skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the things I hate most about it is that it uses simplistic locking for profiles -- you can't have multiple firefox processes sharing a profile. It's infuriating if you have your ~ on NFS.

Safari on OS X handles it pretty decently -- you can have multiple processes (usually from using WebKit nightlies) sharing the same prefs/bookmarks/history. The only thing that pisses me off is that "Reopen all tabs from last closed session/window" gets clobbered.
The way Americans pay for college is a mess. Here's how to fix it.
Compared with some of the things American financiers were believing during the height of the bubble, elves and trolls seem downright rational.
They can always port it to JavaScript. Apple can't control what you load in MobileSafari. This type of app doesn't really need native performance, etc.
IIRC, his reason for Python is the ease and available libraries. C++ is only ever a good choice if it must be real time.
Except that I'm not talking about producing films. Yes, Pixar films are expensive because they are swinging for the fences.

That means they have many, many models, sets, textures etc that go into the production of any film, which of course increase your cost of production considerably. That's just a matter of fact.

What I have been saying is that if you take a different view, don't start out by trying to swing for the fences (you can always scale up later), essentially limit some of these choices you could probably get away with a smaller team in the beginning.

For example, lets move away from films for a second and talk about sitcoms. One of my favourite is Frasier.

Frasier has (for the most part) a very limited series of sets and characters. You have your 5 main characters, your 6 occasional supporting characters and for the most part these back and forths take place in 4 locations...

That's about 6 seasons of entertainment there for a sitcom, or about < 1 minute of Pixar animation.

That's really the kind of difference we're talking about in terms of cost of production.
Can someone please explain how these "simple" CRM's are planning on beating out Salesforce? Salesforce is not your typical 800-lb gorilla, they actually seem to change rapidly AND have the priceless appexchange network and development forums built on their product.

Are these companies trying to win via pricing? Lead Log doesn't publicly post pricing, but if it's competitive with High Rise, it IS significantly cheaper than Salesforce user-for-user.
Several things I've learned from studying nutrition lately:

1. The rabbit hole is deep. What's "healthy" depends how far you want to go down.

2. We don't know know how to eat healthy, just healthier. And what's healthier depends on the resolution you're looking at the body. Also you're particular goals and biology.

3. There's still a lot of conflict about basic things.

4. My old sense of black and white, bad foods and good foods, got destroyed; it wasn't nuanced.

For instance, even spinach and flaxseed contain cyanide [1]. Though not enough to kill you, in extremes they could. That was shocking, and just one example.

With eating and sleeping consider leptin levels. [2][3][4] Some people, because of obesity and overweightedness, in the long-term especially, have awkward leptin sensitivity. Also there are individual differences in genes and gene expression, or overall biology. And exercise factors too.

And that's just one hormone. You add insulin and how that reacts with leptin, and how that's effected by macro-nutrient balance, et cetera. At best I consider myself an intermediate in nutritional knowledge, considering what we now know. The next step up from interpreting papers on PubMed is producing them.

[1] http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts8.html

[2] http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/89/11/5762

[3] http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-docum...
No wing-tip vortices.
Would be really nice if this made it into the next Firefox release. Would put a nice little wrench in the entire domain parking business.

Too many domains being wasted by parking and trying to sell for thousands of dollars. This would allow the value of a parked domain needs down to give startups and developers a chance to buy them at a reasonable cost. Hopefully Mozilla helps in this endeavor.
Nitpick: the title should be "Who needs funding when you actually charge customers?"

My mother pays something like $50 a year for online greeting cards. Do the quick extrapolation on how many mothers there are in America, how many of them use the Internet, and how many you can reasonably convert. Yeah, $40 million for a market leader doesn't seem that unreasonable now does it.

You will not get invited to give conferences at The Future Of Web 3.0 2012 if you make greeting cards. Nobody will ask you for your insights on scaling, principally because at your scale it will be a boring engineering problem with well-understood solutions. You'll just put smiles on a few mothers' faces and, oh, well, there might be a little bit of money involved.

