skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good to see that you put in the effort to back up your claims. Despite the fact that your other claim was misrepresented (I'll reply to that separately) I'll take you at your word that this instance is as stated.

Your original statement implied to me that this was a common occurance rather than a single case. Anyone can cherry pick individual cases that might look bad against any group of people. I'd be amused to see what 'Global warming sceptics-sceptics' could dig up ubout individual sceptics.

To actually count this as evidence againt the global warming case in general you would have to show that scientists who suport the global warming case are generally a lot less forthcoming with their data than other comparable areas (or with sceptics if there was a statistically valid sample group of recognised scientists in that group).

I'm not saying scientist are perfect. But compared with the motley crew of inferentially challenged global warming sceptics I have experienced I would back them any day. And really that's what it comes down to. Nothing is an absolute certainly. We all individually and collectively have to make decisions based on probablilities. Nothing you have said provides any sort of evidence that I should trust the scientific consensus any less than for any other issue.
I think by the time the Wufooers moved back to Tampa they knew more about doing a startup than you do. That's partly due to their YC experience and partly because they really know and obsess about design and user experience. (There's a lot of overlap there.) Spending time around people in Silicon Valley who talk about those two things a lot would help you in that department. And promotion. And marketing.

Maybe you shouldn't listen to me since I've recently failed. But please do change some things you are doing, at least in the design area. I'd like to see you do well.
Taking a Peek into Memphis Soul Music
All soul music enthusiasts will know the impact Memphis soul music had on the history of music. Memphis soul music has been one of the most hailed genres of its own among the soul music lovers. You can find the influence of Memphis soul music in a number of other popular genres including rock and roll, modern jazz and rhythm and blues. Even those soul musicians who were dead almost fifty years ago are still listened to and they continue to influence today’s music compositions. Many consider that Memphis Soul music has its roots in Beale Street. This is one of the famous streets of Memphis where everyone who wants to get some quality entertainment rushed
Deciphering Glyph: The Emacs Test
I know I'm judging your private beta product by its public face. But statements like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 are also worrisome. UI and promotion aren't easy, nor 'easy'. They are hard and a lot of work.

(Boy, telling a Putnam winner he doesn't know enough about something makes you choose your words carefully. And then it makes you wonder why you don't always do that.)
I guess it would be the standard constraints for anything over a network, particularly a WAN: latency and throughput.

If you have a lot of small queries latency might kill you, and if you have large result sets throughput might kill you. (Also, I don't know how safe the mysql connection is outside a firewalled LAN. Maybe that's not an issue.)
Controlling Erlang’s Heart
> "In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature."

This was a single instance of somebody speaking as a private citizen about people being tried (not specifically jailed) for their -->ACTIONS<-- assuming they knew exactly what they where doing. This is comparable to people now calling for the CEO's of cigarette companies to be convicted for knowingly surpressing evidence that smoking was harmful.
New Blogging Software « Micha101’s Blog
As to a specific city I know well, I've been very vocal - there's no better place on earth to bootstrap an internet/software company than Chicago, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a city that's worse to try to raise funds in.

I lived in Chicago for 7 years before I moved to the East Coast, and then finally to California. While Chicago does have it's share of great restaurants, a decent music scene and pretty good art scene. It suffers from a chronic second city mentality, which is--It's a pretty good city for being in the Mid-West, but if you're really good at something go to a first rate city liky New York, LA or San Fran. In 7 years, every really talented theater group, actor, artist or musician I knew ended up having to move to either New York or to California. There just wasn't enough going on to sustain those people in Chicago.

Chicago also has a huge meathead/jock culture. Just walk within 3 blocks of the bar district along Rush and Division on a weekend night. I'm 6'7" tall, 300 pounds, and I often worried about some drunk meathead picking a fight with me. All that to say, that it's not a really nerd friendly town.

If you do move there and you walk around at night, get a black leather jacket preferably with Chicago PD patches sown on it. (The Alley on Belmont and Clark sells them). Walk around with your right hand tucked under your left armpit. You'll look like you're packing heat, and the thugs/meatheads will leave you alone. At least that worked for me for several years.

Oh, and the winters really suck.

Say what you will, I can think of a half a dozen other cities I'd rather bootstrap in--Austin, Boston, Providence, New York, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, Boulder, San Diego.
Ahhh... I can't wait to be able to use CSS3 in production. Down with images for rounded corners and drop shadows!
but...

the whole point of a tiny URL is it being typable. what's with the symbols :|
Lito Sheppard will be traded to the New York Jets
your private beta product

Tarsnap is in public beta right now, actually -- you can go to the website, create an account, deposit some money, and start backing up your data within the next five minutes. :-)

statements like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 are also worrisome. UI and promotion aren't easy, nor 'easy'. They are hard and a lot of work.

