skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inform 7: An adventure game programming system based on natural language
Ask YC: What do you think of Apple's SDK vs. Open Tool Chain from a business perspective?
So several people seem to agree that the Open Tool Chain allows everything Apple's SDK does and more. But, if you want to start a company based on the iPhone do you think it's preferrable to use Apple's SDK to remain "offical"?
I know this is hardly the most salient point, but...

... the HBase logo is fantastic!

Oh, and it's also great to see open source contributions like that. Good job all around, Powerset!
Segway: the product that changed the world
10k new users might be a problem, in the same way that the flood of new Internet users from AOL was referred to as the "September that never ended". Any time users flow in to a community too quickly, it is difficult to bring them all in to compliance with the social norms of the community, resulting in a change in those social norms which the existing community members usually do not like. It's one of the reasons people get upset about immigration.
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=120492689515501&w...
i haven't gotten a chance to test this yet, but how does dropbox do conflict resolution? ie: i'm offline at one place, make a change, offline at another place, make a change, go back online at both places.

for text files, i suppose this could potentially implement svn-like text merging. how would that feature feel, from a design perspective? unintuitive? error prone? or excelent?

edit: damn, this is a really cool app. goodbye emails to self.
I realize part of the benefit of it is to share files - but what about things I want to make sure are private?

I see photos and public when I first sign in - are these both public folders? How do I store things, lets say my resume I want to be able to access from anywhere, but want private?

Other than that, it appears to 'just work' amazingly. Having built a somewhat similar backend to a system like that, it really is quite a feat.

Edit: Since the startup I was at is now defunct - email me and I may have some a good potential market for your product (very slightly modified)
I agree with this statement and will make an additional comment.

I wonder to what extent Warren Buffett's treatment as a oracle by the financial press creates a non-helpful feedback loop where complex financial activities that can't be reduced to simple homilies (i.e., buy low, sell high) are immediately viewed as inevitably catastrophic and diabolical.

I say this with particular focus on the notion, which is once again stated in this article, that if Buffett doesn't understand it, who does? Apparently, a whole lot of very very smart people understand these systems (exotic financial instruments, electronic trading systems) enough to make them a significant part of the modern economic structure. Certainly, there is something more complex and nuanced going on here but you would not know it from the way the press (via Buffett) is presenting it.
"All three groups were significantly more productive using 24-inch-or-larger widescreen monitors (1920x1200 resolution, or larger) compared to 18-inch displays (1280x1024 resolution), according to the research."

They're not comparing 2 displays with the same real estate (in area or total pixel count). Well of course the larger monitor will make you more productive. I'm still dubious about the benefit of widescreen over standard-format.

Widescreen's popularity has more to do with playing DVDs than with increased productivity.
But, see, people like not having strong identities on the internet, and where it matters, reputation and identity get built up organically already (i.e., I don't need Utu to know who the idiots are in my favorite IRC channels).
Have you used Tortoise SVN on windows? I'd really like something along those lines to be honest.

Dropbox looks like a great alternative though.
As far as I can tell, this entire article was based on two sentences in Buffett's letter to shareholders six years ago. Buffett is obviously a financial genius, but it isn't very easy to see exactly what he meant from these two sentences. Basing two entire pages of doom and gloom on that with nothing but arbitrary statistics to back up the point doesn't seem very trustworthy to me. If the author is serious that there is a massive bubble flying under the radar, he's not making a particurlary solid argument.

Headlining this story 'Warren Buffet: *' is very misleading. Please don't.
Nice!

Just in case I need to remove it from my Mac, how do I do it?
"What we really do at Y Combinator is get startups launched straight. One of many metaphors you could use for YC is a steam catapult on an aircraft carrier. We get startups airborne. Barely airborne, but enough that they can accelerate fast."

