skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CloudStatus (real-time health status of Amazon Web Services)
Good ideas, thanks. I'll look into the Mono libraries.
Fast computation of the Median
I think this is prime for hacker news. Between this and the article recently calling into question broader goals for technology (you know solving world problems rather than just scratching niche itches and hoping you make some ad revenue along the way) I am really inspired again. Though this article only briefly touches on the impact of technology on community it must be said that the advent of online "community" is definitely either making the lack of real community more apparent or having a detrimental effect on it.

This is probably thread jacking but I wonder how many other posters also read the works of stafford beer, macluhan, debord, zerzan (select * from social_critique order by nihilism asc) and derive inspiration for their hacking/startup projects? Identifying and grappling with the domination and separation/alienation of daily life is one of the hardest aspects of living let alone being a proponent of technology when it seems to be the driving force in alienation.

Staying inspired and absorbed by technology while at the same time abhorring it for what it seems to be doing to our culture is the closest thing that I have to faith. What is killing us could also be our cure. In what ways could technology actually help build bridges within communities? How can we increase autonomy, security and solidarity on both the micro and macro levels?
Probably most of the people here, we're the people who are actually interested in learning and doing not getting affirmation (a degree) of our worth. I am going to college, but to actually learn something and not for a piece of paper.

Interestingly I have heard from my friends at Harvard & Columbia that they are disappointed with the kids there, i.e. no one is actually an intellectual and everyone just seems to be legacy.
Guido on the fate of Lambda, map() and filter(), and reduce() in Python 3000
I'd say, why not have the choice in addition to existing services?
This is really awesome.

Constructive comment: I can't middle click links to open them in new tabs.

P.S. You're not getting too much enthusiasm for it here because of the choice of PHP. I can assure you, though, if this takes off, a lot of those "can someone build me a Joomla or Drupal site?" on eLance will rapidly turn into "can someone build me a Noloh app?"
why would you attend a school that advertises on TV?
"... The tragedy—the disgrace, so to speak—is that the American scientific and educational establishment is not benefitting from the Chudnovskys’ assistance. Thirteen years have gone by since the Chudnovskys arrived here, and where are all the graduate students who would have worked with the brothers? ..."

Funny enough this was the same sort of response Werner Von Braun received moving to the US with his rocket team ~ http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/bio.html

Thanks for posting this 'nadim' it is hands-down the best hackernews article I've read to date.
But data shows that small business owners are some of the better off in the country. Maybe not as good as the average Ivy League lawyer, but better than most college grads.
kills my browser (ff3)
"... It is also possible that the article made it to the front page ..."

Possible. I tend to read & mark the "new" page before the main page. Could you also take a second bite by indexing a couple of pages of the /new page?
Eventually is this going to be some sort of hosted service or a framework users download, like Rails or Zend Framework?

If it's the former, please ignore my comments :) If the latter, I for one would be playing around with the code right now if there was a download link... A few examples in a README file would do fine for now. Release early and often, as they say ;)

It would be hard for users to do significant work with NOLOH when the code is hosted on your own server and updated automatically, possibly breaking code they added.
BTW the register form is pretty discouraging... Why not let users sign up with email and password and fill up their info/settings later on, as they go along?
Ask YC: How To Value Your Non-Launched Company
I guess you really have to have experience with angel investing for this one...

I know everybody is here is fan of 'build it yourself' but while building it I have this business plan and with my partner decided to go around family friends and other potential investors for investment. same question comes up again and again - "How do you value the company? You did you decide to ask for X percentage for that money you requested? You have no earnings and so you can't use a ratio to value your company at Y."

I know the 1/(1-n) equation which tells me how much it's worth to me and is basically the bottom line - not where I should start the negotiation.

Somebody suggested that maybe I should have a formula such that the investors have a better deal but I have the option to purchase some of the shares back upon completion of some of the steps of development. Makes sense, but is this even done?

