skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple has really executed the iTunes Music Store well. It's been less than a year since they overtook Amazon to become #3, and they're still growing fast. Movie rentals, the iPhone, and the Apple TV are all going to contribute to the stores continued growth.

What's even more interesting to me about these numbers is that Amazon has actually lost about 1% of the market since they introduced AmazonMP3.com. Amazon was probably the biggest threat to Apple, but the product they released was vastly inferior. The search on Amazon.com was much better at finding music than the one at AmazonMP3.com, for example.
The Great Recommender
If you're interested in some of the history behind the 64 bit Mac version, read this:

http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/04/02/rhapsody...
Can't wait for the Google Trends API.

Holiday sex searches skyrocket, news stories plummet: http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex%2C+porn&ctab=0&ge...

Ramadan? http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex%2C+woman&ctab=0&g... (note the Saudi news correlation)

Edit: No coding over Christmas: http://www.google.com/trends?q=html%2C+php%2C+javascript%2C+...
Your Facebook Profile Isn't Really "You"
Promising new nanotechnology for spinal cord injuries
Google Lays Off Double Click Employees who fail entrance interview process
I played that a lot while in high school. It actually has a lot of interesting and beautiful aspects. Strategies evolved a lot since Dewdney's first articles. I still plan to write a blog article about them one of these days.

There is also a newsgroup, rec.games.corewar - currently apparently being flooded by an overenthusiastic newbie, but I checked a couple of days ago, and many famous old-timers where still around.
Startup Idea:Barphone (A Cellphone with a Barcode Scanner that uploads online discount
Basically I want to create a cell phone that can scan Barcodes and automatically uploads you to Ebay or Tigerelectronics or Amazon
For Example
So if your at BEST BUY and you see USB for $35 at Best Buy and you scan the barcodes using your Barphone you are taken to one of the mentioned sites and are able to save $20 as well read comments from other consumers in realtime.
Would this be something the World would want?
I would need four timezone HQ in the U.S for midnight resynchronization, but would this be a disrupter for BEST BUY, WALMART, MACYS, ETC
EMAIL ME PLEASE
Aries Alvarez
alvin1inc@gmail.com
Microsoft Surface Commercial Launch
Technology Upgrades B-52
Yes and no. Not all medical research is created equal. The tobacco industry has done a lot of "research" that's not scientifically honest. Google news used to be my home page and once a week in the health section there was an article about coffee. My mom is a coffee junkie and she always talks about the latest coffee health story in the washington post. I'm not levying a formal accusation of foul play, I'm just saying that coffee articles get a disproportionate amount of play for their importance in human health.
Does anybody know what OCR software he used?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=eggs%2C+roses%2C+tree%2C+turk...

If you just look at the turkey trend you can see the difference between Thanksgiving (in the US) and Christmas (in the UK)

http://google.com/trends?q=turkey&geo=usa&sa=N
http://google.com/trends?q=turkey&geo=gbr&sa=N

But notice that Turkey is popular in the summer in the UK too. Could that be sun seeking holiday makers?

Another fun one is the Hajj (Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca)

http://google.com/trends?q=hajj&ctab=0&geo=all&d...

If you look carefully you can see the date slowly changing year on year because the Hajj is determined by a lunar calendar.
Me too:-) Although I've begun thinking about the feasibility of applying for next winter's cycle if I can round up someone suitable to work with. We've had it with Innsbruck, and going back to Italy may not be very feasible, so that leaves the US... and maybe a chance to apply for YC.
Couldn't you have told him how to do it?
58 Twitter Apps (and then some)
(1) Because of how much money coffee generates for its producers and (especially) retailers, I’d guess there are a lot of industry funds being slushed around for research and PR.

(2) Even so, it would be possible to account for far more articles about coffee than would be “proportional” to the magnitude of its health effects, simply because of how wildly popular it is, and its role as a modern ‘social icon’ of sorts.

