skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Love it! You should threaten your publisher with talk of self-publishing. I'll answer any questions that may come up (as long as you promise to write your own tutorial when it's done). It'd mean more money for that nonprofit, too.

I've always wondered about an entrepreneurship-focused org, but haven't found one that blew me away yet. Loved your RtR fundraising, btw :) My process of selection involves a lot of stalking and research, followed by pestering until I can find someone there who really gets breadpig. I'd be happy to help be a set of eyes for you as you look.

edit: Oh, and I'll gladly help promote!
He means eschew the hyper-daisychained ELSE from hell.
Archeological dig reshaping human history
Does the write glove thing work better than one of those gel wrist pads that sits on the desk in front of the keyboard/mouse?
You can't call this a 1-to-1 copy. Sure, when you look at them side by side, they have a lot of elements in common and use a similar color scheme. But for the most part these elements are common to a lot of websites in general. (e.g. Lighthouse by entp, or http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ and many more) Visual Website Optimizer was a 1-to-1 copy of Basecamp to the point where they were actually using the exact background image. But I'd say that at most Etacts was inspired by the general style of many websites/web-apps rather than Metalab in particular.

However, I had never looked at Basecamp vs. Ballpark (though I could tell that they both follow the same trends) and if Metalab were to call Etacts out for their design as jayair suggests, I'd like to hear Metalab's explanation for the copy of Basecamp's design and copy.

"The Better Way To Get Projects Done" => "The Better Way To Get Paid"; "See Plans and Pricing/30-day free trial, sign up in 60 seconds" => "See Plans and Pricing/30-day Free Trial. Get started in 60 seconds."

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Metalab does have a distinct style in a lot of their designs (they seem to love text-shadows for example) but they're not the inventors of it either. The layout is pretty common place nowadays. (or as lunaru put it about a year ago when Ballpark came out: "the layout is pretty much a de facto standard" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557277)
I'd say they had a means of monetizing their audience that was not proportional with the amount of capital required to run the business they built.
I only use Linode nodes for front end web servers, and the websites already sit on Subversion repositories, so I have no need to backup any data on the Linodes.

What I do is start a fresh Linode from one of their base images, usually CentOS 5. I strip away all the services I don't need, lock down those that I do, and install the few non-standard packages the sites need to run. After all the configuration is set and the website is up and running, I give the whole thing a reboot just to make sure all the services start up in the right state. When it's all configured correctly, I copy the disk image and it's ready for cloning to new nodes.
I'd like to hear more about this sort of thing. Are there any other good resources/discussions on adding functions?
Scoble Covers Second Life 2.0 Browser Launch
Observations that surprised me
It's true that forums are hard to monetize with Adsense and other affiliate ads, but they're definitely not impossible to monetize.

I started/ran silverfishlongboarding.com for a few years and the forums became very popular. Even so, it never made more than a couple hundred a month off Adsense.

Eventually we got rid of Adsense and started selling ads directly. Within a few months we were bringing in several thousand a month. It was much more time consuming, but it worked. I sold the site a couple years ago, but I keep in touch with the new owners and I know that at least one of them is making a living full time off it.
I've done that a few times myself - my first coding experiences with a number of languages were paid gigs [C, shell, Modula-2, Data General Nova assembly, PL/I].
Hope, by itself, is not a strategy.
I know I'm probably being too conservative from my years doing embedded and assembly programming, but I disagree with this.

As you know, there is a cost to adding functions. They are not free from a code performance standpoint. Are they so close to being free that you don't need to worry? That depends on the processor and the application. I still do embedded and assembly programming, so I can't afford to drop this habit, because there, it does matter. So for web apps, I continue to use them liberally, but definitely not "at the drop of a hat".
PHP CLI is brilliant and once I found out about it writing scripts and cron jobs became a lot simpler.

I have php scripts that run on the command line that run for long periods of time. I have also found a lot of ways to reuse code originally written for our website.

