skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Where are they going to go? Back to email, IRC, or Blogspot? I doubt it. To Twitter's cheaper competitors? How are they going to stay in business?"

Where do they go: facebook, orkut, linkedin or any other social network for 'status updates'. Some free service for 'realtime news'. There's no business secret or technical trickery on twitter - it's really a simple and reproducible service...

On how to survive: by using VC money for years, maybe? Expecting to get bought by GOOG (oops, I think jaiku already did this)? Not making any money at all (exactly what twitter does today)?
All the HTML in Urbantastic is completely static. All dynamic data is sent via AJAX in JSON format and then combined with the HTML using Javascript. Put another way, the server software for Urbantastic produces and consumes JSON exclusively. HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images are all sent via a different service (a vanilla Nginx server).

Wait ... so if he wants to populate the static HTML with information from a database, the client side javascript has to access the database directly? And his database is internet accessible/viewable? That seems bad ...
The web was awesome in 1996. It sucked in 1993.

By 1996 you had actual webpages you could visit. IQ tests. News sites. Hotmail. But it was still difficult to tell professional content from amateur stuff. Conspiracy theory and Internet trolling were fresh and interesting and the blink tag was in wide use. And port 80 wasn't the only game in town still: there were still lots of independent BBS that had interesting content and where TELNET was king.

So what if you weren't online all the time. The communities that existed expected asynchronous access. You could grab lots of content and download it for use offline. There were brilliant software applications and games ready for the taking: DOOM had left Wolfenstein in it's wake? Online was liberating. Online was brilliant. It still is.
"Verbs ending in d: shipped, launched, built"

ouch...
Structured information data-mined from wikipedia
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

I must say it's getting really hard to tell the difference in this case.

"less is being paid for than ever before." Really? The second the first recording company came into business it was making 18 billion a year? I'm fairly sure it's still higher than throughout most of the history of the recording industry.

"Unfortunately The Pirate Bay does what it says in its description and its main aim is to make available unauthorized material." No, its main aim is to facilitate the sharing of files. The users choose to upload illegal material.

"It is common sense, if they couldn’t get it for free they would buy it and when we ask them, they confirm that." Prove it. I download plenty of music to see if it's any good, sometimes via youtube, sometimes via torrents. Probably at least 95% isn't, so I delete it again. I certainly wouldn't buy it.

"When asked if downloaders have less money than others, Kennedy said that younger people have the money but just don’t spend it on music anymore. Kennedy said that the reduction in sales in the music industry is directly attributable to illegal downloading." Again, PROVE IT. I suspect that if you put music sales next to video game sales you'll see some very close correlation between the decline of the former and the rise of the latter.

"He was asked if he understood BitTorrent. [...] It was very clear he knew nothing about any remotely technical issues." Perhaps you could spend 10 minutes reading up on it so you know what you're talking about in a court of law?

"The reason for this drop is that the number of premieres have increased but sales have decreased. File-sharing has somewhat made the market thinner." Or maybe people have only a limited budget for movies, so now they have to split it between them, resulting in lower sales per movie? Or you just make too many crappy movies? Again, get some proof.

"Sandgren further told that the damages they claim are based on a fictitious license fee." So basically they're just pulling numbers out of their ass.

"He had to admit, however, that he has no evidence to back these claims up." I'm not even going to comment on this one.

If only I were the judge... I'd hold them in contempt of the court for wasting everyone's time with unsubstantiated BS. Or better yet, sue the entertainment industry because they cost me several billion dollars. How did I arrive at that figure? Well, I have no evidence to back that claim up, but it seems reasonable to me. Now give me my money.

Pathetic.
Amazon Exposes 1 Terabyte of Public Data (meet AWS Public Data Sets)
What other uses does canvas have other than canvas art?
Canvas can be used for many things, but we often only think it can be used for making canvas art and canvas prints. It has many other uses, one of them being in the manufacture of canvas awnings. An awning is a secondary covering attached to the exterior wall of a building.
AWS link: http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/
"serving all HTML static and combining that on client side with the dynamic content using JavaScript"

So baked into this is lack of support for clients without javascript.

I guess I understand if this is a conscious lack of support for the many lynx/noscript/etc users out there (I'm not going to do that myself and so the architecture is not an option).

But what about search engine crawlers, hasn't javascript + search always been an issue?
Last Post Sends Emails and Letters to Loved Ones When You Die
I should have been more specific. Clearly almost every people has created art.

It's hard to dig almost anywhere in the world and not at some point hit some magical amulet or wonderfully decorated pottery art, or something like that.

