skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
C't asteroids programming challenge (german)
They're short-lived URLs on this site like the one I'm using to add this reply:

http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=D5W545W084
Maybe somebody is interested: they modified the MAME emulator so that you can control the classic Asteroids game programmatically. The challenge is to program a controller for the spaceship.

If enough people are interested, I could translate some snippets.
No, FF users are overzealous advocates of FOSS in general and Firefox in particular. Links, Lynx, and w3m users are too proud of their terminals. Netscape users don't realize it's the 21st century, AOL users are idiots. Flock and Seamonkey users are weird. No comment on Konqueror and Epiphany.
That's a decent analogy. I remember all my friends almost simultaneously dumping Myspace for Facebook fairly quickly once they perceived the crowd's momentum in that direction. Now, no one I know uses Myspace, except to post band updates that I doubt anyone reads anyway (that all I ever used it for to begin with, what an ugly place that was!).

Facebook seems to be keeping 'hot' so far, amazingly enough, although there are 'elite' crowds forming at Twitter and the other places. Of course, I think that unlike bars, the people on a service can actually serve to keep each other there. Why go to Twitter if all my friends use Facebook? I might be elite, but I'd be all alone.

Dancing with myself, oh oh... ;)
Google obviously.

Pandora.com - ($15/mo ... i already pay this to Napster for unltd dls (but I would have to be able to press a back button to play the previous song,etc),

Hacker News ($20/mo ... keep the trolls off)

Wikipedia? Well if it came down to it, i'd donate to it; if it started charging, i would use other alternatives. the beauty of wikipedia being free is that it is free from the undue influence of paying subscribers- which is pretty essential to a site that wants to supply unbiased information.)

Facebook.

I don't really know of anything else that truly provides a unique value proposition for me that other sites can't duplicate rather easily.
I work at a engineering company even bigger than IBM, and what we have here is crazy:

There is a corporate Windows network and all computers come pre-damaged with a special "Corporate Image" that we are all obligated to run: it's Windows XP with tons of stuff specific to the company: it even keeps a special wallpaper along with the screensaver that you cannot change. And, of course, there are plethora of daemons running: spying on what you do, anti-viruses, etc. And this image won't run under VM.

Well... these beautiful and powerful workstations that we get from the company aren't really used by engineers: they sit in the dark corners of our offices only to be used to read "corporate email" once a day. Everyone is either on MBP+OSX or ThinkPad+Ubuntu like me, connected to our own "engineering network" we built for ourselves with our own internet gateway, using gmail and IM to communicate.

From what I hear, AMD in Austin runs exactly the same way. This is probably why their CPUs suck lately.

This truly is pathetic. The price you pay for being acquired.
Scout: Easy Server Monitoring and Reporting Software/Service (Currently Caters to Rails)
"anectodal support" is an oxymoron. You need many data points to show a correlation. Adding one more doesn't mean anything at all, whether it's an outlier or not.
Well, you are particularly right and if you do such an extensive development for Linux platform, you should use it. As for the things, you can always do it in the way like you want to. ;)
Keystroke fingerprinting - using Javascript to *enhance* security
Traditionally, authentication is done with a subset of four different identifiers. They're usually said to be

- Something you know (username, password)
- Something you have (key, passport)
- Something you are (finger print, retina scan)
- Something you do (signature, speech recognition) [wikipedia]
On the web, we're very familiar with the "things we know" - practically all web logins depends on usernames and passwords. For a higher level, e.g. for online banking, there are often certificates involved. Unfortunately we don't have the technology to do biological identification online (at least not for the common user).

Fingerprint exploits "something you do" to take measure how you type your password.

Automatically injected into the form and passed along to the server.
If you like Scott Drave's work (and probably even if you don't) you'll love the electric sheep screensaver:

http://www.electricsheep.org/
You made HTTP caching fun! Thank you!!!
Umair Haque: Your Thoughts on "How to Fix Venture Capital"
Google uses Java, and since that is evidentally the only acceptable search engine, I'm not sure pg's posited elitism really goes that far.
But what if it doesn't matter if it takes a day or a week? And how is the business person to know? Just because Joe asks for a lot of money, are they supposed to believe that he is good?

