skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty good bounce rates for all the responses so far. I wonder if those with high bounce rates are hesitant to share.
I used it and I am amazed by how well it works. I asked "what is a cheap place to stay in san francisco that has wireless internet access". Within two minutes I got a great response "monroe residence on sacremento st".

So far, stumpedia = WIN
Top 10 Software Innovators of All Time
cool! why not set up a torrent and seed?
You asked:
What's the difference between big-endian and little-endian?
~~
Connected in chat session (45 seconds).
~~
The other user says:
In big-endian representation, the most significant byte is first (in lowest memory address), while in little-endian, the least significant byte is first.
> All this ridiculous programmer-celebrity blogging echo-chamber bullshit results in very little software being built

or how about, "blogging results in very little software being built".. i never understand how anyone has time to actually code when all they do is write blog entries about writing code...
We've been using this for about a year for our products systems analytics charting features. It rocks. Earlier versions didn't support IE, but these days it's solid just about everywhere, and is really nice to use. We looked into plotr and plotkit as well as several Flash charting libraries, but we only needed time series data and none of the others did it as nicely (and we didn't want to add Flash components if we could avoid it).
http://friendfeed.com/aditya
Wait, how is Stumpedia different from Muchobene itself?
aardvark.im is another startup in this space -- but the idea is to only get answers from whom you have some kind of social connection (after giving facebook/whatever credentials..).

Interesting stuff.
I think this will be a good thing. The Middle East thinks they control the world, which is a bad attitude (although true right now). For some reason, I would love to see Dubai fall into ruins. It just doesn't sit well with me that they are such an authoritarian regime that made money not by innovating but by pumping liquid out of the ground. Such a flashy city... but no culture, just money made from oil.

They're entitled to what they have, but I am entitled to not feel good about it :)
Do you disconnect/reconnect your laptop to the external monitor much? I.e., does it switch nicely between single and dual monitor use?

I looked into doing that for my Ubuntu 7.10 laptop, since I have an extra monitor lying around, but it goes with me on trips so it must be able to do single monitor mode too.

All I could find on the web, though, said such usage was flaky at best and downright hard to setup (for 7.10).

I'd be interested to see if they improved that for 8.04
Douglas A. McIntyre: Always bet against him.

Best line from this: "The PC and Windows had done too good a job." Yes, that's exactly why Apple saw 51% growth in Mac sales - because Windows has just been doing too damn good a job. Just to push his ignorance to the forefront, also tries to directly compare 2008 Apple with 1980's Apple and 1998 Apple.

Granted 1998 may have been an important year in Apples history but they never experienced volume and popularity like they have in 2005-Present. Apple is the biggest brand in tech right now. Trying to compare that with where they were in an infant PC market in the 1980's or when they were trying to resurrect themselves in the mid-late '90's is simply idiotic. He also fails to understand the impact that the young generation of computer users will have in the long-term. How many 20-something college students or IT-types are there that are pretty Apple-savvy. A lot. There is little doubt that this will seriously impact the work computing environment on some level. If any company in this discussion has hit a glass ceiling, it's clearly Microsoft.
Interesting concept, very smooth interface.

3 questions, 3 correct answers too. Who is answering, and what is their motivation?
What exactly is youtube doing on the list? Big - yes, a succes - absolutely, great software inovators - I don't think so.

Or am I missing something obvious here?
After further investigation, looks like you can only use Braintree if you're in the US (you need a US bank account and address).

Which also means the billing code from railskits is no good for people in the UK.

:'(
At Gold Reef City in Johannesburg, South Africa, a theme park built on a defunct gold mine, they do a presentation on gold mining and live pouring of a bar of gold. At the end, you're invited to walk out with a gold bar if you can pick it up by its sides with one (bare) hand. Last time I was there, nobody had managed to do it yet...
Sounds to me like they're setting the stage for a big, dramatic "XP Life Extended" announcement.
What a terribly-written post.
Part of it's expectation setting by the core group of users.

