skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're in the same boat. We've been using Subversion, but will switch to git once our tools support it (we eat our own dog food, and Subversion is the only revision control system our products support right now). The determining factor for us was similar, as well...the Perl core developers appear to be moving to git for all Perl development. We're a mostly Perl shop, so we'll go where Larry and Co. goes. It just insures that the tool-chain for working with our codebase with git will be really solid, if the majority of Perl developers are also using it.
XM-Sirius merger approved by Feds
VCs don't often give you the time to develop those skills, which is why it can be risky. If you aren't performing to their expectations, the pressure to bring in outside management can be very high. Most like to see managerial talent within the founding team--but they also like to know that you'll step aside for a more experienced manager if things get ugly. I'm enjoying having the freedom to learn as a we grow, but we're also concerned that some pretty big opportunities might pass us by while we're learning and growing slowly.
I'm an hg fan, too.

I pondered darcs, since there are a number of Ruby projects using it, but landed on mercurial.
mine is http://twitter.com/laktek
A Drug Deal Caught From Every Angle
Wikipedia is dead... killed by the corruption of Jimbo Whales.
You know about the git svn bridge, right? It comes right in the standard git distribution, works intuitively and easily, and is the only thing keeping me sane as I work on two projects managed in Subversion. Basically, I use git in my development environment, with all the slick branching, merging, and great performance. Then I push code out to Subversion, and it all just works.
In what way is this "hacker-focused"?

Wouldn't hackers be miore comfortable with a local, highly customized development set-up; scp, ssh , etc. + assorted tools for deployment; and want to use their own revision control system?
Sewer-gas-induced suspended animation is rapid and reversible
It worked for me. I stopped getting bullied after a couple months of martial arts, even though the closest I ever came during that time to getting into a fight was one incident of locking a guy's arm behind his back and then letting him go when he tried to shove me in the lunch line. Simply projecting greater physical confidence was enough to make the bullies leave me alone.
There doesn't appear to be much difference between the fates of the startups in each. You should just choose whichever suits your schedule.
If I want to learn english, a page full of it with big fancy words is not going to help. Need to simplify the verbage throughout the site.
If the source is on my mental blacklist, I'll ignore the article and only skim the comments.

Otherwise if the article has many comments, I'll read it first. If the article has few comments I read the comments first.

I find this helps me skip garbage and duplicates. It also helps when someone posts a better link to the article (e.g. text instead of video or mp3).

If nothing recent or popular seems interesting, I'll look for recent comments or submissions by people listed on /leaders
People spend a lot of time trying to sound slick for investors. You may find that customers are more forgiving of your rough edges. Either way, real investors are going to be a lot more convinced by your traction than your talk.
I'm pretty sure they were trading Pokemon cards.
A coworker of mine who's been in the GIS industry for about as long as said industry has existed gave that very same assessment. The real obstacles at this point are social: people will freak out at the thought of robot trucks driving on the same highways as they do (or stealing their trucking jobs).

I give the example of trucks on highways because that would probably come first, as it's simpler to safely implement than passenger vehicles or city driving.
They were obviously predicting the state of the art at the end of President Gore's 2008. ;-)
Land of milk and start-ups
> Then people will be working only to teach, design new things, entertain, as material needs will be superflous.

It's frightening to consider that IP laws would probably outlive natural scarcity...
The Harrison Bergeron school of equality? ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
This is Vietnam era tech, and the US has used it before.
So what is facebook.exe? Anyone willing to run it? :)
Pumpin mix:
http://www.mixwit.com/widgets/7fa39f2cb5988aeeffb7511af507c3...

Pumpin hip hop mix:
http://www.mixwit.com/widgets/152cfcff953ce39f08e232909ae243...

How fun!
Plausible deniability for the win...
I love their faith in the National Centralized Single-Point-of-Failure Traffic Computer. ;)
"the average tone in comment threads is slightly less polite "

This is a hard statement for PG to verify-- right on the heels of the TC spike was all of the crap that popped up about his recent essay.

