skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
well if there is no catch I submit my new site Embought www.embought.com . It's a shopping search engine that donates 50% of its profits to charity.
I will be very happy for two reasons:
-First for the shareholders, it will be a wave of fresh air for their equity which has been plunging in value.
-It will be a good for the search industry; it will diminish the myth around Google and its monopoly, create room for innovative solutions in search technology and for new companies to grow.
MS will die a slow and painful death over the years if it doesn't change the way it does business and treatments towards its customers and other developers. MS also needs more innovation and invention rather than milking their ancient products. If MS takes over Yahoo and force its brand on Yahoo, it will take Yahoo down with it. Reinventing their image and mission as a company is probably a better and cheaper way than forcing to take over Yahoo.
My theory is that a lot of us are rather broke ;-)
"Upmodded for pointing out that Yegge is always a little too sure of himself. "

People are drawn to confidence. Writers who hedge or offer reasonable caveats are viewed less favorably.

It also makes for more entertaining discussion; blunt assertions, without significant evidence, are fodder for endless blog threads. See: 37 Signals)
Media monitoring companies are having a renaissance right now with the rise of blogs and web media. The individuals I know working at such companies said that they've been on hiring binges for the past several years.

Yes, these are professional google searchers, looking for keywords and new hits on customers' brands.
My company is building desktop applications using Swing + JRuby. We (Happy Camper Studios) are developing a library (Monkeybars) that makes this remarkably easy.

We gave a quick demo of using Java Web Start to deploy such apps.

Very slick (though we're still working out some issues).

Happy clients, happy developers.
These geniuses were an accomplished scientist, and a high school friend (who will probably become an accomplished scientist). It shouldn't be hard to find these kinds of people among "smart" folks though, simply because they absorb lots of information on a regular basis. If we arbitrarily set the upper limit of normal reading to be at 800wpm (very optimistic and unlikely), there are people who still vastly exceed this speed. It's not just skimming: they will learn the stuff just as anyone else would, in an almost magical process.

You're right about the bottleneck, which makes my previous post's discussion not so good. There are multiple bottlenecks, and improving one area will not guarantee a result like those programs promise. If it's technical material, obviously, if you were Feynman you'd be able to quickly read hard paper without feeling uncomfortable (hence my reasoning about brain power). If it's Bearstein Bears, then, yes, you can fly over pages with total comprehension. As you said, here the speed of parsing text would make a big difference.

This is related to the "block of text" thing, which can be trained. It's not "reading in blocks" per se, but the training of fast visual pattern recognition. In this sense, it is similar to the pattern recognition the Rain Man used to count 270 or so matches in one glance. The most direct strategy then, is simply twofold. One, increase your vocabulary. Not just so you can answer test questions: you really need to know these words cold. Unfamiliar words take longer to retrieve from memory. Obviously, Charles Dickens would take longer to decode than Douglas Adams. (Hitchhiker is interesting though, since there are many invented terms; maintaining speed on this requires a relevant, but different, skill, and shouldn't be confused with that involved in vocabulary building). Two, read more, and ideally, when you read non-essential material (daily news perhaps), consciously push yourself (this takes discipline). The point of this is not for speed of parsing words. It's for recognizing the shapes of lumps of words. To illustrate: if you see "the Jedi reader reads fantastically quickly" a thousand times, you'll begin to parse that as a combined shape, in a single fixation. You will slow down, though, if you see "fantastically quickly, the Jedi reader reads." On the most part these two sentences are semantically equivalent, but the latter will take longer to parse, simply because it takes a different shape. But if you read that many times, you'll start chunking it like the other sentence. So reading a lot is simply to build up your arsenal of "familiar phrase shapes."

