skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adding a demo of how the ad unit looks was on the to-do list. I guess both of us just forgot about it before launching. We'll redo the front page with better wording and I'll add a demo of the ad unit in there.

In the future you will be able to choose the ads you want to display based on keywords and categories. Right now though, we wanted to make it as simple as possible (with the least amount of steps to get it set up) so it's automatic.
Retro cool: Video of Jack Nicholson's 1978 Hydrogen Car
A core of ugly code perpetuates itself. Partially due to social causes, partially due to the sheer inertia.

Sad but true.
Seven Characteristics of Highly Effective Entrepreneurial Employees
Unfortunately that's the attitude that got Digg and Reddit where they are today: lots of quick/simple/amusing links that are easy to digest and upvote, but not a whole lot of substance.
His first two was the reason I started to read his stuff. It just like those punk band. Even it is green, but you feel there will be something if they keep on working, and after years you know everyone listen to their stuffs. Even though when they look bad later to see how embarrassed it was. But the spirit is the essence.
Kevin Martin of the FCC - Open Network Manifesto
You know, originally that was where my train of thought was going. Then I did some quick research to see what else was out there, and found this Facebook app called "Date My Friends" that operated on this principle. They've been around for a while and haven't really picked up much traction, which kind of made me move away from this idea. Of course, the devil is in the details, but I always look at the motivating factors for each user role..and I don't really see one for the "matchmaker" role.

The "bounty for a successful match" idea is interesting, though...maybe a payment model where the successfully matched people pay to unlock the mutual contact info, and 90% of that would go to the matchmaker? Hmmmm...
Too many hypothetical arguments, "likely..." "almost..." "if we are not careful..." etc.,

Today, I am able to watch instructional/recreational videos at a reasonable download rate with my cable connection, I do not want to digress and go into how much I am or should be paying for it (read FREE).

Luckily, I still remember the Web 1.0 bubble days and here is an article about a company (Enron :-) ) that wanted to trade bandwidth.

http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/8_253861

Also, if I have to speak for the Internet backbone providers alone, then it is certainly not a cartel.
Proofread something once yourself and after that don't. Pass it along to any new set of eyes you can get and get a new perspective on it. Your eyes will fail you very quickly, so getting new people will make anything you write better by a large margin each time.

Edit: Not a YC alum, but I thought I'd leave a note anyway.
Open This in a Web-Kit Based Browser
Just make something.
Within a couple of years it is likely that many of the user interface features that currently distinguish the iphone will become a commodity. The first phones with similar features are just now coming out. It is possible that the iphone will then follow the path of the apple II and macintosh, which were just as innovative but failed to give apple the success of competitors who eventually produced similar products on an open platform. Will andriod be the open platform that steals success from the iphone as windows and dos did from the macintosh and apple II?
I'm not sure there was ever a time where it was good to be a one language shop. Although people continue to pursue it, I haven't seem much progress in creating a language that is both dynamic / abstract and fast.

In my opinion, you usually need two; a high level language that supports powerful abstractions and terse representation of the problem and a low level language that is good at expressing things in terms of hardware operations.

I choose Io + C, but any two that fit this description should be able to cover most cases.
IBM Research's Personal Memory Organizer
A good lesson in make sure you're actually measuring what you think you're measuring.
Nice point about divorce by death, 1860 vs. 1960. But increased greatly from 1960 to 2008.

Compound interest and intergenerational warfare reminded me of the goodness of creating wealth, as opposed to protecting wealth via enduring competitive advantage (bigger pie vs. slice).
Labmeeting: A Social Network For Scientists
lol
tan pintados uds manga de maricas
I think the matchmaker idea is good. Many people have thought, "Man, I just know that those two of my friends would be great together." And I like the way you let people sign up their friends.

