skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"640K (of memory) ought to be enough for anybody"

That was my high school yearbook quote. Everyone laughed about how nerdy I was to quote Bill Gates. Little did they know, the quote gets better with age, in 2 ways...

1. It becomes ever more outlandish of a claim

2. At some point, conversations about RAM will become highly commonplace, as it is eventually grafted into our brains

At this point, my quote will be considered prescient and I will be redeemed!
How A Nerd Decides To Get The H1N1 Vaccine
I refuse to install it because I haven't been convinced by people that I trust that there's anything that demands Silverlight. There's enough quality content that uses Flash that it's inescapable.

I'm not against installing Microsoft products on my system; I just upgraded the WMV codecs from Flip4Mac (now owned by Microsoft) last night. I've got Mac:Office. I'm just not interested in installing an inessential plug-in for something that I'm going to visit just once and probably never play with again.

You also didn't address the point that Silverlight just isn't cross-platform enough. Flash cross-platform support sucks (I can use it on Linux), but Silverlight cross-platform is nonexistent (as "Moonlight" is still essentially a Silverlight v1 implementation).
What's the screen resolution? It looks like 320x480... I guess Droid will be just another phone rumored to have 800 wide screen resolution. :(
It won't be too long before the value of the ads placed in applications like this will be able to subsidize the entire experience, globally.

Google is in the business of bringing their services TO you, this application being one good example.

But like Google Voice and Voicemail, they are also finding ways to completely reinvent industries without locking you in. You don't have to use Google Voice, but boy it's valuable if you do.

I think at some point not to far from now, we're going to see Google Bandwidth or Google Data, which will offer IP-based wireless services for free while wiping out the concept of roaming.

Google makes money on ads through the usage of online services. The pricing structures in the telcos is frequently designed to make usage expensive/difficult.

Google's going to make it easier, again, by cutting the telcos out the equation almost entirely. Their investments in dark fibre and the future investments they'll make off the back of their ad business makes this quite a linear equation as bandwidth becomes cheaper.

Google is going to become the most feared company in the world . . . feared by business, not by users.
Perhaps to you, but I deal with students for whom this is absolutely not interesting. They're not interested in puzzles, they're not interested in challenges, they're not interested in anything except texting their friends and talking about films, TV, clothes, football, etc. They don't want to be challenged.

Uh, yeah I've dealt with those students. Notice the last part I add - optional. The thing that kills math interest utterly is those "required" classes which teach nothing to the uninterested.

Modern schooling drags the uninterested through a process of making motions towards understanding - we all know its a waste of time. It really would be better to give up until the students are interested. A motivated student can learn more in a day than the bored learn in the semesters of basic math. That might put you out of a job but those jobs just shouldn't exist. Sorry.
Not inject. Inject was borrowed from smalltalk's #inject:into, but dropped the "into" and just ended up being unintuitive for many people. Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 now have #reduce, so I'd say that's the way to go. No reason to use foldl unless you're going to also have a foldr.
any newer rumors about how badly verizon nerfed it?
Agree. It primarily has the Android UI which I have been using more a year now and has been great.
I am curious to know if you also considered couchsurfing.org and why you decided to go with airbnb.com instead?
Announcement: YC alumni will help us read applications 
We've recruited some YC alumni to help us read applications,
starting with this cycle. They've agreed to (a) stop reading
any application that seems like it will compete with something
their startup is doing or plans to, and (b) keep stuff in
applications confidential.

These are people we know and trust, so we doubt there will be any problems. But since we didn't tell people about this before they
applied (we are in fact still organizing it), we're giving anyone who wants to the opportunity to unapply. If you want to have your
application deleted, just email me (pg@ycombinator.com).

Also, in case anyone didn't know, the deadline for applying is
tonight at 10 Pacific.

Make sure you actually submit your application, using the
submit or resubmit button on http://news.ycombinator.com/apply,
or we won't consider it. (If you don't see a submit/resubmit button on that page, it's been submitted.) Every cycle a few people
who probably meant to apply forget to actually submit their
application after editing it.

