skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This thread makes nickb seem like a real, individual person:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99923

A word about myself so you can see where I'm coming from... I'm currently part of a startup.

pg comments:

its real purpose is to thank Nickb, and I think he deserves it.
thanks! yep, its all php and mysql. we imagine 'orgu' means something like organization-universe or (you guessed it) organization-university, but in reality we wanted to pick as short a name as possible so groups using the .orgu.com subdomains wouldn't have a long url.
Ben Franklin, for me. It seems like it will take the rest of my life to get a full picture of how his mind worked.
Macs are known as gorgeous pieces of hardware and that seems to be their main functionality. As Neal Stephenson stated, they are polished and nice to look at, hence why the prices are jacked up but that is all that they have going for them. Nowadays, most things that are exuberantly expensive must be worth something and are therefore sought out and it becomes a trend.

If your best friend has a $3000 Mac monitor, why shouldn't you have one?

In my opinion, Dells are pretty sturdy machines though a bit hefty. I would like to get my hands on an HP computer though. That is a beaut.
Agrelo (grade school teacher and cultural agitator)

Friggi (ex coworker)

Nietzsche

G. J. Sussman

Will Wright

Danielle Bunten

Tim Peters

PG

Norvig
Warren Buffet, of course.

And many, many others.
Noah Webster. Guy Steele. Bill Cosby.
Why is the dollar going up? I can understand that the Fed's actions are good for Wall Street. Is it going to take a while for the rampant printing of money to catch up?
Looks like something someone might make while on acid.
this looks incredible! it is exactly the type of webapp i've been looking for. many of the other sites are too cluttered, orgu is simple and easy to use. thanks for creating such a great tool.

will you eventually have a way to completely customize my own template and not be limited to the ones offered? also- will you eventually be charging to use the site? how are you planning on making money??
Notes on the CLR Garbage Collector
Algorithm Proof Inference in Scala
What is interesting is that the Pine interface and paradigm is not substantially different from Outlook's. Pine support MIME types for attachments and has the same paradigm of inbox and folders. This seems like an application area very ripe for real innovation. I agree with sant0sk1 that Xobni is really Kooltuo.
I'm writing a framework that writes frameworks.
Simple: every other major currency block is also pursuing a highly inflationary policy. For instance, the Chinese central bank prints money to buy US bonds. It does this to keep its own exports strong. This is a terrible way for China to maximize its standard of living. But that's not the goal. The goal of the Chinese government is to maintain strong employment and prevent a second coming of the Taiping rebellion. If that means subsidizing Joe Sixpack's HDTV, then so be it.
Synthesis is basically just a form of lossy compression (or lossless, if the original was synthesized as well, with a lesser or equivalent amount of entropy.) For one practical example, think of fractal compression of images--a series of mathematical equations are synthesized that just happen to best approximate the original image.
Gary Simmons: Local sys-op and owner of used car lot. Helped me set up my BBS when I was a teenager.

Mr. Edwards: 6th grade science teacher, leader of the Sour Lake Elementary Model Rocket Club.

Uncle Todd: Showed me my first computer (Apple II), fed me with electronics, bought me my first decent soldering iron.

Professer Hahn: Had the patience to walk me through physics that was way over my head, because he believed I could do it and was so excited about it. We eventually co-published a paper.

Steve Koster: Web early-bird, ex-boss. Taught me stuff about design. Gave me the freedom to hack on cool stuff and get paid for it.

All of those people have done infinitely more to inspire me than anyone on your list. The difference? They're people that believed in me and acted on that.

Could I propose a new rule? No more fawning over Paul on this site. It's just kind of yucky.
Epiphany switches from Gecko to WebKit
Not a joke: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/epiphany-list/2008-April/msg0...
Google might acquire Skype
It might be an interesting deal if Google buys Skype. What do u guys think
thanks! you can completely customize your template w/ the blogger xml template language. the editor is somewhat crippled though, u cant expand the html of widgets, but thatll come soon. we're also gonna put up some better documentation for it
Ask YC: is SOAP vs. Rest the new Emacs vs. Vi?
I've noticed the SOAP vs. REST - style webservice debate pop up again and again over the last few years. Which style of webservice do you prefer to offer/use? Why?
Graham Langdon here, the founder of Entrecard.

Sorry for whatevers going on here, but we do not offer ANY affiliate program. No one gets credits, or has ever gotten credits, for anyone signing up. The move was intentionally to avoid link spam of any sort.

I'm interested to get to the bottom of this. Can you forward me some of the links? This is very strange indeed.
Total hacker news!
But now I can't resist on setting the record straight.
We have nothing to do with SEO, we are in no way an MLM, we do nothing with affiliate marketing. The last thing I want is to be associated with that garbage.

