skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I too think Diaspora will fail (got a blog post in the works with more specific reasoning) but I think this is a little too pessimistic.

Sure they've got a lot of money; which is not a good thing really. Sure their plan (as much as we have seen of it so far) has serious hurdles to overcome.

Im pretty sure that it won't be the solution everyone is looking for.

But we should let them give it a shot. Hell if they had come to me asking for $10K I'd have given it to them and let them at least try.

There is technical merit in the idea. It is going to raise the profile of privacy in general and moving away from FB in particular. And at the end there will be things to take away and work with.

It might even fluke out and take off - wierder things have happened.

We can criticise now, but lets not judge.
Reminds the Tacoma Bridge incident some 70 years ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mclp9QmCGs
This is really interesting to see. I can't wait to see how they morphed this concept into what BioShock became.
My guess is the parachute record still stands. 19.5 miles is not quite 10% the minimum altitude of the space shuttle.

Then you jump and wait for the feeling to come back in your right arm.
Well somebody there needs to fix the problem that arises if you subscribe to subreddits that don't have many stories on them.

I unsubscribed from all of them, then started over...currently I'm subscribed to machinelearning, linguistics, and datasets. Often when I load the page, there are only 2-3 stories on it...other times it will say "there is nothing here".

I'm sure it's trying to just show me the newest stuff, but it would be nice if it showed me enough of the newest stuff to actually fill the page.
the article has no merit, younger people get the technology and are open to try it out.
Sorry if this has already been commented on - how in the hell can anyone insist that "no one will want to setup their own seed because it will be too difficult"? It hasn't been developed yet so how does anyone know what setup will be required? What if they figure out how to automate configuration?

Maybe I'm missing something, but bittorrent is wildly popular, typically requires little to no configuration, and acts a "seed" (node) in a distributed network. I don't understand why the prevailing assumption is that diaspora will necessarily require some complicated configuration that is beyond the capabilities of your average, competent computer user.
I think it is more of a case of the software locking you to the hardware for apples case which is rather interesting now that the hardware, at least for Macs, is now pretty much standard hardware with regards to processors and such.
GCC doesn't use C99 mode by default? Is it going to become the default at some point?
And here it is (after a little Firebug hacking):

http://imgur.com/fNjWJ.png
He admits that he doesn't know Ruby deeply, but then he goes on to assert that Ruby people don't seem to create messes that paint themselves into corners.

From what I've read plenty of people have done just that in Ruby because of monkeypatching.
YC has just closed a new $8.25 million fund
Why do you want to use your phone as a wifi hotspot ? It'll drain the battery. The telco's in the US are the worst of the lot. Android and iPhone are 2 great platforms, Im happy that both are here.
I agree and $50M isn't that much to Toyota. Also, there may have been lease or shutdown and cleanup costs of the NUMMI site that probably would have exceeded $50M if no one took it over.
By "no one" we generally mean "the vast majority". As tech-able people we make up a small minority of social network users - many many people struggle with aspects of Facebook. Setting up a Diaspora seed (while possibly not beyond them to learn!) is an immediate turn off :)
All he talks about in the article is features. Is the day-to-day user experience in Froyo good enough to actually compete with the iPhone yet? Is it no longer necessary to run third-party utilities to keep the system in order?

I want Android to get to this level of maturity to keep Apple on its toes, but I've yet to see any evidence Google is there yet.
My personal experience is that people who change countries for a career really give a shit about that career.
Are they famous for that? I have never heard stories of how they deal with paying customers, but then, I don't think I know any paying customers of Google. No snark intended, I'm really curious to hear.
I really appreciate the effort that has gone into building the demo. But i disagree with you.It is extremely easy for developers to provide fallback content when Flash is not availble.

As a developer, here is why i(personally) wont choose CSS3 animations for building similar content anytime in the near future:

-Works only on webkit browsers

-Performance is really bad on Chrome. Compared to most of the heavy weight flash content out there, this is just a very basic animation.
Basho's Riak Search Roadmap
Well, think of it this way: how many of the 10,000 or so active mountain bikers in washington have an iphone, and how many that do bother taking it with them on a trail? My guess is many mountain bikers that would spend money on the sport already know the trails they like to ride, or participate in online communities to find new ones. Not sure how much market there is for an iphone app to do it.

Our service doesn't have much for mountain bikers (yet), so I don't have any numbers to share. This week I am building out better tracking/identification of riders, so should be able to get better insight into how different types of riders interact/value our service.
Why I Hated Landing Pages…
I like the idea of having the freedom to do everything but also having intelligent defaults to nudge the programmers in the right direction. Optional immutability is a great example of this. When you make something the default, you send the message "this is usually the right way to go about things".
He also thought SCO would win, with such prophetic headlines as "What SCO Wants, SCO Gets."

