skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IPhone rumors galore: Haptic / vibration feedback touchscreen, GPS, Jabber, etc.
I did learn. That doesn't mean most people could figure it out on their own. It's very complicated to install programs on most Linux distros. Any non-programmer would give up in frustration.
I've never used Consolas...but it's the small height of Liberation that bugs me. For some reason it hurts legibility for me far more than I would have expected. I'm trying it again, at 10 points just to see if maybe it was a "what I'm used to" thing, but I think I'll be going back to Deja Vu. I might give Consolas a try...I've heard so many good things about it. Screenshots don't make me love it, but one can't really know until using it for a while.
Ballmer's laptop?
I was mostly referring to your dislike for the "copy apps to the Applications folder" on OS X. It's not that hard; in fact I think it's one of the nicest parts of OS X. (and I'm not a Mac user, BTW.)

As for Linux... I posted something like this earlier; if you can't learn to use your software, then you're going to have to pay someone to write easier-to-use software. You act like it's the end of the world that software you didn't pay for doesn't work exactly like you want.
Beautiful. SLIME works with Scheme, right?
I do know about that. Baseball has 30 teams that play 162 games per year each. It's far and away the most attended. I seem to remember them selling about 80 million tickets a year. I believe NASCAR is around 5 mil total.

NASCAR probably does have the highest average viewers at live events (they do have crazy amounts of seating) but they can't compete with baseball's 2400+ games per year. NASCAR has just over 110 events per year if you count Sprint, Nationwide, and Craftsman truck series. (I could be wrong on this, but I'm close. Pretty sure it's one race per series per week for 9 months.)

So NASCAR isn't #1 by any metric any person would normally use to define it. In fact, the Yankees alone sell almost as many tickets as all of NASCAR put together. The NFL, NBA, and MLB all outsell NASCAR by over 5x in terms of tickets.

NFL and MLB are also dwarf NASCAR in terms of revenue. Both are near $6b, which is roughly 3x NASCAR. (This also means that the NFL's average revenue per game is about 10x MLB).

Don't forget, I run a sports-related startup :)
It's not hard to install applications on a Mac once you know how. It's just very counterintuitive, and a little tedious.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Linux being hard to use for the average Joe, and I certainly wasn't complaining about it. You're totally missing the point. The original quote was "If you can use Windows, you can use Linux." For 99%+ of the population this is untrue. Any moron can get around Windows with no prior instructions. They might not be editing the registry, but they'll be able to download and install programs. Not so with any Linux distro I've ever seen (haven't used Ubuntu yet).
Land of lisp
I think installing programs in Linux is easier than Mac or Windows, but it is fundamentally different.

You do all of your installing and uninstalling from one application, called "Synaptic Package Manager" in Ubuntu. It works really well as long as you figure out you need to launch Synaptic to install anything.
I pity someone who spends more than 90% of their time in emacs. In fact, I pity anyone who spends 90% of their time in any text editor. Googling for things alone probably takes up 10% of my time, plus the time spent in my app, plus the time spent doing none of those things.
I look forward to trying it out!
DMGs auto mount by default if you use Safari (which the kind of people you're worried about would be doing). When they do, the window also automatically opens presenting them right away with the application.

In the best case, they could just click on it and the right thing would happen. This works, but the results aren't what you'd expect usually, since the app will go away once the dmg is gone. The exception to this is Delicious Library 2 (unreleased), the only app I know of that will tell the user the app was loaded from the disk image, and offer to put it in /Applications for you.

In the second best case, you are given the shortcut, and you manually drag it yourself. Then you click applications, and then you click the app. Perhaps a little convoluted.

In the worst case(and by worst I mean, worst assuming the standard default configuration), you aren't presented with the applications folder link and you end up dragging it anywhere -- perhaps the Desktop. But, if you do that, the app still works! That's the beauty of the app bundle, it doesn't matter where you launch it from.

Could the whole process be refined? Yes. And developers are actively making it better (just like they are actively making things like upgrades better with Sparkle). I for one, though, still think its much more friendly than any windows installation with its ridiculous wizards, shortcuts added to four different locations, and the mess that is the windows registry.
I think when the net goes to the IPv6 there will be many more domain options
I have to say, I'm fairly sanguine.

I mean, the worst it can do is not make much money, right? And whether it succeeds or fails, it will provide a real-world test of those assertions that ideas really are worthless, rather than just highly illiquid assets.

I think they have at least a decent chance - provided that the tech guys get a sufficient proportion of the equity they take that they have skin in the game. I watch with interest.
'A girl with some sort of mullethawk and a tattoo creeping up her neck asked me if I needed help and I almost said “no, but you do.”'

