skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I now think lisp variants like scheme, CL and arc allow you to write code that reflects how you think about the problem at hand, with much less boilerplate than C, C++ or Java. Performance is good enough, and the repl is a very effective RAD tool.

Ive heard the same about Python, ruby, ocaml, F#, Haskell etc. After years of C and C++, I just cant bring myself to use the 'end' keyword, which rules some of these out.

Im very impressed with plts mzscheme command shell. The docs are excellent and clever blog articles abound for scheme. It seems a good way to learn a lisp while getting real work done.

I do wish there was a #lang arc 'personality' to provide the Arc language from within plt itself - that would be my dream machine.
Tool for Internet Marketing
If so, it doesn't work.

Made a TinyURL of http://www.amazon.com/10-Inch-Netbook-Processor-Storage-Blue... and the link didn't change.
How to structure start up with partners who already own a business?
I'm forming a partnership with a friend to develop an internet application. My friend already owns an LLC equivilant business together with a partner in Eastern Europe. Their current company develops applications for various clients and employs about 15 programmers.

Our new partnership will develop an original application. I will have 50% ownership and the remaining 50% of the company would be split evenly between my friend and his business partner. I was thinking we would start the business just as a general partnership in the beginning and then possibly incorporate it later in the U.S. (I'm based in California).

What I'm wondering is whether the business should be structured with my friend's current business entity as my partner or with my friend and his current partner as individual partners in the new business. Or does that even matter?

We will be dividing development costs evenly. Most of the actual development work will be done by one or more of their current employees although I personally will also work on some parts of the code. My half of the development costs is based only on the actual costs for them to employ the developer calculated on an hourly basis. (So it doesn't include any profit for them as one of their typical client deals would.) Any work I or the two partners do on the app will be uncompensated directly. We will split any future profits.
I'm using curl to get the page, piping it into a simple one-off Perl-script that produces a comma-separated file, which in turn is read by a tiny R script, which then produces the graph.
I don't 'just do this for money' but an employer that explicitly requires passion and 'not doing it for money' looks like trying to get off paying less and have me working for 'the big idea'.
Calvin Ayre was on Forbes in 2006: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0327/112.html

He seems to be quite fond of regulatory arbitrage. An excerpt:

"We run a business that can’t actually be described as gambling in each country we operate in. But when you add it all together, it’s Internet gambling."
Its tempting to counter with something snarky like a good "whoosh!", but maybe a better response would be to remember that human beings write science fiction and fantasy.
No more surprising than the fact that so many people in the valley say being in the valley is important.

I notice that in the bay area, or at least SF, "startup" is assumed to mean a web site or web app of some sort. So when I hear claims that the bay area is the best place for a startup, I don't necessarily disagree, but I parse "startup" as "web app startup".
The floating arms keyboard sounds really cool.
Howto for orbits: This is a closed system so the only energy that can possibly be added into the system is from your movement of the cursor. So keep the cursor far away from the planet until it hits about center and then move the cursor close but so that the planet slingshots around it. This should establish a stable orbit. If you are careful enough, the orbit will stay in the screen.

PS. Checked the physics. Seems fine as its just standard Newtonian.
Therapy to suppress peanut allergies is reported
Like staunch mentions, there are cheaper places to live in than either SiV or Boston. Living in Austin-TX would cost half as much for instance. Living in developing countries would cost even less (at least if one doesn't insist on 100% equivalent quality of life).

Disclaimer: we're based in the valley and are happy for it, but that's because we're profitable anyway.
E75 vs 5730 XpressMusic
I think that rather than asking you to lie habitually, he actually meant that you should express gratitude in such situations. As far as social and business norms go, thanking someone for a lead and saying you'll follow up as soon as possible (even if that's unlikely) wouldn't be considered lying, unless you're being overly pedantic. =)

It's also hard to see how this advice wouldn't be the optimal behavior in most or all situations. Almost all the time, communication is as much about how the communicators make each other feel as it is about the information being communicated - hence the smiley in the previous paragraph. =) The advice in the article is just trying to point that out in the case of someone offering you a sales lead.
Blogster - A Great Platform For Creating Blogs
My new little blog platform baby is: Blogster. It is very easy to use and it is more social then some of the other blog platforms.
Concurrence: a Python framework to create massively concurrent network applications
I'd argue the lack of backward compatibility is what is keeping hosting companies to stick to arcane versions of PHP despite numerous newer releases being around.

Without a backward compatible environment lots of people will refuse to move forward because of the costs associated with it. For instance Windows would hardly be as successful as it is if it weren't for backward compatibility.

Not that it is all golden though. Java suffers majorly from backward-compatibility which has caused the language to be almost stagnant. In this respect I think Microsoft made a much better decision for .NET by enabling the user to have multiple runtimes installed.
Ask HN: Portable 17" second monitor?
Has anyone here heard of such a thing as a truly portable second monitor?

