skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If only Microsoft had hired me about 5 years ago. I would have started several top secret projects that would essentially rebrand each of Microsoft's products (OS/Office/Search) in an attempt to gain the kind of underground support that Google enjoyed in the late 90's.
3 Cushions, a Million Guests
On the same HN page, couple items a part is the link to the article "New Research Finds Business Plans Are Virtually Useless: Advice to Entrepreneurs: Perfect the Business, Not the Business Plan" (http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/news/releases/2009/040809.aspx).

This article said to have a larger sample size or 700 dot-com companies from the late-1990s to early-2000s boom era. Is this an example of interpretation of statistics?
The American Lung Association, because my wife once had a severe lung infection.
Just curious: Are you now a true believer in the "single exit always" doctrine (as well as whatever the other 37 rules were) or are you just saying that the benefits of enforcing discipline on the developers' output outweighed the disadvantages of having cargo-culted and dogmatic code standards?
Hey - I work for 80legs as well so thought I'd chime in and answer this question (westside is grabbing some food). We have thought about offering easy integration with AWS, but we'd probably implement this at a later time if we decided to go that route.
Pretty cool stuff. My only objection is that it's easy to explain this stuff in algebra, explaining it in plain English is a nice exercise for the reader. ;)
Ask HN:  How is Loopt making money?
Anyone know?
Functions/methods that call themselves, as opposed to having a higher-level function that takes a function as an argument and does something recursive with it.

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-11-2...
Change the world.

/for the better I would hope
No, but I really want that to. We have a bookmarklet that is sort of similar, but not quite there. I know of one tool being built with our API, that will be released soon that solves this problem. We'll mention it on our blog when it comes out.
Funny joke, but didn't FB say they would be profitable in 2010?
no offense but 'end user kind of thing' isn't always where the money is at, b2b is the real money.

of course you are right there aren't a thousand people like jobs, you'd be lucky to find 1, but the point of it is that there are plenty of people to fill his position, you just want to find half his brilliance. however, if your product is abysmal crap nothing will save it, not even Jobs. In fact part of the reason Jobs is so good is he'll cut your product, and you, for doing a crappy job.
I don't think that's fair at all. Meg failed to extend the eBay brand into non-English speaking countries, and didn't extend the platform in any meaningful ways. Sure, not everything Google's touched has turned to gold, but Google Apps, Gmail (a two year incubation before the 4/1 release), App Engine, and a bunch of other things have been moderately successful. There's no parallel at eBay to any of those things.
New approach to splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen
Some programmers out there can do a decent job with just copy & paste...like me :-)
We teach entrepreneurship as if every vertical market had the same set of rules
Judging by the comments, quite a few people in Europe seem to be interested in a summer internship. But we face a shortage of suitable startups in the area.

What do you think of creating our own workplace? Imagine five to ten hackers coming together for a few months. We'd rent a flat, hack together, perhaps do some consulting work to be Ramen sustainable. (No communism implied. We'd go Dutch on the costs.)

After getting to know each other and feeling comfortable, people could split into small teams (three members or so) and create startup-projects, if they want to.

Any thoughts? Please drop me a line at matthias.goergens@gmail.com
I tried doing that too, but writing a parser was a pain in the ass in C. I was going a little crazy trying..

I do a lot of numerical things for my masters, and I want to write a simple numerics language that is heavily JIT compiled to speed up the code. Most numerics is done in pretty tight loops (at least everything I see), so I'm hoping to get pretty good performance. Its also just fun to read about VMs and armed with a parser, it won't be as hard to target different ones and compare performance.
The day FB charges money for a premium account is the day all the competing networks start promoting their service as "100% free".

I think Zuck, and FB in general are stuck in the mindset that they want to 'change the world' with their application. Being profitable is simply uninteresting to them, just like picking up a nickel off the sidewalk is not worth the trouble for you and I (we have better things to do).

FB's stated goal is to have between 1-2 billion users, with lofty goals like that, making a little money now is a low priority.
One word: awesome.
I want to use more lightweight VMs for that, those that blend into native OS more easily

Well, it's a tradeoff, right? With the JVM, because of the separation from the OS, you have that write-once-run-anywhere interoperability?
Lisp's reputation has a tenuous connection to reality; even so, I see no connection between it and the problem being discussed here (name collisions) which doesn't come up in CL. If anyone does make that argument, I'd like to see it: it would appear to require even more obtuseness than usual.
Google is still basically a one-product company: Adwords. (AdSense is very successful, but far less profitable).

Are Adsense and Adwords not just two sides of the same coin? One could not exist without the other.
This is probably due to a longer trend going on since the 70s, where the rise of the programmer, hacker and software enginner started. They don't care about the business.

