skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My understanding is that the only other way to install apps on an iPhone is to hack it, which opens up its own can of worms.
Don't use your gmail (ebay, paypal, ...) password for ANYTHING else.
$10-$20 means low volume. Similar to what you might expect on a small virtual hosting plan. For medium volume, I would happily pay the equivalent of the cost of 1-2 slices for a managed service.

I think a metered plan might be the best option though. There are lots of ways of extracting statistics from a database server. I am a bit unsure how what parameters you would use to meter the plans, but there are lots of metrics you can use. Storage, queries, cpu etc.

There are definitely limits for how much you could scale performance wise on something like this, but that isn't even the point. It's about high availability and not having to manage it.

If you're at the point where you need a facebook size database cluster for your site, this service probably wouldn't be for you.
Voting Locations Via Text Message
Can other people download those off your website and install them without using any crazy hacks?
Properly configured MySQL can safely be partitioned. This is what EngineYard does and what every single virtual host provider does. I fail to see a difference.

If you don't trust a service provider, you shouldn't use them. It is up to the company providing the service to instill trust in their services.
Can you share any examples of startups that you regret saying no to?
I don't know about the LHC. It wasn't invented this year, and it didn't even finish completion. It should either have been named years ago or next year when it actually starts running, and either way it should be #1.
On another note, I have written a small FF searchplugin util to find me publicly available mp3 thru Google, I use Google's suggest/autocomplete on it to find the exact title of the song, and then do search.
I tend to agree with mechanical_fish that search has become wayy faster and efficient, and Google no more is a separate site, it feels like a browser feature, just like File->new.
You're going to be the one geek in the room with the Android phone and the Nomad MP3 player, you know. =)

Are you over the age of 13? If so, this probably shouldn't concern you.
Tesla is a glimpse into the future of an oil-free world. There's very little more important than that at this point.
Heh. I'll let you in on a little secret: I have never remembered the direct shortcut to the search box. All I remember is CMD-L. So I just use CMD-L followed by Tab.

I'm not sure there's a way to do what you suggest. You could, of course, use those aforementioned Firefox keywords. Or, if you've got a Mac, set up shortcuts in Quicksilver (another tool whose subtle points I keep forgetting about).
Pro or top-tier accounts have been around for years, long before the current crisis. LinkedIn and Linden Lab both have claimed to be cash-flow positive (I believe last year or earlier) because of upgraded account services that come with special features, and I know Ning and a few others have business plans based on fee-based extras.
killerstartups has money, and traffic?
Our divorce rate is proof that people don't tend to make marriage decisions that rationally. I'd bet most don't even do basic blood tests, let alone consider genetics.
Yes, but you have to pay apple, and be approved by them before you receive a developer key. Apple still plays the gatekeeper.
I was browsing through some mathematics books earlier, and a large proportion of them were typeset in TeX - whether they be Introduction to Algorithms, Visual Complex Analysis or Guide2 Mechanics, and I'm sure plenty more books are done in TeX that don't mention explicitly mention how they were typeset.

If that's your idea of a failure, what's your idea of a success?
Regardless of how long it takes the interviewer to review them, I think it is pretty extreme to ask the interviewee to give 15 references, assembling 10-15 references, especially if you are young or maybe have worked at a small shop for a long time would be pretty annoying
"You're going to be the one geek in the room...blah, blah, blah..."

Actually real geeks are much more interested in Android than iPhone because of Apple's bullshit.

Welcome to the 90's all over again when Apple lost the desktop war to Windows.
right now you can have up to 100 beta testers for your app, but you need to generate a key for them based on their device ID.
Agreed. If I can provide references from peers and superiors at my previous jobs and also character references from outside of work, why would I need more references?
I'd say the chances that SCOTUS will review this are pretty good, and I wonder whether it will hold. The idea that a method can't be a machine is pretty tenuous.
The books cost a lot more than the "hexadecimal dollars" he has been handing out.
Throw in evil robots and sharks with lasers and I'm there.
Official Google Blog: What we learned from 1 million businesses in the cloud
Rejected from YC last night... got anchor client this morning
Like others, we were down about our YC rejection last night.

This morning, we got a commitment from an anchor client (we target small/medium businesses). It took 15 minutes to convince the owner of this multi-million dollar business to say: "I love it."

We built a demo for our customers and decided to send it to YC as well. In the past 3 weeks, the only one who has turned us down is YC. 6 for 6 (knock on wood!!) We have even turned down a business that is not a good fit for us. These are all paying customers, btw.

