skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking about using something along the lines of 1Password (on mac, at least) and having an autogenerated random password for everything. Not much effort beyond the initial setup and changing the passwords.
If you're on OS X I would recommend Google Notifier for getting desktop alerts.

http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/notifier_mac.html

I have to admit that I want the drag and drop functionality for assigning labels. I wonder if that is just a Greasemonkey script away.
Actually I would say, "The Best Spam Filter Ever" - Gmail
The Biohacking Hobbyist
So, uh, what's up with the 1x1 iframe?
Verifying backups is almost always many times more difficult than setting up the backups themselves. Checking that replication was in fact working turned out to be fairly easy to automate (although, short of checksumming all the records in all the tables you can't really be 100% sure everything is okay).

That's the thing with backups, they can fail or become corrupt in many ways. If you don't use them for something on a regular basis or have some regular verification process you may not know what you have until it's too late.

And, of course, I've also seen situations where subtle data corruption in the master database leads to weeks of subtly corrupt backups. By the time the corruption was discovered we faced the choice of rolling back several weeks to the last good backup or fixing the corruption. In the end we had to do a kind of merge -- it was a real pain.
To many people (not really versed in internet culture) that would be pronounced [pawn/porn]tube, with the connotations such a name brings.

"Mom can I go on pwntube to get a video for my homework?"
"WHAT?!?! PORNTUBE!?!? NO!!!"

;)
I can't speak for nir, but I certainly believe both of those things.
"In fact, I don't check this option. So some bugs may hide on this option. And backtrace (what you see on exception) is changed. It's convention issue." -- http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/164263
Ask and ye shall receive.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322.pdf

I'm not sure if this is a generally available link; I am using it from a Stanford IP which may have purchased access. The paper is Dale and Krueger, "Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables."
Seriously, where is the startup competition?
A better measurement would be a count of unique pieces of media. With a high enough quality for ripping DVDs you could easily fill 2.5TB.
http://www.pogo.com
As far as I'm aware Gmail is far behind even the other webmail providers.
If I just have one MySQL machine and take daily database dumps, what would be good way of testing that my backups are OK?
do apple users count?
Why is everyone giving the credit to Gmail? It's Gmail + Gears.

Anyway, compared to desktop email clients, Gmail still lacks a lot of features. Although the spam filtering and search does put it in a class by itself.

Something tells me that person-to-person asynchronous messaging hasn't been solved forever. Call it a hunch.
A backup is only a backup when you have restored from it successfully. Until then, it's no better than garbage.

A disk raid is only a raid when you have tried pulling a disk and having the raid successfully rebuild (while running in production!).

I once had a system administrator who didn't dare pull a raid disk while in production. After that, has wasn't a sysadm in my eyes, he was a lottery gambler.

Being paranoid doesn't mean nobody is following you.
Hey inerte

Thanks for all your suggestions. I'm not too knowledgeable in all-things-SEO, but this all sounds reasonable. (The anal-retentive programmer in me doesn't like the vagueness in the method name.. what if there's a language called trim? :) but something along those lines makes sense. I remember reading that /php-trim-python was recommended for urls (vs php_trim_python or something). Is there a consensus on whether dir/ecto/ries are better or worse than hyphens?

The only thing I'm not sure about, is that I want to make sure the main user experience of looking up one function is as fast as possible. I thought it would be a bit faster to not have the search redirect to another page. On the other hand, google.com is obviously "fast", so maybe it doesn't matter too much.

I don't personally think it's a money maker, my general feeling is that programmers are too "tech-savvy" to click on many ads. But who knows, I guess. Either way, I'm just doing it because it's fun, and somewhat useful for me. I love my "real" job anyway, so, not really looking to quit. :)

Thanks again for all the feedback,
scott
Yammer took very little funding relative to Twitter, especially if you ignore the fact that the engineers and product designers on it were stealing time from their core work on Geni. The comparison unfortunately falls flat once you go to the graphs, though, since Twitter's numbers are incredible.
Perhaps... but who cares? I doubt the people that made this site really care about the hypothetical kid in your example.
Are we really sure about this? Look at what Kiva does with microlending. Granted, the path to profitability is a lot clearer when you are buying a sewing machine or something.

I think the difference is that VCs specialize in businesses that require large amounts of capital, connections, etc., to work. Supposedly this is their forte.
very hot down here..

Just had 3 days in a row over 43 (109) and todays pretty warm as well. (my house still hasn't cooled down for sure)
In the end you've got to do what you did as a kid when learning the alphabet: sit down, focus completely and repeatedly practice speaking and reading the characters.
It helps to take a nap after each learning session.

Once you can recognize and speak characters you move on to words and develop a basic vocabulary. From there go to sentences.

