skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually posted a follow-up article based on this information, based on something hilarious I found when researching.

My bit: http://shortformblog.com/world/ikea-changed-their-fonts-to-r...

The original article (skip the middleman): http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-ikea25-2009aug25...

Considering that was the reason, it's kind of hilarious that people in China go to IKEA to essentially loiter.
Depends on what you're trying to think about, and what kind of depression you have, doesn't it?
The Pirate Bay is back with a vengeance (or: rethink your business model)
I was moved by how respectful, honest, and encouraging the declination to fund letter was. Seemed pretty classy to me.
Checkout Shareaholic
x86_64 == more registers available than on i386

more registers == fewer spills

For the average compiled program, fewer spills == faster.

=> Average programs run faster under x86_64.
What is Life?
He who speaks first, loses.
What sort of investment do you do?
It is much easier to identify what it is not than what it is. One could even cheat by claiming that anything is "not zen".
Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3
Hierarchy of the Successfully Self-Employed
Smalltalk Agents had no "primitives." (Read, no methods written in C.) The JIT was deemed good enough that everything could be written in Smalltalk. VisualWorks still has primitives, but a surprising number of things are written in Smalltalk, like Dictionary lookup.
two separate lines, as in you read the "dee" out loud?
You must not drive much in places where the effective speed limit is higher than the posted speed limit -- which, in my experience, is almost everywhere. If you drive the speed limit or less in other than heavy, slower than usual traffic, you get tailgated and cut off regularly, and actually contribute to traffic snarls by introducing additional variances in the flow of traffic.
Is it possible to add whatever number Google calls you from when connecting incoming calls to the list of numbers that you can talk to for free? Might be possible to get all calls for free if it's always the same number, until T-Mobile blocks it from those lists.
I have found similar insights to you.

The first problem I had with using ditz on git was that I suddenly need git and ditz to just say 'hey, I'll implement this feature'. If I use trac, I just need a browser (which is clearly an advantage if you have conservative computer-pool administrators at the university :) ).

Second, I don't like how git+ditz allows one to easily see OLD version data. If you forget to pull before checking your ditz, you see old data, so you don't see how I started working on the task you start working on, so we both do the same thing. That won't happen that easily if your task&bug-management lies on a webserver.

This, merging and branching becomes a lot more bothersome, at least if the issue-tracker is not implemented carefully, as you said.

Third, I kept running into problems, because I liked to work on certain tasks in parallel, on differnt branches (because both were interesting :) ), this did not work out well with ditz either, because comments to these tasks ended up being on different branches and this, not in a central thingie.

Thus, I'd conclude that there is a certain analogy going on here:
Programmers need non-programmer managers to reach peak efficiency (even though a programmer-compatible and understanding manager makes this even better), and a repository needs a good issue management tool to reach peak efficiency (even though a repository-compatible issue management tool makes this even better)
I don't see where you get the impression that I'm advocating for (solely) taking your "passive" approach, either. Against what, exactly, are you arguing? Is there something I actually said to which you object? Are you assuming for some reason that the fact I said something is proof that I advocate everyone doing nothing but sitting around saying the same thing? I even agreed that providing more convincing evidence could be helpful, indicating that trying to come up with that evidence is a good idea! What's up with your attempts to cast everything I say as opposition to that?
If BOOBS Could Talk ??  
Talk is cheap, especially when it's being spoken by a woman with large breasts.
getting to see that spreadsheet was worth clicking the link, everything else was gravy.

- a very transparent post :) good job, and thanks.
The Todo.txt Command Line Interface (CLI)
You can write plugins in mysql as well.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/plugin-creating.html

Please do not make things up and claim your imagination as truth.
I linked to a couple of Bruce's stories a week or so ago, including one that was just a link, because a lot of the comments on his blog are well worth reading, often even better than here. The benefit of HN is the breadth of subjects, but if I had to choose one or the other, I would drop HN before schneier.com. Fortunately, I don't have to.
The Linux approach, in my opinion, is the best of any platform. Other platforms don’t offer such a seamless experience; I’m looking at you OS X, and your confusing virtual disk image installation method.

Huh? The installation mechanism on OS X for 99% of apps is literally "click icon, drag to desktop".
Yeah. I think this is one of the only times I've seen raw VC feedback from a private context. Very valuable.
Everything in this was so transparent and useful I had to download it in case they took it offline.

