skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UPDATE: textmarks has an API. wow. there a total winner then http://textmarks.com/dev

Sorry I was sleeping> Anyways here is your answer. 1. If you are broke, like me then consider using an email to sms gateway. you will need to know the subscriber's provider. It can work if you are offering a one-way sms service such as updates. Watch out for SMSC spam catchers . 2. If you have money, but no time then you can use a provider such as Clickatell or Verisign and they will do all the background work. All you will need is an access to their API plus a monthly fee of 500-1500/month on top of SMS fees. 3. You have money plus time plus contacts then Forget all these guys and provision your own short-code, then start emailing your contacts at Verizon and them to give you access to their SMSC. When people say "I don't know how twitter pays for 250k SMS/month" they don't know that Twitter is probably paying less than your startup will for 10k SMS. that is the advantage of working directly with the carriers. SMS is super cheap for them. 4. You got money, but want to be careful, then I suggest http://mobivity.com or http://textmarks. This service charge you for zero to only a few bucks and give you a unique keyword plus short-code. You can easily talk to Greg Harris who is the CEO of Mobivity and he is very open to entrepreneurs looking to use his service which is why he has an API.I mean he will literally let you launch a product competing with his. Textmarks doesn't have an API to my knowledge but you can certainly email Ariel Poller. i would try something like apoller or a.poller@textmarks.com. Be smart when you choose a provider that offers a short-code.When you rent a shared short-code, it can change at any time and now your 50k users have to know your new short-code. If you are doing a interactive SMS service, that can suck. If you are going for the private short-code, then you are safe as a long as you can shell out 1000/month. If you are proficient with Mobile applications, the best way to go is to build your own messaging application. Now when someone sends you a SMS or you send your user a sms ask send them a link as well and ask them to download it. there you have it, no more SMS fees for that guy and your messages can be 500 characters long. OOps I gotta go make more coffee. Email me if you like and I can be more detailed, i just went on here without knowing exactly what you are doing.
Isn't the internet a porn document network?
Fuzzwich: Reddit Alien 3.0 by Alexis
Doesn't this require you to know which provider owns each number? We'd been considering going down that path, but couldn't find any decent way around it (and I don't consider asking customers which provider they're on decent.)
Ask Hackers and PG: Weigh votes by karma?
I'm a bit slow (and may have missed a previous discussion). I'm not sure how the editors can protect the integrity of submissions without having a broad sampling of editors. But isn't that the community already? It seems like the best protectors are those that hang out here the most and have been rewarded most by the community. So, why not simply weigh votes by karma? Here the people already proven to know how this community "works" would be given a louder voice. Those that hang out less often would have less of a voice and all would earn their voice with submissions that best conform to the varied tastes of the community. Heck, it could even go one layer deeper. Karma from discussions and stories could weigh the respective votes. Each aspect of the site would therefore be best supported by those folks who put in the most recognized intellectual work.
If you want to upload adult content to scribd, it must be added to the adult group. If you want to upload anything else, it doesn't have to be in a group at all. At least, that's the way I understood the comment.

If you only measure groups, you're ignoring the vast majority of uploads which are not added to anything.
It's pretty sad that thousands, maybe millions, of people may be wasting away in cubicles partially due to silly regulations regarding depreciation schedules for cubicles vs. permanent walls.

It's also telling that Microsoft seems almost alone in bucking the trend amongst large computer industry companies. If their competitors had spent their money in ways that enabled their engineers to be productive, instead of on lawyers, lobbyists and pr firms blaming MS for 'monopolistic' practices, maybe they could on occasion produce something people would pay for, too.
Especially considering that there will always be more first-borns than second- and third-borns. I'm not sure if the bell-curving is done internationally, but I would bet it is - otherwise it would be useless as a measure of intelligence between different nations. So the difference would be explained if Norway has a slightly higher IQ than average.
A troll is someone who is engaging in an argument because he gets satisfaction from the argument itself, not because he has any interest in the topic at hand.