I think I've mentioned this a few times, but to say it one more time: grown women have money, too, and nobody in tech wants it. Instead of building stuff they want and charging money for it (money they have and spend), we want to push CPM levels to about a quarter (trending towards dimes!) while making social networks for the same people who are already members of six.
> loses himself in unimportant stuff,

If you mean he is perfecting an aspect of the code that isn't important, that is a notorious engineer/Asperger's problem, which is a great strength when properly directed.

It's hard for me to believe that a software developer would have no empathy for this character flaw, so maybe that's not what you meant.
that's all true, and it's probably at least partially why apple isn't letting the app through. it would be nice if they had told the submitters that, though.
Smalltalk, no?
They really were an under-served and unappreciated market. Everyone we got funding went after the cool kids. Meanwhile we were in the business of creating the cutest smiley-face pages. Not as cool, but more profitable.
Judging by the fact that he's hanging out on HN + a quick search for his name reveals that he's probably this guy:

http://joshuastreet.com/
http://twitter.com/JoshuaStreet

Doesn't look like there's any connection to LessAccounting...

I guess the moral is: don't let your first post on HN be laudatory towards a startup. Damn vultures :)
Thanks. I was very conflicted about our obscurity. On the one hand I saw it as a way of keeping competitors away. On the other hand, I felt like the Rodney Dangerfield of the dotcom space. All the cool kids were on magazine covers and I couldn't even get into their parties.
It's true that it's not a great engineering problem, but a great business opportunity no doubt. I think your title change suggestion is accurate.
Top marginal rate is 35% now.

The SSI stops after 105k (or so), so it is immaterial, because the marginal fed tax rate is 28% at that point.

True that state income tax is a big one, for some states. So I completely didn't bundle that in my estimate.

Phaseout deductions never _increase_ marginal tax rates, so also immaterial.

Nevertheless, exceeding 50% marginal tax rate with today's tax rates is unlikely.
I actually quit using stumbleupon but I had heard that it wasn't getting updates that frequently and that their growth rate has been slowing down a lot. Doing a quick search I didn't see anyone stating bad things about it, so I don't have anything to point to but I recall hearing it discussed.
Alienating or even marginalizing the individual is the worst thing you could do. You need to act soon and make sure it is the right decision. It is bad for morale for the rest of your team to have 'the common enemy' even if it gives something to share.

That being said, booting off the person may not be the best course. He has to be good at something or this would have come up sooner right? Leverage his strengths if you can. If your manager is competent, have him address the individual in the context of self-improvement. This can be a great way to re-motivate someone or send a signal that things are not working out.

In any case, act soon and with tact. The last thing you want is an angry and incompetent person on your team.
In fact, this article missed a very strong research team in this area. Take a look at how ATT Labs has achieved so far.

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

Try the demo.
I still don't get Twitter. I'm sorry, I've tried.
I know that it's considered hopelessly square to be behind the twitter trend, but I just don't appreciate it. Maybe it's my phone device? Do most people use twitter desktop software? What do you do about people who constantly tweet, half the time garbage and half the time gems? It's just a constant barrage.
Mercurial 1.2 out with translations, a pure Python implementation, and more
Nice introduction, Andrew. You established credibility and got right into WIIFM (What's in it for me)

There sure are a lot of folks helping startups. I've got a stack of books on startups, e-commerce, and innovation. Hopefully you can distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack. Best of luck. Look forward to hearing more from you.
Divvyshot [YC W09]: Photo-sharing for groups
If you can't go into specifics, can you at least go into generalities? What sorts of things about Excel give rise to the worst stuff you've observed?
Sorry, Belarus cannot even claim "developed". I saw that style design on homebuilt aircraft at the 1999 EAA Oshkosh Airshow. "Commercialized" may be the only verb left to claim...
Congratulations. Looks very attractive!

