skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Text Message Spam
Anyone else get this message too? Is an anti-spam solution likely to be implemented when the cell phone companies make money from the spam? The odd thing about this type of spam is it may have been more profitable for verizon than the spammer.
"from the psychiatry standpoint homosexuality is a pathology too"

Not any more, but in Turing's time yes.
Will there be a plan for text message spam when verizon may have made far more from the messages than the actual spammer? I was one of the lucky recipients of the pump and dump text message the article mentions.
php5 + mysql + memcache
Coffee in evenly spaced doses is key for me. Too much and I go up a tree. It's about staying at peak alertness. I take naps too. Coding while tired=expensive. When I'm tired, solutions come slower, code-quality drops off and I end up fixing it later.
You have no idea? Hmm.... you need to think it through. Just think about how much exactly $200K would last them and how much more money they'd need to raise to become profitable. Not to mention the control problems.

As funny as that whole thing was, the prof was right to break that deal. This company wouldn't have gone anywhere anyway with that kind of a structure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-bomb
When I wrote: "OK. And because of this Rand isn't?"

I meant to write: "OK. And because of this Rand isn't a good writer?".

It's not a non sequitur, just a typo.
Whoah, you're weird. Salinger and Vonnegut are Good (with a capital G).
I don't think early car manufacturers deliberately made cars look like horseless carriages because they'd be familiar or easy to build. I think it was more because it was the only kind of vehicle they could imagine.
Yes, "We" is also wonderful, though I don't see that "Anthem" was a ripoff...it's just another take on the same idea, which many others have taken a stab at over the years. And Brave New World and 1984 are completely different from the former to, and from each other. I love dystopian fiction, so I've read tons of it. My current favorite writer in the genre is Margaret Atwood ("Handmaid's Tale" and "Oryx and Crake"). So I guess if you don't really enjoy reading speculative fiction with a gloomy outlook on the future, maybe you only need to read one of them (probably 1984, since it's the one everybody knows), but otherwise, they're all a lot of fun.

"We, the Living", I didn't care for. The language is stilted (even more than Atlas and Fountainhead). It was her first real writing in English, and it shows. I never recommend WTL to folks who don't already like Ayn Rand, and most of the folks I know who've started it never finished it. I did, but I would never re-read it. (I've re-read Fountainhead and Atlas, minus the Galt speech, a couple of times, and Anthem at least four or five times.)
Now maybe his co-founder will leave, and the founders of Digg will be so impressed that they invite him to be a co-founder--on equal terms.
That's right. I have no idea. You know why I have no idea? Because nobody is offering me $200k, that's why I have no idea. If they were, I'd immediately learn enough to make a relatively informed decision. But until then, I'd rather learn things that would help me build a product, not manage a company. So therefore, I have no idea. Gosh, what a horrible thing to admit.
I presume many of your friends and associates you are referring to made their money from technology startups in MA and CA. Do you have any reason to believe they are a representative sample?
Warning: 10 online marketing trends to ignore
Structurally that is almost guaranteed to be a bad deal. I doubt you'd ever find a deal of this form in the history of a startup that went on to be successful. If an investor buys as much as half the company (it does happen in some series A rounds), the valuation should be higher.

Investors might pay $200k for half a restaurant or some other business like that, but not a startup.
Marketing a small web business
dispatch-conf and etc-update are the two config updating tools included with gentoo's portage. dispatch-conf is the newer and preferred tool.

Be default dispatch-conf keeps a backup of your config files in /etc/config-archive. Optionally it can use rcs to track changes.
Yes, it is a non sequitur, in that it doesn't follow from the given premises. All that does follow is that one can't determine whether she's a good writer just because she's popular.
If it had to do with emails, then this wouldn't just apply to rich people, it would apply to everyone with an email account. Have you never seen spam?
Allows links, doesn't have nofollow or CAPTCHAs in place. Anyone wanna take bets on how long before it turns into a giant cesspool of spam?
I've always felt that they behave like VCs i.e. want a lot of control (hence the 50%) but only want to invest money like an angel. The weird thing is that given the amount of money they invest and the number of deals they do, they possibly can't have the time to run any of those early stage companies.