You know, that seems a pretty hostile way to (almost) talk to a stranger. Maybe it's a cultural thing ...
jQuery seems nice, but I would recommend learning pure JavaScript and DOM first. Sometimes its helpful to understand what's going on underneath the higher level abstractions (which is the same reason I recommend learning C and maybe even some assembly)
It may be true for people who have been 'trained' to use windows.
If you start with a fresh person though, using linux is pretty simple. My kids all grew up using linux (No windows really allowed in our house).

"Any moron can get around Windows with no prior instructions."
Really not true. How often do people search and search for the right sub menu to change some hidden setting? What about the constant registry issues not to mention viruses etc

99% of the population don't download and install programs. Sorry, but they don't. So your argument makes no sense. For 99% of the population, as long as they can run firefox, office prog + email, they're all set. In which case Windows, Linux, OSX all work for the average joe.
What Excessive Pay Package?
I can't tell, are you being sarcastic? You realize AJAX is just a fancy name for using JavaScript to load content dynamically?
In mentioning that its "the new things that give you an edge," are you suggesting that web2py is one of those new things? In what non-trivial way do you feel that it differentiates itself from the literally hundreds of other web frameworks?

Examining the documentation I found the unsatisfying answer: "web2py is better because it is faster, it is easier to use, and it is stable and always backward compatible."
Google as a shield from RIAA lawsuits
This is simultaneously very cool, and very sick.

Oddly enough, that combination seems pretty common where Emacs is concerned.
Good article. It gets at one of the more difficult nuts to crack in Agile development-- how to organize the project so as each iteration produces actual business value to the end-user.
Nice! I'd love to see a follow-up that deals with the "Sideways Heaps" that Knuth discusses in his last "Computer Musings" lecture (on video at http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/students/Dam_ui/pages/Archived...)
So...Skype dropped the ball (didn't develop a mobile client), got their asses handed to them (by iSkoot, which did, and got a Hutchison partnership out of it) - and then decided to catch up cheap by making their own, rather than buying the startup.

So why should Skype buy iSkoot - especially now they've fully duplicated their one big asset? The article doesn't really make much of a case.

I can understand the sympathy with iSkoot, as the startup underdog - but they were playing in Skype's back yard, in territory that really should have belonged to the bigcorp from the start, and so it should surprise nobody when the gorilla chooses to "build, not buy". (Especially for such a relatively simple product...)
I'm trying to apply recommendation systems to baby naming: http://emilyoremma.heroku.com/
Upmodded you because i don't see why your comment points should be negative, but let me assure you that your 50 year old aunt won't be able to install MythTV or whatever on windows either, it depends on the app, not the OS.
Doesn't seem worth the effort for something I'm really convinced is right beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don't even think being proven wrong could convince me to change. It seems like a good idea for society to say bad things about tobacco.

I'll leave the argument at "fix the wikipedia article."
> Also I don't quite get his desire to "live in" some giant all-in-one software package. I think it should be obvious now that Unix philosophy of many little specialized tools proved to be more flexible than uber-environments.

Emacs isn't one giant software package. It's a lot of small, specialized tools (functions) working together. It's one executable in your operating system, but that doesn't mean that it can't be modular inside.
HBase Leads Discuss Hadoop, BigTable and Distributed Databases
Firefox for Emacs users
Ask YC: Someone builds your idea in return for equity. Good idea?
re: parent - it's called sarcasm, people.
Your Weight Loss Problem and Diabetes
The onset of type 2 diabetes carries with a specific symptoms which can be mistaken for other diseases. To learn what these symptoms are and how to avoid this disease read this article.
It is counterintuitive. Fortunately, after I got my Mac, the first few programs that I installed had a giant "Drag the Application Icon to your Applications Folder" message when I opened the .dmg file. After the first time, I got it. Admittedly, I thought it was kinda silly the first time I did it. But now I really like it.
Malware gets an EULA
>Modern license agreements take a great deal of (deserved) fire for being absurdly draconian, but even the likes of Adobe and Microsoft don't claim that purchasing a version of their respective products locks the user into buying future editions.
I think in most cases when you add a feature you end up touching everything in each of the layers.

It's only when you want to change something that it's possible that you might just be restricted to one layer.

I think the idea of the template is that you have one template and many views, and possibly that a template can be created of many different smaller templates, e.g. header, footer, sidebar.

Here is an example of something that I wanted to do with a very specific template that wouldn't be used on any other page.

