skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/db-api/#retrievin...

In Django, objects are retrieved from the ORM something like this:

entries = Entry.objects.filter(published = True)

Entry.objects is a "manager" - an object that knows how to implement operations across the overall set of objects. You can create custom managers if you want to add custom operations that can be run against all of the objects - for example, you might want to "Entry.published" to be a special manager that pre-filters your entries to the ones that have their published flag set.
Yes, but the MacBook Air addresses the main problem with the "netbook" computers. It has a large screen and keyboard, while still being ridiculously light and thin.

So, if you can make netbooks thin and light but still wide (for keyboard and screen), and still cheap, you pretty much eliminate the only remaining argument for more "full featured" laptops. For now, it seems thin, light, and wide is enough of an engineering challenge that it's only possible for expensive notebooks. But it will be interesting to see if that will change.
Twhirl Adds Identi.ca, Becomes Killer App (Yes, Really)
How about linking in to facebook, twitter, etc and monitoring key words, symbols and punctuation in status updates to contribute to a user's wellness level? Example: :) = wellness up, :( = wellness down.
I don't even have to see the video to laugh when I hear it!

Countadown keishi!
iPhone Copy and Paste Coming to an App Store Near You
A related pet peeve of mine: treating the DB as a dumb object store. Its not!!! Thats what file systems are for.
you missed my point - the best answer should be at the top - that's their aim. so either the best answer is at the top or the algorithm is not accurate.
How-much-space-do-those-hyphens-take?
Union Square Ventures Invests in Open Source Cloud Platform
completely ditch their rules and start fresh. use it as a simple last line of defense solution protecting important things from leaking out.
I thought the allusion to Y Combinator was about turning a simple operation (program) into a recursive one (business).
Pretty good write up. The only part I did not care for was the pompous: "[...]I think the reason is that he wanted to attract the kind of programmers who were smart enough to have heard about the Y combinator"... The author has confused ignorance with intelligence.
A different approach, but this may be worth a look from the emotional perspective, at least.

http://www.wefeelfine.org/
It's worth mentioning here that Joe Armstrong developed Erlang for his thesis work.
http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php
China threatens to attack websites broadcasting the Olympics without authorization
JRuby- The Element of Surprise
I have the 2.0 software running on a used iPhone 2G and it just hasn't been this bad. The web browser crashes a fair bit, which isn't good, but it restarts right away. I get occasional runaway keyclicks when I type, which I can't explain. (Might be "user error"? Curse my big fingers!) The rest of the apps have been okay. A visit to tech support may be in order.

Of course, not having used the 1.0 software, I have no standard for comparison. Too bad that you apparently can't downgrade and wait for the bug-fix releases.

I've only got two or three third-party apps installed as of yet. So I note that DHH doesn't mention having tried an obvious step: Deinstall all third-party apps and stick with the Apple ones, which are more likely to have been thoroughly tested than random combinations of third-party apps that were released less than a month ago.
I think you're absolutely right, and eventually the RIAA will have to adapt to accommodate services like these. It's an inevitability.

I'd like to see a single global licensing body with a harmonised and simplified model covering every component; record labels, publishers, performers, writers, download rights, artwork, etc. There could be ways for them to support small broadcasters - by providing access to a large catalogue of digital music, waiving fees in exchange for delivering ads, etc. From this we'd see some really innovative services bubbling up to the top.

However, I still stand behind what I said - if you want to turn a service like mixturtle into a viable business then you have to play their game, which is very difficult. I know it makes me unpopular, but it's just a reality we have to live with (for now).

I had discussions with PPL and MCPS-PRS here in the UK a long time ago - their model is pretty complex - and if I wanted to have users in other countries then I'd need to get licensed with their representative bodies too. Not to mention the issue of download rights and artwork - all that has to be negotiated directly with the copyright holders. I'd wanted to build an ad-based model, but in the end I couldn't see any alternative to subscriptions, so I gave up - I couldn't afford the £10,000 advance fee.
What about small digital cameras, like pencams?
Mozlab: A REPL for XUL/Javascript debugging with Telnet, Emacs integration
I'm as big a Nokia fan as one can get, my current mobile is even the N95-8gb... however, there are a few problems with this:

1) The Nokia N96 is expected to cost at least $800. The E66 = $500. Let's see, buy 2-3 iPhones or one Nokia? The average US mobile consumer is going to look at the fashion factor / price and very little else.

