skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could it be that the people who select Virtualmin aren't the same people who need to scale up? Not a rhetorical question, I don't know you guys well enough to have an idea.

> The performance of hardware has managed to keep pace with the needs of the vast majority of websites

That makes sense, but the absolute number of web sites that need to scale up in a big way is also growing, even if it could actually be shrinking as a percentage.
Someone just has to have a patent of that ;)
Not necessarily, but I think they feel it's worth testing - and if they can mess with Microsoft while doing it, all the better.
Yes, go the Alpha-beta pruning approach. Assume you were rejected and don't wait till too late to find out how screwed you are. Continue working and launch 1 day earlier ;)
Surely a checklist is missing the whole point.

Don't go through the list checking for each one, treat everything as evil, and only allow through what you know is good.
You might find this interesting, if you haven't read it already:

Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158895
How to piss off your users.
what's with calling everything a chess match? as a chess player I can tell you that chess matches are rather different.
If you want something around $1,000 why not a macbook with a student discount? You can buy the white one for $890 if I'm not wrong.
You could run the OSX X server instead and get seamless mode that way. It's free too.
You're crazy :) Buy a second hand MacBook and run it on that. If you love OS X its the way forward. I run VMWare and various OS on my MacBook Air
Be careful here. The content is actually copyrighted. Whilst you can scrape it their T&Cs expressly forbid it. They sell licenses to access this information - the license is NOT expensive and they provide direct access to all the data in XML.
12 Things You Should Know About REST and WOA
I am with all those, who would put you, Paul, on the list of heroes. You do great things.
So if I make a user called "pgfake" can I make your script send you text messages? Neat.
We are working on a lot of scraping and analysis and here are a few links that you might be interested in if you are using Python:

http://pyro.sourceforge.net/

http://pyprocessing.berlios.de/

http://www.sqlalchemy.org/

http://codespeak.net/lxml/

http://nltk.org/index.php/Main_Page

The biggest hurdle is in understanding how to navigate through a complex site - such as a forum, real estate etc. We have created a visual tool for this however there are other methods. Look at dapper.net as this is useful.

I am wondering if there could be some collaborative effort from the minds on this site to create something unique and groundbreaking
Top 7 Self-Destructive Habits
Preview All Orkut Applications Before They Are Launched
I have a Toshiba Satellite M100 that runs Ubuntu just fine. This machine is about 2 years old (ancient in laptop years, I know) but still runs fine. I got it new for around $1300. A similar model purchased today will run you easily under $1,000. I have a 14.1" screen, 1.25G Ram, Core Duo @ 1.66GHz, ATi x1400 graphics card, and it runs Ubuntu just fine. It also runs Vista though it was made for XP.

The media buttons also work in Ubuntu, but the fingerprint reader and remote control don't, unfortunately. I can live with that though.
Good luck to everyone! I admit, I joined with little hopes of getting picked, so just the pleasure of learning about start-ups made it worthwhile.

Thanks YC!
I had a similar problem with my Toshiba Satellite M100. I could only get mono, but I had to do some strange stuff to get that to work (it could only be plugged in half way and held at a certain angle). As it turns out, it wasn't a hardware thing at all, but a software thing. I reinstalled the audio drivers and I got my headphone sound back. You might be able to do something similar. Goodluck!
Oh, so that's what those are. I saw some of those at SXSW.

But $3 for a piece of cardboard?
The internet is shit.
How the iPhone is killing the 'Net
Adults Too Quick to Dismiss Educational Gaming?
Microsoft discloses 14,000 pages of coding secrets
Bloxes, the offspring of famous designer (Macintosh) Jeff Raskin's son's mind, provides evidence for answering the question: Nature or Nurture?

Answer: Both

I'd so love to be able to build a fort with these in our brand-new open-plan workspace but I'd run into a wall of Nopes.
This is one of example of how technology is leveling the playing field and allowing even little people to control the news.

