skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cothink.org (in private alpha)

By making tools to encourage service learning, and continuing to pressure universities and colleges focus outward on community projects rather than the current curriculum. Exciting stuff!
Personally, if my professional reputation were based on some kind of lie, I hope nobody does me the favor of pretending I was noble.
I became interested about Sony Reader when I saw the mention of frontlight...if I can really use it at dark, I am sold.
This raises another question - how do you ensure fairness between co-founders. Particularly if one comes into the game later, or takes an extended break, or simply can't contribute as much as the others (e.g. has family commitments).

Is this usually settled in the division of equity? If so, how hard is this to change over time? I'm sure once you're rolling this wouldn't be overly simple.
First Look: Ubuntu ‘Intrepid Ibex’ Beta Delivers Improved UI, New Features
Keep in mind that there are also people who are genuinely interested in the foundations of starting their own gaming business, who are willing to work very hard, and who are simply looking for a little guidance. When you're first starting out, the whole concept of "creating a game" is very nebulous. There unfortunately isn't a definitive guide, or even a general one.
Because accounting standards make financial reports readable by standardizing them for the audience (investors). Furthermore, accounting standards make it harder to cook the books, just never impossible.
The last company I worked for before starting a startup did pro-audio stuff. Their stuff, generally, was cracked the same day it was released and estimates were that at least 80% of users weren't paying for the software. If you get popular enough, it tends to come back to haunt you.

I think one solution, as mentioned a couple times in the thread is to work on software for rich niches.
"...before this new space is completely swamped."

I don't think we'll reach that point. At least, not very soon. Digital distribution has removed part of the need to cater to publishers. It takes a lot of work for a small team to create a game, but at least it's feasable to do so today. A few years ago, it wouldn't have been. So I don't think it'll be 'game over' anytime soon for indie developers, especially with a platform like Steam to advertise their creations on.
"Google has THE ENTIRE INTERNET IN MEMORY AT ONCE"

Do they? really? or is that a gross oversimplification which clouds the facts to the point of meaninglessness as I suspect it is.

I am not qualified to say whether that is actually possible but it seems doubtful.
Good reviews on Amazon and it's inexpensive. So maybe I'll pick up a copy. I'm asking cause I might get a gig working for a non-profit that does a lot of biological research.
Ok - well this is an interesting article in many respects - but it really brushed over the concepts around transactions.

His bank transfer example is a bit oversimplified. A well designed database can have very fine grained locks that avoid that kind of thing. Big Banks will run intraday work on something like IMS Fast Path and reconcile later.

So - I don't think his examples are actually all that great - I think the better examples are literally hordes of websites out there using databases. These are a better target. If you running a forum you don't necessarily need the concurrency and casuality of a transactional database.

What traditional databases do give you is a metaphor that is established, well known, easy to deploy, etc, etc. You can use SQL Server and be sure it's supported on your host, and that you can find people to program for it. Until the cloud space settles more in this respect (years away) this is still going to be very compelling.

Interesting to watch the trend either way.
Yeah that's the problem, they're all boring and don't lead to a bit of light reading after a hard day at work.
Financial and Corporate System is in Cardiac Arrest
The cornerstone of religion!
My understanding is that the search index (at least) is all in memory - Even if you're talking about just the index hashes, that's a lot of memory.

I doubt that the actual content is - given the Google model there would be no point.
Virgin Galactic wishes to remain a Virgin
Virgin Galactic declines a $1M offer to produce a null-G sex video.
Google sets sights on philanthropic projects
If I were thinking about embarking on some moderately sleazy career path, the thought of being remembered that way might put me off.
Thanks for exactly restating his question. I needed that.
I used to know a psychologist that talked about this. It's linked into a whole bunch of other research such as theory-of-mind and other pieces.

Seeing patterns that aren't there is perfectly natural - because we've grown up and been designed to expect patterns.

Most of our life is cause and effect, so when we see an effect we're naturally inclined to extrapolate on the cause... You see a fresh kill on the savanna, it's pretty reasonable to conclude there is a predator around... This works really well most of the time, which is why we do it.

Of course, it doesn't always work... But it's to be expected.
Obama & Apple:  Advancing Methods Poetically
Thats my thoughts exactly. I feel like I know less everyone else, as everyone seems to have an opinion or something to say, yet as I don't understand the system as a whole, I would rather just shut the hell up and contribute in some positive way (thats all we can really do at the end of the day).

