skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hello Luc,

immagine you want to store millions of SMS messages into a memcached or Redis server. Memory usage can be a problem, compressing this data with Smaz you can use half the number of servers needed otherwise. The same works for URLs as well. Compression examples against URLs:

'http://google.com' compressed by 59%
'http://programming.reddit.com' compressed by 52%
'http://github.com/antirez/smaz/tree/master' compressed by 46%
The joke tomorrow will be that this announcement was a joke and all the submissions were a total waste.
Can interpretive dance save NASA?
Key to FMyLife's Success?
FMyLife.com was registered on 2009-01-18. Thats a little over two months ago.

According to the Alexa ranking system, its already at 2,508.

As far as I'm concerned, I've never seen any web site gain such immense popularity so quickly.

My question to you, is what about the site made it so popular so fast? is it repeatable? And lastly where is the business model?
I enjoyed your manifesto on why seatbelts in cars are bloatware.
An excellent tool for the brightness issue is f.lux: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/
One more thing, those who get the best names will have an edge. So hurry up to get your piece of land or your app will end up with names like iPokrFaze or iChezz4Kidz.
All VC firms have the "we may steal your idea" caveat, which is actually the "we may invest in another company who has a similar idea if their implementation or business plan is more viable" caveat.
"[...] with this kind of programming what's nice is that you can encrypt/decrypt millions of strings from /dev/urandom [...]"

How many of those pseudorandom strings are you able to compress, in general?
Web platforms aren't stagnating. What is stagnating is people's desire to give free labor for someone else's profit.
Not convinced that that's what it is. It's certainly a ~3700-year-old statement that the diagonal has length sqrt(2), but there's no evidence that it is, or was intended to be, or demonstrates that anyone had, a proof.

The author of those pages says "It amounts to a dissection of the square on the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle into pieces which can be reassembled to make up the two squares on the sides, and I can't see why the figure is exactly what it is if it weren't understood to demonstrate this." but it seems to me that even if all you want to do is write down that the diagonal is sqrt(2) then you'll need at least the square and one diagonal, and adding the other could as well be motivated by love of symmetry as by having noticed that with it there you can dissect-and-reassemble into a 2x1 rectangle or whatever.

Remarkable, none the less.
I've looked at those, and even called a few of their executives to see who's in charge of TX sales. I had a friendly response but very little follow through, it surprises me that they aren't doing more with geeks TBH. Austin may not be the valley, but I was extremely surprised that I couldn't find a dealer anywhere to try them on.

Can you tell me anything more about your experience with them? Which model do you have? Thanks!
The Alexis Ohanian presentation linked to in that post is pretty funny: http://www.businessofsoftware.org/pechakucha.aspx
its popular because it did a lot of things right. it appeals to the right crowd, its entertaining and fun, its simple to use, it created and used its own meme, and it promoted itself very effectively.
Exploring Authorize.net Payment Gateway Options and integrating it with django
No. That's not how April Fools works. That's not how Google does April Fools. Google's jokes are funny for people who don't spend their lives in front of computers. That's because they're, y'know, actually funny and not inside jokes.
I've heard of ycombinator clone in europe, called yeurope or something. So maybe times are a changing, as they say.
Yup, I speak _that_ south Indian language which is not of the same family as English.
The vanishing shopping mall
The Biggest of Puzzles Brought Down to Size
I play action video games:

Action video games improve eyesight:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540072

Seriously, I make sure that I:

1. use large displays so that I'm not squinting
2. have decent fonts to write with (Panic Sans is my current favorite for code)
3. blink a lot
4. have a lot of lutein in my diet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutein
In an industry that worships smart engineers this is pretty refreshing. I am biased being a designer but it's still a good watch for you Hackers and also a lesson for the newspaper industry (Hint: death is coming).
Hearing your account reminded me of when my eyes were burned by accidental exposure to welding light. It was quite painful, and basically felt like there was sand in my eyes for several days. The doctor used a special dye to detect the burns. Probably not the case for you unless you've had a particular exposure, but something to think about..
Agree with poster who said ambient light should match brightness of monitor. I always turn my monitor brightness/contrast WAY down so that I don't feel like I'm staring at a light bulb all day. This simple adjustment does wonders for the eyes.
I don't think the Sun are all that hard to fool :p

