skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish manufacturers of flash devices were a lot more up-front about read vs. write speeds and details on wear-leveling.

What I would love: a drive that would tell you when it was 1 month from failure.

In the meantime, there's this 2.5" CF Raid 5 adaptor:

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/centurys-sata-adapter-sup...
I think "British accent" can be a placeholder for "Big words in complete sentences." When I lived in Texas, people asked if I was British -- I'm from the Midwest.
Some classic MJ trash-talking:
http://www.prosportsdaily.com/forums/showthread.php?t=200152

"I hope there's a jumpshot in there." - Michael to Stacey King who was walking into the locker room with a box

The guy was not just a hard-worker, but an obssessed worker who would stop at nothing to ensure success was the only outcome.
It certainly does read like utter insanity to a mind indoctrinated to the 9 to 5 and the traditional concept of getting and sticking to a "career."

It doesn't read like utter insanity, however, to those who are independent, free thinking, and willing to do things a bit differently in order to have the life they want.
The case for Congress to regulate oil futures markets
Oh, please, no. No "Top Ten" anything here. That's what Digg is for.
Eric Idle's reading list
I didn't know colleges had yearbooks. Both of my universities were large (30K, with 5-8K graduating each year) and I can't even imagine how a yearbook would have worked. Sure, you could do them by school, but most of my friends were in other schools and wouldn't have been in that book.
I'm guessing you never baked before, but batches aren't one dozen and you can whip through them in short order. 240 cookies (er, biscuits) would be about 10 cycles if you have two half sheet pans. Depending on chill time (if any) you could knock through it in a regular home oven in three hours fairly easily. With some actual equipment and a helper, it would be half that. Bakeries make ridiculous amounts of baked goods and still time find to sell 'em.
A similar technique is covered in this book, under "Wildcard Queries."

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-...

(see page 38 in the pdf for chapter 3)
Manhattan works for me.
8% of $11 meaning that you make $0.88 less an hour? Wow, earth shattering.
A search engine in 1998 was not original. The implementation and execution were. And Gmail bills itself as "a Google approach to email," so I think they are quite consciously doing the same old stuff in a totally new way.

Are there any products they've made that are really new, versus done better? I can't think of any, though I'm sure there must be a few.
I've been in the same situation, but a lot of people here have given good advice on the general aspects of it already. I have only one specific thing to add..

Build things that you NEED.

There is a natural drive (survival?) that kicks in when you start creating things you need or that will make your life a lot easier in the short term. These things do not need to be for resolving basal needs like food, shelter, or even money, but for resolving problems you have regarding technology, the Internet, or programming, say.

A few years ago I started to use del.icio.us, and decided I wanted my del.icio.us postings to appear at the header of my blog. I developed an RSS to JavaScript service to do this. To cut a very long story short, it turned into a very big deal quite quickly, got funding, tens of thousands of users, made a profit, and I sold it a year ago for a reasonable sum.

Ditto for a "tagged source code repository" (like a del.icio.us for code) I developed a couple of years ago. I needed to store bits of code I used regularly in a tagged fashion, so I built it (in a day or two). Natural forces took over, it became popular, and I sold it.

I'm not a procrastinator, but I'm an incredibly lazy person. I don't "feel" like doing lots of things, but if I know I have a "need" (or there's no way I can get out of doing something) I jump into it out of necessity. Perhaps you are the same.
Silicon Valley VC confidence index falls to new low
Actually, it asks a question: What is the primal, natural element of programming?

Ideas, anyone?
That's going on the "Has PG ever made a joke online?" list.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=234582
Here's another: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=241134
I think the Radegast Beiergarten in Williamsburg (http://nymag.com/listings/bar/radegast-hall/) would be a great place to meet (long tables, beer steins, sausages) and it's very accessible for people of all boroughs (first stop in Brooklyn on the L-Bedford Ave). It tends to get crowded on Weekend nights but should be comfortable on a Sunday evening.

