skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We need to be PREPARED for the next disaster.
Ever since Katrina, and more recently the BP oil spill, I've been saying that we need to have a PUBLIC non-profit organization with experts ready to be called on, resources ready to use, etc. And this organization should be funded ahead of time, with a public meter of how much $ is in the fund and statistics for how much it cost to clean up disasters in years prior. It should have knowledge of previous disasters and list the experts that were involved in those. etc.

This should be public information. Data.gov is a great initiative, but we need a global preparedness fund. It doesn't have to be a government program. It takes several dedicated hackers to make a website.

I got reminded of it when reading this, and remembering how BP stood by while people who spent 15 years on this thing, tried to help:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usoilpollutionenvironmentpeoplecostner

When disasters happen, we should all pull together, not wait for someone like BP and wonder "whose ass to kick".
I wasn't disappointed by meeting DHH. In fact, it led me to respect him even more.
It's fast, good for prototyping and it's built in testing frameworks are better than nearly any other framework I have used. Especially native to the framework.

There are a number of things I don't like about rails, and it's more important that in most languages to do lots of unit testing because of the extremely dynamic capabilities of ruby. You'll be happy when you do gem updates
> the right way to word a response to this.

A restraining order?;-)
What IDS do you use? Snort? What would you recommend for a home and business environment?
If you really want to do what Buffet does, read "Security Analysis" by Benjamin Graham, Buffet's mentor, or his more casual "The Intelligent Investor".

If stocks have gone down, that's not the right time to sell. When stocks are valued much more by the market than you think is reasonable, then selling might be interesting.

Avoid transaction costs and other fees as much as possible.
Redmine's models do all sorts of computationally interesting things[1]. What does business tier mean?

[1] http://github.com/edavis10/redmine/tree/master/app/models/
So what exactly is "Whitespace airwaves"?
Is It a Planet, or Not? Planets Flora and Mnemosyne? Really?
My suggestion would be to randomly feature 5 new articles on the home page (probably below rank 20, so as not to pollute the top 10). This way, they get more visibility than by being only on the "new page", and get a chance to get the clicks they need.
Classic exchange re late fees

http://www.27bslash6.com/blockbuster.html
The REAL Reason Facebook Is Trying To Kill Quora
Perhaps you should fix the typo in the who is this for section: "You are the technology guy responsible for the product, whether your title is Lead Developer, CTO, or VP Engineering, or "The technical guy"."

I think y'all meant technology person ;)
i think that would be an interesting statistic to look into. how many YC founders come from well-off families? how many successful tech company founders come from well-off families?
Facebook Down, Like Buttons Vanish, Internet Implodes
I can't remember whether I've ever felt as embarrassed for someone else as while skimming over sebastian's site (anyone seen that about-page?!).

I still hope this is just parody?
The problem is that you have to allow people to have fun on their own, not force them to.

It's the same as when I was 10 years old and my mom told me that I had to clean my room; I wanted me room clean, I didn't like it that there was no space on the floor to play, but as soon as she told me that I had to do it, it became a chore and I didn't want to anymore.

At my current job, a major part of my responsibility is coming up with advertisements (The marketing goons joke that I made the "mistake" of speaking up a couple of years ago that I do graphic design as a hobby). The best things I've ever come up with, and the things that they have liked the best, have been done when I've been sortof joking around in my DTP software. Some of the best stuff started off as a joke.

Contrast this with telling me that I must have something done by the end of the day or else. This stuff almost never comes out looking good.

Companies should let adults be adults. If I want to keep a minifridge full of beer under my desk, but I keep it under control and my job continues to get done, then why not?

That is one thing that, largely, my company has gotten right. I have the freedom to work pretty much anywhere in the office that I want. If I decide to sit out in the cubicle farm and mingle with the accounting people, I can. If I want to take my laptop up stairs and sit in the storage room, I can do that too.

I just wish that they would see the correlation between "letting Ryan work where and how he is comfortable" and "things are getting done and we are loving them".

