skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't aware of the recent upgrade and unlimited beta, thanks.
This will indeed be an option I'll weigh seriously; I do not foresee sudden spikes in my usage patterns so I am not sure if it EC2 is also economical for steady and constant crunching. I'll check the numbers on this...
And, after reading the Definitive Guide:

http://www.packtpub.com/jquery/book
swelljoe has great advice.

"trivial answers with easy questions" just sounds like a slow google, nothing i would be excited about using, and certainly nothing i would pay for.

that being said, i dont think your idea is horrible at all, but simply that i think you need to spend some time refining it.

someone mentioned a site that helps people answer very difficult, expensive questions, the exact opposite of what you're looking for.

explore that avenue. spend a day reading about google answers and why they died. really, if i were you, i would spend the next week doing nothing but looking at other sites that failed or are failing and ask 'why' and 'what can i do better?'.

it sounds like you've done that a bit, but as you can see from the wonderful amount of criticism you've received, you could probably stand to do a lot more research and thinking about the problem.

i personally think you're on to something, but just need to rethink it a bit.

and btw, dont write off google so quickly. search for "xbox 360 vs ps3" and within .5 seconds you'll have more information about which console to buy than your service could hope to offer in a full day of responses.
Looks like the AE tie-in has started:

http://www.ae.com

http://ae.whrrl.com

I've also heard they have Whrrl pamphlets in-store.

I wonder how they were able to partner with such a mainstream company.
Please write about groups, places to check out, and stuff to do for hacker-types. I just moved to SF and need some advice. :)
Thanks; I now remember seeing this discussion on Hunch a while back and tagging it on delicious. I also remember why this didn't spring to mind; it left me more informed and befuddled :)
the thought of a bubble scares me, especially with all these high profile, ridiculous valuations (skype, google, facebook, etc).
Applied for membership; any reason why even reading through the posts needs membership-level access?
Strings come from a limited range and can be mapped to numbers. A data point can have upto 350 dimensions with an average of 5 bits per dimension.
Didn't we just cover this? Yes, yes we did: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61311
yea, and i'm by no means an expert, but is it commonplace to see VCs owning 70% of a company?
I am not a big fan of advertising-only business models but I think this is one idea that would be better off relying on ads than on paying users. To be frank, I just don't think that users will pay for answers. They will exhaust other avenues first and even then most won't be able to bring themselves to pay.

As I explained in a recent blog post (http://www.ideatagging.com/a-facebook-and-yahoo-partnership-...), after search, questions are the next best thing for detecting users' intent and therefore are a good basis for tageted ads. So my advice, much as it pains me to say it, is to ditch the paying users idea and instead focus on ad revenues.

By the way, I have some interesting angles on the whole questions and answers thing. Contact me via my blog (link above) and I would be happy to share. Good luck.
heh, you miss quite a lot.

i hit rawstory for political news, digg for general news (yea i know), and then YC for venture/tech news.

in fact, the main reason i like this so much is the discussion/comments. everyone is very mature, there aren't that many users, and people will generally give good advice/feedback (meaning they say it's good if it is and if it is not they say why).
go to 111 Mina on wed. between 6pm-10pm. Cool music, cheap drinks, lots of geeks, and few goldiggers.
Yes, agree, but also it is 10times more boring. Just drive-everywhere burbs. Better weather thou, but that's it.
Yeah when I lived in the city I had two screamers follow me home from work.

