skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This line worries me:

"...chafe at his insistence on setting uniform prices for their songs and videos on iTunes..."

because it ignores keen business insight by presenting it as another example of Jobs's mercurial nature.

Joel does a good job of explaining why this is important. It is about the way that the music industry uses pricing as a signal. And Jobs wants to own that signal:

"And Apple? Apple wants the signaling to come from what they promote on the front page of the iTunes Music Store. In the battle between Apple and the recording industry over who gets to manipulate what songs you buy, Apple (like movie theaters) is going to be in favor of fixed prices, while the recording industry is going to want variable prices."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.html
Cool It!
I disagree and am doing just that in the Czech Republic. The governmental regulations aren't nearly as good as in the States, but the local workforce is much better and cheaper, and the politics doesn't get in the way in any case. I assume the same is true for France.

I'm an American, but I would never return to live there. It's good for business but not for the average person. You don't see essentially any homelessness or crime here and the quality of life is much higher. It's true the next Twitter probably won't come out of Europe, but I think that's a good thing.
This thinking is exactly the OPPOSITE of two other very enlightening yc posts:

Here, Warren Buffet says, "Most of the managers at Berkshire have “… no financial need to work” - this simply means that the people who are working are working because they love working."

http://www.pluggd.in/2008/03/startup-entrepreneurial-lessson...

In this one, pg says that if someone gave him $1 billion, he'd still be doing "much the same thing".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79057

So my question is this. If you love what you're doing, why would you want to do it LESS? And if you don't love what you're doing, then why are you doing it?
I also would expect effects similar to Seasonal Affective Disorder would occur in some people, because of the lack of natural sunlight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder
We have the needed software stack at ProcessOne: http://www.process-one.net/

Contact us if you are interested.
That's the same way i feel now. Programming is essentially free and i'll always be able to pursue it no matter what my age is, however art could be limiting depending on the medium you choose - plus you only get one life to take a shot at it.
When Steve retires, a lot of OS X fans could switch to Linux, figuring Apple will never recover from the loss. Maybe hackers will then take the task of turning Linux into the best OS seriously.
I just found my first typo ever in an article from The Economist! That's a once in a lifetime :)
Notice the missing second 't' in "petabytes"?

"Project Kittyhawk, as it is called, would link several thousand Blue Gene computers together to form a system with more than 60m processing cores and room to store 32 petabyes of data."

Candy to my eyes.
UN Makes Its Statistical Data Free and Searchable
Ask YC: How do you manage your startup's knowledge?
I'm planning to use Atlasssian Confluence as a central repository of knowledge for my startup.

I like to use BaseCamp but does mainly for task or pm.

What about a central place to plan your RRPP acctions, media contacting history, future idea repo, etc?
The torture of turning everything off
That just means that those firms are more loyal the the VC funds than to you because that's where they get most accounts from. If I was a VC I'd think any entrepreneur who thinks he has an advantage hiring a firm that I've kept on retainer for a decade is a complete moron. I recall a certain Silicon Valley law firm with the usual "beyond reproach" ... "our reputions are the foundation of our business" stuff ... which at the end of the dot-com boom got into tons of lawsuits when it was discovered that despite "client confidentiality" the partners would pass along information of new startup clients to VCs they knew that invested in competitors.
I went through the exact same thing 2 years ago. I was so sick of sitting in a cubicle and wanted to try stand-up comedy. Every one I knew encouraged me, so like a typical hacker, I set up a project to get educated and find out what it would take. Either a career change, or just part-time to break up the monotony.

Here's what I learned:

The reality is far different from what it appears to be. Instead of nights full of laughter and fun, it would probably be monotonous nights of the same thing over and over, except for 10% of the money I make now, if that.

