skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bigfoot Evidence Expected Today | TechJaws
The point of frameworks is to write something well once. You might then iterate on the core application features, but since you use that code again and again it's cheap.

Many frameworks are larger than you might expect them to be because they take care of edge cases you haven't thought of. YUI for example is guaranteed to work in 6+ browsers on 3 platforms, as well as being tested with screen readers and other assistive technology of disabled users.

With regard to mobile devices, presumably the mobile devices are going to get fast enough to deal with it (my N95 deals with the YUI code on the yahoo.com homepage just fine) or we will make widgets specifically for those devices which are stripped down.
Here's what's actually going on:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/bells-theorem-n.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/spooky-action-a.html
Not at all. SEO is like farming, we can lay the ground work, but there are tons of factors out of even the best SEO's control. So if SEO is farming Google is the weather. That's why it's an art and not a science.

We can and do apply best practices and we do a good job of increasing traffic and conversions for our clients, but there's no SEO that can guarantee anything. (Unless you're doing black hat which is fine, but is always a short term solution and we usually shy away from that.)
Looks like they are finding out. TwitterMail added a lot of new users in the last few hours: http://twittermail.com/
I wonder what types of questions the founders are asking of Google pre-aquisition? As a founder, I would think you are concerned with what is Google's "vision" for your product/company. I could also see just the shiny things being enough to make me not worry about the vision.

Also, there are successes. Writely - > Google Docs seemed to be a pretty big success. I'm sure there are others.
It's hard to explain teenage craziness on hormones when other culture's teens don't go crazy with hormones.
When Google hands over six or seven or eight figures for something, they obviously have a plan for how the technology and team fits into their "master plan".

Why is it surprising that, at least some of the time, they aren't actually interested in the original web site?
I like the idea of having client meetings in one day. I never feel like I accomplished as much when a day is broken up by client meetings.

Most of my work I do remotely, so in similar fashion, I tend to dedicate a client visit day, where I'm out and about on sites.
"Yet still brings in $2,000 a month."

Thats the first month on launch. That will most likely decline now that the hype is dieing out. You only need to buy an app once so it depends heavily on new users.

I'm interested in seeing if its sustainable income.
An interesting fact that we teach in 6.033 is that of the Boston<->San Francisco packet round trip time, half of that time is spent by light propagating through fiber, and half of it is spent in routers.

Cisco makes some amazing products.
Agreed. A better title might have been "The surprisingly significant effect of latency on download speed"... The author starts with the assumption that bandwidth should be the primary determinant of download speed, but it turns out that latency is the primary determinant for some connections, due to the TCP implementation.
That's a tough one that I'm looking at too.

My thoughts on advertising is you need A LOT of traffic to make it worth your while. Or extremely good targeting. Which makes the ad model work for targeted blogs and sites with loads of content with some good SEO.

This is a great article on the topic in general: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/170/Startup-Pricing-Mod...

This is also a fantastic video:

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...
I'd also recommend this interactive guide to programming (also done in JavaScript):

http://eloquentjavascript.net/
The poetry didn't do much for me, but the Mathway site the poem linked to (http://www.mathway.com/) is just too freaking cool for words.
My vote is WP as well. There is tons of development around it so it's much easier to cater to your needs.
I'll see your delicious add and raise you some blog coverage.
Congratulations guys. Keep up the good work.
Was school really the important part, if different people get different results depending on what they do?

That part of my comment was addressing the idea that school prepares 18-22-year-olds for the real world. I think the real world prepares them a lot faster.
OMG A VPN can secure connections into cloud computing hosted services
Um, there's no limit to what your revenue model can be. Basically, it can be anything you want that's legal. Seriously, don't limit yourself, study all the ways to make money and find a combination that works. Advertising and subscriptions are just two. What are you trying to sell?
I don't buy quantum immortality as a necessary consequence of many-worlds. There are some rather dodgy steps in the logic -- in particular the one that says that "you" can't find your personal experiences going down a branch where your existence gets terminated. Surely somebody has to be there to subjectively experience having a bullet blast a hole in their skull?

Personally I think if you tried that, even if many-worlds is true, you'd almost certainly wind up dead.
Instituciones educacionales debatirán sobre Ley General de Educación
Think of ‘entangled’ photons as sharing a secret. If either one gives up that secret than you also know what the other one is doing. The only spooky part they don't behave like they have a specific value until you measure it and you can randomly change it's value.

PS: You can't send information from a to b using two ‘entangled’ photons sent from c and read at a and b.
Guy Films Space Shuttle Launch from Passing Airliner
The point of the analogy was that you are trying to say that you have so looked forward to the old, stupid, obsolete system that you'd like to hold progress back a few years so you can experience it. I think that's ridiculous, and that if we were talking about how you wanted to manufacture buggy whips or VCRs, it would be obvious that getting in the way of cars and DVDs would not be worth it.

