skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He hasn't figured out a format that everyone loves....

....but who else is doing what he's doing: Longform interviews with people who made stuff a lot of us know about?

Has anyone produced a better interview with ojbyrne? kn0thing? Not that I've seen anywhere.

For all the (valid) griping about how articles are presented on HN, I'd think someone like Andrew trying to create a new, "ultimate" format for presenting a longform interview would be welcomed.
Apple Raises Curtain on Spectacular NYC Store
This ignores the fact that even if you explain quicksort to a random person and give them a list of a few thousand numbers they can only look at one at a time you will invariably find out that most of the people will get it wrong most of the time. Just because you think you can imagine the execution of an algorithm given its description doesn't mean any random human brain can; doesn't mean even you can, if pressed, executed a really complicated program without errors.

The error rates we get on modern computers are scary for most "algorithmic" problems.
Perhaps a reasonable idea, but I stopped reading at "Homo Numericus"
I should have not used the word "measurable".
Teen's Facebook update gets robbery charges dropped
Counting yesterday, the ratio of Android to iPhones was about 4:5 among people I personally know. Of course, a lot of them are early adopters and that ratio was changed due to the Droid release.
Who cares if it's "slightly embellished"? I'm sure the spirit of the story is true, so who cares if the details are slightly "improved" to create a more compelling story? I think all founders should be able to provide a compelling narrative. It obviously worked; they made satish's first blog post.
There were 23000 downloads of the free version, and 220 copies paid for at $2. But it's not clear from the post what, if anything, differs between the two versions.
EPiServer Gadget Contest 2009
EPiServer World is currently running its Gadget Contest 2009, awarding great prizes for the most useful and technically excellent EPiServer CMS 6 dashboard gadgets.
What is the exposure strategy like? When you update, do you get back on the frontpage? Is there a way of appearing directly to android users like the iPhone has? What about rogue developers and spammers - can they not keep releasing the same app over and over again and appearing at the top of the store?
Did a YC-alum organize this?
I got invitations about 5 days after joining (last night). It isn't useful initially (unless the people you want to communicate with are already in).

I think you are right that google is taking the wrong approach with invites, but with a bit of patience, your network of collaborators will get in.
Spreedly Pricing Change
I would not really describe this as advice.
not at all -- we're aggressively adding datasets, and those are among the ones that are on the top of our list :-)
I wish I could up-vote this comment twice. So true.
Ad Code sales conversion tracking for iPhone apps
Any iPhone developers out there think this is useful?
It's sad/fascinating that a group of accounting/business/tech/etc. people all got together to design such an ingenious revenue generating system: The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data.

NOT COOL. I’ve had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I’m sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, NO.

"Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!
Stepping 220k processes through a debugger
Ordinarily an impact on the size of either should arrive once every hundred million years or so. That two would independently arrive 300,000 years apart is an extremely unlikely coincidence.

The Nemesis theory says that every 26 million years Nemesis arrives and knocks a bunch of stuff out of the Oort cloud. Most of it is swept up by Jupiter, but the Earth goes through a period where large asteroid impacts are likely. It is a much smaller coincidence to have 2 large impacts in a period where large asteroid impacts should be common.

Therefore this result is more substantially likely under the Nemesis hypothesis than it would be without the Nemesis hypothesis. Which implies that the conditional probability of Nemesis given this observation is higher than it would be without this observation. Which is a fancy way of saying that the observation is evidence for the Nemesis hypothesis.
I was one of these "victims" last night :(

It was heartbreaking.
I'm not sure exactly how it works, and I know Google doesn't disclose any information on this either, but this is what I've experienced: Every time you update your app, you'll get put back on the "Just In" front page list, as long as 7 days have passed since your last update. If you push out an update on your app before then, you don't get put on the new front page.

Like you mentioned, this leads to some unfortunate behavior in the Android market. Some developers will just keep pushing out pointless updates about every 7 days, even though they contain no bug fixes or new features, just to get on the front page.

If you've already downloaded an app, and an update is released, your phone keeps telling you that there is an update for one of your apps. I have almost 20 pending app updates on my phone, and I don't want to spend the time downloading all of them because I know most of them are pointless.
On the one hand I'm surprised people are still playing this game. Then again, given how long Starcraft II has been taking to come out, I guess these guys have no choice but to enjoy what they have.

(PS - I'm not flaming them. I was an SC addict about 8 years ago untill WOW came out and everyone seemed to have lost interest.)
The graphic lacks little beyond greater-than symbols in it's condemnation of "servants". The connotations behind the language used, the number of lines linking concepts, and the horizontal orientation in relation to the word "work" illustrate a particular worldview. So makers are better than servants - I wouldn't tell my startup's first employee that!

