skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question of waste byproducts is a good one, and I haven't seen it addressed anywhere.

Calling the machine 'magical' (with scare-quotes) is disingenuous though. Any revolutionary technology could be described that way. As the saying goes, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The proof is in the pudding.

(Ok, enough pithy quotations for today.)
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I think the reality is somewhere in between the excitable article and the downbeat comment; being able to shoot more cheaply is nice and all, but still does not mean indie filmmakers will be any more welcomed into theaters (many of which still require prints anyway).

Much more interesting than the improvements in price/quality of digital filmmaking is the possibilites of film distribution on the net. It isn't happening as quickly as I'd hoped, but as bandwidth gets cheaper and faster, and televisions get more connected to the net, I'm expecting the film industry to change quite dramatically. The emergence of cheap digital filmmaking and web-based distribution networks will be similar to the recent change in dynamic of web startups. And the longer the big studios avoid exploiting this model, the more chances it has to be seized by independent filmmakers (and startups ;).
Syncplicity launches beta (Dropbox competitor)
It's just you. I would love to be asked that during an interview. At this point in my life I want to "aggressively grow my skill set". I DON'T want to be a CEO. If that guy asked me the question, and we decide that he couldn't help me, we'd shake hands and part company. And we'd both be much happier for it.
is anyone on here hacking on cuda right now? I have an idea i want to test out but i don't know anyone who has a clue about working in a massively parallel environment... would love to hear from a hacker who does.
What is Amazon's strategy regarding digital media sales? Their MP3 store is built around open standards, but Unbox video is tightly DRMed and doesn't even run on Macs, and their Kindle books only work on a single, closed device. Is this all purely tactical based on the individual markets? Do they have a long-term vision for how digital media ought to work?
Well I think the point is that it is small enough that you can place the purifier on the other end of the pipe (in the home) and so what contaminates the water on its way there isn't as much a problem. But then again like you said, even at $1000 it's more than an individual living there will afford. Maybe they will institute some sort of program where people can donate purifiers to villages?
I find that Amazon is getting better all the time. Eg. the recommendation system is like "magic" - the books it recommends are actually highly relevant to me.
Targeting Java Developers Microsoft Launches Visual J# .NET
"There is a non-linear reduction in risk that takes place with adoption of a service."
Have you looked at buying Heroku?
Spam makes its way into anything (search engines, social networks, blogs, twitter, you name it). In essence it's just low-quality advertising at an extremely low cost. Whatever makes it possible for people to communicate cheaply also enables spam.

A "better" mail protocol would still have to be free, or very cheap. Snail mail is not free and you still get junk mail.
Continuations used to be used more on news.yc but it was trivial to flush the cache by making a few requests from a single client causing everyone's sessions to be hosed. That causes a switch to URL parameters for lots of things; why not all things? It's a fundamentally flawed model that I've never seen pg defend. It's certainly not scalable. Either the server stores info for all N clients, which fails for large N, or you give each client their own piece of info to store.
Thanks for your suggestion, man. I gave it some thought and ended up on the front page of Reddit: http://reddit.com/info/6fusw/comments/
Interestingly though my college professors were talking about Internet2 and they seem to think the problem is too much anonymity; they want the US government to be able to track down any communications, you know, to catch "teh terrists"

Edit: Not saying that's what internet2 is for, just what my CS professors were speculating it needs to do.
I'd love to know how he considers an investment when it is brought to him and if/how he seeks out his investments.

Also, where does he believe e-commerce is going? Mobile? Why?
Hacker meetup #2 for UK based hackers (London, this Friday)
After this thread on news.yc (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79164) we hosted a meetup in London for UK based hackers. Around 40 people came along including one from as far as Italy. The Hypernumbers guys kindly donated a projector so we had some short demos and then went out for a meal.

There was a lot of enthusiasm to turn it into a regular monthly event and we've finally got round to setting that up - the next at 7pm this Friday (April 18th). Everyone who came last time already knows about it but I put this up here for any new members of this community.

If you'd like to come along just drop me an email [ian at songkick] or sign up to the Facebook group or Groupspaces group (Groupspaces is created by one of the hackers who came to the meetup so we're testing it for them).

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6677098162

http://groupspaces.com/ukhackers/join/

The goal is for hackers to meet up and discuss cool projects and get feedback on ideas - much like the atmosphere at a YC dinner. It's not focused on general entrepreneurship/business/VC stuff - for that there are already some great meetups e.g. Open Coffee.

Hope to see a few new faces on Friday.
Facebook templates made easy with Rails 2.0 custom MIME types
Job Enrichment: how to make a job un-boring
I disagree completely. If you look at the facts on what websites that are being used on iPhone the vast majority of sites are mobile websites or sites designed specifically for the iPhone - not normal webpages.

