skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The SBCL thing makes me wonder if there are any modern lisps that can be restricted to a 4GB (32-bit) address space, while still using 64-bit values and registers...

Then, cons cells would take up only one machine word.
Good article on the subject:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/16/...
I find it more interesting to note that not only has this sparked a conversation on HN... it has sparked a conversation about the security/efficiency/problems of the proposed solution.

I guess a lot of us are analytically minded here.

My question is: did you (and if yes, what?) do something to release your digital assets to your family?
Yes, soy protein isoflavones are phytoestrogens. Males should limit soy consumption.
Help Komodomedia win the coolest Wordpress blog competition | WeAreJustCreative
this is such bullshit, why not give the money to actual tax payers?

That 7.4 trillion, divided by 300 million people(babies included), would mean that every person in the country would get $24,666, so an average family would get $100K to spend.

Don't tell me, that wouldn't stimulate spending.

Instead they give it to banks, who will just use that money to buy some other banks, while they are cheap
If I search for ‘iness’ and you return ‘Business’ I wonder what your index look like. If it is what I think, you are going the wrong way rantfoil. This will be very time consuming if you are doing it from scratch; it is worth looking at Sphinx as thorax suggested or any open source.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring?
We're in a recession. Many great, talented people are out of work (including plenty of folks here at HN, I'm guessing). We know, though, that many companies are also still hiring - so let's put these companies and job seekers in touch.

Are you hiring? Does your company (or your friend's) have openings? Let HN know!!! Let's get some good people good jobs.

(We've got 900+ startup jobs at Startuply right now, and we'd love to get you all involved - it's easy and completely free for everyone. That being said, post any openings you know of here, too, to get some love from the best hacker community evar.)
Also, video games != casual games. The point of this article was that casual games might be counter-cyclical due two their revenue model which differs from traditional video games.

Agreed to a certain extent, but my opinion also applies to casual games since more and more people are choosing games, whether casual or otherwise, as their preferred mode of entertainment. The industry is probably still growing as you mentioned and this is one of the reasons why I think the industry is recession proof as there is still quite a bit of room for growth. (Room for growth != to recession proof, I know, but it is one of the factors)

Regarding the point about youth, I would argue that older demographics are finding games to be a great form of entertainment, not just the youth of the 80's - The Wii and other platforms (casual games among them) are really making gaming more accessible than ever before.
the last stimulas check was a few hundred bucks, a drop in the bucket for most people.
My team uses this as a screening question, so I won't give you the answer - but you forgot to mention that both the rand5 and rand7 should have a uniform distribution. :)

I'll give you a hint, though - the solution is not elegant at all. Which is part of the point.
I got an answer to my same question below. It's a loan to the banks. It wouldn't be a loan to ordinary Americans.
Oh, we do use Sphinx. It's excellent. It would be insane to write your own full text searching or rely on MySQL's built in indexing.
I don't use them any more as I've moved to Slicehost, but Rimuhosting have servers in London and their pricing and service are very good, if a little pricier than Slicehost/Linode
Ask HN: Does the SaaS model really work?  Really?
I'm working on a web startup with a partner and I'm just feeling unsure of whether whole SaaS thing really works. Maybe it's because I'm personally reluctant to pay for stuff online, but I feel like some of my enthusiasm for this thing is waning because I'm doubting whether anyone really pays for anything.

I mean, I've read all the success stories about the YC companies and other web startups, I've read the "Autopsy of a web app" article that the Particletree guys wrote (awesome, btw). But I would love to see more numbers, as well as hear success stories from others, no matter how small.

To be blunt, though, I have a hard time believing that people will really sign up and pay for this in the numbers that we need. Our service isn't that expensive, starting at about $20 / month, and we need about 500 paying users to be "ramen profitable". But once we get to several thousand users, things start to get really interesting. Is that at all realistic?

I know it's heavily dependent on the market, what value we add, etc, but to give you an idea, our target market is primarily small companies, tech startups, bloggers, and others with a strong online presence. Probably a little smaller than the market for something like Basecamp, but similar in nature.

Bottom line: is it unrealistic to think that we can get 5000 users paying $20 / month? I know this is an unrealistic question to ask without more info, but I'm just trying to get an idea of what the upper limit of realistic expectations is. If a company like 37 signals only has 2,000 paying users for Basecamp, then I don't feel great about our chances. But if they have 200,000 paying users, I feel better about it. I just literally have no idea of what's realistic in terms of the size of a paying userbase. I know that others will be reluctant to post their numbers, but perhaps you can post them under a different account name or something? I would absolutely love to know how many paying users you have. Help a fellow entrepreneur out here :-)
Since Twitter Won’t Sell, Who Should Facebook Buy?
That's a shame, particularly if this effect becomes pronounced elsewhere.

