skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not funny at all. Do you know the country does exist? Do you think it and its people are irrelevant?
Breaking the Internet Barrier
This kind of stuff is pretty neat when implemented in games - never seen an example that gave such a real life feeling though! Props!
I agree with on the reddit point, it seems to have fallen into the trap of each article vying for attention and becoming a pit of exaggerated headlines toeing the party line. Run away!

I don't think that functional programming languages are about to break into mainstream despite the gushing reviews out there. I think it's more akin to learning Latin as a language - I found Lisp very interesting and I think my programming has improved as a result of learning it but I don't think I'll ever use it in a real-life project.
Five Reasons Why I Think Oracle Will Buy Salesforce.com
AT&T Gains 1.7 Million Wireless Subscribers In Dobson Deal
This is the manifesto of the Erlang camp. It forgets to mention the other option: adding transactions to shared mutable memory to get Software Transactional Memory. Besides in real systems, message passing style will need to deal with transactions and vice versa.

Here's a discussion between these two: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2048
Coding Horror: Pair Programming vs. Code Reviews
Songza - Music Search Engine with a great user interface
Inventing Jargon
that is damn good
PDF or no sale.
What do Richard Branson & Tina Fey have in common?
Me too.

Once I realized that voting up was the best way to keep track of stuff I might want to come back to, I used it for that, even though that means voting up stuff only I would care about and not voting up stuff that might be useful to the larger audience.

Comment voting is a little more interesting. I vote up comments I think reflect an interesting point to the discussion, even if I disagree. But I know that lots of people vote comments up or down solely on a basis of whether the comment agrees with their pre-conceived notion of reality.
Peter Norvig - Lincoln's Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
Q: I have worked in various technologies businesses, but I understand that you do not typically invest in the technology sector. Why is that? How do you view technology as an individual and as an investor?

A: Technology is clearly a boost to business productivity and a driver of better consumer products and the like, so as an individual I have a high appreciation for the power of technology. I have avoided technology sectors as an investor because in general I don't have a solid grasp of what differentiates many technology companies. I don't know how to spot durable competitive advantage in technology. To get rich, you find businesses with durable competitive advantage and you don't overpay for them. Technology is based on change; and change is really the enemy of the investor. Change is more rapid and unpredictable in technology relative to the broader economy. To me, all technology sectors look like 7-foot hurdles.
I agree to disagree.
No.

Does a symlink weaken a filesystem?
My favorite episode: "The Psychiatrist"
Fred Wilson: The Coming Downturn
I have two methods:

One, think of what you have to do and find the smallest possible task that's still interesting (e.g read the first paragraph of a book, write the cornerstone function of your program and leave the menus for later) and start with that. Chances are that, as you go along, your interest in the subject will build and you'll end up working for hours.

Two, find a way to make that disgusting job fun. Maybe you can write the most important part of your program in your favourite language and the GUI in the one you've wanted to learn for years but haven't had the time, so you are still using your time wisely in spite of writing a GUI.

It's all about tricking yourself.
People actually use the votes?
By my contribution, I am guilty by association. But do you realize how pointless this discussion is getting? Ha. Only on hacker news.

2+2 = 4. Thus it is written.
10 Template Generators for Blogs and Websites (features Weebly)
Ask YC: Can lawyers and hackers be friends?
In one of PG's essays on this site he talks about start-up hackers often feeling as though they need a co-founder with "business" knowledge and then says this is not a fundamental requirement for a start-up's success. I have the opposite problem, I am a former lawyer (UK) currently looking at a start-up but feel the need for a "hacker" co-founder for my venture to succeed. I know nothing about software code etc. Am I doomed without a hacker to work with me and is YC the wrong place for me to be looking?
$400? - I had enough trouble justifying an xbox 360 purchase... couldn't you just do the same thing with an iphone (or one of its knockoffs)?
Wuby, another light-weight Web framework for Ruby
Shouldn't the title read: "Scribd in the Wall Street Journal in Scribd"? :-)
Commodore 64 Music Tribute
http://brlewis.com/y/2007/devscreen.png

In ideas.txt, what I'm focused on now is always at the top.

Everything you see in that screenshot is done and released. I work mostly in 35-minute train rides. Some weeks about 5 hours is all I get to spend. Am I getting more done than you? Be embarrassed and crank. Better yet, post what you're going to do and do it.

More about public embarrassment as motivation can be found here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
"Scribd (which rhymes with "cribbed")"

Huh. I had no idea. I was always saying "ScrEYEbd", which I think sounds better.
Buffet doesn't actually tell you to save sex until you're old. The actual quote from the article is about him talking to a young MBA grad:

"I asked him what he wanted to do for his career, and he replied that he wanted to go into a particular field, but thought he should work for McKinsey for a few years first to add to his resume. To me that's like saving sex for your old age. It makes no sense."
It's a $400 device that they "let's" you buy books for $10!

