skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hit the desk? I havent heard that phrase before (and neither has google), guessing it means go into a database

Disk. And it means your data is being written to the disk.

if querying history is a functional requirement then your data has to be stored somewhere

The stated functional requirement was "real-time chat". If you want to record all messages ever exchanged then you are not talking about a chat system anymore but rather about an archival system. For the latter a database can indeed make sense but the two should not be mixed together due to the fundamentally different requirements.

but if something can provide distribution, replication and querying without breaking your other requirements then how exactly are you "doing it wrong"?

By hitting the disk for each message.

databases can be built with exactly realtime messaging in mind

And cars can be built with air-travel in mind. It just makes no sense because it's a different domain with different requirements. A database stores data, a messaging system (especially a realtime one) routes messages. Doh.
Based on my Googler and ex-Googler friends, and people they've met from around the country...

* Google disrespects designers

* Google disrespects founders of acquired products/services

* High-ups who hold meetings don't even recognize their lower-level managers who they have tasked with pulling unicorns out of their (lower-level manager) butts -- even after they've succeeded

A friend of mine was a web manager who launched 2 or 3 MAJOR projects that got tons of press, in tons of languages, without nearly enough resources - and a certain Google Diva actually asked to have her removed from a relevant meeting to "cut down on guests"

I can't wait for the Google hero worship to cease.

(PS their NYC office is like a lab rat maze. Shiny colors, sad aura of compressed food pellets and crushed spirits.)
Artificial Intelligence, like controlled nuclear fusion, is always in the future. About 40 years in the future.
And have a look at the Stainless browser (OS X). A project originally inspired by Chrome.

http://www.stainlessapp.com/

I love the multiple browsing sessions feature (great for testing).
A couple of things...

First, great app. Very useful.

But, since most of these videos are already H.264 mpeg-4's, why the need for the conversion step, instead of simply wrapping it up in a quicktime container (if you even need to do that)? Conversion is painfully slow.

The popup dialogs are annoying.

Is there a bookmarklet? That would be awesome.
That example is the equivalent of 'grep -r needle .' if you have GNU grep.
Do You Perceive a Need for a Virtual Web Representation of Yourself?
Getting started and so forth, as you suggest, is a good idea. But unless I have some way to know whether I am currently planning too much or executing too soon, I don't know whether to follow his advice or not.

If I knew that generally potential entrepreneurs are too timid, than leaping ahead would be great, if trivial, advice. But that's not clear at all. We can't know how many people are merely thinking about starting companies but held back by timidity, because thoughts and planning are largely invisible. There are certainly plenty of companies that get founded by headstrong entrepreneurs that end in ruin.

Maybe I'd find the article useful if the advice were restricted to low-risk startups (and a web startup is a good example of that). For something like a hardware startup, I think "just do it" is close to the worst advice you could receive. (Maybe "don't worry about manufacturing " would be worse.)
OK, after testing I have mixed thoughts. The interface is OK (though you really need a way to close the registration pane / beta warning), but the conversion process is painfully slow. It's been converting a 22 minute movie for the past 40 minutes now, and the bar is only at ~15%.

Also, do you really need the 'step 1 of 2' thing? Can't you just leave that out, and adjust the progress bar accordingly? Using multiple steps is confusing, as you have no idea how far the conversion really is.
> 1. No politics. In great start-up cultures, everybody is giving everybody else credit.

No. That is just cheapening credit. No politics means giving credit where it's due and when it's due. In a good start up, people don't care much about giving or getting credit except for cool, remarkable and worthy things.

Everyone giving everyone else credit... That is what actually leads to some really poor cultures.
Unless things have changed in the last couple of years that is only true if the US entity has not agreed to certain "safe harbor" provisions that essentially means they guarantees to treat the data in the same way as if they were subject to EU law.
And in fact they do: http://www.shivaranjan.com/2009/05/17/linux-how-to-install-c...

There are also daily tarballs if you don't use Debian/Ubuntu or feel like doing it yourself.

I don't think the phrase "truly committed to open source" means anything in the context of a company as large as Google. The Chromium team may be hardcore about it and the AdWords people may shudder at the thought. Big companies are all schitzophrenic. (And anyways, "open source" != Linux.)
To whomever down-modded this ...

I'm sure you have your reasons, but I'd love to know them. I've just provided a service in response to someone, why down-mod me?

Talk about shooting the messenger.

This isn't a complaint, I'm simply confused. I don't much care about the karma, but I worry that sometimes people down-mod something because they don't agree with it, rather than because it's of negative value.
"In government, for example, a 'should-have-known-it' blame game is played after every tragedy."