My model gives distance in meters, for each of the objects and I wanted to display it in miles. So I had to add a new method to the model dist_miles. Instead of just saying round(cinema.dist / 1600, 2) in the template.

I've only been using django for a week now so its quite possible that I'm going about it all wrong.
Wow. The Jobs Reality Distortion field existed even in 1984. The crowd was going apeshit over a pitiful demo--the Amiga was already being shown to press in '84 and was released less than a year later...I certainly knew that the Mac wasn't all that impressive at the time. My Commodore 64 even had 16 colors and could talk using SAM, and the C64 scene demos blew away everything that Mac slideshow was doing. But the crowd is simply orgasmic.

How does he do it? What is it that Apple people are seeing that makes them so excited by everything Jobs demos? Really, it's something I've never understood...I see overpriced underpowered machines, and yet, for fans, every Apple product is a little piece of heaven.

So, obviously, I'm managing to miss the point of the article pretty resoundingly, but oh, well.
Great article! I'm struggling with how to respond to an argument from a customer. The customer wrote me a long
email, refuting an article I wrote on the pros and cons of
using CSS in web design--setting the priority to high, no
less. In her letter, she tooted her own experience and
skills. Your article helped me realize why her letter
rankled me. It wasn't that she was disagreeing--I'm not
passionately for or against CSS and could care less what
she thinks about it. But by citing her credentials
the way she did, I felt she was calling my own into
question and using that as her basis of an argument. So
I'd put her debate in the Variant of the DH1. Ad Hominem
category.

And I've decided not to respond to her letter, customer or
not. Not only because it was demeaning, but also, because
I don't have the time or energy to launch round two.

This all got me thinking about how tired I am of the way
that people on the net feel they absolutely must write and
argue about something-- anything--they disagree with. So
many out there are quick to express their contempt for
other people's ideas and opinions. Most such arguments seem pointless and are usually fruitless.

If I read something I disagree with on the net, I take from it what I think is of value and ignore the rest. Time
is just to too short.
Maybe it's not that far off the beaten path, and I assumed that it was because it isn't that well documented... shrug
If we're going to posit extraterrestrial life, I'd view the fact that they've stayed hidden from us as a de facto sign of intelligence. "Smart enough to stay the fuck away" sounds like a good start, to me.
Valley of Broken Dreams: A YC Postmortem
The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)
It depends on your role in the organization.

I've hired a lot of coders in my time, and I have to say that (given a baseline of competence) I'll hire communication skills over additional coding prowess pretty much every time. For a coder who is part of a team (and not the founder of a start-up) you can't "always get someone better than you to do the talking."

In most corporate situations, coders who can't effectively communicate with their peers or supervisors are essentially worthless, regardless of how slick they code.
The one thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
I think you misread the article.

The article was about improving your programming career, not creating solutions, forming a startup, becoming a great programmer, etc. To improve a career, you need to communicate better. It didn't say that it was the single most important thing to do overall. It was specifically about career advancement.

Even in the startup arena, there are lots of capable coders who have created awesome solutions who just don't know how to connect and communicate to the right people. After all, it's not the idea -- heck, it's not even the code, it's the ability to communicate effectively to people that makes a startup run. You can have the next best thing to sliced bread and if you're not able to communicate (market, sell, persuade) it doesn't really amount to much, right?
You know who else had high IQs? Ted Bundy, The Unabomber and Charles Manson.
I'm certain Africans (the people) can do it, but probably just in South Africa (which is most stable) and certainly not in the Sudan, Ghana, Zimbabwe (which ironically is inside ZA), Nigeria or all the other countries (almost all?) with social unrest.
Yep, all wrong :) You want a custom filter: http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/templates_python/
I'd be happy to hear about the online dating ideas. I think that is an are that's ripe for new thinking.
Indian Premier League Twenty20 Cricket Match
Date : Tue 29 April 2008
Live Match Start : 20:00 local, 14:30 GMT
Match Type : 16th Match Indian Premier League
Team : Kolkata Knight Riders v Mumbai Indians
Venue : Eden Gardens, Kolkata
Live Streaming 16th Match IPL Watch
I should have reposted my old YC interview advice comment... I'll write a new set for the next round.

One of the main tips and a reason we didn't get in is that if PG and co suggest some kind of change to you, you should agree with whatever they say. One thing they're testing for is flexibility. Don't waste time defending yourself against them because you can't win.

Whatever they told you, think about it, run with it, and reapply in 5 months. If you can actually make progress towards solving online dating they'll accept you in a heartbeat. If YC was a VC that had a model for the types of companies they were going to invest in, online dating would be at the very top of the list.
Since you've trained with n-back (for two years!):

Did it improve your fluid intelligence?

