skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's nice to see competition doing its thing and breaking up oligopolies.
i dont know what you guys are talking about... I use spring and I just discovered embedded javascript (ala rhino) for view controllers and I'm in heaven right now... Can't wait to release to the public to test real world performance
And I thought browsers deciding on the best way to render was the key strength of HTML.
"That's less than 50 cents per habit!" lol
It's good marketing. Still, whatever, happened to them? They died, right?
I just looked. I'd be prepared to spend loads more on a fully managed setup like that, but the pricing is still 3-4x too high for me. $349 a month for:

- 100% utilization of 1 CPU core

- 4 Rails app servers (ie, Mongrels)

- 640 MB RAM

- Up to 250 GB/month bandwidth

- Up to 45 GB storage

- Up to 15 email accounts

- Additional RAM: $0.25/MB/month

- Additional bandwidth: $1/GB/month

- Additional storage: $1/GB/month

Quick, back of the envelope calculations suggest that I'd be paying 10x more, give or take 10%, than my current hosting costs. I max a dedicated server with both CPU and bandwidth - your mileage may vary (especially if the application isn't bandwidth intensive).
I don't doubt that better educated and empowered locals will be able to solve problems better.

It is just remarkably indirect
having spent far too many happy hours playing each iteration of the sim city series (through #4), i can say the game has gotten way more realistic.

sim city 4, especially, has a bunch of skyscrapers from san francisco that you'll get in your cities if you do a decent job of zoning commercial areas.

there's a certain joy to walking around downtown san francisco and seeing the life-size versions.
Ask YC: I built this to learn Rails in 2 days. What do you think?
I sat down last week and felt determined to learn Rails as quickly as possible. I skimmed the Agile Web Development With Rails book and got to work on a fuel-calculating mini-app. Time to completion: 2 days with very little sleep.

Site: http://fuel.dustincurtis.com

While I was building the site, I kept wishing that I could look at an app's code in its entirety for help with syntax (searching google gave me nothing), so here's the code (it's probably very shitty):
Code: http://itsalltaken.com/fuelcode

What do you think of the design and implementation?

PS. I need to add in a bunch of higher-level validations to prevent people from using obscene numbers/dates/etc. Also the mobile version isn't quite done yet.
I like the clean design
pretty neat idea.
Ask YC:  Why does adgridwork.com use a hidden link to www.freeannualcreditreports.org?
This is an ad exchange service. But the following in the display-ad code provided makes me suspicious:

<a href='http://www.freeannualcreditreports.org' style='display: none'>Free Annual Credit Report</a>

What is this all about?
You need to practice translating your hard-earned knowledge into smartass form. It's a winning combination.
You also need to factor in redundant SAN, hardware load balancers, Master-> Slave mysql databases that do not use your slices resources. Clustered subversion, git and smtp, dns, none of which runs in your resource allocation. Databases are 4 core 4 gig ram for the master and for the slave. Offsite encrypted S3 backups every 4 hours. Worldwide team of expert rails support staff.
Acquired by ebay. Not sure what happened after that.
I know this may sound harsh, but someone who thinks of what they know as "hard-earned skills" may not have especially valuable insights. The good programmers I know don't think of themselves as having skills, and certainly not hard-earned ones; they just feel like there's some stuff they understand pretty well.
American Airlines and Scottrade both do this. Dumbasses.
Ask YC: How do you know when enough pre-launch buzz is enough?
So I've been working hard on creating my latest site, and now after a few blog reviews and over 3,000 launch signups, am I ready to launch? You see, I have everything ready to go - even letting in a few beta testers - but how do I really know when I'm ready to launch. I want to keep the buzz sustained for as long as possible!

Anyway, if you want to know what the site is - hit my profile.
The Minimalist's Guide to Fighting Clutter
Idk, I post something smartass and end up at -8 generally. Maybe it's just me.
How Can America's Rich Teach Their Children the Value of a Dollar?
It's not unimpressive that it jumped to #4, but it's certainly not a sea change either. Not enough that I, were I a carrier, would be jumping through hoops to get it. The deal Apple made with Cingular seems to be far too advantageous for Apple.
4th is impressive considering how expensive the iPhone is. It would be even more popular if it were cheaper. And since Apple will probably push down the price, a great deal more market share is theirs for the taking when they choose to.
What is this all about?

