skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you know how many other photos were in that video? No one else complained because they realize it's a fun little video that's not making any money anyway!

"The real lesson here is to ask for simple permission when including other people's content in your own."

They didn't realize this would be so popular. If it wasn't so popular, do you think this photographer would have complained? No she wouldn't have even noticed.

She's turned herself into the Grinch all because of a 1-second showing of one of her photos. I hope she gets coal in her Christmas stocking!
"That foot that's rapidly approaching my balls hasn't caused me any problems yet."
It depends on the type of the error, but most errors fail quietly in Django templates. For example, you can pass a Python object to your template, and can reference its fields using syntax like
{{ object.absolute_url }}
if, for example, you tried to access a field that doesn't exist
{{ object.doesnt_exist_field }}
then it simply doesn't emit anything (as opposed to failing loudly).

There are a few errors in the template language that do fail loudly, and these fail when the templates are compiled (something you have the easy ability to test by simply loading the page once on a development server. Or by writing unit tests with the Django testing framework to make sure that all your urls are returning non-error response codes). Anything that has to do with the specific context of the page you are loading (the specific instance of an Object you are looking at, etc) may cause some ugliness (blank space where you wanted to print the value of a non-existant value), but the page will still load properly.

So, answering your question, there are a few types of syntax errors in the template language (loading a non-existent template library, improperly using tags or filters) that can cause errors (but all of those errors are easily testable). But the vast majority of errors will simply be ignored and normal functioning will continue.
A little slice of Direct Democracy
Striking writers in talks to launch web start-ups
Any texts on the subject available? Watching a one hour video requires a lot of patience...

I mean not texts on neural networks, but on this next generation thing.
Now they only need subtitles, and we can finally watch them Microserfs-Style (fast forward while reading the subtitles).

That would be mightily cool and save everyone a lot of time. Aren't there several people on news.yc who work on such a thing (adding content to existing videos)?
Well, it doesn't just appear to be an LFM, it was explicitly designed as such.

I don't think that the Python syntax is an inappropriate choice to be used as a fully enabled template language - you could bolt on <% end %> tags with a preprocessor that indents automatically pretty trivially. Such a template language just doesn't exist yet.
You don't think, if Mark Zuckerberg tried to sell his share, he could get more than a billion?

On paper or not, he's worth more than a billion dollars.
Errrrr... http://tlrobinson.net/photos/IMG_0034.JPG
Scientists Discover Ancient Carnivorous Fungus Encased in Amber
1) The spec isn't even finished, and won't be for about a year.

2) Once the spec is finished, it will be years before browsers fully implement it and it's widely deployed.

Do we really need this? I think the focus should be on making current browser JS implementations a) less buggy (i.e. IE's ridiculous memory leaks) and b) faster. That would at least help all the existing JavaScript applications and users of such applications, right now.
It seems the only way would be ad support, but that seems very un-Wikipedia. However they make money, I just wonder how they expect to get developers to contribute to it when Wikia will be trying to make money off the developer's work. I know I wouldn't be eager to work on a project that somebody else will profit from.
"In talks to launch web start-ups." What an LA way to put it. As if you had to negotiate with some sort of power broker to start a startup.
16bugs has just gotten better
Yesterday, we released the new version of 16bugs, a hosted bug tracker used by thousands of companies all over the world.

Give it a try and use coupon code "newbugs" to get a big discount.
Evan misses one very important component of evaluating an idea. What is the effect of mass liquidity on the value add. Is the value gained by the first user identical to the value of the millionth user.

Google,Amazon - even if I was the only user in the world using them, would be just as useful for me.

On the other side of the scale - eBay,Digg are totally useless if I am the only one using them.
Researchers using solar energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuels
Handmade 2.0
Well... perhaps it's an area that requires more capital than yc style startups - many of those writers probably wouldn't know where to start in terms of putting together some kind of startup.

