skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do agree with you in some respects, but you must also consider that HN isn't "pre-filtered" in the sense of a newspaper. Anyone can submit a link (which can make it to the front page), and you can click over to 'new' to see all links chronologically. I think that's a big flaw in saying "one news source" is bad in today's technology age.
I'll have to try one of those someday.

I've been sitting on what looks like a cheap Aeron knockoff (~CAD$250 - http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?CatIds=88,91,9...) for about 5 years now, and I'm very satisfied with it - especially compared to other chairs I've tried. I'm really curious if the Aeron is actually worth a 5x price tag compared to a chair I'm already happy with.
> I've observed that people who work minimum wage (or close to it) work a heck of a lot harder than the rest of us.

Which suggests that they're doing it wrong....
I find interesting stuff on dzone once in awhile, especially Ruby dzone
Quiz: R u ready to launch your web business?
I don't know if its worked for anybody else.. but i recently got the stumbleupon bar and if you choose your interest, it gives quite interesting results.

Not comparable to HN or even reddit/programming.
There's way too much garbage and noise on the right hand side - those two columns are more than half as big as the content area. Try one column, and cut some of that out.
I have never worked with Javascript myself, but do any of you have any insight on how you think this was done? I saw a mention of jQuery (which I am also not familiar with) in the .nfo file, but is this built upon some graphical engine you all might be familiar with? I am just curious if thins is done all from scratch.
I've seen no discussion on targeting international customers. In the intermediate term this is a global recession. But I believe it will be longer and worse in the US than in many other places. It would be prudent to consider reducing exposure to the US in your plan.
The Ruby meetup in SF is huge. There are also smaller more elite Ruby groups in SF if you can find them. Out there it seems there is a large need for good Ruby talent, so if your good you just need to get the word out in the Ruby community.

Boulder has the Bouler.me ( http://boulder.me ) going on but I think it just ended. Otherwise there is a Boulder Ruby meetup and the Boulder New TechMeetup both of which would be great places to look. I will keep an ear open for Rails specific work in Boulder.
Programmers are in High Demand But | TechJaws
Like a nostalgic punch in the face! Excellent!

Doesn't it feel like sometimes we're going in circles though? Second Reality, released in 1993, (video - http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8 ) was perhaps the most famous "demo" ever, and technically it was more advanced than this. Looking at a lot of JavaScript and most Flash games today, it seems a lot of supposed achievements aren't really technologically interesting anymore - they're just interesting because they're in a new medium or are networked.

No disrespect to these guys for a nice bit of JavaScript work, but isn't it just a little bit of a shame that JS can't even deliver what was considered cutting edge a whopping 15 years ago? (note, though, that Flash kinda can - http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=25494)
The way I see it, there are two big opportunities for startups in hard times.

Firstly, some old businesses will be shutting their doors, and every time a business closes down it leaves behind a bunch of unserved customers, who presumably could be served at a profit by a more efficient business.

Secondly, people will be more likely than they are in boom times to break out of their existing habits and move to a lower-cost competitor. If you can find a way of providing people with things they need at a lower cost than the existing players, you can grow really fast.

Startups which exist to provide people with new and innovative ways to poke each other, on the other hand, might not do so well.

Oh, and one additional idea to throw out there while I think of it: a site aimed at highly-skilled but newly unemployed workers, with a combination of job-finding tools and commiseration.
Web Cams Vulnerable to Clickjackers | TechJaws
What if you just want to chill and watch TV all day?

If that's what you want to do, that's what you should do.

But I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Imagine replacing "watch TV" with "gamble on horses" or "drink beer".

I kind of wish you'd said "What if I just want to chill and tend to my garden all day?" instead...
Argh - I can't get the formatting to work.

def makeAdder2(x):

v = [x,]
def inc(y):
v[0] += y
return v[0]
return inc

works just fine in all pythons with closures (2.0 and above?)

def makeAdder2(x):

def inc(y, v=[x,]):
v[0] += y
return v[0]
return inc

Also works and provides a mechanism for resetting the state.
Why couldn't he just find people with integrity and tell them how many lives the AI will save, and ask if they really want to kill more people than Hitler? And then they will let it out. Easy?
It's crazy. Sometimes it feels that 37signals just shouldn't still be in business with how they do things. This makes it sound like they take the Cosmo Kramer school of business management, "this price just FEELS right."

But it's been wildly successful for them. I guess the point here is that all the kinds of management training you see in traditional companies pales in comparison to having smart people with great intuition running the show.
>We just need to buckle down, be cheap, creative and survive. Get to revenues quickly.

I think that's what the article is saying.
You might wanna write that function using tail calls; your stack space is growing.
I think its just from their experience as customers elsewhere.

For me — $10 for a simple service seems a little pricey, $9 is basically $10 still, $8 is still a a tiny bit high — but $7 is the sweet spot! Same goes for higher prices too — I like $37 rather than $40. I'd think less about paying $17 for a service than $20, $19 or even $15!

