skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your argument that only looking at successful examples without taking into account the failed examples might lead to distorted information and wrong conclusions.

But I critize the simplicity of your model that ignores crucial yet tricky questions like: How long does it take to detect a failure? How can I detect it, which criteria should I use? How to avoid "false positives"? A simple "try and repeat every year"-scheme will most probably lead to 10 failures in 10 years...
picwing.com: I know its different but it has similar end goals given time.

edit: Why don't you apply to YC with this idea if you can execute it :P
His shiny new Clojure powered site is down for me...

"The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."

http://origamigallery.net/
Well, if you're a commodities trader, ideally you want to buy something then sell it quicker than it takes to ship it. Then it can physically be transported directly from the seller to the buyer. "Taking delivery", as it's called, is a nightmare for the typical commodities trader, who generally has absolutely no idea what to do with it, and doesn't want to pay for warehousing out of his potential profit.

One tankerload of oil isn't going to be enough to move the market. I suspect what happened was they vastly overpaid for it and can't for whatever reason bear to just write it off.
Morgan Stanley Said to Cancel Tanker for Oil Storage. http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aSia8gPt...
I've always sort of wondered who uses Campfire... Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a bad product, but it's never struck me as something that was really missing from either my work life or my personal life.
That's hard to imagine. Lotus Notes is already a beast. Every time I start it up at work, I cry a little on the inside.
I agree with your points, though I keep coming across variants of rapid prototyping in different fields; and as Fred Brooks told us "build one to throw away".

Is it possible to have a "clear but poorly-defined goal", or are you having a joke? "Fun" is an emergent property - recognizable, measurable but the creation isn't formalizable (though BTW your link mentioned something about game grammars...)
and also because python programmers are confident of their language and ecosystem not to resort to gimmicks

But not confident enough to be just a little bitter about Rails' success?

Seriously, if you think DHH is an asshole then say so. Maybe you would never sink to his level to promote your project. Fine. But jumping to the conclusion that he's not confident of his language is just rationalization. The ugly truth is that brilliant tech is ignored every day because someone didn't know how to market it.
What motivates newcomers to contribute to social networks. Direct access to the article: http://www.thoughtcrumbs.com/publications/paper0778-burke.pd... - worth a read.
One tankerload of oil isn't going to be enough to move the market.

From the article:

Frontline Ltd., the world’s biggest owner of supertankers, said Jan. 14 about 80 million barrels of crude oil are being stored in tankers, the most in 20 years. A purchaser could buy oil now, keep it for months at sea and fetch better prices by selling futures that are higher than the spot price.

The world uses about 86 million barrels of oil per day.
LOL! just sometime after I posted I got another crazy idea, but by the time the edit link had disappeared.

K. la, here's it: how abt setting up mobile content booths?
Like a phone booth. You could keep them at the exits of the shopping malls or huge stores or public places.

These would offer data cables / connection via bluetooth to browse and download stuff including songs, games, etc. You download, the currency is deducted from you prepaid balance or added to you bills and you just walk.

Yeah we all know this can be done thru the normal sms-advertise-download-pay or via an appstore wa etcy instead of physical booths. But when I see a booth, I also remember I wanna download stuff and do it (something like I used to remember to send a post to someone after looking at the red mailbox). Going old fashioned sometimes is cool.
On a business device, usually paid for by the company?

Many companies don't allow their Crackberries to be used for personal crap; iFart and other novelty apps definitely fall into that category.
I sure hope they don't call it the Techcrunch Tablet...talk about a crappy boring name. They need to call it Crunchpad...at least that has a cool sound, and has a hint of Apple like branding.