Eli is implying that those who provide products independently and directly to consumers are superior to those working in a structured environment. It explains his choice of profession, but little else.
I'm married and have a 5 year old son. When I finally settled into a family, some aspects changed but I had already been living life as an entrepreneur for close to 20 years and my wife accepts and supports this. My family is healthy and happy and we are not worried about paying bills.
Facebook canvas app vs. FB Connect/Platform?
Given the latest Facebook announcements affecting developers, how would you weigh the pros/cons of betting on doing a Facebook canvas app as your user's primary means of interacting with your application (as opposed to going to your own domain which would then use FB Connect for login and other the FB API for other features such as friend picker, constant auth, profile sharing, etc.)?

Some context: we're a social advice & reputation game.

By my calculation, it seems that the only a few benefits for developers in doing FB canvas apps anymore:

1) User doesn't have to open another browser window/tab to a site whose domain/brand they're not immediately familiar with.

2) If the user bookmarks the app, the app appears in the upcoming left profile/nav bar.

3) Presumably, I'd expect the new "secret sauce" FB newsfeed algorithm to include some preference towards native FB canvas app stories that can then be "liked" & commented upon from within the user's newsfeed/live feed.

A very prominent FB app company (top 20) told me that they're deprioritizing their native FB canvas app in lieu of their own site with FB Connect given they expect a "40-60% decline in native FB canvas app user activity with Facebook's recently announced changes". They think that Facebook can't be trusted to do well by developers since they're primarily interested in users.

Please mention if you're currently actively preparing or have already deployed a FB Connect &/or canvas app. Thanks!!
I think you and I have talked about this in the past. From what I know of the process and where ECMAScript 4 was going, I am not of the opinion that anything particular great has been lost by its falling apart.

JavaScript/ECMAScript evolution has not stopped just because a design-by-committee extension effort failed. There are a few issues with JavaScript for programming in the large, but they won't last. More importantly, perhaps, I think that even if they weren't being fixed at a rapid clip, JavaScript would still end up an extremely popular language, probably even the most popular language, for many classes of problem. Web applications, in particular, but most applications will be web applications in the future, so the planets are aligning for JavaScript.

I will also add that damned near every major technology company has some sort of serious JavaScript effort underway, as we speak. Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, are all extremely serious about JavaScript. Several well-funded teams are building JavaScript engines, some of which are not tied to a particular browser or limited to only running within a browser. Perl and Python will never have that kind of money behind them. Java was in the same position 15 years ago, but it was never a particularly good language for the Perl and Python market (as evidenced by the fact that dynamic language programmers tend to hate, or merely tolerate Java). JavaScript, on the other hand, not only had incredible corporate backing, it also has a large amount of nerd mindshare. Most of the Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. hackers I know don't mind working in JavaScript, and find it a pretty nice language. I certainly enjoy it. Sure, it is lacking a lot of niceties of those other languages, but with the kind of money and effort being spent on JavaScript, it won't be long before those issues disappear.

So, while Java took over the programming marketplace for several years, to the sound of much gnashing of teeth by dynamic language programmers, it never really won mindshare among the folks who programmed for enjoyment (FOSS, in particular). I don't think JavaScript will run into those impediments. It's a good language, and a few nitpicks about missing features or misfeatures aren't going to stop it from being a juggernaut that rolls over most other dynamic languages in terms of popularity.
Context Scheme
the key productivity enhancer:

Having a good reason why you are doing something
The primary problem of finding cofounders isn't seeding out the bad ones, it's even knowing someone you might want to found a company with.

According to the post your cofounder should be someone of roughly the same age and financial standing that you have a history with, have aligned motives with, has incredibly intelligence, energy and integrity. Oh, and it has to be someone that respects you and that you respect as well.

Personally I don't know anyone that lives up to all of these criteria, and I doubt that most people do.
The free version is merely a trial version that expires after a certain number of uses, prompting people to buy the full version.

I'm not exactly sure if this is a better strategy than simply providing an unlimited license on the free version, albeit with less features.
> I work at a command line all day, and even use the "Terminal" GMail theme with plain-text formatting.

I work at a command-line all day but the 'Terminal' GMail theme makes my eyes bleed. :(
Newsweek's audience isn't people on Hacker News. Shallow to us doesn't mean it's shallow to them. I thought the tone / depth was appropriate.
That's a really nice service. So, how much is this going to cost?
Abstract from the GSA:
http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2009AM/finalprogram/abstract_16019...

