skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But we all know what would happen if that got posted: two Lieberman discussions.

And that's the thing... you can't expect people to not try to advance their own agendas. You have to make a system that's robust in the face of human nature, not expect humans to subvert their nature to use the system. There will always be something like Wikileaks (on Reddit, that something is omnipresent pun threads that can sometimes eat ten pages before you find the rest of the discussion) and asking the userbase to stop won't help (I don't think...) as long as it doesn't visibly harm anyone the user cares about ('round here, if pg says stop, you'd stop, because he's in everyone's Monkeysphere, but that's not a principle that can work in every forum.) In the tragedy of the commons, the best solution is to get better commons.
I suspect it's more like 10 operations a day, 3 days a week, 48 weeks per year since 1992 (when the clinical trials started).
Good perspectives. John Cassidy's 2002 book "dot.con, How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era" is also good reading from a time when bubble predictions proved to be very accurate.
+1

Android App search is terrible. Now this bookstore is too.

You'd think Google could get search right.
Perhaps the ycfounders list is a selected sample: it produces or selects above-average quality founders that are more likely to get a good Series A price (in terms of both control and pre$). I suspect that YCombinator's focus on founders for investment decisions also results in start-ups with assets closely tied to the individuals who run things (rather than say a patent). This leaves future VCs with less bargaining power when forming boards.
This is why Wikileaks is needed. You're so brainwashed by the current political system you're willing to take a politician's words at face value. The only way we'd know what actually happened is if someone leaked Lieberman's communications with Amazon, and Amazon's internal communications about the issue.
Actually, Python does use a Boyer-Moore-Horspool variant internally for substring matching (I'm not sure about Ruby, though). See:

http://effbot.org/zone/stringlib.htm

Here's a link to the file in the Python SVN repo:

http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Objects/stringlib/fa...
Technology now advances crabwise (backwards)
Thought provoking quote from Umberto Eco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco)

"I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by frame, by fast-forwarding and rewinding to lay bare all the secrets of the editing process, but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another. High-speed trains take us from Rome to Milan in three hours, but flying there, if you include transfers to and from the airports, takes three and a half hours. So it wouldn’t be extraordinary if politics and communications technologies were to revert to the horse-drawn carriage."

More at his article: http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/414871-not-such-wicked-leaks
Secondmarket valuations:

Facebook: 50 Billions

Twitter: 3 Billions

Zynga: 5 Billions

http://vator.tv/news/2010-11-30-facebook-valued-at-highest-e...
Well, in Canada at least, there's pretty immovable legislation preventing them from rolling it out.
I have an older HTC Sprint Hero, and it is root-able in the sense that rooting the phone is possible. However, doing so requires me to download old firmware for the phone from sources (ie files posted to Mediafire or the like) that I don't trust. While I will contend that Android is more customizable than say, iOS, to say that all, many, or most the phones are root-able and thus the platform is more customizable for this reason doesn't follow for me. You can jump through the hoops and jailbreak your iPhone with probably less trouble than it would take to root my Hero. You can also just root the HP/Palm Pre by following the community steps, but there really aren't any other platforms other than iOS or Android are there :P.

For the record, I came to Android from WebOS, and the experience has been very painful. I want my Pre back.
The comparison to the previous tech bubble isn't fair though. A lot of these companies are actually profitable and the capital cost is far lower than it was a decade ago.

That is not to say that things aren't overvalued. But bubble behavior relies on investors investing in things because other people are investing in them so the price bubbles up ("housing is never a bad investment!"). I'd say that, while some of the valuations are high, a lot of these companies are at least profitable, which is more than we can take away from the previous bubble.

Prices may end up settling down, but at the end of the day I'd say value is created so it's not too bad.
Things to Avoid in C
It's a fair critique of the funding environment in the 1990s ... although I don't remember any companies with pre-IPO valuations of $45B back then.
The Design Galaxy
More at his clickable article link: http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/414871-not-such-...
Programmers who blog about programming --- particularly, programmers who blog well enough about programming to get picked up on HN --- tend to be outliers in lots of other ways too. I'm saying, just because he got good productivity out of pairing doesn't mean that most developers do.

Also, pairing can be both a productivity enhancer and a lever used by project managers and salespeople to increase project scope.
There have been a lot of good posts about writing on HN in the past month. Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1851957 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1851526, I decided to try to write my own screenplay a few weeks back since I had never written in this style before. I found it to be an interesting exercise and it really helped me think through character and plot a lot more than I ever have with other types of writing. Given my experience writing this screenplay in the last month, I might also add to the list of swombat's [excellent] suggestions that you should practice writing different styles, whether it's poetry, screenplays, research papers, short stories, etc. Each one of these require different skill sets. I'd also add that just as reading a lot helps you write, the converse is true too. Writing regularly enriches your reading experiences.

