skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, my point was intended to be read with sarcasm.

I am basically cynical about the suspicion that this society seems to automatically cast upon the successful. People automatically favor the underdog, casting it in a good light. Once greater successes are reached, the former underdog is looked upon as either a bully or dinosaur.

I'm not saying that the people or organizations that find success necessarily are bad or good. I'm saying that I've noticed that people seem look upon them either positively or negatively based upon their size, rather than their deeds. It is strange to have seen, for example, how rapidly Google went from being perceived as the do-gooder saviors of the new economy to being called Evil. Viewed on the balance I haven't detected much of a change in their behavior, and I am very happy about having Google in my world.

The vibe here at hacker news has grown from being fix-it oriented and anti-establishment to being snarly and anti-success in all stripes. It's one of the reasons I rarely contribute here anymore.

I've actually been yelled at for being a greentech entrepreneur, accused of, alternately, conjuring government support through climate lies, or using the latest craze to aid a power-grab. I've seen rage build up in people's eyes, as they realize I'm not clueless in a techie world, but a technical founder with my own successes behind me. It scares me. I wonder what this future world will do to its tall poppies.

In any case, I strongly believe Facebook is a next benefit for the world. I can't think of any major problem society faces that wouldn't be helped on the balance by better and easier communication, and I think Facebook aids that (as do cellphones, Skype, email, Twitter, etc.).
Number 2 is the biggest issue that is pushing this change. With the GPL 3 none of the new GCC versions could be imported into the base system for FreeBSD as such the base version for GCC has had to stay behind on the last viable GPL 2 version that was available. This has led to major compiler improvements not being available to create better binaries. It was decided that instead moving to a BSD licensed compiler stack would ultimately lead to a better solutions, easier to update, less GPL components that would taint any of the systems thereby causing less licensing issues and headaches for people who want to use BSD systems.
FreeBSD has the libelf project, along with the elftoolchain that is attempting to write replacement versions of binutils tools that are BSD licensed:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/LibElf

More information:

http://elftoolchain.sourceforge.net/for-review/libelf-by-exa...

http://wiki.freebsd.org/LibElf/ImplementationStatus
Thanks! That is cool that you actually saw it. Ha. I'm going to try to complete the Pacific Crest Trail next year.
A Text Field Specification
This active essay is available in a squeak image here: http://tinlizzie.org/lesserphic2/Text%20Field%20for%20LObjec...

Edit: It includes DynaBookJr, a Hypercardlike development environment.
And, of course, the ability to stay connected with nothing but a laptop relies on a huge infrastructure.
Copy machines, a data security risk?
I haven't worked directly with any of the people you mentioned, but with a background in PR I'll give you some general info.

They're not dealing with 100s of pitches per day, they're dealing with 1000s. (That may or may not be completely accurate, but it's true in spirit.) And these publications are not there to serve the world of tech, they're there to serve the relatively small ecosystem of people that they're a part of. Most of the stories they publish will come to them via established channels (a particularly capable PR person, a friend, a fellow journalist).

For the most part, I would say your pitch isn't really even considered. It's not considered because it's not part of a small group of pitches that have to be considered (because of previous ties). To put it another way, there's already enough on the table and ignoring you isn't a political risk.

So, what you're asking for is almost impossible. But so is starting a startup and finding customers, so you're getting used to it.

My advice:

1. Figure out if you really, really need coverage. Ask yourself if it's worth the energy (most of which will be wasted). If you are finding paying customers, personally I would focus all of my attention on that. In my market and because of my previous work, we can get published more or less when we decide to. But we don't. We focus on product and customers (we're currently stealth-mode on something).

2. If it truly is strategically imperative (and not just an ego milestone) you need to track down individual humans at each of the publications and get them on the phone, whatever that takes. Don't be afraid to start at the top.

3. When you get someone on the phone be short, professional and polite. You're not calling to establish how mind blowing/game changing your product is. You're calling to make an impression as someone that needs to be watched. Have a less than 30 second pitch worked out (and practiced).

Good luck.
Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
Unladen Swallow is a series of changes to the CPython VM, so no PyPy doesn't gain anything from it.
Amazing how easy it is for anybody to get hold of sensitive data. I am not sure what is the purpose of a hard disk in a copy machine. They should not have these. The copy machine wants extra money for deleting images or encrypting.
Indeed. This one was pretty good:

{
"id": "709527250_127568693924655",
"from": {
"name": "Heather Smith Kiessling",
"id": "709527250"
},
"message": "never going home to doug he is nothing more than a wife beating raping cheeting asshole who fucked my gay friend in the same bed he slept with me in. plus kept my dildo and wouldnt let me have it hhhhmmm yeah wonder where he sticking that at? sry i ever snuck you in to justin an megs house this last tuseday and fucked you and let you tell me you wanted me to have you baby.",
"type": "status",
"created_time": "2010-05-16T05:15:18+0000",
"updated_time": "2010-05-16T05:15:31+0000"
},
t first, Google's offerings look, as another poster said, like spaghetti flung at a wall in hope that some will stick.

