skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, when/if Microsoft buys Yahoo, some big shareholders wont be shareholders anymore .. they'll be cashed out.

Microsoft is offering more per share than the current share price, benefiting shareholders.

A MicroHoo has better long term prospects of competing with Google, creating additional long term value for the shareholders.
El Dorado 0.9.2 (Group Chat Edition) - it's a Rails app for small groups
This is like watching no-limit holdem .. but better!
I agree. Also: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/studio
This works great in a classroom because a prof is more interactive than a book. You can't shout 'Bullshit!' at a book and have it do anything other than inanimately mock you with its indifference. This is why I believe the idea of adding intentional flaws to reference / learning books is horrid.
Long looks pretty decent, so long as MSFT offers a little over $33 and so long as YHOO takes it.

Or you could wait for Yahoo! to do the stock buyback...Hehe.
How about this? http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.h...

Norvigs point was similar, but Anand has more convincing examples.
Similar to this story:

"Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures ... one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day."

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/my-favorite-lia.html

EDIT: Didn't see that someone already posted the essence of this story below.
But how do I resist the hype around all these frameworks?! haha jk.
Iron Man Film Gets 10th Highest Opening Weekend Ever
I don't think that's the case though. It's just part of the game. Their rationale for wanting Yahoo in the beginning probably has not changed. They just realized that going hostile wasn't really an option.

It really wasn't either. Hostile takeovers happen rarely in tech because it's really easy to create effective poison pills. I only shorted because Yahoo seemed so obstinate. They've had a bucket of cold water tossed on their heads now and are gasping for breath.
My only fear is that the stock didn't sink as much as I expected it to, and that may be because a good deal of people thought along the same lines. They expected Yahoo not to budge, MS to walk away, and Yahoo to come crawling back. Meaning that if Yahoo doesn't bring MS back to the table, their stock has a decent way left to fall.
How would your attitudes towards the situation change had Google been the company bidding for Yahoo? What if it was Apple, had they been in this market?
Amichail, would you please, please, stop or slow down with your Ask YC posts? I went on to look at your submissions: probably more than 80% of your posts are of the "Ask YC" genre.

Maybe you are trying to initiate a discussion. Maybe you are just trying to get the community attention. Maybe you are just putting your ideas "out there"... I really don't know what it is. But it's annoying as hell!

I even don't think that you are just karma-whoring. It seems that you lose more karma after entering in the discussion than by posting your (usually pretty inane) questions.

If you really want to test your ideas or get the community feedback, I suggest you to keep a blog, write essays, put everything you may think interesting there. The process of writing will probably get you much more valuable information than people here ever will. All you're getting (and we're getting) is noise.
Good idea, however, after looking into posting on Craigslist... "all job ads must offer monetary compensation -- no unpaid internships, barters, deferred pay, etc."
Great reply.

My invocation of Position 1 was somewhat whimsical, and I'm not inclined to defend it much further. I'm not convinced that these Intellectual Ventures guys can justifiably be called "patent trolls" -- I think it's more likely that they're fishing for research grants, or slices of other people's research grants, using many, many pieces of bait -- but I'm not sure they're necessarily doing something useful. Based solely on the article, they look like theorists to me -- long on ideas, short on implementation, lacking in (and perhaps ignorant of) good statistics, in love with the backs of their own envelopes, and apt to gloss over any pesky details with Olympic-level handwaving.

I will take note of this line of yours:

I know a lot of people who've dealt with the patent system (software)... I don't know anyone who looks at the patent database as a 'treasure trove' of ideas they can put to use. Most people think of it as a 'minefield' of ideas that are already taken.

I wonder whether your opinion of the patent system is colored by your experience with software patents -- a modern abomination that threatens to bring down the whole system. When you say "most patentable ideas could be reverse-engineered in a day", you sound like a justifiably frustrated software engineer.

But I think patents make more sense when applied to physical machines and gadgets that are harder to get working, harder and more expensive to reverse-engineer, and harder to cover with enormously wide blanket patents (perhaps because the prior art is so much richer, the phase space so much larger, and the inspectors so much better trained).
Anyone else think there's too many MSFT-YHOO soap opera stories here?

