skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three people:

1. My daughter. She's not yet 5. She's inspirational because watching a small child come to grips with the world and discover it makes you look again at things you take for granted and see them as new again.

For example, I showed her the pendulum of a clock and how it swings back and forth based on its length (not the size of the weight or the angle it starts at). The length of a pendulum counting seconds is where we get the length one metre from. So time and space come together in such a simple thing. Also you can use a pendulum to show the rotation of the earth.

So many simple and beautiful things to discover. Also, the original measurement of the metre was done by Mersenne of primes fame. BTW, did you ever notice how children count things by pointing at them one by one and saying the number? That sort of counting let's you can go straight to Cantor's pairing function that the number of rationals is the same as the number of naturals. It's child's play.

(OK, better stop of I'm going to turn into James Burke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series))

2. My A level Advanced Maths teacher who told me that there was "a Group, Ring or Field lurking in every corner". He showed me the beauty of logic and studying systems specified by a few axioms.

3. When I was about 6 years old my parents took me to Cambridge for a couple of days organized by the National Association for Gifted Children (http://www.nagcbritain.org.uk/) where I remember clearly a man (no doubt a Cambridge don) explaining to me the theoretical operation of a computer. It was only years later that I realized that he had explained the operation of a Turing Machine. I was utterly fascinated.
Have you run a technology start-up to the point where it's profitable? My experience is that it takes a lot longer than anyone thinks.
I'm thinking, April Fools! (it's a 1 April release)
And a round number in base 10 at that. Now when gold falls through an interesting binary number feel free to post.
I'm so bored of thisargument.

Jobs is not a control freak. You can put whatever you like on YOUR iPhone. What you can't do is put whatever you like on someone else's iPhone. In that case, Apple insists that you play by their rules, so that their customers can have confidence that the software they buy isn't going to break their wonderful new iPhone. Apple is essentially offering a service to people where Apple evaluates the technical qualities of software so that users don't have to.

If you can't get passed Apple's rules, why should you care? Write for another platform then. If your idea is so hot, you are going to have loads of users anyway. People may even buy the phone you support, just to have your software.

Of course, if what you really wanted was an easy ride on Apple's coattails, I have bad news for you - Apple never gives anyone an easy ride on their coattails... But I'm hardly going to cry a river for you.
Download Youtube Video From Command Line
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152481
WSJ: Yahoo Succumbs to Microsoft Takeover
Ask YC: What income-generating systems do you employ?
I remember reading a Steve Pavlina article a few years back about income. His claim was that it's better to diversify your income in the sense of decentralization. That's why a salary could be a lot more risky than self-employment. If you set up a bunch of automated systems that generate you a $100/month, then a single system failure will only put you out of that $100; on the other hand, if you put all your eggs in one basket, you bankrupt if anything happens. The idea is that once you set up enough of these systems, you can essentially spend only a few hours each week or month tuning them, but otherwise sit back and let them generate income in the background.

Pavlina's example was his game website. He created a site (company) that sold games, and once he optimized his site to be easily found on Google and automatically process transactions by letting users download the game after payment, he could essentially put it on cruise control and let the income flow (and all the games would themselves be little "systems"--if one game was made obsolete by a much better competitor, he would not lose all his income).

I am curious as to examples of such income generating systems. Several blatantly obvious ones come to mind: ecommerce (what Pavlina did), writing a book/song/etc. and collecting the royalties, taking a tiny cut when providing a service (e.g., ATM fees, taxes, etc.). You might be using several of those right now, and that's great. But additionally, I've been hard pressed to find more creative examples that deviate from these formulas. Perhaps it is because they work so well (after all, write code once and sell it a thousand times is pretty damningly attractive), but perhaps there are also many others, simply unpopular due to poor implementation or too obscure for a guy like me to notice.
From what I've seen of the Apple community, they seem to have a fairly easy time swallowing the not-so-savory things Apple does, with reasoning like "they need to maintain the user experience" or "they're a corporation, tuey need to make money for their shareholders, expecting better would be naive" or "screw that, who cares, there's nothing we can do, look at my sexy Mac". Probably the last reason is the most honest, since the former is to some extent BS, and the second is a sort of "well done genius, you've spotted one of the major problems in Western society" moment.

I haven't seen anything of the culture inside Apple that would suggest its employees to be any less dismissive of Apple's forays into "asshole corporation" territory. Especially considering that they're largely recruited from exactly this pool of Apple users.
Amazon Launches SMS Buying Service
Need A Job? Make $1.20/hour Tagging Photos (TagCow uses Mechanical Turk))
Starting a business with a weak company name is kind of like driving a car — without an engine, it probably isn’t going to go anywher.

I humbly disagree. Starting a business with a weak company name is kind of like driving a car with a weak company name--it'll run just fine either way.

