skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is nearly impossible to remove yourself entirely from Facebook
Delver Reinvents Search
Active Merchant - Ruby on Rails Credit Card Payment System
that was it, thanks for the quick response and resolution. :-)
sweet. hope you can come to a show sometime. starting things up again in SF soon
It's amazing to me that caching still isn't on by default in Web servers.
The Naive Approach to Hiring People
Do most programmers really go through a "MUST COMMENT EVERYTHING" phase? I never did. If anything, I probably commented too LITTLE as opposed to too MUCH. In fact, I rarely comment more than the beginnings of new functions/methods/def*s.

Maybe I'm not doing anything sufficiently tricky in my functions?
>> If, as you claim, Marc was one of many students, then >> he was improperly crediting the work as that of himself >> and one other.

I don't know what email you're reading but the one I'm reading just has him and one other guy signing off indicating they're members of a group; nowhere does it say they're the only members, or the most important members, or the members who did most of the work, or anything other than 2 people looking for feed back.

Let's say you got an email from "Sue" from Apple requesting feedback on your recent iPhone purchase. Does that imply that since sue works for Apple and she signed off on the email, Sue is the most important person at Apple, responsible for most the important parts of their more successful projects?

No, of course not.
Your CNN quote is an offhand comment by an aide to Steve Ballmer. That is not a legal channel.

Your second quote is from a web page that clearly has an axe to grind, but subsequently admits that the only thing NCSA could enforce was trademark rights. Had there been a copyright violation, NCSA could have enforced it. It isn't even clear from that page that there was even a copyright accusation. It only says vague things about "standards".
Ask YC: What would it take to create a viable alternative to Evite.com
Evite's been around forever and has hardly seen any serious competition. There's renkoo and mypunchbowl etc but nobody's made a dent in Evite. I am wondering what ingredients a compelling alternative will need.

I am tempted to give it a go myself but wanted to ask to see what others think...
A decent system, but don't expect it to be problem free. On switching over to Active Merchant we saw a downturn in payments. The problem was early developers simply trusting that Active Merchant would be problem free.

We ended up having to disable the internal credit card validation tests to keep the system from rejecting valid cards. No experience with the shipping component though.
It is always good to try things out. How can this work in an iPhone-like device?
this was our yc app idea for quite awhile. we spent months on analyzing competitors, trends, current practices, drafted up use cases, wireframed an entire site, programmed out some functionality, made a screencast demo, and got denied. i have a 1 Gb folder of due diligence for this but ultimately the conclusion was this probably isn't worth pursuing. the dynamics involved requires more than just better technology.
I'm curious how big the "offer the Xobnis couldn't refuse" would have to be. They're the YC company I think has the biggest commercial potential because it looks like something businesses would pay for. Many (many) other YCs look like M&A targets for bigger companies.
Ethics in IT
The Future of Firefox: Chris Blizzard speaks at SCALE
I was wondering if I was the only one!
meet tony wright! i wish i can meet him for lunch
I still have some hope left, if you need it just send me the money and you can have it.
I would set 1 = 2, and the universe would implode!
Bet they'll still arrest you for using it...
In spite of all the downsides, the PhD programs do offer a lot to non-US students who want to gain legal entry into the United States. This can be the first step in the long path to a green card, which is worth a great deal of money.

The equation changes for US citizens and permanent residents, because the green card and/or legal right to reside in the US isn't part of the equation. Residency + a 35K/yr post-doc is a lot more appealing if you don't already have the residency.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if foreign scholars were directly awarded a 10 year residency visa and a spot on the green card list upon arrival in the US, independent of whether they remained in the Ph.D program. In other words, what would happen if the US said "you're obviously smart enough to make the best use of your own life - welcome to America, and feel free to follow your own path in life."

I wouldn't be surprised if the drop-out rate increased dramatically, since the foreign students would now be free to join startups or pursue other degree paths.
I was mostly kidding...but not entirely.