If anyone's interested, I wrote a screenplay for South Park, partly to see what it was like to write a screenplay and partly to see if I could use SEO instead of the traditional process to get a screenplay picked up by a major network. Here's it is: http://www.scribd.com/doc/44671533/Underground-South-Park. I was thinking of hosting it on posterous or making a small wordpress site to put it up and see if I could drive people to it that way. Suggestions and advice welcome!
Melvin Ram (who posts around here as melvinram), the principal at Volcanic Web Design, did it for me. He knocked it out of the park.
The Fall of Niagara Falls
PostFinance is actually not a bank, it has no such license. It is part of the swiss post. Wikileaks funds probably would have been safer at a private bank...
Great article. I especially liked this thought provoking segment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1976276
Luckily, perl will optimize some constant regular expressions to use Boyer-Moore.

For example, if you do:

$str =~ /foobarbaz/;

perl sees what you want and uses Boyer-Moore instead of a normal regex state machine.

This, and many other optimizations, is what 20 years of language development gets you.
Criminals find the key to car immobilisers
If you want to buy this book and can't, email me from my contact info. We'll figure out a way to get it and ship it to you.

That's really whacked. It's also whacked that a kindle format isn't out. Lots of folks who would like to read this book -- and would benefit from it -- can't seem to get connected. We need to fix that.
So? That's the purpose, after all, to give the viewer a choice rather than default to whatever the web site wants.
It's an excellent point that YC founders' experience may not be typical ... a different way of looking at this, though, is that YC and other tech incubators have changed the dynamic to give founders in general a much better shot at keeping control.

Which, as a serial entrepreneur, I see as a very good thing.
How to Kill Your Product Management Career
I was excited to watch this, but the whole time I was thinking ... "What an incredible advert for facebook's new profile pages launch".

I didn't learn one single thing new that I didn't know about facebook or Zuckerberg before ... except that he took his entire company out to see 'The Social Network'

60 minutes got played like a banjo.
Deadly Medicine (outsourcing of clinical drug trials)
Facebook valued at highest ever: $50 billion
Wait, the NFC implementation is receive-only?

Doesn't this preclude using your phone as an NFC payment device (which would be transmit, not receive)?

Can someone confirm if I'm parsing this correctly:

"An NFC Reader application lets the user read and interact with near-field communication (NFC) tags. For example, the user can “touch” or “swipe” an NFC tag that might be embedded in a poster, sticker, or advertisement, then act on the data read from the tag. A typical use would be to read a tag at a restaurant, store, or event and then rate or register by jumping to a web site whose URL is included in the tag data. NFC communication relies on wireless technology in the device hardware, so support for the platform's NFC features on specific devices is determined by their manufacturers."
It is still less than the same size drip coffee.
Is this happening because start-ups are getting series A financing later in the life of the company? It used to be that you needed VC just to build and launch a business, but these days the business can be much more real and the founders more proven by the time they're ready for VC.

Startups are getting further and further on seed and angel funding due to advancing technology.
Mostly I think it's a bit hard on the landlords. They're expected to know that the tenant has stockpiled explosives?

The burn doesn't sound prudent to me. On the other hand, I don't blame the local bomb squad for not wanting to work in the house.
Available only in the US.
The Viral Me
The Inside Story of Facebook the Movie
You Are a Product
I got a Kindle in August, which has a similar "all your books in our cloud" approach. Now I worry about Amazon being able to cancel or delete my account, cutting me off from every book I bought in the Kindle Store. I feel like that's giving them too much power.

The same problem exists with the new Google ebooks service.

I back up my computer with Time Machine and Carbonite. I'm not worried about losing the ebooks stored on my computer. I don't need Amazon or Google to "keep my books safe."

Compare to O'Reilly Media: "Whenever possible we provide [eBooks] to you in five DRM-free file formats — PDF, ePub, Kindle-compatible .mobi, DAISY, and Android .apk — that you can use on the devices of your choice." (from their website)

Music from iTunes is similar to eBooks from O'Reilly: no DRM, download the files and store them yourself.
Sure, just minus the software. ;-)
Be thankful. I've never been able to nap -power or otherwise. After an hour or so of lying there, I'm a bit more rested. If I try to sleep briefly at night, I wake up more tired than before. Alternatively, some well timed caffeine and some driving music makes a short stretch in the zone a lot more effective.
Good Lord, I'm mortified, and apologize to the snake and to everyone else. It looks like my anti-it's zealotry has finally crossed the line.

Face <-- egg
Beginner's Guide to Facebook Marketing by Kissmetrics [pdf]
Because it is a comparison matrix. The page you're looking at is there standard template in the Android Phone Gallery. If you just look at the special Nexus Tech Specs page, it doesn't highlite its missing features.
SARTRE "road train" update
Great work! The output is beautiful. Looking forward to this being a standard library in the future. Do you know how well it might handle cases of text that already has some formatting?

