skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once in 1 or 2 days to check if there is anything interesting.
No regrets if I'm not able to visit!
This is the best article to come out of the switch to hacker news yet. _exactly_ what I'd read all day long, time permitting.
When will we start paying for Facebook friends?
Seems to be power in general - my MacBook power supply had issues, and apparently it's very common for the casing of the wire to start melting and burning, which is what happened to mine... Quite worrying really.
allow me to doubt someone who calls eyeOs window management code as "a full operating system"! this guy is out of boundaries!

How is an empire like Microsoft worthing approx. 289 billion dollars doomed?

seems like somebody needs a wake up call! MS may not threaten Web 2.0 startups in their early steps. Actually it can be the good guy when they come and buy you...And that is not because MS can't innovate. It's just the nature of startups to bring the little thing called innovation to the world. Every big company has this problem! Only that MS has the luxury to buy their mistake...

when PG throwed the bomp MS is dead, I remember there were like 250 comments on YC.news covering every single argument someone could come up with about this subject that probably everyone on YC.news already read...so it really seems worthless that I added this comment...
Arizona Lottery Winning Numbers
1) Accuracy 2) Integration options
Digpicz: digg's missing picture section
Farmageddon
Real or Fake? Pictures of the New iPod Nano?
Pownce Offers New Features, Still No API
Nirvanix To Launch B2B Online Storage: Amazon S3 Competitor?
Good Automatic FAQ Style User Support Software?
I want to build up a strong FAQ page so I don't have to repeatedly answer the same questions and users can help themselves. I like what FAQ-O-Matic[1] does, but it's an old, ugly, and creaky program at this point. I'm tempted to write my own, but not if there's some good out there. Anyone know of something nice?

1. http://faqomatic.sourceforge.net/fom-serve/cache/427.html
This is a calculation that depends entirely on your circumstances. As a startup, you want to get the best product out to as many people as fast as possible, 7 years in the future be damned. Other circumstances (such as being a big corporation) demand more attention to other aspects such as maintainability.
http://Speakeasy.net has always worked really well for me. I get 8 static ips 6Mbps/768Kpbs in Milwaukee, WI. I know they are on the west coast too. I also have to say that their service is top level. I feel like i have the Bently of internet connections with how well they treat me.I highly recommend them.
Anyone who suggests that "You can even get a full operating system to run in your browser!" has no understanding of technology or how it's applied. Also, how me makes the jump from "Dell starts selling Ubuntu machines," to "PC makers are starting to turn their backs on Microsoft", I have no clue. It's like saying "NVIDIA DOOMED!!!! Future Shop starts selling ATI, too!"
The Empty Nest
Heston Blumenthal, self-trained chef and father of 'molecular gastronomy'
"The mighty music business is in free fall," so Sony tries focusing on quality.
The great thing about this post is that it doesn't hide the fact that "building a site without an RDBMS" is perilously similar to "writing your own buggy, half-implemented, slow, nonstandard DBMS".

Building a custom DBMS has been done, and done well, but I think a good general approach to the problem is to read the line about "over-engineering and/or lost time and effort" out loud, to your entire team, at dawn and noon and sunset on every day of the project.
The privacy market has many sellers but few buyers
The one huge problem with Facebook identity that carries over into things like using it for a reputation system, etc. is that each person only has one identity. The immediate consequence is that I can't simultaneously maintain a profile on Facebook that makes me look cool to my friends and responsible to company recruiters. The long term consequence is that without a significant change in information management, Facebook won't be able to be an adequate identity (or reputation) provider, since people rely on the fact that their eBay self is not the same as their Facebook self is not the same as their Valleywag self is not the same as ....
Rick Rubin is a musical mastermind; that's clear. But no indications yet about whether this strategy's going to work out for the music industry.
And now the site is down :(
This is quite a common feature on web mail providers (or at least I've seen it several times).

GMail definitely does it.
Parasite hosting - Or why social networking sites need to review user generated content.
Unenumerated: Bilinear group cryptography
Facebook - A Developer's Perspective
In my experience, Moimoin takes a lot of gardening to keep clean.
What about their Open Source version - http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry ?

