skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We obviously have different ideas on what constitutes manners. Asserting that someone you disagree with didn't read the article and should be downvoted hardly counts as polite.
Newcomers - this site is special - please take time to learn about it before posting ...
A simple request.

Despite Hacker News being comparatively new, there is a culture here. Items are intended to be of interest to Hackers. Reading the guidelines makes it clear that submissions don't have to be about hacking, but should be of interest to hackers.

So you've found a link, you're all excited about it, and you create an account so you can submit it. Then you're ready to submit it.

Stop.

Consider that someone here has already seen and submitted it before you. There's a good chance that someone has. Use the search facility first and avoid the duplicate submission. Further, join the conversation that may already be underway - don't spawn a new one.

But more importantly, spend some time reading around, seeing what people like, seeing what gets up-modded, seeing what gets down-modded, and absorbing the culture.

Don't be a puppy, getting all excited and peeing all over the place. Take your time, and gain a reputation for being thoughtful, valuable, and worth reading.

Please. Make an effort.

http://searchyc.com/multitouch?sort=by_date

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I didn't request you get downvoted. You should learn not to miunderstand.
Face it - You are Addicted to Success
Excellent excellent introspective piece!
Despite the rampant oversimplifications, or because of them?
Holy freaking cow! I've not heard anyone explain/disclose the details of what actually happened before. Cheers to Representative Kanjorski for disclosing the details. The government shouldn't keep secrets.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475581
Newsstand Sales of Magazines Shrink 11%
How about a karma marketplace?

1. Upvoting costs an amount of karma points proportional to the number of points the article has at that time. Hence, it costs more to upvote an article on the home page than it costs to upvote an article in the New section.

2. If I choose to spend karma by voting on an article and it starts to rise, I get proportional "returns" on my karma.

This incentivizes me to upvote New articles I think HN will like. But then again if I lose all my karma points, I might need a bailout.
I think story submission should require 50-100 points or karma and/or a week or two of membership. It's a kind or rite of passage, participate in the community and you can contribute stories. Be around long enough to observe the culture.
Holy crap, I think we just found a way to link Chris Martin (Coldplay) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)!
Sigh... this is why you can never trust a Republican. Putting people who don't want government to work in charge of making government work has lead pretty directly to the financial disaster in which we find ourselves. The Democrats are no angels, but it was a Republican president and a Republican congress and a Republican chair of the Fed and a republican head of the SEC and a Republican head of the CFTC and on and on that fiddled for the last 8 years.
Benchmarks between DBs are pretty rare because they are so difficult to control for. The configurations make a big difference. One set of benchmarks is here: http://tweakers.net/reviews/657/6 but thats in 2006. Also, MySQL has known fatal bugs in the production release so mysql isn't exactly a safe choice.
Thanks; I was actually concerned that my question might be inappropriate because it's a sort of "help me!"/tech support type question. I tried unsuccessfully to find a FAQ which explains what types of questions are appropriate, but couldn't find anything so I just posted anyway. I figured if it wasn't ok, it wouldn't get voted on; so no harm done.
BeOS Lives: Haiku Impresses
s/World/Current Form of the Economy/
RubyConf 2008: Unfactoring From Patterns
Noble sentiment, but if people knew this was going on at the time, it would have likely exacerbated the situation.
Luckily in Smalltalk, you can add that method to your Dictionary class and re-use the image :D
Discussing the Value of Design
For example, if you call up your local utility and ask for your neighbor's consumption, they will tell you to get lost.

Duh. Some kind of opt-in is going to be required for other people's data. The bigger problem is that if you call up the utility and ask for your own power data from your smart meter they will tell you to get lost, because even though they have the data they have no software that can send it to you.

[Google] have the infrastructure and the incentive, as consumption information will be a prized commodity, which only they will be able to get access.

Unfortunately, this is probably right, although Google says they're going to make it open: "We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it."

(Note: I'm assuming that smart meters are a solved problem. I already have one.)
Yes, but they might give you a hard time too if you put out something silly before thinking things through.
Music Industry

This may be one of the most obvious ones out there. Artists don't need the record labels anymore. The money is not purely in the music, but ticket sales, merchandise, extra content,etc.

I like what topspin media is doing. Myspace has made great strides, but it's just a start.
Can someone explain this to a non-finance / non-macroeconomics type? Was it foreigners who were pulling money out? Was it people in the US? If they pull $5.5 trillion in cash out, where would it have gone? Just don't understand why everything would have collapsed.
I've always used Postgres, but don't think the copyright assignment thing is that big a problem. The FSF does that, and it seems to work out ok.
Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots
might not be perfect -- but its really great for me - thanks :)
In my experience, OO is a good thing when you are able to imagine the 'objects' in some real-life representation (like GUI elements which are generally represented as 3 dimensional physical objects). Otherwise OO tends to be too abstract to help you, and already gets in your way.

