skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
E-mail me.

I hooked up with a couple other HN'ers a year ago looking into something like this.

We never made the team gel, but you might have some info that some of them would be interested in.

Government need is easy to spot. Actually making something happen can take a long, long, long, long time. (Like a year just to get a SBIR started)
This is not necessarily true. The number of populated places also increases.

There are many, many more desirable places to live now in the US than there were 50, or 100 years ago. While desirability is subjective, I'd argue that the growth in the number of desirable places to live is outpacing population growth. The revitalization of many American downtowns, as well as the necessary reorganization of our land use, will further propel this trend.
Reminds me of the escalating bumper sticker wars between the Jesus fish stickers and the Darwin fish (with legs) stickers... recently I've started seeing "Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish" stickers. I'm still waiting for "Darwin fish eating a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish".

I can't wait to see Microsoft's meta-meta-response.
Correct. Technically in this case they are in the clear because what people see on Google is what they will get when they click on the link.

What is currently penalized is when you do this without checking the referrer and show everyone a sign-up screen. That'll get you penalized in a serious hurry.
I use a PC and I don't really have any pain that I can think of-- but maybe I'm just used to it. Ya know, one of these days I'd love to compare RescueTime data for the aggregate Windows population and the aggregate Mac population (to see if one works harder, futzes with their OS more, etc.).
And Perl and Lua and Lisp and most other major languages: http://cocoadev.com/index.pl?CocoaBridges
No, my advice is to read well regarded forums (John Stone Fitness is one of them) and to read the stickies which are posts that have been deemed ("moderated," if you will) by the readers and the moderators to be the most informative.
Hedge Fund Boss Retires at 37. Thanks "Idiot Traders"
I don't git your antagonism toward him.
Permit me a moment of apoplexy.

I'm back.

[T]he market place [is] revaluing assets inline with their true values.

This begs the question of how the assets became overvalued in the first place. The answer, though hard for market apologists to swallow, is that the market did it. We can't simply presume that every good thing that happens is due to the market and every bad thing is some unexplained phenomenon.

[T]hat is not the fault of capitalism but the fault of people playing silly buggers.

This is the No True Scotsman fallacy. We can't say that "True Capitalism" would have fixed this, but people playing silly buggers are the cause of all the trouble. News flash: The market is composed of people playing silly buggers! This is the very crux of the point. "True Capitalist Markets" may always value assets best when unregulated, but "True Capitalist Markets" don't exist. Classical free markets are a mathematical construct in which all the agents act rationally but with imperfect information. Real markets are real constructs where the agents are silly stupid human beings with all their irrational beliefs and psychological frailties. This is why there is an emerging field called "Behavioral Economics." This is why there was an article by Paul Krugman featured here the other day about why real markets failed English Cuisine for a century or more.

The point can be beautifully summed up in a joke I read once: An economist and his granddaughter were walking along when the granddaughter saw a $20 bill on the sidewalk. Anxious for moral guidance, she tugs on her grandfather's shirt and asks, "Should I pick up that $20 bill?"

"Nonsense," replied the economist. "If that were a real $20 bill someone would have picked it up already."
[digression]
I find it interesting that "what's old is new again" theme strikes again. In this video, near the 7 minute mark, he's talking about moving applications off of mainframes/servers and running them as desktop clients for ease of development, speed, cost, and so on. Sounds kind of like the inverse of what people seem to be trying to do today with web apps. Again.

And of course, this isn't the first time the cycle repeasts.
Googlers Getting Rich Even As Stock Tanks
k THAT is pretty cool.

you done good, boy
That screencast is for RubyCocoa, a bridge.

MacRuby is a native implementation of Ruby in Objective C.
It's satisfying reading an article on this subject by someone who (seems) to know what they are talking about. I've been hearing so many opinions from so many different sources, but few seem to really understand the big picture of this issue; no doubt because it is very complex.