It used to be that sources could be hand-selected by news-makers and large companies dominated. I think services and tools such as this will change that (along with blogs, youtube, Hacker News, and other new media outlets), and bring a measure of power back to the people.

I'm excited about the future!
Specially cut, though.
It's a start for sure and it's great that freebase does this. But what I refer to is more like Google gives all their business location listings to Freebase. I don't think this will happen, but maybe something of less value while being still significant.
Thanks for the link to the comments form! :/
"Also as a consequence of the introduction of new bugs, program maintenance requires far more system testing per statement written than any other programming. Theoretically, after each fix one must run the entire batch of test cases previously run against the system, to ensure that it has not been damaged in an obscure way. In practice, such regression testing must indeed approximate this theoretical idea, and it is very costly." -- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month (p 122)
I actually cringe when I see Code Ninja

Sometimes these terms are pretty funny and alive when first coined, then die off and become cringeworthy. There are degrees of cringe, too, like the circles of Inferno. You know you're reaching the inner circles when articles start to appear like "How to Keep Your Code Ninja Happy: A Manager's Guide" :)

I wonder if it's an American thing or a programmer thing. Software development is still new and widely misunderstood, and most metaphors to existing disciplines suck. That's the real problem with "software engineer" (as it is with "software architect"). So people come up with wacky terms that are free of entrenched connotations and convey a playful creativity that's actually closer to what good programmers do. But they're disposable. Once the novelty is gone, so is the reason for using the term in the first place.

Edit: "hacker" is an interesting case. It's been around long enough to have had all the life sucked out of it and yet it lives. Perhaps that's because the term (as used here) shadows a more exoteric usage that's sinister and scares the corporate types away.
Yeah, the [] operator works on a variable name, not on the variable itself. Kind of silly.
I'm a big fan of using Hpricot + Ruby. I'd say the sites I had been scraping but I doubt my old client wants it to come out :|

To get the most bang for my buck (developer time wise) I would visit each site with firebug in inspect mode, hover the data I want to extract. From there I figure out how I would style that element, and because Hpricot supports CSS selectors I've straight away got a method for pulling that data out of the page.
Are Macs more expensive than PCs? Does it matter?
Metcalfe's Law is Wrong
my god; how un-usable is that site? .. the odds of me bookmarking it 0% ;/

How much do ads have to pay; to convince you of alienating your users? .. sad. The ad space is more than the content space..
Am I missing something? Our system obviously sucks and there are many better systems out there.

At the same time, we definitely have many of the best minds in the world in America. If educating Americans was so important, I'd think we'd have figured it out by now. Is it really that impossible to make our school system better?

On the other hand, we do seem to be good at producing the consumers who power our economic engine. Isn't there just a big gapping inconsistency here?
Ask YC: best development/project process?
Yes, I know there is no "best" process.

I'm in the position of needing to define the project life-cycle and development process for a new development practice being built within a medium-sized consulting company that has until recently focused on branding/marketing. I've made pages and pages of notes, and have looked a number of development methodologies, but I was hoping to tap into the experience and intelligence here.

Here are the relevant guidelines:

The clients are all external companies, mostly large, paying for expensive projects (therefore scope, meeting dates, quality, etc...) are all critical.

Most of the projects will be ground-up implementations of large, complex, Java-based web applications.

The project teams are distributed across multiple states, and may include off-shore resources at times.

The project teams will typically have a mix of experienced architect/tech-lead individuals and inexperienced people fresh out of training.

My current thoughts:
Due to the external clients, it's important to document and lock down the scope, budget, timeframe, etc... as much as possible. So start out with a waterfall-ish process, with a series of steps, with hard gates, sign-offs, etc...

Break down the development into small feature based iterations. Have the architect design the approach for the first iteration (class skeletons, some commented psuedo-code, arch approach docs).

Do iteration based, scrum-style development, with daily time-boxed con-calls, using GreenHopper+Jira for task management, scrum cards, etc...

Formal test plans and test phases.

