skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to think I could tell as well, but only a trial would let us test your hypothesis.
DreamIt Hacker Track
I’m happy to let you know that our DreamIt Application process is now live!

Our deadline for applications will be in mid March but we encourage you to apply early as we will have more time to review early applications than those that come in at the last minute.

This year we have a track for innovators (people who want to start a company), strategists (people with business skills who want to help a startup) and hackers (people with programming or development skills that want to build something great as part of a startup). Please feel free to apply to whichever seems to fit you best and spread the word to others that you may know!

Thanks!

Katrina
DreamIt Ventures
Yeah, we really like it. Here are the offices at TrailBehind HQ: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33766454@N02/3146045372/in/set-...

We're going to be putting a third workspace in there this month.
Icy currents
They're definitely not illegal, although certain forms are illegal. That law only covers attempts to create currencies that could be mistaken for US dollars. Other systems are illegal because they amount to an unregulated form of banking, or because they are used for laundering.

For tax: it depends on the currency in question. Barter systems that use a currency to settle barter accounts are taxed as normal income. Systems such as Time Dollars are considered tax free because they are used for non-commercial activities (http://www.timebanks.org/faqs.htm#taxexempt).

In China, there exists at least one system that is considered tax-exempt, except when the currency is exchanged for real currency, in which case it is subject to tax.
Unless you can move to a host quickly where you'll know exactly how your app can scale, I recommend you cache the hell out of everything possible. What does the site run on, by the way? Maybe we can offer more specific advice.
Sometimes, an article is boring enough and the writer is interesting enough that the only logical thing to comment on is the writer.
Furthermore, even if you buy that at 12:00 Bush and Cheney's terms had ended but Biden and Obama's had not begun, wouldn't the proper order of succession made Nancy Pelosi the president? I'm having trouble envisioning any interpretation which would have made Rice the president.
Here's his own telling of the story: http://mydaughtersdna.org/Members/hyrjr/the-reasoning-behind...

An example of the zigzag pattern he probably received from the sequencing lab (his would have been much larger): http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Transcript/Summary?db=co...

The reference sequence for the gene (this is what he was looking at):
http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Transcript/Exons?db=core...

and his manual diff (at his site):
http://mydaughtersdna.org/Members/hyrjr/acvr1b

The usual way to do a gene diff is by aligning two sequences with a program like ClustalW (free, and packaged with Debian now). That shows the differences and positions in a format other programs can read. But I don't know how much annotation the lab gave him, and annotating a pile of introns and exons does take a long time, even with the right tools -- the diffs aren't necessarily helpful until the rest of that information is in place.
Knuth all the way down at 16? Tisk.
It's running on PHP 5 in a shared hosting env (Dreamhost).
The framework is homegrown, but pretty small. PDO is used as an abstraction later talking to MySQL. It uses Smarty for templating.
Former Medtronic CEO: 100-Hour Work Weeks Won't Lead to Success
Yes, there was lots of fuss when they changed from the uppercase G in a box to the lowercase g.
Just cache.
Any way to "hack" the Google Lunar X Prize?
Warning: This question is likely so stupid that I'm going to wish I had posted it anonymously to avoid ridicule, but what the hell :)

I find the subject of space exploration and colonization fascinating, but the incredible costs for access to space seem to be a nearly-insurmountable obstacle to true progress in these areas. I've recently become interested in the Google Lunar X Prize and started looking at the teams who are competing. While these teams are probably going to accomplish some amazing things, I suspect they're going to do it on the back of tens of millions in funding...is that truly the only way?

I guess my question is something like this: is there any theoretical way to win something like the Lunar X Prize for $1 million? $100k? $10k?

Here are some ridiculous thoughts that I've had:

1. Using high-altitude balloons to cut down on launch costs.

2. Going small. Very small. Like a pound or two for the rover. Maybe smaller.

3. Getting the cost low enough that you can launch multiple missions, knowing that most will fail.

4. Travel to the moon over a period of months...would this reduce launch difficulty?

I'm sure I'm probably missing the scale of the problem here, and perhaps the simple laws of physics dictate that there's no cheap solution that we know of yet. Or is there?
Imagine what you'd get if you used the same technique to find the "best novels ever."
Ideally what you want is a "useful" history, not an actual one. And by "useful" I mean one where the changes in each commit are related to a specific, self-contained update (feature addition, bug fix, etc.).

That way you can branch at any point in the commit history and be sure it'll run cleanly or cherry-pick a change without having to remember everything that it might depend on. And you get exactly what you want and nothing more.
On the morning of my stroke I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. I'm asking myself what's wrong with me, what's wrong? Then I realised oh my gosh I'm having a stroke, and the next thing my brain says to me is wow this is so cool: How many brain scientists have the iopportunity to study their own brain from the inside out. But then it crosses my mind: I'm a very busy women, I don't have time for a stroke.