We are simply a social network of high quality bloggers, visiting and commenting on each other, driving traffic to each others blogs, and exchanging goods and services with a virtual currency (these credits you keep hearing about). We've hit 1400 on Alexa, we do about 1.5 million widget impressions daily, and were invited to present at WebInno tomorrow.
there's a direct relationship b/w the level of commoditization of your product and the importance of SEO (let alone relevance of SEO).

if i sell "shoes" SEO means one thing to me, if i sell [insert unique thing here] it means another.

irrespective of the ultimate popularity of [unique item], if it is unique, what am i optomizing for?

maybe another way to look at SEO primacy on this news site is to think about how much the dominant vision is to compete with "what else is out there in your space"- in terms of not only search results, but business model, services, footprint, pricing...- versus how "new" or original you are in addressing unsolved problems.

i get paid by a place that cares about SEO and paid-placement services, and i know that if we simply bothered to innovate within our niche, SEO would take care of itself (i.e. be supplanted by the Real word-of-mouth, positive press, no-brainer reputation that comes with actually being 'the solution' as opposed to 'a possible solution, maybe, but we paid/tried really hard to have you look at us')
Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face
All the best essays are.

Encyclopedias are objective truth and they are boring.
If you pick up the book (and I highly recommend it), order one from a while back. I hear the newer versions have edits to remove offensive parts (it was written 70 years ago, women didn't work, etc.), but I also hear these edits sometimes detract from the overall messages being conveyed.
Trying to finish my startup product, over a year in the making. Stuck in that "last 10%" purgatory that seems to stretch on forever.
Yes, but on a site labeled "hacker news", you'd hope to find people at least willing to consider that different OS's have different advantages, and that for hackers, Linux has a lot of them. Being able to hack the kernel is handy (yes, I have). Being able to debug pretty much any aspect of the system is handy. Not being in any way a second class citizen on your own computer is great. The freedom to take the whole thing and repurpose it if needs be, to create all kinds of interesting special purpose systems, from servers to Android type embedded devices is a huge business advantage.

But, being an observant guy, it's easy to see that Mac OS has its own strengths as well. My parents run it, for instance, and I'm sure it's better for them.

Comments like "hobby OS" and "linux sucks", though, are not indicative of serious thinking on the matter.
Massive decrease of earth's human population. Biological, Nuclear or Nano, pick your delivery method ... Stop worrying and learn to love the extinction event.
Old news. The evolution in solar tech begs on question though: get old-school solar panels now or wait out for a year or five? Does solar follow Moore's law if enough cash is injected in research?
I agree but I think this is off-topic, IMHO.
I use calpop.com and like them a great deal. They have dedicated servers but I am using there half rack option with my own servers. You would need to do your own load balancing I have found www.cainetworks.com webmux to be reliable and easy to setup.
Design Patterns of 1972
Run Linux, OSX & XP on a single machine, without rebooting. That's bliss for web dev like me. Sure, those college students may be lured by the 'ooo, shiny ...' factor but they stay for the power & ease of use.

One of the keys to Apple's success is the marriage of open and closed systems: *NIX at the bottom with a well thought-out and (closed) UI on top. Good design (& designers) tend to be dictatorial because difficult decisions need to be made (which features to leave out). Hence the closed GUI system.
I'm probably missing something, but I don't see what's the big deal with alltop.com? OK, it is Guy Kawasaki, but the site -- yet another basic RSS aggregator.
My view:

SOAP is for people who bought the "XML is the universal language" line of bullshit.

REST is for people who know how HTTP actually works.
Trying to drum up customers by driving people crazy.
Dude, this site has been up for months. I know it's hard to keep up with the latest and greatest
Amazon launches text-message shopping
Open Source Databases Widely Used, Seldom Paid For
i think u nailed it in the title yourself... 8 )

<humour>

there are people who use soap,...and then there's the REST of us :D

</humour>
I wonder what they think their target market is... Who do they think would be interested in tech startups and would want to use an aggregator like theirs?
Crummy Day Fixers
Having a crummy day? Has your boss bummed you out? Did you stained your favorite dress? Whatever the reason for your crummy day these emergency mood repairs are sure to lighten you up.
A lot of people here are interested in general business and the markets.
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I only ever see articles proclaiming REST is better. Maybe that is because my primary news source is news.yc.
Polishing up my Facebook Cross Number Puzzle app http://apps.facebook.com/xnumber_puzzle before submitting to FB App Directory
This is pretty cool, WebKit is really leading the pack, making great advancements, and actually pushing them out to consumers (especially with the latest Safari)
+1

That's not to say that there needs to be a war, there's no reason why both can't be implemented, though REST is definitely (as you assert) suited to HTTP.
Nobody is perfect. And Microsoft(R)(TM) is not nobody.
Thank god we have OO
For being rich? Or for having being able to think independently and for spending his whole life doing something he loves? Either way, he's got a lot to look up to.
The reason that SOAP vs. REST isn't like Emacs vs. vi is that both Emacs and vi are pretty decent.

