skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://mail.your.org/pipermail/v6test/2008-May/000054.html (May 1):

"Everything is pretty much ready for launch, we're just waiting for content at this point. I've got 8 quad-core boxes working feverishly to transcode the videos I have already into several formats, which is about 50% of the videos that will be there for launch. The other 50% is hopefully on its way soon, and we're good to go."
obligatory pbf comic:

http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF193-Fun_Bot.gif
I think they meant "teh interwebs"
AppAppeal » Reviews of Web Based Applications
You could try sound insulating your apartment with fiberglass and egg cartons.

If you don't like in-ear sound protection, what about the full size over ear ones people use when they are shooting guns?
Think about all the kick ass products you respect... how much do they blog? vlog? I didn't think so.

This can be incredibly hard for the mind to accept. I used to work in the cell phone components industry. In a fab, you begin to realize how many incredibly talented engineering careers are spent designing and integrating parts that will never be seen by you, the person who carries them in your pocket.

It's weird because that anonymity also works in reverse: The software that I wrote back then has played a crucial role in producing over half a billion parts, for half a billion handsets... and I never really notice, unless I pause to think as I'm doing now. A really astounding percentage of humanity has been touched by my work [1], and they don't know, and they certainly don't care, and I barely even think about it.

[1] Not that this makes me particularly special. There are many thousands of fab techs and engineers who could say the same. Many of you can say the same.
Yes, it is... I guess I'm knocking it because it isn't exactly what I want, which is something that completely eliminates the desktop metaphor in favor of giving me exactly what I want whenever I want it. A desktop where a Spotlight-like tool was the main way of interaction would go a long way towards this goal.
"There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work."

I agree. But, isn't this an independent question?

For such things an individual's flavor of "The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity" should help. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html

Also, look at this gem posted by edw519, :http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275

What do you think?
is there any one stop shop to having a "live" desktop? you set it as your homepage, when you open your browser you are presented your "web desktop" with shortcuts to launch web based office and other apps combined with the standard RSS feeds + search.

does this exist?
found ajaxwindows, why isn't this popular?
no. CNN made a error. They should be getting a letter from MS and Facebook soon.
Please don't editorialize in the titles. That's listed in the site guidelines.
Okay, that's good to hear. Thanks for posting it. :)
Oh no! A throwaway Dow Jones newswire article contains a minor and obvious error! What is the world coming to?
Google Treasure Hunt 2008 (fun algorithm puzzles)
Actually, yes it is. Europeans tend to use a comma instead of a period as a decimal marker, e.g. 0,3 instead of 0.3.
Introduction to Digital Filters With Audio Applications (free book)
that was pretty weak, actually.
If you want to work for companies that have been funded, most of the venture capitalists have job listing in their websites:

http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs (you already know this)

http://jobs.sequoiacap.com/

http://www.ventureloop.com/kpcb/careers_home.php
I did upmoded you, mainly b/c I don't think you deserved it. But gobignetwork seems to be the place that attracts wantrepenours, mostly guys with ideas, no concrete plans and attitudes that real hackers generally dislike.
I could be wrong thou, but that's the perception of the site.
Well, if they don't enforce this, it will look bad when they try to enforce something else. And the government has a lot of money pouring into it for the sole purpose of enforcing copyright.
I have, and I have. I just want there to be more competition amongst these alternative implementations.
I got excited but #1 is a mockup
Knuth's TAOCP, Vol I (page 79 on the 3rd edition) has a very nice introduction to Fibonacci numbers.

The article doesn't mention the classical problem proposed by Fibonacci: "How many rabbits can be produced from a single pair in a year's time?"

(each pair produces a new pair of offspring every month, each new pair becomes fertile at the age of one month).
Why people shouldn't attend Lisp conferences (Kenny Tilton)
And for the others no links or clues as to what desktop environment or window manger is used, nor what theme, background, or distro ... basically some eyecandy with no content.
Current Events, Headlines, and Top News Stories by H. Duthel, Author, Journalist Member ICCNOW.org
Great thanks for that!
I missed that part.
I'd appreciate it if you elaborated. You seem to say that his take on suburbia is incorrect, but you do not say why.
It wouldn't matter, the porn companies would pursue action the same way the RIAA does. Doesn't matter though, apparently the content was donated.
So Yahoo decides it needs more help in scuttling the company!
Many don't even have a startup.
Though I find this comment a bit trollish, I have to ask, which parts do you disagree with? For my own two cents, I grew up in Metro Detroit, which largely resembles the concrete wasteland Kunstler criticizes. And the most accessible, generally enjoyable place I've inhabited was The Loop in St. Louis -- a well-defined, fairly small example of "a place worth caring about."
I keep myself honest by only reading my rss feeds after hours on a mobile device...makes it hard to type a decent comment though.
If there is not blood, lots of blood, game developers will quit?
Single Atom Manipulation and Chemistry of Mechanosynthesis
Microsoft is lying and screwing up your log files
This is an old speach, but a good one. It is crazy on how on every city, the oldest parts (the one build before the 30s) are actually design well, human scale, and apealing.Most things built after the 40ss, is this very ugly strip mall design, that is soul drenching, depressing and plain ugly. You can put as many palm trees as you want, it is still like putting a lipstick on a fat pig.

