skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks! m.reddit.com is indeed much better for mobiles. Wish I had seen that earlier.

No complains about the new layout after all then -- it looks great on desktop browsers.
"Sometimes waiting six months and buying a faster server is a better solution."

Sounds like a great use of your limited resources!
I rather enjoyed "The Cartoon Guide to Statistics", but it might not be quite what you're looking for.
Your characterization of New York is very much that of a visitor, as it should be. "You should be richer" is not the defining characteristic of New York, it's "you're a minority." For anyone who has lived here for a year or more, the fact that everyone is a minority on some level is what makes New York breathtaking.

The New York you're talking about is also a minority. From the outside, Wall Street and Madison Avenue may seem to dominate. From the inside, they're barely noticeable unless you're in that world. Wall Street and Madison Avenue are swept up in the endless current of people just like the gay Puerto Rican teens who hang out above Pier 40 on Friday nights in the summer.

The depth and breadth of "New York" is what makes it truly great. New York has so many worlds swirling around you that you'll never fully understand -- it's humbling and exhilarating to the core. New York's "ambition" is the endless hope of all of those minorities from countless directions -- the ambition you're talking about is much more one dimensional.
Could anyone find a link to this source?
10 Things you Must Know before Renting an Apartment
Berlin is really something to consider if you start in Europe... ;)
Web Worker Daily » Archive Sun’s xVM VirtualBox: Free Virtualization «
There are two types of government entities: let's call them "private" and "pseudo private"....then there is a third type that is very public, very well funded, and very demanding. The first two markets were grossly underserved because they couldn't dream of affording the product for the third. A few startups have sprung up in this area, and that's where we got our start. Only the two rolls royces have any substantial market share in the big public market, and we're going to be the first company of the little guys poised to make the jump into the big one. We're trying to figure out how we're going to multiply our price by 20x, and it is probably going to mean we fork the product development into two separate lines for the smaller ones and the bigger ones even though the cost structure is more or less the same. The big big guys have been enjoying OBSCENE margins (think 5000%) in the big market for a long time due to the barrier to entry of "establishment" there.
I've heard that there is too much latency to use EC2 as a host. Certainly xforwarding is not great. Check out the creators of "Friends for Sale": http://omnisio.com/sdforum/siqi-chen
intro stats is an excellent way to learn from the ground up http://www.amazon.com/Intro-Stats-DeVeaux-Velleman-Bock/dp/0...
It adds an air of authenticity, allowing you (maybe a little bit) to see things as he does. Also, the pictures break up a very long post.
To paraphrase mixmax, I would fight anyone, verbally, fists, or pistols at dawn claiming that neither Apple fanboyism nor Vista-bashing have spread throughout the tech publications.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132271
Christopher Alexander on the difference between a fifty-year-old carpenter and a novice
I think a laptop would work with the bottom half (Where there is currently a keyboard + trackpad), as a second LCD which is touch sensitive.

The default arangement could be to simply have a keyboard displayed on the bottom half, with a trackpad area, but then with other apps you might want to manipulate graphics, or paint, or do other cool stuff on that bottom area.

It'd take a little while to get used to non moving keys, but typing on the iPhone is pretty easy once you get the hang of it, and I'm sure there are technologies that could give some sort of little feedback to the fingers.

(This sounds quite like an enlarged Nintendo DS really).

That way also, you get one clean LCD, and a separate one that gets a little dirty from fingers, and has to be cleaned. Seems a good plan to me.
I've subscribed to the feed-- would love to go, but as a company that JUST started "quietly making money" (Hey Joel!), it's a big chunk of money. Hoping sales growth keeps up to the point where the cost is less painful.
EC2 is the best you can get at the moment in my opinion. I guess it's time to learn some *nix! It's not that hard, really.