I found an interesting connection made between the internet bubble and the housing bubble caused by interference from the Fed (the source has a capitalist bias):

"Injections of liquidity to stop the meltdown in the wake of the failure of Long Term Capital Management fueled the internet bubble. Injections of liquidity to avoid a market crash when the internet bubble burst fueled the housing bubble. Now, following the bursting of that bubble, the Fed is making historically huge amounts of credit available to keep the economy afloat."
http://www.atlassociety.org/cth-43-2085-credit_crisis.aspx

Another piece of the puzzle.
Linux Ecosystem worth $25 billion
I considered Disqus, and will continue to evaluate it, but for now I'm going old-skool and leaving comments off my blog. I'd like to experiment with using HN for comments. Hmm, I wonder if I could hook up a piece of JS that automatically pulls the HN url when I post it here...
I've had dreams in unix and Emacs.
Don't let "details" like "making money" distract you from building a "product".

Meanwhile, back here in reality, monetization models do play into deployment strategies. :-)
My comment on how this is related to epistemology:

http://curi.us/blog/post/1339-steve-yegge-on-epistemology
Illinois is an "at will" state. The useless checklist performance reviews described in the article are extremely prevalent here. Wrongful termination isn't the only reason that people sue. Claims of discrimination are probably the biggest fear.
To be honest I only clicked the link to see a video and I am happy I did. I love messing with my cat. They think they are so clever and in control, it always good to put them in their place sometimes.
I think this service is by the same guy as RailsPlayground. A RailsPlayground account is $5/mo for a regular shared hosting, plus you get a free svnrepository account (1GB, unlimited repositories, Trac, etc..).

http://railsplayground.com/sub_trac.html
Plan Trips Faster by Measuring Where You (and others) Hit Traffic with Android GPS
Blogging platform: Wordpress or Webby?
I'm relaunching my blog and I'm considering two platforms, Wordpress and Webby/Webgen/staticfiles. I plan to use disqus comments for both, and my requirements include easy embedding of media and syntax-colored code.

Wordpress:

* Simple to set up

* Can write in HTML or use WYSIWYTYG editor. Can post from external clients that support Atom Publishing Protocol or Wordpress's XML-RPC. Can easily post from anywhere.

* Disqus plugin incorporates comment text into the actual page without javascript, so Google can index comments at my site

* Plugins provide relatively painless media embedding

* No good source embedding, but gist.github's secret .pibb format (http://gist.github.com/15914.pibb) provides a stop-gap solution, and I'm sure I could get someone to write a plugin to automate that.

* It's written in PHP and MySQL, and I hate PHP and MySQL.

* Since of course I will immediately become famous and widely read, Wordpress's dynamic page generation could be a performance issue.

Webby:

* More complex to set up -- I have to write posts, run the generator on them, and then upload them to the site. This can be automated, but it's still a higher level of effort.

* Can write in HTML, Markdown, whatever. Can write in my favorite editor easily. However, if there's infrastructure for the blog on my personal machine, I can't easily post from other machines.

* Disqus integration would happen via javascript; Google would index comments at the disqus page.

* Media embedding is more difficult, though a few custom template tags can make this easier.

* Excellent and very customizable source embedding.

* Not written in PHP and MySQL.

* Static files scale very well.

On the whole, I'm leaning towards using Wordpress, due to a lower amount of up-front effort needed, but I thought I'd get your comments, if you have any to offer.
I vote for wordpress. I don't know about the source embedding, but Wordpress performance can be significantly improved through WP-Super Cache (which basically generates static HTML files, IIRC). I use WP-Cache, and that has worked fine for me through a couple spikes (5K visitors one day when I hit Hacker News, was also Stumbled, etc).

I think the main concern comes down to how important embedding source code is, and whether there are any good wordpress plugins that do that. I don't know the answer to that.

Also, Wordpress is relatively painless to backup, move between hosts, upgrade, etc. I cannot speak for Webby, it may also be solid.
I talked to a guy recently who had a plausible-sounding theory that ad spend won't drop hugely, but it will be spent in fewer places - the bigger, "safer" sites.
Scopes and the Properties Pattern
It's almost like an animal aristocracy that hundreds of years of domestication can't kill.
What early hires are you thinking of?
At GE in Jack Welch's days, they routinely fired the bottom 10%. Up or out.

