skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.yumbunny.com (dating site)

Firefox 63%
IE 24%
Safari 5%
Chrome 5%
Opera 3%

http://bug.gd (error search engine)

IE 55%
Firefox 38%
Chrome 3%
Opera 2%
Safari 1%

http://tinyarro.ws (world's tiniest URLs)

Firefox 59%
Safari 21%
Chrome 7%
IE 7%
Opera 3%
Mozilla 2%
Mobile 1%
Why Yahoo Is About To Fire More Yahoos
For the "Facebook is worth zero"/"lol no business model" crowd, I'd like your answer to these two questions:

1. At what valuation would you invest in Facebook?

2. Why is your number so different from that of people who have a lot more information than you? Are you that much smarter?
It looks like Microsoft may be falling in step with this thought: Server 2008 can be installed as Server Core, text only, no GUI. It seems to be starting to blur differentiation with other text-base, command line interfaces.
> WTF? That never happened. The Romans defeated the Huns at Chalons and were then conquered by Goths a few decades later.

We're discussing superpowers here, not military battles. The Hunnic Empire overtook Rome in power and size long before Rome fell. However, after the battle at Chalons the Roman army was fatally weakened, it didn't help that the Vandals sacked Rome for 14 days only 2 years after the battle at Chalons. Sucks to be Roman when coincidental invasions happen, I guess.
It's not that the act is fundamentally unthinkable. It's the preponderance of evidence against this being an intentional plan.

Amazon is a progressive company. They're headquartered in Seattle, a fairly progressive city. Their employees do not enjoy being treated like pariahs.

Amazon's best customers tend to be highly literate people who react to book-banning like they've been personally knifed. And Amazon is smart: The company knows that authors and publishers watch their Amazon sales rankings on an hourly basis (if not minute-by-minute) and will commence an immediate shitstorm if those rankings change in an unusual fashion, let alone vanish. Amazon would have an explanation ready. They would roll any change out carefully. They would have approached someone in the publishing industry to discuss such a drastic move before making it.

Because -- most importantly -- Amazon has a big financial incentive not to ban books. Amazon makes money by selling books. Every GLBT book they don't sell is money they don't make. If they were going to bow to pressure and take thousands of titles off the site the pressure would have to be really costly. Hence, presumably, quite visible. Where is it? And wouldn't the company have tried negotiation, first? Taken one or two shocking-looking titles off the list and then publicized that fact? Or tried the case in public, where librarians and publishers of (nearly) all stripes could help them push back against the pressure?

The very fact that the act blew up so quickly is evidence of how stupid it was. And it's impossible to believe that Amazon is really that stupid. (Though, as has been pointed out, it is easy to believe that an AI is that stupid. Be careful when letting AIs make your business decisions.)
3D UIs are not necessarily bad. They are not suited to a 2D display. Solve that problem and you might be able to implement an actual 3D UI.
Thanks for the feedback. We could see that being confusing... we'll fix it!
10 easy steps to writing the scariest cyberwarfare article ever
I've been saying this for the "evaluation" for quite a long time now.

Microsoft will probably end up buying them for "free" in 2-3 years.
Combsort - An alteration to bubblesort compared to quicksort
Personally, I'm not too fussed if Mozilla goes in a crazy direction and Firefox loses popularity now. It's served its primary purpose by opening competition in the browser space which was dominated by Internet Explorer and turning it into a true open platform available on multiple operating systems and encouraging the development of the web and open standards. The Webkit-based browsers (Safari, Chrome) and Opera also exist and are at least at parity with Firefox. Even Internet Explorer isn't that bad these days.

As a mockup, I strongly dislike it. It's trying to be "fashionable and prominent" by imitating iTunes rather than thinking that people want a lightweight minimalistic browser that stays out of the way and doesn't interrupt your workflow. Hell, I'd argue that's what people actually want from a music player, but no-one has yet to come up with a viable user-friendly option that does that, music players are free, and too many people have had their hand forced by Apple lock-in to make innovation easy.

