skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Best Mailing List Software?
What are all of you using to manage your mailing lists? I've been using Mailman, but am curious as to any other alternatives I might have overlooked that are arguably better.
since the rank of a post is votes / hours since submission if you wanted to game the system you would probably wait until the morning to post something. More eyeballs means more potential votes, which leads to being higher on the home page, which leads to more attention, etc. That's just my guess though.
Aesop’s Top 7 Tips for Living a Happier Life
Sounds like they could learn a thing or two from Sheetz's Made to Order system.
Looks like they chose the "defiantly unapologetic" correction. I wonder, have they done any studies on which type of correction gives them more traffic? Might be worth it.
I partially agree with you. While I don't think equity index funds will have higher risk-adjusted returns than any other asset class, they are still useful for diversification. By building a portfolio of uncorrelated or negatively-correlated investments, investors can somewhat reduce the total risk while retaining most of the gains. Personally I try to maximize the expected Sharpe ratio of my portfolio as a whole. This isn't exactly a buy-and-hold strategy; it requires rebalancing the portfolio whenever market moves cause the current asset allocation weights to drift too far from the target.
Fun became "useless" when we started analyzing it, poking and prodding it.

At the same time, apps became useless when people started making "apps" like Vampires, Mob Wars and called them "applications" instead of 'games'.

What a beautiful game of wordplay we play.
Mod_rewrite: the Apache module so complex and confusing, it deserves an entire book
I'm starting to understand, why, in some cases, a narrow, limited communication channel is a good thing.
check out remember the milk. Their FF plugin integrates nicely with GMail (and then there is Twitted and even voice call integration). Pretty slick service.
you can have a large degree of confidence that you idea is good, but you cannot KNOW it is good until you build it.
Not too far off the mark. Once you get your head on straight, you can exploit any salaried job of at least some intrinsic worth as your own tool for business experimentation and even peripheral market research/experience.
Because it doesn't have unlimited power to improve things, and the market seems to prefer most of that power be directed to lower prices instead.
you can't just keep raising your price forever. There is a balance where you can make the most profit.
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...
N-Back Test implemented in flash
How your computer keyboard is five times dirtier than your toilet seat
Juiced Google Analytics Python API
"Don't do it for the money. You're not going to make any."

Agreed, but I would temper that with 'hope for the best, be prepared for the worst'.
A quick look at Wikipedia's entry on Berkshire Hathaway would have revealed that BH owns Geico, General Re (reinsurance) and yes, some life insurance companies as well.
That is basically what I do as well. What are your asset allocation % targets?
Microsoft and Yahoo in merger talks
Microsoft ups Yahoo offer above $31 in bid for friendly deal:
Pursuing the Next Level of AI
Good point -- C was designed to interface with hardware ("high level assembly") whereas javascript was designed to interface with web pages & browsers. Either way, the history helps understand the design decisions.
So it's not a directed graph. Why does the author emphasize "strongly connected component"?
The Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development
Futures Traders Bet on Dollar Gain For First Time Since 2005
I think that's a problem with voting.

A vote up, to a lot of people, is not "this is a great post", but rather "I like this topic".

It'd be interesting to know how many people vote up an article BEFORE ever reading it. I'll bet you a nickel that the majority of votes happen that way... Or at least a significant minority.
Kettles and Pots
Top Five Suggestions For Entrepreneurs From IDEO
Introducing The Statbot
Xobni is worth at least $20,000,000. It is currently unknown as to whether they're worth more.

Evidence suggests those with the most at risk believe they are worth significantly more.
News Fiends Can Get Their Fix With Addictomatic
Google's audio CAPTCHA broken
ezmlm ( http://ezmlm.org/ )
Four Lessons for Entrepreneurs from Working Two Weeks as Press
It is frustratingly common for companies big and small to think of customer service as a cost rather than an investment.

As anyone who has dealt with people in a customer facing role knows you will deal with people who think that a five dollar purchase entitles them to fifty dollars worth of service. Automating your way out of dealing with people like that is a very tempting prospect; but it should be avoided.

It's possible to do a good job of automating customer service; if you are clear and honest and make it easy to talk to a human being if that is what the customer wants.

A book that will change your thinking on the topic is http://www.thesupporteconomy.com/
this is copying the message and style of A Mathematician's Lament
Necessary directories created if they don’t exist:
Neither Mercurial nor Git track empty directories.

While true, you can just put a .gitignore in the "empty" directory, and it's empty for all intents and purposes.
Beware of categorizing something as a toy and not relevant to serious business computing. IBM did that with xerography, minicomputers, and PCs.