Also, the A-Z thing is cute on motivational posters in grade school. Fitting business advice in such a manner to make it follow a fluffy pattern (and hence invariably involve a lot of repetition and bullshit) is not. "K is for Kleenex"? Please, just get to your point.

Edit: After careful thought, I have concluded this is a bad article.
I am guessing this is via the YCombinator startup TextPayMe that Amazon bought:
It is more like Java vs. Ruby.
That's pretty clever....

http://t1ny.us/s.js
Computers to merge with humans
Your attempt at copying uncov.com.. FAIL.
To continue this line of thought, consider one of the most powerful companies in the world: Walmart. Walmart creates stores which are automated systems: each store has employees which manage day to day operations, and thousands of different vendors provide their products that are shipped to each store, and sold with a small cut given to Walmart. Hence, Walmart employs a version of the "take a tiny cut" system.

An easily envisioned future store would completely automate this process with automated transportation (driving AI?) which took the products from the vendors and delivered it to stores, automated day-to-day operations (theft control systems, automated check out counters, etc.), and require only a small amount of tuning (a couple of "real" people in each store to accomodate any edge cases, like an unsatisfied customer who wants to complain to a live person). Such a store would require minimal management (occasional technical fixes and a couple of human managers), but each sale would take a tiny cut of profit for the company. The first company to successfully (without "bugs") engineer such a system would undoubtedly become incredibly rich.
I thought this article was going to be about inching closer to Kurzweil's utopia. :-)
Is TagCow paying for this out of its own pocket? I don't see any "premium" service or payment requirements...
In a similar vein, Axel-Tobias Schreiner wrote a book showing how you can build an OO structure within plain C: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf
The site is really supposed to be a gigantic resource for all things entrepreneurial beyond just VC resources. It includes some great speakers, it talks about successful negoiations, and even has Ron Conway saying that if you want to start a company, then "pack your bags and move to the Silicon Valley."
Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind
The clock is ticking: Today is the last day to apply to YC
I know there are some YC startups which decided on the very last possible day to apply (that's today!) to apply.

Thought about doing a startup this summer at all? Make the leap of your life. It doesn't even take an idea, just the enthusiasm.
uncov actually liked scribd: http://www.uncov.com/2007/4/26/scribd-you-re-alright
ISO approves OOXML
It's not just coming up with a business model that's hard. You need enough time to become fully self-sustaining and then profitable. Anyone who thinks it's outrageous to have $4M to fund a company for years is going to have a heart attack after reading Crunchbase for five minutes.
Right now, I'm using Wings 3d for polygonal models as in the old Elite game. I'm not an artist. I'm going to hire one or two artists to make it look good.
Google Tech Talk: The Secret History of Silicon Valley
PG wrote that, "if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it."

Can someone help explain this paradox? Is it just that there aren't that many great programmers out there, so Damien was forced to java or is he just taking the wrong route?
Player scripting doesn't seem to alienate people in Second Life. Maybe there's something I don't know. Scripting will not be required to play. You will be able to buy scripts from weapon developers, who will finally be worthy of the name.

Faction players will need pilots. Their AI drones will never be a match for human pilots in player ships. On the other hand, pilots will need factions -- otherwise it will be hard to generate enough wealth for the very best high tech equipment.
I would like to have player avatars in the future. We will start out with ships, however.
Good Idea for the next round of YC founding? I mean, five nines of that is above my head but sounds doable. How HARD is that to actually be implemented?
Blinkx Launches BBTV; Ties Up With Dogwoof For Movies
My XP machine can read most common file formats without a hitch.
Possible YouTube Ban In Indonesia
Tooth Regeneration May Replace Drill-and-Fill
From the comments on uncov:

really? you trash viable startups like meebo, but you praise scribd, which has a very, very simple feature that is easily reproducible?

uncov:

I tore meebo apart because they're useless. Youtube is also easily reproducible, but why did google buy them for $1.65bln? I'll leave you to figure out the answer. Retard.
Nice to see they're doing the ethically right (and financially prudent) thing on this one.
Keynote?
it probably took Guy 5 minutes to add startups.alltop.com, so might as well I guess
Microsoft's Surface moves beyond demoware
Thats what I thought at first, but some of it is actually useful as a feed discovery tool.

Also, I found a bunch of cool people to follow in the twitterati section.
Web surfers know advertisers are watching—and don’t like it
I've seen the most growth in Apple uptake among casual users, e.g. non-tech-savvy middle-aged or retired people, and recent graduates that suddenly have disposable income. The usability is a huge factor for the former demographic, cost not quite so much. The latter definitely the chic, although iLife is not to be underestimated.

