skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a bigger fan of Paul Graham than I am of anyone in Google

You must not be aware of who works at Google... Peter Norvig and Guido van Rossum come to mind. Granted, in the domain of advising startups, Paul is both a lot more knowledgeable and accessible.
Its a title I expected Arrington to actually use, I was surprised his real title was kinda bland.
Yes totally agree! Email space seems so stagnant and everyday I use them think of ways it can be improved!

The email experience can be improved so much with just simple data mining like collecting information about a project by just looking at project related correspondence. Who has been active or who is not. Great deal of information about user is hidden in those mails, I am sure an intelligent pass through them can tell simple things like gender of the person, career, location, purchase history, relationship status and much more.

Also, another thing makes me wonder how email clients will adopt themselves to manage messages in forms other than text.
Voila - hand-cranked CB radio.
No more lists please. Especially ones that re-iterate what has been said before and on many other websites.
What _is_ Hunch?
Download Happy Tree Friends Episodes
Cuddles, a cute little yellow bunny; Flakey the dandruff-ridden porcupine; Sniffles, the nosy, nerdy anteater; Lumpy, the blue dim-witted moose; Toothy, the buck-toothed beaver; Giggles the Chipmunk; Handy, a helpful carpenter beaver; Petunia, the skunk who is as sweet as she smells; Nutty, the screwy squirrel; Splendid, the super-powered flying squirrel; Russell, the pirate; Flippy, a gentle bear veteran; Pop the pipe-smoking father bear and his cub Cub; Lifty, little raccoon; Shifty, Lifty’s brother and partner; Mole- a blind mole. They all enjoy the great adventures and horrors of life in their cute little world.
They've had quite a few now. I could imagine YC becoming profitable soon if they are not already.
OK, the Python Package Index is not quite the same thing as CPAN, but it's at least a little better than random blogs:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=daemon...
LG's Netflix box to stream other media, too
Corporate Venture Capital (argument against Google VC)
Just last night I was deciding whether to use SmugMug or Flickr and chose SmugMug for this reason.
I LOVE how the first response is a Troll comment! My only thought to add is an interaction I had recently with a programmer/hacker/entrepreneur who had made a macro program to automate mining in Eve Online. The program is explicitly contrary to the EULA and so constitutes a hack. The programmer/owner had an elaborate feedback password system, so I had to IM him directly to activate my copy of the program once I paid my fee. He was wildly rude--just throwing off flippant and rude remarks like a vagrant dog throws fleas. After the third or fourth example I started to call him on it--to his, and my great frustration. He did not like being called on his nasty tone at all and denied having one at all. I got so heated that I almost ditched the whole project, but finally calmed down enough to get the transaction done. Later I spoke to a friend in-game who had an identical experience. My point is that this article on how hackers and some programmers tend towards this behavior as a culture explains a lot. My programmer provocateur thought his nastiness was somehow normal, acceptable, and utterly justifiable on the basis of some sense of his own personal superiority. I suppose this is what happens when people take their coding/hacking acumen as a license for megalomania and a total disregard of social graces.

Great essay.
IE8 Beta 2 getting heavy performance, crash-recovery tweaks
RE Number 4:

His mention of the difficulty of getting users to trust AI agents is dead right. All the supposedly wonderful Bayes-based filtering today STILL sometimes crashes and burns, to the point where Thunderbird often thinks that fairly important work emails are junk. I would be hesitant to install any other agents unless they performed extremely trivial tasks.

However...

RE: Number 3

Search is nowhere near good enough right now for most desktop clients. Outlook and Thunderbird alike are both terrible at intelligent searches. Only Gmail has a nice search function, which is why I continue to use it over most desktop clients. If he can make a cross-platform plugin that vastly improves searches without turning my client into a grinding mass of gears (hello Xobni!), he will have a red-hot product.
Come on... If you're going to post something completely unrelated to HN can you at least use a descriptive title?
>> "Except that energy saving is capped. If we're using 5kw and we want 100kw, saving that 5 is nice but only 5% of the goal."