I firmly think Firefox has been getting worse and I blame 'interaction designers'. All of FF3.5's innovations are pretty terrible: I find the fact you can't close the final tab frustrating, the moving "add tab" button is annoying and poor for usability (since it's hard to discover as it keeps moving), and Firefox's private browsing mode and tab tearing are both outright half-baked and nowhere near as pleasant to use or as intuitive as Chrome's. Their treatment of self-signed SSL certificates still leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth as it shows that those in charge of ease-of-use only care about flashy features and not core functionality that prevents startling the user with features with cryptic error messages. Even after using the combined history button in FF3 for months, I still find jumping forward to pages frustrating and unintuitive, I think it's terrible they still don't provide a UI for removing custom words accidentally added to your Firefox dictionary, their support when accessing RSS feeds in-browser is still hilariously poor compared to every other browser, and still think the Manage Search Engines dialog is unnecessary clunky. It's increasingly as though they're not trying to solve the real problems I have in Firefox but rather focusing on needless annoying flashy features directed by some self-proclaimed "usability guru".

If this is implemented, I'd probably either move back to Opera, a browser I haven't used since the early versions of Firefox (then called Phoenix) was released, stick with FF3, or await the inevitable fork.

That said, I don't understand their sudden obsession with innovation. Mozilla have never been innovators, least of all when it comes to their UI. They've grabbed low-hanging fruit (e.g. extensions which you basically get for free via Mozilla's design, spell checking) or reimplemented the features of other browsers, mainly Opera's, and got the credit for them (e.g. tabs, download manager, search engine integration, AwesomeBar, Private Browsing).
there's a bunch of wheels like this. the omniwheel and others. generally I think these are holonomic wheels - neat stuff.
A twitter witch-hunt? That's a "twitch hunt"!
A lot of companies team up with universities, and both contribute towards applied research.

I think this is ultimately the best approach, because if you just give academia a bunch of money they will waste it all publishing papers on string theory.
I think this sorta thing is more data-structure-ey than code-ey.
Stupid somewhat on topic question: how are we supposed to understand the parallel existence of python 2.x and python 3?
I know it doesn't help you at all, but I thought I'd toss mine in there:

1 Mozilla 92.7610%
2 Microsoft 6.1730%
3 Safari 0.5710%
4 Other 0.2514%
5 Google 0.1807%
6 Netscape 0.0502%
7 AOL 0.0088%
8 Opera 0.0040%

I guess you could call us a little bit unusual. The site is www.mozilla.com ;) I'll be happy to see the day when those numbers are the same on yahoo.com or youtube.com.
I'm not sure that's a non-controversial point. Dell or BetterWorldBooks & many others were essentially selling stuff on Ebay to start.

This post brings up simple & important points: (a)Of all the businesses being started in the world, only some are of the Silicon Valley cluster type. (b) Not only the Silicon Valley cluster type of business benefit from the changes you describe (again in previous essays): reduced cost of starting up, ability to grow without that much capital, & suitability or small teams.

As you mention, the definition of a startup is problematic. But maybe your definition is biased in a way that equates 'should move to Silicon Valley' with 'Startup' more then is necessary.

I meet with quite a few small businesses starting now. They are generally not the type that will be acquired making multiple founders immediately rich. But many of them are viable, wealth producing & potentially successful. Probably none of them will move to the Valley. Few or none are part of this 'startup' sub-category of new businesses.

But I think they might still be part of this same high resolution revolution. They are following business models that did not exist 10 years ago. They are (i think) proliferating for the same reasons that 'true startups' are proliferating. The are enabled by cheaper starting costs, ease of reaching markets, easy outsourcing. These are all derivative of the same cheaper hardware, free software, smaller teams, communication technology, etc.
It was killed, but someone posted how they had hacked amazon.com.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560075

Do you feel that he was faking it?
Since you are someone who is seriously into postgres, can I ask you, how do you deal with the lack of a serious solution for replication / hot standby? Why is this not a more pressing issue for the postgresql developers?