Interesting way to respond to my question, amichall. What's wrong with just answering it when I asked, back at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66297
What do people here use? I'm about to choose between Trac, Bugzilla, or anything else that comes up.
One should note that not all the content in the adult section is porn. In any case, web filters are getting much better at targeting specific content. I've seen filters that can allow you to log in and use Facebook, but its messaging interface is blocked.

It would seem fairly trivial for a filter to target the big area that scribd has cordoned off for adult content and leave the rest available.
The Future of Reputation and Norm Enforcement
Sigh! Why can't more people listen to Joel, read Peopleware[1] and design offices similar to fogcreek[2]? If Joel can do it at NYC rents, I am sure others should not find it that difficult.

[1]http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html -- some other great book recommendations in there

[2]http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
First Money In - Platform for Uniting Angels and Startups
Anyone raising money? Looks like this soon-to-be-launched NYC company is building out a platform
PyCon: Call for Talk & Tutorial Proposals
Has anyone heard of this site before?
When people pay for music, they're paying for the convenience of the delivery, not for the music itself. For the average user, it's worth a dollar to avoid the relatively clunky wilderness of Limewire and BitTorrent.
This has a little of the flavor of "Valley Wag" -- subtly
slamming innovators for failing to fix the
internet/economy/government. Scribd allows people to share
content and, lo and behold, people use it to share porn -- just
like Facebook, youTube, Flickr...

The author can't really make up their mind as to where Scribd is
in error: are they using porn to drive up traffic, or do they
fail to have right the disclaimer? Going so far as to ask
whether it is "acceptable for a VC backed company to drive
growth via porn?", the author back pedals and asks for an "Are
you OK with this?" dialogue, though the site already has it.
(Maybe that changed recently?)
I certainly can't tell apart people with a 3 point IQ difference but as the article mentions it is possible that this kind of differences would accumulate over time. For example the difference between an A and a B is pretty small on a case by case basis, but it's a big difference between a straight A student and B average student.
Clear the Bookshelf and Fill It Up Again, All Online
I like the subversion integration of Trac. It's a great tool to write documentation in as you can tie it to changesets, files, etc. It's also a decent bug tracking tool, what it lacks in this department it makes up with its integration of bug tracking, subversion and a wiki (which coincidentally is all you need when you start on a project).
what if...

-work there to make the connections

-get a high paying salary

-quit after a year

-and sell them a new piece of technology making yourself millions of dollars
I wonder if I can find a copy of "On Lisp" on this site. I've checked Amazon and it sells for 300+ dollars. I have the electronic copy but reading on the computer doesn't really work out for me.
My impression as an outsider has been that they are a slow-moving company, whereas Facebook moves incredibly fast. It just seems like it would be a lot more exciting to work at Facebook if you had the choice.
I have a friend that works at myspace in beverly hills - and has high respect for the team there - and let's not forget that they still get way more traffic than facebook. From a pure tech perspective, why would you not work there ...

and they are releasing their own platform now arent they ?...
He could go further with the lisp comparison. In the abstract, forth is lisp with fixed argument counts (i.e., without parens) written backwards (i.e., on a stack).

If you went to someone who knew either language and described those two differences, they could easily make a reasonable version of the other.
I've seen this study before and while its certainly measuring something, what its measuring doesn't seem to fit the definition of IQ. Considering it says that younger children score higher when under 12 then vice versa, IQ isn't really suppose to be changeable especially at that kind of age.

The social expectations on the first born may cause them to concentrate harder perhaps, who knows. And while its a large sample its from a particular source that may include systematic biases. If smarter younger kids managed to get out of military service in disproportionate numbers that would skew the results.
Interesting. who would the modern Newton and Edisons be? Or can you only tell when looking back.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are both definitely Edisons. Woz would be a Tesla...
"... "Classics and children's books are very popular. Generally, computer manuals are not the kind of thing that are traded on the site," he said. ..."

