skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And you think that if the government slaps a label on something that the information is correct?

Part of the reason why products aren't always labeled with safety information is because we don't know. Even with the drugs that are heavily regulated by the FDA we often discover things about them long after they have been labeled and consumed by thousands.
I was expecting an uninformed rant, but got an informed essay (however it is still rantish in parts).

Much of the position for greater restriction in allowed characters is based on shell scripts. I can definitely get behind this, but have a hard time resolving it with my irrational love of the simplistic current restrictions (almost none) which is based on tradition and having run into these kinds of filename problems maybe a handful of times in over 16 years of daily UNIX use. In my own experience, it's so rare that "how do you remove a file that starts with a dash?" is one of those trivial system admin job interview questions. Interfacing with other even more braindead systems, like DOS, CIFS and ISO, with their filename codepage support, who try to do The Right Thing(tm) (well, ahem, One of The Right Things(tm)) and fail at it, is really the regular sticking point.
What Kind of Roommate Are You?
There may be studies showing positive benefits to coffee, but there are also studies showing negative side effects. I'll stick with my chocolate bar, thank you :)
You usually have 3 stages (based on the successful guys I've met before):

A) Vesting period- after the initial sale, you take on the day job of either (a) doing what you were doing before, if you were properly aligned in incentive structure, or (b) doing something different that they bought your team for. For some, they find that they have now reached a state in corporate America that allows them to vault to the upper echelons of management, while others feel these days don't go by fast enough.

B) Soul-searching/vacation period- for those who don't stay after vesting, some people go and soul-search, Entrepreneur In Residence gigs, live 4-hour workweeks, travel copious amounts, become advisors or investors in other companies, or find their original cadre of friends to start hacking on stuff. Some start dating.

C) Next gig- depending on the riskiness of the individual, they may never sell another startup again and become the circling crew of technology professionals, others will compete with much furor with another startup, while others will forget their hacker roots and take $5M from a big VC firm on an unproven idea.
This is a great article. It's been around for a while but it completely changed how I build projects on my Mac.
I love Dawdle and wish you guys the best of luck! I came out of a failed video game startup last year, I know how difficult it can be being a new guy on the streets of a massive industry. It's definitely one heck of a challenge but I'm confident you guys will succeed.

I wish I was going to GDC this year, went in '08 and it was a blast.
I fear writing; a result of my perfectionism. The prospect of defective prose frightens me, so I don't try. A thought I put to paper last month:

"I am imprisoned within my lack of clarity and lack of style. Fucking failure. Chained to a quiet and passive existence.

I want to express; I want to free my ideas; I want to communicate my message; but I fucking can’t. I can’t clear this painful fog."
It's not in your interest to have them join the same round. The valuation YC invests at would be a bad one if we were only supplying money. So what we'd recommend is doing another round after YC's at a higher valuation. If you were in YC we'd obviously help you arrange that. Your call whether you want to take the money during YC or have your potential investors come to Demo Day with everyone else (assuming they don't already).
It looks like you all are partnered with Best Buy. Other than that a good article.

Have you considered selling new games directly? I know from another post you plan on expanding to other markets so I can see a future where you advertise more expensive products to be drop shipped from the manufacturer's warehouse straight to the consumer.

...wait, maybe I should build a business on that idea.
If people are going to go to the Walmart to buy new games anyway, why wouldn't the indie store them as well? Even if the prices are a little higher, wouldn't the convenience of not having to go somewhere else make up for it?
Ask HN: Webspace/server tips for startups
Hi!
Are there any resources or tips on choosing a path regarding webserver/space for launching a webapp?
As I see it, buy a domain and then either rent webspace or buy a server and stash it under the bed.
Since users will be able to upload content and I pretty much need a lot of space I'm guessing buying my own server is the way to go.

Are there any cheaper alternatives?
And on the other side, what would be the fastest way to launch? (assuming there is a ready webapp where deployment for launch is next step)
Having sold my startup, the money gives me flexibility to do what I want!

Personally, I am
i. managing an open source project
ii. picking up/tasking the kids to school (generally spending time with the kids)
iii. biking regularly to get/stay fit
iv. lunches with friends
v. looking for the next "thing" I want to get involved in

Ahh .. but you can see I am a little older than you!
Interesting. So you had a SQL Server instance, paired with a failover backup on hot standby (using Windows clustering), serving up data from a bunch of disks attached together in a SAN, right? Which SAN products did you use, and how much did they cost?
If you want to build a business on that idea, we'll be happy to help you out. We know a couple of the distribution companies that drop ship and we'll give you a fee discount to get more new games on the site. :)

[BTW, we're not partnered with Best Buy at all. It's just that blue is a default color in PowerPoint. :) ]
I said nothing the semantic web.

