skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The iPhone and iPod touch: Leading the way to better web apps
That's interesting, I didn't realize that. I really like the tech, I would just rather have it on my coffee table than in a bar. I need to charge my friends for eating and drinking at my place ;)
He's not using "inline" for the C version, so it counts spurious function call overhead. He's also not holding constant the storage classes between C and C++; his C++ version arbitrarily gets to use optimal storage. This should be intuitive: bare C++ isn't faster than hand-coded C, and beyond that all you can compare is the quality of different libraries.

When I say "merely encourages", I'm trying to articulate the fact that most large C projects are composed of modules that implement different ADTs. Just because C doesn't call them "classes" doesn't mean that most C code isn't reusable.
Brainstorm: The software garden
"you get out of college what you put into it"

I guess I'd be a fool to argue with that.

Funny, I only remember 2 things a professor every said in class:

1. A degree in business is a degree in nothing.
2. Never put a lit pipe in your jacket pocket.

Maybe I should have paid more attention.
If we're talking about business networking, I thought LinkedIn was the winner. MySpace and Facebook are both "social networking" in my book, Facebook even moreso, because I only friend people I actually know (However this could be just because I use it in the college context, not the business context).

I'd be interesting if there are different usage patterns based on the main use of the network. I see it as keeping in touch with my friends rather than "networking" in the business sense.
I can't hear your petty little comment from way up here on my throne.
A place to look for ideas
This whole thing is stupid. They set the price. In the product they sold, they made no guarantee that the price wasn't going to drop--lack of a future price drop wasn't part of the product. If anything, the main 'intangible' in this product was 'smugness'.

So, they set the price, and people bought it. End of story. They didn't force anyone to. If someone thought it was worth $600 when, as Cringely says, the 'real' price was the current price, then you made the mistake.
You're saying these guys are taking compressed audio...and compressing it? First off, impressive. Second, I'm sure there's zero loss in quality. Maybe it'll even sound better afterwards!
What makes you believe you didn't take enough steps?
OSCON 2007 - Simon Peyton-Jones - A Taste of Haskell Part I
www.namecheap.com

$8.88 a year, includes free whoisguard which anonymizes your whois info.

It's worth paying the $.89 over Godaddy because there is no spam or upselling when you buy the domain. They just sell it to you.
i use namecheap.com - 8.88 per and they do whois protection for free and i have not had a problem yet.

godaddy is alright if you can sift through the ads on every single page, they are a little cheaper. i don't use them and probably never will.
thats funny. our posts are just about the same at the same time.
Xobni releases new investment details
Sorry, I guess that should have been obvious to me given the rest of what you said.
Russian scientists discover new mineral that absorbs radiation
I'd like to see another source, but if true, this is a huge discovery.
Wow - I use a lisp, but this argument is awful. Saying you can really quickly whip up something that works in Perl is an overwhelming recommendation. That the subsequent code in unmaintainable is a relatively tiny disadvantage.

From the linked-to post: "...the language rewards idiotic behavior... you can commit any dirty hack in a few minutes in perl, but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program..." Sound familiar? That's the mating call of statically typed language programmer and the top-down 'software architect'. That's bad. And I'll admit, Scheme's libraries (I use Scheme) are in practice somewhat statically typed and fussy, which sucks.

I've never used Perl - maybe I should. BTW, is Ruby really just as good for quick 'duct tape' work and hacks? My very limited experience with Ruby made me think it was good, but not extraordinarily handy.
'Maintainability' is the last refuge of the fussy language.
Railsify: Directory for rails plugins & tools
Liquidation Preference and Participation Commentary
Alum Charged With Hacking Into Texas A&M
Holy crap, that is an impressive lineup. Nice work, guys.

But then what happened to Khosla Ventures between the initial announcement and now?
Defining a function is only the first step. Generally, one defines a function so that it can be called. With perl, you have to use an extra symbol to specify that you're calling a function, where Python infers it if you put a parameter list. Common Lisp lets you do it either way.