Edit: Since a lot of people seem to be worried about this, the alumni are reading the applications in addition to us, not instead of us. Our goal is to ensure that we don't overlook promising applications. If we give an application a low rating but it gets high marks from alumni, we'll give it a second look.
Heh. I have, at nominal, 16Mbps. During peak times, though, it drops like a rock below that to even being intermittent - Google Talk and AIM will drop every couple of minutes. Our cable node is seriously overloaded, and Cablevision isn't doing a damn thing about it. Over the summer everything was pretty reliable, but then a bunch of new students moved into the 'hook and it plummeted. I can get 16Mbps - if I'm lucky - at 4am, and sometimes 8Mbps throughout the day. But from 7 to midnight or so, it's impossible to even browse the web.
Marele Alb detronat?
Ten Facts About Millionaires
Here are some interesting facts about the average millionaire in the United States.
Source code analysis : The most sexy plugin of the Sonar forge
I know of a larger organization (60,000+ employees) that has dumped Exchange for gmail. You just aren't reading about it in the press.
Feds’ Smart Grid Race Leaves Cybersecurity in the Dust
This article claims "400,000 pixels, gives twice the resolution of any other (smartphone)". So, it's gotta be a lot better than 320x480, or the Motorola spokesperson is simply lying. The only specific number I could find has it at 480x854, which is more than 400k pixels.
A different perspective on what technology has done as an equalizer [youtube]
This won't be for everybody.
That is a somewhat misleading claim. Whatever area had turned out to be the center of the semiconductor industry, there would presumably have been some electronics firms there already.
What about just bookmarking it? I don't understand how this approach is any better.
This won't be for everybody.
Some people might find playing with programming languages a fun exercise, but many of us just want to build shit that works. Scheme might be the best thing ever, but the two operating systems I develop on have native APIs written in Objective-C and C++, respectively. (If you're wondering, the two operating systems I'm talking about are Mac OS X and Haiku.)

IMO, Python is a great choice. Simple, clean language with a ton of APIs. I'm sure 90% of people out there will prefer hacking together quickie games using Python and PyGame to playing with continuations in Scheme.

PS: I don't wish to imply that Scheme is a bad programming language. In fact, I've been mucking about with Scheme for the past week or so.
Makes me feel nostalgic for this Angelfire Sonic fansite I had when I was younger. I didn't find my page (probably dead), but here's a delicious piece of retro I did see:

http://www.angelfire.com/sk/sonicknuckles/
Algorithm Judges Musical Hit Potential
One theory is that Machiavelli wrote The Prince to make the common man aware of behaviors and practices of powerful people. The same could be said for The 48 Laws of Power.

The books are not necessarily meant to be instructional, but informative about the economics of power.

I haven't read 48 in some time but I believe Greene says something about regardless of if you want to participate in power plays you will undoubtedly find become a part of them so it's best to be aware.
I can search to my heart's content because Google allows IMAP access. I only use the web interface when I'm on someone else's machine.
London wasn't always Europe's financial capital.
Ugh. I had a lot of hope for this one, but the aesthetics do nothing for me, meaning that the GUI had better be a LOT better than my iPhone. W(hy)TF does there have to be a Motorola, Verizon and Google logo on this thing? It looks like it was designed by NASCAR.
I'm curious about the reasoning for this. Is it purely due to not having the time to read through all of them as thoroughly as you'd like, or to help make sure apps don't fall through the cracks (or none of the above)?
Not services that you had a 5 year SLA agreement for.
While I personally don't have a problem with this, I can fathom how some would.

What about (1) announcing who is reading and (2) allowing applicants to specify who should NOT read their application.