Here's a slightly more amusing example:

http://www.b3ta.com/interview/monkeyman/
I use a program called F.lux to automatically adjust the brightness of your screen based on the time of day and your location. It gradually dims the monitor as it gets later in the day and brightens up in the morning.

http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/
Another thing I've heard is that because things like tone of voice are not present, sarcasm is very hard to pick up in emails and online posts... but that's just silly, no one is that easily befuddled.
Free labor? With the non evil model of Ning it's not exactly free labor. Ning provides a product/service for which users pay.

Now if they did in fact merge everyone into a giant social network and then profit from it that would be pretty evil and you could then make an argument for the 'free labor' part but only if you accept that paying for ad removal constituted an agreement that your network is an 'island'.
The best thing I liked about this is not the joke itself but the reference to local time at Kiribati http://is.gd/pPHl. Now I really feel how big our small planet is! Thanks, Smashing Magazine!
Awesome article. Had me until the nonsensical graph. Some people didn't get it, though.
Easy Google Sitemap Generation With SitemapGen
One of the items that I have found particularly useful in my SEO efforts on OpenSource Release Feed is the creation and maintenance of a XML site map a.k.a the Google Sitemap. But, if you are not using Wordpress what are your options for automated sitemap generation?
Google opens free music download service in China
Point taken, I've always suspected my personal experiences are not an accurate representation of the general case.

I'm just wondering if there is a difference between the quants at partnerships where the traders had skin in the game, and the quants where the people who made tons of money had no downside risk?
SO gives power only to people who have given some indication that they are already part of the "community." Answer a few questions, get a few "points," and then you'll be able to really participate.
This would have to expire after a certain period of time, or else it will simply become a downvote. I can imagine someone making a pool of bots who randomly upvote some fraction of all comments, which will build up a pool of votes which can be punitively taken away.
I agree with you here 100%. Maybe this is a good pathway to explaining why relational databases are good ideas in much the same way as having a programming strategy that uses a backbone of pure functions. This purity-dividend is exactly why the relational model is such a good strategy for database management.

In the same way haskell lets you separate your pure functional code from your monadic code, giving you the ability to referentially transparent reasoning and construct imperative machines where you must, the RDBMS approach applies total logic programming to database management. It's frustrating because your code cannot all live in one language as it can in Haskell, but the separation of pure from impure is exactly where the value is coming from.

RDBMSs focus on values and total computations (you know they will halt, making it even easier to reason about queries than non-total functions) allows you to isolate simple logic programs from the rest of your impure non-total code.

Navigational databases don't give the same benefits because they are not value based nor are they total. They are the imperative-model of the database world, and though they are easy to write, they will end up difficult to debug, maintain, and keep coherent.
"We cannot and do not accept responsibility for protecting against the misuse or disclosure of any information unless we have expressly agreed (in writing) to do so."

Well, of course they aren't responsible for protecting your information unless they're contractually bound to do so. If you tell me something, I'm free to tell whomever I like unless we've signed an NDA. This is bog-standard; a total non-issue.
Most of this random strings will "globally" enlarge, but will locally compress. For example sequences of compressible subsequences of two-three bytes are very frequent. The remaining data that can't be compressed will stress the other code that emits verbatim uncompressed sequences.

To stress more the compression with valid sequences it's possible to use a very big HTML file and get ranges at random instead to get this strings from /dev/urandom
I can't watch the video right now, but I do have a question:

Why would we want to save the newspaper?
Journey into a Schwarzschild black hole
In this specific case time constraints had nothing to do with that.

