skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I don't see how it could work so nicely for everything. Though it seems that he picked a specific category (Mathematica) which helps quite a lot on what to do with the query.

Take the example with the first names: "Andrew", then "Andrew John" (or whatever it was) which compares the two names over the years. What happens if I type "Elton John" now?

The screencast was impressive but I'd like to try it by myself (which should be soon apparently) to realize how powerful it can be.
Talking with other hackers and programmers about tips and habits for self-improvement :)

(Which would be easier if I could reply to you guys in a timely manner...)
yes: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
Perhaps, then, I only noticed them for the first time today because of that thread. :)
Ah, but that's also the nice thing about relying on somebody else's API: When it breaks, it's not your job to fix it.

Back in the dot-com days of '99, I built and maintained an app that was pretty much identical to what Google Maps released 5 years later (yeah, with tiles and javascript dragging & all that). The downside is that the backend was pulling from this crap GIS system that was always overloaded.

So it would bog down under load. And it was my problem. And it hurt.

So 10 years later, I run a little site built on the Google Maps API. Today it bogged down under load. And it was sunny out so I went out rock climbing because a whole team of smart people were scrambling to fix it for me and it wasn't my problem.

Sometimes "not my problem" can be pretty nice.
I liked that they admitted that it was an embarrassing mistake. The use of that word resonates with anyone who has ever done anything stupid only to realize it moments after.

For me it's always that same stupid routine operation that I've done 1000x before, so I turn my brain off while I do it. Then there's that moment of shocking clarity where you think "I didn't just... did I?" followed by the mad scramble to check and then the sinking realization that "yes, yes I did." shudder
Ask HN: Why don't more blog widgets use AJAX?
My startup (http//scribnia.com) is building a widget that bloggers can embed in their sidebar to enable their users to rate them. We're relying heavily on AJAX to make the rating process more powerful and slick. Among other benefits, using AJAX allows a widget to have multiple "screens"--when a user does something in the widget, the content of the widget changes appropriately.

As per usual, I scoped out all the popular blog widgets as a prelude to the design process in order to see what best practices existed. I was struck by how few widgets use AJAX, or even Javascript. Nearly all blog widgets are just static links, text, and images. Why is this? Am I missing something here?
I believe the article also stated that tearing it down and building a new 6,000sqft home would be cheaper than the renovations/repairs required, so I wouldn't go too far with your ramshackle assumptions.
MySpace needs to solidify its revenue model. It's ad revenues are impressive, but a big chunk of this is the Google ad agreement. Once this expires, MySpace's ad revenues will decline (and quite dramatically) unless they increase their ad revenues from other sources.
I find the keyword in the domain does help, but it really isn't worth chasing to the point of having a stupid name.. What you really want is an "exact phrase match"

I.e. "On sale laptops" gets searched for 19.9k times a month https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

and position 1 is likely to get nearly 40% (if not more) of those clicks http://www.jaygeiger.com/index.php/2008/11/05/percentage-cli...

Thus if you can own OnSaleLaptops.com you stand to get around 10-30k hits/mo surely you can monetize that :/

hope these answers were ok, they are just my experience.
I helped my uncle that fellow over there off a horse.

you need a comma in the above sentence; it doesn't matter if you use capitalization or not.

i helped my uncle, that fellow over there, off a horse.
Interesting. I do a "status -u" instead, because "update" without knowing what's about to be updated scares me (but I've only been using svn consistently for a few months).
What if we call it a New Kind of Search Engine?
Bit Manipulation Brain Teaser
Please check out my startup Hybir before our public launch (Site)
This is an old article, and I'm tired of seeing Alan Kay talk about the past. That said, it's true. I'm also baffled that we have no collective memory as an industry. The rush for the almighty Euro has left us reinventing the wheel, the axle, fire... We keep writing the same code over and over, often in different contexts, and jumping up and down at the novelty. It's so funny to hear people rave about Gmail when I was using better mail clients in 1992. Honestly. We have no sense of history and we have lost our way.
Sorry for the duplicate. I thought it was inconvenient to have to cut and paste the link.

