skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The value proposition is ease of use. Feedback Army manages the whole process and makes results available via RSS. For someone who has never used Mechanical Turk, Feedback Army is a low risk way to try things out. I pay the Turkers pretty well to make sure users get good feedback quickly. The overall package is well worth the $7 asking price. -- Raphael, FeedbackArmy developer
Israelis develop software to improve your looks
Ramaze: The underrated Web Framework
Golf: Weather and Your Game
Twitter: is there any point?
Can somebody explain to me why email is so difficult to handle? I have four open accounts and get regular email for school and personal business, and I get the occasional set of messages about blogs, along with spam, and it still takes me at most fifteen minutes to sort out.
All the blogs I'm subscribed to are personal blogs, I did have boing boing in, but it got to be extremely annoying. I mean like 200 posts a day is just fucking stupid, I didn't read a single one for weeks because I had to search through a giant list to find anything interesting. The only interesting person posting on it is Cory and even his turned into 1/2 self-promotion.

I currently read a few personal blogs, my favorite is John Scalzi's but I also follow a number of literary agent's blogs. 3/4 of the stuff is personal, but they occasionally give out amazing advice to anyone wanting to get published.
Ask YC: iTunes Podcast Question
I cannot figure it out for the freaking life of me... anyone know how to change your podcast's info (icon, description, etc) in iTunes?
Yes their sensitivity and specificity concern me as well, but if it can be made to work then this will be revolutionary in the true sense of the word.
3 ideas for innovating securities law
You have to make the change on your side and wait for iTunes to re-index. Usually takes a week or so for them to update the info.
The Going Rate for Contract iPhone Developers
Wow. Typoes in the post (their instead of there) and sensationalism.

Twitter moves through social circles not browser windows. It is viral in the most true sense, it moves based on real connections and not what one sees online (usually.)

I got on twitter because my real friends were on twitter, not because I saw a clever video online.
I'm of the belief that it doesn't really matter for the type of people you are talking about.

If these "lost" people are as talented and ambitious as you claim, they will have no problem succeeding at whatever field in which they choose to apply themselves. If they could "hack circles around [you]," then they will have no problem hacking one of the most peculiar and challenging systems of all, the steps needed to be successful in everyday society.

If they are that capable, then surely putting together a decent college application and getting into a good school or getting a great job would be piece of cake. You might have to bite the bullet and do things like create a resume and apply for jobs or take the SATs, gather the necessary papers, and submit your applications, but sooner or later smart, industrious people will realize that you don't get anywhere by complaining about your situation.

Talented, truly obsessive hackers don't need help from society, because they have the fortitude and resourcefulness to succeed on their own. You can't stop them from learning and working on hard problems. The "career-seekers" can take their safe, well-paid programming jobs at big companies and buy their cookie-cutter house in the suburbs next to all the other "career-seekers," with their white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog. Good for them. But the kinds of hackers you are talking about would not be happy with that kind of lifestyle. They would probably want to be on the bleeding edge, to be a visionary or trendsetter rather than somebody who blindly walks along path paved before them. I believe that if you have a passion as strong as this, the rejection letters from jobs or colleges will lie and fade to ashes, forgotten as you blaze ahead into the life that you forge for yourself.
But before you say "I'm with the band" check whether there is a band.

Now I wonder how many roadies Tim O'Reilly has.
This is great because it allows you to create algorithms at runtime for your data.

So rather than doing...

def doit(option1, data):
for x in data:
if option1:
x += 7

You can create a function that doesn't include the "if option1" part. This is great if you have many different options... and instead of bloating your code for many different optimized function, or one slower generic function, you can create the optimized functions at run time.

Looks very nice. I just wish it had support for 3dnow, and windows :)
WordPress 2.6 Easter Egg
Are there any college students that don't know this? I think Joel's growing old :)

But, here's what I think is going to happen during this recruiting cycle, the big name companies will stay on hiring freezes but still go to campus, some people will get offer letters that are later rescinded. Happened during '01-'03 and will happen again. Not sure about the smaller profitable companies, I don't think they'll hire at all, as sales cycles grow longer and revenues drop.

