skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or to use an old cliche, "you only get one chance at a first impression."
I have zero issues with this post.

That said, I'd have a rough time understanding why anyone would do SEO consulting full-time. Is there that much money in it? It seems like it would be a good side-project but if you were really good at it, it seems to me that your time would be better served running e-commerce sites, blogs, whatever, driving traffic to it, and generating more slightly more passive income.
evite...as much as we can't stand how it looks gets this natural virality thing going.

"I'm invited to a party? Well, yes, I'll rsvp and invite other cool people..."
It should be working now, I had some problems this afternoon while trying to upgrade my gems, turns out that gem tries to load the entire tree into memory before operating. On a slice with only 256MB of ram, it sort of demolished everything. Sorry about that.
Second time today I've seen creating fake users suggested as an option for new sites. Is anyone actually doing this?

I know we certainly did it on the social site I used to own. It turned out ok, I guess. It certainly seems sketchy to me now. It seems like you would just want to improve your product until you got a lot of legitimate users, but that might or might not be the best way to go about it.
John Battelle takes $22 million in "fuck-you money"
DVCS is pretty much the best approach for anything. Centralized version control systems might be OK, but SVN is not OK. The whole "everything is a directory" model was a huge failure. Replacing CVS by eliminating the one thing that it got right -- first class tags and branches... yeah, great idea, guys.

Anyway, SVN's time has come and gone, and if I were the author I would deprecate it and never look back. It was excellent while it lasted; it didn't lose data, it was somewhat fast, and it got people into version control. But now it's an ancient relic; its existence serves as a great example of how not to implement a version control system.

Sorry if I sound harsh, but ... it's time to let go :)
I like the fact that he stays optimistic and talks about the opportunities we have to make a difference, rather than complain about all the problems we have.
Reading the linked mailing list post, it seems that Subversion shouldn't even self-host anymore. That is sad :)
Is Lessig's Free Culture just a modern Das Kopyright?
Stupid security question on Rails
Is there a way to secure a Rails-deployed app without exposing the source code?
Thom Yorke: Radiohead's stunt was 'one-off'
HP makes memory from a once-theoretical circuit
Wish cancer was on that list of noble things to fix. But I guess cancer < dirty water > shelter < food
Clearflow - another way to clear floats in CSS
I'd really like to get feedback on this technique from other web developers. What's good, what's bad, etc. I love the community here at Hacker News and would really value your opinions!
Microsoft Says They’ll Pay More, increasing Yahoo! bid to as much as $33/share (from $31/share)
Optimizing Math-Intensive Applications with Fixed-Point Arithmetic
People don't do what's always in their best long-term interest. They don't always even act in their best interest in any form.

Re predictability: You could say that about agriculture too. Think about the great potato famine in Ireland. Agriculture's not immune to famines from droughts or pests.
Where do I buy? I'm sold on that idea.
This isn't really that relevant to the high-tech entrepreneurship community. It seems like it's targeted at entrepreneurs who start mom-and-pop shops. And the article admits that too:

"So that means the odds that you make the Inc. 500 are 840 times higher if you start a computer company than if you start a hotel or motel."
Who said that politics can't be an empirical science? I, for one, am inspired:

"Think about all the hot air and argumentation about a whole host of different political issues—freedom vs. security, absolute wealth vs. inequality, strong family vs. tolerance, open vs. closed borders, whatever the topic du jour is. Instead of deciding them through rhetoric, or voting on a few representatives to decide them for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once, imagine if we could try them each on a small scale and see what happens."
Cat: A Functional Stack-Based Little Language
this combined with the housing crisis; makes me believe a deep recession is coming. (everyone hold on tight) ;) see you on the flip side
Was Google Search a natural or add-on? None of them. It was just extremely useful and spread the world virally nevertheless...
I have just got a rather large team ( > 100 people) using Subversion - from my experience, I noticed two things.

Firstly, most developers I have encountered in big corporations (and India) don't even give version control a thought - I thought it was programming 101, but I was shocked about the resistance I got when trying to persuade the team to use anything.

Second, the people I was trying to get to use version control could barely grasp the basics - branching, merging, frequent checkin's, updating your working copy - alien concepts - and that was using Subversion. I cannot even imagine trying to convince them to use a distributed model!

So my point is - distributed version control is probably great (I have never used it, but I have read a bit) for the clued in 20%, who work with others from the 20%, but if your team involves people mostly in the 80% don't even think about it - Subversion will have a market there for a long time to come ...
Some gems:

"when the customer says yes, stop talking."

