skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you were following for awhile I must have put you to sleep with the lack of action! The very best of luck to your project.

I agree about the problems with text-entry verification. Obviously with multi-line and/or formatted cards (some sort of lightweight markup language) there are further problems. Grading on a scale is an option - whether manually (I was correct/I was wrong or I kinda got it!) or by robo-grading. I was thinking something along the lines of: "Congratulations human, you are 89.3091001% correct". There is software that allows you to rate your level of understanding between 1-5 and assigns the next spaced repetition on a sliding scale.

Yes, I think about it a lot too and haven't wanted to rush to implement a half baked version. In the end I trust the user. If you put a lot of effort into entering cards on a website (or onto actual cards) you generally won't cheat yourself. Removing the pain of managing the spaced repetition is where I find the real value.

I used to have a Leitner Cardbox made of a shoe box and strips of cardboard. I was never using it completely accurately of course and then when my GF found it hidden away, a spider was making a nice place to hatch her eggs. That was the end of the Cardbox.
How a culture is created - lessons from monkeys
Tarsnap isn't exactly what I need

Feel free to send me an email (address on website) to let me know what you'd like tarsnap to do -- the more feedback I can get, the better tarsnap will be. :-)
yeah, millionaires who quit their jobs have it rough.
Writely
With the Service Provider License Agreement, which most web startups fall under, you pay per month for what you use. Machines kept as backups cost you nothing.

The monthly fees are quite reasonable and make the software cost inconsequential relative to hardware and people. You also always get to use the latest version of everything.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to divulge exact pricing details, but the whole bundle of software mentioned in article would only cost $330 per month assuming reasonable hardware.

Learn more at:
http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default....
Priceadvance - Day 3
Oops, you're right, the 2nd-to-last panel is talking about A* and Dijkstra's search algorithms, but it's not clear what the last panel refers to. I just idiotically had assumed that the last panel was referring to sorting algorithms.
He doesn't claim nobody goes to myspace, it was just his way of saying it's not the "cool nightclub" any more. And also probably a Yogi Bera reference http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1311
> I think the answer is "you can't".

That's what I said a few posts ago.

> You can't claim to have a solution for the problem if it only works for a

> fixed input, and if the solution itself would be different for different

> inputs.

"Reverse this array". Done. "Reverse an unspecified array of arbitrary length" is a different problem :)
Chris Sacca's failed career at Google
Writing a reddit clone with Hunchentoot and Common Lisp
There are other episodes as well.

Using Selenium for testing:
http://www.lispcast.com/index.php/2007/10/lispcast-episode-2...

Adding macros to make the episode 1 code prettier:
http://www.lispcast.com/index.php/2007/10/lispcast-episode-3...
The obvious correct solution is to get everyone off of IE altogether.
Add clustering - the so called 'server' platform still requires the entire OS to be restarted for non-kernel updates, so staying both secure and and available requires a second server.
Why are you moderated up? Google never brought Orkut, Orkut was an internal project.
First, this is a silly ad hominem criticism; their arguments have little to do with their Enso application. But either way, these humanized guys are in general on top of things, and their thoughts about interface design are usually quite insightful. Implementing good interfaces, and insightfully criticizing interfaces, are two very different skills.

Second, while I personally love Quicksilver, it has a significant learning curve. Enso's model is, for better or worse, rather simpler. And beyond that, experimentation is good. A direct clone of Quicksilver would be both out of place on windows, and also much less interesting to create than a new application, with its own ideas.

Third, what the hell is Launchy?
TCCBOOT: a boot loader that compiles and boots Linux from source in 15 seconds
Visit Acid 2 in Opera. It's fine.

Visit in in FF2. It's a little odd, but you can tell its a smiley face. In FF3 it's fine.

Visit in in Konq, or Safari, or Nokia browser. It's fine.

Visit in it IE 7.

