skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usually it takes me more than 3 minutes to fill out the necessary forms, though I tend to be slower at that than most people.

But chances are, the amount of time spent looking for alternatives is negligible. I'll have already done a google search and asked friends for recommendations, so I'll have several different options available immediately in firefox tabs.

I'm not completely against paying for software, but it has to really be worth it. The article says that it has to be better than all the free alternatives, which is true, but it has to be better enough to be worth the price you ask for it.
Will a Colony on Mars Save Us Humans from Extinction?
Semantic Tag Suggestions for WordPress
As the author, I didn’t suggest that anyone, including myself, DDOS a site. I said it “made me want to,” which is quite a different thing.

I’ve never done that, nor would I ever. First of all, it’s not worth my time. Second, have you never had any dark thoughts that you haven’t acted on, and had no intention of acting on?

If you say you haven’t, I know you’re not telling the truth. That is a rant blog, not a PhD thesis. As such, it has many rants, that one included.
Yup, great community. Yup, building is better than talking.

Personally, I don't think marketing and communication is a waste of time, even for some one technical - especially when you are bootstrapping. For other folks, it's a login with OpenID, and a copy/paste of info they already have. It helps with page rank too.
I let my subscription to Salon.com lapse around 2002 when it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that they were happy to be a blatant mouthpiece for the left. It just wasn't worth the work to sort out the good pieces from the leftist nonsense. (Also note: I'm not any more a fan of right-wing nonsense.)
Ask YC:  A site for the dying (e.g., in the spirit of Randy Pausch's last lecture)?
In case you are not familiar with this, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5700431505846055184

It seems to me that there are dying people out there who would like to tell the world something in their last moments.
OTOH, virtualization with bare-virtual-metal VMs would eliminate the Unix-Java impedance mismatch.
It's pretty close to the intended, prescribed use. If you can't focus on your work to the extent that allows you to compete with your peer group, you get prescribed Ritalin/Adderall.
"Pick your poison. Nuclear holocaust. Disease. The death of our Sun. It doesn't matter. "

I would suggest it does matter. The death of our Sun could not be avoided by living on Mars.
Wildly off-topic and hardly serious, but consider the problems the actress Leslie Hope must get. Imagine her stopped when driving on holiday in Britain. "How do you give your name?" asks the Bobby, and mindful of the English preference for surname first, she replies:

"Hope, Leslie"
Ask YC: Which OS are you using on your app's server(s)?
I'm just curious as to what OS everyone is using for their app (e.g., CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Ubuntu) and did you have any particular reason for choosing that OS?

For me, I just have a 'play' VPS right now that I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 on. I like Debian-based distros.
Where Did All the Girl Geeks Go?
What makes you think so? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't see why this would be an obvious conclusion.
Computing History at Bell Labs
I don't think you've thought this through. First of all, it's extremely morbid and ... ick. Second... I guess you could do it as some kind of grim community service, but what would people think of you if you tried to make money at it?

amichail, you seem to have a lot of pretty outlandish ideas, and while that's not bad (creativity is good), I sense that you don't have a great filter for what might work and what won't. And I say this realizing that I'm not that adept at figuring those things out either.
Mac fans now have a spacious place to store backed-up files
I agree. We should allow scientists to take whatever drugs they want. Let's add everyone else, for that matter. (I think the steroid question is idiotic, especially as supplementation has become safer.)

Here's another secret. many professional musicians use beta blockers to steady their hands. They're beating out someone who has superior genetics! Pasta-forbid!

It's wetware hacking, and it works. (I'll admit to trying modafinil and realizing it wasn't for me -- never tried ritalin/adderall though.)
Have Mainframe Skills, Will Travel
Doesn't the pricing seem a bit too granular, though? I suspect the pricing categories will collapse into 3, maybe 4, levels eventually.
Well, I was suggesting a colony on Mars would "start the process..." I think it would be wise to colonize Mars before going extra-solar.
I actually have made a conscious effort to avoid buying stuff I don't need, long before PG wrote his essay about it.