When it's done, I'm sure there will be some 'negotiation hack' lessons. In the meantime, this is noise -- leaks, rumors, transient stock ticks. More appropriate for 'Daytrader News' than 'Hacker News'.
8 Tips for Startup Hiring Success
Ask YC: To support Tiger or not to support Tiger?
We've been building this app for a while, and have been continuing to support Tiger. We haven't been able to quite a few things available in Leopard because we're remaining backwards compatible for Tiger. What do you guys think about this. Our product isn't out yet, getting close, but there are tons of things we would love to do but cannot due to this Leopard/Tiger war. Should we ditch tiger?
Why Yahoo Shares Lost Only 15%
That gossip is best left unsaid, but my advice if you are looking to work at Apple - choose the team you join carefully. Apple's most secretive teams are also the most talented and brilliant folks I've ever met. But they work hard to be friends of Steve.
According to this: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1483
you could be losing 90-30% of your potential user base.
That's exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for. Thanks for the link man, appreciate it.
Warren Buffett advice: Buy smart...and low
Comment space is a bit limited to do an adequate explanation. For rules that have straightforward (but possibly compound) predicates, Rete will give you O(1) lookup.
From wikipedia:
"In most cases, the speed increase over naïve implementations is several orders of magnitude (because Rete performance is theoretically independent of the number of rules in the system)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm

My favorite reference on the subject is at the bottom of the wikipedia page: "Production Matching for Large Learning Systems - R Doorenbos"

Sadly (and strangely) many of the "Rete Engines" today do it wrong and will not give you effecient lookups.
True, but if you are know to fall only occasionally then you have a definite advantage.
Release what you have, which works in Tiger. But then, add your new leopard only features for your next version, and don't look back. Although you may lose a little business in the short term, there's very little evidence to suggest you'll fail by going Leopard only. I can't think of a single mac shareware app that has failed because it was only available to the new OS. The kind of people who jump at Apple's latest OS release are the same kind of people who are going to download your application and tell all their friends about it.
What specific Leopard features do you depend on?
Good question. I'm just a front end guy, so I am not exactly sure what we can and cannot do, or if we actually can do a lot of this stuff in both, etc....

But the developers tell me that Leopard offers a lot of animations and stuff (CoreSomethingSomething? haha) that Tiger does not do.
It's brilliant. Everything from the limitations (real text files that can be indexed) to getting people to link their own stuff from other sites is very well thought-out.

There's a double-incentive for users to get their stuff at the top of Digg, Reddit, etc. First is the MBA they win, and second is the fact that it's _their_ stuff that's getting popular - pure brilliance!

And Scribd's slick licensing clause will make people submit their own, original content under an open source or CC license just for the chance of getting that MBA.
that site seems to be under construction...?
I thought of this last time I moved. It took hours to change my address in all the various organisations that need to know it.

Obviously the problem with getting it off the ground. Who is big enough to start this off, short of the Government?
Wrong question. Maybe it's something to do with the billy G. demo ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=xobni+bill+gates

How did they get billy G. interested? Making something MS wants?
I think the answer depends on what your product and target market is.

If your product is designed for technical-users, it's likely that most of them have already migrated to Leopard, making the headache of ensuring support for Tiger likely not worth it.

If your product is designed for non-technical users, the headache of remaining backwards-compatible is probably worth it based on the vast number of folks who don't upgrade until they buy a new computer with a new OS pre-installed.
Typically, I think of a framework as something that calls your code, where a library is code that you call.

The line gets blurry, of course, because just about any framework is going to include some libraries, and you may use some libraries by registering callbacks. But, something that gives you a bunch of blanks to fill in with your code would be a framework.

Now, some frameworks include a set of libraries for the most common tasks you'd want to do when using that framework. E.g., a web framework that provides some sort of ORM. Usually, you can substitute other libraries for those purposes, but doing so has some cost (you feel like you're "fighting the framework", or, you need to deal with configuration overhead for those libraries you're not using). Ruby on Rails is an example of this. This is what I think the grandparent meant by "monolithic framework".

Other frameworks have a more narrow focus and expect you to select and provide libraries for common tasks. Ramaze (an alternative Ruby web framework) is an example of this.

Obviously, the line can get blurry, but most frameworks do seem to have a philosophy of "provide everything a developer needs to get started" or "allow developers to choose the most appropriate tools".
No. What a stupid fucking post.
This is basically right but you're wrong in distinguishing programming from other design tasks. There's never a "process" for design; there's only the meta-process of creativity.
I suggest writing a WSGI app. Then you can deploy it in a variety of ways, one of which is mod_python. Another method, as others mentioned, is mod_wsgi, and the best method in my experience is mod_proxy reverse-proxying to paste.httpserver.
The "cheap trick" part is that the winner is determined by number of page views (which really is a factor of the spamming ability of the contestant) rather than any intrinsic "interesting"-ness of the submissions.

I'm not knocking it, the internet runs on this kind of "cheap trick", and it will generate a ton of traffic and new users. I don't know if it will generate much good will towards Scribd.
The day the music died
I still dont understand, how the this transaction would look like technically.

