skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A 6 member comedy troop active for a decade and a half including 45 episodes of their sketch comedy show and 4 feature-length films, not including the solo works of John Cleese and Terry Gilliam which could easily be referenced in offshoot python projects.

That, plus the snake reference which is used here and there (the 'egg' packages and the 'snakes and rubies' meetup, for example).

Can anyone think of any other popular software project that has that kind of naming pool to pull from?
Poll: Are your parents upset because you did/will not become a medical doctor?
How to reach small business owners
Hey all,

I'm developing an application on my free time targeting small business owners: plumbers, locksmiths, etc.

However, as much as I (and other people I speak to about this idea) think it's a great idea, I'm somewhat discouraged. I KNOW that I can make it work -- the technology is there, and a technological proof of concept worked. The only issue for me is getting to those small business owners.

I COULD try to market it by going one store at a time, in my neighborhood, and speaking to each store owner individually. But that's not scaleable. I could also try to put fliers on their doorsteps, hoping they're sign up for my product. But that seems unlikely -- they'd just throw them out.
Then, I was thinking maybe I could use US Postal Office, hoping they may have mailing lists one could buy and send targeted postcards. But I haven't found anything like that.

I'm only an individual (a mere programmer), not a company, and "self funded" (ie, living off of a salary), so a $3M campaign won't work either. :-)

Does anybody have any advice as to how to reach those people in a smart way? An alliance with some existing service (lead fees)? Maybe mining yellow pages on line?

Thanks in advance for your insights!
The Founder Institute: An Incubator of Persons, Rather Than Companies
US School Kids Are Doing Better Than Ever – But You Never Hear It
My guess would be the that actual computation problem will be something suited to distributed computation as they tried (and failed) to do with their first contest.

The twitter part is obviously for visibility.

edit: sorry that sounded really cynical, it's obviously a fun project and miles ahead of most other forms of marketing.
Plaxo ran a trial using OpenID identifier-select and the OAuth Hybrid extension. They had a 92% on-boarding rate for users, which blew away expectations:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/comcast_property_sees_9...

I'd imagine that FB Connect sees similar numbers.
"they" as in Engine Yard?
Promote Ruby development?
Get publicity from #wa-ste if it trends, and get publicity anyways for running such an odd contest?

I think the concept of using Twitter messages to create an app is hilarious and fascinating at the same time.
Even if I don't participate, I'd love to see how the contest turns out.

The thing that interests me the most is the 5-limit on WASTEpoint submissions, and the requirement to use at least 10 WASTEpoints from at least 4 different submitters, which will force contestants to rely on other people's submissions and not just their own.
I wonder if this will cause potential contestants to delay building their own WASTEpoints, to wait and see what other WASTEpoints are available for use before supplementing with their own in order to complete the contest. -- On second thought, I guess that's why second and third prizes are for the WASTEpoints submissions.

Hmm, now that I think about it, to win first prize, you don't even need to code anything; just create a program listing of WASTEpoints that other people build.
why the fuck does everyone have a podcast now?
My wife is Norwegian. I've been here 12 years, and love it.

In terms of salary: I've never heard of a college graduate making less than 250.000NOK = $43,000 USD, even in the most trivial, entry-level job. Note that that's for 32.5 hours/week, with 5 weeks paid vacation and full health care included.

I don't have the lasagna ingredient prices available at home (most items don't have price tags, but shelf-tags at the store), but I can tell you that gasoline is over $7/gallon, if that's something to go by.
> I still have to decide whether or not I want to use the vague/all-purpose connective for "and."

If you are undetermined, you use the undetermined option, the vague one. You don't really make a decision for that.

> If I want to add parenthetical information, I have to realize I'm doing that and indicate it. If I want to "erase" a mistake, I have to recognize that that's what I want to do and use the proper word. I still have to know exactly what I intend to say.

Planning is not required for adding parenthetical information. You use it on the spot where you happen to want it.