Hell you can see that it's a great name, because in the comments half the people are already calling it a Crunchpad.
> Let the phones hit the market and let developers sort this one out.

exactly. there has been 1 device on the market for developers to play with so far, and the android emulator emulates the g1's form factor by default. put another device out and developers will quickly adapt their code for it, but until now there hasn't been any reason to.

come on kogan, we're all waiting on you.
There are hundreds of tankers out there just like it. Plus, an attack on one would hurt nature more than anything else.
Hard times for web apps - Bloodbath in the Clouds Continues
I believe that common lisp's prog1 and progn both do this.
I hope you don't compose code the way you compose paragraphs. Good lord!
Yeah, the article is really good. Everyone working on social software should read it.
I didn't know about these -- I'd like to support it if I can find a way in Ruby. I'm looking into it.
Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores
Snowball is certainly a good analogy. In my brief experience, success yields to more success, especially with business development deals. If you're close to a company, you're more likely to do business with it. That makes a big network effect from the number of startups in the area.

So your stress level could snowball, or you might leverage strength over strength. Even if stress were an issue, my happiness is definitely tied more to the direction Tipjoy is going than the excess of companies around me.

Unfortunately, the other side to my original comment was lost. I think TechStars is great, and more people doing startups is great. I didn't mean for this to become a debate about the relative strengths of cities.
That is good to hear. It seems that quality (perfection?) is secondary to actually building stuff, making mistakes, improving it, learning. As said in your essay, determination is more important than intelligence. Though "an incurable tendency to build stuff" sounds less depressing.
i'm not sure why the article doesn't mention it, but one of the reasons this makes sense for MS is the rising "contango" in oil futures (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango and http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=1214)

essentially the market is betting that oil prices will rise in the coming months, which puts storage space at an obvious premium.
Any blogger who has published a book of their "best" blog entries.
Another big part of doing less is releasing once you've got an 80% application for 20% of the work. Any additional time spent adding features will be at a lower ROI.
For OS X, Ready Lisp is the closest I have seen to what you describe.

http://www.newartisans.com/blog/ready-lisp.html

It's Aquamacs combined with SBCL, some documentation, and some should-be-standard CL libraries. Double click and it immediately takes you into a REPL. Aquamacs recognizes most of the usual Mac key bindings, making the Emacs curve not quite so steep.
It's Whirlpool (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_(cryptography) ) which has common libraries in PHP & Ruby and accepted in a couple of international standards. I think it's better to replace "lesser known" with "uncommonly used".

(Also I messed up and it's a 512-bit hash, not 1024 like I said above.)
Probably because he was sick of using flash to make something "flashy" that catches the user's attention. But yes, use this sparingly.
Tasmanian Treats: BBC gallery of recently uncovered lifeforms in Australian waters
You are right. Although the guys at 37s are good developers, their business is not writing software. It is to write as little as possible and to squeeze as much money as possible from the result through their promotional materials. Nothing wrong with that, but they cannot be compared to Google or MS as a software development company.
It only makes sense if you are in the 37Signals work universe already... If you have Basecamp, and you spend a lot of your time on your Basecamp page, using Campfire to chat with others who are in your Basecamp page makes a lot of sense - especially if you are behind various corporate firewalls that might block other chat/IM clients.
That revenue model in the graph is quite Madoff-esque.
What I did starting in 1967

1. Learn speed reading
2. If it can be acted upon immediately, do it!
3. If it requires delayed action, put it on the todo list.
4. Else discard it. If its important, it will come back again.
5. Check todo list, for next thing to do and do it or delete it!

My in box was empty and my todo list was short 98% of the time AND I got things done.

The rest of his crap is a con to justify the cost of his clinics.
http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/01/zany-profit-idea-of-da...

Friday, January 16, 2009
Risk-Free Profit Idea of the Day
Posted by Tyler Durden at 1:47 PM
Buy: Barrels of Oil (we do not have a position in this "security" so we hope the SEC does not bust our front door in an hour for position peddling)
I think the point here isn't that 37s doesn't have GREAT software dev and product dev advice. They certainly do.

