skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're still building product on Auctomatic. I helped out on cricket.com as I saw the immediate opportunity (and I had the most cricket knowledge in the LCM team). It's going to be spun out as its own company, with its own funding and CEO.
Good idea. It'll be pretty tricky to get the graphics just right, so that they both show the right information and are not intrusive.

Sounds like a good weekend barinstorming session though :-)
Yeah, the only really good era for written comedy was the 70s, when the National Lampoon had millions of readers. These days when comedy articles appear in the mainstream they're almost always in the fake news format, which is pretty rigid. Even the more creative outlets like McSweeney's have a fairly narrow style.

There are a bunch of decent college humor publications out there, though, and some of them have wide readership at their campuses. There might be a large enough base of people familiar with the form for it to get some mainstream traction again, if it's given the chance.
Reading this article makes me feel somewhat the same...

Does the article say the auctomatic team will be developing the cricket.com site?
Could you please elaborate more on what those two deployments are?
Because:

(1) doing that would pose its own security risks

(2) much of the most sensitive information you send out is unintelligible to laypeople

(3) it's just as likely that calling attention to the risk will increase fear as decrease it

(4) many common security threats are adept at covering their tracks in system APIs.
Personal data stores to revolutionize customer service (covers WebMynd, YC winter 08)
It's good to know that someone knows the future for sure.
Is this available to those of us outside the States?
Mind Hacks: Neuroweapons, war crimes and the preconscious brain
German students on an interview tour
Three PhD students from Germany in entrepreneurship and innovation management are currently writing about their interview tour in the Silicon Valley. They have a couple of interesting stories about entrepreneurs and VCs in the valley...www.ventureroadtrip.com
So how would you address this problem?
Cool business card designs 
Whoever said that your offline design template for life shouldn't be cool :-)
I don't know anyone still using Red Hat on the desktop. Most people I know using Linux seem to be sticking to Ubuntu.

But the excuse from Red Hat sounds more like the result of a deal with Microsoft. It sounds like Microsoft paid them to send the message that Linux is not a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop (and perhaps scare companies from considering a switch to Linux as they can reasonably anticipate other vendors to back out as well).
It's possible I'm just blind, but is there any way to get email notifications of planned events? I'm not going to remember to check it regularly for updates :p
For (2), you could make it so that it is the responsibility of the app developer to make sure that any data transfered is done in a highly readable form. If there's encryption, then that could be done using the tool so it would see the unencrypted data.

Of course, it's possible to hide data (e.g., using spaces say). So maybe one would require that the protocol be validated by security experts.
City-scale energy consumption - data visualization
I have a programmer who due to visa issues is stuck in one state. We have worked together on a startup remotely 4 over a yr now. His full time gig sent him over to work only in one state. Now we are backed we want him to join us where our backers and I am, but immigration is backed up where it will take a year 2 approve his move. We are now looking for LAMP developers (2 yr experience) in and around the Philly area.

I wouldnt say all we need is a programmer, rather another team member who can join us locally, while he continues working remotely! Interested drop me mail at paul9290 <at> yahoo.com. It's a paid position with equity!
Does anyone know what this ring means?
Laser head mount display (Apple Inc. Patent)
If memory serves me right there was a article posted the other day about a company with a similar product only the box that was a the laser source was much larger than "belt wearable"
I'm an RPI grad and I think this is very cool. After hearing about great experiences from other students who studied abroad, I really wish I had minored in French and taken a year in France. English wasn't a required subject, much less foreign languages (they only offered French and German), so I concentrated on computer art classes. In hindsight, I chose poorly.