I don't know about memory consumption problems, but I have php scripts that are coded functionally (not OO) that run for an hour (processing HUGE amounts of data).
Heroku Winter 2009 Survey Results
Nice find. I've been foraying into where these strange xpopup.js errors filling my web server logs have been coming from for awhile now...

I've run into too many cases over the years in which web-browsing computers' security software made strange presumptions in tinkering with incoming web pages' HTML. All too often, those presumptuous tinkerings result in breakages in some cases or others, and the "secured" web-browsing users (and the web developers to which they complain) are left wondering why stuff doesn't work right.

sigh

Thanks.
what are the main differences in the open source version and the commercial version other than not being able to distribute, and the customer support they offer.. do they place limitations on nodes between the two versions ?
I realize there is probably some jest in that sentiment, but if you only want to do YC for these sorts of things then you're not in it for the right reasons.

The extra events are certainly a nice perk, but the main focus is definitely bringing something to market that people want.
I don't think the article was making a case that it will be difficult to make design changes to fit the touch screen---just that it does, in fact, require changes. It's another hurdle of adoption to jump over before the iPad can really be considered the "best web browsing experience EVER" or whatever they are marking it as.
Come now people, remember your history the original FAQ on the Apache Server project's website claimed that "The result after combining [the NCSA httpd patches] was a patchy server..."
One estimate of over $200 Billion has gone in extra payments and fee allowances to telecoms.

In Pennsylvania, Verizon et al. were given billions of extra fees, in return they were to provide high speed broadband of T1 speed or better. They took the fees, but did not deliver the broadband; later it was found that due to the way the law was worded, no penalty for non-performance could be applied.

IMHO, the ONLY thing that telecoms understand is force or the threat of force. Get serious about opening up rights of way that the state government already has, to all comers, and they will act quickly to drop prices and improve service.
I love his CC's, I can't imagine people expect this to work.
...if you are pro-life, how can you want there to be a diversity of views on abortion with none dominating?

I don't think it's incoherent to recognise that I don't always have all the answers, and that I need occasional or frequent reminding that I might be wrong---which will presumably not come unless there's someone who disagrees with me.

Furthermore, thoughtful people change their minds on things (which is why accusations like "flip-flopper" are so ludicrous), and if I agree with everyone now, what will happen when I change my mind on something later?

I, at least, really do value moral diversity as well as demographic diversity.
http://www.indianrail.gov.in/
Upcoming Conferences In Places You Might Actually Want To Visit
Ketchup on noodles was big in Sweden.
Tumblr Killed the Tumblelog Star
To some, career advancement means getting out of coding and into management. To me, that would be like switching from driving the race car to managing the race team. I'd much rather be driving thank you very much...
1) The author is criticizing an unreleased product.

2) The author points out that some current "interactive components" available in a mouse-dominated world won't work in a touch based paradigm and labels these UI paradoxes. These include mouseovers and flyouts. The thing is, hidden behavior (requiring the end user learn these interactions) is almost always bad UX. I don't see the paradox there.

3) The author points out that web-based Google Maps may be a problem on the iPad. Note that web-based Google Maps (not just the iPhone native app) works fine on the iPhones I've tried it on.
So Apple Bans Girls In Bikinis, But A Shirtless Gay Dude Washing A Car Is OK?
Top actors rarely audition, even for top roles. In a case like that, the process more closely resembles an interview. It's really more meeting to discuss the concepts of the role.
Ah, this is unfortunately something I know little about, because it was handled by xkcd's distribution center. I'd love to update the entry with suggestions, but this was operating under an assumption that the book would be an extension of an existing merch system (shirts, etc). The best recommendation I can make atm is Amazon, but unfortunately, it's without experience: http://aws.amazon.com/fws/
New Solar Cell is 98% Plastic and Catches 96% of Incident Light
Google, Yahoo Sued by Xerox Over Search Query Patents
Google’s Music Strategy: Past, Present and Future
I'm wondering if the double hump results exemplify your point #4: those who had previous engagement are in the top hump, while those who had not (but obviously have a little aptitude at least) are in the lower hump.
The article and my reply was in relation to startups, not women in CS.

