skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ben Goldacre's 'bad science' column in the guardian has been going after this for years. It's good, old fashioned campaigning journalism, and after five years might actually be having some effect. As he puts it:
'The very same person who tells your child that blood is pumped around the lungs and then the body by the heart, is also telling them that when they do The Energizer exercise then “this back and forward movement of the head increases the circulation to the frontal lobe for greater comprehension and rational thinking”'.[http://www.badscience.net/?p=613]

On the other hand, a glance at google shows how deep the problem goes: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22brain+gym%22+site%3Agov.uk
that's still compatible with making something people want - read Innovator's Dilemma on demand for sustaining v disruptive technologies.
Web 2.0 Success: A video howto (parody, BarCamp Boston)
This approach fits the WAS-A relationship much better than the IS-A relationship. A heated chair WAS A chair, but we fitted it with a heater.

It might still have enough in common with the original chair that you can use it without any change on your part, but you never know, there was that accident when we decided an EjectorSeat WAS A Chair last year...
If you set things up properly, as a founder or sometimes as an early employee, you should only pay capital-gains tax (10-15%).
I disagree. Microsoft presented an offer, Yahoo! rejected it outright. After being rebuffed, it is incumbent upon Microsoft to either inquire about more amenable terms (to Yahoo!), or to withdraw their pretense of negotiation and go to the shareholders.
Just ship. Seriously.
ColorWars2008
Thats interesting... would love to see more details on this, anyone have any useful links?
Maybe, but the same argument could be used for other open-source apps. "Oracle could just grab the source code for MySQL", etc.

Incidentally, this is one reason the GPL can be a big win. What you described happened to X, which was under the MIT license. It worries me that so many web technologies are MIT; it's so much easier to co-opt them.

There is a web version of the GPL called the AGPL (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html). It's a pity it's not more widely known.
The backwards war scene in Slaughterhouse 5 is still one of the most beautiful things I have ever read:

http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~sujith/slaughterhouse5.txt, search for "Seen backwards"
Ah, he means Ruby-fu. The fu in x-fu is, AFAIK, based on the kung-fu model. Its resemblance to the fu in fubar is (semi-)coincidental.
Naked Shorting Comes Full Circle
A list that excludes Plutarch, Benjamin Franklin, and SICP is utter crap!
Market it as dihydrogen oxide skin cleaner.
Imeem Buys Music Tech Company Snocap
EU To Allow Cell Phone Calls On Planes
Ah man, that sounds like it takes forethought and effort. Just stick it in RAM and pray ;).
Here's a good one for employees:

http://www.payne.org/index.php/Startup_Equity_For_Employees

Founders should just ensure they make an 83b election within 30 days of purchasing their stock (usually the purchase price for a founder is very close to zero, so this is all just a matter of paperwork).
Truer words were never spoken. This is from one who once frequented perlmonks.org and thought himself great for doing so. I'm thankfully past that stage in my life. I encourage others to skip over it entirely.
thanks for adding that layer of details.
Corollary: factor out interfaces.
IF everything is stored somewhere on the client (including keys), what prevents someone malicious from borrowing the same keys to wreck havoc on your S3 bucket?
As the first poster said, don't believe everything you read. The media is all about hype and thousandaires don't roll off the page.

The details: the acquisition price was $5 Million which was made up of $2 Million Cash and $3 Million Stock.

There were 3 founders, Harjeet Taggar, Kulveer Taggar, Patrick Collison. Each founder held 20.89% of the company at the time of sale. YCombinator held 4.38%. Paul Graham personally held 0.96%.

20.89% of $5 Million is $1,044,500. Of course they only have 40% of that in cash and the other 60% is in stock. The stock was $2.69 the day the deal closed. It's now trading at $2.40. If they still have their shares, they are worth 10% less which is a loss of $62,670.

That is all before tax. Factor in capital gains tax of 10-15% before the stock drop and you are already out of millionaire territory.

On an unrelated note, each of the founders are now making a base salary $100,000 at Communicate.com. This does not include bonuses, options, etc.

