skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you sure that's the correct registration date? I recall visiting that site last year... Or maybe it was in January after all.. Not sure now :/
You have to wonder what the buyers where thinking. One problem was that the rating agencies (paid by the companies creating the products, BTW), rated the stuff AAA.
Taking money when you don't need it doesn't necessarily help you in any way. As I have gathered from my conversations with people who have taken VC money (and those who haven't), taking VC money comes with additional burden of a number of admin tasks (meetings with them, status updates, etc etc)

If you just want to focus on building the product first, I don't think there's anything wrong with not taking money.
I don't think this is what I meant.
Yea I agree, I was looking mainly at the .NET ORM they have for sale when I made my comment.
As some of the comments on this thread allude to, it depends on the frame of reference. I'll assume you mean the customer is in a professional garage seeking a permanent fix and has the money to pay for it. In that case is duct tape a"good answer?" I think we both agree its not. But if the person were stuck on the side of a road and a mechanic drove by and that was all he had or if the person had no money to pay for a new hose, well, then duct tape might be a good answer (or the least of evils).

So to point out the obvious with these q/a sites, caveat emptor. One has to look at the context of the site and the question(s) asked to determine what is "right" or "wrong" and what assumptions are made, for right or wrong.
Ask HN: Did anybody think Google Ventures maybe April's fool?
Ask HN: Did anybody think Google Ventures maybe April's fool?
Yes, I didn't realize that "saved" links aren't perpetual (only go back to 210 total - which, for me, is 41 days).

Thankfully, there is http://searchyc.com to surface old, good articles.
Donation-funded reporting:
http://spot.us/
I don't think the reason this is not in is because of the number lines of code. You are correct, it would probably be trivial. But, the ability to reverse a vote, unless restricted to a very short period, would encourage group think and certainly wouldn't reduce the signal to noise ratio as you originally claim.

The number of mistaken up votes is probably a very tiny percentage of total votes, and accidental votes from multiple users on the same comment or post are most certainly even more rare. So the odds any given 'noise' comment or post is accidentally upvoted up to a meaningful level are extermely low.

And group think is already a problem on any voting news site. Allowing people to change their vote after they can see how everybody else is voting would certainly not alleviate that problem.

So while allowing a change of vote would help out an individual on their rare case of accidental upvote or downvote, I think the overall community effect would be detrimental.
Why is this on HN?

Also, who cares if someone takes your picture while you are exiting a sex shop? Are we supposed to pretend that we don't have sex or something?
seedcamp?
It's not something I've ever come across in Britain. People will tend to go and have a stroll around a local country park, or just round the streets near home. Personally, I couldn't think of anywhere worse than a shopping centre to spend a few hours walking!
My thoughts exactly. I don't think "Duped" is the right word; in the Sun's case, it's really just a matter of slight encouragement. They're in the entertainment business, and the original poster just gave them something for nothing. Who's the dupe again?
It'd be really nice if the RSS feed went to HN and not directly to the article. The RSS feed is useless to me as I have to have the HN page open anyway to get to people's comments.
Invites for Lunch.com, a social network that lets you review anything and everything
The fund will focus primarily on companies seeking seed funding and early stage funding, and Google Ventures will have the ability to make investments ranging from tens of thousands to "several tens of millions" of dollars, Maris said.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2009/03/reuters_us_g...

Sounds like competition to me. But it may also bring new opportunities for YC start-ups to be bought.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a long article on Pythagoras that doesn't mention the whole rutti-tutti-irrationality issue.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/

They do say that we don't have anything written by Pythagoras or his contemporaries--the earliest extant works mentioning him were written more than a century after his death--and then a lot of people attributed their own views to Pythagoras to give themselves the benefit of his fame. So it's really hard to know what the historical Pythagoreans did or believed.

I think it is safe to say that if the Pythagoreans kept the irrationality of √2 a closely guarded secret, it wasn't their only closely guarded secret.
Open-source releases coming this year
Yep. I think they need to come a little late to the table with WAY more substance and to follow scandals a month later with serious indictments. Let the net build the buzz before the big reporting and then spread the news and discussion after the big reporting. A good complement.

Decided to follow up on my blog with a vignette: http://justindz.tumblr.com/post/91601837/this-is-sam-he-work...
My guess is the grocery carts. Shopping for food can be a high volume experience. In a place where store owners can get reprimanded or penalized for closing before 9pm (it's usually in the mall lease), I think carts would detract from the shopping "experience".
Stem cell breakthrough: Monitoring the on switch that turns stem cells into muscle
Writing dumb titles makes you dumb and cancels out whatever knowledge you claim to have about causation != correlation.
I agree. It would also be consistent with other interaction on the site -- e.g. allowing you to modify or delete comments for a limited period of time.
Wales giving up on Wikia Search
Here's a very interesting quote:

"If you want to be rich one day, fall in love with a business that you own. Be passionate about its success and love it like you would a child. Don't worry about getting rich, that is something that happens while you are not watching."
While outsiders kvetch, Facebook is locking up the mass market -- people who don't flitter to each new social network as it appears, people who may wind up using the same social network from their 20s to their 70s (!).

