skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I am a US citizen. In a nutshell, I took all of my overtime and vacation in that year of working full-time and went to Guatemala to study Spanish and met a German girl ... that was September of 2001, so a pretty nutty time in the US, and it seemed like a good excuse to try something different.

I had a job with a startup lined up, which fell through, and then ended up getting hired by the SAP LinuxLab who sponsored my visa (roughly equivalent to a H1-B), so I went back to the US for a couple weeks, packed up my stuff, shipped it over and well, stayed. 6 years (and one job) later I got permanent residence, which meant I was no longer bound to having a company sponsor my visa, and a couple months later quit my job to found Directed Edge.

The convenient upshot of that is that now, at 28, I'm permitted to live and work anywhere in the US or EU.
SVN is for version control of files. Dropbox is simply for sharing/syncing files where you don't need a full history.

I use it on my laptop/home/work computers. If I have a file I need on another computer rather than vpn into work and send it over or ftp into a server and drop it there to pick it up later I just throw it in the dropbox and it syncs to all computers. It's nice.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that dropbox does keep a version history of your files. I just don't use that particular feature.
The article is more of a character study and description of modern science when it crosses into politics / pop-culture.

Dyson's view is simple: he thinks the doom & gloom predictions of those who are forecasting the end of life within the next hundred years is simply not borne out by the facts.
I love how Dropbox has a client for both Windows and Ubuntu. I use it all the time.

That said, I wouldn't pay for this service.
Well, this is targeted at GDC attendees (we're flyering out there: http://twitter.com/Christopurr/status/1395013503), but would love the thoughts of the HN crew now that it's front paged.
It's sad to see that era gone, but as you say, it's still kicking around... I can still remember the thrill of popping open my A1000 and seeing all the signatures on the inside of the lid.

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/download_photos/a1000signature...
Outraged Over AIG Bonuses? - Read This
I agree with trezor, this is the exact opposite of what I expected. MSFT's role in the actual story isn't very surprising considering the weak position they have in the Cloud industry.

No official word on who is behind the 'Open Cloud Manifesto', but I'm guessing that it will include some names like Google that will 'openwash' it, meaning to make it seem open by association rather than be open in fact.
Okay, I admit, I was being cheeky :) But there was a whole section of the query that I left out that looks like this:

ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238082049&sr=1-1

This all looks like info they use for clickstream analysis, so nothing too critical. But I wish they had basic functionality on the page itself to generate a URL like you just gave. Maybe with some more info as well like tufte-envisio-XXXXXXXXXX.
My friends referred to it as "unemployed but busy", at one point. Many of them were "unemployed and bored" at the time, since it was right around the time when all my friends were thinking of dropping out of grad school.
Yup. I use dropbox every day, and yet I never think about it. Hallmark of something that "just works".
Google Docs gets collaborative-drawing feature
I wish I had another option but Comcast is really the only option around me. What have others done to try to get on a respectable broadband connection?
your post is an inspiration.....what it's all about! Best of luck w/ your startup.
In my opinion, that's a pretty shallow statement to make considering your usage and the amount of time that has gone into such sweet product.

I'm a little sick of the whole freemium mentality TBH. Maybe I'm missing something re: the 'long tail' that very few ever reach.
If the amount of money were adeguate, I'd probably try and help other startup founders.
I think you're right. It seems the cited 115 tons/year is a mistake that is currently flowing around the internet.

http://www.worldhum.com/travel-blog/item/inside_great_sushi_...

http://www.chow.com/media/2007/6?page=7

This paper has the Fulton Fish Market moving approx. 115,000 tons per year, based on an NYT article from 2005. This puts the FFM near a much more respectable ~300 tons/day.

http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Research/wp/pdf/paper254.pdf
Something about "people like that" always puts me off. You know the kind of big grin, be with you next week, dripping in cash attitude :)

He probably does have the money etc. - but you'd have ot worry if he has the commitment to be a decent angel.... (most angels would be up and running publicly by now)

I could be wrong: just a gut impression I got.
What I love about Dropbox is that you don't have to check in/check out every time you make the slightest change. The versioning is implicit, which is the way it should be for most personal files (although it would be a disaster for SCM).

