skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People who buy three pairs of sneakers or more a year are far more likely to be a leadership type
That's a totally different piece. Are you sure you've got the right link?

Edit: Incidentally, the web page I posted is a little embarrassing. It's the graphic I think is cool, both as a graphic and for its striking content.
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagem:Capela_dos_ossos_inscric...

"We bones that here lie, for yours we are waiting."

http://www.sacred-destinations.com/portugal/evora-capela-dos...
Damnit! I thought this was HTML elements.
How to Use Search Engines & Web Data to Conduct Competitive Brand Analysis
Regarding Ambitious, Independent people.

I tend to agree with you, but there's another class of people that doesn't fit your high ambition/low ambition paradigm.

I don't know how to label these people, and they confuse me greatly, because I'm not one of them and don't understand their motivations. These are people for whom ambitions and motivations are unrelated to "career choice"

I've met a great many people who work fairly-routine/moderate-pay/low-stress jobs, who have no desire to do work any more mentally taxing, and who profess to "live outside of work."

Now, some of these people are just not ambitious or independent. But some really seem to be extremely passionate, ambitious people. Some of these people are the "cause people" -- people that are heavily involved in political campaigns, in "causes," do large amounts of volunteering. They seem to derive their fulfillment from this work, and the paid job is a means to the freedom to pursue these causes.

Yet a different class of these people are the "family-focussed." They work, they may volunteer, but they appear to derive their fulfillment from... well, to be blunt, from raising kids and helping/coaxing/celebrating/watching their kids grow and succeed.

I'm not suggesting at all that these two other alternatives are in any way "lesser" (or "greater" for that matter) -- nor am I suggesting that other people aren't interested in, or don't do these things.

But, to generalize from just one example, (everyone does it -- or at least, I do...) though I don't do much in the way of volunteering or raising of a family just now, even if I do either of these at a future date, I don't think I would ever define myself by these things. I would identify and define myself more by the contributions I make in, for lack of a better name, the financial marketplace. Since this is a forum of "the startup crowd," I imagine that most of you define yourselves similarly?

Anyway, I went on so long, I forgot to make my point, which was that some of these people are perfectly happy in a job where they are not expected to be ambitious, so that they can save their energy and ambition for the part of their life that matters to them. I do not understand this, but I have recently come to notice its existence. I thought I'd point it out, since we're talking about ambition and lack thereof.
Querying s-expressions in Common Lisp
I agree. While I don't like Windows very much, I'd expect a criticism to at least be mature, or clever even.

However, those stickers are annoying though and should be dealt with accordingly. Perhaps if we all mail the stickers to BG's private residence in Redmond (or wherever) along with notes asking that they not be included anymore?
working on my "idea" and at the same time looking for funding here in the philippines :/
On the Need for a Good Computer Science History Course
As long as we're doing the april fools thing:

NetHack dev team announces web integration protocol

http://nethack.org/2008-04-01.html
You're already offtopic -- though I think not as offtopic as you might seem to be.

You are correct, which is one reason why the US has had such a prolific history. On the other hand, as the US government (and army) grow, we are now going in the opposite direction of lacking security from said army.
iPhone Killer attempt by Sprint and Samsung
Acts as ASP.NET (a Ruby on Rails Plugin)
Amazon's customer-centric focus (print-on-demand centralization)
Two of Bocko's doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, worked with Bocko to measure every aspect of a clarinet that affects its sound—from the backpressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way sound radiates from the instrument. They then built a computer model of the clarinet, and the result is a virtual instrument built entirely from the real-world acoustical measurements.

It's really just MIDI with more variables.
This is cool in it's own right but can they really call what they are doing "compression"? It seems more like synthesis to me.
I've never understood why one wouldn't run DNS for yourself...but I guess I have a different perspective, being a developer of systems management software (and BIND being one of the services that our products manage).

So, I'll use this thread to ask a question that's bugged me for a while: Why do folks outsource such a simple and low-resource service?
Ah yes. Screen burn.

I'm going to load up on TeleVideo shares.
I thought this was interesting because it shows how prime directives ("it's all about the customer experience") can help defuse partner complaints. External print-on-demand providers might grumble, but they can't say Amazon's doing it just to squeeze them, even if that might be a natural result.
Are you sure that's wise?

There have been quite a few studies that indicate that trivial reward systems tend to backfire, and have unintended side effects. These are definitely trivial rewards for good developers. Have you instead considered just implementing the measurement system, without the rewards? People can then see their success rate and have clearly defined goals for doing the work you want done. Then, perhaps take everyone out to a really good lunch, or have a catered lunch, at the end of a successful week of pruning? It's no more expensive than your reward system, and feels more like a prize to most folks--everybody says they like cold hard cash, but once basic needs are met, things like the work environment take on more importance. For example, Google pays lower salary than almost any other employer in the area, but it is the "best place to work" in the country.

