skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter is the equivalent of this scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9mioHO4hoM

Sure sit ups have redeeming value.

Crazy guy: You know those sites, where anybody can post about what's going on in their day? Blogs? Which would you read, a blog post about somebody's lunch or no more than 140 characters about somebody's lunch?

Not Crazy Guy: I would...read...the 140 characters about their lunch because I'm not interested in what they ate.

Crazy guy: EXACTLY! We guarantee a little information of value as blogs, but you don't have to waste as much time reading about absolutely nothing!

Not Crazy Guy: Well....what if....somebody came out with something that was 130 characters?

Crazy guy: twitches a bit no! Not 130 characters, 140! 140!

Not Crazy Guy: oohh.....o...ok...ok...

Crazy guy: Step into my office, because you are fired!

So it this place going to overtake Twitter? http://adocu.com/
If you think that it works poorly you are welcome to improve it:) The testimony of the web provides the answer to the fact that HTML and CSS works.

You can read Håkon Wium Lie's PhD thesis as to the reasoning behind CSS.
http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/ and make your own mind if it is POOP or not.

IMHO it has a very good basis and also provides an architecture for improvements. Pretty much similar to Knuth's TeX.

I personally find no difficulty in using CSS! I think it is the smallest of the head-aches that a web developer faces. really a non-issue.
Im not sure I understand what your offering or why I should use it.

What advantages, for example, does it have over using AWS directly? (or have I missed the point - it's really unclear)
Seems like a useful site, but linking directly to the site would have been more useful.
illuminate us.
Apple Patented Ad-Supported Operating Systems?
Oh, yes... of course, Kindle books are just HTML files with some trivial obfuscation.
RMS, GPL, The Peculiar Institution of Dual Licensing
The life and views of Ayn Rand: Capitalism's martyred hero
Since users/fans of memcached will be reading this I wanted to ask a quick question: I wrote a debug version of memcached in Python that has a couple of "x" commands in it - xdump which dumps all the data in the hash using the same return format as get and xtrace which keeps the connection open and dumps the incoming commands, values and results as they come in.

I was thinking of writing an Adobe Air app that uses xdump and xtrace to let you view/edit usage of memcached. A friend has a project on github that lets you do this in 1 app on a mac but the Air app would be cross platform.

Thoughts on releasing this as an open source project?

btw, the Mac app is at http://github.com/gerardg/mcinsight - its a fork of another project.
Usually the way you do it is by replacing the whole industry that's regulated.
I would like to see some Canadian cities in there sometime soon. I will signup my firm for sure when you do.
I see.

Are office hours a good measure of advice? What about the dinners?

Is the advice really completely stateless?

Some of the benefit of YC comes from networking between the teams. I think this benefit may diminish as the group grows.

Just thinking up objections.
I have to agree with the latest theory that Britain had the unique combination of expensive labour and cheap energy.

It was unique to Britain for reasons having to do with coal and trade with the colonies, but the bottom line is only when you have cheap energy and expensive labour does it make sense to invest in machinery.

Only under those circumstances is it economical.

Even today companies in China who have tried to use more advanced machines to replace workers have found out it is less profitable. There is nothing magic about machines, they have to be more profitable then the alternative. And when labour is cheaper, you just use human labour, what ever is cheapest and works.

For those who prefer to read: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570
Angerwhale basically does this. Every page has dependencies, and when the page is requested, it is served from cache unless the dependencies have changed. Otherwise, it is regenerated.

Yes, this is not as efficient as static files, but you can drop a file in your directory and it will render as a blog post as soon as someone wants to read it (or a page that links to it somewhere).
If only there was some technology....that would....aggregate the blogs and news sites I'm interested in....and display it...perhaps in a reader like format....using some kind of standardized syndication service that's easy peasy to setup....and then, when I see something I like....it has enough content in it to be useful....

sigh

Perhaps Google will figure it out someday.
The webserver and OS are not code?

Oh, you mean world-accessible PHP scripts. That's easy to fix by letting your webserver handle authentication to /admin.
They only retain about 40% of their users. I haven't seen any figures on how long those 40% stick around either.
I went to J-School for a graduate degree. I went because I had no contacts in the industry and no experience either and because I wanted to meet people handling the technology side of things. I got my money's worth and came out with a host of interesting people I could reach out to with questions or for advice.

For many who want go in thinking it will help their prospects as reporters, however, they are disappointed. Several friends went right back into their old newspaper jobs with just a $2-3k raise and a new title. Others spent 6 months to a year writing for free or stringing until they could land a full-time job. Many went into marketing and PR where there are real jobs that pay decently.

