skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meatspace proximity to the MCDC and Redmond probably also played a role.

> Windows Vista is a dog of an operating system

To be fair, Vista seems to have shaken off most issues now (I'll wager a majority of the problems were fixed during the Win7 product cycle and back-ported to Vista). I use an up-to-date patched Vista system and have few complaints (the new Win7 taskbar is probably the biggest thing I miss).
My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
For acme - 'apt-get install wily' - wily is an acme work-alike.
For sam - 'apt-get install sam'.
From coal mining to high-tech: fibre paves the way
You may want to run more than a text editor and a compiler, on occasion.
"The answer at speakerconf was: Probably,"

How is "probably" a "consensus" ? It is more likely that there were people arguing "yes", some people "no" and others saying saying "it depends".

I would be very surprised if the folks at SpeakerConf (I've worked with many of them including Jay) arrived at a consensus that unit tests hinder refactoring and/or the ability to add new tests. But, yes, they are some very independent thinkers in that group and I would be very surprised if some of them don't think thoughts at variance with agile orthodoxy.

Jay says nothing about any consensus anywhere. Are you sure you aren't reading more than what he said into the post?
The Money Behind The Money
luck probably didn't play that much of a role in Google hiring them, given that they already established major cred at Bell labs.
Art Is Useless Because... ~ Oscar Wilde
Tools to analyse your twitter account
Silicon Valley Is Not Wall Street: Tom Perkins
Designing User Interfaces For Business Web Applications
Musica Te pido Perdon
Video musical de la cancion te pido perdon de tito el bambino
Sorry for replying late, I just saw it. I'm in Perugia (Umbria, Central Italy).
Job Search: Interview Disasters Revealed By Employers
ICodedHere.com
The beta site is up and updated frequently, work in progress.

icodedhere is about promoting the portfolio of the staff related to web projects, from the CEO to the cleaning lady.
Not only were they doing something virtuous while shrouded in secrecy, the secrecy was necessary for them to accomplish their goals. While I'm in general totally in favor of openness and transparency, there are competing concerns that it should be weighed against, as this clearly demonstrates.
There's SocialEngine. It's kinda an ugly pile of PHP, but it's decently usable.
Or maybe 140 characters of code in the language of your choice...
About this Blog - PeepCode Blog
Personally, I'd rather fill out a captcha each time than have an account. I just don't see a reason why I'd need an account. However, I suspect that this might be a pretty diverse issue (i.e. people feel strongly about each side, so there's really no right answer and compromise is difficult).

Why do you really need a captcha? Have you seen for sure that spambots will target you? I'd recommend (at least initially, while it still scales) that you just let people post. If spam becomes an issue, moderate. If that doesn't scale, then I'd move to a captcha system. But don't build it in unless you know you'll need it.
Good god indeed - there's a germ of an idea for a Google Labs project right there. And if it worked well, it could change decision making of ALL kinds.
I wonder about UK law on this?

From the UK Copyright website:

Copyright is an automatic right and arises whenever an individual or company creates a work. To qualify, a work should be regarded as original, and exhibit a degree of labour, skill or judgement.

...

Names, titles, short phrases and colours are not generally considered unique or substantial enough to be covered, but a creation, such as a logo, that combines these elements may be.

Here we have 'short phrases' excluded again - but in the same context as a title. I'd say that many tweets would meet the criteria in the first paragraph just about.

Thoughts from any other UK people?
I enabled this feature for a similar purpose (exception reports from running apps).

However, even with fixed-width available, I almost always go after the "show original" feature* instead. I find that having the message isolated in a separate tab altogether makes it much easier to read.

* "Show original" is under the drop-down menu for the message itself.
A Mac is a Unix box. Actually, to be picky it’s more of a Unix box than a linux machine as of those two only OS X has Unix certification: http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/certificates/1190p.pdf
Civ II basically fixed that. But I'm not even sure it's possible to have a balanced game and a historically accurate game, unless you have some kind of "Zeitgeist" function that keeps one player from getting a big technology lead over another. If the game mechanics let you discover gunpowder in 0 AD, they turn the entire thing into a race to get good technology.

