skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess that software shares its soul with its creators. Thus heavy Emacs use can influence longer hair (look at RMS!).

But Bill Joy is not bald either (or am I mistaken? -- looked only at Wikipedia photo).
Microsoft beats profits forecast
Chromacs is good. Its marketing tagline could be "Chromium's mac daddy".
check out the beta signup form, doesn't even work. must be alpha then.
This is generally called the power factor - if you have a purely inductive (your coil example) or capacitive load have a pf approaching 0. A purely resistive load is 1.

Phone chargers and similar usually have pretty bad pf - but not because of the above, but because they are designed to take energy in short pulses (they call this a non-linear load).

Energy isn't really consumed by this, but it does affect the way the distribution system is designed and operates (which may involve downstream energy waste).
> They put it up where "anyone" that found it could see it. Which is kinda part of the idea of an internet, isn't it? Otherwise how would they share it with other "techies"?

Agreed. "Anyone", rather than "everyone". (I tried different phrasings about how, unlike doctors, "techies" are likely to communicate semi-publicly on the internet, but I stumbled with words and decided the other aspect was a more important point to make.)

And about inter-discipline discussion, absolutely. It's often difficult, but very necessary.
Solo here, on http://foreverhome.r08.railsrumble.com/

Several of my coworkers also competed - details here: http://www.viget.com/blog/viget-rumbles
Gaps in Understanding
I believe one of the reasons startups fail is 'gaps in understanding' between the entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists. These gaps in understanding shouldn't be surprising considering the different backgrounds of each group.
I understand all the admiration of the US enterpreneurial spirit, and I agree that all the measures offered are conscious populism by the candidates.

It is remarkable however, how little he offers in the way of actual measures a potential president could take. 'encourage enterpreneurs'? Those same enterpreneurs that don't care about tax rates and recessions are going to care about 'encouragement'? Would he fund someone who says 'after our new president's encouragement, I decided to start a business'?

As it stands, I get very little other than populistic statement of the obvious by this blog post.
Thanks, Joel!
Safari 3.1.2 on OS X 10.5.5 (I think). Just tried it now and it works fine. I might have been on Server 2008 with Firefox, it was 8 days ago... (I know late reply)
Unless its an e-commerce site, just don't do it!
Dropping Adsense - Saying Goodbye to $100K Per Year in Easy Income
someone alert Stan Rogers!
Congratulations to another YC start-up which has made their mark in not only a consumer world but the business world itself it would seem. May we hope that they are successful in carrying out their operations.

Now, who's next? =D

Add:
I would also like to add that they do seem to have a good idea. I know that I agree with their logic of how annoying it is to be expected to fill out surveys months, days, or even hours later when I'm at home on my computer and take up my own time. This is the kind of product that would have potential to become as prevalent as credit card processors at most retail chains. While you're waiting for everything to get bagged, or even that damn receipt to print, just fill out this survey on a sleek and simple device.
If you are planning on doing some form of book, why not a website instead? Hell, make it collaborative, and count me in. I work in PR relating to E-Business, explaining this stuff to people who (well, at least the vast majority) still think websites are pretty pictures with a 'contact us' page.
Barack obama birth certificate
I Hate Meetings
So, I hear there are these things called libraries... but not the book kind! Are they some sort of new scienc-ey development I haven't heard of yet?
Before YC I used to deal with a lot of senior debt lending to restaurant holding companies. They are in dire need of something like this.

Most of them realize that sales are down and will be for a while, but they have no idea why other than "bad economy".
Congratulations. I hope you guys have a huge impact, it looks like a great service.
New Palm OS: ALP 3.0
dream theater
I seriously doubt that the same pressure to consolidate will ever apply in the mobile phone market the way it did to early PCs.

Prior to the Internet, the only thing you could do with a PC was run software written specifically for each platform. The average computer in the late 80s/early 90s cost between $3-5000. It made sense that people would settle on a single standard that let them get the most out of a very large investment.

