skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My BS filter goes off when I read that isolated sentence. The context in the OP makes the sentiment novel and useful.
http://banshee-project.org/

(disclaimer: I'm one of developers)
Disk I/O is a huge limiting factor in a filesystem based approach to data persistence. Using a database for the persistence of data allows the db to schedule flushing the state to disk, independent of the actual requests. The situation you're specifically talking about, where there's nothing but static pages, there's no point in using a framework that's designed around building dynamic pages. You could just as easily write/use a templating system that takes content files and generates the HTML files from that content, and just run it when you have new content.
TI and Linear seem to be pushing their power supply modules lately. They are pretty cool for projects where you don't care too much about mass production cost and space.
If you really want to FIX this, offer up a viable structured alternative to aggressively pursue their business.

I believe it's called TechCrunch50.
That's the way it's organized in my country as well. You have to go through GP to see any specialist (with exception of dermatologist, urologist and perhaps few others). It sure helps to save specialist time but there are public complaints about wasted GP time. Maybe the trouble in my country is just lack of money for medical care.
"only half"
The picture of society he paints appears to be a standard scifi plot. From Wikipedia Tron article: "Sark then informs everyone that they can either renounce their belief in the Users and join the MCP, or they will be forced to play games that result in their eventual elimination."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(film)#Plot
Startup School rooms selling out. Rent out your room, get $50 Airbnb Gift Card.
Hey Bay Area hackers,

Our rooms for Startup School are already selling out, and we need more rooms ASAP since demand is greater than we anticipated. To add an incentive, we are giving a $50 Gift Card to anyone that list their couch, living room, extra bedroom, or apartment. Click here to list your room and get a $50 Gift Card: http://www.airbnb.com/startupschool
We have 9M+ parts in our database so we use algorithmic methods to parse and normalize technical information. In general, the data comes from many different sources including increasingly from the manufacturers themselves. We're not parsing pdf datasheets though so datasheet errors won't affect the accuracy of our database.

As you can imagine, it's impossible to guarantee 100% accuracy on 9M+ parts since we can't verify each part by hand. If you spot an error, please send us an email and we'll fix it.
There is no such thing as excellent PHP code.
Straw, camel back... sorry

Keep expectations high and the community will self-correct.
Because consulting makes more money than the "cool stuff?"
While I can't talk specifically about the deal terms, I can say that we are very pleased with the agreement and think it represents forward progress for the industry.

If any of you guys have further questions, I would encourage you to contact our PR guy who is normally very responsive.

I'd prefer to stick to coding anyhow :)
The being a jerk was unconnected to my wife's lack of understanding of flow.

I was grumpy and I snapped at her, that's uncool.

The point of the post was that I wanted her to understand why it's important to let someone to achieve deep concentration when they are programming.

When people don't commonly do activities that require that deep concentration they don't understand why small distractions are a problem. The point is not the understanding of the concept of flow, per se, but connecting it to a geek's ability to output.
Exactly how often do servers restart? Your average commodity server - maybe twice a year. For user data it's too much, but for user statuses, I don't think so. And if you save the data in a controlled restart and only consider crashes, with a bit of effort you can probably go down to about once every couple of years or less.

As for the benefit... there was a picture some time back here on HN: http://imgur.com/X1Hi1.gif
One nit: you are missing a question mark following the first bullet under "Why Qwanz?", so "Feel powerless to influence matters that are of interest to you" reads like a benefit statement instead of a question. (I.e.: "It can make me feel powerless? Sign me up.") I assume you meant "Do you feel powerless...?".

Also, maybe it's just me, but that whole image is very fuzzy looking, while the rest of the text on the page is nice and crisp. Maybe it should be PNG instead of JPG?
I've thought of writing that essay, but it's so dangerous that I'd want to spend a long time on it. (One of the surprises, in fact, is how dangerous it is to talk about.) Plus startup school wouldn't be the place.
That doesn't mean computers won't get faster, just that the features of CPUs won't be getting smaller.
Not really. It takes less than 10% of your income and it's almost completely deductible from income tax. Main trouble is that you have to wait long for some procedures (but not for general care), and that doctors and nurses as government employees periodically go on strike.
App Engine can finally receive mail. [bonus: delete your app as well]
I am curious what the answers to the questions on page 33 will be. I am quite curious what open source operating systems add to optimize for parallel (this, something else, or nothing).
I wasn't really worried about datasheet errors making into the database. I was more worried about OCR problems and human error. It is nice to know that the manufacturers are starting to give you this stuff.
Unshortened URL: http://thisweekinstartups.com/ (no need for bit.ly)

Enjoyed the post, keep it up.
That may be true, but he's not representing the City of Memphis. He's representing the company of FedEx, which is based in Memphis. If I made a Twitter comment saying that I hated New York City, while I was head of a PR firm for the New York Stock Exchange, I would not expect to get a similar response.

