skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you give an example of a business that is presently getting good traction?

I somehow find it hard to recognize trends. I guess I am a hard core skeptical when it comes to noise v/s signal.
The important differentiator is this: why are you so reliant on the opinions of others to keep afloat?

This was a problem I had for a long time. A part of it, I think, was that I didn't really feel like I was contributing anything new - and, in fact, I wasn't. Once I started pruning myself, revising things, focusing on really creating meaningful stuff, then I found that I didn't care so much about comments: I started to make things for the sake of those things rather than for personal vanity.

I think that's a big part of things too. Criticism can get you on the right track. Once you're there, if you don't leave the track criticism stops mattering. I don't know if it's a matter of thick skin - I'm a fairly sensitive person in many ways. It's more a matter of your realizing that some critics are wrong, and ignoring them to continue what you do best.
It kind of depends what constitutes the "open source community." If by that you mean anyone who wants to thrown in, then the community could design a better audio player. Googling 'ipod concept' turns up some pretty neat ideas. As for actually being able to produce it: probably not. Companies like Canonical do great work pushing open software forward, but an undertaking like competing with the ipod is a bit much for anyone to venture in to. This is especially true because Apple would not lose any share without a fight, and when it comes to sexiness - they win.
If this were Digg, this would be the point at which someone would insert an ASCII representation of Admiral Ackbar saying "IT'S A TRAP!"
This is exactly how oldschool MUDs were implemented; Steve Yegge has actually written a more modern version of exactly the same thing.

It's a great idea, but not a new one. You'll want tons of hooks you can customize interactions with as well.
You really need to take a trip to the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Update: looks like their snarky literal interpretations are running a bit weak lately, but the photos people send in are still really good.
Ask Psychedelic Mushrooms for an idea.
Can't help but wonder if anyone noticed any irony in the title? It was more of a joke, just an observation that Gmail is getting all the things a human should do from us. Sorry, did not mean it to be sensational, really.
Someone jokingly asked me how I would sort a million 32-bit integers in 2 megabytes of RAM, using Python [...] obviously this is a joke question -- the data alone would take up 4 megabytes, assuming binary encoding

This question seems to come up a lot at Google - didn't their CEO ask it of Obama and McCain when they visited?

I like that instead of going into a complicated solution to a tricky problem, GvR shows the very simple and general way to solve a slightly easier version more people are likely to encounter. Unfortunately I was sort of hoping he would take the Programming Pearls approach instead of treating it as a joke. Bently showed several ways to do this kind of constrained memory sorting given differing assumptions, but perhaps that kind of thing just isn't interesting for the places Python is used.
I really like the guys at slicehost. They can answer all your technical questions in a few short sentences. They are pretty quick and responsive. Hope Rackspace uses these skills along with their servers.
I equate the statement that "throw hardware at the problem" in the case of Rails to be uneducated. The whole myth that Rails doesn't scale is becoming annoying. The video explains that it's not a framework or language that doesn't scale - it's either CPU bound or IO bound. Saying that Rails quates to 'throwing hardware' at a problem is silly because there are waaaaay more variables and once you get to the bottom of the problem you'll see that the framework makes little difference. In our case (soocial.com) we use rails for our webapp and ruby for most syncing bots - the bottle neck has been the database and never really rails. And we don't expect it to be.
Let me get this straight. You want a large increase in server side complexity just to save you from re-visiting links that you have been to before but did not like. Most people would just use the colour change that most browsers provide for visited links.
Social Web Usage Tipped in 2008
It all depends on how sophisticated your app is. How do you run launchd with a drag and drop installer? You don't. That's why there's PackageMaker (made by, ahh, oh yeah Apple).

PackageMaker doesn't have an uninstaller. The post tells you how to create one.
You should apologize. Most posters are American and thus by definition very good at irony.

/irony
What it would do is increase the average number of items of interest that you see on the home page.

In the current system if you're not interested in 15 of the articles - then you only see another sample of 15. I'd guess that most users would not use more to see other stories. This approach would let you see 30 of interest...

This would lead to more upvoting on stories that don't make the top 30. I guess this would keep the front page "fresher" by allowing for a greater diversity in where upvotes go.

To be honest, not sure what the effect would be overall - fresher doesn't necessarily imply a better SnR - but I don't think it's as simple as re-visiting links or the change in color for a:visited.
I think that the if you look at the cost vs the benefit this certainly leans on the side of being worth it.