Of course it might be pure gibberish, but I believe it does happen to coincide with currently accepted wisdom in evolutionary science.
An audience != A business
What a very very awesome article! So much detail and love the charts. We're currently doing some of these things at Bill4Time, but I'm passing this over to the executives. Thank you so much.
Widgets, ad units, and stream API: should be clickable links IMHO, they look like buttons, and are what i was interested in immediately
Not to downplay the value of this comment—it truly is a victory for open source software—but I first read it as:

I remember in the late 90s being excited to root Apache every month...
No, I don't agree with that proposition at all. Rhetoric is something you don't have to like, but to dismiss it entirely as you have done in this subthread is to do a disservice to yourself. I happen to find rhetoric fascinating, as it has to do with human communication and interaction.

If you've ever given a presentation, you've performed rhetoric (the art of using language to persuade). If you've presented based on measurable facts, you've still used rhetoric. (Indeed, without using other language to help organize and interpret the facts at hand, it's very easy for facts to be used to confuse an issue.)

Parables are rhetorical devices usually used to illustrate a moral or religious lesson. Yet, they can also be used to illustrate other lessons, too. A quick search for "secular parables" resulted in the "Parable of the broken window" as a lesson to be learned about economics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
It doesn't have to be a perfect solution. Making an http request to a submitted url and grabbing the contents of the title tag is a trivial development effort that add a lot of value to a community that doesn't want to see the same stuff on the front page over and over...
I always use Google to search for Microsoft technical documentation, not MSDN search, not Bing. That says it all.
Referral traffic is the traffic one site sends to another through direct linking. In this case if you add up all the traffic that third party sites get from all search engines, Google is the originating site for 85% of that traffic.

It basically means that a lot of people are searching yahoo for things like "yahoo mail" and "yahoo games." Those searches aren't likely to generate referrals to sites outside of yahoo.
You should read Martin Fowler's Refactoring, it's the bible on that sort of thing.
The powerpoint is really good:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27319437/SEO-for-Startups-YCombina...
these kinds of small applications are usually written as $50 gigs on Rentacoder-type sites for spammers.
Hook up with a leather shop and sell custom-fit versions of famous leather jackets. Sell patterns.

You probably aren't going to find a homerun scalable business model, but there are dozens of sustainable small businesses that could be built on such a base.

Hell, it's jackets that were in movies right? Don't netflix, amazon and apple allow for affiliate links to the movie? Depending on the traffic that could add up.
AT&T San Francisco 'reliability': 55%

That's the lowest 'reliability' number in the chart for any carrier, any region. It's 23 points below AT&T's next-worse region, Denver, at 78%.
I've read the paper now, and I'm still a little confused by the way that you have phrased your objections. More specifically, I don't understand how the form of your objections could constitute a valid criticism of any NP-Completeness proof whatsoever.

(While I don't feel qualified to verify the correctness of the author's reduction, the form of the proof feels like any other that I've read.)

...but the author's big leap of faith is that our particular one case of the problem is intractable.

What does "our particular one case of the problem" mean? Do you mean a particular case of the 3-SAT problem?

If so, reductions don't consider a particular case of 3-SAT (or whatever known NP-Complete problem type one is using for leverage). Rather, they transform any arbitrary 3-SAT problem statement, in poly time, into an equivalent statement in the problem domain under consideration. By showing a transformation of any arbitrary problem, it covers all 3-SAT cases: trivial and intractable. All possible problem statements thus covered, no leap of faith is required.

If not, what sort of problem (and particular case thereof) are you referring to?
I'm a man, but I'm happy to call bullshit on that. There are a long list of successful women who are taken quite seriously all on their own. Leah Culver springs immediately to mind. My wife, who owns a successful accounting startup is another. I've met countless others, including one particularly memorable engineer at Flock (I'll protect her privacy).

