skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC : Do you see a different login name sometimes? when you're not logged in?
Sometimes (like 5%?) I see a different login name, when i go to news.ycombinator.com for the first time. This time i saw some login like (jopamer (1) | logout). And then, when i clicked on new, my real login name appeared. I guess this is something related to caching.
Liberation Mono - Ultimate Coding / Source Code Font
and it always means I go to basecamp.com or campfire.com and then remember...
Check out http://www.quotesignal.com/merchant-account-comparison-calcu... *

If you get a quote, run it through this calculator first. The site only has two partners right now, but check them out anyway.

Also, the blog has some information for how to calculate what your costs are going to be: http://www.quotesignal.com/blog//?p=4

It's a three-part series.

* I co founded this site.
Web2py is a joke. The guy wrote his own ORM, rather than working with the best-of-breed Python ORM SQLAlchemy, and he touts this as a feature. He was also quick to point out that Web2py won a rumble, but fails to mention that this was because none of the other Python frameworks had even heard of it.

If you want a good Python framework that doesn't unduly dictate your app structure, go to Pylons.
hahahahahahahaha, those guys are making bank off of the publicity they're getting. The lawsuit probably won't even cost them near what they're getting. Its nothing more than a bundled up hackintosh. Their product is pure hype from the digg/slashdot/blogosphere. Any mention of a lawsuit is only helping them make more money.

I kept an open mind when everybody said (and even on here), OMG they won't last till the next day, apple is going to sue them hard!!! You'd be surprised how crazy stuff works out in the real world.
There are two questions: what's the best presentation for a given subject and audience, and what's the best way to improve your skills.

IMO, a good presentation with whatever-you-call-the-visuals is more difficult to do well, therefore that's what I think you should practice.

Speeches and demos are always easier to give. They may be more appropriate for certain subjects, no doubt.
I am from Tunisia (north Africa). I did http://markkit.net and it will be the next google.
or maybe i just read techcrunch and like posting interesting stories to my favorite news aggregator news.yc The plot thickins....
Did you read the article? The subject of the experiment had, for example, "downloaded music using uTorrent before in Windows" and that affected the results of the experiment. She might be representative of a high percentage of friends of the news.yc community, but there's no way she's representative of 99% of the population.
Jerry Weinberg's New Website
got a 503 when trying to access http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/
What this really means is that, regardless of which email service you actually use, Xobni will really be your email hub. They'll have your contacts, attachments, and conversations from all your accounts. I presume Gmail and hotmail releases are in the pipeline too.

Hats off to Xobni, for expanding from the analytics side to being an hub for all email activity.
Why can't we at least do two tasks at the same time? It would be great to do the dayjob on autopilot and meanwhile think about greater things.

Recently I read about Feynman's counting experiment, so I wonder if maybe it is doable to some extent.
For you, it's not (I'm talking usability for novice to intermediate level users, not just specifically tool-tips). If you're looking for wide adoption of this technology by current Windows users, it's showstopper.
So should you.
Free Stuff You Will Love To Knew About
The Flourish conference was sponsored by Google. The creators of Django, CackePHP and Rails were on the mailing list and some even replied to it. I agree that if nobody else participated it is not a victory. I would not say web2py won, I would say web2py was not afraid to participate and delivered a working project in 24 hours that met the specs. The organizers said web2py won. Ask the organizers. Ian Biking was on the jury.
It is plausible that this wasn't an intentional leak, but it's awfully conveniently timed with the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. This would lose a lot of the buzz if Microsoft-Yahoo had already gone through.
I remember learning Photoshop, and it was hard, too. I am not convinced that Photoshop is simpler than Gimp, they are just different.

Gimp is a bit old fashioned with it's dozens of little windows, though. I think there is a "make it look like Photoshop" mod of Gimp, actually.
Ack, not a good place to be. On a roadmap. LOL
"enterprise" does not mean it is developed by an enterprise. It means it was developed for the enterprise. For one thing it means it is stable and always backward compatible. It also means it packages everything you need including support for xmlrpc web services, file streaming, if_modified_since, partial content, distributed transactions, ticketing system, etc.
Ubuntu is actually really, really good. What sucked most about it was the Flash problem. I say the problem lies with Flash, which is closed source.

Those issues the girl-friend had are really not so severe. She would have had the same issues or worse the first time she used windows. Definitely worse the first time she would use OS X.
So now we know they're for real.

I'm pretty sure what's happening is a home business started making these and now is getting overrun by the press they are getting. It will be neat to see how they cope with it, but I don't think the outlook is good for them.