Talk about dedication to your studies...
Another Mac dev just assured me no one listens to MBW. :)

I'm still putting the files on S3 just in case though.
Congratulations. Your app looks good and I hope the influx of traffic results in sales. (I have no technical advice to offer)
http://www.bugmenot.com/view/ft.com

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
Not a stupid question at all. I remember Cringely writing something about hacking that particular prize, as well... I'll add a link once I find it.
S3 amazon link to download, stripped down version at the ready if your current site will start generating too much load. Dreamhost loves to suspend accounts which use too many recourses so to prepare I would move your site over to something more reliable like a small slicehost slice. At the very least you should lower your TTL on the domain to 10 minutes and as soon as you see your site go down, open up a new account at slice and switch over quickly.
For my money, there's still nothing better than a good newspaper. We get the Washington Post here.

OK. What is the marginal cost of printing and delivering a weekday copy of the Washington Post?

http://www.mondaynote.com/2008/09/29/the-economics-of-moving...

First, the cost structure of a daily. In a typical operation, the biggest costs are industrial ones: around 25%-35% for paper and printing; another 30%-40% for distribution; around 18-25% for editorial; the remaining 10-15% are for administrative and marketing expenditures. It varies from country to country but we can safely assert most of the costs — at least 60% — are industrial in nature. Evidently, that part disappears when going online.
Informative post, I can confirm a lot of the same experiences and frustrations except we had a much different experience with timing. It definitely DID NOT take 2 weeks from start to finish for us.

They must have improved the developer approval process and bank contract processing significantly. It took nearly 7 weeks for our bank contracts to get approved, and we used a major int`l bank - Wells Fargo. By the time it was all said and done, our first app took over a month to get on the store.
Thanks. I was going to skip this article.
This is addressed in TFA:

(6) Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Robert Byrd actually resigned their seats in the Congress. Thus, neither of them qualified to become Acting President under the Presidential Succession Act. Plus, interbranch appointments might be unconstitutional anyhow. See Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar, Is the Presidential Succession Law Constitutional?, 48 Stan. L. Rev. 113 (1995); but see Howard Wasserman, Structural Principles and Presidential Succession, 90 Ky. L.J. 345 (2002).

furthermore, to the parent comment:

I suppose the obvious counterargument is that Secretary Rice also never took the Oath prescribed in Art. II, Sec. 1, cl. 8, and thus was no more qualified than Barack Obama or Joe Biden to act as President at 12:00 noon. But if Secretary Rice was not President from noon to 12:01, then who was?

Verdict: today is an interesting meatspace reminder to check your edge cases.
Cache and/or static pages. DH should be able to handle static pages fine, they're not that bad :p

Anyway, ab (apache benchmark) is your friend. Hammer way. It might be that you don't even need any optimization at all.
I looked at your page. Change the home page with an html page with just two links. One link will point to a Coral Cache(http://www.coralcdn.org/) and the other to your regular page. That should enable you to handle the load you are expecting.
Using this article as a guide, then apparently Grisham.
Being on Dreamhost without the option to move in the limited time, these are your options that I can personally think of:

- Cache the hell out of everything.

- Fix links to broken JS includes. On http://store.wonderwarp.com you link to https://store.wonderwarp.com/mint/?js which does not exist and wastes valuable processing time only to error out.

- Pack and minimize your CSS/JS files, even just temporarily. If you are dead sure this is going to be a lot of people, every small bit of saved bytes helps!

That's all I can think of since you've already moved the downloads to S3. Your site is mostly heavy on the static content anyways so not much you can do unless you stripped it down, but I would say keep it as it is because it looks great.

Regardless, if your site does go down think of it as a victory. You got so much traffic (and probably sales) to knock you down that you can only become better for the next time you get press. If it's a good product, it will happen again and again :)
Credit Card Processor Admits to Breach of 100 Million Records
Ridiculous.

Here's a better debunking than I can give myself:

http://yazilikaya.blogspot.com/2009/01/first-legal-wrangling...

But many have noted that his legitimacy is not really in question because he officially became President Obama (pause to savor that...) at noon, and the oath is just a formality. Amendment XX apparently confirms this:

The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January . . . and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

From a practical standpoint, Amendment XX might have functionally eliminated the oath requirement since it is not really possible to separate being president and executing the office of president, and the amendment is very clear that there are no obstacles to taking office after noon on 1/20. That's my interpretation -- I think if this were ever seriously challenged in court, the elimination of the oath as a Constitutional requirement would be the result.