I've never seen a startup accept funding from them, its either an inventor who gets access to a particular store or a mom & pop shop.
From their homepage:

"Using Web 2.0 technologies such as Google Maps, AJAX, RSS and tagging, you'll find the perfect job based on where YOU live."

This hurts me.
Oh, give it a rest. At least Aaron's still creating value even though he's already rich. He could just sit by the pool all day.
I've been enjoying RoR + MySQL, but I haven't launched a project that has any widespread audience yet.
The statement (or at least the fixed one) does follow from the given premise. Just because you disagree with the premise (that popularity might be evidence of quality) doesn't make it non sequitur.

To save myself from repeating the same argument as the few threads above this, I'll just link to it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54920
I'm sure they'll make links nofollow. It's not hard.
Of those choices? Rails, hands down, but don't limit yourself. There are a lot of options out there. I find it interesting that you're comparing Ruby/Rails and PHP - they don't have much in common. It's also noteworthy that Ruby works pretty well without Rails. RHTML works a lot like PHP, but with Ruby as the language.

What, exactly are you trying to do with it?
ColdFusion? Why?
"To suggest that anyone -not- read them (for the sake of brevity, no less) is to suggest a reader not experience great, life-changing literature."

Brevity is one of the virtues of great literature. You'll probably learn that as you grow older and time becomes more valuable to you. Certainly, great literature can be long (Middlesex is perhaps the best novel of the past 20 years, and it weighs in at a pretty hefty 556 pages...this is still significantly shorter than Atlas), but Atlas Shrugged, as art, suffers under the weight of the philosophical treatise that it's carrying around on its back (much like the mythic Atlas, and yes, I believe he should shrug off all that extra weight).

The Fountainhead is somewhat less marred by needless words, but only Anthem is actually free of cruft, in my opinion.

"Her objectivist philosophy may be a bit overt in the latter, but never for a second could I sleep well knowing I'd proposed that others -skip- these books."

People who like what they find in the shorter Rand books will go on to read the others. People who get stuck in the mud of Galt's speech will never pickup another Rand book. That speech is simply terrible literature. It might be good philosophy, but it's not good art.
Think about it this way: how much would you respect an artist that had no personal vision or personal style in his work, but just did whatever his clients wanted so that there was no consistent character at all in his art? Can you name any respected artist that works this way? My guess is no.

The point here is that for an artist to make authentic art, the work has to be a reflection of that artist's core values regardless of what they are. It is that core that gives consistency to an artists work, and it is being true to that core that is necessary (but not sufficient) to make meaningful art.

Rand's point was not at all that Roark would "force" his work on his clients for whom Roark could care less, but rather that the client had to choose Roark because Roark's work resonated with the values of the client in the same way that someone who buys art is hopefully doing so because that art resonates with their values.

The point Rand was making was that culturally the kind of art Roark was producing, in the beginning of the book, is not popular and that only a few desired it. By the end of the book, Roark had found success in finding a growing body of clients who wanted his style of design. He had found his niche and had remained true to his core values as an artist - integrity being the primary one.
Right. You know, finally I did what one of us should have done some 8 or 9 messages back - I went and checked what you actually wrote:

> the popularity of her books suggests otherwise [my emphasis]

In other words, you weren't actually making the claim I thought you were - that popularity implies quality. So I'm sorry for missing your point originally.

I do disagree that popularity is evidence of quality; popularity is only evidence of broad appeal, and you'd still need to demonstrate a correlation between broad appeal and quality - I contend that no correlation exists. But that's a reasonable debate, not a logical fallacy.

