skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agreed with your overall point, but I was expanding on part of what you were saying:

You seem to appreciate how Haskell allows you to separate your pure code from your non-referentially transparent monadic code. This gives you reasoning where you can have it, and you use monads where you can't.

I'm just saying that same argument applies in databases where using a relational database allows you to separate your total code from your pure code. You use the value-based relational strategy where you can have it (necessary and sufficient for database management), and you use functional (or imperative) programming where you can't.
I found the link at the bottom of that page to be much more interesting: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-eclipse-ebay1/i...
Beggars can't be choosers. Sometimes you have to take what you can get to make the thing work.
If you watched the video then you'd know that the designer did a great job of integrating the content into the design of the newspaper. It isn't a copy-paste job. There was design and layout and graphics that you just can't do on the web, and he demonstrated that people like it.

So if you change the question to, would you invest in a designer who had a track record of boosting circulation by 20-100% in two years time?
I certainly would be hesitant to just email them a business plan...While Google itself might not "steal ideas"; What's to prevent an engineer at Google from culling through great ideas and starting up his/her own company?
Apache CouchDB 0.9 has been released
Then again, maybe he thinks social network platforms should print their own money, in which case the
experience of US govcorp is informative.

He thinks that platforms will take the place of both governments and corporations.

http://www.kidmercuryblog.com/t1689/*

A few years ago, this type would have been a believer in the upcoming "singularity."
Branson's PitchTV, Winners will be shown on Virgin Atlantic Flights
What about limiting the reversal to a short time span, say 1 minute?
It looks like you put together your codebook by hand (containing phrases like "http://" and ".com"), right? Wouldn't it be better to automatically extract it from a sample text corpus? Otherwise, you'd be introducing your own biases.
Track Gmail messages with Google Analytics
VCs are competing with YC the same way that bachelors programs are competing with PhD programs.

Edit: Title originally mentioned Google competing with YC.
>> "I don't know what debt you mean, the division is profitable."

I thought it was just profitable for 2008, but not profitable as a whole, when taken as a venture - 5 years of heavy losses, then 1 year of some profit?

Other points taken, and guitar hero rocks, halo is cool. The xBox is the best part of ms. On the downside, my xbox often sounds like a washing machine and is hotter than the sun ;)
Amusingly, the opposite is happening. Most supermarkets (in the midwest anyway) are starting to sell non-food items.

The one I went to when I was recently living in Texas sold flat screen TVs, DVD players, books, kids toys, and clothes, in addition to food. Many Wal-marts are adding grocery stores.

From the consumer's viewpoint, they can still get everything in one place (just like a mall), but the economics for big box retailers are better than a bunch of small stores that happen to gather in one building.
The Pythagoreans had an elaborate philosophy based on the idea that the harmony of the universe was due to relations between the natural numbers. For example, Pythagoras discovered that musical notes and harmonies was based on relations between real numbers. He concieved the notion that the relations between the movements of the planets would create a similar harmonius symphony, the music of the spheres.

All that beauty and harmony fell apart when it was discovered that irrational numbers existed.
Fancy checking out a PDF conversion of the newspaper that was featured in this video..? I found a copy at http://rapidshare.com/files/142517365/pb.04.09.08.pdf - I'd mirror it, but even though I'm sure they'd love for people to check out their newspaper, it's just too risky legally.
Braille Label Maker
A new service wouldn't have to win you over. It'd have to win over the entire mass of non-technical people who have been arriving at Facebook in droves over the past 18 months.

For these people, Facebook is the first and only social network they've considered, synonymous with the category. They don't rush to try new things, and the number one benefit of any network is that it's where their existing friends are. Facebook is it.

It would be easier to get these people to switch from Google (synonymous with search to them) than Facebook, because individuals can switch by themselves with search. With Facebook, unless you get a bunch of friends to switch all at once, you can't even see the value of something new.
JQuery Plugins to Enhance HTML Dropdowns
A lot of people would be dumb to pitch to Google in the idea phase. If you're a first time founder without a convincing, working (and probably already with users) prototype or some really, really convincing connections your email is going to go straight into the circular file.

