skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't call it nihilism. Nihilism says existence is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. I say the opposite.

To each human being, existence has infinite value, to the extent that nothing else matters.

Of course, that's an extreme statement, and there might be circumstances where even with such beliefs, one decides that something else is of more value (or, conversely, that life loses its value if a life-ending action is not taken). But the point is that you start from a standpoint of infinite value, which makes any declaration that "I don't want people to spend tens of thousands of dollars to keep me alive" completely obscene, a bit like if someone said they don't want to spend $1 to stop you from going blind.
As the article notes, the goal is to price so that 15% of the spots are always open. So it's not really about finding one rare spot -- despite the fact that makes a nice 'gee whiz' vivid opening story. It's about changing the entire calculation about street parking vs. off-street parking or alternate transportation.
Free Coloring Books Tom & Jerry
Yeah, recruiters - especially the ones that troll craigslist - are a real pain. Most of the things I've responsded to have turned out to be fake. The recruiters just make up jobs and post them to get your resumes, and then they give some excuse like "oh, that company has a hiring freeze now" or "you're not really a fit, but I might have something else for you". The longer posts with overly grandiose yet vague descriptions and very vague candidate requirements are a dead giveaway.
Are we all multiculturalists now?
Today is one of the 2 days each year when the sun lines up with Manhattan's grid
Facebook’s Payment System Nigh?
The Jews.
Sergey Explains The Crazy Cost Of Google's Day Care: He's Trying To Fix The Schools
The Handwriting of Typographers
VanityTweets: Globalization Domain ChinaTweets.com Sale
It goes against fashion these days, but I reckon it's still the USA. Anyway, I would go to Cambridge, MA.
10 questions that LBS data can answer
You may personally think vendor lock-in is a fair tactic but if you bother to do a little research you'll find some significant court decisions opposing that view (including the one against MS).

Still, I'm a little confused that you see no relationship between monopolies and licensing given that MS was convicted of abusing its monopoly to dictate licensing terms to OEMs.
Great Hacker != Great Hire
Well, kinda sorta. Why, for example, didn't Oracle choose FreeBSD as their preferred platform? They've gone with Red Hat, and include a long-ish list of stuff that you have to install on top of RHEL to get their software to work. It's crazy really. As in, one of their premier platform simply doesn't work out of the box. Solaris, Windows, you name it, you just install and go, but RHEL is a complete pain in the arse.

So, why? 'Cos Linux has the mindshare, and it got the mindshare because it has legions of activists (e.g. Slashdot) with nothing better to do than repeat the message to anyone who will listen. Linux hoovered up basically all the non-geek consciousness of free Unix, which means you show up to work and the company has already bought a squillion RHEL licenses and can't understand why all the engineers are slack-jawed with horror...
Magnetic Fields As You’ve Never Seen Them Before
A great hacker might well be a bad match for the sort of company that calls itself an "ISV." But they seem to be appreciated at ones like Google, and they make good founders.
If a problem is identified in a truly critical system, then people will deploy whatever means are necessary to fix it. Doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong to choose it in the first place (but it might).
YC Poll: Does anyone else out there think TechCrunch loads way too slow?
When I load TechCrunch in the morning, it freezes my browser. I'm running Firefox 2 on Mac. I don't know about you guys, but it kills me every time I load this site. It has gotten so bad I hardly click through to a story because I know when I go back I will have to reload the page. With cache enabled I am seeing 247 requests and a 43.77s load time.
I hope this is rare. I just upgraded my iPhone and hope I won't have to deal with this on my shiny new toy.
Lively is and never will be a significant competitor to the VW business as we know it now. It's an early prototype of a tiny part of the vision they have; the dipping of the proverbial toe in the water. What Lively and the other Google technologies will grow into will again be a different target market.

More importantly, a VW like that might be a hit for a year or two before people lose interest or something better comes along. But that sort of faddy thinking doesn't interest Google. They're entering the VW sector as groundwork for a service that people will find necessary in 5-10 years time.

My guess is that it'll be Maps, Earth, Street View, Android, Lively, AdWords and many more services all rolled into one big Augmented Reality (in this view it also makes sense for them to take over Wikipedia and Flickr - which they've recently incorporated into Maps).
Ask HN: What is the best online marketing strategy you found?
Ask HN: What is the best online marketing strategy you found?
What he's saying, is that beyond our tiny sub culture of internet nerds, the average person won't be leaving SMS any time soon. The mainstream market has started getting used to that medium in the last few years and has no intention of using a 3rd party platform to replace it.
Solving the problem of multiple writes to the database
Hi all,
This might perhaps be a simple problem but I was wondering if people had any solutions for this.

