skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, that's the idea. In the event that another user is not available at the time a user joins an auction, that user is paired up with a bot.
Indefinite in number, but of certain fixed shapes
Which, in my opinion, is even worse than the bidding fee auction (used by swoopo) model.
On page 25, the subscript for E in the second equation should be k, not m?
The Moth is a great podcast.

People who are mostly in NY and mostly people who wrote non-fiction books who tell stories true stories about their lives without notes. Really engrossing.
When you're starting out, your service can, quite frankly, be down for an entire day and it won't kill you. Once you've got enough traction that downtime could be a money-losing issue, you can step up.

But let's be realistic. Plenty of real businesses host their public site from their own office. At least, several of the startups I've worked for have their own server closet. Many of them don't have redundant internet connection nor redundant power.

It's OK to be a little bit flaky. Look at the poster-child for flakiness (some microblogging service that seems to be popular among, well, everybody), and you'll notice it's still pretty successful even with it's weekly tech-blog-worth downtime. Your average little startup probably doesn't need five nines from the word go. What it does need, though, is a backend setup that only costs $50/month. Hosting from your home-office will give you that.
This camera (the SX-70) is actually a really neat little pop-up Polaroid camera. The Impossible Project actually re-leased an old Polaroid film factory, bought the equipment before it was scrapped and (I believe) hired a few of the old workers to keep the film in production. Needless to say, it is very, very cool. You can pick up an SX-70 for about $100 on eBay and a three pack of film for $50ish.

http://www.the-impossible-project.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_SX-70

A surprisingly worthwhile & technical ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaiq_ZZ_eM
actually, more like 2200 $US these days...
This sounds like the scam auction sites which are actually gambling, as described by Jeff Atwood here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/profitable-until-de....

Sorry to be harsh if I understood this wrong, but right now it sounds like this is nothing more than a way to get money from people who don't know better. It might work, but I'd never go there myself.
It depends on your perspective. The Titanic's sinking was a reminder that nothing is perfect, and that you should never avoid reasonable precautions (like having enough life boats).

In the end, more lives were probably saved in the years since than were lost on the Titanic due to more planners and decision makers being careful.
your site just screams scam to me...not only the actual business model, but the actual design too
"black lists, grey lists and spammers should just go to hell"

Spammers first though. Otherwise things will get worse before they get better.
Those were good ones indeed, but let's not be too narrow. For example, division of labor is a common topic discussed. (An economics program! And division of labor!? No effin way!) For those of us trying to get a business going, it's probably more relevant to our work, even if it might not look like it at first blush.

In any case, I third the recommendation. The host Russ Roberts has a gift for explaining things clearly, and, rarer and more wonderful still, the ability to disagree and remain civil.
This is really a banksta paradise!

(not that real banks are much better, mind you)
I'd agree with timeless. A pile of shell-scripts is the backbone of just about any deployment. And once you have them, they're not going away soon.

Beauty? Not so much.

Bash scripts are still the go-to solution because it's so quick to throw one together. Just paste what you have just tested on the CLI, add a few conditionals, done.

Unfortunately the "done"-part more often than not drags out much further than we'd like. Suddenly there's a need to inspect the output of a process rather than just the return code. Suddenly the script should run from cron, but only one instance at a time please. Welcome to the not-so-beautiful world of lockfiles and the never-quite-complete shell environment in cron.

This is the way our quick and beautiful 5-liners tend to turn into fragile 50-liners in short order. Little helpers like ftsh[1] can mitigate the mess somewhat. However, I for one try to use Python or Ruby for just about everything nowadays. It takes a bit longer to get off the ground that way - but it saves my slightly older self so much time and headache...

[1] http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/software/ftsh/
Why limit to only 2 people?
Because all you did was concur with the above statement?
things go straight to the deep end with everyone trying to sound smarter than everyone else

Yeah, that's the degenerate case, and is why I'm less keen on IOT than I used to be. The Indian Rebellion (20100218) was the worst one this year (although I'm almost two months behind now).

Still, when it's good, it's really good. Fortunately, you're rarely compelled to listen to an episode: if it's no good, just move on.
What a great Sunday morning post. Thank's bluesmoon.
Vancouver, Ottawa, Shanghai
To be fair - as the administrator on the receiving end of corporate email infrastructure - I pick and choose which blacklists and methods I'm going to use based on the needs of my users. If a list causes us to lose legitimate email consistently and we can't work with them, or they take up too much time, I won't use it. What we accept in our door is completely up to US, not any outsider.

