skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flagged.

http://swombat.com/2011/1/13/how-to-get-your-startup-on-hack...
That's my favourite line too -- I'm glad I'm not the only person who liked it. :-)
I think you mean PaaS rather than IaaS.

You do realise there's about 20 other companies doing the same thing at this point, right?
The fashion industry is an excellent example of an industry that has no patents and thrives.

The industry thrives for very few companies. Boutique brands make their money largely by skimming money from extremely wealthy or showy.

If you hear VCs talk about the fashion industry you'll often hear, "It's a brutal business, I don't want to be in it". It's all about rack space. The other issue with fasion is that there's virtually no R&D cost in fashion. Companies like Nike do R&D, but Sketchers does virtually none.

If we couple two large trends... end of SW patents and app stores, the end result is probably a few large partners that copy any hot application and then get profiled in the app store. Word Lens is great, but iLens by Apple is the one that gets all the money due to the fact that its spotlighted in the AppStore.

The thing that I always find somewhat interesting is that computer technology has moved incredibly fast over the past 30 years. Faster than probably any other technology or industry in the world. Yet it happened with patents. If we didn't have patents today would we have perfect AI today or something? The pace of innovation actually seems mighty brisk with our current system.
Wow, on HN again. While I'm proud of that answer, the real bummer was that I edited it too many times (started with a tiny answer and filled it in from there) and it became Community Wiki. I got all of 4 or 5 upvotes before it went CW, so got 40-50 rep out of it instead of the 5290 I would've gotten otherwise. Glad people have found it useful, though.
You don't. Developers would rather spend two months building their own than spending a dollar on yours. No matter how awesome. I have been there.
On the pro side, GAE gives you a pretty big free quota - http://therealurl.appspot.com handles >1m requests/day for about $4 a week.
YES FINALLY!
Congrats! :) Any weird issues?
Link to the actual package is unavailable on that page btw.
10 American Companies That Will Disappear in 2011
Following the media frenzy that is the aftermath of Chua's article i cannot help but feel that there is a larger macro narrative at play here.

There is no doubt, the article struck a nerve for many Asian-Americans, some of which try to either validate the way they grew up or the understandable resentment of others who feel cheated from some vocation that didn't materialize because of the Math/Violin issue.

Then there is this large group of what seems to be largely white who either figured there was something there for the upbringing of their children, and those who cry abuse.

As I was raised in another country, this conversation, whether of Asian origin or Caucasian, strikes me as a genuine american cultural phenomena. There is an anxiety here about children and the way they are brought up and educated that is unmatched anywhere else that i have seen. This discussion and the discussion of yesterday about the treatment of all males as defacto criminals in their approach to children, feeds from the same root, that strikes me at times as some kind of hysterical episode.
Ways Small Businesses Can Use QR Codes
Core Peer Groups: How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised...
Novel will jump from games to business simulations
Actually the only thing we know for sure is that life on Earth happened at least once. It is entirely conceivable that several alternatives to RNA-based life (precursor to DNA-based life) popped up in several different places but then were hopelessly out-competed by the RNA-based lifeforms. I am a biologist by training, and the more I studied biology and evolution, the more life appeared to me as a powerful (somewhat scary even) and inevitable process, rather than a "unique snowflake" that many of us commonly think it to be.

Life, given right conditions and enough time, seems to be about as inevitable as the eventual appearance of viral cat pictures on online forums, in other words.

I think there is little wrong with assuming that the probability of emergence of life given right conditions and enough time is one; however we need to be very careful with estimating how common (and how stable!) those conditions are in our galaxy in the first place. A good place to start would be to look at how many places similar to Earth are out there (which we are already doing).
My guess is the multiple links using url shorteners tripped an anti-spam algorithm somewhere.
Understood and it wasn't aimed at you but the content creator. Thanks for clarifying nonetheless.
Sony uses DMCA to silence speech that reveals its security flaws
Ask HN - I built an extensive networing site for models & talent - need advice
OK, Second time posting this - I am new to this community & I want to follow the rules. I genuinely NEED advice. The site is basically dead and I am not looking for any promotion whatsoever.

Long story short I created this social networking for models & talent site. It took me about a year and a half to build (from scratch) off & on. My partner who bailed on me was the one that new the modelling industry. So I've had this site up for 2 years and i'm at the point where I would like to sell it or give it someone who knows the industry and can actually run it. I would use this money to fund another startup.<p>It has about 1500 members signed up now. I know it can work but desperately needs someone who knows the industry in & out. It was intended for models to better connect with agencies.<p>Any Idea on what I can do to sell this or find someone who can? This site is fairly near and dear to my heart!

It took me a loooooong time to design & develop it.

