skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may be overkill, but there is typically a great deal of expertise around setting up and running them.

Also, MySQL etc have a great deal of network connectivity and concurrency support that is not provided by BDB. (In the mentioned example, they say they used PHP. Can you imagine doing concurrency in PHP?)

So it's more a matter of expediency than aesthetics. At scale, everything is painful and you'd really rather not write anything you don't absolutely have to.
Yeah It
This is absolutely fascinating. It has timely translations into (mostly) idiomatic English, with links to primary sources and the home pages of hundreds of international news sources.
but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.

Ouch, I wonder how much this guy still stews about his loss of business to PK?
Ask HN: Why 	Intelligent people 'less likely to believe in God' is [dead]
?
I've not been there yet, but I'm pretty sure the answer is, "It depends."

I think you also have to have some real idea for how you're going to make money on the stuff. Even if you don't write a real business plan, sitting down and saying, "Our costs will be about this much. We'll make this much per user. So, we'll need to have this many users in a year of it's a no-go." -- doing that can give you an idea of if your ideas sound really nutty or not.

The brick wall is an important construct; it's an important idea to have there to keep you scared of what happens when the cash runs out ... but in reality, if you've got a stupidly low burn rate, you just do one week of consulting and then live for the next two months off of that.
I later found some material that comprehends both our thoughts.

""Systemic learning theory suggests that it is valuable to distinguish levels of learning.

It is clear that most learning that goes on within and outside learning institutions makes no difference at all to individuals’ or society’s overall paradigm. This is because it is first order learning or basic learning. Bateson distinguished three orders of learning and change, corresponding with increases in learning capacity.

Learning I - basic learning
learning, thinking, knowing

Learning II - meta-learning
learning about learning,
thinking about thinking,
knowing about knowing

Learning III: epistemic learning
learning about learning about learning,
thinking about thinking about thinking,
knowing about knowing about knowing

Seeing as how no one may ever read this post, I'm not going to expound any more, but again, I have found studying epistemology to be exhilarating.
Today's word is "mesothelioma"
SF Bay Area Rental market for office space braces for blow
Top 5 uses for Capistrano
I would love to see what would happen if the ACT was tested there.
Interesting but during both the Renaissance and 'Golden Age' non belief was punishable by death or at best imprisonment so 'everyone' was essentially religious. Of course, your point still stands, correlation not causation.
The Google File System - Notes and Commentary
Some rules would be nice yeah, in the same sense that the laws of nature make me comfortable with climbing said ladder.
The image of America in my country(Bulgaria) is pretty bad. Most of us hate you, mainly for two reasons, the first is because of our own ass-licking politicians, who are basically ready to attack China is the US tells them to. And the second main reason is because most of us in Bulgaria are just loudmouth haters and we don't like anybody.

And yeah, I've met with a few Americans in person, two of them are teachers from the peace corps(pretty decent people, be the way, i defeated one of them on scrabble) and the others were some religious nut-bags, trying to convince me to accept Jesus, I told them that most Bulgarians accepted Jesus in 864, and then told them to go screw them selfs. The conversation was in Bulgarian, so i assumed that these people were trained and suspected that who ever trained them and sent them here, was stinking rich, so i decided not to trust them, even thou they looked nice and friendly.
"I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:

*If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your
conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life.*

"

Wow.
Shareware is pretty much the same model that's used for web apps with paid plans. I don't know what the difference in odds are. I tend to think there's a better chance of succeeding with a web app just because your potential customer base is much larger and the barrier to entry is smaller. People are also hesitant to download/install programs these days. Then again, there's things you just can't do on the web. If you have an idea that really can't be a web app to work well then you should probably do it on the desktop and not worry about which is better.
The problem is that the apps that are the most interesting, the most important, are the ones that take the most work to create. And the apps that take the most work to create are the ones that are most likely not even to be made in this environment, because the risk is greater.