It's beginning to look more and more like a Jackson Pollock painting... or maybe a Jackson Pollock exhibition.
I think his primary appeal is that, in a world that tends mostly towards people like yourself, who view programming as science (or engineering), he unapologetically took the opposing view. Your perspective is commonly shared; his perspective was undeniably more singular. One can admire that perspective, learn from it, and be inspired by his passion, without necessarily taking the same approach in your own code. I don't write code much like the way _why wrote code, but I admire what he did and what he stood for nonetheless.

_why was drawn to Ruby because of its own artfulness, and playfulness; you would be hard-pressed to come at programming from the same perspective in Python, not because Python isn't a nice language (it is) but because the diktat "there is only one way to do it" necessarily discourages experimental styles of coding, though not of API or visual design. If your medium is code, then it helps to work with a malleable programming language, and Ruby is nothing if not that. Scheme is malleable, but I'd not call it playful. Perl comes closer, but most languages, which are are written by Serious People with Important Goals, do not.

Anything that inspires people to stretch their skills and try new ideas out helps grow teams and developers, though preferably not when working with production code.
Would you rather build a very successful & boring startup, or work on something super cool, with no clear way of turning a profit?
Yes, I did. I don't see any incriminating posts there. A few are borderline, but they seem to be calling out other people for cheating, not talking about their own escapades. In that case, privacy isn't the point.
depends. Your runway can usually be extended quite a lot by hiring (dramatically cheaper) inexperienced people and training. This is what I did; I paid people at a level where I could pay them out of what I made as a consultant. Obviously, this meant I had to start with people who had no experience. But that's okay. I trained, and I think I have excellent people now. (well, they leave every two years or so and I have to start over, but if you can keep two part timers, you can usually keep one pretty good person and one newbie) On the other hand... I'm not sure you can call me a startup any more.

Of course, if you have a 6 month runway due to something other than running out of money (Say, for example, it's a market where the first mover takes all, and you have 6 months until someone else takes it.) you have something of a point. But even then, I think reality intrudes.

The thing is, most startups I've seen /can't/ attract top talent. The job is stressful and unstable and usually pays poorly when you consider the hours.

Sure, you can get good people as founders, but a good founder is /very different/ from a good Engineer. Some people have both those skillsets, but it is extremely rare. (well, really, in an Engineering startup, the founder _must_ be at least an adequate engineer, or you are sunk. But the founder must also be an adequate business guy, or else you are also sunk. If the founder is the best Engineer at the company, well, you are probably doing something wrong. If you trade away the 'business guy' qualities, you can usually get a /much better/ Engineer for the same money. Hell, if I don't think I can make you a better Engineer than I am in two years, I won't hire you, no matter how cheap you are.)

So, while optimally, yeah, you are working with god-like mental athletes who can work 16 hours a day for 6 months straight and need no training, the reality of the matter is that usually you are stuck with young, inexperienced but enthusiastic and intelligent individuals. I'd argue that those people (intelligent, inexperienced and enthusiastic) are the sort who will get the most out of a good training program.
This guy is (seemingly) so much more productive at 19 than I was. I really envy that.
I think that any tendencies to find out stuff about him tend to lean in two directions:

* The _why that we knew would not be averse to setting up a puzzle of this sort.
* We simply want to make sure that he didn't kill himself or anything like that.
It's really too bad the technical stuff is weak, because I love these longer pieces about computer security/crypto.

Can anyone suggest similar reads that get the tech right?
I agree. I don't know if you checked out the link, but I designed and coded that in about one hour. I may not be a designer - but I definitely speak their language!
Just in case you are not familiar with Peldi's advice, this might be useful - http://balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice...

PS Where in India are you based?
Thanks for your advice! Yes, I was guessing that, just like with VCs, pitches to major bloggers must come from a known reference to be even considers. Random emails to tips@insert-blog-name-here.com probably doesn't even get read by them?
When I hear someone complain that Django doesn't have good docs it comes across to me like, say, I'm overhearing a teenager, who is seeing the Sears Tower in Chicago for the first time, and he says, "Not tall enough. Lame."

I have to laugh, really.

More perspective: I did graphics programming in an evil mix of BASIC and 6502 Assembly, way back long ago. Later I learned OpenGL -- a bit easier, but still a lot of learning curve, math, non-ideal docs, etc. Then I learned PyGame -- muuuuch easier. Then I was in a club meeting and heard a developer (who of course was pimping the latest foshizzle mine-not-yours graphics/game framework du jour) say something like, "PyGame? Too much boilerplate, too complex, too hard to learn." Left me speechless.