If you can find a way to help users "move"/import their stuff from their current service to yours, then it would be really great.
Also if you consider adding service like printing or something...
magic numbers that you have a hell of a time tracking down the source of - links all over the place. Are they still valid or have they gone bad due to all the copy/pasting? etc etc

Would it help to have a sheet of centralized assumptions (constants, magic numbers, etc.) that people could link to from any spreadsheet?

Would it help to be able to reuse formulas from another sheet without copy/pasting them? i.e. link in such a way that you can fill in your own numbers, but keep the original logic?

Would it help to be able to "lock down" certain models that people could use to do their analysis, but not make arbitrary changes to?

Would it help to be able to build some computations in a spreadsheet and wrap them up as a function that other spreadsheets could call (passing in their own arguments)?

I'm interested in what can be done to raise the level of abstraction (and consistency) without giving up the spreadsheet UI which is so productive for many users.
Also, This Week in Virology.

http://www.twiv.tv/
A long approval process doesn't imply rejection. I submitted my first app mid September 08. It was finally let into the app store a few days before Christmas. I just got a nice check from APPL yesterday so don't lose hope!
The Term "Free" - An Open Source Thought
What you are seeing is "drive by committee" that is so cancerous in companies.

Are you seriously telling me that not one soul at Apple has thought, "Well, silly us, we are making enough money that we can regularly run AppStore commercials on TV and we are also an amazingly innovative company. So let's build a transparent system that works really hard with those developers that are making us so much money."

Someone really needs a spanking. I'd be happy to provide.
Those hot girls on the photos will definitely boost sing-up rate.
The only ones I listen to with any regularity are Stack Overflow, Wait! Wait! Don't tell me! (http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=518...) and This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Podcast.aspx).

I was listening to Planet Money (http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=944...) but it got hard to keep up a few months ago - it should have been a weekly podcast, not daily, IMHO. I've also occasionally listened to Hanselminutes (http://www.hanselminutes.com/) and Herding Code (http://herdingcode.com/), and while they focus on Microsoft technologies a little too much for my taste, they'll do in a pinch.
If it isn't, don't read the article ... then state what the article is actually about.

At the very least I hope that you would read the article before deciding what it's actually about.
A couple of themes emerge:

1. The stuff they predicted using dedicated technologies (video pay phones, etc.) ended up being built on top of general purpose platforms (laptops). The fax-from-the-beach thing is another example, although one would just send an email today.

2. AT&T tended to predict evolutionary change when more profound change actually happened. Payphones, faxes, etc. Perhaps marketers realized that they had to attach the wow factor to something concrete that everybody already understood.

What they didn't predict (or at least tell us about) was that voice would become just another service on a general network (Skype). I guess this has only partially happened, but it's clearly the endgame.
Python is correct. It's promoting to bignum, while the others are using floats, presumably, and passing them off as integers. I think they ought to display 1.0333147966386144e40.

Your average wannabe-banker/Wharton undergrad has never heard of Python, however, but has used Excel. Quants are familiar with Python, but they get harder problems.

Most quants don't, however, get to use Python. For some inexplicable reason, a lot of them are mired in C++, of all languages, and tend to be poor-to-mediocre programmers. There are exceptions, though; the one I worked at used an FP language and had excellent programmers.
This is but one impressionistic view of 1975 whose claims should not be taken literally. A few examples...

no video games except pong -- The Odyssey home system was sold as early as 1972.

Word processors were still 10 years away -- WordStar for CP/M came out in 1978; for DOS in 1982. AppleWriter for Apples in 1979.

No one thought to make a sequel to a movie just because it made a lot of money -- Ten Bond films had already been made by 1975.

The work week was five hours shorter -- This still varies a lot by region and industry; there are plenty of people who work 9-5 or less. And long-term studies of work vs. leisure time suggest Americans were working slightly fewer hours in 2003 than 1975. (See for example Figure 1 on p. 9 of this survey: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1233842 .)
Can you be more specific as to what you mean when you say lame? Do you mean that I'll basically end up being the guy who does all of the boring-routine work and won't be able to use my creativity or something? Or are you referring to the scandalously low, poverty-like wage companies try to force us into. One company I worked for paid me $10 an hour as an 'intern', but gave my peers (who had just graduated and were really no more experienced than me other than a degree) something around $25-$30.