If you don't recognize that you want to erase a mistake, you just don't use the erasers.

> When I'm speaking, I don't think to myself, "Ok, this is parenthetical... this is correcting an error... this is vague and all-purpose." I just speak.

I'm not a native English speaker. When I started learning and speaking in English, I would think to myself, "Ok, the word "which", when used after a slight pause, which corresponds to the comma in writing, it means a non-restrictive relative pronoun, which is what I want now, so I'm going to use it that way". As I kept practicing the language, I internalized the rule, becoming less and less actively conscious of it. Lojban is no exception. I have already internalized some parts of the grammar to which I used to pay much attention in my earlier period of learning.

Also important to note is that, what English expresses with non-verbal properties such as intonation, Lojban can do verbally. When you orally say something in English which you would put in a parenthesis in writing, your speech act are still subject to some phonetic principles such as inserting a pause, changing the rhythm, lowering the pitch, using less breath, and so on. You consciously or unconsciously have to be in command of these properties if you are to successfully deliver your utterance. A particular combination of these non-verbal phonetic properties is what Lojban expresses with to ... toi, the parenthetical markers. Whether or not you are actively conscious of them is a matter of internalization. Just like an experienced English speaker not always actively thinks about each noun's grammatical number in their utterance but still manages to add the plural marker "s" where appropriate, an experienced Lojban speaker would be able to correctly start a parenthetical note with "to" but without always actively checking whether or not that's what they really want to say.

> I realize at this point, I'm getting beyond my own knowledge of Lojban, but I just want to make the general point that being able to be ambiguous does not automatically afford the advantages of the natural ambiguity in "natlangs."

Could you give me an English example with such advantages?
Thanks, I didn't know that! With regard to the non-geographical "timezone" concept, is that what the time zone ID string concept "Europe/London" aims to solve (along with historical and assumed future rules specifying time changes)? I always wondered why those were used.
Well, the USPS won't sell mailing lists (AFAIK), but lots of other places do (SalesGenie is one.. but not cheap)

Sourcing/spidering phone books, or chambers of commerce for specific towns is another method if you have more time than cash.
I still think the <a ... rel="embed, present">...</a> was a better solution...
Since Redis 1.1 (currently in beta - don't use it in production for now) there is a new append-only journal storage system alternative to the main one (that is, snapshotting), so starting from 1.1 Resque will be more reliable as well if needed, because in this new (optional) configuration Redis can't lose data. It's also possible to configure if it should fsync() never, everysec, or after every write. It's up to you to select the tradeoff between speed and safety :)
Yes, PC should be better left alone. There are a huge sink of time. Even with Linux on them --- where you do not lose as much time as with that other operating system --- you will still be much more productive with pen and paper.
Trends in the advancement of storage virtualization
For 90% of the sites that I visit, I would prefer no flash. Not to mention the battery, last thing I want is flash chewing through my battery for flash that I dont even want to see. I wouldnt mind the ability to click on a flash movie that isnt youtube, and have it launch a player.
By default, yes, all slices you get are kept at the same data center. That way, if you have traffic between slices, they're on the same LAN and they don't have to charge you for that bandwidth. As has been mentioned, you can request a slice at a different data center, but it does have to be requested.
For a straight web site, I'm sure any of these are fine if not "pricey". What do you folks use for web service hosting? Sure, it can be just a web host like any other. But Heroku (last time I checked) does not support any form of long-polling and/or streaming for instance.

I can setup a VPS with nginx proxying to tornado/node.js/etc that does streaming without a problem. However, there's the issue of scaling it out that's pain. You can use Linode's API or something similar but eek, what a mess.

Thoughts?
2 books, content & product blogs, Twitter accounts, countless interviews & presentations, & now a podcast -- all driven by a consistent, unique message and business transparency.

After watching 37s over the years, anyone who hires a PR firm today hasn't been paying attention.