That's worth spending a few years of losses to achieve.
I don't know what debt you mean, the division is profitable. It took them some money to get there, but that's what happens when you battle competition that has been entrenched for decades. At the rate they're going, they'll soon be profitable on the EDD unit as a whole.

So I'd take the Xbox unit, if we're talking strictly TV consoles. (Nintendo owns the handheld market, and is one of the biggest game makers too, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.) For one, they're the most likely to abandon optical media as a necessity for their next player. Nintendo is very backward-thinking when it comes to media formats, consistently choosing cartridges and proprietary discs. By your own logic, that's pretty bad. (The Wii proves users really don't give a damn yet, but they may.)

They'll still offer discs, because a lot of people will still want to rent games, buy them as gifts from Best Buy, etc. But it won't be the only way to get any new game. You can already pay to just download tons of games from the library.

For another, they're the most compelling VOD service on the market. They're going to achieve the dream of streaming movie rentals to people in large numbers. They're already doing it with Netlflix, but they're still improving. I already cancelled my cable and now watch whatever TV I do through PlayOn or streaming from a PC thanks to my Xbox. Despite rarely playing console games, my Xbox gets used daily.

They're much more than a gaming device, and they're growing there all the time. The Wii is not, it plays casual games well, and that's about it. And that's great, don't get me wrong, but it isn't the only market segment.

Also remember, Nintendo has been playing 2nd or 3rd fiddle for a couple generations before the Wii, after having dominated for 2 generations. There's no reason to believe they won't end up right back there. That industry is tumultuous to say the least.

And even if you'd go with Nintendo, that doesn't make what Microsoft has done any less impressive. That industry is one of the most brutally competitive there is. So many people have come and go, big companies have tried and failed to get a toe hold. Microsoft hit the #2 spot 2 generations in a row, and built a genuinely cool product that is killing the non-casual segment right now. It's really impressive.
You'd first have to prove that the diagonals bisect each other (so that you can say b = 2h). I'm not sure whether that result was known at the time, but it's not too hard to prove.
Is Twitter's breakneck growth causing a backlash?
I don't see this as new/news. When my sister was about 12 (1990ish) and had a lazy eye, the doctor gave her an eye patch and told her to play an hour of video games every other day. I assume this wasn't just his thoughts on treatment and that there were studies at that time that pointed him toward this treatment.

To be fair, the study talks about improved recognition of shades of gray rather than curing a lazy eye, but I still don't think that playing video games to improve eye function is a new thing.
Newspapers must drop the 'paper' from their name and embrace the web. Profit can come from diferent ways, like ads, classifieds, job boards, obituaries, etc.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just move the up/down vote buttons farther apart to reduce the number of errors? The comments here suggest it's a UI problem not "I changed my mind."
One of the best things to stop fatigue I have is a white board. It forces me to stand up (which is good).

I can walk around and think. I get to use my eyes in a different way and white boards rock. It's great fun.

Everyone get a whiteboard!
Newspapers themselves don't do journalism; newspaper journalists do. The journalists who write for newspapers will still exist, and still write what they write, if newspapers die out; their content will just be converted to, and paid for by, a different part of the media.
I think this "fix" would be used mainly by people who feel uncomfortable when they see assertive and well-written comments that disagree with them, and therefore it would hurt the signal-to-noise ratio. True mistakes are rare, no more than 5% of total votes. That's negligible for this context. It would be much worse to let people fix their votes after realizing the social context of their opinion.
http://www.dice.com for US tech jobs.
I copied the date directly from godaddy's whois database, so I believe it is correct, unless I overlooked something.
That's kind of like Post Secret's model and likely other site's models. Get users to create your book for you.
Unfortunately, the full-width text harms readability far more than removing the advertising and navigational clutter.

My browser window is typically sized to a width of around 1200 pixels -- pretty typical I would think -- so the printer-formatted version results in lines of around 30 words. That's too long to be able to read comfortably, and I think it's unreasonable to expect me to resize my browser depending on the type of website I'm reading (I have it as wide as 1200 pixels for a reason).

The standard, screen-formatted version (http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/) is specifically designed at a fixed width for comfortable reading.

