skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with Tufte's general point that the problem with all slide based presentation tools is low information resolution.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Some presentation suggestions can be found here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

I tend to only put figures and equations with the necessary explanatory notes in my presentations and discuss the rest. But creating paper handouts as Tufte usually suggests would still probably be more effective, since your audience has something physical to take home.

I think a mind map presentation tool with infinite zoom and pan could be an interesting presentation tool. Something like a high-resolution poster that you navigate in a presentation. It could be distracting to the presenter though.
Why did you choose XMPP over RTMP?
you shouldn't apply with stupid ideas. One startup article I read said paraphrased. that YOU must believe that your idea is a good one. If you don't believe it then how will you convince others.

That being said most stupid ideas are good ones.

You sound in somewhat of the same position I am. I'm looking for co-founders but haven't found anyone worth my time. It's a good thing I didn't offer it to the couple I was thinking of, he turned up dead today :( he was my friend. sigh alright moving on.

If I don't win this round I'll apply again for the next.

I'd just like to hear (even if I don't make the cut) what they thought of my ideas. you know basically, you didn't make the cut because 'x'. Because I'd fix 'x' next time, I was on short notice this time.
"Instead of saying 'no', I can say 'please fork.'"
$100,000 Recommender Startup Competition
I don't think you could succeed. First of all your self-abasing statement that you could succeed except for DH2 is an obvious ploy to catch us off guard. Nice try.

Secondly, I don't like your tone. Not one bit, sir. Who, exactly are you to try arguing using all 7 categories? Oh, you're a hacker you say? Well, of course a hacker would think they could argue using all 7 categories! I stand corrected!

p.s.ur gay.

(I think you might be right, it IS hard to use all 7 categories and remain coherent).
Cross-site scripting explained
Best quote: "My bet on Microsoft in the late 90s just ran out of gas."
GCC optimisation removes security checks
Bummer. I tried huddlechat today, and was impressed. I hadn't tried campfire before, for various reasons, but I think I might give it a shot now.

At this point it might be just as effective of a tech demo to release the source to huddlechat, although the chances of it happening are quite low.
Epic. In my dreams, this article will become so popular that political commentators will use your Disagreement Hierarchy to evaluate political speeches. (Most political debate rarely rises above DH4.)

I'm going to reference your article every time I respond to criticism. Thank you.

Love your other stuff, too, Paul.
Are they going to take down google docs next?
If your a Hacker and want to work in a StartUp look here
I was being facetious about "stupid." I meant that it's really obvious and that it's stupid that no-one else is doing it.

I don't think that most stupid ideas are good ones. I do think some good ideas can seem stupid, that is, incredibly obvious, later, after someone's thought of it.

Sorry about your friend. That ain't easy.
Yeah, it sounds like hosting companies are nervous.

But of course I think there's somethings I want to host and now there are somethings I want to add to AppEngine.

Sadly, I just rented a new server specifically for a light Python-based app. Only saving factor is that AppEngine is a bit new and I'm not sure I yet want to build on it for something real.
RescueTime/8aweek why? Let founders manage what they want to do.

Am I applying to bschool or job; just checkout the application form.

project plan;milestones,timelines:
Are we getting MS Project and free Manager there?

I would teach something to security guard and let him do some interestring work rather than keeping watch on us.

I hope it turns out well. I wish PG starts YC India chapter.
An XSS is a tad different than being owned (IMHO), but certainly isn't an ideal thing to see right away.

The cool part is that things like this will encourage them to put more security-by-default sorts of APIs into GAE.
How IPTV Will Save Network Television
Adobe Media Player - like the corporate version of Miro
That by going with something like Google's App Engine (or Amazon's solutions, really) you trade off control for convenience.

The article also implies that control is always better than convenience, which I don't agree with. But the main point seems to be the tradeoff, which I thought was obvious.
International Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs
Their main website is also interesting

http://www.textmap.com
But in this case the "intellectual property" seems to be

1.chat in a web browser

2.web pages with a 2 column design.

Neither of which are unique or patentable ideas. Seems like 37signals just exploited this for publicity. Unless there was some innovation here that I'm missing.
Flickr Dips Its Toe into Video-Sharing. How Will You Use It?
NSA releases new version of Linux software
Most everyone doing lots of web apps gets bitten by XSS at some point. Nothing embarrassing about it IMHO.
What's next for news magazines? Fading publications try to reinvent themselves again.
Python does have closures, what it lacks is ability to modify enclosed variables without using annoying hacks. This will change in Python 3000 with the nonlocal keyword [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3104/]. It may also be added to 2.6, but I'm not sure.
Love the "Panic" button on that website! Genius :D
Footers are great. My favorite article about good use of footers (excerpted below)

------

When you're designing pages - specifically content pages - what is the best possible thing that could happen? I mean after the user has bought a computer, gotten internet connectivity, figured out how to use a browser, and somehow found their way to your site ... what is the single best thing that they could do?

