skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think we were actually meant to have chairs :)
Help Your Customer Live the Fantasy
What? A mod_rails? Really? Where will the madness end?
Job Market 2009
Ask YC:  Why is the site so slow?
Something happening today? The site is crawling
Does anyone know the answer to his question about the <HYPE> tag?
I thought it was just me.
Out of RAM?
We're trying to figure it out. I just restarted the server. Will see if that fixes anything...
Xoopit: Proof that Gmail Needs a Better API
I'd love for someone to make photo-sharing not suck horribly. Yes, Flickr is pretty great for some scenarios, but I still have yet to find a great solution for the following scenario:

1. I go to say, a wedding (but it could be anything) with a group of friends
2. Many people take pictures
3. After I come home, I want to easily look at, and optionally download, high quality version of all my friends photos for this event.

Right now, I see people using either Facebook, Kodak, Flickr, etc (I can't easily download high-quality collections), emailing several zips, or if they have a server, placing the photos on their and providing a link. There has got to be a easier way and I'm dying for someone to build it.

For the record, I don't think ideas are worthless. I'm just not going to build this anytime soon and I'd rather an awesome solution sooner rather than later.
startup.com
Chumby Gets $12.5M...Here's Why It's Taking Off
it seems better now...
Humor: Web 2.0 Haikus!
This reads like Mister Spock's review of a punk rock concert.

"I don't understand why the audience was asked if it was 'ready to rock', as they clearly did not have instruments. Also, it was illogical to ask them to 'fight the power', since power is an abstract physical quantity that cannot meaningfully be 'fought'."

And did PG's monumental catalogue of rhetorical errors mention the rule about "not arguing with straw men"? Because I don't think the real PG actually believes that literally everyone "wasn't meant to have a boss", nor would the real PG ever endorse the concept that "you weren't meant to have a chair, because our ancestors didn't evolve to sit in chairs."
Sony/BMG Under Investigation for Software Piracy
The April Fools Thread- List of April Fools Jokes By Tech Companies
Revision3 Selling to Fox-
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/30/revision3-acquired-by-fox-news-says-kevin-rose/

Aviary Photo Time Machine-
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/another-fun-tool-from-aviary-a-photo-time-machine/
Different browsers vary on how they do rounding of font sizes. I believe most browsers now set font size 100% to be 16px.
The error_help() experiment: shared solutions in the Python interactive interpreter
I'd also include slicehost for hosting...cheap, great documentation , and you can install many linux distros
- 3D Live local maps

- Incremental automated driving

- Long tail angel stock auction to get 200 $200 investors for seed funding

- Roomba + cell network + camera = cheap multi-purpose tele-operated robot. Home security a big plus.

- The "piping" for image and video processing to power the next wave of intelligent analysis.
How difficult would it be to host news.YC on X webservers with load balancing?

Is the implementation in arc currently horizontally scalable?
DH-1: Labeling other people's arguments with DH levels.
The Newton Virus [video]
i don't know about the nature of the YC.news architecture, but if it's an error that happens unexpectecly then it must be due to some scheduled automatically recurring function that fails somehow and eats up all memory...

so probably it must be on the web server or the stats logging

update: or the weighting algorithm, which is obviously a new addition
Um, he was actually putting forward an idea though.
I think we should redirect the warp drive through the deflector array. Either that or jettison the anti-matter pods.

EDIT: We should also re-phase the dilithium crystals before we lose containment in the nacelles.

Ok Ok -- I deserve a score of zero for that one. But I couldn't resist. Sometimes humor can be instructive, right? : )
So did I, but then it was a chance to use http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ - told me it was down for everyone.
speaking of which, I would love to see news.yc on an ec2 setup. perhaps YC's own heroku..

edit: nevermind, forget heroku was just for ror apps
1. https://ourdoings.com/makesite.html

2. Upload your own photos

3. Send friends the link and tell them to click the "Edit" tab and volunteer as authors to upload their own. (The happy couple can volunteer as owners.)