Or, maybe it's just a ploy to make the studios nervous.
Great web app!
Father of sci-fi (Arthur C Clarke) lists three birthday wishes
What about ECMAScript beyond the browser? ie server side?
Google Is All About Large Amounts of Data
Perhaps... a few people are already doing it (Steve Yegge's alleged "Rhino on Rails", AppJet, and I'm sure others), but there's no overwhelming de-facto standard that I know of.

Anyone know of any good server-side JS frameworks?
10 (writing) tips from original Blogger, Jorn Barger
Search for 'deep belief hinton' on google.
Google wants your phonemes
"I have always believed (well, at least for the past 15 years) that the way to get better understanding of text is through statistics rather than through hand-crafted grammars and lexicons. The statistical approach is cheaper, faster, more robust, easier to internationalize, and so far more effective."

Thats how google is attacking the "parsing text problem" to find meaning. [0] Not with regular expressions, rules or clever AI hacks. Just plain old math.

[0] Attributed to Peter Norvig. Here's an example of what is suggested. A spell checker in about 25 lines python (old but good) ~ http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
Notoriously selective Stanford considers accepting more students
Interview with Adobe Chief Software Architect - Kevin Lynch
Call me old fashioned, but it's hard to take an article about evaluating ideas seriously whens it never mentions "customer", "demand", "want", or "need".

This is typical geek thinking. What can "I" do? What's cool to "ME"? How do "I" succeed?

Slow down for one minute and look at things from the eyes of your prospects. Better yet, ask them. THAT'S the best way to evaluate a new product idea.
Why XO
try viddler.com
"But some scholars point out that Facebook is not representative of the ethnicity, educational background or income of the population at large, and its membership is self-selecting, so there are limits to research using the site."

They're all overlooking the elephant in the living room: that on-line interaction is NOT the same as genuine human interaction. How much will that simple co-factor skew the results of their research?
Startup promises to seamlessly match phone tools, Web applications
Have you guys noticed the text highlight in Firefox!
That's great CSS!
Startup Unveils Tools to Build Phone Apps Across Plaforms
He does discuss "Is it clear why people should use it?" and whether the product is personal compelling.
A Few Thoughts On Google Knol
Bizarre: Al-Qaeda To Emulate YouTube Debates?
A spell checker in about 25 lines python (old but good)

21 lines in Python 2.5 code
Startrek.com Shutting Down
Biohacking.
similar to this:
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0130462217/002-0316973-9644868?...

only this article applies to web apps...
No it isn't exactly the same, in fact, it's better. It overcomes problems of geography and time, allowing users to have multiple forms of communication. I don't think any researcher thinks that it is an analysis on physical methods of social relationship, but I think they do realize it is a way to understand how fundamental human interactions occur.
From personal experience I would say this is a pretty good summary of improving performance.

My top 2 would be:

-Cache template fragments for reuse

-Get the values from the db, instead of the objects. Values is a very useful tool for dealing with large sets of data that you want to slice and dice in certain ways.
Tim Bray: On Closures
Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
Open Source Ajax IM (using PHP)
Matrix of fonts bundled with Mac and Windows (with and w/out MS Office)
You mean "Network effect", don't you? I think he buries it in "Deepness".
How do you downmod "Will it Blend"? Reexamine your priorities!
It wasn't uncommon for me to drink a 24 case of Pepsi during a marathon coding session, but 2 months ago I quit pop in all of its evil forms and I have to say I've never felt better. Plus I've lost 11 pounds.
Bitnami: Your Favorite Opensource Apps in Easy to Install Packages
Yes I know Linux has apt-get and yum and OS X as macports and fink... to me it's better to have more choices
I'd say IE is pretty much a lost cause. I doubt it'll be years before it's implemented/deployed. As you see a lot of it is supported already and it's not even finalized. I think that's pretty good going.