If you read that link carefully, you'll note that I didn't say anything about promotion being easy -- and in any case, the scare quotes in "that's all "easy" stuff" should have been a tip-off that I didn't really mean that everything I mentioned would be easy. I was effecting the mathematician's habit of referring to any solved problem as "trivial" -- for all that there's a lot of work involved in creating a GUI, porting software to Windows, et cetera, those are all things which people have done in the past, whereas the core functionality of tarsnap -- secure snapshotted online backup -- required solving entirely new problems.
Blackout = The Fight for Online Rights
Oh no, getting a good user interface/experience for tarsnap is a new problem. Only if tarsnap were simply an better implementation of an existing utility would that not be true, and only then if you were happy with that utility's current interface.
"It depends what your city values. If what you want is football, spend the money on the stadium."

I loved the essay, but this line alone was worth the time it took to read it!
Can you give some examples of errors that should be thrown upwards? What percentage of errors in a program belong to this group?
I wish Twitter would put in the new follower mail notification the amount of followers vs. following; 10 to 100 someone worth following, while 1000 to 10 not worth following back as they are most likely a spammer!
I have wondered if I need an OS X backup. I'll check it out, thanks.
Gerd Arntz one of the founders of pictograms, overview of pre-computer icons
the system isn’t necessarily meant to actually replace database administrators, but instead to take care of low-level tasks so that they can focus on more complex and important issues

Nice quote. The last company I worked for developed trading software for foreign exchange and money markets. Only you couldn't ever sell it to traders; they were too afraid of being put out of a job. You had to go to the Head of Desk and sell him on the benefits.

As it turns out few of them actually were put out of work, many really were able to move up into trading more volume and higher-value instruments. But if you say that up front, no-one will believe you.
bookmarklet!
Hmm, now I wonder if we can calculate the Douche-Bag rating of the guy narrating the video - honestly, I just wouldn't trust putting my details into that site after having watched the video.

I know they say "we don't store your info", but I'm not 100% convinced.

Anyway, this might be a worthwhile if it was part of a twitter client itself, like an adobe air app.
"Rent Seeking"

Say this works out in a big way & 2-3 cities take up this $30m challenge. The essay suggests $1m to move a startup, which suggests that having a startup in your city is worth (more then) a million. Why not offer them a million to stay (or half a million if they'll take it)?

What if the cities start bidding against each-other for the 'best' startups (assuming they end up with some mechanism for choosing the best ones). What if start-ups form specifically to take advantage of this scheme? What if angels/VCs that happen to rank highly on this list have all their investments get poached & presenting it as a benefit of taking their 1/4 million?

The perverse incentives, gaming & such might make this impossible to implement as a large scale government/municipal scheme.
Well, if I like a song/album enough, I will actually buy it.

I know its an unpopular opinion in many circles on the net, but I have no problem supporting creators of content, whether that be Music, Software or TV/Film.

The only issue I really have is with the stupid licensing/distribution deals which make it seemingly impossible at times to actually obtain that content. At times it's often easier just to grab something off bitorrent than to actually pay for it.

There is something seriously wrong with the system when the path of least resistance is often unlawful.
I tried this, and the results were useless. I do have a queue of people that want to follow me that I haven't followed back yet, and it seems like this tool would help. However, obvious spammers like "ebaytochina" had scores of 100%, where as members of my family were near the bottom of the list. I don't understand what the DBI is (other than a database module for Perl), so I don't see how it can help me.

Anyway, it's kind of sad that people think that this is their path to "fuck you" money.
If his MacBook can handle the entire database so I don't see the need for a SAN (yet).

The SAN comes into play when a single box can't deliver the IOPS anymore - remember it's not just a matter of adding SSDs. At those rates you start touching the controller and bus limits. Likewise a saturated 10Gb ethernet link causes a significant interrupt-rate (older cards would bottleneck on a single core) that often exposes interesting corner-cases in your OS and hardware of choice.

I'm not saying it's not doable and I know what SSDs are capable of (we just fitted a server with X25's). I'm just saying that your estimate of $10.000 is very optimistic, add a zero and you'll be closer to home. That's because I still think you'd definately be talking an xfire 4600 class machine and a SAN.

Anyways, this is all speculation. Wheels made some reasonable statements that they have it on their radar and I'm definately looking forward to some real-world benchmarks with a concurrent write-load.
On a massive scale things won't change that much. It would be cool, but things will stay mainly the same and people will still use IE 6/7 then.
pg's essays give a lot of insight into practical things in life. The corresponding comments are also good, but sometimes not good.I am a regular reader of these essays. So who posts the comments can be restricted, but sustaining HN will be good for the people like me, who learn a lot from it.But it is quite natural that one wants to just post some comments, just for the sake of being a part of the discussion.Once you keep reading good things for quite some time, your fingers itch to type in some comments. Yes, I agree that this is not good and one should observe some control.But please keep up HN, it is very good.
Agreed. He knows the material intimately, so can speak to it with ease.
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The higher the rating, the more of a douchebag they are. Plus, from what I know about the project it's not something they're trying to make money on -- they're having fun.