Alternatively, they could make technologically advanced units prohibitively expensive if you're the only player with the technology, and very cheap when everyone has it.
7 Simple Strategies For Instant Confidence
Good to we you agree with the points about how angel investors are busy and like to ride on momentum.

I also agree with you that a bright, shiny object is very important. For web products, it's a requirement to get past the first meeting. See my earlier post:
Pitching without PowerPoint: 8 Tips for a First Meeting at http://www.kartme.com/node/31475

I'll qualify my statement on metrics by saying that, if your target angel investors aren't in your target customer segment, then you'll need metrics around usage to convince them of (a) the value of your bright shiny object to your target customers and (b) your ability to make it shine brighter. And I agree it's not about goals and plans. It's metrics about your past achievements and lessons learned.
Concurrent Programming with Clojure
5 Lessons Learned About Enterprise Collaboration
Paper: High Performance Scalable Data Stores
Congratulations on entering the infinite procrastination loop.
Interesting to note that 97% of their revenue comes from advertising. That's a weak spot for them, and surely they know it. If some better disruptive technology comes along they could have serious problems.
Excelerate (Chicago accelerator) extends deadline to 4/2
This seems pretty standard. Why all the uproar?
If you have been involved in an ECM deployment, then I would very interested in hearing from you. I will be presenting on this topic at the IASA ITARC E-Summit on March 11 on Collaboration and would like to hear your concerns, issues, and success stories in order to refine my presentation and to make it more relevant.
I'm not sure which is correct, but wikipedia seems to think that the word 'googol' was first used by Edward Kasner in 1920:

The name "googol" was invented by a child (Dr. Kasner's nine-year-old nephew)
who was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely, 1 with a
hundred zeros after it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Kasner#Googol

EDIT: After looking around some more, you seem to be correct:

"...[Kasner] asked his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, to suggest a word. The youthful comic strip reader told Kasner to use "Google". Kasner agreed and in 1940 he introduced the words "googol" and "googolplex" in his book, Mathematics and the Imagination."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_Google_and_Snuffy_Smith#...
Congrats! No obligation for you to answer, but have you raised any funding yet? Would you be able to spend a lot of money to scale more rapidly or is going more slowly a better strategy for you?
Ibis Reader: Cross-platform HTML5 ebook reader
I don't know what makes you think that all CS programs are like this. My operating systems course did not require me to write a kernel. In fact, there was only one class that required you to work in a language that required manual memory management (using c++). Granted, my department, at least at the time, had a relatively strong functional bent: before you graduated, you would have worked in scheme and haskell. Most people ended up taking other classes that forced them to use C or more c++, but wasn't required. I'm a vassar college alum, for the record.
Congratulations! What are some good examples of feedback from HN that helped you get there?
The guy isn't against unit tests, but rather, what kind.

I've come to the same sort of conclusions as the OP myself. To me, the most important thing is the code, run test, cycle. If it's too slow, I get impatient and easily distracted. That happens when the code base just grows and grows. I'm not saying don't test. But test the weird corner cases and normal cases that you need to get right.

It's a tradeoff between having complete tests and having fast tests for me.
San Diego Hacker News Meetup Tomorrow (2/26), 8:30 PM
RIA Screen Layouts
Yelp Accused of Extortion
TypeFace: Make A Font Using Your Face
Come join us for our second meetup, and bring a friend!
Korean Classrooms will have Robot Teachers by 2012
Maybe focusing on and sticking with one thing may be a better alternative?
It is like ed(1) with a windowing system.
They are prolly the best alternative and REALLY make a point to support customers as much as possible, a good forum as well.... www.nettalk.com
Put Missing kids on your 404 Pages easily
Baidu Registry.com complaint now available to view
Hmm, sounds like it will enable parents to spy on their kids at school.
"Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%
Well, you can't rid bicycles on the sidewalks in most major cities either. So I don't think it's an example of people fearing new and different modes of transportation.
steve jobs lied? wtf, really?
Such an awesome an easy idea... Not bad for a company that wants to show they care about their community.

