skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was possible in Winter 2009, I think (the first session after the economy collapsed), but I don't think anyone did.
You're not allowed to think that way. The committee decided.
You're not wrong. There is a lot of drama on the front page.

Maybe what's happening is that nobody particularly wants "drama", but they do (overtly or subconsciously) take sides in these things, and they vote up stories that confirm their theories.

In any case, I'm not concerned about this (to provide one data point). What I am concerned about are the meta-stories about it. I feel like I can ignore the Apple vs. Google stuff, but that the meta stories might produce HN policy, and so I feel like I need to read them.
So for example what Panic is doing [1] would not be ok and in need of approval? Twitter sure has some fascists working on their branding, I’m not really sure whether that’s good or bad, though.

[1] http://www.panic.com/blog/
Computer solves 400 piece jigsaw puzzle visually
I have an HTC Hero on T-Mobile at UKP20 per month, which compares very well to the iPhone offering which is UKP35 per month, slightly less if you accept a lower offering in terms of calls and texts. So for a little more than the price of an iPhone, I can get two Android devices, one for me and one for my wife.

The experience is STUNNING with excellent performance and more features than I've yet had a chance to grok fully. It's definitely the most exciting computer I've used for a long time.
I find it a lot easier on my eyes than my Macbook Air, for reading, not sure why. But there it is.

Could it be because you spent $500 on it for the purpose of reading books, and your mind won't let you think negative thoughts about the experience?

I had a pair of pants like this. They were the wrong size, uncomfortable, and ugly. But I wore them anyway because it was too late to return them, and I spent $75 on them that I could never get back. So I just learned to like them, even though they were fundamentally flawed.
Can you run a Linux on Azure?
As a relatively experienced scuba diver I can say that the theory is correct. I haven't done an emergency ascent, as you describe, but standard practice is that you exhale on the whole way up or you will burst your lungs.

Look at this table [1]:

lung volume, depth m (ft)
2, 30m (99 ft)
3, 20m (66 ft)
4, 10m (33 ft)
8, 0 m (surface)

So by ascending from 30 meters to the surface you expand the volume of the air in your lungs four times. (Of course, you don't want to do this, as you will most likely get decompression sickness, aka the bends.)

[1] http://www.lakesidepress.com/pulmonary/books/scuba/sectionf....
People can give their money away as much as they want.

Why would you hate it ? Are you jealous ?

The problem is that the amount of money they received is a pittance compared to what is needed to take on FB, and it will take a lot more than just money.

They're in a dangerous zone of having high expectations and no product, it reminds me very much of the cuil announcement, and I fear it will end more or less the same.

edit: dear downmodders, I know that you don't like my position on this but wishing it to be so doesn't make it so.
I called up their customer service and they mentioned that it's not showing up because the servers are under heavy load. The lady on the other end of their customer service line was really nice and I have no doubt the ebook will show up in ours accounts eventually.
This would be so much more awesome in visual form. As a five-page table, it's impossible to extract any conclusions from.
I think the common consensus of successful entrepreneurs, VCs, etc is that ideas are cheap and it is execution that matters.

Part of the problem with ConnectU is they didn't have an ability to execute their ideas themselves and when they recruited Zuckerberg he was like why am I executing their idea for them and letting them reap the profits? ConnectU didn't fail because they shared their idea. They failed because the executed poorly by not drawing up a contract with the person that was going to be working for them.

I personally believe that you should share ideas with people you trust to get feedback. Then build a v0.1 prototype that you can launch and start getting feedback and improving it.
Nope. Windows VMs only currently. Of course, you could run Cygwin or the like on top if you want to
I think ideas are worthless (ok, not completely) but,

The true important thing is execution. And is VERY hard to get it right.
Criticisms 1-5 are basically identical and have no useful alternative for a linguistically diverse country like China until you finally get everyone speaking the same dialect.

Criticism 6--uhh, well, there's also Shakespeare for the English equivalent of incomprehensible classical language. The first time I heard idioms like "one fell swoop" I was totally all like wtf bro. And you don't need to know classical Chinese to be reasonably useful in day to day life.

7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names.

8/9--yeah, that's about the only reason Chinese is really that difficult to learn in my opinion. English speakers belong to one language family, and Chinese speakers belong to another. Tonal languages are weird to you. I assure you, Chinese people find pluralization, verbal conjugation (past, present, perfect, subjunctive...), spelling (threw, through, bought, bot), "r"s, and articles to be pretty fucking weird.
You won't have to. Your alumni network will do it. A more interesting question: how long will it be before YC, or its alumni, are involved in a majority of SV startups?
I'm not sure I follow. But what I have learned from reading HN is that I am probably the only person in the world that reads each page of a book in order. I start with the first page. When I'm done reading that page, I read the second page. Induct on n.
god is nice too: http://god.rubyforge.org/
Oh the price of freedom!
You're assuming most children are planned :)
The cover looks like a manual designed in the MS-DOS era. Something more modern may do better justice to your content. Lose the italic times new roman, try Helvetica. Dog/wolf is giant, this isn't a Jack London novel. I'll design you one if you would like.