Put (1) and (2) together and you get the media equivalent of a caffeine addiction.
8 Views On 2008 Presidential Campaign
Actually, I noticed pg was pretty grouchy about TechStars when they first appeared. Particularly in the way TechStars abused application numbers to try to appear on a level playing field with YC in the media...even though the startup community, in general, tends to take them somewhat less seriously (they haven't yet proven they provide significantly better outcomes for their startups the way YC has...that may change, but I think it's fair to want them to get legitimacy through success rather than comparisons to the success of the YC model).
Right on. Combine that with an ambient fear that coffee is bad for you and we may have an explanation.
actually I applied very early but that was because i couldn't decide during last round.
I wait until the last minute to do laundry [business-suit-and-spandex mode.] My girlfriend hates this; when she did it, she would run it well ahead of time, in effect spending twice as much time and water as I do, with nothing to show for it (and no, she wasn't doing it to increase her clothing choice.)

I think, in general, YAGNI applies to more than just programs, and especially to pre-planned investments in time. You'll be surprised how much of your day you simply waste, and can be optimized away to no ill effect, emotionally, psychologically, or creatively.

[Oddly, just as I finished writing this, I went back to the front page and opened another article which made my statement seem awfully derivative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law]
Business, Revenue, Whatever: Just Hack
Bug tracking shouldn't be hosted, in general. I should be able to declare a bug in anything by posting it on my blog, and people can do their commenting/triage/fileposting/whatever else they do by using Regular Internet Technology. There is a data format standard issue to be solved and a few search issues.

A project can have a central bug tracking site for people who don't have blogs, but if I don't like that UI I should be able to switch to another.

My proposal also helps a lot when issue tracking is spread across companies. I find an in-house issue which I report to my own team; and then they want to forward it to some outside vendor. Much effort is wasted maintaining the links between the system used by the in-house team and the one used by the vendor.

http://code.google.com/p/baetle/ has some plans for the data model and format.
http://thecoccinella.org/
"Coccinella is a free and open-source cross-platform chat client with a built-in whiteboard for improved collaboration with other people. "

(uses jabber)
When you pick a cofounder, avoid mercenaries like your life depends on it (because your life might depend on it). And it won't always be obvious who is which.
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=artoolkit&search...
for some neat demos of OSS software to overlay computer graphics on real targets
If I remmember correctly you can only get a J1 if you are a full time student and will be returning to university to complete your studies at the end of the summer
There's a very thin line between profit maximization and greed.
This reminds me of Bot Wars friends and I used to have on IRC. I dug up the code for my bot (the champion, no one could defeat it! YC hackers can probably make an even more powerful one):

http://therobert.org/stuff/takeover_2.zip

Fully strategized IRC bot teams! I put up an IRC server and am watching them fight each other, it's really fun. Come watch with me!

irc://24.14.149.24/takeoverz
Brilliant/retarded idea for startup. Brilliant/retarded developers needed.
I've already submitted a YCombinator app with friends (under the username ltoop, which has a secure password I can't remember) but I had a really stupid/awesome idea after my coffee today.

Pi is infinite and non-repeating, so there must be a sequence in there somewhere which corresponds to any binary sequence you care to name: text, audio, video, application binaries (Source code!)

So, we could start up a RapidShare/BitTorrent competitor (I have registered ThePiBay.org in preparation!) where is a database of offsets and lengths within Pi for a given file. We don't store anything illegal, have really low bandwidth consumption, and can access an infinite amount of material.

Users upload a file to us. We search for it in Pi, and give them a link to a page which has the details. They'll need some kind of application to use these details to generate the file, and since this could be computationally intense, ideally it could distribute the load across a range of peers and share chunks of the resulting binary sequences. That is, a Pi2Pi application.

Heck, why would anyone waste time downloading 0-day warez releases when you can search for software yet to be designed/released? With appropriate data-mining, people will use us for -1-day warez, like MSOffice 2020 or Mac OS X 10.9. How about i-day warez, imaginary programs that people have never have written and will never write, that are waiting in the digits of pi for us to find them! The winner of the NetFlix competition is in there somewhere!

