skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My party balloons deflate in a day. What keeps theirs from doing the same?

Also there could be some durability problems. Just a thought.
Albert Einstein bot that you can extend (click "chat" near the top to talk to him)
Something you have to understand: as a startup without a product, without users, and without revenue, your bargaining position sucks. It's incredibly easy to start a company; it's incredibly difficult to finish one successfully. If you're Google or Twitter or are funded by YC, you can attract applicants based on the strength of the opportunity. If not, you don't have much to offer besides the money.

Put yourself in a candidate's shoes and ask yourself: what do you have to offer that they can't get on their own? What's to stop a candidate from taking your idea and competing with you?

A pre-traction startup is riskier for employees than it is for founders. If it fails, they get to put "Software Engineer at Company Nobody Has Heard Of" on their resume, while you at least have a founder title. They probably will learn fewer skills. And they don't get the feeling of being in control of their own destiny, because you're calling the shots.

The only thing they do get is a salary, as well as not having the responsibility for success or failure fall on their shoulders. But here you say you want someone who's not really interested in the money, and you want them to take a passionate, active role in the startup. If they don't care about the salary, and the responsibility falls upon their shoulders anyways, why should they work for you instead of starting their own startup?
Driving The Mouse (A startup story)
I did all this: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs and I am very happy.
I think this is a sign that I've been programming too much, but Scroble forgot to close his brace in paragraph 3.
How well does that work, out of curiosity? Are there long loading times?
MyBlogLog: From starting out to being bought out
Great video! Very infomrative
if you're a fbfund recipient, don't you get advice and promotional help from fb? Is that right or am I mistaken?
IPhone Exploit Undermines App Store Security, Lets Devs Update And Run Arbitrary Code
> it was hard to explain retained capital to a drummer.

Sort of offensive =] I bet we (percussionists) are better with numbers on average than other musicians.
Ask YC: Anyone have a good implementation for multiple database support in Django?
We're looking at Django, and while we love most of what we see in the 1.0 release, I'm a bit worried about the lack of multiple database support.

Has anyone here implemented this (basic usages for mysql master/slave(s) replication)? I'm not too concerned with sharding at the moment?

If you have done this, care to share ideas? Thoughts? Code?

Thanks all!
a fascinating thought experiment indeed. although the way i see it, the chess example is more in-line with the google-ing of answers instead of "intelligently" finding a solution.

intelligence itself comes from wealth of experience, subtle nuances and relationships. it's pretty damn hard to counterfeit. intelligence is better associated with the ability to be creative, and it takes a lifetime of trial and error to create.

computers need to have "existence", a persistent memory of trying things and learning consequences and the ability to extrapolate on predictions (using relationships to formulate possibilities) before we start really seeing what kind of intelligence they can form.

i do believe that a great majority of people will be "dumbed down" by machine integration, but the creative ones, that can leverage these new powers yet retain their intelligence will still prove to be the innovators and leaders as we move forward.
Hey sanj,

I have a lot of experience in this area. Drop me a line at jesse@20bits.com if you want to talk.
Sounds like "deploy for free, pay for scale"
Has it actually been decided what the role of the White House CTO would be? Is he an advisor? Or is he actually in charge of something? Or is he just there to look good? Is he in charge of all technology or just information technology? In the executive branch, or in the whole government? Does he have a department working under him or is he just some guy who strolls in occasionally to offer an opinion?
Yeah, very much. It's good as a replacement for all-mouse systems but not all-keyboard ones.
"manipulates the air pressure inside the balloon to change the shape of the mirrored surface so that it focuses the maximum amount of sunlight on the solar cell"

Sounds like they're fancier than typical party balloons.
telecommute
good developers may be "interested in working on something innovative", but no one is gonna work for long without proper compensation.
You can call it a magic buzz word, but I think it's common sense. There's a whole existing segment of the offline advertising market that is built around marketing things close to you. Meanwhile, people routinely use their smartphone to look for places to eat, things to do, places to buy things, etc.
It's a slippery slope, my friend.
Other than the obvious P2P file sharing that grows to fill the available space, better responsiveness (less buffering time) for high bit rate streaming video will probably dominate bandwidth needs for the near future.

