skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Old (June 2007) but still strangely relevant:

"Excluding Flash is a huge slap in the face of Adobe, which is pushing Flash as the basis of its AIR and Flex web application strategies. Adobe likes to advertise that nearly every PC has a Flash plugin installed. Suddenly, nearly every mobile that has access to the real Internet won't have Flash, making it far less attractive across the board."

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...

I like Daniel Eran Dilger/RoughlyDrafted because he has some interesting non-echo-chamber opinions on the world of Apple and technology
best use of ads I've ever seen is on Kingston.com (Ram)

- you select your pc model then the ram size, then click on the you see a ad that compares the perfect ram on 3 different sites.

- I think most comparison sites are just big ads, and that is ok as long as there is a vaule ad.
iPhone developers: Build something good and your profits will scale

Nico Mak (the original developer of WinZip - and remember PKWare was the DOS market leader) was making $1m+ off of WinZip licenses...10+ years ago - as for now...I'd say easily order of magnitude.

Some highlights from the liveblogs:

It's like a Mobile Wii - TouchFighter - use accelerometer to tilt and navigate (remember Wing Commander?)

Will Wright's Spore on an iPhone!

70% of revenue goes to developer, paid monthly. $99 if you want to sell, $0 if you want to give away (most app developers will probably do both)

Deploying to iPhone from the SDK is simple - take that control-freak mobile network operators from the control-freak Apple!

Enterprise-class Wi-Fi, with WPA2/802.1x,

I like how Apple ignores pressure and takes time to get things ready and right. If there was an SDK 6 months ago, it probably would not have been such that non-Mac development orgs could code something in 2 weeks (with Apple assistance)
i believe its still beta, and you showed 2 out of 80 gizallion sites.

- but! - this could be the vista of browsers. (no adoption)
How about Square One... Mathnet! The Mystery of the Maltese Pigeon was my favorite one. I remember it so fondly, I'm almost afraid to go find it on YouTube.
Such rapid development is what sets 37signals apart from the crowd.
I think it's more like having a first kid. We know we've got 3-6 months before it starts breathing and there's a tendency to over-prepare because We Want Everything To Be Right. We're still not to the point of no-return (haven't quit our jobs yet), but I'm trying to learn everything possible and have everything in place so that when and if that happens we can give it our best shot.

#3 is something I'd really thought about, and is probably pretty in sync with what should in fact happen. There unfortunately don't seem to be a lot of smooth migration paths out there, which is what I think tempted me to start looking at some of the more comprehensive systems. There's some overly systematic twitch in me that says, "Get this figured out now, or it's going to bite you in the ass later." But in reality, going with the analogy above, that's probably like planning for a kids teenage years before they're born.
Ronald Bailey had some interesting notes on the conference. Their ideas seem fairly well-grounded and reasonable, the kinds of things we should be debating. Wish I could have been there:

http://reason.com/news/show/125281.html

http://reason.com/news/show/125300.html

http://reason.com/news/show/125323.html

Disclosure: I regularly receive a lot of flack for not panicking over Global Warming.
I've found Google Apps to be my savior in this instance. They are great for having version-controlled spreadsheets, word documents, and now a company-wide wiki with Google sites (though I'm still figuring out how to implement it).

Between Google Apps for document-versioning and mailing lists and 37Signals' Backpackit app for to-dos and milestones (and time-tracking if you need it), we've been pretty effectively productive.

We still need to get a good CRM tool though. I've heard good things about SugarCRM, I'll have to take a look.
over 100k users must have ads.

- that isn't "open" by any definition.
liveblogs are so exciting. i almost want to go out and buy an iphone + macbook right now
Ironically, fixed prices means people are able to afford to buy more music and help the less popular artists earn more money. Incidentally it also makes the more popular artists easier to hear and thus more popular.

Control or not, Jobs' fixing the price is a good thing for the music industry. A book is usually around $5 for paperback, a movie is usually around $10 in theaters, yet the price of CDs vary from popular to unpopular and that doesn't make any sense.