As for sending email out- sure that's a problem -but we keep ourselves off blacklists (Which you CAN do - you simply avoid email marketing altogether, and stop annoying your users with anything but password resets and things they ask for in realtime - the rest you do through the web).
No reason really - 'cept to study one-on-one auctions.
NPR's Marketplace
Agreed. Having a mostly functional system with an occasional bug is certainly better then a half implemented untested version.
There does exist a point at which a rewrite is necessary and is indeed far less often than most would like to think.
Nice to see McNealy doing something constructive with his time. It's not like this idea hasn't been around for some time but it's never taken off, for numerable reasons.
The Banks Strike Back
So, like a casino? Is that even legal?
It sounds more like "My internet, my rules, but I'm also going to make those rules available to others in case they care to use them somehow."

Some jackass who abuses that system will be systematically ignored.
Well, I did qualify with "I believe" on South Africa. You'd obviously know better than I would about what it's like there, but most of what I've read indicates that there isn't a ton of discrimination against white people, especially considering recent history. Sure, there has been upheaval there -- upheaval from a ridiculously racist apartheid system. Trying to claim that whites have it worse seems pretty tough to me, how do you quantify 60 years of institutionalized racism? The whole truth and reconciliation thing seems to have gone about as well as anything ever, considering the alternatives.

Zimbabwe, you'd have a definite point. There's an example of bonafide economic discrimination against white people.
This is highly unethical. Like Jeff Atwood has said, they're gambling: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/05/penny-auctions-they...
Unfortunately I would guess the peaks are simply due to the incredibly low search volume (I say this as the owner of the site that's the second search result for "common lisp documentation").
Try varying the price to see when you start getting takers?
Just curious, whats up with the price increase?
I hate to say it, since this guy clearly must have suffered a lot, but this is just not a very well written article.

At no point does he try to explain who he is or why he was in prison. You get the idea that he was falsely accused, and you learn (at excruciating length) that he's been released, but no details as to the how and why of either event.

Then, 1000 words in, just when he's ready to tell you some of the interesting things that happened to him in prison (hence the title of the article), it just ends.

Really disappointing. I want my ten minutes back.
I recommend out-law radio ( http://www.out-law.com/page-7212 ), a weekly podcast by a law firm covering technology/law matters

EDIT:
Oh, there's also A History of the World in 100 Objects ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/ ) - which does what it says, based on 100 objects from the British Museum.
I like it very much. I think it would be extremely useful if you would display statistics of previous runs carried on each test case so that:
a. I will be able to see the aggregated performance on many machines (not just my own).
b. I'll be able to see how a test case behaves on different setups (for example, it may yield different results on firefox and on mobile safari).

cheers!
(if those stats are available somewhere, sorry, I must have missed them)
As a once-and-future client who does spend his (well, and his investors') own money, I would kill to work with a developer who did this.
for digital video I like Red Centre http://www.fxguide.com/redcentre - it actually covers more than Red cameras and some of the episodes are pure teaching clinics. Plus, it has got to have the best show notes of any podcast (PDF + Pictures).
Reading the spec - this is really a fairly elegant re-purposing/hack of the DNS mechanism to allow DNS administrators to have their servers configured to use their existing protocol stacks to "subscribe" to other administrator-configured policy servers, and to have lookups screened against them. Just like we do with DNSRBL now for mail.

It's completely up to the DNS server administrator which policy servers they are going to configure or not, including using none at all.

In short - I don't see what all the negative fuss is over - corporate networks already filter based on subscribed lists via proxies, home-made things, etc - this is just bringing that ability into the DNS stack in an elegant way.
As long as the root servers don't start using it, it remains a localized issue....
The Moth is a great podcast but there website makes it difficult to find old shows. Subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to look through their archives.
Stuff You Should Know Podcast: http://www.howstuffworks.com/stuff-you-should-know-podcast.h...
How To Deal With Duplicate Content
Any notable startups from those cities that you can name?
I'd love to hear more about what you don't like about the site (email address on my profile page).

Btw, I ran the feature team that built the APIs that powershell and Visual Studio use. So if you don't like those, that's probably my fault. :)
Similar to a casino in that there is an element of chance that plays into the results. But dissimilar in that we're looking to build this into a fast-paced auction site for different items.
Wanted to mention that (at least for me) the iTunes Store feed for This American Life is usually messed up. The RSS feed from their website works a lot better:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast
Ask HN: Review my app: Firetweets
It's written in Python and runs on Google Appengine. http://firetweets.appspot.com/

It's tracking a dozen of topics — for which I'd like to keep up with what’s new. Other topics (ruby, python, appengine…) are coming soon, but the amount of spam or assimilated spam for these topics on Twitter is significantly higher than for the current ones. I'm working on a solution to reduce noise, and duplicates, but in the mean time, if this micro-service is useful for somebody, that'd make my day.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.
Gaming the system was an early concern - one that we believe we solved.
network london
media newyork
vcs israel
costs living / talrnt pool vienna/bratislavia
Start-Ups Are Treated Like Bums
When I was younger and more naive I used to think almost every code I ever saw sucked, but especially if it had any of the following characteristics:

- Indented in another way than I preferred to or the format was in some way not the way I do it (camelCaps, spaces around parenthesis.