And for databases, the new persistent storage feature (http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?t...) is what you want/need. (still private alpha)

But unless you have a multi gigabyte database, a simple mysqldump and an upload to s3 should do the trick.
Yea, wayyy to early to hate on windows 7. I think peoples existing hate for vista is to blame here.
What happened to the other Syracuse geniuses, then? Now it gets more complicated. I think that the article's argument apply more to some fields (e.g. painting, cinema) than others. IT is probably one of these other fields (Guido van Rossum comes to mind here).
Some of these problems have already been solved with timestamp-based migration naming.
I see what Yahoo is trying to do here, but this could've been done by anyone with an activeX or similar plugin for the browser. The reason that this is usually not done is that people do not want to install, or won't install these extra things on their computer.

Surely the Yahoo factor will help it propogate, but I don't really see a point. These features need to become standard and built into the browser, otherwise they'll always be a novelty and definitely not key to the functioning of a core website/web application.
I read an article about a tourist who asked "where are the oysters from" and got the reply "from the bay."

The lesson being that if you want to enjoy oysters, you're going to have to let go and accept that there's a bit or risk in any real pleasure.

To me, that's always been the message of new orleans. True pleasure requires some risk, and you have to embrace it, rather than merely tolerate it.
Ask YC: Can I become a VC?
I'm a hacker who'd love to invest in other people's startups. I, of course, don't have enough savings on hand to do any significant damage.

Is there anything out there like a micro-VC or investors club for tech startups? Say n people put up $x each to fund a project. What are the implications? Would it work? If so, who's in?
We use flexiscale. It does have an api, its just web-based (https://api.flexiscale.com/current/doc/). We have worked closely with their engineers to create a simple desktop app for managing/viewing server status (http://cogniscale.cognifide.com/). This work is on-going.

However, EC2 is a great platform. Flexiscale is an alternative but EC2 is much further down the line. I'm watching this space.
I'm getting the feeling they had too much cash too early and didn't have a good balance of hacker founders. They had two (excellent) UK web agencies working for them that wouldn't have come cheap.
Why not Novosibirsk? With the Siberian climate the message is clearly "you should stay indoors and work"

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...
We use EC2 for everything but monitoring, email, and DNS. The key factor for us to switch from our more traditional hosting arrangements? The fact we could deploy a new server in seconds instead of weeks. Amazon's non-premium support via the forum is about the same speed as our previous hosting providers.

The only downside is that disk writes are much slower than on a normal dedicated server. We had do spread out the application over more servers to compensate for reduced CPU available as well. But even going from 4 servers to 25, we pay less than half what we used to.

I highly recommend EC2.
As a recent NYC "settler" I found this essay insightful in a very empathetic and visceral way. Thanks pg.
Google named best place to work
I learned the most from a hallway conversation with the head of sales at Red Gate where I learned how (and why) to hire an inside sales department; that hallway conversation was game changing for Fog Creek.

Joel, can you please elaborate more on this? Maybe make it an essay on JoS? Thanks!
http://azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201912
Phew, this is way less creepy than I thought from the title. At least they have to specify the sites.
Adobe offers sneak peek of CS4 apps
Provo, UT: You're still single?

Chicago: There's nothing wrong with second place.

Stockholm, Sweden: You're not clean enough!
Finally, Real-Time Stock Quotes at Yahoo-- For Free
I think the story is a little strange with the divorce forcing a freeze on the invested money. It sound more like the investor didn't want to pay, as there are 10 other similar products/sites and their application cost much but didn't deliver much.
i think alot of VCs invest other peoples money

so yes you can!.. now go convince a bunch of wealthy people to give you money
Excel Can't Handle Presidential Campaign Donations
Very cool. I was thinking this would be some type of cookie hack. This is pretty clever tho.

I'm not positive on the overhead for this. Loading a couple of links in an iframe shouldn't be too expensive.