This statement, and the later explanation of "misleading or insignificant" information that can't be sorted from actual signal is one of the best explanations of government failure in recent calamitous US events (i.e. Sept. 11 and the financial collapse). No matter what happens or which side is in power, there's always a politician on the other side who stands up to cast blame. The public never seems to see through this charade.
Documentary on the events that led to the economic collapse of Argentina in 2001:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6_i8zuffs
Gyroscopically stabilized CD-player(s) in microgravity
The conversion is useful so the videos take up less space on iPhones / iPods. I use TubeTV, and I definitely appreciate the feature, because most of my iPhone's memory is taken up by music videos off of YouTube right now.
Technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
You're using FFmpeg in there somewhere so you'll need to offer your copy of FFmpeg's source if you've used the LGPL version. If you've used the GPL version then your whole app will need to be GPL.
"Nobody that I know of has a better docstorage method..."

HTML.
Well-chosen name! If anyone ever creates a gripe site about your app called noevom.org, you can destroy their credibility by calling them nothing more than a front for moveon.org! Brilliant!
The one about look and feel
Ugh. Yet another article trying to define design. Nothing new here.
How about making the 'add to iTunes' step optional? Laptops and large video collections just don't mix.
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The Motorola EM35 is an entry level tri-band GSM device. The cell phone lacks 3G data but does offer Edge/GPRS connectivity along with a 3.15 MP camera that offers 2048 x 1536 pixels of resolution as well as Video recording capabilities.
The definition itself is new, at least for me whe I read it.

Getting to a sound definition of what design is, could be meaningful for people who will hire designers down the road. If my projects become successful I definitely want to have real conversations with the people I hired.
There was a huge bubble in t-bills back in november as the Great Deleverage was occurring, and the bubble has most certainly popped.

Now define "safe." There's safe in terms of geopolitical risk, and then there's safe in terms of capital protection/appreciation. The former is not in question (except by few). The latter is the more complex one; as more dollars get printed, there's much less demand for treasuries as they don't protect against inflation and the returns versus the risk-weighted returns you get in other riskier assets make it not a wise choice.
I don't have a Mac in front of me to check, but isn't mount-after-download default behaviour for Safari?
Obama should call Castro for tips on running a health care system on a shoestring. Just kidding, sort of.
I'm still learning about Git and source control in general, and I love hearing about various workflows.

And running tests before commit? Why not commit, run tests, then commit again? Do you really want to risk losing the work you just did because of a silly mistake (like piping something into a crucial file)?
Why do traders have to be "uneasy?" Financial media needs to stop assigning stories to short term noise.

This is one part of the reflation trade: short dollar, short treasuries, long commodities, long risk assets (equities).
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There's a startup specializing in tracking webspam:

http://www.attributor.com/

Here's the (old) TechCrunch article:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/04/attributor-launches-ser...
You stopped reading at the last line of the article? Well, that's not bad.
"the spectre of protectionism is emerging"? "new borrowing and spending"? "new subsidies and bailouts"?

You give the impression that you only started paying attention to what your government does in the last few months. These things have gone on for decades (at the very least).
Very convenient, though I do have a feature request: make export as only audio an option. Yes, the most common use of that may not be entirely legitimate, but your users will want it. Trust me.
"The stated functional requirement was "real-time chat".

I didnt see anyone list a functional requirement specification, I at least, was talking hypothetically. ITs worth noting that chat applications are almost(always?) never real time, they are soft realtime.

" two should not be mixed together due to the fundamentally different requirements."

Message routing and persistence are not mutually exclusive, they have competing requirements but that does not mean they cannot and do not exist. see twitter, banking, telecoms, campfire, ejabberd.

"By hitting the disk for each message."

If not hitting this disk is a a functional requirement then fair enough, I have never heard of this being a requirement outside of embedded systems.

"And cars can be built with air-travel in mind. It just makes no sense because it's a different domain with different requirements. A database stores data, a messaging system (especially a realtime one) routes messages. Doh."

I wouldnt mind knowing exactly what makes "messages" seperate from data. a database is just an abstraction layer over a set data that can provide several completely different benefits for storing and accessing that data, it isnt even required that a database "hits the disk" in the slightest, and there is no part of the definition of "database" that prevents it from being absolutely perfect for messaging systems, it just so happens that all the examples you can think of arent.
I am Graham Lawlor, founder of Ultra Light Startups and organizer of the New York chapter (we are also in London and Boston now).

I just found this page via Google news alerts. I'm a huge fan of Y Combinator and everything they stand for - very much the same approach I had when starting Ultra Light. I'm thrilled that the YC community has found us. I'd love to hear more feedback and suggestions from anyone who has been to one of our events (or even if you haven't). If you'd like to reach out, send an email to info at ultralightstartups dot com.

