skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's amusing to see Palm try to save itself by becoming more like Apple. Palm is in the position it is today largely because it followed all the dubious advice pundits heaped on Apple during the 90s - split the company into hardware and software divisions, license to 3rd party manufacturers, buy Microsoft's operating system...
Something is broken when a public notice this innocuous is against the law.
The way I see it, Carr is saying that being a prima donna on a team is a bad thing. Do you disagree with that?
I knew about most of those, but it still seems unlikely to do an outright acquisition of a company like facebook. For the most part those other corporations the church owns are there to fulfill the needs of church members and humanitarian organizations, such as the ranches and farms it owns.
Interesting use of the 20-second cookie. What happens when they scale to data centers in Europe, Asia, and South America? Does it become a arbitrary-second cookie depending on where the user is?

Nonetheless, I can appreciate how a simple approach solves the problem. If these are the most dramatic scaling issues that facebook faces, then this provides strong support to the argument that you shouldn't focus too much on scaling and optimization when first building your site. There are probably better uses of your early time.
Network effects are huge, and especially tough to overcome when the price of listings on Craigslist is so low, but I think there's another effect at work: namely, their minimalism actually makes the site more useful for their users than a more structured listing model would be.

By storing only very minimal posting metadata, and eschewing an API that would allow mash-ups and alternate browsing interfaces, Craigslist offers the same (often overlooked) advantage that old-school classified ads do: namely, they more or less force people to read a lot of the ads in order to have any chance of finding something.

That's better for sellers, because it increases the chances their ad will be seen, and in many cases it benefits buyers, too, since they may stumble across ads that would never have shown up in a more sophisticated search result set.
It's back to being a page full of crap... just symbols for me... http://img.skitch.com/20080820-e9u8x5grdwdqbt6dk2wdq4e74e.jp...
NeverBlock - library for non-blocking IO calls in ruby
I think you have to acknowledge the distinction between things that are interesting to hackers as hackers and things that are interesting to hackers as members of larger sets (airline passengers, citizens, or bipedal meat robots).

Just because most hackers find candied bacon interesting does't mean they want to read about it on news.yc; they can subscribe to the bacon subreddit for that stuff...
It may be endangering in the short term due to dilution or pollution, depending on how you want to classify it all. Overall, though, the best products will rise to the top. It's impossible to say when this will happen, but my thought is that it will.

As for other industries, there will probably be cross-pollution based on the quick successes that we have seen. Since the appeal of churning out 'companies' is obvious, I have no doubt it will be emulated in other markets.
Totally agree. I've never understood people who seem afraid to use words.

As a writer, I consider the whole english language fair game. Obviously, you shouldn't swear for no reason, but as David points out, swear words can be effectively used for emphasis and to add some extra passion.
Basic economics states that when many firms enter a market, the market becomes more competitive and the expected returns to those firms go down, which acts a disincentive to others entering the market in the future. The effect isn't immediate (entrepreneurs have imperfect information about the real returns in a market), so that's why you get boom/bust cycles.

Slightly less basic economics states that when a market becomes commoditized, its complements should raise in expected returns. So we ought to be seeing higher returns for web frameworks, scripting languages, open-source databases, scalability services, web hosting, startup boot-camps, and services that help people make sense of the Web 2.0 clutter.

I think we're seeing this, but the problem is that other folks realize this too, and so we're seeing people pile into lifestreaming apps (eg. FriendFeed) and YC clones. I'm not really sure what industry has the best returns now - if I was, I'd be rich. I suspect it's not Web2.0, but there's something within tech that will be very, very high returns over the next 10 years, but it's not an obvious industry at this point.
"You are one of those people who say NO all the time. No, we can’t write our own operating system! No, we can’t have a backup of everything! People hate that! You impede progress!"

Now I find myself wondering, why would he want them to write their own operating system
:%s/emacs/vim/gci
shouldn't it be 75 years?
Maybe its just Bain Capital doing this, and people assign anything one Mormon does(Romney) to all of them. And yes I know Romney is no longer involved with Bain.
...no. no you don't want to know.