That said, I don't understand Facebook and I don't understand why anyone cares about it.
Good for Amazon.
gnidnuF CV

Sorry, but i've been holding myself back from doing that for about half an hour now. I caved.
That's true. Perhaps the part of my comment referring to Berkshire's presence in the reinsurance industry was a subtle clue that I was aware that they had a presence in the reinsurance industry. It would be helpful to explain why Berkshire's CEO would sacrifice his excellent reputation as a fair guy -- a reputation absolutely necessary to Berkshire's strategy of deploying capital cheaply by being the buyer of first resort -- in order to enhance the performance of "some [nameless? nonexistent?] life insurance companies" rather than his flagship holdings like Geico, General Re, MidAmerica, Marmon, etc.? It's a crazy theory. I think the death tax is a poor idea, but this Buffett fellow seems legit.
I don't have sources offhand, but Buffett's been saying this for years. He criticized Bush's tax cuts back in the day, too. I don't see anything wrong with argument, "The government shouldn't be letting me and other billionaires slip through this loophole."
I think that startup is called Ireland.
Things seem to stay on the front page for more than 24 hours on Hacker News, so I doubt there's any reason to try to game the system. If your article is good, people will see it.
supports more version control systems

This is Guido we're talking about. He is not exactly in to "there's more than one way to do it" :)
Lowrise Jeans
Action Seating is the leading provider of discount tickets for all major events – Masters Golf, Super Bowl, and World Series for 2008 and 2009.
NO BLOG SPAM, please. Directly link to the article: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/050108-autoweb.html
Once we were seated, I swiped my driver's license

Wait... what? You have to be able to drive to buy food now?
Problems, Not Features
MobileCrunch » 10 TV Channels from AT&T
FSJ:  The problem with Facebook
Dude, for people outside the US about to test the immigration waters, this article was pure gold.
Almost none are ad networks! We don't track domains of embedded stuff-- only the URL that's in your address bar. So ad networks would only theoretically show up with pop-up/pop-under windows. Which are the devil.

Linux version is open-sourced and active-- and ready for action!. I've heard good things: https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader
MobileCrunch » There’s Gold in them there Phones
Because the people who run things don't have taste or vision.
the MS offer was not that high when you factor in how many people work at xobni. i've heard some tech acquirers say they initially value a startup at $1M per engineer before factoring in the value of the actual product. xobni is up to what, 14 or 15 people now?
8 sec voicemails on twitters
Ask YC: Founders working remotely: pros and cons
Very few startups are willing to accept or allow remote collaboration; almost all startups are clear that co-founders/co-hackers must work on site, together (YC requires that someone be physically present in Cambridge or San Fran). At the same time, PG has lauded the benefits of a comfortable workplace--no set hours or attire. And even farther down the line we have folks like DHH reminding young hackers again and again that they began their company while their founders were scattered across the globe.

So what's the answer? Does it 'just depend'? Speaking from my experience, remote collaboration can be a benefit at some stages, and a hindrance at others. Also, the question arises--when two people share the same time and space, are they productive or a distraction to each other?

Thoughts?
Check out http://seekingalpha.com/article/66982-berkshire-hathaway-app...
On the Survival of Rats in the Slushpile
Cuba: Computers For Sale (First Time Ever)
Now that this fact is known, it will be arbitraged away. :)
I believe it should, but am interested in your speculation as to how you think it would hold up. About half of it is not in equities (cash, bonds, commodities, real estate). And I did not include actual land holdings in the %s (including our personal residence), which brings it up to a majority. Also, some of the equities are international, and we are in a much more global environment now as compared to 1928. Over 40% of large cap earnings are from abroad.

Are you saying that you hold 100% of your assets in gold and land?

"Cash flow from the business" was specifically excluded from the question, i.e. income does not enter into it.
Actually if the company has enough funding (even if you're the owner), you can get an H1-B.
TechCrunch seeks two Rails programmers (lol)
If you go back to that thread, it concludes that there is indeed a place for equities in a balanced portfolio. Your point is exactly the one I was trying to make!
But... I thought Rails didn't scale? Sorry, couldn't help myself.
To (hopefully) push this on-target:

How might increased taxes on the wealthy affect investments in start-ups?
In response to 2 (for anyone interested), look at EEM (an emerging market ETF).
I think it's a stretch to call Buffet anything but consistent on his stance about inheritance tax.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1986/...

Key (and famous) quote: "[the perfect amount to leave children is] enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing."

Notice the date - 1986.
He bets it on himself.
I was talking, like you, about personal decisions. Admittedly I should probably have used "thought" rather than "worked" in my last line, as it perhaps implied working in a corporation limits risk, which isn't true.

You said "I'm saying that when you leave the job you hate, you should consider options other than the one least likely to succeed."

You are talking about a personal decision. My comment was about why people do not rely entirely on logic for personal decisions (and why they shouldn't), not about the contribution of corporations to society.
Characteristics of Effective Boards, Directors and Management
Their story about Facebook yesterday was just a cunning plan to fill those gaps.
Translate DNA into Ancient Icelandic Runes
Hey, I understand where you are coming from. Good luck!
It is indeed amazing that the hard problems are those that most 5 year olds can do.