When offering large enough rewards, you can convince people to do things they don't want to do. And when you ask people nicely for help, and give them clearly defined goals, you can also get them to help without a reward--they'll probably even enjoy the work more, because the human brain shoots out good chemicals when working within a community for a common cause. but, when you offer them a trivial reward, you both offend them and only grudgingly get results (with unintended consequences like code that gets written with the intention of claiming a reward later to clean it up), and morale will go down. Humans are fickle creatures, and I think you're setting yourself up for a long painful lesson in human resource management.

Just a humble suggestion.
For the start up I work at, SEO brings in at least $450 a day, 30 days a month. I believe in SEO and think it works great when you are selling a product or service.

When you are giving a product or service away for free, I don't think the SEO juice is worth the SEO squeeze.
Daniel_K, Who Fixed Creative's Broken Vista Drivers, Speaks Out
Novell has had a solution to the Windows sticker dilemma for a while now, recycle!

http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/decalkit.html
I know, I consider that's in the qwerty group, mind you. Especially since the hjkl keys are at the same place than on qwerty, so your "clever" remark is irrelevant.
www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

I was hesitant to click that link due to the name of the directory, but then I just realized my eyes were experiencing keming... http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term...
Another Entrecard Blog spammer.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150822
No significant percentage of people actually value this form of openness.
Exactly. Don't look for this to reduce the size of your music collection until we can reverse-engineer physical models of entire bands and recording studios from the sounds they make.
Extensive VC info resource
From Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Large number of video, podcasts and presentations by leading VCs.
Using Ruby strings correctly
What's stopping other POD services from integrating tightly with Amazon just like the variety of other 2nd party businesses that sell stuff through Amazon? Or am I missing something here...
Rubies all the way down
Oh, let me tell you the lead-up there is perfect—serendipitous or otherwise. I had a smooth transition: "Really? That seems pretty interes---- oh man, brilliant!"
"While I don't like Windows very much, I'd expect a criticism to at least be mature, or clever even."

It's not criticism, it's mocking.
And the "(c) <DATE-OVERFLOW>".
I thought the gmail announcement was pretty good - everyone's first reaction was that it was fake.

Of course, actually fooling people is significantly harder than putting something absurd at the top of your blog.

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152361
Swiss banking giant UBS takes a $19 billion writedown
"I expected better from pg, especially after the disagreement hierarchy essay."

Well, that was posted way before the DH essay.
Acts_as_rickroll: an actual Rails plugin for pranking users with passé intarweb memes
Gold prices fall below $900 an ounce
Why you're a big sucker
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome my text editor is.
A Quiz to Prove Your SQL Knowlege
Oops! I obviously broke the rule.
Wouldn't the computer have to solve the cocktail party problem and have models for each identified channel for this to work for normal music? And, whooptee doo, it'll still probably sound like shit underwater in a plastic bag.
it must be a joke. i looked back at nickb's posts and he mentioned depending on textmate?! no way a vi user would betray the brotherhood, even in puppet form.
They likely outsource because simple and low-resource is a matter of perspective. If you spend even 1 hour a year thinking about DNS, it's probably worth the price.
Well, there was a submitted story some time ago that showed new technology that can recognize the individual notes of instruments (at some degree of accuracy) and they could then make adjustments... So, it doesn't sound completely impossible.
my sandwich
Vint Cerf Explains Net Neutrality
This reminds one time when I first started playing Counter Strike. I found myself alone one night and could finally play CS without anyone bitching, so I indulged late into the night teaming up with this very highly efficient group of players. Their usage of team commands was incredible and I, being a newbie, followed the better players around closely, often being the support gunner. The teamwork was magical and you just felt the chemistry.

After a few hours, I decided to start making small talk. Then, to my horror, I realized I had been playing with bots the entire time.

I just hope the rest of you are real.
Very cool. Jessica's great.

Any news.YC folks coming to BoS 2008 in Boston?
Why aren’t you using ionice yet?
Is there something wrong I did when posting the news link? It never got posted. It just stayed in my saved folder.
UK gets first 'hacking' training course
Christian hackers hit the web
Is penetration testing breaking Herts on the internet?
Leader: Is teaching hackers to hack a step too far?
A fictional new service of Google to browse the web as it will be like at T+24h.
Thanks aaco. These resources should definitely get me started. Much appreciated!
Get an explicit understanding of what is expected of you from the event organizers. After the crowd, they are the most important people to satisfy if you want to be on the future short list :)

With that in mind, prior research on the crowd is great to have.

If you can get a DVD, Google Video, or other archive of the conference prior, you can get a good baseline on what might be expected of a speaker and how the audience reacts.

