skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
40 gigabytes in a 30 day month looks like a continuous transfer rate of about 128 kbits/s. A little more than twice
dialup.

Heh, watch out for bittorrent clients on your network!
"One issue might be not having database drivers, though (LISP programming???)."

Huh?
Sadly, this is years from effecting the masses. Although depending on the popularity of AppleTV, the Netflix box and other streaming TV boxes that timeframe could narrow. TWC also has to consider how it's OnDemand content is going to be affected in the long-run. And how long is it before the internet starts streaming cable programing with unlimited channel selection and HD? The cable infrastructure is poor and I guess they are seeing what they can do to hold onto their market share until a radical shift happens. Although, since they already do have a large market share, you'd think they'd be more interested in figuring out how to leverage the internet to deliver more content instead of just stifling their users.

They are doing this knowing that high bandwidth customers are likely to leave and they either a) don't care or b) are doing this specifically to lose the high bandwidth users. Cable is already pushed to its limits and providers are spending a lot of money to keep up with satellite's HD offerings.

Unfortunately for TWC, there are plenty of options and eventually this model will cannibalize their entire broadband business.
you mean "from" a Mac OS X client machine right ? use the terminal/shell + ec2 command line tools ;-)
I'm in the same boat as you, I run Linux, my girlfriend OSX and friends/parents have windows boxes. I started with portable firefox for both OSX and windows. Same for putty, ftp client, etc... But in the end I realised all I had on there was for online use. So instead of using all those programs, I just put portable firefox on it and added some extentions, like fireftp for ftp and sites like google notebook, meebo. Now all the other things that are on there are a couple of files (mp3, txt snippets), firefox portable and qemu with a basic linux install.
The safe harbor provision is here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_0...

It could make sense, depending on the analogy that someone picks. For example, I have a coffee shop with a community message board. Someone posts copyrighted information there - someone tells me about it and I take it down right away. That sounds pretty fair.

But what if I make a whole operation out of it - like if there are pictures, then I take those, clean them up, copy them, frame them, and put them on the wall of my shop. Now it seems like I have a lot more responsibility for what is going on. Is it fair for me to just blindly frame every single picture I find, even if some of the pictures are obviously copyrighted? Anyway that is my logical argument (as opposed to a legal one...)
No matter how many mistakes you work at avoiding, you're going to run smack into some you've not even dreamed possible.

Roll with them.
Generally, sane file metaphors try very hard not to change stuff in the middle of the file. Try to keep with one "record" (which might be a bigger object than a single row in a database!) per file, and read/write them all in one swoop. If you need indexes other than the one you get for free (the path name, of course), keep them in separate files and make sure your toolchain can rebuild them as needed.

The filesystem has looser rules about data loss than the database will by default, so unless you want to handle this yourself (which can be done), you should probably to turn on "ordered data" journalling in your filesystem (e.g. for ext3: "mount -o data=ordered"). Then you only need to be able to recover from a crash (or killing) of your own software, which is a problem you'll have to handle anyway.

The classic application for this sort of technique is a mail server. Software like sendmail and postfix has been doing reliable on-disk storage for decades now, and they don't have to jump through too many hoops to do it.
Reference to the law making this illegal?

ESPN360 (from a 'content company') has been only available to users of ISPs ('delivery providers') who've paid licensing fees to ESPN. [1] This arrangement has existed for a couple years, at least. That would seem to undercut the claim such agreements are illegal.

[1] http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-espn-opens-broadband-ac...
this is awesome :D
Enhanced backtraces
their application looks suspiciously like the y-comb app ;-)

http://www.nycseed.com/nycseed%20application.pdf
"While Facebook has a global following, several youth-led start-ups are getting buzz in the valley. Their very names, too, reflect this digital age: Loopt, Scribd, Tokbox, Xobni, Box.net, WeGame, Weebly and YouNoodle."

Half of those are YC funded, yo.
I think some math needs to be done on what the optimal auction structure is given participants arrive and leave at random times.

