skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You Can Write in 140 Chars. But Can You Code In 140 Chars?
But not a statistically significant number. Fred had a great post on this, "Twenty-Two Years Of Job Creation Wiped Out In One Day"

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/twenty-two-years-of-job-crea...
Well, of course it's free. They're trying to beef up the angel market so that YC companies have more options to turn to.

For YC it naturally makes sense, to the extent that it's possible, to be the hub for early stage investors and entrepreneurs.
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This is great progress!

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It works in the latest WebKit nightly as well:

http://nightly.webkit.org/
Good article. RMS has an honest take on Cuba.
Open source can lead to other freedoms - some good discussion of software freedom.

"DT: I've editorialized that U.S. companies should be allowed to compete in Cuba. What's your position on that?

RMS: I really don't care. From my point of view, business issues are minor in comparison with issues of human rights and general well-being. "
See the movie startup.com for an example. A Harvard MBA hires his friend, who brags that he's been programming since he was 6 IIRC, as his CTO. But this CTO doesn't really appear to know anything, and the company ends up burning through $60 million of other people's money without making a usable product.
Cameron apologises for Wikipedia tampering
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I wonder how they would be able to afford 300 staff for 600 programmers?

Easily, I expect. You can see this sort of thing in any industrial town. For n workers at the factory, there are n*m employed in jobs ranging from suppliers of components to making sandwiches and babysitting. Usually m>1, if they can do it at 0.5 they're being remarkably efficient.
any confirmation this is an official YC event?
Hackers Take Aim at Security Companies | TechJaws
Right and his commercial startup is Vertica http://www.vertica.com
Meybe they were running it in a MacPro...
So, I posted my comment on the site, since I happened across this from "that other" forum.

But I've been playing around with this idea for a while, and I'd love to get some HN feedback on it.
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From the article:

So I said, "Cuba has an important resource - lots of people who have never learned to use Windows. And here you are, destroying that resource, gratuitously. If you are not ready yet to switch these clubs so that they teach people free software, at least you should shut them down until they can."

Does he say this seriously? I've seen people using this kind of hyperbole when in a partisan environment to have a laughs. But I have no clue from the article that this is humorous.
You can do a whois on the domain name. It's registered to a Paul Graham. It was reported on TC. So either it's real, or an elaborate ruse to kidnap a bunch of wealthy people.
Hi I have to ask because this is the third startup I've seen recently like this - what do you do for the startup? What value do you add? I'm not meaning to be impolite but you hire a designer to design, a developer to develop, someone else is funding it... So you bring the idea, management and evangelising?
Hey, Daniel Tenner here (author of the article), and one of the technology guys behind Woobius.

We hit the same problem with folders-within-folders getting too complicated, but we tried a subtly different solution. All of us use tags in things like GMail, but the funny thing is, we end up using them like folders (in fact, I have my tags in gmail mapped as folders in Mail.app).

So what we did on Woobius is we implemented folders, but we restricted them to one level. So far, a handful of people have requested folders-within-folders, but the majority seem happy with the system as it is, and the big advantage of getting rid of that messy folder hierarchy is that it's made the system look a lot simpler and quicker to use.

Would love to know your thoughts on whether that works for you.

I'll add this reply onto disqus as well.
Why I won’t touch the Kindle 2 with a ten foot pole.
I'm pretty sure the order was: Roman god; name of planet; alchemists' name for the element, which has persisted to the present day. See http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O27-mercury.html for some evidence.
Also, I like the earlier designs, especially the first a lot - they are clean and to the point.

Your app went from the concept of 'save a photo of yourself every day' to "Not only that, get your own gorgeous widgets and fleet of social features - free."

The complexity you have added has not only faded your differentiation but now you start to come across as a "me-too Facebook clone". If this was ever going to be part of your app it should have been something you integrated as you actually got a social network using your system - new users don't care about the social features and widgets.

Finally, change your blog so your links are more search engine friendly, not ?p=7 etc.
I heard this on the bbc this morning too, pg.
Heard it a few times around recently, but I fail to really interpret what it's saying.