So... it's an incubator? :D YC is what incubators were supposed to be. Even though you don't put them in an office, you do encourage them to live in the YC Tower, etc. It might make you wince, but think of it this way: YC is incubation done right.
7 Universities and Websites Offering Free Business Entrepreneurship Courses Online
I suspect there was a decent amount of overlap between techcrunch readers and news.yc readers prior to the article. I wonder what the spike numbers are for the yc startups that have articles written about them when they first release.
Destined to succeed since day 1.

Is there encryption?
Ask YC: Do you believe social networks have a lock on their users?
Beyond the true fans and those emotionally attached to a product, are the rest of the users locked on any service?

In my mind, beyond Google I don't think there is any social network or service that has a lock on its users, assuming they are exposed to something better.

What are your thoughts on users lock on?
Yes, use the official SDK. The problem with the "Open Tool Chain" is that there's no guarantee of backward compatibility and hence you'll always be at risk that Apple breaks your application. If I was doing an app. for business reasons I'd go with the official SDK.

Sure, you appear to have lost a few things (perhaps the most significant is that ability to run in the background). I suspect that the biggest benefit of the Open Tool Chain is that it will provide a way for Apple to see what people want in the real SDK and they can cherry pick official additions as necessary. The essentially did that with the entire SDK idea in the first place.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2
I'm as impressed by this update as I was by the recent Safari release. FF3 is looking really good.
speaking of which, there should be a 24/7 IRC room for YC. something like #hackernews on freenode?
I thought Hypercard was excessive in its pursuit of an English-like programming language, but this puts it to shame. Impressive and terrifying, and no doubt filled with gotchas for people willing to pretend that it is English -- e.g.:

http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/doc25.html

(On the other hand, is this the opposite of a write-only programming language?)
I wrote a javascript library to use an html table as a database.

http://projects.gregweber.info/tablelib

This is only useful in comparison to other solutions if you actually want to display the data as an html table.
I gave the site a whirl, but my main problem is that it just aggravates information overload. There are way too many headlines to scan through and most of them don't appeal to me.

I like the concept of an auto-generated RSS aggregator for the masses that can't create their own, but I think the user should have some input (i.e. ask them their preferences before-hand) in order to reduce the sheer number of articles on each page.
very cool service, I can just imagine so many uses for this.
"On a typical day there are 50-60."

Which means there are tens of thousands of accounts? I'm amazed that the community still feels small here. That's some crazy lurker:commenter ratio.
www.jing.com

Its free, not the best but super super easy to use. You can make up to a 5 min video, while talking people through it.
Static vs 'dynamic typing', part 2: The personality-factor.
The thing about 'free'
A Python cheat sheet for those of us who do
FriendFeedFeed - Aggregate all your social networking aggregator feeds
Linux Laptops: Despite Minor Annoyances, They're Improving
Assume all new email is useless
7 rules of UI design
I bet $100 trillion that this isn't as big of a problem as they are claiming.. Oops, now it's a $616 trillion bubble!

The fact that this is going on outside of the regular banking system seems like a feature to me.
RadicalBuy has launched a new widget to help sell your items off of Facebook
listing what ciphers and hash functions you're using for a project has got to be on the top 10 list of signs that you don't understand security.
Coding around the Campfire
Minuses: Tab order on the "Link your account" page is wrong.

Pluses: Just works!

Great job, you've solved a problem I've been fighting with for a long (long) time!
Good points. So I guess the challenge is either to convince users that OpenID gives them some advantage to just using their same old login details, or convince website owners that it is a good idea. I guess we'll see how it works out...
Beautiful stuff, Ashwin!
> I don't think there is any social network or service that has a lock on its users, assuming they are exposed to something better.

It's a question of how much better that something is compared to the cost of switching.
Since Drew was cheeky enough to ask.

digg/reddit love :)

http://digg.com/tech_news/Bringing_OpenID_To_The_Masses_Clic...

http://reddit.com/info/6bofr/comments/
From FAQ:

# How does Dropbox handle editing conflicts?

If two users share access to a file (either through sharing the same account or within a shared folder) and a conflict between their two versions appears, the Dropbox server retains only the first version to fully make it to the server.

