skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My gtalk info is in my profile.
interesting, immediately reveals the flaws of democracy.
Thanks! By permission structure do you mean just being able to specify "can edit" versus "can view", or do you have something different in mind?
each query uses 700-1000 machines, am I the only one that finds that (1) hard to believe and (2) amazing?
Video: Social Media in Plain English
- I don't care how easy it is to click through then click the back button; then again ...

- Whenever you build content for page views and NOT users you make a grand mistake, user satisfaction is what makes those page views worth anything.
That's because there is no difference from a simple 2D projection.
MA is a true believer in hypes. Can't you see that he is actually enjoying starting link baiting with exaggerating titles? The more bias he is, more ppl visits and comments, and more page view to claim. If you have commented, the chances that you are going back is higher, isn't it?
Sweet, thanks! Where did you learn all this? Any books/websites? or was it just trial and error experience?
Ignoring NetBurst and assuming that Amazon decommissions servers after three or four years, I think frequency is a decent proxy for performance. If I built EC2 I would expose the real frequency and processor type, so instead of renting a "c1.xlarge" instance, you'd ask for "8x2.5GHz-IntelCore-7GB".
for being so off on stats for any site smaller than top 1,000 and being way off for those as well ... I don't understand how the service ever was bought for $250mm
Very nice! Can collaberation happen in real time? So you just see what's happening without having to click refresh?
Blaine Cook: Twitter is dead to me...
"I have copies of Air, Gears and BrowserPlus on my machine, and each have their pros and their cons."

The major con of Google Gears is that it's a buggy, non-functioning pile of crap. I've tried to use that so many times for want of being able to read my RSS feeds on a plane, and every time ran into errors. If it doesn't work with Google's own products, how can it be expected to work with anyone else's?
Seeing things like this really puts arguments about Twitter's scalability or Arrington's douchebaggery into perspective.
Wow, totally missed this link before. Thanks.

As for my skill set, I'm most proficient in C++ and Java with most of my professional experience in the application development space. I have done quite a bit of web development personally and in the classroom, so I'm quite familiar with PHP, HTML and CSS as well,

While I'm more interested in staying in the app dev space, I really just want a challenging development role -- be it desktop apps, web apps, or what have you.

Also, I've updated my profile to contain my e-mail.
Is there technology to make real time 3D holograms? Why or why not?
I would love it if there were a college specific channel for users. It would be easy to know who else is part of the community at one's college--and maybe meet with them.
Maybe start your research with GSM localization and go from there?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_localization

Not really my field, but a friend of mine is big into it, and I think this is what he was talking about...
Basically, Adobe Livedocs, and trial and error. Although from a rendering perspective just knowing the theory behind it (write code to just rotate an image without concern for quality and it's instantly clear that it'll always be slow) gives you pretty much everything you need to know - it's just connect the dots from there.

Also, Flex Builder is a bit of a dud, but its profiler is very good. If you can afford it, it will give you very good insight into your code bottlenecks, if the $$ is worth it just for that. I use FlashDevelop to edit in still.

P.S. Sorry if I'm hating on Flash a bit too much throughout my posts. There were a few trivial bugs with serious implications that directly delayed our release, so I'm still quite annoyed. I'm back into Flash for the next project, though, because customers are more important than development comfort!
TypePad AntiSpam Is Welcomed, But Times Are Changing
Not sure your email is actually on your profile. Maybe add it in txt in the about portion... I'd like to chat too!
Fakery in Many Images to Support Bio Research
jnthnlane on AIM

or e-mail in my profile.

Jonathan Lane on Facebook (University of Lethbridge network)
Another vote for Flash. FlashIDE and Flex aren't the only options too, haXe (http://haxe.org) is quite viable as well and has a lot of features and flexibility that make it my first choice. With swfmill the graphics can be made as svgs.
That was so not worth the buildup.
I stopped taking TechCrunch seriously a long time ago.

