skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flickr only has "long photos" limited to 90 seconds, and Facebook video isn't public.

This is really great for people who want to make video communities around their (existing or new) brand.

Facebook was once "Friendster for college kids", too.
Your experiment of creating 2 teams would be an interesting one. But I think one team should be given 2 weeks and the other team should be given 1 (or less), and they cannot know of the other team or that they're trying to solve the same problem.

If teams are in direct competition with each other, you get that sibling rivalry effect that almost tore Apple apart (Machintosh vs II).
Have you been looking at our bookshelf? Don't give away our trade secrets!
I agree with you that visual tools are probably not finished as a means for non-programmers to automate things. You point about regular expressions and SQL is very good. Some business people have been doing amazing stuff with Excel or even Access and I know people who use visual regex builders to reorganise the tags and titles of their mp3 files.

What's important, though, is that these people don't build UIs. First and foremost they manipulate or analyse data. The data is at the center. The important thing is a simple data model that follows the closure principle (filter tables and you get tables, filter text and you get text). The UI is there to support this simple data model and it has to be similarly reductionist I think. Placing arbitrary UI widgets on forms is not the way to do this.

Yes, more fundamental research please :-) Maybe machine learning could be used to let users correct the system's guesses rather than initiating some action. That would go further in the direction that graphical UIs have begun, which is to let users select from what is offered to them and react instead of making them give commands to the system.

Or maybe some of the thinking that has gone into computer games would be useful, I don't know.
> is the person that spends 10 hours a day sitting at their desk any more dedicated than the person who spends 6

In my observational experience (in the non-startup work realm), with a few exceptions, the people who regularly work overtime hours tend to not work enough during the regular 9-5 hours.
I did as the example when I released Arc. It's very simple though.
Yeah...try living on another continent.(i am from Lebanon)

I just ordered a Sony reader shipped from the US because i can't take it anymore. Needless to say, shipping will cost me a fortune. It's not unusual to pay more than the actual product price just for shipping.
I like this one too:

The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.

Seems hard to prove but I guess that's not the point.
It's a scam -- they're trying to get you to pay lots of money to register those domain names.
'iTunes university' better than the real thing
It's always nice to hear updates from Y Combinator "graduates".
The CSS Holy War
> Personally I don't believe in average anything when it comes to race, it's a totally meaningless metric that will get you absolutely nowhere when you deal with actual people and in some cases will handicap you with preconceived notions.

I agree that you can't use race to judge individual people, but it's ridiculous to not "believe in average anything when it comes to race". Again, individuals must be judged on their own merits. But if only 20% of Hispanic students graduate college, versus 40% of white ones, you can't just automatically assume institutional racism. All human sub-populations are not equal. Check out this new book - http://the10000yearexplosion.com/
You can always teleport stuff through a wormhole when the two ends are 20 years apartm, duh.

We have to explain everything here ;-)
Concealed Weapon Tips Article
Over the course of the past decade, virtually every state in the Union that did not previously have concealed weapon laws on their books have enacted such legislation. Indeed, at this point in time, 48 states have concealed weapon laws in force at this time.
Nice execution. I drew up a site exactly like this about a year and a half ago, but never got around to building it. One less thing I have to build. :)
Kindle 2 going international
Why not look for someone to take over as maintainer? I'm sure an appropriate person in the community would step forward.

This is the traditional method in most open-source communities... particularly where there are canonical distribution sources such as the rubyforge gems.
blogging in general is tired, but some good stuff comes out of it (sometimes). i did like some of what this guy had to say "When you’re ready to quit, you’re closer than you think". i recently pitched some vc whom i thought would totally get it. i was wrong, but this read is encouraging.
I know techcrunch is(are) full of shit and Arrington is on vacation, but their posts aren't even spell-checked anymore? teh, athough, sItes, Wrodpress?
well good news, it seems Kindle is going international:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/25/kindle-2-going-internat...
Author here. Here's the relevant line in the post:

"[..]web browsers are not the only clients that will use Urbantastic. Mobile devices, search engine spiders, screen readers for people with disabilities, and RSS readers all need the same data but in different forms. Accommodating any of these is simply a matter of dropping a different rendering front-end in front of the common JSON data server."

It's not up yet, but I'm working on a front end intended for non-javascript users. It will also serve blackberry users, IE6 users, and spiders.

It will be a /much/ simpler site, but you'll be able to get everything done on it. I figured it's easier to separate it out than try to shoehorn every use into one format.

The general principle is that I'm going to design for the large majority of the users - and use Javascript capability I can to make it an excellent experience. Then create a simplifed mirror for the minority uses. Gmail took this route and I think it's worked well for them.
I'm a citizen, so grain of salt.