So I am still in search for a way to determine how to present such a financial request to potential investors.

Any insights?
Yes, all those 60 year old Lispers.
Thank you for the kind words.

You're right about the tabs, that will be implemented in the next update to the website. We're planning to release Ruby and Python versions of NOLOH at some point.
That clip was like... the anti-humor. Why is that guy so popular?
For example by implementing Prolog in it? Prolog seems to be the favorite embedded language of Lispers (Graham, Norvig).
A set of examples of great code: Almost everything written by Petr, in Topcoder Competitions, though it is instructive to see how his coding style evolved over time.

Here's an article on him, by the way. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=features&...
You can always learn assembler (sort-of) by playing Core Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Wars).

"Core War (or Core Wars) is a programming game in which two or more battle programs (called warriors) compete for the control of the MARS virtual computer (Memory Array Redcode Simulator). These battle programs are written in an abstract assembly language called Redcode. The object of the game is to cause all processes of the opposing program(s) to terminate, leaving your program in sole possession of the machine."
Reminds me of adwords keyword tool. Fun. Good luck.
If the framework does all you promise and starts getting adopted, you could make the language translation an open source project, maybe. That way it will both be quicker to completion and less error-prone (since you're not locking yourself in). In any case, it doesn't seem like turning this into Ruby or Python should be too much of an issue, since they're all OOP languages anyway.
This link is not working, maybe they should use EC2.
Incidentally, if you want to hear stories about real travel, my mom has a blog, http://www.theyearofbloggingdangerously.com/

Great places to start:

Bootlegging in the Sahara, a How-Not-To guide: http://www.theyearofbloggingdangerously.com/2008/05/bootlegg...

Apropos to the current conversation, Going to Hell and Back the Perils of Travel Writing:
http://www.theyearofbloggingdangerously.com/2008/05/going-to...

and "How to Retire at 28 and Travel the World.":
http://www.theyearofbloggingdangerously.com/2008/02/how-to-r...
what was GameClay about?
We plan to offer free hosted, free download, as well as commercial hosting and download options. Currently NOLOH is being used in several major companies (ex. CIG) for their website in addition to their internal applications.

The Beta Program is setup to allow us to work closely with a small group of developers so that we can help them develop their applications in NOLOH. If any updates during the beta program break an application we will work with the developer at our cost to fix the problems.

We have lots of documentation, articles, videos, etc, to put together before we can offer it to non-commercial users which is what we hope the beta program will help us accomplish.
I'm currently only using Twitter as a sideblog, and Plurk's version seems quite obtrusive. I don't understand sites' obsessions with branding their widgets.
e who cares about that?
Are social ads getting too much?
> Why would googlebot use a different header to pretend that it is a user in order to recieve a broken page? That would not benefit any party.

Well... it would benefit Google (and its users), because they could detect and punish cloaking. How would Google detect cloaking? A clerk examining the two served versions, or automagically comparing the two versions of served content? How smart would their comparing algorithm be? Could it determine that your site was not being deceptive? How would you write such a algorithm (and it better be generic, and difficult to exploit)?

Basically, I have no idea what the hell Google does and does not do, but I am scared (and ignorant) enough to always serve search engines exactly what I serve users.
My Apologies For Disappearing OFF The Grid
Its been awhile since I posted last, so I apologize for that. The main reason is I needed a break from blogging was so I could focus on whats coming ahead for the rest of my year. So basically here’s what I have planned for Strategic Online Business and Marketing BLOG in a nutshell:
Ah, the YMP-C90 (pic at http://www.geocities.jp/takaomitsuji2000/ymp-c90.jpg)...

When I went to secondary (high) school in the UK, we had to do a work placement week when we were 16. My first choice of company was MicroProse, as they had a big UK office. I wasn't quick enough off the mark with them though, and got the standard "too high demand" letter.

