skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a need for an alternative e-commerce/web search and indexing service?
I'm one of the engineers here at Lightcrest - I have a question for the Y Combinator community. We feel that the current search options for developers, publishers, and store-owners are limited and lacking features. Google eCommerce search is expensive ($25k+/yr) and Google web search is limited in scope, dumps ads, and doesn't provide nice features like typeahead. Google also doesn't provide aggressive indexing - even their new indexing service can take up to 24 hours to index new content. Other services like websolr and indextank have some nice options, but they don't let you go from 0-60 very quickly - you need to code up solutions using client libraries before you can get started, and there is no advanced crawling capabilities. E-commerce search solutions should let you rank and promote items on the fly. And you should have access to this kind of functionality for less than $25k/yr.

Would you use an initially free, eventually pay-as-you-go service that is substantially cheaper than Google's to address the aforementioned needs?
Do you have office space in Austin, or are you really in Pflugerville? Your contact page only mentions College Station and Pflugerville.

Anyway, this was news to me - are there any other YC companies here in Austin? I thought I (and I'm just an employee of one) was alone. We should have beers. :)
The article says:

"The academic achievement gap between the admitted white and Asian students and those designated as "underrepresented minorities" is often huge, in statistical terms often exceeding a full standard deviation (equivalent to a 600 vs. a 700 on each of the sections of the SAT exam)."

Sounds like a significant degree to me. Should the OP pretend not to notice this is happening?

I know it doesn't cite sources, but neither do you.
When you open the lid of a MacBook mine have always been ready and running, there is no waiting for them to finish waking up like on Windows.
You could argue against affirmative action on the grounds that it is only about some nebulous notion of diversity.

But it is not --- or at least shouldn't be.

It should be about evaluating people's achievements relative to the opportunities presented to them. MIT, for example, prefers someone who is resilient and will change the world over someone who retook the SAT three times to get a 2400. You could argue about whether places like MIT evaluate these things correctly, but having been at MIT for 3.5 years, I've seen a lot of academically less prepared, but super driven students do astoundingly well.

On a side note, I've seen some of the other side as well. I went to a high school that has a 2% acceptance rate by exam only. It was 60% asian, and about 4% total black and latino. While I was around a lot of smart, motivated people, there were also a lot of smart slackers who couldn't or wouldn't thrive in that environment.
Good news. I have added a demo page, for those of you who do not wish to use openID to view the app. You can find it at http://7courses.com/demo/

Next up is a non openID user system. I was completely unaware that so many people were opposed to openID logins, but live and learn, I will make sure to support you in this app and any new apps I make.

After that, the feature list looks something like this:
1. Editing recipes.

2. Delete confirm.

3. Printing/PDF support.

4. Download/data portability.

5. Permalinks/Sharing ability.

Thanks again for all the great feedback.
> So, getting above 700 is not so tough; actually getting an 800 has to be partly a craps shoot.

Having just had a look at the Official SAT Practice Test
2010-11, I agree. There's no calculus or anything else at all difficult in the maths SAT so getting a perfect score is merely a matter of avoiding slipping up.

Actually I'm surprised Caltech or any other supposedly elite US university uses it as an entrance exam; it's simply far too easy a test to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Some Mac developers would argue that Mac development, being marginalized for so long, led to a distinct subculture with an emphasis on artistic values, community, and high production quality.

There's a quite lengthy study of this subculture called 'Indie Fever' (http://www.madebysofa.com/indiefever/), which is worth reading, although I'd argue the gold rush environment created by iOS and App Store has weakened this community quite a bit.

Unless you go to conferences, you now can most easily see the 'indie Mac developer' aesthetic reflected in snark, like Read The Fucking HIG (http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/).
He did not say that American universities peaked in the 1930s and '40s - he said they had reached world-class status. Later improvement relative to Europe was as much mostly due to Europe's self-destruction and brain drain.
Should you get an MBA?
Google URL Shortener API
If you live in Austin, your tax rate is around 2.3%. 3% is high for anywhere in Texas, I think.
The single biggest weakness (or gap) in our ability to provide amazing customer service is that a lot of people still use iTunes App Store reviews to communicate their issues but there is no way for us devs to contact those people to help them resolve it. Apple needs to fix this one-way channel.

This is very frustrating. I don't think users realize there is no way for developers to get back to them and so many questions go unanswered. In the end I wrote a script to pull all the reviews into my apps site so I can post comments there and I let the users know that in the app. Plus now it's also easy for me to send myself a notification for a new/updated review. Seams to be working so far as some users have come back and added comments.
Not placing the poll on HN will help a little... ;)

1.) Need a random sample
2.) Need large enough sample size

I guess placing the poll on another popular site (not in the same genre as HN, preferably) would help
Thanks! It was nice remembering the glory days.
Knowing that I can't do it all, I like to read about the rest.
One thing Sage needs to do is to make installation easier. Make a PPA for Ubuntu, a repo for RPM packages, and setups for Windows and OS X.

