skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've put most of my comments as inline responses to other people, but here's one more:

If AJAX is too slow, do not think Comet will solve your problems. It's very hard to get Comet to work reliably on all browsers across all types of firewalls and proxy servers.

I did a prototype of something using the library that powers GTalk, Google Docs, and now Wave. Even with the library all pre-built for me, it was pretty hard to keep it from occasionally dropping connections and associated messages, and once in a while it'd lock up my browser (much like GMail and Docs do, occasionally. ;-)). I also peeked under the covers, and there's a lot of subtlety in what's going on.

Comet is best for when you have stuff that really needs to be real-time. Things like stock quotes, or chat. IIRC, everything in Civilization is done in response to user input. AJAX is fine for that.
Hubris: A Ruby/Haskell bridge
The advantage there is that you can date women that farm!
The bay area is the center of the universe, well, for my people. I think living here and needing a part-time job to pay the bills (part-time jobs pay twice as much here as anywhere else, btw) is a better choice than moving to the midwest, or even Sacramento.
I can't figure out if you didn't read the article or just totally missed the point.

He isn't talking about coming to a site like HN and posting a "hey, take a look at my new webapp" thread, where people want to give you feedback and try out your new site. Instead, he gives two specific examples where some web designer or online department's pride got in the way of him accomplishing the task he came to the site to do in the first place.

The point of the post is about customer messaging. When you're talking to your customers, you should focus on the things that matter to them, not to you. The redesign of your newsletter very rarely falls into that category, and cheering loudly about it just looks clueless.
Quite interesting that there are more than a few people interesting in purchasing it on the comments for that post (and the previous post). I wonder how much money they're looking for and why they wouldn't sell it now even after they've made "quiet" efforts to sell it earlier?
I painted myself into a black hole of frustration. The situation was bound to fall apart, and it did about a year ago. Unfortunately, not at my initiative.

I am hoping that this is the time when I take control. Better late than never.

(In some ways, I've always taken control. In never being satisfied with the -- usually inefficient and boring and mistake-laden -- status quo. However, trying to introduce changes from the bottom up, or even just follow your own road, has limited effectiveness in some organizations.

That's just the way they are. You could say it was my fault for not getting out sooner, but then I was dealing with a lot of stuff on multiple fronts.)
Is that the one with the coin flips? As I understand it an experiment showed that if you put people in a situation where one side of the coin loses $100 and the other side wins $x, for most people $x has to be greater than $200 for them to take the flip.
What's the investment strategy for the $4 million?
Not as bad as being in France, even when you just have a connection at the international airport and have to get somewhere it is very common to have people look down on you because you are trying to get their attention in English.
Not sure what the deal with that link is, but here's the actual source (with no weird footer): http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2009/nt-2009-08-10-nobody-ca...
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The problem is "Internet Memes" are basically opinion pieces and opinion pieces, by their nature, inspire an emotional response from the reader. That makes the reader more likely to vote and/or comment on an opinion piece. As opposed to what you'd call the "Content Posts" like...for example...a great tutorial.

I hate to be a back seat webmaster but the time might be coming where HN has to split the Internet Memes and the Content Posts just to keep the later from being overrun completely (which is basically where we are now)
If everything you said is true (profitable, doubling each year, no end in sight), I think you'd be crazy to sell in the current market. Since the goal is to reduce risk, why not just sell a partial stake in your company?

With interest from multiple buyers, you can probably get a lot more than the 5x if you make them bid against one another.

But of course, if the price is right, just sell. If I were in your shoes, that threshold would be around $50MM.
Have not been on usenet since late 2005-ish, I think, ever since misc.fitness.weights went to hell. I was basically just reading alt.humor.best-of-internet and rec.arts.sf.science at that point.
that's the funniest thing i've read in a long time.
Not to mention the cost of airfare for the inevitable trips back home for holidays, weddings, funerals, etc.
Even metaphorically, I'm not sure the question makes a whole lot of sense. My whole life has been a series of progressively more independent and progressively more important choices. I chose to go to a charter school instead of my public high school when I was 14. I chose not to go to college when I got out at 19, instead working at a tech startup. A year later, I reversed my choice. I chose to study abroad for a semester in New Zealand my junior year. I chose to switch my major from physics to CS in my last semester. I chose not to immediately get a job upon graduation, instead finishing up a volunteer project I'd been working on all through college. I chose to work in a financial software startup for a couple years, and then chose to quit and found my own company when the opportunity came up with a friend. I chose to abandon it when it became apparent we weren't going to succeed, and get a job at a big company.

