skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, but he was in 7th grade, 13 years old, so professionalism in that context was about programming.
There's smart and then there's perspective. VCs are smart, but they're looking for perspective. They're cold calling you to understand your company and your space and try to possibly invest in you. In fundamental analysis, they call this the scuttlebutt approach. From our personal experience, we've even gotten partners who haven't done their research. The would immediately want to go into the demo during the pitch. When we meet the occasional partner and associate who actually knows the space and the product, we are more than impressed. In reality, if you only vaguely know the space and you're asking retarded questions about engagement and metrics, you're not really adding value. We judge VCs by their questions.
We're sailing forth into even deeper philosophical waters now, and into a realm where personal opinion plays a big role.

But I'd say two things here. One is that, in practice, I doubt that I could be really be happy as a disembodied mind. I am, in fact, rather emotionally attached to my substrate. We enjoy being human -- that's what our brains were designed for, after all -- and even when we're cybernetically enhanced we tend to use that power in amusingly human ways, like World of Warcraft: An incredibly complex electronic simulation of a bunch of people gathering in small bands and tribes to go hunting and kill big animals.

The other thing is that humans have long since moved beyond cell colonies. We and our technologies -- books, artifacts, traditions, tools that we can make and pass on to others -- have been creating more durable, predictable institutions for centuries. Of course, an institution, like a university or a corporation, is no longer particularly similar to an individual human, just as an ant colony is not similar to an individual ant. I regard this as further evidence that having a human nature is inextricably linked to being embedded in a mortal human body.
Seconded. I cannot imagine any good will come of his getting caught. He should keep his head down -- not tell ANYONE about what he did, even his friends -- and hope no one notices.

Whether he gets caught or not, this strikes me as a good lesson to learn before he's 18.
invest in heyzap.com (haha)
The value of the TechCrunch deadpool is that they actually break stories. I'm not sure what the value of rehashing them on a WSJ blog is.
There are plenty of REST clients for python. It's just HTTP, after all. Maybe this one

http://code.google.com/p/python-rest-client/

but I'm sure there are many others. Django has one built in as well. But I often just do it manually without loading any helper libraries - all you need is HTTP!
No offense, but you have a face that can’t be trusted
The post about TPB deliberately arranging incompetent prosecution seems more and more likely :~) (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484500).
"The simplest and perhaps most obvious thing that they could have done is to engage their audience before they made the change. I believe much of the anger of their audience has to do with the fact that it was "discovered" by The Consumerist - not clearly announced by the company in advance."
Amazing story...

Identifying people like that really would be a mission worth undertaking, food for thought there.

The game reference is a /. meme reference about 'duke nukem forever', a game that has been in production since '97. The running gag is which will come first: hell freezes over, duke nukem forever is released or the Hurd is finished.

My money is on hell to freeze over :)
The Hunt for E.T. Comes Home — to Earth
I suspect this is a case of "poor venture capitalists circulate more", like poor programmers or poor boyfriends. See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/you_are_not_hir.html
dig the color scheme and look.
The case for replacing Java with Python in CS education
Does anyone have the hex values for Hot Dog Stand?
Well, crap. Someone please replace Yelp.
A Tour Through a Large Blog’s Traffic
Gmail: Choose your own theme colors
If you're not actively managing your portfolio, the biggest thing you can make sure to do is asset allocation a la David F. Swensen. I'd recommend Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment.
There's a reason why content providers don't embrace Boxee. NBC and Fox control Hulu. That makes it safe. Hulu won't start showing programming outside of what the major content creators make. Boxee, with its open philosophy, would welcome high-quality non-establishment content. If people get into the habit of using Hulu, they don't have to compete with new content creators. If people get into the habit of using Boxee, lots of people could start creating content and having access to the same distribution channel. That's dangerous for the studios who like to have near-monopoly conditions for their content.

I didn't say it was a good reason, just that it was a reason.
Rumor has it that the game'll be out by 2010. I saw the intro video myself. (And wasn't Chinese Democracy finally released?)
Multitasking is the fastest way to mediocrity
No, but I would like to take this opportunity to do it anyway. Reddit has become a den of melodramatic ideologues and thoughtless iconoclasts. I'm no longer a supporter.

Here are some intellectually unflattering sample headlines from the front page right now:

4. Like NASCAR Drivers, Our Politicians Should Wear Uniforms Clearly Stating Their Sponsors

5. Oh, Canada. “When statements are said that God probably does not exist, this is an implied statement of hatred towards all those who do believe that God exists.”

13. The head of the DEA spent more than $123,000 to charter a private jet to fly to Bogota, Colombia, last fall instead of taking one of the agency's 106 planes.