From my A level Biology I'm aware of some of the more simple methods of DNA sequencing, but I'm assuming this process is something vastly different if not vastly more accurate?

As far as I was aware what little snippets of DNA can be retrieved from a sample are mass reproduced and effectively labelled. These labels are then matched against records and I assume a metric is generated to analyse the coordination of the sample and the stock.

Now my problem is that I also know that a large proportion of DNA is "junk" code, giving no advantageous phenotypes but still somehow being integral to the DNA super-structure - think the folding of the chromosomes (which would be more common across related species than hair colour).

So isn't it possible that "sequencing 60% of Neanderthal DNA" is not really saying anything of meaning beyond the fact that a very close evolutionary relative shows correlations with human DNA in up to 60% of what we have retrieved (which is most likely to be "junk")?.....

.... hmm, getting a little muddled here.... but imagine it's like a torrent for a book - saying you've got 60% of the torrent does not mean that you are six tenths into deciphering the book, even if you can match all of that 60% to words in your dictionary. As the words cannot be guaranteed to be in order. Say it were a Holy Book and this becomes of ultimate import, one needs the complete unabridged word of God before one can infer meaning and knowledge from it's content.
Hah! If you want abuse, you should see some of the frothing at the mouth that happens about LangPop.com, which, as clearly stated on the site, is never going to be more than an approximation. Man does it set people off when their favorite language doesn't do as well as they think:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/01/08/angry-perl-users
Eh, not really.

Treating tags like folders isn't really bad; you might not be using them quite to their fullest extent, but you're also not really limiting yourself when it comes to categorizing data.

...which is where the single-hierarchy folder system wouldn't work, because it does create a limit.

I like to think of it this way: currently, the paradigm (I hate that word) is that you have a folder -- a category -- which owns lots of files. What I want instead is to have a file which owns lots of folders -- or categories.

The one client I mentioned in my Disqus response is doing some energy research, government contract and all that. They really need to keep things well-organized, and they need to be able to organize drawings, specs, notes, graphs, test data, etc. etc. by project, by contributor, by date, by revision, by ... etc. etc.

Another client is a doctor's office, and that's probably all I need to say about that. :-)

So, no. While a one-deep hierarchy solves some problems, it's still clutching on to a silly way of organizing things, without actually providing the flexibility of a really intelligent tagging system.
Being an architect, I'm used to dealing with thousands of documents on a project. The only meaningful way I've discovered to organize those documents is by the flow of work they are being used on, which is what we do. It is especially important when dealing with multiple companies on a single project. Folders and nested folders are a paradigm of the low-productivity windows way - we tried this, it never works well. But document management is really only a small feature of a larger integrated application that guides users through the larger workflow of getting projects done.
The King is dead Long live the king
This flaming of bankers is emotion fueled not logic fueled. IMO, it's not helpful. From the article:

So it’s a typo: no big deal, right? Yeah, but what a typo! It got past Bloomberg and JP Morgan and pretty much all of Wall Street before someone said, Hey, this makes no sense! ... And who was that someone? Me! A nobody

I imagine that the vast majority of bankers who saw this chart realized this error very quickly. I only have 2 data points to support that, but both the bankers that I know spotted this instantly, on Jan 21 when they first saw the chart.
I agree that this is really what a lot of people are probably discussing -- how they feel, whether they are in the zone. The interesting question is whether it really corresponds to getting stuff done. Solving interesting problems in new ways often puts me in that zone, but I'm not clear that such solutions necessarily buys the organization more.
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aka USA Today Chart amongst my former colleagues.

Interestingly, I find this term is often instantly meaningful to those who have never before heard it..
How did you intend to monetize this idea?
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what if it never seemed good at all?
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I imagine it's a few fold...

1. They're not bound by any US minimum wage laws, so any wages will work. I expect most of the staff would be people willing to work for food, anything above that is a bonus.

2. They'll be able to pay their workers less since they're taking care of food & housing & health care.

3. Most offices have a lot of overhead... rent, insurance, janitors, etc.

At the end of the day, I think 300 staff being paid barely livable wages would be a small fraction of the cost. The bigger problem I think would be convincing clients this boat operation was a better deal (and not made up).
Oh, hmm. It would be kinda cool to separate the document management from the workflow ... like, build a document management system with an API, and then create various user interfaces that could interact with it according to different applications.
Man, I almost wish I was.