From the article probably not, unfortunately. Looks like science fiction is traded well.
Yeah I guess that would be fair. Not sure who Gates "tesla" is though, probably 1000's of them.
1960s prediction: by the 1990s robots will do chores for us and make us waffles for breakfast like on the Jetsons.
What do Americans want more than peace?  A computer.
Take a break from coding and learn how to solve the Rubik's Cube
IP theft is rampant in comedy circles, evidentally:

http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/02/take_th...
What if Google had to design their user interface to rank high on Google?
So the study concludes that eldest children turn out smart, as do those who are the youngest by a large margin. One more example of middle children never catching a break.

(Full disclosure: I'm the eldest in my family).
ACM@UIUC R|P Conference Videos (XKCD, Ullman, Eric Traut, Jon Stokes, Valchev, Yegge and more)
DRM is a complete lie
Failing Fast - 'finding the fun' in a design
From a pure tech perspective, why would you not work there ...

They run the site on IIS?

http://myspace.com/!
When life becomes good for a programmer
Yeah, that's a great parallel to draw. In comedy, and writing in general, subconscious plagarism can be a big problem. Sometimes I get very proud of myself for coming up with a clever turn of phrase, only to remember that I read it somewhere a few days before.
At least Alfred Nobel had the decency to right the misuse of his god forsaken invention.
IIS & Sql Server 2005

For scaling up I find this a facinating article on MySpace
http://www.baselinemag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=198614,00...
Algorithms (free book draft)
Termite: a Lisp dialect for concurrency (inspired by Erlang)
Don't Be Afraid to Change the Dream
Haha, too true! That made me laugh, thanks for sharing ;-)

Life must be good at the top!
Coworkers Considered Harmful
Kick-Start the Idea By Planning
I would advise caution if emulating any technical aspect of Myspace. As far as I know, the site still has a very high rate of errors compared to other high-traffic sites.
Outsourcing: The next technology battlefields
Yeah having a wiki for a project is really great. We don't use the wiki built into Trac, but only because we had started a wiki and had a ton of data on it already by the time we started using Trac.
If you're using a web-based feed reader, as most subscribers do, it's telling sites almost as much about you as visiting the site itself would.

The problem the author refers to is the same problem any site has to deal with when they offer content without requiring authentication. The solution is cookies. If the subscriber is using a web-based feed reader, any images embedded in the feed will send the same cookie that viewing the page itself would. Any data you've collected about registered users can be associated with feed subscribers until the cookie expires.

The other option is to use a third-party ad service that has a super-cookie on file for your readers already, like DoubleClick. Almost all of the user-tracking strategies available to you on a regular web page are still available from feeds.

The linked article is what happens when people who don't actually build things try to prognosticate.
This is why its important to love what you do. I'm feeling somewhat burned out right now, but as soon as I start playing music and coding I get right back in the groove. Its something I actually enjoy more than watching Heroes or the baseball playoffs. Playing Halo 3 OTOH....
This only makes sense if you believe the negative impact of your contribution to the country's tax revenues (some of which is misspent or supports things you disagree with) is going to be stronger than the positive impact you'll make through the way you live your life and run your company.

I think you'd have to be pretty pessimistic about yourself and your company to think that your net contribution to the country would be a negative.
Well if we are talking about CO2 then you would see the opposite of Karst: CO2 stimulates plant growth tremendously.
"... So, why not simply weigh votes by karma? ..."

It's been mooted before & discussed a bit. I thought the response was a combination of editors (who delete posts, make titles readable) and upvoting by users. Poor submissions simply sit around 1 and just never make it to the /news stack.

Can you give examples of where the "integrity of submissions" warrant what you suggest?
Are you crazy? You can just set a -1 funny modifier (I set -2, Slashdot's meme humor rampant and unbearable). If you do that, and browse sorted by highest score, Slashdot has by far the best comments anywhere on the net, aside from certain niche newsgroups.
Some of both.

