skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's not that 37signals writes software for themselves and no one else: they write it for themselves and people like them."

I don't think that's true. I think the correct statement is:

"It's not that 37signals writes software for themselves and no one else: they write it for themselves and people WHO HAPPEN TO BE like them."

There's a difference.

I think you are utterly misunderstanding Norman. He's not saying you're dumb for using those tools-- he's saying that 37s is dumb for not trying to understand and adapt to their customers. (Incidentally, is exactly what Apple is doing with the SDK and Enterprise features)

Because of their arrogance, they are leaving money, customers, and customer happiness "on the table". No harm in that-- they're rich and have enough happy customers...
The reason people think there are time travel paradoxes are largely because people think "going back in time" actually moves time backward. If you know the position of every atom in the universe you can predict the future and the past, and if you set every atom to how it was 100 years ago you've essentially 'traveled back in time', however continuity runs along just as normal because time hasn't been effected just matter.

That's the newtonian model of time travel. In the quantum model of time travel, causality doesn't really matter because it happens anyway and nothing stops it; on the macroscopic scale things might get iffy, but as wormholes are predicted to happen randomly in the subatomic scale it might be possible to create one large enough for X-ray scale data transmission (which could hold phenominal data amounts) and you could send design blueprints to the 1940's and tell them how to build advanced weapons or technology with creatable parts back then.

The final form of time travel is the multiverse version, which in time travel is perfectly acceptable because despite going back in time you never kill YOUR grandfather you kill a duplicate you didn't come from.

I did all the research for this for a short story I wrote, sadly nothing ever happened to it. Perhaps when I get my site up again, I should consider uploading it. Oh well.
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61831 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936
Why is everyone so paranoid about having their fingerprints taken? Do you usually walk around with gloves in public? Otherwise this is one piece of data you leave on everything you touch.

I'd rather be fingerprinted at an airport than have to take off my shoes for example.
Why gas prices are so high
A "green" Lamborghini Gallardo
A plane flying non-stop for five years
I'm giving a second to the cross-browser compatibility.
> Real entrepreneurs don't start their phrases like that.

How tastelessly condescending of you ;)
fingerprints = they could easily keep permanent records of you
Flex/Silverlight: The Half Assed Web.
You are correct. From the article:

Heimov said her organization's chief concern was not the quality of the children's education, but their "being in a place daily where they would be observed by people who had a duty to ensure their ongoing safety."
Ask YC: Souping up Ubuntu?
I recently put Ubuntu on my Dell, and quickly realized I needed to install lots of packages to "soup it up". I wanted to ask the hacker community about the best packages to add functionality to Ubuntu. What's your favorite?

Edit: I'm looking mainly for a good development environment, plus general UI tweaks and media stuff (like vlc, mplayer), but not any hardcore graphics stuff.
Though it's not mentioned there, the big difference is that Greenspun was talking about squeezing the last drop of productivity from pretty well paid programmers. And with appropriate bumps in salary to go with that extra productivity.

Calacanis is apparently talking about people making $35k a year, in LA.
Would you consider creating a project at http://featurelist.org so I can submit some feature requests and we can vote on them?

Why can't GTalk addresses be anything but gmail/googlemail? I have accounts that are created using Google Apps and would prefer to use those rather than gmail addys.

Thanks, looks pretty neat so far.
What I meant is that as early as in grad school you start working entirely on your own and your advisor is just that, advisor. He is not going to prove your theorems for you. As far as I know in other fields it takes a while to reach this level of independence.
Would you be willing to share it? I've been wanting to implement something like news.yc for my family, to replace the mass emails being sent around every once in a while, but haven't had the time due to my project.
But it's meaningless data until it's explicitly matched to you.

For example, you leave your username on every comment you make here, but I will never have a clue who you are unless you say in a comment with your username attached.

And after you do that, you will never be anonymous again.

It may seem reasonable in this airport scenario, but the reason people are resistant is because they fear creep. That by giving up fingerprints in this situation, people will eventually be expected to give up private info in more situations.