Just go buy 40 books. By the time you read them all the e-reader will be free. This is not the reinvention of the book, it's just more useless stuff that all of us tech people are tricked into thinking we need.
Use continuations to develop complex Web applications
I don't think IQ means as much as people think.

But I am a fan of making the human race better, and I don't like when you can't discuss certain research.

In the past, I could believe the sociological reasons to not discuss things like this. It could easily be net negative for society.

But we are getting better at manipulating genes. Soon, we'll be enhancing people. I'd like to know which genes cause intelligence (including autism, aspergers, and other potential drawbacks) so that we can choose to activate them when we have the ability.

Socially distasteful research that could lead to improving all humans should be openly explored with that goal in mind.
All Entrepreneurs Burn out, It's Just a Matter of Time
Manu, your question could be "How do I get written up in the press?" or it could be "How do I set up partnerships/sales leads etc.?"

So if it's the first one. My advice is to not be worried about that at this stage. You should be much more concerned with developing an amazing product and then empowering your users to blog about how sweet you are. Always more important to build organically. Trust me, we know from experience.

If it's a question about biz leads. Send an e-mail to someone you know in the organization or even a cold biz dev e-mail is good enough. We've done those and gotten to the right person. To follow-up, phone calls are always best along with another "gentle nudge" e-mail. Phone calls are really important. They help you set off a small amount of time to speak with the other person about your product and how you can make their organization and yours sweet.
The author of this article mentions some nice philosophical elements of the question of electronic books, but he skirts outside the entire DRM issue, which is the thing that is keeping me back. What, the only difference between the Sony "Reader" and this "Kindle" is that the Kindle can connect to Wi-Fi access points? Give me a break.

A _decent_ e-book reader should be able to read any document format, be easily extensible, _maybe_ support one DRM schemes as an afterthought (to appease the publisher ass-hats) and of course have every other benefit a book has: durability, portability, a touchpad or keyboard for taking notes, waterproofness for the heck of it _and_ excellent connectivity.

Every e-book device I have seen have avoided all of these requirements. I won't buy anything that isn't easier to use and better than my laptop. Not a snowball's chance in hell.

How hard can it be to make a bloody gadget that works right? Every manufacturer should be working to dislodge their heads, but it seems like it is very comfortable in there. In the publishers' orifices, that is.

Bite me.
The quality of a comment is not orthogonal to its truth.
Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale
> The application is meant for anyone with a shared hosting account or VPS...

FWIW, I'd never allow installation of a non-"open source" app on our servers. I put "open source" in quotes since our definitions might differ. You can release a commercial product with source available for your customers to see but the product can be under a non-open source labs certified license. Providing the source, in your case, doesn't mean your customers can give the thing away or show the source to someone else. Just specify it in contract.

If there was absolutely no way that we can have the source and the app does something absolutely amazing so we must have it, then we'd install it on a separate slice away from all other apps. I'm not saying that open source apps are somehow safer but at least with open source apps I can go in and try to see what it's doing and what the quality of the code is.

But seriosuly, why worry about source? Rely on social contract, copyright and legal contracts to enforce your ownership. If someone wants to copy your app, they'll find a way no matter what. When people deploy their web apps, they allow anyone to see their source (JS, CSS, HTML) anyway.

Another option is to obfuscate but that doesn't solve much.
There's a short follow up that identifies the author too: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/
Why don't companies hire "idea" people?  Is it because they think anyone smart can get good ideas?
In my experience, "idea" people and analytically strong people are different sorts. And so it would make sense to hire "idea" people.

But apparently, few companies agree. They see analytically strong people as strictly better than everyone else.
Nor is it identical. That's the problem.
Thin vs. Fat: Google's plan to kill Microsoft Office
This is awesome
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/19/live-from-the-amazon-kind...

The design is ugly, but the capabilities rock out.
The death of e-mail - "Email is increasingly for old people, as kids turn to IM etc."
I just found this out five minutes ago -- You can get a plugin called "embedded actions" for Rails (2.0, and probably 1.2.x). The README is here: http://dev.notso.net/svn/rails/plugins/embedded_actions/trun...

A snippet from the README:

Unlike partials, embedded actions also let you define business logic to be
performed before the partial is included. That logic is encapsulated in the
already well understood metaphor of an action inside a controller.

So a simple call like

<%= embed_action :controller => "songs", :action => "top10" %>

lets you include an html fragment containing the top 10 songs into any of your
pages, regardless of which controller, action or view wants to do the including.

----

In other words, you call "embed_action" from within a view which will call the controller-action and embed whatever result is there. You still get the organizational benefit of MVC without the hassle of rolling your own partials.