PS. thanks wmeredith for catching my typo on the home page - I just fixed this.

Best regards,
Graham.
> Financial media needs to stop assigning stories to short term noise.

Interesting.

Any comments on the relative weight given to bad economic stories during Bush's last three months and Obama's first three?

How about something simple - Obama produced "here's what will happen if the stimulus package isn't passed" predictions during that debate. Some of those predictions had "by" dates that have passed. Did you see a retrospective? Would you have if Bush had done the same and had missed as badly? (We're a little worse off than Obama predicted we'd be if the stimulus wasn't passed. Maybe things would have been even worse, but that tells us that Obama's modeling isn't as good as he thinks.)
It is interesting that outsiders keep buying Argentina's soverign debt even though it has repudiated said debt a couple of times in recent memory.
Got the first one. Really fun to play with. (Using it to build robots that drive around and communicate over an accoustic network)
So if someone makes a copy of a car, and gives it to you, it's not fine?
If it's not different, then you have no reason to prefer one over the other.
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Windows 7 Tips and Tricks E-Book
I always use it in the form:

find . -iname '*.someextension' -exec ls -l {} \;

{} gets expanded to the matching file names. Of course ls -l is just an example of command to run against the file name.
Why are they uneasy? They see the GM bondholders (secured debt) get screwed in favor of the unsecured bondholders.

They figure if it can happen with GM under government control, it might happen with USD, which is under the control of the same government.
They're going to make 30 billion on the enterprise licensing deals ...
Your comment triggered some old memories. I'd kind of forgotten how passionate I used to be and how that all occurred in my free time.

I currently have the time: I need to make the mental shift to consider it "free" instead of an absence of "what I should be doing".

I realize my comment is a bit vacuous. Nonetheless, thanks for that moment of inspiration.
Not here, but I bet a ton of them read Jeff's blog
Why The American Civil War Is Important
Why not try it? (Perhaps choose different phrasing than "sucks")

I think a lot of people spend time agonizing over "Well, sure I'd like for exactly this to happen, but I'm a special case and other normal people people wouldn't like that!"

Statistically speaking, you are far more likely to be in the general case than a special case outlier. (Reading HN notwithstanding.)
The difference is that the market controls the price of gold, whereas the Treasury's actions directly control the value of T-bonds and the like. Yes, it's possible to impact the price of gold to an extent, but there's no way anyone can argue the degree of control is even comparable. It just baffles me that you can justify Treasury securities by saying you can artificially control the price of gold.
That wasn't my point. My point was, that if someone commits a crime, and then "gives" you the product of that crime, it doesn't mean you're innocent if you knew a crime was committed.

If someone breaks in to Google and steals some trade secrets, copies them to a memory-stick, and gives them to you, etc

I should have known better to compare stealing music to stealing cars ;)
It's easy to see other people's mistakes.

I take his point that it's possible to overthink things and never get started. I tend to have that problem in fact. But I've also seen work-work-work types expend way more effort than me on certain kinds of things.

It's all very well to get started an then learn from your mistakes, but:

- sometimes it's not obvious you've made a mistake once you're deep into the details

- once you've invested a lot of time in a solution it's hard to convince yourself to bin it. (this is an especial problem in non-startups, because you have to convince your boss, too)

- sometimes your back-brain just needs enough time to elapse for it to solve/understand the problem/subject. After the amount of work required to get it to pay attention, extra effort on the problem is a waste of time.
Everyone giving everyone else credit for something is a good culture.

Everyone giving everyone else credit for any individual thing or for everything is not a good culture.

The first means that everyone at the company is being acknowledged as contributing, which usually means that they are in fact contributing.

If I'm the "tech guy" and I can't give credit to the business or marketing or finance guy because deep down I don't respect what they do or think that it's my contributions that are making the startup go, then we're in for a bumpy road.
There was a law passed in 2005 I think by copyright that said if your in possession of a pre-release then they can come down hard on you if found out. If your listening to the new U2 before it's release then you have possession of the file on your hard drive and allowing last.fm to scrobble it (stupid)!

I use to be download this and download that and not give a rats tail if i was stealing or not. Thought oh Im just sticking it to the man. Well now I run my own business(start up) I have a different perspective. As well the perspective of ten years of the RIAA continuing to fight and win against innovation (Seeqpod being the latest of many before it) and bashing into our heads (at least trying) that downloading something you would have otherwise bought circa 1997(majority of downloaders) is stealing!

