skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article: "The question of whether a valid ticket exists can not be solved for all databases and all queries no matter how long a computer thinks."

Be very concerned if a flight reservation system offers you a room in the Hilbert Hotel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_Hotel ).
The Internet was created that way too...
Rush Limbaugh begs Steve Jobs for bug fixes
I think you have your reddit suit on.
The 15 biggest tech acquisitions since 1998
This verbose stenography also applies to economists. Apparently, Alan Greenspan wasn't happy with a speech until he read the newspaper coverage the following day. If one newspaper reported the opposite of another newspaper then he was satisfied. You don't want to spook the market.
Good idea, I think it could be done. Perhaps you could look at congressional speeches and match it to how each speaker voted?
Do All Companies have to be Evil?
FriendFeed's Google Connection
hussle + luck = opportunity
From the article: "Exclamation marks travel in packs."

Remember: Five exclamation marks is a sign of lunacy!!!!!

Also, the semicolon is the pennant of a dimwit; a waffler. ( http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15020356.400-forum--ho... )
let's all get pho
Is YC deliberately underfunded?
I'm working on something different, but related. I'm hoping to open-source part of it this week, so stay tuned. :)
Yup. Some great talks in that course. This one is average I think.
come travel and downmod me to my face ;)
http://www.xkcd.com/356/
If you guys want, I could try to reserve a room in Old Union for an hour or so after the event so people can get together and mingle.
And apparently I can't do simple math. Those 7 hours.
I think that it is important to have a story behind the name it doesn't have to be something complex, but a sense of authenticity does come through.

The easiest way to do this (and advice elsewhere here in the comments) is to switch up different descriptors of your idea, businees, etc into something where you can get a free domain.

I did this for my startup, Fabjectory, and it was even written up by The Name Inspector:

http://www.thenameinspector.com/fabjectory/

- Mike
Compare that to the shuttle design where lives are on the line and the software has to just work. The microsoft spec approach is really to just ``wing it''
if you have the project hosted on sourceforge you could ask for donations. also you could charge a fee for installing setup of your open source app. so sell that as a support package. lots of companies would rather pay for a license and get support even for open source.

google ad used to pay well but now I don't think it would be worth it.
I've been reading a book called Microsoft Secrets. It is a very dull book so you'll appreciate the summary.

Microsoft works on an industrial division-of-labour principle. It also works on the assumption that bugs ("defects") are enevitable. Indeed, the quantity of known bugs can be used to track the progress of a product. A product with numerous bugs gives a bad reputation and has poor sales. Products with very few bugs are more expensive to produce and users are reluctant to upgrade to subsequent versions. Ignoring the economics, there is a engineering approach to managing emergent complexity.

You'd get most value from this book by comparing it to The Mythical Man Month. There is a strong correlation with the theory in the Mythical Man Month and the observed practice in Microsoft Secrets.

I only bought Microsoft Secrets as a gift for a former manager. However, I subsequently discovered that he was a former Microsoft employee. Sometimes a gift can be too appropriate.
Wow, my copy of this arrived 30 minutes ago from Amazon. Talk about topical.

In the same pile of boxes was "Software Engineering for Internet Applications" which may well be a bit dated now, but I'm sure that the basic idea of using the fewest and fastest components available still holds good.
Ask YC: What are the libraries you couldn't live without?
What are the libraries, that you currently couldn't live without?

You can assume that you have the base c library, and the STL h files.
Device mimics black hole event horizon
You seem to be having an e-dentity crisis. Try 37 Signals' Nametron 3000:

http://www.37signals.com/enormicom/
How rare is this? The caliber of mind required for physics should be more than enough to make a decent programmer. What's preventing your colleagues from just picking up what they need to know?
Politics and the English Language
Can you elaborate on "hopeless," and why do you say this?
A User Interface Definition Language in Common Lisp
Can you actually stream music in pure Javascript? Or are you planning to keep the UI in HTML and just use a small flash plugin for the actual streaming? I like that idea, I'll volunteer as a beta tester for when you need some.
Agreed--the finances claim is outrageous.

