did not look into the pricing of any vendors out there, but is it possible to hack up such a service? I came across this [http://jmarinez.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/poor_mans_sms_g_1.html]

Any suggestions/pointers would be nice.

Thank you all.
"everything will calm down and you will have time to think about deeper things and find deeper connections within your life" - my fear is what happens to those who already think about deep enough things and find scary deep connections within their life, so I'll stay as a master procrastinator!
When Users Hate Change
A great article that explains a lot of things that happen on the web.

For starters take google, they sell attention, to the advertiser´s products, viewers might then decide to buy something; qvc showcases products; your friends on facebook, etc. grab your attention. I guess all of the advertising industry lives on attention and therefore much of the entertainment industry (games, movies, news, tv, social networks) too. Maybe even competing with the education industry.

Other tools (wesabe) save you time so you can direct your attention to what you are interested in.
I think it's odd that most people aren't required to memorize simple sums. I still find myself adding some numbers by picturing dice and counting the dots. I have them memorized now, but old habits...
Inspired by yesterday's question "Users don't like creative founders, right?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118174
There's a very interesting indirect link between the article and Google: one of the people thanked at the end of the article is Terry Winograd, an AI pioneer who also happened to be Larry Page's grad supervisor at Stanford, right about the time this article was written! Winograd is also a co-author on at least one of the early PageRank articles.
498 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

using http://searchyc.com/birthday i found this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65605
If you're looking for a no-cost solution you should consider an email to SMS gateway. You'll have to know who the carrier you're sending to is, and I know several of the carriers give a lower priority to these sorts of messages, but depending on your application, this may be a viable way to go. http://basicstate.com/htm/page.htm is a pretty comprehensive list
I started lurking on news.yc last Jan, so I think the site is older than 1 year...
How the GNU Make jobserver works
It's also my 22th birthday today.
http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html

from the link:

Paul Graham
20 February 2007
Yesterday we launched Startup News...
The only way to make money on get rich quick schemes is to sell them. Personally I wouldn't buy a web 2.0 SEO scheme system from someone who has no follows on their own internal links.
While I agree, I'm surprised that there was more defense of the Castro post than this one. I know there are some fans of the visual display of quantitative information among us here . . .
There's probably some minimum that you need, like maybe multiplication up to 10x10, and squares up to 20 or 30.

I like the idea (though not the name) of mental math. I think that if all you teach someone is multiplication tables and long division/multiplication, then they'll be as lost without a pencil and paper as someone who doesn't know the tables is without a calculator.

I can see a case for learning mental math to solve small-number problems quickly, but really, anything I would want to do longhand, I (and most anyone else) would just use a calculator.

Really why I think long multiplication/division became popular? It's easier to grade homework. If a student hands in just the answers, who can say whether they did it in their heads or with a calculator?
It's probably his first name. Remember Asian name order.
> It doesn't have to be entirely based on past performance - you could do some statistical analysis on the number of funds, which funds are associated with individual investors, fund returns and find whether the distribution of returns overlaps with the distribution that says "the best funds were just lucky".

Right, and as fast as you can generate that data, it immediately falls into the category of "past performance". It's not a market problem, it's a philosophy-of-empiricism problem. ;-)

> What I am interested in knowing is whether the best investors are able to beat the market over time. And there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests this, for example (a rather extreme one, though) the best hedge funds which have generated an annualized 30% return over more than 15 years. With especially high returns when the rest of the world is tanking. Although this is an edge case, this kind of track record doesn't exactly scream "lucky".

Now, that part is a market problem, and for that, "past performance" really does come into play: are today's best investors universally superior market animals, or are they just uniquely adapted to the current climate?
Heavily sugared food and drink is the easiest way to massively increase the number of calories you take in per day. It's also the easiest way to decrease it. That's all I'm saying.
If you've got someone in the company recommending you apply, discreetly ask them what range to expect. Worked for me! ;-)
Friends don't let friends do DRM.
I kind of pity Microsoft here. Is it actually possible to make money writing development tools any more? I use a lot of them and don't pay anything, because whenever I want something that costs money, there's a free version that's better.

Also, does that mean that at some point there will stop being development tools, since there's no money in making them? Or is the fact that you have to make them in order to make things people WILL buy enough to sustain that?
This might be an option: http://smstools.meinemullemaus.de/
I've been in this business for a few years and pride myself in running a professional program that helps anyone learn how to properly market on the Internet.