Then make up your mind.
Sorting for Humans: Natural Sort Order
KDE 4 Uses 40% Less Memory Than 3 Despite Eye-Candy
Centralization is a bug
Still though, when you're fighting for exposure early on, you may not have the luxury of going against the 'tastemakers' for everyone else's good.
Gimp as AJAX application? Jesus... not only this sentence makes no sense ("AJAX" is just one stupid function call), but the idea of running everything "online" is just silly.

WHY would I want to screw myself in the butt by using "online apps" for editing my digital camera photos? Why would I want to wait hours for 2GB of photos to get uploaded at 35kb/sec and then limit myself to a pathetic subset of perfectly functioning desktop application?

Because there are many techies out there who are greedy and fail to innovate, preferring to re-implement tiny fractions of existing software instead. And burning someone else's millions in the process.

I will not be surprised if we'll see hard drive formatting utilities, backed by VC millions, running inside of the browser, so you can "Format your Drive from Anywhere!!!"

A lot of Valley people need to stop drinking kool-aid and read uncov.com more often.
These analogies are terrible. The invention of the spreadsheet may have greatly increased the sophistication of the financial projections that you can run while sitting at your desk, but it has hardly made accountants and MBAs obsolete. Quite the contrary, actually. Now it takes a friggin' Ph.D. in mathematical physics to understand finance.

The ability to make dimensioned drawings with Visio doesn't make you an engineer. The ability to type stuff into Wordpress doesn't make you a web developer. Excel has powerful statistical functions built in, but using it doesn't make you a statistician. And blist may succeed in putting Microsoft Access and phpMyAdmin to shame, but I find it hard to believe that it will displace DBAs. It is much more likely that this new tool will allow users to get much, much farther into their data-gathering project before their search speed bogs down, they accidentally delete their data, they get bored doing complicated queries by hand, or they discover that people's last names can actually change over time. After which they will hire a DBA.

Which is not to say that I don't look forward to trying out blist, because I'm no big fan of Microsoft Access.
This sounds like a review of Fireworks:

"...The first is a modal dialog that covers most of your work and must manually dississed [sic]; the second is a non-modal panel that appears below the menu-bar and doesn't interrupt your work. The first method is horrible, the second is decent."

"For instance, with the text tool, text format options appear, and seem to work when you click on them, but they don't have any effect unless you already have text selected."

"Each click with the text tool created a new layer, so very soon I had accidentally created 10 extra layers containing nothing but empty text objects." (Excepting the fact that empty (sub-)layers in Fireworks are destroyed when you exit them.)

"...there are "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons at the top of the screen, and nothing else will work until you have clicked one of those two buttons" and "you can only rotate the image by clicking and dragging a small unmarked region in the extreme corner."
Yeah, theoretical tests show how shitty IE7 really is, but in practice, it works 98% of the time for me.
Google Preparing To Launch Game Changing Wikipedia Meets Squidoo Project
Why 'Anonymous' Data Sometimes Isn't
Simkl Keeps Record of Your IM Conversations Online
You're completely right - IE7 works fine for users. But that level of user support would be a lot easier for developers to achieve if we didn't have to code around its quirks.
When people say, "I wish Windows had something like Quicksilver," Launchy is usually what gets brought up in response. http://www.launchy.net/
It's not an ad-hominem when someone publishes a critique of X, and you allege that they haven't demonstrated that they are qualified to critique X.

In this case, it might be WRONG to allege that. But it's not an ad-hominem.
Featuritis, Tyranny, and Web Applications
Thoughts on featuritis, forced upgrades, and the differences between desktop and web applications.
Apple working on improved Exchange support for iPhone
Top 20 Entrepreneurial Quotes
Apple's 'Podfather' Now Aims to Revive A Wilting Palm
Porn for Girls by Girls
I was being deliberately rude and snarky about Humanized, who, let it be said, can choose contrasting color saturations with the greatest of ease, and can "collect user interface evidence" circles around my command-line ass.