Mobile web is not WML

Mobile web = XHTML

I work for Heysan and we've been seeing a tremendous growth in the last 6 months. Mobile web is for more than 100 million people in the world the main way to experience the internet. In a year or two there will be more people having their first experience of the internet on a phone than on a computer
He really appears to have relished flexing his legal muscle in crafting his response. His rebuttal only improves with each paragraph. Nice for a lawyer to be one of the good guys...
Let's take http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg as an example. When I visit that I get dealt 75 fnids. They're different every time I go to the page. So I'm using a new 75 slots in the cache every time. It's little overhead in CPU or bandwidth for me to get the page but it has a big impact on the other users of the system if I flush their fnids out of the cache before they try and use them. I first pointed this out at the end of April 2007. In response, pg cut the number of fnids used, but they've crept back in.

The technique's flawed, trivial to exploit, and should be dumped.
How To Fix Venture Capital, Part 2: The Opening is As Important as the Endgame
What Aristotle could teach your business
Holy schnitzel, it's that Okasaki? Consider me subscrib'd!
What sites do you see as being mostly applicable to PCs?
For me, it's more a question of responsibility. If everyone is anonymous, there is no accountability. There's no reason to be responsible. No reason to be well behaved.

On an anonymous internet, you can just attack websites you don't like, post incorrect claims, abuse people and be a complete pain in the neck.
"Plus most of them are money guys rather than technical guys, so they don't understand what the startups they're investing in do."

Yes, and if they were technical guys, they would for the most part be certain that the startup is doing something stupid. Take for example the typical techno-geek reaction to hotmail or the iPod.
Actually Paul Graham's "Why Nerds are Unpopular" is closer in topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
I'm not saying that Apple doesn't have a case, but I think the approach you're suggesting is a bit dicey.

If Apple were afraid of having cheap RAM used in their systems, why would they allow end-user-upgradable RAM compatible with third-party standards in their own systems?

Another possible line of attack is that the retail versions of OS X are only upgrade versions for systems that already have OS X, so they don't cover the real cost of the produce.
It looks like written by Prototype fans! :)
I think that these libraries speed is not as important as usability and maintainability. If you need high performance for some special issue, you better write it from scratch.
I care more about development speed and jQuery goes faster.
If I'm the Psystar marketing department, I'm trying to make hay while the sun is shining. If they can't pursue the Mac thing, they have a small window to try to shift interest to something they can actually sell.
That aspect gets talked about a lot (both in and out of the book), but the truth is he already had a business with paying customers, and he streamlined it so he could run it easily instead of trying to maximize revenue. A rarely mentioned part of the book is where he gives you steps to build a business like his. First, you have to do a lot of work, including doing everything from answering phones, writing marketing copy, packaging every item, etc by yourself. Only when you have a product, traction, customers, and experience managing them, can you write the scripts, evaluate vendors and outsourcers, and streamline the business so that a customer can buy, receive, return, or complain about your product without ever encountering you.

Despite the popular misconception, Tim Ferriss says you still have to build your own business. But if you pick the right business, you can put it on autopilot once it's built. But that aspect isn't controversial enough to get a lot of press.

Did you read the book or just hear about it?
Launch Applications from Terminal in OS X
Rubinius for the Layman, Part 2: How Rubinius is Friendly
Ha! At first glance, I thought he was talking about something more like this: http://bloggoergosum.us/2006/11/20/engineers-dont-get-capita...
I think most people make this mistake. They start with themselves when they think of use cases.

This is when most people use the mobile web:

- At home

- In school

- On public transportation
What does he know now that he didn't know when he started Amazon? What would he now do differently?
60 More AJAX- and Javascript Solutions For Professional Coding
Maybe I really am the absolute odd one out then. I use my iPhone to browse the web. Why would I want to view a 'mobile' stripped down version, when I can view exactly the same sites I view on my PC? The screen is big enough, zoom+scroll work stupidly well...

I agree that more and more people will view the web on a phone, but I disagree about them going to sites built specifically for mobiles.
No, it doesn't. The cheatsheet doesn't allow !^ and !$ to be constructed. The closest would be !!:^ and !!:$.
The VC was "in another realm", so presumably he doesn't fund startups like this one at all.
On an anonymous internet, you can just attack websites you don't like, post incorrect claims, abuse people and be a complete pain in the neck.

You can do that already. On the other hand, if you have anonymity you can still choose to give yourself a name and identity. With strong identity you can even prove that it's you. Or at least that it's the same person each time.

There are lots of good reasons to allow anonymity.
Actually, my impression is that restricting third-party software isn't illegal in general either. If Tivo cuts a deal for Samsung to make Samsung-branded Tivo boxes, Tivo can still include a clause in the contract that stops them from loading additional software on board, right?

