skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FYI.

I'm meeting up with the Python folks at the Denny's in Addison off of Belt Line tonight @ 7.

I'd still like to get together and talk for a spell.

I think the last time we exchanged e-mails was back in April.

I'll shoot ya another e-mail.
It is your $40 billion, however...when you see huge green lawns in deserts like central CA or Phoenix you should also see the enormous subsidies that are being handed out. If those that lived in deserts paid the real cost of water (not the public-monopoly regulated price), I suspect there would be a LOT fewer lawns. The same argument applies to the suburban sprawl: if those that decide to live 50 miles from the city center had to pay the real cost of building 6 lane highways to their "communities," few track houses would be built. Instead, an entire state or country splits the bill for roads and we get inefficient land use. // end rant;
Awesome! Looking forward for the development on Firebug to ramp up.
You sure you don't mean comments?
Mapping Processes for Startups: Monetization
What about lame people as the most common reason for failure (who also build lame products, with lame execution) ?
I turn 38 in two days, and I also fear 38 may be too old.

So I'm starting a company today. Or maybe I'll do it tomorrow.

But definitely before I'm all spent at age 38.
Sprint didn't like something I guess.

"UPDATE: We were asked by Jake to remove the article as it was published. We complied with his request as we are not the type of people to put others into sticky situations over a tech blog. Jake advised that he would work with us down the road, but as of right now, the original article has been retracted. We hope you guys understand and appreciate our compliance"
http://androidguys.com/2008/07/14/talking-android-with-sprin...
Has anyone considered that this is a massive privacy issue?

Imagine an advertiser detecting which sites you've been to, and serving different ads based on what it finds.

Edit: the author of the script thought of it: http://azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/ and it's bugzilla 147777 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777
It is a great book. But the investment advice can be summed up as: "Put $ in T-Bills".
Got the same message. Looks like something's going wrong on PayPal's backend... the link from the site looks pretty standard to me.
I have 867 karma and can't downvote stories. At some point there were talks of letting the top X downvote stories but I don't think it's been done.
If reading SICP or K&R doesn't fire you up to write code, reading, say the Armstrong erlang book or the haskell books (intros by Hutton, Hudak,) won't do it. I think most of these languages, you can look in delicious and see everything that's been tagged on erlang, haskell, scala, factor, whatever, in the last week, what they're being used for, gauge quality/depth of toolset (emacs/textmate support, debuggers, unit test/BDD, profilers, etc), get ideas there.

great thread BTW , mazeltov
You know, in the distant past people had devices which converted them into steak too.
How about $5? Price of a beer, or a thing in a cup from Starbucks.
Thanks for your thoughts - the various incompatible config file formats is something I've been pondering over for some time, and it's interesting to hear the thoughts of someone with experience.

I wonder about suggesting a common format capable of storing most config file structures as an RFC, then patching those apps to optionally use the format. If you could get Samba, BIND and Postfix the rest could follow...
Apple may report a record 2.5 million Macs sold last quarter
There is some good to Rich Dad. For example:

- the explanation of how the rich earn passive income by acquiring assets rather than making a direct trade of time for money. It may seem obvious if you know it, but it's a basic and powerful concept.

- he recommends learning to read balance sheets and becoming financially literate which is, again, basic but important

- his advice to consider the importance of taxes and learn to structure your income to where you pay taxes but no more than you have to.

A lot of it's pretty obvious advice, but there is one thing he does well which is to motivate people to take control and become interested in learning to improve their financial situation. I think that generally outweighs the "bad" and "dangerous" advice in the book.

There are better books out there, but I think that the (unfortunately named) Rich Dad series takes more flak than it deserves.
Searching a Ruby on Rails application with Sphinx and Ultrasphinx
Problem is that if you're a newbie, and these books are targetd at them, you have no way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff. So the book as a whole is simply not suitable for those that it was meant for.
Why this? If you have developed and app as a part of a webapp business, learn a lot about deployment on rails. It's not hard, and is a must.
Yeah, but be careful, most index funds have gone down recently, suffering equity losses in the 10-15% range for the last year, before inflation. Just take a look at the Vanguard funds [1], which have one of the best reputations though. Of course, index funds simply followed the market downwards. Long term, they're still a great, trouble-free investment.