I bet it was one of those insane "I was reading in a management journal about writing operating systems and..." kinds of stories.
Individual employees of a large organization are the very definition of a hard sale. Several hurdles come to mind:

1. Very few people are self-starters to the degree that they'll learn new software voluntarily.

2. It's rare to find anyone willing to spend their own money on something that isn't going to generate an immediate return, and non-managers don't have authority to expense much.

3. Many large companies prohibit installing unapproved software, and get really antsy if anything proprietary leaves the corporate network.

I suspect you'd have more success targeting business applications at self-employed and small business users. There's always been a healthy market for financial and legal products servicing people who don't have the money to waste on 'enterprisey' software.
The article has one very misleading mistake. Four [types] of apes have been able to see themselves in mirrors, not four apes as I watched a video of IIRC eight apes, four male and four female, who used mirrors for self grooming, playing with makeup and a number of other things along with a demonstration of the spot test.

However, I think two were used to show that apes under a certain age couldn't recognise themselves, just like humans under a certain age can't. This was likely to show that apes have an intelligence higher than an 18 month old.
I don't think "self-aware" is the right way to summarize the results of these tests. One thing that this article doesn't say is that the mirror test is geared toward animals with good vision systems, and therefore is, to a large extent, testing spacial reasoning and visual acuity. Birds have great vision systems. It's necessary for flight, and also for picking out specks of food from a distance. A lot of mammals that are quite intelligent have poor vision -- like mustelids, for instance. The mirror test would make little sense for them.

There are other ways to be aware of your self besides through some complex optical phenomenon. For example, an animal might be aware of whether it can fit through that hole, jump up to that ledge, kill that enemy, or stand on that branch without breaking it. It might be aware of whether other creatures are able to see it inside its hideout, or if its cubs are hurt by its bite. "Self" is a rather broad and subtle thing.
I'm pleasantly surprised. I think this batch is as good as the most recent YC batch, at least from the perspective of business ideas...I don't know if they've executed as well. I kinda thought TechStars would fizzle out as an also-ran, but they seem to be hitting their stride. I still find it a little more than obnoxious that they're so focused on YC: They schedule their demo day for the same day as YC (I guess...YC's Valley Demo Day is today, I think...and the Valley Demo Day is the real one...the one in Boston last week is for practice...nobody ever gets funded in Boston), and they make their companies make a decision about acceptance a few days before YC makes their decision.

If TechStars wants to be a serious long-term contender they need to focus more on their customers and less on their competitors.

On a different note, I'm pretty sure Jamie and I chatted with one group of founders in this batch that also applied to YC. I guess they took the TechStar bird in the hand rather than the YC birds in the bush. We liked them, and I'm pretty sure pg and Co. at least gave them an interview.
Foodzie is something I would definitely try if it existed in my area. It sounds like a combination of farmers' markets and the web. A great idea!

I also like the part about the producers making most of the money. Not only is that a classic cut-out-the-middleman play (in what seems like an inefficient market), it might lead to a whole bunch of interesting niche products becoming viable where they weren't before. Which, not to exaggerate too much, would make the world a better place.

I usually look at new apps from the perspective of a developer... can't remember the last time I got this excited as a customer.
Not necessarily. It wouldn't be all that difficult to construct a robot which could recognize its own reflection, but I don't think that would count as "self-awareness".

update: Just read another post in this thread which implies somebody's already done that.
They make a ton of money from job postings.
They have a good excuse to not read books, actually.

(interesingly, one can reversely say that lack of degree encourages you to read more because you have more to prove)
All subjects are good to rant on the education and the social structure, eh?
Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player
So pick a harder problem.
This puzzles me. Why are Mormons so fascinated with genealogy?