Students here tend to be poor, so few have Apple gear and just have some worn-out 7-year-old grey box PC. The only people I knew at university who had macs were international students who were already paying 10x as much in tuition as EU students.

This is from anecdotal observation in the UK and Austria.
10 things IT needs to know about Ajax
"they aren’t that much better than many of the great coders I’ve worked with. They’re just bolder."

Interesting way to put it. Sounds like an critical ingredient for success.
Practice in front of a live audience... even if just your roommates. Videotape yourself presenting and watch it (painful). I just put some points on presentation materials at http://academicvc.blogspot.com/2008/04/raising-capital-part-... and that might be interesting. Try to have a chance to test out the technology the night before... I know you use a Mac, so that eliminates a bunch of potential failure modes, but still..
Embedded + CPU != x86
Founders: Overcome ‘The tyranny of the scattered mind’!
..so in other words, the real implications of this isn't in music compression, it's in simulation/synthesis of musical instruments. This is an exciting field to be sure, with enough unsolved mysteries for anyone. I am still hungering for the abolishment of the guitar amplifier.

Actually, there's this interesting software package written in Common LISP quite recently for performing versatile (audio) signal synthesis/simulation using different physical or abstract models. I haven't had a chance to look at it (and, come to think of it, I probably suck enough in LISP to turn it into a real chore), but it's at http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/software/BlockCompiler/ if anyone is interested.
Yesterday was April Fools day. There is no actual switch to Java. The humor here is the obfuscated statement that fewer than 1000 developers in the U.S. have been involved in a successful Java project. Damien and PG are on the same page.
I am sure there are still some people fighting about it, but mostly what I have heard is REST won. Amazon says 80% of the api calls are REST, I believe Google has been moving more toward REST as well.

After working with both (admittedly only a bit), I quickly decided REST was just far simpler.

Is there specific reasons you see advantages in some SOAP capabilities that you don't think REST would handle well?
As a coder when ever working with API's code examples of how to call and actually use the API's was worth a lot more to me than a ton of documentation.

The WSDL along with JAVA doc does give some good information about the available calls, but I think having a few client examples in a couple langauages would probably benefit more users.
A taste of what's coming in Rails 2.1
Ubuntu should come with a couple of those.
OK, April 1 is over, so which is it?

Either way, great job with the confusion.
Yes, it's a critical ingredient for life in general.
It's the timecube of mental health sites!
i have a full-time job.

edit: everything else i do is on the side
The First Hadoop Summit
My startup: Build your own search engine and share it.
The Idea is to empower the user with the choice of URLs to crawl, when to crawl from where to crawl (you can crawl from you car as long as you have internet access).

You build your own repository around your personal web site, company intranet, your favorite sites or subject and share it with friends or colleagues.

See a sample we did for YC and related sites:

http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?six=SRC6187978038750
The Idea is to empower the user with the choice of URLs to crawl, when to crawl from where to crawl (you can crawl from you car as long as you have internet access).

You build your own repository around your personal web site, company intranet, your favorite sites or subject and share it with friends or colleagues.

See a sample we did for YC and related sites:

http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?six=SRC6187978038750
"SEO experts" are a lot like "real estate experts".

If their advice was so good, what are they doing here? They'd be way ahead if they were just out there implementing their own advice.
Worst April's fool ever. Wait a minute... this is for real!
Exactly - Haagen dazs is one of the worlds leading ice cream companies and I had to look it up to get their name right. Google suggest tells me I'm not the only one who has no idea how to spell it.

And they're doing just fine.
Could use a larger font size.
Success is usually achieved by combining ability and boldness
I like it. I wish I would have had access to this a few years ago when I had to build my own search for a company I worked for :) How do you plan on making money?
Unit Testing with Silverlight
I have never seen a keynote file. If that's some open source format, then there is likely a windows port of the software needed to read it.

However, given that I have used the internet for years and never seen one, it doesn't strike me as important.

Edit: I don’t know why the parent is down-modded. I imagine this is one of the most common criticisms that Scribd will get. Why do I need it? And yes, I watched the intro video.
I think one of the dirty little secrets of succesful api's is not in the API itself but in the example code / implementation libraries provided. Facebook had a great php lib initially & I see the ClickPass guys are providing lots of libraries on top of their API. Anyone else think just providing an API is not enough these days?
Where are you hosting this? Seems you are hitting a connection limit, cant serve any more pages right now.
Skype: The Rodney Dangerfield of Telecom
Off-topic and hilarious. Makes you that the guy who did it is now having mental health issues :)
So far we’re thinking ads for individual account and make it payable for companies of some size.
Thank you and thanks neilc. What is the right order to watch the lectures by the Catsters? Top-to bottom as listed on that page?

