skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had to laugh every time the starry-eyed "interviewer" somehow stumbled into the shot, but I suddenly respect Moby a lot more.

I think this is a pattern, too: every time I see someone's workshop and the tools they use, I understand the product a lot more. It doesn't matter what the domain is; the tools fascinate me. If I don't respect the tools, then I don't respect the product as much. I think this is where Autotuner comes in... Although as an aside, I do have a lot of respect for the autocorrelation maths that lurk beneath the surface of Autotuner.

I also got a gestalt feeling of loneliness from the interview. I used to jam with some friends between 2004-2008, and when I moved across the continent, I lost a really major social aspect of the musical experience. Like Moby said, you don't have to wait around for everyone to get their schedules in order if you're a one-man show, but it's not as much fun either. It's also more work to make sound...

Live music with several people can just happen, once you've set up. Multitracked, solo music involves as much process and perseverance as it involves technique and vision. I think the quality of my solo work is better because it's more intentional, but the live and social experience of jamming feels much more humane. Not surprisingly, it's more spontaneous, and with the warts and everything, it feels more genuine.

Sure, when you take a band into the studio, you get the whole "process and perseverance" aspect back, but with solo music, you never get to leave the studio.

More than anything else, I think the reflection on "drum machines as church organ accompaniment" captures the interview. To echo jnorthrop's comment (i.e. that Moby's studio is devoid of art) it seems to me that the term "studio" isn't apt at all. It's the Church of Moby, where we speak in whispers and wait for the right moment to listen, for the first time, to "ancient" electronics.
All of those are software related. The only hardware parts are cpus, radios and interfaces.
Ask HN: Best Startup-Themed Movies?
Does any one have film suggestions? Startup/tech history favorites?
I did that too. Oops. But it was actually Paul Graham's essays that made me realize I was doing the wrong thing.

Oh, well it was only about a year of my life I wasted, I'm not bitter at all... seriously.

Did anyone else make this mistake? How did you realize what you were doing was the complete wrong approach?
That's correct. According to the press release, they just made a sample in the lab.

http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/degraffnarayan09/

And then some reporter saw it and started making stuff up.
We have been using it for about 3ish months now and have not run into any issues. It is conceivable that the blog would eventually move over to a real CMS (not wordpress) once we have a need for dynamic content, but the website will stay static for the foreseeable future.
The State of the Mac mini October 2009
Disagree. Chris's point regards direct seed-stage investment from a VC, where a "pass" on funding an A-round indicates that the VC lost interest over time (suggesting that they might be disappointed in execution, think the market is no longer there, etc.).

My understanding is that Sequoia is simply providing more capital to YC, and that YC handles all the decision-making with regards to company selection and investment. For Sequoia to "pass" on investing in a YC-funded company after the seed stage is not the same situation.. they never "selected" the seed-stage funding recipient in the first place.

Edit: Regardless, this is all a silly thing to be concerned about. If your idea is even remotely viable, your execution is solid, and you have determination, you will find traction and success (and investment, if you really want it). If you're sweating things like this, you're getting distracted from the things that matter.
My Macbook Pro maxed out too. It's 2009. How is it even possible for anything to peg my CPU playing video?
I think that's a misunderstanding of the YC / Sequoia relationship. YC raises from Sequoia just like a VC raises from their limited partners. What you're describing sounds more like if YC were doing a syndicate seed investment with Sequoia, which isn't the way the deal works.
Create an API, implement it in WordPress, phpBB, moveable type and get everyone else to implement it - then writing an aggregator would be a lot easier.
Kudos on having the best interface for reading I have ever seen on a blog. Yours is the only website I've ever seen that Readability makes less readable.
Top tier firms like Sequoia already have a de facto right of first refusal on the entire startup market. They already see every deal. So if Sequoia passing on a deal deterred other funds from investing, they wouldn't be able to invest in anything.

Which in turn is why Sequoia was willing to invest in us without imposing any conditions. Because the top tier funds already see every deal, it's in their interest merely to increase the number of startups, just as, because Google has such a big percentage of the search market, it's in their interest merely to increase Internet usage.

Sequoia does get an early look at all the startups, but this was not a condition of the deal. They always have. (All the speakers get an early look at the startups; it would be hard for them not to; and since winter 2006 the VC speaker has always been Greg McAdoo.)
Good idea. Hard to keep developers from cheating and selling the discount codes or tying them to other purchases to reduce Apple's cut. Maybe developers would just obey the contract if it said you couldn't do that, and it could be tried and canceled if widely abused.
I know this isn't quite what the article was about, but when he said "modelines" I thought of the lines you can place in a comment in a file to set editor options. For example, http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Modeline_magic

It's great for making things consistent within a file when the editors people are using might not be consistent in their configuration. For example, I might be collaborating with one person who uses tabs with a shift width of 8, while in my own writing I may prefer to use 4 spaces.