Again, this is the most foolproof way of training yourself. There are other things that may bring small improvements. But this is basically the heart of the matter. There are people who can parse unfamiliar word forms very quickly. The "bottleneck" here, as I understand it, is at the pipeline between CPU and RAM, and cache size. Genetics plays a big role here, so I usually don't bother.
Like it. You get my note for the charity side alone!
This is not meant as a dis, just a curiousity question. Is ~2 page views/unique typical for a photo sharing site? At first glance, that seems low.
Check this when you have time
Well, if I was a shareholder needing evidence that the leadership of Yahoo is in fact yahoo, I couldn't ask for a better clue.

MS is gonna save some money in this deal come May.
A little too sure of himself? Really? I'd say the opposite: he qualifies almost everything he says, and, besides, his essays tend to be, for lack of a better way to put it, a snapshot of Stevey's mind at a given point in time.

I agree with some things he says and disagree with others, but I like the fact that he doesn't claim to know everything.
http://bug.gd - Global error search engine and database.

Find an error? Search for it on bug.gd. If it's solved already, great, you're all set. If not, we email you in 48 hours and ask you to share your solution for the next lost soul.

Long term, we're trying to change how all software and operating systems handle errors. There's absolutely no reason it shouldn't be automatic that we're able to find people who ran into errors and how they got past them. Why are we all wasting so much time solving problems that have already been solved by others?
Simple. we just had the explore feature up this weekend, before there was no other ways to see other uploaded photos.
Ask YC: What is the best way to learn Perl?
Language wars aside, what is the best way to learn Perl if one wants to use it primarily for web development? There are so many books and websites out there, it's hard to separate the good from the bad. If it helps, I am pretty proficient in PHP and know the basics of Ruby and Python.
Thanks, I've been working non-stop for the last couple months to get it up and running. I'm in the home stretch (I'll hopefully 'launch' in the next week) and I'm starting to turn my attention to promotion and marketing.
The only way I can learn languages is to start a project using it, then figure it out as the need arises.
I'd like to submit http://www.askurpals.com. A simple review/question-and-answer service that lets you control who gets to answer your question using your existing mailing lists like your yahoo groups or office mailing lists. Goal is to produce collection of quality answers from trusted sources for the community with no spam or trolls
Is the camel book still pretty much The Book? It was back when I learned Perl.
Write like a blogger
10 Bottles, 1 Has Poison - Would you take a drink?
Help this kid get some publicity to get into Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Marc Held is the Pimp of Science, Worcester Polytechnic Institute should definitely not only let him into their school but also let him in for free. If there were more people in the world like this, the world would be a strange and wonderful place.
And that's why your startup needs an enemy. Otherwise you will have to be the one everyone is fearful of.
Java is losing the battle for the modern Web. Can the JVM save the vendors?
The Differences Between Mercurial and Git
Most philosophers start from a premise they want to be true and work it out until they have a proof, (sometimes) claim they did it the other way around and make use of one or more subjective statements in their proof. The subjective statements are usually true to some people and false to others and therefore arguments about a proof are almost always about one statement and evidence to support or refute its viability.

I was a CS major and a minor in philosophy. I think philosophy is a good major and a good minor. On the major side, if you're talented and ambitious you could have a degree in performing arts and succeed far better than a lazy or incompetent person with a CS degree.

On the minor side, I understand your argument that mathematics is the "real" philosophy as it is more directly applicable to pure CS. However, math has nothing to do with human motivation, ethics or other such philosophical concerns which are very, very applicable to working for a company that happens to be doing CS ;-)

Plus, metaphysics is pretty damn fun.
Wow, they really like .net in India
Ask YC: Where are the open source consumer web apps?
On the front page right now is an article about DimDim, the first open source consumer web app I've heard of. ("Consumer" is meant to distinguish this type of app from something like ActiveCollab, which is also an open source web app but which is meant to be installed by the user on his own server). Are there any other good ones out there?

As opposed to open source desktop apps, web apps don't generally require any advanced computer knowledge. There's no compiling, no installing mac ports, etc. This seems like making an open source web app would be that much more fun and rewarding, because so many more people would be able to use it.

