skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RegEx Buddy (http://www.regexbuddy.com) is also pretty good. It breaks down the regex into its parts in an intuitive interface. Furthermore, it allows you to easily switch between the various regex styles, along with its platform specific variation.

It's also great for deciphering expressions long forgotten, definitely a lifesaver.
I believe the parent and parent's parent were talking about comments - I don't know if anyone can downvote articles.
I can't wait to hear DHH chide these guys about trying to be a startup instead of a small business.

[bracing for the karma hit]
Note that /cash/ is crucial when talking about a anonymous transaction. In a cash transaction, after a sale completes, the honest seller has essentially no exposure beyond, say, a warranty return. If you payment is instead made in some way (credit card, paypal, etc) where the seller is on the hook for fraud, things start to suck hard. Unfortunately, no governments/banks like totally anon ecash, for national security reasons (e.g., funding terrorism).

There are certainly ways to make credentials that are not easily recreated. One example, although perhaps not the best, is to send a text message to a cellphone number.
Heroku guys: any chance you'd extend some invitations to your YC friends? :-D
Many of our best developers didn't know C# or ASP.Net when they started. That doesn't appear to be a huge problem if you find the right person.

We've actually received quite a bit of support from Microsoft (free software, design review sessions, books, etc).

http://microsoftstartupzone.com/blogs/ebt_success_stories/ar...

As for cost effective licensing:
http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default....
Pownce becomes more useful
Google denies staff "brain drain"
MySpace officially joins the DataPortability Project
Microsoft is now essentially denying these claims:

http://zuneinsider.com/archive/2008/05/07/just-so-no-one-get...

This whole idea seems a little outlandish, even for Microsoft. What executive could possibly think they would sell more Zunes from having NBC content available then they would lose from people who couldn't put their own media on the device?
Playing Video Games Can Be Healthy; HumanaGames Show How
"Most people want to be well-rounded and flexible. They want to keep their options open. They want to be balanced and not too extreme. Unfortunately, this doesn't work."

Well, if you say so, that's good enough for me. Oh look, you've even included someone else's graph, now that's scientific proof.
how do you sell your laptop on ebay? just list it as a single-priced auction, set shipping to USA only, reject any bidders that don't have a paypal account, etc. anyone who can't sell something on ebay without running into trouble like this is an idiot.
I went to Thailand when I was 23 (I'm 27 now). Stayed at the Khao San Road, traveled a lot. It's a great place to get away from it all. Cheap too, and I earn Mexico wages.
That didn't work out too well for Cory Lidle. The Cirrus SR20 he was flying had a parachute just like that. The problem with parachutes is that you have to know you're going to crash before you crash. That doesn't always happen.

Now, cars aren't exactly the safest thing, either. I wonder how they match up with the most recent (safest) small planes.
or you can do a buy it now that only counts if they actually follow through and pay
No social life !=> no sex life...

Entrepreneurs are more efficient!
too bad the offer ended April 30, 2008
Spend more money right when your income is in highest jeopardy? Most of us wish.

I'd suggest just going in the summer while you're still employed and office activity has slowed anyway. My plan, anyway.
Was this in retail box? Can't believe I missed it.
Gratz guys. Been using them for a while. Forget the browser based editor, you can deploy to them with git. Scaling without thinking (they're backed by EC2 & S3) is great, and they launched before appengine.
I later found this. http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4262102607.html

I guess google with "android hardware development board" will get a lot of info.
Ontology is Overrated
This is something I've been mulling over for our site (one of the big US newsmags) which gets a lot of comments but has very limited community. One of the approaches I've decided to explore a little further is tying your karma to the votes on other articles, outside of a certain threshold. I'd like to use the threshold to prevent people from getting "bombed" if they upset the wrong person. The general hypothesis is that there is a relationship between the quality of your contribution and your support of quality contributions from others. the general implementation idea is that when you vote, it impacts your karma. For example, if you upvote an unhelpful but witty comment and others come and vote it down, you'd lose karma. If you voted up a comment that others also voted up, you'd gain karma. There are a lot of ways to game such a system, so you'd need to be really careful about the side-effects of this (it should probably only account for a small portion of your karma, for example) but I think it has promise nonetheless. I like to think of it sort of as Page Rank for comment karma.
I've sold two Mac laptops on eBay--one 12" Powerbook G4 and the other a 13" Macbook (white). The 12" sold within 24 hours (August 2006) for $500 (!). The 13" sold within three days for $900 (I paid $1200 and it was 1 year old, refurbished). The 13" did come with some other goodies, like Parallels and Win XP Pro, however.
I can attest that this works, provided you pay attention to all his caveats. I walked into my boss's office at my last job and told him I was going to Spain for six months, and that I'd be willing to work half time from there, but if that didn't work out, that was ok too. To my surprise, not only did he agree, but I got a special allowance to have benefits while abroad as well. I did my work out of internet cafes the whole time, and had a blast.