I would also consider buying Berkshire Hathaway stock. Expensive, B-series at about 4K, but worth it, again, long term. Slightly better returns too.

Even better, do not listen to me (IANA financier), but read Phill Greenspan's excellent investing advice [2].

[1] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/FundsIndexOnly
[2] http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money
I want to point out this: the costs of startups has dropped considerably, while investors are being tighter with their money. It's sort of a catch22, but I have to throw this "advice" out with the rest because there isn't a single reason for WHY I should actually follow it.

Bootstrapping isn't easy, the definition of the name simply implies it, and these kinds of posts are sort of reminding me why, even in the beginning I kind of doubt 37s. Getting Real appears to me a bunch of quotes with "I agree" type paragraphs after it. Can ANYONE here tell me why I shouldn't take money if it's given to me and focus on growing my ideas instead of doing it and taking the results afterwards with a proverbial "grain of salt"?
The key to banning is to not notify people who have been banned. You just let them post stuff, but nobody sees it except the poster. Another approach is to make the site seem broken to the banned user. For example, when Arrington's sock puppets try to log in, just throw up a fail whale. Should also make for amusing commentary on Tech Crunch. "IS PG THE NEW BLAINE COOK???" etc.
Hector Ruiz out at AMD, Dirk Meyer new CEO
The good thing about the internet is the older you get the better. I bet you when I am 105 I'll be running another startup, while doctors, lawyers or teachers won't even be able to walk to their workplaces. All I will need is an input device attached to my weelchair. No kidding folks.
I"m a YC start-up founder @ 39. I thought I was going to be the oldest, but there was another in the same cycle that had me beat by four months.

It's not a matter of age, it's just a matter of managing commitments.
You're definitely not too old -- I'm 36, and my co-founder is in his forties.

Possible drawbacks to older founders include:
- may not be able to work for free (or nearly so) for as long a time, because they have families to support (or have simply grown accustomed to a higher standard of living than ramen and crashing on someone's couch).
- may not be able to work for as many hours per week, again because of families, accustomed comfort, etc.

On the positive side, older founders are:
- more likely to have the business and professional relationships that will facilitate customer sales and/or investor deals.
- may be able to work more efficiently and effectively, because of the things they have learned (technology, management, specific domains, business, etc).

There might be some business plans that can best be executed by college-age folks, but there are others that are best executed by someone older -- figure out how to make your idea work for you, and go for it!
As I read it I thought it was just a fake, as he wasn't adding anything which was not already known.

His email address was finally the point where I thought - well why didn't he provide his offically Sprint/Nextel address: jorion@kc.rr.com

If you have questions write to: danielh@android.google.fake.cn
HN should ban this kind of FUD.
After you've read a few books that were recommended here, but before putting down any real money, be sure to pick up a copy of Taleb's "Fooled By Randomness" to make sure you have a healthy amount of skepticism.
my favorites: http://www.uglychart.com/?page_id=1534
It would be nice if the HN feed included the short description -- I find that titles are often too brief to evaluate whether or not it's worth clicking through. Additionally, a comment count would be welcomed.

Including a rating, or including a dynamic feed for a particular rating would be icing on the cake.

fwiw, i'm a happy google reader user -- 158 subscriptions. The only downside is that it's my go-to procrastination website. I read just about all RSS content, and click through about 10-20% of the time depending on the feed. If I find that I clear the unread on a feed more than once or twice, I'll usually unsubscribe (because obviously I don't have the time to keep up with it). Sometimes I use feeds as a glorified bookmark.
Google Reader for all feeds except slashdot, digg, reddit and HN which I visit directly in my browser.
As a fellow Digg->Reddit->here refugee, I think we're the problem. Judging by the fact that you didn't defect from Reddit sooner, it can be reasoned that you enjoy a dash of offbeat humor, politics, and funny pictures with your programming (and in this case entrepreneurial) articles and news. In other words, you're like me, and the rest of the early majority.

