skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know that on one hand, I'm nitpicking. But on the other hand, it makes me queasy when some guy discusses the merits of IP-related policy without knowing the facts. How can he say that AT&T has lost its mind if he doesn't even realize that AT&T is probably after people that are torrenting movies and mp3s around the clock, not those swapping pictures of Britney? And if AT&T is talking to the MPAA and RIAA, part of the bargain will certainly be that AT&T gets to keep their legal immunities, even if it means that the lobbyists are going to have to change the law. In any case, the underground traffickers of celebrity photos are going to stay unaffected.

There must be some subtly behind AT&T's contemplations. They may have decided that they are losing money on certain of their customers, and as a regulated monopoly that can't just raise prices, they may have to resort to legalities such as this in order to eliminate customers, which as an action they deem more efficient than laying down additional infrastructure.
It is not at all clear what do they mean by CDN. "Taking a flash server apart and building your own" doesn't mean anything to me.
Maker Movement Gaining Recognition
to me Loopt is awesome - there's just one problem (that most mobile apps have): it doesn't support my phone

( yes I'm on Sprint =( )
afaik 1,2 and 5 need to be looked on with pure caution and might be an artifact of the kind of startup (consultancy, which works on contacts and is in general much easier than a product startup)the guy has done rather than a generic rule.

#1. It is hard and takes a lot of persistence

#2. The idea with which a startups starts out with rarely works out - so if its not going to work anyways why does it have to be big and there is little 'rationality' about the idea per se. I would go with guy kawasaki here - try to make meaning - build something useful and everything else will take care of itself.

#5 Having a backup plan is highly questionable. The only way you will get to fighting the devil is by burning the bridge which helps you cross over the deep sea.
The article title is wrong; Agile-ness is not measured in the speed of an individual change from code to customer. Any production-server-fuxoring-code-cowboy can do a change faster.

The Agile way would slow down particular changes, with practices like testing. The theory is that you take a little more time for every change in order to maintain optimum speed over the long term.
for those that haven't seen this one yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTby_e4-Rhg
One of the best presentations ever, on any topic.
Um- testing the accelerometer?
i just noticed replies.

mongrel doesn't do it for the same reason tar doesn't support encryption (pgp does!).

mongrel is designed to serve requests, not balance requests or spawn itself. sure it could, but it doesn't have to. it is just as easy to have another project spawn more mongrels. That way if I want to to write software just for looking at my servers and making more mongrels, i can, very easily. Otherwise i have to look in mongrel's code.
You've gone from complaining that the device has super compressed 720p which won't be as good as blue-ray, to claiming that you don't really know what it will look like, but that any compression on 720p video will look worse than uncompressed 1080p.

The facts on blue-ray:
"Discs encoded in MPEG-2 video typically limit content producers to around two hours of high-definition content on a single-layer (25 GB) BD-ROM. The more advanced video codecs (VC-1 and H.264) typically achieve a video runtime twice that of MPEG-2, with comparable quality."

In all likelihood, iTunes is using H.264, or their newest variant. The same as blue-ray. So, in reality, the choice of codec matters a great deal, blue-ray is not uncompressed video (thus, 25GB holds a 2 hour compressed movie), and yes, 1080p is better than 720p.

And it's also worth noting that digital cable, and as far as I know every other on demand HD video service, is also "highly compressed" 720p.
Every time I hear that song I can slowly feel my brain decompose.
Anyone got a mirror for this? Seems to be down, probably due to slashdot etc.

However I guess this is not booting to windows, but to something else? Is that really a new thing?
i dont think loopt is going anywhere they dont hav any user and are basically scamming investors at this point and the dev program works on no phones !
Typography: Where Engineers and Designers Meet
Great article that taught me a lot about narcissism. Many writers consider narcissists evil and imply that nothing good can come from narcissism. Although I would not want my parent or my spouse to be narcissistic, this article made me understand that narcissists do a lot of good in the world.
It is now the first recurrent piece of news?
Interesting point at the end about the inverse correlation between means-value and ends-value. But I'm not sure I buy it. Health and human rights seem to have more means-value than Rosling gives them credit for.