I regularly buy books I'm not 100% sure I'll like, because it's $5. I go see movies I'm not 100% sure I'll like, because it is ALWAYS $10. I don't buy music I'm not 100% sure I'll like, because it can cost $20 for a popular CD. I've bought DVD boxsets for $20! That's a damn months entertainment for less than a 40-minute album.

The only music I ever buy without hearing nearly every song on the album is from bands I know I like. The problem with this is that I'm a huge music fan, and I can't even remember if I've ever gone a day without listening to music in the last decade; yet I hardly buy any new music, because I can't justify the price risk of getting something bad. I mean its two movies, four books and thats if I'm not going for the $1.50 books off amazon. I once bought around 15 books of amazon because they were all cheap as hell, I haven't even read some of them but the author and publisher still made money off of me, no artist or music company gets free money from me when I'm admittedly stupid enough to allow them to if they had good prices.
Also incredibly ironic. These people are just seeing what they want to see and creating buzz within their own community rather than measuring something useful.
Let them find a way to use it.

When I was in high school, I played Robot Battle, a game in which you scripted behaviors for automated tanks. This gave me immediate reason to use and learn much of what I learned in math at school. The day we were taught basic trigonometry, I was on the edge of my seat, because I knew that what I was learning would be useful several hours later when I got back to coding my robots.

Of course, you can't force an interest on a child, but you can certainly introduce them to new ones.
preferable: a cocktail, a lounge chair, sand, and the Mediterranean + a phone to call my peon developers and tell them what to do ;)
Well, best of luck with your project. It's clear you've got some experience so I hope it all goes well :)
Possible, yes, but again, it would be very hard for one person to have all (or enough) of it.
The U.S. doesn't nationalise stuff, but it does invade other countries and re-distribute the wealth!
I felt the same way as you right before we launched our site. I tried to take a week off, but it ended up being a week of me coding for 4 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day. (I still have a full-time co-op required for graduation, so this doesn't count my 40 hours a week for that)

Nonetheless, it was very relaxing and I'm glad I did it. At the same time, when you're this close and really into your company, it's hard to NOT work on it.
Hacker vs Engineer - Know The Difference!
Question on executive summary idea I have
What if somebody who had a few years dev experience, came up with a cool executive summary for a business-to-business, site-subscription kind of business model targeted towards software companies, but didn't really know anyone who were developers in his social circles to kind of coordinate it with? For example I notice the "contest" offered here to fund startups is largely geared to at least two-person teams. Where could one find like a good portal/jboss/xml/xsl/database developer to work with in perhaps getting what one feels is already a good executive summary up for action and perhaps even join in the funding contest, since one isn't likely to want to do it by oneself, even if oneself did have some jboss experience? I am pretty sure "I have a winner", just unfortunately most of my friends are starving artist types rather than starving hacker types, lol. Any info much appreciated.

- "Allocator2008", a unit test/test automation developer in Austin
Interesting looking book. Still, it sounds like big banks transferring big tax money to big companies. 3 big means that it can make a lot of people rich and drive a lot of business, but not necessarily create mega-billionaires.

I mean come on, for $65 billion, you could buy Oracle, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, or Apple (in 2006).

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/18/06f2000_The-Forbes-2000_...

Or try spending it on stuff - the most expensive house is ~$120 million (Mittal's house next to Buckingham Palace in London). The biggest yacht is ~$100 million. The entire "World" development in Dubai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(archipelago) ) cost $14B, and it's selling to some of the richest people in the world. You could buy every superlative in the world and still have most of your money leftover. When you get to that much money, the only thing you can't buy is bragging rights over the people above you on the Forbes list.
Sun Microsystems and SBTVD Forum to Develop Open-Source Java Solution for Brazil's Digital TV System
Coda, OSX, some TextMate
If you've got untreatable cancer then yeah you should be forced to disclose. However cancer invokes more fear than there is actual risk, if I get skin cancer its 100% treatable, some forms don't even need treating because its merely a skin growth with no health risk except maybe an infection if you cut it off with a blunt knife. Yet if a CEO announced they had 'skin cancer' the stock would drop, even if it is one of the benign forms that doctors treat with wart removers.