I've been using Dropbox to sync shell configuration files across several (4+) machines and it's a dream come true. I now have versioned bashrc files, my vim plugins, on every machine.
The Netflix prize is a contest to discover how much you can do with pure data. I don't see how you can place it on the semantic web side of things when they don't do any tagging etc.
The early or late point is debatable, but the other three bits of advice are great. That one about about breaking up the project so that each step is smaller than the last makes so much sense. You have to reorganize the way you do things probably, but it seems like it will pay off in the end. I am going to try it.
Three points.

1. Practicing writing 140 character messages makes you better at writing 140 character messages. It's a point of faith that this skill will transfer to longer works.

2. A better title would be "Twitter as a framework for practice". What you'll find is that people who strive to get better, do so in any medium that allows it. People who don't, will fail to do so in any medium.

3. In code, this is called 'golf'. It's generally thought to a pleasant-but-useless practice (I assert). Why would this not also be true in this context?
I've already said I plan on setting aside a certain percentage of my net worth to angel invest back into startups. I want to help people who were like me when I first got started at 18 (clueless but relentlessly passionate on building things that can change the world).

I'd most likely do a startup again (and again) at some point, but angel investing could easily become a full time startup.

I'd also spend a lot of time setting up a non-profit that introduced young kids to technology at an early age. I was pretty lucky that my dad got me onto the computer when I was four. There are a lot of kids in bad areas of the world that aren't that lucky.

I guess in short, I want to help give people the same opportunities I had from people that believed in me. With a good amount of money, you can do that on a much larger scale.
I disagree with you about #1. There is no reason that serving these images shouldn't go through the same authentication that accessing the document requires (not DRM'd PDFs, just checking the cookies of the request for that image to make sure the user is logged in and has access to the doc). Just because they're available through a non-guessable URL doesn't make them secure; there are dozens of ways that URL can leak without leaking the whole document.

Also the fact that the image is permanently retained after the document is deleted is completely unacceptable. It's obvious that they are trying to save money on bandwidth and CPU here, but it's not an acceptable place to cut corners.

As for #3, I think that it's pretty easy to guess what this vulnerability is. It's probably the following: When you get an invite to view a shared document, either
1) Accepting the invitation after the document has changed and permission redacted still gives you permission to see it
2) After your permission is revoked, you can use that URL to regain permission to the document.
Other than Gamestop and you guys, what competition is there?
Too many websites don't use it.
TED Talk: David Pogue on Cool Phone Tricks
I fail to see how dwadle is radically different from the GameStop model. They only make 12% on a used game sale, so what? They are just cheaper than GameStop. They have the same incentive advertising the purchase of used games over new games as GameStop does. I don't think they are in a position to point fingers at their competitors as is done in the article.
It is nice that you get real cash instead of store credit. On the other hand, as a seller you are competing with other sellers so you don't get instant credit like at GameStop.
It's a choice everyone interested should be able to make for themselves. The remarks towards GameStop are uncalled for though. They should compete on a service/product level and not pull out some twisted ethical argument how they are better for the gaming industry.
I was particularly interested to hear about the T-Mobile VOIP phones. Does anyone use this? Does the G1 support this?
Why does it keep getting killed off? out of interest? I lost track yesterday.
That sounds terrific. Please provide more details about the setup you used. Which database product? Does that product support splitting tables across multiple servers? Does it let clients transparently query across all of them? Which features did you enable? Did you shard the schema and then made the application layer figure out which server to hit?

