skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a site this small, there's absolutely no reason the entire database shouldn't be cached in RAM. 32GB of RAM costs about $800. That buys you plenty of time to not have to worry about caching, and instead gives you more time to work on interesting features. For a single-person operation (or even a few people), you have to spend your time wisely.
CloudBase - Hadoop Map/Reduce in a database
Why do you laugh? If I am saying something wrong, then I would like to know it. I am here to learn!

You wrote this:
465,000 people creating new businesses on average each month
Does it mean that there are around half million people create new businesses monthly?

If this number is monthly, then there are around 5.58 Million people make new startups/businesses yearly?

Is there any proof that these numbers are real ?
Want to Rewire Your Brain? Study Music
That's stupid. Two is prime - which does allow for deadlock. And for odd primes, why are they better than just odds?
Aww, I dismissed Erlang about 4 months ago because I didn't see anything like this existing and didn't want to bother writing it myself.
Complements (either 1's or 2's) are no longer particularly useful patterns with modern HDD codings, which are wrapped in Reed-Solomon and then heavily encoded before hitting the disk.

I'm more familiar with CD-ROMs than HDDs, so I'll explain the need for encoding in those terms. The Red and Yellow Books specify that a track consists of "pits" and "lands", where pit-staying-pit and land-staying-land both represent "0", while pit-becoming-land and land-becoming-pit both represent "1". Due to limitations of the pressing process (which involves physically squeezing a piece of metal in a press to create the pits), you need a specific minimum number of "0" bits separating each "1" bit (because the metal in question isn't ductile enough). But people want to write arbitrary data to their CDs. This is a problem.

The solution: an encoding (Yellow Book, Annex D, Table D.1) maps 8-bit bytes into 14-bit "bytes". Because they had 16384 outputs for only 256 inputs, it was easy to find a list of outputs that spaced out the "1" bits with sufficient distance. (The other 16128 bit patterns are forbidden.)

Venturing out of familiar territory and back on topic, HDDs have a similar problem: high frequency bit changes are more difficult to write to disk, because the neighboring bit domains bleed into each other. That is, if you choose "north-up" to mean "1" and "north-down" to mean "0", then writing the pattern "10101010" will tend to muddle out the magnetic field, strongly increasing the likelihood that you'll lose the data (especially if it sits for a while before you write to that spot again). The solution is another mapping code: I think hard drives use something more tame (like 8-to-11) and have different requirements, but the principles are the same.

The downside from a data destruction POV: there's no guarantees that manufacturers use the same codes, even within their own product lines, since HDDs are sealed and have integrated controllers. The manufacturers don't even bother to tell you the physical encoding, because there's no need for anyone else to know it. The net result is that there is no longer any "magic code" you can write to a disk to stress sectors, guarantee data destruction, or have any other effect whatsoever upon the physical disk. All that stuff died out back in the days when IDE and SCSI hit the scene, after RLL and MFM drives died out.
I have signed up as a Back End developer for the event. I would be interested to meet up with someone who is also going there and team up with them before hand.
I'm not laughing at you; I'm laughing with you ;)

I'm definitely open to an alternate figure -- I just feel Kaufman is reputable to trust.

To answer your question, half a million yearly (465,000)*(12)=5,580,000
But you're going to have to have laws and taxes of some sort to keep the mini-society going - how do you know they'll be ones you don't object to? There's plenty of countries around the world without the same laws as the u.s. and I don't see a massive outflow of libertarian hackers to them, so I'm not sure there's really as much demand as the builders think.
Open source ERP on Amazon EC2?
Hard Disk Recovery : Simple to Learn
Intel wants developers to think parallel
Torrents Simplified on Symbian S60 : Symtorrent rocks
Supermarket Soap - A retail blog
Supermarket Soap is a blog about a night shift worker at a supermarket chain's 24 hour petrol station on the night shift. The blog features stories about bad customers, mad customers, and the people The Store Manager (a pen name) has to work with. Everything contained within the blog is genuine and actually happens. The blog is called Supermarket Soap because the daily action which happens seems sometimes like a a soap opera.
I bet they do. :-)
After coming back to the light background of the Hacker News web site, I have a mutation of my eye sockets.

