skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, you must think either

a) traditional methods of sanitation offer no benefits and only fools would choose not to allocate resources to a western toilet

or

b) that it is the responsibility of those in the US to be entertained by stories of third world men having to be forced to buy their women toilets.

It's a small leap from men who have to be coerced to buy toilets to men who have to be coerced (via bombs) to not be terrorists, etc. The basic dehumanization of the message is also a key bit of emotional distancing that must be done before the American people can sit by while thousands of third world people are killed by American bombs for no good reason.
Ask HN: Interesting Ideas You're Too Lazy To Persue
I end up with a lot of cool ideas for projects, but I often discover that they are way beyond my skill range or I just lose interest in them after a while. What are your ideas like this?
Until about 18 months ago my source control was a bash file that would create a time-stamped backup of specific hard-coded folders into /usr/sourcebackups. Just a mkdir, name the folder, copy everything as it is. This was run as a cron every midnight.

Not terribly proud of this. "Secret shame" is a pretty good way to describe it.
Perhaps, but I think it's important to be aware of the steady stream of "ok America pat yourself on the back again" articles that run every day. They are ridiculous.

edit: and most involve quaint stories about the third world like this one, often pertaining to women's rights.
About half a year ago they sold JIRA licenses for 5 users for $5, for some kind of charity.
I've been through two VSS db corruptions over the years. Never again. Quite possibly the worst Microsoft product of all time.

We've been on CVS for many years.
That paper claims that the light is due to an arc, and involves vaporizing the liquid in the pickle. Presumably this is not true of OLEDs. Who's right?
Watching this, I couldn't help but think that this is the video that human historians will dig up in an attempt to figure out why their distant ancestors thought it wise to develop the robots that would eventually enslave the entire race...or maybe it was just the music selection?
If I don't know any Java or Python, which would you recommend? Which is more similar to RoR?
Antiquated? Wikipedia says svn is only 10 years old. CVS is almost 20 years old!

(And yet somehow, my place of employment, which is only a few years old, chose to use CVS and not SVN...)
I agree, and I also like being able to make "robot" voices by talking into a normal fan.
Texting, Surfing, Studying?
Kiln - Version Control and Code Review Software
It seems like you've successfully niched yourself. I'm interested in what your sustainable competitive advantage is? If you don't want to post this on the forum shoot me an email chris@phonehalo.com
That would only apply to a highly competitive market. In this case, you have one store with a long history of customer satisfaction.
More importantly, what are you doing to differentiate yourself from http://www.redbeacon.com/ ?
Maybe people react differently to it, but git has been my #1 productivity booster that I can remember. Combined with github, it's revolutionized the way open source projects work.
so how much did you guys ended up paying(or was it free?)...or is this some huge corporate secret
It is unrelated to this post but, dropbox rocks. I have tried 4 different file sharing services but dropbox simplicity and efficiency beats them all.
Just be glad you are using a VCS. I know many people who still don't use a VCS when coding (and I don't regularly use any either).
I'll admit that I fell for the wrong domain before.
Twitter's Traffic Declining
If you never are able to sell your iPhone app because it is stuck in limbo, you might as well have written it for Windows Mobile.
Haha wow, I thought I'd be the only one who had flashbacks to Terminator, but I guess am not alone.
Didn't the Pierson's Puppeteers breed for luck? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson%27s_Puppeteers#Foreign_...
You will never leave the Village, number 6.
At MIT's Startup Bootcamp, Kyle noted a similar squatter on http://justintv.com/.
on redbeacon, the only thing you as a consumer can do is put in a wanted ad. you can do this on thumbtack--see: http://www.thumbtack.com/postwanted.

what you can't do on redbeacon is browse service providers' profiles. redbeacon seems to want to segregate the two sides so that they can arbitrage the leads, but it leads to an incomplete user experience.

on thumbtack you can post a wanted ad or browse an available service and book people directly.
Venture Capital Firms Allowed to Live
Python should be easier to pick up. I knew very little Python before using GAE, looking back there was hardly a learning curve. It's almost like writing pseudo-code. (Though somehow not as fun to code as Ruby, for me..)
I've liked git for a while, but github really did it for me. As far as I'm concerned, they're one unit. Open source repos used to be such awful places: most of them seemed like little better than just hitting a directory listing for a web page. Github truly took most of the power of dvcs and made it accessible through the web. I want to fork things and try out a quick change because its just so easy. This is of course thanks to git as its underpinnings -- again, they are inseparable in my mind.

