skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is a fantastic brand name. Water marketed to geeks and techs

"Quantum Water now with 10% more Radicals, Free!"

"Quantum Water, if you're low on Gluons - give us a try!"

"Quantum Water - put a little Strange in your diet!"
I wish people would stop using that term, "free country". I don't know of very many "free countries". If you live in the United States, you live in a free-er country than North Korea, and indeed, that's something to be grateful for, but you do not live in a truly free country.

In a truly free country, you would, for example, have the freedom to eat whatever you want (so long as it doesn't impinge on other people's freedoms). You would be able to have sex with whoever you wanted (so long as both parties are 'mature enough' to agree). This too, is not the case in the states. You would be able to marry whoever you wanted. You would be able to do to your body whatever you wanted. In a truly free country, you would have the freedom to do things that in today's non-free country we consider taboo, punishable offenses. Etc.
Dropbox was a YC company, which meant they had quite a bit of free press and access to a lot of valley connections. I would imagine that had a lot to do with their success.
Stock Valuation Heat Map - See Which Countries' Markets are Under/Overvalued
A Duet Between Subatomic Radioactive Particles And a Live Violinist
HN has been a really high signal/noise site in discussing these issues, so it only seemed fair to give folks a heads-up here and see what other issues people were seeing. But thank you. :)
Study says that Oscar win for best actress increases the risk of divorce
>Anyway sorry if it's a faux pas to complain about my own stuff, but I feel like it's a legitimate problem with the way Google works.

Definitely not a faux pas. Thanks for the example. My biggest annoyance in threads like these is people who write essays about their site losing traffic but then aren't willing to provide an url for people to check out.
Looks like the right kind of thing, but at prices starting at $300 per month, it's a bit too steep (at least for now).
How do you even pronounce syncplicity? Dropbox is a nobrainer in just about every language that is somewhat relevant on the internet for commercial reasons, that alone would give them an edge.

Sycn?what? Oh, never mind, I'll just use dropbox.

Cutesy names are rarely worth the downside. Keep it short, simple, easy to spell and pronounceable in an un-ambiguous way.

Or you'll never even get to the point where you have to worry about how your competitor is doing in terms of pricing or features.
Facebook's Got Nothin' on Google
"Over the years, the index has been both praised and vilified. The latter by language adherents who are unhappy over the decline of their favorite idiom."

Really? That's the best defense that can be brought for the methodology - a textbook ad hominem attack?
I agree. Usually when I visit a new site, I'm looking for a 30-second description of what its purpose is. It's too hard to figure out what your site actually does.
Al Jazeera Releases Egypt Coverage Under Creative Commons
The whole history of Google is trying to find algorithms that encode our philosophy and mental model of what we think users want. We've been discussing algorithmic changes with people online since 2001, when GoogleGuy would show up on webmasterworld.com to dispel misconceptions.
NoSQL, interpreted as "Not Only SQL" and used in conjunction with MySQL
http://translate.google.com/#en|zh-CN|I%20HATE%20YOU%0A%0AI%...

Check out this translation, it adds emotion as well :)
Wouldn't it be more interesting to remotely detonate explosives rather than blowing yourself up with it?
The top comment there doesn't seem insightful at all, especially when compared to the next comment from the Syncplicity founder. For instance:

No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

Apparently every time somebody at Dropbox suggested more features, he was simply told to "shut up." It sounds like the Dropbox guys got it right simply by being not retarded, like the commenter but unlike any of their competitors. Not really; according to the Syncplicity guy, Dropbox built multi-folding syncing and discarded it after they realized they couldn't make it simple enough for users. The lesson is not to "shut up" and listen to people who know what they're doing; the lesson is to design your UI carefully and pay close attention to how users actually use your product.

No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day. If they do, it is IE 6 at work that they are not allowed to upgrade.

As the Syncplicity founder pointed out, it was more important to get coverage from tech journalists using Macs. (After all, if folks are stuck with IE6 and aren't able to install Firefox, how are they going to install Dropbox?)
I'm sure it didn't hurt them but their execution to date has been impeccable.