4. Approve the volunteer applications that you get.

5. After your friends upload their photos, use http://piclens.com/ to make viewing them really slick. There's a button at the top of piclens to leave the slide show and go to an individual photo's page where you can download the full version.
You're missing "containment" somewhere in there.
My idea is to vote for the submitter, not the story. Each user sees a different front page based on how he/she has voted in the past. I see more stories from people who have submitted stories I liked in the past. I have a test site running at www.votetheuser.com . You may notice a slight similarity to Hacker News - being the cheap rip off artist that I am.
+1 for Startup.com + War Games. Aardvark is lame.
"The Machine that Changed the World", an early 90's PBS documentary that changed my life when I was 12. After seeing that 5 hour special, I knew I would work with computers for the rest of my life.
CIA enlists Google's help for spy work
Did Earth Hour Fail?
I have to admit I'm intrigued, but at the same time I'm really wishing it was a proper mod_rack instead of a mod_rails. Rack, for those who don't know, is the Ruby equivalent to Python's WSGI. A number of other Ruby web frameworks are built on Rack, including Merb, Ramaze, Sinatra and Waves.

That said, I'm still pretty excited and the numbers are promising. Wonder how well it handles long-running requests (which is Thin's problem, currently)
Paul,

This is an excellent article! Perchance have you examined some of the code in Csound?
Toshiba robot to follow commands...
Arc is horizontally scalable so long as you can make sure each fnid is processed by the same server that created the continuation.

I haven't looked at the news.yc code specifically, but how data gets stored would determine how difficult it is to horizontally scale.
you have to present their argument

No, you only need to include the aspect you disagree with so your rebuttal can be shorter.
couldn't resist to what exactly?
we were conversing a bit earlier and hypothesized it was a ddos from the spam thread discussed yesterday. was also thinking that maybe a spam filter put in place had a bug.
The author makes four points, which are interesting to consider vis-à-vis YC:

1. VCs and founders have a conflict of interest with respect to risk, because VCs are portfolio investors who need a few home runs while founders have all their eggs in one basket.

2. VCs tend not to respect or care about founders.

3. VCs generally don’t add that much value beyond cash, though they claim otherwise.

4. VCs tend to think of techies as totally fungible, weird, and not capable of leading.

When it comes to #2 and #4, YC is obviously in a different league.

On #3, it's true that some people dispute whether YC adds value beyond cash. But it appears that the founders themselves overwhelmingly say that it does. So I give #3 to YC.

I'm not sure about #1. It would be interesting to hear more about this one.
Ask YC: Who's your favorite J2EE Hosting Provider
I recently launched a small site using the GoDaddy Shared Hosting Plan for a very standard J2EE-based application. Throughout the last month of being "live" it has not been uncommon for the site to go down at least once a day for 30-minutes or more, and I have not had any success with countless trouble tickets with GoDaddy.

Needless to say, I have started searching for other J2EE/Java hosting providers and I would like to see what other YC readers are using...

Can anyone else recommend some other affordable (<$50) services, shared, virtual or dedicated?

I've included a list of providers in no particular order that I have found with J2EE hosting services. I have also seen many providers offering Virtual Systems, which I could administer, but I would prefer to leave patching and maintenance to the professionals.

http://www.hostjava.net/?gclid=CK7GmrOjtZICFT00FQodtVKERQ

http://www.lunarpages.com/solutions.php

http://www.mochahost.com/webhosting.php?ppce=ZT1Hb29nbGUmbj1Ub21jYXQgQ2FtcGFpZ24gMDE%3D
Plus includes software version control system SVN!!

http://www.dailyrazor.com/java/overview.php?r=1&gclid=CNmgnPKmtZICFQE6xwodnh0SRA

http://www.javaservlethosting.com/index.jsh

http://www.visionwebhosting.net/

http://www.jwebhosting.net/service.jsp

http://www.omnicus.net/java-tomcat-hosting-plan/
I used Redfin to find my house. Find. It was a fantastic service that I used for house hunting, but never actually used their service in a way in which they would make money off of me.

I think what the editors at The Standard did in the case you mention was look at the two (or 3) main big boys and weighed in on who seemed to have the best chance for financial success.