The trick is to be willing (as the OP points out) to carry out the bluff. This generalizes to all negotiating. You have to be willing to walk away, and the other party has to know you actually will walk away, before you get a deal.

In about 15 days I am taking seven months off to work on a startup + half a dozen smaller ideas. I talked to my boss about it six weeks ago, and he came by the other day to "make sure I wanted to come back in January." If that doesn't turn out (my startup takes off or they don't have a spot open by then), it's ok because I can always find another job elsewhere.
Wouldn't this just encourage people to "pile on" by upvoting things which already have high scores, or downvoting things which already have low scores?
We switched from MySQL to Postgres because MySQL does not scale. MySQL rebuilds all indexes for InnoDB tables (and all other storage engines) on any trivial "alter table" even though InnoDB indexes refer to records using the primary key. So just adding a column to a big table means taking down your database for hours, even though the rebuilt indexes will be exactly the same as before the rebuild. So dumb... We are happy with Postgres.
Consider it the patented PG Private Karma System. In fact, I bet the PGPKS works much like the Dan Goldin Private Karma System. Participating and being recognized gets you opportunities that don't just happen randomly.

I'm not too great at networking or being recognized, but I'm working on it. In your case, I can tell you that if some guy came up off the street and introduced himself as Dan Goldin, I'd recognize you from here. Whether that would be worth anything to you is another story. ;)

(I guess I'm trying to say that the karma system doesn't matter so much as making an honest effort to say something worth saying.)
Whats the Worst E-Mail Mistake You Ever Made?
This is a ripoff. I paid $5 for my copy. College site license. And it's still legally mine (well, insofar as any software is...damn EULAs) even after graduation.
That's why I emphasize that the key is making sure you set thresholds around it. For example, don't perform the calculation when the post has more than a 10% distribution in votes, or you could add a freshness component, so you would only gain the karma when you are the first upvote on something that ended up being popular.
This article's worth reading just for the stock market metaphor. And the Artic Monkey references.
I'm a little confused

A “work made for hire” is—
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or

I read that as: if someone hired you to write some code for them, then the code you write seems to be work made for hire, in which case they own the copyright.
Ha... I never used EBay in the intended way: when bying I always do searches for local items only, and just pick things up with cash.

For selling I always use Craigslist.
Upvoted just for the neat and brutally honest 'completeness' sidebar.
Let them own the prototype, they are paying for it after all (however little that might be). It shouldn't be hard for you to completely rewrite the prototype if you want to go forward with the idea yourself (after all you're talking about 20 hours of initial work, and chances are the rewrite will be much faster and of much higher quality).
> Anyway, it's worth a rethink along the lines of "can you redefine the problem?"

What if you built an Ebay from scratch around a secure financial escrow service?

Perhaps you could place a hold upon a credit card at the time a bid was placed, release that hold as soon as they lose the auction, and charge the credit card as soon as they win the auction. Don't charge a transaction fee (or charge as small a fee as possible) -- just hold the cash in escrow until the buyer verifies that he has received the product as agreed. If the buyer tells you he has not received the item or that it is not as agreed, you perform some kind of resolution. If no feedback at all is received from the buyer in X days, you pay the seller anyway.

I don't know whether buyers and sellers would love these terms, but they should be securable, and if Ebay is becoming inoperable, maybe they would work.
If you're leaving an enterprise job where you developed years of expertise in .Net technologies and wanted to start building on a stack in which you are already an expert.
This is one of the coolest articles I've seen on YC in a long time. Thanks for helping me de-stress!
Yahoo’s Decker to Microsoft’s Gates: “Should I kiss you hello?”
Bucket list?

I had a couple of weeks in Asia last month and it was very difficult to return. I have thought of going back a couple of times since.

I would say its also a great excuse to buy an air too :)
Nah, I'm not tired of it. It's obvious 37signals want to "change the world" in some way, and if you appreciate that, subscribe. If not, don't.

What /does/ tire me is that they set up a special "product blog" separate to SvN, but then continue to crosspost almost everything to SvN on a weekly basis anyway.. why bother?
PriceAdvance Launched out of Beta (now supports IE, too)
Would enjoy your feedback - PriceAdvance's beta launched here in December. We've been building in support for additional merchants, developing the IE version and polishing the Firefox version (which is now out of mozilla's dev sandbox). We're really excited!
The problem with starting another Ebay is Metcalfes law that states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. They have a lot of users, and thus their network is valuable - even if you try to sell Nigerian stamps from 1800 there will probably be a bidder. A startup will have big trouble getting the first million users, simply because there aren't already a million users. It's a catch 22 situation.

