skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may not be all AT&T's fault. SF has some grassroots groups that reflexively oppose all new radio towers. See for example:

http://www.antennafreeunion.org/

http://www.no-celltower.com/
Brightcove and Ooyala duke it out for Europe’s video market
The people complaining about the lack of ads were the people who ponied up large wads of money to invest in a company with no proven revenue model. Unfortunately their voices are a little louder within Twitter HQ than the rest of us.
We're already using it at Wattvision (http://www.wattvision.com/info/about), and it's pretty cool. Feature suggestion: send me email reminders to approve new stream items. That would be a great feature. Like, "hey, you had 400 new mentions in the last week -- and here are some positive sounding ones. Click here to approve."
Verizon's reliability is better in SF but it's still the worst city for reliability.
Thanks again, Yehuda! I love reading these updates. Although I think there's going to be a lot of short-term pain with many of the gems and plugins I use on a daily basis [1], I am incredibly excited by the flexibility we're going to get from Rails 3.

[1] Yes yes, I know I should be trying them out and filing or fixing bugs, but I haven't had a chance yet.
You'll come across this if you read any book on happiness. From a quick search ("experiences happiness") the first result is a CNN article about this: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/10/happiness.possessions/i...
Bloom Energy
Yes, I agree with you, however I am speaking from current experience (I'm in the W10 batch and was at the conference last night). The extras are nice perks... very, very nice perks. The networking aspect is incredibly valuable (more so than I had foreseen). Yet, I maintain that those other things won't much matter if you don't prove your salt with your own startup. I was just responding to the "do YC just to get into these conferences" statement. That's all.
Right now, we can only add profiles for US locations, sorry about that. International is a top request and is coming soon!
This is an example of what anthropologists and evolutionary biologists call "adaptive storytelling." Just because human beings or any other organism have a particular feature or behavior does not necessarily mean that it is an adaptation and does not necessarily mean that natural selection has acted upon it. You've come up with an interesting story but that is all it is -- there is absolutely no reason to believe it is correct.

For a more detailed (and entertaining!) explanation, see the classic paper by Gould and Lewontin (1979) http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/classictexts/gould...
> There are a long list of successful women who are taken quite seriously all on their own. Leah Culver springs immediately to mind.

That's interesting, because Leah Culver is someone who I've frequently heard discussed in the context of who she is dating or who she has dated, with the implication that she's riding on the coattails of her boyfriends. So, maybe that's not such a good example for you to use.

(Disclaimer, in case that wasn't clear enough: I'm relaying things I've heard other people say. I don't personally know enough about Ms. Culver to have any opinions on her abilities.)
There was already a site for the summer games in China, so I expect there will be a site for the summer games in London as well!
Names do matter. You just have to weight its importance appropriately.

Put it this way: a name might not help your product but you definitely don't want it to hurt your product/brand.
...once you've got a blog/website with a solid userbase...

Do hacker news posts count?

I just determined via searchyc.com that I've posted over 3300 comments here. I imagine there must be some value for someone in there. I'd love to share "the best of edw519" via hardcopy (with pg's permission, of course).

I wouldn't be interested in making money with this. Just sharing my favorite thoughts about programming / business with people who don't normally come here (clients, prospects, colleagues, friends, family, etc.) Any thoughts?
Full disclosure, I was a chemist at a famous salt company many years back. The obsession with salt came following a study that showed a reduction in blood pressure in hypertensive patients who went on a incredibly strict reduced salt diet.

You can't infer from the study that non-hypertensive people have anything to gain from restricting their salt intake, or that hypertensive people would benefit from anything but a draconian salt reduction diet.

If you want to pay attention to salt in your diet, I would recommend getting more potassium, preferably from fresh vegetables.
Experience is of course a double edged sword. It helps good judgement in some cases but does the exact opposite in others as the underlying dynamics change.

It's interesting that some patterns do not seem to change very quickly though. I'm reading "This Time is Different. Eight Centuries of Financial Folly" right now. It's a rather dry empirical study of debt crises. The conclusion is that these crises have certain patterns that recur again and again, but each time there are people pointing at new factors convincing themselves that this time is different and loads of debt are OK.

So it would appear that a minimum of eight centuries on the job experience would be appropriate for any banker.

But even if, as in this case, experience would lead to the right conclusions, I would argue that sometimes it's folly that actually creates value and innovation, even if 3/4 of it is later destroyed in a crisis. The dot com bubble is a prime example of that.

The real myth is that older developers work based on experience. Sometimes experience is just a convenient excuse for laziness. Younger developers find other excuses for that.