The "steal my idea" thing is one of those notions that makes sense until you're out there for a little while. I worried about it too until I realized, wait, nobody cares. A lot of good ideas seem to only look good in retrospect.

Google, "We're building better search." "Uh, huh. Yeah. You do that. Graphs you say? Dweebs."

Microsoft, "We're building a commodity operating system." "Without a computer? Why?"

Facebook, "We're starting a social network for college students." "Uhm, like MySpace?"
One factor that helps me is to set my IDE syntax coloring schemes to minimize the amount of blue one the screen. Mostly yellow, green and brown text with hilights of grey or cyan on a black background.

Staring at glowing text is much better than staring between the glow in a futile effort to mimic paper. Blue light makes focusing more difficult.
I'm not sure whether you are praising colins_pride or making fun of him.

Car safety is one of the canonical examples of the "risk compensation" effect:

"In 1981 John Adams published a paper, The efficacy of seatbelt legislation: A comparative study of road accident fatality statistics from 18 countries, Dept of Geography University College, London 1981 - published in 1982 by the Society of Automotive Engineers. This showed that in the countries studied, which included states with and without seat belt laws, there was no correlation between the passing of seat belt legislation and reductions in injuries or fatalities.

This paper was published at a time when Britain was considering a seat belt law, so the Department of Transport commissioned a report into the issue. In the event the report's author, Isles, agreed with Adams' conclusions. The Isles Report was never published officially but a copy was leaked to the Press some years later. The law was duly passed and subsequent investigation showed some reduction in fatalities, the cause of which could not be conclusively stated, due to the simultaneous introduction of evidential breath testing.

Other research has taken groups of drivers, including those who did and did not habitually wear seat-belts, and measured the effect on driving style in the habitually unbelted. The drivers were found to drive faster and less carefully when belted."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
I often see the "Accepted" answer with 2 or 3 points, and then a question below that with 10+ points which has more work put into it over a longer time, so the first answer was a quick solution to fix the asker's question, but other users put work into a better answer and the answerer ends up getting points for that as well. This is great because it creates a fast answer (good thing) and a good answer that takes longer. (also good.)
I had both feelings of initial excitement and concern. My concept might be 'perfect' for a Google property, but that becomes a double-edged sword. Sure, GVentures will not want to get a rep for stealing ideas from submissions, but it's not about intent. It's always been the main reason I wouldn't be concerned so much about NDAs with VCs is that they're really not in the position to implement at the drop of a dime, or effectively weave key parts into an existing project. Google on the other hand... Hmmm.
How about PG adds vista style confirmations? :)
Chicago Sun Times Files For Bankruptcy
Not a whole lot of detail here - there is a much more detailed history/expansion here: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&... (PDF)
There are retail places where I am price-sensitive when shopping. Borders isn't one of them. I'd worry that the positive comments you're getting here are very biased towards the HN audience.

The place where I'm most price-sensitive when shopping is probably Best Buy.
If you got the answer you needed you should really mark it as the accepted answer.
you can watch this on youtube. i recommend it.
Web 2.0 Expo: Exhibitors down nearly 40%, but attendance down "only by a small percentage"
Reminds me of this:

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Steering-Wheel_20Spike
Clearly, for the VC, the best time for you to raise money is whenever you can.
Hello, no I build it with a Ruby script. But I inserted two codes by hand, http:// and .com. All the rest is based on a probability-length based weight, and a test data that is the following: english books in .txt format, and different .html pages from wikipedia.
Yeah, and? Raise your hands if you didn't already know newspapers were in trouble. Flagged; this isn't Hacker News, it's just plain news.
Jimmy Wales Deadpools Wikia Search
Archivd live, congrats aristus et al
Make Your Firefox Browser Look Better With Mozilla Labs’ Latest Skins
These concerns are overblown. Reminder: Ideas are worthless. Implementation matters. Business plans are dime a dozen.