Anyhow, I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts, experiences, etc... about project process, development cycle process, tools to support it, etc.... Thanks!
Well, actually, if you wanted to generate a false positive, all you had to do was paste the regex text, but why?
I've noticed this phenomenon in two friends, one who went to law school and the other to business school. I've always bounced start up ideas off of these guys, since well before they started their programs. All too predictably, the law guy now tends to bring up legal issues first thing, and the biz guy pokes holes in the financial model (both of these guys used to simply attack the idea directly). It's their new pair of glasses at work.
Research Reveals Internet "Black Holes"
anyone have success with emacs and w3? I haven't given it a shot yet, but seems like its interactive nature might be useful.
Editors, please destroy asap.
Taupe irradie : Page malgache d'une taupe-irradiee
Taupe Irradiee: Harena et sa famille soutient le JO Pekin 2008 et TAUPE IRRADIEE.C'est avec joie que nous annonce qu'une taupe irradie malgache va participer au JO Pekin 2008.Tout à propos de taupe-irradiee (taupes-irradiees).
Too bad Spectrum articles don't have abstracts.
I don't know why but I can amazon buying these running millions and selling them for $1 ...guess its just because they like their hand in everything
Whatever you are trying to accomplish, there's a cheaper way to do it. You can get used cubicles and furniture on Ebay and sound foam isn't all that pricey either.

The chief attraction is that they seem like fun, but just wait till the novelty wears off. I just don't see the need to spend $60 dollars on something I could accomplish with a crate.
Finding high quality data is very expensive, and very well-guarded with license restrictions once you do cough up for it..

Seems like factual data will inevitably gravitate toward free, though. The sooner the better.
What is the average monthly revenue of an early-stage startup?
a lot of people I know tend to stick to one language... from the quote it sounds like he hints at more languages, he just didn't want to list them all
a statement my mentor said once

'People who have made money, think they are really smart in all areas...'

it applies here.
macbook refurbs starting at $799..
Lefora launches next generation forums for free
Figure this would be quite relevant to any startups that need collaborative tools. A new startup I saw up on techcrunch is offering up super simple forums and many to many group discussions for free.
I'm not adding value to NBC's bottom line by watching their television program?? It's called ratings. On the internet, we call them page views.

Either way, I think the equation is changed fundamentally when labour does not need to be incentivized with money. The labour in this case is users, who choose to create value with their own time. How can we have a discussion about efficient inputs of labour when the price tends towards nothing? See, look, I've gone and made my brain hurt!
Stenographers use chorded keyboards, but the demand for speed is much higher. I think the primary concern is that typing speed simply isn't the bottleneck for most users. The learning curve for a regular keyboard might level off earlier, but few really need typing speeds in excess of what's attainable on a keyboard.

What's surprising, though, is that nobody sells a chorded keyboard for cellphones.
Self-employment is neither allowed or particularly well defined, so applying for a TN is a risky proposition.
How many fake "blogs" will this world be able to absorb? And you're advising him to start another one. Do you remember what the word (and a thing) really means?

Lets face it, todays "blogs" are nothing but little PR agencies, and your advice really reads as "start your own PR firm".

Get real, running a successful "blog" is equally hard to running a successful business, and he already trying to run one. Starting a real blog is easy: you just write what's on your mind, but those blogs have nothing to do with business and usually have an audience of 10-12 friends and family members.
That's a much better general principle, but oftentimes you have to use third-party software which you're not sure is safe. A checklist gives you a bunch of tests that you can quickly run to see if the developers were paying attention to XSS issues or not. You can decide whether or not to use the library based on the results.

Spez said recently that over half of Reddit's XSS issues were caused by Markdown. It's not unusual for websites to require 3rd-party forums or comment engines or skinning systems, too.
I don't like them. I had one.
Google Docs = Fire and Motion.

I don't think Google cares much whether or not Google Docs ever replaces most MS Office installations. But it forces Microsoft to respond and protect their core business, and not focus on competing with Google in the markets Google actually cares about.

