skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
good article, but why do these publications (read: Forbes) insist on drawing out articles to 9 or 10 different pages? Awesome for page views, very annoying as a reader.
I am not nearly as smart as most of the people on HN

All evidence to the contrary.

Excellent overview for a potential angel. May not tell them everything, but it's a good starting point for questions and discussion. It also shows that your "finger is on the pulse," perhaps one of the most important things.

I'm sure this will inspire other single founders. Thanks for sharing.
sharing your every accomplishment since getting a gold star for "most cooperative" in preschool.

A "most cooperative" star in preschool is a negative not a positive. Being especially obedient especially early should not impress anyone.
One of the biggest problems is with the left hand menu taking up too much room. People want to fill up the system with more data but there just isn't enough room on the screen. Since I give everything away for free, I had this amazing idea that the "pro" version would use a different template and not taking away anything from the free version it wouldn't have any new features yet but would as I make them :) So for the moment, the grand benefit is a different more usable template, longer term there would be "Pro" only features, everything that I do that is new, wouldn't get passed onto the free users so that I could have something for the Pro version people to be happy about (new stuff!).
Maven and Eclipse strive for Visual Studio 'power'
I don't know about Rails (It's DB library is ActiveRecord, if I recall names correctly) but SQLAlchemy which is Python's big ORM, has support in it for sharding and similar partitioning, etc.

When we built sketchcast.com sharding was on the design list and a concern - there were some fantastic articles at http://highscalability.com/ that we used as a basis for some of our design.
There were a couple of bloody wars in history, too, some of them might count as striving for something (freedom)?

I think most people in poor countries are also poor because they are being held hostage by their government.
This story would be interesting if it was true. Instead, it's incredibly boring.
the red, it's haunting me =(
Amen to #2.

I'm stunned by the # of people who are in the "I have a brilliant idea and a couple of powerpoint slides!" phase who expect to get funding.
What the hell is 'wand cleaning'? (Second picture, bottom left.)
I thought Al Gore was working on global warming.
We've had capping since the introduction of ADSL in South Africa.

To give you an indication as of today I've used 4362MB of my 5GB cap. For which I pay $30 on top of my 512kbit/s line rental of $25). Yes, Internet sucks in South Africa.

We've got a population of +- 48 million, of which 4 million people use Internet and 1 million are using "broadband."

The high cost, low speeds, and small bandwidth allocations have hurt the growth of Internet here dramatically.
Without looking at the answer, I couldn't figure out what the problem with the site was. Could it be that the password is sent to the email? No, that's probably just how they worded the command button. Of course they'd hash a new password and send that to my email. And Atwood wouldn't repeat himself yet again, would he? After a few minutes, I finally guessed: the feature is much too wordy. The entire paragraph under the text field is completely unnecessary. I guess I would want to avoid websites that make this mistake because I don't like poor design and pointless text. Apparently I have more of a mind for design than security.
The party part is at the bottom. In the past I have seen some interesting im in like you comments, so I thought people would like the story.

"Forman told CNET News.com that the entirety of the $1.5 million would be used to throw a large-scale party, but we think that one's a joke."

My feelings are that they had better be careful about hiring expensive employees because they will blow through the 1.5 million like no tomorrow. Hire the flash game developers, buy (inexpensive) ads, don't hire too many expensive employees.
I don't think hackers are anti-politics by default. I for one am very interested in how to "hack" politics. I just don't think the "official politics" we see is the real politics. Like I don't think people's opinions are being swayed by debates. I don't know a good approach for changing people's opinions, unfortunately - but if somebody would present one, I would be very interested.
If by worthless you mean making $14 billion last year than you are right.

http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:MSF...
Can you tell us how you happened to find your first investor? Since he is in Italy it doesn't seem like this is someone you got through connections.
Perfectly understandable, just initially, I laughed.