However, I'm not so sure about the dating on Twitter thing. I think people want to do their dating in private. This is why dating applications on Facebook are not doing that great. People have a hard enough time plucking up the courage to ask out the object of their affection. Letting a bunch of other people know about it as well would be way too embarassing.
I tend to expect the same from the comments.
How do they have any idea of the return on R&D? It's like trying to predict the odds of fusion power becoming possible if we spend a billion dollars researching it. Who knows?
I disagree - he used the initial analogy to show why the wired-bandwidth monopolies are bad, then shows how we can avoid being bandwidth-subservient like we are already oil-subservient. It's not supposed to go through the whole article.
I'm doing it wrong?
The one-click pay for of Amazon accounts on 3rd parties is new.
No, cap-and-trade is supposed to be the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions. Investing in clean energy has many other benefits (improving science and tech, creating new industries, job creation, lower cost of energy, etc).
Parody of Cuil with the Yahoo Search BOSS API
It's like Cuil, but with relevant results.
The comic is sort of funny, but a comment about someone being scared off by make and Linux on a site for hackers is like someone on a cooking site saying "what's this blender bullshit, ah fuck it, I'm going out to eat".
This is missing the fundamental thing labels are afraid of - making piracy easier. What prevents someone from sharing their user id and then all their friends downloading a copy of their songs?
> unless you luck out in the hardware compatibility lottery

Try this site: http://www.leenooks.com

It'll show you what to avoid, with the idea being that pissed off people have more incentive to go say "the damn thing doesn't work with Linux!" than happy people have to go fill in some information about how everything works smoothly.

And incidentally, if anyone wants to help hack on the Rails-based wiki that runs it, or otherwise give me a hand with the site, I'd love the help:-)
Very misleading. Click tracking is a very useful quality signal for search engines. Also, to my knowledge, Google doesn't sell any data -- they're very paranoid about that kind of thing (if you don't believe me, try buying data from them)

The rest of it is about efficiency, not sneakiness. Putting redirects on the links is not only annoying, but it slows things down by forcing your browser to do additional redirects. (and little slowdowns make a big difference) The same thing goes for compressing the JS, etc.
4 Simple Steps to Detect & Fix Slow Rails Requests
On the bright side...

Brazil also suffered from hyperinflation during the late 80s and early 90s, requiring programmers to deal with the craziest policies you (or the IMF) can imagine -- From nationwide account freezes to exchanging entire currencies overnight. As a result, today Brazil has one of the most advanced banking systems in the world, even compared to systems in the US and Europe, and extremely competent senior programmers and innovators in the industry.
I am making something. I am going to make it with or with out YC, but making something with YC would give me access to a new great group of people.
Free BSNL Broadband
I don't think they're as similar as you paint them:

- Bandwidth, pre-wifi, was likely to be a local monopoly or at best, duopoly. Oil has OPEC, but that's a cartel at a different level.

- Tons of industries require large up-front investments.

- Oil and bandwidth are regulated in very different ways.

- Wifi/wireless, as he points out, really changes the picture in some important ways.

So, while you can draw a few comparisons, many others are invalid, and I'd have preferred his article had he stuck to the central point, rather than attempt a comparison that strikes me as a bit opportunistic in its grab for attention.
Top 10 Command Line Tools
What if I went to a Java school Joel?
"Providing Vitamins for undernourished children"

A "solution" proposal like that doesn't make me trust the whole approach very much. There are many underlying issues besides buying a heap of vitamins for x dollars. I think most children would not benefit so much from the vitamins if the situation that made them malnourished stays the same. Perhaps they would be slightly more efficient soldiers, though.

Changing the political situation surely is more complicated than simply throwing money at it.
Cuil: Why I’m trying to get off of the PR bandwagon…
Not all of us are developers/programmers. I'm just a fan :)
No resource is infinite. Technically, we could make more oil too. Just build some carbon lifeforms and give them the right environment for a few million years. In fact there is plenty of oil in the earth that we just can't get to because of the cost of retrieval.