The english auction with a reserve price that is employed by ebay is equivalent to most other auction types in revenue given typical assumptions, but with people coming and going all the time and auctions taking days rather than minutes the typical assumptions aren't satisfied and perhaps a different method would be better.

My idea is to do dutch auctions rather than english auctions; that is, list a high price that decreases through time. That way every price is a buy-it-now price and bidding becomes less time-consuming. Also, it would eliminate the sniping behavior that is so common on ebay.

They're so entrenched though I'm not sure just having a better auction style will be enough to get traction.
I find http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/article/Design Design to be really handy when I'm making sure text line cadence is right. It's handy all around for design: powerful grid, rulers, measuring, and targeting tools.

http://westciv.com/xray/ XRAY keeps a spot on my bookmark bar. It's an HTML-traversing bookmarklet that lets me figure what's going on with underlying HTML and positioning CSS without leaving the page. It's been somewhat marginalized since Safari's Web Inspector started rocking so hard.

They; InstaPaper (also great); and Delicious/Facebook/Yahoo Bookmarks share/post bookmarklets are what currently dominate my bookmark bar.
Sort of a cross between YC and the DMV.
I think you answer your own question. Because of technology, it is irrelevant where we are physically located. So people live where they enjoy living and San Francisco (i.e., Bay Area) is a great place to live. Here you will find successful as well as not yet successful (and still hungry) entrepreneurs and technologists. So it is a great place to do startups as well. And you see the trend even within the Bay Area, the center of mass is definitely moving North.
>This industry is loaded with cash, they're transitioning from traditional analog video to IP-centric solutions and have no expertise.

I can confirm on this one. It's amazing how much money I've seen shelled out for utter crap surveillance / software combined systems, where the individual components are relatively inexpensive commodity stuff; the majority of the price is for simply having a passable bit of software that ties it together in a way that is useful from a surveillance standpoint.
"Gmail This" is great: http://contrapants.org/blog/2005/07/gmailthis.html
I would recommend reading Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques by Gray and Reuter, particularly the sections about ways to construct Atomic commits.

SQLite's atomic commit design is also good food for thought - http://www.sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html

However, while it's good to think about low-level consistency (e.g. disk writes) I think you're better off spending your time on your application's high-level consistency (e.g. procedures for identifying inconsistencies, logging your changes, recovering from backups). Your os developers have already spent countless hours on the issue of getting your blocks to disk, but you may be the only one who has spent any time thinking about what things are important to preserve in your application.
Recap of Chicago's Intro to Lisp Workshop
Among other document-oriented databases mentioned, also check out CouchDB http://incubator.apache.org/couchdb/
Here's a link to the actual productivity tips Xah suggests: http://xahlee.org/emacs/effective_emacs.html

Go Xah!

EDIT: long ago I went nuts customizing emacs but have made a nearly complete recovery. Here are the only bindings I have a hard time doing without:

(global-set-key "\C-h" 'delete-backward-char)
(global-set-key "\M-^" 'query-replace-regexp)
(global-set-key "\C-x:" 'goto-line)
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-e" 'compile)
(global-set-key (quote [f3]) (quote call-last-kbd-macro))
(global-set-key "^[ " (quote just-one-space))
Thanks again. That's good to know.
yes :)... What about the EC2 Firefox extension?
I know there are probably drivers, I just have not figured it all out yet (MzScheme). What about orm mappers, for example?

Sorry, that really wasn't meant as a criticism of LISP.
...and now this one's on top, with the former post in second place. My mind boggles at the possibilities for recursion.
"Don't get pets"

Having pets has been one of the best things I've ever done.

Mine are magical and mystical, have taught me many things, love me unconditionally, and are better companions than many people I know. I love their company during long coding sessions.

They expect little in return. Just a little food and attention. I always have someone to care for them when I travel.

Their greeting is the best thing about coming home, whether it's been 8 hours or 8 days.
This kind of thinking is the major reason why America is behind in the mobile access market and true broadband access.

