skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've used Python 3.1 since it was released. I think most of the changes made in Py3k were good ones, so it seemed like the right thing to do. Now though, I'm sad to say I'm likely going to switch to Python 2.7. Ugh. Think of the version control diffs :(

Every single library I've gone out to use wasn't compatible, and likely won't be this year. I've ported a couple, which wasn't hard, but silly that I had to do it. I've worked around the needs for others, but it's just not a reasonable way to work. Plus, when I've sought help, everyone balked at me using 3.

SciPy (NumPy) was the straw that broke my back. They've just recently started looking at the upgrade. I can't even go through RPy to do calculations in R instead... because it's not available for 3.x yet either.

I really hope Python doesn't get hamstrung like Perl did. I switched to Python on purpose. Ruby, Scala, Haskell, Clojure, etc all have their pluses, but overall they'd be a step back for my work.
Wow, that matchmaking service sounds pretty intense. They literally ask women out for you.
Ask HN: What if all News sites had "FROM OTHER NEWS SITES" from the BBC?
I read all the time about how unhappy Rupert Murdoch and co are with the current state of news and stealing of their content.

Seeing that the BBC has a box on the right hand side which shows content from other news sites.

Wouldn't it be great to get hold of the click thru data on that. Equally to hear from the guys at the other end to say if they have noted:

traffic increase / revenue increase etc

So my question to the esteemed panel ( HN )

What would it be like if all news sites worked together like this to create more noise for each others content?
how does the whiteboard thing work?
Your comment is probably misinformed. But even if it was a free market and nothing was blocked, it's still unlikely a foreign company will win out over a local homegrown equivalent. Like google/baidu, or cyworld trying to take on the US market etc.
Is that statistic based solely on the 1976 vaccine? If so, I'm not sure it's relevant today.
Ask HN: How do I submit an Internet Standard?
I've got an idea for a protocol for delivering simple textual information from network administrators to relevant end-users and I did a quick writeup about it:

http://geocar.sdf1.org/motd.html

I'd like to get comments on it, and perhaps even submit it to the RFC process, but the guidelines on the RFC site seem positively byzantine, and I get the impression that it should be a lot more polished before I do that.

Has anyone been through this process before that can help give some practical advice on how to put this sort of thing together?
That suite is out of date. They're probably testing using v5, the latest version.

http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v5/run.html
It's great that Javascript is fast and all, but what about the HTML rendering engine? What about the network layer? What about the whole package? I remember a while ago that Safari had an SSL bug that failed to cache certain session data and therefore all SSL sites were dog slow, despite the rendering engine being fast.

Is anyone doing any real-world benchmarking with actual websites? But since throwing in the Internet to the mix would throw off the results, perhaps a locally hosted web server to do the actual serving? Create a clone of several popular sites locally, serve them up to the browsers of choice, time the results, ???, profit!
I mean a real whiteboard with real people in the same room and some markers :)

We would alternate one week co-located and have intense design sessions in smaller teams, then go back to our own time zones and code it for 3-4 weeks.

I've looked at a lot of digital whiteboard solutions, but honestly nothing compares to the real thing. I feel this is still an unsolved problem, and a good startup idea.
I was surely expecting downvotes because my comment didn't bring much to the table, but I'm still really surprised that this piece is still getting upvotes:

It has no link to anything startup or tech-related and is not intellectually interesting. It's just a "joke" (granted surprising) from a politician/actor.

From HN's guidelines:

"What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

So, yeah, I'm surprised that it's still on the front page and that I get downvoted for implying it doesn't have its place here. I understand that it's up to the community, but again, that's why I'm surprised: I didn't expect that from this community.
UK authorities considering banning file sharers
Good comment - you would do well to balance your article with this unexpected risk-aversion result of having a name-brand academic and work pedigree.
Yeah, but it still renders text funny when css effects such as text-shadow are applied to it. The anti-aliasing goes all early Windows Safari on you.
Plura sounds pretty cool. I had the vague notion a while ago that society could benefit by somehow using games to solve real-world problems (somewhat like on Stargate Universe). I'm glad to see this is being explored.
Most bicycles, though smaller than people, are much more inconveniently shaped and harder to manuever or get out of the way.
One thing that people on here might find interesting: Unity uses Mono as an embedded VM. Three .Net languages are officially supported as scripting languages (Boo, C# and a ECMAscript-a-like). Yes, C# is used as a DSL.
Why network neutrality is a big deal
I clicked your link, and I have to say that their idea of a really attractive WHR is really spot on (the example at the top).

