skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I guess the popup is better than nothing, seeing a window.alert anywhere usually brings up negative connotations (at least for me). I'd just add some text disclaimer on the sign up page - or at least confine the alert to that page. I tried thumbing through your site, but having to click "ok" every time I wound back on the home page didn't keep me on it for long. Best of luck to you.
Why Japanese Love Robots (And Americans Fear Them)
Linode is awesome and great for small- to mid-range server needs. Even an EC2 small instance is overkill (both in computing resources and in price) for many websites.

However if you do need lots of resources then the cost effectiveness of VPSes - or any virtualized system for that matter - goes down the drain quickly. For high-traffic websites nothing compares to good old dedicated servers. The pricing difference between a dedicated server and EC2/Linode/etc can be as much as 5x for the same resources.

Linode is also a bad choice if you need a lot of disk space, and with "a lot" I mean >100 GB. Expanding disk space on Linode is very expensive, an order of magnitude more than EBS.
Just check my HN profile. :)

And I would absolutely appreciate any/all corrections. I know the early years of YC data aren't as accurate as the last few.
Is Fortune looking in the wrong places for Trader Joe's secrets?
Dollar fall sparks stability warnings
It said she visited on a vacation when she met her husband. It also said she was a home owner, and had kids in college. Given the timeline, her legality is not really an issue.

You're right it's not the best article. But the point of the article was to profile what kinds of jobs tourism brings. Which in Los Angeles, is a very hot issue.

"First in a series profiling people working in Southern California's No. 1 industry."
Good timing. I'm working on a MUD server with lua scripting and this coroutine stuff is a much better way to handle input.

Eventually I'm going to stick ZMQ-based RPC onto it as well, so other services (M2?) can interrogate the server for things like player lists.
Also ejabberd.
I think a new language could win by being more portable. A compiler that targets Intel and ARM is no longer interesting. But a nice language with a compiler that can create libraries usable in JavaScript apps, iPhone apps, Android apps, and App Engine apps would be very interesting.
Anyone know if it's possible to export videos from justin.tv to something that would play on my iPod?
That's an interesting moral dilemma.

I'd say that if you can't obtain it at all then downloading it may well be a legitimate option if there's another way that you could recompense the author or pay it back. For example, you could find a US library address, buy the book and have it sent there instead, then download a copy safe in the knowledge that you have actually paid for it, with the karmic bonus of having donated it to a library.
Looks nice, and they open-sourced their reader. However I wonder if publishers are willing to distribute their content without any form of DRM.
all we need is the opposite of ebay, people teaming their money to acquire something for the commons, so that all these expensive historical products noone in their right mind would buy wind up in the same place that we can send schoolkids to as punishment.
F# was first released in 2002.
Social Mechanism Design
Mechanism design
Would it work on a PS3 running ubuntu?
Ah, I see in the "Extras" page. The pricing seems dumb though-they want $20/mo extra for 360mb of ram, but for an additional $20/mo I might as well update my 512 to a linode 1024 and get an additional 512mb of ram, as well as more cpu power/disk/bandwidth.
This is a very thoughtful article, it's a shame it didn't get more votes.
Sorry for the facebook redirect, when I realized it was too late.
I'm not sure about HN, but I heard people say that the main editors/volunteers on Wikipedia that do the bulk of the work are somewhere in the 1000+ range (somewhere in the low four-digits).
well you couldn't fit all of human knowledge in a text file like he claims, not to mention how hard it'd be to give it a proper filename.
Thoughts on Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition
Time, HTML5 and Google Search results
Gates Foundation pushes technology for college preparedness
Here is an old blog post (not sure how accurate it is), but it has info on some other companies as well,

http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...