I'm almost out of puns and stupid jokes (finally), so lets talk about business plans/monetisation.

Perhaps we have free and paid users, where free users can only search within the first few billion digits of pi. Or maybe their algorithm approximates pi with 22/7 :)

Maybe we search for versions of the sequence that incorporate ads for our sponsors (these versions are already in there somewhere!) and serve them to non-paying users, or we give them low res versions and spelling mistakes or captions in Polish. Pi is an infinite resource, just waiting for us to mine it!

Seriously though, I wish I thought of this last week so I had time to put up a fake page for April Fool's day. Anyone wanna help design a fake website for it with me :)
Maybe not, but may I introduce you the the 'Reply' button with which you may reply to your child's post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153520) thus created 'threaded' conversations which are easier for us to follow.

BTW How old are you? There are some old farts here and middle farts like me.
If you like Core Wars you might also be interested in Tierra, which was one of the first large scale experiment in artificial evolution. http://life.ou.edu/tierra/
The sad thing is that this is probably still illegal.
Try searching google for "if you give a million monkeys a million typewriters" and you might see the problem.

You are joking right?
Interesting; I've only visited Innsbruck, never lived there long term but it seemed like a lovely city. What don't you like about it, if you don't mind me asking? (I'm in Vienna)
Also, you may find that you can edit posts and don't have to reply to yourself.
No. At least, there are multiple compilers for it if you want to go by that. There are a variety of reasons that I didn't want to cover C/C++. I mention in the second paragraph that I'm interested in the subset of languages that have achieved some mainstream success. By some success, I mean less than 20% of software companies actually hire for those languages. That second paragraph is all really about me copping out of dealing with C, C++, Java, or C#. I know. Classy, right?
I happen to just have read most of the literature on this topic. The first part of the article is well substantiated, but the second part (about training your willpower) seems to be based on very little data. So far I've been able to find only one source, I think, in Muraven/Baumeisters "Does Self-Control Resemble a Muscle?"). The title is phrased as a question for a reason. Afaik no one knows if your newly found willpower will last and if so, how long.
When you develop a good process, WRITE IT DOWN! Processes are valuable!
Also, if you only get 2-3 submissions/day early on, those submissions might stick in the YCers' minds for longer. I suspect even the best attempt at giving all submissions a fair review doesn't quite work out if you've got hundreds of submissions to go through in a week. It doesn't sound like it's an instant decision. (with that in mind, expect my name to turn up in the first lot of winter applications)
If RapidShare, TPB and LimeWire can operate, there must be a way to make it work!

The problem is takedown notices -- are we expected to redact parts of a mathematical constant in some jurisdictions :)
Is it too late?

Just kidding... :)
Robin Williams Stand-up Riff at TED Now Online
My gut tells me this whole caffeine craze is going to be a major health concern in 10-20 years. The amount of caffeine people consume versus 20 years ago is absolutely insane.

I used to drink the equivalent of 12 shots of espresso a day. In fact, I could rock out a cup of nasty NYC bodega sludge and fall asleep 20 minutes later. Now I can't drink it at all lest I have a panic attack, save a small decaf in the morning to fool my brain.

Caffeinism, caffeine allergy and caffeine induced organic mental disorder are real things.

I also wonder if there is any causality between the decline in the number of smokers and the rise in the amount of caffeine we consume.
I didn't get the tire shredders joke, what does it mean?
The weather, breathing other people's smoke, not many people to interact with, let alone other hackers - although this is exacerbated by my own lack of German language skills. If you actually had contact information in your profile, I'd write you to talk more about Austria:-)
it made my eyes hurt.
TheFunded Founder Gives Startups Some Advice
Are we allowed to submit joke startup ideas to get your attention?

