skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I need people to test a new app that I have created: 'History!'.
History! is a personal web history manager. It allows you to save, bookmark and tag the page that you are currently reading and gives you the ability to locate the page at later stage.
Requirements: Firefox (with JS enabled), Web Server running MySQL and PHP.
A Firefox toolbar is created during installation and that is when the fun starts.
You can view a demo here: http://www.trk7.com/install/xxx.php?sstring=what+makes+a+sen...

I think it is much more flexible and powerful than other web history managers and the best thing is that all data gets stored in your server (absolute PRIVACY)!

I have tested the app in Firefox (2&3) in Mac and I am pretty sure it will work fine in Win Environment.So please check it out.
Dogfight (Stunt Pilot With Guns!)
Hi Guys,

The highest voted suggestion on the Stunt Pilot thread was guns... so here it is! I'd love some feedback - it was very helpful last time.

Enjoy!
In what way do choices become limited? Financial security becomes more important, and less time is available? But are these really too impeding factors?
Bill Gates Looks Ahead at "Next Digital Decade"
Telrad adds CPEs to Commatch as part of its offering for Voice over WiMAX
Survey questions like this one are not effective, monitor the usage & behavior of your users, which features are they using , which are they ignoring.

Compare the usage of users which are happy with your product (defined as continue using your software for a long time) with users that dump your product after a few hours of playing with it. What features are the happy users using? What are the unhappy ones missing?

Data mine everything, knowing your users behavior is power.

Customize user experience based on those stats.
Any thought on adding screenshots of pages I've recently saved. If often find I can recognize pages quickly that way.
I am thinking about it. I have used websnapr before to get screenshots of webpages but, the quality of the images is not great. Anyone else aware of a solution that is free and better than websnapr?
Film in combination with eyes creates an almost fractal viewing experience. You can look closely at portions of the screen and see greater detail. With an iphone, you get that meager resolution and that's it. I find myself pulling the thing ever closer until it may as well be a panorama but frustratingly, never seeing any more detail. The opposite actually, if I view it from anything but arms length, I become painfully aware of its deficiencies.

The rant was right on the money and funny as well.
Violin duel draw between Stradivarius, new violin
Pod casts i like:
CNET - Buzz out loud - Keeps me up to date with tech news
TWiT - This week in Tech (Leo Laporte)
Security Now (Also from TWiT) - Excellent Security podcast. very educational
BBC Documentry archive - Excellent documentries
Learn French By Podcast
hmm, good point, i really need to see one in the plastic
MapReducing 20 petabytes per day
How do you shoot the guns on a mac? Ctrl didn't work for me.
Generally speaking, the longer you wait to have children the more difficult it is :-)
There probably is age discrimination against people over 40.

But, I also feel like there is age discrimination against people in their 20s. Most companies won't take a flyer on you if you don't have X years of professional experience, and its impossible to have that X number when you are in your early 20s.

And 10 years of experience people get paid twice as much as 3 yrs of experience people regardless of talent.

I wish there was a way to create a standardized hacker test.
Welcome to the (Wicked) World, Wikia
actually, I did find a few interesting solutions and I have implemented it. Check the site now: http://www.trk7.com/install/xxx.php?sstring=what+makes+a+sen...
So disappointing that the ISO number doesn't have 734 on it..
I've used Vista two or three times. Each time, it feels like my first computer experience because it's so hard to get anything done efficiently. The "enhanced user design" just gets in the way. It seems that MS just worked on happy-to-glad UI issues.
Google Android SDK and Platform - review and analysis
Wikia Search Goes Live - It's Not Ready Yet
I can only support this.
I am 43 now (european). Of course also here nobody will tell you why they did not employ you, but one thing is obvious: with 30 I wrote 2-3 applications and usually had the choice between 2-3 jobs. Nowadays I don't even get replies anymore.

One problem that I see is the relative age compared to the future collegues. With >40 you usually know a hell of a lot more than mid 20s. Unfortunately this includes the managers who are often also <30.