There's been a lot written about the psychological/sociological role of places like cafes and bars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Place
I live in Paris and I love these cafés, there are everywhere, you never have to remember a place like you would do with a restaurant. It's only about sitting at a table with friends, drinking a very regular coffee...

About privatization, I was surprised that in Manhattan, there isn't any Café, only Starbucks coffees, on every corner. I guess Paris' cafés will change the same way.
Not hiring exactly--looking for co-founders who are in the fortunate situation where they can work for no salary indefinitely (and get equity of course).
Does the model work? Yes, of course. People pay contractually for things.

I don't understand what you're asking. Whether or not people pay for anything you create? That heavily depends on what you're offering and what value it's adding to your customers. It depends much less on the model; much more on your product.

And I think 37signals have _way_ more than 2,000 paying users.
It's a technical approach applied to a non-technical issue. That's the problem I see.
This won't work. f gives 1 to 5. 7 * f gives 7 to 35. But 7 to 35 will not be evenly generated. Think about it: There are more ways to get a 20 than there are to get a 7 or a 35. Same thing with rolling 2 die.
Related question: I recently left my previous job and am now looking for consulting work. I have never done consulting before. I have RoR / Ruby / machine learning / startup experience. How should I go about finding clients?
None taken. I should have put a disclaimer that you need to do your own research, but the comment was a pretty decent signal through a bunch of noise.
What makes you think we trust GitHub? ;) The only way GitHub could help us is if they were to opensource their site and let us an instance of GitHub in our datacenter.

We have some very strict rules about the code never leaving company computers, and those rules will not be changing.
Hello,

How one can submit the Proposal and the ideas? I think I have something that I am working and would like to see if you guys are interested in to it? So I need a rough-guideline and procedure to submit my idea to you guys (by the way, we are in the process to Patent our idea as well).

Thanks,

Mudassir Azeemi
408-644-7054
mmudassir@gmail.com
any company that's actually generating revenue. until facebook itself has a method of making money, spending FUNDING to acquire more uncommercial services under its belt is wildly irresponsible.

sure it might turn out to be a good idea, but it could more easily turn out to be a bad, horribly bad idea.
http://rateyourmusic.com/ has a nice rating and recommendation system and is a good way to find new music (and procrastinate).

They also have discussion forums, which I haven't tried.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162884

Craigslist used to work wonders for me.
Hmmm, that seems sort of spamesque.
If we can deal with programming languages, text editors, and operating systems here then music people should be just fine.
Awhile ago I posted my site, http://www.happyjobsearch.com here for feedback. I hope no one minds my mentioning it here again, but it seems relevant.

I wrote the site over a weekend after I got laid off for the second time in 3 months. The first time I was laid off, I took a very haphazard approach to looking for jobs and it caused me a lot of stress. I made Happy Job Search to help get organized. It's like a GTD app just for job hunting. It's optimized for quickly adding jobs to your "inbox", then going through and investigating each job, adding notes, and filing the job under a next action (send email, make call, etc). Finally, it's made to be useful for quickly reviewing a job opportunity before you interview.

It takes a little time to actually go through and enter job information, but it really helped me. It's also free. Hopefully others will find it useful as well and won't go through what I did the first time I was laid off :)

(ps, LukeG I'd like to email you but your address isn't listed. Mine is daniel@flyingmachinestudios.com. Thanks!)
Yes. Yes very please.

Every time I have to reinstall or get a new computer, I spend a week or two saving & backing up the old and setting up the new - installing dozens of programs and tweaking tweaking. Anything that helps me out there would be awesome - especially if it could save & restore my program (and OS) settings.

I always loved Steam because it remembered what I had and happily started downloading & installing all my games without fuss or needing to re-enter a dozen CD keys.

How to get app developers on board is the big question. There's a sort of critical mass that has to be reached, I think.

Another issue is how, exactly, to stamp out malware? Article didn't really touch on details. Letting the users report it seems mean - making some take the bullet and potentially get identities stolen and data wiped - but screening apps before letting them in is pretty infeasible at large scale - Apple's app store has hinted at that.
Also, posting any internship opportunities would be greatly appreciated as well.
This is a bit tangential to the layoffs, but it's something I've been thinking about for the last few weeks. This article made things a bit clearer.

I think Google's practices are disturbing. The fact that they use NDAs on everything and skillfully avoid "legal requirements" of all sorts make me wonder what is actually going on behind the scenes. The men in charge could really be up to anything.

Those of us who believe the "don't be evil" motto are getting duped. The information about what happens in the company is very tightly controlled, so if there are any creepy measures in effect, we won't know about them. Google is not better or worse than any other company, but we are led to believe that it is.

