skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About six years ago, I worked in a company where the standard desktop setup was Opera on FreeBSD. At the time, Opera's default user agent string was a contemporary version of Internet Explorer. Furthermore, Opera hadn't released a binary for FreeBSD so it was run under FreeBSD's Linux binary compatability.

So, the web server thought that the client was Internet Explorer and the client thought that it was running on Linux. I was astounded by the number of websites that failed when I changed the user agent string to Opera but worked fine in the default setting.

Why bother testing a user agent string if the app doesn't know which operating system is being used? Why do something adverse when the test fails? Old programming adage: never test for a condition you cannot handle.
I don't think it makes much difference, honestly. MSFT and Yahoo individually were a negligible threat. Combined they'd still be a negligible threat.
Colourlovers: Color Trends + Palettes
If I were you I'd focus more on creating other nice stuff than trying to protect something inherently impossible to protect (client-side javascript).

Look at it this way: you can try hard to protect it even though you're likely to fail (as has been said, if it's worth stealing then it will be stolen), or you can avoid wasting your time to protect it and do something else valuable.

Would you rather have 1 great thing and have a possibility of preventing the 1st one from falling in wrong hands or have 2 great things? You can't always have everything. If your thing gets copied, you'll still have it. Also, I wouldn't worry much about a competitor that has to rely on copying you to keep up with you...

As a radical solution, you could publish the code and blog a lot about it, at least this way nobody can claim they wrote the code themselves...

PS: Sorry for all the "thing"s...
I have a 12px minimum font size set in Firefox because I have a fairly high-resolution screen. This causes the content that should be in the middle of the page to be displayed offset to the right, starting for the right border of where it should be.
Isn't there a way to disable sound from firefox by default?
good advise. I will do that anyway. I'm sure people that copy don't realy know what they ar doing nyway
Thanks I'll look into that.
It all comes back to the pointy-haired boss paradox; the PHBs have no knowledge of tech, but still have strong opinions about it. It's like having a basketball coach who doesn't know the rules of the game:

"Why don't you stop dribbling, pick the ball up and just carry it to the other side?"

It's more or less hopeless, and this "years of experience" thing is just one more symptom of the PHB phenomenon.
it wont, the pie is quite big. for newcomers it'd be moore difficult yeah. It'll be interesting if YouTube/Google reacts by adding live streams.
Apple Print Ads Over The Years
Well I could give you the marketing/PR spiel, but that's not my department.

I see the competitions as being only a single aspect of the site, and we are all hoping it grows beyond a competition and more into a vehicle for getting really talented people produced and promoted. The vision for that particular component is really more of a virtual indie production company - but we all have to start somewhere and I think this is a pretty good way to start.

It's not the only thing we do though. We've got three products in total. The professional networking product is still pretty infant, but we're obviously working on making that a value for indie talent and a means for them to network and get gigs - as well as provide tools for self promotion (for instance, the headshot generator does what many actors pay $400 or more for the exact same result).

Our final product, the next to roll out, are a suite of production development/management tools for indie/web/amateur filmmakers/videographers. It allows you to take your pitches and manage them all the way through post-production.

Producing for on-line is a growing market with different needs/goals than traditional film and we're aiming to help bolster it and become a hub for it. Hopefully, we'll get there.

ps. I don't write PR, I write code. This is honestly how I feel about the entire project, otherwise I couldn't have sunk the crazy amount of hours I have into it.

pss. sorry about the music ;)
of course it can reverse engineered and of course it can be recreated but why at least not make it a bit harder for them by obsfucating the code. Good programmers wont bother copy your code anyway. Its those who will try to copy your code byte by byte you wont to discourage and obsfuctating is a good obstacle for these people.
To repeat myself: I know nothing about hollywood. It just seems like a really, really crusty enterprise. I remember Matt Groening talking about how hard it is to get any idea past the bureaucrats. Well, if big shots can't do it...who can? But then, maybe that's just an invitation for ventures like yours.
Larger companies run up against the fact that this approach doesn't scale. Even if such an organization could reliably identify super-talented programmers before hiring them (which it almost certainly can't), there just aren't enough of them to meet the inexorable demand for growth. Thus, as the organization grows, so does its mediocrity. But it can coast on its earlier reputation for some time.

On projects I've observed, companies like this placed one or two of their best people on the project early, as a loss leader. These did good work, which enabled the sales people to then bring in a larger number of considerably dimmer (but highly billable) light bulbs. That's how the profits are made - land and expand. It seems to take a while for clients to figure this out.
I think the only thing I got out of this was to reinstall SafeHistory and SafeCache for Firefox.