Are there any data structures based on category theory, like sets & graphs which are inspired by mathematical theories?
Geek out old school: Virtual slide rules
sorry about that, didn't see it.
1 point by whalliburton 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete

Just watched several videos by Guy Kawasaki and Jerry Kaplan.

Good stuff.

Lets keep this on the front for a bit. I'm sure its better for us than CobolOnCogs!
Interestingly enough Haagen Dazs is not a European company, but the founder(s) wanted a European-sounding name.

Naming is definitely important. Perhaps just not to the level that the writer puts it.
Emails need to be refactored 
I just read a long winded email from a colleague. I had to read it several times and still had trouble extracting "the point". A long three paragraph email could be boiled down to four short bullet points. It occurred to me that as a programmer, I may be more susceptible to frustration. I spend all day trying to avoid this in code. Do you re-factor your emails before sending? How do you deal with others that don't?
This just convinced me to apply, less than 12 hours to go. What is it going to be. Great read especially if you still hesitate.
I think their point is not that the resolution of human data is lower (although I expect it is quite a bit lower than 44k Hz). Instead, I think they are pointing out that fewer data points are necessary.

If your jazz drummer plays eight notes in a second, the timing alone can be represented in eight floating point numbers (a higher resolution than CD audio); the data is 8 * 8 bytes -- much smaller than the 44k * 4 bytes of raw audio samples that would be needed for a second of stereo CD audio. (I realize a drummer's performance encompasses several other variables, but these data points are similarly sparse relative to CD audio.)
Also, because the "mainstream" press is mostly focused on SOAP because the vendors buying ad space in their magazines, etc. can sell SOAP solutions.

There's very little on the REST side that's being sold (but, for good and bad, people are figuring out how to lie about that, too).
TBH I've never played Second Life, but from what I've read it's more of a social sandbox than a direct competition. The space setting is more associated with combat and domination. It seems more likely that nonhackers will call foul on any disadvantage, real or perceived.

In my experience advocating player scripting in a MMO forum, I've observed that there is much prejudice against real life technical skills. Players seem to have less of a problem with other real life factors having an impact. Factors such as social skills or ability/willingness to spend more time on the game. I think this is because it takes technical skills to evaluate the true impact of mechanics involving technical skills, in order to come to the conclusion that they are mostly benign.

OTOH, I've also observed that some nontechnical people actually like scriptability and others can be convinced (with some difficulty; they often assume you're trying to skew the game towards your abilities for the sake of getting an edge) if you have the chance. And of course, people that can program absolutely love the feature. Unless you start with millions and a recognized IP, I think your best bet is making some underserved audience love your game rather than try to please the mainstream.

So I was playing devil's advocate here. As I said, I myself would love player scripting, and if I was to make a MMO, I'd bite the bullet. But whatever you do, I think these are factors to take into account.
What technology are you using for your crawler?
The 500Mhz geode LX from amd is a fine powerful little x86 CPU with a full 686 instruction set and lots of on-chip goodies. It uses just 5 watts costs $20 with its little companion chip for a one off, and doesn't even need a heat sink.

Lots of small scale embedded manufactures like Soekris make impressive little boards that can be had for $200 or so and run full blown linux distros.

I have yet to see an arm or freescale that can even come close.

Sorry but I have to say !(Embedded + CPU != x86)
1/3 Rule
Bah! The only thing that e.g. WSDL brings is that the "contract" for the service can be baked into the legal contract between partnering organizations. For big paranoid companies where people need a lot of CYA, that can be a big point.

Good RESTful approaches are actually self-documenting. As the example from my recent talk on REST at SD West shows, it's really easy to support human discoverable (i.e., well documented) RESTful solutions. In my example, hitting the root resource returns a page (in html or text) that shows how to interact with the resource with actual examples. That's way better then some horribly verbose WSDL that somebody is going to have to look up.
Python-by-example
All good writing has been 'refactored' as you put it. Except writers call it 'editing', 'polishing' and 'rewriting'.

And just like excellent code when you see some great writing you tend to think 'that looks amazingly simple!' but when you attempt to produce the same sort of elegance it somehow isn't so easy!

How to deal with it: accept you can't change the world, move into a position where you have the freedom to ignore e-mails when you like, get good at scanning!
Keynote is Apple's presentation software (similar to PowerPoint)
Interesting - I thought they were Dutch, the crazy name sounds like it.

Maybe there's a method in their naming madness after all.
Naw. The de facto paylod for RESTful services are XML. Though, yes, that is called the POX (Plain Ol' XML) on REST.

REST is the only thing that has been actually proven to work at internet scale.

SOAP is just the latest version of CORBA, for the web.
AAPL is probably a great stock to short now. Expensive discretionary consumer fluff. It'll tank in the year ahead.
What Question Does Your Product Answer?