Just a thought, there should probably be some more thought on this kind of privacy/conflict since they will not be investors and I'm assuming you will make this standard procedure.
I think the title is supposed to read '.. to use others as tools ...'
congrats guys! had a great experience with airbnb when i moved to SF in march!
Before Spencer joined Carbonmade, I was right there with you. As the coding half of what was our two person design firm (Carbonmade was a side business at the time), I also handled the finances, server administration, and the onslaught of miscellaneous tasks that come up. It was getting to the point of being overwhelming, and things begin to be neglected. The least of which was our support account.

While today, it's amazing to have Spencer taking care of these things, delegating my workload in the beginning was a bit painful. We had stacks of paperwork to exchange and coordinate with our lawyers and accounting company. With OCD, was also difficult not to nit-pick ever single detail in the beginning. But as it began evident that he knew his shit (having ran several companies before joining us as an equal partner), these tendencies quickly subsided and our productivity skyrocketed.
How do you stub out a community?

If the community is engaging, people will be more likely to comment (like HN), but if you are a site, you really don't have two separate communities to swap in/out in the user's mind. Additionally, even if you did optimize your site design/functionality to increase comments, is that really desirable without an engaging community in the first place? Would everything end up being nothing that adds to the conversation? (see Youtube)
s/icon/iconic/
You should make the DMCA policy linked on your front page. That's the safest way to avoid legal troubles.

Also remember you can make your DMCA requirements as hard as possible.

-Your name, address, phone # and email address;
-Location of your content on our site
-your electronic or physical signature or the electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on your behalf;
-a statement made by you under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate, that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf
Cool job. Pre-funding, profitable company, etc etc 
So before giving you the HR pitch, I'll tell you that I've been here 2 months and I love it. I'm heading the mobile division, and I have big projects, get to do creative strategic work, and work with smart people.

I met a bunch of people at startup school that were job searching, so I thought I'd post this here. And I'm putting my personal email on here so that you don't feel like this is a generic job post.

Craig@playdom.com

Check out www.playdom.com/jobs and let me know what interests you. We have a lot of positions opening up even beyond what's on there.

insert typical spiel...

Playdom is looking for bright, energetic Product Managers, Developers, Marketing Experts and Analysts (and more!) to join our social gaming company. We’re a year old, profitable, well-funded, and already boast the #1 app on MySpace as well as a rapidly growing presence on Facebook, iPhone and other platforms. And we’re a fun place to work: Our 99% employee retention rate is testament to our collaborative culture and great work environment.

Playdom offers plenty of room for growth and advancement, hyper-competitive salary, full benefits and a solid equity package. Headquartered in downtown Mountain View (right off of the Caltrain), we just opened a San Francisco office in the Soma district. All of our positions are currently full-time, on-site with flexibility for city dwellers to work part time in San Francisco.

If you are interested in building the next great technology company in a true startup environment, check out our site at www.playdom.com/jobs. If something fits, please get in touch! Feel free to email me atcraig@playdom.com.

thanks,

Craig dos Santos

Mobile Games
Playdom
Dialogue, possibly, but I would not have said dialectic.
The DMCA does not apply to this site.
Fixed, thanks ! There isn't a day that I still learn something about English... sigh...
I'd much prefer percentages to the flat number of deaths in the article; it's much less misleading.

Assume your chance to contract swine flu is in the upper bound stated in the article, 35%. Multiply that by the pneumonia chance of one in a thousand, .1%. Finally, multiply again by chance of death from pneumonia (20%) and you get a minuscule .007% chance of swine flu death, or seven people out of a hundred thousand.

That's how a nerd decides not to get the swine flu vaccine.
Why running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster
Both; those are the same problem, since the biggest danger of not being able to read them all thoroughly enough is that a good one slips through the cracks.
Carbonmade is a triumvirate: one designer, one programmer, and one business guy. I think this is the Holy Grail for a three person startup. I think PG would agree with me?
OTOH, I always find it refreshing when websites don't use tiny 10px fonts -- the "I've taken a graphic design course, and I think small fonts are cool" thing. In other words, 23px might be a bit big, but it's better than too small, at least on a 120dpi screen. :-)
Everyone's said great things about credit unions. So where's the downside? Do you get less interest? There must be some reason they haven't overcome the corporates.
Writing iPhone applications with Gambit Scheme's FFI
Verizon Launches Motorola's Droid Phone, Hits Stores Nov 6th
One would have to analyze all previous relevant correspondence out of the AS's office as to measure vocabulary and other structural elements.