So I can add:

/* vim: set noexpandtab:sw=8:ts=8 */

and suddenly vim will realize that it should treat an input of <tab> as a tab character and render them as 8 characters.

Alternately, if I were writing a document where I wanted all lines to be automatically wrapped to be within 80 characters but I usually let them continue indefinitely, I could add

/* vim: set wrap:tw=80 */

and I quickly have a per-file way of setting my editor's configuration.
Yes. I think that software patents are a severe problem and I vote with my feet when it comes to this kind of issue.

I'm sure my one-man-boycott isn't going to impress anybody but that's the sweep your own street argument working for you.

It's a variation on the 'if one percent fallacy', 'if everybody does it then it will make a difference'. And I'm sure that not everybody - or even a small percentage - will do this, after all the only time when it will make Nokia recant is if the loss in sales outweighs their potential gain in this suit.

But that doesn't matter to me. Point of principle. You do software patents, I might buy your stuff. You sue using software patents (and there seems to be some confusion about that, the non-software issues are dead obvious, the software issues should never have been granted or should have become common property the second Nokia started pushing for those things to be accepted as standards).

Nokia was one of the parties pushing hardest to allow software patents in the EU:

http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Software_patents
Ask HN: Mac vs. PC?
Do you use a mac or a pc?
Missed a 4th reason for a lack of customer development:
4) Hard to get meaningful face time with customers and/or get honest, well-thought out responses from them, particularly hard for a brand-new startup without existing customers on existing products.

Customers are very busy people too, and they are not on your payroll. Totally agree that you should make your decisions as informed as possible, i.e. do as much Customer Development as you can, but ultimately a big part of a early-stage startup is making decisions without the luxury of a complete data set i.e. gut and luck.

Which is precisely why you need to "ship early" (get paying customers ASAP) and "ship often" (start developing them immediately and incorporating their feedback into development).
duh. of course. i forgot that someone pays for gifted apps.
Quote "2. A truly random string is not significantly compressible; its description length is within a constant offset of its length. Formally we say K(x) = Theta(|x|), which means "K(x) grows as fast as the length of x".
But any finite random sequence can be found at some point in a pseudo-random generated sequence of sufficient length; thus can always be described by the generator function and the seed.
This clarification makes a lot of sense to me.
Apple has continually played the patent game to the detriment of others.

Such as when?
The finding that an incomplete degree still has an effect on earning is the most surprising to me. I thought college had mostly devolved into a signal about how committed you were to your career, but clearly at least some courses are imparting actual skills. Maybe the effect is greater in community colleges because they tend towards degrees in more practical subjects? (I don't know anything about community college, I'm not from the US)
Author of the post here.

You can take some solace in the fact that some entrepreneurs never seem to learn this lesson, and fail repeatedly until they stumble into a success by chance.

I touched on this in the article, but I think the VC industry can be blamed for some of this. If you start a company and raise a few million and hire a team and spend two years blowing through your cash before shutting down, it's easy to blame "execution" or hiring the wrong people, or whatever, rather than face up to the fact that you went down the wrong road from the beginning because you had a poor product/market fit.

Success is a poor teacher.
I'm also using a custom Python script to generate my blog (http://journal.uggedal.com). It can be found here: http://github.com/uggedal/reprise

Delayed posts:

at now + 1day yourstaticgenerator.py
The investment means YC will now advise more companies in every batch, so it will have to spread itself thinner when it comes to advice and introductions.
Because they just realized they can't make something that will compete with the Iphone without violating apples patents ?

So they figure rather than to wait they should sue first, hope to get apples attention in a way they can't ignore and 'settle' for cross licensing. And so the madness continues.

Nokia should give up their software patents and simply make a stand instead of going out of their way to look like losers here.

They were one of the most r&d driven companies in the world after Xerox, the stuff they did was pretty groundbreaking, unfortunately in the field of software that allows you to take out patents. That should have never happened. Nokia was one of the parties lobbying the EU very hard to allow software patents:

http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Software_patents

Now you can see why.
Gladwell: "Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs..."
I definitely agree that for a startup, it's better to hire someone who's looking to step up and build the business, not looking down to grab some equity.

However, I don't think someone's résumé is the only way to determine whether someone is looking up or looking down.

There are plenty of experienced guys who have been there, done that, but are looking to accomplish something really significant. These guys are perfect for startups because they're just as interested in achieving lofty goals, plus they already have money to support themselves.
Weird Science. We all want to make something beautiful. The only differences are what goals we're after.
You should create a poll if you're polling.