It is paranoia, sure – if you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about? But what happens when the definition of wrong gets changed?

Edit:

And it's not like you say at the end: you will still have to take off your shoes. The fingerprinting isn't for better security in terms of safety: it's to make sure international passengers aren't getting on domestic planes – which is only a problem because of the airport's bad, unconventional layout that doesn't separate domestic and international travelers.

A trade between privacy and convenience is one thing, but this isn't even a trade.
privacy is overrated, you have zero privacy anyway. get over it already.
I tend to take that approach personally, but on the flip side, you get a lot more attention being brash. Attention for a startup can be life or death. Attention is a huge advantage YC delivers and another reason I'll be applying.
Is that a serious question? If it is, the answer is no.

We hope this feature as part of the whole feature set and the way we present the features to the user will make dating easier for the user. Dating sites (both paid and free) don't have to suck.
The difference becomes demonstrable when arrogance makes you ignore emerging threats and opportunities in the market. They say, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall". So, if you let confidence blind you; you are actually being arrogant.

I do not think 37signals or Jobs is blinded by their confidence. Though one could easily claim Jobs confidence led to his downfall in 1987. He even explained this at the commencement speech at Stanford (I think).
Startups Must Hire The Right People And Watch Every Penny. Or Fail.
Being a founder is a bit different then hired (read paid, not equity) grunts.
Right. And that isn't even in the top 10 list of expenses. There is little reason not to save that $50 though. Then again, I would say not having a red-eye is worth a few hundred dollars.

But I don't know much about all this yet.
This is their actual 'platform':

http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/index.jsp

http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/mobile/index.jsp
Hmm.. don't you guys think that whatever they (37signals) say is being said for PR purposes only and has very distant corelation with the real truth ? Or am I over-paranoid ? :-)
It might...but here's the thing, there's no evidence that it does. Religious folks don't believe in hundreds or thousands of gods, just like I disbelieve the existence of them (Christians don't believe in Zeus, Krishna, etc.), we just disagree on the number of gods to disbelieve.

Should we teach kids that all of those hundreds or thousands of gods might be real? No? Why not? Couldn't we be wrong about them not existing? So, if, in fact, one of those gods is real, you have an imperceptibly better chance of telling your children the truth than I do. But if, in fact, all of them are human creations, then you're just confusing them with a bunch of old superstitions....all of which have some pretty crazy ideas about how the world works and how humans ought to treat one another. Sure, some are better than others, and some are more modern than others, but if they aren't true, why confuse kids with odd fictions in the guise of "One Truth"?
1) Productivity. I get a lot more done.

2) Great UNIX implementation.

3) Great file/user/permission organization.

4) Super-easy backups, with no command line switches to remember.

5) Since I have a Mac, my boss steers me toward fun projects like getting started with iPhone development.

6) Feeling of investing in myself, making a commitment to getting a lot done. Turns out the Mac helps a LOT with that.
The first thing I usually do is change the look, ubuntu's default UI is too basic for my tastes. Here's a shot of my desktop:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/manvsmachine/2319405794/

a good place to start for appearance is http://www.gnome-look.org

as far as apps go, here's what I have running:
VLC (multi-format media player), songbird, deluge (GNOME BitTorrent client), Eclipse, GnomeBaker, Avant Window Navigator (OS X-like dock), Blender (3D authoring software), Inkscape(vector imaging), Picasa, some others... of course, all the plugins, apache, languages / libraries for whatever you plan on running...

There are a lot of different ways you can go with it; it would help if you gave an idea of what functionality you 're looking for. Is this for strictly dev, or do you do image / graphics work, etc? The Ubuntu forums are a good place to start.
sometimes truth is rough
there's a big difference between teaching that something is true, and providing information about mainstream ideas (including criticism of them) to help children make their own decisions.
This is handy for audio/video stuff:

deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ gutsy free non-free
The mighty mouse only has one "button," but uses software to create the second click based on a sensor.

