skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
God does not play dice? Are you saying that you can figure out radioactive decay?

From [http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html]

"But hidden variables aren't the way our universe works—it really is random, right down to its gnarly, subatomic roots. In 1964, the physicist John Bell proved a theorem which showed hidden variable (little clock in the nucleus) theories inconsistent with the foundations of quantum mechanics. In 1982, Alain Aspect and his colleagues performed an experiment to test Bell's theoretical result and discovered, to nobody's surprise, that the predictions of quantum theory were correct: the randomness is inherent—not due to limitations in our ability to make measurements. So, given a Cæsium-137 nucleus, there is no way whatsoever to predict when it will decay. If we have a large number of them, we can be confident half will decay in 30.17 years; but if we have a single atom, pinned in a laser ion trap, all we can say is that is there's even odds it will decay sometime in the next 30.17 years, but as to precisely when we're fundamentally quantum clueless. The only way to know when a given Cæsium-137 nucleus decays is after the fact—by detecting the ejecta. A Cæsium-137 nucleus which has “beat the reaper” by surviving a century, during which time only one in a thousand of its litter-mates haven't taken the plunge and turned into Barium, has precisely the same chance of surviving another hundred years as a newly-minted Cæsium-137, fresh from the reactor core."
also add tipjoy.com to the blog :)
You have to explain what "hello, world".puts does.
Is it a case of simply no good stuff being available to vote up, or good stuff not getting any votes? If the latter, point them out. If the former... well, it happens.
I never really thought of the "digerati" as actual users for the product; they're more like "carriers" for a (memetic) disease--they'll talk about it to their non-technical friends, set up their own stuff using it as a platform, and so on.

(Not that I have any idea how the religious book market works, but) if you want to sell Bibles, do you go door-to-door, or do you just go to churches and try to get the preachers to use you as their source? The tech crowd are the preachers to the regular joe user--they're the ones interviewed for tech color pieces in the news, they're the ones deciding what software to install in your schools, libraries, workplaces, and government buildings; they're the ones who set your router filtering policies. If the students in a school can goof off on Facebook but not Myspace, guess which one the school's network will live on?
No doubt - that is one awesome book. I have purchased copies for friends and they've all come back mclovin it.
Israel's contributions to information technology
Thanks - it's a recording of his presentation at SXSW, not an ongoing series, but I'm looking forward to listening to it.
That's a terrible article and this is a terrible headline. Nowhere does it quote Gates as saying anything like that. The article's 2nd sentence is, "Microsoft has not presented an alternative strategy to compete with its dominant rival in the Internet business, Google, since withdrawing a $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo last weekend."

And MS has at least one full-blown internet search business. Even though it sucks, it is still theirs.
TED.com doesn't let you upload videos. The site only hosts videos from its own conferences and the player is probably custom-made.
'My daughter deserved to die for falling in love'
"When programmers embed their choice so deeply into their psyche that it becomes the tagline by which they identify themselves... Do you, the customer, really care what kind of tools they use?"

The customer probably doesn't care, but recruiters certainly do. They want a 'C# developer' or 'experience of VB.NET' rather than a 'good programmer', which is probably what they should be looking for.

If the writer is saying he'd avoid working with someone who would only use his own favourite language no matter what, then I'd agree with him. However, I'd also be suspicious of an experienced programmer who didn't have strong views on operating systems, languages, and text editors/IDEs. If you don't care about these things, you probably don't care about programming.
Can you do handwriting recognition with this pen?
Airship Ventures raises $8M, brings Zeppelin to California
How I Grow My Blog
They're looking to buy 50,000 apparently
techsoup.org is a great resource for non-profits looking for technical advice, services and products.
use email then
Not really. There are better git tutorials out there - http://osteele.com/del.icio.us/osteele/git (from the article).

