skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Silverlight is a subset of WPF so we should be able to compile it as an EXE, put a different template and tabstrip on it, and have something that looks like a Microsoft Office 2007 app. I don't know any way to do that with Java.
Ask YC: Mac virgin wants to know, what would you install?
Previously due to work and other reasons (I have a large amount of windows knowledge) I have been a windows user. This week, my first mac book pro arrived.

I'm looking for developer tools and tweaks, and cool programs that I'd know if I was a mac regular. On windows I'd point myself to sysinternals programs, registry hacks like opening a command prompt in a folder from explorer and registering dll's from a right click, tortoisesvn, putty, etc. For background, I'm doing development in rails at the moment.

So what do you suggest? So far I have quicksilver and growl.
Exactly. The Wii doesn't contain any new technology either, nor is it even as powerful in specific measures compared to its competitors. I think this is a similar situation of the right execution of good design and execution of the full system that will bring a big change.
Startup Makes Cheap Solar Film Cells With Inkjet Printer - Konarka Power Plastic
Startup Financing During the Credit Crunch
Well, that's emacs for you. Everyone gravitates to different bits.

Yes, backward-kill-word would be excellent. I have C-backspace bound to that in Emacs, but I also have a Kinesis keyboard, so C-backspace is just as easy to type as C-w.
YouTube Removed Search Sorting Functionality. Any Idea Why?
There used to be a pop-down menu that enabled you to sort your search results by rating, view count, relevance, and date added (IIRC). This pop down is gone. Now you can sort by relevance and date. Is there any advantage to this feature reduction? Does anybody have any ideas as to why they've done this? This makes it much harder to find the gems in the piles and piles of garbage they host.
Thanks, this is just the kind of comment I was fishing for!

I was scared off by the claims that the OS X install was tricky. That and the fact that I don't use Firefox for anything but Firebug at the moment... I find Safari to be more stable and faster. This might tempt me to switch back to the Fox, though.
I tend to think of it more as "php runs the internet", "java runs the intranet".

Neither of these are the darlings of most hackers. All hackers should know how to code them, though (IMHO).
Textmate, Transmit, CocoaMySQL.

A nightly build of WebKit AKA Safari is much faster than Safari out-of-the-box. You can get it here: http://nightly.webkit.org/
Schemers who want to borrow the zip idiom can do this:

(define (zip . lists)
(apply map list lists))
iPhone Getting Multitouch Games, Including Spore, Super Monkey Ball
Ask YC: Players at top of puzzle/game high score lists as ideal employees/cofounders?
It seems to me that with puzzle sites especially, such people are probably very bright (high g factor). So if you are looking for an analytic person (not necessarily a software engineer), this might be a good way to find one.

See for example some of these amazing players:

http://numbrosia.com/?cmd=puzzle_r

http://numbrosia.com/?cmd=puzzle_r&sort_by=average

And indeed, if employees/cofounders start to look at these rankings carefully, maybe more people would play in the hope of proving themselves to potential employees/cofounders?

Taking it further, you could even have a meta high score site where you can identify top people in high score lists in many puzzle/game sites.
Active Software got 11 million from the KPCB java fund. They were later bought by webMethods in a deal valued at 1.3 billion. However I don't know if KPCB was able to liquidate their shares before the bubble burst. If they were then their returns were probably "ok".
Have you looked at Android, BTW? It's not as polished and slick, but technically it's pretty close, and certainly better in some areas like the ability to run background processes. And it's going to be way more open. "Technically equivalent + open" gives it a lot of potential, I think.
...if you are already conversant in several other programming languages
Textmate of course.

After that I'd get MacFUSE from Google Code for connection to Unix boxes, CheckOff for simple task lists, Twitterrific, xPad for notes, pgAdmin3 for PostgreSQL, Mailplane for GMail accounts, iWork08 or NeoOffice for Office apps, Parallels for virtual machines, and Adium for chatting.

