skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if this is all worked out to be amazingly effective.. how are you going to convince regular users to put their data on other peoples' computers?

Yes, I realize that it's all put into chunks so people won't be able to snoop on them, but just try getting that concept past my mom.

It's neat but I'd rather my data on my encrypted and fast S3 account.
Lawsuit claims Nvidia hid serious flaw in graphics chips
100 Useful, Free Web Tools for Lifelong Learners
This mega list of 100 free web tools and sites will grant you access to courses at Harvard Medical School and MIT, social media sites that connect you to everything from medical news to politics, government resources, and a lot more.
The Ultimate Guide to Internet Privacy Law: 100 Must-Read Resources
Every time you get online, your privacy comes under attack. Read on to find advice, organizations, and other resources that can help you keep your privacy safe online.
Is the court of public opinion replacing ICANN?
Techcrunch 50 cronyism or merit?
It's only been two days but so far I am underwhelmed. Perhaps I'm just not seeing it but there don't appear to be many break out stars presenting and a few suspect ones. I don't want to single anyone out but a few well funded companies look like their VCs called in favors with Arrington.
Very cool stuff. I foresee the first generation (or four) being extremely awkward and frustrating as the controls react rather slowly in comparison to the speed of your thoughts.

Also a few worrisome items in the article:

"So add that up: a wireless, remote, brain reading/writing device that can scan, interpret, and communicate with someone across the room, without them even knowing it. Connect that to the Internet... and talk about brainwashing possibilities. What if some hacker could figure out how to write viruses to people's brains? It's actually a little scary."

Dude, why do you keep trying to take a crap on my sofa?
Sorry man, I got hit with the defecation virus this morning while I was downloading my kung fu lesson.
A Call to Arms in ‘Hot, Flat, and Crowded’ by Thomas L. Friedman
Perhaps PG gets a pass
Hahaha! Thanks. You really are one of us. Services Needed is if you dont know who to make an offer to privately, you can just list what you need done to the general public (traditional want ad). Offers Wanted means that you are listing what you are willing to do for money and you want people to make you offers.
Download Hannah Montana Episodes
Would you like to enjoy all your favorite Hannah Montana Episodes at the comfort of your own home? Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download Hannah Montana Episodes.
Download Shark Episodes
I believe this is the best way to download any TV shows especially if you do not have much spare money to spend. The service I am talking about allows its' members to download unlimited amount of episodes
What do you think we should get rid of in the user interface to make it leaner and meaner?
Cool, thanks. I've tried Dasher before and did not get the hang of it. Swype looks better but I won't be truly sold until really trying it obviously. Like with predictive text entry on phones etc., the problem of deciding between two perfectly valid "guesses" based on context seems like a hard problem.

(btw, no, I have nothing to do with this company!)
Hey did you use the code I gave you so you could get free credits? Its not reading 20.
It isn't at all unusual for dups to get upvotes, whether they're pg essays or not.
I wonder if anyone else got the joke about the Atom feed...

Anywho, I'm absolutely going to add their feed as a widget on my blog.
That's just an absurd statement. C's worse case is obfuscated garbage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code... that just about no one could read or maintain and you think that's better that Python, PHP, Pearl, or Ruby's best case?

Or is it more likely that like most C folk, you're just stuck on execution speed as the only measure of a language or you don't know what maintainability actually means?

C's being hard to maintain is not a perception, it's a reality. If C were easy to maintain there wouldn't have been room for scripting languages to exist, everyone would have just kept using C. C is extremely low level and extremely powerful, making it hard to work in and very dangerous.

Yes you can do anything with a for loop, but I'd much rather use higher level abstractions like higher order functions, first class functions, objects, continuations, and exceptions and not be able to directly play with memory or pointers because I don't give a crap about the machine, I give a crap about abstracting and solving my problem with the least amount of necessary boilerplate or repetitive code.

Look, make it simple, assume for the sake of argument that Python and C have exactly equal execution speed under all circumstances, given that axiom, why would anyone choose C over Python? Which language do you think most people would choose?
A server written with boost's asio in C++ will be just as lean and mean, but a fraction of the code.
Acknowledgment. I first read of the possibility of such a Trojan horse in an Air Force critique [4] of the security of an early implementation of Multics. I cannot find a more specific reference to this document. I would appreciate it if anyone who can supply this reference would let me know.

The date of this article is 1984, and by this time the aforementioned Air Force paper was effectively already lost. It saddens me to think of all of the stuff of this type we're going to have to relearn (possibly badly) because we failed to keep/retain/organize the information.

Archive.org retaining so much stuff and Google searching it is initially exciting, but there's so much still behind closed doors, whether they're those of the US DoD or just a simple commercial pay-to-read interface.

