skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now this is a beautiful, beautiful hack. It's very well done, and it shows a solid knowledge and understanding of both electronics and basic mechanics.

So, of course, this story is hanging out at #24 on the main page, while an evolutionary change in football strategy is being billed as a transformative hack at #5.

:-(
let's look at requirements first:
solid, stable, secure, KISS, small, best of breed applications instead of trying to include everything, vanilla kernel, not a patched one!

yes friends, it's Slackware I'm talking about
>The video is currently not available

I hate it when that happens. Is it just blocked in Taiwan or is it down?
It is no wonder those Yahoo guys aren’t doing well
Caltech engineers build first-ever multi-input ‘plug-and-play’ synthetic RNA device
that seems to be the case with all leaders.
Is this the beta release before it goes GA 1-April-2009?
That is um, very low brow journalism, to be honest.
Maybe you should focus on building your product and utilize a service that will be able to scale better than you will be able to do on your own. Check out Amazon Web Services http://aws.amazon.com/ . There are a lot of big sites using their EC2 and S3 services...you should check these out. That said, I am not a scaling expert, so if you're hell bent on doing it yourself, good luck! I'm sure somebody on here will be able to offer you "do it yourself" advice.
I certainly agree that the market should determine the value of the assets, even if they turn out to be worth 1/10th of what the banks would like them to be worth -- that's life.

The problem is that if the banks don't like the market price, they don't have to sell. As long as they hold the assets, the credibility of their balance sheets may be in question, but why sell the assets for cheap and prove their own insolvency. As I understand it, this is the current gridlock.
To save money running a startup, follow these tips:

1. Hire a competent but old programmer who has debt, and a wife and kids. Pay him well.

2. Hire a bunch of interns to work on your code. Pay them badly.

3. Let the interns do the unimportant stuff, under the control of the old guy.

4. When the mission critical parts of your software come, for example design or scaling issues, bring in freelance consultants to help you do this

5. Hire lit major students to write a bunch of content for you. They are cheap and good at writing.

6. Release upgrades often and publicize each release as much as you can. You don't need PR.

7. Fire anyone who believes he is a rockstar, knows the best way of doing something and insists it has to be done that way, or somehow thinks he is owed something

8. Get small offices. Make your workers work short hours, so they have time to do stuff at home, and so that they stay with your company because of the amount of freetime available

9. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him

10. Get a guy whose job is to manage outsourced projects. Outsource as much as you can and hold this guy directly responsible for the results

11. Don't go to conferences, don't stay in hotels. Spend to promote your product, not to promote yourself.

12. Take the money you make and put it back in company development. Keep the teams small and unified as you grow.

13. Spend your ad money on measurable ads like adsense etc. No expensive placement ads. You can optmize then

14. Hire people on freelancer contracts. You can save on their benefits as well as the management costs for doing their taxes

15. Take the guys in the startup to strip clubs. Get them laid.

You wanted to save money, right? If you do the above, you don't need aeron chairs to keep your team happy, productive and cheap. However, it's unsexy, and some people will look down on you.
Tim Keller is pretty high on my list. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ
This guy is truly a bad ass.
You are growing as a company, so one would think that with extra press and more success stories, your applications will continue to go up regardless of the economy, because your audience is larger.

It's more likely that you've reached the "tipping point" than any other macro variable out there.

Regardless, your message is getting through to more and more people. Given that I like your message, congrats!
I think there is probably some range of possible lifespans given our architecture. It just so happened that longer ones weren't increasing reproductive fitness (probably for several interrelated reasons) so it was never selected for.
I had a room mate once (who studied biology) that explained to me that the smell we smell when the grass is cut is actually a warning signal that grass expels when cockroaches or other bugs eat grass. It was always humorous because he would smoke a lot of weed and then tell me "The grass really lives man! Plants talk, plants communicate, we need to respect their feelings."

