skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I don't like about mysql and memcache
I second that notion. There's nothing like working for yourself, and being able to create something special to present to the world in your own way. And watch is grow and succeed. I love startup business and enjoy being a founder. Its my passion. I'm the type of person that would much rather create my own company to compete with Facebook and Twitter, and capitalize on their opportunities than be employed by them.
The emotion in GrandMasterBirt's reply is what got you pissed off, but the truth is, he was right when he said "The APIs are in flux. Since Palm controls both APIs and the player, it can ensure that every update of the APIs will not break user expeirence."

It would be stupid for Palm to allow people to use the private/internal APIs, so your "doesn't seem like a balanced policy" is just wrong.
Let me save you some time: Windows users keep buying Windows machines because their last machine was a Windows machine and they already know how to use it. You don't need to write a 1,000 word essay to say that.

Alternative choice: A good-enough Windows machines costs less than half of a low-end Mac.
I like Facebook better, but either would be a step up from my current office. The company I work for (to remain nameless) was a trendy startup in 1998 but has since grown up and gone "corporate" in the decade since. I bet we could set a record for the most beige cubicles in one building.
As someone who tried using twisted.web just a few days ago I can add that yes, twisted.web seems reasonably complete but no, it is not a reasonable choice at this point for many reasons (mostly the common twisted reasons: callback hell and insufficient documentation).

Imho the most interesting part about Tornado is not Tornado itself but the question it rubs into the face of the twisted evangelists: "Why didn't they just use the real twisted instead of re-inventing it?".

This post suggests that they have at least heard the question and, ofcourse, immediately snapped into their long-practiced denial position ("Thou shalt not question the twisted way, we haz performance!").

Only this time twisted does not outperform the newcomer, which should give them food for thought.
Wow, I didn't even know about Skype Extras until today! I could have been using Skype Extras to record calls, send faxes, and do all kinds of other great stuff with Skype.

I think Skype (and, by extension, eBay) really dropped the ball on this one.
Culture excuses prejudice?
To get a rough idea, sum up the rough revenues of the public companies in that industry.
Brain Scientists Misled By Squid
Sadly no, aside from solar I'm highly critical of the alternate energy craze. So I've kept well read on the subject, the topic of melanin and its use as a semiconductor come from a few other fields of overlapping interest.

Solar is becoming popular at a time when interest in biomimicry is also high, I personally believe that copying off nature will give us the needed advantage if we've got a hope to change global warming.
There are also usually trade organizations that will report information. They have an obvious incentive to make the size seem bigger, but if they are big enough organizations investors will also probably use them as a reference.

The other thing is to consider Total Addressable Market (TAM) vs (SAM) Served Addressable Market. Basically, it is the difference between a complete market and the portion you would be able to serve. This is helpful to keep in mind if you are targeting a niche market. The SAM niche may be small, but if there is applicability to the TAM it could be viewed more favorably.

Here is a good link describing SAM vs. TAM:

http://windowmanager.blogspot.com/2005/05/wth-is-tam-sam-som...
Video Head-to-Head: iPod Nano vs iPhone 3GS vs Pocket Camcorders
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Scratch the fact that your company is smaller and has an even smaller budget. Focus on solving a problem and creating something that people want, in the way that they want it. And success will come. Anyone and any company can conpete if given the correct platform in which to do so. Eventhough they may be extremely large, have deep pockets, and even deeper connections, even the "Big Boys", skip a beat sometimes. The larger you are, the more greedy you may become, and the less focus you put on the consumer's needs, and your original business model. And when that ball is dropped, and that opportunity presents itself, that's when your small company with a strong foundation will be able to swoop in, offer the consumer exactly what they want, and how they want it, and become a viable competitor in your market.
The fact that it works so well (makes so much money) comes down to the realization I had that Google isn’t a software company at all. It’s an advertising company.

Google is not an advertising company any more than NBC is an advertising company. The reason Google makes so much money comes down to the fact that they have built the (perceived) best and cleanest search product on the internet. A lot of that probably has to do with writing great peer-reviewed code.
Ask HN: What are your favourite HN Hacks?
I was thinking that there are a lot of HN-related greasemonkey scripts, websites, apps, etc. but there is no place to find them all (that I know of). This is a thread to gather the best ones. Which ones do you use?
Both this and the parent (and even the OP, controlling for Cringely) give a fascinating perspective on Google's culture of peer review. Just out of curiosity, can you give some examples of how coding standards developed for C++ and Java wouldn't translate well to JS? (I'm a little surprised to hear about an anti-JS bias there, actually, though it does explain GWT.)
Oh no! No marketing! Communism! It must be stopped! Shudder.