On other occasions time constrains were a very big deal as were atomic transactions, except that NO one around had heard of the terms real time and atomic transactions. So they did a horrible job of reinventing something like a good DB.
In the 6th century BC Pythagoras' followers knew that the square root of two was irrational (couldn't be expressed as the ratio of two integers). The story goes that this messed with a lot of their theories so it was ordered to be kept a secret, and anyone who dared reveal the fact was killed.

It seems kind of funny to me that they actually had a cult/religion based on math. Instead of just accepting the existence of irrationals and attempting to update their theories - they tried to suppress the new evidence that contradicted their teachings.
I'd pay someone bits of currency if they could give me an RSS feed of my "saved" links.
Industrialized Science
Promotional T-shirts
I found promotional t-shirts very helpful for my company.
This site has many great ideas.
No, I don't want HN to turn into Reddit.

Who are you calling "the mob" here? The readers of HN who vote by their own opinion?

I agree that comments in the spirit of: "This submission should be downvoted because x, y, z" are valuable and help to preserve HN. But comments in the spirit of "This submission should be downvoted", without an explanation, are nothing but herd mentality.
That entire article sounds like pop psychology bullshit. There are far more likely explanations which don't involve implicitly claiming that before Africans even knew Europe existed, they somehow just knew they were going to be oppressed and developed backbeat-based music as a result. (Get real. Maybe you can build all of African-American culture as a reaction to slavery, I still think that simplifies beyond usefulness but whatever, but African culture in general can't be based on that, it's temporally impossible.)
> The author clearly points out he does not intend any causation.

I'd say then that 'musicthatmakesyoudumb' was a poor choice of domain name.
London cops reach new heights of anti-terror poster stupidity
Those statistics are nonsense! Check out my anecdotes!
It's popular because it's hilarious. Probably not repeatable, if only because few things are as funny as other people's happy sorrows. Business model is based on advertising, I suppose.
Wow, Hacker News is playing by Fox News rules.

The warning is to avoid situations where someone has sent intellectual property without legal basis and then feels that that property has been misappropriated. It's entirely normal for a VC to not want to hear secrets until a relationship is established precisely to avoid the possibility of being suspected of stealing ideas.

A better headline would be Google Ventures Launches with "Don't Tell Us Stuff And Then Try To Sue Us" Caveat.
Don't forget to mark a response as the "Accepted Answer", it'll give the poster some additional rep
The article was killed in any event, so it doesn't really matter. The moderators agreed it was lame.
Great first show, love that they kicked off discussion around naming and branding. It's usually one of the first issues to come to surface amongst founders, and one of the most misunderstood areas of importance in my belief.

I also think it's worth noting that the bar for consumer sites / services is set pretty high now. So while server and infrastructure costs are decreasing, one should probably put some of those costs savings into developing a great brand (very important in B2C). After all, infrastructure costs decrease with competition — marketing and branding increase. It's pretty surprising what a well-executed brand can do for you, I consider it low hanging fruit with the right person managing it; however, when mismanaged it can turn into a your own barrier.
I think if they were written deserves some emphasis there. $300 will buy you WPF Flow Diagrams. You can search github for the flowcharts written in Ruby. And, if there actually were any, they'd be free. Too bad there aren't.

Its like the commercial for profit nature of .NET filters down to the people that write code for it too.
But what would "accepting the existence of the irrationals" mean? As far as the Greeks knew, a "number" was a/b where a and b were integers.

"Accepting" that the length of a triangle was not a "number" could have all sorts of consequences, including rejection of their belief in validity of mathematical reasoning, so I'm not surprised they were scared of it.
Is this guy a conspiracy nut? He goes off the deep end in that last paragraph, and his whole blog is rife with 9/11 inside job rhetoric and new world order nuttery. He uses the phrase "conspiracy factualist" in another post. Please lets not get taken over by the 911 truth nutters like reddit.
High SAT = lying to impress others, Low SAT = truthful.