Until we really know what happens inside ("how the food is made"), we should withhold judgment about whether the company is good or bad. It's a setback for objectivity that a lot of smart people hold Google up as some golden standard, when the information available isn't good enough to make any generalized, overreaching judgment.

As for the layoffs, this seems like a turning point in the company's history. Things are going to look different in the future, with the stock having turned a pretty dramatic peak (stock market crash or not). Google won't become unprofitable, but the market obviously believes that its growth is slowing. Apparently with agreement from the powers that be.
I second this.

I currently have a F/T job at a bay-area startup (which I don't want to leave), but am extremely interested in supplementing my income with some consulting/contract gigs.
Yeah this would be great. I would look forward to it.
I am looking for some machine learning guys for quant work. Email me at greggurevich at gmail.com
sounds like a "leave your morals and ethics at home" venture

oh well, good luck with your hunt
Sites, blogs, forums catering to the communities of users that you are after. Which ones these are exactly clearly depends on the nature of your product. For example, if it's a security-related application, it'd be nice to get a mentioning on Security Focus. If it's low-end networking stuff, something like tweakers.net might be a good fit. Etc ..
According to this, Weebly (YC startup) has over 1 million users and "well over 1%" of those are paying users. That might mean 1.1% or it might mean 5%...but apparently they've got at least 10k paying users. Not sure how much their paid plans are...

http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/03/weebly-scores-1-million-us...
http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/
Tectonic, I was an RoR freelancer for 2 years. Here are sites where I've found jobs:

http://jobs.rubynow.com
http://jobs.37signals.com
http://bostonrb.org/jobs

If you also just google "rails jobs" you'll find the other useful rails job sites out there.

The best way to find work, however, is to build your network. One of the best clients I had was referred to me by a fellow I happened to have lunch with when I was in NYC for a couple weeks. Another of my best clients was referred to me by a friend. Where are you located, btw?

Another way to find work is to find other web development companies and just email them asking if they need help. I've found work this way as well, and have had more success contacting local companies.

edit: One thing that helped a lot was I developed a rails tool (Palmist, http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/projects/) , then I gave a presentation on it at the Boston ruby group. Since then, many interviewers have perked up when I mentioned it because they had either seen it or used it.

Hope this helps!
There are some nice meetups in LA, though they're a bit rare. I'm a big fan of netsquared, but mahalo meetups can be nice. Also LAWINE, depending on your taste and knowledge.

I live in Orange County, and haven't had much luck finding suitable meetup venues here (web-related anyway).

If anyone is in/from the area and knows of anything worthwhile, please speak up.
My solution to this problem was to make up sets of editor macros for the various languages I've used, with the same key chords producing the same semantics in varying syntax.
There was a Mark Pilgrim post from a couple of years ago- can't find it at the moment - where he said that getting your data out of an application is not a feature. I agree.

Always maintain your personal data on your own computer and only push to services things at you need access to externally or want to publish/share. Even when requiring external access I would rather have ssh or similar into my own box than "the cloud".
salesforce.com?
I think you really need to go after businesses. Consumers are just plain cheap. I know I am. As an individual I don't really need anything. Certainly I don't really need any web service. Getting me to buy something that is just a luxury is really hard. I'm also very likely to cancel when buyer's remorse sets in.

Businesses are different. If they need to solve a problem (to make or save a significant amount of money) and the choice is between paying one of their developers $10k+ in salary to build it or paying you $80/mo to have it instantly there's not much of a decision there. You just need to make sure that you're solving a problem that thousands of businesses have and then push it really hard. A simple formula that's really hard work to actually do, but quite likely to succeed.
Go to conferences and shake lots of hands. You don't need 150 clients, you need 1 or 2 great clients. Like dating, it's a numbers game.

I don't think you have to push your RoR experience, since many business owners won't get it.

Find out what problems business owners are having and offers suggestions to solve it, even if it's doesn't include your services.
Know any great RoR developers/shops?
I'm looking for a small development shop that specializes in building data intensive websites with RoR. Must have strong portfolio and potential to be around in 5-10 years. Project is well funded and very interesting. Feel free to hit me here or contact me via my blog (http://www.altgate.com/). Thx.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about France

This is a response to PG's comment about social, behavioral change. It is worth understanding the fundamental economic underpinning of this.

Two observations or assertions: a) People have more debt than a generation ago b) People have less leisure today than a generation ago.

These two assertions seem broadly true world-wide. As an example, young people can observe how many of their college-educated peers are graduating with excessive levels of debt. These two are connected - in fact, I believe (a) causes (b), to the extent that you can determine causation in social science.

