skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found the press release you were referencing: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/server_virtuali...

It proves exactly my point: That focusing on power usage is backwards. You should worry about other stuff, like using less servers.

The guy that worries about using less servers can consolidate 159 servers to 28. He saves $5 million dollars and $10k/mo. The guy that worries about power usage itself just buys 159 slightly less power hungry servers. He saves $2k/mo.
Google bought Android before Apple announced the iPhone, although it wouldn't surprise me if Google changed their strategy to target Apple after seeing the iPhone.
No no, I think he speaks of 50 requests from the get go, i.e., 50 requests of 100 friends each, irrespective of the number of servers. These 50 requests is unrelated to the number of friends, it's just some huge number of requests. He claims that no matter how you divide the data, if a certain number of requests create a CPU bottleneck, they'll continue to do so no matter how you increase memory.
This isn't really related to the RFS, but the idea of Twitter as a new protocol sort of scares me. Most of the successful internet/web protocols so far have not been controlled by a single company, but if Twitter can sustain their current growth there's no reason for them to open up the "protocol".
"... We want to fund those companies. And the people at Twitter also want to encourage people to built stuff on top of it. .."

Is building apps using Twitter what building apps to MS was?
New Robocar center at Stanford, Audi TT to race up Pike's Peak | Brad Ideas
Is it useful? I love Fried's point about your product being useful. Useful>Innovative.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902614
That graph of theirs has the yes and no colors reversed on the legend. Either that or the numbers are reversed, but that's doubtful.
I checked it out real quick because it actually looked pretty presentable/useful for other folks (I have 0 debt, literally, not even a quarter to a co-worker now). Playing with the test account, there's no way to view the annual interest rate for cards after you've entered them, or a way to change the interest rates. I tried and tried. Also, it's unintuitive to provide options in the edit card screen that weren't there for the initial creation, but to not display fields that were there for the initial creation.
That's the "broken windows" theory, which is half right. They actually create jobs by doing work.

Imagine the simplest case of 2 people (Alice and Bob) and a single $100 bill. If Alice is kind hearted and gives Bob $100 every time she is able but Bob pays $100 for Alice's work (say, making a chair, painting a house, etc.) this isn't a functional economy. All of Alice's labor goes to benefit Bob, Alice would be better off abstaining from the "economy" and using her labor to benefit herself.

Now imagine that Alice gives Bob $100 for work that Bob's done, then Bob gives Alice $100 for work that Alice has done, etc, etc. Alice then ends up with the fruits of Bob's labor, and Bob ends up with the fruits of Alice's labor, if they have unique skills then this true economy could be mutually beneficial.

The trading of money is just a proxy for the bartering of goods and services, money is just paper. Doing work contributes positively to the economy, it's the fundamental building block of the economy (not spending money).
-Traffic monitoring. Partner with a few delivery companies, and you can start to push live traffic feeds to the web. Start in one city to test feasibility, then grow.

-Maps. Let people register to record a trip from their home to work. Send the package, they set it up on their dashboard, record the round-trip, then send the package to the next location.

-Secret shopping. Boy, do they treat people poorly at some places. Please take a live feed, so employees can be fired or rewarded on the spot.

- Recording Clubs live, so I know what it looks like before I go and spend 10 bucks to get in and find it empty.
Thanks, everyone. Based on your advice I went ahead and signed up for Google. We'll see how it works out.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903276
You'll have a marketing challenge because of all the scammers and spammers out there. Instead of saying manage your credit card debt, maybe say personal card management software. My initial reaction is that you're looking at a huge disadvantage just because of other non-related evil doers.
This is a site that's really good for beginners:

http://www.statisticshowto.com

And it's really relevant here because the approach to everything is step by step -- the author of the site probably doesn't realize it, but the tutorial steps practically read like pseudo code... seems like it could really help you.