Heres the summary according to the post,

* YC S05 - 1 Active /3 Failed / 2 Acquired / 2 Other
* YC W06 - 5 Active /1 Failed / 2 Acquired
* YC S06 - 3 Active /6 Failed / 1 Unknown
* YC W07 - 5 Active /4 Failed / 4 Acquired / 2 Unknown
* YC S07 - 12 Active /4 Failed / 3 Acquired
* YC W08 - 9 Active /10 Failed / 1 Acquired / 1 Unknown
* YC S08 - 17 Active /3 Failed / 1 Acquired / 1 Unknown
* YC W09 - 14 Active /1 Failed / 1 Stealth
* YC S09 - 16 Active /1 Acquired /9 Stealth
Can I just indulge in a bit of patriotism here? A few paragraphs in, I knew I was reading a British dude, and was confirmed right by the URL. Sure, no doubt there are many shibboleths to tell, but the main clue was the joy and easy humour of the writing. Just an incredibly British style, an utter lack of fear in mingling jokes and serious points.

The biggest thing the author won't dare admit - that he's a nice guy. That he cares about making it easier for others. I guess it's self-effacing, and I can see how others may prefer actual open honesty, but this is the way I work, and as such, this prose is like a warm bath to me.

"What are the five things most likely to break it? If somebody is trying to fix a problem and you left them a solution on page 5 of the manual they’re going to be really, really grateful. Once it’s working again they’ll buy you a beer to say thanks for all the trouble you saved them. Seriously, they will."
I've had a very similar experience with Rackspacecloud (makes sense since they're the same company as Slicehost now): Incredibly slow control panel, features sometimes work and sometimes don't, useless tech support (took 5 days to point our server to our domain because someone else had it pointed first for some reason, despite whois being obviously ours).

Meanwhile, I've been using Linode for my personal projects and it's night and day. The control panel is incredibly faster and easier to use, the prices and specs are better, and the community/documentation is noticeably more intelligent and better-equipped.
The enemy of progress in tech is complexity
Well, in all geekiness, pg could release the structure of 'the list' without revealing the actual data & put an end to all of this structured vs. unstructured speculation. Just sayin'.
Exposing the Professional
Thanks for the idea about library!
Ok a couple of things i'd like to see (Note: I haven't used the app yet so this is based on the video/reading the features).

1. The ability for the program to convert the units between Imperial and Metric. This way, it doesn't matter where your recipe comes from. As Epicurious is American, and I am in Australia, this would be my number 1.

2. The ability for the app to product a consolidated shopping list. So if I pick a few recipes to get ingredients for, it should produce a consolidated shopping list (ie. combine the same products)

3. An ingredient glossary. Some recipe's have things I have never heard of in. It would be good to be able to link through to a glossary to learn more about it

4. Another good thing would be the ability to plan out a week of food, or even have suggested menus based on what I have eaten in the past (This is probably getting a little heavy...). It could be based on the concept of 'Other people who ate X had Y'. Linking this with the consolidated shopping list would also be quite handy.

5. Dare I say it, but some sort of social element would be good. Adopting KISS, it could be like the http://pinboard.in of recipes. Very simple tags, etc.

------

Another one.

6. When you cook something for someone, and they ask for the recipe, it would be cool to be able to send it to their instance of Paprika or export a formatted PDF (On top of the email)
Australia's own 'Y Combinator' starts taking funding applications
Get on the Montreal Python mailing list and try to get to an event. StartupDrinks.ca also hosts regular monthly meetups. There is plenty of interesting stuff going on if you know where to look.
Canonical seem to be doing what pretty much every other company which has been involved with linux has done, which is to add a few of their own proprietary bits.

Having stuff like Ubuntu One isn't necessarily a problem provided that the user of the OS isn't required to use it as part of the essential or normal usage of the system. As long as these things remain optional, that's ok.
There is a broader message here than simply "you should befriend the cleaning staff."

