skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did this as well - I quit my job, started reading Ruby books and wrote the Alpha version of Pikimal.com. I did this because I'd been the CMO at another start-up where I'd really not understood the dev process well enough and had thought that it had real costs so I have a pretty good sense of the benefits.

We're pretty busy, so let me cut to the chase:

The good:
I'm credible to our tech folks. I understand when to slow down to integrate a library, and I'm more than willing to find time to re-factor. I learned that pair programming can be awesome, that bringing on new people slows you down, and a lot of other things that probably seem obvious to technical folks but are non-intuitive when you imagine software as assembling widgets.

The bad:
Ultimately, we gave up 3-5 months that we could have been hiring, fund-raising, and building software. On balance, I think that this was good for me and bad for this start-up.

The ugly:
As soon as I'd hired people, I think that we should have thrown out most of the code I'd written. We kept it because it worked and was fairly fast, but I'd made A LOT of newbie mistakes that have slowed things down.

So, tl;dr? I'd suggest learning to code but I'm not sure that you should do it for your current start-up. At the very least launch something more sophisticated than a CRUD app and THEN get started on your small biz.
i am assuming you are using ip address to find where i am and pull in suggestions from google. seems like the suggestions all fall into a category, like movies, fair, restaurants.

you could add vote up buttons to get better data? also facebook integration... to see what your friends might like. it's an interesting idea for sure.
That's correct, but incredibly irrelevant. Yes, money is only "money" because we as a society decide it is. But we as a society (in theory) also decide what our government should spend money on. It is our money, no matter how you look at it. The government does take some of it from us as the price of having a civilized society, but we still get to (collectively) decide what that money is used for. And if we don't like paying for a 4-year college education for someone who is going to end up being a parking attendant, we have the right to try to find a way to fix that.

Maybe we'll fail, but we have the right to try to change things.
Schemas are an optional part of Solr. Pretty sure that the default schema.xml has an example of a catch-all field definition, if you use that it will automatically deal with any key you want to throw at it.

Of course you need to specify one field type (analysis stack) to apply to all, but I don't know how you expect to avoid that - gonna have to express that metadata somewhere if you need more complex behavior.

Personally I think the _d, _i approach is ok, suffixes aside - complex field analysis options w/o a schema.
BBC Backstage (BBC developer network) to close
There's some. Embedly, for example, moved back east after YC.
have you considered using rabbitmq/0mq? It sounds like they are perfect candidates for what you are trying to achieve.
1. get a book about design.

2. Analyse sites you like and measure the proportions, relative sizes and shapes and font sizes etc.

3. Create your site. Ask for feedback from designers.

4. Once you've gone through that process, you'll start to get an idea of how time consuming UI and front end design is.

5. if it's not for you - get some one else to do it.
So does getting thrown off lists (or leaving in a huff as a preemptive strike) count for making me worthwhile? :-P

(Yeah, I'm having one of THOSE days.)
It's a pity that this is the digital privacy case that the media and politicians decided to run with.

There are legitimate unanswered questions about what privacy means in an increasingly networked world... but what to do with personal information broadcasted in the clear and recorded by accident is not one of them.
keep-alive

it doesn't make sense to make a new connection every 1 second, esp. to apache. that is where your prob was, not php
I had never heard of those before. Are they capable of working inside any web broswer? Looking it up right now.
thanks for the feedback! I'm actually getting the location data from google itself.

I like the facebook integration idea, and was thinking of doing something with their checkin feature? Don't they have something that lets you say: "I'm here!"?
As much as the cult of genius is often overwhelming and contributing people have been written out of histories of discovery I still feel uneasy when I see a Prof and a PhD student listed as discovering something as you never know what the Prof contributed with the current state of the academy. It can always be a collaboration yes, so I am not passing judgment on this case, but there seem to be many cases where it is not a collaboration but a payment of dues to seniority. Then again, at my faculty in another discipline we have so little support or contact with the Profs it's embarrassing: so I suppose having any kind of working relationship as peers would be better than what goes on in some places.
Story says "Google collected the data as a result of code integrated into the software used to identify and map WiFi signals. Google says the code was developed in 2006 by an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. That coded ended up on the systems that power the data collection of the Street View cars."
A lot had also changed by that point - namely they failed in selling the technology to Excite. Would they have stayed friends had they gotten the $1 million they wanted?

Shared trials make and break friendships.
Ask HN: OS X Partitioning Advice
Hi All,

I just upgraded my drive in my MacBook to a 500gb hybrid from Seagate as well as 8gb of RAM.

I am looking for partitioning advice. I know there are some work arounds that need to be done to accomplish this and I just don;t know the best approach.

I need:

-1 large snow leopard partition. My main partition.