Time will tell.
You're right, she sounds somewhat more savvy than the average user, so her troubles should be even more worrisome. If she cannot do something, it is likely that >90% of other users also cannot.
Of course free software is not the answer for everything. It's just a good effort towards freedom when it comes to software development and use. I appreciate that freedom very much, that's why I like free software.

Free software doesn't mean you can't charge for them, it only means that the user of the software trully owns it, as opposed to simple having the right to use it.

Where I live it's very common to see companies that will write management software for other companies and sell it to them. I don't see any reason why they couldn't be selling free software, it would be very benefitial for the client because he would be able to even maintain the software if they want to. Or they can even contract a different company for maintaining the software. You give your client a lot of freedom this way.
I still can not figure out how to get my nvidia drivers working in ubuntu, after upgrading from 7.10-8.04 LTS. Windows is still more productive for me, I do want to be fully on ubuntu by the end of june though. So I have a few more months.

Right now my plan is to format my ubuntu partitions and to start over with 8.04.
I use CS3, because that is what my client community uses. GIMP is not a replacement for CS3. Gimp is a photo tool like photoshop is a photo tool, but it is not Photoshop!

How many clients do I look access too, when I can not just use CS3? How much is that worth? $2,300 I spent on CS3 seems cheap in comparison.

If you want converts, GET WINE WORKING! Heck, I will buy windows to have the really DLLs, I just want it to work in Linux.

MACs just work because Mac users that want to run windows, BUY WINDOWS and run it in OS X. There is some software that people ARE willing to pay for it to JUST WORK.
I think it's worthwhile for Ubuntu to aim at converts from Windows. I also think this experiment was useful. I just thought the significance of the result should have been stated differently. Making Ubuntu friendly for computer-illiterate people is a separate, but also worthwhile goal, and would call for different experimental subjects.
The entire argument is based on a fallacy: the idea that most of the software engineering industry makes money selling existing software.

Actually, most of the software engineering industry makes money from selling their services to build new software, or maintaining existing software that was previously built in the same way.

The question of whether the software is then shrink-wrapped and sold for money is irrelevant. As a Ruby on Rails developer, I couldn't care less what my clients do with the applications I build them (except, of course, within the context of building them an application that better meets their needs). And the fact that Ruby on Rails is open source makes no difference to that - except, perhaps, in that it allows me to work solo and so not have to deal with a large team of incompetent people in my daily work.

Actual software licences are a very small market, most of it owned by giants like Microsoft and Apple.

Daniel
Indeed. I don't understand. How else is it possible to write HTML? (without obscene disgusting things like Frontpage or Dreamweaver of course)
Actually there are quite a few good lifestyles available if you charge for licenses of your software and you are a small software shop.
yeah. Khoi Vinh is a pro and so is his staff. NYTimes is a whole department unto itself. any all web company/department is going to do everything all hand coded.
I just made many corrections. I could find only 2 published books. please send me a personal email if you have other corrections and they will be incorporated.
Can you make any specific point so that it can be addressed or are you just ranting as usual? Who is doing marketing here? Since when computer science is about faith?
I think the error would go both ways. Average users might fail where she succeeds, e.g. she recognized the Firefox icon immediately. They might succeed where she fails, e.g. they won't search the web for .exe files.

Just to be clear, I do think this experiment was worthwhile. It's important for Ubuntu to be usable by more savvy users. I just think a separate experiment would be needed to truly measure usability for computer-illiterate users.
I'm still in University taking a design degree, and most of the students, who want to get started on building websites, don't ask the teachers to learn HTML or any other languages — instead they ask: 'Can you teach Dreamweaver?'

The same happens with other areas, they ask specifically for the software, not the subject. It's the WYSIWYG generation.
India sets world record, launches 10 satellites at one go
Startup Failure Rates — The Real Numbers
inklesspen, don't all framework/orm whatever come out when a guy is frustrated with what's there and starts it's own?
Doesn't Django have its own ORM?

You can say that his ORM solution is crappy, or doesn't work well, but you can't dissmiss something just b/c it is not one of the old packages.
While I may not want to use his framework for anything mission critical, it seem to be a good choice for a small and app or for quick prototype development.

His main points in his framework is simplicity and ease of starting.
the perfect measure of UI success, is based on the total efficiency of the system. If 10 million users have a problem with a driver that could be easily fixed with one command line call. you still have:

10 million * (30 min on google + 1 hr reading docs + 1 min typing the command line)

that is a 15.0166 Million person hour loss.

Making the process more efficient, does not involve making it easier to Fix the problem for the user, it involves making the problem not existent.

The number 1 rule of design is "if a user does not need to make a decision, then you should make it for them."