Better article that is more critical of Chatterjee's theory: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091018-dinosaur-crater...
I'm not very familiar with Clojure. On the first glance it looks like Clojure has a good concurrency system. I know many people are talking about Actors(like in Erlang) these days, but from my experience with Scala Actors, they're not very suitable to solve some problems(like when you need a very good performance). Even though Scala makes your life easier to work with native Java concurrency, it's definitely a good reason to have a deeper look at Clojure. Thanks for the info!

Edit: Is there an 'easy' way to create OSGi bundles with Clojure, maybe some sort of Maven plugin?
I feel that there's definitely been a push with the release of Android 1.6 to change the buying behavior of Android phone users. Most noticeably, the Android market app will open to a list of paid apps, instead of a list of free apps.
Ask the guys on this board about the issue. http://tinyurl.com/yzk3je9
In principle, I agree with you. However, we also have to allow for the very real fact that tables work pretty much exactly the same across all browsers, and allow for some very fine-tuned control over layout.

CSS, on the other hand, is implemented differently from browser to browser. Depending on the layout, sometimes that's a problem, and sometimes it isn't so much, but it still requires specialized knowledge of CSS and browser-specific quirks.

...to say nothing of all the various css "hacks" that are out there.

Given a complicated site layout, I think I'd rather crawl through some table code than crawl through pages and pages of complicated CSS where declarations at the bottom of the file are subtly dependent on declarations at the top of the file.

Also, let's not forget that CSS was not intended for layout. When it was designed, it was designed for specific purposes, and it's since been warped into a layout language.

So, sure, in principle, I agree that it's better to keep your HTML clean and meaningful, and hide the complexity in a separate CSS file.

But let's not pretend that some designers will save time by switching to CSS only, or that CSS-only is simpler, or that there's anything intrinsically bad about using tables for layout, or that developers have no reason for doing so.
Longevity Tied to Genes That Preserve Tips of Chromosomes
By the way, I've been wanting to make a prediction on your success, since I've been following your work with interest for a while: I think you will be successful, but not in the sense that YC or investors want from you. I just don't see you breaking out of the lifestyle-business loop. I believe that your technology will be your undoing - it will become so attractive to some outside entity that you will get swallowed up by them. I'm not sure if the technology - as-is - will be that valuable, but I'm assuming that you will iterate and adapt to the changing landscape. There is going to be demand for what you are creating - not for such trivial things as recommendations, but simply as data processing tools. There is going to be too much data, and the people who can structure it in whatever niche, will make good money.

The real question is this : will you guys be able to see the money when it comes? I, being an outsider, would not, but sometimes you can be so much of an insider that you don't see it either. You both seem pretty focused, and that's the big problem I see.

The final problem I see is this: you care about people liking you. I have the feeling pg likes you like he used to like sama. But the difference is that sama is ruthless and focused on making money - would you ever be able to? Can you bite the hand that fed you for the sake of the money?

Your recommendations system is small business and you will change it at some point. The new thing you build will be more interesting, I think.

That's my prediction! Let's see how many years I have to wait!
Didn't watch the video, but she seems to be complaining about the competition.

You should watch the interview. Or atleast let it play in the background while you do other tasks (like I did). She didn't seem to complain about twitter at all, and expressed that she was surprised about all the Pounce vs. Twitter hype when they launched.
Time and Money: Separated at Birth?
I need some sort of multiple upvote. :P
What about the one where you don't use megabytes of disk space? ;)
4 Convenient and Nutritious Dietary Sources of Protein
I really like it.

Are you allowing API users to cache/store data?
Hello World in Go -- A Memcached Server
The Happiness Genie
My Ex Roommate Wins the 2009 World Series of Poker
its a 'preview'.
Daring Fireball en Español
Amazon.com unveils lineup for startup contest
Microsoft employee publicly says Windows 7 inspired by Mac OS
You are disappointed in Mixergy because of your own short attention span? Why is that a problem with Mixergy. If you looked around you would also notice there are transcripts and text summaries. What I like to do is put it on in the background when I'm doing semi-menial work and then focus on it when something catches my attention. Of course talk video has it's shortcomings but Andrew is doing the best startup interviews anywhere.
So which of the people in this have capital and which ones are the wage-laborers?
Four color problem finally proved without a computer?
If you can't cut features, then it's better. Maybe you want to market a kitchen-sink type of app, one that's already trimmed, or that does some thing better than a competitor (showcasing that one thing).
Haven't had time to dig in but nice work with the gfx, looks great.
I’m a nerd who’s done some typography, and I hate monospace. The distinctive thing here is that nerds are about language, and the good linguistic interfaces to the machine are mainly monospaced just by historical accident. It’s not like we’d invent it over again if we hadn’t thought of it until now.

Now that it’s established, of course, we’re all pretty much locked in. Most of the text on my screen right now is monospaced. I mean, good luck writing code in a proportional font: pretty much every language and text editor assumes you can align with spaces, tiny punctuation looks huge, etc.

