skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ITA, InspireData, PWGL, Viaweb, news.yc, reddit (initially), ...
The other side of the story: http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-velibs-demi...
How To Find Acutally Interesting People On Twitter
WhoShouldIFollow.com is your new little friend.
>>To the contrary, the Web 2.0 silliness is a result of people thinking like you. Most Web 2.0 companies (reddit, twitter, youtube) are time-wasters.

Perhaps she has a point -- Twitter and Youtube are not making money. By her definition, they fail as entrepreneurs. I don't know about Reddit.
Comparing a 3.5 liter diesel with a 4.8 liter petrol car, that's like comparing apples and oranges.

Topgear on those same cars, better data: "

All the bigger BMW engines are wonderful and the X5 boasts three of the best. You can go for a ‘base' 3.0i petrol(268bhp, 0-62mph in 8.1 and 130mph), the diesel version of the 3.0litre (232bhp, but because of the extra torque 0-62mph in the same 8.1 and the same 130mph top end), or go for the range-topping 4.8-litre V8 with 350bhp, 150mph and 0-62 in 6.5."

So, exactly the same performance for two 3.0 liter engines by a quality manufacturer, one diesel, one petrol.

And yes, if you increase the displacement the petrol engine will get more power but that is no longer a fair comparision.
I always hate finding new people. Even this system is not perfect. We need to get some people who are good with data algorithms to tackle this.
Based on what I've seen in real life in the American version of this, you can be pretty "intellectually successfully" just from being pushed, although they lack the "spark"; I can't imagine this producing an entrepreneur (and I'm not just saying that because this is HN; that really is the opposite of where they end up).

The problem is that every other kind of success tends to be elusive, up to and including "succeeding in not committing suicide". (Fortunately, I don't quite know anyone who made it that far, but I know some people who came close.)
http://wigflip.com is probably the best-known and highest-traffic Lisp success story!
Most of the anecdotes I have heard like this seem to come from societies where scores are very important to getting into college, and where a college education can make a vast difference in the material well-being of the family. India is another place that sounds like this.
I like that the child ids are keyed with "kids"; but was disappointed that the parent id isn't keyed with "mom".
> "Thepiratebay isn't illegal in Sweden. Banning something that isn't illegal borders on totallitarian."

I'm confused. I thought you said it was banned in Denmark, not Sweden. What does Swedish law matter if you're a Dane?
What percentage of Pirate Bay traffic do you think is legal usage? I'm guessing less than 1%.

What percentage of Google's traffic do you think is legal? I would guess at least 80%.

These things matter in court.
I honestly could not get into this book. I mean I bought and own it but I guess the conversation approach just didn't work for me - the stuff people talked about came across as promotional/PR work rather than honest advice.
Sounds useful for college, where often there aren't plates where there is pizza. Other places, I think it loses some utility.
How come pg links to webmynd and not searchyc?

Searchyc is a lot more useful, and you don't need to install anything to use it.
That is the way it should be, not the other way around. Solving problems is hard, solving them in the 'right' way is even harder. For every hour that you spend thinking about your code you are probably saving 10 hours on code that you'll end up tossing anyway or that will perform horribly and will need extensive rewriting or optimization.

If there is one common mistake I am guilty of then it is to sit down and start coding too soon.
"I was told that this is because Koreans basically get one shot at the exam. It practically makes or breaks your life."

People talk about the superior nature of the American higher education system, which might seem strange if you are used to hearing about how much it sucks, but of course those criticisms are talking about two different things. The American system is superior because you can get a second chance in almost anything. You'll have to pay, but you can get a second chance. If you don't like your major, you can change at any time, carrying over what you can.

This sounds so stupidly obvious if you grew up in the US that you may not realize that even in otherwise very enlightened societies like Europe, this is not how it works. In the UK, you declare your major in high school and from what I've heard talking to people who went there, it is possible to change, but very, very hard.

Now, match that against the number of people who change majors in the US... almost everybody does within their first year! Even if you count "real major" -> "real major", i.e., one real engineering to another real engineering and not something like "real engineering" -> "English degree", you're looking at a lot of motion.

It's really strange to me how much this has stuck in those places when, in general, it would be really easy to pick up that aspect of the American system. I suppose it should be pointed out that there are still some clear advantages to American culture, for as much as people love to dump on it.
if you increase the displacement the petrol engine will get more power but that is no longer a fair comparision.

Why? Are they both turbocharged? http://www.google.com/search?q=bmw+x5+35d+biturbo Do they both weigh the same and take up the same amount of room in the engine bay? Do they both cost the same?
They did: http://ecoincorporated.com/ecoincorporated.com/Green_Box_Vid...
Emacs. It uses C as a base but the rest of it is all Emacs-Lisp.
Yes. Thank you for pointing that out—that typo's been fixed.