I agree in principle that there are a lot of distractions on the screen-formatted article, but linking to the printer-formatted version does not seem like the right approach. Perhaps the best current solution is that readability Greasemonkey script that appeared a few weeks ago.
I've read that putting a light behind your monitor helps relax the eyes (i.e. illuminating the wall around the edges of the monitor) -- and it seems to work OK for me.

I think the theory is that it increases the amount of light entering the eye peripherally, which contracts the pupil slightly, helping focus.
If you could go to a museum and view a five-hundred-year-old version of IE6, people might shed a lot more tears when the last copy was turned off.

Newspapers are one of our oldest media. There's an entire infrastructure of mythology built around them that will be difficult to replace overnight. That's one reason why everyone finds it so easy to make glib generalizations like "the death of newspapers will herald a big increase in corruption". This isn't a rational statement. [1] It's a statement of religious faith, akin to the belief that atheists can't make moral judgements because they don't go to church on a regular basis.

But, more charitably, and to return to your point: Yeah, we should have at least some sympathy for the people who don't know about Firefox, or can't use it for some reason. The prisoners of corporate IT are people, too. The people who can't understand their Windows box are people, too. And the folks who are losing their jobs in journalism and have no idea what to do next are in legitimate distress.

---

[1] I mean, where's the controlled experiment? The last time a case of corruption happened in an era without newspapers was three hundred years ago. Unless you're a really well-read Latin student or a Renaissance historian, every case of corruption you've ever heard of happened in spite of the existence of newspapers.

Of course, if you hand-pick the data you can prove any point you like. There have certainly been many heroic acts of journalism. But there have also been many shameful acts of journalism, and one hell of a lot of mediocrity. I'd wager that for every great investigative journalist there have been a hundred mindless stenographers, several dozen shameless toadies, and at least one William Randolph Hearst. And that's without even getting into Pravda or (pace Godwin) Joseph Goebbels.
Experts Get Serious About Cloud Security
they would for sure not have a classical music CD in their car.

Point taken, but an aside:

I find listening to classical music in the car to be an exercise in futility. The dynamic range of classical makes it so that you're constantly adjusting the knob so that you can hear then quiet parts, then turning it down when it starts blasting your face off.

For the car, I just prefer the "normal" stuff, which has a much smaller dynamic range and is more conducive to listening over the background noise of a moving car.
I might still be new here, but I have to ask the same question.

----

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I think a lot of people will be scared to pitch to Google in the seed stage.

Google has pretty much established itself as "anything goes" company. So no matter what you pitch, you'd worry about them stealing your idea.

And why should Google back someone like you with no connections/traction etc, if they have plenty of resources to implement your idea on their own.
(I work for Ning)

It can take a huge amount of effort to build a social networking site. It can, also, take no perceived effort on the part of the person setting it up. You need to separate out the "I am building this for profit and see it as work" and "I am looking for a place on the interwebs which lets me interact with people in this way" -- we support both, and other, models. If we can find a way to make it even easier on the part of network creators, in terms of setting it up, building a community, etc, we will do it.

If you build up a profit or brand oriented network, you should probably consider running your own ads on it, you can do that (we then charge you, a small amount, for actually hosting it).

If you want a private SNS for your family and friends, boy scout troop, class, conference, user group, or any of the almost infinite reasons people want it, then the free model (where we run adds and hope to profit) may fit you best.

In the model you describe, the lack of compensation to the network builder is purely monetary. We provide goods (albeit virtual), support for those goods, and a continuous stream of improvements on those goods :-)
That's the first rational defense of Facebook's losses I've ever heard. Thanks gojomo!
"Don't even think about coming into work on Sunday if you don't show up on Saturday."

That's an interesting perspective. I think it's related to the "fall in love with a business" phrase in the quote already mentioned. I just couldn't see devoting that much effort to something I didn't love.
Seems to me that gzip or lzma with a constant, language-optimized dictionary would both...

(1) compress better; and

(2) be more robust/self-documenting.

EG: "Feed this dictionary, optimized over 1 billion [English|Western language|etc] documents, to zlib deflateSetDictionary() before compressing."

(The zlib/gzip dictionary is only 32KiB, but the lzma dictionary can be up to 32MiB.)

Building a small library of standard dictionaries, keyed by hash (so they can be locally cached or fetched when needed) would offer good coverage of many string domains.

See for example the Google 'Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP (SDCH)' proposal, apparently a feature of Google Toolbar:

http://sdch.googlegroups.com/web/Shared_Dictionary_Compressi...

http://groups.google.com/group/SDCH
Simply navigating to the oldest posts shows that the site itself existed prior to the stated registration date.

