skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can somebody who can actually click on iTunes links where they are tell me what this thing is?

If you've built a successful iPhone application, you're a marketable contracting operation. Stop talking about getting funding.
Thanks Micah. The free version was dropped very quickly...although it was exciting to be in the top 25 free downloads for those few days. It was an experiment to get some sort of quick market validation (for ourselves and potential investors) and it worked in the short-term. The price at cost put the breaks on downloads fairly quickly and we are back keeping things manageble.

Also, we ran into the surprise of discovering our potential userbase: the 12-18 crowd stormed in like bulls in a china shop posting sexually explicit pictures, profanity, etc. which created a whole new slew of headaches. It's a valuable/lucrative audience, but you need a fair amount of policework to prevent things from getting out of control...
Robotics company unveils toys that mix science, cool
"The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight."
video search isn't big today, but it'll probably be huge in the future, may be as big as text search if not bigger. same can be said about video advertising. at that time, who do you think is going to have tons of inventory at their disposal? Google

it is just part of a bigger strategy - text search, book search, audio/video search etc.

youtube is a long term investment. as long as G has money to keep it running/improving, they have nothing to worry about.

may be 5-10 years from now, the same ppl would say that the best investment that google made, is youtube.
We know almost nothing about Chrome OS.
This is a really interesting piece of code. The style of C programming looks unreadable for the uninitiated, but is in fact very close to what in do in mathematics. I will try to play with this style myself (not for working code, of course).
10 best example of Underwater Photography
is that Bathos?
....or Pathos!?
... no, Hubris!? That's the one!

[EDIT: Just finished reading the OP... From wikipedia Hubris: "a term used in modern English to indicate overweening pride, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution or nemesis."

From OP: "An overgrown man-child and his precious collection can become a closed-loop co-dependency that functions as a moat"

I'm pretty sure that's a classic set up for Hubris? Well written piece methinks]
He cited research from Credit Suisse

Seriously? People are still citing that hack-job of an analysis? It didn't even take peering into account - it was ridiculous.
Honest question: Why?

Why are you attempting to make a Twitter clone? (I'm genuinely curious)
The problems he encountered with his phone getting prank called had nothing to do with the 118 800 directory - it was due to a friend losing his cell phone.
It's been a while since I learned something new from a nytimes tech article.
Actually, the more you use Google's free services the more you cost them. It's the non-techies who are clicking their ads which are making money for Google so, for all their technical marvels, Google's revenue source(s) are pretty narrowly defined.

I can almost picture Steve Ballmer slapping his cheeks with a mocking "Oh, no! Google's dominating yet another money-sucking cost pit! Whatever shall we do?!?!" before bursting out in laughter.
Thanks, tptacek. Actually from a founder's perspective, my BATNA is maintaining the day job and surviving on Ramen noodles. Which in the short-term is a distraction but can keep the project going while controlling the increase in the userbase and minimizing costs. Bootstrapping could continue ad infinitum until a deal is struck.
Lamson's Bounce Detection Algorithm
Last time I checked, and feel to correct me if I am wrong, MySQL used Row lookups when doing JOINs. There was no support for more efficient join algorithms like hash-join or merge-join, something which kills performance if you intend to run JOINs on a result/working-set bigger than just a few rows.

Are there any improvements in this area, or is it still just the same old, same old?
This is really all up to the seller. When we listed out house (albeit in a very different real estate climate), we decided we wanted to get about $300,000. When informed that I'd really be getting $276,000 after "commissions and fees" I simply said, "No you misunderstand, we want $300k for this house."

What actually transpired was that it listed for more than 300k (but not 24k more) and both the seller's and eventually buyer's agents decided to take less commission to make a quick sale.

These numbers aren't carved in stone. Everything is negotiable. You just have to ask.
Sure, a lot of successful tech companies come out of Silicon Valley, but there's a disproportionate amount of tech companies in Silicon Valley to begin with. It's certainly not obvious that the success rate is any higher there.
It appears to be a chat application.

Which naturally raises the question: "Doesn't the iPhone already have a perfectly usable chat application built in?"
Seem to be running the Identica platform, is there any features you are providing that Twitter/Identica does not have at the moment?
That's one lousy graph. It makes it look like there's twice as many men unemployed as women. The reality is there's only 20% more.
The article and the whole thread are based on massive overgeneralizations. The author only makes a couple of concrete observations of California's decline; most of the article is based on the author's conviction that the state's culture and politics won't work in the long run. I'm just getting in on it by comparing Texas cities in the same spirit :-) I certainly know Houston has a leg up on Austin in a few areas, and I have some Aggie friends and colleagues. Nobody looks down on a Rice degree -- quite the opposite. (I went to college out of state, but when I'm in College Station, I'm immediately pegged as a tea-sipper. Meh, I could do worse.)