Also: It blows up in IE9 for me though, many of the lines go on for quite a ways.
According to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Asymmetric_algorithm_k..., their choice in using 1024 bit keys might be a bit short-sighted.
You can store payment or your monthly pass on the MBTA card in Boston.

It's been live for a few years, so I'm pretty sure it's not a trial run.
I apologize for my previous flippant grammar-Nazi comment. I was on thin ice as it was, but that I was also wrong—that is inexcusable!
Just tried it, and yes, this is sad. Gmail is another Google site that fails in the same unscrollable way, although at least there you can get around it by falling back on the HTML version. Do you suppose this is due to sniffing the particular User Agent being sent, or is it a general shortcoming of Webkit?
well this is an unexpected but pleasant surprise :)

I suppose this is a good opportunity to let you guys know that the project IS very much alive and kicking still, and we've just released a new set of invites today (which I suppose is why we got posted to HN today, thanks!)

We've been very busy with coding and work, which is why we haven't really been updating the blog, but if you have any questions I'll be happy to continue answering them here

edit: FYI, the original discussion is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1538731
> What do you mean, you can't sign up for a contract? They're actively turning down more money for the same service?

shrug That's what they told me-- my account would be flagged and I wouldn't be allowed to sign up for a contract with them ever again once I went the no-contract route. It didn't make any sense to me at the time, and still doesn't, except for cynically suspecting that it was a scare-tactic to chase me back to a contract option.

I'm curious if anybody knows of any legitimate reasons why this would be their policy.
In those cases it can auto-logout of the previously connected platforms, the same way Steam does.
What makes transmitting from the point of sale through the internet any more secure then transmitting from the phone itself?
Alec Baldwin: Assange goes on trial, they go on trial
That's why a year ago, when I was experimenting with the effects of caffeine on myself, I switched between regular coffee, decaff, and coffee with caffeine pills. And the acclimatization effects is why I used each for a full week before switching. It turns out that caffeine has no detectable effects on me at all; I already knew it didn't have much effect, that's why I used such an elaborate trial.
Show HN: My post-YC-rejection start-up
http://invincibilitee.com

Me and my co-founder submitted an app for YC W11, with a web site that would help college graduates figure out what jobs they could get with their chosen degree. We got a rejection email, and already had this as a back-up idea in case we did get rejected. So in the month between rejection and today, we found a printer, found some graphic designers, and got enough done that we felt comfortable with it as a first iteration. I know there aren't so many non-web app startups on HN, but I thought y'all might like to see how 2 guys rebounded from YC rejection.
Clickable link: http://invincibilitee.com
Google App Engine and why vendor honesty pays
I switched to a shaving lotion made by an all natural company, can't remember off top of my head, but it works way better than shaving cream.
Boston is a completely contactless system using the same RFID chips as in London. It isn't a trial.
I apologize, this is barely tangentially related... but I'm excited to endorse Google and T-Mobile...

I'm currently paying Verizon $40/month for an extra line on a family plan, and unlimited data with no tethering (though I do for free via CM6.1). I could have my own account with T-Mobile and get unlimited data for $50/month with no voice minutes.

I can use Google Voice and the Gizmo SIP Provider to be accessible via Voice Calls. I want the Nexus S. I am tired of Verizon, Motorola and HTC's nonsense with the locked NAND and the locked Bootloader. No new VZW phones have custom roms, in fact, hardly any since the Droid 1.

Go Google. Go T-Mobile. Thanks for not being (as) evil (as everyone else).
I can't say I was surprised by Amazons actions, but somewhat by their motivation behind those actions.

I think this should serve as a wake up call for founders who maybe to easily trust a third party with essential parts of their business. As the real question should be what happens when a special interest group pressures Amazon to take down your startup? Do you have external backup?, is your codebase adapted to Amazon? etc.

I think it's in the interest of all service providers to be seen as just only a service provider. There was quite a big discussion about this in Sweden several years ago which made Bahnhof start the "integrity" initiative[1]. This is, among other things, why Wikileaks have been hosted in Sweden for a long time.

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=sv&sl=sv&tl...
True, but his suggestions on competing at the highest level definitely apply to startups.
Do you think you're producing quality software that meets your client's needs now?

Do you think your clients will pay more than they currently are for quality software that meets their needs?

If so, just start charging more. Make up whatever story you want about why you're charging more.

If you don't think you're producing quality software that meets your client's needs, but you think your clients would pay more for such software, then take whatever steps necessary to make better software and then start charging more.
It's a deal breaker... that is has a headphone jack? I feel as if I'm missing context due to the deleted post, but I'm confused.
Companies are trying (or are encouraged) to keep away from WL. Amazon, EasyDNS, Paypal, SwissPost Bank.. they're going to find reasons to deny WL.
It seems that Eco's DVD player has no "pause" button.