The earliest post I can see, #6, has the date of 10/13/2008. That's still pretty recent, but earlier than the time in the comment. It's possible it was at a different domain, of course, or that the domain was re-registered.

http://www.fmylife.com/love/6
X slim x340 msi notebook reviews
Just to second this: Amazon.com was founded in 1994 and achieved its first operating profit in 4th quarter 2001, almost 8 years later.
Not strange at all. I do that sometimes when I don't have a drawer. But pay attention, because you might find that the gods have not designed your lap to be at the ideal angle and distance for your arms and your wrists. And it's harder to perform mods on your lap than on your keyboard drawer. ;)
Preview HN: our research tool, Archivd
Hi, all -- we're launching our app in a few days and I wanted to give Hacker News a sneak peek:

www.archivd.com

Archivd lets you pull together useful and detailed web research very quickly. For example, here's a survey of 70-odd Y Combinator companies:

dev.archivd.com/public/detail/goy8uFXNKe2xGK?o=30

I'd love to hear what you think. HN's response to my old Dowser project is what got me seriously thinking of having a go at this startup. Thank you!
Can fractals make sense of the quantum world?
"Table of Integrals, Series, and Products" by Gradshteyn and Ryzhik. An awesome book, if you're one of the people who need it.

I wonder if today's physics students use books like that anymore, or if it's all gone Mathematica and Google. I would bet on the latter, but I can't be sure. It's been a long time since I looked up an integral.
See my comment above - the site existed in some form circa Oct 2008.
err... how will they be paid for?
Yep. If it doesn't fit you, it doesn't matter how much it costs. I'm only 6'2" and the Aeron C is a hair short for my legs, so I can well imagine that many 6'4" wouldn't like it.
svn's externals work quite well

I found them quite painful. Links to external paths don't work, committing with multiple externals when one or more of the external repos are down has some sort of problem (though it's been a while and may have been fixed), doing anything from the external to the parent (like moving files) had some sort of problem as well (again, maybe fixed). It was enough of a problem that the project I was working on ended up with two repositories for the same code...and they would manually merge them periodically. Obviously sub-optimal and a big waste of time, but it was less trouble than the alternative of having every developer understand why the external repo had to be treated completely differently from the rest of the repository in many regards.
Sure you can do this, what you get is something that is also able to adapt dynamically after the first 100 bytes or so. My requirement was to have something smaller, simpler, possibly able to run on low memory systems, and especially, with a much faster decompression compared to zlib.

I'm not exploiting an arithmetic encoding basically, and the dictionary is (intentionally) small. Add to this lib an arithmetic encoding and you get near to a zlib with an optimized dictionary, but at the cost of a lot of speed.
He didn't say that the developers in particular didn't like it. He didn't even say that _he_ doesn't like it. He only gave a generic statement referring to an unknown group of people.

Also known as "weasel words": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
It's not at all clear to me that Facebook has anyone locked up. If there is a competing service, one that even figures out how to be profitable, there are a lot of ways it could win me over from Facebook. Heck, Facebook is sufficiently off-putting that my ceasing participation there is readily conceivable.
Climate control is most of it.

I'm from this area (although I haven't been to Metcalf South in ages). Our winters are mostly below freezing and our summers are mostly above 95, so for older people, walking outside is rather less appealing than walking in what amounts to a climate controlled indoor track.

Sadly, this isn't even the worst case. The (not so) Great Mall of the (not so) Great Plains in Olathe (about 20 mins away), actually opens early in the morning so people can use it to walk. The stores don't open until 9 or 10, but the mall itself will open at 7 for walkers. This mall is a giant oval that is probably 3/4 of a mile in circumference, with carpeted floors.

Yeah, it's stupid, and it's not that cold/hot outside, but honestly anything is better than the average suburban exercise routine, which is to do nothing.
As the old saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Facebook does have to make money sometime, or it all comes to an end.
Ask HN: How was Vimeo built?
I really like the look/feel and light-weight design of vimeo.

Would anyone mind giving their 2 cents on what languages it was built using, or how it was built?

Thanks :)
I've tried this approach; taking the time to give a detailed answer with reasoning behind my choices and explanations for areas that might be unclear. Two things happen:

1 - The fast, but "good enough" answer wins out for the short term 10+ votes (and "Accepted status), then the question falls into the mire, occasionally floating to the surface via a Google search, where I might get one or two votes.

2 - My answer is accepted, enough that noone else bothers to partake in the question, and it falls off the radar having received maybe 1 or 2 votes.

In terms of getting good answers into the system, I guess things are working as intended. In terms of creating an engaging experience for the questioner and answerer, this seems sub-optimal.
Not long ago, Libya was on US trade-restricted lists.

If Libya were to return to such lists, would using a bit.ly URL to link to advanced encryption code be a federal offense?
When it's below freezing out and you're 75 years old, a mall is preferable to most anyplace outside.