One thing has popped up recently: Dropbox relies on the urls to folders in 'boxes' that are shared to remain secret, nothing stops google from indexing the contents once the location is known, there is no 'robots.txt' that instructs google not to peek there.

This could lead to a lot of people being highly surprised that the contents of their secret stash are suddenly open to the portion of the population that uses google.

The problem is that it's not just the users that nominally own the data that control this, basically everybody that you share that url with can 'leak' it to google, either by using a toolbar or by posting it on some webpage. After that it's fair game.

To see this for yourself:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=a+site...

According to dropbox support this is by design, but I can still see how some people might be very surprised by this.

edited for clarity, thanks thomaswmeyer.
One of my favorite papers along this line is http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/summit2010?action=AttachFile&do=... (PDF) which talks about a compiler fuzzing technique that found bugs in all kinds of compilers, including 11 bugs in a research compiler that was proved to be correct.
The fact that William knows the owner of PostDesk makes no difference to the speculations made in the article about the future of Tumblr under Karp's leadership. Disclosure isn't really needed when the only difference is that he came to us to break the story as opposed to any other news outlet who would have said the same, or similar.
You actually own a AK-47? Out of curiosity, why?
And over 100!
Bing has similarly poor results. This isn't a Google problem -- it's endemic to all search engines.
You're right of course. Very poor choice of words on my part. It sounds like a power vacuum in the making and I was hoping to understand who was poised to fill it, but instead most comments are focused on the unfair broad brush I used.
Apple, PlayStation Network, Vudu, etc.
Another option would be to have two versions of each article. First, the "your own voice" article, and then the "journalistic style" article which gets to the point quickly, doesn't inject opinion into the news, etc...
WikiLeaks rival launches, aims to give whistleblowers more control
Thanks! I'm trying to cover the stuff that surrounds game dev, managing my time, keeping track of expenses, marketing the game, etc. 'cause I think that stuff gets glossed over a lot.

Like I'll be posting my financials for the month soon, even though I know they're going to be negative since my game isn't out yet haha But it's the principle of the thing, getting into the habit of keeping accurate records.

Glad you like the blog! I'm shooting for daily-esque updates so pop in again in a couple days!

- Quickdraw
Good for you. I recently removed TechCrunch from my RSS feed, and I haven't missed it for the last two weeks.

I was trying to find a feed that let me exclude certain authors, but I ended up ditching everything.
I think it's important to distinguish "platform compatibility" from the kinds of feature requests he's talking about, because I don't think the take home lesson is necessarily "cater to some minorities' requests".

Adding Mac support didn't make DropBox any more complicated for the end user -- there were no new corner cases or potential conflict scenarios, no new steps in the setup, no additional configuration complexity, basically no cost at all in terms of end-user mental load in order to extend their product beyond the Windows platform and reach some important taste-makers.

This is distinct from the end user confusion created by adding, say, multiple folder support or any of the other complex features and configuration options that users will clamour for. When you don't carefully curate those kinds of features, you end up sticking your users in tyranny-of-choice territory in a way that simply broadening your platform support doesn't.
JavaScript with a double-arrow drop in 2010?
That point about credits being potentially "bigger than PayPal" is spot on. The network effects pulling people into Facebook (and thus credits) are so much stronger than any pulling people into PayPal.
I'm going to be using Cocos2d, but I honestly couldn't give you many details on it because I'm going to be out-sourcing to a programmer to do that part. I'm making 2d games and Cocos2d is supposed to make it a lot easier to juggle sprites and everything...but we'll see if I can break it, hehe

- Quickdraw
Ada, RPG on OS/400 and Transact SQL? Really?

Anyone risks a hypothesis on why this happened in 2010?
Misery Has More Company Than You Think, Especially on Facebook
How the Challenger disaster (1/28/86) changed my life
This is exactly the kind of ridiculous relativism I'm talking about.

The UK is a democracy where some of the taxpayer's money goes towards financing the BBC.