The machines still in conflict with the server will get copies of the file with a suffix like "(Drew's local copy 1-25-2008)." Users can then manually fix the conflict and remove the extra copies of the conflicted file.
The thing is, I know how small the Kindle is. In theory, it's pretty cool. But it is definitely not something that fits in my purse or in my pocket like the iPhone does..and even if it did it doesn't do everything the phone can (especially with the just-released sdk).

The integration is the only reason why I would contemplate a Kindle purchase..and yet..isn't a very compelling reason for me to do so. There aren't many new books I am truly interested in that I don't want a dead tree version of (easier to share with family/friends) or that I can't find an online version of (e.g. safari books, books24x7).

I suppose it's really a personal preference thing. If the cost were slightly lower than it is right now I may consider it for home use. Or maybe if more of my textbooks were available..I would definitely purchase it in a split second. But as-is..nah.
Plus, when you read the FAQ, it's even cooler than it sounds at first: automatic photo albums, public/shared/private settings, automatic versioning, secure sending, etc. This is one sweet product.
Great idea Buxfer guys.

A simple version of this can also be done through mofuse, granted I think the Buxfer one looks better.

I was able to create a News.YC in about a minute.

Here's the link to the preview.
http://gg20o9.mofuse.mobi/iphone/preview/
Seems like nice reference. But is it really useful outside a programming marathon or something like that? I mean, most of the algorithms described are already implemented by libraries for the most famous languages.

Anyhow, if I saw it being sold on a book store on a reasonable price, I'd defenetely buy it.
Develop a Firefox 3 Add-On, Get a Free T-Shirt
I think a certain percentage will stick to what they know. But yet if you had a specialized social network for lets say insect collectors - members of the other social networks who loved to collect insects would probably jump ship. And then another question is what would make one "insect collector" social site better then the other? I guess you could offer free insects to users or suchlike. Do something focused and cool and maybe you can "unlock" users...
Whoa, $30-50M is waaay out of my price range. I'm talking really small time here, a couple k at most. Thanks for the info though. And, I would like to learn how the whole VC world works. I know pretty much zilch about it.
Gave it a swirl just now. I have tested Wuala, AllMyData and a couple of other similar services before and DropBox does stand out in a general look&feel as well as the implementation details.

IMO it has two major problems at the moment -

* On Windows, if DropBox is not running, it causes Windows Explorer to lag like hell; entering a folder on a local disk takes seconds and the Explorer basically plays dead at this time

* There is no detailed description of the security model - what's encrypted/authenticated where and how exactly. While some (most ?) people don't care about this sort of thing and tend to take devs' word for it, the model needs to be disclosed to allow independent review and evaluation. Otherwise it's just a proprietary crypto, which should be assumed broken until proven otherwise.
So cool! My cell phone bill was killing me, but this is great, saving me tons of money. Goodbye T-Mobile!
The Chatterous group is 24/7 as well.
Looks like the Dropbox client doesn't work if you're behind a Proxy servers.

Any plans to allow a proxy configuration setting in the future?
Can anything significant come of something like this, or is it way too small time? I'm just a normal working schmoe, so I can only afford to support someone's basic living requirements and simple hardware.
$75/Month is way more than the $20/month slicehost is offering. They do offer a lot more memory, but for the time being, I just can't justify $75/month.
Its simply http://originalsignal.com sans technology articles.

Not that clever or ground breaking really.
Hey there, guy. So you bought yourself a shiny new Core 2 Duo/Quad machine. Good, you're gonna need it, cause your web browser is about to get even slower thanks to Taffy!
US (Northern VA)
Yeah, then you're on the scale of "friends and family" like Will said.

I suggest reading Venture Hacks if you want to learn more about VC, and the blogs of people like Fred Wilson, Don Dodge, etc. I'm sure you can find a list somewhere out there.
WebFaction is nice for shared hosting, but the 60MB limit on RAM and the lack of root access is fairly irritating sometimes.