I've been a lurker on c.l.l. for years and I've also seen quite a few interesting threads derailed by Kenny's...uh...UNIQUE sense of humor. The megalomania thing wears a bit thin, for example. I know quite a few noobs that have been helped by his pragmatism ("just pick an implementation and stick with it," "Stop bitching and do something"), but just as many that have left or put him in their killfile because of his off-center tangents and his occasional desire to be the new Erik.

You received a warm welcome because you contributed something useful and didn't just come in bitching and moaning. You were also smart enough to figure out something you could contribute with your current skill level instead of just copping out. Like Kenny, I admire that. And I think Kenny is often very helpful and entertaining. Like many /stereotypical/ geeks, though, I think his sense of humor and social skills are sometimes a bit off. IMHO, a blog is a better outlet for his thoughts...I think it will help the signal-to-noise ratio on c.l.l. and you will still get to read his insights if you subscribe to his feed. I've already subscribed.
TortoiseSVN just sucks. I'd rather use the command line. Actually, I do...
For the times you just have to use a GIU, try SynchroSVN. It isn't free, but worth the price IMO.
news = WASTE
Because 40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, a fourth of the planet’s surface area has become an accumulator of floating plastic debris. What can be done with this new class of products made specifically to defeat natural recycling? How can the dictum “In ecosystems, everything is used” be made to work with plastic?
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/master.html?http://www.natu...

hack = ENERGY
Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste—tires, plastic, vinyl—into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running)..
Pringle created the machine about 10 years ago after he drove by a massive tire fire and thought about the energy being released. He went home and threw bits of a tire in a microwave emitter he’d been working with for another project. It turned to what looked like ash, but a few hours later, he returned and found a black puddle on the floor of the unheated workshop. Somehow, he’d struck oil.

Their first order is under construction in Rockford, Illinois. It’s a $5.1-million microwave machine the size of small bus called the Hawk, bound for an auto-recycler in Long Island, New York. More deals loom: The U.S. military may use Hawks in Iraq on waste such as water bottles and food containers.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/innovator_2.html

idea = trawl for free plastic in oceans, zap with Pringle's machine, cleaner oceans, more energy, less waste..
The brand awareness evite has is something I wouldn't want to compete with. Making something technologically superior wouldn't be hard. Making people aware of it and trust it would.
i actually don't see the ability to go independent on this. it's valuable because of the networking functionality it adds to email, but that's only worth money if EVERYONE adopts it.

so what's the best way to push the tipping point? microsoft.

and fwiw, i think loopt was the most commercial YC company but they haven't gained much traction.
Some kind of space propulsion company like John Carmack

And also autonomous control of some other things.
Not a bad process to go through regardless of whether you pursued the idea.

I am actually working on something similar-ish, but since I am in stealth mode I won't say what the differences are, and I am definitely aware that it is a difficult area to get into. You need a recognizable brand and a certain starting size to get it snowballing.

I have the luxury of doing it for my own personal enjoyment, so I don't have any concerns :)
A.) Whatever the shortcomings of my citations, they're still better than yours, which is just an email by Marc looking for feedback, proving nothing other than he once worked on the project.

B.) I have OCD so I tend to get baited on flame wars; you on the other hand seem to just have waaaaay to much time on your hands.

Here - I know how to satisfy you: You're 100% right, I'm 100% wrong, you're the greatest, enjoy the free Ferrari that comes with being right on the internet over things that don't really matter too much to me but obviously are life and death issues to you.
Heh-- Tony Wright is down in CA for YCombinator... I'll have to grab Andrew sometime in SanFran.

Where the heck are you? Alaska?!
well i've rejected from yc 5 times in a row now. my project folder just grows bigger and bigger. but i guess it goes with the territory of thinking i'm an entrepreneur.
i'm in the south bay, let's grab lunch sometimes!
Excellent - shows you are dedicated and in it for the long haul. My suggestion is in that group of 5 applications, there is probably a good enough idea.