Fellow Hackers.

The product is Hybir Backup which is a full online backup service. It is windows only for now.

The site has all of the relevant information.

Comments and Questions are encouraged.

If you would like a free trial use HACKERNEWS as the promotion code.

I have lots of exciting news I have been unable to share with community just yet. But if you are where I was a year ago. I was told "NO" so many times I thought it was my nick name. Just keep going it is well worth it.

Thanks,

Rasch
(Hacking Founder)
I hate when someone suggests adding process to fix a problem - and I saw this quite a few times already.

Most people clearly understand the benefits of adding process, but very few seem to realize the costs.

If I tried hard I am pretty sure I could create a checklist with 1000 items for each developer to go through, and no one could argue against any of the items - individually, they would all be ok / necessary / correct. However, if I forced every developer to go through the list every time, for every change, they would - rightly so - feel crushed.

With very few exceptions - where a new process is really granted, I see people trying to substitute either thinking or automation by process. Which is a recipe for bureaucracy, and in my view a good part of why working for a BigCo can be so miserable sometimes.

A new process should be a last resort, after we answered yes to: a) Is it really beyond us to automate this?, b) Is there some flaw in human beings that will ensure this will repeat? c) Are the consequences of this mistake really serious?
A friend of mine was talking just this morning about how he had thought about keeping a blog to go along his learning of iPhone development but was worried about being public about basic stuff, thus making him look bad. (like it happened to a certain dev from Pownce) And even though I believe being candid about what you don't know or your mistakes should be generally laudable (because you're not pretending, are just honest about your pitfalls, and willing to work on them), it can very easily backfire.

It's very similar when a company acknowledges their mistakes: some smart people would look at it and praise the company for it, others will just continue the bashing. It can work but it's tricky, and the bigger the company, the trickier it gets.
The homepage doesn't make it sufficiently clear what your site does.
Some hosted services prevent users from embedding scripts in their content, for security reasons. At blist we decided to use JS, iframes, and Flash in our widgets anyways [1], but it means they won't work in certain contexts.

1. http://www.blist.com/web-publishing
I'm sure they have plenty of safeguards in place. Think about all the times in the last 5 years that Google's service has been seriously interrupted. Oh wait, there aren't any. Their turn around time on this bug was pretty fantastic as well. Discovered, analyzed, patched, and apologized for in under 24 hours. Nice.
How to write a template compiler for Erlang
evan miller explains how to write a template compiler for erlang.
For those of you paying attention. I posted this first under CRASCH and then again accidentally under VIPER.

I created the VIPER account a while ago when I wanted to share my successes with the community anonymously. The reason is that I really felt compelled to encourage my fellow hackers. I never ended up posting those. I must have written that post ten times though. I always ended up thinking it either felt like bragging or was not believable with the facts to back it up. Facts I still can't disclose because of NDAs.

Rasch
It's not immediately obvious, but click the image that says that they reinvent backup.

Direct link: http://www.hybir.com/HybirBackup.html
This article is a writeup of someone else's writeup. Keeping an eye out for publications with surprising findings is a good way to fill that last bit of space in the science section, but it's not going to reproduce all the details. It does give you enough information (PNAS and two authors' names) to find the real article pretty quickly, and that turns out to be open access:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/05/11/0903485106.abst...
Can you elaborate for me please. Do you mean the landing page or the product pages? How would you change it?
I'd be surprised if they wrote the media player they're using for the screencast.
Ask HN: I have been experimenting sleep maintenance insomnia. Any recommendations?
To give some context; I have been experiencing what I think it could be called sleep maintenance insomnia.