Ridiculous.
For transactional file systems and transactional databases, the lower-level software deals with this for you. This whether a transactional SQL, or Mac OS X Core Data and its undo, or otherwise. ACID is goodness.

For non-transactional databases (and non-transactional file systems in general), look at the concept of "careful writes". At its simplest, you seek to allocate and work and read and write structures outside of the live application data structures and only add your structures into the static storage with a single-block or other canonical write as the last step of the update or change. To always avoid having inconsistent structures.

In the event of an application or system crash, you can (will?) need a clean-up daemon that finds and releases any dangling allocations.

And one that threw me: there are cases where multiblock writes might not see all blocks written. Some storage devices might either cache the data, or might (due to a power failure) not write all blocks.

You'll find various discussions and papers on "careful writes" around. And ACID. And related.

Once you get the hang of this sequencing, the next level of complexity upwards here can involve distributed access and coordinating and sequencing write operations. This can involve locking or queuing.
Why we skip Photoshop
sit down and build a small app with it that doesnt rely on the crud framework. something like an events calendar should give worthwhile insight on setting up an application, working with the database orm, controllers, templates, etc. you could even sprinkle in some web service consumption on top afterwords to play around with web api interaction with your application.

by this time, you should have a pretty clear of how it feels to work with rails. more importantly, you'll be able to determine whether you want to take a deep breath and inhale the hype or try something else.

if you don't care for it, go back to cakephp. or codeigniter. or phreeze. or, give django a try. i tried rails when it first came out, didn't care for it, and went with django because i enjoyed python and liked how django was shaping up.
"The author doesn't write like a human"

hahhaha

My writing has received a lot of constructive criticism in my day, but "not human" is a first. I totally agree that this is not the most stellar of posts I've ever written - I'm actually in a bit of a blogging slump (which you would actually know if you followed me on Twitter)...I am just trying to dig (claw?) my way out of it. Thanks for bearing with me...or not if you can't stand it.

Have a great day!
The Panacea for Putting Things Off
The bookmarklet for the app I'm building... :)
I have a Mac Mini at home with 2TB of attached storage (mirrored RAID to 1TB).

I use Offline Files to keep a copy of my data on all my laptops (including VMWare Fusion for my Macbook). For my laptops with smaller hard drives, I keep less stuff available offline.

It works perfectly - I couldn't function without it, and the redundancy/convenience is awesome. Having a Mac Mini I can then use as a media centre as well is a nice bonus. Cost the same as buying an embedded Linux solution too (such as a Thecus box).
My point was that studing other people's mistakes is a really good thing.
Some mistakes are too costly... You can't afford them.

Because one really bad mistake I'm half-blind and since then I prefer to think damn hard before making decisions.
Ask YC Facebook App
Hi I'm building a social networking site and want to hire some one to build me a facebook app does anyone have a suggestion for a company to hire to do this for me.
I guess to create a great economy, the only way is to allow goods, capital, good engineers comes and go.

But U.S. politicians have to work on different issues like voters anger on potential job loss and I guess unless voters can feel the benefit from the economy, they will choose to protect the existing benefits.
It's too bad issues 1-71 aren't available. I was really interested in comparing the content from the earliest ones with the latest ones.
Startup Tip: How I grew Mint's waiting list to 20,000+
Scientists create metamaterial that can absorb light completely and turn it into heat
A very unconvincing list.

1. That's what package managers are for.

2. If you're in the position of configuring your own web server then this probably doesn't matter to you.

3. See #1.

4. True, but your /usr/bin/python processes will be lighter because they won't exist.

5. I have no idea if this is true, but no evidence is provided.

6. My personal experience with mod_proxy has been...unhappy.

7. ???

8. See #5.
Stay Tuned.

Coming soon from the same author: The panacea for quitting smoking (Don't Smoke!) and the panacea for depression (Cheer Up!).
Well, I'm not too familiar with MzScheme, but http://planet.plt-scheme.org/ would probably be a good place to look.