I ask because at this point I feel like an industry day job is a very possible option.
I never got that unless you followed about 4 people.
I've heard of a number of ways of solving this. I don't like json in blobs since you can't query or index the blob data effectively.

I propose the attribute table pattern, which I've used to decent amount of success. It's not as sexy as ff's, but it is simple, easily cached, and queried. Here's an example schema of attributes you could set against a userId.

CREATE TABLE `Attributes` (

`userId` int(11) NOT NULL,

`attributeId` int(11) NOT NULL,

`charValue` varchar(512) default NULL,

PRIMARY KEY (`userId`,`attributeId`),

) ENGINE=InnoDB;

CREATE TABLE `AttributeMap` (

`attributeId` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,

`attributeName` varchar(64) NOT NULL,

PRIMARY KEY (`attributeId`),

KEY `attributeName` (`attributeName`)

) ENGINE=InnoDB;
I am working on a new vetnure with some friends, payed for from the cash flow/savings from their other project. It's the best system. Eat out less, build more things.
The design looks really nice. I already use drop box with friends to accomplish pretty much the same thing, and it wasn't immediately apparent what the added value would be to using Divvyshot.

Also, the first time I went to the upload page I got a "unknown certificate. trust/don't trust" dialog which disrupted the otherwise excellent UX. Mac OS X 10.5.6, Safari 4 if that's relevant.

Overall great work. I think this will be really appealing for people looking to share photos without any setup.
to clear up any misunderstandings I'm sure he is talking about the girls on the beach and not the kids at the birthday party
I am actually genuinely excited to use this

There bringing something new(er) to photo sharing which is awesome
Props on using a quick sign up box.

I would take out the "free" from the Alpha account, might turn away people who'll think you'll need to pay later.
It looks like the pure-Python fallback implementations were a big deal for the (nearly resurrected) Jython project, in particular:

http://fwierzbicki.blogspot.com/2009/02/progress-with-mercur...
Diet or no diet...it doesn't really matter. What matters is putting in the effort to work out every day. Most workout diets will have you eat way more than you do right now anyways.
Here's my 10 second review: I have no clue why I should want to use this instead of flickr.

I'm sure there's some reason -- but whatever it is, you might want to point it out more clearly on the front page, because otherwise those 10 seconds are probably all you're going to get from most people.
Microsoft to lay off H-1B visa holders
Hey guys, it's Sam (divvyshot's creator).

The site's a piece of crap right now, but hopefully things will be better over the coming weeks. Release early and frequently, right? If you find any huge bugs email me: so / at / divvyshot / dot / com

Features we've built and haven't yet launched include:

- A Desktop client (PC & Mac)

- Twitter, Flickr, & Facebook synchronization

- Facebook application

- An iPhone app (you can see real time what's happening at the event you're attending and push photos to the event from your phone)

- Snipshot photo editing
I'm a little confused - really great execution (!!) but I don't see the business sense. I'm not sure how this differentiates itself from other file hosting/photo sharing sites. For instance can you have private photos on Flickr? At the very least there are things like drop box as mentioned. What about people who tend to share photos through Facebook? Besides which, what is the monetisation strategy? Freemium? What features will be added?

There must be some sense or it wouldn't have got YC investment - maybe the idea is to execute this so well that Google buys you you as I don't think they have a good photo sharing method yet and it would be a great way to expand?
My assumption is that the teacher should optimize the class on the amount of the course material the students learn, and how well they retain that knowledge. As far as I can tell, the goal of all of the teachers I know is to get the students to learn the material the best they can, so they structure the class around that ideal. I fully understand that some students just want the credit, or to just get by with whatever they deem to be sufficient knowledge, but I don't think it would be generally beneficial to structure the class to give them incentives to do so.
I agree whole heartedly (trust me on this) but even if it is a better system it will never be implemented.