Then people will start talking more about Sage. It's a great package, but the road to getting it is bumpy.

For those who don't know what Sage is, think of it as an Open Source alternative to Wolfram Mathematica.

I also see comments about R. For me, the best way to code in R is to use RKWard. It's maybe the best frontend for R. Feel free to check it out..
It (obviously) depends whether I have a computer in front of me that day...
Parallel Programming book by Paul McKenney
>Words with Friends would make a fantastic Facebook app.

Arguably, it already did (cf. Scrabulous/Lexulous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexulous). I never played Scrabulous, so I don't know how similar it is to WWF, but since WWF is a play-alike clone of Scrabble (different tile loadouts and bonus square positions, but fundamentally the same game), I can't imagine it's that different.
not sure. part of the benefit of the use of client libraries is that I can make sure private data stays private - 'crawlable' content is going to make me have to format it in such a way as to make sense to the crawler, and deal with making sure it's not accessible.

do you have a way around that? or am I missing something?
I like this idea, and used to have a whole spectrum of color-coded terminals when I looked after dozens of boxes years ago at a large company. It proved to be very useful because although we did automate most activity on the machines (using cfengine + other tools) I still found myself logging in regularly to various machines and could often have many terminals on screen.

However... the color coding can be a bit misleading sometimes, particularly if you are chaining SSH sessions and the colors are being set on terminal launch (not on shell login). I was using PuTTY config settings for color on my company-mandated Windows machine and soon found the limitations of this when I logged in to machine A (green), then from there to machine B (red). The terminal was still green and some time later I trusted the color and ran a (destructive) command in the wrong shell. This reinforced to me that while useful, color is no substitute for thinking before typing, and double checking everything before performing destructive operations :-)
Not so with MongoDB. Let's please not blame all of NoSQL for MongoDB's bad design decisions.
This was exactly my point. Thus far we have not seen significant core inflation, hence why I said "QE1, QE Lite, and QE2 might not be there, yet." I later went on to suggest that additional rounds of QE probably will, however.

Please explain to me how agreeing with your fundamental observation, that QE2 has not yet sparked significant inflation, is financially illiterate.
Maybe it's time to start looking for better quests than "brush your teeth".
A bit more Twitter conversation here, for the curious:

http://bettween.com/jashkenas/mentalguy
Better response: more often than I should.
Axure is cool but it's pretty expensive. It's the only one I've used (and I only used the trial - yeah I don't wireframe all that much :). It was great but I'm going to try a few others before shelling out the dough for a license.
Could work well printed by mykea - http://www.thisismykea.com/ too. Is it easy to generate a larger resolution from a recording for printing?

I love generative art and this looks very polished - the sparkles are a nice touch!

As someone else mentioned, the flags are easy to miss on a wide screen, maybe vertically align them with the content column?
Analogies carry a lot of meaning, often subtle and hard to get across in a paragraph, let alone a line.

Who else would you explain it? PHP cloud hosting?

Peoples understanding of a thing is not always very high res. Take 'evolution by natural selection'. Some people understand the mechanics, consequences and how A leads to B quite well, some don't. People assciate all sorts of things outside of the mechanics with it: 'aha moment,' 'prototypical scientific theory,' 'gradual process,' 'controversy,' 'cornerstone theory,' etc. etc.

You can get at this fuzzy nebulae of meanings and associations via analogies: "Darwin of climate science," "Natural Selection of Geology," "Intelligent Design of Feminism."

A lot of people don't know exactly what Heroku is, they know it's getting a lot of buzz, have heard the praise, have heard customers staunchly defending the prices, etc. They might be inclined to check out a Heroku (or for example, app engine) for their language.
The application looks really neat, have you thought about making use of more of IndexTank's features such as scoring functions, faceting and autocomplete?
See: http://indextank.com/documentation/ruby-client#relevance-fun..., http://indextank.com/documentation/ruby-client#faceting and http://indextank.com/documentation/tutorial-autocomplete
Marginal Revolution: Explaining France, a reader request
Retreating from the cloud, and writing down appointments in the book, is the wrong solution, globally.

The convenience of being able to access the data everywhere is too huge to sacrifice; this is only going to become more important as people check their mail from their ever growing number of devices - smartphone, tablet, home+office PC, to start with.

Instead, we need to make the cloud storage secure.
Encrypted end to end services and protocols, federated encrypted services.