I ask this in the following context: I frequently argue for postgresql but in a majority of cases it gets shot down because MySQL is perceived to have a better solution for maintaining hot standby and people actually care about availability more than all the other retarded issues MySQL has put together. Unbelievably, after losing the publicity war with MySQL, postgres actually seems to now be proceeding to lose the technical war on one single issue ... yet I don't see much urgency in the postgresql camp to care about this.
To be fair, the "right thing" would have been to never develop it in the first place, or to have started with making it opt-in and promoted the hell out of it.

Deliberately breaking the way the internet works and then, later, changing your ways after everyone tells you how annoying you are isn't really being a good neighbor.

The bar was (and is) jarring and annoying and breaks the way things are supposed to work. I barely put up with that sort of thing from the free internet connection at Denver International, and at least they have an excuse (free internet but you have to watch ads, seems fair.)
A big shot marketing guy at my day job (large company) started promoting Yammer as a "great way to share ideas and information".

But, no proprietary or internal only communications please, since its on offsite servers.

WTF?
Given the prior assumption that introverts are generally more intelligent than extroverts, we can actually make the argument that this has already happened. For example, rather than lobbying for lower prices from Microsoft or filing antitrust lawsuits, geeks invented GNU/Linux and created Google. Rather than attempting to play the extrovert's game of socializing and interacting face-to-face, introverts invented the internet, which is the single most pervasive form of communication today and happens to be a medium where anonymity is the norm and extroverts are unable to gain an advantage with their superior skills at non-verbal communication. I think technology has probably changed the world and the way people behave way more than any politician has.

Of course, that is assuming that geeks are mostly introverts, which is by no means a given. As a previous poster has said, the introvert/extrovert divide is probably a false dichotomy. I think it's more likely to be a spectrum than a binary categorization.
I liked Nancy Kress' sci-fi suggestion in her "Beggars of Spain" sleepless series. Gene-enhanced people who no longer need to sleep (along with more future gene enhancements) find speaking too slow. They begin to craft thought objects that they transmit to each other that express whole spheres of information at once.

Wouldn't the interface that was developed using book-based prediction, where the user just navigates forward towards the most likely letters/words, completing the words/sentences, be a step forward along this approach?

(Sorry, I can't find the link, but I know I read about it and watched the video from a link on HN).
Their growth of their user base, IMO, is seriously degrading the service though. I get repeated login failures through timeouts and whenever this happens I'm lucky if I'll even get on Facebook, now I usually check my messages through my email because it's faster to start Thunderbird than to try logging into Facebook. This then means facebook makes less money off of me.
Don't disagree there, but you cannot explain evening spent talking, Sunday mornings watching birds, Friday evenings in the library, walks explaining why leaves are green and the beauty of mathematics. In other words, how do you distill 20 years into an argument, when no one else was there to experience a second of it? I can't.
So you believe that "government cannot calculate, ever" is bullshit?

If government can calculate the allocation of resource then it invaildated the entire concept of anarcho-capitalism.

This seem an unlikely hypothesis because government tend to listen to political talking points rather than economic talking points. Whatever is political prudent tend to not be neccesary economically prudent.
Londiste from skytools (backed by skype) is an excellent replication product that matches mysql replication. We use it, it's bulletproof and dead easy to administer.

However the lack of hot standby is definitely a keenly felt issue...it can take an entire day to warm up a new slave.
Actually he's doing quite well and growing, which is why I was surprised and am still considering that deal. As long as I place a minimum amount on that rev share dollars expected then the deal would have great upside.
Two issues, one with design, the other with your algorithm.

Design-wise, I'm no expert but you need to make better use of space. The grey boxes are spaced too closely together, and the text in each box is too close to the border. The uneven vertical dimensions of each group of boxes is subtly disturbing and stops me taking in the content. Your colour palette is a bit odd too.