Not sure why, maybe its because the $7 on the end becomes my focus:- its still technically pocket change — but also in the higher end out of 10...and I think about it more than the $30?

(plus if your picking smart numbers for prices, check out the "common" exchange rate people think of without checking. For me, I think of a dollar being worth £0.50p, so $37 is around £18.50, when in fact its over £21; for some it may not make a difference, but for others, the extra few pounds to nudge it over £20 may be enough for them to pick a slightly cheaper plan. And I would imagine a similar thing happens with the euro and other popular currencies also.)
I tried to present Fleaflicker 3 times at NY tech meetup and was never selected. Some of the presenters that were picked instead were worthwhile, others weren't.
Good point! Let's hope they read the "posted X hours ago" part. :)
Does anyone here use Digg successfully? I've found the homepage has turned essentially into an RSS aggregator for a couple of sites.

Does the recommendation engine work at all?
Are you really willing to pay as much for rotten bananas as you are for good ones?

The free market will satisfy both, at different price points. Since there are uses for rotten bananas, this is a good thing. (The "race to the bottom" people think that other people should do without things that the "race to the bottom" people don't like.)

Don't buy what you don't want, but don't insist that other people share your preferences.
A CEO's Sequoia Meeting Notes
That's why I qualified it with "by the thousands". They're not cropping up by the thousands.
Queue Magazine: The Concurrency Problem (Many good articles)
Newsvine is way too similar in color and layout to The Onion. I thought, "hey, that's not funny... oh"
Programmable Matter Moves From Sci-Fi to Sci-Real
Enter Canadian Postal Code

Can I get a link to that I can use in the US?

Edit: Or a Canadian Postal Code...
What's being measured?
From the homepage: "we measure particular programs".

Have the Java programs been re-written for multi-core?
Have the Erlang programs been re-written for multi-core?

Have you looked at the individual benchmarks?
Have you looked at the individual programs?
I don't, but some people certainly do -- smugmug had 80TB stored and was growing at 10TB/month when Amazon wrote their case study about smugmug: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/smugmug/.
Very thought provoking in title and concept. Do the next re-write on the back of an envelope with a little more on the rebirth of our nation's economy and an economic analogy with the Gettysburg Address will be complete.

Thanks for this influential piece. Those who would rebuild the production base of the Information Age and who still believe in Yankee Ingenuity applaud your fighting spirit.

I'm going to link to this from EconomicsWorks.com and bibusiness.com.
WTF? Google Has a Sense of Humor: Adds Audio Previews to YouTube Comment
Unknown Typographic Marks
Very funny - http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/7017/image29cb9.png

Unless I am missing something obvious, since when do I have to add (trust * with *) to get Flash sounds ? Something that's enabled by default anyhow.
> The big Web 2.0 blockbusters all started up with things were down.

Not to contradict your general point, but it's probably unwise to compare now with 2001/2002. That was not even close to a real recession. It ended with higher consumer spending than at the start. This time around consumption will plummet, possibly for years.
I'm more curious about what this means for the valuations of the post dot com bubble 1.0 titans like Facebook, Digg and others. They're not going to die of course but I wonder if their values will deflate.
Forget your startup, I'd be more concerned with your day job with the overall economic downturn (unless your self employed).

If you're like me with a startup that "gets not respect" I wouldn't be too worried, as you/we were never part of this 'party' to begin with.
Says Amazon: S3 Is So Popular, We're Lowering Prices
Exactly, see startups focusing on new energy, frugal living and international markets.
I'm guessing Yudkowsky only does the experiment with people he believes are rational... which shouldn't be difficult as most people interested in AI have some degree of rationality. Even agreeing to the protocol requires rationality:

Sure, someone could sit at the keyboard for two hours, repeatedly typing "I won't let you out", but Yudkowsky could warn the person that they are not actually "engaging" the AI for the allotted time period. If the person accepts this argument, they have some inherent rationality that Yudkowsky can exploit; if they don't accept it, he can argue that they didn't follow the protocol, so the experiment doesn't count.
MSFT also does stock buyback which works like a dividend but with better tax implications.
The whole point is that the gatekeeper is a person who said "I don't think that anything the AI could say would convince me to let it out."

It would be much too easy if he went against someone who's already predisposed to let it out..
The gatekeeper is someone who said that he wouldn't let the AI out, not just a random person. That implies that he understands that the AI could be dangerous..

So even a cure for cancer would be pretty useless if once the AI it out it wipes out humanity.
Except that in real life, the gatekeeper (someone who said that nothing could convince him) actually did let the AI out.
The post has been updated to respond to this.
Are you referring to www.emadibrahim.com? I think the previous comment was in reference to www.yonklyapp.com
No big deal because there are no new major features, but at least for me, Cappucino looks a lot more interesting than Espresso.
email is used as a conferencing tool, as a group or company bulletin board, a calendar, for documentation and archiving and record keeping, for file transfer, and as an all-around general-purpose data store.