I'm pretty confident in the future of Android, but a positive prediction from Lyons is one of the few things that could cause me to reconsider my opinion!

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lyons )
Post Question : get Answer
If you want to remove the sound use this bookmarklet which deletes the iframe used to load the Flash file:

javascript:(function(){var rancidbacon={};try{rancidbacon.com=document.getElementsByName("pm-sound")[0];rancidbacon.com.parentElement.removeChild(rancidbacon.com);}catch(_){}})()

More details here: http://stuff.rancidbacon.com/google-pacman/
I agree with everything you're saying about programming languages having a grain, and of making some things easy and other things hard. That's the general case.

However, the two specifics we're talking about are well-behaved code and consistent code. Most language in theory make it ridiculously easy to re-use code, to make code DRY. Languages like Ruby actually give you more tools for making code consistent than languages like Java.

Yet, there is a lot of awful Ruby code and some elegant Java code. I've seen some amazing assembler code. It seems that somehow languages don't seem to have a lot of influence over what we might call architecture.

Perhaps the issue is that languages are hand tools, but programs are cathedrals.

p.s. If I had to bet, I'd say there is more of a correlation between languages and architecture than a causal relationship. Paul wrote about this some time ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
This argument is common, but I think it's bogus. There's plenty of astonishing Java out there.

More rigid languages don't lead to less astonishment under complexity. A given line of code may contain less astonishment, because there are fewer possibilities for what it might be doing, but what matters is global understanding, not local. The meaning of a program is not the sum of the meaning of its parts. Otherwise we'd all be writing in assembler; it's easy to say what this is doing, locally:

mov eax, [ebp + 8]

The key is writing well-behaved and consistent code, which you can do in most languages.

But the set of problems for which a well-behaved and consistent program is readily writeable is not the same for all languages.
Does anyone have anyone any feedback on Juice Plus? I took it for a month and didn't notice any difference and energy levels or boosted immune system.

I've heard conflicting reports - some say it's all full of bullshit studies by the manufacturer claiming all sorts of benefits and others swear by it.
If you want reference sites, why not just add them directly?

Most of those sites has an opensearch provider.
If we would just all collectively stop tolerating this crap and treat it with the contempt it deserves then patents would disappear.
This is exactly the sentiment I think we need to get rid of. I have it too. Why? Because it is depressing to think of ourselves as a product; we'd rather just dismiss that idea as "being of a culture we do not choose to belong to".

But the problem is that's like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground. People are making money off your existence, off of every click you make online, off of your gender and your religion and what you read last weekend.

Until we are able to accept that reality as active, willing participants, we won't be able to demand better legislation to give us agency is the issue. The ostrich never had any agency in the stampede rumbling by him.
I tether it via usb. It charges as it tethers.
Check out Healthforce Vitamineral Greens! They are composed of real foods, they are raw, and easily assimilated by your body. No vitamin supplements needed when you get the nutrients directly from the real food source! http://www.healthforce.com/
Oops Microsoft Dynamics GP's huge security hole (Caesar cypher)
Right, I believe I now understand more of what's happening.

Prior to C99 there was no strtof. Some people may have rolled their own, but it wasn't provided, you used strtod and cast to float if that's what you wanted.

Then C99 included strtof, so the code (and hence symbol) became available in the libraries. However, to avoid clashing with legacy code in which someone used their own version, the prototype is only declared if the compiler is in C99 mode.

That means that if you're not in C99 mode, you use the symbol strtof, and you don't declare the function for yourself, the compiler successfully finds the symbol in the library and links to the C99 code, but hasn't declared the prototype, so you don't get what you think you get.

And by default you don't get warned.

To repeat the moral: use -Wall.
We don't just "trust" anyone to drive a car properly nor do we trust that people will not shoplift. There are laws in effect that intend to prevent underaged people from driving without consequence (as well as anyone who has demonstrated they can't be trusted to drive properly in the past). And stores often use some sort of system to detect when people walk away with things they did not purchase.

I agree that on a certain level, we operate in a way where we assume people are trustworthy. As far as I know, there are no strict laws on how bank queues work, and there probably don't need to be.

But crowdsourcing? I see it as having plenty of problems, and I can't agree that we just trust people or corporations to accept what is more of an investment under the guise of a donation in a responsible manner. They need to be held accountable for the money they accept.

On the other hand, I feel little sympathy for people who throw their money at projects like this. I wouldn't invest in a flying car if it was just an idea presented to me with no working progress.
The average Kickstarter is not pulling down anywhere near 200k, and it would take a remarkably clever con to pull off what you propose. Why would a clever con target Kickstarter, something that is trivially traceable? Also, why target a large group of smart, motivated individuals who know quite a bit about how to track people down on the internet?
I think a better comparison, is to linux - since it really is a linux kernel underneath, and it is open source. Linux has plenty of flaws, especially with hardware, but anyone can take the code and try and improve it, then contribute back to the main code base. The cyanogenmod is an example of this.
> The problem with Reddit is that it does not localize content, only the interface. It should be either both or none.

