skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. I loathe slide share. Slide share presentations are usually information light. Worse, it presents what should fit on a single page with a couple of flicks of the mouse scroll wheel at most in a hideously inconvenient format. In this case it required literally over a hundred clicks just to get a teaser. Truth be told, I got sick of clicking around click #87 or so and just abandoned it.

Thanks for the link!
Twitter now worth $7.14m per character
Hewlett-Packard sees tech rebound
Can I ask what your using now? I haven't found many alternatives to Twilio. --> Ah, found below that your using drop.io, no idea they offered phone stuff :).
Yeah, but I am just assuming that after a transition period they would stop using your name. But you should never burn your bridges...so be patient and if they do not do anything about it then politely approach them. I would say a month is enough...but then did you not have a handover period that should have taken care of this issue.
Here's my 2 cents:

Pluses:

+++ It is very nice and simple. I never subscribed to any teleconferencing solutions simply because I think it may get complicated and it probably requires subscription.

Minuses:

- The phone number & pin shows up intermingled in Firefox.

-- I need a global teleconferencing solution, and I don't see myself saying, come on guys lets call this number in new york for connecting up.

Good luck.
A has his problems, and I'm not sure that I'd hire him...

but here's something to think about:

If you hire A, the next person that you interview will see A and think "there are geniuses here".

If you hire B, the next person that you interview will see B and think "there are mediocre players here".

Of course, there's a third option: defer hiring until you find the perfect guy.

I will note that I once hired a guy so good that on his first day I knew he'd be leaving soon. He stuck around for a year and left. I don't blame him - he got a much better deal - one so good that I couldn't match it. I got a ton of great work out of him in that year though, so I'm still glad I did it.
Their business is based on selling an mp3? If the music industry is any guide, it won't be long before their therapeutic sound recording is all over the file-sharing networks.
Two interesting things hit me:
1. Will this affect prices for brand-able names not listed here?
2. Great resource for just brainstorming ideas.
I think the reason that has generated so much chatter is that jwz's experience goes against a lot of current advocacy--TDD, c++, design patterns. Personally, I think this is a worthwhile discussion.

And this is just from the first chapter. Spoiler: it doesn't really get any better for C++, TDD, IDEs in the rest of the book.
I am not 100% clear on the law but I believe they'd have an infringement case against you. Although, I did a quick search and did not look like huddle.net has registered the huddle trademark. (A brief 5 minute search, looks like all 'huddle' communication related ones were abandoned)

But if they did have a trademark case, this would likely strengthen it. If you benefited from a referral program, huddle.net could prove you profited from domain infringement.
I would at least give them a couple months, it takes most companies that long (or longer) to update their site. I don't think it would be burning bridges if you email them in a couple months if it's still up. You could always say someone contacted you requesting help since the information was still up, that the last thing they want is their customers coming to you.
Up until 2 years ago I never paid for software. Having a MSDN subscription on Windows gave me access to all Microsoft stuff I needed, and on Linux things were always free.

But Adobe managed to fork $600 out of me for Photoshop CS3. After a few months their RAW converter stopped working demanding CS4 and my new SLR wasn't supported otherwise. So essentially I feel like they fooled me into renting Photoshop for $600 per year.

Needless to say, if I want to run my purchased copy on Windows (I paid for the Mac version), I'll have to pay for it again, the license covers only one OS.

Oh, and the only software that ever manages to crash my computers into must-be-turned-off-and-on state (I have Linux and a Mac) is Flash. Freezing the entire OS is hard, they surely have an engineering muscle to pull that off.
"It wouldn't work.
....

But YC is extracting 6% from promising startups for the same reason that 37signals is extracting millions of dollars for a web-based bulletin board: the total package is compelling.

