skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like the expansion of America over the Midwest (replace seas with prairies, and native plants and animals with Indians).

The book Hawai'i by James Michener is a good historical fiction about the natural and cultural history of Hawai'i (including the early Polynesians)

http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0449213358/pchristensen-20
"@edwardbenson"

Hope you don't think this is too snarky, but there's really no need for the at-signs on a site that has threaded comments ;-)
Each worker isn't much cheaper. My dad retired from GM in 2005, and the Toyota plants here in the US pay $1/hr less than he made. There is a decent discrepancy in health insurance, but not enough to totally justify the difference.

The key is what gibsonf1 pointed out. Each worker at Toyota is much more productive than each worker at GM (and most likely other companies).

They also benefit from a halo around them of 'superior quality'. I'm not entirely sure if a big quality difference actually still exists (it definitely did once), but in the minds of many, Toyota will always be the 'reliable choice' which allows them to charge more for their vehicles than GM can for it's equivalent.

It also didn't help that GM made ugly cars for years, and even today is only marginally improving. I sincerely hope the Volt actually happens as planned, both for nerdy reasons, and because it'd be nice if GM didn't blow a golden opportunity to save itself (and my dad's retirement).
Haha. Good to know I wasn't talking about you behind your back. It's cool, man.
I think aggregations typically fall into one of a couple of category: topical, from the trenches news, or community building sites.

I'm mostly hoping that this will be a community building site, and in that case I think that some off-topicness is acceptable. I'd say that a target signal-to-noise ratio is about 80% :-)

The other 20% helps to give character to the people that are being tracked. At least for "planets" like the three I mentioned in the original post, the site is mostly for the people that are collectively posting there, and has the side effect of making it possible for fans to easily peek behind the scenes.
Tips on creating another layer of security with .htaccess
Which is exactly what IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has been since 1989.
Ask YC: In the hack of life, is it the people or the code? 
I am currently a college senior who upon gotten rejected by YCombinator (made it past the 1st round, didn't make it beyond the interview), have decided to take on another project. Hey you might have even heard of it, it is called life.

The first time I tackled on the project of life was during high school, when I decided to quit Computer Science. I was frustrated by those surrounded me, who cared about U.S News & Report college rankings than the possibility of the subjects that we were learning then. Too often, we talked about too a bland thing - maybe we were all not-so-very-daring, conversations centered around homeworks, college, computer games and sports, and not upon the philosophy or the very core of human affinity for another that I was searching for. I felt that I was isolated from the mainstream society - like Bobby Fischer tinkering on an abstract chessboard in his head - what's the point if there's no one who could appreciate the beauty of the algorithm as you do?

So I went to a small, non-technical, liberal artsy college, bent on starting afresh. For the first two years of college, I tried to meet as many interesting people as I could, people, for a lack of a better phrase and to plagiarize Jack Kerouac, burn, burn, burn. So I went to hipster parties, concerts, and have had many a late-night conversation with someone, I meshed in the "social scene" of college, I had made lots of friends - I have met a few amazing people whom I could relate closet ever in my life. I daresay that I felt even happy for a time-being, except not. It was like a second language to me. I was fluent in the social subtleties, what to say at what time, but I said it like I was in a sheep's clothing - like I was LAMP developer forced to use .net tools for money. I hated that I couldn't be my true self, that I had to dress a certain way, that I had to have a specific set of approved outlooks and opinions, that I had to attend or do certain activities identified with a sub-culture, just to fit in.

So I decided to start all over again, and start programming again. I re-discovered the joy of striking it on your own, building something concrete out of just a trace of inspiration in your mind, a itch that you just wana scratch, doing it because you want to do it, not to placate anyone else. But at the same time, I alienated myself from all of my friends - in my cocoon of midnight bliss of hacking, I could care less about the everyday social small talk BS or superficial parties filled with even more superficial people. But always, after finishing a big project, I would hit a wall because after initial ecstasy, because I realize that I had been staying in my room for a whole week straight and haven't had talked to anyone for a long time.

I realize that my little tirade sounds a little bit like "Catcher in the Rye," the CS major edition. But I would like to know your experience as a hacker/programmer living in the real world filled not with news.yc/slashdot people, but with regular people.