No one is selling a "get rich quick scheme" nor a "web 2.0 SEO scheme system." Just trading money for what any business owner needs... knowledge.

Now about my "no-follows." Although I appreciate you attempt at analyzing my internal link structure, I got a handle on it. Any experienced SEO knows that this prevents PageRank leaks to unimportant pages.
The notation x <- f y means "f y returns a monadic value; take the next line (which is a monadic function) and apply it to x."

Naively, you can think of x <- f y as pulling the value out of the monad. Now you can apply non-monadic functions to it. In a certain sense, this is true. However, by the time the do statement is finished, you will need to push it back in (the return statement). So you can only pull stuff out of the monad if you immediately put it back in (otherwise you get a type error).

(card, rem) is simply unpacking a 2-tuple, containing the card and the remaining deck (after picking 1 element).

The "let straight = ... in \newline (some statement)" means exactly what it sounds like. "let x = 3 in xx" means "take the statement xx, replace x by 3, you get 3*3=9".
Holy crap mods... bad mood or something? It was just a joke...
digg called, it wants its comment back.

If you have nothing more interesting to say yourself, then please just don't.
good post. As a hacker, i just hate the american suburbia. Boring, non-inspiring, and soul drenching.
"And that select group appears to be getting smaller and more exclusive by the day."

Did I miss something or did he provide no evidence of this? I don't see any data about what the distribution looked like in the past. How do we know diversity is eroding? It's not a trend if you're only looking at one point in time.

I also couldn't tell whether the top 11 tech sources were the _only_ tech sources or whether there was a long tail of one-time-source stories.
Freebase Wikipedia Extraction (WEX)
soul drenching?
>Contemptuous, resentful, cheeky, mocking. ...it lends me to believe that the 1-4 things I described above simply raise people to a cynicism that won't tolerate the more obvious fairy tales.

Not to defend religion, but young people tend to be "Contemptuous, resentful, cheeky, mocking" of pretty much anything that isn't centred around their own world.
Strangely, everyone whose name I recognized looked exactly as I would have expected ... except for Jakob Nielsen.
It all depends on home many messages you're sending. If you're sending in the tens of thousands per month, there are companies that'll pay you to send them for you (and include an ad)

If you're just sending a few, you should send them using an email. The only downside of this method is that you need to know which provider they use, which means either asking the user, or looking it from an expensive DB.

If you do know which provider they have, you can look up the email here

http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?mode=detail...

If you don't want to ask, you could use Teleflip, who will do the lookup for you. Just email phonenum@teleflip.com

There was an earlier discussion about this, but we don't have a FSQ [1] or search feature, so I don't blame you for missing it. Take a look at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68227

Let us know which way you end up going!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97491
Happy Birthday :)
That video totally backfires. I think many of the techniques she's bashing are better than what they are replacing - I'll certainly use some of these when I have kids. (Semi-relevant I guess: my PhD is in mathematics).
The thing is, with websites, launch dates are very elastic. The first line of code was written on day x, the first alpha was ready on day y, the public beta was day z, and at the official launch was after everyone already knew about it (and started using the site).

(This isn't HN's story, just a template for a hypothetical site.)
I don't think this belongs on YC.
Doesn't matter! Sometimes it's not the tool that's important but how you utilize it. Scribd guys are doing something smarter with the tool!
A startup idea is not just a one line description (like those much maligned hollywood pitches). The initial germ of an idea is followed by a series of ideas as the site is developed. Which of these end up being crucial to the success of the site is only obvious in hindsight. A similar thing happens when a mathematical conjecture turns out to have an elegantly simple proof. While the proof seems obvious in hindsight, and people are surprised that it wasn't proved earlier, the process of finding it is quite messy.

For example, I believe that the genius of youtube lay not so much in providing a site to upload and watch video, but instead in their decision to let people embed their videos freely on any other site. This led to explosive growth in their name recognition as users saw youtube videos pop up everywhere on the net. Think about it this way: they basically got to promote their website on almost every blog in existence. While this may seem like an obviously good idea in hindsight, this was not the conventional wisdom at that time as they were essentially giving up a lot of page views.
There is Nothing Small About Everything
I'll jump. The reason I don't like Jakob Nielsen is because I don't think you can be a great usability expert without being a part of the solution - read, he's not a designer or developer.