How has it affected you personally?
“What has greater social impact than online dating?!”

getting laid with online dating ?
There's a port of SLIME for Scheme48 v1.3. It's apparently usable, but unfinished. I don't know of any other ports to other Schemes...
just going through the process of failing already puts you ahead. after school, most people don't put themselves in positions where they can fail at something. it's not human nature. so congrats.
you're putting waaaay too much weight on this silly idea of startup success. seriously man, put things in perspective. what exactly were you expecting to get? life comes with its own sets of problems regardless of where you are.

if you have any savings go and travel the world. if you don't, work for a year, and then do it. my guess would be that 3 months from now you'll be laughing at yourself.

good luck.
ITunes Store May Capture One-Quarter of Worldwide Music by 2012
Most regular people would say this guy has too much time on his hands. I say (and I'm sure all of you too) that he is AWESOME.
The Emerging Main Street Web
why do you think the time is ripe?
Mind's Limit Found: 4 Things at Once
If you'd like to try them before upgrading, you can use VirtueDesktops from www.virtuedesktops.info - it's free and a pretty good virtual desktop app.
I think both install processes suck, in their own ways.

Mac does due to all the reasons listed by the article.

Win sucks (at least circa XP, I haven't touched Vista) in that each installer is often still inconsistent and unique in its own little annoying ways. Plus you have issues with apps putting shared files all over, in different directories, so uninstall is a mess. Mac install is better in that regard, since uninstall usually means dragging the .app to the trash.
First, +1. I think there is a lot of room for debate around this subject, and frankly this was exactly the debate I hoped to provoke (which is why I included a video of Jobs introducing macintosh, a product he really did not create in the engineering sense).

Should we be like Woz? like Jobs? Should we strive for a partnership like Woz + Jobs? Hire a "Sales Animal" and a PR firm as Paul has described doing with his company?

And what is the role of an incubator/angel/YCombinator? Can it help programmers focus on programming? Or is there something really fundamental in "communicating well" that is necessary to successfully creating programs?

I think there's a lot of room for discussion around this, and I hope it's as productive for you to weigh the various options and outcomes as it has been for me in my life.
Why Everyone Should Backup Google Calendar to Their Own Computer
Secret to life: it's about the stories.

Fifty years from now will you remember that day spent coding, or will you remember your adventure in California?
Why Women Live Longer Than Men - A Pictorial
Note to self: must remember to do more group-think.
Linux and Formula One
Just like OP, one thing I didn't like about the interviews was the instant and final yes-or-no answer. In our case, YC said they were worried about a problem we did not think would be a serious issue. We did come up with a solution, but only a few hours later, which, apparently, was too late.
Ted Neward evaluates 20 programming languages
The only question to ask is :How experienced is the team in converting ideas to businesses ?

...and if not then it's like someone attempting to build a car factory without knowing what a gearbox is.
I'm 1/4th of the way through this article and confused already... Steve writes:

I never managed to use XEmacs for very long, because it crashed a lot

but then

XEmacs doesn't crash any more often than Firefox

and

XEmacs may crash even less than Eclipse and IntelliJ

For me Firefox and Eclipse are rock solid. So what is it? Does "a lot" mean every 6 months? Or every day?
That's pretty funky. Turn of author style sheets in your browser and see a lot of O's, parentheses and bullets. Nice.
Aiee! How many times has this been submitted and voted up now?

I count three, now:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176381,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176381,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176055 and

This is getting silly. At least this particular submission linked to the actual website of the people doing it...
These sites are popping up all over the place: http://www.killerstartups.com/Social-Networking/eLogoContest...
Atlanta Early Stage Investors
Newsflash: Display Ads On The Internet Don't Work
One-line web server in Ruby
I disagree, I think display ads work much better than text ads. Display ads have the benefit of always being SEEN, which means that I'm getting the message the advertiser wanted. When I see display ads for some TV show, game, or upcoming movie it registers with me even if I don't click though on the ad.
I would estimate that there are just as many startups using .NET than all the other languages combined. And when I say startups, I mean serious ventures; I'm not talking about some guy with a day job who writes a front end for Amazon or GoDaddy. Pretending that people don't use .NET just because you don't (or the predominance of the folks on this board) is just myopic.
Why Chinese is so damn hard
Self-Copying Factories
> your 50 year old aunt won't be able to install MythTV or whatever on windows either

Especially since MythTV only runs on Linux. :-)