skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Equivalent features in Django:

* Gem Dependencies -- this would be nice

* Dirty tracking with partial updates:
http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/4102

* has_finder in the form of named_scope -- not sure I understand, but these look like custom managers:
http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/model-api/#custom...

* Built-in timezone support:
http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/settings/#time-zo...

* Better caching infrastructure:
http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/cache/
This article has nothing to do with the death of desktop machines. It is just a simple reflection that it is cheaper to make them in places other than Austin. I am in fact surprised that they haven't already closed all of their US-based manufacturing.
Last time I used a desktop was in 2004 I think.
Try using a desktop in the bath or sofa or toilet :/

Also desktop keyboards still just don't work.
If my boss only knows I'm working by observing the physical placement of my body then we have more serious issues to worry about than whether I'm using a laptop or a desktop.
Just in case you were wondering of relevance to Hacker News before reading the article:

"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people - many of them just work in offices, jobs they don't enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."
Google Launches Google Docs Community On YouTube
Desktops are going to be around for a long time...

- Gamers have an insatiable need for power, and the fastest computers are always going to not be laptops.

- A lot of people are very price sensitive, and desktops are always going to be less expensive.
In the 90's people were saying the same things about perl that are now saying about arc.
Four Companies that Conquered America
Bosses are concerned about productivity, but it is really hard to measure. So they use physical presence as a proxy. The whole concept of working remotely pretty new (~10 years old?), so it is going to take some more time for people to think differently about what it really means to be working.
The Ten Worst Job Interview Questions Ever
http://images.ucomics.com/comics/tr/2008/tr080324.gif
New Work City - Coworking in New York.
Sometimes the fastest education comes from working for a bad boss.

I know I have picked up responsibility and skills quickly when work has been dumped on me by a superior who wanted his afternoons free to nap :)
What Everyone Should Know About Science
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface
not only s3, but googlepages for the images...and nearlyfreespeech for the hosting. all content is compressed and weighs in at <200k, w/ 10-yr maxage headers for the y-slow fr3aks.
ingenious!
Should we submit our startup - feedback please
Please review this website http://www.LimeAll.com. Should we submit this for YC.
Regards,
LimeAll
surprising at 7%/week growth with Tony being featured on so many blogs
The name is suspiciously similar to TextPayMe (noun verb pro-noun). Other than that, it sounds awesome.
"and then attacking specific small startups unprovoked does not seem like a very proper way to spread the word"

DH2. Responding to Tone.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I still don't get why people by HDTVs and not just an HD projector for the same price or cheapter
Linux: Always a Bridesmaid
Why not just flood their mailbox with fake leads from hundreds of fake email addresses instead? Is that possible?
So far, our internal clients have been the only client for the axis-driven web service, so I haven't really opened it up. In other words, we're really just using axis2 for internal rpc-style calls. We also aren't transmitting much in a soap message - really just the parameters to run. The bulk of data transfer is handled through other methods.
also, mad css-sprites...
Does anyone know who does the credit card processing for Amazon FPS? I know that in the case of PayPal, it used to be a company called EPX and is now done by Wells Fargo, but can't seem to find anywhere who is processing for Amazon...
I'm disappointed by progress in the dental field. I have a feeling in 80 years, people will look at present-day dentistry with particular horror. You could say this about modern day surgery in general, but there's a special horror in "You were awake while they drilled into your teeth?"
Surprisingly low or surprisingly high? If you think that's low, consider that 7% weekly growth is roughly 3300% annual growth, something that most companies would kill for. If that can be sustained for 3 years, the company will be roughly 25,000 times larger than when it started.
"...and while they're happy to take the cash the business throws off, it's not what they're focused on."

"So what is that? Making more media, we gather."

Interestingly, the T-shirts are actually a form of media for delivering jokes.
Interesting use of Google maps API for non-cartographic data
Are these all short clips? Is there any way to see more?
I've definitely had this happen to me.

Another great experience (though you'll want to kill someone during it) is working with horrible co-workers. I've found my tolerance is huge after working with difficult people and dealing with them is so much easier.

Overall, I still prefer working with great people. You can still learn the same workings while at the same time foster a growing appreciation for your work and environment. Great people inspire others to do great things.
My Startup: tracking real world trends - thoughts? suggestions?
Quick background: we are just two guys (24,25) who left our jobs and started this site. We have been working on it for months, and would love some constructive feedback. Thanks!
The list was of people who'd inspired you. I was honest. Besides, admiration is not fawning.
They're using the Google maps API to display genome data which doesn't have any relation to the underlying cartography. This seems like a neat trick and makes me wonder about what other kinds of structures you could represent this way. It looks as if they're just using Google maps for the JS library?
Computing started off with mainframes and terminals. Then we got to workstations. Now with the web and your prediction, we're going back to the server/thin-client model.