Great way to pitch Fog Creek's internships though.
On servers, Solaris is better than Linux. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, resource management framework, RBAC, service management framework, among other things, are all better. Solaris already has most of the Linux userland available. A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH. If you change your default path, you can get access to a lot of the inferior Linux tools that you are used to.

Yum and apt-get are better at patching and package installation than Solaris tools. However, the experience on Solaris isn't so bad that the whole OS has to be thrown away because if it. Besides, when IPS is released Solaris's package management will be better than both Yum and apt-get.
5 Things Facebook Needs to Improve Right Now
I use Yahoo Boss as my site's search engine (by using the site:domain.com query), but since my site is new, the Yahoo crawler indexes pages very slowly.

Assuming BOSS Custom has a way to feed results to the Yahoo crawler, this should become the best way to a simple site search.
What do you mean by the pirate reference?

I've updated the grandparent to make more sense though.
Yea I'm looking into it but I need a crawler I can feed data into as well as a way to provide auxiliary data.

For example, if I am selling houses I want to be able to have additional information about # of bedrooms, # of bathrooms, and so forth that can easily be included in search.
Honestly, does anyone believe these fictitious stats? Trippling? In a quarter?? Give me a break!
The key thing being Vim's "modes". Vim users spend most of their time in normal mode navigating and doing some editing. Insert mode is for actually typing characters into the document.
Touche. I read that 'and' as starting a new unrelated characteristic where 'ground' was bridge level. Reading it again, you are right.
And all this time, I've been injecting it into the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Oh, what a fool I've been!
First Hand Accounts Of Terrorist Attacks In India On Twitter
I work for http://meehive.com
you're absolutely right but it'd be straightforward to implement the technique server side to fix those problems.
Needs more user friendly / readable URLs. Like easyfreeimages.com/{username} and the domain name is quite long. Could it be shortened to something like efi.com (probably not, but it would be a better option for quick typing and pasting urls in emails).
FYI Flickr has started using ads sporadically..
Did you also know that according to their terms of service, you give them "world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive license(s)" to whatever you upload on their servers...

I think the whole "social networking" part is nice but it's turn into a mess where you're constantly fending of spam and lame comments from complete idiots...

I'm workiong on tags, searching, favorites etc. not sure about comments...

Also working on blackberry/iphone uploading etc.

I'm more interested in things people want, not just flash !

thanks
I agree. I think this could make a really interesting project in PHP/Python/Rails/etc
Work in progress... need translators !
My Top 10 Tweeple
Yes. At least it's the relation is not visible to outsiders. Perhaps there's a hidden relation?
The Tyba Startup Diary Day 1
Good suggestions... thanks
Yes, except that, as with the Beijing Olympics, I can't shake the knowledge that as they perform these marvelous feats, deep problems linger.
I'd wager most college students don't know this. I graduated 2 years ago and I wish someone had told me this. And I still try to convince friends of the same when they're out interviewing.

It's even worse when you're graduating because you're nervous about finding a job and these big companies throw a huge signing bonus at you. (In stock of course, which you can't touch unless you stay for 4 years - but at the time you'd never imagine leaving!) That stock is pocket change to the company but a huge sum of cash to an undergrad and it's hard to risk losing it.

I did convince one guy to push back on the exploding offer. He did, and they bumped it up 10% just to try to sweeten the deal. If it's that prevalent, it's the kind of thing the career services folks should warn you about.
They can and are. They're called "FX forwards", and what's more the technique you described is exactly the one the Medici family used to make their fortune (avoiding the usuary laws of the time).

However it doesn't work if you can't guarantee a fixed rate of interest (as in this case).
It's remarkable that this was on the front page with the TechCrunch article citing the Tweets concerning the Mumbai bombings.