URL with screen shots. http://imgur.com/a/01C09#GkpDQ
More so:
http://strikedisplay.blogspot.com/
"A lot of the old socialist mentality can still be found in the government's employees."

Yes, let's blame everything on socialism. Because unhelpful civil servants never occur under any other kind of economic occupation.
justin is way too modest. He grew his plugio to a passive $1000 a month revenue which is actually more than most here I suppose. It is certainly more than me.

I don't know him personally but he is the host/cohost of http://techzinglive.com/ my favorite podcast where plugio developpement is actually a recurring subject. He actually turned to a paypall paywall first in the recent days, so he is taking the monetising subject seriously.
good catch, thanks! we've fixed it
Are we to understand that "crypto developers" never forget to increment something or never have copy-paste errors? It seems most of the difference between a "generalist developer" and a "crypto developer" is the amount of money his employer puts into QA.
Since no one has mentioned it yet - Varnish-cache.org, written by a FreeBSD kernel hacker, has a very nice feature, in that it will put all overlapping concurrent requests for the same cacheable resource "on hold", only fetch that resource once from the backend, then serve the same copy to all. Nearly all the expensive content on HN would be cacheable by varnish. Then you can get it down to pretty close to "1 backend request per content change" and stop worrying about how arbitrarily slow the actual backend server is, how many threads, how you deal with the socket, garbage collection, and all that.
A belief in technological elegance created the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Customers weren't demanding that technology, mostly they only realized they wanted it after it existed.

Really? The MP3 market was niche, but growing when the iPod came out. The same for the iPhone market when it came out. And the iPad came out at a time when everyone was talking about tablets (remember Courier predates the iPad announcement).

If anything Jobs understood what customers needed, but often what others thought wasn't possible.
You might be interested in The Great Filter, although it probably won't make you feel any better: http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html
pg: you could probably try to write an event driven HTTP server on top of Arc, so that you don't have this kind of problems. Something like node.arc

Also if I understand correctly you use flat files that are loaded into memory at startup. It seems like that switching to Redis could be an interesting idea in theory, as it is more or less the implementation of this concept in an efficient and networked way.

Probably with such changes you can go from 20 to a few hundreds requests per second without problems.
Yeah, I know... though it is already too late at this point.

Usually I just volunteer for dev tools (I'm a contributor to Firebug).
Google bought it in order to irrevocably release it as a free standard, and now it's baked into hardware where they can't change it further. That's less of a good way to exercise control over the video standard at everyone else's expense while reaping profit from them, and more of a good way to prevent anyone else from doing so. Are you suggesting something else?
Final Report On The Palindrome Number Quest
At college, you develop yourself intellectually, through interaction with peers, professors, understanding complex material, finding the fundamental insights that underly your field, building an maintaining a network, developing your skill as a leader and/or a team player, learning how to read and write at a sophisticated level, and how to go beyond these things. Your brain is a living organ that needs training like a muscle, but it is incomparably more complex than any other part of your body. You need to run with the best to be able to follow their footsteps, to foster the techniques and gain the insights that will lead you into a wealthy, interesting and happy life and perhaps one that can change the world. You don't need to be aware of all of this when you're in it, it happens in the ingenious way in which college has developed itself, even if you drop out.

I don't know which philosopher is to blame for the idea that a brain is some kind of black box and school is there to put knowledge in it, but I'd send him back to college.
I had to learn AutoLisp for my job. It wasn't really all that fun because I didn't have to do anything particularly fancy, just a bunch of 8th grade geometry problems over and over and over and....

Mostly, it made me very familiar with why one might want to find the intersection points of two circles.
Google gins search formula to favor its own services
Along the lines of blown out knees in gymnastics is the incredibly inspiring story of Shun Fujimoto, who injured himself during a gymnastics routine in the Olympics, and then kept competing.[1] Per the Wikipedia article on the guy, "One doctor stated: 'How he managed to do somersaults and twists and land without collapsing in screams is beyond my comprehension.'"[2]

Watching that video and reading his story quickly put an end to my complaints of "but I need a nice ergonomic keyboard to be able to work at all!"

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq-C5-vIim8
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shun_Fujimoto
I really dislike the drake equation because it's the epitome of bad science -- when someone enters value for the variables they have no idea what is reasonable, absolutely no idea -- is it 0.1 or 0.0000000000000000000000000000001 we have no way of knowing.

Though I do like how it gets people to realize how small and insignificant we are in the grand scale that is the solar system, the reasoning we take to get there is fundamentally flawed. We use numbers that have everyday meaning to us, and of course it spits out nice results; this is flawed reasoning since we have no basis to think those numbers are even remotely correct. In general, I just think it's sloppy thinking that takes advantage of deficiencies in human thinking -- it's a magic trick.
Or you can put a reverse proxy in front.

http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html

(Like I suggested in 2009...)
For sure. Google and Apple both play the good for humanity card and both have had some failure and success with aligning their strategies with the people.