Meanwhile, Microsoft disparately tries to get Yahoo, just to stay far behind Google in advertising, but maybe less far behind than they are now (see McDonald's trying to make Starbucks style coffee in the article).
They should give them away for free, but put ads on them. That's a better cardboard 2.0 business model.
You know that you can scan for his replies on any thread by using the http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments link, right? Just in case someone starts another "YC e-mails are out!" thread?
It could very well be a bit of a situation where, "We don't offer a scaling solution, so customers that need to scale don't come our way, so we don't hear from customers that they need to scale."

But, it's worth noting that my previous (now defunct) company was entirely devoted to web performance and scalability. It's not a volume business--the folks who need it spend a lot on the problem, but their just aren't that many who need the extreme solutions. I've often chuckled when the few Virtualmin customers who do want scalability have explained their requirements and they match to a great degree the products I was building five years ago (and found to be a niche that wasn't worth continuing to expend effort on). If I thought it would be profitable to pursue, I could certainly revive some of those products in the context of Virtualmin...but I think there are far more profitable areas for us to work on.

Everything related to the web is growing, so all ships are rising, including scalability issues...but I believe several others are rising much faster.
It'd be much more interesting if you could build machines, rather than just structures with these, esp machines that can assemble bloxes, to make another machine.
I think I'd give in just for the sake of having something fun to do...
I'm not playing with blocks, Mommy, I'm building a workspace!
I did not know about that feature. Thanks.
The title here is a little bit too harsh methinks, give the guy credit for being a recreational academic
Entrepreneurs - Keep Putting One Foot in Front of the Other
Ever felt like giving up? Clayton Christopher, founder of Sweet Leaf Tea (one of fastest growing iced teas), shares a cycling story analogus to the many times his company almost went under over the last 10 years. Now he's in 6,000 stores in every state. Sometimes you just have to keep going.
One can only hope...
I hear this sentiment about eVite alot. I personally hate that they don't put the contact info in the email for me either, and people keep using it to send me invites. And their iCal import is provided only as a file, doesn't hook in to google calendar, 30 boxes, etc.

That said, lots of people have tried (and failed) to topple eVite. Maybe people keep using it because it caters to people that send out invites, and not to people receiving them--and there in lies the dissonance.

The only thing I've seen that circumvents eVite is facebook's own event inviter.

Anyone have a good strategy to topple eVite? (I'm not in the invitation business) It'd be an interesting thought experiment.
Ask YC:  Do you have a brother/sister also in computing who disagrees with you about what's important?
In my case, I focus on novel ideas. My brother is the exact opposite: he is concerned with high quality implementation of existing ideas.
The New Math
FCC approves emergency alert text-messaging system
In my case, my brother is contented in working for a large company and earning a salary and he works harder hoping for a raise every year...ugh, why doesn't he understand that its not going to be like that forever?
I think this is really the wrong way to think about blogs in the context of your startup. Sure, you could make yet another useless blog to brag about your startup...or you could make a blog that provides useful information in your field, thus proving your expertise and spreading around good will that's bound to come back your way. You obviously shouldn't create another useless blog about your product, and no one is suggesting you should (at least, I hope no one here at news.YC is).

Wufoo gets a significant portion of their traffic from their (excellent) blog. 37signals got pretty much all of their initial uptake from people who read their blog. Not because they talk about how awesome their product is...but because they help people learn new things, solve problems, and enjoy their time on the web a little more.

If you want to call a blog a "PR firm", that's fine. Most of us are doing our own PR, as well, and if blogging fits into that line item on your budget, that's fine. The OP wants to take advantage of blogs without blogging, and people are telling him that it doesn't work that way. Nothing you've said counters that advice.
2 minute guide to jruby on rails
But if we toppled this horribly useless company, how could we laugh at the jokes based on it (think How I Met Your Mother: "Yes, I received your submissions Barney, and no, we will not be attending any parties in your pants." "But you enjoyed the evite, right? That was an ACTUAL picture of my pants.")?

