skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a home made kit made out of big paper clips. Its not that good, and im a bad picker, but i find it interesting. Its a nice hobby. I feel safe because my dad installed a good lock that uses an electromagnet to unlock our metal door. Eastern Europe in the 90's(and now too) required such measures.
"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
'No decision' on giant database of all phone calls, emails and internet use in UK
I kind of want to be the next Steve Jobs. Sorta.
The biggest issue with that is that if you pay this bill, when someone else wife gets cancer, do you pay that bill too?

I do agree though that they should be doing something other than asking everyone else to fork over cash.
i can't seem to find a simple solution on-line

Even in this day and age, the off-line solutions are better. Get a DVD or flash drive and send it by mail or FedEx. Even on a moderately fast connection 5 GB is no joke to download.
Here's my situation. In no way am I trying to say I'm doing better or worse.

I graduated with Physics BS two years ago. I work 4 hours a week as a teacher/mentor. ($30-40 an hours) And I code AI the rest of the time. I live in a van on a co-op property to illuminate rent money so that I can work less for money and code more.

This is just temporary, but I do love the lifestyle. I have never learned as much and as more efficiently as I do now. So if you have a specific project to do, do it yourself or find other bright people to partner with. If not, it's time to network.

You will get a good job lead either by having a lot of accomplishment, or lots of good networks. And the latter seems to work for most people.

It sounds like you have done a lot of good work for other people. Have you exploited your network yet? Email friends of friends, past co-workers of co-workers, find out what they are doing. I'm sure if you dig hard enough you will find someone interesting that needs your help.
You mean like netcat? (Not to say that it's what they should use, but the idea is the same, right?)
Another vote for Komodo Edit. Runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac, so I can use the same tool wherever I'm working (and edits files remotely too).
Most ISPs are slimey and anti-consumer. Rogers is no exception, but I don't know if I'd go so far as to say this is a new low. This is hardly worth complaining about compared to throttling, traffic shaping and rewriting pages. All they're doing is redirecting failed DNS lookups to search pages with ads.

I'm pretty sure quite a few ISPs do this and typical users may even like it. It would be nice if you could opt out, but this is easily solved by OpenDNS or some other service. I think it's mostly power users who would object to this practice and they're more than capable of switching to different DNS servers.

This guy could have switched to OpenDNS in less time than it took to write that blog.
Ask YC: Looking for a web 2.0 designer from Toronto, Canada
Hello,
I am currently working on a website project and need to create a demo. I have the structure of the site and also I know what goes where on each page. I need someone with good design skills and also a good understanding of web 2.0 sites so s/he can do the interface design for the site.

At this point the goal is to make a demo of the product in order to show to VCs and others, so we need to make the pages first and then bring them to life with flash. Hence, we either need to find someone with both design and flash skills or just one of the two.

We are located in Toronto, Canada. Please let me know if you are interested to work on such a project or if you know anyone that would be.

Thank you,
you can either email me at shayan@dineorwine.com
or call me at 416-824-1404
Moral Development isn't moral if it infringes on human rights. Therefore you are incorrect.
The South End Technology Center (SETC) has an open-access lab in Boston. Thanks to their partnership with the MIT MediaLab, they have many of the same tools as TechShop.
I've been running a real estate startup for two and a half years and wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone in this market. Tough business to make inroads into and find profit in, despite the tremendous opportunity to improve the user experience. Not saying you can't do it, but it's not the kind of low-lying fruit you should look for as a small startup.

For example:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/141586.a...
If you work for Apple, we need your help...
On that note, Dropbox streamlines exactly the process you describe (I'm whoring it out now as it's pretty darn good... now that I finally got an invite. I have a few of my own, too, if you're curious.)
Thanks! I just ordered The Wisdom of Crowds on Amazon--been meaning to read it for a long time now, and needed a push.

