skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thanks mseebach, I don't think your concept will work (and I've been known to be wrong before) ... but at least I understand how you're approaching the problem, and that helps me to get a better grasp of how I might have to go about it.

It seems to me that I'll have the fastest performance by storing all the bid values in a single 'column' (in RAM of course) to make it faster to find a new unique high bid when someone posts a bid that matches the existing unique high bid. So here's my current concept of how to structure the RAM data:

Create a RAM-based 'table' with only two 'columns', bidValue and bidStatus. The bidStatus column will store a single character such as 'D' for a duplicate bid, or 'U' for a unique bid, or 'H' for the unique high bid. Then go through this procedure when someone posts a new bid:

- See if his bid matches the 'H' bidValue:

- If so, change the bidStatus from 'H' to 'D' then identify the new unique high bid and change that bidStatus from 'U' to 'H'.

- If not, and if there is already a matching bidValue in the table, set that bidStatus to 'D'

- If not, and if there's no matching bidValue in the table, append a new row, then:

---------- If the bidValue in the new row is lower than the one in the 'H' row, set the bidStatus to 'U'

---------- If the bidValue in the new row is higher than the one in the 'H' row, set the bidStatus to 'H and change the old 'H' status to 'U'

- Append the new bidValue, timeStamp and bidderID to another RAM-based table designed to store this data for each bidder (to create an archive of the auction).

-- Send the status of the member's new bid back to him so he will see it in his browser.
Ask HN: Alternatives to Y Combinator?
I have an idea for a startup, and would love to submit it to the YC program. However, I also have a wife and an infant daughter and the move to either Cambridge or Mountain View would just be too much of a burden.

So, is there a similar program but without the move? Or perhaps a little closer to home (Phoenix, AZ)? Or should I pursue a more traditional seed/angel funding route? The biggest attraction of YC to me is the cumulative experience and knowledge of the founders, and I worry that I wouldn't get that with a standard VC path.
I think it might be worth pointing out that this is only applicable to "those seeking cabinet and other high-ranking posts." It's not like every possible White House employee is being asked to hand over the keys to their online lives.

And the submission headline here is a little misleading: the questionnaire appears to focus on affiliations and past financial associations, not facebook pages and IRC logs.
I'm not a big fan of OWL either. I think that you can get all the expressibility of OWL and more using rules - in fact the fastest current OWL reasoner, OwlIm, is based on using rules to model owl. A constraint like this would be something like SELECT ?invalid WHERE { ?invalid rdf:Type your:Class . ?invalid your:value1 ?v1 . ?invalid your:value2 ?v2 . FILTER(?v1>?v2) } Sparql queries can contain a construct clause which turns them into rules. For querying an RDF view of a relational database, I don't think anyone has solved this yet - D2RQ tries but like you say the performance tends to suck. A lot of the current promising work is using triple stores to store RDF directly, with a big leader in Franz with Allegrograph.
Now Hiring: Ruthlessly Honest Dick
The TechCrunch formula: take any interesting rumor ("Apple is building a search engine"). Throw technical platitudes around it ("you need people who know what they're doing"). Do not commit - neither assert ("why invest all that capital into search? The answer is they’re not.") nor deny too strongly ("There are pieces of this we are still putting together"). Be sure to stick ads on the page.
Finally? Profit of course.
Finding a Freemium model that works for you
Ask YC: What are some hot news startups?
I'm researching the future of news delivery.

I'm looking for some companies that are working on improving the news delivery experience - it may be filtering or it may be the interface or some clever way to sort news.

What are the hot news startups? I havent seen any mentioned since Google News came around ...
What do you take "possible sources of embarrassment" to mean in the context of one's personal diary or blog?
Around here OCLC (Columbus, OH - where it's headquartered) is known as a place developers go to retire. Pretty good pay, flex time, good benefits and a sweet campus. Their time tables are also huge so it's a good place to go if you don't mind taking your good old time finishing projects. I cannot really comment on anything else, although the few people I've known to work there enjoy it. Personally I think the slow timetables would drive me up a wall.
Revenue is great. But what about profitability? Right now it is unclear how they will ever profit and I think you have to take that into account when you make your valuation. You can't say, "well Google did not know how they were going to profit but they figured it out" because when you do that you just bloat the evaluation through mindless speculation. Bloated valuations == bubble, which is why I think we may be blaming fb if/when the next tech bubble arrives.

Revenue is relatively easy to generate. Profit is much more difficult. I have seen revenue projections between 250 and 300 mil for this year, which is ~2.08 to 2.50 per user. That sucks. Plain and simple. End of story. It costs more per user to run the site right now.