You're all set then!
More JRuby Performance
Real programmers can write Fortran in any language.
I always get cool stuff from the following links. You'll learn a hell of a lot from what you find here and it will be useful virtually everyday:

http://del.icio.us/tag/mac+osx

http://del.icio.us/tag/macosx

http://del.icio.us/tag/mac

http://del.icio.us/tag/osx

You'll also discover all the cool ways Macs are being used and it might even give you some new ideas on how you can use your Mac in ways that are not possible on Windows.

I would also suggest that you first see if there is a way to install ANYTHING Unixy via MacPorts (as posted by another user). This is a VITAL component for developing on Mac OSX.
Or you might end up with people who just play games all day.

[Unlike us serious-minded folks who read message boards. Because we don't, um, waste time at all.]
It's not a developer tool, but it does mean you can put your MacBook Pro -on- your lap.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23049

I'm also a big fan of SubEthaEdit for collaborative editing. http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
First, the basics:

Signup with the Apple Developer Connection (ADC)[1].

After that you will want to install XCode. You can get that from the ADC or from the install cd.

You should then install macports[2] so that you can easily get BSD tools and utilities.

There is also a friendly GUI shareware app called Port Authority[3] you can use to maintain your ports tree.

[1] - http://developer.apple.com

[2] - http://www.macports.org

[3] - http://www.codebykevin.com/portauthority.html

I'll skip the whole code editor issue. XCode has one and you'll probably want to use some other one you already know about in addition to it anyways.

Some of my must-have utilities:

Disk Inventory X [4], so you can see where all your space went.

Hex Fiend [5] is a good open source no-frills hex editor.

[4] - http://www.derlien.com

[5] - http://ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend

When I need to write technical documentation suitable for printing, I use Scrivener[6], with MultiMarkdown[7], TexShop[8] and MacTex[9].

[6] - http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

[7] - http://fletcherpenney.net/MultiMarkdown

[8] - http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop

[9] - http://www.tug.org/mactex

Finally, here are a few things I've already posted to YC in the past.

FreeDup - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=89078

KeyCue - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97555

Top 100 Essential Mac Applications - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110233
I don't actually bother installing much desktop software these days. Just a good text editor, browser, subversion...
> they built their software so that it could grow to 2 servers

This is somewhat debatable -- all software can be grown to multiple nodes, it's more a question of how much work is involved.

They built their software to meet needs. Then, later on, they worried about the other stuff. That's a good way to determine whether the other stuff is worth worrying about.

See also the WebVan analogy for an example of the converse.
Vienna is a great free RSS reader.
Colloquy is great for IRC.
Yes it will, if you break it up onto multiple shared memcached servers. Or re-think how you're serializing it. Or why. Or use a distributed hash table (although if you own all the machines, memcached is easier and faster to ramp up).

Basically, all of these exceptions people are cleverly bringing up are exactly the sorts of things that get in the way. Do everything well enough to get a usable product. Throw it out in front of customers. If you need to make it better because people are beating down the door, go for it; that's a much better problem to have than a scalable but unused resource soaking up your operational budget.
There's nothing more maddening than seeing someone write Java in Python. I see it all over the place here, with giant utility classes that should just be modules, instance variables instead of locals (yes, that means `self.foo` where `foo` would work exactly the same).
For what it's worth, the apps I normally install on a new development box include TextMate, Cyberduck, QuickSilver, OmniGraffle Pro, Photoshop, and Skype.
I don't have much to add, but how do you like your MBP so far?

I've had mine for almost a year and like it very much. I liked my Dell laptop running Ubuntu, but I do prefer the (more expensive) Mac hardware. The fan runs almost silently when compared to the Dell and, okay, it's just a nicer design too.
The differences in the DOM of IE and Mozilla.
Why do you like colloquy? I found it barely adequate.
I like it very much so far! I don't have a nagging paranoia that I've somehow got a virus. I like the quiet, and design itself. It's also faster all-around, and slicker.

The only downside at all so far--I can't stand the way the home and end keys work and I'm having trouble with not having ctrl-C/ctrl-V and ctrl-Z work--the apple key does those functions, but on my keyboard, I find that key to be more awkward. It's screwing with my keyboard shortcut mojo.
no one has mentioned installing firefox yet. plus web developer extensions.

also get VLC for playing video files and DVDs
you can swap cmd and ctrl keys if you want, in the keyboard area of system preferences. you can also change caplocks there to something more useful.

for home/end is the problem them not moving the cursor? try cmd-up-arrow and cmd-down-arrow
A must try service for every blogger
I'm not sure it is dimwitted. They're probably just trying to make sure people are running efficient code, and scripting languages don't compare to ObjC.