Say, Yahoo agrees to sell itself to MS. Then where would MS send the money to, and how would the shareholders get that money?
I'm not familiar with Tweetscan's specific implementation, but I would assume they're just grabbing the public XML feed, no?
why_ is really one of those dudes who needs to be funded by the community to work full-time on his awesome, wild projects. He is le-git.
Home Brew Solar Powered UAV (Yes, it runs Linux!)
Just for clarification, this isn't my project, it's just something cool that I came across.
In the final analysis, the wild roller coaster is so much more fun to ride than your average jetliner :) Go figure...
Marketing in the Recommendation Age
I applaude Yahoo for not selling to Microsoft.

Yahoo is a legend and runs a couple of interesting websites and keeps doing new stuff here and there. I like that. I want that to continue. I dont want them to be swallowd by a company that I dont like.

And about the money... its only money. Do we all HAVE TO bow down to the dollar and each and every day go the path of the most money? No. I dont. Im free. And everyone who says Jerry HAS TO because he is the CEO of a public traded company has simply been proven wrong. How cool is that? I dont want a predictable world where everything is based on pennies. Lets celebrate some rebellion ;-)
Brand Positioning Clift Notes
Quick and dirty framework to give your startup concise brand positioning.
It's a map of Neurotic People.
"based on data on hundreds of thousands of people compiled by psychologists, Jason Rentfrow at Cambridge University and Sam Gosling at the University of Texas"
From a book called Who's Your City, by Dr. Richard Florida.
More maps here:
http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2008/...
Facebook App Platform Says No More Java Support
1.The mathematics that sort of fell into and formed the structure of Einsteins work was about 50 years old when he used them. I am talking about the attempt to prove Euclids 5th axiom using the first 4 and the subsequent evolution of hyperbolic geometry.

2.Godel was working on the problem that was proposed by Hilbert (Google for Hilbert's List Of Problems). At the time when Godel was working on it, it was actively pursued by prominent math dudes of the era;

One connection that I find in both these cases is this: They were both trying to prove something is not possible. And whenever that happened in Science - it usually causes a huge splash. Another example is Group Theory: fell out of the proof for the fact that a 5th degree equation cannot be solved using algebra.
At least they get weekends off, unlike the startup life. :P
How much YHOO stock do you have?
Bootstrapping a Niche Social Network
Books will contain errors whether you want them to or not. Adding more is insane.
But where is the gulf between Mac and PC?

For Linux and Mac/PC, the gulf might be where SuSE went. I liked SuSE, but once Novel bought them it seems like they tried to move toward Pop and slid into the "gulf".

So, PC on one peak, Ubuntu on the other, and Slackware far to the left?
The iPhone Gets Its Own Photo Sharing Site
Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know
EC2 + S3 + http://insoshi.com + a little development customization

Insta-social network!
About half of the US population is currently getting govt healthcare at a per-capita cost that is basically the same as the per-capita cost of the folks getting private healthcare.

If govt healthcare in the US will be cheaper than private, why isn't it now?

Note to single-payer advocates. Nothing is stopping you from fixing the existing US govt healthcare system to provide the promised benefits. When you do, then all you have to do to kill the private system is open up the fixed public system at cost. Of course, that assumes that you can actually make govt healthcare work as you've asserted, but surely that's no big deal....
Google patent for tv ads: viewers required to watch some commercials to enable actual program
Crack open a CSS book, and start imitating some designs out there. Either that or just tweak the hell out of an open source CSS design.
word of mouth > everything else
Does Google actually produce these commercials like spotrunner.com?
i dont think so - this is just a patent that outlines the idea of "rewarding viewers who watch commercials and punishing those that dont"
Top 15 emerging wirless startup
Gary Kildall Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)
A lot of people are horrified by this idea. I'm not sure it bothers me. I think market forces will let it sink or swim. If channel 1 has forced ads, and channel 2 doesn't, then channel 1 better be a lot more interesting, or I won't watch it. It just isn't that hard to flip channels or stumble elsewhere on the web.
nope - the aggregators/searchers/... run get updates via jabber
Requries programmers with good security background.
Yes. Not becuase I read it, but because I don't want to read it. I'm always disappointed when an interesting-sounding article ends up linking to a pointless Techcrunch rant.
Is someone censoring internet sites from Iran?
Internet ninjas I beg of you, please help me figure this out. I recently wrote a blog post predicting a US invasion of Iran in 2008. I received one comment from a poster from this url http://iran.tedtheblog.info/?p=20109 but when I point my browser to that url it resolves to http://www.everyrecipe.info/

Am I just being paranoid or is someone really re-directing traffic away from this address? If so is there any way I can determine if it is my ISP or a central dns that is blocking selected traffic?

Thanks for your help, this thing has me spooked.

