skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Universities typically use some of their endowment to fund current operating expenses. That means that Harvard can lock in some permanent losses in order to do things the way it has in the past few years or it can tighten its budget. Neither are very desirable. They don't want to have to cut back on things like financial aid nor do they want to have to sell at what are extremely low market prices and reduce that endowment more than expected.
I wouldn't rely on alexa for reliable stats. Compete.com says the opposite http://siteanalytics.compete.com/youporn.com/?metric=uv
Here comes 5,000 of us again ;)

I think it's a great idea, I haven't tried your tool yet myself (it appears to be the ... Hacker News effect).

I agree with affiliate linking it to godaddy or something - I imagine you would make a lot of money. Also, get it it's own domain and brand it? Or get a web designer to do that for you if you are not into that. I don't really like subdomains, but that's just me.

You could also affiliate link to hosting websites if you don't already.

Another idea - how about make pages of common names? "Viagra" "Spyware" etc? Even hacker, java, whatever maybe a separate page for each of the top 500 searches

And then you could slap some Adsense ads on there. These pages would refresh every 24 hours, and I am sure people would bookmark them and/or subscribe for updates. This way if I was just browsing the site, I might click around between some pages.

The problem I see with advertising is that you can't target it very well ("domain searchers" is broad), but you could if you did it this way.

Even a "startup" tag would work, and you could then affiliate link to amazon to books with startups (or hand pick some for each tag)

These tags might eventually even rank in google, if you made enough of them (make one for every keyword searched, not just the top ones?). Not for spam purposes: for organization.
Yeah, I am. I'm currently having to deal with a horribly written java component library called Richfaces here at the office and I'm getting "missing object" errors in IE on one of their controls. Trying to identify where its originating from so I can bash it. I hate java, hate this framework because of the horrible front-end code it produces, and just glad I don't use this crap in my own projects.
Perhaps allow people to subscribe to a daily/weekly email with results matching their regexp?

That way people who find it and like it can be converted to return users? For instance I would be interested in any 2/3 letter domains that become available just for curiosity's sake.
They claim that how memories are stored in the brain over decades is a mystery. But even simple Hopfield networks have stable fix-points to a few gradual deletions, especially if new neurons come into replenish them. I very much doubt that the major mechanism in the brain can be explained with this phenomenon, though the protein mechanics of synapses could certainly be aided or realized with this as a crucial component.
Harvard's endowment is so huge that they use it for everything.

"Harvard depends on its endowment for about 35 percent of its operating budget, and some of its schools rely on endowment income to cover more than 50 percent of their expenses"

That isn't a 401K, it's a trust fund.
Also, perhaps you could get a better domain name for your project with the tool? ;p
Python's competition these days is most likely to be Ruby, not Perl. A fair number of people I know that once programmed in Perl are now Python/Ruby people.
I wonder if they accelerated their schedule due to rejecting Mazo just a couple of days ago (a third-party Amazon client they denied API use).

http://emptyfactory.com/mazo

http://emptyfactory.com/mazo/rejection
Some utterly ridiculous FUD about Ruby in there. I can't make Java scale.. but that's not because it can't - just because I don't know Java well at all.

If you're not already good at something, of course it's easy to say something else doesn't work or isn't any good.
There are simply too many bad (really bad) things growing exponentially in our current times.

(Nobody wants to hear it, but it will come: we all will be poor within the next few years. That is, the small world-wide percentage of still-rich-ones will all go away...)

So, the whole planet will have a 'reboot', and since a reboot starts from 0, there will be an exponential growth of wealth for everybody!

Now, the above is either foolish or prophetic...
Having been to Douala myselft, I could'nt agree more. There is so much money going around but the city (which happens to be one of the most expensive in the world) is in ruins.

This is because of the centralized governments that France instituted in its African colonies. Before a road is contructed/repaired, you must first get authorization from central command (Yaounde)
I agree. Python has a long way to go before it competes with Perl instead of Ruby.
It's no longer between Python and Perl, it's Ruby now . Perl still has it's place. Personally, i use it everyday, what surprised me more was Delphi. i only know skype company wise that uses it so i dunno.
As posted in another thread: Please add a view of only startup / site review threads.

Also please change the way 'threads' view is sorted to bring the most recent thread to the top, meaning my most recent post in a thread of comments rather than my most recent root comment.
Conversion as an Alternative to Advertising as a Revenue Model
Regarding the pharmaceutical industry, there's a lot of redundancy. As soon as one company develops a blockbuster molecule, others begin testing chemically similar molecules, hoping to "get in" on the category (e.g. statins). This is because there's a higher rate of success in developing a profitable brand in an established category where one successful molecule is already known. It's not necessarily a bad thing-- for example, it's quite good that Lexapro is available for those who might otherwise resort to the older and more side-effect-ridden Prozac-- but this leads to a proliferation of very similar molecules and devices, instead of research into entirely new approaches. In other words, the market ends up favoring optimization and refinement over innovation.
Ok, it's an old idea and that article is vague, but this is talking about something else. Read the summary and focus on what in the adult nervous system means.