As an additional note to what I was saying about partials, Rails 2.0 also has a concept of "partial layouts", allowing you to switch out the surrounding content of a partial.
Yes, Google Is Trying To Take Over the World (with the Google Phone)
An idea is only worth something when it's put into a fixed medium. We refer to people by the medium they work with. People who turn ideas into code are called coders. People who turn ideas into writing are called writers. etc.
Liveblogging the Amazon Kindle E-Reader Show with Jeff Bezos
how much money? :)

http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/19/live-from-the-amazon-kind...
This is really good. There is a small problem though when you move to fast the object that you're holding will go through edges.

Also, the other demos are even better, like the ragdoll. This is very impressive!
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Coding
Coders generally don't turn their own ideas into code. They are given something to work on.
This question has been asked plenty of times before. Look up variations of "business/idea guy needs hacker." But you should at least hack a bit with Ruby on Rails so at the least you won't piss off your technical co-founder. If you have deep domain knowledge, significant contacts, and a problem that is worth solving, then getting a hacker co-founder should be pretty straight forward.

It is my personal belief that the team composition depends on the type of opportunity and where the core competitive advantage will come from. If you are a lawyer, and you want to make a paperless solution for legal firms, you better believe you'll need a technology wiz. However, if the technology component is honestly only a small part of the overall problem, then you can perhaps look to getting an employee or contract out the tech work.
If you take his idea for the CAD program and combine it with his ideas from the TED speech of using materials as code you might end up with something that you can digitally generate very complex 3D structures from very simple building blocks using only a sequencer for the blocks and that might be a very cool product - think of it as the next generation of 3D printers.

And then if you opensource the diagrams people can finally apply opensource ideas to production.
IMHO, I think Bayesianism is more interesting than a lot of the stuff discussed here. The idea that all reasoning can be done as Bayesian inference is pretty damn cool. If someone looks at the above and thinks "Whoa, Bayesianism is neat! I should go read more about it!" then I'm happy, but if everyone is just thinking "Duh, of course 2 + 2 = 4"... well, shit.
What we need is better recommendations systems based on your past activity, instead of a monolith feed that is served to everyone.

It will be more relevant, less prone to tampering and manipulation.
I admit. If I ever get a Sony Reader, the first thing I'd do is to hack it so I can access all the text files I already have. I want to be able to read, say, the electronic copies of David Weber's scifi books that I bought, the PDFs from my software reference library, the Art of War in the original Chinese, and whatever I want off of Gutenburg.

I've seen the Sony Reader first-hand. There was a demo unit in one of the Border's in Atlanta. It looks a lot cooler than the Amazon device. It is almost as slim as an Apple iPhone. It also has a lot of random ports surrounding the device ... pretty useless if I can't get it to access the things I want it to access. Compared with the OLPC XO, it looks like it'd break if I drop it.

On the other hand, the eInk display is everything the press says it is -- the fonts are crisp and the display is a pleasure to read in standard lighting. It has no backlights -- but neither does a hardback novel. The refresh rate is too slow for animations. It takes almost as long for the page to refresh as turning a page (that's probably perceptual ... I didn't time it with a stopwatch).

It might just be easier to buy the eInk developer kit -- http://www.eink.com/kits/index.html and roll your own. For about a $3k a pop.
Put yourself in the position of a company. You decide you need an "idea person" position. You post an opening and collect resumes. How do you decide whom to call? Whom do you interview? How do you decide whom to hire?
The bottleneck is almost always implementation. Therefore, it makes sense to hire more implementation people. If you hired more idea people, you'd just have more ideas that you don't have time to implement.

And large companies do hire idea people. That's what corporate research labs and fellowships are for. But you need a really strong track record to qualify for those, because if only a limited number of ideas can make it to implementation, you want to generate only the best ideas.
My bet is to see someone "steal" a lot of FP ideas and integrate them into something aimed at being a more mainstream language, rather than Haskell or something of its ilk becoming popular. That seems to be the trend with things like Lisp and Smalltalk.
They should really have partnered with Apple on this... gadgets are about cool factor and then function.
Yes, and the OP didn't mean that, either.

Context that prompted posting this to news.yc (see parent):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81196
Bruce Schneier: Ten Security Trends [mp3]
Come on man, the same exact story was posted 30 minutes ago. It was and still is in the top 10 for new stories, so I'd imagine it wouldn't have been difficult to spot had you have looked.

Do you post out of a genuine intention to contribute, or just karma whore? You've accumulated 270 karma points in the last 18 days.
I have a sand clock on my desk.It brings a spatial dimension to the passage of time which the lower parts of my brain understand better.

My clock gives me one hour, when I find that I am procrastinating, I turn the clock and promise myself not to do much else other than work till the clock is running. works every time. But their is some sort of ritualistic behaviour involved. you have to respect and even fear the sand clock for this to work.
The reason there's a "Cult of Mac"
Best CSS Tools!
Google Magazine?
Apple Secretly Tracking iPhone IMEI and Usage (with proof)
Identifying the key benefit is, er, key here (sorry, little sleep last night). As you've been very vague on what the product/service is -- do you have competitors? What makes yours better than theirs?