The ability to distill something as seemingly boring as a product (early/beta Multics) security review into an important and generally applicable treatise on software trust definitely earns my admiration (aside from the important obvious work that he's done on UNIX), and I would be delighted if I could ever contribute something so important to the world of Computer Science.
Ask HN: Review our startup Iterend.com (Private beta launch)
Hi,

We are launching our Blog Search Engine today in private beta and I would be very happy if some of the hacker
news readers could give us some valuable feedback. You can access our site under http://www.iterend.com/?ref=hn
(the link will work for the first 1000 users and you have to use this link first before the other links below will work!).

So what differentiates us from other blog search engines: (e.g google blog search, technorati, twingly, etc...)

We want you to be able to actively discover the most recent, most discussed and most important articles of the blogosphere.
Iterend gives you an overview of the information you are looking for, where you are then able to drill down into the different categories of interest related to that information.

* We display an overview of what is currently being discussed in the
blogosphere, so that you are able to dive into the different areas
you are interested in.

* All articles are linked to structured wikipedia information, which
makes it possible to search by categories. (eg.
http://blogs.iterend.com/en/?query=category%3A"Swimmer"+category%3A"Medalist"&date=alltime)

* Search results are clustered and you can search on sentence level,
post level or blog level.

* Next to the search results, relevant phrases and categories are
displayed, so you are able to restrict your search or get an
overview over the information you are looking for. (eg.
http://blogs.iterend.com/en/?query=techcrunch&date=alltime)

* You can search for related posts to a given topic, url or cluster
(eg. http://blogs.iterend.com/en/?query=related%3A"iphone"&date=alltime)

At the moment, about 50 000 mainstream english blogs are indexed. The number of indexed blogs will be increased soon,
while we will still focus on the mainstream (and hopefully spam free) blogs. We will add support to search in additional
languages in the future as well.

We also offer an Api for application developers wishing to use parts of our service in their applications.

I will be very thankful for all of your comments! If someone wants to create an application out of our api (related phrases, categories, or the related search future), that would be great!
Would love to see something like this for Django. Hmmm...new weekend project!
Tapping the oceans
Watching while you surfing
Again, you're looking at best case. Talk to us when GC is mandatory, not optional, because until then, we'll still have to work with C code that can't be trusted because it may not use a GC. To folks who want higher level languages, CG is not an optional feature, it's a core part of the language.
Ok, I sent you an offer so you can see what happens.

It will also post here until you are through negotiating. http://www.greedypeople.com/index.php?m=account_offer_made&#...

As a deal is negotiated the public page changes so you can see whats going on.
Following the crowd
So how do Itunes and Amazon fit in with this author's viewpoint. To broadly paint all online music stores into one of three categories without once mentioning the largest and most successful certainly casts some doubt on his opinion.
No, it's just inspired a popular physics rap:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
So... they haven't crossed the beams yet?
Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists
http://www.cambrianhouse.com/
for those who are interested but lazy
" I'm absolutely going to add their feed as a widget on my blog."

this is a great idea, the LHC is already very popular, why not instead of constantly blogging about the world ending, just add a widget to inform us if that happens.
http://twitter.com/cern/statuses/916122478
Ask YC: What email/calendar/contacts solution do you use to organize yourself?
How do you organize yourself? What email/calendar/to-do programs do you use?

I'm having trouble finding a good solution because I use both a PC and a Mac and use my iPhone's calendar extensively. So far, MobileMe seems like the best option... but I'm very hesitant of switching from free email (gmail) to a paid service (mobileme). I'm sure someone here has somewhat similar needs and I'd love to find out how you guys are handling situations such as this (and organizing yourself in general).
I'm surprised that the same URL minus "www." doesn't automatically count as a duplicate.
Desalination has been around for quite some time, but the alternatives are so much less expensive that it's adoption won't increase until populations reach critical levels.
I posted to YC about the bootstrapping aspect of it (at 3am -- it didn't make the front page but contained interesting feedback).

Basically, we did it successfully by taking it to extreme with no outside VC or angels. Profitable with millions in revenue. It CAN be done.

Here it is:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295627
How might the discoveries of the LHC experiment be applied? For instance, is it likely that the knowledge gained will allow the creation of new technology? None of the news articles I read touched on this point.
"It's a bit like anaerobic respiration: not the optimum solution for the long term, but it can save you from an immediate threat. If you're having trouble raising money from investors at all, it could save you to be able to shift toward consulting."

