skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started off using TypePad, then went to self-hosted MT, and then started a second blog on self-hosted WP. (I also have one on WordPress.com, but I don't recommend that to anyone serious about blogging due to lack of plugins and other advanced functionality.) I think if I were starting another blog today, I might actually go with self-hosted MT.

I had my WP blog compromised by a security flaw and then listed as a spam site by Google, meaning that anyone who came there in Firefox (which is most of my readers) got a warning rather than my homepage. Never had that happen with MT.

I also had an article take off on StumbleUpon and let's just say Wordpress doesn't handle traffic well. I later tried tossing in the most popular caching plug-in, but it borked my RSS feed such that Feedburner wouldn't recognize it.

Long story short, the last 6 months of WP have been nothing but headache after headache for me. I write all of my posts in Word and then publish via xml-rpc, so I don't care much about the interface, but I think MT's and WP's are pretty comparable.

So yeah, though a year ago I was considering converting my older blog to WP, now I'd vote for MT. (Haven't used TypePad in years, so I can't tell you about that one specifically.)
My standard recommendation: begin with the SICP videos, which you can find at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

I can't think of a more effective way to invest 20 hours.
Hey Hacker News,

I would love to get some feedback on my summer project:

talkOlympics aggregates the latest on the Olympics and lets you read it together with other surfers. While browsing, you see the people following the games and also the article that they are currently reading. You can follow the crowds to find interesting articles or join the group chat to discuss the competition.

We put together the site in order to test whether / how this whole idea of social browsing could work. Please let me know what you think - I have found out that HN is the best place to get high-quality feedback!
People also claim that we never walked on the moon and that George W Bush planned 9/11. I imagine the reasoning is pretty much the same.
Game sharers face legal crackdown (the UK way)
Reminds me of the Y2k bug.
You need a bookmarklet.
How about adapting the Skype way of poking holes?
Jive Software releases Clearspace 2.5
For the founders: what's the going rate on a short code these days?
If that's your reading list, you must often be disappointed.
I don't think that is a good test, simply because Google has many more users than Yahoo. Maybe one thing you could see from the server logs is how well the search keywords matched your site, though.
I'd have to agree with other statements here. As a Ph.D student myself, funding varies quite a bit with the field, the university, etc. However, you really shouldn't be worried as a graduate student. Most well-reputed universities guarantee funding for anywhere between 3 to 5 years for Ph.D students, so even if your adviser hits a rough patch, the university/department picks up the slack. Trying to get a tenure-track position in this funding climate is a different matter ;)
It's interesting how easily people are subjected to ad hominem attacks if they dare to criticise Apple. There are unhappy Apple customers. Count my vote. And just because Apple censors their own message boards doesn't mean they should be able to count on their "loyal followers" to oppress opinion elsewhere.
That is so true. When the iPhone came finally out in Canada, the experience was ruined by roger's horrible contracts & conditions.
I really don't see the point?
Does anybody know how the size of the Windows team compares to the size of the OS X team?
Every time you do this ... Knuth kills a kitten (pic)
The world does not need yet another shitty PHP tinyurl clone.

Kill yourself.
"She gets me going on purpose just so she can see my arms waving and the vein pop out of my head while I'm trying to describe this stuff. I don't think she really pays all that much attention to what I'm actually saying."

My friends do this to me all the time. I know they don't really care but they keep asking questions until I can't resist explaining stuff to them.
Why isn't an open source mp3 player winning against the iPod?
Customers don't care if things are open or not. Unless android is put on drop dead sexy phones with killer features, it'll fail.
Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered
i wonder if this is due to the nature of PageRank. eg when you search for some words that you intend as direct, Google sends them through PageRank where they're stretched, weighted, and pulled apart by the Graph of the internet, whereas Yahoo's algorithms might be rawer (but probably not as raw as they were in the early days)
Spying as a business model. Will these guys get a clue already?
TechCrunch50: $3.5 million x Disingenuous
This has always been my favorite pulp cover: http://www.moviegoods.com/assets/product_images/1020/410188....

It's supposedly the first cover set in outer space, but even if that's not true, it's pretty exceptional.
Aww, just a few days after I discovered it. Even if they got shut down, I hope they make the names of the songs on my favourite playlists available to me, cos I found some good stuff there.

(On a side note, it's a bit annoying how much emo rock seems to be loved by people on the intranets)
Does anyone else find it hard to care when CS types start talking about nouns, verbs & grammars?
blogger works for me. WP has been a headache, sometime back the edits wont reflect in the published site until much later.
We'd love for you to try posterous.com -- it's a YC 2008 company and we're growing fast.