Algorithmically, you're relying too much on your "authority" rankings. The result is that the top of your site is over-stuffed with HN links. My solution would be to assign an "exhaustion" parameter to each source. Each time your algorithm picks the next article to show, it increments the exhaustion parameter for that source. Then you can just subtract the exhaustion parameter from the authority score in order to give other sources a chance for the remaining space on the page. Tweak the weighting of the parameter to taste.
The high costs of running YouTube
Your valuation is only worth something if you can cash out to that amount. Just because somebody says you're worth $2B, doesn't mean you can necessarily arrange a clean exit in that ballpark.
The use of bodily expressions for states of mind
Okay this isn't as bad as I first thought from the title. I was thinking USSR style where the government forced more workers into farming than using technology.

This looks like the Japanese government is trying to protect its agriculture industry, which a complete collapse of agriculture can be dangerous for a country. The USA has energy dependency, would you really want food dependency?
Why is your number so different from that of people who have a lot more information than you?

People who are a lot smarter and had much better information than me thought that loaning $300,000 to a minimum wage immigrant (one anecdote among hundreds of thousands) was a highly profitable business, too. For eight of the last ten years they were looking pretty prescient now weren't they.
The point of the article is kind of subtle. The research is pointing out that excluding genetic factors, parents don't really matter. So parents do matter in the sense that they are the gene providers but not in the sense that they are the jean providers.
Firefox 72.35%
IE 11.36%
Chrome 05.39%
Safari 05.26%

The blog is about Zend Framework, PHP, jQuery, etc.
Paul, out of interest, at what phase do you think the term "startup" changes to "business"? It's pretty clear when there's an IPO or a big aquisition, but what about companies that just steadily build their revenue like 37signals? I wouldn't call them a startup now, and they dismiss the term as arbitrary and favour simply "business".
Free Microsoft pro products and trainings for students
"Certain types of (non-violent) parenting suppress the influence of peers completely, but no types of (non-violent) peers could suppress the influence of that sort of parenting at all."

Wow, I guess she must have completely missed the studies showing this. From the article:

"Despite the reduction in physical punishment, today’s adults are no less aggressive than their grandparents were. Despite the increase in praise and physical affection, they are not happier or more self-confident or in better mental health. It’s an interesting way to test a theory of child development: persuade millions of parents to rear their children in accordance with the theory, and then sit back and watch the results come in. Well, the results are in and they don’t support the theory!"
From the release notes: This is the second bugfix release of the Python 2.6 series. Python 2.6 is now in bugfix-only mode; no new features are being added. Dozens of bugs that were reported since the release of 2.6.1 have been fixed.
1) I wouldn't. It's simply not something I'd put my money into. For lots of reasons you clearly wouldn't agree with, which is fine, you can invest your money in it.

2) Like those people who invested in the bonds backed by subprime mortgages? Or the people who invested big in the first bubble? Or the people who are really just playing with other people's money? What makes the group of people who think Facebook is somehow worth billions smarter than those groups? Only time will tell. It's a big gamble on either A) Facebook monetizing their traffic to the tune of a few billion dollars or B) finding BIGGER suckers down the road to buy/merge/invest in/buy the stock of/etc... A is imho a big gamble, and B is imho both a gamble and a poor way to do business (not poor $ wise, but banking on big suckers seems unethical to me somehow). All of it is unattractive as a way for me to wager my money.

I also don't bet on boxing or horse races. Am I that much smarter than people who do? Hard to say.
It's not a matter of studies, it's a matter of parents having full control over who young children meet or do not meet, whether the children leave the house or not, etc
Can you extend that observation to the adopted kids you know? The adopted children I know are far less like their parents than the biological children I know. Granted, the adopted children I know were not implanted in their adopted mothers' wombs, so it's not a perfect comparison, but I definitely think it's worth thinking about. Observation about parents and children who are biologically related doesn't seem to me to be particularly informative when thinking about nature and nurture.
1 - I'm no investor, I prefer to spend my money building things :) But nonetheless, I wouldn't invest in a company unless I saw a road to profitability - doing otherwise is playing the hype/bubble game, and we all know how well that works.