In the hack of life for happiness, in the long-run is it about the people or the code?
These are the ones I've checked out:

48 Hour Print - http://www.48hourprint.com/

Vista Print - http://www.vistaprint.com/ (not to be confused w/ Windows Vista

And another creative site I'd recommend checking out is http://www.moo.com/ -- they've got a lot of creative sort of cards. Not necessarily great for business cards, but can work well as thank-you notes and things of that nature.
This "(hopefully someday)" part scares me. And the fact that its in brackets and not that talked about scares me even more.
"grandma doesn't need your totally sweet amazon ec3 backup tool, she wants to keep in touch with the family and look at their pictures and such"

What, Grandma thinks disk crashes can't happen to her? Grandma's wrong.
Uh, yeah. So, you've wondered why the site is slow sometimes...
That's what DropBox is for. ;-)
Well everything "social" certainly has a very large mindshare and buzzshare nowadays. This is due to very nature of social apps and also due to the fact "social" apps are relatively new. The buzz of social apps is also much greater in the developer community since the basic ideas are something that everyone understands. Not every developer will be able to talk about hospital software for example but every Joe can talk about "chat widgets".

But it certainly does not have an equivalent revenue share. Put the PROJECTED revenue in 2009 of all "social" apps/platforms together and still you would still be at far less than $10bn.

You certainly can make a lot of money by building useful non-social software. It just wont be as visible or talked about.
Thanks for the info..
Exchange Traded Funds, A Great Alternative to Mutual Funds
If that's your goal, then that's okay. Good luck!

I should warn, however, that being included in a planet can cause some people to think a little too much about what they post. My personal blog is included in a planet and I'm often wondering whether I'll get kicked out if I post something irrelevant or cause too much noise. Really, I should be able to get that planet to subscribe to a certain /category/ on my blog so I get the choice. Just bringing this up in case it becomes a point later on..
The way it shows the shorter / trimmed variants of what you type is interesting but not, I feel, particularly useful. It has a nice UI though and does seem very fast! It also only does com, net and org, whereas ajaxwhois, for example, does biz, us, info and ca.

Two alternatives:

http://www.ajaxwhois.com/
http://www.instantdomainsearch.com/

A "sort of" alternative (requires a click but comes up with better results for word mixes): http://www.bustaname.com/

I'd rather like to see one that can also do .co.uk, just being a Brit and all :) I have a few customers who would use such a thing.
Amazon doesn't get a lot of recognition for it, but in terms of being iterative, getting small but powerful new features out on a regular basis, etc, they really are industry leaders. This is just another cherry on an already well-fruited cake.
From what I gather it's a social networking site for people with certain medical condition(s). I might be wrong but this is hardly a "medical startup" and thus it's not likely to require extensive certification/compliance paperwork (if any at all). Besides this paperwork would've needed to be handled by the lawyers.

I can see the logic in your UI comment, but again - 12 months ? That's enough to design and polish the UI of a Boeing cockpit :)
kind of like... squurl.com as well
15 Great Examples of Web Typography
> Which is exactly what IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has been since 1989.

No, like gmail, yahoo & hotmail.
Remember that the topic of "people" can be sub-divided. "People" does not mean everyone (acquaintances, business partners, even good friends). It can mean your wife / significant other, your kids, and your family. It can be "about" them and not the "other" people.

In a subtle way I guess I've been like you, neglected social aspects and focused on my business to the point where I only have a few firm friends. Life is still not, however, "about" them. Life is about doing what I want to do, but ultimately my wife, my (forthcoming) kid, and to a lesser extent, my parents.

The trick in life, I'm finding, is to still have respect for people, try hard, and be able to support yourself while you nurture the things you appreciate most. For me, that'll be my ambitions and my family. Friends will be a bonus. For you, perhaps, it's programming for now, and family later. Go with what feels "nice."
???

What about "gal"?

I guess Encarta isn't very knowledgeable about the American West.
In Australia, Telstra already does this. They run an On Demand Entertainment business (music, movies, games and sport) where the content is 'unmetered' (when downloaded it does not get attributed to your Usage Allowance). They also have exclusive rights to online AFL content (national league of Australian rules football), so you can't watch AFL matches, press conferences and various other things online unless you use Telstra as your internet provider.

FYI, you can see their exorbitantly priced plans here:
http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansando...
Their overage charges are $1500 AUD per 10GB. Many A Current Afair story have been about some poor family slugged with a $10,000+ internet bill.

Since Usage Allowance's are so low in Australia, pretty much all ISP's provide unmetered value added benefits, like ftp mirrors and game servers. I had never realised that these kinds of thing were not net neutral. If these features were revoked, my internet bills would increase by 25%, which I obviously would not be too pleased about. Gah, now I am troubled; I'll be thinking about this all day.

EDIT: It appears these kinds of things are net neutral, because they don't restrict other people's packets.
why does the last line sound like one of the voice overs from 'Sex and the City', maybe 'Nerd and the City'?

Happiness is as happiness does. Be happy with yourself. Everything else in life follows from that.
If you've designed a business card for yourself, here's a tip: Give the card to your dad!

If your dad's anything like mine - over 50 and suffering from the torments of age - he won't be able to read your type without squinting through his glasses. He won't get the subtle reference you made in the graphics. And he definitely won't be able to figure out what your phone number is.

