skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only real downside, according to Juristovski, would occur if MetroLyrics remains the only lyrics site that pays publishers. Now that Gracenote offers a way for pure lyrics sites to license songs in return for a revenue share, he says, there's no excuse for unlicensed lyrics sites to continue operation.

There's no excuse for the current state of affairs in IP law, either.

The only thing that matters is what goes through a dude's mind before he decides to make music. It has to make enough sense for him to write the song, so there has to be an upside for him, and there may well be case for the law to protect him. But having the rights over ads on lyrics websites ninety years into the future? Does anyone really think John Lennon thought about this kind of thing before deciding to write more music?
Pondering Persai
The BBC has a Twitter feed
Moore's Law is like driving in fog
When you're logged in, the asterisks denote your own submissions.
I've boot-strapped projects while doing full time jobs. I have trouble imagining not being willing to put a few bucks into it. If you need to mentally justify it, think of it as the "risky" part of your investment strategy.

A virtual server can be a good starting point. I recommend rimuhosting. You can get something at the low end of workable for around 30 bucks a month, there. Shared hosting can be passable, it depends what framework you're using. Capacity is a problem to solve as-you-go, though. Legality aside, is your current problem hosting-related? If it's not, I say focus on building something users love.
Fundamental limitations of Python are responsible for most of the memory footprint and performance difference between the old official Python implementation of BitTorrent and C++ implementations like libtorrent. The kind of obsessive optimization that made uTorrent so tiny and fast is just not achievable in Python, due to things like per-object memory overhead and reference counting.

I've also done audio processing projects in Python, and ended up switching to D because Python couldn't do floating point additions and multiplications across large lists fast enough.
Bummer. I had a great idea for a pizza-centered startup (no joke) and that would have been perfect. I only had 2mil budgeted for the domain (joke).
When I worked for a university, I asked my boss if I could open-source my code, which was largely funded by NSF. I showed him a license, and summarized it for him. His response surprised me:

"By all means -- anything 'open' is music to NSF's ears, because it means they don't have to pay for several labs to do the same work. I'll mention that in our annual report."
"You can never assume you wholly know your own software..."
With respect, it's a compelling app but it's easy to give something away. The real question is how to wrap a revenue model around your offering. If you base advertising on my on-line behavior it may be viewed as too invasive. Another key attraction is that it doesn't interrupt me when I am in flow, so you are probably limited to presenting ads during the analytics so that I am not interrupted when I am actually working. You've done a good job of addressing privacy concerns so far, but a local app would be even more secure: why not offer a version that competes with http://www.timesprite.com/ the attraction for me is that their revenue model is clear and I can rely on them being around for a while. And I would be glad to pay $40/yr for rescuetime as is if I knew that would allow you to persist in your current privacy model. Your situation is unstable until you get to at least cash flow positive. It's a great app, but I would worry a lot more about adding some kind of paying customers instead of more free users.
They actually have a lot of the pieces out there but unconnected. I will answer the question.

Willpower is an equilibrium between two distinct drives, one of which is a drive to act, and one of which is an inhibitory drive. The first step to growing willpower is to make sure your lack of willpower isn't caused by a biological problem or a mental health problem. Before struggling too long to grow willpower, have a physical, have your thyroid level checked, and get a mental health evaluation.

The reason you can build willpower is that it is an equilibrium between the parts of your brain that produce fear and anxiety and the parts of your brain that produce good feelings. Your right prefrontal cortex produces negative emotions, and your left prefrontal cortex produces positive emotions. This circuitry is linked up to the circuitry that primes your body to move. Assuming no mental or physical illness, willpower is simply a measure of the relation between these systems.

We know that monks who meditate for 10,000 hours have much greater gamma ray function. Gamma rays underlie large scale brain synchronization. These monks also had a different relationship between the left and right prefrontal cortexs (corti?). In monks, the positive emotion producing left prefrontal cortex was much more active than the right. Also, they were much more primed to move.

Meditation, particularly certain kinds from Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, are scientifically proven to work on this, to such a degree that neuroscientists haven't seen some of those neurological states in normal people. From studying these monks, we know what to do.

It's scientifically proven that you can grow willpower by getting a physical, and a mental health eval, and then meditating. It's the best, most efficient way. Everything the nyt article lists as a way of increasing willpower is an example of an activity where you must be continually bringing your attention into the present. I don't want to sound like some stupid hippy, but meditation can be the most concentrated way to practice this focusing of attention, and directing your focus in certain Tibetan buddhist ways hits all the main parts of increasing motivation.