Nice analogy.
Have you thought about a personal Exchange service? I'm not sure if the iPhone supports contacts/calendar sync via Exchange yet but if it does I would definitely take that route. You'll accomplish what MobileMe will give you, plus you're fully covered if/when you change phones.
Ten laws of cloudonomics
Particle physics tends to be pure research, but there's a chance that they might find something entirely unexpected that might bubble up into research into renewable energy or material science.
It is interesting to note that the majority of startups at DEMO are hardware companies while most at TechCrunch50 are software companies.
The title is horrible, but this is a very solid piece about how and when to use external utilities for computing.
Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications
Blackberry's First Flip Phone
The most interesting part of that discussing was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=299133
Startup, SpinSpotter, aims to spot bias in the news
Fifth Gear - Mitsubishi Evo X FQ300 vs. Subaru Impreza WRX STi
I tried to, but it wouldn't let me type more than 'ycomb' in the field.
Is that by design or just by random chance?
Thanks. If you post your email in your profile then I'll send you feedback when I get home.
The Emacs tagging (minor) mode is handy, particularly if you're already familiar with outline-(minor-)mode.
Microsoft’s WinMobile team: Big on futures, slow on deliverables
Having the priorites behind the project (improving the general body of freely available libraries for future browsers, encouraging sandboxed processes for each separate tab, etc.) makes it seem far more significant than just a new, fast browser. (If I want a fast browser, I use w3m or dillo. That's not the point.)
Startup idea. Dating site that matches people according to the Major Histocompatibility Complex.
It would just come from admin -at- greedpeople.com
Many areas of physics start out as pure research and are applied much later to life changing technologies.
Thanks. I'll fix that. We just put that feature up yesterday.
You're Not as Smart as You Could be
Here's where Heinlein got the Renshaw Tachistoscope from (Gulf, Citizen of the Galaxy, etc.)
Nope. No surprise, as the article notes.
I disagree. I have recognized people from across a busy park and on the street based on their gait, known it was them long before I could make out any other recognizable trait. It's like your typing fist, or handwriting recognition: can be beat, but it's tough. I've conscientiously tried to change my gait and walking style, and I think it's kind of hard to do (I can still feel the distinctive elements of my gait coming through). It would be an interesting experiment to try to beat this.
Because unless the HTTP response is a redirect to the www. url (or vice versa) it's technically a document available at a distinct URL. For most servers, the two hostnames point to the same server (and vhost) but it's conceivable that they might not.

You've got a similar problem with arbitrary appended query strings.

I guess the clean way to handle this would be to detect very similar URLs and ask the user if it's the same document.
I couldn't agree more, I have spent significant time in Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Austin and the feel and driving factors in each city is vastly different. It's a function of who lives in those cities, what the support network looks like, and how good the competition is. While living in Chicago I worked in futures while trying to get a band off the ground. Compared to other bands and futures workers I/we were average. The problem was that the competition for bands was so weak and the competition for futures traders was so high that when I finally got spit out of both of these I found I was above average as a a futures trader but below average as a musician. Relatively speaking you are only as good or slightly better then the competition. You have to pick the best competition to compare yourself to or you will never grow.
I think his issue is not with doing business with China, but rather with the censorship Google has implemented in the Chinese version of the search.

One thing is to do business with an entity you disagree with, another thing is to act unethetical (or "evil") yourself in order to do business.
I think the first part is confusing in saying that "[good programmers] have a model of exactly what the computer does when it executes each statement." That makes me think of machine language: absolutely no abstraction. Good programmers don't need to understand every little detail of what's going on when a computer runs a program; it helps sometimes, but it's not fundamental. Anyway, from the article we can't say if that's what Reges meant.

The idea of a generative model reminds of the Architect, one of the INTP types, blokes the seek to model everything and understand every little detail of how stuff works. I expect a lot of hackers to be of this type.
The Art of Nomography
If we're going to rehash PG's essays let me say my favorites are:

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

http://paulgraham.com/die.html
Maybe we have reached a critical point of potable water shortage because according to the this report http://www.bccresearch.com/report/MST052A.html,

"The global market for seawater and brackish water desalination plants increased from $1.7 billion in 2005 to $1.9 billion in 2007. It should reach $3.6 billion by 2012, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.4%."
High tech companies really should be partnerships like law firms and medical practices. The only reason they are not, is because tech firms do produce a product that can be copied and sold.

So high tech firms occupy this strange space between a 50's style manufacturer and a service type partnership.
No, it won't. OO has ruled the roost in the so-called Enterprise space for nigh-on 20 years now. Java hasn't (yet?) fully displaced C++ in 10 years despite, for this specific class of application, have several clear advantages. This is as much cultural as technological. Large corporations have a morbid (and self-fulfilling) paranoia about staff turnover and have adopted technologies such as OO because it is far easier to manage a hundred average coders each of whom has a clear boundary (the object) than it is to manage 10 rocket scientists. The power of the functional paradigm comes with a steep learning curve, there's no way around that.
Perhaps instead of "a participant" I should have said "as if he is representative of hackers" which manifestly he isn't.

