skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Less than an hour to fix it, without any major data loss or collateral damages that I can see. That's pretty good !
the solution I used leveraged non-blocking I/O in a roundabout way. 150 separate procs (quick and dirty) per instance. no threads. I let the OS manage the I/O in that regard. My thinking was that if I had "a lot" of procs trying I/O... I'd get the same effect. again... quick/dirty.
If you're not really devoted to monetizing it , you might be able to compete with google on ad quality.
google's really into getting maximum money , so many times the ads suck.

You, on the other hand , could offer the most helpfull ads.i'm thinking of something like showing the disruptive companies for a service your looking for.

for example , let's say you're looking for a divorce lawyer. one option to save a lot of money is using an expert system software to generate the required papers. most people don't know about this option, probably because real lawyers outbid them in the ad market.

So knowing about the expert system option is very useful.

Of course , you don't have to show only disruptive ads , but an ad combination that offer the best knowledge for the user.

Now , if there's a way to make this scalable across many product types, you have a very powerful feature, one that the big search engines would find very hard to imitate, because it would hurt their profits.
The list of things is pretty long... Notes for an eventual review here: Read my outline here: http://meef.us/~rev/n1/n1-notes.txt

@ergo98: Please elaborate. Even if I concede that my problems with multitasking are imaginary, I'd love to find out how I can enable built-in support for Exchange calendaring, copy from emails, and make the N1's screen readable in bright sunlight... Believe me, I'd love to find out there was just a preference I missed!

(replying here because I can't reply to your comment directly)
The Ultimate Food Diary & Best  ways that Ultimate Foods for Ultimate Health
Always Be Coding?
We switched over in our shop on release week, and I must say that I'm enjoying the new features of .NET and C# 4.0. COM interop with Office Communicator is cleaner. IronRuby + Sass for css with ASP MVC rocks. Optional parameters have killed off many pass-through overloads. Also, DynamicObject and IDynamicMetadataProvider give potential for the dynamic keyword goes far beyond ExpandoObject. It opens up possibility for new DSLs within C#. Although likely to be misused, having the power to manipulate the meaning of the language is an impressive feature.
Certainly you should revise your text to be the best possible. But a lot of app buyers simply don't read the text, and dealing with negative reviews is part of the app store process. I sell a gps and offline maps app. In big capital letters with asterisks around it we say that iPod touch users need an external GPS device to gps track, but that they can use the offline maps. We still get irate emails from touch users.
Whoa whoa -- next you'll be telling me that the claims of strapping young bucks buying t-bone steaks at the supermarket with food stamps were, um, a lie.
An alternative (or even complementary measure) to strict abuse detection is graduated benefit reduction.

Graduated benefit reduction might prevent the moral hazard, but it does so at the expense of introducing all sorts of assumptions about the availability of work, and the likelihood of getting an offer and becoming reemployed again quickly.

In fact, it may have a non-linear detrimental effect, because people who end up unemployed long-term will come to depend more on UI as more and more of their savings dry up. It stops being effective just about the time they need it to be effective.

The UI system inherently sucks because of this; either people will game it, or it will be eroded too severely to be of any real use during really tough economic times.

As an aside, to help my own thinking about this, how much does the average employer contribute per employee to UI benefits? This is really open-ended on purpose, I'm just kind of looking for ballpark numbers, from as many contexts as people are willing to offer them. :-)
Yes, and when you prorogue parliament it effectively dissolves any tabled motions in parliament. Taking away the chance for the opposition to lose confidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Canadian_parl...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112100
Why 'hooking up' has become so prevalent on campus
This is the national enquirer: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/
PHP engineer for a small fast moving technology startup
The last time I checked, no one had to pass an IQ test to use the Internet. Maybe it's time for Twitter (and other social media--you know who you are), to require potential users to pass a "minimal common sense" test. BTW, my remark is intended as humor and is in no way intended as a measure of my own common sense.
Ask HN: PayPal's Adaptive Payments API
I stumbled across PayPal's Adaptive Payments API (https://www.x.com/community/ppx/adaptive_payments) and was considering using it to facilitate payments. It has some interesting features like chained and parallel payments. So a buyer can make a single payment and the funds can be split amongst multiple receivers. You also get to choose who pays the associated fees. But the downside is that it requires both the buyer and receiver(s) to have PayPal accounts. Is it a bad idea to force the buyer to have a PayPal account? How unwilling are people to create a PayPal account for a purchase? Or just use PayPal in general?
"... whenever I have a moments pause while waiting in line or stopped in traffic"

