skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not going to make a comment on whether or not FB can be profitable... but here is some doom and gloom comedy if you believe we're in a monsoon of a shit storm:

Employers will cut staff, trim the fat, and leave only the super productive. Businesses will put a stop on productivity leaks, this means the 18-20 people on my FB buddy list (99% of which have graduated) at 1pm on a Thursday will have to call it quits, or lose their job.

College students will be faced with a credit squeeze, halt their $30-40 a month @home internet and return to using school provided connectivity, making them a far less connected market.

Fb traffic declines, advertising expenditures are cut... Fb and Pets.com become soul mates.

Just kidding... :)
What is worse than politics on Hacker News? Bad technology drama.

On Lisp is fucking awesome and that will never change.
Three years?!
Yes, Uncov is Back
Cheap outsourcing is probably going to start looking pretty good to the management-types. Quantity over quality...
To all the ex-ycombinator,

If I have a proper beta product, do I have higher chance to get in?
Investor calls up press contacts for their portfolio companies, news at 11.
I'm trying to understand what you're saying.

"but must dollars earned have a good chance of being a Google's"

Are you saying that the few companies "make" the portfolio (i.e. the anomalies and hits carry the return) or? If so, I agree, but the hits aren't all run like Google.

My personal risk preferences have nothing to do with this argument.
>It is clear his teenage shyness is a thing of the past, but his inner geek certainly remains. Who else but the co-founder of Apple would name his dogs X, Y and Z, and consider naming his child Zowoz "because it's a palindrome"?

Wow. Just... wow.
Norvig's sudoku-solving essay is pretty awesome, too (100 lines of Python).

http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
Huh? Lifting for an hour burns a comparable amount (around half as much) of calories to jogging for an hour and is not only more sustainable for a beginner, but helps build muscle mass which makes losing fat exponentially easier.

I guess you could argue that it doesn't have all the cardiovascular benefits, but the usual definition of "in shape" isn't exclusively cardio-fitness. Just do whatever exercise suits you best that you are most likely to devote time to.
Five million in funding for local information ventures
I've always done this...but sometimes to an extreme that is unhealthy (for myself and my company). I come from a DIY family. My dad never hired anyone to do anything: plumbing, car repair, electrical (he was an electrician and electronics repairman before becoming an engineer, so this was obviously sensible), roofwork, ductwork, painting, landscaping and yard maintenance, etc. So, when I run into a problem, my first instinct is to do it myself. And a lot of times, I end up doing it myself...and spending a lot of time learning how to do it.

But, I'm (finally) beginning to learn that there are simply some things that I will never do well. And some things that, even if I can do them, it makes me ill to do them because of how repetitive they are (like bookkeeping, filing, accounting, etc.), or how much practice it takes me to get to proficiency (like web design), or how my natural and very strong introversion fights against success in the area (like cold calling, or LinkedIn "warm calling", for market research and business development). I'm also beginning to realize that by focusing on these tasks, which can be very time consuming, I'm missing out on other opportunities to grow our business. So, I'm interviewing bookkeepers this week (craigslist is awesome for job postings, by the way...I've been amazed at the results: 200+ applicants for a part-time bookkeeping/filing office management position), and I hired a friend to do some light business development and market research for us.

The thing is, when I add up the numbers (for example, $400/month for a bookkeeper), I realize how stupid it was for me to try to do this work for so long. There is certainly value in knowing the position well enough to hire well. I can choose someone based on their intelligence and enthusiasm rather than purely on the resume and experience, since I can train them in the specifics, if needed. But, I think I waited too long to hire this position. It's one of the aspects of the company that has been weighing on my mind for a while, and keeping me from being as enthusiastic about getting to work each day.

So, as with most things DHH says, I agree...but with caveats. Don't take it to extremes.
Do you really believe that a company that makes the majority of its income from advertising will hold its value through one of the worst recessions were facing in a long time?

There's going to be some major spending cutbacks across the board over the next couple years because there HAS to be (from people to business to government), and advertising/marketing is going to be at the top of the list. There is a fundamental shift in the economy right now - credit is drying up and people are going into conserve and save mode.

There's no way in hell Google will have a $15 EPS two years from now, you can put this post in your calendar for October 2010. So yes, when Google's EPS is something like $1.50, it will make a ton of sense when they're trading at $40-50. Unless they've got some mysterious source of income, advertising is going to suffer horribly in this recession and so will the companies that depend on it.
Yeah, not very smart to say "Weight lifting is a cop-out" and then say "Don't shirk on your core" a few lines down...
You'll need to whitelist that page within Flashblock, then it should work.
Rails Logging Tips
Is this the bottom? Maybe for now. But not forever.
I posted page 3 because page 1 has already been previously posted, but didn't get modded up.