Part of it is the same as in "Average Down" hiring. I.e., as a community grows out of the early adopters, the cluefulness/etc. of the average user will drop. A given community can only effectively support a certain rate of newbies and still be able to absorb and inculcate them into community (or drive them away :-).
Close. I'm a WFP'08 founder.
http://friendfeed.com/anwamehtar
> One of the huge hassles of running a blog is that when someone thinks you're wrong, they think it's their right to enter into a formalized duel of wits.

Well, the key is to not care what these people think. You are the person contributing valuable insight the the world. The commenter is just some troll with time to kill because he has nothing interesting to do.

I am very anti-censorship, and I never delete comments from my blog. This is amusing because if you search for my book, one of the top results is an unsigned comment on my blog saying how bad it is. I've thought about deleting it, but I don't care enough. The comment basically says "I didn't bother to read the book, but I didn't like it." There is no need to debate that. It is what it is.

It's nice when people like you, but it's also amusing when you find out that you've annoyed someone so much that they come to your own website to attack you. If you aren't pissing someone off, you're not doing anything worthwhile. :)
Rethinking the Presentation - tips for a simpler presentation that makes an impact
I agree, though 'easy things that take a long time' fall into the 'hard' category as far as I'm concerned. But maybe I'm just impatient. :-)
Because the company doesn't believe that is the black mock turtleneck that is going to work on the product.
Very interesting idea, looks pretty slick too.

"Sorry, nobody is currently available to answer your question. If you leave your email address, we can alert you when it's possible to get an answer."

I'll stick to Google for the time being though.
It's easy. Do you really have 18 hours a day of time when you're focused on programming? I don't, but I can write in the downtime.

I enjoy educating people, so I try to blog about what I'm working on, and other projects that my readers might be interested in.
I've noticed that forums I frequent that have high signal-to-noise ratios fall into two camps (with some overlap):

1. Niche topic. For example, I frequent forums about Go and salsa dancing that have next to zero noise. The trick I think is keeping the focus narrow: the programming reddit has worked rather well, technology-in-general forums have become cess pools.

2. Strictly moderated. It seems the only way to maintain a non-niche forum is to aggressively counteract unthinking contributions ("me too" posts, Internet memes) and trolls. Having a sanctioned area to vent and flame in, to keep the main area focused on serious (or at least on-topic) discussion may also help. The Ars Technica forums and The Straight Dope Message Board come to mind.

The dynamic on social news sites is a bit different than a traditional forum, however. Different tactics may be required to keep things in check.
Being overly cynical here should be fine because cynicism correlates with correctly perceiving reality. But polite and overly cynical.
What about Bram Cohen, for BitTorrent?
One other thing I should add -- reddit also punishes people who submit content. I used to seek out and post programming articles, but if you posted them at the wrong time of the day, some bot would mod them down pretty quickly. Then you would lose karma.

After a while, it becomes not-worth-the-effort to contribute to them. To summarize: reddit punishes people trying to positively contribute, and doesn't punish people trolling, flaming, and spamming. Not a good way to build community.
ya know i haven't much since running hardy. The last time I did I didnt have any problems (i think i restarted gnome though)...
The only problem I had was that the panel I keep on the second monitor moved to being on top of the other one... So I ended up with 2 panels, stacked, showing the same information.

Ill give it a try a few times tonight and let you know how things go
You will definitely get interrupted and sidetracked, so don't expect to get through your entire demo.
Can I import the posts into jaanix so it is available for searching / tagging / saving / editing ?
> so only download it if you need it
> This dataset may be removed in the next week or so

the latter cancels the former.
The writing is a little off compared to his usual stuff, but it still raises a valid point: Apple can only grow so big if they can't get companies/schools to start buying Macs.

Personally, I think it'll be a while before this happens, if it happens at all. Too many of the people who control what computers those companies buy don't see Macs as 'real' computers.
It's not well written, but there is a kernel of truth in there: Apple has not even scratched the surface of the corporate computing world.

