skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't believe Chris Anderson is still pimping "The Long Tail." (His latest book: "The Longer Tail.") As his website mentions, his initial "The Long Tail" Wired article came out in 2004. OK, we get the concept. Please come up with some new material. Perhaps the fact that he still has an audience for "The Long Tail" books and speaking engagements proves his theory that the long tail does exist.
Fossil of four-legged fish found
I didn't really have a point, but if I did, it wasn't in support of the wiki idea (or at least not using "productivity" as a way to sell it).
Yeah. But. Um. Those tests suck?

It's officezilla. The cadence is all wrong. Say it over and over again. Too much at the end. It flows like a boulder swims.

Normal people, when they hear office, think "I hate the office.", and normal people, when they hear zilla, think godzilla, which is not so pleasant in it's associations. Why would I want a bigger office thats like a giant dinosaur that messes stuff up? Officezilla sounds more to me like the way a therapist would label the kafkaesque reoccurring nightmares of a middle manager who wants to quit and live by a lake and paint, but whose soul is being consumed by recurring office work that takes all his energy in the same hopeless, pointless ritual he lives over and over again, the only change day to day being the slowly and constantly mounting frustration, then an inviting place I want to go each day to try and make something creative.

The way it works isn't does it pass a few tests. There is no set of rules such that meeting the rules is a necessary and sufficient condition for the name not sucking. The way it works is, consider the totality. Does it suck or not. This name sucks. Really strongly.
Why do I have to download anything to participate in this? Haven't we moved past that yet?
Ask HN: Stats/Monitoring Sites you admire
I'm in the development phase for a web app that will track statistics for a website (traffic over time, etc. - no, its not a GA clone).

What sites do you admire in terms of layout, usability, usefulness, etc.? I particularly like clicky and mint interfaces, but I'd like to know of others. Don't feel limited to stats-heavy representations - if you've seen something you like, tell me!

Thanks to the HN community.
AVG is an antivirus. When users install it, they give it full privileges. A program like AVG Antivirus runs on many computers. Ofcourse this gives AVG enormous power to affect ad market, not only will CTRs go down, but also if AVG is corrupt, they can make auto clickers or have rival's ad income down by a great extent, or eat up adsense impressions of rivals.
I wonder why didn't anyone think before implementing this.
Rich Long Tail, Poor Long Tail
Last.fm Released New Public API That Allows Deeper Integration With the Last.fm platform
I can't vote for China's leaders, but I'm all in favor of pressure where applicable. And I do support nuclear power as at least part of the solution.

So do I pass your anti-communist filter (seize control of the means of production, indeed -- you sound like Joe McCarthy)? Do you believe I'm not just trying to take your stuff? And, yet, I believe strongly that this is a problem worth fixing.

And frankly I don't know what you're talking about with that "global cooling doom" nonsense. I think maybe you're confused with nuclear winter, which was a notion from about the same time.
It's all about audience.

Wiki's work for techy people. Most CEO's and other management types don't even know what a wiki is, let alone use them for anything meaningful.

Besides, you can read a word report on the plane, or over dinner, or while waiting for your next meeting. This is upper management's environment. Cater to that.
I know you didn't mean to imply to opposite, but you did. Someone who's so busy wouldn't have time for obsessing. As you said.
All these people seem to admire PG, but the way to emulate him is to stop trying to emulate someone else so strongly, stop trying to create an identity by taking giant pieces from people you admire, and take the risk of digging into discovering this stuff for yourself. The path PG tread is now tired and stale. What made PG good was that path he made. But there should be more cognitive dissonance between admiring him as a trailblazer and worshiping him incessantly while trying to emulate the same path he walked.

I like PG too. Don't get me wrong. I like reading his stuff. But this fanboy shit depresses me.
>My goal is to be completely anonymous because I find it almost impossible to get any coding done when I'm the goto guy with people needing my attention all day long.

I think you're missing the point here. Assuming you want to get promoted to something beyond coder, you'll need to be something more than a coder. Assuming you are perfectly happy doing what you are already doing, there's no real reason to be worried about advancing your career at all.
predicating my life on these hucksterish immortality wishes would rob it of all meaning while I'm alive, and then I'd still be dead.
Ask HN: Carbon neutrality for a startup?
I've been seeing more and more companies becoming carbon neutral these days (Dreamhost is a popular example, and Rackspace offers a "green" server configuration as well as of this past January). After watching Al Gore's TED talk covering 15 ways of reducing your personal footprint, I started to look into companies selling carbon offsets.

My question for Hacker News is, how would you assess the footprint of a startup so as to be "green from the get-go"? What I can think of is:

- Personal carbon use (house, transportation), since we don't have an office yet
- Servers (our host isn't green to my knowledge)
- Additional services such as Amazon S3 and EC2

How would you go about calculating a carbon footprint for such a scenario? Also, do you think there is a real promotional advantage to being green?
does anyone care about the poor captcha system on http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/ ?
I gotta add something to this. Bill Gates is also not evil. I reread this and it sounds like I think he's evil. No. Not at all. The system is evil, but not Gates himself. He's doing a lot of awesome work right now. The world needs him.