Convincing search engines that the specified link is very relevant for the search terms "Free" and "Credit Report".
So this service is not legit? I should not use it?
Inbox 2.0 isn't coming, it is here.
Looks like karma, a mechanism designed to encourage people to post valuable comments, actually demotivates submitting everything more valuable, thus controversial. In other words, down-voting in comments, that was designed to punish exceptionally bad posts, actually punishes all exceptional comments.
I know people who meticulously keep pen & paper records of their mileage... I'm sure those people would love this site.

It's very elegant in its simplicity - well done!

Bonus points for being from Santa Rosa. I spent four awesome years living there. Pepe's still has a special place in my heart for best vegetarian burrito, evar.
Paul Kedrosky warns that VC is swamping tech startups
Very nice visual design.

Your code will improve at once if you read a Ruby book. For example, you confess to being confused in your fueling.rb model file --

<GOBBLEDEGOOK>

-- where you define a class method on the Fueling class, then set an instance variable (@current_id). I believe this will set @current_id in the scope of the Fueling class. Then you define a Fueling instance method (validate) and try to read @current_id inside it -- but it fails, because when you're in an instance method @current_id refers to a variable in some actual Fueling object, not to the @current_id that's in the scope of the Fueling class.

</GOBBLEDEGOOK>

You may have no idea what I just said. Even experts can get lost in Ruby's class hierarchy. So get a Ruby book and it will help you sort out the Ruby approach to OO programming.

People seem to like "Ruby for Rails", and its author is smart. The Pickaxe book ("Programming Ruby") is more famous and I liked that just fine, too. (Don't tell Zed Shaw.) If you're not already intimately familiar with another OO language, you might not want to learn Ruby from _Why the Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide to Ruby (with cartoon foxes!)... although that's what I did.

P.S. Just today I had my accountant explaining to me the importance of separate tracking for "business" miles that I drive for my company, as well as tracking total miles driven. Food for thought. Just don't offer that feature if you plan to take the service down sometime during a tax year...
Hey, what about this statistical evidence, which we all know, that no ones successes without the VC funding?
The Cringe Test for usability
Neat! Love the design!

PS: Could you add km/h and L as well?
Heh. Don't know if that was sarcastic, but in case you aren't: when I want to highlight something for copy and paste, then yes, I use CTRL-A.

What we're talking about is an almost obsessive compulsive clicking and highlighting of words while we read.
Yup, that's on the list of things to do!
OK, how many of you run web sites with SSL?

From the article: "my computers are much more at risk when I use them on wireless networks in airports, coffee shops and other public places. If I configure my computer to be secure regardless of the network it's on, then it simply doesn't matter."
>DHH also went so far as to recommend we not treat the Rails community as a 'paid vendor' and to 'wipe the wah-wah tears' from my chin. While that is a very valid request, I don't believe it applies in this situation.

Great. What a way to spoil good will of the community.

>Additionally, our business will not be significantly affected one way or the other by the future actions of the Rails community.

Then why are you whining? Why did you write that 2st post in the first place?

>That said, I would like to see Ruby on Rails reach toward that critical mass of users, and thereby become a larger portion of our business.

Huh? You just said it's not.

>If Ruby on Rails were made to be simpler to use with a wider range of hosting environments, big and small, that would ultimately benefit Rails itself far more than it would benefit DreamHost or me personally.

Sure, maybe it would but what are YOU doing to help? Whining is NOT helpful!

I'm not a Dreamhost customer but these idiotic posts have made me resent Dremahost and I will avoid ever dealing with them and ever recommending them.
Nice job. Looks like you had some fun doing it!
That was funny, so I downmodded you. This makes it funnier. Enjoy.
Sure, you get a lot - which is why I said I'd be willing to pay a huge premium for it. But not that much!
Wow! Great design, nice clean look to it. congratulations on your first rails app. To add to mechanical_fish's comment, David Black's "Ruby for rails" is a good book. Another good book which I have not read, but have heard great things of, is Peter Cooper's book. Again, congratulations! Great work...