There's no single point where I "switched on" and said "Okay, now I'm going to take charge of my life." That's the stuff of movies - most of the time when people try it in real life, they go right back to the routines they had before.
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the SF bay area has enormous quality of life advantages for the common nerd, when compared to anywhere else I've lived.(granted, which only includes other parts of the US.) - but just on a personal level, being a nerd is a very lonely thing most places, and that loneliness gets distracting after a while. In the bay area, you are no longer weird or different. Hell, I can walk down the street to the hacker dojo, and be the dumbest guy in a room full of people (well, maybe not the dumbest, but certainly below average. My point is that in the central valley, it was pretty rare to meet others with my mental abilities. The bay area teaches me humility.)

I think this might have something to do with the disparity in wages; standards are just higher around here. Yeah, you pay more for a person, but the pool from which you can hire is so much richer. if you can choose good people, you can get better deals in the bay area than most other places.
Used to. Lately it turns up a lot in my google searches. Not Usenet, but I actively mirror mailing lists via the NTP gateway of GMANE. This excellent for learning Open Source software packages; I mirror the entire discussion archive with Thunderbird and I can search it when I am not online. I think I have "groked" the guts of major software projects fairly quickly this way.
Is there a way to have a wifi phone yet?
I can see the perspective that physical books as an inefficient alternative to digital books, and I grew up with books and books will always be a part of my life.

I believe books can be totems of our life and interests. Even if they don't get read and/or don't reflect your current life, books on a shelf are still telling a story about you in a way that DVDs you own can't. I feel that a single book by itself that someone owns is not particularly interesting but the larger hodge podge or holistic collection of books that it belongs to is interesting. For example, my friend Simon and his wife have a collection of travel books in a high-traffic/prominent location (right next to the garage access/front door) (to places they've been and hope to go) - and I feel this is interesting because they have two very young kids and are in no position to travel off.. But perhaps a daily reminder..

Books can be good conversation starters/icebreakers. Seriously, if you want to meet someone with a certain type of interest, try starting conversations with people who are hanging out in that area of the bookstore. You can start to learn more about a person from the books they have on their bookshelf. If they have any biographies, I usually ask why they are interested in that person. Sometimes you can even infer what they are hiding from the books they show.

Before a party in my apartment, I deliberately randomized the books that were all neatly categorized and alpha by author (like in a bookstore! I own one of those UPC barcode scanners too) to make it appear that I wasn't that OCD. I don't think anyone noticed.

I believe physical books are more valuable than digital ones because they are a concrete representation of someone's passion and their investment of time in it. The sentimentality of books as being part of someone's life work is more noticeable if it is decades old and sizable (page-wise) - makes you wonder - who wrote this/why did they write it/who were they.
I live in Honolulu and New York City, so I'm not qualified to give advice regarding choosing domiciles with cost of living in mind =)

But I do always see ads in the Wall Street Journal enjoining people to move their businesses to Moldova for a variety of attractive reasons — low cost of living being one of them if I remember correctly.
I am in the process of going digital on books- having just moved a couple of thousand books in and out of boxes a few times, it's just not worth it. It just doesn't work for everything. Some kinds of books- cookbooks, API reference guides, things with diagrams and pictures, large books, etc. just don't play well on the current set of devices. The key thing I am missing so far is the ability to lend/give books that I am done with- even though no one seems to want my out of date technical books. There is no resale value on digital goods.

Maybe the solution to Rands' problem is a projector that shines a picture of a bookshelf with simulated spines onto the wall where your real bookshelf used to be, or maybe he could read your Amazon reviews.
Thoughtful Op-Ed on Obama - are we being punked?
My girlfriend is on tour right now and the last time I went to visit her she was excited that she got a new plant. Now I personally didn't see what the big deal was but I was there with a friend of hers and they went on for about an hour on how plants "brighten up a room" and such.

Point of the story: Some people do care about things like new design and the authors of the e-mail, the one's this blog author accuses of being marketing hacks who don't speak from the heart, are probably in fact speaking from the heart. Because some people care deeply about aesthetics.

In other words the author of the blog post mistakes "I don't care" for "no one cares" and that's why he is, imho, wrong.
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For your startup you want to work on a product you're passionate about.
It can be an experience in and of itself.