I guess that's just another example of just how much Steve Jobs hates buttons.

Also, not including the keyboard, the MacBook Pro has 3 buttons-- the mouse button, the power button, and the battery indicator button.
Ask YC:  Anyone know of a web site testing service where you can see a video of the user (not just a screencast)?
Something like that would be quite useful to see how much confusion various parts of your site cause. It would be even better if the user is encouraged to think out loud while using your service.

Also, I suspect many people would be willing to provide the video provided that they are paid something reasonable.
Trance! http://s-torm.com/forum/dload.php?action=category&cat_id...
As far as I understand, dark matter and dark energy are capable of being explained by us botching our calculations.

You see time in the universe is predicted on an archaic model of the universe where density is equal; this doesn't take into account galaxies or the huge voids that exist. This is inherently wrong and stupidly so as time is controlled by gravity; time around a black hole is so, so, SO far away from time in flat space. 1 billion years near the event horizon of a black hole can be equivalent to a mere second on Earth.

The time difference between a probe between planets and the time we see on Earth is so small I expect no one thinks of it. This is why the archaic model usually works because relativistic effects are exponential. However, even 0.00001 of a second has an effect on what we see, this might be negligable for the probes, but then it might now. The effect could be big enough to predict this, as it's big enough that all dark energy in the universe doesn't exist when this effect is accounted for.

Supernova explosions tell us the universe is much larger than it really is, because we don't calculate that there are huge god damn hills in between us. We live in a 'valley' called the milky way, and we live in a little dip in that called the Sol system. Between us and a distant supernova are 'hills' of empty space and numerous other valleys and hills. It does in fact take 10 billion years for the light to get to us from one, however it doesn't travel 10 billion light years due to these 'valleys' in time.

This is a fundamental prediction of general relativity, and one scientists don't account for. It's pure schmuckery assuming you can average out the differences. If there was nothing between us and a distant supernova explosion it would take (IIRC) only 6 billion years to get here and it would travel 6 billion light years, with things in between it travels slightly further but takes a hell of a lot longer to get here.

If this effect happens in our solar system too, and I don't see why it shouldn't, then it could account for this acceleration. However, it won't be at the 38% predicted for the universe model, but certainly time will deviate through our solar system.

Hopefully this makes sense to people other than me...

Essentially, yes. Dark matter/energy (or the alternatives, like I 'explain' above) are likely the cause, even if they're not on the percieved scale of the universe. Dark matter seems to populate the outer edges of galaxies more than the interior, perhaps our solar systems position only gets a 'light touching' of the WIMP particles or whatever.
The Feel Good Initiative
http://thefeelgood.com/

Found it here on YC, actually.
My answer: no, but he should want to find out.
Not everyone can lead a company. luck can only take you so far.
NSX2 is the latest of several accounts created by a long-time News.YC troll. I don't know why he's obsessed with this site, but he just keeps coming back.
Go for instrumental music, it doesn't activate the part of your verbal part of your brain. Essentially to hear singing (or talking) your brain mimics it, however when you're trying to read/write you've got two processes and only one processor to put it through. You can struggle through, but not nearly as well as running them solo.

Also, just go onto TPB or usenet and download some Beethoven or Wagner. It's 100% legal, no copyrights exist on them and even if they did they're so old it'd be void anyway. Even the BBC offered them up for free at some point, they were surprisingly good quality too.

I learnt this a long time ago when I was working doing reviews. When you spend 10 hours writing reviews, you need something to listen to or you're going to start shooting kids and spearing dogs for making the slightest noise.
Yeah, not having home/end, pgup/dn, is a huge pain in the butt. I never realized how much I used them for navigating within textboxes. Especially in combination with shift and control.

In general expect to spend a good amount of time reacclimatizing on keybindings when going from PC to mac worlds. I find myself constantly guessing what modifier (shift, fn, cmd, ctrl, alt) to replace in this keybinding to get it to work.
The Feel Good is the bomb! ;)
Yeah, I listen to that too
>i'd say he did so because he felt you were abusing the privilege.