I find this argument appealing because if Apple took it seriously, it would lead to a more open development process. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the logic is sound -- innovative or important applications aren't necessarily big, so the development cost of one needn't be much more than any other application. If innovative applications are more the product of chance and insight than long development cycles, Apple only needs to attract many developers, not big developers.

However, if you assume the logic is correct, then Android may end up helping the iPhone: If a developer has an idea for the iPhone that requires significant investment, they can develop it first for Android for some payoff, then (with development costs largely sunk) they can port to the iPhone. The net result is that the iPhone would get a large, innovative application that it wouldn't have gotten had Android not existed.
If it's a mass-market kind of thing, maybe.

If it's a niche application, then not so much.
I have a feeling that porting from Java/Android SDK to ObjC/Cocoa/iPhone SDK is probably still a lot of extra effort and presents many hazards of its own...
I spent a month in Cambridge after writing this and now think this post was a bit rash.

Cambridge may be more about ideas than anywhere else, but it also seemed home, more than anywhere else, to people doing scholarship for scholarship sake and to people who had subjugated significant ideas to serve their little ideas.

Again and again I ran into people studying great thinkers and great thoughts for no greater reason than that they had never been out of academia, didn't want to leave, and were using these thinkers and thoughts as fodder for their thesis (job application) in order to get a professorship that would shield them from the outside world forever.

Encountering those sickly sorts will leave any results oriented person, like Charlie, wary.
A programmer's ghost story in the making...
Great post, Norman.

I also love programming too much to do anything else, so much so that I have always been reluctant to change technologies with the times. In fact, I still do much of my work in a 40 year old language: PICK BASIC. (Much like the lisp crowd, I have my reasons for clinging to something tried and true.)

But here's a dirty little secret: the technology doesn't matter. Right now, I could write the same app in 5 totally different technologies, they would all be about as much fun, and they would all work about the same.

But if I wanted to reach the widest audience, build something for the future, and maybe make a couple of bucks, I would only write it one way: a web app. Learn to love javascript, PHP, and MySQL (or whatever combo you like) as much as you love whatever you're doing now. In 3 months you'll wonder what took you so long. Don't make the same mistake I did and wait too long to adopt what most others are using (and buying).

You can also look at it this way: a web app is also a desktop app anyway. Since every PC already has a browser, just put a web server on the client and throw in a little AJAX or FLASH and no one would hardly notice.
But you can spell "pronunciation", which many english speakers have difficulty doing :)
Reminds me of Gary Kildall (the guy IBM asked for a PC OS before Bill Gates). He loved coding for the joy of it, but became bitter, and died after a bar fight. This bit was new to me:
When IBM called, Bill Gates told them that CP/M wasn't his and directed them to Gary Kildall.
http://www.freeenterpriseland.com/BOOK/KILDALL.html
Just because the concepts are sound, how do you know the ladder was well-constructed, doesn't have any damage that might weaken its structure, etc? You need to trust the company that built the ladder to make quality ladders, and you need to trust the individual ladder to not have any major faults.
We use a lot of PHP cli cron jobs at my work. It works fairly well, but isn't as stable as I'd like. Any bug which could cause a fatal interpreter error can't be caught by your code so it's difficult to diagnose problems when they crop up in production.
Maybe that's the license? Kinda poorly explained though. And what happens if the copy does get more hits is the obvious question for me.
Amen. The OP should know better, he has been here awhile. No mas, please.
The Case of the Slooooow System
Looks good.

I tried latest Kubuntu on my spare laptop just to see how the new KDE was. I definitely need to replace that shit with anything else (I guess KDE is just not for me).

Sounds like something I could try out.
So the NY Times suffers from not being part of thestandard.com? It seems to me that they're one of the few companies from its era that does get the whole internet thing.