BTW the reason Google's products are in perpetual beta is because they do not plan to charge the end user ever so they do not need a release version and they have figured out that if they keep saying their product is in beta, they do not have to do annoying things like providing customer service.
I think what axod is saying (and I agree), is that being a random "business guy" who wants you to implement your great new idea is easy. But being a really great business guy, on the level of someone like Richard Branson, is really hard.

And, unlike programming, which is "easy" to learn in the sense that there's a hell of a lot of resources that teach you how to do it, there simply is no way to learn how to be the next Branson.
Why do I have a bad taste in my mouth?
That stinks. I rely on Skype + plugins for my remote interviews.

Everyone else from cell phone makers to TVs to Twitter sees value in being a platform. I don't understand why Skype can't make it work.

Maybe it goes back to what Eric Ries told me about his experience with IMVU. He said his product didn't take off until the co stopped making it an IM plugin because most people don't understand what an IM plugin is.
This is offtopic, but I'd be curious to hear which five books you chose.
I think stupid behavior is exhibited by everyone from time to time depending on the particular gifts and knowledge of the individual.

Most of us a smart in some way, and stupidly incompetent in another.
That's a pretty good justification for your grabbing a pirated copy, but that doesn't have much bearing on whether your comment was valuable. A downvote for your original comment is (I hope) a judgement about the value of your comment, not about your moral character.
Mass-production and standardization, in answer to both questions.

While authoring a text book takes skill and practice, it is a process. The same could be said of a Brittany Spears album. They are carefully crafted to appeal to a wide audience.

Art serves no one other than the creator. Try to tell Picasso realism is more popular, or Charles Bukowski that he needs to tone it down. Not gonna happen. Because they weren't doing it for money, but simply for the pleasure of doing it - living; satisfying that itch to create something exactly as they wanted to.

Obviously, sometimes artists happen to strike a chord with society. Their vision becomes mainstream, their work becomes collectible, lots of money trades hands. But this didn't happen because an editor said "Bukowski, go write something these damn hippies will like and I'll pay you $$$"

More often, an artist strikes a chord with a few people. They make a little money. They keep their day job. Maybe they get a grant.
One typo I can forgive. If I see more than that, I'll typically leave the site, especially if the typo is in part of the site's static text rather than a post/article. If, for example, HN had misspelled something in the footer links and on the sign-up page, I might never have stuck around.
If we transplant #1 to twisted, then it should be just as easy to develop web apps on twisted, except you get a whole lot of stuff for free.

That would be... beyond awesome.
>> I'm guessing most Mac users have Google... But most windows users probably have a portal as their homepage

You know, coming to conclusions by starting from guesses and straw men isn't very useful.

For some reason, a lot of people like to say the Mac is inherently a more "productive" tool. Some people also say Emacs makes them more productive. Others swear by Dvorak or Colemak. But the thing is that the user is always part of the UI system and things like familiarity and muscle memory play a big factor in productivity. Not to mention the actual tasks. Not everything can be done easier in Macs than in PCs.
That's true, IBM is still one of Intel's biggest server OEM's world wide.

Personally, I think that SPARC will end up getting buried by Itanium and POWER, which will in turn get overwhelmed by Opteron and Xeon. :)
Yahoo Introduce Web Analytics – Highly Customizable & Powerful Tool.
There was a segment on NPR about this last weekend, centering on a husband/wife couple that lived in Belgium and commuted to Paris via high speed rail; 1.5 hours each direction made it feasible for them to work in a major metro without having to move there. So that's good.

On the other hand, the investment required to pull that off is staggering. Europe taxes heavily to pay for the infrastructure. The people involved in that infrastructure were interviewed saying to expect it to take 20-30 years to build.

Then on the other hand, we got the to moon and built the interstate highway system.

Then on the other hand, it's easier to link Brussels to Paris than it is to link Chicago to Houston.
App Engine gives you 1.3M free requests per day. Assuming that each peer announces and scrapes every 10 minutes, that's over 4,500 simultaneous peers. You get 6.5 CPU-hours per day, which leaves you 18 CPU-ms per request.
Audio White Paper - Create A Smarter Storage Strategy
Twitter's offices seem pretty dark. The video of Schwarzenegger visiting the Twitter offices was pretty dark too.
First debug the child, then the computer
It will also use Python 2.6's native epoll (see line 326 of http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/9a8bd2fb6fd6279be16d...)
> Since [the bandit] is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account.

There are, I think, some people who probably could produce pluses all around but prefer to harm others. Alternatively, there might be some tradeoff between a lesser plus and a net gain for society vs. a greater plus and a net loss for somebody else. From an intelligent person's perspective, the latter might be preferable, depending on the gains and losses and the preferences of the person.