The same is btw. true for facebook, etc. Their value is not in their technology but in their size.
I emailed Morph Exchange. They have plans to do PHP but they do not have a timeframe for it yet. For Java however, they it should be done within this year.
Now I want Heroku for PHP ^_^
Coincidence, I also posted something about heroku here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184317
Couldn't agree more, the bar for entry with MS tools is very low, so it's not a surprise that lots of applications written with them suck.

The biggest problem I have with MS tools in my day job is usually getting the 3rd party add on tools to work. And those are often license problems...
I leave Canada for Australia in a few weeks. Though not the 3rd world it's a new base of operations which will allow us to easily travel around Asia. Though I plan to work the odd consulting gig to help pay for it mostly we'll be living as cheap as possible and moving as often as possible for the next year or 2.
IMAP headaches caused by GMAIL
The point is that you are free to stay as long as you want and not have to rush it. A few weeks in a new place is rarely enough to get a real feel for it and experience everything that place offers.

Besides you'll probably be spending less traveling in 3rd world countries than you will living in a tech centre in North America or Europe.
+1 for sphinx.

It's fast and memory efficient, an in my experience rock solid.
Comes with excellent python bindings, and if your python is django, there is also a really nice django-sphinx project on google code.
Solr is also good, but it does require java and behaves slightly differently. I would recommend you give both of them a look.
This is my plan too.

I read "C With Assembly Language" by Steven Holzner as a kid... he wrote that he works 6 months and travels for the other 6. It has been my dream since. It should work out this year.

If you are planning, reading "The Four Hour Work Week" might help.
Why is there are Rails and a RoR section, they're the same thing. (Are there not any pure Ruby questions on YC too?)
That sounds like it might work. I have no suggestions of my own however.

I don't know why you should be sorry. :)
Mastering the Brain-Computer Interface
Check out Dawdle (http://dawdle.com). A friend of mine started it, its a pretty nifty E-Bay like site based around video games which takes a stab at solving the credentials issue.
The only legitimate use of the blink tag
My guess would be that it has to do with the red tape involved in getting something authorized to go up on whatever.microsoft.com.
Go to Amsterdam! Tulips, pickled herring and lot's of fun :-)
Which one of these comments seems like the better startup filter:

1)"That correlates more with any other success factor that I've seen in the world's greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo Inc. co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."

2)Moritz said he's learned as an investor to listen carefully to entrepreneurs and only look at the facts, casting aside prejudice and opinion. "That stuff will preclude you in making a new investment in a new area that hasn't hit the radar screen yet or is preposterous to other people," he said.

Put my money into Sequoia.
I liked this a lot initially. I'll give it a shot again. Congrats!
I used this a few months ago it was great.
Shawn Fanning Finally Gets A Real Payday: Electronic Arts Buys Rupture For $30 Million
I basically agree with what your saying, but I think it's more about the relative amount of work they get done per hour than the absolute amount of work. I try to get 30 solid hours of work done per week in a normal office setting. However, by approaching coding like a surgery where I want to make the minimal changes to get something to work I can get a lot done. Where "workaholics" want to sling code around which seems to work really well but takes 2 or 3 times as long for the same result.

EX: One workaholic I knew spent 15 hours "cleaning up" a five line function I had written in an hour because it looked odd. Now he also produced a working result, but his version added 3 classes and changed about 20 pages of code. A few months later and he said "I would rather spend time making the code understandable than try and understand the code." Which seems stupid to me, but by burning a lot of time he ended up being fairly useful.
It's Not A Flying Car, It's A Drivable Airplane (made by an MIT Rocket Scientist)
My bad. Fixed. I must have switched the name mid way through, and didn't realize when cleaning it up. (Yes, I know they are the same thing.)

There is a Ruby vs Lisp q under X vs Y (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98227). Otherwise, I didn't see any pure Ruby questions. But if you have some saved, I'd be happy to add them. Or you can.
Has anyone had any success applying deliberate practice principles to learning how to hack? I'm having a hard time coming up with measurable units of work because hacking is very much an art.

Measuring output by lines of code or # of functions doesn't give the right metric. It's like measuring the # of brushstrokes a painter takes to gauge his/her quality.
Everyone has already said this, but I want to give you my own thanks. Cheers to you, sir!
Typo, and past the edit period.
The material about LLC is in the following chapter ...

