skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coding Horror is like comfort food. It's not very healthy, but it makes you feel better.

Sometimes I feel like I can't program and I can't write. Then I visit Coding Horror, and I don't feel so bad anymore. At least I don't write book reviews for books that I clearly haven't read.
UK 'closer' to adopting the euro
Are they still trolls when the content is right and the object of they're trolling is risible to say the least though?
OK, what I meant is "relatively perfect" ;-) It is just that in many cases, pg's treatment of a topic is the most succinct and accessible one I have seen.
I did. It took seconds to realize that this was interesting.
It doesn't have to be, and we've talked about going down one or both of these paths in the future. Doing it web-based is a nice way for us to demo it, though. Also, since it's possible that we'd want to somehow integrate the tech with our main app, doing it on the web is a natural first step.
Damn, whole seconds? I gotta work on that.
Please don't take it all so seriously. :-)
I don't think there is no risk--would anyone think there is no risk in starting a car company!??!!? Hello!??!

The issue here is if we are going to give 25b in funding to companies to advance new car technology we should probably start with the company that has been most successful in actually delivering a product (i.e. Tesla and not GM).
This title is horrifying!!! Java set back good OOP by about 20 years!!! We're still recovering from what Java did to the OO community.
It almost certainly won't be advertising, though we'll make it easy to get to Dabble DB from here, which seems to be a good way of monetizing traffic. Otherwise, we're pretty open-minded at this point -- I'd be interested in hearing what people think makes the most sense..
In other words, a horrible example of?
There's something very wrong with that 2003 picture. If you look at the corresponding number of sales you see that there were less than 10 sales in 2002 and 2003. That can't possibly be correct (even taking into account a post September 11, 2001 slow down) and data pre-2002 looks fishy too because it's order of 100s of sales.
ummm.... this is very cool.
Does anyone else think so? I'm using Clojure a lot and really like it.

But Lisp has been around for 50 years and never hit the mainstream so it seems there perhaps is something about it that doesn't fit with most programmers?

Also it only offers one form of concurrnecy and while I like it there is still much speculation and research in the area.
Scala for example kind of builds on the whole Java-language and offers a more recognizable language for Java-developers and more opportunities to roll your own concurrency-mechanisms, or at least that's the impression I've gotten.

And then we have Haskell and Erlang.
If you like these kinds of thought problems, I definitely recommend Thinking Physics by Lewis Carroll Epstein.

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Physics-Understandable-Practi...
It reminded me quite a lot of ItemField and so I was instantly intrigued to understand what had been done.
That background sound has got to go. I almost want to flag this article just for that.

edit: Oooh. Awesome. You only hear it if you visit the site in Internet Explorer. It's this type of immature, irrational Microsoft hatred that makes all of the folks who avoid MS products for good reasons look bad.
Clojure just might become a popular lisp. :-)

In terms of Scala, it's built on top of the JVM (as is Clojure) and so it's underlying model is the same -- Java threads mapped to OS threads. Scala does give people a variety of syntactic constructs.
YouTube Usage Decoded
Ask HN: Marketing ideas for my book "The Geek Atlas"
Next April my 'travel book for people interested in science and technology' will be published by O'Reilly. Of course, O'Reilly will do their own marketing, but I feel like I ought to be doing my own guerrilla marketing since I'm a geek.

I would love to hear the thoughts of HN people on good ways to build a buzz.

PS I probably should have said a bit more about the book: it's 128 places around the world with significant scientific, mathematical or technological significance without being a list of the the usual science museums (although there are a few good ones in the book). The book has information about the place, and an explanation of the science behind it.

An example place is The Horn Antenna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_Antenna) in New Jersey where the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was verified (by accident).

To be notified about the book you can put your email address on my little mailing list: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/12/geek-atlas-mailing-list.html
Welcome to Hacker News... if that's really you...
> You should meet my Grandparents. My Grandma especially is a firecracker. She's done more this past year than some do in a decade.

Must... resist...
we're working on doing more and more updates, its surprisingly hard to find totally happy news though :)
fixed that, stupid mistake. :)
Good idea, nice implementation, wrong medium. There is no reason this should be a web application - in a perfect world, I want something like this directly integrated into my database tool, and not have me open my browser and all that.

At the same time, considering that the data work may be large, having this on a server is not too bad of an idea.

What I suggest to you is this - spend a day to make a version of this wrapped in a web browser in a .exe file. Put a price on the .exe, and sell it directly to businesses. It's an easy sell, and it's way more convenient to have a "local" application for a tool like this, than a website.
Google reader caught it, here's a link from my shared items: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/10769756911853394104.

