skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
bingo... I've talked to Yehuda and he does know what he's talking about. Given that he works for Bell Labs, it might be within the realm of possibility that he actually tried using movie metadata.

If those students have actually come close to BellKor's score, they should submit their qualifying set - Yehuda already has a 9.05% improvement.
Surely that's in Beta?
'Hello World' for Startup Wannabes (like me)
An oldie but a goodie.

Back when I started working on Unix (early 90s), the only editor on the lab machines vi. The learning curve was horrible, but after that I never was able to use an editor for human beings again.

Nowadays, when I'm trapped in a Notepad derivative, it's all jjjjjjkkkkkkwwwww for the love of God Montesor, give me back my dot!!!
Ask YC: any good Web based DB Client?
I am writing a querybuilder to QUICKEN developer work. Below is what I set as plan. Let me know if you know any such tools.

Initial Agenda:
1) Create Table/View

option to add primary/foreign key
Create indexes on columns
Null/Not Null/Check constraints for each column

2) Insert / Update / Delete / Select
where condition
"and" operator
"order by"/"group by"/"having" clauses

Till Now:

Fetching metadata was easy and I have just added JavaScript sugar code using jquery to put things into place.
I am able to get proper sql for around 60% CRUD cases which we require in day to day DB operations. Lets see whether this works out well or not.

What next?

I am thinking of make this work across databases db2/oracle/mysql.

Advantages:

For users who just need simple operations with tables can use this thin web client. For small firms can
simply get rid of the license fees for most of the developer machines.

Things to look:

Need to search whether such commercial applications are available

Ideas:

Write DSL ( on top of/ using ) JQuery for commmon db operations; which can return me back correct sql.
Count me as another who considers Pittsburgh as home away from home. Would probably move back there for the right opportunity.
Guatemala as Muse and Base for a Writer
The first step is admitting you have a problem. You're on the right track.
Or genius.
Startups pay attention: Announcing Ruby on Crack
I think someone takes themselves way too seriously.
works just fine on my azerty keyboard....
I propose we assemble a committee and have several meetings to formalize the design of the perfect april fools joke.

Any naysayers will be taken out back and shot.
That is both cruel AND unusual punishment. You can't have both.
Yeah, I've used gears (or tried to) with Google Reader many times since its inception. It doesn't work. It is probably the worst product they've yet invented.
COO of TBWA Manila Interactive attended the 2007 Advertising Week in New York
In the flickr set, you see a shelf of autographed baseballs and Dot-com boom books. Including one pretty awful, discount-rack one (which I've read) called 'Burn Rate'. I'm pretty sure it was just there to make the collection complete.
http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/wearefamily/index.php

Was lucky enough to see this set in person.
The answer to all of your questions is "No, but that's irrelevant". If you had made your points in the form of statements and not questions, you'd see that they don't actually contradict what I said. As one poster has pointed out, there's no reason to doubt != it is unquestionable that. Likewise, ad hominem can never be valid != biases are never relevant; these accusations of bias are unfounded != PG is completely free from bias; happiness serves an evolutionary purpose != happiness is just a reward (whatever that means).

As for the last one, I did back it up. I refuted a central premise of the author, that happiness is evolutionarily useless.
Ah, looks like I was. Wrong window opened (I'm the one that moved all of the old content over and started the new 2008 entries...you'd think I'd know what I'm looking at).
Yes, I think that's appropriate.
No Plan, No Capital, No Model...No Problem: Interview with 5 Successful Startup Founders [video]
Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corp.
isnt this something like instablogs ..http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/18/instablogs-negotiating-...

everyone blogs about successes, but blogs about failures are hard to come by, and that too straight from the horses mouth.