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/01/bootstrapping.html
What did you use and how were you doing the unit tests (e.g. tools/processes). Thanks.
I been looking at tools too. My friend recommends http://www.datanamic.com as his lecturer at Imperial says it is good, but I have yet to try.
Since fallentimes just asked the same in an e-mail I can copy paste it here :-)

Basically it’s an advertising display. The way it works is that you have a motor with an attached circuitboard that has a row of RGB LED’s attached in a line from the center and out. When you spin the circuitboard and modulate the LED’s in the right fashion you can create the illusion of a display that’s hanging in midair. This is pretty computationally intensive for an embedded application (72 RGB LED’s that each need to update roughly 5000 times a second) so we used FPGA’s for it. The whole contraption has a built-in GSM phone module, and can communicate with a central server. The idea is that you take the display to a bar or some other outlet and plug it in. It will then automatically call in to the central server and request updates. Each display has a unique ID and thus it is possible to create content and advertising for individual displays, or groups of displays. If for instance you want to advertise in a certain part of town you can buy advertising time on only displays in the part of town you’re interested in. There’s a webbased tool for doing this.
How to get a job in venture capital
That was probably because a few years back when those sites where launched MySQL was much faster. Now PostgreSQL is as fast (in many cases even faster) BUT much more robust out of the box (no corruption worries like with MySQL) and more feature rich (FTS etc is betetr in default).

I think today when building, the choice is not as one sided in favour of MySQL.
Facebook App Categories Ranked By Usage
Why we still don't have that kind of site for Django?
just a thought...
Interesting question is if they could do it again today, what they would choose.
Simple JUnit tests for a Repository style class that does database interaction. I can't remember the exact query or details anymore. Just that we were extremely surprised to see that switching back and forth between minor releases gave different results.
Great idea, there was a clock display on Wired a few years ago that did something similar. Did you guys roll it out?
Agreed. This is pretty much the greatest article ever. The funny thing was I've been thinking about going to Thailand this summer anyway, so this article pretty much clinches it. I get my diploma in a couple weeks (I failed twice at dropping out) so this is the time to do it.
I think it's just the honeymoon is over and people are looking at it a bit more objectively then a year ago when all the Web 2.0 fashionistas were gobsmacked over it.

Don't get me wrong, I like Rails and it's a great framework as long as you keep in mind its warts, but there was a period of about 8 months where Rails was the Second Coming of Christ in web app framework form...
Ask YC : Is Zend Framework good enough for a startup?
I want advice on weather zend framework is good enough for a startup.
(Why) NBC Bypasses Apple to Stream TV Shows to the iPhone
No unfortunately we didn't...

Our focus was on building a media channel, and we thought we would be distracted by doing consumer products as well.
Ask YC: Does anyone know of any good Cobol tutorials?
Okay, well I am graduating from college as a Computer Science major and we were taught the usual C++, Java, etc... but obviously we never got much into the ancient languages. However, the job I got is part of a team converting a companies' applications from COBOL to Java. So, I would like to learn as much COBOL as possible in 2 weeks. Does anyone know of any good tutorials out there that can teach such an outdated language? Note that I have googled for some and got some okay results, but nothing that looks particularly wonderful for learning business level COBOL.

Also, if anyone else has been in a similar situation, I would be very interested to hear about your experiences.

Thank you!
I went to Africa after burning out at my first startup (which spectacularly imploded 9 months later). I recommend travel, but taking time off is not necessarily a panacea. In particular, be realistic about how much money you have and will spend. Otherwise, when you come back you have to scramble to find a job, which isn't an optimal position. In retrospect, the time could have been better spent figuring out a startup of my own.
I think the idea is not to explain what the sites does but the problem it solves. the details of how it solves the problem are less interesting.
Most interesting. A related insight: people will often not think much about what they pay in a social context, but be brutally penny-wise in non-social contexts.

This explains why restaurants can have huge margins, but coffee shops rarely do. It's normal to see people working alone at a coffee shop for hours after paying $1.99 for a coffee. Such behavior is uncommon in a restaurant -- the common script is to go out with friends or on dates to eat socially. A restaurant can charge more for ambience and service. $$$$ coffee shops on yelp are at the level of Starbucks.
Multi-millionaire startup founder throws 29th birthday party...with 300 homeless people
This is why we love startups, right guys?
"in 2007 companies worldwide spent some $280 billion on outsourced call-centre services"

This is a huge market, and as anyone having seen call-centre software from the other end of a phone line can attest: It sucks.

I think that the current approach goes about solving the problem in the wrong way - the focus is on minimising the time per call which leads to an awful experience for the customer. Why not focus on accumulating knowledge instead? 99% of the questions have been answered before, and are basically repetitions. Find a way to dynamically learn answers to common problems that customers have based on previous calls and serve them to new callers. This isn't easy of course, but I think it can be done. And there's a $280 billion market waiting to buy...
Visualization of Google's Trigram Data
Why software reuse has failed and how to make it work for you
did you also post this on reddit? ;-)
Philosophy 2.0 - understanding perennial change and local change
Indeed ;)

Just trying to get a good sample, I guess... I have no real idea of the hell on earth that I am walking into.
Utro vechera mudrenee. Morning evening wiser. Evening! That's the word I couldn't think of :-P

And here's a song about evening:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoNUYLBnX8