skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chatterous.com

Rather than rehash why I would.. I explained it not long back here: http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2009/03/dont-ignore-the-donator...

How much? At the moment Chatterous is probably worth... $50 a month to me - and probably more to the company I work at.

EDIT: I realise that verges on linkspam but otherwise I would end up writing an essay on why chatterous should offer "pay for" - and I already did that :P
Unfortunately, I think the community is about as likely to change.

I agree. They've had longer than anyone to figure out the "community" thing, and they've self-selected into near obscurity.
Twittering for dummies
Yes. But I don't think you need all the pieces to make a whole system. How about small electric rental cars, which you drive yourself to the destination and once you get there are remotely driven to the nearest parking/charging station? For practical purposes it's the same thing... and slowly you add some AI to the mix.

But they have to be small, cheap and can't depend on you driving them to a dedicated parking lot.

On the other hand it's perfectly ok if they never go past 40 mph and need recharging twice a day - as long as they don't need the "client" to take them to the fuel station.
A fuel efficient car / minivan with room for a family of 6 to take a road trip. There are no hybrid minivans :(
DRM Ends, Variable Pricing Begins for iTunes Music
A transition to nuclear is not fraught with hard technical problems and apprehensions... it is only fraught with apprehensions.

The problem of overcoming those apprehensions is much easier to solve than demanding that the unscalable solutions like wind or solar suddenly start scaling.

Part of what frustrates me about the whole energy discussion is that, frankly, we know the solutions, it's just that they aren't acceptable for non-engineering reasons, mostly irrational fears.

(I'm not saying all fission fears are irrational by definition, but most are irrational. On the internet, this often takes the form of people giving themselves cover by convincing themselves they are citing technical issues, but when it is pointed out that those issues already have solutions, their minds don't change. And most frustrating at all, the reason those solutions aren't acceptable is simply because Nuclear is Bad. Don't tell me about how to process waste or how to better store it, I already know Nuclear is Bad and I don't need to think any more about it...)

(And so help me... if any fusion ever becomes practical and people start complaining about it being nuclear, I think I will have to punch them.)
How about equity, do you get equity back too?
Not necessarily, but I get your point.

When I say Invoice.Select(1234) I want the data engine to query 20 nicely normalized tables and bring me back one object with the invoice I am looking for. The same when I say Invoice.Update()

Most DBAs are very jealous of their territory and rarely collaborate with programmers in how to make that process transparent to both of them.
Can someone figure out:

(1) What does "compatible with most major Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora" mean? It's a separate distro, right? I've never heard of one distro being "compatible" with another.

(2) Does the "media player" play DVDs?
Don't confuse a symptom for a cause. If going to college would have helped the 20%, they would have gone to go to college. Similarly, if it would have helped to skip college, the 80% would have had no qualms about doing so. The cause here is the motivation and skill of a winner that every self-made billionaire has. You're glorifying a symptom by idolizing dropping out of college.
I'd add, a halfway decent pizza in Havana.

When Cuba opens up, the first decent pizza place to go down there is going to make a killing!

Seriously, there the pizza is terrible, doesn't matter if you are in Havana, Santiago, or Gerona.
"How to/not to become a religious zealot of your favorite language"
Try AlphaLab http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550892
<blockquote>
mkxpud is an image generator, and a binary-level build system very similar to Woof of Puppy Linux.

We don't want to handle the package dependencies, so we just leverage APT/dpkg. When running mkxpud, it reads project config (called cookbook), parse it into package settings (called recipe), strips directly from a working Debian/Ubuntu Linux, extracts them into root filesystem and finally generates image.
</blockquote>
Your site gives me an error when I try to shorten "www.google.com"

It says that it wants an http:// in front.