Along a similar note, I wish I could work along these lines. I tend to be too much of an academic, and spend endless weeks reading about whatever (rails in this case) and never actually get down to implementing much, then get attracted to the next new shiny toy, and move on. So from my perspective, great job!
And if you look at /bestcomments this appears to be the case.
I see that Dreamhost has raised their bid: now they're offering a free hosting account to anyone who can help make Rails work on their system.

Six whole dollars per month! Why, to justify an extravagant development budget like that, the upside must be enormous!
Chinese Blogger Beaten To Death By Government Officials
The good news is that news.yc is still the least Godwin'd of any major social news site. Some numbers for comparison:

site:news.ycombinator.com hitler - 18

site:kuro5hin.org hitler - 1,380

site:slashdot.org hitler - 3,080

site:metafilter.com hitler - 6,260

site:dailykos.com hitler - 9,610

site:reddit.com hitler - 16,600

site:digg.com hitler - 34,300

site:4chan.org hitler ---

site:fark.com hitler ---

Presumably it's because this site already has a vegetarian who enjoys painting...
Ah. I didn't know about /bestcomments.

I bow to the master.

I had also forgotten that edw519 was the author of one of the most sagacious smartass comments in software history.
"I started restricting myself to smartass remarks for that reason."

I understand why someone would do that; it's easy and fun (especially if you only have short breaks).

I implore you to reconsider. My own personal lack of peers to debate and commisserate with drives me to this site. The karma may be the gravy, but the experience is the meat. Sure would be nice to have you as part of it.
Maybe. I'm unconvinced they can do so well while tethered to one carrier. The number one selling phone (RAZR V3) has sold over 50 million units. AT&T has 63 million total subscribers.
Those are dog years.

(Credit where credit is due: the author does explain that he's tabulating years of generic "software development" experience, not experience in a particular language. You do kinda have to read the fine print, though.)
Looked at your code: looks very much like mine :-) I suppose it's a good thing since the mantra of opinionated Rails means just that: "stay on it".

I saw your confusing comments for non-working Fueling validate(). Why don't you just check for nil there? It's always nil for 1st time users, no?
19 Now. Bastard.
Well, with how the ad is phrased, I assume you would have to do both for the relationship to work.
The value of my skills and knowledge may be debatable, but the effort expended in gaining them is not. I have the scars to prove it.

And I'm glad to share any or all of it here to save others from making the same mistakes. Just as others did for me.

(I'd also like to think of myself as one of the good programmers you HAVEN'T met yet. Who knows, maybe someday...)
This is more far-fetched than the Apple-Google merger that's been oh so rumored lately. :/
Young IT workers disillusioned, hard to hold, survey says
I don't find this report noticeably bad. The paper did call the brain a "computational device." It was a "simple" experiment and simple paper. There is also nontrivial effort going into the numerous little steps, crammed into the methods section, that brought about this experiment.

palish's comment is informative but not absolute: depending on your interpretation, the headline may not be sensationalist at all. The software was, as described, an "F-22 flight simulator." Confusing to the general public? Yes. Shameful? Not really.

I also disagree that it's a high-tech Rube Goldberg machine. The analogous term for EECS folks would be "hack." It's like saying a wiimote mod for an FPS is a Rube Goldberg machine... which isn't false, but misses the point, don't you think? As a hack, I think it's very interesting. Not surprising, not epochal, but cool nonetheless. A plane can be flown by software, or by bioware, neither approach is perfect at the moment, so "hacks" like these serve their purpose.
NBA player selling his branded shoes for $14.99. Disruptive, maybe?
Thank you, fish, I think.

May I use your comment quote in the promotional material for my next startup, SagaciousSmartassCommentGenerator.com?

Input: Whatever you want to say.

Output: Greatly compressed text (using our proprietary smartass algorithm) guaranteed to generate karma in even the harshest environments (Reddit, Digg, Slashdot)

My email blasts will probably have subject lines like, "Karma Enlargement: 12 Points Guaranteed"
I know little about this, but my impression since the iMac has been that Apple was going after the smug, family, friendly, part-of-your-life image. Now they're more of a (all-encompassing) media company, which isn't so far off from the digital hub. I'm not sure how Adobe fits in.