But microsoft does mostly evil and is mostly the suck.
If tomorrow you come up with a catchy term for a concept that captures the imagination of the business media market and then write a bestseller around that concept -- I guarantee you will still be "pimping" it 4 years from now.
Pretty neat stuff!!!
China is well on their way to becoming an American-like consumer and polluter. I'm not sure what we can realistically do about it since modern lifestyle is correlated with energy use (e.g. climate-controller rooms a.k.a. AC)

"The best way to understand Beijing's size is to visualize what Manhattan might be like without the Hudson and East Rivers. Beijing just keeps going. Manhattan is almost 23 square miles. Beijing is more than 150!...
Given the size, you can probably imagine the traffic. It's like Los Angeles without interstates, at rush hour, in the rain. It's impossible to get anywhere quickly. I was warned before my trip that traffic would be worse than anything I'd ever seen, and it was. One evening, it took our crew nearly two hours to go about eight miles...
Had the Olympics been held last August, the air quality in Beijing would have been in violation of the World Health Organization standard every single day..."

http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=3453777
Interesting book. I just briefly skimmed the TOC, and jumped to this page: http://awurl.com/ajzgvj114896

Notice the yellow highlight:

Using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as
Visual Studio (commercial), NetBeans (free, for Java),
IDEA (for Java, commercial, free education licenses may
be available), or Eclipse (free, works with multiple
programming languages) is a must for today's software
projects.

Why?

Today's IDEs are loaded with features (and some of them
are actually useful!). Keep looking for smart ways to use
your IDE - a good start is to learn the keyboard
shortcuts for frequently used features.

This is actually why I can't stand the available IDEs. They are too loaded with features I don't give a rat's ass about, they steal screen real-estate. Some of the "useful" features no doubt include things like intellisense, which help a newbie get up and running faster, but ultimately can be a huge hinderance in learning and API. Once you've learned the keyboard shortcuts for the features you do care about, all you've learned is a half-assed re-implementation of Emacs or Vim that can only use a maximum of 80% of your screen.

Interestingly, the quote at the top of the page (blue highlight): Tools amplify your talent

If your talent is managing project directory structure, clicking buttons with your mouse, and setting project properties, then by all means, use one of these IDEs.

This was merely an excerpt that I happened upon by chance, but if the book is just page after page of telling me that his "religious" choices comprise the Right Way, then I'll pass.
Fios might hit 20% penetration across the US in five years but it's only going to slow down after that. Today it's only in 16 states and Although the network already reaches 10 million homes and business, it will reach more than 18 million by 2010. so it's growth in availability is good but not all that extreme. And a lot of people who could use the service don't. Personally I would go with FIOS but I am dumping my 20Mb Comcast connection for 3Mb DSL because they keep messing with my line.

PS: Once they started to send RST packets on non BT traffic I decided to jump ship so that BR movie is going to be 37hours for me.

EDIT: I only point this out because if your business model assumes most people will have 20MBit connections in 5-10 years you’re going to be sadly mistaken.
And what about Bill, down the hall from those three, who only offers his best price when he charges his customers for every computer they sell whether it comes with Bill's product or his competitor's? (I.e., RTFA.)

You do understand how this abuses a monopoly position, don't you? I have a feeling this subject hits a libertarian-crank nerve, though.
That's exactly what we're trying to achieve.

It's where individuals speak and companies listen. Helping to create an ongoing conversation between companies, groups, Nonprofits and their customers who are individuals or employees is our goal. If we can improve the experiences we have with the things we interact with on a daily basis doesn't that support a better quality of life as well?
>If you live in North America then there is a shortage of Wii's because the dollar is weak and Nintendo can make more money in Europe.

North America != USA. In Canada, not only is our dollar not weak, we have plenty of Wiis to go around.
A million lines of Lisp
I understand the use of closures for data hiding, but why is it news that a cute trick can get you access to the private members? If you dump whatever a C++ object ptr is pointing to, you'll see its privates too.

I just don't see it as anything to be raising a fuss over.
I sometimes joke with my diabetic friend that if we lived in the Middle Ages we'd be sent into the fields to farm and we'd die pretty quickly (weak, not able to produce) but this story gives me pause.
Clearly a sign from the Lord to test our faith.
Did I not say this 3 days ago (on a less scientific note)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227331 ?
We like Clicky.
Funny math: Angry Napster shareholders point to last.fm, not balance sheet, to determine valuation
And frankly I don't know what you're talking about with that "global cooling doom" nonsense

Welcome to the internets, an exciting place for you to learn.

