skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
definitely! meetup someplace in mountain view / palo alto?
where is everyone staying at?
Internet ‘In Running’ for Nobel Peace Prize
This is not a big deal as an engineering project. It's a lot of expensive track-laying, but the obstacles are not as bad as some already conquered elsewhere.

Politically, it's basically impossible.
Doesn't Joel live in NYC? A husky in an apartment is a terrible idea.
My micro economics teacher said that nearly everyone pays about 50% of their income in taxes, either through property taxes, sales taxes, vehicle taxes, etc.
(I shan't confess this is partly an excercise to see how deep HN will nest comments)

Lua is interesting in that instead of using traditional regex it comes with its own "pattern" matching - the implementation is much cleaner than most regex implementations. See http://www.lua.org/pil/20.1.html for a bit more info.

I reply to this comment because Lua patterns actually have an operator to match balanced parentheses (or any pair of characters): %b()

Also worth a look if you're feeling bored of regex are PEGs, which leads me nicely onto: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html

(and finally yes, everything I do or speak about does tend to revolve around Lua)
I've said it before and will say it again: Repeating yourself is what effective teaching is all about.

You need to say the same thing over and over to refine your own understanding and presentation. You need to do this not just once, but periodically thereafter, because the thing you believed in 2007 will be different when you restate it in 2010. Experience has taught you things since then.

You need to say the same thing over and over because students don't learn it all the first time. They, too, grow in experience over time. When I reread the things that I read twenty years ago, I see completely different nuances than I did before.

But, most importantly, you need to say the same thing over and over because most people didn't hear you the first time, and even if they did, the world keeps making more people. If nobody ever reposts or retweets the classics, they rapidly become forgotten. (And then they aren't classics anymore: The reason classics are classics is that people can't stop quoting them.)

We've "all" heard that NDAs are worthless and that execution matters... and yet prospective clients keep pulling out those crazy NDAs. We've all heard that agile development is better than waterfall... except for the thousands of programmers who are working on waterfall projects right now. We all know that there is No Silver Bullet, and yet silver bullets continue to appear and continue to be touted, almost 25 years after the original essay.

It's okay that Spolsky himself no longer feels called to the vocation of patiently teaching the same things, over and over, to new generations of programmers and entrepreneurs. That job is not for everyone, and he's got a few other things he could be doing. ;) And it's also true that the web does a miserable job of segregating the newbs from the old hands, such that it's hard to avoid hearing lessons repeated more times than you really want to. But however much Spolsky may not need to write the 18,001st restatement of No Silver Bullet, there are always going to be people who need to read it. We're never going to finish the job of teaching people. They aren't born knowing.
I expect this to be the start of a water fall, the baby boomers of the blogosphere. Blogs are hard work and a successful one is a full-time job. I would be more worried if Joel continued to keep it up. (I'm not buying the dog excuse though)

That said there should be a graveyard for old blowhards. An invite only site where we can send our stalwarts who can lend a post or two a year. Collectively there would be no pressure to post but we could keep their insight on life support.
Just finished reading Rework by 37signals, here’s what I think
Well, I looked hideous in video. :) Besides, building the product and business is priority number one, not the funding process.
Would love to here what others thought about the book as well.
Oracle Coherence (formerly Tangosol) can be configured to be more or less anywhere you like on this triangle, including persisting everything to disk. Makes me sad that it's so expensive, and it chats a lot if you replicate fast-changing data across too many nodes, but man it sure is nice to have around.
why does it matter? they're not the experts on your business - you are. unless they're buying your product, keep calm and carry on - the best validation comes from customers.
That's easily within reach. I remember there being issues with read/writes. You could only write so many times or read so many times. Is this still true? How long will an SSD last?
I don't know about "big business" but I could imagine a startup that made it easier for dog owners to find a person to walk their dog. In Boston, most people charge $15-30 a walk depending on length and whether it's a group or individual, so money could be made by handling transactions and charging a small fee.

Would add value by providing customer reviews and rankings.
I'll look forward to this blog post and/or Tell HN!
They're related because they both describe him. Perhaps he feels they are the two most helpful pieces of information for understanding him and his writing.
We had something like:

1) 0 ;
2) at least 3 ;
3) 3 (we think) ;
4) unclear
A trans-North America high speed rail route would be pretty cool. This seems analogous to the way sputnik ignited the space race.
> A rejection from YC should make you rethink your business/people/idea.

disagree. it should push you to get market validation so that you don't rely on investors to determine whether you go forward with your business. instead, you decide whether to go forward and how to change by relying on input from paying customers.
my apartment has a half mile elliptical snow track -- he does 20 laps a day with a team pulling a sled full of New York phone books
I'm told that older datacenters are maxed out on power consumption, not physical space. It seems that companies with storage-intensive needs could get great deals for colo if they used SSDs along with low wattage processors. Of course, for $4K/TB, it doesn't makes sense. However, when prices drop or someone makes slow-but-cheap solid state storage (for long tail stuff, not OLTP), things will get very interesting.
In perl you can use http://search.cpan.org/~abigail/Regexp-Common-2010010201/lib...

