skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microblogging is more like IM and email, so people who are talking about caching and databases and scaling twitter like a traditional web site all miss the point. This is rare exception, too bad the author abandoned his own attempt at doing it right. I think there's still a chance that somebody other than twitter will be first to general adoption.
There are times when it makes sense to use more threads than CPU's though; one good (and common) example is web application servers. Applications that use resources like databases that are I/O rather than compute bound can be significantly more efficient with additional threads beyond the number of CPU's available.

Of course there's a limit; overkill doesn't do anyone any good.
I love how the first result for "2 + 2" on Hakia says that 2 + 2 = 5. http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=2+%2B+2

Seriously, Hakia seems useful (if slow), and Powerset seems useless. It'll be a shame if marketing wins this game.
I agree.

Then again, most of the people that I've met who share the threads are evil mindset write bad code and can't manage requirements, like a certain project manager I had who was full of "trivial" last-minute requirements...

I suspect that there's a relationship there. :)
Hawking and other british scientists invest in Africa's intellectual future
Try "Why is there air?". It finds Bill Cosby's album, but forgets to quote the ? in the title, so the link is broken. Oops.
This is pretty meaningless.

Vista [...] managed to record 639 unique vulnerabilities over roughly the last half year [...] Windows 2000 [...] experienced 586 over the same period. Windows XP [...] had 1,021, with Windows 2003 Server reaching 478.

What does this data mean? You have to take the total number of users of each OS into account, as well as the age of the OS (if Vista is roughly as secure as 2000 is now, maybe that's significantly different from being roughly as secure as 2000 has a reputation for having been, when it was popular.) The article also mentions that these numbers don't take the severity of the vulnerabilities into account, or even whether they were OS vulnerabilities or just application vulnerabilities.

The Australian security company collected statistics on the number of infections by analysing figures from anonymous users of its ThreatFire community, with vulnerabilities double-confirmed by third-party anti-virus engines. The numbers are per 1,000 machines on each platform.

This makes the numbers sound more relevant, but, wow, high! Wait, 1021 vulnerabilities per 1000 Windows XP machines? That could be true -- XP is the most attractive target right now -- but it sure sounds like a lot.

Which brings up another point: there's a difference between "insecure", as in, inherently vulnerable, and "often exploited". The biggest reason why so many exploits and viruses exist for modern (NT-based) Windows OSes is that those OSes are so widely deployed, and are managed by so many inexpert users.
Most people around here look at XML a lot, i.e. XHTML.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78739
You're still looking at it in the short term. A decision to buy/rent should be made based on the fact you might actually spend a few years there. By which time your repayments will be far less than the rent you would have to pay.
Depends on the company. We always suggest they talk to Techcrunch, since Techcrunch covers all types of startups. Beyond that it depends on what they're doing and how much money they have. PR firms are good for startups that have raised at least a million; I wouldn't use one with much less. Google ads are good if you're doing something very specific. I wouldn't recommend email as a way of getting new users. The white hat half of SEO should be done as a matter of course; and the black hat probably never.

On the whole, the best ways to get attention are the honest ones: to make something so good that people spontaneously tell their friends about you, and to impress bloggers so much they want to write about you. This is especially true for YC cos, because we like to fund people whose strength is in building things, rather than marketing them.
This Week in Ruby (May 12, 2008)
Lisper responds to Dynamic Languages Strike Back
Wow. I know a lot of people that either work for or used to work for EDS (including my dad who's been there forever).

Be interesting to see how this plays out!
Don't underestimate the power of good brand marketing. The author of this post caulks up Apple's success to good design. I think design is important, but the Apple brand is more important. Apple has created this club-like feel to their products... if you own a Mac or an iPhone, you're in the in-crowd, and they have spent ungodly sums of money on star-powered commercials to create a brand with that "in-crowd" effect.
I'm just wondering what he'd say. It's a very poor rationalization if he can't even answer that basic question.
I read that sleep has nine purposes. Burning long term memory was only one purpose.
I wonder, though, if Google was planning on that already, or if they instead started working on that when PowerSet started releasing such hype?
Maybe the reason why boston is fun during the summer is the neurotic people leave?
If you go to bed at 10PM, you'd wake at 7AM without the use of an alarm clock and you'd more time during the weekend. It won't be easy to make the transisition but you should consider it.
Slight drift: Tarver's current project accompanied by a fascinating read. www.lambdassociates.org/FPQi.pdf
I know I am bragging - but I don't think you could find a better merchant account than the one I have to offer. Check out my blog for more info http://www.straightpassthrough.biz
A Wrinkle in Time
"There's no point in making some software for the sake of making the software."

This is like telling an artist there is no point of making art for the sake of making art.

