skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. That is almost as evil as putting "like Gecko" into the browser string for a browser that is clearly not based on gecko.
Pozdrav, susjede!

Zagreb, Croatia
I suspect the changes in your wants are a result of maturity, not income. The cars, clothes, and restaurants are really just toys, of the same type you wanted when you were five.
The longevity of short URLs (or any form of redirect) is their primary drawback. Having one company bail out another is not a long-term strategy. The only long-term way to make sure redirects continue to function is to have some kind of open, federated redirect service (which might be what 301works is trying to achieve). However, the kind of flexibility inherent in a federated service implies that the links would not be very short (e.g. 301works.com/bit.ly/abcdef), so they would at best be a backup solution.

The long-term solution for shortlinks is very unclear, as long as services (and who are we kidding: we mean Twitter) require them. Twitter could solve it by allowing metadata around links, but that would break their 140-character protocol, which has been a big factor in their success.

I don't have a solution, or I'd be building a startup around it right now :-)
Yeah, I'd be down for coffee or beer anytime this week (Kreuzberg/Neukoelln, preferrably!).
Tell HN: Fate of a typical webapp
I remember http://hnstartups.com/ was launched here and it received some 200+ votes. I genuinely think it is a good idea but when I tried visiting it today, I found it full of spam. I feel sad for people not caring about their apps. What do you do with your project where you lost interest and motivation but somebody else might be using it?

Btw, thread where the app was announced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=572631
That's a good point, but long urls are not exactly 'required' by google.

Giving weight to words in URLs was a mistake in my opinion, it lead to URL spam.

Any kind of ranking system that uses criteria outside of the factor that is best classified as 'human appreciation' will lead to some form of spam.
Paris, France too (Arcueil exactly)
Oh, and re: the idea of internal URL shorteners, Google's suggestion for rel=canonical

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...

is a way to allow those to exist without destroying your pagerank. However, I'm not seeing them too widely implemented yet.
Near Bassano del Grappa and currently studying at the University of Padova.
another capetonian
edit: as in I'm also from cape town
El Paso, TX
San Antonio, Texas
Attention span is a huge problem for developers in general. Creation is more fun than maintenance, so there is plenty of drive to fire off new projects, but only a little bit of energy for maintaining stuff.

I think that if something does not take off almost instantly (say within the first month of roll-out) that the attention will shift to something new for a large number of people that are capable of making these things.

That site is a sample-of-one though. The funny thing is that it would be the ideal vehicle to keep track of what is happening to sites announced as 'new' here...

This is roughly where it went wrong:

http://hnstartups.com/newest?page=1287

If the spam had been removed right from day one (but hey, how to figure out with the theme of that site what is spam and what is not, that's a tricky one!) then it would be a useful resource today.
Zurich, Switzerland, too! hopefully there are a few others!
Konstanz, Germany
That would be very interesting (to me, at least). In particular, I'd be curious to know how you test your inferences. I guess you could run it on the NetFlix/GitHub prizes ... but in general, I'm finding that getting reliable data on which to validate algos is one of the biggest challenges.

In any case, I'd be interested to hear about the math, since there are about 50 different ways of doing this stuff. Even just vague stuff like "We might use a boltzmann machine".

There's some interesting work done on optimal stimulus selection (MacKay has a paper on it, and there's one in a neuroscience setting by Paninski). The idea is that you generate data for which the response will give you maximum information. So you figure out which edges would be most valuable to your algo's predictions (using information theory) and then make recommendations based on hypotheses about those edges, which are later confirmed/denied by user behavior. This gives you an optimal learning loop.
This defeats the purpose of trying to create a web game.
Samsung Reclaim: Green Environmental Friendly Mobile Phone
Twitter is for Old People
I'll come!
I think if you come across something that you like on services like twitter or fb that if you want to have access to it ten years from now you'd better archive the whole thing.

Hardly any webpage lives that long, in spite of the 'urls should never die' recommendation. In practice urls live a couple of years at best, go find all those good things you found on geocities or myspace a couple of years ago...