The entire Regexp::Common namespace is basically a cookbook of the "right" way to use regular expressions. Worth stealing and porting to other languages...
I don't really know all that much about Joel but huskies can behave pretty well indoors with supervision as long as those guidelines are met (exercise and training) but if the apartment is small the exercise is going to have to make up for it in time and amount.

I have had huskies that could and would run for hours on end with no sign of slowing (as they should be able to) and currently have a husky akita mix that takes full reign of five acres.
1. 0 questions

2. 7 views

3. we didn't send them a prototype

4. no idea
Three innovations that changed America
One particularly popular austrian school student has predicted many collapses just a year or two before their occurrence.

citation needed!
Time to re-think the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence?
For the past year at least, it's become tiring for me to even read the headlines for these kinds of articles. I've become more and more cynical as people pump out yet another logical fallacy themed blog post whose headline is carefully crafted to prompt me to get just emotional enough to click on it.

I read Hacker News out of habit now, but it's not nearly as enjoyable as it once was. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I remember the intellectual stimulation of scouring the web for great blog posts around 2002-2004. You know, before people worried about ensuring the content was search-engine optimized, or if they'd be able to sustain the Slashdot (or I suppose Digg/Reddit) effect. There was something special there and people seem to have lost it as they rushed to implement Google Analytics and ensure that their readership kept growing.
This is an old hoax from 2005.

"The graphics for the article were lifted from another site's page about commercial keyboard loggers, and the purported letter from the Department of Homeland Security appears to be an altered version of someone else's example of correspondence from the DHS."

http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/dellbug.asp
In the U.S. it'd be politically impossible, but not in other countries, especially not in China. All the other countries have to say is "yes" and they very likely will because it'll be cheaper to transport goods and people between their markets. The Eurail pass will take you nearly anywhere you want to go in Europe for 6 months and $2k. They love trains.

This project and this vision is another nail in the U.S. hegemony coffin.
> 1) Why is this not on the motherboard or chipset level?

It depends on the particular design. If ethernet is provided by a separate chip, then the motherboard manufacturer doesn't have to be "in" on the whole affair. During final assembly the keyboard output is spliced through this special board then plugged into the ethernet chip.

However, if ethernet is completely integrated into the chipset, then this is probably already provided and we just haven't noticed it.

> 2) Why is this not backed up with TCPDUMPs of the call-home?

Because that would be a very bad design. It would completely blow the whole thing out of water. If someone designed it that way at the NSA, they should be fired immediately for incompetence.

What should happen is that this capability should be turned on selectively upon receiving a specific "wake-surveillance-up" packet or even better a specific timed sequence of regular packets (sort of a secret knock code using ethernet frames).

Even better they should be able to access this wirelessly as well and perhaps use some of the wires as antennas.

> 3) Source? Receipt of the computer/manufacturer/model? New or used purchase?

Now that would be interesting. Unless, of course, this story in an of itself is released by someone planning to integrate such devices and they just want to gauge public's response and see how this story spreads and who is concerned and who isn't. But I'm moving into 'tin foil hat area' here.

> 4) Storing e-mails transmitted over the wire has nothing to do with keyloggers, just FUD.

Agree.
oh yes I remember that story.
It seems they approached Digital Equipment Corporation to sell it to them for $1M and, they refused so these guys went ahead with their own search engine.
Yeah I know that trick ... but it's not quite the same as ALT+(underlined character of the menu item) thing on other systems. For fast typists, it's pretty awkward to hit the  first and then use arrow keys to move around. I wanna go directly to "File" menu by hitting SUPER+F, for example :|
Personally I love Haskell, but I did a bunch of mathematical logic at university so that might explain it :)

For practical work though I think hybrid FP/OO languages like Ruby and Scala (maybe Python and LISP too) are usually a better choice. Pure functional programming requires too much of an appreciation of higher structural aspects of mathematics, logic and theoretical computer science, to be viable for use with mixed-background teams on bigger projects.

I'm also not convinced Monads are the final word as a scalable structure for software engineering with FP. I think (hope?) research will yield something better.

