skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Only if gas guzzlers are more profitable than efficient cars, which, granted, has been the case up until now. However, with so many companies trying to differentiate based on green credentials now, it seems likely that their high margin business will be in efficiency in the future.

So short answer: maybe.
I assume he went to school once.
I just check the site a lot.
If you cross the pond often, it's useful to remember the following:
x mpg * y l/100km = 240 (or more exactly 235 and change, but 240 has more divisors and is easier to manipulate).

Illustrated:

10 mpg = 24 l/100km

20 mpg = 12 l/100km

24 mpg = 10 l/100km

30 mpg = 8 l/100km

40 mpg = 6 l/100km

60 mph = 4 l/100km

Small cars in EU are i the 4-6 l/100km range, or between 40-60 mpg. Sedans are typically between 8-12 l/100km, or 20-30 mpg.

HTH
Let's talk about documentation
Nice. These photos are part of a larger set of design patterns (collected by Chris Messina et al), http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/collections/72157600...
and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/collections/

Thanks for finding this.
O'Reilly To Release DRM-free Ebooks In July
If you want to know the most important/useful areas in compiler research, go ask a compiler researcher. I'm not a compiler researcher.

Compilers are used on a daily basis for real work; protein structure prediction is not. For this reason alone, research into compilers is more useful.
A Plane Hacker
Omnisio - The Interview - Part 2
The problem is that "miles per gallon" gives you a false impression of your costs and the fuel savings you get by switching to a more or less fuel-efficient car.

This is likely not a problem that many U.S. citizens are aware that they have, though.
Lambda calculus is beautiful, but modern computers are not lambda machines.
They're a lot more aware of it than they were a year ago.
is hex(-1) still '-0x1' ?
Manufactured diamonds now indistinguishable from natural ones
Not having used such a tool, I'm not going to say that it's worth using. But my reddit-crippled attention span managed to sit through the 38-minute demo and actually find it interesting because it seems to match the way I THINK about a program. Programming, for me, is about translating a mental concept into a specific programming language - this looks a lot closer to directly capturing (drawing, really) my mental concept. I pretty much taught myself to program, but this is actually similar to how programming was taught to us in certain classes - using flowcharts and logic tables. It's supposed to be about the logic, not about the language. He drives that point home towards the end of the demo, where he shows three completely different representations of a program - nested if statements, switch statements, and classes with polymorphism - collapsing into the same representation.

That being said, I've always been wary of "visual" tools that promise the sky and the moon, and I think I would go nuts if I had to use the mouse like in the demo, but it definitely looks interesting.
This is the kind of rephrasing of concepts that's just so ingenious and makes you wonder why no one thought of it before. Props to the people behind the (so obvious, so effective) idea!
Uhmm, it's been used in the rest of the world (I can vouch for Europe) since forever? In the form of liters/100km.
Hierarchy of argumentation:  Calling someone an ass-hat is not an argument
Strange history of the "Utah War"
I was really surprised to see how little research is done in the CS fields until I realized something: the lines only show the quantity of citations going in and out across different fields.

They have bio and med listed separately when they're really closely tied - so they naturally have a huge amount of information exchange going on between the two, making for the seemingly-gargantuan research count/amonut for those areas.

In CS, on the other hand, the amount of research is huge (probably biggest of all since the barrier of entry is so low and isn't limited to people of that field alone); but it's mainly CS people citing other CS people's work(s). We effectively live in a bubble, albeit a very huge one. We interact and share with one another, but not that much with the rest of the industries - and we probably should, since there's a lot of ideas in cyberspace that can be mapped directly to real life.....
That reference clip is amazingly sad.
Padpaw Group Text API
Upmodded for

"I think the key in science is to do something that is interesting and pleasurable in both the long and short term."

I discovered that this (the hard way, after a decade buildng enterprise software) is true for software dev too. Now I do algorithm intensive work and there's more to do than I have time in this lifetime to do.
Padpaw, Inc. <http://padpaw.net>; is pleased to announce our Beta API for adding group text messaging to your web site or social network.The API is perfect for social networking sites that want to quickly add text messaging capabilities to their services without the long implementation of getting a short code, working with an aggregator, or getting a campaign approved.

Text messaging to groups can be challenging. While it's straight forward to send a single message to an individual from your web site, managing group communications are more complex. Padpaw is offering this capability which has been developed and tested with real live groups.

The text messaging service consists of a REST API to Padpaw's messaging server which allows for a quick integration. Individuals and companies wishing to use the API will need to register with Padpaw to obtain an API key. You can find out more information, including documentation at our web site:

<http://padpaw.net/api/>;

Future API releases will incorporate other Padpaw features such as event RSVP, sign-ups, and polls.

