skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has (had?) this opinion, I think this is a straw-man: my sentiment is that "python syntax is good enough to take a 3 year break from evolution" seems too confident.
What paid for the roads he took on his way to music classes? What funded the internet he made money off of? What paid for the tanks that kept his country in such a state that people could spend time studying music rather than fighting civil wars and subsistence farming? I'm sure I'm no more a fan of the Iraq War than he is, but I'm glad we have tanks and nukes, if for no other reason than their very existence reduces the likelihood we will need them.

If everyone gave their money to helping other people with their hobbies, rather than paying taxes, would you want to live here?
Ben and Dion left in September, just before we kicked off the "Bespin Reboot" project, which we had been planning since mid-summer. I believe we'll soon have much better velocity than we did previously, thanks to our work in the Reboot. (Reboot is not a rewrite, but a very significant rearrangement of the code.)

(I am on the Bespin team.)
Build It With Me (Connects designers and developers)
Intel Cancels Larrabee graphics card
When is Rails 3 going to be released and where do I download the current (unstable?) Rails 3 version?
In his stack example, why doesn't the normal method need a filter? Does the execution of methods which match a filter take precedence over unfiltered methods?
This seems to me like a classic case of a company buying another company just for it's patents. I'd be willing to bet that the main reason Google is buying Etherpad is their synchronization patent and any other patents Etherpad owns that cover the functionality of Google Wave. Google probably won't use any of the Etherpad code in Wave.
Much like how we project our ideas about our ideal love-object onto the people we fall in love with. Which, of course, no person can ever live up to.

"God" is a very flexible object of contemplation. As a word, its entire meaning is dependent on context. To a great extent that context is very private. Yet most of humanity naively bandies it about as if we're already agreed on what it means. As a meme it's certainly one of the most, if not the most, successful that's ever grabbed hold of us. For whatever purposes.
For being written in November 2009, this is comedy:

Of the various marketing ploys used in business to promote websites, the most controversial is a technique known as search-engine optimisation. Several years ago, web developers found they could boost search-engine results for their clients by stuffing their web pages with all sorts of popular keywords and phrases, many of which bore no relationship to the actual content.

Now Google, Yahoo! and others are wise to such marketing gambits, the riggers have started stuffing a web page’s metatags (hidden attributes of a web page that describe its content) with words that score highly on search engines. As a further refinement, they bury phoney keywords in the web page’s actual programming where they cannot be filtered out but can still boost the page’s ranking. Such tricks are now being adopted widely by cybercriminals.

EDIT: It gets even better:

How do you protect yourself? It is difficult to say. But there are a few obvious things you can do to practice safe surfing. First, never click on links to unfamiliar websites—especially those that promise unbelievable deals. If you must visit them, type the web address manually into the browser’s address bar yourself.

What? How does that help? Are spammers infecting Google now so that the URL listed isn't the one that the link goes to? :)

Second, know the retailer. Even if an unfamiliar site looks legitimate, if the company appears to be based in America or Canada, check it out on Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org) before visiting it.

Umm...how am I supposed to know if it looks legitimate before I visit it?

Journalists who write from the economist should have to consult a security expert before publishing stuff like this.
Not only does it not explain why there are so many Israeli startups, but it's a false hypothesis altogether. Aside from the fact that IQ is more a representation of adaptation to modernity than intelligence, there are many environmental factors that come into play.

There would probably be more startups in the Arab population if they weren't so discriminated against in the country.
A related theory (PDF): http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocs...
Every installation of this program needs to come with a statistician to stand over your shoulder and hit you with a ruler and shout "That's data mining, not a controlled experiment! No causality for you!"
CrunchPad Litigation Imminent
apparently, second life insiders don't think much of this article: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/11/five-bbc-fact-fails.html
Does anyone know what exactly Apple did that infringed this patent? Looking at it (to the extent I can parse patent-speak) it appears to be on an optimization in PCI DMA transfers. Does Apple actually make their own PCI controllers? I would think this would be something they would source from chipset manufacturers like Intel, and if so, how could OPTi successfully sue Apple for it? I checked several other articles about the judgement but none had any details on this part of the case.
The Entrepreneurs of the Decade: 2000 to 2009
The latest Rails is at GitHub: http://github.com/rails/rails/

