skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, I don't understand this either. The PhD is what makes you a patent clerk by day? Does anyone actually know Einstein's real history and not the vague stuff written on the backs cereal cartons? This sounds like the same stuff people say when they erroneously talk about Einstein as having not been good at mathematics. As for all this stuff about how PhDs don't make any money and how no one cares about their work boo hoo wah wah .. There are thousands of working PhDs that would disagree with you all and think you all out of your minds!
Most of the ads I see are for paid apps. I wonder if there's any data on the ROI for these advertisers. If advertisers are paying $2 CPM, and getting, say 5*$0.99 app sales for those impressions, then it's quite possible that those CPMs could keep up. That's a 72% ROI after the Apple tax.

(Note: All the numbers above are made up.)
I can agree with that, the site does look like it's still in the 90s. It's a shame there isn't anything much similar (searching GitHub can turn up some gems though). It's an idea I toyed with once.
Interesting, how do you think it fits with your Founder Visa essay? Is it possible to extrapolate and say that 26 companies == 200 jobs, maybe 10k companies ~= 75k jobs? . IMHO, not quite, since 10k companies wouldn't get funded the way current YC companies are, but just thinking about and compiling these stats are a good tool to approach politicians.

Oh, and I just thought about a lame joke: Yay! The ramen industry has 198 new costumers. Actually not that lame, what's the value-social-capital contribution to society from a YC employee, compared to 198 new Google employees? Who would politicians backup? Why they love Wal-Mart even if it decreases the local economy output? And yeah, I know the answer to the last question ;)
Photos of Amazon's new Kindle DX
The thing is, none of this is necessary. HTML has a built in URL shortener:

<a href="http://example.com/long">Short</a>

There you go.

Twitter is already parsing URLs out of tweets in order to feed them through bit.ly. At that point, the length of the URL isn't relevant -- it's been turned into a single token and pulled from the tweet.

Why don't we just stop there instead of first stopping off at the shortener before writing our HTML?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't all of those links become useless when the domain name shortener goes down for any reason?
You probably aren't aware that we just hired 3 more. Make it 201.
I'm almost positive there are a couple office manager/secretary types in there (though those can be highly skilled too, just in a different way) but yeah, mostly. The average salary is probably 50% above national average.
I'd be more interested to know what the median salary is.
It was a refreshing sight after going through so many URL shortening websites to find www.aafter.com. The website is the first of its kind in the entire web shortening websites to generate two smaller URLs as you type one lengthy URL in the search box. Either of the smaller URLs could be used to access the website instead of writing the lengthy URL and are quite easy to remember.

Tony Smith
I don't think you seem to know what a PhD is about.
It wasn't the language, it was that your comment was not thoughtful, interesting, intelligent, or even justified.
>If the mom and pop store can't afford to stay open at night then nobody is allowed to. Because that's "fair".

Any time I finding appealing stories of the allegedly comfortable northwest European life, I just remind myself of things like this.
That doesn't work as a text message.
Five futurist visionaries and what they got right
Yes, they would be useless.
I think it's worth giving the student some credit for not adding something embarrassing:

While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone’s death as a social experiment, he had carefully generated the quote so as not to distort or taint Jarre’s life, he said.
I'm surprised they didn't include an option to specify how many faces you want it to detect before taking the picture.
Why not count founders? At least, those who draw a salary. Those are jobs too.
Great argument, nice analogy, makes a lot of sense, and I completely (and respectfully) disagree.

Your analogy reminds me of the greatest cook ever, my grandmother. She used no technology whatsoever. All of her tools had been her mother's which were probably manufactured in the 1800s. She chopped everything by hand in a wooden bowl. (If anyone else helped her with the chopping, everyone at dinner could tell.) She never used pencil or paper and measured nothing. She stood in line at the farmer's market, the butcher, or the grocery store and inspected every item. And absolutely nothing I have ever eaten since, in any restaurant or home, has been remotely close to hers. It was magnificent! And I miss it so much.

I'd like to think I have almost as much passion about my work. I use the most primitive tools, 24 x 80 green screen editor, no framework, no IDE, no debugger, and mostly pencil and paper. I savor every byte just as I imagine my grandmother savored every little detail of her cooking. I'm not trying to save time or be fast, I just aspire to creating Grandma-quality software. I only hope my software brings someone the same joy her food brought all of us.

I've used many different tools, including php. And I rarely care how fancy they are. Ironically, the simpler, the more joy I have found along the way.
scp -C does the same thing. Both methods use gzip for compression.
Because laptops don't fit in your pocket.

I am sure that Kindle owners love the devices, for the reasons that you stated. The problem I have is the price. Students and newspaper readers will have a tough time justifying a $500 purchase, especially in this economy.
> Breaking news from the red-hot world of URL shorteners.

