skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whiny bunch want to go on strike? Good riddance, and if you meet one, remind them not to let the door hit them on the way out.
I don't want to be rude or anything, but this is the function of recessions: clean up excesses and un-effectivness.

Sorry, hoping for easy life people who got their whatevers in Women Studies, Sociology, Psychology, etc, etc. You must have skills that are useful for people to earn money. The party is over. Mr. Market saw enough "professionals" whose only advantage is to talk, talk, talk and talk. Now there is time of doing things that benefit others.
The thing that's interesting to me is both Blogger and Twitter focus on simple, straight-forward human to human communication. Neither are complex or try to solve abstract, confusing problems.

By the measure of Blogger and Twitter's popularity, Evan is obviously skillful, regardless of whether or not Twitter is purchased by Google or some other entity. He focuses on an area relevant to all humans, communication. He makes his services easy for everyone to use. He has the foresight to see potential value in something unexplored, and he has the tenacity to work problems long enough for the results to prove if his hunches are right.

But perhaps most important he tries over and over, failing more often than he succeeds. That seems to be the real lesson here, it's not that Evan just luckily makes some mistakes and comes out on top, it's that he tries over and over.

Success has very little to do with luck, a bit more to do with circumstance and mostly to do with trying, and trying and trying some more.
ah, sorry if it wasn't clear, i meant to ask jorgem about the book that didn't mention exceptions :)

although, i have seen this particular pdf floating around before, and i keep forgetting to bookmark it and this time i did, so thank you :)
Another sensational news of Nazi-Science from the economist. Recently they also wrote about better sperm of the rich people.

Stephen Hawking must be lucky like hell that The Economist isn't estimating his creditwothness...
So it's a text box that creates links that, when clicked, send you over to twitter where you can click submit to turn them into spam?

That suggests two groups of users: Spammers to post links, and, uh... stooges to click links. I can see the motivation for the spammers. What exactly is the motivation for people to come to this site and click links?

It just doesn't make any sense at all.
Perhaps you could explain (on the site) what retweeting is and why it would make ones life better to engage in it. Perhaps you could also explain it to us here.
retweeting is something already done by the twitter community. At the moment if you have something that you want to encourage your followers to spread, the most you can do is say "Please Retweet!" (which a lot of people do - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=please+retweet ). We are just trying to make an action that people already do, easier.
I should be more precise. What I really meant was, has a spam ever made it out of the holding pen of the new page and onto the frontpage? The new page only gets a fraction of the traffic of the frontpage.

I'm pretty sure the fact that spammers do something doesn't automatically mean it's worthwhile. There are some spammers whose stuff has been autokilled for months, but who keep submitting. They can't possibly be measuring the traffic they're getting.
MYOB Indonesia Community - Exporting and Importing MYOB Data
There are two things to take into consideration here. I agree with the premise of what the author is saying, that URLs should be as short as possible, but I also think URLs should be informative as well. The amazon.com/wii url is great because it contains information about where you're going. If that was amazon.com/sD5E, I would have no idea where it's going to send me. This is the biggest problem with Tinyurl, I think.

URLs should be as simple and short as possible but not too simple and short. It should still tell me where I'm going, just extremely succinctly.

I see developers make this mistake all the time. They make their URLs look like this: http://example.com/users/dcurtis/profile . That has at least 14 useless characters in it. It could be changed to http://example.com/dcurtis with no loss at all, because /users and /profile both are useless structural information.
Paul - you're the man, thanks and gratitude from me and lots of people for another essay. Learned some good stuff this time.

Also, did you write this one either Etherpad? I took a lot from watching you write your last piece in Etherpad, so if that's available that'd be very cool. Cheers.
That is an interesting issue, and one I've never considered before cause I just took the data from MaxMind for granted.
I work for Mozilla crunching numbers. There isn't any way I could share any IP addresses of course. If you pull down the data from MaxMind and do a search for AQ, you'll see a set of IP address ranges that are recorded as being located in Antarctica. We get a small amount of traffic from IP addresses in those ranges.
My weed dealer is a PhD Candidate in film studies. Can't wait until I can tell people my dealer is a doctor.
I would pay money for a button which, when I saw someone retweeting, I could press it and that person would experience an electro-convulsive shock.