Also, there are some calculators on there, and I've seen the code, which isn't bad, and it's not obfuscated so if you want to get an idea of how to implement something, you can just look at the source directly.
remember to check the LCD monitor for high frequency noise, too. recently i came across several samsung monitors with this issue :|
Great idea - few things:

- You could have problems with mastercard wanting to protect their trademark.

- Your homepage is pretty heavy on copy. The copy's a bit long on hyperbole, too. Maybe edit down a bit and add a banner pic/video. Webapp homepages are a bit of an art, but good ones are fairly formulaic, too. Lots of examples out there, smashing magazine is always worth a look for inspiration.

I didn't try your app (not really very useful for me), but I think if you fix your homepage, you could convert really well. It's a problem a lot of people could use help with.
No, because context is king. If I ask a question and I get an answ3er within 15 minutes I still have the right context. IF I get answer next day I may no longer care as much.
I've written about this before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728863

I freely admit I'm unusual, but then again, so are you.

Here it is again:

If you apply for a job with me, I want to know why I should employ you. I want to know how you will add value to my company. I want to know that you will bring skills and abilities.

Do you know what I want? You should. You shouldn't just read the ad for the job - you should find out what my company does, then read the ad, and work out how your skills will help me meet my goal of making money. If you can't or won't do those things, I probably don't want you to work for me.

What skills do you have? How can I tell?

Can you work on your own? How can I tell?

Can you work in a team? How can I tell?

Will you get things done? How can I tell?

I don't really care about your education, or your recent jobs, unless they show me why you are the right person for me. And I want to read that on the first page, preferably in the first paragraph, and preferably without typos, grammatical errors, or anything else to distract me. I don't at this stage really care what your name is, or how to contact you, or whether you can typeset 16 different fonts on the same page.

Why should I employ you? What do you think I want, and why should I think you have it.
That's evil genius thinking right there. There are some newsgroup postings Google has archived for eternity I would pay good money to get rid of.
Hosting this might get expensive after a while, are you going to put up ads anywhere or do you plan on eating the cost???
4th International Workshop on Plan 9
Will the November 5th invitation date remain unchanged?
They don't make laptops with 42" screens, which is what he has attached to the mini.
That was a great read - nice work jacquesm!
An always on torrent server, as described in the article, doesn't sleep.
I've noticed recent startups aren't that fixated on having the domain from the get-go (dropbox is a notable recent one).

I have no idea what stage you're at, but is it worth considering just going with websiteapp.com, getwebsite.com, websitehq.com or whatever until you've proven the concept enough to make the purchase worthwhile?

Domain names don't seem to be very fungible, and it's a market where it seems that professional dealers seem to have an unfair advantage (like real estate). Nightmare.
Do serious PHP developers use PHP's built-in template language? Yahoo and Facebook don't.

PHP is also not tuned to some fitness function; it tunes its users. In exchange for not having to understand abstraction or OO, you get to learn the wierd quirks of thousands of inconsistently-named functions that live in a shared global environment. Sure, the number of "concepts" you have to know is low (no closures, no MOP, no lexical scope, ...), but the number of inane details you have to know is high. PHP shows that people would rather understand the exact details of arguments to a function instead of understanding abstraction and metaprogramming. (Similarly, people like to cram for exams without really understand the subject matter.)

That is fine, but unless you are "people in general", you are missing out on a lot by "choosing" PHP.

(Deployment is always a big issue. Do you really want to market your app to people that can't even run a package manager, "cpan" or equivalent, and so on? I find Perl perfectly easy to deploy. If I can't "apt-get install" the app, I type "cpan AppName", wait a while, and my app works.

Additionally, users that find deployment too hard unless it's "untar this and click pictures" are going to require a lot of support but aren't going to contribute a lot of code back to you. So maybe this isn't the best optimization to make.

Finally, why not JSP for this? Startup Tomcat, edit code in a web page, and boom, your "app" works. It ain't pretty, but it's better than PHP. Tomcat is no harder to setup than Apache + mod_php either.)
As far as blogging? I know a guy making a few grand per month, but he's got 30-some sites going at any given time, and can spend as much as 15 hours per day, 6-7 days per week developing, ferreting out and posting content. Like pmichaud, they seem to be niche sites, and if things aren't panning out with some topic, it gets abandoned.