Read the text of a SOAP transaction sometime. Or, more realistically, just read the first kilobyte or so. It's ridiculously over-engineered, and should just never be used. REST is a good example of how much simpler it could be.
Linux kernel developers have tripled in number
It's because no one uses REST and then choose to go back to spending days making java axis web services and .net clients play well together with ugly hackish custom soap extensions.

Or maybe I'm just venting about my shitty week at work :)
That's only available on Super vim Fighter II Turbo Championship Edition.
Rule the World! or Acknowledging Startup Idealism and the Shift to Pragmatism
Price movements aren't that interesting though, IMO. I might vote for some kind of in-depth analysis type of article, of the kind you might find in The Economist or FT, but this sort of "look, a round number!" thing is boring.
Here is a pointer to a transcript of this talk:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf
I was tempted to downmod this, just so it would be a lower number and run faster...
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky

Just to add a little to the ideas vs execution debate: stories of people whose ideas were not recognized in their time (e.g. Hermann Grassmann) generally interest me more, especially when the reasons for their failures provide lessons from which to learn.
Startuprant.com rants on about Scribd.com
Economic report says Bay Area could lose its global competitive edge
Google's CIO leaves search giant for job at EMI
Over here in Holland, Macs are definitely becoming more and more popular. Not sure about the rest of europe though, but my guess is that it's the same all over europe...
I wonder how many variables it would need to capture differences in human performance. Will it faithfully capture the differences between two world-class players? Glenn Gould and Evgeny Kissin? How?

If it manages to do that, it may incidentally help us understand feelings, or personality. The captured data could be mined to search for the pattern of joy or sadness, for example. Furthermore, given enough data, software could synthethize new pieces. Kissin never blayed Bartok? No problem, just ask the software to 'play' Bartok in his style.
Validating Checkboxes and Radiobuttons in Symfony
Quick tip for radiobutton/checkbox validation in Symfony.
PGP Adds Encryption To Windows Mobile Smartphones
Thanks for the pelekhl. I reblogged it on Venture Hacks: http://venturehacks.com/articles/missionaries
Top 100 Rails sites
Google Offers Free License To Patented Atom Based APIs Extensions
Slick or Slack? (HotorNot for code)
Best of April Fool’s
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And here I was thinking this was an april fools joke :)
What about the documentation angle? SOAP supporters claim that WSDL removes the need for custom-written documentation if combined with something like javadoc. REST inherently needs more documentation which makes things harder to maintain. Or so they claim ;-)

Anyone know a nice way to expose a webservice as SOAP/REST/XML-RPC & write the documentation automatically?
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Shitty week at work? Don't get me started ... that was the reason for this thread in the first place: an 'enlightened' architect imposing Axis/SOAP & then being surprised at the implementation-level problems.
Do you know if the F3 will work with T-Mobile in USA?
Interesting implementation. I tried to build a social code site (http://www.usethesource.com/) but it didn't really take off.
Thanks SwellJoe for the detailed response. And I did notice that a to of the people on the Joyent forums were discussing your product--congrats on that.

I think the key is figuring out a) how reliable they are, and b) how much that's worth to me. Right now if our server goes down I have big problems, since its only one box and we're not setup to quickly change to another. With a VPS at least they can just move an image to a new machine, and if we're on 2 or 3 machines already all the better.
John Doerr on Mercenaries and Missionaries.
Faceoff between Facebook app analytics startups
There still will be trees?
Occam's razor? You mean "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"? So <i>every</i> account here is pg?
89 percent of college students say their next paper will be finished on time. ;)
“Land of Lisp”
Perhaps the archive of 419eater.com could also be used to train algorithms to write plausible emails. They already have a lot of email responses to scammers on file.
Seasonal change != Climate change. The former is something ecosystems have had years to adapt to. The latter is a problem because it disrupts an established pattern & organisms (including ourselves) have not learned to adapt to the new environment. The loss of biological diversity as a result of human disruptions of ecosystems is the real killer here.
Honestly? Ray Kurzweil.
i think you're wrong about Octopart - they are optmising around individual part terms e.g. http://octopart.com/category--Integrated+Circuits--Semicondu... not for a generic "electronic parts" ranking. Their recent user data indicates this has been pretty successful - basically SEO - adding categories to search.
The discussion about the existence of sqrt(2) made me wonder: is there any object in mathematics that we know exists, but have no way of calculating it? I.e.: no algorithm has been found, even given a Very Powerful Computer.

