skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Fed is covering us - they just cut interest rates by 25 points to 3.25% and they issued a new lending policy for banks. Not like its going to help in the long run...

The Fed is just delaying the date when the whole financial system crashes... The sad thing is that unlike Japan's financial crisis in the 90's, who's going to bail the US out? China?
Ars Technica reviews Komodo Edit 4.3
Yes, and they are available on a reoccurring basis. People like this. Soon the internet will be predictably new.
Python-safethread | CPython mod for safe, easy, and scalable concurrency mechanisms.
Yeah, this seems exactly what people would want in a simple, widely accessible package.
Someone in the know, what makes this so nifty? I understand they've used a random walk to measure the internet and show the stock market is predictable. Is that sort of thing the motivation here? I do like a nice spot of stochasticity.
good work ! the engine is getting better and better...
I have to wonder how one would build a software product that is 40% GPL code, and not understand the implications (I know this is a hypothetical story, but it's just not believable). Ten years ago, sure. But Open Source and its viral licenses are pretty well understood at this point.

This feels like FUD to me.
Finally, trying something to correct this problem. Good to see.
Another way to look at it is that Google is not working with the advertisers. At the end of the day they are customers and Google is not providing for them.

See there were always problems with monetizing video given the results of eye-tracking results (people just don't see the ads, but quickly fix on the video). This article tells me there is another problem - being associated with certain videos - albeit YouTube-specific.

You're right though about the more efficient way to use YouTube for marketing.

Pierre
There was a NSFW item on the front page for a brief period of time but it fell off. Seems like things that don't belong on the front page fall of pretty quickly.

I'm sure it could still be gamed by networks of gamers like http://piqq.us/ (thankfully they haven't hit reddit yet).

The important thing is that they're trying. In this case, almost any change is for the positive.
Licence your desktop app under the GPL. Headache gone.
Milw0rm - exploits, vulns, videos, papers, shellcode
And the majority of these networks have less then 3 users.
That doesn't exactly work when your revenue comes from selling shrink-wrap software or games.
Wow, this is ambitious!
Bear sale sparks global equity and dollar sell-off
We're going to have to start doing stuff like this when we start to reach 8-16 cores per processor in the next 5 years or so.
Wikipedia: A shoestring operation stunned by its own success faces growing pains
Second question: 1.
Uh... if we're going to argue that way, we could say that Matz and Guido did the same thing by creating those easy to use languages that don't make real men out of their users like C did. Or that the C language took all the pain out of assembly that made users tough...
From http://xkcd.com/about/

How do I write "xkcd"? There's nothing in Strunk and White about this.

For those of us pedantic enough to want a rule, here it is: The preferred form is "xkcd", all lower-case. In formal contexts where a lowercase word shouldn't start a sentence, "XKCD" is an okay alternative. "Xkcd" is frowned upon.
TV channels hire pretty women as presenters. Where is the mystery?

OK, thinking about it again, it might be a mystery if they did not do it before, using ugly men instead. is it a kind of giving up on the stock market, admitting that for the masses it is just gambling and entertainment?
A ravenous dragon | China's quest for natural resources
I wrote a 'similar' thing called l8tr (http://l8tr.org) that mails you when a down web site comes back.
I think you took the original comment the wrong way; no one said xkcd was bad. Just that every comic gets posted to every social news site every time.
I wouldn't be too convinced it's that close to correct... Usually the set up a handful of experiments, get as close to the original situation as they can (which is often not that close - sometimes they're basing their experiments on movie events and guessing metrics), and give it a go a few times. But that said, the show is about entertainment rather than hard-core scientific vigour, so I'll continue to watch and enjoy :-)
Is Google still considered a startup though? Sure they may compete in similar markets as startups - they're all 2.0 companies - but does 2.0 always mean startup?

Or can a company move on past that and become established without being bought out by some other big company?

Oh, and just food for a thought, does this definition make Yahoo a startup with MS trying to acquire them and their stake in web2.0 sits?

To avoid going too far off topic though, it seems like there's an ecosystem of programmers and exec's going between the major companies/startups for a few years at a time, how well does this work for innovation - do the same people do the same type of thing all the time with minor tweaks (albeit in different languages/forms), or do people largely try do things differently every time?
reasonably good with PyDev. Not as good as NB for RoR though
They lied saying they didn't had any liquidity problems several times last week, until Friday when they said they are fucked. They should go to jail!
Yahoo Buzz to Dominate Social News?
'Saved' (or whatever the term) for the ability to view the article all on one page. That and a decent list of tech-related movies.
Reddit is a cautionary tale of social sites. I'm new here, and love it so far: has there been any discussion of how to stop this splendid corner of the internets from being ruined by incoming hordes of morons?
It depends who's perspective you're coming from. You want people competing for you, whether you're hiring or looking to be hired. It's great for the self-esteem and makes you look good to companies.
thanks for the explanation - you said 20% goes to the partners, you mean founders, right? and then what happens to rest of the 80%, does it go to LPs? and how do partners(founders) earn money on the work they do through out the year, I mean whether they get regular salary, because it may happen that no deal goes through 100% through the first couple of years? is it salary comes from 2% management fee?
if the management fee is just 2%, is it enough to pay salary to VCs for the whole year?
Better to try and "move" your product rather than yourself. The exchange rate means it will be easier to sell overseas while the local value of your money (ie, to buy groceries and pay your rent) will be largely unaffected. Not that London is a bad place to go, and the majority of the UK's trade is (iirc) with the Eurozone so that might have a buffering effect on the economy here.
Taleb vindicated. Again.
"This feels like FUD to me."