So well said !
Jeez, dude. I hope you're just having a bad day. Relax. Have a party with some friends. Play some guitar. Paint a self-portrait. In other words, try to be happy. If you don't care about others, they won't care about you -- and that's a rather scary position to be in.
Karel Baloun: 4 million Leaves, The game, and I am X progress
You can't hurt the feelings of the dead. I would sooner speak ill of a dead person than (an equally deserving) living person, for multiple reasons, first among them being that people can and do change.
Well, 1000 item limit on offset wasn't introduced recently. It was always there, and it was always documented. It's actually that no matter what you do, query always returns max 1000 items, offset just works "locally" on these items. There have been workarounds floating around the net, I remember one about using filtering on timestamps.

What is not documented is 1MB limit on memcached entries and also on HTTP response size (I found out only cause of exceptions). And there is 5 second limit on urlfetch with undocumented cryptic "DownloadError: ApplicationError + various numbers" exceptions.

What is tricky is that many limits happen only on production servers, so you don't discover them on a development one.

On the plus side, limits are very generous on memcache total size. Which is good as even trivial operations on datastore take a lot of CPU cycles.

Still, limits can be good. They force you to architect your application in a different, hopefully more scalable, way.
Sounds like sour grapes to me. I remember the arc vs pkarc vs pkzip deal. [1]

PKArc was arc with its compression routines rewritten in assembly. In most cases it was 5x faster. In many cases it was 10x. 10-upping a program's performance with your mad "mov ax" skills is a little bit more than "...professional reputation is based entirely on a lie." Back in the day, this was genius incarnate.

Phil made no effort to hide that it was arc redone better. He called it PKArc. May as well have simply said "Phil Katz does Arc." When he got into legal trouble (he was a far better engineer than business man, after all). He just said, "hell, these things aren't hard, I'll just make my own." and we got pkzip, which was an even further improvement.

He had skills, he had attitude, he had zero business sense. He lived hard and died young. He could have done better. He was not "a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie." IMHO, the author of arc should have spent a little more time with his assembler, a little less time with his lawyer, and a lot less time whining about the whole deal.

[1] Yeah, I know, some wide eyed youngsters are now going "you remember the zip wars!?"
I truly, honestly believe that as of today many people just cannot get to their data.

For end users that is having good web/UI tools to help them. Another part of it is allowing programmers to express their ideas about data in a better way - It should feel like you are expressing normal program logic concepts that just happen to be backed by reliable, durable, fast, cached storage.

Theres a renaissance going on now, where lots of ideas from functional programming are filtering out and being adopted..thats wonderful for our craft. We spend a lot of energy comparing one language to another, but pretty much accept without question that SQL as the only-one-true-way of handling data. Or we make a big framework to wrap that in objects, and the framework generates SQL.

Databases could have much much better programming facilities out of the box, including an expressive modern extensible language and event callback mechanisms. It should be easy to just write a usable web site without stepping out of that language - optimizing the common usage scenario.

There must be a better way, it is time to make SQL obsolete.

If your interested in hacking on something like this as open source get in touch,

gord
quantblog.wordpress.com
I'm planning to introduce a new type of financial instrument. Basically, it'll be a contract between two parties, whereby a buyer pays periodic payments to the seller in exchange for the right to a payoff if there is a default relating to some asset (e.g. a mortgage).

In the event of default, the buyer delivers the defaulted asset (e.g. the failing mortgage) to the seller for a payment of the original value of the mortgage. I think I'll call this a "physical settlement".

Alternatively, the seller can pay the buyer the difference between the original value of the mortgage and the market price of mortgage. I think I'll call this a "cash settlement".

I think this will provide a way to distribute risk through the financial system. The benefits are numerous. For example, a lender of mortgages can turn around and sell their mortgages on the open market. This should lead to laxer lending practices.
@Joshu How involved are you still over at Yahoo?
GPL and Javascript
Cliffs Notes:

Sony: Product Design = Great, Bookstore = Sucks

Amazon: Product Design = Sucks, Bookstore = Great

Sony + Amazon = Great
They brought up the Google buying Digg story repeatedly for months before Techcrunch confirmed it. I love valleywag, because they're a tabloid. They dig for dirt, throw up crap, but they break stories early and often.

Everything on Techcrunch is carefully polished press releases fed through the established PR pipeline. Everything on valleywag is actual (though often scurrilous) journalism.
Gawker Cutbacks an Early Indicator of Ad Slowdown
That's a great point. The publishers and huge game studios will continue to have their market, but the barriers to entry for small and mid-size games have definitely crumbled. It's easier to create, distribute, AND monetize the games than ever before.
I'm not. I've been gone three months now.
> The dedicated 10Gbps pipe allows much more interesting problems to be solved than a traditional grid computer (unless the grid computer uses P2P).

Particularly as this article implies CERN is connected by dedicated 10Gbps links to sites in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Taipei, UK and the USA.
I just fired up the beta on my MacBook Pro (which hasn't had an upgrade since 7.10) and... wow.

