skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I am curious about is how many of them have already distribution channels and established brands so that there is a possibility to trace them through the supply chain based on the barcode (pure FMCG/CPG market). My believe is that 90% of them are "white label goods" or are re-branded as the reception point. My hope is however that 10% are becoming more and more integrated into "integrated" supply chain with no repackaging taking place, so that China/India goods are produced and immediately sold worldwide (through a wholesaler step). I would love to have a system like alibaba but more enforcing from barcoding perspective: each barcode has manufacturer prefix, based on the barcode you should be able to trace back to the manufacturer - also there might be a need to list all the resellers, wholesalers etc that are importing particular goods from the particular manufacturer in the particular target market, etc ...

Anyone who is willing to exchange thoughts on the subject feel free to contact me through email in my profile.
Oh, of course - range() is evaluated once in either case. It returns an array, which is then stepped through. The time difference must have been just some inaccuracy. I guess 'time' isn't the best command to use to test efficiency ... or maybe try adding another 0?
Good quote out of the article "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
Ten things I love && hate about C
swhnorton, how big is the use of QR in China?
Sweet! I learned to program by writing a Forth compiler. Was an excellent way to learn. I only discovered Lisp much later, and definitely like what I see, but haven't gotten around to learning it properly yet.

Interestingly, Lisp people think that Lisp doesn't have much syntax -- Forth has even less. It's basically words separated by spaces, and that's it.

Is it just me, or has Forth been getting quite a bit of mention recently? Perhaps it's because the Forth-derived Factor language is getting more popular.
New reddit broken for text-only browsers :-(
Doesn't a user's karma say more about how much time they have to contribute to Hacker News than about how good their judgment is?
You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World
it certainly says much more about the time spent contributing than anything about quality
Good quotes:

"...[people] cannot accept that skills and payoffs may have nothing to do with one another."

"We need more tinkering: uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein
I really respect people with extreme ideological views because I am glad that someone is fighting for most of the different ideologies. We'll get to rms's Free utopia eventually.

Any idea if GNU Hurd supports USB yet? Maybe even Intel wireless cards?
Great blog about the process of building an e-commerce startup
Ask YC : Is Ruby on Rails the holy grail of web programming ?
I keep seeing this posts about ruby on rails and it sounds more and more like it's suppose to be the holy grail of web programming. Yet, I don't see many success story's to back it up. Is it going to be a ruby bubble happening soon ? How many projects for YC use Ruby ?
heh ... I posted in an share-your-ideas last week about making a site that agragates the agregation sites and it seems that's just what picurls.com is all about. Taking the pictures from other sites like digg, readdit, del.icio.us and puting it all toghether. I think this can be done not only for pictures but for other things like videos, news, other-niches-categories.
> And, closer to something I've needed more than once, how do you give your program an int and string version number with only one thing to modify?

This is not very elegant, and you have to split your version number to major and minor part, but it does the job. Oh, yes, minor version must be between 0 and 99 (inclusive).

#define VERSION_MAJOR 2
#define VERSION_MINOR 9

#define VERSION_INT (VERSION_MAJOR * 100 + VERSION_MINOR)
#define STRINGIFY2(x) #x
#define STRINGIFY(x) STRINGIFY2(x)
#if VERSION_MINOR<10
#define VERSION_STR STRINGIFY(VERSION_MAJOR) ".0" STRINGIFY(VERSION_MINOR)
#else
#define VERSION_STR STRINGIFY(VERSION_MAJOR) "." STRINGIFY(VERSION_MINOR)
#endif
I suppose you'd just have to exclude submissions where the total points never reached some predetermined floor - say 5 or 10 points. That would eliminate all the points accumulated from submissions and comments that were not received well. And you'd still have a measure of the users who "understand" the community.
Thanks for submitting my article!

It describes how I created picurls.com from scratch and I released the full source code of picurls.com! (Perl and PHP)
And if you don't need string constant, but just a string, then you can use the following (I'm not sure about portability though):

#include <stdio.h>

#define VERSION_INT 3209

#if VERSION_INT < 100
#error VERSION_INT less than 100
#elif VERSION_INT < 1000
#define VERSION_STR (char[]){VERSION_INT/100+'0','.',(VERSION_INT%100)/10+'0',(VERSION_INT%10)+'0',0
#elif VERSION_INT < 10000
#define VERSION_STR (char[]){VERSION_INT/1000+'0',(VERSION_INT%1000)/100+'0','.',(VERSION_INT%100)/1
#endif

int main(void)
{
printf("%d\n", VERSION_INT);
printf("%s\n", VERSION_STR);
return 0;
}

Output:

3209
32.09
Ignore those low-recognized submissions and the associated points.