600GB of bandwidth is nice though, way better than the paltry 100GB slicehost offers with their minimum package.
The odds are that you're going to lose money since you can't diversify like YC or a VC can.
Qoof Launches iBeg App for Facebook - Watch Videos of facebookers begging for prizes
It is much better than digg or reddit, in my limited experience. Karma mongering still happens though, and it will probably increase with time as more users are added unless karma mongering is carefully considered in the design.
Ask YC: Providing Hosting Services?
Hi,

A friend and I are talking about doing some hosting for a niche industry where we know some people. We'd be reselling a machine based somewhere like Layered Tech, which has these requirements for resellers:

http://www.layeredtech.com/dedicated-servers/resellers.php

Has anyone ever worked selling hosting services? I don't imagine the margins are good, but it might not be something bad to get a bit of money if it's steady business without a lot of hassles. What kinds of software is out there for billing and managing the business?

We're thinking a pretty small operation... 10's or at most 100's of clients. Worthwhile?
N.Y. Times CEO: Online Growth an "absolute priority"
What convinced you that you couldn't?
There are

> (len hpasswords*)
14357

accounts. Not all active, obviously.
Web programmers who follow your advice usually sound like idiots who don't know much about what they're doing. Lots of them like to reimplement wheels like HTTP caching, HTTP authentication and content negotiation, even error codes (!). I have grown tired of stupid shit web "programmers" without knowledge of HTTP are capable of generating. Especially when paid by an hour.
I agree...to a point. Most referrals like this happen at lower level job descriptions where sub-$1000 bonuses are still a meaningful % of overall compensation. I know one consulting firm where a guy doubled his take home on referral bonuses.
A good idea, but I don't see any "friend" category. Maybe he has a completely separate personal email address... but he has a folder for family.

I do something similar with my gmail account. Information emails are either deleted (your account has been activated!) or archived, depending on the content.

Actionable emails (reminders, or emails that I plan on replying too) I keep in the inbox, until they are obsolete, then I archive them.
Am I wrong to assume that in the chatterous web chat, everyone in the group receives the updates by default, either be it SMS etc? I don't want to use it too much if I feel like people will get annoyed by getting my every update.

To me it seems like reinventing the wheel for chat in this case. Yes, chatterous is great for getting a group of friends together to plan something like a dinner and have all the updates go out to everyone.. but for a regular web chat I don't see how this is any better than IRC.
Because it takes a genius to explain it in the simplest, clearest way possible.
The way they get that number is something like this: imagine a small economy with one oil well, one gas station, and one commuter, and one speculator. The oil well owner pre-sells $1000 worth of oil to the gas station (that's $1000 in notional derivative value). The gas station owner pre-sells the same amount of oil to the commuter (that's another $1000). The commuter decides he'd rather walk, after all, and sells the same value of oil to the speculator ($1000). The speculator decides he'd rather play the soybean market anyway, and looks for someone who wants to trade oil. Alas, the only person who feels good about oil is the oil well owner, who is willing to buy $1000 worth of oil from the speculator.

Since nobody has canceled any of their speculative contracts, the notional value of the derivatives is the sum of the value of all of the trades: $5000. And yet, all but one of the participants made a positive bet (buying $1000 worth of oil) followed by an exactly-offsetting negative bet (selling the same amount of oil). So they all net out to zero, except the oil-well owner; we're all back where we started.

The problem is credit risk. If the gas station is destroyed in an earthquake, the commuter may not be able to collect on his bet with the station owner, and may thus be unable to pay the speculator, who may thus be unable to pay the oil well owner, forcing everyone to cut their spending or possibly even default. But in this case, it takes an outside catalyst, and the problem is not the derivatives themselves. The problem is credit risk. Also, earthquakes.
This isn't the latest breaking news but I was just reading over their blog and noticed it. It looks like very interesting tech.
An interesting counterpoint -- or at least, a tempering perspective -- is the story that made the rounds recently about a consultant who was called in to fix an unstable Linux kernel driver:

The company programmer was slavishly fixing each symptom as it popped up during boot -- that is, each "first problem" he saw. The consultant instead took a look at the code from a holistic perspective, and was able to fix the root cause.