I think saving the investors from themselves should be just as big a concern. He is predicted with survival past 10 years, which IIRC the average age of death with someone having that prognosis is in fact only a few years shorter than the average age of death. If Jobs getting cancer means he kicks it at 78 instead of 82, I don't see why it should be disclosed immediately or at all.
Sorry if the format is kind of ugly, but these Sun guys keep hinting that Java was really open sourced because of this deal with Brazil, which is interesting.
Ubuntu + Python + Scite atm
“the general advantage of cap-and-trade is that it makes it profitable for entrepreneurs to innovate.”

So does a tax. Innovating in green tech reduces your expenses on carbon tax. Some may complain that this is a reduction in costs instead of an increase in revenue, but the two are equivalent.

The entrepreneur can also sell his green tech to other businesses who want to avoid heavy carbon taxes.
You've got at least 80% of web designers ensuring good layout as part of all of their compliance testing. Additionally, there's plenty of legacy intranet applications that only work well on Internet Explorer. Not defaulting to a quirks mode is a quick method to annoy designers and managers.
I've been tracking this project for a while. The most interesting part is that much of the work is done by undergrads. That's really impressive considering how hard robots are to make.
Ads I would like to see: none. If I can't have that option I'm going to cast my vote with Adblock on FireFox and you're not going to get an option. Find a better way to monetize pls kthx.
Personally I would. If it peaks my interest I will look, I'm not interested in "low rate mortgages" or "win a free(*) iPod". I own an iPod and I have no interest in owning a house, which is why I now own Adblock Plus and Flashblock. I hardly see any adverts anymore because they annoyed me by not targeting me.

Context ads are good, except when the ads aren't in the context of the site. Just because sex gets mentioned in an article, doesn't mean I want adverts for sex pheramones and when I read something on bargains on HDTVs I do want Bestbuy, FutureShop or eBay adverts popping up as I'm actively looking to buy something.
Grindstone: Greasemonkey script to Stay Focused
1) They ignore you.

2) They laugh at you.

3) They fight you.

4) You win.

With apologies to Ghandi, don't give up at #3.
for shared hosting I highly recommend webfaction as well. I've used them until I needed to move to a VPS.
Diigo/Del.icio.us Square off at SXSW Interactive?
Everybody knows that Del.icio.us is what AOL was to the early internet. Everyone uses it because it was the early player. Well, Diigo will be showing off it's superior features on Sunday at SXSW Interactive.
So far, little demand for Silverlight developers
> Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Uncle Bill only pays the bills if you're a paid-up member of the fan club. This is a cost that you've been externalising. So, now would be a good time to re-evaluate open source alternatives. You can decrease your costs and increase your margins. You can also migrate legacy applications and data to more contemporary systems. This brings considerable value to clients.
Iphone developer program only for US developers? So how do I incorporate in the US as a non-resident?
According to http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/,
"The iPhone Developer Program will initially be available to a limited number of developers in the U.S. and will expand to other countries in the coming months."

So in this case, what is the best way for me to create an offshore company in the us to have the best chances of getting in the iPhone Developper Program?

Does anybody, knows of good (and cheap) lawyers specialized in these kinds of incorporation?
You'll love the dev tools. You'll be able to enjoy what we Mac programmers have been enjoying for several years now.
This seems like good advice, but to me it would be interesting to read about what can be done to minimize growing pains.

If a developer only focuses on the immediate future, it seems like they could be caught off guard in the case of rapid growth. This might leave them scrambling while their app crawls and users become upset (or decide to use something else) because things are unresponsive. Twitter comes to mind here.
here is mine:
Ubuntu, Scite, nano, ssh, LightTPD, Python, gcc, gcl and Firebug.
Virtual Box with FreeBSD and Windows Server 2003, Windows XP SP2 (for pre deployment testing)
Thank you all for sharing.
The really interesting part of this is the python-to-javascript conversion, which appears to be based on this:
http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/py2js
Have a great iPhone idea? Apply now to KPCB's iFund!
From the article: Silverlight is being downloaded and installed an average of 1.5 million times a day

Does that include or exclude the AOL Mail users ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130000 )?
I'm really impressed. Trying to download the SDK now, but the the ADC servers are melting...
Except for the ones with "1-3 years of experience" :)
AOL Launches Open Aim 2.0
Mathnet! That was an afternoon staple for me. The two detectives named after days of the week...