Aren't they a little concerned that if they keep researching genealogy they might find out that, say, Native Americans are in fact not one of the tribes of Israel magically transported halfway across the world and "cursed" with dark skin as punishment for their sins? Because, y'know, that would pretty much prove their entire religion false.
Samsung Omnia (i900) Unboxing Video
I respectfully disagree. To put it in another's words, "my momma raised me right."
this is a minor screwup.

<Cough!> As a pilot I can tell you that in many real cases, your very life depends on the proper functioning of these instruments. That's why we check them fanatically! If I wanted to crash a plane and kill those aboard, I wouldn't waste my time with bombs. I'd wait for a cloudy day and subtly damage the instruments on as many planes as I could.

There are heroes among us and they don't wear TSA badges. They check instruments and mechanical systems. Every day, for every flight, whether they feel like it or not, whether "its been working fine all day" or not. Air safety is a friggin miracle of eternal vigil. This fool is an "accidental terrorist" and should never be allowed near a plane again.
I echo again my misgivings about systems that try to make pure async code look like threaded code. You can string together very, very fast code from async callbacks, and you can write simple code with threads. Try to do both at the same time, though, and you end up with the same problem as RPC: the complexity you tried to hide eventually bites you in the ass, and you're in worst-of-both-worlds country.

That said, I'm liking the async renaissance in Ruby, and I really love EventMachine. I wrote a trivial async MySQL client library in it:

http://github.com/tqbf/asymy/tree/master
The parrot you had might not recognise itself in the mirror, as it might be trying to impress its reflection.

However, I'd really like to see this performed on an African Grey, as the one in the local pet store is surprisingly smart as it actually amuses itself by speaking. This isn't how it sounds; people go up to it and say hello -because- it's a parrot, and it never says anything except when the store owner says hello. Yet when someone goes to walk away it'll say hello or meow (yep it meowed at my girlfriend's mum) at them and they'll turn back to try and talk to it again. They'll give up and it'll say hello/meow again and will keep doing this until it gets bored and moves to a different part of the store.

I'd like to see an explination as to how the african grey seems to have a sense of humour. I've heared all the "it's been trained to" dismissals, yet it does it of its own volition as it's left to roam the store and the owner barely works there. It's not like it gets a treat as I've spent an hour in there and it does it to select people. I just can't figure it out, and I've heared repeatedly that people see a sense of humour in them.
Great use of slinkset ... funny how TC gave SS a weak review but then spotlighted one of their users.
whereisbob is the new DailyWTF... I feel like I just hate a lot of empty calories.
Start a side project, says GitHub founder
Venture Capital Awakens In City That Never Sleeps
This is a must read. Great advice from an awesome Ruby hacker behind one of the coolest startups around!
Most often it strikes me as shallow. Like most comedians who swear, it typically masks a lack of substance.

Some people make effective use of swearing, but most use it as a crutch, or in a noticeably calculated way, and even if it makes me remember something I doubt that the memory is going to be favorable.
That's no different than any other consumer-focused software. Easier in that you don't have to setup a payment gateway, but you'll also be 26% less rich for that perk.
"Slightly less basic economics states that when a market becomes commoditized, its complements should raise in expected returns."

Good post - I see a big opportunity emerging for those who can figure out better ways to enable sophisticated use for and make sense of multiple databases.
Katherine McAlpine: particle physics, the large Hadron collector & rapping at CERN
I'm not a Mormon (or even religious), so this is conjecture, but I believe that it has to do with posthumous baptism.

Beyond that, I'm sure there that some of the original interest in genealogy had to do with attempts to prevent inadvertent incest during the years where polygamy was accepted.
linux kernel poster

http://www.makelinux.net/kernel_map_poster

OR the one that looked like the milton Bradley Simon game
Is #1 actually correct? The plain interpretation would be that if you join two tables on one field, it can only read the index from one table at a time and needs to do a linear search through the second table for each row. Clearly that's ridiculous, and not MySQL's behavior at all. Clearly this is a more subtle problem. The rest of the text implies this is a scaling issue ("wait until your tables get large enough"), but I don't see why that's the case.