Turning pages in a book and folding a paper backs are actually mechanical tasks of immense subtlety.

Playing chess is easy because it is so well defined.
Brilliantly put.
The Cognitive Age
The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit
How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language
Grandview New York Real Estate
A Sotheby's Affiliate, Ellis Realty in Nyack NY - a real estate brokerage company offering luxury homes, condos, and ranches.
In the limit, may be there will be a 1 person start-up that will be the dominant company of an era in future, and it will achieve its 15 minutes of fame ;-)

Am I waiting for that day or what? :-)
"I sold cars to unlicensed drivers."

This concisely describes a mistake that a lot of IT consultants have made (myself included), when the product they've installed/built/configured/whatever works perfectly well, but accomplishes (next to) nothing, because the customer doesn't know how to use it.

Pretty much all of the examples the author cites of failing his clients sound familiar (although fortunately, I have avoided most of them).
I don't mean to sound smug, but I recommend they try Solaris, which seems to have excellent performance when dealing with large amounts of RAM (greater than 8GB) and also has excellent multithread performance.
Ask YC: Easiest encryption routine for developers?
I'd like to mask an email address that will appear on a web page. There are numerous encryption schemes possible, but my biggest concern is integration with other sites' backends that will produce the masked email. This means that the encryption routine should be dead simple to integrate across of languages and frameworks. It can use a private key.

My main concern is harvesting the email address, meaning it needs to be just strong enough for spammers not to bother.

Any suggestions?

update: this is for machine consumption, not human. This means an image from an email is not what I'm looking for.

1. Email to obscure string on another site's backend
2. Obscure string to a javascript/iframe call to my site
3. Email retrieved from obscure string, probably using some private key

I'm looking for a mechanism for step 1 that will be easy for every developer.
Two Hour 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special in 5 Minutes
>Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Italian and English use the same alphabet (mostly). Studies into this topic have already shown that the difference in prevalence of dyslexia between Italy and English-speaking countries rests in a lack of phonetic conformity in the English language and a strong phonetic conformity in Italian (that is, letters in Italian have fewer phonetic variants).
Part of it is the large number of css and javascript files they load on each page. Visiting the home page (and not logged in) results in 34 http requests. Roughly 1/3 are images, and the rest are javascript and css. That many requests slows down all page loading, even when locally cached. If I were facebook (the best I have is a parody site of facebook: http://farcebook.codeirony.com/), I would put all the css into 1 file, and all the js into 1 file.

The other part is that they have a ton of users. It's a non trivial problem to make pages load quickly while providing dynamic content for millions of users.
And somewhere in the supply chain, there's the law of conservation of attractive profits.
This post gives a powerful lesson. Try to have a direct experience of being the recipient of the sort of messages you want to send. It's a bit like "thinking like a user" when testing your product (although you should have real testers too!) .. you also need to know how to "think like a journalist" when pitching journalists unless you have a PR guru on retainer to do it for you.
In recent years, many of her graduate students have gone to work at Google.
However she tries to persuade undergraduates to stay in academia and not
rush off to become software engineers at start-up companies.

She acknowledges that the allure of Silicon Valley riches
can be seductive. “My husband still berates me for not
having jumped on the Google bandwagon at the beginning,”
she said. Still, she insists she does not regret her
decision to stay in academia. “I like the freedom to
explore the things I care about,” she said.

It worries me how many people do take the easy option of heading off to "chair warmer" jobs at places like Google rather than work in lower-paid, but ultimately more rewarding, academic and research jobs. What's even more odd is how few people when exposed to the commercial world actually return to the academic world.

There's a lot of work to be done in the fields of computer science and computer engineering, and a lot of the people who could be making the breakthroughs are instead chasing the dollar. We can't blame them, but instead perhaps we should be looking for ways to ensure the cream of the crop have, at least, an appealing alternative in doing research.
Is there anything that Why The Lucky Stiff touches that doesn't turn to gold? He should surely be called the Midas of the Web.
This happens all the time in the real world. A chef/hairstylist/douche bag who makes choppers gets on television and their prices increase drastically. A website that only has 10 ad spots gets a waiting list of 100 customers and increases their rates.
You can raise it quite a bit when you have a waiting list of 10k people.
It's a cute headline, but the toilet seat is a weird, but common, target for cleanliness comparisons. The Daily Mail have done this before by stating the average kitchen worktop is no cleaner than a toilet seat:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.htm...

The fact is, toilet seats are cleaned regularly (at least every few weeks even in the most shoddy of households, I'd hope - but usually at least once a week) whereas keyboards are not. Most people's buttocks don't harbor germs either. It's not as if people defecate on the seat or rub their anus directly on it, whereas sweaty, dirty fingers can infect a keyboard in no time.

