skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really know whether this will pan out or not, but I do find it really strange how people defend this move with "examples" like twitter and facebook. Even if we assume that these are valid comparisons, we do realize that neither Facebook nor Twitter is really a success yet and the jury is still out on both of them right? Unless you're using "being able to endlessly raise VC" as your metric of success, then there is still no guarantee that they will actually generate tons of money and match their valuations. For all we know this completely twice-removed model of generating profits doesn't work, and thus using them as shining examples isn't that prudent.
This was a chair developed by an entrepreneur who pitched at the Big Success in SF and won the business pitch to be on CBS5. He was fantastic, as was his chair.
http://www.GymyGym.com/
This might be strange but I've found that putting my keyboard in my lap keeps my wrists and arms from aching.
exactly. http://www.49sparks.com/?b=51
I wouldn't give up my Mac or my Linux PC for anything, but over the years I've found that Microsoft products are vastly superior to what they were circa 2000.

BTW, you can blame Microsoft all you want, but they're the ones holding 90% of the desktop market, not our Macs and Linux PCs. Their consumer products might not be top-notch, but they did many things right - things which Apple and Sun and Linux vendors failed to do.
When they say 'close' Encarta, does that mean they will be taking down http://encarta.msn.com/ or are they just not going to keep it updated?
They come in three sizes, A, B and C. Since you're 6'4" you need size C. You can tell the size of the chair you're sitting in by feeling under the top part. If you're in the wrong size chair, you're probably not going to like it. FYI.
Wonder why that happened. Works wonderfully for me.

I can imagine the huge amount of effort gone into this feature, since Hindi is richer phonetically than English.
Is Harvard A Hedge Fund?
The HN library is a strong reading list:

http://ycombinator.com/lib.html
Or how about for just 5 min? with some sort of "serious trouble in the google factory" message plastered across the screen?
Can you briefly discuss how a graph database of type you describe (AllegroCache or KiokuDB) differs from the object-oriented databases which have not exactly taken the world by storm?

Basically, object databases and graph databases are conceptually the same. I have only used graph databases to store object graphs. Instances are nodes, and "has a" relationships are edges.

I don't know why this hasn't caught on, as it's made my life significantly easier (by making my software simpler and easier to test). My guess is that there hasn't been a good implementation in a popular language. Perl and Lisp are widespread, but not nobody is going to start using either because there is a nice object database for them.

(Neo4j looks nice, and I don't know why its not more popular. Perhaps it needs a good object-storage frontend, and this is hard to write since Java's MOP is pretty limited. Perl and Lisp both have excellent MOPs, Moose and CLOS, so this makes it easy to write good object databases. With Java, you will have to build your own MOP, which is hard. Same goes for C++ and C#, which are the other "popular" languages.)
Edit: One other thing, representing polymorphic data in a relational database is a nightmare.

Edit2: Wait, how did this end up in a separate comment? I am confused :)
It is absolutely true that size of the codebase is not a consideration to business success. Mine would fit comfortably in the average CS101 lab project -- who cares.

The reason why bit.ly's triviality is a reason to worry about its future is not that it is short. It is that there is no defensible competitive moat -- they're primarily parasiting their users off another popular service (Twitter) who could obliterate them as a side effect of an engineering change which would be mostly unremarkable. (e.g. "Our front-end now auto-crunches URLs to internal twitter ones, complete with analytics.")

There is also no compelling reason for people to pay for their service or their data -- the notion that the second has any value at all appears to primarily be bubble thinking utterly disconnected to any actual experience of selling data. (A few hundred people -- can't quite tell you who, but they're out there -- like computerized voices which sound like Hannah Montana, as demonstrated by the response to this tweet. Shazam! Pay me money.)
Google's newest venture
The problem with sharing over WiFi is that it drains the hell out of the battery life, in some cases even faster than it can be recharged from a 500mA USB port.

The iPhone 3.0 tethering is via USB or Bluetooth, and won't have that problem.

They seem to have designed it to be as hack-friendly as possible, so even if AT&T wants to charge an extra $30/month, you can get around that by just replacing one of iTunes' resources (no jailbreak required).
oh the topics hackers concern themselves with :P
"Another problem is to explain knowledge in Chinese that I learn first in English. Especially terms in computer science are not unified in Taiwan and China."

