skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, if yahoo is unable to find a way to make money off something like Flickr, there is no way any number of layoffs will save them.

And there's something else I don't get. Why are they not trying to outsource projects that they do not consider to be core? Why are they not asking people like George to enter into some other kind of contractual relationship with them that would allow the continuation of a good project? Someone as well connected as George might be able to find additional funding for Flickr Commons from other sources.
Have you ever walked through a department store? Try it sometime & see if you pay for everything you'd take for free.
I don't care so much for the ssl certificates as a protective measure, to be honest. Maybe I should invest more time to understand them, but my current impression is:

- there are now ways to get ssl certificates for free for anyone. So it would be easy to get a certificate for myopenid, where the "i" is not an "i" but some exotic letter that looks the same (or something like that).

- ssl certificates often don't work correctly (setup in the wrong way), so clicking away the warning is becoming a nobrainer. Maybe there isn't even a way to set them up to work correctly across a web site with subdomains, I am not sure. I mean, not even the Chaos Computer Club got them working on their own web site...

Of course ssl certificates are still necessary, but they don't seem to be sufficient to me. I suppose even if I type in an URL directly I can be fooled (DNS servers hacked or whatever), but still.
The irony here is you're supporting click fraud. What advertiser would want to waste ads on people who are obviously hostile? But you're perfectly happy to take money for worthless views & that sounds a lot more like actual stealing.
or as Keynes said, "on the long term we're all dead"
There's local S3 API clones available, e.g. http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/parkplace

That said, it sounds like the filesystem is the right tool for your purposes.

I don't want to manage (all) my storage, but I'm trying to avoid using S3 as both the primary and backup (thus wasting the money and effort spent attempting to reduce risk).
Don't know Weewar, but maybe creating maps for it is already a bit like programming?

What I always wonder about, how do we know what is best for our kids future? Maybe in 20 years 80% of our lives will take place in virtual worlds, and kids having grown up with computer games will have a real advantage then. Maybe the "get outside and play" paradigm was appropiate for a time when the most likely careers where lumberjack and potatoe picker?
Except that "go home" would be your house, right?
The Ladybird Book of Computers: old but brilliant
If you don't think Perl is a productive language, then you have never been a UNIX system administrator.
I merely don't misinterpret lack of understanding as dislike.
bare essentials:

uses memory to create hypothesis about situations

experiments using hypothesis

augments memory with results

loop
You don't believe we're stupid enough to kill America?
This isn't a problem for me on the pc, but on the iPhone, sometimes I want to kill someone it is so annoying. Even though the OS itself is totally language-localized, there is no setting to choose the language of the built-in google search in safari, and it always ends up searching in Japanese for me.

OK, so let's make a bookmark to a localized google. Hey, there is a built-in main-page bookmark to Google! Which you cannot edit.

So you have to jump through so many hoops that I just grit my teeth while a search for "widget-342 review" returns 10 pages in japanese that all contain the word "review" in katakana. Sometimes the small-mindedness of these half-baked localizations is extremely annoying, all the more so because I know the engineers that wrote it have almost certainly NEVER tested their code except as "US English, operating on a US network".
And in Missouri at least, teachers' unions have made it so that any teacher, no matter how bad, can get a raise just by getting a master's degree or a PhD.
Viper Window Manager (VWM) is a lightweight, extensible window manager for the console.
i was one of them
That's fair. If this is his or her motivation for doing good things, all the better.

Well ... there was a scientific debate over whether neurogenesis existed (in adult humans). I wouldn't say they were "stomping all over anyone" ;-)
I'm in no way supporting click fraud. I don't care if you view adverts and decide not to click on them.

I do care if you aren't even prepared to entertain the notion that at some point you might find an advert intriguing enough to click on it.

How is the relevancy/usefulness of adverts going to increase if you're not prepared to listen?

It's fine to be hostile to websites that use horrible techniques - flash, popups, etc etc many of the news sites seem to do it now - "Here's an advert while the article 'loads'"... But I think the non-jerk thing to do is to give websites at least a chance. IF they abuse your trust, and advertise intrusively in your face, it's probably best to just not go to that website any more.

By installing a blanket earplug mentality, you're refusing to trust any website to treat you properly. Which IMHO is pretty antisocial.

>> "What advertiser would want to waste ads on people who are obviously hostile?"

Do people using adblock never buy anything? Do they never find information useful or interesting? Are they really immune to all forms of useful communication? Never read a product review and then decided to purchase? I'm skeptical.