Yes, there is a point.
Buffet is not too bad in math, as far as I know.
Wow. That was a really great post. I've been contemplating about switching to JRuby because of all the headaches C Ruby and Rails has with Threading. This is a very good endorsement to switch. And, with GitHub doing the same. hmmmmmmm
> "Solaris is better than Linux."

That's a very blunt statement of fact.

Yes, DTrace is great. ZFS has a lot of greatness if you overlook the bugs production systems have had (see: Joyent) to fix still (systems down for a week while they hand-fixed the FS - Yeah, fun stuff). Zones are cool, but has its drawbacks (and advantages) when compared to something like Xen.

> "A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH."

Uh, you know that when people talk about "Linux" they really mean "common GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL", right? You realize they mean more than gmake and gfind and gcc, right? Sorry, Solaris has absolutely nothing like the apt repositories available on Ubuntu (I know they're working on this, but that is still the not-so-stable-or-bug-free OpenSolaris, and it still isn't anywhere close, and we're talking about today, right?). Can I pull down svn, git, mercurial, bzr in a simple command? How about lighttpd, nginx, haproxy? What about a recent vim and emacs? Recent memcached, python/perl/ruby client for it? Those are all basic and well known, that isn't even the hard stuff. What about something a little more specific? PostGIS, GDAL, Proj? I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds.

And of those you can compile from source yourself on Solaris, you'll find many a quirk because the project maintainers tend to run either a flavor of Linux or FreeBSD.

Yeah, Solaris is "better than Linux on servers", and my time isn't worth anything.
> What do you mean by the pirate reference?
i think he means you have to change the "yarrr" bit .. :)
I'm pretty sure he means to fix the deliberate piratized misspelling of yarrhoo-inc to yahoo-inc. This technique started with inserting "NOSPAM" into email addresses when posting them publicly on the web as a spam protection measure. Since email harvesters probably account for NOSPAM insertions by now, the pirate spelling is more effective and, on top of that, arguably funnier.
If you are interested in structured data you should also look at some of the search monkey stuff. Search monkey gives a real insight into how the Y! search engine uses structured data.

http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/smguide/datarss.html

Essentially the crawler will discover Microformats or RDFa on a site to use in the index. The current suggested vocabularies are Dublin Core, FOAF, VCard, VCal, Review, SIOC, Good Relations, DBPedia and Freebase (http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/smguide/profile_voca...).

Searchmonkeys use these to visually enhance listing but I'm sure there will be other structured data use in the future, and that the technologies used in BOSS vertical search are in the same family as those used in Searchmonkey.
Apple sale:  All Macs must go
I made that mistake well after college and I'm not alone. HR is a dirty business, it's good to know they practice.
When I say that humor is objective, I mean there are several patterns underlying what can make something funny. (You yourself said you enjoy discovering new kinds of humor, and kinds of humor implies underlying patterns.) I believe that it is possible to discover these underlying patterns, and then make a determination as to whether a statement falls into one of these patterns or not. This can be done independently of whether or not a person exists who can see that the statement falls into one of these patterns.

Okay, then. That makes sense. I don't know if from that you would be able to quantify humor like you mentioned before, but yes: there is rhyme and reason to it.

Anything that violates our expectancy is interesting in an objective sense. And things that violate expectancy do generally hold our attention. But not always. The reason being that insightful writing is even more compelling than writing that is merely interesting, so it tends to steal our attention away.

I still don't agree with that - I think that there's more to "insight and interest" than just declaring objective tags to things. I have easily learned more from reading fiction than I have from reading nonfiction. But I see where you're coming from.

Now I have to go and upvote this whole discussion. This was one of the best I've had on this site. Thanks a ton.
Is Debt Necessary For Generating Income?
The SEC regulation are their to prevent companies taking advantage of naive investors. From what I've read Prosper mis-represented the risks of these loans, which is precisely the kind of thing which SEC regulated companies are not allowed to do.