When you say "lead a discussion" if that means a panel or you acting as a moderator for others, it is good to know the personalities that will share stage. Definitely reach out to them for conference calls (if the organizer has not already) to map out what you plan to say and build quorum around time limits, pacing, and what you feel the crowd gets from the talk.

If you have access to similar audiences or students of those profs prior to the event you could offer to provide pre-event talks and collect surveys to grade how you performed.

Lastly, make sure you go easy on the food and drink prior to getting on stage ;-)
Launching a technology startup in Montreal
What gives you a sustainable competitive advantage?
Do want
Discussions of miscellaneous mathematical topics.
http://www.justsayhi.com/bb/html_quiz
DNS is an easy service in isolation, but complex when your business demands it remains fast and reliable. This means you'll need the following, in no particular order:

* servers in multiple data centers and close to your end customers

* multiple backbone providers

* some idea of what to do when your first DOS attack hits

* a sysadmin who monitors all this stuff and gets paged when it fails

You might say this is overkill for a new startup, but when we can get all this for $50/year or less -- or free from EveryDNS -- I can't imagine why we'd go it alone.

I should note that we do run our own DNS servers (tinydns) at Wikispaces, but we also have four EasyDNS secondaries watching our back.
if you aren't going to be running osx what is the point of buying a mac? especially now that they run on intel cores?
Larry Page and Sergey Brin Fund Nanosolar's Innovative Process for "printing" Solar Panels
A significant part of the value-add of POD publishers is the printing on demand. It lets them operate on the Long Tail of demand. Now Amazon wants to take over the printing & distribution side.

Here's a look at the pain & agony from the POD publisher side:
http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597...
Free: EveryDNS
Paid: EasyDNS

Looked at Neustar/UltraDNS, and while they were technically appealing, the pricing got out of hand for what we wanted.
Still haven't seen that software in action. I'm more than a bit skeptical that it can do what it claims in the general case.
I feel like, as in many things, you learn to give presentations by giving presentations. Offer to give the same talk to your college's ACM or LUG groups a couple weeks before.

To me questions are always the meat of a presentation -- getting good questions means that you succeeded in getting people thinking. The most important thing is to know what you're talking about (a surprising number of presenters / politicians / whatever don't). If you know your topic reasonably well, you answer a question as far as you can and if it goes beyond what you know it's ok to say, "I don't know." You can use that too to sidestep questions that aren't really on topic and take away from relevant questions.
Uhm, this is called silliness. Man posts picture he thinks is funny on his website. News at 11.
Nanomachine That Kills Cancer Cells
Startup feeds on Alltop, including News.YC
So, my immediate thought on reading each of these points is:

"* servers in multiple data centers and close to your end customers"

"* multiple backbone providers"

If you need both of these for DNS, then you need both of these for all of your other services, right? Or it's pointless to have bulletproof DNS. If you don't have multi-homed web service, an outage of your server is still going to take you off-line, regardless of whether you have working DNS or not. Likewise email, database, etc. I think one should have a backup hold and forward mail server, and that should also act as your secondary DNS server. And it should be in a different data center.

As for locality-based DNS, what name service software do you think people are using that they can choose a DNS server close to them? That data isn't available when the decision for which DNS server to use is selected. So, having DNS service close to clients is roughly pointless. And, the services that CAN be locality-aware (pretty rare and esoteric) almost universally use DNS records to achieve it. So, DNS would be the one service that cannot possibly benefit from being available in a bunch of different locations around the world (except by accident).

"* some idea of what to do when your first DOS attack hits"

What to do when the first DoS hits is to try to figure out how the hell to fix the web server or database or whatever it is that actually has trouble dealing with the load. DNS isn't going to be the attack vector or a source of trouble. DNS records are tiny, heavily cached all over the world (so you regular users would be roughly immune to a DNS DoS), and very very cheap to serve. BIND named (by no means the fastest DNS server) provides almost all of the worlds root name service on a few dozen machines. That's billions of requests every day. A DoS would saturate your network before it would take out BIND.

"* a sysadmin who monitors all this stuff and gets paged when it fails"

So, you don't need one of those for your web application or email or databases?

I'm not saying having outside secondaries is a bad thing, I just don't understand the benefits to outsourcing something so fundamental to the success of your website--DNS can make seconds worth of difference in the response time of your site. Why trust some random dudes with that?

So, there's nothing wrong with using them for secondary service. I just don't know that I'd want to trust primary service to somebody else.
Towards Bug-Free Code
This is a duplicate post (sort of--the YC item below is a preamble to the link above):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121956
I suppose you're conscious that there are a few huge cans of worms in your way. Expect QA and customer service to become more 'interesting' than in the typical MMO. Player scripting will tend to alienate nonhackers (script trading notwithstanding). Empowering players as you suggest in other comments (letting them run whole factions) reduces the pressure to socialize, which is the main driver of player retention.