But if it were a problem you could easily create a solution to store these settings in a cookie, so the iframe would only be loaded once.
Another possibility would be to have a smaller area, like a touch pad, that corresponded to the screen. Wouldn't be great for detail work, but would save space and cost and I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to get used to doing multitouch stuff on it.
Try this: ban yourself from commenting on anything on HN. Just opt yourself right out of the forums. I tried this on reddit, and it was an incredibly liberating experience.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78939

You could use that as a barebones way to send data to google analytics or getclicky, or plug it in to a user profile (generated by yourself). Of course Aza's solution is waayyy more elegant.

And I'm sure firefox/opera/webkit will be closing up this vulnerability in the near future.
The only problem with identicons I have seen is that the algorithm used causes a majority of them to look like swastikas. But that seems like an easy thing to fix. Most of the identicons are quite pretty (including a large number of swastikas), but most people still associate swastikas with naziism.
OS X 10.5.3 released!
i'd suggest getting some experience working for a VC or a seed fund before setting up your own shop.
Well, you assume they are meant to be irritating because they irritate you, probably largely due to my use of the word "fanboy". If I had posted that article on an Apple Developer forum rather than my personal blog, that might be a reasonable assumption. Hell, if I even wrote it here, that might still have some validity (though I think not much) given that most people here probably use OSX.

But they're on a website whose URL is my real name. It should be pretty clear that I write for myself and people like me. I am of the opinion that much of the tech media is held in thrall by Steve Jobs and is abandoning their job of fair and balanced reporting because they want to have early access to new iPhones and iPods. (In fairness, I blame Jobs as much for having that policy as I do for them abiding by it.) So I write about it.

If that's irritating to you, don't read. But don't accuse me of trolling for simply expressing Matt Maroon's opinions on mattmaroon.com. That's very small-minded, and egocentric. No offense, but I don't care enough to spend my time irritating you.
i think alot of VCs invest other peoples money

Essentially all VCs invest other people's money. If you invest your own money, you are an angel investor, not a VC.
Ask YC: Hiring non-technical ("business") staff?
Finding good developers is hard... but finding business people to help drive growth is, in my opinion, harder. Especially people who get the Web.

Who's had luck? What were you looking for, and where did you look? Where did you ultimately find them?
I think I get what you're saying: I wish there was something established that I knew about, but for now I've seen this: http://couchtycoon.net/
1. all VCs invest a small amount of their fund's capital out of their own pocket

2. there are some surprisingly large "angel" funds out there that do VC bite size deals
I rent, and after having lived in a few apartments myself, I agree with a lot of the points mentioned - To add a few myself -

1. I normally carry a compass with me when inspecting an apartment for the first time. I like to have a lot of light in my apartment so I tend to find apartments that have a lot of east facing windows.

2. Lots of electrical outlets - Definitely need those. I hate it when apartments have one solitary outlet per room

3. Measure the furniture that you have right now before inspecting any apartments (that is if you are moving in with some furniture). The last thing you want is that beautiful L-shaped desk not quite fitting in your office

4. The article mentions this, but __read__ your contract. Living in an apartment for a few years means there will be wear and tear, and this should be included as part of the contract. A lot of apartment complexes are just looking for an excuse to take away your deposit on something as flimsy as "the carpet has worn out". Of course its worn out, I walked on it for 3 years!

5. Take a tour of the apartment complex before signing up. A lot of apartment complexes advertise gyms/swimming pool facilities, where the gym has one stationary bike from the 60's and the swimming pool looks like it has not been cleaned for years. Talk to any residents if you can, and ask them about the responsiveness of the apartment's management for any and all issues especially emergencies. Considering I live by myself, I normally pay attention to that. Considering I live in OH, I normally ask how the apartment complex deals with snow and ice. This is normally a liability issue for the complex, but its best to know stuff like that

6. A lot of apartment complexes mandate that you need to have home owners insurance when you move it. Even if they don't, you should buy it