The point is, once the cost of adding bandwidth exceeds the value to the market due to shortages of materials, energy, real estate, maintenance, etc you run into the same situation. Bandwidth availability has an s-curve like any other resource, and once you pass a certain threshold its just too expensive to add more pipes. It may not happen soon, but it will happen eventually. Its the same problem on a different time scale.
Yes it is, which is why the ones that are submitted and front paged have been filtered for quality.
Unlock car door with mobile
Wow this looks awesone! Good job.
The one fact that people always leave out when discussing life expectancy increases of the last century is that it is almost entirely due to lower infant mortality. The life expectancy of a 30 year old now is almost the same as it was 100 years ago.

That means that seniors aren't disproportionately represented due to medical technology, but rather due to baby booms.

"Fifty years ago senior citizens were not a force in electoral politics. Now the AARP is widely said to be the most powerful organization in Washington. Medicare, Social Security, retirement, Alzheimer's, snowbird economies, the population boom, the golfing boom, the cosmetic-surgery boom, the nostalgia boom, the recreational-vehicle boom, Viagra—increasing longevity is entangled in every one."

No, it isn't because longevity has not increased. It's just the fact that an unusually large number of people were born 60-70 years ago.
I understand that not all of the money under a cap-and-trade system goes to generating new clean energy. For example, in many cases using a kilowatt of energy we already have more efficiently is less expensive than generating a new kilowatt. However, the idea that we should design our energy policy around maximizing new energy creation even when it's more cost effective to make our current products more energy efficient makes no sense, assuming we take economic benefit to mean wealth created per dollar spent. Unless Lomborg simply means that investing all of our money in clean tech would create more jobs, in which case that's just an example of the broken window fallacy.

(And I understand that many cap-and-trade schemes also have provisions for things like paying South American countries to reduce their rate of deforestation, which is neither a case of conservation of existing energy nor production of new energy, but this amounts to only a few million dollars per year.)
Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization [pdf]
a good programmer that is forbidden from changing ugly code will become frustrated and will either become less productive or leave

Absolutely. Only so many bandaids can cover the Grand Canyon. Sometimes, you just gotta bite the bullet and make it right. It's extremely frustrating leaving a mess in your wake, regardless of source.
NY Techies Schooled On Dating, Baldness, SIM Card Hacking
The "money" type in Postgres is deprecated (e.g. see the locale-dependent restore issues that doc link mentions). "numeric" is an arbitrary precision data type that is probably a better choice for representing currency.
Well that's awfully shrill.

Attaching event handlers when the page is ready is by far the cleanest way to do javascript. Plus, it's the most downlevel browser friendly.

Google's javascript is compressed for size, not obfuscated. It ends up looking the same, but the intent is different.

That dude should just browse with no javascript enabled.
A bit about how this was made: http://www.javarants.com/2008/07/30/yahoo-boss-is-easy-meet-...
Google Moves to Reinvent Transportation
Created in 1938 and protected through 2063. One hundred and twenty five (125) years of protection does seem like a bit much...
China to Limit Web Access During Games
Has the Web 2.0 cycle come to a close? No.
The World According to Cuil
Workings of ancient Greek 'computer' deciphered
http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132
11 - mine
I cannot forecast to you the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95. It is a hack wrapped in a kludge inside a compatibility box.
Oh I agree there would be roads/railways/airports without government subsidy. Frankly there is a need for those things, so someone will build them. I should have been more clear in that 'the road system as we have it today would not have happened without government subsidies'.

Back to the topic, what I was trying to point out is that it's silly to expect unsubsidized private railways to compete with massively subsidized road/air transport and still be profitable. It's hypocritical to always expect rail to bootstrap itself while giving such massive assistance to road/air, then claim that it's somehow rail's fault when it cannot compete.
http://astartupaweek.wordpress.com
Goes to show there are downarrows on comments but not front page links.
A few weeks back someone posted this on Hacker News: http://www.indiangeek.net/wp-content/uploads/Programmer%20co...

It might help you gain insight on how some employers might evaluate candidates, you can assess where you fit in the matrix, and work on improving in the areas of weakness (this is a long term thing).