Edit: as absconditus pointed out below, it does look like a lot of other O'Rielly books. Suppose the highly analytical people that read these don't mind.
If this was Slashdot, I would post an ASCII art picture of a joke flying over a person's head. Since it's not, I won't.
Interesting. The fact that there are no loops means that there might be something close to a well ordering of language difficulty.
Please review streamtu.be
Ideas/comments welcome.
Or maybe someone at ATT realized that their ETF was almost half as much as Verizon's and adjusted it accordingly.

Also, I think it would be fair to speculate that as your "average consumer" starts buying more smartphones, carriers will see more early terminations. Businesses are typically better able to pay their bills and are more apt to fulfill a multi-year agreement.
All they need to do is to re-implement facebook (trivial, right, after all it's already been done at least once), woo away 400M users from their direct competitor that has very big backers, against an established network effect (that's trivial too, shouldn't take more than two weeks, after all once you have the first couple of million the rest will follow), they have to do all this without any privacy mess-ups or their credibility is shot (and they are all big names in the cryptography scene so we can see that one as in the bag) and to top it off they have to stay good friends through all this.

Really, what could possibly go wrong.

On top of that, they have decided to solve those problems in facebook that do not really need solving, after all, if the only thing they did different was to default all privacy settings to do not share this they'd be doing just fine.

To paint this as Diaspora vs Facebook and to suggest they will 'win' is to make it impossible for them to succeed at any level. This just makes it harder for Diaspora because it raises the bar at which they will be considered a success to the 'impossible to meet'.

If they attract a 100K userbase that is happy they ought to be able to call it a success. But that's no longer an option with bullshit-titled articles like these.

Leave them alone, support them, give them resources but don't raise that bar any higher, please.

Writers like this are setting these kids up for failure, no matter how successful they are.
You get free updates on eBooks, eh
But these should have been done before selling.
Well, I don't have too much control over the cover design - O'Reilly does that.

I did pick the animal. The animal is a 'dhole' which is popularly called a 'red dog'. 'Red Dog' happens to the original secret code name for the Windows Azure project.

How that code name came to be is an interesting story in itself and I open Chapter 1 with that.
No. I am certain that isn't it. As I did get it for free. I don't really think the iPad is the Jesus tablet, but I certainly would spend $500 on another one if I lost this one, to read books on it.
Simplifying the social web with XAuth
For my personal development at home I use an old asus eeepc 900 as my tiny server. I've taken it apart to remove the screen and used ubuntu mini.iso to install CLI mode + apache2, MySQL and php5. I use apache with mod_vhost_alias to map a directory structure to hostnames automatically so developing/testing a project is very easy. My apache webroot folder is actually a folder in my dropbox, so my code is automatically backed up too.

I have a macbook (a 13" unibody) with the dropbox account and MAMP to develop on (type the code). I usually mount the folder of the project I'm working on, on the macbook and turn off dropbox to go easy on the syncing.

Lately I tend to go more to my linux roots (I was a linux only user for quite some years before I bought the macbook) so I bought an asus 1005P and put ubuntu on it, again with mod_vhost_alias and dropbox. I must admit it's a great little machine and it has almost 8hrs of battery time, wich is a real plus.

For me developing is something I should be able to do anywhere, at all time. Hence the rather unconventional development environment...
For a long time I've just been running Linux and use emacs and the zsh shell as the main environment I operate in within it.

I recently got a laptop though and for reasons I won't get into, have a visceral and probably irrational dislike for Apple and I really didn't want to deal with Linux wireless not working well, or sleep not working well, or whatever else may or may not work well on the laptop. Anyway, for the laptop I got a machine with Windows 7 and I installed Linux on top of it in a virtual machine.

