skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Porn and free music."

They may not understand it, but they'll want to check it out.
What would be the main advantages switchpipe has over the conventional mod_rewrite solution under Apache?
I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in the community voting. I think the site/system works quite well as it is. If there would be any tweaking it would be to attribute some kind of score to people/sites which will weight give them a handicap score which will work alongside the standard voting algorithm. I don't agree that they should be automatically banned though
You're correct in that a better system could be implemented than a manual blacklist, but, as my old boss always used to say, "some progress is better than no progress". Although it is nice, you don't need to get fancy when simple things satisfy your needs.

I think you can't really rely on people to withhold their votes when the content is engineered to take advantage of the human psyche.

Could a bayesian filter really separate fact and fiction? Cross-correlated ancedote and rumour? Satire and sensationalism? Humans struggle. Maybe one day...

The community doesn't seem to be able to correct itself, so if the content starts to veer away from the site's original principles, some external force is needed to gently nudge it back on track.

All that said, I don't really have a considered opinion on whether or not blacklisting Valleywag is a good thing; it is not something that I care much about.
That doesn't measure what brand advertising wants to measure, though. If one ad gets 16 clickthroughs that result in 4 transactions, that ad is inferior to one that gets 0 clickthroughs but results in 8 sales when customers actually go to the store.

Brand advertising works because most consumers rely on a recognition heuristic when faced with the dozens of products in a store. They'll buy products they recognize, even if they have no personal experience with the product. You don't go out and buy an All-New Mercedes Benz immediately because you saw it on TV - but when it comes time to buy a car, you're far more likely to buy it because of all the associations that its name & image bring up. You can't measure this with any existing web metrics - it may be years before customers actually go out and make a purchase.
They're profitable, though. So if they wanted, they could avoid taking any more funding, ever, and just grow the company off retained earnings.
Vim Filters: Transforming Java to Perl
A few years ago I looked at an early draft of an essay to see which text made it into the final version. I never published it at the time, because it seemed presumptuous to think anyone else would be interested. But since you ask,

http://paulgraham.com/laundry.html
yes, sure. But the thing is, if you have to do something like work, even if it's the coolest thing, it gets sucky.

For example, I love programming and I love learning math. But working with programming feels really bad sometimes. There are deadlines, there are times you have to work long hours on a row in something you don't like much, or you liked at first but now it doesn't feel good anymore. I'm not sure we can escape that on the system we live in.

Also, doing math on school (high school and university) a lot of times feel really bad. Sometimes you have to take a test on stuff you don't really feel like studying at that time, or maybe you won't feel like studying ever. And you end up not having time to study what you want, or you end up studying less of it.

I don't know, maybe it's the morning coffee talking, but I just don't see the society making progress towards making life of the individual better. Or rather, it seems to associate production with happiness, while I'm not sure that's the case.
Your question misses the point. Essay editing (and double-checking anything, for that matter) is about THINKING.

Write something, then read, THINK, and improve. Repeat.

No more changes on the last pass? You're done.

(How many passes did this post take? Four. The secondary point of this post is to suggest making it a habit of double-checking everything you write)
Yeah, there are three Windows versions and no macos :(. Does anyone even uses windows 98 these days?!

BTW, I've tried XP SP2 (base install) and win98 SE (version with ms jvm 1.1.4). Neither worked, a black screen shows then it says the login failed and says that's error 4096. It was because I had gcj plugin installed on my Debian instead of the sun plugin. It would be nice to have support to gcj, but having support to macOS is more important, I think.
The author seems a little high strung.
I think he's using gcj instead of sun's java plugin. I had the same problem here. I think it would be a nice feature to have it working on gcj (if it's at all possible, because for what I hear gcj has its limitations).
Seconded (by experience)
Profitable, but nowhere near profitable enough to justify the enormous investment they've taken and their valuation.
Show Your Human Side
I disagree. Google's value is in the quality of its results and the speed of search. Facebook's value is in 1) all the users (a social site sucks if your friends aren't there) and 2) it's brand (people know about it and trust it). Someone could buy equivalent technology but not the users or the brand. Remember Google Video vs YouTube?

(fwiw, I think Facebook is valuable but if they can't monetize it, then they're in trouble and it won't bode well for all the other social network sites out there either)
It took a while to get to this point. I ended up taking a (sort of) normal job after the experience. I had quasi-ownership in the company, but I wouldn't say it was a startup.

It helped me to get back my confidence.
Listen to it in audio mode!

http://asp2.readspeaker.net/cgi-bin/oreillyrsone?lang=us&...
Blogging Is Good For Your Social Life
I saw the gcj references and thought the same thing. I will have to do some testing to see where the problem lies. Probably our applet does not work with gcj. We will look into it.
Question: "Even though the value was comparable [cans of sodas and a dollar] --and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways. Why is that?"