I'm reposting because I think it's a good read given the current situation.
Distributed programming with Jabber and EventMachine
Perhaps it's still too early to tell, but this certainly does read a bit differently now than it did when I wrote it two years ago.

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/letter
Ha, I got way into this game. It's all about the recursion! At least for me. Here are the videos of my solutions (132 commands, total):

http://toshuo.com/2008/light-bot/
Do you really believe that a company that makes the majority of its income from advertising will hold its value through one of the worst recessions were facing in a long time?

Umm...yes?

But, at least you're making a little sense now. I don't believe they will lose as much revenue as you think. Marketing does decline in a downturn--but it also retreats to quality (i.e. the overall ad spend declines, but what is spent is refocused on the best performing tools). And AdWords is among the absolute best bang for your bucks advertising model available. Anybody that's doing even basic metrics will know that (I advertise on a half dozen different networks, and AdWords is pretty much the head and shoulders best performer, and in response to that knowledge I've increased AdWords spend, and decreased spend with folks like AdBrite and Yahoo). Also, the downturn will hit smaller advertising networks much harder than Google, who have huge cash reserves. Google will survive. Many of its competitors will not. So, the number of places companies can advertise is going to get smaller, possibly a lot smaller.

So, while I agree that everything is going to see cuts, including marketing, I don't think it's going to just stop. As long as a company is in business, it must be marketing, or it'll die soon after. If you aren't reaching people every day, you can't survive. Cuts will happen, and some of Googles customers will die off, but marketing spend isn't going to dry up any more dramatically than other aspects of the economy--maybe less so, since it is core to making money. And companies really want to make money now.

So, long-term, I'm still bullish on Google. Particularly if the stock price continues to drop. I should probably shake down some of my friends at Google for hints on how much impact this is really going to have on their bottom line...but I'm kinda running on gut feeling right now. So, I could be wrong, and you could be right. I'm not betting any money I can't afford to lose, but I'd certainly like to win rather than lose.
Hedge Funds May Cut Volatility as Short-Sale Ban Ends
Why should the risk strategy of a company be any different from a personal risk strategy? If anything companies can afford to be riskier.
There's no "formal agreement," because we don't have the power to dictate to startups we fund how they should deal with the press. We tell them, as I would tell any founder, that it is good to be covered in TC, and TC is generally willing to write about them, because they know YC is a genuinely good source of leads. Each one of these startups has already been selected from among many applicants.
its simple really, Arrington trusts PG's judgement on what is a good or a bad startup, so he covers them so that he can be one of the first ones to cover the next reddit
http://slashdot.org/
I doubt its impacting them that much. I mean its only 15 grand. Maybe the YC graduates will have a tough time getting funding...but the actual program will probably operate as usual
I am the worst procrastinator ever so I know where you're coming from. However, procrastinating / being lazy occasionally doesn't change the fact that I know what I should be doing. All the article motivated me to do was rant about the article ;)
David Axmark Leaves Sun
We're not planning to do anything different, and so far the number of applications is about what it usually is.
Just to set things straight, you are suggesting companies shouldn't start like Google where they are focused on a technology that has no obvious way to make money (at the time). You agree the high growth long term strategy has its place, but claim companies should not just start down their runway before making sure there is even a profit to be made there.

I was talking past you because in my mind I wasn't seeing a distinction between having a long term, high growth business and being unsure of how to monetize.

While your stance is prudent, most of the greatest tech company success stories of this decade were from companies that didn't know (for certain) how to monetize, because they were so far into uncharted territory. And even though there are only a few of those companies, they seem to be earning most of the money between companies started in this decade. So being more focused on technology than profitability is a valid business strategy, as long as you have runway. That's what I'm saying, and what I think you disagree with.
In the post about strength & training, I was going to discuss this very point.

My point is still that lifting by itself is not a complete work out.

I lift regularly, for a number of benefits, including the one you mentioned. But to the idea of getting in physical shape, lifting weights (with a good program) is still secondary to cardiovascular activity.

Besides, the real hack is taking the time spent discussing here and on other boards, and exercising! ;)
> Take 90 minutes, same time, same place every day.

Completely ridiculous and counter productive. Half an hour twice a week is quite sufficient to maintain a reasonable level of fitness if you're doing it right.

> Get at least 9 hours a day.

Who the hell sleeps 9 hours? Sleep when you're tired. Drink when you're thirsty. It's not complicated.
More of the same thing http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker...
There are few people that I would rather see fall into a fiery downfall of fail more than Zuckerberg. Maybe he'll wise up and take the cash before it's too late.
I have, but oddly enough not to track workouts, but just nutrition. Quick & easy way to keep track of calories consumed, proteins, carbs, etc.
Sell Short to Save the Market
Sure. So it's easier to make programs that scale well. However, given sufficiently low-level primitives, you can completely emulate the Erlang model, with problem-specific extra hacks to help performance.

