skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
unalone, you have some excellent points. By the tone of your voice, I clearly struck a nerve. I appreciate your constructive comments though. Here's my own response to your comments:

"That's because Groups and Pages serve as a sort of utility on Facebook. Yes, they're abused by immensely stupid people. But where SHOULD they go? On the "info" page, which is designed to show the user's INFORMATION on the site? That's what groups and pages ARE. On the "feed" page, which is supposed to show incoming activity? Yes - that's why they ARE displayed on the site when there's activity regarding them."

My point on this was that it's now in a different place than before. I recall no blog post or documentation by Facebook pointing out that these were going to be removed. I use them frequently to find out affiliations a user is a part of, and with them having moved, I had to search to find them now. Once users get used to this, I agree - it's in a good place for now. However, they could have provided better documentation to users that this was going to be there. It wasn't in the developer preview until it was just launched, and I argue it wasn't even in there last week, because I looked pretty thoroughly last week when I was preparing this.

"1) Facebook is not a site for businesses. It's a site for connecting with people you know. They fucking SAY that when you register. If you're trying to exploit it, you do it AGAINST the system, and them stifling that is a GOOD thing."

I beg to differ on this one, and this is part of the problem. Businesses see Facebook as a huge opportunity, and it's part of the reason the 25 and older audience is the fastest-growing audience on Facebook. As Facebook ignores this, businesses, and professionals will also flock away from the site.

"You're supposed to use your network affiliation to announce your job. Not groups, and not pages."

Facebook has announced they are eventually removing the networks so this won't be the case for long. Facebook also isn't just about "announcing a job". It's also about providing businesses an opportunity to interact in a reasonable and social way with users. Facebook is a tool for both users and businesses. This is how Facebook makes money and I doubt they're going to ignore it.

"The changing of the FriendFeed information is because Facebook has suddenly added a lot MORE functionality into their feeds. Apps can show MORE information now, because there are multiple tiers of app distribution."

I agree completely, but my point there was that Facebook gave developers little to no time to improve this. This is why you're seeing poor feeds, and poor use of the design by applications. I agree though that this is a bigger opportunity for developers, and over time this should be much better.

Oh, and you can call me Jesse. :-)
Pretty cool but I think most liquor stores have the same capability.

I found a bug though: when I search for sherry it shows that there are 4 results but when I click on "Sherry" on the left hand menu I still get the original 7 results.
The dumbing down of science
Congrats.

May want to invest in some web design though, your site layout is pretty obviously copied from 37Signals' Basecamp...

http://www.basecamphq.com/
"I'm beginning to think Cuil is going to be the CueCat of this millenium"

Still awaiting the Cuil article in Wired magazine with bated breath.
Are you finding the root cause?
Esquire to geeks: hack our e-paper magazine cover
Is Gangplank still going on? I was thinking about stopping by tonight or next week.
> The best algorithm I can think of takes amortized constant time and linear (proportional to window size) space.

Sounds about right for what we do to compute Geometric Brownian Motion.
I'm on Dreamhost shared hosting - they have RoR.
> not be a best choice for occasional use

That's a reasonable point, but I struggle to see how other powerful languages differ. Complex syntax and idioms are part of the deal if you want to use a powerful language. There's always BASIC...

I have never had any problem reading perl, whether my own or others'.
Hi there, the design is mine (and sadly it shows), but when I did design it I was at the peak of my 37signal fanboy phase, so I'm not surprised you see similarities.

I am working on a new design with a graphic designer friend...so there's hope. :)
YouTube videos with Captions
I agree with you, but this is also why Cuill's enormous marketing push this week was such a bad idea, even though it was executed brilliantly. (what's the last startup that you remember that had an article about it in the New York Times on its launch day?)
Omnisio - used it once and was impressed - viewed videos of speeches and could skip to various pre-determined points, with accompanying slides at left for viewing, and underneath for navigating.