Update: I've posted the same question on my blog http://startupkarma.com/?p=49
Feel free to leave a comment either here or there. Thanks.
Internet ninjas I beg of you, please help me figure this out. I recently wrote a blog post predicting a US invasion of Iran in 2008. I received one comment from a poster from this url http://iran.tedtheblog.info/?p=20109 but when I point my browser to that url it resolves to http://www.everyrecipe.info/

Am I just being paranoid or is someone really re-directing traffic away from this address? If so is there any way I can determine if it is my ISP or a central dns that is blocking selected traffic?

Thanks for your help, this thing has me spooked.
I really love the concept of this contest.. putting all that random crap on your hard drive to good use.

I must admit, I’m a compulsive hoarder of files.. I’m often surprised when I’m browsing through random folders at all the cool stuff I’ve collected over the years and forgotten about.

It’s like digital archeology. :)
This really isn't intended for technical topics, but VideoJug.com is informative and hilarious. Videos are instructional, and include dating tips, reading body language, cooking, diy projects, negotiation, etc.
Why isn't anyone writing about Yahoo's amazing stock gains and Microsoft's plunge?
Linux on embedded systems really isn't surprising anymore. It would be a bad idea to choose a system you couldn't tweak and optimize given the hardware constraints.
It really depends on what you want to do that isn't possible in Leopard. You haven't said what that might be.

If it's something that pivots entirely around a feature in Leopard, like Time Machine integration, then go for Leopard only. Otherwise, release for both Tiger and Leopard. Why not? Not everyone is using Leopard yet -- I read somewhere that the adoption so far is about half Leopard and half pre-Leopard. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but I have a hard time believing it's true.

I only updated to Leopard on my main workstation about a week ago.
No, by size I meant complexity.

Daniel
Quick.as - Better Than Google
Quick.as allows you to put a "command" (a keyboard shortcut of sorts) in front of you search term and you will go directly to the search results of a particular site (e.g. w Boston Celtics searches Wikipedia). Quick.as allows access to the search results from other sites in the one convenient location. The post explains how Quick.as provides you with better information than Google (or at very least the same); and after the commands become second nature, it allows you to access to the information you want quicker and with less mental processing.
It doesn't matter. ObjC is just C with []s.
I admire you, even if I can't spell your name.
Forget Tiger and go with Leopard. Don't waste your time implementing Leopard features yourself by hand just so that they can run on an obsolete system. In two years time, those features will be worth exactly zero to your company, when all of the new features that you could have written instead using Leopard's functionality will still be worth something.

Joel Spolsky says it best here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html.

"The developers who ignored performance and blasted ahead adding cool features to their applications will, in the long run, have better applications."
so when can we start editing submissions with this
Did you know that banging your weenie with a hammer is intensely pleasurable-- when you miss?
Rearden Commerce builds something companies want, raises $100MM
It's redirecting from here in the Czech Republic, so it's not your ISP. It looks like the dns has changed. Who knows why. What's your blog url, by the way? I'd like to read it.
I second this. I work at a small flat fairly flat company (owner -> experienced programmers -> inexperienced programmers) and it doesn't feel like there's any politics at all. People separate into their project teams obviously, since you talk to them more, and dealing with large clients has a lot of annoying bureaucracy on their end, but otherwise it works fine.

Another thing to get rid of politics is to make it that there's nothing to be political about. "Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions on who gets what" or "social relations involving authority or power" [wikipedia]. If you have things to decide about, authority to hand out, your going to get politics! Politics is also a bit about gaming the system. Don't have a system to game!

People will start getting political when they start running into frustrations (or see opportunities) where politics will benefit them or their team in some way. Also making everyone feel like they're on the same 'team' can also help with getting rid of politics, although you have to have a small company to do that.
Microsoft and Yahoo! are probably in the top 5 at purchasing startups, other than Google and Amazon.
i think thats a good solution if all shows were the same. but if you like "how stuff is made" on discovery, and they choose to use this system, then switching to gilligans island on channel 2 probably isn't up your alley.
Ask YC: What is your favorite IDE?
Hi YC hackers, I was just curious as to what your favorite IDEs are?

I was at the CommunityOne/JavaOne conference today and everybody seems to be using NetBeans (Sun product, duh.); and the consensus seems to be that NetBeans is actually very good for Java, Ruby, C/C++.

I was just curious as to what people are using for Python, Perl, PHP... and Ruby.

Thanks.
Thanks for the quick response. Guess I was just being paranoid after all. I've posted about the episode on my blog here: http://startupkarma.com/?p=49 and the original post is here: http://startupkarma.com/?p=48
Pure speculation but I'm guessing not.
It redirects to everyrecipe.info for me in the USA. Probably related to CIA black ops.