skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I highly doubt changing the name would do much. This isn't social media we're talking about, where a name can make or break the company. In real world businesses, people go above and beyond the name - they actually look at what's being offered and if it's better than the competitors. As of now, Revolution Money isn't that revolutionary or gamechanging enough for people to switch from paypal or whatever they're currently using.
Marriages in America frequently break up over money, i.e., one partner wants to spend more than the other. I wonder if the Indian system helps avoid this problem.

I don't know about the Indian system, but I know in some East Asian cultures it is normal for the wife to run the household finances. That means the primary spender is financially literate, has a feeling of responsibility, and knows the couple's financial status. Contrast that with the US, where wives often have a very vague grasp of the couple's finances, yet are in charge of most of the spending. American wives can run a man into the ground and then blame him; East Asian wives take pride in maintaining healthy household finances. The downside is that a man can become financially irresponsible if his wife's level of control makes him feel emasculated. The ideal is a true feeling of joint responsibility, and neither system ensures that. It has to emerge from the trust and good faith of both spouses.
> "but the searchable internet is just not growing that fast over the next 20 years."

Please defend that statement.
Lenovo discontinues automatic System Update for ThinkPads
That's not the point.

He's questioning Soros' motives for uttering the statement, not whether the statement is correct or not.
A Twitter Rant and the Twidiots
No, it affects people who play the game of adsense/affiliate arbitrage - that is, people who find keywords in which the average CPC of an adwords ad is less than the average return from the affiliate (which is both very risky, and very profitable to those who succeed).

Amazon is just trying to take them out of the equation, which makes perfect sense because they provide nothing of value to Amazon; they are just middlemen who drive up the cost of Amazon's CPC campaigns and collect commissions from customers that would have ended up with Amazon anyway.
The outrage is palpable. http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Special_...
People always say that, but it applies only in an ordinary, garden-variety recession. In the great depression, payrolls started dropping around May of 1930, roughly 8 months after the financial contagion began (where are we now? 7 months after the financial contagion began). Then they kept dropping for about 2 years. Each time someone was laid off, they spent less, which meant some other business took in less revenue, which meant they had to lay off people, who in turn spent less...

It's too soon to tell, but I'd bet this recession is a lot more like the Great Depression than the 91 or 01 recessions, or even the 80-82 and 73-75 recessions. 91 and 01 were fueled by the bursting of economic bubbles in specific sectors of the economy (S&L and tech, respectively). 73-75 was an exogenous supply-side shock (oil crisis), and 80-82 was because of monetary policy (Volcker lifting rates to squeeze out inflation). Both 29-32 and 08-?? came about because the consumer is tapped out - they've taken on more debt than they can possibly service, so there needs to be a period of deflation while those debts are unwound and prices readjust.
Books and Blogs For Startups
That's fine by me. I'm sure some of the things they'll discuss will be new to people. At least they're trying to help.

That said, I'll agree with Homer when in that episode, he said:

"Alright, alright! I'll go to clown college!"
Setting up nginx to reduce load and memory usage for your Django / Python website.
UK Internet records to be stored for a year
Why aren't people up in arms about this? I don't get it.
Some of the people that called the financial crisis are perpetual bears. That said, many of their reasons for this bear market are sound. The bleeding has slowed a bit but the fundamentals just aren't there. Unemployment is still high, credit is still in a crunch, and banks are still over-leveraged. All that AND we haven't been hearing about the coming Alt-A mortgage flood.
Tutorial: Building an embedded Linux system with a web server
2nd article in the series on adding a simple web server:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/articles/AT2300227928.html
Nifty little javascript regex tool
The Bank of England is not a publicly traded corporation, so it cannot be shorted at all. It is the central bank of the United Kingdom, which functions very much like the Federal Reserve in the United States.

George Soros bet the Bank of England would have to raise interest rates by sellings short several billion pounds. When the Bank of England succumbed to reality and devalued the pound, Soros profited about 10%.

He and other serious investors profit from being rational when everyone else is doing dumb things. The idea that banks are doing dumb things today should not come as a surprise and should not be much of a hard sell.
Yes. Language warring with extra nerd-rage.
The core idea of this article has merit but the analysis of the topic is abysmal.

Ford invented the assembly line, we're calling it "Staged Event Driven Architecture (SEDA)". End result, ninety three seconds to manufacture a car vs one to two days, and over one million cars produced every year.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say there's never been a way to assemble an entire car in 93 seconds. It takes almost that long to put the lug nuts on two wheels, if you're fast. I believe the ideas of retirement rate and total time to perform are being conflated here. You could get the same thing with 930 teams performing the task the slower, manual way. There are obvious speed benefits to specialization, but the two ideas should not be confused.

