skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MySQL will have to be run on the instance itself, not on S3. Just pretend it's a normal computer, except that you have to have a plan for backups from the very beginning. I recommend the book "High Performance MySQL" from O'Reilly. It's helped me out a lot witih how to manage MySQL. Has chapters on backups/replication/high availability.
How speculation may be contributing to oil prices
How speculation may be contributing to oil prices (thoughtful):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202498
They also expanding into basic doctor's visits through their pilot clinic program. It's in the article.
I had over half of the class accused of cheating in an undergrad class.

He let them off the first time without including the grade on that assignment, but warned that it would not be acceptable on future assignments. When people did it again they failed.

Two of them were caught cheating in another class, and attempted to withdraw after they were told they had Fs for failing. They were kicked out of school.

But it really should take less than 3 instances of cheating in class and 1 of cheating on the system to get kicked out.
Is this a fair summary?

Option 1: Spend half your time at a hideously boring job, half your time hanging out and exploring Erlang.

Option 2: Spend all your time doing something you are good at and enjoy.
From a resource perspective basic medical care is cheep and effective. EX: The cost benefit ratio of free vaccinations is varying positive. We can efficiently have basic universal healthcare without spending huge piles of cash on every patent. The problem is we obligate institutions to treat everyone without funding them to do so which destroys the free market. We don't have huge efficient hospital chains because it's not profitable to create them. I say we use the Japanese approach of basic universal insurance and private medical system for the best of both worlds.

PS: Would you rather the government pay ~50$ per MRI in Japan or your private insurance pay ~1500$ in the US for the same procedure?
SURELY WE HAVE SOMETHING BETTER TO CHAT ABOUT
THX!
OneRyng - Better than TinyURL
Drone planes research hurricanes
Real-time Link Tracking on Twitter
Not only did the Nazis ruin an ancient symbol, they ruined rotational symmetry.
Open Source Hacker for Video Startup
Wistia:

Want to work for a company which has built an exciting product in the web video space AND actually has customers and revenues? Then Wistia is the place for you. Our video sharing and collaboration platform is changing the way that companies use video. Our customers include companies in lifesciences, video production, and the Global 100. Our vision is making video as simple for companies to use as email and Word documents. We're early stage (i.e. lots of opportunity), well funded, and passionate about what we're doing.

http://www.wistia.com

Position:

We're looking for a highly motivated individual who enjoys working with a small, tight knit team to create cool and exciting web applications. While our platform is built in Ruby on Rails, you only need strong coding skills, excitement to learn, and experience with some other similar language in a Linux environment (e.g. PHP/Python/Java). Skills are important, but passion and drive to build something amazing also counts for quite a bit with us. You should have a strong entrepreneurial interest and enjoy working in dynamic and extremely exciting startup environment.

Desired skills:

-BS or higher in CS or related area

-2-3 years experience in designing and developing scalable websites and applications

-Solid programming skills in Ruby or a simlar language (PHP/Python/Java)

-Development experience in Linux/Unix environment.

-A strong knowledge of relational databases

-Experience creating and using backend REST web services

-Creative, thoughtful, and detail-oriented personality

-Must be authorized to work in the U.S. currently

-No contractors or consulting offers please

Wistia provides competitive salaries, generous stock options, and top-notch healthcare/dental. We are located just off Rt. 2 (inside I-95) in Lexington.
Assuming pay is the same, I think I'd choose job #1.
GasCalc: A Google App Engine + Twitter App
30k is on the high end for a full-service web design project.

30k is on the very low side if that work also includes software development (database, forms, etc).

Your web design, as long as it falls within a very large window of acceptable quality, is vanishingly unlikely to affect your outcome. But your equity before you have even a demo site is not particularly valuable either. If your tolerance for financial risk is very low --- I know mine would be if I were you --- I might be really happy to peel off some equity to get a committed design partner.
Mosso is easy to manage. Sure. check out http://status.mosso.com to see their downtime track record. It's bad. I'm currently leaving mosso for EC2.