It had that feel to it. And of course, it's impossible for a company to release GPL code and hit the big-time. Teh GPL will kill your business!

[Edit: and the name of his site implies a less-than-helpful relationship to GNU software.]
Your ability to develop profitable business is limited only by availability of profitable market who needs your services. Costs of starting/running a web business are low enough. Automating some business service is normally a cost saving so this should be in principle recession-proof.

What recession limits, however, is you ability to flip your business early to new investors. This is the VC business model and it will suffer when risk capital will become scarce.
He said it was similar to the posts about the Feynman quote. So the coast is clear, I don't think you hate anyone in this case.
Markets tumble after Bear Stearns rescue fails to reassure
Ha! I was wondering why I could see content from all my subreddits today! Time to turn back on the main reddit and politics reddit.
The swan swims again:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
Never ever again
Has there been discussion about anything else?
Loans cheaper? I think you're dreaming. The problem with your "standard economic theory" is that it fails to account for how much smaller a part of the world's economy the US is. The way to leave risk behind is to leave the US and invest elsewhere. I think we will see that happen at a greater scale now.

I think EU startups will do very well.
That's such a weird rule. What's to stop them from buying put options?
Can't check it at work. Proxy bans the word "games".
"Regular" size Lego fits onto Duplo -- including Technics.
LovdByLess is launched! Check out http://lovdbyless.com for more info.
The crisis started in the US but is worldwide, industrialized countries are so dependent from each others now that if the US economy happen to collapse you can expect a worldwide collapse. You won't be safer anywhere else.
IE8 represents a problem for our servers
Exactly. Based on that number, it would mean that 95% or more of the social networks are on the ning platform. However I can't name a single one.
I think the ability to put things together from someone else's code is a good thing. Of course, I'm just getting old, lazy and cynical. But there's limited virtue, IMO, in creating something from scratch if Duplo-style development achieves results which are just as good.

Thoroughly take his point about whiny users though. Unfortunately, if you commit to an open source project that's just part of the scenery and you have to live with it.
Malcolm Gladwell on Taleb's investment strategy: http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm
Yes it does. The people buying shrink-wrap software don't typically go online and compile from source. The users that are capable of compiling their own version (and supplying their own artwork) based on GPL source code are likely to just use (or develop) free alternatives to commercial software. So releasing your software under the GPL, even when you're in the business of selling said software is not exactly a bad idea.
Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale stepping down
JPM is a bank and the Fed can loan money to them in a way that they cannot to BSC because BSC is not a bank.

As I understand it, the Fed will essentially loan against 100% of the value of $30B worth of hard to liquidate, hard to value (read: value is less than 100% of face value) mortgages as part of the deal, covering JPM's exposure in that part of the business.

What should happen: head of BSC should face criminal charges, not for running company into ground, but for lying to small investors (you and me) while disclosing other information only to large investors (JPM and other institutions). This is a violation of SEC rules.

This is not the first time JPM helped, there was the banking panic of 1893 (IIRC) - JPM bailed out the USA and in return, got $7 million in fees.
"a 1930s-like Great Depression" is a quote from an economist not a sensationalist spin put on the report by the journalist.
Open Source Adobe AIR application to organise code snippets
There were a few talks about this at BarCampNYC this past weekend (http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarCampNYC3Day1).

The consensus was it will probably be easier (in the short term, anyway) to find VC funding now that investors are fleeing real estate and need to put their cash elsewhere.

Tech actually looks good now, compared to other investment options.
Sometimes their basic science has been lacking. (Compressed air jet-boat was supposed to work by "pushing against the water"?) Though they have been improving, I've noticed.
I like Rails a lot because it allows me to focus on concept and less on the actual code. If anything does pan out (which might happend 5% of the time if I go through enough concepts), then it's time to revisit whether or not Rails is the appropriate framework -- IF there are issues with it.