A lot of this trade is on a large enough scale (Minimum orders are often 1 container) that the buyer wants to define the packaging to match his brand, but it's usually a lot cheaper to have them to custom packaging here in China before shipment, rather than repackage later on.

The sellers are often flexible. They offer some packaging options based on what they've done before and the vendors they know, but if you want custom packaging they'll be happy to 'do it your way'.
Build a $2,500 supercomputer, or about $50 per gigaflop.
What do you think of debating societies?
70+ JavaScript Resources for Every Web Developer
Hey, the smart color picker link gives an error. Could you repost it please?
There should be a clear distinction between Java web development (JSP), and GWT. I think this creates confusion with some. GWT compiles restricted Java code to native Javascript. From an implementation perspective, it is not similar to JSP or JSF at all. When talking about "using Java", one should distinguish if they are talking about GWT because it is totally different.

I agree with the reasons mentioned for not using GWT, with the exception of the loading process (this is no longer used in GWT 1.4) and the CSS/HTML argument. You could code your entire site in HTML/CSS if you wanted to, wrapping your HTML in HTMLPanels.

That being said, I am not surprised that someone would switch from GWT to RoR. It really depends on what you need. I think for most applications, GWT is simply overkill. Sometimes people dont need to utilize RPC's or client side processing. Rails is so fast and elegant and you can reach desirable results quickly. And lots of people are simply tired of looking at Java syntax from their day jobs (I think this partly fuels the Java-hate).

But I would argue that there are times when RoR is not the best choice. The application I'm working on would not be possible for me to build in RoR (realistically). It could be, but I would have to write entire RPC and event listener frameworks to handle the level of complexity required for the asynchronous components. I need bullet-proof debugging, a native Ajax environment, low-level server back-end control, and high-level RPC abstraction right out of the box. We'd like to internationalize this stuff too, and directly integrate iPhone support (loaded via user-defined properties). It is for this type of stuff that GWT is my tool of choice. Sometimes complicated tasks require leveraging tools a bit more complicated to get the job done...
Tools for optimizing your website: Etag and Expire headers in Django, Apache, and Lighttpd
This isn't a supercomputer. There are various definitions for what qualifies -- "a computing resource which costs over $1M", "a computing resource which requires several forklifts to install", and (my personal favourite) "the FIRST page of the Linpack 'top 500' report" are the most common -- but this fails to even come close to any of them.

Microwulf is certainly a neat hack -- but a supercomputer? No.
Good deal, Papadimitriou is the author of this well-regarded book,

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486402584

that somehow luckily wound up with Dover.
"I think the only real solution is to have a small community whose members are actually heavily invested in the topic... basically, experts."

Commitment to a community is completely independent of investment in a topic.
Having ads attached seems like a potentially pretty high cost to me.
Hmm...I'm afraid I don't understand why do you considering using P2P unconvenient. Cos here in Russia it is the most comfortable way to get music. Internet music market is only a few $millions for now. But even if it will grow, I doubt that people will drop P2P. Cos it easy as open StrongDC++ in your metropolian network, type an artist name and download all songs at the price $0,0004 per mb.
Maybe I'm wrong and you have different situation in US.
Just my 2 cents.
Justin.TV Lifecasters Not Welcome Everywhere (like movie theaters)
Thousands... one of them was Charles Simony for sure.
Drug companies have been advertising this way to doctors for years. They often hold lectures and give out educational tchotchkes that many doctors find genuinely useful. In fact, drug company lectures and educational materials are the main way that a lot of doctors keep up on new developments in their field.