I have to say, I love it! If I want to look at something in IE or use MS Office (I prefer it over OpenOffice, sorry), or whatever else I might want to do in Windows, I don't have to reboot. I can snapshot and tinker, without worrying about breaking it, and Win 7 works really well. When I want to do dev work I boot up the Linux VM and put it up full screen and haven't had any problems yet. Next time I put together my main machine, I'm considering doing the same there, though I have gotten quite used to all the Linux apps.
The low end iPhone is $99; if they increase the subsidy by $150 they'd be paying you $50. OTOH if the cost of the iPhone 4 increases and they want to offer it for "zero down" then the new ETF makes sense.
Sure, some of the points are valid, but he sure made a big deal of the age and immaturity of the participants as if that's some kind of negative. It could just as easily be a positive if they are at all in tune with the sentiments of their peers. Certainly Facebook is completely out of touch with their user base.
Facebook is really innovating here. They figured out how to get their users to leave, without even threatening to charge them money. Impressive.
I think there are too many "HN is going down the tubes for x reasons" self posts.

At any given time there are thirty (often unique) stories on the HN frontpage. From time to time some of them will be off-topic, link-bait, sensationalist. The current x vs y soap opera is not any worse than Apple vs Adobe opera or Apple vs Windows opera or any other opera for that matter. These are predictable patterns and happens ALL the time and anyone who has been hanging around long enough should know that.

I don't think it is any worse than last year or the year before that.
That's wildly inconsistent with everything I've ever heard from you on the subject before.

I thought the limit on YC was you -- that the partners didn't have enough attention to distribute to any more startups (or more tablespace to sit them all at for weekly dinners :)

How are you planning to expand sideways without drastically reducing your (non-monetary) contribution? Wouldn't this just make YC less valuable on it's own merits? You'd retain the brand value, but that would diminish pretty quickly if the startups you funded started getting crappier. If you did diminish your responsibilities, and the startup quality didn't go down, what would that say about the value of your higher-bandwidth contributions before?
I suppose it depends on your personality, perspective and how you grow your company's culture.

I just finished reading Tony Hsieh's upcoming book, Delivering Happiness. He describes how LinkExchange, his first big company, became boring to grow because the company culture wasn't fun. But he still enjoys working at Zappos because he and his execs managed to keep the company culture fun and interesting. He doesn't know everyone there, but it has a great feel to it. Keeping his employees engaged, serving his customers, etc. are all great joys to him.

Note that I'm not saying Zappos still feels like a startup. I think from the book it's apparent that it doesn't have a startup culture at all. But it does have an "engaged" culture. Everyone enjoys what they do.

Side note: I don't recommend reading the book. There are about 10 pages in it I actually felt I could generalize to be useful.
> How else was Apple going to maintain their 55%+ profit margins on the things?

Gross margin on Apple products has consistently been around 33%, at least for as long as I've been listening to their quarterly conference calls.
Even better.. A single page:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2010/05/the-net-wo...
This article is great fun to read and overall very informative. Yet I had a few gripes about it.

* Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols directly refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term.

The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".

* Writing system not phonetic: Any other European language than English would have formed a much better argument, since English is notorious for its haphazard mapping of mapping phonemes to the alphabet, partly caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch with bare knowledge of English.

One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent. Compare with, say, Greek grammar which has baffling complexity or Lithuanian that still has noun 9 cases! Some exotic native Indian languages have 10-15 noun classes (German has three, which we call gender). In pure writing complexity, some people rate Japanese to be even more complicated (with its three sub systems). Or for an older example, consider Mayan hieroglyphs.
It looks just like every other O'Reilly book.
Great. I don't think it's going to change anything in my life (though you never know), but I really like it just on principle.
Yes it's available until your business has been around for 3 years or has >$1mm in revenue. You are supposed to be a business although verifying that is done more or less in good faith. You are required to have a URL and an email at that URL. You don't have to be using the MS stack though.

If I remember correctly, there are program directors, you contact one and ask them to sponsor you. They do whatever they feel they need to to verify that you're a business (our sponsor just looked at our website which had some simple info on what we were working on) and then they give you a key that you use to sign up. More info, including the sponsor we used, can be found here : http://www.47hats.com/2008/11/47hats-is-now-a-microsoft-bizs...
Basically yeah, I'm saying that this is a mutually assured destruction situation. Google having MPEG pay them license fees would validate an MPEG lawsuit against VP8 users.

On the other hand, if MPEG decides to sue, Google will do a counter-claim, refuse to settle, and the thing could easily be tied up in courts until all the relevant patents have expired.
And because of that, there is a healthy market for products and services dedicated to people who want to stop smoking.

The door is opening for some form of competition and a possible segmentation of the market.
I'm not exactly sure how this helps Twitter.
It's ironic to me that on a page discussing display guidelines, the numbers inside of the red circles overlaying the screenshot are not x/y centered. It's annoying me, I want to fix it :(

Anyhoot, on the topic, it would be nice if Twitter would give you a special .png image that's generated on the fly or something by the server, for a tweet. Like embedding a youtube video, but simpler. Like add .png to the basic tweet_detail URL to get an image of it.

