skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good read.

Summary:

1) 2008 sucked badly, and so will 2009

2) Even Buffett makes mistakes. Last year he made moves that lost his company billions of dollars. One bank stock he bought lost 90% of its value.

3) The Government has taken actions that will have many negative consequences, but swift action was necessary to avoid a giant collapse.

4) Even though the near future looks gloomy, America has been through worse. We've been involved in World Wars, had great recessions and depressions, and have emerged stronger.

5) 75% of the last 44 years have had positive gains in the S&P 500. He thinks the next 40 years will be similar, but we will have some rough years. Don't be an idiot and try to go all-in catching falling knives or timing the bottom, average in your investments slowly, buy things you can afford, work hard, invest in well-run businesses, and you'll be aiight.
Mufin Player organizes songs by sound
Some of the niches have gigantic potential. Iceland and California should have a huge lead in geothermal. Germany has a couple of leading companies in solar panels. Denmark in wind. China is at the top of the list in coal pollution; solving that puts them at the head of the class in clean coal. Twenty-first century manufacturing is up for grabs; MI and PA should be in the running.
What version/build of Firefox do you have? Firefox/3.0.6?

Also, check your about:config and filter by IDN, you should see a lot of settings there. Any of them not set to default?

Especially check this one:
network.enableIDN

by default it is set to True.

What other Firefox addons do you have that might be parsing URLs before you visit them? Any?

Thanks a lot for the feedback!
We used hashes with BDB. I didn't dig down deep to see what was going on since we weren't really considering using BDB because of its licensing -- GPL, and applications link directly to it, unlike, say, MySQL, and while we're currently only offering access as a web-service, we'd like to have the option open to licensing the recommendations engine in other ways down the line. So mostly we were trying it out to have another data-point to see how our implementation stacked up.
I've also seen a brand in the US from New Zealand...
Didn't we just spend a decade or so trying to get everybody to keep their styles OUT of their markup?

I'm all for reusable css components. Personally I'm using http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/
Ah, may be a problem with Chrome 1.0 they're going to fix soon?

It works fine in my Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.166.1 Safari/530.1

I'll have to see if I can install the original Chrome 1.0 on another machine and check it out, too.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.
Sure! Being non-American I read this essay this way too: Can you buy a Silicon Valley if you're not in US? There's little friction in moving to Silicon Valley if you're in the US, but much if you're outside of US.
Wow, they just cut and paste that (with no added commentary) from Tampa Bay Online -- and while they give credit at the end ("Source: TBO"), they don't give a link or nothing else. Here's the original article: http://www2.hernandotoday.com/content/2009/feb/28/ha-dial-up...
So true, I just buy water at the store for home.
Why not? It doesn't really take much time to note down what you ate, or step on a scale. I brush my teeth every day and that takes much longer.
TechStars Boston
It's bottled water!
My new favorite startups are the ones with a "Pricing" link and without "Share", "Collaborate", "Easy", "Friends".
How To Create a Facebook Fan Page
thanks for posting the link, I tried to find the original post which netted that link, but the hernandotoday threw me as someone's personal blog so I never bothered to open it
Firefox 3.0.6

network.enableIDN;false (user set)

Addons that can modify urls:

NoScript, AdBlock Plus

I guess it's probably NoScript that disabled IDN (internationalized domain names). I don't remember doing it manually.
Marissa Mayer Keynote on How Google Works
TP is talking about the use of classes as mixins. One class could style the container and another could style the contents. I use multiple classes to add effects like hove via JavaScript. Hover can be a single CSS description rather than dozens of alternatives such as box and boxhover.
Now if FathomDB had a rails plugin that made it stupidly easy to shard, they'd have a new customer.
Like ibsulon said it's all a matter of taste. When I was very young, we lived on a farm and had well water. I would go to school in the city and I hated the taste of the water there. Later we moved to the city and I remember how I then hated the taste of the water at my relatives' farm house.

If given the choice between a bottle of "spring" water and filtered water, I always go with the filtered one, because I think it generally tastes better (and more like the water I drink at home). I always find the "bottled water is just tap water" meme annoying, because it generally isn't "just tap water". It's usually water that's been through reverse osmosis filtration and had added salts. That's like saying that spring water is just rain water found in your local puddle.
That's pretty awesome. but...

I'm pretty sure services like Twitter count bytes, not characters. So unicode will not give you much by ways of savings characters.

Also, analytics make the shorteners these days, not length. They're all pretty much short enough, no?
From the insurance company's perspective, it's a $1 million bet they are taking that no one will be able to achieve it.
From the participant's perspective it's a $1 ticket to a $1 million lottery. From Zucker's perspective a business (I would call it a scheme) for making money. Quite interesting.

On a related note, Ansari X PRIZE (for the first private space flight) was partly funded through a similar deal with an insurance company.
Clearly it hedged on finding a stupid-enough insurance company.