Full Disclosure: I live in Williamsburg. That said, I'm more than open to any other location in Manhattan or Brooklyn.
With so many bubbles all the time, I'm starting to feel like the world economy has become some sort of fizzy drink.
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/jul2008/bw2008...
Psychiatrists have detected the first case of "climate change delusion"
This place sounds awesome. I'd be down for here.
China grants video license to 'Chinese YouTube' Youku
SQL for Smarties
SQL programming style

both are by Joe Celko
Live in Brooklyn, work in Brooklyn. I'm happy to travel to Manhattan. The title of this post isn't immediately clear, I'd hate to miss out on meeting fellow NYC hackers
Yeh, this is little more than a continuation of the "windows sucks" theme. not much to see here.
I would say that:

Dude, quit your job, work at a coffee shop, and build things because you want to build them.

is good advice only in response to

I'm bored with my job AND I have an idea I really really want to work on. Here's the idea: [insert non-bad idea here]

but it's not very good advice in response to

I'm bored with my job and I'd kinda like to work on something different, dunno what though
That depends on when my current POS dies.
Unfortunately, I'll be out of town that weekend. However, I don't want to interfere with the group's plans.

What about the weekend after (July 26/27) or the first weekend in August (August 2/3)?
I vote for near a subway stop as well. Weeknights or Sundays work best.
more at http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/poker-vs-chess.html and http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/man-machine/.
Ask YC: Ruby Hosting
Where are you hosting your Ruby Apps?
I like this idea. How about Sunday July 20th starting around 7:30pm?
'Microsoft trying to weaken Yahoo'
The Black Swan and You
As far as I can tell, if all your product pages are dynamically generated, then if someone does a search for your product, they won't find it, because the search engine robot can't input information to get the page to return the results (although this is changing). Read a few SEO articles, there are a lot on the subject that can explain it better, but basically a lot of people were cutting themselves out of the search engine game by using dynamically generated pages. Most people don't do it anymore.
Joyent.
36 steps to success as technical lead
I came across his site before, he had a long list of good books he read with some reviews. I'm sure some googling can turn it up.

Also, Eli Bendersky's book reviews are fantastic when you need to find something to read. Eli's reviews are a little humbling, considering the pace he reads books in... in four languages. http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/book-reviews/
Although today’s students find yearbooks old-fashioned, they may one day miss their vanished youth. Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and the electrons dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the permanence of ink on paper.

Other than concerns of walled gardens, the data need not go away, and being electronic, it could remain more accessible. I have preserved -- and referenced -- more documents from 15 years ago electronically than in hard copy. The files have made their way from floppy discs to the cloud, from old versions of MS Word and ClarisWorks to modern formats. Books like yearbooks? No idea, probably in a box somewhere.

My parents gave me a bound copy of my emails from college (98-02) for a historical record. While I've accessed some of those messages, it has always been electronically. The bound copy is probably 2500 miles away in a basement.

Of course this is the concern of walled gardens. I used to carefully preserve every email sent, and they move with me from mail host to mail host. I have some confidence that my pictures on flickr need not go away, ever. When flickr dies, I can extract them and move to the next storage system. Facebook interactions are obviously more ephemeral...
Doesn't the step "have a kick ass portfolio online" seem unhelpful to someone who is just starting out?
GasBuddy.com - Find Low Gas Prices in the USA and Canada
Sweet - I'd be in for Manhattan or Brooklyn for sure then.
Hell, I was in LA last week and saw a gourmet bakery for pets. No joke. They seemed to be doing brisk business. Several customers went in with their pets in the time it took me to drive by.
That sounds good, but I think some YCers may be under 21.
A simple proposal: if 7 people post here agreeing to show up at the aforementioned time/place, it's on.

Counting me and j2d2, we've got 2 so far.
The Sleepy Geek
A look at technology in my daily life.
If you want to increase your lifespan dramatically (like a change from 50 to 100) you need to eat a lot less. You end up eating so little that you literally don't have enough energy to do anything (think < 1000 calories per day).
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a human.
It worked for me. I kinda wanted to work on something different, didn't know what though, and found out what when I stopped working on the stuff I didn't want to work on.