I think a lot of what the RIAA does is dumb, but they run a business, which is out to make money and thus they are finding their way kicking and screaming into new models. Though everyone wishes they'd go away or at least that's what they say and yet those same ppl continue to consume their product keeping them going and stronger!
This article is full of fallacies. First, it would help if the author had actually read "The Innovators Dilemma" If he had, he would have understood that Christensen never says that innovation is limited to small players, but only that disruptive innovation is best tackled by small players, whereas continuous innovation is a strength of large companies. (Disruptive innovation is characterized by Christensen as an initially small market with a different customer base than is satisfied by the mainstream players.)

All the infrastructure changes mentioned by the author of this article should be categorized as continuous innovation, improvements to existing systems, upgrades that serve the same customer base. (e.g. Improving existing energy and healthcare infrastructure)

Then of course is the ridiculous quote

"To be competitive in Internet search and some other Web services, which cater to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, a company must build data centers of gargantuan size, and only a handful of companies can design and afford them"

However, the winning search company did not start out of Microsoft or any other gargantuan company, it started as a startup then grew into Google.
Not a problem. Lets just pass 1 more stimulus plan (to make it a trifecta) and then implement national health care. Because we all know the best way to lower prices is increase demand.

No doubt this problem is going to catch the country completely by surprise in the next 3-5 years. Paul Krugman will be shocked, just shocked, that the government is out of money.
P.S. I should elaborate why I saw my own listings.

The 500,000 pages that I had indexed in Google were mostly mispellings/typo pages of the top 500,000 searched keywords in terms of volume.

So you can see statistically, it's very possible to come upon your own sites...
I came here to also disagree with the article. You -just- beat me to it and for similar reasons.

One key mistake the author of this article made is how vast is an economy of potential collaborators versus the limited number of people extant within one company. And being in the same company is no guarantee that you will be motivated or -allowed- to be motivated to work to a shared goal. That last point is particularly addressed in "The Innovator's Dilemma." Large businesses got large by being very good at focusing on an established goal. A new goal is particularly unwelcome.

I wonder what Clayton Christensen would make of Apple (Apple II->Mac, MacOS <6 -> System X OS, iPod [where did that come from to become a huge share of revenues?], iPhone). Steve Jobs seems to have been innovating despite what Clayton writes. I still think Clayton is right but how does Steve Jobs do it over and over?
I'd love to hear more about your acoustic networking if you've got time to tell.
I wonder though, if you compared the performance of one of these 12-Nano systems, with a loaded 48GB RAM, dual quad-core Nehalem system running Xen and connected to relatively fast disks, which would be faster overall? 48GB RAM = 4GB per Xen slice if you have 12 slices.
"CubeSpace has a 15-year lease with U.S. Bank, and owes $12,000 a month."

Are leases of this length common?
This link appears to be devoid of usable content. However, I will say that if something like this were available and soundproof, I'd take it if stuck again in open space. (I imagine climate control would be near impossible, however.)

I couldn't help thinking, too, that an "escape pod" feature would be nice. Mental image of, as the company fails, dozens of pods bursting through the walls and boosting away before the final strike hits. ;-)
In the immortal words of Monty Python during the killer rabbit incident: "run away!"

I blame myself as a partial culprit.

Boy was I a sucker. Even though I am an independent, I have picked a party to vote for based on which one I thought would keep spending under control. I used logic, reason, historical trends, etc.

Boy was I a sucker.

Seems like each side is playing "who can run the biggest debt up" game. One bunch takes it to new levels, and the next bunch tries to outdo the first. Not only is the slope of the equation bad, the first derivative is bad too.

I honestly don't see a political way out of this. For the first time, I wrote a letter to my senator and asked him to do what he could about spending. Don't make a scene, I said, and don't play politics with this. Just try to do the right thing.

In reply I got a form letter with a political speech in there about how he's such a great guy for voting for such great bills.

sigh
Not only that, but if the app's the only thing in the DMG, it copies the app to the download folder then unmounts automatically.
Ever wondered why those routers at your ISP don't have harddisks in them?

Anyways, you lost me the moment you mentioned twitter in a line with banking and telco systems. That's like bringing up the bobbycar in a discussion about jet engines.
A very nice development. I like the AT90USB162 for its native USB interface (no serial unless you build it). I find this makes the code for host communication cleaner as it dispenses with serial parsing and all the error handling that comes with it. The lack of analog inputs hurts on the '162. Even for nominally digital applications, I find it handy to use the analog inputs for things like instrumenting currents and secondary voltages.

For the folks mystified by Arduino popularity this may be your preferred solution (lower cost, more capability). My personal opinion is that Arduino is not popular because of the hardware or software, but because of the culture. It is deliberately kept accessible to people that don't know fancy words like "data direction register". You can look at the examples, do a little copy and paste, make some breadboard connections and build that special little object that you thought should exist.