(Having said that, I don't know how they find the time for it all.)
Speaking as an Indian by ethnicity but American (U.S.) by birth and heart, I can say I have always found India to be void of innovation. There is a general attitude there that there making leaps and bounds in terms of developing their economy and technology, when in reality they are just doing grunt work for the rest of the world. Being a cost leader is not sustainable, and they don't realize that.
Stay away from SugarSync on mac. After 3 months of using them, I've had to reset my entire sync library 5 times after the shitty client gets corrupted and takes over the CPU and ram.
Obviously they are admitting this is the "worst app server tech", but seriously, since all of the communications are public and unencrypted, a rogue-agent could torpedo all entries by POSTing corrupt/meaningless data to the "output" endpoints during the calculation processing just by watching for properly formatted WASTE messages. A "correct" entry could then never be found.

Also, it could be the case that no combination of WASTEpoint steps could solve the problem (though they may tailor the calculation problem based on the registered WASTEpoints). I also wonder if some of the accounts may be suspended as spam mid-way through the contest?

This is an interesting idea, but I think the transport mechanism is too open.
This, I feel, has just crossed the line in becoming troll submissions. What are the point of all these threads? Most are massively off topic.
Those are some great straw-man arguments! Anyone who says that "Before the 20th century people lived off the land, and all was good" is an idiot and guilty of vast oversimplification. More importantly, the author never said anything like that. I've read a lot of what Ran has written, and he advocates MOVING FORWARD and in fact demolishes the silly "future primitive" approach. Going back is a conservative viewpoint, and he is most certainly not conservative. What he constantly returns to is that we are not at the pinnacle of human societal development, and that by leaving behind SOME of the problems of our current society (like wage-slavery) and creating new societal ideas and forms, we can go forward to a better place.

Oh yeah, by the way, I don't think Ran has ever written about development in Africa, and he actually loathes hard labor and would be the first to agree that farm labor can really suck! But don't worry, some people may not notice that your comment has nothing to do with the stated purpose of this comment section, namely COMMENTING ON THE ARTICLE AT HAND.
I think discounting entertainment as not having value is where you're going wrong. This may be precisely where the value is for the constant update, interruptions interrupting interruptions, hyper-flow of information.

Other uses might be traffic information, black-friday sales, tornado tracking/response, stock trading, organizing and coordinating civil protest, and rapid response for brand managers.
I totally hear you there. Herbert the Friendly Dragon can only get into so many sticky situations that require the children of the village to help him out before I start repeating myself :-)
> Note that timezones aren't just geographical. In London, you'll be in timezone GMT (+0000) for half the year and timezone BST (+0100) for half the year.

You're comparing apples and oranges. There are two different concepts here: 1) the name of a UTC offset for a given period of time in a given region i.e. BST. 2) the geographic area that has a set of rules about when to change the UTC offset.

In the US, we call #1 "Central Standard Time or Central Daylight Time" and #2 "Central Time". #1 means "UTC -6", and #2 means "convert UTC according to whatever the current rule is".

The author's point is to store local time + concept #2.

EDIT: ok, I see what you mean. If the user types in "send me a reminder at 12:30 Oct 25 London time, you don't know whether they're talking about pre-DST, or post-DST. Interesting.
1. I use the arrow keys to scroll in Firefox. You have made them move me up and down through the set of results. I see what you're trying for, but it's too jerky and confusing for me.

2. If I hold down TAB and click on an item in the Zero-Click Info section, my current tab still gets redirected to the linked page. This is now how links normally behave in Firefox.
Not only off topic, but are based around some inane generalization.
Given the comment below linking to the register article mentioning no floating point units on chip, maybe they are emulating FP in software giving the lowly number.
Finally someone shows the other side of the story about education in the U.S. -- not saying either is right, but always great to have balance.