This is very simple to prove: give a group of experienced coders the same 2 problems to solve: one taken from a real world object, and the other purely theoretic; both to realize in OO. This experiment would show that the real world object problem is solved in a similar manner, and the theoretic one in all different ways...

And yes, I use OO, but only with the libraries written in OO style, and never in my own code.
A. It uses reference counting. -retain (+1 now), -release (-1 now), -autorelease (-1 later).

B. Creation/allocation is +1, thus: +alloc (+1), -copy (+1).

C. Your goal is to keep the count balanced at 0. If you do a +1, make sure you do a -1 either now (-release) or later (-autorelease).

(C) is the guiding principle, thus in this order:

1. If you +alloc/-copy something in a function and is done with it, make sure you have a corresponding -release.

2. If you +alloc/-copy something in a function and return it, -autorelease before you return, so that counts are 0 (in the end anyway).

3. If you didn't +alloc/-copy an object, (1) and (2) don't apply. E.g. NSMutableString's +string.

4. If you -retain, make sure you -release or -autorelease to pair it up. (remember balanced to 0).

5. If you get an object from calling another function, you shouldn't -release/-autorelease it because someone else or you should have done (2). But don't forget (4).

The rest is about memory management in accessors and IB outlets.

PS: I give up on formatting this. Hope it's readable.
iPhone app development is not, as many people make it out to be, the Gold Rush. It's very easy to make a small amount of money ($10 a day), but making $150 a day on the App Store is not any easier than making $150 a day doing anything else (for somebody with the same skill level). And yes, there are people making $21,000 a day, but those people exist in every business. We only hear about the people striking it rich on the App Store because everything Apple-related gets tons of attention.

I'm a bit torn, actually. I'm making good money on the App Store with 4-5 apps, but I don't learn much making iPhone apps compared to doing other kinds of programming. So, I'm making a significant trade-off. (That said, I'm open to doing iPhone contract development, so contact me if you're interested.)
online auctions.

ebay sucks, for both the buyers and sellers. and ebay doesn't even like auctions anymore, they're moving towards the amazon-style marketplace model.
Amazon Cloudfront forces you to put versioning if you want to expire objects manually, check out this page:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/2008-06-3... (under `Object expiration`).

Unless you specify "Cache-control: no-cache" header you aren't really sure how the browser caches your static files (especially if the user is behind a proxy - and even "Cache-control: no-cache" can easily be ignored).
New Gnip schema live for testing
There's a limit to that though, it's weird when they start asking me about stuff from page nine of my Google results.
You mentioned it, but I think the music industry is really ripe for disruption. Their business model is definitely shifting as we speak.

ebay/auction sites/local commerce can be done better.
I just launched a Windows-Apache-Postgres-Python/Django stack on EC2 using Elastic block for the postgres database storage. That install worked like a charm, and I'm running www.cuuute.com on it right now.

I had an urge to try MySQL as a database, and I found an installer bug that broke the installation and messed up my server. The installer died giving me a "MySQL can't install as a service" error, and then not allowing me to go forward. So, I did that a couple of times. I then realized that the installer had installed MySQL each time I ran the installer, but didn't complete it.

I Googled for an hour and couldn't find a resolution to the issue, just a bunch of forums= threads asking for help on the same problem for the past 9 months.

Postgres for the win. BTW EC2 + Elastic block rocks like Dokken for a WAPP setup.
Stuff falling off the end of the New list before it has time to get voted onto the front page is a perennial problem. It doesn't seem any worse now than it was a year ago. Which is not surprising, because the factor driving the rate of new submissions, the number of users, is also the one driving the rate at which things on the New page get upvoted.
The reality of the situation is that online advertising doesn't make enough money to support real journalism. It just doesn't. I wish that it did. I'd prefer to continue reading NYT for free of course. But my wishing it doesn't make it so.

I have no doubt that new papers would find it near impossible to draw paying subscribers online, but they'd find it totally impossible to profitably put out good original content via ad revenue. I'll take nearly impossible over totally impossible any day. People used to think it nearly impossible that the Japanese could succeed in the car market.

I'm assuming this Op-Ed was aimed at the NYT itself, given the news yesterday. They almost certainly need to charge, and their content is of the same caliber as WSJ (and has impressive demographics) so they can get away with it.