By "integrity", I just meant a way to protect from drift. If the early users "know" the community, and they soon get overrun by newbies (the Reddit phenomenon), then why not give those early/frequent users a greater voice? A newbie would still get their voice amplified as they show they "understand" the community (i.e., accumulated karma).

I'm cool with editors fixing and deleting posts. But amplifying their voice in votes seems more problematic - both technically and from a community-stand point. Why not let the "best" voters simply emerge from the community esprit de corps? That's not to say a great voter is anyone above some predetermined ceiling - just that community knowledge increases as a function of karma - weight the votes accordingly and you protect the community while respecting every user's contribution.
And yet that's exactly the business we're in. I just stopped in to check Hacker News before getting on with reading applications, which consists of trying to predict who will change the world, and the top story is that one can't.

I agree with this essay, but I don't think the title is quite right. All the people who've changed the world have been energetic and determined. So you can to some extent predict by recognizing those qualities. You can predict the people, just not what the ideas will turn out to be. The title should have been "You can't predict how the world will change."
"Random tinkering is the path to success."

This is of course why we're all using a neighborhood DC power station provided by Edison Electric.

Nope, sorry, "random tinkering" will get you only so far.

Not so random tinkering can get you farther, it's no accident that about the most popular handgun design in the USA was made by John Browning (the greatest firearms design genius in history) and adopted by the US Army in 1911 (!). (We're also still using his M2 .50 cal machine gun with no real need to replace it, just as there was no real reason to replace the M1911.)

But if you combine "random tinkering" with "European math" (i.e. Tesla and the polyphase AC that Edison could not do the math for), now, there you really have something.

When I read some histories of the founding concepts of MIT, it was very clear they desired to meld these two powerful themes into something new, the motto Mens et Manus (Mind and Hand) and the seal expressing this quite clearly.

And while I understand that a lot of you all who are focused on a niche that richly rewards "random tinkering" don't think there's much value add to e.g. the sorts of engineers that MIT turns out, I submit to you that you wouldn't be here unless you were standing on the shoulders of the people who produced artifacts like the transistor, the IC and TCP/IP (and maybe even ACID databases :-), none of which were pure "random tinkering".

To recast this a bit, maybe look at it through Clayton Christensen's lens:

The transistor, IC and TCP/IP were all sustaining innovations, replacing the tube, mechanically integrated modules and previous networking systems respectively. Each dropped right into the place of their predecessors with the usual teething pains, but represented qualitative improvements that in a while were game changers.

What you are doing is disruptive innovation at its finest (read The Innovator's Dilemma for the full treatment).

There's a place for both, but I believe that while what one is working on might strongly emphasize one or the other, one should be reasonably grounded in both.

Otherwise you might find your lunch eaten by a disruptive innovation, or hit a brick wall when you're in the sustaining axis and e.g. something doesn't scale in an important way.

(And I thank keaneu for reminding why I dropped my subscription to Forbes a long time ago (before SCO vs. The World). :-)
Measure online advertising with Google Analytics
Only if the evolution of programming languages has stopped.
"There is a season for sowing and a season for reaping. They are never the same season."

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is stop sowing. You've done all you can, now sit back and let it come to you. If it doesn't, sow again.
just wait like everyone else :)
while we use it to power our startup, I don't think that it is a holy grail :)
http://www.abebooks.com is the place to buy used books, not Amazon.
What is this "compete.com" site, and why are people believing this bogus data and even cite it?

The data from this site is highly irrelevant and false.
And the Search Analytics is a joke: For example for wikipedia top keywords are "snape kills dumbledore page" and softpedia.com has "vanessa hudgens pictures", mit.edu has "romeo and juliet", slate.com has "girls gone wild"... huh? What is this bs?
Oh, thanks. I redid it using xrange instead of range and the numbers went down to an average (over 20 tries) of about 1.36 sec for maxval1 (which computes endpoint within the xrange) and 1.9 sec for maxval2 (which uses variable in xrange.)
I've heard this a number of times now. Since we're using SVN, I'll definitely try Trac.

Is there any reason to not use the built in server?
There are a few success stories out there using Rails, starting with, of course 37Signals themselves, and Twitter. Rails has gotten a lot of publicity and there are more than a few Ruby fans out there.

I would not call it a holy grail. There has been the growth of several frameworks that use the Rails philosophy recently like Grails and hopefully we will see a few success stories come out of those too.
"The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design."
Yep. This article is painful to read: they propose to eliminate cubes by switching to... open plans and shared tables! Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

My home office has a Kinesis keyboard and three monitors placed at the proper height. Now they propose to "improve" my office arrangement by forcing me to use a laptop all day? I'll stick with telecommuting, thanks.

If I'm going to work at the equivalent of a table in Starbucks, why wouldn't I just work at Starbucks? There's natural light, and the coffee tastes better.