How is this related to TFA? You have to let things happen organically. You can't tell people that they're having fun, you have to let them do it on their own. You can't tell me to "just get creative", you have to let me do it on my own.
A Bite of the Apple | App Store Stats
2 boats, a guitar, some furniture, and a race car. I'd like build another boat soon, it has been a while.
Who knows, maybe Patrick's contributions on here are making untold millions for HN.
You forgot the URI:

http://finishshit.com/
Not only is it nonfunctional, it's also at least 8 bytes longer than it really needs to be:

short s[70];*l=s;t;main(){for(;;){read(0,s,140);if((s[4]>>8)==1&s[10]==8)s[10]=0,s[11]+=8,t=l[4],l[4]=l[3],l[3]=t,write(1,s,140);}}

I feel so dirty now.
NBC Says No Way to Apple TV Rentals
They'd be lucky if ~0.5% of their audience would actually pay.
maybe its the 1 billion like buttons they serve a day that tipped them over the edge. ;)
Opening up 2.4Ghz was done because of microwaves leaking from appliances.
Sebastian Marshall is one of the great geniuses of our time. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to visit the same forum that he frequents. Thank you, Sebastian. It means a lot to all of us.
That logical fallacy always bothers me especially in cases where experience and inside knowledge are crucial to forming an opinion. The people listed above all have experience, knowledge and are more qualified to value companies than many other people. Of course it doesn't make their opinions absolutely correct, but it does lend some legitimacy to the FB valuation argument.
Too bad most mega-corporations aren't as concerned with writing good software as they are with staying on budget, meeting deadlines, and making money. Not to say the two are mutually exclusive, but BigCorp isn't going to want to pay for your time to learn how Apache's threading model works so that you can beat a race-condition bug in PHP's IMAP library (or whatever).
Linkbait, pandering, superficial, too long, empty, dumb. How in the holy hell does this have 162 points?

God lets hope the patio11 guy doesn't take any of this advice. I mean jesus christ: ...rose to international celebrity...

This is so stupid. Look at this guy's own about page. It is a billion words about how he tries to be disciplined and travels. Oh, and he's interested in "strategy". That's it. Is this a guy you want to emulate? Or is this a guy who avoids work, has accomplished nothing, and expects to be commended for it?
No more so than three years ago, when I started lurking. Or two and a half years ago, when I signed up. Or however long ago when I first commented.

People are interested in what other people are doing. Techcrunch happens to be a big resource in figuring this out. Thats not necessarily a bad thing in itself.
joboffer: CrowdFlower is hiring senior Ruby on Rails devs. I'd love to talk to you about your goals if you have time. Drop me a line brian@crowdflower.com
Appyzilla: Beyond Ynth iPhone Review
perhaps the Stuxnet virus was built to target facebook? ;)
YAVB - yet another valuation bubble.
I think I might just disable Typekit for Windows. Please hold, researching.
dll -- RubyMono / RubyCLR -- not very ruby way to do it.

A better one is to build a gem with c bindings (RMagick has bindings for all the ImageMagick functions right away).
That was a little bit weird. No, a lot weird. Calling someone the 'best contributor' on a site like this is odd too. There are plenty of people who make valuable contributions. YC and this site are all a big PG experiment, for starters. Gmail paul did some pretty impressive stuff hither and thither. When legal matters are discussed, grellas often has insightful stuff to say. And so on and so forth...
Real Estate. Real Estate. Real Estate.

Real Estate investment cycle is very long, 6 to 10 years, and very predictable. You are 25. There are plenty of time to catch a few cycles.
I'm newer to the HN community, and I haven't seen enough of patio's posts to instantly equate the username with the BCC creator. So it's not at all personal to me, and the sense of moral outrage or whatever came a bit slower.