I guess from this article that him being stoned didn't deter him from telling the truth.
Which made me feel old.

This is the funny thing though: the majority of people out there are all older than us!

I'm the last of the gen xers, (75) and I can still say that. With something like twitter that needs to be popular to stay alive; if my initial reaction is "I feel old because I don't get it", that's not a good sign.
This app was most likely released by an iphone hard case manufacturer. :-)
Dysfunctional Nerds OutShine High School Football Captains in Life
This is excellent news for us all.
Consulting Cofounder
I'm planning to start a startup with a cofounder in January. However, he's considering a consulting offer from his current company: 8h/week + fly abroad to their HQ every 2 months for 8 12+ hour days (excl. travel time of 12h + jetlag), all while working on our own startup. He's citing as pros: money for our startup ($2500+/month) + contacts + we get to keep the stuff he develops + the company is working on interesting stuff. I'm weighing the pros and cons, but I'm gravitating towards 'no': it takes too much time, it will be a distraction, and it's unsettling that he'll have responsiblities to another company than our own. What do you guys think?
Is Adsense even worth the space it takes up on a site anymore?
LOL! I concur.
You don't switch off and recharge in meetings? ;-)
"15. Take the guys in the startup to strip clubs. Get them laid."

This was a great TicketStumbler company outing. I still think you should have good chairs (not necessarily Aeron). You're spending 1/3 of the day in them - get something nice.
Who cares. Mostly retards and IE users click on ads. That's why I love wordpress's strategy so much (only show ads to IE users).
If you total up those hours, you're getting 160 hrs per 2 months = ~20 hours a week. So

a) that's a pretty large time investment

b) $2500/mo for 80 hours of consulting is pretty poor pay -- $30 an hour?! That's $60k/yr with no benefits...

Seems like a pretty poor deal to me.
Given the lack of other data (what would be his role in your startup, how good is he at multitaskig, what are you building, how much time will it take, can you augment his absence with another person, is this Forever or For a While), it's really hard to make any good recommendations.

Some people will tell you they did this and it worked out fine, others will tell you it was the cause of their demise.

I don't mean to attack your question, it just seems that you're asking for an answer to a multi-variable problem, and you've only given 1 constant.

Also, what would happen to that $2500? Is it to pay his bills, or fund your venture?
I don't want to eat lunch with the people I work with. Go out for a beer afterward if I feel like it, sure, but during lunch, give me solitude, sun and a newspaper.
completely depends on your roles in this startup and what you're planning to make,

it's going to be one of those things where you have to decide what's best on your own, because you are the one with insight as to what needs to happen.
Money quote: "This is the first time I've ever said this to anybody, this is an exclusive: this will be my last company. I'm not going to do another company after this."

I'm not a giant fan of Mahalo -- don't hate it or anything, but I don't really believe in it either. Be interested to see how long Calacanis sticks to his word if it goes under.
Thanks. I bookmarked your post, which is a whole lot more sensible than Calcanis' bullshit.

Calcanis has yet to demonstrate how Mahalo is different from 1990's era Yahoo. Until he can do that successfully, we can continue ignoring him.
French President Sarkozy's Bank Account Hacked
The Big Picture | Andrew Lahde: Goodbye
I'm sorry to say but for development a Linux machine is way more productive.
Who are you trying to market to? You can't really market a product to "people". If you have a specific product, you likely have a specific audience. It could be as simple as redesign refocusing your current campaign/ads.

Try testing your ads on people you know. If you can't get your friends and family to bite, you can't really assume that anyone else will.
I hate those glossy screens.
I was netting it after taxes, the deal is about $50/hour. Plus his options keep on vesting.
I believe that was the worst article I have seen on ycombinator both full of crap and boring.
The money would be completely for the startup. Of course there are many variables to consider in this dilemma, but I didn't want to make the post too long.