First and foremost, stop thinking about time to complete. Think workflow instead. There is no reason to hold up the front of the line if someone else can do the work later. By deferring the work you cut down your response time, which means snappy user experience, and it also means that you're able to take advantage of the latest industry buzzwords: elastic computing, and real-time web.

Time to complete is crucial if you need to make a decision about step two with data from step one. For example, consider an order flow: you have to decide whether or not to ship a product based on a credit card approval. Furthermore, if the card is not approved, you'd like to provide the opportunity for your customer to edit their information, rather than just wonder why their widget never arrived.

Also, elastic computing is orthogonal to this. If you have 1000 concurrent order flows you could still assign an entire machine to each order flow: very much the "one team per car" approach derided above.

All of the sudden, the cost of hiring / firing another server is zero, and the datacenter (factory) costs are swallowed by the provider

Vendors are not charities and costs are never "swallowed" by a profitable vendor. While analysts love the hand-wavy approach of "just build everything IN THE CLOUD", a lot of workloads that would be ideal inside of EC2 (for instance) are great... until you consider the costs. Just allocating one machine and leaving it idle all month is (IIRC) $70ish/mo: vastly more expensive than a non-cloud approach. The win comes when your workload takes advantage of what the cloud providers can do cheaper than you can. Sometimes this means parallelizing the old dumb way instead of spending the time and money engineering a cloud compliant web-2.0+ system.
Miyazaki an "anime master"?
This is just an anecdotal recommendation, I don't have any data to support this. During my time as a research assistant at GT I seem to recall hearing more from/about CMU people than Stanford.
So the idea is to provide a service where people can submit articles or blog posts or threads and print them in binding?
Use an API combined with Lulu? Probably wouldn't be too hard.
Ask HN: Supplement for a CS degree?
I was wondering if someone might be able to give me an outline of the courses/topics that are integral to understanding computer science from the bottom up.

Basically I'm looking for a solid "self-taught" curriculum to supplement a four year BS in Computer Science. I know the topic of Computer Science is vast, so I'll just say that I'm interested in acquiring a deep understanding of the fundamental knowledge required to learn high level topics in CS.

I would assume there is a healthy dose of math in the mix.

Links to content are appreciated.
I feel like you're arguing with a straw-man here. I've not said that most sites should avoid relational databases. I've said that there exist applications where RDBMSes are less than ideal and graph / key-value systems seem to be a better fit. We seem to agree there. We can argue over how large that slice is, but since we'd both be making numbers up, it seems rather pointless.

Your business seems to be invested in pushing out commodity RDBMSes. Mine is focused on applications that need super fast graph traversal. It's no shocker that we have a different take on this. :-)
When did you last read a print newspaper? (Me, I can't remember.)
The Python versus Java comparison is a red herring, I think. While Java is more verbose than Python, and some of that verbosity is from its type system, not all of it is.

A better comparison would probably be Python versus Scala, or Python versus OCaml.
Flagged. This is a lot of biased rambling. Assigning arbitrary low scores because the main character's never female? Maybe the fact that Pixar has a strong male team of writers/animators makes them feel like they are better able to write from the male perspective? Or is it sexist for men to favor writing men? Why don't more female writer/animators enter the scene? Then to knock them for finally having a female lead because it's a fairy tale? Christ.

Why not pick on Dreamworks? They don't have that many female lead movies either, not in their animation. And David Lynch didn't have many female leads either, not until his movie with the lesbian lovemaking scene. Coen Brothers? Stanley Kubrick? All sexists?
Ask HN: How to Hire Hackers
JamLegend is about to hire some interns for the summer and we'd like your advice.

We're about to conduct some interviews and are still receiving applications. Honestly, this would be our first time bringing folks in. We don't know how to go about this the right way, so we wanted to seek out HN advice advice about Dos and Don'ts in the world of hiring and share with everyone.

Since we've just begun our process, we've come upon some tips on HN and elsewhere that we thought would be nice to share. See the comments below separated by stage (sorting resumes, interviewing, puzzles, etc.). We'd really appreciate the help because we want to make sure we're bringing on the right people.

Edit: I took off links so I'm not hawking my wares like a Chinese DVD merchant, we're honestly interested in getting advice on how to hire correctly.
New Yorker. The Atlantic. Harpers. Slate and Salon are a rung below that. Wired doesn't always totally suck. I'd mention Pitchfork but there's a lot of hate against them.