"always assume positive intent. Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent."

"I've noticed that some of the most effective leaders don't make themselves the center of attention. They are respectful. They listen."

"you shouldn't go chasing after fancy titles, but try to find people who can teach you something. "
Social Media still on rise: Comparative global study
Can you be more specific about the word "secure"?

If you mean, "can I ship customers a Rails app that they themselves run, either on their own servers or an appliance, while keeping them from seeing the source code?", then the answer is "no".

You should be aware that the same answer applies to Python, Perl, Tcl, Java, and C#. Bytecode is trivially decompiled back to readable source code.
Also Parakey, but maybe they're a special case
Well, put it like this. If they're looking at your source code it means they're already in your production server, and they can do pretty much whatever the hell they want anyway :)
I work at a small software development shop of about fifteen employees.

Though, I agree in 10 to 15 years, I'd be concerned if anyone even asked me what school I went to. I'd start to think it's not a place I want to be working.
Dutch Company Launches Solar (Green) Speedboats
He is correct, Subversion WILL linger on in the corporate world for a decade at least. We're still using CVS where I work. We branch and merge every change we make and management still considers SVN to be 'immature,' never mind Git.

Companies just can't let go of legacy systems. That's why we still have companies running Cobol systems on OpenVMS. The term 'legacy' sometimes means permanent.
Five runs developed a system for packaging and deploy ruby/rails apps without exposing the source. Bruce Williams presented on it at RubyConf2007:
http://rubyconf2007.confreaks.com/d2t2p2_desktop_apps.html

I don't know what the state of the project is, but it looks like what you wanted.
You are very right. And I read pg's essay on how to disagree too. While I (for this audience I will assume-- obviously) agree with jmc's objections to intelligent design on that page, pretty much all of his politically-geared statements would back up my name-calling above.

<ul>

<li>He supported Bush in 2004 and reasons read like a list of right-wing talk radio talking points. I will not take up space by refuting each one of these points here because they have been dealt with elsewhere, but for starters, why the concern about Iraq's human rights violations in contrast to the many other violators that are allies of the U.S.? <br><br>

(It is obvious that to refute each of his opinions would introduce a lot of off-topic discussion into this space, so I'll keep this mostly in the abstract, leaving it to you to digest jmc's views further.) To list a few other absurd ideas:<br>

<li>he speaks about "alarmism about the environment", and elsewhere allies himself with deniers of global warming (while avoiding making any direct arguments against it, so he's pulling a type 0 on the pg scale with some of his comments as well).

<li>he uses the term "Moslem fascists" which as far as I know has no direct meaning other than to link yourself with the intellectually sloppy hack writers working to market neoconservatism (and related wars).

<li>There are others, but I'm just making a general observation here, not writing a book. You'll form your own own opinions anyway...

</ul>
I cannot even imagine trying to convince them to use a distributed model!

You're assuming distributed version control is harder to understand than centralised version control. That certainly hasn't been my experience.

Using svn or cvs, I find myself rummaging round in the docs to do even quite basic things ('recursively add everything in this directory', 'maintain a personal branch of an open-source project, and keep it in sync with new releases'). I've found bazaar and mercurial much more intuitive.

Maybe my experience is atypical. Maybe it's because of the particular qualities of the programs I've used, rather than centralised vs. distributed. But it's not obvious that distributed is harder.
Meebo Closes Big Funding Round
Yes:

"They intend to make money because of my desires, not despite them."
i do not really want individual stats. that would be like asking the companies to reveal their secret sauce. i am curious about the trend data that YC has generated.

example: (startup life expediency)
@month 0: 80 companies
@month 1: 80 companies
.....
@month 36: 4 companies

example: (won a series A)
@month 0: 0 companies
...
@month 4: ~5 companies
...
@month 12: ~7 companies

a final comparative time line histogram could be made of variable percentages of YC companies vs. some measured goal so you could have histogram timelines of VC age vs. having angel funds, or YC vs. VC funds. or YC vs. liquidity, which might lead to the following example:

example:(YC age vs. liquidity)
@month 0: 0 companies
@month 12: 1% companies
@month 24: 5% companies
@month 36: 10% companies
@month 48: 10% companies

graphs like these could lead to some interesting metrics about the measurable success of going through the YC process. Its a great way to study groups and to begin the comparison between group 1 and group 2 or YC vs. non YC. It should help build a case that getting into YC might improve your chance of success by say 10% or 50%. A lot of what pg talks about is how he feels that YC will improve your chance of success by more than 6%. I think at this point pg could present a fairly empirical case to prove that. I sense that many of us believe that to be true, but I have talked to some ex-startup vets here in Wisconsin who are not so convinced and others that are. I just think it would be great data to think about.
FiveRuns deploys berkdb's with AES-encrypted compressed Ruby source. I have no idea what the point of the encryption is here, because it's a speed bump to someone who wants the source code; the "player" needs the key to run the code, the key sits in memory, as does the decoded source code.