Okay - you want to ignore the staff because you have no desire to meet them and you think they want to be ignored. Well, fine. You definitely don't sound like a people person. But if this is what you think, you are probably ignoring a lot of other people too. And missing out on a lot of opportunities and great relationships because of it.
Also, check out http://vimeo.com/10119028 . Jessica, of ycombinator, interviewing the AirBnB founders.
Linux Mint polishes that ball of mud even more, but your point still stands, I think.
very briefly. We're comparing the time + effort spent crafting an application (which apparently is quite large, for first-timers) and not fitting the ask VS simply building it and approaching consumers / partners.

If you have particular insight on any SBIR proposals related to our work, do share. Thanks!

ps. yes, Nathan is a friend.
Space Ruler Xzorganax, I present to you: misc.txt
> If you do, please try to answer this simple question: what single application of widespread importance benefits on a game-changing scale from running on multiple cores?

Computer vision and machine learning both benefit a lot from multiple cores. They seem to be really big growth areas at the moment and have the potential to dramatically change the way we interact with computers. It's already happening: recommendation engines on e-commerce sites are a great example of machine learning in practice. I believe we're going to see this sort of thing appearing in more and more places.

Web browsers already take advantage of multiple cores, by the way. The Rust language is being developed by Mozilla because (one of the three reasons from the project FAQ) of dissatisfaction with the concurrency support in existing languages.

I think there's a large opportunity cost to dismissing concurrency & parallelism at this moment.
W08 stats are out of date ;)
The Role of Qualifiers
Go watch Pirates of Silicon Valley. The movie is surprisingly good and pretty accurate (for a movie).
I think bytes are next. Then bits. Then the glory of square waves.

Seriously, I can understand the fascination with something so fundamental to programming. I'm just surprised the favorite editor wasn't mentioned.
Yeah, disk space is pretty much my only complaint with Linode. I'm not a big fan of their new manager interface, but that one's not a big deal.

Otherwise, Linode is really amazing, and the author is right -- they do seem to always be improving their service.
The problems Zed lists for a co-routine based web app (essentially tying important state to a single server) are also problems for the Scala/Lift framework. Dave Pollak, the author of Lift, claims that maintaining some server-side state solves more problems than it causes but I haven't had a chance to test this myself in a real app.
>1) When built-to-sell startups get customers, they aren't really interested in listening to them to improve the product – the company is supposed to be sold anyway.

I don't agree entirely with this one. For a company to be able to sell, first it needs to have customers around or else how will attract buyers?

No customers, no business...
The player skipped to the beginning when I tried to pause it. This happened three times before I decided to get the download link from the markup. I am using Opera on Windows 7.
Very good! I'll buy it. But then I'm a NetBSD refugee.

Should we all scrap the infernally complex Win32 interface? Or PHP? I guess that since DCE and CORBA have gone by the wayside, all we need to do is wait by the river long enough, and the body of SOAP will come floating by?
...which then results in a few people reading the library copy rather than buying their own, so that he effectively stole a book for personal use and discouraged multiple sales by other people who would have otherwise bought copies. His attempt to pay back the publisher for the book just cost that same publisher $50.

Our systems of morals assume a scarcity of goods which is increasingly not the case when the goods in question can be represented as bits of information. Sooner or later society will have to decide on a new set of moral rules to account for that, but for now things are fuzzy and a simple application of the traditional answers (goodwill and charity in this case) don't always give the best solution in a modern context.

(Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with this solution - I just like playing devil's advocate.)
Come On, Gartner - Show Your Work
Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age - Day 1 - Keynote - Geoff Canada
2010 Living Planet Report - We're quickly outgrowing our planet
In the humanities, one way into a text is through close reading. So here goes (just the first paragraph mind you because this can get tiring).

>>> I've written before about my deep skepticism regarding the true motives of Canonical, Ltd.'s advocacy and demand of for-profit corporate copyright assignment without promises to adhere to copyleft.