My point was about the rather unusual situation of Leonardo,
and even more so, jonmc12 question on how to allow more people the same freedom Leonardo had.

The large degree of time and effort devoted to art, by a large part of the population, is unusual.

Clearly every society has art, and often individuals, shamans, singers, etc, can be full time so to speak.
But it's rare that most people can devote most of their time, to activities other then survival.
Firefox takes ages to load. All the plugins everyone loves so much are hogs of memory and just plain annoying. The only plugins worth a damn are adblock and greasemonkey, the rest Chrome already has.

Also I cannot seem to grok vim/emacs.
No, presumably the client clicks on something, which calls an action on his server via xhr, which does some server-side logic (say, update the cart and compute a new total) and returns a json packet, which the client then uses to update the page.

Without knowing the specific details, I'd imagine the json response has directives for what static html to load if needed, which results in more xhr requests to get those files. The client side js simply needs to know how to process the json it's given, it doesn't need to know any business/persistence info.

What I'm curious about is how he handles urls (if everything is xhr, then the url will always stay the same, which is kind of a pain for linking to specific stuff, unless you do anchor workarounds like Facebook does). Also, I'd be curious if he uses the static html files as templates (injecting data into them clientside) or just has a TON of tiny html fragments.
I think this is a brilliant idea in theory. In practice, the sticky part seems to be how Last Post finds out about your death. I guess someone has to notify them officially. Otherwise your relatives might be surprised when they open their mailbox some day. And you would be rather embarrassed that they had learned your parting thoughts before you wanted them to.

Could become a popular service among Wall Street types at the moment.
So if the user has javascript disabled, nothing on the site works?
Jamis Buck lets go of Capistrano
This is a huge part in the disconnect of views between the entertainment industries and the public. Physical media scarcity of past decades enabled a false duality to develop that entertainment companies have come to depend on. They want you to have to buy their product as if its a physical thing, but then behave as if its a temporary license grant. When you understand this, their seemingly irrational behavior starts to make a little more sense.
Django-springsteen and Distributed Search
I don't approve of affirmative action if I am just as poor and started out in just as bad conditions but get treated like cause I'm white my life was automatically easier and college will be automatically easier.
Hey! This is what my start-up does, so I can talk about that a little bit.

The first thing to change about the business model is the focus. A lot of people who are enthusiastic about writers know two or three names of writers they follow, and that's it. Everything outside of that is an unknown to them. The first part of the solution is to focus people who are enthusiastic about writing in one place.

The next fix is to let writers release fast, iterate often, similar to hackers, and that means critique. You need to give them a good system for getting lots of feedback fast. The minute they start writing they should have access to feedback, even if they choose to finish a first draft before releasing anything and showing it to people. The better your revision access is, the less of a risk it is.

The final solution is to publish more writers, more incrementally. It means that you sift through a lot of short stories and poems and yes, even novels, if you're a publishing company, and you get back to everybody so that they can figure out how to get better. At the same time, you expand aggressively so that you can handle the incoming people as your model expands outward, and you keep the focus on quality publishing, just more of it.

Also, computer-based vocalization is horrible, and it will never replace audiobooks. I want Steven Colbert reading to me, not my Kindle.
A journey down the road to the Ivory Tower investigates the allure of academia
Making vs. Modeling: A paradox of progress in nanotechnology
Yes, they have a small chance of hitting it big. But I reckon it's a much smaller chance than that of a startup founder.
Thanks for posting this. I haven't seen much about Magento on HN, though it's got a ton of potential for ecommerce startups. Unfortunately its development has been pretty rocky so far. I added this post to their bug tracker.

I think someone could do very well offering Magento as a hosted service once it matures. Server administration is the cause of a lot of strife, and few online retailers are interested in that.
May I suggest, then, buying only Forever Stamps? They cost whatever normal first-class stamps costs, but they can be used even after first-class postage rates go up, with no need for extra make-up stamps, hence the name, "Forever Stamps".

More info: http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/forever_stamp_fa... (though a bit out-of-date).
Google joins the EU's Internet Explorer smackdown
He sounds like somebody who doesn't fundamentally understand the nature of audio reading. He's envisioning something more threatening to audio readers than actually exist today.
It also works like that in the Netherlands.
Probably just a judgment call he'd have to make about his users, but your machine would have to be pretty old and slow to not be able to manipulate the few kilobytes of text that is a typical web page.
Why not in paper form?

There's something lost from paper to e-ink, and everybody who uses a Kindle will realize that. If e-books become big and cheap, that means book sales are going to benefit, to some degree.
The Benefits Of Sharing Your Idea
Rule #1 could read along the lines of: "Is the [potential] cofounder an animal?"