Welch's rank-and-yank has been documented as, almost without debate, a failure. GE still uses some form of it, but not the draconian 10%.

The first problem with it is that it's difficult to allocate the firings across divisions. If you do this unevenly, workers and managers in the divisions hardest hit get angry about the perceived injustice. If you do it evenly, you end up firing people in high-performing divisions who might be good employees by the company-wide standard.

The second issue is that a company's proportion of deadwood decreases with successive firings. The first iteration, most of the people let go are of negative value to their teams, and few people miss them. Second iteration, some mediocre performers are fired, but managers would rather not let them go because they're still of positive value to the team, and their firing means that those remaining have to do more work. Third iteration, it's impossible to find enough deserving people, and hell breaks loose: managers get pissed off about being forced to can good people, and line workers get angry when they see respected colleagues depart.
Authenticity
On that thread, it'd be a pretty nifty thing to have HN comments & posting directly integrated at the bottom of the blog post.
Microsoft U Rank: Personalize Your Search Results
I just got the new macbook too! Its so frickin solid. The only thing that makes me mad is that they don't have s-video adapters anymore...lame.
You mean 2.0 times as good! :P
Ask HN: What billing merchants do you use?
I'm currently on giving our site (decorati.com) the ability to buy services via PayPal and am curious what you all use out there to process payments.

The last joint I worked at utilized a combination of Netbilling, MetaCharge, Servebase, SafeCharge, CCBill and LocalBilling.
I use a lot of computers but I don't have that strong feelings about them. What's your point? That you know people who hate Macs? Good for you. I do prefer Linux for work, but I know many people who love Macs and even the ones who don't use them respect Macs as well finished computers with a polished OS. Remember: OSX is kind of Nextstep 5.0 and I can respect that as much as I do respect, say, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX.

You may think there is a huge number of people who can't stand Macs, but I assure you it's a very localized phenomena you are observing. Most certainly you are keeping the wrong company. Do they also install neon lights under their cars?

Classy...
Bloglines Gets A Band-Aid; And We Hear It’s Still For Sale
Haha. Try running that through Apple's iPhone app submission process. Viva truly open platforms!
I want to be this man.
Who Should Be CTO of the USA?
From yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335815
I respect them, too. I'm a little surprised by how many people have harped on this minor detail. The name was intended to reflect how uncreative Pierre is -- embodying the worst of web2.0 copycattery (is that a word? I like it anyway).
This is also multiplied by the character encoding, so when you have a table with 10 columns at VARCHAR(255) because your too lazy to define them, and they are all UTF8, so that's 255*3 for each column for each row when used in a MySQL Internal buffer (not, these buffers may or may not be used depending on the type of query).

When you have 100s to 1000s of queries per second, knowing and using your memory wisely is very important, because MySQL unlike Oracle for example, does not cap the amount of memory used for the Process, again using the Oracle approach the PGA (Process Global Area).

It's always easy to take sort cuts in design, when your DB will never grow above a few GB's and your users will never grow above say 10.

VARCHAR(255) is just as much a sign of little to no design, and therefore this and many other beginner 101 mistakes are likely, and therefore large performance gains are generally easily made in a system that now is needed to perform.
Sorry about the dupe. Missed it yesterday and it looks like it's re-sourced here.

You'd think we'd have some kind of spiffy dupe-detection code here, huh?
Ask YC: Examples of freemium companies that did not work?
After the recent discussion on the freemium "business model", I'm doing some research (for a future blog post as well as just personal interest) into what makes companies successful or not using freemium.

The funny thing: though it's very easy to find companies that use freemium successfully, it's much more difficult to find companies that failed.

Does anyone have examples of companies that failed trying to use freemium and either died completely or switched to another (more or less successful) model?
If you submit the same link twice it catches it, but there's no logic to try to detect the same story reported in different locations.
Google internal employee-compensation presentation on Transferable Stock Options
Vint Cerf/ Bill Gates
Some link sites (like DZone) will go out and load the page in question once the link is submitted. I know DZone makes a neat little thumbnail of the site, but seems like you could also do some basic text analysis while you're at it.