I struggled with bouncing from ideas too long, and really there isn't one factor that makes or breaks an idea. A lot rides on the execution. So start executing to start making some new mistakes to learn from, thats what I am doing :)
the your kitchen box can use some text to explain what it's for, especially to new users. better utility of your screen real estate is always good. the pinstripes can stand be toned down just a pinch in opacity, those kind of patterns might be hip but they're an eye sore and an eye strain.
Strong AI, obviously.
I think the possibility of failure is a great motivator, so I wonder if I would have the motivation to attempt to succeed if I knew I wouldn't fail.

The most interesting things I've ever done started with questions that began "I wonder if..."
hope can also be interchanged with the word faith
Tiny robot walks using rat heart muscle
Well, if you are not in downtown, you probably won't see a Starbucks when you are inside one.
This is, strangely enough, one of the most common ideas people propose to YC. We get several every cycle.
Just curious... How can one 'fail' at sex? :)
Envisioning what things will be like 10,000 years from now.
Real Artists Ship. Bootstrap!
OK, I think I misunderstood your first comment. My positive opinion of Ken was based on a few threads (< 20 probably) I followed before the warm welcome I got on my own thread. Apparently that wasn't enough to see the side of him that you're talking about.

I couldn't tell if you thought having less Ken on c.l.l would make c.l.l better, or if having Ken write his own blog made it easier to find Ken. Apparently it was the first!
You haven't funded any of them because the idea sucks or because none of the teams were the right fit?
A few more features added to Wufoo.
I like loopt too but it seems like a network effect type of product, and I don't trust those until they succeed. Didn't realize that Xobni required everyone to use it for it to work - I thought it just mined your email to construct a network relevant to you.
My wife loves the idea and is telling her friends. Hard to say how sticky it is, but anecdotally the first impressions are a good start.
Cure hunger. Challenging problem where you would need the wind at your back.
Great news!
It doesn't seem like a great idea, but that wouldn't disqualify a group if they were open to changing their plan and seemed strong in other respects.
i believe the social aspect of xobni requires a massive network effect to get the best value. the email searches and threaded conversation style emails are great in itself but those aren't worth much more than shareware pricing.
I end up restarting Typo several times a week because I run into memory issues. Hopefully they'll have a way to add more RAM soon.
ok.. i'm a designer with an idea for a business with global potential, stalled because i'm programming illiterate.. thus, i seek a programming partner, and am especially interested in data driven read/write web, hence RoR.. i'm not in South Africa, but would consider moving anywhere to get this thing done.. to learn more, google "twexter"
> nowhere does it say they're the only members, or the most important members, or the members who did most of the work

You could also try reading Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web, where he gives them credit for Mosaic. They're probably not the only members (few projects have no outside involvement), but it's pretty clear from Berners-Lee's account that they're the ones pushing things forward and implementing stuff.
Loopt has a lot of users, actually.
There are a number of well funded and executed takes on the idea in addition to the ones you listed:

http://www.socializr.com/
http://going.com/
http://eventbrite.com/

Perhaps the problem is that none of them are a 10x improvement over Evite. Perhaps MySpace/Facebook are diminishing the space's potential. Maybe this is just one of those things that will take years.
"a lot of users" is relative. How many is a lot for you?
All I know is that OSX users without a Linux background do not find "sudo rm -rf /" jokes funny...
Trying to install Lisp on Tiger Hurts
How can I do this? I'm stuck on getting macports to work.

It's been three weeks since I tried installing Lisp, full time. I've been trying to get it since about september, but as a noob, it's pretty hard. There's a lot of stuff out there, but I just can't make it happen.

Weirdly enough, it took me a few hours to get emacs running on Windows.