If you really see a sale viable, even partially by auction, who would participate? Google (for Flash?)? Microsoft?
Seriously. If I don't have drinking water, food, and protection from the elements, a laptop is the last thing on my mind.
Nice work. I like the design!
Karma is designed to motivate submissions deemed valuable to the community. "Exceptional" is relative to the community and reflects its collective taste.

With this many headline spots, this many eyes, and this many submissions, it is unreasonable to expect a filtering mechanism that worked for population size x would work similarly for 10x. Your voice is diluted; what you used to consider {attribute} is now something completely orthogonal.
Bill Gates Interview Uncut (20 min)
Maybe not an acquisition... Can you say that something else could be "in the air" (http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/01/macworld-theres.html?c...)?

Perhaps, an iPhone SDK based on Adobe AIR?
Interesting thoughts.

But the fact remains, they weren't really using the neurons as a "brain", which is what the article/headline claims, they were just using sophisticated software to find an ewualibrium point and self-correct.

They were hacking the neurons, yes, but only at the most basic level of neuron function. The author misrepresented the facts by suggesting it was "learned" behavior, and that is, I think, shameful.

If the neuron cluster actually learned something, then it would be pretty amazing.
Shared Hosting is a Ghetto
Lisp on the OLPC XO Laptop
KDE 4.0 released
The design is very clean and appealing. Also the function is user friendly. Some cursory testing uncovered the following bugs:

Location: /

Sign up

- "email address" should select or disappear on click.

- password should be empty.

- login cookie?

Location: /account/login

- Tabbing should go from the "Login to fuel" field to the password field. Currently focus vanishes on tabbing from this field.

Location: /fuelings

- Past fuelings: The time calculation is wrong. It shows 21 hours for an edit I made ~5 minutes ago.

- /edit

- commit button still says "Add this fueling". Should say something like "Update".

- values are old (e.g., change the "Gallons" value, and click the button. Dashboard shows new value. Click to "edit" the fueling again, and old value still shows here).

- Date text box allows invalid date values. Replaced "JANUARY" with "PLUTO", and date disappeared from dashboard. On the next access of dashboard, got a "NoMethodError" on line #68 of fuelings/index.html.erb.

I was never able to access the app again after the last error.
50 Tools and Resources to Help You Start a Webcomic
The Google Fridge Giveaway
The First iPhone Threat - Built by an Eleven-Year-Old Kid
I conclude that it's probably a good idea to keep configurations in the same programming language as the rest of the project.

Of course, if you used lisp you wouldn't even notice :-)

XML is ok if nobody (other than the original developer or the person who takes over later) has to look at them. Lots of OSX apps use XML in .plist files and nobody cares because that's just a detail of the class library the devs use and an OSX app without a nice configuration panel is unthinkable.

However, visible XML configurations are a symptom that your app is about to be assimilated into the borg collective.
For the code hilighting part, you could probably hack something together with http://pastie.caboo.se/
Wow, thank you so much.

The javascript stuff to make the forms pretty (and disappear when active) is the very next step. Login cookie is next.

account/login tabbing: I'll fix that. Thanks.

The time calculation is based on midnight of the date you select on the Add Fueling page. I'll add the time of day, but I don't think people keep track of their fueling habits that closely.

Regarding editing, I've removed your NULL date, so you can log back in. I'll add verification to prevent that from happening in the future.

Again, thanks. Awesome.
You could get Yelp recommendations for water holes not manned by Janjaweed militias. XO will save Darfur!
Make them confirm their email address to register

The only good reason for this is it helps prevent people from signing up other people to harass them. But even then, most sites I've seen aren't smart enough to require confirmation to change the email address once registered so it does no good.

Companies should just offer RSS feeds for people who really want junk solicitations.
Same with medical devices and FDA requirements. You wouldn't want a blood glucose meter device to give you the wrong number!
With its mesh networking, I wonder how long until the XO is used like a cell phone ala http://mobileactive.org
Java isn't dying, just evolving.
OLPC CTO founds own company, aims at $75 laptop
12 Business Lessons from the World's Great Business Success Stories
Not bad for a first shot. One suggestion is to use the "fat model, skinny controller" way of thinking. It'll help clean up your code significantly.

http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2006/10/18/skinny-controller-fat...