The core idea of decisionero is based on methods like The Six Thinking Hats, the Creative Problem-Solving Institute's six-step method, SWOT analysis, and other structured methods--and, of course, personal experience seeing the structured approach work in person.

Can someone recommend other particularly useful decision-making research? decisionero is not about heavily mathematical approaches, like the simplex method to optimize a decision. It's about collaboration, where people combine their knowledge and insight. There must be plenty of research about that.
A lot of the high tech locks have key backups - so it makes me wonder if they can easily just be bumped too.

I want to get one of those fingerprint ones soon - because I am horrible with keeping track of keys.
Hmm... I wonder how often these loans default and if the derivatives markets trade them...
oops! can someone fix that for me?

The correct link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...
www.pando.com
Same here. What beer? That may be the only way to identify the HN crowd.
That's unfortunate. Any idea why it's blocked?

Do they block by hostname, or ip? You can try http://ff.im/e/0268007b-db20-4e2c-822f-7028a98016e4/How-long...
Share Your Resume Revision History with Google Docs?
Studentsell.co.uk
Studentsell.co.uk (www.studentsell.co.uk) is an entity designed to act as a medium that enables students in Scotland to trade physical items and share information with each other and could be considered as an electronic version of the ultimate student notice board.
The main objective of the business is to create a vibrant niche trading community for the Scottish Higher Education marketplace and from this develop Studentsell.co.uk into a name synonymous with further education in Scotland, followed by the rest of the UK.
Studentsell.co.uk does not incorporate a ‘bidding’ system used by auction sites - there is no reserve pricing, auction end times and last minute sniping. Instead members are offered items at a set price for immediate purchase.
The website has the potential to develop into an integral part of College and University life for students all over the country and although the work to Studentsell.co.uk has only recently been finalised with our website developers (Alienation Design – a Glasgow based award-winning company) there are already over 1500 registered members and this could easily be turned into several tens of thousands following a successful marketing strategy.
The student population is commonly regarded as one of the easiest markets to target because students are easily located. Further to this due to the fact that they live, work and socialise together positive user experiences will generate positive word of mouth and this should result in the website becoming very well known in student circles within a very short space of time.
Websites with very high levels of traffic, particularly with such a specific consumer base coupled with an extensive and accurate customer database have the potential of selling for several millions of pounds. Successful online trading communities can sell for vast sums frequently in the eight and nine figure regions. The following links are two recent examples of this phenomenon:
http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-1264250/Trade-Me
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4502550.stm
Those that do versioned the first version of Windows NT "3.1", to give the very impression the grandparent mentioned: that it had been through three major releases (and a service pack) already, making it pretty darn good. Whether or not the experience felt like a 3.1 is left as a question for the user.
On this topic, I think people aren't upvoting the articles they like enough to squash stuff that isn't particularly interesting.
"But what's really bad about that is that when you look at efficiency numbers only about 20% of the energy contained in those gallons of fossil fuels are actually doing useful work. About 80% of their energy is simply wasted as heat. That has to change."

Uh, I'm not a Mechanical Engineer, but isn't that a pretty typical ratio? Obviously higher-efficiency tech should be a priority, but in an article whose purpose is apparently to compare China and California, this makes it sound like California is using particularly wasteful technologies.
Ohhh--I assumed this was going to be a Go-based programming language. Are there any? (Or anything similar--Hello World in chess positions, for example?)
references and/or affiliate programs.

for example, if you were to write a movie bot, if your users want to find movie times, display the times and a link to buy a movie ticket, which would send them to fandango through your affiliate link.

solicit other websites without affiliate programs to get similar mentions on your bots.
Perhaps we should all make an effort to wear technical swag? Or perhaps xkcd t-shirts?
I think an automated, IM-based help system could be a great product. If you have a website for these bots, you might create a help-bot to showcase how effective it can be.

