skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only difference that twitter provides is that the state of your washing machine is publicly broadcast, for everyone to see. I'm not sure why that's such a value add that encourages the creation and use of these kinds of services more so than the ability for your washing machine to send you an SMS, IM, or email and having it remain private.

I mean, if someone were to create a tool tomorrow that monitors various things and notifies you of when they change (nagios for real-life?) would anyone use it if it didn't have a twitterable component or twitter integration?
Right, but doing that 50 times per day is more challenging than once, for example.
Well, I'm not sure; I'd have to program more in Smalltalk before I could say. But my guess is that it comes from the remarkable regularity of the language as well as, to quote Kay's definition of what he meant by OO, its "extreme late binding of all things" (I love that phrase!) These are the most interesting things about Smalltalk as well as the things that it has least in common with all the other languages called OO.
Yeah. Good thing startup founders don't drive much. I haven't gotten gas in a month.

Hmm... new YC tagline? "Avoid death while saving on gas!"
visas / immigration. you're looking at $400-900 an hour for lawyers to point you to the right webpage and tell you whether or not your particular situation fits through a loophole.

corporate setup & startup paperwork of all sorts. also housing rental contracts, contractor... contracts. etc.

patent applications. it's so hard to find good examples and templates. i'd pay to have something that said "type your overview here", "upload a picture here", etc.

college applications. they charge what, $50 per application they look at? save them time, save applicants money. and how many colleges would perfectly suit you that you never heard about?

make school scholarships more transparent and ease the application process.

keeping up with relatives. i feel a little dirty about this one, but i'd love to have a helper manage my familial relationships in a behind-the-scenes fashion. birthday email templates, friendly hellos, status updates, etc. although deciding to pay for a service of that sort would mean acknowledging that you're a terrible grandson/husband/etc.

warranties & mail in rebates. they all turn straight into money and dealing with them is total bs.

i'm going back to work...
Popular Jamie Zawinski article where he writes in terms of meeting users needs:

How will this software get him laid?

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
That's a pretty good site. I was thinking of something similar, to be honest. Seeing a competitor like that makes me pause. Their traffic numbers look good, but still fall behind sites like CareerBuilder, and, of course, Monster. I do note a recent spike in traffic numbers. Thanks, economy!

Hashjobs.com is a pretty cute rails app one guy threw together, I assume to show his Rails chops rather than as a startup. It's not mine, but was interesting enough to mention.

http://jobfeedr.com/ is another interesting one, I think I heard of it here. It's a modified WP blog...
This exemplifies the hysteria that my comment was trying to downplay.
To answer my own question, of course job listing sites want their sites to be discoverable. At least monster.com doesn't even have a robots.txt file.
Both of those posts are being downmodded because this is not the place to have a "democrats versus republicans" debate. Keep that stuff on reddit, thank you.
What if Apple had bought BeOS?

Now that is a major "what if?". For, not only did Apple actually go on to buy NeXT, but in doing so they brought Steve Jobs back into the company. I.e. we might have had Mac-BeOS and no Steve Jobs: what would have happened?
Backwards Compatibility is Technical Debt
MySQL general purpose routine library
<sigh> Thus demonstrating that even long-standing members of this community don't bother to check if something's already posted.

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475891

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475873
Antivir flags this site as having malware, here are the details:

Special detection HTML/Crypted.Gen

Description:
To avoid detection by antivirus software, authors of HTML malware use browser features like Java and VisualBasic Script. These scripts are small and very often quite simple encryption routines hiding the malicious parts of the script. Encrypted malware is detected as HTML/Crypted.Gen.

Version history:
The following engine updates were released in order to enhance detection:

• 7.04.00.44 ( 18/07/2007 )
• 7.04.01.62 ( 17/08/2007 )
• 7.08.00.04 ( 08/04/2008 )
• 7.08.00.25 ( 30/05/2008 )
• 7.08.01.34 ( 18/09/2008 )
• 7.09.00.26 ( 05/11/2008 )
• 7.09.00.41 ( 04/12/2008 )
• 7.09.00.54 ( 09/01/2009 )
• 7.09.00.57 ( 16/01/2009 )
• 7.09.00.70 ( 30/01/2009 )
• 7.09.00.74 ( 04/02/2009 )
• 7.09.00.76 ( 06/02/2009 )
Last time we ran into this one, we made sure as much page state as possible was pushed into the fragment portion of the URL (for bookmarkability as much as anything else).

Then when the AJAX stuff saw a version mismatch, it would wait until the user completed any operation that -wasn't- stored in the fragment and put up an "updating, gimme a sec" box, and refresh itself.