I consulted http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma8/monkstudy.html to refresh my memory on the monk neurology study.
email never seemed elegant to me. mailing lists in particular are atrocious. i think a good communication medium for a business would be forums (eg vBullitin) which allow topical conversation in an organized, non-retarded way as well as one-on-one private exchanges
Here is a good discussion about using Lua to script stuff for embedded or cell phone development:
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2007-11/msg00248.html

Its an interesting read. Lua seems pretty sweet!
Don't try.

Instead, find a way to want the thing. Really want it. No tricks; they don't work.

You can't pretend passion (and sustain it).
Good job on the site!

I like how the song keeps playing when you click around, but when you hit the back button the song gets cut off :(
Do you think launching here can hurt your startup credibility
YC News is a great resource for startup entrepreneur or anyone in the startup and/or tech environment. several entrepreneurs have launched their startup here, but when it happens it automatically makes me think it is another feature, or someone who wiped a tool in a few hours and throws it out to see if users will bite or not. do you think launching your startup here can hurt its credibility, making it look less serious then it could be?
"I refuse to grant credibility to anyone using a study to support an argument without a reference. If the study was published I can read it myself and see what it actually says."

Red Herring. There are widely-known tools to look up research articles, and it's not conventional to cite such articles in newspapers because the journals are not easily accessible to the general public.

I wonder how many other things he refuses to believe in because he's never read the papers?
Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900
Coding Horror: UI-First Software Development
First of all, excellent job ( As a long time reader of HN this is the first time I've felt compelled to comment). I just spent more time on your site than probably any I have found through HN.

+
Love the Growlesque notifications and trivia.
Love the continuous play music.

-
I subconsciously thought the black header on the home page was a banner ad thus completely ignored it. Only later did I realise it actually described what the site was about, even then I didnt want to read it because the colours were too contrasted.

Im no designer but I have to agree with the comments about the font and the indecision about rounded or square corners. This could all be a product of the page being too busy though.

Overall though I'm very impressed. Good luck.
Why do you think I want to read a big advertisement? No, I can't show you applications without violating my security clearance, FYI.
"As a baseline, anyone with above average willpower has a busy enough life not to have time to participate in psychological surveys."

I wonder if that's true. Aren't a lot of psych experiments done with college students? I think I know a lot of people with above average willpower that did psych experiments in college because they were kind of fun and paid pretty well.
"Craigslist's content is not at all bandwidth intensive--all light text, no computation or transactive processing like eBay or Google--so this should keep its costs well below those of other huge global sites. Let's call it $50 million a year. (This is probably high--grateful for any help in refining)."

What is he smoking? Sure they have a lot of page views, but man, you can do a lot for $50 million a year. Craigslist's site is as bare as it could be. All static html, that is probably just generated using whatever scripting language it wants. I'm there is some engineering challenges and that they go through a good bit of bandwidth, but i mean, I feel like this guy is off by like an order of magnitude. Now, I don't know squat about serious big iron servers and doing stuff that large, but its definitely not $50million to run it. A guy in the site's comments puts the yearly cost at $1 million and he even over-estimates a bit in my book.

Also, all these analysts always speculate about how much money craigslist could make if they charged for all job postings and ads. As soon as they started charging for anything more than what they do they would probably get an order of magnitude less postings. Then they would just another monster.com/careerbuilder.com/etc crappy clone. Whats great now is that people can post whatever they want for free, with the few exceptions that help pay for it all (and still probably make Craig rich). The author obviously didn't study engineering or physics because his back-of-the-envelope calculations suck.
Ugh. Then he follows his straw man with an over-generalization and appeal to ridicule:

"anyone with above average willpower has a busy enough life not to have time to participate in psychological surveys"

and an appeal to personal belief (which also happens to be biased, and begs the original question):

"I think I possess above average powers of will, but I would never test them against things I thought were pointless."

Finally, he closes by quoting a section of the original article out of context, and misinterpreting the meaning:

"there are tons of higher level masters of teaching willpower, but since they don’t have neuroscience degrees, this article neglects to give them a voice....Why use 10% of the article on a guess, when a phone call could bring an expert with data."

(the original Times article explains that the theory of glucose-induced willpower was tested in specific experiments, and found to have some merit.)

For a guy who wants to take a science reporter to task for sloppy reporting, he sure does play fast-and-loose with the logical fallacies....
Fred Wilson: Time To Stop Spending Money
Open Source Meets Unified Communications
I can recall at least 3 startups (non-YC funded) which announced their launch here and went on to gain traction and good blog coverage. The quality of the product speaks for it self really. Some have been good, others weak. Regardless I dont think it has any affect on credibility of others announcing their launch here. The goal is just to show people what you've built and get feedback, right? If a product is truly good, it will gain dedicated users and begin its viral spread.
fwiw, in my experience, when i read the papers, they suck. (have not read the article, not defending the guy, just commenting on papers)
Webfaction.com is good for Django, Rails, Pylons, etc.
My old slow powerbook doesn't run the everyblock map very well.