And I've heard that ADD and ADHD drugs work well.
The difference between Hacker News and Everyblock is that Everyblock needs to pay six salaries. (I know they have a parent company with cash now, but does reddit even cover its own hosting and salaries? I honestly don't know.)

There's survive and then there's survive, right?
If YC crashes and nulls my karma, there's gonna be a lawsuit!
Question: Where to Buy Music?
For discovering music I use pandora, imeem, amiestreet, songza. I want an easy way to buy high quality music. All these discovery sources are good, but it's hard to buy high quality mp3s.

Where do you guys buy your music?
Sometimes You Have to Take a Break
Before I learned the alphabet the risk of wasting time on Reddit instead of studying was significantly lower :-)
WOw thats incredible
"For once"?!
Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn

His talk at Google:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc
If a child prodigy becomes famous in later life, it's probably not because they were a child prodigy but for some other reason.

One example I can think of would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram but I'm fairly certain there are many others.
"I'm planning to do CompSci for three years and then train in medicine for four."

This somewhat surprises me. If you ignore the crazy number of A levels his grade in Chemistry puts him on shaky ground for Medicine.

http://www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/medici...

"For applicants taking three or more science/mathematics subjects at A level the agreed minimum offer* is three A grades in three science/mathematics A levels."

"All Colleges strongly prefer applicants to have Chemistry A level."
Celebrities will bring Twitter to the mainstream
I have some experience in the printing industry and this doesn't come as much of a surprise to me. Printing is a hugely difficult business to turn a profit with. The harsh reality is that the cost of doing business is so high that profits are usually depressing by comparison.
++ for betterexplained ... great website!!
You can control a whole lot of life with 500M. 50M for that matter. I'm not saying you're wrong, but having that kind of money in the bank opens up a lot of possibilities. You don't suddenly have to become materialistic just because you could.

I'm honestly not trying to be rude by saying this, but it's hard to believe that your ultimate goal in life is to sell tickets to people. If it is, more power to you, seriously, but isn't there something else you want? Something that TicketStumbler is a means to achieve later?
saying that flash is not a de facto standard is surely missing the big picture on this. Sorry but what would you call the standard for showing video if not flash? What would you call the standard for doing animation or another other sort of rich manipulation.

Just because it's not open does not mean that it's not a standard.
I've never understood why it's so popular in those countries.

That's probably because you don't understand the cultures of those countries. Just because something is attractive to an American does NOT mean it's going to be attractive to everyone else in the world. When a specific social networking site becomes popular somewhere, it may just be that it provides a user experience that the folks in that place truly value.
Facebook Founders Settle Their Feud
I think it would be great to work with founders who are also hackers and love what they do. But if I were an investor I'd be rather concerned with the notion of passing a $500M offer for an investment of $15k and a couple of years.
CS at CMU can be a crushing experience for even extremely bright students. I knew one. He chose to go into CS, but didn't realize that a large percentage of the other CS students were already hardened developers far more prepared than he was. He crashed and burned and almost lost his scholarship before moving to another degree plan. Today he's a programmer but his self-esteem is gone and he feels like he's faking it even though his work is good.

I chalk it up to the CMU CS experience. They should screen their CS students more carefully. It is extremely difficult for students (who tend to be idealistic and optimistic) to anticipate how difficult the workload will be. It should be the university's responsibility to restrict class size or offer alternative preparatory classes for less-prepared students. "Survival of the fittest" may be great for the university but it's a tremendous waste of time and effort for many students.
Friends, Until I Delete You
First Look: MSI's Second Wind Blows Away Its Predecessor
I knew all that killing and blowing things up wasn't for nothing!
I know three. Two started maths at uni at a young age and got bored. One is now a party animal/heavy drinker and another pushes trolleys at the supermarket. The other is a doctor because his parents pushed him into it.
I remember these days from high school with my Apple //c. I took a copy of almost everything I came across. I bought unmarked floppy disks in bulk and made a new write protect notch with a hole punch to make my disks doubled sided.

Several years ago I bartered some computer parts to a like minded individual who could 'rip' my Apple disks to IMG files so I could run them in an emulator. He ended up giving me a copy of his whole collection in addition to whatever disks of mine that he didn't have. The whole thing is less than 180MB.
This is so cool! I have been looking for something like that for a while.
Thanks for the tip!
Yeah, I might have been a little excited when posting this, and a bit frustrated at the type of material we've been seeing here recently.

To your question, 3 things:

1. Even if you completely disagree with the message, Kunstler's delivery alone is worth the 20 minutes.

2. His urban planning arguments go a bit further than "Main Street shops are important". In my view the suburbs are simply a bad design choice - he explains how they came to be, what are their inherent problems, and why this touches many issues of our society & life quality, well beyond energy consumption.