Consider that ObjC 2.0 on the iphone doesn't support garbage collection (unlike ObjC 2.0 on the mac). Also, note the emphasis on profiling (they have a really cool tool 'Instruments' just for that).
That is what we call "a good problem to have."
Passion: The Secret Ingredient?
so it's a good time to start a business, b/c the supply of labor is high, and therefore you can pay people less. and there's 63,000 new potential hires to choose from. yay!

PS if the employment rate goes up that's also a good time to start a business cause the economy is doing well so there's enough for everyone
I find Colloquy is fine (though it has a bad habit of pinning the CPU every now and then...), but there's nothing special about it. I'd switch in an instant if someone suggested a superior alternative.

What do you suggest for an OSX IRC client?
While there are a bunch of browser screen shot SaaS out there (browsershots.org browsercam.com), I haven't found a good app to do the same thing locally (that ideally controls the corresponding VMware instances as well).

Anyone seen such as a beast or do you need to roll such a thing by hand?
X-Chat Aqua is good, though unmaintained.
Perian and NicePlayer are required for watching random bits of video from the rest of the world.

http://perian.org/

http://niceplayer.sourceforge.net/
mostly CYA, because I can't remember all of it anymore. I do remember thinking "we'll do it a little differently than it says". There wasn't anything in the book that I can recall that I thought was completely wrong, though.
I'll try the swap asap for command and ctrl. That's great-- Thanks!

In windows, home and end jump to the end of line/beginning of line, so I frequently hit shift-home or shift-end to select a whole line of text, then I copy or cut and move it.

I found app-specific hacks here:

http://www.starryhope.com/tech/apple/2006/keyfixer/

but I haven't checked out how it works yet, as I think I can add Thunderbird and other programs myself. Or I'll just re-adjust...
How about this:

"Right now I'm a software engineer (really, it says it on my business card!) and it has been good to me. I get unusual technical challenges that I wouldn't have come across in my own projects, and unlike the "friend's couch and ramen" startup life, I can feeds myself and my family and live comfortably."
I spent a long time looking for a decent, free text editor. I eventually found two: Komodo Edit and Text Wrangler. The only reasonable terminal program is iTerm, although I'd give it up to get a Mac port of PuTTy.
AIM: Adium

IRC: Snak

RSS: NewsFireRSS

Notes: FreeMind

Newsgroups: Unison

Misc: Aquamacs, AppFresh, WhatSize, Flip4Mac, Twitterific

If you go to Startup School then you should also have a copy of SubEthaEdit installed. It's a text editor for mac that lets you take notes collaboratively in real time.
One last thing: if you're going to play with Arc[10] you'll want MzScheme[11].

[10] - http://www.arclanguage.org

[11] - http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/mzscheme
I installed macports. Before I get to deep into this, is this error obvious to anyone? Note--I do see it's a missing folder, but what is unclear is why I don't have it, and whether it's a part of something larger I'm missing. When I run:

sudo port install putty
------------
Error: Target org.macports.extract returned: shell command " cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_textproc_expat/work" && gzip -dc /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz | /usr/bin/gnutar --no-same-owner -xf - " returned error 127
Command output: sh: /usr/bin/gnutar: No such file or directory

gzip: stdout: Broken pipe

Error: The following dependencies failed to build: gtk1 gettext expat libiconv ncurses ncursesw glib1 pkgconfig
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.
Honestly, I would hold off installing a bunch of software until you have a need for it – or at least until you can appreciate the problem it solves.

OS X comes with a lot of tools out of the box, and I think it'd be better to stick with that stuff until you outgrow it or are no longer satisfied with it.

For example, people will recommend the VLC player, but QuickTime with the Perian plugin is what I use: more stable than VLC and plays all the formats. And it's one less app.