Can you imagine companies putting these on all their 404 pages. Might be something to consider when building your next companies website.
If you enjoyed this article, check out the book "Universal Principles of Design"- it has a wider breadth and depth, and the approach is similar. They use it at my school to teach basic design to programmers.
If you search for the title of this article in Google News and click on the link there you can see the entire article without subscribing. (I'm guessing it's the referrer header that makes the difference.) Well worth the effort.
It seems like it'd be a great topic for a marketing case study.

Too bad they didn't put as much effort into making you not look ridiculous riding it.
Ask HN: Anyone in Paris
I am in Paris for 3 months and am trying to meet some new people and network in the hacker/entrepreneur area. If anyone is in paris please drop me an email jbrun@jonathanbrun.com
-- Candidate used Dungeons and Dragons as an example of teamwork.

That's a negative? WTF? There's a hell of a lot more interesting in the way of teamwork, management, etc. in role-playing games (especially MMORPGs) than in most corporations.
I never really thought about whether or not it was actually needed. Good insight. I think I will remove the requirement to post but keep the accounts as an option for users to track their posts. I'm also working on the voting system right now.

Also, I gave the site a visual makeover. Hopefully it will be easier on the eyes now.
I read that some airports use them because seeing police running could cause people to panic in an emergency. Not so with helmet-wearing cops on segways.
Secret AIG Document Shows Goldman Sachs Minted Most Toxic CDOs
I disagree with his point about various collectives overall increasing the sophistication of angel investors, because the existence of organizations like YC are likely to draw in newer, less experienced angel investors.

When you democratize a process and make it easier, you'll get some more sophisticated folks using it, and a lot of new people using it who otherwise wouldn't.
Pretty clear BigCo corporate bias in these results, as this would likely be a positive in SF/Bay:

-- Candidate used Dungeons and Dragons as an example of teamwork.

The meeting for drinks also cracked me up, as Linden ended many a job interview with drinks at the end of the day!
Here's a link: http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&...
I think this is trolling, and if it's not, it's pretty poor form. It's also not very interesting.
I am curious how many of these became "disasters" for the interviewer because the interviewee had already reached a point where they considered the interviewer/company/etc. a disaster (no longer wished to work there).
Pruning features is as essential to software quality as adding new ones.
Congrats! I used to live in Chicago and would have loved this as a resource
State of the Internet
I have a foreboding that the first "real" AI may well come out of spamming and other forms of unpleasantness ...

the operation hasn’t cleaned the infected computers and [... a]lthough the zombies are now largely out of the bot-herders’ control, they are still infected with the original malware

That will learn them some bird calls next time, if not yet done.
Proxying to Apache for dynamic requests is still a win if you let nginx buffer the response. This local transfer is fast, which frees the apache process, and all the memory it uses, to serve the next dynamic request while nginix takes care of emptying the buffered data to the "slow" client. At the same time, you get to tap the vast knowlwge base for deploying php apps on apache.
Good for you!!! (Go Blackhawks!)
This is a deceptive demonstration. The video is H.264, which can be hardware accelerated on many chipsets. This means Flash may be doing very little work, and undermines their goal of showing that Flash is an efficient runtime. A more revealing test would be a traditional FLV, since the argument for Flash is that it supports "innovation" and wrapping open, hardware accelerated formats is rather later in the game.

