skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in DC, now I live in NYC. DC has a couple of messages "You should be a lawyer" is the one I felt the most, that seemed to be the thing to aspire to, most politicians and lobbyists are lawyers.

As a programmer I heard "you should get a security clearance" many times. The amount of people aspiring to government sloth in DC is astounding. DC is not a place to be if you want to build things.

I guess in New York I feel "You should be an investment banker". It is still amazing to me that lawyers aren't all that impressive in New York, they are also rans compared to financial workers.

Yes the finance industry is huge in New York, but so is media. Media people are mostly young and paid very little. I think I read that the average starting salary for someone with a college degree in New York is $36,000.
I understand the economics viewpoint, I just don't see how being natural makes a difference for CO2 compared to, say, plastic. Sooner or later there will probably be organisms that can "digest" plastics, too.
Are there any stories of Silicon Valley start-ups getting themselves into a similar state to this with a product at a similar stage?
I would offer Santa Fe, NM. It is culturally alive. It is a state capital replete with hacks, journalists, policy wonks, lawyers, and elected representatives with their hands out. It is also a town that attracts people of real accomplishment, in other words people who have tested their passions against reality and won. Judgement is a consequence of life's lessons, and is not intuitive. Santa Fe has it all: art, culture, political preeners, and people of experience and wisdom. Joe Wilson
IMO it's just a case of MS being late to the party (again).

Personally, I think it's good for Flash to have some competition, and I like the fact that Silverlight includes support for Ruby, C#, and F# for code-behind programming.

I also agree with the Windows is becoming less relevant part.
Apparently the consumers aren't so eager to invest in this. It's a chicken and egg problem on many levels:

- To be able to finance this you need the money you pay for oil. To use those money you already need the solution.

- To have many electric cars on the streets means you need the distribution system (ie gas stations). To finance the new electric stations you need enough cars on the road.

- To get the consumers to buy electric cars they need to have lower prices and better autonomy. To get to lower prices and better autonomy you need economies of scale and a few generations of cars to develop the technology.

This chicken&egg problem it's specific to this. Pretty much any successful entrepreneur just found a way to solve one in his domain. If nobody invested money and time in this it just means there are better ways to invest - i.e. it's time hasn't come yet. When it will, you'll see people coming with the money.

And about forcing the government to invest into a venture private capital doesn't dare enter yet it's ... not a good idea. This rarely works, and only for some special cases. Remember the government is always less efficient then private capital, so there'd better be a good reason to succed where free market failed.
This could be a long list.

http://snipurl.com/2b32f

http://snipurl.com/2b339

http://snipurl.com/2b33j
Yes, it is me who is trolling by posting my opinions to my blog. It's not you, who out of kneejerk reflex caused by your sensitivity about being an Apple fanboy (a label you applied to yourself, then took offense to) leaves 10 negative comments every time someone posts me here.

Anything on my blog is, by definition, neither irrelevant nor off-topic, since the theme is "things that are interesting to me".
SocialHistory.js: See Which Sites Your Users Visit
Some would argue that Microsoft got to the top of the pile due in no small part to maintaining backward compatibility. By doing so they lower the barriers to upgrading for most of their users, who don't want to reinvest in new versions of applications that can't make the jump.
My father was in charge of purchasing the natural gas (which is intertwined with oil at the extraction and pricing levels) for most of Rhode Island for years. When I ask him about this, he says capacity comes on only slowly because of the massive investments involved and time to build out, so supply lags demand, which is why prices go from a buck a gallon to four in a few years. Yes, it's more profitable to increase capacity, but if you decide to invest now, you don't see the benefit for years and in the meantime, prices are high. If everyone decides to increase capacity, and it comes online all at once, prices fall apart. It's an interesting game theory problem in that regard.
"What is wrong with MSFT simply copying Apple while maintaining compatibility and familiarity for its users?"

I didn't say MSFT is doing something immoral by copying Apple. My point is that Apple has shifted perception such that MSFT, and specifically Vista, is now the butt of a joke. They have had external help, for sure, but Apple's relentless advertising campaign has certainly also contributed to making it so.

So my argument is that, empirically, in the minds of many consumers the burden has shifted to Microsoft to prove they do not deserve ridicule. Whether or not that is "fair" is a separate matter.
CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 1
Listless
MySpace Shows Facebook How It’s Done: Google Gears To Power Messaging
Amar Bose in US Inventors Hall of Fame.
2 + 2 = 4
In my opinion, after the ycombinator rejection letters go out there will be a bunch of people that look very much like goatse commenting on this site.
Drop the price sensitive people. Those guys suck up your time and make the entire business no longer fun. The guys with money are always there for follow ups, upgrades and so on.
Vistaster didn't exist in the Urban Dictionary yesterday and now it has five almost identical listings, one with almost 200 votes ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vistaster ). It seems that FakeSteve has popularised a new word.
Portland OR: Do what you can to make the world a better place. The Dalai Lama has more street cred here than Larry or Sergey
You do. I'm a fan of magical realism, so the esoteric content doesn't bother me but I totally get your ranking on that point. Norwegian Wood is all psychology and no parapsychology. If I remember correctly, South of the Border, West of the Sun is similar in that regard.
This seems like rather a waste of user and processor time. While the Debian OpenSSL disaster is both hilarious and embarrassing, the impact on the end user is more or less non-existent.