One thing I noticed about Redfin when I used it was it had a fairly small coverage area, although luckily it included mine. If memory serves, it only included five areas around the US.
I'm not a huge sports fan, but this is an excellent idea. I, too, am an F1 fan and in America races are usually broadcast while I'm asleep. I can't subscribe to any F1 rss feeds because I'm guaranteed to accidentally open up my reader before they're re-broadcast. In this case I'd almost be happy with an intentional delay on my feed reader. That is a pretty specific feature, but I'd love to automatically hide the F1 feeds each race day.
We Tried To Warn You, Part 1
A lazily-evaluated, infinitely-recursive generator function decided to become ambitious.
Startup.com was lame, it moved slow and had no point. I never did care at the end that their website blew up considering they never really explain why it blew up.

E-Dreams conversely was a better documentary in the same vein but harder to find. It talked about the rise and collapse of Kozmos.

Aadvark is lame. It's just a bunch of kids being hyper that they're working in New York with fancy schmancy big screen LCDs.

PBS also did a lot of features back in the 90's. Code Rush as someone mentioned and Revolution OS are both good to take a look.

In Search of the Valley http://www.stage4.co.uk/film/dvd_offer.php is also worth a look. The filmmakers examined why Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley and talked with quite a few well known people.
On the driving and maps note, I'm at a large university and I'd love to be able to determine via phone if a certain parking lot is full or not.
The entirety of NewsYC is kept in memory, if I recall correctly.
but what does it mean to "have" a "boss"? ;)
Hmmm... I seem to have lost my comment history and karma. Related?
Massively distributed Ajax profiling
Video: What the job market for 2009 will be like
The Aggregated Me
Why Email is Dumb | Leveraging Ideas
One of the issues Workstreamr.com is tackling is the notion that ‘email is dumb.’

So why is email dumb?

Generally, there is no database attached to email. Even if there is, email is still essentially dumb text sent from one person to another. Email is dumb in the sense that the content of a particular message is subject to the interpretation of the person receiving it. While you know things such as a) who sent the email b) the date and time it was sent, really the crux of the message is not necessarily clear. People are notoriously poor communicators and in today’s multi tasking environment, particularly poor readers.

While the dumbness of email doesn’t matter much when email is being used for social communications, the lack of ‘intelligence’ in email really starts to matter when we’re talking about work. Deadlines. Action items. All critical to the success of a project – and our careers.

How many times have you emailed someone only to learn a week later that they ‘overlooked’ something you had asked them to do? How many times have you searched in vain, even with advanced systems like Gmail, to figure out what was assigned to you? Or how about when an email chain contains multiple changes to a deliverable’s due dates? Who changed the date and why again?

Email is not intelligent in that it lacks the ability to recognize and translate grouped text into action items. Microsoft Outlook, or iCal offer a slightly more intelligent approach. When you receive an iCal invite you clearly are being asked to a) attend something and b) respond. Those are two calls-to-action that might be missed in an email or IM such as “Jones Meeting at 4pm. You available?” Tumblr.com takes an interesting approach to how it renders text, but from a more visual standpoint. [Here is my Tumblelog]. Tumblr is a blogging platform but unlike any other in that you have multiple types of posts you can use; they are posts with very specific formats. For example, if you wanted to blog a quote, Tumblr lets you simply select its “Quote Post.” All you do is add text and Tumblr formats it all for you, rendering proper quote conventions in a aesthetically pleasing manner. These variations on types of posts, or ‘typed-posts’ are a very powerful concept on a number of levels.

Shortly we’ll reveal more about how Workstreamr is tackling this ‘dumb communications’ problem. For the time being, it’s simply important to recognize the limitations of email. Newer, and more innovative tools are a step in the right direction for producing much more intelligent workflows.
Ask YC: Feedback on our webapp (website-building tool)
http://orgu.com

We have just launched a website creation tool for group-based websites. A few student organizations have been using it since alpha (you'll see them at the bottom of the homepage) and they really like it so far.