-1 small Windows 7 partition

-1 small partition for "OS X Developer Previews"
(obviously I cannot voilate any NDA's)

I don't really want to run virtual machines for Windows, but if I did, then this becomes easy as it is possible to run multiple OS X versions and I have done this many times.

I know that if I decided to throw in a small Linux partition (which I would only use once in a great while for testing) that it complicates even more.

Advice is appreciated.
Giant Stinson Beach Bubbles (Canon 550D)
When making these kinds of submissions, it's helpful to provide some context.

Like... what is this? The linked site doesn't make it clear.
Can you ethically invest in unethical companies?
The best online university/course websites I can use as a benchmark for ours?
I'm in charge of creating a website for a new online degree program at Clemson University.
Do you know of any online university websites (not University of Phoenix!)or other online course websites that I can benchmark our website to?<p>Even though our website is for an online degree program in Manufacturing Engineering, I wanted to benchmark it to any online program out there. Basically I wanted to compare the features, performance and other usability parameters.
Here's one on the personal level. This might sound a little silly, but simply being allowed to submit a bug report and see the progress being made on that bug has got to be one of the most cathartic experiences in my entire relationship with machines and software.
Game Changers: Jon Stewart [video]
Professionals exist for a reason. That doesn't mean he can't learn enough to establish a MVP and become knowledgeable about the subject domain though.

Being able to call BS from your developers or a perspective co-founder doesn't require you to be a programming god.
Progress Is a Greater Motivation Than Money
Net sales for 2009 were 52% US, 48% international. They don't break down the international category.
My top 5 (non tech and in no particular order):

Ronaldinio
MF Doom
Madlib
Bansky
Aaron McGruder
I think it can be summed up in this statement by Doug:

"If they indeed act as they have promised, then the JCP can never again become more than an approval body for Oracle-backed initiatives."
Yep. The bank started my first checking account at #1500.
Coffee + 10 minute breaks every 20 minutes of code. Weekly/monthly hackathons help condition your body for this ;-)

I obviously crash immediately after. I'm usually delirious and black-out (after TechCrunch Disrupt for example).
Definitely: "If I can tell from a book's Amazon sales rank that I'll be able to sell it in one day, I might accept a projected profit of as little as a dollar."

There's no way that's worth even the time it takes to package the book for shipping.
Cisco-RIM talk underscores Microsoft's missed opportunity
yeh facebook has a checkin feature... foursquare and lots of those sites have apis also.
I don't understand how you can compare wifi usage and radion transmitting. With radio transmitting, you are actually, purposely broadcasting information. With unencrypted WIFI, it is just a technical consequence of using internet, but there is absolutely no intent of giving this information away.

If I were pushing this argument, it would mean it is ok to copy say a movie I am downloading from a pay-per-view website on the condition it is not encrypted. Which I think does not stand legally speaking, but IANAL.
Timing out connections is pretty standard practice. However that's not what the article is referring to. Imagine requests being handled serially by the web server. If two clients are queued up, [A, B] with B being the first in line, and B also happens to be on a flaky wireless connection that takes 2 minutes to complete the request, then A doesn't get its turn until 2 minutes later.

To fight this undesirable effect, you will want to handle all connections simultaneously so that no user has to wait for the other. However many web apps tend to be serial with limited concurrency, because of the way they're written.

One way to solve this problem is by buffering the request and the response at the reverse proxy level, where the reverse proxy can - in principle - handle an unlimited number of connections concurrently, or at least a large number of them concurrently. The reverse proxy doesn't pass the request to the web app until the request has been completely received. Likewise, the reverse proxy receives the complete response from the web app, thereby immediately freeing the web app's limited concurrency resources, and then sends the buffered response to the client no matter how long that can take. Both the reverse proxy receive and send steps can be combined with a timeout; this is what you're referring to in your reply but it's only a part of the total picture.

However all of this is pretty standard practice for many web servers, and has been for a while. Phusion Passenger has done this since version 2.0 (2 years ago). Before Unicorn, traditional setups with Nginx + mongrel_cluster, Nginx + Thin, Apache + mongrel_cluster, Apache + Thin, do exactly the same thing.

To be clear: Unicorn is not responsible for handling slow clients. It's fairly unique in its policy to explicitly not handle slow clients, and to require the user to put it behind a buffering reverse proxy. This makes sense if to people who are intimately familiar with network server architectures, but can be confusing to newbies who just want to setup a server expect it to work; this newbie will be in for a nasty surprise.

For example Thin does not require a buffering reverse proxy, it buffers internally. Mongrel can handle slow clients up to a certain number because it's multithreaded in so far it hasn't hit the app's lock yet.
Serious question: what's utility?
Sigh, it wasn't that long ago that a 17-year-old with no income could have gotten a mortgage to buy a $1M loft.
Wonderful post, I especially love the part about naughtiness, when it's time for me to apply to ycombinator I will share my little ninja hack that I used for about 2 months ;).