Then again (yes I am arguing with myself) the valuation can and should take into account what someone else could do with that data. Just because Facebook (Zuckerberg) sucks at monetizing the social graph does not mean someone else would suck too.
JsTree Nears 1.0; Solicits Feedback
Switzerland gives start-ups Silicon Valley offices
You could do cambridge / mountain view for the three months that you're required to be there, then leave - I don't think there's anything in the rules against that.
Free Weather Icons Collection
Racist comments, photos of you doing lines off a hooker's ass, getting "McCain 2008" tattooed on your forehead, etc...
The Unofficial Guide to Friendfeed: What Makes Friendfeed Special
"the individual makes a poor decision which affects the individual" - except in the case of smoking where the poor decision also affects anyone else in the vicinity of the smoker, including those who have chosen not to smoke.
89,094% Traffic Increase: Data on the Slashdot / Digg Effect
He says that Open Source + Freemium provides marketing + development, but that you need a premium product that pays the bills. Similar to my argument here:

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/freemium-isnt-a-bu...
No. No. No. It doesn't matter. Not one bit. Exception: for FF maintainers, opera programmers. But ordinary javascript programmers never have to worry about a ms here or there.

Let me quote again from your blog post:

This was quite odd since the tests should've taken, at least, a couple milliseconds to run and getting consistent times of "0" is rather infeasible, especially for non-trivial code.

Conclusion 1: The code _is_ trivial! Why? it takes < 64ms to execute.

Conclusion 2: The actual time spent by the code doesn't matter, because you can't notice the difference between the reported 0ms and the actual 3ms or so that it takes to execute.

Next paragraph:

Second, I was running some performance tests, on Internet Explorer, in the SlickSpeed selector test suite and noticed the result times drastically fluctuating. When trying to figure out if changes that you've made are beneficial, or not, it's incredibly difficult to have the times constantly shifting by 15 - 60ms every page reload

Why does it matter if loads 15ms to 60ms faster/slower? It's not noticeable. And once you see that the difference is roughly 15ms a quick google search will reveal it's a simple timer accuracy issue.

So why the graphs? Why test different browsers on different platforms when the outcome can't be anything else than the 60ms fluctuations you've already seen? But you knew the second you saw a single time reported as 0ms that that the time accuracy is not on the 1ms precision level, which means that they use GetTickCount or something which has a 15ms precision.

> It certainly wasn't obvious to the WebKit, Firefox, and Chrome teams who were all happily testing on Windows XP using bum tests

If they used the tests they would've noticed the 0ms results. Therefore, they either thought 0ms means it's <15ms, which is fast enough, or they tested it primarily on other platforms.

I don't believe for a second that the WebKit, Firefox and Chrome teams have done ms comparisons with tests that don't report data on the ms level. 0ms results stand out, after all. They probably are pretty smart people, and they realized it doesn't matter.

> Any performance tests are better than no performance tests

Nope. Silly performance tests are worse than no performance tests.
My first piece of advice would be this: don't bank on YC funding. Sure, it would be great if you got accepted, but that shouldn't stop you from pursuing your idea. Especially if it is still just an idea - work on it at home, in your spare time, and then evaluate your options once you have done everything you possibly can do on your own.

If you decide that you need outside funding, and even Mountain View is too far, then your options for YC (or a similar program) become more limited. The next YC round will be in Cambridge, but there is TechStars in Boulder, Colorado which is obviously much closer, but may still be too far. The only other programs I have heard of are in the Philly / DC areas.

Like you said though, there are more traditional routes. A Google search for 'arizona angel network' brings up over 2m hits. My point is that, I'm sure there are options, you just need to look for them, and then evaluate.

First things first, though: start hacking!
My personal definition would be "anything you wouldn't be comfortable seeing splashed across the masthead of The Drudge Report."
Forget the bailout, start over: the New American Bank Initiative
Yes but I think he's already severed his connections with Reverend Wright.
Genetic programming, with mutations guided by learned patterns from a corpus of data? (or that's what I imagine it to be)
So, is there a similar program but without the move? [...] The biggest attraction of YC to me is the cumulative experience and knowledge of the founders, and I worry that I wouldn't get that with a standard VC path.

How do you expect to get a "similar program" without moving? The cumulative experience and knowledge of YCers isn't something which can be conveyed remotely.

My google-fu is failing at the moment, but I remember seeing a comment from pg here a while ago to the extent that YC once tried funding a team remotely, but it didn't work due to the lack of frequent contact. Don't look at YC's move-across-the-country requirement as a roadblock they're putting up -- look at it as them trying to maximize the chance that the companies they fund will succeed.