It's great for a beginning blogger. It's dead simple blogs by email, and it's the easiest way to post a ton of photos or video straight from your digital camera.
I know, I tried to do mini apps with text shorted feature for big apps. I don't kill myself :D

Thanks
Phonetic mapping for IPv6 addresses
I'll say this, and I speak only for myself and a medium sized rat I have in my home:

I think it makes a company a lot more likeable when we see an interview with the founders where the founders are just normal people who appear _humble_! I won't mention any names, but there are a few founders who have blogs and whatnots that give this vibe that they are so intelligent and so much better than the rest of us. It makes me want them to fail.

The Disqus guys seem down to earth and a bit camera nervous, which makes them likeable, and makes me want them to succeed too.

So, I think more founders here should post videos of themselves on their product pages, and people will generally be nicer, I believe, as you change from some text into a real person one could meet someday.
The argument is also too optimistic about the number of phones that will be produced and what networks they will be allowed to operate on.

Contrary to what Google's marketing materials would have you believe, neither the handset manufacturers nor the carriers want to get deeply in bed with Google. In fact, they distrust Google already because of their involvement in the 700Mhz spectrum auction. The carriers all know that what google REALLY wants is to own their own wimax network so they can bypass the carriers altogether. Ultimately, this might be great for consumers but for the near-term Google will have to cooperate with the carriers if they want anyone to actually use the Android phones.

Regarding handsets, the only major phone manu interested in Android is Samsung. Nokia, with 40% of the market, doesn't give a shit about Android. Neither does Motorola or Sony Ericsson. The companies that do care about Android will play it safe and let HTC take on all the initial risk and see how that goes before committing any serious resources to the platform. The only Android phones that have a chance of coming to market in the next 9 months are from HTC.

There will not be 100 different Android phones on multiple carriers anytime soon - there will be one or two HTC phones on T-Mobile.
The Future of News?
* git
* jQuery
* Python's decorators
QQ. An entire fucking new world out there! -- and they LIKE flashy gifs!!
"A diverse group". -Not really. All dudes. I don't see any girls.
Research funding is way down, and you don't need to ask YC -- there have been numerous articles and editorials in the major journals to verify the facts. In particular, Science and Nature have been quite vocal about the decline and its consequences on our national competitiveness.

It's true that research funding varies by source and subject, but the bottom line is that funding is down across the board. The NIH and NSF budgets are have been shrinking (in real dollars) for a few years now, and funding for the big physics initiatives has been slashed. While there has been a slight bump in funding from sources like the DOE, the DOJ and DARPA, it doesn't even remotely make up for the declines in the other areas (and most researchers can't get that money, anyway).

I did my PhD at a major research school. As of late last year, they were quietly laying off staff (techs and staff scientists), reducing enrollment in the graduate programs, and increasing the teaching requirements of the remaining students (in order to offload their costs onto the university, away from grants). Moreover, the faculty are basically constantly writing grants, because the funding rate is so exceptionally low.

Now is not a good time to be in science.
Automated Comment Spammers FAIL
Give me a break. The only jobs worse than the ones that have an HR team write dopey want-ads about "madmen" are the ones where the FOUNDERS write the dopey want-ads and think what they are saying is deep and poignant. Smart and capable programmers see through bullshit easily, therefore the only people applying for your job as listed are dumb and desperate.
I like Chyrp, too.
No, I didn't actually. My mind was literally just a loop of the terrifying thought "I'm about to die", with nothing else, apart from a very persistent soundtrack (a progressive house tune, one of my favourites at the time, that kept going through my head for the following 45 minutes). I think the music was part of my brain's attempt to keep me calm and focused.

Once I started moving, the soundtrack continued, but the loop was gone.
How serious are you about your intention? My suggestion is, that if you want to just try it out, register instantly on wordpress.com or blogger.com and try to run it for a few weeks. The thing is, that maintaining you own installation at your own domain takes quite a lot of time.

On the other hand, if you really want to run a successful blog, register your own domain and install...well, you will not go wrong with Wordpress.
I carried around the Google sawzall whitepaper, printed out, in my bag for a month.
Here is an arc version of the struquine macro:

(mac strq (name . slots)
(withs (bname
(coerce (string name "#") 'sym)
creator `((def ,(coerce (string name "?") 'sym) (thing) (is (car thing) ',bname))
(def ,bname ,slots (cons ',bname (list ,@slots))))
accessors nil)
(on arg slots
(= accessors (cons `(def ,(coerce (string name "-" arg) 'sym) (thing) (thing ,(+ index 1))) accessors)))
(cons 'do (join accessors creator))))

I had to use "#" instead of "!" since that is used for special function access in arc, but the effect of this code is pretty much what was written about in the blog post. It creates a constructor for the struquine with name#, accessors for each arg of the form name-arg, and "type" checker of the form name?. For example:

arc> (strq point x y)
#<procedure: point#>
arc> (= mypoint (point# 1 2))
(point# 1 2)
arc> (point? mypoint)
t
arc> (point-x mypoint)
1
arc> (point-y mypoint)
2
Laparoscopic surgeons who play video games are 27% faster at advanced surgical procedures
I about vomited when he claimed that CSS files alone were exceeding 30KB. I'm still a little sick to my stomach. :-(

Does that really happen? Are conditional comments and CSS hacks really absolutely necessary? I've done a fair bit of CSS drudge work, including for some moderately complicated layouts (and hated every moment of it), and never resorted to either. There always seems to be a better way if I think about it hard enough.