Not sure it's worth it, though. I don't think the dupe ratio here is that high.
Or, better, WP-Super-Cache. It makes static files.
Something I wished for when disqus first came out...
With Free Bikes, Challenging Car Culture on Campus
Woz
These ads are getting more and more lame. As a fulltime programmer and xp and vista user - I never felt the need to use macs but for their unix base and cool design. Considered buying one recently but settled for a vista pc with much better configuration at half the price. It has been running great for me with not a single issue in past 6 months. For any need of unix system, I run ubuntu or freebsd vmware appliances on my vista.

If apple cannot convince a frugal programmer like me who would love to own a mac - I do not know how even these ads can help them much in the general pc market. I think they will remain limited only to folks who really appreciate their commitment to design and would pay so much extra just for that.
I'd pick WordPress.

Sure, static files might scale better, but handling traffic is not usually the problem for most people. Getting traffic is.
RSS Adoption at 11% and it May Be Peaking, Forrester Says
If Lessig doesn't want the job then Obama should give it to Rod Beckstrom and then have Bruce Schneier replace Beckstrom as head of the National Cyber Security Center. Giving someone the position just because they're famous for inventing a piece of technology is a terrible idea. Schneier would be a much better pick for NCSC because not only is his expertise in security, but he is really good at selling his ideas and motivating average users to get behind best practices. Beckstrom on the other hand is highly intelligent, competent, and intellectually curious, but he isn't really a security expert. He would however be an excellent candidate for national CTO.
You can now use Backtype to import your News.YC comments on FriendFeed
Before our eyes, the Arctic is changing from an impenetrable wasteland into an oceanic crossroads.
Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Jay Fields
I've only had a small amount of experience with Lisp, so I'm just curious: would macros solve syntactic problems like that?
Wordpress all the way. Just use WP-Super-Cache. Scales very well.
Starting a company is like landing on the shore of a deserted island
"... Compelling? It's wrong. ..."

Contrary statements are fine if you can explain why. Why is this wrong?
Great read, but I have to say that I'm disappointed that Tom felt the need to publish actual numbers. There are other folks still working at Powerset/MS who would rather that the details of our offers stay confidential. Very classy, choosing self promotion over the financial privacy of former coworkers.
Damn, did someone actually read this whole thing?
Good point, but isn't a million dollars a minute more like $16,000 a second, not $183,000 a second? So he's really worth more like 19 nanojerries. Not nearly as bad as you make it sound. :-)
I meant it sarcastically...
Is USA the new Google killer?
Guess there is only left to say that when and if Yammer's model works, Twitter only needs to copy it and call it a day.

By the way, I am thinking about implementing a similar model for my soon-to-launch Twitter for the homeless (incl free iPhones).
vint cerf gets my vote
"... Successes like YouTube ... convinced some venture investors that building a Web site with a large number of users could still be more valuable than making money from paying customers ..."

Does this still hold in the current post sub-prime credit squeeze?

"... Yammer, a new and much smaller copycat aimed at corporate customers, has a mere 60,000 users ... Just six weeks after its public debut, Yammer is already bringing in a modest amount of cash ..."

Note that Yammer really didn't have to invent the idea. Just sit, notice Twitter was on to something then build something derivative with a specific niche in mind - a Twitter hybrid. Steve Bowbrick mentions the BBC uses Yammer ~ http://commonplatform.co.uk/index.php/2008/10/15/huggers-yam... So Yammer is going for a profitable niche.

What is Twitters niche?
I'd vote for Wordpress, just use a cache plugin which will generate static pages.

Unless you're going to do a _lot_ of hacking on it. Because if you don't like to work with PHP/MySQL and you're planning on hacking the internals a lot, you should pick a platform implemented in your language of choice.
Compatibility. Nothing draws me to Windows other than the programs I NEED to run on it for work. For me, Solidworks 2007 is needed. It doesn't run on Vista/Linux/Mac, but it does run on XP. So I will never upgrade until we upgrade Solidworks versions (unlikely), or Microsoft or the vendor fixes compatibility issues (unlikely). If you want to talk about day to day use, Windows is far inferior.
Thats cool ... hope you release it!
"... I was not saying you should not have altered the title, but rather that it seemed he was stating something specific to Aussie startups ..."