As for our roles in the startup, he is a web developer, I'm a mathematician/developer, so we complement each other. Just the two of us, at least for the coming couple of months. The idea that I'm getting, already in this phase of preparing for the startup, is this: in a startup, there's always work to be done and you get bonus points if you iterate fast. So that kind of mitigates the factor if somebody is a good multitasker or not (I'm more of a believer in focus).
Automatic Production Rails
Microsoft self interest is its commitment to open source
This proves my point that there are many, many people out there (no offense) who can provide more insight then the supposed "elite."
Ok this deserves the top page: an article about things years old on TC and the author is claiming this are signs of recent strategical changes. This is really high quality stuff...
Y Combinator Gets Record Number Applicants
I think the most interesting choice would be automatic usage of some scripts, subject to certain criteria (popularity, manual review, etc). It's a problematic idea, but it would have really interesting effects if it were widely used.
Algorithms for programmers - ideas and source code [pdf]
Exactly. As long as population increases, the populated places tend to become more populated, central places more central, desirable more desirable.
Indeed, this code reminded me of a Brian Kernighan quote:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
In many species, if the tree loses its leaves due to a pathogen or insects then it can still get nutrients from any tree (of any species) nearby, as long as both root systems are in symbiosis with a common fungus. The mycorrhizal net actually transports nutrients between trees. It's pretty cool.
oh, we have no desire to do it ourselves. We only started using our own server because of the politics of hosting university content offsite. It makes the relations with the professors easier.

I've been looking for ways to move storage and bandwidth to AWS, but just set up my own personal account with JungleDisk a couple of weeks ago. What utilities do you recommend for shifting webserver stuff to AWS? What can be pushed? As I understand it, it's strictly blobs, and all data manipulation still has to come back to the site's CPU for processing. Am I mistaken?
Much thanks. I'll keep this comment bookmarked.
1. Hire a competent but old programmer who has debt, and a wife and kids. Pay him well.

It's actionable age discrimination, but go ahead. You gotta break some eggs if you want to make an omelette.

9. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him

It's actionable discrimination and a shitty thing to do to an otherwise valuable but shy person, but he's too shy to bring this to your attention or to hire a lawyer, so it's a win-win. (Again, eggs->omelette.)

12. Take the money you make and put it back in company development. Keep the teams small and unified as you grow.

Also, breathe air, drink water, and eat food.

15. Take the guys in the startup to strip clubs. Get them laid.

Again, actionable sexual harassment, but you're a nouveau web entrepreneur and therefore not concerned about things like legal liabilities. Let IBM, Microsoft, and other old school outfits worry about things like that. Besides, you're saving so much money by doing this that you can afford the suit.

I feel like I've fallen victim to a motivational seminar version of Poe's law.
Aho/Ullman - Foundations of Computer Science (free book)
The group I am primarily trying to market to is teenagers, thus my use of Facebook advertising. I do have friends and family using the service, but viral growth is limited, as it is most useful among a small group of friends. I recently did change the ads and the landing page to be more teen-friendly, which increased conversion a bit, but still not to an acceptable level.
I think the point he almost makes about there not being many jobs anyway is a good one. when there are lots of well paying jobs, there is social pressure to take one.

When things are quiet, there is less of that pressure to go get a nice job, and you can take your time (kind of forced to).

I think someone else mentioned it here as "someone else moved your cheese" - I like that.
Google App Engine to support Java
public opinion has been largely formed by the opinions of the regulators. I have never known a regulator to want less power, so libertarians are fighting a lost cause.

I don't think that's fair. I think the public's opinion is being reflected from the sentiment in the public debate around the world. Politicians, central bankers, academics, big name investors, etc. The specifics of interventions (proposed laws for bailouts) have been supported by public figures usually on the libertarian side of the policy (eg Rupert Murdoch). It's true, they've still stuck to their respective positions: John McCain is still more of a libertarian then Obama, Hugo Chavez hasn't moved much, etc. Die hards are still dies hards. But, the whole debate has shifted left.