"The only point to making software is filling a need"
During the years I have listed to myself several "needs" that are waiting to be solved
The other article I was asked to write, which should still have some relevance to startups. From here on out, I can hopefully write about what I want to.
Because they read the Innovator's Solution. There's a chart in there (can't find it in Google Books) that has the hierarchy of what customers value - it's something like 1) possibility 2) cost 3) ease of use. Ah, I'm not doing it justice, I've got to go get the book now.
You have a point, but at the same time: Apple is only able to get away with their particular brand of marketing because their products work in ways similar to the manner broadcasted.

Case in point: the iPhone commercials, which were extremely minimalist and made out to promote the iPhone as this ultrasmooth, ultraenjoyable product. That commercial line made the iPhone as popular as it has become. But it wouldn't have worked that way if the iPhone hadn't had such perfect design. Imagine a commercial for the Voyager attempting the same types of ads. It plain wouldn't work. Not because the Voyager is a poor phone per se, but because it's so deeply flawed in its design.
working for Elbit Systems (http://www.elbitsystems.com/) [I am located at Israel]
MIT class shows what's possible w/ google's android
Try explaining this "logic" to a family with a newborn when the landlord decides to kick them out! Owning a home is security. Also, as noted by tesla, at year 31 you no longer have a house payment. I hope the people who advocate renting for life like paying rent after they are retired!
Agreed, but in this case the readability of the text format is only a minor benefit.

I didn't want to go on a tangent, but the problem is that vanilla Windows XP (not sure about Vista) does not make it safe to play with plain text files, especially those meant for a Linux system. Notepad is not safe. So to protect the unaware, we need another layer between the user and the raw data to make . Any format would be fine, as long as there's a free tool available that the customer and their paranoid IT support would both be comfortable with, which preferably might already be installed, and Windows knows not to open it with Notepad by default. Since other products on the same network already use XML, the customer is OK with staring at this format, expects that .xml files will pop up read-only in Internet Explorer, and knows that the angled brackets mean serious business.

If any other format met all these needs at once, I'd jump for it -- but I haven't seen anything else that does. Any suggestions for other formats that work well on both Windows and Unix?
It's because landlords bought pre-boom that it's cheaper to rent now. It has nothing to do with what you should do today, just a little background to the situation.
Programming languages are as much a social construct as they are a technological one!

Python and Ruby are doing tons of things right on the social/cultural side, but the technology was in many ways a big step backwards from Smalltalk and Lisp. The poor performance serves to reinforce the old dynamic language stereotypes.
If you want to play with numbers, the New York Times has an excellent tool:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/2007_BUYRENT_GRAP...

It allows you to play with multiple variables and then tells you how many years you need to own a home for in order for it to become profitable.
It's something that applies to most art forms. The more you tell somebody what something is, and the less you show them, the more time it takes for them to comprehend it, and therefore the less it actually has an effect.

Of course, in creative writing it's a bit harder, since there are some very good ways of showing people things that have become deeply cliched, and it's considered improper to use those techniques. That's not the case online, unless you consider glossy buttons and rounded edges to be a cliche, which is entirely possible.
"Big money IS more fun."

Do you think guys like Linus Torvalds or Guido Van Rossum are having less fun than Mark Zuckerberg?
1. pay downpayment
2. let other people rent from you, pay mortgage with that rent
3. profit.

the downpayment you made gets paid back into the equity on the house within the first couple of years. everything after that is FREE EQUITY.
...or perhaps not. If you bought in Seattle five years ago, you'd still be on the wrong side of the rent/ownership equation (rents have risen about 5% per year here, whereas houses were expensive relative to rent even in 2003).

I grant you that if you own long enough, your costs will someday be lower than renting the same space. But that's a tricky calculation, and your break-even point depends heavily on your assumptions for inflation, rent increases, interest rates, etc. And over the five-year timespan that most Americans own a particular home (very few people spend 30 years in the same house anymore), it's not even worth considering -- you'll lose far more money to interest payments in the first five years or a mortgage than you'll gain in savings over rent.

My point is that we can both be right. Eventually you'll break even on monthly costs, even if you buy at today's bloated prices. The question is, how long is "eventually"?
also: I blame this partly on the attitudes of today's generation. they can't seem to distinguish between owning and borrowing.

Is music DRM preventing people from making good financial decisions in other aspects of life?
The author also says that it's perfectly acceptable for something to be 10x slower, because "a well-capitalized company" can afford 10x more servers... I am thinking of how to respond to that, but I don't know where to start
I remember coming across one a year or two ago, but I didn't bookmark it. It was either open source or very cheap (10 dollars or so).

It sounds like an interesting sort of thing to base a project around, though. Out of curiosity, what exactly do you think service like that would have to be able to handle?
Jeff Rothschild will likely take over a lot of his portfolio, which is good for Facebook, because that guy is rockstar.
Why ask for opinions that you're just you're going to question anyway?