And let's face it, the weather in Troy is pretty horrible and it's not exactly dripping with culture. Studying abroad could help overcome this, especially if it was part of your tuition.
I'm writing a framework that I intend to use because I haven't found anything that quite suits me. I was feeling a little guilty about it, but not after reading this. Thanks.
IPhone Development for Independent Developers
hmmm . . . sounds more like, as desktop Linux takes off in the home market, Red Hat is responding to increasing pressure by reminding folks they're not in the consumer desktop business. I've been using CentOS 5 on a server, and during initial install, I went ahead and loaded the desktop packages, in case I ever want to go to runlevel 5, which I did for some of the initial, local setup. I find the gnome desktop entirely satisfactory. It's just a gnome desktop. Just like Ubuntu is a gnome desktop. Oh, and SuSE, yeah, it has a gnome desktop available as well. Come to think of it, pretty much every Linux distro has a gnome desktop and a KDE desktop, and an XFCE desktop. What burning motivation would Red Hat have to get into the desktop business?
Pioneer spacecraft mystery may be laid to rest
NBC: iTunes "a convenient place to put some antipiracy measures"
I can see the headline next month, "NBC lobbies for outlaw of USB cables."
It uses more.
Neuron Javascript Workouts
This is an ill conceived and short sited idea on so many levels the immediate effect of which would be to spur people to use something besides iTunes with their iPods.

I can see the headline next month, "NBC lobbies for outlaw of USB cables."
132 sudo

84 cd

63 ls

33 HandBrakeCLI

29 rsync

10 java

8 ssh

7 mv

7 mkdir

7 javac
If memory serves me right there was a article posted the other day about a company with a similar product only the box that was a the laser source was much larger than "belt wearable" and the head gear was a HUD type monocle.

Does Apple actually have the tech to make this now or did some employee read about the other companies product and rush to patent a similar idea?
It's a wiki, why not add them?
i think he means that missing link of directly tying the internet back into real life.

despite what people like us think, the internet is still just entertaining emails coming out of a confusing box for most people.
US army develops robotic suits
Frameworks written for general use will always be overengineered yet clunky compared to what you could write for your own project, and here's why: if I'm writing a framework and it has a collection of foo, and I know I only ever add(foo), then I don't have to write a delete(foo) and a search(foo) and a count(foo), just the add function. You also don't have to test those other things, or put anything in your model to support them. Frameworks for general consumption, however, do have to have all that stuff because they don't know what subset you'll need. Now imagine that x100 for all the classes in the framework. Even if it doesn't increase the size of your executable, it still increases the cognitive load in terms of having a full understanding of the source. It's the flip side of "not invented here" - i.e. writing your own is not automatically bad, just a trade-off.
This is from 1 week of usage on my MacBook Pro:

38 ssh

33 cd

32 ll

21 scp

16 ant

10 ls

7 ping

6 mkdir

5 mv

4 file
Wow, I didn't know that. This is a handy site.
Solo founders: how do you stay emotionally efficient?
There's a great online book called "The Hacker's Diet" (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html) which is a no-bullshit dieting/fitness book written by an engineer with the assumption that the reader is fairly smart and rational. He even has some nifty Excel charts. I lost 50 pounds with his approach. Self-help books are usually total drivel with no respect for the reader, so I wish there were tons more written like this one, but on other topics.

But I figure starting a discussion about a problem I have (and others here might) could be a good idea...

Anyway, as I've worked on my business in my spare hours, I've gradually refined my methods for planning projects and getting work done. I'm more productive than I was a year ago, but there's kind of a blind spot that maybe other folks here don't have.

I've noticed the biggest bottleneck stopping me from efficiently accomplishing the tasks I've set up for myself is just my mood. I'll have a clear definition of what needs to be done, full confidence in where I'm going with things, and I'll sit down and just think "aw, damn, I feel like shit." Then I'll generally waste time until it's 1am and I need to sleep. This happens 1-2 nights a week.

I'm looking for news.yc folks to try to get some rational insights on on the irrational problem of keeping your mood in check and focusing on what matters, when you're just one guy.

How do you guys deal with emotional problems?

How do you avoid ruminating on things in your day that have pissed you off? This is my biggest issue.