I believe you've got it exactly backwards. The advice comes from exactly the experience this person describes, and the conditions which you think would make my advice better may actually worsen it.

If you know exactly what you want to build, you don't need the open schedule factor, as you can scope it and schedule it around what you're already doing, or timebox the project between school years or between jobs.

It's when you don't know what to do next that exploring different options pays off.
so make something dog owners want. unlike children dogs don't typically whine until they get what they want.
Businesses are sometimes built on the most unlikely of ideas. Selling tumbleweeds online, for example.

http://thatslifeinthecity.blogspot.com/2007/11/kansas-womans...
UFrame: goodness of UpdatePanel and IFRAME combined
Federation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries Per Day
How to Make the Right Choice
I'm starting today with a couple of people i met at meet-ups. Then i plan to tap into my alumni and keep spreading the word. Good luck to your launch!
In college, two years ago, they had to give them away for free - no one had any interest in buying them.
Spam is different
According to the post the extent of Google discovering erlang is erlang style concurrency in Google Gears. To me erlang the language and erlang style concurrency are two very different things.
Anywhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn would be nice. Preferably closer to a subway station.
I always took that as a case against mutating arguments, not against defaults. You still have the same problem if you pass in an argument:

>>> MY_CONSTANT = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
>>> def f(l):
... l.append(0)
... print l
...
>>> f()
['foo', 'bar', 'baz', 0]
>>> f()
['foo', 'bar', 'baz', 0, 0]

I would've rewritten f as:

def f(l=[]):
print l + [0]

...unless you specifically want f to mutate its caller's variables and have documented it as such.

Generally, I try to avoid mutating objects unless a.) I just created the object within the function or b.) it's specifically intended as a "long lived" data structure, i.e. something that survives multiple user interactions. For everything else, I try to use the non-mutating operations (slicing, concatenation, list comprehensions) or make an explicit copy of the argument.
I'll try to attend, as will my co-founder. As somebody else mentioned, a 21+ venue might prevent some people from participating. Manhattan is preferred, although Brooklyn is no big deal.
Hunter is not especially arrogant or intense or brash. (He is Canadian, after all.)

Shudders. Do small generations like this make anybody else cringe?
I'm guessing you never baked before...

This discussion is already stupid. No need to make it worse.
Sudafed no longer uses pseudoephedrine in its products because it was being used to synthesize meth. It now uses phenylephrine, which does not have an appetite suppressing effect.

I only happen to know about pseudoephedrine's appetite suppressing side effect because of terrible allergies. For years I hated eating, until medications stopped including it as the active ingredient.
Ahhh now I see what you're saying. You make an excellent point.
But is that his doing, or the doing of the Nike marketing department? As I recall, Jordan was the first sportsman to be hyper-marketed in the way he was.
The article tells us nothing new about Reiser except that the author interviewed him and didn't like him very much. The author even tells us why he wrote it:

"I had written a book, and his story was crucial to it, but the book was really about me."

He interviewed Reiser purely for material for his book about what he thinks of murderers (spoiler: murderers are bad). Given this, it's not surprising that he would sell a chapter to Salon for money and publicity. The article is not journalism, it's part of an autobiography largely unrelated to Reiser that nevertheless capitalizes on the publicity surrounding his trial.
$5000 for a yurt? Build your own in two hours with $250 of materials from Home Depot. (Plus, it'll have that angular high-tech look!)

http://hexayurt.com/
Well, this is an especially poorly-written article. I stopped reading and skipped to the comments after the second sentence was:

As Jane Austen might have said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a man who single-handedly loses a large fortune, especially one that wasn't of his own making, must be way more interesting than the average man.
Thanks for the blog spam.
This article agrees with all my prejudices, but I still don't think it should be here.
I do. I find that code with the spaces around assignment and arithmetic operators is way easier to read.
When you're only making $10.12 an hour, it probably is.
Looks like I've already been RSVP'd, then. See you there!
Lots of dog owners want pampered dogs, just like lots of parents want spoiled kids ("I want to give them all the stuff I never had...").