Regulations exist for a reason. As long as your willing to follow the regulations (which exist to prevent mis-selling, market abuse, insider trading, and other such things) getting SEC approval isn't that hard.

The other alternative is to partner with a regulated firm and use their approval, this it the route Zopa has taken. But again you need to make sure your company follows SEC guidelines.
Shut Up- You’re Helping the Customer
The Great Depression, as I remember
Twitter Kills SMS in Canada
At the moment you have to go to an app's page and if there's an update you can get it with one click. There's a lot of potential for further automation.

.NET support is in the works.
Then what makes your service better than Picasa? Because that's the flip side of the Flickr coin: no emphasis on the social, heavy emphasis on controlling your images and sorting them well. And it's a beast. Flickr's nicer and more used, but Picasa may be better in a lot of ways.
All Fall Down
Where can I find a feed of interesting videos on startups?
Interesting = Interviews with people like Jeff Bezos, Max Levchin and so on. Office tours. Roundtables in any conferences currently happening and so on.
Here's a simple approach - just say yes to exploding offers. Then, when you get the better offer, you can send the other employer an "exploding neg".
Interview: Muziboo - generating a community around your startup
"I think that there's more to 'insight and interest' than just declaring objective tags to things."

What makes something insightful is a whole other discussion, which probably it would be best not to go into here lest pg shit himself when he checks his threads page.

"Now I have to go and upvote this whole discussion. This was one of the best I've had on this site."

Same on both counts. Thanks. Discussions like this help immensely to strengthen my writing, in terms of having someone to try to break my ideas and force me to express things with more clarity and precision.
I like patent lawyers more than I like tech recruiters. Really. The ones I hate the most are the guys that call up a company directory and dial every extension pretending like they have a relationship with you. I want to sue one of those guys for harassment or something one day.
Why treat consciousness as a property of brains, rather than as a property that could be -- but doesn't necessarily have to be -- implemented with one?
What we can learn from spaghetti sauce (by Malcolm Gladwell)
> very strong associations with waking up

Which is why I said espresso shot, which you can throw in without much time for "ooh I am drinking coffee" thoughts.
Wouldn't that be an imploding neg, for symmetry?
The Long Tail Is Only As Good As The Recommendation System
The Unknown and Unrecognized Contractors
"Maybe R.I.M. is just overextended. After all, it has just introduced three major new phones — Flip, Bold, Storm — in two months, each with a different software edition. Quality-control problems are bound to result; the iPhone 3G went through something similar."

The simple explanation is that the consumer market is more than willing to tolerate bad quality for the latest and greatest. As everyone will remember iphone OS 2.0 shipped with many similar problems yet Apple still sold many millions of iPhone 3Gs. RIM is obviously well-aware of the issues people are having, but that won't change the fact they too will sell huge number of these this holiday season.
25 Unanswerable Questions About Apple
Spontaneity is just a synonym for "I don't understand what's going on when this happens".
use the google translate API. It's magical.
Is this just a long winded way of Jeff apologizing for being overloaded and giving himself a get out of jail free card?

He included the simple truth "humans don't scale". Surely that's the end of it.

Email or anything else isn't going to solve the problem that a single human only has a finite amount of attention to give things.
Coupons ?!?
I coded something similar a loooong time ago (long since lost the code) except that it had a hot-or-not type of grading system so the user would be shown each variation one a time, then user simply clicks on a rating for how much they like it on a scale of 0 - 10 and then they see the next variation. Of course the challenge is to seed it with meaningful font, layout, and color scheme templates otherwise the user gets bored slogging through hideous variants with purple fonts and lime green backgrounds.