AFAIK, You need to be careful about changing jobs though, if you are out of work for some amount of time (a month?) your visa expires on you.
The Left doesn't believe in evolution any more than the Right. There is no magical equality fairy even if it would be a nicer world if so. Still, that is never any excuse to mistreat someone due to their race -- which is what racism really is.

All my statements above are about population averages. Some ignorant people (I certainly don't mean you) don't understand that population averages apply to populations, and not to individuals. For example, women are shorter than men, on average, but there are millions of women that are taller than me. Native Americans tend to have a lot of trouble with alcohol (for very simple genetic reasons). On the other hand, many don't. Africans have invested a lot of evolutionary effort into malaria resistence. Sometimes they get it anyway. Europeans have invested in lactose tolerance. My dad can't drink milk. Unsuprisingly brain genes (check out Lahn's papers on ASPM and microcephalin in Mol. Gen.) differ between population groups as well. That doesn't say much about any given individual. It does say a lot about groups.
I don't believe that's effective, especially for projects like Net::SSH and Capistrano where the hacker-to-user ratio is so low. If someone wants to step forward and maintain Capistrano, they'll do so, and the community will organize around them because they'll show they have the passion to do it. If no one steps forward, then an appointment would have failed anyway, because obviously no one has the necessary passion to maintain it, and it might be better for it to die and make way for other alternatives. Either way, appointing a successor would be futile.

Even if no one steps forward, would that be so bad? Capistrano works perfectly well for the vast majority of folks. It's not like I'm leaving behind a legacy of mostly-broken software. :)
When acts_as_solr was abandoned by its old maintainer, there was a lot of confusion about what to do with the code. Unfortunately, no one was named as the maintainer of the project, and no one could push to the official repository. It didn't help that the code was moved to GitHub with git newbie problems, like directories not being in the repo, that stopped it from working out of the box.

Eventually, things sorted themselves out (here's the maintainers' fork: http://github.com/mattmatt/acts_as_solr/tree/master) but there are still frequent questions on the mailing list asking why the plugin doesn't work. It would have been better to name a maintainer who could manage things.

I hope Capistrano can avoid these problems.
A similar criticism could be made of Thunderhead. If you want to run in the browser but not participate in the Web, you might as well use Flex.
This type of experiment was done by the Peopleware authors. They are the source of many of the productivity numbers you see quoted for software developers.
If you mean video embeds then yes, each video has a code and can be embedded just like YouTube.
How do you write such code in x86 assembler? All the instructions I'm familiar with have side effects except for nop, hlt, and, arguably, push and call.
The book is not exclusively about the making and selling of Hotmail. It's a collection of short vignettes about Silicon valley in the 90s.
Making Startups Pay for Awards
I did a quick blog post about the Technology Association of Georgia asking companies that they selected for their Top 40 to pay after being selected (http://www.sanjayparekh.com/georgia-startup-award/). I kind of have an issue with this and there has been a furious discussion in the Twitter stream about this (I'm @sanjay, you can find my tweet replies there to some of the comments).

I'd like some feedback about this and would love to hear how prevalent this is in other cities/regions. Do startups get charged money to pay for the event when they win stuff or is this unheard of?
Mobile Ad Spend on the Way . . . Up?
Would you mind emailing me? I'm working on a project in Flex and always like to learn more about how others use it.

(That goes for any other Flex developers here as well. Seems that the intersection between HN readers and Flex developers is pretty small!)
"I need some way to know how hard the engineers are working."

Why? And what does "hard" even mean? (working more hours?) The goal is good results, not hard workers.

"...clear correlation between hours worked and results produced."

Working zero hours will produce zero results, so there is obviously a correlation, but this correlation cannot be linear, and may not even be positive in all cases. I would expect working 100 hours in a week would would make for worse results than 40 hours.

Hours are not a measure of output, or efficiency, or results; they are a measure of time.
i'm happy most of the time: i mostly leave technology at work and only use it as a tool for interacting with people when i'm home. technology is not the end, it's a means.
flickr is a photo sharing site, that also supports video. Facebook is a social network that supports video. Both are inherently made up of many-to-many personal relations without much direct focus. Neither of those, though, allows you to create a video site dedicated solely to a community of you-to-many. So, first, the ability to upload a video and share it with your friends is not equivalent to running your own video site. The two have different value propositions to you, the user.