Most stand-up comics barely scrape by, spend a lot of time in their cars, a lot of late nights in the bar, and eat a lot of fast food. They do the same 5, 10, 30, or 60 minute routine night after night, while they work their way up the ladder from "opener" to "feature" to "headliner". Every one of them plays a bad room once or twice a week. Many of them spend half their time looking for work. And less than 1% ever really "make it" and less than 1% of those "make it big", no matter how good they are.

No thanks.

Then I redirected my thinking to figure out how to take what I currently did and make it something I'd love. Pretty straight forward solution to that: my startup. And I'll save the laughs for friend and family get togethers.

Don't mean to scare you. You SHOULD do what you love. But you should also get a clear idea of what it'll be like before you flick the switch. Sometimes, the grass is NOT greener on the other side.
I'd like to start a startup with someone. I'm a very enthusiastic coder who likes challenges and wants to learn new stuff.
Communicating only over internet doesn't seem that hard, you have a lot of online tools, from IM to Basecamp.

Perhaps making a startup about finding startup partners ? :P
Games People Play - Bayesian filters in recruiting
Sent a message to your blog - or just "emailadrian[@]inbox[.]com"
I'm in NYC. We have Central Park and lots of Barnes & Nobles and Starbucks and stuff like that. If I could get the startup I have in mind going ... which I'm trying to do, just having difficulty finding available tech talent ... hint hint ... I'd have mandatory random blocks of individual "Go out and walk around Central Park for a few hours and distract your conscious mind while your subconscious mind calculates solutions" time and random blocks of group "Go out to Starbucks, get some fresh air and discuss projects outside the office for a change of pace." time.

Also weekly company movie viewings - either outings if something good is playing or good 'ol Netflix.

Our first movie would be Office Space, as a friendly reminder of why starting your own thing is the best thing to do in life.
I could see this being incredibly useful, there has been tons of code pasting, but it will make things a lot cleaner and simpler being able to check out fully functioning code while discussing the problem with someone.

Now all it needs is an embeddable widget and this would take over coding blogs and forums.
You could place a Java applet on your website which connects to an IRC server, such as pirc.
Some people are wired to do art. They have to to be happy. If you're one of those people, by all means, do art. But it sounds like what you're debating here is not doing art vs. not doing art, but taking art as a career path.

All that I'm saying is I don't expect you'd gain much by swapping out a tech day job for an arts day (or night) job. It's still going to be the thing that's paying the bills to help you support what you're really into.

We're awake about 112 hours a week. Even with a full time job that leaves more hours than most people can be productive in arts endeavors.

This isn't, "Well, goofing around on stage is fine as a hobby..." blather. Go full on. Set goals. Get in a community. Produce stuff and find a place to exhibit it.

But if the guys in the Blue Man Group (or similar) are doing artistic stuff they're really excited about, it probably isn't the Blue Man Group. :-)
We've used both LivePerson and LiveResponse (http://www.kayako.com). We preferred LiveResponse as it is incorporated with their help desk software which is fairly robust. Both were easy to use and install though. If you are looking for something simple then I would recommend LivePerson.
Coimbatore is located in Tamil Nadu where they speak Tamil, definitely not Hindi.
HTML was designed so that if you're using it correctly the first version of the site should be accessible.
Bingo - you use perks like this to a) make sure your best employees would never, ever, ever consider leaving, and b) to make sure your next hire is as good or better than the existing team. If something like this takes you from being say in the top 20% of places to work to the top 2%, then you can be a lot choosier about who you hire.
What do you think about artistic flash games, for example http://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/

I've recently stumbled across the "casual games" scene, and I think there are really interesting things going on. I always thought of games as art, but some of these games take it to a new level. Another example: http://www.10gnomes.com/02.html

I'd say there is more artistic motivation than traditional gameplay in that game (photography).
I bought NIN's album for $5 on Amazon to support Trent for distributing his work in an enlightened manner. $5 for 3 dozen CD-quality tracks, DRM-free, off Amazon. Download was as fast as iTunes or Steam or any other respectable online download service.

I made the decision to do that after downloading the first part of it for free on the Pirate Bay.

