skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I expect rents to go up considerably, given that people are avoiding buying houses, population is increasing (expected to be 500M by mid-century), and inflation is high (I don't see any way out of the US government's debt mess other than inflation to reduce its real value).

So in 10, 20, 30 years a renter will be paying considerably more while a buyer will be paying a rate locked in long ago.

Imagine the relative pittance you'd be paying now on a loan locked at 1988 housing prices - and that's after 2 decades of inflation rates that were lower than those of the next 2 decades will probably be.
Gladwell: Why the Good Ideas Come all at Once
you're just posting a form to the server. You can pretend to be IE in code and send the same HTTP traffic that the browser would send (use fiddler to watch the traffic and mimic it).
use this wallpaper:

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/details.php?id=1223

tested, works perfectly!
I agree that you should launch early. But you need to launch with a product that is different and better than your competition on day one. It doesn't have to include all your features, but at least one or two that show how you're different and better. Otherwise users won't return to your site when you do launch those unique features.
History of logic programming (via lambda the ultimate)
Gaming Google: In defense of search-engine optimization for everyone.
FuelFrog: Track Your Gas Mileage
I didn't read it, just briefly skimmed, my comment is related to seeing the reoccurring fb rants on YC.News.

In case you've missed it there is a lot of advertising happening on fb, some major brands include Blockbuster/BMW/Virgin America.

Where I see the value on fb is search ads for smaller advertisers, the cost-per-click on some prominent keywords are so much less than google, if the fb demo is your target, this can be a very cost effective channel for reaching them, plus this is where they are spending time.
Don't be quick to dismiss Powerset's indexing speed. It is relatively easy to improve the efficiency of a known algorithm. Likewise, it is easier to develop an algorithm if efficiency constraints are defered.

It is relatively easy to improve efficiency within one module by 10% and occasionally by a factor of four or more. If the average system performance improves by 10% with each change then a team could eventually improve efficiency by a factor of 2^10.
Cablevision buys Newsday for $650M
For a moment I was surprised that no one made the obligatory "I called your mom last night" joke, but then I remembered that news.yc is a more refined crowd
The fact that you
a) don't know how to do this, and
b) don't have a choice over which browser to use
leads me to conclude that
a) your company has an IT department, and
b) you're not in it.
I suggest you get in touch with them, as although the task you wish is simple, they're not going to be happy being stuck supporting some code they didn't write, that one of their users "got off the internet somewhere."
I think you took this a bit too literally, all I'm saying is that hyper-consumerism has placed the planet in a precarious condition, and a solution may be to slow things down a bit to focus on and enjoy what you have instead of always clamoring for more, more, more.
For some new work, I originally fought against using XML for storing data. Good ol' "key = value" would have done the trick, mostly, although as we kept adding data it might have been handy to impose more structure on it. Nonetheless, it was explained to me that the customer would have to be able to deal with these files, and we absolutely could not rely on them to touch the files with Notepad without screwing things up (CRLF vs LF, accidentally scrambling key names, etc.). What we can rely on, though, is XML:

1. Whipping up a web interface for editing the values in the files is trivial

2. If the customer or a less computer-savvy rep needs to tweak the files manually, we can tell them to use XML Notepad to minimize the risk of clobbering something.

I found that by using one layer of nodes and putting the data in attributes instead of their own nodes, the structure is roughly equivalent to INI or Apache config files, and not much more verbose. Maybe it's the Python in my blood speaking, but I appreciate having one obvious solution to a recurring, mundane problem -- organizing and storing small amounts of simple data in a way that anyone can retrieve it.
On the Need of Minimalist Polyglots
This topic was discussed about two months ago. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108528
Yes, but the renter's balance is higher than the future value of the owner's house (which the renter could then buy in cash and still have money left over).

One thing that was ignored is the increase in rent over time. By year 30, the monthly rent will probably be higher than the mortgage payment (in the calculation, we assumed fixed rent over 30 years).
Keep these kids far away from the Joel on Software crowd, they'd have these kids doing nothing but creating UML diagrams, doing "OO design" that isn't really OO, and writing stored procedures for SQL Server, in the name of like, being "pragmatic" or some bullshit.
Hands On: A week with Xobni
Of course the answer is always "it depends". If you want to run the numbers, here is an excellent Excel spreadsheet that will analyze the rent vs. buy decision for your personal circumstances.
http://randolfe.typepad.com/randolfe/2006/04/bubblizer_a_req...
"The soft over comes the hard, the slow over comes the fast, let your working remain a mystery just show people the result."