I hesitate to even mention it because some jerk will run off and patent it, but the real killer app of this kind guided design is architecture design software. Imagine a screen that simply shows you 4 possible variants of architectural plan, you choose just the ones you like, and the software cross-breeds the preferred designs and shows you 4 other variants and so on. People who don't know a damn thing about architecture could still use the software because they only need to point at what they like, and anyone can do that.
Don't sue them...toy with them. Waste their time. Make them call you back, put them on hold, string them along, then disappear. Like car salesmen, unethical recruiters have a high tolerance for rude behavior. The only way that you make an impact is by hurting their paycheck.

(I used to date a recruiter who did cold calls like this. She could handle any type of rejection, but she hated it when a candidate played her. Every time she would rant about it, my faith in the world was restored.)
Yeah, a 25% off coupon direct from the publisher isn't really newsworthy.

Bookpool does even better than Amazon: 33-51% off on Pragmatic Bookshelf books.

http://www.bookpool.com/ss/L?pu=PB
I'm a researcher by trade and have absolute sales call reluctance. I won't sell something if I don't feel it is worth the persons time to hear me or money to invest into the product.

Are you planning to introduce anything to help select the right Turkers to comment on a project? That would be worth having.

Heck it might even be worth having as a standalone "selecting applicants for usability testing" application.
Are there any college students that don't know this? I think Joel's growing old

Yes. For a lot of college students-- probably a majority of those aiming for private-sector corporate work, since it seems to be the default for the unimaginative-- the "job problem" is this annoying project that emerges in the senior year. Because it's an annoying project, as little time should be spent on it as possible, at least during the "golden years" of college.

Even the college students who are relatively "on the ball" have very little experience with the job search process and generally don't know what to expect.
Intel presentation reveals the future of the CPU-GPU war
FriendFeed/Twitter allows you to specifically choose each individual that belongs to that group that gets you your news. I just don't feel like these two companies focus on this aspect of it enough.
I guess the discount is just handy for people who buy beta PDFs and screencasts
I constantly find the Chinese inspiring. Their construction seem to span an interesting divide between high tech and low tech. Their high availability of cheap labor being one of the primary factors enabling construction which would be considered prohibitive in the western world.
Problem is most of us work on our computers, and many of us need the internet to work.

Personally, I use this:

echo "0.0.0.0 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts
If one believes your summary, this thing is pretty silly. Why not stick a god damned battery on those devices?!
New Cases of Cancer Decline in the U.S.
"As the number of applicants has soared in recent years, premier schools admit as few as 1 in 10 students, a far more selective rate compared with a generation ago. To make room for an academically borderline development case, a top college typically rejects nine other applicants, many of whom might have greater intellectual potential."

http://www.projo.com/education/content/projo_20060917_brown9...
Note that this article is over 18 months old.
Ah thanks for the lesson.

I didn't even notice the misspelling.
OLED Is Now Where LCD Was 10 Years Ago: Tiny, Expensive, Awesome
That's pretty much the size ofit. In our office we definitely value funny.

I was so tickled when I found out we own the misspelling yarhoo.com and point it at yahoo.com
Toshiba Unveils 16GB MicroSDHC, Bright Future for Computer-phone Interactions
Chris Hoff on Cloud Computing and Security
At the bottom update, he proposes that standard procedure should be to cryogenically freeze unknown corpses. I as a taxpayer do not want to shoulder this burden. As time goes on, the expense of keeping unknown corpses frozen continually increases as they pile up.
You might want to consider Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
Well, I'm no expert but it sounds like source port randomization is a bandaid, while DNSSEC is the better lasting solution.
Joel is still an amazing writer, regardless of how relevant his topics are these days.

I can't help but to instantly read anything I see that pops up in my inbox from him.
I am a big fan of http://omnisio.com/startupschool08 (Jeff Bezos, David Heinemeier Hansson, Mike Arrington, Paul Graham...) I also enjoyed the movie "startup.com". Hope that gives you a place to start :)
NYTimes uses Scribd to display Newman's will
Dunno if NYTimes using Scribd is old news, I just noticed it.