Now excuse me, I'm going to play my flute for a bit, then go and shoot something, and maybe write some more of my sex-advice column :-P
Google News Glitch Causes United Airlines Stock Crash
The Distracted Developer: Tactics and Workarounds for a Fast Paced Scene
I have thought about it (and calendar/contacts do sync on the iphone), but I'm not sure if it's worth the money. I thought many people would have similar problems, and so wanted to find out what they do.
This is a great idea since the story is already at the top any way.

I've understood equity from a financial standpoint for a long time, but from a conceptual and value standpoint this essay did it for me: http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html
Technically, you can have one site on www.website.com and another on http://website.com and hence they can be considered different and unique.
"Whatever measures you could do to reduce your risk for diseases 23andme says you are at risk of, you should probably be doing anyways. Eat healthy. Exercise more. Get a colonoscopy every year."

Uh,,, a colonoscopy? Yikes.
Perhaps it is because it is more likely for a hardware company to be able to afford the $18500 fee for DEMO, while software companies are generally poorer and might chose to go the cheaper TC50 route.
Do you offer an API that will return me all blog discussions on certain keywords?
For everyone who does not know, Russ is referring to Dropbox
I don't like the maximum height (L) parameter. While it might be useful to devices with very tiny (1-2kB) amount of memory, it unnecessarily parametrizes the hash, and MD6-256-3 and MD6-256-5 will be completely different hashes.
It looks like you've built a consulting company. MOST people are talking about product-centric companies when they talk about bootstrapping startups. Having bootstrapped on both fronts, I can tell you that it's literally night and day.

Don't get wrong-- bootstrapping a services company is a great accomplishment (my first company was a consulting firm-- I sold my interest in it when it was about your size)...

With a services company, you can be profitable tomorrow. When I spun mine up, I made two phone calls and had $95/hr work coming out of my ears (in 1997 FWIW). Voila-- bootstrapped! From that point on, it was just managing headcount and sales pipeline.

Of course, the downside is that services companies are rarely valued very highly when you sell them. And they don't scale very well... Recurring revenue is scarce and your a slave to your sales pipeline.
Probably not most of us, but I think the recommendation is to start when you're 50, or 40 if you have a family history of colon cancer.
There are other reasons. For instance, it lacks granularity; if the only statuses are "partner" and "employee", there's not the flexibility of options grants. People are willing to suffer as the low status and long hours as employees in law firms and accountancies because of the guaranteed payoff when making partner, tech is a lot riskier. At partnerships the partners typically bring in the bulk of the business, a tech company would have a very hard time hiring talent if it were run along those lines. Not to mention that the partners have an unlimited personal liability. A law firm doesn't require much capital and doesn't risk much either. A high-tech company often needs to (do) both.

A high-tech services company could be run as a partnership, as Accenture was for many years, but they turned themselves into a public company so they could use their stock as acquisition currency.
Best part of this site:

if (!(typeof worldHasEnded == "undefined")) {
document.write("YUP.");
} else {
document.write("NOPE.");
}
Jul 31 2008 	 On Square Pegs and Reasearcher Bias: Women in Engineering
One book a year feels right, while three a decade...wouldn't work for me or my core readers.

He's right about not self-marketing his "backlist". I didn't even know he had books out.

At any rate, keep in mind that your posterity will be thin, almost surely. How much did Voltaire write? [1] How much do people read? [2]

[1] http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/VOLTAIRE/restricted/VOLTAIR...

[2] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19942
15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Oh for God's sake... I admire Doctorow deeply for his writing and work ethic, but he's really venturing into tinfoil hat territory here.
Uhh. I think its intellectually dishonest.

He wants Google to not play in China because he thinks its morally wrong. Yet, he uses Google even though he views their policies as morally wrong.

Do you see what I mean?
I like it and would actually use it to search blogs (though the url is hard to remember). One small caveat, I would make the pagination bigger and easier to click on (look at google).
and a front page reddit hit! Congrats. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/70mmv/amazon_me...
which happens to be on amazons computers ;) face it, more and more of your data will be living on other peoples computers from here on out. best we can hope for is encrypt everywhere.
Finally, a well articulated antithesis of the 37signals Kool-Aid.
The sites you mention are retailers. Retailers don't have any legal gray areas; it's pretty straightforward.
Well I imagine it depends on which provider you chose. I now use BES/Exchange but prior to that I was using mail2web and was very happy with it. Their customer service is somewhat lacking but I always found their services to be reliable and fast. In terms of expense, mail2web starts at $4.95/month = $59.40/year versus $99/year for MobileMe. There are plenty other personal Exchange providers to choose from as well.
My startup (http://harmonize.fm) tried to go the legal route but couldn't find the massive funding necessary to do so. It's sad, since I feel that our service was so simple and useful.

The large up front fees required by the labels ensure that there are very few players in the space, and with that, very little innovation.
Text-Messaging Rates Come Under Scrutiny
I second that, Roth RIA is really good place to start.
Death of a Startup | TechJaws