</rant>
Absolutely the finest introduction to computers ever written. I seem to have lost touch with my copy but it always had a place on my shelf when I was an IT manager - it was great to lend to people who needed an introduction they could absorb in just a (very) few minutes.
Even more successful would be Cambridge University. 83 Nobel Prize winners in total. (31 Nobels from Trinity College, Cambridge alone!) http://www.cam.ac.uk/univ/nobelprize.html

That said, Cambridge is a far bigger University than Caltech and others, but a large proportion of those degrees are awarded in non-science fields.
Is "marketing geek" not a contradiction in terms?
Nice, there is also a tile window manager based in DWM for the console: http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/
OilCan: Grease up your Android browser
The usefulness of measuring depends on how actionable the measurements are. I think this is one of the big reasons that the startup culture in Europe has never really developed. In most European countries (and US government agencies) it's almost impossible to fire someone after a short probationary period. This distorts labor markets so badly that even left-leaning labor economists (e.g., Brad DeLong) have sharply criticized European labor laws.

This brings up an interesting sorting issue. If it's easy for people to be terminated and/or quit (because they know that there are other jobs, available in part because other employees have been fired or quit), there should, over time, be an improvement in the matching between employees and jobs. This should lead to higher productivity as well, not to mention greater job satisfaction.
I think a distinction needs to be made between credit for consumer expenditures and credit for capital expenditures.

I think that somehow eliminating or reducing the former would be beneficial to society, though I wouldn't advocate force to accomplish it, but the latter is a powerful engine for growth.
what use is a gimp if you can't lock her away in your basement?
Yes stealing is not the right word.

I always think its odd - the one thing, really the only one thing that computers do really really well, flawlessly, better then any other tech in history is copy information without error. And yet the primary business model of successful software is (or was) charging people for the copying of those bits (allowing, rightly so, the creators of those bits to get paid for the content creation).

I am not saying its wrong, not at all, it just feels like a kind of arbitrage, and can't last. Well I guess that's one business reason why software is increasingly moving online.

I guess the same is true of any content creator. I am happy to pay for content and software, and do, but kids these days....
Windows crushing Linux in netbook market: Acer
The point is that at a certain point writing the code gets easier than writing a spec.

Lets say you outsource this site, and you send a spec to the developer the spec looks something like this:
1) These 27 actions should only be used by an administrator.
2) All users must register with a valid looking email and choose a username.

Every one of those would still take one line, wouldn't it be simpler to just code the damn thing yourself???
That explains the crying, etc... Thank you for clearing that up.
Go go java ... play catch-up with C#
Future features of the Java language ... old stuff in C#?
Perhaps it would be helpful to propose some alternative situation-specific metric of fair to help me understand what you're not understanding about what I'm saying. To you, how would you define "fair" so as to create a stable system in a way that's fundamentally different from "in keeping with free market economics"?

In a free market of lenders and borrowers, "fair" is whatever each party agrees to enter into acting in their own best interest. If the lender thinks the terms are "unfair" to them, they don't lend. If the borrower thinks the terms are "unfair" to them, they do not borrow. Therefore, if a lender lends to a borrower, both parties have agreed that the deal is "fair".

If a borrower finds that no one will lend to them on terms the borrower likes and then freely decides to loosen their standards and borrow anyway, I don't see any unfairness at work, rather that the borrower has updated their own concept of what a "fair deal" is, in order to borrow the money they want.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00...

I know it's the weekly standard, but I thought this article does a good job of talking about market scams and financial panics. I found it more loaded with historical information and it had relatively little current-events politics in it.
Not to mention that the .NET platform is moving in an even more radical direction with F#, bringing functional programming to the commercial mainstream. Java is still philosophically crippled by James Gosling's original intent that its users would be people for whom C++ was too difficult. Now they are struggling to retrofit features in. In C# Anders Hejlsberg created a language that he could use himself, that's the big difference.

(Yes I know about Clojure but it's not Sun Clojure is it?)
I'm assuming that you mean national power. Plenty inherit the family business and/or money and wield local power.

In formulating my reply, I think I came around to the other point of view. Bad things can happen, but inherited money is probably a minor enabler in this, and just the opposite can happen as well (inherited money can do much good).
chroot jail
Actually I'm more inclined to believe that Forth is Zen Buddhism for the following reasons:

* Syntax is an illusion, created by our own subjective definitions of words.

* All suffering (stack management trouble) is caused by the desire for and attachment to the worldly concept of variables.
If C is Judaism then Smalltalk is Jesus and Objective-C is Orthodox Christianity.
Ruby is Smalltalk with Perl syntax.
Emoticons and Perl
What's good for the network is not always good for applications
Yesterday I installed Feedly and it looked great while using the dashboard and as a start page. But when I went to Google to search something I was surprised because feedly inserted search results (from my feeds) just above google search results.

I then went to Feedly website, searching for info whether they are storing my searches somewhere, how long they keep it, etc. I was unsuccessful so I uninstalled it right away.

Don't get me wrong here, I find this functionality very useful. I also understand it's great business to gather data on people searches and some people really don't care.
Just I am not one of them.