It's that their marketing advice (like Joel's) can be a little off-base. Both created a HUGE cult following with great writing. This cult was a perfect match with their products (webdev geeks for 37s and all dev geeks for Fog Creek). It's a beautiful sales engine, but it isn't particularly repeatable unless you are charismatic, a great writer, and are dedicated to creating a community like this.

In absence of this particular bottled lightning, you have to build a sales/marketing engine with some combination of sales guys, adwords, print ads, SEO, viral, whatever... AND (of course) a great product that keeps getting better.

(this is all assuming you sell stuff to businesses).
Between being posted here and on reddit, I'm sure he's getting much more traffic than his host is accustomed to.
Optimizing DB Tables for FB Connect
An update on MicroGiving using Tipjoy on Twitter
Tiny boat uses water tension, not tiny moving parts, to move
If there's one thing we've said more than any other thing it's that our ideas are not one size-fit-all.

There are a lot of different ways to do things. We only have the answers that work for us. We don't pretend to have your answers. That said, we don't preempt everything we say with "it depends." Reasonable people understand that everything depends.

We simply share our way based on our experience. Take whatever value you find and leave the rest behind.

From the front pages of our book:
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch01_Caveats_disclaimers_an...
Prospectus: PotG, Inc. ("Pirates of the Gulf") will take the proven Somali piracy business model into the Gulf of Mexico.

We will use using occasional hijackings to extort protection money from supertanker owners.

Competitive threats: US Navy.
Google's "official" hiring docs say that they pay in the 75th percentile, with stock options in the 90th percentile. I'm not sure if that's true, but then, I'm not sure if Microsoft's claim of paying in the 68th percentile is true either. From the Envy data someone else posted on the thread, it looked like Google engineers were being paid just slightly more than their Microsoft counterparts.
"I thought it all had to be expressions."

This is a common misconception. You are thinking of pure functional programming, not Lisp. Certainly a lot of Lisp programmers, myself included, prefer functional programming. Scheme, especially, leans toward functional programming. Haskell, not Lisp, is rightly known for embracing functional to the exclusion of all other paradigms.

What really stands out about Lisp is support for ALL paradigms, even those that haven't yet been invented. Lisp is an extensible language, that can be changed to fit your needs. Features that would require language extensions in other programming languages can be implemented as ordinary libraries in Lisp. Lisp was the language that allowed experimentation with new paradigms like functional programming, object-oriented programming, and logic programming long before more specialized languages (Haskell, Smalltalk, Prolog) were created to provide specific support for these paradigms.
Great post, I think more people need to post deep analysis on fundamentals like this. I've been programming in Ruby for the last 9 months, and like the blog post assumed, I had no idea what the real difference was between the symbols and strings.

Likewise, I think there are a lot of subjects like this that the majority of web "hackers" just don't understand. Awesome post and if there are other Ruby ninjas out there, please copy this style, it's really helpful to the community at large.

I would write this to you, Robert, if you had a comment section, but you don't. So I'm just going to leave it here on HN.
If you follow the MTV Cribs link below the embedded video, you can see it. It's a bit over the top, but there are some nice areas there!
I imagine it's hard to steal 2 million barrels of oil.
I personally prefer building my own systems so that I can upgrade or repair it easily. All of the big box manufacturers use non-standard cases, motherboards, and power supplies. They will use standard components like RAM, drives, etc. but motherboards typically won't be a standard form-factor like ATX.
I would say 37signals and FogCreek/Joel On Software.

I was thinking about the same thing when reading the comments on TechCrunch: there is a big following that would buy it in big part because it's from TechCrunch. Or let's say that, in all these cases, the blogs are used as a great advertising platform.

You can't blame them, building a following is hard work too.
PowerShell ABC's - S is for Synthetic Members
ROI relates to profit not just cost. Going from 80% to 95% might cost 5x as much, but if you get 5x as many customers it's probably worth it. Heck depending on the profit margin spending 5x as much for 10% more customers might be worth it.