Yeah, I know it kinda reads like an advert, sorry about that. But I'm still a little shocked when I come across support systems that work as opposed to the common OSS-project style of "File bug in Bugzilla. Wait. Wait. WONTFIX."
I am top 0.1% in India (and anywhere in the world). I missed out on H1b last year because the quota (65k) got filled in a day or so.

and I said - f@#k America...your loss, not mine
He certainly is serious. But as long as his ridiculous totalitarian/communist ideas only apply to software, he's mostly harmless.
Author here: Random number generators have logic behind them. My capitalization prefs there did not.
Get thrown in the slammer for 4 years for eating a poppy seed roll. Ouch.
If they believe that then they aren't really pros, are they?
This seems like an unusual charge to make against a national news organization, so I googled into this last night.

Got a link? All I could find were the 33 memos put out by a VP in charge of all news content and an attack piece being promoted by a political group and a few former employees. I also found Fox's challenge to release all internal memos if other organizations do the same. What I didn't find was mainstream collaboration that reporters were directed to change news content.

I like studying the media in general (used to do some reporting) and while it seems fashionable by some to slam Fox, this is the first I've seen of anything tangible. So I'd love to hear more about it if you've got anything.
Indeed. "Cringely can't chart" would have been a better title.

He visually squared the values by using quantities as the radius of the circles.
Still no SSL, right?
A large number of citizens might be under house arrest, as I think spending against future earnings is part of our culture.
These are the Glengarry leads.
On that note... We actualy have an XML API, though it's not quite public yet... We'll get around to tidying it up and making it public sometime, though...

If you're interested in writing something for it for your clients (with the caveat that it's not even in beta stage... though it appears to work), I can probably send you a ruby example that interacts with it... Let me know via our support link. :-)
Bespin says it lets you self-host, which considerably alleviates "fuck the cloud" concerns. (See http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717 )
I think the hope is you write one test then write the code to make it pass. In theory the code and tests grow at a similar rate. If one treats the two activities as separate then i think it would be very easy to get caught up in the productive feeling that writing tests gives without receiving a good portion of the benefits.
Hacker News?

Spam?
Its interesting to know that Mike Pinkerton is also the project lead on Camino. If working on one large OSX browser wasn't enough he is also involved in Chrome on Mac, that is pretty cool.
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> I wonder how they would be able to afford 300 staff for 600 programmers?

No minimum wage laws, and if the staff can't leave the ship, say hello to slavery.
"One of the things we see when businesses have too much power is that they corrupt those watchdogs, and we see this in the U.S. all the time. The U.S. government has ceased to effectively monitor the market to make sure it works well. Instead, it is a tool in the hands of big business."

I think Stallman's views tend towards the extreme but I have to agree with this one.
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Not too mention that sharding probably is one of those things which might seem clever when your database engine doesn't even have hash joins.

I mean, when your DB can't join large result-sets quickly and efficiently in process, why care about the loss of joinability when you spread your data across several servers?
I agree with Gilb's law, and I measure a number of things on projects I lead. However, there is a difference between measuring things that are indirect and imprecise and measuring productivity.

So I disagree that productivity can be measured, but agree that there are things you can measure and agree that measuring those things is valuable.

In the quoted example, Joel's eigth test measures the environment for interruptions. This is a good thing to measure. However, this is not the same thing as measuring productivity, because then we jump to the conclusion that "Working alone in an office with a door is more productive than pair programming because pairs interrupt each other constantly."

So, my thesis is that you can and should measure lots of things, but if you are not directly measuring productivity it is misleading to pretend that you are.
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Interesting idea, but you're gambling on a huge network effect there. I'd need to get a whole group of my friends using this for it to be worth it, and I can't be bothered to do that. Even if I could, each one of them would need to remember to update it before they went anywhere... what a hassle.