Just imagine telling users that a pro version is the same thing but with a different template.
Steve is actually quite technical, he just wasn't a world-class prodigy in engineering like Woz was.
Unless you were a crafty little devil and used the supposed obedience to easily get away with mischief and worm your way out of trouble, much to the dismay of your peers.
I was in favor of this kind of thing and supported AlterNIC in the early 90's, but I'm not so sure about this new change. ICANN wants to charge how much? AlterNIC was free, and so are other alternate DNS roots.
pretend the person is your equal

Why pretend?

Every one of us has something special and unique to offer. No need to "compare" our personal offerings. Just find it and share it.
Microsoft To Buy Powerset? Not Just Yet.
markov?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80773
It is evidence that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

(And according to the manual, that particular button is for cleaning the "cleaning wand", which is the thing that does all the washing and drying mentioned elsewhere on the panel.)
Through HN. I posted a document that I wanted to send to angel investors, I didn't get too much excitement from those who replied, they were not so sure it would work but some gave excellent suggestions.

One of the people "lurking" but didn't reply was this guy in Italy. He emailed me, personally I wasn't sure if he was for real or not but he turned out to be totally real. So that really moved me forward a great deal and I am greatly indebted to him. I have never actually spoken to him on the phone, we did all of this through email. Pretty soon I am about to register his 5% of the shares with Nevada so he is going to be good to go, totally official owner of 5%. I am presonally excited about kicking this thing into high gear and returning his investment many times over.
Posted already twice: http://searchyc.com/submissions/you+and+your+research
I hate it when they don't say the price right away.
The editorializing of titles should really be mellowed down.
Haha, yes, well, I'm not sure that's an accomplishment you'd want to brag about either :)
This is going to make such an awesome 2009 South Park episode.
Ah. Sorry about that. I don't like to dupe.

On the other hand, I think this is worth rereading. But I understand if that makes for a more boring reading list.
Dubai plans 'moving' [skyscraper]
Abstract of the paper:
No-Boundary Measure of the Universe
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v100/e201301

Another paper on the topic by the same authors:
The Classical Universes of the No-Boundary Quantum State
http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.1663v1
"The down side of the whole deal is that you have to choose between two 23’’ or one 30’’ Apple Cinema display. Life is tough and you just can't have it all."

Tough? Two 23'' all the way. My heart went all a flutter reading the development box specs.
Yes. Do people talk less on their mobile that have less minutes.
Getting more from Moore's Law
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1149615.e...

:-)
Does anyone see ANY potential?
[Nokia] morphs itself from within
Facebook website outage resolved
Visa taps into Facebook following
You should buy stock in a company you think will grow. The two main components of MS are set to shrink drastically.

Stock in a dinosaur is worthless.
Behind the scenes of Firefox 3.0
If the person is a fanboy, they probably won't think they're equal. Pretending will at least get them part of the way until they know it's true.
Yahoo goes back to its roots
Virgin territory for ISPs
Trade agreement could hit privacy
Digital switchover is 'a mystery'
Police look to digital switchover
It's ok man. No need to have a flame-war here. I consider anyone with a different viewpoint to be offering an argument against my pov. It's not vicious or aggressive, but still an argument. :)

I'm down to have the debate in another forum if you'd like. It's a good chance to learn some more about Ruby.

jdennis@gmail
Google is terrified, no doubt.
His books are well worth a read ("What Should I do with my Life?" and "Why do I Love These People?"), and they're nice commuting/bedtime reading because they're a bunch of short vignettes that follow a general theme.

And as far as I could glean from a 30-minute reading, he's a real mensch.
I suggest we call them vanity TLDs.

(I Googled it and it returned results. I thought I was being original :().
The title only included factual items from the article 1) The funding 2) The humor came from the company and was not just made up out of thin air.
The halfway point between salting/hashing a password and storing it as plain text would be having functions that encode/decode the password.

This way you are not actually storing the actual password in the DB but just it's transformation.

Although if you are gonna take this step you might as well do the salting/hashing so some rogue programmer doesn't steal your functions.