Speaking of Apptism, I like that site a lot, except that I can't figure out what those little numbers in red circles mean. I'm sure they explain on their site somewhere, just haven't found it yet.
JCDecaux's losses from theft are explicitly limited by their contract with Paris, so their sudden change of heart is probably more of a PR move to aid in contract negotiations than a true sign of the viability of bike sharing schemes.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-velibs-demi...

Maybe one day, the peninsula will have a quality bike sharing network to help solve Caltrain's last mile problem. One day...
Damming fish (no pun intended)
aha, you outed the site in question :) which was the same one who offered the same deal to us..and they still haven't reviewed our app one month later. backlogged indeed that they can't catch up with so many other sites that do just fine?..

i took a closer look at the site and their traffic after an informative discussion with another hn reader via email, and i'm really wondering if any devs that paid for this found it worthwhile.
This URL goes directly to the article,

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/676a4a28-bbd0-11dd-80e9-0000779fd1...
I'm not sure that's the case. Although it's likely that many of the app reviews on AppCraver were paid for, there's no way of telling that a particular one was. For example, there are a couple of negative reviews on the site which I imagine weren't paid for.
Great article, finally some commentary on the "other" side of the AppStore's hit-driven economy. Just about every aspect in this article I can attest to having delt with. We're having modest success but we've got a long road ahead of us. Criticism aside and to Apple's credit, this is the most fun i've had in a while — it's an great idea-to-consumer sandbox that can be piloted by a very small and agile teams.

The iTunes App Store is a weird, wonderful and ever-changing beast. If a developer launches an app and leaves it alone expecting it to earn money, it won’t.

This is what I keep telling people looking to enter the market. You really need to go in with long expectations and commit to your vision. It can be a reality but there's no easy gold, it will likely be fool's gold for 80% of those looking to make money. My advice to indie's is to partner up and don't quit your day job just yet.
A denied grant proposal - how can I get the grant this year?
The Art and Science of the Small Exit
Conversations aren't scalable, and they're subject to the biases of the grader so they're not particularly useful either. And how do you test someone's knowledge on history with real world tests? Subjects like English, Physics and Chemistry put real world problems on the test.
Thanks for developing and maintaining this, I use it several times a week to get context on news.yc posts and comments.
searchyc seems to be down for me, is this related to the improvements or is it just that I can't reach it and everybody else can ?

edit.

thanks to the people that tested it, ok so that seems to be my problem then, here is a traceroute of the last steps before it stops responding:

11 * pos-1-4-0-0-cr01.mclean.va.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.86.29) 251.887 ms 252.502 ms

12 pos-1-11-0-0-cr01.atlanta.ga.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.85.241) 267.698 ms 268.398 ms 234.520 ms

13 pos-1-13-0-0-cr01.dallas.tx.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.85.253) 227.691 ms * 153.851 ms

14 pos-0-13-0-0-cr01.losangeles.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.85.145) 202.909 ms 204.094 ms 204.818 ms

15 * pos-0-14-0-0-cr01.sacramento.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.85.189) 215.876 ms 216.499 ms

16 pos-0-15-0-0-ar01.oakland.ca.sfba.comcast.net (68.86.90.138) 219.741 ms 220.384 ms *

17 po-30-ur02.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net (68.87.226.222) 222.161 ms 223.248 ms 222.742 ms

18 te-8-4-ur04.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net
(68.87.226.85) 224.225 ms 224.801 ms 225.416 ms
Ok, then they should make that MUCH more evident from the home page. It should replace that big image.
Supercool Video Explains New F1 Rules
Here is a great article comparing the Chinese and the Portuguese approaches to exploration. The comparison between ship sizes is just stunning. It's the 15th century version of Lisp versus Blub :-) : http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-succeed-or-f...

Decentralization was a major factor in Europe's success. The Chinese government could issue an edict and ban trading voyages for centuries. No European ruler could afford to be so foolish. There was no single point of failure. When John II of Portugal refused to fund a voyage west across the Atlantic, Columbus simply went to Isabella of Spain and convinced her to role the die.

China was one monolithic civil service state. Europe was divided into a dozen kingdoms that were essentially profit maximizing family businesses. The intense competition between these states propelled Europe forward at a rapid rate.
This was a sort of naive grant proposal I put together last year for a local grant program. I'd like to take what I've learned since then and rewrite/resubmit it this Spring, but hey - what do you all think?

Love to hear criticism, here or (anonymous) commentform on the site (until the spammers come, it's pretty homebrew).

Help me help my home in Michigan!
Yes! The article makes me wonder why Google isn't funding research into this, frankly.
I could too, but I think I've just been exposed to this trick too often.
I'm able to get in. And it's not taking a minute to load the front page...

Good progress, guys!
cleartrip.com

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2491#comment-37479
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/searchyc.com

up for me.
Exactly. That does not detract from the simple fact that the pirate bay itself does not distribute anything illegal at all, and in that respect they are as legal as any other site that produces pointers to information.