- The code was doing to much in a single line. Preventing readability, etc.

- It had inline HTML or just anything less than 100% separation of code and presentation.

- I didn't understand it

These days I almost never think anything sucks, even though it's written by some beginner right out of grad school. However there are exceptions and now the things that make my dislike some code might have something like:

- Big huge functions that do too much without splitting it up into smaller chunks

- Things done in many lines of code that can be done in a single line [in a simpler/faster way].

- Obvious slowdowns, such as way too many SQL queries than needed, for loops that go through 10,000 cycles when you can get the same result in 15 cycles, etc.

I'm guessing in the future it will be something else entirely that I will look at and vomit. And it will most probably be my own code.
This is really, really nice, I would buy a print copy subscription for sure if I didn't live in the middle of Africa.

Some others have brought it up, but any chance for Kindle (normal size) optimized version? I'd pay for that too if it was reasonable, but this is just screaming for me to sideload and read in my downtime. I'll make do with the pdf, but having a Kindle optimized version really seems like a win.
You don't say where your passports are from, but if you're in Europe, there's London.

There are many startup and entrepreneur events on meetup.com, such as minibar, london bloggers.

Also, in terms of a geographical 'valley', there's Silicon Roundabout ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=silicon+roundabout&... )

Ah, relatively low costs - that could be the kicker. London is an expensive place to live. That said, one can still live frugally by cooking for yourself rather than eating out, and the GBP has fallen in value so it's become a cheaper place for those dropping foreign currency.

Finally, GOOD LUCK in your venture - keep us posted on your unnamed product, and where you're heading, in whatever sense of the word :)
The novel _Cane River_, inflicted on us by a neighborhood book club, had what purported to be facsimiles of backwoods Louisiana newspapers of the late 1800s, with typography that looked to me like 1970s phototype. I was pretty well inured to anachronisms of the novel, of fact and of language both, but that did annoy me.

"Chocolat (2000, Mirimax) wasn’t a bad movie." Actually, it was pretty dumb.
IRC: Where men are men, where women are men, and where 13 year old girls looking for someone to talk to are FBI agents....
I would guess that the search volume has been hovering around the cutoff for what gets recorded in the google trends database. Like a noise gate : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_gate
New Insight Into a Caterpillar’s Crawl
It does sound gross. I'll admit that. A friend of mine, after hearing about all the gorey details, hated the idea. He said it was intrusive and ripe for abuse. Every bit of that is true. Your reservations are accurate and commendable. I'd have the very same objections.

But, I've got a few ideas about how to do some initial data mining to build a useful-yet-niched database. I'll target a specific industry and, I'm guessing, enough people will value their skills that they'll be happy to encourage their friends and colleges to rate them. The hope is that this can be done quickly enough to generate sufficiently many data points for accurate analysis without the initial dataset.

Once that happens, I'm banking on the utility of the system. If it's as good as I hope, it'll be adopted by other groups. If it's not, then it should fail.

As far as the grossness factor and potential for abuse goes; I'm protecting user information as much as is humanly possible -- at least, to the limits of my own ability. The system will be open sourced and as transparent as possible. Unfortunately, I can only guarantee so much. I can't think of a way for users to verify what code is actually running on the server -- but, they can ensure that the data they are sending to the server is exactly what they expect. But, there is no certainty that the server isn't recording their IP and associating it with the input for future data analysis. Hm.
I always keep some episodes of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and Car Talk on my iPod for long drives. They're not very productive, but they are entertaining.

Backyard FX is an interesting video podcast with lots of DIY projects for budding filmmakers.

The Wizards of the Coast / Dungeons and Dragons podcasts with the Penny Arcade / PvP / Wil Wheaton guys were pretty entertaining.
http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Archive.aspx?category=resources&#...

I also like John Hodgman's "Today in the Past" as a quick break between other podcasts.
Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
I would guess Vancouver or London.
Understanding a VC's Seed Funding Policy is Critical
More pages (MagCloud charges $0.20 per page).
Ah, very inspiring, and reminds me of the quote by John Waters: "Without obsession, life is nothing."
Berlin, Germany. Tons of startups, low costs for renting.
London, UK.