It's getting harder and harder to find work as a reporter. meanwhile these schools keep churning out newly minted grads who think having a bunch of clips will be enough. It's worrisome.
Interesting, but can you give some background for the uninitiated?
File-based storage may be "storage-friendly", but it isn't retrieval-friendly. For example, finding the list of all tags your blog uses requires a linear scan over every document in the system. Not fast. (Visit http://blog.jrock.us/. It does this. It takes a long time to load.)
Auto racing and start-ups aren’t that different, really
> The answer returns us to the biased brain, and a mental flaw known as the fundamental attribution error. It turns out that when we evaluate the behavior of others we naturally overemphasize the role of personality - we assume people are always aggressive or always dishonest or always sarcastic - and undervalue the role of context and the pervasive influence of situations. Nobody, it turns out, is always anything.

Does this really mean that all human beings are in effect 'two-faced'? Very interesting perspective into personality. Does anyone know of any personality tests that are actually accurate by follow-up studies?
I liked listening to a marketing executive own up to serious mistakes that were a part of the companys failure.

Seems like too often when startups go under business and engineering point fingers at each other and nobody learns anything.
Yeah, definitely. I wish they'd publicize it more! It'd also be nice to have a similar tool for adding the default CNAMES for mail, calendar, docs, etc.
We know plenty about it. The mechanism for causing cancer is ionizing radiation. The ionization rate for radiation is proportional to (I'll ignore boring constants) Amplitude^N, where N is the least integer such that N omega > - E_0.

Here, E_0 is the energy of the bond the radiation breaks, and omega is the frequency of the radiation. Amplitude is small (you'll be thermally cooked long before Amplitude > 1), so the ionization rate is a small number to the power of large N.

It's virtually unmeasurable for small amplitude and large N. Typically to measure ionization in the microwave regime, one needs to use a microwave resonating cavity.

(I have a paper doing some rigorous math on this topic. The paper itself is not so interesting, but the references might be useful to you. Many of them go into the basic physics of radiation interacting with matter. http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/pubs/dipole_delta.pdf )
The amazing power of graphs...

Before I started a mobile enterprise anything I'd want answers to the following questions:

1) Delivery? How are enterprise apps going to be distributed? Right now almost all mobile software distribution channels are directed at the general consumer. This, obviously, won't work for enterprise, yet no-one has announced a solution to this problem. This also brings up the issue of authentication.

2) VPN? Blackberry is the only platform I know of to tackle the problem of VPNs. As in, within a native application, I can direct traffic over the VPN. There may be support for this on Windows Mobile...

3) Control: There is no centralized way to control access within 3rd party applications. My IT department can't lock me out of an app (aside from doing a full phone wipe, which only happens on the iPhone and the blackberry) they certainly can't control what I access from within the applications I download.

I'm starting to feel like a broken record online and amongst my friends. Mobile has a bright future but right now it's got systematic, challenging problems. Now's the time to start in, but if we move too fast we'll create another mobile.com bubble.
Yes, the study suggests that dietary fat is not the cause of body fat. Fixing total caloric intake is how to measure that.

Drinking higher fat milk will make you fatter if you don't need those extra calories and you don't reduce calorie intake elsewhere in your diet. But that's a statement about calorie intake, not fat intake. For me, personally, I need both the fat and the calories.
Some misconceptions about NoSQL
Just do it. Don't overcomplicate it.
Sex is
- Fun
- Does not worth thinking about it too much
- Does not solve any problems (Sex with a hooker solves hooker's financial problems only)

p.s. Use a condom.... and avoid repeating it in future at all costs(addictive)
It's a good idea. Seems like security through obscurity though. Once the scheme is widely known it is useless.
I have to stand back and squint to see the other image, kinda. Interesting though.
Compare to engineers becoming marketers:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=890110
no, they did not "release" it.. and "looks great?"..
I don't think my advice has gotten any stupider. If anything, probably better, because I've seen so many startups' paths now.

It's funny you should use the word stateless, though, because one of my tricks for scaling is to keep all the state on the client. E.g. I tell the startup "remember to tell me x next time we talk." I've been doing that for a while, and it seems to work fine.

Networking between the startups has actually increased. The more startups there are, the more likely you are to be in the same batch with another one that would be a natural beta user for your product, or that happens to be expert in some technology you have questions about. Maybe there would be problems with startups connecting if there were 1000 in every batch, but between 8 (summer 05) and 26 (summer 09) things just get better.
You also forget the adult education population that are there for career changes because theirs was cut short, further education for promotions etc. and the foreign student population attending to learn English. The community college system in my area if packed with ESL students from Asia and Africa looking to either return to their home country with a new skill, or move into better life in the U.S. using the CC system as a way to open the doors into the 4-year state schools they wouldn't have been eligible from coming fresh off the boat.