This system looks even easier to deal with than a typical J2EE app; at least with J2EE, I have to fix up all the JAD artifacts.

Beware of systems that offer packaged solutions to hard problems, like the software protection problem.
there is that settle co-op that generates an investment pool share for each years participants.

i am really curious if a YC:index fund would be a better play than say investing in the DOJ or NSDQ indexes.
Engadget is playing around with theirs, as well.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/30/psystar-open-computer-not...

Edited to add: includes benchmarks, and the important proviso that iLife isn't bundled.
In other news, p2p killed off websites.
Visitors: http://www.hping.org/visitors/
Oh, and in case I forgot to mention, it's alpha :) so please send your feedback!
My main takeaway on this is that if you build something that is naturally viral, chalk it up in the pluses column for that idea. Having an idea that is inherently viral is awfully nice, especially if you're a guerilla underdog.

However, bolting on "viral" features isn't going to make your site really viral. That doesn't mean your site is a bad idea, just that you need to find different ways to get the word about your site out to your target users/customers. I think the point is that you shouldn't delude yourself, not that the only way to succeed is to build a naturally viral site.
You "go viral" by making people fans of your product, whatever it is. It's no more (or less) complicated than that.
I went to google's san francisco's open house a few months back where Vincent G. Serf (http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#vint) gave a talk and at one point he mentioned a list of engineering "grand challenges" put together by the National Academy of Engineering. It's an interesting list and may provide some good food for thought for anyone with a bit of free time on their hands:

http://engineeringchallenges.org/cms/challenges.aspx
> However:; I think that it's easier to contribute in a big, serious way to charity if you've already made your pile of cash elsewhere.

That, or if you're really committed, go work for a relief organization in the third world yourself. Sometimes cash isn't as important as people who are willing to get their hands dirty.
I've dealt with a variety of Rails apps on different scales and this is a recurring problem. I think Analytics is good for the business-types who want to use stats in their reports, but even though there's some nice features for developers, such as detecting screen resolution and browser type, it's not all that helpful tracking, say, which user is viewing what. AWStats I like too, but it can be a pain to get the trends in an Analytics fashion.

So far I've found the best solution is to build whatever important trends you want to track (ie. which readers have viewed what article) as part of your app, include Analytics anyway (it's no effort at all to add), and for any serious number crunching take a snapshot of your database to do some calculations from (off server).

Really though, if someone has a good Rails solution, they should build a plugin :)
A lot on that page is written in a highly polemic style, a good example is the 2004 March 16 entry.

I wouldn't call him naive, but his general political attitude does seem overly hawkish.
I didn't have time to read though all comments, however, it appears to me that Google has a very strong and unique culture that is often credited for contributing heavily to the company's success. How does this factor into the why aren't there more Googles question? I don't hear the same things about Facebook so I wonder if in 10 years will they still be mentioned or spoken about in the same vein? In any case, the reason I mention this is because it seems like a very difficult part of a company to place a value upon. Perhaps this is why "Googles" escape acquisition...
Not quite sure this is what you are looking for, but maybe:

http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
Three Human Interface Hypotheses Update: Email is Efail
Bloggers Unite for a better world! Help improve human rights!
Makes me wonder, why put stuff on the web as PDF's at all. Cross-platform or not, browsers handle HTML much better than they handle Flash or PDF. IMO, PDF only makes sense for e-books, and then only if the book-like formatting is important enough and wouldn't work as a web page.
I don't see why people get so excited about version control, myself. There are so many other areas of tech where it's more productive to follow the latest & greatest, or learn about new techniques. Sure, istributed is an improvement, but for many people, even CVS would be "good enough".

BTW, you do sound a bit harsh, and I hope they continue to maintain SVN for many years to come. It's sort of a thankless job compared to working on something new and flashy, but I'm glad people put that kind of dedication into their open source work, instead of just chasing after the latest fad.
Xobni Walks Away From A Microsoft Deal
What Really Goes On At the Large Hadron Collider
I had to get wifi to support http://tipjoy.com while in Cheyenne Wyoming. While it's the biggest town in Wyoming, I'm pretty sure any single block in SF has more hotspots than the whole town.
A Classroom Path to Entrepreneurship
Context is everything. I'm looking to better understand why a company might succeed or fail - something beyond a meaningless percentage. It seems like a very useful skill.