Common Lisp certainly does have good database support: CLSQL probably supports whatever combination of OS, Lisp implementation, and RDBMS you need.

ORM tools and other object persistence solutions are there too. http://common-lisp.net/ is a good source.
5GB for $29.95 is hardly fair. Web hosting companies have found ways to increase bandwidth and keep plan prices at same or lower levels. Why can telcos do the same? $5.99 per GB is a ripoff. I have already called Time Warner Cable and warned them that if they implement bandwidth caps in my area, I will discontinue their service. I have other options in my area like Speakeasy or wireless internet providers.
What's best depends on you.

If you can code a few python scripts, use boto http://code.google.com/p/boto

If that looks too scary but you can handle ruby then consider Capazon and Capistrano - http://capazon.rubyforge.org and http://capify.org/

If none of this command line / script stuff is your thing then you may want to look at some web admin tools like Virtualmin (http://www.virtualmin.com) that support EC2.
Great article! Some really good tips in there
The Weird Economics of Information
I couldn't agree more. I love when interesting companies share solutions to their hard problems. SmugMug's SkyNet is so rad that I might flee Flickr just to be a part of the machine revolt...
Pretty good advice overall, but #6 I disagree with... and contradicts #2. You don't build wealth by spending... and while optimistic, chances are you won't go from $0 to million. But I suppose it's all relevant to one's goals... so long as your choices don't impact my taxes.
http://turtle.dojotoolkit.org/~david/recss.html
Business Intelligence (Analytics) for Desktop Software
I don't necessarily agree / disagree however there is a whole lot more to learn from Philipp Lenssen's interview of Kevin Fox than this post from 37signals about iterative design / usability

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-06-02-n56.html
Let me start by getting the "none more black" joke out of the way.

Anyway, this is kinda neat (though I'm skeptical that it's really 100% absorption) but not really all that useful for anything, as far as I can tell. There aren't many applications where the difference between absorbing 99.9% of the light and 99.99999999999999999% of the light is a particularly big deal, as far as I know.
21. Becoming a woman’s friend and confidant is not going to get you into an intimate relationship. If you haven’t gotten the girl within a reasonably short period of time, chances are you won’t ever get her. She’ll end up confiding to you about the sexual adventures she’s having with someone else.
23. Realize that love is a numbers game. Guys fall in love easily. You’re going to see some girl and feel like you’ll die if you don’t get her. If she rejects you, move on to the next one. It’s her loss.

Oh dear. I hope there are exceptions.
Google Business Edition is now Google Site Search | Tech Jaws
Agreed, good time to lock down those open Wifi boxes you've been sharing with the neighbors.
That assumes that you will be disciplined enough to not want to "upgrade" once you've sold it off.
Basically you should use mod_wsgi these days...
If local newspapers want to save themselves from Craigslist, Wal-Mart is their best chance
The Daily WTF: Deploy! Deploy! Deploy!
Google Quietly Getting Itself Into the Sports Market
25 Things I Learned About Business from "South Park"
“Hurry up and lose your first 50 games.” - Go proverb presented by Adam Keys

Adam then keyed in on the core of his talk: Learning. He said there are only kinds of learning: Learning from others & Learning by doing. You only learn by falling down. Nobody gets everything right the first time. Set yourself up to rapidly trying things until you find what’s right. Just like you don’t play hockey without padding: don’t develop without padding. Unit tests, exception notifier, cheap branching/merging in git, fast deploy with capistrano are all padding that mean you fear less and can try things that might hurt you because you can fix them fast."