The service is in Beta and we're looking forward to you trying it and giving us your feedback. During our limited Beta program, you can use the messaging system to up to 200 messages. Pricing for our production version of the service will be announced later.
Ask YC: What Social network questions would you like to see answered?
Imagine you have complete information about the evolution of a relatively large (10^5-10^6 users) social network. Who connects to whom, when, and some basic information about each user.

What questions would like to see answered?

Which quantities do you think will be of most practical interest for the next few years?

Can you direct me to some standard (and not so standard) literature in this field?
Many things make Einstein more human. You should hear the story about his first wife, Mileva Maric. Quite a sad ordeal.
I use Safari for general browsing because it is fast and familiar. I use Firefox for web development because the add-ons and tools such as firebug and web developer toolbar can not be beat.
IMHO, the internet enabled us to discover the existence of the Long Tail and appreciate that it's there and is of huge potential, but is ill-suited (at least in its current format) for making use of the Long Tail. I had high hopes for "the semantic web" and unlocking the tail; but that - most unfortunately - amounted to nothing.
I'm a law geek as a secondary to my computer geekery, I'm thinking of ideas. :)
In my experience, you can only easily find tech books, which admittedly is usually what I want, but finding Gore Vidal was shockingly difficult (in this case, impossible).

Technical books that are out of copyright aren't likely of use. Books that are out of copyright by now are aaaaaaaancient.
It would actually have all the books a standard library would have.

Like Gore Vidal.
I'm not certain how I want to do it yet, as far as payment or lack thereof goes. I definitely want to provide for ebook readers.

Personally I do tons of reading on my (blurry :( ) CRT screen, so I've never had much issue with that.
My girlfriend bought one when the price fell also. She adores it. It's been practically glued to her hand for the past few weeks.
OK, then props to whoever is bringing this idea to the USA :)

That's like pointing out the Arabs invented algebra before the Europeans started using it, so the European mathematicians don't deserve any credit at all.

Props to these guys and the entire denizens of Europe, if that makes you feel more politically correct :)
I don't see the point. It seems as worthwhile as selling Mary Kay products, only with more maintenance.
Thanks guys, apparently this community isn't for me. The point system is just that, silly points. But I get a few bumps up from long thoughtful posts and a huge bump down for one bad one. The down votes are way out of proportion with the up votes.

The point system can discourage participation. I am a pro hacker like many here and also like many here I have very little time to contribute to boards like these. When I get so heavily down voted for something I felt was not that proportionally out of place or spammy then I wonder why I should bother to spend time here. I'm blacklisting this site from my browser.

Edit: One more thing to add. Voting is an anonymous comment, which is evil. Even worse, it is an anonymous comment with no text. People have nothing to risk in a vote. They are not putting their opinions and views out there for discussion. This is another reason I feel the vote system is flawed.
Brilliant. Now if only I could find out who tagged it as "Humor" on Delicious, because this is one of the most important & serious diagrams I've seen online in a long time....
looks like this is a common prob... I guess i need to migrate to jruby sooner than I thought
It's disappointing that stories like this get 50+ points. I fear the non-commenting population here is much dumber than the commenters.
lol. a point well made! (it's funny, but we DO NOT WANT it here). you should be at +9 not -9.
Montreal public bike system to use Web, RFID and solar technologies
If it wasn't for the programmer creating languages that make massive, fast computation accessible to the biochemist, there would be no Python for the biochemist to use to do their research. The programmer is just once removed from the "important to humanity" aspects.

And if it wasn't for the programmers who get excited about languages and pioneer different uses of them, the biochemist would most likely never even know there is this tool available for them to use.
Ask YC: Login system
I'm working on a startup involving lots of sub-$1 payments. Because of this, we pretty much need a valid e-mail address.

Our options are: A) Let the users create an account, type in an e-mail address, and we send them a verification link (I hate these)
B) Let them log in with a Google Account. They would actually be redirected to a Google.com page to log in, and Google would give us the e-mail address (we never have their password).

Personally I'd much rather do B as a user, but I can potentially see some confusion for users, especially if they don't have a Google account already. In theory we could allow both, but for launch we are only going to spend time on one. There's also a concern that some users would think it's a scam to get your Gmail password (even though it's entered on a Google.com site).

What do you think?
When was Steve Balmer an alpha male? Steve Jobs, sure, but Balmer? He's a big, fat, bald guy who has spent his whole career in Gates's shadow.

He's a very, very, very rich beta-male.
I've been moving from doing most of my server side work in PHP to doing as much as I can in Rhino. I'd have been more anxious about doing that if there hadn't been a clear path to openness for Java, and I'm glad to see it get there.
How do you do italics on Hacker News?
I'm getting a different error with x86_64, but probably not protected against other bugs:

(irb):3:in `[]=': failed to allocate memory (NoMemoryError)
from (irb):3:in `irb_binding'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/workspace.rb:52:in `irb_binding'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/workspace.rb:52
Why does 37Signals only have the luxury of working less? I'm sure when they were starting out (for their consulting business, not Basecamp) they had to work hard.