As a kid, I remember watching one episode where they opened a door with a credit card(!) and I was like "Mom, do you have a credit card" - I didn't tell her why and next thing I know after thirty minutes I shocked her by opening our side door with the credit card. Later, I got it down to 5 seconds and they changed the locks...
they're not trying to avoid competition. They're trying to focus on the only demographic that was taking them serioulsy. Their current strategy wasn't working and I think they actually increase their market share by stealing users from Google. Before they were trying to steal all re users, now they only want to steal married women. That's likely a good thing. Married women probably click on ads more often than recent college graduates, news.YC readers, etc.
If Version Control Systems were Airlines
There are standards. The problem is that the minority of hits are made by software which implements those standards.
Ugh. "Sucks balls." Ignore gay bash and hesitantly click.

So new layout features of a beta browser release are breaking some layouts. I wonder if the author ever used a Mozilla pre-release browser.
Exhibitors raided at German tech fair
Anyone who's done website design knows that it's pretty standard to include hacks for IE. So the problem with IE now running in full standards mode, is that all of these hacks are still applied! And all of the IE conditional comments are still applied. So until developers have a chance to get their sites ready for a (mostly) standards compliant version of IE, of course it's not going to work correctly.
Yeh, I'd like to know this too.
Thanks. I just overnighted it from Amazon. My coding partner wants to use recursive database queries to do this--I want to avoid it because it's slower, breaks our object model, and makes the application non-database-agnostic. (Currently, we're using NHibernate and can run on most major databases.)
you might have better luck finding hackers if you dropped the jboss,portal,XML bits.

Having a 2 person team is good. But if you're working with the right tools you can probably throw together a prototype yourself. Then you can use that to better illustrate to fellow hackers what your idea is about. I for one am not a big fan if reading executive summaries. But I'm willing to work on something with someone I know is also a good hacker. Being able to see the prototype of an idea for example would show me if I would enjoy working with someone.
I'm not familiar with this but you can probably check out the Company Corporation (google the name)
I hate this things.
I wonder how effectively a Bayesian filter could identify hate-comments as spam.

Today Julia Allison wrote this: http://itsmejulia.com/post/28132498
Adobe did improve performance dramatically with Flash 9, but only new code gets the speedup. Many game developers seem to still be generating the old slow bytecode.
Kleiner Perkins Anounces $100 million iFund for iPhone Applications
I don't think lacking technical prowess in setting a proper charting package to be a significant reason. That would be like saying you are cheap for using a web framework instead of writing your own would be cheap as well. Just this case, it's a "framework" (it's techinically and API, I know) for displaying charts.

They do look cheap though. You could maybe count on the fact that they would improve the chart's presentation without changing the API, but that could never happen.

If your app is simple and doesn't value presentation too much, you can go ahead and save the extra hours you'd spend on a charting package on some other features that people want.

They are too simple for me to use in my apps, though.
How is saying that something "sucks balls" a gay bash?
The way you can wire up a UI without writing any code is masterfully done.

Really, your GUI should have a clear separation between your logic anyways, so if you can't wire up the GUI without writing a ton of code, something is astray.
Building a Multisourced Infrastructure Using OpenVPN
My clients have already sunk the cost of MSFT, Oracle and SAP in their enterprise. I am not in the position to push them either way.