They are saying that they are opening the beta to everyone, offering limited free usage (500MB, 25 machine-hours) and that they reduced the pricing to $0.25 per GB per month.
It's limited to 100 domains with 10GB each.
Come on, IE? Really?
Didn't expect you to show up here, but since you are, here's my major disagreement:

What makes you so certain that Tesla has so much more ability to execute than the big three auto companies? They're years and years behind in the "deliver a few people electric cars" race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car). And based on the executive turnover at Tesla, how could anyone really be sure that the leadership there is stable enough to be trusted to actually make good on a government loan?

I know the Roadster is awesome, and I agree with most of your points about it being at least a legit, innovative, and potentially affordable venture. But you kind of omit the part of the argument about why Tesla deserves it and the other companies don't...
You certainly appear to have an abundance of education that should assist you tremendously...

A born financial conservative, I say go with Option 1 - but note that I have completely no experience in these types of ventures.

What I can offer is that in this time of economic turmoil, if you happen to be doing alright - you don't need Warren Buffet to tell you that now is a nice time to buy as things are on sale, even if we haven't completely hit bottom yet. Now that only relates to the market and stocks specifically, but apply that to your idea - startup costs specifically, mustn't they be low too? Supplies, equipment, all marked and coming down due to businesses going belly-up. You fancy open source, so that's a cost saver too... heck, you've got an MBA and you're asking us about plunging, mortgages and finances?

I say keep at your goal in the moonlight, pay off deficits as much as possible, that way you'll have less to worry about when you do take the plunge. I'm not really impressed with the numbers showing page views - your company could go bankrupt for some illegal exposure that you didn't foresee occurring. What I am concerned about is how much can you afford, and/or how much can you risk? If you don't have a backup plan, I say you have no plan - hence the cushion that the 35% would provide.

Best of luck.
Another quote from Ray Ozzie:
"Microsoft is a pernicious form of American capitalism."

(I can't find the quote anywhere, but I read it in 1996 in a magazine in Germany, loved it, and remembered it. I could be wrong, though.)
Really. Haha. Ask me about it sometime.
I'm not sure this works as a website (the copy/paste/email cycle is probably too much effort for interactive editing.).

But if it was an Excel add-on of some kind I bet you could sell it. Maybe to Microsoft. Or, sell the underlying technology to Google Docs. It's got a wow factor that could inspire upgrades or switching.

Anyway I doubt you hadn't thought of that already. Cool stuff.
"Making it" is a journey of several steps:

1. Realizing you haven't been checking price tags on food or household items for a while now.

2. Making money faster than you can find things worth spending it on.

3. Being well-off without having to work full-time.

4. Being well-off through actively-managed passive income.

5. Being able to sail around the world and come back richer (through passive income, not sea trade nor piracy nor fortune hunting ;).

6. Being able to do what you want, where you want, when you want, without the permission or approval of anybody.
Clojure is clean and lean while Scala is heavy weight. I'm learning them side by side but enjoying Clojure way more, especially the pragmatism of feature decisions.
Just Wow: YouTube Had 344M Global Uniques in Oct.
He isn't lying. If there had been no Microsoft, there would be no commodity PC market, and little competition in hardware for home or work PCs. Moore's law would still be there, but it might just be a means for increasing profit margin or enabling ever-more-bloated systems, under strict control by manufacturers.

The web might exist but as a phenomenon among people who buy weird computers like NeXTs.
It's sad that out of a list of 100 blogs, only 2 are authored by females.
We don't need this kind of lists anymore. If you want this just check http://delicious.com/popular/
I disagree with the claim that harm to the U.S. IPO market was "not the intention" of the "people who wrote" Sarbanes-Oxley.

I have two pieces of evidence.

First, it was well-known and easy to see that Sarbanes-Oxley would be extremely expensive. It was well-known when passed that its costs fall disproportionately on small public companies. Because IPOs by definition are small public companies, the costs fall disproportionately on them. Thus, it must have been known when enacted that the bill would harm IPOs.

Second, suppose in fact it is the case, as Graham seems to advocate, that Congress "inadvertently" harmed IPOs. His argument is that Congress just accidently happened to overlook the harm of the bill to IPOs. In that case, when the harm to IPOs became factually clear, the bill would have been changed or amended. The fact that the law was not amended even after the harm to IPOs became clear proves that it was Congress' intention all along to harm small public companies (the companies most dangerous to the large corporations who have the most lobbying pull).
The examples are pretty basic and can be done with 4-5 excel functions and no scripting. Do you guys have any heavier duty examples in the works?