IMO, you may be better off in the long run to figure it out on EC2 (possibly with rightscale).

The other possibility is to do it in python and use google appjet (publically available this week, just announced at IO)
Use convertible debt.
To the poster who said curiosity is a strong emotional driver...

Nonsens.

You are not taking into account the other side of the equation. People will not click because there is another emotion : fear. Fear of being ripped on the internet, fear of wasting money, fear of the unknown. Besides the "average" persons as you say do not let people reach into their pocket that easily. Curiosity can only go so far.
http://www.netcraft.com/ can be used to determine platform.
I would suggest doing a test project first. We often work out situations like this with my company, but it's always best to get an idea for the way that you work together first, before you go for the full on marriage.

Plus, building a small project or prototype should give you a better estimate of costs and value, so you should be more able to understand how much equity its worth.
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195294
I believe apple has something similar to this in the case that they have a multi-touch track pad which can recognize some multi-touch commands. I'm not sure to what extent you can use it for though. (of course, macs still have the keyboard.)
OpenID To Look For New Leadership
ImportGenius: The Disruptive Shipping Database
Interesting, but the benefit of tinyurls is that I can copy-paste them into emails and chat and so on, and people can click on them. It's a one-step process, and there are tons of applications that support opening links.

OneRyng is a three-step process (go to oneryng.com, enter keyword, click "warp"), and zero application support (and very unlikely to get much).

No, thanks.
Dear Microsoft,

Please shut up about Windows 7. That's so far into the future that any discussion of its features and capabilities is entirely meaningless.

As for Windows 7, please go implement things that are interesting and elegant and useful and desirable, and -- when your set of features is mostly baked and mostly ready to ship -- then and only then tell me about it.

Finger-smudge-covered displays and tablets are useful, but far from cool or original.

Sure, do copy the cool stuff from other platforms. We know you want to. But you better have some fresh new tools and toys; the new features and tools that make me or any other customer want to drool over and buy and use your platform.

And for those few moments while you're not busy working on Windows 7 coolness and getting set to rock my world, how about fixing the mess that is the Vista ecosystem?

Using a Windows PC is somewhere between unpleasant and frustrating. This due to the mess that is modern PC design, adware, malware, bloatware, buggy software, proprietary formats and the rest of the stack. Make some room for your partners, too.

Oh, and this little Vista mishap will arrive fully fixed and solid and ready for production in Windows 7, too, right?

Thanks.
Fine by me. I randomly generated my username with the explicit intent of not being identified.
Dnsthru.com - web based dns lookups
What do you guys think? For now this service provides quite simple (basic) dns lookups for a domains and reverse dns for ip addresses. Any feedback is more than welcome.

http://dnsthru.com
Phone-based Two-Factor Authentication Now Available for OpenID
What do you guys think? For now this service provides quite simple (basic) dns lookups for a domains and reverse dns for ip addresses. Any feedback is more than welcome.
I think the "qualified investor" rule is for investing in certain types of (venture/hedge) funds, i.e. handing your cash over to someone else to invest. So your investors would need to be qualified investors, but not yourself. Otherwise, there're an awful lot of friends & family investors who are breaking the law...

I'll second the "talk to a lawyer before you try this" advice.
Whenever possible, pay cash rather than equity. Cash you can get more of. Equity is limited - there's only 100%. Once you run out, that's done.
If it's such a great business idea, than you should all the more want to keep the equity.

Ask yourself this - are you able to find an investor that puts in the 30k you need to hire them for cash, and add more value (advice, connections, more cash, etc.)? How much equity would you give to such an investor? Is it more or less than what they're asking for?