.. best of luck for your next venture
Zoho did it a month before: http://blogs.zoho.com/writer/zoho-writer-extends-mobile-supp...
StartupWear: VC Wear style torso covering devices for entrepreneurs
Microsoft Launches Self Promotional Video Site Built On Silverlight
Google Announces Availability Of Message Discovery
Is this an April Fool? In either case, here's some suggested searches: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/chachacom-ge...
Great memorabilia. I have a collection of autographed books (mostly from authors who spoke at Kepler's) including: TAOCP, Generation X, The Cuckoo's Egg, American Psycho, Hackers and Painters...
rucursion is always funny, u fag!!1
The most instructive thing about this story is to understand how Ariba made money and its CFO rich. Ariba was in the B2B business, specifically doing something very boring: automating procurement inside large companies replacing paper procedures with computer systems.

One good way to make a fortune is by solving the mundane problems of the wealthy (by they people or companies).
"Besides - where are the chicks?"

For that you may have to check a Flickr set which doesn't belong to an employee's girlfriend. All things considered, the ratio was surprisingly high :)
You may also enjoy http://www.limerickdb.com/?77 and http://www.limerickdb.com/?103
re: newbies, must be gmail's fault for adopting vi keybindings. e.g. j to navigate down and k to navigate up (in "list view").
"smart" and "has good fashion sense" pull in different directions. one requires caring about interesting stuff, the other about pleasing people and fitting in.
That or just be the first to proclaim your product works on this new fangled thingy called the Internets and ride the ipo wave to the top while cashing out before the crash. But your way sounds nifty too I guess.
Marissa Mayer? Carly Fiorina? (if you're over 45..)
> about the longest 'combos' you make are action-move combos,

And then you use :wq as your finishing move!
Google = Microsoft: same fights, same tactics, different Monopoly
Google "intercosmos domain sniping". I only knows what the Internets tells me, and the Internets have spoken about Intercosmos/DirectNIC.

If you find a good one, let me know, as we provide automatic registration in our product, but we're not ecstatic about only supporting one registrar (Register.com) that is known mainly for being expensive...they are seemingly honest and their tools are fine, but even reseller pricing is too high (and their retail prices are laughably high).
ok, maybe should I have clarified: most people (women too), in SF just dress like they just rolled out of bed. (exception, those that work for financial companies downtown SF). It is part of the culture around here. Comfortable but not visually appealing. And yes, you can be smart and dress cute at the same time.

But at the end it boil down to numbers. I was browsing around linked in the profile of some of the area companies, (now linked in has basic stats for all companies), and everwyere the ratio was ranging from 70% male, 30% female, to 80%/20% male female ratio. So, if you are girl in the valley, you don't have to do much to get attention. In NYC, it is the oposite, lot's of girls in the city, hence more competition, so they have to try harder to get attention. That's why you have Sex and the City, Lipstick Jungle, 30 Rock, shows, all revolving around 30+ yo females that can't find a man good enough for them.

So, that party just looked like the average tech party around here. (the worst are the digg parties).
<<This supposed refutation can itself be disproven by reductio ad absurdum, because it could be applied to any explanation of our inclinations based on how we evolved.>>

Which incidentally means that all such arguments are fundamentally flawed, the classic is/ought dilemma.

Pg's argument moves from 'is' to 'ought' without explanation or justification.
I don't know what it is about this guy, but I hate his style.

Douglas Crockford is much better:

http://javascript.crockford.com/

http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/24/video-crockford-tjpl/
Try opening up a python interpreter and running help(int). You'll notice something surprising -- there are over 50 methods available for ints. This ranges from all the basic math operations, shifts, boolean operations, and high precision math functions.

The actual data itself is small, either 4 or 8 bytes, depending on the architecture. Now, depending on the language php was written in (I believe it is C), the other ~60 bytes is probably has metadata associated with all the operations.
You haven't addressed Pg's unstated presuppositions. His 'telos' is that the programmers should be happy -- although only circumstantial evidence is presented it is likely he is correct that large organizations undermine such.

Of course, persons can sacrifice for the greater good or a greater civilizational vision. This produces societies, not tribes. Your space program example serves to illustrate what is possible in the context of such a vision.
JQuery adds a touch of class to it's act
One of today's (1st April) better web posts - it actually has some value as well as humour
Right. Even if Pg decisively proved that an optimal group size is c. 10, this has nothing to do with leadership within the group. Groups of lions and monkeys also have 'bosses', us. selected through battle.