Also, we used to use SVK to do the stuff git has built in, for that alone I would never switch back.
I don't know RoR but Ruby is similar to Python from what I've seen.
That, and the large list of links to the right of it. Domain parking pages often have a list of top 5 or 10 "relevant" links.
At least it wasn't designed for an 800x600 monitor.

http://www.aa.com
I'm sticking with Subversion, for now. I tend to work on team projects, not open source, and we tend to collaborate quite frequently, making frequent commits. It seems like many of the advantages of DVCS are being able to achieve private branches without using the server. I kind of like having the copy on the server.

I like the idea of local history, and the implementation in RubyMine is pretty spectacular. Just adding that feature into Subversion would probably keep me off of DVCS for a while longer.
Strangely, during the development of the robot, several members of the team were plagued by persistent, unexplained nightmares. An official spokesman for iRobot attributed the nightmares to high stress and said that the affected researchers were recovering on vacation. Requests to contact the researchers were rebuffed and their current location is unknown. When approached for an interview, the project director gave only the cryptic statement, "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

No firm date has been set for commercial release of products using this technology, a spokesman giving only a figurative release date of "when the stars are right". However, he assured us, that it would "definitely be... soon."
I'm in!
Edit: uh oh, Thursday doesn't work for me (watching the kids), but I'll be there in spirit. Looking forward to meeting you all some day!
What do Seattle, Silicon Valley, Berlin and Cambridge Have In Common?
I thought google just bought dropbox.com? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=857101
Microsoft Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) had a nice feature- you needed a license on your server if you want to check out the code from there. I haven't used it in a while, so I don't know if that is still true. Storing everything in SQL Server is an interesting approach to selling another SQL Server license.
Thank god. Having a fairly common first and last name, I actually do get an email or two a month addressed to the wrong person. And it's usually addressed to a lot of people.

Although I did kinda enjoy it from a voyeuristic perspective, you'd be surprised what kinds of stuff people email to many of their close friends.
The domain owner had set the DNS to point to the Google App Engine servers. Google was never directly involved.
It's morphable, not sentient. Besides, rupturing the inflatable components will remove its morphing ability. Not exactly as resilient as T1000, wot? :p
Sucks that it took lawyers, but good for them
I doubt most people navigate that way. Sure, plenty of browsers will do a google search from the address bar but only if what you've typed doesn't resolve on its own.
Tell PG: Cal football game (same day/campus as Startup School) to start @ 1:30
Haha. You know, this must really be an amazing company. I have never used the product myself, but every time a post about Dropbox comes around, there are always at least a few comments of people just wanting to mention how much they love it, regardless of the actual submission topic.
I've been using SVN for a while but I'm pretty sure that the VSS db corruption was due to its reliance on Windows file shares.
I was just noticing earlier today how clumsy a dl.getdropbox.com/u/00000/file URL looks

Feels weird being exhorted to "Get Dropbox" when I already using one...
Yikes, seems like things could easily turn out different if that email is directed to the wrong person or misunderstood.
Do you have any advice about building a business that is, "just a working system"?
My offer to break that guy's knees from summer 2007 still stands.
You'd be surprised how far normal users will go out of their way to avoid the address box, often using comically complex routines.