Finally, I'm wary about entering into partnership with a firm that does other things (that aren't investing in start-ups). This isn't like bringing on a full-time partner. It isn't like bringing on a VC/angel investor either. They're likely to have their own agenda, and will only contribute up to a point. They have a business to run that is probably bigger than yours.
I never understand why they charge insane amount for stock quotes. A while back, I had an idea around stock trading. After some digging around, I found out it costs thousands per month for 20-minute delayed quotes, that pretty much killed my idea.
Well first, the link I provided discusses marginal medicine, or medicine people choose not to buy if it will cost THEM lots of money. Emergency care tends not to be marginal.

As for the opportunity cost of exercise, it is only $2850 (average wage is about $38,000/year, http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/AWI.html) if people substitute exercise for productive work. It's not obvious that that is what would happen.

I suspect most people would substitute exercise for TV. Lots of people watch 3 hours of TV per day. Squeezing out 3 hours/week would be easy. For gods sake, 9.9 million people sit on their asses watching The Biggest Loser (a weight loss game show). People can exercise more.
MIT researchers: morphing Web sites could bring riches
london "bring more money" - is spot on - damm that city is pricey.
I'm afraid of the Internet. That's why I never log onto it or post on news forums.
Enforcing MVC for web programming makes everyone work like a novice: lots of planning, little hacking.
Don't like the touch features? Don't use them. It's not like the OS won't work just fine with a keyboard and mouse. Not liking Windows 7 because of a feature you won't even use is like me not liking Office because I only use Word and Excel but not Access. Windows 7 won't force you to use that feature any more than using Word and Excel forces me to use Access.

And on a slightly separate note, I'm pretty curious to see how this actually works. I use a multi-monitor setup, as I'm sure a lot of developers do, and I'm curious to see what it would be like to, for example, use my left index finger to quickly flick windows out of the way while using the mouse for specific activity. Or even just doing some basic stuff with touching with both hands to reduce the repetitive use of the right hand on the mouse all the time. I'm more than willing to give this a chance.

It took me ages to use the scroll wheel in my mouse instead of pointing-and-clicking on scrollbars, but once I did, I couldn't believe I waited so long to get into the habit.

A lot of people probably thought the mouse was a dumb idea when they were just using DOS. I doubt many of them would give up the mouse now. The uses for touch may not be obvious now, but once it's available, you may see very novel uses for it that people aren't thinking about now because it's not a standard feature. Just give it a chance. No one is ever going to force you to use it (just like you can still use a graphical OS without using a mouse if you really want to).
Using Wii Fit to cruise around Google Earth
First live images of fullscreen Android demo
It's not odd at all, it's because of the dichotomy of being able to downvote comments but not stories. So a story that 20 people love and 30 people hate gets 20 points while a comment with the same demographics gets -10.

This system encourages stories that generate strong emotions even if disapproval is strong.
Google Earth, meet the browser
Another thing you can do in both this situation and for your company in general is plan on raising your prices.

You've said that you are operating on razor thin margins. Raise your price and possibly get the attention of the clients of the higher-level competitors.

It's also a kick in the rear to your current potential client that "you are worth it," showing them that this is a good deal for them and that what you're offering is clearly a steal at the present time.

Whatever you do though, don't "threaten" to raise prices on them if they don't call in the next 10 minutes. Just let them know, "We're planning on raising our prices about 15% (made up) next year (quarter, month, whatever), but if you decide the other guy isn't what you need we'd be happy to work something out for you. Just let us know soon."