IE users are always going to have a massive disconnect with the current innovations and technologies, I think the best thing to do is to make them fully aware of what they are missing out on.
Are you sure? I bet Google uses users' clicks to improve their searches, as well as Amazon's search, recommendation systems and used books heavily rely on crowd.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of that truck.
Ok, so maybe I'm missing this whole multi-core dilemma. But I don't see that big of a problem. I just think that people are asking the wrong questions. The question isn't how can I write software for mutli-core chips, it should be "what problems are solved best with multiple cores?"

There are categories of "embarrassingly parallel" problems that have been solved for years using multiple cores: video rendering, 3D graphics rendering, etc... In short, anything that does repetitive processing on large datasets.

Now, people are upset, because we're not going to be able to improve the software for the average user with multiple cores, and they are correct if they want word processing and email to get better with multiple cores. The question that we need to be asking, is this: how can embarrassingly parallel problems make user software better?

How can we use multiple streams of video in software? How can 3D rendering improve my software? Or, what sort of very large datasets can I process with multiple cores on the desktop?

The companies that answer those questions (e.g GOOG) are companies that will make a lot of money in the next decade.
"...we at least have a nucleus of people who kind of know what's possible and what isn't..."

A sure fire recipe for missing the boat.

Honestly, which would you rather have, more power in your hand or a faster pipe to the rest of the world?
Sure. It's not a hard problem any more, but as you say, a lot of web servers still haven't had the pressure/motivation to fix it yet.
Presumably some of that is due to so much being built on top of apache etc, they have come to rely on 1 thread/process per connection, so it's hard to change from that.
First of all, Google doesn't use clicks to improve their searches, because they have no way of knowing on what you click, the links on the search page are direct to the websites that interest you and the JavaScript function (clk) doesn't send any info to GOOG. They do monitor AdWords clicks obviously and do a ton of optimizing on it, but that isn't where I get my value from. ( a possible exception is clicks to sites with Google AdSense where they can monitor both ends ).

And I don't care what other people read, maybe its my weird taste in books, maybe it is my extreme individualism, but I really don't give a damn. I just want to be able to find a book and get it to my doorstep as soon as possible as cheaply as possible and as hassle free as possible.

Most importantly the point wasn't the examples it that there are ideas that need very little users to be useful to their end users - think 37signals apps. And there are ideas that need a lot of people to have any effect.
"Will It Fly?" - Ev Williams, on Idea Evaluation
His quote:
"practically any application, once people start using it, can be used as a lever to more activity and benefit delivery. Being smart about what you're leveraging is key."

But my point is that some applications aren't viable at all without this critical mass and some are. While obviously everyone wants more users, for some ideas the critical mass requirement is a very high initial obstacle and for some it isn't.
Photogs are a notoriously conservative bunch when it comes to this sort of thing. Witness the wedding photographer basically holding hostage the wedding pictures for extremely high "print fees" and denying the bride and groom any rights to reuse the pictures of their own wedding. This has been the "industry norm". We were unable to find ANY wedding photographers who were willing to allow us to produce a CD containing the photos from our wedding for the guests, at any price. A few high quality digital cameras and some volunteers solved this problem, yielded outstanding results and saved a ton of money. One more industry bites the dust thanks to greed and an unwillingness to change with the times. Good riddance.
Ribbit Pulls Back the Covers On Its Voice 2.0 Master Plan (And Raises $10 Million B Round)
Perhaps someone should start a "nuisance registry" that tracks so called "artists" that abuse the spirit of the legal system in this manner. That way the rest of us can systematically ignore their "art" and they can quickly fade into the obscurity that they so richly deserve.
I'm sure he'd be happy to tell you, if you offer him immunity from the lawsuits. Can you do that?

Remember that the movie studios maintain that ripping your own HD-DVDs to your hard drive is infringement. In the USA, describing that process to someone else is a potential violation of the DMCA. You're helping them break a protection mechanism, don'tcha know.