And check out this line from the article:

"Cubicles can prompt odd behavior... It is hard to see if colleagues are busy, so some cube-dwellers will send emails to a neighbor about a simple question that could have been answered more easily in a conversation."

Yes, the real problem with cubicles is that they make it too difficult to break people's concentration!

"Where people in jobs such as marketing tend to want open offices... employees in product groups favor cubes." No kidding.
You still can't predict just who, out of a reasonably large pool of energetic and determined people, will be the ones with the really big payoffs (for whatever definition of payoff, be it monetary, a big discovery or whatever).

You can probably say with some degree of certainty, which people won't do anything big. That might still leave a pretty large group of people, though.

Who else thinks it would be a lot of fun to see a Graham-Taleb debate on startups? In the end, I think he'd probably like what YC does, because you're giving some people the freedom to "tinker" full time, along with the support to take advantage of the tinkering if it produces something cool. Given a non-infinite supply of money and attention time, of course you're going to have to pick and choose who gets those things. I wonder if he would suggest any changes to the format?
I don't think he's saying to just take a bumble-along happy go lucky approach, with no rigor, training or mental discipline, but that you can't "sit down and invent things" most of the time. Sure, you can point yourself in a direction, but even then, you have to try, fiddle, experiment, and calibrate as you go along, and you might even then arrive somewhere that you didn't set out to go, if you're well placed to grab opportunities.
I think it would be hard for pg to comment on how the applications are going without talking about the number of applications, which he doesn't want to do.

Also, do you really think talking about an application would constitute taking a break right now?
Remember, This Stuff Is Supposed To Be Fun
Who Needs Talent When You Have Intensity?
what it takes to be a "good" programmer?
Anti-Google: the Future of Social Networking
It's a big step on the path forward, even if you only judge by how many people are copying it.

It gets a lot of things right, in my opinion. It had to - no one would even consider jumping to a new platform for a %10 increase, so it must be significant.
"... The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet ...."

More than likely Tim O'Reilly quoting William Gibson. O'Reilly loves this quote because he uses it to identify new markets. I've often wondered where Gibson said this. It certainly wasn't in any Gibson book I've read. It is attributed to an NPR interview he made in 1999, "The Science in Science Fiction", November 30, 1999, 12min into the interview ~ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1067220
I do not think it's the holy grail. At the same time, I wouldn't count success stories to gauge its usefulness. There are many factors going into success, and the programming language you choose is just one of them.
This is exactly why we are in a startup, because we love this stuff.
Outsourcing can be a boon to the end-users (society) - the case study of manufacturing outsourcing to china doesn't require any discussion - same would happen to business process and knowledge process outsourcing - the r&d will be done at one tenth of the cost in third world country - from idea to reality will also take one-tenth of the time - so at the end of day society at large would benefit.
Imagine if you had a Beowulf cluster of those!

(SCNR)
Taleb actually says something similar in his answer to the 2007 Edge question:

"The only bad news is that we can't really tell where the good news are going to be about, except that we can locate it in specific locations, those with a high number of trials. More tinkering equals more Black Swans. Go look for the tinkerers."

http://edge.org/q2007/q07_5.html#taleb

The Forbes article is basically just the edge answer minus a few paragraphs, although sadly the paragraphs that got cut were the ones that would probably be most interesting to YC types.
Moreover, the extent to which you predict who the world-changers will be does not have to be great.

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-...

One reason that applicants should not take rejection personally is that YC would be wasting time trying to evaluate them with 100% accuracy.
"... just that community knowledge increases as a function of karma ..."

Reasonable approach similiar to perlmonks where you have to earn rights instead of being "gifted" them. The karma approach breaks down if you assume karma is permanent ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63583

An effective way is to be familiar with hacker submission names from the leader board or read the comments. I do like your idea though and it's something I wish existed on /. a long time ago when the "hoards" found it.
What Makes a Global Leader?
50x Faster Than BitTorrent: I Want
Clearly, the answer is no. It is not the holy grail of web programming.

Is it a step in the right direction? Absolutely.
I love Trac. I use it for a commercial project of mine (http://www.extravalent.com/) and I use the Wiki to provide the documentation to my end users, I use the bug database and I use the SVN integration.

John.
They've been saying that for years though. In a sense, we are cyborg-human mixes: Heart-monitors, hearing-aides, etc.
I think the integration will come, but I think we're still far off.

I'm just waiting for my flying car damnit!
I use Clickatell and like the service. At 250k messages you're getting a 23% discount. At today's prices 250k messages will cost $12,000.

John.
I hope an occult style following does not develop for this book. Much of what he says in his book can be learned by going through David Hume's essay a "An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" which is widely available and surprisingly to say, an easier read then Taleb book.