Online-only I could only name the ones I read, namely Smashing Magazine and I Love Typography.
I explicitly said I was referring to the end of your comment ("fuck you, you pompous twit."). That is not taking him to task, and that's what I objected to.
For Fun-

Anti-rockstar thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255587

The ultimate secret to hiring:
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=hire.txt
8x10 Tasveer,Movie,mp3 song,wallpapers,posters,review,cast
Watch 8x10 tasveer an akshay kumar movie. Now when 8x10 tasveer an akshay kumar movie is relased you were thinking of download the songs of 8x10 tasveer an akshay kumar movie and really its a really good thinking so if you think same so don't waste and time for download8x10 tasveer an akshay kumar movie its free here 8x10 tasveer an akshay kumar movie is a akshay fight trend back movie. Akshay can be seen as doing his tradmark stunt for the movie8x10 tasveer an akshay kumar movie. Sences like water stunts, Vechle stunts, stunts and only stunt no comedy.
Ask HN:  Feedback Please - TapInko.com
TapInko is the online Market Place for Traditional Media, we were a DreamIt Ventures company last summer and have spent a considerable amount of time understanding the 'offline' advertising world. Though this is the first version of the product, we have many features in the works. I will be giving an online WebEx tutorial this Friday at 3:00 pm (est) and invite anyone to watch. If you are interested please shoot me a message.

Thanks,

- Pete Groverman -
Pgroverman@tapinko.com

Some things about the venture:

1) We have an executed agreement with The Greater Media Group of Freehold NJ, they have begun creating profiles for their different outlets

2) We are based out of Philadelphia

3) Our goal is to make advertising...easy

4) Buyers of Adspace can use their same account to also become Sellers of Adspace (ie. a restaurant desires to place an advertisement but also sell advertisements in their menus)

5) How We Differentiate from Google Print Ads:
http://www.phillypreneurs.com/2009/02/david_vs_gooliath/

6) If you have a publication or outlet that you would like to sell advertising on (even as a sticker on the back of your computer) please feel free to make a profile.

7) Business Model: No setup costs, no annual subscription fees, we charge only 7% per completed transaction to the seller. This charge includes all banking fees and credit card costs.
Puzzles:

We've been told to give simple puzzles during the interview (intro CS) and to not make puzzles a requirement to apply. Nevertheless, here were some prominent ones we found

- Justin.tv puzzles: http://jtvproblems.weebly.com/ (problems for
flash developers too...)
- FB Puzzles: http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php
- Meebo puzzles: http://www.meebo.com/jobs/#web
- ITA Puzzles: http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzles07.html
- ICFP contests
Oh, and here's the source for my pessimism. I've been following this website for a while now. The guy that runs it is a computer hacker to boot! I'm a big fan of his analytical skills and refusal to make predictions, just provide the numbers.

http://dshort.com/
Being a software startup in a recession
Interviews- two resources we found here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=89615

Joel Spolsky's Guerilla Guide to Interviewing Developers:
- Version 3.0: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...

We honestly don't know what were great interview questions or were terrible ones. For example, google asks "can you teach us something?" while James Hong of HotorNot said once that he would have loved to asked the question "If you had to rob a bank, how would you do it?"
IBM asking employees to outsources themselves
Selling It-

Joel Spolsky's Field Guide to Developers (or what a developer wants)
- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/Field...
Dealing with Resumes:

Joel Spolsky's Sorting Resumes
- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SortingResumes.html
Video of Ryan Singer of 37Signals giving a talk on Value Judgements in Interface Design
Just because the bubble lasted longer than "perpetual bears" thought it would, does that mean their analysis was wrong? For instance, Andy Beal, the banker Forbes profiled (that was at the top of HN), saw the crazy deals being made in 2004 and got out of the market. If for the last 4-5 years you'd heard him argue that the fundamentals did not justify the credit bubble, would you call him a perpetual bear? The same happened with George Soros in 1997. He recognized that the stock market had become an enormous bubble, and he began shorting it. He lost a huge sum of money because the bubble went on for three more years. Was his analysis incorrect?

No one likes to hear that the party is over, or that things won't go back to the way they were in our lifetimes. During the bubble, people try to marginalize those opinions by calling them "perpetual bears". But we're finding out that they were right. It will probably take years for banks and households to fix the holes in their balance sheets. Even if GDP stops contracting, a "recovery" will likely be so anemic that it will feel like a recession. And job losses will continue to pile up. I'm afraid we haven't hit bottom yet - and maybe aren't even particularly close.
Best places to post- Aside from the HN startups, so far, we've found the biggest pickup to be from Craigslist, Snaptalent, Startuply, Startupers, and JobScore. Others have said we're likely going to work off referrals (our personal networks).
Most governments (city, county, state, and even national) are required to post all requests for proposals (RFPs) publicly and consider all proposals they receive. As with any business or political process, it helps if you know people.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=city+RFPs%7Cstate+RFPs%7Cfederal+RFPs
HTML 5 is two things: a codification of how browsers parse documents and handle errors, and a slew of new features for HTML and JavaScript.

The first part is more of a set of guarantees that browser vendors can agree upon, and I believe it's largely based on IE's behavior.