Remote computing applications will probably also get richer as latency drops and throughput increases.

If we ever get in front of the common user's bandwidth needs, I'd say you might see applications that download speculatively, such as pre-buffering the videos advertised in the youtube player at the end of the selected video, or pre-downloading (pieces of) movies or TV shows that you watch online.

Beyond that there's room to innovate in being clever (video codecs that don't under-run but degrade the bitrate of the video trying to keep things flowing), and there's probably a lot of untapped innovation there that could take advantage of more bits.
> And that's only for one data packet.

A crucial point. A few years back, I had to deal with some rather "chatty" applications that were attempting to span filesets/databases located in both the U.S. and India. Latency on a single data exchange might be annoying; multiply that by hundreds or thousands of exchanges per each human-level interaction with the application, and said application ground to something that would make a "crawl" look high speed.

Partly the vendor's fault, for not accurately representing this situation. Partly the Company's fault for neither anticipating nor investigating it (nor listening to me when I advocated doing so); further, for attempting a non-standard deployment in an attempt to save a few bucks.

I guess I'll blame the vendor again for such an unnecessarily verbose and crap-laden application design. Anyway, the whole thing turned into one giant, festering pool of fail, that the users actively avoided when they could and loathed and sweated over when they couldn't. Eventually, turnover at the pointy haired boss level made it politically feasible to kill more and more of the pieces, and now some years later the Company has supposedly ponied up the money for a solution that actually works (well, the demos look/work better, and the basic design seems capable of allowing it to work).

When I think of the countless hours and frustration wasted on that doomed deployment.

So, anyway, watch your network latency, know your application design, and pay attention to the implications. When testing, test network performance, and inject latency, noise and the like to get a picture of what things will look like in the real world.

Sounds simple; nonetheless, this technologically relatively sophisticated company still managed to completely screw it up.
Sounds vaguely plausible. For something like Mysql, I can see it. For stuff like Java or Openoffice... I'm not so sure; although I'm sure there's lots of consulting work to be had regarding Java.
You might also be a grammar geek. That bugged me too.
Don't do this in Django. Just don't.

This should be done with a database proxy server. With MySQL, you can use MySQL Proxy and PostgreSQL has pgpool-II.

Yes, you could hack the Django code to solve your problem. Why do that when there is a very simple and tested product that already does that transparently? For me, supporting multiple databases in a web framework is akin to writing an HTTP server into your web framework. Maybe you should do it for testing purposes, but not for production.
That's like saying European tourists who visit only NYC and SanFran and stay in posh hotels aren't seeing the real America. There are many faces to China, and the expat life is one of them.
Read all his books :)
MySQL master/slave replication is implemented:

http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/mysql_replicated/en/

I'm not sure whether authors are here or not.
They teach that primarily in US schools, too. I was lucky: my teacher was fascinated in things high schools don't usually teach, and he showed us a lot of great stuff, including some of the stories about the Japanese.

I think that we should show photos of Nagasaki. Hiroshima, it could be argued, was necessary to end the war quickly and effectively. Nagasaki was more morally grey: chances are, Japan would have surrendered without it.
gist.el is available on GitHub
What if we send our leaders on a 1-on-1 battle instead of a million men. We could save a lotta blood.

The problem is that war evolves. It used to be small-scale and formal. Then the U.S. devised guerilla warfare in the Revolutionary War and suddenly that was impossible.

If there was a way of enforcing the deal after the duel, this would work. But there's no way to prevent people from reneging.

Also, what would that change? Suddenly, the best leader isn't the brightest or the wisest but the one who's best with a gun.
Yeah. They're going to sink like a lead log.
There's an attitude of putting people down going round HN.