It was a hell of a lot of work but -extremely- slick (which I'm allowed to say because it wasn't me who wrote that part ;)
How the Stimulus Bill Funding Will Actually Be Distributed
It's nice to see Haiku making such good progress -- I feel that the existence of a user-friendly open source OS that's not a UNIX or Windows derivative is a good thing in itself, if only because it may be keeping alive some ideas that don't fit in the legacy-oriented Linux mold.

Maybe Haiku could become a nice netbook OS? Its single-user media focus certainly fits the bill. (Although Internet appliance computers were Be, Inc.'s swan song marketing attempt as well, so maybe they don't want to reopen that wound...)

I do think that Haiku needs some kind of forward-looking showcase project with a bit of gloss. Right now the superficial impression is that they've mostly catched up to a decade-old commercial project. Consider these screenshots of the first and latest release of this system...

BeOS Developer Release 4, from 1994:
http://osnews.com/img/20869/screen2.gif

Haiku, from 2009:
http://osnews.com/img/20951/1.png

(I prefer the 1994 version actually -- those tight pixel fonts and prominent grids of awesome 45°/30° icons must have something to do with it... The old light-grey look actually looks fairly contemporary alongside the Leopard and Windows 7 aesthetic.)
Yup, Chrome put up a warning before showing the site. DO NOT WANT
"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."

I realized this when the New York Times had better analysis pieces about cultural happenings in my city (Pittsburgh), than I've read in the local on-line paper. Their best sports writer just retired, too.
This appears to be the earliest, but now posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475873

Some discussion started on that posting.
ID is more than that. Specifically, ID claims design can be detected empirically. Biologists then apply this claim to biology to combat Darwinism. Creationists go further and use it as evidence that God created the world.

What you are talking about is not strictly ID. It is the combination of ID and creationism.
The thing I'd be really interested in is how you deal with UI changes - I've never found a satisfactory way to test "is this ugly/confusing" other than letting a few users bang on it on a staging server.
Oh, yeah: Gissa job! ;)
its not all stock, so regardless of the amount they still made more profit than facebook
I'm not sure why it would have to take longer to prepare for an online class vs. a regular class. I had been taking online graduate CS courses through DePaul University and those were set up as regular classes with an online component being recorded. All the technology was there to view slide presentations, capture writing on a physical whiteboard, and recording of the lecture which made not only distance learning possible but reviewing the material possible for the regular students. All assignments were submitted online as well. The only time it seemed extra onerous to the professor was one time when the professor forgot to set the equipment to record and he had to redo the lecture for the distance learning students.
Isn't this article just saying, "if the Fed had chosen not to fulfill one of its basic duties to act as a circuit breaker in the event of a banking panic, there would have been a calamitous banking panic?"
Everything :)

No, seriously, I'd be much obliged if you could tell what tools go into your setup, how much of it is created in house - and thus unavailable - and how much of it is off the shelf, preferably open source. I'd very much like to spend time on recreating what you've done there.
Are you saying that you shouldn't yell "Fire!" when there's a fire? Sure, maybe you can probably put it out, but it's generally a good idea to get everyone out of a burning building until it stops burning.

Hmm, now I need to relate this to the economy somehow... uh...
if you believe that Facebook is worth $15 billion.

Facebook is usually valued at $4 billion. http://blogsearch.google.comq=facebook+valuation+%224+billio...
Daring Fireball: Apple, Google, and Palm.
I discovered BeOS about the same time I started getting into UNIX. I remember being impressed by the graphics and performance (the knoppix-like demo cd was ahead of its time). One thing that always perplexed me was that despite having a POSIX/GNU/whatever interface, they stripped out the multiuser abilities. This seemed like a tragic oversight, particularly as the need for multiple users and security tiering (administrator rights) was taking off.

It's not obvious to me what the Haiku team is doing about security in this regard, but if the same intellectual effort and creativity used to create the BeBox and BeOS was used to address spyware/malware/other desktop security concerns, it could be awesome indeed.
Embrace Failure
You asked for algorithms that use constant memory. So M is a constant and M log M is constant too.
> financial companies wouldn't have been able to roll over their short term debt, which they rely on for day-to-day operations

The fact that they rely on debt for day-to-day operations should be a red flag that they are doing something wrong.
Spectacular consulting d-baggery in alleged leaked Pepsi rebrand proposal
"Have you ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? MORONS!"
Is Food the New Sex?
Television + Highly accurate profiles of the person watching the TV at any moment.
First, what makes you think that "they probably would have failed"?

Second, he stole not just "an idea", he stole the code, he participated in their in-house discussions and effectively was spying over his future competitors, and most importantly he stole a lot of time - ConnectU founders were lured into believing that their product was moving along for a while.

Nobody pays $65M in a settlement for "stealing an idea". The fact that Facebook settled for such amount only means that ConnectU lawyers were able to prove some of these nasty things above.