Goodluck!
I lived in Pgh. for 6 years (7th-12th grade), and my family still lives there. That's a very good point about the cultural institutions -- though in my experience, they're woefully underattended. It's possible to hang out at the zoo, conservatory, science museum, etc. ...but my family was thought to be a bit odd for actually doing so. (Of course, we lived in the wealthy suburban soccer mom part, not the university-intellectual part, so that's probably why. Neighborhoods have messages, too.)
Yahoo Unveils Webtop Plugin, BrowserPlus, Before It’s Ready
10 reasons you should never have a religion
The Future of the Web: An Old-Fashioned Debate With a Social Media Twist
I must agree with brlewis. Another way to look at it is
Option 1: Spend 50% of your time honing your skills, gaining valuable experience
Option 2: Spend 100% of your time honing your skills, gaining valuable experience
Another thing to consider is how awesome it is to work with people who are as good as you (or better), love what they do, and have things to teach you. Even if option 2 pays less, take the cut and get the experience that will propel you into a higher pay bracket. BTW, none of the supremo hackers I've worked with have begrudged me time to play with some cool new tool - as long as I willing to share my knowledge.
Ozzie: Open source a more disruptive competitor than Google
You can take on unqualified investors. This happens all the time with family, friends, etc. The problem is when you're publicly seeking investors. If you're doing that, they must be high-net worth investors.
W3C, please hurry up with HTML5. This is getting ridiculous. I wonder if anyone will actually use this over Gears, Silverlight, AIR, or Prism?

So much fragmentation and I only see it getting worse..
Moscow: You should be rich, or Russian. Preferably both.
SezWho acquires Tejit to expand commenter reputation
Palm readies next-gen ‘Web 2.0’ OS
Doesn't work in Konqueror -- the query line is cleared, but the response never appears.

More importantly: What's the point? I can do this far more easily using nslookup.
40+ Most Useful Mashups for College Students
To help the college students keep better track of their time - even when they’re procrastinating - this article has listed over 40 different mashups that combine the best features from favorite tools like Google Maps, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube and more.
I understand that there are limits and finite resources. If you're asking where to get the money from how about a little less on weapons development and a little more on medical research.

"How much medical care should everybody get?"

Well -any at all- would be a start for the millions without it. A lot of the questions you posed (who gets what and how much) have been answered in one way or another by the dozens of countries who already employ a universal health care system. We should be looking to them as a template and applying their to a new system.

Sorry, but I get a bit heated about UHC. People tend to say things like "Where is the money going to come from?" or "The government is too incompetent to manage such a system" which are cop-outs, imo.

"The question is, how much of a reduction in the quality of life in America are you willing to accept for an improvement in the average quality of health care?"

I'm willing to give up a lot more of my money for health care than for weapons and war funding.
The press release mentions quotes would be available to Yahoo Finance users but didn't mention an API. Can we get some REST love out of this?
I doubt you will ever be able to have a stock market for private companies. There are reasons why they make companies be public in order to have their securities on the open market. Doing this would undue all of that, would be rampant with fraud, and would implode quickly.

A one-on-one buying/selling system could work but you could never emulate the way the stock market works, it would be far to easy to manipulate stocks and the company has way too many incentives to fool investors with no regulating body. If a regulating body was created, it would cost the startups too much to comply.
"The notion that posting content of whatever sort onto your own web property is somehow illegitimate, to me, seems like an unhealthy notion."

Let's put that theory to the test:

"The notion that posting [spam/outright lies/defamation/deliberately inacurrate and misleading information/gratuitous hate speech] onto your own web property is somehow illegitimate, to me, seems like an unhealthy notion."
Job #2. I don't know about your Big Company specifically, but turning down good opportunities often leads to them not being offered in the future. Besides, performing well may put you in a position to use Erlang with more authority down the road.
"as long as you can find a bunch of rich people and/or pension funds willing to give you lots of money"

I had a VC explain to me that the primary skill needed to be successful was the ability to raise money from the limited partners, not to be a great picker of companies.
"Some would argue that Microsoft got to the top of the pile due in no small part to maintaining backward compatibility."

The most dangerous curses are the transiently useful ones.
Strokable robot rabbit talks with touch
3D Graphics through JavaScript and Away3D
So a conclusion that's been arrived to empirically by a major portion of consumers and professionals alike is not a basis for that opinion statement?
Ask HN: What's your search traffic breakdown?
Digging around in Google Analytics, I was surprised to see how much traffic Google sent to my blog compared to other engines. We are 97.7% Google, 2.3% everything else. Google has a 59% market share overall in the US according to comScore.

