skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I had some thoughts a while back on one way this could work using social search: http://tchblg.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/why-friendfeed-deserv...

Basically, you'd get results back that are from conversations posted by your friends, side-by-side with traditional results from a search engine (using something like Yahoo's BOSS). Then, if you still didn't get the answer you are looking for, you can broadcast the original query out to your online contact list to see if anyone within your social network knows the answer. You wouldn't get instant results, but it would likely be a very good, trusted result. This probably works better for things like opinions (what's the best Chinese restaurant in Seattle?) vs. a fact-based search like "C# string replace".

I would seriously avoid trying to take on Google or MS or Yahoo by trying to out-index them. Cuil has millions in the bank and some of the world's foremost experts in search at the helm, and things aren't looking all that bright so far. There are lots of problems to solve in the world and lots of approaches on how to solve them - solving search by out-indexing Google should probably be pretty darn low on your "problems to solve today" list.
The kindle's e-ink technology is very impressive. It is easy on the eyes and works well in sunlight -- especially compared to my iphone.

It's also nice that you can read only using one hand. Since you don't have to turn your head or flip pages, I can actually read faster.

If Amazon can beef up its experimental web browser, the kindle would pay for itself with its free wireless.

The only drawback to e-ink is that it is very slow. It would be hard to leverage the technology for more interactive applications like games or video.
Customers pay with Google now, supplying them with private information and attention for their advertisements.

This is the same model almost every magazine and newspaper, where the cover price merely offsets a portion of the printing costs.
Insight into Creating a Profitable Startup Company, by Ruby on Rails Creator
Certainly my first impression was Buzzword Bingo - we win!
Please let us know when/where you open source your phone system app. I am very interested in learning from your experience.
I think people are a bit afraid to post things outside of the main themes. The quality and relevance of such posts is a lot more subjective, so you always will see people complaining that it is not hacker news.
> The OS is rock solid
> I used about 12 different BBs for a year and half

I've used a Blackberry, an iPhone, Nokia N95, and Windows Mobile 2005/6 in the last 4 years.

Blackberry was by far the most stable. Mine never ever crashed, after about a year and a half of daily use.

Is there a BB with a gecko / webkit / opera browser?
I felt pretty good after watching Pineapple Express.
How To Speed Up Wordpress With Nginx And WP Super Cache
Don't ever rely on HTC backup tools.
I think the bar for a non-programming, non-startup article to count as "interesting to hackers" is a lot higher. Really interesting science articles just aren't written as often as somebody blogs something useless about how great closures are.

Your English is fine, by the way. I wouldn't have known you weren't a native speaker if you hadn't said so.
Most pictures I've seen hosted on SmugMug and Flickr are either rights reserved or non-commercial CC. "Consolidating" them into another site will eventually anger the wrong type of people.
Also the whole "you must have quick changes to succeed" is overblown. Sure a hacker will probably be able to roll out a new change a week earlier, but how much can you really gain during that 1 week?

In many cases, a hacker will be able to roll out a change three months earlier. Sometimes I turn around a change for a client in as little as an hour, but a big change? Those rarely happen within a timeframe that most entrepreneurs would find acceptable. Especially if you don't have an agency-of-record relationship - those always take priority.
I strongly dislike: 'What stops Google from replicating your idea — at full scale and with a huge installed base — over a long weekend?'

Historical evidence shows large companies do very poorly in emerging markets and new technologies. Google employees also don't randomly work on a weekend for an idea.

I have been in more than one meeting for an obscure technology that there is no way Google or Microsoft were listed as huge concerns for the project. No, the huge concerns for the project are bringing it to market well and primarily creating a new market. If Google or Microsoft develop a competing product you have already succeeded.
Google does have paying GMail customers. It's $50/user/year for business class GMail.
The second derivative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift

Maybe in a small population social news site, the 'norm' for content can drift in a similar fashion to allele frequency in a small gene pool.
no i did not.

I'm not crawling the entire site, just enough to get the data that is needed. I think the app would still work if my ip was throttled anyways, albeit new items would show up on feeds later (but the app response time would be quicker).
It is a good time for Indian research-related startups to take advantage of this. Indian VCs should take note.

"Over all, United States banks will cut 200,000 employees by 2009, the banking consultancy Celent said in April. "

"Theoretically, as much as 40 percent of the research-related jobs on Wall Street, tens of thousands of jobs, could be sent off-shore"
The danger with this stuff is some people take it very literally, then a few years later we hear that it's not the whole story and unless you take something else into account then you've done it wrong.
I'm not trying to shoot down the research I think it's great to have more understanding of how out DNA affects personality, but that's just another tool to add to the whole set.
You can't reduce the complexity of parenting or education to an easy 10 step program; you actually have to pay attention to how each individual child learns.
Google to Congress: We don't do deep packet inspection like NebuAd with our ads
Agreed with your post, except where you called Struts "the right way" made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. :-)
Ya that is a valid point. I've yet to work on a product which targets dial-up or older machines.