Then I was in our career room, and found some random business listings book that had a small call-out for Cray Research. I put a letter together, thinking "there's no way someone as cool as Cray would have spaces," and sent it off. A while later I received a response from a manager, who said (paraphrasing) "nobody's ever asked about this before, we'd love to do it, but we'll have to figure out what you can do." I was rather pleased :)

The UK office was mostly support, so I spent a day and a half with the hardware guys who gave me a tour of ECMWF (http://www.ecmwf.int/) - they were an ongoing Cray customer, and always had the fastest hardware available from them - happened to be the C90 at the time, or "the dustbin". Then it was off to the software support team, who got my 16-year-old self drunk at the local pub (I doubt they knew my age) while hosting a Spanish sysop who was troubleshooting some benchmark results for his employer. The software guys let me loose on a couple of internal Cray machines ('forest' and 'wind') so I could write some quick C programs to see how they compared to the Sparc 5 on my desk. Finally, I sat on the helpdesk team for a day or two, where I fielded live questions from customers ("sorry, we don't support bounds checking in Fortran in your version of UNICOS, it's a known issue and will remain such").

An amazing week. And yes, I still have the T-shirt ;)
So what happened? It's been a month and I am curious how things settled out.
In a nutshell, I would say that woti simply "gets it". If anyone is seriously interested in working at woti.com and is highly qualified, I would be happy to talk to you offline. My address is utefan001 -yahoo-
This site isn't about startup news, it's about hacker news. Small reminder...

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Carlin was damn interesting and someone I'd bet many many hackers looked up to.
I visited Rolla (errr....S&T) a year ago for an admissions event, and was impressed by the CS program as it was presented to me by one brilliant, enthusiastic assistant professor. I then went home and reflected on the impression I got from the rest of the school, and it was not so rosy.

Big-O notation is taught at S&T in the Data Structures II class, which they recommend taking as a sophomore. I welcome anything that would tell me otherwise (I would like to feel better about my backup school -- 'twould ease the nightmares of universal rejection), but, until then, I'll consider that a microcosm reflective of an overall slow pace.
"filter(P, S) is almost always written clearer as [x for x in S if P(x)]"

Is this widely believed by Python hackers?
OLPC News: Did Microsoft Fake XP on XO Press Media?
Because Tim Russert wasn't the genius Carlin was, and didn't make a living hacking our idiotic social norms like Carlin did. Carlin was a hacker in the truest sense, he was curious about everything and wasn't afraid to explore any topic, despite the consequences.
Drive Flex from Ruby, via Javascript
Are you building a rich Internet application with Flex 3? Testing by clicking around is too tedious. Want to automate exercising the user interface by writing Ruby code? flexamater is for you.

flexamater's goal is to allow you to write automated unit-tests in ruby, which perform prescribed actions on your flex app and then ensure it has performed appropriately.
And that, friends, is a grade-A piece of writing.
More Chudnovsky adventures: Capturing the Unicorn
Only the first setting makes anything I want to look at, but I'm very inspired that that's canvas and not Flash. For me (FF3, Ubuntu) it runs better than Flash usually does, too.
Boston Lisp meeting sponsored by ITA Software
I can only imagine how much more robust (and maybe unmanageable) this might be if it didn't rely solely on information from CrunchBase.
From the article: Linux started as a terminal emulator.

Huh?
or it could that the /. effect produced by an hacker news is now sufficient to swamp dynamic blog software that has to generate each page from a database...
JavaScript's creator ponders its future
Runs very slowly in Fx3.0_rc1.
The page is completely white. Nothing there. Fx3.0rc_1.
The sarcasm didn't come through, sorry.
Like Jackson Pollock.
Look at Wordpress (wordpress.org). Their code makes me want to throw up, yet it presents itself quite nicely to the end user.
wait a minute, you can't just expect python primitives to vectorize? And people live without any(), all(), etc?

Its been a long time since I primarily wrote python, and I guess R has made me lazy, but seriously: WTF?

