skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me flexibility was important and web.py just let me do my stuff without getting in the way while being minimal. Of course I wrote my app on web.py + Medusa (http://www.amk.ca/python/code/medusa.html) and old but extremely cool for me to scale for my needs
I'm still getting spotty S3 service
Ok, I should have said "one" instead of "you".

Screencast of the automatic-organization feature (among other things) is here:

http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/windows1.htm

Almost all of my users are using it for non-public photos. One notable exception:

http://ourdoings.com/neverlandtheatre/

I will improve the demo.
I don't know what InfoQ is thinking putting an article in 2 text boxes with clickboxes to expand the sections.

Here's the text of the article in a much easier to read format: http://jottit.com/u9hf6
How much energy does it take to lift a squirrel on a solar sail?
Nvidia eyeing AMD acquisition?
I really like 8aweek, I am using it right now, and yet I would probably never use RescueTime. Hard to explain why since they are almost the same, but one hits the sweet spot for me in terms of aesthetics and functionality whereas the other does not.
How many people browse News.yc on an iPhone...at the coffee shop... Or in the office bathroom stall .. Or is it just me? Since they got rid of the open wi-fi and replaced it with authentication-required, I find myself using EDGE more
Yeah actually only HTTP object GET requests seem to be working for me (although they're working 100% of the time).
I had a really great job in the music biz when I was 20-21 but after 9/11 I converted to Islam and decided it was a good idea to quit my life and move to the Middle East to study Arabic. I had an Airline ticket, $250 bucks and enough high hopes and faith to fill the Staples Center.
I had decided to go to Egypt, ( it was Syria or Egypt at the time because they were the cheapest places to go) my idea was to learn Arabic and return to the states to work as a translator ( that never happened haha ) Anyhow, my $250 bucks got me an apartment with a couple other American guys ( who were believe it or not on the same spiritual journey I was on ) for $35 bucks a month. I ended up taking some money from mom a couple times but I did it mostly on my own. Anyhow, now 2008, I married an Egyptian girl, I have a 6 Month old baby boy and a new carrier as a teacher. Not bad for leaving with 200 bucks and a couple T-shirts :)
I <3 Ron Paul
Run Your Anti-Virus at the Gateway
"We strongly recommend you to install the Firefox for better viewing"

No
A Farewell Note From a Departing Yahoo
Escaping materialism can be a very difficult gift to receive. I think rebuilding after losing everything is a beautiful thing -- rejuvenating yet humbling.

Thank you for sharing, I really appreciate honest sentiments like this.
I agree with you, on both counts. It seems very ironic to have a toolbar app that monitors and prevents your use of the web. This is a behavioral problem (procrastination, time wasting, boredom, poor management), not a technical problem. This seems like a simple feature that browser developers could easily build in.
I am not shocked at all, I have to say I predicted this all along! All we were waiting for is a decent UI and a real browser and a qwerty keyboard for mobile devices.

I also predict that future mobile phones will also try to increase the screen sizes.

I also predict that Apple will repeat their same mistake by tieing their OS to their Hardware, and that googles Android OS will be the next windows of all other Mobile devices.

I also predict that it will take Apple long to realise that they could have eliminated or a least make it harder for Google's android by licensing their mobile software to other phone companies such as Nokia! And that by not doing so they lost a lot of money!
Sounds like a job for a web proxy. One that showed an ad on the "Get back to work" page could pay for itself.
Scoble makes me cry. And not in a good way.
I think its fair to remove the 'Possibly' from the post's title at this point
Why does Scoble get time on news.yc? All I ever see him do is shill for large publicly listed companies.

Now they're making him cry?

Scoble is ESR 2.0.
This funny because when web2py started we aimed at being small like web.py. In fact the core web2py functionalities (from gluon import *) are very similar to web.py and the entire core is less the 120KB. Ocan still use it that low level and import SQLAlchemy and Mako for example (with loss of some of the higher level functionalities of course, like the database administrative interface).