You should probably fix that.
Outliers compared to the general population. The subjects here are billionaires; there are enough billionaires in the world to extract statistically significant patterns from that subject group. The article certainly doesn't do this, but you imply that billionaires as a group cannot be analyzed, which is not true at all.
Wasn't this an april fool's joke? I thought I saw it last week.
A combination proxy/script/something that'd pop up an interstitial task tracker/to-do list overview when I go to any of a list of "time-sink" sites. I can click "snooze" and go to the time sink, with the task tracker popping back up after 5,10,30 minutes, turn it off for a day or two, or click through to the detail/edit view for any task and get to work.
I think one of the defining characteristics that differentiates "good" from "great" is discipline. Good students possess great skills, but they lack discipline.

But in my opinion, discipline can be taught.
I think I'm going to try this tactic on my Match.com profile. It'll be interesting to see how many pageviews I get...
Far too often, unfortunately.
ha I tricked Obama.. I had our accounted take out extra money so I will get my tax rebate in one big chunk when I file taxes.
I would be surprise if Regan knew what was happening from day one. BIH Ron.
Good question - not sure I can answer ...

I've known lots of people who program/hack but who do so because they want results from computers, not because they are producing programs as product. They are people using computers as tools, and I would not class them as generic hackers.

I guess I meant people who program to produce programs as the main goal, as opposed to producing programs to perform an analysis and get results.

For example, I wrote programs for my Ph.D. and for the research positions I held afterwards. I wanted the answers from the computations. I didn't want the programs. These days I write programs to analyse data (of a specific and esoteric nature) and I manage people who write programs that form part of a product. They are generic hackers. I'm not.

This isn't, in my usage, a derogatory terms. I'm not implying that programmers are interchangable parts. they're not. Some of my team are gifted all-rounders. They choose, however, to write programs-as-products as their means of earning a living. Most, but not all, also write programs for fun. They're also not limited to web programming, or database programming, or spreadsheet programming, or any other domain specific work. They program generally, and can turn their hand to any domain, always with competent and workmanlike results, although not always as well as specialists from the area.

Does that make it clearer? Does it actually matter? I probably used the term to refer to people who can program generally, and in a wide variety of domains, as opposed to those that have limited experience, knowledge and ability. I'm no longer sure though, and don't think it really matters.

"Closed Mouths Gather No Feet." Perhaps I should've shut up ages ago ...
Codd did his job very well when he set the model 40 years ago based on set theory and predicate logic. It has to do with atomicity, redundancy, validity and integrity of data.

Any object you can imagine can be decomposed in atomic parts that can be stored individually with their respective relations to each other.
Back in Moscow, there used to be a lot of Students from UAE and Saudi. They were very rich (free scholarships), always drunk, never went to class and refused to graduate (even if they could) because they didn't want to go back home.
You(know, something's, always, bugged(me), with, python, and(other, programming, languages, for(that, matter)), but, I, can't, seem, to(remember, what, it, was))
Whether you moved forward with the idea or abandoned it, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and reasoning (rather than a plethora of yes/no responses).

What have you learned?
I think the worst student of all time when it comes to successful entrepreneurs is Richard Branson. He's always the example I give when talking about this sort of thing with friends.
I was really angry after reading this article. For the many reasons you will find in the other comments, debuggers are useful tools. It seems very arrogant to say that you don't need a debugger. Maybe the author's mentor was trying to train him to do better design or to desk-check his code.
Uh, good students (if you mean the ones that get good grades) have incredible discipline. Indeed, given a base amount of talent, discipline is all that is required.
Your post really sounds like you massively misunderstand the program.

You mention using the $15K in funding to buy a graphic design,or to pay for some PR. The idea behind the $15K in funding is (as I understand it, never having directly participated) is that it is just enough to cover reasonable living expenses. It is enough to take your mind off of "how will I pay my rent", but not enough to put your mind on "what clubs will I party at this weekend after I spend a day surfing (ocean surfing, not web surfing).

You make reference to Googleing obsessively on certain topics to learn. But how do you know that which you do not know? I've been involved in startups for years, and I still learned things in the very first Startup School ('05, I think), that I had never considered before. No amount of Google-fu would have been as efficient or effective. It is safe to assume that having 1-1 time with pg and his ilk would be massively more valuable than having direct access to Googles entire cache of startup-related data.