The nice thing about salting/hashing is that even the guys running the site don't know what the password is.
Ask HN:What e-commerce package should I use?
I am developing an e-commerce site to sell custom built computers, parts, software and consumer electronics. Kind of like New Egg, but with a limited selection of best in class products. I would like to integrate strong community / social marketing into the site.

I have looked at osCommerce, Zen Cart, Magento, and others. I'll most likely end up going with an open source solution and customizing it.

Do you have any recommendations or experience?
Yeah, and there continue to be lots of people in that phase. It's even more surprising because you'd expect the market not to give them funding, and eventually people would learn its not worth their time to seek funding at that stage.

So that means either some people are getting money with just an idea, or the market is really slow and inefficient.
1) When the user forgets their password, you can send it back to them instead of them having to come up with a new one again

2) When you send emails to a user who hasn't logged in for a while, you can include their details so they're that much more likely to actually log in

Not being able to do these things costs users.
Google: we're having scaling issues, please stop distributing your FF extension
Craigslist to surpass eBay in 2009?
Great analysis of how the little guy can challenge big corporations.
Union Square Ventures to Startups: Shop Around for a Better VC Deal
You're not reading what I'm saying, either that or you're choosing to misinterpret me.

Brute force is a plausible attack against anything. No, doofus, I don't mean that you sit there and try to decrypt the SHA-1 - that's impossible. Instead, once you have the salt (which you can have easily since it's in the code which we've already surmised you have access to), you start with the dict database, and then various crack databases out there. In comparatively little time, you're likely to have cracked some 50+% of the passwords in that salted, SHA-1'ed database.

Unless, of course, the cretinously short-sighted designers of the system were so up their own arses about security that they put in all sorts of rules about what you can put in your passwords, requiring symbols, numbers, and no recognisable words, etc. In those cases, we can safely assume that the system is indeed secure - it's also secure from quite a sizeable percentage of users, who won't bother themselves with it.

2) Who said anything about HTTPS transactions? 99.9% of the logins are not HTTPS'ed. If I really want to sniff your fucking password that you use for everything, I'll sniff it from one of those other sites that don't have HTTPS login forms.

Now please stop assuming that everyone is as dumb as you and understand that there are people out there who are vastly more skilled at cracking systems than you can contemplate, and they will fuck you sideways should they really want to. And no, there's nothing you can do to protect yourself against them, other than not be online.

This should not be so surprising. It's the same offline. If someone really wants to kill you, particularly if you don't know that they do, and they're skilled enough at it, you're dead.
OmniFocus Review
Power > Money.

It's practically a hacker axiom. Money matters, but changing the world is what really matters. Money is just a way to be able to work on changing the world without having to worry about keeping the rent paid.

Thanks for sharing this.
they leave a negative impression in the minds of many smart developers"

They also have a lot of smart developers working for them ;)
An VMWare sharts to chew through my RAM - espeially if you're trying to do something non-trivial in a couple of VM's simultaneously.
New support for Rails 2.1 and DB2
I don't think that many would argue that Bill Gates is clueless or lacks insight into technology. Just that they disagree with the way his company applied his insights and attempted to turn them into reality.
Well, the mere fact that you know what Live.com is will make Microsoft happy.

Frankly, Microsoft has done a bad job with branding, and I still think most people don't even know that Live is Micrsoft's search engine. What happened to MSN being the brand?
How Microsoft can reinvent itself in the post-Gates era
yes and no...

Remember one of the common ways of getting anywhere is to type www.google.com in the msn homepage that comes up. And then you type www.myspace.com into the google search box...

This "may" be a solvable issue...
At first I thought Powerset was nothing since it only searched Wikipedia and the normal wikipedia search works fine.

However if you really use it the right way, asking questions of the type "which tennisplayer beat andre agassi" which is an example I saw somewhere then you see the power.

I am hardly an expert but I guess the problem is that the monetizeable part of search is the easiest search, keyword search.
And beating Google there, well good luck...