The applicant in the story put down the other applicants. LeadLog put down him, publicly. And now, HN is putting down auston. Everyone is criticising everyone else's spelling and grammar - and therefore becoming more self-conscious of their own.

If you are truly capable of creating value for others, putting others down is pointless for you. But it's worse: focusing on other's mistakes can and will erode your ability to create value for others. You will end as a destroyer of value.

Pride comes before a fall, and you won't be the first. Not by a long way.

s/Dashboard/LeadLog
I imagine a good blog compiler would have caught that :)
No, no one really has any idea -- though I would be surprised if he personally is responsible for government IT, that seems like something best delegated.

Like many of Obama's policy proposal, it consists of a paragraph of sentence on barackobama.com.

If it weren't for his strong anti-freedom stance, Bill Gates would be a great pick.
Yeah, thanks for proving my point. All of you people in South Florida need to sink into the ocean. I was the IT admin for a mid-sized real estate company for 2 years and while I liked my job and loved the people I worked for, the pay was crap. I looked for 6 months for a job after leaving there and jobs like yours were the only ones that kept popping up. You expect to get the most skilled person in the world, yet only want to pay them in packing peanuts. There's a reason that skilled people like me(I consider myself skilled) leave South Florida, and its because of people like you.
I think the dirty secret around here is that a lot of us are Textmate and gVim users (amongst other ...ahem... editors)

Anyways, that's a great link; although it looks like they need to fix their links to gnu.org. Thanks!
This is nothing new. This is a typical customizable chat bot with random Albert Einstein quotes.

Albert Einstein: Everything is relative you know...
You: Hi, there.
Albert Einstein: Hi, I am Albert Einstein
You: No, you're not.
Albert Einstein: Write "Tell me something" and I will tell you something
You: You are a computer.
Albert Einstein: You are right. What gave me away?
You: You are stupid.
Albert Einstein: Oh yeah? Well, you are ugly, and I can learn.

Clever, but it still needs a lot of work. Why haven't linguists ever approached this problem? I'm sure you could analyze how famous people talk, and really learn how to simulate their talking patterns, and make a bot that sounds like a specific human.
Budweiser is popular in China because it's practically a Chinese beer... it's brewed in Wuhan and made with rice. This means that in Germany it isn't beer.

The internet censorship isn't intended to change the attitudes of the upper class -- the government figures that anyone who can understand English enough to read foreign news is already lost. And they don't care about foreigners circumventing the filter for personal use, as long as you aren't actively spreading subversion. Definitely don't spread subversion.

They want to keep the common person ignorant and the censorship helps. If the momentum of the people ever shifted, things could change, so there is enormous reason for the government to maintain the status quo. The protectionism is incidental (but is a nice perk0, the censorship of ideas is why they do it.
I imagine nothing could taste as bad as I expect chicken feet to.
Like the concept, but it violates Fitts' law. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27_law )

I don't want to make precise movements with my mouse. Buttons should be large and margins between buttons should keep me from accidentally clicking the wrong one. The time picker fails on both counts.

Also, first picking AM/PM before you pick the hour is confusing. Add to that that the control is huge, so it wouldn't fit in any normal web forms.

Good exercise in UI design, but I hope no web-app will ever force me to use it.
Ask YC: Anyone in SF have a spare couch this weekend for a 2-guy "startup"?
A friend and I are pitching in mountain view this weekend (13th to 17th) and are looking for like-minded people in the SF area that have a spare couch or floor. Hotels seem to be expensive and don't provide the hacker atmosphere we're looking for. We're going to be busy practicing our demo, so we will try to stay out of your hair. We'd gladly compensate you for any expenses.

We're both male and in our early 20s. We're also not crazy, if that matters.

I'm posting this here because there's probably several other startups in town this weekend that might be interested in the same thing.

My email: sam -@- odio.cøm
I think what's different here is that submitting a chat rule is so simple that anyone can do it.

