skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An application with lots of users seems likely to get better faster than an application with few users, if only because a larger user base means a) bugs will turn up faster, and b) patterns of use will suggest feature improvements faster.
Wow the world just changed today. You can have the best 3d engine on the market with no upfront costs ;) Interesting startup possiblities
Under Account I clicked on "Websites authorized to access the account" and saw that clickpass had access to my Google Contacts. Why do they need access to that?
The Big Lie About Twitter
Maybe this is mean, but when I read blog posts by him, this is all I see. Arrogance and disobedience.

I read it because everyone is reading it, but I hate reading it. I always feel like he's sending poor new boot-strappers down the path of destruction and he doesn't seem to care - it's all about getting eyeballs on his blog and on his products.

He disagrees with just about every tried-and-true business strategy that ever existed, and he gets a lot of readers by just flipping the ideas upside down.

Please, if you're starting a business, write a basic plan (at least), set goals for your business, and launch when you feel the time is right, not just early because everyone says to launch early.

After all, everyone around the tech forums just want you to launch early because they want to see if you have a good idea that's not flushed out enough yet so they can copy it quickly and build it out faster and better than you. Only the competition are reading these threads - your customers are out in the world.
New Car Camo
To add to your point; the Apple rumor sites spend so much time taking small bits of information (e.g. a developer release is reported to not work on Atom processors) and creating a whole story out of it. This is kinda insane.

Look, Apple likes the profit margin. They are very fiscal minded (witness that Apple rumor sites report on GAAP changes). Netbooks do not make the money laptops make and Apple is still selling a lot of laptops.

I actually don't think they care that much about individual power users creating netbook hackintoshes. Remember how everyone freaked about the TPM chips in the original Intel Macs? That "threat" never materialized.
I find it interesting that there is so much redundant and conflicting information in there. Mine has 3 different addresses, from the last three places I lived (and hadn't updated).

I understand that they are all different services, but since they're all controlled by Google, why not add something to sync them? I'm pretty comfortable with all the information that's up there, so why not have the information constant, and leave the privacy settings down in the individual applications?
Ha ha. I'm in the middle of a class where we make an environment for UT3. Everyone gripes and complains about how limited we are, because we're only using the level/script editor that comes bundled in with the game, and that you need the super expensive license in order to make anything that deviates too much from the third/first person shooter formula.

This changes a lot of things. I know there will be a lot more interesting output from my school now that Unity3D and the UDK are free.
Yes, I think it marks a certain level of success/fame when someone takes the time to make a parody of you. Most Saturday Night Live skits for example or http://www.fakesteve.net/
He's a controversial writer for that reason. I find that he switches between really writing fascinating insights into how he does work and being a dick for the sake of being a dick.
Before the internet, people would run an ad campaign, and then measure sales for that period.
We've become addicted to click-counting because its there. But its missing 84% of the data.
Come up with another way to correlate ads with traffic, and make your fortune!
Optask
HN,

We're proud to announce the "preview" launch of a B2B service for startups and small businesses that arose from our own needs. Me and my cofounder came from corporate backgrounds and were afforded a high level of administrative support in our day-to-day work.

Optask - http://optask.com - aims to bring the same service to startups, small businesses, consultants, etc. Our "task engine" lets you simple fire out a quick task and get it done within hours (we're working on making this minutes), at a rate of 5 cents per task-minute. Optask's mission is to make work more efficient by relieving them of the need to do mundane or repetitive work, like cleaning up the formatting of documents or manually aggregating and inputting data.

For those startups surviving on a skeleton crew, I invite you to try to give our service a shot. So far, our customers have had the most success Optasking their marketing chores like compiling contact information from multiple websites or signing up for accounts in various forums. We're excited to see how other folks use the service and how this helps their businesses.

Use "hackernews" as the signup code to get 30m free in trial credit - Please keep this code within the community

We welcome all feedback, suggestions, questions.

Regards,
euwyn@optask.com
Then using SO careers isn't a good idea for you? The whole point is people who want to try and leverage what they do on SO towards easing/improving the job hunt.

Which if you aren't reputable on the site would tend to imply that isn't a goal so why would you care?
Well done, but why wasn't the compiler doing this automatically?
Let me say this, from my experience with Redis, here the real starts are the early adopters. I think that the most important ingredient for any artistic, scientific, technological progress is courage, and early adopters of new technological solutions have a lot of it.

They are not afraid of using something less than one year old, while all the rest is trying to do the safest choice for storing their data. Are they crazy? No, just they are people able to meter a solution without requiring somebody else, or the mass, putting a that's-safe badge.
Game Design: New Game Designers Make A Simple Mistake
Basically, all the Google services you subscribed to, like Gmail, Alerts, Blogger, Youtube, Calendar, Docs, Health, how many Picasa Web Albums uploaded, what is your recent favorite Youtube video, recent Task, or your recent Web History (disabled for me).
The title, which _is_ from the original article is a bit misleading, no?