I actually, factually enjoy classical music, to the point that I voluntarily listen to it of my own free will. I've participated in a lot of musical conversations with high-SAT people. People either don't like classical and make no bones about it, or give a nod to Beethoven but cite other people they like better. (In my case, Schubert and Rachmaninoff would be the ones I cite.)

Excepting perhaps the Ninth Symphony, which if listened to properly really is a tour de force. ("Properly" is listening to the whole thing straight through with no distractions and at a decent volume level; the Ninth is designed to be a bit loud. This is not something you can do very often.)

But then, I'm conversing with adults, not adolescents trying to impress me.
Retirees Dick and Anne Saplata work out by walking around the largely empty halls of the Metcalf South Mall in Leawood, Kan. It’s likely to close soon, and there’s talk that a developer will raze the place. If the mall goes under, Dick Saplata asks, “where are we going to walk?”

Er, outside? Down a street? God forbid, in the country?
It seems pretty sarcastic.
Angels Flock Together and Offer Less
Wait, are you leaving out that block of time that comprises most of Apple's history where they made bad business decision after bad business decision?
If you know that 1/2 * base * height = the area, then the second diagonal can be seen as the height of the triangle cut by the first diagonal. Since b = 2 h,

1/2 b h = 1/2 ==> b h = 1 ==> 1/2 b b = 1 ==> b b = 2 ==> b = sqrt(2).

I can't read cuneiform so I don't know if it makes this argument.
Apple fans always move the goal posts when discussing Microsoft. The iPhone sells 17m units, and it's a hit, despite having relatively small market share. The Xbox 360 sells 28m units (about 30% market share in its generation) leads its segment, and it's not a hit somehow.

Microsoft is doing really, really well in the gaming space, in fact they lead the serious gamer market. They sell more games per unit at higher prices. They've been the clear leader in online connectivity and game distribution, with Nintendo and Sony lagging years behind them there, and they're doing a million downloads a week. They've also got the top game franchise with Halo, smashing sales records with each release.

Comparing them to the Wii is like comparing the iPhone to a free-after-contract clamshell. Of course some of the clamshells sell many more units, but that doesn't make the iPhone a dud.

And they're moving into the VOD space. They're now streaming tons of videos through Netflix and some of the built in stuff. Having a console attached to 28m TVs has given them the video distribution channel that Apple tried and failed miserably to get with the Apple TV, though I have a feeling that if that product sold 28m units you'd call it a hit.
SO is the HN for programmer discussion ++1
And the follow up might be that more people applying to Harvard (and other good schools) even if they're not really qualified for the schools (but they think they are).

America's entitlement problem (and the "we're all winners attitude" some schools teach early on) could lead to a serious education disparity. Public universities, like the one I'm currently attending for my master's, has something like a 90% acceptance rate (and a high wash out rate, as freshmen sometimes learns that college isn't all kegstands and tail gates) whereas Harvard only takes the 93rd percentile...
Makes a lot more sense for it to work this way, especially considering that people often mention more than one person in their tweets.
A major demographic in the United States has a significant nostalgic attachment to newspapers as a vehicle for information and as a driver of the public discourse. Losing that could disenfranchise a group of people who still comprise a large portion of public opinion. More importantly, those views might not survive to be digitized if we don't soften the death spiral facing print media, so we all lose out - even if we don't consume archaic forms of information dissemination.
Thanks for this exhaustive response, I usually feel a blurry vision when I work for more of 2/3 hours with a computer. My symptoms are not very strong but I prefer to prevent instead of cure later when a problem might arise.
Hi everyone,

Thanks a lot for the comments! - all of the feedback is insightful.