Absolutely no journalistic integrity.. even for blogging standards.
By "dead to me" he means that he'll only post 2x every six hours...

http://twitter.com/blaine
Ahh, yes. Now it's visible. Good call, thanks.
TechCrunch 60
I disagree. Spam has a low success rate, so it's only extremely profitable when the cost per advertisement is zero. If you have a service where it costs _any_ money to post then spammers will go find somewhere else.

I think it could work well for classified ads since that's something people are willing to pay for. Not so well for wikipedia or social news, because who cares enough to pay money for those?

I'd price classified ads at one dollar each -- small enough that it's practically free, but large enough that you could easily make a lot of money out of it if people ever decide to abandon craigslist.
Human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people, judging from the logarithm of our brain size

The "logarithm of our brain size" meaning what, exactly? I'm curious as to how Dunbar arrived at this conclusion.
http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligence/issue17/braintease...
Why Broccoli? Because Broccoli is good for you!
Depends on the context. If this was a question posed for an embedded s/w eng position, I would not be inclined to hire.
On a sidenote, the embedded videos/images is RSS reader dependent. I like having them load in my reader because I don't get any of the other cruft I don't care for half the time (e.g. comments on TechCrunch...).
Dropped you a line via Gmail -- feel free to get back to me.
Brian Lash (University of Pittsburgh) on Facebook.
Maybe Wikipedia wouldn't work unless you made the whole service "for-pay" in some way. The nice aspect of requiring users to pony up some amount, which then becomes a pool that you make micro-payments from. So you get the gating aspect of a for-pay service combined with the market forces resulting from the micropayments. And yet, the users are really not paying the $5 up front.

Wikipedia might well not work, simply because the free one works so well.
Fun cheap places to get resident and startup
I'm in the valley and stuck in immigration paperwork hell on a h1b. I'm about to hand my boss her head on a plate so am considering a new gig.. probably a startup. I have $500k burning a hole in my pocket from a previous fun gig... my ideal is a fun place where that will last several years while I bootstrap something. Any suggestions for warm geek friendly places to do it? Excellent internet availability is required but after that..

(My home country is ridiculously overpriced, cold and not geek friendly)
Ironically, I go to a small Liberal Arts college. I think my experiences can happen anywhere. It's tough being a kid these days, making friends, and more importantly, keeping friends.

I appreciate your comments, as well as everyone else's, very much! Thank you.
Actually, this content was built because it's interesting (and therefore satisfying for users), it ties into our coverage areas and historical mission, and it supports our business.

The format was derived from a British music magazine that I used to read, as described here:

http://ilamont.blogspot.com/2008/05/dot-com-nostalgia-whatev...

If this were a single-page article, the length would be more than 5300 words long -- or the equivalent of around 20 double-spaced typed pages on A4 paper. Do you think that's more enjoyable to read or scroll through?

Yes, I could have comissioned it as a feature-style article, which probably would have been half as long or less, but I really don't think it would have been as effective or readable as the profiles. For instance, the profiles allow you to easily skip over companies and sections you don't want to read, whereas a feature would force you to skim.

As for generating page views, it's unfortunate that this drives so much online journalism today, but this special feature would have been commissioned regardless if we were using page views, time spent on site, or some other metric.

One of these days, a new business model will come to dominate online media -- maybe even invented by one of the Y Combinator companies -- and I honestly hope it will encourage media outlets to return to an emphasis of quality over quantity. We're in the age of the page view right now, but it won't last forever.
Having partial content (where it would be feasible to provide the full thing) in a feed annoys me because I have to click through not because I'm really interested in leaving a comment, but because I don't even know if it interests me that much because there's not enough information to make that decision. Especially with the feeds that at most just have a link to the full content in the feed (not talking about how it works with feeds from here and reddit and the like, which is something else altogether). It's so much faster to ignore content I don't care for and move on than having to open the link in my browser to do so.

If it's ads that are the problem, by all means, I'd prefer full content with tons of ads to partial content with none.