Git allows you to choose which way you work more than (say) subversion. This article is an example of a slightly different way to work.
You Can't PDF Your Way to Good Software
the funny thing is, I'd much prefer that, but there are many people that for whatever reasons, are comfortable only using one particular variant of electronic communications, and if I want to reach them I have to accommodate that.

I have friends who aren't comfortable using phones (the lack of body language stresses them out), friends can't deal with textual communications because of the lack of explicit emotional tone leaves them confused, and friends who only check their email when they're expecting an email. And those are just some simple cases. In the context of that, using any single digital communication mechanism only allows me to communicate with a subset of the people I care about.

Anyways, my point was that the ads on facebook can be obnoxious enough that it spurs someone to install adblocking software
Job: need to replace useless designer - $750
Hi all. I'm having problems with the designer I've hired to skin my app. He has taken a $200 deposit and is 3 weeks past his first deadline with nothing to show for it except something he downloaded from a free templates site. After the recent stories on YC I've decided to ditch him and hire someone else.

My app is aimed at the education sector. Target users are students and teachers (not always web/tech savvy). I'm looking for something clean and uncluttered. Designs I like:

http://www.wufoo.com

http://warehouseapp.com

http://fireeagle.yahoo.net

http://www.rescuetime.com

http://www.shopify.com

http://www.fetchapp.com

http://basecamphq.com

It's quite a data intensive app so if you can build nice looking tables, forms and reports that's a plus.

Almost all of the internal pages are made of sections which have the same underlying markup so there is a fixed amount of markup to style. You'll also need to build a landing and signup page.

Budget is $750, timescale is 4 - 6 weeks. I'm flexible on both. If you're interested, please send me a link to your portfolio: ap2004@tiscali.co.uk

Alternatively, if there are any designers who would be interested in a skills exchange please get in touch. I'm proficient in java, ruby/rails and php.
I am pretty sure Google doesn't use your back search history in advertising targeting. They've said this many times.

If they did, here's my past few searches: jordan ritter, glowing resin bar, mac hard drive use visualization, ironport, joost commercial, photoshop light bar, wiki futurama, wiki lost, xserve g4 wiki

What does that list tell you about me or my buying habits? Now expand that list by a few thousand random search terms. Any more detail?
It is simply the abuse of monopoly [and THAT is illegal]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
Terrible to hear. No one desrves that, but things like this happen all the time all over the world. If it were not for the british soldier aspect, it would never make the news.
Great post & totally agree.

silly nitpick: you get free svn integration with Eclipse, too.
on b): yes, but do you do it on client time? I try not to, as it causes uncertainty in deliverables, unless the client is happy with experimenting. I learn/expand in my own time on "fun" projects :)
Rental Property: My One-Man Startup *Just Launched*. Comments Please!
Well said. I got the impression in this thread that some AI researchers are trying to beat physics into shape so that it would support certain views favorable to AI.

[This is not to say that those researchers are unintelligent, just that a certain bias may exist.]
You should use a passphrase, not a private key. Just use a passphrase that you're not going to forget, or write it down and put it in a safe deposit box. (The only people you are trying to protect your data from are people that work for Amazon. They don't have access to your house, so writing down the password isn't a security problem.)
I assume this will be a helium-filled airship.
While I've met many of the guys who work at OpenMoko and think they're great engineers, OpenMoko just isn't any sort of serious mobile platform. They can't even claim the kind of industry support SavaJe had before they went tits up.

They're also making a touch screen handset/platform which makes them automatically a niche player everywhere except China. If one of the first tier handset manufacturers expressed some interest in the platform, it might be worth considering, but in advance of that extremely unlikely event it's just an amusing novelty.
On Beauty in Code
Most likely - anything else would be too stupid.
I'll now annoy and patronize you all by again agreeing with the spirit of this post while disagreeing with the particulars.

Security documentation is different from normal documentation in that it serves dual purposes, and "comprehensible documentation" is the lesser of the two. The more important objective of a security standard is to provite citable line-item rules that can be audited against, and the reason you do that is so that you can make reviews, tests, and audits objective.