If you want customers, go through Craigslist and for every support job that doesn't specify phone work, let them know how much cheaper they could get the same product.
I think so too. I think people also sometimes vote up interesting articles that may be off topic just to save them. I've voted up a couple articles to save them and come back later that I might not have voted up on merit alone. I won't do this with total garbage, but sometimes a vote up is easier than saving the link to delicious.
Steve Jobs is equivalent to 10,000 actual users.
It's quite silly that Apple still has the SDK under NDA. How do they expect developers to share tips and tricks to improve their applications?
So apparently there's a time limit on post edits. I had planned to edit the OP and point to this response as it is now buried. Anyone have an idea as to how I can make this comment more visible? I assumed a new post would be inappropriate...
Jessica Livingston Speaking at Business of Software Conference in Boston
I've tried them all and keep coming back to VIM. You can get intelli-sense, err I mean code completion and it integrates right into VIM. It's just fast and minimal. It just works.
> "Apple (AAPL) shipped 1.4 million computers in the US during Q2, representing 8.5% market share and 38% year-over-year growth. Mac shipments grew 9 times faster than the overall U.S. PC market (4.2%) in Q2."

Is basic mathematical literacy too much to ask for? When your market share is small, it's easy to grow faster. Apple can cut in to a tiny fraction of Microsoft's market, and growth is huge. But even if Microsoft converts all Apple customers to PCs, the percentage growth will be small. When your market share is 90%, it's impossible for your market share to grow more than 11%, and pretty difficult for your sales to grow at 38% (unless people buy new PCs every 6 months, or you find a big new market). While it's true that Apple's growth is faster, it's hardly as surprising as the article makes it out to be.

My company's computer shipments grew over 10x faster than Apple's -- so about 90 TIMES faster than the overall market. I increased by sales 400% by selling computers to 5 of my friends, since I only sold 1 computer last year. Get my point?

Yes, Apple's growing, but this whole "9 times faster", while true, is misleading, meaningless hype.

> "But at the rate Apple is gaining share, it won't be long before Microsoft begins to feel a real bite."

Yes, but as Apple grows, they can't keep growing at that rate!

For example, MSN/Live search market share grew about 27% from May to June (http://seekingalpha.com/article/85321-msn-live-only-major-se...). But you don't see anyone making a big deal about this, because it's impossible to expect Google to grow at that rate. This situation is no different.
I disagree - Apple was pushing the entire idea of a Personal Computer before that market existed. Microsoft's big break was when they were called upon by IBM to provide the OS for IBM's competitor to Apple. Had not Apple taken IBM by surprise, IBM may have eventually decided to go into that market anyway. But absent competitive pressure from Apple compressing their timeline, they probably would have gone with a more proprietary design and wouldn't have even needed Microsoft.
Google trying to stop the inevitable: Cyber-sex in Lively
Monad is the name for an algebraic structure, the same way that 'field' and 'group' and 'monoid' and 'integral domain' and 'vector space' are names for algebraic structures.

In particular it's useful for actions. It has only two functions, 'return' and '>>=':

(return x) -- an action that returns the value x

(a >>= f) -- the action produced by attaching the
-- continuation f to the action a

It is the algebraic structure of attaching continuations to things.
"They're a necessary workaround to do some stuff in pure functional languages"

This isn't actually true. You can still write imperative programs in a pure FP language. The most obvious way is to write your code in continuation passing style and pass the new state of the world to each continuation; taking the implicit state changes of an imperative language and making them explicit.