Even though I'm all for optimal layout of options I don't think that any website should try and go parading through my history to do so...at least not without my explicit permission.
We've Been Offered Investment Which Values Our Venture At $1.9 Million - Should We Take It?
We've received a serious unsolicited offer of 1000 pounds (US$1945) for a 0.1% stake in our venture. Should we take it? We don't need the cash. However, the investment is smart money - although with limited contacts.

We haven't incorporated. Indeed, we're inclined to decline the offer because we'd have to formalise the paperwork prematurely and this could prejudice further investment.

The offer was not a take-it-or-leave offer. It is a standing offer which is unlikely to increase due to the budget of our potential investor.

Should we get seed funding with better contacts? The most optimistic valuation from YCombinator (US$20000 for 2%) gives a maximum valuation of $1 million. Should we defer this 1000 pound investment until after we get seed money with better contacts?
Why Michael Dell Is Still No Steve Jobs
This works well in Windows, I haven't found a Linux equivalent though.

http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/04/flashmute
Take it as a redeemable loan with the condition that it will be converted into equity upon closing of your next (first) round of investment. You don't need a lawyer for this, just write it in plain English so everyone can understand.
Whoa. Jaw drops
Yep. Thats correct. Although, at the last point I looked into it, there were some firewall-related problems with using Flash for that purpose. I don't remember the details though...
dig that design man.
Poorly written software and a poorly written spec! W3C is responsible too for using a silly namespace identifier.
Yeah... convertible debt is the way to go.
i guess i know a shitload of idiots...
I have no idea what you guys are doing, but your designers rock!
It's really very easy to make an anonymous account on this site. In fact, it is easier than going to bugmenot.com. And the way you did this, a malicious person could come along and delete this story.
I like Crimson Editor. I think it's a bit nicer than Textpad.
I hear you. But it might not be as weak as you say.

Their argument lies in the last paragraph: "Global Marine Systems [...] says more than 50 cables were cut or damaged in the Atlantic last year; big oceans are criss-crossed by so many cables that a single break has little impact. What was unusual about the damage in the Suez canal was that it took place at a point where two continents' traffic is borne along only three cables."

Although they (indeed) do not point to the cause/s of the cables breakage (which could have effectively dismissed any conspiracy theories), they certainly show that the room for conspiracy is considerably reduced.

Plus, they duly remind us of the network's vulnerability in certain locations, the Suez canal in particular.

Thus, I would say those 2 points were interesting enough to be highlighted. As for their editorial/biased style, that's The Economist's trademark, like it or not :)
Widespread encryption heralds new attacks
Take the money.
Thanks for the heads up. Fixed and added as a test case to our QA. Thanks again :)
28 Hour Day
Upmod for the great point - OCaml's niche is advanced data structures.
Heroku is the weirdest company I've seen. Everything started rather typically for a YC-backed group: an announcement of beta on YC news, immediate if not mandatory post on techcrunch, hundreds of enthusiastic comments. Cool.

Except this time I feel like I am alone in my feeling that the service is completely useless. Tell me, how is this better than my regular "offline" dev tools? How can browser-based JS-IDE even approach a productivity of NetBeans or my beloved Vim? Who told you that having a Rails stack on your own machine is hard? Who told you that deploying your existing (already developed) Rails app is hard? Why would I want Heroku?

I do remember that question, on YC application very well: "What is the problem you are trying to solve? What are your users forced to do now?". I am a typical user of Heroku, and I don't have any problems that need solutions like this. I am not forced to do anyting unpleasant. My life is awesome without Heroku. But I feel soooo dumb because of "not getting it".

Damn...
Yeah, I see it as a happy medium between the practical world and the form of programming - an Aristotelian language, if you will.

It's nice when the philosophers come down to rescue us from our cave.
Io
Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).
Also, if your investor doesn't want to do convertible debt and you don't want to incorporate, you could just do it very informal style, and say that he gets .1% in your company whenever you guys do incorporate. Presumably he trusts you if he is willing to invest in you.
Jeff is getting boring. Stating obvious isn't new: he wants to blog almost every day, instead he should pause and come up with actual stuff to write about.
يعيش اليونيكود, شكراً بول.
No shit, Sherlock.
Ask PG: hidden mod commenting?
When I mod people, sometimes I'd like to explain why. However, comments become way too cluttered with noise if many people did this, and not everyone leaves contact information. Would it be simple to add some kind of hidden mod commenting system?

I think this would add value to karma (greater weight to mod points with rationale?). I suspect conscientious people hold off on modding because they want to communicate their intent, whereas others mod freely without caring about the consequences. Consequently, there are more "noise" points than "signal" points, and the information content of karma is lessened.
That's kinda oxymoronic. If their designers rock, you'd know what they are doing no?

(I had to click on the tiny tiny "about" link in the footer to find out what they do)
Go&learn C++. It blows my mind how often people confuse C++ with "C with classes" in 2008. Granted, C++ isn't as sexy as OCaml, but it's still C plus some rather nice extentions that (finally) got trully portable and work as advertised.