It won't work for local papers, of course, they're just doomed. But those are irrelevant anyway. They're merely a bunch of AP/Reuters stories with a little poorly written sports commentary and a police scanner tied in. Nobody under 60 will miss them.
BackType Tracks the Commentsphere; Adds FriendFeed Support
You don't think NYT is a valuable brand or his great reader demographics? I certainly wouldn't argue charging is right for every newspaper. At the risk of getting some Michael Dell-style egg on my face later, I'd say that most of them ought to just shut down now and give what little they can get via liquidation back to the investors.
Good one. Ebay is just such a force to be reckoned with, but they've completely lost their soul. They've pissed their sellers off like none other. You would have to have something so different and innovative to start stealing their thunder. Maybe you start in a different niche ie- Etsy. I really like what Etsy is doing.
As market conditions changed so fast in those days and weeks, folks in the industry probably needed to cash out of previous investments, in order to invest their money in less risky markets.

Most likely, the very systems and theories that built the house of cards also decided to gather up their deck before someone else toppled it first.

Note: I'm no economist, nor expert, but neither are you (or anyone, anymore).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Object_System

"Sweeping generalizations are always bad" :)
> Python is a pure OO language; everything is an object.

It is now, but it wasn't always. For example, you didn't used to be able to create a subclass of dict or int. And you can certainly code in Python just using built in data types and functions, not making use of any OO features.
You're talking about the other assignments at the bottom? That's $16 total... He didn't pay more than $3/hr for any of them.
Most people would interpret what you said that way, though you could claim it was grammatically a question.

Now would you two please stop?
Of note, Sun ironically performed a benchmark between PostgreSQL and Oracle. The results were that PostgreSQL performed very closely to Oracle under several scenarios.

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/postgresql-publish...

It's not a direct comparison between MySQL, but Oracle is highly regarded from a performance standpoint.
Isn't this rather like saying than since a five pound sledge hammer can't fix watches, tools suck?

I find it best to use the tool that is appropriate for the task. This is true even though you might be able to force fit a particular tool to a mismatched task. Saying that there is only one true way is always wrong. Especially since any of the ways we have are at best only good enough for some tasks, mediocre for many, and really horrible for others.

The title should be translated to "Why One True Ways Suck" or on a really bad day "Everything Sucks".
Thank goodness we have computers to track this stuff.

I wonder how long it took to see the sell-offs before the subsequent collapse in the 30s?

EDIT: I didn't mean to imply that we're near a depression. I was think about how technology helped us. Thanks makaimc.
Classifieds.

CraigsList is not the be-all end-all of buying/selling things locally online. It may be a tough nut to crack, but it won't be hard to radically improve upon their horrible user experience. I would love to see some competition in this space.
If you read the comments, someone said that it was mid-level people, like money market managers who were pulling the initial money out. I can't speak for the entire 5.5 trillion.
Yeah, it is lock-in. Live Nation owns The Fillmore (and 130 odd other live music sites). So they aren't going to be interested in any web solution you could come up with. They don't care about any new customer friendly features because there's no where else for customers to go. If you want to see your favorite artist, it's not like you can buy tickets to the other show at the venue across the street the next night.
If you are interested in monitoring just a few key appliances in your house, there is a nice DIY project for a wireless home power monitoring system:

http://www.ladyada.net/make/wattcher/index.html
ASK HN: Start-up internships
I am planning my summer vacations and I'd very much like to do an internship at a start-up (or small company).
Do you know any good ways of finding start-ups that are willing to take interns or is it futile?
Twitter starts to talk up the charging companies plan
You are using a randomized algorithm to approximate the smallest element in a collection of (object, count) pairs. Instead, use a min-heap to find the smallest element. You do need a hash table as well to keep track of items' locations in the heap. You don't have to do any pop operations - since you only need to remove something from the list when you have a new item with count = 1, you can just replace the item at the root of the heap.

This is probably also not the simplest way to get a reasonable approximation. Certainly those Hayes algorithms are better. You could also try something like, read in 2N elements, sort them, and drop the least-frequent N of them. Then read in N more and repeat. Pretty hacky though. You could also try bloom filters.
Look at a lot of big traditional B2B businesses. They haven't gotten much coverage because they aren't sexy and visible to the normal consumer.

- ERP ssystems are impossible to understand for the people that work with them, and require an army of highly paid consultants just to get it up and running.

- financial software for large companies doesn't allow managers to see numbers in real-time, is difficult to get numbers in and out of, and hard to use.

- HR software for managing people, their interests, knowledge, track record, etc. in large companies.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more.

The advantage of B2B software is that you have a very good income model. A SAP ERP system for a company with 1000 employees runs into the millions. There are customers out there willing to pay you by the bucketload if you can make something that doesn't suck. And most of what is on the market today sucks badly.

This is an industry that has been resting on its laurels for many years, and is ready to be picked off by nimble competitors.
I think there is a big difference between the two.

The FSF uses copyright assignment to ensure that open source code is not legally encumbered.