As for the release date: "[T]he Rails 3 release date will likely be in the first quarter of 2010, or even before Christmas 09 if things go really well." (http://railsnotes.com/745-rails-3-release-date-news/)
yeah. thanks mate. i must've changed the URL after posting.
Adoption. Email is universal. The notifications are already coming via email, not RSS.
Here's a use case: someone sends an office-wide email saying, "There are Christmas cookies in the kitchen. Help yourself."

I think notifications handle that use case better than RSS. I think of notifications as basically an email subject with no body.
The Gambler Who Blew $127 Million
Considering theres only about 13 million Jewish people in the world, they are disproportionately successful. Top of the Forbes 400, correct me if I'm wrong -

1 William Gates III, Athiest/Agnostic

2 Warren Buffett, Athiest/Agnostic

3	Lawrence Ellison, Jewish

4	Christy Walton & family, Inheritance

5	Jim C. Walton, Inheritance

6	Alice Walton, Inheritance

7	S. Robson Walton, Inheritance

8	Michael Bloomberg, Jewish

9	Charles Koch, ?

9	David Koch, ?

11	Sergey Brin, Jewish

11	Larry Page, ?

13	Michael Dell, Jewish

14	Steven Ballmer, Jewish

15	George Soros, Athiest, but Jewish by blood

16	Donald Bren, ?

17	Paul Allen, Athiest/Agnostic

17	Abigail Johnson, Inheritance

19	Forrest Edward Mars, Inheritance

19	Jacqueline Mars

19	John Mars, Inheritance

22	Carl Icahn, Jewish

23	Ronald Perelman, Jewish

24	George B. Kaiser, Jewish

25	Philip Knight, Athiest/Agnostic

26	Sheldon Adelson, Jewish

26	Anne Cox Chambers, Inheritance

28	Jeffrey Bezos, Jewish

29	James Simons, Jewish

30	Dan Duncan, ?

30	Edward C. Johnson III, Inheritance

32	Jack Crawford Taylor, ?

33	James Goodnight, ?

33	John Paulson, ?

35	John Kluge, ?

36	Steven Cohen, ?

37	Philip Anschutz, Evangelical Christian

37	Rupert Murdoch, Christian

39	Harold Hamm, Christian

40	Pierre Omidyar, ?

40	Eric Schmidt, ?

42	Eli Broad, Jewish

43	Steve Jobs, Buddhist?

44	Len Blavatnik, ?

44	David Geffen, Jewish
Kinda ironic for a Techcrunch product fiasco to become fodder for its own articles.

Is the crunchpad dead?
Huh. Lala is the company that bought and saved Woxy.com a few years back. (As an aside, the story of Woxy's business model transition is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOXY.com )

EDIT: Lala doesn't actually own Woxy.com anymore; my bad for forgetting.

A funny detail is that Bill Nguyen announced his intent with a short post on the site's boards, which were still up even after the second shutdown:

http://www.woxy.com/boards/showthread.php?t=41077&page=1...

As you might guess, there was some ...dubiousness from the fans.
Did Google just get into the real estate biz?
I just noticed for the first time in the google maps "More" dropdown a button for "Real Estate" - is that live for everybody?
Sigh ... let's think a bit about how speculative, ad-hoc genetic explanations for cultural achievements get traction if they spin the right way...