The reality is that there are simply very few women that hold the qualifications necessary to be successful in the startup world. When you do find one, the competition for their services is incredibly fierce. In a previous gig I tried desperately to hire a particular woman who had just graduated from MIT. We lost a pretty serious bidding war, not because she was a woman but because her skills were off the charts.

It's funny, there are similar articles written about certain disciplines in academia (like accounting). There too it's just a numbers game. My wife, until her latest birthday, was just 1 of 5 female accounting PhD's in the whole country (including foreign born) under 30. Of course there are precious few female accounting professors, there are very few females pursuing accounting PhD's!

Of course, that means she enjoys a tremendous advantage over her peers. The pressure to promote diversity means she enjoys a better salary and lot more job security than her male counterparts.

The same is true, from my experience, for the few intelligent and talented female engineers that I've met in the valley.
NSF: Science and Engineering Indicators 2010
uh, I've had no problem getting hired in silicon valley as a software engineer. They never asked me to pass out t-shirts or give a "massage".

Being a woman and being in tech is certainly different than a man could completely understand, and hard for not exactly the reasons a man would expect. But being a man is hard in different ways.
I think if you re-read my comment carefully (with my apologies, as I seem to have worded it obtusely), you'll see that I'm actually addressing your point, and not changing the subject to CS.
Of course Apple is free to do whatever with it's platform, but it's a little suicidal to change the rules out from under the people who make your platform worthwhile by creating its content. A couple more shifts like that might cause a big migration away from the app store by companies who don't think it's such a great investment when the rug might be pulled out arbitrarily and without warning.
This is not the first time where deregulation of an industry that happened in the past decade has brought about bad results.
How vision trumps all other senses - or, fooling wine professionals
forums don't make any money.

I know a guy who runs a very successful forum...#1 forum for a particular car niche...has 110K registered users, and about 50K uniques a month, and 1 million page views.

Know how much he makes? $2,500 a month. $500 from Adsense, $1000 from selling car parts, and $1000 from direct advertising sales.

$2,500 is not bad, until you throw in the cost of servers and bandwidth....after all is said and done, at the end of the month he clears about $600.

Sure $600 is nothing to sniff at, but he's been running the forum for 10 years now....so you would think at that level it'd be making a ton more money than that.
Looks matter because we all have feelings
I really like this idea. I, too, hate getting gifts. I already buy the things I need and gifts just end up getting stacked in the corner.
I wonder if this will eventually turn into a launch event for YC start-ups
Except that the last condition can be T, and that's exactly the same as "else" in a more conventional language.
How do women fit in business?
Ah yes - sorry about that.
It was a blast-- as a panelist I learned a lot from Rand (who lives and breaths SEO).

Check out his post and certainly check out: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors - it's the most definitive work on ranking factors out there. Once you grok that, it's all about psychology-- figure out what would motivate the "linkerati" to link to you (and tweet about you).
Creative marketing by grasshopper
>> "Some Twitter users say they will stop using the service if advertising becomes prevalent in their streams (but may be willing to pay a fee to keep it out)"

It's hardly going to be rocket science to filter out adverts. I'd expect most twitter clients will just filter out adverts or at least have an option for the user to click to do it.
> And worst of all it is not a secure source of income. It can drop to close to zero if they decide to change the rules

That's what single-vendor reliance _means_, genius. Should have thought about this up front before deciding to base your livelihood on someone else's caprice.
Hell - if you don't know the modulus operator you should be able to implement it in a couple line.
Maybe I overreacted, but the article does make some pretty big claims: needing an entirely new version of a site just for non-mouseover browsers? C'mon...

Re-tooling your site so that it's not dependent on mouse-overs, fine. Making a "third" version? Time to re-think your existing site.
I'm interested in using Habitstream for Gridspy. It is quite a big price step between free, branded streams and unbranded commercial streams.

