skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have much faith in their selection process. Their list of economists includes the man who guided Russian economy into a 40% GDP drop.

>Yegor Gaidar, Russia, Economist, politician

>Gaidar was Boris Yeltsin’s acting prime minister from June 15 to December 14, 1992 and a proponent of “shock therapy” for the Russian economy.
Searching searchyc.com for common single-words has improved greatly. Searching for "startup" previously took more than 30 seconds. However, you're still slower than http://y.soho.lt/ for multi-word searches.
Are you raising venture capital? A name like ycnuzsear.chr would work a bit better too.

Great service. Thanks.
I'd demand a refund if I were you.
That, sir, is bizarre logic.
If you don't like this yc post, why don't you demand a refund?

Silly argument.
This things rocks! good job guys!
> I read this Jeff's blog as some is interesting, but I always laugh at how he is so pro-windows.

On the plus side, he's not pro-Windows in the sense of being an evangelist or anti-something else. He's been working for a consulting business up until now, and there's great money in .Net consultancy, just like there is with Java. It's just a very different world from the LAMP-style web community.

> I admit I don't keep up on what MS offers in the server side but it seems linux + apache is still a better choice.

People publish working websites all the time on Java+whatever and on .Net+Windows, and Microsoft is working to make Windows/IIS a workable platform for PHP. I would personally recommend a LAMP-style stack for someone trying to decide what web technology stack to learn, but for someone who already knows a different stack, it may not be worth the trouble unless you need immense scale.
What RDBMS's don't have caching? If we're talking about mysql, there's a query cache, a data cache, more...
"Worthless". Pretty funny. Why was I in TheStreet (http://snipurl.com/25hkc) last week? Twitter.

Yes, my opinions on how crappy The New Pornographers were live this weekend are not particularly useful. It's not the messages that add value; it's the access to people. It seems to work particularly well for the trade press, who can use it as a LazyWeb.
We're running on very limited resources. But the good thing is we can now throw hardware at the problem (if we had the money to do so) and performance would improve. I couldn't say that with the old system.

Isn't http://y.soho.lt/ a wrapper for Google search? I'm searching for "demo day techcrunch" and soho returns no results. http://www.searchyc.com/demo+day+techcrunch returns 11 results.
The Beginner's Checklist for Small Business SEO
Google spends $72 Million on Food
Neat, I've been looking for something like that. Thanks.
here's a good explanation:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/1206/
Perhaps a demonstration of some of the UI parts, such as account creation/management and some diagrams of how the billing procedure works, to throw more light on if the system is going to work for us. A demonstration of how we can customise/integrate the system would also be beneficial.

Looks exciting though, but I've never heard of BrainTree - perhaps that's just me! Anyone care to share some thoughts on them?
Planet Mytopia is Weapon-Free
Despite the lack of machetes, M4s, and rocket launchers, casual gamers will find plenty of ways to break each others' spirits and reasons to shout "I win I win I win!"
I just didn't like that he made it sound as if everything was so easy. Most of the time, it is not.

Not saying that it is wrong to quit your job, but doing so is no guarantee to become a millionaire. Why did he even write the "some of them making millions" line? It's dishonest, in my opinion (he probably didn't mean it like that, but it draws the wrong picture).

Also, will people be more employable after quitting their jobs? It depends what employers are looking for. Some of them want "stable" employees who won't go leaving soon again, when the next best opportunity shows up.
Wow, how long is he going to keep harping on about this point?
Repeat argument for YouTube videos, blogs, IM, SMS, personal web pages, web pages, gopher pages, email, IRC, bulletin board systems. Win.
Confirmation emails just puts me off ;(
I feel a hint of castigation in that small comment, and it's been bugging me for the last few days ;-) Yes, I admit it, I don't spend my day in emacs. Too many things don't work quite right inside the emacs shell.
Why do you care?

The reality is that most human conversations are fluff. If you could listen in on everyone's cell phone calls, do you think they would sound very different?
Yay! I can search for URLs now!
I think I'm gonna go with the Lisp approach too. I think I'd be able to pick up Python much quicker given my experience.

I'm also getting very interested in Genetic Programming so Lisp would be a boon for that.
I can't wait to see nigerians advertising the h0ttest de4ls on viagr@ in full-motion video format!
Well they are compensated by the managers who have an incentive to make them be as productive as possible, otherwise they'll get replaced by the shareholders.

I'm sure there's some way to structure this to make it legitimate - maybe if we can tax it!
I feel like I must be reading a completely different blog post.

Can you point to where he even suggests lying? How is "I can see that you are annoyed" in any way false? He even said of his examples, "Every one of these statements is true". Are you responding to tone (DH2), or something he said?
...

Did you even read what I wrote? Maybe I'm clueless and 'trade press' and 'PR' are two different things... but if not, then that is exactly what I said.