The best idea is indeed Tichys: gather experience, knowledge and money as long as you can and then do a startup later. This does not necessarily exclude family. At 25 we may not need so much cash but with a family in the background there should be at least one (hopefully secure) income in the background.
Is Time Running Out For CNET And Its 2,600 Employees?
True: compiling is obfuscation, not encryption but, the same argument applies to Java, VB, etc. Even compiled C++ can be disassembled. Anyway, web2py inlines some stuff before bytecode compiling so if you decompile a compiled web2py app you do not get a valid web2py app (because there is no one to one match between modules) unless you tweak it. In most of the cases it is not worth the task.
If we want python to take over java, we need to speak "their" language. Seriously, why don't you give it a try and tell me your impression? It takes 10 minutes.
News.YC Faster
Flaws in Wikia linking keywords to prolifes.
I don't know how they link up profiles with keywords, but playing around with porn, STDs and other searches always brings up people's profiles.

Do they have a privacy problem?
Thanks for that write up. I'm waiting for my XO to arrive (should be within a week or so), and I'm going to be handing it to my 4 year old daughter to see how she gets along with it. She'd very much like a computer of her own and I'm hoping that she'll be able to figure out Draw and TamTam and Memorize.

Anyone else here got experience with XO and a small child?
Simonyi and Gates donate $30 million for new "movie camera" telescope
Forget the meteorites - it was insects that did in the dinosaurs
@seren6ipity: Yes, you can now have a phone number that protects your privacy.

@soundsop: Yes, it is a subscription, but you can cancel anytime, and it's still pretty cheap. One phone number + 200 minutes a month for $8. And when you are done with it, you can cancel the subscription, no commitment.

@inovica: We do have a pool of numbers, but it is large. And to prevent reuse of a number that gets a lot of unwanted calls, we disconnect numbers for up to 25 days to cause traffic to subside, and if it doesn't, we don't reuse it.
No, no one signs anything. The startup world is small enough that gentlemen's agreements work for most things.
First views of the palace of Augustus
Building a .com in 24 hours
I wish I could upvote that four times.
Separating the Linkbait Wheat from the Chaff
"You can't spare a square?"
Coding Horror: The Magpie Developer
My gripe with the legal and medical professions is that I think they use licensing, ostensibly meant to protect the public, to create cartels and up the cost of their services.

I attended a single semester of law school before dropping out and getting an MS in Engineering, and believe me, it wasn't because law is "too hard". I'm convinced that you can get through a top law school while sitting on your thumb, dude. There's nothing in there that a reasonably bright and literate high school student can't handle. I'm not saying it's easy - a reasonably bright high school student is a pretty well educated person. But it's not in the same leage as grad programs in hard science, math, or engineering. I think the main reason for the 3-year grad degree is to keep smart people who could figure this out more quickly and offer services for less money out of the field. To make it worse, lawyers lobby heavily for regulations that tend to increase their billable hours. Restrict supply, increase demand, largely through government manipulation. I just couldn't be a part of it.

Medicine is a bit less objectionable, but I do believe that the Nurse Practitioner field has shown that a very high quality of independent care provider in less time. Nurse practitioners have to do quite a bit of grad school and apprenticing, so it's still a degree-intensive field. But physicians have definitely tried to use licensing to limit the competition they feel from NPs.

This is why I like, and admire, the software field. It's totally open and free. If my clients want to open up a book and try to learn it themselves, they are free to do so. If they want to hire someone right out of high school, they are free to do so. If they want only a PhD out of Stanford, that's fine too, as long as they're willing to pay. It's a genuinely open and free market - and while that means there are a lot of truly crap programmers, it also means that a brilliant person who is ready to contribute doesn't have to deal with a cartel that wants to keep him or her out.
Programming for the Masses- Social Computing
Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter
Plus you wouldn't need such a large power pack.
Wiki Citizens Taking on a New Area: Searching
To See the Future of the Recording Industry, Look to Pac-Man
Oh my. You're not half bad at this. I am sorry I missed it. Now I feel really embarassed :\

There are two links, not implemented in the demo, that export either a .csv file or an Excel spreadsheet containing data on all transactions in a single account, for the last 1.5 months. Four columns: date, explanation, in, out.