When I was in Japan, you could put your subway ticket in any direction, and "IT WOULD JUST WORK," the machine did not spit it back out at you and FORCE the USER TO DO IT THE RIGHT WAY, because it was a waste of time to do so. Instead the machines are incredibly more complicated to account for someone putting the ticket in wrong. It made the whole subway experience work much more smoothly. Now people who can not read, make a mistake, or are completely foreign to the system, can JUST USE IT. They do not have to read docs, to do one simple thing, pay for the subway ride that should be fast, simple and easy.

The whole software industry could use a little bit of time learning industrial design.
I'd absolutely agree with rantfoil and damon, but here's another reason why (and I own and love a Mac, for the record):

Fanboys.

I'm not kidding. Microsoft can innovate well (and they have in the past) and they'll always have an evil stigma around them. Apple, whatever they do, mostly has an "everything Apple does is awesome and good" while glossing over the things Apple has done wrong.

Granted, Apple's done some great stuff. But I'll say this: when Apple releases a Tablet PC, fanboys will praise it even though if it is with similar functionality to Microsoft's Tablet PC, and will cause the inertia to start and people start pointing out the obscure flaws in Microsoft's Tablet PC and talk about how amazing Apple's is.

I'm being absolutely serious here. It's something that's akin to the Google/Yahoo! competition also. Fanboys and the people that they influence have a great effect on a company's desire to innovate.
8 ways to destroy a startup
Good Math, Bad Math: Binary Heaps
The thing I love about Dells plan to keep XP with Vista Ultimate and Business is that now, literally, the most popular killer feature in Ultimate and Business will be the ability to downgrade to XP.

Vista is New Coke. Of course all the XP sales from Ultimate and Business will count as Vista sales, so they can save face and dupe others into buying the lame versions you would have to upgrade to downgrade to XP.
dude, you are missing the point.

I CAN HACK the registry in WINDOWS, but i can't figure out WHERE to find information on fixing my nVidia Drivers on a released version of Ubuntu. Vista has the same problem. Which is why XP is the best OS right now. Things are most likely to just work.
This is about as useful as that Ruby interpreter written in JavaScript. Without the libraries that help make a language good it's nothing but a neat trick.
"At any given time though, my design group is working on roughly a dozen or more projects of nontrivial size, while simultaneously watching for urgent problems cropping up across a site of significant volume and breadth. That keeps us very busy. So as a matter of resources — having enough designers to take care of everything — it's almost impossible for us to implement every change or improvement we'd like to see happen."

sounds like they need to hire 5-10 more people who just focus on new things.
At SwitchAbit, Twittergram Shares a Common Future
don't forget that you will never be able to earn a living selling free software. instead, you will only be paid for your time fixing small bugs. you will be forced in to a life of non-innovation.
that kind of comment also shows you just how little people understand the value of a dollar. If people truly appreciated the range of creative potential that 10 million dollars represented they wouldn't be nearly as dismissive about it.

bottom line: if you're going to be doing the same exact thing whether you have 10 million or not, just give me the 10 mill. I guarantee I won't be doing the same thing.
photoshop is fine if you do serious graphics work and get paid for it. I just hate when people that are not willing to pay for photoshop bitch about why gimp is not photoshop.

Mac users that want to run Windows buy windows and install it inside of a VM (or dual boot). What's preventing you from doing the same under Linux?
It isn't that Apple has better designers or programmers, but they have a culture that thrives on quality, innovation and just plain building better products than the competition.
Here's a great post on that:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/07/05/how-many-of-your...

"... [Apple] is a company with leadership who has the fortitude to take the risk, find the budget, and push the technology for the single cause of designing compelling user experiences. Apple got it right."
SCIENCE FOR SCIENCE SAKE IS EVIL
I think it's fundamentally messed up to measure your success based on how much money you make. It reminds me of http://xkcd.com/59/ .

The work should be the reward itself. You shouldn't be creating a product because you think it will make you $$$. You should be creating a product because you think it will have a true and substantial positive impact on the world.

I remember when I visited France, one of the things that really struck me, was the number of shopkeepers I met, who owned their shop, often selling stuff they had a hand in manufacturing, and had decided that this was what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives -- to create something beautiful and share it with others who could appreciate them.
I really wish we could get past free as in beer & move on to free as in speech. Getting the sofware for free is all very well & good, but the really valuable part is being able to change it for your purposes.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SoftwareDevelopmentIsGambling

I won't focus on the rest, the reader can judge. Though, I think PEP8 is usually a good start, no matter what the code does.
I had one domain name I wanted for my personal site, and the .com was taken (and not even available for an extortionate amount despite that there was only advertising on there), so I got that name .org and .net.