But I have to ask - why didn't you tell me that I was refuting an argument you hadn't made...?
Wow, we're definitely on opposite sides of this one. Atlas Shrugged is on my list of life-changing books. I've long since moved on from objectivism (I'm now a Rothbardian), but it was Rand who first got me thinking coherently about property and social obligation. OTOH, I found Cather in the Rye pretty shallow, and Slaughter Five just seemed like dada. Vonnegut did some great work (Harrison Bergeron comes to mind), but that book is not among it.
Hmm. It looks as though someone's systematically downed every comment of mine they could get to in this thread. If so, that someone should be ashamed of themselves.
What is it with these fuzzy entrepreneurial articles, and how do they get 15 votes? An article's appearance on foundread.com must kill off the 'critical thinking 101' brain cells or something...

1) The author's examples aren't terribly convincing, especially when they're trying to support an argument followed by the ever-definitive 'Always.'

2) In 3 out of 3 examples, his gut totally rocked. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a more statistically significant sample. I wonder if it helped him out as effectively in multiple choice exams.

2) The author is an 'Internet Marketing Manager'. That's a respectable job, I'm sure, but his advice would probably carry more authority if his gut started a really successful company.
>I guess you need a person in the know to set up Ubuntu properly for you, but that's it.

This is true of Windows as well. Even assuming the manufacturer has everything working out of the box, it's unlikely that it has virus and spyware protection included that won't demand money within a couple months, automatic defragmentation, etc....
Depends on what you mean by webservice - SOAP or REST.
Rails works great for REST, but not for SOAP.
For DB interaction, I really like ActiveRecord. Don't think that PHP can offer any serious ORM alternative.
As for scaling, well, Rails has just a few real world test cases, whereas PHP has many.
Because it is probably the easiest site to test out that I've encountered. I've never demoed a site and had it be so easy to get up and running. It should be a model in user interface.

The reason it's interesting here is that it was partially made by a well known y-combinator person (who also worked on reddit).
Is Ayn saying that the individual is more important than the collective, or that the best route to collective improvement is through selfishness? I suspect it's the latter, but Ayn and her followers frame the debate so combatively that it's hard to be sure. I see this confusion rearing its head throughout this page.

(I read the first 100 pages of Atlas Shrugged, and got sick of it. I thought it was uninteresting as a novel and inefficient and not rigorous as a treatise. This part of the novel seemed to intentionally perpetuate my confusion: the conflict, as I recall, was between truly selfish people and collectivists that were too incompetent to see when the selfish people were doing collective good. Why conflate incompetence and collectivism?)
Dangit, Aaron beat me to the punch with the idea of creating a globally-modifiable page and then later creating an account to claim ownership. The demo I'm working on right now works the same way. I'm still one-uping him, though -- just a button on the front page, no text box.
Grilled chicken + bacon calzones, loud music, and Propel. Gotta stay hydrated.
In the first place it shows how user registration should look like.
I'm not being clear. What does this site actually do? All I saw it do was echo the text I entered back at me, and store it the equivalent of a tinyurl.
You mean, like Mediawiki?
TwitterNotes - Take notes anywhere using Twitter
"Wow, we're definitely on opposite sides of this one."

Not sure where you got that. All of my posts on this topic should make clear that I'm a very big Rand fan, and have read all of her books (really, all of them). I would never call myself a SOME-PERSONS-NAMEian of any sort, so perhaps that's the difference. I do sometimes refer to myself as an anarcho-capitalist, so, philosophically, your Rothbardian views and mine probably coincide more than they differ. ;-)

I actually did enjoy Atlas Shrugged. But the speech is too much, the book too long (by about half), and the characters are weak (for such a long book). When I first started reading Rand, I wanted to share her books with everybody. So I recommended Atlas, her opus, to everybody I knew. None of them made it through the book. All got bogged down in the speech, and either gave up, or skimmed the rest of it. Even people who were reasonably heavy readers (though mostly pulp) still couldn't stomach the whole thing. I started recommending Anthem after that, and everybody made it through...everybody enjoyed it...and some went on to read other Rand books (I recommend The Fountainhead next).