If you can give me some reason that the existence of something that performs most of the functions of college, but that is cheap enough to be a viable opportunity for people who work, or people who want to get their credentials faster or whatever, is such a threat to college that it must be stopped -- but college, despite its vulnerability to better ideas, is still worth keeping around -- I'd like to hear about it.

But that might be convoluted. So here's what I would ask: if we had the credentialing system and no college, how would you pitch the concept of a modern college to the typical VC?
Thanks so much for your response, That's awesome to hear!
Thanks for the encouragement... being impressed with the demo is ultimately what matters.

A serious problem I have however is that this geography database isn't so interesting. Who is really going to learn anything from this rather low quality database? What I am looking for is some database that is: 1.) complex enough to preclude standard forms interfaces and 2.) contains information worth asking about. Not an easy task to identify, obtain such data sources.

I was thinking maybe a sports scores database or something...
Google: Massive Spike in Email Virus Attacks in July
Unfortunately sabbaticals aren't part of the Swedish system... Still I am sure I could swing a non-paid leave starting in January or so. Perhaps even in November. But not in September/October! I am already down for teaching AI.
I'm not saying you're wrong...but there are some things about starting a new company that cannot be delegated. Like the strength of your own focus on one single goal.

It may not be the right time for him to make the leap, but there is always a right time to make the leap (or give up on the business or on entrepreneurship in general). Since he's asked us here, and seems to have put a lot of thought into it, I suspect he is now at that point. Thus it is not a "needless risk". It may be exactly the risk that needs to be taken, and it may be exactly the right time to take it.

Entrepreneurship does involve putting some skin in the game. It's not optional and you generally can't be a regular guy with a regular job, and also a big entrepreneurial success. At some point, you have to decide what you want, and go after it with vengeance.
Does the Thrill of the Chase Make PR Obsolete?
You're right, now I come to read more carefully there is something new here -- it's a more convincing test than has been done before.

The experimental setup is neat -- by setting up the detectors along an east-west axis and using the Earth's rotation, they can show that there isn't some "special" frame of reference in which the particles are communicating. Very neat experiment.
baseball statistics could be good.. there are a lot of baseball stats nerds

who had the most stolen bases from 1935 to 1955?
how many people have had back to back 5 hit games?
Outsourcing does not suck. Our understanding of it does
Indie Game Developer Finds Success On Xbox 360 -- Est. $825K Sales In First Week
Scarier than the playground bans was this line from the article;

>There's only one solution. Someone on behalf of society >must be authorized to make these choices. Courts must >honor those decisions. Otherwise, the pious accusations >of safety fanatics, empowered by the nearly universal
>fear of being sued, will guarantee a cultural spiral >downwards toward the lowest common denominator.

Someone "authorized to make these choices" that the courts can't overrule (i.e. must "honor) is a pretty good definition of a dictator.

I suppose this guy is right that if individual rights and property rights are off the table then dictatorship is the only answer. Let's start with a playground dictator to get people used to the idea.
Yes. These are exactly the kind of questions that the system can support. There is a big baseball database out there that I played around with earlier (http://baseball1.com/). It's only for non-commercial activities the last I checked.
Solar power breakthrough: 20% cheaper, on sale within 18 months
Sivers/Ferriss interview that will make you think
I wanted to link to the interview directly but it's quite long and this link gives you enough if you want more.
Michael, I suggest this:

1. Don't spend any huge money on this project until it picks up significantly.

2. treat this as a hobby, which means don't lose sleep over it.

3. focus on your work that makes money if money is a factor

4. take it easy. leave the company as it is.

5. try to make this not be written in LISP. that is a lot of lines of code. convert it.

6. Keep everything going the same time. don't quit your job.
Once they're done with the tumbling, divers are minimizing their drag. I'd be surprised if they actually got to terminal velocity by the time they hit the water. Drag increases roughly with the square of the velocity. If they are nowhere near their terminal velocity, the effect of drag is going to be pretty low for most of their fall. If the divecam's terminal velocity is also suitably high, then the difference in acceleration won't be very much in the first several seconds.

IIRC, terminal velocity of someone trying to be streamlined is over 120 mph. 9.8 meters per second square is about 22 miles per hour. Drag is going to rear it's head in a big way only after 5 or 6 seconds. By the time drag force starts to really shoot up, the divers have already hit the water.