The web is like any society, things have a life-cycle, links have one (where the content gets moved or the short url dies), pages have one, and websites have one too.

Routinely universities wipe the 'students' directory when the new year starts, companies will remove entire product lines from their websites (including all the documentation) when their support for the product ends. The web is very much 'current affairs', preservation of the past is not the biggest priority. Archive.org tries to combat this but it's a losing battle, they can't buy drives fast enough to keep up.

Bookmark collections need periodic maintenance because of this anyway.

Worst case there is always your printer. And storage is cheap, for the little bit of content that you come across that you really wish to preserve. A USH stick will hold a surprisiingly large amount of webpages.
Books are also generally far superior for those who want to learn or develop themselves.
Check out YUI app theme, it's built using the Yahoo Interface Library Grids which means rather great browser support across the board.

http://clickontyler.com/blog/2009/03/yui-app-theme/

Demo: http://clickontyler.com/yui-app-theme/
Depends what you do outside of your job. There is more to your life than your work. Some people may have important aspects of their life (e.g. families, friends) which don't fit together well with a start-up.
I always record calls that include word-of-mouth contracts, from negotiating auto repairs to canceling paid subscriptions. I have never had to use one of these recordings, not even in case of disputes, but I have always felt comfortable that if push comes to shove I have their word on tape.

(In Denmark it is legal to record a phone conversation without the consent or knowledge of the other party, you'd probably want to check your local laws regarding this.)
Birmingham, England
Im staying in neukoelln so neukoelln/kreuzberg is great for me. lets watch this thread for a few more hours to see if anyone else shows up and then pick a spot for say, tomorrow?
Hej! Pozdrav i tebi!!! :) Bas je fino vidjeti ljude sa nasih prostora :D
Lahore, Pakistan.
Johannesburg
What?! There's no math!

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...

That's more like it, no?
Durham, North Carolina
Given that I'm not exactly experienced at game development either but I find this discussion really fascinating, I would be interested to know why his architectural decisions are so horribly wrong.
Rio.
Cool - nice area: the very first time I came to Italy, I stayed in Romano d'Ezzelino. You have no contact information, so it's impossible for me to contact you about a spritz or otherwise saying 'hi'.
Austin, Texas, USA, Earth
not responsible towards the Internet

1) Link shorteners are used mainly by the Twitter crowd
2) None of them have anything important or interesting to say anyway

I don't see what the problem is.
Bloglines On Life Support. This Story Needs An Ending
And better than most things you find on forums. I just plain forget that it's there. Some of the better ones seem to have been vacated by these greybeards or taken over by spam.
East Brunswick, NJ.
A well-developed site blocks most spam. There are plenty of good services out there for it too, like Mollom.
Bedford, Virginia
Live in Delft, work in The Hague.
Windows 7 and the OS Market Share
So I think the validity of the observation stands

Which observation? That the COBOL-type programmers (and we can add in RPG, and other non-sexy languages as well) are isolated from the rest of the industry? Sure. But in-house developers of serious, back-end-heavy apps have always been isolated-- including from each other.
Sofia, Bulgaria :)
As open source gets more commercial, does GPL still matter?
No, Google Wave is the new RIPscript: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS...