Secondly, there is a business/blog play that you overlooked. There is a reason TechCrunch didn't build Elevator pitches as a Facebook Group, or on flickr, and it's the same reason we (I'm one of the founders of JamLegend) didn't waste our time using a social network as a video site. The point of the mockup video sites (for Techcrunch Elevator Pitches, VentureBeat, and Mashable), is to show that the video services of all of those businesses could have been built on Fliggo, quickly and easily, and at what I presume to be a reduced cost. The hack solution is wordpress + YouTube, but that's not very elegant, lacks a certain amount of professionalism, and can be difficult to monetize effectively. So, to have a more professional solution before Fliggo, you had to develop your video site in-house, outsource/contract/etc, or use something like Brightcove. Now that there is Fliggo, the process became as easy as point-and-click, while still allowing a full array of customization (as we took full advantage of).
Facebook Connect sees sharp growth less than three months after launching
Not that I know of. Unfortunately, it's not something that's easily just listened to either since there are some example programs presented.
There are some things linked from http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Practical_web_programming... but I don't know if they're Modern. Maybe they're Postmodern or Futurist or something.
Four node mysql5 master master replication
Answer?
So far, all the HTML that a given page will need is part of the same document. The templates for the dynamic content are all stored inside a hidden div.

I expect that eventually this will cause too much of an up-front load time, so I'm planning on having the JS load bundles of it on demand. Reducing total HTTP requests is a big usability win, in my experience.

To answer your URL question, I use attributes, like this:

http://urbantastic.com/org.html?id=org-8srmt85mtf8t

Which the server ignores, but the Javascript parses and uses to figure out where it is.
Amazon Kindle 2 Review
that's still begging the question.

What is? This is the salient point:

running it through the reading software at my home certainly is not illegal.
that's just scary.

I had to go and try it just because I could not believe it, now can anybody explain to me why there is a difference here ?
So says Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Mail

but you're right, it can't be that much.
Can't make the above links so here, to make this easy:

http://www.sanjayparekh.com/georgia-startup-award/

Sanjay
You link says that no comparisons can be made because each country defines the number of hours worked differently.
Ask HN: Why haven't the industries embraced open platforms
I work in the health care field as a programmer and i am sick and tired of proprietary software that doesn't work correctly and providers that don't answer their phone.

So my question is, why do you think the industries, and especially the ones that deal with health care, haven't embraced open source and free software? Even though they all seem to understand the danger of having their data locked away and their business tied to the whims of bad providers.

My take is that it is because there are very few businesses that offer support for such solutions. And large organizations always fear that they won't have the man-power or know-how to fix it themselves(which is a totally legitimate reason). Do you agree? And what if we solved that problem? Or is it about politics more than technical merit?
Would the second (higher paying) contract understand if you wrapped up the first contract before offering more hours? Bailing on a contract is certainly bad for business, but more importantly, you could be on the hook for the amount paid to you depending on how the contract is written.
7 Germs That Can Actually Kill You
I would not use javascript much in the same way as I would not use assembler. But using javascript as the target of a more stable platform with extensive tool support (e.g., Java with GWT) is fine.
> A summary of that would be great....

Heh. Serious power, terrible polish. They blew off all the NeXT veterans when they destroyed it as an objective-c development platform, but didn't finish the job of porting it to Java for five years so you ended up working on this platform that feels like a developed-in-isolation mainframe monster. Dev tools looked nice but made you want to slit your wrists from random crashes and other strangeness. There were a couple of periods where they looked like they would kill it which was stressful for people with codebases on it. All efforts at documentation did a very poor job of selling its incredible patterns and features.

But everyone I know who stuck at it has done well - many ended up at Apple working on very cool projects. I'd love to read a history of whoever wrote it one day - it was so far ahead of its time - I've got a theory that they had some people on it who had done serious research and practical time on some sort of web-like thin-client platform that pre-dated the web. Culture in Apple is different now too.
It's because of semicolon insertion.

Ostensibly, this was added to the language to make it more user friendly. Instead, it's the source of a lot of bugs.

Here is a decent overview:
http://www.openjs.com/articles/semicolon_insertion.php
I've been wondering for a while - why doesn't Y-combinator take in more B2B business ideas?

It's much easier to capitalise, the market (defined as customers willing to pay you) is huge, and the products out there are crap.

Does Y-combinator just not believe in the B2B market, are none of the applications in this area, or what? I'm genuinely puzzled.
Jim Skinner, Vice Chairman and CEO, McDonald's Corporation - Global Business Forum - Video
> That doesn't say much about any given individual. It does say a lot about groups.

Why are you repeating everything I just said?
I'm liking this a lot. My only suggestion would be to have some sort of indicator for web-safe fonts. Maybe a 1px box around the font name/text?
Through consulting I've seen the numbers, and I wonder why more people don't push to get users e-mail adresses and send newsletters. This is partuciularly true if you sell something online.
Ancient flamebait.
Tough situation to be in. But it's great that you're stopping to think about it.

I would say why do you have to stop the low paying project? Isn't it possible to cut down on the hours? Also, if you explain why you need to cut down on the hours, i am sure they would understand.(You can say "I need the money", nothing wrong with that) And if not, then they would've answered the question for you.