In YC's case, you're getting access to a hands-on software startup fanatic who's words you already hang on, plus the network of VC's his team has built up over the last N years. "

which is why the "Indian Y-Combinator"(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842150) will (eventually) fail as well.(besides the fact that they won't attract smart people with stuff like how they micromanage the 10,000$ they might give you for 10% of your company - Founders can't operate the bank account, and apparently need a board meeting to decide on line item expenses! See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842882 for details).

Cloning the legal/financial structure isn't enough. YC succeeds because it has very high calibre people leading it, not because it has a specific "algorithm" that others can copy.
I've been working as an independent software consultant for about 5 years now. I've found the best way to get work is via past contacts. For example, if you are really good at what you do, then all of your past supervisors / colleagues know it, and when they move on to other companies / jobs, they are your best bet for getting started. This cascading effect works to your advantage as you take on more projects and meet new people.
I have only tested in chrome, I have to optimize it for other browsers.

And, one of the reasons I would like to redo it in Twilio would be the ability to provide a 1800 number instead of a NY one, which would make it easier for people in the US. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to provide numbers outside the US.
I'm using them as well -- have been happy so far. I avoided insurance altogether until a client required it. Don't get it unless you need it. You can get a policy in place fairly quickly.
I'll have it in mind.
Do your children push the boundaries? It may be a sign of leadership abilities
Tried it. Didn't work for me. Apparently people who think you suck don't have the time to tell you why or they just don't fucking care.

What did work was asking customers. They care AND they'll tell you what they want.
Why So Much Rush : Does working 80-plus hours a week Really Helps ?
Does Overly working really helps, or it in reverse hamper your productivity?
Java and Haskell Common Ground
There are a number of us who love the city and shake their heads about how unsupportive it is for tech startups. (I examined the claim with data: http://www.sachinagarwal.com/illinois-so-called-tech-leaders...)

At the end of the day, if you can't get angel money - and I reiterate, there is no active angel money in Chicago, only a bunch of self-proclaimed angels that don't cut checks - a YC-style program won't work. What's the point of having a program in Chicago, or Cambridge, or Northern Virginia if you have to fly everyone out to the Valley anyway for a Demo Day?

If you can forswear ever, ever raising money, sure, do your company here. Chicago's the best city on earth. But if you need the option value of maybe raising money someday, you should go West. (And if you want to start a YC company, contact me. I'm in the market for a technical co-founder for the Winter 2010 batch.)
How to Make Your Tools, Gadgets and Appliances Last Forever
Yes this is a problem. Worry about whether or not I've proved something is strongly related to by understanding of the solution.

If the proof is ad-hoc, and cannot be related to existing theory then I am concerned. If I can rephrase my results in terms of existing accepted theory this both makes the work easier to understand, and "more likely" to be correct.
Wow, gOs looks like someone figured out Apple's secret sauce and they're applying it to a user-oriented Linux desktop. That is: keep it simple, avoid surprises, make it all just work.
The article is correct in noting that there is a huge tech community in the chicago area. Some of it is rather unique in the financial sector--trading, options, financial (more so than new york).

But as a distant observer to YC, isn't a key factor in YC's success the culture of the surrounding community (as indicated by the move from Boston, which is certainly more high-tech than Chicago to the valley) and the particular knowledge that YC has in doing this sort of thing?

And from what I have read of Jason's posts, he doesn't seem to think that building a company to be acquired is what he would recommend (in particular, his post regarding the selling of mint to quicken). I would think that would be part of what a YC-like outfit would need to have in its bag of tricks.

And, from a distance, there just seems to be this startup fever in the valley, not something that is really evident here in the chicago area.
I'd be careful with this. I find it a bit suspicious this project is named "Chrome OS" and hosted on Google yet it has nothing to do with the real Chrome OS or Google. Seems very suspicious to me. No one would be dumb enough to create this type of confusion by accident. Would they?
Google Search Traffic Down | Internet Security
if you'd like to be added to the developer preview for Twilio's conferencing API please drop us a line at help@twilio.com and we'll add you to the list.