You can argue with the specifics of those rules, but even something as obvious as "keep windows synchronized with data" could merit a line item if it's something that bad devs consistantly fuck up, and could be inclined to argue with ("that's not a security problem and nobody has ever complained about it!") in a review.
Very Specific Generics
Neat, but it's more like "Tinydb: store some tiny data at a website reachable via a tiny url". The URL doesn't store the data, Tinydb stores the data.
Off topic.
Well, you can run arbitrary code on the device, so sure. I assume you can also upload images recorded on the device to a real computer, so double sure.
Victorian 'supercomputer' is reborn
The Disposable Economy Has to Change
MUD Shell
I'm liking this community less and less each day. When this sort of comment on this sort of article is the top comment something is wrong. For some reason I don't seem to be able to vote that comment down either.
I recently switch all my domains from godaddy to namecheap and is happy. I wanted to use 1and1.com but they can not accept my order as they are not able to "establish a clear system with regards to the ordering,maintenance and billing processes." with the country Singapore I am living in. Make me feel like I am in 1980s again. :-)
Huba Huba — overlooked but tasty GitHub tidbits.
How many domains are you planning on registering, that price is a significant issue?
You Jeepies?
Now all they need to do is add a wireless transmitter, and give these out in U.S. embassies... The price was what amazed me - I knew this was possible, but at that price? Pretty cool.
Chances are, it won't. On second thought, let me rephrase that: it will work, but it might not be called Web "3.0", since everyone seems to be getting sick of those phrases.
In my experience, it is normal practice to factor time into the estimate (call it risk factor if you want) to push your skills. You factor a profit margin into your estimate right?

As long as the customer is satisfied with the overall quality, cost and timeliness of the product, you've met your obligations as a business. Why does the "profit" always have to be only cash? learned skills are a form of capital reinvestment that the customers pay for just like they pay you a profit margin to do the work.
A Case Of The MUMPS
Stephen Hawking in hunt for Africa's hidden talent
It's a little interesting, at least!

http://tinydb.org/p5
Webcam DoS Attack
Wow, CL and Perl :) I thought I was the only person with such odd tastes... glad to know I'm not alone.
Investment Readiness Programme for London based start-up and early stage companies
Interesting. You can easily redirect-loop too. -> http://tinydb.org/py

Also, you can create entries with nothing, just by hitting _write.

Needs more work, really.
Wow! I had to re-read the second point several times before I could get it through my head:
"Compile-time type errors annoy students to no end. It's better to at least let their program run and do SOMETHING rather than fail to compile and do NOTHING."

This is non-sense. It's encouraging bad coding practice, and it's the reason why languages like ColdFusion, JavaScript, etc. gave real developers so much trouble: amateurs write code that "runs" but is wholly broken. I agree that Python is a great beginner (and pro) language, but not for this reason!!
NBC makes video deal with Zune
Education and Tech Entrepreneurship
can the URL store the data? an idea: http://twext.cc/dodo_data
Hitting 300 SimpleDB Requests Per Second on a Small EC2 Instance
(Sorry, but simply down-voting isn't 'good enough' here -- if you aren't able to provide some convincing argument, you just confirm my opinion.)
...and here is a VC fund manager proverb:

"On my left side nothing is right.

And on my right side nothing is left".
I didn't mean it this way (but in a much more abstract way) -- but even here it seems to be true:

If you really would understand the complex things (you mention) the same as the trivial ones (you mention), then you would be able to remember equally easy.

So, the problem here is not the complex thing itself, but your non-familiarity with it.
DoubleClick is now part of Google and DoubleClick has a terrible record with promises and privacy. In the 1990s, DoubleClick said that they wouldn't associate off-line profiles with on-line profiles. They lied.