But I agree, I think their attempt to position Enso versus Quicksilver is weak. If Quicksilver was ported to Windows, nobody would use Enso; the marginal cost of that particular value prop for Windows users is already zero, and Quicksilver's "search-and-act" idiom is just more sophisticated, and makes a greater contribution to UI design, than does Enso's. Sorry, command completion? Not revolutionary.
And, hey, what's with "a direct clone of Quicksilver would be out of place on Windows"? No it wouldn't. It would be more appropriate. Quicksilver on the Mac competes with a lot of well-thought-out workflow that already exists in the OS X interface. Quicksilver on Windows would add far more value. And the QS "search-and-act" idiom is universal.

Have you used Quicksilver? You should. It's pretty amazing.
Ahh, the inevitable rise of the "top n <something>" lists.
Funny, but not entrepreneur-related.

Also, no it doesn't.
Some of those were new to me + really good. Thanks for sharing.
o...m...g
Amazon SimpleDB Goes Beta
Scalable database as a service.

My previous employer Powerset was an early tester, good to see it finally out in the world.
This is a low.
Google Knol: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge
Google Knol - Google's Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages
Knols Project: Google Experimenting With User Generated Encyclopedic Pages
Agreed. This article would have been just as good without the 'Top' in its title.
Can't help but feel that this is a bit of a harsh reaction. Although I guess you'd better know what you're talking about before you represent your company in front of such wide audience.
Here's to You Mr(s) Arrington, Goodbye and Good Luck Startups
It grew out of this awesome winning IOCCC entry: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/otcc/

If you're not familiar with IOCCC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOCCC
I think you need to take the long view. Based on your comments you're looking at tactics instead of strategy. I should know, I'm guilty of that.

Focus on making something good. Focus on providing real value. Focus on having fun. Focus on getting solid and stable. The traffic and money will come.
Insightful comment buried in the middle of the noise:

If you listen, normal people have novel ways of thinking about computers that are completely natural and that we've entirely lost sight of from long habit. When I was teaching my Mom to use a computer (a Mac) I had a hard time explaining to her why she couldn't name all her pictures of me "Jerry." "Well, if they were all named Jerry, how would the computer know which one you meant?" "Why, the one I just clicked on, of course," she said, giving me a funny look. After all, the images have icons that are thumbnails of their contents, so it's perfectly obvious to her which one she wants!

And you know, that sort of logic is very hard to refute, and it's perfectly feasible for a GUI-driven computer to work that way. Now, programmers understand why any chunk of data that needs to be accessed needs a unique key, and find that natural, but that key doesn't necessarily need to be the file's name, nor does the name need to be the primary way users identify files. Every file has an inode number or other unique file system identifier anyway that could be used behind the scenes, and that's actually a more persistent way to refer to the file programmatically than the name (which is why the Mac uses it for aliases).

My mom did eventually accept that each file in a folder needed a unique name and that if she wanted to merge two folders she might have to rename some files to avoid losing them entirely, which of course, if you think about it from her perspective, is a dumb outcome from a dumb requirement. So now she's one of us.

Naturally, it was also obvious to her how files should sort, and I was happy to install an extension that did that for her on her Mac OS 9. At least I could solve that problem.

Jerry Kindall on December 13, 2007 08:51 AM
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342335011
This is cute, but doesn't really do anything which isn't already possible with EC2 and S3. The most critical limitation of EC2 and S3, at least where databases are concerned, is the "eventual consistency" model: If you store data, you'll eventually be able to get it back -- but there are no guarantees as to when.

When I heard rumours that Amazon was going to be launching a database service, I hoped that it would solve this problem; instead, it seems that Amazon has released the world's first "database" which not only transactions, but even lacks consistency!
http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/
The last line:

> There's one significant cost that SimpleDB users can avoid: keeping a database administrator on the payroll.

cringe cringe cringe.
Arguments about the topic matter. Qualifications of the people don't.
What to look for when joining a start up?
i am young, no wife and kids, and am not in SF, but moving to SF in a couple months to get into the game. i have a technical degree, have worked for start ups before, but can not program. i have the start up affliction.

what types of jobs are available for a non-coding, technical person in a start up?
what do you look for when joining a start up?
what can i expect as far as avg employee number?
Online Fame Easy; Ads Harder to Get
iPhone App Allows its Camera to Record Video
The real question is: did he come on his own, or did some Googler call him up and get him to come as a prank on Randall?
I read one or two kb of that and skimmed the rest and I gained zero bits of information.