Answer: Sane people leave six packs of sodas in refrigerators so the sodas get cold and in case those with access to the refrigerator get thirsty. The old idiom applies: treat others as you would want to be treated.

Dollar bills generally do not belong in refrigerators. Thus there is no social norm reasonably explaining the purpose of the dollars in the refrigerator. The researcher needs to provide an explanation as to why the situations are supposed to be equivalent.
Yeah someone else had the same problem with gcj. I will look at it.
Hmm .. looky, looky .. 1-point comment from a single use account and yet not only it was quoted in TechChrunch cover of the story, but it was also remarkably fit for propagating whatever point Arrington was making.

Does it smell fishy to anyone else ?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/11/hacker-news-considers-b...
Unfortunately, I posted without thinking (or even reading) and hence the business end of the story begins on page two - http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/dayjet/2. The entire rest of the story is significantly shorter than the first page. Sorry about that... :/

In case you don't want to read through the first page, it concerns aircraft development, engine technology and airline politics.
Thanks, but the difference between tribal medicine man and typical grandmother still leaves room for confusion. A typical grandmother knows that computers exist, but a tribal medicine man might spear me for stealing his soul with this mysterious "light box."

The reason I ask is because I wanted to know if I was supposed to explain the computer to this person or just how it interacts with the internet.

Maybe the question could be "explain the internet to someone from 30 years ago. (Computers present, but no complete internet to speak of)"
Power of Django Admin - Even For Non-Django Projects
Frighteningly close, but we're not quite there yet. The "freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect regularity" part is still lacking (consider recent stories about governments monitoring and censoring the internet, and massive outages from damaged cables).
Confirmed or assumed? If this is true, it's a big point against FaceBook's continued success, because it means current employees are underwater until FaceBook's worth more than Ford. One of the big motivators for a startup employee is seeing those options you got for pennies suddenly being worth dollars; if those options won't be worth anything for the foreseeable future, there's little reason why good employees would choose to work at FaceBook instead of Yahoo or Adobe or any of the other mature tech companies.
Also, training users is expensive. Integrating with existing systems is expensive. The price of failure (in opportunity cost) is high enough that most big companies would rather pay 10x for something that WILL work than for something that might work.
Good read. Especially these 2 pearls:

"Very rarely do I have good ideas when I’m working. Work is to execute on those ideas."

"you have to think big but execute small"
That assumes someone actually makes an app which is worth using. Let alone paying for...
It only submits GET forms, you shouldn't use those for those things.
Wouldn't inflation slow the diminishing marginal value of money? If my next dollar is only worth $.90, then it's not as far over my usefulness threshold.
Using software to provide cheap business jet service
Page one of this story is an insanely long, slightly unrelated article about aircraft development, new engine technology and airline politics: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/dayjet. Sorry about linking to page two of the news story, but it is for your own good.
Page one of this story is an insanely long, slightly unrelated article about aircraft development, new engine technology and airline politics: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/dayjet. Sorry about linking to page two of the news story, but it is for your own good.
Scala Talk by Martin Odersky
Show, don't tell.

Or, as Louis Armstrong once said, "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know."
I think there are quite a few exceptions, perhaps you just don't hear about them so much in the media and they sneak up :)
Oh no! You have to make money ??
Well getting investment and perpetuating inflated valuations until someone stupid buys the company sounds a much better idea.
If it's just vnc and the java applet is a vnc client (as it appears), why not let the person choose which vnc client to use? That would allow for greater flexibility and less pain for the guys mantaining the service. The java client could be there only for the people who rather use it that way.
This is not as irrational as it sounds. In our own personal lives, we make decisions like this. As an example, I haven't in recent memory visited a ultra-cheap ethnic restaurant (though I go to more expensive places), because I am worried about their health standards. I am using price as a signal of quality - which is reasonable in a perfectly competitive market, but alas, if a lot of people act like me, the "perfectly competitive market" assumption may not hold. In other words, this "price signals quality" thesis itself depends on people evaluating quality first, and then the market sorts itself out based on quality. But if people start acting en masse on the price-signals-quality assumption, it stops signaling quality.

So this is a perpetual tension (or a perpetual self-referential loop!) that means there are going to be overlooked bargains in the market. In case of restaurants, I am just not that motivated to find them.

I can imagine enterprises feeling that way about IT.
The European Startup Ecosystem is Entering Puberty
Take a look at the following two solutions:

Compiere is open-source system of software applications that provides ERP, CRM, SCM for the small and medium-size enterprise. Versions are available for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac.