I think you are confusing your personal experiences and situations with the situation of some business guy. They are not out to start a software company, where they will manage programmers. They just want product x build.

It is an exchangeable skill, in the same way as there are thousands of mechanics who could fix your car, or thousands of window-makers who could create a window for your house, or thousands of carpenters who can create a cupboard to your specifications.

If you drive your car into some mechanics garage, you are not expecting to manage that mechanic. You just want your car fixed.
A lot of the applications for the yc like programs are similar (ex. launchboxdigital), which, I agree, does make it easier to apply to multiple programs.
Kexter: "Combining Craigslist and Google Maps to make housing searches easier"
I use both Yahoo and Google.

Why can't you just use <a rel="nofollow"...> or a robots file to stop them from indexing x-links?
I guess Apple supports see this as a win, I see it as a death sentence. Big Business will kill the Mac, power to the people
Sorta like how IOS is illegally tied to Cisco hardware and my car's engine firmware is illegally tied to the engine computer, etc?
well unless CL has changed policies this will be going down in 3... 2...
I didn't say that PG would refuse to use any system that was developed in Java. What I meant that he would never would put himself in a situation where the application would depend on Java for development, or to add more features.

To integrate with Google, you talk HTTP, not Java. To adopt Lucene, you'll have to talk Java. There is quite some difference, isn't it?
Right on your first sentence. Denying them attention is the best way to get rid of them. That's why you delete their posts. If you make them think you didn't, they'll continue because they think their posts are still being read by others.

Eventually by actually deleting them, they realize how long it takes them to write the posts and how short a time it takes you to get rid of them and give up.
Dutch startup Soocial makes Plaxo look lame
Does this image have an Origin story?

It seems far too Random to exist on it's own.. I had thought it might be related to Asterisk, the Open Source PBX software, but the name on the file says 1995..

"Your search - link:www.paulgraham.com/asterisk.html - did not match any documents."
The Virtual Office & You. Belong together?
Gmail definitely, but I would consider it bait and switch.

Wikipedia absolutely.

wordreference.com (online dictionaries for english/french/italian/spanish). Love to have better options though.

The Economist (used to have a web subscription, but cancelled it when they made all content free).

Rescuetime. Keeps me productive.

Fogbugz definitely (it's free for 1-2 persons). I entered 3000 bugs in 5 months.
If 18 of the 24 said that the Mac offered a "better or best experience" compared to their existing computer (i.e. the IBM Thinkpad), but 15 of the 18 (83%) already had "moderate or expert knowledge of the [Mac] platform" - does IBM have enough unbiased data to make an educated decision?
Hmm, I can tell you what I do pay for. A hosted exchange server account. That's it.
They asked Craig first and he gave them permission to do it. If I remember correctly they aren't allowed to monetize it using ads, and there may be other restrictions as well.
I think Pandora is the only one that could reasonably charge there. The rest would see massive switchovers to free, similar competitors.
- Consumer Reports: When it comes to buying a big ticket item, like a car, the reviews and the user comments are very useful. Plus canceling my subscription after I bought my car was quick and painless
I'm coming from Edinburgh and staying until the 21st. There's a photo of me here: http://younoodle.com/people/hasan_veldstra Come say hi if you see me.
Ask YC:  Is there currently a good way to have very long-lived debates on the web?
Do you see any benefit in having a service specifically for this purpose?

I was thinking of something where for a given debate topic, you would "subscribe" to people whose comments you would like to see more of.

It's kind of like having a huge debate involving many bloggers.

But in this service anyone can subscribe to anyone and you are encouraged to forward comments to your fans. Each comment has a history showing you all the people that it passed through to get to you.

The service could show you in real-time a visualization of the active parts of the debate network and also a summary of what is currently being discussed and by whom.