See http://railspikes.com/2008/5/28/search-engine-traffic

What's the search traffic breakdown for your site?
Mosso is one of those used-car-dealership services. They insist that you're getting something amazing, but they won't exactly tell you what you're getting.

More importantly, their $100/mo plan includes 3,000,000 requests - that's not a lot considering that every CSS file, image, page, javascript, etc. is all another request. So, they're giving you a server that can handle 1.16 hits per second - DreamHost could do that!

Let's say you have a nicely busy site with 20 hits per second - your next big thing. That's 51m hits/mo. You'd be hit with over $48,000 in overage charges for requests alone - nevermind bandwith overages. Even if your site is a small next big thing and has 5 hits per second, you'd still be hit with nearly $10,000 in overage charges.

Plus, do they really guarantee automatic scaling? No. They're not going to auto-scale a twitter or reddit. You're buying the idea that you never have to think about server administration and that it'll come cheap.

Amazon has a realistic offering. Mosso is a way for you to tell people that no one has to worry about scaling until it hits the fan and you're finished.

If you disagree, maybe you could shed some light on Mosso. Do they automatically set up mysql clusters - multi master and all - as you get too large for one database server? What if I decide to write a page with a looped query: do they just scale that? What if I'm joining 20M records against 10M users (an expensive, On^2 operation)?

There's no such thing as a free lunch.
The fact that a person's name often makes a lousy search term is the very reason we have brands and branding, it's one of the reasons internet semi-anonymity or pseudonymhood can be so interesting and useful, and it's one reason to question the future of businesses that assume we all wish to consolidate the shards of our multifaceted online identities.
For a guy whose entire life revolves around smartening the smarts of smart people to make himself seem smart so he can sell stuff to people who aren't so smart, he sure does come off as a moron. Has he even read the Bible? I mean, of course, beyond the minimum required to construct some artificial and arbitrary "contradiction" (Lookie! The Old Testament and New Testament say different things! That proves that religion is for idiots!).

I can play this game, too: in each of his points, substitute "knowledge", or "choosing a major in college", or "going to alcoholics anonymous" or "being trained for a job" or "obeying the law" for "religion" and "spirituality", and boom! Nearly everything you do in life is stupid, and is just a hindrance to the enlightenment that Stevie is here to sell you (which is as much a religion as anything else).

I can sympathize with those who have problems with organized religion, or even an antipathy toward God (or the idea of God), or particular groups; but what Pavlina spewed here is just drivel.
If I were you I'd go for the hardcore job AND sneak some Erlang in there. Working without quantifiable goals will make you sloppy in the long term, even if it seems liberating in the short term - dangerous.
I think the human brain is optimized for recognizing faces. Those geometric variations of identicon don't look different enough in my opinion. I like the general idea, though.
Judge to Dell: Dude, you're defrauding your customers
Heh, that's the advantage of our boys still being young (4 and 6 now, 2 and 4 when we first moved here). They don't know any better than to think those activities are perfectly normal. We have successfully brainwashed them so far, and by the time they hit teenage peer pressure, it might be too late to undo the "damage" of a cultured mind :).

The "under attended" part isn't all bad. Our boys can run around a little bit in Phipps Conservatory, for example, without many negative glances.

We do live in a city neighborhood, so that might account for some of the difference.
The comparison was intended to highlight that by giving that presentation, Matz is not simply propagandizing Ruby, he's trying to distribute accurate information. The parent of my post seemed to be critical of Matz's approach because it was humble and honest. The implication of that is either that he expects Matz and Ruby to be perfect (an impossible feat) or that he would perfer Matz to simply evangelize Ruby blindly.

I personally do not find it distasteful when someone is honest about the shortcomings of their project. It takes humility to do this, and it's totally uncool to rip on someone when they do it.
Living With the Computer Whiz Kids
Boston Lisp Talks (Podcast)