"DNA methylation is a covalent chemical modification of DNA catalyzed by DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs). DNA methylation is associated with transcriptional silencing and has been studied extensively as a lifelong molecular information storage mechanism put in place during development. Here we report that DNMT gene expression is upregulated in the adult rat hippocampus following contextual fear conditioning and that DNMT inhibition blocks memory formation. In addition, fear conditioning is associated with rapid methylation and transcriptional silencing of the memory suppressor gene PP1 and demethylation and transcriptional activation of the synaptic plasticity gene reelin, indicating both methyltransferase and demethylase activity during consolidation. DNMT inhibition prevents the PP1 methylation increase, resulting in aberrant transcription of the gene during the memory-consolidation period. These results demonstrate that DNA methylation is dynamically regulated in the adult nervous system and that this cellular mechanism is a crucial step in memory formation." (added italics)

PS: Sorry, if you where all just joking, but the summary is worth a read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/technology/01facebook.html...
"He substantiates his claim with historical evidence and observation of current trends."
He can substantiate all he want with as much evidence as he wants, there is just not enough information to know how the state of large organizations will look like in 50 years from now.
If a very intelligent person in 1908 tried to predict something about the economy in 2008, do you think he would have gotten it right?

"Do you have anything other than your personal opinion?"
I have not stated much...

""A few decades" is not a short amount of time. I don't think it's naive to believe that this trend is lasting."

How do you get from a few decades to an indefinite future? I believe in start-ups, but it doesn't mean that start-ups are the ultimate sort of company forever. Maybe, and this is just an example, maybe in twenty years from now, corporations will finally learn how to identify smart people, and give them what they need, and to quantify their performance, and all the other things that they're lacking, and start-ups will not have many advantages on them.

In summary, even though start-ups are great now, we shouldn't become fixated on start-ups.
Can you mount it on the front pages of news sites that target people who'd use something like this? I was struck by how important Google's placement in all firefox browsers is. maybe you could get placement on tech news sites as a fun utility?
That sounds like a good plan. Are people going to set their own level? And/or people could rate (or vote up) the essays and then a person would build karma in a particular language? Or maybe I'm just imagining that anything could benefit from being more like HN.
Goldman Sachs Could Open Or Buy An Online Bank
Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work
Cool idea, but...

1. It's very slow (HN effect?), speed it up
2. Domain Name isn't great
3. I can't jump to a letter via hyperlink
4. I see something called Regex search...what is that?
5. I'd like to see 100 or 500 names per page since there are 256,000+ pages

Honestly, you'll likely never make too much money off ads since the demographic of your audience is technical enough that they probably have an ad blocker installed or they have trained themselves not to click on ads.

Instead of clicking to the whois information, link to some registrar that has an affiliate program.
It is very hard to build software like this which is both accurate and easy to use. Especially for general use. There are a lot of expert systems for medical diagnosis, including some which were accessible on the web (hundreds were at Revolution Health), but they are really not useful: they take far too long to use and are not sufficiently accurate. In fact Revolution Health removed most of them. One of the main problems is the terrible bandwidth of answering questions posed by a wizard.

But, at least, if it's on the iPhone, the huge costs of building and dealing with hardware are dealt with. I wish them luck, though I expect they are ignorant of the challenges ahead.

Some time ago, my strategy was to focus on high priority automated diagnosis, using much higher bandwidth channels, like microphones and cameras and so on. I had some machine learning algorithms for detecting skin cancer that I thought would significantly improve on the best existing algorithms, reaching 80-90% accuracy on a single viewing (higher than physicians which get around 60%), and nearing 100% if the moles were tracked. There were two major, but surmountable problems: I needed to do a lot of preprocessing to remove the variability of different cameras and shots and conditions, and I needed to get a good dataset to train and test (those are hard to acquire.) Ultimately I shelved the project because my cofounder wanted to work on something else (which I shelved because now I'm working on compressed air powered vehicles.)
People are coding more?
Future Schlock: Disney's New "House of the Future"
I still use Perl to this day because of Catalyst + DBIx::Class + CPAN. I can feel like I can do basically any web development task at least as elegantly, cleanly, and quickly as I could with Ruby or Python. Because of CPAN I think Perl probably wins more often than not on the speed aspect. I also tend to have a lot of backend stuff that runs as daemons/cronjobs, etc. Perl is really great for that stuff.