I haven't started using it yet, but they claim it offers only slightly less accuracy with access to all of their libraries.
Offer staff more time off instead of more money?
A better title may have been, "50 Billion Reasons Why Microsoft is not Doomed"
This is a problem that I've been thinking about for a bit. I think what FB should do is make tags (or categories) specifying one's friendships, such as business buddies, casual friends, relatives, etc., with the default being acquaintances. Then, one could filter what content can be seen by whom.
The hardest part of learning to play (and to master) the violin is definitely learning how to use the bow. Actually learning how to play in tune is hard as well. It's just hard.
Driving Me Nuts - Things You Never Should Do in the Kernel
Comcast seems pretty fast to me, but their customer support is horrendous - the only play in their playbook seems to be: "turn off the modem and reboot your computer"
Yes, it's a really good article. I don't know why it's not in the front page...
Good article. Seems like a good guy. But I think their problems are so deep and fundamental (as in their entire business model is broken) that his magic ears won't really help.
I am usually something of a Xobni fan, but this facebook 'praise and adoration' is a little over the top. I see a place for charging people to 'follow your lead' or take your advice based on your community reputation, but the article should have talked about this in a broader perspective .There are several reasons why this would be hard to implement within a facebook context AND absolutely no reason why it cannot be done by someone else.
Interesting side-topic: how many hackers out there are also musicians, and what do you play? I started playing violin when I was 2, but haven't played so much since leaving college. Maybe we could get a quartet together or something... you know, "I'm starting a hacker quartet, BUT I'm still going to work on my startup" :)
Whiting Out the Ads, but at What Cost?
Starfish Robot showing robotic introspection and self-modeling
Odd that his self-professed technical inability extends to mixing boards and the like...standard tools of producers. Maybe that's a good thing. Take someone with a decent ear, mix it with no real capacity for muddying things up (Phil Specter-like) and I could see him "producing" quality material.

Neil Diamond...? "Hey, Neil, why don't you record songs the same way you did back before sucked so hard?" ...I could have told him that.

The Black Crows told a story about how Rubin wanted them to call themselves "Krawford Kounty Krows"...KKK LOL. Good one, Rube. He isn't universally popular.

I seriously hope that record companies aren't feeling too down on themselves. Music blows anymore, and blows hard. I don't know if it's the long-predicted exhaustion of good melodies, or just the distraction of new media, or what. The fact that so many people listen to "rap" suggests lead in the water as much as anything else, so what can you say?

Here follow a few albums from 1969. It's hard to imagine a time when so much great material is being produced. When I hear a decent song these days, I'm absolutely shocked.

Abbey Road - The Beatles

Blood Sweat & Tears - Blood, Sweat & Tears

Crosby, Stills & Nash - Crosby, Stills & Nash

Green River, Bayou Country, Willy and the Poor Boys - Creedence Clearwater Revival

Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin II - Led Zeppelin

Let It Bleed - The Rolling Stones

Tommy - The Who
That's a good point. The ability to disagree well is useful. I'd rather work with someone who won't automatically rubber-stamp everything I say but instead, when he disagrees, can argue his points in a clear and well-informed way. It is rather satisfying to be proven wrong and learn something in the process.

A friend of mine who works at Goog since the early days has noted several times that he frequently feels like the dumbest person in the room. He's quite bright and probably would be the smartest person in MOST rooms.

I think I would rather work somewhere I would feel like the dumbest person in the room than the smartest.
Essential Qualities in Startup Founders
Which service was that specifically?
Are you looking for zip code accuracy or just country accuracy? or something in between?

If all you want is what country the IP is from then go to http://www.ip2location.com/ and look through the forums. You can find out how to do it yourself.

If you need really fine granularity you will need a for pay service.
Related:

Startup Philosophy? Do As Much As Possible Yourself
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startups/philosophy.html
Violin was my first instrument, but I've mostly played guitar for the past ten years or so. I guess I was a musician long before I was a hacker, and I see a lot of similarities between the two - the variety of things you can do, the amount of time it takes to become decent at either, etc.

Surprisingly enough I've never tried to bring the two together. Signal modelling/processing software...talk about 'hard problems'!
10 Tips To Choose A Good Gym
Another happy speakeasy customer! Never had any issues with their service. Highly recommended.
If I only listen to the music I like from 1967 to 1995, 2 things will happen: 1. I won't have to buy any more music. 2. I won't run out until 2058.
This article covers the most basic yet the most important ten tips in choosing a gym. Though the requirements and priority may vary for individual, one can use these tips as guiding principle to select the gym best suits him.
i try bringing to up
How to make millions of download to a program !
How to make millions of download to a program !
We use http://wikkawiki.org - a lightweight and stable wiki engine.
Good article. I particularly liked this line:
"First and foremost, almost nothing is that complicated when you get down to what it actually is."
'C-based family languages"?

Objective C is fully dynamic. Typing is entirely optional. If you give every type declaration the type 'id', it's effectively the same as using 'var' in e.g. javascript.

I'm not sure what you mean by C-based, but I'm guessing ObjC would fall in your definition.
> is perilously similar to "writing your own buggy, half-implemented, slow, nonstandard DBMS".

People have used files and in-memory data structures just fine for a long time. I don't they had bugs in their code owing solely to the fact that RDBMSes hadn't been invented yet.

I also don't see how this is slow; it's all in-memory. Why bring a big honking DBMS into the picture when all you wanted was a hash table?