Openbravo is a web based ERP for small to median sized business. It's function include finance, supply chain, project management, manufacturing
I was sort of hoping they had a valid credit card number:-)
Check out Exponent Enterprise on my web site. It's better than the others at a fraction of the price. (I've spent the past seven years building it.)
China Tries to Solve its Brand X Blues
Blub thinking. People who have completely bought into the MS stack won't see any value in App Engine.
Targeted Ads Designed for You
grass roots is needed, people in New York (and everywhere) need to know this isn't right; Where were Amazon's lobbyist?! There are good things they do sometimes (this should have been one)
I can't help but think "Does source control matter that much in a startup".

I can see why git may be much better than svn for large groups of developers, but is git really that much better for small groups? Are people really spending much time on revision control?
Do you find that you get better and faster at editing the essays, comparing the first essay to the most recent one? (I imagine so) Or it is something like a constant, but you just find ways to work around it?

I find that writing is good practice to to get my thoughts down coherently. And with a blogging habit, I find I can do it with much more ease, but it still takes a long while to re-edit something.
Well said. Similarly, if I found 6 dollars in a parking lot with nobody around, I'd probably pick it up. But if I found a 6 pack of soda in the parking lot, there's no way I'm picking it up, except perchance to throw it away.
you're right - I forgot that even name brand soda bought in 12 packs or more cost much less than a dollar per can (I think it's less than 50 cents for a 12 pack in cali)

Still I feel that if they modified their experiment to have quarters instead of dollar bills (or upgraded the cans to mini-bottles while keeping the dollars), it may have had the same result
I think the ideas are good, now for the execution. As the years go by (only 23 of them) - I find people can make an average idea fabulous; although the wrong people can make a good idea bad;
That's an interesting question, but you can replicate this experiment in a variety of ways and see the same result. My mother is a nurse, and she has a saying that goes something like, "Leave a $50 bill in the break room, and nobody will touch it, but leave a plate of brownies and they're gone before you can tell people to take one."

Since it won't cost you much, try this:
Leave a box of pastries or chocolates somewhere people congregate (the lunch room, a common kitchen, etc. Probably not on the street :). Count how many are left the next day. At another point, leave the cash equivalent. Count how much is missing at the end of the day.

In the vast majority of cases, the food goes (in the absence of explicit permission), but the money doesn't.
Good Read! - I think freemium is the best model for most internet 'service' and 'software as service" - its not as good as having a $29 widget, or even a $3/mo residual; but traction is 10x easier to gain.
It's the best thing to have happened. You were a little obsessed. Now become a lot obsessed with yourself. Essays and some rent money don't have all the answers. No one really does.

People, please stop obsessing over this stuff. It's nice. It's great. But imagine this: Instead of spending your time raising money, spend your time making money. If your product isn't ready then take on some part time consulting.

It's not hard to earn enough to pay the rent.

For me the holy grail would be 100% in control of my destiny. Taking early seed money is actually being rejected from the world of 100% ownership.

So rewind. Do some part time work to pay the bills. Launch and make a ton of money, and keep it all for yourself (and your cofounders).

How much fun would that be?
Should have read, "volume is no substitute for profitability".
If you are going to learn something, then why not learn something that will scale? If you can already make SVN dance, sing and bring you dinner then the economics might be different of course :)

Personally I wanted to learn Git as a couple of projects I track are now hosted in it. So I took the nuclear option and started using it to version control ~/ and power my backup system.
But then he tried another variation: Before doing the test, he asked one group of subjects to name 10 books they had read in high school. He asked another group to name as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. The group that listed the books followed the same pattern as the earlier test – they all cheated a little. But the group that named the commandments was different: Nobody cheated at all!

"Just the act of contemplating morality eliminated cheating," Ariely explains.

This conclusion seems like one someone wanted to make, not one that makes sense.

Couldn't it just be that people know the ten commandments are easily checked, so it's silly to try to make some up?

And I don't understand how they know people cheated on the books question. How can you possibly find out what books someone read while in high school? Unless they mean specifically which ones were assigned (which still seems hard to verify).

And if people listed some titles they hadn't read it doesn't imply cheating: they could simply be remembering incorrectly.
Don't plates of food carry implicit permission? One person wouldn't bring a plate full of brownies if she intended it only for herself.

And if she did she would make a note saying so.
Git is not just a better revision control. It changes the way you do things. I am just a lone entrepreneur... not a part of some giant team. It lets me do things that was never possible before. I know I sound like a zealot but I don't know how to convince you. Perhaps I can say it is like the difference between Java and Python. But I don't want any language war crap confusing the issue here.