Source:
http://www.edgar-online.com/bin/cobrand/?doc=A-1108630-00011...
This is a very longwinded way to say "sell the sizzle, not the steak."

You don't sell water. You sell rebellion.
Very few people write Web servers or other networking code; they just write code that plugs into some existing Web server (usually Apache) or framework (e.g. Rails).
Perl has a number of books, but the one that seemed most useful to me is Intermediate Perl because it covers Perl's object orientation and references in great detail. To learn the basics of the language either spend money for Learning Perl (which I would not recommend you do) or use the online tutorials and websites.

Honestly though for web development, unless you either have a legacy Perl code base you have to work with or are already a Perl guru, nearly every other option for web programming will run faster and have lower maintenance costs (in time and effort) than Perl.

Since you know PHP and have dabbled with Ruby and Python, why not take a look at Seaside Smalltalk or PLT Scheme?

Seaside: http://www.seaside.st/
PLT Scheme: http://www.plt-scheme.org/
Here here! Of all the desktop software I use daily, Firefox is the most annoying.

To be fair to the developers: it is a very difficult implementation burden to keep up with the complexity and fast pace of change that is the web, with its numerous stakeholders.
Yep, C++ is unnecessarily complex, suffers from bloated syntax, and is almost as hard to read for a compiler as it is for a human. The point the author has missed is that it's fundamentally not that flawed as a C replacement for projects where C outgrows its usefulness.

Okay, so it's essentially destroying itself as a general-purpose language with the complexity and idiosyncracy of some of the additions; a decently standardised ABI would help for embedded stuff. But on the whole I'd rather use std::vector<> than malloc() and free() when it's impossible or exceedingly impractical to use my favourite Lisp, or Ruby if I'm feeling imperative, or Java/C# if someone's forcing me.

Yes, you need to know what's going on under the hood, but it can save you a lot of micro-management that slows you down in C. I've come to realise that you have to treat C++ as exactly what the name suggests: a step up from C. If you treat it as anything more, you end up building template empires. Been there, done that, realised it was a bad idea. I'd still pick it over C though.
This was slightly interesting to me as I took a few CS courses during my brief stint in college. The professor taught in C++ and made it seem simple which seemed like something of an accomplishment at the time.
Well, Perl code is usually write only anyway. So why not?
If it's read-only, no harm. Add write abilities and he's in deep trouble. But from what I gathered (he seems to be using only GET except for admin), the site is read-only.
Using Starbucks as an example of async communications is brilliant! I can explain async to everyone I know now. Great article.
http://markkit.net

highlight text in any web page
Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely.
Even Giants Trip and Fall Now and Then
Ask YC: Running a WebServer on EC2
Been looking into this for our startup. Who here has been running a webserver on Ec2? the static/elastic ip addresses make this much more feasible. Anyone using scalr? What issues have you run into?
True, but the aluminium of the Pro is also quite noticable. Maybe a bit less than the white plastic, but you won't confuse it for a Dell.
Reinforcement Learning 2008 Competition
The consumer facing side requires no access keys so he's good. The admin side does however, so the assumption is that only a select few (one person really) is responsible for administration.

You could add SimpleDB to the mix to store hash data using similar practices.

Pretty cool imho. Libraries like jquery can easily be used to create the C in MVC anyways. Model in SimpleDB, C in Jquery, and V (plus any bin files) in S3.
http://markkit.net
Analyst on Amazon EC2: "We don't advise anybody to use this for anything mission-critical"
Apple says Web designers can post "any font" for use with Safari.
Don't forget the glowing apple logo on the lid. That unifies the look a bit, even if aluminum and "matte black" trim gets thrown in. Or you go for the 24kt gold laptop: http://www.computer-choppers.com/pics/17mbp31.jpg :)
What are you talking about? THERE IS NOTHING MORE INTERESTING THAN COMPUTERS TO EXPLORE!!!
Search engine relevance - an empirical test
Thanks for mentioning so many English heroes: Newton, Austen, the Spitfire, Wodehouse. I love em all too. As an Englishman, I'd like to nominate some American heroes: Paul Feynmann, Jimi Hendrix, Willard Van Orman Quine, Jackson Pollack & Hunter S Thompson. Where would the English speaking world be without them ?
I dunno, an awful lot of people seem to be making an awful lot of money by selling bottled water, and I don't see any of them using a rebellion-based marketing strategy. I see messages ranging from "Buy our water, it's cool and refreshing and comes in a pretty bottle" to "Buy your water, it's cooler and more refreshing, and it comes in an even prettier bottle!"