I'm going to reserve judgment for a bit.
There have always been lots of bad submissions. The real problem is voting, not submission. People aren't so much submitting worse stuff as upvoting worse stuff.

And the danger of that is worse than just encouraging bad submitters or discouraging good ones. It makes the site seem to be about dumber stuff. Seem because it is now about dumber stuff.
I guess I am in the same camp as Marc Andreessen, i.e. Munger being more interesting than Buffet. The book is fantastic, it was a tie for the best book I read last year, the other being "Founders at work".

Munger discusses many interesting things including "a Latticework of Mental Models", Bias, etc. A few of those essay's are available online.

The one Marc Andreessen talks about is available here:
http://vinvesting.com/docs/munger/human_misjudgement.html
The Firebug 1.1 Beta works with FF3
http://www.getfirebug.com/
>Similarly, practicing for demo day means getting the exact phrasing of a 7 minute talk absolutely perfect.

When I was a student of Toastmasters, I came across the treasure chest of dot-com era (2001) VC pitches from SpringBoard Enterprises ("Women-Capital-Connections").

I feel that many of the video clips of pitches in their Learning Center's Video Archive demonstrate the power of a confident, polished, professional, articulated pitch.

I'm happy to have found them again on Google. RealPlayer streams (Use Real Alternative instead of Real Player)

http://www.springboardenterprises.org - Learning Center - Video Archive or http://64.45.59.230/learning/lc3.asp?pid=699

KimFisher of AudioBasket.com - http://eventuring.org/Video/real/opsv00audiobasketa.rm

Julz Chavez, Get Real Girl, New York 2001 (0:42 min)
Chavez describes her two market segments and focuses on her addressable market.
http://eventuring.org/Video/Real/marny001getrealgirla.rm

Yes, most of the pitches are for failed B2B enterprises but you can't dismiss the presenter's drink-the-kool-aid-style fervor (remember that?)
Yes, and the funniest part is that he is probably oblivious to it. Consequently is argument can be turned against himself; if he can't understand fully the concept he try to present has ridiculous, no surprise he can't get an article written by someone else.
> Then came Git, and then this.

Git and hg were both started in April, 2005, in response to the Bitkeeper fiasco.
Nerd quiz: without consulting your own dice, which number on the pictured d20 is facing up?
Can you put up a vote weighted page on an alternate URL, if the vote weighting implementation is ready to be turned on? In the past you've said that with vote weighting on the front page looks mostly the same, I think many of us are curious if that is still true.
http://twitter.com/topa
So now you're finally admitting there's an effect-- any plans for fixing it?
Choosing a development ’stack’ for Windows desktop applications
Puzzle based social news only appeals to people that like solving puzzles. That's fine and I'm glad your site exists, just don't expect your model to supplant vote based story ranking.
UPS chief urges investment
not everyone would love to get rich. Certain people want to get rich and some of them work in startups. But even within startups not everyone is trying to get rich. I'm pretty sure Paul didn't start FriendFeed just to make even more money, but I could be wrong.
another one to watch,

http://www.myplaylist.biz
That's actually the original version of the talk -- the version in the book is considerably updated and was finished in 2005, just fyi.
sorry but intelligence testing alone isn't meritocratic. perhaps when combined with other metrics it could be a factor, but far from the only one.
A lot of summer startups do end up in the Bay Area. Personally I'd say go with the winter, assuming both fit your schedule. The guest speaker list looks better, at least in the one year of comparisons that I have to work with. And the weather in Cambridge can be fairly brutal during the summer.
The Internet Effect on News
i knew i had read that after one sentence. thanks huhtenberg for linking to the original.
so it's like a pause button for meatspace?
It seems highly unlikely that this happened as randomly as the kids parents seem to think. Kids are brutal, but they are also inconsistent. The fact that they are all beating up on the same kid, day after day, means there is something more to it than typical teenager douchebaggery.