What kind of non-computer things can you readily do to get away from it? What kind of breaks do you take, and what do you do?

What time of day do you work on your own stuff? Do you ever forgo sleep to hack into the night if it's going well, or do you always get your eight hours? Which is better in the long run?

These might seem like goofy or stupid questions, but I think discussing them in a nifty forum like News.YC might yield some good insights.

My thinking is that while some emotional problems are complex and difficult, a good number of them can be solved simply. I've noticed, for instance, that about half of the time I feel like dying, the trifecta of a shower, a nap, and a bowl of chili reverses the feeling 100%.

I had a few thoughts and suggestions around things that have worked well for me, but this post is long enough, so I'll leave this open. Thanks!
I remember signing up with these guys when they first launched. To be honest I haven't used them since (due to lack of flights to certain places), but they've certainly evolved a lot since then. Congratulations are in order!
Facebook, from my limited use of it, seems vastly inferior to a mailing list + wiki for the purpose dscribed in this article. Or did the small investors want to find photos where others in the group had been tagged? What am I missing?
External DSLs made easy with Scala Parser Combinators
exactly. we don't have an efficient market (see the efficient market hypothesis) but it averages out to be pretty close.
One last thought:
Just about every night when I'm about to fall asleep, I'll notice the logical inconsistency of my own thoughts and think something to the effect of "Wait, what exactly do kangaroos have to do with zeppelin pilots anyway? Oh, awesome, I must be about to fall asleep. Freakin' finally. ZZZZZ..."

I'd love to be able to do this more when fully awake. Sometimes I can -- I'll realize the influence of my emotions on my thoughts when considering them. But not as often as I'd like.

I liken it to a kind of metacognitive exception-throwing. Have you guys found ways to put a few more asserts() in your thought process?
Shoot, I thought he might have been referring to Candygram:
http://candygram.sourceforge.net (not to toot my own horn)

It isn't maintained anymore, though. But the LGPL'ed source is always available.
every few years something like this gets really popular so that people can go "see? we like positive uplifting things!"
then they go straight back to their violence and misery fetish that the news people make their living on.
ContractPal - Electronic Contracting
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I'd be interested in checking it out.

I've been using Rhino a lot recently, and I must say it's pretty awesome. You get all the functionality of pretty much any Java library out there for free, without all the cruft of Java.

However, I did a quick benchmark of Rhino, Spidermonkey, and JavaScriptCore (WebKit's engine) and jscore beats the crap out of Spidermonkey and especially Rhino. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like this:

JavaScriptCore: 0.5 seconds
Spidermonkey: 3 seconds
Rhino: 6 seconds

To be fair, the benchmark was very specific to the project I'm working on and involved a lot of regex and string manipulation. Rhino's regex implementation is known to be pretty slow.
How do we set the valuation for a seed round?
I find I work more consistently on a day if I have exercised on that day; a jog, or maybe a session of pilates or something. Often I will work quite well in the morning when I know I am going to go for a run at lunch time, so it seems to benefit me both before and after strangely enough.
Git for Idiots (and Java developers)
As often as I can, I try to work on the thing that I'm most interested in doing at that very moment, even if it's not the most important. Experience has taught me that an hour on the wrong task is better than an hour wasted procrastinating the right one. Eventually my motivation will return to whatever it was that I should have been doing, and at least then there's not a pile of stuff that's accumulated.

As for frustration ... dancing. Seriously. I tend to go out dancing once a week and just shut off my brain, chat with my friends and forget about everything productive for a few hours. It just helps me reset.
yes, email and we will set you up.
Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The News.YC effect
So, i'm by no means a master... but i have a few thoughts.

1. I've found recently that when i don't want to code, it's because i don't understand something. I've been picking up a pencil and paper and just working out things i'm nervous about a lot more often lately. it's been a nice productivity boost.