However, 90% of what people do with smartphones - calls, email, music, web browsing - is inevitably provided with the phone. 3rd-party apps are a nice addition, but hardly necessary. The iPhone and Blackberry got along just fine without them for years, whereas Palm and WiMo are floundering despite having allowed 3rd-party apps for the last decade.
I thought the same thing. Cuban's outlook on America seems a little too focused on money imo. I think there are more things to consider than merely your pocketbook. Granted, he is worth 5 billion times more than I am, and the financial crisis is a hot topic right now.
That was the first thing that crossed my mind. I can't get the deal math to work in my head without staggering licensing fees, legal exposure, or debt obligations.
it's a rare genre but i've used several music sites and recommendation engines that had spot-on choices. (last.fm, itunes, pandora, amazon, and that spiderweb-like thing i can never remember the name of, etc)
Congrats, Jeremy!
why'd i get negated for that..being out of ideas sucks
Congratulations!

I think that there is a huge market here for custom mobile enterprise solutions. I know that the iPod Touch would have also been a good choice for them to deploy on, since they have an enterprise program that allows an ad-hoc distribution of applications.
Great. I'm feeling that much better about the recent acquisitions of Slicehost and JungleDisk, both of which I pay to use.
You pay the school for an education, ergo, it's hard to get kicked out.

The employer is paying you. Underperformance is a quick way to be shown the door.

I believe that would be sufficient motivation.
Android: Android Is Getting a Touchscreen Keyboard Next Year
In Germany you generally do not pay the school or university. And you can get kicked out for failing too many tests (and not doing a test for two years can count as automatically failing).

Anyway students' time management is just as bad.
Microsoft closes the quarter with less cash than Apple
NP - it caused me to fix a bug.
That was a great way to handle the subject line (original title plus 16-word summary). Thanks!
SmallBasic: "Fun" programming language for beginners
Thanks Lee!
This reminds me of the article that i read on 'Common Sense in Business'. While most of the times, people say that marketing is all about common sense, time and again Apple has been sailing in the direction opposite to the wind, doing things that defy common sense, and creating newer and newer success models! Be it, launching better iPod to kill the existing ones or opting for a no subsidy model with AT&T.
I doubt the people are worth that much. Staff journalists don't vary _that_ much in quality (though editorial standards do) and there's tons of fresh meat coming out of j-school every year.

The most valuable asset that the New York Times has is its brand. Well, that and a big honking New York skyscraper.
Ask HN: If you have ever played WoW please critique my new site
Or take a leaf out of the London newspapers, and blend news with pornography.
Let's put a smile on that Gmail
I didn't compete in it but I was very impressed with what some of these people pumped out, and some of them looked like they didn't even really have any history on the scene and they still made impressive apps.
Nice work guys. This is going to be huge.
Sounds like this is a little bit more heavyweight than MIDI. MIDI uses simple events and relatively simple representations of sound to play back compositions. A MIDI file contains no sounds- it is more like a sheet of music. You can play this file using an instrument you choose.

The compression they speak of is really just a more efficient storage of data. Memory that was once used to encode raw sound data is now used to encode information about sound dynamics- totally different from MIDI.

I would like to know how large the libraries are though. Seems like they could easily take up a lot of space. Still a very useful technology though if they can perfect it. Can you imagine what streaming music would be like?
"Taken to it's logical conclusion, this kind of means that we can't tell if we should even be paying attention to these two on this matter."

In that case, it also means you don't know if you should be paying attention to anyone.
I won't argue with that logic. It's the same market change that has led to Mac making a comeback, and Linux making a (small) move into the consumer desktop space, in ways that simply couldn't have happened in the 90's. If apps continue to move to the web, the key will be who has the best browsing experience--and right now, it's roughly tied, IMHO (and they're based on the same rendering engine, so that makes sense). This also explains why Windows Mobile has had so little impact--in all fairness, it ought to simply rule the roost (and it does have good raw numbers, but I don't think it has much mindshare)--the browser in Windows Mobile sucks dramatically worse than even IE on the desktop. The same can be said for Palm and the Symbian devices that I've seen. A smart phone with a crap browser is just a big ugly phone with some extra fancy crap bolted on.