The issue was that Microsoft did in fact have a de facto monopoly (>90% share) on operating systems, and was leveraging that monopoly for control of other markets. EULAs have always been a dicey legal area, but no sensible judge is going to throw out Apple's EULA simply on the grounds that they have a monopoly when they are obviously the (still distant) #2 player in the OS market.
"What do you look for in entrepreneurs? First and foremost, they need to be magnets. For talent. For money. For attention. And for much more."

Do you guys think that hackers actually have this "magnet" quality?
Open break-up letter to rails
Wow. Great post. Although the concept itself isn't too novel it's presented very well and makes this a very quick read.

The anecdote is interesting as well and helps prove the point.
If you're the Pystar marketing department, you probably have very little time to build that strategy while also screwing motherboards into ATX cases and driving boxes over to the FedEx shipping office.
This is not an affiliate link (someone complained incorrectly about this on another post from this blog - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164120). He just read the book and liked it.

Other bigger bloggers (Coding Horror and Raganwald are two big examples) DO use Amazon affiliate links, all the time. And you know what? 90% of books I've read in the last couple years are books I knew about because someone wrote about it on their blog.

If he talked about a book and didn't link to it, someone would complain about him being lazy. So if it's courteous to link, why not throw in an affiliate link? It doesn't change anything for the reader.
Am I missing the other legal barrier Cisco has to prevent people from adapting IOS to aftermarket hardware, though, or is that just EULA? I note with amusement that Cisco has a much more constrictive and anticompetitive monopoly in switching than Microsoft ever had.
I guess if it's necessary to get your startup off the ground it could be a good idea. It's just that I see a lot of people looking at the internet just as a source of money, rather than thinking how can I improve this or add something of value. Having said this I do think some of his techniques could be useful and the book was quite interesting.
Well it depends on how it's asked. You definitely want to get a feel for it first and then tailor the question to the candidate.

Even if you are put off by it at first, if it was asked out of genuine interest I'm sure you'd feel positive about it being asked.
Cool, Snaptalent crew will be there as well. Come meet some more UK YC startups... I know WebMynd are also in town.
Interesting question. I think the "lack of identity" to which you refer has greatly contributed to the rise of Telecom and Internet giants. Also has it likely played a significant part in the erosion of Net Neutrality. There are still far too many corporate-centric entities which control or wish to control and influence what is or becomes popular or noted in traditional media outlets (television, radio, cable, etc.)

Traditional media relies upon what marketing people call "push advertising" where people are encouraged to take what is being said in the commercial/infomercial as fact. The Internet, however, is literally able to generate its own "pull advertising" as it enables people to participate and research between or among alternatives. Think of the Mac VS PC VS Linux spoofs. Apple spends zillions of dollars in advertising (which is one of the reasons their products are so expensive!) and many PC manufacturers do, too ("Dude! You're getting a Dell). But Linux doesn't have any advertising, really . . . (Novell does not count), but that hasn't prevented it from gaining momentous adoption in recent years.

But anyway, before going too off-topic:

Maybe it's not that strong identity should have been "included in the first place," but that the infrastructure could have been planned better to include room for a more equitable exchange among "providers" and "producers" and "consumers". After all, it's not like the ISPs or Internet giants are actually the entities _producing_ most of what is interesting or useful on the web. Of course, those touting themselves as "providers" would like most people to equate them and pay them as "producers" and such.
Book recommendations are a good thing. Don't let grumpy people scare you.

Btw, you can get an affiliate ID (something like stealthstartup-20) from Amazon and only they would have to know who you are.
It's maybe time for Craigslist to grow up and start charging fees, at least for big-ticket items. Their anti-profit approach to business is annoying because it only moves the profits from where it could go (craigslist) to another place (all the people selling things). If you think greed is evil, shifting it around in a zero-sum way isn't doing any good.
There is a tradeoff though--accepting a smaller probability of success increases the variance, which deterministically drags down the returns. To see the effect, extend your argument to the extreme case of very very early valuations. You have $100k to invest, and you invest $1 each in 100k companies, each with a 1 in a billion chance of being a billion dollar company. Though your expected value is the same, at the end of the year, most likely you have no money left to invest for next year. The same effect holds in less extreme cases--if you increase your variance and lose 50% of your money, you can't just make it back by having a 50% upswing the next year--you need a 100% return to recoup it. So variance matters.
Some sort of stateless method of interacting with a site helps alleviate the session problem. That's one of the touted advantages of REST architecture.
Most people aren't laser-focused they're on Amazon - it's more like browsing in a store. Why do you think shopping is considered an activity instead of a task? If they're doing micro-testing, I can guarantee they only keep the features that increase browsing, time spent, dollars spent, etc. If it hits the mainstream, it's because testing proved it increased the metrics Amazon cares about.
It depends on the market, locally, the owner of a major theater chain has adopted digital projection on something like 35+ screens in the greater metro area and has really been open to some of the smaller indie films. Many times it takes a lot of vision on the part of the theatre owner/manager because indies can really depend on the "long tail" when it comes to theatre audiences. They don't have the money to advertise so you run the film for a week and hope those people tell their friends and they tell there friends and pretty soon you start to see some steady returns as the word gets out, but this takes some guts and patience from the owners.