[I then go to google up some statistics...]

http://www.golftournamenthio.com/

Yep. AIG.
direct link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x0cAzQ7PVs
Sending your password after signup doesn't necessarily mean they're storing it permanently.
My philosophy professor still uses dial-up. He says it's because wireless is so unreliable My head almost exploded when he said it because he was using his laptop on our school wide wireless internet while he was saying it.
A lot of crazy promotions are. Jordan's Furniture (in Massachusetts) ran a promotion where if the Red Sox won the world series, all furniture purchased in the month before would be free. Their radio ads actually answered "How are you doing this? With an insurance policy. That way, if the Red Sox win, we can be happy too." And the Red Sox did win the pennant, and lots of people got free furniture. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/PersonalFinance/Story?id=3771...

A bunch of crazy dot-coms were also funded with insurance policies, eg. treeloot.com (the infamous punch-the-monkey ads). Berkshire Hathaway annual reports often describe a bunch of them, as they're often the ones underwriting them.
The point isn't whether or not $1 billion in $1 million increments would work in Chicago - it's about where it would work anywhere, including the cities that you name. My argument wouldn't be any different if I said Tampa Bay, New Orleans, Atlanta, or some other city.

(New personal rule: stop making throwaway comments, especially w/r/t Chicago. People latch onto them like remoras.)
The key is in switching to an actionable ad model. Let's say I'm watching TV, and I know I'm going to have to buy toothpaste anyways. Then an ad comes up that says: Try this new toothpaste, it tastes like pork mixed with vanilla, and it just so happens I like pork mixed with vanilla, I click a button and my order of toothpaste is in. Or I'm watching a TV show, and then a 10 second Ad about the new Lexus comes up. I'm interested, so I hit the interest button and when the show is over, a browsable website is available with more information.

But this will not work on the current broadcast system. It only works on the web, and that's why TV is going to have to merge with the Web. The infrastructure is almost all in place, it's just a matter of switching. This is the real shake-up that is about to come, not gradient borders on todo lists.

Some TV shows are good, but they are expensive. But people pay for entertainment. There will always be an audience for Battlestar Galactica, and if the networks cannot offer it, someone else will offer it by making it cheaper and make the profits.
You could just buy a Nalgene and fill it up with tap water. Or if you're really cheap, buy one bottle of bottled water, save it, and fill it up again with tap water later. I do that all the time.
Finally, someone is saying it. The ideas in silicon valley that are being produced now are just so boring. I can't remember the last time I said : wow, or even just thought - well, that's different.

Sure, it's great to make a better database examiner, but if you're young and you have nothing to lose, why not try something really fresh. Something brand new? That webcam figure is fresh, for example.
One bad part of JavaScript that really irks me:

- Newlines get converted into semicolons.

It seems that JavaScript is really forgiving of mistakes in the same way that browsers are really forgiving of malformed HTML.
Thanks for the feedback!

Sorry for the accidental downvote-- I have a reflex of downvoting people who reply to the wrong comment and I forgot this was my own thread. Sorry. :(

Twitter is doing a character count and doesn't care about bytes-- if it did, it means that tweeting in non-ASCII languages only gets half the characters. That's not exactly fair.

If people like the service, we'll be adding metrics and even allow people to search for tinyarrows that were associated with a particular domain.

It's more of something fun-- we're not trying to change the world or anything. We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people.
Progressive postal-mailed me a letter with password on it when they sent my first insurance cards.

I think some health insurance sites do the same thing.
SEO - Tips & Strategies you aren’t hearing from high priced consultants
The reason this works in NYC is that their tap water is basically mountain spring water, piped in from the Catskills.
How Many Gallons of Fuel Does it Take to Travel 350 Miles?
Most of the really successful ideas started without a "pricing" link - google, skype, wikipedia, youtube, facebook, myspace, craigslist, plentyoffish, instant messaging etc.

And what the people want is free - torrents, muxtape, tvlinks, etc.

I'm not saying it's wrong to charge money, but not charging money has been a successful strategy for a good number of startups.
Why Should Someone Do Business With You?
We often share this advice with internet entrepreneurs who are for the very first time launching a web-based-business.
Ask HN: How do you do your company's taxes?
As someone who has been working on tax software for about five years, I'm curious as to how most startups handle getting to March 15th. Do most entrepreneurs even know what taxes they're supposed to be paying, or is that something for a CPA/payroll company to handle?

I'm mostly interested in U.S.-based businesses, but it wouldn't hurt to how things work in other parts of the world as well.
How To Keep Your Laptops Clean
Daddy washes his laptops after the kids play in the dirt. Yes, it's staged, but still it pretty impressive! Yes?
Mapping a New, Mobile Internet
Why didn't you build it then? Because you had a single meeting with a VC and they didn't offer to give you tons of money?

