skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When a scandal broke shortly after 1900 to the effect that John D. Rockefeller had a notorious family secret in the form of a bigamist/swindler father still living in the United States, Joseph Pulitzer offered an $8,000 reward to a press corps that utterly hated Rockefeller as a monopolist to go and locate the father. After a frenzied 18-month search, they failed to find him before he died. A Wikipedia write-up on this appears at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Avery_Rockefeller.

This is equivalent today of the press being unable to find Bill Gates's father even after being offered a rather large monetary reward and after applying all of its vast resources to the effort - even as the father continued to live in the continental U.S.

It was a lot easier to "disappear" 100 years ago, before the advent of modern technology, than it is today. There is something vaguely creepy about how one's whereabouts can so easily be tracked with the modern tools at hand.
Couple guys from my University started Jobloft.com and they were recently acquired - although this was before the recession.
You know Cheers—"where everybody knows your name" and all that? The Internet is like that, for some people: a third place[1], a place that people want to feel sociable and at home at the same time. Celebrities are the plague of third places; because people rarely actually know the people they meet in a standard third place (unlike Cheers), certain people—the celebrities of the individual third place—are gravitated toward as topics of conversation, because they are "safe" topics of conversation that most people there are sure to have something to say. Beauty parlors have magazine-cover celebrities; we have ranting-douche celebrities.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Place
I have to say I love my Blackberry 8900. App World is no App Store, but it's perfectly fine for my needs and I couldn't live without a physical keyboard!!
One reason for the proliferation of Pittsburgh startups are the efforts of a number of people/programs that want to see the city make a comeback. AlphaLabs is one, but IdeaFoundry and Lenore Blum's Project Olympus are two more that deserve some credit. When I started up as a CMU student 3 years ago, there was no shortage of professionals and established entrepreneurs happy to lend a helping hand; and most just wanted to see productivity return to the region.

I'm curious how this atmosphere compares to Boulder, Boston, San Francisco. Is there similar camaraderie in those cities?
It's too much debt out there.
schneier writes about how evil the flash cookies are, but he doesn't mention how to deactivate them. I did it (http://giu.me/s/ngaf8k), and that's how it went down (note: some flash applications won't work anymore after you deactivate the flash cookies!):

first, go to the Website Storage Settings Panel by following this link: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay....
while there, hit the delete all cookies button.

next step, visit the Global Storage Settings Panel located at http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay.... deselect the first option (the one that permits third parties to save data on your computer).

finally, excuse me that I didn't use the exact english description of each option. as you may guess, my settings are displayed in another language than the english one (it's the german one, to be exact :).
The author's mind is beyond debugging, and needs a complete rewrite.
No, your feedback has been great. We need to think about these things and we're glad you brought them up. Thanks!
yep. Mahalo is the new squidoo. Lame.
As the author of that "especially ignorant" quote, I'll try to explain what I meant.

When talking about Linux on the desktop, I'm not talking about the kernel, per se. Mostly, I'm talking about the user experience as informed by GNOME, KDE, and other Linux/Unix desktop environments, which have not been particular successes; Android's UX is a bit like GNOME on a phone, even if it doesn't use GTK widgets. This is to say that most of the applications are pale copies of standard applications on other mobile platforms, and that the UX is generally clunky.

When it does come to the kernel, I'm mostly talking about the difficulty of having an operating system that's designed to support a large variety of hardware. Perhaps I've gotten lemons, but the Android phones I've used seem to have a tentative relationship with their network interfaces.

I would actually welcome a platform that isn't an iPhone clone; that's why I got interested in Android in the first place. Android doesn't need to behave exactly like an iPhone to be a success in my book. It just needs to adhere to the same general level of quality control: things look good, they work right, the interface is intuitive, the hardware is speedy, third-party apps work 90% of the time. I don't care if the interface metaphors or hardware form factor is completely different. It just needs to not suck.
when i ride a motorcycle, i rarely use turn sign ... i literally use my head to turn

i don't even use the mirrors because turning my head eliminates blind spots

car and bike riders here understand (and accustomed to) what it means when an object in front of them slows down while its rider's helmet turn to left/right

but of course it's not safe :( so maybe a better solution is a bike with accelerometer built in (like in iPhone) so the sign flashes whenever i tilt my bike accordingly
Wow! Really?

Downloading music is greener than buying CDs?

You've got to be joking!
I found in IBM Archives John Backus' (Fortran) thoughts on programming:

“Von Neumann’s concept was brilliant. of course, and worked fine 30 years ago,” said Backus. ‘But...here’s my highly oversimplified analysis of the von Neumann computer. It consists of two boxes. One is the central processing unit, where the calculations take place, and the other is the store, or memory. Traffic between them takes place, figuratively speaking, through a narrow passage that I call the von Neumann bottleneck. Because it is just that. You see, the purpose of a program is to make a big change in the store. But how does it do it? By huffing and puffing words (a computer word is only 32 bits — 0s” and ‘l’s”) back and forth through the tiny passage between the store and the CPU. One word at a time.”