Isn't progress cool?
Firefox 3 beta 5 is out
I really like the pathfinding screenshot!

I wish there were more games that exposed their internal operation or made it part of the gameplay. It seems like many hacker news readers would enjoy a game in which you assemble an AI in competition with other AIs -- what I'd like is a game that allowed you to do that with varying levels of abstraction. A nice API for an RTS engine would make that possible, I guess.

And, on a tangent: it'd be cool if more games responded to the way people "cheat" at computer games, like if there was a game that made saving and restoring state an actual part of the gameplay...
This looks like it could be great -- it breaks it down to gameplay without fancy 3d engines.

You should put an email signup on the site so that people who want to play the game when it's really playable can keep it in mind. Otherwise we might not remember the web address.
The primary user seems to be the author, who wrote it to learn about game AI. And a game that doesn't get written is no fun at all.
TechCrunch Down?
I'm getting an error 503 when I visit TC, anyone else?
they have figured out how to make something people want, it's the monetization part they're struggling with
A lot of companies stop at 1.

A lot of companies don't even make it to 1. I've been witnessing the trials of finding and keeping good people firsthand, and it's not pretty.
I disagree. Some of those people may be experts at SEO but not have the first clue about how to make a good web app. The best they may be able to do is write a blog and apply SEO techniques to it to get it to the top.

On that note, If I was ever to pay someone for SEO, I'd probably Google the term and pick one of the first consulting companies that comes up.
Beware of Hash Cookies
Great. We just submitted our YC app, and I wanted to make sure that my account history was going to be OK.
Another classic story is Enron. The company was originally to be named Enteron, but at the last minute someone realized that enteron is synonymous with intestines.
Aircraft Outsourcing Problems - With a Twist
Using Rake for Erlang Unit Testing
Yeah, we're pretty damn tickled with the growth (and stickiness-- abandonment seems unusually low for web software, from what I've read).

FWIW, the 7% week/week was well before any of the press coverage around YC demo day (and associated splash). We've been 12-14% for the last two weeks. I expect it to settle back to the standard word of mouth level of 7%. Of course, I think we have some clever SEO/viral things in the pipeline, which might pick things up a bit.
Cameron's point regarding designing for a color blind audience is extremely valuable. Such an easy thing to overlook.
I have neither; is the image quality the same for both?

How much does a good, portable screen cost?
This article is right on. The thrill of creating something new quickly wears off when business gets in the way, but those who push through get the reward.
Yeah! The damn things just make you hungrier...

<ducks>
At least he's upfront about his age discrimination.
my problem with laptops is that when i'm at home, i want to hook up external mouse and keyboard, and put it on some books on a desk to get the display at the right height (or plug it into an external display). if you're doing all that, a desktop makes some sense.

laptop using all the built in stuff is bad ergonomics.
This might be a too-fancy way of saying "we focused on what people wanted" (to put it in PG-speak rather than Andreessen-speak).

We started with a permission marketing campaign (before we wrote a line of code)-- showing a few screenshots and allowing people to sign up to hear about the launch. That helped us understand how much people wanted it (measured by traffic and conversion of traffic to sign ups). We were immedietely barraged by lots of people who had ideas about the product, and we listened very carefully.

We ignored lots of things that it might've been bad to ignore in favor of building features that people wanted and talking with users. We didn't incorporate. Didn't get a bank account. Didn't talk to a lawyer. Didn't worry about SEO or any other marketing (even though I'm a bit of an SEO nut). Didn't talk to investors.

Lots and lots and lots of focus on reducing frustration, reducing friction, and increasing value-- and lots and lots of communication with users (to understand that stuff better).

Boiled down-- lots of focus on understanding what the market wants (both individual lifehackers and biz teams that want to be more productive) and then building/iterating. Rinse, repeat.
How about the evidence of actual work produced? The facetime model is seriously broken. It doesn't promote productivity, it actually decreases it when employees figure out how to falsify the results.

http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html should be required reading.
Passion supercedes brute force. Go out and do something you love people. Even if you failed, at least you have a life lesson.
JSON is the "new hotness" for a lot of people but the default is still XML.

Also, note that depending on what format the underlying data is in, using JSON can actually be worse for performance than POX (escaping, etc.).
The Power of Persuasion
It's important to note that it's not clear that Asperger's actually exists as a separate set of people, rather than simply as a group of people who's personality fits in some distant corner of the normal distribution.