The new features are already slowly trickling into browsers. For example, Firefox, Opera, and Safari all implement <canvas>. There are a number of other features that are already implemented in browsers, which you can read about here: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Implementations_in_Web_browsers.

So, right now some new features are closer to the mainstream than others, especially where there are 3rd party implementations for IE (like ExplorerCanvas, and Google Gears which will probably have HTML5 APIs at some point). I wouldn't hesitate to play around with these new technologies, especially at the rate they're being implemented.
When the book "Best of HN 2009" sells, who gets money? The people who wrote the comments? HN? The business that printed the book?
It says I can't see go to the webpage because I'm not using a supported browser. I'm using Firefox 3 on linux. However, I can see the webpage if javascript is off, but not much is there.
Your UI needs a little work.

The results to be specific, they don't tell me much without reading for more than 10 seconds, try showing ad rates, available slots, etc.
I met an English professor this weekend who was interested in how to best archive one's digital life. He recently went through the last N years of his email, copied the most treasured or important ones, and then had them bound into a book.

It seems like a pretty cool idea.
Isn't the problem that no one wants to rent the apartments for $520/month and no one has any idea when someone will want to rent them?
Awesome Idea.
Finding freelance jobs: Sites for talented techies
These days just about everyone is feeling the financial pinch. If you're lucky enough to have a day job, chances are you've at least had thoughts of moonlighting. Here are 6 sites that promise to help you put a little cash in your pocket.
Interesting analogy. At the end of the day, however, what are we trying to achieve from this model? It seems like maybe the author is after faster production time. While this has its commercial advantages (as the author points out in his slide presentation) it's not necessarily the bottom line for every application.

The article finishes with, "Having said that, we still have a thing or two to learn from the physical world." I would argue the reverse in this case. My problem with the assembly line is that its bottom line is only speed, without stopping to think of time vs. product diversification. Search queries in the cloud aren't streamlining the process to respond the same every time (that's 1.0) they are dynamic (2.0). But the physical world assembly line is very much static.

Shouldn't we be applying cloud principles to physical world examples? Why isn't buying a car like buying a computer from apple.com or dell.com? Take a base model, tweak the specs to be personalized, and hit "make this for me". The cloud assembly line would then adjust real time to create the personal model. 93 seconds a car? Probably not. Higher rate of sales? Most likely.
That is correct. Still, it's profitable and runs pretty much on its own. Our free -> premium conversion is pretty good and keeps going up. We've hit the bullseye as far as feature set for our target market. We just need to advertise better and get more signups. I guess that's true of most startups, though.
Yes. I, too, really wish that places would stop calling themselves or their training programmes "university" inappropriately. A university is a centre of research, a place for deep and distinguished study. It is not a place for cheap training courses in pretty wrapping, and it is insulting to those who spend several years of their lives dedicated to learning at a real university to pretend that a few videos from a small commercial group is even on the same scale.

And anyone who presumes to teach others had better learn to write better than the first paragraph of that blog post first.
A Hospital is Offering Digital Health Records
Why go to HN? Why the middle man?
Nor do rains of super-Exocets.
A Cloudy Future
Sorry to bother you folks, different web authors licence their stuff with such a variation of licenses that it would be practically impossible to sell customed collections of printed articles.

That is kind of funny, because it wold be quite easy to more than compensate lost revenue from adds.
this answers some questions (not being sarcastic)
Often I wonder if people are attacking the wrong problem.

Personally, my "DB" problems mostly revolve around SQL the language, as opposed to the RDBMS model. SQL is a piss poor language for what most developers want to accomplish.

1) SQL queries are not composable, and it's a bear to make more complex queries by building on top of existing queries. i.e. I have a query to find all customers who live in CA. Now I want to find the list of customers who live in CA and bought product Foo in the last year. There are many tools like ActiveRecord and SQLAlchemy that attempt to sweep some of the complexity under the rug, but nothing comes close to covering it in the general case, and once it breaks you're back to writing SQL by hand. I blame the complexity of the language syntax.

2.) The SQL model is declarative, which is nice when it works, but really sucks when it doesn't. Being able to look at a query and know whether it is fast or not depends highly on your DB vendor and product version, and is basically impossible without the EXPLAIN command. Writing efficient SQL requires you know that your vendors optimizes this command, but not that command, but only in versions 8.2 and later.

3.) Sometimes, I really really want to call map, filter and reduce on my dataset to write my own queries. In some cases, it is much simpler than a page of SQL. Yes, this isn't purely relational, but I don't care. I want fast, simple access to my data, and preferably in the same language I'm using for development . No programming paradigm (imperative, OO, declarative, functional) is perfectly applicable in all situations. So why does SQL declare that declarative style is the One True Way to get access to your data?
"Being good at all three may be possible, but being optimal at all three is probably impossible."

Why?
We will enhance the site as we continue to move forward, thank you for pointing this out.