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Isilon Systems' Comeback in the Data Storage Space
Facebook and Google Expected to Offer Song Sampling
I've been a part of two startups, neither of which did anything remotely like "Customer Development". The one was consumer oriented, and they sort of stumbled through the launch of a prototype that was built to scratch their own itch (i.e. they were their own customer, so they kind of knew what it needed).

The 2nd still has very little revenue and I would say is still struggling to align with the customer. They've spent many years now developing a product that they think will fit the customer based on their experiences working in the target industry 10 years ago. Its a little scary to watch this company spend their money after only showing a mockup to a customer once, about 3 years ago.

This 2nd company is starting to get paying customers, and then they panic when the customer says, "Wait. It doesn't do x, y, and x? I assumed it did, I mean, everyone in our industry does that! You didn't know that?"

I'm curious to know how these 2 companies would be different had they done solid customer development first.
Agree on ship early/ship often, but most of the startups I've observed (granted, a small sample) didn't skip customer development because potential customers wouldn't call them back. By and large, I think most folks are willing to sit down with you for a cup of coffee for 30 mins and talk about their needs and how your product could help, especially if you make it clear up-front that this is not a sales call.

YMMV, but we've had great success with just sending an email or picking up the phone and asking people if we could chat for a bit.
Blogspam: the original article is here http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=Direc...
Android 2.0 First Look: Fresh Face, Sick Speed
Here is an informed discussion on this issue by a serial-entrepreneur-turned-VC fellow who specifically addresses the points raised in Chris Dixon's piece and generally comes out in favor of startups being able to take VC seed funding without serious risks: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/10/18/vc-seed-fundin....
The good, the bad and the awful: a history of Windows ads
Good point. We are, in fact, using Cloud Front. I've updated the paragraph to be more technically accurate (and fixed the typo). Thanks.
Online Money Making Sites
XPUD: Floating On The Cloud
Most Zynga games appear to be rip-offs. Farmville was ripped from Farm Town, and he recent Cafe world is almost a frame by frame copy of Playfish's Restaurant City (in terms of general gameplay and graphics). Mafia Wars came from SGN and Pirates and the Space Genre games both share the same backend as Mafia Wars.
Accelinova provides chapter 10 for free off of their 'bookshelf': < http://www.accelinnova.com/pdfs/kohn.pdf >. This chapter is focused on motivation in the workplace, and he does have several concrete proposals, organized into sections: 1. Abolish Incentives - While pay is not a motivator, it can be a demotivator. "Pay generously and equitably...Then do everything in your power to put money out of [the employees] minds." 2. Re-evaluate Evaluation - Do away with the regularly scheduled performance review, and instead give employees regular, useful feedback, and in particular, the entire process of giving feedback should be separate from the process that determines compensation. 3. Create the Conditions for Authentic Motiviation - Attend to "the collaboration that defines the context of work, the content of the tasks, and the extent to which people have some choice about what they do and how they do it." He goes on to give more details about these three conditions in the second half of the chapter.

The other 2 chapters in this end section are similar, with one each focusing on raising children and how to structure education.
"...but then eBay happened." Best line =)
Drupal can also do this with the Boost module. Boost is very similar to WP-Supercache, except it has a multi process crawler to push the site out faster and some fairly smart cache expiration settings. Also caches AJAX & XML & Pages with URL variables. GPL2 - http://drupal.org/project/boost
Presuming some superior ability by Sequoia to choose wisely. If in this particular case Sequoia is already "ambulance-chasing", hanging around YC's alley door hoping to pick up strays, I presume they are relying on YC's expertise, and simply expanding the opportunity to invest in worthy startups YC could not affort to fund. Otherwise why aren't they running their own show?
Not to criticise Sequoia; I've been in 2 startups they funded. But VCs are notorious for herd mentality.
Can you guys try refreshing your cache to grab the CSS changes?
Ugh! Repeat after me: correlation does not imply causation, correlation does not imply causation, correlation does not imply causation.

People who work straight out of HS are very different from those who decided to save up money and go to college, even before they go to college.
Automatically configure your MX Records for Google Apps on Godaddy
What if the founders don't seek investment from Sequoia after the initial YC investment. In this case Sequoia would never have had the opportunity to pass.

I imagine there is no 'you have to request funding from Sequoia' clause that comes with the YC money. In fact, from my understanding, you don't have to take any investment in the future if you so choose.
Primer

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
Why Social Networking Websites News
Why Social Networking Websites News live news.
Portishead cut samples of their own playing back to vinyl so they could bring them back in as scratches.