But in environments where a lot of smart math/comp-sci oriented people work on a codebase, I think something pure functional can be a good choice. eg stuff like darcs (which is very algebraic), compilers, comp sci research, people at algorithmic trading firms, projects that want powerful code verification capabilities.
Volleyball 2009 | 100% FREE DOWNLOAD FULL PC GAMES
You should figure out your elevator pitch. I would've preferred, "personal blurb aggregator and it's better than Twitter or Tumblr because _____"

I still don't know why anyone would use this when you can do all this using existing microblog services like Twitter, Posterous, or Tumblr and it's obviously already exists in social networks like Facebook and Buzz (status updates with comments).
Wow, why all the negativity? This is an awesome project and lots of rational reasons it should go through, but you and other commenters are being so irrationally negative. People in the old days said, "International plane flights will never work. People won't trust flying over the ocean."

This project will happen. It's inevitable. It's the only way people will be able to move between countries when planes are too expensive to fuel.
It's awkward to fit Windows 7 Ultimate in 30G, never mind applications. Swap file and hibernation file, which will both be present by default, added up to over half that in my case immediately post-install (12G memory).

I'm using an Intel 80G SSD in my desktop as the boot drive, on Windows 7. Rather annoying is the fact that directories like Program Files, ProgramData and some others cannot be moved to another drive and replaced with junctions (the moral equivalent of a mount point), because some MS application installation features rely on hard links for some kind of checkpointing, and these cross-device links fail silently.
Joel, I just wanted to say that despite the fact the evidence suggests you are an intelligent person and I know nothing more about your position than the fact you have a puppy, I want to join the horde of people ensuring that we stick our nose in your business to remind you (since nobody else has) that dogs need to be fed rather a lot for optimum health (once every two days just doesn't cut it in my experience). They also require water, and unfortunately despite my best efforts most of the food and water just comes out again several hours later. No, despite what you think you can't seem to just reuse the stuff that comes out. I'm not certain if you were aware of these things so let me call you out in public as someone who doesn't.

...

Jeez, people, lay off with the dog advice already. You don't know enough about the situation to advise meaningfully.
JS animations took me back to 1999 again.
Everyone has to keep saying "yes" in perpetuity, or the project has gaps and interruptions and is worth less than was planned.

17 nations with wildly different goals are unlikely to keep saying yes.
...I still don't know why anyone would use this when you can do all this using existing microblog services...

1) Message length

2) Content preference learning system

3) Niche product
I'm not sure how 'qualified' I am to give you an answer, but I do technical due dilligence as a part of my consulting work, and some of that has been evaluating web based applications.

In general the criteria I use are:

- is the team a part of the acquisition or is it just the code

- how much of the knowledge about the code is present in
the heads of the authors and how much of it is
transferrable

- is the codebase in a language that you can easily get
developers for

- how much time is invested in the code

- what is the 'backlog' in terms of open critical tickets
and such

- what is my estimate on time to re-write the whole thing
from scratch (some help here from wordcount and gzip)

- how well will the current implementation scale

All those (and a whole bunch of other, but less relevant) criteria together make up the main ingredients of what goes in to determining what the value is of the code behind a web app.

I hope there is something of use in there for you.
> I also wonder about the feasibility of sending traffic that can be routed meaningfully at the data link layer level.

It was probably not designed to log and transmit data across a WAN (the Internet). It was probably designed to be used on a LAN. Whatever agency is meant to take advantage of this can probably get close enough to the victim's LAN switch without alerting them. Then they remotely turn on the surveillance capability by sending a specific frame or a specific patterns of regular ethernet frames. The device starts logging and/or transmitting the keys back to the switch. As a bonus, the wire that connects the little board to the ethernet board might also function as an antenna for wireless access.
Within the US, it'd be easier than going through the Middle East. To get Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Turkey, Poland Germany etc., totaling 17 countries in agreement is a monumental task, exceeding getting Israel and the Palestinians to settle their differences. Then every time China does something that annoys any of the 17 nations, those trains will be held hostage. Yeah, it's a huge challenge, but not because of the engineering.

That said, if it gets built, I'll be rushing to ride it.
Greenspun applies a book of sales advice to his business
"I hate to cry conspiracy theory, but I really do think that American culture in particular has been groomed to think and eat this way by food suppliers."

I tend to consider conspiracy theories a last resort. It is not that they are never true, just that reaching for them first is a mental crutch. In this case, I would suggest that given the importance of food, one would rather expect evolutionary considerations to dominate how we feel about food colorations. It may be true that making food "look good" can be used to hide flaws, but I seriously doubt the concept of "looking good" comes from training. I would imagine it mostly comes from genes and common-sense-type-training.