You can, of course, fight this stupid doctrine if you have lawyers. Software companies, universities, and some big magazines have lawyers, but random posters to Slashdot do not -- they prefer to spend their money on other things. So I wouldn't be too quick to accuse them of ignorance. The vagueness is often deliberate.

Do you hate that? So do I. I really hate living in a world in which vitally important information about the functionality and security of our operating systems is spread by samizdat -- traveling in the form of dark rumors posted semi-anonymously on foreign-hosted IRC chats by guys with names like "3l1m1n4t0r". Thank god for the occasional foreign security researcher (warning: PDF link to Peter Gutmann's talk):

http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/vista.pdf

(Note that these slides contain some references to the kind of "real-world" examples you're looking for... e.g. folks who can't play back their own home movies. Feel free to follow these up.)

But even professional security guys don't seem to talk openly about what they know. They get a lot of their information via quiet chats with each other, because publication is risky. Meanwhile, Microsoft can fill the airwaves with all the propaganda they want, because they occupy the legal high ground.

I wouldn't be surprised if, legally speaking, it's safer to upload footage of yourself having sex than it is to upload an honest verbal description of how you got the movies onto your Apple TV. God help us.
From Jimmy Wales' talk at the Tools of Change conference (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/toc/view/e_sess/13441) in June, here are some quick facts about Wikia:

1) a completely different company and organization from Wikipedia

2) it is for-profit and will be ad-supported. The deep content in each subject should provide a more profitable, targeted audience for advertising than general ads

3) revenue will be used to pay for computing, hardware, bandwidth, and development. All content is created for free by volunteers and will remain under open licenses.

4) Since quality web searches are becoming a commodity, they want to develop an open source search engine to give power back to content creators (from aggregators like search engines)
For a more technical take on this idea, search YouTube for a Peter Norvig talk called "theorizing from data".
The trouble with five
"Is it clear why people should use it?" DOES NOT EQUAL "Is it what people want?"

This is not an argument in semantics. This is the ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, MOST FUNDAMENTAL question in business. If there is no demand, you are dead. Making something that creates demand is about as likely as winning the lottery (albeit as lucrative).

I'll stand by my original post. You must satisfy a demand. The best way to identify that demand is to ask. The best way to ask is to know your prospects. None of this is ever mentioned in the original article.

Whoever downmodded my original post still doesn't get it. I am interested in using technology to build a sustainable business, not a hobby. So I care about my customer first. That's the whole point.
When I search for "Hacker News" and do Copy Link Location on the url, I get this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=3&url=h...

I'm pretty sure Google knows what I'm clicking on.
The good news is, you don't have to know about the demand and neither do the demanders! As was mentioned a couple times in the "Will there always be more room for web startups" discussion last week (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=89055), customers often don't know what they want until they see it or use it. That unknown demand is why the trial and error of the marketplace always tolerates "crazy" ideas. I agree with your comment that you should ask and find out what customers want, but you can definitely succeed if your instinct matches an unexpressed demand (Twitter, Facebook) or if you can envision a product better than customers can express it (Apple)
Qik streams live video from a mobile phone
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4]

Its a good talk, though maybe should be called "theorizing from massive amounts of data". Makes you wonder what Google are keeping under wraps for now, and how the powerset approach can compete, except maybe for domain-specific stuff.
Internet and Mobile Developers
I am leaving MIT to set up an Internet and mobile innovation group at an Internet personalization company (Mystrands [1], with a recent $50m investment and $12m revenues in 2007, [2]). We are actively recruiting talented Internet and Mobile Engineers/Developers to work in a number of very interesting (internet and mobile) projects. See

http://ana.lcs.mit.edu/peyman/EngPos/

for more details

Peyman

[1] http://www.mystrands.com/

[2] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mystrands-55m.php
What did we say about PHP? "Never use it for new projects unless you absolutely have to"

Ridiculous looking code too.
Nice article, but what a strange title. Faster chips are leaving programmers in their dust? Huh? I wasn't aware that I was competing with cpu speed. All this time, I thought more processing speed expanded my possibilites. After all, my entire field (mathematical optimization) would be pretty useless without lots and lots of processing power.