Have any of you considered making an open source web app? For awhile I've been toying with the idea of building a text-based team death match game, perhaps using MUD scripts. I think it would really make the game fun to add a graphic interface so that it could easily be played on an iPhone just by quickly tapping the screen. It'd be fun to work with other folks on it, and fun to be able to implement player/programmer additions. Will this kind of open source work become more prevalent?

edit: The first couple comments have been, basically, "What the hell are you talking about?"

DimDim seems different in a crucial way from open source web apps like shopping carts, blogging software, and project management tools (Trac, ActiveCollab). With DimDim, the open source product is of primary concern to the site's users, anyone is free to use the product, and the product appeals to a wider swath of humanity. On the other hand, users aren't primarily concerned with what shopping cart a site uses (the primary concern is buying something) or what blogging system a site uses (the primary concern is the content). Projects like Trac generally are installed to be used primarily by a select group of people, and they appeal to fewer people.

Another difference: DimDim exists only at dimdim.com . The project is not about providing other people with the means of creating their own web meeting site; it's about being THE open source web meeting site. Another way of explaining this is that Reddit is a web application, while there are also many "make your own reddit" kits which are also web applications. DimDim is more like reddit.com than a "make your own reddit" web app.

Hopefully this clarifies the distinction. Maybe someone else could explain it succinctly.
I do not think MS will attempt to merge teams and technologies; they are smarter than that, not at least for a mid term.
I think they will basically run two companies and go for the main prize: ads base customers and search traffic. They will keep both engines separate for a while and consolidate the ads business in general into a giant force in revenue making; this will be the main problem for Google.
The Next Web: Kevin Rose on future of Digg and an exclusive feature announcement
Yahoo! formally rejected the offer in February. What more response is necessary?
I use keynote(www.keynote.com) or gomez(www.gomez.com)
Better yet, would be Mercury Managed Services(MMS)
Ask YC: Python Desktop Frameworks
I need to write a desktop application in python that would take a tcpdump on the users' desktop and HTTP POST the dump to a server. Has anyone used Dabo before? Any other suggestion for Desktop Client Frameworks in Python?
http://streamfocus.com Get things done and collaborate with our integrated project, workflow & action management system. We just launched limited beta after over a year of coding.
Huh? There are huge numbers of open source web apps. Most blogging software, webmail software, web-shop software, ...
I think Yahoo should accept the deal, there’s no way they can reverse the course at this point, and they’ve tried. Another six month they could be in the red, then the takeover will be nasty and the losers will be the shareholders.
This article aggravated me a bit.

"As for Web developers other than Google, I'm not sure whether they're struggling with Gears, or whether there's simply less interest in offline apps than I hoped and guessed there would be."

Go ask a few and give your opinion. A little research on what really is going on might support the claim of a frustratingly unfulfilled promise. I happen the think Gears was unveiled a bit early--getting uptake is easier when you've demonstrated the toolkit's potential first. But, this just seemed to fall short as an article for me.
Google's share of U.S. search market hits all-time high in March
Very creative idea... I love seeing this kind of stuff going on in the news.yc community.

I'd like to offer up 1 month of bluwiki.com to the cause. Here are my stat's from google analytics (3/7 - 4/6):
325,934 Visits;
1,029,153 Pageviews;
3.16 Pages/Visit;
41.37% Bounce Rate;
00:05:58 Avg. Time on Site;
23.71% % New Visits;
86,076 Visitors

Reply to this post if you're you're a struggling startup and want a mention on my main page.
It depends. Unfortunately, we have a huge gap between poor people and those of us who can afford a little bit more.

So 2c per message is cheap and SMS is quite popular here. However, it is still cheaper to call than to have an SMS chat because, for example, I pay 2c per minute for both outgoing and incoming calls.