That's what i would do anyway. Good Luck.
> All human sub-populations are not equal

You look down on hispanics, do you think Asian Americans look down on you because your racial "subpopulation" is behind theirs in college degrees, graduate degrees, and median income?
methodA returns "undefined", methodB returns an object.
Prediction markets lean toward a Dow rebound
To me, our triumphs will likely never out weigh our failures. There are a small group of people in this world doing amazing things. However what is the point if we can't survive as a species? As technology improves, one day making something to destroy the world(bomb, nano-machine, virus, etc...) will be as easy and accessible as buying a toaster and if we haven't evolved mentally by then, none of our technology will mean anything. The world right now could be a vastly better place if people only cared a tiny bit more, but we have been so bought off by convenience that I don't think we ever will.
Galaxy may be full of 'Earths,' alien life
Ahem. There are, uhm, ways around that. Not that I condone it. Just wanted to state a fact.
I don't think it's solely politics or technical merit.

Put it this way: I'll bet your personal computer is well-maintained, well-researched, and generally works better than the average civilian's. The same probably goes for people in your immediate family.

Now imagine a lawyer who does not know anyone who is a programmer. Odds are her computer is a virus-filled default Dell piece of crap, or if it's not, she pays someone a lot of money to keep it running for them. It works, but is probably not A+ for the money.

Meanwhile you pay lots of money for legal advice and general legal know-how... and how do you even choose the right lawyer? You end up depending on your friend's anecdotes. Ignorance costs you in money and quality.

Same thing with non-tech industries. They simply don't know enough to ask and to evaluate risk/benefit correctly.
There's a layer (written in Clojure) between the client and CouchDB which does authentication, permissions, etc.
Bizarre. Everything from "The Language" down wasn't there when I read this earlier. I guess I must have been having connection problems.

Anyways, thanks for following up - this is a great way to handle clients without Javascript.
What does "results" mean in knowledge work? It's impossible to know whether the results could have been achieved faster or better if you had indeed measured hours. I'm not saying measuring hours is the only thing to watch, but you can't simply track a undefined concept like "results".
It's probably just me, but the 10 reasons to buy seemed to far outweigh the reasons against. Someone I know is getting a Kindle2 soon, so I suppose I'll get to judge for myself.
Disagree. If you measure hours for yourself it’s very healthy. You know what you do and when. They help me a lot. ("Ah, it’s 3pm, I never get anything done in this timeframe. I think I go outside.)

Measuring the time of others is worthless, to that I agree.
My point is that there's it's very difficult to measure the productivity and "results" of knowledge work, and you need to look at all the data. This includes looking at hours worked, plus the quality of the end product, the way they work with others, the clients impression, and the success of the product in general. This is a complex problem the requires a holistic approach.
I would have LOVED to have had a stand-up desk while in school. Stand-up desks are great for your neck, back, and mind. Adjustable height sit/stand desks are the way forward.

If you work for a big employer with ergonomic office furniture available, be sure to put in a request!

If you work at a home office, where you surely spend way too much time in front of your computer, definitely consider the investment in your health and productivity.
So you have 200 hours of remaining work? In my opinion it would be unethical to leave the project hanging. Can you establish a specific deadline/deliverable within a 40-80 timeframe (e.g, get the project into beta) and then work out an alternate (e.g., flexible, work at home, higher hourly rate) arrangement to move the project through the final stages (e.g., QA)?
If you like this, check out Datastore (http://github.com/ociule/gae-datastore/tree/master). It will allow you to put up a simple hash-value database on AppEngine.

Live demo at http://gae-datastore.appspot.com/

Have not got around to doing performance tests, but based on general AppEngine performance, I guess it will not come close to a dedicated Memcache machine. Should be good for everything else.
How about milestones achieved? Anything but hours. I did the startup thing (worked at a successful startup) 10 years ago, and we did work long days -- but spent most of that time creating things from whole cloth that exist as commodities today. (Everything from fast search libraries to infrastructure tools.)

I don't believe that most founders need to work 12-hour days. Not anymore. It's not the hours -- it's your progress that counts.
I think the TAG people have a funny definition of "WIN"
If it's your company, you know what results are (you'd better!). No, you can't track that, but I'm not sure it's meanful to compare startup progress.
New technology make us unhappy and stupid?
I tried a sentence at PolishMyWriting.com. The sentence was: "Onec upon at time, there was a potato." It found my misspell, but it:

1) Didn't capitalize the correction suggestions.
2) Ate the space between 'once' and 'upon' upon correction.

And now that I've given it this reply to proof, it doesn't find the misspelling inside the double quotes. Is that intended?

Also, it thinks every first word in 'single quotes' is misspelled.