>Your argument is flawed because you are assuming that you either have to create new electricity or conserve electricity and you can't do both.

Huh? In my example, I did both.

I should have written that the low-hanging fruit is being picked.

The fact remains that expected energy demand exceeds current capacity. That means that savings can't get us out of the problem.

Also, if you care about CO2, you want to replace existing sources even if the existing sources provide enough energy.
If a user adds your app, you can send them a notification within Facebook.
It really depends whether we are a niche or the leading edge. If we are the leading edge then the masses will use these new systems later and it's worth building technologies now.

Bear in mind that your argument applied to email in 1986 when I first got the email address jgc@prg.ox.ac.uk.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that you do something like POPFile commercially. If you are feel free to email me and I'll spill all its secrets :-)
http://searchyc.com/motivated

Perhaps there should be a message in the article submission to suggest searching for duplicates before posting an Ask YC...
Can we buy a few and test them? Would be good content and good publicity...
Yeah... but in my company, there are many cases where job positions have spontaneously materialized that are essentially programming positions, but that we have "con" someone into doing it even though it really is programming. The users are, for all intents and purposes, programmers... but we have to keep them from finding that out!
Can someone explain why he forks the process twice? The url in the comment doesn't work.
I didn't mean only leave titles and usernames, just to cut everything you can.
If it's a few things that you don't particularly want to do, but have to do: Cut out all of your distractions (twitter, e-mail notifier, digg, children, co-workers, etc) and do it in one big burst (I like mine with espresso or Code Red Mountain Dew).

If it's a bigger issue of not caring about your work at all. I agree with jlouis, do something else, or figure out why what you're doing matters.

Look for a position in an area you can care about, or make your own position, or tell your boss your work bores you. Your boss could fire you, or he could give you something interesting, I have no idea about your current situation.
Microsoft redesigns Live.com
Girth of a nation
read the whole article. They tried to get some of the women to do high intensity exercise, but they couldn't stick to the protocol.

> Jakicic and his colleagues originally designed their study to measure whether weight loss could really be achieved and maintained through moderate-intensity exercise... or whether it was preferable to engage in shorter bursts of more vigorous-intensity activity... The problem was that not enough of the women stuck with their assigned exercise categories for the researchers to gather enough meaningful data. Within a few months, most of the participants had resorted to exercising as much as they chose to. That left researchers with a slightly different data set than they had planned for

(FWIW I'm all about HIIT, but I don't know how you can get people into it once it becomes inconceivable to do high-intensity work.)
Noted, though I did add a description in the comments. As for it being unrelated, I've seen political threads here before. This film will most certainly impact the election and therefore is fairly relevant.
How did you make the transition from Physics to Hacking? I just finished my Physics PhD (along with a MS in CS) and have been pondering this move for a while... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I think it is wrong to say that there is a big lack of internet accessibility in Australia. Compare that map with the population density: http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2001/publications/theme-re...
Why Apple won't drop Intel chipsets any time soon
ETP Network: "Empowering Today's Professionals"
Ask YC: Duplicate Posts
Ok folks,

I'm pretty tired of people complaining about dupes that are more than a couple of days apart.

Discussions change, perspectives change. There is serious value in re-asking a question 2,4,10 weeks out. I've even considered re-asking my own questions before.

While it is nice to have a listing of posts that have talked about something before, please don't patronize people who do ask questions that have been asked here before.

So, my question:

Can we specify some civil way of
1)Telling someone their post is a dupe
2)Pointing out that search options do exist
3)Continuing on with their discussion and anwering their question as asked.

Thoughts?
Surprise A big media company says digital revenue actually matters now
25 Best Business Books Ever
Some of my favorites on the list esp. world is flat! I wonder why founders at work isn't included.

What are your favorite business books which did not make the list ?
Search options exist? Is that in some karma wonderland toolbar that I don't have? :)
Nobody cares how fast your compiler runs.