I usually unsubscribe to feeds providing only partial content, it's only a matter of time and how soon I find an alternative that has full content in their feeds.
From the mouths of VCs ... sort of
Google found that when the results increased to 30 per page ... it took about twice as long to display the longer results list for the user.

I'm surprised that increasing from 10 to 30 results increased total latency by ~100%. I would have expected that other factors (one-time costs like session establishment) would dominate the overall latency, and the marginal cost of fetching 20 additional query results would be fairly small.
Finding friends is such an odd thing. In college I had a million freshman year, but it seemed that every year the number dwindled, but those remaining were that much better. Now I'm in grad school and I only have like 3 friends, and I'm totally unsure as to how I would make more? I don't understand how people moving to new places make any at all.

I'm also going to a school now that is more of a commuter school, so nobody lives close by. I honestly think that if people lived close to school, then everybody would have more friends.
Yeah, I think this approach makes a lot of sense (and it is another instance of "more data beats better algorithms", in a sense). It's also similar to some of the themes Paul Buchheit talked about his StartupSchool talk -- you want to listen to your users, but don't just blindly do what they ask for.
Big Telco’s mindset change, embracing the unknown
I thought I preferred single paragraph, and I went to a good bit of effort to code sane "beginning excerpt" extraction code for my feed generators. But now that you make me look at my habits it seems I prefer to get the full feed and then tell Safari to shorten them up. That way all the aggregated articles are similar within my groupings.

Clicking through isn't the issue for me. If it is a lengthy article I'll probably click through to see it as you intended... unless your site is so ad heavy it drives me away.

Now I'll have to go throw away all that lovely code I wrote to do the excerpts.
Fold!

Er, no pun intended. Thanks for the links!
Conversational Terrorism: the ways people (consciously or unconsciously) conversationally cheat
Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku
Are you looking for a place to live or a job?
$100 dollar alternative to OLPC
I got the impression that most of the ones I talked to wouldn't know the difference. They ask the question seemingly just to try to get a feel for how much you know what you're talking about.
Dumping on the internet
Yeah, I don't know that putting it all on one page is the solution, but having each page linked to from each page might help a lot.
Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget
I was just thinking the other day how great it would be to have a Hacker News meetup.
I'd certainly be interested in meeting other like-minded people.

That said.. are there any people from Melbourne (Australia) that hang out here?
Ask YC: In SF for a few days, where to go to see "hacker culture"?
Any events going on? Right now Stanford and surrounding area is on my radar, any suggestions on what else to see/do?

(I have typical travel plans too, just wanted to throw this out there)
First thought is place to live so I can build a new product. However, given a sufficiently fun job and ability to get residence.. then I'm interested in that too. Getting residence is required for my wife to stop going crazy not being able to work etc. H1B+H4 is an ugly visa combination for a couple to live on.
Brutal Truth. I like it.
I was subjected to the variants of "YOU'LL GET OVER IT" many times when I was young -- it seems to be a favourite fallback of 30- or 40- year olds when they realize that they've been outreasoned by 10 year old.

Oddly enough, in spite of being 27 years old now, I still haven't "gotten over" the notions that a schoolroom is a perfectly good place for a reasoned debate; that English essays should be marked on the quality of the writing, not on the conclusions reached; or that constitutional protections, including due process rights, should extend to all places where government regulation is enforced.

Maybe I'm just not old enough yet.
soon we'll need a dedicated processor just to handle which data gets sent to the other processors.
Canada is good (particularly Vancouver, which probably comes second only to San Francisco in the race to be the most socially liberal place in the English speaking world), and is far more immigrant-friendly than the US (especially if you're educated and speak English or French).

