skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if I'd want to pitch my idea to Google at such an early stage. They have enough resources to duplicate a lot of entrepreneurs' efforts. Seems like it is still best to start small, think big, and dream even bigger. Pitch the idea to Google once it has tangible promise.

My gut tells me to head to Google for sizeable funding, on the order of 100k and above. Anything less and I'd keep it with places like YC and friends and family (oh and fools too). Just my 2 pesos
A Crash Course on the Economy [video]
I'm curious as to what the overall "cost" of spam is. Other than the bandwidth cost, is spam really that big of a problem? Both my work and personal addresses rarely to ever have spam, so it really does not affect me in the slightest.
The article also mentions Microsoft is shuttering Encarta-- a victim of Wales' Wikipedia. Win some, lose some.
Facebook is blowing by MySpace in usership, with users who've never tried MySpace.

MySpace had a great thing going with the music/culture/youth/extrovert demographic, but that's still a niche of experimenters who move between fads. Facebook is reaching people who never considered MySpace (if they were even aware of its existence outside jokes on TV). Housewives, middle-aged professionals, laborers, retirees, etc.
"a constitution of sorts for your users"

When your users are trying to build businesses, they'll eventually realize they need demand a binding statement of reasonable terms, i.e., a contract. The system only scales if all the users accept one contract, or minor variations on a single contract. Therefore, a constitution is a brilliant idea.

The idea will encounter resistance because it contradicts two related biases that were ingrained during the early years of the web. First, the contract accepted by all users is a EULA (which eliminates all rights and guarantees no matter what the consumer thinks), not a contract (which attempts to specify a reasonable relationship acceptable to both parties). Second, people using a web site are consumers (who must be screwed blatantly and thoroughly) rather than business partners (who must be screwed subtly, if at all). I would love to see these two assumptions challenged.
While I enjoy my weekend newspaper, and feel that it far surpasses a good deal of the writing available in other mediums, to suggest a dead medium deserves some sort of protection even though it cannot survive on its own is basically counter to everything the free market stands for.

If there is a market for the product, as you suggest their is, then let them pay to enjoy it. If not, so be it.
Orgs like http://www.propublica.org/about/ are funded privately by people or orgs who believe that there is a public interest in maintaining independent journalism.

Orgs like http://www.npr.org/about/ are paid for by the public, using a distributed model. There are local stations that are paid for locally, who in turn help fund the umbrella organization of NPR. Likewise there are private individuals who have left endowments or other contributions to maintain NPRs independence.

Journalism is alive and well. Corporate journalism is dying. And i can't say i'm hugely sorry. Sucks that the industry has crashed as opposed to transitioning, but i can't say that it wasn't at least in part their own fault.
Ask HN: We launched our startup (GroupieGuide) today. What do you think?
We requested feedback on HN when we first launched our private alpha. We launched publicly today with a new interactive theme designer, group subscription with integrated e-mail, and a bunch of usability fixes. What do you think?
Interesting. When people clicked on the ad, what did it say on the landing page?
It looks like your encoding routine could get better compression if it weighed alternative encodings more carefully. For example, "not-a-g00d-Exampl333" could be better compressed as a single run of literal characters rather than as several runs of literal characters interspersed with codebook entries. (In this sense, the single letter codebook entries might not be helping your compression ratio.)
Another fun RSS / Friendfeed hack: I use the RSS stream from searchyc to pipe my news.YC comments into my Friendfeed stream.
Funny how as an investor, Kevin is clearly unaware of iminlikewithyou's name change to omgopop. :P
MySpace, Citysearch Partner To Create MySpace Local
Interesting article about a new joint effort from Myspace and Citysearch.
http://groupieguide.com/
Like everything else: People who value the service will exchange money for that service.
Weird, I got hg too...

And git came on 12th try.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'random' is not defined
J2EE vs ASP.NET vs PHP
Tried it once with a Yahoo Pipes mashup. The problem is that it gets an "updated" status every time somebody writes a comment which is annoying for the way I read RSS.
For the uninitiated, Hunchentoot is a multithreaded, complete, standards compliant Common Lisp web server written by Edi Weitz. It dutifuly server 8 "web sites" for me (internal web apps rather, and 2 public facing sites.)

http://weitz.de/hunchentoot/

CCL is Clozure Common Lisp, formerly known as Open MCL. A Common Lisp implementation with a native compiler[1]. Clozure runs on various combinations of 32 and 64 bit x86 and PowerPC running the usual suspects (Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, OS X and Solaris)

[1] Not to be confuse with Clojure, which is another Lisp dialect that runs only on the JVM. Or Closure, which is a Common Lisp web browser. Or Closer, which is a portability layer for advanced CLOS meta-object protocol extensions.
How to Organize Information in 3D
To be honest, the newspapers of yore are already dead. I do have nostalgia and a sense of wonder for the industry that ran full page broadsheet political cartoons, or Little Nemo in Dreamland, but those orgs are already long gone.