We may not be headed to YC but we are still building stuff people/companies want. Hope this inspires others to forge ahead.
I have used 64-bit Debian for several years and haven't had any problems.
Postal Service Looks To Cut 40,000 Jobs In First Layoff In History
Before the SDK was released you had no way to get any apps onto your phone, or anyone else's. I see the current situation as a step forward and I believe Apple will looses restrictions for ad-hoc distribution of applications, they just need to figure things out (the same way they needed a while to figure out building a good SDK and distribution platform).
Gruber at http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/10/30/opera-iphone:

"I don’t see how this is surprising at all. One can argue about whether it’s a good policy for Apple not to allow third-party web browsers on the iPhone, but unlike other rejections, this one is not arbitrary. The iPhone SDK Agreement clearly forbids writing your own JavaScript interpreter."
What about the fee that the credit card charges? And don't you have to them go to the offices to pay the rent then?
Just because you got rejected doesn't mean you have a bad idea. PG/YC might have even liked your idea but did not think it was a good fit at this time.

Congrats on the new accounts btw!!
This election - Ride to Vote
On Election Day, make your vote count in the polling booth and on the road - by riding your motorcycle or scooter to vote!
The typical cut taken from a $5 transaction would probably look like about 30 cents flat fee plus 3% = 15 cents with another maybe 5 cents per transaction (on average) from the flat fees you pay to all of the people helping you process cards if you have particularly low volume. That's 10% lost to processing, which clearly sucks, but you're still taking home $4.50...
Kubuntu 8.04 kicks ass, but 8.10 sucks. Maybe its because of KDE 4, but i had a hard time setting up my keymaps,the new adept had random bugs in it, and i found it almost impossible to eject a CD!(i click eject and the cd ejects and GOES BACK IN!?!?!). On the other hand, since i switched back to 8.04 this morning, I've been missing folderview all day. KDE 4 has some good ideas in it, but needs more time to mature.

ps. I love kubuntu, but this time they screwed up seriously!
Don't let Sequoia derail your locomotive
An early-stage startup CEO's counterpoint analogy about the Sequoia advice.
I know from experience that your project is like a _lot_ of currently funded, large research projects. Depressing, huh?

Also, I know this is likely not what you want to hear, but it doesn't get any better after your PhD. If you're lucky, you'll get on tenure track and work your arse off for the next 5 years in order to (maybe) get tenure. If you're not so lucky you'll be fighting for post-docs on the type of projects you're talking about. Hopefully there will be only one post-doc, there could easily be 2 or 3.

My take is this: Under no circumstances accept the status quo. I've seen so many graduate students spiral into depression because they stuck at it. I know I did, and I stuck at it because of some weird obsession with how I was perceived in the world (by my parents, my old friends, whatever), and because I didn't spend enough time asking myself: What makes me happy? How do I want to live my life - and I don't mean "I want to be a scientist", I mean day-to-day, what do you want to be doing? Where do you want to be doing it?

So my suggestion is to spend time figuring out if there's another project you'd _love_ to work on, and if not, then consider quitting. No shame in that.

Also, I'd spend the time to watch Dan Gilbert's TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_...

If you want to talk more, please feel free to contact me: einar@vollset.com
I suspect it's really more political debating on HN that's an issue. It's so close to the election most of us are likely looking at political news in another tab, anyways.
IANAL, but although the phone hardware is "yours", I think what you can do with the OS is defined by the license agreement. Prohibiting third-party software on Windows may seem crazy, but there's no reason a EULA cannot prohibit it.
I think your answers to these questions have a lot to do with your career goals. If you don't have an interest in being an academic, then I'd definitely jump ship and do something where progress is tied to revenue (i.e., business). If you do want to be an academic, then I'd work hard to make the best out of what seems to be a pretty frustrating situation. You can still redeem this experience through networking, running side projects, publishing etc. Those are all things that will help you if you choose to remain in the academy.
What are the units? 10^14 is indeed far too much if it's seconds, but might not be beyond reason for a set of size 10 million if it's nanoseconds (then you have a bit under three hours.) So think about which units this would actually have.

Indeed, an algorithm being in P may not be sufficient to scale, but if a problem is NP-complete (assuming P != NP) there's almost certainly no scalable algorithm for it.
If you think 29/31 is old - what about me? 37? I am doomed, LOL!
Somewhere in his essays, PG mentioned that startups are achievable within 21 to 38 yrs of age. So I was thinking this is my last chance - what the heck? I will still do it, because I believe in it and my users do!
Better Blogs with Microformats
You're probably right. It was more meant as a subtle hint instead of the all too common "not hacker news" comments.

Besides, not all of us are from the US...
The 10-15 includes all references of all kinds, professional, friends, even family.

I spoke to one of my hire's father, one time, because he worked for him for 2 years. You'd be surprised, family members are often the most honest. The point is to get to know the candidate as quickly as possible and make a good decision. Speak with as many people that know them as possible.
Neither's The Economist. ;-)
Totally agree! and so does the article... See point #5, the second bullet.
I agree. At least he's upfront about his ridiculous standards in his blog.