While it's difficult to put a metric on thought work, I think, at least for myself, it's easier to put in my 40-something per week, do a little bit of weekend work in maintenance windows and on-call. And I still make more than he does, plus have insurance for my family. But he's his own boss and loves it. It works for him and his family.

There's probably this extremely minuscule core of people who either through luck or years of brute force, can make a fabulous, lavish living on a handful of blogs, but the big names you already know are basically on the clock every waking hour. Kudos to them. They're definitely the exception, not the rule.
Thanks gstar - any examples of some good webapp homepages?
cgherb911 - 'personal card management software' - I like that, has a really nice ring to it :)
I'll take this opportunity to plug my site that is built using the Twitter API - http://www.playtwabble.com . Twabble is a vocabulary game based on the words you use in your Twitter status updates. It uses a point system based on the game Scrabble. I built it to learn Django and Python. I didn't get much feedback when I submitted it to HN, so here goes again?
Hope this isn't spammy, I think my game illustrates a basic example of what is possible with Twitter.
Bump Technologies (YC S09) Confirms Sequoia Funding, Reveals Roster Of Angels
I wonder if the augmented reality tech that Yelp is using on the iphone could be overlaid on a Justin.tv stream. Anyone watching a stream could click on a business in the video and connect to their site|Opentable|Yelp. If we could get solid object recognition working we could link to Amazon product pages (revenue!!) or such. Find a bottle of Pepsi|Coke in a stream, click on it, get a coupon for .50 off your next Whopper meal with a large soda. (revenue??)
Popcorn: Data Driven Testing using JSON
ismarc - I will get that fixed, thanks! And if you have a chance to set up a new account (even though you don't have any debt yourself) and give it a proper run through some time I'd love to hear some more of your thoughts on design/usability.
It's probably not trivial to put the firehose in place. Until they have some way of reliably and scalably opening it up and charging for it, close partners are probably the only practical customers.
Really? I do all my work at work through VMWare to a Linux image. I honestly wouldn't know that I'm not sitting at a Linux box save for the little border at the top of the VMWare console. Performance is the same.

I hear when you go the other way, Windows windows appear as windows on your Linux desktop. Sounds cool.
The beauty of twitter isn't that you send messages without specifying recipients. Any billboard does this. HTML webpages, blogs with RSS feeds, etc do this.

Twitter allows you to:

1. Communicate on equal footing. You're living on someone else's blog, or their social news site, or their subreddit, or their messageboard, or in their chat room. There's no need to shout anyone down with negative karma, because everyone controls their own feed.

2. Control your world. If you stop following someone, they basically cease to exist. On the other hand, they can follow you if they want, with no harm to you. This allows celebrities to share directly in a way they never have before.

3. Stay engaged with minimal time. Tweets are limited to 140 characters for everyone. Writing a blog post requires a commitment and willpower. A tweet is extremely easy.

Despite all of this, Twitter itself is very awkward to use, and making sense of the un-threaded mass is very difficult. It's reaching mass adoption because it can be all things to all people (microblog, chat, rss feed, friend updates, broadcast announcements, etc).

There are better ways out there to facilitate good discussions. Google is trying to tackle the office collaboration problem with Wave, and I think there's huge progress to be made in the space of online discussions, separate from the current plethora of news reaction sites (coughhackernewscough) that we have now. The inevitable rise of self-posts on news sites (it's usually resisted or frowned on at first) shows the existence of this need.
Recording Clubs live

We have http://justin.tv/dnalounge - that one has worked out pretty well, but obviously jwz isn't your average club owner. I'd love to see someone start a jtv-based business that helps all the other clubs get online (but I have no idea what YC would think of it - just in case that needs to be said!).
IMHO This is a good idea.