I think this is one of the most difficult rules to abide by because a lot of very talented people say they would like to start a company, but never will. When it comes down to it, they'd rather be unhappy at their job and receive a steady paycheck than take a risk and start their own company. Do you lower your standards and start a company with someone who may be talented, but may jump ship at the first job offer elsewhere?

It takes time to find out what people are really made of. From my experience, people who say they want to start their own business or be their own boss really just want to be a mid-level manager. Other people have the "Entrepreneurial ADD" and will never be able to stick to one idea from beginning to end. Others get scared of the prospects of late-night coding and early mornings, and decide to go to grad school instead (how does that make any sense????).

What's the solution for finding good cofounders? I think at some point everyone comes across someone who would be a perfect business partner, but has different ideas. Start working to form a business with that person regardless. It's likely that the business will evolve into something that neither cofounder originally anticipated. So getting everyone on board with the same idea may not be all that important, you just need to be able to work together.
I think the author is right, but in the wrong way.

He posits that mind vs. world dualism is mistaken because I can for example map addresses on my iPhone, thereby allowing me to store memories of different locations in my iPhone instead of my brain, therefore the iPhone is part of my "mind", therefore separating mind from external world is mistaken.

I think there is truth here, but I would go further - that just as in a LAN many terminals can access the same file, and therefore the separation between terminals is fuzzy, so too "mind" is a fuzzy concept much as "terminal" is a fuzzy concept in a LAN. Where does one terminal end and the next begin? Where does one "mind" begin and the next end?

Maybe instead of attacking mind vs. external world dualism we need to re-evaluate mind. To me it is perfectly valid to say the brain can "out source" certain tasks, like storing locations in an iPhone, and therefore the line between "outside world" and "inside world" gets blurred. But instead of saying my iPhone is part of my "mind", let's say the iPhone gets read and written to by the threads of my brain. Let's look at the iPhone not as "part of mind" but as an external hard drive written to and read from by the threads of my brain. At the end, there is no "mind" as an irreducible entity. There is only a multi-threaded neural network application in the wetware of a naked ape lately out of Africa.

The real dualism to attack is not "mind" vs. "outside world" but "brain" vs. "mind". There is no "mind" per ce in my opinion. What we call "mind" are the threads running in the brain, nothing more or less.
Why does it look so different? Did he change the fonts? What kind of server resources are required to run it?
Perhaps I'm biased because I'm a writer myself, but I think they're a little bit more excusable than the RIAA. Writers have an ancient history: as a group they are further behind the times than any other, and their world is extremely closed-door and high-barrier. Because of that, their love and joy has dwindled, decade by decade, and they haven't noticed that the people who are making their craft more loved are the people who are embracing the future (Billy Collins, former poet laureate, for instance).

The effect is that you have something akin to a group of old, uninformed, frightened people, who are all very bright but very ignorant regarding some things, and some of those people think technology means books have to die, and if that was the case then they'd be right in that something powerful and valuable was being lost. So I understand why they're so fearful, even if I wish they could comprehend how things have been moving forward.
ITunes U Proves Better than Going to Class
But Amazon is neither selling nor giving away audio books. They are giving away a general text-to-speech solution which may conveniently be used on a book. Arguing that this is violating copyrights is the same thing as saying that text-to-speech is inherently illegal.
Conservation of Processing Power is in effect, Gordon Moore would be happy. Processing power on the user end may be going down, but it's just transferred over to the servers. Stronger servers, weaker clients, more bandwidth...
McSweeney's is an icky model. They work online, but they're very closed-door, they appreciate only a very specific manner of writing, and they don't tell writers what it is they're doing wrong when they are, in fact, doing something wrong.
dead mans knob. Don't respond to x polls in a row and you're assumed to be incapacitated or deceased.

Trains have a similar mechanism, hence the name, it is to avoid a train going on to build an accident with a dead driver at the wheel.

I have a similar idea yet to be fleshed out revolving not around sending messages after you're dead but to alert others there might be a problem. Say you're travelling on your own between x and y, if you don't reach 'y' and reset the timer then an alarm is generated.

For solo travellers, people living alone in remote areas that sort of thing.
I think you have overdosed on acronyms.
it would, which is why it is included with it.
What makes you think that the Mexican problems of multi-generational poverty and lack of education have anything to do with quality high IQ stock?

You mention Europe as our historical sources of quality immigrants, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Mexican's mostly of Spanish descent, just like Americans are mostly of English/Irish/German/Italian descent?
And the last time I checked Spain is in Europe.