For instance, I have no problem doing "harm" to other "bandits" (for instance, conking a thief on the head as he tries to rob me). Does that make me a bandit myself? According to the author, yes, because it's a net negative to the bandit, even though I'm doing it in order to put a plus on "society's" account.

I think intelligence is more about capacity (whether for good or ill) than the actions of a person. Granted, we can't poke around in their head and measure it, like we can "add up" their actions, but I still find action accounting a false metric.
On the other other hand, it should be roughly as easy to link San Francisco and LA as it was to link Madrid and Seville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid-Sevilla_high-speed_rail_...).
This article is talking about a specific brand of stupidity, and Carlo carefully lays out his definition of "stupid people". It has nothing to do with competence or knowledge.
Great picture, mediocre article... "... erupted in a pyroclastic flow..." clearly the author doesn't know what that means... the plume isn't a pyroclastic flow, those are flowing down the mountainside.
That depends on a few things. Specifically, if NASA is sufficiently far-sighted, finding sources of intra-solar resources which are easily accessible once in space could be viewed as a long term R&D investment. It may be massively expensive to try and use the resources now, but if NASA can find resources on asteroids, it becomes significantly easier to get funding to build and deploy equipment to harvest and use those materials without returning to earth with them.
Neither mindstorms or vex are very good programming environments. I'd like to see an open linux box with client libraries in a bunch of languages.

The controller should be in a browser for any laptop that can connect to wifi or bluetooth, with a web server on the robot. No one should be building GUIs for a particular environment. You could also build a heroku-like environment to write code for the robot from the browser. You could add a graphical layer for kids who could eventually graduate to code.

I thought this when I was working on robotics, and even more so having worked on the web for a while.

I don't know if this system does this stuff. To my knowledge, no one does yet.
I agree. What I posted was not about that, merely the idea that merely by being arty, we are required to support it. It's a popular idea, but I don't think it stands up to clear thinking.

If you do produce a buggy whip and price it for $75,000, nobody is entitled to thereby take it, but, well, while you have every right to whine about how nobody values it, I have every right to call that a terrible argument.
Then what story is there? If you know what I know, then I have no reason to read what you say.
Ask YC: Feature request for the Disqus guys.
I know you guys post on here, so I'd like to make a feature request. Can you add thread exceptions to moderation settings?

What I want to do is to be able to set my entire site to be fully moderated, and then to set certain pages to be unmoderated.

Basically I'm using moderation, as a way to get updates when new comments are made, but if its a high traffic page, it gets a little overwhelming, and pointless, since I'll be going to that page anyways.
The Route Map is very interesting:

http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloads/RRdev/hsrmap-lv.pdf

It seems odd you would be able to go from Boston to Houston on all high-speed but not New York to Chicago. I think they should add that Buffalo to Cleveland rout to the high-speed list. Of course it probably has to do with the condition of the existing rails and the terrain.
I find this search page is useful http://searchyc.com/ but the same is achieved by Google domain search as well.
Contact information found here:

http://disqus.com/about/
I would refer the high-speed-rail types to James Kunstler's brilliant post 'financial crisis called off' where he reminds us...

We blather about high speed rail, but you can't even get from Cleveland to Cincinnati on a regular train - and what's more amazing, nobody is really interested in making this happen. All we really care about is finding some miracle method to keep all the cars running.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/financial-crisis-called-off...
Biden dreams of a wonderful new way to travel:

"Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes."

Now imagine that people actually start taking trains. Wouldn't you expect the TSA to start screening trains too?
"telling employees the exact situation when money is tight can be regarded as that"

Not telling the employees there is a non-trivial chance they won't be paid for their work when you have actual knowledge of such could pretty easily be shown to be theft of services/fraud in front of a jury, and almost certainly piercing the corporate veil in the process. It's simply not right to force your employees that have no equity in the company to assume financial risk on behalf of the owners, particularly without the employees' knowledge.
Both twisted and Tornado are very fun to work on and I think it is great they are focused on performance. This is nothing but good for web frameworks in Python.
Are you familiar with Edward Bernays? Have you watched Adam Curtis documentary 'The century of the self'?

From http://www.perceptric.com/blog/_archives/2008/8/14/3837144.h...:

Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. His family emigrated to the US from Germany by way of England before World War 1. Bernays was the father of the modern public relations business. He used some of the ideas that were the brainchild of his uncle and was able to convince clients of the ways that people thought and how their thoughts could be turned to the benefit of the clients’ needs.