The last section is also very interesting. I'd like to see a study done on the people who find smaller hips more attractive, whether this correlates to less intelligence.
I feel like a lot of these suggestions would rely heavily either on the existing networks (and we know how fast AT&T is at implementing things…), or would require Apple to invest a considerable amount of time and money into building the infrastructure behind these features.
The more they produce, the more I can't help but feel that Boston Dynamics must be stopped at all costs.
Yes. Completely happy. As everyone else said, the export to pdf is great.
This is a brilliant decision. I attended Startup School this weekend, and used the event and the surrounding parties to pitch our idea to at least 10+ Y-Combinator startups. Every time i pitched our company i learned something new and got great feedback on how to pitch it better next time. Startups that are concerned about this, should realise that to be accepted to Y-Combinator is not the goal of your startup. It is more than everything else a great test for yourself. Are you able to explain your idea in a couple of sentences, do you have a great founding team, is there really a market for what you are building? Trust me, when i remind you that making your company succeed is much harder than filling out the Y-Combinator application form.

Having other startups validating your idea is a great way to actually proof your team, competence and idea. We're based in London and despite the fact that we were lucky enough to know a couple of YC startups, that gave us great feedback on our application, we're thrilled to know that our idea, our team and our startup will be reviewed by a couple of other great YC startups.

Mark Zuckerberg, probably put it best during his Startup School talk. He told the audience that instead of going for the universities that really wanted to use Facebook, they rolled out Facebook to the universities that seemed the least interested in it. I think this is a brilliant move to test your product. The same applies here.

Good luck to everyone!
Why the World is Actually Getting Better
Internet Speeds and Costs Around the World, Shown Visually - Broadband
That's a good point, but you can't deny that there are a lot of opportunities around social apps and games. And the whole pitch behind Facebook Connect makes complete sense: you don't want to duplicate a whole social network for your little app.

At Startup School, I talked to somebody who was building something on top of Twitter and Facebook, but his philosophy was "it won't last forever, but let's take advantage of it while it works".

I don't have a solution for this and it doesn't look like something is really emerging to solve it.
For some reason, this chair reminds me of:

http://www.keilhauer.com/pdf/brochures/Felt.pdf
You're doing a lot of assuming you're right, and then concluding that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. That's poor reasoning. In particular you say

If you find that rationality and logic indicate that an individual should not vote, then you haven't used enough of them.

Specifically, if everyone was rational according to the definition you're implying, then bad things would happen. That sounds to me like it's the wrong definition.

You have reasoned from the premise to an apparently absurd conclusion, and therefore conclude that the premise was wrong. But in fact what you should do is look farther to see whether the premise is, in fact, RIGHT! To that end I strongly recommend that you read The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson. This sets out the classic theory of public goods which, among other things, concluded that very often bad things happen if everyone acts in their own self interest.

Now rather than seek a reason to reject the premise, analyze it. My claim is that if your reason for voting is X (for any particular X you want), then unless your act of voting has a chance of affecting X, you logically shouldn't spend energy voting. Why would that be? Well when you vote you have a cost (your effort) and a reward (something you care about becomes more likely). If your expended effort has essentially chance of resulting in a reward, then logically that effort was wasted.

This applies whether X is "get the election outcome you want" or "makes politicians care about the electorate" (which is the reason you gave for why people should vote) or anything else. If your vote isn't the deciding factor one way or another, then it is a waste of energy for you to vote. And that applies to both of the criteria I just listed.

In fact if you want to make politicians care it is far, far more effective to send an email, make a phone call, or send a piece of snail mail. Then you get to not just make them aware that someone is out there, but you actually get to tell them your specific concerns. Now odds are that you won't sway them. But the effort involved is on part with voting, and it is much more effective. So if you're willing to vote to make them care, you should send email about something every weekend!

When you look at things this way, my voting actually is logically defensible. After all the warm fuzzies I get from my emotional reaction to voting is a guaranteed return on effort that justifies the effort I expend. There is no question that the act of my voting makes the difference in my getting that feeling. So it makes sense for me to vote.
refactor

It may be slim on unit tests, but it passes one huge integration test (people are using it!). You can add unit tests as you refactor, and make gradual progress.

Rewriting from scratch you will need to relearn all of the knowledge that already has been put into that code, and it's an all-or-nothing bet.
Agreed. I've been playing around with web development with Scheme and Arc, and it really is a joy to use.

Do you have any sites that are live right now that run scheme?
And it clearly works; otherwise, there wouldn't be so many women using the site.
Mozilla’s SeaMonkey 2.0 now available for download | Techno Kyle
"groups come in all forms and as a result have very different requirements.... The response of the service providers has compounded this problem ... they all seem to want to own the group and lock it in."

I guess the title was a rhetorical question!