IMHO, community college systems are one of the backbones of the American Economy. Cheap, customizable, readily available, flexible and practical education that nearly anybody can benefit from at any age in almost any subject.
California says the iPhone costs $599
Lots of CC programs are certificate or licensing programs designed to get people into a trade. Anything from electrician to nursing assistant.

Those jobs pay far better than most unskilled labor jobs HS only grads are eligible for.
It's refreshing to see such a level of humility from an open source project!
Agreed. I work in the south bay, so I usually can't make it back to the city until at least 7:30.
You bring up some very good points, especially with the iPhone. There are limitations that it has that the Blackberry doesn't. I know my work Blackberry routes browser traffic through a filter and won't allow 3rd party apps to be installed.

I've got a friend who's developing enterprise apps for the iPhone and is dealing with the limitations of that platform right now.

Does anyone know how Andriod addresses the enterprise mobile market?
"Science is just what we can't yet prove to be wrong through observation."

There is a lot that falls into that category that most people don't consider to be science.
Side note: how does Tokyo Tyrant get listed as a "highly scalable data store"? The only way you can scale with TT is by buying a bigger machine.
Android Invasion: A Comprehensive List of Android Phones
Peering Disputes Migrate to IPv6
I would tend to agree, but it might be unfair, I have a bias towards HTC because of their overall high level of quality.

Bias aside, they seem to be very committed to the nature of AOSP and they also seem motivated to help it grow.
Code that has write-permission to anything fancy.

I'm in pedantic territory here, I don't particularly mind the idea of generating static files. My personal opinion is that having a dynamic frontend with fast caching for the most popular views is a better solution for that vast majority of CMS/blog (ie: dynamic) sites out there.

What I do mind, are "I use semi-obscure technology X, here's why X is better than established, proven and hugely popular technology Y in every conceivable way" style ego-boosting articles. I'd rather read a show and tell about how this technology solved a real-life problem for you. I also enjoy the honesty of acknowledging the shortcomings.
"modeling software interfaces after real-world objects is often a very bad idea." really?

What do you think of the desktop of your computer, compared to your physical desk?

or the fact that the windows of your programs can be stack on top of each other like paper pages?

Or text processing programs, that show you the output the way it is going to be displayed (WYSIWG).

Or that whole Object Oriented Programming thingy.

On the contrary modeling software interfaces after real-world objects is a very good idea.
The entire idea of electronic voting just rubs me the wrong way. Any way you shake it, it seems as if the security of the systems is only as good as the lowest-payed employee with access to the source code.
To my understanding thus far...

it doesn't.
I'm not sure but I would assume if once the app is released, they can't even reward the beta-testers by giving them the app they helped build.
Glad that you noticed, or at least were made aware of, the full context of Zeldman's post via the public HN community and back-channels.

I urge some self-reflection via a few full listen-throughs of the early audio-only CalacanisCasts immediately following your tenure at AOL. It was especially galling given your impending fatherhood (congratulations btw.) and his current family status.

Given his near continuous contributions to the Web community over the years, Zeldman has more than earned the right for a little public venting.
Surely there is only a single individual who is maximally smart - I'd imagine you'd need an identical brain to be identically smart; assuming that (as is normal) even speed of application of knowledge is measured as part of smartness.

Now define "smartness".
Inventions that made them billions you mean.

Sure, inventing stuff costs money, but handset manufacturers all benefit from those inventions by being able to charge for them.

As for the history of GSM:

"In 1982, the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) created the Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM) to develop a standard for a mobile telephone system that could be used across Europe.[6] In 1987, a memorandum of understanding was signed by 13 countries to develop a common cellular telephone system across Europe.[7][8] Finally the system created by SINTEF lead by Torleiv Maseng was selected.[9]"

The rest of that stuff: communications methods and associated bits & pieces should simply not be patentable, especially not if they consist of pieces of software.

By your reasoning every TCP protocol stack component should have been patented because it cost 'billions to develop'.
Classic game theory: it's (supposedly) a net benefit for everyone to watch TV, but for any given person it's a net loss.
The big question I have is will the OMAP3430 600 MHz ARM Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX 530 GPU + 430MHz C64x+ DSP be faster than the 1GHz Snapdragon?

Boy Genius Report says the Droid coming out on the 31st is really fast. This Techcrunch report also says it has 7hrs talk time, which is an improvement over the G1. Still going to be keeping a dock at home and work though!
Sorry, the link was broken, now fixed.
If you are attending Startup School, don't forget the Hackers and Founders meetup Sunday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=893109
> Deploying like this has another advantage: you can deploy to a subdirectory of an existing app.