Storing data in-memory doesn't amount to a "buggy, half-implemented, slow, nonstandard DBMS" -- it's serving an entirely different set of goals. Storing data in-memory in data structures is how programming is done. If you actually started to make the interface to your data layer as horrid as the interface to most DBMSes ($DIETY help you), you'd definitely end up with a shitty buggy half-implemented DBMS. But if you just want to store a couple hash tables with a sane interface dictated by the software design, not by your DBMS, just store the hash tables! Don't go wrestle with SQL just because that's the buzzword in-vogue.

You should measure your DBMS sometime, and consider it in terms of a hash table lookup. It starts looking like a comedy of horrors: first, generate a string in an obtuse language to perform the lookup, and oh wait, don't put a quotation mark in the wrong spot! Got that string generated? Now send it over a socket to a server. Now the server is going to parse your string into an AST, turn the AST into an internal representation, then it's going to guess how to optimize your query (this is also expensive in terms of cycles). When it's done optimizing, we run it to the query evaluator which looks in memory (since your table is so tiny anyway) and pulls out your hash table value, encodes it, and ships it back over the socket to you.

I agree and concede that these days you'll fit into the ecosystem better if you do use an RDBMS with no rationale (other than that it's the de facto standard), generate giant SQL strings from objects, and most worryingly from my perspective: deal with the big impedance mismatch between the two paradigms of OO/anything and RDBMS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mis...
I haven't seen a single ORM implementation that really makes it truly simple. You end up manipulating your structure at a lower-level than you'd like to naturally.

This is partly why my next project isn't being done with an RDBMS, and I'm not storing it just in memory because of the volume of data involved. I'm going to be using Erlang and its bundled Mnesia database. There's no impedance mismatch there. The whole thing, including the database interface, works the way Erlang works.

I'll throw a party when RDBMSes die.
I play several instruments, but it's the violin playing that goes rusty quickest. Past a certain stage, you can get out of practice with just one or two weeks of neglect.
Nice ideas. If you have people who have the ability to go out doing things by themselves though, having experienced mentors would be an even more unstoppable combination. A few nudges in the right direction would take you a long way.
Dilbert and the Mythical Man-Month (pic)
They are all horrible companies but Comcast is very fast and won't make you sign a year contract like some of the phone companies. On the other hand I had ATT in SF when I lived there and the service was fine. Speakeasy is good but a little bit more than Comcast if you bundle internet and cable.
Question, from A to L what do qualities do you think you already have?
So what are you using, vb6?
Wi-Fi Toolbox: 30+ Ways to Find Wi-Fi Hotspots
Well, many people (myself included) honestly believe so.

I think DHH nails it in the article when he likens Java's failure to input from "multiple special interest groups".

Java is design of a platform/language by committee, and is a PITA because of it. I'd rather use classic ASP and trim my app's purpose than use Java/J2EE and implement the monstrosity.
For free software projects, Launchpad ( https://launchpad.net/ ) has a great Answers application which works like a FAQ on steroids.
I think we have to understand the employment scenario in place before you can assume that employees will care about having more time off.

For example, the "10 minutes early" piece would be laughed at where I work. Why? Because the knowledge workers on my team can leave 10 minutes early any day they want. They aren't bound to the clock. They're bound to getting their work done. If they do that, I don't give a damn if they pick up their kids at 4:15 every day.

In addition, the most of the time, my employees struggle to take the vacation they already have, why would they want more? (21 days + for the most part) I'd rather give them a few extra bucks as incentive than hound them to take even more vacation come November.

Finally, there's an important point to realize. If people like their jobs, they don't necessarily care too much about vacation. Sure, they want to be able to go on a trip in the summer, away for a few weekends and time for the holidays, but since they enjoy working, a lot of the time that's where they want to be.
I've had AT&T for as long as I've been here (at first it was SBC). I've only had one outage that I can remember and service has been acceptable. Prices have gone down since SBC bought AT&T and changed their name and it seems like customer service has gotten better a little bit though I haven't had to call them many times.

Also it now looks like if you turn down some of the promotional stuff you can get the same prices w/o a year long contract which was not the case back when it was SBC.
Business schools and research - Practically irrelevant?
What would help is fewer mandatory time-wasting activities. Fewer meetings, and when there is one, it should have an agenda of issues that need to be decided that meeting. Fewer interruptions and distractions. No bullshit technology choices dictated by managers who don't understand the technology involved.

Most hackers want to get things done. Getting them done quicker lets them choose whether they get more done (= more money) or take more time.
Code to unlock iPhone cracked
Jotspot Coming to Google Apps as Google Wiki?
>"The Big Red focus groups were both depressing and informative, and they confirmed what I -- and Rick -- already knew," DiDia told me afterward. "The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don't consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That's how they hear about music, bands, everything."

