skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, I'll agree that a lot of their products are fairly successful in terms of being widely-used. (Revenue? No way for me to know.) But how many of them are evolved or improved on a regular basis?

Reader has had some social enhancements, but I don't know if I've seen anything in the last year. Google Groups spent a long time sitting dormant after they bought DejaNews. Much of the Google Apps suite stays static for long periods of time. Chrome I'll give you, and I'm sure there are new features for some of the others that I haven't followed... but Google seems to be very good at creating apps which are just good enough that they don't need to do anything further with them. More power to them for that, I guess, but I do like to see products evolve.
I like the idea of microframeworks. My first framework was rails; I struggled with it after being used to framework-less PHP. I was much happier when I found out about Sinatra! I'll have to check out Flask, though really Django doesn't get in your way too much for most tasks.
Google Grows Revenues 23 Percent In Third Quarter (Earnings Slides)
For example, imagine an enzyme that was designed to (a) receive microwave radiation-

In that case, why privilege microwaves over all other non-ionizing frequencies? If people are concerned about microwaves causing cancer, they should also be concerned about infrared, radio, and power lines. You bring up a good point: If cell phones cause cancer, it would tell us something new about biology, chemistry, and/or physics.

Even if the worst-case studies are true and cell phones double your risk of brain cancer, I still don't think people should change their habits. Brain cancer is incredibly rare and phones are incredibly useful. We make these usefulness-safety tradeoffs all the time. For example, automobiles cause around 2% of deaths worldwide (1-2 million people per year) but we use them anyway.
I understand, but what they need to "relearn" isn't that hard. The skills are quite easily transferred, especially the skills that they would use an office suite for in grade school. And especially the skills that the grade school students would use an office suite for.

Like any population, some of the teachers are actually quite tech-savvy, and some will whine about anything. This is an area, however, where if I was superintendent I would make the switch and take a day or two of their "planning time" for training. It would be a good place for a "peer teaching" lesson plan.

When we first got computers, we had to teach the teachers what it meant to "save," how to insert and eject the disk, and so on. Transferring to OO would be much easier than that initial training.
Would you mind expounding a bit? What, in particular, makes you uncomfortable enough to take on the burden of cycling through accounts? Are your concerned about your safety, politics, job prospects, family?

I'm genuinely interested in people who prefer anonymity, because I have a hard time identifying with their emotions. (Please note: I am NOT saying it's an invalid or "wrong" opinion to have, it's just one that I struggle to wrap my head around.)
The Register
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/]

discussion by recovered and recovering sysadmins
[alt.sysadmin.recovery]
I'm currently using Cloudkick's 1 server developer plan.

I would really love to use them to monitor all of our servers but their current plans don't work for us. We use lots of tiny instances and virtual machines. This means for us the cost of Cloudkick for each VM would be around the actual monthly cost of that VM.

If you have are in a different position to myself and are using larger instances then I would recommend you give them a try!
American courts have ruled that sports statistics are "pure facts", and therefore not copyrightable. In fact, companies like STATS, Inc. rely on the fact that they are public domain. When you pay STATS, what you are buying is the compilation and quality control they provide.
Thanks for making the site. Very useful.
But isn't it just a platitude you tell yourself to feel better that you will never be that successful? How can you be sure Zuck isn't better than those who failed? And how can you be sure those who failed didn't do something wrong? You see how pointless this is?
What is a "real" identity? I mean, I'm using obviously a pseudo, but looking for it on google will give you my real name in about 30 seconds, and there is very little possible confusion.
This is very interesting; it's the first time I've heard of an IV patent actually being (almost) litigated. Here are a couple of relevant points:

- Running this patent as a separate company limits the potential downside for IV etc. Even if the legal system awarded legal costs to the winner of the suit, which it won't, and even if other companies countersued for tortious interference with business relationships, which they won't, the worst that can happen is that the patent corporation goes bankrupt and there's zero return to the investors.

- It isn't necessary for IV to have control of, or even an ownership stake in, the licensing corporation. They can sell the patent to a company run entirely by third-party investors for its expected licensing revenues, minus some return for the investors. If the payments for the purchase are spread out over a period of time, then IV could charge a higher nominal price by sharing in the risk that the patent won't pan out (and that the corporation will therefore go bankrupt as a result with some payments still unpaid).

- Webvention, to an even greater extent than IV itself, is immune to countersuits for infringements of other patents.