Powerful templates plus multiple inheritance give you a very impressive weapon to play with. C# and Java don't even come close.

And please... 99% of software on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are built using the same stuff: C/C++/ObjectiveC.
Complete List Of Microsoft Acquisitions
Who would see the comments?
To be a bit more accurate, GS is fancy shared hosting that lets you do things like host Rails apps on Mongrel on a separate server from your static site. DV is a managed VPS - nothing more, nothing less.

If you're not afraid of server administration, there are more cost-effective VPS options. That said, I have a customer on MT, and their service and support are great.
This is probably not complete. Companies don't announce acquisitions below a certain threshold.
My Reddit clone so far.
Allow the recipient to choose. The default would be private.
The best way to learn Haskell is a combination of #haskell on irc.freenode.net and the Haskell wikibook (incomplete and often flaky, but up until the beginning of the Advanced section, a very nice introduction to the language)
shouldn't the default be public? i'm more inclined to write something for the whole site than for one particular person (especially someone i'm downmodding)
Oops. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_acquired_by_M... ).
Suppose you could make a reply "private", meaning only you and the person you're replying to could see your comment.

Their reply to your private reply should be automatically private, effectively creating an isolated thread.

People who want to disagree indefinitely on some fine point could do so without creating a ruckus.

If anything especially worthwhile came up in the discussion, either party could easily just repost it as an ordinary public reply.

To discourage people from harassing each other with private replies, you should only be allowed to downvote them.

This would also allow people an easy way to say "Thanks" or "I agree" without having those comments pollute the top level space.
I like to use jEdit for coding. EditPlus is commonly used where i work so I use that for general text editing.
If you make the default public then it would be awkward to take it private. If you make the default private then you either keep it private or you risk looking like idiots and being downmodded.
Check out this presentation by Yaron Minsky of Jane Street Capital, JSC uses OCAML extensively.

[pdf]
http://cufp.galois.com/slides/2006/YaronMinsky.pdf
I've read a lot about ruby but coding wise I'm a ruby newbie. I signed up for Heroku yesterday and haven't gotten to the link yet but I plan to tomarrow.

If it seems to work then I'm going to show it to my daughter, who has gotten more interested in programming ever since we solved her "$1 word" math homework a few days ago with about 7 lines of python. Her school doesn't allow her to take her laptop or things like usb drives to school, but I don't think showing off stuff she makes online will be a problem.
Homework for the startup founders
Startup Review Blog - Analyzing Web Success
While this is a pretty good idea, it adds a significant amount of complexity to news.yc. A lot of the appeal of this site is in its simplicity, and adding this public/private commenting system would kind of sacrifice that feeling.
Here's a direct link to this article.

http://www.toddpinkerton.com/blog/2008/01/01/from-powerpoint...
Here's my favorite open-source OCaml application: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

It's also listed as one of the OCaml "success stories" here: http://caml.inria.fr/about/successes.en.html

Subversion access details here: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/svn-instructions....

The author has several papers on it and data synchronization in general here: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/index.shtml#Synchr...
My home setup consists of two wide-screen 21" ViewSonic monitors. Wide screen is interesting, you can easily have three documents open side by side (html, css, and browser for example). I usually play a TV show or a movie on the other screen - gotta have something playing in the background.

Tall monitors seem interesting. I came across this photo of an office at Apple:
http://www.officesnapshots.com/wp-content/galleries/apple/ap...
I've never seen one of those, but that seems just incredible for coding (I know it's a flipped wide monitor, but the dimensions are interesting). You can see much more code in there. It makes code much easier to read and understand.
I agree. Taking an equity investment at a too-high valuation can jeopardize your chances of getting more money down the road. If, as you say, you don't need the cash and you're doing this for the connections, just give them the 0.1% in exchange for their services as a consultant. Taking such a tiny amount of cash for equity will be more trouble than it's worth.
What would you say about a simple, self similar surface that allows for deeper layers of complexity, if the user wants?

Perhaps just adding an invisibility option to a comment, which the receiver can deactivate?
He's smart money, but unable to invest more than $2k and has no connections? It's not worth the time or legal fees to do it.
I think you're building a very cool system for bringing film people together, but I ditto the skepticism about any mainstream film guarantees. Particularly since there's nothing about who you guys are in the "About" page.
I did read the article...
Web development these days is probably the easiest it's been, the only issue is IE, and that seems to be declining in usage thank goodness.
Agreed, being a genius doesn't matter in a vacuum (a point RMS apparently doesn't get).
I think you are asking for two features - a way to privately exchange contact info and a way to publicly/privately explain rationale for up/downmod.