> many of my peers and I question the expense of paying Ketchum to produce the video open for today’s event; work that could have been achieved by internal, award-winning professionals with decades of experience in television production.

This seems more like the crux of the issue. Someone pissed off that the company didn't use him or his working group and instead outsourced the work.

> Not knowing exactly what prompted your comments, I will admit the area around our airport is a bit of an eyesore, not without crime, prostitution, commercial decay, and a few potholes.

He even admits that it's possible the @keyinfluencer had a bad experience with the town. So @keyinfluencer's comment could have been totally acceptable within the context of the experience that he had had with Memphis at the point.

This whole 'response' comes off as a gross over-reaction. Much in the same light as the guy that writes a 12-page essay in response to an off-hand comment that there are 'many inconsistencies' in the Bible. The guy writes the letter/essay not because it is justified, but because someone has hit a sore spot and he feels a need to 'react' to what he views as some sort of 'transgression.'

In this case, I feel like the 'transgression' is probably not 'insulting my city' so much as 'he took mah jerb!' But he couldn't outright say something like, "this guy's an assclown and I don't like him," so he used this off-handed comment as an excuse. Notice how he CC'd this to all the FexEx upper-ups. He clearly is trying to give them the impression that they need to drop this 'outsourced' company and bring the work back in-house.
What you didn't club is that Apple couldn't keep Flash and Java off the iPhone/iPod Touch if they let a 3rd party run the store.
18 minutes isn't live. It isn't real-time.

Live and realtime is instant, as in less than a second or two and at most a minute (in certain contexts).

Friendfeed, for instance, is a live search engine. Update your GChat status or share something on Google Reader. The time to update and be indexed by the main search engine on Friendfeed is seconds.
Ask YC: Impact of University on YC Application?
I'm curious what impact this has.

Is it possible to break down acceptance percentages into YC by Ivy League/University/Community College/No Higher Education? Even as a rough estimate?
Perhaps I'm displaying a lack of sophistication, but by my reading, the title "implies you should miss deadlines...and you should never update" in the same way that "worse is better" implies that shipping a ten-line random number generator is an acceptable solution to all problems. I mean, that would be worse than that database app the bank wanted, right? So it must be better!
Instructions received by the woman previously known as Julie and currently known as online shopping facilitator.

Marketing: What to do when we are having a sale:

"Post to your tumblr and submit to all major social news services. It's better if these get submitted by your followers (you can let them know by tweeting), but you can do it yourself if necessary. Check on these a few times a day (as often as you can) and jump in identifying yourself as the author if they seem to be getting any traction. Respect the norms of whatever community you are participating in."

IT: What to do when we are having a sale:

"Log in to your site admin account using your username and password. Edit each of the product entites for price. Swap 'RRP', with 'Display Price' and reduce the number in the priceA and priceB fields to the appropriate levels. If the sale is a promotional sale make sure that the 'customFied3' is set to 'false.' If you are doing this for a large number of items there is an online sale applet available to help you. The marketing department informed me that they are planning to use rss feeds in their viral marketing campaigns. To enable this, tick the appropriate box in the a 'advanced settings tab.' Note 'xml(rss1) is not the same as 'xml(sitemap)' & 'xml(basefeed).' I'm not sure if you want those other two on, that is something you should discuss with Greg from marketing."

Its funny that IT tends to be so antagonistic towards marketing.
I just got my invitation today- there is no way with:public will be usable once anyone can join. I can't even keep up as it is. Maybe it needs a pause button.
Wouldn't disk I/O be equally bad for a database? I assume the database gets cached in memory (as much as possible), but I would think that the file cache would have the same effect.
I recently mailed short set of logins and passwords to my old customer instead of my current customer. Source of my mistake was that these two people shared both first and last name. Fortunately I felt uneasy and double checked to whom actually I sent the email, and after noticing mistake I promptly changed passwords and sent them to the right guy this time.
Payday Cash Advances
Well then I owe you a better explanation. If you haven't used Google Wave before I should first state that there is a search box in the center window. Simply by typing in with:public it searches all public waves and displays them. Then you can scan through waves of interest and join in where you like.

Additionally you can add extra qualifiers like with:public HackerNews and get waves like the HackerNews wave.

Nothing Earth shattering yet, but there is definitely some potential for people connecting which is always fun (at least for me) as well as building tools (robots) for automagic wave processing.
Except that it happens a lot quicker than it ever did on Wikipedia or blogs, and reaches a much wider audience now.

Here's the thing people like us tend to forget - the power of Twitter is mobility. Yes, blogs and wikis are powerful publishing platforms for people viewing them on computers.

Twitter is viewable on the most common device in the world, mobile phones. There are very few mobile phones in the world incapable of getting access to Twitter, making it potentially the most widely available social network on the planet.

No computer required.