What people don't understand is that there is SO, SO MUCH MONEY out there!!! You just have to find it!!! There are scholarship, grants, loans, work study, tuition waivers, in all shapes, sizes or flavors. If you really, truly want to go to college, then money should NOT be your impediment.
Ask YC: Creating a new company, all live with parents, what can we use for a business address?
Are there any companies that will provide an address we can use instead of an address we will only have temporarily?
s/facetious/fallacious :-)

Of course, what the author meant is that the set of non-transcendental numbers has measure zero. This implies, among other things, that a number chosen randomly from, say, [0,1] is transcendental with probability 1.
It's pretty easy to traipse through Europe and not learn jack shit if you're poorly read. I've met a lot of total ignoramus ex-pats who've been living overseas for years.

I don't even think spending time overseas in the industrialized west is much of an eye-opener. Appalachia would probably be just as much of an experience for a lot of people.
He says, "I can’t remember anything good coming from my freshman year – other than starting a business with a few of my classmates, which inspired me for subsequent businesses."

So, he found his calling in College? A waste of time? Could he have started this first business without attending college?
I am repeatedly amazed at what kinds of people leave comments here.
In the space shuttle, almost every bug could kill an entire crew. For Microsoft, a bug may cause a desktop to crash. Arguably, Microsoft wastes the most potential because many millions of instances of Microsoft software repeatedly waste a few minutes of people's lives.

The difference is that Microsoft is able to externalise almost all risk and accountability. The same principles of "defect management" are applied to aerospace hardware and Microsoft software. The only difference is the acceptable threshold for bugs. For the space shuttle, bugs are minimised until the budget is exhausted. For Microsoft, bugs are minimised until it costs less to to say "Oh, heck. Just ship it."
Seesmic gets $6M funding
It seems that latest iteration of web company names do the following: start with a "regular" word, then start dropping vowels.

Flickr, et al.
Get a PO box.
Good article, but its unfortunately also a good example of how misspelling and using the wrong words can really hurt public writing.
Are you asking specifically about C libraries or any library in general?
And if you need to incorporate in another state, get a registered agent -- they're cheap and give your company the required official address in that state.
Along the same lines, I read somewhere you can basically shut down an entire IT department for a couple of days by handing out rubik's cubes to everyone.
Yes, actually it extends even to that. Part of the reason we're not interested in taking outside investment is that we worry if we had a lot of money it might harm more than help us.
I would like to see two highly seasoned salespeople introduced to each other, each told beforehand that the person they are about to meet represents the biggest client of their life.

Some kind of droste effect in live action... amazing!

How would this work? Suppose A and B were meeting and each was supposed to mimic the other within a finite duration T. Since there must be a deal, somebody needs to initiate the action, triggering all subsequent mimicry. I suppose the starter could be arbitrary. Assume very perfect mimicry... what would result?

Perhaps it would be some kind of "purified," or "meta" form of salespersonhood; then, both would notice the intense recursion in each other, yet try to keep a straight face. The deal goes through as planned; everything seems pretty, but both are exhausted beyond belief.

Just an interpretation out of my own amusement.
If you're using an alarm clock then you're not getting enough sleep.

I've found that fruit as the first meal is effective for alertness and many diet problems.

A small amount of exercise also reduces sleep. Effectively, you get exercise time at no cost. However, you have to remember to do it before you get exhausted from coding.
and some fraction, like me, won't have any version installed.
Hopefully the only one hurt will be the author(me) for his spelling and awkward wording.
The less you exercise, the less your body needs to recover. So you can balance your health and sleep time depending on your goals.
Nice. Do you plan on sharing with the rest of the class? Do you have a site for this project?
Ah, usually before the planning phase there is a pre-planning phase that takes weeks. During that time the group tries to identify all the people that need to be in the planning meetings.

I actually worked in a place that developed software this way. The smallest of projects would take over 8 months. Large projects would take close to 5 years.