I have the same problem, too. A much worse thing for me is that I use English as my primary language for quite some time now, I sometimes have difficulty finding the appropriate Chinese words when I need to talk to Chinese friends. I guess that's the price one has to pay if one really wants to re-wire the brain :|

"I am also ambidextrous to the degree that I can write in both hands and using chop sticks in both hands."

This is quite an achievement. Is it a born gift, or you trained yourself? Very amazing! :)
The twitter comparison isn't really accurate - if you & the people you follow are on twitter, it's not trivial to just switch to identi.ca. Switching from tinyurl to is.gd to bit.ly to whatever comes next is a lot simpler.
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"Don't be evil" is a KICK-ME sign on Google's back.
Identical twins reared apart are much more similar than fraternal twins reared together.

And to me at least it makes a lot of sense. If you share almost 100% of your DNA with someone else, I'd expect you to look the same on the outside - that's a given. In the same way I'd expect your brain to be highly similar and therefore it makes sense that you will behave similarly in a lot of situations even though you were reared in completely different environments. I mean you're not gonna get a different color hair just because of environmental differences, so applying this to brain development is not such a stretch.
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Like the difference between native apps and VM apps ;)
The former ones work better than the latter.

Altho' my mother tongue is an Indian language, I think _natively_ in English now. I think its a matter of time and exposure.
For example, that pure functional programming is easier to reason about. True, but as soon as you have to simulate state it's more complex that just having state.

I actually disagree here. It's true that the traditional state model of "everything gets everything" makes writing code very easy. Everything can see and modify everything else, so you never have to worry about manually passing state around.

This makes the code easy to write, but very difficult to debug. A function can do something different every time you call it with the same arguments. That is hard to reason about.

There are actually a few layers involved, the programming language, the data types, and the app code. In a non-functional language, you really ignore the data types and let your app code interact with the language. ("var foo = 42; ...; foo++")

In a language like Haskell, it's important to think about your data types. Your state abstraction will live there, and then your app code will not have to worry about the details of passing state around. So in the end, your app code looks the same in either paradigm.

An advantage about this approach is an increase in generality. If you just have some variables hanging around and some "stuff" that uses them, that's all you can ever have. If you interact with state via well-defined interfaces like the Monad or Applicative Functor, you can build abstractions that work on all types like this. This has worked very well for Haskell. (An example is the do syntax for monadic computation. Although you have functional purity, your program looks imperative. This, IMO, is the best of both worlds. There is some complexity under the hood, but you get code that's easy to read, write, and reason about.)
It's certainly normal. Many, many people do not have a single entrepreneurial bone in their body- they really do wish to be told what the task is, and sometimes how to do it, when they arrive at work. And they want to punch out at 5pm, turn on the television and forget about work.

If that's what they want from work, then pushing them to start their own company, or take over the family business, can only end in disaster. Have you ever seen a company driven into the ground by the 2nd or 3rd generation owners, who don't have the passion for sand & gravel that Granpa Kerzyk did?
Slate's 10th Anniversary / Good list of all-time favorite articles
I guess I missed what someone said after I left my comment, as it was deleted.

Hacker related or human related I was just detailing my experience in the hopes that anyone going through what I did knows there is hope! Again, talking about it and relating with others was the key that led me to a better life...in time! But, that is my experience and these drugs are helpful to millions, besides myself!
I have an armchair like Joey's armchair from Friends and I'm loving it. It's big and I can put my legs on it, and be in any comfortable position I want.

I tried Aeron at work and man, it doesn't even come close to awesomeness of armchairs.

Maybe I'm just big (6'3 220).
Ask HN: Best way to come up with startup/product names
I'm sure there are many web tools that helps you come up with some good name combinations for your startup/product. Just wanted to find out from the HNers the tools of their choice.
Oh, okay, now I'm clear about what you meant. Thanks. I've written up a little FAQ on college application demographics; please let me know what you think.

Population trends in the United States are not the only issue influencing the competitiveness of college admission here. The children already born show us what the expected number of high school students are in various years, but the number of high school students in the United States, which is expected to begin declining in a few years, isn't the whole story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/education/09admissions.htm...

First of all, if more students who begin high school go on to college, there will be more applicants to college even with a declining number of high school students. And that is the trend in the United States and worldwide.

Second, colleges in the United States accept applications from all over the world, so it is quite possible that demographic trends in the United States will not be the main influence on how many students apply to college. The cohorts of high-school-age students are still increasing in size in some countries (NOT most of Europe).