There's an article about the creators on Seattle 2.0 - http://www.seattle20.com/blog/Startup-Profile-TweetSum.aspx
Using FathomDB as a database provider: WebMynd's experience
The 5 Dumbest & Deranged Home Booby Traps 
Find out if an alarm monitoring service is worth the money and how it works to keep you and your family safe from harm and hazard.
8 or 16? In 5 years? I think Moore's Law will get us more than that. Typical now is 2 to 4.

The number of transistors per unit area of silicon doubles every generation, and generations of silicon are coming almost exactly once every 24 months now; so if the number of transistors per core and area of CPU silicon per system remained constant, you would see 8 to 16 cores per system 4 years from now. I'm guessing that the number of transistors per core will continue to grow slowly, so I figured the fourfold increase in cores would take 5 years instead of 4.
Yeah, I was going to give the author a hard time, but the fundamental ideas aren't bad. Considering most people without training invest like drunken cowboy fighter pilots riding a skateboard backwards down a hill, being told to be ultra-conservative might push them from "totally asinine" to "moderately asinine" and thus is a good thing.

Index funds are probably the easiest way to stock your IRA these days. If you have larger money, real estate probably offers more flexibility with tax deductions on interest and 1031 exchange to defer capital gains from selling if you buy more property. But I'm not an ultra-savvy investor myself, and my IRA got obliterated with everyone else's last year. I reckon I'll sit on it for some decades and it'll be okay again.
Every time you write an essay on this general topic I sit here wondering: Has he looked at Wellington, New Zealand?

Beautiful city that people want to live in, lots of people living downtown, good university, a community with several very successful technology companies that are a source of angel investors and advisors e.g. Weta Digital (Lord of the Rings etc) and TradeMe (online auction site that beat eBay in NZ and sold for $750m).
Though PG specifically mentioned politics, I took away the message that any person or group with $30 million could do it, if they wanted. Is it likely that someone cares enough about a specific place to to altruistically transform it into Silicon Valley? Probably not (maybe in a seasteading future?), but nor is this politically feasible. So, it's just fun to think about.
Budget Airline Plans to Introduce a $1.50 Charge For Using In-Flight Toilets 
No-frills airline Ryanair, could start charging customers £1 a time for using the toilets on its aircraft.
Europe’s largest budget airline, Ryanair, could soon start charging customers £1 a time to use the toilets on board its flights.
Plus, from what I know about the project it's not something they're trying to make money on

I disagree after having read the terms of use and privacy policy.

Here are some gems.

- In addition, from time to time we may collect personal information that you provide in connection with participation in surveys, sweepstakes, contests, games, promotional offers, and other activities on the Site.

- we also will collect your credit card and billing information.

- contact you about our or a third party's services, products, activities, special events or offers

Given the tone of what they plan to do with your information once they've collected it, this isn't a site I'd sign up for.
@detroit HEY!! no you're totally right except detroit is right next to Ann Arbor, which is actually one of the bigger tech startup area's in the nation, or so I've been told... I don't think downtown detroit could be an SV, but I think you could turn part of metro detroit into one. If you could somehow avoid all the morons and corruption...
FathomDB looks awesome. Can't wait to get our hands on this to trial.

I love the YC eco-system:

>> WebMynd have been lucky enough to be using just such a database over the last year: FathomDB, which launches in private beta today.
I remember way back in MG310 or some such, the sliding scale between the Promoter and the Administrator.

It went like this:

1. Likes new business, new things, getting the word out: Promoter

2. Likes built business, established, running things: Administrator

And there's a scale too. An Entrepreneurial Promoter/Administrator scale. It looked like this:

Promoter <-----------------------------------------------------> Administrator

Where the entrepreneurs just totally get off on promoting new things, and can't be bothered with details, so they hire administrators to run things. But administrators bore entrepreneurs, so entrepreneurs run off to Promote something new as soon as the admin start Administrating.

And at the end of that particular class, that if I did some basic division I would have realized cost me hundreds of dollars, I realized that this Promote/Administrate Entrepreneurial scale was completely, totally, fundamentally reflective of the real world. And yet, having digested this fancy correct lesson, I would never make additional money, make anyone else happier, or otherwise do anything particularly awesome with this scale.
How We Got Here
Take a look at http://blog.rightscale.com/2007/11/13/mysql-performance-on-a... - RightScale Blog
MySQL performance on Amazon EC2
Don't use multiple '!' or '?' signs: they just tell us you are inexperienced.

Your sentences contain vague speculation. Without any hint of knowledge, speculation doesn't add anything constructive to the conversation.

