skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The end is not as fascinating as you might think, though the barcode itself is:

http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3432026155/2001-a-space-...
"poverty is a result of poor life choices"

You should check out a third world country. I live in one and I can tell you for a fact that this is not true.

If you wake up thinking what you're going to eat today and where you'll sleep tonight, then there aren't many choices to be made.

I see 8 y/o kids begging for money on the streets every day. They will never be able to make a choice.
Kurt Ralske has done a lot of good work in this space: http://retnull.com/
You mean, not every movie uses a Teal/Orange palette?

http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...
Apple's amazing iPad business in context
lol i think these comments are a bit malicious. Since when is it a bad thing to provide an analogy at the end of an explanation to solidify the idea in people's minds?

"Heroku, the TurboTax of Rails Application Deployment, acquired by Salesforce, the TurboTax of CRM.
10 things you can do with Dropbox, the TurboTax of Cloud Storage."
Yes, these would also be acceptable applications of the analogy--thats the nature of an analogy...its analogous.
It applies a bunch of lessons we learned making a live video broadcasting app for Justin.tv. The distance is not so large as you'd think (minus the whole "not live" part).
After participating in Rails Rumble a couple of years ago a fun idea I haven't been able to shake is if it'd be possible to work 20 hours a day Saturday and Sunday and then take M-F off (plus, you'd have less online distractions during your "workweek," since it'd be everyone else's weekend).
Very interesting; thanks. I had only taken a cursory look at the KDD cup page.

I didn't know the dataset was crippled, because I doubt the netflix attack would work with music.. there's no IMDB for music that acts as an independent dataset. Unless they intersect the set with last.fm, of course :)
Google Controls 97 Percent Of Mobile Paid Search
So I've seen a couple of these types of websites out now. I have never understood why anyone would want to launch such a service, other than an exercise for creating a website that uses video? How is it so much better than the available alternatives that people would want to switch?

Can you explain why people would go through the process of registering to use your service, over just sharing using youtube links on facebook or facebook directly?

Do you have a business model? How would you plan to monetize assuming your service became really successful?

Is the success of twitpic limiting your imagination?
Having read the betas, I can't recommend this book strongly enough to people wanting to master Clojure. The authors really know their stuff.
If I was interested in tagging people, why wouldn't I just post it to Facebook?
It wasn't github. It was the fact that, at first blush, Noisy seemed to fail the actually-does-something test.

It turned out not to be so, but it did take me a lot of control wiggling to figure out what was going on.
Any corrections/requests welcome. If I'm missing anyone, I'll be adding new accounts tomorrow, just toss them in this thread.
In the end, isn't that the only thing you can say? Maybe you can prove something about how secure a service is, but you definitely can't prove you'll respect people's privacy. All you can do is to respect them, and ask for trust.
Bleeping Expletives (William Safire, 2008)
Another way to browse the site is by the /archive/: http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/archive.

Come to think of it, I might use some of these as my wallpaper.
Parent is the TurboTax of comments.
Google Schools Its Algorithm
Subway Passes McDonald's as largest fast food chain
I think hashbang URLs are a temporary phase, one abstraction poking out into another, like a sharp cliff being pushed up by the forces below. Eventually it will sort itself out. No one is breaking the internet forever and ever.

I agree with you that everyone should have a 1:1 mapping between "real" urls and hashbang state fragments, eg /foo/bar/1234 == /foo#!/bar/1234

The purpose behind all this is that you want to separate delivery of the "application" from state transitions of the application. Changing the hashbang avoids a roundtrip to the server, while providing deep links into application state.

Hashbangs are not ideal, but they work for now (see 1:1 mapping comment above). There are new History rewriting features (and libraries to take advantage of them) that can make all this ugly jiggery-pokery invisible to the user, not to mention headless clients.
Here's the click through link: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/03/07/study-too-much-technolo...
Happy birthday Will Eisner
You're missing one of the points of the article: When you fail, it has to be cheap (i.e, a rope attached so you fall a few feet).

Bouldering and falling all the time does not mean that you're failing cheaply. Falling hurts!
http://socialcam.com/v/5lLancXG
You would post it to Facebook...which is why we offer one-click post to facebook.
People Coping With Rare Disease Are Internet Power Users
I'll second the call to hear who the designer is, if you don't mind sharing.

Actually... could you outline your process of finding the designer? What was the workflow like? Did you send him your .nib files and let him go to town, or did you send him screenshots, or what?
I've read a lot by him, but looking at it again I think it's fairly reasonable to say that this post is written with the assumption that you are up to date with at least some of the way Rands presents situations and conveys his message.

Over time the site has largely evolved into the first public pass of content that eventually becomes part of a book.