You also overly discount the value of what you label as "notoriety". No matter what you build, you have to get your message out there somehow. Being prefiltered as a valuable or insightful company can accelerate the growth of your product/company.

At the end of the day, YC and programs like it are not the only way to launch a company. But I think the value, especially to "entry level entrepreneurs" is pretty significant.
Remember when eggs were bad?

Does anyone think that an "egg tax" would have been eliminated when we found out that eggs weren't as bad as previously assumed?
continuing university and doing side projects, as is my habit
I definitely was not implying causation.

I was merely pointing out that the article takes the exceptions (dropouts that became billionaires) as the rule, when in fact the opposite is true: dropouts don't become billionaires; graduates do.

The article says the probability of becoming a billionaire increases if you are a dropout because 20% of billionaires are dropouts. But in fact, because there are many more people who didnt complete college than who did, this is even more wrong than if you didn't take that into consideration(which it seems the article didn't).

Like pretty much every article in any type of popular publication, the statistical analysis in this article is wrong. Not "somewhat off", but "wrong". Like, if I was a stat teacher, I would put "F" at the top of the page. Just like I put "F" in my mind on every CNBC or WSJ headline that says "Market drops because of...".

My comment was very short because if I put in much time debunking improper statistics I'd run out of time fast.
Debt at 106% of GDP.

Wealth entirely based on combination of oil and slave labor.

Unsustainable water supply situation.

I don't see much cause for optimism.
Anything on Tokyo Cabinet / Tokyo Tyrant
"Thinking in MapReduce"
(2) Does the "media player" play DVDs?

Probably not, since that's technically illegal.
18 months ago, I think. Abandoned that idea; now working at a job. I'll try a startup again with a different idea in the future.
> took issue with that, as I know I can copy a 1 terabyte drive in about an hour using my aging Macintosh (not the most efficient transfer).

That's 278 MB/s. I call bull. At best, they're merely confusing the prefixes.
Gained great traction and received funding from a top tier angel a month ago. Thanks for asking - it is an interesting thought experiment to look back and consider "alternative" futures.

Because we did not get into YC, we were able to iterate freely on a big idea and get to where we are right now. But we took longer than expected in a much more painful way.

My sense is that if we did get into YC, we would have a much easier time, but probably would have settled on a smaller goal.

Worth pondering over.
Twitter should give you tinyurl previews
Clearly, I'm comparing it to the general population. Of course you can take any data set, look only at the outliers, and try to get some patterns. But almost everyone reading this is in the general population. I'd also bet they want to be billionaires.
Very interesting! So people really get so frantic as to not understand that someone is trying to save them. Reminds me of Survival by John Wyndham (good, quick read of sci-fi horror). The ending was not so scary as it was baffling.
A device that could accurately measure caffeine intake, levels present in the body, and the strength of your bodies resistance. I know if I have another cup of coffee at 4PM, the quality of my code will be much better. What I never know is if it will wear off in time for me to get a normal nights sleep. :)
I'm guessing that will be a favourite to recommend to others, too :)
Re photocopier: I don't want to give away the answer and spoil it for those who may want to think about it, but photocopiers do not shine light through paper. When I say "from first principles" I mean - think about the task accomplished by a photocopier, and the general means by which it does that. Deduce from that what must happen when it photocopies a mirror.

And when I say "well-designed", early copiers had some undesirable characteristics which have now been eliminated. I can't think of any more to say without giving away the answer.

And to the question of the TM:

Part of the assumption is that we have an NP problem, hence we have an algorithm (in the technical sense) to verify an alleged solution. By definition that algorithm must run in polynomial space and time. That means the graph only needs to be polynomial in size.

More specifically, for each cell on the tape have a vertex for each possible symbol. Arrange logic gates so that exactly one of them will be "1" and the others will be "0".