I just said that sometimes, all the data in the world isn't enough if you don't have the right algorithms or insights.
Note: this only really works on cable/fiber internet on XP. And to avoid an ad-infested site repeating a "tip" that's been around for decades:

First click Start button and then click Run

Type in GPEDIT.MSC

Click computer configuration>Administrative templates>Network>QOS Packet Sheduler>Limit reservable Bandwith

Enable Reservable bandwith, then set it to zero, "0". Click Accept and Ok.
They've told us it doesn't make up for it. The stores just walk down to the Wal-Mart themselves to pick up a couple copies of Halo 3 or whatever rather than actually working with a games distributor like Jack of All Games or whoever. They just can't compete on new games; that's why they do used, retro, and host tournaments and so forth.
Rhomobile unveils Ruby-based cross-platform mobile framework
If Free Software concepts spread in cloud, things will be better anyway.
Recession lifts social networking site LinkedIn
Yeah, it's unfortunate that the community for java and jvm have not been as robust as they could be.

It's heartening to know that MySQL, Hibernate, and others are being supported, but for a small startup, it's tough to find the the right folks who understand these tools.
I'm not a heavy Dropbox user. But I'm pretty happy that it makes my life really easy at times.
It's not a troll. I'm a US hunter who is not particularly in favor of guns for personal protection. I've spent some time living close to Juarez, Chihuahua, which is a significantly more violent city than neighboring El Paso, Texas. I'm very interested in explanations of why this is the case, and have never seen this particular argument before.

For me, this falls in the category "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" and "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". Thus I disagree that it is inappropriate. Interestingly, I also found a guideline "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."
Well I think Einstein said that if you haven't made your major contribution to society by 30, you will never make it.
congrats to my favorite ycombinator product.
Why is this the number one story on the front page right now?

Don't get me wrong, I love dropbox. I use it everyday. It's a really impressive product.

But 30 points at 9 PST on hacker news just to tell me that dropbox is doing well? Seriously?
Reuven Cohen just posted about an "Open Cloud Manifesto" on his blog- http://www.elasticvapor.com/2009/03/introducing-open-cloud-m...

He provides links to a Google Groups discussion, as well as another discussion board. No real details on what the manifesto is supposed to say, though.
what part of the coursework was hard, not the actual practice of business

An MBA is practicing business, at least at the top tier schools (possibly at the others, I don't know). Most of the focus is on case studies and group projects tackling real business issues, usually from real businesses, sometimes simulating what you would do and sometimes actually dealing with the actual company. Group projects in part time programs are frequently based on things actually occurring at a business one of the group members works at or runs, while in full time programs students will work with companies on existing issues. Traditional coursework is more commonly found in the the strictly analytical finance and economics classes.
Using Google Voice to extend T-Mobile MyFaves
Well, I know you can't downvote articles, but you could trigger vote-inflation by making sure to vote for lots of submissions you believe are "above" the level of hacker news.
Capitalist Thieves whose greed knows no bounds...
I'd look into Slicehost for a web server, and using it in conjunction with Amazon S3 if you're planning on serving a lot of files.
I certainly hope people that are buying their own servers aren't stashing them under their beds.

You should really consider VPS if your needs out way shared services, which I would seriously question if you are brand new. If VPS in all its forms, including slicehost or linode is still holding you back (I'm not sure there are many cases of this being true), collocation would be the way to go.

Hosting your own data centre makes very little sense these days given the options available.
Worth a repeat on how the selection process worked: http://techpulse360.com/2008/11/10/how-fairsoftware-became-a...

If I saw my story in a movie, I'd say Hollywood writers exagerate. And then it happens to you.
I have taken the ASP.NET approach to how I count and figure out Tags. Quite genious when you have millions of tags where each item has about 20 tags.

I create one table that contains all 20 million tags with a Unique ID which is 99% a integer just counting up. I also add a column sometimes for a counter which every time a tag gets added to an item, I uptick this counter once. Keeps track of how many times I used this tag.

When I tag an item with 20 tags, I create one column for all my tags.

So lets say I have tags

1, 5 8, 20000, 35, 36.

It doesn't matter to me in the database at this moment what they correspond to, but it does matter that I need to make this column as small and easy as possible because with 200000 mil tags and another 2mil items, the database can get huge.

So my method is to insert the tags like so.

1:35:2000:35:5843:34

I then have created methods to where I can find the tags, export them and so on. So the tags above are also now search able through an easy Regex Expression "\d+".

That row of numbers is in one single column for my item and I call the column tags.

I have done this for many sites.