Perhaps Pg should go mano-a-mano with Zed Shaw.
I believe the author, who is self-important, is calling me a dilettante (clearly he would say that, he's a writer). He's wrong. He thinks people shouldn't argue. His main point seems to be that people will be happier if they agree with him, but I'm enjoying this post anyway. And he said, "people are getting angrier". Jerk.
New York for pretty girls?

Clearly you've never been to the South. ;-)
Kinda misleading title. It's not the int, it's the int in an array. Or, more precisely, in a hash table, since PHP doesn't actually have strictly-numerically-indexed vectors.
Posted 4/01/2008 12:01:00 AM...
Implementing cryptography isn't that hard, the algorithms are fairly simple. You can write RSA for example in a couple of hours if you already have BigInt implemented. The hard part is the math behind the algorithms that makes them work and be secure, but thats what we have Schneier for...

Although I wouldn't recommend implementing them yourself, unless you have a very good reason for it, as Linus once said "Given sufficient eyeballs all bugs are shallow", in Cryptography that is doubly important.
After 38 years, a new type of memory to hit market
The fact that you don't find it interesting does not mean it isn't nor that smart could like it.

I don't know if I'm as smart as you, but I think that fashion is quite interesting. I don't follow it at all, (I don't like to spend money on clothes that will be outdated in 3 months), but I like to see what the trends on the street are, questioning them and if I like some idea taking it. Fashion is a very dynamic, always changing, and quite unpredictable concept.

What do you demand on something to be interesting?
It depends on the effort/prospects ratio.
studying fashion is reasonably interesting but that's different than having fashion sense, which means taking the time to look pretty so shallow guys will like you.
These are very good tips. I've flown _a lot_ (so much that I have my frequent flyer status for life on at least one airline) and I think that being pleasant, having phone numbers to hand, knowing schedules, hand luggage only and taking action when things go wrong are all really important. Also, I prefer to check in online and print my boarding pass (that also gives you the opportunity to hack the boarding pass and go through the first class security line).
India Start-Ups Look to Home
This service is a very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
Bringing parallel programming to the engineering masses
Go for it, it is even more fun that way.
Yes, it's an April's Fools joke. How tedious...
Domain Registry of America Scamming Non-Profits and Charities
Not only shallow guys.

I like to think of myself s not being shallow, and I have to admit that I, often subconsciously, judge people by how they look. And I think everybody else does as too.

If your goal is to interact with other people and get something out of it (everything from investor meetings to dating) you need to think about your looks to some degree. I'm not saying you should wear Armani suits, just that you need to fit in.

Think of it as hacking - just with people instead. How do you tweak the system to get the most out of it.
One cannot gain entrecard credits from visitors that do not participate at entrecard,also to obtain this credit onother user has to click an button to "drop" a credit so it is useless to spam here to get more entrecard credits, that can only be done through entrecard itself, the reason why some might submit their posts here is not to spam but to get some quality traffic from another source, just like digg and stumbleupon,
haha, not too long I hope!
The only problem I see with vim is that today I write everything online. In textboxes like the one I use right now to type this text. Maybe we need a firefox extension, that blows up a textarea fullscreen and edits it with vim?
I switched to vim for a few reasons:

- I didn't want to get trapped into being comfortable with some editor that I would later not have access to. vim will always be there on any unix box

- there are no showstoppers for vim. Every other editor is great because it has x and y, but the lack of z is annoying. with vim, you can configure it to do almost anything with macros in your .vimrc

- it was slow to get going at first, but now I find using vim you can edit files much faster than using the mouse.
If JavaScript Were Such A Great Language ...
hack the boarding pass??, that sounds interesting.. could you tell us what do you exactly mean ?
really grok source control, merging / it's not a windows share with revisions on top of it.
NZ Teenager guilty of million-dollar hacking campaign
Mozilla Turns 10 Today
Why does this have 8 points? It doesn't answer how to get profiled, and it says nothing of substance.
The Semantic Web goes thin
The Transition to a Mac-ready Workforce
Try Mozex.
Sharing My Location Just the Way I Like It
A cellphone with no flips, no folds - just a very low price
OK. I was at a start-up that failed called "Optimal Networks". Optimal was sold for pennies on the dollar to CompuWare (who, to this day, continues to sell the Optimal product line and make a bunch of money from it).