Qatar is a monarchy, where the control of the nation is passed within Al Thani dyansty which uses some of its oil/gas revenues to finance Al Jazeera.

When the BBC reports something that is inconvenient to the UK government, as it often does, there's no real risk involved. Al Jazeera simply does not report things inconvenient to Qatar's Emir, with good reason.
I think you need to do a lot of lists. I'm serious. There are a LOT of tiny startups out there and you can hit upon 10 at once this way, while also building good content.

I'm going to be self-serving here, but it makes it easier to articulate my idea and point. I have a small, "lifestyle startup"/hobby -- a daily email newsletter where I share awesome/true facts like how Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service the day he was fatally shot. (Really -- http://dlewis.net/nik is the subscribe URL, the archives are linked thereto, and it's in the archives.) There are a LOT of small, wannabe thrillist/daily candy email newsletters out there. Featuring one is stupid, but writing about this emerging/cottage industry is interesting.

Basically: "Ten Interesting Email Newsletters" is a great post, potentially, as is "Ten Ways To Manage Your Business Connections" (hashable? cloudcontacts? cardmunch?), as is "Ten Sports Startups" and ... well, you get the idea.
But... not a plausible reason for carrying the bomb it's attached to.
I think this dovetails nicely with Mark Suster's article from awhile back: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/03/22/6-tips-to-buil...

Basically, active engagement with journalists is key to getting the right press, especially in a competitive market.
Pandora and Rhapsody seem to work just fine. Audible seems to have a nice app for all those audiobooks. Netflix also seems to work fine.
I thought TIOBE was vilified because it does a really bad job of measuring what it claims to measure.
How long user stays on page (hint would be how soon they make next search/click), whether or not they continue looking for something under a similar search query, having actual buttons users can click to rate, etc.
Egyptian here.

What I can't believe is the irresponsible behavior with taking down the Internet in a civilized country smack-dab in the middle of the World. That reckless behavior only goes to show how out of touch the current regime really is. There's no thinking whatsoever in how catastrophic (economically, politically, morally) such an action really is.

Yet beyond that, I'm just worried. I'm terrified actually. While the regime needs to change, I'm not yet sure about the future. Will Islamists seize power? Will another corrupt official do that? Will Chaos and Anarchy ensue?

The trouble with Tunisia is that we've yet to see the results of the revolution. Things are developing...but we don't yet know if it's successful or not.

Not to mention that certain events are making me very sad. I do realize it's hard to mass-protest in a very sane manner...but something like lighting up the National Democratic Party's HQ on fire, when it's across the street from the National Museum (King Tut + 100,000 other priceless treasures) and there's a huge threat of the fire spreading...just worries me. I remember when Iraq was first attacked; the first things that were looted were priceless treasures from Mesopotamia.
Amazon SimpleDB? I don't know what the pricing would be for you though, as it is metered:

http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/#pricing
I do programming in Lua as well lately and nothing beats vim for me.
How can you switch to an editor that doesn't have documentation for it's custom key binding API yet? I currently use my leader key as comma "," and have bindings to open an interpreter, save file and run in interpreter, execute block selected in visual mode in interpreter and leave interpreter open, execute selected block + os.clock() to benchmark a snippet, etc. http://www.lua.org/pil/1.4.html

>mongrel2, lua and Tir

Also, respect to Zed and MVC fans. However I've found it simpler to write a pure Lua coroutine\socket based stack on top of HTTP and TokyoCabinet than to use preexisting servers, DBMS, or frameworks. The advantage of LuaJIT is it allows you to develop highly refactorable multiprocess stack in one language and have it probably be faster than I/O that you won't need to use non-refactorable C black boxes or frameworks.
It is, but the page is unwieldy and overly wide on that browser.