The result, says Backus, is that the programmer is left with an enormous task of how to get things out of the store, combine and pump them back into the store so that the ultimate result is achieved. Everything that can be said in a conventional programming language has to be thought of in advance, making the language huge and inflexible. “And because it takes pages and pages of gobbledygook to describe how a programming language works, it’s hard to prove that a given program actually does what it is supposed to. Therefore, programmers must learn not only this enormously complicated language but, to prove their programs will work, they must also learn a highly technical logical system in which to reason about them.

Here is a link where I put together some information:

http://blog.thstart.com/2009/07/scienceibm-archives-john-bac...
For the record, I did read the entire article. And I admittedly dismissed most of it when you stated "This is not a tested theory, just simple speculation." As you discovered, your implementation was effectively a deque. I don't really consider keeping an in place iterator around any kind of "fundamental" optimization, hence my reply. Anyway, feel free to pontificate all you want about my answer in your blog, however it wasn't my intention to get in to a pissing match about it, it was instead just to point out that I felt misled by the title of the original post.
Jquery - simple AJAX browser history and bookmarking
Having done the switch from my iPhone 3G to an HTC Magic I find both of these phones are far from perfect. I may switch back again, but believe me, both still have problems.

-My iPhone would not rotate when I was rotating my phone, I had to do it 2-3 times or exit safari and restart in the landscape orientation for it to switch. At other time the orientation changed but the width was not changed.

-I'm not a big fan of reboot so every 2 or 3 days safari would just start to crash on page load with no reason. Only solved by a reboot.

-On the reboot front, once I made everyone at home change there time. Since my phone is taking it's time from the cell provider and this as always worked correctly on my many Motorola phones, I told everybody they were 10 minutes forward. The day after, at work I saw the time on a friends iPhone and it was also 10 minutes forward. This made no sense, we have the same provider. It was probably more than a week since my last reboot. Android may have the same problem, I don't know.

-OS 3 gave us the search but before that remembering on which page some of the less used apps were was just a pain. I still don't like this way of organizing, but I lack a better solution.

-Talk about obscure way of doing some action on the iPhone. As an example, have you taken a screenshot? The way to do it appeared to you how?

-I think the HTC magic has too many buttons, but the iPhone lacks some. Even after a year of using my iPhone, I still sometimes closed the application with the home button while I was just trying to back off one level. In fact the back button on the Android and the way application stack themselves is really superior.

The iPhone 3Gs finally has a camera. Come on the 3G was not even able to read bar codes (except with red laser, doing image correction and enhancement)

After 2 weeks without my iPhone what I miss the most is the vibration/ringer switch. This is a great feature.

The one feature that keeps me from going back on the Android is the notifications "pull down"

One last thing, latitude on Android is awesome;-)
"fastest-growing company in world"

bloomberg.com says RIM's fallen 42% in the past year:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=RIM%3ACN
But does that excuse issues with a platform that's intended to compete with the iPhone? The whole point of Gruber's piece is that Android is going to have to exceed the standard set by the iPhone in order to capture mindshare with early adopters who then encourage wider adoption.
Covered here earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768784
Side note: Imran Zaidi is one of my favorite web designers. I remember him trying a startup with Streem.io; glad he made it out here, to WebMynd and made it absolutely beautiful. WebMynd's homepage is really tripping me out with how great it is.
Android G1 may not have enough space for future updates
Good luck! It's never fun to read about a young startup closing its doors, but I'm sure you'll do great things with these experiences.

A quick question: I've been reading a lot about the theory of customer development lately (mostly via Eric Ries's blog and The Four Steps to the Epiphany). I know hindsight is 20/20, and I apologize in advance if it sounds like I'm just rubbing salt in your wounds, but I'd love to know what you think about this...

It sounds like your experience is a good example of a company that might have benefited by putting as much effort into finding the initial customers as in product development. Working closely with these earlyvangelists from the start might have helped you learn whether the product being built solves real pain points and to learn how and to what extent these earlyvangelists would be able to deploy the product internally.

I personally think it would be very difficult to do anything but build product in the three months leading up to demo day. The time it would take to locate and engage potential customers seems mammoth. Perhaps the product delivered on demo day is used to secure additional funding, and then as the demo product used to find market fit.

Anyway, I'm no expert in this stuff, which is why I'd really like to know your thoughts.

Best of luck with your next company!
"... So, wouldn't it be more practical to work on a model for something that has real life applications instead ? ..."