The problem here is that it has turned out to be notoriously hard to go after the distributors of the files so now the legal spotlight has turned on the distributors of the whereabouts of those files.

I once wrote a bit about this stating in brief that the piratebay is the internet equivalent of saying that you know where there is a bicycle standing without a lock, clearly that should be legal.

STEALING the bicycle is illegal.
Damnit - this is not "hacker news". F the bbc and nytimes.
>> the customer base forms part of the toolset.

> Toolsets can be changed, improved or mastered. I [cannot] do [this] with my customers.

You cannot provide any value to the world that would involve a different customer base? After Kozmo re-emerged as MaxDelivery, it changed its customer base (one of its tools in value creation) by starting out with only high-density neighborhoods of Manhattan (and it continues to change its customer base as it gradually expands its delivery areas). It has mastered its customer base (again, one of its tools in value creation) by learning how that tool reacts to various delivery deals, and by employing improved delivery deals. Please see the article linked above.

For at least many decades, bike-sharing advocates and politicians have been failing to efficiently employ the tools at their disposal, one of which is their customer base. That tool, the customer base, has been blamed over and over again as "the problem" as bike-sharing advocates and politicians have repeatedly employed essentially the same defectively-designed policies.
How tiny Portugal beat the Chinese Empire in the race to control the seas
Both my parents have post-graduate degrees and have told me one thing repeatedly:

Shamiq, we know how important it is to learn, but the only way anyone is going to look beyond your skin color is if your scores are so superior, if your skills are so superior, if everything is so much better than the number 2 that they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they don't hire you.

But the main focus has always been grades and scores.
The problem is that we have testing all the way up the ladder. You can't implement a better option without hurting students when it comes time to take SATs or go to another school. For a better method to be developed you would have to somehow implement it across the board, which is probably not going to happen.
I think AutoCAD is written in Lisp.

I like that, Lisp used to make something used to make something.
This phone looks amazing. However, am I the only one tired of amazing phones coming out that don't run android?

Since i've used the G1 for the past couple months, I really can't imagine buying a phone without android on it. That is, unless Palm's webOS blows my mind.
I think a more interesting way of phrasing it would be "the rare earth hypothesis, as a candidate solution to the Fermi paradox, appears to be false". Which ought to worry anyone who wonders what else is keeping intelligent life down.
Isn't webmynd YC? I dunno why, but the guy seems to have a bias towards YCombinator-funded companies.
There are few societies that don't teach respect for parents in some form. The difference seems to be that there are many fewer obligations on the parents in the Confucian model; in the extreme version as related in the article, children are basically servants of the parents' whims.
I don't think that you can compare a broken business model with abuse of a system by spammers and others hell bent on destroying some of the nicer sites that well meaning teams have developed.

By that analogy usenet was 'asking for it' because it was open, worked and actually contained great content. Of course that meant that it was ideal for the jerks of this world to try to peddle their wares, eventually resulting in the near destruction of usenet.

On the web the relationship between the number of people that you have to employ to look after abusers vs the number of people that are actually productive is a good way to measure your success....
I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP is what you're thinking of. I doubt AutoCAD itself is written in Lisp.
There's the "OpenSearch" protocol, which just tells your browser "to search this site go to [someurl]?search={SearchTerms}" SearchYC could certainly add this, though I think it may be limited to 1 search only, and not something like: "I have two types of searches, one for everything, and and another for users."

But beyond that, OpenSearch it's pretty limited. I expect this area of semi-semantic searching to explode, which is why I'm investing my own time into it.

So, hang tight for a couple of weeks, then the problem will be solved :)
nice link by the way, thanks !
I like SearchYC a lot, but when it's slow I tend to use Google site search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+sea...
Any place where we can find dev details on that?

I couldn't find any mention of it at: http://280north.com/
Exactly. In particular the API is rate-limited, even for whitelisted users.
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#RateLimiti...

This makes it hard to build your own analytics service.
The XMPP "firehose" would help, but it is only available to specific partners, as well. While part of this is for scalability and performance, it offers Twitter a way to screen what sort of services people build on top of the data stream. So if they didn't like an analytics service as a competitor, they could just turn them off.

There's integration with gnip as well, but I don't know what the exact features or limitations it has. Again, though, that feed is controlled by Twitter, so they could perhaps direct gnip to cut off a service they don't like.

If you're curious, there are periodic discussions at the Twitter development google group on the effect of API limits. Sometimes these include ideas for reducing the number of API calls required to do something:
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk

That being said, Twitter has enough capital to acquire companies. Summize is now search.twitter.com, for example. Would not be surprised if some of that most recent $35MM is earmarked for buying companies that provide the next "big" twitter-driven service, whether that's analytics or something else. I'd guess they would try to go that route first, rather than take the bad PR from terminating a competitor.
the relationship between the number of people that you have to employ to look after abusers vs the number of people that are actually productive is a good way to measure your success.