Only pain: the embedded scribd document. To download that separately through scribd I had to signup, skip two pages of subscription stuff only to be redirected to scribd home, go back to the original site (now registered and signed in on scribd), try and download again, skip some ad, skip another subscriber page, and finally get to download it :-)
I wonder what would happen if he had 999999999999999 emails, and then he read 999999999999997 of them?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782985
switching to log-space is insanely useful for compounding returns.

inside mysql, i used it all the time.

for example, perhaps i want to get a sense of the distribution of users; i have a table "users" with columns "user" and "count"

i could get a log-scaled histogram like so:

select pow(int(log(count)/log(10)),10) as bin, count(*) as ct from users

this would get a table like such (forgive my ascii art)

bin | ct
----+---
1 | 12
10 | 27
100 | 35

another thing you can do is us the order of magnitude with repeat(char, num) to make a sort of visual bar chart.

that said, i'm sorta glad i don't have to use mysql professionally anymore.
I think the type of person who knows enough to buy a police scanner also knows enough to start their own blog somewhere. Perhaps they started it at WindyCitizen in a rational decision to maximise their audience / build community.

He's 16, for Christ's sake. In days gone by he'd be married with children by now. And yet people internalise these "underage" rules and insist on treating people like toddlers until their 18th birthday. It's completely arbitrary, and ridiculous. Let him do as he pleases.
MitM attacks are a legitimate concern. I have an open bug to implement straightforward RSA signing of menu responses, with validation in the gPXE code, as well as to have gPXE hash check downloaded images. The reason I don't simply want to use SSL is because I don't trust gPXE's SSL implementation - you wouldn't either if you'd seen it - or my ability to fix it properly.
On Clojure documentation:

* There is a very informative book about clojure by Stuart Halloway: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure

* http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming

* http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=clojure+tutorial

Take your pick.
Scribd used to be cool at the start. Now they are like some landing page for adverts. YouTube has a better mental image at the moment than scribd. Scribd comes across ultra spammy.

To quote the bible: "What does it benefit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul?"
Why asynchronous file upload still a pain?
So to summarize, don't start full-fledged building of a product until you've done some customer development first. And make sure you've read Steve Blank.
If you do it in the database, you don't have to shunt all the values across the wire from the database server. If the middle tier is on a different machine, this can make a significant difference to the time taken to do the query.
A somewhat tangential meme is making the rounds of the VC bloggers at the moment which might be applicable to the point of this article: the current VC model is mostly broken because VC firms make too much money on the carry, so they raise huge funds (using past history during the 'fat' years to justify them to LPs) and this increases the pressure to deliver invest in larger chunks and aim for unrealistic returns on these large investments.

If a firm's GPs expect a seven-figure base of compensation they are going to want to raise 200-500MM depending on the size of the firm, which is difficult to effectively distribute in chunks of less than 10MM.
Nokia N97 Smartphone WHITE unlocked
Nokia N97 is one of the most brand new dramatization by Nokia Blackberry with ample of excellent feature highlights, dual mode functionality, integrated GPS, 5-megapixel camera, and more. With its touch screen just flick the monitor to scroll, hit to select and click to activate the option.
Relational databases really are for doing relational operations. If you're using them for doing bits of arithmetic then you're going to come up against all sorts of limitations. Trivially, if you use this computed value in a where clause the query optimiser will have no choice but to do a full table scan. It can't index by all possible computed values.

Horses for courses. Do the query in whatever programming language, then just multiply the numbers together. I don't try to do left outer joins on my HP12-C calculator either.
It's why I mentioend previous edition of the book. For very common courses, it can be next to nothing for the book. I'm talking $10 vs $80 for current editions.
I guess that the article is the same as it was in the paper edition, which makes the shortifying more useful. They could have just written "check on Apple's website", of course. Or maybe even go through the trouble of editing the web edition.
that's not even a reason, did they write it on a type writer?!
id be thrilled if flash died as the defacto video player and made way for html 5's feature.
I too use this.

The nice thing about Jungledisk is that you can just mount the thing as a directory (uses fuse under linux) and use rsync to do the backups. That works well for me with multi-Gb source repositories, whereas when using Mozy on windows, its built-in scheduled backups struggled badly and chewed a lot of CPU, presumably scanning through all the thousands of files.

That's not really a fair comparison - I haven't tried Jungledisk's built-in scheduled backups, merely using it as a mounted drive and doing the backups manually with rsync. But that's too bad - last time I looked, Mozy didn't support mounting as a drive, or even linux.
Thanks for your effort. When I retire, I envisage spending my time a little like you do - trying to help the communities I love.
Amen to that.

And since we're on a Ruby thread, Ubuntu's Ruby 1.9 is 1.9.0 which is (1) buggy (2) broken (3) more than a year old. It is fucking ridiculous, no-one with any sense is using that. This version manager is actually better than apt-get for managing your Ruby installs. Go figure.
Which appears to be browser dependent and potentially horrible?
There's a nice object lesson here about fully understanding the impact of a system change on your users. Making things "better" for them often isn't.
Yes, I am a C coder. The variable names use awful Hungarian notation, but are often otherwise tersely named beyond that. It could use more whitespace to signify logical blocks instead of running all the logic in a function together. It's well commented except for the confusing parts, like the concurrency logic and the memory management, which seems rather backwards.