2) The N96 is being released without support for NAM-3G (the same thing they did with the N95), so basically the phone is useless in the US from that standpoint.

3) Nokia E66 is not a U.S. spec Nokia N96

The N96 might drive sales over in Europe/Asia, but in terms of seizing a growing 3G market in the US, they're absolutely screwing themselves by releasing NAM-3G counterparts half a year later. Nokia needs to get in the game and realize that NAM-3G is finally here (because of the iPhone 3g), and waiting 6 months isn't helping to push new products. 3G is the US cell-phone buzzword for 2008, and Nokia fully blew it on this one.

And yes, I'm pissed, because I expected to get rid of my Euro-spec N95-8 and get an N96 that would fully work in the US.
Symbian = Wheel 1.0
A Lisper's initial experience with Java
A PII uses 7.5 million transistors @ ~233 MHz.
A Intel Core 2 Quad has 582 million transistors @ ~2400 MHz.

I don't think there is a point to using anything much less than a PII on most consumer cell phone / PDA devices. And 10 years from now when 20 billion transistor CPU's are normal for home PC's I don't think using something less than a Core 2 Quad is going to have much of a point to it. (Note: I am talking about devices that show websites and take pictures.)

PS: Granted if your building a toaster then an 8080 is probably overkill.
P.S. This is the best explanation of combinators I've seen on the web (and includes Y of course):

http://users.bigpond.net.au/d.keenan/Lambda/index.htm
And that makes perfect sense. In an environment where the typical phone makes a noise, carrying a phone that takes photos silently is like wearing a sign around your neck that says "pervert".

The bad news for birdwatchers everywhere is that this trick doesn't work with binoculars.
"UI design != UI function"

I would say, UI design != Graphic Design. UI design is inseparable from UI function. They are one and the same. Design isn't how something looks.

It shouldn't be confused with graphic design though, which is really how something looks. Graphic design is purely in the realm of the aesthetic.
I absolutely agree with this. The article title seems like little more than something mildly controversial to lure clicks. The author using this title and then stating that two of Graham's ideas are something she needs only proves it: no.
Ask PG: What percentage of active users upmodded "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"?
how fitting - safari crashed while reading this article on my 3g iPhone. In addition to all those complaints, GPS and other location based functionality have been down for 3 days in NYC. Anyone else seeing this?
I meant that I think your talents can be applied to something that creates happiness and not just shows or maps it. Solve a problem for people that's making them unhappy or frustrated.
Using apps or normal function?

If I don't (ever) use any 3rd party apps, the phone seems about the same as before. After I play some games, I tend to power off and power back on to get it back into good shape.

Hopefully they'll get this sorted soon.
kottke: Twitter is broken for me so I'm moving to this text file.
Agreed. It's nothing a solid 2.0.1 release can't fix, but they need to push it out ASAP.

Between the buggy 2.0 software and the nightmare that was the signup process, Apple wasn't totally on its game this time around.
Right. That's what I meant but not what I said. Thanks.
Yes, definitely. A big benefit of macros is being able to abstract away boilerplate and reduce code to what it actually means. If extracting repeated type declarations and syntactic noise makes your code harder to understand, you have much bigger problems than using macros well!
Whoa, what's the deal with the 911 emergency button on the OneTouch?
1) Do you think this should be specific to a particular business process (like managing sales force performance, managing inventory, etc.) or open ended enough to just consume data in whatever form and let the user mold the application to their liking? I guess the short version of this question is: Will they know what they want?

