skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I thought the comparison was between paper books vs ebooks, not ebooks vs the web.

That's the thing, though -- it's as if we're pretending that the Web and eBooks are as different as radio and TV, when in reality, they're about as different as FM and AM radio. I think that one of them offers enough marginal benefit to trounce the other -- and in the case of the Kindle, the ''other'' is more expensive while offering less!

I don't see a divide between the Web and eBooks. I see a divide between digital content and print content. And I think that, just like the Web is reducing the market for newspapers, it's going to reduce the market for print books. It won't eliminate it. But god knows any eBook has all the drawbacks of the web (the transient nature of its contents) and few if any advantages beyond the low power draw and sharp screen. The former can be made irrelevant by better batteries; the latter is being made irrelevant by better screens. So what's the advantage of Kindle?

It's quite mad. Mark Pilgrim does a great job of documenting the misfeatures in his 'Future of Reading' bit.
Libertarians/objectivists/whatever don't typically fit the hollywood stereotype.
Pretty awesome, and by awesome I mean totally sweet.
Facebook has 50 million active users, is the 7th largest website online according to Alexa, and is growing rapidly.

Many of these startups failed to even launch, and the ones that did never got traction or had completely unsustainable business models.
bazaar is great. so is git. i like them both.
Can I work for anybots?
Greenback's Woes Can Be Good for Founders
The article below includes a script to test yourself.

http://www.venturecake.com/web-20-is-built-on-open-source/
There's a re plenty of companies using Fortran too. The poster asked specifically about startups.
It is used widely by Apple -- iTunes uses it as well, as does .Mac. It has a few users outside Apple, but as far as I know the number is incredibly small.

I'm curious if anyone even thinks about it anymore, its been off the radar screen for a while I think. It is, however, very powerful.
How was evolution able to get "100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses" functioning properly if it would take an intelligent person 3 billion years (according to this article) just to make a map of it? We're not even trying to build the city, just make a basic map of it.

This article seems a little bunk that we can't map and fully understand our own brains much faster. Evolution is effectively an unintelligent process, so how can it take us several billion years to understand what a blind and unintelligent process has given us?
Impressive but I dislike the title because it tries make other looks bad. Please don't be like the Rails cult.
There are some folks working on the code and we'll be testing it on an Amazon EC2 cluster. Once there's stuff to share, I'll share it.
ActiveRecord and Flexible....
eh,

whats rms
Can a Mac user clarify what that is a screenshot of? Most people seem to be a capture of CPU instead of memory use (in which case the author clearly has no idea what he is talking about).
You a big fan of herbal teas? (Just kidding!)

Inside joke. RMS is another poster on the board.
But Richard Stallman has a katana. Or is he a Ninja Pirate?
darcs, it's distributed, doesn't require a server setup, lets me work without a network connection, and the cli is extremely user-friendly.

instead of committing files, darcs record lets me pick and choose what changes to include as part of a patch, resulting in cleaner patches which actually encompass a logical change to the code.

i've also heard many good things about git
What about Gnash or Swfdec? A free Flash player seems to be high enough enough priority that one will have feature parity with Adobe "soon".
Excellent, please do.
There really is a sucker born every minute. You people really buy this schtick?
Some time ago I tried to start a mailing list* with colleagues from the university, but after 9 messages on June the list died.

Maybe now it can reborn from its ashes!

The list is available at http://groups.google.com/group/eucaliptus and eucaliptus@googlegroups.com and no, it is not a misspell but Eucalyptus in Catalan. (Note: someday to be migrated to eucaliptus.org)

So, feel free to subscribe and lets see if it gains enough momentum.
my proposal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82245
Ask YC:  Why not prevent suicides by automatically spying on people's emails?
One can create AIish algorithms to see how depressed someone is likely to be by analyzing their emails. Something like that could be done with gmail for example.