As for this article the only interesting thing said to was "Ignore what you were told by your college economics professor". I agree with this because economist have this notion that theory comes before practice. Often you will see abstract mathematical theories developed first, then secondly attempts to execute then in the world afterwards. Common sense should tell anyone it is the other way around.Successful execution preceeds any good theory.

This is essentially Taleb's point about trial and error, though if you follow that point religiously you end up adopting the concept that theories are of no worth at all, since everything can be reduced down to luck.

In the end even if that maybe true, I still think the idea of things being reducable to luck is a wrong way to approach the challenges that you will face with life. You start to say after this startup failed..."well i was just unlucky", when in fact you should reflect and make sense of your mistakes, rather then just playing it down to some mysterious luck hypothesis that you had no way of influencing.
I'd be happy if he left our application till last, because I'm still adding features to our demo. ;-)
using p2p depends on what other people are sharing. I want to download some older, lesser-known artists: Damien Jurardo, Stavesacre, and the list is pretty slim. If you want something popular and recent like Linkin Park, no problem. But if your off the beaten path, it's kinda hard to find what you want
The Capital Gap is Shrinking
Hmm, I'd guess it's harder than that. Being energetic and determined may be a necessary condition to change the world but it is not a sufficient condition. There are plenty of energetic and determined people who won't change the world.

Though, as far as one can predict, I bet determination is the best indicator we can hope for.
Their message is already confusing. The header says FALL 2008 - but the copy below says Q4 2007.
I think everyone else has pretty much summed it up.

My answer is: No, but it is closer than anything else. It is a huge stepping stone towards a truly powerful web applications framework.

Rails won't stop innovating any time soon. There's an absolutely enormous amount of innovation going on in Rails plugins / RubyGems. Eventually the different plugin/gem approaches to common problems will become standardized, and those standardized approaches will make it to Rails core.

Once Rails core has all of these awesome things standardized (multi-stage deployment, more "ruby-like" templates (ERB replacement), fixtures replacement, automatic generation of integration tests, better caching, etc), it will become both great and a bloated piece of crap.

Then, another platform emerges that does to Rails what Rails did to PHP. It will take all of the features of Rails+Bloat, and put it in a sexy package. Then, THAT will be the holy grail.

At least until the cycle happens again.
So, I know nothing about the atmosphere there but from a tech perspective it'd be pretty sweet. They handle quite a bit of traffic and must have interesting problems of scale. My guess is that I could learn very much from it.

Yes, they run IIS, but I don't see why that matters; I'm not paying for it :)
This is good.

There is a role for randomness in every effort, but it needs to be understood. There was another article on the list today about failing a lot to succeed. Dedication and a great team will always overcome, but they will overcome only if they fail quickly and explore the chaos and randomness of the problem domain. At the risk of link-spamming, I wrote in my blog this morning about the role that divergent thinking has on social networks. http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2007/10/do_you_want_m...
I think Paul and others make the same point in regards to how it's better to be in the valley than in Deluth -- you can harness the randomness better there.

As hackers and analytical people, we've been brought up to feel like we should take a direct path from point A to point B. But it never works like that in the real world. Good solution-based thinking is divergent, and understands and accepts that you're not following a recipe as much as you're playing a game of chance -- but playing very cleverly!
scribd!
Why do you think I still use Google as my primary source? Some people say iGoogle is overcrowded, but that falls under user-error, what with tabs and all.

I like Google cause they don't shove themselves or their friends down my throat. In fact, sometimes it's hard to find what services they do provide.
It's never too late since the early adopters would still have more accumulated karma. But you're right - if they aren't as active as they were you could run into a community that wants to pass them by (viva la revolution!) but is hindered by the status quo. Still, with so many voices, I'm not sure I'd be concerned. Anyone who accumulates karma would get the voice to match.

P.s. I say all this knowing that my own votes would likely lose value. But that's cool with me since I don't get to hang out here as much as I'd like. Better to make the keepers of the community the ones who have the most invested. What's nice about karma is that it's recognition by other community members that your voice matters.
Crowdsourcing The Crystal Ball
Vimeo adds HD streaming - could they offer this to other startups?
For founders, a more inspiring title might be "You can't predict how you'll change the world."
Ask YC: Does everyone get notified?
I had a quick question for the YC people. Does everyone who applied to YC recieve notification if they do or do not get invited to Boston?
So I'm got some free time this week and I've been submitting and commenting every day. PG gets a lot of votes cause, well, he's PG. Some other people don't participate a lot, but they've been on since it started. One guy might make funny comments that everybody wants to see at the top of the page.

What about any of this would be indicative that giving these people more say than others would be a good thing to do?
Everyone who remembered to include an email address.