Thing is.. many of the people with the money, the power, and the NEED for business cards are those older people with fading eyesight! Do you really think some 20-something upstart needs to see business cards? We've got e-mail, text messaging, and iPhones for that! Business cards are for a wider, more general audience.. so unless you run an avant-garde design agency, design your cards with that general audience in mind.
Sites that seem to perform well on SitePoint are those that are old and undeveloped. A lot of search engine marketing specialists are scouring those boards looking for older sites and domains that have some sort of standing on Google. They know they can load them up with new content and quickly reposition them!

So.. if you have a site that's been around for several years, isn't making much revenue, and that you don't want to develop, give it a go. Talk about your PageRank, talk about the link backs you have, and talk about the domain's age.. and you could make a pretty serious amount of money compared to your existing revenue.
jdavid.net for anyone that wants to read about my tech interests, rants, projects, startup life, and or some other personal adventures.

i will be rethinking my blog in summer so any comments on what would interest folks like you would be of value. I also plan to better edit my blog in the next 2 years than i have in the last 2 years.
Live Universe buys another company...
What I do is keep on programming, etc., but mostly keep non-geeks as friends.

I also tried the "hide your inner geek" thing, but in the end I seem to do better socially when I'm open about my interests (although I did lose a few people that I was friends with only on the base of common partying and clubbing interests).

The reason is simple - being an entrepreneurial programmer is one very distinguishable feature about you, especially in liberal art schools. If you look around you'll see that most people your age don't have something very unique about them.

For example, I only told a few friends about my startup, but the word spread out quite quickly and everyone is excited about it, calling me to check how things are going, etc. Somebody else got that McKinsey job, which is also cool, but that's not what people are talking about over drinks at the bar.
if I read it correctly she REFUSED to take a paycut.
Many blogs do allow for RSS feeds based on categories, and I know of a number of people that have their blogs aggregated based on those category feeds. If a particular feed gets too noisy that's something that we'll deal with (as I've seen done on other planets), but there that usually amounts to, "Uhm, can you set up a category feed?"

I personally just have three separate blogs -- one for a few friends, my KDE blog which is fairly widely syndicated, and now the Directed Edge one. I tend to include bits of personal information in my KDE blog from time to time, but still keep in mind that it's mostly being read by people interested in my open source work, not girls I'm dating. ;-)
Life? Dude, you haven't even started that project yet! College is just the part when you think you may have an idea that life would be worth perusing! :-)

Here's the secret: It is about the people; just not all the people, but a select few. Who those people are and how they relate to you is something that you need to discover on your own, however.
Google App Engine: Ytalk like multiuser chat
The "average" social site dies.
it does when you authorize a new computer. But apple makes it incredibly east to migrate your data either from old computer to new or from time machine backup. And I wouldn't be surprised if it synced iTunes authorization keys to .mac

Even if Apple shuts down the iTunes store I expect them to keep up the authorization server as long as possible.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177270
13 Execs Dish Out Advice
You are who you are. If coding makes you happier, make time in your life for it. You have acquired the knowledge and experience (skills) to be social. Sometimes you don't have to listen to the criticism you hear (especially if it is coming from your own thoughts)

I hang around with a diverse group of friends. I find that the more interests I pursue (improv comedy, entrepreneurship, triathlons) the more people you meet. Some of them shape your life view; others are merely acquaintances. I am always shocked to learn again that some people don't think obsessively and analyze everything (a.k.a. analysis paralysis née nice guy née loner). One positive aspect of being able to dive into coding is that you can always exercise your creative mind and feel good, without relying on other people.

Life is not a measure of its longevity, but its complexity.
There's also http://domainzomg.com/
You just aren't reading enough 37Signals, obviously.

No seriously, you're just seeing the hype from SV, which is the same hype that existed 10 years ago, and built basically on the same foundation of sand. There are people out there building useful software, they just don't get the attention they deserve because the niches they fill aren't new, splashy, or "the next wave".
I've often felt that many News.YC-ers are more introspective than I am, but this goes above and beyond.

Does the choice have to be so binary? People or code? News.yc/slashdot people or regular people?

I program, but I don't filter my relationships through this one fact. I am who I am, I get along great with some people and can't stand other people. It doesn't have to be much more complicated than that.
It probably varies from person to person, but I'd say that the majority probably need both.
ovi256++ just for being a good sport.
oohh.. some design issues. Awful font for logo, please don't use that. The font you used for your buttons are also ridiculous.