Net distribution will be a great avenue as well, given how reticent the studios have been to band together and provide "one" place where people can go to rent/buy films online.
Not sure about Unbox, but Kindle is just doing what the iTunes did - start out locked so that media owners agree to get on board, then once they're addicted to your revenue stream, then you can pry some openness out of them if you want (or any other concession for that matter).
Awesome.

Is anyone having any luck with the skype out? It seems like I can call over skype no problem but my skype out isn't working.

(Plus it sits at the subscribe screen for a few minutes whats up with that?)
Best 'open' tip, use '-a' to specify the application, even without a file or location (e.g. 'open -a Firefox').
I'm hopeful that net distribution will eventually feed-back into theatres - so films can build small followings online before getting theatre runs.
Ironic that you mention Fred Wilson, since he (or his doppelganger) apparently read drafts of PG's essay (and hence presumably influenced it somewhat).
ask him when I can buy a kindle without a ridiculous waiting list.
Cameras are to indie film makers as laptops are to web startups: important to have but not their biggest concern. Pro cameras can always be borrowed or rented if need be. The bigger concerns for an indie film are paying for a lighting crew, a sound crew, line production, then months of editing and post production, and then trying to get anyone at all to distribute the finished product. Nice camera? Yes. Game changing? No.
Fair enough Paul, but I think we've already proved your as much an exception to the rule as Google is. :-)

My point was that "most people" would have considered Google a bad investment prior to adwords. Given the response, it's obvious I should have been more clear.
Have you tried the Firefox extensions?

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3247
Not so much. The key issue is whether people will somehow pay for apps, and by extension FB itself. That remains to be seen.
given that apple's sales are up I'm notebooks, I would argue that an increasing number of people find the quality to be worth the price difference.
I actually disagree with a couple points there.

I think it's not true that entrepreneurs are "born". I come from a culture (middle-class India) where entrepreneurship is so unthinkable, it's almost a taboo. And yet, I think I am very much passionate about being a startup founder now. Paul's essays have been a big help in making me re-think quite a few things about life. So, I'd say that people can learn to be entrepreneurs as well.

Magnet for money, attention: I don't think these are the primary qualities to focus on. They are usually a by-product of intense passion for the product and good taste / judgement.
Please ask him about his (all time favorite) reading list and report back ;)
The charmed dot-com life of Jeff Bezos
Bootstrappers guide for Denmark
Fair point, but with this kind of opportunity, I'd let the fulfillment fall behind for a couple of days to pursue it.
British Invasion: BBC on the Wii
Fact that he was a student of Andrew S. Tanenbaum might have made this decision a lot easier.
Aaron Swartz's newest project: watchdog.net
What is Amazon's strategy around an offering (EC2/S3) that wouldn't be subject to the PATRIOT act for those of us who aren't American? (ie the rest of the world)

One of the biggest gaps to me using AWS as a Canadian is that I would face a firestorm of crap for storing personal information that could be mined at the whims of US services.

Any plans to open/license S3 to someone in Canada or the EU?
Good question. I don't follow Cisco closely, but it may simply be the EULA (and the team of legal attack dogs behind it).

It may also be the implicit expectation that computers are made to run other software while switches are closed-case boxes engineered as a single unit. This is pretty stupid to most engineers, because there isn't much technical difference between the two, but sometimes legal things work that way. It's also possible that Cisco has an antitrust suit in it's future (but probably only under a Democratic administration).
Heck, I'm only 24 and I was just noticing that the other day. I remember when I was in second grade, and the year switched, I put the wrong year for months. Now the turning of a year just doesn't seem that momentous anymore.

I wonder why time seems to accelerate as we age. Is it because we are more busy, and hence spend less time being bored? Or is it somehow related to the fact that any given year's memories are an ever shrinking percentage of my overall memory store? If I were rich I would study people's perception of time, because it seems so non-linear.
Rails Monitor: pings and restarts frozen Mongrel instances automatically.
I really like this point. I use Amazon a fair bit, but I wish there was a way for me to turn off half the stuff on their page. Recommendations, "users also bought" etc are not things I care about 90% of the time.