Google is much more trustworthy than DNS -- it's essentially content-addressed.
With a 1:30 pm kick off time there won't be any conflict with crowds in terms of starting Startup School at 9am. I would, however, suggest a late lunch (at or after 1:30pm) to avoid fans and long lines at the local restaurants. The biggest problems will probably be at the end given that the game will probably end around 4:30 pm and it's generally a couple of hours before the crowds in/around campus and traffic out of Berkeley start to die down.

I'd recommend people park outside of Berkeley and BART (www.bart.gov) in.

Other notes:

- parking fines are doubled on game days

- many parking lots that are normally public lots on weekends are more expensive and/or reserved specifically for fans with season parking passes

- many streets that normally allow street parking don't allow parking on game days.

Finally - Go Bears!
I could be wrong, but from looking at the authors data, and the writing, it seems as if the author is "massage" his interpretation of the data to fit his hypothesis (which could very well be valid).
The author suggests "You can draw a straight line: The faster they added fees, the more their revenue fell." While it may be true for the worst performing carriers, this trend doesn't hold with the "least bad carriers" (Alaska fell faster than AirTran but added fees later, Southwest fell faster than JetBlue, but doesn't have fees).
While I do see the point the author is trying to make, and it may very well be valid, I'm not prepared to reach the conclusion "The faster airlines add fees for basic services like checked bags, the faster their total revenue declines.", the data he provided just doesn't show that.
edit:typos
While it's easy and fun to assume malice behind everything Microsoft does, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Saying that this news (which should be spread since it can lead to quite unpleasant problems) is being promoted by Microsoft fans doesn't take away from the severity of the bug. And the fact that this news is out certainly doesn't take away from the disaster that is the Sidekick story.

Take a step back and try to avoid looking at it from a "Microsoft is a bunch of evil jerks" perspective.
With choice of version control so important for any project, how can they be so light on details about what theirs is or how it compares to the very strong competitors already out there?
Why does every robot need to bring out the crazy in people that predicts some humananity-is-doomed scenerio? Such a tired idea
Maybe this is relevant?

This is the organization that created AutoModeling-
http://www.acvt.com.au/research/videotrace/

This firm is working with it-
http://punchcard.com.au/wordpress/
In the event that robots eventually enslave the entire race, I doubt there will be any video record. It'll all be on youtube, owned by — guess who — the machines.
Reminds me of the time I searched for 'Google' using my browser's Google search, and then clicked on the first result to get to Google to search for what I was looking for...
Caterina Fake on the Value of Viral Loops
Here's a Technology That Will Revolutionize Publishing
Well said.

You know, the whole "X is not for mere mortals" crap gets old. Yes, writing multithreaded apps in C is probably a bit harder than following the "blog in 30 seconds with framework Y" tutorial, but it doesn't require supernatural abilities.

Anyone can accomplish anything with sufficient motivation. Writing something off as a task for "programming gods" is just an excuse to not even try it. You too can be a programming god, and there is no better feeling than when you solve a hard problem.
Eagerly waiting for the controversial "Don't release" response screed.
It was still probably cheaper to get the lawyers involved than buying it on the open market or public auction.
Haha, only on HN.
here's a related story that i am reminded of: i had a customer complain that a survey form on their site was occasionally not working, according to their customers, which they learned by those customers filling out a feedback form on the company's site which then sent them an e-mail. this survey form was a special url that was printed on receipts they gave to customers.

after looking in the server logs and finding nothing strange that would explain why the survey is only occasionally not working (i still didn't have a concrete definition of what "not working" meant), i had the company talk to one of their customers to get more information. he forwarded me the feedback email generated from their website, which included the end user's ip, which i then looked in the logs for.

what i found was that the way the user got to the company's feedback page was by typing "www.theirdomain.com" into yahoo search, clicking on the first result, and then going to the feedback link from their site (the referrer of their initial visit was a search.yahoo.com query for the domain). only after typing "www.theirdomain.com/survey" into yahoo's search box, did i discover the root of the problem.