Take example: San Francisco, built mostly before 1920, and then SJ, or most of the peninsula, build mostly after the 50s.
Which tourists ever say, I came here to see San Jose?

Even when I visited Kansas City, the oldest part has some good charm and apeal, and some character. As soon as you drove out of the oldest parts, you end up with this insane grid of streets and strip malls.
I recently tried to reset my password on the account D_T . I mistyped the password, making it impossible for me to log back in.

I would greatly appreciate the ability to reset my password using the email that I entered.

PS Please send that email (My old account was D_T).
The IPv6 mess
So one guy has an opinion counter to the norm (here) and he gets thrown under the bus? I don't even know the guy and I think that's pretty weak.
I have seen those videos before, but in the name of furthering the Internet I guess I can watch them again...
The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits
I have different method. A two step approach.

1. I dont waste time surfing or doing other distracting things for more than one hour a day.

2. When I dont feel like working, I sleep.
Also, see http://www.HotStartupJobs.com/ for more listings.
That's unfortunate - #1 was the only interesting looking one :(
These are all ugly and useless. My desktop is better:

http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/desktop-20080518.pn...

Notice how all the space is being used for actual work instead of pretty pictures. Computers are for doing things, not looking at.
Facebook’s Friends Data Has Already Left the Barn
> The only thing that seems to work for me is to make whatever I'm working on significantly more fun than what I should be doing.

That's very true. Having two or more tasks at hand is always key, so that you can do the least intimidating of the two. The downside to this approach is that sometimes you really do need to do the more intimidating one.
This account has been marked dead by some editor.
Reminds me of http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/
Though, I am curious about how the paper wheels fit with the rest.
Which Problem Should I Solve? « 48-Hour SaaS Product Launch
Hacker News Editors Out of Control
Marking not only threads as dead, willy-nilly, but entire accounts.

If you don't reign them in, the site is going to lose any vitality it might have.

Why the hell would you need 30 editors for a site this size? It's not the Times. Not to mention, unlike in a newspaper, they aren't broken up by department -- it's like having 30 bosses looking over your TPS reports.

You can either have a forum for lively discussion, or a personality cult monoculture.
I'm just really upset today and I had to troll... no, I'm fine, and I wrote that post sincerely. You made a valid point, and perhaps I was reading too deep, but you have to agree that pg being an investor of RT implies partiality and marks an easy target. Hit or miss is a different matter, but I used it as an example of something that didn't do much for the quality of the essay. But don't get me wrong, I have nothing against RT.
why was I downmodded? I actually legitimately do not understand why.
use this to force extension compatibility: www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/nightly
Oh. That explains it. Thanks.
even my haiku was downmodded! who knows. just ignore them.
First off, how ironic is it to stumble on this post when in the act of procrastinating?

It's also true that most of our economy revolves around "time wasting" actives, especially with the Internet (e.g. google, facebook, youtube, amazon, ebay). But then look at most major inventions in the last 2000+ years, and almost all can be qualified as being used as distractions. (e.g. alcohol, religion, music, books, painting, cars, airplanes, telephone, movies, TV, VCR's, Tivos, phonograph, vinyl, CD's, sports). I wouldn't want to be in a world without such a variety of distractions.

The happiest people will be those that overlap their preferred distractions with their vocation.
Please don't waste everyone's time hyping a trivial reporting error.
Ask YC: How do I store online contracts?
Our site has a component where certain people sign up for accounts and get paid. I'm planning to do the contract online.

Googling keeps getting links to sample legal agreements, etc.

I'm concerned about how I store the contract & proof of signature. Does anyone have any pointers for storage/format of electronic legal documents?

Much appreciated.
Ask YC: How do you handle development planning
I've never worked on a project I couldn't fit into my brain all at once. Now that I have an idea for a large development project, which I hope to eventually take through the start-up process, I have started to research different development methodologies.

What I would like to know is how other groups manage complexity. Do you create use cases and make use of UML? Do you just start coding and see what pops out? Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Ask PG: What is Your Main Motivation In The Startup World?
What is your main motivation in the startup world?
Kinda makes you wonder if it was worth burying it in the first place. Above-ground lines may be ugly, but they don't require chemists and mechanical engineers to repair....
Take a look at this brochure of some of these types of cables: http://www.taihan.com/customer/pdf_down.asp?file=Oil-filled....

Amazing feat of engineering!
yeah. It's still reading, and most of it is either educational or pseudo educational. Well.. at least if you waste your time where I waste mine. HN, Slasdot, Linux Today, Free Software Daily, Freenode (irc), etc.

However, I should be coding my app. I've spent most of the day working on a mock up so it's ok to spend a few minute here right?