I once met with someone in charge of big chunks of IT for VW who was quite the Mac fan, but had an interesting perspective on why they couldn't even really consider them:

Apple has positioned itself as a luxury item (and much of their strategy depends on that image) and as such can't play in the commodity market. They create artificial scarcity. They have real production limits. They don't have the support infrastructure to deal with large corporate customers.

His line was, "What if I call them up tomorrow and order 10k machines? There's no way they can fill it in a timely manner, much less support us after the purchase."

Interesting, certainly.
I'm trying to pull it down to one of our university boxes so we can mirror it. It's going a little slow at the moment though (eta 10 hours).

I'll update with the link as soon as it's done.
How about Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman the creators of RSA without which the entire online e-commerce thingy wouldn't have existed.
> It also plays a preview of mp3s you mouseover in the filebrowser, not a big feature, but I liked it

I don't think that's new to HH, my girlfriend's GG does that.
Really awesome idea. Though most of my queries didn't get answered, but can't see why this could not be helpful for certain kind of questions.

I was just talking with a friend of mine who is working on a project which, given data, lists the expertise of a user. We have plenty of information about our expertise on facebook, email clients, local documents, chats, and twitters. The only problem is that all the systems which have this data are disjoint. If a system processses all my communication - emails, IMs, forum posts, documents, maybe phone calls - it can learn easily which Stumpedia querries to direct to me.

My motivation to answer those querries is that I get visibility and I become a specialist.

I love Web 3.0!!
Are you addicted to (email, the web, coffee, alcohol, etc.)?
You might want to look at Nu (http://programming.nu). It's a new Lisp built on Objective-C, designed to make it extremely easy to call C or Objective-C libraries and frameworks (particularly Cocoa). It's a wonderful merger of Lisp, Objective-C, and Ruby.
Tech Firms Stocks 'Powering Ahead' Amid Slowdown Chatter
http://friendfeed.com/awt
I am undecided, but he sure is good at creating/maintaining mind share.
This isn't worthy of YC news - would someone please kill it.
I agree. The wording is fine, but it's pure speculation and FUD. There is absolutely no indication of any research done, data collected, or sources cited.
http://tinyurl.com/qyhcx
interesting - i didnt know where to ask a question until i click on the welcome text. i was expecting a straight-forward textarea instead of a styled part of a note pad, though ;)
You may want to counterfeit older currency. I would suggest 5 dollar bills because they are less likely to be inspected carefully.
I use pbwiki; free personal version; has all the features i need; wysiwyg, data backup, fairly simple UI

I really like versionate -- but it is still missing some critical features -- I am keeping a close eye on it and hope they eventually do the needed upgrades.
"It has to be short. It should take 5 minutes or less in person. An online video should be no more than one and a half minutes long."

That is so true, i have attended some demos that went over 20 minutes, at the end I felt like punching the demo-er in the face.. some people literally walked out of the place.

Remember, if you are not Steve jobs do not talk more than 5 minutes.
http://friendfeed.com/theproductguy
What are your pre-launch priorities?
Why do you need a client to answer questions?
One can only drop this joke once or twice a year and it gets downvoted??
I clinically have a significant sign of addiction towards email, the web, coffee, alcohol, weed, snowboarding, listening to music, and the best... hacking!!!

Should I seek help?
It might be best to wait a day or so if you're not installing from a disc, as their servers usually get hammered during the first 24 hours or so.
I'm absolutely stunned at all the success HN people are witnessing (even if it is a small sample). I thought this would turn in to a prank/snark fest like chacha.com except in this case I envisioned the question askers and answerers as guilty parties.
Maybe they shouldn't have tracked sex of a child as compared to the weather on the day of conception or delivery of the child. To work out if kids conceived on a rainy day where more likely to be boys or girls.

I have a confession to make. I don't read any newspapers or listen to any tv/radio news. As they have a tendency of giving credit to anything. They'll put results taken from one study and publish it as if they are really statistically significant. One of the worst things is people who don't understand science commenting on it.