What market are you going after? Soccer moms managing team phonebooks? Entrepreneurs who have other things to worry about than cleaning up data?

It'd be cool to see see prompts that inspire better uses/structure to your data. E.g. if a company is managing their sales pipeline (as in the dabble db 8 min demo), analyze that data further than excel easily allows.. track how the data changes over time to deliver insights that people wouldn't see by just producing graphs.
What common trends exist among sales that actually close? How long does a sale stay on the table before closing? Does this vary by salesperson/location?

It makes sense for people who know little about spreadsheets [like my mom who would manually add dashes to dozens of rows :) ], but they may also be the type who wouldn't think to seek out a web app to help them clean up the data.

I'm probably a poor sample b/c I spend 5-6 hours/day in excel (finance @ tech company).

Color-logo feature is sweet!
At least they did a good job; the font is quite professional IMHO.
There is a reason cloud services do not support full SQL - relational storage doesn't scale.
Why is the alignment of the numbers so wonky? Georgia also has similarly weird alignment.
patio11:
I like so many things Japanese (work ethics, striving for everyday improvement, food, Ruby - to name just a few) but I often hear and read that the Japanese society can sometimes be very unfriendly towards gaijin. What are your experiences?
Oh please. Perfect troll bait.
I think you're trying to solve a valid problem - i.e. allowing Excel type data to be manipulated/formatted more easily than Excel (or similar tools) currently allow. And I think you have a cool product, but...

But I don't think this is a solution to that problem for most people who have that problem.

My previous job involved a lot of Excel work (so I became fairly good at it) and it also involved interacting with people (often clients) who used Excel occasionally and really werent very proficient at using it. So for simplicity, lets imagine the world of excel users is made up entirely of those two types, and lets call them A and B respectively.

Types As don't need this service - they can do all the things you showed in Excel quickly (using keyboard shortcuts etc), using formatting codes (even though Excel format codes are clunky. eg. SSN format code is: ###-##-####).

Type Bs do need your service. But will they use it? If they use Excel rarely then is it worth the overhead of knowing how to use a separate service (even a simple one)? If they can't figure out how to use Excel codes then are they the type of person who will be interested in exploring new services? (note, this is about the type of person, not about how simple your service is)

OK, so the world of Excel users is not as simple as the A/B world that I describe. There is no doubt another type C somewhere between the two who might value this - but how many of those are there? My gut says 'not many', but I don't have data. Can you describe to me your archetypal customer?

Making this an Excel plug-in might solve this overhead problem somewhat, but even then, the latter issue still remains.
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indeed. I have regretted a lot that i have not mingled with other activities/folks during my 4 yr stay. :)
Live Piracy Map
lol - looks like we wrote pretty much the same comment at the same time..
I find it hard to believe: "Studies show that loneliness is associated with morning surges in cortisol, the stress hormone, and increased vascular resistance, which results in higher blood pressure. They also show the lonely drink more, exercise less, get divorced more often, and have more family estrangements and run-ins with the neighbors. And they’re fatter."

I'm alone for last few months, ie not in relationship and without too many friends, and my live is much more better.

I eat much healthier because there are no conflicts of interests, so I don't have to reward myself with junk food. Also, I have much more free time so I'm swimming every day and I don't feel bad I spent few hours just walking and thinking about my life. My blood pressure is now lower than ever.
I am also inclined towards option 1. That would significantly reduce the risk of not being able to pay the mortgage if things don't go well..

The downside being competitors/followers might leap ahead and I might lose this opportunity when I see some traction and consumer interest in this concept.
I also work in Japan, and I've always been treated politely. Of course, there's the occasional politician who announces that all crime in Tokyo is committed by foreigners, but real people tend to be a lot more level-headed.
I think Clojure might succeed even without its great concurrency features - and by succeed I mean gaining a Porsche-like marketshare.

It has all the good Lisp stuff, but ditches all the historical Lisp cruft, actually has a little syntax. And because it runs on the JVM, it's stable, fast, debuggable, has a wealth of libraries and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

And there's already a (beta) book: http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure
American students going off to college abroad for less
Usability Toolkit
Boo. Georgia's got the coolest numeral typesetting of any commonplace font. If you really think about it, why shouldn't numbers have a "lowercase" mode that features descenders and ascenders?
It would be hard for me to give any meaningful advice since you had me halfway through the title. I even made a note in my calendar for April 2009 that your book was coming out and I need to buy it. (this was when it was on your blog last week).