Hong Kong, China

Sydney, Australia
Indeed. Hollywood spends too damned much time trying to get period details right & omitting what matters. Steven Spielberg puts enormous effort into the visual details of films that are hollow at the center (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List).
Why Apple Should Buy Infineon
Hard to believe nobody has mentioned Tel Aviv. Definitely the #1 spot outside the USA. Soooo many startups coming out of israel lately.
And the price right now is so high because Polaroid stopped making the film a couple of years ago. Before that, film was a little over $1/picture.
Exploding Moss
This week in google - Covering the googleverse and the cloud
http://twit.tv/twig

A lighter, enjoyable podcast from Leo Laportes network. I've been listening to this every week since it launched and it's one of the ones I never seem to miss. It's perfect for a commute where you tend to miss things here and there.
I can recommend Brighton (100km south of London), which is great for new media kind of startups with huge pool of musicians, designers and such. It is also much cheaper than London.
Here's a list of podcasts for .net programmers: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselmanListOfPodcastsForNETP...
Have you tried the iPhone app instead of the iTunes feed? It sends a nice push notification whenever a new episode is ready.
There's no technologically huge breakthrough, just a suggestion that, instead of higher level abstractions, this could be handled by a simple, compatible modification to the existing DNS protocol.

This is something that administrators already do through less elegant and less scalable methods. It's trivial to put together a list of domains, or subscribe to a list, and have them resolve differnetly.
His take on what combat must've been like in ancient times is spot on. It gives you an insight of how different the psychology of people like that was.
Business of Software 2009 videos
This is a feature I have been looking for in google reader for ages. It's especially useful for web-comics. I sure would use it if you made it.
Black founded the National Post and his trial was extensively covered in Canada (and even in the US). He's quite right to presume that his audience know who he is and (roughly) why he was in prison. As for how the article's written, your objection is really to the headline, which is scoped somewhat inaccurately. The article itself is written fine. (And I would have said one of its main points is that he didn't really suffer a lot.)

It's interesting that this prominent arch-conservative is, through personal experience, now citing facts and making arguments that are unfortunately nearly exclusively those of the left. It's like the old line, "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged", in reverse. I wonder if he will do anything about it in the future.
Well said. If you listen to No Agenda you quickly start to realize that mainstream media is a huge waste of time and completely controlled by corporations.

Adam may have some crazy theories, but a lot of what they talk about is the truth.

You don't have to agree with everything they say. In fact, if you only listen to opinions that you agree with, why bother listening to anything?
I wouldn't personally start there (eg I like econtalk & I like PG's essays but I didn't feel like the show was a showcase for either one).

Looking over the archive, here are some from the archive that I liked:

Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property

Okrent on Prohibition and His Book, Last Call

Romer on Charter Cities

Boettke on Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, and the Bloomington School

Hitchens on Orwell

Kling on Freddie and Fannie and the Recent History of the U.S. Housing Market

Karol Boudreaux on Wildlife, Property, and Poverty in Africa

Chris Anderson on Free

Taleb on Black Swans
Just curious -- why is Berlin rent cheap? Seems like capital cities (or large cities in general), in wealthy Western countries, are generally really steep.
Important Points while Buying Term Papers
Students buy term papers when they are unable to meet the strict deadlines or quality standards set by their colleges, due to some reason or other. But most of the term papers bought are plagiarized. Some tips to help you buy a non-plagiarized term paper are given here.
Ah, it's Google Trends again, the world's most famous chart with no units.

They should put a link to How to Lie With Statistics on every page.
* Berlin is bursting with new ideas & startup culture, cheap, great people & scene (access to money less easy but changing fast). Scott Wheeler (http://www.directededge.com/) a HN alumnus is based there. The guys from Dopplr (@ Nokia now but it seems they are up to sthg)

* not just Bratislava but Vienna, I heard it is also great to startup there (Schnitzelconf. sept 7 there)

* Zürich (ETH university, many Google engineers there)

* and btw Chile offers you $40 000 to start there (not sure that is a very convenient location, but that's a bit of cash and the wine is good;) my2cts Good luck with your venture.
We evolve, or we die. Truism that. Sometimes it might take awhile, but its not less true.
More like, "Lets find interesting new people together."
This is a big dilemma for me. Because shouldn't making the code the right way be faster?...

This is something that gave me grief for a long time until I realized that I was thinking about running a marathon not a sprint.
I wish I had enough karma to down vote you for wasting my time (even if only a few seconds).
I can vouch for the expense of London :S