Even an exploitative factory owner wants workers to be somewhat healthy so that he can hire lots of them, and so that there will be more competition between prospective workers (which keeps wages down). And human rights seem like a prerequisite for maximizing a society's creative output. I suppose frightened and brutalized people can do agricultural or factory work, but I doubt they can do great physics.
I'm thinking of an app that pushes location data from loopt into fireeagle
Enso Demo (Flash movie)
send me an invite lemme see if it even works
How to Shoot Yourself In the Foot
you guys know about 'superman' right? it's nasty.
Entertaining, yes, but it was too TV-like for my taste: fast and excited talking to lull the audience into thinking something exciting is happening, when really there isn't. The animated statistics were nice, though.
PC versus Mac - U.S. presidential candidates
Have you considered the Drupal framework? For an example, check out http://www.flippr.net/ for a Flickr clone that was built in a weekend.

To a great extent, Drupal can be seen as a point-and-click website development kit. Assembling pieces like like the image, watermark, lightbox and other modules like postcard and image notes can provide the pieces you're looking for. Being modular in design, this installation of Drupal could start its life as a simple image gallery but later grow to become a full website with features like an OpenID provider, BitTorrent tracker, Digg-like voting, etc.

There's also excellent Menalto Gallery2 integration, but Gallery2 may or may not be what you're looking for.
When Apple's Keynote Bounce Is a Thump
Okay George you got my vote :)
Have you ever seen a real deadlock?
My understanding of a CDN was:

You build your own geographically diverse network. Servers in each country/state/area. You put in very high speed links between each node.

When a user comes to get something from you, you redirect them to the node that is closest to them (Either geographically, or in terms of hops/ping time).

Is this not what CDN means typically?
I guess I still have not fully understand the concept of earning money with open source software. Any ideas on how they plan to earn a billion dollars with MySQL? I thought what most open source companies do is sell consulting from time to time (help us set up our MySQL server), is that really such a big market?
pyglet 1.0 released (radically pythonic game/multimedia library)
Health is definitely important, but it's difficult to achieve without the ground works in the other areas such as education and economy. (Rosling is a professor in public health)

As for human rights, it is important for producing creative work. However, the nature of creative work is that the results are indirect and unpredictable, and the benefits are usually spread beyond economic boundaries, which don't address the immediate needs of the poorer developing countries.
I think he is much better than anyone else in the movie. He carries it well at about 0:20-0:25, while the others look like spastic white people.
Yes. But TechCrunch apparently doesn't know it.

You don't need a server in each country, just "close to your users". Like one on the east coast, one on the west coast, one in Europe, and you don't care about the rest of the world. But I am not sure Justin.tv has that.
Cost saving alone doesn't qualify for a CDN either. You need geographical distribution.
Here are the tips for people like me who skim YC comments before reading the article.

Tip #1: Don't worry about not being courageous enough for the uncertainty of the business world, as being an entrepreneur has nothing to do with courage.

Tip #2: Look for a big idea, and be rational.

Tip #3: Start small.

Tip #4: When faced with the fear of giving up a secure job, concentrate on the equally frightening possibility of someday looking back with regret.

Tip #5: Have a backup plan.
Yes. One thing I will never understand is why people considers more regrettable sex and the human body than war and violence. Maybe I'm a little hippie, but I would prefer my sons watching a naked body than a fight.

This is a quite strange world!
agile [aj-uhl, -ahyl] Pronunciation Key adjective

1.	quick and well-coordinated in movement; lithe: an agile leap.

2.	active; lively: an agile person.