Read this article to learn all kinds of facts about Jakob Nielsen:
http://experiencedynamics.blogs.com/site_search_usability/20...
You also have to keep in mind that most of Saudi Arabia's GDP is concentrated in the hands of a very few, whereas Tennessee's is more spread out.
Found this hot vid on youtube
hot site giving music video icons away. for now free suppoet to be charging
Re: vast wealth, just want to point out that there is a lot of poverty in Saudi Arabia that westerners don't realise, and that unemployment is estimated to be at 20% or so.
No, it's a specialized persistence system. Not everyone wants or needs the truckload of other stuff that bogs down a traditional relational database.
why? It may not be startup related, but this seems like very cool software. I haven't seen the code, but from the list of features and my own experience using it, its very useful.
HOWTO: Convert (now obsolete) HD-DVDs to Blu-Ray
This is one of the reasons that I'm planning on having a get together the night before Startup school. That way, if people want to, they can have a chance to get together and meet each other in a smaller group before the big event the next day.

I'll keep people posted, and start a Meetup group on Meetup.com pretty soon.
>There's not a whole lot of point to memorizing multiplication tables

I disagree. Knowing the answer to a simple multiplication problem instantly will help when solving a more complex, multi-step algebra problem -- your concentration flows better.

For example, imagine teaching a child to factor a second-degree polynomial. You probably wouldn't get very far if s/he was constantly having to enter numbers into a calculator.
> why I think long multiplication/division became popular? It's easier to grade homework.

No, it became popular because it used to be necessary. Math education (at all levels) is designed to teach 'how' rather than 'what' and this made sense when computation was something you had to do on paper. As to why it hasn't adapted, my guess is politics. There are too many people who lack any capacity for abstract reasoning but squeak through math classes by memorizing rules and procedures. These people naturally make a fuss when the rules and procedures are taken away and they start doing poorly.
The last bout of irrational exuberance gave us a lot of dark fiber and that obviously had positive effects. However, unsavory elements (porn) and respectable ones (news.yc ? :)) can coexist in peace because of the impermeable barriers of bit packets. Social dynamics are osmotic and will lead to re-invention of the new and newly cheap neighborhoods. But will these reinvented neighborhoods be slums? Changes (the more disturbing ones) observed in the article might be temporary aberration, for slums seem to need a combination of cheap housing and proximity to unskilled jobs that pay by the hour; the daily opportunity cost of the commute is quite literal.
Super sick.

I still wonder though, is the trend to share information through PDF style formats or to convert it to true HTML.
Ask YC: How many startups outsource?
Does anyone know how many startups outsource their development? Let me clear my point. Speaking about outsourcing, I am talking about offshore development, outside US, the power of freelancers, who stay below the US market rates.

Outsourcing sometimes can save a good chunk of money. Isn't it a very valuable reason especially for brand new startups, when they count every single cent?

Here is my point: a lot of startups are looking for someone to join them for a tiny salary plus huge chunk of equity. So why wouldn't they consider outsources, using the same amount of money, they may not give any equity at all or just a small piece of it.

If you do, what're your major pros for it?

And if you don't, what're your cons against it? Would you like to?

Personally speaking, we do outsource some of our development. As far as I'm originally from different country, I still have a lot of connections and partners in my home country.

Please, share. Thanks!
I agree with that, I just don't want people here who are trying to be healthier to get the wrong info. It's something I see on a large number of sites I visit, so I try to clarify things like that when I see them. :-)
PDF killer
There are a few examples of online communities expanding so fast that original users no longer find them intellectually stimulating. Is there a single root cause? Are users so overconfident in their mutual abilities to discuss off-topic content safely, that they mistakingly end up allowing their own communities to kick themselves out; is it the fault of the design of the community software and system/processes; or, could it be that the community grew too quickly?

As somebody who enjoys this community a lot, I want to know that if 1,000 people start posting random URL's tomorrow, that not only would software filters stop junk from getting through, but that the community would step up and moderate itself because, albeit this is Hacker News, algorithms are never perfect: we are going to have to use our brains to make sure the site is still focused (or re-focused) regardless of how interesting an article might be.