Now also have a set of vertices for the states, and arrange that exactly one will be "1" with the others "0".

Make a copy of this, and connect with gates so that the second copy is forced to be the state of the tape and machine after one step. Repeat as many times as there are steps in the algorithm, which is polynomial.

In short, we're not converting an arbitrary TM. For a given instance that needs checking the TM is of finite size and runs for finite time, so the graph to color is finite. If it can't be colored the problem has no solution. If it can be colored, the coloring gives you the answer, appearing at its inputs.

Please, ask if there's anything still unclear. It's nice to reactivate the associated mental pathways.
Cocoa with Love: 8 Confusing Objective-C Warnings and Errors
"Writing a Compiler in 24 Hours"
What strikes me most is that Toyota has been doing that for years, preparing themselves for the future (now present) while GM was sitting on its fatass giving millionaire executive bonuses watching the economy collapse.
Ask HN: Invite-only beta test management platform?
With everyone and their dog creating a web app these days, and with 75% of them running invite-only beta tests, it boggles my mind that no one has released the code for their beta test management system (i.e., collecting and management invites, creating and releasing beta invite codes, etc.).

Yet, I can't find anything.

The closest thing I have been able to find is http://www.prefinery.com/ which is a SaaS app for managing beta tests. Surely there must be others, though? Certainly someone must have put up their beta management code on Github, right? Maybe someone's created a Rails plugin for this? Something?

Or does everyone just roll their own...? To me, there seems to be an opportunity here.
Engine Yard Hiring to help build the cloud
I desperately wish i could find top level tropical and non-tropical fruit of many varieties here in Houston. I love fresh fruit but mangos from Mexico are not that great and the lack of variety gets old.
Paused the idea I applied with for now; will revisit once I have the skills to code it up in a very short period of time (<20 man-hours) as well as figure out an intuitive UI for its functionality.
Disk IO Performance: EC2 vs Mosso vs Linode
PriceAdvance.com is a YC interview reject from Fall 07. We went to our interview with a prototype. After the rejection call, we had a few beers and discussed next steps. We started development the following week and launched about 2 months later. Our application recently passed 250K downloads and has received a decent amount of press. We are now covering monthly expenses and should be profitable soon.
An intelligent agent that would hunt up best comment threads from lots of news aggregator and other discussion sites.
Oh my god, hear hear.

Went to a "Mexican" place in Vienna (I'm an American expat) a few months back and it was horrible, terrible, frightening.

Somebody ordered the spare ribs (!) and they crackled as you pulled them apart.
Teleportation device. Sign me up today!
I've been using EC2 and more recently App Engine. While AE isn't suitable for things like render farms, if you are in a situation where you could use it, I would really recommend trying it out. No longer will you have to even think about how many servers you need, how much space you need or such considerations. You just magically have enough.
I wanted to apply last fall but my day job prevented me from building anything demoable in time and, being in Russia and not having any hacker reputation (I'm bachelor of Economics, worked in management consulting) I figured I had no chance to get in.

My job was steadily taking about 14 hours a day and some of the weekends so in December I eventually quit in order to keep my sanity, then started learning PHP, MySQL, nginx, etc. and by now I've came close to releasing alpha (a couple of weeks, I think).
A cheap and noninvasive device that can monitor and record a bunch of metrics would be great!

I would love to be able to graph my cholesterol, BP, heart rate, etc. over time. It is a shame i can monitor my car more easily than I can my body.
Beers are awesome after rejections. ;)
I took issue with that, as I know I can copy a 1 terabyte drive in about an hour using my aging Macintosh (not the most efficient transfer).

Oh, really? Really? 1TB is 1million MB (according to HDD manufacturers, let's not get into that debate again) so even with a relatively current and snappy drive and controller you're looking at about 100MB/s net. That's about 10000 seconds or roughly 3 hours to copy. You'll get faster speeds with SAS drives, but far from all hosting sites use them, and I doubt the author's "aging" Mac does.