What's left are the dregs. They can't justify their existence, and so they're disappearing. Clay Shirky's piece on the nature of technological shift is particularly enlightening ( http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking... ).
A great read. It makes me think about the software I write on a daily basis and how it's effects may be felt much further than the end user I am providing it directly to. Interestingly, I currently write software (admittedly much less complex) for a mortgage company, so the article hit home.

Regarding the author - should he be "blamed" or feel ashamed of his work somehow? I don't think so, and I'm glad to see that he doesn't think so, either. The software he was commissioned to create worked and performed well for it's intended purpose.

What if a software engineer lands a job working for a defense contractor to create programs for missiles, bombs, or other weapons? Are they to blame for the world war? Of course not, but that seems to be what some people are thinking. [I'm not sure if that comparison is fair, but it makes sense to me.] Could they have turned down the job based on principal? Sure, but sometimes a job can be very tough to come by. Besides, who would think a simple programming job could possibly lead to such catastrophe, especially in the business world? Maybe that's a take away, or at least something to think about when looking for your next gig.
ok we get it you are an fb fan boy. Now please stop ranting and base what you say with real data.
> A few years ago, this type would have been a believer in the upcoming "singularity."

The belief that technology will usurp governments is more than "a few years old" (the cyphernomicon was written in 1994).
excellent guide, will be running through it tonight
Safety systems to save human lives in rare but catestrophic events are just not the same as adding code - and more importantly design complexity - to handle the odd mis-click where the most profound consequence is frustration on the part of the individual who made the mistake.

Ultimately I think it just comes down to how minimalist your design philosophy runs, and I'd be quick to admit that mine is more minimalist than most.
I have. All of my knowledge of theoretic CS comes from research papers.

There's pretty much no such thing as computer science education in my region (Ukraine) -- no theory is covered whatsoever. Long story short, I'm studying physics instead.

Anyway, my interest in programming eventually lead me to interest in Scheme and specifically, compiler construction. And the only source of information on this subject are research papers published online.

So for the last five years I've read half of readscheme.org, and some papers from the home pages of various researchers. Topics include algorithms and data structures, various programming techniques, garbage collection, control flow analysis, and so on.

I can attest that productivity of this method is low. It's hard to read about relations between CPS and Monadic style, while you don't know the definition of either. But eventually it comes to you; after a number of papers with lambda-calculus inside you can pretty much infer the notation.

Another issue is that some large chunks of knowledge are missing; some topics are out of scope of these papers, some are considered to be common knowledge. And you often just don't know what have you missed; needless to say such education is fragmentary.

On the other hand, over the years I've mostly lost interest in physics, but interest for CS is higher then ever; and I believe it's no coincidence.

So there. While this is not the fastest way of learning, it certainly has advantages.
Capitalism. This is the magic of capitalism. There's demand for journalism on one side and supply on the other, and if there's a profitable way to bring them together, it will be found. Newspapers can stand in the way of that by constraining what people think of.

You don't know how it will be done. I don't know how it will be done. But nevertheless, similar miracles happen every day; there are millions of examples of this sort of thing occurring, it is not the exception. One of the most intriguing things about markets is that they can be smarter than any given participant. (This is part of why they can become hard to regulate; they are as good at outsmarting regulation as evolved programs can be, in much the same way.) Bounding what the market is capable of by your comprehension or your credulity is not the path to understanding.

In truth, it is not that there is no possible way to bring them together, the problem is that there are a staggering number of ways to bring the supply and demand together and nobody knows what is best. It seems unlikely that newspapers are the answer, though.
HTTP decision graphs
Tweetbook.in : Make PDF of your tweets
Yeah, I was a big fan of the idea. Clearly Google saw the potential, too.

I almost wish it wasn't a part of Google. I'd like to have two offerings that are totally different-- one that's 100% pagerank and one that trends towards user-ranked. Right now we're kind of losing out on the latter because Google isn't necessarily taking into account the user rankings across accounts.
Malls, the Future of Housing?
Quick feedback / pet peeve: You've done a great job of making it easy and quick to see how to create a group, but I'm curious about what the groups look like & do. Screenshots or a link to an existing group would do just fine.
Corporate venture arms like this tend to be too conservative and not willing to take risks.
Google Ventures.

Oh wait.
Some might ask how is this different from Ning.com or Tangler.com?

What are you going to say? How are you going to win? How will you overcome the customer lock in at established competitors?
Q&A: Anthony Bourdain
Good point, here are some groups:

http://thegroupies.groupieguide.com/
http://fixie.groupieguide.com/
http://cohitre.groupieguide.com/
http://stptraining.groupieguide.com/
Yes, that at least gets the temporal ordering correct, and I agree the observation is interesting. I just object to the pop psych additions. I find it more likely that local materials lent themselves to drums, and since they had drums, drums are what they developed.