They don't charge for web access to current issues, they have archived material from 1851-1922 and 1987-today for free, and they did the creative advertising bit: Times Reader (joint NY Times/MS venture for a digital newspaper) camew ith a video game awile ago.
Dabbleboard collaborative whiteboard
What I don't understand is the relevance of high school exam results when I have a Bachelor's degree. I mean who cares?
From here: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html

It is pretty clear that support for WIN2K, at least SP4 is NOT being dropped.

"The support for Windows 95, 98, ME and NT4 has been dropped. Python 2.6 requires at least Windows 2000 SP4."
That depends on which section of NYC you want to live in.
We're finally Lifehackered! Funny how we finally updated our video last night. And it already has as many views as the previous one, which was 3 months old.

Edit: since it looks like this isn't dropping off the HN home page yet, check out our developer API at http://www.dabbleboard.com/main/developer . (I posted about that a couple of days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=321413 , but it dropped off the HN home page quickly.)
Granted, but I'd guess the major cost of an application is coming up with the idea and working out the functionality and any user interface issues. With that cost sunk, porting -- or even rewriting from scratch -- could well be worth it, especially if you can already gauge the popularity on one platform.

Along those lines, I think we'll quickly see the most popular iPhone applications either ported to Android by their original authors or cloned outright by others.
I'm not a moderator, but the question assumes too much.

Even if you provided hard data to back up the assertion implicit in your question, I'd have a hard time understanding what this has to do with startups or hacking...
Why 48 hours? Would cycling catchwords in shorter increments do a better job of keeping people engaged with the site? What's the smallest period of time you can find that still yields decent photos?
Slacker G2 Radio Reviewed | TechJaws
Hackers Attract Users to Fake Blogs | TechJaws
Here's a tip that might come in handy if you use Firebug a lot.

I had major trouble with it this week. The script debugger stopped working in several nasty ways.

The problem turned out to be a corrupt Firefox user profile. Creating a new one restored correct behavior.

I'd never have thought of this on my own (the answer came from http://groups.google.com/group/firebug) and it was a big relief as I depend pretty heavily on Firebug for my work in JS.
Three Free .Net eBooks
Circular Data Structures in Haskell
All you have to do is call them back and say "don't worry about it, I shot the guy who tried to steal from me"

They'll show up.
User Agent String history
Congrats! One feature request: when I embed a drawing, then click on the link provided, let me edit that drawing if I'm the creator (and logged in).
I told them that most Bulgarians accepted Jesus in 864

Upmodded for one of the best comebacks I've heard to that one.
Scroll down, the 3rd chart is just that
Citizen “Journalist” Hits Apple Stock With False (Steve Jobs) Heart Attack Rumor
I wonder if one couldn't use the large tagged database of images from the ESP Game for this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_Game

To get a database that large, the spammers would have to set up their own ESP Game and tag a big chunk of the web.

Even better, show two images, one with known tags and one unknown, so that you can build the database further, like RECAPTCHA does.
I don't understand how people do any sort of web programming without it.
New features on OurDoings.  Thanks News.YC for earlier feedback.
Judging by the amount of money I spend on shareware apps (for the Mac) someone's making some money. I can't be the only one, can I?
Because we flagged it, because it was off topic. Power to the people.
There are much more less-startup-and-hacking-related topics on HN
maybe it's v because the move cursor looks like a 'v' ??? (and because m is taken of course)
We tried to do this last year when the "Safari SDK" was released, but the side project died... I still think it's a great idea and you've executed it nicely. There's another iPhone application that does something similar called Scavenge built by the hosting company A Small Orange, however they currently do not have the website component as far as I can tell.

http://www.apptism.com/apps/scavenge
Classic Feynman. I read it every year with my CS students. But let's give it some context.

Von Neumann had delivered his talk "Computers and the Brain" only two years earlier where he referred to the components of a computer in biological terms -- "organelles", "the brain", etc.

No CRTs, mice, hard disk drives, or timeshare O/S. Internal memory was magnetic "core memory."