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08

But, if one sells out, the startup never goes on to acquire other companies as seen at Sun, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc. Perhaps only early players in any industry or application type can obtain such growth to stave off the gorillas and sharks, and resist the temptation to be acquired in order to vye for a shot at the IPO brass ring.
How am I supposed to pronounce the name? Like "cool"? :p

I think this is interesting but the search results are off, at least for "little penguin". It only looks up the word "little".

It's pretty useful. I looked up "California" and I learned that there are champagnes made there. Weird.

But I don't buy wines, so this site isn't really for me :S
"Spending an extra dollar cutting C02 to combat climate change generates less than one dollar of good, even when we add up all the economic and environmental benefits."

I don't think there's any sort of consensus on that. I've seen varying figures proposed by economists. An accurate cost benefit analysis would seem to require too many facts we just don't know yet.
Does this run in Rhino? Or uh, which JavaScript version is it?
When I saw an image in my feed reader, this is what I thought. Glad to find it dead.
I read recently that the largest increase in human life expectancy came from the advent of indoor plumbing, which still does not exist in much of the world. I don't know the French word for Plumber, but perhaps we should start the equivalent Sans Frontieres for them.
Python vs. Ruby threading(?) performance
Simply encode your unicode string in utf-8 and print the resulting bytestring. Simple, huh?

Okay, say you don't want to do u"somestring".encode('utf-8') all the time. Python has a set of classes that will wrap files and transparently encode and decode for you. And stdout is just another file.

import sys
import codecs
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter("utf-8")(sys.stdout)
line = u"\u0411"
print line
mazal tov!
Another reason to buy an iPhone: U
Not ‘you’ but iTunes U. Apple is now offering downloadable videos of museums, cultural institutions and a bunch of world renowned universities such as Yale, Duke and MIT. Just login, select a few courses you are interested in and download them to your iPhone or iPod, for free.
> Let's say it costs 5 dollars to save one kilowatt of electricity. Let's also say it costs 20 dollars to generate one new kilowatt of electricity. Both ways, we get one new kilowatt of electricity, but one way is less expensive.

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.

And yes, we're going to need significantly energy than we have today. The first of those "extra uses" are also known as India and China.

Also, while the assumption that energy savings costs 25% of new production costs is convenient for an argument, it isn't all that common. People don't spend more money than they have to. As energy costs have gone up, the low-hanging fruit has been picked.

Of course, some folks cheat by including "savings" that requires changing behavior/reducing value and assuming that that's cost free. That's wrong because minimum energy use isn't the goal - the goal is to maximize value for cost. Just because you don't see the value of something that uses energy doesn't mean that everyone else agrees.
thanks for your detailed blogging about the whole process of going from idea to quitting your job to launch. i spent about 30min going through all your blog posts. very encouraging and real. a great resource for others who are in the same boat.
A Lisp by any other name would smell as sweet?
Please, no more lists.
The only way to find out, in my experience, is to sit down and work with each candidate, for a couple of hours. Not easy indeed.
Lomborg is a menace:

http://climateprogress.org/2007/09/17/debunking-bjorn-lombor...
Sorry for posting this, guys. I thought it would be apropos. I guess not.
OK, it's one thing to say there are underlying differences between men and women backed by some scientific data, but it's another altogether to make unfounded claims, shoot from the hip and be disparaging. Not cool.
Ode To Hungarian Notation
I submitted http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/ earlier today, but HN seems to have deleted it (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262081).
I might be making mistake (should go to sleep), but shouldn't the alternate formula be ((average * count) + x) / ++count, that is ++count instead of count++? Then I arrive at average += (x-average)/(count+1)
Um... I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but this isn't that insightful. It even has a name: this is called a "high pass filter". Over time, it seeks to a constant input level (the "DC bias" in the parlance) while allowing the instantaneous signal excursions (strictly: their derivative) to pass through. It's a useful gadget in both analog electronics and in software for tricks like this one.