It'll be interesting to see how cost, and other ancillary features (like GPS, to name just one) will effect buyers decisions. Fashion (as in, "who makes the prettiest accessory for my wardrobe?") may, in fact, rule the day...in which case, Apple still has the upper hand, and, if PC history is any indicator, they will hang on to the upper hand for years to come. Even today, it's pretty much impossible to buy a PC that looks as nice as an Apple (Dell has made a few effective moves in the area, and HP and Sony also seem interested in good design). Then again, PCs still outsell Macs many times over, both in lappies and desktops.

So, maybe you're right, and the market will shake out dramatically differently than the PC market. But, I'd sure hate to bet against history repeating itself given the wide array of similarities (many of the players are even the same, and they do appear to have the same playbooks).
Using Scala for Domain-Specific-Languages
Maybe that was because vi users outnumbered emacs users 8:1.
nice job, jeremy! we need more monroe, ct entrepreneur folk =)
Attack code for critical Microsoft bug surfaces
I think I'm missing something. Each month there are new visitors, some of them convert to regular users. So there is a small amount of regular users. However, those users do not rollover to next month - they just disappear. Even the premium users disappear. This can't be right - some regular users should stick around for next month. They even have a name for it - "churn rate" (percentage of people dropping off each month).
I finally figured what happened to Wall Street
Not necessarily. Often the best candidates are the ones you have to tempt out of their current position.
"Best Buy is recognizing that sitting in a chair is no longer working."

"I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done."

"decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity."

Holy crap finally someone with the balls to come out and say it like it is. I find it shocking that it took until 2008 to figure this out.

The other less obvious lesson in this article is, the only way to get a really good and inovative idea implemented at a large company is to not tell anyone about it until it is already successful. Then they can't deny it's benefits.
Good for him :) It takes balls to just pull all ads off your site. That being said, how in the world does a guy get $100K+ a year from AdSense? My blog got Slashdotted (and reddit'ed) a while back and I think I made <$1 that whole day (while serving some 200K+ views)... Even multiply that by 100x that readership (20M a day?!) wouldn't make the math work...
After spending years focusing on such specific skills, many developers fail to appreciate the skills necessary for other jobs.

It boggles my mind when developers seriously believe lawyers, graphic designers, chefs, etc. don't require a high "standard of competence" in their own skill sets, just because they aren't e.g. messing with pointers or refactoring.
I worked with a few awesome folks in Providence, RI to produce http://twalala.com - Twitter with a mute button.

All four of us are avid Twitter users, and had frequently run into situations where we wanted to put a muzzle on some of the folks we followed, without going so far as un-following them. Whether you want to block all tweets containing spoilers for your favorite TV show, or if you temporarily want to mute a drunk co-worker, twalala gives you that power. (We also added a whitelist, so things like mentions of your name can always get through.)

AFAIAC, the big wins were (a) working with a team of friends that I hadn't had the chance to collaborate with before, and (b) building something that we all wanted to exist... and now that it does exists, we all use it every day. Winning some contest prizes would be great, too, but we all agree that the experience was well worthwhile, regardless.
Rather insidious...Flash "cookies"
If your browser has a Flash plug-in, it is capable of storing cookies that are not at all obvious.

I'm fairly security-minded (as I use OmniWeb's many features for filtering out the stuff I don't want), but this one I missed. And it really bothers me, because:

1. Nowhere in the contextual menu for Flash content is there any way to reach the interface for managing cookies (e.g. deleting them). For this, you have to go to a web page:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

2. The menu does have a "Settings" item, which displays many tabs of Flash player settings. This conspicuously does look like a complete set of controls, yet it omits cookie controls completely. In other words, if you think this shows everything the player can do, it doesn't.