No, it's not as easy. It's possible to make it perform much better, though, through micro-optimization of the specific operations needed.

It's similar to doing a problem in assembly. On the macro level, it takes far less effort to make a performant system in a high level language, however for simple algorithms that are commonly used, you can typically get a threefold speed improvement by doing them in assembly, for a significant increase in implementation effort.

Wow, I never thought I'd compare Java to assembly.
The Kodak Zi6: A Flip Killer?
MySQL vs PostgreSQL
Really? What types of exercise do you recommend?

I'd have to be dead tired to sleep 9 hours.
Good points (I wrote the article in question).

I'd like to put this out there -- I am talking to people on the business end of things a lot more than the technical talent (I've been on both sides).

Also, I am responding to the video that was embedded that implies that the sky is falling and everyone is going to be out of a job soon enough. I've always been opposed to that sentiment because it ignores what you so elegantly put at the end of your comment -- people doing good stuff (from both a technical and a business perspective) will continue to do well.

As for "digital marketing expert," ugh . . . I think it follows the same line, us "experts" will need to relax or panic as quality dictates.
McDonald's Embraces Twitter by Agressively Following Others
I see nothing wrong with gambling on horses or drinking beer all day. One will quickly put you into debt and the other will quickly put you in a grave, of course, but who cares?

Look, I spent many years of my life quite literally telling people what they needed to do achieve their goals and trying to keep them from making short-term decisions that were quite obviously poor.

"Don't get back together with him, I guarantee within a month he'll leave you again and you'll be screwed."
"I know you hate your job, but stop cussing at your boss until you find a new one!"

I have a pretty solid track record of being right. I used to judge people pretty harshly when they made obviously stupid life decisions that turned out to bite them in the ass, but I realized all it accomplished was making me incredibly cynical and untrusting towards anyone to do the "right" thing; whatever I happened to define as "right" that is. Now, I just live and let live. As long as someone's decision doesn't affect me I am not going to recommend against it. I'm also not going to make distinctions between "drinking all day" and "tending to a garden all day" -- they're both equally acceptable to me. Drinking all day while tending to a garden sounds like it could prove entertaining.
The guys at Sequoia, whatever their flaws, don't panic easily and wouldn't call all of their portfolio CEO's together to issue this set of warnings--which will lead to layouts and cutbacks of all sorts--if they didn't believe that it was necessary.
Counter this doombaya ceremony with these (wiser) comments (pulled from a CNN economic report), below. Most salient point: This is a financial panic, not an economic one.

QUOTE:

The weak dollar is boosting demand for our goods abroad, and lower gas prices are making Americans feel more flush. Add in the cash that the Fed has been hosing into the banking system and we are bound to see growth in 2009. "If all this stimulus has no effect on the economy, that would be a rarity indeed," says Paulsen.

Standard & Poor's chief economist David Wyss expects a mild recession that ends next spring. "Gradually we will regain confidence in the market. Lower oil prices and a falling trade deficit will help," he says. "This is a financial panic, not an economic one."

Of course, that could change if the financial panic doesn't abate soon. If banks remain too scared or broke to lend, would-be home buyers will be frozen out of the market. If that happens, home values could fall even more, crimping confidence and putting the brakes on the economy's greatest engine: the consumer.
Domain Name Dollar Store
It's not so much that lifting "boosts your metabolism" as it improves your hormone profile, which reconfigures your body to be leaner. Lifting with intensity boosts growth hormone and testosterone, which will cause your body to shed fat. Muscle mass also increases insulin resistance.

Your body is not a simple thermodynamic machine. Calories in vs calories out is really not how it works.
Hilarious - reminds me of Ric Romero.
Will is a strong word for so early.
KKR - the idea here is to get in shape, not maintain a reasonable level of fitness.

While certainly 1/2 hour 2x/week is better than no work outs at all, it's not the quickest way to get in shape.

That being said, I do advocate start slowly -- I started just 3 days/week.
Maybe you are just unaware of the dangers.

Bike lanes are usually very close to parked cars. A door opens, and you are in the hospital.

Bike lanes are poorly striped at intersections. Sometimes they stick them to the right of all traffic lanes, so if a cyclist in the bike lane stays in it to go through the intersection, he is going to get right-hooked by turning cars. Sometimes the lanes are striped so that straight-through traffic is in the right place, but this encourages cyclists to do stupid things like making turns from the center lane.

Finally, the cars driving in the real traffic lanes push all the debris into the bike lane. That means you will be riding over wires, broken glass, etc., and that you will be very susceptible to flats.

Basically, once you are comfortable riding on the road, you will forget that bike lanes even exist. Riding a bike is statistically somewhat dangerous, but if you actively try to stay safe, you will.