There is nothing wrong with Canonical requiring copyright assignment. The FSF do it, SUN did it, I would guess Microsoft does it. It is not unusual for a corporation to be a for-profit entity. There is no way someone would do unpaid work for somebody else and get nothing in return unless they were a slave or forced to do so. How would it be even possible to contribute to a Canonical project if you are not part of Canonical if the codebase is not freely accessible or at least in some way open?

>>> I've often asked Canonical employees, including Jono Bacon, Amanda Brock, Jane Silber, Mark Shuttleworth himself, and — in the comments of this very blog post — Matt Asay to explain (a) why exactly they demand copyright assignment on their projects, rather than merely having contributors agree to the GNU GPL formally (like projects such as Linux do),

That's interesting because the issue of copyright assignment arose when SCO started the whole litigation thing against Linux (well, Linux companies). Also, again, canonical is a for-profit corp, Linux is a (as you say) project so you can't compare them. I wonder what the policy of the Linux Foundation is?

>>> and (b) why, having received a contributor's copyright assignment, Canonical, Ltd. refuses to promise to keep the software copylefted and never proprietarize it (FSF, for example, has always done the latter in assignments).

Why should they promise? It's not their job to promise such things. The, again, are a corporation and have to look after themselves. They are not the FSF which is as far as I remember, a charity. What does Redhat do? Or Novell? We know that SUN required copyright assignment for OOo so it's not unreasonable for corps to have this requirement. If your issue is with code being worked on by individuals not employed by Canonical, with that work then being used in non GPL projects and with the copyright assignment of that work being handed over to Canonical then fair enough - please show me how this happens and where.

>>> When I ask these questions of Canonical, Ltd. employees, they invariably artfully change the subject.

Seriously. Citation please.
So, everything at Mint.com isn't open source, as many non-technical reports make it sound like. It's just some of the technologies...and much (or most?) of the code itself was written by Mint.com employees prior to the sale?
Actual report is here: http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living...
After watching the Airbnb talk, I took away a huge morale booster and some major (a few more obvious than others) pointers.

* When situation worsens, be opportunistic. Survive however you can:

Airbnb pushed their website with media when it was obvious that hotels couldn't facilitate the flood. That got them some drifting traffic while their site was still not the perfect user fit. They went on a tangent with breakfast cereal for presidential campaign candidates just to settle their credit card debt.

* Get in touch with users and prospects. You need to know your audience if you want to speak with it and pivot your product accordingly:

It seems that most of their successful pivots came from interaction and analysis of users. The concept of Bed and Breakfast service morphed into a community marketplace for space after they discovered a user is renting an apartment while they're absent (on a tour with a popular musician). Instead of sanctioning the user, they changed the rules, thus enabling another category of service. Knowing that musicians leave an empty apartment behind when they travel on tours gave them an insight, that probably helped them identify user segments worth communicating the service with.

* Focus on one thing and you will achieve it:

PG gave them a pretty good target for Demo Day, profitability. They did what is a common goal-oriented approach: they hung a graph of their profitability ratio on a clearly visible space they would encounter every day (bathroom mirror). By hands-on engaging with users directly, pivoting the business model as required, they managed to pull off the profitability breakthrough two weeks before Demo Day.

* Dive into payments:

End in end, using an outsourced payment solution proved to be more hassle than it was worth. They started processing payments and charging their 10% provision although they were just three people, and it seemed like a huge responsibility to take. Now it seems logical.

* Persevere:

It took them almost three years of hustling, with more-or less a traffic flatline, credit card debt and dealing with a hopeless horizon, to finally come to an awesome business model, which in retrospect would seem impossible to build.
The advantage to staying up late is that you can focus on what you want to do, rather than having to work for someone else. Being in the office alone can be incredibly productive, I find it a lot better than being at home alone. I used to do a similar thing, go into the office on weekends and stay late at night, to work on my own projects. I started my own business that way.
Verizon advertising iPads now - October 28.
Do I get to decide what disgusting thing you eat? :)
Repost of my reply:

