skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, in an ideal world I'd be in favor of using something better than what we currently have as the default, but for now we have to strike a compromise -- SHA1 is about the "best" hash that's ubiquitously available on the platforms and Python versions we support. Down the road when we've deprecated a couple older Python releases and can rely on things like hashlib being available, it'll be time to talk about improving the default setup.

And, in the context of common use cases, I think it's probably an OK compromise -- I doubt somebody's going to devote the resources to plucking the password for a random blog, for example. Once you need tougher security, you can plug in whatever scheme you like for storing credentials and authenticating users which, anecdotally, most people seem to be doing when warranted (there are quite a few third-party auth backends floating around). And, really, if I were going to brag about anything, it'd probably be the ease with which you can do that -- one class with two methods, a settings tweak and (depending on your credential scheme) possibly a short form class that knows what the incoming data will look like, and you're done. Of course, I think we could make it even easier, so I won't be bragging about it just yet :)
I use ShoveBox, but then again, I'm biased.
Oh, I agree that some people are going to suffer because they overpaid for their houses, but you make it sound like every homeowner is in this same situation, which is definitely not the case.

I do agree this is going to be a drag on the economy, lots of people are going to lose real money. We built houses that people cannot afford, we built houses in the wrong areas etc... we had a massive case of malinvestment so of course there is going to be pain when it's corrected that is only natural.

Also a lot of people think houses are good investments, when most of the time they are not, in fact most people would be able to have a nicer place and save more money if they rented. Just because people believe something does mean it's true.

Edit: Also a lot of people may feel like they're losing money, because the artificially high price that they thought there house was worse is no longer there -- whether or not purchased a house in the last few years.
1.) mxmlc Main.as -> main.swf
2.) iilwy.com
3.) mxmlc main.as -> scp main.swf www.mysite.com/main.swf
It is not dominated by casual games it is now dominated by latest and greatest. It is still hard to find a computer at the store that can play games well without any additions for cheap by the relative consumer. Just the other weekend I had to add ram and a video card to my uncles computer to play half life 2 comfortably/smoothly and that game is from 2004.

Sure there is a market for board games and such but that is largely moving to flash/net based alternatives the real games are played on the xbox... it is hard to meet a person where I live that hasn't heard of halo or xbox but finding a person who plays video games on their computer is in the minority.
Right, but that's not the whole story. The 5 star system is probably a lot better suited to the sorts of things that Amazon sell (music, DVDs, electronics etc.). These ratings are not as time sensitive as a bar or restaurant ratings for example which could change entirely in the space of a very short period of time.
Why Membership Sites Make Such A Great Business Model For An Online Entrepreneur
The term membership sites refer to the fact that it is exclusively restricted for the use among the members. A membership site only allows its members to surf and view the inside contents of that particular site. Most of these membership sites are paid sites. The paid membership sites charge a nominal fee from the viewers who wish to be a member of that particular site.
Sounds like an entrepreneur trait.
Not a reason, but, is the reason. Unspoken, but commonly understood, paradox.
pg has said they fund as many great groups as they can find. So, if that's correct, then giving an additional point or two for being female founded, while assuming some base level of competence and dedication, is not "instead of" it is "in addition to".

Note that we're all speculating here. We don't actually really know anything about YC and female founded companies (except that the number of female founders amongst YC companies is strikingly low, but is representative of the applicant pool).
The Problem With Young Web Entrepreneurs
Poll: funded or not funded?
Since you guys seem to be in the mood to poll... What is the state of your startup?
Angel funded
VC funded
Bootstrap + ramen profitable
Bootstrap + break even
Bootstrap + in the red
YC funded
Since we're here, if there are women in the SF bay area who want to get together for a bring-your-project-and-work-on-it afternoon/evening, contact me.
Why do you assume that without the XBox 360 everyone would play Windows games? My guess is that more folks would buy a PS3 -- it's much more similar to the 360 than is Windows from a user's standpoint.

Presumably that is Microsoft's analysis as well. It could cost them a few sales on Windows and still be a net moneymaker. And the fact that 360 games are easy to port to the PC actually _helps_ the PC (while at the same time encouraging development for the Xbox).
FreeBSD 7.2 released
Release notes: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.2R/relnotes.html
High energy prices are good for whoever owns energy. Mostly it's countries with natural reserves. But there is nothing stopping anyone from investing in a way that ties his fate with theirs.

A house deteriorates too. You invest in upkeep. The difference between the two are: (A) you buy housing all at once and (usually) pay over time. (B) housing is a manufactured good while oil is a resource.

Sure it would be a difficult "adjustment" for those that saw their house as an investment if prices went into reverse in the long term. It would be a serious hit for those who are invested in multiple houses. But it would be a net win for society.