An idea: why not exploit an existing framework that people use for frequent updates? Add a facebook app (150m users), add twitter integration (another 800k users or so), and you're off to the races. I'd be much more easily convinced if instead of having to update your service I could just update my twitter with "eating at joe's diner tonight 6pm, hangoutable".

Also, do you have Google Calendar integration yet? If not, what are you doing? That's where I keep my calendar. I even have it set up to send me reminders and everything.

I like your hangoutable branding - there's not currently a good word for an ad-hoc social event, and you've picked a descriptive one that's also pretty catchy. Sponty is halfway between silly and awkward. Maybe you should consider rebranding?

Lastly, while I commend your Google account integration, I'd make it an "...or log in with your Google account" and get your own logins. Much as it pains me, the world's not ready to have all their services nestled in Google's ever-expanding bosom just yet.

Anyway, best of luck.
Anyone else find it curious (almost) no one argues that "National Socialism didn't fail because the Third Reich wasn't /really/ National Socialism"?

It's interesting to contrast the utter repudiation of National Socialism after its defeat in 1945 compared to the ongoing romance with Communism after its collapse in 1989...

E.g. On a university campus today, it's acceptable to call oneself a socialist, but utterly unacceptable to call oneself a National Socialist (a Nazi). Considering the horrors of both, the difference in their treatment in American academia today is somewhat surprising.
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Sell access to it I would expect, or offer a classic Freemium model with features free and higher level features for cost. Just a guess though.
Can't wait. Wonder how fast it will be in comparison to Safari.
the date on your site is 13th February 2009+1900
Custom functions mean no caching

This only applies if you are using a sub-par database. While caching computationally heavy operations is not always a good choice (since they will need to get updated when more entries are added to the dataset), chances are you will have orders of magnitudes more lookups than writes and hence it makes sense to create a computed column and index the results (and hence cache them).
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really? I'm willing to bet that any file that would be "big" for emacs, would melt eclipse, word or any other text editor, except maybe for vim.
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It seems to me that people's measure of productivity is relative. For a Java programmer, typing in 1001 getters and setters might be quite productive, at least compared to their typical day. For more sophisticated programmers, sure, it sounds like a waste of time, but perhaps that's because they have a higher average productivity.
Very cool. As someone who is about to move into a new city (Montreal) I really like things like this because it makes it easier to get to know people.

I really have nothing to add that hasn't been said (damn!) but I figure a bit more kudos isn't going to hurt.
sigh

I remember lobbying for this change along with many others when we did it in the first place. Then I was completely shocked when Microsoft actually listened. Now I am completely unsurprised and depressed by their latest flip-flop (MSFT has a history of depressing me, which is why it isn't surprising).

The way to move the web forward is obviously to take 2 steps forward and 1.5 steps back, right? Right?!
Overall it is a very exciting beginning. Right now there's nothing in it which would convince me to switch. I have a laptop with my web development tools in it, so I can work wherever I am already.

However as the tool progresses and they add features, the web enables further work and functionality, such as a snippet library or other fun tools, this could be a major tool for developers and open source.
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Another Explanation of MVC
I think that is the future - many smaller apps integrated together as features within a larger comprehensive application. Integration is the key to really getting productive as opposed to having multiple disconnected apps.
I just read about one incident where he was just missed by an artillery shell. That made him believe he was protected by god. Sorry, I do not have the reference handy.

But I have a source that says he was at least wounded at another time: "Adolph Hitler, aged 25, volunteered for the Bavarian army in August 1914, and rose to the rank of corporal. He fought in 47 battles, won the Iron Cross for bravery. Wounded in the leg in 1916, he spent six months in a military hospital then returned to the front. Badly gassed in a British attack in October, 1918, he recuperated in another hospital for three agonizing months." (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/World_War_I)

Also just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#World_War_I
I think that we're talking about different "good"s.

Here are some examples.

I understand that using heroin feels really good. However, the effects of using heroin are (stereotypically) bad over all.

A Somali warlord has it much better than the average Somali. However, a warlord culture is, on the whole, a disaster.

Are there examples of slave cultures that were as productive as same-era free cultures? (Not that productive is the only measure of good, but ....)