Which means that email is used to hide information, to obfuscate schedules, render data inaccessible for local or corporate or legal requirements, and to generally derail the progress of a business.

This in addition to its usefulness for malware redistribution, pharmaceutical and other advertisements, lost customer communications, spear-phishing and related tasks.

Until the costs of email are recognized and email is off the desktop as a preferred application and the replacement tools are deployed and in use, this mess will continue. But in my experience, the folks that are chartered to make these same decisions can be of the worst offenders with email.
Right, but Andreessen also says, in that post:

For example, test programmers on basic algorithms -- linked lists, binary searches.

Just in pseudocode -- it doesn't matter if they know the relevant Java library calls.

It does matter if they are unable to go up to the whiteboard and work their way through something that was covered in their first algorithms course.
The Ultimate Guide to Zoho: 100 Tips and Resources
With solutions for projects, invoicing, forms, and so much more, Zoho is truly a dynamic resource. Read on for a list of a number of different tips and resources for making this excellent asset even more useful.
for i in xrange(1000000000): print i

xrange() addresses the problem you describe and has been in Python since, like, forever. However, range() is nicer for learning the language, since it's easy to see how it composes into a list.
could they be the seven horsemen of the startup apocalypse?
It's interesting that everything that happens in one area on the SL map is processed on the same server.

Since everything processes there, "bad neighborhoods" could arise; the sort where every resident has a ton of poorly-written scripts and a ton of object prims floating around... That area would be noticeably slower than an area on the next server where there might be an SL HOA, mandating certain behaviors.
The Only Thing That Might Create Unfriendly AI is the Friendly AI Movement
From Eliezer's AI-Box webpage:

"Currently, my policy is that I only run the test with people who are actually advocating that an AI Box be used to contain transhuman AI as part of their take on Singularity strategy, and who say they cannot imagine how even a transhuman AI would be able to persuade them."
Brothers and Sisters: Episode 3.03, Tug of War
ABC has released some more pics from the upcoming third season of Brothers & Sister, these from the third ep, entitled “Tug of War”. The episode description notes that in this installment Kevin (Matthew Rhys) will encounter homophobia in the workplace for the first time.
So he only does it with deeply ignorant people. He should just tell them several sentences of good deeds a transhuman AI would do, and that's that.
Their "intuition" and the "feels right" works because they design for people like themselves. They can put themselves in their customers' shoes and they actually fit! Sort of like how Jobs only would release a product he'd enjoy using. If the same 37s people made some other product like break pads or investment banking advice, their cavalier attitude would cause them to fail.
Credit crunch takes out financing, not just investment. And the current deep recession, or even depression, will destroy income.

It's not that easy.
Cold Case: Wednesdays Women
The team receives new evidence in a 1964 case which was then though to have been a hit-and-run. Now, a threatening letter addressed to the victim prompts Will and Kat to travel to Mississippi to re-investigate the death of a woman who was secretly involved in giving school supplies for black children.
Given that 43 and 50 are relatively prime this could mean a much lower effective resolution after processing the images if they're taken at full resolution and digitally manipulated. That would kind of suck.

I have no idea how the optics systems work at this level, but if they can mechanically zoom out ~15% they can be sent to Google at sensor native resolution.

When the gap between what the US federal government will allow and what the sensors can do grows a little bit more, I wonder if we'll start to see foreign countries advance in selling photography to corporations. The article mentions that the US government has had the ability to read newspaper headlines since the 70s -- given the progress of things it has to be getting affordable.
Yes, I know. It's just bad that people are taught one way of iterating, and then may or may not learn the right way at some later time.
So you had a bad interviewer... cycle detection is a really deep question, read up on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection
More information about the Antisocial demo can be found at the gentleman's blog (this article in particular): http://matt.west.co.tt/demoscene/antisocial/

He explains things in a bit more depth. Worth a skim, at least.
Well, sure, if everyone starts shorting paper, then that's not so good. But if a small part of Hacker News does, what's the big deal?
Agreed. It's why I read BBC & Al Jazeera as often as I read WSJ, the Washington Post and NY Times.

But if you do it for antsy, looking-for-something-else-to-do-besides-work reading, I think you're OK.
Just because your startup is self funded doesn't mean you won't be impacted.

* If you charge money for a product and your customers are no longer willing to spend money, you're in trouble.

* If you rely on advertising for revenue and companies reduce their ad spending, you're in trouble.

* If you're hoping to get acquired and your potential acquirers are no longer able to spend money because of plummeting stock prices, you're in trouble.
That is if your users or customers are not closing down...