I know this is completely irrelevant to the linked article, but using white text on a dark background is such a significant violation of readability and visual comfort (unless you're reading several such articles in a row) that I can't help but be completely distracted from the article at hand.
Nate Silver - What Tim Geithner Can Learn from Baseball
Track record. What have they produced in the past? Do they tend to complete things they've worked, or die 90% of the way to the finish line (a really bad thing)?

Have they had any fallouts/meltdowns? There will always be a "good reason" it happened. No one will say "Yeah, I was a prick, and a drag, and a pessimist, and the company/project/whatever collapsed largely because of me." Also beware the, "I was immature back then, but I've recognized what I did wrong, and I've improved." No they haven't. At least, not if their last gig was a failing.

Past a certain age, the vast majority of people pretty much don't change very much at all, ever. And if they had changed, they'd have accomplished something they could show you. So look at track record - it doesn't lie.

Beyond that, there's plenty of good advice and Paul Graham's written on this plenty. A very big one for me - do they read books? Yes, books, not blogs/social news/newspaper/magazines. Avid reader of books is always a huge plus. Knowledge and lessons from books are repeated into you many times over a few days to a couple months as you read, so it sticks more permanently than reading a smorgasbord of unrelated things.
Obama is a politician. Revenue is one of many tools, not a goal.

To be fair, the amount of revenue "lost" by these increases is dwarfed by the "stimulus".
I know Tony and am in contact with people around him. Friends/family are looking for him on the Gold Coast.

There is a possible lead in the form of a Brisbane 2005 UBD Street Directory, with the following pages marked:

Map 239/240: Browns Plains/Heritage Park
Map 1/2: Mt Tamborine (...went riding?)
Map 29/30: Labrador and Southport (...including both Labradore and Southport Squash Courts) Gold Coast

and:

p374/375: Faculties A-C (including Cemetary...?)
p386/387: Gold Coast St Listing (letters E,F,G)
Can't this be changed, you know, by hacking the registry or something ?!
This sounds like something Twitter will eventually do themselves, but will have much better access to the data.
2 gig is all you're going to get for a single process anyway, that's some kind of limit if I recall correctly. This site is a single process.
The Mailing List Battle (On answering questions)
Do you (and y'all) know about dorkbot, Plutopia, and Datapop party?

http://www.dorkbotaustin.org/

http://plutopia.org/

http://www.datapopparty.com/
Hopefully, the "fast" discharge does not mean explosive discharge.

I was kicking around an idea of currency based directly on energy units with friends for a while. There were two requirements, though. One was some sort of battery or capacitor technology that can hold a charge for very long period of time (as long as cash currency typically survives) and and the other is the ability to quickly transfer energy from one unit to another (fast charge/discharge rates).

If this tech is commercialized, that would be one half of the conditions necessary for trading monetary value directly through the transfer of energy.
So i can't imagine why they made this a free service. I think that a lot of people would be willing to pay a reasonable price for this. I know i would(if i was in the US).

Missed opportunity? Or a lack of vision from my part?
I've set this up and it's pretty slow. Cool hack though. Better off with 3G card or tethering bluetooth on a 2G network. Useful with international travel though where phones get sketchy...
And if your app is $5 and it's not selling, it's time to rethink things.
yes but its just a profile page for now - its not a network until it lets you establish connections to other Google users. It will be cool though once you can, then you can see your friends on mobile maps, in Picasa, gmail, chat etc.

There is an overall strategy shift at Google. Years ago they talked about how apps were basically the results of 20% time. Each app was an isolated silo, developed in different programming languages, at inconsistent locations and they shared nothing. Google claim that this is what enabled them to be innovative. Some apps were born out of organized teams (like Calendar).