I get tons of ideas; Rails and Ruby together (I cannot begin to tell you how valuable Watir is) afford me enough speed so that I can prove if the concept is worthwhile while at the same time have something to build upon towards a production application. I could easily do the same in Java (what I use 40 hours/week), but I'd spend an equal amount of time on coding as I do on concept/design.

The fact that I don't have to worry much about coding components from scratch is useful specifically because I have a day job! Even if I didn't have a day job, I'd be cranking out more concepts using Rails than I would with Java.

So what if Rails lowers the barriers to entry for writing a web application?
How the latest in high tech works
Agreed. An interesting alternative approach to a single 'parent' pointer in the record is the use of an ancestor table.

http://www.evolt.org/working_with_hierarchical_data_in_sql_u...

This allows all children (or parents) to be fetched in a single query. A suitable "order by" clause also groups them together for easier processing in one pass.

The cost is the same as any denormalisation - additional updates and integrity issues - so it isn't a no-brainer but it's probably a win in most such situations.
I worked at a company where we used a decimal number to represent a tree for a threaded forum. It meant that we could use an ORDER BY clause and quickly get all the descendants sorted, like this:

7.401
7.40101
7.40102
7.4010201
7.40103
7.4010301

The downside was that it wasn't nearly this straightforward -- numbers seemed to be assigned haphazardly. And the scheme wasn't documented well, so it was nearly impossible for new programmers to understand.

I would not recommend this approach again. If you need high-performance searches for descendants, a separate table relating ancestors to descendants will be much more straightforward in the long-run.
Black Swans - unexpected movements in financial markets.
Benioff: I think Microsoft is still a dinosaur.
Lots of these are trivialisms and quite a few are contradicting eachother.
Getting tired of the browser-go-round
Younger, Heavy Online-News Consumers Don't Read Newspapers
Read Taleb's book, "The Black Swan." Very timely these days.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp...
5 downsides of working at home
Listen to this talk he gave at the Long Now: http://s3.amazonaws.com/salt-recordings/salt-020080208-taleb...
At first glance, this seems far better than grepping my home directory for random code strings I need to dig up...
This approach is strangely similar to Woz's work habits in designing the Apple II. He intimately made every aspect of that work part of his brain's firmware. After reading about that in Chapter 3 of Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work, I have made a conscious effort to do the same with my software.
How is YEurope doing? Serious question.
Dissing Venture Capitalists Is So Cool
USBCell Battery Recharges Via USB
Foreign investors veto Fed rescue
The primary ideas seem to be: “Keep it uninteresting for the hordes of morons." Which seems to be working. Granted it does not scale, but when your not trying to make money exclusivity is a reasonable solution.
Bridging the Designer-User Gap
Insanely Great - Steven Levy. About the building of the original Macintosh. Extremely inspiring and interesting.
"I am right and you are wrong."
-book by Edward de Bono

[In deference to de Bono I must add that I am using the phrase with it's original meaning.]

Indeed I am right and you are wrong. The foreign markets are punishing the Fed's moves.

1. Yes, BS was "projected to be worth less tomorrow". Until the Fed stepped in, JPM wouldn't touch BS without the Fed first taking the bad parts.

2. J.P. Morgan is buying only the "liquid" assets of BS; the Fed is getting the illiquid assets. Of course that's a sweet deal for JPM. It's a very bad deal for the Fed and the U.S. taxpayer. And part of the deal is a 6-month guaranteed bailout for hedge funds for the rich that have been posting returns from 20%-80% annually. Moral hazard never reached such scales before.

3. Drop the straw-man "this isn't a zero-sum game" statement: everybody knows that. The Fed's move is a redistribution of wealth regardless: wealthy investors are now wealthier than before the Fed stepped in and the value of the dollar is plunging further.

4. "There are smart people working there." How smart? I don't see the smarts oozing out today as the foreign markets punish the choices the Fed makes. Wait until the stock-buying public gets into this brouhaha. I would be the last to oppose the existence of the Fed, but today there I see only people who have their own and their mostly wealthy friends' interests in mind.

5. Sometimes inaction is best. Inaction would resolve the quandary more quickly by allowing the liquidation of BS assets on the open market and punishing wealthy investors for taking high-risk investments in hedge funds. All worthy goals. And that would happen without adding inflationary fire to the economy.

6. I don't relish "punishing investors" for it's own sake. But protecting high-risk investors against risk is foolish and, in the end, inflationary. "Caveat emptor" should apply to any investment.

This is indeed "Socialism for the Rich".
Are MacBooks Just Trendy?
But everyone will have a different opinion on which ones ARE good. Even this one.
A plugin by the newbies this author is so down on would probably not be a plugin you'd want to use. It's cool that they're learning rails, why begrudge them the chance to learn on the framework or harangue them for not writing plugins? The natural learning curve of ruby/rails is nice in that mostly people can create plugins when they've climbed mount ruby on rails, but not sooner.