What makes you think theoretical research into imaginary scenarios isn't needed? Back in May this year I would have loved to have read this paper and tried it out ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3517984501/ #melbourne #zombie #shuffle
Apple and the Futurist
It would not be comfortably chosen, therefore it should not be presented as an option? Knowledge is knowledge. I am pro it.

Also, the funding came from at least one grant (OERA) that pushes for youth interaction and outreach from active researchers. It seems like zombie math --- 'treating it like some kind of computer game' --- is a pretty good way to accomplish that; how much money was spent to make a few graphs in MATLAB, to such good effect?
I'm surprised that this is actually an issue, can someone who is more familiar with the Android OS explain how the space available was consumed? Is it simply a matter of adding tons of new binaries?
In setting up the model, the birth rate is given as a constant (capital pi). Clearly the birth rate should be proportional to the number of survivors S.

This doesn't materially alter the thrust of the argument, which presupposes a short outbreak with pi := 0 anyway, but does negate the conclusion of the first section, that "an outbreak of zombies will lead to the collapse of civilisation, as large numbers of people are either
zombified or dead."

In reality, the first ODE just states that the sum of (living+zombies+dead) only increases when new humans are born.
Makes it look easy. Python is poetry in $EDITOR.
You're right that dataflow is well suited for concurrent programming. For a certain class of problems, it's ability to express your intentions in simplistic form is outstanding.

I currently work on the compiler team for a dataflow programming language. Our compiler generates machine code for various processors, as well as VHDL for FPGAs. As you would probably expect, the generated code is very different depending on the target. Most CPUs are more suited to imperative programming rather than dataflow, so we often have to compromise on the granularity of parallelism to get good performance. On FPGAs, the compromise is typically reducing either parallelism or performance to save resources and making the code fit on the device.

Programming for a dataflow environment is definitely a very different experience. Our customers typically do not have a computer science background, and in some ways this is a blessing. Most people with a computer science background initially try to program imperatively when exposed to an inherently parallel dataflow language. It takes some time to adjust to it, but when it finally clicks you can begin to look at problems from the both perspectives simultaneously. I feel like having a mastery of the different styles (imperative, dataflow, functional, etc.) has improved my overall ability to solve problems regardless of which model of computation I decide to use.
Mahalo.com is a different take on search and worth checking out. While although "human powered" results can never cover the breadth of Google. They might be able to compete on depth.

I once heard an an important realization from Jason Calacanis. He said that most search revenue is generated off just a few phrases. While you want to be useful with the ability to answer who shot Alexander Hamilton, the cash cows are in searches like home mortgage.
So overweight, depressed, 'pattern-hunters' are more 'evolutionarily advanced' than people who aren't?

Sounds like the 'fast company' (url) is trying to pull a fast one on us.
Wow. Talk about over-engineering. This was a software problem, not a hardware problem, solved about ten years prior to 1987 by vi:

/ search string

? search string

n to repeat

No thumbs needed.
reinventing single sign-on. woot!
Not originally from Pittburgh but spent 5 years at CMU. Love the city and really hope the tech industry there takes off (more than it already has).
Okay, I understand your take on it.

Whether or not my optimization ideas were "fundamental" is up for interpretation. From my point of view I used the word "fundamental" in that my ideas build upon the basic format and operation of the linked list.

They may not be major but they are enough to make the class considerably faster than STL classes including the deque class.

And if my response to your comment took a pontificate form it was only because I was slightly disappointed that you passed off my idea as a "doubly linked list" when it was actually considerably more than that.
Ok, it may not be a perfect, or even a close to perfect parallel, but it does get the point across. I for one am guilty of spending way to much time running around doing stuff instead of stopping and spending time processing what really matters. A mental "defrag" if you will.
I have the HTC ion, which is I think the same as the myTouch. Performance is similar to what I was getting on my iPhone 3G doing mostly web, emails, messages and phone functions. My battery life is shorter than on my iPhone though, I pretty much have to charge it every night. If I don't then I'll have to keep the usage to a minimum the next day.

So battery is not as good, but the notifications are always timely, since they work in background and latitude keeps my position updated, those are probably the culprit for shorter battery life.
How not to die
If only BB would create a phone with a keyboard and touch screen, they would really have a killer phone. I love the Palm Pre hardware, but am not sure I want to jump OS's yet.
Its funny - but for so many startup success stories, bubbles are the pink elephant in the room.

When you try to draw lessons from success during downturns, the lessons are very different, and yet most thought leaders come from bubbles. This deeply effects the quality of the advice out there - most of it comes from people who are to some extent unknowing products of bubbles - but who attribute all of their success to actions they took that have universal applicability. When it often ain't so.