For one thing, in path attacks not on the local network are more or less impossible. Even if you're talking to a server which has a weak key, the chances that your data will be compromised is small.

Second, nowhere that collects important details is going to have a weak key. This is Debian we're talking about. This is not a distribution that is used by a many online retailers. Even if it was, anywhere you're likely to trust is going to be using TLS offload cards anyway, which have hardware secure random number generators.

Third, anywhere you'd trust with important personal details has already reacted and generated new keys. If the people you're dealing with aren't keeping up with high publicity security advisories sure as hell aren't keeping up with much lower profile advisories. This will tend to mean you are far more at risk from the server itself being compromised, rather than any communication in progress.
I've done very little Windows programming, but I am amazed how few tools it has "out of the box". If they want me to push my customers to use a new OS, they could ensure it comes with a good set of primitives: preferably the GNU tool set, as well as perl/python/tclsh/ruby/sh in predictable locations. They should also have networking tools of the caliber of PuTTY (or maybe just make a deal to have PuTTY available).

Thankfully, at work, we at least ship a build of Perl to our internal customers; otherwise I'd lose my mind trying to get anything done on Windows! Yes, there is CygWin, but there's definitely value if people can Just Work without downloading a bunch of stuff to their PCs first.
Here is what I would do. I would take the contract at a lower price and ensure that the other guy is history. This is good because

1. It breaks the competition's back. And leaves no room for him to claim territory in the future.

2. With the one man competitor dead you can start increasing prices, clearly in your market there is room for higher pricing. And spend your energy on tackling the rolls-royce and whatever other car you got going there..
Because they're useful, but without being particularly salient in any given interaction.
Live: Hacker News on TechDosh
A Peek Into Yahoo! BrowserPlus
It strikes me that this is the kind of feature that you can safely ignore if you don't want to use it. I suspect that touch surfaces will increase in popularity over the next few years, at least amongst certain user groups and having the OS accommodate these devices can only be a good thing. It's not as if you will be required to use it.
Leaving usernames out entirely would make it harder to gain reputation which would probably reduce the amount of incoming content. The reputation aspect tied to a name, the cult of personality, is part of what keeps this thing churning.

Imagine watching the NBA on TV with no names on the jerseys and all the faces blurred out. Writing style without names would be (in some but not all cases) like trying to identify players by their shoes, tattoos or morphology (read: mostly freakish tallness).
My mental models for grades today: B is the median. A is above average. C means you showed up and handed things in, but didn't really "get it".

So, on this scale, D and F aren't really distinguishable. Either pretty much mean you didn't make an effort.

I've been taking CS graduate classes part time with (who I consider to be) pretty smart people, so I am happy with an A and satisfied with a B. If I try and still get a C, I'll know that I didn't really belong in that class, at least without more preparatory work.
Online brands losing respect
A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue
So are users really going to end up installing Google Gears, Prism, and BrowserPlus? Destkop/web interaction is definitely useful, but I wonder if it's going to get complicated because of all the different platforms.
This is a great article with much insight. As a cartoonist covering life in the Chicago area for the past 20 or so years, here is what Chicago says;
"You really need to be successful here, but if not, someone just might help you."
The main point I was making was that your articles seem to be written with the aim of irritating and provoking a response.
I guess perhaps that's why they get posted - people can see that they are controversial and baiting in their nature.
Now how about this question ?

What's more noble to try to live somewhere else that encourages intellectual ambition or to try to improve the condition of where you are?
I'm not certain of that. In every focused forum I've frequented, when a sense of community grows, the focus turns inward instead of staying on the stated subject. I think, for instance, that the chans' insistence on anonymous posting and ephemeral content helps keep most of their boards full of posts focused on the board's topic, rather than the poster's reputation.
"Vista is not good" gets the point across. Nobody that reads this site likes Vista, so there's no point in writing a long post that preaches to the choir. The short, one sentence comment allows the reader's mind to fill in the details that he's undoubtedly heard again and again in other places.