I don't know if the goal of the author was that but after the first sentence of the article I was laughing like a mad :)
And that he wouldn't accept already-completed patches to do so, and told their authors to maintain their own fork if they wanted to use other shells.
OpenHosting. It seemed the most reputable at the time I first got the service, though today I'd probably pick SliceHost. No problems with OpenHosting, but SliceHost offers more for the same cost. I'd switch over, if I got myself motivated to go through the process of moving my data.
now who wants to guess if this will be something that he'll keep up, or if its just a publicity stunt like Sergey Brin's blog
Thanks, checking it out now. ^ & v, it's nice to know I'm not the only teevee person here. I felt a bit guilty showing up to the last HN meetup in SF given that the I currently program an average of 2 hours a month :-)
For me, there are two qualities I look for when hiring an outside service provider like an accountant which go beyond the $/hour perspective.

1) I assume my time is essentially priceless. If I've ever had complex finances, for example, I hire an accountant because it's not worth me trying to decode some obscure tax law (which commonly changes year to year btw) for several hours just for the satisfaction of knowing I've DIY'ed the situation and maybe saved a couple of $ in the long run, while quite possibly also having had made mistakes.

2) Speaking of mistakes, the second reason is that often times hiring someone else comes with some kind of guarantee or warranty. Hire an accountant and if your taxes aren't right you're liable to make up the error, but you're not going to jail for tax fraud. Hire an electrician and (usually) they'll stand by their work and come fix errors within a given amount of time.

Not saying I disagree with your statement, just offering a perspective on why $/hour doesn't always evaluate so clearly as a meaningful metric.
There are some lazy and irresponsible journalists out there. Speedy delivery and hype is often more important than correctness.

In my country we have an old saying "If the papers say that your sister is a whore, good luck proving you don't even have a sister!"
I flagged it because the submission contains no content. It's just a link to a random(?) wikipedia page. The page was last modified in November 2008. The device was released in 1987.

You do know what the N in HN stands for?

Seriously, are we gonna submit half of wikipedia now?
I'm sure the pages for Newton, Apple II, Atari, Amiga and other vintage hardware are no less relevant than this.
The man who revealed the secrets of sweat
The author states '. Evolutionary theory suggests that in order for them to be still here, there must be some kind of survival advantage to them.'

However, if this were true, wouldn't that mean illnesses like Cancer would also have a survival advantage?
who knows, but he did submit his own first post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=596327

and he's a lot more interactive with the community than brin is.
What's particularly silly about all this is that when using the website to tweet you by definition do not need a URL shortener. You are not allowed to type more than 140 characters in the input field, so your message is necessarily already under 140 chars, so the shortening does nothing. I find this particularly frustrating since I have a message with a perfectly legible URL, hit send, and all of a sudden its a short URL that now one know where it goes anymore. If it auto shortened your URL as you pasted it in (as opposed to after hitting reply/send), then it would at least allow to type more, but as it is, the auto shortening serves no user-purpose.
He already has a great blog http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
I think it's also interesting to note that once you do a cluster, you have a distributed system and instantaneous writes are no longer a cheap operation... Plus how many operations do you need to access full data in your database? For simple one off access, you could propagate the changes into ram on each of your cluster machines (memcached) and only relatively "unimportant" search operations would see stale data.
HMAC is mostly useful when you want to verify that some text hasn't been altered. The client sends message + HMAC(message, secret) and then the server (which also knows the secret) can verify that no-one has changed the message.

Dunno if it helps anything when it comes to salting. Anyone else who knows?
get a friend in the USA to buy one and bring it over. That's what I plan to do once someone confirms that technical books display well on it.
Google could step in that second market if they play it right.

I would love to be able to upload complete episodes to YT and sell ads against that - our show is local but of general interest (cooking, basically). I'm looking at just breaking it into chunks and creating our own YT channel but the exec isn't terribly web-savvy so I'm probably going to do it on my own time and keep my mouth shut until we have >10k views.
if you think PhDs don't make any money

I don't. PhD correlates with smartness, and smartness correlates with wages. Please take care not to assume causation.

But should you get a PhD just to make money without a love for research? Each year of industry experience at a young age will be more valuable to you than a year of study. Yes, you can get stuck. You can also get unstuck and learn ten different languages under ten different employers, as I did.
I'll substitute that with a (better) metric:

100+ million users have utilized code that I've written.
"I’ve often believed that the true measure of an entrepreneur’s character comes not during the boom times, but how they react in times of adversity and challenge."

Couldn't be more true! I have a friend who runs his own restaurant. He's successful because of his character and how he responded to diversity. When he was starting out, I remember he would have rather spent his money to get a better stove for the restaurant than a new couch for his living room.

There's definitely a cost to that sort of attitude, but that sort of tenacity makes for a business that just won't die.
I got a diploma at my graduation. It was two full weeks after finals.
There are different sorts of creativity.