The performances of the methods he worked have been bumped up 63% in maximum, 8% in average. His patches were applied to Ruby trunk in Oct. 5 this year.

I'm not knocking the kid's contribution, but the title oversells it a bit, implying that the kid improved Ruby 1.9's overall performance, which apparently isn't the case.
"people don't like"

perhaps you refer to the "mac people" as there is at least one of us out here who "likes" the asus netbook he typed this with and uses every day, and LOVES.
What's obvious to the people who downvoted you is that the YC program is about much more than $5k. http://www.ycombinator.com/about.html
This is bazaar-style development in action: do a crap initial job and troll up helpful comments from people like you.
Thank you. One more question from complete Blender ignorance - can you create models with animation in Blender and still export to .ase or only static meshes?
He improved the performance of a few specific methods. Not of Ruby in general.

Google translation of the article referenced in the article: http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...
(mostly funny to read, as the translation is quite wacky)

(Bablefish chokes on the site)
Steve Jobs Named ‘CEO of the Decade’
"Oh the better to advertise to you my pretty"
Interesting bit of history.

In the US there are four major consumer credit bureaus (Experian,Equifax,TransUnion,Innovis). The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 included a proposed rule change to require credit bureaus to offer a free credit report, once per year, to anyone who asked.

Experian fought this proposal tooth and nail. They lost.

So they rolled out freecreditreport.com, with it's scammy operations and unavoidable advertisement.

I guess if you can't beat 'em, then carpet-bomb the market with ads to confuse people, seed Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt into the whole idea of 'free' credit reports and make a few bucks on the side. (The other bureaus quickly followed suit with their own operations)

On the plus side, these scam-tactics are specifically addressed (somewhat) in the Credit Card Act of 2009.
> Why do they need access to that?

I think it may have something to do with making money.
I use(d) only Google Docs, and it tells me
"Detailed information from this service is unavailable at this time."
Absolutely typical, which is why I abandoned it for other collaborative file sharing tools. Also I hit my "share quota" whatever that is. Typical of Google toys - not ready for a production environment. I know its free, but I can pay for real tools that don't fail me randomly (or as much anyway).
Sigh. Didn't mean to rant. Sorry.
I hit my head to wall after reading this. Difference table is a really cool way to solve this kind of questions. I thought "how come I have never learned this difference table before". I could make better points with IQ tests with difference tables :)
and launch when you feel the time is right, not just early because everyone says to launch early

There's so much thing from 37signals that are applied blindly by "startups" : subdomains (mycompany.theapp.com), launching too early, having a name that is [random_number][random_word]. They have good ideas but sometimes, it may not be good for you...
pay for someone to put up my cv on their website?

Anyone I know who is a good developer has more offers than they can manage, even in these times of recession. In my experience, there is no real need to put one's cv up on a jobsite to get good offers.

Would any good developer pay to put their cv on SO? I find it difficult to believe but I could be wrong. If anyone does this, please keep us posted on how it went.
Wow, I'm going to have to be a lot more thoughtful when I post on news.ycombinator from now on.
> sobering to see how much information one company has

> Now imagine

Uhm - have you ever checked your credit report?
" . . . steal all of your account data, including your photos, personal messages, and basically everything else you’ve ever put on the social networks, without you ever realizing it."

Its Facebook! Everything you put on a site like that is public, or can be and will be at some point. Its a public forum, as this one is, and any promises to the contrary have been clearly proven false on about a weekly basis.
This has no C++ support, it's the same SDK you get buying UT3 plus the ability to make a standalone binary that doesn't require UT3 installed.
I discovered difference tables as a kid, didn't know they were used much, I was modelling motion on a 2D display (an oscilloscope hooked to a P2P11!). Was a lifesaver for quick polynomial evolution - uses only addition, execution time scales linearly with the order of the polynomial.
So, how do you go from the difference table "coefficients" to the polynomial?
SNORE how's this news..
It's a bit non-trivial, but mechanically solvable. Polynomial coefficients are for normal powers. Difference table coefficients have more to do with falling powers (x * (x-1) * (x-2) * ...). Look up "Finite Calculus" or "Difference Equations" if you are interested.
Novell Pulse: a communication platform that will be compatible with Google Wave
Joel do you pay any royalties to this employee whenever you use his photo? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/11/05work.jpg

Because every time I've seen you use it in an article and/or on your site, it really cracks me up.
Oh. Dang.
> It's still lightyears above any Windows setup, of course.