A company that can't raise money for an idea or implementation I judge to be bad shouldn't weight down my perception of raising money on a good idea.

Thanks for the info though.

A fuller picture would also involve the personalities of the founders. Judging potential future performance from an initial meeting is invaluable. I've been thinking a lot about this in preparation to start hiring.
No, it doesn't make sense. But it's a cheap way to get karma points.
Scientists Create First Memristor: Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element
I think if you're willing to assume the risk of starting the company in the first place, then you ought to be willing to assume the risk of rejecting an offer and then potentially failing afterwards. It's a risk, but if you enter into it with your eyes open, and the situation makes sense, it's one you shouldn't be afraid of.

I wonder if people wouldn't be having this same conversation about the Google/Yahoo deal that was kicked around in the early days. (I know that deal was different, but it's the same risk - what if your company could become the next Google by turning down this offer?)

On another note, I think this response speaks to the question a lot of people have asked about whether YC companies are being created simply as acquisition targets or whether they're in it to create long term businesses.
Help me test my web app and get $35 worth of video advertising
Thanks YC for all the good reads about design, development, technology, and trends.

I'm launching an online-video advertising marketplace. It's not your usual video ad network, it's simpler.

I'd be more than grateful to anyone here signing up and helping out during the beta period. There probably are a couple of bugs or quirks left so having some knowledgeable and trustable people would be great!

Here is the url :

http://www.videorix.com/
It is called variable pricing - and the service you provide shouldn't change based on what keywords are relevant. It is not like BMW vs Kia whatsoever.

I don't claim to know all about SEO, but the basics are incredibly simple. I do know there is an abundance of people offering services like this, and they like to spread a lot of FUDD.
There is loads of information on the official SDK webpage. Did you have a look at that first?

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
Here is the clickable url for the lazy :p

http://www.videorix.com/
Why does nobody mention the fact that it would be very unusual for VCs to allow a company to be acquired at a 2x return? I don't know what their pre-money was when they took that 4.25m, but even if they gave away half of the company, that's a post-money of 8.5m. No VC is going to approve a sale for less than 30m in that situation, and even that might be too low.

I don't have any inside knowledge of what went on there, but I can't imagine that selling for 20m was an option for the founders even if they had wanted to.
i kind of doubt it's real, but it sure seems like it is sometimes.
boredguy8, that is completely far away from the truth. that's like tossing a coin up in the air and hope it lands heads. what if you could predict, quantify and know what it would do?
definitely agree about evite. surprised that other event based sites haven't taken off as well. guess is that younger crowd = facebook events and older crowd on email, outlook meeting requests and evite.
google was neither, it was just an awesome product that with word of mouth and a great partnership with yahoo/aol grew to epic proportions. it's as pg says build something people want. i would say 'need'
I think DVCS is probably easier and less sexy/revolutionary then people make out.

But I agree - whilst important, its hardly that exciting - unless your current VCS is causing a problem. At best a DVCS can remove barriers to productivity.

I think this is an example of people fussing over things they can understand and control, to avoid facing up to the harder problems they have on a day to day basis.

Like that story of the design of a new nuclear reactor - everyone was afraid to commit to things, to comment and collaborate on things that were hard, but when the subject of a handrail around the reactor was brought up, suddenly there was a deluge of opinion on it - it was something people could understand and feel like they were contributing.

Often the debates over the less significant problems are the most heated.
Interview with Steve Perlman of Reardon Labs
You're probably right. Also, I would imagine that if you take 5mm in funding from major VCs that you don't plan on a quick & cheap exit.
Mike Arrington in Time 100 list??
I think it's clear that Microsoft want to add these kinds of features to Outlook. I wonder now if they'll attempt to build their own as a direct competitor, or shop around for another business to aquire?
I can only imagine a VC would approve such a deal if it became obvious that a purchase by MS was the possible exit. Hopefully the Xobni guys have a plan though for what to do when the next version of Outlook will inevitably ship with a similar feature.
W.r.t. to simply becoming a feature of Outlook, I can't imagine what else they could possibly have expected. But $20M is a pretty weak offer.
Just another data point, even AOL tried to acquire yahoo during 95/96 for cheap. Just that price wasnt agreeable I think. Now 12 years later Yahoo acquiring AOL is an option to fend off MS.
dude, the font on that page is horrible. Lucida Grande at size 12px? Its unreadable in Firefox.