We go from social news site to social news site, dragging down article quality with our penchant for less-than-total fact saturation and off-topic posts.

The only responsible thing is to get your hacker news here, and your funny pictures elsewhere. Refrain from contributing posts or articles and let the people that make this site great continue to make it great.

Wait, crap. Except for this post and that post.
That's the point. It's far easier to simply tack on more code to special case something than it is to come up with a simple solution that will gracefully handle all input.

To take your example of the Windows scheduler, I would expect that the reason that they made it special-case the foreground app instead of coming up with a more generic, algorithm with better interactive performance was because it would have required more hard thinking. (Of course, I can't say this for sure without seeing their code)

This is also the same reason that a beginner's code will be so convoluted. They try to handle everything through adding more complexity in special cases, instead of stopping and thinking about how to orthogonalize the code, making a simpler algorithm.

The same argument applies to UIs -- its far easier to add an option than to make a tool more generically useful. It would be far easier for google to add textfields to their UI for specifying the sort of searches you want to do more clearly than it would be for them to improve their pagerank algorithms.

Things need to be as simple as possible, but no simpler, and simplicity is usually far harder to achieve than complexity for a given problem.
Guns, gold, can food, and liquor - if you listen to the internet doomsayers. I'm thinking of setting up an ETF.
Annotations on ANSI Common Lisp
Yegge: How to ignore marketing & become irrelevant in 2 easy steps [mp3 11Mb]
44 when I co-founded digg. Go for it.
Throw Out Your 5 Year Plan, but Keep Your Investors
(off-topic)

The link posted points to http://72.14.20.104/... but here on news.ycombinator.com I see the title "Banned Interview With Sprint’s Android Manager (104.205.14.72)"

The IP is "inverted" for some reason. Is this a bug, or am I missing something?
That page seems to be entirely one author's (Jared Diamond) twist on the original phrase. There's nothing wrong with turning a phrase around - it's akin to irony.
Getting into IT? - Get into Usability
Who made you the arbiter of taste and decorum on this board? This is a user-driven website; what is popular is what we want to be popular. Of course PG can do things like block Valleywag but if he gets too cavalier about it the users will go elsewhere.
rss2email -- rocks for blogs where you don't want to miss a single post (friends and other high S/N feeds)

In general thought, most news actually isn't news. It's just data and we need to model what we actually care about, and then monitor for that.

E.g. I don't really care that there's a war in Darfur, I care that the world has more armed conflicts now than last year. So write a script to keep track of them (scrape wikipedia) and when the number goes up, email yourself to write a check to UNHCR.
Google Doc template for 10/20/30 rule pitches from Guy Kawasaki
Forget Pressflip, I want Uncov back!
My Top 10 Worst Business Ideas
I want to make a reinventing the wheel regarding anyone who makes a template for a Google Docs Presentation, but I just did.
it sucks and how Uncov was stupid
i guess the opposite of the 'aha' moment is a 'ha?!' moment
The price quoted sounds high even for the USA.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Bone-Marrow-Transplant-Costs---For...

says it can be done much cheaper in India.

This is not leading-edge medicine today (it was perhaps 10 years ago). But medical centers still try to charge leading-edge prices.

Yet another reason we need a national health care in the USA - to get doctors out of their Mercedes, off the golf courses and back into medicine for medicine's sake.
I wonder who will buy the handheld graphics divison. Any ideas? Current competitors in the handheld divison are imagination technologies and nvidia and neither will probably buy the Imageon divison. Perhaps qualcomm might buy them given that qualcomm is using Imageon in its own SoC?
"conned out of" was perhaps too extreme an expression, I should have researched this before rushing to register those domains.
I think I'd sound more like a "huh!?" moment. Close though.
Hey that's my site!

A while back I made pageonetimes.com, which was sort of a reddit for sports. I found out that it is hard to get people to submit sports stories. So I redid it as a Drudge Report for sports news.