@jazzychad I've got you on there already

-danielle @ twilio
Postgres defaults to "read committed" isolation, rather than repeatable read or serializable isolation. I have mostly noticed the difference when dealing with updating HTTP session objects in a transaction; with "read commited" isolation, concurrent requests can overwrite newly-written data. With serializable isolation, the transaction that tries to overwrite new data with older data (read at the beginning of the request) is aborted.

(The fix for this is difficult, but I basically don't use the session for much transient data anymore, so this became less of an issue. Before setting up the database to be strict, I never even thought of this as a problem. But obviously it is.)
you didn't take into account the downvoters.
Great idea. Quick thing. The app says 'The number is based in New York City, for the time being (sorry!).' but the number that displayed for me was 218-486-3891, which is Duluth, Minnesota according to Google. Should that output read 212?
I guess one issue here is that I don't see how removing my name from their website prevents them from continuing to service their clients or direct their queries to the correct person.
Anyone have experience using this? Certainly the pricing is attractive, but I'm also concerned about quality and stability.

I've used Adobe ConnectNow for several meetings, but found it to be very flaky. At this point, I would not trust ConnectNow for an important meeting.
And Apple bought NeXT. That doesn't mean the NeXTers became the peons :)
Is it possible to make the drop.io workspace private?
I created a Huddle named testuddle and I can access http://drop.io/testuddle with no restrictions.
That's ~1.16 advisories per year. Show me an operating system, web server, and web application platform (Java, RoR, PHP, whatever) that average less than ~1.16 per year each.

Further, out of all of the advisories for OpenSSL, how many would be mitigated using the technique from the article? Few or none, because most security issues in OpenSSL are about the way it implements the protocols (problems in the PRNG, problems parsing X.509, etc.).
GNU Screen - A Hacker's Ideal Terminal
I think YC probably takes all the people interested in something like YC already, so starting something else "like" it won't ever be successful. It's not about the location, it's about the connections that YC has.

Otherwise, Chicago is a fine place for an Internet-based startup. We have Internet access just like San Francisco :)
Grouping Related Trends with Hadoop and Hive
1. Using the "You are not Google" argument is a blatant disregard for the facts. If you've done the math, you would see that using tries and ternary trees often lose performance at 60,000+ elements, and this is even ignoring cache invalidation that often occurs in jumping through nodes. I'm sorry, but you are the one who sounds like you've never had a dataset bigger than 10 elements.

And speaking of Google, have you ever heard of this?

http://code.google.com/p/google-sparsehash/

2. The point is that lazy evaluation has More problems than strict. Not less. If you read the comments you will see that Dons actually agreed with me after arguing the contrary. Even Simon Peyton Jones believes that "the next Haskell should be strict".

3. LGPL is a problem for many companies. If you don't really care about it, good for you. You are in the minority.

In conclusion, I thought that Hacker News would be immune from Haskell group think, but I was unfortunately wrong.
At minimum, the fact that the core functionality is available as open source gives me some additional confidence in the platform's long-term viability:

http://www.dimdim.com/opensource/dimdim_open_source_communit...

Even if the company goes away, others can use the Community Edition source to host their own instances of the service. Also, security reviews and enhancements can be generated from the bottom up by the community, instead of being 100% dependent on Dimdim.
Namecheap Coupon Code September 2009
September 2009 Coupon code for the Namecheap is

DREAMTIME

This Coupon code will give you a discount of 88 cents off on a domain registration done at namecheap.

Do stay back and check out October Coupon Code coming up soon and also check out other domain registrar Coupon Code in my blog.
The huge difference, though, is in how those people are approached.

If you've got a good product and you go and talk to the right people about it, some percentage (hopefully much larger than 1%) will end up buying it. If you just send spam to a billion people, however, chances are hardly anyone will buy it.

Advertising is spam. Sales is not spam. Giving out CDs as a promotion at an event where you're present, where people can see you, is not a faceless marketing attempt to get that "1%" effect.