So can someone please tell me if the searches I do are sent to Webmynd, stored, sold, hacked or not?
Apple Announces Last Year of Christmas
My recent layoff turned into a great opportunity to do this. My professional life is taking a strange new turn, and I like the direction it is headed. Enterprisey corporate development was getting really stale after a few years.
Ask HN: Tutorials/Info on creating Hosted Web Apps?
Does anyone have any links to good resources or books that cover the logic and development of hosted web applications that provide users with their own website(such as Weebly)? Any tips on database architecture would be very helpful as well.

I'd prefer to work with Django or RoR but at this point, any information on this topic would help. Thanks!
How does this differentiate from using 'google site:ycombinator.com [search this]'? I've never had a problem searching for what I wanted using google's site option. i.e. I have 334 HN threads saved in my profile; googling 'site:ycombinator.com mllk' results in 326 entries found. I haven't used the application yet so, of course this is my prebias speaking, but I never really saw a point for redoing a site search besides the idea for using a different index.
Wow, man. Are you my past self speaking from an alternate universe? Never admitting a mistake, buying/integrating before building, worthless COTS licensing and contracts and dead-end projects everywhere. Yup. That's exactly what I remember from gov't contracting 5 years ago!
You could buy the Rails book.
The first search for me also had some screwy CSS. Mine looked really funky on the first go, which made me skeptic and I came here and read your note. Subsequent searches run fast and don't have CSS issues.

Love it.
The main thing I dislike about this is that the domain isn't shown. But neither this nor iCombinator does as good a job as the main HN site at displaying a lot of information in a small amount of space. There is no need for iCombinator to have three lines per entry, and I think that your one needs to display more information.
Looking at the cup half full, this is great news for Java, its evolving, its been open sourced, its eco system still growing, so many FOSS projects are Java based.

And nowadays the JVM gained so many new and interesting languages: Groovy, JRuby, Scala.

All in all, I find the Java platform more interesting comapared to .Net.
It probably depends on the person, but it's clear worthless views are rather overrepresented. Look through the adblock reviews on addons.mozilla.org. When I'm choosing a new graphics card, I ask around forums instead of looking at ads. Antisocial or not, you'd be wasting your advertiser's budget by trying to target me.
Thanks for your help. This was just an idea I wanted to run up the flag pole. I don't plan to implement the site unless I can partner with someone who would be able to handle the main part: the SEC and legal.

That said, I'm dying to see someone (anyone) implement something like this. It's simply the future of funding web applications, in my opinion.
"Flickr is a great product and has had huge returns for Yahoo."

Personally I think it was a good site until Yahoo! took it over. Now it feels a bit like that local friendly coffee shop you'd been using for years that suddenly became a Starbucks. I'm sure there's room for an innovative competitor there.
Whereas .NET is still philosophically crippled by Microsoft's intent to create a platform for Windows development and not a true cross-platform development platform.

(Yes, I know about Mono, but it's not Microsoft Mono is it?)
Dark energy found stifling growth in universe
Thanks; you're right. Doing disk + S3 is a great idea. I'll implement it immediately. I also have an idea of how I can implement disk + SimpleDB as well, which would make everything faster and easier. (It also solves the inconsistency from the delay before written data is replicated across SimpleDB servers.)

Thanks for that! (I wish I could help you with an answer to your dilemma in return. :)
Here are a few of ways adding the site-specific search on the right is helpful:

1) If you frequently find yourself referring to sites like Amazon or Wikipedia, or indeed Hacker News now, to find information on particular topics. WebMynd saves you a step. You don't need to navigate there or craft your query in a particular way.

2) If you don't realize that a particular site or source could have useful information on a particular topic. With this toolbar you don't have to remember or think to check, you will be presented results from your favourite sources for each query you do.

3) It increases the amount of information on the page and so increases the chance you'll find exactly what you want.

Bear in mind that while the Hacker News search is currently powered by Google's site specific search, most of the other sources WebMynd provides use the sources' own search engines. Which means they may include results which Google does not readily surface.

I hope you do get a chance to try it out!
For nimble organizations, the support behind the language isn't the issue, but the support of the platform is. Anyone can easily fork Clojure, embed it within their application, and have it play nice on the huge Java ecosystem, perhaps even running on J2ME or Android (or even IKVM).

From what little I've seen, the technical fundamentals of .NET seem nicer, and the C# language certainly is. But following Microsoft's footsteps isn't the best way to remain flexible.
Even if such statistics existed, they wouldn't be that helpful because it pretty much comes down to how successful each company is when they outsource development work.

In my own experience, I've managed outsourced teams in China, Mexico, India and Argentina. While doing so, I've worked with some fabulous developers and also many not-so-fabulous developers. I've also hired more than my share of engineers in the US and the fabulous:not-so-fabulous ratio actually ended up being pretty similar.