There's nothing like having crazy people yell at you while you walk home, unless it's being panhandled 20 times during a 15 minute walk. Or maybe all the "urban camping" that goes on. Nothing like the smell down by the bus station early in the morning... :)
Thanks =) I'll check them out!
You should check out MeetUp.com. I'm considering starting up a OpenCoffee meetup in SF. The only one I know of in the Bay is in Palo Alto. What do you all think?
How iLike Scales with Rails (older article)
I had no idea iLike was written in Rails. I'm actually surprised they were able to scale so well.
Puppet - one key component of iLike's scaling success
There are tons of things to do. I think its the best of both worlds since you're between the City, the Valley (San Jose, Palo Alto, etc.), and the water (Half Moon Bay). But then again, my opinion may differ because I grew up in the Bay.
Not that you'd want to do this... but you could even leverage Amazon Mech. Turk w/o telling your clients =)

If you have plenty of good, inexpensive answerers then you wouldn't need to.
Hey, that's a good idea! There's no shortage of stuff like that around here, obviously - meetup.com is a great place to start.
I live in the avenues, which really helps with this sort of thing.
Emotional imbalance and lessened productivity. More startups should really let their hackers work odd hours occasionally, or from home sometimes.

As co's get bigger they tend to enforce stricter day schedules, killing any potential for late night hackfests and flexibility to run errands, etc.
I was up at the top of nob hill. Great view, great city -- didn't mean to put it down. City living is just something you kinda need to get used to :)

I got a great workout everyday walking back and forth to work! At least, until I wussed out and started riding the cable cars. I'd go back anytime. Great location.
And be sure to avoid civic center / tenderloin, unless you want to pass 5 homeless people on your half-block walk to the local Starbucks. =)
The leaf of the kratom tree is commonly referred to as kratom. It contains a mix of many different lkaloids. One of these alkaloids is 7-hydroxymitragynine, in the same way that one of the alkaloids of coffee is caffeine and one of the alkaloids of coca is cocaine. Animal testing shows that 7-hydroxymitragynine has opiod agonist activity 17-times greater than morphine.
3 or 4 minutes every now and then between posts.
Yes, that's the essential catch-22 of the kratom business. I just do this on the side, it's not my "real" business.
Best book hands down for learning JS is called Simply Javascript from Sitepoint written by Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams.
To me, off the top of my head, I'd say you need to first focus on the community that you'll be targeting. People want something better that makes their life easier. I think the bigger challenge you'll have is the credibility of responses. I'd almost suggest a way for people looking for an answer to evaluate the answers they've found. I'd take a look at www.qaboom.com. A similar idea, but it is targeted to students. The question I would ask myself, is, who are the early adopters. If you have some early adopters, what is going to make it worth while for them? What if the person tags their question with a category and another person subscribes to the RSS of that category...being able to see what others are asking and then seeing the real time responses is going to be powerful. Just some thoughts. I'd love to be a beta tester for you. Let me know. Honestly, you might want to look at a model like about.com. Find some experts who already belong to a community and give them a % of revenues. just some thoughts, I think it is a great idea! Good luck with it!
From zero to a million users in 8 days - Graffiti (the facebook app) tells us their story
Brilliant staging with the cereal box, Immad. It gives it that authentic bootstrapping entrepreneur touch.
There's really nothing like a stereotypical "the burbs" on the peninsula -- or anywhere in the Bay area for that matter. Concepts like "the burbs" are perpetuated by the perception of a need to commute via personally-owned vehicle or transport, as there are no other options -- and that just doesn't happen here. It's perfectly reasonable and viable to live without a vehicle in this place. Besides, Caltrain is fun.

If you think about it, the only people that benefit from people en masse becoming infatuated with a certain neighborhood (or likewise shunning certain neighborhoods) are Realtors, who make $ based on turnover of property in certain areas, and Realtors are all pure Evil. I actually gave up driving my car after I moved down here; only 5 months thus far, and I estimate I've saved a lot -- far more than I would have spent otherwise -- in transportation costs, time, and even energy.

I guess I just don't understand your point. I've never met a genuinely creative person who ever gets bored. I guess I don't really think of "getting bored" being resultant from a function of place.
Wear a helmet!!! I got NAILED by a commuter on a cellphone running a stop sign. I was 4 blocks from my house getting my moring cup of coffee. I ALWAYS wear a helmet but didn't that day b/c it was such a short ride. I was lucky to only be limping for 6 weeks.

Contrary to common sense, stick to the major roads. The traffic flows better and you don't have to gamble w/ stop signs.