Education and Climate are currently the two most abused topics facing our politics and society today.
How to extract your LinkedIn, Facebook contacts
While I think the constant pressure to reform is generally a positive force, to hear that AP placement in math and sciences is triple what it was a decade ago is a nice reminder of progress.
World Building in a Crazy World
There are already three companies building OpenCL GPGPUs.
Thanks (my upvote didn't work for your comment). I didn't mention that I'm in a rental so I'm looking for a floor lamp or similar option. Maybe an array of desk lamps similar to your chandelier. ;)
Awesome. I like seeing news about the private air industry here. I normally wouldn't think this is hacker related, but knowing a few private pilots they're definitely of the hacker mentality. And seeing this article here just feels rights.

Also, the private pilot culture is definitely of the geeky variety, sans computers (though some cockpit gadgets are pretty impressive now-days).
Why Are Kilimanjaro's Glaciers Fading?
Being a cost leader is not sustainable, and they don't realize that.

I don't think it is so much that they don't realize it as it is that they see cheaper cost as a huge advantage, jump on that bandwagon and end up building some huge corporations(ie. Wipro, Infosys, Tata). I don't see anything wrong with those companies.

Secondly, I get the sense that you are defining innovation very narrowly. All of the huge consulting companies out of India are a work of a lot of backend innovation. The smaller ones also do innovation--albeit at a smaller scale. Difference is they are innovating on things like management and education.

they are just doing grunt work for the rest of the world

So are many of the programmers at Google.

I feel what you are seeing in India is a huge bunch of people for whom the Wipro and Infosys salaries were akin to selling a small startup in the Valley. Your standard of living takes a major jump. Overtime, and we are already seeing more and more of this, these employees of big corps realize they need more money and the once-enough salaries are no longer that motivating. This is when you'll see more startups. And if few of them end up becoming the next Wipro/Infosys, I don't care if people attack it for lack of innovation.

There are far more companies known for "innovation" than companies doing multi-billion in sales. I'd rather be in the latter though that may be a personal choice.
Wow, this has to be just about the most blatant propaganda piece I've ever read. They somehow managed to avoid citing a single relevant fact or statistic, and yet claim that there is 'evidence' that our school system is largely succeeding. Reading this truly makes me feel like I'm from another planet or something.

edit: Let me just preempt this whole discussion by saying that anyone who claims that more people going through the system means that the system is of high quality is being incredibly intellectually dishonest.
Managing Software Engineers
Yes, it's from 2002, but still surprisingly pertinent.
Yes, it's from 2002, but still surprisingly pertinent, in my opinion.
The Decade’s Biggest Bonuses (Surprise: No.1 is not from Wall St)
There was a great Inc.com interview posted on HN yesterday (until some jerk commented on one line from the interview and ruined the whole conversation...) about what an average day looks like for Jason: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-way-i-work-jason-fr...

Definitely worth the read.
Strategies to Build Sustainable Web Traffic to Your Startup
"After watching 37s over the years, anyone who hires a PR firm today hasn't been paying attention."

A PR firm is just a different path to the same destination, though most of them DO suck.

Believe it or not, there ARE PR firms out there that chase a similar strategy to 37s. The 37s guys are awesome at PR. If you are not awesome at PR, then you can hire a firm. But yeah, if you hire a crappy firm that sends out press releases, you probably HAVEN'T been paying attention (and neither has the PR firm).
"Another is to group related websites together and run ads evenly across all of them. This is how most smaller ad networks work."

I help design ad ops software for ad networks, and ads definitely don't "run evenly" across ad networks.

Some campaigns are broken out into hundreds of parts, where a particular part will target a certain set of creatives at users/ad spaces with certain parameters. The parameters include browser, BT, time of day, connection speed, geo location, and more.

It is actually quite rare to have a straight run of network campaign.
Psychological/sociological issues are interesting to me and perhaps others -- particularly those interested in social apps.

It's interesting to see whether experiences that you might expect people in some group to have were actually experienced by many people in that group.