I didn't know about airbnb until now, thanks for introducing me to the site.
AT&T prepares for life after iPhone exclusivity deal
Wouldn't this "tangible medium of expression" be the clothes themselves?
I'm not an authority but in my mind, Iphone == Wowness and simple magic, Android == Open hacking and Google cloud, and Palm == getting things done with a proven organizational tool.

Now all of those things you can probably do with each of the others, and I'm sure one could dispute each as well, but advice is only good to pass along, and not often of much practical use (perhaps, heh bastardized wilde quote)
Adobe and Oracle are gaining control over Java and Flash, two things that previously Apple controlled themselves. The app store isn't replacing the ability to install application on your own, it's just another option to purchase and install apps in a way that may be more familiar and user friendly for those who use Apple's phones. This seems more like Apple reducing their control over the user experience.
This is one of the cheeriest buildings I've ever been in. I remember an automatic mood uptake walking in the door for each weekly dinner.
I never developed for it, but I ran the free install years ago on (then) laughably slow hardware, and it was still quite snappy.
I think I can make out "ridiculously easy life-sharing"
I think his question was whether SEO overall, rather than the good or bad part of it, are good for the web.
Ask HN: Good "about us" pages? Looking for design inspiration
Advice and/or examples are appreciated.
fixed. thank you.
If you're not excited by the idea of going into space then nothing I can say can possibly communicate the excitement that the idea holds for me. Overanalyze everything and nothing is exciting... I'd also like to have sex with [insert this week's celebrity crush here] even though it's "just sticking one piece of meat inside another piece of meat".

I will, however, say that every one of our ancestors for the past four billion years has been confined to a thin layer on the surface of a smallish and otherwise-undistinguished rock in a universe whose scale is... very big. To be one of the first thousand or so Earth-origin organisms to get away from the rock, even if it's just to float for a half an hour in the dark vacuum just outside, sounds pretty darn exciting to me.

It ain't first-man-on-Mars stuff, but as far as expensive rich-person holidays go it's better than a week in Vegas.
I think it's important to learn how to hack, if only simply to be able to fundamentally "follow along." I'm a big "idea" guy; and, most of my ideas have often been internet based. Being a lawyer, it never occurred to me to learn how to hack. This last week I started teaching myself at Google Code University. If you're halfway intelligent, it comes pretty quickly, particularly if you work through the practice problems.
> compare wifi usage and radion transmitting. (sic)

Well technically speaking, they are the same thing. Your WiFi router and your computer's WiFi card are both radio transmitters. If someone doesn't understand that, there's going to be a problem. But it's definitely not Google's problem.

As for your second point, taping video from the air on the VCR is fine. I'm sure it's fine digitally too.
The Amazing Anti- Inflammatory Properties of Black Rice
While the full results are still being studied, recently conducted research suggests that black rice can protect against inflammation. The full breadth of uses and possible applications for Black Rice are still being studied as we speak. Black Rice is proving to be one of the most amazing and beneficial ‘super foods’ available.
In the end, they both play by certain rules, that is the algorithm, which rewards or penalises a certain behaviour. Nothing to say about the penalty, but the rewarding part, in both cases, simply leads to a gain not due to merit but due to technicality.
> it's more of an issue when a company like Google does it

I don't know if it's more of an issue, but articles like this one make it more visible certainly.
Tldr: according to the article, the answer is a resounding "no".
Writing your own server in C seems a little crazy anymore. Just use a C++ framework like POCO or ASIO. POCO gives you a fast httpserver component with all the tricky stuff figured out.
An English BA who is waiting tables isn't necessarily wasting their education.
for copying the values to the clipboard
I think if I were in your shoes, I would purchase some decent looking themes from themeforest or similar, get an icon set (if you need one), and pay for someone to do a logo. Do what you can in CSS/HTML to get something cohesive together. Maybe pay a designer for a couple of hours just to review what you have done or give some pointers. This will be quite a bit cheaper than hiring someone to do the whole UI.

Learning to design isn't something that happens quick and some people just can't design, period. It isn't something that happens overnight or in a few weeks. It may be worth taking some design classes and getting into some design forums to get feedback etc, on what you have done, if you have an interest at getting better.
Me too. The best I did was driving past it when I came out to Cambridge for the first Startup School, but it was such a unique building even from the outside that seeing it again sparked a fond memory. Nice listing.
It is good to see many HN meta services started like Heacker Monthly, Newsletter, Hackerslide etc. It kind of speaks for popularity and value of HN. I am feel really good to be a part of such community.
So instead of understanding the problem and implementing the simplest possible solution, you're recommending throwing more middleware caching crap at it? Brilliant engineering. I think I understand "web scale" now.
[video] Gestural input with webcam and spandex glove
It's hard to imagine an hour spent managing the logistics of a coworking space in Boston that isn't better spent on one of the large number of startups YC is advising already.