It's called "minimalism."
Guru, keeping Windows machine clean is trivial, I more than agree with you (in fact I've never used an anti-virus or a software firewall in my life, and never had any security issues). The issue isn't technical, it's a strange fusion of "software culture" that surrounds Windows: a combination of how software is written and how it gets consumed. Things that Windows programmers can get away with are not tolerated among OSX/Linux users, and the way typical Windows users do things is just... crazy. But I do believe that it was Microsoft themselves who seeded and cultivated those expectations.

And .NET is really just a layer on top of Win32, it was an MFC replacement, not Win32 replacement (which is what "new windows" really needs). Just getting rid of registry (along with stinky AutoRun section where every piece of shit software adds itself) and making system32 read-only-for-all would solve most problems.

But personally I don't care anymore.
Ask YC: How do you measure your app's performance 
Whether you host your app on your own servers, rent servers from a hosting provider or even can afford a CDN - you probably want to know, how performance looks on distant locations. Is there any way to measure website performance in Asia, Europe, on the other side of the continent (or the world) without beeing there?
Some clarification on what this product does...
* It requires a physical component beyond desktop computers, one that requires ongoing support and maintenance and precision installation. This isn't like a sales order system or something like that, it might more be called a public works project.
* It is a service-based ASP model
* Bear in mind that the usual pricetag for organizations of medium to large size is $2M to $30M and we are doing these deals in the $100-200k range so we very much are operating on razor thin margins
Yahoo's Endgame
SV != "rest of the world". Maroon seems to be more more in touch with outside-of-sv-reality on most issues. And majority of readers here aren't in Bay Area.
Probably not a standard monitor. Maybe they are targeting something like Microsoft Surface?
Amazon Ready To Unbox Video Streaming For Digital Movies
Adding multi-touch to PC screens without reinventing the form factor is one of those visions of the future that our grandchildren will chuckle about. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw from 1900, depicting a classroom of the year 2000. Presciently, the students had access to any book ever printed—there was a huge machine with a tube that spit out the requested book.

Multi-touch will almost certainly work its way into larger-than-iPhone form factors. But just as certainly, they will have to be different than the ones we're used to.
I think they only go back one month, though.
Overdue Retirement
only the elite have the privilege of changing the topbar color.
Here we are TWO+ years out from Windows 7 and you already have bloggers and various websites bashing it.

MS will never win.

How about this, just by reading the headline "Windows 7? We already hate it." I chose not to read the article because I knew it would contain useless/troll-like/flame bait. How's that for jumping to conclusions?
I agree. I think pg's essay is spot-on. However, I don't believe that choosing where you live is as simple as saying, e.g., "I want to be an academic" and thus you move to Cambridge.

What if, say, your spouse is really into acting and loves the Los Angeles area... it might be very hard for them to find the same happiness in Cambridge, just as you might be harder-pressed to be as academic as you want to be in L.A.

I think a fair question is, if, for whatever reason, you can't move to an area that would well-support your ambitions, what can you do to improve your environment? Surely the best answer isn't "nothing, just resign yourself to live your life in obscurity and failure"...
Alternative to Amazon EC2?
So I have been reading a few tutorials on setting up EC2 and it seems like you need a fair amount of system admin experience (which I do not unfortunately have). Plus, it also seems you'lll need to actively manage your instances and consistenyly backup your database in case an instance crashes.

I have been exploring other 'cloud' hosting services and came across mosso (www.mosso.com). Does anyone have any experiences with them? It seems to be as easy as setting up your site on a shared hosting service. Anything I should look out for?
While I do see the value of having a profile picture, the comparison you draw here doesn't hold. To answer this comment of yours, an avatar and a username are "so different" in the sense that comics and novels are different: they can both tell stories, but the degree of freedom of imagination on the reader's part is larger in the latter case (this is only of minor relevance, but it takes apart your argument).

Two, getting a username is considered a sunk cost, one many are willing to pay, but setting up a picture is an additional cost; some will pay, but I would wager many of us here won't bother. However, once you set up the option, there will be a "ah, they're the ones who like to update their profile pic!" and "ah, they're among those who simply don't care!" Assume many people don't bother, you still need to make do, which is your current situation.

Third, user-selected pictures carry a lot more information than just the usernames, and this information may simply detract from the core of the site, which is the content and discussion. If you treat usernames just as differentiating handles, they currently serve exactly that purpose.

Of course, you will be right to say that pictographs can be more efficiently retrieved from memory here, but the case doesn't seem strong enough to spur investing time into accommodating the functions in the code. I agree with pg above in this thread.
EBay Architecture
Plugins - custom_migrator
Funny thing how oil automatically translates to cars and SUVs in ears of most consumers, while in reality transportatino sector consumes only about 18% of oil, at least in US. And that includes (!) aviation.

There was an edutorial on the subject by one of C/D editors, that's where I got my number from.