- There's nothing stopping IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc., from doing the same thing. If Unisys had done this over the LZW patent, they wouldn't have suffered the PR black eye that they did.
> Obviously no one is suggesting that cell phones create viruses

It sure would be some kind of dystopian cracker's paradise though- imagine being able to use computer viruses to make people viruses that jump from their computers to living beings!
The silver lining is that ridiculous situations like this -- which is no less than legalized extortion -- will increase the obviousness of the need to reform the patent system and end the ability to patent the obvious. It will happen. It is happening.
Where's the Windows Azure support?
I would argue that,unless you're a nonprofit or heavily government funded if you want to keep innovating yes, you need to be a business.
On this video (http://ycombinator.posterous.com/dropbox-interview-now-onlin...), Jessica Livingston interviews Drew. Besides being an interesting interview, it reveals that he was rejected the first time he tried out YC.
Yes, good points. It's so unexpected by you, me, and most everyone who does science that it would probably be a Nobel-worthy observation.

The point about effect size is also critical. If my probability of developing brain cancer is 0.00001% and talking on a phone multiplies my risk by 3 (quite a large effect size), I'm still far more likely to die from heart disease, or an accident, or some other cancer, or, well, anything else.
What makes you say they have a smaller learning curve than iOS? Is that assuming previous knowledge of Microsoft development tools? Or do you think that someone who only has experience with say C or Ruby would have an easier time of picking up Windows Phone dev tools over Xcode/Cocoa?
You should go look at the code, and then write a blog post about it, so the next person who is googling for it can find the answer more easily....?
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. :/
Yeah, it looks a bit pricey considering the cheapest paid plan is $99/month for 6 servers.
The second comment on scientificamerican.com (by richard2010) after the article explains why we should not dismiss precautionary worry.

There are many other ways radiation can affect microbiology besides directly ionizing atoms.
Really great: I like its speed and layout. The color search is a nice touch. My only complaint is about the quality/quantity of results. When I searched for "pulp art" I only see _3_ results whereas Etsy itself finds 531.
http://www.etsy.com/search_results.php?search_query=pulp+art
And now for something marginally different:

"I have no idea if <bats can fly>. But if I have a model of <flight in biological animals> and <bats> happen not to fit the model, that's nothing like proof that they cannot <fly>."

Notice how if you change what someone is saying, you can make them look silly?

And yes, if you are looking at it from the perspective of deductive reasoning, the statement does make perfect sense.
MessageParty (YC S10): How The Idea For My Startup Came At A Music Festival
Header documentation and pointer-as-output conventions are both typically available in the Google libraries I've used.

I really don't understand what you are complaining about. Earlier you said you didn't like references being modified by functions to which they are parameters. Now you are complaining about the use of pointers as parameters? In a language like C++, it's pretty difficult to do neither.
I've only attended one NYTM so far, but the one time I witnessed somebody get booed for asking the "how will you make money" question, it certainly wasn't wrapped in MBA speak. The crowd response seriously saddened me - this sort of attitude will only detract from the amazing things going on in NYC right now.
Because the business of building robots has nothing to do with building OSes or media players? How about that for a start?
You should take it because being slightly under pressure, and worried, creates the emotional environment that is most conducive to learning. You are forced to focus on what is essential, and have a constant source of external motivation.

Just think about why human animals have the capacity for learning and knowledge in the first place. It was for survival in a much harsher setting. Jumping in water which is just a little too deep is a good way to simulate this.

Good luck
No, that's not how it works. The overwhelming evidence from physics consideration to actual studies suggests there is no such connection so it's a little silly to be say 'this is false because it's possible for nanites built into our DNA by Xenu to awaken when you call this special 1-900 number and hold your cellphone just so'.

You've probably read this before but what you're saying sounds a lot like the argument described by Carl Sagan here -

http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Dragon.htm
Opera Unite is actually seriously awesome. Faster sharing than uploading somewhere or sending through skype. You can give a person access to some photos without the whole internet seeing it, without having to upload lots of huge pictures or without using the crappy facebook uploader
BYD Fined, Factories Confiscated By China in Land Dispute Case
Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers.
New book Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants
My point is that hiding his name wouldn't make it hard to find out who he is with an interesting enough story. So anonymity doesn't buy you license to speak freely.
Quite the opposite, unless you are a born plumber, somehow ended up learning programming. Downloading and installing the compiler, and learning how to compile just to get things going is to programming what putting on a condom is to a... you know...
But those without experience tend to undervalue it.

Getting turfed from Apple was the best thing that happened to Steve Jobs. If you read the folklore, he was bit of an enfant terrible, and I'm of the view that the experience of running NeXT and Pixar gave him the insight to turn around Apple.

I'm not nearly convinced that Apple would be the same company it is today if Steve Jobs had not been forced out.
I'm interested in exactly how you diverged. What changes did you make to the protocol (especially in terms of server-server communication) to facilitate that kind of scalability?
> you will never use it to inspire them to appreciate the beauty of math.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
Lifting Buckets, But Not Carrying Water
Yeah, it seems to me that taking the time to build something with polish __is__ what gives the company value.
We use Nagios on one of our Linodes to do our server monitoring. It's set up to do nearly constant monitoring; the last time we had a glitch, I received a text message about high CPU load before the graph at Linode had even updated to show the spike.