I'm not looking for an OS-fight, but why make silly claims like that? There are a lot of smart and highly productive people who choose Windows, and if you've been using Linux since 1996 you probably don't know much about modern windows dev setups.
It seems like the proper advice here is, "Network with your friends."
If you pledge money to Archiveteam please pledge some to archive.org as well, they have a substantial workload there and could really use the money. They're less 'glamorous' but they are certainly in for the long haul. And they've done as much or more than anybody else to make this happen.
Data-mining on the game of chess
Is the financial crisis really over?
You could always ask the "stupid noob" questions under a different identity if this is something you are worried about.

Although personally I wouldn't really be all that crazy about working for the kind of employer who cared about this thing ("What? You asked... questions?").
flickr too if i remember right
Agreed, one of the things I learned is that leads can come from anywhere.
Yeah and I loved my n800 too.

But everyone I know that has purchased a netbook and doesn't know an Atom from Adam has been disappointed. (None of them own Macs, btw) I also noted Michael Dell's recent admission that most netbook purchasers are chasing a price point and are disappointed in short order. So I feel it's a fair opinion, not limited to 'mac people'.

I'd be very interested to see proper customer satisfaction surveys though.
Well, we got into these businesses from meeting industry insiders and specialists. You sit down with people, chat, and find out business opportunities. Just today we evaluated festival, trade show and expo opportunities; took me about 10 hours to study the industry and see potential, I am still evaluating it, but there is no reason for YC not to understand it fully.

Seems like the whole startup scene is focused on web-based tools and utilities, while we're focused in real-world businesses.
Thanks. It's kind of surprising I've managed to avoid all that stuff. ;)
Lies, damn lies and statistics: European outsourcing lags behind world
Best WordPress Permalink, Organizational Structure For SEO And Why?
Twitter did facilitate the Iranian protestors. And facilitated getting the word out to the world.
Twitter did help make the Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck a sensation!
Twitter did keep us updated about Balloon Boy in real time.

I agree that it is not a "platform" but it does provide real-time news and discussion like no other tool at this time.

Obviously, people who Tweet that they are riding the train to work don't 'get it.'

But those of us who have formed discussion groups using hashtags do.

As an example, I'm CulinaryHatchet, have a blog (that I've been neglecting while working on BHeardusa.com start-up), really into the #profood movement and have met many other very informed #profood -ies (as well as #agchat and #foodinc) on Twitter, including the son of the people from whom Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma) purchased his cow. There is great discussion in #profood from all sides of the issue. There are farmers, farmer's markets, attorneys, journalists, restaurants, etc. I can't think of any other resource that provides this kind of value right this second (although BHeardUSA.com will be taking it to the next level and using Twitter as one of the tools.)
Answers To 15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid
Nice, except google hasn't learnt how to do internationalization yet.
Is a demo required?
That they were using and contributing to an open source project for study was more surprising to me than the details of this improvement.
Doing it Wrong.
This is like me taking my son hunting, holding the gun for him and having him pull the trigger for the kill.

His mentor was Koichi Sasada...he wrote YARV!

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great to get kids involved. But it's not like he walked in off the street, "saw the matrix" and then committed a patch.

I can already sense the razzing coming from the Python camp! :)
The wall doesn't need to be physical. It works as obstacles to slow down movement of the enemy.

For example, Google has built up its own wall by making practical extremely large computing platform. That's a big wall for them to deter competitors. Apple focus on user experience and that is a big wall for them to fend off copycats.

If U.S. has to build a big wall. The wall has to be something that make U.S. an aspiration for those enemies of our enemies, such as rebel students in Tehran or Beijing.
Probably the best thing about NoSQL is that once there are high performance and scalable data storage engines out there, it will prompt the SQL vendors to improve the performance and scalability of their products.

There are few, if any inherent reasons SQL can't scale and where there are, like ACID over the network, those features could be disabled to enable scale.

I believe it will be easier for traditional SQL databases to achieve the scale of NoSQL than it will be for NoSQL to figure out how to do all the things SQL already does.

In a way, NoSQL could be considered a form of premature optimization. Due to this, NoSQL will solve very large, but esoteric problems in the super high scale space, but fall short when complexity is needed. One thing SQL is good at is reducing the complexity around data management at the developer/programming level and NoSQL flips that, putting all the work in the hands of the developer for things like aggregates, acid, integrity, consistency, etc.

I suspect a lot of early NoSQL adopters who choose it because it lacks the complexity of relational databases will find themselves flummoxed when they are faced with solving some of the problems caused by features missing in NoSQL databases.
I used FCR once years ago and found no problem with it. The credit report was free, and it was pretty clear that getting it enrolled you in a free trial of some credit monitoring service that was fairly easy to cancel, which I did immediately. I'm not one of those people who sends every Terms of Use I come across to my lawyer, but I definitely found it clearly worded enough that I didn't get hit with a single bill.