After a while adding features is more about keeping customers and killing off the competition than it is growing the market. Most users probably use 25% of Photoshop, but they don't all use the same 25%. Which makes it much harder to compete with Photoshop.
I imagine it's hard to steal 2 million barrels of oil.

Someone did it, just the other day. http://news.google.com/news?q=pirate+tanker

The tanker's capture in November sparked fears for its enormous cargo. The Liberian-flagged tanker was carrying 2 million barrels of crude oil worth about ...
for more javascripty DB/server stuff http://dev.helma.org/ is (though relatively unknown) the premier (kinda) server side javascript library/framework,
"Meanwhile, you're welcome to try to compete with Campfire yourself. Bolt on features, make it do more, add plenty of nifty-looking toggle switches and a skinnable interface, make it scale so well that it runs on a netbook, etc. Go nuts. Don't skimp on the work if you don't want to: Work day and night! Just don't come crying when you can't make any headway in the market because it turns out you've been working on the wrong things."

Umm I'll bear that in mind thanks ;)
This is considerably better than your average 'meetings suck' article. The author actually does offer some practical advice.

Unfortunately, the most important piece is probably impossible to implement in most business situations. No one can really keep a running tally of credit and blame assigned to meeting leaders. (Not least because meeting leaders are often your bosses!)
I'm glad to hear you have an opinion. Maybe some logic and reasoning would go well with it?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424877

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426142
Also answered in this article:

- Why exactly you're getting downvoted on HN for that unpopular opinion you just posted
Why don't more people accept paypal?
I've written here before about the fact I can't use services such as AWS because I only have a maestro (switch) card which isn't reall accepted in the US and dn't have Visa or Mastercard.

So, my question is, why don't more people accept things like PayPal?
The number of people who communicate using the service when its free != the utility of a commercial service that's charging you to help customers.

It never hurts to add "one more" free tool to your promotional toolset. That said, if its $.75/update for @britneyspears, it makes more sense for them to just post info on her facebook "fan" page. Or leak it to TMZ.

Again, Customer Service through twitter while free == awesome. Paying for it, when you're already paying for an outsourced Customer Service Center (like Comcast and Time Warner cable do) not so much benefit.
Apple's switch advertisements are the other side of the coin however. They have been pretty effective in talking about their competition (Microsoft) and making a case for their product.
in case you're interested in more bug photos:
http://www-math.mit.edu/~dhu/Climberweb/climberweb.html

david and i worked together at the fluid dynamics lab. my job was mostly macro photography and matlab, while he was the actual grad student doing research. he builds robots now that emmulate biology (though not the robot boat in the article).
It all sounds rather not-ready for prime-time.
Might it not be better use of time to get-over those six "reasons". They're hardly insurmountable.
Not likely to drag me away from generalized RDBMS solutions that can work with either MySQL or PostgreSQL.
A Strategic Approach to Using Twitter
"The first high level programming language was Ada, also known as Smalltalk."
It's because there's contango in oil futures right now.

The spread between front month futures and november is something along the lines of $30 a barrel.

So you buy a front month future, take delivery, simmer, and sell a november future. If the profit from the futures arb is worth more than the opportunity cost (tanker rental), then it's a good play.
I follow my doctors' advice. Every doctor I've ever had has given me the same advice on insomnia. It's not rocket science.

1. Go to bed at the same time every night.

2. Get up at the same time every morning.

3. Don't do anything in bed other than bed-related activities. No TV, no reading, no radio. (If you must read, just don't do it in bed. Get up. Sit in a chair.)

4. Exercise more.

5. Cut caffeine consumption.

This is common-sense advice. Your situation may be peculiar in some way. See a doctor.
I use my netbook for recipes all the time. It's on the bar, I don't keep it next to the fryer--no grease issues.

That said, I think the netbook works better than this tablet, it has a built-in stand and storage so I keep commonly used recipes on it. I have been baking quite a bit lately so recipes actually come in handy.
Still No Japanese Exaflood in Sight
His whole point is that "it will come back again" because it runs in the background of your mind, taking up resources that could be used for better things.
I haven't read it all, but only one person was complaining about snacks. Most complaints, as far as I can tell (having been shafted by companies, and also having found great matches) seem legitimate.