I still believe that intelligent people can get everything they really need to know about Rand's philosophy from Anthem. And, of course, dumb folks can actually read Anthem, understand it, and enjoy it.

But, you're definitely weird to think "Catcher in the Rye" is shallow. Perhaps you like a lot of words in your stories. I don't. Word of advice: Stay away from Hemingway, you won't like it.
It seems like a relaunch of Infogami.com, but with a really clever entry point. Infogami had a couple of cool ideas, like "we'll release one new feature every day" and optional commercials (support us if you want). I liked Infogami, but I stopped using it when Aaron stopped doing any development on it.
"The architect who wouldn't design what people like (because it wasn't rational, as I recall) seemed like a really annoying person to deal with. And I certainly wouldn't want to invest in his startup :)"

This one made me laugh a little. What did people want from gmail, Paul? Folders, right? Lots of good folder-related features. Did you give it to them? Nope. You made search work right, threaded the conversations, and to hell with what people wanted. You gave'em what they didn't know they wanted (but what was right). And you were right to do so.

Sure, now you have labels, which are just like folders only not called folders, but I'm pretty sure you weren't around for that (or at least you didn't push for labels if you were around for it).
It's very easy, but doing so degrades the value of the site for honest users.
I guess I never really understood Infogami either. What's the market opportunity for Wikipedia without any of the content, controls, or attention? If it's a blogging tool, why is it better than Typepad, Blogger, or Wordpress? I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'd just really like someone to give me their take on why this is a good business idea, and how it could possibly be defensible.

The "feature-a-day" thing was a clever marketing idea; it did keep me coming back. But where was it going? Where is this going?
Yes, I didn't mean to imply that there was a conscious decision -- everyone is limited by what is familiar, including designers and inventors. The point is that retaining familiar elements doesn't doom us to stagnation. Incremental improvements are usually sufficient and more successful.
Really? I'm doing the same thing, except it's just a button. When you click the button, a page comes up and says, "You have clicked the button. To click the button again, click the button" When you click the button again, it says, "You have clicked the button again. To click the button again, click the button again."

I'm trying to get it down to the absolute minimum of annoying configuration and deployment options. I don't think I'll ever match the masters though:

http://www.zombo.com/
I'll pass on her. If she were really any good, she'd have gotten her hands on the volume 4 fasicles by now too.
You have way too much text on your front page. It should just say, "Button clicked. Click again to click again." Better yet, why not just click it for them automatically? If they intended to do something else they'd have already gone to another page.
Dan Brown.
One of the lessons of the net so far is that there's always opportunity in making web authoring & self-expression easier: HTML, FrontPage, Geocities, blogs, wikis, friend-linked profile pages. Jottit looks like another point on that curve.
That's a false dichotomy. Vision is important, but that vision needs to include a path connecting the vision to the present, and that includes making things sufficiently familiar.

For pure art it may not matter (though I suspect that wealthy artists have adapted to market demands, but won't admit it), but for functional products it matters a lot.

This is sort of an amusing debate, because usually I'm the one pushing to make things more different and unconventional. However, to make changes really take root, you often have to "boil the frog".
easy to test because it doesn't do much...
It can password protect it, and you can link things from page to page. Some of the best sites don't do anything "impressive", really...
No doubt "stupid and irrational" takes it to a logical extreme. But on some level we have to believe that we know better, don't we? And I'd argue the grander the vision, the greater the stubbornness necessary. What I love about the web is the empiricism involved for the low price of testing what works and what doesn't. Perhaps the conservative nature of car companies owes itself to their expensive design process?
Yes, I'm not suggesting that you have to deliver exactly what people ask for, but you shouldn't completely ignore it either. I'm basically saying that both extremes are wrong. You need to be both arrogant and humble at the same time. I know what's best, but I might be wrong. :)