Anyone that dedicated is, in the best possible sense, a bit of a nerd.
My understanding of the Chris Dixon + Venture Hacks argument is: VC participation in a seed round means that they have a deeper understanding of the company than if they merely see a deal and pass on it. This implied deeper understanding gives them greater leverage in controlling the terms of a future financing.

So Sequoia passing on a deal doesn't deter other VCs because they might just say: "Well, Sequoia might not have given this deal enough scrutiny to see the value." But if Sequoia is already a seed investor, it is more difficult for other VCs to convince themselves of that.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here.
This article provides no evidence whatsoever that trace amounts of steroids or antibiotics in milk are harmful. It merely suggests they might be present.
> If in this particular case Sequoia is already "ambulance-chasing", hanging around YC's alley door hoping to pick up strays,

That's a wonderful analogy, thank you for that one!
Maybe this article:

"Cellular automata and music: Using the Java language for algorithmic music composition":
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-camusic/

Or maybe one of my other developerWorks articles:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/search/searchResults.jsp?s...
For me the only really dangerous one is Civ IV, which I play until bedtime whenever I start a game, whenever I start a game. Thankfully I have enough willpower to avoid starting a game most days.

Civ IV is an incredibly well made game, just amazing.
Launching LinkedIn From a Living Room
It gets complicated if you want to support multiple browsers. The current Android browser does not have the HTML5 Database or Offline Applications APIs enabled, but it does have Gears built in. Firefox 3.5 supports HTML5 offline apps but not database storage. Gears is available as a Firefox extension. IE8 supports HTML5 key-value storage but not HTML5 database storage or offline applications. Gears is available as a plugin for IE. Safari for Mac supports both Gears and large parts of HTML5. Safari for iPhone supports HTML5 but not Gears.

Take a look at: http://code.google.com/p/webstorageportabilitylayer/

This is the database access layer that Google wrote for GMail mobile. It works with both Gears and HTML5, so you can use SQLite on IE, Firefox (including pre-3.5 versions), Safari, Chrome, iPhone, and Android. However, it provides only a low-level (raw SQL) API and is asynchronous for performance reasons. You'll have to write a bit more code than if you use a high-level Gears-only library like ActiveJS.

Clearly things are simpler if you can choose either Gears or HTML5, and support just one or two browsers. Some features are more widely supported using Gears right now, but this will probably tilt the other direction soon. For example, the Chromium developers have no plans to add Gears support on Linux, because they see HTML5 as the way forward.
I hadn't thought of that as a way to game the system -- it does, however, cause a tax disincentive.
Justin.tv is looking for great Software Engineers
I bet most people don't talk about their studying, and if you don't see the person studying, what stands out is their ability. So if the person goes home and spends twice as much time studying as you do, you still only see the part where they demonstrate their knowledge. If they studied ahead, they'll look like they know everything when really they are working twice as hard as you.

Basically, we humans are really bad at judging things, particularly abstract things like "intelligence". Heck, we can't even really define it yet.

Just get your results, and be happy with those.
I think you leave off an important point about science though: that there isn't anything better.

It's perpetually incomplete, but it's more complete than any other "way of knowing", and there's always more being added. It doesn't have perfect facts, but it's got the best ones, and they're always improving. It is indeed merely good enough, but it's the best of what we have, and always getting better.
Thing I love about Hacker News: this post will be dead within the next couple hours.
To the extent I understand this, you're selling web hosting. But there's no mention of traffic limits. For my $10/month 20-page single-site:

- Can my 20 pages of 'content' each be 700MB movies?

- Can I serve millions of hits / thousands of GB per month?

I suspect the answer is no, but when you talk about "content storage" and "content delivery" such metrics are the usual ways an offering is defined.
Hello jbellis,

it's really a matter of design. I like the idea that the Redis servers are dummy, and it's up to the client logic to handle sharding. For instance the Ruby client supports this feature in a way mostly transparent to the client.

In traditional databases sharding is hard not because they are not good at it form the point of view of "feature set" (like in Redis VS Cassandra), but because the data model itself is not right for working with data split across different servers. If you use an SQL DB just with tables accessed by IDs and without queries more complex than lookups by primary key, then sharing starts to become simpler.

Even if Redis will ever get server-side sharding, I'll code another process that handles this issue instead to put the logic inside Redis itself.

Btw how is it possible to build something really horizontally scalable without to use client-level sharding?

What you want is to have N web server and M databases, without any single-dispatch-node. At least this is how I'm used to thing at it.

Without any kind of client help I guess there is some kind of master node handling the dispatching of requests. Maybe I missed the point, please give me some hint.
That would be a chipset issue, apple does not make it's own G3/UMTS chipset, although there are some rumours that they have some custom mods.
I haven't looked at the net neutrality rules. Would they ban e.g. the business model of espn360?