The real reason for using monads is that the scheme I just described is inhumanly complicated. Monads are a much more structured way of doing the same thing. Instead of writing these state passing CPS functions, you write functions that build them for you. A consequence of this is that monads perform much the same function as macros in Lisp; they are programs that build programs.
Dealing With Bad Apples
http://getdropbox.com

(granted, we don't let people buy additional space yet, but ping beta@getdropbox.com and we can hook you up :P)
For key articles it will become important to check the "checker."
I work with ActionScript 3.0 on a daily basis. This article does a good job of summarizing some of the things that are wrong with the language and that I have run into. The advice on how to try and fix what is wrong was useful. Flash is the most widely adopted (http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers...) way of presenting complex interactivity in a browser. For those trying to reach the widest audience possible for casual games it is the best choice. With the release of the flex compiler it is possible to create Flash content without having to buy the Flash IDE and FlashDevelop (http://www.flashdevelop.org/) provides a good alternative IDE.
The link broke for me, but I just went up-URL to see the post. So awesome. I just... this is amazing.
ctags + taglist (http://vim-taglist.sourceforge.net) and a proper .vimrc and .vim/plugins cover mostly everything you might need.
try: http://share.memeo.com

1. install the desktop client

2. drop all the pictures there

3. invite everybody you know.

everybody will sync all the photos (no limit). And it is FREE.
You could use a http://instapaper.com 's "Read Later" bookmarklet.
I have the same setup, only one backup system.
Add a footer to the comments page.

Justification : When I page down and hit the end of a page of comments, there is no visual cue in the page telling me that I'm at the bottom. Since I think I've gone down a full page, I lose track of where I was reading; which is annoying.
um yeah, we're doing that now but i thought with the whole interweb tube thing there'd be something a little more point-to-point sitting in the mac or xp os's ;-)
It's always seemed like that general rule was a not so subtle way of saying, "you cannot possibly be trusted to manage your assets responsibly, so you should tie them up in a house, so you can't do anything stupid with your money". Certainly real estate is historically a reasonable investment, but almost never the best one. And the additional upkeep costs: new roof every 7-10 years, lawn care, time spent cleaning 1000 extraneous sq feet of rooms, the opportunity cost of all that extra crap to fill up your McMansion, plumbing, electrical, etc.

It's also worth thinking about the fact that if you followed the trend of the past ~20 years, and moved further out of the city with each new "upgrade", the reasonably sized house you left first is probably more valuable than the McMansion you live in now, because people are returning to cities and paying more for that convenience. And the suburban mega houses are steadily dropping in price.

But, I agree. It all really went pair-shaped when people imagined themselves getting rich by flipping houses, and so spent more than they could afford--imagining that they'd flip it before the mortgage payments caught up with them, and make huge profits. Calling it "gambling", and treating it the same way, would probably not be incorrect. I think it's the same mindset that gets people in trouble.
thanks for the tip, i'll spend some time investigating this but still 25$/year...
As mentioned in the discussion thread, some YCers (me) are under 21. I usually don't have a problem getting served anyway (it's the beard) and they claim to serve food as well so I'm not too concerned.
I love Apple. I've used Apples since grade 2 (first computer ever touched was a IIc). I went through the whole gamut of Macs - LCs, Performas, Quadras, PowerMacs, iMacs, G3s, G4s, MacBook Pro. Apple is going to grow in business, but they aren't going to threaten Microsoft.

Why? Many reasons. Companies don't like being beholden to a single provider. With Windows, at least for the computer, they get Dell, HP, and many others to buy from. There is a huge ecosystem around Windows. I work at an office that uses Exchange for email/cal. Entourage always has little weird anomalies. We have constituent management software that only runs on Windows and we're not going to switch because we have too much data (and it's a terrible, proprietary format).

Plus, the biggest thing, businesses like ABI stability. It's why MS has done so well. While others would break compatibility on both the ABI and API level, MS has kept it stable for over a decade for the most part. It's made Windows cludgy, sure, but customers like it (mostly). Often, when Apple releases a new OS X, there are little things that need changing in programs. Apple seems to have put this more in the past and I'm really excited about Snow Leopard. However, if Apple goes the MS route and demands forever backward compatibility, it's likely that OS X's advantage disappears.

Apple is poised to make inroads, but part of MS' problem is also its greatest feature - backward compatibility. Should Apple follow suit, the pace of development would slow and OS X would get more cludgy. And if Apple ever displaced MS, MS would have the option of breaking compatibility and then leapfrogging Apple like Apple has done to them.