Read. That's right, read. And read all the way to the bottom of the page. In this business, a user that actually reads all the way to the bottom of a page is like gold. They're your best, most engaged, happiest users. You know, because they haven't clicked away. They did the best possible thing they could do, and now they're at the bottom of the page. And how do you reward them?

With a copyright statement. Maybe, if they're lucky, some bland footer navigation.

If you ask me, that's just rude.

http://powazek.com/2005/09/000540.html
37signals ripped off IRC.

story at 11.
Thanks to everybody for honest feedback. That is what I want to hear :)
Thanks .. we are working on most of what you request. The sound should be the premium feature.
that's BS. We already put a CNAME for a chat subdomain pointed to our closed huddlechat room. it was going to be nice..

"Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Google App Engine. We've heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we've decided to take it down. If you'd like to see more sample applications written on Google App Engine please check out our documentation and our App Gallery.

Thanks,
The Google App Engine Team"
Thanks .. we will provide some kind of explanation as we need to make the service more user friendly.
microsoft represents the old guard, the place where nobody gets fired and no superstar survives; the 'mediocre'.

it represents security, 'the known'
No sorry at all :) And thanks for the inspirational links and a very concrete critique.
We have big discussions inside our team about the widget appearance, hopefully we upgrade the widget soon so it is straight, clear and easy to use. Thanks :)
Joyent: free hosting for high-volume Python apps, if you give us customer info
Hey its cool! I liked it. The design is also clean and usability is awesome. Keep it up bro!
13 x $15K is $180K; 2% of 5 Million is 100K this is 6.6X
If YC only had 1/3 exit they would earn 2.2X which is surely less than their total cost per investment

YC looks more like a heavyweight advisor or individual angel than a seed fund in terms of the size of their equity stake.
The article is very interesting on the psychology of how it works and anecdotally I would completely agree with the findings.

However, the title is putting the cart before the horse. Just because people respond to things this way, it is not the cause of the tradition.

The best researched article I could find (that matches a story from an old book I once had) about the origins of the $.99 can be found here http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_166.html
misleading headline. plus why is a valleywag article showing up on HN, I can get that elsewhere.
Late April Fools? I hope so. At least the customer info. part.
Take a look at http://www.mibbit.com if you're interested in more of a feature-rich webchat.
Who is paying for this stuff?
Well, it's nice of Google that they've taken this down. But I'm really annoyed by 37signals' reply. I mean I recently developed the similar app to learn a particular framework so if I go market this product do you guys really think I should be taking this down if I see DHH or JF complaining how I ripped their app off? I mean a 100% similar app will cetainly be a dissaopinting effort (for both them and I) but I can always improve on that(improved/diff UI, new features and etc). Moreover, I can point anyone to couple of BaseCamp and Campfire clones and HuddleChat was just an example for app_engine (not a stupidly easy thing to implement like Basecamp and not a technicaly very challenging project). Just the right balance for a good tutorial. I was looking forward to read how did they do it using app_engine ;(
i think this spells out how a lot of people have great disdain for 37 signals and their perceived growing arrogance, more so than it is about Google Apps.
facetiousness like sarcasm can be hard to see on the net.

well perhaps I phrased the 'most stupid ideas are good ones' wrong. On the other hand it more likely depends on who is calling it stupid. The average person thinks computers are stupid, the funny thing, is they have no idea how right they are. I think myspace is stupid... (not the concept just the implementation). So by that logic stupid is good ;)

thanks.
Stallman

William Blake

PG

McCarthy

ESR
Flash messages are for doing notices and alerts
Why flash messages in RoR/Symfony/Django are not for passing important variables.
Such a small team (37signals) manages to generate lots of buzz, sometimes I'm not sure if it's signal or noise.
Nice article, I learn something new about git everyday.
You'd rather rush a product out the door than cancelling a press release?
Pricing starts at $3.65M
Sure. The proper way is to code up a quick ruby script to generate 100,000 or so bogus form fillouts per hour. It will be gone in no time.
At this point, considering how many people have been confused by that form, it's PG's fault for not fixing it.
"And we were always far ahead of them in features. Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.

It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of secret weapon--" -PG

It's up to 37Signals to find the new features; it is not up to competitors to stop competing.
Have you thought over if you want to build it into a system with any community aspects? I'm working on something that has very similar base level functions.
I'd never seen a good XSS hack up close but our beta got hit pretty hard by a viral XSS. It automatically added everyone as a friend and then non-destructively inserted itself into your profile. What scared me most was that the javascript was so readable and looked like something I could write. I saved it:
http://www.stubbleblog.com/foocamp_xss_hack.js.txt

If you're programming in rails I'd recommend sanitize_params:
http://code.google.com/p/sanitizeparams/
Of course Steve Jobs also received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock options over the past few years. And a $46 million Gulfstream jet.