It utilizes the Blogger XML template language (and can use any template of this type), so the sites look a lot like blogs. However, you might say they are suped-up blogs, with added features like calendar and photos.

We are 2 people, we have recently graduated in the Chicago area, we hope to pursue this as a startup. The webapp is still very much in beta (and there are many half-baked features), but we just wanted valuable feedback from the YC community to help us in future iterations. Thanks so much!
seems back to normal now, it was really slow and i could not login about 2 hours ago
oh yeah... we are aware of a possible naming conflict with orgoo.com, so we're thinking about rebranding. any suggestions for new names would be appreciated.
You mean this isn't related to the spamming problem discussed earlier?
thanks for the responses. i put up a long one 2x earlier but the site was all jacked up. in short i think ringcental has more corporate type options than GC, i haven't been psyched with 37 signals stuff (although it looks sweet!) but will check out campfire as well as theplanet (and lots of people psyched on slicehost - i'll check that too).
No, you fool!

Reroute auxiliary power through the plasma conduits!
Did anyone else lose their comments, karma, etc? I'm down to 1 point. My profile settings seemed to also be reset, though it still remembers my saved articles.
Lol, for the first half of the movie I couldn't figure out if he was saying "Winner, winner, chicken thinner" or "dinner". Thanks for resolving it for me.
Aren't these complaints why the upcoming iPhone enterprise stuff was announced recently? http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/

You know, coming up with innovative products that can delight users and satisfy businesses is not easy.
Interesting stuff.

We do some really basic distributed error reporting: any uncaught exceptions are caught and reported back to our server. Multiple errors are batched together to limit the network requests.

While we try to test extensively on all the major browsers we can't test everything, so this has helped us a lot.
I actually thought the exact same thing while watching the movie.
I remember that article - I quickly reassured my self by writing fizz-buzz in Perl, Ruby and PLSQL (my three most used languages) - no great achievement, but I am better than the majority of comp-sci grads apparently!
Is there anywhere to get e-dreams? Apparently it is something of a collectors item. http://www.amazon.com/E-Dreams-Joseph-Park/dp/B0001EQIFQ
Yes, it takes a real genius to work on bug tracking and project management.
I am very interested to see the memory usage. With mod_perl, you pre-loaded a lot of your modules in the httpd.conf file, and Apache loads them once and shares them across all processes saving memory. With Rails that could give large memory savings, and memory is the major pain point of getting more than one or two Rails apps up and running on the same server as I understand it.
For sure - thats one of those hard problems that has not be well solved yet ...
To round out the data point you provided. Sorry for sounding terse.
TheUnFunded.com - a place for VCs to rate entrepreneurs
I would get a patent on it.
Yes - and second that with a usable white board interface - Livemeeting sucks so badly!
Awesome chair for those long work days: Haworth Zody
Accidentally hit the up arrow instead of the down, so I will respond.

His bug tracking/pm software is actually quite good. He doesn't actually write software anymore from what I understand. And attacking him personally doesn't change the validity of his point.
Maybe an isolated incident. My stats/history appears fine.
In the 5th grade my teacher had all the students play a "game" where he drew a massive map one wall and we all picked starting locations for our "countries". Our countries grew in population with a random roll of a dice each day. Our civilization's developed by having to write little reports on various inventions. If we could figure out a good way to build an axe or how to make a boat, we worte it up and submitted it for approval. In essence it was a pen & paper style (ala D&D) game of civlization. Us kids benifited because we had to go out and research simple things like, how people actually smelt ore, and how thread is actually made.

So my idea (albeit a poor one) is a civilization-style web-based massively multiplayer video game. Map is randomly generated and number of players per map is limited. There are no pre-existing technologies or units, technologies and units are created by players and must be approved by other players (possibly players from other maps) before entering the game. The idea is the game could be open ended and vastly repeatable. The open ended nature of the game would allow for a lot of exploitation, so conquest would be minimized as a practical course of action. I imagine the focus being on economics and diplomacy.