That's in addition to the fact that YC was never really a coworking program itself; one of the distinctions Graham drew between YC and "incubators" (remember those?) was that YC companies had to find their own working space.

Also: who gives away equity for office space? Don't do that.
How did you collect these jobs? Automatic screen scraping or manually?
Many of the languages can ultimately produce the same result. If you look at Google, facebook, and twitter, they all use different languages.

One that kept popping up often in my search was "Python." Consensus was that it was pretty user friendly. Plus, the guys at Dropbox built their application with it...if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. I say, just pick one and get started.
Personally, I agree with some other folks here - your market is students and people learning languages.

Add really good pronunciation help - something you can hear. Make sure you integrate SRS - see Piotr Wozniak's work on the forgetting curve. (Also see Mnemosyne, Anki, etc.)

Check out lingt.com - they're the leader (feature-wise) in the language learning market for Chinese... at least from what I've seen. I recommend it to friends here at college that are trying to learn Chinese.

Personally, I learn English words /really fast/. I can see them once and get a definition and I'll be good for two years. This doesn't work for any other sort of information... only English words. Why? I have no clue. Anyway, my point is that no, I wouldn't see myself using it. Sorry.
Let's say you're manufacturing a product with thousands of individual components, each of which has a different cost, a different lead time, a different shelf life, and so on. These thousands of components are made into hundreds of sub assemblies, then tens, then are finally assembled and you have your product. You can crunch all of that and answer questions such as, in what order should we do this? How much of each component should we keep in stock? How does the rate at which we work affect the final cost? Would it actually be cheaper per unit to open another assembly line? And so on.
...which [Erlang] is not compiled.
Depending on your usage ~20GB should be enough for Windows - but you'll want to get it right because resizing an NTFS volume is a pain (with something like WinClone).

The second OS X partition, I don't think there aren't any DPs other than 10.6.5 that have been released to Mac Developer Program members (unless you're a Select or Premier?) and you can always install and use the included reversioner.... now 10.7 will be a different story when it comes along, but another ~10GB should be enough.

I would put the rest of your disk to the main partition. You can startup the Mac from your boot DVD or find a Snow Leopard image and an external drive somewhere to use Disk Utility to repartition.

edit: of course repartitioning will erase the drive, so backup carefully.

edit2: actually, Disk Utility does have non-destructive partition editing but it hasn't worked the two times I've tried it, giving an error about unmovable files or something, but it might still be worth a try.
What's Greener: A Refurbed Laptop or a New One?
Pirated Scans of 'Underground' Boost Sales of the Indie Comic
Huh? How does Apple get a security update in its own software too late for GM?

Apple handles the SDL for its own security flaws internally. It tends to know where it stands with them. Apple cannot say the same thing about Flash; Adobe (as a simple matter of course) may have tens of queued vulnerabilities, with some arbitrary subset of them having actual fixes in the pipe. That's the nature of software security on large projects.

Apple can't wash its hands of Snow Leopard vulnerabilities, but it essentially can do that for 3rd party software like Flash.
Indeed.

The box should jump to the top if you hover over it before locking a color.
Steganography?  A student "hides" Rick Astley's lyrics in an essay.
Wikileaks dumps 400,000 more files
My thoughts exactly, I had no idea that that was the intention of that question especially since it had no context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb

Fork Bombs are easier to pull off from the command line. Not so much with DOS. I would say that loading a large webserver for each request would use up more resources than a tiny C program. Thats the whole point of the post.
I think a good example would be the way Randy Pausch "hacked" his way onto NASA's "vomit comet". There was a program for students and faculty were not allowed so he couldn't go as a teacher, but he scoured the rules and found out that press were allowed so he found a way to get a press pass. He didn't break any of the stated rules, just found a loophole he could squeeze through.
Thanks for sharing the clip of Joe Ades. I've seen a lot of street performers and people selling odds and ends here and there but few people have made me stop on my tracks, in the middle of the day, and made me an instant customer by buying a product that I didn't even have in mind when I set out. That is powerful.

exhaustedhacker, I feel for you, but since when is TechCrunch to bouncer or doorman to your success? No ones fortunes should be dependent on Michael Arrington. Instead of taking time to craft emails for him and his staff him, spend sometime crafting emails to targeted users. You said that you have had some success from meetups, do more of that, fight for every user. Give out a few free trial accounts to influencers, such as to folks here on YC. Reach out to other disrupters, Mashable, This Week in Startups, etc. If you don't have time to blog about your, you can contract folks for $10-20 a post.

Good luck, and thanks for sharing!
I really don't think it's a big deal. If people need flash they'll make sure they have it. This just throws the responsibility to the user. It's reasonable for apple to do this, but looks/sounds a little over the top.