I take it you've never written a C++ program which depends on heavy template metaprogramming.
The NetFlix of Junk
"Under SVR4, some people recommend calling fork again at this point and having the parent terminate. The second child continues as the daemon. This guarantees that the daemon is not a session leader, which prevents it from acquiring a controlling terminal under the SVR4 rules. [...]"

(That's from p417 in my first edition copy of Stevens. The page number and/or the text may be different in the second edition.)
BTW, I second this idea. Its way better to give someone a little leeway and help them get the answer than to just shoot them down. Great suggestion.
Yeah, where is this alleged search option?
The wisdom of having your daemons daemonize themselves is debatable. I think it's better, for a variety of reasons, to run them from a supervisor which can handle things like logging and signal handling.
Perhaps we should try to convince pg to add a link to searchyc.com in the top menu?
I use procrastination and guilt. It's actually why I read Hacker News.
The Pirates Can't Be Stopped
Switch to something interesting, e.g. a pet project that's quite different from your main work.

Productivity breeds more productivity... as you do things, your energy and enthusiasm will come back up.

Taking a break works too, but less quickly.
I'm kinda sold... Does anyone have any disagreements?
I find that by ensuring I have time set aside for specific tasks, that I get more accomplished and that sense of accomplishment helps keep me motivated.

For example - I try to limit the time spent on certain personal activities (scouring websites) to specific times, that way I dont find myself losing track when I have work to get done.

Also, one of the side effects of setting a limited timeframe to do work in, is that you end up doing better quality work out of necessity more than anything.

I also found that I'm generally most creative in the mornings and late evenings - so I schedule coding time around then... so I dont end up wasting time chipping away at something and getting nowhere.
Bravo!

Let this be a lesson to all those who believe a CS degree should amount to nothing more than "Learn Blub in 21 Days Vocational Training" :-)
Start with the smallest chunk of work. If you look at it as one giant dull task, it's going to be really tough to start. You can't picture the task as moving a whole mountain at once, when in reality the only possible way to move it is a single rock at a time.

So start with a simple goal to get engaged, like fixing a single line of code, and you'll end up doing the whole task.

For me, I always have that initial adverse reaction and stop myself right there, tell myself I'm going to do it NOW, and then just get it done.

If your work is truly dull and uninspiring though, find something else. I find it hard to see any programming as "dull", because it always presents new problems that need solutions.
Safari on OSX works, too.
But whenever I finish with my dull work, they give me more...
Watch Hackers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
this may change the whole industry - Apple TV will have hard time to sell a separate box - unless they built in any extra feature such as games, DVD player, storage drive etc.
Ask YC: Why the excitement over XMPP on the backend?
I'm developing something now that implements a push client, and I keep seeing people getting excited about XMPP for publish-subscribe type things.

The slide deck that keeps getting press lately is here:
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/4359

It really seems to me that using XMPP (which is a stateful chat protocol) for RPC might be the wrong approach. Have the XMPP advocates just re-invented message queues?

In the OSS world, ActiveMQ exists, so does AMQP. MQ theory is very old, having been used for decades for things like financial systems.

Am I missing something?
Then wouldn't it be 2pir, ~6.28 if we assume a unit circle?
Wordscraper Hurts My Eyes
If I had to guess, it's because overnight, maybe, it does a lot of indexing that forces pretty much everything to swap out to disk? And maybe with everything paged-out, the whole machine is slow when I need it the most? It just doesn't seem to ever really recover, though.

Google's old desktop search product (haven't used it in a while) had that kind of problem which made it really painful to use since it did background indexing frequently back then.

I'll reinstall and drop you an email if I see the problem return. It happened twice, once before you launched publicly and again after. Now, though, I have a laptop with >1GB of memory so maybe it won't be quite as bad?