I.e., I'm saying I want to see a continuous stable functional with a margin (1) to distinguish between asperger's and non-aspergers before I take it too seriously as a "condition". As far as I know, this has never been done.

(Note that I'm not disputing full fledged autism. I'm just uncertain about aspergers.)

(1) For those unfamiliar with stats, this is what I mean. Let x be an N dimensional vector, representing the personality/physical features of people (i.e. x[1] = propensity for antisocial behavior, x[2] = seizure frequency, x[...] = other diagnostic criteria). Then I'd like to see a continuous function f(x) such that if f(x)>1, you have aspergers, f(x)<0 you don't, and the probability that 0<f(x)<1 is very small.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
The content of that article is part of the same author's book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" (http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_power_of_persuas...) which is one of the most interesting books I have ever read.

Even though it is not "new" I posted it because I wanted to ask the question of what are some of the sites out there that you have found employing those techniques to sell their product online.
<insert snide comment on IDEs vs. Emacs/vi />

More seriously, another problem with the SOAP approach is that a lot of the toolchain'ish malarky around it hides reality from the developers and so they tend to create even worse abominations.
That is an interesting story. What would be really interesting, though, is to read about the company that saw through this kind of prejudice -- that hired the equally-qualified minority workers at wages depressed by such prejudice, and then made a killing. It happened with women -- Greenspan Townsend hired lots of female economists, because they were underpriced -- but I've lived in St. Louis, and I do not recall any successful businesses that emphasized hiring minorities, outside of sports and entertainment.

This reminds me of Blink, in which Malcolm Gladwell dwells on a similar habit of used car salesman. It is fortunate that Gladwell's career as a journalist has given him more insight into auto sales than all those guys who do it for a living -- but what's sad is that he can't convince jurist and economist Richard Posner that it's because car salesman are immoral, not because they are making intelligent deductions from available data (http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner-blink.html).
Ouchy. Basically, it looks like you're taking a very narrow view of REST and conflating lots of it with historical RPC-ish thinking.

Re: There are other verbs that need to be applied over a network.

Please name one that's actually needed.
Are you familiar with the phrase 'starving artist'?

Just because it feels good doesn't always mean you should do it.
AFAIK LCDs have higher image quality and good screens are not cheap. The cheap option is to paint a wall with special paint and use that as a screen.

I bought a 47" Westinghouse LCD last year.
Foreign Affairs - Public Footprints in Private Markets - Robert M. Kimmitt
I also recommend these podcasts:
http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

As well as just perusing the whole site -- there are a TON of videos on there by many smart people in the entrepreneurship community.

http://edcorner.stanford.edu/
QR codes might work better for low-res cellphone cameras. I have a QR reader (http://reader.kaywa.com/) on my phone and it works pretty well, even with only .3 megapixels. I never use it though, since QR codes don't seem to have much uptake (yet?) in the US.
My understanding of the current situation is that good projector bulbs are fragile, only last about 1000 hours, and can cost as much as half the projector's price. After a few bulb replacements, the cost of a projector can be the same as or more than a large HDTV, so other factors come into play: you get a bigger-but-dimmer picture with projectors, some of the cheaper DLP projectors are bright but flicker horribly, etc.
Ben Franklin,
Richard Feynman,
William Blake,
Dylan Thomas,
Marcus Aurelius
Using Basecamp to automagically keep track of product releases
"Technologies such as this one, that that do not threaten dentists' incomes, may succeed. But any technologies that threaten dentists' incomes, such as vaccines for tooth decay, inevitably fail."

Possible future: One or more developing nation, way short on all health care options, and more so on dentists, will bypass patent law and start using the vaccine.

There will be outrage, of course, from some nations, but not enough
to stop it.

Before too long it will be clear that the vaccine works, and some modern nations will employ it (Canada, perhaps, or Sweden). Eventually everyone will get to use it because the benefits are too damn obvious to fight.

Dentists will learn PHP to survive. :)
Describe your invention as thoroughly as possible, to maximize the benefit of the search. Press the Search button. Results: Prior Art found - invent something else.

The they have a nice collection of other people's inventions.
This is incoherent. Why are childish comebacks better than actual responses? It also looks like the symbols are mixed up (e.g. #9 seems to be about legal issues, but the icon is for 'hackneyed'). Why isn't question #10 a way to explain why you're a good fit for that company rather than some other job? Why isn't #9 a chance to talk about leaving other positions on good terms? Why would someone take the pen in #8 (this is not rhetorical: if you have an actual answer, you can obviously take the pen and explain)? Why isn't #7 an opener for telling someone what kind of office environment you prefer, and why?