Finally, the advice in the previous article was intended to make an immediate difference to the band's receipts and, iirc, it did. The fact that some percentage of those who bought the donationware CDs also brought more friends along the next time the band visited was only a nice side-effect.
Horrific software demo turns out to be a gag
Thanks, I found it already but I can see you're one of the co-authors so I appreciate your effort.

It's going to be some time before I can get to using it but like I said this pretty much is exactly what a currently-stalled project has been looking for.

If I make a real use of this library I'll pass along a proper description so you can see what use it's getting.

As it'll be awhile I'll give you a minimal summary now (in as much detail as I can, which isn't that much sorry).

The overall point is to take input (sequence of words), and then generate further input that is "related" but not identical (think: clearly a variation on the theme, but not rote repetition). The mechanism is that there's a set of grammars specifying overlapping formal languages; input is broken into words and each word is parsed in each grammar that contains that word; some inference and calculation is done to generate a sort-of style profile and then that profile is used together with the underlying grammars to drive generation of new output.

The quality of the output has been underwhelming, mainly b/c doing exact parsing seems to leave a nasty trade-off between the "interestingness" of the grammars in the set and nontriviality of the "style profile":

- having "interesting" grammars means the style profile is too constrained (so the generated output too closely resembles the input)

- having "larger" grammars means the style profile is richer but the output is weak (doesn't adequately resemble the input to a human observer)

Where a library like hampi fits into this is (hopefully) the ability to efficiently loosen-up the parsing in a nicely-constrained way; using some metadata attached to the grammars it ought to be possible to intelligently knock-out part of a word and ask hampi to find a replacement string that makes the word parse within a particular language.

Essentially intentional misunderstanding of input => novel synthesis.
Yes. I mentioned in a comment that I will add password protection to Huddle, which would protect the Dropio workspace as well.
That's the point. Adobe post-purchase is effectively continuing Macromedia's focus.
This might be one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Summary

Blogger: I'm not going to follow you because you don't use Twitter the way I think you should

Consultant: Piss Off

Blogger: I'm going to write a blog post about how you told me to piss off.
Maybe he has to stop at a lot of intersections
> Is that a fact!

Yep it is a fact. Did you disprove it? No. The benchmark is right there in front of you showing that Haskell is taking 10x longer than C++.

> Is your fact also why the Pascal program includes a Pascal translation of simple_hash.h ?

What is your point? Haskell supporters often cite its speed and brevity in GPLS. Instead of using the bundled hash table, the fastest Haskell program needed to implement their own, losing out in brevity. If this is not indicative of a problem in GHC, then what is?
I'll check up on that.
Use Google Docs to view PDF and PPT from inside your Broser
I'm really having trouble with this. My understanding is EC2 provides an internal and external IP for each instance : http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonEC2/dg/2007-01-19/in... as well as a semi-friendly DNS name. Each of these machines can certainly make its own requests to arbitrary URLs? I don't see how this is any different than a bunch of machines sitting in a data center with a shared, dedicated internet connection? Also, from my rather limited experience of crawling sites the only time I drew negative attention was when I did not throttle my crawler. If you are properly caching to avoid repetitious requests and throttling your requests, how are you going to get blocked and why would it be different in EC2 versus a dedicated hosting center?
IllinoisVENTURES is still going, as far as I know. IllinoisVENTURES iVentures10. iventures10.com

They are the only YC pseudo-clone that I have heard actual horror stories about. They give terrible deals to the academics commercializing research they normally fund and can be outright abusive with the micro seed stage program. Stay away.
Most of us have a finite supply of willpower
I am very, very curious to see the actual design for Chrome OS. I'm optimistic for something revolutionary and I am hoping to use it as my primary OS.
FounderCast Episode 1 (this one is edited)
We tried the free version and decided that it didn't provide the QoS that WebEx did -- the video was VERY choppy. Because our product relies heavily on doing client presentations (we have a small number of large clients instead of a large number of small clients) we decided that it made us look less professional and made it more difficult to really show off all our bells and whistles to prospective clients than WebEx.