It's true that products don't sell themselves, but on the other hand some products are dumb enough that even a huge marketing campaign won't make 'em popular, and I'm pretty sure that five-spouted rapper-endorsed water is one of them.
Nice - there's a vote of confidence.
Aluminium is the way forward. I had a black MacBook but its only when I used the MacBook pro or my current MacBook Air that I really thought it was an Apple. Its about time for a refresh and I'm looking forward to what they do
My day job is basically as a feature programmer for a perl based web application system. Trust me. Learn python / ruby for web applications. Or stick to PHP.

The thing that made people love Perl is the same thing that makes more mature people hate it. The language is so flexible that you will invariably write bad code. You need a very strong set of coding standards if you'd like to write perl systems that remain maintainable.

Learn python or ruby to make your web app. Learn C# / ASP.Net if you'd like to be on a windows stack.
Here is what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about just this topic in a 2002 New Yorker article: "Institutions are not just the best environment for success; they are also the safest environment for failure--and, much of the time, failure is what lies in store for innovators and visionaries. Philo Farnsworth should have gone to work for RCA. He would still have been the father of television, and he might have died a happy man."
Hover Menu: Extending jQuery's "animate"
Making the Macbook Pro slimmer would be an impressive engineering accomplishment, but don't do it simply for the sake of design and hurt the performance.

The current MBP's are nearly perfect, save for the glowing white hot (aluminum) case.
Bionic Office
"It's not just college.

It's community college."
The rebellion example came from the article. It suggested creating an alternate means to drink water that "rebellious" people would use.
On the contrary, that is precisely the scenario the author is describing:

"The interaction between two parties (customer and coffee
shop) consists of a short synchronous interaction (ordering
and paying) and a longer, asynchronous interaction (making
and receiving the drink). This type of conversation is
quite common in purchasing scenarios."
There is some validation logic on the server side using an S3 policy.

Base64 decode the policy input field on the postForm and you get:

{
"expiration": "2009-01-01T12:00:00.000Z",
"conditions": [
{"bucket": "vtabroadbandwiki" },
{"acl": "private" },
["starts-with", "$key", ""],
["starts-with", "$Content-Type", "text/xml"],
]
}

http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/proposals/post.html#Access_Contr...
EC2 is still in beta. The fact that a beta was down for an hour at 2am shouldn't be newsworthy.
It is the case that there is between 20-30% valuation that they typically need to invest. And yes, that does effect valuation math. However, there are of course plenty of other cases outside the "norm"

a) A super hot company people will always make exceptions for. Especially smaller more focused funds like Union Sq.

b) No VC is going to give you $250k on an A round valuation and expect 25% of the company. They will either be angels (who will take more like 2-25%) or if a VC they will do the $250k as convertible debt to the A round.

Do not raise $2m if you don't need $2m. Structure your round around the capital requirements, not the other way around.
The secret key isn't stored in the client (I looked :P), only the AWSAccessKeyId, policy, and signature are.

The policy dictates what can be stored in the bucket, and the signature validates the policy so folks don't tamper with it.
Even as a beta that beats the uptime for a lot of other services I've used.
http://www.ethoswater.com/ Click 'About' - Sell $1.80 bottles of water and 'give' $0.05/bottle to your own charitable foundation. They were acquired by Starbucks inside 2 years.
Kern. Hint. Burn.
Railbait.
From our experience last night, 1 or more Amazon datacenters went off the net. Our instance kept chugging along while it was unavailable (but we didn't know this at the time). We were firing up another instance in a different data center (using the new trusted zones feature) when the outage ceased and our site on the original instance resurfaced.
Gregor is a good writer - he makes it very clear. His stuff kind of got lost in the web 2.0 noise about how you don't need enterprisey stuff like integration or messaging, but his points are always valid. Good to see people are still reading him.
Or don't. If you haven't read the book just start from the beginning.
Ruby's not ready
If it crashes, it's probably written in C++.