Behind the scenes, the site checks ~100 sports feeds, and using classifier.arc and some other things, puts it into a league and judges the story for interestingness. Interesting and timely sports stories are put on the page, sorted by league (or by topic if the topic overwhelms the league, e.g. the Brett Favre unretirement or A-Rod divorce stories).
Yeah, it's a pretty massive privacy issue, but at least I would hope people wouldn't do it and expect to get away with it.
I think that he was referring more to Window's eventual commercial demise, rather than its technological inferiority.
These were great!

I think we all have a notebook full of these.
I don't really see a difference. No one seems to mind that ".tv" stands for Tuvalu and not Television.
Just out of curiosity I've made a bug-to-bug translation of original Ruby version of the Y Combinator function from the submitted link to Python language.

In Ruby http://is.gd/gdJ :

y = proc { |generator|
proc { |x|
proc { |*args|
generator.call(x.call(x)).call(*args)
}
}.call(proc { |x|
proc { |*args|
generator.call(x.call(x)).call(*args)
}
})
}

In Python:

# Y = λf·(λx·f (x x)) (λx·f (x x))
y = lambda generator:\
(lambda x: lambda *args: generator(x(x))(*args))\
(lambda x: lambda *args: generator(x(x))(*args))

Example with factorial:

factorial_generator = lambda callback: lambda n: n*callback(n-1) if n > 1 else 1
factorial = y(factorial_generator)
n = 5
print "%d! = %d" % (n, factorial(5))
The page suggested that it was also used in statistics and ecology. I'd never heard of it before I Googled to make sure I had the quote right, so I'm basically taking Wikipidia's word for it (always a risky thing...)
Those techniques work to protect against bots and similar, but do little to help in the case of a real person.
Agreed. What was sad/amusing is that I had a similar idea to his #1. Like his #1, it was very original, very funny, and so outrageous that it just might work...It didn't though...As soon as I have a big success I promise to make my own top 10 list of worst ideas...Actually, I'll probably make it a top 20 as narrowing it down to 10 would be hard.
In my mind, a facebook app would be part of a wider strategy, such as integrating your external service into facebook to drive additional use of the core service. It didn't seem like many facebook apps on their own made that much sense, especially for VCs. I mean, they basically allow you to spread your ads across a small portion of facebook's site. As a business model for a couple dudes, fine, but as a model to throw millions of bucks on, not so sure there. Unless VCs were hoping facebook would acquire them, which it doesn't need to to benefit from them, so why would it?
I love the fail whale; I'm wearing a fail whale Tshirt right now.
Yeah, some of those gave me deja vu. I hadn't thought about the girls in the Ferrari though, I might pursue that one.
Im 25, my cofounder 42
I've been wondering lately why lawyers and politicians write in the indecipherable manner that they do. Is it really that difficult to write unambiguously in English, or are they just doing it for job security?
This exchange made me laugh.
Calling what a startup has made a "feature" is just an empty insult. Google was just a feature, until it wasn't.
You're already 18 months older than you would have been had you gone for it when you first had the idea.
Online office apps get real: Google Docs vs. ThinkFree vs. Zoho
The main difference is very simple, yet effective: HN has a specific goal. It is not a place which will just flow with whatever is posted. Some things are allowed, and some things are not.

Hopefully, the choice of content will keep people interested in that kind of content, and remove those that don't. They already got reddit/digg/foobar for their stories.

Comments would take more time to moderate, if we think of users up/downvoting as a differential equation that slowly is moving towards the "intelligence of the masses". So in time, the level of comments will degrade. The way of keeping that from happening is, of course, to mercilessly kill bad comments and keep them out with overpowering ;)
"... Forget Pressflip, I want Uncov back! ..."

Got that covered with a new column at "The Register". You got to read a bit harder... it's to the RHS of the article near the about box ~ http://teddziuba.com/2008/07/announcing-my-new-column-at-th....
TechShop lets you use their shop equipment to fabricate anything.
Would it be possible or useful to create an X extension for higher lever (ie, toolkit) primitives for remoting? Ie, an app can send 'list box widget in GTK' to the display server?
A friend of mine actually was working on something similar for a year(may still be working on it, gotta check in with him).