One could also provide a search across all comments, where the ranking takes into account the fan count of the comment's author at the time the comment was made say.
The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg
April 2008 Web Server Survey
Ugh, Is this some lame attempt at a viral marketing campaign? They just need to stop trying, even their cool products come across as lame because of their marketing department.

(Note: When I say "cool" the only thing that comes to mind is that photo stiching software presented at the TED talk a couple weeks back which I immediately thought less of when I went to the website to downloaded and was accosted by the MS marking machine.)
Directed, no doubt, by Steve Ballmer.
'Sudden increase in MS Vista salesperson suicide rate' Story at 11.
> But since we currently decide last, we're not pressuring anyone.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible, eh?

And then there's the "accept immediately or you failed an IQ test" attitude. If you have a common date with the others then that's got to change.
Google (more so in 2000 than now)

HNYC

Gmail

8aweek

Chatterous (seriously)

Used to feel that way about Reddit.
BigString:  Silicon Snake Oil
I would pay a join fee for a lot of sites I use daily something like http://forums.somethingawful.com/ but not much over that
That's a very interesting paradoxical situation you have pointed out - the weird trap, I mean.
well what's the point then ;)
As said by many hackers repeatedly, especially PG, languages are slowly turning into their own versions of Lisp. Greenspun's Tenth Rule. When even Java starts having macros...

Personally, though, I think I would be against this. Adding too many such things would turn Java into a language as bloated and complicated as C++ is right now - as if the Java bloat wasn't enough already.
Maybe this image is for a default user avatar when none exists already?
I currently pay for Flickr and Remember the Milk. I also pay for my web host.

Would pay for nymag.com (restaurant reviews & db is worth a few bucks a month).

... other than that, everything else I use has enough free comparable alternatives.
spoke to a "in the know" silicon valley lawyer about this a few days ago. two of the three triggers he mentioned are similar to the one posted by tandaraho: 1) when you need to limit exposure to liabilities (e.g., from customers/clients/users); 2) when you've developed intellectual property that needs to be assigned to an entity; 3) when your business partner(s) need firm clarity on where everyone stand.
waffles.fm
Hey, I actually am from Albania. I was born in 1980, so my first 10 years were under comunism. People were poor, but there was more equality. So, when you saw around you how everybody was doing about the same, then you didn't feel that bad.
The lack of general resources, made people and families to be much more connected, as you had to rely more on your family (not just the inner circile, but everybody, from uncles, aunts, third cousins, etc).

When comunism fell, some people started making more money, getting new cars, houses on the beach, while some were left with less, which obviously made them unhapier. They might be slightly better off than in comunism, but they were much worse than their peers.

Well, accoding to Kant's principles, is the extra hapinness gained by those that made it well, worth equal or more than the happiness lost by those that are faring less well? It is a very hard thing to quantify.

But even in the 80s, we could watch Italian TV, so we kinda new that the rest of the world was doing much better, (and eventually overthru our comunist goverment), BUT everybody around us was doing about the same.

My mom told me a while ago; well we are doing much better economically (as a family), and have a lot more now, BUT we seemed to be a lot happier back than.
Another vote for Pandora.

I'd be willing to pay for Hacker News, but deeply suspicious that it would start dying as a paid site.

Yahoo Mail charges me for POP access, and I'd probably pay gmail similarly.

I happily subscribe to Emusic.com.

That's about it for me.

I like Twitter, Friendfeed, and Blogger, but I wouldn't pay to use any of them.
10 brilliant office interiors
Is there a way to block only the useless calls? The x that fail? Or to robots.txt anything that isn't main story pages so it wouldn't follow every individual comment link?

It might be good to still be indexed on the primary single page for each discussion... Then again I only use google, so it doesn't bother me any.
Screencasts take a lot of time to watch and, most importantly, they aren't google-searchable. Tags aren't enough.

In general, video sucks as a medium for surprising number of applications. I rarely bother with it - when I stumble across one while looking for something, I always move on to the next search result.