(That said, I submitted a YC application in spite of not being able to move -- but I wasn't really expecting to be accepted, and if I had been accepted, it would have taken sitting down and trying to figure out exactly how YC could help a non-local startup before I would have accepted.)
"Sequential programming is dead. So stop teaching it"
> "The" is one of the most common words in the English language

"the" is THE most common word in English.
4 Languages you should learn in 2009
The Pragmatic Programmer Books suggests you learn a new language every year. I suggest you learn 4 that will be beneficial to your career in 2009.
Um, is today the day to make up implausible rumors and then say that they're implausible?

Apple doesn't have the scale to do web services like that. Yes they have MobileMe, but that's very different - people pay for it which makes up for inefficiencies. Google (and even Microsoft and Yahoo) are very efficient (cost-wise) when it comes to web services compared to Apple. Now, there is always the possibility that Apple will replace Google with a competitor in Safari should Google's agreement become less lucrative for them.

Seriously, their evidence is Apple not liking Android? If it were a real fight Google wouldn't be developing for the iPhone awesome stuff like the street view that auto-pans as you move the phone. Companies both compete and cooperate all the time. Toyota sells hybrid technology to Ford and also produces cars that compete with Ford's. Likewise, Apple and Google will both cooperate and compete.
Python+Scipy+Matplotlib vs Matlab?
I'm learning datamining, machine learning, image processing etc by myself now but will start uni next year probably doing the same.

I tried Octave briefly and wasn't that impressed. Ok some neat functionality and easy matrix manipulation but pretty ugly and language isn't as nice as Python. Not sure about interoperability with other tools.

I already knew Python so I naturally tried numpy+scipy+matplotlib and was literally blown away. So easy to use, really nice plotting capabilities and it is extremely convenient using a real and interactive programming language, especially when that language is Python. Being able to do everything with one tool is awesome.

I haven't tried Matlab yet because it costs money. Big minus right there obv especially since it is not exactly cheap.
It is also proprietary which is a another problem.
From what I have gathered it is an awesome tool though and there are huge amounts of Matlab-code out there.

Have any of you tried both? Which do you prefer and why?
Do you think Scipy can take over?
Python seem to be used everywhere in science; signal processing, chemistry, bioinformatics, NASA, Google etc.

I have found a library for pretty much everything for Scipy though. I mean having 10 different FFT-libs isn't exactly much of a plus, one great one is enough.
So does Matlab beat Scipy on that point or not?
And is Matlab much better than Octave? Different feel?
Does Matlab allow easy interaction with databases and other tools?
We talked about that, and it would mean bad things all around for my family. Background: She's a PhD student and will graduate in May or August.

Option 1) She continues what she's doing right now, research and lab work, and occasionally pick up a shift at a "real" job. However, we wouldn't have health insurance, and that is crucial (pre-existing conditions and baby).

Option 2) She gets a full time job, with benefits. The downside is that we would then need full time daycare for the baby, which is something I am against. Yes, it would only be for a few months, but I think it would be too much for her, since she would essentially be a single mom.

Crazy Option 3) We pick up and move to Cambridge/Mountain View. This would keep the family together, but the logistics of figuring that out while starting a company make my head hurt just thinking about it.

Ultimately, a 3 month separation would be an incredible stressor on our marriage, and that is something I'm not willing to sacrifice.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's had trouble with this. I remember reading some C code once and I saw some strange operators I had never seen before... <? and >?, if I remember correctly.

I eventually figured out they were GCC extensions for "min" and "max", but only after a painful experience trying to get more info out of Google than "here's how you do addition and multiplication in C!"
Thank you. That's pretty much what we've concluded: continue at my current job and hack at it on nights and weekends until a prototype is ready.

I hadn't heard of TechStars, and will check them out.
You probably have a day job, right? Put aside a certain amount everymonth and hire people on elance to create your product for you. In a few months it will be done and you can test it on the market. It's risk free, and it's the sensible solution for someone with a wife and children.
Tusentals svenska länkar
En svensk länkkatalog med över 3000 utvalda länkar i alla ämnen. Här kan du lägga in din länk gratis.
How to enforce the division between free and premium?

I guess you choose a natural line, that doesn't need explicit enforcement - like 300 photos on flickr. There's no fuzziness about whether you have >300 photos or not, and the consequence of the older ones disappearing is gentle and non-punitive.

You can do the same thing with a software license, by having versions with different functionality - feature subset, capacity limits. Some companies have a "community" version that is free.

He's also talking about models where you benefit from the "free" users - for selling software, bug reports and feature requests are valuable information, for product quality and market needs.

One danger is that if you whet people's appetite with a free version, you can be priming them as fuel for a free/open source competitor! E.g. Photoshop enabled The Gimp; Unix vendors enabled Linux. This happens if they really need/want some feature in the premium version, but it's too expensive for them.