By contrast, both the Linux kernel and WebKit are far more beautiful codebases than SQLite, and also deal with far more complexity. If SQLite's the best you've seen, you haven't really seen much...
This is where it gets above my head and into John's wheelhouse, but for the sake of humoring a VC newb like me ...

... why couldn't these lower cost deals scale out? Couldn't they make more investments at lower initial valuations rather than less investments at unrealistic valuations?

Maybe it's because I live in this world nearly 24/7, but I can look at the press and the presentation of everything I get pitched by the PR flacks on a daily basis and make a snap judgement on at least 80% of what I see as to whether or not it's going to last or make money.

I'm not 100% right, but I'm right a lot more than I'm wrong.

If I'm just a pundit, a guy who blabs for a living (who, btw, isn't very expensive to employ), why can't more folks like me be employed by these VC firms to scale up these low cost investments?

Is there something completely wrong-headed about what I'm asking that I just don't get?
I have a syllable counter, we should merge it!
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Actually, I think that the lesson is more of balancing existing, niche user needs against prospective mass user needs. Almost nobody gets this right, but it's a wonderfully challenging game.

For one, I would have made the awesome-bar return some search results as well, and made it impossible to distinguish between those and the bookmark results. They could also have compared auto-completes against whitelists/blacklists.
Where's the best place to learn about online advertising?

More specifically, say I wanted to do an analysis similar to that done by First Round Capital. What should I read if I want to learn, e.g., what is a reasonable eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions; I had to google it), or what CTRs to expect, etc. etc.?
Wow this brings back memories. I studied this language in europe back when I was a kid (must have been around 20 years ago). Very interesting and it definitely changes the way one thinks about programming. Too bad the purpose it was written for (the so called expert systems) never really became popular.
With that kind of attitude, user interfaces should never, ever change. I don't think a conservative attitude like this is the path to success.
And use about twice as much Ram. Personally I think 8 bytes for every single pointer seems wasteful for most programs.
1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A modem
Last I checked, Debian was still working on their own elaborate scheme to have 1.8 and 1.9 coexist, without the involvement of the Ruby community. Meanwhile, the latest apt version is a useless 1.9.0 that's at least a year old.

This looks far superior to what they were cooking up, or to the ad hoc shellscripts I've been using. I wonder how well it handles gem binaries, which I found to be the trickiest aspect.
Lectures on Discrete and Polyhedral Geometry (free ebook) [pdf]
Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
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Absolutely. I've been freelancing for two years and found that even little things like not gelling my hair or not shaving can throw me off for an entire morning.

Environmental triggers like having a cup of tea or coffee ready, music playing, and the right windows open are surprisingly significant too.
Joe, if you're still following this thread, thanks for sharing that presentation and for the extra information here. I have a question. Your very last point says "Board composition REALLY matters". Could you expand on that? What are some red flags to watch out for? Is a fair, founder-friendly solution possible? Is it common? What does it look like?

I ask because I have heard many nasty stories of founders thinking that they would stay in control of their company, only to find that, because of the board, this wasn't true at all. I would like to know how to make sure this doesn't happen. It seems like the issues can't all be obvious, or so many smart people wouldn't fall prey to this pattern.
No, you're being down-voted because you're a selfish arse. Is the primary concern the slight inconvenience his disappearance will cause you?? ... to us, the answer is No.
Well, prolog is especially good at a certain task. And that is storing and dealing with logically organized language like data. Back in the time, people used to refer to this as storing and dealing with knowledge instead of data.

The main idea of prolog is to kind of mimic the way the human mind stores knowledge. So eventually one would be able to store the knowledge obtained by an extpert, such as a botanist, engineer, car mechanic, attorney, etc. and be able to recall it or use it to solve problems in simple language like queries.

That is a pretty ambitious goal and, to the best of my knowledge, I don't think it has ever really worked. Nevertheless, it is a very cool language and its ultimate goal may work now that computing power is so high.
On what basis do you conclude that?
Air-powered LEGO V8 engine running at 1440 rpm (vid)
This would be cool but I think it would be hard for the average Mechanical Turker to get it right. They'd have to learn all the numeric codes police use for everything, for one thing. Also the dispatcher and cops know the local geography very well and use a lot of shorthand. Here's the live police scanner feed for Seattle (mostly silent right now since it's 1am):

http://www.komonews.com/news/content/scanner/31214074.html?v...