Looks like there's a big gap between "small screens" and "screens that can comfortably display the page".
Press Release: 37 signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion After Bold VC Investment
Call for entries/Feb. 4 deadline: $50k for media-tech startups
I can never get over how Pyongyang has skyscrapers. Given how underdeveloped the rest of the country looks, I can only surmise that they must dump the majority of their GDP into building up Pyongyang.
Redis is great for small things. Massive scale players in the write-heavy owrld can rarely consider it in its current form.
It's a very simple idea that one can independently evaluate the quality of the reporting, regardless of funding source, especially when Al Jazeera is not the primary source of information (as no news agency should be).
Looks like this might have the same idea? --> http://startupanimal.com
Thinking about this.

I'd think i'd have the courage to go talk to the president of the united states or prime minister in the uk. However I'd don't think have the courage to talk to jobs.
Your comment seems familiar too - sure it isn't a rerun too?

Might just be me though.. Oh, well..
There's a change slowly rolling out that improves the [nfl jerseys] query substantially. I'll check on the others. Thanks for the examples.

Some really dramatic changes to how we use links are on the way. (Sorry I can't say anything more specific. This is a really sensitive area.)
Unless there is a certain feature you needed a more expensive camera for (higher fps for sports photography for example) photos are much more the photographer than the camera. Glass is a much better place to spend money than on a camera body.

The professional photographers I know or even the guys who just sell pictures on the side use relatively inexpensive equipment compared to what is available for sale.
I'm not sure if he's added it to ST2 yet, but in the original there was an option to open a directory as a project. If it's not in yet, it's probably on the to-do list.
Does anyone find the non existent capitalism and zero brands very peaceful?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiobe_index

"Tiobe programming community index is an ordered list of programming languages, sorted by the frequency of web search using the name of the language as the keyword"

Maybe people are searching more for specific frameworks and libraries instead of the language. I work mostly in Python and it's been a long time since I last googled for "python". These days I google for "django" or "appengine".
this is good, i'll send you email about songslike.me and strangrchat.com soon
Sadly typical of an Indian bureaucracy whose core competency has forever been to obstruct the free flow of money, goods and services, often for the purpose of positioning well-connected fixers to extract lucrative commissions for pulling the strings that would clear the "roadblocks"
As of 4:12p eastern time, 19 startups from HN have already gotten in touch with me. There are some really great companies brewing on HN, and I'm looking forward to covering them.

The response has been fantastic. I can't wait to see what else comes in.
Egypt’s Internet Blackout: Extreme Example of Just-in-time Blocking
Too bad we can't connect dup'ed stories in some way (except deep in the comments). Further thoughts about that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975950
This is only for content that's explicitly placed in your "Public" folder, not for anywhere else in your Dropbox.
My roku can stream both Hulu Plus (which also costs a subscription fee) and netflix. I tried out hulu plus, but after the first commercial streamed in the middle of my show, i stopped it and stopped watching hulu plus. I'm ok paying for a streaming service, and I'm ok with free content having ads, but not both at the same time.
Amazon Tax Enjoined in Colorado
Yes, hence the 'that are not shielded'
Paying for Pandora has been one of the best investments I've ever made. With a little tuning you can get stations that play endless amounts of music you enjoy with no intervention on your part, and you never have to stop listening. If I had to guess I'd say I listen 50+ hours a week.

Their Android app also works pretty well. I use it when working out and when walking around campus. Using the app I was also able to listen to Pandora when some friends and I road tripped to Seattle this summer (3500+ miles round trip). No CDs or station flipping required :)

I would note that I'm not real prone to buying music, so Pandora tends to be my only music source. That makes it pretty easy to justify $36 a year.
One caveat, though I imagine this has been thought of before, is that mobile versions of sites often have the same content as full-browser versions of sites.

So ideally, perhaps m.google.com would be able to sort through this and not penalize the duplicated-nature of the mobile version.... Anyway, something to think about if you haven't already.
Reserve Bank of India restricts Paypal payments to merchants to under $500
Lot defense work, people not replacing OS/400 machines and still needing new features, and MS sold a lot of databases this year[1].