The main thing that local developers have in their favor is they get to partake in the evolution of thought that takes place in any long term product strategy whereas remote developers don't have that advantage without the help of enlightened managers / dev teams.

The really good developers, however, wherever they are, are able to transcend even that challenge and contribute effectively to the product strategy. I've seen that happen in remote teams in all of the above countries and it's pretty cool to watch.
I meant as "the having of sex" not "being aware of / seeing images of sex". I found out about sex at an early age too (thanks, Internet!) and it didn't twist me.

I'm with you on the general demonisation of sex-under-18. But I don't think I'd want my 7yo having sex. Not even with another 7yo. If that were possible.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/silv...
"NET Framework support with a rich base class library. This is a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework."
How do you get into anything else?

A. Research. B. Experiment. :)
I wouldn't be wasting anything if it was a % per sale.

So an advert such as "Get 10% off [the graphics card you are about to buy] by using this link" wouldn't interest you at all eh?

Also, it's pretty probable that some of the forums you look at are in fact just adverts. They don't look like adverts, adblock doesn't think they're adverts, but they may well be.
I get it; it acts like a client-side filter/index, my fault for jumping to conclusions.
I see a lot of discussion about YC, but I don't think this has much to do with YC as much as it does with the market in general. The two really important things I took away from this were:

1) Instead of trying to make credentials harder to hack, we can also make them matter less.

> Comment: I think this is a general statement being made, correct me if I'm wrong. I didn't think this was a "At YC, we can make credentials matter less." I see this happening at the successful startups. They no longer say "B.S. in C.S. required" they say it's "optional, or equivalent experience." I would say that is brilliant.

2) Now we seem to be entering a new era based on measurement.

> Comment: I would agree 100%, and I'm glad you used the example of East Asian culture. There was a lot of turmoil, but one of the biggest things was feudalistic societies. If you haven't read the Biography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, I would highly recommend it (especially if you're an entrepreneur). His father hated Japan because it was feudalistic, so where he exerted the most effort and was far more intelligent than his superiors, he never moved up. Your position in society was not driven by merit, it was essentially determined by your family and birth. That frustrated a lot of the people who were very smart, even though they lacked "credentials" of going to a nice school because they couldn't afford it (or taking the Civil Service Exams for the same reason).
A subset of .NET, available as a browser plug-in that no-one actually uses, available on one single other platform proves my point wrong how exactly?
No one ever owns ideas. It's true, look it up.
What WebMynd does is covered in our FAQ:

http://www.webmynd.com/html/faq.html

Depending on the settings, WebMynd does collect some search and browsing information. We never reveal this information to third parties. The information is not exposed to other users (even in aggregate / anonymized form).

WebMynd includes the ability to save and index (on our servers) your browsing history so you can find things again faster. This is disabled by default in the Hacker News Search version. You can turn on recording of history and select history search on Google with a couple of clicks if you would like to. More information on that here:

http://www.webmynd.com/html/help.html

We do gather data of how many searches are performed, how users interact with our UI and which sources are generating click-throughs all to try and make the service better. I think this is standard practice for search engines / aggregators and most users expect that.
Clearly you've never been to whole foods.
Oh hey me; for where-to-search is 18 at http://mashable.com/2008/09/10/startup-jobs-sites/
Maybe someone should create a better adblocker then. Recently I would actually have been willing to turn the adblocker off for some sites that ask kindly, but it is very inconvenient to do so. It seems AdBlock plus only let's me either turn the whole thing off or on at once (or I could wade through the thousands of default filters - no, I won't). It would be nice to have an easy way to enable ads for certain sites.

Although in general I think it is stupid - I wonder if for people hostile to ads, the ads might actually have the opposite effect (hate of the product instead of desire to buy). So actually it would be better for the advertising companies to not show ads to such people (like me).

Another thing: if I want recommendations, I am definitely not hoping for some ad provider to get it right. I will go to a site that gives me recommendations directly.
No, a "get 10% off" link sounds like a scam.
1a. Does HN have any kind of hidden search engine?

1b. If so, could OpenSearch be implemented over it, enabling a real HN search extension?
TweetLater.com - set up auto-responses when people follow you?
18 Sites For Finding Startup Jobs
not to mention http://www.indeed.com/ and http://www.simplyhired.com/
Ok, if it makes you happier, I'll turn off adblock the handful of times a year I'm shopping online. The signal-noise ratio is so bad, I doubt it'll make a difference to either of us.

"Also, it's pretty probable that some of the forums you look at are in fact just adverts..."

I ask on the sites I usually post.
"Send automated thank you notes to new followers"

"Schedule tweets"

etc..

Is automated tweeting spam? I'm curious what other people's opinions are on the topic....
Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface
Not to mention http://www.indeed.com/ and http://www.simplyhired.com/ making 20