I still don't think giving NSX2 20 upvotes was a very big deal. After Paul told me to stop, I did, then he took away my voting rights three days later. He didn't like my reply to his nasty email telling me to stop upvoting. My reply was "Sometimes you take yourself too seriously." Paul interpreted this as a "Fuck you." Which it really wasn't, though in the context of the email he sent me, I could see why anything other than "Yes sir, I'm sorry" could be interpreted as "fuck you." He has since ignored my attempts to apologize.
Donkey Kong and Me
I think this has been discussed a couple of times here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61831

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936
Ask YC: Suggestions for great "how to" EC2 articles
I'd love to get my hands dirty with EC2 but don't even know where to start. I've searched around and found some articles that show how to get an instance up, load an AMI etc but the end result is the long Amazon url for the instance. How can I setup a load balancer instance, or at least communicate with EC2 with a separately hosted web front-end.

I don't have any use for EC2 yet but like any good hacker I just want to tinker.
Lately: Moby, Kenna, Cee-lo, goodie mob, david bowie, prodigy
Music when coding is a MUST!
Preferably a band you love/like.
Arrogance comes from a root meaning "demand" (related to prerogative). Confidence comes from a root meaning "trust" (related to fidelity). So self-confidence has to do with trust in one's own ability to deal with a situation while arrogance has to do with demanding status or privilege from others. Based on this, it would seem that either of these qualities can exist without the other.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=arrogance

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=confidence
As new users sign up to HN, and older submissions drop down the list, it's the sort of question which is apt to come up a couple of times.
On http://getdeb.net/ you'll find a lot of deb packages for almost everything you need.

What programming language do you use ? I use NetBeans for Ruby and vim for other things (C, minor python edits).

I have VLC, Totem, Avant Window Navigator, Miro, GIMP, NetBeans, Wine.
When I was still working in an office, I found listening to film scores, in particular, very helpful in shutting out the noise of the office.
/upvote for giving a reason

(I'm assuming it was killed automatically so humans don't have to take the time to moderate all his comments.)
That's just stupid :S
Clearly, he hasn't compiler a single proggie from source, except maybe his own.
Couldn't agree more.

The point about how some startups go from launching on 200k to raising 5mm and then spending 200k a month was right on. After closing a big round of vc funding it's so tempting give yourself a huge raise etc....and so deadly.
I've always thought that the "Back to the Future" style of time travel would be a direct violation of the first law of thermodynamics.

Let's say that you invent a time machine and go back to time (t) in the past. Now, if someone at time (t - 1 hour) measured the entire energy in the universe and arrived at figure (e), when he measures again at time (t + 1 hour) the total energy in the universe will have increased by a factor of (<your mass at time of departure from present> * c^2). Energy will have been created.

I suppose you could look at it in terms of an equilibrium over all time--i.e. if you take eternity as a whole, the disappearance of your energy from the future would cancel out its appearance at time (t). But it would make these laws basically useless, I think, if you have to take into account any future or past events and how they might affect your current measurements.
that's an odd choice of metaphor. war and verbal disputes are very different things.
Is Jobs arrogant?

Look at the evolution of the iPhone-- the SDK and Enterprise features. He essentially did a 180 degree turn on the SDK and embraced a lifelong enemy (MS) to help his customers.

Any examples of 37s ever doing anything like this?
iPhone App Store Revenue Split
Maybe someone should create a Hacker News (or hacking music) group on last.fm?

My hacking music preferences:

http://www.last.fm/user/zenlinux/
Mostly instrumental music, primarily some type of jazz or classical.