Also the bad neighborhoods always seem to be in the valleys, which, unless you're Lance, is where you'll be riding. So follow the crackheads for the least hilly route.

I don't care if I get hit a few times. Driving is maddening in this city. I only use my car to meet w/ folks in the valley and to surf or get out of town.
I'm no expert either, but from what I've read by the end of multiple rounds, they could own that much. Right out of the gate a 20% or 30% is more common.

As a company comes back for more rounds of funding, the founders get diluted. The VCs often have anti-dilution provisions in there to protect against this - something to watch for.
I'm doing just exactly that. Kitchen table status yet, but hopefully I'll have a beta with the new year. If you want to know additional details drop me a line: abarrera at neurosecurity dot com
Operations as a competitive advantage for startups
It's funny that nobody mentioned pac hts. If you're looking for a multi-room place, it's REALLY expensive. But for some reason there are plenty of cheap studios. I know lots of young people here who don't pay more than folks in the mission / hayes valley and have much nicer places. I live here b/c I need to run on trails every day and the presidio is close by. Parking is mellow enough. I'm never more than 5 blocks from my house and seldom closer than 2. There is just enough of a social life to keep you going and you're not far from anywhere. I also surf when the waves are good and it's near OB (waves were rocking today.) My car has never been robbed and I hardly ever see crazies. I grew up in DC and NYC and I thought we were the market leaders for crack heads! Man, they are a different breed out here.

I can't imagine being w/o a car. Once every two weeks we have a 7:30am meeting in SV (angels, VC's, lawyers) which means a 6:15 wake up. Usually we don't finish coding until 4am. I could not deal with that on public transpo.

Also my co-founder lives in the Presidio in an ex-military barack. His rent is as cheap as it gets but he is a bit removed from the city.

Hope this helps, good luck!
The Web 2.0 Disaster - Blog/Twitter/Maps about the San Diego Fires
I found it very interesting that the newspaper decided to use blogging software instead of their own website to publish updates. The blog model is very good for this kind of always changing, always updating, live news coverage - much better than the traditional "front page" newspaper front page model.
You can also search by name... just type the name into the search box. If you had some friends on facebook, it would kind of sort those search results by their connectedness to you but you might have to sort through a lot of people if your friend has a common name.
Has use of lead-free gas decreased the crime rate?
Lives Of Others: A Very Interesting Film Review.
Infrastructure 2.0
We're talking trucker here, not college kids.
Worse Is Better - "better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed"
hmm, you have a bit of a point. But seriously, how many of the "hacker" articles that are worth reading aren't already picked up by reddit/digg/slashdot?
"The scheme, which is more restrictive than the US Green Card, would need the approval of all 27 EU member states."

ROFL. Good luck with that.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71827
A great idea - go for it.
"... I wonder if they'll respond to the question you sent them. ..."

They have. A copy of the email text can be found here ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/1685662827/ Here's the response:

Thank you for contacting NYTimes.com.
This article was published in the NYTimes.com Job Market section.
Article is by Bharat Mediratta; as told to Julie Bick.

The Job Market section is essentially equivalent to a
help wanted section of a paper.

Regards,
Eric Winston
NYTimes .com
Customer Service
www.nytimes.com/help

A sub I guess. Thanks karzeem for being so critical. I'll be restricting the urls next time to tech or the main page of NYT. So another way to check for Submarines is to check both the location of the article in the paper (ie: is it in Tech, news or Jobs) and if the format, layout and bylines smell "funny".
Sorry if these are stupid questions, since all my Lisp experiences are academic.

Do you need some kind of remote procedure call to coordinate the updates from an admin instance?

I only know that there's the swank server for talking to emacs, is there something similar for talking between CL instances?