That's not true. It has localized interfaces and content. The non-english content just isn't very popular.
I think it will be okay as long as updates are continually released and those updates are supported by the carriers because phones have a rather fast rate of adoption considering many people do the two year contract and phone upgrade cycle.
In your preferences, do you have it set to hide things that you've upvoted?
To be fair, recent versions probably do. For reasons I won't (or can't) go into, I have a tendency to be using slightly older systems. That's why I'm more interested in finding out how things can be traced, rather than worrying about this specific mis-match between my expectations and the system's behavior.
To date, support for hardware accelerated H.264 video playback in Flash Player has only been possible on Windows PCs and x86-based netbooks

I love how they try to make it look like they support two different platforms when they're both exactly one and the same..... and they forgot to add "that run Windows" at the end of the sentence, because netbooks running Linux or OS X are not hardware-accelerated.

Shame, really.
Facebook did not integrate in to MySpace, and managed to unseat it. I agree that ease of use is key, and this is what has crippled cypherpunk projects in the past; it's why STARTTLS protects so much email, and PGP protects so little. Also, most people using IM service today use Adium or Pidgin, which supports multiple networks.
"Over the last few days we've been running an online poll asking..." fail
I can't wait until Clang++ is a standard part of CEDET and Code::Blocks and even Qt Creator and Eclipse. (Heck even Netbeans, I feel charitable today :)
True to some degree, but it's also about having a level of detail needed for something that many people will rely on.

Give a simple brownie recipe to enough people and one them will burn down the house because you never specifically said to turn off the oven when done baking.
That was sarcasm. I have had no direct experience, but from what I have read, you are generally ignored, and if they dont like you , your results ranking can be trashed.
That's true. Windows is burdened by the fleets of corporate computers running all kinds of proprietary business software, and it must maintain backwards compatibility. Phones get replaced every two years or so, so there won't be much legacy support issues.
API Importance and Quora
The competition is great for the users.
The only bad thing is the war of words from either side that insults the intelligence of the readers.
FTC Approves Google AdMob Acquisition
First 1000 lines are just the map and related data
I'm sorry, but why are people even talking about this thing? It's...nothing.

Hey, guys, I'm going to start a new social networking site and it's going to, uhh...solve all the problems that facebook has! I'll call it "beehive". (Oh, wait, that might actually make sense)

Me and my "team" are going to pose around for a bunch of hip shots of us sitting around and being hip.

Sorry, I don't mean to sound so harsh, I just don't get it with all this buzz over this non-project.
Congrats pg, jl, tlb and rtm! 70 startups per year is an amazing number - how long before YC is involved in practically every startup in Silicon Valley?
but that's $5/mo not $5 total. On an annual basis you can just multiply the subscribers by 12 and it's like making 600k sales/year, expect they are automatic. That is $3mm/year.
Interesting points, but I think you're bordering on straw manning the author. I'll grant you that maybe C++ is about as bad an example as you can get of putting responsibility in the hands of the programmer.

In fact, it was behind a lot of Java's decision to take that power out of the developers' hands. I would argue that Java was an overreaction. It corrected the safety issues, but also removed a lot of the ability to create abstractions. Want a global variable? Those are bad, don't use them. Want multiple inheritance? That's bad, don't use it. Want operator overloading? That's bad, don't use it.

The problem is that the fact that those things are bad in some cases (even arguably most cases), doesn't mean they should be forbidden. I know what I'm doing. If I want to use a global variable I should be able to. I know what I'm writing. The language designer doesn't.

In other words, to make a long story short: I don't think he was trying to say that responsibility needs to be in the developers' hands in all cases. But I think that he makes a valid case that newer languages are right in moving some of that responsibility back to the programmer.
A certain level of boilerplate and redundancy is humorous. I'm wondering if all of their food specifications contains that "All ingredients shall be clean, sound, wholesome, and free from foreign material,
evidence of rodent or insect infestation, extraneous material, off-odors, off-flavors, and off-colors." (quote from the linked pdf), or just this one. Maybe they should define some general rules, after that a brownie recipe is really only one page.
I dont know why, but I'm really happy this exists.
At the same time, to take a position that you know for a fact will drive the bubble up to be larger, to fall harder...

A long position drives prices up and inflates the bubble. A short position lowers prices and lets a little bit of air out of the bubble.
I guess am in the minority here of people who have actually used a Zune (HD, completely by accident, woke up on the floor of a Zune product manager's sweet apt in downtown Seattle while visiting a friend, long story.) I've got to say, I was impressed. Screen looked amazing, device is smaller and more responsive than an iPhone. The browser was sort of lame but you could just put Opera on it, no?