Yes. That is what I said. The workman with internal-locus-of-control improves his value-creation system based on feedback, and is seen as more successful. The workman with external-locus-of-control blames parts of his value-creation system for acting (in his eyes) wrongly, and is seen as less successful.
Issuu - Glorify Your Documents
Here is a feature request that is relevant only because you are already archiving hackernews:

Send a notification to my email __________ whenever:

(checkbox) Someone replies to a comment from user _________

(checkbox) User _________ makes a submission/comment

(submit button)
Running OS X, I just got an upgrade from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. I wouldn't have bothered--just running the OS, Eclipse etc. is fine--but when I'm running Photoshop and an instance of XP under VMWare Fusion, things start getting a little sluggish.
Harper's Index Now Online
its not a matter of the school culture, just the silliness of some parents.
It's not banned by the Danish state but by the Danish ISP's.

The piratebay is not illagel in Sweden (yet) in the sense that last time there was a court case about the legality of linking to copyrighted material it was found to be legal. I think this was in 1995 or something.

If The Piratebay is found illegal then the ISP's will not go after the site but they will go after ISP's and force them to block the URL like they have in Denmark
Yes, I willingly ignored your armchair reasoning. You are saying crazy things directly contradicted by the science and citing no sources. What do you expect me to do?
Notifications was one of the original motivations for creating SearchYC, but there are a couple of fundamental flaws:

1) How would we know if you've already read a comment/submission? It would get spammy really quick unless we did some kind of periodic digest. We decided that creating RSS feeds for search terms (e.g. username) is a happy medium for this, but we're open to suggestions.

2) New items can take quite a bit of time to get indexed (usually 0-2 hours depending on the number of new items and position in the queue).
That's strange. We made changes to DNS a few days ago. I suppose it's possible that if you're on the very outskirts of the internet, that it hasn't completely propagated yet.
What if someone made a magical index of all the bikes in the city that are unattended and unlocked? Should that be legal?
That's, umm, not what most people who flush out of the US school system end up doing, even among the small percentage who have the ability.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the Chinese education system, coupled with discipline through fear works. I competed at last year's International Physics Olympiad (Viet Nam), who won? China, as usual.

China starts preparation for the competition when their participants are just 8; they work ~16 hours a day on physics problems. The result? Winning with ease. You have, I all presume, read Gladwell's latest book. The Chinese education system squeezes the 10,000 hours required for expertise in before the children are 18. I'm currently [one of] the best physics students in the UK and I'd pay anything to have had an uprising like that, instead mine was consumed with PC games, and posting on forums.

The evidence I have shown can only be used to defend the proposition that: "The Chinese education system is best for those students with a natural skill in certain areas; i.e., physics". It might be argued that while it has these benefits the negatives - I reference the article in question - might outweigh the former.

I hate to go all reprogenetic on you. But my argument would go something like the following:

(1) A productive society is one with experts.
(2) Expertise is only accomplished with relentless practice.
(C) The most productive society will be accomplished if citizens are made to constantly work at their discipline.

There will, of course, be a transition stage in which those that lack real expertise are weeded out; but, I'm ashamed to say, that seems the most productive society.

Until then I will carry on working on my physics/philosophy 16 hours a day - I only wish I'd been forced to start earlier.
It's hard to take seriously because of the hyperbole and smug, but he does make some good points in the article. He's basically right that any Linux software is available for Windows and lots of widely used Windows software isn't available for Linux, for instance.

But your response is just a personal attack. Two personal attacks, indeed.
Looks good and seems to have the full set of assumed features. I cant help the gnawing thought however of a blasé advertisement campaign with the catchphrase Idou2.
"Think of of Docstoc and Scribd the Wal-Mart of documents and Issuu the IKEA of documents. They both have products that are useful, but IKEA has the higher quality."

I don't think you really want to equate yourself with IKEA on quality...
Diving into Django
Could you elaborate on this? How extensively do you use it's combined features and what would you change about it? I'm currently living a life of no mobile phone whilst weighing up my options. I'm heavily skewed towards the G1 and need tipping either in its direction or the forthcoming n97.
appreciate the great advice about user/customer support. i especially liked when he talks about how to think about what the users want, relate to them, tell them what you can do for THEM - "nobody cares about you except you, people care about themselves"
thanks
a/an, of course.
I think so, although nowhere on their website do they say this
This is the second comment by you on xmonad I've seen in a few minutes - have you written anywhere about your use of it, or do you know of anyone else who has written a good summary/explanation/use case of it?
Submissions and saved don't work for anyone beyond a certain number of items.
Clever, although I'd probably still continue folding the slice in half like I do now