skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So true. We do most of our printing on an ancient LaserJet 5, which even does duplex. Okay, the thing is so heavy I can barely lift it without taking it apart, occasionally it gets a paper jam somewhere deep inside (it's been nicknamed 'Satan') and parallel ports are getting harder to find. But it still works. For your average text and light graphics printing, laser printers are awesome.

That said, there are certainly decent, affordable inkjet printers out there that do what they do well, namely printing photos and graphics. Most people just go for whatever printer is cheapest, but if you do just a little bit of research, you'll find models that have separate cartridges for each ink colour and permanent printing heads. This means that (a) you only replace ink that's actually used up, (b) the print head is built to last, (c) the cartridges are simple and therefore cheap. Our HP PhotoSmart 8250 is great, never jams up and a pack of 6 cartridges with a stack of photo paper costs less than €30. My parents' cheapo inkjets keep playing up and replacing the cartridges costs twice as much because the print head is on the cartridge. Plus, the print quality isn't as good. After about 3 refills, the price works out about the same.

So basically, it's just the old fallacy that cheapest = best value.
The real WTF(tm) is that the mailing address is listed along side the email/internet address!
Ask YC: Does anyone have any experience with these guys (http://prototypeinvest.com)?
There is a new kind of VC called prototype invest, and they claim to develop any software or webapp for equity. i will like to know if anyone has done anything with them and how the experience was.
True, but on the other hand you've accumulated a ton of company specific knowledge, familiarity with the codebase and so on.

And usually the exact skills are less important than the innate prowess of the programmer.
Anybody not in any social networks?
By social networks, I mean friends' friends type of things like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn... I'm not in any of them, so are the few people in my project. What about you? And why don't you?
Startups Buying Startups…
American Passport
For more information about Express Passport, Urgent Passport, Renew Passports, Passport Info, American Passport visit Apvi.net
Twitter has $5 million in funding? That seems excessive.
Yeah, that hasn't been my experience. I tried reading reviews, and chose the best reviewed inkjets time and again. I tried an Epson C80 and another Epson model, three HP something-or-others, and a Canon. All well-reviewed, all (but a couple of the older HPs) had separate ink cartridges.

They were all crap, and stopped working by the time of the second or third cartridge change--total and unrepairable ink clogging issues on the Epsons, while the HPs had a bad habit of banding. Even though the HPs continued to print, by some definition of print, they were useless for use by my business. I gave one away to someone who didn't care, and left the other one by the road (someone carried it off by the next day, so I guess I gave that one away too).

I've learned my lesson. I'm always surprised when I come across folks who've ever had a good experience with an inkjet, as they are 100% garbage in my experience. For the first six months or so, they print beautifully, and then it's all downhill from there.
Debugging printer issues is just way to hard. Some manufacturers just don't see the importance of an error message. Why have useful information about why something isn't working, when you can just have a red light!
Bring a Yak to Work Day at Seattle Startup Cirqe [Video]
I got one of these recently. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828118...

Color laser for $300 flat. It does what it is supposed to do.
All your souvenirs are on a crashed HD, what do you do?
A desperate mum's hard disk loaded with her son's pictures makes more noise than a faulty motherboard.

It sounds really bad :
http://samueladam.net/_uploads/hdsound.ogg

To all HD recovery cracks, it would be nice to have your opinion and your general advices on what to do, where to go with an apparently dead HD to expect a miracle.

The first one who talks about backups will be downmodded. ;)
Cuzillion
That's a joke. It's from 2003.
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(java|curl|wget).* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(winhttp|HTTrack|clshttp|archiver|loader|email|harvest|extract|grab|miner).* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(libwww|curl|wget|python|nikto|scan).* [NC,OR]

Yeah, that ought to stop all those crazy h4ck3r5... for about 3 seconds until they change their user agent to firefox. It's always a bad idea to trust user-provided data. How does this help your security?
Stephen Fry and The Machine That Made Us (Gutenberg Printing Press)
They've been submitted here a couple times now... I think someone should submit an idea to them just to see what the process is like, though I'm guessing they are incredibly selective about ideas.
That's actually fairly useful: it distills everything down into a few basic rules, which is basically about how things should be with this stuff. It's not exactly nuclear physics.

The comments on his site are funny. "Put me out of business". If all it takes is a two page PDF to "give away all the secrets", then you were inflating the value of what you sold in the first place.
i used belong to facebook and myspace but i just dumped all that because i used to waste hours on those sites instead of coding and adding no value to my life, i will say that social networks are pretty useless 70% of the time.
I think in terms of startups, that social networks are "the last war" (meaning: generals are always fighting the last war, rather than the war they currently face).
Those quotes remind me of Eric Hoffer. I mostly agree with the worldview expressed.
> Hacker News community is San Francisco-based and/or Iron Man fans.