Kilby and Noyce had invented the integrated circuit a year earlier. The "old guard" i.e. Ken Olsen, Bob Metcalfe, and others were still in school. Grace Hopper thought it might be a good idea to "compile" code.

And here comes this guy from CalTech thinking it would be cool to have ants project manage aphids so The Library of Congress could fit on a credit card.

Am I wrong or could this world use a few more human beings "out there on the curve."
Senate bill sets guidelines for cybersecurity center
YouTube - O'Reilly Blasts Barney Frank On Fannie Mae Mess
It's as if T-Mobile is simply out to prove the Apple app store isn't as lame as it could have been
Google stays mum on plans for public documents, Ancestry.com points to OCR hurdle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading
This seems like a story of self-medication that never worked. It's incredibly sad.
Ruby, art, and LSD: The most important video of 2008
take it to politics.reddit.com
Terminator need a bailout
"Ubuntu 8.10 Server consolidates its support for virtualization with an integrated Virtual Machine builder" Anyone know how that works? Any screenshots?
http://www.dabbleboard.com/?b=13587&i=3&c=c1935d7c27...
Can a micropayment strategy make money?
So I'm bouncing ideas for business plans around, and one of them involves selling low-cost digital goods. Basically, an online store would sell goods priced at $.99 and the consumer would pay by credit card. I know a place like the iTunes Store makes money doing the same thing, but on a massive scale. They also have an advantage in that many times the actual purchase is higher than $.99, because purchases over time are lumped together and a consumer often makes multiple purchases.

But is it viable for a business that would sell small quantities of goods, resulting in a credit card charge of $2 or less? Is there any profit at all in a credit card transaction of $.99? Disregarding the overhead for a merchant account for the time being, what are the transaction costs for a credit card transaction, and what is a good estimate of the available margin left over to spread amongst the interested parties? An example: I sell a digital picture for $.99. How much will I have left over after credit card fees to split with the copyright owner?
Will Y Combinator fund a service Company?
Hi
We are a Lahore, Pakistan based software startup that focuses on developing Mobile2.0 ( IPhone and Android ) application. I wanted to know, can i apply for YCombinator or only product based startups get funded ?
www.geniteam.com
What Really Makes One Framework Different From Another
If it was a short seller, he's going to find that the SEC does not look kindly on this sort of stock manipulation.

In fact, he will find himself stripped of any need to worry about lodgings for some time.
What Is An Idea Worth?
You can make over 9000 dollars.
Excellent, lower costs for startups.
It took me a while to understand how he built the doubly linked list. Here's my explanation.

You want to build a function which takes two doubly linked lists (DLList) and some values and inserts the values in between the lists and returns the starting and ending nodes of the new DDList. Call the function go.

go leftDLList values rightDLList -> (start, stop)

Now start and stop will end up being the original boundaries: RightDLList will be the DLList node which contains the first inserted element, and leftDLList will contain the last inserted element. Thus when we run out of elements to insert, just return the starting and stopping nodes. In Haskell:

go startingN [] stoppingN = (stoppingN, startingN)

If we haven't run out of values, then we simply build a new DLList node for the first value, and recurse with the new node as the first node.

go prev (x:xs) next = (this, last)
where this = DLNode prev x rest
(rest, last) = go this xs next

That's it! now we just call go with starting and ending nodes which we haven't defined.

(first, last) = go last (x:xs) first

Because Haskell is lazy, it doesn't try to evaluate last and first until it needs to. The recursive call to go will bind first to (DLNode last x rest). Last will be bound when the base case definition of go is called. By that time go is called with a real DLNode as it's first argument.
Those references don't seem to address my question about effort having an effect on intelligence.

To paraphrase Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the Firefly class ship Serenity: "Well -- they do." Try checking the subject index of The g Factor:

Abecedarian Project, 342-44, 500, 522

Head Start, 337-39

Milwaukee Project, 500

.

My question isn't about the heritability of intelligence

Why would you think that a book called "The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability" would only be about heritability?