My friends and I submitted our real idea (GigHello) last week, but I came up with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153760 this afternoon after a brainstorming session. I would never have written it up without all the dumb puns and in-jokes, but it would have been a great website to unveil on April Fool's day :)
I've also thought of a name for the client software: if our users are Pi-ers (short for Pi-rates?) then it's Pier to Pier and hence should be called 'Ferry'.

Anyone have a worse pun to add?
Fixed.

Wow, I love the Austrian weather. Living in the UK for 5 years was terrible in that respect. It probably helps if you're into winter sports. I guess the "other hackers" issue is just as bad anywhere I've lived so far.

Smoking: yeah, that totally sucks. Well, if this government gets its ass into gear that won't be an issue for much longer. Fingers crossed.
>are we expected to redact parts of a mathematical constant in some jurisdictions :)

Do you remember the fiasco on Digg when the Blu Ray decrypt number was released? Numbers can be illegal. In that case, it didn't go anywhere, but with ThePiBay I think Big Media would try and push for the redaction of a mathematical constant.
Nice to hear of a work on a smart AI.

I've had the same ideas, that the situation with AI or any scientific tools in the gaming mainstream is unsatisfactory. I had to deal a lot with AI air traffic control in MSFS2004 and it was noteable that they abandoned it's development as soon as it was able to do all the chain of basic operations from taxiing and takeoff to approach and vacating the runway. The real-life ATC are always sloving an optimisation problem, which is the most crucial at approach. Of course, AI ATC doesn't care to optimize anything and may make a poor a/c go around forever.

One problem with AI is that it can't be estimated quickly by game reviewers. It takes much time to notice it's patterns, probably it takes to complete all the missions up to the end. As a result, AI quality doesn't affect game's grades much enough to care about it.

Another thing is that many game developers are good at algorythms and programming, but not (if at all) at game theory, and social math theories (like evolutionary dynamics), and optimal control.
Submitted for obscure reason
while rapidly scrolling and skim reading i noticed this:
>Interestingly, a study of 1,027 IT projects cited...

and my first thought was 'how could you trust an IT study conducted by someone who could possibly bear, nay sleep at night, by ending a study at 1027 data points - obviously a HR weenie report...
there's no hope for me - save yourselves, i'll hold them off as long as i can.
Of course I would have gladly helped him, but I didn't know there was a problem until it was too late! I had recently moved at the time, and neither of us had a mobile, so we were just out of contact for a while. I thought I was giving him a comfortable gig, so I was shocked to find out he got fired.
Indeed, I learnt that lesson from that episode!
Software had to be on disc and I specifically remember that they banned digital goods up until about 2005.
* The falling dollar is a way to default on international debts. *

Isn't that what third world countries have been doing for decades? :)

I hadn't really thought of the increase in export volumes would essentially be zero sum because of the fall in value. Good point.

I don't know. I've been of the impression that the US dollar has been overvalued for quite some time, however. You can't keep running the trade deficit's that we've been running for decades, and expect the dollar to stay strong.

Essentially, what I think is happening, is that the whole world has been running up the prices on the Dollar for decades by using the Dollar as a benchmark and holding currency. And, now the market is correcting itself, and buying the Euro instead. The Dollar has never really had a decent competitor until the advent of the Euro.

While I certainly don't think that it's going to be good for us in the short term, I do think that it's going to knock some financial sense into us. We've been living on credit cards for far too long as a country, and now we're going to have to pay off the credit card bills. I'm okay with that.
I don't think there is an exact analytical solution. Of course if you're only interested in the first d decimal points you can just rearrange the terms so the piece you're inserting the recurrence in is less than 10^-d for very large k (around what you'll be using). IIRC this is also the only way to solve problems in form x*e^(x) = k. The rearrange of terms is trivial in that case. I think it might be harder in this case.
Maybe he also sent in an application? ;-)
> Pi is infinite and non-repeating, so there must be a

> sequence in there somewhere which corresponds to any binary

> sequence you care to name

Sort of wrong. The question you need to ask is "Is pi a normal number?". We know that pi is irrational (i.e. can't be expressed as a fraction) and that is is transcendental (isn't the root of a polynomial with rational multipliers) but we don't know if all sequence of digits occur in the expansion of pi. In fact we don't even know if 0 through 9 with the same frequency in the infinite expansion.