As far as I can see, this doesn't meet the criterion that Hacker News articles should be "interesting", even for a wide definition of "interesting". Please, let's not turn this into "Web 2.0 Gossip News".
How to build a Computer Science Department
Absolutely and I am not saying that going after them isn't the correct strategy sometimes, but you should always be aware of your balance between these two poles.

All I'm trying to convey is that you shouldn't assume that they represent your average customer. Think of the difference between an iPhone and a Treo or BlackBerry, iPhone was made for the general user who never owned a smartphone in his life, the Treos & BlackBerries are designed for the power-user/taste-maker.
Seems like a bad soap opera... Reads like a bad soap opera... Lesson, skip what seems like a soap opera.
Used to be that when Google announced stuff there'd be a live URL like http://knol.google.com to start poking around...
Dirty Laundry 2.0
I wrote up an overview post at http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2007/12/amazon-simpledb-t...

The eventual consistency part is going to be interesting to watch.
Computer knowledge 'undervalued'
GCCalc: a horrible abuse of GCC (GCC powered calculator)
Ask YC: Thoughts on iPhone mobile office market
My startup, iTenna, is working on mobile document management for the iPhone.

Specifically, we are solving 2 problems:
1. Enabling access and editing of MS docs on the iPhone / web
2. Providing wireless bi-directional sync across iPhone, computer, web (bye, bye to versioning hell, cables and missing docs)

Our target market is sales and mobile professionals that need synced docs on the go.

We subscribe to MA's product/market fit and would like feedback on the market part of that equation (if iTenna "just works", then the product part should solve itself).

Based on our research, a large segment of early iPhone buyers had used Palm Treos (which has a mobile office app, not wireless bi-directional syncing though).

Is our target market ripe for such an app/service? Are we solving a real problem?

Thanks in advance.

(btw, if you want to help test, email me at beta at itenna dot net)
xkcd - Flies
Is India's computer-services industry heading for a fall?
sales engineer, product management, program manager
This is great news. We have just started using EC2 and S3 for a startup I've invested in and one of our concerns has been using mysql as it needs to be used on an EC2 instance. We've been looking at ways to ensure our data is safe, but this SimpleDB could provide the answer we've been looking for. Hope I get into the beta! Out of interest, anyone else out there using mysql on EC2 and how have you dealt with ensuring your data is safe?
IT - The 7th most important business skill?
Yeah, because nobody wants to upload and store their photos on the web--so they certainly don't want to be able to edit them once stored there.

You're just missing the point by a mile. Online photo editing is a great feature for people who have already committed their entire photo collection to flickr (or one of the other several dozen competitors). There will come a time when photos are mostly taken by cell phone cameras, uploaded on the spot, and never dealt with except in an online form. An online editor is the only sane solution.

But, I agree that porting GIMP to forward its UI out to a browser is madness. Writing a GTK to JavaScript layer is probably significantly harder than writing an image editor from scratch in pure JavaScript or Flash (at least the 20% solution that'll satisfy 80% of users).
Is it possible to hack admissions for the CFR?
I wonder if there is even a single hacker in the group... we could use some more representation among the world's scarily influential decision makers.
I'm going to go ahead and preemptively post xkcd #358:

http://xkcd.com/358/

In fact, while I'm at it, here's the next month's worth to save nickb the trouble, since he seems to feel the need to post every new xkcd comic:

http://xkcd.com/359/

http://xkcd.com/360/

http://xkcd.com/361/

http://xkcd.com/362/

http://xkcd.com/363/

http://xkcd.com/364/

http://xkcd.com/365/

http://xkcd.com/366/

http://xkcd.com/367/

http://xkcd.com/368/

http://xkcd.com/369/

http://xkcd.com/370/
Reddit got really ugly right around the time people started preemptively submitting the next xkcd cartoons.
I think we can all agree that projections are meaningless.
mmmm costs $1226.4 just to run without datacost being accounted for.