Anyway, I agree with Cosmin's assessment that it grew to do a lot more. The main phylosophy is that the framework should make (by default) some decisions for the user, in particular particular about things that have to do with security and persistance.

At high level web2py borrowed some ideas from Django (the administrative interface and {{...}} in templates), some from Turbogears (response.flash?) and some from cherrypy (@cache).
It won't install on my PPC Mac running Tiger, unfortunately ("download error (-228)"). Works fine with my Intel/Leopard MacBook, but I still kick it old school on my desktop. Here's my User-Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
+1 Arabic is said to be one of the difficult languages to start learning
Are you sure you want to use __repr__ in this way? You'll end up with 'None' instead of None at the end.
Not much, I would say about a snickers worth.
Heres how...

1. Eat Snickers.
2. Feel Satisfied
3. Unwrap Solar Sail.
4. Wrap Squirrel in Solar Sail into a soccer shaped ball.
5. Punt Squirrel.
6. Measure Distance.
7. Call and report your findings to PETA.
8. Eat another Snickers.
Trouble Ticket System is broken
Our site seems to be running fine (EC2/S3). We actually have all files currently on EC2 and backed up to S3 (We haven't checked to see if the backup is still working yet)
I got one, I used Business Plan Pro software, pretty friggin cool if you ask me. I had no idea about how to do a business plan before but it's pretty good at guiding you threw it.

www.BusinessPlanPro.com

It's like 100 bucks but ... * cough ... * cough ... Usenet Cough.
That may be a "silly name" effect, not a racial effect.

I read a while back a similar study done (sorry, can't find a link), but comparing different white names. Jennifer and Meghan got far more callbacks than Rainbow, Peace and other hippy names.

More anecdotally, my friend Dikshit Gupta got far fewer callbacks than Dave Gupta, even with identical resumes (both are obviously Indian).

I'd be curious to see a similar study done comparing generic names to generic "dead president" names (George Smith vs George Washington Smith), rather than made-up african sounding names.
Why do web services (e.g., for advertising) exceed your specified budget slightly?  Is that ethical?
Why does this happen? To encourage you to pay more (by making you feel guilty about having a small unpaid amount)? And while you are at it, you might as well put in a lot of money rather than only the small unpaid amount!
Ok - we are back in business
I must admit I don't understand the benefits of embedding some form of temporal reasoning in a language or library. Anyone care to explain?
Ask YC: What's the best way to do payments?
We are a startup, deploying an application that will require a monthly & yearly license fee from users - nothing too complicated. This is our first startup, and we've seen a range of opinions online on how to process payments. I'd be interested to hear how YC'ers have tackled this question!
8aweek only tracks time for the current tab that you are active in, and after 5 minutes of no mouse movement it'll realize you're inactive and not count that time.
It seems to be back on. I wonder if the outage's length had something to do with it being so early on the west coast.
Somebody is wildly confused: a site which needs to aggregate login information for several dozen other sites, each of which give it permission to use only some features and not others, is a killer app for OAuth, not OpenID.

OpenID might play a role in the OAuth-enabled World of the Future, but I kind of doubt it. I think OpenID will continue on its current trajectory to the bottom of the sea. I'm still waiting for evidence to the contrary.

This suggested use case is not the evidence I'm looking for. It it touchingly naive. It is a little too retro. Like telnet and rlogin, this use case is designed for the primordial world of the 1970s, when all users were brothers, and the snake had not yet visited Eden, and Delirium was still Delight. You're encouraged to put all your keys in one basket, and then you're encouraged to share that basket freely with sites like PageOnce. Presumably you should also drop acid.