Everyone thinks their child is sweet and innocent, but in reality the kids who get beat up repeatedly are doing something to cause it. They may not deserve the end result, but their actions do encourage it.
>the world’s second most important technology cluster, called Silicon Wadi (“canyon” or “gorge” in Hebrew)

Is that really true? Seems to me like Boston and NYC beat Tel Aviv. What's the #2 city for startups outside of the USA? London is the only one that comes to mind but I also know that it has an anti-startup culture. Maybe it really is Tel Aviv, at least until India catches up...
Google in fresh WiFi access push
WOW, didn't know you read Hacker news!!

I own the book, have highlighted almost every page, made tons of notes, try to put in a lattice work pattern as Munger mentions, also try to use as many of the things I learned in real life. Next step is to put it under my pillow and get as much as possible through osmosis :-)

The one I keep joking with my friends is using "Constraint Mis-reaction Theory" in getting hired. E.g: If one want's to get hired for a position, send in a couple of people before you that are better than on you on paper, and ask them to deliberately mess up the interview. By the time you walk in, you can ace the interview, by interviewing the way you normally would.

If you don't believe me, think of the number of times, you have spoken to folks at various companies and wondered how they got hired in the first place, this didn't happen deliberately, but never the less, no one noticed :-)
Though we've never had an influx like this before, we're optimistic the same thing will happen this time.

That's a no.
man i'm tired of hearing 2.0 tacked onto stuff. anyone know what the approx. total bandwidth available in the "so-called white spaces" is?
Did any stories about the end of the 700mhz spectrum auction make it up? It's not a good sign that something that big gets missed over by the community.
I say we just wait it out. It'll blow over.
GlassFish sounds interesting but why muddle Ruby with Java unless you really need Java?
Fun With Dot
Yes the wiki was invented by an "uncaged lion", but it was built on over 3 decades of advances by employees of large organizations: Andreeson was an employee of NCSA at UIUC or some other university when he wrote Mosiac. Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW while employed at the big European organization for high-energy physics (CERN). The TCP/IP stack was first added to Unix by grad students and faculty at Cal Berkeley, funded by the US government. Almost all pre-WWW internet software was written by employees of large organizations. E.g., the traceroute utility was written by an employee of LLNL. Sendmail, a grad student at Cal. Earlier mail servers and user agents were written at RAND Corp (which is only medium-sized but is funded almost entirely by the government). The first mailing lists, SF-Lovers and Human-Nets, were started by employees of large organizations and populated almost entirely by them for the first two decades of their existence. The end-to-end argument and the notion of the IP layer were formulated in the early 1980s by employees of large organizations. The father of the internet, J.C.R. Licklider, worked for large organizations his entire life (MIT, Dept of Defense). The first internet hosts were developed by medium-sized defense contractors: BBN was one.

The first entrepreneurs to significantly influence the evolution of the internet were probably the founders of SUN, most of whom came from Cal Berkeley and worked on those government contracts to add a TCP/IP stack to Unix. (The main contribution of SUN to the internet that I know of was to accelerate the number of internet users: every SUN workstation came bundled with internet software -- probably the first time that a marketing department helped drive internet adoption.) After the founding of SUN, not much entrepreneurial influence on the internet that I know of till the internet gold rush starting 1993 or 1994, which was 33 or 34 years after (planning and research) work started on the internet/Arpanet. I know UUNET was an entrepreneurial venture of the 1980s: I am unfamiliar with whether or how UUNET influenced the internet though. In 1992, entrepreneurs/lawyers Canter and Siegal invented spam, but spam is hardly a distinguished contribution.