I don't think that this is entirely too complex, after all, this is Hacker News. It's a feature that I am sure many would enjoy, and a true hacker would rise to the occasion and try to implement it for all to play around with.

Sadly I am a designer who merely dabbles with code, let alone something as high-level as Arc or Lisp.

Also, and I mentioned this in my initial post but it might not be entirely clear, sometimes the stories I don't want to see aren't stories I plan on visiting. One technique would be just opening and quickly closing those links I don't have any desire to look at.

The final reason I think that this could be useful, is that I tend to work across multiple machines, one or two at work and a laptop (which I am writing this on now) at home. It would help to flip those stories I have seen at work so that when I am at home, I can check out the fresh stories and not have to sift through stories I have already seen or have no interest in.
"company" has an 'n'
In Europe minimum vacation time is simply legislated, just like minimum wages, minimum notice periods, and so on. It's in public interest to require that people are treated well, even if it reduces economic efficiency by a tiny bit. Not treating people well has a much higher cost in social capital.
Remove the IT Department from the e-Discovery Process
The state of information security
Sun Loses Co-Founder to Start-Up
Yeah - either it needs to have so much volume that it's representative, or they need to include some kind of demographic to stop the results getting skewed.

As a mechanism it's an interesting idea. There are probably other twitter-ish aggregation start-up ideas that you might be able to get out of this.... e.g. send an sms/mms and it's posted as "news" for that geographic area. You could then aggregate news for relevance for a given area (e.g. local, state, national, world).
India will comprehensively prosper when 85% of all registered marriages are Inter-Caste or Inter-Religious.
Doesn't this hack require that the service is used in an extremely constrained way, almost entirely to get a refund? You cannot employ this hack if you are using S3 in a meaningful way. Thus, you are simply getting a max 25% refund on the money you spent gaining nothing.
I don't believe a traditional 'Open-source' item could beat the ipod. (I think The Iphone and G1 will kill the ipod). The market has started to become modular, and us such 'good-enough' products will slowly eat away at the ipod, for a firm (opensource or otherwise) there needs to be a design-led core team to make decisions, to get working capital to manufacture, distribute, market etc (like mechanical_fish suggested). Regarding the average consumer arguement, to an average consumer an ipod has become synonymous to a mp3 player, and as more and more generic 'ipods' flood the market apple will probably leave the market.
Sometime back I read that MBA students in HongKong were told to go to the nearest street corner and beg alms from the pedestrians for 1 hour. To develop thick skin among students this seems a ingenious way to include in their curriculum.
In fairness, I think if you average this poll and Fox News together it comes out about right.
Backlash over Microsoft's anti-piracy tactics
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What deal terms appear in down round and highly dilutive financings?
I take your points but (you knew there was a but ;) it all sounds just a little too passive.

The new items are best found on the new page. The main page is a great way to catch up with the big items of the day - as filtered by those excellent folks - the HN site users.

If your area of interest is (say) web design then you will probably find that the best posts on that subject never make it to the main page. You need to seek them out on the new page - and vote them up if they deserve greater attention.
There are scenarios where this could be exploited quite easily -- the "backups which aren't being touched" scenario is one of them.

If you're issuing a constant stream of requests to S3, then this can't be exploited, since it relies on being able to say "I'm not going to issue any more requests until the next 5-minute interval starts".
Andy Bechtolsheim is also famous for being one of the first investors in Google.

After getting the pitch he went to his car to write a $100,000 check for the not-yet-incorporated company. At one stage I saw that investment was valued at $1.5 billion, but I guess it would be less now.
Ok, let this comment be accepted as my public apology :(
Health 2.0: Rules of Engagement
No, I do get that. Perhaps I wasn't clear.

I was trying to point out that these same pool of people (low-paid workers in India and/or China) are necessary to the economies of all developed economies. And so it's not really fair to say India isn't a developed economy simply because it contains this pool of people.
Visualizing Data with Flot
the corporate line for microsoft doesn't float. "we want to tell people that they don't have an authentic product". well you can accomplish that without disabling the fake with a simple notification.

the public outrage _is_ a little absurd, however. it's as if they don't understand the piracy epidemic.

i'd say it's a failure on both sides to think rationally
Well, they sort of build/manage stuff for you.

So when you ask for pricing information, you get a call from a account manager, who helps you find what you need and offers a price.
For instance if you need a server to do your email there are a lot of options and solutions to choose from, managed server or exchange mailboxes.