It was the first time I bought music fair and square in about 10 years.
IE8 - better Ajax CSS and DOM - announced at Mix
Brain computer interface - with typing!
would a simple wiki suit your needs?
SXSW Interactive Full Schedule
Here is the full SXSW Interactive schedule with times, locations and descriptions.
Representations of uncomputable and uncountable sets
Here's a take from an ex-classical musician, now software engineer:

Making a living in the arts is excruciating. Classical musicians today tend to live in an unstable patchwork of part-time gigs, private teaching, side jobs lacking health insurance, etc... and that's if they're lucky. Only a few manage to obtain full time jobs. As others have noted, the day to day life of a musician isn't as glamorous as it might seem. I loved Beethoven's 5th as a child; but after playing it for the N-teenth time, I began to see how a career in music could grow tedious.

When I decided to go into CS it was because I realized that the people who had successful music careers tended to be a.) either so insanely talented that it was obvious they'd be catapulted into the inner circle (eg, full time gigs) fairly easily or b.) so monomaniacal in their dedication to their craft that they simply had no other choice. Anything other than being a musician would have meant having to curl up and die.

Since I was neither of those, I decided to turn to something that'd I'd been quite good at in high school (math/science) and rather enjoyed, and I would describe myself as much happier now. Vastly happier, and financially secure. Music is still a part of my life as a fulfilling hobby.

Whatever you decide, I'd highly recommend reading Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness," before making any irrevocable decisions. Gilbert is a psychologist whose research suggests that people are generally extremely bad at predicting the future and figuring out what actually will make them happy. It's a cautionary tale for anyone who might think "If only I could do X I'd be happy..." Follow that with "How to Want What You Have," by Timothy Ray Miller, and you have a prescription for happiness.
As long as it is on-topic, it's fair game, because if the blog entry would not look out of place if posted in the forum, it's ok to put a short and tastful note of its existence. If done correctly, you are strengthening the community by making pertinent information available by sharing high-value links.

Three exceptions.

Exception one: you shouldn't explicitly charge or ask for money on the blog entry (modicum amount of ads are ok, though, to help defray bandwidth expenses).

Exception two: if there is a more appropriate venue, such as a Planet <X/Lisp/Ruby/etc.> that acts as a syndicate for blogs and covers your area of interest, then the blog syndicate should be used instead since most people understand that that's the place to go if they want to read blog entries.

Exception three: don't bother spamming your lesser blog entries that hold little new value.
"Buy stuff with the cash you haven't already spent on buying stuff" is not exactly a strategy.
I have only used Django, Rails, CakePHP and raw PHP.
Django has a superb ORM layer (beats Rails 10-0), where relations are really well implemented, as members of the model. Selects are easy, and can be chained (as filters). In Rails (even 2.0) I had to use find(:all, condition => <SQL fragment>. That is so not hiding the db layer.
Generally, there is much less to none auto-magic. This is a thing I quite disliked in Rails, both as a beginner and beyond. I like to keep most things explicit. I find it baffling that Rails is considered easy to understand. Due to the auro-magic, I found the learning curve pretty steep.
Converge (Python-like language with macro-like facilities) 1.0 released
Of course avoiding tables doesn't automatically make things accessible. It makes it possible to be accessible.

Accessibility is tricky. For instance, one of the largest things that HTML tables break is the linear flow of the page. For people using screen readers or text-only browsers it becomes far, far more difficult to understand the content of a page.

CSS tables can be applied with consideration only against the hierarchal structure of the page allowing you to write pages that are accessibly legible yet stylish.