I understand your position. My only concern is that every time I look, there's a new TechCrunch article on either the New page or the Homepage. You can't tell me that these are all news-worthy, and if they are, TechCrunch should provide a "these stories are not crap" feed that individuals in the Hacker News community can subscribe too.

I don't wanna bring up "the golden days" of reddit, but I'm going to anyway. There was a time when everyone XKCD comic was posted to reddit mostly for karma. I feel as though someone discovered TechCrunch as an "instakarma lottery game," and scratches it off every now and then.

Perhaps I shouldn't have complained, (I don't like complainers either) but my point was made when 3 TechCrunch articles appeared on the "New" page. The fact that I choose to complain in the IronMan had nothing to do with the fact that it was about IronMan (I can't wait to see it), but more the fact that it was the last one of the 3 submitted.

EDIT: as of this posting there are 4 articles on the "New" page.
Gutenberg moved to a startup hub, took VC and made something people want (and kicked off the renaissance in the process)
There is no way or reason to stop Techcrunch articles from appearing on the new page. They cover news particularly relevant to this audience.
I disagree with his graphs. His premise seems to be that experience is the most valuable contribution you can make to a team. I don't see that as sustainable, though... I think the most valuable contribution is intuition. If you want to be a programmer, you need to know more than "given problem a, here's how i've solved it in the past". You need to come up with new and better ways of doing things. You need to do research and learn by thinking (mixed in with a bit of learning by doing, of course).

JMHO. But I mostly see work as a way to get money for ideas, not experience.
I worked for McKinsey for 4 years and I actually really liked the up or out process. Yes, it puts you under pressure but not much more than the pressure young competitive people tend to put themselves under anyway. Nearly everyone there wanted to be challenged and get fast promotion. At the same time the process was very open, feedback was fair and when people didn't make it there wasn't much stigma attached (it just didn't work for them).

The flip side of up or out is that if you are any good you get promoted very quickly. I couldn't think of anything worse than waiting around for your boss to retire or move on.
I would have answered it if they were hiring 9-year olds :) Although, I think I knew more C++ back then than I do now. Sad. :)
Twitter’s Success: It’s the Ecosystem
That's right, but understanding and customizing a Rails app is a walk in a park, while a dissecting and adapting somebody's PHP app is a tough task.
> most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long

If this is true then it's a recent development caused by changes in companies behaviour rather than anything intrinsic to engineers.

If you look at Bell Labs, HP, even Microsoft back in the day, engineers stayed there forever. The perennial example would be Steve Wozniak not wanting to leave HP.

What has changed since then is perhaps that companies now only do one thing and then specialize their people even beyond that. You need to allow some variation in work or anyone would get tired of it and leave. Even Google falls foul of this, you can change and work on any project as long as it uses the same infrastructure and is a web application, this doesn't compare well to Bell labs.

Most programmers are not ambitious by normal standards and tend to be risk adverse. As long as you don't make their job deeply boring or annoying they will literally never leave.
Understanding is a mental disorder(wikipedia)
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding

Understanding is a mental disorder related to an abstract or physical object, such as, hallucination, becoming, or chocolate whereby one is able to hit it with a hammer to deal adequately with that object.
> There is no way or reason to stop Techcrunch articles from appearing on the new page.

Well, of course there's a way.

As far as reasons go, you're right. Most of them are on topic. But my guess is that if I submitted the on topic Slashdot posts, I'd get flamed, because there would be lots of them, and people would say the same things I've said. I'm done with any more discussion.
I have proposed before to organizations that they implement a non-management technical track all the way to the CxO level, because it’s a lot cheaper to keep your best people on salary than to hire them (or their equivalents) back as consultants at 2x to 6x their salaries. Such a track might look like this: Associate Engineer -> Engineer -> Senior Engineer -> Technical Officer -> Senior Technical Officer -> Executive Technical Officer -> Chief Technical Officer (only one of these). The ranks from Technical Officer and up would have salaries, perks, and benefits equivalent to progressing through management (VP, Senior VP, Executive VP), but without actual management/head count responsibilities.

I like this idea a lot. It certainly sounds like a reason to continue working for one company.
Lovdbyless is impressive, but it is mysql-specific and depends on some non-standard plugins to work (one of them is proprietary, somebody correct me pls if I've understood it wrong).