But saying that monospace is inherently nerdy is like saying that, say, slashes are inherently path separators.
ScamVille Lawsuit: Facebook, MySpace, Zynga And More Face Possible Class Action
You are correct that SEO people would latch onto the idea and start producing faster sites. But so will many legitimate sites that want to provide a good user experience. Is that really so bad?

I think that site speed does correlate with a better user experience. A site that loads quickly shows that the person who made it cares about my experience more than a bloated site that takes forever to load.

I will admit that it's certainly not as as strong an indicator as the content, inbound links and other factors that are rumored to be part of PageRank but speed does matter. All other things being equal, I would much rather visit a site that loads in 2 seconds than one that loads in 20 seconds.
Unsticking Spirit
Recap: cracking open US courtrooms
Selling Tickets with Startup Megatrends
Rihanna topless for new cd (Photo)
Rihanna went topless again for promoting her new cd! Actually no one knows why she went topless! Check out the photo on the website!
You're just biased in favor of yourself because you know what you produce, and it is tangible. However having a product does not make a company.

If you get sued the lawyer could make the difference between the company existing or not.

If you have your head down all the time writing code, you may be oblivious to the need to cut certain corners in order to get to market before the money runs out. The manager might save your ass in that case.

Also, let me add marketer since a lot of engineers notoriously hate marketing. If you don't have marketing you may have a great product, but have no clue how to get the word out or position it so people will actually sign up. In that case all your code is worth exactly nothing.
Medical care is a service. I keep myself very healthy, so I pay very little for medical service. I am willing to pay for Medical Insurance, because like automobile insurance, I may find it difficult to pay for drastically large bills that arise, and may be quite large due to the reimbursement system for emergency services.

In car collisions, pain and suffering is a scary demand. In emergency medical care, all those fancy machines to figure out what is going on with my body right now is likewise rather expensive.

A long term plan to adopt a good diet, exercise, stretch, brush my teeth, etc. is a relatively easy way to avoid paying for large amounts of medical care. And, I am fortunate enough not to have any major body/mind disability.
Is there any reason to expect more from this (non-peer-reviewed) paper than from the hundreds like it that have failed before?

Edit: At least it appears to be by an experienced mathematician and (at first glance) fairly coherent. So it should be possible for other mathematicians to review it for correctness.
It is not, though I've tweeted at least one annoyance.
Right now the model is free. We limit it to 20K hits per day. If you need more than that, ping us and we can help out (api at geoapi.com)
Merece mucho la pena, Daring Fireball es uno de los blogs en inglés más seguidos. Estupendo poder leerlo en español.
I disagree. This event does not support the Nemesis hypothesis. This might only add evidence to suggest that there is periodicity to Earth impacts. Although, it might not. As I understand it the idea of periodicity for impacts is debated and is not statistically conclusive.

There are other hypothesizes besides Nemesis to explain the supposed periodicity of impacts. Essentially, we need something to cause a gravitational change to the Oort cloud. Other possibilities include Brown dwarfs and black holes or precession in the rotation of the milky way.
I don't understand how nerds could date non-nerds. But that's just me ^-^.
I wouldn't say he's "optimizing" if he chooses to use a cheap host and subdomain. He's boostrapping an agile product. He can always get a better host and full domain name in subsequent iterations.
You can run Team Proggit's bot locally pretty easily (one click if java is working right): http://rictic.com/marioai/
Depends on the kind of nerd. I wish I were a typography nerd, it's one of my weaknesses. On the other hand, I actually have written more than my fair share of COBOL74 on an old greenscreen, and if I had to do that in a beautiful typographical font, I would have killed someone.

Monospace isn't entirely an accident.
The article seems to extol the virtues of founders who were and are willing to lie about experience and make up numbers. And instead of planning and saving up to fund their startup they maxed out their credit cards and nearly got evicted because they couldn't pay their rent.
The OP says he uses both Emacs and Vim regularly. Emacs alone uses less disk space than Emacs and Vim combined.
I too work at a command-line all day. mutt plays nicely with the terminal. You can even tweak it to your heart's desire :)
From the graph, it looks like the Droid launch was responsible for an order of magnitude jump in sales.

With those kinds of growth rates, the Android marketplace could rival the iPhone very quickly.
> ... with the kind of money and effort being spent on JavaScript, it won't be long before those issues disappear.

I thought that too, but Microsoft's "You can't break the Intranet!" argument was enough to kill ECMAScript 4. I lost a lot of faith in JavaScript's near term future then.

In the interest of having a more productive discussion, what concrete signs give you hope that time and money and effort will address JavaScript's missing features?
I'd definitely be interested.