It would be a fun project.
The Chinese Internet: Why the “Copy Cats” Win
A Smallcore Manifesto: Help Us Build a Better Teddy Bear
Ask HN: What's it take to start a telecom?
So, rather than sit around and complain about how [service_provider] isn't providing the kind of access and lines we want, I was wondering what it would take to start our own service and roll out [FIOS] directly to houses and apartments in the area.

Anyone here have experience in the industry or is capable of shedding some light on the matter? As far as I know, if you've got sufficient funding or chutzpah it's possible.
Unboxing The Verizon Droid
Will this, or the extended application deadline, affect Nov. 5th feedback date?
Microsoft Selling Crapware-Free PCs
If someone could guarantee say 100 years of webpage hosting and uptime, for a cheap fixed one-time cost, I think they could make a lot of money AND stop the massive page-drain of the Web today.
Xerox Claims Printable Electronics Breakthrough
Actually games are at least as useful as movies. And when a talented guy wants to be a director or actor, nobody tells him that it's nonsense and he should do something useful instead. So this was not fair from the teacher.
I'm guessing they're doing this so they'll be able to keep the Nov.5 date, after seeing a huge increase in the number of apps.
From what I saw of the videos the spokesperson simply seemed to be not too bright. She made somewhat stupid errors throughout the video.

The resolution of the screen is 480x854 and you can see the full specs here: http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and...
Design principles to choose the right ideas
couchsurfing is tough - for the popular destinations you need to contact lots of people with personalized messages, and you still might not find anyone with a free room. there's just often more demand than supply.

paying might feel weird at first, but it works - you still stay with really awesome people, but since there's money involved, expectations on both sides are slightly different. gotta find out yourself what you're more comfortable with - in general i think i prefer the airbnb experience.
Your welcome. This is one of my favorite parts of HN: built in error correction.
SAT Scores And Family Income
This article is nothing more than weakly supported anti-Drupal propaganda. Don't waste your time. It's almost as if an editor asked the writer for a piece to counter all the positive press the switch to Drupal has been getting.
Scheme has always been interesting to me. It gets really interesting when you have a Scheme with a C FFI, as discussed here:

http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/07/19/gambit-scheme-app-devel...

Using the FFI, I could write my application code, low-level graphics calls, etc. in C or C++ or Objective-C, and call into my Scheme code at appropriate points. Gambit Scheme, discussed in that article, has a remote debugger as well, which has its own set of interesting possibilities.

I guess I'm thinking mostly of Scheme for games and simulations, which seem more natural to me to express with a clean functional language like Scheme.
Zinc-air battery could hold 3x more energy than lithium-ion
the reason why health officials often want everyone to get vaccines is two fold, and has nothing to do with your chance of getting the bug:

1. consistent supply regardless of demand. when the killer bug does hit and suddenly everyone wants the flu vaccine there won't be enough supply because the manufacturers and distributers have never dealt at that scale before.

practically, this seems wasteful in times like these when we don't need a huge supply....but compared to some other things we spend taxes and the profits of certain involved actually increasing...it's actually not that killer expensive, and in fact would be good for the economy.

2. some people can't get vaccines. one reason is if they have a complicating disease or are susceptible to side-effects or are traveling from a country that failed on the supply issue. it is for these people that everyone else should get the vaccine.
Not saying that correlation == causation, but damn.
I'd rather make the system based on trusting people.