The tips were ... eh.

But I did really really like the graphics that he used in his examples, with a page from the site folding back to reveal the code underneath. That was sexy.

EDIT: Hell, all the JS for the photo gallery at [http://davidmckayphotography.com/], combined, is just a shade over 30KB, and it does some fairly heavy lifting. I really hope the guy was kidding about 30K of CSS.
A problem called ‘Credit Card Debt ‘
Using E-Books as a Tool for Marketing - heartharmony.com.au - Small Business Tips
I don't want to defend Apple. Infact, I don't even use their products. My point is that he's as guilty as an Apple fanboy, except he's a member of the Apple haters' cult.

Some of his posts above about Apple products are just not factual. There have not been widespread issues with bricked iPhones nor have people been returning them in droves like he's claimed. I'd imagine that you could make the same exaggerations about the Motorola RAZR. There are always defective products from the factory and people who return them; the numbers are not any higher with the iPhone.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss Apple as hype.[1] Let's give them credit for creating some very well designed products and hate them for the right reasons.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=275608
The SB-POSIX package has a function that calls out to mmap:
(sb-posix:mmap addr length prot flags fd offset)
Feedly needs your help please
That domino effect was rather obvious. A slightly less obvious dangers: http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/the-unexpected-dang...
How about Social Action-streaming concept?
Another example of a vertical based Lifestream.

http://ejang.net/freetibet
Spot on.

I started thinking the same thing when the blog started a point with, "If you fail...". I doubt that Steve Jobs ever really worries about failure.
The RIAA has been doing this since Napster with concerted and ruthless effort - in other words for the last 9 years. I am a little sick of hearing about this type of news, as I am with the music of a now much smaller stable of artists the Big Labels have been pumping into the community during this time.

Here are some factors I attribute to the decline in the music industry:

- Artists are locked into contracts with RIAA labels

- Most artists still looking for the best deal. Label can provide advances and recording studios. Even big name artists speaking out against P2P.

- CDs, which were once the dominant format are now being marginalized, but only slowly. The equipment is still around and goes through a replacement cycle by users. Handheld and car players have taken time to be developed and purchased.

- Ogg and FLAC have only slowly risen in popularity, with MP3 a royalty imbuing format and yet the most prevalent.

- ISP bandwith costs for streaming have had to come down.

- Too many music sites competing for the same small-to-medium sized bands. No unified charts that could theoretically be created.

- Not enough umbrella organizations for non-RIAA sites and artists: does SoundExhange have an independent competitor?

- MusicBrainz (music metadata) not universal enough

- Micropayments not mainstream

- song-profiling, listener-profiling only a recent development, and proprietary

- Listeners still very much in love with old songs (RIAA back catalogue) with new music often of short-term quality

- Massive RIAA lobbying for home internet streaming laws, and legal action against P2P users.

- Semantic web features still in early phases to make audio and video a "free-floating" entity

- Home sound recording and production technology still improving to studio quality levels

- Ticketing and gig tracking sites: no clear cut destination.

- Does iTunes provide enough price differences between RIAA and non-RIAA content?
Well, it is true that, being open source (well, it will be), the carriers could hack it to be just as closed and broken as they want. Whether that happens lots, none, or something in between is anyone's guess.
Great insight. Search used to seem such a fragile business, because where's the sustainable competitive advantage when there're no switching costs? When better search comes along, everyone switches!

But... unless the competitor is significantly superior, why switch? So Google just needs to be good enough such that no one is significantly superior in a way that makes a difference to users. If you're technically better, but it doesn't really help anyone, it doesn't harm Google.
Yep. And again, there's no business here.

A start-up is a small business with a lot of growth potential.

It needs:

1) Revenue streams

2) Revenue streams

3) Revenue streams

If it's missing any of these three, it is not a business, and hence not a start-up.

PS: Sometimes the revenue streams are not active yet, but there needs to be a way to make money from it!
Funny thing is the killer feature of the iPhone is not that it has a phone. It's that it is a decent portable pocket internet tablet with edge/3g/wifi.
The fact it's called the i"Phone" is quite weird in a way I think, as I'm sure 90% of the usage on it is not phone related for most people. I had mine a couple of weeks before I used it for making a voice call...