I don't have any magic means for getting 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants out of poverty, but I do know that America has a unique underclass problem in the industrialized world.

And I don't think immigration has much to do with it, there are not a lot of immigrants in Appalachia.

Compare the social services in the US vs the rest of the industrialized world. Outside the US, you tend to see things like cradle to grave, and those are not magic. They are expensive, but they are not magic.

A valid debate would be the cost vs benefits of European or Canadian style social services vs what the US has.

Lastly, I don't think low reproductive levels are responsible for the lack of European immigrants.

Ireland still have quite the high birth rate, and they aren't falling over to come the the US, like they did during the famine.
Their present standard of living might have something to do with that.

You don't attract masses of immigrants from places that have a standard of living just as high as yours.

And I'm not sure what you mean by East Asians having a higher but less creative IQ?

I suspect your prejudices are formed by the fact that East Asians can't walk into the states, and that means they are less likely to be common laborers and more likely to have a formal schooling background.

If the US bordered India, and Mexico was across the ocean, things would be reversed.
Those sound like the right goals, if you have a way to implement them.

Does your startup have a website yet?
Is it the demand for semantic web?
Makes much more sense. Thanks
Actually, Twitter's users are worthless. They are a cost to Twitter -- and they bring in no revenue (yet). (Obviously this doesn't apply to their new business/commercial accounts).

Facebook's users at least see Ads. I have actually bought stuff off Facebook because the targeting was perfect.

And Twitter's user base is about 6 million, which is also a far cry from Facebook's 50 to 175 million, depending on what number you believe.
IPhone App Store Secrets
I agree it should not take seven years and a team of lawyers to open a small business...and in general it doesn't. I agree that city politics should not favor a local cartel, but every new business venture faces some degree of barrier to entry, this just happens to be an extreme case. Does this mean Erroll Tyler is in the wrong business? Not necessarily, he just needs to find a new way to compete. He needs more friends in government, and cartels are notoriously unstable...
> East Asians are even higher IQ (perhaps less creative)

Less creative? How exactly do you measure this? Or is this your totally non-racist white hunch on how to classify a third of the population of planet Earth?

> Oh, and if you are getting ready to call me a racist (I'm not)

This seems to happen often enough that you have a prepared response. You might want to just go with the flow and reclassify yourself as a racist, that way you don't spend half your energy defending yourself against false accusations and can spend time attacking people who aren't white in a more efficient manner.
Startup School 2009?
http://startupschool.org/index.html

Currently says there will be another one for 2009, but there are no details yet. Since last year's was in the spring, has anyone heard any details about this?

I really want to go if it happens.
I appreciate side effect programming, but I really think the java criticism is unwarranted. The first thing I think of is: "How do you do a CRUD app in your functional language?"

I enjoyed ML when we were doing it in school. However, I've only worked on one application that could be translated easily to the functional paradigm. The rest have parts that would be well suited to functional programming, but the rest of the program is one giant side effect. Monads aren't the answer there, they're a workaround.
> And I'm not sure what you mean by East Asians having a higher but less creative IQ?

See, when racists use "average IQ" as a weapon against blacks and mexicans, they have to somehow justify their 2nd place to the Asians or else they will not feel comfortable using these "studies" as proof. They just say "oh, well they're less creative, so you know, white people are really still at the top", and everything is right again in the world.

Did you see what they did there? They took valid objective metrics - statistics - and disqualified the positive outcome for a selected class of people with something totally subjective - creativity. This is classic racism. It's a nonsense argument posited by younger people who really haven't had much life experience, and have not met many people who aren't of their same race.

Personally I don't believe in average anything when it comes to race, it's a totally meaningless metric that will get you absolutely nowhere when you deal with actual people and in some cases will handicap you with preconceived notions. I've conducted enough business with enough people in this economy to know that. Younger or less experienced people may have not.

> but aren't Mexican's mostly of Spanish descent

Racists never blame white Europeans for anything, especially not fundamentally flawed colonial systems like the Spaniards' that were devised by greedy people who were bent on raping native people and lands for as much wealth as possible in as little time as possible - actually, why should they blame them, it worked flawlessly, didn't it?
They're getting much better, check out http://www.ivona.com/online/editor.php?set_lang=en

I can tell it's generated, but there are bits here and there that sound like a normal speaking voice. This is like CGI in the 90s, where everyone was talking about how it was wooden and clunky and awful but the proponents just kept building better tools and now teenagers can make lightsaber duels with their laptops.
I think something like this is a better fit for something more application-like and less web page with dynamic content. I suspect Google will eventually start supporting Javascript as this sort of design becomes more popular.
It will be in the fall this year.