They need to implement better zooming. I really like the google maps one. In fact, I really just like google maps. I use it like everyday for driving directions and looking for places to eat and just anything I need to do anywhere in my city.
For another US$700 you could buy a cheap RAID card and another six disks. That would quadruple the storage and only cost a total of US$1600.
http://www.factorcode.org
They should just buy a bunch of iPhones (or iPod Touches) and a team of programmers to build a program using the new SDK. Its reasonably location aware, has mapping, has everywhere internet, is reasonably robust, and is super intuitive. Plus, the census folks could listen to music while walking around.

The numbers they use always baffle me. How can anything cost $11 billion dollars let alone just counting people?
That first point has merit. Studies and surveys in general always pretend to be dealing with random samples, but that's never the case.
For all I know, it's the worst paper in the world; that's not the point.

This guy rejected the credibility of the newspaper article (and hence, the reporter), because s/he didn't cite a research paper.
I always keep an eye on the Arstechnica.com hardware guides. If I'm ever building a server I'll probably just get whatever they put in their hotrod minus the fast video card and double the ram. Or just keep the video card and play HL2 while I serve pages :)

Its amazing what you can put together for <$1000 these days. I'm sure I'll be saying that every year hence forth, but it never ceases to amaze me.
openfacetomatopie.com sold for 5 cents.
A Camera for the Shot You Missed
You're committing to the same fallacy. I don't care what "studies in general" do -- I care what this study did.

Same goes for your use of the words "always" and "never" -- given that sample bias is a well-known scientific phenomenon, you're going to have to provide extraordinary evidence to convince me that studies "always" make the mistake...that's a rather extraordinary claim.
Its the 10 x 10 x 10 rule.

An individual is 10 times more effective working alone than working as an employee. An employee is 10 times more effective than a government bureaucrat.

So:

An individual could produce a surprisingly accurate count for $100,000.

A private company could produce a surprisingly accurate count for $1,000,000.

A government agency could produce a surprisingly accurate count for $10,000,000. (The rest of the billions are earmarks that have nothing to do with the census.)

I won't mention the UN.
Much as I hate PDFs, the google cache should only be used in life-or-death situations.
What is a Specialist's Skill Set?
If you are giving a product or service away I don’t think you can assert that you have “product/market fit.” You have a very compelling application, but until you figure out who is going to pay you for it, and how much it’s worth to them, I don’t think you can put a check in the box next to “product/market fit” since you don’t pass this test from the same Marc Andreessen post you reference ( http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html ):

And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account.
Arc Lisp to C compiler
You only get to lose your virginity once
I'd have sprung for a 10,000 rpm WD Raptor SATA drive. More expensive, but they are large enough now to hold OS + VMs + main data, then you can have less frequently used data on the cheaper SATA RAID drives. Still amazing what you can buy for the price nowadays.
C'mon. If I say, "Okay, here's my random sample", and it's a self-selected group, you know immediately it's not a random sample. Whether or not this matters has much to do with whether we are testing physiological or pyschological criteria.
1. Stash key-value pairs in signed cookies (salt + text + sha1 should be fine; HMAC is even better-- I prefer a variant of HMAC where I concatenate the client's IP address onto the first hash before hashing again with the second key).

1a. Note that this only goes for key-value pairs you don't mind the user seeing, but want to keep tamper-proof. Real secret stuff still needs to be handled server-side.

2. Display them javascriptically, and only verify/change things server-side on login or POST. This lets you serve most pages as cached, static HTML!

2a. So if my username cookie is "[some 40-byte salted sha1hash]icky", then, client-side, I could change the username or the hash, and the page's javascript would display the new username for me (blindly chopping off the first 40 bytes that form the hash), but if I tried to post, then the server would detect the tampered cookie, and log me out. [Tampering with the display-name client-side is something you can already do with the Firebug or Web Developer plugins, so this really doesn't pose a problem].

3. When a POST happens, just regenerate the cached page that it dirtied, and dynamically serve it back to the poster.

4. That's it! You now have turned nearly all of your read-only requests into a static, cached page GET, which you can let Apache take care of without even hitting your application server.
The centenarian strategy: life/career planning when you will live to 100
Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine
Firefox Personas
http://www-plan.cs.colorado.edu.scribd.com/diwan/3308-07/p17-armour.pdf

errr..I mean:

http://scribd.com/slurp?url=www-plan.cs.colorado.edu/diwan/3...