There are many reasons Optimal failed (a dysfunctional founding team, changing the CEO three times, impatient VCs watching the .com boom pass Optimal by).

But the most important lesson I learnt was: start your own damn company. It's much more fun to be a founder than one of the first employees.
You don't have to go on the plane as soon as they start boarding. Definitely don't line up. You have a reserved seat, you can sit and use the internet for an extra 15 minutes until they make the last call. If you're the last one on the plane, you also won't have to fight with other people to use the overhead compartments.
Build Your Very Own Google Airplane
I hardly recommend using PHP for number crunching to all of my competitors.
I agree with rms...not too much in terms of startups, but we do have 2 things going for us:

1) College students, lots of them. That means that you can find cheap smart labor if you're looking to hire (Carnegie Mellon has lots of coders). A noteworthy number of startups/startupy ideas came out of CMU students, including buxfer, flexcar, and recaptcha.

2) Everything here is really really cheap. The cost of living is 84% the national average, vs. 182% for Silicon Valley. A lot easier to bootstrap something.

Full disclosure: I'm only in Pittsburgh for school and intend to move to SV ASAP. Weather's much nicer there, and I go where the work is.
vim7 especially is great with the new tab features and omni-complete
Anil Dash: Your April Fool's Day Joke Continues to Suck
nice comparison
Getting TechCrunched should be a means to an end. Launching your startup in a certain way should not be a means to getting TechCrunched.
Adobe AIR alpha unleashed for Linux
it was indeed his dad's funeral
I've talked about this before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104969
How To Install The Openbravo ERP On Debian Etch
The bug report was submitted yesterday, however.
>You would have a computer ask people to describe the side effects they've been experiencing, and ask probing questions to evaluate how serious those side effects really are, and which of their two dozen drugs might be causing them, and which drugs might be usefully discontinued or substituted and which might not?

The only thing here I actually would want the pharmacist to do is ask the questions.

The rest of it should be done by computer, and in fact some of it already is (checking for drug interactions). People sometimes forget stuff, whereas a database doesn't. People are sometimes mislead by experience/spurious correlations, while a properly designed computer system won't be.

So I would, in fact, assign important decisions about my medical care to a java program written by a team of doctors, pharmacists and computer geeks.
I didn't think they put it out on March 31st at the time. But in retrospect, it was april fools in Australia while I was reading it on march 31st in the US. I deserved my down votes.
Hasblog, part 2: Html Flavour
...where simple HTML flavours (by blosxom terminology) are implemented. Also can be viewed as a primer of GHC's Text.XHtml combinator library.
...where simple HTML flavours (by blosxom's terminology) are implemented. Also can be read as a brief intro to the Text.XHtml combinator library.
Refuting the proof of a central point rather than the central point itself must be considered DH6 in Paul Graham's hierarchy. Roth probably took that for granted. I certainly would. Otherwise I hereby claim P = NP and preemptively accuse anyone not accepting this of deliberate dishonesty and bad spirit and categorise their disagreement as "formally possibly up to DH5 but effectively DH1 at most".
Interesting perspective, I'm wondering if you're a "Gen Y'er" (or whatever they're calling that newfangled generation these days ;)

I ask because I started with PCs before the mouse was really commercialized. My first programs were on Commodore PETs and C64 and my PCjr. (Although I did later buy a mouse for the PCjr, I think it cost close to $200 at Babbages, had to save money for a while for that one...)