That seems a bit of a silly thing to say to this crowd, many of whom have built bigger things than this article describes without any funding or support.

Go build version one this weekend, launch it on Monday and report back here so we can give you some feedback!
The Year to Bribe Your Way In
I'm optimistic about America's future too. It's the present that's worrying.
I read this article years ago, in the print magazine. The process they go through is extreme overkill for 99% of applications, but it is interesting to see what level of rigor is required for applications where failure of your code is really not an option.

Best quote in the article:

"If the software isn't perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die."

Puts all the code I've ever worked on in perspective.

Last note - the link above doesn't go to the beginning of the article, but rather the middle.
"Approval, though, is not the goal of investing. In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it
sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier.
Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns."

Also, surprising to me that this landed in his shareholder's letter:

Indeed, recent events demonstrate that certain big-name CEOs (or former CEOs) at major financial
institutions were simply incapable of managing a business with a huge, complex book of derivatives. Include
Charlie and me in this hapless group: When Berkshire purchased General Re in 1998, we knew we could not get
our minds around its book of 23,218 derivatives contracts, made with 884 counterparties (many of which we had
never heard of). So we decided to close up shop. Though we were under no pressure and were operating in
benign markets as we exited, it took us five years and more than $400 million in losses to largely complete the
task. Upon leaving, our feelings about the business mirrored a line in a country song: “I liked you better before I
got to know you so well.”

Imagine how Citibank would have worded the same sentiment in its shareholder letter.
Speaking of his experience with first blogger and now twitter:
"I'd learned to follow hunches even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they will go". Great take-away. I also thought it was interesting how the seeds for twitter had been a project Jack Dorsey had been apparently working on for a number of years.
US Hole In One, too. http://www.prlog.org/10092942-hole-in-one-insurance-odds-gol... :The "average" golfer's chances of making a hole in one from 165 yards out are 1:12500. Heres a question for probability geeks: are the chances of anyone out of 12,500 people, each trying once, higher than for 1 person trying 12,500 times?
I'd heard otherwise about the byte count, but I don't have any authoritative knowledge on the matter

We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people.

Awesome. There should be more tiny projects. I recall comments on http://tweetbysnailmail.com saying "this startup will fail". They obviously miss the point :)
Another step towards toy monoculture.
truly innovative ideas are almost impossible to make money with, so people settle for doing things that they know will sell(either to users or another company)
Could Atlanta Buy A Silicon Valley?
I'm with you. Recently I've seen people Twittering about Twiddla with tinyurl'd links that are actually longer than the domain name. It's just silly.

I think that SEO is really making things worse for URLs. Remember 4 years ago, when "The URL was the New Command Line"? And it was considered a feature that you could look at a URL like http://site.com/user/3916 and hack it to get similar pages for other users? Can't do that with http://yoursite.com/this_was_an_article_that_i_wrote.

Seems like a step backwards.
Anyone know of discussions or articles on what is wrong with the dom?
That doll is awesome. Watch the video.
The Secret History of Silicon Valley - Steve Blank (Gave the same talk to Twitter)
Okay so this happened to me with windoze...and guess what I did? That's right, I said "screw you" and learned Linux.

Pirates created: 0, Open-Source Advocates / Linux Zealots: 1
I know someone who still uses dial up because they can mooch off their neighbor's wifi...haha.
It's considered "HIP" to say that at the moment. That doesn't make it right though. In the same way it's hip to hate Java right now. That doesn't mean that Java isn't good at solving a set of problems in a good way - it clearly is.

There's millions to be made from advertising revenue. If you can get people to pay for something, great, but not every product is the type where paying would make any sense at all. By charging consumers directly, you massively reduce your audience to a small subset of users.

It's quite funny to see people imply that advertising revenue isn't "real" revenue, or is in some way less valuable than getting customers to pay directly.

You know what the most powerful marketing word in the world is? "FREE".
The clever thing is using that to your advantage and still making money. Tons of industries do that though, loss leaders work, 'free cellphone (with contract) works' etc etc.
This is a pretty famous talk, it was also given when I attended CIKM '08. He is a really interesting speaker.

Plus his book is a great read for all startups: Four Steps to the Epiphany. If you don't own it, you should check it out:

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=four+steps+to+the+e...
> I'm more interested in the fact that twitter is (or will become) a live database of everything happening in the world

That's the first description of twitter I've seen yet that actually makes it sound like something interesting, however, I still don't see how it's any different that calling IRC or NNTP a live database of everything happening in the world.

Twitter still seems to be like something kids are all excited about for no real reason other than they're too young know it's all been done before in various forms.
return
{
ok: false
};

Have you seen this part of the video? That's a perfect example while adding semicolons is a bad thing.
Note: I'm a software engineer/chemist, and I've not found the latter on the list yet... A few thoughts come to mind:

1. #1-3, 8, 10 and 11 you could not pay me to do. They strike me as jobs that make debugging binary I/O interesting.