If you own a house that is going up in value, you win nothing unless you sell. Even if you sell, you are most likely to lose since most people upgrade rather then downgrade or move to renting. If house prices went off a cliff new buyers would win, upgraders would win and "investors" would lose. The long term nature of the product would mena that it would take time for the benefits to affect the averages, but over time people would need to spend less on houses. This would make them weathier.

The problem you describe is not inherent in houses. It is inherent in expectations. People made decisions based on expectation that houses are the best investment. That is the root of the problem. If the expectation had never existed, houses would be seen as goods and noone would be that worried about their house value going down. It would just be like buying an item at price X, one week before it goes on sale. That's not such an economic hit.
There comes a point when you're just circling the wagons, be careful of that.

My gut feeling is that this guy is right. This kind of stuff is above my pay grade, so if I'm wrong I'm wrong, that's the risk with intuition.

I think that important decisions need to be made on firmer grounds than 'pythonicity'. Reminds me of when PG talks about 'yellowism'.
While a simple scale rating system is just that, simple, anything more complex quickly exceeds the amount of effort both rater and searchers are willing to put in to understanding it. "Rate this restaurant on a scale of 1-10" is much simpler to understand than a massive questionnaire (even ratings on something like 3 or 4 axes may be too many/too much effort). It also has the advantage of being ambiguous enough that ANY opinion can fit into it -- you would be hard pressed to find the right kind of questions that fit all the different things that can be rated (What if you liked a place but didn't experience any of the specific things being asked about? Would you rate a movie theater on service if you never used the concession stand?). A site that didn't allow a reviewer to put in prose to explain their rating would be useless; I believe all the sites the OP talked about do. The rating scale is just meant to be a summary, each one is a summary of the thing being reviewed, and in aggregate it's a summary of the community's feel for the thing being reviewed.

When flipping channels looking at movies that are on, the star rating system is largely worthless because 1) it was most likely done by some paid movie buff who has inherently different motivations and likes/dislikes than I do and 2) there is no explanation as to the reasoning why a rating was given. It's all subjective measurements, and it can't be objective. The whole point of rating systems is opinion. It's just like asking a friend if a place is worth going.

Often times, the use case is "find something good with a minimal amount of hassle". This comes down to things like "places people liked that are within a mile of where I am right now". I have five minutes to make a decision on this, the single data point of a rating scale helps me make the decision quickly and (perceptually) accurately (it may not actually be accurate, but I feel like I'm making a good decision). These sites are also designed for repeat users and users being contributors. You learn the way other people have rated things on the site over time and are more able to decide for yourself what a "1 star" means vs a "5 star" means given the context.

I think a larger problem is getting people to want to expend the effort to provide a review of a place that they aren't extremely excited about (either positively or negatively). I know I don't bother to review places I had a so-so experience at, but if I had excellent service or really bad service, I make it a point to rate them. In some way, this skews the results, but is most likely isn't that big of a deal.

I don't know what the OP has in store for his next posting, but if it's truly revolutionary, he should be starting his own competing review service.
5 most Amazing world records on body Organs: Is it Possible
I don't think WA is going to get Cuiled.

Cuil results really were nonsense, and still are today. It wasn't some over-hyped bad publicity that was Cuil's downfall -it was their crappy software.

If WA is good, people will use it, and the talking heads won't have any say in the matter.
Nothing about his analysis is limited to local reviews -- the mean is a limited measure regardless, and the limitation of reviewers reviewing at different times is a function of the number of reviews per unit time, not locality. (They're correlated, obviously, but far enough out in the "long tail", even international reviews are going to be thin.)
World's Best Photographers and their Amazing shots
Have you ever heard of 'regression towards the mean'? On average, exceptional parents tend to have slightly less exceptional children.

In any case, there's no need to sit here and think up a priori explanations for this correlation. I'm afraid I don't have time to look them up right now, but I would guess that there have been studies done that examined the performance of adopted children of wealthy families, and I strongly suspect that these studies show that the adopted children perform comparably to biological children of wealthy families.
I've always thought 5 star rating systems were fundamentally flawed because they're based on the assumption that the same experience experienced by two different people will get the same star rating. For example, what might be a four star experience for me could be a two star experience for you.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer a probability system such as up and down votes. If I see a restaurant has 100 "likes" and 10 "dislikes" it's probable that I'll also enjoy the place (given the fact I already know they're serving food and drinks I would normally enjoy).
Come on ladies! get out and vote!
I already do this with an old linux box. You can also watch videos on a real TV rather than a little monitor.