The product I work on right now is for engineers who design and manufacture things. 97% of them have .NET 2.0+ with XP or Vista. The remaining 3% are Windows 2k. Almost everyone has .NET 2.0 installed but occasionally there is some squirrelly box in a manufacturing plant with no internet connection. For those customers they just use a CD with the application and framework on it.

If you are targeting customers using Windows 98 or Windows 2k then you are also limited to .NET 1.1 or 2.0.

.NET 3.0 and 3.5+ are XP or Vista only. And as I mentioned before most people in the windows world (at least engineers) are using XP.
I second waiting for the bold. It's quite capable, and has a screen with double the pixel density (screen has the same resolution, but is smaller to make room for the keyboard) of the IPhone. It's beautifully sharp, and I'd have to say that the tactile keyboard leaves any touchscreen in the dust when it comes to actually doing input to the device.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-op student at RIM for the summer. This means that I've gotten to play with the Bold, but it also means I'm a bit biased =P
Best tools for remote real-time development collaboration?
I'm trying to collaborate with a friend across the country and I'm frustrated by the available tools.

What we normally want to do is have an audio connection open, work on our own individual Eclipse instances, and have a small window showing the other person's screen.

We do the audio over Skype, but we can't figure out how to share a miniature version of each other's screen. What we do now is point the webcam at the screen -- it's horrible but a driver that allowed you to share your screen contents exposed as a webcam interface would allow us to use Skype's built-in sharing features.

A lot of people here must do this. What tools do you use?
Patrick Stewart? Doesn't David Attenborough narrate?
Link Directory
I have to agree with you. While I find tech news interesting, I am also a big fan of science news. I'm not a hacker, but I hang around HN because the community seems to filter out very well all of the garbage found on Digg.

I came to the HN because of YCombinator and my ambitions, but I am no longer studying computer science (I have changed my major to mathematics and physics, pursuing what I dropped my first go-around at an undergraduate degree). I stay because this group shares many of the same interests in news. If science posts were to show up, then all the better. If not, then it may be that this group is more inclined towards tech news.
I call bullshit.

Raytracing an entire city with quality exceeding that of any video card on the market -- and do it in the cloud in real time?

Mind-blowing and seductive, but impossible with today's technology.
I posted an article on my blog about how, at digg, science ended up being the best quality category (largest promotion/submission ratio - http://owenbyrne.com/2008/06/05/yet-another-random-digg-list...). My impression at the time was that there was no money in science - So people post crap constantly in other categories, because that's where the dollars are. There's a lot less money in the promotion of science, hence less sock-puppets, gaming, etc.
Pet Insurance: Fido Gnawing at Your Finances?
Commentary about Pet Insurance.
I'd start with this thread from yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=272361
I have a blackberry pearl with t-mobile, and it's not bad. The data rate is slow (200k if you're lucky, usually much lower than that), but it lets you use the DUN bluetooth profile when connected with OSX, so it's an acceptable wireless modem, and a decent phone. The DUN profile only seems to work with my powerbook though; I've tried using the phone as a bluetooth modem with my nokia 770, and the blackberry won't advertise that profile in that situation. I don't understand how that works, but it's a limitation to be aware of.

I'm personally holding out for an Android device, mostly because the pearl thing in the blackberry gets crap in it and then you can't really use the UI until you manage to work the dust particles out.

Also, what is this excellent data plan you're speaking of? Is it just the $40/month unlimited internet plan on their 2G network, or is there an actual 3G data plan somewhere that I haven't been able to find?
Never use zip ties in a data center. Use velcro strips instead.

I don't want people trying to pop zip ties with knives near my cables carrying production traffic.
Meeting customers in person. Sitting in meetings in companies that is going to have IPOs. Sitting in wealthy client's private jet or yachts in Saint Tropez talking about the new products to hedge the client's capital. And because it has to be in person, they would better dress nicely and are attractive.
MOG Launches Ad Network, Columbia Records Exec Joins Board
non blackberry devices get unlimited data for $20, this is why I'm trying to avoid blackberry devices, or at least avoid letting them know I have one.
Eh? I am talking about premier. It's 99.9% for premier and uh ... 0% guarantee for anyone else.
I really don't think there is that one feature that will kill a product, if its not rolled out immediately. + I don't think there has ever been a startup that didn't have it's users clamoring because they have to wait for some new feature to get coded. And usually its something very simple too.