One reason why I don't use twitter much is that a lot of tweets are uninteresting. Perhaps a Google-style Markov algorithm could work for filtering a feed.
A worthwhile idea. After trying a few projects, I've come to realize that it's going to have to be something I care enough about to sacrifice my time and energy for and sell without feeling fake.

I really have no clue what that is. All I want is cash money really.
The problem is that other forms of birth control all suck in one way or another. Your chances of successfully preventing pregnancy go down if you can't use hormonal contraceptives. That's why they were a big deal when they were invented.
Yes, the Linux kernel code quality is low, and things often regress. C + no unit tests + opinionated dictator with very little computer science experience = very, very bad. But it works well enough. As long as you are on the beaten path, with Intel hardware and Nothing Too Weird, you will be fine. On OS X, you don't even have the choice to even try anything else.

As for the distribution issue, it's true that you are either out of date or slightly unstable. But on OS X, you can't get any packages at all. So you manage everything yourself, or rely on a third party to package everything for you. Then you are out of date or unstable, and the various package managers conflict with each other and with Apple's stuff. There is no magic fix there, it's the same set of problems.

So anyway, I don't care what OS you use... but OS X is not objectively better. (I have noticed that OS X users prefer no way to do something over a flaky way to do something. Linux has a lot of flaky ways to do a lot of things; OS X just doesn't do much. Tradeoffs.)
Content-Based Music Information Retrieval [pdf]
Presumably Twitter is doing this because they have limited time, and they feel like giving priority to YC companies makes sense because they are well vetted.

It's not a great system, but even a bad policy is sometimes a step in the right direction.
There were 5 production and 8 mock-up vehicles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_program#Current_status
How to Fix Our Education System
Google TechTalk: Initiatives in Education
I've been a sysadmin for several years now.

I don't know what would possess me to run that program as me, I would run it as them. That's if I ran it at all since I would check the fault they reported first anyway.
Networking, networking, networking. I hit up everyone I had worked with in the previous few years, and several came up with projects that they wanted done which I was an ideal candidate for.

It helped a lot that I maintained connections and have an unusual combination of useful skills. Therefore people have things they want done which they know I can do, but don't know who else could.
Hi, I know I haven't set up the ToS yet, probably a bad move on my part as I guess this should be the first thing I should have set up. Will definitely take care of this today.

As for the tour link going to a 404, I mentioned this in my original post - I haven't bothered with it yet.

On the email address thing, I do see what you're saying, but I sort of feel like in this day and age you can claim your service is anonymous/doesn't ask for 'personal details' even if you ask for an email address.
As for the tour link going to a 404, I mentioned this in my original post - I haven't bothered with it yet.

Yes, just spotted that and deleted my post because of it!

Oh well. :)
Report: Use student performance to rate teachers
Pardon the expression, but people are complete suckers for sort of thing.

Given two similar services, one with a limit on registration and one without, you can bet that the one with the limit will garner some sort of popularity just by virtue of being "exclusive."

This doesn't mean it's a bad marketing tactic. On the contrary, it's obviously excellent for exposure... but if it ever becomes a popular service, saying "I was there first" is a huge deal for people. For reference: Lines outside movie theaters days in advance for the Star Wars movies, video game midnight release parties, and 8 hour lines outside Apple stores for a phone.
Rubypython: A bridge between Ruby and Python
I have a similar experience.

I got used to having a linux server on 24/7 when I was in college (no electricity bill in the dorms).

I moved to California when I graduated, and was spending over $40/month on electricity. I borrowed a friends kill-a-watt and measured my server at 180W-220W depending on the load!

I put together a machine based around the Via C7 and measured it as using 18W at the outlet. The whole thing cost a bit over $300. Also, no fan, which is nice as the server is now in my living room. As soon as SSDs get cheap enough, I'll have a no-moving-parts server.
Newspaper Circ Declines Driven by Cost-Cutting, Price Hikes, Voluntary Pullbacks
Mine was in the Bunker! It was related to Red Alert 1 and had lots of Under Construction images :)
I read this in the print edition this afternoon. The expert panel identify one problem with education reform: lack of incentives that will move the key actors who could make things better.