Here's a hypothetical Python:

mana=foo(100)
mana(-10)
mana(-15)

Here's Perl:

$mana=foo(100);
&$mana(-10);
&$mana(-15);

Common Lisp:

(setf mana (foo 100))
(funcall mana -10)
(funcall mana -15)

Also Common Lisp:

(setf (symbol-function 'mana) (foo 100))
(mana -10)
(mana -15)
Very impressive! Its good to see YC having grown from an experiment to something thats represents a 1st step towards marquee VC funding. Khosla does not invest in a whole lot of web based ideas these days (mostly focused on alternative energy type of stuff) and the fact that xobni is one of a handful of exceptions speaks for itself I think.
Wait until you get bitten in the butt by "compatibility files".
IPhone: American Express Honoring Price Protection For iPhones
I hope this is official because Microsoft is awesome!
You can also get the $100 apple gift card

(via iPhonewebdev group)
Wow. My curiosity is piqued. I look at this list and wonder, what are we missing? I don't doubt Xobni is really onto something. But it's hard to get fascinated by an Outlook plugin. Clearly there's a lot more going on.

I also find it a little curious that there's a disconnect between the "put something in front of the public as soon as possible" meme and the long lead times that Loopt had first and now Xobni has before their product reveal. Is the better growth strategy to put something in front of investors first and see if you can hold off on the public launch?
herdrick, sorry if this wasn't clear. khosla's name was made publicly available in march when another blog found it in a regulatory filing concerning xobni's latest funding round.

xobni has sinced decided to release the names of its other investors, as well.
i kinda of like this
Uh huh. I'll just revert that last commit of yours, and we won't tell anyone.

... whoops, wrong window!
You greedy, shallow iPhone whiners
I don't know bestechvideos.com, but there several good presentations at OSCON this year - including two other talks by SPJ. The O'Reilly page with the presentation files: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/58/presentations.htm...

The official video hosting: http://oscon.blip.tv/
I interviewed at Vertica. They have some really cool stuff going. You can get a lot of it in C-Store, a BSD-licensed academic project. The main C-Store paper is very informative if academic papers are your thing.

The big advantage of changing the storage mechanism from row-based to column-based is that queries over large amounts of mostly-static data go much faster and take up much less space. MySQL, Postgres, and Oracle are all more or less row-based - each row or set of rows is stored whole - while in a column-based store, each column is stored individually, and the rows are held together in some fashion.

Say you have a lot of columns and few tables, and that all your normal queries heavily use a few columns - if you're doing marketing maybe that's zip code and age range, or if you're doing inventory prediction maybe it's item id and sales date. Pre-sort those columns. If you want to get addresses or sales records of everyone in a certain zip code of a certain age - say, the 20-somethings that bought at the local Wal-Mart - that's now very quick, because you can sort a table first on the zip code column, then on the age column, and then on whatever else. It's like addressing an array, as opposed to processing each row and testing a few columns.

That's not a big win on your PHP/MySQL website, but that's a huge win in your 10TB data warehouse.

Once you sort, you can do really simple compression like run-length encoding to get the size down. Maybe you have a million people per zip code, but if you've sorted on zip code, you only need to say "entries 1 through 1 million in the zip code column have value XXXXX". You don't get as good compression on the column used for the next-most-important sort, but it could still be pretty good.

Vertica also does some cool things with replication and redundancy.