I recommend reviewing the technical stuff so you can come out sharp and talk intelligently about those topics. Brain teasers often come up. It's been a while since I interviewed with Microsoft, but I remember lots of questions about data structures, linked lists, traversal algorithms, etc.

Employers are looking for people that are technically solid or show potential, have a good attitude, can work in teams, are good communicators, etc.

Good luck.
I likewise wasn't impressed. The analogy was tenuous at best, and the author made it painfully clear he didn't have a clue what he was talking about when he said:

> "A future possibility is to buy your own fiber, the way you might buy a solar panel for your home."

... and connect it to what?

I mean, what the hell was the guy thinking? A solar panel is something that sits on your house, like a TV antenna. The effect that buying your own fiber would have is about the same as buying your own natural gas lines. You can't exactly switch natural gas providers on a whim either.

Maybe I should go into business selling reporters their own fiber. I'm sure they'd go for it if I said the magic words 'Net Neutrality'. Then this author could have a nice new spool of fiber sitting in his basement, to go with the solar panel on his roof.
An example of that S-curve today - my only possible "broadband" connection these days is satellite. And I'm only 100 miles from Boston.
What about an aftermarket for profiles on failed dating sites? Or even ones that haven't failed yet.

Dating profile portability? Dating site messaging federation? Pay per message that crosses networks?
1. Based on content management: PHP. The biggest publishing site on the Web, Wordpress, uses it.

2. Based on libraries: PHP. You have PECL, PEAR, ezComponent, Zend and many others. Whatever you need, it has it.

3. Based on syntax: PHP. It's damn simple.

4. Based on deployment: PHP. It's fast and painless.

5. Based on execution model. PHP. mod_php, as an apache module, works and it’s scalable.

6. Based on frameworks: PHP. Symfony and Zend Framework offer a modular, MVC, loosely-couple architecture. They not only provide a solid infrastructure, but also an extensive component library.

7. Based on performance: Any, as long as you cache everything.

Good luck!
The ridiculous thing about Raymond Chen's writing is we're supposed to find his tales of software mediocrity charming and enlightening.
"Windows is a 32-bit extension to a 16-bit graphical shell for an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition."
This is a childish rant. I'm surprised it was posted and actually voted up on HN. Maybe things are starting to slide around here.
Being an application developer myself (C++,C#,VB, Java...), I stumbled across Perl when I had to code some text parsing scripts.

From my perspective as an amateur in Perl, I found some similarities with C++ - in my opinion Perl is expressive, powerful and even beautiful. But I also came across one problem (called "Myth" in the presentation), which is that Perl code is not very maintainable.

Of course, code in any language can be made maintainable with proper practices, but I must say that when I looked at my old code 12 months later, I just didn't know what exactly it does. So I consider Perl to not be a best choice for occasional use: I always had to re-learn the syntax and decipher my old code - something I didn't have problem with in other languages.

To sum it up, Perl is a great language, but requires a lot of dedication like C++ does. So the eternal question still remains - Perl, Ruby or Python? ;-)
Man, I just know that those two of my friends would be great together.

I'm still a little skeptical how a web app would replace 2 phone calls and a blind date. I also have no problem being proven wrong.
I never claimed not to be lazy. :)
And if money were no object (i.e. if I were a student, or didn't have a family), I would at least take a stab at doing it myself.
But, alas: money is an object, my job is demanding and my family comes first. (Although I don't deny that I am partially making excuses for myself).

Talk is cheap but life, sadly, isn't.
Here's a book (recommended by Clifford Stoll) that helps simplify the process of writing:
"Write to the Point" by Bill Stott.

I'm not an alum either, but enjoy this group, at least the 'ask YC' questions and responses.
That would be interesting.

It hinges on whether matchmakers can work their magic only on people they actually know (which limits the number of people they could match up), or if they could do it simply by looking at profiles of people they don't know personally.