2. avoid crap that will piss you off to no good effect. I read reddit.politics from time to time and lose an hour just grumbling over some comment. huge waste of time.

3. i like running. i don't do it often enough... but a couple of miles will really turn down the volume on the rest of the world. very nearly a reset button for me.

4. by all means, stay up late and hack. However, for me, more than once a week is very detrimental. Sometimes, it's worth being a little slow the next day.
the regex implementation is extremely slow, but in general it's quite reasonable. i wouldn't use it for number crunching, but for all the things that we've been using perl/ruby for it seems much faster (and it has jvm concurrency, which means we can thread really nicely which helps too).

i'm going to be at web 2.0 next week but when i get back i'll put together a tarball that has some examples and stuff in it and send it along. the project is called 'jetstream' by the way. please send me an email to remind me.

cheers,
ben
You might consider getting a co-founder. It's likely your moods will be out of phase, so that when one is down the other can be the motivating force and vice versa.

Also accept the fact that doing a startup is an emotional roller coaster - one day you will believe you are about to take over the world, the next you will wonder why you are wasting your time. Just accept these short term variations and focus on building a great product :)
I've done the same. Written a framework, used it for one project, and went back to other frameworks because quite frankly the other frameworks were much more advanced and written by those more knowledgeable than I am. However, writing the framework was an excellent learning experience.
Writing is much like being a single founder. I find the single most important thing is to be aware of how motivated you are, and to adjust the work accordingly. If you try to work on hard stuff when you're low, you'll just procrastinate. But if you start working on easy stuff, getting something done will put you into a better mood, and you'll be able to move on to harder stuff.

Hemingway used to leave something easy unfinished in the evenings, so he had something to start with in the mornings. That works for me too, with both writing and hacking.
Same here. I remember thinking it was a cool idea, but they only tracked certain kinds of flights, so the service was useless for me. I checked again a few months later, and there didn't seem to be any progress. I never checked again. Suddenly, Microsoft values them at $115 million.
Source of what? Do you care to elaborate...?
sorry, I take it back. I thought the decline was b/c of the earning report.
That's great for Scribd, not so great for Rails. The largest (known) Rails site isn't even in the top 500!

I'm curious how this compares to other technologies. Someone should write a script that crawls the top sites attempting to detect the technologies they're built on.

I can think of a few heuristics, like URL patterns and file extensions (.php, etc) and cookies (PHPSESSID for PHP, _session_id for Rails, JSESSIONID for J2EE, etc)
Darwin's original theory of evolution goes online
do something outside

step away from the keyboard

meet girls get laid
One virtual step for man, one real leap for mankind
Developing long-term relations with robots
The Gauntlet VC model: American Idol meets Venture Capital
This has been floating around the net for a while. A lot of these are really cool, but now that I've started having to collect these things and refer back to them, the non standard ones have a tendency to get pretty annoying. In particular, the smaller cards (there seem to be a lot of people with the same size small cards...) have a tendency to get lost amongst all the standard sized cards. The other thing that can be really annoying is cards that you can't write on. Either they are dark on both sides, or too glossy, or whatever -- if you can't write down a note on the card, it becomes significantly less useful.
PHP coding question
To all PHP hackers out there,
I have a basic PHP question. The application I am working on currently allows a user to upload a jpeg or gif image only. My code for enforcing this rule is as follows:

if($type!="image/gif" || $type!="image/jpeg"){
$error = "Your image needs to have a gif or jpeg format";
}

$type in this case is obtained from $_FILES['file']['type']

However, this does not seem to work. Non-JPEG images get rejected properly. However even JPEG images are rejected. Any ideas on how I can check the type of the image.
I enjoy watching a good movie to get me in the mood. Rocky or Rudy usually does the trick.
try: ($type!="image/gif" || $type!="image/jpeg" || $type!="image/jpg" || $type!="image/prjpeg")
http://www.python.org/doc/2.2.3/lib/pickle-sec.html
I rarely get pissed off at other people; for me that's usually a sign that I'm insecure about something and unwilling to admit it. But I do get tired and unmotivated now and then.