I have 20 years of programming experience but I'm still struggling with the urge not to jump on each and every new fad that's out there, at least when it comes to things like programming languages and paradigms. What I can do way better than any recent college grad is to explain in a very reasoned, professional and well informed way why it is absolutely critical to use that fancy new language or paradigm now ;-)
> Or re-think their design choices in the first place

+1. I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is to try explaining to my parents (both of whom are in their late 60s) how and when common mouse gestures should be used. And I'm not talking about anything extraordinary, but instead left clicking, right clicking, mouse hovering, and so on.

Of course, once they get their iPads I'll have to explain pinching, but that seems relatively straightforward compared to our 40+ year old Engelbartian input mechanisms.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that clients which refuse to whore for twitter will gan users at the expense of other clients. Twitter will also have to offer better ad terms than those clients could get on their own. Twitter controls the interface from their own web client, but has very little leverage over the other clients unless they try to enforce compliance by limiting access and that strategy has a huge risk (mostly downside for Twitter) if they attempt it.
marshallp wasn't criticizing him. On the contrary, he was just pointing out that Buffet's actions are morally consistent.
Not sure how it is in SF but in most of the US it's very difficult to get the permits/public approval required to build new towers. Existing towers have strict load limits for weight and wind resistance and often require structural testing/upgrades for any work to be done. Verizon seems to manage so I'm not acquitting AT&T of any responsibility here but it's another example of US laws & regulations being incredibly unfriendly to infrastructure development. Of course these towers should be safe so some of these regulations are completely valid. I'm more concerned about the privately owned towers whose owners simply don't want to spend the money on new construction or the communities where a small group of civic minded folks are able to stop the construction of new towers for the sole reason that their appearance offends them. We're going to get left behind in this world if we keep this mindset up.
Can anyone propose any automated techniques for discovering or sifting through potential niche communities, to figure out which can be monetized?
PyCon 2010: Event Report
it's based on books means one lists book titles to describe his/her character? Interesting to see how some people would abuse this to become popular.
Has Rails jumped the shark?
Interesting.

Synopsis is that there's a temple complex in Turkey that dates back 11,500 years, way before anything like it (6,000 years before stone henge, for example).

The earlier theories were that farming and animal domestication led to stuff like religion, since it made food more abundant and stable. This guy is saying, based on this finding, that in fact religion prompted them to build the temple complex, and the task of maintaining it prompted people to get clever about staying in one spot and supplying a population with food.

I'm not qualified to evaluate the merit of the claim, but hot damn those are old temples!
Toyota U.S. chief insists electronics are not the problem
What you allude to in your first statement is incorrect for most cases, IMO. Staying together doesn't necessarily mean letting it decrease your happiness. It might just mean you have to get your happiness from a different place.

Often in life you're not presented with win-lose situations. Instead, you're presented with lose-lose situations, and it's your job to choose the least worst solution for everyone involved.
imo it makes sense for Apple to ban what they describe as "degarding and objectionable" content. If they don't want to provide a platform for the objectification of women, good for them.

imo, the one thing Apple should do is provide more clarity and transparency about the rules for the app store - i.e. what is allowed, what is not allowed, why an app was rejected etc. That will help developers decide whether or not to build any specific app for the app store.
Was the conference recorded?

If not, I'm sure everyone here would love to watch the next one on uStream. If not, what are the reasons it shouldn't be streamed?
Easier scalable webapps, because it is possible to offload some data crunching from server (paid by us) to client computer (paid by him).

Examples?

Calculating and matching SURF points on large set of images for image matching, point-of-shot localisation and some more fun and profitable purposes.
First off, I doubt you would say that about anything you feel very strongly about, otherwise what is the point of holding that belief?

To expand a little bit, Haidt argues that too much moral diversity leads to anomie, in which the condition in a society with no clear rules, standards or norms. This is the case of when there is "too much" individualism, and it is very difficult to achieve happiness without a coherent social structure.

"In an anomic society, people can do as they please; but without any clear standards of respected social institutions to enforce those standards, it is harder for people to find things they want to do. Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety and leads to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior."

Though he is a liberal, one of his points in the book is that the relentless pursuit of individualism without regard to shared values leads to unsatisfying lives.
Perhaps you were thinking of wu-ftpd?
For anyone interested in researching this, OpenSecrets would be a great place to start: http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?cycle=2006&#...
Er, I would recommend giving it up, or at least cutting back. There was a period in a previous programming life where I drank 10 cups of coffee a day. At the end of one weekend after I had been yelling at everyone in the family for about two days, I quit cold turkey.

And those were four days of serious discomfort. Headaches, cravings for coffee, distractions. But after a couple of weeks, I was fine and didn't drink any coffee for several years. The scary part was that my sleep became different after I quit. More calm.

Now, I drink about one cup of decaffeinated a week, max.