[1] If you go through your corporate approval process to replace mysql because your mad at Oracle, don't be surprised if SQL Server walks in the door.
Hmm, this discussion has been going on for quite a while now and obviously will so in the future. I have to say that I feel the FB vs. Google discussion doesn't make much sense to me, and the only thing worth comparing is that they are both big. Clearly, the all social approach from FB is not a direction Google thinks is worth following. Doesn't make Google vs Apple way more sense here?
If true, the SMS might be the only time that a wireless carrier’s SMS message has ever been useful.
What kgrin said above, but not only that, even at $20/month for 3 shows, it'll still be a good deal for a large segment of the population. The internet has disrupted TV viewing habits in a huge way - where people actively couch-potatoed themselves after work each day in the 90s, now they office-chair-potato themselves in front of the internet.
It's not Python. I ran otool -L on the binary, and on my Mac, it looks like an ObjC++ program.
Oh, duh. Good point.
Ask HN: What causes you problems, and how would you like it fixed?
For example: Your personal information is being shown by facebook, so you want to find a way to hide your personal data.

I want to hear all the things that are just inefficient and ineffective.

I'm going to collect the ideas, and publish them on my website as an "idea bank" which would be a list of important projects.

Then, I'm going to start trying to accomplish these, with the help of anyone that jumps on board.
Agreed. The article's title deliberately said Google, as if the other engines are doing a better job.
what's stopping the 'bomber' from just ditching the bomb?
Anybody who disrupts techcrunch would have my respect and gratitude. Try not to take credit for other peoples' work and you'll already be one step above Arrington when it comes to ethical grounds.
'Dropbox' is one of the best product names I've ever heard. Someone mentioned it to me once and I instantly knew exactly what it must be, and remembered it forever.
The single biggest cost component of building a high-rise is wages, in a planned economy that factor pretty much disappears.

Other than that it's concrete, steel and time. In the former eastblock there are also plenty of highrises, very few of those would meet your expectations in terms of construction quality.

Also, highrises are actually more efficient material wise compared to building individual homes, after all each dwelling shares 4 surfaces with those around it (except for the edges).
Kevin Smith's full statement on film distribution
Engine Yard Cloud interview Carl Lerche
Surprisingly - it wasn't, and we're still not sure how William was in fact discouraging their entire team...
I've used Cocos2D, and it was great - I've been meaning to write some posts about it, haven't got around to it yet. I haven't used other frameworks, so I can't compare, but for a simple 2D sprite game Cocos2D was a great way to hit the ground running.

Video of me making the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se2mi_kfUko

I'm far from an expert, but if you have any questions I'll try to answer them.
And for us on the bleeding edge, spelling 'getdropbox'
They've also a movement to try and get people involved:

http://www.meetup.com/aje/
Aside from the difficulty of setting the explosive in a proper location. It is more impresive in the news when somebody kills him/her self.
OPENMESH Is Seeking Alternatives To Egypt-Style Internet Blackouts
Kill Switch: Egypt vs. the US
When we had revolution in Russia in 1917 they attacked and looted czar's palace. Then they made it into world renowned Hermitage museum.

King Tut's relics are the least of my worries.
This is the similar kind of advice that those behind 37 Signals give in their book Rework http://amzn.to/hkrGuU
Ok here is the search that first brought this issue to my attention:

mysql spatial index example lft rgt

I see the following order:

1: http://planet.mysql.com/entry/?id=23512

2: http://efreedom.com/Question/1-1743894/Mysql-Optimizing-Find...

3: http://explainextended.com/2009/09/29/adjacency-list-vs-nest...

4: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1743894/mysql-optimizing-...
Among the basic Prolog interpreters is the one in the later chapters of our patron Paul Graham's On Lisp, available online for free. Graham writes it with Common Lisp macros and macro-based continuations all in about 100 expertly described and lovingly documented lines of CL.

Very educational, if not so practical.
Yes, she (and the publisher) most certainly have trademarks as well as copyrights in the characters. "Famous" trademarks are especially fraught with peril.
I think it seemed that you were trying to imply the dropbox's content (not just the public portion) would be visible to anyone.

I am glad this was clarified.