Can there really be evidence that the genetically similar brothers and relatives of Christian priests weren't helped by their siblings status? Can we show that priests had a disproportionate amount of the intelligence genes of the Christian population to begin with? Can we show that converted Jews (like my ancestors) didn't skew the results? Can we show, even, that priest didn't actually reproduce quite freely through the behind-the-scenes-hanky-panky they were famous for? The list could go on and on. Jeesh!
Joyo
cek & ricek
How to Generate Online Income in Any Niche Market You Desire
Sadest thing I have heard in a while. I guess I'll give squadedit a try now.
Then you might want to ease up on the coffee.
The combination of IQ and "chutzpah" is the essence of the entrepreneurial personality. If Jews are (for whatever reason) disposed to be high on these traits, it's certainly a sufficient explanation.
Sounds like the absolutely "ideal" YC story. Stick with it. Iterate. Beat 'em with technology.
What about the choice of symbolic forms? It'd be cool if some of the data analysis suggests other possible blocks to use in the modelling process.
I'd rather python take a break so libraries can develop/upgrade than go the ruby route where everything is consistently upgraded to the point that no substantial libraries really exist and you are learning a new framework or tool every few months to a year on the ruby speed of light track
John, great article. I met you at the first Rails conference in Chicago, I've used your well written CMS, so, I'm expecting addendum's to the related RFC's and an implementation into the major MUA's with all due haste :)

Seriously though, you make a great point. There is a definite distinction between "mail" and "notifications". When I went to go get my mail today, there were a bunch of actual letters, and, a bunch of postcard like notifications. Most were SPAM of course ("use our maid service!", "you need new gutters, ours are the best!", etc)... but some were legitimate reminders ("your XXX runs out in a week", "remember, we're coming by your house tomorrow").

I'm all for it, seeing that the amount of online notification-like emails are getting more and more frequent (at least in my case).
I'm a bit concerned what it will mean when Yahoo's engine is shutdown and only Bing's is left. Presumably it will cause a massive reshuffling of web traffic, because Bing's crawler and ranking algorithms are different.

There will probably be some major winners and losers as a result.
Two biggest problems with this:

1. The interface is awful and terribly slow. I don't feel like you can have filtering as a "coming soon" feature when the entire service is based around filtering. Also, I don't know what sort of awful JS is used to power the site but it really needs to go. It feels extremely sluggish (which after browsing Drew's other sites seems to be a theme).

2. It's built entirely on trust and very limited amounts of information. I feel like one could waste a lot of time contacting and vetting prospective collaborators.

I really want to like services like this; finding fellow designers/developers is difficult whether you have a project in mind or not and is really stodgy outside the comfort of referrals. Sadly, this isn't looking like a great fix to the problem (though it is a start).
See syntaxy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vib9hOL4Ju0 and similar tools in Wave.
See syntaxy
I should be able to fucking downvote things by now. This is bullshit.
I look forward to learning the other side of this fiasco.
Relevant to this, I got this upon loading the site.

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue.

Script: http://www.builditwith.me/js/jquery.js:19

While sexy, it is extremely sluggish here as well. :/
My Funnest Bugfix Ever: the Double Relative Redirect
I'm a nobody in AppStore land and I live outside the US

A few months ago I received a personal phone call from Apple just to remind me that my annual dev fee was up for renewal soon.
That's a good point. I must be in a mind-changing mood, because that definitely seems like the better option.
Printer friendly (non-paged) version:
http://www2.inc.com/print/138
Exellent point. Web apps are not the only use case.
Guy gambles away $127 million and turns around to sue the casinos - only in America!
The tech press hasn't done a very good job of being clear about the details of the deal, which is unfortunate, since it's left many people with an inaccurate picture of what it entails.

A modern search "engine" is really many, many engines. There are countless backend systems layered on top of and alongside the core algorithmic search system that most people think of when they think of a search engine (and that Microsoft will soon be running for Yahoo! as part of this deal). None of those other systems are going away as a result of this deal, nor is Yahoo! Search itself going away.

Yahoo! isn't just going to flip a switch and start using Bing's algorithmic search. As part of the deal, Microsoft has licensed the core algo search technology that currently powers Yahoo! Search, so you're likely to see more of a melding of the two.

Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo! Search (on the frontend, not the backend), but I speak for myself, not for Yahoo!.
Reminds me of Hearst running the headline, "How do you like the Journal's War?" taking credit for the Spanish-American war.
I am literally in the process of changing out Stormpulse.com's maps for something higher res (BlueMarble at 500m), and this shows up. Awesome!
Some day, code will be old news and I'm sure you people won't appreciate it when some young kid gets on stage saying "textual non-interactive computer code sucked, how could they have been so stupid?".
either: It doesn't reach down that far, or it can't lift, or they haven't thought of that.
I've never had to coordinate when I'm in the same doc as somebody at the exact same time. But I don't dispute your account. It's actually a quite interesting observation of how differently we all work.

In any case, I'll be following this thread. Tools aside, i think the topic is one of the most transformative things going on.
He still pays for that from his personal income, and pays a lot more than most of others do.
Top International Web Products of 2009
The obvious way to make it more valuable is to integrate a web version with other editors--be they rich text or not. I'm not sure how easy it is to plug into Word, but seems like that could add lots of value.
No, I'm young and healthy, and don't care about health care. I wouldn't go to the hospital anyway.

Mainly, what's keeping me from doing it is that I'm doomed to obscurity and people tend to dislike me when they either see me, hear me talk, or read what I write.

If anyone has experience overcoming those problems, I'd love to hear it. But "health care" is right around "what color is the sky?" on the list of things I worry about.
Here's an idea for an open source search engine: If you could make the search index small enough, only the crawler would have to be hosted. The actual search engine would run on each user's machine and download the diffs to the index regularly, and big brother would never see your queries.

This might be a pipe dream, as modern search indexes are probably much larger than the plaintext of the whole of the web. Maybe it could be divided by subject.. I guess that would have the same privacy problem: the server would see which subjects you were requesting. Maybe you could download the whole thing and only decompress locally the subjects and languages you wanted.
Every year I have this realization that I need to put a week aside and re-lean Rails because it changes so fast. But I'll take that any time over a framework that just atrophies.
To me it looks like they're burning down a simple product people love -- to go work on a bloated product people are at best ambivalent about.

Sure, they could end up bringing their spark to Wave and making it into something that all the Etherpad users will love even more, but what do you think the odds of that are? Why kill Etherpad before that happens?
No, it's just pining for the fjords.
Yeah, besides the Linux binary is only for 32-bit x86 machines :S
blew, past-tense. They killed their public product today, the funeral's in three months.
Anyone have a link to this video that doesn't require Flash to be installed to download it?
Jeff Bezos is not Jewish. Steven Cohen is probably Jewish. But yeah, you are right.
Interesting. Whenever I hear discussions of these sorts of things they're made out as basically swapping plugins -- Site X will now use Site Y's search algorithms, index, etc. instead of their own. If it truly is a melding that could result in better search results in aggregate, I like the idea that someone (or someones) could actually compete with Google.
Ass-slow for me as well. I thought it was broken because none of my clicks did anything. But it was just slow.

The secretly not-working search was really annoying.

"App ideas" - wow that's just annoying, but is so because you must know by now about how HN feels about ideas.

Overall good start, and a good problem to tackle but I don't realistically see how this would be any different from those "hire a freelancer" type sites. Don't mistake that for me "hating", rather it would just seem to me that the more users using your site, the more noise you are going to have to deal with. Whether that be "biz-devs" with million dollar ideas or designers straight outta devry, or lowball $20hr programmers.
Why do some people have their religion listed (or atheist/agnostic) but others have inheritance?
The sound quality on that is.. unbearable.
10 Brands That Will Disappear In 2010
But on a larger scale, it helps Ferran Adrià make money, even thought the restaurant loses cash, he ends up making money by being highly respected, in part for elBulli.

I totally agree that the restaurant's existence probably helps Adrià make money, even if on the books it's a loss.

But I have no idea whether all of the strange things about it contribute to the success - it's only open a few months a year, only takes reservations on one day per year, doesn't try to push down the costs of supplies, etc. The simple fact that they book an entire season of reservations in one day indicates to me that regardless of the cost structure, they are not charging anywhere near what the market would be happy to support, and that's a business change that could be made without any reflection whatsoever on Adrià's talent, so it shouldn't have any impact on the second order benefits.