2 - Do they have more information than us? They might have concrete operating costs, revenue, etc, but I'm convinced that many analysts haven't a clue how the internet works.

Historical perspective also works too: remember the last dotcom crash? Those companies were being valued in the billions by a large number of analysts who "know a lot more" than the average joe. Hell, kicking and screaming against ridiculously absurd valuations at the time was a minority voice.
No need to bring immigration status into it. Frankly loaning huge sums of money to people with poor credit ratings and not enough income to pay it off with if they wanted to was a horrible idea, and yet tons of "smart" people made it their primary business. And yes, some of them actually got very rich from doing it. Doesn't mean I want to do business like that.
4chan hacker discusses the manipulation of the Time poll
In the future after we meet certain milestones I'd never contemplate such and offer. However, for an early stage startup that is ramping up sales to internally finance its growth I think its necessary to consider such offers.
So is this data from the US or worldwide? I couldn't really gather it from the article
Python 3 made some critical changes that are incompatible with older 2.x code.

I believe 2.6 is meant to make it easier to transition from older python code to version 3.
You've now described your experiences. I'm perfectly willing to accept that it seems to you that that's what happened. But did it happen that way?

Once upon a time I talked to this guy, and he runs a group of Objectivists, and says he's a huge fan of Ayn Rand, and how much her books influenced him. And he talked a bit about his life. And you know what? He had lived it roughly in the opposite way to what one of Rand's heros would have done. He played it safe, didn't stand up for his values, settled for less, cared what others thought of him, didn't have the drive to pursue difficult goals, etc

He thought he was strongly influenced by something, and lived his life by it, and he'd failed to notice how little he acted on that influence.

Such stories are common. I have no idea if your interpretation of what influenced you is correct or not, but I do know that people often are mistaken about these things.

Suppose you were genetically programmed, and part of that programming made you think your parents were important. Couldn't that account for your experiences too? (I think it could not, but only due to some philosophical arguments. I think your experiences don't contradict the genetic theory.)
I think he just needs to place the ads properly. Those link ads, in my experience, are wonderful.
I agree. Furthermore, I don't think Asian teachers necessarily have a special knack for controlling kids. I behaved well in class (I'm Asian, btw) because I knew my mother would beat the shit out of me if she heard anything bad from my teachers about me.
English text reads from Left-to-Right. So it would make sense to put tabs and not use the iTunes navigation bar -- it would be a waste of real estate.
There's nothing brilliant about atheism. It's just as scientifically dishonest as religion.
Where is this $20 million/month figure cited from?
I'm hardly a researcher, but I've written my share of dense academic papers as a student.

I remember not trusting my own ideas if they didn't seem written in a 'smart' enough way. I almost thought if something could be written simply, it was too simple.

So I'd re-word my sentences until I came up with something appropriately jargon-filled and wordy. Then I'd feel better about it.

I guess it comes down to trusting yourself.
Nobody seemed to mention (in a quick read) that the local/legal environment influences whether startups fly or not. Boston was a startup hub well before Silicon Valley was flying, but it's my understanding that IP and labor law in MA is (far?) more favorable to the employer than the employee - as compared to California.

If you're going to look for an environment that has "movement" of ideas and people, the environment has to be conducive to this. California has done well, but might strangle itself on commuting costs, the lack of infrastructure and the costs of living there.

It'll be hard for states to favor new vs. old businesses, but there's 50 of them out there, and a number of them will probably give it a go at some point.
Peeping into PostgreSQL
Need to probe your PostgreSQL database for some stats? Here are a few useful queries and as easy way to commit them to memory.