Stereotypes are fun!
I donate mostly to EFF, but should donate to more.

http://www.charitynavigator.org/
Ask HN: What software do you use for managing communications with media/blogs?
We've been working on our own internal software here at Miracle Labs for tracking communications with the media, emailing blogs about news for our sites, and putting together press releases.

We were curious what other small-medium startups are using these days? PRWeb? Some good open source solution?

Do you have this problem and just manage it with Gmail? What do you use? Are you looking for tools that make it easier to announce/track/grow your own publicity?

We're debating opening up our tools as a cheap service for startups who don't have a big PR budget. I'd like to get an idea if this is something people want or if they've solved this problem in their own creative ways.

Thanks in advance!
Ask HN: Online Discussion Site with Balanced Percentages of Males and Females?
I saw an interesting comment in another thread about online sites that help "match up" people for intellectual conversation, with the clear implication of "match up" being "find a date." That got me thinking that most online communities I join for intellectual discussion are either very predominantly male (my guess about Hacker News) or very predominantly female (the typical case for most online communities about homeschooling, where I spend a lot of my time as a member of a tiny male minority). The one online community I know with a good balance of men and women and sometimes very intellectual discussion

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/

is explicitly for parents, and thus probably doesn't include a lot of single people of either sex. So offhand I can't think of many places to go online for intelligent discussion with smart, young people who may be heterosexual and who are looking for a date with someone of the opposite sex. How about you? What sites do you recommend for that?

See the thread from pg, "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704

based on his announcement

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

for background on this in discussion of item 8.

for more bac
Get a generator. I live in the Northeast US too and it took only 1 snow storm with no power (or water) for 5 days to take the plunge. Your problems are more local than 'national'. I agree we have problems all around, but your personal experience does not reflect the national challenges we face with our grid.
A lot of parts of Clojure seemed to be created specifically with the JVM in mind. Not sure if porting it is a good idea.
Business Plans Don’t Matter to Venture Capitalists
I'm thinking of a variety of ideas, mainly to do with farming out the decision making process to qualified people who donate. E.g. sending out information to a few people and letting them chose whether to fund it or not.

No point getting too far in advance though, unless I can find potential donors.

I am one of those crackpots as well, I just figured it would be better to try and build an institution for funding OS research than tinker on my own and it whither from lack of people to take it forward.
Let me know how that ivory tower is treating you
Satellite Image Shows North Korean Rocket Launch
Ruby, despite having 4? sigils as scoping operators, pervasively screws up or simply doesn't have support for scoping.

It really should have support for having class modifications scoped to your module (and accessible manually from outside), but I couldn't find it.

If the language is such that everything "should" be a method on the broadest-possible class, people are going to monkeypatch, because it feels "wrong" otherwise. People just want to write idiomatic code.

In Objective-C this ends up not being an issue, because there's very little usage of non-Apple libraries -- plus the default way of adding methods doesn't allow replacement, and Apple libraries are well-versioned (if you build your app for >10.4, API changes in 10.5 are invisible).
Who's in Journalism School Right Now?
Search by color
Spam killed Usenet for me years ago, but it hasn't killed email yet. (And, for that matter, having observed when my cell phone works at my home and when it doesn't, I still subscribe to a plain old telephone service landline, as do millions of other people.)
I became a true believer once I got past my personal prejudices and actually made an attempt to understand "why" some rules were the way they were. I wasn't as smart as I thought. Still not.

Enforcing discipline for the sake of enforcing discipline? See military.
I doubt it and as always Sturgeon's Law needs to be applied here.
Easy dependency management for git with braid
Last October I awaited the arrival of my new university roommate. He arrived toting shoe boxes, piled high. They swayed side-to-side as he walked, and he shuffled cautiously to assure they didn't fall. He dumped them of his bed; I guessed they contained books. After he'd brought in his clothes he opened the small boxes: CDs, shiny plastic cases. I counted 560.

I wasn't a musical kid. I brought my first album at 16 - Dido - and had recently, at 18, started listening to Boards of Canada. Why anyone would need so many CDs puzzled me, but, I assure you, he did need them. Music played all day: Kraftwerk, The Human League, Sebastien Tellier, Air Lemon Jelly The Divine Comedy MorcheebaMassiveAttackdarfpunkkidloco...

I loved it. I found my musical niche - electronica - and started listening. The change from music novice to music whore was gradual, as my last.fm attests. But I'm now listening to music 10 hours a day, often falling asleep with it playing. Like a rollercoaster, there's the gradual grind up one side of a large drop, then the clicking stops, and everybody holds their breath, and you fall. Headfirst. You can't escape gravity.

I wish it hadn't happened. It's hard to think with music gushing into your ears, it's a constant nag on clear thought, so you turn it off. But that's worse. There's something missing. It's like the feeling having forgotten something, you pat yourself down, you look around, everything seems fine, but something's amiss.