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.
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8 Good instances of z-index property
If you are new in CSS then you may find difficulty to understand about z-index property. In simple words z-index sets the stack order of specific elements. An element with greater stack order is always in front of another element with lower stack order.
I moved to Japan, not because the cost of living is lower (though it is in some cases) but because of the opportunities I saw here.
A lot of times, micro-optimizations are more fun.

In a hobbyist culture, we tend to do what is most fun.
What's wrong with what we eat
Growing up, my parents' apartment (which contained their startup's office) had about 300 feet of shelves, all completely full. On top of that my dad had about 2000 vintage trade paperback scifi novels in grapefruit juice boxes, and at any one time there were ~3000 computer magazines in banker's boxes. Every few years we would fill the building's dumpster with magazines, but the piles would grow again. It's much harder psychologically to get rid of books.

Books are a burden.

When I was in college I would go through periods of using the regional interlibrary loan to its limits -- having 30+ books at a time, going through 10 a week.

Now that I've graduated, I read almost solely from the screen. I already spend almost all my time reading, and there's a massive surplus of material. Why would I want to spend my time and anxiety on acquiring physical books, and paying for the privilege, when I already have too much to read?
I have nieces who are identical twins (they were tested for monozygosity after being born). But they are not even identical in appearance--I'm decent at telling them apart, and their mom does that very well. Professional geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite discordant in height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of interest. Some of those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks on human genetics.
Interesting that they are also stopping development on Nambu as a part of this: http://blog.tr.im/post/159489555/tr-im-to-december-31-2009#c...

I do hope they open source it. That client had the most potential from the native Mac ones that I've tried.
Don't forget to include Apple in that group...
hm. I wonder.. how much of why they want to shut down is the hosting costs? it seems like the perfect sort of business for a "Host me for the publicity" deal. I'd be more than happy to give them hosting just for the bragging rights, and I'm sure many of my competitors would also be interested.
I am very sad that google seems to have killed historical nntp search; back when it was dejanews, it was the place to find info from greybeards.
We've gone to the dogs in just the 38 days you've had your account?

Sundays are always the slowest news days.
I'm also in Manila. Would love to meet up. Email in profile.
I'll give them credit for how they are communicating and hope for the best to them. I'm sure the developers there gained and learned something in all this. Unfortunately though, if they were to get bought now, they will look like hypocrites.
The website is an email newsletter template. That's part of the joke ;) The weird footer was the best part haha
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"Generally, we find MongoDB to be a very good fit for building web infrastructure."

I strongly agree. I just went through a painful transition of our product from CouchDB onto MongoDB. It was a week or two of pain, but I had things isolated enough that it didn't hurt as badly as it could have.

Fundamentally, Couch was a pretty amazing piece of technology, and Damien Katz is coder's coder. But they want to make something that would act like a Lotus Notes client. I wanted a piece of web infrastructure.
I think that reading it will greatly alter your view of such governmental interventions.

I wasn't sure if the "you" here is "you, the person who posted the link," (singular, referring to me) or "you, the readers of this comment of mine" (plural, referring to anyone who reads your helpful comment). I agree that Brave New World, which I read in childhood and reread in childhood and in adulthood, is a very thought-provoking novel.

On my part, I posted the link under the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" clause of the HN guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

after it came up in a Google News alert that I've had set for months (which only rarely yields blog entries worth reading). I endorse this submitted blog entry as worth reading for better-than-average research and for important subject matter, without claiming I agree with all of the author's conclusions. Maybe I'll agree with more or fewer of the author's conclusions after I read the discussion here. I'm willing to be convinced by evidence. I see an interesting discussion is developing through your comment and others. Thanks.
Ask YC: What do you use for your business address?
My business partner and I are finally sitting down and getting all of our corporate paperwork in order with the state, and as part of this we need to list the official address of the company.

We're bootstrapping and don't yet have an office, and if possible, want to avoid getting one. We're both very productive working out of our respective apartments, and can't see a lot of sense in adding another expense on to the pile.

So, what do other HNers do for their business address?

We're going to be based in/around San Jose, if that helps.
One of my own 'AHA' moments was when I discovered that you can't. Yes you can never take control over your life. You need to relax and go with the flow. We all think that we are controlling our lives, but consider this, suppose time is a river and your life can be represented by you sitting on a small boat. You can puddle a bit and control a little bit of where you are (akin for example to choosing a career or job).

However, the flow of the river determines the overall direction! Now, for the interesting part. Now and then other people get on your boat. A girlfriend, a child a wife! As you go along the river, people come and go.