Add in all that other media democratization stuff, and that's why you get a lot of the hoopla around it you never saw with Wikis and blogs.
I hope that the public pipeline is maintained as long as possible. The searching power available from such a stream is quite rich with opportunity.
Now that's a quick response. Monitoring the public channel for information relevant to your interests is a great way to use it.
too disorganized. I prefer these linked lists, I collectively call them the skeptic's bible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
I believe the data pipeline will be quite valuable, and strong filters (Google can search like a bandit) will help you find information relevant to your interests.
Actually I've found that people follow twice as many people on Twitter as on Facebook and receive updates a whole load more often. Facebook does benefit from being a older company with a lot more engineers though.
Because drama ought to be a part of the structure of a piece. When there's a logic to the drama's being there, then it's fine. When it's just drama added to a very simple idea, then it's excessive and a waste of reading.

Perhaps I'm biased, because I came across this just as I was finishing a large and dramatic post based on a similar idea. I worried a bit in mine trying to figure out just how to place my story in a way that it enforced what I was trying to say. That, to me, is the challenge of writing about something like this. This piece strikes me as much more divided between the point and the drama.

Then again, I'm a pretentious asshat of a writer who uses phases like "structural integrity" when describing writing, so perhaps I'm in the minority here. I'd suggest that perhaps writing good blog is like writing good code, however, in that there ought to be a reason for everything beyond just holding attention. There's a noticeable logic in well-written pieces that I don't feel this holds.
That of a metacircular evaluator such as the one described in SICP.
An aspect I would be interested in is the roles of isolation and social validation. My understanding from other reading is that isolation tends to correlate with overall decline. And with regard to the article's description of the largest benefit correlating with those who remain in the same career, I can speculate that such an experience might tend to provide the greatest validation.
From a potential investor's point of view, would you want to invest in a startup that spent scarce funds on a scheme like those mentioned here instead of adding value in another way?
I think the point is that Microsoft has a history of failures resulting from rewriting things in MS tech. At some point you just have to admit your weaknesses and deal with them rather than living in some sort of management-denial.
> There are so many ways in which failures can cascade in a complex system there can be no absolute guarantees.

What about off-site backup? How many failures can cascade in a way to wipe out off-site backups?
NSA.gov Site Defacement
Out of curiosity, which startups?

I'm not sure this changes anyone's chances though -- bug tracking was already a bit crowded. They're probably going after the trac users.
I'm sure PG could break down those numbers for you, but they wouldn't be meaningful. Yes, people from "better" institutions are more likely to be accepted; but that doesn't tell you whether it's the institution which matters or simply that those were the better students to begin with.
Minix3 has comments galore, but seems plagued by one/two letter variable names like 'c' and 'ip'
Pervasive writes?
I'd rather have a consistent database than a fast one!
Hi there,

I'm the main developer for GoPollGo.com. Some pretty big changes are coming along in the next few weeks and we're definitely fixing up the voting statistics portion of the site.
30 years of failure: the username/password combination
I think he did a grep for "construct.gif". This image:

http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/SiSiliconValleyVi...

Is from an ancient version of JavaDoc if I remember correctly.
Finally. Now, we just need wildcard subdomains...
Ask HN: Early Preparation for Scaling?
From Todd Hoff's comments on the Tim Bray / Casey Forbes interview about Ravelry: "Going from one server to many servers is the hardest transition to make. Everything changes and becomes more difficult. Have this transition in mind when you are planning your architecture." How do you build a small-scale site to minimize later scaling issues? Where are the "gotchas" lurking?
Make the twist more obvious.
"Ever wanted your opinion to actually matter?
Qwanz groups your opinion with other passionate people and lets you take action, together."

I am a big fan of blatant one line descriptions of what a site does. You can follow this with your "why qwanz" graphic. I'm not saying this is the best line ever, but you have to think of what benefits you are trying to convey.

Polling sites are boring. I'm not going to get excited about a polling site. Seems like you are pushing more emotion though. People passionate for causes can group their opinion and actually "do something about it". Sell that passion to me, not the details and certainly not "polling".

First impressions:

Terrible enterprisey, hard to remember (how to spell) name.

I like the 3 top create, view, browse boxes. They were the first things I noticed and helped me understand the site a little better.

Usability impressions:

Right panel is too big. No need for that. Looks like ads. Encroaching on the content. Flash movie looks like an ad and could very well be thrown into a "learn more" page. Seems like you are trying to oversell your concept - dont add more, just be clear! Benefits, not features.

Take some organizational influence from stackoverflow.
It's all about scope. You have 10 main categories. Each of those cats has filters and sorters. Then your categories apparently have sub-catories. I don't like how sub-cats are simply partitioned within the list.
The Main category "home page" should have a sub-cat drilldown, and a global (relative to the category) list of all polls with sub-cat tags. (think stack overflow).