Ofcourse at that moment they'll try to sell you some more, like file hosting, terminal services etc...

It's just not a plan A, B and C with options x y z company.
He looks at differing error rates for GET/DELETE/PUT to S3. This will presumably include any failures on the network path from the client to the server.

Might that be enough to explain the higher rate of failed PUTs?

Would anyone expect the effective network path from them to a well-known service like S3 to be noticeably asymmetric (at the levels of failure mentioned in the article)?

Most consumers' 1st hop (ADSL or cable) is asymmetric in bandwidth - does that imply the ISP is doing different sums in terms of capacity planning which might cause a difference in packet loss?

Does this asymmetry also exist outside of consumer 1st hop connections?

Do modern network shapers prioritise download ACK traffic (needed to give the customers those blazing download speeds) over uploaded data (bloody file-sharers)?

Lastly - given packet loss as measured by ping includes packets lost up or down, I guess there is no way to measure these independently without some co-operating code at the far end?
Harvard prof sues Google over ads on typosquatted domains
Sun melting down, and where's Java?
Where does this bad reputation thing come from, this thread is the first I've ever heard of rackspace having a bad reputation.

I've used them with two different companies, and in my experience they are nothing short of excellent. Yes their managed service cost is quite high, but its worth every penny if you want to sleep well at night.
The story was in the privacy-link announcement. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-comes-next-in-th...
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This has really left me cold.

I love Slicehost, and have received nothing but great service and support from them. Their articles are indispensable, and their control panel is simply world class.

What I dislike is Rackspaces shady pricing practise, the fact that whenever I've dealt with Rackspace as I've come away with quotes that were wildly excessive, and generally the view that Rackspace are a large company focused on new sales through hard-selling practises rather than focusing on customer service and their existing customer base.

To me, Rackspace are the most-reputed of a very bad bunch (the best of the worst). Slicehost are the shining star of a new breed (the best of the best).

As a Slicehost customer I really do not want to see Slicehost become anything like Rackspace, at all. Instead I want to see the opposite, Rackspace become more like Slicehost. But will that happen? Well... did the Slicehost guys get Rackspace board seats? There's your answer.

I'll wait and see, but whilst I had loyalty to Slicehost and the people there I won't feel loyalty towards Rackspace. Should I feel any affect on the service I receive, through price increase, impact on backups, downtime, etc... I'll jump.

As others have said: DON'T FUCK IT UP, RACKSPACE.

Not least because with this many entrepreneurs here with growing ventures, it might not be the wisest business decision to piss them all off.
> Well, they sort of build/manage stuff for you.

And I don't want that. I know how to build/manage stuff, so I want to know how much it costs to have a server there. The less they have to do, the better for both of us - the only thing I need them for is to kick the hardware if it has a problem.
http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/9776/bgc3ya3.png

Makes all the difference, doesn't it?
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LivePipe: User Interface Components for Prototype
Yours is really a poor definition for “developed nation.” A more standard definition of development is based the amount of available capital in an economy. Compared to W. Europe, Japan, N. America, etc., India has a pitifully low amount of capital, per capita (also a poor population: 25% is still below the official poverty line, etc.). Interestingly, one of the chief factors slowing Indian economic growth may be that it has avoided specializing in products requiring cheap unskilled labor (e.g. textiles), as China, etc., have, instead wielding protectionist policies which supported local capital but ultimately weakened its ability to compete on the world market, and other regulation, like draconian labor laws, which have discouraged direct foreign investment. See <http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/01/why...;
Fox News has Obama +9 Associated Press has Obama +1.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/ge...
Yes the question is bogus since 1 million 32bit integers require 4MB storage.

Here is my solution. Select the 500.000 smallest values, sort them using an in place sorting algorithm and spit them out, then select the 500.000 biggest values, sort them and spit them out.

The problem then boils down to select the n/2 smallest values of the list. To do this I store the n/2 first values in the 2MB buffer. I then organize them into a heap with the biggest at the top. I then process the remaining n/2 values. When one of these values is bigger than the heap top value, it is skipped. If it is smaller, the heap biggest value is replaced with the smaller value and the heap is restored to get the biggest value at the top. When all the n/2 values have been processed, the 2MB buffer contains the n/2 smallest values of the million integer list.

Since it is already organized as a heap one can use heap sort to sort it. Pick the biggest value at the top and swap it with the last value of the list and restore heap to get the next biggest value at the top. Swap it with the last unsorted value and proceed until the heap length is reduced to one element.