15. PWNED!!!

19. Citigroup, which lost $18 Billion Last year, laid off 39,000 and got a $52 Billion Govt Bailout still provides perks to directors and former CEOs such as airplanes, helicopters, and drivers costing millions of dollars per year.

20. Cousin of 9/11 Hijacker Arrested as Israeli Spy

21. Fuck the media. CBS Evening News only points to $4600 from Stanford to Obama as well as showing Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. No mention of McCain's $28K or any other Republican. (1:55 video)

22. Ten years. Ten FUCKING years you've been following me. And for what? PIKACHU?

23. Woman Blinded By Acid Requests That Her Attacker Be Blinded With Drops Of Acid In Each Eye. Iranian Court Accomodates Her.

25. Giant rat caught in China
"If this technology works, more power to them. And to us."

That's the whole point!

Seriously though, space based solar power is definitely the future, unless of course there is a breakthrough in fusion power. There's nothing in the way (atmosphere, clouds .. 100% full power, all the time), you're not using up land, and it's 24 hours. It may not be viable for a while, though, since launch costs are still too high (space elevator?).

Solar panels in space don't get dirty, don't have to support themselves against gravity (so they're way lighter), don't have to pay for the land they sit on. Sure, it's expensive getting them up, and there's engineering challenges to be solves. It's all doable, though, IMO.

It's a question of when, not if. Within 10 years seems a little optimistic. But if there's no fusion breakthrough, if nuclear remains unpopular, and if the climate change thing really starts to get serious (no more coal power), it's definitely a viable option.
Back to the Future for Data Storage
So get into their machine via SQL injection and fix the code. Jeez! This Web 2.0 where users are expected to contribute!
You need an investment advisor, not recommendations from your accountant or hacker news. ;-) Find somebody with a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designation. A good CFP may charge you $1k-$3k up front for a comprehensive financial plan, then around 1% of your total portfolio annually if you want him to actively manage your assets. I work in finance and can give you some recommendations if you'd like.
Valve Exec Explains How To Compete With Piracy
How about the dining philosophers? If none dies, your program probably works.
Continuation because noprocrast locked me out awhile: As pointed out in Jeff's article, McQueen's character knows what questions to ask. And per The Unthinkable [ISBN 0307352897], Rescorla knew what mistakes people were likely to make. An expert can anticipate problems and raise good questions.
This is a fantastic way to get your cousin expelled from school, and to provide him with a shiny new juvenile criminal record.
Sale pricing on Steam games: 50% off = 3000% increase in sales
You may not want to get into this, but why was the database half a terabyte anyway? That seems like a shitload of data for a site like ma.gnolia.

My best guess is the link screenshots were being stored in the DB.
Health-care reform will resemble the evolution of browsers + HTML: both are path-dependent
Ask HN: An introduction to web platforms?
Hi HN. I'm a college student studying physics. I've been pretty interested in startups for a while now, but I haven't really taken the time to truly invest myself into learning the tools required to build web apps. Would anyone be kind enough to give a quick crash course or point me in the right direction to get started? I see terms like jquery, ajax, javascript, ruby on rails, etc get chucked around all the time, yet I don't know how they fit together in one cohesive whole. It's my own fault for sure, but I would appreciate a gentle push in the right direction to begin to understand these concepts.

Thanks!
Not really a fan of the popup for the zipcode. Maybe do a geolocate for the ip and match that way
Twitter and Google Search. Because you can't reply to a search engine result.
Part of the 3000% jump was probably due to the fact that this particular sale made the front page of reddit and digg, but still, it's quite impressive.
> ... and I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces.

I'm a graphic & user interaction designer. About 4 years ago, I volunteered to help fix Drupal's UI problems. Everybody was like "Yay! UI help!"

I started by offering a new theme and giving feedback on the arcanity of the calendar API.

Result: no changes were ever made. None of it ever went anywhere, because the weenies prefered to argue on the mailing list about every single point rather than concede that somewhere, something might need to be better.

I gave up. I never volunteered for OSS again. It's not worth it.
Data Center Knowledge had another story (Exploding Servers) on Slashdot at the same time it was getting the HN traffic, so a double-whammy.
People discovering alternatives to MS Office is an even bigger threat. Office is where the big money is.
I can't seem to get it to add either of my favorite pizza places in Cambridge, MA 01238 ('Cambridge 1' and 'The Upper Crust'). Am I doing something wrong?

Their URLs are http://cambridge1.us/ and http://www.theuppercrustpizzeria.com/
Price/rent ratio almost certainly varies by neighborhood and general price level. What I meant to say, and should have said, is that price/rent ratios are mostly over 40. The specific data point that followed was one case of that.