It's hard for a small design group to understand the universe; the imagined 'solutions' are limited. And it's hard to design a set of tools that people can use to evolve their own solutions. But it's a hard problem. Simplistic 'answers' will fail.

I'm reminded of many attempts at educational software. Too often the programmers clearly had a limited view of what constitutes education. You can't design your way out of your own limited perspective. Research has to precede theory; else you wind up with solutions to the wrong problems.

Proprietary solutions tend to be more passionate about making money than at helping people. Bass-ackwards.
Thanks. My GST comment wasn't a judgement on it, just a policy comparison. If you'd asked me in '98/'99 about whether Howard would get it through, my response would have been something along the lines of "it looks like it will be impossible to pass through parliament".

Here's hoping that's where the comparison ends.
New technology for parking bicycles
Yes, if you close the right instance, it stops. but there doesn't seem to be any correlation with whatever page was in that instance. I've also had issues with an instance suddenly using 20-50% of the CPU for no reason.

Chrome is now my primary browser, but this one issue has made me consider switching back to Firefox.
I wanted to write about going after the mainstream press. Why just focus on bloggers?

1. Do not use a PR firm. If you are on HN you are probably a startup with out funding. They will charge you an arm and a leg. You can do better on your own. Be passionate about your product - people will respond more to that, then anything else.

2. Make your product sexy. Sexy sells. A new way of using mobile phones is more interesting than a new DB model. If it is not an inherently sexy product, make sure it looks professional. People want to write about companies that 'feel' professional.

3. Come up with a story. "we are two guys who sold baseballs for 3 years and worked on this in our spare time." "the recession hit, and we both lost our jobs, and this was the result."

4. Reach out to reporters. Every newspaper/magazine/tv news show now lists reporters emails. Reach out to them; tell your story. Find them, and buy them a drink. They are often young and looking for cool stories.

5. Network your face off. Go to places where new startups launch, and launch there. Meet everyone. Get business cards. Tell people you are looking for press contacts. You should be doing this stuff anyway.

6. Use http://www.helpareporter.com/ Journalists need stories to write about. They need new (sexy) material. Craft your story to fit theirs - don't lie, but if you started in a recession and they are talking about new businesses in the recession, make your story fit.

7. Leverage your friends in PR / make friends with people in PR. If you are based in a major city, if you went to college, if you know anyone in marketing - you have a friend or friend of a friend in PR. Leverage them to write Press Releases (which I don't think work in the beginning) and to send you out the emails they get looking for stories.

8. Make an awesome product - at the end of the day, if your product sucks, nothing else you do will matter. No one will write anything about it (unless your FB)

Ok, just a bunch of quick thoughts from a guy who has had a little luck with this.
But will it retain fart odors in it's porous materials?
conspicuousness of logos = (size of logo) * (number of logos ^ 2) * (1 + logo is text)
I don't know if this is your problem, but Chrome on Linux has some memory leaks that occasionally put my 2GB desktop into swap. Luckily I can use the Chrome task manager to find the offending tab and kill it.
The smartphone market is increasingly looking like it'll end up as a fight between Android and iPhone. Droid looks like an incredibly compelling phone, and Verizon will probably sell millions of them.

RIM is going to be able to hang on for a while, but if third-party developers were going to flock to the BlackBerry platform, they would have done so by now. The same goes for Symbian.

I still hold out some hope for Palm, but they'll probably be confined to a small niche for the foreseeable future.
A little surprised that the stock market should fall down so much. After all, how many phones actually run on Android. If this was an iPhone app, that would have meant a lot more "danger" for the GPS manufacturers.
Not to mention that most successful do not have the the time to segway off on someone else vague but 'brilliant' idea.

I know electrical engineers who have zero interest in Schematics/PCB files etc -ready to manufacture - because the time to complete a project is excessive for something that is not their core focus.
"tianaco is a vocal person who says what she thinks."

As a team member, she oughta reign this in a bit. As a company founder, saying what you think can sometimes hurt your company. I think you have a duty to put a buffer between your brain and your mouth, especially around touchy subjects. If you always say what you think around investors and customers, you'll probably have fewer of both. :-)

I think a lot of people (PG included) have remarked that founders are ALWAYS selling (to customers, investors, new hires, reporters, etc). Part of selling is the ability to anticipate a reaction before you say something and to say the things that will elicit the reaction that you want. Or, at very least, speak the truth in such a way that it maximizes the effect that you want and minimizes the damage that it might cause. Example: last night I ate a juicy organic steak vs. last night I ate a muscle tissue sample of a castrated bull (hat tip to Robert Heinlein).