The amount of code and then the use of the code strikes me as unethical. I don't see where the company would own any of that code whether or not the coder is hired. If you want a contractor for a short project you should pay for the work, file proper tax documents, etc.
Conservative America also needs to recover its vim

Until I read that I had no idea that "vim" was defined as such:
vim
-noun
lively or energetic spirit; enthusiasm; vitality
mine went there too, on gmail.
Aesthetically pleasing, functionally terrible.
It's certainly worthy of their time.
Congrats! In the time of Sequoia presentation, recession and YC rejection, we need to hear other success stories like yours to keep ourselves focused! PG/YC are Good, not God!
10-15 references is really annoying. How many people can even provide that many relevant references?
TEN to FIFTEEN references? If you're (a) "that fast" on reference checks, or (b) that totally dependent on references the candidate provides you instead of backdoor references at their employer, you are doing that part wrong.

Sad, because references are extremely important.
I, for one, demand that Conservative America keeps using Emacs!
Asking for "friends and family" references is unprofessional.
Why not money orders?
A lot of the comments here assume you can see truth at a glance, but intuition is fallible. I'd be rather curious to know if Huffduffer did A/B testing of this form vs. a more traditional signup page. Doing that test, and gathering real data, is the surest way to know if this alternate design is any good.
Presumably, you're only providing suggestions for what your applicant writes; if they want to demonstrate their ability by writing a modular synthesizer simulator in Ruby with an AJAX front end, you're going to let them do that instead. Open source or not, asking for portions of your own product up front is spec work, and it's also unprofessional.
Google to AdSense users: Please don’t dump us in crap economic times
Nanoscale dimensioning is fast, cheap with new NIST optical technique
I would use the word "amuse" in place of "concern".
Wait a minute, that's like nothing compared to Joe the plumber endorsing McCain. ;P
Conclusive proof that polar warming is being caused by humans
Yeah, because I definitely see more geeks writing Android code than iPhone code.
A whole new life with Harley Davidson.
Choosing a Background Job Processor for GitHub
I've never heard of the "across the room" usability test before. I'm intrigued: can you point to sources?
Europe, not-so-high salaries, high taxes, social equality, long payed holidays, etc. etc.
Web Startups: How to improve your sites performance (guide and free tool)
Give me a break, Derek. They weren't "testing the waters". Wired wrote a story in March about how the public SDK terms would prevent Firefox and Opera specifically from being allowed on the iPhone, and the story about Apple declining "competing" applications is months old too.

I'm sorry for ribbing you for wanting to work on Android; I'm just being snarky, although I really don't share your politics. But let's not be disingenuous. It's not news that you can't run Opera --- or Flash, or Skype --- on an iPhone.
Besides, I think it's clear that this election will have ramifications far outside the borders of the US...
That's what I decided to do a week ago in one of my classes. I have to write three analyses of other people's work every week on Blackboard, so I will create 4x3x2=24 insightful posts, then post one at a time from a nearby computer lab on the days of the lectures. I think the professor is looking for regular frequency per week, and not on whether we are commenting on work that was put up that same week or weeks ago. And while I copy-paste, if I notice a brand-new interesting work, I might write an analyses about it right on the spot, so as not to have every one of my analyses be about work from October.
Like hell they would.

It's hard to explain, but if I had the choice between a $100 textbook with Knuth's signature, or a $2.56 check for finding a bug, I'd take the cheque. It's such a unique way to thank people, unlike an author-signed book.
Well, we're working on a video demo and technical information and this stage. The backend of what we're working on proved to be very challenging indeed and was a lot of work. It also ended up being a lot more complicated than we thought due to the volume of data that we'll have to support.

So we're very close indeed!
"election silly season"
Isn't that rather slow?
Nice that the Economist is endorsing Obama, but the major problem I see with him is that he wants to make alternative Energy the cornerstone of the American economic revitalisation.

I think that's wrong. Energy independence is a fine issue, but I believe that the new government should pay as much interest to the real advances in science that are coming.

The internet has opened up a new frontier for science. Not the little toys that allow you locate your friends on your mobile phones, but the more fundamental changes - milions of people can work on the same thing at the same time, knowledge can be available to everyone at no cost, communication can happen globally without any problem, and hardware is cheap and fast.

What this means is that humanity is about to make a new intellectual leap forward. It's not there yet because the tools are not yet available that actually allow it work efficiently, but facebook and future generations of such connectivity tools will make it possible.

When these methods are applied to biology or robotics, the combined intellectual avility of human beings made lead to some type of exponential effect that will finally allow us create things that we cannot dream of yet.

We are standing on the chasm of the unknown. We should be forging forward, looking for new things, not focusing on that that we know.