Here is an image to help: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2175536082&size=...

Sadly, the account selector doesn't seem to be implemented in the demo. The links to export are

csv: https://nettbank.edb.com/payment/transigo/transactions_export?debtaccount=MY-ACCOUNT-NUMBER

xls: https://nettbank.edb.com/payment/transigo/transactions_export?type=excel&debtaccount=MY-ACCOUNT-NUMBER

...MY-ACCOUNT-NUMBER being replaced by eg. 1234.56.78901.

Does this help? I still think it's a bit of a cludge to have to implement this manually for every bank, but maybe you will think of a better way...
Mozilla Secretly Launches A Viral Campaign For Firefox
Gates bids adieu to CES, sense of humor intact
Your Company Is Who It Hires
I use a phrase that attempts to highlight the importance of hiring decisions in a company: You are what you eat and your company is who it hires. This observation has important implications for your company's internal operations and appearance.

Simply put, excellent companies are very often comprised of...
Fake Facebook widget infects 3% of users with malware
Very nice article, but what is this?

> Running things in the background X dubbed backgrounding X is
> an important part of production ready web applications. It's
> a relatively new concept, since web applications used to be
> less complex.

That made me smile.
I loved the parenthetical note by TextMate "...use the trial version and reset your clock!" Since you're building commercial software, the folks at TextMate might want to have a discussion with you, dude...
Andrew Chen: Does Facebook reflect your same friendships? How about e-mail?
Awesome.

When you have time, here's my wishlist:

1 Change password functionality

2 Make the "Y" logo at the top go to the hacker news index (I always accidentally click it and go to ycombinator.com)

3 Make the foot that is on the index page with links to Y Combinator, feature requests, etc, be standard on all pages.

Thanks!
Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly
Nice. What are you using for screen shots?
"...24 concentrated hours spread out over 4 days..."

Oh.

Reminded me of the old Steven Wright joke when he went to the Quickie Mart and it was closed.

He said, "But the sign says 'Open 24 Hours'"

The owner replied, "Not in a row."
it was a joke holarit
I think I heard this guy interviewed on the Nature podcast last year, when his Nature paper came out (warning, PDF link):

http://www.nagyvaryviolins.com/Nagyvary_Nature_Page.pdf

He was great. His contention is that the key to the unique sound of the Strads and other great violins of that era is the treatment of the wood, which the makers did to preserve it better.

Apparently the heirs lost the recipe, replaced it with something else, then spent nearly 300 years lost and wandering in Violin Phase Space trying to figure out where they went wrong. Those of us who have worked in semiconductor manufacturing recognize this problem all too well. :)
http://www.artviper.com/tools.php
Ask YC: where to order cheap food (generic cereal etc..) online?
I looked at Amazon and Froogle, and most are more expensive than the grocery store. Amazon has free shipping for orders over $25 though. I want to eat cheap but fairly healthy - and I don't care about taste but no monkey chow please.
Excellent, fast-loading makes a huge difference in enjoyment of using a site for me.

Any chance of More links for user-comment pages?
I think he's confusing "programmer" with "developer".

"Elite developers ... blah blah blah..."

May I suggest...

"Elite developers are elite because they're far more concerned with delivering results than caring how it's delivered."
In the US I believe they're not allowed to ask your age in an interview (along with race, religion, IQ, sexual orientation, state of health (these last two I'm less sure of), some other things). Of course they'll know it eventually, and the number of years experience you claim on your resume would give it away, too.
Why in the world does CNET need 2600 employees? Talk about Payroll bloat.
My wishlist is pretty short: UTF-8 support. What's a y-combinator without &#955;s (lambdas)?

edit: ooh, it almost works! But the ampersand gets escaped.
"Almost always an initial vision or product idea is recast to fit an evolving market"
I thought that comment lent a lot of insight into the mind of the author.