I love the idea but I feel the pricing should of been like s3 I.E just paying for storage and bandwidth.

I can't see how you would get out a key from the system when you add a new record...
Hm, I don't quite get it: in his examples the ASCII sort order is also the alphabetical sort order: z1, z100, z11 IS alphabetical, or am I missing something? Where there is an issue with ASCII vs alphabetical is capital letters, ASCII would be a,b,A and alphabetical would be A,a,b? (not sure if a<A or A<a).

Now, should Microsoft be commended for guessing that the user probably wants to sort the files by trailing numbers? I honestly think not. Usually it is exactly that kind of thing, Microsoft kind of guessing what the user wants to do, that drives people mad and makes them hateful towards Microsoft. This particular case looks good on paper, but at the end of the day, the algorithm is making things behave in an unexpected way.
In most cases I would agree with you, but in this case the free market doesn't really work that well because the stakeholders in the internet browser compatibility market are the software developers. Unfortunately internet software developers make up such a tiny portion of the actual market share of web browsers that they could all make the move to Firefox or Opera (and most of them do) and it would still have minimal effect.

The software developer is presented with two choices: 1. Continue to develop software for IE no matter how annoying and time consuming it is to nail all those annoying bugs or 2. Refuse to support IE.

Since the general public (read: the bulk of web browser users) are generally ignorant of the difference between IE/Firefox/Opera/etc these companies are really left with no choice. Either support Microsoft or die. The stakeholders are left powerless because they are participants in a market where the participants in that market don't even understand what they are consuming and why.

Of course Microsoft is not a monopoly (by the precise definition of the term), and I tend to lean away from antitrust legislation. However, the externalities their selfish decisions in this area project on the market sum to millions on millions of dollars, if this threat incites them to do something about that I am all for it.
Top VCs of 2007
Asymptotically Approaching Useful Developer Metrics
The list of early-stage VCs is quite similar to the one our poll produced

http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html

with the striking difference that KP is entirely missing
from their list. It does seem like KP hasn't been funding
so many Internet cos recently.
Yeah, this crap belongs on Valleywag.
dont vote it up then. this is how social news works.
I don't want to vote up a valleywag article, out of principle, but I like the term "luckocracy". As pointed out in The Black Swan, skill and hard work do not account for multiple order of magnitude differences like those seen in our industry. They may of course be necessary ingredients to take advantage of what luck brings your way.
"We're putting new cover sheets on all of our TPS reports now before they go out, didn't you get the memo?"

Joking aside, it's not an easy problem. I would have liked to hear more about the nitty gritty details of what these new systems are supposed to be measuring.

At a more general level, it's a manifestation of the principal-agent problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem) which is caused by information asymmetries - the programmer knows more than the boss about what's really going on.

Compounding the problem is that even the programmer can't predict "black swan" types of issues that come up and blow things up in a big way.
Details: Amazon SimpleDB
Till recently I was working for a startup, that used evaluation copies of various Microsoft operating systems, especially Windows 2003 Server - the evaluation period is 60 days for w2k03 server, iirc.
Voting this up for 'The Black Swan' reference.

The vicious tone of articles like this makes me wonder - is it because journalists never do/create anything, it's easy for them to comment about people who try out stuff. Thank God, I recognized this trait in myself and now catch myself often.
I think theres a need for this. Go for it. I know there are a lot of business-type folks who adopted the iPhone because they wanted it, but still need traditional MS doc syncing and transfer for their day jobs. Apple has never really been very accommodating to business, so if you could satisfy this need it could work well.

What technologies are you using for your iPhone app development?