Okay I'll leave you with this. It is Linus' speech that convinced me to give Git a shot. Listen to it and if it doesn't make you try Git, then I guess you don't need Git.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2199332044603874737...
Pity to ignore SV VCs who have London offices. I worked with Accel when I was in California and they have a well established London office: http://accel.com/people/index.php?group_id=122000
I'm about to switch from svn to git, and I'm hoping it'll make a difference. My webapp has been released a while now and here's how I'm hoping git will help my release cycle:

I don't like / use svn's branching support. So, after every release I'm reluctant to start any major development. What if I've pulled the guts out of my app, and a critical bug is discovered?

Clearly not a problem if I have either a stable branch that I can apply the bug fix to, or a branch for whatever major feature I'm working on.

It's quite possible that this is my shortcoming and has nothing to do with svn vs git. But, if switching to git (which seems to have great branching support) is what it takes for me to adopt a better practice then I'm for it.

Anyway, I think SCM is a major part of running a software startup. It has too much of an effect on operations not to be important.
yep, totally agree - i coulda mentioned them (and benchmark/balderton) along with index. accel seem to be much more confident than the london-only vcs.
30 Seconds with Paul Graham/Trevor/Jessica during Startup School
600 attendees with brilliant ideas and concepts. Everyone will want to talk to PG, Trevor, or Jessica to hear their comments or opinions. Instead of fighting among 600 people to have a chance to talk to them about an idea during Startup School, how about setting up assigned 30 second time slots?

Or if PG has the time, there could be submission of ideas/concepts he finds interesting and the potential of having a minute reserved for that particular person/startup for 60 seconds of advice for Startup School Applicants
HP-UX Powered by Linux Development Tools?
I think the biggest dichotomy in outlook occurs when you finally discover or stumble on a tool of great quality which is also either free, or a very good bargain. After that point it becomes worth it, on a personal level to invest time into finding more of those gems. You become a believer in what I like to call the "hidden gems" -a less obvious, and often more elegant solution to a problem. (Be it software, or a life choice, or anything.)
How a hacker became a freedom fighter
Ok, here's another example. Only a few people I know, a small handful, have had roommates take money from them. However, virtually everyone I know has had a roommate take food from them (or has taken food from a roommate) without permission.
Bruce Golden who runs the London Accel office is someone I know very well (he was on the board of one of my companies) and I think the team there does 'get it' with regards to Europe and they have a large fund and the experience of seeing what worked in SV.
True. Advertisers sometimes say half the money they spend on advertising is wasted, but they don't know which half that is. Internet spending might be smaller because advertisers can figure out which half of ad spending they are wasting.
Right, that is how brand advertising works. But given the structure of the web, you can get an estimation of how effective it is by how users respond to it (clicks).

Put yourself in the position of an ad exec who has $n dollars to spend on his campaign and has to present to a superior how effective it was. If he has a web ad placement, the execs in charge of the money are going to immediately query him on what they got out of it (how much traffic they got from it). Adsense has spoiled companies into being far more demanding on number metrics on effectiveness. I can't think of 1 flash ad, branding or not, that does not have the option to click and learn more about the product. They are measuring the ad resonance, transaction driven or not.

The fact of the matter is, companies want a return on their web ads they can quantify. They measure using stuff like this:
http://www.vizu.com/

When they don't get it, branded or not, they leave: http://mdurwin.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/corporations-leave-s...
Microsoft Remains Favorite
Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts You Probably Don’t Know About
Puppeee: Puppy for your Asus Eee PC
Interview: Patrick Collison of Auctomatic on his company's acquisition by Live Current Media
Good read, thanks! The draft seemed to me more living and personal, while the finished version is pure idea. I wonder if it's possible to keep the intimate tone when you're editing for clarity.
It's a cool story; why'd you delete it?
oops, I meant browsershots is GPLd, not browsershots.org
Geek Politics FTL
Ask YC: Has anyone switched from OS X to Ubuntu?
I'm considering switching from OS X to Ubuntu full-time for both personal and development work. One of the reasons (although not the only) is that since I run Ubuntu on my server, I'll be able to develop on the same platform my apps will be running on. Before anyone mentions it, I do know I can run Parallels/VMware on OS X with Ubuntu virtualized, but I'd like to see if anyone has made the switch completely and if they either regret it or love it.
Too much whining. Don't like it? Don't use it. They will likely support other languages in the future.
I love svn's branching support. I always work in new branches and then merge them back to trunk. I never have trunk anything but what is 100% working and deployed, and then branches can be in any shape. This way you aren't afraid to check in code.
Excellent post.

I particularly hope the predication about SeedCamp comes true. It really does need to become more like YC if it's going to have as big an impact. Alternatively they could start again from scratch and keep it much simpler.

It seems to me that SeedCamp's biggest problem might be that there are so many people involved. Committees of even the brightest people are good at making ok decisions but rarely take the risk of making brilliant decisions.
provocative..but he's right. not going to be quick nor easy, but here in Europe we're comin' atcha!