In all seriousness, however, I'm a big fan of Facebook event creator. And as most of my friends are on Facebook, it saves me a lot of time and hassle to try to figure out everyone's phone number/address/email--just type in approximately the first four letters of their name, select them from the now extremely narrowed down list of friends with those four letters in their name, and tada! You have just completed what used to be several hours worth of work.

Now if only we could get our parents and distant relatives on, so we don't have to send all those wedding invitations by mail.
Aza and the Humanized guys have done some pretty impressive and diverse stuff - Enso, Songza, Bloxes, not to mention getting hired by Mozilla.
That's a very small list of countries. Large, no!
Holy crap, that's insipid.
I agree with your brother. Look at Google. They were not the first search engine, they were number 7 or 8. But they took a great idea (search) and added "high quality implementation." End result = $billions and lots of happy users (myself included).

I guess you could argue that Google's process itself was the novel idea -- that Yahoo and Altavista hadn't thought of link-counting and algorithm's and thus the novel idea is what allowed for Google's success.

But then you might be getting into a semantics game.

Or maybe this means you're both right.

Maybe it's time I let somebody else comment.
I was wondering how long it would take for something like this to go into effect--the school I'm currently attending (University at Buffalo, in NY) started an text message alert system last September.

It's good to know that all of the major cell phone companies have jumped on board (or claim to expect to, which I suppose is largely different from actually doing so), though I'm curious as to the balance between executives wanting to gripe about the bottom line, and not wanting to seem "unAmerican".
First look: Mozilla Fennec takes browser fight to handhelds
That might be misconstrued as sponsorship of what the boxes are used to build.
New Ruby news site, RubyFlow.com released
Innovation, Disruption and The Economics of Free
Even if true, the call to action is obscure at best.

"Go forth and complain!"
If all you see on the internet is shit, it's probably your browsing habits that are to blame.
Oh was suppose to be today? slipped my mine
Oftentimes judgment is clouded by prior experience as FSJ describes.

Unfortunately our dear fake Steve has setup a bit of a strawman. No core idea is disputed, just the qualifications of those trying to approach the problem.

EnerNet and other negawatt proposals attack the same kind of inefficiencies in power utilities as once plagued circuit switched telephone utilities. The two problems are actually analogous, which FSJ hasn't analyzed at all.
>I personally think if you can’t think in a few languages on a project then your a dumbass

Wait, whose "a dumbass"?
Playing to your strengths is a tried and true strategy...
The Four Horsemen: Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris meet
See the google video links
I would guess that you want a VCS based on a pack repository format so it doesn't use 10M inodes. That would be git or bzr. Scanning the tree to determine changed files may take a while, though.
MikeOS - simple OS you can use for learning about how OSes work
Yeah, the University of Pittsburgh started their system at the same time. It works well.
Embedding and Encoding in JavaScript
This whole thing reminds me of when FOX News started forcing everyone to wear American Flag pins. Way to go, 37signals
Ruby VM in JavaScript
Ask YC: How do I build a news aggregator community? (Similar to Hacker News's format)
I'm a noob in programming and want to build something that gets me excited, and the thing that keeps coming to mind is a news aggregator produced by the community (similar to Hacker News except with a different focus).

Where should I start to build this? What language should I use? What books should I read?

Thank you!
I make software to entertain myself, but I also get paid because it generates value for others, too.
To steal something, you have to take something.
Is he the older brother?
Buy one box, a pen and a box cutter.....the cost goes down with every trip to no frills for free replacement cardboard :D
Younger.
Yes, it was once Overture, but Yahoo hasn't been able to successfully monetize it: http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/
Makes no sense to me. Snubing MS for the sake of pissing on their offer just so Yahoo can turn around and undermine their own service. Sounds more like Microsoft is playing Bullshit and Yahoo is playing Go Fish...
Ad Hominem, dude.