This logic should be true for the global list of all top level categories. I.e. like the stackoverflow homepage. A list of the top global polls with tags.
Organization and scope imo is very important.

Using this logic, you don't even really need a right panel, maybe just a tag list or other popular filters, sorts.

Links:

http://www.qwanz.com/poll/248

could easily be :
http://www.qwanz.com/poll/248/what-changes-should-qwanz-make

thats it for now.
This is true of a lot of trades.

Music and writing. Do not let people in on your work, unless they're privy and trusted.

It is hard for average people get excited about your intentions, if it isn't presented properly.

In fact, it is all about presentation. Look at the average response to the awesome explosions in Transformers. It would take more words to describe the functions of Notepad than to describe what is going on in the too long eye-candy scenes of that movie.

Hell, look at the bible. Why do we need long parables to describe simple ideas?

From This is the Dreamtime blog post by Robin Hanson (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time...):

We were built to be influenced by the rhetoric, eloquence, difficulty, drama, and repetition of arguments, not just their logic. Perhaps this once helped us to ally us with high status folks. And we were built to show our ideals via the stories we like, and also to like well-crafted stories. But today we are exposed to arguments and stories by folks far more expert than found in ancestral tribes. Since we are built to be quite awed and persuaded by such displays, our beliefs and ideals are highly influenced by our writers and story-tellers. And these folks in turn tell us what we want to hear, or what their patrons want us to hear, neither of which need have much to do with reality.
or dinosaur comics
The light blue on white text is terribly hard to read.
My track Paris Thru the Tears scores a whopping 7.9! :-D

It was recorded on analogue synths (£1500 + £200), a HardSID slaved to an old P300 running Windows 98, an old Akai sampler (which cost £100), and 2 crappy mixing desks (£75 and £100) over the past month...

The only digital hardware was my Toshiba laptop running the Cubase sequencer.

But I have been making music since 1998.

[My point here is that getting a 7.9 doesn't mean huge studio expenses and watered-down content]
The example given to show that the "manager schedule" works isn't even about programming it is about making a wiki page.

I agee that the argument is somewhat BS (I use the excuses sometimes so I can work on something I would prefer to work on), but that doesn't mean that the "markers scheduler" is worse than the "manager schedule"

EDIT:
I seem to have missed the point of Alex's article. The comments provide some clarity
A graph of values PHP considers "equal" (includes some surprising paths)
This article highlights a reason that 12-hour work days could be a bad idea for startups. Perhaps you'll be working so hard on your Odeo that you won't get "lucky" and find your Twitter.
Sorry if this duplicates, my machine glitched. I just wanted to comment that unless you are independently wealthy, money has to be a big concern - which means either doing something commercial or getting into academics. I would love to have a business in ANY field that would provide enough residual income to allow me time to pursue my own ideas long term.
How did they respond to that? Obviously, they were still interested enough to proceed with the offer, but do you think they offered less because of that condition? Also, what went into preparing them to take the reins? I guess you probably had key employees that you could transfer your responsibilities to before the sale. Were there any other logistics that went into it?
Being able to delete an app is huge too. I've been waiting for this from day 1.
Funniest thing is, it did make sense & I understood exactly what you meant.

Translated to non-trader speak.

The cable (British pound)

breaks out (starts a significant upward movement)

against the yen (Japanese Yen - ie, we're talking currencies, foreign exchange or forex here)

from a consolidation range> (a period where the markets 'consolidate' against each other, ie, just get bunched up & go nowhere - it's where the traders sit around, scratch their arses & nobody knows what to do or what's happening)

which was the result of a previous head and shoulders (this is a pattern where this is a slight peak (looks like a human shoulder) which drops down followed by a larger peak (the head) which drops again followed by another slight peak, roughly the same size as the previous peak (the other shoulder))

resistance level (this explains the consolidation bit before - namely, it's a level above which the market seems to have difficult getting above - large numbers like Dow 10,000 are like this. It's kinda mystical mumbo jumbo, but enough people believe it & it becomes true. So the market hovers, maybe goes up to, occasionally slightly breaks, but always pulls back below this 'resistance level' - until it breaks through & takes off - as it just did)

in other words: british pound is getting stronger against the yen, after pissing about for quite a while.

[uhh, just in case anyone was curious, bored and/or didn't already know. hehe]
your search engine is very quick and thinking that you're doing faceted search it's incredible. do you use sphinx, lucene or custom search engine implementation?
Have a look at the book "Procrastination - Why you do it, what to do about it now" by Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen.
Thanks for the Wikipedia lists link. I like Shermer's writings for the examples that they give as he discusses general principles.

After edit:

Oh, and there is some doubt that the Hawthorne effect (mentioned in the link you kindly shared)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#Interpretation...

is a genuine phenomenon.
Checking Twitter/Facebook: the new post-coital cigarette?