Furthermore google knows that such an event would kill their credibility as a VC instantly and hurt the Google brand as a whole due to the motto violation.

I can't think of an idea or business-plan that could possibly be worth that risk, therefor I assume google will take proper care of confidentiality.
He seems to contradict himself:

"I measure my success by answering a very simple question. Did I make money for my investors? If the answer is yes, I was successful and if it is no I failed. Every time I sell a business and I make money for my shareholders I consider that a great success. That's the thing about money, there is no grey zone. When I hear a CEO say their company lost money on an investment and then try and chalk it up to experience, it frustrates me that they don't apologize to their shareholders and admit a mistake.

Losing money always gives me great pain, I will never get used to it."

So the absolute goal is making money but you shouldn't worry about getting rich?...

Also this seems nonsensical:

"A very good friend of mine and a legendary entrepreneur, Ron Posner once said to me, "When someone wants to buy your business, sell it to them." It's a philosophy that has served me very well during my career. I have started multiple businesses over the years and I have had my share of success and failure but when approached to sell I always do."

Guess I'll buy his businesses for 1$ each. Personally I'd rather sell my business when I decide I'm "done" with it.
What are you doing to achieve the compression? Huffman coding (or a similar symbol code)?
>> "Deleted means deleted"

Gmail: Delete... oops... undo.

Granted though, it should warn you that you're resuming a deleted campaign. But that's a feature request to save people making mistakes IMHO rather than anything inherently wrong with their UI.
Google is slowly morphing from technology company to tech focused private equity firm.
"print(random.choice(['svn', 'bzr', 'hg', 'git']))"

This actually printed "hg" for me the first time I ran it.
I know plenty of others, including myself, who back up the anecdote with the same story. When does an anecdote stop becoming an anecdote and start becoming evidence? ;)
When society is involved, controlled experiments are impossible.

Take a look at the front page of a common "new media" blog: http://dailykos.com/

As of this moment, about 18 out of the 20 posts are using old media (almost always newspapers) as a source, with the bloggers' total contribution being opinion. Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. There's a serious void threatening there.
Britain has quite a few parks and streets designed for walking. Those are very valuable commodities in the USA.

And, as others have pointed out, much of the USA is really cold in the winter. Here's an article about Britain's "record cold" from earlier this winter. (As low as -11C in parts of Scotland!)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/article5459012...

Here's a map of Minnesota's mean winter temperatures. Note that the mean temperature in the southern-middle part of the state, where Minneapolis and the Mall of America are, is around 14 degrees F, or about -10 C.

http://climate.umn.edu/img/normals/mean_temp_norm_adj/mean_t...
I have a friend who moved to ning. They find it slow and inflexible. I'm suggesting they move to an open platform, like AroundMe (which, if they need to, they can customize. No can do with Ning).
A distributed filesystem is certainly the way to do this and I like what I'm hearing, but I'm still curious what the underlying capabilities of that filesystem is.

Who is authoritative for a given file? Is it a crypographic least-authority filesystem like freenet or allmydata? Or does each identity basically own a top-level directory with the others caching what it publishes?

What do identities and the identity server look like? Does the server only handle pretty name -> crypto key mapping, or is it highly trusted?
it uses mootools for a lot of the pretty UI stuff, and it's ruby on rails.
I did forget. But I just went back and did it. Thanks!
It's crazy how fast he went from making an interesting argument to completely cuckoo. It was like Woody Woodpecker dressing up in a lab coat and playing it serious, only to bust out at the end and peck a short bald man on the nose.