EDIT: Just noticed the word "warm". If this is a reference to the physical climate rather than the social climate, you'd definitely want Vancouver or Vancouver Island rather than anywhere else in Canada.
Twitter really needs to work on reliability so the newbies can use the service without it going down.
When are you going to be out here?
Very true... no matter what the power users do, they need Twitter to work!
I would love Vancouver but the downside is that 1) I'm not rich enough to skip the queue and 2) the queue is 16 to 44 months long (depending on place of application). Its very high on my list of preferred locations but no joy in discussing with the immigration people.
Why iGoogle is About to Change the Web... Drastically
[immigration queue]

Yeah, that's the one problem with Canada... we're too popular. :-)

The immigration rules are in the process of being changed, though (legislation currently before the parliament, I believe) to make the queue somewhat less rigid -- the current process is broken (e.g., each office must consider applications in the order they were received, even if the applicant has died in the years since they applied), so the government is putting forward a "let's consider applicants in whatever order we feel like" bill. If this passes, there's a good chance that highly qualified applicants won't have quite as long a wait in the future.

Another option, of course, is just to send in the application and let the government chew on it while you go somewhere else for a year or two.
Its interesting to note:

Craigslist - 0.6 seconds with ~12kb markup (just html)

Google - 1.2 seconds with ~6kb markup
How to Unleash Your Creativity
Classic Tech Rivalries
Being an OSU student, I have to agree with you, but to be fair, I think Columbus also has some more interesting things to say, depending on where you live.

Brewery district: You should drink better beer.

Short north: You should be more artistic (in terms of both art and "sophisticated" things like wine-tasting).

Anywhere near High Street: You should hear more live music.

Honestly, Columbus has a thriving music, art, and gay community, and I think that makes it kind of a cool city. There's this very strange dynamic of party-going OSU students, diverse foreign-exchange OSU students, sports-crazy Ohioans, business-minded corporate-types, and aesthetic art aficionados.

Maybe, most of all, the message of Columbus is that diversity is good.
This is the first comment I ever written on YC News, your story was strangely compelling. You are a very talented writer, you can really capture the emotion though your words..

I go to college too and there have been some times where I felt the same way.. The best thing to do is to get involved with something you are interested in and meet people through there. Use events or activities as a medium to get closer to interesting people, its one thing that has really worked for me.

People are naturally social creatures, its probably hard but force yourself to go out and meet people. The best way to start a conversation is just to say hi. Yea you will probably get rejected by 90% of the people you meet but keep at it and the 10% will more than make up for all of those failures.

Also if you want to talk feel free to email me at chris.r.mccann [at] gmail.com I'd be happy to talk
Sam, do you have an email address to send you something about add-on to Loopt service? Or send to my email on profile.
Enough on Twitter already. I'd wager that 90% of the stories on Twitter have had no cumulative value whatsoever. It's all a bunch of temperature taking with no real insight.

Same goes for Microsoft-Yahoo.
Cisco offers open source alternative to SOAP
Reminds me of something a friend told me today...

The singer for the band, The National, apparently forces himself to write down a new idea (for lyrics) every 45 minutes. He says he only uses about 5% of what he comes up with. Coming up with a lot of crap is a recurring trend for many successful creative types, but you only hear about the 5% that isn't crap.
Don’t Debug Alone With FiveRuns’ TuneUp
It's information typically requested by a user (e.g. forgot password, register confirmation, etc.).
I hope you were at the Google IO conference?
Submit to Reddit and get your URL indexed fast by Google
If it's so easy why did you get fired for not being able to do it?
Living in the developing world, as I do, net connections can be pretty flaky and certainly far from ubiquitous. As a result, things work much better for me if I can grab feeds when I have a connection and then read them offline. For me, partial feeds are a pain in the ass; give me a full feed every time. And no, I don't mind ads in my feeds.
Agreed. I'd love to read an announcement about "High Memory" instances. It'd be great to be able to pay 15 cents per hour and get the basic instance with 3 GB of RAM, or 20 cents per hour to get 5GB of ram.
Good to hear from you. :)
kashif(dot)razzaqui(at)gmail
Thanks for the compliment and advice.
Cambridge Ma is pretty fun, but doesn't fit the bill of being not in the US etc
That's a very clever hack.