I did not know about the FTC thing. Perhaps they hid it better after I used it. It currently says, in perfectly legible text on their homepage:

"IMPORTANT INFORMATION

When you order your free report here, you will begin your free trial membership in Triple Advantage(SM). If you don't cancel your membership within the 7-day trial period, you will be billed $14.95 for each month that you continue your membership."

It's exactly this sort of thing that makes me leery of calling things scams. Having a free trial, or some free hook to get people into your service legitimately is not a scam. But there are enough stupid people out there who will sign up accidentally that they often get labeled as such.'

Nonetheless that wasn't even the point of that small segment of the article, which is that Arrington overestimates by an order of magnitude how much money is coming from "scams".
Wherein Javascript borrows a language feature from Arc
http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=...

Sounds like they have no intention of sharing the logs or cookie-related data either. We're still expected to simply trust that they're sufficiently anonymized and not actually linked back to our google accounts.
Hey VCs, it’s not your company
"Japanese people were surprised about the news since he made that in his age."

As opposed to most other people, who were not surprised at all?

I agree though, the title implies that he improved all of Ruby's performance... even though it was just several methods. Still cool that he got into this kind of project at a young age, but it's not like he re-wrote a bunch of algorithms or something....
> so I don't look like a woman taking my closet.

Could you please reconsider your phrasing? Thank you.
Except it doesn't appear to be. The original author has responded to my criticism of his code by calling me a 'fool' and 'snotty kid', ignoring the actual criticisms that I made and that writing a blog post explaining his superiority.

Or is that what you meant by 'bazaar-style development'?
I think it depends on how you ask the question. If you give every indication that you've made an effort to try and figure it out on your own, even if it's a newb issue, I doubt anyone who knows what they're doing would see it as anything other than a good indication of character.
It would make sense to slip potentially controversial things into ADC releases, knowing that if they are controversial then word will leak out to the bloggerati. Then, when controversy erupts, you have plausible deniability ("it was just a bug") and you can slip another developer release out the door as soon as you sense some backlash.

Never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by indifference.
I think that's already the case. When I get a resume the first thing I do is Google the name. If I find an intelligent programming blog, good questions and good answers on Q&A sites, and intelligent comments on online discussions I'm way more likely to call back.
Perhaps you should define areas of expertise, where one of the founders has the final say. And add a shotgun clause, in case you really get stuck.
I do think this could site could add a touch of friendliness to make it less harsh.
I have to admit it has occurred to me that he sounds like The Sphinx from Mystery Men sometimes.

The Sphinx: When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.

The Sphinx: When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you.
"The other one allows me to block offers I don’t like, and I do this whenever we get complaints about specific ones. That’s not easy because often the customer doesn’t even remember the name of the offer that sucked them in, but I do my best to hunt them down and make sure they’re never seen on our games again. "

Shouldn't it be possible to flag offers as potential scams using something like a spam filter? I'm guessing you have access to the text and can find find print like "$10 monthly charge will be applied" or whatever. You don't have to block it on the first showing but just flag it for follow-up.
No, but obviously better if you have one.
I think you are being a little over-critical. There are always better ways to do everything. This contributor was doing something that had never been done before -- by himself.

Isn't the whole point of open source to show the code and let community involvement make it better?

Since you have a lot of experience with HTML parsing, it'd be better to contribute your experience to the project than to bash someone for not doing something you know well as well as you could do it.
Average business has 7 social media campaigns, no way to measure its success
I find real-world business refreshing (compared to the reality bubble of web-startups-only). I'd say, go ahead apply. You will at least get noticed easier than the next twitter clone.

By the way, I am also interested in operations research. (I write my thesis about the very real-world problem of scheduling at Deutsche Bahn.)
It takes a very sophisticated compiler to know that rubyobj->isString will always be true when the ruby interpreter is evaluating a constant string.
WindyCitizen.com awarded $35,000 Chicago Community Trust news startup grant
At least at first glance, this all seems predicated on hiring managers browsing CVs at this one site.

This seems fairly unlikely at first glance. Large organizations often have required procedures that hiring managers must use. Smaller organizations clearly have more flexibility, but it seems the ones that want to go searching for talent themselves instead of soliciting applications will probably be looking for people whose reputations they already know or even already know personally.
And that response isn't very conducive to creating a community of people willing to help you on your open source project.

Too many egos getting in the way here guys. This is an all right project. Don't let disagreements on how to do things make it all fail. There are always better ways to do things and there are prototypes that do a lot of wrong things.

Now's the time to make the bad parts good. The code was just released, okay, now make it right.