Also, "something that, on the surface, seems downright worthless" != "twitter is worthless"

My whole point was just because a messaging service limited to 140 chars per message may seem like a gimmick, it's not, because people find creative uses for it.
So, who are some computer scientists (and mathematicians) that should be on the list? That is a loaded but honest question.
MA@TC made an appeal at SS08 for less snark and critical sniping

I remember thinking that was weird. He spent several minutes asking the audience not to troll his site. Apart from being off-topic and self-involved, it seems unlikely that there would be very many TC trolls in that audience .
It's the information equivalent of sugar water.

Here's some 2007 numbers, courtesy of Yahoo Finance:

Coca-Cola Company (KO): $6B net profit on $29B revenue

Pepsico (PEP): $5.6B net profit on $39.4B revenue

Google (GOOG): $4.2B net profit on $16.6B revenue

Microsoft (MSFT): $14B net profit on $51.1B revenue

I'd say that, while Microsoft Windows is more profitable than sugar water, the soft drink industry is holding its own. Of course, Pepsi and Coke know how to monetize sugar water...

Paging John Sculley! Where is he when we need him? He wasn't the world's greatest tech CEO, but he sure knew the value of sugar water!
Ad:tech Takeaways
http://y.soho.lt/ is not a wrapper. It is 8KB of web services with data held locally which is a proof-of-concept for a larger search system. http://y.soho.lt/ also runs on limited resources, namely virtual hosting. Furthermore, we were indexing slowly over the past 30 days and therefore a full index wasn't collected until this morning. A complete and current index will be public from Sunday onwards.

How about a bake-off this weekend?
It gives Micheal A something to write about...
> In short: If you don't want to create a lot of wealth, chances are, you won't create any.

Completely depends on what you're trying to do. It's easy to make a small, sustainable business in some areas, especially service businesses. If you get certified and get a union card, you can hang out your shingle as a plumber or electrician, and odds are you'll make plenty of money, but you have no hope of getting super rich.

As a plumber, there really isn't any technology on the horizon that is any obvious threat to make your job redundant, and people in India will never take your job. You are creating wealth, just not a ton of it.

This kind of business may be harder to make sustainable in the internet technology industry, but as 37 Signals has demonstrated, it's certainly not impossible.
Sorry, I didn't mean to come off so aggressive. Bad habit.

I'm just pointing out a startup-relevant use that Twitter has, which is bidirectional access between the press and companies. When you said PR, I assumed you meant what JetBlue and Comcast did with the service.
There are two biologists, one physicist, one neuroscientist, and one medical scientist. The list is dominated by individuals with careers in politics, religion, literature, philosophy, and history.
Disclaimer: I'm the dumbass developer of Chyrp. I was pointed here by a follower. :P

55 queries? I see 18, and 20 when logged in. Something's weird there. Admittedly, it used to be quite high (116, nervous chuckle), but nowadays it hovers below WordPress' query count.

I don't know where you're getting that whole admin authentication thing from. Nowhere in the code does it do anything remotely similar to what you said. The cookies simply hold the browsing user's ID and md5ed password (the md5 is the only information on the password that is stored), which is then authenticated. It's not a username and password for the admin area. It's just the information of the user who's logged in. Nothing new.

There's no single "is_admin" check or anything of the sort. There's no "authentication to the admin". It's not an all-powerful section that checks for a single thing before giving you access to every function. The group that the browsing user is associated with must have the proper privileges to perform the various functionality that is checked throughout the administration section.

As for using salts on the md5 encryptions, I don't see anywhere in WordPress's code does that either (I just downloaded the latest copy). I might add it in to 2.0, though. Should be a fairly easy change.

If you want the software to improve (which doesn't exactly seem to be the case), I just think you should either file tickets or confront the developer (me, and a couple contributors in the IRC channel) instead of spouting off misinformation on other sites.
Clearly a man who has never spent time on a boat. If you ever want to find out why Twitter is irrelevent, learn how to sail and disconnect for a week. You will learn a lot about how meaningless Twitter is once you disconnect from email/phone/internet/tv/radio for a week and feel incredibly liberated. If you want to find an idea that will change the world, disconnect from it all for a short period. When you come back the first thing you will do is cancel your Twitter, aim, etc and the next thing you will do is start doing something meaningful to more people than just those who are plugged into the net 24 hours a day.
AutoBayes: a DSL for Bayesian networks; generating data analysis programs from statistical models
For anybody still tracking this:

The event was pretty decent. There were a mix of programmers and business folk, free beer and food. I'm almost certain that I'll go back next time.
I'd like to be there, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get away from coding on the weekend.
Take the Tetris test (an Arc version, anyone?)
Ask HN: What was/is your limit for private beta users?
Do you have limits to the number of users you allow in your private beta? At what point to you stop new registration and interact with the first set of users to clean up your application?
Thanks for the heads up.