If you decide to try, it is useful to have a major distraction to keep you busy, like working in a startup, or a cross-country hike.
StackOverflow is hugely relevant to hiring decisions - their biz model?
As we all know StackOverflow is on the road raising money.

Lots of the discussion in the HN boards focused on why they need more $$$, and what about their model scaled.

Here’s my best guess: in our ongoing odyssey to hire a few add’l great programmers I’ve found myself relying more and more on StackOverflow to decide who to spend time interviewing.

They also have a $500 a month premium access option for hiring managers to sift through candidates.

Unlike linkedin, which let’s candidates kiss their own asses, StackOverflow lets you really get a sense for who you’re hiring, what their skills are, what their problem solving skills are, and find the BEST candidates, as reviewed by their peers.

This is an ingenious way to qualify talent and could be scaled in many other industries.
I think it's an excellent example. She clearly has the programming ability. She's clearly incredibly intelligent. She's clearly taken seriously. That she also runs in higher profile (At least in the valley) social circles hardly discounts her accomplishments.
oh my, you just mentioned uStream. I think you meant to say Justin.tv
It took several read-throughs to work out what you are saying, but I think you're asking this:

I want to purchase services from a small company - a start-up - but in doing so I run the risk that they won't prove to be viable in the long-run. Choosing them is a risk. How can I assess that risk so I can make a sensible choice?

Is that right?

If so, I don't have any answers, and it depends greatly on the services you are purchasing, the amount of lock-in, the promises made, and whether the founders/owners will be able to behave honorably in the case of a failure.
You cannot avoid playing in derivatives. Do you have a bank account? Do you own U.S. currency? Is all of your wealth in gold? In any of these cases the price is set by the market and strongly effected by derivative trades. You need to understand derivatives just to do a reasonable job avoiding them.
Ok cool, that is what I figured after thinking about it for a bit. Thanks!
And then they made enough money to pay the government back.
Yup, that's the idea. It's less about revealing character and more about giving people something to talk about. Like flirting at the book store.
How quickly will Moby Dick be the most read book on this site....
The title of this post is a bit of an exaggeration, to say the least. There is a great discussion over at Reddit about this same article, I strongly recommend reading the highest rated comment.

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/b53f5/a_temple_comp...
Transparent bias is better than imperfect objectivity.
Indeed, it's an advantage over cells that reflect more light, but it isn't in itself enough to have an efficient cell.

They haven't released the actual conversion efficiency numbers yet, but from the qualitative talk about it, it sounds very promising. That's one tech that I'll keep track of.
A Freemium-type conference would be really interesting to us...
So, if someone is not a member of this one particular Q&A board site, you aren't interested in hiring them?
FreshBooks Webhooks - (think of it like a push api)
Breakfast cereals, bread, tinned soup, package meals, these are hardly "what is seen as a good diet".

And what makes you recommend a varied diet for health anyway? How many creatures on Earth eat anything other than a limited and pretty monotonous diet?
One more caveat, there only a small number of profiles on there right now, so search results will probably not be very interesting just yet.

We are most interested in feedback about usability, technical issues, and whether we are generally on the right track.
Where does that leave us? Where does that leave Emerson? I guess one could be an apologist and focus on "foolish," but that turns the quote into, "Consistency is bad, except when it isn't."

Why do people even care about random quotes from a crazy transcendentalist? Just because something is old and sounds profound doesn't mean it's correct.
The first thing I wanted to do was SEE who else was on there. Dating sites need to have people to attract others. You don't make it very apparent how to see or search who else is on there.

I didn't even read the popup because it GOT IN MY WAY of seeing who else was on there. And then the 'find people' form was off to the side, and I didn't notice it because I looked at the featured profile...a dude...then up top Find people should be first, not getting started.

If people find other people they like on there, they'll find their way to the signup screen. First show them your goods, then they'll sign up when they see what they like.
In my experience people who've never been in a startup don't know what it's like. Therefore their decisions are based on prejudice. And since most men, as most women, also refrain from trying to start their own company or follow their passion (even though both are very common desires) due to their fears and the social context they've grown up in, I think that if one were to alter the growth of startups from women (as men) one must focus first on deconstructing the prejudices and, in particular, just helping people to start.

I think that YC has done a very good job of that.
A more interesting question if it made iPhone _users_ angry, and I really doubt it did.

Having these apps in the App Store is like having porn and adult toys section in a department store. Technically, there is nothing wrong with, but practically it does leave a bad impression and ultimately reflects poorly on a brand.
Also handy to know: does it last very long?
If it's not due to controlling your salt and fat intake, then it doesn't work for you, it's just correlated with some behaviour which does.
There are some good reasons users flock to App Stores. Security, compatibility, ease-of-use, eas-of-installation, etc. Free markets should focus on solving these problems while maintaining their free market if they want to compete.
[bug] - search for books with nothing in search field.
Agreed. It's a chicken-and-egg problem on any social site. Our first challenge is getting that critical mass.