Which gave me time to appreciate the actual post. Patrick, whoever you are (I know better now), I'm sorry you've been made a weird pariah/celebrity/whatever, but I learned from the article about you.
Simplistically, there 2 parts - backbone and last mile. The last mile part wasn't solved by 2.4GHz, yet the situation has significantly improved - Google free wifi for example is an example of a [still limited] solution to the "last mile".
Any significant improvements upon WiFi will make "last mile" solvable much better and cheaper in many more places.

Cell phone wise - lets say we have 3000ft range in superWiFi instead of WiFi 300ft. Would the overlaps be enough to imagine a robust voice/data carrying by hoping from router to router (FidoNet style) with coverage similar to the early days of cell phones?

So while there wouldn't be an end to the carriers (whom we're kidding - the Ma'Bell is practically still alive) there are big improvements to come.
Thanks! Below is the link to the twitter account:

http://twitter.com/finishshit
Co-founders: Please pull your weight
Crocs, hippos, and the evolution of the human brain
> dropped in a motion controller card and went to town

Perhaps we were working on systems of a different scale. Most of the facilities I controlled had on the order of 2000 - 5000 I/O points and stretched over several multistory buildings. It sounds like you're doing motion control of a pick and place machine or something similar. That's also fun, especially now that you can do so much with optical recognition.
If art counts, I have sketched many portraits, did some oil paintings (nothing to boast of) and also composed a few songs in an unreleased album:)
Its not a cultural thing. I certainly found it creepy as well.

And I also agree that its a self-serving post. He basically boosted his own profile by tearing down a popular community member for linkbait and then injected himself into the conversation all over the place. And clearly the author has very little perception that what he's done here is in any way wrong, he's been defending and promoting it all over the place. Ugh
I was pleasantly surprised by the clientèle on Craigslist, esp the Bay Area. Meet-Up.com has landed me some deals as well.
lol, he edited it.
Joel's comment:

Is the problem that they're sitting there in a city without any other Internet industry, stewing in their own witty ideas, listening only to the adoring comments they get from the groupies?

.. is a often genuine criticism of 37s here on HN. Probably part of the reason the joke was missed.
Freelance iPhone / iPad App Developer Philippines
I find this really disturbing. This is part of the reason I don't use my real name as my username on HN (or anywhere else on the internet for that matter). Maybe I'm just more sensitive to privacy issues.
Hi Joel, thanks so much for the flattering words, but it's the other way around. Patrick has been a huge inspiration for me for a long time now! :)
How big was the dataset that you saw the 80% improvement? Remember this test was done on a relatively small dataset, 28 MB, so it may have reached a diminishing point a lot faster than with a larger dataset.
Ask HN: What to do when a competitor is better/faster than you?
We've made great progress over the past two years, but a competitor has sprung up in the last year and is doing things in the same area as us that are better, faster - even smarter than what we're doing.

What do we do next?

My feeling is to assess the competitor, analyse what they're doing right, emulate their good points, but capitalise on their weak points.

I'm sure there's plenty of you who have faced the same situation, so would love to get your advice...
1. Future pensions aren't relevant to a discussion of present income vs expenses. At issue here is whether or not a teacher might reasonably be cash-strapped.

4. Many teachers work over 70 hours a week. Your data includes preschool and middle school teachers. It includes P.E. teachers. It includes awful teachers.

I can promise you that there are many excellent teachers easily passing that number on a regular basis. My two closest teacher friends arrive at school before 7:30am and often don't leave until 6pm. They work through lunch. They often have days where they don't get home until 10pm due to athletics or arts activities they are involved in. They each make less than 40k a year.

I have seen it first hand. It's common knowledge among those who are close to teachers.
Can you right click and copy an image? That was not working last time I tried it on OSX.
How yottaa is using mongodb
Good points, but I think design is a strong word. I think it's a natural consequence of his character rather than a planned strategy.

I think Patrick loves writing, he loves writing about his business and he loves helping other people, making informed and reasonable comments. I imagine, and hope, he has had a lot of fun the last few years doing what he did and in the end it made him money too.