Anyone can be talked into giving something a try if there's no risk (don't ask for a credit card number up front), and if they can see the benefit to using it.

Do you have any traction yet? Get some testimonials from existing customers (if you've got 'em). Name dropping never hurts.
It's up on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/2au6ab

And it's ugly. I don't care about all of the assuredly wonderful technical features - I don't see myself reading comfortably with a device like this.

I can't believe that an organization known for its human interface design could take 3 years to introduce such a mechanical looking product.

Well, perhaps using it is better than looking at it....
there are apps that do that already, but I am not sure if that is even the final solution... to give you an example, one day I wake up with a new idea in my head, and all of a sudden I am interested in certain news that I never found interesting before! and there might be some very relevant stuff there for me, which will be filtered out since I wasn't interested in it before...

also it happens a lot that I find something interesting, but couldn't ever find it based on my past history or interests (like some stuff I find here at hacker news)...

also there might be some important news for the day which I want to know about but is not necessarily what I always read about... for instance Amazon introduced Kindle today, I might have not been interested in ebooks before, but I would like to know about it, as it is the talk of the day!

so I guess the final solution might be a combination of all these, my previous history, what other people talk about (techmeme), what other people with more common interests as mine find interesting (hackers news), what the "wisdom of crowd" chooses for me (reddit, digg) ... and what some of the people I find interesting are talking about (my RSS reader)

but I guess if anyone can find the best solution here, they are in for a good ride and big $s
"Everything on the Interent will be gamed. And user generated content won't stay "user" generated forever. The pros will crash any party that's worth crashing and make it their own. "

techmeme, reddit, digg and others are all great as long as we can prevent users from cheating the system ... they kind of remind me of Yahoo and other search engines in the early days which had very simple ways of ordering the search results (and many took advantage and got better rankings for their sites), and then came about the more complicated Google ranking with much improved results (yes there exist SEO but half of SEO is to improve your site as well, and you don't really get on top of the list really easily)

I think as time goes by someone will find a way to make it harder for people to cheat the system and give news that is more relevant
I don't know man. No native pdf support, I can't get the pdf books I already have onto it because it won't reader PDFs from the SD card. I have to PAY to read free blogs. Sounds like a lot of potential but not much utility. I suppose they have to defray the EVDO costs but it sucks.
There will always be a drive to game the system, that is the greatest advantage of small communities like this one a lot less incentive to game it.

But the problem is not exactly the same, Google still almost always gives the same results to everybody (they are doing some experiments in personalized search but they haven't rolled out these features).
You can but

a) Smaller screen
b) E-Ink displays are much easier on the eyes (no strain)

Still, 400 for a box that won't even let me read my PDFs or blogs that I can read for free. No thank you, I'll continue using my 12 inch laptop (eye straining as it is).
Absolutely. Plus what's with charging me for reading slashdot?

(O.K. so you found a way other than ads to monetize blogs but sucks for me)
I know most solutions that try to do it are pretty horrible.

I didn't say it was trivial but there is a very lucrative market here for someone who successfully balances all these pressures, history over time, current session, N closest peers etc and builds a good recommendation system on it.

Until then our only real solution is to create and participate in niche communities like this one.
"assuredly wonderful technical features" yes, but locked down by DRM. I might buy one if/when some hackers manage to add native pdf support and free access to free blogs. Until then I'll just stick with my 12 inch laptop. (Or if I am desperate buy the Sony reader thats $100 cheaper and actually supports PDFs, even though it doesn't have wireless)
And yet, it won't let you read PDFs from the SD card.
Reading Tea Leaves and Campaign Logos
"every Kindle comes with a customized e-mail address. You attach your personal docs, and they are delivered to the device, can do this with docs, Jpegs."
Facebook acquires Chinese social network
yes you are right but none of the sites I mentioned are trying to give you customized, personal news... I was mostly referring to them rather than the customized version

And to be honest I am not sure if it is a good idea to go really customized based on my preferences, since I really think there might be stuff that I should know about, but I just have no idea what they are and someone or something needs to point them out to me. But to be customized at a more general level, would in fact give you what the current sites are (but are doing a somewhat poor job at it as we mentioned). For instance, you come here for startup and hacker news, and you go to techmeme for tech, and you could find yourself on reddit for politics and so on. So to some extend they are customized, since they are more focused, but not so focused.

Its all about filtering the noise, but thats very subjective, as any news on Paris Hilton might be noise to me but must read for someone else!
I'd suggest writing a blog yourself and establishing some credibility.

Given your target market, this seems like a good thing.
The death of e-mail: The young are abandoning email for IM, SMS and facebook