Everyone was a beginner once.
Cross browser API text stroking (canvas and VML)
Verizon Developing Faster File-Sharing Software
Rails search benchmarks
Given the really low barrier to entry it seems like this is very low number. I'd say Ning hasn't reached its product/market fit yet :-)

I created a private network for my family a while back and thought I'd invite everyone but I got frustrated with the post-setup and gave it up. I probably should probably try again and send in some feedback.

I do think 70% active after 30 days seems good. I wonder what the drop-off is at 60 and 90 days though.
Yeah it has a lot of potential! I wondered the same myself and posted on their forum asking....

Maybe the founders are focusing on other aspects of life - wife and kids maybe?
True, and FYI it's not just an "Xbox-360 game" as it's also on the PC and PS3.
Key words "if they had the inclination." Imprinting minds with the idea that ideas should be tested by experiment is of tremendous value. Rigor can follow once the inclination is there.
Chatwo - another ajax powered chatroom?
You can fetch all of the comments by comment_link_id in a single query, then work with the result to recursively print the tree.
I was thinking about doing something like this, but web based with code shared, so users can search for code that others have saved. I don't know if it's still worth it...
I've got an idea! We can vote, and only the ones that lots of people agree are good go on the front page.
Ask YC :What Single Sign On (Open Source) Solution you use ??
What Single Sign On (Open Source) Solution you use ?? I am trying to implemetn a SSO for my Web App . So far I have found JSSO and CAS . What are other good open source implementations ??
I meant Facebook (poaching employees from) -> Google.
RetailMeNot Sales Figures
I agree. Journalism shouldn't be about affecting the outcome of our subject. That's just what this and other crap that predicts the future does, it makes it that much more likely that it will happen. Financial markets are all about confidence, and if enough "journalists" predict this, it will happen. The ensuing panic will cause sell offs that will trigger a landslide.
If anyone, xkcd would be the offender here, because he put the rather generic quote into Feynman's speech bubble.
ARGH. this is SUCH a tiring thing to read, over and over again. as if all us mac users were all buying computers with the same criteria that a clotheshorse uses when buying a pair of jeans.
Well, 2% of $200 million = $4 million. Funds typically have a lifetime of 10 years, so they have multiple funds in the pipeline.
"The work of intellectuals is ordered and paid for by Governments or rich men, whose aims probably seem absurd, if not pernicious, to the intellectuals concerned. But a dash of cynicism enables them to adjust their consciences to the situation."
- Bertrand Russell
reader.google.com
www.dogsonacid.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=3
thesartorialist.blogspot.com
or worse some bonehead warmonger. war and sinking economies have some strange correlation.
The numbers would be higher for 60 and 90 days. The statistic is that 70% of networks that were ever created have been used within the last 30 days before today. The other 30% were most recently used more than 30 days ago.
$2/share might be what it takes for JPMorgan to guarantee a profit.

I wonder what the real market value is of Bear Stearns is, at $2 a share and a market value in 12 months of $10 a share sounds like a great investment for JPMorgan, and will result in a very strong company in about 1 year. This is definitely something to watch. I wonder what inside efforts were put together on this.
My family had stock in Montana Power before the decided to become a Fiber company in 2001. the stock price was 70+ and 2 months later it was trading for cents.
Very good question.

I remember that in DLD there was a session about this topic. The consensus was that Private Equity firms (or those that invest large sums of money) will get hit much more than VCs, and as a result the bigger the startup the more at risk you are. I also recall that Morten Lund claimed in the panel that a recession might prove to be beneficial (at least as far as Angels are concerned), because according to him, it will separate the great startups from the mediocre ones.

In my opinion, a strong recession, might cause valuation to go down, but it shouldn't affect early stage startup too much, because their backers usually look at a long term investment period.
>This site is about submitting awesome links

I thought reddit is about that, not HN
I have been living outside the US for 4 years now, and for the first 1.5 years I pretty consistently (as in, every month) used my www.firstib.com bank ATM card to make withdrawals all over asia, and they never even once blocked me. They also have interest-bearing checking, and US ATM withdrawals are reimbursed. I forget if international withdrawals are.
that's great, Mark.

Any idea how much money all this is bringing in?

I am not convinced that letting others create free social networks is a good market to be in.
Attacking anything from Apple is a great way to generate traffic. The site seems to have done that, since I can't get there to read the story.

I think there are a lot of people who bought macs because they are trendy, but for me (and probably a lot of other people here) the appeal is that they run unix with a nice gui.
CIX - Canadian Venture Capital Meetup
Technically, this is standards compliant:

From RFC2616 HTTP/1.1 ( http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html ), Section 8.1.4, Practical Considerations: Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to another server or proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously active users. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response times and avoid congestion.

Regardless, breaking this advice is grossly anti-social and likely to cause problems.
SearchMe launches new search interface