Personally, I'm a big fan of articles that don't assume every reader is a newcomer. It's a barrier for newcomers, but explaining all of his shorthand and previous content... well, it's arguably two books worth of stuff.
Fun trivia about Shatner (who at 79, has unquestionably still got it) that I just discovered on his wiki:

In 1958, he appeared in the film The Brothers Karamazov with Yul Brynner.
Not really. I'd have to go back to India to do it. In India, the payment problem hasn't been solved yet. People barely use their debit / credit cards to buy stuff at stores let alone online. The initial fear that the US had when online purchases were introduced are being replayed in India. People are told to never use their cards online.

With all these problems, It's pretty hard to actually build and sustain non B2B businesses in India atleast.
What I disliked about Riak is that although at first glance it appears you can namespace key\values into multiple buckets you can't. The whole database is really only a single bucket and if you want to run a map\reduce it's always over every key in the database!

Now you can simply increase complexity and create multiple Riak clusters for different data schemes and treat it as a replication tool. However, their in memory bitcask map-reduce was actually slower than a hard-drive map-reduce on text JSON files in a folder. Where each file was individually opened, read from disk, encoded, and closed in a loop (with nothing held in memory). Which was rather scary!

Their replication scheme appears to be a pretty genuine copy of Amazon Dynamo though (consistent hashing ring, quorum, merkle trees) which is nice.
Since this is your most recent reply:

How did you manage it? I see some of the info, but I haven't picked apart the code yet. This makes it massively more useful, I think you may have a convert :)
For the purposes of this discussion, there's very little difference between joesomenick and Anonymous Coward.
cat /etc/lsb-release

I usually ignore the name of the release as well. Usually just knowing you're on 10.04 LTS or whatever is enough.
Is your son a hacker?
> We rolled out a cluster of 5 nodes and 1024 partitions. Each node has 8gig of memories, 3x1Tb disk in RAID5.

This hardware configuration doesn't make sense. 8 gigabytes of memory is pathetically small today. 32 gigs is basically standard, with 64 gigs costing little extra. RAID 5 with only three disks will have horrible performance. A single machine with 32/64 gigs and 12-16 disks in a better RAID configuration should perform better at a lower operational cost.
Not a statistician, but I don't believe this is true. You need ~1000 individuals to find statistically significant phenomena in a population the size of the U.S.. Since the population of rich people is so much smaller, you'd need a smaller number of individuals to draw statistical inferences from it.

Anyone know the actual formula for statistical significance, and able to work out how big a sample needs to be for, say, a population of 100k?
Does Arizona pay an IT penalty for ignoring Daylight Saving Time?
Speaker Recognition
Soon after that I sent Andres the link, and we started throwing around ideas for startup companies. In the spring of 2006 I got a phone call from Andres. He was having trouble finding a low temperature capacitor for his experiment and suggested that we build a database of electronic parts and make it easily searchable on the web.

I love seeing successful YC startups that are outside of the fairly insular "startups serving startups and other stuff startup people are interested in" space.

There's so many verticals out there that have passionate users that are being under-served by today's technology. It might be less sexy from a TechCrunch perspective, but I have the sense that's where a good amount of the lucrative business opportunities are going to be for this next era.

We don't need "a better Twitter", "the next Google", or to be "as big as Facebook". But we do need to bring the power of these products to more and more people and markets.
It's never too late to start climbing! The goal doesn't need to be to climb extremely hard routes, but rather the ones you enjoy.

Rock climbing is a great way to get your head free (being a developer myself, I find myself thinking about project related topics all the time, and climbing and sex are the best ways for me to get my head free).

Re: crashing against the wall: that usually does not happen because you fall mostly downward and only a small bit towards the wall, which you can absorb with your feet.
> I don't think that application developers are employing it just because it is a " cool new thing"

Have you seen the Gawker media redesign of lifehacker, Gizmodo, etc? They appear to be using the hash-bang for all links for no good reason at all. So yes, some big sites are employing it because it's a cool new thing.
Ampersands are great design elements. I'm not such a big fan of images, so some nice typography can fill in for visual interest. My website uses an ampersand like a logo: http://www.iqdupont.com/
> Loren’s programming talents are well known within the community, and I struggle to accept that he wrote this buggy piece of code.

Who says it's a bug?
True System Security for Optimizing Windows
thebigsecurity.com
it reminds me of some of ad reinhardt's earlier artwork.
What tools did you use? Sounds like a nice exercise
TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future
Could you add @ninite (YC W08). We just got the name a couple weeks ago.
Como prevenir el cáncer de mama
I'd love to use LaunchRock. Sending you an email now.
Firefox 4 RC Vs. IE9 RC: The First Duel
Yes this is one class of mobilization of a network effect business - exploit irregular network topologies. In our case that means targeting areas with high trip density (defined as locations where people are all leaving by cab to nearby destinations).