Thanks a lot for responding.
Why I don’t use javascript frameworks
I'll give you $50 for a worse brand name than Knol
SilverLua, an implementation of Lua for the Xbox 360
This is a no more a blind "taste test" than if Pepsi hadn't allowed their pawns to actually sip the cola, but just described to them how good it was. Ridiculous in the extreme.
Give me 5 good reasons why HN shouldn't have any more lists.
Spending can't cause inflation as there's no increase in the money supply, and so prices can't uniformly rise as there's not the actual physical cash to pay all those higher prices.
They can't verify what every executable in the bootloading chain will do, so they simply refuse to boot vista in the event that they can't verify it is being booted by known code. This is "secure", because they do a best-effort guarantee to prevent foreign code from entering the boot process. Refusing to boot is "correct" because it is the only course of action the Vista bootloader has to avoid loading tainted code. A far worse decision would be to modify the system to remove that bootloader and then reboot.

This is not a MS vs. the world thing, and I am certainly not a microsoft apologist. Whole-disk encryption for Linux should do something similar, and hopefully will make use of TPM chips if they are available.
I watched "corporate VC" totally fuck over a bizdev strategy at one of my last jobs. In my case, it wasn't even a real investment --- just a "strategic" chit from a syndicated A round. Unfortunately, that chit went to an 800lb gorilla in our space. As a result:

* It was hard to get the investor's competitors to take us seriously in OEM and acquisition discussions, because the 800lb gorilla was seen as having "first refusal".

* It was hard to get the 800lb gorilla to take acquisition seriously; in fact, they expected favors in return for having "invested".

The company did OK in the long run, so all I have here is an anecdote.
that email wasn't web based was it? thats changed. (unless it was ;)

good point though
Yes it's totally wrong. Something like 98% of Australians live in the cities where you have multiple suppliers of ADSL 2+ (28Mb), cable internet, HSDPA (3G wireless internet) and so on.
you know it's impossible everybody to know what everyone has read.

re-iterate, the principle of learning
Surround phrases to be shown in italics with asterixes...
> It's not very difficult to make a functional search engine. With the amount of resources cuil had, all you would have to do is provision a few thousand servers and deploy a nutch cluster on them.

This is incredibly wrong. What Cuil has done is neither easy (in terms of effort) or trivial (in terms of overall accomplishment). Most people simply don't understand the incredible amount of infrastructure that goes into a search engine. Certainly I did not until being part of what Powerset did, and I was shocked.

> Then you pair random images with random search results. Voila, you have cuil.

I confess I am confused why they don't just turn the feature off. It's certainly not baked yet.

> The criticism is duly applied as Cuil made the claim that they would be better than Google at the same game.

They can be better than Google at the same game at some point in the future. Right now all they have is a faster index generator, which is obviously what they feel they need to pursue funding or acquisition.

> Powerset never made such a claim. The people who criticized it didn't have an understanding about what it was actually trying to do.

I am watching the same series of events I lived through with Powerset unfold for Cuill, and it is no more tolerable from the outside than the inside.
If you want to revolutionise email merge it with a task list since my inbox is basically a big todo list.

Let me create tasks right in my inbox (at the moment I have to email myself), let me sort the emails myself by dragging them up and down to prioritise them, and let me split single emails into multiple tasks with some link back to the original email.
I don't really care to get a high Tetris score, I just play it some times, occasionally I play for way too long. But it's not a subtle obsession or anything. I can quit any time.
Surely you're not going to get very good programmers that way?
well often enough a query like "site:news.ycombinator.com techcrunch" on Google works for me
Surround yourself with other smart productive people and it'll rub off on you, it's easy to do dull work if you're in the right environment
Coder: "An ever-expanding universe of languages is becoming a drain on productivity"
Then leave. Or tell them to hire someone else for the dull work. Give it to someone who considers programming a 'good job' and not 'fun'.
in addition to searchyc, there's xirium , Goog custom search

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=018342486690831005521:1iq2...

http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/
i am surprised nobody write a booklet for the either ;)
Download King of the Hill Episodes
Created by Beavis and Butt-Head’s Mike Judge and The Simpsons’ Greg Daniels, the weekly, half-hour animated series King of the Hill was a genial “redneck” comedy set in the fictional burg of Arlen, TX. The central character was Hank Rutherford Hill, a 40-year-old salesman for the Strickland Propane Company. Staunchly conservative and fiercely macho, Hank might have been described as the head of the Hill household were it not for his iron-willed wife Peggy, a substitute teacher.
We're talking 1986 here. That email was based on the command-line, but we did have IM: it was called talk. And we had anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing using FTP. And we had discussion forums using Usenet.