Dallas, on the other hand, (which is where you live -- who uses the archaic name "Fort Worth" anymore?) is an unholy Sodom of beehive hairdos. Did you know you can get fined for not washing your BMW, or for doing your own yard work? It's true!
There was an article a while back about how the driving demographic for the sales of the Kindle is women who do not want everyone to know that they're reading bodice-ripper romance novels.
Very strange. LinkedIn is infinitely better for professional networking.
That's some interesting code, but would be more interesting if it worked. Segfaulted.

K is also fun, but considerably less fun to toy around with now that GUI functionality was taken out of the standard lib.
I like how no one cites employment figures for engineers and programmers in these articles. That's going to be the future employment prospects for men in the long term.

I would not see health care as a safe industry right now, what with the uncertainty of reform looming over our heads and what appears to be a bubble in health care in any case. Yet with job growth in healthcare, government, and education, the trend to notice isn't men and women, it's government and market. Government jobs, and jobs in highly regulated industries, seem safer at the moment than jobs in the market. Which is to be expected when government spending rises in an economic downturn.

If we see recovery soon, this short term trend will reverse itself and all this will be forgotten. But if we deepen into a depression, the other shoe will eventually drop once the federal government reaches a debt crisis. Then women (and, in fact, everyone in government/gov. regulated jobs) will be in the same boat. Neither outcome will really sustain this trend.
Wow, that's rough. I noticed on my brief foray into AppEngine that it is really easy to run up against their CPU limitations (as in, four trivial queries on a single pageload will do it), but it's amazing that you've managed to run up a $1,000/mo bill with them.

Or are you really burning through SQS requests fast enough to make it cost cash money?

Either way, it sounds like you've painted yourself into a corner it will be hard to get out of. AppEngine is probably the most difficult platform imaginable in terms of how hard it is to migrate off of. You'll have a ton of work to do just to get out of BigTable, and then you're left with a Django app.

I guess the best you can do is start charging money, and start developing a new version as quickly as possible to stop the bleeding.

Good luck!
Not wishing to defend 118 800, but after the first prank call from that service he could go "ex-directory" and get no further calls.

However, he's spot on when he points out that when you signed up for your mobile, there were no questions about being listed in a directory nor any expectation of such a listing.
60 million stung in social networking rip-off
like some kind of irritating Three Musketeers
Someone should write a Forth in brainfuck.
Correct: we are a chat message application. You can find friends and exchange messages with online/offline users based on location-based proximity. Offline messaging is available in the next iteration, v.1.2.
How does FF 3.5 get the location? The example asked me to share location, but then showed me in the middle of New York City when in fact I am in Burlington Vermont
A lot of databases "suck" because they have to be jacks of all trades, in that they have to be able to do a ton of very general things.

That's why a crap-load of web sites and apps can all use the same database software.

You will ALWAYS have much better performance if you write your own "database" that specifically does what it is you need doing, as in the case of Google, etc., that you mention.

And don't forget, Google didn't just write their own database, they wrote their own file system, etc., and even designed their own hardware (batteries on board to eliminate large UPS's, etc).

But they can afford to spend the money to hire the really smart people to build and maintain that stuff for them, and they have the scaling requirements that justify it.

Most other companies either can't justify it, or don't want to... they'd rather rely on the vendor to maintain the DB code, to security testing/updates, etc.

Really, I think a lot of the complaints about SQL (especially in the case of these recent articles) come from the fact that it's hard to design and implement a system that works the way they want it to, and there's no tool that just plugs into what they have that does what they need.

I see their issues as the exception rather than the rule, and not really applicable to most situations.

$0.02
This probably doesn't surprise anyone but their current business model is terrible. Why would anyone click on a text based ad which distracts them from the video they want to watch. I don't see why anyone would voluntarily do that. At some point google is going to have to bite the bullet and have video ads. Even if they are on after a video is shown they would be far more effective and desirable for advertisers.
Ask HN: I'd like to learn French without enrolling in classes
Some background: I'm a programmer with two jobs(day job and consulting), so my time is severely limited. I already know several programming languages and have no problem picking more up in a short time(picking up as in understand and write the syntax. "Learning" a language actually takes a long time). English is a second language to me(Arabic is the native one).

Now I'd like learn French to be able to converse in. Any helpful pointers?
Video search isn't big today because there is exactly ONE use case for it: [heroes season 2]. Text search works perfectly fine for that -- you type in [heroes season 2], you will find Heroes, season 2. It is probably one of the best single domains for searching -- canonical or near canonical names for everything, with disambiguating numbers that users actually know, and built-in metadata which links all your canonical names together in a pattern users actually understand! Brilliant!