It sounds like you did not use a SAN or Oracle RAC or anything else which requires exotic and expensive hardware. Please confirm this, and also, if you used non-open-source software, could you provide a ballpark cost estimate?
Entrepreneur Life vs Corporate Life
Ruby Algorithms: Sorting, Trie, Priority Queue & Heaps
Dawdle is a good thing for gaming culture because it stocks classic games that are valuable to people who seek to broaden their horizons with a wider variety of titles. GameStop merely pushes the "hot" games. GameStop doesn't even sell games that don't get preordered at their stores. GameStop is utterly devoid of any real cultural value to gamers.
Full-size keyboard on an iPhone - no jailbreak
eBay, Amazon Marketplace, and Half. [Fee comparison: http://www.dawdle.com/selling/index.php/fees/ The Google Spreadsheet isn't locked, so please don't abuse it. :) ]

What's interesting is that we're trying to get all the small independent stores to sell on Dawdle. They're a different beast - many of them don't even sell new games. They're typically in a strip mall next to a Wal-Mart that does. So people go into the indie store, sell their games, and walk to the Wal-Mart to buy new games. Only the people who can't afford new games anyway or are looking for older stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't stock end up buying at the used game store, so the publishers/developers/retailers actually don't "lose sales", which is their main concern.
Duplicate of a recent post (14 days ago).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512421
A better model: Perhaps smaller democracies? Instead of everyone having 1/300,000,000-say in 300,000,000 lives, let them have bigger chunk in smaller systems.

Stronger, faster and more direct feedback can enhance control loops without adding more sophistication otherwise.

More data usually beats better algorithms. (http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.h...)
Probably a direct e-mail to the YC partners would've been more appropriate
> Apple clearly didn't intend this 'loophole'

How do you know?
dropbox is my favorite YC company.
What's with all the infoworld articles around here lately? They just might be worse then codinghorror.
No, if a new game sells on Dawdle for $60, we make $7.20. If a used game sells on Dawdle for $55, we make $6.60.

Technically, we'd favor new games because our commission dollars are higher. But our margins are not. We're like the real estate broker; we make money by finding market-clearing prices. Higher prices are naturally better, but we can't control that. Our goal is to reduce friction.

As to your second point, you can get instant sales when there are Sell It Now buttons for items that have StandingOffers. (Example: http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/wavebird-wireless-controll...)

Lastly, there absolutely is an ethical argument here. The publishers send traffic to GameStop, then GameStop sales reps push used games. That's what gets Dave Perry and all the other publishers who are willing to speak out so angry.
>I think it's an acceptance of reality.

All of technological progress consists of refusing to roll over and "accept reality" - instead, attacking it and modifying it to suit our needs.

>There is a phase change when systems become too complex for a single human to ever understand them in their entirety.

This is how innovation dies. The disease is preventable:

http://naggum.no/erik/complexity.html

> To them, MySql is the hardware. Is it a bad thing?

Yes! It is. A programmer's finite mental capacity for dealing with complexity is consumed by an ever-greater load of accidental complexity - inconsistencies in the medium learning about which teaches you nothing. They are holes in reality. The thing that made modern technology possible is that physics, chemistry, etc. do not have "bugs." A correctly set up experiment will yield the same results when done a week from now, in Australia, etc. And in the end, there are unifying principles governing it, which will explain everything that happened in a way that teaches you something permanent. A medium with "holes", like a buggy programming system, is a universe where "science does not work":

http://xkcd.com/298/

> Some of them hopefully will dig down the stack

Wading in sewage.

> languages are not all that important

This statement is true when the languages are all equally crippled - as they increasingly are, through their reliance on an ever-sinking foundation of 35-year-old rotting OS.
Dot-matrix printers still have a large market in Brazil, were they're needed to print out receipts. But because only businesses buy them, they cost about three times more than the latest inkjets.
I will pay for the service, but only after I've exhausted my X free gigabytes. I'm extending that as far as I can by referring people, and thus getting 250MB more free space for each referral.