Okay, I just Googled terminal velocity. We should probably expect 160-200 mph terminal velocity for an Olympic diver.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/JianHuang.shtml

(For those with access to dive video, who want to check my reasoning out, remember to start counting seconds only after the divers start going down!)
You should check with a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that mlb statistics are public domain, just copy the database.
Arguably that's what AppEngine is for.
That "you" can be you in other people's mind as described by Hofstadter in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
Yes I am at that point... The problem is that I am now finally getting reasonable academic success. A lot of people want to collaborate on papers, projects, etc. And I must say these are some of the best researchers in the field. The only thing I am certain of is that I will be working on this NLI problems for many years to come. The question is which side of the fence will I land on. I can not keep riding the fence for much longer ... or, who knows, maybe I can ;-)
The cover shows a samurai not a ninja, big difference :D
Shark vs Octopus
Interesting strategy on how much money to ask for. He says:
“We advise startups to tell investors there are several different routes they could take depending on how much they raised. As little as $50k could pay for food and rent for the founders for a year. A couple hundred thousand would let them get office space and hire some smart people they know from school. A couple million would let them really blow this thing out. The message (and not just the message, but the fact) should be: we’re going to succeed no matter what. Raising more money just lets us do it faster.”

The challenge here is having several funding plans up your sleeve that show different growth rates and also stack up together. To be credible, the plans should show that if an investor puts less money in, the business will not grow as fast and will also have a lower chance of success. The key is putting the lower growth scenario together without putting the investor off and at the same time not making the larger investment easy to pass on because the lower growth scenario looks like a good investment. Why put more money in at the highest risk point when the start up can show good progress with a lower investment?

For me, the difficulty here is that I know if we have less money the chances of our success are greatly reduced. The reason for this is you don’t know what you don’t know and more money allows you to find out, flex your plans and find a successful strategy. Credibly telling an investor that if they give you less money, you are still equally confident of success albeit on a smaller scale, is a challenging balancing act.
Co2Stats (YC summer 08) compensates for your site pollution
Twitter blog: Twitter shuts off SMS updates for most countries
Data Mining to Detect Pump-and-Dump Scams
I like it a lot. Once you can nail this you aren't very far from knowing how to do any web framework.

Direct link: http://appjet.com/learn-to-program/

Update: I love how step 5 gets you to send emails. That would be like step 100 in most other frameworks.
Ask YC? google snatch - is it any good?
I am planing to buy this product but before i do can anyone advise me; does it really work?? what am i buying here? a program? a file? a book? has anyone used it before?
How does one get on Thrillist?
How does web advertising work? How effective is ad serving technology?
I wouldn't discount your product's usefulness for simple datasets. As a UX guy I'd love to see this put toward a better ecommerce search/browse -- "Desk chairs between $150 and $225".

I see it augmenting the standard facet-filter style browse. For example http://nymag.com/restaurants/: I enter "indian food in the east village" -- your product helps pre-arrange the facet filters for me, but I can still add a price range or another neighborhood to the query through standard UI.

The obvious benefit is that natural language browse offers quick access to complex queries (within the user's mental model). But if the results are presented well, your product can be used to train the user to understand the mapping between natural language and executable query (and in that way inform their mental model).

If that means that some users only need to use the natural language feature a few times (before switching to standard UI), it's still successful.
Seems fair to me - you wanted 65/35 and he's happy with that. I might put in clauses that would allow him to make it 60/40 if he turns out to be a miracle worker though; nothing wrong with a little extra incentive. 60% of $30,000,000 exit is better than 65% of a $20,000,000 exit...

Did you sign the deal?
Wow. Thats all I can say. Wow. That one page has to break the record for the most marketing nonsense gobbledygook I have ever seen gathered in one location. Its worse than a real estate infomercial. Its the epitome of selling something without actually telling you what it is you're buying. So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no, its probably not any good.
I need to be to do better printing, better contact management, better searching, better handling of large files, and better spam filtering. I like Outlook's interface but it needs help in those areas. Outlook 2007 was a big disappointment to me since there were no real improvements in those areas.
Luckily we had a good set of data to process and Wordle is a nice little analytics/rendering engine.

Yeah, agreed: when you take the intersection from a set of ideas that large the least common denominators are going to be pretty... well, common.
When will SMS die, can you imagine if your ISP charged you for IMing but let you surf the web (and do everything else) under your data plan?
Guess which country searches the most for "email account?"
Nope, I'm firmly in AT&T territory, so best I can do is 6mb dsl.
http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/busines...

http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2006/07/busines...
Maybe Google think they know everything and AOL just feels lucky to have found such a beautiful jewel?
Will Horizontal Layouts Return?
GM shows 2 pics of production Volt, GM share is up almost 13% today
Identi.ca Will Succeed Because Its Technology is Viral
No, you're not alone. This is exactly what i said when i first say the examples.

But there's a reason for that. I use YUI all the time and think its excellent, but i think that its too verbose. And apparently a lot of people think that way too. So this is their approach to learn from jQuery's minimal syntax(which i love too)...