I exercise every day, am in a good shape, watch my diet (by trying to eat the healthiest stuff I can get my hands on), and also try to have good sleep hygiene (I tend to go to sleep everyday at 11:00 p.m.). However, I regularly (almost every day of the week) wake up like 3, 4 or 5 a.m. (it depends) and cant get back to sleep. This results on me feeling like a zombie, and being unable to get done intellectual tasks (4 months aprox. without approaching coding, the way I used to).

I can deal with the physical exhaustion, but feeling my intellectual capacity diminished is becoming frustrating (there are days I barely come up with something done!).

BTW, I have read and heard about melatonin; could anyone recommend me taking it for the sake of getting rid of this problem?

Any recommendations would be extremely appreciated.
Thanks for introducing me to Core Wars! Always wanted to learn assembly, so an abstracted version in a game format is exactly what I need to get started!

Any such initiatives for Lisp.....?
So You Got an Arduino
It seems a little underhanded, but try and populate your forums with a decent number of posts before you launch. Either that, or don't launch your forums until you have a decent number of users. An empty forum has a pretty significant impact on someone who is casually looking at your site. Whether that reaction is justified or not, you still have to recognize it. You might consider a mailing list as a temporary alternative.

Also, I'm not sure how essential the user's email is to the sign up process, but if you can take that part out, I would go ahead and do it. That will encourage people to register, and you can give them an incentive to add their email later. For example, on the admin page you could tell them to enter in their email in order to receive notifications about the status of their backup, etc. That's mostly just a personal thing for me. It's not like your breaking any rules by using an email in the sign up process. In fact, it's nice not to have to deal with remembering a user name.

More advice: when you launch send a press kit complete with a company summery, personal bio, relevant media (images, video, etc), and a free registration key to all the popular tech blogs. People are inherently lazy, and if you hand an author all the tools needed to quickly write an article, plus a free premium version of your product, it's likely you can generate some good press. It also might be a good idea to include the press kit on your site for easy downloading.
When I said process, I meant automated process. As a programmer, performing calculable tasks by hand is always out of the question :-P
Or the big Hybir Logo. Hmmm. It never occurred to me people might not click. Maybe I should change Unbelievable to Learn More.
It's so funny to hear people rave about Gmail when I was using better mail clients in 1992.

So you must still be using better email clients. Gmail is the best I've come accross; I love tags compared to folders. Please, what is better?
Thanks. That is just the type of insight I'm looking for.
But it's a one time production cost. Once its made, copies are free. Distribution is getting to be near free. It's fundamentally different from food.

What, exactly, are you hoping to get paid for? I don't mean that sarcastically, I really want to know. In an economic sense, what value are you providing? Entertainment has always made its money in one of four ways: by limiting access (theaters, concert halls), by selling physical objects (books, cds, paintings), by draping it in ads, or by pure patronage.

You've still got 3 out 4, and yet you're on here bitching just because someone told you how much money they're willing to pay you for one form of content delivery.
Ask HN: Do you C++ for Web App Dev? 
How come C++ is so rare in the web app realm?

It's a pretty bad choice for using on frontend of sites, but for backend stuff where you have CPU bound tasks it's great. Lean and Fast. But when ever I bring this subject up, I get weird or confused looks...

* Some reasons I am given is that it's complicated. Not really, writing web applications in C was complicated, but with the C++ STL and Boost, lot of your generic things are a breeze like string manip, not to mention the millions of other libraries out there.

* Development time: For me writing a Python or PHP app that does the same thing takes equally the same amount of time as writing it in C++. (this is for backend related stuff like computations and other CPU hard stuff, not front end)

* Other's are equally fast. They can be, but you have to add additional layers on top, accelerators, caching systems, etc etc and make sure everything is all optimized. A lot of things on top of what you would normally do to achieve a C++ level app aperformance

C++ with FastCGI is a excellent choice for backend development, yet it's so rare. I don't even recall a single time this was brought up during web development talk or conference.

Why do you think this is?