"MR. MURRAY: When NIH funding discovers some protein that will cure some disease, it gets snapped up in a heartbeat by big pharmaceutical companies who capitalize on it and make it widely available at a profit. When we have lots of successful experiments in education, the mechanisms for transmitting that success to the broader system don't seem to work very well. Why?

"MR. KLEIN: In part because there are not competitive influences that drive it. In a public-delivery system like ours, competition is not typically a driver."
The point is not having to sync stuff between multiple computers. Of course if you fully embrace "the cloud" it might be less of an issue, but that is not for everyone.
There seems to be a consensus that SEO is distorting Google search. I think I can refine that a bit. It appears that Google is using a "don't feed the trolls" strategy in response to link spam. Here's my evidence:

"The Modbookish" is an inconsequential six member Ning social network, but doing a Google search on "Modbookish" is interesting. There are the annoying 'Google thinks you are stupid' hits like the site in which there is a sentence ending with "mod" followed by a sentence beginning with "Bookish". The remaining results are sites that link to the Modbookish. However, the Modbookish itself is NOT in the results. As Google ads are on the site, there is no doubt that the Google bot visited it shortly after it went online. Nonetheless, Google has refused to put the site into its web index for a couple months now. Clearly, (and not without cause), it is assuming that the pages that link to the site are link spam. It is probably waiting for some semi-authoritative link to appear before it indexes it.

So, why is this bad? It undermines Google search purpose: to provide the most relevant results. When Google got started, I recall that when Sergey or Larry were asked why Google search was better they often offered the Harvard example. If one enters the search term "Harvard" with no other terms into a web search box, there is really only one reasonable search result: the Harvard University website. However, in the search engines of the time, the university often ended up on page five or six. On Google, it was search result number one. By the same token, if you enter "Modbookish" (no spaces) there is only one reasonable result, and Google doesn't offer it. In contrast, both Duck-Duck-Go and Yahoo list it in the first spot.

Why is this really bad? Many (Most?) websites do not do their own site indexing; they let Google do it for them. Clearly if Google refuses to index a certain important but only occasionally referenced page, that is a problem.
Ok, that is fairly expensive. I pay 0.74 ZAR (~0.097 USD) per KWH.

Although, a recent proposal of a 135% increase over the next three years is under discussion.
I am curious to see evidence of the encouragement to cut and paste. Especially now that 5.3 has real first class functions, I can not see what paradigm/feature (other than macro expansion) you are using in another language which can not be done in php. Well ok mixins would definitely be nice...
What I've learned from debating religious people around the world.
You live in a wonderful country!
Lithium - another (new) PHP framework
Oh, sorry. I just replied to your comment doubting the use of type systems. I did not want to make a statement about C++. I guess you could make C++ dance, if you tried and were smart enough.
Microsoft to open up Outlook .PST data format
What to do with a Full /dev/null
If it looks like time has been spent on attention-to-detail - and the application's approach has been thought out well, there's a fair chance visitors will view the app as a quality product regardless of graphical finesse.

Maybe the best approach to take when good graphic design is in short supply, is to keep it simple - and strip back all graphic elements that have no strict purpose?
Finding Users: "Proof that we're not (completely) crazy"
We are on it; http://thecadmus.com.
The maintainers of the contraptor project have done some pretty neat demonstrations with an Arduino. I was particularly impressed with this X-Y plotter/drilling assembly: http://www.contraptor.org/fast-drilling-contraption
I'm not very familiar with memcached - is replication and load balancing built-in, or something facebook added on themselves?
from your profile: My dream is to make a big chunk of fk you money without having to do marketing or sales.

Web commerce doesn't sound like the way to go for you. You want to be a Wall Streeter.
There's also foldr: http://foldr.com/