Maybe this concern doesn't apply to retail/consumer subscriptions because they aren't expensive; definitely not worthwhile anyone creating an open source competitor in the first place; and not targeting programmers (who could create a competitor).
Good idea, though I'm digging Chris Anderson's journey through freemium on his blog.
"It is one of two official languages used at Google and it does power a lot of their most profitable products."

One of 2? I thought 4:
Java, Python, C++, Javascript.

And does it really power a lot of their most profitable products?
Like which?

(Not bashing here, Python is my main language and I love it.)
Hugely misleading title: the questionairre is for cabinet posts and senior staff. The positions they're talking about are Senate-confirmable: the Obama administration is asking for these details, but the Senate can subpoena for them.
...pg here a while ago to the extent that YC once tried funding a team remotely, but it didn't work due to the lack of frequent contact

It's on the faq (http://ycombinator.com/faq.html). I understand the reasoning behind it completely, and agree that being local is the best way to go.

I may just end up submitting an application anyway, just to see if it would be accepted.
Engine flameouts and market regulation
The cumulative experience and knowledge of YCers isn't something which can be conveyed remotely.

I would definitely agree with that. I think another reason might be simple "peer pressure." When everyone around you is working on a startup, and when you start to see some of those people succeed -- it lights a fire under you. (Or at least me)

I'm in a "live-and-learn" entrepreneurial program at my university. Everyone on the first two floors of my building is in the same program, working on their own ideas. It's pretty neat. One of the alums of this program founded Squarespace, another guy a floor above me runs Invisionfree/ZetaBoards. The immersive experience is what makes the program. My co-founder lives next door (about five feet away). I don't know that a YC-like experience can be had remotely.
The proposed National Parks Director writing a personal essay about why we should turn them into private game reserves? The proposed HUD director writing that HUD should fund plasma TVs in public housing?
All sounds rather familiar...

"research and lab work" - are you another tech guy with a biotech/chem girl? You have no information in your profile, BTW.
As crass as that may sound- its very true. When 'evangelists' start throwing around crazy ideas and plans at cocktail parties, it leaves the people on the ground who are actually working on a product dumbfounded
Interesting you should say this, as this is exactly what I've been doing this week as well.

If you don't like Octave's language, you won't like MATLAB's, they're almost identical. They were both designed for engineers (I mean engineers, not computer programmers) to explore matrix models interactively, then save their work as scripts - you were never meant to use m-files for general purpose programming. MATLAB was the first GUI programming I did that wasn't just for myself.

What you're paying for with MATLAB is access to the Mathworks Toolboxes. If you need them then it's absolutely worth every penny. If you don't, Octave will do. You also get prettier graphics with MATLAB than gnuplot can do. Matplotlib is good, but it's nowhere near MATLAB, which does a heck of a lot more than plotting 2D graphs.

I think Python will get an increasing market share here because it's free and easy to use and lets you do things that are clunky in MATLAB like parsing log files (in the past I have used C or Perl to munge things into a format MATLAB will like tho' it is possible in m-files). I don't think MATLAB is in any danger tho', it does too much too well and has enormous mindshare and legacy (no-one doing civil or mechanical or aeronautical engineering cares what Google uses to show people ads - SRSLY). Think about how people happily pay for Photoshop when there's GIMP. DSP is another big MATLAB market, but (AFAIK) biologists aren't doing the matrix-heavy computations that it's best suited for.

You can get a cheap version of MATLAB when you're a student (or know a student) it used to have a limited matrix size (256*256 IIRC) but I think now it doesn't. That was sufficient for the Mech Eng stuff I was doing, but not in my 3rd year when I got into image recognition. It's really nice, definitely worth trying, your university probably already has it.
unless all your friends have significant "reputation" they wouldn't be able to impact the system.

we wouldn't be giving complete noob accounts the same voting power as vetted community participants. voting ranking wouldn't be anonymous either. if you voted for something you'd have to be able to back up your decision against the scrutiny of the masses.

every system has flaws, these ones are at least minor and possibly even self correcting
So, basically, have you had any ideas you weren't supposed to have? (Or spoken up against the status quo, as I said originally.)
Close :). Her field is Audiology. (And I'm filling out my profile now, thanks for the heads up).
Why do you need seed/angel funding. Why don't you bootstrap it? Work on it in your spare time? And don't give me excuses about a young daughter. I did it with a young son while working full time. It's about desire, not location. Don't buy into the hype.

I'm not convinced YC is a good thing. What about the group think problem? Hey everybody let's build sites then [..magic..] profit!

If it's a good idea slow and steady will do just fine.
So just wait a cycle. Also, it should be less difficult to get health insurance to cover pre-existing conditions in Massachusetts since the state offers health care. However, if you ever move back to wherever you were then you're probably screwed.