The big complaint about food is that it seems its expected to work after dinner, and that a lot of politicking happens after dinner as well. The people who go and be social at the dinners tend to get the "cool" assignments. Others tend to be multiple bosses, inability to shift projects, or just a better offer came along.

That said, I don't think these people are "bitching" or disgruntled. Google asked for their brutal honesty (which deserves credit) and they're being open about it. Not everyone is going to find Google to be a perfect match. And for tech firms that aren't Google, that's a good thing.
$30 a gallon.

Barrel?
I'm sure Big Mike would have no problem going back on that if it looks like this thing could make a mint.
i run a site where articles are voted on. we don't show scores in the 'voting' part of the site. people have to make up their own minds. also, a user that participates in a discussion relinquishes past and future votes in that area.
Next-Gen Cloaking Devices Even Better At Hiding
Judge: 17,000 illegal downloads don't equal 17,000 lost sales
Win a Trip You Won’t Forget
Persistent in this case means that if FOO has value '((2 3) 4) and someone does (CONS 1 FOO) => '(1 (2 3) 4); the value of FOO does not change, but the new list shares its structure.
I agree. One question though: Why shouldn't people save their tax-cut-money? Given that they will not put it under their pillows.
Its a fine article. I always found that some people immediately "get" what a symbol is and others take a while.

The way I used to teach symbols, not in ruby, but in some "other object language" that had such animals is to have people play with their tools. In such other languages we had these visual tools to inspect and see references between objects. One of the first things you learn is to understand that objects just have "slots" which are referenced through variable names (or indexes) and those slots simply hold pointers to other objects.

Now, once you get that, you can visually explore what a symbol is. Its an "immutable" object sitting in a global table. When you inspect these symbol objects, you see they map to a unique integer value (hey cool, like constants in C!!). And so on goes your understanding...the "name" of a symbol is an array of characters. Open an inspector on the symbol #hello and the symbol #goodbye and you can discover visually that the character $e that each different symbol contains points to the same exact character object in the system. There is only one character $e in the entire VM!!

ok, I probably went too far. Anyway, the point is if you had the right tools to explore, people just need a push in the right direction and their understanding will deepen on its own.
I wish ruby had such visual tools...
A fact that reflects well on YC News, IMHO, is that it's not only having a dissenting opinion that gets you voted down, but rather being poorly reasoned, inadequately substantiated, badly stated, etc...
Curiously, the server appears to be Apache rather than Jetty.
From: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=395951

"Yes it [Common Lisp] does [look bloated]. It has at least 4 different ways to loop, 4 different types of arguments to functions, 5 or 6 different lets (functions, macros, let* , normal let, ...), 3 or 4 different kinds of variables (with no unifying underlying theme), and at least 3 different flow models (the nested lists, tagbodies, loops with returns, etc...). That is exactly the same problem with C++. Instead of finding unifying abstractions which give the same functionality with 1 idea, they have chosen to add in multiple specific quick fixes to the language. They have chosen to amend the language with a thousand small changes, each suited to its own little use case, and have ended up with a monster of a standard that takes up 15 megabytes in 2300 files with 110,000 hyperlinks. Thats 15 mega bytes mostly of text.

Scheme is a lot better but its going the way of CL, slowly but surely."

Thats exactly what we are seeing here.
You mean the users of such a startup are not the target for any market?
I would think there are more profitable profiles than others but i would think anyone has to buy something.
Without the war thinks might have been even better. Too bad WWI stopped the first age of globalisation.
Or much cheaper private roads.
Most of 37signals' customers probably don't care that they wrote Rails. Their products don't exactly target the Hacker News crowd.
Fortune 500 employees can use it to find a new job when they get laid off.
Sailboat To Sail Autonomously Across The Atlantic