I will pay for a bed, because I know that I don't want to sleep on the floor and I can't make a bed myself. I won't pay for a chair, because I have a piano bench and a few blankets that work fine, so long as I maintain a good posture. I may pay $1 to download a song from iTunes even though I already have it on a CD somewhere, because it's faster and easier to do that than it is to dig up the CD and rip the mp3.

Very often when you're looking for tools such as Beyond Compare, you're looking to solve an immediate problem, in the next 5-10 minutes. For a programmer asking a question like "show me the difference between two text files" you are probably be expecting an immediate solution. If you're using unix, all you may need is a page that tells you to try 'diff -u file1 file2'. For a problem that straightforward, a programmer will tend to be suspicious of someone charging $30.
Sun makes plenty of acquisitions (mostly startups):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems#Acquisitions
Inequality is a major component of why the third world isn't producing wealth the way it could.

Every person who is born into extreme poverty looses the opportunity for health, stability, and education that is necessary to build his or her abilities to the point where he or she can contribute to building wealth.

Think of it as analogous to human resources in a private company. It would be incredibly foolish to exclude a large part of your potential hiring pool.

What if the next Bill Gates is born in Nigeria? The potential production that the world would loose is staggering.
I've always wondered if Nasdaq Portal is an adequate alternative. It lets you issue shares to qualified institutional buyers (anyone with over 100 million dollars) for 2,000 to 3,000 dollars in signup fees. I don't know much about the process, so I wonder: is there a reason nobody talks about it? Is it a reasonable way to get an IPO-like event?
I think that a service catering to that wish could do well, if tastefully done. You'd have to really think critically about the customer need though -- just standing up yet another social network and saying it's for terminally ill people probably wouldn't get you far.
I, too, believe in freedom. But freedom doesn't absolve you of personal responsibility for your actions. If anyone could consume any substance they desire, it would have a detrimental effect on some basic level of social order (and I'm not talking about government or top-down control) and it would have a negative impact on other's freedoms and rights. That's why many drugs are banned and why people aren't allowed to drive while intoxicated (despite it being an act of freedom to live your life as a drunk). And I won't need a lecture on libertarianism, thank you, which many people seem to confuse with lawlessness.

I'm not sure what else there is to debate about Ritalin. If you want to be a dopehead scientist, have at it. When the long-term effects start to manifest themselves in physical or mental conditions we aren't aware of, don't start whining for the FDA or an attorney to sue the drug maker.
Oh, definitely. But the GitHub guys put a really nice UI on it. It's one of those things that is easy to underestimate until you've actually used it for actively developing an open source project. I've actually met other developers through it, so I guess the proof's in the pudding.
> In my experience free software tends to be better, that's why I also tend towards a "we don't use software that costs money" approach.

Even if it's not better, you can fix it, if it's actual free software and not "freeware." Or fork it and make a version that is better. And if the creator abandons it, it's easy for anyone to pick it back up again.

For me, dead ends and a lack of user extensibility are as big a problem as the cost when it comes to commercial software.
ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

I will probably upgrade to the next LTS when it becomes available.
I agree that's likely; but they have a business they can sustain without ad revenue. Google does not.
he meant users, as someone up there said.
U.S. Air Force sets up cyberspace command against continuing China attacks
os x tiger
I run Debian exclusively on my servers. I don't have any great reason why it's better than any other distro, it's just what I learned first and I know where everything is.
So, anyone can take any drug they want, but steroids are idiotic? Why? Are you discriminating between scientists and non-scientist bodybuilders? Or are you singling out steroids as unacceptable and anything else as acceptable?

It's not "wetware hacking" (whatever that means, but it sounds cool). It's biochemistry, and it doesn't always work.
Especially compared to taking 20 seconds to grab something with Synaptic or apt-get. I'm about 5 times as likely to try something out if I can just grab the packages for it than if I have to install it through some other means.