(Backstory: The backend for our project is a lot of C/C++ on FastCGI on Apache. My workflow usually consists of Pyhton for prototyping and verification of design, then writing it in C++ for production, the speed is not even comparable).
Change or Modify "Hybir Unbelievable" to add something descriptive like "Hybir Features". When I don't see any obvious way to checkout a list of features I bail out instantly.

Also why do Signup, Login, Unbelievable and Forums each have their own font? Different colors, same font please.
Grasshopper is a pretty cool service, had some clunky UI though. We use it at BumpTop.com.

They mailed us some chocolate covered grasshoppers recently as a mktg campaign, kinda crazy.
Ask HN - Chinese localization/internationalization
I just met with our GM and we believe we can offer these services as a package for US-based startups who want to make a dent in the Chinese Market:

1. Translation of English Website to Chinese with cultural-mapping (to address cultural differences)
2. Creation (if not yet existent) of a Chinese business entity (i.e. a HK incoporated Pvt. Ltd. or an off-shore entity)
3. connecting #2 to a payment gateway (we have this) that can accept China Union Pay (CUP) credit cards (about 400 million Mainland Chinese have this credit card). Our gateway also accepts the normal Visa/MasterCard/JCB/PayPal/Amex options

and optional 4. A Chinese language and/or dialect call center.

Question: Is this bundled service something that YC startups (or even non-YC startups) would be interested in?
Thanks! I like that even better than my learn more thought.

I will fix the font issue too!

I love this community! I should post more often.

Again thanks for your help everyone.
I always had my notepad + pen beside my keyboard.
without those 2 things it just not feel right.
I'm a user and their service is different from Google Voice. It's a professional sounding 1-800/voicemail system intended for business, not personal use. "Push 1 for customer service, Push 2 for sales" type of thing.
To my fellow beta-testers (I'm sure some of you are here): have any of you found an actual productive use for Alpha? Scratch that, has anyone here used it "in anger", even once? I've been trying, so far, to no avail. (I have a copy of Mathematica, so use cases which intersect with that app's existing features are not of interest to me.)
Isn't that always the problem? Too many managers, not enough creators?
If anyone actually wants to try the service for free use the HACKERNEWS promotion code.
Somewhere... forgot where, I heard there exists a group of people who call them selves "Doctors", crazy right?

Apparently their in to these crazy practices that involve studying, diagnosing and treating diseases and injuries of people. So fake!

More about these crazy folks at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physician
How much do you get outdoors during daylight hours?

Do you have seasonal allergies, perchance?
Hi all, long time reader first time commenter. The popup experience we've implemented with Google aims to bring a smoother experience to traditional OpenID sign-in (think Facebook Connect).

I'd love to get some feedback from HN community about the popup based flow. Try visiting http://uservoice.com/session/new and sign-in by clicking the Google button. Also, if you are starting up a new project, I encourage you to take a look at rpxnow.com for your auth piece. Thanks!

Cheers, Brian Ellin
Your homepage is OK. The site is missing viewable screenshots of the application. The page with all the features is too long to read. Too much information that doesn't get to the point (ex : "how fast" have a text that goes "it can take 3 minutes to backup 1 Go"). In short, I'll make it more friendly for non-techies.

I like the design but the icons in the feature pages are odd-looking. The sub-menu (overview, comparison, in action...) was invisible to me.

It looks really cool though and I hope you will change the world of backups, we really need it...
Factory-issue brains have already divided humanity.
Humanity is already deeply divided by the ownership of technology; it has been for all of recorded history. Those that have the technology have won the wars, grown the food, and built the shelters to survive and propagate in greater numbers. The availability of augmented brainpower may widen the gap, but it will not create it.
Agreed. I think that saying that people mistaking entrepreneurship for innovation is an "ideology that has been slowly and quietly ruining America and the world" is a bit of a dramatic overstatement.