Another interesting part is what I call 'crossroads', they also appear almost randomly. Situations where a 'do this' or 'do that' can influence the journey. You will probably get about four in life. Most of the times when this happens you will not know is happening. For example you went on holiday to Costa Rica and ended up meeting a girl in the Airplane, should you eventually marry this girl it can influence the rest of your life.

Money and success can give you a temporary dejavu of control. You can have a great business, you control your time, your health is tops and out of nowhere your boat hits a rock, or somebody came in the boat and drilled a hole.

This is advice from a 'baby boom hacker' they exist on HN too! :). Married same day as Charles and Diana! So far the score is on my side! Had a lot of bumpy rides, married three times, 5 kids, a number of businesses, went bust twice, lived through two wars (Cyprus and Gulf), lived through the bad years in South Africa, worked in five countries.

Control? We can't even determine the outcome of a program with certainty!
It's funny, I wouldn't mind being told about someone's new site design, but I would mind if it was some company "interrupting" (seriously? e-mail isn't real-time; I must have the metaphor wrong; why do I think of it as an interruption?) me to tell me about it. A third party can say, "Hey, check out this guy's redesign" and it's news, but when it comes straight from the company, I for some reason don't want it, unless I have established ferocious brand loyalty with them, like Nintendo, and their e-mails to me feel intimate (like I'm part of an in-group and they get me and I get them) instead of markety (unlike Nintendo, which feels spammy)

Edit: What introspective drivel is this? Nobody cares what I think about whether or not anybody cares what anybody thinks about anybody's website.
I would use this all the time if it masked the domain name rather than just forwarding to it. :)

I would charge for more specific and secure uses. Sensitive private data protected by a good terms of service/privacy policy and no questions asked.
Twin studies say otherwise. Not sure why you would think this.
I just sort of lucked into it. My first job out of college I worked for a professor who went on to start his own consulting firm. They hired me on and when I said I wanted to work as a contractor they were fine with it. I have to say it's a fantastic setup--if you get the chance to become self-employed, take it. The best part is never feeling guilty about being out of the office or taking off for extended periods.. in fact I've probably taken about 8 weeks of vacation so this year. Of course the downside is that vacation = unpaid leave but I find that the time is worth so much more than the money to me right now.

My job is kinda specialized, it has to do more with statistical programming and mathematical modeling than the coding that most people on HN do, so I guess that helps when it comes to trying to go it alone. To the extent that I'm qualified to dispense advice it would be to develop a specialized skill that your average competent hacker doesn't have, particularly if it involves a lot of math--a lot of good coders I come across know surprisingly little math. Most of the people I know who are successful consultants have such a background.
they could ask the community to donate the code in the interest of maintaining the links that depend upon it
I pay for Easynews.
You are the real life Mexican Fisherman.

http://www.protolink.com/MexicanFisherman.html
I like Eureka Lab Book (http://www.eurekalabbook.com/). Lots of variety, including waterproof and class 10 cleanroom.
I think people like books because bookshelves hold them so well. They are decorative. You need something on your wall, but posters are for college kids, so why not some books?

I have a shelfful of books. I maybe read one of them every few months or so. But mostly, it is a list of books that I've read that takes up a significant part of my flat. They take up valuable space and collect dust, and are a pain to move, all so I can flip through a book instead of do a Google search. Not very convenient. You could go so far as to say, "pointless".

e-books are much better -- when you are done reading them, they become a line on a display that you don't have to dust, find storage for, or pack when you move. And of course, just like real books, you can refer to them years after you've read them. (I guess you can't loan them to people, but for $5, who cares?)

And oh yeah, trees. When you buy a book, you kill them.
I'd think the exact specifics matter a lot with #3. Just how likely is it that something can swamp you? Do you have a lot left you want to do with this company or are you just waiting for growth? Because you sound a little passive about it which is probably dangerous.
So did we, in the U.S, but we also had interest rates that are about as close to zero as you can get.

Interest rates now are going up, but so are inflation expectations. And I'd bet that inflation will go up faster than interest rates, which sucks for debtholders.
I really like this comment in the submitted article by Professor Mark Blumberg on experimental design:

"What we will never see are two groups of subjects, chosen randomly or chosen based on the possession of certain genes, who are then afforded the greatest enrichment and training programs available. The question would then be: Are there significant differences in accomplishment and excellence between the two groups?"

He has good insight into how organizations respond to incentives, including incentives to junk proper science

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

while pretending to do science for commercial gain.
You obviously didn't have money invested this year. You would have seen your $2m become $1.5m. I had money in "stable" funds and it hurt.