OK, so we've got Heroes season 2. Now we have the problem: do people want to pay money for it? Answer: well, no, not if they can get it free on Youtube. Piracy is Youtube's killer app. Unlike the iPod (piracy is the iPod's killer app, too, unless you think 20-somethings are filling 8 GB iPods at $1 a song), Youtube doesn't have plausible deniability or a convenient way to extract money from the pirates.
I have bought none, if its less then 10 hours my point is even better made ;-)
FF 3.5 uses your IP address or wifi basestation id to retrieve the location and there is no guarantee that is accurate. In order to be accurate you need to use GPS or Cell Tower Locating from you cell phone.
exactly. how many of MS products are profitable? every successful company has a handful of ultra profitable/successful products, and a bunch of average ones, some that take years to start making profit (as will probably be the case in youtube) and many products that may never make any profit. google is just making sure they get into as many online/mobile biz as possible.
[pdf] A case study of web pornography search - SFW
Best Navigation Options, Help Users to Navigate Through Your Website Effectively
My friends are on twitter, why should I use this?
What is your current cash flow? That is all that matters. At a minimum your cash flow needs to be enough to service your debt and living expenses. Then, you can all work for equity and make a go of this.

Figure out what this number is, and then ask yourself how you can earn that money. You may need to do a part time job in order to get that money. Yes, your ability to focus on this company will be hindered. But imagine how much of a bottleneck being absolutely broke and potentially bankrupt will be to the progress of your company.

EDIT: You may as well call up your credit card issuers and ask them to drop your interest rate. I've had about a 50/50 success with this approach. Both times I was successful I went from an 18% interest rate on an account down to 12%.
Making an Operating System Virus Free
How Not to Advertise on the Internet
I think Ballmer stopped laughing at google sometime between them crawling out of their garage 10 years ago and them approaching MSFTs market cap today.
Have you seen youtube comments? They probably are coming from the non-techies.
Google/Adobe? No.
I believe in God, and I will admit that I don't understand a lot of the reasoning's in the Bible and why certain things happened, it's beyond my comprehension, but I realize that in the text, God wasn't the only one with the ability to affect things. Keep in mind, just like the Good vs. Evil idea, there is God vs. Devil (which in terms of the Bible, is catalyst for tempting us out of paradise).

Now, lets look at the fundamental morals behind the Bible, New Testament of course, because with the New Testament we were given a new law.

- Love one another
- Be a generous, helpful person
- Accept personal responsibility
- Don't have a sense of entitlement
- Honor and cherish your spouse
- Don't mislead or abuse children
- Honor your parents
- Be proactive
- Resist conformity
- Abide by the laws
- Don't be judgmental
- Be kind
- Be compassionate
- Be empathetic
- Don't be obsessed with possessions or wealth
- Work hard
- Ignorance is not an excuse
- People are people, no matter their ethnicity
- Be tolerant
- Don't cheat
- Everything in moderation

I could probably go on if I thought about it more, these are the immediate things that I try to keep in my mind from my studying. Say what you will, but that's a pretty good model for living life. One that I try my best to implement, and constantly fail at, but hey, practice makes habit.
Well, with an increasing version system, you can never tell when you're finished. Is version 3 FINAL the final version, or is some new maintainer going to come make version 4 anyways? If you iterate toward 0, your final product can be awib-0, and you'd be hard pressed to find a new version number without further confusing the three people who got what you were going for.

(I'm guessing it's just a typo.)
what if I am searching for a particular scene (say a 2 min scene), in a particular episode of heroes, in a particular season?
Inside Gazelle, Microsoft Research's "browser OS"
Article consists of a 54 year old man glamorizing physical media in comparison to digital media.

I may live in a world where I no longer have the fun of meticulously organizing my album collection or noticing cute girls reading smart books on the transit system, but at least I'll be able to pack a hard drive and a couple gadgets with me instead of a whole U-Haul full of books and records whenever I want to move. As someone who's moved ten times in six years and wouldn't mind moving some more in the future, I don't mind reducing my data to a more efficient physical form.
Historic Atom Smasher Reduced to Rubble and Revelry | Wired Science | Wired.com
Not sure why this guy is being downvoted. He's right.
two words: PayPal lol

Ebay was so awesome when it was the wild wild west and you had to actually email back and forth with buyers and sellers to establish a repoire before you trusted them. It baffles me that a smaller auction company has never really risen from Ebay's apparent ashes. I really had my money on Gbay for a while...

Between Ebay, Craigslist and Amazon (who charges say a 15% fee to sell video games), I'll get the most money in my pocket selling on Amazon and that is bullshit.
The service they use is particularly bad then. Most places I have tried get within a few towns for my office. (Obviously none can get my home satellite connection correct)
> It was an experiment to get some sort of quick market validation

Market validation is once you have the data to say "customers in demographic X will pay Y dollars for this app, I will make a margin of Z percent, and there Q customers willing to pay."