.

Do believe that mental exercise has no effect whatsoever on mental ability?

Yes. Why do you ask?

.

studies [show] that a lack of stimulation ... retards cognitive development.

What studies are those? Would you consider being locked 24 hours, seven days a week, in a dark attic with a deaf-mute mother, and no toys, to be adequate stimulation for a developing child? The child rescued from that situation turned out to have mentally-developed normally, including having a normal IQ. Read all about it, and other cases of rescue from severe adversity, here: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Early+Experience+and+the+L...

.

Jensen discusses the case of Isabelle (reported by Clarke and Clarke) on page 113 of the g Factor:

From birth to age six, Isabel [sic] was totally confined to a dim attic room, where she lived alone with her deaf-mute mother who was her only social contact. Except for food, shelter, and the presence of her mother, Isabel was reared in what amounted to a totally deprived environment. There were no toys, picture books, or gadgets of any kind for her to play with. When found by the auothorities, at age six, Isabel was tested and found to have a mental age of one year and seven months and an IQ of about 30, which is barely at the imbecile level. In many ways she behaved like a very young child; she had no speech and made only croaking sounds. When handed toys or other unfamiliar objects, she would immediately put them in her mouth, as infants normally do. Yet as soon as she was exposed to educational experiences, she acquired speech, vocabulary, and syntax at an astonishing rate and gained six years of tested mental age within just two years. By the age of eight, she had come up to a mental age of eight, and her level of achievement in school was on a par with her age-mates. ... She graduated from high school as an average student.

What all this means ... is that the neurological basis of information processing continued developing autonomously throughout the six years of Isabel's environmental deprivation, so that as soon as she was exposed to a normal environment she was able to learn those things for which she was developmentally "ready" at an extraordinarily fast rate, far beyond the rate for typically reared children over the period of six years over which their mental age normally increases from two to eight years. But the fast rate of manifest mental development slowed down to an average rate at the point where the level of mental development caught up with the level of neurological development. Clearly, the rate of mental development during childhood ... is largely based on the maturation of neural structures.
Should You Build or Buy Your Micro-ISV?
Exactly the same here. The Acer Aspire One runs almost fine on intrepid out of the box, except for the wifi hardware toggle/led. Very nice though.
you don't think a person should be able to sign up for a gmail or hotmail account anonymously without tying it to their real identity?
The Return of the Monster: A reasoned take on the bailout
Google Chrome Rejects Google AdSense Page as Unsecure - Screenshot
YC funds startup with great growth potential; companies that can "scale" well. Service companies scale linearly, and require you to hire additional personnel to grow, whereas product companies scale exponentially compared to personnel.

So my guess is YC will not fund a service company.
Tried to create a profile, but failed when I got to the picture step. In my first attempt I tried to upload a bitmap. I don't see any reason why you don't support this format. Size isn't the reason, as it's already been uploaded to your servers when you reject it. I converted the file to a tiff, uploaded it, and was stuck staring at a "Loading" screen. I tried both IE and Firefox, but never got past that point.
You won't want to go with a traditional merchant account since the fees are typically $.30 per transaction plus 3%.

You'll either want to hit up PayPal's little known micropayment feature which runs $.05 per transaction plus 5% (https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.ht...), or use Amazon's Flexible Payments Solution which has a similar pricing model and is set up for developer integration.
the others were some religious nut-bags, trying to convince me to accept Jesus, I told them that most Bulgarians accepted Jesus in 864

Probably LDS missionaries (Mormons).

http://www.google.com/search?q=lds+missionaries+bulgaria

At least some Mormons are alright. Some build very sturdy buildings: http://static.monolithic.com
The space elevator is miles off, so...

I put my money on Elon Musk and SpaceX to make space travel cheap enough in the meantime, until we can build the elevator. Got to focus on the short-term, the elevator is long-term.
I know people related to this project are interested in and working on such systems: http://gsn.sourceforge.net/