The data points I actually know about are in the $2000-3000 range. One of my friends tried to buy his $2800/month apartment and got a quote around $1.5 million.
In fairness to your otherwise overly twitchy school administration, it is in fact possible for dumb people with just enough DOS knowledge to screw up a standard PC build from the command line, enough to require a rebuild.
Looks like an extension on the Google Charts API. Google Charts offers an incredible API, and for the low cost of free, but I'm disappointed that Google still hasn't made any inroads into offering an secure HTTPS interface.

Google actually has a secure version online that they use on internal projects, but it's been strictly hands-off for third parties until now.
awesome, congrats guys
They include the answer to the question in the page so Google and other pages pick it up. You'll often see part of an answer in the blurb under the link in the search results.

When you follow the link, it hides the answer from you and basically tries to shake you down for money to get access to it.

Individually the practices are ok. When dealt with together, it is a nasty business practice.

Alternate explanation: Google "experts exchange sucks"

Alternate explanation 2: If you first found the site while looking for an Expert Sex Change, you might still be bitter.
I thought this piece by Atul Gawande on how health-care reform in the U.S. will proceed was illuminating. He uses the social science term "path-dependent" to describe systems that grow up around early design decisions, and they win out over alternatives that purport to be better (for some definition of "better") because those very decisions turn out to be far more consequential than could have been foreseen at the time. He argues our new health system will build on the existing one, and not be a from-scratch replacement, because of path-dependence, and give examples of how other industrialized national health plans follow this dictum.

I thought of the co-evolution of Web browsers and HTML, and the current efforts to create a successor to HTML 4, while reading the article, and noted the similarity. HTML 5 is expressly designed to "pave the cow-paths" of the way HTML 4 is actually used and implemented by browsers.
How about each one of n threads prints out "hello world".
It's spooky, the timing of this post for me.
If it adds expressiveness, then by definition it's not clutter.
Using Captchas to help OCR books
Yes, developers put this in their apps, which I've downloaded, and collect and share this data without my consent.
There really isn't a good way to do an annotated timeline without Flash?
I've never liked sites that start the user off on a crowded country-wide Google Maps view. It seems like such a clumsy way to display data. One, I don't want or need to find every pizza place in the US, so why show it to me? and 2. it's overwhelming and a pain in the ass to have to zoom into my location.

Google Maps embeds are fine as a way to put things on a map for searches inside a specific, narrowly defined location. But they're not so good as the first thing you'd see.

I'd ditch the giant US map and redesign to put more emphasis on the zip/city search box -- maybe get a fix on the user's location by IP and automatically pop up popular pizza places nearby.

Also, a bug: I was able to share my favorite pizza place over and over again ... so really easy to game the system.
When you compare this to a previous keynote here: http://gist.github.com/6443 you can see how he's getting better at this.
FutureRuby, new conf from the creators of RubyFringe
Just wanted to chime in to thank everyone for the great and diverse advice. I definitely can't respond to all the overwhelming feedback, so I'll keep it at thanks. This is a great community, and I appreciate all of you. Seems nobody has any good financial software other than quicken for mac, but that's ok. Maybe that'll be my next project. :)

You've definitely given me a lot to research and think about as I approach my retirement. Thanks again!
There is another reason why some of these calls may be made: due diligence before investing in a competitor. This would explain why VC's ask for an explanation of things that are obvious and available on the website: they are looking for any unreported changes, and trying to get some nuance by talking to a founder.

I like the WuFoo folks and have been impressed with their approach and their application ever since I saw them at the first Office 2.0 conference, but one thing they may not appreciate is that their business stands as a beacon pointing at a large and profitable market, and their lack of desire to take funding means that some other team may be using them as a proof point. Naturally a VC firm will contact them before making an investment in a competitor. I am not suggesting that it's every call, but it's likely to be some of them.
My only advice is to go for B's. A will be too suspicious.
Web server sends pages to client on request. Examples are Apache and IIS.

Web server interacts with server-side scripting language. Examples are PHP and Ruby. Allows you to generate pages on the fly custom-designed for the user, and allows you to do useful things like templating via databases with ease.

Web application framework is built on top of server-side scripting language. These are designed to make life easier for the programmer. Examples are Ruby on Rails or Django.

Serves to a browser. Browser displays HTML (structured content), CSS (for designing the HTML), JavaScript (client-side programming language that deals with interaction on a page). Ajax is a buzzword for JavaScript communication with the server without refresh. jQuery is a library (essentially a bunch of useful functions designed to work together) for JavaScript that makes things like Ajax and selecting individual parts of HTML, something that's usually a pain, easy to do. Cookies allow small amounts of data-storage on the client-side.