Hope this helps.
It's better than what quantcast has to say:
http://www.quantcast.com/getdropbox.com

yowzers
The title of the article here is misleading. He isn't the global warming heretic, he's always been a heretic in everything that he's done or talked about. The simple fact is he's quite often accurate.
I wouldn't worry about it really. For every non payer, there are more than enough people who see the value of dropbox.
Memory footprint of objects in Ruby 1.8. 1.9 and OCaml
Does Dropbox ever check their bizdev email address? We've emailed them trying to partner, and our users would all be paying users. Guess they don't like revenue.
Is Apple Really Charging Developers 100% of App Refunds? Not So Far.
Well, in my view security is not a binary, nor is there a silver bullet which renders all software secure. Security is a strategy in which one implements as many known protections as reasonably possible in order to reduce vulnerability. In the Google Docs case, I think there is absolutely no good reason not to authenticate HTTP request for components of a document that also requires authentication.

Sure, crypto-strong nonce URLs are better than unobfuscated URLs, but that's just one protection.

For example, let's say that Google accidentally leaks a directory listing of all files on a particular google docs server (or let's say an access log, to be even more realistic). If Google had properly authenticated access to these images, then the leaked access log would be worthless and unexploitable. However, without authenticating these requests, Google has suddenly caused a mass security breach, as hundreds of people rush to wget all the URLs before the images are taken down.

If Google is seriously expecting people to use their product as a replacement for a business intranet, then they need to take seriously all concerns.
A slight criticism, looking at your application: asking me to fill out a PDF resume for a founding team is irritating and time-consuming. Is there anything that a PDF form can give you that you don't get from having applicants fill out relevant information into a text box? Drafting a PDF means that now I've got to spend time making my typography look pretty, getting things organized in a nice way, and generally spending more time on presentation than I'm putting into just conveying information.

One of the things I loved about the YC application was that it didn't require external files - excepting the Posterous video, which is a supersimple email-and-receive-link system.
"An MBA is practicing business,"

This is the first time I've ever heard an mba as practice (vs a study of theory) in running a business. Great insight (if true).

"Most of the focus is on case studies"

A case study is not quite practice, more like a review I'd think. If this concept is adopted , analysing Napoleon's campaigns would be "practicing war" , reading about Bruce Lee's fighting style(and even debating about it) would be "practicing KUng Fu" and an analysis of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony would be "practicing music".

" and group projects tackling real business issues,"

This is more like it. What percentage of an MBA do you think would involve running (parts of) a real business? 25 %, 50 %?

"This past quarter, for instance, her group in one class did all the business planning for a group member's business that he is now creating."

Well, this will become a "real business" when it is actually running? I mean, till it runs this planning is as good as anyone else's?

"In other cases, they've done restructuring plans that are then implemented by the company. "

This is more in line with "practicing business". Thanks for the input. Thought provoking.
I remember when this was the community's response to declining quality on reddit, too. "Just upvote better articles!" It didn't work.

I've lowered my threshold for flagging articles. Dunno if it does any good though.

------

edit: 5 minutes or so after my flag -- dead! Guess it does some good. :)
Also, if you don't find the answer here, there is always www.stackoverflow.com.
1. Learning to express oneself concisely (while still conforming to rules of grammar) as well as verbosely may make one a better writer.

2. Writing tweets does not necessarily help one learn to express oneself concisely. For many, it leads to dropped articles, lack of punctuation, and other issues that may reduce the expressiveness of the prose.

However, kudos to her for coming up with a headline that attracts attention and page views.
Table Top Fusion: Beast that will not die
One of the things to realize about Microsoft is that it really is not a cohesive entity. It's like a bunch of different companies stuffed under the same name with a minimum of common shared business infrastructure. So it's entirely plausible that one group would believe in openness and transparency at the same time as another group is suing over software patents.
Why change the title from "Microsoft Readies For Another Big Tech Battle" to "Microsoft To Rivals: Take Your 'Open Cloud Manifesto' And Shove It". If you really want to get creative with titles and comments, start with Digg or Reddit. This is just plain depressing when people try to make up titles so that it sounds either interesting or religious.
How the recession might change capitalism
Reuven also posted a reply on the original Microsoft blog post (essentially the same as what he posted on his own blog.)
Babylonian Dreams: Comparing the achievements of ancient Greece and Mesopotamia
The entrepreneurs are supposed to be on stage - they don't pay the entrance fee.

The room, full of people paying $2,995 are bankers, VCs, journalists (they don't pay), bloggers, corporate dudes, etc.
12,000 year old pre-agricultural temple findings - Gobekli Tepe
Readers of this article might also be interested in Fink: a package manager for OS X, based on dpkg and apt from Debian.

About Fink:
http://www.finkproject.org/about.php

Guide to building your own packages:
http://www.finkproject.org/doc/quick-start-pkg/index.php
Gen Y logs on at the library
This was a HP EVA San solution with fibrechannel interfaces and hence somewhat costy, but it was used for the entire organization (file-clusters, VMWare-clusters, Exchange-clusters etc etc), not just the SQL Clusters.