Can someone enlighten me?
I'm not sure I understand the motivation for LDS to own Facebook.

Sounds like lots of eggs in one basket for a company that certainly hasn't proven it's value yet.
Three Services For SMS Text Applications
Martin wants broadband across USA
Injured? Horsing Around With Stem Cells May Get You Back in the Saddle
I'm trying PostgreSQL for the first time, with Merb and Rack, to implement an API. The reasons I switched:

1) Built in full text search (tsearch2). No messing with Sphinx or Ferret.

2) Write ahead logging is pretty useful if you're running on EC2 and don't want your DB to go away when an instance goes down.

3) Basic GIS functionality available via module.
I'm not sure, but perhaps he means one index per table per query.
I've been debating about getting an Ork poster (http://orkposters.com) of Manhattan, but there are a few other cities that there's posters for as well.
Do you disagree because of a prejudice, or do you have well thought out reasons? If you have reasons, could you post them?
I swear.. a lot.

But as the article suggests, It's only when I'm really passionate about something or if I want to make something really clear.

I only use it for good, not evil. :)
I'd second you on that. While working as a reviewer I found that swearing when talking to my boss made him understand my point better.

Similarly I've found that when talking to people, sometimes dropping a 'fuck' in as punctuation scores gold. I worked as an electrician, and when I add the 'F' in there, people recognise it isn't my opinion I'm expressing when it comes to doing something, it's a simple fact.

Again, something I've seen on the construction site. Workers regularly swear, but when working swear words begin to illustrate numerous things. How good/bad something is, how urgent something is, etc. When someone says grab a new fucking bolt, I know they don't need one now, I know they're holding something likely very heavy. When someone uses a swear word, I don't walk, I don't run, I sprint cause I know someone's going to end up hurt.

So as a writer, and blue/white-collar worker I'd say swearing is a fundamental type of punctuation. It makes a point that an exclamation point wouldn't. It's wrongly seen as vulgar to swear, when originally it was only seen as vulgar to swear AT SOMEONE, but victorian times supposedly perverted this. However, I'd consider it returning more to the original sensibilities, and that if the wireless operator on the Titanic had put a fuck in there, the other ships might not have thought they were partying when the ship was sinking.
I'd guess that they'd need to partition their data somehow by then, so the Europe DB is master for European users and slave for the rest, and so on.
Here's a linked link to the video: http://rubyhoedown2008.confreaks.com/08-chris-wanstrath-keyn...

(The preview image is not my default facial expression, I swear.)
Do they charge users the "premium" SMS rates for those short codes?
>Of all the presentations I’ve given, I’ve generally had the most positive feedback from the ones that carried enough passion to warrant profanity and it’s been very effective in making people remember key ideas (“they sell fucking shoes”).

I can't imagine how "fucking shoes" would be useful.
1. It works
2. It is cheap (mostly free)

This is the same reason why it's hard to beat google, ebay, etc.

Things change when the company which owns a market leading product makes a mistake - case in point: Microsoft Windows Vista.
I speak Hebrew.

I don't speak Russian, but I had a lot of Russian friends growing up. So I've heard a lot of jokes fall flat in translation from Russian. I thought I recognised the sound.
Install GreaseKit for Safari and run the Greasemonkey script.
thanks for sharing those links.
I would say a slight Russian accent.
There's still a problem that no one's figured out matchmaking properly yet. At least not online.

Offline the two main methods are:

- friend set-ups/ Family

- Dating (I think this is what this site does)
"Bob’s initiatives, literally reeking with an overwhelming stench of incompetence, were consistent only in their absolute absurdity."