Also, the VP's oath is only mandated by statute. ALSO, because of Amendment XX, and contra Katie Couric, Biden was not president for five minutes today.
New OS X research warns of stealthier Mac attacks
Worthwhile. Not as flashy as some other presentations (not that flashy is bad), but a substantive talk. Thanks.
This doesn't mean much. I believe all works produced by the federal government are in the public domain and you don't need permission to reproduce them.
I am somewhat inclined to disagree. I think a lot of geeks desperately want to be help, to be appreciated by the non-geeks. Why else would they starve themselves in garages trying hack to start-ups that so universally strive to do not just valuable, but helpful, socially-centric things? The odds of money just aren't there.
I visited my Circuit City's liquidation sale. Nobody was buying anything.
Ask YC/HN: What's a problem you'd like to see someone solve?
Broad topic, I was thinking just about this while I was in the gym.

What's a problem you've seen that you just want to get solved? Any problem, big or small, just spit it out, as big as world hunger, as theoretical as string theory, or as specific as twitter API architecture.

Perhaps something good will come of this? I'm sure this has been done before, but you learn something new every time.
why the UML hate? Sequence and class diagrams and such can come in pretty handy as a design or reverse engineering aid.
the cost of living on something like this would be huge, since they'll need to import all their food

Don't terrestrial cities import their food?
Left or Right Mindedness (Thoughts on Jill Bolte)
Most of the entrepreneurs we work with are over 35, and in many cases know and/or have worked with department managers and senior managers who own a budget and can influence purchasing. For the most part they are not selling applications that are mediated directly by IT in the way that a security app would be so some of the friction is taken out of the process. I do agree that for younger entrepreneurs in the security space you are offering a realistic scenario. My comment was more in response to team size vs. sales cycle than the overall thread, I should have been more specific.
+1. Also my favorite. Though at a close second is Deborah Gordon's talk on ants. It's amazing:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants....
This is the link, although you'd have to go back a couple to get the beginning of the story: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080530_0049...
Amazon'd. I've actually meant to research her recovery. Can't wait.

I agree that the spiritual half of the story is crucial as well. Actually, this reply got too long and spawned a short blog post, check it out if you are interested. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442574 )

I was merely reaching across the aisle, lending her some tech credence despite the fact that she sounds like "one of those spiritual types" at times.
Link back to the conversation that spawned the post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442111
Have an almost-static replacement index ready with just enough stuff for a php "give us your email address and we'll send you invites [and a discount or some other bennie]". No CSS or JS on that alternate universe page. If things get nasty you'll want this to be as few keystrokes as possible, because it's possible to trash interactive response in the shell.

Maybe make a pass through your normal site with YSlow if you haven't already, but your site is super fast right now (2009-01-20 17:20pm PST), which is good news.

Also, if you're concerned about it still and you have another hosting option available, change your index.php to <? header("Location: http://www.temphosting.example.com"); die(); ?>, which is probably the smallest amount of cpu you can involve without getting dns moved.

Good luck.
Update: my Aunt informed me that there was a private swearing in at precisely 12:00. She claims the 12:03 oath was just for the TV.

She sourced this to an anonymous TV talking head on a channel she doesn't recall. Anyone able to confirm/deny this?
What's the breakdown of costs... my intuition is that the biggest number is from launch (especially fuel) but am I wrong?
Had the privilege of hearing a presentation by Brian Binnie, the test pilot for Scaled Composites (http://scaled.com) shortly before they won Ansari XPrize back in 2004.

His description of their team sounded like the ultimate group of hackers. And his description of their process sounded exactly like the questions you ask above... discarding all preconceived notions, how do we make this happen in the cheapest, simplest way possible?

He also advised that teams adopt a mantra of "Question, don't defend." In other words, it's more important to realize that something is wrong and get it fixed than to assign blame or respect egos.
I had a crazy idea too, and I'll probably get ridiculed, but what the hell.

I think it is fairly straightforward to get something tiny to the moon. The challenge comes in making it broadcast back to earth. For wireless transmissions, you need considerable bulk and you add a lot of cost.

Wouldn't it be cool if, instead, it was connected to earth by a ridiculously long insulated wire? Then you might even be able to cut down the size to well under a pound for the rover itself (not including the fuel needed to get there). It shouldn't have problems transmitting as long as the wire is insulated well enough, right?

Some back-of-a-napkin calculations lead me to believe that you wouldn't need more than 60 cubic miles to store enough wire to reach the moon (200,000 miles long, 1 inch thick).

what do you think? flame away :)
It depends on what you consider great software. I agree the Office programmers could do with being cut in half or into two departments, one with a majority of senior programmers and one with newer programmers; one produces Office and one runs through all the code and tests the sucker to death.

However, writing an OS I don't think fast is necessarily good. The biggest improvement (IMO) microsoft could make to windows would essentially be a completely error free XP. I've tried Vista and I've seen no appreciable improvement and just a huge pain in the ass for doing absolutely everything I'm used to.