Moreover, such discussions not only tell you something about the psyche of the startup community and/or users but might also give you novel startup ideas.

For example, one could imagine a startup to help convince your parents that you made a reasonable career choice.
Everything Should Have An API
Given the current legal quagmire that is the joltid/skype/ebay saga, I doubt they could open source the whole thing even if they wanted to.
<sarcasm>
- I guess since it's on the Internet it must be true.
- All the other smartphones which have Flash must have 30 min battery life.
- Apple is saint and Adobe is evil.
- iPhone is such an open platform.
</sarcasm>
The real problem with "Duck Duck Go" is that it's too long and not easily verbed. You'll notice everyone is going for the easily verbed names because they're marketable and great.

I used Duck Duck Go for a month or so earlier this year. I liked it and thought it was awesome for general queries like movie or person names but pretty bad for text searches, like error messages. For this reason, I returned to Google. I also thought there were way too many "Search on these sites..." icons for that to be useful in any way; if Google was easily searched from there with just a click, I may not have changed back.

Most people don't like the name "Duck Duck Go", and it's too long, I think. Guy should rebrand it into something similar but under two syllables.
I wrote DJ. This looks amazing for high volume sites. At Shopify DJ is barely able to keep up these days.

My biggest regret with DJ is actually that I added numerical priorities instead of choosing the same tag based approach that Resque implemented. I'll likely release a DJ2 at some point which backports some of the ideas.
And #1 on the list is a well deserved bonus too.
Agreed, this "story" smells fishy. How is it that flash works acceptably on other platforms but not the iPhone?

A much more likely explanation is the one everyone has been assuming, viz., Apple doesn't want any code they haven't approved running on the phone, period.
Rethinking Customer Support
> , but I don't think there is any electrified freight service.

Are you sure. I live in a third world country and most freight tracks are electrified.
You might want to listen to this venture voice episode that I just heard:

http://www.venturevoice.com/2007/06/vv_show_46_jeremy_stoppe...

It's about the beginning of yelp by it's founder and one of the areas he touched on is how they started off in new geographic areas. It might be a good fit for your situation.
BNSF rails are used for mass transit in Chicago. They're also used for Amtrak routes.

BNSF has historically been the freight railroad most friendly to passenger rail. Unlike Union Pacific and CSX, they aren't antagonistic to Amtrak, and make an effort to give the passenger trains proper right-of-way.

An interesting note about the Metra service in Chicago is that it is operated by the BNSF under contract with the State. So the Metra conductors on the BNSF line are actually BNSF employees. It is one of the busiest and most productive lines Metra operates. It's also one of the most professional.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect
I get that, but that's still not what it means. I can say that A means B all day and it doesn't change reality. Google, Yahoo and MSoft have defined SEO and support that definition.

If someone tells you that keyword stuffing is SEO, they're wrong. I could tell you that stuffing chickens in a bag is plumbing, that doesn't make plumbing snake oil.
I was actually thinking about writing this for my own use. This is great!
True, there are probably a few.

But I'm starting to believe that -- just like Craig Newmark and Fried suggest doing your own customer service (as long as humanly possible, Newmark still does it daily b/c he's crazy, I think Fried has hired a couple people to do the daily, easy-to-handle questions & problems) so that you "feel the pain" -- you should do your own PR, not just b/c it's cheaper, but also so you can sense what connects and what doesn't and give your small company/startup a human face as soon as possible.
Where is Twitter? - 250,000 users plotted on a google map
Article is completely devoid of content.
Flash doesn't run "acceptably" on OSX or Linux. It uses around 30% of my cpu on either platform, compared to using only 3% of the cpu on my windows machine. Clearly they have some work to do before they can make flash as efficient as running on their core platform.

Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone...

Running any flash app on my macbook causes the fan to turn on within 5 minutes -- it's horrible.
You can install click2flash plugins on most browser that wont load the flash until you click on it.