What is happening now is that Google realized that many of these applications duplicated functionality. for eg. contacts in gmail, contacts in calendar etc. They are starting to centralize the common components like the user profile and links to apps. Friends will be next.

The result: a platform, not unlike facebook, except the 'apps' are much better and come from Google. OpenSocial becomes the API to this platform, and they fill it with users from their search market share. The Google API becomes the new web API and they won't have to regret not buying Facebook because by that time they have all their users on an 'unintentional' social network with kick-ass apps.

Schmidt said that Google is now 'search, ads and apps'. Until recently there was no strategy to apps, but now there is: they are taking over and providing the new web OS.
One ongoing and disturbing trend is having a literal clock included in the interface. It seems like a terribly inelegant and kitschy way to display essentially a few numbers, a colon, and a single letter.
Not sure about this. I've tried to use OpenDNS behind a "buy my wireless for 24 hours" at an airport and I still got the page requesting me to buy a page.

Also, even when I pinged servers the IPs were resolving to their "purchase" page. Unfortunately, I didn't have an IP of a site on hand to see if I could request by IP out.
Please tell me this will finally kill SMS, at least in that an incoming SMS can just be routed to my gmail and I can designate an outgoing email as an SMS...

Of course I'd rather have end to end mobile email with instant (configurable) notification.
"Dude, frack no. Having everything in a database means you are tied to the speed of disk, instead of the speed of ram. "

database are not tied to a storage medium. there is no reason why you can't run a DB (key-val or even a full RDBMS) in RAM.
I was planning on stopping into dorkbot while in town.

Other than that I'm just gonna play everything by ear.

Having lived in Austin I always really liked "Maggie Mae's" on 6th and "Club Deville" on Red River. "Mohawk" was also a pretty cool spot, but I had only been there a few times before I moved.

That said if something materializes from this thread I'll drop in.
Does anybody else see an opportunity from the interest of the other posters?

On a seperate note though, how does the top keyword provider mine the google trends data without Google flagging their IPs, etc.?
Wow. I personally would not want to know. But... If I had the means to fire-hose money at researching this problem the way he does, I would want to know. Something really good could come of this. I wish him luck...
I suspect that Orkut is the Google equivalent of the ROKR, the iTunes phone that preceded iPhone. It's a moderately successful trial until Google can really sink its teeth into social networking, whether through its own service or an acquisition or a Twitter/Facebook clone or a new idea entirely.
The Haskell ⇌ Erlang FFI
Dissecting Safari 4’s Welcome Screen
The captive portals I've seen don't tamper with HTTP headers at all, or were you referring to IP headers? As for DNS, I don't think there's any safe way to avoid providing unauthenticated hosts with working DNS.
Drupal: Building And Maintaining A Page
Need to master the basics of content creation and administration in Drupal? Posting and publishing new pages, editing existing pages and managing contributed content is where a site lives or dies and Drupal. In this article you will learn all the ins and outs of building and maintaining a page in Drupal.
I've always wondered when someone would use EC2 and launch a free service with ICMP/DNS tunneling... and release a dead-simple client app.

I'm guessing most of this wifi infrastructure would take quite awhile before very much of it was closed up.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=308623
User Clickstreams Lead To A 'Map Of Science'
they found a faster way of charging a supposedly slowly charging material (namely FePO4), not that they found a fast way of charging a already fastly charging material (e.g. CoO2). So no revolution here, MIT's guys are good at regularly releasing some baits for new funds.
CNET News posted a more in-depth article http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10194446-2.html and gave an answer to a question i had: can i port a number to Google Voice? (No, not yet.)
Even with its new, Twitterlike home page, Facebook is more mundane, less surprising
Has anyone realized Yahoo has been creating a Social network right under your feet for years?

http://help.yahoo.com/tutorials/prof/prof/prof_start1.html
i find lack of ubuntu disturbing...
I am seriously considering giving 23andMe a try. But since it's purely out of curiosity, I am not sure if I really want to know that I have an elevated risk of Xxx and how exactly this knowledge is going to affect me in a long run.