_Tao Te Ching_
As a consumer, I'd agree wholeheartedly with this post. I can't tell you how annoying it is when online companies make it almost impossible for me to give them my hard-earned money. More than once I've left a site I was ready to buy from in disgust because the forms are so awful.
My guess is they have a really stupid architecture if they are having significant issues. This is probably due to reusing legacy code when they should have started from scratch. I am honestly temped to code something up this weekend to see if I can find out what there issue is.
> zero experience with each language

I've seen ecommerce documentation billed as having examples in Perl, PHP and Java. What they meant was some of the examples were in each language and you needed experience with all three to get something working.
As a almost total visual thinker, I often get in trouble for taking it too far and basically finishing a project in order to show somebody what my proposal for given project actually is.
I bought my house in 2001, and for me to rent an equivalently sized house now is already $600 to $1000 more expensive per month than my mortgage. It was a bit worse a couple of years ago, but still; people who forget about rent increases are in for a big surprise if they could have gotten a house for a reasonable price.
I disagree. It would be easier to write keylogger which reads 16 sequential digits, computes a checksum and then emits a UDP packet to a hardcoded IP address.
This article is wrong. Admittedly, some problems occur due to its US-focus. In the UK, for example, residents pay property taxes, not just owners, so you pay the same property tax whether you own or rent the property, removing that advantage of renting.

The figures for the mortgage versus renting are bogus in any case. The writer has not compared like to like. An apartment with people walking around above you is not the same as a HOUSE. It is therefore no wonder the rent is 2.5 times cheaper than the mortgage.. it's on a property that's subjectively at least 2.5 times worse. Like for like, the mortgage on a similar apartment would be a lot less than $2500 a month.

Given increasing population, rents and property prices are unlikely to rise at just 0.4% above inflation over the next 30 years. While the mortgage payment can only go up based on interest rates (and it's not /that/ hard to lock into a fixed rate right now..), the rent will go up in absolute terms. Assuming a 3% rise after inflation, the unlucky renter will be paying $2303 per month at year 30, and very little will have been put into savings for the last 10 years. Worse, they won't have an asset - the homeowner will.

Buying a property with a mortgage gives you incredible leverage you'd struggle to obtain with other investments. The bank won't loan you $400,000 to invest in stock, but you can invest in a property this way.

Given that rising rents will cause the renter to barely be saving anything by year 20, that the renter will have no property and a less than exciting savings account come year 31, and that the renter has had to put up with all sorts of restrictions that come with rental properties (no modifications, often no pets, no guarantee you can stay there), I think the homeowner is a lot more wise if they plan on staying put for at least a few years.

Renting is a nightmare even if it proves to be cheaper in the /short-term/. If you're an automaton that doesn't mind uprooting whenever your landlords say so, perhaps it'll work for you. But for those of us with kids, pets and geographical attachments, owning a home gives us both an asset we're invested in using the bank's money for leverage, and a permanent base that only severe economic conditions can take away from us.
CitizenHawk Raises $3 Million To Target Cybersquatters
Uh, maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly do you go from 10% increases and end up with a 1000-fold efficiency increase?

Unless you're saying they can make 75 such changes, each giving a 10% increase...
I would suggest reading pg's essays.
In terms of public messages, they certainly aren't. We are collecting their public timeline and it's about 400k messages per day, each one less than 200 bytes (if you count metadata).
That's 80 MB of uncompressed data per day.

I don't know how much the private messages add to this, but it can't be an order of magnitude higher.

Perhaps they are continuously doing DB writes instead of keeping a write cache and storing content in batches, who knows.
Well I think it’s really hard to compare a search engine to another base on what happened behind the curtain. Search engine technology is a really complex matter. Any speculation done from the surface is probably a guessing game.

I will agree though that Hakia seems to be much closer to what they promise to deliver that Powerset. Hakia may have a bit of semantic flavor but remain overall a poor search engine. I always wonder what Powerset is doing with all the money they have raised. I would felt terribly disappointed if I have given them my money. Building a search engine for Wikipedia (not even a good one) with all that money is a little short.

I will take the opportunity here to express my reserve on semantic search. If semantic search is define as a search engines that answer questions, here are two reasons why I think it is not a very promising way for search:

1.It is hard for people in general to type an entire question, users are generally lazy and anything that makes them think is not potentially good.
2.The language factor. Though the web is mostly written in English it will be a challenge for these companies to implement a semantic search in every language. From English to French there’s a whole new world.
Yes, many small changes. Furthermore, this is a pessimistic case. If your average improvemented was 12% then you'd require significantly less improvements.
"they're still afraid of anything that's different and are looking for any excuse they can to maintain the status quo."

That's exactly what I want to hear! Let them keep their 600+ page C# spec and their 10+ year java resume - leaves more opportunity for people are willing to "take the risk" and pick the best tools.
Ruby on Rails 2.1 RC 1 Released
1) Identify what group of people (professional group, culture, etc) would benefit most from your product.

2) Seed early to this group and use them as a sounding board. Build a relationship with them. Focus on solving problems for this user base first.