Insoshi on the other hand is DB agnostic, works beautifully out of the box with sqlite3 (or mysql) and does not require any esoteric plugins.

Elimination of unneeded dependencies is a major requirement for me so I consider Insoshi a winner.
There is another social network on Rails out there: http://code.google.com/p/railscoders-net/. You can see it in action at http://railscoders.net/. It is also associated with a book ('Practical Rails Social Networking Sites', published by Apress).
Dang. I wish this thread came up a few months ago. I have an Epson R280 that's still working well, but won't talk to Linux.
Roger Ebert starts blogging
"Homeboy", not "Homebody". It makes a difference.
It is funny how now hedge funds and bankers take all the blame, even though millions of 'common people' speculated recklessly in real estate and picked up up enormous debts without any second thought.

The Fed has tried to avoid post-2000 recession and to stimulate general consumption by keeping low interest rates (and not objecting to the tax cuts). This was obviously politically motivated and not very smart as we now see. It did result in a credit bubble. But to claim that it was done to benefit a few 'well-connected' financiers is populism to my opinion. It was done to avoid discontent among people. To appease the masses, so to say...

Interestingly, it is the capitalists who are suffering now, as their equity is eroded by inflation, weak dollar and the bear stock market. The average Joe just defaults on his debts and walks away from his 3 year old house. His creditors take the loss. So it is actually a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor.
That's so true, but this is still a great response to the work.
Dancing With Gorillas: The New Web Era
I use ruby so I guess I am ok ;) Oh noes - he may pick up on it !
>it is the capitalists who are suffering now

lol
How Google Fuels Its Idea Factory
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.bea...
Barbie Games
Coolest barbie games on the net. Dress up any of the barbie dolls in wonderful dresses, select a haircut and create your own barbie character.
On the Need for a Business Language
Startup Bootstrap Funding: Unemployment
This might not work so well for people just out of school but for hackers wanting out of a lame (but relatively high-paying) job, I say... Go wild!
These are brilliant! "It's possible to program a computer in English. It's also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs."
75% Of Your Site Visitors Will Never See Ads Placed Below the Fold
It is funny that this is more money than a beginner typically could easily get from an angel.

The rest is entertaining, but I think I'd need some liquor before I start to get it.
Income Growth by Income and President Party Affiliation for United States
Mollom Just Gave Me An Hour A Day Back
What are you talking about? This is a great idea. Did you think Zappos (http://www.zappos.com/) was a bad idea? They're doing quite well.

I think there's a huge potential market for online retailing of specialty apparel items.
Barneys and Friend - Pattern-Recognition Skills
At least it wasn't written in Java. http://weblogs.java.net/blog/ddevore/archive/2008/03/call_fo...
After looking all over the home page, I had no idea what this does.

Then, after creating a page, I had no idea what just happened or why I should care about any of the information presented. Also, the page components still had the crosshairs mouse pointer style even though they were no longer draggable.
I'm on Linked In, but only for the networking opportunities. It's not generated a ton of leads, but it has helped me a couple times.

I spend about 30 seconds a week on it, so it's not like I'm really active with it.
social networks focused on entertainment will have a limited shelf life, as the tend to focus on short term attention and on teens.

Linkedin is a slightly different case. It is like a useful business directory.

The next wave will be vertical SN's.(few billion dollar ideas there), and networks with a strong mobile component.

I have started to dump all my entertainment focused social networks. I keep an account on facebook, but only use it to keep track of people. I hate their stupid applications.
Uggc: URL Obfuscation Service Version 1.0 Source Code
The source code for uggc ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176509 ) can be downloaded from http://www.xirium.com/uggc20080430.tar.gz
I'm finally starting to find LinkedIn kind of useful (http://micahelliott.blogspot.com/2008/04/sponteneous-recomme...), when the various features are used holistically, and profiles near completeness.

Some others (facebook) I just sign up and experiment to learn how the user interactions and features play out. In general, I'm not too interested in being a part of their microcosms. But if massive amounts of users like to spend time using them, we should probably understand how and why.
I have to agree with him to some extent. It easy for the mind to wander, and yes, I think thats true for even good books. Having a distraction free environment is a good idea regardless of what you are reading, further, having the ability to write while reading is also important.

Having said that, I have no issues with electronic format of books (except they make my eyes hurt). Sitting at a computer reading a good book works just as well as reading a paper book. If you are that enticed by the web, unplug your ethernet cable.

On a side note, has anyone read "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by the same author. I am halfway through it, and I think its a phenomenal book.
I'm in touch with them and have requested to add FAQ section on their website to make us understand how the whole thing works and how much equity they expect in return to develop, maintain, support and upgrade an application.
How to market your website on the cheap, by co-founder of reddit.com
Sometimes you just need a script
Now come on, just because some outdated computing hardware is shipped to Africa, everything is peachy?? I agree that "the poor to rich, sick to healthy" is moralist and simplistic, but it doesn't make the opposite true. There are injustices in the world, some of which we probably actively contribute to without being aware of it.

Maybe more transparency would be one thing where web startups could help (ie tracking of goods from production to consumption, giving consumers the choice to consume "fair" goods - and I am aware that "fair" is not always "fair").

Are you sure that the "hardware for Africa" thing is not just a scheme to avoid recycling costs, btw.? (I don't know, just asking).
Ask YC: Quick desktop blogging tool
Hey guys - can anyone recommend a tool/widget that quickly let's you post to a WP (.com) blog without logging in to the admin panel, etc (i.e., not using the browser)? Something like Twhirl but for blogging?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite
CSS Variables: Coming Soon to a Browser Near You
100 exclusive alpha invites to socialmedian code = hacker
Three million messages per day is the same volume as those sent by the population of Bulgaria - which has seven million people and 85% mobile telephone usage.
It helped him find the Precious?
A related issue to syntax is consistent naming, especially in the core API of a language. Java for example has _relatively_ consistent naming for methods, whereas i find the core Ruby methods to be all over the place...
can someone explain this one to me... i just don't get it.

"A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot"
Boiled down to one sentence: your web site should not be a massive image served from a URL with fifteen thousand query parameters.

The best SEO tip is to have a site that is useful for the keywords you're targetting. My website is a boring (design-wise) collection of text, but when people are searching for something on there, it usually comes up pretty high in the results. That's because I'm not trying to make my site "relevant" to people that aren't interested in it.
Student Entrepreneurs: Unite! (the Boston ones, anyway)
There was also a German Open Source (CC licensed) social network that launched last week: http://inside.gruenderszene.de/2008/04/18/open-socialnetwork...
Einstein finally came to realise that Science is a Paranoid Fairy Tale!
I went to a SEO conference a few years back when I was working for the man.

It cost a few thousand dollars for me to attend the morning session, where they told us basically those points on the sheet. Then they answered 1000 questions about people such as 'I heard hyphens are better than underscores in URLs'.

Clearly SEO folks are good at inflating the value they provide.
Surely someone can cobble such a language together.
Steve Souders is the man who was the head of Yahoo's Exceptional Performance Team, which gave us these rules for speeding up your website: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/ and also YSlow.

Cuzillion is something he seems to have made to give you a generalized example of what components affect your performance and by how much. So it allows you to test a fabricated example rather than a specific website.
if you are sending those, i wont mind getting one at jrcapa@gmail.com
>Bartels shows in his book that this difference is not a statistical artifact or a fluke.

With sample sizes of 5 and 6 (for dem/rep), Bartels shows that his results are not a statistical fluke. Sounds plausible.

>(It turns out that the same pattern prevails even when a Republican president is succeeded by another Republican.)

I take that back, sample size 2.

I'd be really curious to see the leave one out error for his statistics (i.e., throw away Nixon and Clinton, and see if the result persists).

Look, I hate Bush and McCain as much as most people (I liked Paul, however). But this book is just propaganda.
Actually,they claim to develop a 'PROTOTYPE,' not a shippable product. There can be a large chasm between the two.

They way I interpret their service is like this: They build enough of a prototype to help you get funding. They make no mention of taking you the rest of the way. Nor do they claim to build 100% of your functionality.

If that's true, then you will end-up walking into a VC/angel office and showing the prototype. The person across the table will ask you how long it will take to turn the prototype into a launched product. So, here's the question: Can the prototype they develop even be turned into a real product or is it throw-away code only mean to help you raise money? What if they're writing crappy throw-away code and you know it, can you ask them to improve their engineering? Probably not because they're writing a prototype.

If you walk into a funding meeting with a prototype but without an engineering team, your chances of getting funded are pretty slim, IMHO. But, it is possible that a good prototype can help you attract engineers, so maybe that's not so bad.
Our model will probably end up being more like MySQL than WordPress, but that's a harder analogy to understand. In any case, though, we think Heroku (http://heroku.com/) is a game-changer when it comes to hosted Rails apps.
Difficult without context. It could be a joke about academic jealousy.

EDIT: Forget that, I agree with the Marxist comment.
Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming
Own Your Own Micro-ISV: DotNetInvoice is For Sale