"In 1993 Telegrafix created RIPscript or RIPscrip, which stood for "Remote Imaging Protocol". It was intended to be a vector-like graphics protocol that used ASCII files to describe lines and shapes to a client. This sort of approach (send descriptions of graphics, render them at the client side) had been done before, but a major push came with RIPscript and it followed onto the internet as a plug-in. Ultimately, the protocol did not catch on and was soon forgotten."
Bandung, Indonesia.
Houston, TX, US
Kuching, Malaysia
Glasgow, Scotland
Vernor Vinge's fiction introduced the concept of the "programmer archaeologist," which seems appropriate here. He predicted that in the distant future, the skill of programming will have entirely shifted from writing new code (everything you need has already been written) to reading and curating old code. We may be there with COBOL already. _Understanding_ COBOL might be more important than _writing_ COBOL, so the newest variants of COBOL (like .NET) are _less_ relevant than the old stuff.
Istanbul Türkiye :)
This is a problem google can solve pretty easily, isn't it? They've indexed both sides of the link... so they can somehow 'heal' the broken link - right?
Honolulu, Hawaii
Collection of Really High Quality Photoshop Navigation Menu Tutorials
+1 eh
I think no. Subtitle: A study of the style and context of his work
Word. I used to live off Northpoint Pkwy. But now I live in Midtown.
FTA: "Your servers and desktops don’t reach out into the great beyond and allocate more memory or CPU cycles from “the cloud” when necessary. That would require an entirely new operating system model that simply doesn’t exist at the moment regardless of the haphazard slapping of “cloud” tags onto operating systems and products that is happening right now."

That already happens though, sure there is a lot of 'mislabelling' (read marketing) going on. But thin client applications that use the cloud for the 'heavy lifting' exist and will be more common as the cloud services expand to accomodate this model.

Right now you can pretty much get storage on demand through SAAS from any number of vendors.

You could have a front-end to your application running on a local machine and a backend of 100's of cpus 'in the cloud'. A cloud hosted renderfarm is a good example of this.

It's not simple yet, and it usually involves a bunch of pieces of custom software (though MPI does a pretty good job of talking to the cloud for stuff like this).

The reasons why it will take a while for Carrs' vision to become reality is not that it is hard to allocate compute, storage and memory 'in the cloud'. It's just that applications in general for regular users do not need such heavy resources, and secondly that plenty of data can not be allowed off-site because of privacy concerns and security.

Another reason, and maybe this is the biggest, is that cloud services are simply too expensive for what you can get if you spend the money on servers and bandwidth directly. It only really makes economical sense if you need large numbers of machines for a very short period.
Bratislava, Slovakia
Same here. Are there enough people for a meetup of some kind?
Well, the subtitle of the submitted article is "a study of the style and context of his work up to the genesis of information theory". Shannon did a lot of amazing work before the seminal 1948 paper. As an example, here are his M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis:

A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/11173

An algebra for theoretical genetics: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/11174

Shannon was quite a unique thinker. I would dare to say that very few people had such tremendous impact on the world via abstract thinking. He single-handedly enabled the digital revolution. And though a lot is known about his contributions, less is known about his personality, interests and style. Thus, I believe the submitted article is indeed quite an interesting read, despite the fact that it's not about the mathematical theory of communication.
And me in Tallinn, to be specific.
This wasn't surprising the first 10 times it was reported either.
I'm near CP.
I am also thinking about moving to Thailand.
Stubbies?!
Yes, I think it would be great if we could proactively leverage our convergent social media 2.0 synergies.
+1, yeah?
I'd also make sure that you honestly ask yourself the following question, when it comes to this relocation / radical burn rate reduction issue:

Can I somehow make more money with what I (we) am about to create and stay where I am (or US)?

Sure these places have cheap rent, but you also leave all your social ties behind and will be limited to a particular subset of the social fabric (expats, most likely, that either teach English or are avoiding something important by coming there). It's also distracting by being elsewhere, though often in a good way.
I think this is awesome. It makes me more apt to try Knob Creek. It really does show a commitment to quality.
New Brunswick, NJ
"Most hackers don't want money to feel rich, but buy themselves financial freedom, so that they can read and study during the day like you, for example."

Exactly. I think that really cuts to the essence of the matter.
I'm in Dublin as well.
I'm a Bloglines user, and it never really occurred to me that there were any problems. Sure, they've been calling their latest release "beta" for a couple years, but that's nothing in this post-Google age. I have no idea what their revenue is like, or even what their business model is, but I sure am one satisfied user.
Why There Aren't More Software Startups In India
Well, tr.im would possibly get out of some hosting costs since they've promised to keep everything up until December 31st. That said, I'll be surprised if it actually happens.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Just there for YAPC::EU last week. Lovely city, I just wish I had had more time to explore it. :-(
http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html good place to start
Wait until west coast US wakes up.