Maybe it doesn't feel like work so much when you really enjoy solving the problem that your software is addressing.
What about clickpass? Although that might be subject to trust issues too.

Most users are familiar with the verification concept, although still don't like it.

Can you explain why you need a valid email address to do payments?

Just allowing Google accounts limits your market somewhat, but if you are going for techies first, then you should be fine.
Is there a problem which can be solved in Lambda Calculus that cannot be solved in a Turing Machine?
The market is in an ongoing race to the bottom. With google pages & app engine, charging for basic hosting is becoming a losing proposition. The only place you can make money with hosting this days is by selling to power users; unfortunately you can't really do that without a large investment in hardware and connectivity.
sizeof(long) is different for you, and fixnum is 63(?) bits. Try 0x7fffffffffffffff.
That's very easy to say, but the reality is more complex.

Much of the attraction of Craigslist is the free posting. Not all the groups are commercial in nature, many are just discussion. Also, the Craigslist founders think of the site as a public service.

No convenient and reliable micropayments system yet exists. Cost per transaction on credit cards is far too high. Online games use private currencies; you buy a big chunk of currency and you draw on it for in-game transactions. That could work, and it kills spam dead, but the big upfront cost would make many users hesitate before posting. It's not like a game, where you can expect to play for hours at a time. I bet most Craigslist users post perhaps once or twice a year.

Extra screens for purchasing would also complicate the UI. Another deterrent to posting.

It's not clear to me that you could set a price which deters spammers but allows the good postings through. The economics are different from email spam. A spammer can flood a Craigslist group with just a few hundred messages, and then Craigslist will do the work of distributing it to millions.

Furthermore some Craigslist spammers are real local businesses that just post too frequently, or in improper places. Like a local car dealership flooding the used cars group. The dealership's expected return might be a few thousand dollars, and they may be perfectly willing to spend $20.

Maybe payments are part of the solution, but I don't think they can be the whole solution; at least not if Craigslist wants to be like it has been in the past.
"I'll do 160 mph at 32 mpg at 9500'or 10,500'... so clearly flying is cheaper than driving, and I don't have to stop and buy lunch!"

Brilliant. Why don't more people do this? (Aside from landing fees and weather etc, still very cool).
Actually I mostly use the Gnome document viewer (I don't recall its name), but it also pops up a new window.
At my sites I like allowing members to create accounts without email validation. To post anything, however -- or in your case, send or receive funds -- their email needs to be validated and I use a persistent message in the header to remind them of that.

I would personally never use your site if you required a Google account to log in.
Good point.

I can't believe I read his whole rant and there wasn't even a simple exploit test case in Ruby.
If you can manage the mind-numbing, 1990s flash interface, here's another project that did a similar analysis:

http://mapofscience.com/

Their site shows a similar, higher resolution map of science and maps it to a sphere. Pretty interesting.

Running a literature search, Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack published papers concerning science mapping between 2005-2006, so I imagine there was a good chance they were inspired by eigenfactor.
As everyone has pointed out, hosting is an extremely competitive space. We (Virtualmin) build tools for the industry, and the majority of our customers are providing hosting services in one form or another (though not all could be called "hosting providers"--many are web developers that host their clients sites as a value-add, and for their own convenience, since they can always install the software they need when they need it).

I would recommend you do a bit more research before building a basic hosting service. You'll be competing with people who charge a couple of bucks per month for service. It takes an awful lot of customers to make a living out of $2/month agreements (many of whom will disappear after the first month or two, so customer acquisition will be a constant struggle).

I would almost certainly recommend you aim for the high end of the market rather than the low. You can't do it with a cPanel plan from Hostgator, however. You'll need one or more dedicated servers with a good method of backing it up (either to S3 or to a file share at your hosting provider). From there, pick a niche that you love (Ruby on Rails, Python/Django, PHP with some framework or application, etc.) and build a really nice service based on providing the best possible user experience for deploying that kind of application. Or, focus on your local market, and build relationships with small businesses in your area. In either case, you can charge a premium for good service, and because you're offering a very focused set of features (either support for a complex set of tools, or a local personal touch, or something else) you won't be competing with every hosting provider in the world (of which there are thousands or tens of thousands depending on your definition of hosting provider).
James Gardner: "something is going to change radically with the internet in the next 2-5 years"
Google already working on Yahoo Messenger integration or has been for a while?
PG agrees: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
A Two-part Rule for Naming Your Startup
A Lambda machine can be implemented using a Turing machine, but not the other way around, which means, Lambda calculus is a subset. Correct me if I'm wrong.
There was just an article linked on HN the other day by some professor who pointed that out.