One of the clients that Bernays worked for was Sarah Lee. They had a problem. They had created a cake mix that just needed water added to it and then could be popped in the oven. The problem was that housewives were not buying it.

Bernays did some studies and came up with the conclusion that the housewives that the product was targeting felt that they had not personal involvement in the success of the baking of the cake. He proposed that the company change the formula for the product to require the user to have to break an egg and mix that with the water into the cake mix before baking the cake.

The rest is history. The new cake mix took off like wildfire and still today in every supermarket that you go to you will find cake mixes that require the user to break an egg into a bowl and then mix it with the powdered ingredients in the packet.
RSS has the potential to be the worlds biggest micro-content social network
the investment required to pull that off is staggering. Europe taxes heavily to pay for the infrastructure.

The problem is, we (America) have been neglecting our infrastructure for far too long. As a country, we've been doing little more than keeping our existing infrastructure in working condition, and only upgrading where it was absolutely necessary. We should have been incrementally upgrading our infrastructure over the past 50 years, but we haven't been.

I always find it staggering how location locked much of the US population is. Finding middle aged people who have never been more than 20 miles from where they were born simply floors me. We are in desperate need of affordable mass transportation, and high-speed rail seems to be the best way to achieve that.

If the current administration can at least start the upgrades to our Transportation and Communication infrastructure that we need, at least enough to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world, I will consider it a massive success.
Earth -> Space is fundamentally expensive. Space -> Earth is not; there's a lot of tradeoffs available to you to cut down price, mostly in exchange for receiving the goods later. You can bring an moderately sized asteroid to us reasonably easily, if getting to space was easy itself.

(And that is how you do it; bring the resources to us. I don't know what we could do that would involve carting atoms into space, getting them space-blessed, then carting them back to Earth.)
Github and Engineyard part ways
There is much less danger on a train vs. a plane. A bomb would only destroy a section of a train and you can't really hi-jack a train and do much damage.
Won't this create more urban sprawl?

I'm also not convinced they won't have security screening for the high speed rail. I wonder if they do in Spain because of 911 + 912.
Being from India (where the rail system is awesome, even though its not high speed), having extensive traveling experience in Europe and an avid hater of driving, I love the fact that something is happening in this area in US. When I came to US, I was surprised to see the only modes of traveling being driving or flying. My friends told me its because the auto lobbying in US is so powerful that they don't let any public transportation system to develop. I believed them. I am not saying it is true but I cannot figure out a reason why public transportation system across US sucks and even though this venture is highly cost intensive, IMO, it will be well worth it. Also, I dont understand people who prefer driving 8 hours, rather than sitting in a train, stress free and can actually use their time to work/read/socialize.
Does anyone have any idea what host github is moving to?
It was accurate around 56% of the time classifying as positive, negative, or neutral. I used a naive Bayesian classifier and guessed the highest rather than showing the percent positive.
Before answering that question it's important to recognize that the future he's describing is the present in Europe, where there have been terrorist attacks for decades. Therefore, if security fears result in a system worse off than what he describes, then it's simply a US cultural artifact.
Not to be a dick, but I am hoping you can save me time. I have heard the assertion that Americans are more land locked than other (well, European) countries, but I have never seen anything more than anecdotes. Does anyone actually know of any serious comparisons?

It seems to me that a similar anecdote would be the "American's own more cars than any other group and are ridiculously mobile."

I would side with the latter anecdote.
Never mind Kindle, I just want a paperback.
A classic case I can think of involved a JavaScript class (or "class" for the purists out there) that was just used for data interchange. Basically it was just a collection of properties. However, for each property "foo", there was a trivial accessor method called "getFoo()". And because the coding standards said that everything must be JsDoc'd (JavaDoc for JavaScript, basically), the property initialization in the constructor had a JsDoc comment, something to the effect of "This is the Foo.". Then the accessor function, getFoo() had a JsDoc comment to the effect "Gets the Foo".

Now in all fairness, the JsDoc comments were used to pass type annotations to the JavaScript compiler/compressor/obfuscator. But still, what the hell is the point of not just writing useless comments, but writing them twice? Not to mention the fact that accessor functions aren't all that useful in JavaScript, and they're especially not useful for objects that are just a big bag of properties.
Southern senators need their pork. Logically the south is not the best place to put rail because they do not have the large population centers, but politically there has to be just as much rail in the south as in the northeast or the southern congresspeople will destroy any legislation.

This is one of the reasons Amtrak has been losing money, btw.
> You don't know what it's like to see megabyte after megabyte of source code scroll by, and you can't tell who wrote it.

Sounds like they have an inefficient meat-machine based code generator. Why not just use their considerable resources and automate that process?