skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose it would be legal to fake one's own gold bars? Maybe that would be a good idea. If shit really hits the fan, maybe you need the full fake gold bar and are desperate enough to not care about the legal issues.
From first glance it looks like Muchobene is the client that you use to answer questions, stumpedia is a site where people without Muchobene can ask questions. I could be wrong though.
http://friendfeed.com/sdpurtill
Startups Toolkit: 14 insightful articles you can’t do without
It would be neat if there were comparable datasets available for other sites. For example, I'd be excited about getting my hands on a dataset describing Twitter's user/following graph.
http://friendfeed.com/ettorepasquini
AskBINC: The BINC Blog
Not sure if this is what you want, but look at the NLTK for Python
The army examples don't mean a lot imo. They have unit sizes across a lot of different scales, so it's not significant that some happen to fall into this range.
Obfuscated Arc: a function that changes itself everytime it's called
MediaWiki is the king of unrestricted wiki platforms. However, if you're looking to restrict access to certain portions of the wiki, or develop some sort of responsibility and/or permission structure, or add features such as forms and even embedded apps, I recommend TWiki. There are lots of plugins available, and there is plentiful documentation.
"iPod sales sales have slowed considerably. They were up only 8% in the quarter. to 10,644,000. With almost 150 million sold since the product was introduced, it is surprising that the music player has held up that well. The product saved the company from obscurity but its best days are over."

Interesting statement, and a noticable lack of facts to support that statement. With 150 million iPods sold, there are about 6 billion people on this planet that don't have one.
If Apple managed to sell 10 million iPods last quarter, why would it not do the same this quarter?
So after this I thought: hey, why not pose the parent's question to Stumpedia itself? Here's what it gave:

~~
You asked:
how is Stumpedia different from Muchobene itself?
~~
Connected in chat session (41 seconds).
~~
The other user says:
Stumpedia is powered by Muchobene
You say:
so where does one begin and the other end?
You say:
is stumpedia just the web site you access muchobene from?
He/she says:
yep, like other partners, ubergizmo.com for isntance
You say:
ah, cool, thanks!
The article does not say why the Lisp code was faster in the float case. What bottleneck did GCC face there?

Btw does CL have OpenMP style parallel for loops?
Hire Family People
Same addictions here, minus the snowboarding. I really need to be more active. That might cancel out some of the effects of said addictions.
Video Comments? No Thanks - 5 Reasons They Don't Work
Ask News.YC : Optionally statically typed languages?
I am trying to survey programming languages which have optional static type declarations. I know about CL and Dylan. Kawa Scheme and Clojure also appear to be using optional static typing. Are there any others?
MoinMoin (python) is good.
Thats right, you said you are launching in a week, not getting selected in a week. My bad.
My work site is setup with MoinMoin and it's been pretty good (although we're a couple revisions behind now). However, the configuration is a little quirky and takes some work, so be prepared to put in a little time and to know a little Python.
Deploying KDE to 52 million young people
I'm not complaining but is it 37signals week?
I love Xubuntu. Surprised there isn't more buzz about it.
I believe that David came away from Startup School with a heap of new ideas that he's been talking about back in Chicago.
Microsoft Earnings Decline 11%
7% commission?
I think a lot of people came away form Startup School with the idea they want to hear more from dhh.
Yahoo to radically open its platforms
Glad to hear it. Maybe I should check back in.

Specific developments I should be aware of...?
I'd personally go for Ikiwiki, just because it lets me ditch the browser for editing the wiki. I personally hate the embedded text controls in web pages, finding that they invariably stink. Ikiwiki stores the pages in a $SCM repository (eg, your pages are stored in Git or SVN or whatnot) so you can check them out and edit them.

Being able to check out the wiki from the repository backend that Ikiwiki uses and edit it with my editor of choice (Vim) is a huge win, I think.
Are wired kids well served by schools?
Drew Curtis says it well:

"right now everybody is talking about the wisdom of crowds, and all that—which is complete horse shit, and I think the next step is realizing that what crowds pick is pretty much pornography and Internet spam, and as a result you've got to have some editing involved there somewhere."

http://www.smileypete.com/Articles-c-2008-03-31-75227.113117...
In most software, the UI is what you use primarily to interact with the software. In games, what's called the "UI" is usually what you use for tasks like saving and loading games, and setting options. It's also frequently given to a junior programmer to implement.

I'm a professional game developer, and I think the article makes some really good points.
They take 7% of your profit as a commission or you keep 7%? I'm guessing the former.
I do what I can.
Feature request: news.yc support!
first response "No way, I can quit any time" ... then I hear the song ...