Third, even if the number of applicants to colleges overall stays the same, or even declines, the number of applicants to the most competitive colleges may still increase. The trend around the world is a "flight to quality" of students trying to get into the best college they can in increasing numbers, and increasing their consensus about which colleges to put at the top of their application lists. I do not expect college admission to be any easier for my youngest child than for my oldest child, even though she is part of a smaller birth cohort in the United States.

And now I would add to this that at the very most selective colleges that have just announced new financial aid plans, next year's (and the following year's) crush of applicants will be larger than ever. When colleges that are already acknowledged to be great colleges start reducing their net cost down to what the majority of families in the United States can afford, those colleges will receive more applications from all parts of the United States, and very likely from all over the world.

The Economist magazine published a brief article about these trends in April 2008.

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...
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Paul scared VCs by pointing out that they were competing directly with Google. Looks like Google's competing with him too.
Google to found venture capital firm
It's been stated again and again that Apple doesn't run such tests on their products. They make their products to feel good for them.

See, saying that sales are drying up is a completely different thing. You'd be stupid not to change from that. I thought your question was about the intuition-based design process, period, because you can design intuitively and NOT lose all your profit. The 37signals design isn't making sales dry up, for instance, even if they didn't run tests on it. It's subjectively a much better page.

Obviously there a "don't do stupid stuff" rule in place, where if intuition is very, very wrong you slap the intuitor and start again.
But why do you think the structure of one's brain affects personality?

We have these things called universal computers. Differently structured CPUs run the same programs. It doesn't matter so much which CPU you have, they all have the same capabilities.

Why should it be different with brains? I think brains are universal knowledge creation devices, and universal means universal, structural changes won't alter the feature set.
http://pycon.blip.tv/
Funny, last night's episode of House was about exactly this, and was one of the best episodes I've seen.
'Open cloud' plan sparks dissent
That’s that one covered: The value of code coverage
Irrespective of the actual reason behind the result, I found this, through personal experience, to be true. I spent the greater part of 2 years on several SSRIs, and went from a creative writer/clever programmer/poetry writing (clinically depressed) geek to a quiet, emotionless "normal" person riding an emotional flat line.

Perhaps being depressed makes me more creative. Perhaps the medication suppresses something inadvertantly, who knows (AFAIK, no one does, at least for now). But there was a definite correlation between the SSRI and my creative side.
I think I lost you there, can you explain this line for me?

A friend of mine started taking Effexor, but then we found accounts of how it's impossible to stop taking Effexor:
blood-curdling stories about pharmacists who'd dissassemble the pills and reassemble them to titrate the dose down,
and who'd still be unable to get the dose to zero. He stopped in three days, before the damage was done.

Edit: Fixed format as requested.
It's always right to learn the discipline in a language that has the most abundant material, most of time it's the language that the discipline originally came to being.

As for computer science, learn it in English, because that's the language it's written in. Whatever anglocentric or *centric it may sound, it's the way you will get most out of it, it's that simple.
For me, the most important trait I look for in a co-founder is trust. If that element is absent, I think building a long-term partnership would be too difficult, no matter how wonderful they may be in other areas. They also need to be reliable, as you need someone who's going to stick it out through the highs and lows. Apart from that, I look for an overall high level of intelligence and someone who compliments my skill set (e.g. someone with a killer sense of design).
Very much so. Sometimes you have little choice but to take the drugs.

It was once explained to me that depression is somewhat like a deep pit, with slippery sides that get steeper and steeper....once you are in a certain depth, you need a rope to get out.

Over the last year or two, I have begun to really understand how true that can be, learning to control how deep my moods get, and use the people, world, and experiences around me to keep myself from going beyond that self-salvageable depth.
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Y-Combinator isn't competing with VCs, if anything, I'm sure it's glad to have new reputable ones emerging. They're much closer to "competing" with angels, yet they're out there trying to drum up more of them. YC invests about $15k. VCs normally won't mess with less than $1mm. Conceptually, YC seems more like a ready-made, actively involved, advisory board than a first investor, to my eyes, anyway.
Palish, thanks. I read this 75 days ago. And when similar things happened to me, just now, I re-read it. It helped some. Thank you.
they're primarily parasiting their users off another popular service (Twitter)

source? not sure that's totally true. (maybe for tinyurl, which twitter uses automatically, but bit.ly?)
If you buy one refurbished from a non authorized reseller, then it most likely won't come with the kickass warranty, but then again you might save a few hundred dollars...
I've got an Aeron at home, and a Mirra (http://www.hermanmiller.com/mirra/) at work. Both are made by Herman Miller. The Mirra is a bit cheaper and doesn't look as swish, but I find it about 50% more comfortable than the Aeron (to the point that I'm thinking about replacing the Aeron).