Most mathematicians would probably not do very well in the open-ended creativity of writing a novel say.

One type of creativity is goal driven (e.g., prove this theorem), while the other not so much (e.g., write an interesting novel).
Not only the dependencies, also the requirements and the people who use it.

But it's more than this. I think the real lesson is that a program is always a work in progress... like a walking person, always falling forward and putting one leg after the other to stop the fall. The moment you don't touch it anymore it dies.

"Working" can be a programmer writing code, or just a user putting data in, or submiting the occasional bug report... or anything. But the moment it stops interacting it gets out of sync with the world.
Do people actually use SMS with Twitter any more?
OK, done. :-)

Now, on to grad school.
The absolute key thing is that you can do this with an API and pay by the hour! I think the proper term is utility computing and amazon launched the cloud meme with EC2...
Even if those ten titles are at the top of the NYT best-seller list? There should be a limit to how many sales are attributable to the Kindle version, which would keep the percentages lower.

It would be nice to see the unit sales percentages for books with a Kindle version, instead of averaging the percentage across all books - that would weight it more toward the high-volume titles.
The one thing I've noticed about all successful programmers is that they incubated their interest and skills outside of academics.
I actually suspect that the majority of those are incremental sales (to use the article's terminology, where "incremental" means ebook sales which aren't cannibalizing book sales). I suspect this based just on my own anecdotal experience, but in the absence of hard data that might be the best we can do.

Since getting my Kindle 2 under two months ago, I've bought seven ebooks (and besides those seven I've also downloaded five more that were offered for free, usually the first books of multi-part series, but I presume that they're counting these as part of "sales").

All of those are non-technical books. Prior to my Kindle 2, I bought maybe one new book every few months, always a technical book. Non-technical books I would usually buy used (with shipping costs, often around the same price as a new Kindle ebook, but much more convenient), and only maybe one or two a month.

One of the huge reasons has been that it is now far more convenient to read samples. Amazon has always let you read the first chapter or so of lots of its books, but I've never really used this feature because it would be uncomfortable to read these samples on my computer and because when I'm browsing Amazon my mind is in web-browsing mode, which means I'm multitasking and interacting heavily and am uninterested in even reading blog posts that are too long, let alone chapters of books.

You are also not allowed to add a Kindle book to your Amazon wishlist. At first I thought this was immensely frustrating. At first, I thought they put this in place because you can't yet buy a kindle book for another kindle owner as a gift, but what I use my wishlist for is to keep track of all the interesting books I hear about and want to investigate later. Without a wishlist, what I started doing instead is sending the free sample of the book to my Kindle. I have now amassed dozens of free first chapters on my Kindle, and of course when I reach the end of each one, it's only a couple button presses to buy the full ebook.
"If you earn $100 as a freelancer, you might get $60 after tax, which means you'd have to work one hour and forty minutes to pay your accountant $100." - um, isn't the accountant a business expense and therefore a writeoff?
That's really cool, but the problem for newspapers is bigger than the medium. I can already pull up the New York Times on my iPhone. Now I can do it on Kindle. Cool, but not big news.

Newspapers are still slow to respond. The news is already out on the Internet before its on the front page of the New York Times.

This definitely helps newspapers, but it's only part of the solution. Another part may perhaps be design? (http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1660-jacek-utko-can-desig...)
If you are in a situation where you can only receive messages via text, then you aren't able to visit web pages.

So they could replace the urls with "[url]" or somesuch when sending them via SMS.
Yes, editing to reflect that.
Plus, those are 35% of Amazon's sales of those books. If you have a Kindle, you are defintely buying from Amazon; if you're buying paper books, Amazon is just one of your suppliers.
Houser & Marquiss: Sea of Forgetfullness
Pirate Party 3rd Largest Political Party in Sweden
True.

>> "...and pay by the hour"

If you have money to burn.
Why I hate Investors
Well said. The thing that bothered me the most when I forced myself to use it was that it seemed like a high-school language hack tried to rewrite perl and got some of his buddies to help. Each of these guys hacked in their own versions of standard functions ad-hoc, and they each chose their own naming convention (e.g., strcmp vs str_replace). There is no uniformity in the language. Elegance is completely lacking.

If you're new to programming, don't waste your precious memory to inventorying an ugly mass of built-in PHP functions. Just pick Python, Ruby, C# or something else--anything else. If you have to learn it for your job, well, learn one of the other languages anyway.
VPS hosting? Though that doesn't cover GAE and Heroku style hosting.
Prohibited Application Types on Windows Marketplace for Mobile [pdf]
I was pretty sure this only applied to comments, not articles?
Not anymore. http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2009/05/amazon-t...