No hardware issues, everything installed itself, even my keys light up again. Multiple monitor support has gone from being a 3 hour configuration nightmare to two clicks.

Far and away the best bit is the UI polish. It seems to have everything functional I liked about clunky old KDE 3.x (window shading! focus on mouse!) plus all the good bits they could swipe from OS X and Vista.

However I wish they would enable the dark theme by default, it looks much better than the light one. None of the review screen shots do it justice.
Hey, it made things clearer. For example, when you break it down like that, you might realize that the cost vs. benefit analysis is different for different kinds of software -- there is no "critical level" in general. This is good news for Apple. As their market share grows, software crosses that threshold continuously (as opposed to all at once). That makes their platform become continuously more appealing to users too, creating a positive feedback loop.
So do I (an also am not American). I love the attitude, I have endless admiration for the US of A.
CakePHP gets a speed boost. One step closer to a RoR contender?
Significant court victory for Open Source licenses
With bug.gd, we're going to change the way users and software engineers deal with faults and errors in their applications. In our world, by default, people are going to work together a lot more to solve them and developers are going to know when/where/how their applications failed during user interaction.

The goal is to make sure that no one ever has to repeat research to work around problems that have already been solved.

We feel some of our initiatives could single-handedly lower the computer expertise needed to work with open source software, cutting-edge technologies, and things typically reserved only for early adopters.

We're really excited about the potential here.
Rules of Logo Design
Norwegian standards body implodes over OOXML controversy
How will I change the world?

Longterm:

I'm building my startup with a friend (we've applied to YC) which with we can help manage a common problem.

I can't really say what it is just yet, but we've got high expectations of ourselves.

Short term:

I know this is going to sound like an immature prank, but I'll be helping to get Rick Astley voted as the Best Act Ever at this years MTV EMA in any way I can.

Why you ask?

Well its sending a message that we don't want to be dictated too on what we should and shouldn't like - kind of like a virtual protest against the media in general.

When you consider some of the other acts up for nomination some of which I'd never heard of until yesterday (tokio hotel?), then you would understand - how can some of these artists (U2 is an exception) be classed as best acts ever when you've got the greats like the stones & beatles weren't even considered?
This looks very nice. I finally installed Ubuntu Hardy on my main desktop and got dual monitors working after a lot of hassle, but now I'm excited to try this out. Going to hold off on the beta until a final release though
MonetDB and many others are already available.

Their research last year on running on Cell (Playstation 3) was mind-blowing. Haven't seen anything even close to that anywhere.
Ask:Which is the preferred hosting solution of the web startups?
Ask: Which is the preferred hosting solution of the web startups? What is the cost involved in it?
Ripped directly from Wikipedia: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (sometimes known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act)[1] was an act signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. In the United States 1,028 economists signed a petition against this legislation, and after it was passed, many countries retaliated with their own increased tariffs on U.S. goods, and American exports and imports plunged by more than half. In the opinion of most economists, the Smoot-Hawley act was partially responsible for the severity of the Great Depression.[2][3]
Windows XP gets another six months
Practical Functional JavaScript: Code Samples
I want to introduce quality control in the field that my start-up's for. It's something that there isn't any system for online, and I want to introduce a level of self-respect beyond offline publication.
This is one of the problems of being fresh out of college. You not only know all of these models for things -- you actually believe in them -- like they're some sort of independent thing that has worth beyond its use as a glorified guesstimation metric. I don't mean that in a patronizing way -- I was exactly the same.

Buffet's kind of a champion of what you might call really-existing markets. I don't think he sees the US economy as a grand experiment where "health" exists independent of the people that are its constituents. A market is better where, as he says in the interview, 3 million extra people don't lose their jobs.
Slicehost (+ AWS)

Also see: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
Maybe you haven't heard: In Web 2.0, only free databases exist. Clustered relational databases can't exist, because if they could, the open source community would have already written one. Can I interest you in yet another sharding tutorial?
So is it better to GPL your Javascript across the board?
Query String Aware JavaScript
Changing the world seems to be a bit of a loaded phrase that begs for delusions of grandeur. I prefer the phrase Guy Kawasaki uses sometimes, "make meaning".

I think ideas are more a product of the times than they are of individuals, generally. Most important new ideas are invented in multiple places simultaneously.

I love music. And film. And I read a lot. And I'm fairly social online. I started Directed Edge because there's too much noise on the web that gets in the way of me finding the content I care about.
Yes, they both were.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_B...