So I see it more as a "How can we make a cool pocket macbook which has a killer browser" rather than how to save the iPod. After all, no other mobile browser can compete at the moment.
I recently set up a new savings account and for some reason when the paperwork came through I couldn't recall the password I had used. Getting a new one issued did require a phone call but the questions asked were only the standard things like mothers maiden name, first school etc. These sorts of things are as easy to compromise on the phone as they are online.

On the plus side they only gave me half a password on the phone. The other half was emailed to me.
Is Duncan Riley bitter about something? Say what you may, Riley did put out a few articles in his techcrunch days that were not that great. And the name of his techcrunch clone kind of sucks.

I'm no fan of either of them, but I don't think it's appropriate to publicly write a bunch of weak arguments against someone trying to make money by selling a service that people obviously think is useful.
AFFILIATE MARKETING – THE BEST WAY TO MONETIZE YOUR WEBSITE
Startups bridging the Atlantic
You right! Thanks
100 Billion Note
Digital Nomads (new Dell blog)
Seeing that capital "i" in the title hurts... I need eye bleach!
Brave Attempt
> [M]aintaining you own installation at your own domain takes quite a lot of time.

Not sure I agree with this, at least where WordPress is concerned. What, after all, is involved? Grabbing the source from the latest stable branch on the WP svn repository takes less than a minute. Creating a new database is a few seconds; adding the database details to the config file is less than a minute; and the install routine can also be run in under a minute. That's installation. Then there's maintenance: a cron job that updates the source from svn every night, and a one-line svn command to switch to a new branch when it comes out. A database backup script which, like the domain configuration, is not WordPress-specific.

Actually, having gone halfway through this response, I'm not sure I agree with my disagreement. Once you've sorted all of the above, you need to start doing things specific to your installation: choosing or creating a theme, installing plugins (preferably over svn from the WP plugin repository so you can update them automatically), and tweaking the various settings to your liking. But only the details are specific to WordPress, or Movable Type.

It would be more accurate to say that maintaining any reasonably complex website takes quite a lot of time. But then, we knew that already, and it still only takes five minutes to get WordPress installed on your server.
* Google (search, then maps)

* iPod and iPhone

* Programming
OMFG - diets!!?? on HN?? good grief.
Our startup didn't make the cut, so perhaps I'm subconsciously biased. But even so, I think that TC50 is an acceptable venue, and they're fairly upfront with everything, as far as I can tell.

I agree with them DEMO drama - but I'm one to avoid social drama. Jason Calacanis, it seems, isn't. That's fine, he's the founder of the show, more power to him.

And as long as there's competition, everyone will benefit to some degree. Let's just try to lower the drama level a bit.
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It should be possible to dispute someone's claims without resorting to vitriolic ad hominem attacks.
Absolutely!

But although SICP teaches you a great deal about Lisp techniques, it doesn't teach Common Lisp. Abelson and Sussman use Scheme. If you are aware of the differences, it should be no problem, though.

This has been written 10k times here: The video lectures are great, the book is great (It's also free on the internet)! If you don't depend on Common Lisp, this is probably the best Lisp (and programming in genereal) introduction out there. As a follow-up, Paul Graham's "On Lisp" is a great choice.
You're right, especially w/r to NIH and NSF, but the DARPA vein is very rich. Still, if you're accepted into a reputable program, you're guaranteed funding for four or five years.

Don't forget how much of this is driven by the president's budget office. Not surprisingly. this administration isn't interested in science.
Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road
Is the video choppy for anyone else? Trying to view it in Linux.
The advisability of using this tool has already been discussed so I'll ignore that aspect and critique the tool as is . . .

- It isn't clear what's the significance of the master and slave pages. I know you have a paragraph of text on the slave page but I think that needs to be the first thing you see. It's a feature which distinguishes you from many other services. Shout about it.

- Your guidelines state that a good password will, "Be seven or fourteen characters long, due to the way in which encryption works. For obvious reasons, fourteen characters are preferable." The default on the form is 8 characters. Try to be internally consistent. My knowledge of encryption is fairly weak, why is 7 or 14 characters best?

- Your privacy statement says, "API page only permitted SSL(https) requests." I seem able to access the page using plain http.

- What is the significance of "You generate password 50 times in the an hour. Because, we check SPAM requests." The way I'm reading it you only generate 50 sets of password each hour and if more than 50 people come to your site you just serve the same set of passwords again. I doubt this is correct but that's the way I read it.
Not so cool when they get lung cancer and have to start selling meth to pay for their treatment.
I'd never actually checked this out until this post :)

Had a look and I'm very impressed!

I'm putting together a personal blog and thought it'd be a good idea to do the posts by email - was a bit unsure on the anti spoofing measures though. I'm sure you have it sorted!

I've recommended it to a friend already- Well done!
I use some variation on

tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9' </dev/urandom | dd bs=8 count=1 2>/dev/null; echo

when I want a quick throw-away password.
Reuse of session state for Seaside performance