for whatever reason, yahoo wasn't returning any results for the specific "www.theirdomain.com/survey" query, despite the page being there for years and having proof of yahoo crawling the url many times in the logs. google would bring it up as the first result, as did every other search engine, but for some reason yahoo would just return a "couldn't find anything matching that" error, which the end user translated into "your company's survey page doesn't work". after telling the specific user to type the survey url into the box "at the top of the screen", it of course worked. every other customer complaining about the problem was doing the same thing, all because of yahoo.
LAPACK

http://www.netlib.org/lapack/
From the PDF:

"21. Plaintiff has expended considerable time and effort promoting and advertising Dropbox, using DROPBOX as its brand name. To date, Plaintiff has spent in excess of $1 million dollars marketing the DROPBOX brand."

They have $1.5m in funding (according to CrunchBase), and they've spent over a million dollars on marketing already? There has to be an interesting story in there somewhere.
In some models, sure, but is that true in Facebook's? Does anything go beyond one degree?

I can't think of anything, really. If X and Y becomes friends, X's friends and Y's friends see it in their feed ("inbox"), but nobody else. Same goes for tagging someone in a photo, etc.
i still use cvs and i have no shame in that. it does what i need, i've never had major issues with it, and i've managed large, multi-user and small, single-user codebases with it.

i've had to use git and subversion to work with external projects and the one thing i noticed with both was that 99% of the time i didn't use any of the fancy features they claimed to support that cvs didn't.
There's no literate source linked to on that page. Just plain, normal, barely-commented C.
Seems like the guy initially registered dropbox.com before anyone had heard of it, not sure I think its a great thing. Surely you just call your company something that you can get domain for. Well whatever really, I love dropbox and this guy was just leeching off them.
In this article, Thomas Guest suffers from the blub paradox.

"What do I like most? The command to revert a change. Merge it backwards.

$ svn merge --change -666"

This is like lupin_sansei writing an article about how much he loves that the command to edit a file in Visual SourceSafe is "check out." It's broken, and doesn't need to be that way. In mercurial, for instance, the command is called hg backout!

I celebrate the fact that Mr. Guest at least uses version control at work, and Subversion is fine. However, the comfort working with it is the feeling of stagnancy in personal growth.
http://superuser.com/questions/4143/what-interesting-types-o...
"There's no literate source linked to on that page. Just plain, normal, barely-commented C."

The book by David Hanson is the literate program.
On Startups: Reasons to stay in Boston (and not move to SF/The Valley)
Do you know how he encrypted his email?
That sounds good.

I don't think the parent is arguing this is impossible. I think he/she just thinks the environment is not very conducive to a gradually increasing user base. I'm sure that isn't a rule, web services tend to be gradual growers with spikes being mostly noise and there are plenty of exceptions (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/elfyourself.com/).

It's just that if you have no preconceived idea of whether you want to enter this market or another one, and you want the kind of business mrshoe does, maybe the iphone market is not the best choice.
A quick UX note: I think it would be a good idea to use a more appropriate cursor style on the mileage slider.

Otherwise, nice clean design.
Works great on my b-berry tour. I especially like the grayed-out stations when the train skips the stop--nice touch. On another note, a while back I started building an app for tracking the street cleaning schedule w/ respect to the location you parked your car (including SMS message reminders to move your car). Would any of you find use in that kind of app?
Ideas are a dime a dozen. What separates boys from businessmen is acting upon one idea and executing to the finish.
Foreign Exchange Rates
Protip: on a game day, Berkeley traffic grinds to a standstill. This is due to the fact that in Berkeley, some things (well, most things) are backwards, so traffic engineers figure out new and creative ways to impede the flow of traffic rather than improve it. Don't delude yourself into thinking you can find a parking space.
Did he accept the offer of employment?
No it is not a joke. A patent is public information. I just want advice and ideas on how to go about it. Maybe other geeks have done this, maybe even dealt with Microsoft.