(All this, of course, is notwithstanding the bad parts about drug companies giving doctors free stuff).
The Stickiness of Stories
good point - i guess it's just no guarantee of delivery then
so it looks like we dropped the ball a bit on innovation. Actually I don't think robots that do some chores would be particularly hard to build, but they would probably be so expensive it might be cheaper to a) do it yourself, or b) hire a maid
> But how hard would it be to create a peer-to-peer internet connection? One of your devices would be connected to WiFi, but also connected to every other device in the area. And those would be connected to more devices, and so on. It would form a big chain, possibly extending several miles.

It exists! See for example http://www.fon.com/

By the way, P2P networks don't have to be slow as long as they're well designed; they can even be faster than traditional client/server.
i think the economist got this wrong - i don't pretend to know if skype is worth all that money but I do know that people love skype and it is one of the web's most useful apps, thats saying alot.
I was trying to find a picture of aaron, but I was curios if people would describe his tendencies as "emo" (given his age). I am emo-cluefree, so was just curious. Or is emo really for sub 20 year olds (and 20 to 30s to sell to them eg Fall Out Boy).
well, it's one thing to take risks, it's completely different to write a production application in a language and framework you barely know. you end up spending a lot of time looking up things that you already knew how to do in the other languages you were familiar with. also, what happens if the application goes down for unknown reasons and you have to troubleshoot the application at 3am on Sunday? It's sometimes wise to stick to the things you have mastered and learn new technologies on non-critical applications.
In general, people like to do things faster to achieve the result ASAP. Most people have a short patience level.

Why do you thing startup is using Rails? because they want to get rich fast by throwing their simple products faster.

People can't wait for 8 months to see their work comes to fruition.

Basically it's human nature to like Ruby on Rails, not because of the technical merit.
Prince is not all that much more than XEP, I don't think. But, XEP was the first commercial product I tried (after giving up on FOP, since it could only process about 80 pages before crapping out)...it worked great, I paid them $300 or $400 (I don't recall exactly), and got back to work.

I have never tried Prince. I probably won't do another book in Docbook, though I don't know what I'll replace it with, since I generally hate WYSIWYG word processors. I'll probably end up writing in markdown in vim. ;-)
Warning: turn down your <blood drips from ear> volume before you click.
The 7 Secrets of Inspiring Leaders
me: business guy. moved here. join start up. adventures.
Facebook, Quant Fund Meltdown & the Techmeme Leaderboard
ODF enters the Semantic Web
Debate:  Does Computer Use Cause Carpal Tunnel?
Right. The approval process with carriers is what makes getting a short code so time consuming. What was it like working with the Aggregators? I've heard mixed stories.
Very good, impressive way to get the message across.
Looks like a Warren Buffett type investment.
Tried Bookfinder.com. Can't find it. Recommend that you use Bookfinder.com. Might get lucky next time around.
Ask PG: How are the applications going?
If you happen to need a break, I'd be happy to talk about our application for a bit, or just, well, it would be cool to get a phone call.
Del.icio.us are rewriting in PHP with the Symfony framework:

http://www.symfony-project.com/blog/2007/10/02/delicious-pre...

Why would they choose that??
Given what we know about program length vs bugs (it's pretty linear), I think it's a "technical merit" that Rails lets you write shorter, clearer code. In an environment where you're not sure what you're doing is going to go anywhere, and where you need to be able to turn on a dime, shorter, clearer code is also going to be an advantage.
CSS Vertical Bar Graphs
Making a picture website from Picurls.com
PHP + Smarty + SQLite, including source code
The Ugliest Products in Tech History
How to add mail server to the whitelists for hotmail, gmail, etc?
for sending out invite, reminder emails, etc so they don't end up the in the junk/spam folder. i remember there was a thread on this here, but i can't find it anymore..help!
I think the crap producing PHP crowd the peeps are referring to are those developers who use plain jane php with their webpages (logic mixed with presentation). Believe me I was one of those guys and I hated myself for it. Now there are real serious PHP frameworks out there that do a very nice job of MVC (obviously due to the popularity of RoR). Symfony, Code Igniter, CakePHP(to some extent) just to name a few. So don't worry there is still hope for PHP yet.