I miss mathematics.
The Rise of Independent Media Brands Online
Curious: how do you get the 3d models? I just wonder how much effort it is to create 3d models for a game. I am not afraid of 3d programming, but the modeling is a different kind of beast...
Do you still have humanoid "player characters" in your game, or is your avatar simply a [set of] ships? I've always wished for a space game where each "ship" is a thriving colony all on its own, with hundreds of players with their own quarters, and an intense rivalry over who will be "captain", "navigator" and so on (unless it's some sort of military ship, but there could still be a mutiny!) If you are the ship[s], this gets a little less poignant.

Also, watching sci-fi TV shows for a long time, I've come to appreciate the visual value of "away missions"/shore-leave. It's boring staring at a starfield for hours at a time (even with cool nebular effects.) Is there a way to land on planets that have life on them (that is, not boring ol' asteroids) and perhaps stay there, living off the land for a while where no one can find you but for your radio pollution?

Sorry if this is all irrelevant to your particular implementation, but I've been planning my own similar venture for a while.
Maybe that's why hackers would buy an iPhone due to its "restrictiveness". That's the fun in being hacker isn't it? Breaking into the system and playing around with it.

I'm not saying closed architecture is a good thing and am not a fan of Apple.
Dear PG,

u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!

There. Somebody had to do it.
For anyone who hasn't read it: The autobiography of Ben Franklin!
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/148

Also: it's been a year since this has been submitted. I think dupes should be allowed once a year. Does everyone think this is ok to submit?
There are two versions of the F3; the 850/1900 MHz variant works with any GSM carrier in the US (AT&T/T-Mobile/etc).

I bought one for $40. The calls sound clear, the battery lasts for 5+ days, and you can run over it in a car without breaking it.
"Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD."

This seems widely flawed. Changes in play are limited by the dexterity of the player (and upper bounded by the dexterity of a body), but choices and timings aren't so mechanical.

The exact timing (feel, even) of, say, a swung eighth requires quite a lot of resolution before it's done right. I'd love to see them, even after they get tonguing "down", do a double blind study in Jazz.
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I love it how all links on svnhub.com point to Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up.
Polling Twitter: 4 Startups that Take the Pulse of the Twittersphere - ReadWriteWeb
Simple: every other major currency block is also pursuing a highly inflationary policy.

Hmm, I don't know, in the Eurozone inflation is high (~3.4%) at the moment, but it doesn't seem to be policy as much as they've been unable to prevent it. Target inflation for the ECB continues to be 2%.
You Need an Elevator Pitch!
> While ranting; what the f*ck do you need $4M for?

According to the article the company has 12 employees. Assuming a fully loaded cost of $100,000 per employee (I expect most are coders). Then $4m covers 3.3 years of salaries. So they give themselves about 3 years of runway to actually make the site make money.

That's what you do with $4m.

> The whole iPaper thing is cute.

> But how do you build a working business model around it?

That's what $4m gives you 3 years to figure out. Also, I think iPaper is a bit more than 'cute'. I have a lot of different document types that I need to make public (e.g. PDFs, PPTs,Keynote, Excel, Numbers). Since Scribd can just take these and turn them into a common format for me it makes sense for me (when I get around to it) to convert everything to iPaper so that everyone can read them.
It all depends on the keywords you rank highly on, and the value is almost boolean in nature. Appearing in the first 3 links can be very valuable, appearing in the third page practically worthless.

Ranking first on Mesothelioma, a form of cancer only caused by asbestos exposure, can generate a few millions a year, as there is almost always someone to sue for the exposure (btw CPC for related search terms around 70$ ).

Ranking first on "purple dragons with red horns" will probably not generate a dime.
"... Hi, sorry to hear about your trouble getting a reply. I’m one of the founders at Scribd. What was the javascript issue you found? ... Tikhon ..."

Found this in the comments section. Short cuts the rant at the source.
Inside Higher Ed - "Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia" - April Fool?
Sure! Looking for ways to burn through $4M in cash, even my 12 year old nephew will come up with some way! I bet I could do it with half the staff in have the time. Pissing away money is easy. However, this doesn't makes it good business.

And when you're already planning to take three years to come up with a business model, FOR GODS SAKE drop the whole thing and do something useful with your time and other peoples money.
Finding the right name is overrated.

The classic story is Apple - After a lot of discussing what the name of their new company should should be Steve Jobs said that if there wasn't agreement the next day he would just call it apple and be done with it. And they seem to have done OK.

Often names of companies sound ingenious because they just seem to fit so well to the company, but what people tend to forget is that the reason the name fits the company is because your association of the two are linked. Google is an example - there are probably thousands of names that are just as good, but they don't sound it because they have no mindshare. Google sounds like a great name because you recognise it instantly and associate it with a great company - nothing more.

As long as you can get the .com domain (or be creative like del.icio.us) and make sure you don't infringe on trademarks you'll be fine.

And you should also google your proposed name just to see what else it means. There is a classic story of an upscale bathroom factory that called their new line of showers for goldenshower. Bad idea.
Lessons of Y Combinator: Things I’d do differently after 2 startups