Somebody needs to come out with a good, inexpensive way to interface with it. I have a wireless keyboard with a trackpad, but I don't like it and it was expensive.
If it might incite immediate violence, then there is a possible argument for limiting distribution of something that would cause or significantly aid violent acts. But the threat of violence would need to be imminent for it to be justified. If anything, though, better communication and information availability is often recognized as empowering to populations.
Legal zoom charges you on top of state fee's. Your state will normally charge you 4-500 bucks. Legal zoom will charge you 100-300 + state fee's.

The forms are easy enough to fill out yourself.
Fallacy in the first paragraph.

"Rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor" is not supported by the stated evidence of the growing income gap _ratio_. The ratio can increase even if the poor are becoming richer, so long as the rich are becoming richer faster.
Apparently Google can't win no matter what it does.
One thing to keep in mind of a LLC is that the annual franchise fee is not limited to $800. If you start to make money, you will need to pay a fee calculated based on the "gross" revenue, not "net" revenue (which is sales minus expenses). Also, you will need to pay self-employment tax on any money leftover.

I summarize some of the tradeoffs in the following ...

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/01/bootstrapping.html
I always start by looking at the code and trying to get an intuitive leap about the problem. But if it does not come the next step will often be to drop a breakpoint on the first line of the 7 or 8 functions involved run it and feel the flow. One of my specialties is embedded code in C/C++. Not even an OS necessarily. ISRs changing state behind your back, etc. Feeling the program run can be important. Seldom do you single-step. Often you drop breakpoints at the important points like the first line of a function or the first line of an iteration.

Depending on what you mean by "isolating ... programatically" it might be very similar to how I sometimes use unit-tests in general or the REPL when programming in a high-level language such as Lisp or Python.

The unit-test/REPL lets you play with functions on an individual level. Checking inputs and outputs. Slowly synthesizing more complex arrangements which approach the problematic arrangement actually found in the real code.

All of this is about augmenting your intuitive understanding of the code with real solid empirical data about the behavior of the program. If you can't explain a given bug your intuitive understanding is somehow wrong or lacking and often you'll see surprising behavior when you actually instrument the program. Those surprises lead you to the solution.
There's nothing wrong with asking users to rate things out of five. However, just seeing an out-of-five score is, indeed, pointless when you talk about products that can vary per-person and over time.

I'd suggest that the score be rendered as a Sparkline of aggregate-score-over-time, with a surrounding colored field, the width of which is the deviation for that aggregate sample point. Thus, you could see whether a five-star restaurant used to be a three-star at a glance, and see how many people disagree with the current rating with a simple visual geometric comparison.
I've heard that the approval process is sped up if you actually go to Sacramento and file in person. Is this true?
FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE announcement
I just us the editor I like the most that I also code with.
I understood that statement to be talking about class mobility. Obviously 'poor' and 'rich' are relative terms, not necessarily pegged to a specific amount of income or wealth.
The pleasure experienced while consuming products that happen to contain methamphetamine is a beneficial effect, no matter what the study says.

I don't think so.
Stephen Wolfram's not just modest - he's A New Kind of Modest.

Seriously, though - I can't help but think that no matter how brilliant Wolfram Alpha might be, it will never end up being as good as he thinks it is. I hope I'm proved wrong, but that unpleasant feeling has definitely coloured my opinion thus far.
Kind of surprising that Google is lowering the quotas. This seems like bad judgment that could anger a lot of account holders who will move from non-paying to paying.

It would have been much better to start out with low quotas and gradually raise them. What other freemium services have lowered the value of their free service? I can't think of a single one.

Imagine Gmail doing something similar and reducing their storage quota. It's unthinkable.
As a longtime slicehost customer, thank god for competition. Slice has been slightly overcharging for memory (my current bottleneck). I also don't use any of slicehost's (admittedly great) tools.

I'll probably think about reevaluating my server costs (about 300 mo) if slicehost doesn't boost their memory offering in the next few months. Especially using chef for scripted
infrastructure, all I'd have to do is change my ip list and rerun.
It's really easy to register an LLC in Pennsylvania, you can actually mostly do it online.
Looping should work better now. I pushed a new build.
So did he get in?
When the problem involves peers it has to be elevated to the next higher level for resolution. It is a management function called integration.
Makes sense. I'll keep that in mind if I make further updates to the simulator.
The reviews I have read of those lead me to reject them as an option.
It's not really a gift. They are plenty companies out there providing free service with some limitations just like GAE. It's called marketing.

I wouldn't deploy anything on GAE as long as Google is the only provider.
A new build has been uploaded. Gates now have a propagation delay.
Why selfish?

You'll be able to afford your house. Your friends will too. Your parents will still own the same house. So will their friends.