That last part is important because it could be that at some point in the expansion one of the digits doesn't occur as often which will make finding your blocks impossible.

Happily, we do have digit extraction algorithms that would allow you to jump to any point within the expansion without having to start from the 3, but what you are proposing would require a very large amount of time to find the appropriate offsets.

Also, if you try the pi searcher (http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi) you'll see how hard it is find even short sequences (e.g. I can't find any of my phone numbers in the first 20 million digits)

What might be more fun to try is for any given sequence of numbers (a file) create an appropriate formula that when repeated (like a random number generator) outputs the file you want. Then you just publish the formula and initial values.
Dr. Greenspan's Amazing Invisible Thesis
i worked a barista for a year at yahoo hq when i was much younger. they gave out free espresso drinks (how i wish my fortune 100 company would do the same) and other stuff so there were always customers waiting to get their morning go-juice.

the problem was that the heavy drinkers became extremely dependent on caffeine to function properly. some would literally shake from having deprived of coffee while others would tell me to low-fat milk when mixing their caramel machiattos with whipped cream because they want to lose weight.

i myself never touch coffee products.
This is a very pious debate.
This is akin to an idea I had in college that if we take any multimedia or any data that is in the format of header+fixed size of data, we can fourier transform it and the frequency at which headers occur will spike as they repeat with the same frequency, thus we can easily identify data that looks like multimedia and even have an idea about the contents! Man did the stupidity of that idea shine through when I actually read up on how things /really/ worked.
On a more personal note, let me add: writing your thesis.
Leading Clever People
FriendFeed's goal: More than just a feed aggregator
The Threat of “Free”
Workflow software: I'm calling the bluff.
Hmm, I feel the sentiment. But this is more of a problem with the world rather than something Google is at fault for or evil because of it.

Brainpower is sucked to where the money is and thats not necessarily the best place for it to be for the greater good.

I guess you could say Google is evil if it was doing it under false pretenses
Merb on JRuby 1.1 RC3
I applaud the effort, however the scan quality is very low - it's barely readable, even to humans. Also he should highlight the search terms.
In a related topic, it seems that pulsed microwaves (such as GSM signals) increase the blood-brain barrier permeability. Could that explain their cognitive effects? Could caffeine protect from GSM hazards?
I've noticed that the most effective way to get a programming project finished is to just let everything else slide for a few weeks: paying bills, exercising, being social. Probably not a very healthy way to live in the long run, though.
Great post. If I ever start a blog, the first entries are going to be on lessons that can be directly adapted from research to the world of business.

So many people fall in love with their ideas, and seem to forget that things like business plans and revenue projections are just models, and that models are utterly meaningless without supporting data. You can plan and scheme and predict your quarterly revenue to the penny, but that effort doesn't affect reality in the slightest.

The grant proposal is the analogue to this process in the academic world. Virtually every researcher knows how to write one, and anyone who has will tell you that the game is equivalent -- you're presenting future research (stuff that hasn't been done yet, and that will, in all likelihood, fail completely) in a way that makes it seem as if success is inevitable. (To make the analogy complete, you're doing all of this so that you can beg someone for money!)

There are many ways to write a grant, of course, and you always try to include as much real data as you can from past experiments. Fundamentally, however, what you're really creating is a very detailed, very technical bit of science fiction. Moreover, if you ask 10 researchers if they believe in the details of what they said in their last grant proposal, 9 of them will laugh in your face (and the last one will tell you that their research has already moved in a different direction).

This is one area where the business world has a lot to learn from science and technology: data trumps all. The more time you spend planning, the less time you spend doing, and when you're not doing, you're not generating the data you need to refine your plan.

(Digression: I think this would be better understood if business majors had to take science classes once in a while.)
What’s in a Name? The ABC’s of Baptizing Your Biz.