It is not, however, an "averager". The output depends on the order in which the inputs are delivered, it seeks to an average only given constant input. Think of the output for a continuously alternating set of 1's and 0's, vs giving all the zeros first then all the ones.
> I'm not sure how serious an issue bandwidth really is, though.

He keeps going on about consumer telecom. Does anyone seriously believe that household consumption of cable TV, web surfing, and cell phones is an economic driver? Seems kinda ridiculous to me. They're just consumer amenities.
Who makes more money founder CEO's or non-founder CEO's?
"In addition, there are very few things that actually need to be written in C. Operating systems and compilers are the two big areas where use of C is nearly always required. Both are territory that I am not interested in venturing into at this point."

First, why is C nearly always required for writing compilers? I've written one in C and a few in higher-level languages, and the HLL ones were easier due largely to garbage collection.

Second, those two things, if learned, would teach him vastly more about computer science than just learning C. For a better understanding why, Steve Yegge's essay "Rich Programmer Food" is what you want to read.
If Techcrunch is right, Chris Sacca was part of a seed round. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/omnisio
Did they have multiple rounds of funding from YC or did they make it this far on the initial money? Seems hard to believe that could tackle the scaling issues with $10K or $15K
This one liquidity event must go a long way to cover all the investments of ycombinator.
Founder-CEO Succession
The other end of the fiber is intended to connect to an Internet exchange point with multiple transit ISPs available.
Those who itch for success must keep scratching
You're right. Also used CrunchBase as a source, didn't see that it was a dual party round.

That's interesting though. Sacca is an Omnisio advisor, and also was the Director of Special Initiatives at Google.
"Hacker" vows to fight extradition from UK
awesome - thanks for firebug lite. That's exactly what I was looking for.
just to let you know of good refs for IE 7 ( i refuse to acknowledge IE 6

http://www.naterkane.com/blog/2007/04/02/ie7-quirks/

http://weblog.openlaszlo.org/archives/2007/03/how-we-deal-wi...

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/11/30/internet-explorer-...

http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/

(yes, not the most appealing design, but verrry time-saving)

TO track IE 7 and 8, check "browsershots.org" "ies4osx" and

http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone
> Research suggests that weight may largely be regulated by biology, which helps determine the body's "set point,"

So where did all the fatties come from? They didn't used to be here.

This is ridiculous. There are big, obvious changes in diet and exercise levels since the 70s that have correlated well with rising obesity.
Seems way a little bit complicated, I still prefer the kill switch option. Costs you like 3 bucks for a switch from radio shack and some spare wire you have at home, and bam noone can steal it w/o knowing where the switch is.
i play badminton twice a week at my local badminton club. it's awesome. remember playing badminton in gym class? fun, right? go to your local club and watch a high level game. ask for some beginning pointers, how to hold the racket, etc. and give it a shot. you'll have fun i bet.
Well, here's a naive one written in Lua. it keeps a fifo list of {timestamp, number} pairs. The fifo is implemented as a double-ended queue in a closure. The averaging function takes in the current time and a new number. Pop off the pairs that are outside of our sliding window and subtract their value from a tally. Push on our new value and add its value to the tally. Return the tally divided by the size of the queue. This algorithm takes linear time with respect to the rate of transactions (i.e. how many do we expire each call) and linear space with respect to window size (how many entries fit in our sliding window).