2) You mention admin web interface to the app. Do you think this interface has a chance of being used by a non-IT people? Will business users have conceptual appreciation for data quality issues (great majority of problems with data analysis) like deduplication, incompleteness, errors, etc. Will creating clean data repositories (and therefore QA) be the core of this service or should the user be in charge at every point, allowing him/her to even get the "garbage in" and, what follows, "garbage out"?

3) Would the ability to create private data mashups with data provided by the service provider, other publishers, or publicly available be something of core importance or nice to have?

I have a lot of other questions, since I've started working on a web solution to this problem that would work in a way that is quite similar to what you've described. I would be great if you could share your responses/other thoughts further, either here or privately on my email (in the profile). Thx!
PG's way of email is precisely mine. In fact my inbox is actually renamed to ACTION and I've written before about how I manage email: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/06/measuring-my-inbox-depth.htm... and http://www.jgc.org/blog/2006/01/how-i-manage-email.html

I use a combination of automatic filtering (i.e. POPFile), fast keyboard shortcuts, and public shame (I publish the number of items in my inbox on my web site) to keep it under control.
For me, it's just normal use... I had the last.fm app for a few days but removed it after I realized it was making iTunes freeze.

I agree with 37signals that it is the best phone I've had. It used to be better.
It's targeted towards an older demographic.
Since you can see how many votes it got, what you're asking in effect is how many active users there are. This is a strange way to phrase that question. What's your definition of active?
Pierre Francois speaking at Spolsky's Business of Software Conference
Here is a derivation of the Y Combinator in Perl:

http://use.perl.org/~Aristotle/journal/30896
I'm quite happy with mine, maybe because I never had an iphone 1.0.
The apple in apple computers is explainable. If your logo fit your name or a concept, then it would work, but as of now its just not connecting. otherwise, without signing up, I'd like to see the app in action with a tour vid or screen grabs.
Venture Capital is Broken, Let’s Fix It
PS: Granted if your building a toaster then an 8080 is probably overkill.

No, but using a $.95 7 million transistor cpu to simply emulate a more expensive mechanical timer might not be. And then you get internet and an LCD and all sorts of stuff basically for free. You could even emulate that 8080 if you wanted.
I hear the example of youtube thrown out a lot, but I don't think it's a good comparison. YouTube had an incredibly useful function beyond sharing copyrighted material. It was also miles ahead of competing services (e.g. google video) in usability.
Twitter took off from simple to 'tweet' success
Not that I really care, but I'd be curious as to the number of users on this site as well... active would be login < 30 days ago.
Just for Jeff Atwood: Seaside for the .Net Developer
Hold off on WiMAX investments, Gartner cautions
Cool idea... I understood instantly what it does ... and I think most of your audience will too... the term "streaming" has become pretty ubiquitous.
How do you plan to monetize?
It is very hard to grasp what did you mean. But if you are questioning passions for ideas and entrepreneurship, then my feeling is different from yours.

When I first read the post on YC by PG, I understand PG tried to tell people this is not an inclusive list. All ideas put down by PG have a common pattern. It is PG's motto: "making something that people want". And PG also alerted the would-be applicants that not every problem is solvable only by purely engineering or computer science. Some problems require much clever hacks to acquire user bases and break out stereotypes in jaded users' mind. Of courses, some ideas that PG pointed out are traditionally viewed by startups as "suicidal" to get into territory of MS/Google.