On the other hand, there are good signs this may not necessarily happen to Hacker News. It's very possible that Digg, Reddit, and newcomer social news sites will be enough to satisfy the needs of most users. This site could be like a chess club in that it's open to everybody, but most people wouldn't care.

At the same time, one has to admit that if a social news site continues to address every topic on earth, it could get to the point where as the content becomes more similar to that of Digg or Reddit, there would be an exponential increase in new registrations daily of users looking for the next big thing. These users would then vote up new types of stories and change the site in a very short time. I think I read that one can't grow a team by more than 25% in number per year, or one will have a team that has lost qualities of the existing group--this is likely a major factor in retaining consistency and focus for this community, too.
Leave it at reddit.
This is f*cking awesome. Great job!
US $5 Dollar Bill is now Purple
Wide Open VoIP: Top 50 Open Source VoIP Apps
Yeah. John Cage doesn't really do it for me, either. While I'm sure he's philosophically important and all that. I'd much rather listen to a Mozart sonata, Vivaldi, Copeland, Phillip Glass, Gorezki or Arvo Part. Heck. I'd rather listen to the Bee Gee's than subject myself to John Cage for crying out loud.

Same with so much of modern, deconstructionist art. You can look at Picasso's cubist period, Pollock or Marcel DuChamp and say, "They break all the rules, and make us question why we have the rules in the first place." And while that keeps me interested for roughly 1 minute 15 seconds, I then want to look at something beautifully done like Picasso's rose or blue periods, or perhaps some Italian or Dutch masters. I can look at Renaissance master's paintings for days on end because they actually followed the rules.

So, the same reason that I'd rather listen to Mozart over Cage is the same reason that I'd much rather watch Bill Murray or John Belushi over Kaufman. Of course, YMMV.
I'm not trolling, just genuinely curious: How do you support word/excel/powerpoint 100% if you're not printing from the app themselves?

Also, for the developer API, do you add advertising to the documents you convert? Are you approachable about private licensing?
i don't think anyone wants to throw away the multiplication tables, they're written in our brains and can be accessed without much effort.

rather, it would be cool if kids could grasp, sooner than later, that "3 x 7" is (the bulk of) the answer, no matter if the question is 21 x 49 or 1 x (7/3).
There will always be people making development tools: Python and Ruby are both available for free. As for tools to develop software? Well making a new Emacs environment is simple and since most languages are based on old ones you can just adapt that environment

As for paying for software? Well I might do it for Delphi if they ever salvage it, or Franz lisp (though _not_ at their current price and I want to be able to sell and use the developed programs as I please).

The reason I am willing to pay for either of those? They are damn nice and can compile to native code, so I can develop programs that can be run by everybody.

As for server software - well there is no native code requirement, so I can use any of the 2 million software products available.
"I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about the justice and justifiability of your actions."

Quite true. My main issue was with the scant detail in the article, which assumes the reader should simply accept the proclamation of harm.

Had the article focused more on the more important matter of taking responsibility for the extended consequences of one's actions it would be harder to be dismissed out of hand.

Better results may be gained by provoking some introspection than by taking the moral high ground and attempting to shame people into acting a certain way. Even if shame works, the behavior is less likely to stick around.
I think the majority of the people here creating startups are broke, often in college, and in their early to mid 20s. I'd wager that the vast majority do not have any funding beyond credit cards and family. With that kind of budget, outsourcing isn't even something to be considered.

Beyond that, we're mostly hackers. Why would we outsource what we do best?
that page took 5 hours for me on dial-up, clearly not usable.
http://www.google.com/search?q=soul+drenching
Happy Birthday

Busts out the party hats, streamers, and Lisp tutorial manuals. . . . What, you think a Hacker News birthday would be anything but a Lisp study party? :-P
I outsourced my email server to google apps.
Happy birthday! Yay.
You're absolutely correct about the suing remark. I should have said "He can't have a valid basis for suing..."

If he shared Patented information, Google would not have free access to use it. A great deal new ideas are patentable (though I hear the process can be a nightmare), but whether or not the Google Sky concept was patented is not the issue.

Like I said before, I am pretty sure Google would have had some sort of clause that allowed them to use anything this contractor came up with as a consequence of working at/with/for Google. And if he used an internal Google discussion board (presumably used by those working for Google to share information) to discuss the concept, then Google should and probably does have a legally defensible right to use those ideas for its own purposes.