Also, paranoia about secrecy is one of our selection criteria. E.g. every cycle there are a few applications that say they won't tell us any details about what they're doing without an NDA. We thereupon instantly hit "next." People who think their startup's success is going to follow from their immensely valuable secret idea are disproportionately likely to have bad ideas. I'm guessing it will be similar in this case, and that anyone who would be freaked out by YC alumni reading their application is probably someone we wouldn't have funded anyway.
Maybe there's a way a limited version of the app could be viewable by the alumni, and only the complete viewable by the YC partners?
agreed, investors reading something is no big deal, since they aren't going to go out and use your ideas. A possible competitor reading it is a whole other story all together.
Go to Alltop.com, Select your industry. Bam, I just saved you hours and hours. Tip me.
I wouldn't dispute this - I'm sure that many finance people are pretty brilliant and have very strong math backgrounds.

That said, I met a lot of folks who work in finance who make a lot of money and absolutely do not have a strong math background.

Of all the folks who make substantial salaries (let's say above $250K/year) on wall street, what percentage do you think could, on the spot (or within a few minutes of consulting a book or web site), solve a simple differential equation, the kind that you encounter in an upper division undergraduate math class?
Also, from http://smallcore.org

honing drupal into a viable web framework, one patch at a time: fewer dependencies, fewer required modules, and a robust packaging system for tailored, targeted distributions.

why? because the only thing between us and world domination is blog module.
Google’s New Mobile App Cuts GPS Nav Companies At The Knees
Thanks for the disclosure, Paul. We look forward to you guys checking out our application for ADstruc!
I think it would be nice/fair to know how much input the Alumni will actually have. Do they give you summaries? recommendations? Do they have the power to completely block applications?
hehe, You're welcome.

Let me return the favor there ;)
Hi,

I recently read your article entitled "Where's the Money in Casual Web Game Development?". Our firm, Plura Processing, provides a really easy way for online games to make money through grid computing. If a game developer embeds Plura on his site, we will pay him up to $2600/month for every 1000 concurrent users. This revenue source is a completely new and incremental source of money for game sites, which means it does not have to replace other revenue sources, like advertising.

We entered beta a few months ago and currently have a handful of online games as affiliates, including the game you highlighted in your article, Desktop Tower Defense.
When people come to these sites to play games, a Java applet is initiated, which connects the user's computer to our grid computing network. Our customers use that computing power for a variety of fascinating problems.

A game site owner just has to include 1 line of iframe code in the HTML body to use Plura. An example of this is:

<iframe src="http://ourserver.com?affiliate_id=xxx&cpu=0.7 scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="150px" height="100px"></iframe>

The parameters you see in that code can be adjusted, so site owners have pretty much complete control over how Plura is run.

We've designed our applet to be very lightweight and secure. It follows and is restricted by the Java sandbox model (http://java.sun.com/sfaq), so it doesn't touch anything on the user's computer and runs completely in
memory. We understand that player perception may be a challenge, but we feel the security and control we provide to site owners helps mitigate this.

I can share a lot more detail with you if GigaOm is interested in discussing this more. You can go to http://www.pluraprocessing.com for more info. Because we're currently in beta, we're working with site owners on an invite-only basis, but we do consider people that are interested in Plura and would be a good fit for us.

We feel that Plura is a great opportunity for game developers to boost their revenue and profitability. We would also love to hear what the GigaOm community has to say about us, considering your focus on computing technologies. If GigaOm is interested in discussing Plura, please let me know - thanks!

---------

N.B. Keep in mind that some of the technology has changed since then (Plura now focuses on desktop apps).. also, I now work for Plura's sister company, 80legs.
But, wait a sec... aren't the people who are against potential competitors hearing about their ideas EXACTLY the kind of people who shouldn't apply? I mean, they have to demo their product to the rest of the group at some point, right? That's part of the package.

More disturbing is the idea that they will toss any idea that competes with existing startups. That is unsettling to me for some reason, and I would love to hear more reasoning behind this.