Now who caused (a) i.e the culture of debt? Answer: Government policy, in particular central bank policy. Ultimately, money is credit in a fiat system, so when we talk about "Fed creating money out of thin air", they are really creating credit (i.e debt instruments) out of thin air. Eventually, cascading layers of debt entraps most of the population - corporations and individuals alike.

Debt causes serious cultural and social changes. Keynes had this right:

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
Twitter for hiring / getting hired?
What do you guys think of the potential of Twitter for hiring and getting hired? Much of these is done via word of mouth, and Twitter is like THE word of mouth machine
Perhaps a niave question, but why should facebook buy anyone? Why shouldn't they just focus on their own revenue stream?
Same as you, except "a subsistence wage in the Bay Area" instead of "no salary" :) (see my profile)
Why Does Twitter's Business Model Matter to You?
We are hiring PHP developers at Connected Ventures (College Humor and Bustedtees). If you are in the New York area (or willing to relocate), send your resume to techjobs [@] connectedventures.com.

I will post more details at Startuply next week.
#django, #python, #startups on freenode.

Most active in #django, can be a pretty fun channel at times
Understand your time frame as well. How long are you willing to wait to get to 5000 paying users? If it's 6 months, quit now. However, if you're willing to wait several years and grow slowly, it's perfectly achievable, assuming your product isn't completely asinine.
Another example: http://www.cobalt.com/

This is a Seattle company that does other stuff, but is at heart mostly a SaaS company and they're doing well. Really well actually, from what I can tell.
Kudos for pointing out the obvious, and in one URL summarizing what another poster in this tread already explained: target businesses, not consumers.
I've been using Linode for a while and I've been generally happy with it. There were some glitches when they started doing xen hosting, where one of my filesystems would suddenly drop into read-only mode and only a reboot would fix it, but that hasn't happened in months.

I used to use OpenHosting (openvps.com), and I have no complaints about their pricing or service, but (a) they use CentOS exclusively, and (b) they use Linux-VServer rather than Xen or another better-known virtualization system. If you can work within those constraints I would recommend looking into them.
The SaaS model works, infact it works really well. This is a great time to be selling SaaS because the TCO (total cost of ownership) tends to be much less than that of standard licensed software. (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_saas_cheaper_than_li...)

The question you need to answer is "how big the opportunity is for your application?" The number of paying customers at other SaaS companies is irrelevant unless you're playing in the same market and you expect to steal their customers. Which by the way should be a valid strategy if you believe that your application is going to be better.

Figure out what you're replacing, guess the % of that market that you can own and decide if it's big enough for you to survive and thrive in.
I believe Usenet disproved the infinite monkeys theory.
Amen brother! I've been struggling with git for a couple months now, and I really don't see much benefit above and beyond svn. I got so pissed off the other day I took a moment to rant about it: http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/11/23/git-the-fsck-out/

I'm always willing to learn new things, but I heavily disagree with anyone who thinks git radically changes the programming landscape.
+1 for #scheme--it's been a while since I've been on IRC, but enjoy that, #emacs (cause I learn a lot), #autonomo.us and on occasion hop into #lisp
What about the ban on smoking that happened two years ago? Couldn't that also be part of the problem?
If you're an emacs user, give rcirc, or erc a shot. They're nice and simple.
If everything you point to is aligned on an eight-byte boundary, and if you don't use type tags, then a 32-bit pointer can point to anything in a 35-bit address space. So you can get up to 32 GB.
That's right - you've got to be patient. It will not happen over night. And you've got to target businesses. But from what I see (http://uploadthingy.com) - once they're in there and paying they pretty much keep paying.
Facebook spammer fined almost $1 billion under CAN-SPAM
if you have a business and are providing a service that the consumers want, then you will have no problem getting people to pay for that service, given you are staying competitive in the given market space.

if you are selling primarily to online companies, there is no doubt that these people will buy your service, as they are used to doing business online (unlike yourself).

how old are? if you are under 30, and you feel reluctant to pay for stuff online, then you are a minority. most teens and young adults spend their money online, with growing numbers.

right now, the economy is tough, so it's hard to say exactly how your business will fair, given most companies are cutting spending (less trade).
How timely, we're looking for 3 fulltime quality software developers right now!

Some requirements: 4+ years experience doing fulltime development, proven UI/UX skills, experience with SaaS oriented development, and desire to continuously improve your skills. And at least 10 points of karama at Hacker News :)

You'll be working on projects from conception to launch, contributing to the success of the business in a big way.

Preferred: Experience with Perl and Scrum.
I like http://thefeelgood.com/
well, not sure about the 'shops/experience' but in the comments on the 'Who's Hiring' post now #1 on the main page,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375410
there is a guy with machine learning and RoR experience looking for a contract.
Might be just what you're looking for.