2. #4 means you'll deal with a LOT of ex-pre-meds pissed they didn't make it into the big time.

3. #7 and 12 are good jobs, if you happen to find them and if you happen to get tenure. And write like a demon. And like to teach.

4. #13, umm, err, boom? Like the idea of a security clearance?

5. Finally, #20. Great if you like night work, wearing gloves w/o fingertips and aren't trying to make the big bucks. Unless you write like a demon, have good TV presence and say BILLIONS well.

Ah, found it. Chemist, #57. Tucked right under Hotel Manager (#56) and Typist (#54). Not sure there ARE any typist jobs, as the pink-color field sorta vanished about the turn of the century.

Humor aside, if you're looking at lists like this to debate job choices, for $GOD's sake pick something that can't be outsourced...
Rendering images of Canvas data is what the toDataURL() method is for.
If the site isn't taken down during an update, some parts of it will always be broken during a schema migration since our ORM expects each table corresponding to a data model to be in sync after a code update. I guess you could always version your data models and handle the pre-upgrade and post-upgrade cases, but that seems like a lot of work in our situation.
You're focusing on the technology of twitter, which isn't exciting or innovative at all. What's interesting about twitter is that they've made it extremely simple and accessible for non-techies, who have no idea what IRC or NNTP are, and don't care. As a result, it's breaking into the mainstream and rapidly becoming the "live database of everything happening in the world".

Could this have been done with IRC? Probably. But it wasn't.
recall when warren said "buy american. i am". in reference to stocks?

remember how many people here said he was "brilliant"? that was at dow 10k. -30% ago.

i think in the end warren was just a slightly-better-than-average investor whose career tended to coincide with a generational bull. at this point i don't think berkshire will outperform tbills.

warren, give it up. you'll be dead before the next secular bull arrives.
Numbers Show That Movies Are Really Recession-Proof
Added tip: You can also get to us via tinyarrows.com, too.
It's awesome technology, but I'm disturbed by the seeming purpose of it. There's a whole section of the video devoted to molesting, and taking clothes off of, the teenage girl figure until she's crying in a corner...and then giving her a teddy bear to make her happy again.

The Japanese sexual culture is deeply disturbing is what I'm trying to say here.
Replay an Apache log file and graph the response times
Neither the CPU nor the router were invented in the last 10 years Paul, and the retreat to hardware makes for a weak case since new FABs are generally financed by banks and corporate bonds rather than venture capital. Neither my router nor CPU were produced in the United States, although that is beside the point.

My point was that IPO and M&A activity are highly correlated with stock market performance. I can't run a regression analysis linking exit opportunities to international capital flows because there are no statistics on international investment in US stock markets, but it hardly seems radical to point out that the VC boom of recent years has been fueled significantly by the stock market boom. If strategic investment decisions were the primary driving force behind the success of the industry the industry should not be facing such a bad liquidity crisis right now.

And perhaps this is harsh, but I don't see a lot of competence in the investment decisions which have been made in my own industry so I find your argument unconvincing. A lot of startups are competing against other startups and most funded companies in my space are disasters. But they all love AdSense, which means that as these companies flame out my ad-spend is going down and life is getting much nicer. Your suggestion that public policy should involving giving significant sums of money no-strings-attached to groups that seem responsible for major capital misallocation and band-wagon investment behavior seems beyond unjust. It seems crazy.
Well, if you assume all 12,500 people are of the same ability as the one person (perhaps it is sufficient for their abilities to be randomly drawn from the same population distribution, but I'm not sure of this), then you're taking independent observations from the same distribution, and both situations are essentially identical. However, you'd probably learn something after a couple thousand shots, so I'd give the 1 person a better chance.
Williams is right. Users will always find more creative ways of using your product than you can think of. The best thing to do is keep things open and stay out of their way. The other tech company I think is great at this is Mozilla.
Nokia 6080 Black Unlocked
Presenting Nokia 6080, a multi function phone supporting GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 and also with great dimension having 105.4 x 44.3 x 18.6 mm with lightest weight 91 gm
> It's quite funny to see people imply that advertising revenue isn't "real" revenue, or is in some way less valuable than getting customers to pay directly.

As long as numbers like these hold true: "At the $1 RPM (CPM/CPA/CPC) level achieved by most general sites, you need 4 billion page views/month ... to [reach] $50M in revenue per year" (http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2007/03/a_vcs_view_...), charging money for a product that creates value is going to be a more viable way of starting a successful company online
Quite prolific lately. Clearing out the buffer?
Public source code repository for code snippets
These already exist! I was looking in the cleaning supplies the other day, and they sell empty normal-sized Windex-like bottles, along with a very small bottle of concentrate!
Also: "I just wanted to explore what it take if one did." is missing something.