// eof
Two things are certain in life: every language has its pluses and minuses, and every person has an opinion.

There are lots of things perl is bad at, but it has a lot of strengths, especially if you work in the biological space. I also know several successful internet startups that run on perl, so I have to disagree with benreesman's advice to not learn perl.

Is it good for everything? No. (and no language is)
Selecting an Attorney for new startup
How's it handle user submissions, then?

Here's the site in question: http://s3.amazonaws.com/broadbandwiki/broadbandwiki.html
It would be interesting to combine this with Google Gears for offline storage too. Tougher to create something that securely shared data between users, but for a single user this could still make some powerful apps!
Static IP's are a game-changing game changer.
Google's US Search Market Dominance Hits All Time High
[snicker] should be re-assess not re-asses [snicker]
And, yeah, if they could keep them from getting so hot, it would be a big plus.
Font designers are a funny breed. They are upset that Apple said designers can "use any font they want" with Safari 3.1 without including a statement adding "unless you licensed it from someone who forbids you to use it for this purpose".

I would like to join the rest of humanity in welcoming typographers into the world of text, images, audio, and video where a browser can transfer any work to a client.

If you want to forbid your licensees from using your fonts on web pages, then educate your licensees.

Perhaps this should be viewed as a profit center. Soon google will return you lists of potential copyright violators. You can go sue them.
From the other thread talking about their outage earlier this morning; remember that EC2 is currently in beta, and as such there are no SLAs or guarantees. While I'm sure pretty much everyone believes that EC2 will become a full-fledged live service (with SLA), that may not occur before your app is ready to go live.
Isn't it a little late for April Fools' jokes?
Global Top 100 Blocked Sites
poor ad revenue != poor monetization. hotornot.com and forums.somethingawful.com come to mind.
Goodbye Scrabulous, Hello "Scrabble by Mattel?"
What keeps you motivated on hobby projects?
This article has some weird examples. I could've sworn most C++ compilers would go ahead and throw in default and copy constructors for you by default. It's only by explicitly defining a lack of one of these that you would hit an error (as he did in his examples). As in, your basic class would be fine, and then as you added special constructors without adding the basic ones, you'd make trouble for yourself. Note that he has to explicitly declare the copy constructor private to break things...

Then again, I was never really that far into C++ land, so I wouldn't be surprised if I were wrong.
I know, I thought it was a silly example. Sorry, I kinda convolved my reply to your comment with my reply to the article.
3D Self-Replicating Printer to be Released Under GNU License
Fantastic response... exactly why I love Hacker News! Thanks all. I'm going with JMeter for now, but will report back success or failure.
"Like every one has said so far"

Then why start a new comment? This is what the "upmod" feature is for!
Great stuff! How bout some love for NewsCred. We're launching our private alpha this week, and would appreciate any publicity from the trusted HN community. Wish us luck!
Facebook To Settle With ConnectU
Great stuff! How bout some love for NewsCred (http://www.newscred.com). We're launching our private alpha this week, and would appreciate any publicity from the trusted HN community. Wish us luck! If anyone wants invites and didnt sign up earlier, email me at shafqat[at]newscred.com!
And the idea that not all transactions have to work perfectly for a business to run.