So not only do we want to try and target specific cities, but also specific landmarks within those cities where this will be ultimately useful. We've identified two of these - airports and college campuses. We are working with Boston Logan airport to see if we can do some co-marketing with them and advertise to all the passengers arriving on flights and in the cab stand. As for colleges, there are a lot here in Boston! Its just a matter of reaching out to the right student associations and newspapers who can recommend the service to their students. Any connections here would be greatly appreciated!

I've never thought of the conference idea before, I wonder if cabs a re a primary mode of transportation there or not. I'll contact you offline for more info....
Will the U.S. get an Internet "kill switch"?
[video] RE:arrange – Interview with Moritz Uebele
Moritz Ubele is a young upcoming filmmaker who just graduated from my uni. His latest film, Slice of Death, was featured in the RE:arrange exhibition (vimeo.com/​20190998) and I sat down with him to talk about his work, the difference between analogue and digital filming and the crazy machine he built with his friends to transfer analogue film to a computer.
I don't see why you should decide to never have a social account. Personally, I don't trust Facebook, so I don't use it. Twitter, on the other hand, I've found useful both to follow people I know or know of in the context of a hobby &c., and as a microblog for myself.
You don't need to regenerate any HTML and changes are instant. Also, I honestly don't think one can burn through too much CPU with occasional JavaScript. This is some hardcore environmentalism.
a usability bug perhaps: it is a little over zealous if the iPhone is muted - hides all signs of volume :)
Agreed, though at times "Hero" is borderline heavy-handed with color. However it manages to remain beautiful. One thing I've learned, though, from a set-designer friend, is that nearly every movie is highly attuned to color and lighting.

If you're looking for other films that use color in interesting ways, check out the "Three Colors Trilogy" by Kieslowski.
PS3 Firmware (FW) 3.56 Jailbreak (hack) Exploit Found
As someone who is extremely cautious about any medical information found on the Internet, I would wonder whether that cautiousness is heightened or lessened when talking about rare diseases. How do these power users know who to trust?
How about over the last 12 months? Many of those companies are old-timers and their last 30 days growth is almost a flatline.
On the other hand, if you have to do it one or two times a month, you should write a script. It prevents future mistakes on your part, and makes the task a lot easier to hand off to someone else, because you're guaranteed to record all the necessary steps.
Vivek Wadwha Speaks at Columbia (video)
The test version is now replaced with a new version which runs a lot smoother...

One of the major problems with the test version was the rotation of the tiles which was done within the perspective matrix. The tiles were also rendered separately. In the new engine those problems are fixed along with the texturing of the ground.
Use "Weird Rules" To Boost Your Creativity
Can you also add @tellfi (YC W11)
Is that necessarily true? Germany is not exactly a small country (and Kik has a _really_ bad reputation), and few people type in domains directly anymore. What matters more than a good domain name is a name that is easy to remember and google. So I don't know. It might be either way.
An inside look at the DDoS attacks that hit Wordpress.com last week
Every time family comes over, we play multipong, wurdle (yes, works great for groups) and battleheart (again, 1p but works well with multiple fingers).

This is a very interesting untapped market, but how to make a breakout hit in this market is still not clear to me.
Very interesting, another single data point. My brother (went to school at the University of Milwaukee) lived at home while attending. Ambition has never been a strong suit of his.
You can see the trend, though. Most big movies since the 2000s seem to fit this.
I think this is great. I wish we had experimented more with microservices, especially on twitter.

Merchant acquisition is the hardest part of a payments startup. Tipjoy failed to get the top "merchants" on Twitter's platform to use us. That's because they didn't really want to make money. Look at what tweetdeck, twitpic, seesmic, etc. still do today with commerce: nothing.

There is a lot more to do for minno, but the micro sites are great.
Good point, though that's really just the summary from the magazine. The actual Hart-Risley study (which was mostly the basis for the passage I quoted) shows that the relationship between SES and achievement is fairly linear, as are the relationships between SES and the factors that lead to achievement. I don't have time to scan in the entire appendix of the study, but here is a quick snap from Hart-Risley:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/picture_library/hart_risley.jpg
Rudimentary version control?
Assuming that people still have the same devices as they did two years ago when they bought Tweetie.
Using noise is a way of adding another aspect of realism to objects. Normally you can prepare images ahead of time and use those in your css to create this effect, but for some procedurally generated things images can't always be used. That's where something like this would come into play. While the use case for this over precomputed images is quite small, it's nice nonetheless to have.

Aside from sites styles though, it's also a fully functional noise implementation - which could be ported to web based photo/graphics editors.
I mildly disagree that coupling it to the controller makes the best sense. Maybe in MVC that isn't component structured, but even then, you'd probably want more granular control than that.

In Appleseed[1], I mapped CSS component views, and foundations. Foundations are layouts of components, and describe the whole page. Views describe a specific view of a component.