If some depression threshold is passed, mental health authorities would be contacted automatically and immediately. Surely the lives saved would be worth any loss of privacy?
You sound surprised. Death and aging are engineering problems. This is a site filled with people who believe engineering problems can be solved. What Aubrey brings to the table is reminding us of this and daring to attempt it. Fixes are possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

It's amazing what a difference believing something is possible makes
Does anyone know of ANY other users of WebObjects? I can't seem to find any, anywhere.
have you checked out http://www.flexiscale.com/

Its like s3 and ec2 combined and they have an sla.

Its fairly easy to get it up and running and they have load balancing out features too.
A bit of clarification: Buffett is very big on only going after investments that are within your "circle of competence"--the domain of businesses you understand well. He's saying that while there's plenty of money for investors to make in technology, he avoids it because he doesn't understand the sector.
Y-Silo?
fair point. Wait until MVC for asp.net it looks pretty cool.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/14/asp-net-mv...
svn here too; plenty of nice clients and trac integration.
heh, this is kind of a bad idea for a lot of reasons.

but rest assured, the nsa already monitors all domestic internet traffic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects has a list of sites using it. not sure how up to date it is but there is nothing special there.
Why not have televisions that watch back and make sure we're not making bombs? Why not have random searches and seizures if there's a chance we could save a life? Why not put GPS tracking into every car, every person, so we could find out where they are if they go missing?

Slippery slopes.

And don't call me Shirley.
there are a variety of open source bittorrent trackers out there that are easy to set up an administer.

it's similar to many other sites, easy to set up, hard to get people to use it.

the software is the easy part, the community is not.
i used to use svn at work, and lately i tried git for my own needs.

git seems a lot better but i did not try it extensively.
Apparently the open-source bittorrent trackers scale horribly. Oink used a custom bitorrent tracker, and waffles.fm and what.cd had bumpy starts because the free trackers they were using couldn't handle the traffic.
Must be HP then?
its like, as opposed to pmpo, the real thing
If you believe curing aging is as simple as he says, and that there's even a chance of it happening this century, you are a sucker.

> Death and aging are engineering problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer's_Syndrome

The tendency to see solvable technical problems where there aren't necessarily any. Exemplified by those financially successful technical people who purchase sports franchises and then always manage them into the ground, having approached the enterprise as an engineering problem. Also evidenced by the horrendous record of technocratic governments and affiliated political philosophies formed by technical people.
Anyone else get excited the first time they saw a post from someone called 'rms' on a site based around hacking?
I built my entire startup on .NET because I think the feature set is richer, Visual Studio is a great tool, and speed of development is faster. I've done extensive work in PHP and Java in the past and both were much harder to work with IMHO. I also have backend applicatiosn and mobile devices that run versions of the framework, so the entire solution lent itself very well to .NET. I happily paid windows server and SQL server 2005 licenses as well; money well spent.

Feel free to crucify me now, but remember that customers don't care what you made it in -- just that it works and brings value to them.
I would also hire a team of ninjas to protect you!
Move to Canada, and steal wireless from another igloo so you cannot be tracked. However, a serious drawback is that it will be dark 24 hours a day soon, and fishing is tough until the ice breaks in the spring.
Amichail you have missed your calling -- you shouldda been a hacker version of Jerry Springer. "Live! This afternoon! Gay Midget Nun LISP programmers and the System Administrators they love"

Here's a better follow-up question: if Google currently analyzes emails to determine what advertisements to place, and it can be shown that similar email processing could prevent suicides, is Google liable for not either providing the service or notifying people that the service is not included?
Future of Hollywood: Owner-Entrepreneurs
The Linux kernel is fairly important and the kernel developers trust a "bleeding edge" VCS.

SVN is great for an individual or simple project, but sharing patches between branches is a nightmare.
utter fanboy rubbish come on guys.
And what if by analyzing your email Google aided in your suicide by bringing up advertisements that lead you to what you used to commit suicide with. Google might bring up an advertisement "Search eBay for 'commit suicide' now!" or "Find books on amazon on "commit suicide"!"
> Why not put GPS tracking into every car

This is already here... GM offers use of it's OnStar system to law enforcement so they can hear what you are saying while in your car, OnStar also has GPS tracking.