When I was transitioning from Windows development over to Linux world, I was lucky to have guys like this one, posting "obvious" things on their blogs: it's indispensable when searching for a specific error message you got in your terminal.
is this a not-so-sly reference to Vonnegut?

http://vonnegutsasshole.blogspot.com/2007/04/authors-and-the...
Embargo Management Process for Startups
"Feel free to use this image however you like. It would be nice if you mentioned it was drawn by me, but you don't have to if that would be graphically inconvenient."

I have to admit that it would be amusing to use that quote as permission to launch a new website, using *Man as it's logo.. The perpetrator could launch with its new site with cleverly adjusted fonts-

New Loobot, (with logo by) PAUL GRAHAM!
Second Windows Vista SP1 prerequisite update causes problems
Live Search News tries to combine Google News and Techmeme
Microsoft releases Vista SP1 in remaining 31 languages
Turn your iPhone into a wifi Skype phone
wikipedia, gmail, and thesixtyone.
If you want to know how Toyota outproduces Ford, go pick up a copy of the book The Machine that Changed the World. It outlines all of Toyota's lean production methods.

Continuous flow processing doesn't even scratch the surface of how far ahead Toyota is with Lean.
It depends what decision you are talking about:

Can Mac experts use Macs productively?
Can we switch all employees to Macs?
etc.
You've constructed an argument against higher-level programming features, not just the STL. Learning the STL requires learning more concepts, but this is true of all higher-level features. You get out what you put in.

Further, I'm mystified why you said learning the STL is premature optimization, and then further advocated premature optimization regarding memory allocation. I don't see how learning the STL is a premature optimization. As for your performance problem, STL containers can take a custom allocator as a template parameter.
Good god, that feedback form is everywhere...
helpful or annoying?
"See what's on employees' laptops"

It is the first time that I have seen invasion of privacy as a feature ;-)
Did you not find searchyc.com useful?
Google. GMail. Wikipedia. DropBox. Anywhere.FM.
I'd also recommend The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&... for STL usage.
Programming is not the only profession where this takes place
Trains are competing with cars, not so much planes.

It's the government subsidy of highways that's insane.
Actually, I started out with Dive Into Python, because it was showing me this is how to do it in Python. I can already program in several languages (and paradigms), so I wanted to know what the idiomatic Python way is.

By doing that, I absorbed some of the important languages concepts and capabilities. I find that I learn best by example; show me what a correct solution looks like, and I'll figure out why it's correct, and hopefully generalize that to the whole language.

Once I started doing some Python programming, I jumped to mostly using the online library and language documentation.

Disclaimer: I still haven't used Python extensively, but I feel comfortable when I use it.
There are no problems that are better solved with less money.
Ask YC:  open geoip databases?
Hello,

Is anybody else using geoip on their sites? I remember I used it a while back and it was off of a maxmind database. Is there anything else out there besides maxmind? Google isn't much help here.
Alexa changes their ranking scheme
I've considered it, too - but then I decided against it...
I finally agree with TC, that seems pretty pointless.
Need A Moment?
Support our troops!
You can push everything you want indexed into SOLR by HTTP -- so even though it's Java/Lucene you don't have to get your hands dirty.
I like the openness/energy level of number 10. The others just seem silly, and not to mention extremely expensive.
The problem with this question is, when you think about it, one big reason all the popular free web services ARE popular is because they're free. So pretty much my answer to any of the sites I use would be, I might be willing to pay if I couldn't find an alternative, yet at the same time, I'd probably never be using any of them in the first place if they weren't originally free. However, I would NEVER pay for social news/discussion sites like this one (or digg, reddit, etc.). Regardless of the quality of the stories and discussion, social news sites are services I only use in my leisure time, I would probably not visit them if I didn't have tons of spare time anyway. No offense to social news sites, it's just that I wouldn't pay for them.
That's one that didn't immediately come to mind for me. I gotta admit, I almost certainly would pay for that (although it's almost completely hypothetical since paying for it goes completely against the entire philosophy of the service, and if it had always been a pay service, it wouldn't be as extensive).
I am reminded of "If his blog posts get any lighter he's going to have to switch to Twitter." -pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110
You, or someone else, could very easily create a free alternative to it. Hacker news is good because it's still relatively obscure. ANY social news site that is full-featured and doesn't censor its users will almost invariably start out great then begin it fail as more people find out about it.
I might pay for Facebook, but if they started making EVERYONE pay, it would cease being the site which I began this sentence by saying I would for it pay.
A good alternative to Google Reader is simply visiting the sites you want to :-) I'm being sarcastic, but I honestly don't get the point of using a web-based RSS reader, I've always just bookmarked and visited the sites I desire to check.
Hacker News Comments RSS?
Is there a feed for comments?
slashdot ;)
www.debatewise.com
My best interpretation as to the point of this image, and/or this submission, is to test whether any pg-created content will automatically rise to the top of Hacker News regardless of its actual merits.
The lack of cash for the gig isn't really the problem here. I think the problem is that the person asking for work is poor at business.