I think if they could make XP survive anything that can be thrown at it and virus proof the sucker to hell, I think it would be the best product MS ever made.
If you can, also move all of your static content to S3 including every image, css, and js file. You're currently serving ~47 requests per user to load the home page. If you move all of your static stuff to s3, each client makes 1 maybe 2 requests to your server instead of 47.

If you're using apache, any content, including static files, has a huge memory overhead to serve. Also, because you're not setting far-futures expires headers, users have to check for every static item every time just to get a 304 not modified.

Last bit of advice, get firebug http://getfirebug.com/ and add yslow http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/.
Great Way to Have Unique Passwords for Every Site on the Web
A lot of people talked trash on Powerset, but the following comment from wired was pretty awesome:

"i tried out the beta demo thing and this thing sucks. i would rather use a manual card catalog in a library staffed by josef stalin. seriously, i hate you people." --posted by jr
I think there'd be a problem with extreme temperature conditions as well as the fact that the moon is not in geosynchronous orbit
So IF you could find a wire long enough and insulated enough, how would your wire deal with the rotation of the earth? :)
Cloud provider GoGrid seems to be doomed
Sounds like the space elevator. The problem's that the moon and earth move back and forth too far, and space debris would kill it. You need a string made out of nano-carbon or another material harder than diamond.
Wouldn't it be cool if, instead, it was connected to earth by a ridiculously long insulated wire?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_strength

Another way to quote specific strength is breaking length, also known as self support length: the maximum length of a vertical column of the material (assuming a fixed cross-section) that could suspend its own weight when supported only at the top. For this measurement, the definition of weight is the force of gravity at the earth's surface applying to the entire length of the material, not diminishing with height.

According to that article, the breaking length of steel is 26 miles, of kevlar 256 miles, and of carbon nanotube 4,716 miles.
Along with S3 for large static content,

- Make sure your MySQL queries are optimized (use EXPLAIN SELECT to make sure indexes are being used as you intend)

- If you end up needing a dedicated server, look at a service that can automatically provision servers in a matter of hours (such as http://www.theplanet.com). Or go with something like (http://www.slicehost.com), which can set you up in minutes.

- If you need to change servers in a rush, you can leave your DNS with Dreamhost; just set up a subdomain like 's2.wonderwrap.com' that resolves to your new server, and redirect requests for wonderwrap.com to s2.wonderwrap.com

- I think you'll be fine! Good luck
What is TechCrunch is smoking?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com+digg.com/?metri...
Yes, you and me know YouTube was bought out by google. Nearly everyone else has no clue who owns YouTube.
Employing high-altitude balloons to cut down on launch costs is potential feasible, as traditional launches can run into the tens of thousands of dollars (or more) per lb.

One potential problem with going small on the rover end is that the prize stipulates that the rover must travel a prescribed distance on the lunar surface, and going too small will make traversing distance a much greater obstacle that it already is. Additionally, how would one power the antenna necessary to communicate with earth (I am thinking specifically of battery power only, and I think it would in and of itself weigh more than a pound)?
Yes, but one must wonder if he uses "The Google"
traditional launches can run into the tens of thousands of dollars (or more) per lb.

$8.90/lb. http://neverworld.net/truax

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429099
Smarty has caching in it that is easy to set up. Just use that, and it should be good enough. PHP5 won't be your problem, the database will.

If it's your Wordpress site that you are worried about, Wordpress has a caching plugin that is supposed to work if you can get it installed properly.

Both of those are file-based caches.

If you want to get super ghetto, save a copy of the loaded page that is going to be hit the most and rewrite the URL to that saved static page.

Since we're talking about a podcast here, the traffic is most likely going to be distributed over time, so you really shouldn't have to worry that much.
Its crazy, you would think this is horribly inefficient. I worked a bit with Oracle Siebel, its a customer relations management software and the company decided to use it for its system. The database is just this giant juggernaut with thousands of tables generated automatically, if you look closely there is redundancy everywhere, which I assume is for performance enhancement, but even then it is horribly slow.

Its absolutely drives you nuts because everything, from business information, to server configuration, and even even the interface - menu items, buttons, page layout, links, is stored in the database. Now this may make the software less 'bug free' and thus make less trouble for Oracle, but it is an absolute nightmare for the developer because everything has to be changed through the IDE, which is basically a retarded version of a database browser without the ability to run SQL update command, and only allows you to change one row at a time, you might as well as be a monkey. Working with the database directly is apparently against the rules of Oracle and will revoke the support from Oracle.

Good thing I stopped working there @_@
I listen to MBW. But I often do it weeks after the fact. I wouldn't be surprised if the traffic increase is smooth enough that you don't have a problem. It's not quite like running a Super Bowl ad.
I've never heard of 'accidental account suspensions' except for AdSense, which is because it actually costs them money. The only reason it's considered accidental is because it cannot be directly linked to the person owning the account, however all the youtube accounts that get closed are never accidental it's cause someone committed copyright infringement.