Has anyone gone through this sort of testing ? Care to share the thoughts ?
50+ Ruby-related Blogs to Read
It'd be interesting to read a write up on the concepts used (such as the in memory database) and the server restart mechanism. It'd be hard to tell from the source for non Lisp programmers.
I'm in the same boat. Would definitely be interested to hear others' experiences with 23andMe.
Dolores Labs Vets Web Sites On The Cheap
I agree, the dark background is a huge distraction. I think I can see through walls now, though.
I have to admit I like it. I've been using it as my main os for a couple days.

It's fast, and I haven't had problems with stability.

There's a few visual bugs, for instance every now and then a very blurry block will appear on top of the taskbar.

Also, it seems to run a little faster than windows vista did.

I did have one program that wasn't compatible. I tried to download Daemon Tools to mount a linux iso, but Daemon Tools isn't compatible with Windows 7 beta. Other than that, no problems with hardware or software compatibility.

And I installed it when I was putting in a clean hard drive in my laptop and was basically choosing between the iso's on
my college's network, so it's not like I was really excited about it before the installation.
http://www.thinkgene.com/media-induced-confusion-about-lrrk2...
:) What's European time? I imagine we (you and me) share Central European Time (CET) but ET?
Actually, no. These tag bits are usually stored in the lowest bits which are zero for all pointers (you would be mad not to align your data structurs to the four or eight byte boundaries your hardware uses for memory access). So you get the full width for pointers, but reduced width for your fixnums, because you have to set one of the least significant bits of the machine word to one to distinguish it from a pointer.
That you still can't use the full 4GB of a 32 Bit address space is due to the fact that the OS needs some address space for itself, the details of this vary from OS to OS and what the runtime of your language does with the addresses the OS allows it to use. So beeing able to use more than 2GB on a 32 bit architecture should not be taken for granted.
I'm developing a free Ruby Gem called Invoicing -- http://ept.github.com/invoicing/ -- it basically provides a miniature accounting and invoicing system inside your app, it's very powerful (flexible tax handling, multi-currency, support for resellers/affiliates) but easy to get started with too. At the moment it doesn't include particular payment method implementations out of the box, but I want to start including those soon. I am also working on integrating it with OAccounts http://oaccounts.org/ -- a (work-in-progress) open standard for exchanging financial data between different accounting systems.

The important thing is though that with the invoicing gem, you end up representing the data in an accountant-friendly structure, without having to think like an accountant. And that makes things a hell of a lot easier when you start scaling the business and need to know what's going on in your accounts for tax, legal and management reasons. Just taking payments won't do; you also need to know who is paying for what, keep statements of accounts etc. If you're a business in the EU, selling to another EU country, tax is different from selling within your own country. And so on.

Would love to hear your opinions on the Invoicing Gem; I agree that a standard framework is needed, and this is my attempt to contribute one to the community.
Actually, I said I agreed to the post I was replying to, not to PG's post. Sorry you think it had zero value.

For what it's worth, I never said nor meant to imply that I thought the website of the lady who wanted a job with Twitter isn't suitable for HN, though I don't find it to be exemplary. It's a whole lot more on target than (as previously stated) articles on macroeconomics, politics, or flirting.

None of this is to say that I actually disagree with your point on the silly nature of what garners karma and what collects down-mods, but that is a topic for another time.
So, it's not a first-month slam-dunk instant-payback project.

What if a trickle of further reviews, word-of-mouth, and incremental low-cost marketing (minor updates, free 'lite' version, half-off promos, light SEO) results in ~$500/month revenue for many months or years with very little cost in time?

What if some of the code or lessons learned mean the next similar app only takes $10K investment to make, and makes more than $500/month from the get-go?