Perl 5 is obviously on the way out and Ruby/Python are coming in. But they're just passing by each other headed the opposite direction right now. The stigma Perl has just makes it seem worse than it is objectively.

Today Perl 5 is still a very reasonable choice IMHO. I'll switch to Ruby or Python full-time at some point. If Perl 6 ends up being better at some point I'll switch to that. We used to have to choose between C++ and Java and Perl. Perl was so much nicer. Now we have to choose between three languages that are all heaven by comparison. I don't really care which "wins" because I will no matter what.
Sharing Compile Code: Building Static Libraries in XCode for the iPhone
I get lots of nasty mysql errors when I open the link. Make sure error_reporting is set to 0 and that you log errors to a file, which can be done via Apache (or your choice of httpd server).

Because of the mysql errors I cannot use your application either so I'll hold judgement on actual functionality for now.
this is almost 100% wrong. the more frictionless a market is, the more it will consolidate to a winner-take-all scenario. in ten years, five companies will control 95% of web traffic. we're already on the way. you can see the same slow-motion activity in the PC market. anyone can build a PC, so we must end up with 10,000 little PC builders right? wrong. you get HP, dell and Apple. even IBM has left the PC game. pg you are a righteous coder but this is economics, not tech
I would like to second (or third or whatever) the notion to get it a better domain name (perhaps one of those really good expiring ones). A hyphenated subdomain does not strike me as a good choice for a service that helps you find good domain names.

Also, I haven't had a chance to check it out because it's taking forever to load in my other tab, so I might be missing exactly what it does... but, how about some RSS feeds?

There we go it just loaded... I'm getting a MySQL error on line 105 of index.php.

Any chance you could do some data parsing to give me just the relavent whois info instead of dumping the whole entry into the page?

I do like the idea overall. Expect 51 visits per day now.
My Small Bug, Big Consequences
You can be a two people startup serving a huge user base

you live in fantasy land. at the very least you will need N customer care agents to every M customers. sorry, people will email you and phone you when they have problems. someone needs to answer the phone. and thats just customer care. who are the sysadmins that watch 10k servers on the weekend? who is doing payroll?
All I can say is, Oops!

Hundreds of people exploited the loophole before I closed it. Unfortunately items are not stored on the PayPal server, even their encrypted urls still supply the price, so all I could do is check whether the right amount of money has been paid. I couldn't use the encrypted URLs because Flash doesn't support popping up a window with a link that long!

Live and learn, I guess.
This is consistent with what we are seeing. CPM is actually up for us year over year, and the seasonal trends remain similar. No rush away from online advertising yet - though I'm worried about Q1 09.
The main reason is RA fees.

Most people that incorporate in a different state have their incorporation company act as their registered Resident Agent for the life of the company because it is convenient and cheaper than having an attorney act as the RA. So, incorporation companies offer you something that is very low cost (filing) in an attempt to get you to pay the agent fees for years. They might give up a one-time (stated value) fee of $149 in exchange for X years of $100+ in agent fees. As others have noted, they will also try to upsell you on other products and services ("You need an official corporate stamp for your corporation documents!")
Flatly claiming that Rails can't scale is overstating the case, but their is some truth to it: relative to other frameworks / languages, the effort required to scale Rails is greater than other popular languages.

This has improved with mongrel_cluster and (more recently) Passenger, but the memory footprint for a Rails application continues to be an issue, even relative to other dynamic languages.
Better Than Free
It seems like each language only gets to have a one-liner description in everyone's head. Ruby is "can't scale". Perl is "line noise". Python is "clean, but boring" (or something), Java is "verbose and corporate", C++ is "overly complex", Lisp is "for kooks", etc, etc...
You mean that no Haskell programs can do I/O? Given that I've written Haskell programs that do I/O, I'd guess you're wrong.
It's weird, they're both now credible mainstream sources with huge brands.

I was a bit put off on how they spent a whole five minutes on CBC newsworld looking at the buzz in Twitter, and it gets frequent mentions in newspapers.
That's a uniquely bad article.
The 2nd slide that dropped the line

"How I built a web 2.0, user generated content, citizen journalism, long-tail, social media site for $12k"

made me want to vomit, all I see is How I Buzzword, buzzword, buzzword..
I see this blog on here every so often and as soon as I get to the word 'adVenture' I just stop reading.
Purely functional languages are a red herring. So-called impure languages however like OCaml can be enormously productive for certain classes of problem. As always, it's a matter of the right tool for the job. Too many people these days only have one tool, then every problem looks like your face.
In that case why dispute the claim? Or at least why not add small print to clarify the point to a layman that performance varies.
"Few (if any) cultures are so deeply authoritative as to be anti-success."