(I see you did the same thing to bjclark.)
Does Being Ethical Pay?
That's actually a valid point to make. It's a perfectly valid theory that if you don't have a point to make with your art, that you're not doing anything worthwhile.

But apparently you've got an idea or two, so it wouldn't hurt for you to try them each out.
That just means that current paradigms are not suited to what your body wants to do. I keep hours similar to those you keep over the weekends. It is no problem so long you can put yourself in a situation in which you decide your work-schedule around your lifestyle and not the other way around. hint: startup :). Grad school also works. Contractor work probably does also.
It's a nice idea.

Except some of us can be ready to sleep at 7:30, but wake up at 9, only to get tired again at 12:30. I know that I have windows of opportunity to sleep myself.

And if I go to sleep at 7:30? Oh, then I wake up at midnight and can't get back to sleep until 5 in the morning.

So, for some of us it gets a bit more complicated.
It is possible that the company is structured to make a loss so that it can avoid tax. This would definitely be worthwhile if the investors are on the payroll. They could take large salaries and dividends ensuring that the business remains unprofitable. Despite such structuring, it may have made an inadvertent profit due to increased subsidies for renewable energy and a shortage of a equivalent goods.
An FAQ for Hacker News?
If there was an FAQ section that had threads to frequently asked questions, it would go a long way to acclimating newbies. It would also serve as a tremendous resource for everybody.
An FAQ section could also help ease some of the frustration some veterans of Hacker News have when they see questions that have been answered many times already.

I think some of the comments are really good, but after a while the thread "disappears" & and the next newbie asks the same the question. Consequently, some veterans get frustrated.

If threads are put in a FAQ section, then people would get the benefit of what users have said in the past and any new things users decided they wanted to add to the various threads.

Thoughts?
The web frontend could just be a static list of your contacts, with ajaxy grabbing the tweets from each. This way, you could cache each users tweets and avoid the issue of each user's page being different.

That's just one idea. I'm not really an expert.
Performance of C vs Smalltalk:

A friend of mine implemented some Block Cipher algorithms in Smalltalk a few years back. By working with the VM engineers so he could have a few things (like 32 bit registers with bit-shift and bit-rotate operations) he managed to come close to or BEAT RSA Data Security's reference implementations in C. In once case, the algorithm was 3% faster. (RSA's implementations used malloc/free in a naive way. Great generational GC in Smalltalk was like a custom buffer cache implemented for free.)

A company I worked for once has two Smalltalk implementations. Some work was done to host one inside the runtime of another. The hosted Smalltalk has a compiler written using Yacc & Lex which was compiled C. The host Smalltalk has one written entirely in Smalltalk. It was discovered, that if you took the text notifications out of the Smalltalk Smalltalk compiler, it runs faster than the C Smalltalk compiler.
Thats a great idea. There;s a wealth of information (links, posts etc) in HN and it would be nice to easily access a submission that was posted in the past.
Are there any GTD books you'd recommend? I've heard a lot about GTD and it sounds very interesting, but I've never actually figured out what a good starting point would be.
Google's been working on the OneBox (instant factual answers to everything you could ask) forever. As has MSN/Live search:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=president+of+france

When I was at MSN Search 3 summers ago, they were objectively ahead of Google in that area.
Or access http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/10/cto_vs_vp_engin.ht...
Interesting. Didn't know that!
Agreed. Personally, my most awake portion of the day starts around 3-5 pm and ends around 11-1 pm, depending on how I feel, what I'm doing, etc.

I can't even take naps during that time...
fascinating, although fold.it appears unavailable currently
Uh huh. So after a hard day killing people, they can blog about it? They're gainfully employed, if they want a damn laptop let them buy their own.

On a list of people deserving of charity, soldiers come way down mine. Surely there are some people who are actually impoverished you can think of who could use your time and money? Stray kitties and puppies too. Even the narcissistic navel gazers at the EFF would seem like a better bet for volunteering and donating to.
I would imagine it would be a set of APIs a website could use for new user signup, logging in, session tokens, logging out, and retrieval of lists of users based on some criteria.

This could be a hosted solution or one that you install on your own servers (preferably self-installed and easily modifiable) - either way you'd set it up, code your own visual interface for logging in, signing up, etc, but use the user management API on the back end for storing user data, storing new user data, etc. It would also utilize smart encryption techniques, allow for mass emails, etc.

I understand that these issues are mostly straightforward, but it seems crazy that every new web app has to re-invent the wheel for user management!?
I think you actually just nailed the three biggies. The reason is that each of the three works in the same way: it gives you a list of "things to get done," and in two of the three cases that list goes on for a long ways. (Email does too, I suppose, if you really use it extensively.) The only other thing I think fits into this case would be social networking.