If he is expecting this guy to work for free, he should make him feel super important, ask for advice and not really ask him to do the work.

Assuming that someone else has nothing else going on and will spend their evenings/weekends on your project for free, just points out that he doesn't have a clue about how people work.

My advice to anyone looking to hire a programmer for free, try a subtle form of flattery and see if you can get a good deal. Alternatively, learn programming.
Thanks for chiming in everyone. Hacker News continues to impress me - the community feedback is superb.

It is not beRecruited.com (http://www.berecruited.com) - which is doing quite well!!

It's a side project that I worked on called PopChatter (http://www.popchatter.com) - which was more of an experiment in Ruby on Rails than anything else. I simply don't have enough time these days to grow it and innovate (just not enough time in the day!).
Poll: Are you going to startup school?
It's not annoying.
In my opinion the software is the business. Without that, its just an idea on paper. And the marketable value of an idea is zero.
You are only modding me down because you are sexually frustrated...
Inserting a big chunk of C++ into my Apache listeners doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings. Neither does the fact that mod_rails just flat-out doesn't work on OS X, which is where a large number of Rails developers do most of their actual, y'know, development.

Personally, I don't think you can really call this a 1.0 release. Pre-beta preview, maybe; stable, point-oh release, definitely not.
Exchange options I know of for a Mac:

* Microsoft Entourage

* Outlook Web Access

* The open source Gnome email client Evolution now runs on a Mac, and it can connect to Exchange (actually, it scrapes Outlook Web Access)

* I believe you can configure Exchange to support IMAP connections

* Parallels and VMWare Fusion allow you to run Outlook for Windows
pg writes nice essays. what was my point? oh yes, pg writes nice essays :)
Not to mention their long time PowerPC relationship with Apple.
Let me get this straight: Microsoft ran this as a commercial? It's a joke, right?
How do you robot.txt for search engines? If anything, you could ban all robots, I suppose. I wouldn't like that - it is akin to those social networks where you can't get your data out.
('*')
Python:
- the first time I concisely solved a seemingly complex problem with a few list comprehensions and a well thought out structure of maps and lists

C:
- Using an include file as a simple database and redefining a macro to form a primitive code generator (first saw this in a CPU simulator)

Haskell:
- SPJ's books on implementing functional languages -- the simple beginning pieces seemed to generate more Aha moments (pretty printing and parsing)

While none of these are specific to the given language, they represent points-of-no-return for a change in the way I think about solving (or even representing) problems.
How To Make a Bookmarklet For Your Web Application
Ask YC: Recording the Startup School talks?
This is a request to the organizers of Startup School to arrange for soundboard recordings of the presentations at this year's event.

The audio recordings from 2006 and earlier have been gems in my car CD inventory on many long drives. Unfortunately last year's audio recordings were really low in quality, to the point of being unintelligible.

It would be a shame for these amazing talks to not get preserved for posterity!