Is column-oriented revolutionary? C-Store has been out for a few years, and there are a few commercial and free software implementations out there, and it's in the textbooks, so no.
name.com - $5.99 + $0.50 whois protect / year
I should add that I don't work for them (if that's not already clear) and that you can read more on their website if you ask them nicely through some form.
Other notable directories include the plugins page on the Rails wiki (http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Plugins) and the plugin pages run by Benjamin Curtis (http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins)
Interesting analysis on the commercial malware industry [PDF slides]
I highly recommend DynDNS for DNS registration and hosting. Their amazing customer service, excellent web interface, and expertise are well worth the higher price.
I actually know a few people who go to A&M who discovered similar vulnerabilities. A friend gained access to the Windows LAN Manager passwords and cracked them, getting access to login and passwords of the entire freshman Engineering class. On a separate occasion, he noticed a windows folder share on a server which contained the logs for the Engineering departments student portal. The logs contained every login attempt with the login and password stored in plain text! Not kidding.

So he told the department system admins and they basically shrugged him off.. Maybe now they've learned their lesson?
"... Sometimes you really do need to write systems software. In these instances, I'm still going to use C++ ..."

So you write non-portable code?

c is still the language of choice for "portable" system work because c compilers can target lots of different systems. You cannot say this for c++. Not because of language deficiencies but limitations with the toolchain.

Wx faces the problem of using 10yo c++ features because of the lame nature of c++ compilers (Codingstyle Interview with wxWindows Developers, Steve Frampton, 2002) ~ http://codingstyle.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&...
10 tips for web programmers
of course it had to be a top ten, but some seem like they could lead to a reasonable disagreement/discussion
There is a good point in there. How does Apple get away with bundling Safari, Mail, iChat, iLife, etc with Mac OS X when that is what Microsoft ran into trouble with in the EU?

The only difference I can see is market share. Not that I'm complaining. I like some of those desktop apps.
Its here to provide another viewpoint for people to discuss (criticize) in (supposedly) intelligent debate.
its not something you just dump something onto, its not a big truck, its its a series of tubes!!
And bundling IE was always the weak argument why Microsoft is a monopolist. Microsoft is a monopolist because they have a serious majority of the market, used completely undocumented features of their OS in their Apps, and particpated in extremely unfair trade practices.

Apple is busting an entrenched industry. This is good. Its possible that Apple will become the new Microsoft indeed. But they are so laughably far from this status the PC world article remains equally ridiculous.
Venture capitalist: We need to prepare for artificial intelligence
A phoenix-like quality where ongoing arguments are pushed up according to popularity ... or at least featured on the side in a box somewhere, like, "most active discussions".
Yeah good point. All of them, Bit of a sweet tooth so 'dates' are definitely in, "dates", ISO8601, yes. Even getting a "Date" with Perl! ~ http://datetime.perl.org/?Modules
Skynet here we come! Woo-hoo!
Questions about competitors and the YC application
I've found a few direct competitors (all are other start-ups), and plenty of indirect competitors (larger more established companies (which I'm less concerned about)) to my particular idea. I understand that competition can help validate the existence of a market, but at what point do VC's feel like there are too many start-ups competing in the same space (or does that not concern them (perhaps they are just hoping to pick the best horse))? I should add that I think my target market is rather large and there would be plenty of room for all of the start-up competitors to co-exist (IMHO). For the YC application in particular, are many turned down primarily for this reason?
> The San Francisco company announced in March a first round of $4.2 million in capital, naming only Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator.

Is that $4.18 million from Khosla and $0.02 million from YC?
The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces
> But it's hard to get fascinated by an Outlook plugin. Clearly there's a lot more going on.

Gabor's posts here have indicated that they're doing stuff with NLP and machine-learning. There's a lot more you can do with that than what we'd think of as a simple Outlook plugin. Think of a smart personal assistant that understands each email, can file and classify them, trash the spam, send out canned responses to common queries, and flag your cell-phone or PDA for urgent messages from trusted folks. It could replace secretaries.

That, and investors are likely the people who have the most need for such a tool. So it'd naturally look better to investors than it would to the rest of us. That's the risk of putting all your ideas before a certain group of people.

> Is the better growth strategy to put something in front of investors first and see if you can hold off on the public launch?