I would see if you can get on "geek" media: geek.tv, NPR's Science Friday, etc. Science Friday had a 20 minute talk with the people that wrote "My Nuclear Family Vacation" where they visited nuclear history sites.

Not sure if it's in the budget, but you should go to any of the places you can and do a little 2 min video about it, with info about the book in the fade-out. Put them on youtube and on the book site.

Definitely have a site for the book, preferably with a decent blog. This lets people find out more about the book and lets you give periodic reminders that it exists and should be bought. See "Permission Marketing" for more details.

Anyways, good luck and I can't wait until it comes out in April!
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604/778 numbers, Vancouver Starup? Can it be?

You guys looking for an intern? lol
I really like the YouTube idea.

The plan is to have a dedicated web site for the book (O'Reilly did buy geekatlas.com).

Thank you for the suggestions.
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Yeah we're in Vancouver - drop us an email and we should at least grab a coffee.
My initial thought when I read the title was that Excel isn't just water around the stone that is the database; it's also the drop that erodes the stone when people start relying exclusively on their Excel hacks.

Seems I'm not the only one to think so.
Doctors and lawyers can generate large amounts of cash, too, but they continue doing so at an accelerating rate until well into their 60s.
This is a great story, the only sad thing is that most of the affected high-stakes players still do not have their money back, and the companies involved still maintain their innocence blaming 'previous management' for the scandal. The latest news is available on the popular twoplustwo poker forums.
How does encrypting data and not allowing passwords for shell accounts affect your budget?
Strange that the C&C servers are in Estonia still, one would imagine EU and for that matter Estonia itself could take matters in its own hands, if appropriate authorities could be provided with a list of those servers.
That's just silly. IBM opening up their architecture (unlike Apple) created the PC market. Microsoft just squeezed profit off of every sale.
I own two laptops, a Macbook Pro and ThinkPad with Linux Only.

Yet I cannot agree with this stupid post.

Sticking to domain specific historical facts without looking around and viewing the whole spectrum is none the less but ignorant.

Microsoft with its evil way spread the word around.

Microsoft brought the PC into every house for what seems to be at the begining a reasonable price.

Yes, I think at the end, the price of your privacy and freedom, viruses and loss of data is higher than one can anticipated at the begining.

Microsoft was ugly all the way when trying to fight the web standards every time.

Moreover, without windows being that popular and making computing and computing related such great business, I might not even picked up my profession as a software developer early then at 1995.
Managing a Virtual Infrastructure Requires an Application Centric Approach
Sounds good - emailed.
It's nice that most of them are polite (okay, except some politicians) but how many are friendly, how do they see foreigners staying for very long (or maybe forever?) in Japan or even marrying a girl (daughter?)? During my years in Germany, I have observed the politeness and sometimes friendlyness but, after meeting new people, most of them would ask me "And, when do you go back home?". (BTW: Almost every foreigner who lives there - even those born there but with african, asian or other non-white roots - reported the same experience)
What presidents accomplished in their first 100 days
The business model that makes the most sense to me is to sell the solution to businesses. Companies that deal with a lot of databases and want an easy solution to do mass edits. They probably could have their IT guys write some crazy Excel macro to do a lot of this, but your product is so simple my mom could use it, which is a great thing.

You could keep it as a web service and/or charge to license it to businesses and make residual income off support/updates/installation on their network.
Ask HN: Are you a Firefox Extension Developer?
I am looking for a Firefox extension developer who is interested in turning the Tyba Firefox Extension into an opensource project, manage the code, make changes so that it's compatible with a new internal API (just a few changes of XMLHttpRequest URLs) and most importantly make it work cross platform. The groundwork has been done by a Firefox developer (it currently works great on XP and Vista) allready but it's proving difficult to make it work cross platform.

Besides the occasional freelancer (hence the initial FF extension) it's a bootstrapped one man startup I work on fulltime (I code and manage everything but the FF extension - currently out of my range of expertise). Our budget is not large but the majority of it is allocated to this.

I am really looking for someone who is enthausiastic about the idea of Tyba and is willing to initially spend some time to make it work cross platform, the api change and set it up as an opensource project and from then onwards just spend a few hours each week maintaining it.

If you would like to use the extension before replying just go to http://tyba.com and request an invite I'll be sure to send out the invites immediately.

You can contact me by emailing: contact [at] tyba [dot] com

Thank you,

Eiso
Don't go to business school (Seth Godin)
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Ths one may evenbe better suited for me needs. Thanks!
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