I think the existence of your app makes the world a worse place. Please take it down.
as a "private amateur" angel investor, i put ~$300K into 13 deals over a period of 4 years ('04-'84(, at a median size of around $20K. my largest investment was $100K; my smallest was $5K. most of them were at valuations south of $3M (in a few cases i did A rounds north of $5M pre, however in both cases i was working or consulting with the company). so far it looks like 3 of the 13 will do >5x, another 2-3 are likely going to return 0, and the other 5-6 are still tbd. i'm hopefuly i'll end up with 3-5 wins, and an aggregate return of 4-5x over a period of perhaps 7 years.

as a "professional" angel investor now for a VC fund, i typically invest $50-$250K at valuations between $1-3M pre-money (however i'm new on the professional side; only done 4 deals since December). too early to say on either wins or returns, but i'm happy with the deals i've done so far.

i think most private angel investors (in Silicon Valley) who dabble do deals at between $10K-25K. most professional angel investors in Silicon Valley who do it as their primary profession invest between $25K-250K per deal.

your mileage may vary.

some angels may do deals as high as $500K - $2M, however those are select cases. most times there are multiple angels syndicating.
Yes, replacing the monster that is comet/longpolling with something sane is indeed a worthy goal. But I also agree, this is not the solution.

For the simple reason because it won't work over standard proxy servers and I don't see the trillions of proxy servers currently in use being updated to support this any time soon...
sorry that should be "over a period of 4 years ('04-'08)"
We will definitely be putting an explanation on the site. A good explanation can be found here: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_retweet

Basically, when you see someone tweet something you find interesting, something you'd like to share with your friends/followers, you copy and paste their message, and usually put RT @username at the beginning. This helps ideas spread through twitter. We're taking away the need to copy + paste, and putting the retweet request in the URL itself to help with the 140 character limit.
There's an ACM article with a time-line of new technologies (with company name) followed by date that technology based a billion dollar industry (with company name). I can't find it now but it was interesting because the company name was almost never the same on both lines. It has been a pretty damning history for any company trying to justify basic research.

Not to suggest that basic research is optional, just that it is fundamentally for the greater good. Kernighan seems to get that. He's focused on the needs of his company but also understands what motivates academics. Interesting...
Upvoted for the phrase run-whack-ass-protocol-over-HTTP-POST which accurately and creatively describes the current data streaming situation. (and made me laugh)
pleaseRT.com is too long. What about rt.me ? It's available and then your URLs would be a lot shorter.
I love the design it's great.
Ah this is truly a business opportunity - a nice supplement to your FICO score forget mechanical turk:

Step (1): Get access to frontal photographs of a large random sample of borrowers along with their financial history and records of any defaults.

Step (2): Extract a vector of facial features from each photo. Similar to the feature vectors used to judge attractiveness in the work of Cohen-Or et al. http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~dcor/

Step (3): Have users apply for a loan by submitting a mugshot. Use support vector regression or some other similar technique to predict the probability of default.

Step (4): Profit
flot is also worthy of a mention

http://code.google.com/p/flot/
I don't think it's possible to register a 2-letter .me
This isn't really new. Academia has been in this recession for almost 3 decades. Universities are just using the recession an an excuse to ramp up the same garbage one more notch.

One reason universities get away with this horseshit is that they're able to take advantage of very smart people who caught an idea very early in life-- that schooling opens doors and improves one's life-- and failed to disavow themselves of it when it was no longer true.
It would be surprising to me if someone didn't build this concept with valves and vacuum tubes before 'software' even existed. People always quote it as some major milestone like the invention of the wheel or something but it honestly seems to me like a natural and obvious design that just about anybody comes up with when faced with the right set of problems to solve.
As always, it depends. Arguably, http://example.com/users/dcurtis/profile is short, but not too short. If a website/service is centered around people, it makes _more_ sense. Else, the longer URLs seem to make more sense. http://www.amazon.com/wii is only as useful as someone knowing what the Wii is.

I wouldn't consider the users and profile namespaces a mistake. People get cute and it can create a large constraint how your architecture works. Also, URLs structures as such are often a result of some framework behind it. http://example.com/model/controller/view. It expedites development and managing code something fierce. Perhaps there is opportunity for a shortening widget within the MVC pattern. I need to think about it -- or let other smarter people than me think about it. :)

http://www.amazon.com/shamwow is invalid, along with the other permutations I tried. Amazon doesn't have core shortening service, it seems.

I think the issue is more around URLs which can be parsed by a human vs the proverbial querystring. A TinyURL solves technical problems and looks nicer which is 2/3 of the way there. The remainder makes sense to a person.
Thanks!

The #1 story is bright green, changing to dark green until it's off the front page. Then it turns red, with
alpha = 1 / (rank - 30)

Sure, I'll be glad to put up another video. Will reply again when it's ready.

Or, could send you the code and data if you want to play around with it.
The people who succeeded (and their investors) probably think they foresaw it.
Ask HN: comments automatically killed?
Hello,
I want to know why do I see dead comments? It looks like comments by specific users are killed automatically? Why?
You can't use the excuse that "the software urges me to do it this way, so I'll make the user's experience suffer." As a developer of user-centric software, it is totally your responsibility to do al the hard work for the user. That includes the couple lines in your routes file to fix the /model/controller/view default.