And both are many, many times more comfortable than anything else I've used.
Tim Bray on the Open Cloud Manifesto
That looks really promising! And fun, to boot.

My game is very simple, graphically, and doesn't need 3D (it's a pattern and sound-based brain game, so it isn't fast and it isn't flashy; it's being written first as a web application, and then it'll be ported and enhanced for desktop and iPhone/Android)...but I might try to figure out a way to make it use 3D just to have an excuse to buy and tinker with Unity.
Just got accepted into Emory today. I'm sorry but I want to yell it to the world. I hear back from the last college I applied to tomorrow. I have to keep telling myself to expect a rejection. It's the one ivy league I applied to. Gulp.

This whole process has been odd and strange. It has put a very friendly group of students at odds sometimes. And by no means is it over yet. It only intensifies with the work load. As seniors, we constantly expect things to cool off, but they never ever do.

I suppose this is welcome to the real world.

I have done well in this system of admissions thus far but I do not feel deserving, I feel lucky. I feel shit damn lucky. Qualified friends of mine are getting rejected or wait listed left and right. This system is flawed. I feel as if it has destroyed the best in me. Tore me down. And for what?

The college admissions process and high school as a prep-school need serious fixing and nobody is talking about it. And by talking I mean doing things.

I wrote about this today: http://blipfoto.com/view.php?id=275574&month=3&year=...
Disney/ABC, ESPN to allow short-form videos on YouTube under ad-sharing revenue deal
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Layyed off?? Insufficient Salary ?? Don't worry - If you are serious about surviving this recession, we can get you there.
Here's a list of their most popular links.

http://twitter.com/bitlynow

Copy/paste each link into their search page, then click "info", and you'll see where the users are clicking them.
Wow, finally, a real competition to Y-combinator?
Could someone please edit this to make it not break the layout? It's a really long line and makes this whole conversation a pain to read.

Edit: thanks!
It shouldn't be a big revelation to anyone that a Chinese person can communicate more efficiently in Chinese than in English, or that the same applies to other nationalities and native languages too.
Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific
I just wanted to sing the praises of StackOverflow.com for a second. I wanted to put together a custom query to display a few key metrics for my social news site. The folks on IRC ignored a polite request and I found a few folks willing to help for $50/hour. Both of these were expected, sensible outcomes.

StackOverflow came through with the answer in about 15 minutes.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/696289

The impressive part, to me at least, is that the initial answer posted wasn't yet easy enough for me to follow. I asked a few questions in the comments, more detail was added, I asked a few more questions and came back in a few hours and a copy-and-paste code snippet was waiting for me.

A+
Past the Inflection Point
Ask HN:  Please provide feedback for fonefu.com
Is it just me, or does this seem like a bad idea for entrepreneurs? I mean, if Google backed you, wouldn't that make you less desirable to many acquirers who compete with Google?
If this is anything like every other corporate venture arm that has ever existed, this will be a political (interally) and financial mess. This may also mean that the acquire-to-hire era is coming to an end at Google, which would be a negative situation for seed investors such as Y-Combinator. Overall, I'm not seeing the value equation here -- it's not as though Google and its employees didn't already have a birds'-eye-view of the startup scene.
how? this seems a lot more traditional VC:

We invest anywhere from seed stage to mezzanine and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance.

Does this mean mentorship? Demo Day? Who knows, but I think not...
No - I'm just going to take your word for it :) Thanks!

Edit: oh wait. In the top 10:

Email Clients, IM, AIR Apps, and Direct

Direct Traffic includes people clicking a bit.ly link from:

- Desktop email clients like Microsoft Outlook or Apple mail

- AIR applications like Tweetdeck or Twirhl

- Mobile apps like Twitterific or Blackberry Mail

- Chat apps like AIM

- SMS/MMS messages

It also includes people who typed a bit.ly link directly into their browser

seems to be 10x of twitter.com, so it's not easy to say that most of that is API traffic from Twitter clients, then.

So, then, no substantial evidence. I'm just curious whether it is a good assumption that twitter provides most of the traffic for all URL shortners, or not. Perhaps the people that run URL shortners can comment?
No; they're planning to operate like a regular VC fund.