Apply the same algorithm with the n/2 biggest value but using a heap with the smallest value at the top.

This algorithm requires two passes over the million integer, and uses nothing more than the 2MB buffer.

The complexity is O(nlog).
I'm not saying that I agree with the article, but it's pretty funny how all those commenting that it's wrong sound exactly like the people they are talking about.
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You can tell your customer rep that. I'm sure he will oblige.

They just want to talk to you to get everything set up like you want/need it.

How much memory does your server need? Need a backup solution? How bout an apc module? What are the bandwith requirements, do you need multi or single gigabit lines? Like I said, their business works more on a case by case basis instead of select a, b or c and proceed to checkout.
I'm not saying you have to join them, but they're a good, solid serviceprovider.
Is Anyone Buying the Googlephone?
La spiaggia di Vendicari | SiciliaSud
How to do an Xray with Sticky Tape as your xray Source
Just a couple talking to a salesman who too was figuring out how to work the new mobile phone which is powered by Google’s new Android operating system.

This line in particular makes me realize something important: All of the media exposure that the iPhone got, including (and especially) the iPhone ads, effectively acted as tutorials on how to use the device long before someone actually bought one.

Pre-launch consumer exposure to the Android interface, however, hasn't been anywhere close to what the iPhone received. That's partly because the iPhone sucked up the novelty factor, but has there even been a memorable advertising campaign for the G1 in which the interface is front and center?
Agreed. Look at the FB application platform. A year ago everybody had an app in development. Now it's a ghost town (comparatively), and everybody has an iPhone app in development. In a year, something else will be the focus of the web hype machine.
Marketing
People are talking about free or very cheap marketing on the internet... What is the least expensive way to market small online-businesses on the internet?
No matter what, to me, it seems that you need the capital up-front; without it, you are going to have a much tougher time finding developers. That capital could come from you - it doesn't have to come from investors - but you probably have to pay your developers.

You don't mention your background with respect to doing a startup before or managing people/budgets so I'm assuming you haven't done those things (also the question itself seems to support my assumption). In that case, I would suggest that you want to make damn sure that you want the money (from anyone - friends, family, etc) before you sign any deal. As an entrepreneur, you have ideas and you have a reputation. Your reputation is way more important than your ideas. This idea may be brilliant but all kinds of pitfalls lay ahead for even the most seasoned of entrepreneurs who have brilliant ideas and capital. Here's the key: if you #### this particular idea up, you #### up your reputation - and then no one wants to invest in future ideas...

Again, I'm making the assumptions that you are young and haven't done a startup on your own. Please feel free to correct my assumptions and I certainly don't mean to offend if I accidently have :)

Another word of caution: lots of people think they have access to capital but, when it comes time to actually getting the check, they find it wasn't as easy as Uncle Jimmy made it seem. Maybe you can get the money without a fuss but I'd assume you need a pretty damn good business plan if you've never done a startup and are wanting capital for a pre-revenue, idea-only company.
He explains when he talks about "heap". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_(data_structure)
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Choosing an Austin Search Engine Optimization Company
One of the Austin search engine optimization companies noted recently that if you have been a part of the web community for a long time or even if you are just starting out as a newbie, you are going to see or hear the words Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is more commonly known. SEO has become very popular these days, as there are so many different sites that are popping up on a daily, if not hourly basis.
This video is a little more informative:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7685466.stm
Ask HN: Using a hosted mail server with a CNAME that isn't your domain name
I want to use a hosted, pay-by-the-mailbox email service for email but I'm concerned about getting our emails marked as spam. I'm looking at Simplicato now (http://simplicato.com) and, when I see the configs to use, I get nervous that since the CNAME is not my domain name, many ISPs will block the email or will rate it a higher likelihood of it being spam. Example:

To use the Email Hosting Service, here are the MX and CNAME records:
·Point mx record to mx1.theemailserversdomain.com with priority 10
·Point mx record to mx2.theemailserversdomain.com with priority 20
·Point mx record to mx3.theemailserversdomain.com with priority 30
·Point CNAME mail.scottsdomain.com record to mail.theemailserversdomain.com

Notice how the MX and CNAME records are not my domain. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Thanks!
I'd venture a guess it's because that way they can extract more money from you than with clearly stated rates.
Not presently, but a good example: Facebook was copied by the German Studivz quite succesful some time ago.

Setting up a Mechanical Turk for non-US markets might work. (As of today you can work on mturk as a foreigner, but you can not commision tasks.)