One study of 740 women among maybe a million times that number every year, is meaningless. They could have as easily tracked the weather and found out that 55% of the kinds conceived on rainy days were boys.
Thanks for the 1/11429th of a burrito.
"Apple has not even scratched the surface of the corporate computing world"

Apple actively subverts any desire the corporate world may have to switch. Unreliable supply chains, a lack of scheduling, unpredictable design decisions, &c. I know their sales people feel the frustration that their corporate clients feel: they -want- to be able to sell 10 million in product annually to a single client. But, for instance, this last year their educational deployment was MONTHS delayed because of the new iMac.

I wish this were the exception: it's the rule. And that's great if you're selling 'cool', it's not great if you're selling 'reliable'.
Web 2.0 Expo SF Launchpad: Six New Startup Stars
Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago, study says.
Common Lisp would sound like a miracle language if it wasn't real.

Can be configured to run almost as fast as C. Or dynamism that rivals Ruby and Python if you don't bother to specify types. An object system (and meta-object protocol) that rivals Smalltalk in sophistication. Full functional programming capabilities, and a syntax and libraries that favor that style. An entire sub-language for iteration that rivals Python's generation/comprehension facilities. The ability to be procedural when you really need to. Sophisticated built in data types. A facility for abstraction unrivaled by any other language that's not a Lisp.

The point is not necessarily that CL is the absolute best for every one of those points. But you can make a case for CL vs. another language based on that language's strong points, not its weak points.

Of course, don't get me started on the mess that is CL's community...
http://friendfeed.com/kschrader
http://friendfeed.com/engtech

http://friendfeed.com/ruby

Here's a tool I wrote for importing your Twitter contacts into friendfeed: http://internetducttape.com/2008/04/21/import-twitter-to-fri...

Here's a ton of greasemonkey scripts I've written for Friend Feed:

http://internetducttape.com/tools/#friendfeed
Update: now it's http://twitter.com/mhartl
"Be careful here, though. Even seemingly trivial things like UI or VFX can have a massive impact on the usability of your game."
UI has a massive impact on usability? Well I'll be darned.
to follow up, though, its an awesome idea
This post has singlehandedly killed my productivity for the entire day.
Seems like it needs a 5th question. Perhaps: how long could you have answered positively to these questions?
Making Long-Distance Partnerships Work
He was just on regular old amphetamine. Not to Godwin the thread, but Hitler did Meth every day during the war, via an injection from his personal physician. It certainly didn't help his progressively worsening insanity.
Paul Graham for President!
This must be a common gold mine thing as I recall seeing them do it at the Red Lake gold mine in Ontario Canada too on the show "Ed's Up"
Most people are just not as well spoken on camera as they are in text.
Actually, that's a valid point. "Two-pizza team" could mean 2-5 people depending on how much pizza that really is and how hungry your teammates are.
Pretty cool, but there's lots of dupes in the result.

Would be great if I could put in my FF username and it would filter out the people I'm already friends with.
Amazon Introduces WebStore
Yes. With proper help, you could add a few more to your list.
I've been thinking that all other commenting systems suck compared to the one here. This is so nice and elegant compared to most. A little tweaking needed here or there maybe, but, aside from the unknown post links when you take too long to post, it's the best I've used.
1:5-scale A-10 Warthog, perfect to the very last detail
"Just your name and your company's name. Your "title" is meaningless. If anyone asks, there's your conversation starter."

Damn right.

I do too many varied things at my company to have a pithy-yet-accurate title.

When people ask I tell them, "I make stuff."

My title is not what I want anyone to care about. What matters is what I and my partners are doing.
"The writing is a little off compared to his usual stuff, but it still raises a valid point: Apple can only grow so big if they can't get companies/schools to start buying Macs."

It's worthless because he gives no facts or useful figures to support his hypothesis.

1. Schools ARE buying Macs. Pretty sure they displaced Dell to become number 1 in that market again (or was that just laptops?).