But the logic is pretty straightforward:

Most startups fail. Suppose startups that succeed have a return of x%.

Compare this to established firms, which rarely fail, and usually have positive returns, even though they're less than the returns of the 1 in 30 successful startup.

So overall, the investor would be better off investing in big firms -- this is why the SEC restricts investing in "high risk" startup firms to accredited investors only.

Of course, if you found a startup you surely don't expect it to fail (I know I don't). Investing in a startup (as in investor or founder or employee) has a greater chance of making you millions, and a greater chance of making you nothing, compared to an established firm. But on average, the returns from startups (when you include all those that fail) is worse than for bigger firms.

This is why successful VC firms are picky with who they invest in and why they focus on profitable exits even at the expense of a more sustainable long term strategy.

It's also why 37 Signals focuses on telling people to start a sustainable small business rather than a startup -- startups and the associated gabling psychology are often poor investments, and one doesn't necessarily want to forsake a nice small business in order to make a big gamble.
Originally posted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158060

Which points to the original blog post here:

http://blog.createdebate.com/2008/04/07/writing-strong-argum...
I'm particularly interested in how users use and interact with tags, but it's a really complicated topic....

I blogged about the need for a tagging standard in the past, and raised a number of questions & concerns therein.. a couple of commenters promised to share their findings if their social networks took off, but to no avail:

http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/the-need-for-creating-tag-stan...
Thank you, Paul Graham, for elaborating God's own -- er, your own -- Hierarchy Of Argumentation. Without it I would otherwise have passed this life unaware of the fact that "you are an ass hat" is a poorer argument than explicitly refuting one's opponent's central point. I can't show my appreciation enough for this.

I genuflect at your feet, sir.
My Experience at Interviews with Microsoft and Google
Ask YC: Any successful start-ups which outsourced their product development?
My personal experience tells me that product development is the last thing that a start-up should outsource. You don't outsource your core competency, and the core competency of a start-up is product development.

In fact, I've seen some start-ups fail quite badly after outsourcing their development (and, in my opinion, that was because they did so). By contrast, every start-up that succeeded spectacularly seems to have had some serious engineering talent involved right from the start.

However, to keep an open mind, I'd be interested to know whether anyone knows of successful start-ups (i.e.: made a good profit, and are reasonably well-known in their niche) which did successfully outsource their product development. It'd be particularly interested if there are any such start-ups which actually outsourced their development to a low-cost location like China or India, and still succeeded.

Thanks for any information on that matter!
I still can't wrap my head around celsius. Is 20 celsius hot? Is 25 hot? I'm not sure. I'd have to convert it to fahrenheit in order to get a feel.

Same thing. I know that 20 mpg is somewhat bad, 30 mpg is somewhat good. How about... 0.05 gallons per mile? I'd have to divide it first. This is the reason why grocery stores sometimes advertise prices at 4 dollars per 9 units, and similar. They know people can't work out that math instantly...
nope, they're turing equivalent. read up on the church-turing thesis.
I'm also confused about why you need a valid email address for the payments. A little clarification would be good.

I would recommend against the Google account login system, I prefer to try to keep some of my life secret from Google.

Have you considered openID?
I want to get info on trends to predict future behavior. What type of information makes teenagers and college students more susceptible to suicide? Could we predict that with complete social networking information?

Can we determine a person's cognitive capabilities by their trends and actions?

Can we predict future trends in markets and purchasing habits via a complete social network?

THAT is what I want to know.
In [1]: hex(-True)
Out[1]: '-0x1'
Sometimes, I just want to pass a function to a function. And sometimes, I want to just say, very concisely, "do this", without giving a name to "this".
Instead of writing Python 3000, they shoulda written another Haskell!!
"...you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously." -PG
Control the username/email and password and ensure that the password is very strong. We're talking about money here, so it's best that you control access as much as possible.
WTF? Why doesn't the new repr(1L) return "1L"? I thought the whole point of the repr custom was to output something that would regenerate the same object.

Are they going to abandon the 'Format %d:%s" % (n, s)' or just add PEP 3101? The % syntax is down-and-dirty practical good. PEP 3101 is neat, but printf() syntax is tough to beat.

OK, the first screenful or so scared me. The rest looks like clear-cut improvements.

So far, I've loved Python's balance between simple purity and down-and-dirty pragmatism. I sure hope they don't shift too far toward purity.
It can be worthwhile, but there are a couple of different types of hosting resale that you could consider, apart from web hosting. It may be more economical for you to rent a low-end dedicated server (Celeron etc) and a control panel license, and then resell service from there. However, Hostgator might provide an all-in-one solution for you to use (billing, automatic setup, etc), which may simplify the process.

I personally won't allow any money to ride on a machine to which I do not have root. :)