That costs us $20/month, except we're doing it on a server that was already required for another service and had plenty of disk and CPU to spare, so ... really it costs us nothing, and gives us most of CloudKick's features, in our specific case.

Given their pricing, I think I'd rather take that money each month and pay someone to contribute to Nagios instead. :-/
I don't think he spent time making a custom iPad app for his daughter so he could make learning independent enough to not participate. He was merely trying to apply one of his strengths (programming), his background (a startup designing educational games), and background knowledge (knowing his daughter loved Harry Potter) to try to create a better learning experience for his daughter, which is something I think every good educator, whether it's a teacher, parent, or peer, should do. You have to teach people to your strengths and their strengths - if he was an author and chose to teach math to his daughter in the context of elaborate stories and fairy tales, would you call that self-defeating as well?

This reminded me of Randy Pausch's last lecture (if you haven't had a chance to watch it, I highly recommend it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo). Teaching kids is all about headfakes* - you are't encouraging them to play soccer so they can go and play in the World Cup, but rather so they have a fun context to learn about things like hard work, practice, and teamwork. Analogously, I think this personalized Harry Potter app just teaches his daughter that learning doesn't always have to feel like work, not specifically that she should spend all day trying to get praises from Hermoine and British men answering math problems.

* Disclaimer: I don't have kids and know little to nothing about raising or educating kids.
The answer to your question is yes:

After Hours: 591.50 +50.57 (9.35%)
Oct 14, 4:49PM EDT
Don't be afraid, just configure your Apache server correctly and you'll be fine.

One-liner if you're already using rewrite:

RewriteRule ^(./)?.svn/ - [F,L]

If you're not:

<Directorymatch "^/./.svn/">
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Directorymatch>
Wow, that's just idiocy. What do they think some HFT algo's do?
It was a lot better than expectations. The stock is moving up substantially on this news.

Also Google is a pretty good indicator of what is happening with the Internet as a whole. If Google's gross revenue jumps 23%, that bodes well for many smaller companies.

Edit Removed wildly incorrect estimate of the size of the jump. I clearly didn't sanity check the miscalculation I did...
Here are a couple characteristics of the elite in a field (certainly exceptions exist). 1) they know that they are decent to the point that they no longer need peer approval and 2) they have a better understanding of how vast the ‘knowing what you don’t know’ really is. This can create interesting situations in which the best in a field will be the first to tell that they don’t know. I think you are getting to a good place since you realize that there is quite a bit left to learn.

Perhaps instead of thinking: ‘Am I good enough’ think of it as ‘How can I improve’. The idea is to shift the focus toward being your best, which is largely under your control while how hard other people work is not. Those that are internally driven tend to do better since they are trying to maximize their situation. By helping your friends in order to improve your skill set it seems you are doing just that.
I like that you shared the apathy and Excel insights. I learned this early on too. Even today in the PF space, I'd still say that's true and shouldn't inhibit anyone from trying to create something cool.

Thanks for adding the PR point too. I get tired of hearing the "Mint didn't spend money to attract users" line.
Apple's design is well known and impressive, but even more impressive IMO is their ability deliver it with such incredible operational efficiency. My favorite insight from this article was that Sony was the production role model for Steve.
I don't think that's a remotely fair reading of what I wrote. Perhaps our perspective is informed by our backgrounds; mine is more biological, so seeing proteins do totally unexpected things is commonplace for me. I'm not inventing a dragon.
Foot traffic would be great for places like suburban malls or the weekends, but is less relevant for things like burglaries and car thefts (unless its burglaries at businesses). For city centers, worker population density would work just as well during the week, since workers are going to be the most likely to be in an area from 8am-6pm.
For fitness:

http://www.reddit.com/r/fitness/
http://stronglifts.com/forum/

For design:

http://dribbble.com/
Do they have an IaaS solution yet?
damn, I was going to do this! Hah, it's a good idea.

Actually I was going to have something like this: <img src="foo.webp" onerror="makecompat();"> where makecompat gets the webp data and implements the webp algorithm to draw the image onto a canvas which replaces the image element. That way any browser that supports canvas would be able to support webp, and it would 'fail forward'.

But still, this is a cool script, and I'll certainly use it if I want webp images.
4 figures a month, 5 figures a year/season :)
Has that kind of thinking really changed though? Apple was already a sizeable company with real revenue making real, physical products at that time.

Outside of online businesses, do you really see a lot of young CEOs?
What I'm saying is that people who are bad at C++ get all of the bad parts (memory allocation hell) but none of the good parts (supar speeeeeed). Since most people are bad at programming, it confuses me why they want to use a tool that makes them look bad when they could trade a little theoretical speed for a program that actually runs.