3. Although you can finally delete the cookies from the web site, I saw no "don't ever store cookies in the first place" option. So I basically have to keep going in and removing them. (You can limit storage per-domain, but this is hardly a solution as many come from domains you'd never expect.)

This is insidious, Flash is not being forthcoming about what it is capable of doing. Those of you on HN who are normally protective of other forms of cookies, what are your thoughts?
Free book: Squeak by Example (300 pp PDF)
Free Software Understanding Follow-up
Steve is a great guy and some of his work really resonates with me:

- http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea...

- http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

- http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/the-law-of-attracti...

But lately his stuff seems too "out there"--even for me. I fully respect what he does, but his way of life seems too extreme for me.
Looks cool. Too bad most WoW players are 13 year old jerks.
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Monday 7:30 pm Eastside
Tuesday 7:30 pm Eastside
Wednesday 7:30 pm Eastside
Thursday 7:30 pm Eastside
Friday 7:30 pm Eastside
Saturday 7:30 pm Eastside
Sunday 7:30 pm Eastside
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Tuesday 7:30 pm Westside
Wednesday 7:30 pm Westside
Thursday 7:30 pm Westside
Friday 7:30 pm Westside
Saturday 7:30 pm Westside
Sunday 7:30 pm Westside
God, this poll sucks.
Quality can be as important as quantity. Slashdot traffic is notoriously bad... people view the content, often using an ad blocker, and then bounce without clicking any ads.
All because of the Seinfeld ads. ;)

But definitely uplifting that tech spending isn't completely dead during this downturn.
In the audio, he says expenses of 80M, with revenues between 90M to 100M. He also was not holding out for the best price, but a combination of price, terms, and ability to deliver good service to existing customers.
> Could it be good programmers are worse resume writers?

Judging by myself: FSCKING YES!!!

The only thing I hate more than resume writing is Java,

This freaking "resume screening" selects best resume writers, not best programmers.
My brother is a classical musician, and the preparation he puts in for an addition with a major symphony are brutal. it's like a Y-Combinator startup for each audition plus he continues to play his regular job and teach on the side.

The simple truth is, some fields are performance-oriented. Either he is the best Tuba player auditioning for the chair or he goes home with nothing for his efforts.
I think its an awesome way to try out and idea and throw it out there. The time constraints make it accessible to those without a lot of spare time. Love it.
I was in a team of four, we built Twippet: http://railsrumble.twippet.com

It's code sharing over the twitter network. Throw up some code snippets, enter your twitter creds (pass not stored) to verify your twitter account and scrape your followings, and then you get a twitter-feed-esque list of searchable, taggable code snippets.
(the irritating html-escaping bug will be fixed as soon as voting's over - couldn't squeeze the fix inside 10 lines!)
I would think it would have a bearing. Wimps are wimps. I retract my AWS S3 suggestion.
Craigslist has killed the classified markets dead x 100. This is huge for newspapers and not to be overlooked.
VenueM.com makes a great RSS to iPhone-friendly web site interface. Check out their Hacker News site (ideally on an iPhone/iPod Touch) at:

http://i.venuem.net/ychn
Keep the AdSense, donate the money to charity.

Asshat.
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They wont go bankrupt. They are the closest thing to the worlds premier newspaper. If the company was distressed they could sell it in a heartbeat.