I have to admit though, the idea that the revolution will be fueled by social networking platforms is a new twist.
IMO News shouldn't be a for-profit industry. For-profit news encourages poor journalism as you can make more money selling lies than selling the truth.
Get used Aeron, they're pretty cheap.
The Greeks did know about irrational numbers. They could draw a right triangle whose legs were 1 and 1. They knew that the length of the hypotenuse (a number that we call the square root of two) couldn't be represented as the ratio between any two integers, yet it had a length.
Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail
You could at least have a greeting and some options read by a real person.
OnLive claims to have compression time down to 1 millisecond. I'm not sure how long decompression takes, but it would be more accurate to say "the latency will be ping + 1ms + decompression time worse than a local game".

Anyone have stats on latency for decompressing 720p video?

BTW: Local game latencies for 30fps games are often (30ms/2 average time between controller input and controller sampling) + (30ms gameplay&physics processing) + (30ms CPU-side graphics) + (30ms GPU-side graphics) + (30-90ms TV signal processing) >= 135ms.

I had a chance to play Mirror's Edge through OnLive at GDC. They were claiming a 50ms ping to the server for that setup. I choose that game because I am very familiar with it and it is a very demanding. The extra lag was noticable, but still playable.
Printed git for me. Phew.
I'm sad to see the doors close on Wikia Search. I was an intern in the NYC office last summer. The project had a refreshingly open philosophy and was built using FOSS components.

At least the index is still available at http://index.isc.org/
Are Bloggers the New Pamphleteers?
They don't rush to try new things

Evidence of this in light of the counterexample known as MySpace?
Device allows plants to Twitter
Thanks a lot, pclark. I really appreciate the input :)
To be fair to him, he didn't mention anything about price. One would assume that a fair price would be a conditional concern.

Personally I'd rather sell my business when I decide I'm "done" with it.

I think this speaks exactly to his point - that because you're never "done", you never sell, and (in his mind) miss out on a good deal of the business' value. Certainly, a certain Facebook owner would have been fared better had he followed this mantra.

I don't agree with a lot of his take, but this one I thought was a great little nugget.
so should the USA have something like the BBC?
Not if, even with the boost, you're still not breaking even.
2009 Rubyist's guide to a Mac OS X development environment
That's why getting a good soundsystem (read, one with a very nice range) is important. It's also why having an EQ is very handy.
If there wasn't a need to explain that it should be flagged, why was there a need to say at all that it should be flagged? If people are smart enough to understand the reason the submission should be flagged, aren't they smart enough to understand on their own that it should be flagged?

Also, I personally did not understand why it was flagged.
It's not that simple.

While there is a very large market for silly lies - tabloids.
That market also has a very low barrier to entry.

There are market segments happy and able to pay for quality, try The Economist.
Those markets are much smaller but also have a much higher barrier to entry, and a very affluent audience.

I think what's killing the newspapers is that they tried to sit on two chairs at once. Trying to be both informative and popular.

Without competition that might have worked, but it's over now.

Because for pay news like the AP and Bloomberg and magazines The Atlantic Montly, etc, are doing just fine, and because tabloids are also fine, I don't think many will miss those going out of business.

But I also agree with you, the non profit newspaper is a good option. I believe The Irish Times is a grant based non-profit.
Alternatively, the USA has PBS.
If it blew out the walls of the garage, then the roof would collapse. That doesn't bode well for anyone under the roof at that time.
Novell's Mono Gets Faster and More Visual
Makes sense. People in Sweden used baskets, not carts, so it fit with the other shop experience.

But what grocery store closes before 9pm?
"I find listening to classical music in the car to be an exercise in futility."

Also, the better stuff demands attention, which I prefer to give to the road and other drivers.

(I'm a fan of post-rock, which, for lack of a proper description, is sort of like prog rock meets Michael Nyman on the way to Brian Eno's house.)
I think what he's trying to say is that it's best to concentrate on that which brings in the money rather than on the money itself. The latter should follow from the former.
China gets ad-supported music through Google
adsense, common sense!
I'm still going to wear my seatbelt.
This code made me smile, so don't take this the wrong way.