Unless you can survive on your free version (which it sounds like you can't), you haven't validated the market yet. Find the price point where you are profitable (and people will pay!)
Exactly. The point of this is not one celeb who's number inadvertantly became public domain, it's the rest of us poor sods who are forced to use our unique contact information like phone numbers and mailing addresses to get regular services, and then watch that information get bought and sold until it ends up in the hands of scumbags, at which point the junk mail, automated phone calls and spam texts become a denial of service attack which is very hard to guard against.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656237

The article and discussions are helpful.
Good work!

I know how hard it is to try to build a tool that already exist, one advice quit doing twitter; instead build a good complement of twitter. Think of features that twitter does not offer, find ways to leverage the power of twitter, use its API to provide cooler stuff.

One thing to know is that the hardest part is not to implement twitter as an application; the hardest part is to convince people to use it and technically scale.
Video of evolution of an HTML document from scratch to final site with CSS
Google CEO to discuss his future as an Apple director
One force of nature vs. another: Bill Gates tries to stop hurricanes(new patent)
No, the graph makes it looks like from a baseline of about 5% a year and a half ago, unemployment for women has gone up about 60% while unemployment for men has gone up about 100% -- or not quite double the increase. It's a fair representation.

And even in absolute numbers, there are far, far more than 20% more men than women who are unemployed. It's the unemployment _rate_ for which the figure for men is about 20-ish% more than the rate for women.
I have just one Don't!
Don't follow people blindly. Unless you find them interesting, don't follow them.

Don't follow so many people that you cannot participate in conversations. While twitter is good as a one way broadcast medium, it is much better as a conversation tool. Especially short conversations.
I don't know if I should be sad or grateful that Billy Mays did not live to see this day.
I don't understand the obsession with trying to add a few years to human lifespans. I'd personally rather live a shorter enjoyable life than a long one full of depravation just so I can eek out a few more years at the tail end.

I guess that's easy to say since I'm barely reaching middle age.
Hoarding physical goods as a method of passively boasting is stupid. Good riddance to limited edition releases, and paying exorbitant prices for imported editions with special content.

If you're really into what you like, and want to 'show off', do something constructive. The Nine Inch Nails fan community is a great example: nincatalog.com and nintourhistory.com are crowdsourced and way cooler to check out (as a fellow fan) than a shelf of CDs and records at someone's house.
Here's a slightly lengthier walkthrough that shows a Frogger-type game being created:

http://vimeo.com/2443941
"No, the graph makes it looks like from a baseline of about 5.5%"

You're assuming that most people who look upon the graph understand concepts such as "baseline". I very much doubt that.
The Associated Press adopts an extended hAtom microformat
Spec of the extended hAtom is at http://valueaddednews.org/technical/techspec
Because a communications link is generally only a passive part of the system, it relays the signal and that is all...

Computing on untrusted hardware is like trying to convert a plaintext secret message to ciphertext while an enemy agent with perfect memory is watching over your shoulder, not exactly easy.
Essential Skills for Geeks
Perhaps some definition of terms may be in order, given that some may not know that unemployment means those who don't work but do want to work. Stay-at-home moms, for example, would not be unemployed.
After watching this video: http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14310459/kodu/videos/ces2... it looks to me not like Logo, but like all the existing Windows game creators - Game Maker, Klik & Play, Multimedia Fusion - but with a nicer UI and easy 3d. Seems neat, looking forward to me.
Important point about the cost of the original acquisition:

"Even so, it’s important to remember that Google paid for YouTube in stock, not cash, that represented a tiny fraction of the company’s total market capitalization. (The deal was initially valued at $1.65 billion.) And immediately after the merger was announced, Google’s shares rose, which in some sense seemed to pay for the deal on its own."
It certainly is. I found it via search before i posted here.
The 'best' method to keep viruses off an OS is what Apple is doing with the iphone - reviewing every app by hand before it is allowed to run on the OS. Even that is far from foolproof though, and it has a whole host of other problems.
Oh yeah, but you don't HAVE to live in an HOA. I understand what you were getting at now though, I think I just failed to realize your point.

I don't know about Fort Worth being archaic, it's actually a city that is not part of Dallas, complicated zoning up here, I can't put "Dallas" as my address, since I wouldn't get my mail then.

I will have to concede to your point about the beehive hairdos, but I've seen plenty of that in Austin as well, it all depends on neighborhood....plus downtown DFW is a mecha of status symbols, not sure about the culture in downtown Dallas, I try to avoid it as it's a little too congested for me.
risk of using paypal, risk of getting scammed(never getting an item, getting a box full of rocks, getting a refurbished item as new, getting a knockoff etc)
The "Learn French with Coffe Break French" podcast. I listen to it in my conmmutes.
How can you automatically detect that from a video? And if instead of automatically detecting it, you just let the users tag the video, why does text search not work? Finally, even if they manage to get a useful video search working, why do they need Youtube for it, when they can crawl the web for video?