It's funny, I thought it might work because of its originality. My opinion has changed now.
Yeah my bad, I'm talking about comments.
Either you didn't read the books, or I'm afraid you completely missed the point.

His investment advice is to invest most of your money (say 80%) in T-bills, and the rest in speculative investments (Taleb does it through derivatives). The rationale is that most of your cash is protected (short of a government default) albeit making modest returns. So you'll never spectacularly "blow up"... but you also have the upside exposure to good "black swan" events in your speculative investments.
The Neo has a 280 DPI screen?

That's awesome - I don't think I've ever seen a display that close to print quality. Its a pity the styling and software don't seem very consumer friendly.
Wait, is this real?
I would be pretty surprised if people weren't already doing this.
I will admit to having added incentive _because_ they were using PayPal. I know there are drawbacks, but I had funds readily available in PayPal.
WardsWiki
If I had money I would donate, I don't like PayPal and don't like using them unless I have to, they should setup alternate payment methods so people have a choice on which one they prefer to use.
Traffic actually grew last month. It went down at the beginning of the summer though.
Plus, as far as I can tell, you don't really get any of the benefits of EC2, i.e. easy scaling.

If you want simple scalable Rails deployment, check out Heroku.
I'm not sure why you are getting down-voted. I think some people find the idea of being poor inconceivable. Perhaps some people think that if you can post on the Internet, you should be giving money away.

In any case, I know from whence you are coming. I'm sure the family would appreciate your efforts regardless. Advertising for the cause is absolutely helpful, as most Hacker News posters should know.
Yeah it's calculated. I thought you were talking about comments. Or it was last time news.arc was released by PG

(= gravity* 1.4 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1)

(def frontpage-rank (s (o gravity gravity*))
(/ (- (realscore s) 1)
(expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity)))

http://github.com/nex3/arc/tree/master/news.arc
"So, as the Twitter's out there continue to have availability issues and the debate continues as to the scalability of Ruby on Rails, BIG-IP helps show that with a good design and infrastructure planning, big things are possible."

Uh... the bumper sticker app is simply an app that creates static images and then uses static asset servers to serve them up. Twitter aggregates data each time it displays a page. If you think that sticking your f5 BIG-IP product in-front-of twitter is going to make a lick of difference, you are beyond wrong.

You might want to read-up on software architecture before you compare apples to gorillas.
I really like the article about the Facebook ads; that website has a lot of good articles!
Amazon To Target $5.5 Billion Textbook Market With New Kindle?
i thought that it must be too good to be true when i snagged you.me (or so i thought-hehe)
Me too, permanently.

What techcrunch doesn't make clear is that this wasn't just some inter-registrar communication problem. Godaddy itself was selling the same domain names over and over and over for hours!
It would be interesting to find out. If any of the big players are doing it, there would be a huge backlash if they got caught for it.
Increases in guaranteed human rights must keep pace with technological and moral development.
Logged in or out, Facebook is watching you
Not if it's in hex :)
When I pressed "flip" to signify that I did not like the content, it bought me to a login box. I have decided that the content they gave me is not useful, and their response is to ask me to create an account with them?

This is the point where Uncov would have posted a 'FAIL' picture.
How did the first three go if you don't mind me asking ?
Like this?
http://www.gtk-server.org/
Another reason to use NoScript.
Sorry - couldn't make it tonight. Too short a notice for a guy with a family (it takes a couple days to coax the wife into letting me go)
Reuters Stock Buzz, Powered by SocialPicks
Saved to a text file. Thank you for taking the time!
Wow, that picture is really manipulative.
Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate
PressFlip, former Persai.com (remember uncov.com?), finally launches
And how would you handle personalization without an account?
Cool. I always thought YC aims for kids in early 20s - with the $5k/mo model etc.. Are your co-founders also in their 30s?
They show how they got the result.