Typically, people learn HTML first, then mess with a server-side language (or learn "how to program" in general), then once those two basic skills sets are there build on them at the same time.
Congratulations! I think this shows the benefit of being a YCombinator company and getting lots of press because of it, starting with TechCrunch. As some have noted, the company simply takes the feed from http://www.mochiads.com/publishers.html and allows users to insert a snippet of html containing embed code for that game (with heyzap's affiliate id) onto their site. On the other hand, it's that kind of simple idea that all one needs for the first version, and also proof that one really doesn't know what to expect from the media and the users until they launch, and so the only way to know how the market will truly respond is to create and release something.
A Trivial LLVM Lisp
Do what my parents did when I got suspended for "hacking":

1) Get him a new computer (but with a crappy video card, if he's into gaming)

2) Find him programming internships and introduce him to programmers you know

I would also add:

Tell him that he isn't a real programmer unless he understands Prolog, Haskell, C, and a flavor of Lisp (Scheme/Arc), although Python might be a good first language to start with. Be prepared to spend lots of $ on books - all of these topics have books which work for different people. I would recommend:

The Little Schemer series: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/
and
Programming in Haskell http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html

These are solidly good books, there are others, but they really depend on personality.
I'm finding the best way to read these articles on this trial now, is with the Benny Hill theme song playing in the background.

Try it - it works.
actually insurance companies have many rules put in place by the states that will assign the accounts to a different servicing company. but that is US, I am sure Canada has similar rules.

check out coffee house investment strategy, I have been doing this for years (10+) and have fared well in this recession. Less worry and excellent gains. Make sure you always bleed a large sum of money slowly into the market, so you will not be caught at a specific point price-wise.

See: http://kd7yhr.org/bushbo/coffeehouse_investing.md for pointers
They picked one hell of a lazy animal. I doubt most cats move enough to charge the battery...
Multiple Tabs For Home Page In Firefox
If you have two or more favorite sites and you want to use them as a homepage, if you want to do it without any plugin or similar, then this simple trick is a solution for you.
Designing from the outside in
Wikileaks gets taste of own medicine with leaked donor list
"When I was in high school, I guessed the administrator password of our computer lab (it was the administrator's daughter's first name)"

Holy cow, so you mean this doesn't just work in the movies, but in real life, too?
There is a page describing which browesrs support which parallel download types at
http://stevesouders.com/ua/report.php
You could use canvas or SVG, although they're less portable than Flash.
That's a great idea for sure but I had a question. Most reviews for products are generally bad unless the product was so extremely good that someone wants to share how awesome it is with others or is already a member of the community. That being said how do you think small business owners will respond to forum trolls? My first thought is that it could turn into some ugly threads pitting the business's word against the reviewer where the reviewer is in the anonymous and protect position and the business is more vulnerable.
When I was in elementary school around 4th , we always had to wait for the teachers/admins to come put there passwords in so we could log in. One day I just didn't want to wait. So I tried a simple password: The first letters of the schools name. Got on and did the work. The Administrator noticed she didn't have to put the password in and so later that night I got called from the school asking what I had done. I told them about it and what the password was. She was grateful since it was a password she hadn't known about, left by earlier Admins.

That was about five years ago. Today I am usually always at odds with the teachers. Either I can't sit still, I'm too quirky or snappy, or whatever the teachers want to make up. Then their computer acts up. Perfect opportunity. I go over and fix the simple problem and they now regard me as a demigod and no longer hate me.

That's how I fix my relationships with my teachers.
I built a Yelp-like site for my local area several years ago (before Yelp existed). I never really pursued it, but it was nice to see the idea validated by Yelp's success.

That being said, it stinks if they've really resorted to this. I understand they need to answer to investors, but their choice of business models is fairly un-creative.

If I were to build a better Yelp, it would look like this (off the top of my head):

- Reviews in two columns: positive reviews on the left, negative reviews on the right.

- Bad/good reviews cannot be deleted (unless it can be verified false or shills), but the business owner/manager can reply to the review (tripadvisor does this)

- Business model: allow businesses to sell printable gift cards or discounted vouchers (ala restaurant.com) and take a %

- Business model: for a monthly fee a business can add videos, images, and additional tools (similar to yelp's current sponsorship program but better)

- Business model: build a flexible reservation/appointment SaaS that can be used by any business that needs it. Anything from restaurants to salons to mechanics could use something like this. If a customer could find a good business AND make an appointment on the same site, that's gold right there.

Think out of the box, Yelp ... c'mon
Those 4 diagrams should be printed out by everyone trying to deliver a product, because it's too easy to forget about it when you are focusing on launching your app.
hn amazes me sometimes. how does expressing your point of view warrant downvotes? bad language? going against popular opinion?