Perhaps in 50 years we'll reach a point where if anything that needs to be done isn't fully automated and handed to us on a silver platter, people will complain, "Needs a button I can push to make it happen. No button. Lame. I'm going back to bed."
Radio stations are granted access to a public resource: the airwaves. Hence they are subject to regulation. That doesn't map well to the current discussion.
There are many ways to say sorry in Chinese - some of which imply one's own culpability/guilt, others do not. I'm not sure there's a good translation for whatever statement Foxconn expressed.
I agree wholeheartedly.

We've started doing some pair programming. In addition to making the code better, we've also found that it serves as a form of training, helping us to learn coding techniques from each other.

For small startups where you need people to fill multiple roles and new people to get up to speed quickly, it's best to teach as much as possible.

Finally, training is also a great source of team-building and motivation. When people leave the perks of a big company to join your fledging startup, you can offer them the satisfaction of learning new skills and taking on new responsibilities.
Yeah, read that article and followed his advice. But it is 2 years old. Not that advice has gotten old, but I am fearing if randomly pitching to bloggers is still as effective as it was earlier?

PS: Based out of Delhi
Most people would consider that oversharing even among friends, so I don't think this is a privacy settings issue. I'm sure there are plenty of blog posts with the same kind of content, and there was never any semblance of privacy there. You can't pick a couple of potentially embarrassing posts and conclude that Facebook has misled a large portion of its userbase. Some people make bad choices.
1. "The Framework for Perfectionists with Deadlines", not "The Framework for Non-Programmers Who Don't Know How Pick Up A Framework"

2. What?

3. Good talent is generally not free. Turns out that right now, a lot of good talent happens to like Django. Perhaps this indicates something, hm?

4. As opposed to writing raw SQL for different RDBMS's?

5. What?

6. If you use something large like Photoshop, the amount of memory it consumes is large, too. Pinax is a large collection of apps. Turn off the parts you don't need!

7. What? Setting up sites to handle 1k reqs/second is trivial with a little bit of caching.

8. Perhaps you should read release notes then, hm?

9. Welcome to Django -- don't use the parts you don't like. People have successfully used Jinja with Django to good effect. But your claim of the template language being hard for designers to understand is bullshit. The most advanced logic they have to deal with is if/else, and even that got easy in 1.2 with the smart-if tag.

10. See point 1.

You might not like Django for a lot of valid reasons -- but all of these weren't.
To both / all replying to this: I'm not in any way claiming proprietary doesn't have crap. It's got loads of crap. But I'd be willing to bet that a large amount of the most used applications out there are proprietary, in many cases because there is no comparable OSS equivalent.

And remember that the deciding factor in many cases is user interface - the average user does not care if they can hack it. Many many many OSS projects which could be contenders have absolutely abysmal UI and help documents.
I went to this once back in the 90s when I worked there -- there was a science-fair vibe (I guess; never been to one of those) with little booths and posters and some demos of things like active vibration control or some cryogenic/vacuum thingy whose purpose I've forgotten. Afterwards we had some food and juggling in the quad.

If anyone wants to make an outing Sunday, email me (see my profile). You'd have to supply the wheels.
Because I have personal experience of being completely shafted by software companies. In a past life I was a music technology geek. Recording engineers spend huge amounts of time, effort and money on learning our preferred Digital Audio Workstation software, which has come to replace almost every piece of equipment in a modern recording studio. Think of it as the audio equivalent of Photoshop, but with half a dozen competing alternatives. It's the kind of software you go on training courses for, the kind that comes in a huge box to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth, the kind that has multi-thousand dollar plugins available. The market leader, DigiDesign Pro Tools, only works with DigiDesign's proprietary hardware, which can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Two major upheavals shafted a lot of audio engineers.

One of the most popular DAW suites is a package called Logic. After nearly twenty years of development, Emagic sold out to Apple and Apple decided to abandon the PC version. Suddenly guys who had used the same piece of software all day every day for a decade or more were faced with either buying at least one top-end Mac, having to learn to use OS X and potentially a whole bunch of other software, or abandon their preferred DAW and have to relearn how to do their work in a different DAW. Either option would prove enormously expensive for a lot of engineers, both in direct costs and lost work.

When Apple shifted over to Intel, there was a huge lag from many developers in getting updates released. For engineers, this is a serious problem - having the fastest hardware and the latest software is a significant competitive advantage. A lot of people lost out on work, or had to buy PCs or new audio hardware.

The experience of that world has led to my current position. Professionals in all sorts of disciplines have huge personal investments in particular software and are often completely betrayed by the developers. EULAs are a one-way street and only the most rarified of enterprise software has any sort of reciprocal commitment. What Stallman talks about isn't purely abstract. Relying on proprietary software is dangerous, for very straightforward practical reasons.
What did you send in your emails to these sites, can you show us, so we can critique it? The video was good, but a bit boring and non-obvious to people who aren't aware of the problem you solve. It's dumbed down, but not far enough. Did you mention that your users think you're kicking Google's ass? That's the kind of think a writer loves to claim -- it means page views.