I've noticed this as well, and it really bothers me. I wonder why I can't sit through a stoplight without a distraction, and I realize it must not be a healthy thing that I've developed.
Front running: Joe wants to buy shares. I buy ahead of Joe, driving up the price, let him buy, then I sell my shares, profiting off the price delta. This costs Joe money, since he buys at a high price and sells at a lower price.

Flash trading: Joe wants to buy shares at price 10 or better and places an order on NYSE. The best ask on ARCA is 9.99, but the best ask on NYSE is 10. NYSE gives me the option of filling Joe's order at price 9.99 (rather than routing the trade to ARCA), saving Joe the cost of routing.

Flash trading and front running are just not the same thing. Flash trading only happens to traders who chose for their orders to be flashed. All flash trading does is moves the trade from ARCA to NYSE.
I have to say, I do love the fact that everyone here is whining about people making $355 a week. Before taxes. I'd love to see the people here attempt to live an adult life on (52*$355) $18,460 before taxes.
Mine were reset to zero but the numbers are the same now.
This reads like the guy just discovered the phrase "object oriented". I know he's a smarty, but come on, haven't we had the idea of data as objects for years now? Is it that the iphone is the first device to make it usable by restricting the available pool of data types instead of trying to boil the ocean by making "everything an object"?
Hey! Viagra makes life worth living for a lot of people... so I've heard.
I get what you mean in that names definitely change as we get used to them.

But these names aren't created equal. "Duck" is a noun. There's a very definite, "meat-space" thing attached to that word. It's a whole lot harder to visualize a "Google" (a google of what?) than it is a duck. And what's a Bing?

I don't think there's any level of familiarity that will allow me to read Duck Duck Go and not see a duck. Again, is it a bad thing? I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing. But it is a thing, it's not just like the others.
It appears that Taylor Swift and Mariah Carey have un-followed me. The others that I forced into my followers list are still there though. Kinda disappointed about Taylor, I really thought that she and I would get a lot of value from each-others tweets.
Apple has never played the numbers game. To do so would be like BMW, Jaguar or Lexis selling a car for the same price as a Kia Rio. Sure they'd sell tonnes of them, but what is the point in that?

They make their money by making good, high quality and reasonably expensive products. If their stock price keeps going the same way then they shouldn't even consider changing the recipe!
You should be angry at twitter. They have made a spammers paradise. Any blame should rest with them IMHO.
No self-respecting professor wants to discuss the soul in class
This has been my experience too. I'm downloading now to see if performance has improved.
Why did categories instead of folders never take off? Just implementation complexity?
Flash trading: Joe wants to buy shares at price 10 or better.
You are Goldman Sachs, you see Joe's order before anyone else.

You see shares costing 9.80, so you buy it up quickly, and sell it to Joe for 10, making a profit of 0.20 per share while driving up prices for Joe.