For this reason, for me, 'startup credibility' goes up tremendously when it comes from a serial entrepreneur, or from someone that has actually built a cash-starved company to success during a downturn. "What can I do with very little?" and "What can I do if it is possible to raise $1 million?" are fundamentally different questions - and the same person isn't necessarily going to be skilled in both situations unless they've demonstrated that ability.

Whereas this comment - it has the legitimacy of coming from a complete failure :D

Finally... if your community leaders are state employees that can't say anything negative in public... you really need to be aware of that before you take their optimism at face value. Take to time to query them in private, to find out what they actually think. It might save you some mistakes and some grief.
What's a Reader's Digest?
Key facts about India's 20 GW solar energy plans
It's pretty cold here in early summer -- I was wearing a sweater and a winter coat a few evenings last month. I just spent seven years in Seattle (aka the Gloomiest Place on Earth), and even I think it's a bit ridiculous to be wearing a winter coat in July. I also routinely run into tourists over by Giants Park who underestimated the weather, and who are frantically searching for warmer clothes.

That said, I like it here. But had I moved here from LA or anywhere with heat, I would have probably been sorely disappointed.
I wonder what he could have accomplished with the resources we have today. He was so far ahead of his time and accomplished so much - I wonder how he managed to find time for everything. We owe him a lot.
Respect, but no love, for hackers
I think the only way to get businesses to adopt radically new technologies is to start new businesses. This is one advantage small companies/startups have... they can leverage radically new technology as an advantage.

Eventually these new companies become the 'big companies'... but by then they are also hopelessly out of date because processes and tools have become ingrained and can only change incrementally. The cycle begins anew.
The winners write the histories.
Although I know about proxy style auctions work, I was also a little shocked by the suddenness of the

Enter the bid amount... OK.
Buy points... OOK.
Enter credit card... OOOOK.
You're about to bid... OMG OMG OMG!
Are you sure you want to bid?... Yes! Yes! Yes!
Oh, sorry, you've been outbid. Granted, this made me run for the PayPal link ;)

I think a wording change should be enough for people who don't know how proxy bidding works. Instead of saying "Current bid", say "Second highest bid [?]" (with the [?] being a link). When someone clicks on it, explain how proxy style auctions work in very plain terms. Ditto for the "Your max bid" - say "Maximum you're willing to bid [?]".

I'd also suggest a slight UX change: maybe slow down the process a little so that you can see "You've bid 200 points! Comparing bids... you've been outbid.
"... I think anyone who reads HN who needs to be told to open windows in order to keep cool should maybe hand in their hacker badge. ..."

It really depends. On the really hot days having a window open increases the interior temperature if the previous days have been cooler. On successively hot days leaving the window open decreases the interior temp but only if there is a wind.

I don't know what latitude where you come from since you don't have any identifying information but being smart has nothing to do with understanding how to keep cool. It comes from local knowledge. If you come from the continental Europe or the UK I'd guarantee you'd miss half these hacks due to the heat.
Energy-Aware Internet Routing
This kind of stuff is Python's strength :)
Digital Goodies Shopping Guide
The real reason why the major labels love Spotify
Work hard and never give up. Got it.
US man 'stole 130m card numbers'
It is similar to a small intestine.
or, work hard and know when to give up. much harder.
Not there anymore, but got my undergrad in CS at CMU.
Yes, and all it provides is anecdotal evidence. Do you have a link to Microsoft's tech specs for the Vista / 7 graphics stack where I can find factual evidence? Probably no, because they're only made available to graphics chip manufacturers under strict NDAs, hence "Where's the code?".

My point with the Windows graphics driver example is that if you plug untrusted / untested / uncertified / crappy software into otherwise stable software, you can't hold the latter responsible for the unpredictable behavior you may get. It's not specific to Windows, X or any other software or platform.
I've started 4 companies. 3 died (but not badly) one petered out and I sold the core tech for a pretty decent figure (so I call it a semi-success even though it was the least likely to succeed)

I dont know: I came to HN after I began hacking and doing startups (I never even called them startups till I got here) and my assumption was that 99% failed anyway as a part of the process of learning.

I figure you have to either be super lucky (and make a Twitter, Facebook or Google hit) or you have to fail hard a few times before eventually succeeding. I chatted to some London VC's the other week and they said they trusted founders from previously failed startups a lot more than newbies - simply because they had learned many of the hard lessons and wouldn't then make them at the crucial moment their company could be worth something 6 figures or more.
My guess would be fraud - they're looking to compete with e-bay by side-stepping their most resource-draining problem. Great idea, IMO.
While 301works might not be just a bit.ly stunt, it certainly was disproportionately important to bitly not to have a glaring example of the negative effects of URL shorteners staring people in the face -- they encourage link rot and offer the potential for lots of it. The potential for shorteners to disappear and break lots of links is certainly a massive flaw in their business model.