> every person

Your cellular phone already does, even when it is turned off.
David Bolinsky: Fantastic voyage inside a cell (for the impatient, start watching at 6:33)
It could be worse. It could be Microsoft, and that little animated paperclip pops out. "Hey! Looks like someone is wanting to commit suicide today! Have you written your suicide note yet? Studies show that suicide notes written using AllIsLost letter creating software are 22% more poignant! Thought about creating an online will? How about some overseas prescriptions at really low prices? Did you know that the nearest gun store is 7 miles NE of your location. Like directions? There's a Taco Bell on your way in case you're hungry. I'll just keep chatting down here until you finally off yourself."
all three of those us the same base - torrentbits. torrentbits is an awful tracker. you ever wonder why oink spent like $30k/mo in server fees.

why do you want to use bittorrent to distribute files?
The main difference in effort between a Scala/lift and Erlang/ErlyWeb implementation is that making the Erlang app distributed and linearly scalable doesn't require any coding. Just store the process IDs in Mnesia and when you add more nodes add those nodes to the Mnesia schema and you're done.

Not having to restart your Erlang server (and therefore lose your client connections) to do code updates is also pretty cool.
The article is very verbose. They only answer the 'how' question at the very end (burying the lead?). Apparently it's some kind of weighted work pool:

Tovey and Nakrani set to work translating the bee strategy for these idle Internet servers. They developed a virtual "dance floor" for a network of servers. When one server receives a user request for a certain Web site, an internal advertisement (standing in a little less colorfully for the dance) is placed on the dance floor to attract any available servers. The ad's duration depends on the demand on the site and how much revenue its users may generate. The longer an ad remains on the dance floor, the more power available servers devote to serving the Web site requests advertised.
The Venture Brothers

Mission Hill was great, too, but it ended.
I think that Mercurial is the official name. "Hg" is the chemical symbol for mercury.
I have a feeling that the person receiving the email will be a lot better than your AI is at knowing if the person is depressed or suicidal.
Pop Quiz: How Many of Y Combinator's Latest Start-Ups Got Funding from Boston VCs?
7 Lies That Prevent Your Great Idea from becoming a Real Business
But maybe he/she would not be willing to contact mental health professionals without your permission?
Yes. There's also nights after work.
Video Interview: Top Youtube creator Lisa Donovan of LisaNova on her story and web video
Pandora now includes Classical music
It would be called Hotmail?
What do you recommend for distributing files?
Comparison of Mercurial and Darcs
Would "liberal science" be a good major to create?
Most curricula in the technical fields are self-centered, but would a curriculum based on the overlap and interplay between the fields create a more adaptable, inventive graduate than the micro-focused majors of today?
I didn't make the first comment. I just showed up to say that you were completely wrong in your retort. I also don't know exactly what you're arguing about, so I'll just let you ramble in peace. :)
Why not? Have you read "1984"?
OiNK's tracker was rewritten in its entirety by one of the admins.

I seriously doubt they spent $30k/month on server fees (citation?), but it wouldn't surprise me if they spent a lot - do consider they needed to servers with an ISP that wouldn't shut them down, the sheer amount of requests (300,000+ users, each of their torrents announcing every 60 min, plus startup and shutdown).
Less likely. How is Justin.tv align with Amazon business? Kindle makes more sense, Justin.tv? far.. too far.. It's more like a personal investment from Jeff Bezos if he ever decided to.
Like industrial systems engineering? At least at my school that was considered the "easy" engineering major. I have a feeling that "liberal science" would tend to be even easier.

But if executed well I think it's a good idea.
I can give 5 good reasons

1) Eee PC

2) PS3

3) Lots of books...