It definitely shows that they're listening to the community...
Everyday Uses of Psychology
God, if I see another code example using Factorial I am going to hurl.
"TwitterMail added a lot of new users in the last few hours"

So many users that all I get to see at that URL is an orange rectangle on a white background?
by making all hardware equivalent, good software enabled bad hardware.

An excellent point.
Class action lawsuit filed against Facebook
Please link directly to the article. Linking an article that links to an article is bloody annoying. Thank you.
Implement Text-Overflow:ellipsis on IE, Firefox, and Opera 9
I think the jury is still out on whether a corrupt elite cannot hijack a democratic system.

I don't think the jury's out, so to speak. It can definitely happen, and I think US plutocracy is definitely corroding the democracy. Democracy is a complex system and needs a lot of safeguards; a constitution and an electoral process are only two of many necessary ingredients.
There are many days when what I really want is freedom from other peoples' presence.

"40 acres and a high-speed internet connection"
the phone launches in India later this month. That might cause another jump.
That's wrong, actually. Getting high throughput in the face of high latencies is a solved problem, and the solution is called "buffering". TCP does this just fine, and was designed to do this from the beginning.

The problem is that the buffer isn't big enough. Standard TCP windows top out at 64kb due to field sizes in the header. This was a lot of data to be going over the wire in the days of 56k frame relay lines. Unfortunately, in the modern world a connection with a round trip latency of 200ms (not uncommon) and a bandwidth cap of 10Mbps (ditto) is going to need four times that much data "stored" on the wire. The TCP headers don't allow for that, so the transmitter needs to wait to send new data until the long-delayed ACKs come back from the receiver.

As the article points out at the bottom, there is a "window scale" option to IPv4 that allows for larger windows that is reaching common deployment, and of course IPv6 doesn't have the size limitation in the first place.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/07/10-practical-uses-for-psych...

Sorry about that, just grabbed the wrong link.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Cisco routers, at least at the level I've been exposed to, don't have particularly good switching times. In point of fact, switching an IP header through a few-hundred-thousand-entry routing table is something that any desktop CPU can do in a microsecond or so. Companies like Cisco have managed to convince a lot of people that routers are these hugely complicated devices. They aren't.

The hardware side of long haul fiber networking is where the voodoo is. Routing? Not so much.
Grand Theft Auto is more fun than little league or hanging from monkey bars.

Is it really though? When I was a kid at least, video games were great fun. But my bicycle was too. And swimming. And exploring the woods behind my friends' house. I think there's a confounding factor in the case of "kids are playing more video games" other than "video games are more fun."
Traffic over Britain from space
Ultimately it's up to the parents of the individual kids to decide how far _they_ take it with their individual kids.

Unfortunately a lot of busybodies disagree with you.
Or you can always just outsource the problem to a company like www.icontact.com since they have whitelist agreements with all the major ISPs.

Good Luck!
What are some other simple examples of recursion, though?

Quicksort would be pretty good for this, but the straightforward recursive version has several edge cases that lead to bad performance.

Getting the length of a linked list is probably a better example:

(* ocaml *)
let rec length l = match l with
| [] -> 0
| h::t -> 1 + length t

; scheme
(define (length l)
(if (null? l)
0
(+ 1 (len (cdr l))))

Neither of these is tail-recursive, of course, but that's another post entirely.

Any other ideas?
Very true. When i see the kids in India today and the parental pressure they have, it is scary. They have schools, tution's(so that they don't forget what they study in Schools)then study time after they come home, this all happens in a day. They take memory pills, so that they don't forget what they read. I don't know, what will happen to this kids but I am sure they won't be creative enough to create anything.
HN != digg
That's somewhat true--I've noticed that AOL is very aware of their uncool image and they don't overtly brand their properties with the AOL name (e.g., TMZ, MapQuest, Moviefone, ...).
Jim Gray from '06: Distributed Computing Economics (how to allocate computing resources)
Resartus: A Social Revision Engine
I recall that all TCP versions after Vegas or Reno use pipelining to increase transfer speed. They send more than one segment before waiting for the ACK, and this of course multiplies the transfer rate by the number of segments. However, some TCP implementations either never initiate pipelining (it was the case of Windows XP) or use a low limit of 8 to the number of maximum outstanding (non-ACKed) segments, which does not push TCP to its potential.

See details here: http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose/transport/congestion.html
In fact, the rule is in the older leagues (11 yo and up) that you must slide in order to avoid a collision. If a kid doesn't slide into a base and a play is attempted there, he or she is out by rule.

The no-slide issue is really a developmental issue. At very young ages, (levels, really), there is no sliding. But as the kids advance, they are able to slide (by 11 or 12 years old). The point is, they have to be taught (1) how to slide safely, and (2) how to cover a bag safely in a slide.
Big Companies Are Where Small Companies Go to Die