Example: http://twitter.com/whalesalad/status/14450770448
Could be: http://twitter.com/whalesalad/status/14450770448.png

Of coures this presents a whole new can of worms for the Twitter team... but it would be nice :) There might even be a way to do it where you can't hotlink it, but you can download the file and host it yourself.

A real life example of this occurs when hitting up speedtest.net. Once you're finished, you're given a simple link to share on forums, with friends, etc.. to a generated image of your results. (http://www.speedtest.net/result/822174957.png)
One note: The extra speed is by definition a bogus feature. If the apps were compiled natively for the processor in the phone, they'd already be running at full-speed. So therefore I gather that until now, the Android apps were running at a fraction of what the CPU(+) can do.

If I understand correctly, iPhone apps are compiled natively (from Objective-C). So they always ran much faster than Android apps, and now they probably still run faster, but less so. Am I correct?

(+) I used to design CPUs for a living
That's cool. It's sort of a shame that the "We're really profitable now and don't need any more funding" doesn't get as much/any press compared with "We just took more funding".
I think that that 'culture' thing is why the faster growing tech companies spend so much money on trying to maintain that 'start-up' look-and-feel.

If there is any kind of financial crunch though, those perks are the first to go, and 'efficiency' is suddenly the buzzword.
Why not just do $1k x 400 investments, if the number doesn't matter? Obviously it does matter.

The current YC investment size was an estimate based on their own experience raising angel money for Viaweb. It's not some magical number arrived at through hard analysis. It's essentially a guess.

There's no way to know if it's the right number or not. YC can't know who isn't applying. I suspect they're losing out on a large number of the most promising candidates.
Thx. I understand the bad first impression. I would still appreciate you emailing me the bad link.
Honestly, do yourself a favor and check out MAMP. It works great and won't gack the next time apple updates php, mysql, etc. I even kicked in and bought MAMP Pro and its arguably the biggest time saver on my laptop.
They probably didn't email it because people would then complain of spam. The industry standard is to grab an email address to make only a one-time notification.

All this is irrelevant anyway; Wakemate will get crap no matter if they remain silent, or write blog posts, or send email, or update twitter as long as a physical product is not out in the wild.

I'm actually in support of the Wakemates on this one; I wouldn't have sent out an email either.
Oh, no! Not again!
Living to be a 1000 years old
More details here:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...
Aging certainly is a natural process. So is Aids. I always assumed that a disease can be both and most of time is both. I don’t even know whether it makes sense to define disease with the help of a term like “natural”.

I would define a disease as something which harms people (i.e. curtailing their cognitive or physical abilities) or kills them. Then I exclude a bunch of stuff which has traditionally not been called disease (like accidents, murder, suicide, etc.). Using that definition aging is most definitely a disease.
This is an old article, because he says he's only been studying Chinese for six years and I remember Doug Hofstadter talking about him, as a Chinese expert, in the 90's.

In fact, Moser gained some renown as being good enough at Chinese (after writing this article, obviously - but not too long, as the date that appears on it is 1991 and I heard about this in about 1996 or so) that he appeared on a Chinese game show involving language mastery, apparently something along the lines of a linguistic Jeopardy.

So clearly, Chinese is in fact damned hard, but not impossible for an obsessed genius.

I wonder if anything has been done about the dictionary situation.
I believe you fax them a lease/rental agreement or a utility bill that shows an out-of-coverage address.

I think I'll make a web app that generates a fake one for people that want to get out of their AT&T contract.
It means that 74% of the graduating class is alive and healthy, at least for a while. Don't try to read more than that into it.
Portfolio Management  Services in India
UNICON is a financial services company which has emerged as a one-stop investment solutions provider. It was founded in 2004 by two visionary and hard working entrepreneurs, Mr. Gajendra Nagpal and Mr. Ram M. Gupta, who possess expertise in the field of Finance. The company is headquartered in New Delhi, and has its Corporate office in Mumbai with regional offices in Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Noida
UNICON is a professionally managed company led by a team with outstanding managerial acumen and cumulative experience of more than 400 man years in the financial markets The Company is supported by more than 4500 Uniconians and has a team of over 900 business offices in 235 cities across India.
If you want to protect more than your searches from someone listening in, you'll have to get an encrypted VPN.
From your first link:

Alan likes to use the example that our "pop culture" is more concerned with "air guitar" and "Guitar Hero" rather than appreciating genuine beauty and expressiveness of real instruments (even though it takes a bit longer to master).

I thought this was interesting, because I have a music teacher friend who says she can fairly reliably tell which families have a games console at home. The kids that do, and play Rock Band or something like it, are a long way ahead of everyone else in developing a sense of rhythm and pitch.