I have a form which allows people to upload images. When a user uploads an image, I save to a database,
1) a modified name for the image,
2) a caption for the image,
3) the id of the user who uploaded the image,
4) Some other information that are used for image retrieval purposes

The form allows users to upload up to 30 images. I do not want to write to the database each time
the user wants to upload an image. Rather, I want to store each upload request (plus all the associated information I need like captions etc) and make a large write when a user has confirmed that he/she is satisfied with all of their choices.

How can I do this easily?
1) I have considered storing the attributes and information associated with each image in cookies and retrieving and processing cookie information after the user has confirmed his/her choices. However, I am not comfortable with this option as I cannot control what happens to the cookies when they are stored in the client machine.

2) Another option is to obtain many hidden fields (more than 30) in the HTML form and fill these up with the associated information I need. I could then process the information in these hidden fields before writing to the database. However, this seems pretty clumsy.

3) A third option I was considering was using Amazon's Simple Queue Service to queue image upload requests and then unqueue and process the messages after a user finished making his/her choices and hit a confirm button.

Which solution among these 3 is the cleanest and most flexible implementation? Are there other solutions for this problem?

Thanks all.
Build something exceptional and be authentic while telling everyone you can find about it.
personality goes a long way, look at photojojo.com
Here's a link directly to the film's page - http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Magnetic_Movie/Magnet...
You can't simply say that since men are more hesitant to commit to relationships, and women less, that the same holds true in startups or careers, or that it translates at all. Both genders exhibit behaviors where mating is concerned that are very different from how they behave in other situations.

You should really read up on evolutionary psychology, I think you might enjoy it.
I feel a bond...

"He has, however, plunged into a quixotic and surprisingly adept legal effort to challenge the company's registered trademark. In addition, he's using the experience of publicly criticizing Facebook to inform his own startup."
Yes, but it is much more than that. You need an overall concept and strategy.
this is great =]
I love Dropbox. So simple, and yet, so awesome.
Earn money with your website the autopilot way | MAKE MONEY ONLINE WITH HARRY
Actually, even the definition of this form requires i, because it's

e^(i)(pi/2) = i.

The simple assumption that sqrt(-1) = i is problematic because you can get something like

i^2 = (sqrt(-1))^2 = sqrt((-1)^2) = 1.

The wonder and surprise of complex numbers is that assuming seemingly arbitrary properties of a constant like i lead to a number of deep and beautiful results.
I'm not sure a significant raise in meter fees is required. If the sensors are tied in with the meters themselves (letting you pay for it over your phone and whatnot), then a lot of the work for the city's parking enforcement is gone. All that would be required is to keep track of expired meters with cars still parked there, and any cars parked while parking is not allowed.

Although that will probably mean that a lot of people might lose their jobs, it means that the gov in turn saves money on gas|CNG|power for the cars, and possibly get more money from parking tickets.
DVCS and its most vexing merge
I guess that depends on how you define "crappy". If by "crappy" you mean "spartan" then sure. If by "crappy" you mean the code is bad, then you're only racking up technical debt, not making progress. ALWAYS start with the simplest solution that does the job.

Yet most people start with the most complex solution they can come up with, even though they don't know what they're solving yet.
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site?
I have a closed beta service and we just released a prototype to get user feedback.On our site we allow users to use their gmail/hotmail/yahoo accounts to authenticate themselves. As far as implementation is concerned we take all the precaution to make this login safe. We use SSL, do not record any passwords or users etc.. in short we are legit. However, users still seem to be hesitant to provide their password and username to a small service like ours. Market penetration of OpenID and tools like ClickPass is so limited that those words on our site don't do any good either.

How can I make users trust my site?
Smelly? How do you know that?

I made no cross-cultural comparison, I merely suggested that the influence of one group was of great intensity.

Your refutation is kind of like me saying "peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are great!" and you saying "dude, how do you measure greatness? a bowl of french onion soup is better than that child's food -- it is served in restaurants."

You tried to change the argument about the value of the bible as a historical document into an argument about the relative technological achievements of different societies.
Why not write to the database and just not COMMIT until ll the images have arrived?
Yes, agreed. I should have specified the scope limitation to my statement of the interview context.
As long as there are kids aged 4-10 I would expect there to be a market for engaging 2D games. My kids used to spend hours playing Pokemon and stuff like Puzzle Pirates http://www.puzzlepirates.com and Horse Isle http://www.horseisle.com
Aha - I think this thing I just encountered on Level 13 is an object you can synchronize on!

Of course, I now know this game better than I actually know concurrent programming, so this metaphor could be wrong.
The scope of the project doesn't change the need for concept and strategy.
Not sure what you meant. Could you elaborate? The form basically accepts input until a user reaches the 30 image limit. A user can then hit the confirm button if he/she is satisfied and wants to commit all the changes.
We have learned to value the needs of the users over our own preferences.