So, basically, if I have a component "example", with a view "list", then I can create a file in the default theme:

themes/default/styles/components/example/list.css

It will only get loaded into the <head> if the list view of the example component is loaded. I do similar things for the client-side Javascript.

It is good that people are working towards figuring out these patterns, though. The sooner we can move away from the wild west of spaghetti css and javascript, the better.

[1] http://wiki.appleseedproject.org/doku.php?id=developers
Always an interesting debate on whether you should try and fail quickly in a project etc. The faster you fail, the more m&m's you can attempt to catch in your mouth?
Some may cast a negative shadow on Turbotax & other tax filing companies because their existence and lobbying has "prevented" the IRS from implementing a free e-file service of it's own. This is either a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.
Why Wolfram (Mathematica) did not use Lisp
"It was the fastest growing website in the UK in 2007, eclipsing the number of pageviews generated by popular social networks, including Facebook."

What does this mean? It can't mean it has more traffic than Facebook, does it mean it provided more outbound traffic to other sites than Facebook? Actually it says 2007, Facebook was quite small here in 2007 I guess, seems like a misleading and silly comparison to make.
One thing I'll point out: co-incidence in time alone is going to have a greater effect on user-populations and the ability to effect a match than location alone, though both are important, naturally. (Gedankenexperiment -- which is more of a stretch, time match being a stretch or location match being a stretch?) By targeting events, you have high densities of coincidence for both.
Thanks for posting this. I've been trying to get an idea of just how useful/helpful YC is in creating a successful company but evidence in of this impact in terms of social media has been hard to come by.
any other sources you'd suggest?
Ask HN: Why is my directory with 300KB of files 60MB large?
Well, actually I know how the directory (on my ext4 partiton) got to be this way but I was interested in the technical details behind it. I was running many network simulations, each one generating a packet trace file. I was going to parse these offline but the simulations ended up making 163GB of small trace files before I ran out of disk space! [I have since changed my scripts to pipe the traces to the analyzer, eliminating the problem.] After deleting the traces, which took about 20 minutes, a `ls -la .` shows that the directory is 60MB large while containing just 300kB of files. I suspect that some remnants of the links to the trace files remain in the directory inode. Why weren't they removed? Will they get "garbage collected" in the future?

Thanks for your insights,

Jevin
Good Markets VS Bad Markets
I actually think I got fairly lucky on the designer front. I think I it was successful because:

1) I already had the general UI layout I wanted
2) I was very specific on what I wanted (from color schemes to font sizes, etc)
3) Iterated very quickly - since I outsourced the work and they were in India, I would stay up late to be on the same schedule as they were and give them sub 5 min feedback whenever they sent out a design

Here was my general process:

1) Wrote the server code, agnostic of client

2) Started writing UI code in in Objective C. This was a mix of programmatic UI code and interface builder. But I designed the UI from scratch, didn't really do mockups just coded directly and refined by testing on device (imagining where I would have pretty graphics in place).

3) Recruited a designer on elance based on their portfolio. I would send you the link but they no longer seem to be active on eLance.

4) Sent them screenshots of my current ugly design plus detailed spec of exactly what I needed on each screen (i.e. background, a logo, buttons, icons, etc). If you are interested I can send you the spec I sent them (aleem.mawani at g m a i l)

5) Made sure they sent me high rez PSD files of the screens they designed.

6) Used photoshop to export individually the layers I needed. This was the most painful part.

7) Plugged those images into IB or code directly.
If you really want to teach them what programmers do these days I think you need to start with the API that is available so they know the resolution they need to reach to make something that works. Maybe introduce that API after they realize how far down the rabbit hole they have to go to explain the operations required.
The Cypherpunk Revolutionary Julian Assange
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_%28software%29
AdGrok is an awesome service, we just started using it and have been happy with the results. We've found it very useful for getting AdWords campaigns off the ground quickly.
I don't think it'd be much of a problem, kik the shop may have a bad reputation but I don't think people will easily confuse the two companies.

3-letter pronouncable dot com. That's worth a lot.
History API changes in Firefox 4
RIM App World is hardly "where it counts" when it comes to mobile app distribution. It's a distant third after the iPhone and Android markets. Blackberry has a significant lead with the BBM but the market is growing fast enough that they might get left behind if they don't move fast which history has shown they won't.
The author explains in the bitcoin forum that the library is his 20% project.

from http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=4236.0
"Google staff have the ability to spend ~20% of their time on projects that interest them ... standard process for open sourcing our code ... checked by our lawyers for things like trademark/export compliance... This is why the code has our copyright at the top.

This is not "official" in that it does not reflect some vast corporate master plan, we are not about to start accepting BitCoins for AdWords, we have not just dropped 200GHash/sec into the network and we are not going to fork the block chain (to mention just a few of the theories I've seen floating around)."
Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?
A new direction for Jolicloud…
Dont forget to pay them well..