I didn't use Quicksilver for much more than a launcher when I had it. The Spotlight menu in OS X 10.5 is pretty much as fast as Quicksilver for launching apps. So maybe wait to install Quicksilver.

Same with Adium: iChat is good enough for me.

And people recommend Growl, but I found it more annoying than helpful. Pretty much every third party app registers itself, which means seeing tons of alerts I don't care about. (Unless you go into the Growl preference pane and unregister everything, which made Growl too high maintenance for me.)

The only essential things I'd recommend (again, only get them if they make sense to you):

TinkerTool http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
– Gives easy access to hidden system preferences.

Perian http://perian.org/ –
A plugin for QuickTime that lets it play all the formats it doesn't play.

Paparazzi! http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/ –
Makes taking webpage screenshots easy.

Service Scrubber http://www.manytricks.com/servicescrubber/ – Lets you prune the Services menu. (Don't worry about installing this until you see a need for it.)

TextWrangler http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/ – Free text editor with terminal integration and excellent file search capabilities.

Transmission http://www.transmissionbt.com/ –
My favorite bittorrent client.
Learn some Unix -- Bourne shell and all the usual suspects like awk, sed, grep. OS X has Unix under the hood, you might as well make use of it.
What makes a good community?
for line, cmd + left/right arrow (+ shift)
The Dangers of a Startup Democracy
The PDF was painful so here is a converted HTML link
http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/xdLbwd
Rather than rearranging everything to be like Windows, maybe you should learn to use things the way they are on Mac.

Just consider that every hack and customization you make will make it that much harder to use another Mac without all your Windows-y adjustments.

For example, on Mac you navigate around text with the Command and arrow keys. So:

Win Mac
Beginning of line Home ⌘←
End of line End ⌘→
Beginning of doc Ctrl-Home ⌘↑
End of doc Ctrl-End ⌘↓
Looks like their valuation hasn't changed much in a year and a half:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_33/b3997001....

"People in the know say Digg is easily worth more than $200M"
Innovation takes decades to be accepted
It's not really my thing but there are some great gamer/hackers out there. Dennis Fong, the former DOOM champion who went on to start XFire before selling it to Viacom for $100 million, comes to mind.
Well there's a Gettier problem for you:D

And, I haven't replied to your email because I only check personal email briefly on the weekends. Less distraction that way.
This is a good way to find the wrong kinds of clever people. They won't be productive because they will be too busy putting their hours into their favorite puzzles.
Oh I completely disagree about the Spotlight menu being as fast as Quicksilver for launching apps but even besides that Quicksilver can do so much more. You can: set global shortcuts for damn near anything you'd want to do; add a line to a text file (for quick note taking); send a quick email; move files...

And for the Quicktime+Perian vs VLC thing, Quicktime will be decent enough for xvid or divx (though you'll take a small performance hit for it), but if you use MKV you will definitely want to use VLC -- Quicktime doesn't give you the option of switching languages or embeded subtitles, and the performance is awful.

But I do agree with the Transmission recommendation, it's really a great BT client: clean, not nearly as bloated as Azureus. Unless you really need some of Azureus' more advanced functions, you'll find Transmission can cover everything you want.
I like using Anybots as an example actually. They're on a good track. But...

1. they are completely teleoperated, skipping some hard perception problems.

2. they're still solving a really hard problem that will take years.

So if you're just starting out, don't expect to be as good as smart people that have been working on it for years.
That's where I'm at, too--just keep it simple. vim, svn, FoxBug, and I'm all set. I believe simplicity correlates with productivity.
I have had that thought, but I find the positioning of the apple key awkward. Also, 95% of my productivity is determined by how fast I get around my own machine, and also it's unavoidable for a while that I will be using my mac and other people's pcs.

Thanks for the translations.
C++ Stylistics
OR you can do:
CTRL+e for beginning of the line,
CTRL+a for the end,
CTRL+k to kill from the caret to the end of the line,
CTRL+u to kill from the caret to the beginning,
CTRL+h to backspace one character,
CTRL+w to backspace one word,
CTRL+f to move forward one character,
CTRL+b to move backwards one.