It's playing with my head. Seriously.
Fixing the corporate credit ratings system via crowdsourcing
code - refactor - code - refactor - sleep - code - refactor - code....
The former suggest you weigh the results of your previous attempts and make improvements in order to increase your odds of success. The latter suggest simply applying the same approach over and over without major reconsideration.
I recently spoke with the founder of a company that has an extremely interesting tool for visualizing traffic trends and how they are impacted by referrers and search keywords. Seeing this tool made me feel that it and other tools or suites like it are something that I think could be very useful for a lot of companies that are trying to figure out how best to make themselves noticed on the internet.
Cool UI for accessing and working with files online
Can cloning resurrect an extinct species?
Agreed. It's also hard to get good metrics if you want to use something other than Facebook's tools. Hard to beat Google at this game when they do both the advertising and the analytics better than anyone else.
I hope she's debating/participating and not simply watching cable news politics.
Not really reverse induction, but related: The principle of induction is equivalent to the axiom that all non-empty sets of natural numbers have a smallest element. And one can always convert proves from one technique to the other.

As an exercise, try out converting the "Interesting Number Paradox" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number...) to use induction.

("If there were uninteresting numbers, there would be a smallest uninteresting number - but the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting, producing a contradiction.")
The Big Three credit rating agencies (Moody's, S&P and Fitch) have been ripe for disruption for ages. Something's flagrantly broken when Lehman carries an A2 rating right up to its bankruptcy filing and AIG's troubles go unnoticed.

Maybe the transparency of open reporting standards (XBRL) and the insights of crowdsourcing (FreeRisk) can be combined to fix the system.
Great article. I'm reminded of Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction.
copy & paste chunks of code is not necessary bad if you want to accomplish a specific task (for example, how to crop a square image, how to format date time into relative format, etc etc)

It will allow you to see if this chunk of codes work, and if it does, you can learn from it, improve it or give it back to others.
Swedish Royal University gives kafkaesque math test
OnHollywood Top 100 Companies (Heyzap and OMGPOP)
If it's all lies, what's the motive? Politicians/government officials don't usually lie without some sort of expectation of benefit.
Is it okay to grill a candidate about their religion?
Where's the best to stay in the bay area.

My concern is good neighbourhood, is closed to tech events and of course has to be ramen-affordable too! I know it's possible to find the best of everything.
I'm not too convinced at the minute. The problem is that everyone here (hacker news) is having their own little converstation about this and it's the same for reddit etc. When you stick all this into one list, you are losing context.

What if someone replies on the blog to a hacker news comment? Good chance the hacker news reader will never see the reply.

Perhaps it would be better if all the different comment systems were grouped independently?
It's funny, we don't hear much about the wonders of Java web app development until google announces AppEngine Java support.
Three of your four sentences are non sequiturs and the other simply confirms the point you're objecting to.
"Freshman physics at MIT gave me my comeuppance. Every week I stared at a whole sheet of problems that I was sure I could never solve even if I lived to be 100. I'd never learned how to work on a problem for more than 10 seconds so I was stuck with a knotted stomach and a panicked brain. Fourteen years of struggle with these kinds of problems in and around MIT taught me, by imperceptible steps, that I wasn't actually better than the average person. If a slight increase in the difficulty of the problems rendered me just as helpless as those poor souls in junior high, then who was I to hold myself above anyone? Without consciously trying to do anything differently, I found myself able to have real conversations with people from all walks of life."

From http://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/samantha-XIV
Where is the data supporting this conclusion? This sounds like it was written by someone theorizing about startups rather than someone living it.

I have always heard that people invest in the team. I think a poor product with a good team has a better chance than a great product and a poor team. I think this is because a good team will recognize that they have a poor product, and will change it until it is good. Where a poor team may not even realize they have a good product.

Jeremy
What, you mean this?

~ $ irb

irb(main):001:0> Object.methods.size

=> 90

irb(main):002:0> require 'activesupport'

=> true

irb(main):003:0> Object.methods.size

=> 177

[ugh, no preview..]
CUDA 2.2 beta available to registered developers
If they plan on doing it (charging for some kind of account) I think they need to start soon. Facebook is already decaying into the sort of novelty/advert app, Hallmark gift shop mess that Myspace has been for years. A year from now their product will be alot harder to sell to the kind of people who would be willing to pay for it.

...Unless you could buy an account where you never had to see an ad or a third-party app of any kind, I might even pay for that.
There's a whole lot of propaganda all around us, and the willingness of newspapers and columnists to constantly grant anonymity to sources has turned it from a valuable tool for sunlight on public affairs into a valuable tool for any stakeholder with a telephone.
Some commentators were suggesting that there was no satellite, only a rocket.