3. As for the world running out of cheap oil - I'm no expert, but as I understand oil is found in nature rather than produced, so by definition its total amount decreases when use it. Even if we have enough oil to last thousands of years at affordable prices, the political and environmental implications of using it still stand.
You are correct. One example that makes it obvious:

Take 100 calories of lettuce (which is quite a lot).

Now take 100 calories of oil (which is not much at all).

Combine the two into a salad, which contains 200 calories and 50% of calories from fat.
Poop is Good Fuel
Microsoft will die in the same way IBM 'died' 20 years ago.
Suburbs are a bad design compromise, like an weird all-in-one tool that tries to do 10 things and ends up doing nothing well. The dream was to combine the convenience, excitement and diversity of cities with a relaxed, nature-centric country living. The result unfortunately combined the worst of both - mind-numbing conformity and boredom, isolated unwalkable neighbourhoods and hardly a drop of much nature anywhere.

I present Markham, a very typical suburb (exurbs are even worse) of Toronto: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Mar...

As with other things, I'd take the UNIX philosophy here - small, powerful, well-designed tools that can be combined. I'd take a small apartment in the downtown and a small cottage in the middle of nowhere rather than one of the houses above.
I think Rails itself works, the problem is the servers. Mongrel doesn't work on 1.9, and the others have problems too. Also the DB libraries.

Plenty of other gems don't work either, basic ones like JSON (works only in pure Ruby mode). Hopefully the stable 1.9 release spurs maintainers on a bit, but I imagine it'll take a while.
ESR has a long history of wishful thinking regarding the demise of Microsoft. Ten years ago he was saying:

"""Windows 2000 will be either canceled or dead on arrival. Either way it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft's history.""" -- http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-revenge.html

> Legacy customers will ensure that Microsoft will retain its profitability long after it loses its stock value

Absolutely. Microsoft's downfall (if it happens) will be from industry-controlling colossus to large and profitable software and services vendor.
Jamais Cascio has termed it 'Aspirational Apocophilia':

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cascio20090103
Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs
Maybe if he didn't spend that much time on all the other 23, he would have aced Chemistry. :) I'm sure he'll do well once he focuses only on medicine.
Yeah, that's exactly the problem. I live in Boston, where the vast majority of drivers are commuters, and nobody even knows what a generator looks like.

My best search algorithm is to locate the nearest freeway exit, then find the nearest gas station.
If you look at the other end, though, those at the top of many fields did have remarkable experiences growing up. Being academically precocious is no marker of predestiny, but for some, it can mean one's ducks are in a line. It can help.

I wrote an essay on this: http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-...
Does anyone else see their sites reflected wildly incorrect by compete.com?

I have two sites that get 5-8 times the traffic shown by compete's graphs. Because of this, I just never take compete.com's stats as reliable at all.
mod_lua will be in the next stable apache release. http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-12/msg00119.html
Startup2Startup Unites Startup Rookies With Veterans; Five Invites For TechCrunch Readers
Cities seem more natural in that they are allowed to grow as an autonomous system, rather than being designed. Not all cities, of course, but most of the good ones. There have been attempts to design a whole city and they mostly failed.

It seems to me that life in the city, in many ways, are much closer to the lifestyle of small, tight communities than suburban life: short distance between various functions, constant contact with other people of various ages etc.

This might sound superficial but I don't think I need much evidence that certain environments feel better than others. I think its obvious to anyone who spends time in different places that some feel better than others. Subjective issues like taste and quality of experience may not be quantifiable, but are still real and relevant to what many here try to do: build well designed user-facing software.
I actually find Yahoo better.

Not sure why - perhaps they process a greater volume of mail so they have more data to crunch.
Fidel Castro's Blog
The Physics of "The Hit"
I went to both sites for the first time just now. I was instantly drawn into ticketstumbler with the events happening this weekend in my neighborhood front and center. My first reaction was to subscribe to the RSS feed (but I haven't found it yet, please add it!).
Whichever has the better, broader Linux support gets my business.

Last I looked, Dropbox required I use Nautilus, whereas I prefer Konqueror (I'm running Kubuntu).
Well, if you're going to argue the case of proximity... then you should consider the relative strengths and weakness of those geographic areas too.

pg has an active role in the local universities (which are world class btw), and is more philanthropical in his approach with nurturing talent and intelligence. lots of people admire him because of he's genuine. and imo, a lot of these other incubators popping up have alternative intentions. i'm not saying that it's wrong for there to be capital motives, but I think pg's approach is what separates him from a lot of the others.

my suggestion is if you're considering any of these programs, then study their boards, compare the application process, and pick the one that fits you best.
I didn't realize this before but the reason why we can use Open Table to lookup availability in real-time and make reservations at a participating restaurant is because Open Table is the restaurant's back-end management system.