I guess you feel frustrated because as a CS student, you probably think about the best things to save the world is to do something CS cool. But in reality, what a CS graduate can do to make people live better is probably to create an application that frustrate end user less than what users are using now. This seems so uncool. It takes more passion to care about my users to make them happy than to make myself happy. I can be happy for creating some cool hacks. But to make my users happier takes me more patience to know what they really want, more thought and effort to figure how can I create a better product. Though Model T is not a Ferrari, but I know my users are happily driving around to make their life better.
In honour of Jeff Atwood's post Web Development as Tag Soup (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=252185), here's a post from 2006 explaining Seaside for .Net developers.
Amazing video of a metal ball falling on sand
Where are you grabbing the tunes from? Isn't RIAA going to go ballistic and shut off your supply?
Home Depot's slogan: "You can do it, we can help."
Lisp's slogan: "You can do it."
(emphasis on "you" doing it and lack of offer to help)
Really interesting, and potentially useful for me, thanks for posting. :-)
Valuation the easy way
great design, so far it is still searching and its been like 3 minutes ... so I don't know what to say
SQL Parsing with Parsing Expression Grammars in Lua
I don't know the name for it, but there's a psychological difference between risks that you could have prevented and ones that you couldn't have. People think driving is safer than flying because they're doing the driving.
Sometimes I get annoyed when my cat is particularly vocal and won't respond to, the usually effective, shhhhhh. I can only imagine the frustration the people at the RIAA feel with so many smart people trying to figure out how to take them out of the picture. Including many musicians!
Wow. When I read your comment I thought is was pretty prickish, wondering how a stock photo could possibly screw up a good article.

Then I visited the site. Agree 100%.
UNIX was designed for collaboration rather than security. The permissions, the (originally) open password file, sticky bits... it was full of security holes. Big ones. The engineers closed those holes after the fact when the internet started opening UNIX machines to the outside world.

NT actually has an enormous edge on security because of its roots in VMS rather than in UNIX, since as gaius pointed out, VMS places far more of an emphasis on security than UNIX did until the internet made it necessary.
That's fucked. How was the earth surviving before we got here and realized it needed lime. Maybe we can all just stop being energy consuming pigs and global warming could be stopped.
I've been debating back and forth about the iPhone being worth the '1/2 the price, 2x the speed' and everything I read justifies the complaints in this article. Having installable apps is a good thing, not having the iPhone "3G" function work only 20% of the time or sporadically malfunction more than 75% of the time is not good... regardless of the great new features implemented in the latest version.
No, we'd be using MVS, VMS, Nonstop, and their competition, not UNIX or Linux if security were important enough to us... or at least those of us who are well-informed enough to know the difference.
Did you try rebooting? (turn on phone, hold down lock button until "slide to power off" appears, then press lock buton to turn on)

Location dies fairly often for me, and I have to reboot to get it back (fairly often being once every 24-48hrs).
Hey guys, lets all dance on the head of a pen together--ruminating on the blatantly obvious!

Anyway all those extra bytes are mostly inconsequential unless you're sending that code over the wire on a regular basis (as with client-side javascript).
iPhone OS 1.x wasn't anything like this - even with me jailbreaking it and throwing all kinds of bizarre apps onto it.

I played with it enough that I did get the occasional reboot, but maybe once a week. In the 10 days I've had the iPhone 3G it's rebooted on me at least three times, I've had app store apps crash at least a dozen times, and had countless weird 5-10sec freezes.

Really hoping 2.0.1 fixes a bunch of these problems...
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles Duell, 1899
Love: a procedurally generated MMOG written by one guy
Samsung M110 (Unlocked) 
It has come up in two eye-catchy shades of Olive Green and Black with a unique feature of browsing internet, via its embedded technology of WAP 2.0/xHTML, even if you are at move.it comes with a long lasting standard battery of Li-Ion of 1000 mAh.
Top Ten Recession-Proof Jobs
If you focus your idea more, I think you might have something. I founded and funded a company that did something along these lines, although I think our portfolio company was a bit more focused on trying to solve specific problems and generate revenue.

Our portfolio company developed watches and mobile (cellphone) software that worked with biofeedback attachments to monitor various aspects of health for users. It all integrated with an online system, which tracked location and company/community trends, among other things. There were games that helped people lower their blood pressure, etc. There were also systems to monitor wakefulness, to predict heart attacks and strokes, etc. I think we had around 80 specific use cases. We were working with an EAP company and several wellness/insurance companies.

All of this is past tense, because the company never made it to market. We presented at a single tradeshow and were promptly sued by about a dozen companies. We also got cease-and-desist letters from quite a few major companies (Nokia has several patents in this area, for example.)