Any ideas?
people are shifting to external twitter apps?
We have projects on git and other on SVN and we prefer SVN. It may be a pain in the ass sometimes but it just works. Git is too complicated when all you want is a source-control for a team of two. But, every of our new projects are on git now... in part because of github...
A story relayed to me by a colleague goes something like this:

He and his group went to Facebook about a year ago to seek out a relationship, spent weeks setting up the meeting. The day came, they finally arrived, sat around in the conference room with some of the other FB execs (sans Mark). About 20 minutes after the meeting was to start, Mark walks into the room, looks around at everybody there for a few seconds says a flat "No" then walks out of the room.

The FB execs then jumped in to handle the situation and actually get down to negotiating the deal with lots of utterances of "he's just like that" and "he didn't mean anything by that" and then handled all the business stuff you would expect to happen at a high level meeting like that.
I agree that this can probably be just as effective while avoiding making claims that may not stand up in court (eg, "bogus forums," & "nothing but frauds") but avoiding naming firms and keeping it all high level and philosophical is not as effective, even if it is probably safer.

If you have a legal background, I think you might want to see if you can find precedents in the talent (modelling, acting, script-writing) fields.
That screenshot is the best looking Trillian I've ever seen.
1 or 2 months later an offer of employment (to a Canadian!) arrived at his doorstep.

This is a standard way to catch people who do this type of stuff. Once he sets foot on American soil, he would be arrested. You actually have to be pretty dense to fall for it. ~99% of employment at the CIA requires some form of security clearance, which in turn requires you to be a US citizen.
Definitely take Bart in if you can. Almost all of the UC Berkeley parking garages/ lots are reserved, and the street parking is either limited or metered. The only other option is to pay the $40-$60 fee some people charge to park in their driveway.
Beyond Eureka - How to brainstorm a business idea
We (FB) actually push new code every day.
You should still be able to park if you are parking 10-15 blocks away from campus. Go south or west. When I was living on Berkeley you could still always find a spot to park on game day if you went south of Ward street or so.
Makes me wonder what a Google Search for "Google Search" will yield? Is that a new kind of Quine? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing))

Chuck Norris is the 3rd item!
Seems like a pretty large number, but remember, funding isn't dropbox's only source of income.

In addition, depending on the definition of 'marketing' (IANAL), the referral engine (i.e. free space for referring other users), might count as marketing the dropbox brand, and the 'value' of the free space would likely count as the amount customers would have to pay, not the cost to dropbox.
It really is an amazing product.
Btw aaron, your talk at Startup Bootcamp was great. I didn't realize you were such a great speaker. All those years with Lessig really paid off.
I met Drew, one of the founders of Dropbox, a few years ago at Barcamp Boston. If I remember it right, he said that the initial dropbox.com owner was just some random dude who was planning on starting some sort of venture related to dropboxes, hadn't done it yet, but didn't want to sell. My impression was that he got the domain some time before Dropbox launched, and at least initially, he wasn't doing anything particularly irritating other than letting a short domain name languish (not that bad, in the big picture).

From the PDF in the link, it sounds like the original owner then transferred the domain to a third party, who then ran ads for Dropbox's competitors, leading to the legal wrangling.
Ad targeting, what's hot in your network, friend recommenders, etc. are all essentially ranking problems. They're moving more in that direction, definitely.
If it's televised I would make it a 4 hour game. 9am isn't too early for tailgating ;p

Good luck folks.
Meh... it's against the Cougars. Worst team in the Pac-10... I'd be surprised if anyone shows up ;-)
MongoDB as a service
Reminds me of the work of Japanese artist Mio I-zawa, who makes things like "mechanical tumors" that grow in size based on your CPU load:

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2009/09/mechanical-tumor-externa...
"Blogs were around for a long time before they had a name."

Exactly. We simply called this concept 'Travel Journals'.

The main obstacle we faced in 1998 was that most people didn't have digital cameras yet and the scanning and uploading of photos was a serious timesuck.

I like your site, thanks for sharing.
After my investigation, it turned to be a debug version of Chromium-for-ChromeOS. If you open it with a hex editor you can see a ELF mark at the beginning.