According to the APPMA statistics on spending("Pet Industry Statistics and Trends"), Americans spent 34.4 billion dollars on their pets in 2004, which means pet-related spending has doubled in the last 10 years in the US.

The APPMA's reported the following breakdown for the areas in which money is spent on pets (2004 figures for the US)

$14.2 billion for food

$8.1 billion for supplies and OTC medications

$8.2 billion for veterinarian care

$1.6 billion for live animal purchases

$2.31 billion for other services such as grooming and boarding

http://exoticpets.about.com/cs/resourcesgeneral/a/petstates....
Is there any other sourcing about IMDB moving to Erlang? This is the first (and last) that I've heard that.
Yang accuses Microsoft of 'trying to destabilize' Yahoo
If the Fed would actually do it's job and drain the swamp (remove excess credit from the system), it would help calm the bubbles.
Oily Speculations
I would expect this to be true of any probability-based game, particularly where:

1) the distinct human advantage of unquantifiable sensory perception is taken away (i.e., a person can't "read" a computer's body language to make his probabilistic estimations more accurate), thus reducing the game to a number-crunching contest. We haven't been winning those contests since the 40s.

2) enough time is injected into the experiment.
>maybe that's more about ego than it is about money

I would say it's about being willing to pay a premium to live in a dense, vibrant city with all that goes along with it.
Check out The New Yorker's take...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=241284

makes sense to me.
You can get the "old formula," in most states, but they keep it behind the counter and you need to hand over your driver's license to be scanned. I only happen to know that because the phenylephrine doesn't work anywhere near as well for me when I have a cold.
I think he meant build it up to a kick ass portfolio? hahaha yes I am starting out.
Groklaw - Tesseract OCR How-To, by Dr Stupid; Scripts by Fred Smith
Ocropus - Google Code
This is the Chewbacca defense and Congress knows it. They need to put a leash on the Federal Reserve and make them withdraw the slosh that's pumping the commodities exchanges.
Canadian Rogers caves on iPhone 3G plans, offers 6GB for $30 a month
We’ll do a beta, then a Hacker News launch, followed by an official launch.
5

ps. fortes, you're coming in from Seattle?
Call centers handle that uneducated/prejudice problem since everyone reads the same script. The three big "accents" accents I've come across are southern, black, and Indian (other places with distinctive accents like Boston, Australia, etc don't have a lot of call centers). It's not hard to spot any of those 3, although anyone with those accents can learn to speak in "unaccented American".
What I love is in any movie not set in America, people speak in an English accent because it's foreign. Doesn't matter if it's France or Outer Space, it sounds English.
Yes. http://www.workpost.com runs on ASP.NET. And like every technology, it has advantages and disadvantages.
I believe the transcript of the trial is public record.
FWIW, I would lawyer up the second I was accused of committing a crime, regardless of guilt. If you're innocent, saying nothing is better than saying you're innocent. You want the charges dismissed as quickly as possible.

If you're guilty, the same is true. Don't confess unless you want to go to jail!
I just hope idiots like this live long enough to experience everyday morning temps of 95 degrees plus...
Yeah, the phenylephrine is garbage. I just ended up stopping taking anything and got a prescription for one of those nose sprays.
Sounds great. I'd love to join. Can you update this by week's end when you've completely settled on a time/location?
For that you'll probably need to hack the sendmail.cf file. I suspect it's probably easiest if you can use the "plussed user" feature - http://www.cs.ait.ac.th/~on/O/oreilly/tcpip/sendmail/ch24_04...
For better or worse, I think sounding "anything that could be perceived as uneducated" hurts your income. This could include any type of accent (Boston, Southern, Indian), which leads to pronouncing words wrong (e.g Wata vs Water, Y'all vs You all).
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Of course yes.
Or "pronouncing words properly". I'm originally from the Midwest too and have received similar responses. Although I've never been accused of having a British accent - just "an accent" that can't be pinned down.
Same here. I conceptualize it as part of a code compactness strategy: array indices are part of the same item, and thus I use syntax (like yours) that suggests inlining.
This may be a little nit-pick, because the data are certainly interesting, but the graph is a shining example of how you can use graphics to exaggerate your story.