/users and /profile do not ever have extra information, except in extreme cases where you have /users and /aliens and /pants that your app is centralized around.
Several good hacks from the writing:
1) Be relentless resourceful.
2) Lower your risk to be decisive.
3) Be good.
Mozilla and WebKit, browser platform wars.
Hedge Recession
Valley Cycles and Scott Rafer
You see them because you've selected "showdead" on your profile page. They are dead because the person exhibited a lack of understanding of the mores of the community, and either posted spam, or egregiously violated common courtesy in comments.

Sometimes, I imagine, users may get auto killed prematurely; if their first submission appears to be obvious spam, for example. But, I wouldn't think that would happen often.
"Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. "

We'll lose money on each unit sold, but make it up on volume!!

What I fail to see, is how twitter won't be replaced by some open source library that does the same thing. Just as you can install blogging software on your own server and use aggregators to aggregate.

But they're the current dotcom darling, so they can do no
wrong.
After using Drupal, Rails and web2py, it feels like I spend an awful lot of time finding out where a framework begins an ends -- the core philosophy which often times isn't quite articulated. Using Sinatra, and potentially Juno, there is a hard line: we don't do ORMs. We don't do y. We don't do z. I find that useful and refreshing. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy writing for each given because they have differences. It sometimes took me a while to pick up on the subtleties. :)

To suggest creating a framework that does less than other frameworks is the soup du jour isn't quite on. I'm loving Sinatra because it does what I need: routing. I'm using other tools to bite into git as a data store and Haml for views. It makes me giddy. Each part works the way I think or the problem I needed to solve. To expect one framework to fit all criteria is a tall order.
who else thought that this was going to be a rate my picture type site?
Perhaps the single most pragmatic and understandable description of angel investing I've read to date. I am courting angel investors currently and have only run into a small handful who meet the criteria you describe.

Thank you so much for writing this.

Ted Ray,
Founder & CEO, Ted's Tinctures Inc.
http://jetlagformula.com
Stanford iPhone Application Programming course materials here:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php
Interview: Jerry Lawson, Black Video Game Pioneer
Highlights: He had a full PDP-8 in his garage in 1972, and released the first cartridge-based video game system for Fairchild.

BE: Did you talk to Steve Jobs and Wozniak back then?

JL: I was not impressed with them — either one, in fact. What happened was that when I had the
video game division [at Fairchild], and I was the chief engineer, I interviewed Steve Wozniak
for a job to work for us. Well, my guys were kind of impressed with him at first, and I said I
wasn’t. Never had been.
Good luck with the fundraising!

I'm curious about your product though. I find it hard to believe that your formula is more effective than 1-3mg of melatonin when the time comes to sleep.

Is it the particular combination of ingredients that is so effective? It doesn't seem like any of the individual ingredients would have much of an impact. It doesn't mean you don't have a business model though, you have very nice packaging and there is currently no package on the shelves that treat jetlag.

It would complicate dosing instructions, but would not bundling your product with 1mg of melatonin to take when it comes to sleep dramatically improve effectiveness?

Edit: After reading the testimonials on your site, it seems that you are not trying to (supplement) sleep cycle issues, but are dealing with the fatigue and haziness one feels after flying for 18 hours. I would believe your product helps with that.
Unrelated, but the article had one of the best photos I've seen for one in a long time.
We'll take you! http://ycombinator.com/s2009.html
Join the PPCGeeks Group location tracking on Google Maps
/users and /profile could easily have extra information. a GET /users could provide a list of all users. the /users/dcurtis might be the blog or home page, while /users/dcurtis/profile is specifically the person's profile.

Having a hierarchical resource namespace makes plenty of sense in many contexts. If nothing else, it's more likely to be long lived because it makes URL redirection easier in the future if the system changes. When version 2 of the site software comes out, someone can easily redirect all the /profile urls to a legacy system or parse them into the new system. Whereas a flat namespace is much harder to migrate and keep constant.

And besides, we shouldn't confuse the two issues of readable URLs and short alias URLs. Both have very legitimate uses.
I think he got it but has no sense of humor.
"One reason universities get away with this horseshit is that they're able to take advantage of very smart people who caught an idea very early in life-- that schooling opens doors and improves one's life-- and failed to disavow themselves of it when it was no longer true."

You went too far -- education does open doors, and if we're going to have any hope for the future, we need to continue to strive for a world where that's a fact. I know that it's fashionable to bash higher education in this forum, but an economy that's driven by technological progress takes more than high-school kids who know Python and HTML. At any rate, I sincerely hope that this isn't the first generation where education no longer correlates positively with economic success.