I'll be buying this for my site in a month or so.
Ahhh, I forget that big companies like to spam everything.

For my part, sorry to come off so defensive... Going through caffeine withdrawal.
Firewall Script - No more hacked PHP sites?
I agree - I think this is going to be full of unintended consequences and require substantial amounts of additional editing. Normally, censoring comments in mass is much easier than censoring video clips in mass.
What Blaine Cook needs to do is to embrace criticism and engage in an active conversation with trolls. Perhaps through increased twitter and blogger use.
The title of the list is a gross misnomer. Half of the people on the list are political activists of some sort.

Take Barenboim. Why is he an intellectual? He is a fantastic pianist, a (IMHO) mediocre conductor and an activist for peace in the middle east.

Take Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is a Dutch politician who build her entire career upon the fact that she has suffered a lot being raised as a female Muslim. She is definitely not what I would call an intellectual.
IBM Wants a Piece of Web 2.0 Pie
Three advertising models for online video
I've long considered it a flaw in Facebook that one can't try out an application before adding it to their account.

This prerequisite defies one of the best trends in web design today, which is only making signing up required when it adds value.
Dear 37Signals,

Quit telling me how to live.

Love,
Sabat
Doug Adams had a story about that, coincidentally involving birds: Aurthur Dent taught himself the language of birds. It turned out that birds are mostly chattering about the wind, and seeds, and who got whose feathers ruffled, etc.

Humans are crashingly boring. We fart, we scratch, we worry about our hair and our petty insecurities.
St. Bernadette's Photos - Mystery
I would really like to see OpenID authentication. Clickpass would be ideal, but any OpenID would work.
Grothendieck, Knuth, Paul Cohen, Terence Tao, Shing-Tung Yao.

In my opinion Godel was the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, but he's dead.
Way too long to analyze without any type of status bar, update bar, or something else to do.

People will just wonder and then leave.
That is probably one of the sites I hit on a daily basis coz invariably I am looking for an opinion, and HN is probably a good place to start, be it books, music, a startup in a particular sector of the market.

Thanks guys! Really appreciate the good work.
Modified quote: "How will people like me who really like Twitter and use it in personally useful ways going to manage without Twitter?"

You might not be that person (note: I'm not), but to assume the other types don't exist or that their reasons for valuing Twitter are mis-guided is a bit grand.
You're old.

Twitter is in 2008 what checking AIM away messages was back in 1998.

Welcome to the long tail and all that jazz.

99.99% of everything is boring.

Join Second Life if you want something unique.

Internet is just a wasteland.

Web 1.0 was creating the playground for information.
Web 2.0 is about sharing more information.
Web 3.0 will be about how to extract utility out of information.

I can go on and on about pithy pseudo-analysis but you should just keep listening to Matt Maroon.
I'm not nominating anyone. I don't think being named to the list of "100 random names, compiled over a round of beers at a Foreign Policy office party, that make you sound sophisticated when you drop them" is a very high honor.
ironic that, as a person who clearly spent time on a boat, you're still posting on HN in a twitter thread instead of curing cancer or something.
If the next "version" of the web is all about semantics, why aren't more people using microformats?
What it says above. Or if not microformats, then something else.
John! Do you want to peddle sugar water all your life or do you want to make a difference in Web 2.0 technology?!?
What you are saying is incredibly true. See and that is what we are trying to determine, what is our product worth. Hopefully our beta testers will help us determine that.

Chris

http://www.propertystampede.com
"For me I just tend to take Jeff's tone with a grain of salt rather than expecting each post to be dispassionate analysis."

Well, I like a lot of what he writes (by a lot, I mean, "a lot of posts every year," not necessarily, "most of his posts.") I'm quite happy his posts aren't dispassionate. Shrug. I guess I'm being remarkably asymmetrical and patently unfair: I want his passion, it's just that this post is a necessary consequence of his style.
Bug or Architecture Flaw?
What are you running on for Hardware?
Can the service index across multiple machines?
"If you want the software to improve (which doesn't exactly seem to be the case), I just think you should either file tickets or confront the developer"

Consider removing the parenthetical remark and adding a period after a statement like this and leaving it there. Simple, powerful, and makes your point:

"If you want the software to improve, I just think you should either file tickets or confront the developer."
IMHO Mandelbrot, Prigogine, Mccarthy and Minsky should be on that list and by the way Baremboin was born in Argentina.
Maybe those non-tech people simply don't matter. They live on another planet.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. The semantic web is a pipedream. It's never, ever going to happen. The whole idiotic scheme hinges on the notion that people are going to spend a whole bunch of extra time adding intelligent metadata to their data. Never. Going. To. Happen.

I find it far more likely that we'll have built a practical AI before the semantic web ever happens, at which point all semantic efforts will be obsolete.