Maybe hold off on Py3K until this is done?
A great quote:
“In ten years, a Cray will fit in your pocket,” David said.

The article is a bit weak on specifics, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are totally spot on. The article was written in 1992 after all.
N == 1 in my sample but a few random things that I did in college that have made me happy ever since: meet you future spouse; make lifelong friends; learn a foreign language; play in a band; act in a play; and find a life long sport that you enjoy.
I'm a medical doctor looking to join a healthcare startup. Not interested in residency right now; interested in rolling the dice. Shoot me back if interested.
My gut feeling is, by the time you read about a scandal in the press, its too late. Everyone else who was in the loop has already cashed out.
In some cases, it might be, such as when you're combining map and filter. Then the list comprehension just looks like psuedocode: include this in the result if these conditions are met. In that example. though, it isn't much clearer. And the 'x for x' seems sort of repetitive.
It seems a shame to me that a couple guys saying hi to one another got downvoted into oblivion. I've noticed a lot of downvoters piling on lately. I'm going to see if I can tweak voting to prevent this.
I'm not entirely disagreeing with you, and for a straight ecommerce site, I think it looks a lot more pro to have your own merchant account, ssl certificate, domain etc.

But for more specialised needs FPS could be the right answer, particularly if you are acting as a broker or escrow agent (which sounds sort of like what coglethorpe was describing) and it would let you build something that would at the very least show the potential of the business model enough to justify a real investment (10-50 Million USD for a new bank that is intended to operate nationally; more if you want to start global).
Err... What manner of tweaking would solve that problem? Just curious, since to me it seems to be more of a community issue.
Haskell hacking
Indeed; by the time you do, it might have been usurped by D.
"I sat down with SocialMedia co-founder Seth Goldstein last week, who told me that the response rate to standard display advertising on social networks is abysmal. People click on ads about 0.02 percent of the time, he said, because people have started ignoring ads.

Thus the deperate need to interject your friends-- to knock you out of your efficient browsing routine."

This the desperate need for pop ups. Popunders. Interstitials. Animation. FUIs.

This kind of crap spikes when it's new and will get added to the mental ignore list as people get used to seeing it.
One thing I tried (released yesterday) is more aggressive graying out of negative comments, in the hope that people wouldn't be so prone to downvote something they could no longer read. I also increased the threshold for downarrows to appear. Neither of those helped in this case, though.

So for now it's back to the drawing board-- or rather, vi. I'll write some code to analyze voting patterns and see if there is some way sw could distinguish mean downvoting from e.g. the downvoting of trolls and spammers.
I don't think the "x for x" is repetitive. It's there for the cases you mention. e.g.

[str(x) for x in range(100) if x%2 is 0]

VS

map(lambda x: str(x), filter(lambda x: x%2 is 0, range(100)))
I have been doing pet projects (some of my dumbest ideas) and some freelance work to "practice". This has been going for at least 3 years now ^_^ so far so good...
Spread of Information in a Social Network
Congratulations guys. I keep running into your sites ever since SXSW. I'm excited about what you all are doing. Have you guys already figured out costs and filled up the place? It looks very cool. Nice location.
How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system - Postfix
"distributed" in what sense? Technology-wise, Twitter is highly centralized - and a rather unreliable center at that.

A Twitter-like UI that would simply send email to all your emergency contacts might be a lot more reliable and much easier to scale.
Ugh. This is now a straw-man argument.
I would say ikea. they are cheap as hell and very configurable.