That is front running.
I'm the lucky "business" guy who works with this team. All of us have built real companies in the Valley. You don't have to have their level of experience, as long as you're sharp and motivated. Couple things about us:

- Our investors are by invite-only.
- You won't read about us on TechCrunch. We prefer to work quietly at our desks on products that directly make money (and evolve the web at the same time, interesting byproduct).
- Working with this team will open lots of doors to you in Silicon Valley.
If you have any questions about Tender, I'd be happy to help answer them. Just ping me on support@tenderapp.com or here, whichever works for you.
you are in favour of startups being actively ruined because you dont personally find them useful?
$10 Million Round For Ruby On Rails Startup Heroku (YC W08)
Sounds like a backdoor that someone forgot, or was too lazy to remove.
There are constant references to the etched-glass aesthetic with no examples or explanation, and while I am pretty familiar with iPad reviews and whatnot, I have no idea what this means.
What excatly is "same" between the teeny shuffle and an iPod touch? This only underscores my point that you need a fair amount of diversity in your products o dominated a market.
I have to say this again, be careful with giving advice like this. To me, what should be encourage is people to think for themselves; just as you can figure out this start up game most other's can too. 41% of Entrepreneurs succeed on their first go; I think advice like this just taken as static algorithm for success without considering the context of your situation can be very detrimental.
I spent a while today trying to decide what I like better, Cocoa Emacs or Aquamacs, and I eventually decided upon Aquamacs.

I found that Cocoa Emacs is faster to setup and get running, but once you have Aquamacs behaving the way you want it the extra features really are worth it. For me, tab support and the ability to re-open windows & frames from the last session seals the deal.

One oddity that I struggled at first with was how to get it to load ~/.emacs.d/init.el. I eventually solved this by loading it from: ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el
I'd only used an iPhone for 6 months, but the experience was positive enough that I'm still in the headache phase with the N1. Largely over hardware problems that will likely never be solved until a later revision: battery life, AMOLED screen being unreadable in direct sunlight, the camera can take 1-4 seconds before snapping a photo, dust under the screen, low-end multitouch sensor, and flaky touch sensing (often thinks I'm pressing an inch down). I feel sort of ripped off when I think of some of those aspects.

Don't get me wrong, there things I prefer, even over a jailbroken iPhone- especially the notifications system. That's genius, IMHO.

My trough is the Facebook app- I went from making a few photo posts a day, mostly of my kid, to one or two over the last two weeks. Never bothered to update Feacebook until I got an iPhone- it's rough enough on Android that I've stopped.
Ask HN: What metrics does your business need?
There's been a lot of discussion on business dashboards here and elsewhere recently particularly since software house Panic blogged about their internal dashboard [1]. These dashboards tie together up-to-the-minute information on the various aspects of your business such as outstanding support requests and emails, project status, sales/revenue metrics, web analytics, infrastructure status etc and put them all in one place for easy consumption. I know that BCC Patrick (patio11) is a big fan (so much so that he built his own [2]), others too have mentioned how useful they are.

I thought it might be useful to offer a hosted dashboards for businesses so I began working on one that would consume data from some common APIs that many businesses - particularly startups - will be plugged into. The service will launch into a mvp beta in one month with about a dozen APIs including Google Analytics, Basecamp, Commission Junction, Pingdom, ChartBeat & MailChimp [3]. One thing it's not launching with is a custom data upload facility but I've got a pretty good idea of how that's going to look and it'll be added shortly after.

The question I'm asking today - what are the most important metrics to your business and how do you currently track them?

[1] http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/ and discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1177227

[2] http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/dashboard-on-a-shoestring.htm and discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189203

[3] http://www.geckoboard.com (you can register your name to be part of the beta)
It seems Taylor has un-followed me as well. I was also thinking that she could get some value from my cooking tweets.
>The list of things is pretty long...

The N1 has flaws, but many of your complaints are hilariously wrong. The fact that you give pronouncements on multitasking borders on comical, as you have no understanding about how Android's multitasking works.
Grokking Idiomatic Dynamic Ruby
This post looks like a great example of networking :)

It looks like the blogger, the guy who posted the link (1 hour ago) and all the 8 commenters are based in the same town.(I also know that many of them know each other) Most of the commenters have karmas less than 25 and it is probably not unreasonable to assume that most of the 29 upvotes came from people who know these 8 commenters.