Any project that took over 1 year was likely to get canceled. The budget would usually look different the following year, the business priorities would shift or the technology stack would be obsolete.

I was in meetings over 90% of the time. Often meetings had to be scheduled during lunch time since it was the only time everyone was available.
6 hours usually - 7 if I'm lucky. Can't usually get to sleep before 1am - usually the kids are up by 7, I can sometimes stay in bed until 8. I wish I slept more actually - I really sometimes do feel like I am brain damaging myself. But I try and take a nap around 7pm usually - a half hour or hour while the kids go to bed - then I get up - watch TV and hang out with the missus, and get to work.
The man who can unboiled an egg
great book picked it up and about a month ago, when i get down i read it. .rb
It is possible to power-nap ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_nap ) on public transport. Your timing has to be good but it will quickly improve with practice. Masters of the art are able to nap while standing on a train and wake shortly before their destination.
it might be a good idea if you guys brought in more people on the business side? that's what developers realy need.
The real reason: people in rich countries have been tamed to be orderly cells inside larger and longer-lived organisms -- the nation, the culture, a religion or class or movement, a corporation, whatever.

Within a larger organism, there's no surprise individual cells don't wildly reproduce in the organism's warm, safe, nutrient-rich environment. That's against the conditions of formation/inclusion. When it happens, it's often a cancer that threatens the whole.
yooglebookapedia.com
Regus offers 'Virtual Offices' from very prestigious addresses - they also have other services other than providing just an address (Office Space, Mail Forwarding, Phone Answering, Office Equipment, etc).
yeah, it's quite a fun book. i read it before last investor day.

the only part i didn't like was the Lycos story. basically, a guy gets a call from a VC: "hey, we've got the idea, the technology, and the funding. can you please run the company?"
A friend's favourite was: sport + portal = sportal
Why they fear the meta
One thing you forget: If MS where to remove all the bugs nobody would buy their software, as it would cost 10-20 times what it cost today.
Those aren't very good sources. Amazon links are all weight-loss-oriented "pop" diet books. The genre is notorious for being full of inaccurate and misleading stuff.

On that other site, the author's other books include Natural Cure of Cancer. More hilariously, he has "D. P., N. D., D. C., D. N. T., D. N. Sc., D. N. Ph., D. N. Litt, Ph.D., D. Orthp." after his name.
Some fraction will also not have JavaScript enabled. That was very popular among nerds back when JavaScript wasn't essential to web browsing.

Fortunately, that particular brand of nerd can safely be ignored. They are a tiny, tiny minority who make a lot of noise on websites such as this.
Yahoo Makes Its Case in Letter to Shareholders
Wow, I really admire your initiative in bookmarking sentences, taking notes, etc. If I can ask, what's your motivation for doing a startup? What drives you?
A former client named his educational enterprise after his building which was named after his area. He was able to register the .com despite .net, .org, .co.uk and .sch.uk being registered. How fluky!
You can use your house and change it later. Probably better than wasting money on a virtual office.
Money
Ego
Women
FOOD!
:)
i don't know much about POS systems but there is a 99 cent store near by that when they scan an item it make a koo koo sound like in icq when you get a new message. its realy funny shopping there.
Shoot me an e-mail when you do, please?

fedorov@rutgers.edu
SchrödingerExceptions
where do you get good and bad seed phrases?
Xobni gets a shoutout from big bill @ microsoft
Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work
Ok, I'm seriously interested in this. Nice work!
Better yet: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/earthclassmail/

I use it and it works pretty well - in many ways it's better than a PO box. Actual physical address, no paper to deal with, and you don't have to drive anywhere to get your mail. The interface is a little sluggish, though (ASP & MSFT Servers...) - but they say they're working on that.

It's great if you don't want to change your address every time you move.
Science fiction has been very fruitful for band names, such as Duran Duran and T'Pau.
Wouldn't it make the company looks shady?
What is your ideal office?
I was thinking about how I dislike the current setup at my job. We have desks instead of cubes in the main open space. Many folks dislike cubes, but I miss the illusion of privacy they create. I hate distractions, and the open desks only cause more of them.