:-D
"Companies that are built on having lots of users but no real revenues won’t last. That all changes with the downturn”

I like this quote. Notice the sudden change in the vc funding market. The barriers to entry have gone up a bit due to the credit squeeze. Now risk has a different price. It's interesting to see how this cycle repeating. Now all those funded companies that don't convert users into dollar making users are going to get squeezed.
Project management of complex projects
Growing Leather, Fur, and Meat in Labs Not Far Off
From the article: The fastest way through the project is to do it right

Too often, managers want to deploy inappropriate technology, colleagues want to build their CV, you have to integrate with a badly designed cashcow or you have an urgent deadline. Remove these constraints and it makes open source deployment joyful.
"... The question is... was this comment posted before or after this xkcd comic was published ..."

The irony is not lost on me. Probably both at the same time. I guess I could have said the poster was wrong & left a pithy joke I suppose but duty calls ~ http://xkcd.com/386/
I introduced paper prototyping at the place where I was working & it's amazing how much it can help you define your product. It's a great way to side-step the feature-bloat trap at the specification phase in waterfall development. We focussed on finding out what not to build. I work in a pretty risk-averse environment & was surprised how well it was received.
It doesn't make sense to sue a startup--it's just not profitable. However, there are instances where universities have appeared to wait for the company or technology to mature before taking legal action. Two examples of this:

University of Wisconsin sues Intel for Core 2 Duo patent infringement:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/07/intel-sued-for-core-2-duo...

Northeastern University sues Google over Database Architecture:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/10/google-being-sued-over-...

This goes to show that universities aren't always benevolent when it comes to IP. Even if the software is rewritten, there's no guarantee that university lawyers won't accuse you of infringement down the line.

Isn't licensing specifically designed to address this issue of IP? What would be a reason not to license the software from the university?
Correction: "...the average WEB developer seems to lack any sense of security awareness."
The “dot-corn” Bubble
Yeah, that depends on your browser. Firefox works great.
C'mon nothing:

A) I don't know if the study authors claimed that they used a "random sample" (not all experiments require it).

B) Even if it wasn't a "random sample", unless the selection bias was correlated with the trait under study, it's highly unlikely to matter.

C) All of this is window dressing. The point is, Berkun's argument was overly general ("Anyone with..."), and based on ridicule of the experiment, without actually knowing anything about the experiment (by his own admission!)

If Berkun knew the details of the experiment, and was pointing out a methodological flaw, he'd be making an argument. Instead, he's speaking from the comfort of ignorance, attacking a study based on second-hand information and his own personal biases.
Maybe it is time for venture funds to find companies that can create revenue, own a part of the revenue stream, and keep investing in companies that can create more revenue streams. Oh wait.. that would make too much sense!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Parenscript doesn't abstract away HTML, CSS, JavaScript, it just lets you write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using a Lispy language.

This is very different than abstracting away HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is where I think the real problem is.

I shouldn't have to learn 3+ of different languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc), AND 3+ different variations of each (Mozilla, WebKit, IE, etc), AND multiple versions of each, AND another abstraction layer (Parenscript) just for basically macros, just to write a web application.
Calling Y Combinators: Lessons from a “Serial First-Timer”
25 Great Geek Websites
The availability zones do guarantee EC2 placement within specific data centers, but from what I've heard, do not guarantee S3 placement. Because so many web services are tightly coupled with EC2 and S3, this presents a dilemma. If I'm wrong though, please correct.
TC50: 1 - Demo: 1 - Startup: 0
Red Envelope Saga All But Over
I can't help but think you haven't written a sufficiently complicated client side web application.
It seems to me we've had this discussion before! No, it doesn't abstract these things away in the sense that compilers abstract away machine language. That is, you still have to know about them. Is that what you mean?

If so, it's a fair distinction. Probably it would be more accurate if I said abstract over rather than abstract away. We can get rid of a lot of repetition this way, but not a lot of the details that remain after that. Still, that's a big deal; better than anything else I've seen by far. So while "abstract away" may be an overstatement, I think that "just lets you write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using a Lispy language" is an understatement. It doesn't just let you write those things - you don't need Lisp to do that. Similarly, saying "just for basically macros" (my emphasis) reads like an oxymoron to me. Macros are a big deal!

If you can do better, I definitely want to know. But my definition of "better" includes being usable in a standard browser, and "usable" includes performant.
My initial reactions:

- I would be cool if I could play with the site more without registering.

- I like the UI and the interface. A lot of people have been talking bad about the design, but I don't mind it. I think it's unique.

- If someone asked me to describe this site, I would say "it's like iminlikewithyou, but for music".

Overall, I think this is an amazing website. Great job, guys.
Pwn 2 Pawn: Why the Vista hacker turned to eBay
Jott Review