3.	marked by an ability to think quickly; mentally acute or aware: She's 95 and still very agile.
A Closer Look at Apple's MacBook Air
Why Americans don't buy DVD players that record
Thinnest notebook crown doesn't belong to Apple MacBook Air
I thought Monzy's "Kill Dash Nine" was even funnier.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4

(Monzy was one of my TAs last year!)
"Sometimes their shoes are even cheap and beat-up, even though it's a mortal sin in England".
It is?
Should they need to? They should be free to scrape and represent, and ycom should be free to block them if they choose. When you pursue anti-rights relating to the ownership of information distribution you come to disgusting solutions like current copyright models.
Many GPL'd sources do the same to my brain.
Hell yeah. Over here (in England), people will make a pretty quick negative judgment about you if your shoes look wrong, in the typical office environment. A lot of people (none of them managers) walk around wearing shoes that look like they've been wearing them since A-levels (pre-university school). You can't get away with that in this country.
My programming (development) resources include sources that are as much a evolution of the Internet itself. There's news:, pre Web, then web 1/1.5 and finally web2.0.

You may notice the sites are not always exclusively about "programming". Why? Well I find that a lot of the best stuff occurs at the edges of programming/development in lots of different areas. This wide scanning of sources is an attempt to avoid the narrow focus of any one "technology" and to see how "stuff" is being applied. Ultimately I'm just as interested in building stuff than just merely playing with cogs & gears. The cross-over of technology and technique is at the edges. Exactly where new stuff & ideas emerge.

a) Newsgroups

The real source of Internet news, plain-old news-groups. Rowdy, without pictures but the source of infinite detail. I don't scan them as much in news-mode but still flick through them:

- news:comp.lang.* (perl python core language)

- news:comp.unix.admin

- news:lucky.openbsd.misc (obsd chatter)

- news:linux.kernel

- news:rec.games.programmer (where all the good programming used to be discussed)

- http://groups.google.com/group/webpy

- http://groups.google.com/group/django-users

b) Web1/1.5: sites & blogs
Every day I log onto these sites & scan them.

- http://scripting.com

- http://radar.oreilly.com

- hackernews via my summary http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/hackerid/

- http://techmeme.com (broad brush)

Then if I get bored I go and take a look at the following urls or listen via c) ...

- http://factoryjoe.com/ (standards, usability & bleeding edge)

- http://www.plasticbag.org/ (ui, standards, application)

- http://www.hackdiary.com/ (bleeding edge, standards)

- http://jeffcroft.com/ (django)

- http://willotoons.com/ (tech in biz)

- http://chrisbrogan.com/ (social tech)

- http://www.valuesofn.com/blog (extracting meaning app)

- http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=guido (BDFL, creator of python)

c) Web2.0: Twitter & Flickr, etc

I've been on flickr for quite a while and when twitter started I added mostly my flickr contacts on twitter. So I'm hooked into twitter (and flickr) so a quick grab from my twit list shows quite a few ppl who blog and write. So you can listen to the cross chatter and see references to articles, topics or interesting things. You don't have to know them all. The direct line of contact means you can listen, ask questions, clarify information & facts. [0] For example my list of the first 20 twits or so include:

Watching the "alpha geeks" ....

Biz Stone , Blaine Cook , rael , veen , davegray , Sacca , Ross , Justin Williams , Mr Messina , Dave Winer , Bon , Scott Rafer , Chris Brogan , julien , Lachlan Hardy , 47teen , Jeremy Keith , Andre Torrez , Hicksy , Tom Coates , Matt Biddulph , Todd Jordan , Paul Boag ... etc

[0] Like the time I did a quick quote check on Chris Sacca & got a response back via twitter in a couple of hours.
About the man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
"... Where this knowledge becomes really useful is when you decide that you want to be promoted to one of these levels. When that happens, in order to achieve that, you must ensure that you adopt the same patterns of behaviour as that of your target group. If you fail to do that, you'll be putting yourself at a huge disadvantage compared to someone who does. .... This is a lesson that was regularly drummed into me in the consulting corporation where I used to work ..."

Aping the grooming and characteristics for the sake of advancement and favour, sans improvement. In a way this is an adaption tactic. A chameleon-like adaption. Great article inclusion btw.