Don't run smaz() on untrusted input. Two things you need to fix, and a general word of advice:

(1) In the 0xFE case, you check for headroom in the output buffer but not the input buffer. If 0xFE is the last character in the input, you run right off the end of it, dumping the contents of memory to the output string.

(2) In the 0xFF case, same thing; if 0xFF 0xFE are the last characters in the buffer, I get at least 254 bytes of surrounding memory in my output.

How big a deal this is depends on what's in memory (and where the buffers are being kept). Generally, these are going to be on the stack, thus, a big deal.

General advice: not in love with using signed integers for byte counts; also, I don't think you have this problem because you're using full width integers, but be aware that your length bytes can theoretically wrap back to 0 if you're ever not careful in the future.

DON'T DATE ROBOTS.
You're right. That's pushing it for those handful of scratches on the tablet. Who knows, maybe they had some lemma tablets lying around.
I'd like to see malls in the US become more like those in Singapore. Supermarkets, fresh fruit stands, top-notch restaurants and amazing food courts. A reflexology clinic here & there would be nice too :)

Of course, malls in Singapore (and probably elsewhere outside the US) benefit from being placed within walking distance or directly on top of/underneath mass transit hubs. When you have to drive to a concrete island, it won't be quite the same.
Seconded.

YC provide the capital they do to cover only the most necessary expenses. For many people there are other ways to raise that amount of cash if you really needed to. (Probably not glamorous ways, but you could likely get there).

It's not exactly apples and oranges, but to focus on the cash kind of misses the point of what YC is about, and what it really offers.

I'd like to believe that Google entering the space is a good thing, and I do, but I believe the focus in the article on the $100m is kind of irrelevant.

How much of that is Google really going to invest at seed stage? And with what ventures?

I'd be eager to find out.
Troubled SeeqPod Files For Bankruptcy Protection
Or you live in Phoenix and a stroll on a summer day is potentially lethal.

Walking around a climate-controlled mall is great exercise.
Why does this guy get negative points? It's legitimate...
Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters.

But this is like arguing that, if Internet Explorer stopped working tomorrow, 90% of web users would be out of commission for years. Whereas, in fact, if IE stopped working tomorrow there would be a brief panic for a day or two until the world's techies, armed with handfuls of installation media for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, filled in the gap. After which things would continue much as before. (Except that many websites would be cheaper to build and would work better. But let's not get into that. ;)

There would be several years of intense pain on the edges as various people and companies who have tied themselves too closely to the IE codebase scrambled to adapt to the new world. But in ten years nobody would even remember IE, just as few people today remember Lotus 1-2-3.

Of course today's blogs depend on dead-tree reporters. Dead-tree reporting is available in abundance -- indeed, in many niches there is a massive surplus of it -- because it is subsidized by steady outside sources of revenue derived (in part) from monopolies on local advertising. It was hard to compete against that subsidy, while it lasted. But that subsidy is smaller now, and shrinking. [1] And we just don't know what happens next.

---

[1] Though, in fact, I don't think it is gone. The death of print media may be greatly exaggerated. It's hard to tell the difference between an extinction-level event and an event that will reduce the population by a mere 85% when you're in the middle of it. And simple mismanagement has a lot to do with the newspapers' current plight.
Uncle Saul Video - Three "C's" of Wealth Creation
The small investments are not what makes YC YC.

Existing VCs also have the ability to make investments in the tens of thousands. But they rarely do because that's not what they're designed for.
Are you an anti-conspiracy nut? Please, let's not get taken over by (equally fact-free) official story nutters like reddit.

Certainly "discussions" about the events of sep11 are pointless sparring - like politics in general, people have deep-rooted beliefs and emotionally argue about something that is inherently unprovable.

But this has nothing to do with the linked article - you are starting a political argument based on other things the author has written (but not submitted).
SAP Labs working on Implementing a Ruby VM on SAP