Plus, like a good handyman, I have lots of tools in my toolbox :)
I really hate building interfaces for the web and would love to build them with tools like interface builder but I just haven't felt any need to build a desktop app. Its really exciting that you can now use desktop level dev tools for a mobile application.
FYI: Last time someone made a $100MM fund to boost development it didn't turn out all that great
What the advice misses is that even at an early stage, you need decisions in place that allow scaling. For example, if you buy 1 truck for your one-person shipping company, you can move 1 container at a time. Adding a second truck lets you move 2 containers. 37signals is smart--they built their software so that it could grow to 2 servers--but they left that out of their advice. There must be a path from simple to complex.
the best thing is that there is no deadline
c/c++ is broken. Doesn't support this:

int x = 4;
x++;
printf("x: %d\n",x);

How can you say you support c/c++ when you don't support ++?
Thanks yeah I tried the first release but it would not work on my fresh install of vs08 and .net 3.5

I'll give it a go again.
What would the web look like if everyone used Adblock? Not much free content I would guess. Would you like that better?
can somebody who's succeeded set up mirrors? :P [private of course, for a couple days until the surge subsides!]
Wiki for code and algorithms
You're right, I take back that it's a "bash", but it is informed by anti-gay culture. I don't want to get into a discussion about that, because it's very much besides the point. I only included it because I thought it betrayed the childish nature of picking on a piece of software for no reason besides that a beta release still has bugs.

If you ignore my criticism of the headline, the point still stands that it's the article is empty. All pre-release software has bugs that will be fixed in the final release, and browsers, including Mozilla's, usually have some layout bugs. These get fixed, so if people are looking for problems with a browser, they should look elsewhere.
Ubuntu with decked out Gedit, desktop with two monitors.

I also have a tablet with XP. My favorite editor for Rails is RoRed, but it only works for Windows :(
Just pointing out to aneesh that the article indicates Obama uses a product that competes with the one from 37 signals.
Mostly, what I did at the time was googled something like "example operation agreement" and went from there.

A new site I like is http://www.docstoc.com

Also, check out the Nolo series of books. Those are awesome and usually come with a CD with a bunch of stock templates.
Sigh, one more browser version to test for. Plus with Firefox3 coming out this year and Safari gaining market share, things are going to get worse before they get better.

What are your favorite tools to automate functionality testing/layout verification in different browsers?
ubuntu+xterm+screen+vim+git and bash/python scripts.
Agreed. I currently have a VPS with Rimuhosting and it's just shy of $40-50/month. All servers come pre-configured with all the basics. If you ever need something installed/configured which is out your realm the support staff is great about guiding you how to do it or just doing it for you.
It's a shame that I can't get an iPhone in South Africa, I suppose it's like that for a lot of the world, I'll be playing around with the SDK in the meanwhile.
Computer language history
Note: all the software I have developed so far has been for personal use.

I use a desktop computer with a Microsoft Natural keyboard, Arch Linux, Emacs, Emacs Lisp, the shell rc.

The elements I am most pleased with are the keyboard and the shell rc. I am also pretty happy with Emacs Lisp, especially its manual and commands like C-h c C-h w and C-h f. Too many administration hassles with Arch Linux though. To reduce hassles, I would buy OS X if I were not very low income.
I imagine you didn't store any per-session state on the server as well, so I'm curious about what you used to validate the cookie.
I'm pretty sure there'd be a ton of free content. How much of the content one the internet earns its creators more than they spend on coffee?
1. need a mac
2. need xcode installed
3. need cocoa knowledge

i can't share my copy otherwise i would host it.
Looking to meet up with geeks in Los Angeles too. Any suggestions?
another +1 for webfaction, really simple django deployment
I agree that as an entrepreneur it's very beneficial to be able to change "modes" constantly all the time.

I personally juggle school, a full-time co-op, a rock band currently recording an EP, a consulting company, two startups (one is on its way out), and a few hobbies.

How do I do it?

1. I love everything I do.

2. Multi-tasking is good. When we're in the recording studio just mixing, I'm coding or answering customer emails. Same goes for boring classes.

3. I sleep 3-5 hours a night, though I'm no stranger 5 hours in a particular week.

4. I exercise and workout to keep me on my toes.

5. I try to stay single as much as possible ;)
Anything good enough to become popular.
.