This is the "anti-startup pattern" that the "Dignity is Deadly" article warns of ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98686
This sounds like a nice feature for tvio-like systems but I wonder if a move towards flash drives will undermine the opportunity for this sort of software more generally.
pffft.... lets see if he can do the spiderman
How to Create a Time-Lapse Video of any Web Page
Closer look at Apple's innovations - MacBook Air, Time Capsule
I like the idea of a REPL into my web app (may add one actually - different language, but that's not the issue).

But can a production-lisper tell me what is best practice regarding versioning and saving to files?

I'm assuming that modifications via the REPL are affecting the running image only. Can the running image save back out as source? (I'm assuming not, surely comments etc aren't preserved?)

Is it down to the admin to replay all changes they make to the REPL to the app source?
All-Star winners enjoy OptiTex software
OptiTex partners Brooks Sports and Teamwork Apparel recently won awards from Apparel magazine for their outstanding business practices. Brooks won the top prize, the Grand All Star Award, while Teamwork Apparel received one of only nine All Star Awards.
I love the lab coats.
This is interesting...
Our process is to test code first locally, push it with Git to the server (on the cloud) then type: (sf-load) on the server REPL - done (less than a minute). The (sf-load) function loads the asdf file which recompiles any code necessary with the changes, such as dependent macros, etc, automatically. The server continues to run through the process - unnoticed by the user except for the sudden new features :) . http://www.cliki.net/asdf
Well if Paul can do this, then maybe he can put a password change or retrieval feature in. /sigh
Sure is. I thought pg put in a safeguard against this that would refer you to the first submittal. Running out of storage space, I guess.
What about MC Hawking? Entropy is my song:
http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Rhyme-Hawkings-Greatest/...
I don't want to ruin the ending, but that's one skill I hope I never have to learn to get my point across.
God forbid I ever come to the point in life where I actually do this.
Push for Education Yields Little for India's Poor
When I ran CL server (it was in-house service, but heavily accessed 24/7 and I couldn't stop it to update frequently), I used a few ways, depending on how imminent the problem was.

The normal routine was to change the source, test it, then from server REPL I just reload it. If the problem was more serious that I had to fix it ASAP, I sent the definitions directly from the editing source to the REPL (in Emacs it's just a couple of keystrokes).

It was only when the situation was extremely serious (e.g some bug stopped large part of the production pipeline) that I typed expressions directly into REPL and afterwards I put the fix into the source. It was pretty rare, though.
Discover The Dead Sea Scrolls
In 1947, by the north-western tip of the Dead Sea, a few Bedouins accidentally stumbled upon what would turn out to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Following this initial discovery of parts of seven scrolls, archaeologists uncovered a huge library, comprised of thousands of scroll fragments in different states of preservation, found in eleven different caves in the vicinity of the ruins called Qumran.
What do you mean by "control the market"?
Oh the hubris and carefree living of youth, how I miss thee
Ask YC: Safe to release user entered information gathering websites without being a company?
I'm currently working on a project that I would like to make available to everyone, not just friends and coworkers, but I'd rather not, at this time, make it into a startup.

The project involves collecting information about a user's diet as well as profile information. By default the user entered information is public (though there is a way to make it private as of yesterday) and none of the information in the profile is required.

What advice do you guys have on starting personal projects like this? Will a basic privacy policy and a terms and conditions page be enough to protect me? Should I not even be worried about it? Thanks in advance.
Yahoo Implements OpenID; Massive Win For The Project
It was a serious suggestion. FireEagle let's you control the privacy of your location data. You can specify the precision of data provided to consumer apps, eg country, city, co-ords.

In this case loopt can provide fireeagle with exact co-ordinates and fireeagle can forward only your city to dopplr, and which neighbourhood you are in to your facebook/dodgeball friends.
I'm not saying it qualifies as a CDN - I'm pretty sure it wouldn't - just that it's more complex than simply putting stuff up on S3, and based on the info in the article, the above is my guess as to what they're doing. You don't get 1/4 of a penny per hour of flv by building a worldwide network of servers.

