skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Number of votes on news/links on the front page declining?
There seem to be less and less upmods on the news items on the front page, even those which stay for days.

Personally, I almost never even bother to upmod, and I only log in when I want to leave a comment, yet I used to upmod stories all the time.

Is this a trend?
New Admin console for Google AppEngine
I think in addition to their own servers, they use AWS http://www.slideshare.net/tracylaxdal/justintv-aws-the-start...
A friend of mine's working on a bunch of DARPA projects, and his path was:

1. Attend a top liberal-arts college (CS, Amherst)

2. Get master's degree from top research university (HCI, Carnegie Mellon)

3. Work for General Dynamics

4. Stick around long enough to get promoted, kick butt, etc.

5. Profit!!!

BTW, he said that chances are, whatever the next big thing is will come out of DARPA. His bet was on pervasive computing - DARPA's apparently doing a lot with computers in clothes, computers in canteens, computers in backpacks, computers in visors, basically computers everywhere. The logic being that most of their troops are getting deployed to inhospitable environments (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) and if they can monitor environmental conditions for things like excessive heat, sandstorms, laser sniper sights, explosive residues, they can save lots of soldiers' lives. And of course, if it trickles down to consumer uses it could completely change how people use computers.
People who include "5 ways" in blog titles will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

To me it always screams, "I'm about to reduce a complex topic to a self-help guide."
> Until your site goes viral, quashes your "dedicated" server (or the providers upstream bandwidth) and your customers are met with some fail-whale variant.

Most sites don't "go viral". A reasonably powerful dedicated server can handle serving an incredible number of requests for static content. Any good host (like ServerBeach) is going to have far more bandwidth to spare than what you're running to your own rack. They can also give you additional servers in an hour or two in an emergency. Far more quickly than you can buy and install your own.

Using dedicated servers these days is not like it was in the past. Servers are far more powerful and bandwidth is far cheaper. One beefy server can do what a dozen older generation machines could do. That 40 server rack in 2001 is a couple dedicated servers in 2008. For me, at least.
John Battelle: Algorithms and Community
http://thegeekreview.com/2008/04/25/steampunk-mac-mini/
I agree actually. I was a little hesitant to put this one in, but it was on topic (late bloomers), and once I get started its hard to stop.
First New York Times API is Live - Here's Why it Matters
Wouldn't that be a body transplant?
I won't use a glossy screen. If all Mac offers is glossy, then I won't use Mac.

This is why I didn't get a Dell Ubuntu laptop.
He's mentioned previously that he means you should block out that amount of time; he's including getting ready at the gym, etc. (#2 from here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328289)
Definitely as to be free until it becomes a standard... Which will probably never happen..
Google Health feels accessible
".... People search is “the new black” ..."

The data already exists so compiling it is a routine exercise. I wonder how this kind of service could be fooled or played or worse misattributed?

"... Spokeo fits in nicely I think, to answer the so what and offer a more rounded view on prospective candidates. ... It reduces asymetry (sic) of information and reduces the risk of adverse selection by employers ..."

It would do nothing to reduce risk. In fact I'd go further to say that organisations that hire on unverified information are open to risk of future legal action. This is information gathering at its worst. How does more information of dubious quality on a candidate rule them out distinguishing themselves at a given task? I would propose a counter application to the likes of Spokeo - a registry of potential employers. Free along the line of Craigslist. Someone looking for a job can view lists of companies by sectors and geography, rated by what matters to employees and updated.

This is an example of asymmetry.

Companies may have more money but there are more employees than companies. More data thrown at the employee allows greater scrutiny than what I guess most companies would like. A comprehensive list of companies worldwide ranking them by employee friendliness. More information in choice of companies you work for might make you think twice before you apply. The cream of companies rising to the top? For example imagine if you could view a company that you thought might be a good place to work only to find company information:

- In the press: current directors are constantly in the news for poor financial results, mismanagement or outright law breaking.

- Ethical status: encourage low wages and outsource, made no efforts to improve greenhouse gas emissions

- Enhancement: no effort to supply extra training

- Finances: public finance information reported against the rest of the market. For startups it might also have the VC's or publicly declared finance as this has implications on how a company behaves.

- Blunders: What was the last publicly acknowledged blunder? How was it handled.

- Relations: do they have induction? how do they handle various HR issues?

As you imagine if you start to put the spotlight back on companies that employ people a lot of PR companies will be getting anxious calls.

Maybe it might force change?

"... I don't think there's any substitute for a good face-to-face interpersonal interaction to determine a person's character or suitability for a role. ..."

