skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If MS wants to kill Google, they should build an adblocker into IE that defaults ON and updates regularly. I don't know why they haven't done that. I don't use IE much, but I run FF with Adblocker Plus. One of the chief benefits is that it keeps certain ads and sites from slowing down my surfing.

Of course, it'll probably kill my business...
Illegitimate Name
That's what's great about open source: I can monkey with the security to do custom checks.
Of course there's a world out there beyond the internet, but before the internet it was a lot less likely you'd ever really know what you were missing. Sure, you might know the great diner around the block, but would miss out on the other dozen great ones within a couple of miles that you could have found on yelp.

It's an interesting essay but rather excessively pessimistic I think.

I have of late--but

wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all

custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily

with my disposition that this goodly frame, the

internet, seems a filthy promontory, this most

excellent filigree, the web, look you, this brave

e'erchanging firmament, this majestical net fretted

with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to

me than a foul and pestilent congregation of feces.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!

how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how

express and admirable! in action how like an angel!

in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the

world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,

what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not

me
The climate change diet
My definition of entrepreneur is someone who takes risks in a managed manner. Going on this trip is more about expanding my comfort zone (unfamiliar language) and adding more life experience to my non-work resume.

I agree that it's harder to start a successful company virtually without face to face networking. Silicon Valley will always be Valhalla. There are a handful of people on News.YC who are already living abroad and managing to code to support themselves.
I realize this is only incidental to his article but the Lisp Regex Coach donation-ware is nice: http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/
Outside of work, I code now just to dip my feet in the water. I find coding cuts into my desire to become a better Salsa dancer and networker. Priorities?
Maybe they are getting too busy, too successful? Not a bad problem for them to have - but difficult for us vagabonds.
Personally I enjoy not having a co founder. It makes everything a lot easier. I just get done with things. No dicussions or waiting for other people. I Work when I want and have 100% ownership. I quit my job four months ago, and live off some freelance work and subletting some rooms in my apartment. I have a shared office with cool startup people, so I don't get too lonely, but often work from home. The biggest problem I've encountered so far, is that freelancing can take to much time away from your startup project.
Opera Labs Roll Out Opera Mini For Google Android Phones
Ving, Vang, Vong. Or, the Pleasures of a New Vocabulary.
Linkedin's promise - user experience observations
Would it be possible to specifically mail those who were rejected?I do understand it would be time consuming for you guys, it would be really helpful to all
Google's API is Back
Google long-undead SOAP API is still in that state, but now there is a new (apparently) REST API with JSON output.

Details at http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje in the "Flash and other Non-Javascript Environments" section.

Their description:

"For Flash developers, and those developers that have a need to access the AJAX Search API from other Non-Javascript environments, the API exposes a simple RESTful interface. In all cases, the method supported is GET and the response format is a JSON encoded result set with embedded status codes. Applications that use this interface must abide by all existing terms of use. An area to pay special attention to relates to correctly identifying yourself in your requests. Applications MUST always include a valid and accurate http referer header in their requests. In addition, we ask, but do not require, that each request contains a valid API Key. By providing a key, your application provides us with a secondary identification mechanism that is useful should we need to contact you in order to correct any problems."

This puts things on even footing with Yahoo!'s excellent API.
I'm not sure whether I should take this as a compliment or not. :)

In any case, I think it is more a testament to my laziness than it is my business acumen. I haven't been posting to the blog much lately, and thought this would be a good way to get some insights that I'm sure to be good and my readers will get value out of.
LinkedIn a posh haven from the recession economy storm
Free as in cost software is often just simpler. When I "beg off" suggestions like Beyond Compare, it usually comes from the idea that instead of spending time rooting around for my credit card and putting my personal information in a whole bunch of forms and submitting it, I could spend time finding an option that wouldn't make me feel burned when it doesn't live up to the hype.
I was once again not accepted.

I really wasn't expecting to get in this time, but it really can be a big hit on the ego seeing all these people getting in and not being on the list. However, it shouldn't deter me - I will continue on fighting the good fight. Best of luck to the other applicants.