Artists of all sorts tend to be poor at running businesses because of an inability to figure out which inefficiencies actually help and which ones hurt. They stubbornly assume that all of them are important, and F-U if you don't like it. I don't see any particular business genius happening at elBulli, what I see is an artist that in this case can get away with being a diva because of a truly extreme case of talent that pays off in other ways. And again, that's fine, great, even, if you can do it. PG couldn't work on Arc at such a leisurely pace and with such a perfectionist attitude without other successes to support him while he "burns money" on it, and when everything finally comes out the other end, we may all be far better off for the fact that he is able to do it that way.

My main point, however, was that there's no lesson to be learned here unless you're already an industry unto yourself without your business. Very few people are lucky enough to be in that situation, and once you're there, you probably don't need any advice from anyone, as long as you don't really mess up, you'll always be able to pay the bills one way or another.
I'm aware that restructuring the Domain Name System is not practical at this point but here's my idea:
Domains should work hierarchically and be privately operated. Google Search would be "http://Google/Search/Web ". A company would buy "http://Org " and run a forwarding service so that "http://Org/RedCross " forwarded to the respective site. This would allow "http://a/ " to be a forwarder and, best of all, for the web to be fully recursive. Seems like the possibilities for such a system are limitless. For example, an internet-archive would be the normal site with "archive/" injected.
There are of course many complex details and inefficiencies, but it would greatly improve human-readablity, making things more easily-explainable.

This could partially be based on all file-extensions being in the file-data rather than in the name and all folders having an "index" file that represented them (which could, then, be any type of file).
I'd like to have an explanation for down-votes, please.
Naked Women - Realporn.com
i really have alot more ton discuss if the time is given
Chandra also forwarded an internal email from one of his shareholders. My favorite part of the email: “We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.”

I just don't see how you could possibly spin that. It's clearly out of the blue & they're clearly trying to push TechCrunch out.
It runs pretty quickly in Firefox 3.5, but the font rendering is horrific:

http://i.imgur.com/HXFke.jpg
These kinds of issues are very common in hardware; electronics (pure IC), devices, batteries, any kind of physical good with an outsourced manufacturer.

Partner / Supplier diligence is just as important as a good idea. Techcrunch is hurting their ability to find future partners in the way they are handling this, regardless of who is at fault.
Agreed. I keep having to remind myself there's two sides to every story (and the only side we've heard so far has a widely read blog to use as a mouthpiece).

Still, Fusion Garage has a lot of explaining to do.
Actually, unlike other commenters, I found the interface to be pretty fast (I'm on Safari 4.0.4).

I like it. Very cute. We could use some of those fancy GUI tricks on FairSoftware.net, since it's basically the same people finder (with solid legal dealing on top).
And "lost" here means "unknown to the editors of NY Times". I remember studying about the Cucuteni culture in the 5th grade.

Here is a link with more info on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture
I'm not a lawyer but is it not possible that if a lawsuit proceeds, TechCrunch's own inaccurate, often speculative, bordering on drama queen news posts could work against them? A lawyer could paint TechCrunch as the kind of entity that blows everything out of proportion, including their involvement in this project. Surely the lawyer could dig up some TechCrunch stories spewing inaccurate rumours and speculation as proof. Seeing as how it would be a civil case, this sort of evidence could surely be brought up could it not?
There is just no way to argue that TechCrunch is not the joint owner of all intellectual property of the CrunchPad, and outright owner of the CrunchPad trademark.

The trademark for "CrunchPad" was filed on November 17, 2009. It's registered under Interserve, Inc. doing business as TechCrunch (apologies if the link goes dead - sometimes they use weird sessions on USPTO.gov):

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4002:t9...
No sympathy for him.
Thanks. I needed this advice. Especially that 'Read books' one.