Lots of other feeds are linked here:

http://www.police-scanner.info/live-police-scanners.htm

Having said that, I don't think you need to hire mechanical turkers - you could make a nice app for the community of people who are really into listening to this stuff, and they'd do the work for you - Timmy is not alone. Make a community site around that does a nice job aggregating the feeds, and that rewards accurately reporting them and adds maps, trends, etc. Not sure there's a business there - you might be able to get some grant money to get it off the ground though.
I don't think N = NP, because NP in polynomial time seems unnatural. Nature usually solves NP problems by natural selection, and from empiric observations it seems that finding the best answer is never a concern, usually a good enough one will do.

We'll have a Star Trek-like utopia once we are able to create human-like intelligence, and I think that's doable.
Passive crowd sourcing: How Google uses your data when you’re stuck in traffic
Even better is the camper kart http://www.kevincyr.net/index.php?/ongoing/camper-kart/
firefox 3's location bar is a mess, not just because of this issue. It will suggest me a gmail authentication string for almost all of my inputs. There are lots of ways to do this better. I like chromes way of doing it, but it has some privacy issues.
Windows 7 Codec %100 ücretsizdir... | iYiblogcu
You know, this will probably be downvoted, but isn't this exactly what the investors & programs like YC are there to prevent? If someone has an "idea" without any market knowledge, why fund them?

The first thing I do when helping out other entrepreneurs is to make sure they really know their market.
Firefox private browsing aka porn mode:

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AK...
I'd be surprised if the Open Mind Common Sense project didn't have data like "burn" is something that can happen when "cook"

http://openmind.media.mit.edu/
Having worked with java apps for blackberry, I fear that not everything is all right with their current organization. Making java apps for blackberry is even worse than making them for nokia or sonyericson. Poorly documented and broken in mysterious ways.
Avialans are part of the Dinosauria classification, yes.

The problem is that that not even all Avialans are "birds", let alone all dinosaurs.

So, yeah birds "descended" from dinosaurs, so did a lot of other stuff. I don't think anyone disputes this.
This is pretty cool. I've been using a textfile for todo lists for a while, but the video tutorial really blew me away.

EDIT: This is really the type of stuff I'd love to see more on news.ycombinator.com -- tools to make me more efficient.
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Urg... I think I know why I'm confused.

P, NP, etc... are sets of yes/no or boolean problems. That is to say, the answer to these questions are always "Yes" or "No".

Lets take the traveling saleperson problem. You have a bunch of cities, and the distances between them. Also, your given a threshold, K. Your goal is to tell me if there is a path through the cities that has a distances less than K. All you output is "Yes" or "No"

This can be converted to an algorithm for finding the shortest path in polynomial time, which is the optimization version of the problem. But this problem is not in NP, its not even a candidate to be in NP.

However, I'm having trouble relating to what your saying.
> A possible solution can be found in P time. But checking if it's THE solution (i.e. the best solution) requires NP time.

In terms of traveling salesperson, what is "a possible solution" and what is "the solution"? I'm guessing "the solution" is the shortest path, but if "a possible solution" means some path through all the cities... then that doesn't help much. Even for problems that are harder than NP, I can come up with a possible solution in polynomial time as long as the size of the solution is polynomial (I'm having difficulty thinking up an example at the moment).

Tell me if I'm being hard-headed or overly semantic...
Tell him. If he doesn't /take/ responsibility, it doesn't change the fact that his life is his own and whatever he is experiencing, belongs to him alone.
Boxcar 2.0 Is A Must-Have For the iPhone.
...with cardboard, scissors and duct-tape.
MongoDB fantastic for logging
Yes, I think this pretty much sums up the confusion I've been having. Lack of understanding of jargon on my part...
Hi, looks like it was a fun project. While you save yourself from checking the DB for a duplicate hash with your hex id strategy, a side effect of this technique is that every URL created with your service is effectively public. For instance, I could start at http://briancray.com/tests/shorturl/0 and work my way up through every URL ever shortened by incrementing the id in hex. Whether this is a vulnerability or undocumented feature is up to you to decide :)

I bring it up because I ran across the same issue with my own site, droplink.me. It was a more serious problem for me, because user uploaded files are supposed to be private. I went with randomly generated URLs.
Is it just me, or does this come off as an advertisement more than an article?
I think you're neither. My understanding is based on practical applications. That is, as far as I understand it, you're right about P and NP. From a practical point of view, the optimization of the problem depends on knowing what the smallest K is that has a "Yes" answer.

So, yes, checking the solution is P. Finding the solution is NP. Optimizing for K is, therefore, intractable. Does that sound (at least somewhat) right?