(And oh yeah, please get some freakin' lights for your bike if you are going to ride at night.)
Positive cash flow gets you "infinite runway" and allows you to survive through a downturn. In a down economy just being able to say that you are viable means you are more likely to get new business.
Ok, but if your body wasn't built to do something and you're still going to do it anyway, you might as well use any resources you can afford to ease your pain.
Intense exercise. I usually come close to puking when I lift. Keep moving and breathing hard.

I go to a track and do various kinds of intervals. Sprint 50m, walk 50m for example. It doesn't even take 20 minutes and if you do it right you should be quite sore the next day.

Fitness comes from pushing your tolerance, NOT from investing a lot of time. You should be pushing yourself hard enough that working out the next day will not feel like an option.
If you're interested in starting a lifting program I would recommend "Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe.

http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength-2nd-Mark-Rippetoe/dp...

It includes a good starting program for beginners which is built around the deadlift, squat and bench press.
Indeed, 90 minutes/day is just not necessary, unless the goal is training for sport or competition.

In fact, the HN crowd in particular might benefit from the compressed workout routine known as CrossFit. The workouts seldom take longer than 30 minutes--usually less--and have the combined benefit of training strength and cardio-vascular fitness. Mental toughness place a BIG role here, too. (Think: Better, Faster, Stronger)

Check it out:
http://www.crossfit.com/

Each WOD ("Workout Of the Day") is different than the last, and all of the exercises can be done at a park or in a home/garage gym. Any equipment used has DIY instructions to build rather than buy. In short, it's perfect for us entrepreneur-types who are [by necessity] so stingy with our time and money.

A quote from one of the CrossFit founders/coaches best sums up its benefits: "Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and are more useful in general." -Mark Rippetoe
Nasa X-29 [An aircraft only computers can fly]
> KKR - the idea here is to get in shape, not maintain a reasonable level of fitness.

I am in shape. I ran a 56 400m the other day. That's not competitive, but it's in shape. I average about 2.5 "workouts" per week, but it's not rare that I go a week without exercising at all. Nothing I do takes over 35 minutes, except for long bike rides, which I don't really do regularly.

Unless you're training for an endurance event, you do not need to spend a lot of time exercising to get into the top 20%. And if you ARE training for endurance I would recommend against it if your goal is health, because endurance athletes have health problems.
Has anyone done market research for their startup?
I'm working on a web startup in the medical technology field. I'm taking a 10 week business entrepreneur course and I've started doing old school market research at the business library at the advice of a potential investor.

I'm actually finding the process really useful, but as a long time software developer a part of me is urging myself to stop the research and finish coding the prototype of my site. Has anyone else struggled with this balance of work when building their prototype and business plan?
The answer is simple. It is the same reason why most of you here automatically vote for anything posted by PG to Hacker news :)
Adobe demos Photoshop CS4's content-aware scaling
If you're doing Crossfit style sessions, then it certainly is "enough" to get in shape. There's more to strength training than typical body-building workouts.
Excellent. I just moved close to Tuft's where there's a track. I'll try it out - thank you.
I have a tendency to follow the "do everything yourself" mantra, where everything refers to things I actually enjoy doing but may include an excessive number of tasks for a single person to do with great efficiency or skill. Did you ever watch "Jack Of All Trades?" Well, I'm Jack, but not as awesome as Bruce Campbell. Man that show rocked. Where was I again? Oh, right.

So I'll code, design, sysadmin, and all this other stuff. I'd be a genius if I weren't so average at all of them. The problem becomes, though, that since I've been doing all this stuff for so long I'm very reluctant to actually let someone replace me. What if they're incompetent? What if they're really smart but lazy? How do I manage them when I can't even reliably manage myself? What do I do about the fact that I've become so used to being in complete control of everything?

I think there's something to be said about just finding someone smart and talented to do something you have no idea how to do. I definitely take this approach with all business matters as they are forever deferred to Dan; I have no desire to gain more than a cursory understanding of how that stuff works. Sometimes I'll want to learn a bit more about what caused the financial crisis or what some business term is and I'll ask, but it's only out of curiosity, not because I want to actually use that knowledge for anything.

A prerequisite to buying a microwave isn't knowing how it works, at least for me. I only care whether or not it heats shit up.
This is great news for those who opted for the slower route of developing services/solutions without external funding. It has the effect of reducing competition within the marketplace. It will also divert developers to projects with better business models.
An ISBN doesn't mean much. Anyone can get one for free from createspace.com. I liked getting real and bought a hard copy on a recommendation even with the free PDF available.
I never thought it was funny, but those who did may not like it so much in a bad economy. It won't be amusing to hear someone always being negative when all the other news is negative already.
Yeah, but cardio is good for the brain.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_11exce...