As I recall, we were promised better QoS if we purchased the paid version, but because we didn't have a way to see how that stacked up against WebEx without paying for it, we never tried it.
Squada Non Grata
Unlike the unedited alpha/pilot episode this one is edited. We talk about acquiring customers and maintaining customer loyalty and take a side trip down memory lane to talk about how we got our first sale.

Thanks for everyone on HN for the feedback about Episode 0.
http://sqlanywhere.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpublished-mysql-fa...

Most of questions here are lack-of-strictness-related.
Pininfarina-Bolloré Bluecar EV Confirmed for June 2010
It's just such a simple app I think you should be able to sum it up in that first blurb.

And maybe separating the phone# and the PIN would simplify it a bit. something like "Call this number to begin a conference call: XXX-XXX-XXXX. This is your PIN. You will be prompted for this after dialing." Or whatever..
That's the point: people got to pick their stuff, so they're generally proud to show it off. People didn't get to pick their bodies, so they're generally embarrassed by them.
In a similar vein, this is a comparison of 8 multi-person SMS services from September 2006:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/27/a-look-at-eight-multi-p...
A programmer's primary job is the act of classification. Encoding a range of behaviors into functions/methods/objects in a way that we can keep track of and use over and over is what we do. So it's not too surprising that in our profession the notion of every idea having a "correct" box to fit into is so pervasive.
Postgres defaults to READ COMMITTED transaction isolation, where it is possible that if you perform the same SELECT twice you will get different answers due to a transaction committing in between. This can affect updates in some circumstances, although if you build your database so that everything is done with INSERTs then it's pretty harmless.

Postgres permits you to specify the SERIALIZABLE transaction level which is complete isolation, if you care about this. MySQL does not.
You're right, I've never had anything like that happen to me. But am also quite sure, what you describe is extremely rare, no? Sort of like getting hit by lightning?
Agreed. I've had two lenovo X-series models (X61s and X200s); they've both been fantastic.
I hate to join the cynic wagon, but their about page and the constant shilling for Microsoft, from their Web Platform on the front page to the Resources pages which has: Windows 7, Microsoft Expressions Studio 3, Silverlight, and once more the Microsoft Web Platform, makes this blog post seem less than genuine.

They come out and say that they are part of the Mess Initiative supported by Microsoft.

I'm not disparaging Silverlight or this Mess company, but this does seem a little fishy
Actually, installing or upgrading Firefox extensions does require restarting Firefox. Mozilla has realized for a long time that this is not optimal and have a new project called Jet Pack that will give programmers a lot of control, and be a lot easier to write for, but won't require a restart. It's still in early development, though. https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/
I love Sir David Attenborough! Some of my fondest memories growing up were watching his shows on PBS with my family. The way he talks and grips audiences without all of the antics that a lot of the newer hosts use is a lost art form. I even bought the Planet Earth series with him as the narrator instead of Sigourney Weaver (although she did a good job too).
I actually did buy the book because of the discussion that came from it. Definitely a good series of responses.

I also bought Programming Clojure for free shipping. An Amazon Recommendation win, to say the least.
I don't think I can live without it anymore.

There is no reason why you shouldn't use screen when ssh'ing in and working on remote machines, it will save you tons of time in case the connection goes down, plus allows your to keep a persistent working environment on remote boxes.

ssh -t user@host screen -rx

That will drop you immediately to a running screen on connect
They travel at 30mph often, but not over very long distances. Imagine your stereotypical cab driver, with excessive acceleration and lane changes, and insert a stop every two blocks to add/drop passengers.

Actual average speed depends a lot on the number of passengers. At rush hours, if you're walking at a fast pace you can outrace a bus. Only so much the driver can do when 20-30 people get on the bus at a stop.