Of course, the most popular closed stuff (Flash, Java, etc.) is in the Ubuntu repositories, but the vast majority isn't.
FreeBSD 6.2

I've deployed it before, it's rock solid, secure and the ports system rocks.
Linux. Debian on my shared server and Ubuntu 7.10 on the laptop and dev server.

I've been looking into Solaris (for ZFS), but debian-based distros is what I know, so it's what I'll use for now.
RHEL -- wanted Linux and our host doesn't offer many other variants. OS X on dev though ;)
I agree with you about the filter problem. But isn't that a problem that everyone has? After all, this is an empirical area. And a way to see whether there is interest in something is to ask others to see what the majority think.

As for this idea, it is rather curious that some dying people have a strong need to tell the world something. I think it's a form of therapy for them.
The other concept is that developing good spending habits can help you save money all the time. If I get it into my head that $30 is cheap to spend on a tool for comparing text files, I may also think $30 is cheap to spend for a DNS client, and an SSH client, and a text editor, and a compression/decompression utility, and suddenly I've spent $150 on basic applications for a single PC.
He presented the idiomatic C way of applying a function to a list. The idiomatic C++ way for STL style containers is:

for_each(spam.begin(), spam.end(), eggs);

And for native arrays:

for_each(spam[0], spam[spam_length], eggs);
I don't know if there is a good reason and I don't know if they are safe for long term use. What I do know is that using them for non-prescribed uses is illegal, as are painkillers, HGH, and other drugs. If you guys don't like that, then lobby the FDA to do studies for general use and make them legal for general use. That's the point of my posts.
Some Day Our Companies Will Put Us All On This List - 2007 Top 50 CEO Compensation
Alexa's often wrong on an absolute scale, but why would it be inaccurate for comparing the relative traffic of two companies in the same business?
Wouldn't it be a bad move to do this if you are still in "stealth mode"? I have been thinking a lot about this especially after having not been accepted into YC. Half of me wants to know what people in the business think about my idea, and the other half wants to wait longer until closer to launch?
Thanks for the tip. I'll update the article.

Edit: updated.

Edit 2: apparently there's some controversy. I'm looking for a definitive answer.
They are legal for general use, as long as they are prescribed by a doctor. It is the "off-label" loophole: once a medication is approved for a specific use doctors can prescribe it for whatever they want.
Awesome :-D

<3 your posts btw
I stand corrected. They have now posted that it's not an April Fool's joke.
Raising Money in a Soft Economy: 7 Tips to Fund Your Great Idea
In enterprise software, the cost of the product is usually a tiny part of the TCO, the bulk of which is typically labor (whether in-house or consulting). In some cases, it is far more important to buy a product that is popular (and thus comes with its own labor pool from which to recruit) than to save money by finding a less-expensive product. In other cases, a particular integration product that connects your particular endpoints may be rare enough that no one would ever bother to build it unless they could get reimbursed reasonably.

That's why it's not surprising that there is free a free version of something common like Java middleware (JBoss) that's pretty solid (but not worth the trouble of switching to if you have a significant investment in a proprietary vendor's tools), but if you want a less common tool like one that allows you to plug an asp.net web application into a Java portal framework, you should expect to pay a premium for it.

I think the reason this hasn't been addressed from a startup standpoint is that these lessons have been absorbed so thoroughly that only startups with a really clear, well-defined niche would even consider the possibility of going into the desktop software market, because everyone knows it's a tough row to hoe. Web business models like advertising are premium accounts a lot more plausible, even as it look like web advertising may be looking at a correction.
>That's why many drugs are banned

I bet you also bought the government's line about the war on drugs.

>If you want to be a dopehead scientist
You're using ad hominem instead of logic. And I expect you still haven't said the real reason you are so strongly in favor of drugs, because none of the reasons you have given have made any sense.
CentOS, because it seemed best supported by VirtualMin Free
That's a nice trick...
here's one place you can go for that
http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/executedoffenders.htm
Well, dynamic scoping does allow a form of destructive update, but define statements are not just an assignment; they also allocate a new memory location. So in my example the two foo's could represent completely different memory locations and it would still work.