And the search that Powerset does so well isn't as easy to monetarize.

So as someone said, the best way for them to make money might be through licensing.

I guess there wont be one form of search to rule them all(nor have there ever been) but many different ways of search coexisting and cooperating.

One thing I wonder is, is the scalability a money-issue, ie can they buy truckloads of servers and index the whole web with their technique or could their algorhitms simply be too complex to scale, ie NP-complete( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete )?
I found it strange.
Definately interesting and well written, but strange.
Wasn't life changing (for me at least) either.
I've never met a math/physics/eng faculty member with an IQ below 120 (though mine is below 100).

Yummy, you have to be kidding us. Either that, or you were drunk when you took the test, or we really need to rethink what the tests are measuring. There is no way somebody with subnormal intelligence is involved in exchanges like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216701
Congrats for what?

Getting bought before they could completely implode on themselves?
A very low price if they really believed all the hot air they were pumping out. It's an implicit admission by Powerset's management and board that they didn't genuinely believe they were about to do something extraordinary.

It was already pretty obvious that Microsoft is so braindead these days that they'll spend hundreds of millions for the mere appearance of being able to compete with Google in internet technology. I suppose if their stock stays up an extra $100 million it sort of pays for itself.
I'm assuming congrats for the $100m. That's something to be proud of.
Bill Gates' management style lives on
It's worth about $27 a share, by definition.
I didn't expect to find a new favorite essayist today.
The problem is that you refer to it as "becoming infatuated." Replace that with "start liking" and you should be okay.
It made me contemplate the nature of reality a great deal. Can't say it's changed the way I've lived my life, but it's pretty good. Also, as far as utopian/dystopian works go, the book builds up a rather great utopia but still manages to trigger its ultimate collapse. I'm a fan of Asimov, so it's definitely a great exploration of his three laws.

The plot of the book, in short, is what happens if a benevolent AI bound to Asimov's Three Laws gains absolute control over matter and energy.
If they give you big enough monitors you can fashion them into walls for your cubiclette. Ugh.

Seriously, I'd trade a 30" monitor for a quiet spot with almost any view and a minimal amount of privacy.
I still don't quite get how Live is related to search either. Is it live? Or is it cause it lives to search? I don't get it.
With no itunes store for windows at the time --> it was Windows customers missing out on the service, not "All customers". (Everyone knows Linux users aren't "customers" - :P)
With that kind of context, "windows download service" makes sense.
Clip of Bill G endorsing Mac (circa 1984)
Either that or it was a useful way to limit the search space to make an easier problem.
I'm glad you posted this. I doubt I would have found the original. For the really good stuff it doesn't hurt to repost.
"A very low price if they really believed all the hot air they were pumping out"

If Powerset sells for $100M, then they clearly don't believe their own hot air. I'd be very nervous if someone accepted an offer for much less than they claimed to be worth.
Kind of cool but I prefer engineers creating these structures rather than architects.

Also, what's going to happen to Dubai when the oil boom ends?
There's already a good discussion of PowerSet on another thread, but at that price the emphasis should be on would-be and not Google Killer.
I figured gibsonf1 would submit this. He's our resident architect.
They'll settle for being a favorite tourist and business destination for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Being Las Vegas, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, and Orlando for 4 billion people isn't a bad economic base.
No sure about you guys, but I find it hard to sell items on ebay when I'm competing against MegaSellers. It's much more effective to sell or buy an item on Craigslist.
Can't beat free postings and local sellers and buyers! Craigslist FTW! =)
The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy & Funding
E-Mail Etiquette for Public Figures
Also consistent with the observed results: your subconscious keeps thinking through the estimate, even as your conscious attention is directed at other things.
It reminds me about the true believer in precautionary principle - the Luna Lovegood's father from Harry Potter series:

You can't prove it doesn't exist, so it probably does.
This is so awesome. I read this thread, upmodded it, and left. But somehow I started feeling really happy, and had to come back to write! We do need 1000 more hackers like this! Persistence!
Atlas Shrugged,

The Fountainhead,

Stranger in a Strange Land,

The Rules of Life,

Catch-22,

1984,

Brave New World, and

An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning (by Peter Eccles)
With all due respect, many of the required traits listed take years to develop and are never expected from entry-level designers.