If you are interested, here is an information page from our biggest operator: http://www.mts.uz/eng/abonents/tarifs/

(I use another company but its website has no english version)
http://www.thephotostream.com

The Photo Stream delivers buzz and newsworthy content to the masses through a rich, eye-opening photo interface.

This is a good fit for the free advertising space because although The Photo Stream is in the "photo" space -- we're not a photo host.
Ask YC: Can a person in US on F-1 Student Visa be a co-founder?
And if you don't know the answer to this, would be nice if someone could recommend a good immigration lawyer.
Having a "recommended" link is a hard problem for news sites like this one. If you have a well defined category then there are lots of techniques that will give you good results.

At a place like this, people are looking for "interesting tech articles", which is a really vague thing. Also, interesting articles tend to be things that you haven't seen before. So it is hard to build up a training set for that.
There are a few U.S. universities doing good work in continental philosophy. And there are actual real, rational people who want to study there!
I never fail to wonder what could we do to stop them. Isn't there anything that could be done? An anti-worm, tracking down the origin, anything?
Grains Gone Wild
i have to be misreading your comment, because there are about three hundred zillion open source web apps.

could you clarify?
Raganwald on Inheritance
Simplebucket could use some kind of "love" as well ;)
Mobtropolis - a social photo scavenger hunt making it easy to photo stream your adventures, big or small, and get inspired to try new things.
http://www.mobtropolis.com
Earth in crisis, warns NASA's top climate scientist
Yes.

Yahoo has been able to generate great amounts of traffic to their site, but their ability to 'monetize' it has been abysmal. They treat their free-for-use visitors wonderfully, but treat their paying customers (the advertisers) like crap.

Microsoft, for all gripes against it, knows how to build a decent ad management system and assist their customers (the advertisers). From my own perspective as an advertiser, their ad management system, customer relations, etc. are far and away superior to those provided by Yahoo.

If you keep Yahoo's content and rip out its horrible ad system, you'll have a winner.
Pitchfork.tv Launches Music Video Site to Challenge MySpace Music
I like photostream, so I've put in my vote for it.
No I'm suggesting that static content be served by something lighter than Apache.
Requiring every process to have a digital signature.
I'm so happy I didn't have a computer when I was 12. When you are young, there are so much more interesing things than computers to explore!
On Time & How to Invest It
I'll submit Embought for this one as well. http://www.embought.com
Mobtropolis - a social photo scavenger hunt making it easy to photo stream your adventures, big or small, and get inspired to try new things. http://www.mobtropolis.com

Even though mobtropolis uses photos, it's focus isn't to host photos. I'd say it competes more with the likes of 43things.
What does the botnet actually do, other than hook other computers up to the network? Just send out spam? Or what?
Sounds like http://exchange.contextweb.com/
Ask YC: How good is my privacy policy?
Pretty much every website has a privacy policy these days, but as far as I can tell, actually crafting one is a black art. For Golimojo, the need for a good privacy policy was even more serious than your run-of-the-mill website -- the Firefox extension in particular is in a position not just to gather information about hits to golimojo.com but to many other websites as well. In fact, communicating information about other websites is fundamental to its whole purpose (Golimojo automatically adds Wikipedia links to arbitrary web pages). I had a two-part strategy for my privacy policy. The first part was to make design decisions in the implementation of Golimojo to limit the kind of information it actually gathered and to make it clear through the UI when it was active. The second part was to explain clearly to the user about what information was gathered and how I might use it. As a user of a service like Golimojo, I think my privacy policy is pretty reasonable, but of course I'm neither representative nor objective.

My privacy policy can be found at http://www.golimojo.com/privacy.html. Take a look if you have the time and tell me what you think.
From source:

"This was our first logo. I won't mention the name of the designer, because he threw it together in a few minutes and wasn't especially proud of it.

The logo was designed to be centered, because centering was the only formatting that existed then. Netscape had not yet introduced tables.

The address was my apartment. It was a calculated risk to leave off the apartment number.