2. How big is big, exactly? How much of the consumer market can they realistically get? Once upper level managers decide they need the cachet of a Mac laptop precisely because of its must have status as a consumer item, how are the IT guys going to tell them they won't support it and keep their jobs? There's some evidence this is happening with iPhone already.

"Too many of the people who control what computers those companies buy don't see Macs as 'real' computers."

Those are probably people who are very cognizant of the stock market, and judge the appeal of potential suppliers at least in part by what the vendor's stock price is doing. In the media, "Vista is a failure" and "Apple is the hottest company in tech" are strong memes right now. I guarantee you that the "decision makers" are very aware of them.

Also, the unstated idea that Apple needs to overtake Dell and/or HP for its stock to continue to grow is badly mistaken. When you have 3.5% world wide share, a single percentage point of increased market share is a huge increase in revenue and profit. Add to that the fact that Apple's share of the market is mostly among the most profitable customer segments. Much of Dell and HP sales are for product lines with razor thin margins. So, no, it is not necessary for Apple to rival the dominant players in corporate sales to continue to grow.

UPDATE: I totally left off the fact that Apple is really the most successful 21st century consumer electronics manufacturer, and are almost certain to introduce entirely new product categories. They won't all succeed, but given Apple's track record it would be foolish to bet that none of them will.
Ask YC: How would you detect a page type?
Hi. If you were creating a script which searched for forums, or detected blogs etc how would you do it? We're working on a system that crawls websites and it would be great to be able to say "this is a blog" or "this is a news site" or "this is a forum". Any suggestions on how to do it?
I canceled my download, so hopefully part of 2.5KB/s will trickle down to your connection.
So, any plans to launch in the UK? I don't do much electronics stuff myself these days, but I know a few people who'd be interested. The site looks great.
Anyone who ate lunch at startup school knows this quite well :)
This doesn't seem to differentiate between an addiction and a hobby.
This is a silly line of reasoning. By your own argument, you shouldn't have made your own argument, as it probably has not resulted in any code being written.

So nyeeeeeeeeeeeah.
What kind of mind discusses people discussing people? A small meta-mind?
I think http://wikinvest.com uses a heavily modified MediaWiki. If you're happy with PHP, it's a solid choice.
Here is my comment. If you don't dig it, don't read it! Fucking DUH. It's your life. It's your time. Choose it how you spend to choose it, that reflects on YOU, not me.

Muppets.
> Of course, don't get me started on the mess that is CL's community...

is or was? It is in fact changing into better.
If I answered that, I'd be guilty of having a meta small-meta-mind ;-)
Yeah. OK. So, I'm bringing this whole irony thing. It's kind of ironic to say somebody else is small-minded because they have opinions about other people.

Honestly, don't you fuckers have startups to build? I'm not interested in your opinions. Just die.
An interesting, but frustrating read. Shirky makes statements that conflate what requires thought with what's hard and what's hard with what's impossible.

For example, he says:

*

Consider the following assertions:

- Count Dracula is a Vampire
- Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
- Transylvania is a region of Romania
- Vampires are not real

You can draw only one non-clashing conclusion from such a set of assertions -- Romania isn't real. That's wrong, of course, but the wrongness is nowhere reflected in these statements. There is simply no way to cleanly separate fact from fiction, and this matters in surprising and subtle ways that relate to matters far more weighty than vampiric identity.

*

Note the last part: There is simply no way to cleanly separate fact from fiction. Usually statements that start off as "there is simply no way" are wrong and this one is no exception. This and many of the other objections he raised can be addressed by using the right ontologies in combination with techniques like fuzzy logic and webs of trust.

Also, one of his big arguments is that the Semantic Web will never work because the data will always incomplete. He characterizes the Semantic Web as assuming a simple world in which all information is known. This is completely false though, as the Semantic Web standards have specifically been architected with the Open World Assumption in mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_World_Assumption

That's a pretty fundamental thing to get wrong if you're going to try to talk intelligently about these issues.