3) Figure out a way to drive and capture the enthusiasm of this group and leverage it outside when you launch. Your PR will not just point to a product, but a social group using your product in a compelling way. Your feature list is now a benefit story.
Generally, whenever I have held a design contest in the past I have made sure to specify in the terms (as a contest holder) that I would only claim rights to the winning design. I would make sure to have the winning designer sign a copyright release.

I'd also ask that because designs used my trademark or IP that if designers included a losing entry in their portfolio they should label it as "designed on spec" to avoid looking as if they had a working relationship with my company. If they wanted to sell the design as a pre-made logo, template, etc. I asked that they altered it slightly to make it more generic if it included my company name (i.e., from "Joe's Diner" to "Moe's Diner" or something).

Every contest site might have a different way of dealing with this sort of thing, though. I'd check their TOS.
Well, the .NET people's biggest problem isn't fear of dynamic languages, it's fear against anything that isn't Microsoft.

Seriously, google "Alt.NET". They're people whose toolchain is not 100% Microsoft, and they're outcasts.
I have not looked at Freebase in a while, but, theoretically they could -- assuming all the info is populated in freebase.
Wikia. The #1 Free, Hosted Wiki?
"I Was A Teenage Bot Master"
"mindless young kids who join groups aimlessly, post pictures of the almost daily college parties, and find joy in spamming friends' walls"
this is so condescending, how about just saying there are millions of people that enjoy facebook and use it a lot.
this is very generic things to do to begin with - the idea is to know what exactly pg recommends to use as a powerful tool, such as PR firms, facebook, twitter, blogs, buying email list (not spam), google ads, display/banner advertising, other social media etc. The marketing scene is changing extremely fast - what works today may not work tomorrow - so it would be interesting to know what pg suggest if any company has to start today.
First look: Microsoft enters social video with Messenger TV
Okay, I did my part.
Using Ruby on Rails is an issue, I would think. You do not need a framework for storing and sending out 140 byte messages but if you do use one, its overhead will actively hurt performance.

The fact that they chose to use RoR anyway hints that they may not be one hundred percent technically competent.
The 7 Rules of Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement
Here's something PG said 3 months ago about PR firms:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116557

About marketing in general:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116280
Some good points from that page:

Myth: Since we feel rested after sleep, sleep must be for resting. Fact: Sleep is for optimizing the structure of memories.

Myth: It is best to wake up with the sun. Fact: You should wake up at the time when your body decides it got enough of sleep.

Myth: Sleeping little makes you more competitive. Fact: The only good formula for maximum long-term competitiveness is via maximum health and maximum creativity.
This was discussed a couple of days ago here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186133
Congrats to Adam, he's done an amazing jobs scaling facebook to meet the unbelievable growth demands.
Why is buzz valuable or desirable?

I would only care whether the right people are interested, not any random person.

For instance, I'd rather target small businesses who are in a hurry and need to get things done rather than, say, young kids with tons of spare time and no money to spend. To target them with their online games, Blizzard Entertainmnent had to create special "gift card" type time cards that you can buy in stores with cash because much of the people they're going after don't have credit cards.

So, start by building a product meant to appeal to people with $$$ first.
Your question is very generic, too. Startups targeting consumers are different from startups targeting enterprises. What users do you address? What about the business model you have in mind? The size of your market? Has your product viral features built in? etc, etc, etc. I think it is presumptuous to believe that there is a single marketing strategy that may fit all startups in the world...
Honestly, focus on the product first. If you fulfill a strong need for a defined group of people they will do a lot of the talking for you–in a much more authentic way then you ever could.

Once you get their support you can put your small budget behind the stories they are telling around your product.
This is big non-news. Quote: The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday).
Why does RIM have to bribe BlackBerry developers?
You put them on a train that doesn't stop moving around the country to hide your whereabouts as you use your servers to facilitate your data-hungry conspiracy needs, of course.
yup, i know that and there are many ideas with their own pros and cons, so it would be interesting to know from pg what he thinks is the best tool in today's time and age!
"Go Left, he said" (preventing carpal tunnel syndrome)
The reason I used that line is because that's the differentiating point between why a community like the one here doesn't see the value in Facebook, and why millions of kids do. Sure, Facebook serves other valuable purposes like the one it serves me, but where Myspace and Facebook get their click intensive users are from mindless kids.

You can't just say millions of people enjoy it, because within that group, there are many varying segments that play varying degrees of significance in contributing to why Facebook is successful. And the mindless groups of kids who join groups aimlessly, having that show up on their news feed, and having their friends join, ultimately creating this huge domino effect of clicks, is probably what contributes the most.
I say learn to hack, find someone you can trust who can hack and give them 50% ownership in writing, or call it a learning experience.