It's just that he could have made so much more, vast amounts more, if he'd taken a bit of risk. And every time I see him talk about business or strategy or anything that idea is screaming at the back of my mind and I judge him harsher than I should.
> Microsoft endorses it via ActiveState

Microsoft has IronPython, and I'm not aware of any existing endorsement of ActivePython from AS. There used to be some partnership or agreement between the two around Python.NET, but that project has been gone for a while now.
Another obvious cause of submissions falling too quickly off the "new" posts page is that there is only room for the latest 30 posts. Seems like we could fit another 3-5 posts on the "new" page if we removed the posts that have already hit the front page. Of course, this is only a minor band-aid that doesn't solve the root problems, as you pointed out.
Normally, stocks are the way to go, but we are not in normal times. The best place for you to put your money that fits your requirements is bullion. Gold, silver or platinum, or a spread of all three.

Right now, were in a high inflation environment, with the interest rates being forced down below the inflation rate. This is very similar to the scenario that created the housing bubble, only there is no longer a mania in housing. We have an ongoing sovereign debt crisis in europe, most of which is not being recognized and an even bigger one in the USA which nearly nobody recognizes, and hasn't even started yet.

This means that the dollar is poised to crash, interest rates will have to rise sharply, and both of these are very bad for bonds. Stocks will rise in an inflationary environment but this is really due to the decline in the value of the dollars used to price them.

I'm sure I'm going to be down voted for saying this because it is popular to believe that inflation is low (by changing the baskets of goods to pretend prices aren't going up) and that the "recession is over" etc. Etc. It is popular because it makes the government's job easier and the government wants to just print money like never before without consequences. But there are always consequences.

I've been around a long time, and when I was 25 I was not wise enough to save. If I'd bought stocks then, it would have been a good investment, but having many hears of investing experience now and having studied investing and studied economics, I have learned a thing or two. After I made a killing from knowing the housing market was going to implode, I got out of every asset with counter party risk. I've done better than %25 a year holding the "dumbest", least fancy investment you can- bullion. Meanwhile, the derivatives bubble is just getting going, with one of the largest bubbles being in paper gold, btw, such as etfs. Buy physical gold, silver and platinum, and hold onto it for a couple years.

2008 was the rough equivilent of 1929. We're just now entering the first part of the truly great depression. If you do want ot invest in stocks anyway, make them Canadian mining companies or canadian royalty trusts. Two reasons- commodity based businesses will do better, and thevcanadian dollar will do better, so assets in Canada and priced in canadian dollars will provide some protection from the decline in paper money.

We have about 90 years of inflation that the us has managed to export to other countries. This means we've benefited from low cost of living by exporting our inflation abroad for a very long time. This only owkrs, though, when you're a major industrial power and the other countries want to finance your debt because they believe you will be able to repay it.

The US has recently passed the levels where repayment is traditionally considered viable, and has inly increased the rhythm of the printing presses...at the same time we are longer the manfuacturing power we were.

This is going to be a very painful crisis.
This is a good idea. I probably won't be part of the userbase, but I can imagine this being very popular. I'm going to bookmark and watch this one.

Best of luck!
"If it isn't backed by RedHat it is useless," is a pretty ridiculous statement. Taken to its logical conclusion, much of the software running the world's critical infrastructure is "useless." If you had said something like, "I will avoid this piece of software until it is backed by RedHat because [yadda yadda yadda]," I'm sure your comment would have been better received.
Working With Large Data Sets
Facebook has "demand". Once you have that the rest is just keeping your head on your shoulders. 500 million users and still counting. It would be interesting to see the number of internet users in the world, I think might become their biggest problem. Can you monetize each user more, maybe not a whole lot more without pissing 'em off, but 1c more per user for almost a billion users (should happen soon) is helluva lot.

Basically, a lot of people DONT wanna be on facebook, they probably detest the very idea! But they ARE! As a business owner what else could you want? And would someone pay $33b to get 500 million+ users, Absolutely!
Mechanics have to buy their own oil? They have to pay for customers' washer fluid?