I'm in Boston, Massachusetts (just relocated from Mountain View, California).
Blacksburg, Virginia USA
Virginia Tech
I said I'm in Sydney, Australia.

But for the last eight months I have been living in Woy Woy on the central coast just north of Sydney. I have lived in Sydney for most of my life.
Brno, Czech Rep.
I'd think a 301 Moved Permanently is more appropriate - and also how many URL shorteners work today.
Heh, I wasn't aware someone else from Brno is on HN. Nazdar!
Sounds like Bit.ly is offering hosting services. Swoops in to save...that's going a bit far (unless they offer cash).
Buildabrand.com
Beirut , Lebanon
> just beware of problems with asynchrony

Please elaborate. (I have also been experimenting with Flex.)
It's the 'broken windows' metaphor: http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/so...

Once you let something that is clearly wrong hang around, problems (spam) increase exponentially until it is no longer worth trying to fix.
"I have your cold".

1. Get people to tell you when they're sick and what symptoms they have.
2. Get access to their social network (facebook app, email contact list, etc) and figure out who they got their cold from.
3. Tell users who got them sick and what they should expect (e.g., "looks like you picked up Joe's cold, but don't worry -- it's mild and you should recover by the weekend").

Possible future directions:
1. Given enough users, you could do a very good job of tracking influenza or other rapidly spreading infectious diseases.
2. Have people tell you what medicines they tried and what worked / didn't work (very useful in the context of antibiotics).

Monetize via advertising (good rates in the medical field) or by referrals to drug stores which sell cold medicine. Get publicity by publishing statistics (e.g., "looks like the flu season has started in California, but hasn't hit New England yet").
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Moon, USA space territory.
Mallorca, Spain – 1h 15m by plane.
Quad Cities, Iowa
The "low-resolution multitouch" thing was interesting. I would really like a keyboard that doubles as a touchpad. I want a mouse closer to my fingers. (but I hate the nub)
The Pitfalls of Self-control
> Any time you've made any web request, there's been a SPOF

And when you make a request through a shortener, there are two independent SPOF's.

Also, if you go to www.example.com/here/there/article and get a 404, you navigate up in the hierachy, and search for the content. If you get a 500 or server is down, you can try later. If either happens at the shortener-level, you're SOL.
Gainesville, Florida
generally the merge layer kills you because you must query all nodes to support global indexes. that is not to say that its impossible.

It's not that bad actually. PK lookups and range queries are rather easy because mongos (the sharding daemon) knows the shard layout and only queries nodes that hold data relevant to the query.

Other query types, especially joins, are much harder. But frankly, PK lookups and range queries go a long way for most applications.

The real effort is in making all this, especially the automatic shard rebalancing, not only reliable but absolutely bulletproof. That seems to be on mongo's roadmap and if they get there that would be a major selling point.
Detroit, Michigan (USA)
Java has switched from Mergesort to TimSort
#5 Phillips Screwdrivers: Everywhere and Nowhere

Just because you take your car to Pep Boys, call the landlord when something breaks, and use power tools in the garage doesn't mean that olders tools don't serve their purpose.

COBOL is just another tool in the hacker's toolbox. It does a great job at what it was meant to do (neatly laying out and processing business transactions) and continues to do so.

I have worked on many COBOL systems and choose not to any more. Why? Just too damn many lines of code to do the same thing as many other languages.