If you haven't signed up yet, use my referral link, and you'll get 250MB extra free too :-)

https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTQ4MjgzNjk

PS: Thanks to whoever did use the link :-) I now have 4.5GB :-)
Landing Page Makeover
One that condones blatant copyright violation? Not sure. Let us know if you find one.
Why would you want to take both? It would seem to me that if people are approaching you asking to invest you're in a fantastic position. The money they're offering seems (Q2 2010) to be more than the standard YC offer but what you're getting there is (mentorship + community + brand + Demo Day + MONEY) whereas all you're guaranteed from the Angel/Seed Fund is money. You will more than likely get mentorship as well but the community and brand are not availabler outside YC.

It sounds like you're being offered ~double YC standard investment, but how much stock your potential investors want is not mentioned.

You're obviously in a good position with people looking to invest in you already but why would YC take on the pain of having others in on the round with them on anything resembling an equal basis unless they think you're so fantastic a bet that they'd be fools not to take it, like when Sequoia and Kleiner (bastards who invest in patent trolls) Perkins went in together on Google, which didn't need the money?
The complete setup was a 2-node active/passive Microsoft SQL Server-cluster solution with SAN backing, hosting various systems across 5 different SQL Server instances.

For clarity and to avoid confusion, since Linux-clusters and Windows-clusters are quite different: An active/passive windows cluster does not distribute load among nodes. A 500GB workload attached to one instance on one node will only have that node to work on. The remaining node will only be for failover. So despite this being a 2-node cluster, it can easily be pictured as a 1-node setup for all practical intents and purposes.

Also SAN backing is required for Windows clusters, and hence can't be avoided. For perspective the amount of actual disks used in this setup was far from extreme. I'm pretty sure we are mostly talking about a few LUNs running something equivalent of RAID5 and RAID0 on regular 10k SAS disks. Nothing fancy.

No schemas were sharded as that completely breaks referential integrity and is something only done in the MySQL-world and essentially kills the ability to do efficient joins. No special features apart from indexing and use of file-groups was enabled, but if disk IO or CPU had been a problem, you could very simply have setup partitioned tables or distributed partitioned views between linked servers to transparently involve more servers and distribute load.

No front-end load-balancing was used, so no client-redirection would be necessary, although Windows clusters allows client-redirection in case of failover. No client configuration apart from the server's cluster-name is needed.

Products used: Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition. Cost of these products will most likely vary depending on what kind of existing licensing deal you have and where you live.

My estimate would be that price for this setup is rather insignificant compared to the amounts of data it can seamlessly handle without any developer effort wasted on scaling. No effort what so ever.
This would work well in my house, but not for the stated purpose.

We have a hydronic heating system (hot water circulates through pipes to toasters...kind of like old radiators but more efficient). A heat exchanger from graywater to our heating system would help our winter gas bill quite a bit.

Tying it to the dishwasher and washing machine would help out a lot too.
No reason you can't take both I think... but I'd wait for PG to weigh in.
Anyone know of an API to access that trillion word google corpus mentioned in the article?
Which is sad because it didn't always feel this way. GameStop still employs gamers, so it is easy to miss this. The racks they keep for the previous generation consoles isn't as prominant anymore.

Funcoland had a great feel to it. They always had several TV's with games on them. I think I played Super Mario RPG first there. It was weird compared to what I expected, but that was a great game.
Greying Japan plans robo-nurses in five years
It will probably not be as interesting as this cloud manifesto: http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/manifesto/
Not a good article at all. It makes MyISAM sound good which just isn't the case.

MyISAM is good for read-only tables. It has very fast reads. Once you start getting writes, it crumbles. Since most web applications today have a decent amount of writes, MyISAM isn't that good.

So what is MyISAM good for? Well, let's say that you have a table of post codes. Maybe you want to add new ones every month, but for general purposes, it's read-only. You'll get MyISAM's speed for reads and writes won't matter.