Other than cubes, it's nice to have access to a clean shower and be in an area where you can run. A kitchen is essential too (fridge, sink, toaster oven, microwave).
If You Want Customers to Be Happy, Give Them Less Product Information
Google Analytics actually just added support for AJAX/Flash actions...look up the documentation, you can have each step of that process appear as a "page".
What have been some of the dumbest things you did?  
I guess mine was when I formated the wrong drive partition. And another time I blocked my self behind firewall and had to drive all the way to the dataceter to unblock.
I'm sure i've done other dumb things but it would be funny and maybe educational to know some of your mistakes. it could be anyting...
YouTube is Down
Cannot wait for Livingston's new one. I heard it follows the same theme, but focuses more on engineering.
Who says travel says also learning other languages and cultures: get used to changing frame and realizing your own cultural assumptions in human communication.

The horrible problem here is that unless one has lived abroad for a while in a country with a different language and culture than one's own, there's no way a person can see value in it. But if you don't have that experience, you will always drag behind those who do.
Comcast FCC filing shows gap between hype, bandwidth reality
C'mon, we're trying to rehabilitate the words 'hack' and 'hacker' to not be associated with scams, theft, and vandalism. Didn't you get the memo?
when you're talking about recipe sites where content is a very important part - yes it does make it better
Harvard Proposal to Publish Scholarly Research Free on the Internet
How do you install macports?
I'm stumped right were I'm supposed to mess around with the .profile thing.

I've looked at http://www.nabble.com/%22port:-command-not-found%22-after-installing-MacPorts-1.6.0-10.5-Leopard.dmg-td15348745.html, but can't figure it out. I created a .profile ($ touch ~/.profile) but have no idea were to go from there. What terminal commands should I do?
Plaxo’s Buyer - Not Facebook, Not Google. Likely Comcast
Go to the UPS store and get a mailbox. Your Mailbox has a real street address. It will look something like 1845 Blank Street Suite #ofmailbox
Nerds seize power at school formals
So that's like 200 years of school. Does he also have a book about how to live forever?
ASK YC: How does a non-American entrepreneur get into the US?
I'm a Canadian about to graduate from engineering. I'm well into my first startup, but I need to get to a startup hub where I can iterate faster and be around the right people. I don't want to spend 3+ years working for a company to get a green card, I want to focus on starting companies and failing as fast as possible. Is there any way I can get into the US?
What would happen if a VC sent you a term sheet, you had good alternatives, and sent them back a term sheet with a whole lot of changes marked out in red (say, no board seats, no preferred stock, no outside CEO, shorter vesting period, etc)?
Sounds like a great idea. I would be in.
or http://domify.com -- it bruteforces the synonyms for you and checks availability
well... your shell is probably ignoring .profile. I think the default shell under osx is now bash, so look for a file called .bashrc, and if it exists add the settings from .profile in there (or you can just source .profile from your bashrc).
Any libraries. It doesn't have to be C based.

For instance, I wouldn't be able to live without my Oracle JDBC libraries.
"...	What is your ideal office? ..."

Hmm couch to the left, bookshelf in front. Large table. Places outside to walk and think.

a quiet place that's a
leap and a bound from
a keyboard & monitor

Close to food, kitchen, stereo, whiteboard. With all these things I can move from idea to code quickly. Having said that it's a fair hike from the city central. Read these articles to rate your own environment: [0]

- http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

[0] btw I add these references not because of "who" wrote them, but the quality of the descriptions.
I've seen the effect of two people mimicking each other at a motivational meeting. From this, I presume that the situation would devolve into fits of laughter.