That's not counting the labour of documenting/tracking the origin of the drive, actually hooking it up to the target equipment, etc. The authorities could probably be handling much of this investigation a lot more delicately, but give them some credit on this side of things.
Where have all the graduate students gone? (2002)
"18. The WebOS. It probably won't be a literal translation of a client OS shifted to servers. But as applications migrate to servers, it seems possible there will be something that plays a central role like an OS does."

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

I'll know it when I see it, and when I see it, I'll happily pay for it.

It has something to do with CMS + federated, micro social networks. One should be able to easily migrate + back up one's "OS" to another provider, or even run the OS in parallel between two providers.

I know this is vague, but I feel the absence of something like it.
I'm looking forward to the next article a week from now how the popularity of this post even further proves...
As always, cost matters.

If you're trying to get folks into a part-time vehicle to save gas, that vehicle must cost under $3k. It is unlikely to be a big success if it costs more than $1,500.
I want a desktop computer with a docked netbook. The files, programs, and program configuration on the netbook should auto-sinc with the desktop. Large files should be easy to stream from the desktop to the netbook. The netbook needs to have an embedded, fast cell network data connection.

I might be able to build this myself with a MacPro, a router, a COTS netbook, hackintosh, dropbox, etc.

I'd probably have at least 2 30 inch displays for the desktop, making the total cost in parts ~$8K. Companies would be wise to pay $10K for this kind of setup.
The problems with nuclear are not so much technical as economic. Moody's Investor Services, hardly an outfit run by hippie freaks, estimates that a new nuclear plant will cost over $5,000 per kilowatt to build--twice as much as solar and four times as much as natural gas. The government is offering massive subsidies to build nuclear plants and power companies still don't want to take the plunge.

Source: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.blake.ht...
An online memorial for a dead relative.
Hiring: Front End Engineer, Ruby on Rails Developer
I work at BleacherReport.com and we are currently looking for a Lead Front End Engineer and a senior Ruby on Rails developer.

More details: http://www.bleikamp.com/2009/03/23/are-you-an-awesome-engineer/

You'd be one of the first 25 employees and one of the first ~10 engineering hires.

We have (very) competitive salaries, we're venture backed, and we are one of the 20 biggest Rails sites in the world. We are growing quickly and want people with significant experience working on big sites.

ben.bleikamp [at] gmail
It's not just GUIs. We're still typing (or cut&paste) into search boxes.
3 Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup Out of School
It is not really a question of authority. I don't try to exert authority over my kids and I certainly did not grow up feeling that my parents have exerted control over me. On the other hand, Asian family (and perhaps true also with other immigrant family) tend to have a tighter social network by comparison so perhaps that could be mis-interpreted. The point of my original comment is that it is really more an issue of communication. Parents have a hard time understanding children as well. It is a two-way mirror.
I'd buy a CDMA iPhone. Forget ATT's slow and spotty GSM 3G. Bring on CDMA RevA.
for example: CDNOW
How ironic.

When we interviewed at YC, we were told that "selling products online is depressingly orthogonal to good design".

We gave a competitor's site (http://bit.ly/15mzF) as an example to compare with our site (http://stylous.com/).

We were told that "they probably understand things about user behavior that you guys don't"

I guess "High Production Values" (http://bit.ly/oC5Y8) and "Make Your Site Easy" (http://bit.ly/YYfr) don't apply anymore.

(To be fair, there were other reasons we weren't accepted.)
Two years later your data is an inflexible mess with subtle integrity errors here and there.

Well yeah, if you do it wrong, it doesn't work.

You get to skip the laborious step of developing a proper relational schema and setting up mechanisms to ensure integrity.

Basically, every program needs to ensure consistency of its in-memory structures. If you have invalid data in memory, you can't trust your program to return correct results. With an OODB, you reuse these integrity checks for your data model. With a relational database, you have to specify your constraints a second time.

Twice as much code == twice as many bugs.