Surprising as it may sound, the downsides that many MMOs have as games actually help them succeed as the glorified social networks most of them are. Boredom and disempowerment bring people together. As the cliché goes, they come for the game and stay for the community.

That said, I love your concept and I'd definitely give that game a try. I wouldn't consider playing a MMO that runs on rails and where I can't automate away my repetitive tasks. I think you'd get a smallish but interesting and loyal player base. Maybe it could reddit out from there if that's what you want; otherwise I believe it would work great as a lifestyle business.

Is it on purpose that you don't provide contact info in your profile? I'd love to exchange some thoughts with you (see address in my profile.) I worked for a few years in what is today the leading commercial space MMO, and I've been entertaining some ideas on those lines too.
Personally I think it would have been funnier if it was rms or someone else slightly more controversial :) Before I realised it was a joke I just couldn't understand where you found the time submit so many articles.
Reasonable perspective. But I suspect you have to spend some time thinking about it anyway. Like, which provider to choose, whether their service is fast/reliable enough, whether you can make changes you need when you need them.

I'm beginning to sound like a know-it-all asshole, so I should stop talking. But, I think it's probably a mistake to outsource DNS to a third party, if your entire business is on the web. Understanding DNS is pretty fundamental to troubleshooting and avoiding problems with network service. In fact, when people ask me to recommend books the O'Reilly DNS and BIND book is always at the top of the list. DNS is important enough that you should spend at least an hour a year thinking about it.
I think I've discovered a sure indicator when the singularity has been fully realized: when every geek story posted on this board on April 1st is actually is real.
It's nice work, congratulations! As someone else said, leveraging Blogger templates is a great idea.

All PHP + MySQL?

Curious to know if 'orgu' indicative of the target market, university groups? Or am I reading too much into those four letters? :)

I think your greatest challenge will be breaking out of the huge array of similar and seemingly-similar products out there. This is a battle more likely won by marketing than technology. Find that niche, attack it, dominate it, and you'll do well.
Really? Perhaps Apple should try selling their laptops with the same restrictions then?

People may not use the same specific terms, but whether it's computing or politics or anything else, they don't like to be arbitrarily told they can't do what they want to do.
I think this mental health site might need a new webmaster.
Cornell has like 15 cafeterias. Anybody know which one was the plate-wobbling one?
Ask HN: Extraordinary people who have inspired you
I've started reading biographies lately out of a desire to study actual success outside of any theoretical ideas. The definition of success here is broader than just financial success. I'm looking for anyone who lead a particularly interesting, inspiring, or worthwhile life.

A few people who were influential to me:

Richard Branson

Dean Kamen

Richard Feynman

PG (our obvious common denominator)
In order:

Gandhi, Einstein, Alinsky.
My bad... I got a pop-up blocker banner when I clicked on the link, and I instinctively didn't click on the options button for the banner.

But, when I went back and did it, it worked appropriately.

Thanks again. I've been using the extension quite a bit today. I really like it.
Sweet. I dunno why this is titled so pessimistically...the dollar is finally rallying.
Here is a comment I wrote yesterday, which might apply here as well:

I think that this is not the kind of thing you learn by reading a book - or sitting in front of a computer. It's a people thing. People have a knack for seeing through other people, whether they believe what they are presenting, like what they do etc.

These are the things I would recommend if you want to do a great demonstration:

- Love your product - nothing shines through like enthusiasm. Don't be afraid to show it either.

- Talk to people, study their reactions, smile to the waitresses, hook up with girls (or guys if that's your preference), start conversations with strangers on the bus. Like in all other walks of life if you practice interacting with people you will become good at it.

- Study great speakers when they do their thing - Start by looking at some of Steve Jobs keynotes. The guy is amazing. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are great at it too.

- Be prepared - Do your presentation until your girlfriend starts complaining that you talk in your sleep and she has heard more about you product while you sleep than she has heard about her other girlfriends sexlife. And that's a lot... Steve Jobs recites until everything is absolutely pixel perfect, and every eventuality is covered - and it shows. On their keynotes I heard that they have three independent AV systems. Just in case two of them break down.

- Read Dale carnegies "how to win friends and influence people - it's much better than all the modern crap. It's from the 1930's if my memory serves me correctly.

Good luck :-)
Title is missing one or both of "MS" and "Server" :P
PHP/GD Cartesian equation plotter
http://www.therobert.org/stuff/tools/grapher/

Found this little tool lying on my server from a few years back when I decided to learn GD one night (and was still hooked on PHP). I needed some graphs and figured I'd make myself a right-click-save-as tool. The funnest part was writing the DSL mathematical expression parser. Try, for example:

sincosx^2
-tanlogx^e^x+-1x
sin1/x^sqrt4

I wanted to implement multiple graphs, polar, and maybe 3D, but it was 1AM I think...Anyone done something similar?