The performance test I want to see is the most common one: a text page with a Flash banner ad, versus a text page. Adobe would never show it because this (most common) scenario is the worst case. What would be a 1% CPU situation becomes something between 5% and 100%, based entirely on the (in)competence of the (poorly compensated) designer who slapped it together for the ad agency.
Thanks for writing this. I am in the same position, working full-time in a semi-demanding job, with a wife, son, big lawn to mow, etc. I've been working nights and weekends for over a year and am 2 months away from launching.

My schedule looks almost exactly like yours. On Saturdays, I watch my son while my wife is at work, and I have the same mixed feelings about spending time with my son vs. working on my startup. Then I feel guilty for having mixed feelings...you know how it goes.

Good luck with your startup. Keep fighting the good fight!
No, it wouldn't. The guest kernel has unencrypted access to the filesystem (it has to if you want to get anything in or out), and that's just a process running on their host. I'm reliably informed that getting the FS contents under those circumstances is relatively trivial.
Maintaining stuff most people don't use is an unnecessary headache. Yes it works today but what if some future gmail feature breaks it?

I'm pretty sure even Labs go through some sort of QA process.
"What kind of company spends this amount of time talking about the crappiest part of their product?"

There is a lot of BS out there regarding Flash.

For example, on HN I can up my karma easily by just hating on Flash. I don't need prove it or show evidence. As long as I am part of the "gang" mentality, then I am welcome to shoot my mouth off.

So then there are those who wanna see evidence (crazy people, I know!). We get scenarios like these -- where the debunker must over explain, over analyze and over emphasize to get the message across.
What about the artist/poet Jenny Holzer who tweets her latest compositions before subsequently publishing them elsewhere:

http://twitter.com/Jennyholzer

These short phrases have been the basis of her entire body of work for decades. I find it hard to believe she cannot copyright them.
I think the interesting thing is summarized in this http://getsatisfaction.com/ning/topics/ning_tos_its_our_resp... Unless I've missed it, they say backups are your responsibility and they don't provide a method to backup the data. I do believe data security is the responsibility of whoever is setting up the service. I think it's just one of those things you have to check when you're exposing something to the public, to avoid showing your ass basically.

edit : also I think a scrape of only the salient pieces of data on his site, the settings files, would have been the 80/20 on backing up without a policy from ning
'How is "probably" a "consensus" ? It is more likely that there were people arguing "yes", some people "no" and others saying saying "it depends".'

Well, "probably" would tend to imply the ones in favor of the thing labeled "probably" were winning. Or at least louder. If it was totally even, the word would be "maybe" or "nobody could agree". But:

"Jay says nothing about any consensus anywhere. Are you sure you aren't reading more than what he said into the post?"

In a word: No. But double and triple checking I still don't find it an impossible reading of the text, so I don't feel bad, and still won't even if it is clarified later that I am wrong. In the meantime a good discussion has broken out, so shrug.
Are TV ads obsolete in the online world?
M.C. Escher and Hyperbolic Geometry
I think it's about time that "well-maintained" and "supported" stop being used as some kind of differentiating point against Linux. There are just as many, if not more, regular updates, both in terms of packages and new distribution releases, to the popular Linux distributions as there are for OSX and Windows. This is even more impressive when you take into account that any random Linux distribution comes with more software out of the box than either OSX or Windows. Both Ubuntu and Redhat provide significant lead time on their release schedules and give you access to the next release before it is official, allowing you to plan your upgrade path better. Even when a distribution is EOLed, you can find people who still offer packages and upgrades for it, and to top it off you can maintain your own upgrades if the vendor EOLs a release and your environment requires not upgrading. Linux distribution releases are not as marketing based as OSX or Windows releases and release schedules, and you don't need to wait until the official day, or be some kind of partner, to find out what's going to be in the newer versions before it is released.
I love this bit:

"The first practitioners, including Eugene Kleiner and me, had familiarity with Wall Street operators and we set up our partnerships to avoid specifically problematic practices.