Of course, if there's anything more masturbatory than the semantic web, it's microformats. Hey! You there! Don't link to a vcard object, that's yesterday's deal. Instead, painstakingly reproduce your vcard in XML! Yeah, that's a good idea, isn't it. Lets take a widely supported data format that many people already have, and turn it in to a completely unsupported, poorly specified fantasy format. Then you can maintain two copies of the same data! Endless fun.

It's just a symptom of the general web malaise. Am I crazy or was it once possible for real human beings to write web pages? You know, before you had to remember 90 pages of how CSS worked? The W3C these days seems to be where small minds go to die, and even TBL isn't helping.
There's also Noam Chomsky
Client Testimonal - right from the homepage:

> People think my site is weird because it's about the supernatural. But they're out there! Sometimes the extraterrestrial see our website and try to hack it to avoid the information we reveal about them. However, since we purchased FirewallScript, we haven't had a problem since. [...]
For better or for worse, the modern connotation of an intellectual is heavily slanted towards the matters of humanities and arts. I've had the pleasure of studying under some great computer scientists, but unfortunately, although geniuses in their field, very few of them could be considered an "intellectual" in the current form of its meaning.
For people voting him down: This is a funny reference to what Arrington said in SS.
Very nice tutorial. It's good how he points out the useful libraries for web development with lisp.
The emphasis is obviously on the "public" more than the "intellectual." Witness Thomas Friedman's place on the list!
It doesn't matter, because this method is somewhat archaic anyways.

You might want to consider how horizontal share-nothing apps tend to work. You can combine share-nothing with continuation-based web servers if you have a smart and fast dispatcher sitting above your cluster of responders. I'm working on fixing that in Fuzed ( http://github.com/KirinDave/fuzed/tree/master )

You might want to quickly whip up a fuzed binding for CL and give it a try, it makes wiring any language to a webapp as simple as responding to a binary protocol. This might seem like a sidestep to the actual problem, but it actually has a lot of nice side effects in terms of your organization of discrete responders.
I agree, a list of the Top 100 Intellectuals would be dominated by mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and probably a hacker or to, but this list is titled The Top 100 PUBLIC Intellectuals, i.e. public policy, so I wasn't expecting any different.
It's the longtail of investing.
The secret will always be in the filter - how to seperate the wheat from the chaff.
Right now people wait to see what survives.
How does one do this better? No idea - but let us imagine that we can use The Wisdom of Crowds.

Maybe the trick is to build operate and own an exchange that performs some level of due diligence on the companies and lets people - us, the great unwashed - invest micro amounts via paypal or similar methods. Of course there will be frauds and fools, but let the people decide how to establish 'trust mechanisms'.
10 Percent of Broadband Subscribers Suck Up 80 Percent of Bandwidth
Note that the list is of public intellectuals -- intellectuals who play a prominent role in public discourse. Most great computer scientists tend to stay out of the public realm, for the most part -- and perhaps with good reason.
"Once installed, you can configure what mischevious things you want to be on the lookout for and let FireWall Script do the rest. With the logging functionality included, you can also go back and see if anyone is attempting to sidestep your rules and stay ahead of the game."

Isn't that a case of Enumerating Badness (http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d...)? Why not instead have strict rules about what you allow? It's telling they suggest you "stay ahead of the game", it sounds more like "play catch up in the arms race because your design is inherently insecure"

"Testimonial: Being a very old website, it comes hard to update because of the potential risk. So we often risk hackers everyday because we run unprotected. Now that we use FirewallScript, updating is not required for security and protection because we have it in this easy, fast script."

I don't think you can juste substitute a simple script for competence and sound, robust design like that... I don't drink this kool-aid.
Re:TechCrunch and LonelyGirl15
I expect something called SearchYC to be the authority on finding things at YC. Pointing me to google when you find no results should be useless and detracts from that authority.

That's all the critique I can come up with though, looks great.
We're not even done with the current version of the web, let alone getting started on the next!

Take your time, what's the rush?
Thanks for the feedback! We are trying to improve the speed but it takes a fair bit of time to process the document and then parse for skills, etc. Until we get it sped up, we could either have a placeholder (which we do currently), or we could just block the user on a status bar, but they could be stuck there for up to 30 seconds.

Any thoughts on which might be less painful until we get it running faster?
Very cool, but I wonder how usability will be impacted when the number of tagged things increases a lot.
You certainly won't find me on twitter/irc/aim, but I read Hacker News because there are generally intelligent stories. And a "Do you need Twitter' thread is right up my alley. Actually I work on computer vision not cancer, but if it ends up working out cars will drive themselves and some lives will be saved. It probably doesn't pay as well as founding a throw away social networking Web 2.0 whatever, but it is more fulfilling than networking on Twitter all day to see if I can get my noticed for something.