function create_sliding_averager (window_span, debug)
local window_span = window_span -- seconds
local tally = 0
local fifo = { tail = 1, head = 0 }
local debug = debug

return function (amount, current_time)
local head = fifo.head + 1
local tail = fifo.tail

fifo[head] = { timestamp = current_time, amount = amount }
tally = tally + amount

local cutoff, old_time = current_time - window_span, nil

if fifo[tail] then
old_time = fifo[tail].timestamp
end

if debug then
print ('cutoff: ', cutoff, 'old time:',
old_time, 'current:', current_time)
end

while old_time ~= nil and old_time < cutoff do
tally = tally - fifo[tail].amount
if debug then
print ('expiring: ', fifo[tail].timestamp, fifo[tail].amount)
end
fifo[tail] = nil
tail = tail + 1
old_time = fifo[tail].timestamp
end

fifo.tail = tail
fifo.head = head

if debug then print(tail, head) end
return 'avg: '..(tally / (head - tail + 1)), 'size: '..(head - tail + 1)
end
end

averager = create_sliding_averager(10) -- 10 second average

while true do
local rand = math.random()
local time = os.time()
print (averager(rand, time))
end

I would usually use a small library to implement (push(), pop(), peek()) on the fifo but this example will run in a stock interpreter. On my system the average for rand() hovers around .5 so it passes my initial smell test. It's hovering around 80k entries in a busyloop with a 10 second window.

This is a pretty brute-force solution. I'll see if I can think of something more elegant.
Creating Heatmaps in WPF
The author of this site, Paul Graham (pg), is an essayist who listed single founders as number one on his startup mistakes list. It's not an opinion I share, so yes, sarcasm intended. :-) Agreed 100% about sarcasm being hard to see in text. While an extra person can be an advantage, I think he overestimates the advantages and underestimates the disadvantages.

Nice work on the site and app! Congrats!

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Actually no. Take lisp for example. It's syntax can be described in a few lines. The functions also are usually quite straight forward and its pretty easy to go back to previous code. Or try python. This language is also pretty easy to work with. The syntax is consistent and the one right way to do thinks philosophy means that reading even other people's code is not a big problem. Contrast this with perl...
Why Free Software and Apple's iPhone Don't Mix
VC funded will probably succeed more because they get more coverage. And if you are in a niche that will only have 1-2 big players, it kinda helps getting that initial coverage to grow fast.

Honestly I don't think I can come up with 1 big player(100mm/yr revenue) of the top of my head, that never took any funding.
10 Big Questions for Geneticist J. Craig Venter on America's Energy Future
The importance of the quote is that Google is using it to support a common logical fallacy.
Those languages are simple if you use the same basic constructs available in every procedural language. You can write BASIC in any language, including Perl. Otherwise, you have to learn complexity.

Yes, I'm sure description of lisp's loop function would fit in your few lines...
Why no lists? This is a good one :)
+3.14
Didn't it happen with Mosaic :)
I have to say, UC Irvine (the school discussed in the article) isn't really a Java school. Introductory students are taught Scheme, and the required curriculum includes language design, algorithms, and operating systems. Optional courses that I took included cryptography, computer graphics, computational geometry, and artificial intelligence. Some of these classes used Java, others didn't.

That being said, the threshold for just passing the classes never seemed very high. The education was there if you wanted it, but most students didn't seem to, and were happy to get by with a barely passing grade. This is obviously a problem, but different from the one discussed in the Spolsky article.
Dealing With The Asus Eee Lack Of Space
Please critique my Startuply ad for a co-founding developer?
Any critiques for my job-ad on Startuply for "SaveStaff" would be much appreciated. Or advice on where else I can post to actually get some responses. Of course I could raise the base salary rate, but this is a co-founder / equity position. Thanks in advance!

Or

www.savestaff.blogspot.com
McCain runs a cowardly sleazy ad, early
Ask YC: Which looks better? (Website design feedback)
We're trying to figure out a good way to list items on the 'browse' page of our site... the problem is that there is a lot of info we want to display for each item, and it gets pretty busy. We've been playing with different solutions, and we want to know which one looks best. Or maybe we need something completely different.