These parameters included: no leverage; audited statements; never investing personal capital where the partnership could or should do so (that is, no "cherry picking" at the investors expense); no profit participation until the investor's entire capital had been repaid; limited partnership life and no investments of new capital in older deals. These early ideas have become nearly universal over the decades. And in my opinion, they have kept our industry healthy, profitable and largely scandal-free.

It is time the venture industry is rewarded for the work that we do and how we go about doing it. We are not asking for bailout money or additional tax breaks. We simply want those in the Beltway to leave us alone and let us do our jobs—which means creating more jobs for our country."
Ask HN: Meetup in Milwaukee
My understanding is that the Chicago HN meetup went well. I just wanted to see what the interest in doing something similar in Milwaukee would be.
-- Candidate wore a business suit with flip flops.

God, who cares?

-- Dressing inappropriately - 57 percent

If dropping your dress code expectations will increase your potential hire pool by over 50%, that is a serious competitive advantage over more stodgy companies.
Tobias Buckell: Delaying gratification
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup.

In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so:

a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult.
b) Evaluating potential angel investors would be just as hard.

He offered to give me a call every Sunday for a year for advice and moral support if I promised to go it alone for one year, build my own tech (tricky considering I'm a decent designer but not a backend guy), and not take any money from anyone.

That first year was miserable as I iterated through a few versions of the product and lived on about $10k that I earned from freelance writing and design gigs. The first idea was to build a big blog network for Chicago. I found about 20 writers, but ran into two big problems:

1. Drupal's content creation forms are not suitable for non-technical users or people without special training. They have some WYSIWYG add-ons, but they're frankly terrible compared to Wordpress/Squarespace/MT. This meant I had to post up most of the blog posts myself and my writers were always frustrated and demoralized. On my end, I lacked the skills to build a good writing UI or the funds to hire someone to do it for me.

2. With my time swallowed up by posting and editing stories, I had no time to even worry about ad sales or recruit new writers. I think a local blog network could work really well...if you had 2-3 guys. As a solo project, no dice.

So 9 months in, I switched to letting anyone join up and share links to their favorite local news, blogs, and events. We've been doing that for the last 14 months. Midway through that, I picked up someone to handle ad-sales on commission with some opportunity to earn equity in the business. Together we've reached a healthy "ramen profitablity" position and are having a lot of fun.

4 months ago, I scored a $35k grant from the Chicago Community Trust to invest in our tech. We've spent a bit of it on performance improvements and are looking to spend a bit more on FB/Twitter integration (if you're good at that stuff, drop me a line!).

So I've been pursuing the slow growth strategy. All bootstrap so far. I believe we're very close to "cracking the code" for doing this sort of thing which then could change things a bit, but in the meantime we're working on incremental improvements to our sales strategy and product.
From what I've been reading in places like Touch Arcade, review times are going down significantly. I submitted my app (http://tcgcounter.com) on Monday night, it changed to In Review the next morning, that evening it went to Ready For Sale, and was on the app store about two hours after that. Super fast.
Wow, that's pretty awful. I've only been living in NYC for 2 years, but I've totally absorbed all of these etiquette rules that are fairly well ingrained in the local culture. Still, I find myself gritting my teeth a few times a week when they are breached. I've never thought of myself as a tense person, but I swear my body temperature goes up a few degrees when boarding passengers either stand right in front the door, blocking those exiting, or worse, attempt to board through the exiting passengers, somehow.

I might need medication if I ever move to Boston ;)
It is time the venture industry is rewarded for the work that we do and how we go about doing it. We are not asking for bailout money or additional tax breaks. We simply want those in the Beltway to leave us alone and let us do our jobs, which means creating more jobs for our country.
Did you Not get accepted to YC Boston?
are their individual developers or small teams that got turned down for a bid for YC? If so, and you're weighing whether to continue on or not, please contact me.
Tim Berners-Lee rejects Adobe's procedural arguments
Why Facebook won't buy Loopt