The funniest thing about this "killer app" is the implicit notion that financial sites like banks will implement OpenID within the next decade. That will be a cold day in hell. Even sites like Blogger don't really support OpenID logins yet, and who is trying to rob Blogger?
A Large Scale Study of Wireless Search Behavior: Google Mobile Search
http://www.esprockets.com/papers/kamvar-baluja.chi06.pdf

This study was presented by some Google employees at CHI'06 and some very interesting things to say about the use of mobile search. Best finding, ~20% of mobile searches are done for "Adult" content.
Are you sure you didn't mean to point to http://www.mschaef.com/blog/tech/lisp/car-cdr.html ?
Rather than an explicit Maybe I've always wanted something built into the language. Why can't the language check for null customers in customer.id? I'd prefer customer.id to == null if customer is null.
"there will be room for many slightly differing approaches"

I agree

Also, although RT and 8AW seem different, assuming they are funded under the same roof, I wouldn't be surprised if they merged. RT will appeal more to busy people/professionals, whereas I see 8AW reaching younger crowd.
Unfortunately, pen names and screen names are chosen to obscure ethnic origins, by marketing necessity, more than choice.

My Indian and Asian friends used to know if a telemarketer was calling because the maybe-it-sounds-like this mangling of their surnames and sometimes first names. With the recent outsourcing of telemarketing to Indian call centers, I wonder if pronunciation of their names has improved, if any.
Ironically, non-public photos are a great feature. But it doesn't advertise itself! So find some less-shy sample users, or send someone out to a parade or something and document it.

Sorry I missed the screencast, but I guess that's the point of the drive-by demo: to see what casual visitors notice and what they don't. Of course, at this point, I should remind you that I may not be the ideal sample of your target demographic. :)
Paypal is almost certainly the way to go for micropayments

https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.ht...

$0.05 + 5%
Familiarity matters. Attractiveness matters as well. I remember a VH-1 popup video for Fiona Apple that highlighted how many months it had taken Fiona to get from demo tape (one of her friends babysat for a music industry big-shot) to recording contract to hit single. Then it contrasted that with Newt Gingrich (7 years or something to rise to Speaker of House) and other powerful, not-so-attractive individuals.
It's not an either or, but there needs to be a balance. If you're product is 100x excellent but your marketing makes you 0.001x obscure, you need to play some marketing catchup. Word of mouth is fine, but 10 users is a pretty small user base to expect them to bootstrap your growth for you.
Lessig For Congress?
Grant money? Now I really have to read the article to see if he explains that.

EDIT - duh, it's in the first few paragraphs. $1.1 million grant from the Knight News Challenge
Ruby's Active Merchant + Paypal.
Addiction probably won't be fixed by 8aweek, but for alot of self improvement types, like myself, I can definitely see how it'll help me shape my own behaviour.
America for Sale
What bothers me about Google search on the iPhone is that the native search in Safari goes to Google's desktop version. Why can't it go to their mobile version?

Seems kind of dumb, right?
Still Java-Developer here, with all the bad habits: wouldn't you properly encapsule the use of something like S3? I haven't used it yet, but I imagine I would create some kind of EncodeResourceLink class, that creates a link to a resource an can be configured for a variety of storage solutions. Then some kind of open source clone of S3 could run on my own server. If the amount of data got overwhelming, I could easily shift everything over to S3, or whatever competitors emerge.

Or do I have the completely wrong idea here?
The Apple iPhone is a mobile experience.

Those of us who are fortunate to forgo its "lack" of features, understand that it can add value to part of the routine and boredom of day-to-day life.

It's actually fun to do something productive and/or kill time with it while out-and-about.

From presentation by Jared Spool UX expert:

1st generation - It's about the Technology (Big mainframe computers - had to go to specialized training at HQ to be able to use it, let alone program it. Early dotcom sites where you could theoretically buy something if you could figure it out)

2nd generation - Features (Mobile phones with streaming TV, MP3 - all thrown in, loosely coupled, none integrated, some Internet portals)

3rd generation - Experience (Craigslist, MySpace (it does what their target market wants them to - peer communication), Google is getting there... Facebook is getting there, flying sheep aside).