The popup is just a welcome for alpha testers. It will go away when we're in production.
Those specific anecdotes were also really useful because they let the audience go home and do more research on their own. If someone says "a company did this thing and it worked/didn't" that's useful. But if they give you actual companies who do a great/terrible job on different things, then you can dig up a lot more information after the fact and keep learning.

I agree with everyone who said it was a great event. Thanks to Paul, Jessica and everyone at YC for putting it together.
I think Apple's mistake was to permit adult content in the first place.

My wife was looking through apps the other night, and she was appalled to see the number of sex apps showing up in searches.

Apple needs to maintain a reasonable tone in the app store, and banning objectionable material is a pretty good start.
First, it's not "this one particular Q&A board" IMO - StackOverflow is now in the top 600 largest sites on the web, and the central hub for programming discussion.

I would consider somebody else if they gave a sufficiently compelling reason, but again when making the decision about where to focus time (think 20 - 30 resumes a day coming in) it's an easy way to qualify people.
HN Dupe Detector Implemented
I just submitted a wired article, and I was taken to an identical submission, without the option to upmod, so I assume my dupe was counted as a vote.
I thought this was a good idea. One of my own particular favorite authors is usually mentioned on social sites but in the form of "I hate people who like <This Author>."

Alpha testing: I searched for "Thomas Paine" and got one result. The one profile result didn't seem to match the query at all.

I tried searching with the quotation marks and got an error. Exact matching doesn't seem to be supported in that manner?
"If someone offered to give you $1000, plus an extra week to accomplish stuff you want to do, wouldn't you take it?"

Yea, in a heartbeat! I'd take that $1000 dollars and accomplish my goal of spending a week in Barbados!
Yawn...what would really be intersting is if someone wrote an article surveying the best commercially available solar technology over the last 10 years with comparable price points and performance. Then we might get some understanding of how much progress is really being made and where we might be headed.
Boring + Boring = Pleasant?
Forums in themselves don't make any money. Access to a big, active, interested market is worth an absolute fortune if you have the Direct Marketing expertise, but most forum owners don't. There's a reason why all successful print magazines have teams of advertising salespeople. Advertising is still a relationship business, especially when dealing with niches.

Do you know why you get an inflight magazine on a plane? Because it's hugely profitable for the airline. They are prepared to pay big chunks of money to writers, photographers, designers and printers just to be able to sell ads targeted at the niche of "people on planes". How lucrative do you imagine a super-targeted forum might be when monetised properly?

Direct Marketers treat mailing lists as a saleable commodity. A relatively cheap mailing list costs $50 per thousand names per mailing. A high quality list for a suitably lucrative niche list could sell for ten times that. Sponsorship of a regular newsletter with good readership could be worth even more if sold properly, likewise sponsored subforums.

That's the simple stuff, the things proper businesses do when they have a huge list of people who like to buy the same stuff. Today though, the sky is the bloody limit. I feel all tingly in my private area when I think of the Customer Development possibilities for someone who has a trust relationship and constant two-way communication with that many prospective customers.

A forum is a publishing business, potentially a highly lucrative one. It's not going to monetise itself. If you don't have the skills and aren't ready to learn them, you need to bring in people who do.
Wow, I used to surf the 'fish a good bit last year. Got hooked up with the Friday Night Rip at Prospect Park with the Earthwing and Bustin crews, bought a Kracked Skulls M1; my roommate bought an Original Apex. It's still a great site with a valuable community. Nice work!
Xerox suing Google, Yahoo over software patents
I can finally get rid of all my white solar cells.
As I commented elsewhere in the thread, people will avoid situations they are uncomfortable with.

If app store searches fill up with sex apps, then less people will be interested in searching and buying.
Is it not our goal as programmers to make manual labor unnecessary? Even if Google (or LexisNexis) is a poor substitute for a librarian, it has likely reduced the economic demand for simple research. While making society as a whole more wealthy, it permanently removes jobs from the market. If this age-old employment trend were to change, now is exactly when I would expect it to happen.
Users expect it and are confused when an expected field is absent. You don't want to make a customer think twice about you when they have their wallet out and are about to make a purchase.
TonidoPlug - Innovative Web App Marketing
What? You should probably read the post again, as I haven't even seen the end of the movie.
Improvement suggestion: Run the URL comparison logic with and without a "#" at the end. Both of these URLs currently have submissions:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/al...

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/al...