Breath it in and breath it out
and pass it on it's almost out
We're so creative and so much more
We're high above but on the floor
It's not a habit it's cool
I feel alive
If you don't have it your on
the other side
The deeper you stick it in your vein
The deeper the thoughts there's no more pain
I'm in heaven I'm a god
I'm everywhere I feel so hot
It's not a habit, it's cool
I feel alive
If you don't have it your on
the other side
I'm not an addict (maybe that's a lie)

It's over now, I'm cold, alone
I'm just a person on my own
Nothing means a thing to me
Oh, nothing means a thing to me

Youtube video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-3DzM1KSnU
Why even try to make it into an acronym when you have to work that hard for it?
I believe he has decided to take the opposite position to pg on every point about how to start a business and see how well he can argue it.

Which is a healthy thing for Hacker News, I think, getting other perspectives.
http://friendfeed.com/mikedesjardins
Comscore: Actually, We Were Right. And Google's US Business Stinks
This also seems relevant to the discussion of the relative strengths of the Mac and PC markets right now:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aQ7_...

vs. Apple's Best. Quarter. Ever.
Your Customers Care About Design, Even if They Don't
Trying my hand at some corporate blogging for my new company. (Design/SEM House) This is my first article.

Excerpt:
"So, why is such a silly mistake so common? It has to do with vocabulary. Even people who don’t care about design, care about it. They just think they don’t care, because they don’t know the language. They don’t take note of poorly thought out ergonomics when they encounter them, but they sure recognize it when they’ve purchased a product the maker clearly never used for it’s intended purpose. When they feel they’ve wasted money, they certainly do take note. And they tell their friends."
The assumption that generally fails to get communicated is that the host will always give you an option to switch. You can only do proper statistical analysis of the situation if know what the host will do under any given set of conditions. Otherwise you have to consider the possibility that you'll have the option of switching iff your first choice was the correct one -- in which case you obviously should never switch.
So if your first post gets a minus one rating there is no way to get your account back up since all your subsequent posts will not be shown?

Bad luck...
same as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172767
And you just about can't recover because no one can see your stuff to vote it up... I don't think that this harsh behavior was the intended scenario so that's why I file this under "bug".
This is brilliant. Can you please contact me (I can't figure out how to reach you from your comments and profile) and let me know who I should attribute it to: it's a succinct insight that I would like to quote properly.
A List Apart, Issue 257: the tragicomedy of teaching Rails to non-programmers
Google Finance Interface Change
Google Finance changed their layout today to the regret of many users that preferred the old layout (reflected in the comments).<p>It will be interesting to see if they revert to the old look based on the outcry or if they keep their 'improved' look.
Scrum: Putting a Name on Intelligent Development Practice
Right. I missed one.
Won't comments made on other posts offset that though?
Yeah, Envy totally did the job for me.

Which is nice, because video drivers were the only nontrivial thing that didn't work for me in Gutsy -- the free nvidia drivers don't work at all with my T61p, and the version of the proprietary driver in the repository was complete crap.
My notes of DHH's speech were on the front page for a couple of days so maybe users were inspired as well as inspired to post more themselves. ;)
I don't think that's actually true, unless you've seen it in the source code. I think the editors are such that this behavior appears to be true.

There were two sockpuppet users who got banned for having a troll battle, seeing how low they could get their karma before being banned and I think they got close to -80.
It's debatable, but you have to keep in mind that sometimes drastic action is necessary to protect online communities.
I'm just going to point out that this sets a troubling precedent. If one firm thinks it's legitimate to discriminate in favor of mothers with children, that suggests that being a parent is an acceptable basis on which to discriminate. It opens the door to people thinking about whether somebody is a mother in making hiring decisions. That's troubling on a lot of levels, and in some states illegal.

EDIT: apparently the source has been revised to make it clear that the point is just to look evenly at parents and non-parents; that's OK, but I'll leave the comment above in reference to the earlier version.
I assumed based on the title he meant "hire people from your family." Was totally expecting an essay about the McAskill's at SmugMug.
When you're cutting turns on the snowboard, don't you find it hard to keep typing without spilling your cup of spiked coffee?

Maybe it's easier if you're stoned.
I use a second monitor at work and only my onboard screen at home. After fiddling around with settings for a while, I got it to work, but I also shut down the system when I go to and from work (I expect restarting X would also work).

The main downside of this setup (other than the rebooting thing) is that it makes it impractical to unplug my laptop and move around when I feel like it.

I'm also interested in seeing what happens under Hardy.
He did post a revised version shortly after I submitted it - http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/996-why-i-love-working-wi... - Deals more with 'why working with family people is awesome' instead of just 'you should hire family people.'