Anyways, it's true that Zune is getting trounced, but if Apple continues to piss people off and there are alternatives that are actually a pleasure to use, that may change.
Ask HN: Similar Image search
What are the alternatives to Gazopa, i tried to upload an image and search for similar but it is almost useless. Now with 'Google Similar Images' you cannot upload your own images as a search query.
this site needs an api... although... hmm... it probably just would be middle-man for the api it pulls from... but all the same.. this site needs an api...
not on my slightly older imac's graphics card.
Pyposterous, a Python API wrapper for Posterous
Where did people get the idea that you'll have to set up your own seed? Most people can't install WordPress either; hence WordPress.com and a viable open-source business model.
Monitoring Your Server w/StatusNet Updates
He didn't really say the Zune had a shot. He just said that the new Zune was a good alternative, and didn't suck like the previous generation.

He noted that most iPod owners were already locked-in by their libraries. His closing line: "Microsoft, you've got your work cut out for you."
I don't think they're making it sound like they're supporting two platforms, they're just trying to exclude non-x86-based netbooks..
I've been coding in Ruby/Rails for 3 years now, and been active in the community, and I haven't yet done that or encountered anyone who had done that. People are warned that monkey-patching is dangerous, they learn how to monkey-patch responsibly, and they act accordingly and responsibly - if something does go wrong with monkey-patching (which, as I've said, seems not to happen), the person who did the patching is aware of why things are going wrong, and doesn't blame it on the language - I can't remember reading a single query in, say, #rubyonrails, where the problem was due to monkey-patching.
8.25 million / 20 K per startup = 412.5 startups!
They do make good wines, though I've mostly had the whites (spouse's preference).
I think the best comment on this comes from Glenn Vanderburg:

http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Development/sharp_an...

The money quote here is this:

"Weak developers will move heaven and earth to do the wrong thing. You can’t limit the damage they do by locking up the sharp tools. They’ll just swing the blunt tools harder."

Which is so very, very true in my experience.

Designing a language around the idea of protecting weak developers from bad choices is a recipe for failure and mediocrity. Instead, look toward designing in a way that guides experienced or at least thoughtful developers toward greater success.

tl;dr: Don't make bumper cars for people who can't be trusted to drive, make nomex suits and roll-cages for race car drivers.
This is exactly what I assumed. This model would allow the Diaspora developing company to host their own set of servers to jumpstart the network effects.
Today, 5/20/10, you can play the Google logo. (Just Double Click)
I'm wondering, will YC's current setup scale with the increase in numbers? As in, will new YC companies have less time with staff, etc..?

How do you plan to cope with this?
I can confirm that Paperclip does work with Rails 3. Some recent merges and updates broke it for awhile, but I think things are back to normal now. (If not, a pre-March fork of the rails3 branch will do in a pinch.)
I agree that the arguments in the article were not well formed. One big thing they seemed to have overlooked (or consciously ignored) is the timing of the project. I think its obvious by the amount of donations that they received that the announcement of Diaspora certainly had good timing (or luck).

Now the rest really is in the hands of those four to actually deliver. It'll be interesting to see what the reaction is when they "finish" in 3 months. I think its possible that even if they deliver on every promise interest in actually using the product will be limited to the set of those who donated to the project. A lot can happen in 3 months. Depending on how Facebook reacts to the recent privacy criticism, everyone might not care about these issues in 3 months. How many people were still complaining about the news feed 3 months after that was released?
I'm hoping we'll eventually see some experimentation with the model, now that they have more money to work with.

I've always believed there's room for a YC-like company to do slightly bigger investments. Instead of $17k for 2 founders, it would be $80k for 2 founders. That way they could attract people with higher cost of living/high paying jobs (who would hopefully tend to be more successful due to more experience/connections/stability)
That should keep YC going practically indefinitely :).

Assuming the data at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1... is complete. And assuming a $17k investment for 6% from all the companies who have exited (I know, big assumptions):

207 investments @ $17k is $3.5m
13 exits @ $69m total is $4.1m for YC

That means that YC is probably close to breaking even already, plus they have all their equity in a ton of successful companies that haven't exited yet.

I don't know much about investing, but at this rate $8.25m should keep them going for quite some time.
I've seen both Lewis and Tavakoli on C-SPAN's Q&A recently. Lewis seemed to be trying to be funny, but I found Tavakoli more interesting. And I think Brian Lamb did try to wind up Lewis by mentioning that remark from JT, but I can't recall now how he responded.

JT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA20Am0pwtA
ML: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x387_k963yY
It does seem a bit cruel, to be honest.
For the information of anyone else looking to do this, you can do it in the GUI:

Add it to the search bar

In the search bar dropdown, click "Manage search engines"

Select DDG and set a keyword. I use "d".

Then, search using e.g. "d Hacker News"