7. Look around the complex. Is there a pharmacy around, a grocery store? This is critical especially if moving to a big city since you may not know the neighborhood well. Again, useful in emergencies
Keynote and Gomez are two of the most common ways to measure app performance. You can select the number and location of agents you want to test from based on your app's geo market.
MacOSX 10.5.3 released
Check out RightScale: http://www.rightscale.com

Cheers
I was at a web 2.0 presentation couple weeks ago and there was a company presenting their product, which turned out to be essentially a social-bookmarking-aggregator. What's next? An aggregator for that as well?
Vista is good in the same way that a $4 gallon of gas is good: it gets people to consider alternatives.
Ha, yeah. I don't mind. Until PG lets me convert my karma to real bucks, it's OK by me.
The author of the post referred to in the article is one of the brightest architects I've ever worked with. (Former eBay'er here.) Definitely worth reading to get his take on how eBay works, but the lessons are applicable in other contexts.
Whoever wrote that article is super into the em dash.
I used Google Desktop Search on XP. It was nice, but not as nice as having good search built into the OS.

I largely agree that Vista isn't that compelling of an upgrade. I just don't think it's the disaster its often made out to be.
I had this idea earlier this year. However, after talking with a couple of lawyers, non of them felt comfortable with any sort of structure for doing this. The way they are setting this up makes me pretty uneasy (not to mention that it isn't even U.S. based). If you're going to be dealing with U.S. securities, it should be within the laws of the U.S . I think if anyone can get around the SEC laws and structure something that IS legal, P2P investments could be a really great thing. I'm not sure if that's happening EVER though.
Lol. You're much better than the last agent I worked with.
The Surface team contributed but it's meant for a wider range of devices. The demo was running on a Dell tablet.
As far as I know there's no reason why it wouldn't work, as long as you can find a bunch of rich people and/or pension funds willing to give you lots of money. There are presumably legal issues involved with setting it up as a proper venture fund, but it should be fairly straightforward once you hire the right lawyer.

But of course, finding a bunch of rich people and/or pension funds willing to give you a lot of money is the hard part, and by "hard" I mean "almost certainly impossible". But hey, good luck!
The same thought occurred to me, with reference to exactly the same earlier piece. Economic computer models surely suffer from most of the problems that the climate models do. I kept expecting him to repeat the same critique and was a little surprised when he didn't. I'm willing to cut him a little more slack than you are, though; it's true that he might just be changing his tune to suit a predefined viewpoint, but I can think of other interpretations as well. Hopefully he'll write more about it and we can see.
Whatever happened to "The power to tax is the power to destroy?"

Folks like the author want us to tax the automotive petroleum fuel industry to destruction. But most of us suspect that this won't be politically viable. So just how much "power to tax" is there?

The real hurt is the power to subsidize. (Which includes the power to selectively tax less.)
What a preposterous suggestion. Should we start having Taco Bell service our cars?
Dead insightful and well put. About the only thing I read TechCrunch for is to get invites to beta start-ups. I don't care about MA's perspective on Silicon Valley.
Or they could just use the Tablet-PC form factor
Austin, TX: You should be having more fun on the weekends.

Rio Grande Valley, TX: Play your cards right and some day you could be middle class!
Well.. not exactly. I'm thinking more along the lines of investing "our" money. The P2P comment hit it on the head.

Say 100 people think project x is viable. Each person throws down $1k and gets a small piece. You have 100 people interested in seeing the company to fruition who may or may not be able to lend a hand using their own expertise... managing the noise may be tough.
Did you watch the video of his presentation? (the link is at the bottom of the article). Very entertaining.
If YUM wants to switch its core competency from serving fast food to automobile servicing... why not?

Snark aside, there's a current trend in "retail healthcare" that I think is really interesting. Drug stores like RiteAid and Walgreens experimented with posting a doctor at each store to provide basic diagnosis for approachable prices on a 9 to 5 scale. That combined with cheap generic prescription drugs, it's become a very good health service for people that don't have jobs that provide medical care.