I, for one, would love to know how an initiative can "literally reek" of anything.
zappos, they just sell fucking shoes, they win because of their custormer service.
And it didn't even have a technical twist. Just whining about vagueness from a boss. So what?
I think it depends on what your real definition of start-up is. Is it only businesses that can scale and create huge amounts of wealth? Or does it refer to anything someone starts with the intention of becoming profitable and supporting themselves? I can imagine that with enough time and hard work some of these apps thrown together can indeed produce returns, and might even give someone some financial success. Sure, they're not likely to be the next Google or YouTube or Amazon, but I don't see a problem with people cranking out code if they so choose.
The takeaway:

You are not actually that different from other people. Build something for yourself and you'll find that if you love it, others will love it, too.
Ha, I love this line: "I know this may sound kind of crazy, but you have to trust me. I'm keynoting." :)
The Truth Behind Liveplace’s Photo-Realistic 3D World And OTOY’s Rendering Engine
Seems like fewer web-oriented folks this year.

Congrats to Adam!
I guess a way of asking is why are we so married to the concept of classifieds. Maybe you should look at innovation in finding jobs, finding houses, etc.

Ebay is an innovation in buying selling stuff (once classifieds territory).

Personally, I think maps/real-estate, very possibly from Google could be a major point of attack. just makes sense to find real estate on a map. Also makes sense to book hotels.
2 money areas online.
I don't have a TV. What a waste of time.

I find out about new products and gadgets from sites like this. Is HN an advertising hub?

I never see pay-per-click text ads or banner ads, that's for sure. I also avoid webcock blogs, so I mostly steer clear of shameless "viral" marketing trying to subtly promote services and products.

You can take your ad money and keep it. You don't need to be condescending to me, especially when you can't spell common words like "blatant" correctly.
Scalability Worst Practices
Doesn't this violate the terms of use of the iphone sdk?
Not really. One reason that you infrequently see C++ programs using garbage collection, is because the language includes some nice tools that mitigate many of the pain points that drive people to use GC in the first place.

If you're using C++ as its own language, you get many of the nice things that come with memory management in dynamic languages, but you don't have to pay for it at runtime (the inclusion of shared_ptr in C++0x is a great example of this, actually). If you merely use C++ as "C with classes" (I'm not saying that you do this...just generally), then you don't see this benefit of the language.
"Anyone with half a brain (and therefore with any money in their pocket) uses Ad Block Plus, don't they?

I don't understand advertising and I don't want to. Selling a useful piece of software seems much more classy and straightforward."

Your original response wasn't condescending at all?

"I never see pay-per-click text ads"

Sorry, but that's absolutely wrong. How do you know which links are paid for and which ones aren't?

How do you expect to sell anything to the average person (Who watches TV by the way), if you never watch TV? Apart from some shows being pretty interesting, other mainstream shows are a great way to gain insight into how things become popular.

Thanks, and I do enjoy the money :) If you want to make money, learn about advertising.
Ha! I have a replica of Sting hanging on the wall behind my desk at home :-)

I'd put one of my katanas there instead, but I have a 7 year old who sleeps next door...
Interesting strategy, but Girlfriend came out 18 months ago. That post reviews the song and the song as if they're something new.
I've always been curious why someone hasn't (or why I haven't heard of someone) prototyping an improvement to MySQL's query cache to invalidate the cache less frequently and get more dependable usage. Currently it invalidates when any table referenced by the query changes. It seems like you could improve this algorithm without too much trouble. For example, it feels like if the query was located solely through indexes, it should be able to do cache invalidation on an update to those index hits rather than on the entire table.

I'll have to look through the code one day and see why this makes no sense.
How do i get the nbc olympics widget off my imac?
how do i uninstall nbc's olympics widget from my imac. i only see the program when clicking the dashboard so i can't drag and drop it into my trash.
I listened to the video, and I have to say I was inspired. The startup I'm working with helps communities and students, and that's a hugely motivating factor - but I love exploring my python co-dependent species evolution sandbox.

I lost the code to it, so perhaps as a side project I'll learn ruby and rebuild it - then post it on github. Why not?

And....I'll give the no RSS thing a try.
The predictable lifecycle of the skeptic (or even better, cynic)