Unless people knew/looked up my address from an email or business card, people kept going to the .com address..and sent email to the .com address as well and got "no such address" replies back. Then they'd call me up or something and bother me about it. Even my mom sent emails to the .com address.

Eventually I gave up and got another name that ended in .com, and I haven't had problems yet. Plus, it's something fairly memorable (if you know me) and also the first few google results for the name :D

I suppose the big problem is that even with the big name sites (del.icio.us comes to mind), some people have a hard time remembering "delicious" as being del.icio.us and instead go to delicious.com (I think I even heard something about them changing the main site address to .com...edit: it was from a TC article about the new preview.). It's been too ingrained into people's heads. It's probably not going to change anytime soon.

edit the second because it just popped up in my head: I might note this probably depends on where you live (or more specifically, where your visitors live). .com seems to be the default TLD people think of (sometimes the only one) in the US. Meanwhile it's not necessarily the case e.g. in South Korea, where .co.kr is just as well known as .com, et cetera.

edit the third because I haven't fully woken up yet (although it's 1pm PDT): I'm the general computer person for a small nonprofit in Southern California. We have a .org address, and you'd imagine it would be appropriate to use a .org address and that people would remember it. Nope. We're now considering buying the .com and redirecting to the .org because people have trouble associating a .org with an organization.
I think there should still be a line between personal blogs and busines blogs, let your client decide their own line between the two. Give them advice; but some people need to learn the hard way.
Honestly I'm a fan of good old gedit... but this makes a good case for trying emacs one more time.

I haven't really understood the appeal of the single, monolithic, do-everything editor up until this point, but looking at it from a self-modifying point of view does make it somewhat more appealing (and I need time to ingrain the key chords into muscle memory and learn some elisp).

I think the exciting idea was that of a the browser-as-editor. Where is the browser that acts as an editor and has all it's plugins written in javascript (as opposed to elisp)? Of course, once we had that, the next goal would be to replace bash with it... browser as terminal ftw.
It also might be worth pointing out the community size based on the frameworks. By looking at their respective IRC channels and/or Google Group sizes you can get a rough estimate how big each of their communities are. Overall, I've found any / all python web framework communities to be extremely helpful and friendly. I say that not to take away from the non-python frameworks because I don't have experience with them.

I couldn't easily find your email so here is a list instead. These books are out right now:

The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right: http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Guide-Django-Development-Ri...

Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours: http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Django-Hours/dp/06...

Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and Turbogears: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Python-Frameworks-Program...

Here are two coming out later in the year:

Practical Django Projects (June or July 2008): http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Django-Projects-Pratical/dp/...

Python Web Development with Django (Sep 2008): http://www.amazon.com/Python-Development-Django-Developers-L...
they just need a steve jobs like person. I don't even like apple but you need to have a guy who can make large decisions and also have a vision of the ways things need to work. If the people in charge are not already like that they will not jump at the chance to give up their power to some one else.
#9 - try to sell technology instead of selling products
Exactly why I brought it up in the first place. :P
Humor: Essential Advice For Levitating Startup CEOs
"Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk,"

Damn good name for a book!

Anyone notice; if you selected text then right clicked, WSJ throws up some css box with information relating to that text>? kinda neat.
Get Yourself Some Ubuntu 8.04
Steve Jobs summed up his opinion on why this is:

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is -- I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products. And you say, "why is that important?" -- well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea -- if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products and so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success -- I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products.

(from Triumph of the Nerds)
Alan Kay (guy who invented the window and other GUI goodies while at PARC) once said that innovation really isn't that difficult to achieve -- you just need to rub smart people and money together.
IE-only... I understand the motivation behind it and take my hat off to their pains (I did lots of IE BHOs/Sidebars in the past - what a miserable job to have), but don't they have to tackle early adopters first? Even among business users, those who'll most likely to discover Xobni are advanced enough to use FF/Safari, just my $0.02.
I can't find establishment starts and closings broken down by business type on the SBA site, but you could probably work that out pro rata by comparing California to, say, North Dakota, state-by-state. 50% of tech starts still in business 4 years later sounds crazy high to me.

I'm not sure this is super relevant to YC get-rich-quickr's. Built-to-flip startups have a different lifecycle than small businesses in general; a small (read: "real") business grows more conservatively and lasts longer, and a flipper actually works to shutter itself early (on favorable terms).
> Mac users that want to run Windows buy windows and install it inside of a VM (or dual boot). What's preventing you from doing the same under Linux?

Seconded. Lots of apps run really well in XP with VirtualBox in seamless mode. That's how I test sites against Safari and IE, and I run Visual Studio that way when I need it.

VirtualBox is the reason why I never got around to setting up a Windows partition like I was planning on. Instead, I just reclaimed the space for more files under Linux.