This is very likely to bring with it other changes. I complain about people looking at the political spectrum simplistically just like anyone else. Left on A shouldn't mean left on B. But in reality, these things seem to be associated.
Anyone else think that was far too many shades of blue?
I think it's time to dismiss one of the falsehoods perpetuated by MSM and this article: that the main reason why the credit market is seizing is because banks do not trust each other.... wrong! the real reason is they either don't have any spare cash or that they have no more risk appetite to lend.

The UK market would make for a good case. With interbank lending guarantee by the govt, you would expect the credit markets to resume flowing, but it has not materialized. The banks have made a decision to lend less and deleverage.

So don't expect the capital injection by Paulson to make the banks start lending. They won't. Which is why the Fed will have to go into the markets and be the direct lender (which is what they did in the commercial paper market)
Wow, green or not, I am amazed that the Model T got more than 20 miles per gallon. That seems extremely efficient for the first mass production car ever.
> Most of these make sense, but I don't really see how a 2nd monitor can save half hour a day

Wow, no programmers on your team?
It implies that he's not even looking for a way to make money, as well as sounding rather arrogant ("Well, we're obviously going to be the next google whether we try or not")
Whatever your dedicated hosting service uses.
What he means is that he's going to push Mahalo into a big enough exit so that he never has to work again.
Obligatory it's UNDER 9000 post.
Regarding the iPhone, I agree completely (no one else comes close). However, not so sure on laptops. I think when your "big change" is that the body of the laptop is built out of one piece of aluminium (as Ive prounouces it), then you might be in trouble. The average consumer does not care about that.

The competition has figured out that design and weight matter and as a result has produced some pretty nice looking, very portable machines... for a lot less.

I personally am sticking with my iMac/Macbook, however as price becomes more of a factor, I think that negatively impacts apple.
"Not really. Dziuba's rants had a self-pitying aspect. He seemed to be really bitter about the success or inordinate attention given to people he considered less talented than himself."

Wow. I got none of that from his posts. Unlike most ranters, he never struck me as bitter or slighted, just bizarrely funny in his attacks on what he thought were dopey ideas or poor implementations.
The Centripetal Web
No doubt. There's [ ... buffering .. ] nothing like the browser [ ... buffering .. ] experience to really [ ... buffering .. ] engage you.
Maybe Slate should spend its dollars on decent writers instead of the design overhaul. It's unbelievable how far their journalistic quality has fallen over the past couple of years.
Create a promotion where users would invariably make use of SMS (text 12345 for a chance to enter; only something less cheesy), and introduce them to your service.

You've got to keep in mind, folks are kind of sensitive with SMS. Mobile carriers are stingy. Unless it's got a usability factor of "wow, this is something I really need to be using daily", you're going to have a hard time getting the use out of it.

SMS, by the nature of how it's currently being controlled is going to have a high barrier to entry as far as creating services goes.

Good luck.
I was going to upvote the grandparent, and then I thought "Wait...he might be serious."
I've developed professionally (like, at a company and stuff) on Linux, Windows, and OSX at my current gig. I do mostly Java and Open Source stuff like Python and Perl w/ Postgres. For me, Linux and OSX are about tied for most productive, with Windows coming in a close second. For the price, I think you'd be best off with Linux.

Having said that, I am a bit of a Mac fanboy, so they can pry my MacBook Pro at my current job from my cold, unemployed fingers. :)
Can anyone find Myspace anywhere other than the US? It's the largest by far but it's interesting that Facebook actually dominates in more countries.

Edit: It looks like it could be an Alexa error from the footnote.
Personal Fabrication for Dummies: 10 technologies shaping the future 
This post provides video demonstrations of 10 personal fabrication technologies that could shape the future. These machines combined with software enable people to create anything they can imagine, increase choices for customers, and help the environment in the process. Learn what they can do and what others have done with them.
Generating domain names using Markov Chains
If libertarianism is a kind of religion, then The Wealth of Nations is a theological work. Give me a break.
Any promotion I do would have to be based around the concept of also inviting others, as a chat service is obviously only useful with friends. Maybe people could become eligible after they invited x number of friends? I'll think about it, thanks for the input.