I doubt it. Historically, that approach has had very few successes and many, many failures. Once in a while you may get an Amazon.com or an Akamai that takes tons of capital to get started but then has a wide moat and enormous profits. But more likely you'll end up with a Go or a Value America or any one of a number of dot-com flameouts. (Even that's misleading, as Amazon got users and went profitable before taking outside investment, then operated in the red for like 7 years while they built up infrastructure.)

Personally, I'd put Xobni at the top of the YCombinator deadpool, with Loopt in the top quarter, even though those seem to be some of PG & investor's favorites. But then, they're swinging for the fences. If they succeed, they'll also be among the most lucrative.

(Incidentally, I'd put Wufoo, VirtualMin, and DropBox at the bottom of the deadpool, i.e. most likely to succeed. You may all publicly pillory my predictions later...)
libavl. Next?
Install Vista and that'll flip him. Flip him for real.
How long before Anywhere.fm + Wimax kills terrestrial radio?
We've all been subject to the abuse of radio as we know it. My drives on my daily commute to college were brutal; repetition and uniformity in all the station playlists. When, not if, wimax reaches wide penetration, it will likely disrupt radio as well as cell phone carriers (Skype + Wireless IP == end of cell phone bill).

When?
Care to elaborate more? I am 100% with you in case of VirtualMin, but it is interesting to hear why you're more skeptical of Xobni. I am personally very intrigued: a lot has been said about lack of innovation in "electronic mail" but these guys are doing something about it and what they're doing happened to impress a lot of people.

Unless you know something we dont' :)
I've been doing the splits on chairs and having coconuts dropped on my abs from increasing heights but I still can't catch tiny koi fish while I'm blindfolded. When do we learn the Art of Flipping Off Your Customers?
Spider-like vessel hits New York waters - can cross the Atlantic on one load of diesel fuel
Marvel Comics up 35c in afternoon trading.
Whether you think you can, or think you're Kant, you're right.
Plan for taking over the Earth:

1)Invent a way to eliminate nuclear fallout

2)Retreat into a space station

3)Incite nuclear war below

4)Wait for apocalypse

5)Come back down, clean the place up, and take it for yourself

The Russians are avenging the Soviets' failure to spread communism throughout the entire world.
I scored 26 as well. INTP: the cause of and solution to all of my problems.
I just thought of something... is the iPod Touch / iPhone the apple stealth entry into tablet computing? If so, it's a classic way to do a good market entry - give something to people that they KNOW they want (a better iPod and better cell phone) and then transition them into the thing they didn't even think of (a personal computer controlled completely with their hands, that they carry everywhere, all the time)
Yes; and conflict of interest is a perfectly valid basis for questioning impartiality as a matter of jurisprudence.
In the meantime, here are a few of the differences I've observed:

Perl flattens lists by default.

All subroutine parameters are passed via @_, resulting in an imperative-style parsing of variables at the beginning of every sub.

A perl program is a file of perl statements, a lisp program is a lisp list of expressions.

Perl has contexts.

(edit) Also, Lisp reserves almost no characters. I can use square-bracket as a symbol name if I want.
I know nothing that anybody else doesn't. This is all pure speculation.

My skepticism about Xobni is:

1.) They're doing a lot of things that are commonly regarded as mistakes, i.e. launching too late, writing desktop software, making things complicated.

2.) A friend of mine did something very similar in 2003 - it was an Outlook plugin to categorize and organize your e-mail. He gave up on it because it seemed very difficult to get people to pay for an e-mail organizer unless it saves them the expense of having to hire someone to deal with e-mail, and it better be damn good if it's going to take over the job of a person. He perhaps didn't carry it through as far as he could've (he was coming off another failed startup and was running low on cash), but his observations seem valid.