The drop-off at Q307 looks really really drastic because the x-axis is pinned to the number "3" rather than zero. If the next data point is lower than three, are we in some kind of negative territory? No, we aren't.

Otherwise, the article was certainly interesting.
From my personal experience there no better place to post then to send an email to your professional network (maybe use LinkedIn now). Specially if you want to be able to work remotely, and get good contract without worrying about consequences and risks.
It's a flawed conclusion based on flawed data. You read about it, and it sounds compelling, and then you find out that reality just doesn't work that way.

I'd say it's not worth the time spent.
Southwest Airlines' Seven Secrets for Success
Apparently there exists a similar place in Tokyo. I remember watching a TV show where they rented a dog and took it there to eat. Apparently the humans and dogs could eat the same food.

Edit: Ah yes, Hello!Morning episode #331 and #332.
"Paul Graham ... is making a large amount of very small investments each with an extremely risky yet potentially huge return."

Based on the success rates so far, why do people still consider pg's bets to be risky? Do people still think he sends a shoebox full of $10K to kids in their dorms and then checks back in 3 months?

Is it in YC's interest to make knowledge of it's success rate more well known or more private? Since pg has discussed it somewhat in the open, I'm assuming the former.
Even if the UIGEA is overturned, that's going to be illegal here. The UIGEA does actually provide for legal state lotteries online, but nothing else. Without it, those are even questionable (beyond, of course, intrastate use, like sports betting in Nevada).
You missed the next sentence: "YCombinator as an organization is spent trying to push the success of the group as a whole."

Like any other early stage equity investment each individual investment he does is extremely risky by definition, however the way he manages the risk is extremely smart.
I'm not around on the 20th either.

But please include me in future gatherings (my email address is in my profile).
RailsPlayground, though many of my friends swear by SliceHost.

I used this resource when choosing a hosting provider:

http://www.railshosting.org/
I'm not sure what the point of that blog post is, or if it even has any coherent thesis.
This is good news but still need to sign a 3 years contract to get that package. I have a first gen phone so not sure what I'll do :/
"far more people play poker than chess"

Is that true? Certainly in the US, but worldwide?
They at least used a couple very good heads up limit players this time, rather than Phil Laak and some other guy nobody has heard of.
It's always important to get the process correct in a civilized society.
Treat Me Mean, I Need The Reputation
Looks like blatant misinformation to me. As to sources:

* Amazon SimpleDB on Erlang (friend of a developer): http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/

* IMDb on Java/Erlang (a job posting): http://www.computerjobs.com/job_display.aspx?jobid=2052172

* Gears on Erlang: N/A
Do you suffer from Programmer's Apathy?
Is this an issue for anyone?
cool demo. i guess i haven't really noticed this problem since it usually seems faster to clear the search box and re-type your query.
Introduction to Google Ranking
Um, I work at Google, and I know people that have come into the office once in the past six months.

> Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices

This is just not true.
question: (insert question about hosting here)

answer: buy a VPS. the most popular one seems to be slicehost.
Well the fact that the machine is using probability and is playing rationally can be used by opposing player.
Low point of argumentation: guy being paranoid about global warming is "proof" that all worries about global warming are just paranoia???
Does it work? Last time I tried a Google OCR it didn't work at all (forgot the name, something with t).
18 Project Ideas from Seth Godin
Not all colleges had them but when and where I went to school we had to send in a passport-sized photo to be used in a directory of all the incoming freshmen that listed high school, where you were from, your declared (if you had one) major. It was called the facebook