Why does this take six months and thirty man pages instead of four seconds and two clicks? Why does this take so much longer to download than rescuetime or firefox?
I'm going to blog it in detail soon, but I thought I'd mention that tipjoy's front page is entirely static. The content is refreshed very often, and a new file is saved. Right now lighttpd is setup to serve the static page when / is requested. Soon, it will be nginx because of the ease of using it as a load balancer.
Xobni is valuable in its current state as a powerful standalone email productivity application. Future versions will create more value around networks of Xobni users.
Solve the halting problem. One minor detriment: because it would effectively create an infinite solution in a finite space, the resulting impact on space-time would probably be cataclysmic.
This is great news for Xobni. Was there an actual crowd, though, at the Office developers conference? (Just curious about the interest of developers to work with MS products - I know I personally wouldn't want to.)

I guess the bottom line now for MS seems to be that they are "desperate" about the future and have a large pile of money to invest - which could be a good thing for developers and acquisition targets.
www.RecipeMatcher.com has gotten lots of press (techcrunch, lifehacker, bbc, local media) from the same idea.
Sorry for being imprecise, trying to avoid a lengthy political debate. There are many examples when American actions have helped put and keep despots in power because of perceived American interests. If we expand the criteria to include examples of American interests sustaining systems which keep despots in power, we can find even more examples. Either way, America hasn't had a non-interventionist foreign policy in a long time, and it's both frightening and insane that some still see it as a mythical white night battling for good in the world.
Wow, congrats guys!
Leopard 10.5.2 is Out
Coolest news ever.
The Grammy in Mathematics
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/
I attempted to delete my Facebook account over the last week and it has been a grueling experience. I tried to change my name to "Delete Me", but that name is on the list of names you're not allowed to change your name to.

I've had to go directly to Facebook "customer support". I was asked what email address I used to create my account. I answered with the email that I was using. I was then told that I couldn't have my account deleted because I needed to respond from one of the email addresses associated with my account. Yet, presumably they had some way to confirm the security question they gave me, regarding the address I used to set up the account. Doesn't that mean that the sign-up email is associated with the account? (Sorry to be repetitive here; it makes me dizzy, too.)

I'm slightly concerned that the reason they won't delete my data is that they've already sold it to Satan.
"we spent months on analyzing ... i have a 1 Gb folder"

"well i've rejected from yc 5 times in a row now. my project folder just grows bigger and bigger"

I can't believe people spend so much time (and GBs) just preparing themselves to ask for the kind of beer money you get at YC, and more importantly all this is time spent NOT HACKING. How do you cope? I seriously couldn't... ;)

Granted, the money is enough for students to live of Ramens for a couple of months. But if you spend months working on your YC pitch, you can just as well spend the same time earning that kind of money or more by bartending or moonlightning/consulting.

PG, admit it, you'd love to invest in bootstrappers / fanatical-about-frugality entrepreneurs but the trouble is, they'll never apply to YC in the first place. :)
It is also one of the most common ideas proposed at Startup Weekend.
An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists
I don't think the prevailing economic situation can really affect a few guys working hard to solve a problem startup style - people will still use the internet when growth slows. I'm in CT and working on two projects, one on my own and one with a cofounder. I find I work much harder on the one with the cofounder, the desire to not let a friend and business partner down is a powerful motivator! Our project will initially focus on SA, but we're building it in such a way as to be able to internationalise it country by country as it grows. My own project is inherently international; its going to take a while though, real-time clustering with adaptive algorithms is hard! Good luck, I hope you find a lekker cofounder, I have found it really makes a difference!
http://www.lispworks.com/
A "Starbucks purchase card" is like a gift card. Except they encourage people to buy one for themselves, so that you don't have to carry cash.

I guess if you use a gift card to make a purchase, then they can tie your purchase to an AT&T account, and they'll give you 2 free hours of WiFi service.