Now for your second example; nested define statements do not allocate a top-level memory location. Instead they allocate a local memory location. Consider the following example:

> (define foo 1)
> (let ((bar (lambda (n) (+ foo n))))
(define foo 2)
(bar 1))
2
> foo
1
> (let ((bar (lambda (n) (+ foo n))))
(set! foo 2)
(bar 1))
3
> foo
2

Here we see that the define and set! methods operated on two different memory locations. When a reference has no matching local declaration, it defaults to looking for a top-level declaration. These top-level declarations are resolved at run time, which is what makes them dynamically scoped.
Debian Stable.

It is called "stable" for a reason, you know.
No, some people have a really keen sense for what products will fly and which ones won't.
>simply another channel to communicate your idea

I thought that one of YCombinator's key values was picking good people and teams, not good ideas.
gentoo, I'm a control freak...
Us trying to colonize Mars now would be like the British trying to colonize the Americas with nothing but canoes. It's impractical with our current technology; too long and too risky.
I clearly remember when we had the reverse... which was really a problem. Business users shunned free software coz it was free (and hence, they reasoned, worthless).

Jeff is a windows programmer... 'nuf said. (I don't say that as an Ad Hominem. I say that as in "He is a serial killer.")
1.Debian
2. CentOs

Debian is more stable and just holistically better in my opinion...
Blocking people who block ads is fine as well IMHO
Seems to me that if it's stealing to block ads, it must also be stealing to click on an ad when you have absolutely no intention of making a purchase. I'm with you--it's not stealing.

However, when my competitors click on my ad, it pisses me off. But is it stealing?
+1 but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try anyway.
Debian and RedHat
This has gotten kind of confused.

When I talk about merging data, I'm talking about taking two independent documents:

<brian> parentOf <bct>
<brian> name 'Brian'

and

<bct> name 'Brendan'

and being able to join those graphs on the <bct> node, to say that a person named Brendan has a parent named Brian. This is what TimBL means by combining data from multiple applications (IMO).

This is trivial for software to do and takes a lot of the effort out of merging datasets. It's what makes the semantic web a web; you're linking different datasets together. I don't see how Shirky's arguments apply here.

--

When I say "inferencing", I mean something like Swish http://www.ninebynine.org/RDFNotes/Swish/Intro.html#ScriptEx... does.

Given two statements:

<brian> parentOf <bct>
<bct> gender <male>

and an appropriate set of rules, an inference engine can create a third statement:

<bct> sonOf <brian>

This is what I understand Shirky's article to be about. IMO the applications of it are limited. It can also lead to the ridiculous results Shirky suggests.

Enabling inferences of this kind is neat, and it may be useful in the future, but it's not what the semantic web is About.
For my personal stuff, I run Ubuntu 7.10 because Ubuntu was my first experience with Linux (in May '07), and it's what I'm most comfortable with.

At work (I work at a startup), we're using CentOS 5 because that's all that (mt) offers.
There's no question that you can make a good living learning to program dinosaur machines in COBOL, but then you would have to spend your life programming in COBOL.

Good coders want to use the best tools, because using good tools are part of being a good programmer. Unless things have changed radically, those tools don't exist on mainframes -- or at least, what most people consider the best tools don't.

Taking one of these jobs is more or less the exact opposite of starting your own company.
I think he's using inequity as a proxy for poverty and oppression. Maybe this isn't accurate within the US, though I'll argue it is. But it's certainly true on the global stage. One thought: unless we change our culture, inequality of power often leads to both poverty and oppression, often for political ends.
remember that other rich guy chose bill gates' foundation to be the recipient of his money

i doubt that decision was made carelessly
After a few months of Python programming, I started using list comprehensions more and more. I really think they're an elegant solution for dealing with lists.
He didn't say the chief evil is inequality. He said it was inequity. Those are two different things: http://ninjawords.com/inequity,inequality
Gentoo - it's what I know.
FreeBSD 7.0 on dedicated server, Ubuntu 7.10 on 512mb RAM VPS.
As soon as you see the new model, your old iPhone will look inexplicably clunky.
Definitely Debian. Had some adventures into the world of FreeBSD, but I have been using Debian for many years, and I know where everything is located and it's pretty solid and stable, if you know your deal. I'll probally stick around for a while.