Will this scale to other more advanced medical treatments? Maybe. That's what the article is talking about.
Netflix sees DVD-by-mail peak in as soon as 5 years
Sell this customer a crippled version of your software. Just make it slightly better than your competitor. This 1) Provides a clear future sale when this customer wants to upgrade, and 2) Allows you to sell at your standard rate to X, Y, and Z.
AOL Joins OpenSocial
Before swallowing this tripe, one must first believe the "government is your enemy, the market our savior" mantra.

Government is a tool that can be wielded effectively or ineffectively. Though Americans haven't quite learned how to do anything with this tool (or rather, have forgotten over the last few decades), other people have and they enjoy the benefits, one of which is affordable, effective health care for everyone. Americans too can enjoy these benefits, however too many of them would rather repeat the mantra and eat their tripe, than learn from reality.
> Also, I believe it's the only country in Europe except for the UK where everyone speaks good English. In most big cities in Europe you will eventually find someone who speaks English, but in Amsterdam the odds that it will be the first person you approach are no worse than in London or California.

Stockholm is similar -- most people speak good English.

Amsterdam is one of the biggest tourist destinations in Europe, no wonder about the quality of their English (although this applies to the whole of Netherlands, not just Amsterdam).

I hear the Danes speak excellent English too, but I haven't been to Denmark myself.
@backward compatibility

This doesn't really matter anymore because you can just make a VM with the OS you need and install your program there. There are both free and open source virtualization programs.

@Vista

The UAC is annoying for programmers; that's the real problem with it. I've even had trouble doing reasonable actions in the designated folders (make a new directory, for example). Yes, it is annoying for customers too, but that it annoys programmers is an unforgivable sin.

Having just interviewed with a couple of people from Microsoft, it's clear that they are working on interesting problems and that they aren't dumb. Individual Microsoft engineers seem to be just as dedicated and smart as the rest of us. Some of these decisions must come out of committees with values different from the individual engineers.

Their major concern was security, which they've frankly fixed in XP at this point. I haven't had virus software on my XP machine for 18 months and I haven't had a problem. So, the major feature of Vista (more security) was filtered back into XP, thus there is no drive to change to Vista.
My First Brush with the Music Industry
Maybe work through an interest group on prosper.com?
Don't worry. I'm sure Will Smith will be there to save us.

Anybots looks super awesome, by the way. I can't imagine you'll have too hard a time recruiting a young product designer. Seems like a dream job.
I don't think one needs to subscribe to a particular mantra to make healthcare effective. It doesn't matter if it's a government official or a business that getting a doctor to see you, tell you what's wrong, and fix you up, the point is that we ant something like that to happen.

What's being argued continuously is how do we get that to happen given the clear disproportionate amount of doctors and resources to people.
Thats a pretty interesting idea - I have participated in a real estate investment syndicate which was basically 4 guys I knew and trusted, plus myself - We pooled our money together and purchased 2 four-plexes - Its a great experience and has netted us a nice, although not huge, return - We sold one of the units and re-invested in raw land in the path of development. We're all under 30, so we figured we would invest in more speculative properties (raw land) and wait for the higher return.

Anyhow, that was slightly off topic, but an investment syndicate with say $500k-$1 million would be interesting as a seed stage 'micro'fund - As mentioned in a previous comment, the cost of legally setting up this type of fund might be expensive with other legal implications as well.

I would definitely be interested in something like this though! Everyone has got to start somewhere right? Just like my buddies in the RE investment, we started out small, but we are certainly making progress, have made a return and have property in our name.
Alone Together in World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG
If you're really smart or if you're really good at sales you can apply for entrepreneur-in-residence positions at venture capital companies.

It also works out very well if you move to where the startups are. Silicon Valley. Washington. New York City. London. Tel Aviv.
And their pre-existing general loathing for Microsoft.
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