I didn't see that. One thing I'm conscious of when posting local news to an international forum is the content & title relevant? I have probably missed something here. Did you spot something uniquely Aus?
Thanks Paul! You can also use it to import your comments made on thousands of blogs :)
1) That has changed recently with the addition of the Liberation fonts, but I agree - a few months back it was a hack

2) What? I don't think many people will agree with you on that aspect. The fact that most Linux crashes you can just reset X and be back at the login screen, where as a Windows crash needs a full reboot means that even if Linux did crash more often - which I don't think it does - you spend less time getting screwed

3) Really? I haven't found much of a difference on my Dell laptop.

and 4) Probably true
P.S. One of the ones that I do have on my list of companies that failed is The New York Times and its TimesSelect program.
Track Your PHP Errors With Twitter
Automatically submit your PHP errors to Twitter for easy tracking and notifications.
Am I the only person who finds this insane...? Walking away from over a half mil over 3 years! GitHub is cool, but is working at Microsoft for a few years _that_ bad?
Looks like it:

http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...
Software Development - Fire Fighters vs Real Heroes
Well written article to be sure. However let me say what a lot of folks here I bet are thinking but don't want to actually post: they would give their left-you-know-what for a 300K over three years offer from Microsoft!! I darn sure would, and I am not afraid to admit that! :-)
Economics FAIL. -0.5% growth over 10 year is a loss of money because you are falling behind inflation. Based on their market cap Microsoft is shrinking at a rate of 2-3% a year in real dollars while Apple is growing off the charts. You can't say that the falling Windows brand is not a direct cause of that, and Apple's contrast with Microsoft helps that. Apple's growth has more to do with the iPod than OS X, but OS X has a lot more to do with Windows falling image than anything else.
Peter Norvig would be good.
2nd that, the .Net installer was a big problem at my former company. Can't say Python is any better, but to say .Net is perfect shows you haven't seen it used in a lot of places.
I think that his strategy was sound at the time. The market he was talking about did grow. But he missed a critical point.

He was thinking of it as a split in the workstation marketplace. Sun had a 50% market share. He thought he could beat Sun. In effect, this marketplace became dominated by PC players & PC users (EG Mac Pro). A subset of the PC market really. Publishers, animators, designers, architects etc.

He did pick them up in the end with Apple.
I had hardware and software problems with it, and the software problems continue today so I'm on Linux/XP dual boot to work around these deficiencies. When Vista works it is great, it just doesn't always work.
Beware the Digital Zombies
Vint Cerf seems far too academic. I doubt he'd be able to bulldoze the bureaucracy the way Gates could. Most of the other obvious choices would have the same problem. I think you'd have to be a bit ruthless to make any real progress. Eric Schmidt could probably do it, but not as well as Gates.
The psychology of conmen
This is why I love Hacker News. :)

Lead Developer of Gmail Paul Buchheit? He's here.

CEO of a startup reviewed? He's here. (TimeSvr)

News algorithm about social news sites? delicious.com founder joshu corrects the article. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=234749)

The community here is just excellent.
1) No fonts for Linux compare with Microsoft's ClearType fonts (the C* fonts). And, Ubuntu's anti-aliasing still isn't nearly as good as Windows's or Mac OS X's, as of Ubuntu 8.

2) My Windows XP machine hasn't crashed once since I've had it (over two years). Ubuntu 6, 7, and 8 have all consistently crashed when resuming from hibernate on my laptop (Lenovo T60, one of the most common in the world).

3) Ubuntu 8 usually runs about 45 minutes to an hour less than Windows XP on my laptop's battery.
Quit my job to work on side projects full time
summary: traditional employee stock otions can not be sold by employees they can only be excersized. But new google ones can be sold to investors, subject to some restrictions. Thus employees can gain money even from an underwater option.