No one's said that they'll be offering any extra free services for iPhone users, which makes me assume they won't. (AT&T already runs WiFi hotspots now, and those aren't free for iPhone owners.)
I will not admit to reading Valleywag ever. Shame on you. ;-)
What's in a name? I just registered the backwards spelling of rotator, kayak, and racecar.
With the exorbitant cost of rackspace/bandwidth in SA one shouldn't consider hosting here if one wants to serve any serious traffic, especially to an international audience. Thus Eskom's inability to realise that planning for a 2% p.a. increase in electricity consumption when GDP growth runs at +- 5% is a bad idea shouldn't really be a consideration before getting to work on a startup in SA, although having a laptop with enough battery to get through the load shedding might be a good idea :)
My advice would be to get out of SA. It's going to turn into Zimbabwe in the next few years. If your startup is successful your best case scenario is that it will be taken away from you.
Microsoft Responds to Yahoo’s Rejection
Any chance the site could automatically reject all posts with "[pic]" in the title? Then ban the poster.... then make their computer explode
Sadly, here's another possible trajectory - (1) MS "partners" with Xobni; (2) Xobni busts a hump for two more years getting some corporate adoption; (3) MS introduces "MS-obni", an inferior yet similar product; (4) corporate IT departments everywhere dump third-party Xobni for MS version; (5) Xobni dies a bitter and lonely death.

I don't mean to be a downer, but if I was a Xobni guy, this would keep me awake at night.
Digg this podcast!

http://digg.com/programming/Joel_Spolsky_on_How_to_Bootstrap...
5000 users?
Anyone from Xobni care to comment on how this came about? Crack PR firm? VC connection? Angel investor who is Linked-in to Mr. Gates?

I've learned that what appear to be serendipitous events usually take a HEAP of backroom planning.
Do folks here have a problem with doing business with AT&T, given AT&T's involvement with domestic spying and their expressed desire to filter the Internet?
This is old news, but thanks for posting it anyway - I had forgotten the URL.
I remember reading this article a while ago. It's a good one. Nick invented the 68000 architecture IIRC.
Chatting with Evan Phoenix
Exclusive interview with the author of the Rubinius project, Evan Phoenix. This is a must read because Rubinius is leading to become the de facto Ruby implementation in the near future.
If we're going this way on hackers, I'd go for Galileo as #1 (although a great case could be made for Archimedes).
YC sourced on ValleyWag: Yahoo to sell at $36?
They've evolved past the click but not, apparently, the pop-up. I left as soon as that appeared.
Microsoft shoots back at Yahoo
Wow, and I thought Ruby was slow!

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?t...
Large corporations always try to buy you before they try to bake their own. The risk is smaller.

I wouldn't start worrying until I said no to an offer from Microsoft.
Is sendmail setup to route mail through Google then? I've been trying to figure out the best way to approach email. Right now, I'm using google apps and a Django patch for TLS support. It's not ideal and I'd like to change the setup.
In summary: UI gave an exclusive license to a co started by some UI employees. They sued Netscape for screwing up this cozy deal by giving away a free browser. It doesn't even sound from this as if Mozilla included any Mosaic code.

We're now pretty far removed from Pmarca "letting himself into" a lab while no one else was around and stealing the source of Mosaic, aren't we? Really, you should be more careful before trashing people's reputations.
Well... There are a lot of third-party software houses that crashed and burned in the '90s and '00s whose stories look exactly like what I outlined. And MS didn't always offer a bag of cash before opening fire.
Microsoft Responds
Take that, ferret face
hmm? Megaton is a unit of energy.
That's not what I said. I said outside of academia which you switched to non-research. There's plenty of research done outside, from Boeing air tunnels to biotechnology to (some) computer technology startups.

Plus, there are definitely some non-research jobs for which it's useful. Financial markets. Programming. While I wouldn't recommend doing a Ph.D. to become a better programmer, having done a minimum of research gives a different perspective on some problems.
You're famous: http://valleywag.com/355173/yahoo-to-sell-at-36
I have several slices.. putting nginx in front of apache and lowering down apache's processes has really helped me tighten up my memory needs (I use django).
Nerdspotting: A real live Kindle user
RubyFringe
Gates talks up declarative modeling language effort
Wow, this is... horrible.
Really, We Don’t Want to Join Your Social Network
How's The Google Plug-In Hybrid Fleet Doing?
I'm waiting for the interface-less UI.

Seriously -- didn't like it.
This gives new meaning to "hack the planet".