Just like with location-based apps, there are a slew of overly broad patents that seem to tie up most of the basic functionality you would want in such a device/service.
Many startups don't realize the unbelievable amount of 'IP' that has already been sewn up by companies in these areas. The patent holders don't usually go after you until you announce a big funding round or gain some traction in the market. We had to write off most of our investment because we weren't equipped to fight the legal battle at the time.

There are a ton of startups that are still working in this area, though...and I think there is a huge market. If someone can figure out a way to circumvent the existing patent mess, I would be interested in investing again.

From a hacker point of view, there are some interesting open-source projects. OpenEEG, for example:

http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/sw/
San Fransisco Officials Locked Out of Their Own Network
The site is a bit maze-like so here is a brief overview: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/02/20/for-the-love/
Not very impressive looking. Don't get excited.
Not much - 7.7% in standard functions (mostly in uncommon functions), 3-5% in a selection of user code.
Accomodation Options : Knott's Berry Farm - Buena Park, California - Associated Content
I guess the guy has a point, but ... I still disagree. There are only two ways to name multiword identifiers, this-is-a-multiword-identifier or this_is_a_multiword_identifier. Both take the same amount of space, and the lisp-version is easier. No serious programmer would write thisIsAMultiwordIdentifier, so it doesn't matter that it's shorter. It saves a few bytes, but it will ensure that your program is completely unreadable.
Physical theories as women - Timothy McSweeney's
Check out the new Facebook
I've went away from template-like solutions for this reason, moved to XSLT/EXSLT and very happy now.
One advantage to the tag soup approach is that you can just take the templates the designer gives you. Usually they have been created with some WYSWG-software like dreamweaver and contain hundreds of nested tables and divs. Translating all that to a completely different language would be a nightmare. Much easier to identify the parts you have to manipulate programmatically and leave the rest of the code alone...

(This goes mostly for client projects, for my own projects I might have other standards. Although in fact for my moon calendar web site, I ended up doing the same).
Agreed regarding a video. It's a nice addition to have on an About or Tour page but never rely on a video to be the piece of content that tells potential users who you are and what you do.

You guys have a terrific and unique service offering - one or two well-placed sentences (and perhaps a more link) will work wonders...
Another option: get a language where markup itself is first-class syntax. JavaScript with E4X has XML built-in, which of course means XHTML if you like, which itself can be trivially translated to HTML if you prefer (as I do).

So just like regular expressions have first-class syntax, i.e., in JavaScript you can write either of:

myRx = /somePattern/g;
myRx = new RegExp('somePattern','g');

So with E4X you can write either of:

greeting = <b>Hello, {user.name}!</b>;
greeting = new XML("<b>Hello, "+user.name+"!</b>");

Though those really aren't equivalent since the second might be a XSS vulnerability, whereas the first is automatically escaped.

E4X only works in Mozilla-based browsers, but it also works just fine in Rhino, so you can use it in Helma (http://helma.org/) or any of the other Rhino-based frameworks or in Jaxer (http://aptana.com/jaxer).
Prototyping a hobby project
My Dell Latitude X1 is a real laptop and not much bigger than eepc. Not much more expensive than eepc on ebay, either. I think the eepc-things are a passing fad. Among other things, soon "real" notebooks of the same size won't be much more expensive than the semi-things.
The traditional view is that HTML is a messy presentational format with lots of repeated boilerplate and lots of subtle gotchas in the syntax.
In that view, it makes sense to separate HTML from the logic into templates, where the markup is basically handled as opaque strings by the template engine.

However, with semantic markup, each HTML element actually have a functional significance. The HTML is now the model, not the view.

This does not solve the labor division problem you describe, rater it turns it into a completely different problem. Now HTML is basically the domain of the programmers, and CSS (and perhaps some amount of XSLT) is the domain of the web designer. It it still not clear to me how these should work together.
rebooting? that reminds me of one of those apple commercials with that trendy kid and that dorky guy in a suit.