It's an adventure like the adventure of first flight. Governments should recognize this, and they should focus on non-commercial research that will take us to where we could be.
I can update some packages without upgrading the release, right?
Also, try to get outside funding for yourself (grants, fellowships,etc., apply for everything). Your advisor will like it, but it will also make you more attractive to potential new advisors, even if they don't have money for an additional student at the moment.
Oh wow, learn something new each day, huh...
It's cute how you think it's possible to use logic or evidence to convince global warning deniers.
I've had major issues with the Flash player not having an up to date and stable 64-bit version. Everything else has been perfect.
When the Going Gets Tough…
Interesting perspective on how individuals (and organizations) can endure economic uncertainty and other adversity by focusing on discipline, constant attention to technique, process and efficiency.
Interesting perspective on how individuals (and organizations) can endure economic uncertainty and other adversity by focusing on discipline, constant attention to technique, process and efficiency.
Hi, thanks for asking!

I'll start blogging fairly soon and all your questions will be answered. I need to start blogging because I promised a bunch of posts on Arc (including many modifications that I've made to it), Lisp, business of startups etc. To tell you the truth, I just didn't want to start a blog because blogging eats up a lot of time and time is something that I don't have in abundance right now. If the curiosity is eating you, you can always email me and I'll provide you with more info.
You use this word "safely" as if you had some ability to know that. You don't. Consider rewording.

The vast majority of MySQL deployments conceal the MySQL connection handler from end-users --- in the vast majority of deployments, it's the web app stack talking to MySQL, not the client. Virtually all security testing of MySQL is done to that service model.

"Partitioned" MySQL is a totally different service model, where the attacks aren't simply string escapes or column truncation through HTTP post-args, but arbitrary SQL syntax, arbitrary MySQL commands, and the MySQL network protocol itself. That service model has received very little security testing. Some data points for context:

* The second model implicates vastly more MySQL code, which has to be bug-free for this to be safe.

* No major database has survived intensive post-auth security testing; Litchfield's results on Oracle --- a database that got millions of dollars of security attention internally --- were all post-auth; that testing happened after he (presumably) beat the crap out of Microsoft SQL Server.

* Even if you "partitioned" MySQL into multiple running instances of mysqld running under different UIDs in different filesystem paths --- which is not what this article is implying --- a vulnerability in that MySQL code still gives an attacker code execution on your database server, which would be a game-over problem in a commercial app.
"[T]he Federal Circuit said the patent application in question -- a method for reducing the risk of sudden changes in energy costs -- was not a machine and did not result in a transformation." (FTA)

The article seems to say the method is not a machine, which doesn't make much sense. Business method patents are still allowable if the process "is tied to a particular machine or apparatus."

See here for more background:
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/10/in-re-bilski.html
You know, I've worked in labs which employed actual minions and actual doomsday devices (well, maybe not, but they were more than deadly enough to destroy all of us minions if something went wrong) ... and the excitement wears off. Eventually you stop being awed by the doomsday device and start being annoyed that its repair bills are so high and that you have to keep filling it with liquid nitrogen in the middle of the night.

Whereas putting something together in your garage from flea-market parts has a certain pleasure all its own.
Most shops in the US do not accept checks anymore, either. I would surmise that check-acceptance depends on the portion of a store's customers who are elderly.
Techdirt: Court Greatly Limits Software And Business Method Patents
Umm kinda depends.

If you have 1001 apps open (especially ones that hammer the filesystem) then yes.

Mine I use for programming & email so I have maybe 10 apps open maximum and it runs perfectly fine.

Saving is a little slow but not hugely noticeable :)
Now's probably a good time to ask to be reinstated if you've been kicked out, I imagine.
Those bastards!

How dare they communicate with their customers! They have no right to try to persuade anyone that despite the downturn, they are still investing in their product and trying to improve ad effectiveness. Don't be evil indeed!
Call it what you will, but as a hiring manager you really should review as much code as possible before hiring. Usually they can't show you proprietary code from their last company, so unless they've already done open source contributions, there won't be much to look at unless you give them a project.

In the past I've given candidates projects that we've come up with together. Check out the ones mentioned in the article... fairly straightforward Rails plugins. One of the was particularly successful, and included in the Advanced Rails Recipe book.
That's not the best hiring process, but I'll grant that it's the best vetting process.
I wouldn't specifically ask for friends and family of course. The moral of the story is to try to collect as many perspectives as you can on the candidate.
So you're fine with (a) open source contributors just providing you with samples of their previous work, (b) people who can show you non-public code just showing you that, and (c) candidates coming up with example projects totally unrelated to your own products, so long as it's demonstrative of the right expertise.

You should write that, then.
PG/YC are Good, not God!

Blasphemy!
Flat centralized namespaces are bad; creating new ones is worse.
Sinking economy stressing you out? Chillax with 5 minutes of this