I would argue that most cultures, even in California, are too authoritarian and inflexible to really cultivate productive, disruptive change. For all the talk about innovation, it is genuinely difficult to argue against the status quo. It is very, very hard to change one's frame of mind, and people tend elsewhere to defer to expertise and experience over ideas with are promising, make sense, but are not so fleshed out. In the Bay Area you will at least find an audience, if not easily convince them. Being anti-authority is obviously insufficient for startup success, though.

A good quote to keep in mind:

"...I would design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it. That was another thing that made me very good. All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life." -- Steve Wozniak

We are currently encountering much existing knowledge in engine design. Some of it is undoubtedly wise, but a lot of it is probably out of date. We have the chance to experiment. But it would be genuinely impossible to do such a thing in most auto companies today.
It ought to be possible to structure an OO program so side effects can't escape their logical boundaries. But the only people who can do that are a) functional programmers and b) given the choice aren't using Java...
We've been very happy with them.
They've cleared up now but make sure you turn visible error_reporting off, no excuses. You should also look into better error trapping and handling.

On another technical aspect I notice you're passing regexes via GET. Don't - setup an array of regexes with named keys (e.g. default => ^[^.]+[.](com)$) - I'm about to test to see how much damage I could theoretically do (without too much effect if possible). I hope you're not using that in an SQL statement.

Edit: Ah didn't notice it was a feature as such - while it's a pwoerful feature it's not very user-friendly. Perhaps create a search form that works similarly?

Issues aside it looks like an interesting tool - an additional sort could be to pick up domains that are single dictionary words, and then further sort those by number of syllables.
Counter-argument: Google News.
Better competitors. Including aggregators that pull from all the major porn sites.
I would hate to be the person swapping HDD in that environment. I can't help but wonder how much savings you get by building that type of data center. Let's say you are averaging around 500$ PC's per square foot a data center floor. Is not building a roof really going to save that much cash to pay for the increase in failure rate? I think building a wallmart style building with highly custom duckt work would end up using less material on walls and let you add more redundancy to the ventilation system even if you are just venting in outside air.
I would expect an essay talking about smaller is better to discuss two things I didn't see there (although I'm pretty tired from having driven through the Alps, again):

* Coase and lower transaction costs. I think this generally favors pg's argument.

* Capital requirements for new companies. With internet startups, these are extremely low. Is this an anomaly that will disappear soon? Is it a new trend that will spread to other fields? Is anything else that has 'gone before' comparable to this field's low capital requirements?
There are some errors in the sql.

The monthlyRevenue field datatype should be tinyint(1) with a default of NULL.
Yahoo Mail goes down for some
Procedural does not mean "has a main()". It means that the code within a procedure (or method, or function) is always a sequence of steps, i.e., a procedure. OO is a procedural paradigm. doThis(that) is replaced by that.doThis().
Yea, sometimes the cutesy jargon is off-putting,(Big Dumb Company) but I have read some good posts on this site despite these references.
A good wake up call to YC/TechStars, etc. It has occurred to me that having lots of good programmers with a vested interest in breaking into the server you take applications from is a high risk situation. Not everyone has high ethical standards and it is a tempting target.

It'd probably be best if all applications like this were downloaded off the server that accepts them. But even that wouldn't prevent someone from altering the code to send off a copy somewhere.
Perhaps it's an east coast thing but I was just back for Thanksgiving and of the many Ivy League superstars I grew up with, almost all are working on Wall St, in management consulting shops, or they have become lawyers. I'm not saying that Ivy League == best and brightest, but it is probably a good indicator of ambition.

These three industries all have one thing in common, they pay well and they only require a Liberal Arts degree. My sister graduated from Harvard a few years back and I'd say that every single one of her friends I've met works in one of these three industries. Their conversations of others I haven't met indicate that these three professions are the norm for all their classmates.

Perhaps Stanford is different and perhaps CS majors are as well. But the major trend I see is that the most ambitious people from the most prestigious Universities are going to the places that pay them the most.
Economies of scale come into play when the increases in revenue are outpacing the increasing in spending. This is best shown with fixed costs. If you pay $10,000/month for office space and sell 10 widgets or 100,000 widgets, you're still paying for the same amount of office space. So it's always beneficial to scale so long as your fixed costs aren't increasing enough to override the benefits.

It could be that PG meant that large corporations were more willing to take these bets as they had less to lose than a small company. Taking advantage of economies of scale will generally require some investment upfront as well as adding something to your fixed costs (building a new plant for example). If things don't pan out, you're left with the new expeneses, debt, etc. The financing gap between big companies and small companies has shrunk a lot of the years. During the times that PG is talking about, a small company would have difficult time getting the same amount of financing as a large company in a comparable amount of time. I doubt a small company back then could scale at 10% of the speed that a small company could now.
TechMeme Gives Up On Fully Automated News