Many might recognize these from emacs.
A line item veto of most pork would effectively kill it.
interesting proverb :)
It would help, but more would need to happen. The environment that allowed Paul to win might be enough.

At this point, I have more confidence in my ability to start a new country than a democracy system's ability to get over the problems the US faces.
The wikipedia link for him doesn't mention this but I thought he also had something to do with the weird japaneese parallel-prolog fifth-generation AI project Feigenbaum and McCorduck wrote about.
or use a better dbms
Agreed. And if you keep your desktop light, you can switch to working on another desktop easily. There are some pretty usable webapps out there these days.
I've used SCPlugin for Subversion access on the Mac desktop, it has a similar feel to TortoiseSVN on Windows.

I would also tinker with Apple's Automator (a built-in application) and look at the Finder's Folder Actions (which Automator supports). With surprisingly little effort, you can create some very powerful commands to use when right-clicking desktop items.

Finally, perhaps the Mac equivalent of a "registry hack" is the command-line "defaults" program (also built in). It allows you to explore and change the preferences of many programs. You can turn on hidden features and other cool stuff that way.
* The box model. Specifically how padding doesn't behave like most people expect. Be sure to include or point to a good illustration.

* The difference between inline and block display of elements – and how you can change them with css.
> it's a good time to start a business

This sentiment is at odds with any empirical examination of past recessions. Just because some guy at flickr said it don't make it true. Specific cases vary, but the sentiment is simply false in the general case.

The bottom of the business cycle is a good time to start. On the actual downswing the non-discretionary spending businesses offer a safe-haven, but not great opportunity.
Sounds like this may be your problem: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2007-Au...

Ryan Schmidt suggests:

Please verify whether you have /usr/bin/gnutar. If you do not, then your Mac OS X installation is incomplete. I believe gnutar is provided by either BaseSystem.pkg or Essentials.pkg from the Mac OS X DVD, both of which are quite essential to Mac OS X's functioning.
Poll: Why Are There So Few YC iPhone Stories Today?
My friends and I are very excited about it - are people ambivalent, or busy downloading the SDK and writing apps?
I hated spotlight on 10.4, but with my new machine with 10.5 I've found spotlight good enough that I haven't bothered downloading QS.
I just got a Macbook Air and listed the first things I installed/uninstalled when I got it. Might be of use. It's at the end of this post:

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/03/06/how-i-got-a-macbook-air-...
I don't know. I think maths can be fun and can be very interesting without having to hide it as puzzles. I'd prefer to call the things by their name, but to show them as they truly are: interesting, fun, and even quite addicting.
There's a ton of Mac terminals. I use MacTelnet as an OS X terminal, even though it isn't finished.
Quicksilver, Adium, MacPorts
Advice to Entrepreneurs:  Been There... Done That... Here’s How
DarwinPorts
no problem.

personal emails are more distracting than yc? :)
I find Colloquy to be significantly better. For one thing, X-Chat is pretty damn ugly.
It's awkward because it's unfamiliar. I was pretty good with Windows before I switched to Mac and now I definitely prefer using the Command keys with my thumbs than the Ctrl keys with my pinkies.

It does suck though to be using something so unfamiliar.
I haven't used the Nokia-- but I'd rather have a usable browser that's a touch slow than a crappy browser that's faster.

After owning an iPhone for a few months, I almost went nuts trying to use a Blackberry Pearl for a few minutes.

I'd disagree about the great leap thing... It's huge to have a phone have such a tiny market share but utterly DOMINATE the mobile browsing world.
no, it's half full
Simulating table based layouts without tables (before there were frameworks for it).
I've seen a lot of people fail to grasp the specifics of float.
Looking for partner in NYC area
Not sure if this is kosher or not, but I figured I'd throw it out there.

I am looking for one or two other people in the NYC area that are interested in partnering up to create a startup. I already have an idea (and a very rough, but working demo), but I am open to changing it. Also, I am interested in people who might want to take part in this summer's YC session.

Again, sorry if posting requests like this isn't acceptable, but I'd rather not go at this alone. If you have any interest in discussing things further, please email me at jason.m.falk@gmail.com. Thanks.