MySQL uses the copyright assignment so they can sell code contributed by open source developers in their commercial platform without compensating the authors.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a bit of high-quality churn on the front page.
Close enough for the millions that would die in the resulting unrest.
Title Insurance. See this article from Forbes magazine: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1113/148.html

Summary:
Fancy this: racetracks that keep 93% of your money and return only 5% in winning tickets. They wouldn't last long, not unless they could somehow rig the rules to both forbid price competition and make the purchase of race bets mandatory. That's more or less what the title insurance industry has done to American homeowners.
If you want to guarantee it returns, then after N failed operations, just convert the hash table to a list and pick something at random. That will take O(N) time, but since you've already spent O(N) time it amortizes out to no additional cost.
I'm really not sure why we should always focus on the monetary value of taking on a hobby. Por ejemplo, I have spent thousands over the past two years on Salsa classes/lessons/DVDs/cover charges/one-beer-for-courage-drinks. Is it worth it? Perhaps. I'll never be the best - but being above average is sometimes achievable. A few pretty good dancers ask me to dance now.

Just being able to bang my head on Objective-C after a day with Flex or something worse (requirements meetings) is worth it. It is something different. Yes, there is the undeniable Gold Rush mentality, and my expectations for selling an app will be realistic (e.g. sell it to someone you don't know/are related to). It's about entertaining yourself intellectually.
VC Return Numbers are Bogus
I just read about this over the weekend in John Kenneth Galbraith's book The Great Crash. The ticker tape machines were about 3 hours behind in most parts of the country and that caused a massive sell-off as people tried to get out of the market even though they did not know the current value of their stocks.
I didn't expect this to turn into a flamewar and I'd never attempt to engage into one. But, attacking authors of articles without good points, is what made me write the comment the first place. That's why I asked why others are agreeing? If I am missing something.
Indeed... this is worse than shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. In fact, it's like shouting "Deadly stampede!" - if that makes any sense...
TC vs NYT vs Economist
is this really one continuum with two extremes, with NYT in the "middle ground"?

It could be middle ground in terms of penmanship, but neither TC nor Economist can be a daily news source. Daily, with general relevance. Different function IMHO.
I'm not saying I'm convinced either way. I have an idea of what it takes to pull together a location based service with a business model similar to the yellow pages (in my case, I'm referring to a local service in my city which is not as big as the Yellow Pages, but is still a 30+ people operation).

If he has valid arguments about why his model doesn't work, I can combine that info with what I already know about the amount of effort, time and money needed to reach the critical mass needed for the yellow-pages-like model.

Then I can come to my own conclusions.
A better question is: Where would it have come from? Most of the assets backing money market funds are short-term obligations to repay from a broadly diversified range of borrowers, usually corporate or municipal, with a small amount of cash to facilitate transactions. The terms of those loans to companies and local governments don't allow the bank to just demand the money ahead of schedule. The assumption is that when one particular fund experiences a high volume of withdrawals, it will be able to sell its commercial-paper assets to other banks, or as a last resort, borrow from the Fed to cover the withdrawals. The extraordinary event here was that there was such a massive panic across the entire country, not even the Fed would have been able to keep up.

Incidentally, what touched off this panic was when two money market funds "broke the buck" on the same day; that is, instead of paying their investors an interest dividend, they announced that their investors' deposits had shrunk (by a small amount) from the day before. Depositors thought the financial crisis was about to consume money market accounts, panicked, and moved their cash from non-FDIC-insured MM accounts into regular checking accounts.
There wasn't anything good on the radio in the 90s unless you were a fan of acts like Hootie and the Blowfish.
So far the only auction site I have seen that has gone anywhere is tfields.com which started as a transformers toys auction site and grew from there. It is a real catch-22, you need lots of buyers and sellers suddenly.
I'll only point out that this happened last September. It's the first I've heard about the details. It's not shouting "fire", it's waiting four months to explain why there's a burnt-out hole in the ground where the theater used to be.
that is the biggest issue. they are the giant in the industry. their name is a word for selling something online, just like 'to google' is 'to search'. taking down that giant would be serious business. but its a giant that can be taken down, and would be seriously worthwhile to do so.
my initial thoughts on how to make that happen would be to round up some medium-sized ebay sellers, ask them what their needs are, build the site to meet them, and offer them free auctions for a period of time to switch and help promote.
I'm not sure I see what this has to do with the topic of the article.
iTunes much?
On JDate and the ABC’s of selling yourself or any product online
lacker, there are infinite solutions to every problem, but if you want really to find a competitor to my algorithm that performs better you NEED to talk about algorithms not using more than O(1) for every new element processed.

To sort the set from time to time is not valid under this assumptions for example. This is going to be M log M.

Registers is O(M).

p.s. M here is the number of top-elements tracked.