"Update: Removed potential confusion around labor discrimination."
Gruber posted an apt response to this on Daring Fireball, I thought.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/april#thu-24-mcintyre
He's not advocating that you should only hire people with families. He's just saying that people with families shouldn't be discriminated against in a startup world that seems to value youth, because they can be as productive.
I'd really like to see that Peer Insight study.
R - v2.7.0
Laws or not, in the startup world there's a lot of discrimination when it comes to hiring decisions.
It's in the news.arc - sumbitting and voting both require karma above 0. While I suspect this site runs a slightly different version than what's included with arc2, I'm pretty sure that part hasn't changed.
You're exactly right. Startup School was a great way to collect some thoughts that had been scattered for a while. A real energy boost.
so commenting can be done with negative karma?
"$59.99 per month + 7% commission"

So they keep 7%, not 93%
Y Combinator as a tattoo
Activision: We're competing with Facebook
Shit. I drink too much. Maybe not first thing in the morning, luckily;)
There are a lot of competitors in this area; I don't see what makes Amazon better than Yahoo stores and the like.

I do wish that there was an online store provider that didn't take a fixed percentage of revenue.
Noah Kagan: Learning Viral from Linkedin.com
It's worth noting that this is the first LTS release since 6.06, and thus the first release of Ubuntu in a few years that is sane to run on servers. The LTS server releases are supported for five years, as opposed to 18 months for non-LTS releases. A five year support lifecycle is awesome (and means that LTS Ubuntu releases are comparable to RHEL/CentOS and Debian for server usage).
You could get clever algorithmically, but I think it would be far simpler to look for identifying traits of specific software packages. eg. if you see links to /wp-content/something, you're looking at a Wordpress site and therefore a blog.

Obviously that alone won't be able to classify a lot of sites, but I suspect it will get the bulk of them.
Nintendo: Average Wii Sits on Shelf for Just an Hour
This is a joke? Can someone explain it and why is it so offensive?
http://github.com/nex3/arc/tree/f06375c697f5fb0698174e04ae58...

Almost done piecing it all together myself. Have a look.
http://xkcd.com/178/
SVN vs. Mercurial vs. Git For Managing Your Home Directory
Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and determined etc, also work long hours.
You're doing it wrong. If you want to pimp your blog here, you should at least tell us what it is about. Even better would be linking to a particular post that you think will be relevant to us.
After a contractor decided on a radical life change and moved to a different country, leaving us without anyone with his skill set, my old manager used to joke that he should only hire people who have a mortgage, because they'll never leave on their own.

Funny as a joke, but a bit chilling when it's given as real advice.
There are many other nice tattoos on that site. This one is particularly nerdy (in a very good way): http://carlzimmer.typepad.com/sciencetattoo/2008/03/think-pe...
Thin-Ice Interaction, The Ice-Breaker of Social Media
I think the reason for that is more one of risk. Starting a new company is a lot more risky than being an employee of one. And if you have a family to support, you're less likely to be willing to take on big risk.

So I absolutely agree that it's easier to start a company when you're single and have no obligations because you can tolerate much more risk.

Update: Seems that the original argument changed from "if kids are so great, why aren't more founders parents when they start their business" to "kids might make you more productive during regular working hours, but you need more than just regular working hours to start a business".

I'm happy to offer my thoughts on the second argument as well. I think people working on startups generally work way too much and the ones that succeed don't do so because they put in 14-hour days.

At 37signals, our "startup" (Basecamp) got off the ground on a 10 hour/week programming budget and designers who were busy doing client projects. For the first year, it wasn't the sole focus for the company.

We believe those constraints were instrumental in their way they shaped Basecamp and thus part of the success of the company.

Doesn't mean that there might not be other businesses out there where working lots and lots of hours can be beneficial somehow, but I think that it's a fallacy that you need to work crazy hours to succeed. I do believe that others believe this, though, I just don't think it's healthy or beneficial.

All of this is somewhat tangential to the original argument, though, which is that you shouldn't be afraid of hiring family people. Who should start a company is a great debate as well, though.
Don't get your hopes up too much. Petrobras is a state run monopoly and has had a number of recent corruption scandals. Even though the price of oil has risen dramatically and Brazil continues to find more reserves, production has actually dropped the last few years. This is due to the fact that a platform sank a few years ago and 5 year's ago the government decided that all new platforms should be Brazilian-built. Of course they are also behind schedule with cost over-runs. These new fields are very deep and will require new technology and significant investments. Given the government's tendency to maintain political and economic control of natural resources, it is unlikely that much external investment or technology will participate in the exploration. The benefits from these new fields is many years away probably much later than 2012.
this guy knows about online dating. sweet.
But it does apply to founders. Nearly everyone interviewed in Founders at Work remarked that constraints breed creativity. That focus is one reason startups can kick the ass of big corporations.

It's just that it's possible to overconstrain the solution as much as underconstrain it. In the early stages, there's so much work to do that if you try to add kids to the mix, you don't even attempt it. As the startup gets more developed (or if you start with a simple enough problem), the amount of work needed becomes manageable enough to juggle with family life.