Part of the reason I love the Mac is that Apple is willing to break compatibility to make things better/more stable/more lovable. OS X is at a really great place right now and I'm also glad Apple is going for more stability than in the past, but businesses really want MS-style ABI stability. I definitely see Apple displacing a good amount of MS in the home, but businesses can be more conservative.

I guess I'll see what happens. As someone who was in the fold during the darkest times, I'm just glad to know the company is stable, profitable and growing.
this looks the kind of thing i'm looking for - thanks
it will probably bubble to the top as it gets voted up. also, the 'email' field in your profile is hidden. if you'd like your email to be visible, it must appear in the "about" section.
I didn't mean that to be a reference to YC. I was just pointing out that Sam was as good a candidate as anyone for "next Steve Jobs," and that he did in fact get funded by VCs-- Sequoia and NEA.
sorry that won't work - those acronyms may be obvious to most of this community and i might enjoy figuring out how to make it work but there's no way any of the rest of the group could do it (or care how to...)
SciTE is a fine editor; it was one of the only ones I liked before I fell under the emacs spell. Now I can't use anything else, but I can certainly second the recommendation if you're not willing to fully invest in emacs (takes time, but completely worth it!)
Be very selective during the hiring process. You may be forced to throw out what could be good apples, but at least it reduces the chances of you hiring a bad apple.
thought of that but there's a 20 MB limit and i'd go nuts dumping photos (zipped) 0.02 GB at a time - if i was smart i'd be able to write a script that did it to an entire folder of photos, zipped them into 10MB chunks and emailed them to a gmail account specifically opened for the purpose. hmmm.
"It's a blast, they say. You lie all day to sell subscriptions, and you unwind afterward with some smoke. You tell the customers that you live a few streets over, that you go to the local school and play on the soccer team, that you just sold subscriptions to their neighbor, and the idiots buy it because by now you've got it down to a science. And on to the next town. And the next."

That was the most interesting paragraph. Raises the question of how moral sales is. Clearly this is pure lieing but their are more murky lines not far away.
Steve didn't originally intend to build computers. They were just going to sell plans for computers. So don't be too hard on present day founders. Companies tend to grow in the making.
I'm addicted to WingIDE (Professional). The killer features for me are vim mode, fast context-sensitive autocomplete, cross-file go-to-definition, automatic syntax and indent checking, and "Source Assistant" which shows you the prototype+docstring of whatever function you're in the middle of calling. Altogether it's significantly faster than vim alone, which is what I was using before.
http://news.ycombinator.com/apply
i'm starting to get that idea - seems sad huh?
A fair question but I don't see them as mutually exclusive options. You can absolutely work 70 hours a week and have a great relationship with your family. I also work from the house so it's not quite the same as someone working for others in an office they spend 2 hours a day commuting to.
We're not talking about skipping your kids altogether, we're talking about spending an extra 20 hours a week working for just 5-7 years so that you'll be able to spend the next 30 years any way you want to (I assume, since you're on this board, you're a 50-hour-a-week person to start).

My kids are the most important thing to me and, in life, you make trade-offs: bigger house or nicer car? Get my teeth fixed or go to the Bahamas? Work 50 hours a week doing something in which I have little control for 50 years or work my ass off for 5-7 years so that I have control for the next 45 years? That's how I see it.
khatmandu is not known for it's blistering high tech hub - at least not in the district i was in. besides, my last couple days after hiking everest with friends from around the world and i spend it burning dvd's? i don't think so! ;-)
Joel says 10 years:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html
I wonder if we could get discounted HN tix.
There is also external completion for Emacs with rope library (http://rope.sourceforge.net/), which also provides some refactorings. It is very useful, but not always stable.
Ah - thank you sir, on both counts!
There is already a thread on this stat here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249867