This is one point I agree on. The problem, the best shady characters can fool all but the most thorough of vetting. I'm not sure that software can play a meaningful part in this process?
I agree.

I like that story, wish there were more like it!
Ad Model vs. Premium Model
after doing consulting i can tell you that you need a very big client list to make a go of it full time. you need companies like telcos, insurance companies, food industry...not just core tech companies...that won't last long. i just don't see hadoop being a pressing need in the wider consulting space

then again, maybe they just want to get their names out there...as long as they keep overhead low, might be worth it
"... I love Quicken and I really really need web finances... but why on earth do they ask me for my banking username and password? ..."

It's free. Maybe the credit information is paying for the service? and room for a small profit.
and crucially, in a way that is currently of little but growing significance, such information will never go away or shrink.
Fun fact: data centers account for 1.2% of American electricity usage. Finding more energy efficient data center architectures is a big deal that a lot of resources are devoted to. Even a small improvement can result in large energy and money savings.
Some are surely unsatisfied customers, but a lot of old-rev Macs go on sale when the shiny new ones come out (there was a flood of sale listings on my local craigslist today). People need to blow their cash on something, I guess.
When reading this I begin to remember an article I read on MSNBC some time ago about a sting operation in which several criminals (not violent ones, just ones wanted for robberies of various sorts) were identified and traced but were evading law enforcement. To solve this problem, police sent them priority mail, from the Police Department mind you, informing them that they had all won brand new 42" HDTVs, among other prizes, and that they needed to show up at a local mall at such and such date/time in order to claim their prize. Every single one of them showed up and were arrested upon walking in the door.
Time is your most valuable resource, so in that respect... if he was working 2x more than anyone else on the team and they were questioning his lack of commitment... that's just weird.
True. And I'd imagine that the drivers for Mac computers are all completely covered in Linux, considering there's not, ahem, too much variety to pick from. So that's an advantage.
Anyone else notice that the date on this article is 6 days into the future? And the url as well.
Ah. So matte is something that goes over a screen?

In that case, yeah: what you said makes sense. I like the glass-over-everything aesthetic: it unifies everything. And losing matte is a shame, but I'll reserve criticism until I see the new Macbooks in action. If the screen really is bright enough to cancel out overbearing glare, then I'll forgive Apple for this. If not... then I'll just hope they have some revolutionary anti-glare thingie coming out soon.
Oh & so was Steve Jobs. But how many CEOs do you need?
I was bantering back and forth with a couple friends recently about what our dream datacenter/colo space would look like. We estimated with devices with good airflow you could stay within the operating temperature range of most computer components with the outdoor air temperature in North Dakota (at least on the high side... you'd have to close the vent window in the winter). It would be wild to operate a datacenter with no active cooling at all.

The sooner the days of wearing gloves in the datacenter are over the better, in my opinion. Bring the steel toed flip flops and cargo shorts. :)
Actually, they are. Or at least, if you've ever donated to any political campaign they are.

http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/
I have done it with my mac book pro - the screen seems to cope well with bright light environments.
Yeah. And Spokeo is old, old news.

Really, it's a matter of what you make available. I can't imagine "stalking" somebody ever really being a good use of time. What bad things are there to find? Drunken pictures? And that's on Facebook, behind a wall.
Upon reading the article, it seems that the father does not, in fact, find any help through Twitter. "Word of missing girl spreads somewhat quickly through Twitter" would be more accurate (and less interesting).
There are two basic paths:

1) A lot of large research companies get DARPA research grants. General Dynamics (like nostrademons said), HRL, Boeing, etc. etc. You can get a job with them, and if the environment doesn't feel soul-crushing to you, you are golden.

2) A lot of CS research at Universities is funded by DARPA. If you are still in school, or if you are out but still have close relationships with your professors, you can always find out what kind of projects they have. DARPA projects are especially nice because they are large in scope and there's always a need for extra people. Don't expect to be paid much though.

I chose route 2 - after my startup failed I wanted to do something that paid, was not as intense, and had nothing to do with Web 2.0 and Social Networking and all that, so I just e-mailed a professor.
S3 based on 100k members uploading on average 5x5MB audio files each, and a growth (new uploads) of around 10%/month:

Storage: 1500GB
Transfer in: 150GB
Transfer out: 30000GB
PUT requests: 50000
GET requests: 10000000
———————————————
Total cost: $4,560.10

Not too bad if you ask me! (btw its late and I'm tired, so sorry if my figures are WAY off! :P)
with some help from the palm tree?
Working on a desktop app that keeps your photos safe (through sync/backup), and allows collaboration on a bucket of photos across multiple computers. Photos are stored in a peer-to-peer version control system like git. http://www.thephotothing.com
'Programming Collective Intelligence'

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210132

Thanks Toby. Awesome book.
There's also something to be said for the difference between face time and productive time.
vtnext, in all the excitement of his Nobel, his actual economic views (as opposed to his politics, which I completely don't care about one way or another) about events in the real world have been forgotten.