Does anybody have experience with Ubuntu Server? While Ubuntu is a great distro for people new into the linux-world and people who just need something that Work's Out Of The Box, are there any advantages over Debian, with the server edition, that is?
I think that underestimates the state of our technology and its potential for growth by orders of magnitude.
I actually think that in this case, "too long and too risky" is prohibitive. This analysis explains why: http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q2811.html

We're not doing it now because our technology is not good enough. It's less likely to fail if we first improve our technology.
I feel so guilty. I realize I was stealing when I pulled the curtain on highway ads as I rode the bus to the beach.
He said "what the boxes are used to build", the original guy was talking about shapes you can make with the boxes. The replier was too: someone could stick a bunch of them together into a swastika.
This is less about the rumor-mongering about the upcoming iPhone and more a comment on design.

The title is amazingly true. Apple's designers seem to be that good.
This reminds me of Google on April Fools' Day, creating a project willing to do exactly that.

http://www.google.com/virgle/
You can raise equity through private securities that "trade" (with little liquidity) on these markets through rule 144A offerings. I've never heard of a 144A being done for less than $75 million, although I haven't followed the tech markets. After all, it costs money to market your company to the kinds of firms that invest in private securities.
Does he think that I'm so stupid, that when I produce open source software, that I don't realize some people will be free riders, and that I still don't mind?

I'd like people to contribute back, but if I used that license, it means that I'm ok with people using the software under those terms.

The only thing that really irritates me is when people don't report bugs... that drives me crazy.
Is this true with regard to all drugs, and for all reasons? For example, could a physician decide to prescribe narcotics for anxiety? Or an athlete steroids to increase performance?

I will also ask again whether these drugs should be illegal. From my point of view, it seems logical that anybody should be able to use whatever drugs they want, so long as that drug use does not affect others. So, for example, heroin would remain illegal due to the strong negative externality imposed on a community by heroin users.

Mental performance enhancing drugs don't seem to have any negative externality associated with their use. In fact, the argument could be made that by furthering scientific discovery, they actually have a net positive effect.

I find no compelling evidence in favor of the prohibition of these drugs.
That's funny, but it is also a shame Mars colonization has become a butt of jokes instead of a reality. Or perhaps it means it is getting closer to reality in peoples' minds if it is an April Fools Joke (in the sense those jokes are often supposed to trick people)?
That widely-reported study was well-skewered here:

http://life.lithoguru.com/index.php?itemid=119

May still be true, I don't know, but the study fodder that created the headlines a while back was flimsy.
And we can improve technology to go to Mars by trying to go to Mars, facing obstacles while doing it and overcoming it, right?
IEEE Spectrum: People Who Read This Article Also Read...
This is an interesting argument. From a libertarian standpoint, I have the freedom to take whatever actions I want, so long as those actions don't interfere with the freedom of others.

Now, science is not a zero-sum game, but school is. There are a limited number of spots in top universities, and the pressure to get one of those spots is enormous.

So if my peers are all using study drugs, then I would be compelled to use those drugs to remain competitive. So their use of the drugs would interfere with my freedom of choice.
In the past 5 years they've mostly been one of:

1) Hardware

2) Giant

3) Enterprisey

None of which are very applicable to the original question, which is about web software startups.
Are you sure about that? Say spam is:

int[] spam = {1,2,3};

How will for_each know what to do with this argument list? You would be passing in: 1, segfault, and a function object named eggs?
That reasoning doesn't hold water - highways don't count on billboards for funding
Be careful, Moore's Law doesn't apply to everything.