If I am in a noisy working environment, then I keep the music going pretty much constantly, to block out extraneous noise. In general, the more quiet and peaceful my environment is, the less music I listen to while working.
What also works is recorded rain sounds, and James Horner (A Beautiful Mind soundtrack). Loud enough to drown out the talking, but doesn't interfere with the thought process.
It's easy to talk about balance, and I agree; but I've observed few people achieve it. Most are either overcommitted (working like machines at the expense of their own creativity) or undercommitted (putting in time at a day job they don't much care about).

When people talk about how hard startups are, I think they mostly mean that you can't be in the latter category and succeed. Obviously, they don't mean "work so much that you inhibit your own effectiveness". But that's what most of us who take that advice end up doing. Conversely, the day-job types call themselves "balanced" but, in my observation, most are lackadaisical, which is not the same thing. (At least not for those who aspire beyond mediocrity.)

My point is that this is a hard problem. Glib statements for or against workaholism don't shed any light on it. But glib statements in favor of workaholism are more harmful. I worked briefly at a startup where people were looked askance at if they went home at midnight instead of 3 am. This company got nothing done. But they certainly pointed to every blog post about workaholic startups that they could find.
Python Tracer
I tend to listen to something from the death metal genre
http://www.newmetalarmy.com/band/unleashed

or maybe in the thrash genre

http://www.newmetalarmy.com/band/evile
Ask YC: Hacking my TomTom to play video,mp3s etc
This is kind of random, and doesn't have anything to do with a startup or anything, but i'm thinking of doing the above and posting the results (somewhere).

so, who here has hacked their own gadgets,iphones,xbox etc? Any tips, suggestions? Bonus points for cool tips on the linux kernal (which tomtom is based on)
NIN - a downward spiral. Daft Punk - Alive. Timbaland. Kraftwerk, Chemical Brothers, Radiohead.
It's a dup, but I think lots of people don't mind that. I for one don't mind seeing this pop up every few weeks if people suggest new songs.

Toward that end, here is some music I haven't seen mentioned here before. List of Demands, and Black Stacy, both by Saul Williams (see also http://niggytardust.com/, which many here may have heard of). He's on tour right now, if any want to see him live.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=l1llNYAlYrc

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kRsgavuG4sg&feature=related
position: absolute vs relative

I've had to look up the rules several times now for how the parent box is chosen. I still don't know if I'm making more intermediate divs than I have to.
ASOT, nice, I listen to that as well :-)
I usually don't bother to look, but from a recent comment of his: "piss [pg] off ... brings me more joy"

I've never seen a more obvious troll.
Brian Eno - Music For Airports
bassdrive.com, itunes -> radio -> electronic -> bassdrive ...
you could try out robotreplay and 'watch' how they use your site
Take a break and enjoy. courtesy of IMINLIKEWITHYOU (unofficially)
Not just a second tier executive team, but second tier legal counsel as well. It's telling that he felt sorry for his lawyer after he lost a case that he should have won handily. Like many people who focus on making something good, he's just way too nice. He doesn't seem to understand the implications of the fact that many people get wealthy by securing a piece of a carcass that other people kill.
Necessary but not sufficient conditions. To get the complete recipe you need to add one more thing: to make something customers actually want.
I haven't played with EC2 yet (but it's on my list). I know about a firefox plugin that helps manage instances (http://sourceforge.net/projects/elasticfox/).

As far as I know you launch the instance, ssh on it and have fun. That url is your instance address. You can make a loadb alancer by installing Apache or Nginx on a server (instance or other) then from there proxy to your instances (you'll have to open the ports). See the Nginx wiki for more documentation (http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxLoadBalanceExample). If you need help configuring the Nginx shout.

It's basically VPS but where you pay by the hour and it doesn't have a static IP and persistent hdd. You can also use a AMI with what do you need (I saw there was one for Rails).
VoiceThread: Online slideshow app with Audio and Voice (through your Mic)
Can one get an RSS feed for specific topics here? (I looked but did not see a way.)

It's a feature on Reddit, and being able to subscribe to something such as listings of books, music, etc. would be handy.

Then if someone wants to pose the question again they can refer to the initial posting and ask people to add their comments there.