Stick to the basics, helvetica or arial.. they'll carry you a long way in terms of making your app look simple and unobtrusive.
New Breed Of Supercomputers Proposed To Improve Climate Change Prediction Accuracy
In my experience what works best is making friends you actually like, and coding stuff that you and your friends want to use. Lots of reward and no alienation.
Before the G5, macs were also painfully underpowered compared to even standard windows PC's, and before OSX, there wasn't really much by way of robust, high-performance 3D libraries or media API's for the mac. Now, Apple has a solid OS, comparable (i.e. identical) hardware and therefore performance and features, and also pretty close to a complete analog for DirectX -- not just for Direct3D, but all sorts of other API's like audio as well.

So now Apple has the technology to offer up a solid gaming platform, so the question is what are they doing to attract game developers?

I don't know the answer to that -- I'm hoping someone here might.
thanks for the ballsy urban dictionary definition link. that really made the post for me.
In the long-run, it's about balance.

It might take years to balance out but the balance must exist. I've done the geek thing and I've done the social thing. They are both interesting for a while but I always seem to eventually shift back to the center.
start publishing the same data for other sites and you'd have a pretty good business going ;)
"There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself."
- Henry David Thoreau
I would avoid India as the people I know who have tried it, have had serious quality problems.

I would investigate the offers of people on this forum (including me: patrick at zill dot net) to assist in some way.

I would start learning Django but, would not make it a full time effort as there are other things to work on, no doubt.

I would immediately contact a lawyer and work on reducing or eliminating the 35% stake. As far as I am concerned, reducing it to 0% is wholly acceptable.

At the very least have the lawyer send her a letter stating that the work she was to perform and which she was paid to do, was not completed and was not up to acceptable standards. This can form the basis of denying the equity stake later.
Facebook Overtakes Myspace
I was in a similar situation until a couple of weeks ago. Westminster House at UC Berkeley allows non-students to live there during the summer.

http://www.westminsterhouse.org/
You have the same problem with almost any streaming media, be it internet radio or youtube. I personally almost always have KEXP streaming in the background. I have no idea how much bandwidth I use for that alone but it's non-trivial.
jQuery is FTW.
also, I can't live wihtout visualjquery.com
Code? You kidding? First off, the answer really shouldn't be either-or like this. Second, I don't think it is normal to find happiness in code itself. That's like asking the poet, "is it about the people or the words?"

I know you're getting at something, but don't frame it so rigidly, so early.
Open source: Farmers vs. Nomads
If you are open to trying SitePoint, DigitalForums tends to attract similar audiences / traffic. Listing is free too - though you need to 'qualify' with 25 forum posts.
The legoland matrix
Meevee Acquired by LiveUniverse
What separates this from being an experiment vs. harrowing life experience?

Another Milgram study involved asking NYC subway passengers to give up their seat. The interesting part is when Dr. Milgram participated:

"Dismissing his students' fears, Dr. Milgram set out to try it himself. But when he approached his first seated passenger, he found himself frozen.

"The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge," he said in the interview.

Retreating, he berated himself: 'What kind of craven coward are you?"

A few unsuccessful tries later, he managed to choke out a request.

"Taking the man's seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request," he said. "My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/nyregion/14subway.html
I think when doing a startup where you rely on someone else to do the coding it is essential your interests are aligned and you both share the vision. cofounders, not employer/employee like here.
You are right, the choice doesnt have to be so binary....

I come at this from the other perspective. I was a business guy who has learnt some hacking and got into the whole startup thing about 2 or so years ago. Nearly all my friends are non-hackers, they laugh at me when i receive tweets and think I am crazy and raise eyebrows when I make some programming joke.

But you know what, underneath it all they kind of envy me because I have a palpable passion which many of them lack. They see that for me, life is not something you endure its something you enjoy. I have recently made more hacker friends and have great conversations with them...

But ultimately the people i get on best with are the entrepreneurial types. They can be selling lemonade on the road or trying to do the next big web thing, they dont have to be hackers and so i would suggest you broaden your pallet. Look for those kind of people.

Mix and match and you will be happy. I am sure u can have friends who have little interest in internet startups but still get on well with. I just hope u have something more to you than internet startups.
It's worth looking at this even if you couldn't care about typography. ILT (I Love Typography) is one of those rare blogs that picks a topic and writes about it with such passion that even those not interested in the topic feel an urge to subscribe. It's pretty much a picture perfect description of what a niche blog should be like, so if you're into developing blogs, check it out.

Disclaimer: I was a very early subscriber, but don't know the guy who runs it.
Friends, you do NOT need business cards.

You spend your time creating and learning and meeting interesting people instead of obsessing over unimportant details like business card designs. You meet someone. You want them to know they are personally important to you. You want them to be able to contact you.

Just take out the simple, elegant, paper notebook you habitually carry to record thoughts, names, lists, etc. Keep talking. Print your name and the way you would prefer to be contacted. Add the date. Hand the piece of paper to your "contact".

Immediately you have something beyond the trading of little uniform squares of bland cardboard.