Personally I'm very disgusted by this accident, I regret that jail time wasn't even a question. Something very similar happened to one of the startups I was involved in, but in that case it was an opposite spin: an "idea guy" who contributed nothing but the idea, used cofounding developers to build a prototype and then diluted them to almost zero even prior to A-round.

This undermines the entrepreneurial spirit. And the fact that you can get away with it (like Zuk did) in such visible manner is even worse, it's like O.J case for software.
Design for Behavior: Part 1 — Dave Troy: Fueled By Randomness
Ouch. There is a huge degree of truth in that. Situations differ however and I know of at least a few local book exchanges that are making a living (i.e. in operation 2+ years).

I do however not know of one central/large one. There are several reasons why in some cases it succeeds and in others not. In poorer regions/countries people would look for more ways to save money (the pressure isn't really on an Ivy League guy to buy a $50 book instead of a $100 one when his tuition is $40,000. In countries where students live on less than $3000 a year it is).

A solid business idea I have seen is a chinese copy center - you hand in a book and the next day get your book and copy for about $20 (this business is in operation more than 7 years without any uhm... legal problems).
Sustainability and opportunities for the IT sector
Sure, I made two simultaneous changes in the last year and a half, with each one helping to make the other happen: went from a jack-of-all-trades front end dev to a usability-focused designer, and from never having been at a startup to focusing almost exclusively on them (and working with earlier and earlier stage startups as I went on).

It was definitely a rocky road but helped keep things fresh and I like where I am a lot more now.
Why don't erlang people understand that erlang processes are objects?

- You can send them messages

- Their state can be mutated through receipt of messages

- They have private state

- Their functions are associated with the data that they operate on
Instead of Steve Jobs, Apple would have acquired Jean-Louis Gassée... But he probably wouldn't have been in a position to take over the CEO job, not to mention being able to replace many of the important executives with those from the acquired company.

More fundamentally: Gassée probably wouldn't have been able to reinvent Apple's engineering values and sprawling product lineup the way Jobs did, simply because he had been so heavily involved in the first place in what Apple had become since Jobs's departure.

(AFAIK, Gassée was in charge of the infamous Macintosh Portable project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable ... So it's clear that he doesn't have Jobs's nearly infallible design taste for compact computers and lustworthy gadgets :))
Emerging opportunities - alternative energy from forest waste
Ask PG: voice/video interview
Have you considered using skype (or similar) to interview people remotely for the same reason you ask for videos? I guess talking over skype for many people is much easier than parting with a video of themselves.
You're exactly right, but that's my point. I mean, isn't it always obvious that you need to be adding value? If you're not, how are you in business at all?

And yet, he's saying this as if it's a great admission of defeat, that location is dead as a business because you actually need to do something with location information, not just provide it, and the only things he's thought to do that could possibly make money are sex and security.

But he's wrong. "Who's nearby?" is still very valuable, just not to the guy holding the handset. It's valuable to the businesses who want those people to walk in their door and buy something.

The thing that he talks about being commoditized is your friends locations, the social graphs that we define. But I'm not going to add grocery stores and such to my personal network, so the how are businesses going to know I'm nearby and want to spend money?

Well, what if I implicitly gave the companies around me permission to know I'm nearby by pulling them up in search, mediated by my location? The company that sets this up using realtime local search is going to be able to make a lot of money, because businesses are going to pay to know who's around and what they're looking for, and to be able to pitch to them directly (think, as a consumer, how great it would be to have access to a reverse auction from the six stores within walking distance anytime you wanted to go grocery shopping. Then think, as a business, how great it would be to be able to broadcast any price advantages you had over your competition in real time to the people who wanted to buy what you were selling).
This should be on a site like Stackoverflow. That being said, the same thing happened to me. The problem was the GMail offline plugin for Google Gears. Delete it from /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ and restart Safari.
Blackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use. Blackboard sucks and could be easily replaced by hacking together open source solutions and presenting it in a slick package (like 37 signals) but tailored for college instead of business.
Finance is another area ripe for innovation. There's a crisis going on, as we've all noticed, and one reason behind it is that businesses in the industry who were perceived to be creating tons of value turn out to have just been running intelligent people in circles.

Here are a few thoughts:
- information and analysis. It's still too hard for consumers and too expensive for professionals to get access to reliable and usable information on the state of companies, economies, etc.
- sources of capital for individuals and businesses. New ways will emerge of providing good ideas and reliable individuals with cheap access to the capital they need to build businesses, buy homes, etc. Prosper and kiva hopefully are just the beginning.
- payments and micropayments. Does anyone out there love paypal? Or credit card companies, for that matter? Should it really cost several percent to handle every small and large transaction that takes place in the world? And several percent isn't all that bad compared to transaction costs in some industries, like healthcare. Should it really take 10 minutes and require complete trust in the waitstaff to not steal my information every time I use a credit card at a restaurant?
Slowing Growth: Introducing a progressive fee-based system to join a community
If 1 is true, then marriage should no longer have special status in our laws. So, instead of trying to get the government to recognize gay marriage, the special rights for marriage should be largely done away with, or made dependent on actually having children.