Chris
Thanks for the response. That's very true today. But I am assuming that among Microsoft/Google/Apple, 3rd parties will use their SDKs Android's open source to create business applications and integrations that will make the Blackberry look lame and expensive in two years, so much so that PalmOS and RIM's OS and SDKs will look lame not just to developers, but users as well.

There are currently many problems right now. Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync is free per device, but flaky. As well, IT has to install iTunes on user machines to allow business users to activate and sync the devices. Finally, Apple does not allow IT to disable iPod functionality on their business iPhones. I am betting that these huge problems will be addressed before two years from now. My point is that there will be a noticeable dent in Blackberry use (as long as good keyboards accommodate the phones running these new OS); I'm sure RIM will still have a good stock price and profits two years from now.
So what makes this any different than the version of this idea that was built in 2003 (George Washing Univ. researcher)?
Overwhelmed by the barrage of web services?
Everyday, we see one or more new startups announcing the launch of one or more web services. I assume most of us take a look at the service but do not actively use it, at least at first.

I am interested in getting your opinions on the following points

a) Is the web/Internet space becoming too saturated?

b) If yes for a), how do you think new startups will be affected? Programs like YC?

c) What web services do you use regularly? What do you like about them?
true, one size can't fit all - though i think major YC cos. are mass consumer base (than enterprise soln.) so buzz creation tool for most of them will be more or less the same (may be i'm wrong).
Most of us would submit that people might read XML data more often if it didn't look like crap. If all we wanted was a metadata format that was easy for machines to read, we wouldn't have specified it in text.

If you're not reading your XML, you're probably using it wrong. And even if you personally don't care, we're still at the mercy of all the developer out there specifying their configuration formats in XML. If you're not reading your configuration files, you're definitely using them wrong.
I've been really pleased with the quality on the Dell XPS line. Comparing it to the new T61 I got for work, the Dell seems better in every way with the exception of the lack of a force mouse in the middle of the keyboard.
San Diego GOP Chair former "warez d00d"
DC "technologically challenged"?
Your point is that XML is good because it is standard. That is valid.

The OP link, however, was pointing out that while this is true, it's also true that XML is a very bad choice for that metadata format. Look at things like JSON or YAML for saner, simpler and more readable alternatives. We ended up with XML because it looked like HTML at a time where "web stuff" was all the rage, not because of its inherent value.
An idea a day - Remotely hosted Analytics solution
As usual Josh nails it with an incredibly useful post. I highly recommend watching Josh's blog for pearls like this one.
Sun is bleeding; More engineers leave as JavaFX is pimped
Collaborative Competition?!? Contest Brings Collaboration to Center Stage
curl (http://curl.haxx.se/) is a utility which you can script to post to web forms.

Just use the --user-agent option to pretend to be IE so the server accepts the request.
What makes you think landlords don't take losses and don't stop doing it? Measuring only active landlords gives you a biased sample set.
Zoho Creator Pricing “Strategic Blunder” & Lessons Learned
It's Refreshing! (mento, that is)
I thought he was talking about functions defined within the same file or some such.

Like:

int square(int x) {
return x*x;
}
int sum_of_squares(int x, int y) {
return square(x)+square(y);
}

And then the compiler could just know to turn that into

int sum_of_squares(int x, int y) {
return x*x + y*y;
}

(apologies if my syntax is invalid; I'm not actually a C programmer)
I notice it mentions DrScheme but leaves out a link to "How to Design Programs", an introductory programming text (available in full online) designed to complement DrScheme.

http://www.htdp.org/
Before I read the article, I thought "angle bracket tax" would refer to how much bulkier (both in terms of storage & bandwidth) xml can be.

In some cases, the trade-off between larger data streams and semantic descriptiveness is not compelling.
A set of useful wordpress plugins and arcane SEO techniques from a power user of wordpress.
Google-Yahoo deal faces resistance
"Startup" has first quarterly operating profit since 1969
Now I know why it works in my ING Direct Orange account. Thanks :) Any chance you guys can make my account balance field editable? That would be a killer feature.
SF JavaScript Meetup #2 -- first one was awesome
Finally, a use for humanity!
Boy this is confusing, could you just use fake names instead of all the random letters?
Twitter Beats The USGS With China Earthquake News by 3 Minutes
I suppose you're right. Hopefully he will explain it more in a future blog post.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ENER
Talk about comparing apples to oranges. I could send a few terabytes (or 100 32GB SD cards) from one location to another for about $20 and compare the costs of sending data on the Internet unfavorably to it. Like this, however, such a comparison would make no sense.
Talk to someone in the mobile industry and they'll brush this off as "not being afraid to charge for value", or at least that's how someone like Russell Beattie describes it.
OK, let's talk about how sending data via SMS is astronomically more expensive than sending data over a standard broadband Internet connection, a more terrestrial comparison.
3G iPhone coming this week? No.