Apart from that teenie weenie bit about having an officially supported clustering-setup, I see no reason why you couldn't have used some random Linux iScsi NAS-solution, for instance powered by OpenFiler, which is 100% free.
Scott Berkun: Why requirements stink
The Scala programming language - introduction
What stops you now?

My credit balance.
You say that as if to imply that documents managed by conventional office suites were in any way secure to begin with. You seem smart enough to realize that isn't the case.
The US Department of Defense has 42 million billion billion billion IPv6 addresses
Unleash the Browser with Cross-Domain Requests - eh not yet
PimpThisBum.com Raises 50k For Homeless Man
I have to agree with MS position here based on the the information that is available, which isn't much. Just that only is problematic!

Sam Johnston's approach seems to be so much simpler especially for a startup.
http://wiki.cloudcommunity.org/wiki/Main_Page
TED talk by Bill Gross on simple solutions to new energy
I'm often faced with the following choice: write a paper about Algorithm 1.0, or try to figure out Algorithm 1.1? Or perhaps tweak the code to make it cleaner/faster/more general?

Writing the paper usually loses.
Potentially very good news -- algae is not a food crop nor does it complete for acreage otherwise available for growing food. Also they seem to have figured out how to run a continuous rather than a batch-oriented production process, which should scale better.
The biggest problem I have with developing on SQLite is the limited capacity to perform DB schema migrations. I use South.

SQLite doesn't provide much by way of schema changes, at least not in a manner that the Django ORM can make use of. I just run Postgres locally now, because I can be confident that any migrations I test locally will work on the production system.
Also I would maybe write a hacker community site in an obscure language for fun - and just not care how long it takes. That's luxury.
Google's App Engine to get Java?
While I'm not a fan of grinding on code for hours anymore, I still code a little but for the ends rather than the means. I've become content and outcome focused rather than code and technology focused, so I can "outsource" to existing technologies/apps (e.g. a Wordpress install that does 90% of what I want, rather than a custom CMS that does it all).

I've looked into outsourcing to other people but find myself too much of a micromanager to get away with it. No-one deserves micromanagement so I avoid it. Everyone else seems to want to turn trivial tasks into big "projects" with budgets to match ;-) - but that's because they're professional coders with standards, whereas if I can use an off the shelf product or bash something messy together in Ruby in 2 hours, I'll do that instead.

Professional coders tend to gasp in horror at my philosophy and I can't blame them. I'm very much of the "duct tape" mentality when it comes to engineering. Thankfully, you can get away with this on your own non-critical projects.. (it's a bit like the welder who doesn't use a mask when doing his own stuff in the garage) but I don't advise it for career programmers because otherwise you'll end up on The Daily WTF every week ;-)
As the quote by Mann is from a published scientific paper rather than an editorial page, I can only hope that the statement is believed by the authors. I disagree that it would be reasonable to make an unsupported political statement in this context, thus I assume belief.

The IPCC AR4 statement on this matter (presumably written or at least approved by Mann) has this to say: "The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing and very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone." p.39, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf

While there is an important difference between 'impossible' and 'extremely unlikely', I think a journalist or lay reader could reasonably conclude that the scientific consensus (as represented by the IPCC report) is that warming could only be caused by anthropegenic forces.
Macports is a similar project. I usually use it as a last resort when I can't "roll my own".

http://www.macports.org/
Some of the coursework is difficult precisely because it is unstructured. I didn't find the finance courses to be particularly difficult because the problems typically fit into a fairly neat structure: "price this option" or "value this project/company".

One of the more difficult courses I had focused on managing small-to-medium businesses. The issues and cases we discussed tended not to be quantitative in nature, but really honed critical thinking. A particular case I remember dealt with a struggling, family-owned company whose founder/CEO had just died in the midst of an IP lawsuit, etc. (I don't remember all the details). Imagine you are brought in to run the company. What do you do first, second, third, fourth? The challenges are legal, financial, technical, and interpersonal. There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait? What information do you need and from where are you going to get it? The answers are not always obvious and don't necessarily fit inside a neat framework. This is "hard" in a different way from advanced quantitative analysis of futures and options.
These people have been (most likely) switching to heat pumps, not space-heaters. The heat you get from a light bulb is purely waste from the resistance of the light bulb, so the output per unit of input will be around 1:1, comparable to that of a space-heater. Heat pumps are much more efficient, because they give you both the waste heat (from resistance) and heat from outside.
sorry for the stupid question. Why people use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL? Pros and Cons?
Less than $10/Mbps Colo4dallas with cogent bandwidth.
Hacker gone Firefighter
Is it better to debut at TechCrunch or DEMO ?
Yes. The chart struck me as highly suspect, that is why.
"Time management systems don't work...for me...well, except for this one."