I have to say, I'm glad to see APL getting some mainstream attention-- it seems to be almost a forgotten language these days...
Having to use a special character set and a special keyboard didn't help its adoption...

When I first saw APL, I thought it was Cree or hieroglyphics.
I'm pretty sure he meant it literally--IM is his primary interface for Twitter so when it's down his personal usage pattern goes down also. The post, like many complaints on Twitter, is pretty dramatic. I don't mean to defend that, just point out a bit of context that most people don't have (or if you're Valleywag, don't care about).
How To Start A Business
Melbourne, Australia -- The place to be!

Startup scene is pretty good and improving:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/australia_top_web_apps....

http://www.futureexploration.net/topweb2apps/
Yahoo to increase domain renewal fee to $34.95/year in July
Why don't you try the Philippines? Manila and Cebu have plenty of hackers. It's cheap, warm and friendly. And we all speak English.

Singapore might be another consideration.
My FriendFeed Wishlist
Personally, I don't bother subscribing to an excerpt feed. I find its utility of little value.

In any case, isn't the net littered with enough AdSense-stained blogs?
Event: Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications
There is a phenomenon where one forgets these things the moment he has kids (or becomes a teacher, maybe); the adults who were unreasonable to you may have been more reasonable when they were younger. Just a friendly warning. Better take significant precautions not to suffer the same fate (they, like most young people, probably thought they wouldn't suffer it).
Is there anything like Heroku but for Python or Java besides Google AppEngine?
I'm not sure about the question itself. Consider:

1) If you're choosing a programming language, you are probably just beginning to implement your idea. It is premature to be thinking about what matters to VCs at this stage.

2) Forget about focusing on what VCs want. The language/framework you choose should allow you to make an interesting product in the least amount of time.

PHP bashing, or rails bashing - exactly how many VCs do you think pay attention to this?
Hawaii (still in the USA) is great in that it's a warm place, but the cost of living is high.

However, great hackers in Hawaii cost 50-75% what they would in Silicon Valley. A lot of intelligent, quality people move back here after going to school at fairly good schools (many go to USC,UCLA,Berkeley,Stanford - a smaller amount Harvard and MIT before returning home for cultural/family reasons).

I know this because I left Los Angeles for a 30% pay cut to come home to Hawaii. I get paid less, but I can walk around in my tank top all year. Call it an extreme sunshine tax.

The highest profile startup we've had recently are the guys that built Sprout Builder. ilovephotos.com (Blue Lava Technologies) is an amazing product that I'm not sure I'm allowed to discuss, and also built out of Hawaii.

They also have a few incubators/innovation centers where you can get cheap office space (and cheap everything else). They're nice offices,, but subsidized considerably by the local government specifically to spur more innovation here.
What Google Looks For in Potential Acquisitions
Seems to fall behind for days/weeks sometimes without getting updated. I think they should rename "yesterday" to "Some day in the last month"
Yeah, especially if you don't drink alcohol. I've heard that around 24/25 is when people get over the novelty of it and start not caring about it as much. Maybe you can move to a country where nobody drinks. I can't think of one that isn't islamic although :( It's sad that people need alcohol to be 'drunk' (stupid, goofy and social), it's such a crutch.

What I do is talk to random people on the street/mall/coffee shop with complete honesty that look interesting to you. Maybe even a few girls ;) Some will get nowhere, some will putter, others you'll click. People from more social cultures (latin,etc) are a lot less uptight. There's millions of people out there in your city today, a few of them have GOT to be interesting :P Or create user groups or meetup groups or whatever your interested in and advertise! And organize, and initiate. And keep on going and going an going. When your the one who starts it, your the one with the ultimate choice.

And to be honest, programming doesn't have to be an anti-social job. There's a lot of ranting and raving with your fellow co-workers ;) It's like saying film-making is anti-social because you have to sit infront of a terminal editing video, thinking up scripts and creating sets.