I don't think it should be any different to hoping ipods will be cheaper.
Arguable on the label reversal. As someone on Reddit explained, "a lightbulb accepts input, and switches and clocks produce output".
Steve Jobs at home in 1982
sigh I really oughtta learn linear algebra in my Copious Free Time....
So if you are attracting investors, why do they trust you? Or rather how to you measure success?
I had never heard of the idea of keeping a ring of rings for a limited stack trace (the "history"). It's my experience that seeing the last few calls in a backtrace is usually enough for me to see where I went wrong.
I agree, except that I think there's also a lesson to be learned from this piece about marketing -- dishonest marketing, sure, but there it is.

I found it interesting, so submitted. shrug
This is a meta-comment, and I'm meta-sorry for that, but I wanted to say that HN has got to be the only social news site that has articles sit at the top for some time before anyone comments on them.
Is it that people are actually reading and digest the content first?
Not sure if he's right with regards of building great company. We're also on our ways of solving our own problem at the moment.

So far, i can say that, the only concern that i personally have with solving our own problem is, "is it just us that have the problem or other people got the same issue?" (a.k.a is this a big enough problem where we should spend our valuable time on? or should we move to another project).

From my own experience, 2 benefits that i personally have with solving our own problems are: you understand exactly on what is the 80% of the pains and when things get tough, you can encourage yourself that worst case scenario is you use it yourself.
Unlock iPhone 3.0
I am looking to unlock iPhone 3.0. My iPhone is a 3G iPhone.If anyone knows of a website that has been proven to Unlock the iPhone 3G 3.0. Please comment.I have found this website but I do not want to buy without some real feedback.This will help massively as I am dying to use my new iPhone 3.0
Heh. No, your description does make sense, and made me laugh. Never do I feel more validated than when reading a Paul Graham essay, ("Guess who's not crazy?? Me!").

As I said above, I freely admit I'm oversensitive, something I probably share with many HN users. Maybe one reason I wince here at HN more than elsewhere is because I'd otherwise consider HN somewhat of an intellectual refuge, with peers. So when you read/hear something about you described as an Other, or somebody who should/does have traits different than you do (example: I don't like fashion.), you feel out of place, something I'd otherwise never feel at HN, a place I usually feel right at home at.

Anyway, I like your description of how it feels to read HN, pretty right on :D
Just out of curiosity: are you planning to centralize your operation?
That's why I believe there is such a low success rate of websites. The itch you are scratching is unlikely to be one that others will a) want solved and b) want to pay to be solved.

The best serial entrepreneurs (multiple 7+ exits) I know all have a structured approach to picking a project, and it always starts with a statistics backed market test of an either fake product or hacked together prototype.
This article seems kinda troll-y to me.

Why? Because even Yelp understands the "The man who drowned in the river whose average depth was 6 inches" problem, which is exactly why they offer both a histogram view of ratings, and an average-over-time graph. I frequently use both of those tools.

Now don't get me wrong there are all kinds of problems with 1-5 rating schemes, and there are probably better schemes out there. But what Yelp does is as good as any I've seen towards combatting the problem, which is why I enjoy using it.

As someone that took 4 semesters of business statistics in college, my personal favorite alternative scheme is paired-comparison, or even better yet, the related (and newer) MaxDiff algorithm [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxDiff]. The only problem with these schemes are that they require much more user input which frankly is a lot to ask for on a site like Yelp.
If I had to guess, the problem behind most failed companies (by young and old people alike) is building something people don't want.

Also, don't forget that it is the same fiddling around that leads young people to develop products that older folks could not come up with.

YC has a t-shirt that reads "Build something people want."
I think that both this article and the Wikipedia article are correct.

The LA Times took the more human-centric approach to the story, which from a technical perspective was just 'how many and which characters can we cut out to maximize the 128 bytes available'. It also highlights the person (or the person who lead the team of people) who actually extended the SMS control channel to include text messages.

I think that overall the story told by the LA Times is probably a lot more interesting to its readers than the tech behind it.
Defending Against the 2nd Worst Developer
Time and Space Tradeoffs in Version Control Storage
@zaidf At least the founders of the company must want their own product, like @hwijaya was saying. However that doesn't mean anybody else does.

Also a great quote on the need/want subject: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” [Henry Ford]
Yeah Twitter has no chance of threatening Facebook.

I'm not a Facebook fan but Facebook is making at least some money, allows much more than just 140 (?) character message broadcasts and has a lot more users with a much more diverse market share.
Ben Stein: The Sales Profession: Attention Must Still Be Paid
This entirely depends on the kinds of problems you try to solve.
That's why you test to see if your target customers have the problem and are willing to pay for it. Do this before building your product if possible (and it usually always is).