If that were the case, the US should announce that we shot down the North Korean satellite. Which would then lure the North Koreans into admitting it was all a fake, at which point Obama would call them up on the phone and say something like "gotcha bitch".

I kid but seriously, is there any way to know for certain whether there's an actual functional object orbiting the earth under NK control?
Not necessarily -- I think if Google only advertised on their search engine they'd still be a multi-billion dollar company. I don't think anything has higher CPM than Google's search.

Adsense, however, does make the platform more enticing to advertisers.
http://kiva.org
Why the Lack of a Jeff Bezos Dooms Mainstream Publishing
I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two chicks at the same time, man. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had 200 million users, I could hook that up, too; 'cause chicks dig geeks with a large userbase.
Today at Stanford: Michael Mace on App stores and software ecosystems
But, as the article says, their "moderate successes" have failed to be profitable.

A startup can get away with not figuring out every monetization angle and focusing on developing cool stuff, as long as they're profitable overall. But once the startup hires a non-technical CEO and IPO's, the CEO's job is supposed to be monetization. Sure, some things can be out there to build public goodwill and brand image, but when you're a publicly-held for-profit, "cool technology" is no longer the benchmark for the CEO's success.
We hope to, but the decision for us is not to bring in a warm body, but to have a high threshold and if someone clears it then then they join.
Doctors Without Borders

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/index-alt.cfm

But only because a friend of mine is a volunteer. To be honest, he pestered me about it for years but I didn't actually donate until he came back from Israel and told me about how he and some other Western doctors had almost been accidentally shot by Israeli troops while taking care of some wounded Palestinians. Of course he probably made the whole thing up, since that could never happen.

With tax time around the corner, be reminded that a donation is tax-deductible:

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/donate/
Will I have to uninstall Disqus to get this work? Is there a way to migrate to BackType's connect or combine the two?
The outgoing CFO said they would be cash flow positive in 2010, but who knows how advertising projections will hold up? It's kind of a down market at the moment.

He could have simply meant they plan to stop buying $100m of servers every year next year and as a consequence won't run a net loss. Or it could just be the fired CFO talking nonsense. Who knows really?
But if the whole pie increases, then perhaps even the 10% is significantly large, especially given costs to music creation have decreased so drastically.
So you're taking content written on other sites, scraping it without permission of the original authors or site owners, and reproducing wholesale on your site? This is unethical at best and outright illegal at worst.
Some old discussion here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/15/loopt-may-be-friending-...

> Loopt has remained tight lipped about who they’re talking to, but the pitch is pretty clear. Competition is driving down mobile voice revenues which Loopt says they can help offset by driving new profits in data plans people pay for to use the program. Currently they make money through $2.99/month subscription plans or by being bundled in with a phone data plan. Location based services and advertising are also other key revenue sources. Loopt says that 51% of all mobile application revenue already comes from location based services.
Unfortunately they don't work together. If you use our plugin with Disqus enabled, it will just show the "Summary" of activity above the comment section.

Disqus has their own "Social Media Comments" you might want to look into.
"Recent research has established some interesting facts about our relationship to music. The average American hears more than five hours of music per day, yet a new survey suggests that American teenagers actually consumed and shared 19 per cent less music in 2008 than they did a year ago. CD sales were down (28 per cent) but download sales also fell (13 per cent) and even illegal downloads declined (six per cent). More pertinently, borrowing and swapping music between friends was down 28 per cent. Thirty two per cent of teens expressed discontent with the music available for purchase, while 23 per cent said they already have a large enough collection of music. Is it possible we are reaching some kind of saturation point?"
The Unnecessary Demise of Local and Regional Print Newspapers
There is a significant momentum building for stronger executive control over Internet connectivity to private-sector networks that are designated as "critical infrastructure."

The proposed CyberSecurity Act of 2009 would allow the president to designate a private network (such as a SCADA system) as critical, and in the case of a declared emergency, shut it off from the Internet.

As you can imagine, there is resistance to this from multiple parties, including those industries who fear additional government regulation and also privacy and anti-censorship advocates who fear "scope creep" in the legislation.
Sounds like the answer to countless "why did I get rejected by Y Combiner/TechStars/etc." threads we've seen lately.
Great explanation. It doesn't really have to do with CLOS though. The package system works on any names whether you use classes or not (we don't).

One little detail I love because it illustrates Lisp's design style nicely. If you're using an exported (public) name, you say foo:sum. But if the name is private and you want to breach encapsulation to get at it, you say foo::sum. The language makes you state your intention, but makes it easy to do so and doesn't get in your way.
Oh dear, for so many, many reasons.
Uh... aren't we kind of burying the lede here?

Ruby has macros now.

For some limited definition of 'macros,' maybe, but screw it, I'm there.

Thank you, Mr. Braithwaite!