I really like the former but am fine with the noise of explaining mod-rationale in the comment itself.
það er gaman að lesa. Takk fyrir!
If you don't need the money, and he has nothing to offer in terms of contacts, what good will come of it? You'll be giving up 0.1% of your company, and more importantly, telling any potential future investors that you are worth over $1,000,000. I think this will make it more difficult when a potential angel investor comes along with a serious investment offer and plenty of contacts.
does the UK have rules about being an accredited investor? If he can only afford £1k the investor most likely wouldn't meet these terms (at least in the US where the minimum requirement is $1M net worth excluding primary residence or an annual income of somewhere around $300k)
I had the idea once that when you mod people, you must explain why, or it doesn't count. In fact, commenting and modding would be one and the same--in order to reply to something, you must mod it first; clicking the arrows opens the box. Then, I had the idea that your vote is weighted by what people think of your comment, and so on... eventually the scheme got too complicated to implement.
Maybe. You can design for aesthetics, and/or for functionality. Sometimes, "rock" doesn't mean "is good"--think about the negative opinions some people have of [the term, or the actual] "rockstar programmers." In this case, I was thinking about "rock" as in a Hendrix guitar solo--doesn't really get a point across, but doesn't really need to.
svn command line, why would you need anything else?
The burgeoning hobbyist/amateur/online market sounds like a much more natural place to aim at than Hollywood, unless you guys have some ins somewhere. But then, I don't know anything about anything in that industry, so maybe I'm totally off.
Wow, this is great idea for a startup. Is someone already doing/done this?

Peer-to-peer user tracking. Like those crappy toolbars of yore, but all server side. Sign up, put our random-URL-sampler-JS block in your page, and you get access to all our mined data.
He probably could have written it better so it wouldn't have been inflamatory, but this has been done for years now... this probably applies for all apps beyond just Rails...
I don't see the point of explaining your mods. I think modding comments is of dubious value by itself.

Private messaging might be helpful, but I don't see an urgent problem to be solved.
The most interesting part was that google has an open proxy. I had no idea, has that always been like that?

edit: Crazy, apparently it has (2+ years anyway).
I actually liked the video. Dell is selling lots of cheap computers to schools, governments, big and small companies; it doesn't have to be trendy.
YUI Compressor works pretty well.
Thanks for reiterating conventional wisdom, but the person missing something here is you.

Sure Google can computer more for less, but I already have a PC; why buy two (one for Google and one for me)? SETI@Home leverages... (wait for it)... the desktop!

Second, the point here is not about utility computing. It's about developing applications. Let's face it, web apps are struggling to the the things that most desktop apps do easily. (Ajax is a joke.) Certainly they both have their pros and cons. And there are certainly some situations where a web app makes more sense. Don't get me wrong. But when creating rich applications, the web sucks. And all your arguing here won't change that.
I disagree. If you're a clever programmer and can 'unobfuscate', you're likely to be clever enough to write it yourself anyway.

Obfuscation is there to prevent non-clever programmers from stealing parts/the whole source code, and it works.
Fellow YCers, SERIOUSLY.

Take a look at this graph:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/online-info-flow.jpg

And come up with a way to optimize that.

Now THAT'S a startup.

What do you think?
If you do think it might be a good idea you might want to take a look at the Enterprise Investment Scheme in the UK which provides a whole bunch of tax incentives for someone making this sort of investment.
http://www.eisa.org.uk/render.aspx?siteID=1&navIDs=21,97
It should be noted that the released version of Arc actually did support Unicode. The only reason that it became a controversy was because PG said it was ASCII-only and implied it was a design decision. It is purely a communication issue.

(Btw. same thing with the controversy over presentational markup vs CSS. AFAICT the Arc framework don't do any layout at all out of the box, including any presentational markup.)

Now PG seem to believe that controversy is inevitable when creating a new language so you might as well throw a few random punches. However if you want to build a vibrant community around a language I think it is very important to choose you battles carefully and your swipes wisely.
Is Iran still on the Internet? Find out with a traceroute
Measure the time-to-marketness of the feature. Instead of obfuscating JavaScript try spending your time to make the whole thing look as great as you can. Developing something like _Basecamp_ is easy but I doubt something as simple as Basecamp will be a success again--unless you improve it by an order of magnitude.
I guess that you and I had different interpretations of the Arc challenge. I thought it was intended to demonstrate how easy it is to implement multi-page flows in Arc by binding closures to links and forms. I didn't think it was intended to convince people that Arc is a good general purpose language because its scope was so narrow (if the challenge were to build a search engine or an image editing tool, it would have been a different story).

By the way, although I didn't expect people to extrapolate from the Erlang challenge that Erlang is a good general purpose too, I do think that it is, at least for building backends for a wide range of applications. I wrote a followup on my blog to the Erlang challenge where I listed some of them.