"We like to remember the clients' birthdays, their favorite tables, their likes and dislikes. With OpenTable you don't have to keep it in your head, it's all there in front of you."

http://www.opentable.com/info/restaurateurs/software.aspx

http://twitter.com/ctemp
It'd be amazing if we could see an income statement with a full breakdown of costs of goods sold, operating expenses, etc. -- itemized and all!
Welcome to the Universe of Fancy Colored Paper
Who wants to hear that old fool blathering...thank god I don't live in Cuba. Fidel blathering away 24/7 b/c he has so much wisdom for you to learn. Fucking narcissitic self-indulgent ego-maniacal idiot.
Thanks for the feedback Owkaye - the current website is just a Typepad blog that we threw up for the launch, but we have a designer doing a custom template for us that should be up there soon. We'll focus on making the text more readable.
Indeed. GMail has quite poor usability even when compared to other web clients - massively wide lines of text across the whole screen are really difficult to read. We got over this for regular websites when suck.com popularized snake text in the early 2000s. Why does gmail still use it?
We're just doing 3 companies this year because it's the first year and we want to start simple and make sure each company gets lots of attention. We'd like to see it grow to 10 companies in future years.
You must have misread the comment. He said the two different comparisons were apples and oranges, not YC and TechStars.
Our intentions are not financial (see the philosophy page). All of the mentors in Capital Factory are doing it because we love working with young entrepreneurs. We've all built and sold companies and even getting a 100x return on $5k won't change our lives.

Putting up some money and getting some equity is analogous to playing poker with dollar bills instead of chips. It increases our emotional attachment and shows that every mentor is really committed.
This has been discussed on HN before...

One of the reasons they have little competition is because much of the value they deliver is in the form of the POS (Point-of-Sale) systems they provide restaurants. I don't think those are even mentioned in the article. They also have a decent sales organization on the ground pushing their wares and providing training. They offer some analytics. (Etc. Etc. Etc.) Most blogs and magazines significantly simplify the business model or value proposition of companies like this so that they can tell the story in the space of one article...

I'm not saying that there isn't an opportunity for a competitor...but I think many people dramatically underestimate what it takes to go into markets like this and compete. To be a bit snarky, a cloud-hosted Rails/Django app is not the answer to every question, and not EVERY market can be conquered with just software, ramen, and ambition ;-) It's not simply a matter of someone throwing up a CRUD site to undercut them on price and then watching the checks roll in. Yeah, it looks easy to compete with them after reading one of these articles, but they are doing many things that it would be difficult for a small (and likely underfunded) startup to do. A team of 2-5 just isn't going to have the time or bandwidth to unseat them unless they have another trick up their sleeve. I think there are many better opportunities for YC-style startups out there.
Using an SRS is a good idea. Here is a Wired article about the developer of one such system. http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
It's a Google form that pipes into a spreadsheet. We can't really control the display of the * but its important that they are all marked as required so it won't let you submit the form with a field that's missing.
who cares

Those who want their sites/products to go mainstream without ridicule (ExpertSexChange.com/ExpertsExchange.com is a popular example) or false negative impression/bias. This is why people often spend a lot of time to choose a name carefully, especially when you consider the long-term branding and marketing.
I still greatly prefer Outlook + Exchange. Gmail was not built for power emailers or it would have folders (or at least hierarchical tags). It would have the ability to mark something for follow up, then have it pop up in your to-do list later. It would have ActiveSync and/or Blackberry server so it could support push email to the smartphones that people actually own. It would be able to sync your contacts and calendar from one phone/client to another. (Calendar + ActiveSync + Smartphone = personal assistant.) It would have crazy powerful rules like Outlook. It would have baked in RSS functionality. Need I continue?

I'm a power emailer and that's why I don't use Gmail's web interface. It's meant for casual users. I do use the service though due to free forwarding.
Minnesota Homes for Rent
Or management oversights is symptomatic of Fanny Mae generally.
Yeah sure, but can you wait till Gmail is out of beta? Please?

While GMail works fantastic, I do not see how I would manage my work email without folders or the ability to sort per message/ sender. And how about the tight integration with Calendar or being able to sync with your mobile device. No I don't want to search all the time.

There is lot to improve for email apps. But to say Gmail killed Outlook is only a sensational statement. A cheap trick that is.
nope, rails will still buffer up the whole template render before it sends it down the socket. I think he means progressive rendering directly to a socket rather then buffering it before shipping.
Peter Thiel and Max Levchin ended up on top in the end. But they have since made up with Elon. (If Elon had 'won', Paypal would be on Windows and would be called X.com now.)
An unofficial estimation is that all books that were cited in the Siku_Quanshu in 1773, only 5% were preserved.
Outlook Also allows you to do the same:
- access office & personal email from the web
- use a browser to access email

For first, your exchange server needs to be configured and for second check the Outlook Web Access.
Behind how? I've been using it for a while and have missed nothing; am I missing out on something I don't even know about?