I travel a lot but find it very difficult to do web work with only my 17" macbook pro, yet my 24" BenQ external monitor is a real pain to drag around, and either impossible or expensive/bulky to bring on flights. I'd love to have a second 17" screen, identical to the one in my MBP, that I could bring with me in my bag.

I tried a web search for this but couldn't find anything useful, so thought I'd check here.
The moderm tiling WMs (DWM/awesome/xmonad) allow you to use a dinamic layout (overlapping) if you want.
You know what? This time and this time only I'll play devil's advocate and say: I like how it looks on the page. The slideshow transitioned very quickly (I didn't stop to check if it was AJAX, but it was fast either way), and the click targets to progress were large enough that I got through it quickly and effectively.
I know him from his days with the Microsoft team. He brought a real enthusiasm that I didn't notice from many other people in the industry back then.

Does that count as a success? That's why people still read him, anyway.
It got changed later, earlier it was stock traders...
I used to do this with a large magnet and a little chip off the magnet... accidentally figured out how orbits work. Fun times. :)
I couldn't resist the hype and bought the cheapest no-name (A-Data, anyone?) 32GB second-hand SSD. I haven't seen a noticable performance improvement since but FWIW the silence - getting rid of the disk thrashing - is worth alone the price of this thing.
There are plenty of nontechnical people in SV too. There are dentists and cooks and policemen here just like everywhere else.

AOL, incidentally, did not cater to idiots initially. Before the web it was something a lot of hackers used.
Marginal hike in jet fuel prices
SXSW: Tips: On The Cheap
I wish I could better inform the six people who upmodded you, because you've clearly been lost to the conspiracy theorists.

Read some facts first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt
Marketers Need to KISS: Keep it strategic silly
Marketers Need to KISS: Keep it strategic silly!
Although this article is short on substance, I didn't know about this company or their story. This sort of thing gives me hope for the future of mankind. We've become a world dependent on inefficient big companies, but these guys have proven that there is refuge from the mess we have made.

I know we are very web-app centric here at Hacker News, but this just goes to show that the principals grown from hackers roots have applicability in other, even physical, domains. It seems kind of odd that software engineers are revolutionizing the world even without software. Who'd have guessed it?
Who cares if your clock slows down say 20% by 50? Think how easy it is to optimize any program by 20%. It's irrelevant. Much more important is what software you're running. Like other posters here, I struggled with things in my 'prime' that I now find much easier. That phenomenon doesn't seem to get talked about much. There seems to be this truism that intellectually challenging work peaks before 30. How many great novels or plays were written by anyone in their 20's? Yet important math and music is often done young. Go figure.
Twitter is still nascent compared to Facebook traffic-wise, and I bet that the vast majority of twitter users are also facebook users. So, if Facebook gives you the same functionality AND user experience, why maintain your twitter account?
There's a difference between Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com. These designs are for Mozilla.org, home of information about what Mozilla as an organization and the Mozilla foundation are about (as well as for developer resources, which I imagine would be a little less heavy handed than the landing page, regardless of what style is chosen) -- not for Mozilla.com, the product-focused site intended to handle download requests and information about Firefox and Thunderbird.

I think that, while these designs might be a little art heavy for some, they are on the right track, as when you're talking about Mozilla as a public organization and an umbrella of properties, it makes sense to have the sites talking about their broader goals and trying to educate people about the ideas behind the group. Mozilla.com can "sell you" on Firefox and Thunderbird. Mozilla.org can do the same for the principles and resources behind the products.
With No Long-Term Solution, Nuclear Pallbearers Bury Waste in America's Backyard
it kinda reminds me when Starbucks switched from the century old type of espresso machines, to the new automatic makers. Faster coffee, better and more consistent (optimum) quality they thought they would have.

Who knew the the centuries old manual espresso machine produced a such better tasting coffee.