I want gazoline prices to be around $8 to completely eliminate vehicles heavier than 2,200lb, and force lemmings to live closer to the city, but I want oil prices to come down, because it really increases costs of nearly everything. Tax on gazoline looks like a candidate for a solution, although I am never going to support more taxes.
Good article, but why does he take screenshots of his email and attach them to the post instead of just cutting and pasting the text into the post?

I personally have no trouble reading it, but pictures of text are not very easy to read for some people.
And yet this comment thread seems to be bringing out the worst in many people - I certainly haven't learned anything by reading it.

It's novel, to see a flamefest on HN, but it's not the kind of novelty I like.
Does your company uses Twitter?
That would be a risky effort because:

1. Google App Engine (GAE) is non-relational in both structure and use. If your app has significant database complexity then your GAE database may not be consistent at any particular time. Correcting those inconsistencies is up to you.

2. Each year computers get faster and faster. What doesn't scale today may likely scale tomorrow. Sometimes waiting six months and buying a faster server is a better solution.

3. The a priori likelihood that your site will be popular enough to demand the scalability GAE can apparently deliver is very low, indeed nil. Are you willing to pioneer on an inconsistent infrastructure when you could use a proven relational one?

4. Above I said "_apparently_ deliver...": it is by no means a given that GAE will prove adequate. It is, after all, a beta site.

5. Is it worthwhile investing the time to learn a new non-relational database system and framework and implement your site in that system when you _know_ you could implement it instead with proven technology? Were your site to prove popular you might have to buy some computing power, get new servers, etc. But isn't that a known path? Isn't GAE the unproven, unknown path? What do you do if your GAE app doesn't scale? Is the flaw in your code or in Google's infrastructure? You can't always tell because Google's infrastructure isn't transparent.

I see GAE as useful mostly for it's integration and toolkit. I would welcome the addition to GAE of a relational database (or of even a non-relational database that guaranteed the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties. But barring such an addition, life will continue just as before GAE.
So your smaller competitor is doing to you what you are doing to your more established competitors. Do you think your major competitors initially discounted your ability to prosper? Also from the perspective of your prospects, given that the next nearest major competitor is 20X your price there may not be enough of a difference between you and your lower priced competitor. Why not be just be 1/2 price of your nearest major competitor instead of 5%? Do you have to discount so strongly? Will you significantly enlarge the number of buyers with your price point or just shrink the total spend in the market? You may be being excluded from many more deals because your price is not credible (e.g. are you trying to sell a $10 car, people wonder what's missing or wrong with it).
didn't look like they were very scrappy from those pictures
Soon, there may well be bacteria that produce it. That would blur the lines a whole lot.

The difference is in the fact that there's been a Carbon Cycle for ages, just like there's been a water cycle for ages. Hydroelectric dams use energy in the water cycle. Gravity driven irrigation canals do as well. The point is that there's already a natural system out there that's capable of capturing huge amounts of carbon.
Where did karma begin?
can anyone recall the first website to implement karma for user activity?
Eventually this will just turn back into a message board software.
RightScale.com is probably the easiest way to start.

Try one of their RightImages; we use their CentOS 5 32 and 64 bit images and they're perfect.

There's also plenty of tutorials on Google on how to get started, but it'll involve installing Amazon's command line tools, which is definitely more complicated than point and click on RightScale.
there is flexiscale (http://www.flexiscale.com/) we use them... they are ok... you still need plenty of sys admin experience... but they have good uptime... and you pay per use time and bandwidth...

they don't have an API yet to start and stop but they have a web interface... the thing is that provisioning used to be manual I think its done from web interface now!
I like the pretty colors.

Also, Blogger is fucking evil, and it eats the > from quoting e-mails, which sometimes is a very time-consuming bug.

By the way mad apologies but I'm actually banning my own blog from my view of Hacker News, using a Greasemonkey script in Firefox. I would seriously kill people to defend my right to post gifs instead of cutting and pasting text, even though I realize it's ridiculous. Reasonable people can disagree, but for the rest of us, there's Greasemonkey.
There are two extremes, neither one better than the other:

The proposed extreme is to encourage community via personalization. I personally disagree with this: web sites are typically too big to be communities in a natural sense. What you will get is increased visibility for a small elite of spam-heavy commentators.

The other extreme is 2ch-style anonymity. This is open to mob abuse, but it also discourages powergaming.

The core issue is how to continue scaling the system to match interests when they reach hundreds or thousands for every front-page story. news.yc is getting there already....
Let WalMart Fix US Healthcare
Apple orders more iPods, slightly fewer iPhones, Macs from suppliers
You can make a claim that Ebay did it with their user rating system. They were started in 1995 but I am not sure whether they had user ratings as part of their launch product.
Why are some people downmodding Matt's comments for no apparent reason?

Form your own opinion on whether Matt is trolling in some way or not, but even if you decide "yes", don't take it out on his innocent comments.