Gmail definitely contains some compromises, and I'm ok with that. I'd rather have a good product with millions of users than a "perfect" product with zero users (not that perfection is possible anyway).
In any case, competition - and therefore the market - is necessarily a collective endeavour. You can't come second in a race with only one participant (well, except for some snobbish cake competitions in tiny English parishes).
"Yes, I'm not suggesting that you have to deliver exactly what people ask for, but you shouldn't completely ignore it either. I'm basically saying that both extremes are wrong. You need to be both arrogant and humble at the same time. I know what's best, but I might be wrong. :)"

I agree, and I know you're not as arrogant as a Rand hero. Your post just made me laugh. ;-)

But I'm glad you clarified, because the "I know what's best" sentence could very well be the best thing ever said on News.YC.
Have you tried jottit? I can't imagine anything simpler than that, I mean the registration process. Although the idea itself is probably not new.
200k for 50%? That's crazy.

The professor was right on so many levels. That 200K wouldn't last three to four months. Rent, salaries, hardware, etc.

That said, the professor was slightly insulting, but I don't think his position was wrong at all.
If the site grows big enough, some significant part of spam would be easy to filter out statistically.
I'm missing the comment functionality here though. Jottit may become a perfect semi-blogging platform once they add commenting. "Semi" is because articles won't be linked to the date of publishing - something that always annoyed me on all other blogging platforms.
Then why you think he is in the list of "crazy" mathematicians, at least according to the authors? (It may be because of the suicide though, which is considered pathology even now.)
I too am struggling with the value of this site. However, I think the minimalist design is very compelling.
It just keeps saying "welcome to zombo.com"
You're comparing a framework to a language.

Rails vs Django vs Cake vs CodeIgniter vs ....

As someone who just went through this selection process for a large scale production site...

Rails. Rapid development, deployment. Serious effort to scale. Needs a lot of metal. Database heavy applications require a lot of tooling/optimizing, to the point that Rail's features for autogen become defeatist at a certain point.

Django. Rapid development, awesome performance, stuck with the Django way or the highway. Once you get deep into development, the benefit of the rapid development can become a hindrance. See notes above about Rails.

PHP w/ MVC Framework. Rapid development, frameworks not designed for scale, most frameworks designed for a language other than PHP (most seem to think they're being written for Java). Easiest to scale out of the three I've mentioned, not hard to make the framework bend to your needs.

.NET, if you want to pay licensing fees that could sink your business if you don't have the budget.

That said, we chose PHP with PostgreSQL. We rolled our own framework taking design cues from Rails, ASP.NET and Django. Foremost built for scale, ease of development second priority. We run weekly performance comparison with other PHP frameworks, and are able to beat them all by 50% or better; but that's because of a design choice for the framework. We chose performance over ease. I'd much rather spend the upfront effort to sleep well at night once launched. Heavy use of memcache, strict rules regarding use of session, cache at every level (database calls, html fragments, models). Custom templating for views that incorporates reuse and encapulation principles via ASP.NET/JSP style tag libraries/controls.

That said, PHP sucks. Horrible hackish language. But it's easy and sleazy, scales easily. Scaling the database is a separate issue. MySQL possibly better for this, but PostgreSQL is a better RDBMS on many levels. Most frameworks for PHP suck because most of the people designing them aren't disciplined in other languages and make horrible assumptions about best practices.

Flame away.
I have dreams like this sometimes, but I cannot do anything that's not possible in the real world. I can try, but my brain always corrects the universe in the next second. For example, I cannot balance a pencil on its point; it will always fall over.
Neither did the first iPod.

Edit: Okay, okay, sheesh, I'm not insulting it. I meant that it had one feature, which was to play music. It did exactly what it needed to do and no more. That's all I'm saying.
You mean besides fitting ten CD cases worth of music into something that fit in your pocket? What a silly argument.
Web Site Search - Goodbye Google Mini! Hello Google Custom Search
We're talking focus. The iPod wasn't especially innovative, but it was extremely focused on exactly one thing: playing music. And that focus was executed perfectly.

Having an extremely narrow focus isn't a bad thing, so to use the statement "it doesn't do much" to suggest that Jottit a bad product seems weak.