I talked to a dude with an OR background, and he said that in the 80s people laughed at the notion of using this kind of math to solve business problems. Processing power increases the opportunities for programmers, without question.

Anyway, fun to read, just a very strange take on the relationship between programmers and cpu speed.
Now you just need to quit calling it "pop"...
You are not looking at organic search results. The link is for non-adwords sponsored links. (notice the colors are different ).

This is a paid advertising option, so it obviously has to be tracked so they can price it correctly.
"customers often don't know what they want until they see it or use it"

Absolutely.

And I want to be the one who gets to know them, understands their pain, asks the right questions, and prototypes. I want to be the one who is told, "Yes! That's what I want!" instead of those who depend on trial and error or instinct.

And sometimes, I just have to get up off my butt and away from my screen to get that done.
For me it says: http://news.ycombinator.com/

I think Google sometimes uses direct links and sometimes redirection.
I agree.

At least half of the "dilemma" is pure, unadulterated marketing. In this article, the marketer is Microsoft, which is trying to convince end users that there's some kind of big problem, one which no mere mortal can comprehend, that is somehow preventing our expensive new Vista machines from being any better than the XP boxes they replaced. It certainly has nothing to do with Microsoft's incompetence, nor with their slavish devotion to Hollywood-approved, mind-mangling, box-breaking DRM. And it's certainly not their insistence on foisting incompatible proprietary crap like IE on the industry. No, it must be a Fundamental Problem of Computer Science that is holding us back. Naturally, this problem can only be solved by the big academic brains that work for... Microsoft!

The email example is a dead giveaway... it's laugh-out-loud funny:

"In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant."

Ah, the intelligent personal assistant -- it's the application of the future, and it always will be.

How do we know that intelligent email processing is not being held up by the lack of suitable coding techniques for eight-way parallel processors? Because I have a dual-core processor right now, and it spends the night contemplating its digital navel and counting to 2^64 by fives for fun. If there was something smart it could be doing with my email, why isn't it working on it right now? I am drowning in unused processor cycles.
One alternative approach (prob too late for you) would be to put a "Wedding Photographer Wanted" in your local Craigslist with the stipulation that you must be able to buy the digital negatives. Let photographers know that current practice is unsatisfying and there is an opportunity they're missing.

Unfortunately, people easily buy into the FUD about not "capturing the magic moment" and will pay almost any price to "ensure" perfect pictures. If these guys weren't so flush with bookings, they would have a reason to be more flexible.
Read the quote again: that's the canonical definition of an LFM. It's a language that restricts the user's power, not by accident, but by design.
Maybe those extra cores can be used to do a better job of remembering, learning, and anticipating what users will do. This could pre-load or unload applications or components based on historical usage, rearrange toolbars to have the most commonly used commands, and in general make the kinds of improvements to computing in general that the squiggly underlines did for spell checking last decade. Right now computers are largely deterministic and users have to learn how the computer works. That's why users hate computers. Some of that pain could be taken away. I think this will benefit OSes, thick clients, and installable programs more than the web.
Jason Calacanis on Mahalo Social
I've seen a couple of implementations of "Python as a template language with 'end' statements" over the years. Here's one:

http://www.kryogenix.org/code/vellum/docs/templates.html

Another one is Python Server Pages:

http://www.ciobriefings.com/psp/

(Edited to fix typo.)
You think PG is buying AdWords ads now? I'm aware of the difference between paid and organic search results; give me some credit.

I bet you're not signed into Google when you try it. I'm signed in for gMail, Google Reader, etc. When I mouseover any of the organic search results, it shows the normal link in the status bar. But when I right click on it, it switches to the google address and that remains if I move the mouse and mouseover again.