4) Anything else that costs $400

And finally

5) A library card.
what's wrong with suicide? all of us die at some point. i'd rather die at a point of my own choosing. so suicide is the best death option (for me!), and since i'm going to die, it's best if i (eventually) commit suicide.
Now there's this problem of committing suicide "too early"...presumably the right cutoff point would be the point when life stops being worth living. which then raises the problem of knowing when that is (i.e. teenagers getting dumped and assuming, erroneously, that life is no longer worth living). thus, having a web app for calculating that point would be REALLY convenient (hint hint!)
Memory... what about CPU usage? It too is out of control.
If you are seeing CPU performance degrade with time it is (likely) a symptom of memory fragmentation. I have not seen any rendering benchmarks where gecko fairs significantly worse than the others.
Demonoid was taken down by Canadian version of RIAA so I doubt you'd find any safety in Canada.
"AIish" is my new favorite word. Let's apply this principle to some other words.

"I'm sorry that your father died, but we aren't really a hospital... we're hospitalish."

"I'm not a plumber, but I am plumberish."

"If I just came right out and said that strong AI is a joke, and that I wouldn't necessarily trust an AI to sort my socks, let alone recommend to government authorities that I be committed to a mental institution, it would not be subtle. But it might be subtleish."

Also, you do realize that your plan would permit anyone who can forge a FROM header to conduct a denial-of-service attack on your entire life, don't you?
One of the student groups I did web work for back in college used a less-than-legit copy of ASP.NET. IMHO, it works well enough. I had limited *nix experience when I first started coding and Visual Studio lets you do things like drag and drop components and various HTML elements into a pseduo-WYSIWYG environment. The Windows Server environment also made it easy for us to train our non-tech people to remote login and do simple things like restart the server, fix typos on the site, and even execute basic SQL queries.

That said, I'm using RoR now. Fast, easy to learn, and an active community.
One of my cofounders uses Hotmail for his personal mail. This isn't far from the truth.
I'm not getting my hopes up until its greenlit. Plan B is pitts development company, and Baldwin Entertainment Group are the ones with the rights. BEG has been consulting with luminaries from The Objectivist Center (NOT the Ayn Rand institute, which would be bad news for the movie) and they have been working for about a decade on a shorter script, with three-part miniseries versions that Turner was going to produce, and now a single moview version that will be reportedly 3 hours long. Though there has been some talk of doing it as two movies, or a trilogy like the Lord of the rings, I believe the script now is a single movie.

The book is, of course, quite long, but there is a lot of it that can be lost- many of the sub-plots about various businesses who shrugged and secondary and tertiary characters can be lost.

So long as they don't get Antonio Banderas for Francisco, I'm up for it.

I think Pitt would be a good John Galt because Galt is, ultimately, a minor character with little "screen time", though I think Pitt may want to play Rearden. I am confident that Jolie can do a great Dagny, if she's in the mood to.... but for both of them, Pitt and Jolie, they really want to have this movie made and I think they will make it even if their schedules don't work out for acting in it.
Good description. I am currently planning my startup, and that sounds a lot like my weekend.

Though sometimes it does seem that I need to get out and meet some people every now and then...
I think a more practical trade-off would be to do a double/triple major.
I'd make one myself, inspired by the TACOS at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. I think that if you clearly and plainly communicate a TOS contract to your users, that is probably good enough to establish your intentions, should a legal issue arise at a later time.

It's probably as good or better than an inaccessible bunch of boilerplate legalese copy-and-pasted at $300/hr., if only because the end user may actually read and understand it.
The estate tax is a better monetization plan.
This one (done internally by a group at Microsoft) is vastly superior: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4313772690011721857
Universities don't care about educating entrepreneurs. They are only concerned about educating specialists with a high probability of finding a high paying job.
Maybe they built a better cdn for video?
I watched some online videos on git and have now fallen in love, to the extent that love is possible between a man and an SCM.

The Linus Torvalds Google talk is great fun [0], but it may not actually convince you -- it'll just goad you. The Randall Schwartz talk [2] is more practical, and I recommend it. Finally, the Peepcode screencast [3] is worth the $9 -- it gives examples of git in action, and a handy cheat sheet. It's what finally pushed me over the edge into full-blown fanboy mode.