Nothing wrong with any of this, and no offense intended, but I often see posts asking how posts get to the front page. Well, for all of you, here is one example of how posts can get to the front page.
>He had the confidence of the House

No he didn't. He introduced a confidence motion and the three opposing parties, representing a clear majority of MPs, announced that they would vote against the motion and ask the GG for a chance to form a coalition government. Harper responded by asking for a prorogue - an unprecedented manoeuvre to avoid facing a vote of non-confidence.
Starving yogi' astounds Indian scientists
How many Facebook users won’t "Like" Places?
How is shouting threats on Twitter fundamentally different than calling the airport or going there and shouting the same words there?

I don't think it would be OK if I emailed TechCrunch and threatened to kill them all if they don't stop their blogging within a week. And if the police comes call it a joke.
The wrong way to "personalize" your startup's welcome e-mail
A perfect example of how not to "personalize" your startup's welcome e-mail.
The Problem with Software Patents
Sass makes your life easier. Compass is a life-changer, especially for layout.
It's impressive. It feels like BeOS, unlike Zeta which was had poor quality.

There's some things not like they should be. This alpha is missing vi and ed (and no 've' either). It has nano. It has gcc and python2.6 and a perl5 though. Python libraries seem to work.

In some ways it's further ahead than Be. For example - far better web browser than was ever available back in the day (even relative to web browsing standards of the time). Could use some polish, but still a remarkable achievement. Better email functionality, although parts could be implement a lot better.

Little things are not right - keyboard shortcuts and the like. But it's much better than I was expecting on this front. People have definitely been putting energy into quality. A lot of little things work like they should that I've tested.

I'm using it under vmware on a macbook. The 'tracker' interface still feels way better to use than anything else I've used (including current-era finder).

I was a die-hard user, and it's quite novel to think that - long after having given up on the dream of being able to run this as my primary workstation OS - I may be on the brink of being able to do just that. The key will be whether it can be installed natively with all drivers working effectively.

Update: dell lat. gets a good pass on compatilibity: http://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/dell_latitude_x1_dre...
Also I call bullshit on Ingenic XBurst. Ingenic won't release any public documentation on what these extra opcodes are or what they do.
I've installed it in VirtualBox. Pretty slick UI (although it does take some getting used too). Reminds me a whole bunch of most Linux\Unix distros. It's multitasking abilities has been hyped up much, although it didn't seem that mind-blowing to me (that might have been because it was running in a VM). Reportedly the OS code and API is very clean, so unless you are planning on developing on the platform I don't see why you would choose it as a primary OS over Linux.
Am I the only one who thinks Dustin Curtis is kinda a retard with good design skills?
Museums are obsolescent
How does one tell a quick + sincere "thank you" from a slow and insincere "thank you"?
They no longer have a stranglehold on the platform the majority of software is written on.

Apple is starting to out-evil them in terms of perception.
Why safari? You mean to add to safari?
USPTO Ramping Up Patent Approvals
Congrats guys - 60,000 app milestone last week, $10m funding this week.

It's a great service and I'm glad to see it continue to grow.
Help build a Test Content database (Wiki) for testing Software/Apps
As someone who sometimes think the advice 37s tries to be a one-size-fit-all (that is: it worked for us, it's the gold standard), I've got to say I've never been disappointed with their decisions in writing software and designing UI.

My favorite feature: Backpack remembers that I use openID to log in, so when I boot up my laptop, and head over to backpack that's the login screen I see. Well done.
Another thing to worry about is manufacturers abandoning support for old phones prematurely, or causing long delays between updates to new major versions. (I'm not sure if Android phones can update over the air, but if not then you may have a large number of users who never upgrade their OS.)

Yes, technical users can probably acquire third-party firmware if the manufacturers drop the ball, but that's not a mainstream fix.

Android will not be fun to develop for if you're targeting (hardware spec fragmentation) x (Android feature fragmentation) different combinations of phone.
Great to hear.