On one hand, he's trying to make a buck. On the other, he figures it's okay to take advantage of someone else in the same situation.

I wonder if he even understands the contradiction of ethics?
I like the site. I just watched a few interviews and they were all above average. I'll definitely come back. But I have no idea how it will scale if they have to conduct every interview.
Ask YC: Monetizing your blogs?
Hey all, what do you guys use to monetize your blogs? I'm deciding between options. Is adsense effective? What other considerations do you make when choosing who to go with?
Seven Habits of Highly Successful Websites
Well done. This site is (for me) the best information source on the web for hacker/entrepreneur/startup info.
Agreed.

Maybe he's also confusing "elite" with "elitist"?
lol

gills, thanks for providing more data that a hacker can be a cunning linguist.
That was actually quite funny.

Good for you Willy...spending a billion+/year should be an enjoyable experience.
How 7 Mongrels Handled a 550k Pageview Digging
I'm thinking of de-monetizing mine, as it just doesn't make much money (adsense), and a cleaner look might be nice. To actually make money, you have to write a lot about writing on your blog, or have massive amounts of users, or write about something that a lot of people click on ads about. Meaning that tech-savvy people, who are the best at ignoring ads, are a terrible audience.
I'd love to know the answer to this one. I've always sucked at monetizing and I get 300k pviews/month. I've attempted joining the larger tech blog ad networks but they pretty much won't talk to you until you hit 1M pviews/month. I'm not one for ugly advertising like adsense - just a personal thing, so I've started running those 125x125 ad blocks and various sponsorship things. They're hard to sell but if you can find the right companies and get decent traffic you can do alright. I sold my last 125x125 for $800 for a month.
For most blogs, just don't bother. You can make more money from getting your message out there and from linking to your other work than by advertising other people's stuff.
Also the comment rules somewhere on the Add Comment page.

I always forget how to do this.
Free the algorithm: Wikia launches open-source search engine
Heh, you've got the Dilbert calendar on your desk too, don't ya?
Seth Godin pointed to a study from the AOL Global Advertising Strategy about who actually clicks on ads:

'Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit'

'Who are these "heavy clickers"? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.'

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/your-ads-are...

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/12/03/who_cli...
If the change occurred over the weekend, I noticed it - thanks! I'm mostly using a satellite connection these days and those extra milliseconds saved are nice!
Here's what's annoying about Mongrel, summed up:

> As the title of this article suggests, only 7 mongrels were required to sustain the level of traffic. (this number was already set to seven before the digging, and didn't have to be increased)

Having to pick arbitrary numbers beforehand is a bad way of scaling. Apache with fcgid launches new processes as they're needed. It may not scale due to other problems, but "pick a number and pray" strikes me as a dubious idea.
I am wondering why X mongrels are commonly used with Rails, is it just how mongrel is designed and dispatched that you need to establish X amount and it does not change with the load?

Being completely ignorant of mongrel, what is the benefit of having 7 mongrels running instead of 1? Does it not just do the job of dispatching the child processes to handle requests, so one would handle things just as effectively?
I suppose what I am asking is, with one box why would you have more than one dispatcher?
Not a single word about reddit, although this is a nice observation overall, of course.

Bad graphical design is about minimalism rather than ugliness, I think. Although yes, some logos are hideous, childish, so unprofessional (del.icio.us, reddit, google, etc.)

Liked the web standards part a lot. Somehow it reminds the situation with programming languages - no good software is written in Java - another committee-driven cra... sorry, product.

However, these 7 habits are not sufficient, not even necessary conditions for success. This is just an observation, and I'm almost sure things will change tomorrow in this regard.
A little "help" link showed up next to the text submission box for a while, but it's missing now.
I'm surprised no one has asked yet: Why is it faster?
I love the taste of fresh produce. It rocks.