On the other hand, say you're making a site like HN. In that case, you constantly have writes (votes, submissions, comments) and locking the table isn't an option as it would just crumble.

The article says that MyISAM is good if your application "has to be fast". That isn't true. Most applications would be faster with InnoDB. This article takes a completely inaccurate approach to databases. So, they'll be lots of people who read this and think, "faster is better, therefore I'll use MyISAM," when such a choice will give them lots of speed problems as users start using their app.
Robert Stark, sutter board meeting videos, sutter county auditor, sutter videos
This is the official website of the Sutter County Auditor-Controller’s Office, Yuba City, California. The Auditor-Controller is independently elected by the voters of Sutter County.The information provided herein is authorized by the Auditor-Controller.
How Companies Use Twitter for Business
Best of luck to all the YC companies planning to apply!
> Once again, it doesn't seem like a complete breakdown of security if your collaborators can view earlier versions of a document or a diagram within a document

I think the real issue is whether the systems operates as people expect it to. I would not have expected it to operate in the way described, and I suspect a lot of other people wouldn't either. There is a precedent here in tools like MS Office (ok, it isn't cloud based, but it is where some users are coming from as they adopt GDocs). If you told the average PowerPoint user that when they send a deck to their customer/partner that person will be able to see all the previous 'versions' of the document that you went through prior to giving it to them, then I think that PowerPoint user would be shocked, and worried.

I realize that cloud sharing and emailing aren't the same thing, and that GDoc's versioning system isn't the same as making changes and hitting save in PowerPoint from a technical point of view, but for the average user they probably feel like the same thing, so they will expect the same rules to apply. Bottom line: if it's going to operate like this then GDocs needs to make sure that users totally understand that.
Ok, this makes sense. However, one also needs to factor in the pollution/ energy-usage in manufacturing a new car to the total product lifetime cost.
People don't pay proportional to the effort involved. If they did, you'd be able to charge a few hundred $ for an Ubuntu install CD. But you can't.

Even if you provide an extremely useful service, people may still not be willing to pay for it.
It's under the same domain, so probably, yes.
As much as I like DropBox, you have to take dl.getdropbox.com out of the equation to get an accurate comparison, because dl is used for sharing files with third parties and even hosting files on the web.
Cash For Flash
From the YC startups I have spoken to, you can raise more money from outside investors, but it cannot change the fundamental terms and amount you receive from YC.

If you talk to YC, I'm sure they have a pretty good strategy on that since they're very entrepreneur-friendly.
IPhone vulnerability worth more than $10,000
Thats not necessarily a bad thing.

I'm guessing a lot of the schema is for caching purposes. A lot of player statistics need to be accessed instantly, so if a table can store some common aggregate data that eliminates the need for on-the-fly intensive queries, they're worthwhile.
It is not that much money and if you can double the team and have a better product by Demo Day, you may be in a better position.
Yeah, couldn't we at least link to the original blog post? The TechCrunch writeup adds nothing.

http://peekay.org/2009/03/26/security-issues-with-google-doc...
Re #3: that does appear to be the case. Create a document, edit it, add a collaborator, verify they got the invite email (but don't sign in for it), remove all collaborators, edit, save, then follow the invite; you'll see the most recent copy of the document in the invite landing screen.

I disagree with you on points #1 and #2. A lot of very important web apps are very insecure if crypto-strong nonce URLs aren't good enough. Clearly relying on URLs is suboptimal, but it's a long way down from "suboptimal" to "vulnerable".
Seeqpod to Developers: Say Goodbye to Free Music
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Somebody bought a used game for 40$ on Dawdle (or Dawlde bought it for 40$ and resold it for > 40$), and that is not showing up in the second chart. If that was included in the second chart, it would look exactly like the first chart.

Edit: to clarify, the second chart only shows purchases of new games, whereas in reality some used games must have been purchased to provide the new 40$ in purchasing power.