Adam Key's talk summarized "Oh the Fail I’ve known"
http://drewblas.com/2008/06/01/railsconf-2008-sunday-afterno...
MyGADs
What you call integration testing, I call sloppy programming
It only absorbs over a narrow, tunable, frequency range. That won't make it black. Personally I was disappointed when I saw they could take a picture of it.
It's funny, this isn't the only place I've been seeing this "when Obama raises taxes" thing --- I also saw it in the Joel on Software Business of Software board. No offense, but --- political sockpuppet?
Wow! Thanks for Design and XRAY. Those look to be pretty useful.
Turkish delights are awesome. I like them with nuts, almonds especially (pistachio delights are good too).
Back home they are traditionally given to people if you are visiting, for weddings, deaths, etc.

But as with every desert, don't eat too much of them.
How do you market a bookmarking service without attracting spammers?
I am struggling to come up with a sound plan to market a key feature of my social search service without attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Basically users can syndicate bookmarks from our service to delicious, magnolia, and simpy at once. Or they can do the opposite, syndicate from these cool services.

The problem, this kind of feature is also highly sought after by spammer hordes. The wrong kind of attention could turn my little bootstrapped service into Squidoo overnight.

Any advice?

Thanks in advance!

Geoffrey
This will never work, and thank god. There is a reason they are releasing in the boonies where there is no competition.

Why would I pay $29.95 with a 5GB cap, when I can get 1.5mb/s DSL for $19.95 with no cap

Why would I pay $54.90 for 15MBps with a 40gb cap, if I can get 20MPps FIOS for $39.99.
This is cool. Anything that will help us convert light (particularly from the sun) into a more directly usable form of energy should be a good thing.
Levels of Enthusiasm
If anyone has questions about how it went that I didn't cover in my writeup, please let me know and I can include them here and on the recap page.
You can get all of that by using mod_rewrite/mod_fastcgi/mod_wsgi to passthrough to a full-blown Python app server running behind the web server as a separate process. All of the other mod_* authentication and authorization hurdles will still be evaluated first.
Because it's the wrong tool.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/fireworkscs4/
NYC High-Tech Meetups usually have very good turn outs
We were all doing physics before Octopart so we were pretty comfortable in a unix environment. I took a class in C as a sophomore in college and Sam took the same class in Java. When we decided we were going to start a company I had never heard of MySQL and when we launched we didn't know how to write a single line of javascript. Our core search engine is written in C++ so we've had to learn quite a bit more than traditional web programming as well.
The thing I hate about Gauntlet interviews is the emphasis on having everything right at the top of your head.

There are a million things I know how to do but have filed away. Like writing a typedef for a C function pointer -- I just check out a source file I wrote before or man qsort because I don't remember the exact syntax. Or tricks with data structures -- I WROTE my own linked lists and trees but it's not something I do every day because it's pointless. Or certain Python tricks -- if I haven't done them in a while I just look them up.

Gauntlets always turn out to be Gotchas!

The more junk you know, the less of it you are focused on at any given moment. Give any CS major the exact same tests he took, 5 years after the fact, on the spot, and it's probably a straight fail.

I remember the general sense of things and outsource the details to my prior work, open source code I can refer to, and Google.
I think you have to , have a sketching/mockup process ... before you start coding html/css

- If you like to sketch on paper, or do super quick mockups in photoshop it doesn't matter. The point is don't waste too much time making it perfect just to look at it.
Agreed. I had some hope that earlier issues could give me some perspective on the progress of AI research.
It's been a little over three years now however I had some relevant background in the problem area from my previous job. Right now 2 people (founders) are working on it though we are planning to hire some more soon (if you are a C++ hacker in Cape Town and looking for interesting work, drop me a line).
You don't regret that stuff... you just laugh really hard about it in a few years.
I haven't found there to be.
That's awesome. I'll definitely give it a try then.
Horrible advice from a company who has never lost their ass on a project when the client didn't like their HTML/CSS 'mockup'.

For a small project I spend 4-5 hours in Adobe Fireworks, then upon approval (hint: very important if your client doesn't worship you like 37signals) I build the pages out in real HTML/CSS/JS etc.

My sketch/mockup step is digital, I don't use dead trees.

Alaskamiller is right on, Photoshop is the wrong tool for the job.