[0] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2199332044603874737

[1] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3999952944619245780

[2] http://peepcode.com/products/git
You are the first hit in my suicide filter, and I didn't even need access to your mail client. Please pay up.

If you were being remotely serious about suicide, here is what I decided at a young age when I first thought about the subject when trying to decide whether a religion was true or not:
If this whole existence is worthless and meaningless, make the best of it while you are here. If this whole existence is part of something bigger, make the best of it while you are here. There really is really no problem or ailment that makes suicide a viable option.
roots of weighted summations of real polynomials
Does anyone know off hand if the summation of a set of real polynomials with roots bounded in the complex plane (stable), with each polynomial weighted by a real value a (1<a<0) is also stable? Intuitively it seems that would be the case. This is related to a practical idea.
Industrial Engineering is my major at Pitt, and it's not THAT easy. It's the easiest of the engineerings, sure, but still a lot harder than everything else.

I think liberal science would be a good idea, but how would you make it be more than a watered down pure science? At Pitt, science majors have to take a lot of liberal arts classes anyways and double majors are common.
So the app writes itself? wow.
We have a "basic map" of the brain, now we need a more detailed map in order to understand it further. From the article, it clearly won't take us several billion years to get this map.

Also, evolution can't be described as "blind" or "unintelligent". Perhaps best to say "objective" and "non-sentient". It is an incredibly powerful problem-solving mechanism.
You sure have a lot of faith in "the authorities". Should they be able to forcibly medicate you into a vegetative state for life so that you never kill yourself?

A better use of technology is to make people's lives better so they don't feel suicidal.
Pets.com:

Once backed with $50 million by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Bowman Capital, and Amazon.com Inc.

Can I get $50k from one of those?
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Godel and the End of Physics, by Stephen Hawking
The ZUI was the worst idea in Raskin's book. You can't use muscle memory for the system because the target x,y positions and sizes change based on how zoomed in you are. Worse, the ZUI doesn't solve the biggest bottleneck in the existing GUI canon - asking the user to arrange and keep track of his own crap. His ZUI concept is like the mac or windows desktop, except now you get a magnifying glass.

The better method is search, or more accurately, comprehension, but this is a grail quest, and my solution isn't done yet.
f+(-f)=0.
Django Tech Talk on Google video
Although being "first!" is perhaps of historical interest, the idea of a web-based application is hardly any more original than a million business method patents that simply add "with a computer!" or "over a network!" or "via the web!".

Far more interesting is the way they did it.
Every time I see a post like this I'm sure amichail wrote it, does it happens to you?

I'm sure google ads will show some health club publicity with that kind of content on an email.
The Wizardry of Id Software
>Feel free to crucify me now, but remember that customers don't care what you made it in -- just that it works and brings value to them.

Fair comment.
How many stuck around in Boston, funding or not?
Financial Stability of a Bootstrapper
A quick perusal of the WWW'95 (April 1995) shows a whole variety of "web applications"

Beyond Browsing: Shared Comments, SOAPs, Trails, and On-line Communities

Spectrum: A Web-based tool for describing electronic resources

Using the Web as a Survey Tool: Results from the Second WWW User Survey

I can't find the abstracts for the earlier 2nd WWW conference, but I'm sure there a bunch of goodies there. And these are only published papers.

The CGI spec was defined and implemented (in NCSA httpd) in the late '93/early '94 timeframe by Rob McCool. The WHOLE purpose of CGI was to enable people to create "web applications". It is highly unlikely that there were no other "web applications" in the 18 months between the birth of CGI and Viaweb, considering the sheer amount of intellectual horsepower and entrepreneurial fervor at that time aimed at harnessing the net.

I think the claim is pretty shaky.

That said, you guys were definitely among the early pioneers. You built a great product and had a great exit. What more could you ask for? :)
It doesn't write itself. Mnesia is a distributed database. When you use it you get distribution for free.
How about a pigeon?