That said, I agree that Universities are taking advantage of naive young people -- especially when it comes to PhD programs. But if we're going to have a serious discussion about the flaws in higher education system, we have to start from the premise that higher education is itself a virtue.
After seeing that headline (I'll admit I skipped the article) - I figured that Google was either making a play for twitter behind the scenes - or had been rebuffed by them.

Also - he technically has this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku
The headline could not be more misleading. IE8 cannot be removed, it can only be disabled so that the user cannot execute iexplore.exe. However, any program that makes use of the web browser control will still be able to instantiate it. And, the user can re-enable iexplore.exe at any time.
This is an interview about his personal life, though. That's the point, I think. You can read about the business aspects of Twitter anywhere.
Batman's fight to get on Facebook
But if we're going to have a serious discussion about the flaws in higher education system, we have to start from the premise that higher education is itself a virtue.

To the contrary, I would say that if we're going to have a serious discussion about the flaws in higher education system, we can correctly start from a premise that LEARNING is a virtue, a personal virtue that has positive externalities for society. But then we have to ask if institutions of higher education are effective at all, and economically efficient if shown to be effective, at providing learning. Learning is a wonderful thing, but much of learning occurs outside school walls, and some very socially useful learning doesn't gain the learner a credential such as a Ph.D.
amazon.com/books worked for me..

Imagine the namespace collisions if every product that amazon sold could shorten like that. Categories break down nicely though.. eg wii, books, even garden
Has 'cloud-computing' lost its VC luster?
How about, instead of just modding me down, you explain why this app serves a useful purpose?
If I had to guess (which I do), I'd say you were down-modded due to the way you expressed your opinion, not that anyone necessarily disagrees with you...
Incredible publicity. The daily show has mentioned it nearly every day for a week, sometimes in several minute segments. I wondered it was paid placement.
The research you end up doing, the collaborations you end up fostering, those are not possible in any other environment. Of course, a lot of learning occurs outside school boundaries, but some very important learning occurs within those walls, and that learning is hard.

Plus, not all learning (I would say the most important bits) have anything to do with economics or being socially useful, especially in the natural sciences.
You're on the wrong track. Lots of users create new accounts when they want to say something unpc. They're not all one person.
If you only had one minute to pitch your story
Oh, I see now. Makes sense. Thanks.
All operating systems today need to come with some library or framework that lays out and renders HTML and CSS, whether they have a "web browser" installed or not. It's just one of those basic things developers have come to expect to be available when creating GUI software, and personally I'd hate to see it removed as an option.

That Trident is that option makes sense to me; if it could be swapped out, though, that'd be interesting. I wonder if an interface could be written so that Gecko or Webkit could be used in place of mshtml.dll?
> Important to recognize is that while these applications can be turned off, meaning they are not loaded by the operating system or available for use, the files remain present on the hard disk in a staging area so that they can be easily turned back on again without the need to use installation media.

I hope there's a solution, first- or third-party, that wipes the staging "cache" from disk. I rather like keeping what I don't need on offline media, and, as a Mac user, I also rather like keeping down the size of my Boot Camp partition.
Maybe he used it so those watching the screen cast could follow along a little better/easier? Duh? I think it's pretty obvious he could be keyboard only if he wanted to (i.e., emacs supports and he clearly has the ability).
St Joseph Statue - How to Sell Your House
You're right that /dcurtis could have different information. But I am talking about webapps that would return a 404 for http://example.com/users . The vast majority of major apps do not use urls the way you described.

Unless you absolutely positively have to have another extra layer of url hierarchy, and you can justify it extremely well, please don't. It's just a burden on the user when they go to share/copy/read it.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
I don't think universities deliberately take advantage of either students or professors. I think the people who run them are for the most part genuinely idealistic. The problem is that universities (through lack of competition and inelasticity of demand) got to be terribly inefficient, and thus gradually and unintentionally ended up in a position where they were taking advantage of people.
well, the article talks about doctoral candidates in the humanities (I think, I may have missed any non humanities candidates, I am too tired to read the article again right now). Perhpas doctoral candidates in the hard sciences/ engineering have more options?
FYI, in the first 2 hours you can edit your posts via the direct link to make corrections like that. (And thanks for the great specifics in the grandparent post.)
Come on. Look at the word "humanities" in the title. A sociology PhD application passes your desk and goes right into the round filing cabinet.
Hm. Ok seems you are right but plzrt.me or whatever something that's as concise as possible.
CSRF vulnerability found in Gmail; Google not willing to fix it
Facebook Application on Delicious
I'd love twitterific integration.

Umm maybe you could create a dashboard widget (or desktop gadget for vista) - then I'd consider heavy use. Until then I think I will only use it when I REALLY want people to RT something.