In fall of 2004, as Greenspan started raising interest rates in baby steps (very belatedly - housing was already bubbling up), Krugman was very opposed to those rate hikes. His analogy for the tech-telecom bust was with the post-bubble doldrums in Japan - and it was no time to be risking a slide back by rising rates.

In the event, directly as a result of that easy credit policy, we got the mother of all bubbles in housing, which has almost taken the entire financial system down with it. Krugman did not anticipate the bigger bubble that was brewing even as he was advocating continuing 1% interest rates (well below the rate of inflation even then!).

Economists like Nouriel Roubini, Steven Roach (then Chief Economist at Morgan Stanley), eminent people like Paul Volcker (Fed Chairman between 79-87), investors like Warren Buffet & Marc Faber all warned about the 2004-7 bubble in housing several times, for many years. Krugman had a very public voice during that entire time, but saw no problems with the Greenspan/Bernanke Fed.

It is worth remembering this real world record, as the world fetes his Nobel prize.
That's surprisingly a pretty common sting. I've heard it used to nab deadbeat dads by getting them to all come to a stadium to "collect the prize they won".
Working on my startup, http://taskgravy.com. A project management / collaboration suite that doesn't neglect the analytical side of project management.

And also looking for a permanent gig, because I just got laid off. :]
FAQ: Being a network admin in Iraq
Besides the day job (Program Manager),

(a) Working through Cormen et al's Algorithms book.
(b) Trying to learn how 3D game engines work by building one (in java). Rendering is completely in software.
(c) Working through Rudin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis"
Our Y Combinator application
yes. this is the point - all this fuss will look quaint within months.
Researching statistical machine learning algorithms.
I think the most interesting thing about them is that they switched from free to pay, overnight, without warning. Have many other software service startups done that?
Try deleting your Facebook profile my friend, just try.
http://www.simplecdn.com/savings (On-Demand Flash Streaming part)

Don't know them yet, but there are some good reviews. Perhaps it can be a starting point even if it doesn't deliver completely. I am planning to use them in the near future on top of AWS and Google App Engine, but not for streaming.
It's always fun finding 10-year-old, embarrassing news articles or pictures of someone. :) Also, if you're one of the many people who use MySpace instead of Facebook, those drunken pictures aren't behind a wall.
Announcing: First Round Capital Office Hours (and free coffee)
Unless you disable it in the privacy options, your facebook profile has a special view available to non-members and search engines.
Send a message to all your friends and Facebook will do it for you.
Quite. They have me tied by email address to Facebook and I'm 200% certain that my email address there is not "publicly-available information".

Facebook permitting this app to operate will give it serious legal trouble in the EU.
Y Combinator Mentoring for Women
"Separate founders with blank lines."
Probably more than 500 lines. Doing information extraction on all those different sites probably involves quite a few scripts and doing search on the scale and at the speed they're doing undoubtedly involves backend services too.

When they launched, Spokeo had a really nice Flash client too for aggregating RSS news about the people you're following.
Top 5 ways to X.

Where X = Anything.

Seriously, this guide has the same points made in any Startup Guide, regardless of current financial environments.
When you're that tiny, does anyone notice or care? You can grandfather your favorite users into free accounts and, worse case, you piss off all 10 of your users.
Perhaps more important is the reputation he already built through predictions on the primaries.

From a recent New York Magazine article here:
http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/
on the Clinton/Obama primaries...

"Reading the polls, most pundits predicted she’d win Indiana by five points and noted she’d narrowed the gap with Obama in North Carolina to just eight.

Silver, who was writing anonymously as “Poblano” and receiving about 800 visits a day, disagreed with this consensus. He’d broken the numbers down demographically and come up with a much less encouraging outcome for Clinton: a two-point squeaker in Indiana, and a seventeen-point drubbing in North Carolina. On the night of the primaries, Clinton took Indiana by one and lost North Carolina by fifteen. The national pundits were doubly shocked: one, because the results were so divergent from the polls, and two, because some guy named after a chili pepper had predicted the outcome better than anyone else."