It is a cool idea, something that I'll have to come back an explore as we start to take off.
Apache, truly a great web server and still truly underestimated. People immediately switch to things like lighttpd or nginx when they start to feel perfomance issues coming on. Yet Apache gives you many different mpm's to choose from, worker being one of the greats (a hybrid multi process multi threaded server), or even the evented mpm which is much faster. Its all about knowing how to tune it.

Love you apache.
hacking on it in httpd trunk man, just working for this startup called cloudkick keeps distracting me from the real priorities in life :-)
"People talk about brands and share their feedback", and companies should jump in with… ads? Was somebody complaining about there not being enough ads? Really?
Getting a complete list is very hard due to the nature of zip codes, but the wikipedia article I linked to has an incomplete and unordered list.
.50-1.50 for apartment related things, 3.00-4.00 for doctor/appointment scheduling related things :-(
I fully identify with the OP and some others commenting here. I've tried partnering with someone and it works great, the bad thing is that you end up always depending on someone else. If you don't have a partner to do something, then you don't do it... or don't finish it :(
However, if Twitter offers a rev-share with the 3rd party clients, then they will be less likely to filter them out and also be able to make some money for their work. I run a semi-popular twitter tool site and am hoping for this option.
Specifically this link: http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/05/blocking-requests-and-nginx...
@pg I think a great one would be "b2b customer acquisition". This was one of those things that we realized was CRAZY HARD and (anecdotally) I've heard a few other YC startups who have run into this wall. Stuff like inside vs. outside sales, lead generation techniques, hiring salesfolks, adwords, etc.

Of course this stuff only applies to maybe 25% of YC companies out of the gates (tho eventually, even the consumer plays have to hire ad-sales guys).
With a Sufficiently Smart Compiler (tm), there is no cost to adding functions because the compiler can inline them. FWIW, on the simple example I just tried "gcc -O3" is a sufficiently smart compiler.
Tell HN: Credit Card type is very easy to ascertain from the number
One thing I hate is when I'm checking out and a site asks me for my credit card number, then asks what type of credit card it is. Maybe it was my years in high school working for a pizza place, but credit cards are very easy. I thought it was basic info, but am surprised when I find out how many people have no clue. The first digit always determines what kind of card it is:

3 - American Express

4 - Visa

5 - Mastercard

6 - Discover

Go ahead, check your wallets, I guarantee that's right. Don't make your users give redundant information!
Similar problems in Illinois, particularly with regard to SBC, now AT&T (SBC bought the hollowed shell of AT&T, many people believe largely for the name/brand identity).

Oh, and, in response to another commentor on this thread with regard to lobbying influence, it's worth thinking for a few minutes about who in DC is from / has ties to Illinois. Telecom has a lot of clout in Illinois; the SBC, now AT&T, corporate headquarters is located in the Chicago suburbs.
The modern definition of diversity is "people who look different and think the same".
> In 1995 I was hacking scripting languages and MySQL... and that's what I'm doing in 2010

I think that's the problem (I'm also not a technology bigot: you can do s/scripting languages/J2EE/ and s/MySQL/Oracle/). Doing simple things may pay well at some point, but there's no technical career growth path.

There's also no security: there's no experience/education/intelligence based barrier to entry. In the end, there's nothing to differentiate a 40 year old CRUD-screen developer from an 18 year old one. You can't say the same thing about a (for the education/domain knowledge angle) search relevance expert or kernel hacker.
This sound sensationalist, and I apologize for the tone, but it's almost like we've entered a new era of white-collar serfdom. The big conglomerates create the walled gardens, tell us where to till, decide what's acceptable conduct or not, treat certain serfs with favoritism, and get the best cut off the top.

Sure you're free to go anywhere, but if the future really is app stores, what does that freedom amount to?
Good idea. Maybe we should make it be about getting paying users generally.