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

The data quickly contradicted the global cooling predictions, as will happen again--perhaps. Of course, such contradictions are never a problem for people with an overriding political purpose. Instead of one crisis, they are happy enough to take the opposite crisis. Whether they have to switch again anytime soon is to be seen. Global temperature trends are sometimes quick and sometimes long.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/02/11/a-200...

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/loehle_fig3.JPG

99.999 percent of temperature swings occurred before the industrial age. Occam's razor again suggests that we should not blow trillions (yes, trillions) of dollars on anti-production boondoggles.
$200-300 for creating the next Facebook or "build in the Cloud" whatever that means. This sounds spammy to me.
Connecting with people is an incredibly powerful thing. If you can inject meaning into the hearts of the able, you have the power to do good.

You may discover, however, after going out and dancing Salsa and enjoying life in that way, that you can come back to technology refreshed and renewed and ambitious. I've seen this time and time again.
In Mexico, where Wiis sell for MXN $4999 (roughly USD $486), they're rarely out of stock. New and/or popular game titles retail for nearly MXN $800 a pop.

(Getting the game you want can be difficult at times, though. Maybe because high prices lead to low turnover which in turn necessitates low inventories. Maybe due to other endemic inefficiencies.)
Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
Production JavaScript Debugging
It's not necessarily dismissing them. Face it, some people are mediocre and unambitious. It doesn't say anything about what kind of people they are, but it says something about how they are intellectually and how pleasant working with them will be.
Yahoo re-org: A view from the ranks
Another question I didn't include in the original post but is also important: Are the carbon certificate issuers worth trusting? I'd definitely want to do some research on any company I potentially invested money into for something like this.

I wonder if there's a site where you can rate or talk about these companies, so the bad ones can be outed to the public... :)
From Investing in Modular Innovation to Google "magic"
Yes it is, with a dash of ADO/ COM/ ASP/ OLE. I used to lurk in there for some time, and the forum seemed to be populated mostly by one-man micro-ISV's trying to sell shrink-wrapped Windows software packages.
Watch out, Zuck's gonna steal their spot!
Don't forget people also lie.
Why does Google adsense have an invalid https certificate? (looks SCARY in Firefox 3)
Well, Fast Company magazine just had an article about American Apparel's failed attempt at ethical marketing. That isn't quite the same as "green" marketing, but I think it's parallel. They chose to market a sexy young image with ethics as a subtitle:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/sex-vs-ethics.html
Try it with www.google.com instead of just google.com.
I saw an incredible presentation on this at the MIT monthly Lisp meeting by the ex-OLPC security guy and BitFrost architect Ivan Krstic. Fascinating idea, and something that made me really want to explore the uses of JavaScript in terms of security.

It also made me wonder about the feasibility of implementing a capabilities system in CLisp or Scheme. So many ideas, so little time...

The spec is great reading, too [PDF]: http://google-caja.googlecode.com/files/caja-spec-2008-06-07...
I have been all over the map (literally), but most of my work has been in finance. I agree that your sentiment is the prevailing wisdom, I just have never found it to be particularly true. It is perhaps counter intuitive but in my experience showing gratitude and humility has lead to an extremely happy existence and a constant stream of bonus money and tickets to the company's suite at Fenway.
Joe Bob says: check out Radix/Crit-Bit/Patricia Trees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_tree
Hey Startups, Amazon Gets It
Not everyone likes GoDaddy, but its founder, Bob Parsons is a two-time startup success story who didn't attend an Ivy League school or Stanford. He built technical companies outside of Silicon Valley (the current one is in Arizona) with (from what I understand) no Angel or VC money.
> promoted to something beyond coder

Many of the organizations that I have worked for have management and technical tracks that lead up the presidency. Organizations with a lot of money on the line are more than happy to provide advancing career paths to people that keep things working. I'm absolutely estatic doing what I am doing, thank you, but I never object to another superlative being added to my job title or another increase in my income.
Which is the classic mistake, "Selling features instead of benefits" or "Selling features when you should be selling benefits?" Honestly, trying to sum it up with only the two words "feature" and "benefit" is an enormous mistake as well.

Feature: My software uses closures. (Who cares?)

Benefit: My software will save you tons of money. (Bullshit, show me how.)
So if you continue what you're doing, you'll blow through all your cash in a year seeing "if the idea has legs." Consulting would pay you cash. That cash would allow you more time to test the viability of your product, wouldn't it? I'm assuming you are more interested in your baby long-term. I see win/win with consulting. If you take equity, it will likely be 2+ years before you see anything substantial whereas consulting can have a deep impact to your current business.

I don't know though - I guess it depends on how much equity, how big their market is, when you vest, and how much trust you have. I lean towards consulting because it allows you longer to work your deal.
Nice list. Except that I think he missed one.

I would call it, "Looking out for #1."