Every Starbucks leaves a few unclaimed drinks ever day, but they are still raking in the cash.
Whenever I see a story like this I wish the United States would provide students a far more flexible and natural learning curriculum. For example, the "mathematics" course trek in the US school system alone is one of the most dreadful:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130499

The problem lies in several issues. As one of "those kids" that started college at 11, one issue I have recognized to be by far the strongest is the self-perpetuation of incompetence: high school teachers are usually direly incapable of providing students with the actual modern perspective on the subject they are teaching! Qualification wise, I could have been teaching high school classes three years ago, and I knew a lot of education majors back in my undergraduate days. Usually, it's the people that aren't smart enough to pursue the subject that they simply make do with teaching it instead. Most of the brighter math and physics majors I knew went on to graduate school or a scientific profession; the others usually minored in education. Perhaps it is an unfair generalization, but it does seem to be true from my experiences. Of course, you can all draw the implications that would have on the K-12 education system. To illustrate with a final example, some of the math major / education minor people told me "I hate proofs"! I thought I would cry.

I didn't mean to make this my life's story, but in any case, perhaps it could be argued the current quagmire that is our method of ensuring child "development" is in some way good, simply due to its inherent selectivity. Perhaps the innovative and intelligent and resourceful will escape the K-12 system much like Dmitri did. It's largely luck, though, as it heavily depends on their environment (parents, town, etc.). I considered undergrad to be like my high school. Although I skipped the latter, undergrad was fairly similar in structure (homework, participation, tests, etc.), except that the classes were taught by people who actually knew what they were talking about.

On a final note, what Dmitri or I or the 12-year-old Asian kids (sorry for the stereotype) "do" is not being "super intelligent." It's merely being lucky or fortuitous enough to see the light in a (imho) broken system. Really, when you think of it, nearly everything in an undergraduate curriculum is quite simple if you just read the damn textbooks and do your homework, and in the case of people like Dmitri, be a hacker and play around. In a perfect education schema, every kid would be like that. Every kid would be creative; not shackled and restrained.
In bulk. Through a pipe. Cheap. Advertise that it never touches plastic.
Why is aluminum better for the environment than plastic?
Isn't there a lot of strip mining and nasty chemicals involved in Aluminum production?
The Technological Departed
benreeseman somehow missed the bit which said "language wars aside"!

If you're learning Perl for web development, after you've got through the Camel book and the basics, you would go to PerlMonks, as many have said, and I'd say the main task before you is to get to know the various templating systems.

There's a progression of using perl for HTML and it goes like this:

1) hundreds of annoying print() statements

2) fewer print() statements because you've discovered HEREDOCS, but still annoying

3) using a templating module

and in my case it was 3 a) using a templating module badly then 3 b) using a templating module properly.

So check out the options like HTML::Template, Mason, Template::Toolkit, and so on to see what they do.
Equating monetization with advertising is a mistake.

There are lots of ways to make money -- if it's hard for your site to make money off ads, or if the overhead is too high, then it's probably worth looking at other means.
I've been saying this about EC2 for some time (and we have a product that manages EC2 instances, so I have a vested interest in seeing EC2 become successful). It's just not very reliable, when compared to the best hosts in the business--while EC2 downtime per year can be measured in hours, the best hosts are down minutes or seconds each year (of course, your apps and your system administration abilities can easily make up the difference--we've been offline a couple of times due to Joomla problems, and there's nothing a more reliable network or server could do about it). But, every bit of downtime adds up...and maybe your next big customer or investor was looking at your site at that very moment.
Congrats to the two people from ConnectU who post here--any thoughts? Did that ebook help sway Facebook's decision?
Shouldn't you have used the down arrow?
"My Advice: politely ask for the shares outstanding, or for what percentage your share offer represents (then confirm the approximate shares outstanding). If the company won't provide you with this necessary information, it's unlikely they're going to be straight with you on other issues; go work somewhere else."

The number of jobs just shrunk by 90%.
TechCrunch, VentureBeat in merger talks
This particular book was just finished two or three years ago, although it builds upon materials written in the 1990's.

It seems his attachment to AOLServer and Oracle are because they still work, and he personally has no reason to switch.

Most of what I know about web programming I learned from Philip, though I have had only brief exposure to AOLServer and Oracle. What he's teaching transcends particular technologies, and it's fairly straightforward to apply it to, say, Apache+Python and PostGreSQL.
"The language is inconsistent and needlessly complex."

Huh? This is Ruby he's talking about? I don't find it to be inconsistent or complex.
Pinkberry's surprising success