It's why I was interested in that new Times application for the Mac, the one that turned RSS reading into a sort of newspaper. When you have that format, then you're expecting to look at something only to have it come to an end. It's a different mindset. At the same time, though, it doesn't solve the problem entirely, problem being: the Internet moves constantly, not only at set intervals.

I wonder: is there a way of limiting that without alienating people? Of setting a precise limit to how much can be done during any given time, then ending things up? It would make it a lot easier to avoid sites. At the same time, though, it would slow things down to a crawl compared to the speed at which things move now.
Cisco Introduces $34K "Personal TelePresence" - who is it for?
Right, I recognize that and agree that the top of the top is still phone calls, but as far as the web as a communication medium goes, e-mail is still the most used and most important.

Plus I couldn't immediately think of a non-intrusive way to collect call history from any phone so that idea was out ;-)
Dilemma? Why not do both? Make embeddable a simple new value-adding resource to popular text applications, targeting a well-defined and large learning community of end users.

Use a mysql-like dual license to develop and promote the software freely, then charge fees for support and/or commercial (enterprise) licensing.
I think that the Ask YC Archive does a good job at this. Too bad it isn't constantly on the main page.

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

which makes your question amusingly ironic :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184766
Hey! Don't downmod kul!

This topic was discussed at the TechCrunch UK meeting on Fri 9 May 2008 ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183305 ) which Harj and/or kul may have attended. Apparently, some people use Facebook solely to get dates with their friends of friends. Apparently, such activity can get intimate relatively quickly and with relatively high probability.
Hmm... he seems to be using strong/static typing interchangeably.

Thats a bit like a lecture from a physicist confusing gravity and time (unless of course they are talking about inverted universes, maybe a black hole or something).
Just for the record, the "Lisper" in question isn't me, it's Dan Weinreb.
> I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep following =)

Same... He does a weird mix of TMZ & TechCrunch
Hakia seems quite excellent, actually. I suspect the defaults are better than google -- words are much more 'closely bound'. When I ask a question, I seem to get back results in the form of an answer.

But we can't figure out just how useful the tech Powerset is, because it indexes so little of the web. Were I looking for an answer on wikipedia, I'd have probably looked there anyway.
http://www.powerset.com/explore/pset?q=Why+did+powerset+fail...
didnt know you did javascript
How does the recession affect my startup?
Ah, so it's a case of "I believe their choice of Tool A is wrong for solving Problem B, thus although I cannot see what they have done with Architecture C to solve Problem D, I don't have a lot of confidence they made the right decisions."

Thanks for explaining your reasoning.
These are the impressions I got after 40 minutes of tests:

- The UI design is visually distracting, bulky, complicated. There's too much going on at the top, 3 differently colored bars with the powerset logo, tab(s) and huge search bar. The search bar is omnipresent, even in the individual Wikipedia page you chose. Ironically, Google has a similar structure in its result pages, but feels completely different because the background is all white and less invasive.

- The Factz are often distracting and presenting useless stuff. E.g.:
http://www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/Simple_DirectMedia_L...
presents around 25 factz. I counted 3 or 4 factz that are actually useful. The meaning of the other factz in the context is either obscure ("parameters": which ones?), deceiving or incomplete ("functionality", "ports", "operations", etc), useless ("needs" (??), "SDL", "The Video"), or all of the above.

- The way you actually use the Factz is terrible. First you clik on one fact, then after being flashed with the fade-out bling on the right column you actually have to move the mouse pointer all the way there, then the animation scroll, then probably move the pointer to the left to click on something actually useful or go back up to select another fact because the one you chose was wrong anyway (why? see above). After 5 minutes of this I feel dizzy. Who designed this stuff?

- massive waste of screen real estate with large white space on the right column, either entirely (results page) or partially (actual wikipedia result page you selected).

I do think there are some cool things, but so far it seems hard to use IMO.
Having a documented api doesn't make it easy, just ask Xobni. In practice, making a fast and stable Outlook extension is extremely difficult.

Also, Gmail actually does have a number of documented and stable hooks for extensions to use.
I'm procrastinating reading this stuff on procrastination. Good stuff. Yet another thing I should try. Now how do I deceive myself that getting this homework done is not near the most important things I should be doing...
Would you say An FAQ or A FAQ? Not to be mean, just not sure---cause pronounced it sounds like 'an' but spelled looks like 'a'
but searching wikipedia with the normal wikipedia search beats powerset...

i mean this is essentially air.

like norvig said "capital of france" is the important part, not "what is the capital of france?".

oh well i wish them good luck and hope the succeed. competition is a good thing.
MSN's is nice (I'm not a huge fan of Google's, though I like its being integrated throughout search results), but I think Yahoo!'s is the most broad-minded. They really take advantage of their various hundreds of sites to give you relevant stuff. It's one of the times when having many half-baked sites gives you an edge.

EDIT: I didn't realize that Google's search result answers came on a OneBox. I just thought their first search result had been dead-on.