Also, Engelbart worked for TRW or some other defense contractor (a large organization) and then SRI (medium-sized but funded almost entirely by the government) so pointing out that he was never an employee of Xerox does not exactly score a point for the uncaged-lions side of the ledger.
From "why is sex fun" I remember vaguely that there is an arms race between women and men going on? For example the point of "inside insemination" (don't know the right words) is that it is impossible to tell who is the real father of a child. It certainly sounded as if it was not a goal of humans to have children with only one partner over their lifetime, so I guess the advantages of marriage are not primarily in the sexual realm.

What are good reads about the hunter gatherers?
I believe it :-).

Charlie also talks about Ben Franklin working the system:

"As he was rising from obscurity in Philadelphia and wanted the approval of some important man, Franklin would often maneuver that man into doing Franklin some unimportant favor, like lending Franklin a book. Thereafter, the man would admire and trust Franklin more because a nonadmired and nontrusted Franklin would be inconsistent with the appraisal implicit in lending Franklin the book."

I've always wanted to try that...
Monogamism prevalence is vey high, although not universal. There are rare matriarchal societies (matrilocal/focal, to be exact), where the "clan" is based on the offspring of one woman. Mating occurs between poeple of different clans and children are raised in the mother's clan, by their mother, aunts and uncles.

But even there, ideed, the children know who their father is, even though they don't have a peculiar relationship with him.
sure. Let me know which book you would like to borrow ;-)

BTW: Thanks for recommending "Four steps to the epiphany", I am halfway through it and it's in the same league as Munger's book.
Very nice. A few comments:

> And sure enough, in the wake of shifting towards restricted stock and away from stock options, Microsoft's stock has been flat as a pancake. The incentive works.

Does that "flat" include regressions for other factors? There might be one or two other things that affect their stock price.

> A specific form of this dynamic in a startup is when you have multiple founders, of whom one is the CEO. The founder who is the CEO inevitably discovers that it becomes very hard to stay close personal friends with the other founders. As they say, it's lonely at the top -- if you're doing your job right.

What with the emphasis of YC on having cofounders, and being on very good terms with them, I'd be curious to hear PG's take + any of the YC people taking a more long-term approach.
Could it be related to this: http://facebookmessenger.ws.tc/
http://twitter.com/goldfishs
I wanted to try Italian, because I speak it fluently, but it's not on the list.
What cooks at Google?
Couldn't agree more.
The easiest way to learn is to sample the example!
That's great! I'll probably go to the one on April 15th :D Thanks for sharing! I hope it's easy to get there because I'll have to commute from Berkeley as I have no car :(

Btw, the url is wrong, the correct one is: http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com
Thanks for the tip neilc. I've never been there so I can't say. Any other places that might be a little bigger?
I took a momentary break from breaking-gets rid of the tension
Sort of depressing - basically everything that rings true was possible in '68. Hell, even the internet was almost ready in '68.
yes. follow only interesting people.

here is the workflow :
1- create a twitter account
2- find people you already know on twitter and follow them (try googling their name + twitter)
3- setup alerts on topics you like (hint : setup an alert for your geographic area)
4- manage people you follow : if somebody sucks, unfollow him. if your receive an alert, follow the user who sent the twit for some time and decide later if you want keep following him.

after some time (about six months) you'll find only interesting topics on your twitter feed.
You guys seem to forget the fact that YC applications are due soon. Perhaps some of the new influx is users trying to cash some quick karma?
Mysql --i-am-a-dummy
Hell yes. That article reads like what I think my product will do in four years...
it would be better if everybody added his twitter handle on their user page.
http://twitter.com/slim_amamou
AJAX-powered Web apps disappoint power users, Forrester says
If you do someone a favor, they may look down on you but if they do you a favor, they respect you more... I believe I got my first real full-time job in software that way.

I met the CEO of a ($300M/yr) company at a networking event (for job seekers) that he sponsored (very classy - it was like a job fair except it wasn't because there were cocktails and the atmosphere was relaxed and mingling-favorable). I was talking to someone from a bio-tech startup and someone tapped me on my shoulder ("Excuse me. The CEO would like to take a picture"). I was even more clueless about social niceties back then - I immediately thought in my head "Meet the CEO?! sure!" - Basically I didn't even excuse myself from the guy I was talking to and went over. I posed for the picture - shook the CEO's hand.