So while sometimes the temporally-first problem is the root cause, sometimes it's just a symptom. Look for the _logically_ first problem which precipitates the symptoms.
You might try reading Matt Heaton's blog (http://mattheaton.com/).

He's the CEO of bluehost and hostmonster (which I use) and he provides a lot of insight into what the industry is like.

I'm sure there are many other good hosting blogs out there too, which you could find via google.
Just went by the Dropbox booth at SXSW. Looks cool.
Easy enough. I'm in.
1. Systems Theory with Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff.

2. Recursion, not just in programming, but in other parts of nature.

3. Memory and social size approximations, such as memory chunking in seven plus or minus two, and Dunbar's number.
"...I rarely find smart people willing to grapple with this higher-order problem unless they have a background in economics"

Interesting. I recently came to the same conclusion (for myself anyways) - my thinking became a lot bigger after reading (addmittedly pop-)economics books like Freakonomics, Hidden Order (the better of the two IMHO), etc. It's not perfect, but I have yet to see a better explanation than the utility-maximizing principle (I made up that name but you get the idea). The key is to remember that all utility is not created equal, and that there are diminishing returns. (sorry, rambling)
Why on Earth would ANY startup want to play "Treasury" like a large corporation? Using the KISS Principle an 'normal' bank account is much better. We all have better things to worry about than an extra 1% return on 'cash'.

As Warren Buffet says, if you don't understand it not invest in it.
I don't have any mind-blowing scientific proof to quote, though I am a trivia and wikipedia junky.

Just the other day I was watching my dog 'dig a hole' inside my house and attempt to bury one of his toys. The problem was that he wasn't actually digging anything up, and was covering the toy with 'ghost' matter (there wasn't anythying there, it was make believe dirt).

This got me to thinking that our entire universe has conspired for planet Earth to harbour life, and for life to evolve through millions of iterations to create the genus canus, and animal behaviour has developed to this exact point in time, where my dog innately knows how to dig, and he has no idea why.... and for that matter, neither do I. We're all such a fluke of existence, and we never take a moment to realize that.
Seven Rules for Managing IT at a Startup
I "half" agree. It doesn't take a genius, but it surely takes a lot of effort, intention and of course, some intelligence too. Without those, there is no way you can teach maths, or history or anything else without making them boring and stupid.
I think it's #startups (or #startup) on freenode.
The Microsoft Passport solution was proprietary, heavy-weight, required a licence to use and was over-engineered. It had a pretty good user experience but it was Microsoft and it was also difficult and expensive to install.

OpenID is decentralised, open-source, free and does one and pretty much only one thing very well. It may not win but historically those have been shown to be really good traits for success.
Cacau Freire
power relationships on virtual communities
Well I haven't had an OpenID until now.

Here's what I think you're saying: A feature of OpenID is that, unlike passport, there is more than one ID provider. With Clickpass, although you can use a generic OpenID the normal way, it works best if you have a Clickpass account.
They're good ;)
".. but for a regular web chat I don't see how this is any better than IRC."

I can connect to Chatterous rooms using the ways I already communicate - IM, SMS, Email, etc. I don't use IRC often (and neither do most people, I suspect). For the die-hard IRC user, Chatterous is probably not that different. For people that want an easier way to chat in real-time without changing existing user behavior, it's great.
Dropbox are in SF at the moment?
I figured that the key to this was ease of use, and by that I mean really, really easy to use. I didn't think that I'd be able to get it to be so easy to use that my mother could use it.
Alright, I guess I'm just biased having been an IRC junkie in the day. Also, is it just me or is there a noticeable lag? although that might just be gtalk to the website
It's our polling interval. We can probably change that.
Looks like logging in with the AOL OpenID provider doesn't work on news.yc. I don't know if this is a news.yc bug or AOL OpenID bug.