As a community of startup founders, we're all in the game to make money, and as such we're all nominally competing against one another, albeit on a very low level.

Whenever I see somebody making a business decision based on emotion rather than technical analysis, I can't help but crack a little smile. One more potential competitor has weakened himself just that little bit.

Closed minds in others are a competitive advantage for your business.
Apple stores have a "concierge"? Oh brother.

I'm starting to get embarrassed that I own a Macbook. I wonder if I can decal it up to look pedestrian...
SFO room needed for international entrepreneur
I'm a mature Aussie female entrepreneur from London pitching to vcs for a site here. I need somewhere to stay from 18thMay to 10July preferably SFO or Berkeley. I can't pay rent but can provide business coaching (ICF certified business coach) or housework etc. Email me if you have something that may suit ezebis at gmail.com Thanks
you'll have to excuse me for the tone. I realise it was just a straight up repetition of the original article's outrageously negligent strapline. But it's still absolutely your duty to set it right rather than help propagate a very misleading meme. And the same will be true of the generation your partner is now teaching, bless her. Teach them to set messages right, based on fact and truth not sensationalism and angst or ignorance. If our generation truly revolutionised the media, let that be the revolution, not the creation of an online echo chamber for misleading memes...
That's actually really cool. I'm not ruby/rails user, but if I were I would certainly use Heroku, it is one of the YC backed companies that really stand out for me.

From the design of their website to the naming schemes, the price points and so on it all seems to be equally well thought out.

Back when considering which platform to try next (python/django or ruby/rails) I was very impressed with the way they did their best to minimize the surprise factor and to really inform the user up front of what they're getting in to.

The documentation is also excellent. I still don't know if I made the right choice, but I'm a bit too far in to django now to easily back out again so I guess I'll stick to it, but to see Heroku has now found very solid financing is definitely a factor to consider.
Startup Insights From the Co-Founder of Kayak
"It's impressive. It feels like BeOS, unlike Zeta which was had poor quality."

I guess I should have clarified - I've never used BeOS either, or well, even seen it I think, so more detail would be interesting, but from what you're telling me so far its not in a very usable state, but nonetheless I'm curious, might install it some weekend.
Ask HN: Distributed teams
So, recently there has been a lot of talk about how good distributed teams are, but, i'm having problems finding companies that actually do it. So, it would be awesome to get a list of companies that allow for people to work from home most/all of the time.
My followers have rather increased because I made Justin Beiber follow me by exploiting the bug and some chicks followed me just because of that.
It's obviously not statically typed, but Perl has dynamic scoping (and that was the preferred way to have a local variable in perl4, before lexically scoped vars were introduced in perl5).

Whether perl is part of the lisp community is another matter :-)
i used it, yes, but only to test it out. i was too curious not to.
> EDIT: I amended my comment above to be irritating and sarcastic toward people who modded me up.

Classy! My email is in my profile by the way, in case you ever want to take something 'offline'.
Ha, yeah wouldn't surprise me. I don't remember it but definitely believe you.

I think what New Coke proved though is that haters have an unduly large influence. New Coke kicked both original Coke and Pepsi's asses in blind taste tests. It's possibly bad to have something that has a love to hate ratio, even if a large one, rather than something people respect but don't care much about one way or the other.
You apparently do not know what a flash trade is.

A flash trade gives Goldman the opportunity to fill Joe's order at the NBBO price before it is routed to another exchange. It does absolutely nothing else. The person receiving the flash is even prohibited from making offers on that security on other exchanges for a few milliseconds after receiving the flash.

This gives Goldman an advantage over other high frequency traders since it gives Goldman a higher fill rate, which is definitely unfair.
New video on Web 3.0 - "Semantic Web"
'Deschooling Society' by Ivan Illich is by far the best book on this topic I've ever read. Old, and somewhat dated since it presages the Internet but never experienced it - but still as fundamentally brilliant