Same goes for having a day job. It worked for Joshua Schacter, Pierre Omidyar, and Steve Wozniak, because the focus of having only so many hours available disciplined them to work on products they could do in those hours. And the economy was such that not many other people were working on those products, so they ended up dominating their niches. But it fails for many, many other entrepreneurs, because the problems they could solve within those constraints had already been solved by hundreds of other people.
Just got Techcrunch'd - ReviewGist.com
We just rolled out a big update and got techcrunched.

Do check out ReviewGist.com and I will be very eager for some feedback.
(If this exchange is confusing to anyone, it's because dhh was replying to my comment while I was still editing it.)

But in reply to the second half: while 37Signals may be a counterexample to the rule that startup founders need to work long hours to succeed, there seem to be a lot more startups that did than didn't.

Different people presumably have different points at which spending more time on something makes the result come out worse. Probably this also varies with the type of work. So it could be that when person = dhh and work = product design, 10 hours per week is a reasonable limit, and when it's someone else and the work = writing database software, the limit might be 70 hours per week.

In the absence of any other evidence, you have to assume that successful startup founders knew what they were doing, and that if they worked long hours it was because it paid off for them.
DHH: Why I love working with family people
Second Life convention center shows virtual meeting pros and cons
Actually there wasn't anything in DHH's talk that I really disagreed with, except the use of the word "startup" for the kind of company he was describing. There's already a word for companies like Italian restaurants: businesses. A startup is a very specific kind of business: one that starts small but could grow very large. Only a fraction of the 30 million businesses in the US are startups.

I think what made people think DHH's advice was relevant to startups was that he was talking about starting a business to write software, which is also what most startups do. But structurally the kind of small business he was talking about was more like a landscaping company or a shoe store or a restaurant. Which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do; it's just not a startup.
Nearly everyone interviewed in Founders at Work remarked that constraints breed creativity.

That doesn't mean that they make you net better, though. If they did, you could prove by induction that the ideal strategy in a startup would be to work an arbitrarily small amount of time per day.
I am curious: do any of the founders of YC companies have kids?
I've cancelled mine too. Was getting 1.5 kb/s
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears
Easy approaches make learning math hard
I think that's a pretty narrow definition of a startup. Also, there are plenty of businesses that start out small and then grow very large over time. Actually, most large businesses took a long time to get there.

Say like foot locker or Zappos for a "shoe store" (both big business) and say McDonald's or Olive Garden for a restaurant.

By the same measure, we're building 37signals to grow as well. Grow revenues, grow customers, grow influence. We're just not that hooked on growing head count or office space (which are often the most visible indicators of growth for a private company and thus often mistaken as the only indicators).

To me a startup simply means a new business that's getting off the ground. That business may well end up big one day and it may not, which is okay too.

I generally don't think that you can become a star by trying to be a star. I think you just try to be the best at what you do and if you are, hopefully the star part will take care of itself.
Although often used with Agile processes, Scrum actually has nothing inherently to do with Agile

... except that it is one of the two most prominent agile processes and its creators helped write the Agile Manifesto. By this logic, although he often plays with them, Keith Richards has nothing inherently to do with the Rolling Stones.

Edit: software "processes" of any kind are pretty anathema to hacker culture.
Surprisingly expensive. 7% of the merchant's revenues is very high.
Thank you so much, 37signals guys.

I've always found pg's essays to be motivational and inspring, but there are two things that always turn me off; 1.) I don't live in San Fransisco, and probably never will, and 2.) I have a family. I often feel dismissed by PG and his disciples. DHH's stuff gives me hope that there's still a chance for "fogeys" (cripes, I'm only 33!) like me.

I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids. Is that fair?

I stay up late into the night hacking after the kids go to bed, and I'm in the office hours before other people are there so I can do some extra hacking. Am I not motivated enough? Can I not be passionate? Perhaps DHH is onto something. Perhaps balancing the challenges of work and family five you a healthy dosage of time management and prioritization skills.

There are some interesting comments on DHH's site - several presumably young, single kids are crabby and crying "discrimination!" (e.g., "Wow, that’s actually offensive. And illegal in BC, Canada and I hope other enlightened jurisdictions.", or the more eloquent "I’m single and you can kiss my ..."). I wonder if these people have ever noticed that the discrimination often goes the other way, against the thirty-something parent crowd, too.
Researchers discover secret to happiness by analyzing blog posts from LiveJournal
> If they did, you could prove by induction that the ideal strategy in a startup would be to work an arbitrarily small amount of time per day.

For a given startup, a particular limit on startup time might actually be optimal. But I think it's pretty likely that different startups are going to find different sets of constraints (regarding time, budget, or other areas) optimal.
Would like to add Guy's chat with Mike at http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/11/how_to_get_in_t.html
was spot on in approaching TC.

Mike spells it out in the first two minutes.