Perhaps you just issue an HTTP Post for each server in a loop?
Would much prefer a transcript to video. The audience can read the equivalent of your 23-minutes of video in a minute or two.
Judy's Book To Shut Down. Yelp Is The Last of The Local Review Sites Still Standing.
WYE, WYG: Windows Vista vs Mac OS X Leopard
Three people sharing one microphone is awkward.
Truth: how great a virtue is it in business?
Verizon Introducing FiOS with 20Mbps Upstream and Downstream
OpenStreetMap on the iPhone!
Google Continues to Bankroll Mozilla
Yeah first time I did that, I have a solution for it for next time.
Your comment about the IP disclosure sheet is good. I'd like to see more discussion on this board about how to handle IP disclosure before taking on consulting projects. I don't have the answers but the question is very relevant to me and, I suspect, a lot of other people here.
I prefer video personally, but a transcript or notes might be useful.
Microsoft to push functional programming into the mainstream with F#
Zero to Z-Shell: Learn what all the fuss is about with Z-Shell
Fake Memory Cards - Learn how to spot them so you don't lose your data
Ask 37signals: Can I build a product business if I'm just a designer?
Take a look at the videos on Yahoo by Douglas Crockford on the Javascript Programming Language, and his "Advanced Javascript". Very well presented.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
Optimization starts at the requirements and architecture design stage.

Requirements: The fastest feature is the one that you don't implement.

Design: Quicksort may be faster than bubblesort. But it doesn't matter if you have layers of singletons and visitors and decorators and observers.
Has the freakonomics theory of legalized abortions being the cause for falling crime rates been debunked? It seemed quite plausible to me - more plausible than the lead thing.
What does News.YC think of distributed version control?
Good article. Let me try to generalize his main point a little further:

"Premature" does not mean "early in the project" -- it means "before you have hard data to justify the optimization". The reason this guy's optimizations aren't premature is that he's implementing a game engine, a well-established class of program with well-known pitfalls. His hints are based on hard data -- data from earlier game engines, which he and his veteran colleagues have managed to acquire and digest.

In general, it's hard to use performance data from one software system to design optimizations for another -- the two projects must have similar platforms, design constraints, and architecture. But the programs this guy is talking about are all in the same family -- they're built in C++, constrained to run in real time and monitor interactions between hundreds of in-game objects, and descended from a long line of ancestors whose architecture has evolved step-by-step since the earliest days of game programming.
I was going to ask this same question. I'd love to do consulting but I don't know anyone. What do I do exactly to find gigs?
The problem isn't completeness but focus. Reddit is larger, so it would pick it up along with a lot more chaff.
Joshua Schachter would disagree with you
I started by working through the temp services. Usually they have some general-purpose programming gigs. Once I got a few projects under my belt (and did some freelance programming work in the area) I went online and started spamming all the resume sites. Then the gigs come to you. Ideally you want to move into a word-of-mouth situation, but sometimes it takes a bit to work up to that.
Wouldn't more abortions mean less unwanted children mean less screwed up children mean less crime? Sounds plausible to me -- the main issue is whether this is a big effect or a small (negligible) effect.

This lead thing, on the other hand, is silly. It's just a correlation and then they guess there is a causation. Plus some statistics, but people get those wrong all the time, and they still allow for some other thing to cause both.

It's especially silly because the thing being explained is so easy to explain. Crime rates are lower in more modern times? Really? Wow. Maybe it's because children are beaten less often, and thus less angry, or any of the many other ways we've become more civilized.

Even a correlation with air pollution is pretty easy to explain this way. Maybe the same states that regulate air pollution aggressively are also progressive in other ways.
I would never pay for shopping advice from people who might be paid PR shills.

What's to prevent a guy from GM from signing on to answer questions and advising every single one of your questioners to buy a Chevy truck?

More importantly, if your site tells me to buy a Chevy truck, how do I know that I'm not a victim of product placement?

At least when I read competing ads for game consoles I know the bias of everyone involved. And reading ads is free!
all of a sudden

You're right. The wholesale replacement of one people for another by bureaucratic fiat should be done gradually, so as not to alarm the sheep.
Selling software/services to corporate clients
Can any one on this discussion forum please share their experience on how they went about selling their software/service to a corporate client? What's the best way to approach prospective client companies once we have identified them? Do we just go to their office if they are local? Call them or email them?