As for the usability factor, I do think it is certainly there. I have often heard complaints that while texts can be sent to multiple people, replies only go to the sender, preventing group chat or collaboration. My service, in essence, provides that reply-all button. If you want to check it out, follow the directions at http://slide.fm/ (I direct traffic from advertising to a different, more teen-friendly landing page, just FYI).
You know that iceland is not a large country in the very least. It's population aprox ~300'000. It's like saying like a small bank that was popular in the town of victoria, canada failed recently.
I think there are a lot of weak points in the article.

- Outsource all HR, he even calls it a no-brainer. To me outsourcing the well-being of your employees, probably the most important asset you've got is downright stupid.

- All this talk about saving five minutes by having in-house great coffee instead of lettin gpeople fo to Starbucks, having meetings over lunch, etc. misses an important point and tells me that this guy has no idea how to deal with human beings. Your employees don't go to Starbucks just to get a coffee, they go to get a break, to ponder over a problem, have an informal meeeting, or something else. It's not about the coffe. Same with lunch. People need breaks, particularly people that make their money by thinking. I read a post by Joel Spolsky where he claims that he probably works around 4 hours a day, the rest of the time he just goofs around trying to get his thoughts together, thinking over a problem, etc. And he seems pretty productive. People aren't machines - if you treat them as such expect results thereafter.

Jeez...
Guide to Network Programming
You wrote: it's not " do not trust each other", it's "have no more risk appetite" - those are the same thing! You are directly contradicting yourself in the same paragraph.

You wrote "[the problem is] ... don't have any spare cash" and "don't expect the capital injection [to fix it]", which is again a self contradiction.

So sorry, I think I'm going to trust MSM (or at least this article) and not you.
I first read about Calacanis in a book called DIgital Hustlers (remaindered) and he used to run a newsletter in New York, which made him rich. Then he coasted for a few years, and he made millions on his last sale to AOL. He could just retire now, it seems from this interview.

I love scrappy 'operators' who reinvent themselves time after time to the jeers of those without an understanding of enterpreneurship. I don't get it either, I admit.

Best part of Digital Hustlers - a several-month, million-dollar party in New York ('Silicon Alley') which lasted right up to the bust.
Google needs to figure out display. Really needs to. or someone else will.
Geez that thread is filled with such cynical, judgemental, and straight-to-absolutest right/wrong , black/white thinking.

I don't get it. Why was it shady? Just because he is good at business/marketing? The drug was geared toward the sports industry and was for athletes to improve performance. I'm not saying his product worked or it didn't, but HE DID NOT MAKE the product. He simply marketed it well. What is also funny is that this guy is the opposite of those "get rich like me" late night informercials. He DOES NOT CARE how much money he makes. He DOES NOT care about material wealth. He does not care about most things our information-overloaded, consumer, more more more, American culture cares about.

I just want to officially say "give the guy a break". If you don't agree with him that's fine, its just a point of view, just an opinion, everyone has one - but don't bash a guy that made it - what is the yield?
There has been some analysis of eBay, MMORPGs and related online markets. I know of one study that compared eBay's rules that encourage late bidding to Amazon's rules that manage to get people to bid early. (Amazon extends the deadline after late bids so that at least 20 minutes remain for other bidders to react. This removes the advantages of late bidding.)
Oh, it works. Your satiation systems need some time to react. (At least that's the case in normal people.)
Yes, but only for the part of math that deals with (real) numbers.
I think they might still be pretty durable in terms of market share. But not against deferred purchases. Apple's stuff tends to be discretionary. People buy when they want. That can be delayed.