He's missed the main point that PG makes about languages - if you are writing software to run on your own servers and is delivered through HTTP, no-one cares what language you use. In that context, fussiness is fine.
Also, I didn't want to write to the database each time someone uploads an image. I just wanted to queue all these writes and do it at once in the end when a user commits to make all the changes.

That would save some processing time right? Thanks.
Not diversifying my portfolio as soon as I had the chance.
"I believe reincarnation is the most likely afterlife"

Why?
The annoying thing with religion is that each has a body of good principles which serve to lure new believers, and then after that it's: "Now that you've learned all the good stuff that actually makes sense, here's more 'good stuff'" and then they proceed to teach arbitrary principles and even harmful ones that sometimes completely contradict the actually good principles.

Example: "Don't kill your neighbor." Hey that makes sense, let's become Christian! And then later you read in the Bible that "if your neighbor does X or Y, KILL HIM WITHOUT MERCY!"

As for the problem of inconsistencies in the Bible, the usual response is that you need someone to sort it out for you... But what's the point of having a reference if a big part of it is bullshit and you need someone like a priest to sort it out for you? And then you lose your self-determination...

As for the arbitrary stuff, one good example would be "Don't work on Sundays", though I admit that's not a very popular one anymore. I think it's normal that everyone holds some arbitrary beliefs without good proof but it's appalling when a MASSIVE amount of people standardize on a common body of arbitrary beliefs and then collectively "refute" your rational objections (oftentimes by refering you to "authoritative" sources like the Bible, and then you can never win against "Bible lawyers").
> b) Dominant, decisive, intelligent, women are likely to share similar evolutionary advantages to men.

Unfortunately women like that are incompatible with many human cultures. E.g. try being a dominant, assertive woman someplace with Sharia law. Historically, those traits were bad for survival in many parts of the world.

Or women were treated like chattel and were property of men, and they didn't get a say in who they mated with. So their intelligent genes would be diluted. Or look at Darfur -- it's rape rape rape all the time. Being good at Sudoku requires a certain level of societal stability before it's really that handy.
Would it save processing time? Why do you think it would? How do you plan to manage the queue - by writing your own "database"? If you queue them somewhere, you'll end up having to do two writes, one to your queue and one eventually to the database. So that's adding more processing.

It's a serious question. Have you benchmarked this? Writing BLOB data to any reasonable database (or storing it as BFILE if you must) is imperceptibly slower than a filesystem write. In the case of MySQL the database is just syntactic sugar sprinkled on the filesystem. In the case of Oracle on raw volumes it's going to be faster to write to than a cooked filesystem. If you're worried about huge transactions, just COMMIT each one and add a column for approved_yn that you update in a single transaction when the user is happy.
> Miscarriages, even a century ago, claimed so many women

s/Miscarriages/Childbirth

That's why wide hips are important.
Margo Seltzer - CEO SleepyCat (until Oracle bought them) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margo_Seltzer
I agree with your complaints, and many other complaints. Christianity is flawed. But the fact remains that in some situations it helps people, and we should respect that.

It's not like any of our traditions are without flaws, and it's not like starting from scratch is better than modifying existing traditions, so be kind to Christians.
That would save some processing time right?

If premature optimization is the root of all evil, I'm afraid you are halfway to hell.

This is not a good reason to make your app more complicated than it needs to be. For one thing, it isn't even easy to tell if your statement is true, let alone how true it is. (i.e. it may be true that you save a few milliseconds, but is that even going to be significant?)

If there is a UI reason why you have to have the user specify 25 uploads on one HTML page and then do them all at once, that's one thing. (I'd use the big-pile-of-hidden-HTML-fields approach; that has the fewest moving parts, it's simple to conceptualize, and I don't think the other methods will make a big difference from the user's perspective.) But don't try to work around your DB until you absolutely have to. Use it. That's what it's there for.
Sorry if I am not being clear.

I am not uploading each image as a BLOB. Rather, I am storing a bunch of strings in the database that will later help me point to the actual image (which is first stored in the local webserver but is pushed into Amazon S3 after the user has finished with the form).

I want to avoid these multiple writes to the database (which stores various pointers to the image) and just do one large write operation at the end. Does this not matter? Would you know any benchmarking tools that will help me measure this?

Thanks
I don't think his lawyer is an idiot. We don't know what rjett told him. Sure, if you're immediately going to get funding, a C-Corp in Delaware is great. If you're just starting your own company, an LLC saves you a ton of dough. There's no reason to pay to incorporate in Delaware if you're not going to raise funds right away or if you're not sure how well it will go. Not all start-ups will take VC capital. Some states also allow for a lot of variety for LLCs. An LLC might be the best bet depending on the circumstances.
It doesn't matter. Just trust the database :-)
This is what sessions are for, maintaining volatile state that may or may not be written to a more permanent storage.

If your application stack does not have a session implementation that 'Just Works!'(tm) for you, you will have to implement one yourself.