The only problem here -- if any -- is sky-high expectations for the first step up to the plate.
I can't believe pg implied that Erlang is boring, haha.
I question whether publicly posting these discoveries on a blog is in line with the hacker ethic. I have figured out how to open doors before, but I didn't use it for personal gain or feel the need to brag about it.
OK it seems it is related to a medical condition, Brad Clow from workingmouse has posted more on his blog: http://bradclow.blogspot.com/2009/03/tonys-letter-to-medical...
Personally, I far prefer lxml to BeautifulSoup. The latter is incredibly slow and leaks memory like a sieve unless you manually tear apart object trees. Although, BS is easier to write in many cases. Just don't use it for any heavy work.
What's amazing is there has been no 'crazy revolutionary interface breakthrough' since the early 1980s. I mean, the UI looks pretty much the same and contains the same basic metaphors, doesn't it?
Yes you can! I have a well paid job in the UK and I am applying for YC et al. I would jump at the chance to go on any of these opportunities... and I would embrace the ramen!

You're not moving permanently. Get a flight to SF, and live in the cheap appartment. You're not moving all your furniture. You just have to be able to cover 3 months of rent/mortgage at your home and hope the OH can do without you for a short while.
MatLab-performance can be quite good :-)
Why do Weebly links provide the subdomain, but other URLs (I'm thinking Tumblr) only show the root domain?
Yet: there's an inherent tension. Unless there's a credible threat people will go to another engine for natural results, for Google to degrade their own natural results slightly can improve Google's quarterly revenues!

Let's say Google is A/B testing a ranking tweak. Option A results in more searches (because people don't find exactly what they're looking for on the first try), and more clicks on ads (because they look relatively better). Option B results in one click on a natural result and nothing further.

Are we sure they'll always choose option B?

Maybe Google can add a new advanced operator: [-src:googlesyndication.com]. That is, don't return results that 'source' (as in <SCRIPT SRC="">) Google ad units.

I won't hold my breath.
I'm all for charging for things...but, you haven't done the business development needed to make your site a destination. With no one looking, ads on your site have no value.

There have been a half dozen other "hackers find co-founders" sites spawned here at HN, and so far all have been free...and they haven't really gone anywhere (though there may have been some traction gained since I last looked). I'll be absolutely stunned if a pay site like this goes anywhere. If it is to go anywhere, you need to get your biz dev down to a science...and it needs to be what you're doing every single day.
From my app store experience, pricing an app $1 or $2 doesn't make that big of a difference, but pricing an app in the $3+ range causes a huge sales drop off.
Charlie Rose - A conversation with Timothy Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary
Long Tail Author: My Two Cents on Charging for Content
From breily
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512416
Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
There aren't enough literally dirty jobs to go around, unless you consider "dirty" to merely mean "in need of a shower", in which case my 36 hour coding sprints at the office definitely qualify me.

The important distinction is "job that pays me to do what I love and totally fulfills me" vs "job that is in demand, pays well and I can tolerate". The former is a meme that the baby boomers invented and indoctrinated into their children, resulting in a generation of highly educated barristas. The few that make it into the cushy jobs are the ones who end up complaining constantly, a symptom of inhibiting their natural productive instinct.

We need to get shit done. It's primal. And nothing feels more like getting shit done than something disgusting and dangerous. That's why you feel great after you clean the bathroom.

The tech industry is an anomoly in that the productive jobs are often also deeply fulfilling. There are a few other jobs like that, but not enough for everyone and they set a bad example for the rest of the working world.
I'm a GC beta tester and it's a pretty nice service, especially for free. I don't use it in any serious way because I moved abroad and only have the one US VoIP line.

It'd be fantastic (read: I'd pay for it) if they'd forward to international numbers (at VoIP rates). Even better would be to allow me to add int'l virtual number to my account.

We're getting close to phone numbers working like domain names, and I'll be happy when this finally happens.