Same here. They probably going to get better consistency from their wine, but it probably wont taste any better, and it will lose some of its character.
agreed. I haven't seen TBL do many(any) speeches before to compare - but he didn't seem comfortable at all. I support the idea (actually - it made me think a lot about Wolfram's alpha -- it seems to be a compiled version of what Tim is after) - but I thought the pitch for it was all wrong. The "Raw Data Now!" chant was cringe-worthy - even without comparison to BillG.
Orbiter - A free space flight simulator
Try an I'm Feeling Lucky for "Firefox." "A lot of people know Mozilla is non-profit," sure, but more people know that there is a browser called "Firefox" and don't give two craps about Mozilla or non-profit or open source or anything else. Surely there will be some fringe cases, but I bet most people who still go to "mozilla.org" for Firefox requests are die-hard old FF/Moz fans from before the .com site appeared, or developers. Most people will, I'd bet, just google Firefox or type in "firefox.com" and be correct.
My Agile Team: More Code, More Problems
Why should personal debt contracts be legal but not equity contracts? Equity contracts are actually more progressive - you don't have to pay if you're not making anything, and those who strike it rich cover the costs of those who make less. I actually think we should fund the education system through personal student equity (rather than taxes and student loans). If a school fails to teach students to read, it will lose out when the kids cannot earn as much later in life.
If they actually implemented them they wouldn't be mockups. If they hacked together some shim to get the text represented as in-browser text instead of baked into the image, people would waste time shitting on their code. Some people prototype extremely quickly in Photoshop, some people prototype extremely quickly in a text editor. No need to hate. :( I imagine, also, that if there really is any irony there, they do understand it.
Is there a plugin for Firefox or something else that can convert math TeX to vector (non-raster) displays in the browser? Wikipedia/Mediawiki (and lots of other systems) converts equations to PNG, but they get pixelated when they're scaled up, they don't print well, and they don't look beautiful like a TeX PDF does.

In my math courses recently, I've come across lots of things that don't have any good explanations on the Web. I'd like to write a bit about them on my site to help other people studying the same things, and I'd like the equations to look really nice.
My father's mortgage payment in North Carolina is one-third of my (shared!) rent payment in San Diego.

When I hear of my younger friends buying houses back home, I am reminded of the real monetary costs of the life I lead.
It is possible that some wines will lose a bit of their character, in some years at least. But let us not paint things with such a broad brush: so many different technologies (e.g., biotech, robotics, machine learning, etc) can be used to improve wine-making that it's really hard to make general statements.
Definitely about the people. Unless you are the founder of a company, you are never working for the _current_ company, but instead are working for the next company (in which you will be a founder, or an early stage employee that gets a good chunk of equity) - you need to demonstrate that you are someone they want to hire.

With the possible exception of craigslist, where they manage to accomplish heroic feats with very little in the way of staff, any company that is eyeballing $1B+ market-cap will grow to hundreds, and possibly thousands of employees.

Where else on earth can you find such a concentration of DBAs, Sysadmins, Designers, Tech-Friendly-Lawyers, Developers, Product Manager who have all three of the following characteristics:
o Very, Very good at their job.
o Real world experience in several major companies.
o And, most importantly, willing to go to work for a "lets throw caution to the wind" startup.

Change is the only constant in the valley. People here, for whatever reason, are just comfortable changing jobs, sharing information, and building new things.

The weather is astoundingly good. Never too hot or too cold - 350 / 365 days in the year. And the other 15 usually mean having to actually turn on your heater or open a window on a warm summer night.

The peninsula, for the most part, does suck in terms of lifestyle. There are exceptions (Murphy Street in Sunnyvale, Good portions of San Francisco, downtown San Jose on a Saturday night) - but, in general, it's mile upon mile of suburbia and strip malls. This is not Manhattan or downtown Vancouver. (On the flip side, with few distractions there is more time to get work done)

The major downside is that unless you are filthy rich or already a home owner, the only sane strategy (unless you don't mind commuting for 90-120 minutes each morning) is to rent.

With all that said, if what you are looking to do is grow a company organically, and have your eyes set on something more sane like a $10mm-$100mm market cap over 5-10 years, there are probably a lot of ways to succeed without being in the middle of it all.
Thinking of packaging up a script I'm using for http://urli.ca and releasing it. Extremely simple php app that anyone could code in under an hour. Anyone interested?
There is truth to giving more thought in functional programming. Writing recursive functions requires thought especially when implementing tail recursion.
That's interesting... I've been thinking about this for a while now and at first I thought it would be incredibly bloated, but now I'm not so sure. Definitely interesting.
Perfect Upload and Resize an Image with PHP
The first design is easily the best, but none are very good. They need to tone down the approach significantly -- all of them are too cluttered to really extract the information people will care about. They need to do something bold and h2-like to explain quickly (one sentence, ideally) what Mozilla is, and then say "Here are our products:" with big, paragraph-level links, icons, and descriptions to Mozilla's flagships, with miscellaneous/other information at the bottom with modest 200x200 pixel icons and three-four items per line, or something like that. They're going way, way overboard -- this can and should be almost all text that follows the reader's flow and puts all the pertinent information right there. Ads for opensource can be placed below the fold or on a separate page. I'm tempted to do a mockup; Mozilla, feel free to send me money if you want one. ;)
Cyborg Beetles with Remote Control
working now on getting to be a top hit on google. I put up google ads right before the article came out since I am nonexistent on organic results, but a bunch of my competitors probably got a lot of clicks too
I'm working on SEO now, got a programmer helping me.
Also, the site was made with dreamweaver, so my room mate (current YC term) just cleaned up the html to make it easier for google to read
I guess you are right. I don't see any scores on there at all.
Ethically and scientifically, this seems stunning: a radio receiver is attached to a live beetle, with probes inserted capable of flight instruction. And these are inserted in a pupal phase, so as to not be visible in the adult.
you're absolutely right, just fixed that
thanks all for the feedback
mapcar in clojure wouldn't be limited to lists even if no one had though about the it at the time - this is the difference.