That's pretty vague and not well thought out, but for some reason I found myself pondering it recently. Since the involvement by the developer could be minimized, by placing game management on players, the game could be free and monetized by ad revenue.
whatever downvote me, i am probably done also with hacker news too...
no comparison to what it was 1 year ago...or at least few months ago
This is EXACTLY what pg was talking about in "How to Disagree".

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Your response is DH1, attacking the writer, not the message. Too bad.

I don't know Joel and I don't know how good is software or business is. I DO KNOW that this essay is a real saver. It's what I hand clients who question my rates. It shuts them up every time.
also, fwiw, mod_rubinius is also underway (old-ish news, but highly relevant): http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/02/12/what-do-you-want-to-s...
How did I attack him personally? I didn't say he was stupid. I just don't like his ridiculous, impossible elitist attitude towards hiring wherein, if you take him at his word, approximately no one is good enough for him. Talking about famous works of high art when you make your living off server-side software that integrates email and version control through the browser is ridiculous, too.

The lesson of his business is that you should try to produce boring, solid software that solves problems in a very simple, straightforward fashion using a handful of good ideas (maximize the probability of getting bugs in by, e.g., not having any required fields; prevent the improper use of metrics by not adding much reporting functionality). He has long, old release cycles that ensures polished, stable software. This is not rockstar genius ninja work at all.

The Javascript wankery that's far beyond the capabilities of typical code monkeys (the spellchecker, dragging and dropping columns in tables, etc) is the least valuable part of FogBugz.
Ask YC: jQuery vs Prototype
I'm curious what people here use for their projects, especially ones making heavy use of javascript.

I recently started doing a lot of JS and found prototype to be a lot more useful. I've used jQuery only a little bit, but Prototype v1.6 seems to be able to do everything jQuery is good at (DOM traversing and manipulation) and has other useful things like a extended arrays, hash maps, ranges, classes/inheritance etc.
At what point did I call him a name? What name did I call him?

The boring database frontend/service integration software that keeps Fog Creek afloat is not a symphony or other work of high art and the analogy simply does not hold water.
I didn't say that Facebook has failed, I said Facebook has failed us. There's a huge difference between the two statements.

I would imagine that the average reader of Hacker News uses a few web apps already. The point of my article was that Facebook doesn't play well with anyone else. They do an amazing job at their core function, connecting people, but they should give it a rest with all of these half-assed implementations of existing functions and focus their efforts instead on making it easier to integrate with Facebook.
Ask HN: Why should I use OpenID?
I know this is going to be controversial and I know I may have missed something, but here goes...

As a website owner, why should I allow OpenID logins on my site? I see one major disadvantage: I don't have any contact info for my users. This breaks the primary link between me and my users.

I can see OpenID being used for many scenarios, but I don't think it's the ultimate cure of login cancer it's hyped up to be.

Again, I'm all ears to learning something new here.

Thanks,
Pierre
4 More Years Of Silicon Chip Speed Increases Left?
Alternative question: why shouldn't I use OpenID?

What are the common concerns, and which are valid/invalid?
This brings up an interesting issue of scaling. Most larger sites would use a relational database for the backend store (right or wrong) and scale the frontend and backend independently. Because news.yc is using in-memory and disk storage, what are the options available to scale this type of backend architecture?

Assuming load was the issue earlier (which it most likely wasn't) would you move the store to something like a Berkley DB with a network accessible frontend or the newer Memcachedb? Maybe a relational database or even Amazon's new db webservice. If this site was your startup, what would your next move be?
March 31 is probably the best day for April 1 jokes. Is this one?
like clicking down votes,

let me make it easier for you, here vote this down too...

good luck and good bye yc.news. hope you recover

i am done.
How many perfect founders could dance on the head of a pin?
Joost and Hulu are interesting, but there are so many similar services going on it is tough to say which will succeed and which will fail.

I disagree on Twitter. While the UI may not be elegant, there is a ton of potential as a backend service and it has critical mass within the tech savvy crowd. I think it'll be a big hit going forward.
Thanks. I'll wait a bit longer and then ping the powers that be.
Could Apple sell 45 million iPhones a year?