(I assert this without proof, which is why I mentioned my conspiracy-theory metric. My point is that I don't see a need for the conspiracy theory choice here.)
I'd be full time Chrome Mac if:

1. 1Password extension was equivalent to the Safari version (it will get there, I hope)

2. ChromeHelper didn't occasionally go insane and eat CPU cycles like donuts. After quitting Chrome, mind you.

3. I could open 50 tabs and start surfing immediately on my Macbook Air.

The last one is a big deal for me. I can open a 50+ tab folder on my Mac Pro in both Safari and Chrome and there is no noticeable difference.

On my Macbook Air (SSD, not half bad in general), opening 50+ tabs is fine in Safari and I can start going through them almost immediately. The same Chrome that works nicely on my Mac Pro chokes when I open those 50 tabs on my Macbook Air. Chokes hard, spikes CPU and pretty much becomes unresponsive for a good long while.

I'm really hoping Chrome on the Mac achieves the same performance as Safari. I'd switch full time in a heartbeat.
They said yes to airlines for the same reason they'll say yes to this project. China paying for it is a big incentive. Imagine if the U.S. told Romania they'd build them an international airport if Romania provided the concrete and iron.

Do you think Romania would say no? Of course not. Saying yes opens up Romania to the world.

Similarly, this rail line opens up europe and asia to a market that will dwarf the west. If they don't say yes, they will be excluded from perhaps the most powerful coalition of countries ever before assembled.

It is definitely not in any country's best interest to say no to this project. Why would they say no?
The first sentence must describe your product's essence in ten words or less (it really should be more like five). Cisco didn't talk about tcp/ip, or wires, or routers, or drivers, or a million other things that made connecting distinct networks possible. They said "we network networks". You need to find a way to do this for your product, and if you can't do it after a few weeks of thinking, you need to rethink your product entirely.
Not sure why you were downmodded; I agree with your sentiment exactly.

I have found it very difficult to read Digg for the past year or two, similar to how I can't read Slashdot anymore. The highest voted articles are not really that interesting, and you'd think that technical/scientific articles would be more interesting to a group of self-supposed "rationalists". Instead the site is morbidly political, with each "group" colonizing its own set of articles and never interacting.

I much prefer the level of conversation at HN and a handful of blogs.

If you feel that this is a mis-reading of the situation, I strongly recommend this thread:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Digg_Saying_Yes_to_NoSQL_Going_Ste...

Sort by the highest dugg comment. There are two that I noted at the top that were somewhat interesting, but the rest were just not useful; me too style comments to the extreme.
Congratulations, to raise a million and a half from a VC within two months of a YC rejection is probably a record.

That should really help to put a YC rejection in to perspective for those who receive 'bad news' in the mail in the next couple of days.
Partial Picnik
I'll preorder my ticket. If it was easier, why hasn't it been done yet? Our rail lines are ancient compared to the rest of the world. We spent too much money on outdated infrastructure for cars and we are about to be leapfrogged. The same thing happened with wireless. Imagine if we had spent that money and energy building something efficient instead of catering to the individual and hugely inefficient cars.

Regarding the politics, you know Russia, Iran, and China are friends right? Turkey needs to do more for their place in the EU. Germany wants a bigger market for its products. Poland can be bought and China will pay more to build the rail than the U.S. will pay to prevent it. Kazakhstan is still trying to shake the Borat image. They are poor and they want to increase their wealth. This is their ticket!

Besides, poland is in the north and they only need one way in so resistance is reduced through parallel resistors.

The U.S. can't even build a fence to keep out immigrants -- not that I think they should.

I wish there was something in the U.S. that was at all exciting. What are we doing?? We're blowing all our cash on guns and we are running out of butter!
Existing rail network covers entire world already and works without any drama.
I suspect that this article may be about Optimus Maximus as much as anything else.
It is cheaper for me to fly Aalborg-Copenhagen than it is to take the train.

I don't see this as a cost cutting meassure.

It would also be a major annoyance to have to go through customs in 10 different countries.
Heh, this will be possible on the iPad too. Wacom must be shaking in their boots.
Theoretical reliability and lifespan is much higher than that of mechanical drives. There have been bad "batches" of SSD drives from one or two companies, but there are from mechanical drive companies too.

"Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact."
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34...

People should have backups anyway, so I guess if the companies are standing behind these drives and all the users so far are pleased it's not really an issue, though it doesn't beat the mech drives really (although in mobile applications shock resistance is higher) but there seems to be no cons. It's just price, size and speed to decide on them now.

Still, given the prices, for home applications I imagine people just want a boot drive and storage on a larger mech. On the server side there are probably quite a few databases that could benefit from 1TB with good random access and throughput.
I didn't make it either. I still think I have a great idea though, but what really intrigues me are those 60 companies that made it through to the interview round. They must have some insanely great ideas!