Wordpress can do this too, out of the box.
Poll: What is your position on software patents ?
The Nokia vs Apple thread has me wondering what the HN audience thinks of Software Patents:
I'm against software patents in any form
Some software patents should be allowed
Some software patents should be forbidden
All software patents should be allowed
> If there were no patents, the iPhone would have never been built, because Nokia would have kept this IP as trade secret, or not developed it at all.

knee-jerk? ROFL... talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Have you ever actually read a software patent? I have yet to find one which is educational, which is (as you point out) the basis of granting exclusivity for disclosure. The complex and abstract style used to write many of them makes them basically useless. Even those that are readable are often obvious to those "having ordinary skill in the art". They were granted because the USPTO is over burdened and innovation happens quickly in the industry, but once they have been granted, simple prior art is no longer sufficient to invalidate them.

Patents on software are basically patents on math. I'm all for copyright protection on software, but patent protection is stifling the industry.
Ah, the mantra of the mad scientist: "I'LL SHOW THEM! I'LL SHOW THEM ALL!"
Still happening here: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pt-BR; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
I really enjoy the Beyond the Sword expansion. My only complaint about it is the AI tends to not be incredibly smart on certain issues; for example, if there's a choke point between my civ and a civ that's warring with me, and my city is sitting square on that choke point - they'll send armies of 4-5 units every ten or so turns, instead of building some galleys (or galleons if it's that far along) and circumventing. They also don't seem to like to build more than 4-5 catapults/trebuchets per army, and for a well-entrenched city you need more than that.

I can beat it pretty constantly on Noble, but as soon as I dial up to prince the computer player cheating gets out of hand. Maybe I'm just not good enough at finding efficient research paths.
> Thoughts on releasing this as an open source project?

The only reason I'd say you shouldn't release something as an open source project is if you strongly feel that someone is going to hand you a sufficient amount of cash to keep it proprietary (and even then, it's pretty easy to convince them that there's potentially more value in your project as open source).

I have regretted not pushing projects forward as open source in the past. I have never regretting making something open source.
You don’t sell to an industry, you sell to people.
I installed Windows 7 Ultimate a few days ago (after some rather dicey fixes to my previous Vista/XP dual-boot configuration, which involved wiping partition tables and manually rebuilding them) and I have to say I really like it.

The first thing I noticed is it's incredibly fast. The second is that apart from a few clunky holdovers from Vista, the user experience seems to have dramatically improved. Lastly, and I never thought I'd say this about something out of Redmond, it's actually quite pretty. I don't miss OS X as much now when I'm in Windows.
"She lived to see laissez-faire triumph over collectivism and one of her leading acolytes, Alan Greenspan, appointed to the president’s Council of Economic Advisers."

I would never count the chairman of a central planning entity on the side of laissez-faire economics.

I don't know much about him before the fed though, maybe he changed in the 10 years between the Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve.
Another knee-jerk reaction is thinking that companies must have looked at the patent and copied it, if they infringed on it. Most likely Apple never considered those patents.

I would imagine that the iPhone still would have been built and would have been nearly as good, even if those patents did not exist.
This line says it all:

"Earlier this month, Nokia posted its first quarterly loss in a decade amid falling sales."

And that in the same month where Apple has a record quarter.

If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em.
Support software freedom with the new FSF credit card
Very cool, thanks for those responses.

I remember 'stateless' from last year's 'Be Good' startup school talk.
Even if that were a necessary condition, it wouldn't be sufficient. You also have to have an economy where investment in machinery makes sense. (I.e. your investment won't be confiscated by corrupt officials or destroyed by invaders.)

Also, humans only compete with machines in a few types of work. For example, you could not use human power to drive most of the things we drive with engines: cars, trains, ships, planes, etc.
I can't speak for the parent but I know that I'm not using my brain to it's fullest - it's not that I feel because I'm intelligent that society expects me to use that intelligence I don't feel I owe anything because of that blessing. It's simply that I'd like to use my intelligence to better effect, to positively influence society, to leave a legacy somehow of benificence, etc., that's probably more arrogance than anything else though. It does lead me on to thoughts of being an academic teacher in the more formal sense of the word (I consider many aspects of what I do to be teaching roles).
Ah yes, the "I've got the inside scoop blah blah blah you'll just have to trust me" argument. Brandished like a true former journalist.
Apple (greater than) Google = Absurd
Y combinator's Google timeline
Ironic; I didn't.
I'm conflicted, but against. (Disclosure) I don't have any software patents.

I am also ignorant about a lot of the details.

Can anyone recommend this book?:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596517963/
Massachusetts does the exact same thing.