Amazingly, his motor challenge was quickly met by a meticulous craftsman using conventional tools; the motor met the conditions, but did not advance the art. In 1985, Tom Newman, a Stanford grad student, successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities by 1/25,000, and collected the second Feynman prize.
ATL Startup News
Biography of Jenny Rivera
Anyone notice banner ads on Google Image search?
I was poking around on Google image search and they have standard wide banner ads along the bottom. It's weirdly jarring to see on Google but inevitable, I guess (they did buy DoubleClick after all).
You don't need to look at the relative credibility of the Daily Show to tell you that our media is worthless (no, worse -- it is dangerous).
For virtualized systems, a lot of our customers are very happy with Linode. We also have folks that seem extremely happy using Joyent and Rimuhosting. AWS is very promising, but has a history of reliability problems that makes me less enthusiastic about it than I want to be.

We've got dedicated boxes at The Planet and Softlayer. We've been happy with the hosting experience at both, though Softlayer has exhibited some very shifty billing practices...so I probably wouldn't go with them in the future.
Well, if you want to be technical - the rise of shareware was mostly about the distribution model.

Shareware came about when distribution was very expensive. You needed to have retail channels to sell software - which is why software and hardware channels went hand in hand. If you wanted to sell Norton Commander, you needed to manufacture it, send it to stores, sell it, etc, etc. All very expensive.

So the idea behind Shareware was - make as many copies as you like, give them to your friends, if you like, send me some money. Obviously not everyone sends you money, but your distribution was free.

In a time where distribution was expensive, this was a big deal. You could make money from the occasional $20 contribution from what was a comparatively massive distribution channel - rather than charge many times more than that and have fewer sales. It enabled "smaller" applications to thrive.

Now - this isn't really applicable today. Distribution isn't as expensive as it was. So the same rules don't necessarily apply.

Not to say you shouldn't adopt the shareware, or philosophy of shareware, or some of the models - but depending on what you want to do there are many more options available to you nowadays. Have a think about your solution and how best to put it in the hands of people that need it.
By building a Twitter for the homeless
Well, at least he wasn't bitter about it.
Good authority meaning?
Slacker Uprising BitTorrent Takedown Sent to DNS Provider
10 Must-Have Linux Office Applications
Be Your Start-Up
Download Battlestar Galactica Free
One of the most popular shows is Battlestar Galactica and there has been a drove of people appearing to Download Battlestar Galactica Episodes Free .
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I've produced this article for anyone that's looking to Download Big Love Episodes Free to tell you a couple of things you should acknowledge before you do this! First of all a great deal of the websites or services you see out there that say you can Download Big Love Episodes Free are nothing but cons!
I think changing the world is a fairly daunting task, so I'm just trying to focus on solving a specific problem in my world.

I think if we all solve one problem, collectively we can change the world for everyone.
I think any gambler sees patterns in streaks, whether it be roulette or poker.

People see patterns in athlete's hot streaks, but really these streaks aren't outside of statistical randomness. People think that someone on a streak should take the next shot, but really their next shot is as likely as any other shot.
I would love to read what pmarca has to say about all this. Too bad he stopped blogging just when things got really interesting :-/
"Good authority" almost always means "People so highly placed that they do know what's going on, but not so highly place that naming them wouldn't get them fired." On the hierarchy, they are below "A spokesman," but well above "people familiar with the matter."
The OLPC-provided Reader activity is very functional, but last I checked, it eats memory at a ridiculous rate. Someone recommended FBReader to me, which is a cross-platform reader app with a Linux version.
A little late to the party. This happened weeks ago.
Remember the Sony-BMG rootkit scandal?

I haven't bought anything with Sony's name on it since then, and if I'm getting a reader (likely) it's not going to be from them.
i like the approach; intridea's socialspring has the same architecture
I thought about it but facebook seems the wrong context for this. When I go to facebook, I'm usually bored and this does not satisfy that need.
Useful pointer. thx a lot!

I'll be in touch.
Google App Engine has all the makings of a great service, but for the reasons listed in the article, it fails...

* ...1M limit is also on files uploaded — early on, created a game application with Django on GAE but had to trim down my /dict/words file to words with less than 9 characters as it had to be under 1M or it wouldn't upload...

* ...really don't mind the 1000 call limit as you really shouldn't be doing that much DB access for a single transaction... ...but the lack of aggregate functions (and the GAE team suggested "workaround" is an inelegant non-ACID compliant hack that really is dreadful when you consider the next point...) and inability to run any offline processes against the complete data repository (if you go over 1000 records). There's been some rather arcane AJAX hacks to mediate this, but to me, that's an awfully inelegant solution.

* ...I bumped up against quotas by simple performing ONE DataStore read/write with a 200-300K object pickle/unpickle... ...not the total quota, just the singles got tagged as CPU-intensive...
I don't understand why people care how they will be remembered.
Also Hosted Labs - they meet USV's definition of a real cloud (although entry price point is very high).
It's either Slicehost or Linode when you're starting out... Slicehost is slightly preferred here for their more stable architecture, but Linode is slightly cheaper and realistically just as good.