That said, Steve Jobs has done amazing things with Apple and arguably deserves every penny of his compensation.
I don't think there are any official government agencies that let you report fraudulent sites to them. Your best bet is to go to the commercial providers of anti-phishing software (IE, FF and the addons that seek out phishing sites, etc...) and contact them. I believe many of these have a process for users to submit their sites.

On a "fight fire with fire" note, see what you can find about this site. Do a whois lookup (probably won't find much, if they know what they're doing). You may be able to find their hosting company and contact them directly. Also see if you can find where the site is hosted geographically. This will give you an advantage of knowledge should you need to take any legal action (a host in Utah is easier to fight legally than an off-shore one). I also like the suggestion about creating a script to bombard their servers with false registrations - maybe as a last resort thing...but maybe not. :)

Also, would you mind sharing the sites with us (both yours and the bogus one)? I would personally like to see how this site is trying to phish information from your visitors.
Google App Engine: Batteries sold separately
I wish this was a non-story. Google just put out a great new product. Everyone there wants to keep the focus on that story. This would have been a real story if Google had kept Huddle up and 37Signals had kept pushing. But now the story is being manufactured and pushed by people who aren't even involved.
Symbiotic Vs Parasitic Computing
Don't forget gmail. It has a list of messages on the right, list of folders/tags on the left!!! blatent copy of other email clients.
Naw, they just took over some channels during a netsplit...
I think it has a strong community aspect already -- that's part of the point of it, to draw microblogging into this emerging "campfire" style of social networking. You don't really get a sense of it until you have a real social circle on it, though; currently it's not super easy to add friends or import lots of friends at once, so your crowdspace isn't immediately useful. The global "universe" feed is kind of cool but not everyone wants to talk to strangers. I'm going to work on making it easier to bring in friends.

I'd like to hear more about what you're working on.
And if you don't mind using their mutant Solaris...
As someone explained earlier on News.yc (can't find the link), Paul Erdos (and possibly other mathematicians) got it "wrong" because they weren't told the correct problem. If you don't mention that:
(1) the game host knows where the car is beforehand
(2) he tells beforehand that he'll reveal a goat,

then there's no paradox.
But Google has probably hired ten PhDs just to make sure none of their products gets exploited like this.

But the PhDs failed. Thus, it's newsworthy.
Oh my god. That is just comical. They took the food pyramid and, to my utter amazement, made it WORSE than before.
A Silicon Valley Slowdown
Hooray?
Writing a compiler in Ruby from the bottom up
scratches head Couldn't you have done this before using AuthSub and a registered application?

The only thing that seems different is that Google returns an email address to you with App Engine, so you can skip that step in the registartion process.
No, it's evil to steal from companies smaller than you, but admirable to steal from companies bigger than you.
Legacy: The browser ecosystem reborn
Twitter Adds Search
That already makes me incredibly suspicious of Joyent.

I'm.. not sure I will ever use them. I mean, what're they gonna DO with all that data?
Hi, this is Nicola from Learnit lists.

We are currently running a private beta test of the next release of the widget, after identifying many of the concerns raised in these posts in previous research.

If you would be interested in helping us with a private beta test of the next release, please contact me on info at learnitlists dot com.

Many thanks for your time.
If this came from Microsoft then everyone would bitch but no one would think twice about it. Google tries to be at a class above everyone else down to their company motto of "Do no Evil". Whether it was a few guys working off the clock or using their 20% time at work it was still Google that released it.

Don't get me wrong, I do think Google has a right to release competing products and they have done so with Gmail and many other apps. However, it's a very crappy message to send would-be developers to "trust" them to do the right thing. Let's not lose perspective just because you may or may not like the 37 Signals guys, it was a pretty crappy message to chance sending.
Version control system for large number of binary and text files?
I have large number of mixed files (text and binary) that I wish to put under version control. This is primary test scripts and test intermediate data and results. What Version Control System is most appropriate for this task? Number of files currently is close to 200K but is expected to grow to 5-10M.
"... Any chance of showing the template or portions of the templates? ..."

I asked Bret on the blog if there was any chance of showing some more, especially the templates & replied he'll release the code ~ "... Sure. I will post the entire code base to Google Code in the next few weeks when I get a few moments ..."
A faster Y Combinator search
Very nice! An indeed, why hasn't Google done this on their own yet?
Ask HN: Good online link checker?
I need a way to spider my clients' web sites and check for bad links. What works?
> Beyond that, you are locked into their authentication systems, their email systems and most importantly, their specific approach to scaling.