Moreover, it's kind of fun to submit a chat rule and see how well it works out in actual chats.
Embedded Stack Language for .NET
Yeah, but that's an old thing. A friend did this with Trillian for a group of us: it's neat at first, but it's simply preprogramming responses, even if the web site in question says it's teaching the computer to think.
But isn't Obama himself anti-freedom?

Anti-free[dom] market???

;)
"We’ll take care of you if you are dedicated to your work, trust me." - Trust? How about no...
Sometimes simple methods can work well. For example, Deep Blue brute-forced it with speed in chess.

The idea here is to accumulate a large database of chat rules to provide convincing conversation.
Sounds like an excerpt from his next book, Panic, due December.
The avenue may be gone, but there will always be rich idiots and smart young people to take their money.
Just after DjangoCon there was a long discussion on django-dev about implementing multi-db support in the upcoming releases:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...

Also, according to JKM, Django 1.0 does suport multi-db, it's just undocumented and at a lower level:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6zbos/django_10...

HTH.
There are reasons why mysql_replicated backend was created and used successfully in production instead of MySQL Proxy.

For example, MySQL Proxy knows nothing about transactions.
This should be titled: How to post a startup story on a site that loves startups and get down modded in to oblivion.

Impressive Auston.
Uh, this is silly.

If your notion of the App Store review process was that Apple was conducting a line-by-line source code audit of submitted applications then, yes, this is a calamity of the highest order.

If, like a reasonable person, your notion of the App Store process was some Q&A, documentation, and background info on the developers themselves, so that Apple could go in and kill any application found to violate their policies, then this "flaw" doesn't mean anything.

Apple may very well fix the underlying problem, which is that signed code bundles can include symlinks to unprotected app data, which links are not followed during signature verification. Then again, they may not. Why would they care? If you abuse the "feature", they're just going to kill your app.

Don't forget, Apple managed to stick a tethering application on the app store that John Gruber reports works just fine. If they're missing things that big, I doubt they're looking very carefully at the code.
It took a lot of work to try that out. You should try to focus on value proposition to the user. SHOW them what luckycal can do, don't try to just tell them with text on the home page. You can probably make some assumptions and suggest calendar events to the users. Or just show local events. I'd like to understand what luckycal is and exactly why I should use it within ~5 seconds of seeing it.

My advice about the product itself: I think you should focus on making luckycal very useful for an individual with no friends using it. The idea of finding local events while filtering out noise is something that a lot of people have tried but no one has quite gotten right. If you can make that work for one person alone, then people will naturally tell their friends without being constantly prompted to "invite".

I think this is a good idea, I hope you keep working at it.
Chess is far less complex than conversation, though. For conversation, the opening line alone will have trillions of possible permutations. Brute-forcing it won't work for something that incredibly complex. A more subtle solution is needed.
I think you're overrating your new funding. It's cool, but mainly because it means someone believes in you. Money is just money - not important in itself. Get over it as quick as you can.

The great appeal of a startup is that early employees often end up being a VP or something. They get into a higher position than they would in a conventional company, and faster, provided: (A) the company takes off and (B) they are basically capable of it.

For this, people will accept less money initially. They know you're a startup. This is the kind of motivation you want; and this is the kind of person who wants you.

Thinking that this temporary funding makes you a target for gold-diggers suggests you've lost sight of what you are - a startup. Imagining you are flat broke, desperately needing to make and sell cool stuff, might help. It's the truth.
I have; even the painfully dated "Next: The Future Just Happened"; Lewis is even worth reading when he's writing about Marillion, the UK's answer to Kenny Loggins.

If you're an entrepreneur and you haven't read Moneyball, [insert snark here].

I was disappointed by The Blind Side, his football book, but it was at least well-written and enjoyable.