Wait, I answered my own question.
Agree with this but it doesn't answer my original question.

Why bother with encryption when each person having an email list would work as well as anything for distributing information? Why? It's like UPS buying armored cars to deliver your packages with but still plunking the package down outside your house when you're not home.

I have a reasonable expectation of privacy sending email through a webmail account. If I was sending the corporate crown-jewels or something, I'd encrypt my message but email these days is appropriately secure.

I'm asking these questions with the best intentions too. I like the idea of a Facebook alternative - I'm working on my project along those lines in fact. The thing is that to offer an alternative, you've got to be clear what services Facebook offers and how one could offer them better. It seems like a lot of upset over Facebook confuses Facebook's abuse of user data with the inherent insecurity that comes from sharing information with any group of people. We'll have to educate ourselves and our users about the difference if we want to have this Facebook alternative thing get off the ground.

As far as I can tell, almost everything Facebook provides is something you can do with the "regular web". Facebook simply puts everything in a nice package (and that nice package matters a lot as we've seen). If you had a script which aggregated your friend's blogs, tweets and emails, you would have something like Facebook. The only service that would be required is friend-discovery and perhaps a "like" messaging system. The rest could just involve wrapping/packaging existing stuff.

The thing about Facebook and walled-gardens in general is that they really entice people who otherwise wouldn't participate in "cyber life" to come onto the web. But Facebook users hopefully will also be learning that their walled-garden doesn't offer the protection it claims and hopefully they'll realize that nothing can simultaneously offer free-sharing and perfect privacy in the modern era - your friends' friends just aren't necessarily going to be your friends etc.

So we "Facebook alternativists" have to offer something that gives the good stuff that a social network can realistically provide for people who are over the illusion that they can live in a one-identity, total-trust world.
Beyond the Medical Chart
Maybe I'm too opinionated about the whole thing, but I have yet to find a cloud management solution that does things the way I want. Cloudkick, Rightscale, Chef, all seem to work ok, if you're willing to buy in to their preferred way of doing things. If you want to stray from that, though, its a lot of work, and brittle.

I don't know that they're wrong, and I'm right, exactly, but it feels like they're all trying to paper over the features and drawbacks of cloud, and making it act more like traditional hardware that people are more familiar.
I think you're wrong on several counts:

1) While AMD64 is an extension of x86, the result in exploiting it is largely new architectural guidelines (things like different calling conventions for common calls) and one of the reasons why every major OS has an AMD64 version of the OS which distinct from their x86 version.

2) Windows Server 2008 R2, released in retail about one year ago, support Itanium. That's the last version to support Itanium. But still has standard MS support, so you can get hot fixes for it for the next 10 years.

3) Millions, if not billions of ARM processors are shipped every year OUTSIDE of mobile phones. There is no mobile phone, no matter how dominant, that could kill ARM simply by moving to a new architecture.
My little piece of Privacy
It would be nice to see these guys mend their relationship before it's too late.
The last Windows to support Itanium is Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7, and Server 2008 / Vista ran on Itanium too.
A Chinese New Deal for the United States
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841117 including comments by the author.
We use Nagios combined with Ganglia for webpop.com as well and it's a great solution.

But if we weren't on a tight budget (we're bootstrapped) I would have gone with something like CloudKick no doubt.

The server for Nagios might be cheap, but installing, refining and updating our monitors does take time that could be used on developing our product instead.
KDE plasma in 18-24 months?
Doesn't the US already have a form of this, in that losers are sometimes required to pay their opponents' litigation fees?
Isn't Segway protected by its uselessness rather than a patent?

Edit: if you believe that Segway's lack of success meant nothing, and that many companies want to build and sell self-balancing scooters but the patent system is stopping them, you should argue that point and downvote, not just downvote. I'm annoyed.
Yeah, let's hope. Human life is important and all that. But just in case they do (which would be very unfortunate!), may they do so in a violent and spectacular way.

Not that I advocate it (really!) but if that's to happen, then at least this should have a clearly shown moral.
Yes. They can sue. And if you just don't show up they can get a summary judgement against you. If you show up without a lawyer their lawyer can make you look unprepared. And if you show up WITH a lawyer then you have to pay a lot of money for the lawyer.
Sorry, I have to choose multiple for various reasons:

AirBnB, because it appears to be immensely profitable and those guys worked hard in some very creative, unorthodox ways to get it going.

Justin.TV, because the founders have always been nice, helpful, and approachable with me whenever I've needed advice/help/insights.

Directed Edge, because wheels is wheels.
Sounds terrible - why airline food tastes so bland
I'm probably one of the few Canadians who prefers a weak Canadian dollar.

I'm biased, however, because I've spent a lot of my career in services with a lot of American customers, so I've enjoyed the benefits from the exchange difference.
When Dilbert came to Nokia