Ouch! So they're confirming what we've all suspected for a while: social nets are fads and people outgrow them just like they outgrow pop bands.
It would be interesting to know how many users would vote with their feet based on this point.

Trying to "solve" this multiple identity problem is complex both from a personal as well as a technical perspective.

I suspect most people neither want nor need this additional complexity.

The people who really "need" it (i.e. those who are irresponsible maniacs but do not wish to appear as such) would not really benefit from it anyway. The thing about irresponsible maniacs is that if you sit down and talk to them for an hour (the typical duration of a corporate job interview) you can detect that either they are a maniac or that they have something to hide. Either way it's a no-hire. There is no need to dig through Facebook or Google to detect this sort of personality.
Yes, yes, a hundred times yes.

The other thing I'm a big proponent of is offices for everyone. The "open office collaboration" trend is the biggest scam to hit the workplace in the last 30 years. How one can be "more productive" hearing everyone else's weekend stories whether they choose to or not is beyond me.
The best creative leaders are always specifically opinionated and decisive. It tends to build a mystique around them, but it's what people want, even need, to hear. If you asked for a critique from a creative leader you respect, you want to hear specific, decisive feedback. Artists of all kinds are dying for that kind of interaction. Remember the "More Cowbell" skit?

When the system works, leaders improve the works they're responsible for through expert criticism. When it goes wrong, critics who are not responsible or responsible parties who have bad taste fill the creative leadership vacuum with disastrous results.

I think this article shows how desperately large creative enterprises need outsize creative leaders. Not managers, and not business guys who "let the artist do their thing." Artists can do their thing on their own, but if an artist is a part of a large company, that needs to work for them and help improve their work.

http://zachbaker.com/articles/2007/09/03/exploring-creative-...
MyLiveSearch - reverse engineered- under the hood
I'm surprised more companies don't already use a CNAME to serve external ads. Then again, ad networks are loath to have clients touch their source in any way, so it would have to come from their side, and they don't care about that kind of stuff.

Interesting to see this publicized by the NYT. Maybe they're showing off how independent their editorial is from their business side.
What about a help page with current and in progress and rejected features? (give us a wiki and we'll write it)

I wish a way to sort|filter comments by points, date, etc. exists, but I don't know if I'm the only one. I've tried to search in this thread but I've found nothing looking for "filter" as searching by "points" is impossible (well, possible but futile)
Well, hopefully we can hear more from Joe Kraus once it does. I mean in terms of interviews or blog posts, but if he's going to be starting up a new project, that would be great too. Does even Joe have a Google 20% time project (call it a GTPTP)? I wonder about stuff like that.
Jotspot is my favorite wiki of them all. I use it on daily basis and we use not only the wiki but also the bug tracker, project management app and also the to-do list app. It has had features 2 years ago that many apps still lack today.
Somebody gives you money for something you do. It's the same basic formula for startups and employees. Your definiton can not tell them apart.

BTW: That's only a theoretical counter-argument to a theoretical argument. I understand that in reality startups are vastly different from being employed.
Starting a company is similar to starting a band. Sometimes a group of friends can start jamming together, and very quickly they begin to make music people love. Other times producers and managers need to match talent, as was the case with The Temptations.
PG is in a position to match talent just as Berry Gordy of Motown was. If he does he may see more hit songs... I mean successful companies.
Many people already "solve" it by maintaining different accounts on different social networks. I use LiveJournal for keeping up with my HP fandom friends, planWorld for my Amherst friends, FaceBook for high school friends, and I've switched between C2/L:tU/Reddit/News.YC for programming/professional acquaintances. My identity in each is recognizable, but subtly different, since I'm writing for different audiences.

There's some cross-talk - many of my younger HP fandom friends found me on FaceBook, one of my Amherst friends found me on Reddit, and one of my middle school (!) friends found me on C2. But social relationships are sustained by groups, not individuals, so even if they find me they tend to lose interest in what I'm doing.
Haskell: Overloading Functional References
Software Development Flowchart
Writing Tight: Why Tiny Business Plans Are Best
Will this compete with Versionate? That'd be at least three YC Google competitors (Kiko, Zenter being the others) I guess.
I admit that I block ads. Long time ago, I started using ad blocking soft to get rid of ads for two main reasons: many were obtrusive, misleading (remember those alert box ads?!), and annoying (I hate those flashing alerts) and also because they were way too heavy and were slowing down my connection. I don't use Windows but if I were a windows user, I'd also worry about spyware that always tends to sneak in through ads. Also, since many ads these days use Flash & Flash just sucks on a Mac (high CPU usage), I block them for that as well.

Now the ethical question... is blocking ads ethical? Who knows... I tend to think that it is. I also tend to donate money/buy from sites that I use often and that offer subscription.

More on ethics here:
http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php?title=adblock_rev...

http://adblockplus.org/blog/ethics-of-blocking-ads-part-3