DoubleClick and Google were very prolific with webbugs before their merger. (The latter is in the form of Google Analytics.) They're probably the most prolific now that they're combined. And they wouldn't do it unless they thought that the data was valuable.
Ask YC: How do I send incoming email to a PHP script?
I've never dealt with email servers so don't quite know where to begin. All I'm looking to do is send incoming emails to a PHP script that can then parse the message and take action based on the contents. I've got a box running FC and it looks like the default mail server is postfix. Is there a simple way to get this going? I'm worried about fiddling too much on my own as the server hosts a few dozen moderate traffic sites. Thanks!
They could make more money if they offered fantasy rides, like a steampunk themed adventure. It's all right there. . . .
In Web 3.0, search will be better! And you'll be able to find restaurants more easily! Did I mention that you'll be able to find restaurants more easily -- from a cell phone!?

Let's actually get some good ideas before we declare another "new" era of the web.
Compiz Fusion On Mandriva One 2008.1 Spring (GNOME/NVIDIA)
In the postfix configuration, enable allow_mail_to_commands ( http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html ). In a Unix account home directory, create a .forward file which begins with a pipe symbol and names your script: |./my_mail_stub.php

For each message sent to the account, postfix will run your script. Your script can obtain the raw message from stdin.

You'll be pleased to know that the principle for sendmail and qmail configuration is broadly similar and shouldn't require any changes to your script.
lol - I love that, when I print that, it prints off as 16 blank pages. Woohoo!
I was recently talking to some VC's and asked what they thought of my one-page business plan concept. (We're not sending it out to VC's yet.) They loved the idea though. They also said that they believe that a well crafted business plan should be less than 9 pages.

They also distinguished between an operational plan and a business plan, saying most combine them. The "how" you are going to accomplish your goals can be in a separate document for later.

Here is more info on the one-page approach:
http://www.mystealthstartup.com/2008/04/15/a-different-appro...

Here is what we used to model our business plan from:
http://www.ftpress.com/articles/article.aspx?p=385536
"The architecture uses two thread pools: one to run queries and one to get record values. Applications must carefully tune the number of threads in each pool so the queries to overwhelm the gets. Using a query thread pool with 2 threads and a get thread pool with 32 threads it was possible to perform 300 TPS on a small EC2 instances. "

This seems horrible design to me. Surely it must be possible to make it asynchronous and event driven - getting rid of the need for threads?
Try to print it from the actual PDF file rather than from Scribd.com. You can get the PDF file from the URL:

http://www.kauffman.org/pdf/Education_Tech_Ent_042908.pdf
Three reasons to use IntenseDebate
Nope. NL is a much more complex game than limit. This is covered fairly well in the U-of-A literature. Also some of the two plus two NL books describe why NL is more complex.

Just because there is a simple strategy (shortstacking push/fold) that can be applied successfully against weak players, that doesn't mean that NL is a simpler game.

When you are trying to model the game there is a lot more to consider in NL. In Limit at each point in a hand and at each future point in a hand there are only limited actions that your opponent can take - raise, call, check, fold. In NL they can do any of these actions but also for any amount - push, raise pot, raise 1/2 pot etc. So the problem space for NL is much larger than for Limit. Bluffing is a much bigger part of NL and bluffing is hard to model.

Playing profitable limit poker is a fairly mechanical, mathematical process. You can't force people out of a hand with a big bet. It basically boils down to betting when you're probably ahead, folding when you're probably behind and drawing when the pot odds are favorable.

The U of A bots can play limit reasonably successfully against decent players. A decent player can easily beat their bots at NL.

Building a bot that can profit at the microstakes tables might be easier for NL than limit because you can employ a push/fold short stacking strategy like you describe. But building a bot that can survive against better players would be much harder for NL than Limit.
The Extreme version will offer thrill-seekers a hydrogen-filled zeppelin under fire by anti-aircraft flak guns! :)
About 15 years ago there was a similar scheme in London, UK. It was quite surreal to see an airship moving slowly along the horizon from the east end of London to somewhere near the centre (I forget where it was).