That is, if a sufficient number of users care enough about security to make security a differentiating feature. Previously, the vast majority of users haven't expressed a market preference for more secure services - maybe this will change when as people put more important information (critical business details) into the cloud.
I tend to use my karma as a proxy for whether I have replies to my comments. I figure if people are up-voting, then it was a worthwhile contribution, and they might be responding as well.
It's not the word gender that I'm referring to. It is the implication that in order to date, it would have to be with someone of the opposite sex.
I agree with you until your last sentence. Especially in upper division courses, the material is more complicated and problems that really test understanding are too ambitious for an exam. This means that if you want to see the student solve interesting problems, they have to complete problem sets or a project. (The corruption of the assignment system means that you're still stuck with exams until the students reach a certain point, though.)

Of course, my experience is only with math courses, and your mileage may vary.
Finding data races in the JS engine
I get the point you're trying to make but that's not exactly true. For every legacy candidate they admit, they must reject exactly 1 qualified candidate as a result.

For every candidate they accept in general, they must reject 8 others.
I don't see how HN 10 times a day could be considered time well spent. That's a LOT of interruptions.

[disclosure: I picked 5-10 times a day]
Or, for us northern folks that the winters are nice and mild. I guess it depends where you're coming from. Point taken.
A few apps have been using the exact same API (though it wasn't officially documented until now) for some time now.
Nvidia does not have a license to make chipsets, and it would be pointless if they did since chipsets are now boring.
Typical high traffic stuff. Expected traffic growth is a big number and we've already had availability problems. We're also consolidating all of the overseas deals onto the main platform, and that alone will double-ish our traffic. If you're good at or want to work on Big Huge Websites, this is a good place to be. There's also the problem of targeting based on preferences, deal performance, purchase history. Think personalized searxh results. The team in Palo Alto is doing a lot of that stuff.

Of course, we aren't spending the whole billion on technology. Lots of sales people will be hired :)
I'm curious how the app in the last five months not covered.
Good question. I was just about to tell a friend about it and this is the only post I can find.
"...such an introductory programming course has successfully been given to hundreds of college freshmen each year"

Anyone know whether this course material is available online?
It'd be cool to rig this to upload your facebook profile pic automatically everyday.
Not to mention 0% short and long term capital gains. That's another 10% over California, and it's where it counts.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 review
Ask HN: What are some other online communities?
I love Hacker News and will always be a user. But the community has a very narrow interest/belief set. I'd like to read some other opinions and get a more diverse opinion on the internet.

What I really want to know is where do people that don't care about starting a business or developing software hang out on the internet.
"Twitter deserves recognition for its principled upholding of the spirit of the First Amendment. It’s a shame that PayPal, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America and the U.S. government all failed — and continue to to fail — at their own versions of that test."

Yeah really. OVH (Wikileaks' French ISP, whose managing director said "this is a matter for the courts") and Twitter (presumably thanks to @amac) come out of this looking like companies I can rely on. The others ... not so much.
Try using AngelList, filtered by market: http://angel.co/mobile
Clean Commits (Being Nice to your Fellow Developers)
This made me realize that Google's click to call functionality that I've seen in their search results from time to time should be, if it's not, just be routed through your Google Voice account.

They could even allow vendors to run real-time Groupon-like promotions to certain targeted users as part of their AdWords campaigns.
will be there.
Actually, I just remembered that I had left a comment on that thread, so here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049698

He took it down at Kayak's request, because of the load caused by continuous requests on their servers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2052920

Oh well.
Wow....this seems like rather big news. Server and Tools Business has been a bright spot for Microsoft in the last few years.
I cannot seem to edit my post, so here is the issue I am referring to w.r.t. couchdb and unused CPU: http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@couchdb.apache.org/msg06520....

here is the interview of Damian Katz concerning couchdb: http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2010/06/18/interview-with-dami..., which mentions that large data is not a focus.

There are some companies which seem to use couchdb for large usage, for example bbc (http://enda.squarespace.com/tech/2010/3/4/couchdb-at-scale-4...). I don't know their infrastructure, but they claim to server 4 billions requests as of 4th march 2010 since summer 2009 on a 32 nodes (16 master, 16 backups). Assuming that summer starts in september to get an upper bound of the traffic, this means 250 rq/sec on average, which is nothing impressive for an infrastructure with 32 machines without more information about what they do. Generally, I would not say much about this kind of usecases, but since it is often advertised by couchdb proponents, the burden of the proof is theirs.
Thanks for sharing. I wonder if others experienced similar numbers.
it is in one of the tabs almost all the time and I just hit refresh when I feel like reading something new or just checking how my comments are doing.
Damon, the iOS version is being written natively for that platform in Objective-C. I've got many ideas to explore on the iPad and iPhone/iPod -- what's on the web is just a taste.