And once again you approach this as a hacker. Put yourself in the shoes of a complete noob. Lets say 2 years later he was able to copy paste together some working code to get his basic idea working(it has to be basic, because the person doesn't have the skills/resources to do anything groundbreaking). Then its time to add a new feature. Once again he needs to dive into the code, and it'll take him a lot longer to finish, compared to even a contracted agency that can just jump into the source safe and copy paste the specific code for that specific function.

If you are a hacker, doing it yourself is definitely advisable. But for your average Joe Blow who has no clue how to code something as basic as a hello world app, I'd think its much more advisable to have someone else do it, instead of wasting time putting together crappy code, they can be up and running with a decent quality website much faster. And then while the new changes get coded they can continue working on marketing their site. You can have the best site on the net, but w/o users its worthless.
Perhaps dreamhosters.com is blocked where he works for some reason.
Posted some thoughts on what problems are appropriate for Hadoop here:
http://weblog.strlen.net/?p=8

(Another post on parameter settings and machine configurations for Hadoop cluster in the making, once that's done I'll post to news.y.c)
Hey at least it's more stable than Vista.

And hibernation/powersave probably works better than on Ubuntu.
My address bar says http, so no, doesn't look like it.
Very true. I think some of the "Topic Nazis" have migrated here from Slashdot.
Windows security rendered useless? Uh, not exactly
18 Ways to Power Search Google
The HMS Beagle Project
Do you have numbers from a comparative analysis over time? (It may be true; I'm not sure and it would be good to quantify beyond anyone's vague impression.)
you are right thanks
About the bar, I think that while it's certainly higher for science than for programming articles, it has dropped a lot for programming & startups so I don't understand why people is so incredibly picky with science (even for good articles) but an order of magnitude more tolerant with other subjects.

Oh, and thank you for your comment about my English :)
The only thing I got from this article is reaffirmation that Ted Dziuba is a huge Hadoop fanboy and still hates Twitter.
Well, that's exactly why I mentioned not being a native speaker... I do that kind of mistake (and less subtle ones too), and I don't want you to think that I'm just ignorant or something.
We don't consciously post things here trying to comply with the vision. Historically, communities evolve independently of the vision their founders had when seeding them.

So, you can't complain why there are less science related posts. It is just the way because the community does not find science interesting. (By the way, I personally love science). You can try seeding the community with science related posts and see how we respond.
No, I didn't do such analysis, but I think the difference is quite evident (even if it wasn't 50/50, sure there was a drop).
Is the iPhone 2.* software better or worse than the unlocked iPhone?
you have to be kidding me. kosmix is so bad i won't even say its shit. it would have to locate some amount of good and like triple it before i would even call it shit.

kosmix has recruiters carpet bombing all the bay area tech companies scrounguing for talent....i'm sure they work very hard from keeping potential recruits from actually looking at the site

your obvious astroturf reveals you as an employee. pathetic.
The average upvoter has become less sophisticated.

A top story for almost two days was a screenshot of a hapless fellow complaining about mistakenly ordering the 'I Am Rich' iPhone app. (It got 59 story upvotes, and this was in addition to other news coverage of the app.) The thread had multiple highly-rated comments that were no more insightful than "ha, don't click 'buy' if you don't want to buy". (Two of those had over 20 net upvotes.)

The idiot hordes have arrived and are breeding like rabbits through mutual upvotes. Death of News.YC predicted; news at 11.
Playground Blues / Creating a basic API with Django
Since you're already using Eclipse, check this out: http://codesurgeonblog.com/2008/06/cola-real-time-shared-edi...
That's my point with posting this here. I don't want to complain, but I want to make the correct people aware of this (if they weren't already). What I think is: 1) interesting enough science articles go to the front page when they are posted on the news queue, 2) there are people interested in science here, maybe they'll care to start posting science related links again? I don't know, it's just an idea.

I post my own articles when I have time too.
Believe it or not, mistakenly substituting the word "less" when the correct word would be "fewer" is a mistake that a lot of native English speakers make.
I've tried several of those and none of the ones I've used allow you to shrink the window and have it scale -- it will just show a small part of the other person's screen. I need to see a scaled-down picture of his screen while continuing to work on mine.
Jakob Nielsen ranks Wufoo, Sugarsync and Xero among 10 Best Application UIs of 2008
The winners are:

- Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.

- CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system.

- FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor.

- PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.

- Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.

- SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics.

- SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.

- SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.

- Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.

- Xero by Xero (New Zealand): Accounting for small businesses.
The End of YouTube: Would Anyone Really Care?
Well, I guess we can discuss whether science is one of the main themes or not here... In my own pov, science is not only inherently related to technology, but also it's a common interest of everyone I know that works on high tech. Not so sure about general tech and web startups though.
You can download Opera for the BB (at leas the Curve, whatever model that is) but I honestly found that I preferred the built-in Browser app over it, and I am a long-time Opera user. Trying to use the mobile Opera is when you really start to feel constrained by the BB's UI.
A suite of genetic tests in this area would be a novelty but there will probably be something here in the long run.
The fact that I've been going back to nature every weekend for the last 4 decades should kind of speak for itself.