It will be great to see how his model stacks up against reality on election night.
Steve Jobs on why Blu-ray is failing
If Firewire is gone, is there another mechanism to replace the target disk mode? If not, that's pretty disappointing.
Helping you break the language barrier
To be fair, the MacBook pro has looked dated for a while. The design is nearly identical to the aluminum PowerBook G4 that came out in 2003:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Aluminium_PowerBoo...
Shouldn't that be POST? PUT would be for updating the file that was originally POSTed.
Interesting Browser Bug with CSS border and the Select element
Download Firefox 3.1 beta 1: Get Geolocation API, @Font-Face, and More
I think he's just appealing to the fighter mindset that some of us do have. I don't think that's a general characteristic, or at all necessary to success, but some people (I count myself amongst them) get fired up by adversity... Like a "bring it on!" mentality where you get more and more motivated to win the more problems there are...

I don't think people who react differently are in any way inferior, though, which the OP does seem to think.
What If You Ran an Ad, and Nobody Saw It?
With tools like this I'll probably remain unemployable indefinitely as anyone with a subscription will find my quaint short stories. Written at a time of youthful tribulation they read like PKD with a sadistic streak.

Or I could just get a new email, but then I'd have no audience and possibly miss out on some interesting conversation.

'So, the main character gags on a dildo laced with LSD?'

'Yes, sir, it's suppose to symbolize the rape and indoctrination of the indigenous people of the amazon'
Yahoo Releases OpenID Research
It's a nice looking design - what sort of functionality are you rolling in?
Yay! It's really nice to see women help other women out like this. I'm not applying for this upcoming cycle, but I have benefitted from talking to and being mentored by other women with more experience. Helps a lot when there's only a very, very tiny percentage.
Jive Software Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff
Not to distrust Intel's study on temperature, but it makes a lot more sense for Microsoft and Google to raise their temperatures than smaller operations (like my company). We have a small server room (3 racks, mostly full), but we don't have seamless failover and often we're without hot spares. So, it matters that servers stay up.

With Google, it's not that big a deal. They expect failure and so it simply becomes a calculation of what's worth more, the electricity or the hardware and I'm guessing the electricity would win out in that situation. However, for us it's the hardware and the downtime and the hassle of setting up a box to support some ancient system some of which, no joke, date back to DOS days (or maybe I'm just really young and think that's old). Suffice it to say, it isn't seamless and it isn't even as easy as installing and configing a LAMP server.
The site claims that 'look beyond resume' - is the data found in MySpace, FB, Friendfeed a valuable data to any recruiter? I can see this being used only by 'snoopers'/'stalkers' - kinda thing that will bring nothing but bad name to Social Networking. I still know a majority of the people who just do not go onto eBay thinking its a congregation of fraudsters and phishers.
This site sucks.
We're hoping that it gives more women the gumption to apply. It's Susan Mernit's idea, and a good one.
all glossy screen :-( never liked them. for me, coding on non-glossy screens are better.
Last time visiting USA I was as usual turning off all the lights of the room I didn't need. After a few days I noticed a 747 could land with just the lighting of the long hallway. The hotel was mostly empty. I felt so stupid.

There is a need for USA business to revise their attitude on energy.
For some reason, I can't imagine he'd be terribly proud of that. Do you think he's just really stupid? I wonder if maybe he's working on other stuff, or found he couldn't afford everything he wanted on a professor's salary, or maybe this is what the house looked like two weeks after he moved in? I'm not an apologist for the guy, but that flashpaper is basically some guy trying to gain some reputation by lampooning someone better known than himself, which belies a moral corruption that far exceeds the unfortunate physical corruption of Mr Alexander's house.

Have you read the book? Its merits are fairly self-evident if you read a few pages, regardless of the author's choice of paint colors for his own house.
1. How can you be sure someone wants to pay for something unless they bring out their credit card? I would love to know a better way.
2. Is it unethical to sell a product that isn't right for the market, and promote half truths like most advertising does? Which is better in the long run?

I would rather have a product I can be statistically confident is going to sell because users have wanted to pay for it. There's no debating whether it's right for the market or not.

Thanks for the discussion by the way, this is fun :). If you do have a better way I'd love to know.
A friend of mine runs http://www.udm4.com and we've talked about running an ad on there since its primary audience is developers (nevermind the fact that I don't really like the menu). Other than that, try to partner with good development shops that do online stores ... I have a few in mind.

Any other ideas, besides taking out the obvious ad on google? I really don't want to screw with trying to get high keyword ranking via the SEO black-magic route.
Same here. Annoying.
Do you think this is indicative of the market in general? Will most previously-ad-supported sites be forced to have a premium model?
Has this always been possible? (By always, of course, I mean these past years.) Because this is the first time I've heard of a successful hand transplant, or, actually, any hand transplant at all.
Obvious solution: put a different email address on your resume
Run Code Run: Hosted Continuous Integration for RoR Projects