You don't see a lot of startups based in Manhattan. The address seems even more anomalous if you know the neighborhood."
Yes exactly. I'd probably drop any paid service if the acquisition happens. Besides that, the whole culture at Yahoo would change. Everyone there runs linux development enviroments. How long do you think that'd last...not long at all.
Sourceforge mostly.
technically, the answer is no.
Then you have the whole problem of what signatures to trust, etc. Behavioural analysis is pretty much the only effective counter-measure I'm aware of at the moment, and that's still in its infancy. (and really hard)
Did Powerset outsource their crawl?
Yes, F-1 students can be co-founders. (I personally did this.) The only restriction is that you cannot earn any money personally from the company (via dividends or by selling stock) unless you have a work visa or an OPT.
Great post in that EC2 is essentially a low-risk way for a computation-heavy startup to scale without having to buy thousands of dollars of servers plus co-location fees. The tradeoff is that it's more expensive per CPU cycle, but the ability to scale without risk is fantastic.
Well, if it can update its code over the internet, it can do pretty much anything. Typical uses: spam, DDoSes, anonymising traffic for illegal activities, etc.
Actually, from what I know, you can sell, and buy, you can pay dividends to yourself (though you doubletax your own behind). What you can't do is be hired if you are on F-1 visa, which means that you can't get a regular paycheck or have a position in the company (owner/shareholder is not a position).
Warning: Google Is In Your Driveway
It would make prosecutions easier, where appropriate.
"We eventually named Gears as the most innovative product of 2007."

How utterly clueless. Gears is a neat browser feature, but it is far from being the most innovative product of 2007 (iPhone, Kindle and SimpleDB are three more likely candidates that immediately come to mind).
Either identifying an alternative option to their shareholders or responding to Microsoft with the price Yahoo thinks would be reasonable.

Microsoft has basically said "Hey, guys. We made an offer that's more than a 60% premium over your share price. If you won't accept that (or even let us know what price you will accept) we'll take this right to your shareholders and do this the hostile way at a price that's lower than our current offer."

The ball's in Yahoo's court on this one.
I would go one step further than this article and come out and say it: The idea of taking web apps offline is flawed!

I have watched in amazement as Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla, and Google has raced to deliver to deliver web apps offline. The idea just doesn't seem appealing to me, and I would think that the vast majority of users also find it unappealing.

The primary strength of web applications is the fact that they are online, accessible from anywhere, shareable, and able to tap into the resources of the web. Take that away and what do you have? A watered down version of Microsoft Office, etc.
Sure, as long as you are not making money from it :)
Technically, you are not allowed to earn income from anything besides an on-campus job (unless you get a waiver from INS, which is very rare... they must be convinced of your "extenuating circumstances" to approve such a waiver)

But I could be wrong, I'm no professional. Your university might know about any loopholes and stuff and would probably know some immigration lawyers in the area.
Interesting...I got my cofounder position because the previous technical cofounder was on a student visa, and his immigration lawyer advised him that "It's probably not a good idea." I don't know the specifics of his case, but he gave up a cofounder position at a startup he thought promising based on it.

I'd consult an immigration lawyer. It sounds like there're a lot of thorny issues that depend a lot on the specifics of the case.
These articles are always frustrating. If these researchers know how to identify bot infection, how about telling the rest of us how to identify them?

It'd sure be nice to be able to take a look at our own networks and see if we have a problem we need to be aware of.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I quickly got on to an OPT in 15 days after founding the company, and became an employee of the company, so none of that mattered, but it's certainly good to know!
I acutally have numbers of good lawyers, but they are based in New York. B/n $200/h and $500/h. I haven't talked to them since i never had the money, but got their numbers from a good source. Email me if interested.
We did consult a couple immigration lawyers and all of them said it is possible. The foreign student advisors in our school were a little more circumspect, probably because it is very very uncommon. I don't understand the "probably" clause though -- either it is lawful or it is not :-)