But thanks for the link! I'll keep it in mind if a use for it crops up.
Answer to the translation: yes :(
As far as I'm concerned, you all have it easy. Try running a startup from a remote town in Greece!
50 Cent's tweets move markets
Submission from when this was first published - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684023
Anatomy of an Apple Email
Well, sure, it is impossible to have 0 inequality if you consider pure equality, but that's a trivial remark. The notion of equality almost always makes sense only in a statistical sense (are two values statistically different), unless you have a discrete observation.
Do you pay national income tax or something? I find it hard to believe that you get to keep 100% of the money you make.
That CMU President was Jerry Cohon?
Correctamungo.
They have to do different URLs each time because you get stats for each shortened URL.
If you're storing information on the internet (aka buzzword "Cloud"), you're at higher risk of getting that data stolen or spied on. This isn't new. It is something to be aware of the more you store online.
Scheme code that takes advantage of lexical scope with indefinite extent might qualify:

The functions f, g and h use private variables x and y.

(define f #f)
(define g #f)
(define h #f)

(let ((x #f) (y #f))
(set! f <<Lambda term for f>>)
(set! g <<Lambda term for g>>)
(set! h <<Lambda term for h>>))

F does whatever.

<<Lambda term for f>>=
(lambda (p q)
(21 lines of code))

G does something else

<<Lambda term for g>>=
(20 lines of code)

...
Added to these 60s-era trends (some of which have mercifully waned) came two further developments which are still very much with us today and which moved the elite universities further away from the pursuit of excellence and merit which was their greatest achievement after the Second World War: the competitive sports craze and the affirmative action crusade. To these two anti-meritocratic developments...

How is being pro-sports being anti-meritocratic? It's anti-academic, but not anti-meritocratic. Getting a sports scholarship requires a tremendous amount of talent, teamwork, dedication, etc. Selecting students based on athletics is every bit as meritocratic as selecting students based on academics.
10+ times a day? That seems an awful lot!

~8:20 am: Check HN on iPhone while getting ready for work. Make mental note of top stories.

9:00 am: Load HN in a tab at work

12:00 pm: Check HN before leaving for lunch. Usually a quick peruse as I finish up my tasks before my coworkers and I head out. Again, I take a mental note of the top stories of the day.

12:45 pm: Now that I'm back from lunch, I will read a few of the stories, sometimes leave a comment or two, before delving into my afternoon projects.

5:30 pm: Home from work! Time to check HN (and Reddit, etc).

So I guess that's five times per day, during the workday. When I get home, I easily refresh another five times.

But, hey, that must be awesome for pg's analytics, right?!
Man, I really wish that this tool showed stuff in forwards order rather than backwards order. And when I tried to flip it around, it showed a bunch of your previous conversations first instead...
I'll call bullshit, even though that will score me downvotes.

We're not lowering the bar on who we hire.

Good luck hiring 100 top guys in 8 Months.

Work and requirements are decomposed and estimated as a team so when it's time to code it flows quickly and everybody is on the same page.

That's so detached from reality, sometimes I wonder if there's some parallel universe where phrases like that make any sense.

What these hiring frenzies really do is they transform any company from being (possibly) productive straight into eBay-mode. They're also usually a surefire indicator that the last person with a clue (alt: the last person who gave a shit) has just left the company.
The future is heterogeneous Platform as a Service (for example, http://dotcloud.com/) in my opinion. I can't imagine going back to Heroku where I can only host Ruby along with a selection externally hosted add-ons.
"I'd love to know why people choose Mongo over say, Riak, or CouchDB"

Here are some reasons:

* excellent documentation

* runs right out of the box

* excellent libraries like Mongoid

* user can easily perform deep queries (e.g person.address.zip = '90901')

* services are available like MongoHQ
Sounds like a pretty weak cypher by todays standards. 90 million combinations seems like it would be fairly easy to brute force. Still, it's interesting to see that some of his ideas, like row operations on matrices, are still used in some crypto algos today.
API Sorting Algorithms
Try Alaska. I keep getting phone calls at 4 AM several times a month.
3 Reasons Why Cr-48 Shipments May Have Stopped
I found this Defcon 18 talk highly informative about the government and the internet.

'Your ISP and the Government Best Friends Forever' - Christopher Soghoian (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJDCxzKmROY)

To summarize, it's easier for police/gov to get data. Some companies provide user information to them without hassle or fee. A single request can list any number of names. MySpace and ATT love the government and go out of their way to help.
I usually just pull it up on my phone a few times a day and bookmark relevant links to read later (Opera Mobile syncs with my desktop). It depends on how many times I am in a position to randomly check on my phone more than anything and it´s not too often that I get on from my computer.
Yes, you can't avoid federal taxes. You just don't have an additional ~10% on top of that from the state.
About 50 times a day, on bad days.
"Objects are a poor man's closures.." (OOP in Scheme)
2 or 3 times a day. I am preparing exam now. After that, maybe 5 or more times~