That is unless you want to make whole new versions of your site for any number of accessibility domains: modern browsers, IE 6-, blind people, lynx, mobile browsers, mobile safari, colorblind people, &c. Good luck with SEO on all of those, too.
I think the argument is: they're not working at it LESS, they're just spending less time sitting at the office. (I find the proposition dubious, I'm merely pointing out the argument.)
make things that artists like :)

For what it's worth, I think this is what PG tried to do... Viaweb started out as a service to allow art galleries to get on the web:

http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
AOL opens AIM and ICQ instant messaging protocols
It probably bring a lot of opportunity to build new interesting services.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1... is a good rebuttal.
Somehow that really hurts. I know it is probably a good thing, but why not just use table, instead of redefining other elements to be tables?
Somebody has actually implemented this (http://londonmiddleware.org/chaff/), though it's not clear how seriously the results are used in a real candidate evaluation.
So was mine with while(fork()); :)

Seriously, very very cool app!
We have a public chatroom in our campfire account that we use for this purpose.

Also, I heard that you can now embed gTalk widgets in webpages, allowing gTalk to be used for that purpose. I don't know the details or if that's true at all.
Yes.
Isn't that what the karma thingy is for, to punish spam? If you suck, they will let you know.
Does anyone know if there will be video of all the panels posted online? live or otherwise...
I don't know what article you mean, but read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html?p...

Long, but fascinating.

The rampages you're talking about have been linked to elephant culling. Elephants grow up in structured societies, where older elephants teach younger ones proper behavior. Because of culling (a sterile word, if ever there was one!) and the elimination of older elephants, younger members of the herd (1) have not had the chance to learn proper behavior, and (2) suffer traumatic grief early in life. Hence the rampages. Very humanlike, indeed. (Lord of the Flies, anyone?)
^ He dropped his label and is now doing his own. Also it is revolutionary to sell direct.
Thanks for the link, I will add it to the post. +1!
The power of momentum is an incredible thing.
...#2) Not sure how to get included in those aggregations

...#3) This should be #1. It's my main criteria for deciding to post something
you should work, when you feel your at your most productive. Day or night shouldn't matter, employers need to understand this when dealing with some jobs (most held by people here at news.yc)
You aren't redefining other elements. You're styling other elements such that they're laid out as tabular data would be, without having to redefine them as tabular data.
Octopart Traffic
"...A more effective strategy would be to try to tilt the economy away from consumption and toward exports and long-needed investments in infrastructure."

Fat chance of that. Faith in the spending power of American consumers would have to dwindle a whole lot before companies stop selling to them.
The problem is that most places want you to work four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour ones. Suddenly the deal isn't so attractive.

I worked four 10's for about a year, and I can say that you just get stir crazy by the end of the day, and you don't get any more/less done than an 8 hour day. If a four day week meant 32 hours, then I could see the benefit, but to a company, that just says "20% less work will be done." If you try to argue that the same work will be done, they will ask why you are goofing off 20% of the time.

As for staggering schedules, I'm with you. It's retarded that we all work at the same time. I chose my dentist specifically because he was open on weekends (he takes tuesdays and wednesdays off).
"Submitting blog entries because you think they'll be of interest to people here is good; submitting blog entries because you want to attract readers to your blog is bad."

My feeling is that you should submit everything you write. Let us decide what is worth reading, thats' why we vote.

My suggestion--for your own optimization--is to submit articles slowly, there is such a thing as "raganwald fatigue" or "coding horror fatigue," where reading several articles from the same person on the same day becomes tiresome even if the content is good.

But I don't care why you submit for the same reason I don't care why you write. You want to make money from ads? As long as you write well, what do I care? You want to be famous? As long as you write well, what do I care?

It's the same thing with programs and start ups. What, are we supposed to shun the YCombinator startups that market themselves? I say judge programs on their merits, I say judge posts on their merits.
I guarantee you that there have been artists selling some music directly to customers ever since people have been able to record music. No, even before that.

This guy used the labels and middlemen extensively already, so he is really a terrible example of this revolution.
Ruby running MS Silverlight and in your browser
location: Thailand
Nationality: Burmese
The Social Me, by William James
But companies are the only ones married to a five day workweek to begin with. The only reason you work five weekdays is to seem professional.