When I catch myself procrastinating, I just say "OK, I'm going to procrastinate for the next 30-60 minutes". Then I set the timer and goof off without guilt. When the timer rings, I go back to work.

Minimal exercise is really important: some stretches/calisthenics in the morning, occasionally pushups or pull-ups as 5-minute breaks.

My social life is limited, but I see my girlfriend every day and that helps a lot.
An easy way to debug is to just echo $type for a file that you want to allow and see what it is :)
Bezos On Innovation
Exercise helps.

Music I like can also help me focus when I'm procrastinating too much.

There are times when I'm at an energy/focus low, and can't get anything done, which just lowers my energy/focus more, which can lead to a downward spiral. If I can push through it and get something done, that might pick me up, but more often it's a signal that I need to take a break and get off the computer (things like reddit or stumbleupon don't count as a break, they just turn my brain into mush).
having an online audience that gives feedback is motivating. even better if your friends (cheerleaders!) are your first users and constantly give you reallife feedback.

if you don't have cheerleaders, try to find some. even better, find projects you can cheerlead for too. starting stuff without an audience gets depressing real fast. if someone takes notice of what you're doing it's a lot harder to bury yourself if things get tough.

it's all about building structures that force you to succeed. put yourself on rails, and make sure it's really hard not to stay on course.
Where did all the conspiracy theorists come from? I think Paul is right on the money here.
It's crazy what you can get away with if you simply look like you know what you are doing, and you speak with authority.
"KDDI announces ER search" : Visual search coming to mobiles!
Looking for early adopters for ClutterMe.com
JoS has been popular right from 2001, that probably more than anything else helped.
We're looking for a few early adopters to tell us that they think.

We would love to pick your brains and will listen to every detail you suggest.

We want to work closely with you because we recognize the expertise on these meesage boards and want to make something you would want.

Sincerely,
Mark
ClutterMe Founder
Fundamentally: be conscious of your mood and the things that affect it, and work with your mood rather than against it.

The suggestions here are good examples of this philosophy. I would add: don't try to change your mood by force of will alone.
i hate scribd. the reason it gets traffic is deceptive search engine rankings. I refuse to ever go there again after being falsely sent to a page that did not have the information it ranked for multiple times.
I clean my desk and make it clutter free. I tend to accumulate everything from printouts to coffee cups over time.
consider using the getimagesize function.
http://us.php.net/getimagesize
the comments have some useful info on how to get the image type.

iirc, the problem using the file type string is that its not consistent.
If anyone wants to try out Github.com, this is the way to do it. The example works perfectly and definitely great to start out. I've played around with github a few times and this is definitely the best tutorial I've seen.
take up some form of martial art as a hobby. i suggest this because it involves a lot of important aspects that you won't get as a full-time solo hacker: gets you physically fit, helps to relieve stress, gets you to clear your mind and focus on something different for a while, and puts you in a social environment away from a computer.
As many people have said, exercise is key. Besides just clearing my mind, I find that going for a run or a bike ride actually helps me focus on what I need to be working on when I get home.

My #2 problem after procrastination is prioritizing what I should be working on. Whenever I go for a bike ride for a few hours, I have a lot of time to think about the direction of my project, which really helps me focus and get right to work when I'm home.

Also, a girlfriend helps, or at least set aside time for dating. Balance is key, or you'll burn out quick.
Sproutit's Investor Pitch
excellent point. I find that once I start working on a few easy tasks it actually improves my motivation.

Some example of easy tasks:

* document the code
* add a couple more tests
* write a quick shell script to automate some repetitive task
I'm an Entrepreneur on Facebook
Funny Wes Cherry interview (creator of Solitaire)
Neat stuff
Hack your Pillow (5 Tech Solutions for a Cold Pillow)