Getting "their specific approach to scaling" for free, without having to do much myself, sounds like a really good deal to me. Scaling stuff up is a pain, and something a lot of people (myself included) have only taken so far.
They are using parody to criticize the very same terms that Google is offering for their App Engine (which people seem excited about).
Forgive me, because this is not an insult, but this "doesn't make conceptual sense" argument I hear so much is so much nonsense and excuses to me. Git supports multiple workflows and allows you to either directly resolve tainted-working-copy situations directly or avoid them.

By allowing for local branches you enable multiple parallel lines of development in one repository. It saves space, it saves effort, it saves time, and it's a cleaner way to organize your projects (all in one place rather than scatted across a directory listing). It also means you can evade the tainted-working-copy problem entirely by keeping short-lived, private, parallel branches of current feature development. Personally, I much prefer this mode of operation when I have the foresight to do it.
Really? That's what college and working a regular job is for. If you're starting a company, taking two weeks off to be exposed to the corporate world would be worse than a waste of time.
A First Look At IZEA's SocialSpark
i think they are secretly working on some high level AI stuff that requires lots of worldly data
... And they are starting to look childish in the process.
Worst. Registrar. EVER!
I would agree, but only if they didn't actually give you those terms if you really wanted them. And I have every reason to believe that if you actually were to take them up on it, they would deliver.
Toward Harnessing Computation in the Browser
Me and some friends of mine applied for Summer YC too, a few new ideas around online publishing.

Good luck all!

Regarding the number accepted vs interviewed, excerpted from Matt Maroon's awesome post: "[From the interview they] just kept all of the ones they liked last time. I think it was 19 out of 54, but I could wrong there. so you might think you only have roughly a 1 in 3 shot. But if they keep everyone they like, and they like you, then you have a 100% shot. So just go make them like you. Like most investors, they want to."

Full link to the article (great read, recommended)
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=247
Thanks for posting Matt's article, it's great. Good luck tomorrow.
Future of [mobile] social networking  --- is this Loopt?
IPhone Consumer Network Launching? Seems so...
That's a simple XSS example hack. Google should have filtered that out, but it's not that bad either (as long as they react fast).
Given the brief of "Make a webchat client", it's hard to come up with a different design that would work.

Like an email client, it has an obvious design that works.
Gemstone, it's like Rails, but faster and easier
Apologies for having done a bad cloning. I represent CIIE - group which is doing the iAccelerator. We definitely can't match what YC has done. We are still open to ideas and would love to get your advise and restructure the program.

However, we would like you guys to understand the Indian innovation scenario before any suggestions. In a space where there is limited innovation happening, very few university start-ups happening, very few "IT-expert students" creating anything world-class or anywhere closer (other than doing some outsourced software services) - we feel this is a step to try something new to push people into starting-up an innovative company.

Our aim is to change the statistics of number of kids starting up out of college. And believe us, if we can't make a huge difference and end up creating 3 start-ups out of this process - we would have succeeded.

For those who understand this space better, we would love to have your feedbacks and how we can use this model better.

Apologies PG and YC fans (believe me I am one of them), we are just trying to bring some disruption in our innovation system. Look forward to your inputs.

Best,
Kunal
I seem to be getting results from places other than YC; but only on some queries. 'data mining' only gets two results, both from HN. 'machine learning' gets a bunch of results, none of which seem to be from here. Is there a way to limit my search to just HN?
If aim is for tech startups; you must spread this message in enginnering colleges/IITs across India.
The main criticism was that you enforce draconian working standards. In YC, people work hard because they want to. You say you have a guard to prevent people from leaving. It sounds bizarre.
Perhaps it is for building social capital - accustome users to help each other.

Just like in a related way - but with a different morale - SMS seems from one point of view an inferior user interface. But people use it anyway instead of calling.

Anyway - I suspect he just has not come around to fixing it.
At least for consumer goods.
The Case Against Overtime
Yes, I understand. We were actually kidding. But I guess the message wasn't put across in the right manner. Have changed the text anyways.

I thought people would understand that we can't be so cruel and must have been kidding. Apologies for the assumption. Yes, we do provide people mattress next to their workplace - give them the luxury of resting as and when they want. We are trying to be as friendly as possible. Thanks for your feedback. It's not gonna be a jail believe me.
So you always have change left on your card and a reason to come back. You do not want to give them the remainder for free - do you?
Microsoft Publicly Posts Additional Protocol(outlook/exchange) Documentation
So what does this mean for companies doing exchange replacements?

Everything for Outlook and Exchange seem to be here...
On the other hand: Perhaps it makes the tradition survive?

Maybe like in the theory of evolution - things get started by chance by stay for a good reason.

The straight dope was interesting, too.
yes doing that...