My idea is great, and I have just starting working on it. I will keep you guys updated, hopefully release before demo day, and with some luck nobody will notice I wasn't in this round.
What's wrong with S-Expressions?
Opera (9.27, Linux) too.
Jef Raskin is one of my heroes.
Results from 2008 ACM Programming World Finals: As always, Russia leads the way.
1	St. Petersburg University of IT
2	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	3	Izhevsk State Technical University	4	Lviv National University
5	Moscow State University	6	Tsinghua University
7	Stanford University
8	University of Zagreb
9	University of Waterloo
10	Petrozavodsk State University
This can be a problem, but there's an excellent solution. You should start attending user groups, be they Python, or Lisp, or whatever. If you can't find a local user group, start one. Give presentations, ask questions, get strangers excited about your idea.
But then I couldn't explain how shitty this was...
They completely ripped off Vimeo.
Would a trial period or shareware solve this problem for you?
This reminds me of CS 350...we used Nachos, here is a good walk through.

http://www.cs.duke.edu/%7Enarten/110/nachos/main/main.html

I got a good laugh from the marking scheme, I had forgot all about this:

Normal = (0.02*A0 0.10*A1 + 0.10*A2 + 0.13*A3) + 0.20*M + 0.45*F
Exam = (0.20*M + 0.45*F ) / 0.65
Assigns = (0.02*A0 + 0.10*A1 + 0.10*A2 + 0.13*A3 )/ 0.35

if ( Exam < 50% ) {
Course Grade = min (Normal, Exam)
} else {
Course Grade = Normal
}

Then on the first day of class they tell you if you fail the assignments, you fail the course.

I really enjoyed taking that course, it was very interesting material.
Dinner in the Sky
When to launch
Not really that interesting. The Internet is just a means for people to communicate faster. If most of it is shit it's because most of what people talk with each other is shit. While I think that got to be changed, I don't blame Internet for that.
From one perspective, the kludge of DOM, CSS, HTML, synchronous communication and occasional and disgustingly jury-rigged asynchronous communication is shit, and the results are as well, so it's pretty hard to avoid.

I built an online application once where on returning to an area of the application it remembered what you'd been doing and all of your data was set up. Numerous people complained about it - colleagues and customers - and all eventually agreed that it was fantastic. But it was so different to their expectations of what a web app should do (i.e. strung-together cgi) that their instinct was to get it purged.

The web does nasty things to our brains, and our ideas of quality. Great post.
But can't you see, the simplicity is the genius of it. Everybody can create a complicated chat tool, only few can create a simple chat tool. ;-)
Excellent Commencement Speech by Bill Gates
It would be nice if all posts would still be linked to the main page somehow. OK, it would be nice for people pondering to crawl Hacker News. Even better would be a zipped download of all the posts...

Still, would crawling be OK? Since the old posts are not linked anymore, I consider crawling by id (check all ids up to 150000 - ugh...). I would try to minimize requests (one topic contains several ids in one go), but still...
Pfft, Russia doesn't always lead. :-p

Thanks for the results.
If that was the solution I doubt we would be having the discussion. Shareware/Trialware is usually only good for enterprise solutions. Places where it makes sense to test it before full deployment.

Once an OSS solution moves into a domain the best I think the market can do is offer a free solution that competes with the OSS and a value-added solution that takes it a step higher.
Prove them wrong ;-).
Well - he has a point!

But everybody has to be able to handle addiction and everybody has to build his/her own crap filters.

We do this more or less successfully with alcohol and TV. Why shouldn't we be able to deal with internet too in the right way?

I propose the author of internets####.org may start a software to distinguish quality from crap in the net. Something where everybody can define his own crapfilters, like with spam.

I'll buy it instantly.
Ubuntu Brainstorm: where ideas have a value?
This is a remarkably common fallacy when interpreting false positives, false negatives, or sensitivity/specificity data. It's a shame Bayesian statistics isn't more commonly known as it's a good way to avoid the misconception.

Simply put: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary support.

If the prevalence of PGD is very low, you need a great deal of weak tests showing positive results or a hypothetical extremely sensitive and specific test showing positive results. Both routes are difficult and expensive.
I have the same problem "John Graham-Cumming" often gets flagged as offensive.
YouTube Updates Layout, Now With Tabs And Statistics
Which seems to be where Eclipse has ended up, I think.
Yahoo Enters The Analytics Business By Acquiring IndexTools
See Where People Are Coming to Startup School From
Programmers' love for "free" software is one of the strangest things to happen to any industry in history. It's like...winemakers refusing to pay 20 dollars for the occasional bottle, but forgetting that they sell a million/year to the public. You lose on one side more than you save on the other.
Program Your Digital Tattoo Designs to Present an Image, Mood or Reminder
Top Ranked Tech Countries
I have no problem paying for software if there isn't a high quality piece of open source software immediately available.

I would rather pay $100 for a piece of software with great documentation and quick setup then spend a day trying to figure out a mostly undocumented but free and open source solution. A lot of people forget the value of their own time when figuring these things out.
I've written a lot of this sort of program over the last 18 months. This is something that people are in need of all the time. I would say that there isn't yet a tool which does this to the level that customers want.

I use Mechanize, both in its Ruby and Python forms (I prefer Ruby) and plain old regular expressions to get the information that I want. Often times I will use a divide and conquer strategy by removing part of the web page (for example, the <head>) and successively paring it down to what I really want.

Javascript can be a problem. What I normally do is actually read the Javascript on the page, and then recreate that behavior in my Ruby code. Often times this means simply setting some form values (usually hidden) and then submitting the form.
Ask YC: Do unpopular languages affect acquisition?
I read somewhere that when choosing a language for your start-up you should pick the most powerful language available (e.g. why Viaweb picked lisp). This sounds obvious, but I can't help but feel like if you build a great product using unpopular language X and your competitor builds a slightly (or even significantly) worse product with popular language Y, then a buyer would prefer your competitor's product for the reasons large companies prefer popular languages in the first place. Has this ever actually been a problem for somebody?
True, but it would give me a better explanation for owning a large cardboard pirate ship than I currently have.
Where does TimBL say that "intelligent agents" will be blindly crawling? Certainly agents have to follow links they haven't seen before (there wouldn't be much point if they didn't), but following links provided by trusted sources is vastly different from what Google does.

> The RDF format deals with "triples" precisely to enable inferences ("syllogisms").

As far as I know, this is not and has never been true.

RDF deals with triples because they're a small unit of data, which makes it easy to take the chunks you want from one dataset and graft them onto another set.

I suppose you can call matching URIs to graft one triple onto another a syllogism, but it would be a stretch; if that's a syllogism then so is joining two tables in a relational database. It has nothing in common with the ridiculous examples Shirky uses.

> If we have to pick sources and massage data by hand as you say, then I'll go with CSV files.

Have fun merging data from multiple sources. RDF can't make this completely painless, but it can make it easier than CSV files.

Your third article doesn't make much sense to me. How is RDF "semantically committed"? An individual RDF vocabulary is "semantically committed", but so is an individual XML schemas or a documented use of JSON. RDF (like XML and JSON, and the generic tools for all 3) doesn't care what you put in it.
How are any of these proposed mergers actually going to, y'know, work? As far as I can see, the only compatible culture for Yahoo is Google, and anything else is going to mean a huge exodus. Of course, with all of the ex-googlers roaming around SV, a few thousand more from Yahoo could make for a very interesting startup climate!
It's healthier not to eat meat and dairy products anyway (at least according to the china study). But unfortunately because of the Malthusian law, a diet change will not help much against food scarcity in the long run.
I think making something that is valuable is most important. Viaweb is one example. Microsoft buying Hotmail is another.

At Scriptics we did everything in Tcl and still got bought.
Your comment reminds me of the underpant gnomes from South Park.

My co-founder and I are moving forward regardless, since our only real expense is server fees and advertising costs. We've also joined both LinkedIn and Doostang and I've begun trying to tap all of my friends who are either smart, connected, or entrepreneurial to get together over lunch and discuss things. As a younger founder, it's great to still have the parents to fall back on for expenses. :$
"Cold calling is dead"? Uh, no it's not, and neither is direct marketing or spam. None of these things are dead because they work.
Rails schema browser plugin: proof of concept
I think that decision is much broader than that. Companies are concerned not only about the product itself, but the market share and the image. They'll rewrite your product from scratch if they have to (and they will eventually sooner or later anyway) in order to get your market share and image.
I would guess that it'd matter if the language poses a problem for when your acquirer tries to integrate you. Of course, this can be greatly outweighed by the value added of your product.
companies will probably start working on projects that don't get as much traction in the OSS land because they're not particularly "interesting" problems for hackers to solve.
My whole point with Hotmail is that it was so valuable that Microsoft bought it despite the fact that the entire infrastructure was Unix.
Thanks for sharing this... But isn't the AJAX Search API to be used from within the browser (client) rather than from a central server?
Hasn't China and Russia/Eastern Europe been winning competitions like these, in all fields (maths, physics, computer science) for ages? How come the winners stop performing when they grow up? Or is it just that it takes 30 years to evolve from "excellent at solving small tasks" to "excellent at solving real tasks"?

It seems to me like these countries (and China in particular) have a culture of overworking and overperforming, while most of the time managing to avoid making a significant impact on society as a whole. A young, ambitious Chinese student studies as hard as most start-up employees, while aiming for much smaller gains.
Ian Bicking: App Engine and Open Source
What's odd is that it varies by community. The Mac software world has been dominated by shareware throughout its existence, and even now it's fairly easy to convince a Mac owner to buy a piece of $20 software that is slightly better than the free alternatives.

The glib explanation for this is that cheapskates don't tend to buy Macs in the first place. I don't think that's the whole story by any means, but it's certainly a start.
Technology can be ported. User base doesn't care about the underlying technology, if they get value from using your service.

Good read from 2000-era

"This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000"

"Hotmail has grown from 9 million accounts when it was acquired by Microsoft, to 100 million in July 2000, without significant changes in the hardware or software architecture"

"The most challenging, and anticipated, problem with converting from CGI to ISAPI derives from the forgiving nature of the CGI..."

[PDF] http://tonnerre.users.bsdprojects.net/doc/facts/microsoft/Ho...
could'nt have said it better:

Schemer: "Buddha is small, clean, and serious."

Lispnik: "Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs." —Nikodemus Siivola
It makes me sad to see them going this route, even though the only things I've used from the have been Flickr, and at times YUI.
>to avoid making a significant impact on society as a whole

I would hardly call launching the first satellite into space, followed by the first man in space, followed by the first unmanned Moon landing, followed by the first space station a result without a significant impact on society. That's with respect to Russia.

Further, if you look at the list of Nobel prize winners, China and Russia are right up there, making huge, positive impact on the society.
also, can you define what do you mean by "excellent at solving real tasks"
We recently implemented a wiki for our project and it's been a big help.
Document it anyway! Although it might seem like a waste of time to write about something that will change, the fact is that all software is potentially throw-away code. That's the "soft" in software - you can and should change it if it needs to change. If didn't document things that might change, you'll either never document or you will be loathe to change code that has been documented. Instead, just look at both the code and the documentation as a working sketch.
I think there is an implicit assumption that, if the pay product was any good, why hasn't someone made a free clone yet?

I think that with development tools, this makes sense. It makes less sense with consumer software.
I love free as in speech software, I don't mind so much if its free as in beer.

I just want to be able to see the source code, tinker with it, and be able to trust it.
Initially yes, and it is intended to be use only for clients, although not only from javascript, i.e. as the guide says also from flash, etc.
But nothing stops you from using it from the server too as it is technically possible, although I guess Google could stop responding requests coming always from same IP address, as would happen if you use your server instead of the client.
In an increasingly international world, making any assumptions about names is just asking for trouble. In some cases even the first name / last name structure doesn't hold up. It's probably best to just assume that the name can be represented by a free-text field.
Do you really find it that difficult or time consuming to type in your credit card number and billing address?

The average time from clicking checkout to finishing paying for the last 5 or so pieces of software I've bought has been less than 3 minutes.

How long do you spend finding your alternatives?
Users, users, users. (or even better: Customers, customers, customers)

Whatever language gets you the best product (and hence the most users) is the best language.

"Once you've got a lead in terms of a subscriber base, that is unassailable ... it would've been easy to pick 15 [Microsoft] guys from 16,000 and build this product. But I knew we had that momentum behind us and that is very hard to replicate."

-- Sabeer Bhatia (hotmail), in Founders at Work
Internet Black Holes
"I've always believed that a relationship isn't something you find, it's something two people build together."
I was reading the comments and saw someone mention fuzzy bunny (fuzzi bunni?) then realized the comments were from 2006.

As for a better solution. Allow anything but flag the names you would normally ban to a moderator to have them checked over.
In my experience free software tends to be better, that's why I also tend towards a "we don't use software that costs money" approach.

Another advantage of free software is that it is available everywhere. If I switch company, or if I am traveling with my notebook or whatever, I can just download the software anew and start coding. It think it is worth a lot - also saving the hassle of evaluation.

If I use an IDE that costs 10000$, that skill will be unlikely to be of any value at the next company I will work for.

Also, free software tends to concentrate on the important aspects, whereas commercial software tends to look good superficially, but is often crap below the hood. (yeah, broad generalization, but that is how I have come to feel).

The only commercial software I have is Windows XP and Computer Games (and XP is needed for the games).
Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault
If you dream or desire of being acquired by Google, strongly consider Python

"Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language" said Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, Inc

"Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers" said Cuong Do, Software Architect, YouTube

http://www.python.org/about/quotes/
That reminds me of Microsoft givng their source code to the European Union (or somebody, I forgot), supposedly so that the European hackers could check that it is safe.

Frankly, I don't think it works that way. People don't check a billion lines sourcecode for security holes just for fun. With normal Open Source software, the code gets some scrutiny because man different people look at it, and they are motivated to do so because they want to improve on it or learn from it. Both motivational factors are missing for commercial software, no matter if the source is open or not.
you forgot allmp3.com and other good and successful non-legal enterprises. Who said they stopped performing?
I'm way too into open source to pay for software unless absolutely necessary. I'd rather contribute a bit of code or support on a mailing list.

Edit: Wow... I didn't do more than glance at the article because I don't really care a lot for that guy's writing, but I missed this: equating open source with pirates. This is generally the point where I decide that a well crafted reply is not worth my time and respond with an insult.