My only wish is that we identify the difference between tribe-mentality and logical necessity.

cookiecaper said it best here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2105570
note that the drake equation gives the number of currently communicating civilizations.

if you think there are 10 communicating civilizations now, each communicating for 10000 years, then there should have been quite a few such civilizations in the 13000000000 year history of our milky way galaxy.

if the parameters provided apply for 1% of the milky ways history, we would expect 13000 communicating civilizations in total.

i would imagine any communicating civilization lasting 10000 years would also develop self reproducing space probes, thus becoming a permanent feature.
Well if they're not careful they could end up being Sony minus the videogame and music business units.
Very well put! This I had in mind, lacking the words.
TripIt Joins Concur to Become Bigger, Better and Stronger ($120M USD)
okay fine, i do agree to the fact that it's not the best comparison ever, but it gets the point across. The point wasn't to make the perfect analogy, but to get across the value of Facebook relative to countries. How do you value a country? Many ways, but one of the most popular one is GDP. How do you value a company? Its valuations. That was the thinking behind my statement. I mean if you don't see it, it's fine, disagreements are justified.
This is something I have hard time understanding. Most of the stars are having star flares most of the time. If they're like our Sol, they have periods of high and low flares activity, but within the periods the pattern is random (i.e. noise). Presumably, the change in luminosity caused by a random flare is bigger than by a planet transit (remember transit of Venus?). So how are they filtering the noise out?
Tim Ferriss: How to Negotiate Like an Indian
To the man who got on the bus dressed up as a wizard...
Conversions: Know What You Want
Tableau: physical email
1) use your head to do your thinking because if it's near and dear to your heart that will just cloud your judgement

2) it seems like a viable niche industry for its own networking iste

3) you dont have domain knowledge to build a site for this niche

4) it sounds like you need to use your 1500 existing members to rally behind the community and go out and help you find someone who can make this work.

5) have you considered traveling to nyc, hollywood, i dont know, wherever modeling is big, setting up some meetings and trying to sell your idea to the highest bidder?
Yes! Thank you! I can't believe it's still in operation... crazy.
MapQuest rollouts open-source mapping for Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand
MapQuest rollouts open-source mapping for Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand
You can treat the notes like a simple document. I have lots of leaf nodes that are like big documents, once you get into them they're basically just like a big plain text doc.

(I am co-founder of WorkFlowy)
Is Facebook taking over our lives? Interesting infographic.
I think there is little wrong with assuming that the probability of appearance of life given right condition and time to develop is one

Fair enough. It's a bit like the infinite monkeys in infinite typewriters scenario. Given enough time, sure, you'll have life. It's a question of how much time. Still, assuming all Eart-like planets will actually develop life given the time lapse of the existence of the Milky Way does still seems like a bold assumption.
Ooops, yes, you are right, sorry. Then I guess it's a pretty decent rate for a Core2 duo.
How vague secondary liability doctrines hinder technology innovation
There should be a Google AI Challenge coming up in a couple of weeks.
Seriously, I'm an "HTML guy" too. But you're missing the forest for the trees. Yes, in an idealized world, "HTML5+CSS3+JS" would be a more accurate name, but I wouldn't care if it was called Jesus Christ if that's what made people actually want and adopt web standards.

See your comment above about 'the way that they are' and 'the way that people perceive them to be,' and apply it to HTML5 itself rather than the WHATWG.
You clearly don't understand the problem. Even mod_pagespeed or memcached would be more appropriate here: They are rate-limited by the LISP kernel anyway (we are talking about dynamic content here).
It's built on EC2, so no and no.
Neither. CLL has never been as bad a place as some people like to portray it.
From 60 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929267
I really tried to be even-handed with my comment -- I didn't want to sound like a troll -- but you are completely correct.

In fact, the Drake Equation is a religious statement. That is, it is a creative speculation using commonly understood symbols to that which are completely unknown to us. It's the same as a couple of cavemen sitting on a hill talking about thunder as being large rocks falling from a cliff in a faraway valley. It makes sense, it fits in with what we know, but it's really just a bunch of guesses connected with symbols that, based on context, we feel social approval towards. It's a mind-hack. And a very nicely executed one at that.

The reason I didn't use the "R" word, religion, is that folks see that word and stop thinking. They give you an instinctual answer. No way! I'm not religious! etc.