Generally it will look something like a cross between your solutions 1 and 3, you create an opaque session key which is stored as a cookie and is used to retrieve the data from the session store. What you use to store session data is going to vary depending on how valuable the data and on how tragic failure is.

Avoid hidden fields in the html, they are a pain to maintain and will cause you problems because the temptation is to trust that their contents are what you put into them... it also means that you are repeatedly processing the same data. In sum; hidden form values make baby jesus cry.
That's helpful. Thanks. Maybe I am overthinking too much about optimization. It doesn't seem like updating a bunch of columns with text will result in significant time savings.
Don't try to. Users shouldn't give out passwords like that to anyone.
How to estimate your bank's failure risk
Ref Obseedian's post.
Yes, the majority of other, modern cell phones provide novices "an sdk and a few simple functions to get position via GPS".

BREW:
http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/11195

J2ME:
http://developers.sun.com/mobility/apis/articles/location/
The Economics of Bananas
Thanks. It seemed to me in the beginning that HIDDEN fields were a very clumsy solution. Now I understand why they indeed are.

We use PHP as our server side scripting language. I was thinking of using the $_SESSION variable but attributes and pointer information for 30 image uploads per user * no of concurrent users seems like a huge drag on server memory.

I'll probably just write the pointer information to the database for now after each upload. It might make the web app slower by a few milliseconds but it reduces unnecessary complications
has anybody finished it? I'm stuck on level 11.

EDIT: looks like there are 35 levels of increasing difficulty. This could waste a LOT of my day away...
I consider myself Christian, but I do not subscribe to the notion of specific social roles per gender.
I'd rather have an employee that challenges my thinking, perhaps maybe even challenging my authority, than one who never speaks up and is always complacent.
I rarely give my password out in that way, and only ever if it's a well-known service. It's foolish to do; that implies that it's foolish to require.
I've always thought about developing a mmo/virtual world set in a original nes zelda style world

It would be pretty easy from a programmatic and art level.
I can help answer #2 and #3.

#2. I received an NSF fellowship in grad school with 6 months of research experience. The experience probably helped, but getting an NSF is a long shot no matter what. I know of other students with similar qualifications who didn't get it.

#3. The prestige of your grad school matters in some circles but not in others. If there are particular companies that you want to work for, try to find out what their hiring practice is. Some companies place a high value on the school you graduated from, and some don't care at all.
Why not allow them to create an account without giving you that information? Then they can get into the app and see that it's legit.

Also, user testimonials might go a long way towards building some trust.
Use OAuth. Redirect user's to google or yahoo's site.
I use BackgrounDRb in a couple of apps because it's easy and quick to set up. When I need to scale it up or route jobs to systems that may not be Ruby based, I go with ActiveMessaging connected to ActiveMQ. ActiveMessaging supports a lot of broker types through StompConnect.

The solution outlined in this article looks a bit simpler, though, so it probably worth tinkering with.
Ask YC: How do you compensate sweat equity?
I am ready to incorporate but the history is that I've had several technical cofounders who ended up working for 1-3 months and then moving on.

1. How do I compensate these people for their sweat equity fairly?

2. From which pool of stock should I compensate them (they intended on being founders but did not end up being that).

3. How do I also factor in my contribution (design, all funding, and bringing the project to finish with foreign contractors).
You had me at "Oranges instead of Snickers bars."
We put a detailed explanation on our wiki in layman's terms about how we only store hashed versions of your passwords--so that even if our systems were compromised, your data would stay safe. If you stress transparency, then the users who care enough to go looking will find that reassurance.
One important point that you missed is that it is also a de-humanizing view of what we do. It's not limited to programmers, it's typical of corporate america to treat employees like they're nothing but cogs in a machine, rather than people.
Only a fool would give away personal info like that.

Most social sites trick you into giving away that info when you sign up in order to spam everybody in your contact list.

I really don't know how Mint (financial) can get away with such sensitive banking information. Beats me.
That question is way too broad. What are you selling and to whom? What are your goals - brand awareness, memebership boost, etc?

There is no one solution for every company and every product; web-based or otherwise. [oversimplified:] I wouldn't recommend a racy viral YouTube campaign to a company selling a revolutionary denture adhesive but it may work wonders for a dating site...
I might agree with everything you have said. The thing is, that this young man asked what he should do. He, presumably, has very little capital, and so should look only at those places that Google is CERTAIN to avoid in the development of its 'Lively' offering. A clear area that Google will avoid is the 'RuneScape' area, or any game serving teenage boys.

Also, if we consider the possibility that you are correct, and 'Lively' will be a hit for a year or two before people move on, this young man will still have trouble. You see during that time he will need to run his own service for free. Additionally, all of Google's users will be learning that everything should be free. When they are bored with Google, they will come to him looking for free entertainment. See the problem?
TechCrunch had this up for a bit 2 hours ago, but the story is now pulled...