We all make mistakes-- I HOPE she realizes that there's a reasonable chance that she (and her company) might have been better off if she hadn't said what she did or said it in a different way.
We already have a bare metal VM though. It's called X86.

Call me a luddite but I have never seen the point of Java and the JVM at all.
Manual Mocking: Resisting the Invasion of Dots and Parentheses
My moment was playing with "digital toys" all my life, exploring, looking around in wide eyed power mad wonder at all the things I could do with them, and the gradual ascent to mastery of all the various aspects involved with this, achieving satori through technology.

Staying there, for a fairly long time, watching the rest of the world with exasperation and contempt, wondering when they would figure it out.

Finally realising that this was my part, this was what I could handle for everyone else and make sure they got what they needed from this vast, critical piece of the puzzle that despite constant popular opposition and attempts to pretend like it doesn't matter and would eventually all be handled by swarms of desperate unfortunate identical fleshy automatons in a dark room in some hell hole on the other side of the world.

Grasping all of that, understanding that people are what they are and are probably not going to change. Understanding that I am different, and I need to take advantage of the ways in which I am different, and parlaying those abilities to my own advantage.

Letting go of emotion.
The New Rules of Angel Investing
Great post, Bastian.
I think it was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but investors do realize that the end won't be tomorrow for GPS makers, but it will certainly be in the next few years as new android sets come out.
Yes, it is undoubtedly a striking statistic - a really dramatic reflection of how the VC world has grown.
I hope this doesn't get buried. Fascinating article about how a media company is scaling itself in real-time (by analyzing over 100 high-value sources of what people are searching for) and algorithmically determining what obscure piece of content will generate a lifetime profit (at 55 to 60 cents per adsense click). They match the costs of production to the expected life-time profit, for example $15 for a few-hundred word article (fully acknowledging that most content on the Internet is cheap)
Cool, keep downvoting. But what I'm saying is that performance etc always comes at the cost of something. In this case: font-rendering and anti-aliasing. Firefox renders text-effects beautifully!
Ironically, I think that my review is probably obviously not from a "casual user" and that changing it to be a general praise would make it more effective.

I don't think there are hairs to be split here. It's going to be deceptive as long as I don't announce who I am in the review.

It occurs to me that signing the review might be the most effective thing to do - at least I would be unique.
20 is probably not enough. It would need to be closer to 100 years both because of copyright law, and to make sure the owners are no longer alive.

Put this site in your will for your descendants :) (You have any kids?)
Ask HN: How to master the Art of Selling
It's very easy to deal with people that need you. I've always had the pleasure of dealing with such clients, always cooperative people that got to know me by word-of-mouth, often technology enthusiasts who want to make their core business easier and pay me to do it.

Yet I want to grow my freelance activity into a business by reaching this promissing but scary thing called market. I've thought for a while and got a good idea of what my revolutionary product will be about - all I need to do now is to code it and sell subscriptions.

I'm absolutely sure that it will be great, but I'm not so sure that my clients, the ones whose doors I'll have to knock and arrange meetings, will agree. We, geeks, are geeky; my potential clients (ie, small business owners) are not. I wonder if we speak a different language, and, if so, how I can reach them.

In other words, I wonder how I can sell them my product. Tips and reference are both welcome.

A related question is how to pick this quality among my potential partners? I've got a friend who swears that he is a great seller, but, frankly, he looks too shy; there are others who are more extroverted, but I wonder if this is a reliable indicator.

Thanks!
"...whether this correlates to less intelligence."

I laughed out loud when I read that line. Maybe it is correlated with poor eye-sight!
Yaw, that's why I said I'd like to think that's how I'd react. But that was another way of saying that I think it's the BEST way to react (from a business/professional perspective). As someone who HOPES he brings very little prejudices to the table, I still don't particularly like being around people who are hyper-attuned to prejudice (and probably lumping in a lot of innocent behavior-- confirmation bias is a bitch). I'm not saying you're this way, but there have already been a few comments/upvotes that seemed to think you had a chip on your shoulder. That's a bad vibe to give off, whether it's true or not.
Wrong context. The amount of money raised is a function of how much money is chasing that particular kind of deal. A better context is the current cost of doing business. The inflation adjusted costs of computers, licensing, and marketing are all down. Therefore startups need less funding, not more.

People forget that there is a cost to receiving too much funding, which is that you now need a success that justifies the money spent. Which means that if you spot a viable opportunity which is smaller than that target, you can't explore it. Even though in other circumstances it could have been perfectly appropriate for that company.

For an interesting book that covers the dynamics of how over-funding kills success, I highly recommend The Innovator's Solution. It is a follow-up to The Innovator's Dilemma, but the discussion of how money distorts organizational dynamics is only in the sequel.