Math is one of the foundations of all engineering disciplines and some of the great mathematical minds like Newton and fourier and laplace considered themselves more engineers than mathematicians.

But nature is nature and engineering is engineering. Both have their fascinations but both are different.

They need to be apprciated as they are. I find no need to ask questions like "Is one better than the other??".
The reason there aren't more science submissions is probably just that there isn't very much good science writing on the web. Most of the science articles being written today are basically just poorly summarized press releases covering cleantech, medicine, space, and the physical sciences. Most of the announcements are bullshit to begin with, and the fact that the writers don't know what they're talking about makes it even worse. If there were people who went out and read interesting journal articles and wrote up the results in a readable way then I'd be all for that, but the number of people doing that is basically zero. Aaron Schwartz et al. were trying to do that for a while on their blog Science That Matters, but they don't seem to even exist anymore.
"... why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? ..."

I don't know but every time I post an article detailing the hard science behind say a wired, the economist, newsweek, salon or FT post it will be ignored. The reason behind this might be the fact the real science doesn't make for entertaining reading or more likely journalists explain difficult things in an more entertaining way.
Very nicely stated RL.
All you did was reduce your sample size. That doesn't mean you're any more profitable than anyone else in terms of EV. For instance, if the market crashed during the short period in which you were exposed to it, rather than a little later, you would be hugely negative.

Again, read the book. Really, it's eye-opening.
Quantum mechanics and Tomb Raider
You can't reduce the complexity of parenting or education to an easy 10 step program

The cynical part of me notes that this is EXACTLY what some parents want...
The home page linked me to http://www.kosmix.com/topic/In-N-Out as a sample search.

Is that really superior? If I were in middle school, doing a research paper on In-N-Out, I could see the appeal. It seems fairly humming with information. Certainly it feels like it could fill a poster board.

Mostly, it seems to be trying to anticipate my next search related to In-N-Out. Did I really mean "In-N-Out videos"? Did I mean "where's the nearest In-N-Out"? Did I mean "what does 'animal style' actually mean?"

But really, if I had wanted any of those things, wouldn't I have used those as my search terms? As it stands, I find the page a little confusing; I don't know where to look amidst all that second-guessing.
Information Graphics In Javascript With Sparklines.js
Digg is of course the classic example. I know of one that I'm not at liberty to divulge in my sector.

Just seems like a bad idea to say that something is a bad idea when clearly it's worked out well.
Wow looks neat. We need to share other applications as well but we'll probably use this for Eclipse.
There are some interesting blogs to follow though... Terry Tao's, and Scott Aaronson's are two examples: they can be very technical, but when they are more focused in the general public, they are great.
NYT on Magic and Neuroscience
phishing was the first thing I thought of.

I understand if you need to run the site on another domain (because of cookies) but please don't train your users to be phished. The login page should have been on tumblr.com/beta (or beta.tumblr.com) that posts to the other site (or if you have an authenticity token to protect against CSRF posts to the login path, you could iframe the login page from tumblr-beta.com/login inside a tumblr.com domain).
It doesn't meet your criteria, but I recommend the Palm Centro without hesitation. The ecosystem of developers and applications (freeware, shareware and commercial) is enormous.

Say what you will about the operating system being old (not to mention the sad, backwards ways of Palm, the company), but my Centro is running brand new programs alongside 8 year old applications without a problem. Oh, and the Centro has real copy and paste.

The GSM version of the Centro also has the lowest SAR radiation levels of any phone I've seen (it's something like 0.74).

I share my Centro's data plan over Bluetooth with my Nokia N810 tablet all the time. Ironically, all my Palm software also runs on the N810 with the Garnet VM from Access.
Mailbox stuffing is a great idea for me actually. I walk every day past roughly 100 mailboxes and would stuff a sheet of paper in each for 1 cent if I could do it without slowing down.
Cool idea!

If you don't mind answering I'm curious as to how long it usually takes for your HITs to get answered and do you get many problems with ones that no one will do?
imho, the title of the paper is really great, and that's about it...
The article was definitely entertaining. I definitely laughed at

"Starling is the Ruby-based messaging system that runs Twitter's backend. Yes, Twitter, the nonprofit web service known widely for its downtime, dropped its disaster-producing shitpile on the world."
I kinda agree. Especially if there is a thread about macs, and you dare say macs are too expensive, you will get downvoted to death. It's like fanboys have arrived, and herd mentality is being prevalent. Unless the post is offensive, there is no point to downvote more than a -2, just b/c you don't agree with.
Pictures From the Boston/Cambridge YC Meetup