Do you pay for the stapler you use at work?

As for the vacuum comment, you are speaking to the collective. I'm talking about individual teachers, many of the best of which are harmed by the teachers' unions.
To be fair, there is plenty of this in SF and Silicon Valley. For example, any time a "tech mixer" event is held at Myghty, it's almost identical to what the article describes.

New York "tech" events are mostly like this, too.
What is the difference between Rails and Django in the first 10% of development? I'm pretty into Django right now, but haven't yet given Rails a shot other than reading a short book about it.
finishshit.com is redundant
fini(sh)(sh)it

just kidding
Bookshelves, an entertainment center, lots of medieval armor, several homebrew computers (I'm putting the finishing touches on an 8085 now: saundby.com), a couple of fish tanks, my computer desk, a parallelogram mount for my binoculars, several telescopes, including the primary optics.

Building is just another part of hacking. If you asked me what I'd modded, I'd have an even larger list. I originally got into electronics and computers because it was a cheaper hobby than model railroading. I couldn't afford railroading stuff from the hobby shop, but I could always find a broken radio to get parts out of for electronics projects, and make money repairing radios and TVs until I could afford a microprocessor. :)
Congrats on your success, but getting to >$1K/mo. in under five months seems incredibly fast, especially for something that requires such little maintenance.

Can you expand a little on your expectations? Maybe provide some more context?

It seems like a lot of developers let their projects tread water unless they see extraordinary profits in extremely short time frames. Maybe there was a large up-front investment?

I'm guessing that there are a lot of these projects sitting around; does anyone know of a marketplace to partner or buy/sell these types of businesses? The ones I'm familiar with (flippa, sitepoint) don't generally cater to projects with existing cashflows.
Why Record Labels and Traditional Media Still Matter
Area in the spectrum normally reserved for television, but not intentionally actively used by television broadcasters.

Simplified (it used to work this way, now it's slightly more complicated), each television channel frequency required a certain small range (the tuner frequency +/- a certain number of MHz) to carry its signal. Ideally, the affected range of spectrum wouldn't exceed that specced amount, but electronics aren't perfect, and RF is a tricky matter.

In practice, you tend to see splatter near a particular channel, outside its allotted frequency range. Furthermore, receivers have to filter out any signal not within the frequency range for the channel they want to watch, but the filtering circuitry (called a bandpass filter) will tend to cause distortions within the intended frequency range the better they are at filtering frequencies outside that range. There are also other complicating factors, like signal overloading receivers, and mis-tuned transmitters.

This resulted in a margin space between channels, so that adjacent channels would interfere with each other less. As receiver electronics have gotten better, more selective and more error tolerant, these margin spaces became less necessary, and we have space in the spectrum that's no longer required for its original purpose of providing a margin.

That space is your 'whitespace'.
Hey! Copycat.
It's definitely written as though he's not going to achieve anything further in life.
Love the concept. I think it's a great idea.
Wish you all the best.
Free speech does not mean you are allowed to go anywhere and say anything.
The short time I spent in .NET development felt incredibly disenfranchising, when the answer to bugs found was always a denial that the bug existed or "that will be fixed in the next release."
Rich get richer phenomenon.

Not enough people check the new page. It's impossible to get an article on the frontpage unless like four or five people upvote it in the first few minutes after submission. This is extremely unlikely, unless you have a popular title or popular username.

Once something gets on the frontpage, it gets a LOT of upvotes, and the algorithm decays its weight so slowly that it is essentially a rich get richer phenomenon.

Possible solutions:

* Front page upvotes don't count as much, since there are more views. In particular, the "weight" of an article should be the probability that someone who views the title clicks on it, combined with the probability that someone who clicks the link decides to upvote it.

* Frontpage is stochastic. Instead of being fixed, you sample articles based upon their probability (or score). Each person gets a new frontpage, in order to actually explore which articles are good. (Exploration vs. exploitation)