Entrepreneurship is directly related to innovation. Innovation does not have to mean inventing the light bulb. It can also mean coming up with new ways to do things (e.g. Southwest Airlines). Entrepreneurship is an integral part of what makes capitalism work.

Additionally, just because you're a craftsman doesn't mean you can never be a businessman also. Any individual craftsman that wants to make any money from their creations will have to at some point become involved in business. Even if you're just selling your new technology to a big corporation and not starting your own company, you're still having to make a sale (which I'm pretty sure would go under the business category).
Yes, but I always wanted to be able to do correlations with more kinds of data. Non-financial data.
You should say that it's windows only.
Thanks! Very insightful advice.

You are correct on the email and in fact you can use any unused user name. I should make that clear. It will save them a step.

I will prepare a press kit as you are suggesting.

Thanks again!
Well... regarding this I would count 1 hour/day aprox (commute time) + 1hour/day (running). This is the minimum time I spend outdoors. No allergies.
Yawn....

No Value Proposition. No Call to Action. No Immediate Offer.

No idea what you sell?

Online, Offline, Come hold my hand and teach me?

Do I have to be a nerd to use this?

Is there phone support.

How much does it cost.

How do you secure it so that I can be assured no one else can get it.

And I roll my eyes when I see hyper claims like

"Reinvents Backup"

You have 15 seconds. You lost me at 3....

And black makes me feel dead...
Alright, I've been meaning to write up a blog post detailing my thoughts on this subject. This post prompted me to.

Here it is, enjoy: http://jasonmbaker.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/programming-and-...
What would this offer that isn't already freely available on e.g. iTunes U?
Brain implants have already been in use for a decade. Brain pacemakers have been successfully used to treat epilepsy, Parkinson's, and depression. So while the implants seem relatively simplistic, they do exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_pacemaker
No problem. The email point is the one I am least comfortable about. I'm not sure how the public in general feels about it. It may be that they like being able to sign up without an email, or it may be that they find it annoying to have to enter it later. My other points represent common knowledge and/or are not too controversial. My email point is just based on personal feeling. :)
Financial incentive for employer: when shopping around for health insurance, be sure to mention to the insurance company how many of your employees bike to work. Healthier employees == cheaper health insurance.
Agreed.

And I think his observation on back vs. browser tabs is very insightful. When browsing links, as on HN, I always open a new link in a new tab. And I think the reason is exactly what he says: I don't trust the back button to get me back to the right place quickly. Killing a tab does do that, and so I use tabs.
You just published your startup on a popular tech news site.

This is your public launch.
I think you mean to say that there is no FreeBSD code in the OS X kernel.
Signed up ok. It seemed to have logged me in after signup - great. Then it kicked me out. Now if I try to login it says invalid credentials. Pretty sure I am using the right credentials. There's no apparent way to send a password change request either.
> The web browser has very little to do with this problem; it is merely doing what the website has told it to do (or not to do).

I don't agree. It's my browser. It should do what I want it to do, not what the website wants it to do.

And what I want it to do is exactly what this guy says.
Actually, Quantum Theory states that the world, at the lowest level we currently conceive of, is discrete and 'digital'. Time, space, energy - everything - come in little chunks called quanta which represent the smallest possible subdivision that the universe permits. For example a photon is a quantum of energy - the smallest possible unit of energy. If you had a perfect dimmer switch, that would be the lowest setting - turn it even a fraction more and it's off completely. The universe isn't continuous at all - it just looks like it from waaaay up here where we live. If you zoom in far enough, you can see the pixels of reality. All properties of the universe behave this way, according to our best theories and best abilities to test them.
Given that this applies to space and time too - look up 'plank length' - you can see why this would make people make the connection to cellular automata. Zoom in far enough and quantum theory tells you that space is divided up into minimum sized chunks, and quantum events can only happen within this framework.
Good and Bad Public Cloud Candidates
Advertising Yourself: Building a Personal Brand through Social Networks