My long-winded point being that I "grew up" with a CLI. We edited our text files with edlin (and we liked it, dammit!!). Maybe the folks who didn't get started viewing the mouse as a primary interaction device feel more comfortable with vi, and never really missed the mouse interface.
A simple api would be nice.

An api to a user's comments or submitted threads would be handy. The output could simply be an RSS feed to make it serve two purposes, but JSON output would be especially nice.
Hacker News Firefox Extension
I was finding it a little hard to find when someone replied to a comment I made, or to quickly view if there were any new comments on a post I may have submitted.

So I made this little firefox extension to tell me when someone has replied to a comment I made, or posted a comment on a thread I submitted. A little YC icon will appear in your statusbar (ala Firebug) which will highlight whenever you have a new comment. Clicking opens a pane (again, similar to firebug) listing the comments with the ability to click to go straight to the page with the comment (and highlight the new comment if you so desire).

It can be grabbed here if anyone is interested:
http://wildstabmedia.com/hackernews

If you want the source to modify it to your own needs or add to it or whatever, just save the .xpi to disk and unzip it.

It was not meant to steal page views from HN, so it really is very simple, and amounts to pretty much just an rss feed to comments related to you. Some notes:

- it does not attempt to display comments in any nested hierarchical way

- column header colors are gimped on Windows (if anyone cares Ill try to fix that)

- the comment tree is currently a fixed height

- without an api, I resorted to a page-scrape of the fetched response, making it brittle (in the event HN changes layout). I made a feature request: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151926

it should work for ff 2 or 3, linux or windows
Ok, I'm glad that someone else agrees. After I read the "thing" I was sort of baffled that it said nothing. But, it did make me think of a question. If this were the case, "TechCrunch will only cover you if they covered you at launch," how would this affect a company releasing very often (with not a lot of features to start)? Would TechCrunch still cover the startup because of potential "promise" in the market that the startup is in?
Nice site.

One question - How do you handle the auto-creation of user-specified subdomains ? (I ask as I'd like to do something similar)

Do you run your own DNS or do you update records at your DNS provider ? (If the latter how do you automate that process ?)
/dev/afj08 - Store your April Fools URLs here
This is just meant to be a general collector for all the various April Fools gags. If history is any measure, most of them won't deserve their own topic, but I figure a collection of the URLs in one place would make perusing the list easier.

So... Comment away!
Ask PG: API for Hacker News?
Hi PG,

Are there any plans for a basic API for Hacker News? These functions will be useful:

1. List of recent/top stories (we can get this from the RSS feed though).

2. List of all users who upmodded a story.

3. All stories submitted by a user.

4. All stories upmodded by a user.

The response could be in JSON or any other format...

Arnav
I'll start with the yearly ThinkGeek entry, some cool ideas this year:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/

The Betamax to HD-DVD converter is brilliant.
To Open Source or Not
From the FAQ:
http://igoogleforyou.com/igoogleforyouhelp.html

# Is this an April Fool's Day joke?

No, this is an innovative Web 2.0 start-up.
listen to the expert on the high horse. dear me. stick to computers amichail. your love for a quarter of a century.
Satisfying and functional is often good and right, but in my personal system, it is sometimes not.

I could start cheating on my girlfriend pretty easily, but that would not be "good and right" to me, though it would arguably be satisfying and functional for me. Sometimes it seems satisfying and functional for me to punch people in the face. The problem with "satisfying and functional" = "good and right" is that both sides of that equation are highly complex, contextual, and subjective.
Virtualization startup creates $10k four-socket box out of thin air
Yes. I lived in southern VA for 5 years, and NC. There are pretty girls there, but unfortunately 80% of the people are just fat or obese. Plus, let's just say that smart girls tend to go to the big cities, and the one left behind, are ummm..... more of the local types, and probably less traveled and less culturaly open to new things, which are very important to me (as a foreigner). I know I am over-generalizing, but that is the trend.
Bastards, I only realized I got fooled at: "Later on, he also unfriended me."
At first I thought it was a search engine for finding virgins.