I will let the community know when I make the updates.
Bah, what Google-hating FUD. What investor will promise to not disclose everything you say to them without a NDA? Even if they did put it in their contract, they probably wouldn't be bound by it, as NDA's need to be very specific as to what they cover:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement
I'm sure it would work sometimes, but it would say a lot about the character of the people involved.
The Xbox 360 has widely reported (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems), ongoing, hardware faults and is beaten in sales by the Wii. It also still loses Microsoft money despite entering this market in 2001, whilst the Wii makes a profit.

The 360 is a much better gaming console. It does have the worst failure rate of any piece of hardware I've ever owned, as well as being the loudest. Yet I still play the heck out of it because the library is pretty amazing. Nintendo managed to produce a "trendy" product, but as a gamer myself, my Wii has been relatively unused for over a year. The Wii may be a success from a business perspective, but I'd say it's rather disappointing from a gaming perspective.
Apparently profit is simply no longer required as a measure of success. I've given up trying to understand this nonsense. Apparently burning VC money and hoping to either be bought or go public just trumps all business sense.

Having no actual business model is the new cool.
Jacob, thanks for the comments.

1) Yes, that was intentional. I'd like to take this to serve different types of media, and possibly extend to UPC (although the haphazard ways that UPCs are assigned makes this task difficult). If there is any way I could make the purpose clearer short of changing all of my branding, I'm open to suggestions.

2) Yeah, for sure. This isn't necessarily for the early adopter crowd. That said, there are many people without smart phones who have no idea this service exists.
Yeah, good idea, and that's one service we definitely plan to offer. Meanwhile, one thing I might add is the ability to enter an email address and have the service email you.
are you talking about the tech industry?

as an engineer/hacker, i think its pretty clear that design is important. its cold, hard facts that people like something that is visually appealing. the issue is, though, that this is a community of hackers, and so we're all mostly poor at artistic design, nor are we particularly interested in it, so we don't talk about it.

its definitely interesting, and this meshes well with the community because its a discussion on the numbers of how design works.

just my $0.02, though
and actually write well-written, detailed essays, along with samples.

Unless the question is on a topic I love, that makes it into work. Is the point of SO to gain points to look clever in front of your peers or to actually help people? I'd rather just write a post blog to send someone to, since it stops other people editing it and I'd get all the credit and the traffic.

Perhaps I'll give it another try - maybe it's settled down a lot since launch when pretty much every question was getting a quick fire answer in minutes.
The labor is creating the network, managing the network, sending emails to your network so they can stay up to date. Not to mention all the technical issues of setting it up, styling it, making it useful, etc...

Now, ning is taking all that work to build a list of eyeballs and using it for their profit without compensating the builders of each individual network.

Don't discount the amount of effort -- and WORK -- involved in maintaining a social network. If you still think it's easy, read Hackers and Painters. pg explains why the hackers don't have a lot of friends and the social people don't concentrate as much on academics -- because both are very difficult to do and require a lot of WORK.
i assume the YC agreement has a similar clause, so why not accuse YC of having a we-may-steal-your-idea 'caveat' too? as a matter of fact, show me on VC agreement that doesn't have such a clause and i'll buy you a beer.
If Linus had kept Linux closed source, people would have still been perfectly within their rights to write a manual about how to write programs for that operating system as long as they didn't sign a NDA. I doubt anyone who read HP signed an NDA...
Maybe the implication is the opposite - backbeat-based music has been lost over time in our countries. Perhaps to the expense of gaining harmonic complexity. Perhaps due to the rise of marching music? Just thinking aloud.

In any case, I think it's an interesting observation from his travels.
"We welcome new ideas. However, please do not send us information that you consider to be confidential or proprietary. Because of what we do, we receive a high volume of business plans, presentations, pitches, memos - you get the picture - and because these materials are often similar, because they come to us in a variety of forms, and because we read a ton of stuff, we cannot and do not accept responsibility for protecting against the misuse or disclosure of any information unless we have expressly agreed (in writing) to do so." -- http://www.google.com/ventures/contact.html