What kind of documents, supporting material(other than a demo of the product etc.) should we carry with us?

Neither my cofounder, nor I have any formal sales/marketing background.
We would really appreciate any advice/suggestions/feedback regarding this.

Okay, thanks a lot for reading this,

-Manu.
Really? Good idea. Here's my idea:

I finally have time to do what I've always wanted: write the great American novel. Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it "Billy and the Cloneasaurus"
My advice: find another founder that has that kind of experience. It is a whole different world selling to corporations. A good friend of mine spent years getting good at it: studying, reading, networking like crazy, getting coaching, and he's pretty good now. Another very important detail: the corporate sales pipeline is very long. 6 months would be pretty fast to close a sale.
I'm Indian. Got a grad degree from a school in the US. I work in the US. High Tech Migrant Labourer (TM). H1B. Skill Set: you name it I got it ;).
Most Indians I know would stick to English speaking countries, but the Chinese are a little more flexible as they have to pick up a new language anyways.
Indians don't really have as many reasons as the Chinese to leave the motherland and stay abroad as politically, it is a lot more "free" than China. Both countries are finding it hard to find graduates to employ even in their own countries. So the exodus is not going to happen anytime soon. For right or wrong my perception is that most of EU is not socially evolved enough to become a multi-cultural community like the US (at least the big cities). Most of America is not either. France, no path to citizenship after generations of settling there? No thanks! So I think Denmark is safe for now!

But, OTOH, the good thing about being a high tech migrant labourer is aaah choices... choices.. :). If the dollar tanks, now there will only be more countries to choose from.
You guys do realize that this is possible with Java, right? (It depends on your environment, of course.)

...generally, you wouldn't do this production systems, I would hope, whatever the language.
What kind of resume sites? Like monster.com, or special ones for freelancing?
jia is not only a savvy entrepreneur, he's a really chill guy. and he takes the prize for Best Haircut In Silicon Valley
You can safely ignore this one if you are working on server software. Instead you really should focus entirely on functionality and ignore all considerations of performance until you actually have a problem. Be a dogmatic anti-premature-optimizer! You can always throw some hardware at the problem later.

If you are building something that will run on machines you don't control... well, then your problem is a bit different. If you are doing that and it's a something like a game, which must "feel right", well... maybe you should make some decisions up front trading off productivity for runtime performance. But even in those extreme cases, you are probably better off fixing speed problems when they come up, not before.
I agree that it sounds plausible, but it seems like his math just might not hold up. If you want to see a detailed analysis of the issue, check out http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/miron/papers/Comme....
I like dropping the f-bomb, so perhaps my title was overly hostile. I hoped the takeaway would be that real-life interaction is still the best place for serendipitous encounters.
as a facebook only friend of alexis, I took no offense and thought it was a great post
Gmail gets IMAP
Natural selection applies to criminals as well. I'd love to see some sort of Darwin Awards for stupid criminals.
http://disastr.org

I know I've discussed this here before, but this is exactly the kind of scenario that the system would handle - 300,000 displaced people in an area with massive network connectivity, trying to figure out where to go.

These Web 2.0 sites are showing the outline of what is possible, but they don't have the granularity (i.e. individual people looking for help) that could be managed with a dedicated system.

The shelter, by the way, just came up on Wired. So, c'mon, somebody bite - tell me why your mapping tech and my shelter design couldn't work for the next fire season.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2007/10/ga...
I don't seem to have the setting enabled, but I'm guessing it's just a matter of time. This is going to be great. I wonder how much the iPhone had to do with this.
Paul Rand on design: "Don't try to be original, just try to be good."
I noticed that the iPhone is the only mobile device listed on the support page.

OTOH, if Googlers are forced to use Gmail internally, I'm not sure how they lived this long without IMAP.
Did Sigmund Freud make any important (and correct) contributions?  Why is he famous?
See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud#Critical_reaction...