I've pastied an example of how this approach should help.

http://rafb.net/p/P4YMM359.html
(Pastie.caboo.se is down now for some reason, so this is good enough for now)

Generally, the only major issue I see throughout is the repeated Fueling.find(:all) calls. Not only will that hit up the database quite a bit (Rails 2.0's query caching would help a little, but that's beside the point), but it would take up a crazy amount of memory once you get a lot of fuelings in the system.

Keep at it!
"the ruby way" is the best ruby book, but neither beginner or rails focused
Yay! Finally... Blaine was talking about releasing this for months; glad he finally got around to it :)
Ah, the Torvalds protocol.
One item a day--it always seemed like a standard gray-market outlet store, except with about 1/100,000th the potential volume.
where are you hosting it ?
More info: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_15/b3979091....
One million is still the magic number. But in facts inflation makes one million dollars mean less and less in real terms.
Making Money With Your Blog Just Got Easier
This is a new way to generate revenue with your blog. 50 private invites are being offered through the website.
21 points needed to enter the list. Should be doable.
This is cruel.
karma / work - ratio:

hard earned skills and knowledge < smartass remarks < just citing stuff

(I call it: stealing with a receipt)
Dreamhost. And they're pretty good about it, too.
Sure. But once you can survive for the next couple of days - getting market prices without actually physically walking to market town - gets suprisingly useful.

OK, this is more of an explanation for the success of cell phones than laptops.
Perhaps they should just buy old laptops from eBay add crank generators and software - then pass them on to the third world. That would mean much lower up-front capital requirements. I mean - I could organize such a project in my bedroom.
"This obviously causes serious problems for the gadget, because uninstalling the [malicious] firmware automatically removes [...] Doom."
By the way, do you work there? You joined News.YC specifically to post this, as well as saying something subjective like "Worldwide team of expert rails support staff." is a bit suspicious.

If you do, that's great, I very much respect people who stand by their products. If you think I'm being unfair, call me on it. But please don't post anonymously. That's dishonest and disrespectful.

If you don't, false alarm. :)
What about parties in the library?
This has been out for almost 2 years, it's old news.
Old news -> Olds?
I apologize, I should have said that this is my startup. I've been a long time reader of new.yc but never felt the urge to post. But I am pretty excited about what we are doing and so I was compelled to respond.

My name is Ezra and my blog is http://brainspl.at if you have any interest in what I work on.

The most exciting thing about what we are doing wasn't really covered in this article. The real news is about our Rubinius(http://rubini.us) and Merb(http://merbivore.com) projects. We are trying to improve Ruby as a platform for everyone.
Well... it's down right now at 9:24 CEST. Or at least 'loading...' is taking forever.
Next thing you know, the brain in a petri dish will be a leading light in the Church of Scientology. In to the danger zone
I really hope not.

I don't really like Adobe as a company, but whenever Apple buys a professional tool house, they kill it but awful. Witness the demise of Shake and Silicon Grail, both top notch compositing packages for Irix, Windows and Linux. Jobs bought them both, jammed them into a forced marriage and told them that their stuff could only run on Apples. People in the effects industry stayed away in droves (because of the Mac as dongle thing), which finally led to Apple fire-saling the Shake source code and killing the product. _That_ sure worked out well.

Now the only professional compositing option for Windows and Linux is Eyeon Fusion. Not a bad program, but the only one left standing thanks to Apple's actions. I suppose that if Apple buys Adobe, makes everything but Flash players Mac only, then Corel can finally make a comeback...? ;-)
Yeah, http://dreamhoststatus.com/

They're rebooting after a failed update or something.

edit: it's back up (12:41am pst)
Uhm... without dividing that by the total number of results, you're not getting anything very meaningful. If that other number is 180 for YC, and 1,000,000,000 for Slashdot, YC is worse than Slashdot.

I like the concept though... measuring a site's godwin factor.