"Google Website Optimizer is old news. Visual Website Optimizer is next generation A/B testing"

I think your name might be hurting you. Your name sounds generic and spammy. It's great for SEO maybe, but it sucks for making people think you're a legit startup. You may want to change the name to something friendlier, like Vizzy Optimal -- VizzyO.com
I hope that's a troll.
People will always make bad choices. Good tools help reduce the damage those bad choices cause.
But we're definitely moving in the right direction.

Replacing functional, well-tested, and Free tools with completely new ones?

Yeah, there's a reason why I don't use *BSD.
In that case everything is art and the word loses all its meaning.
If you don't like pontification on the Internet with coy rhetorical devices, I'm somewhat confused as to why you read the comment sections of social news sites. And reply.
Gattaca.
Are you referring to the "{this is good]" thing?

They stole that from FilePile (which was an exclusive private imageboard-like community for dot-com yuppies)
Ah, so you think video was non-obvious? Never realized that! Do you have any ideas on what can be done so that lay people can get the concept? I think, as a creator of tool, I have got a blind spot that A/B testing is obvious.

Yes, the name might sound generic. But this is the product's name. Startup's name is actually Wingify http://www.wingify.com/ I chose Visual Website Optimizer, because it solved all pain points of Google Website Optimizer by allowing creating A/B tests visually.

Here is the pitch I am using:

------------------------------------

Hi there (or name of blogger, if available),

I'm Paras Chopra, founder of Wingify. We just launched Visual Website Optimizer (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/), which is the world's easiest A/B testing tool. Here is a quick 2 minute video which demonstrates just how simple is to create and test different versions of a website http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YYNebfuvLc

Even though we are a small bootstrapped startup, initial private beta users (about 1200) think we completely beat Google Optimizer by a huge margin and are in fact much better than enterprise testing tools (costing thousands of $$$ per month). Here are some of the testimonials from users http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/testimonials.php

By providing a dead-simple tool, we aim to transform A/B testing from being an niche, enigmatic term to something even small business owners can use. Already, in private beta phase, a couple of small businesses have been able to increase sales and conversions b 20-90% http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php

Since you have covered other web analytics startups in the past, we are hoping you could write about us too!

Regards,
Paras Chopra

Founder, Wingify
Phone: +91-98682-21372
Skype: paraschopra
I can safely say I don't remember even posting this. My jealous sarcasm must have thought it was funny a few hours ago. Won't happen again.
What is the list of banned sites and why are they banned?
I was doing a search for my 'default page' and came upon the article at this URL: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910 . In the list of banned sites my webpage 'rsscctv.com' came up. Can I please have a specific response as to why my site is banned?

Also, how can a ban be rescinded?

Thank you and best regards,

Redda M. al Sadat
Owner
http://www.rsscctv.com
Personally, I mostly dislike news personalization. For instance, I always log out of reddit unless I'm actually going to post something or add a comment, because of the personalization issue. My selection of techy-related aggregators like reddit and HN are enough personalization for me.

The problem for me with personalization is that it's annoying to always see the same set of things. For instance, I'm mostly a Python programmer. But I've found that if, for instance, I'm subscribed to the Python reddit, I get too much Python-related content in my news feed. That's not really my focus -- I'm really a programmer first, and a Python programmer second. I'd rather see interesting programming things -- regardless of the language or focus -- than I would in seeing Python-related content.

As anohter example, I've found the same is true with political stuff, which I've mostly tried to handle using RSS feeds. I can subscribe to political content that I'm interested in, but then I find that I just end up reading the same things and viewpoints over and over again. I'd rather read political content that's interesting and well written -- regardless of its political stance -- than I would read political content related to some sort of viewpoint or interest. That's the value of a "logged out" reddit/hacker news, or the front page of a newspaper; I'll see the most important things first, and then do my own seletion of whether or not I want to read the stuff contained therein.

One interesting sidenote is that reddit basically dropped the personalization filter thing a long time ago. You may recall that they used to have a "recommended" articles tab, which was supposed to learn about what you were interested in based on your voting history, and then by clicking on the tab you'd see the top articles that it thought were relevant to you. AFAICT this feature no longer exists, and now they just have the sub-reddits system where you get a simple mix of content from subreddits you're subscribed to. I'm not sure exactly why they dropped that (it never worked very well), but that might be something to ponder a bit.
I went last year and had a great time. Be sure to arrive as early as possible though, as some of the buildings have long lines to get into.

I waited 1-2 hours to get into the one with the clean room where they're building the new Mars Science Lab rover, but even those 10 minutes you get to go inside were totally worth it to get that close to something that is going to end up on Mars.