The comment below has the live links, basically they are all of the form http://www.siafoo.net/snippet?style= and then a number between 0 and 4.
Clearing Up a Blurry Work Life
These are all variations on the same thing. Notice in particular what happens when you mouse over one of the snippets.

http://www.siafoo.net/snippet

http://www.siafoo.net/snippet?style=0

http://www.siafoo.net/snippet?style=1

http://www.siafoo.net/snippet?style=2

http://www.siafoo.net/snippet?style=3

http://www.siafoo.net/snippet?style=4
I had to solve this recently for a data processing script. I don't keep a running sum, I do keep a running count. In python:

nums = [5, 7, 11, 9, 6, 6, 9]

ravg = 1.0
for i, num in enumerate(nums):
ravg = (ravg * i + num) / (i + 1)
print n, ravg
Fair enough. :)

I can't wait to see more...
Not only does this give a sense of the lowest levels, but you also get to build your own Object Oriented language and write your own kernel and Operating System! This is one of the best and most practical ways of getting the whole enchilada I know of.
I suppose the website you link to isn't entirely useless. If I were contemplating buying a new computer (and I am), I could check every component of a potential computer against the list. If one component were red-listed, then I would know that Linux would not run on that computer. I could then go to my next choice and check every component again.

However, while lists such as these might help me weed out potential computers that won't work, it cannot help me find one that will work. I cannot avoid the compatibility lottery for two reasons: 1) the list is incomplete and 2) hardware compatibility varies from distro to distro and release to release.

I suppose you could make a similar website for the last two versions of every popular distro. Then, I could take each potential computer I was considering purchasing and check each component's compatibility in each distro I want to use (if one system won't work in Ubuntu 8.04, then maybe it will work in 7.10). Please note that this consumer nirvana would only work if the lists were reasonably complete.

What I would love is a website that links to computers from major manufacturers where the current version of a given distro works 100% after install. Perhaps Ubuntu could link to a set of major brand desktops and laptops that work with 7.10 and 8.04. That would be much more useful than a list such as this: http://tuxmobil.org/ibm.html which isn't exactly an easy-to-use Linux shopping guide.
The only people making real money off of web-based Office products are the founders who sold their startups to Google or Adobe.
s/These are all variations on the same thing./These are all the same thing./

Fixed that for you.

The differences between them are close to irrelevant. Though I find the mouse following a little irritating, so the last one is a wee bit better.

But, the things I think are wrong:

Too much. Over overwhelmed.

The Filters interface is horrible. I couldn't find what I was looking for at all. Sliding through the list looks awesome...but it's really time-consuming to use. A dropdown would have been faster, and would be what users expect. A simple textbox with auto-complete might also be a way to go about it.

There are too many types of filters for a front page. Make it keywords by default, and hide the rest on an advanced search page.

Or, simply get rid of "filters" and make search work really nicely. That'd remove a huge amount of the confusing stuff on your page...but maybe filters are worth having, regardless of clutter...you can decide that. But you definitely need to do something about those filters.

The rest of the page might be a bit busy...but it looks pretty nice.

One thing you might consider is making a bunch of language specific versions, e.g.:

perl.siafoo.net
python.siafoo.net
java.siafoo.net

Or siafoo.net/perl, /python, etc.

Most people looking for a snippet of code will need it in their own language. Sure, a lot of developers are happy to learn new techniques in many languages, but if it's a "here's where you go to find the bit of code to do this tiny thing" kind of site, then you probably want it to be obvious how to find the right language. The "Languages" filter obviously already provides the functionality...so maybe a direct link is trivial to add.
I agree that economic growth outweighs anything else.

But why would funding companies be the best way to generate the highest economic growth? There are many obstacles that prevent economic growth, especially in poor countries. Examples are high child mortality, malnourishment, corruption, lack of any kind of (micro-)credit, lack of education, tariffs, red tape, etc.

Taking away such obstacles can do very much for economic growth. The main advantage of funding companies is that their profits are returned to the investors.

E.g. the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws had a much greater positive effect on economic growth in Britain than any investment in specific companies.
Umm most of the slides appear empty to me with one or two lines written in each slide. Maybe somethings broken with my browser (ff3 on linux).