In Jared's opinion, the Apple iPhone leapfrogged directly to the 3rd generation - it's not a phone, it's not a portable computer - it is a great way to kill time (everywhere I go I see people trying to kill time on their mobile phones, rarely is it an iPhone).
Best to market always trumps First to market
The real challenge is building out the back-end that deals with the service you select. (Unless you plan on handling unsubscribes manually, which might not be a bad idea if you are dealing with a low volume of users. IE: I'd pay someone $8/hr for an hour a day before I committed an $80/hr developer to spend a month building a system, until they are spending more than an hour a day dealing with orders.)

I was consulting for a company where we spent weeks building and testing the back-end component that worked with Paypals API. Their API is embarassing. Instead of building a system that allows you to poll for unsubscribes daily, their server "pings" your server with data periodically. Imagine the difficulty of testing this out when they don't provide a way to simulate this.

So if you do decide on a back-end, spend some time seeing if there is an open source component you can use to handle subscribe/unsubscribes. (Maybe ActiveMerchant?)
I think the internet needs an S3 clone, offered by another company. Both companies would be better off because of eachother.

S3 is still more reliable than a couple of dedicated servers, though :)
Crash: Amazon's S3 utility goes down
Our EC2 instance is still running the same process since we booted it 1.5 months ago - no downtime yet.
I remember when I first saw Bill Atkinson's Hypercard back in 1988, when it came bundled with my MacSE. I was 15 and it opened a world of possibilities for me as far as creating something fast and functional. True, Hypercard was not something that made much of an impact on the world at that time...

It was a few years before we saw a derivative of the human-computer interaction present in Hypercard come out that changed the world in the form of NCSA Mosaic. I'm guessing Scoble was moved to tears because he feels the seeds of something great is going to be released on March 3 in that it will open up a world of possibilities for some other group or individual to take the possibilities to a higher level (in much the same way Mosaic took the concepts of Hypercard to the next level). I highly doubt we are going to benefit immediately from whatever we see.

I also think Scoble has hit upon a great point: today's overwhelmingly profit driven model for creating software sometimes misses the beauty in creating something for the pure joy of creation (probably an ironic statement given the fact that this is a VC-based message board). Part of me is saying this because one of the projects I'm working on frequently hits the question: "It's a nice idea but how is it going to make money?" (so I suppose my personal biases are showing through here in this remark).
ProtoTextboxList meets Autocompletion
There's sort of a cute easter egg in the Photosynth demo - see if you can find the photo of Stephen Hawking wheeling around the Piazza San Marco.
Seth's Blog: The posture of a communicator
7 Food Hacks to Stay Alert Without Caffeine
The lowest cost and easiest way is to use our free API and processing services. E-mail me at coachfrits1-blog@yahoo.com
We've created a free API and "lowest cost" processing model that is working well for what amounts to subscription fees in your case. coachfrits1-blog@yahoo.com
Apple patents speaking map device
Protein quantum dot optical next gen storage
"After several months and giving a few classes in LISP, we realized that 'first' and 'rest' were better names, and we (John McCarthy, I and some of the rest of the AI Project) tried to get people to use them instead. ... Alas, it was too late! We couldn't make it stick at all. So we have CAR and CDR."

So car and cdr have been around for 49 years, while first and rest have been around for 48 1/2. I don't think "historical reasons" explains the survival of car/cdr. How many other things that survive from the first 6 months of Lisp could be called accidental?

Edit: this reminds me of the survival of s-expressions. For a long time the plan was to replace them with m-expressions so that Lisp could be a "real" programming language like Fortran. But people kept preferring to write s-expressions. Eventually it became clear that s-expressions were not an unfortunate weakness at all, but one of the best things about Lisp. Obviously the names car/cdr aren't close to this important, but I do think that if there weren't something deeply right about them, they would have been discarded long ago.
Hypercard was my first exposure to a Mac and to programming. I remember thinking programming can be fun!

I remember staying up to 4am with my college roommate, the night we found installed NCSA Mosaic for the first time. Of course, we regret not becoming wealthy by creating a free email service or whatever (it was wide open) but ce la vie.
ESR? Equivalent Series Resistance? EE here :)
I suspect the variation in wealth in SV is as great as in other places, if not greater. It's just that the median is higher.
Interestingly, my desktop applications did not go down this morning. It was right there waiting for me as I sipped my coffee.