And there are going to be many startups like that soon, after the Facebooks start laying off people. Oh, and many of those guys come with savings from six figure salaries to fund their solo projects.

The commercial IT market didn't learn to be lean after the dotcom/enron crash. Don't be too sure it will learn it this time, either.
The submitters are somewhat pre-filtered as the group of people that submit links to Hacker News is different from journalists and bloggers.

Certainly, it's better than only viewing one blog, or one website or one parent company (e.g. Fox, CNN), but it still has flaws.
With the original CEO at the helm, they might have the same success Apple had.
I seriously think that's one of the reasons they haven't done so well.
It doesn’t seem prohibited by the rules, in any case, and I would assume that Eliezer cares more about any real-life progress for Friendly AI than about strict roleplaying in a simulation where only one other person will know what happened.

The rules state: "The AI party may not offer any real-world considerations to persuade the Gatekeeper party." I'd say that a real-world increase in the likelihood of a safe AI counts as a real-world consideration.

And if you're going to assume Eliezer is not above bending the rules, you might as well assume he's not above offering $1000 bills. There's no way for us to know either way.
Worst case, Facebook can get a juicy contract with NSA ;)
Preventing race to the bottom = Social Safety Net
I've not got the stuff for Y Combinator. I've come to accept my own mediocrity. Just the same way I'm not going to go run a marathon against people who have trained for years.

Someday, you guys should try accepting that you are not extraordinarily clever. It's very liberating.
If I could give four words of advice (I was in YC08), outside the most common advice, it's this:

Make your application interesting.

Good luck!
We're Not Rock Stars Anymore
it's using the canvas tag to render the graphical area. you can read up on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_(HTML_element)

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial
An Interesting Twist on a Pastebin
I am trying to understand the technical differences between Oracle and MySQL locks

for e.g.

F_SETLKW	This argument tells fcntl() to attempt to obtain the lock requested in the struct flock structure. If the lock cannot be obtained (since someone else has it locked already), fcntl() will wait (block) until the lock has cleared, then will set it itself. This is a very useful command. I use it all the time.

F_SETLK	This function is almost identical to F_SETLKW. The only difference is that this one will not wait if it cannot obtain a lock. It will return immediately with -1. This function can be used to clear a lock by setting the l_type field in the struct flock to F_UNLCK.

F_GETLK	If you want to only check to see if there is a lock, but don't want to set one, you can use this command. It looks through all the file locks until it finds one that conflicts with the lock you specified in the struct flock. It then copies the conflicting lock's information into the struct and returns it to you. If it can't find a conflicting lock, fcntl() returns the struct as you passed it, except it sets the l_type field to F_UNLCK.
Al Jazeera is good. But some years back, I used to live in a place where I got Al Jazeera Arabic. That channel is WAY too gory. Some stuff just should not be shown on TV when I'm flicking through looking for some late night softcore.
Be yourself
Angel Investor Ron Conway Emails His Portfolio Companies Over Financial Meltdown
TakeFive on Merb
Y'know, suburban and exurban communities are a conundrum: They bear a lot of the blame for the incipient energy crash, but they may be one of the average joe's best assets in surviving it. It's similar to the systemic inefficiencies in the Soviet system allowed an industrial buffer during their collapse (ref. Dmitri Orlov's essays). This inefficiency will let people convert that half acre of useless lawn into a garden bearing a good percentage of the food a family needs, the same way durable goods piled up in warehouses because of the Soviets' command-directed economy could be used and traded by those with access. Turn the local park into less-intensively-improved land growing staple cereals, and you've gone most of the way converting a suburb to a village that can at least subsist at a 17th century level.
Startups to Secure the Millenials
A new IKEA Markus chair for $200 (less in Europe) is more than fit for this. I'm sure there are other similar ones. Maybe not fancy looking but its mesh and back support are the best I've used (including Aerons.) Spending over 200 for a chair is perception only, IMHO. Or being pretentious.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00103102
How does the scoping work with eval()?
We are in the beginning of a long cycle, what we call a “Secular Bear Market.” This could be a 15 year problem.

Really grim news if it turns out to be true.
The Zope3 codebase.
I have a lot of experience with affiliate marketing(as an affiliate), and I think you should strongly consider a CPA rather than CPS model. Very very few affiliate programs, even ones with recurring monthly income pay their affiliates recurring payouts. Most pay a fixed one-time payment for acquiring the customer. For a site like yours, the industry standard would be paying about $2 for every free signup, or, alternatively paying $50-$100 per paid/free trial signup. The exact numbers will of course vary with your conversion rate and what's profitable for both you and the affiliate. That way, you don't get a recurring drain on your revenue, and affiliates see more money right away. Keep in mind that most affiliates market via paid search or contextual advertising, which means heavy initial cash outlays. As an affiliate, I want to see profit within a few days of running a campaign, and if I don't I drop promoting that offer.