Even if it ran at a loss it still has value due to its prestige. Newscorp recently bought the WSJ for 6B when it was in a similar predicament.
The linked blog entry talking about the bad code in Windows that caused the vulnerability is much more interesting: http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl/archive/2008/10/22/ms08-067.aspx
They clearly thought long & hard about whom they were building this for, and it shows. They picked a good problem: helping companies connect better with their customers. Well done!
Not a bad idea. No need for the second comment.
NYTimes used to have subscriptions for a lot of their content a year or two ago but figured they would get more if they just had ads instead. I think the WSJ will do the same eventually. Although it is different in that it has a more affluent clientele. Business people pay crazy amounts of money for premium content/data.
Interesting that he has a donation link on the sidebar.
The new Concorde: Supersonic jet will get you from London to New York in just three hours
Yellowdot: software solution to privacy-invading “yellow dot” printer watermarks
We could do it that way if we wanted to, but it sorta doesn't make sense. The "to" address determines where you are posting "to". We already use this for things like flickr@posterous.com to indicate you want your post on flickr. And soon we'll do post@sachin.posterous.com so you can post to various sites.

Tagging has no relationship with the "to" field of an email. However, the subject line in an email is just that, the subject of your post. Which is a perfect fit for what tags are.

If there's better syntax than ((tag: we're open to change it. but it needs to be something that can't be misinterpreted.
And I always thought The Office was an exaggeration:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Anything-You-Can-Do-Lyle-Can...
Thanks, this is much more compelling.
Huh? That seems pretty irrelevant to my question.
Fair enough. I'm still not gonna invest six hours in it, but thanks for clarifying what it's about.

And I apologise for guessing about the "fringe views". I've seen too many LaRoucheites on campus today.
Great work all of you Frogmetrics guys. The design is wonderful. So simple.
Actually watching the 3rd episode now, and it is more socialism vs. capitalism. Resonant line from it so far:

"The bailout worked" (In relation to the near collapse of the Mexican economy soon after NAFTA).

Its very much the best episode, too, thoughtful, lacking jingoism, and somewhat anti-capitalist.
Google's view on the future of business: An interview with CEO Eric Schmidt
way of the future
funny how they labelled Taleb an economist, that must have riled him
An elegant demonstration of the probability-theoretic truism that to compress information is to understand it and vice versa. (Of course this doesn't work with shallow compression like zip.)
How can you use an interpreted language and not Emacs?
This just puzzled me. I recently found out that you can't run a REPL in VIM.

OK, so how do you use interpreted languages if you use VIM?

C-c C-l, C-c C-e, etc is kind of the whole point no?

Don't you miss a lot of practicality there?

With Python the editor/interpreter that comes with Python is pretty good so I can see how.

Or do you use Eclipse or Netbeans? Do you think it is ok to run a repl in them?
Let's set aside for the moment the issue of whether it makes sense to call this "compression". What I'm interested in is: does the simulated instrument sound any good?

At first, I was extremely impressed... but then I figured out I was listening to the original. Listening to the simulated version, it really didn't sound any better than, say, the "clarinet" mode on a cheap Casio keyboard.

PS. I used to play the clarinet. I don't know if this makes me pickier about clarinet sounds than other folks.
Ask HN: How much revenue should we give to content creators?
I cofounded a yet-to-be-released web application with a friend. It's yet another music streaming service for independent artists.

So far we've agreed that we should distribute 70% of the revenue generated from song sales to artists.

I don't think this is enough though -- I think we should distribute some specific percentage of our total revenue (including song sale revenues and advertising revenues) -- maybe 50% or more -- to artists. But my partner disagrees. He says that doing so would be generous, but wouldn't make sense financially. He argues that it would be absurd to pay artists more than the business is making itself.

I think that it wouldn't make sense not to pay artists more than the business is making, since the only reason artists and users would use our site would be to share and discover new music, something our business takes no part in creating. I think it's in our best interest to be fair to artists because they'll reward us with loyalty to our service.

Anyways, it's difficult to find a balance between how much revenue we're pulling in and how much we're willing to pay out. We host the music files for free (maybe not a good idea), we offer song downloads for less than half of the industry standard, and we offer a good recommendation system to help users filter through all of the music.

Any ideas about what we should do?
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We use Trac and like it a lot. Love to hear someone convince me that there's something better out there.