There's a ton of CL code out there that only works on cons lists, adding a sequence type doesn't solve this nor does it force people to use it or change existing code.
I would love music, movie to be sold on SSD, but the high fixed cost ($2) is unlikely to change much, and it really eats into margins on low-priced products (eg a $20 DVD). And what about online delivery?
I remember the same interview. They have also forgotten what made Firefox popular in the first place, it was simple, fast and secure. FF is starting to become bloat again - and it will eventually be eclipsed by the KHTML based browsers like Chrome simply because they will go back to the Mozilla way rather than the Firefox way

These re-designs worry me.
Creating Entertaining Social Marketing Sites
How to build entertaining social marketing niche websites using Facebook, Twitter, etc. that also create profits for social marketers and their business.
Yes, I do think it is more likely, because "businessperson skills" are skills that an observant and intelligent person might pick up in the normal course of his life, for example, arithmetic.

I think business is very simple. Profit. Loss. Take the sales, subtract the costs, you get this big positive number. The math is quite straightforward. - Bill Gates

Then there's negotiation/persuasion/deal-making/people skills. Most people engage in activities involving variations of those everyday. You'd almost have to be a hermit to avoid picking up some people skills. While some hackers may halfway fit that description, I doubt that most do.

Acquiring hacker skills, OTOH, involves rather more specialized effort.
Interesting that the intelligent and concerned blogger at NC says he didn't read the book initially because he heard so much about it already. Don't we all know these books that everybody talks about and seemingly nobody has read. Reminds me of certain assets or investment strategies everybody did and nobody researched. One point that Mandelbrot did not make publicly as far as I know but that NNT makes: Humans _want_ to be suckers. It's comfortable. That's why no amount of blame and regulation will ever stop this cycle. The problem is not people's intelligence, it's their ego.
Since the PLT Scheme community is so helpful, you might consider diving into the language by immediately trying to build that Arc-flavored dialect. The source to everything is available - give it a shot!
The Big Ruby Vulnerabilities
Well, I enjoy zed shaw's essay as usual
Ruby XML Performance Shootout: Nokogiri vs LibXML vs Hpricot vs REXML
I thought he would be more articulate for a Swatty.

In order for linked data or semantic web to really take off someone really needs to break through with a proof of concept. Right now it is just extra work.
Perhaps a 1) could be better served with asking a programmer why they started said interesting programming project. If they started a project for the specific purpose of learning a particular skill and they've already learned it, it would make no sense for them to complete it, I think.

For example, I once started a bittorrent client in C just to learn how to use sockets and pthreads in C as well as understand the bittorrent protocol. While I never completed it (what would have been the point? there are already way too many out there and I did not have a unique take on the idea), I did accomplish what I set out to do.
I enjoy the line and, living next door to Bezerkley, I take the point, but LSD was invented in Switzerland (by Albert Hofmann) and Unix came out of New Jersey.
Giving Bath To Baby-Keep Your Little One Clean
IBM’s HSTP - Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol [.pdf]
PHP Development Company India
cyberThink Infotech Pvt.Ltd. is best source to PHP Development Company India.
They're not really saying that SSD will match HDD price per GB, but that it will reach parity for a specific demanded GB capacity (64-256GB) in a few years.

But by then, as you imply, the demanded capacity also will have increased...

So it seems to be a question of the rate differential. So far, SSD's are getting cheaper at a much faster rate than demanded capacities are increasing, and (assuming nothing changes the rates, like Blu-ray-sized 400GB movie downloads), it will catch up soon. Firstly just nipping at the heels of the low end, then biting a chunk out of the mainstream, and eventually consuming all but niche applications.

It has already caught up for lower capacities e.g., a 1 GB flash drive is cheaper than a 1 GB HDD (fixed costs: $2 vs $40-50), and disrupted hard drives from iPods and netbooks.

Meanwhile, desktops PCs themselves are being disrupted by laptops, which are being disrupted by netbooks.
He's used the Euler method, which I think is why you get aberrant behaviour when the cursor comes near the particle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_method#Error
Spot on!

I want it to be trivial to make a greasemonkey script which adds people's small facebook profile photo into their news.yc profiles.

Or add a feature which lets me share a news.yc story on anything that implements a share-link interface - say, with my facebook friends, or my twitter followers, without leaving news.yc.

These things are possible right now, but doing them requires a lot of work, most of which would be duplicated (lots of html parsing, for example). How can we make it easier?
Amy Jo Kim on The Psychology of Fun & Game Mechanics for Internet Startups