Many European instruments, especially in the era when European music as we know it today really started to take off (Bach's time), require significant technological advances to create. Not all of them, necessarily, but a harpsichord is not a trivial instrument. Having harmony, they developed harmony.

It is worth pointing out that both have spread the world over (with changes as they go, as cultural artifacts should travel), which I think further knocks out the "oppression" aspect. Plenty of non-oppressed people love a beat.
Then call it archive or something?

I find it strange that anyone would argue in favor of this deletion-means-paused behavior. It's counter-intuitive to many people (me included).
Since one of the current topics being discussed is the vanishing shopping mall (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540166), I've been wondering why there isn't more of an overall interest (and I don't mean on HN, I mean in general) in apartments and condos mixed in with shopping centers, like malls. Well, a quick search found this article.
Ruby and ABAP. That is totally crazy Ruby Enterprise Edition :)
Accounting Outsourcing - Cost-Effective Means Of Handling Accounting Tasks
First of all, the picture on the homepage is hilarious.

But I would need to be convinced why I should use these groups instead of Facebook Groups, when my friends and I are already all on Facebook.
Streaming games players emerging from the clouds
I'm very surprised it's shutting down. 3M uniques a month and still growing according to Compete.

Seems like it would have gotten acquired at the very least.
Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
And NPR, which is going gangbusters with increases in listeners.
The Hulu/Boxee endgame
So, discovery of municipal corruption will be paid for entirely by people who lack the conviction that they shouldn't have to pay extra just to have a clean government? Are you sure there are no flaws in this plan?
This is an excellent question, and if we want excellent answers, it is the question we need to be asking - NOT "how will we save the newspaper."
That was exactly my point.

Besides that, to make sure I wasn't crazy, I checked some chat logs I had. I did send some FML links to a friend on Jan 14th, so the domain was registered at least 4 days before the date mentioned. In that case, maybe it could have been simply re-registered, as sho mentioned.
The Chicago Sun-Times is a huge paper, though. I found it pretty damn interesting that it's not just medium-to-small papers. This is the paper that houses Roger Ebert.
If the cost was really unbearable we'd have a secure mail protocol in widespread usage by now. We might be better off if the problem became so bad that we'd solve it once and for all.
Good point, we probably need to emphasize this a bit more. We are trying to convince people that GroupieGuide offers groups a fully-functional customized website that they can call their own. On Facebook, Meetup, Google/Yahoo Groups, groups aren't able to express themselves with their own design and branding. GroupieGuide only has a single link back at the bottom of the group page.
Different funding model or scam?
My co-founder has a meeting this week with a group named Liberty Capital (http://www.liberty-capitalfunding.com/). They offer money with future invoices as collateral.

Right now, my team needs cash. We're pretty savvy (thanks to the HN contingent!), and still early enough where we need cash to get ramen profitable. My first thought on this was, "SCAM" -- but is using future invoices as collateral just a horrible idea? After all, you usually give up equity, which is trading future money for money now; not really that different than what Liberty claims to do.

Does this scream SCAM to you guys too? What are your thoughts on it?
Oh noes, they've removed this piece just after I saw it.
It used to say:

Chosen DVCS

import random
print(random.choice(['svn', 'bzr', 'hg', 'git']))

http://svn.python.org/view/peps/trunk/pep-0374.txt?r1=70206&...
The tablet just gives the lengths of the sides and diagonals. There is no sign of any explicit reasoning on it. The author of the pages linked to from here thinks that the maker's decision to show both diagonals of the square indicates that it's meant to illustrate a proof. I am not convinced.
It's been a few weeks now since the Seattle P-I went web only. Anyone else notice how there were lots of news stories about that change, and now nothing?

Reporters aren't even interested. They just believe that going to the web equals death.
The Chron is about to go under; Seattle is losing a daily; the NYT may run out of operating cash in May. Is there a trend story out there about the newspapers that would be Hacker News? Sure. But this kind of isn't it.