For 2 I am wrong and uninformed then. If it is only a state by state issue and it is supported by the majority of a state, then I don't see a problem.
I think it's mostly as a way to smooth out their financial numbers, even companies with tons of money in the bank still uses short term debt on daily basis... at least that was how a business owner explained it to me.
Comparison of the House and Senate versions of the stimulus bill
Nowadays I doubt you could turn on MTV and hear any music, let alone good.
Time for a revolution in economic thought
Oh christ on a bike, not another one of these. It's not even well-written - I wish I could downvote this thing just for the giant chunk of writing completely in italics.

Here's my problem with all of these articles with the rails versus django battle-to-find-the-one-right-answer approach rather than rails and django different-arrows-in-the-quiver: they always seem to focus way down at too small a level of detail in their comparisons. I understand that being a programmer means being down in the trenches with the framework every day, so the temptation is to assume the important differences are down at that altitude as well and that's where the focus of any comparison should be. But it's totally wrong - they're just different at that level (not necessarily better or worse) and the important difference is at the higher level of what these tools are good at. And for that, you can look to where they came from to see their overall focus:

Rails -> came from building a web app (Basecamp) -> great for building apps, has to be rejiggered a bit for web sites

Django -> came from building a web site (several newspaper sites in Lawrence, Kansas) -> great for building sites, has to be rejiggered a bit for web apps

The idea for this has been building in my head for a while now and was solidified when I saw the creators of each framework say basically the same thing in a video showdown a few years back:

http://www.djangoproject.com/snakesandrubies/
> "This is a disruptive technology," Anderson says. "It's a game-changer."

It certainly is a slick hack, but "disruptive technology"?

...I do not think that that word means what you think it means...
We don't read applications in sync. Plus arranging scheduled interviews with hundreds of people would be pretty unweildy.
Angry shareholders say Microsoft squanders billions on pointless R&D projects
call me a cynic, but has anyone actually verified that what this guy says is correct..

i worked on a trading floor at a major US bank and i have a degree in economics. its sometimes mind boggling to see the lack of knowledge of some of these senators.

to put it in a tech perspective, remember back to the "series of tubes.."
Oh, they'll be there, they will just be collectors items, and replacement batteries might be a bit harder to come by....
I guess the word I should have used was "arbitrary". It's going to be difficult to get all of my neighbors and myself to agree on all the rules for our society, I'd imagine. I have no reason to expect that they share more than the most basic assumptions about societal rules.

In the case where we move in and open up a munitions dump, either we signed an agreement not to engage in risky behavior, or we didn't. If we did, we're liable. If we didn't, then it still may be that the folks we bought the land from had, and then they're liable, since they didn't make buying the land conditional on signing the no-risky-behavior contract. Otherwise, buying that land turns out to have been a bad call for everyone else. Of course, once the dump explodes, we're liable for the damage, but as you note, we may no longer be able to pay for it.

Even when I advocate mandatory crime/injury insurance, I don't mean mandatory in the sense that I'm willing to throw people in jail for not buying it, but mandatory in the sense that I'm not willing to interact with people who refuse to buy it, or who are such bad risks that they can't afford it.
This is the most arrogant thing I've recently read (though maybe, he is laughing really hard now as many people have bit the bait). Seriously, wow.

What is someone's incentive to publicly post a biz plan+idea in a blog comment over there? Apparently, a tiny amount of money and likely no other help from Mark, wow.
In the interest of keeping Facebook private, I'm sure they would have given out the shares with some sort of stipulation against selling them without Facebook approval. Once too many people have shares, the company would be required to IPO.
i think its saying "we came closer than we ever have to the Fed not being able to fulfill one of its basic duties"
The market segment for paying customers is small, largely due to little value added. Even with their set of "enhanced search/stream" tools, companies will only benefit if users are commenting on their products. That goes to say, if companies are popular, they will hear that they are popular. Little known companies will not hear valuable opinions on their products. Furthermore, analytics will be skewed since the twitter community is a particular set of people.

Also, a large question would be: Who gets to choose between personal and commercial? If I have an personal account where I talk about work, is this a commercial account? The "web evangelists", marketing, and branding "gurus" - do these guys need commercial accounts? Does the size of the company matter? C-Corp or Sole Proprietorship?

While I do want to see Twitter succeed, I feel like they have other, more appropriate alternatives that could be feasible.
Using gas to heat water in instant/tankless fashion most certainly works just fine. There are off-the-shelf units that can deliver over 5 gallons per minute at 75*F temperature rise.