To summarize: The price of e-mailing your Kindle is now 15c/MB, rounded up.
On a more general note, this has significant long-term cultural implications, which I'm surprised nobody is discussing. At relatively small cost, one could (say) place commercials at a particular time slot in a major metro for viral effect. As a silly example, imagine 750k people in NY are watching the evening when they get a 30 second message along the lines of 'the cake is a lie'.

Less amusing examples crop up in Gibson's Neuromancer (disinformation in an ersatz news format being used to cause a riot) and Vinge's Rainbow's End (subliminal information used to activate a preprogrammed behavior; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii

What's interesting to me is that the current commercial message pipeline has a degree of editorial oversight, albeit a weak one; automating the process subverts that to a degree (although they'll check for basic FCC compliance), which opens the possibility for both greater creativity and for abuse. I expect this will first manifest in the form of political speech, which isn't subject to normal commercial considerations and which attracts more funding than arty experimental stuff.
Innovation - Miguel de Icaza
Superior entrepreneurial performance is not driven by technical knowledge
Yup.

They also become useless when the link points to a site on a server that has gone down for any reason - or that just throws a 404 back to you.
Yes, but not in that way. Let me put it this way, if you have the choice between breaking laws and breaking customs, always choose laws. I see the biggest differences between the US and Holland as legal.

Lets not forget that Holland basically invented modern capitalism and the US has many programs much more socialist then their equivalents in the so called social states of Europe.
Being able to pay by the hour massively, massively reduces the capital expenditure required when launching a public site? You can launch on a relatively cheap $75-$150 a month and then if you get Slashdot/Digg your code can automatically scale and only pay for the extra capacity when you need ... that's kind of the point of the service. Check out Bezos at startup school last year talking about animoto : http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/jeff-bezos You can't expect to launch a public site with no budget! It's only a few thousand to support this sort of thing. If you launch unprepared to scale, you are just asking for someone with funding to rewrite your stuff.
A problem with Wikipedia is that it only presents you with a snapshot view. Yes, the diff tools are right there but sadly people don't use them enough. I think it would go a long way to have a simple indication of frequently changing or recently changed content in the default article view (eg, content added in the last week highlighted in yellow, items removed in the last week in lined-out and grayed text). Something like this probably would not have prevented the problem presented in this article (which is apparently that some reporters are lazy), but it would be a big improvement, IMO.
I think this is a hugely exciting development and can see numerous ways our startup can use this internally.

Our team is spread between San Francisco, Cape Town and Rio De Janeiro and the real time nature of this makes for an excellent internal dashboard/forum/news/tweet/status mash-up. Matt talks about how it's changed the way they communicate internally and I see this as the biggest win here.

We had started to do some of the above with Campfire, but Wordpress+P2 looks so much more powerful. Imagine tweets, exception reports, business alerts, notes and more, all showing up in one place, tagged, discussable and in real time.
Yeah, I haven't had a chance to use the Cloud Host.
Yup, read it before. Thanks!

Noticed that most graphs start with the baseline being the lowest value (usually slicehost 512). Which is ok, but for somebody just glancing at them it looks like linode is always a few times better, when usually it's only 10-30%. Some form of relative comparison might be useful.
Ask HN: ways to obtain critical mass?
I started this for-fun-project: a highly viral site, called http://www.tjetter.com - it enables you to randomly chat with others, with the added twist of being able to eavesdrop on (and replay) other conversations that take place.

The dutch version is doing OK, because I was able to use my established network to get some initial visitors. However, I have barely any international contacts, so getting some exposure in other countries is rather difficult.

I'm looking for suggestions as to how to proceed in trying to obtain critical mass for this kind concept. Ideas?
"And Arthur Brooks told me that giving goes beyond their own religious organization"

I'm curious as to the percentage that goes outside givers' own churches.

"when they give, they give more money"

I'd also be curious to find out whether or not the less religious give more time, and how much money that time is worth.
I'm on EngineYard as well, and have been pretty happy.
If you're 30 that is almost a certainty. People stop changing as fast after 30. If you're 20 the change in 10 years is much larger.
Well, right, but the shortener is adding another layer of unreliability into the transaction.
I am assuming that most poeple here will be delighted by these numbers. 200 jobs. 100+ startups. Millions of users. Millions of dollars in revenue etc... Great, but frankly I would not measure YC off those numbers.

Fast forward YC 10-20 years from now. You often hear of Paypal or Google Mafia. My guess is that the YC Mafia will be orders of magnitude more powerful.

Successful founders will go on to invest into more startups or create more startups, hence creating more jobs, bringing out more technologies, helping more companies etc....
Maybe do a more involved study, see how many are programmers, how many are sales people, how many are marketing people, etc etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men:_The_198
Eh, eight semesters in college at $400 in books per semester comes out to $3200. An extra $500 wouldn't make a huge difference, and would make biking up the hill much easier. ;)