The toilet seat, therefore, is a weird comparison. At least compare the keyboard to a bath sponge, a washing up cloth, or something similar that's almost certainly going to harbor germs.
AFAIK, the rate of PhD production in US CS programs is actually quite healthy:

http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may07/taulbee.html

Admittedly the rate of new graduate student enrollment has decreased recently, but that's after a few years of record PhD production.
Interesting statistics. I'm actually surprised how few PhDs there are each year compared to what I'd have estimated.
This article is all around dumb. Whoever wrote it doesn't appear to understand either the laws of supply and demand, or the music industry. Or he's just denying to himself that his site, which is based on the CD industry, is about to go the way of the cassette tape.

Concerts are highly scalable. The Rolling Stones sell out one arena after another full of 50k+ people. Their "A Bigger Bang" tour grossed $558m in 147 concerts over about 2 years. That's far more than any artist ever made in 2 years off of CD sales.

And true, I guess they can't scale much beyond that, but any other musician can scale all the way up to it and none have. But placing a limit of $558m on your income seems fine to me.
That may be true, but lack of scalability doesn't necessarily impose a limit on your profit. And touring is highly scalable.
mask and encrypt are different. Perhaps you want to obfuscate it. Perhaps you want to encrypt it but have it decrypted via javascript so that real humans can see the address.

Or perhaps this is your web2.0 startup and it's going to solve the spam problem. :-)
Anything more complex than hashing is not easy, as managing the keys is a pain (assuming you want to keep them secret).
Totally agreed. And if you aren't running qmail, there is a GREAT clone of ezmlm called mlmmj which works on other MTAs. Find it here: http://mlmmj.mmj.dk/

Oh, and Mailman is a total piece of garbage. The fact that it sends me a plaintext email with my plaintext password is garbage. And that monthly subscription reminder? All garbage.
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Omnidrive: Officially Cooked?
I mean mask in a general sense. I'll decrypt it on my back end, as the email will be a parameter in a javascript or iframe call to my service.

Gmail already solved the spam problem for me - but it is a popular concern for others.
JDK6 Update10 Beta D3D problems - 15x slowdown
Ask YC: specific metric request
I've been thinking a lot about Socrate's/Plato's assertion that the community reflects the mind. So , I'd be intensely curious to see some numbers on the percentage (per use) that someone hit's the procrastination link? (pointer answers count, if the data is still out there)
Better translation: Don't sell your time.
I could tell you, but the answer wouldn't be applicable to your or anyone else. Almost all of my long-term investments are in a certain retirement account that only provides a limited set of mutual funds as investment options. If I could invest in anything then I'm sure I would have different allocation targets, but since I can't then I haven't bothered to figure it out.

What I have done is write a small program which can take a set of allocations for portfolio components and then calculate an expected Sharpe ratio for the whole portfolio by using a Monte Carlo simulation run over hundreds of years using historical returns data. It then uses simulated annealing to do a constrained optimization over the solution space. This is only feasible because there are only about 20 available portfolio components. There are also no capital-gains taxes, transaction costs, shorting or borrowing, all of which keeps things reasonably simple.

Of course historical returns are a poor predictor of future performance. But historical correlation coefficients are a reasonably good predictor of future correlations, which is mainly what I am after with trying to find the best diversification.

Actually at the moment I have the majority in a money-market fund just because I'm trying to time the market and play a hunch. But that's usually a poor strategy and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.
Yes, and that's called a "maid." Do you want to be a maid a or a mommy?

(daddy)
I have that down as reason #17 for leaving your corporate job. Seriously, though -- having your prize projects locked inside corporate walls is a huge problem, a real innovation-stifler. After many attempts to get a couple of my old projects open sourced, and then watching them deteriorate to non-use as they were passed on to others, I've all but given up on starting new projects at $JOB. Glad to see Google is still open to letting some things into the wild.
limit the email addresses to 6 characters, hash them, then do a brute force attack to retrieve the right one from the hash.
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Are you sure that encryption, not hashing, is what you need? I am not exactly sure what you are planning to do, but you can take a look at XTEA or TEA (Tiny Encryption Algorithm).
http://jeaig.org/
You and I must be seeing two different things when we look at that graph. I see a pretty standard list of Fortune 500 companies, like Proctor & Gamble or Exxon. Some tech in there to be sure too, but no reason why GE would be excluded. And I'm sure they'd have more nodes than almost any non-tech company, even if your assertion is true.
He mentioned drinks on the rocks, which would indicate alcohol. It was probably just confirming their age.
The reason why keyboards are dirty is because they are difficult and time consuming to clean properly. All of those little cracks are hard to reach. And the special ones that are (like the silicone keyboards) are a pain to use.