Both people would be inclined to be cheerful. If this was mimicked then both people would be increasingly jovial until both would be laughing uncontrollably.
Bad Form: Companies Still Send Passwords via Email
if you're working with python and images, the Python Imaging Library is a must-have
A large room with a desk, computer, sofa. In an old country house in the UK.

http://xara.com/gaddesden/
Wow, this sounds awesome... my problem is exactly the same, so I usually just buy frozen food...
Numerous mistakes involving "rm" and "*"
I meant short time procrastination as an indicator of sleep deficit. It's the best indicator you sleep not enough. You should pay some bill today but you can't find enough energy to do it (you can also feel strong aversion to do it) so you move this task and three other tasks to the next day. Ask yourself if this already happened.

There are some techniques by ex. some very intensive buddhist meditations (you can't perform in normal daily life) which can help you slow down your metabolism and so also need for sleep and eat without impact on your health, or techniques how to wake up exactly at 7AM (it's the best time IMO) without alarm clock.
No, bash will also use .profile
Aha! The problem is unsolvable.
Just like that nabble page says, add the following to your .profile using a text editor:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
Good analysis. I'm half way through reading F.A.W. but I have a bad habit of switching books. Right now I'm on How to Win Friends and Influence People and then I'll go to 7 Habits of Highly Successful People and then I'll read a few more cases. It keeps my mind fresh for each book.
who is giving negative points without even adding their own comments? It was a question/comment and if you realy think about it developers do need people that understand business as well.
Something on the beach, with an ocean view.
I would be very interested in a digital copy (pdf) to read on my Iphone (usually in places where a book is very incvonvenient) I'd be willing to pay (to the author of course) :)

I was just recently reading about Macros in PG's _On Lisp_ on my Iphone - excellent work PG.
EURion constellation
burning a copy of "7 habits ..." would be a greater symbolic gesture.
And how do I do that? Where is this .profile?
My ideal office would have an ocean view, be close to everything geographically but never have any traffic congestion. Preferably the top floor (or at least a corner) of a large building with everything I need located inside of it (bathroom, shower, couch, kitchen). There would be two desks. One would be facing away from the large glass window (where the ocean is visible from) so that I can interact with the people who come to visit. The other desk would be against a wall (maybe a corner, or even a small hallway shape) where the real work gets done. In there I would have my computers, printers, and the other essentials. The couch would face the ocean, but rotate to face the flat screen TV. Scratch that. The Couch faces the ocean and when I want to watch TV the window is covered by a drop down wall with the TV inside of it. I'd also have a bed so I could stay the night comfortably when necessary.

As you can tell, I think it's healthy to dream big.
Use your parents' address. I did it for my first two companies, never had a problem.
i'll take a desk or a cube with a brick alley view where i can sit whenever i want to (within reason) over a pastoral mansion that looks at me funny when i show up at noon.
One with great colleagues that help, inspire, and challenge me. Everything else is optional.
Lots of different places to work - from a 24" monitor attached to the MBP in the "office" to the Eames lounge in front of a big TV. Add the coffee shop down the street and I'm set.

Note - don't forget about ergonomics!
I tried to leave a tip but nothing happened when I clicked 'Tip This' even after I enabled JavaScript. Does your site support Opera?
Come to think of it, instead of trying to beat the filters, what if they specifically cooperated with them so that they'd filter out nothing at all? Think of what a great boast it would make: "I'll take you straight to the point, and these folks over here will prove it mathematically". I could picture Ralph Nader trying this.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9965

I like to think that my comment is when the Techcrunch comments jumped the shark.
(YC Winter08) Addher.com goes Beta
i cant wait to read the comments for this
Internet Software Patents
umm.. you'll have quite a learning curve ahead of you, but preserver.

open up terminal.app and type -

>ls .profile

You should see a response like -

eric@quark:~>ls .profile
.profile
eric@quark:~>

this means that the file ".profile" exists. If instead you get something like -

eric@quark:~>ls .profile
ls: .profile: No such file or directory
eric@quark:~>

Then you should type -

>touch .profile

this will create the file with no contents.

Next type -

>open .profile

(I assume you don't know about vi, so TextEdit.app will have to do for now).

Paste in the macports environment settings, save, and open a new terminal window. macports should now work.