The photographer took the photo and then I asked the CEO "can I give you my business card?" (Before the event, I had made some Kinko laser printed ones with my name on the front and three bullets about my skills [mini-resume] on the back). I was surprised that I asked (the favor). And he regarded me for a very short moment and said "Yes". And then he pulled out his wallet and gave me his (I still have it). And I sent a thank you letter a week later (honestly thanking him for hosting that great, alternative networking event). Then, they called me in, asking me to come in and interview.

As a weird follow-up, through charity work, I've met someone (who is very networked in the tech community). I told her the story - she loved it (and I didn't know she was a personal friend of the now-retired CEO until after I told her the story)
If there are more than three digits in the serial number then it's probably too specific a matter for news.yc. :)
I strongly agree with #2. I usually stick to contributing comments because I don't want some of my favorite stories I've come across (which I have not yet submitted) to get buried (and unable to be submitted later because of duplicates).
This is a bit old:
"Published: February 5, 2007"
Can this be automated? I love Techmeme. A system for surfacing new conversations from interesting twitter users. I assume twitter pied pipers like Scobleizer would need to be weighted (downwards). Kind of a TechMeme for twitter. Has anyone done this yet?
Genetic algos have had some success, kind of like that.
Again: why?

Why should we strive for equality?
"The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer."

A true visionary.
This happened to me.

I wrote a post about setting up IIS 6 and PHP (oh, my misspent youth). It was split into 3 parts; except I never got around to writing the third part: the copy-paste author made an attempt at writing it for me! How nice of them ;)

Shame it was full of spelling and grammar errors, and entirely devoid of any useful information. Nice try, though.
I won't get on the bandwagon yet until I can use Vimperator and FireBug without any problems.
Just ridiculously solid. Not very often I check out a site and inadvertently end up spending over an hour playing around. Although, I wish it hadn't been 2 in the morning when I stumbled upon this. Thanks for the creation and good luck.
go to http://twitter.com/public_timeline. see "featured"? choose one (i suggest @zefrank). then click the "With others" tab. thus you see @zefrank and the people he is actualy following twits.

this is techmeme the twitter way.
Did you get my email yet? I'm not sure if the email address that's on your site is the right one.
ValleyWag Seeking US$10 Million VC Funding, TechCrunch Could Follow
For now, we can strive for a bare minimum of clean water, 2000 calories a day of food energy, and governments that don't stifle economic advancement. We have plenty of resources to do this now, but it isn't happening because once wealth and capital get concentrated in individuals or groups of people it tends to just make them more wealth.

And the answer to the why is that I believe humans have a fundamental right to life. I have no real justification; it just feels right to me.
How To Set Up Software RAID1 On A Running LVM System (Incl. GRUB Configuration) (Debian Etch)
"I never saved anything for the swim back"
That's a quote from the movie Gattaca by the main character answering his genetically superior brother's question as to how he beat him in a swimming competition in the ocean.

I really like that quote, and thought it was appropriate at a time when YC apps are coming due. Jessica Livingston says in "Founders at Work" that the common trait between the founders was determination. Maybe the best example that I can remember is Evan Williams who went through a lot before Blogger was successful (losing friends and more).

What has struck you guys as the best modern-day example of determination (it need not have turned out successful)?

Another good one was the guy the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" was based off of (though I'm not sure how accurate that story was)
There are some others, too, like darcs, arch, bzr, and probably others.

I'm super conservative about version control. I'll wait until there's one clear winner, the bugs have been ironed out, lots of tools have been written for it, sourceforge/google code/etc... support it, and so on. I'll save my exploration time for other things.
Relying on the Big Companies for OpenID?
Using Command Prompt from Any Directory
moo?

That's how the idiots sound to me, ignore them, you are right, they are wrong.