At a startup you should work whenever you feel like it (which is hopefully seven days a week starting at 11pm and going til dawn, with copious amounts of caffeine and loud music). But if you can get a lot done in four days and it'll keep you happy, work four days, you don't have any corporate culture to prove anything to.
Fire Eagle goes to open invite status
This is basically me giving away some invites I have to people who might want to check it out:

The eagle has landed! Fire Eagle's Beta is now open by invitation only. We've chosen to invite you because we think you're a super-cool hacker, super-cool early adopter, or just super-cool ... and also because you gave us your email address and told us to let you know when we launched (thanks for doing that!).

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and online services, while maintaining unprecedented control over your data and privacy. It's built on open APIs so you can build all kinds of applications that respond to your location.

We're also giving you four more Fire Eagle invitations to pass along to a few friends. These are also one-time invitation codes and can't be reused, so share them wisely!
http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ticket/PiybqXZSW2CJen7C
http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ticket/WQi54p9MdWiQCNFC
http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ticket/nrKGwlmzFDtyzIT2
http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ticket/PMMhrqllLvcwRVWz

Finally, if you want to get started building an application that's powered by Fire Eagle, then you should join our developer group:
http://new.groups.yahoo.com/fireeagle
The first point is sadly true - probably more a comment on human nature than on the arts, per se. "When your hobby becomes your job, you have to find a new hobby."
Not when it is material to the operations of a public company.
Well, no, not when the price of your publicly-traded stock hinges on whether or not you're at the helm.
no really. I need something that has search engine, upload attachments, blog for internal issue, something to truly build a fast intranet to sustain the growth of the startup.

I don't wanna relay on my inbox for that, or even a weak wiki.
They chose to write a story "Steve Jobs is a loose cannon putting investors at risk". The problem is that he's just so damn good at what he does the article comes across as really awkward and forced. Too funny.
romantic gesture - give root access to specific user - please help! - Linux Forums
Criticism is dead
Afaik, the only (reasonably common) languages with good sandboxes are Tcl and Java. Like they said above, they're the ones building the sandbox, not the language.
ICQ soooooo nostalgic, who still uses ICQ?

I wonder why the makers of ICQ never predicted Facebook, they had the opportunity to improve the Interface, increase the features in a nice manner, and becoming facebook!

I dont know why they stuck themselve into the narrow one column interface thingie! They just cluttered their interface sooooo much

They so desperately needed to think outside the box, literaly
Never work more hours than they are willing to pay you for. Would your employer give you an extra 30 hours a week off because they found your startup idea interesting? No, so don't give them an extra 30 hours of work for free either.

It'd be different if you had equity or some further promise of long term benefit.
Alan Kay at TED: A powerful idea about teaching ideas
I agree with the proposition. It's all about not being required to be somewhere doing something. Even if I would be there anyway, it's still significant that I have the flexibility that the reduced restriction affords.
Mint.com: Why Design Matters Too
I'd rather they paid me more and let me decide to do with the money.

So Mark's taking flight classes? Guess what, that comes out of everyone's salary. So does the extra holiday every Friday, and all those other honey-traps.
Real, successful sites do make multiple versions for mobile and regular browsing. If neither of those work for you then you are a rounding error on a rounding error that's ignored.

Regardless, use of tables means absolutely jack * as to whether real life sites are "accessible." Lots of this anti-table stuff makes sites less accessible to regular users.
Thanks, and I hope you get your voting rights back soon.
Nine Inch Nails Reinvent the Music Business
This means everyone can use AIM and ICQ via the Jabber gateways: http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/openaim_aol_is_o...
What about Google's new sites app?

http://www.google.com/sites/overview.html
Robot keeps Midtown block safe [video]
Loving something doesn't mean I want to do it all the time. I love playing my guitar, but I don't think I would enjoy playing it 40 hours a week. At my current job I seem to enjoy it much more when I work 20-30 hours/wk.