I wouldn't worry too much about the supply of programmers for aging COBOL systems. Supply and demand will take care of that. Which would you rather do, web work for $50K or COBOL maintenance for $100K? Many would choose the latter.
Just posted one the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750930
Ithaca, New York
I had no idea Madoff would get Internet access from prison.
Paul Krugman, Charles Stross, conversation on Economics, Biotech, the future.
Wigan, UK. It's the new Silicon Valley ;)
I think 'urban slang' obviously refers to the language of a particular socio-economic group, and that avoiding using it in an inappropriate context is just as simple as not swearing in front of your grandmother or not blurting out to every attractive woman you meet that you want to have sex with her or whatever. I mean, really, do you have Tourette's or something? You never think it's appropriate to filter the words that first come to mind to say?
Completed Universal Computer/Constructor
New Jersey :(
Shorten this
Exclusive Interview: Hacking The iPhone Through SMS
Would be un-Australian not to.
6 Reasons to Jailbreak Your iPhone
Now that is very impressive, a compiler with 'life' as the target architecture :)
As of now this article has received 62 upvotes, so i guess some people liked it enough to upvote it.

I actually liked this article just because it contains more truth than "The case against apple". I don't understand why everybody reacted to "The case against apple" with agreement and now they decide that a counterpost is pointless.

If you didn't like the article, please just ignore it instead of posting a comment like that.
Just create a web application which will answer your question.

Some place where people will come and complain about something they miss. And where needs will be merged and shaped and will finally lead to "the next killer application for a niche".

If it works you will have plenty of fresh ideas for the next time you will have the time ;)
How about this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602606

Create an online AJAX IDE for developing flash using the haXe language. It would be compiled and put together on the server, but the client would be open source and free as a desktop app too, by the magic of haXe. Services could include webhosting and automatic upload of your app, as well as stock flash animation media and sounds.
Yep. HN seems to be doing a pretty good job of it though, hardly any spam ever makes it past the bottom of the new page without a [dead].

But for that to work you have to have an active community that values the resource more than they value the few seconds it takes to flag a bad submission. Absent such a community you have to do it yourself at least until such a community has formed.

The funny thing is that the combination of 'flag', karma thresholds and community seem to be enough to let the 'submission' box sit there without any tricky stuff like captchas and so on.
Thanks for the feedback. I should've been more specific. But I felt asking a specific question while easier to understand, excludes people by definition. Like if I asked, why did you decided to startup? That excludes employees. So I asked "take greater control". But I never said "get complete control".

I meant share a story about a time when you were prompted to become more independent; like why you became an entrepreneur, consultant or employee for instance. Or if you left home, why? What happened? Why the choice of more independence? Frustration? Drive to do good? Forced by circumstances?

Maybe I'll ask again but differently next time. I didn't think asking for the full story was trivial.
The "next killer application" is a farce in your mind. Give it some rest, and think outside the box. Go visit your favourite website, and ponder what it is missing? That's a clue to your next "next killer application".
Nyon, Geneva, Switzerland... Added in http://www.hackrtrackr.com/
In one case, the start-up spent $300,000 to host a video from pop singer Alicia Keys that managers claimed would draw 1 million new users. But without any of her hit songs in the clip, only 5,000 visitors showed up.

Ouch.
Wilmette, Illinois, USA
North of CH,IL.
I've never met a COBOL programmer. The only times I've seen actual COBOL code have been examples to show how inscrutable it can be (like the example in the article). I haven't seen any open source software written in COBOL, although I'm sure there has to be something. Yet, I know COBOLers are out there.

Given the fact that COBOL refuses to die and not for lack of other options, I've always assumed there's something that kept these guys going. I used to think it was just hard-headedness ("Haven't these guys heard of Python or Ruby or even like Java or .Net or something?!?!"), but age and experience have lead me to believe that it probably has something to do with the size of the paycheck.

So I'd really like to know:

Do COBOLers have a community of any sort?

Where do they go for help?

Do they read HN or proggit (or do they have their own portals that only run on green screens)?

What keeps them going (and do they actually despise their language but just suck it up)?

Are they locked away in the dungeons of enterprise IT departments (or are they more like the wizards in a tower)?

Is there some sort of annual conference where they all meet and dance in front of a bonfire (lit from the heat of their mainframes) and sacrifice young virginal (pure? dynamic?) OO or functional languages to keep their own alive?