@Jacques: the last thing I was expecting in response to my post was a near incoherent rant from a disgruntled HN user. But yes, I'm glad that Mr Anonymous was able to so deftly demonstrate the downside of online anonymity and thereby reinforce the conclusion of my post. I don't think I've personally had any direct contact with you before now and I did not really have any preconceived opinion of you or your contributions to HN. But if it's between even handed and civil comments or over the top bitter trolling with a side of character assassination, that's not a hard choice.
>> I wouldn't bother until you have a couple million a year of profit from non-U.S. sources. The overhead is too big. <<

Is the cost of setting up these entities falling? Rising?
Linode indeed has great support,from my experience
Youku seems to be severely throttled in the West. Anytime I've tried to use it, I've given up in frustration at the buffering times.
Worked well, but I wonder how the page load size compares to Kindle files?
- I am targeting both coders and non-coders. People who are willing to spend some time learning a new interface and some new concepts by watching some videos.

- Want to realize their idea of creating a complete functional app (as complex as Hacker News or Twitter) in few hours.

I agree that at the moment the interface sucks, the tutorials are missing and discoverability of so many features in the builder is super low, and I really need to work a lot more on them than I thought. But, I am excited that you liked the concept and took the time to evaluate it further.
The way I understood it was that the average life expectancy was low, due to the high rate of infant mortality. But the mode of the age data is up in the 60's-70's. I.e those who didn't die from infection, or being eaten alive actually lived similar lives to us.

edit: Article quote

Page 29:
The data show that modal adult life
span is 68–78 years, and that it was not uncommon for individuals to reach
these ages, suggesting that inferences based on paleodemographic reconstruc-tion are unreliable.
Another option you could have tried would be to make contact with someone trustworthy outside of your country, transfer them money to make a legal purchase and ship it to you. Much more time consuming, certainly, but if you wanted to exhaust all legal avenues that's an option.
There are two things my dad has always told me. 1) "Always make sure you get paid" and 2) "Work hard when you're young, you can handle staying up late"
ebay may be an option where the seller ships worldwide.
Found at least one
http://cgi.ebay.com/Delivering-Happiness-Tony-Hsieh-BRAND-NE...
Ask HN: Do we no longer support our members?
I saw a link marked [dead] earlier today and decided to click through and check it out. The submitter had a simple post describing where the idea originated and then broke down the development into a nice timeline of events. He threw this little project together in a few hours with his buddy, working through the night. That sounds like it would be something HN members would support.

At this point, I wasn't sure why it was marked dead, so I visited the site and found some pretty disgusting submissions from what I can only assume are HN members. Comments along the lines of "keep this crappy site off HN" and one submission even telling him to die. These submissions have since been removed.

In any case, the response from HN made me angry and I've been thinking about it all afternoon. Who cares if it's not the prettiest site, or if it's not something you'll ever use. This guy built his project and shared his experience with us. The least we could do is give him some constructive feedback so he can improve it and maybe learn a thing or two.

Here's the link to his original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800925
Agreed; only, the fact that no one has done it conclusively so far says to me that the Lua community isn't/hasn't been thinking about these sorts of things, and makes me worry about the other holes I will encounter if I do delve into the language. I'd rather invest my time and energy into learning how to use Cython to speed up Python, or Clojure to make Java more fun.
Enumeration-Based I/O in Scala using Haskell-style Iteratees
Unless you are already making a sh#t-ton of money, I'd just start the company in the States. It seems a bit "cart before horse" to spend all the time & money to offshore if you have no revenues yet.
One thing to add to the points about documentation: if you as a developer either don't write it or do a half-assed job of it, then you won't be able to just hand it off to the systems guy - you're going to end up doing 2nd/3rd/whatever line support for it because the documentation is YOU. And that, of course, will mean less time for coding.
It looks like many of them are trying really, really hard not to use the word "douchebag".
Diaspora is on the AGPL, so that Facebook won't be able to use their code.