It was cool but it just disappeared. Anyone know why?
Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit
What is the problem with threads? I keep hearing that they are so difficult to work with but yet people ar successfully building very high performance Java applications that take advantage of many CPU cores. Simply by using the proven patterns and concurrency abstractions available to them.
data: urls can store data :)
A lot of advertising isn't targeted towards getting you to buy things now, it's so that when you do go out and buy things, you'll recognize their product first and prefer it over the competitors that are also sitting on the shelves.

As a kid, I always wondered why companies bothered to run TV commercials. After all, you aren't likely to jump off the couch and buy a car this instant, no matter how much Ernie Boch tells you to. But a friend's mom explained that they don't care if you buy now: they advertise so that in a year or two, when you find yourself in need of a car, the first place that comes to mind will be Boch Toyota.

It's amazing how many people don't do any research on consumer purchases and instead rely on a simple recognition heuristic. Even people who should know better. The reason my startup's on GoDaddy is because when my cofounders bought the domain & rented the server (before I came on board), they just went with whatever they'd heard of.
Debt also makes a lot of sense for variable costs like servers, where you know roughly how much revenue you'll get per additional dollar investment.

Akamai financed most of their infrastructure with debt, which was a huge drag on the stock price in 2002-2004 when people thought they were going to go out of business, but since has paid off very nicely for stockholders.
73 Biggest Brains in Business.
There's a chapter about this in Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Websites...
I've read over the comments and I absolutely don't agree with those saying a business plan should not be a priority. If you do it right and spend a lot of effort on it from the start, it's not just a documentation for possible investors but becomes a set of guidelines for your company. It forces you to sit down and really analyze your product, market and the goals of your startup.

Personally I've read my fare share of literature on business plans but must say the book "The Definitive Business Plan" by Richard Stutely stands far above all. It's not written with a specific focus for a Web 2.0 firm but will give you a really clear overview of what you would want to include.

I hope I have been able to be of some help.

Best regards,

Eiso Kant
No. I am very excited about F8, especially after the Connect announcement.

Word is Mark Z in busy doing an outsourcing deal in India (anyone know anything about this :) )

http://kara.allthingsd.com/
Power wordpress plugins
power wordpress plugins and seo tips from a power wordpress user.
"""This seems horrible design to me. """

Have you actually read the code? I just did and there is barely any thread-related code in the example. It's mostly code to push and pop stuff from a queue.

Personally I would turn this into a little Java/AWS framework whose API is based on a high level queue object to abstract away the communication with SQS. Probably simply modelled after a java.util.concurrent.BlockingQueue and configurable through Spring so that it becomes a nice reusable component.

Then it gets totally simple and interacting with those (remote) queues will not be any different than with one kept in memory for example. Since it is all thread safe it will be a no-brainer to create a simple workflow where you take stuff from one queue and put it in another.

I seriously don't understand why people are so afraid of threads. All you need is a good and well tested abstraction for common patterns.

http://www.javaconcurrencyinpractice.com is probably a good start for Java people with the threads-are-evil mindset.

S.
here you go guys...

a small business opportunity. allow people to post their redacted business/operational plans for funded/non-funded entities.

allow people who are looking for live plans to be able to search through abstracts/text of the plans to get a feel for what's there... charge people something small, like $10/year for the rights to access/view x number of plans.

charge them something less if they post their own plans...

also, have the ability to have plans (anonymously) reviewed by given trusted people within the site...

to deal with someone's fear that a given idea might be "stolen" the actual idea portion of the doc can be left out... for the purpose of this site, it wouldn't be that important/critical...

thoughts/comments...

if you want to build something like this, let me know.. i'd probably be willing to personally throw a few grand into something like this....

-bruce
caliventures@yahoo.com
Fred Wilson FTW.
State of Merb on road to 1.0: the good, the bad and the ugly.