The Drake equation basically says what anybody who has looked up at the night sky knows intuitively: there are a lot of stars out there, and it's extremely unlikely that we're all by ourselves. It just does it in a way that makes us feel like we're receiving some sort of imparted scientific wisdom, instead of what it really is: creative speculation. In that sense the formula itself may be total bullshit scientifically, but what it tells us about how science and religion play with each other is very important. People look at it and just feel that there is some truth there, and there is, but it's not the same kind of truth as f=ma, although both statements are expressed mathematically and have the same air of seriousness around them.
http://lispm.dyndns.org/ptf-ai-1-1/LANG/LISP/CODE/TOOLS/XREF...
Digital Photos Hide Data -- and Cyberstalkers Can Find It
With more users 'jailbreaking' or 'rooting' their phones, it's not as 'secure' as before. The point of doing those things is to break the phone's security and allow you to do more things. What if the creator decided to put in a little extra code.. or it introduced more vulnerabilities..

* I'm not trying to make you guys paranoid. Just wondering about the possibilities and playing devil advocate.
The Beagleboard is a little too bare-bones for me, since it lacks onboard ethernet (USB ethernet is no excuse).

At least a Guruplug costs $50 less and has ethernet right onboard.
There's no quick answer to that question, unfortunately, because if you want something other than handwaving the answer is to go learn about the basics of signal processing. But in short, the signature of a set of random flares and a regular crossing of a planet are sufficiently different that they are easily separated by the correct tools, the frequencies are totally different.
Feel free to fork MzScheme and replace the garbage collector with a new one that runs continuously.
How cool can a flip-phone get? (Designer: Kristian Ulrich Larsen)
The FSF is calling for a strategic direction that helps their ultimate goals, which you may respect and share. But if you slavishly followed their edicts, you wouldn't have an iPhone in the first place.
Can't you only use varnish for mostly non-dynamic content? Like for example, wouldn't the fact that it displays my username and karma score at the top of the page make it so that you couldn't use varnish (or at least make it more difficult)?
I hear he crashed 1507 systems in one day.
does anyone know if it's possible to use the Google Picasa CDN with ssl?
Men have upper hand in sexual economy
I like the idea. The front page gets you going right away. The three screenshot links on the bottom should have information that's more easily viewable before they are clicked, or maybe some title above them. For instance, Blog Activity, Official Reviews... something along those lines. Also, it takes too long for the overlay to pop up. It has to be a lot snappier. I'm not sure about this suggestion, but possibly a button or link somewhere to "find out more", however the tagline is very effective and succinct. Lastly, I would say, if you haven't already, to buy findmybiz.com, findmybizz.com and findmybuzz.biz. Could be useful for mistyped URLs.

I haven't actually tried out the report yet, but those're my initial thoughts on just the basic site. Hope that helps! Good luck.
> It's a question of how much time

Your point is correct, but my hunch is that the time needed is no more than a million years or so (small on the galaxy scale), possibly less.
Opportunity knocks: management fails to answer.
The Top 20 VC Power Bloggers Of 2010
If you search through my history, you'll find lots of material for your "HN is so mean" page. Not just sexism, anti-gay/pro graph theorist material as well (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183868).

But just a nit - I'm no longer at Courant, my webpage is stale.
The first thing that comes to mind is that it opens up a timing attack (with JavaScript; it might be possible, though more difficult, with server logging). An attacker could find out which (secure) pages you've accessed. Given that there are link coloring tricks to do this anyway, it might not be so bad, but I was under the impression that browsers are starting to close that hole.

Of course, you could always cache-control this behavior away on the server, but not if you don't know about it. I, for one, am glad I found out.
Open Source Bridge 2011: Call for Proposals Now Open
In case it is unclear, this approach is a ducted fan (driven by a gas turbine) with vectored thrust nozzles. Very clever.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust_vectoring
I use autotest for this - it notices files being altered and runs relevant parts of your suite. If something goes wrong it'll keep trying that test everytime you save a file, until it works. I think it's fantastic.
> Why are you inventing arbitrary rules for the usage of “most” that have never before existed?

I'm not. The rules aren't arbitrary, they're based on the grammatical roots of the word.

Your consistent problem is your assumptions, which run rampant throughout your comments, as evidenced here.

The colloquial meaning and usage of a term will always trump the technical reality.

Commonly, 'most' is used to mean there is more than a simple majority, e.g. a supermajority.

"Most senators voted in favor of the bill," this isn't said when 'most' refers to 51 senators voting in favor of a bill because journalists understand that that would cause confusion. Instead something like, "The Senate was nearly split on the vote, 51 to 49," is used because it is far more descriptive of that actual situation.

The relative position of numbers matters, whether you want to accept that or not. However you sound like a fool promoting ambiguity of information and obfuscation of data.