...also, keep the asshat comments under the brim.
Chad Fowler and Bruce Williams came up with http://slickorslack.com/ which presents code snippets where people vote them 'slick' or 'slack'.
I have to say that fact that I got minus 5 from this comment is pretty indicative of the kind of community hacker news, and I mean it as a compliment. I saw the UPS thing and the first thing out of my mouth was wow, it was instinctual , as soon as I submitted it I knew some negative karma was coming my way. I forgot that I wasn't on digg.
thanks, i was looking at the yaris, very good mileage.
I think there must have been a lot of undated paintings in Cezanne's studio that just got dated the year of his death when his estate was sold. His most admired paintings are not from the last year of his life.
any() and all() are available in Python 2.5.
Doppler Effect and Razor Sharp Focus
Applying Laws of Physics to Business problems.
World-changers? A very noble ambition amidst the saturation of self-obsessed meandering web 2.0 circle-jerking that usually graces random blogs like this. But let me <rant> for a just a second oh so typically...

I'm so tired of the ___-changing or -changers meme! It's the worst kind of empty meaningless dribble that you'll find in bad technology articles.

A new Ruby VM? It's a gamechanger! Startup X integrated feature Y! This is unbelievable, gamechanging, news!
That kind of sucks if you ask me.
http://www.mach-linux.org/reviews/justforfun.html

Even better, a video of Linus Torvalds speaking on the history of Linux at the Computer Museum in 2001:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WVTWCPoUt8w
“Look, we are getting nutty,” David said.

“We are not the only ones,” Gregory said. “We are getting an average of one letter a month from someone or other who is trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.

This was written in 92. Fermat's Last Theorem was proven in 95.
FYI Harvey Mudd is very selective. Don't assume it's easier to get into than Caltech.
The author says that at the end of the post. Tell good stories, but make sure you're not falling for them.
I know of at least one coming with another rumored to be in development. Without the cutesy factor of Plurk.
Agreed. I personally think it's not the risk to put yet another layer in your stack that has the potential to royally fuck things up.
One of the "interesting" things I see in ruby is that people are happy to accept any suitable way of doing something, whereas in python there is general demand for more language or official support.

eg Ruby has no named params, no biggie, just use the convention that you pass around hashmaps, something like

foo :bar => 42 etc etc....

close enough for rocknroll. In python they wouldn't necessarily like that, and named params are available (I am just making this up, they could have been in there for the start, but my point remains...)
My startup is self funded, and we recently have a prototype that we will use to generate an Angel Investor. We intend to use a Subscription Revenue Model to hopefully breakeven in year 1.
weird, runs smoothly on a core 2 quad 2.4 ghz machine with firefox 3.0 rc1, windows xp sp 2.
3 Steps to Overcoming Corporate Blog Denial
3 Simple steps that will help your boss overcome their fear of genuine corporate blogging.
Ask YC: A Magazine That Publishes Blogs. Startup Potential?
I had this idea about 10 minutes ago on my way to the mailbox. Since I believe that ideas aren't worth anything on their own, I submit it here to see what you guys think about its potential. Here's the idea:

A magazine that finds interesting blogs, bundles them together (maybe with themes), and publishes them in a print magazine.

My thoughts on this>

People could be exposed to new/interesting blogs that they might not find on their own. They can also read up on their favorite blogs in places that they normally wouldn't be able to (anywhere they don't want to pull their laptop out).

There are some pros for blog publishers too: For new and undiscovered writers they can have their blogs featured. More established writers could opt to publish with a revenue sharing model.

Of course there are also the articles about Adsense optimization, etc.

Another variation of this idea would be a system for bloggers to have their blogs bundled up and printed in a magazine to give as a gift to their readers, similar to amateur musicians making a family and friends CD.

Anyways, what do you guys think? Is something like this even feasible? Any gaping holes that I haven't even realized yet? (And remember, I just thought of this a few minutes ago.)
does anyone know how you write code to implement drawing operations like this efficiently? i remember in the late 90s there was stuff you could do, for instance, where you had a large number of low-opacity swirling ellipse objects that looked like smoke (basically a very crude particle system) - and it brought my Pentium 3 450 to its knees. (this is what i'm referring to: http://www.presstube.com/project.php?id=212 )

have computers just gotten faster, or does Flash have some way of doing, say, hardware-accelerated graphics?