It also didn't go down all the times the 37Signals web apps I pay for or the hosted FogBugz installation my company uses have gone down.

Desktop apps rock! :)
That assumes that pg (or any other person funding a company) is an oracle of what will make the company successful.

In a sense I am, actually, because I know my (or anyone's) predictive ability is no substitute for watching actual users. So I tell everyone: launch quickly, listen to your users, and iterate rapidly. And that rule, so far as it goes, is a recipe for being successful.
You have stated exactly what I was intuitively feeling. It definitely seems like a long stretch to call this a killer app when it seems to me that these two projects seem to be solving the same problem but by different means.
It's not about which phone had features X, Y, and Z first.

The iPhone is: known to focus on usability; made by Apple; has iTunes, a big screen, a great screen, a wide screen; has a PDA brother -- the iTouch; runs a version of a real operating system; and is made by the manufacturer of the most popular portable digital music players of each of the last 7 years or so. Finally, Apple is not a phone manufacturer but a designer of usable things -- people want to buy something that is made by Apple, and not a phone company. The resulting popularity, promise of an SDK, a commitment to the product line, and an exciting bridge of software and hardware gets developers on board. This gets the iPhone to the point where all of a sudden, it doesn't matter who created it--Microsoft, McDonalds, or Staples--or exactly what it's capable of: everyone else is using it, which means it's now a "standard", and a good enough reason to make that your next phone.
There is no killer app for OpenID, it's a tech looking for an audience, and the audience doesn't care. The browser is your OpenID, you tell it to save your logins and it keeps them all for you safely on your computer, not up on some server owned by a company you don't know.
Wootoff today
FYI: Woot.com is having a woot off today.

http://www.woot.com
Something else interesting:

"One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?"

"The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the open-source requirement certainly influenced us."

Source code forthcoming?
From the corpspeak website:

Next Media's research focus spans the linear and interactive media spectrum from television, broadband, and gaming to combinations of traditional media forms or emerging media forms too new to have a name. The group partners with product groups within Microsoft and select outside content partners such as museums, and public broadcasting to develop conceptual and working prototypes which best demonstrate the functionality or vision for media that can anchor new businesses, services and consumer experiences.

(Thus my guess is a fullscreen handheld device with gesture input that runs Outlook, IE and Excel ;-) (but photosynth does seen quite cool)
I disagree completely. In my opinion, quite the opposite, actually. "How to win friends..." gives you shortcuts in life. It's all about pretending to be someone else to get short-term gains. Doesn't work quite as well in the long term though.

"7 Habits" is about how to better yourself, which gives you immensely greater long-term benefits. The downside of that is you're going to need to put in a lot more work to see them. You won't find advice like "just smile" in "7 habits".
It's been done before...I've seen a site that's like a browsing proxy, but it strips out all the stylesheets from a website and then substitutes one that looks exactly like MS Word. So you've got this word-processing document with the text of whatever you're really looking at.

Alas, I can't find the URL.

Also, my site (for casual games) gets nearly all of its traffic between the hours of 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM, Mon-Fri. The most popular time period seems to be Tuesdays from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. Gee, I wonder what they're (avoiding) doing...
Reminds me of a software vendor who sold us our Accounts Payable system. It didn't work. So we couldn't pay them.
You're probably right that this killer app isn't, but I don't think OpenID's future is as bleak as you're making it out to be.

Your email address is already a single basket for all your keys, or at least all the keys to locks with "I forgot my password" mechanisms.

That Blogger doesn't support OpenID suggests nothing about its security.
pg says that making something great sells an app, but he also hired an expensive PR firm and said they were worth the money.

I hired a PR firm in 1997. Things have changed in 11 years. And also, we were fairly established at that point: a year and a half old, with roughly a million in funding in the bank. When we were in the OP's position, we just focused on making users like us, and that was the right thing to do.