Well, perhaps if you were as big as Google you could. I don't know enough about the economics of scale. But you'd have to be doing some serious volume at the local internet exchanges.

By the way, I was kind of thinking out loud because I'm in the same position:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/rocksolida...

Bandwidth is averaging above 1mb per person (and growing - the new games are bigger than Stunt Pilot and people play more the more we have), which is probably quite a bit less than justin.tv, but still costly. I definitely won't leave the US for bandwidth, but I'll probably end up with a mixture of baseline servers, gigabyte per month servers and a mirror of static content ready on S3 (as well as a static version of the site), just in case too many of my servers go down at once or we get a massive traffic spike.

Maybe then I'll get a story on TC about how I've created a "CDN", and hey, I wouldn't email them saying remove the story, it's innaccurate. :)
Stupid article. Sorry. The change that PG made is tiny. So it was surely an easy change and so his responding in under 7 hours is hardly something to blog about.

Right now I'm working for a very large European web site that's entirely written in Java. We make changes all the time (e.g. we probably make at least 3 code changes to the web site per day). Doesn't need any magic PG pixie dust sprinkled on the engineers to make this happen. What we do is run all our web server/app server combinations inside Solaris zones. When we make a change we tell the production system to shutdown each zone when it's ready (finished with current requests) and load the new one.
Article on Etsy and building a community
I've had some thoughts in the past about a couple different mobile applications that would benefit from location data. It looks like the dev platform these guys are building could be the answer.
The Rest of the Rest of Us
Old School BBS: The Chinese Social Networking Phenomenon
Although refutation by dictionary is a valued technique, I think its invalidated here by the capital A in Agile.
I disagree. It sounds like you work for a company who has their build process worked out really well, so fast changes are less impressive to you, but have you considered that maybe your company is not the average? I think it would be fair to say that most development shops are NOT that responsive to user changes because they don't have either the language features pg used, or a well-thought-out build process like your company.

If the article author works at one of those "average" shops, I think he has every reason to consider his experience on news.yc as a breath of fresh air and tell other people about it as an example.

Additionally, I think part of what impressed the author so much was that pg took the time to handle the request immediately. This isn't a site anyone pays to use, there's no revenue incentive, and the request was not the early stage of a riot, but they took care of it as though it was as important as a paying customer relationship, and that's not a response you expect from most web services. In fact, I think that may be what impressed the author more than just the speed of the fix.
Fair enough. I guess we do have a system for making rapid changes in place, and I'm just used to be able to do that sort of thing regardless of the language.
Let's not miss the critical "take away" message of this article...

Often, it's NOT the capabilities of the app that are the most important thing, it's the ABILITY TO CHANGE those capabilities quickly that matters most.

I've seen this over and over and over again in businesses. When the app (often packaged) is missing a certain feature or capability, the organization will always find a way around it: a satellite app, an excel spreadsheet, pencil and paper, even hiring a few extra clerks. But what really drives them nuts is when the business has a new critical requirement and the software can't be changed in time to meet it.

The examples are endless: we're running a special sale, we have a new temporary warehouse, the accountants insist on special security for certain classes of workers, Joe just found out that <abc> has happened in Duluth - if we knew <def> by 3:00, we could do <ghi>.

I know many business people that will only buy packaged software with source code. They will not pay maintenance, and use the money instead to hire their own programmers. It's THAT IMPORTANT that the software can "turn on a dime" to satisfy rapidly changing business requirements.

Bravo, pg, for doing something (however apparently minor) to bring this issue front and center where it belongs.
I was hoping it was referring to the real old school BBS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS
Entrepreneurship Takes off in Ireland
Here's the reason (FTA):

"Cable TV penetration is far higher in the States than Asia or Europe. With cable, the same show can appear on a channel several times. In Europe and Japan, you need to grab it when you can."
"The best confluence of hacking and hip hop"

That's like saying the best confluence of oil and water.
Hey, you're pretty good at that. You should write a few summaries for my site Squeezed Books :-)
Salesforce starts to charge by the login