Be a cold day in H*ll when it is

I am depressed to pay for college :/
The A-Z of Programming Languages:  Interview with creator of Bourne shell, or sh
Quizlet (http://quizlet.com/about/) seems to be successful and is run by a teen. I'm not sure if they've taken funding though.
About the frontpage question:
"You and your friends went to a party. where do you put the photos? Right here!"
--- ehh wrong, personally I'd put my photos on facebook. I have an account there, my friends do as well, so I don't get it... sorry :S
LOL

I wish these social sites would just stop that would be awesome.

Facebook and Myspace got it for now
Youtube Blocked in China as Tibet Anniversiary approaches.
No matter which language you choose for productivity, I would start with the exercises in the Little Schemer or Little MLer. They're disarmingly simple while still challenging your brain to shift into a recursive/applicative mindset.

As for what functional language you want to end up using...well, it depends on your goals.

I'm personally partial to the family of languages which use ML-style type systems, which include OCaml, F#, and Haskell.

The core of F# and OCaml are very similar. F# has better libraries whereas OCaml has both a more powerful type system and more powerful module system.

Haskell is less straight forward than OCaml and F# and has many more esoteric features you need to learn before being considered an expert. Nonetheless, many have found the process of learning to be a mind-expanding process. Also, the Haskell community is much larger and more vibrant than what you'll find with any other statically typed functional language.
build it yourself. If you believe in the idea that much, take the time to learn how to do it.
Poll: Does your startup use pirated software?
Do you have any pirated software on any of your startup related hardware?
PS3, 360, Wii? You're using IBM pretty much directly.

Microsoft ain't going anywhere.
Pool Party - EC2 deploying/monitoring/scaling with Ruby
read this at the bottom of the page:
Hurry! Only 738 free alpha accounts available! After the first 1,000 accounts, we're going to charge for storage.
I think that this is certainly much welcomed to us Atlantans. I am sorry that I missed it, but happy to have learned about it here.
I just realized that the email field isn't shown so pg can see them but other people can't for people applying to YC.

Sorry about that. I put it in my profile now.
Google Watchmen Shenanigans?
For about 6 minutes, Google.com, and all Google.com search queries displayed blank pages. For a moment, I thought my connection was timing out, up until I checked the page source and all I saw was

<!--squid-->

Watchmen fans at Google?
Maybe the karma accrued to the submitter should equal upvotes to the article, minus how many linkbait clicks it receives (with a floor of zero).
Apple Ads 1997-2001 [video]
Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships
Nokia and Facebook: The Cool Combination
Startup executive compensation survey going global to include China, India, Israel & UK
Developer Burnout Stories
For ri.ms and tinyarro.ws, we've actually seen significant reduction in spam just by banning abusive IP addresses. So far, that has had the biggest bang for the buck in terms of dropping spam considerably.

In other words, we periodically do human review and obvious spammers are IP banned. It's a neverending problem, but they don't use so many IPs that things are out of control.

If you do come up with a better approach that doesn't ruin usability, I'd love to hear it, too!
And beat the free storage competitors?
Personally, I'm all for any options that bring down the incentives for parking domains.
Divvyshot centers on events -- not albums by individual photographers. You can quickly post a few pics and get folks uploading their photos to the same event with almost no effort. Check out the immediate photo upload -- just drag and drop into your browser! And you can click to download a zipfile of all photos in an event, at full resolution. Think of it as a new spin on photo sharing, similar to how Posterous is a new spin on blogging.
Your branding is at odds w/ your mission statement. High res photos speaks to pro-sumers. Party pics speaks to grainy iphone shots.
I believe Divvyshot is largely for grouping high-res photos centered around events (multi person gatherings with more than one camera)... and I guess it isn't as clear as it should be. Any idea on how to convey that message more clearly?