I hate the smug around organics. The fact is that it takes an order of magnitude more land to produce the same output.

Forget cars, TVs, and McMansions. China and the rest of the world couldn't hope to live the purported ideal without destroying a great deal of natural habitats.
For Most Programmers, Learning Haskell Will Be No Picnic... Unless They Read This Tutorial First
Left cntrl is only if you're doing a 2 player game. For one player, Space shoots.
I read a statistic from around 2002 that China consumed slightly more coal than the US, while polluting twice as much and generating half as much electricity.

You needn't be an environmentalist to be concerned with such numbers. You also don't have to be an optimist to expect this to get better.

More wealth will mean more efficiency and less pollution. More wealth dispersed throughout the population will mean greater demand by people to take action against already horrible air pollution, and other damage.

But the pattern is familiar, and we only point out China because of its size. Production will move to poorer countries, and they will outsource their pollution generation just as we have.
I didn't care for Stunt Pilot that much but I'm already afraid of getting addicted to DogFight! It's a blast, although I pity my poor pilot for all the loops and crashes I'm doing - it's probably better just to get shot down!

Great job!
Most people don't know that the obelisk in the move "2001" is actually a self-replicating exponential space probe. Kubrik edited out a short bit in the beginning explaining the theory behind it along with other discussion of alien life.

I saw a talk from Hod Lipson who mentioned that NASA estimated that the machinery needed to rebuild civilization could fit in a 100-ton cargo hold. That is pretty amazing. With the right resources, send one to Mars, let robots build some radiation shields, and get crackin.
On 2, I prefer it the way it is. If I want to go to the Hacker News index, I can click on "Hacker News", which is, after all, right there beside the YC logo.
It's noticeably faster - a lot more noticeably than 25 ms would suggest.
Why would you ever want to go to ycombinator.com from hacker news?

Maybe on strange cases you would, but it's poor UI form to have the logo link to a different site.
one mongrel handles one request. if you request takes one second to complete. you get one request/sec. 7 mongrels => 7 req/sec.

100req/sec * 7 mongrels => 700 req/sec total. and other simple math.

they aren't spawned automatically. you setup a number and distribute to them. there are ways of getting them to spawn automatically, but it isn't inherent to mongrel itself.
That dang anti-aircraft gun is going to get me fired from my day job!
When you go to edit your "profile" thing, the help link shows up there. Should be standard and next to every text box, though.
Paul, when you write your great reviews why not use affiliate links to the products? Seems like an non-intrusive way to monetize your content.
Valuation snowball
looks like facebook has shut this app down:

http://www.marketingshift.com/2008/1/facebook-bans-adware-fr...
Oh, I see, thanks.
So I now ask, why have not spawn them automatically?
Yeah, I should have indicated that I was excluding search from this. The original article was more about "display" / contextual ads, be they text or images, on content/community sites.
In his defense, he wrote this in response to a comment similar to yours:

"Actually, I am paying for TextMate, I guess I wanted to make a comment about trying to do things cheaply - bad joke. If one piece of software is worth buying it, it's TextMate!"

He also just deleted the part about resetting your clock from the post. Sounds like he was just trying to spice things up a little.
That's a really good question, eh? :)

It seems to me the webserver would then need to support that (dynamic allocation of additional target mongrels).

The way it works currently is you put Apache2 / Lighty / nginx / etc in front, working as a proxy, which has a list of host/port pairs which it forwards on the request to.

The proxying end of things would have to be smart enough to tell mongrel to startup more processes, and begin forwarding more requests to those.
Napster to Offer DRM-free Downloads
It's very beautiful. I wonder how far they intend to restore it? I would pay quite a bit to see it as it is now, let alone further restored.
I just went on a cross country road trip with my brother. We listened to a good chunk of Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". It's astounding.

Give it as a gift to anyone who thinks today's political and social class is at all historically unique.
Very Funny 404 page. (image)