We didn't have Facebook, but we didn't need it. I knew everyone who was using the Internet :-)
We often have more choice than you might think. Here's an example - today my boss wanted me to write up a C header file - essentially I had to take an interface supplied to us by a partner, and modify it so that it respected our coding standards. Now, I could have spent 4 hours of hand-editting this (rather large) file, or, I could spend 4 hours writing a custom pretty_print in Ruby to do it for me. One way of doing it is very boring, the other is rather interesting.

More generally, boring = automatable. If the code that you are writing, or the other task you are doing is boring, it is ripe for automating - so automate it! You'll never have to do the boring task again.
As a Google user (gmail, calendar, reader, notebook) taking a look at the new Live.com frontpage, it looks nice. No scrollbars at all unlike yahoo.com and the images used seem to belong in the page. Unlike the text they keep adding to the Google front page, these links seem thought out as to where to place them and what to keep.
I agree - There is no need to do 'dull' work. If it takes up more than a small portion of your day, then change what you do.

If it's a job you have, then talk to your boss about what projects you would be excited to do, and see if you could work together to change the dull/exciting mix. Offer to work extra on the exciting/challenging project to prove your capabilities if that's a necessary step.

We had a programmer who was often on 'dull' assignments worked nights on a really big problem our company was having - our new product was sluggish, and needed some serious redesign. He spent a month working on a proof of concept on his own time, and then presented it to his boss, and then the programming team.

Now he's working on future architectures and pretty high level, fun and interesting stuff.

It's dull enough to post for help on a newsgroup. Do something about it. Change your trajectory.
Not a lot of meat, but I vastly prefer this to the LOLCuil posts (which are hopefully over).

The most interesting thing about Cuil was that I got the feeling people WANTED it to succeed. Maybe we're getting bored with Google and ready for a shiny new toy? Looking for another David vs. Goliath story?
Well obviously they dont need to follow every rule but these are good ones to listen to ... Just because the site is successful doesn't mean they shouldn't use this.

"Lists in general are never good" ... Why is that? Are lists generalizations?
Very good execution on the idea of "brokerage of everything" - if you can find a way to determine relative selling prices, then offer a margin below that - then resell its money in the bank.
Y Combinator Challenge #9 - Photo/video sharing services
I was never a fan of "alternative" tab behavior in Visual Studio, and I'm not sure I like it in Firefox either. The saving grace is that the other keyboard shortcuts for changing tabs keep the original behavior, but still. It always feels like the tabs are a moving target when it cycles based on last viewed.
Man, I might use this service. Seems like an excellent, hassle-free way to unload junk.

Excellent submission.
But you don't actually have the email address, and Facebook decides what to send or not to send. Once your app is gone it's just too late.

Basically Facebook is a prison guard and an app has access to email the same way a prisoner has access to letters.
I've voted you up - not sure why you were voted down. If I created a business and then I was ripped off then I'd not be happy - be it online or a physical business.
> Since when do people have a choice?

Free trade.
on #1) Asking a question again is fine, the problem (IMO) is that the poster might not realize it is a dupe. So when someone posts a dupe, IMO, they should be told it's a dupe (and then the previous date/time posted), and let them decide whether or not to post it.
Yup, wrong job in that case...
What's thought out or well-placed about the link I see on the front page?: "Can you guess today's hottest celeb? Check xRank Celebrity." I can't recall anything similar on Google's.