3.) E-mail analytics seems to be an all-or-nothing product: either your software is reliable enough that you can just run it and trust it'll get the right answers, or it does more harm than good. If you have to double-check the program's results and/or approve every action, it'll cost you more time than it saves. I've heard that NLP has gotten much better recently, but I still had the impression that it's far from perfect. The Xobni founders and Gabor seem like sharp guys, but I kinda doubt that they're good enough to take what's basically bleeding-edge research and make it into something that business execs can just count on.

4.) They've taken a lot of money without users, revenues, or any proof that their market exists. As a result, they have, basically, one shot at this. If they blow it, they can't really flounder around until they find the right angle of attack; they're basically screwed.

I'm certainly willing to be proven wrong - really, I make these predictions so everyone can say "Don't you feel foolish now?" when I'm wrong. I learn better when it's humiliating. ;-)

But one thing I don't put much stock in is the "Well, lots of investors think it's good, so therefore it must be." Lots of investors is an idiot. (The subject/verb disagreement is intentional.) There've been cases - like Go, or the dot-com bubble - where everybody was certain that this was going to be the future, and it never ended up going anywhere.
If you feel you have a decisively superior advantage whether strategically (your idea of how to do it is better) or tactically (your technology works better) then keep at it, but realize that it's tricky with VCs. True story: Back when I pitched a startup during the good 'ol dot-bubble days, we worked a long time to put together a world class management team, prospective customers, figure out how to make money, etc. VC response: "But I just read an article in Red Herring where these two guys just announced they were going to do something similar and that their company is the global leader in the XYZ sector. Too late. Try something else."
"But", I tried to reason in vain, "How can it possibly be too late when for a year I labored to figure out how to make money, put together a great team, found prospective customer and all they did was blabber in some magazine about how they just had the idea now and they plan on being the global leader in the industry?"
"But they said they're already number one so why imitate them?"
"But how are they number one? They're just two guys in an office somewhere doing interviews about as-yet non-existent developments!"
So on the one hand you're correct, it is a proof of concept, on the other hand, many VCs, like people in all other walks of life, look for excuses to lose ... so they think if they read about an idea on a forum this morning, by the end of the day it must be well on its way to an IPO so there's no point in even bothering. Never-mind that many late-comers eventually have risen to the top and top dogs are only a few missteps away from losing critical masses of users.
Cal Newport graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2004, and is currently a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Something about a buck fifty in late fees at the public library.
Wow not a single example!
You forgot the profit step.
Interesting how there are only 5 places on Google that mention "Kolsky Research Institute" at all. And all of them reference this exact story: http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&clien...

Smells fishy
My school experience indicates that the career path that can be predicted for gifted youth at age 13 is: burnout.

Hopefully things have improved since then.
OK. Can someone tell me what are they going to release? And I do not want he classic "email analytics" answer
> Gabor's posts here have indicated that they're doing stuff with NLP

NLP? Great, maybe it can make me get over my Luposlipophobia.
I've seen extremely smart, rich, accomplished, and respectable people (not crackpots) talk at length about the inevitable coming of bona fide strong AI, and I don't believe it. You try getting someone excited about a cool machine learning paper you read. See if they give a shit.

There's a large gap in between the development of an exciting new algorithmic technology and use of it in the real world, if anyone ever takes notice at all.

The silver lining to this is that if you find an interesting but obscure paper and you implement what the authors implemented, you can be pretty sure you and the authors are the only people who ever have or ever will actually do that. It's a nice change of pace from writing CRUD web apps.
Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books
Don't forget we're planning to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Chinpokomon.
Internet.

Serious business.

The slide about not running if programmer/hax0r tools are found is interesting: it's almost like you get a pass from this crap if you're a computer smartypants.
Or how about just using a streaming service? Pandora, Rhapsody..
> and I don't believe it.

Yoda: "That is why you fail."

See http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38

Cf. heavier-than-air flying machines, walking on the Moon, the Internet, sub-4-minute-mile, summiting Everest, Deep Blue, the integrated circuit, Cold Fusion [1]

[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/