It's an interesting wish list. Almost 37Signals-ish in attitude.

Link bait?
Implode?

You must have one killer insider source to make claims like this despite the fact that the blogosphere is abuzz with unconfirmed reports of acquisition!
I suppose in a private school they can do anything they want?
Ask YC : [Optionally] Statically typed languages on the JVM?
I know of 2 statically typed languages on the JVM : Java and Scala. Any other interesting languages on the JVM which are more or less stable enough to use? I already know a lot of dynamic laguages run on the JVM like Jython and JRuby but not too many nice statically typed languages around.

Something with optional static typing like Common Lisp will also do. (I know about ABCL but its GPL and I am not sure how well CLOS maps to JVM for example).
Ask me about the time I interviewed with a live.com team, and asked that very question. They Were Not Amused (tm).
It's nice to see someone actually using the site a little before proclaiming "Wikipedia already has a search, so their site is fail." So thank you. :)
WAFS sounds like it borrows a lot the research done 20 years ago by the Sprite group.

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/filesystems-metadata.h...

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/sprite/ret...

Ousterhout's LFS paper is from 1991 and according to Wikipedia NetApp wasn't founded until 1992.
MS Office is crashing down? What world do you live in?
What's with the sarcasm? At least they shot at something not pathetically trivial, like sending "up to" 400 bytes of text to random people. Or selling a few percent of message board technology to the same restless company ran by an idiot for $250M.
A nice blue-sky cover letter written with passion.
The Worst Journey in the World - Story of Scott's famous expedition to the South Pole written by an unlikely team mate. This book literally changed the way I see men and heroes.

Mein Kampf - never has fascism looked so reasonable (if a little repitious). A portrait of a dangerous idea.

120 Day's of Sodom - Freedom as most people will never experience it.

1984 - the first book that, as a child, told me that every adult had lied to me and I was walking in to a trap.

Bible, Quaran, 2600 - showed me that social engineering can get you a long way.
Yahoo's Loser Board
I have fixed it!

No more warning. Thanks for your patience.
Google faces human rights votes
EU acts to cut mobile phone costs
Want some real info?

You're partially right, but only in a very broad sense. One of the really ugly problems with web search is identifying real content from meaningless crap, and wikipedia rather nicely gets rid of nearly all the extraneous stuff, or boxes it in.

The actual semantics stuff is pretty robust, but like any piece of software can be tuned to get incrementally better results on any corpus.

Really, one of the major reasons we started with Wikipedia is that we wanted to build out the core search infrastructure and website infrastructure. These are non-trivial things to do while also setting up a search interface thats suitable for public consumption. I'm sure you can find a longtime powerlabs user to tell you how far we went in the interface and speed department.
In Innovation, Meta is Max
I agree. I mean human minds usually forget things unless they're reminded more than once.
How a Man-Made Tornado Could Power the Future
Good for them. I like iminlikewithyou.
Experimental iGoogle features
Reddit no longer counts karma for self-posts
Rails test fixtures are evil: Object Daddy is the solution
I might be retarded, but I don't get it... Jetty and Tomcat are both servlet containers, why do you have both in your "stack"?
reading that made me really itchy
Foundations of Programming Ebook [pdf]
This is the type of thinking we're going to need to get humanity out of the mess labeled as 'global warming', not environmental rallies, or teaching all kids to conserve energy or whatever.
Visualizing 4.5 years of Flickr development
Writing My First jQuery Plugin
Agreed. Nice piece. Pity the page style makes my eyes bleed (small white-on-black fonts, oww).
OAuth for Google Data APIs