The questions in the post are all bad questions -- but the kind of person who would answer them like BusinessPundit.com is an even worse employee.
It's the same problem as current passwords, but with higher consequences for those who don't use the same userid and password across sites.
"Im a virtualmin user, I love it, I use the GPL version as it's lighter and I need to squeeze out every cent of my server as memory is the big issue for my app."

Awesome. Memory usage of GPL and Professional are roughly identical, but if you don't need the features of Professional, we'd encourage you to keep using GPL. Also check out our guide for running Virtualmin on low memory systems:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/id,virtualmin_on_low...

Most memory usage is actually found in the underlying services, and not Virtualmin/Webmin proper (though Webmin with all of the Virtualmin modules cached is about 110MB...turning off that caching takes it down to 10MB).

"Alas I don't expect that the startups I see here will change there focus and concentrate on SEO anytime soon, the general opinion that seems to be prevalent is that SEO is like web1, and social graphs and viral marketing will build the traffic."

Actually, we thought hard about viral marketing and social graphs and realized that we don't stand a chance marketing via that path. Almost nothing about our product has viral characteristics, though word of mouth has been strong. We've been focusing on increasing the amount of valuable information on our network of websites (Webmin.com, Virtualmin.com, and Doxfer.com), such that searches for all sorts of common server administration problems will result in the user coming to one or more of our sites because the solution can be found there. I don't know how to measure the success of this, and it hasn't resulted in us being front page of Google for any of our keywords...but we do get several hundred visitors a day from natural search results to our forums and wikis. As I mentioned, our traffic is nothing to be ashamed of for a product site, and it's growing rapidly.

All of this discussion has made me think a lot more about the problem. So I'm going to start paying more attention and blog about the results. Starting from our current "zero SEO effort" state, I'll spend the next couple of months tuning for SEO and post a few short articles about the results. It's certainly worth some testing, if we could crank up traffic without spending ad dollars.
Make the Most of Muxtape: A Field Guide to Playlists
Because projectors require a few things that TVs do not.

1. A dark room

2. Nobody getting in between the projector and the surface it is displaying on

3. Extra space

Don't get me wrong, projectors are cool, but there is a reason they aren't as popular as regular TVs.
Articles of this kind always confuse me. Is the thesis that the US is now an unfavorable destination for money? Putting aside currency and liquidity flows, which also confuse me, how about talking about economic activity as a barter system where paper monies are convenient proxies for a million linked IOUs. We all produce a bit of something and trade with it. Now it seems like the author is likening the US to that guy who washed ashore on an island inhabited by two others who have already captured all sources of food, shelter, and entertainment between them and trade in a perfect harmony. The guy who washed ashore, having nothing to offer, will die. However, comparative advantage suggests that even the entity that is not foremost in any activity can eke out a living by creating/manufacturing the stuff that has the lowest opportunity cost of production? Metaphorically speaking, the US will at the very least get to ask the others if they want fries with their fish sandwiches. And that is in the bleak scenario that the US slips overnight into a sweeping mediocrity in all fields.

This is hardly true. Despite many legitimate concerns, the US is a definitive leader in pharma, entertainment, technology, and education.

"Our college graduates are roughly equivalent in ability to other nations’ high school graduates (story) and a lot of our high school graduates could not compete on the world market for any jobs other than manual labor." This statement is misleading, the US happens to send a very large percentage of its population to high schools and colleges. The median student is, of course, not going to be as smart and able as the median student in India where only a really really tiny percentage of the population has set foot in a classroom.

http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/files/2008/03/kierkegaard.jpg

Even the percentage shown in that graph is probably over counting using a very lax definition of college: I say this not as someone speculating on the basis of some internet research, but as a product of the Indian schooling system.

And, this might be a stretch, so what if the average graduate is not as smart and intellectually competent in a narrowly defined sense? We became soft and pudgy after physical prowess stopped determining survival probability and reproductive success in industrial and post-industrial eras, so what if we (on average) do become thicker in the post-information era where we have cognitive aids for almost all functions?
Yes, sometimes when I'm playing a game I'll come up with an algorithm to handle some aspect of it (e.g. adjusting the tax rate), but the game doesn't allow scripting so I have to run the algorithm by hand.

Also, check out Bolo and the many bots available for it (if you can find a way to run it - maybe someone should clone it in Flash).