Even the most outgoing people I know have less than 1,000 friends on Facebook. How many matches could they possibly mine from that group?
They just dropped 10 zeros to fix the bug:
http://redwoodage.com/content/view/143539/49
Good points, I am also with you that I personally would have enjoyed the article more without the attention grabbers.

At the same time, I think good analogies beckon more questions and push for further clarification. I got that from this article, and explored a few thoughts that never occurred to me before.
Google testing “AdSense for Games” in bid to shake up in-game advertising
Joel On Starbucks
I work here. I love helping scientists do important research more easily.

We have big plans and we could always use more help in making things better, faster. We're hiring: jobs@labmeeting.com .
"In one of these lives you are a successful computer programmer. In the other you are a hacker known as Neo...One of these lives has a future, Mr. Anderson, the other does not."
Wait, I thought all real hackers use Macs.

(-1, flamebait)
I wonder how they're dealing with the issue of gated or subscription-only papers that are uploaded to the site.
Yes, I think you're right on that distinction, and I guess I sort of internalized that. As Seth discusses to in the linked article, things don't become "iconic" without at least being "good enough" in that category - so if you're saying you're the "next" something, they're probably at least good enough.
Oops, a little bait and switch, eh?

I guess those traveling there might do well to brush up on their tunneling skills.
Are satellite phones banned in China?
Ad Slowdown Crushes Some, Leaves Others Unscathed. What Gives?
Can Rails Affect Your Business' Bottom Line?
where are you and what technology stack are you using?
Multiple currencies support billing app - Free
This seems to rely on Larry Wall quotes as evidence.

Edit: I didn't say exclusively... Sheesh...
If, as he claims, most people would want to take longevity treatment, why does Aubrey De Gray face such opposition from people against it?

Why doesn't he consider anything else that would change? You don't get longevity right now - nobody will be a hundred and fifty for a good 50 years, and that's a lot of technological change at today's rate.

What about the problem that all the things he discusses relating to compound interest, insurance and pension investments and so on rely on the economy "continuing to grow" forever and ever, which seems a bit of an unsustainable idea.

Also, he is arguing as if the longevity treatment will lead to a world full of handout-dependent frail unproductive elderly people. Aubrey de Gray particularly, is after life extension by reverting ongoing ageing and keeping people healthy and middle aged indefinitely. That is, not retired and on handouts and depending on young people to support them, but "being" young people themselves. The real goal of longevity is not a long retirement but a long vibrant life.

What about people who own their own homes by the time they are 50, invest for another 50 years until they are 100, then live off the interest - they wont be dependent on young workers to keep their pensions going (except to the extent of needing a permanently growing economy to pay interest :P). Pensions are only around because old people "can't" work today. I say "can't" in quotes, because if it came down to it a lot could with the help of good future telecomms kit or part time work (or powered exoskeletons or whatever).

It's a very poorly-considered scaremongering article and as such quite annoying. The author should go and read John Wyndham's "Trouble With Lichen", and then some De Gray, Kurzweil, Yudkowsky and as much general Sci-Fi as possible to broaden his/her perception of the kinds of futures that may be, so they don't get stuck with one world view.

Indefinitely long lived people could colonise Mars (and further) - what's a 6 month trip and 50 years of colony building then?

Or with some improved materials, Clarke style space elevator skyscrapers, or Asimov style undergroundscrapers or undersea dwellings.

Or any of the following somewhat plausible ideas could change everything - AI / effective neural enhancements / wearable computers where (user + wearable) > (unenhanced human) / useable genetically engineered bacteria / usable nanotechnology / etc.

Craig Venter is working on genetically engineered bacteria to convert plants -> fuel locally, on a small scale. Imagine owning a home and a fuel plant and a self harvesting farm with resiliant crops... you wouldn't need to work full time to live and that would free up partial jobs for younger people.

As they say, it's prudent to think about longevity before it happens. But shouldn't we think about how to make it happen smoothly and pleasantly for as many people as possible, and not just worry and spread FUD about it?
Password: You're doing it wrong