Remember, when not knowing what to add, your best comment is silence. Enjoy the forum.
Congrats on release.

People interested in FantomDB should also consider RightScale who also offers managing and scaling MySQL on EC2 - http://blog.rightscale.com/2007/08/20/redundant-mysql-set-up...

RightScale doesn't offer MySQL-specific services such as reporting etc. but can help with treating your entire application stack "as a service"
Thanks for the detailed answer. I've a start-up idea that needs a big dag offline for the production of a smaller (in bytes, not nodes) one used online. My intention was to use Berkeley DB. It's good to see you say it's the fastest of the off the shelf options, but it only reaches 5% of your own code! Any thoughts on what BDB is doing "wrong"? Were you using hash or B-tree with BDB?
"The organic way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live."

Obviously not the case. We can just go down the list of top universities and look at the ones that are in desirable places that aren't Silicon Valley. We can even have a laugh at all the names people came up with, like Silicon Alley, Silicon Hills, etc.

One very important reason is that the tech talent in the top tech hubs is old-growth, and recycles between all the different tech companies. And it's huge. Funding 1,000 startups for just 5 years still seems very, very small compared to the existing ecosystem in Silicon Valley, let alone the logistics of finding enough of them, vetting, competing with other funds, etc.
Dude you should be Treasury Secretary. Good stuff.
5 Ways to Boost Web Traffic | TechJaws
Not to mention that if you can start any business you want, why not start the one where it's going to be the easiest to make a huge profit? And the business that fits the category almost certainly isn't the business that matches whatever limited technical skills you happen to have.
If only the http:// part was to disappear, that'd be a huge win.

For example, emails and http:// addresses are already recognized as such in places like the gnome terminal (which is great then for irssi IRC) or even in this forum comments. But can't just domain.com/that/ be enough info to ne recognized as an url?
ODE Open Dynamics Engine compiled for Flash Player with Achemy [demo|sources]
Personal branding in the age of Google
Digg - YOUTUBE costume carnavals in 2009 : reddit.com
Nicole Sullivan’s Object Oriented CSS
Datamining for terrorists would be lovely if it worked
Well they're just starting out and I guess that's where the obvious potential is.

The screencast didn't get me so excited either. Mostly because of the guy raving off in that annoying marketing slang over the most basic features, without answering any of the interesting questions.

For example he praises the ability to make queries from the web frontend and the visualization of the mysql logfiles as "enterprise features" - Oh c'mon boy.

More interesting would have been to learn more about that magic "server size" slider that goes from 1-256. Will that select the amazon instance type, mysql configuration, EBS size, or what does it do?

From what I can see they built a pretty frontend that lets you launch customized AMI images with a mysql installation. I sure hope there's more about it because this alone would take little more than 4 weeks to clone...

(We built a similar frontend for our own EC2 postgres cluster, so this is a bit more than an educated guess).
Evan Williams's Twitter talk at TED
I was at an international technical meeting where someone was about to show a web site on a projection screen. The browser's autocomplete tried to fill in the names of what were very clearly NSFW sites he had been visiting during off hours. It's easy to forget how much info your browser knows about you.
Brian Kernighan Interview (2000) (education, debuggers, plan9, Lucent, lots of C)
Much needed. Long overdue!
Is Submitting Your Own Blog Articles Acceptable at HN?
I'm not new to the blogging scene, but it's been just over a month since I've started taking it seriously as a medium for building contacts and getting to know great people. You can probably see from my profile that right now I have nothing interesting on my blog, but I plan to use it as a sort of scrapbook or diary where I can write down some of the really insightful things that I am told/read/discover. Is submitting your own blog posts over and over to HN considered "bad behavior"?

You see, I mostly use the web for programming related activities. I get all my news from websites like HN. I rarely discover great links/articles on my own, and I don't think HN readers will be even slightly interested in mailing list debates about memory management issues in Objective-C. But what I can do is submit links to my own blog. Sometimes there are issues I wish I could discuss with people, and I find my blog is a great way to discuss those issues and keep a record for later reference. Also, being very honest about it all, I sometimes like to see some traffic in my blog stats, and some comments on my posts. If none of my posts are of any value to anyone, I think the HN community will do a great job of not letting it reach the homepage. And, just so you'd know, I have no ads on my blog and the sudden onslaught of traffic when one of my posts reaches the homepage actually poses a risk of me being kicked off of my webhost's server (cheap hosting is not cheap).

So, HN, is shameless self promotion discouraged here or is it okay to post links to your own blog/website?
This has been answered before: It's ok assuming the content is relevant.
That same band still chooses to work with the big labels.

I might not buy cd's as a protest against the way the labels behave, but I don't see the need to protect the bands from the labels. If the bands don't like to work with the labels, then they can refrain from doing so and sell their music themselves.