(I'm more worried about where Jim DeRogatis is going to land than about Ebert, who can obviously just retire now).
Your accounts rarely have spam thanks to the effort of many people you'll never meet (and lots of CPU cycles at your email provider).
where the fuck is the "dont be evil" thing? i dont think financial results as the first focus is ethical
PSP as a status monitor - Hack a Day
the shopping mall was a product of the 1960s, when land was cheap. I hate shopping malls. They take up a huge amount of real estate, encourage people to drive instead of walk and take transit, and house overpriced businesses selling things I don't want anyway. The only reason I go into Bellevue Square is to visit the Apple Store, which now is too small for the number of people shopping there and so crowded it is unpleasant in there so I don't stay.
It sounds more like fraud and misrepresentation.
Hmmm, if only there was a database-as-a-service provider for CouchDB. I, for one, would subscribe to our distributed, document based overlords.
The background pic is a little confusing to me
Most people lie for free so it's strange to suggest that profit is the problem.
Man uses 35 cable modems to provide WiFi, sued by Comcast
For what it's worth, Thor Muller (Cofounder of Get Satisfaction) responded in the comments and said the wording was a mistake and would be changed immediately:

"Gosh, we messed up on the wording of that badge and are changing it pronto. The wording on that badge was actually intended to explicitly state that the space was NOT OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED by the company, but that doesn’t come off at all. The idea is to encourage openness, and provide a badge for companies that want to be associated with it. This was just unfortunate phrasing (one small part of an ongoing redesign effort), and doesn’t reflect our values, as I think many, many people and companies who’ve used our service can attest."
Roger Ebert on Twitter
Built this quick hack a couple of days ago, got tired of hitting the Belkin switch to watch the status of my second computer...

The PSP side is very minimalistic and dumb, you just send it an image in PNG/JPEG format or a short text and it displays it.

The python part is linux specific but you can easily write your own in whatever platform you are using...

Enjoy
As an Ohioian, I hadn't even thought about this.
You need to edit your ipythonrc so that useful modules like random are imported for you automatically.
(But it's not about his well-being. It's that I don't want him to lose his blog or to stop reviewing. He's such a tremendous writer.)
This is a common financial practice in some fields -- you might have heard of something called "securitization" in the news lately. :-)

That said, applying it to a startup seems rather weird. Normally the way securitization works when future revenue streams are predictable, which is far from true for most startups.

I wouldn't call this a scam necessarily, but it certainly raises my eyebrows enough that I'd recommend reading over the fine print very carefully to make sure that you know exactly what you're agreeing to.
It's not about lying. It's about sensationalism.

Either you tell in-depth news for a small group, or you go sensationalist to go after the masses. News groups increasingly tilted towards the latter for all of the last two decades.
We switched to UserVoice because GetSatisfaction is often simply broken. Way too many links have just failed.

Try to count the steps for a new user to leave feedback. There must be at least 10.

Our UserVoice widget (http://tipjoy.com/feedback ), also has a really easy email form.
sue them
So you're thinking of a database-in-the-cloud concept?
I don't have any strong feelings about Get Satisfaction (or any of the other sites like this), but we made http://featurelist.org available for free to anyone who wants a lighter approach to that sort of thing. It focuses a bit more on the feature request side than the technical support pieces, but it might be interesting to some of you.

Once we catch our breath from our other sites, we're going to provide featurelist.org as open source (PHP/CodeIgniter) in case people are hesitant to host their user feedback on someone else's site.

For our own usage, we really just needed a way to track feature requests and have YC-inspired feedback widgets for our own sites. So we opened that service up for everyone to use.
The text in the badge is/was:

37signals has not yet committed to open conversation about its products and services. Encourage them to join and support the Company-Customer Pact.

I really have a hard time believing that this was an oversight. It is at the top of almost every page. When you consider GetSatisfaction's strategy it is even well written.
Sorry about this attempted topic hijacking.

I live in Mass but enjoy NHPR, does anyone know of good alarm clock radios that are powerful enough to get NHPR in Mass?
To prefix all this: I've never really looked in to Get Satisfaction for anything except a couple of random posts on other companies pages there. I can see where 37 Signals is coming from with the whole not being committed to an open conversation thing but I think the whole article is a bit sensational. A guy from Get Satisfaction even jumps in and says they messed up with that badge. They do need to make money some how and targeted ads seem like a good idea for that. It really strikes me as a young company that's just making a couple of mistakes and I don't think they deserved this PR. I wonder if anyone at 37S tried to contact GS before making this post. If they did then it was deserved but if not I'm not so sure.
I'm sorry I don't follow. If you are a writer known for uncovering government waste, and I like to hear those stories, I'll pay you for it, or someone else will indirectly.

What matter is it the medium you choose?
Summary:

Use Google Adwords to A/B test your company/product name. Throw up 6-12 names on adwords, have them lead to blank pages, find out what names convert the best.

Both Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose are doing angel investing.

I lost interest after that.
For those building business, there's money changing hands, and I think equitable contracts will spring up sooner - Google's recent snafus come to mind as examples of what happens when income streams are subject to "as-is" terms.

But for free services, "as-is" agreements will always reign supreme. The ability to sue a company for violating said agreement is not worth much to a user, while creating a huge aggregate liability for the company.

The way to give users rights is through technical means - export functionality and interoperability create well-defined capabilities that users can easily understand and exercise.
That badge has been on GetSatisfaction pages for as long as I can remember, at least a year. I find it hard to believe that it could be an oversight.