I even have a huge bound volume of classic econ texts with his commentary in it. I will probably never really finish it, but I'm a huge fan and a completeist, so, he got me.
11:06 am: Completed setting up local media server and proxy apache server, creating textmate project, development starts
11:24 am: Completed mysql database setup and django settings tweaking, working on URL conf and first view
11:44 am: Going to chiplote (previous lunch engagement, should be back in 30 minutes)
12:21 pm: back from chiplote, researching twitter API
Sounds like you may be using a colorscheme that only defines gui colors. We get plenty of "problems" like that in #vim.
I thought that was a crazy weird post... Then I realized it was from somebody I know! I hung out with Sam at Startup School 2007, and he did not rape me. And his college friends were cool and regular posters here, so I assume the same again. If I was in California, I would let Sam stay over, why not you? Thanks.

We even stopped by Adam Smith's place, where Drew Houston was also... and look where they are now with Xobni and DropBox!

Five stars, recommended.

(Sam didn't ask me to post this, I just saw this.)

By the way, what type of startup is this? Good luck!
Humans are predictable though. That makes it tractable via brute-force.
First impressions:

New User Experience: Requires me to give up a lot of personal info without providing me with a compelling reason to do so. Maybe this is typical of Facebook apps but it is still likely to be a significant resistance point for signing up. I wouldn't have if I hadn't heard about it on HN

Marketing Strategy: I think for this to be successful you will need to focus on groups with a vested interest in promoting themselves and their events. Think MySpace and bands or local community event organizers. You are likely to get easier traction if you focus on specific geographies - say New York, San Francisco, or your home town. These people need to get their message out so could become active super-users and draw in users of their own. Think about a local band with an existing fan base and how you could target your app to help them reach and connect with their audience.

The look and feel should be more like a Facebook app. As it stands it looks out of place. Still, nice start. Keep it up and good luck escaping cube-land.
Why Jerry Seinfeld Probably Cost Microsoft a Lot More than $10 Million
edw519 & rms Interview with Andrew Warner from Mixergy about Hacker News
Don't know about the loading times since I didn't buy the game, but 5 other million people did!
No, but I'm familiar with it. What did you submit?
Didn't work for me (FF2, linux).

EDIT no, it does. You have to hover and wait. When you click, it sets the time. (I was clicking immediately.)

AH: the confusing thing is that it is already "open" when I visit the webpage. But the instructions say you have to click it first to open it.
Scroll down far enough and you will find my picture on a CD jacket. That picture and the quote from pg are both from this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202096
Eugh, yes... I'm really bummed about being on MySQL now. This ability alone would take a LOT of risk out of deployments into production.
that's like making Paulson (former head of Goldman Sachs) the Treasury Secretary... we've already seen what happens there
The question is - how much of everyone else's money will go down the drain to pay for these financial gigolos and their obscene money fetishes.
Don't worry, the lead guitarist didn't get it either.
14 Big Businesses That Started in a Slump
There were some parts that were difficult, mostly finding vendors. It wasn't exactly easy to figure out who offered the best/cheapest shirts/stickers/cd pressing.

Other than that, if you hire an experienced PR person and booking agent, it is pretty much the same as a record label.
I had to say basically the same thing to a CEO just a couple weeks ago.

Of course I did after I was offered the job for what I can only describe as a joke. I asked for twice as much and though he offered me more, I had to say no and wish him the best of luck finding any developer at that price, let alone one who knew fizz-buzz. Needless to say, I couldn't have worked for him even if he met my demands. Truly the "we'll take care of you, trust us" makes no difference once you know how you're valued.
Due to articles like this Apple may be inclined to remove this nice feature. The end result will be us not be able to use dynamic Default.png

Pity.
Similar GUI concept to navigating nested menus, adapted for a new purpose.

ie: The top-level menu choice is AM or PM, then there are 12 sub-menus, and each has identically named set of sub-sub-menus (00, 15, 30, 45).

EDIT a difference is that it remembers the (sub-)submenu chosen when you change a higher-level menu.