Also, the interesting part regarding Berlusconi in the WL cables are not the facts, but the american opinions about them, which apparently are quite different from the official ones.
A buddy and I coined SQL Ejaculation.

Where you use SQL to generate text to be executed by another system...like HTML.

Have you ever seen an entire web site generated by stored procedures. I have. It aint pretty.
Makes sense. Another article spoke of how documenting the Bush and Obama presidencies will be tough and probably not that thorough, as the juicy bits are written on scraps of paper that are immediately disposed of.

There is a market for an offline, secure technology, like a modern day codex.
Glad to see that I'm not the only one. I was very confused, I was in a weird mood and was looking for both Pink Floyd and Smashing Pumpkins, but couldn't find either of them. Now I know...
How about using soap on half your body and objectively observing the difference? A lot of these self-run experiments run into confirmation bias.
Programming Mistakes to Avoid
dammit - warning came 2 hours too late.
This advice is not only for people wanting to get better at writing, it's more a general advice for improving anything. The best way to get better at programming is to program, to read about programming, and to practice new things while programming. Want to get better at throwing a football? Practice throwing a football, read articles on the best and proper techniques on throwing a football, and practice different variations of the techniques to find which one suits you.

I'd think this sort of advice is obvious, but lots of times one overcomplicates the learning process because of a need to make it easier to learn. This type of articles are needed to answer the main question every beginner (and even some advanced people) has at some time during the learning process: How do I get better?

By practicing. We often forget that it's that simple.
Maybe there are some lessons in the Denver International Airport baggage system:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/world/americas/26iht-denve...
Those are the extreme examples, of which there are few, and they're not easily traded by the general public. Bubbles almost without exception (please correct me if you have a counter example) are pushed to extremes by the general public (commonly called "mom and pop investors").
I think YC is also responsible (with others) for radically improving the information disparity between, e.g., fresh college graduates with a gleam in their eye and partners at firms with 9 figures under management.
If I were a dentist I would probably search for "appointment software", "appointment scheduler", or "scheduling software".

Edit: According to Google's keyword tool "scheduling software" is a great place to be. Patrick, you may want to expand your software to handle scheduling as well.
Groupon Says: The Groupon Guide to: Bedtime
Each Wikileaks dump is a different kind of funhouse mirror, aborbing the gazes of politicians, activists, philosophers, pundits, and what-have-you, repaying them with illusory advancements of their agendas.

So now we get --- respectfully! The Name Of The Rose is one of my all-time top-5 books! --- the take of a blowhard classically-trained Italian semiotician (yeah, there's someone who isn't going to see his life's work reflected in the Wikileaks narrative) on world politics.

And from it, we get these gems of foreign policy:

* The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper

* Embassies have turned into spy centers (heavens!)

* Wikileaks did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama (irreparable! Unlike, say, losing the house and practical control of the Senate?)

* Technology has advanced to the point where governments can't keep secrets anymore

These points, all utterly banal, some dubious, would have been shrugged off in any article not written by a famous person in the context of Wikileaks. But now that we have Wikileaks, anything any famous person writes, be it bridge trolls like Michael Scheurer and John Bolton or has-been literary stars like Umberto Eco, glistens with supposed insight.

I'm not a WL supporter, but I'm worried that the effect it's having on public discourse may be bothering me even more than the underlying principles.

PS: I'll concede the humor buried in the subtext of Eco making reference to Dan Brown.
I'm glad it's funny to you. For me it was without a doubt the worst customer service/sales experience of my entire life. I don't mean that as mere invective or rhetoric, I mean that literally-- I have never had a worse experience trying to give a company money.

Almost nobody I talked to had any idea what was going on or what they were talking about. I was billed for all kinds of crazy stuff I never signed up for, and I have been billed an activation fee of ~$120 for three months running. I'm also being billed for phone insurance I've cancelled at least four times.

I want to state that every phone rep I've talked to has been unfailingly polite, which is marginally nicer but doesn't fix any of my problems. Bad but obsequious customer service is still bad customer service.

I've since been told not to bother with T-Mobile's phone system; apparently walking into a T-Mobile store is a much less stressful and faster way of dealing with them. I plan on trying that, if I ever feel the need to contact them again.
This is pretty cool. I've always wished there was a way to hitch my car to a truck during long drives.
or rather... it doesn't.
not really... i worked on a comedy/social site for a while and that was the plan, but it never really got traction :-(

it just always seemed like that was going to be the way to make money... put other funny material in that was for sale. obviously comedy stuff is terrible for adsense... the keywords are not relevant to the material.