You can do everything on his list perfectly and then, when review time comes around, you'll get the standard 4% because "that's the corporate limit right now". To which I would respond, "Then it sounds like you'll have to promote me in order to pay me what I require without violating any corporate mandates."

The same thing applies to customers. If a customer says, "$10,000 is too much; I'll pay $8000," I'll say, "Fine. Which 20% of the project shall we eliminate." I never compromise quality and I never compromise my rates.

Don't ever bluff. Save that for the poker table. But always always remember:

No one will ever look out for you as well as you can for yourself.

Violate this rule and you might as well just bend over.

Follow it and save yourself a lot of stress, money, and reputation.
A buddy of mine built this by himself: http://www.statsinsight.com/
No kidding. They also wouldn't say what the company name was. I flagged it.
I didn't mod you either way, but a statement such as this

"He may or may not have done a few questionable things, but what business hasn't? "

is stunningly vapid in equating all things "questionable".

Some things really are better or worse than other things, and some companies really do behave better or worse than others.
I don't think people are paying that much attention to you...

Try phrasing it like, "I said something similar 3 days ago. Perhaps you'll find it relevant."
Exactly.

For some reason, Google has SSL certs for www.google.com, and tries to use that cert for google.com connections too.
You seem to be talking about something different than the skiplists and their effects on the cache. Unless you're building the actual chipsets, you don't get really any say in the amount and style of caching that your skiplist code is running on.

Skiplists end up with a ton of pointer chasing and hence dramatically increase the pressure on the memory cache. There's no real, profitable way around that fact.

You might want to look at the non-block hashtable work that I pointed to previously for a lot of information (and the actual code (in Java) is up on SF.net so you can actually try it out for yourself).
Yes that is the case to which I am referring. I am often working with multi-terabyte datasets.
Have A Plan
Everex (makers of the Cloudbook) "mostly" acquired by NewMarket
linux+fluxbox and you are ok. I recommend Fluxbuntu as a good example it beats xubuntu and its really beautiful(xubuntu is ugly in comparison). Its a very slim OS i really like it, but i use Kubuntu on my machine, its powerful enough to handle KDE and i love KDE, but on my other pc i have a fluxbuntu installation.
More to the point, people who are unambitious are mostly harmless. It's their right to be unambitious. It's those who start trying to persuade ambitious people that their ambitions will fail that are annoying.
OR the CO2 is released as a result of warming, and greenhouse gasses aren't that effective anyway...

I assume you watched "The great global warming swindle" ?

Pretty compelling IMHO.
Ben Franklin's autobiography is the best. He was a world class genius, a reasonably-effective political animal (the American revolution happened when it did in part because the English pissed him off), and the old goat admits to having/liking sex.
Bill Gates: top ten greatest hits (and misses) - the Microsoft years
Hmm, I don't know if I would call Windows CE one of their bigger successes.
If you don't know how the product will benefit the user, then what is the point of the product to begin with?

If you don't know how the product will benefit the user, it means either the product is worthless and you shouldn't be selling it, or it means that you don't know everything the product could be used for.

It's the difference between, "This music player efficiently handles large music collections", and, "Only 10 songs are kept in memory at once, and indexing is done so that searches over the entire collection can be performed in constant time."

My point is you need to identify your audience and know which to use. Even for your seemingly obvious example, it's possible there might be a user that actually does care about only 10 songs being in memory at once (and the impact that would cause to his particular needs), and may be suspicious if you try to say "oh yeah it efficiently handles large music collections."

The result is that sometimes people have evolved bullshit detectors and when you try to sell things in terms that aren't precise enough they may assume you are a waste of time.
Oregon Petition , anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_petition
http://www.amazon.com/Deniers-Renowned-Scientists-Political-...
Ruby project patches serious flaws
Couldn't tell you... I can't get to the article.
Glad to see this. If more platforms like, say, wordpress.com, allowed Caja, we'd see a lot more secure widgets out there.
environmental hoopla.

I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude.
You make some good points, but I think they are a good argument for having a "technical description" (or something like that) page for those who might be interested. I still think that the description everyone sees should focus on the benefits to the user, because that's what the average user cares about.

...or it means that you don't know everything the product could be used for.

Even for such an open-ended product, I would still say, "We developed this to solve X, but it offers other possibilities as well (link to feedback from users who have found other uses). Thanks to its extensibility, new functionality is being added all the time (link to top plugins)."

All I'm really saying is that I agree with the author that it's worthwhile to re-frame the product description in terms that will immediately tell the average user that your product is worth their time or money.
I agree that sucks, but the laws wouldn't likely be there if people hadn't pushed those boundaries to begin with. I'm sure people were quite happy in the pre- Sarbanes-Oxley US but Enron went ahead and screwed that up for everyone.
Miller is awesome. Just finished Tropic of Cancer -- Couldn't recommend it more.