I should also be doing homework.
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/index.php

I like this guys idea's on procrastination. I've been using it today I think. I should be doing homework. Instead, I've been working on my supposedly less important (definitely less urgent) startup. I've also been avoiding that business plan I want to write.
Spammers Create a Tricky Situation for Stickam - Bits - Technology Blog
At the first (bad) workplace that certainly wasn't the case. The place had high ceilings, so I could hear the sales and support guys who sat 20m away. At my current job, yeah, people generally speak in hushed tones or grab a conference/breakout room.
I'm not sure whether you are rewarding or punishing yourself.
Erlang and High-Scale System Software
http://www.ventureloop.com/ventureloop/home.php
I almost like this the best of all the stuff on here. you are tricking your brain.
Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless
The Perl Foundation receives $200,000 donation in support of Perl 6 development
Good news for Perl and "chapeau" for Firebird Management LLC.
Wondering if anyone has tried meditation as a means to solve this problem. I am no expert in this, i do it only occasionally. But i have noticed that i seem to have better control over me on those days when i meditate.
I think Chuck Palahniuk was the first to say life was nothing but one addiction replacing another. It was in "Choke", if I remember correctly...
PG Essay Suggestion: an essay about each YC startup
"This is a bit tangential: Every start-up that YC funds is potentially worth an essay. Isn't that why they are funded? They solve a problem that nags many." --ChaitanyaSai http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192730

I think it would be interesting to see what PG thinks about the startups they fund.

Why pg and the others at YC picked those of the groups they interviewed; what about the product was it they liked; what wasn't right; how did they see the people and product grow; etc, etc.

I of course understand this would be a lot of work. But it would be quite interesting. It might be easiest to start with the current group and keep a journal on them, and refine it after the current period is done and then publish.
I had no idea that brochures were made for these types of things. Who is the target reader?
Who says big ideas are rare (about Nathan Myhrvhold's idea incubator)
> I've got my emacs rigged so that, when I type source code, I don't need to press Shift to get symbols out of the top row of keys instead of digits.

I'd love to see a method to do this in Vim from anyone.
I took several courses at Stanford with Julius Smith (the author of this ebook). He's really sharp, and explains complicated audio signal processing concepts very well. If you're even remotely interested in pursuing research in audio technologies, I would highly recommend the CCRMA program at stanford.

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/
Scribd Goes Straight, Bans Porn
you might like this book (I've been glancing through it).

http://safari.oreilly.com/9780596527358

Well I just spent the majority of 6 hours building a site mock up. We've done lot's of brain storming. But we don't actually have that much in structured layout yet.
Unless you have massive engineering resources that's not dedicated to feature enhancements and new developments of your main product (ie. a small startup environment), a full rewrite is just too expensive.
"Should we expect Scribd’s traffic to take a nosedive? Unlikely. Porn may have helped Scribd gain momentum in its infancy, but the site has long since proven its use as a blogging tool and a document repository. If anything, it’s surprising that it took Scribd this long to make the switch."

so will Justin.tv ban illegal broadcasts as well?

seems the somewhat successful strategy for building content on these community apps is allowing either illegal or unscrupulous behavior to build traffic, and then nix it when you're big enough to survive on your own.

Is this the strategy PG recommends, or the YC founders just think of it on their own?
People who make decisions on how to wire grids. Private companies in US. Governments in other countries.
I had something similar once. I had to drive to the library. They closed at 9. I unfortunately didn't get a lot done. I get a lot more done when I have the internet anytime.
yes and then if you want to surf you must use links :P
> This is what I meant when I said the long-term solution might be software

And I thought that was just a not-so-subtle plug for YC-funded companies ;)

PS - I guess these things aren't intentionally PR-ish. If anyone spends time talking to startup founders who are solving problems, it's only natural to start incorporating these problems into your world-view...
An interesting conclusion from the article:

"The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight"
Even people who don't happen to like suburbs should be turned off by the speaker's arrogant central-planner community-before-individual attitude.
Yep, #1 is a quite popular and highly rated idea for Topaz (GNOME 3.0) over at Gnome-Look: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/May-B?content=45837

By the way, if anyone likes #3, it can be easily pieced together with:

* Mire v2 GTK theme (http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Mire+v2+themepack?con...) with the included Emerald window decorator theme

* area o.42 icons (http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/area+o.42+SVG+icon+th...)

* gnome2-globalmenu (http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/) for the OS X unified menu bar
This is great to hear. Perl has been really hurting because none of the important people are employed by big companies with lots of money to spend, and none of the big Perl users really donate much money. That means Perl6 has been strictly volunteer-only up until now. (There has been a bit of money, but most people can't just take a month off from work and live on a grant.)
This is the thing that nobody seems to have mentioned - both about WoW and HN: they're very different from watching TV. They're both inherently social, for example.

HN is much more akin to what sports fans do at sports bars (but asynchronous and otherwise more efficient). How much time is "too much time" to spend here depends on what else is going on in your life, but it's definitely not something to shun altogether (like cable TV).

WoW is also very different from TV - I haven't played since high school, but I remember it requiring quite a bit of interpersonal skill to organize and lead 40-man raids: settling people's personal issues, coordinating teams, etc. Maybe I romanticized it (as I did most things in high school), but I'd imagine that the kind of teamwork one learns from being in a large guild doing end-game raids comes in really useful in any organization.
Digg - 'Soziale Werbeagenturen in Deutschland'? Auslaender raus?
soul drenching, again?
Most of them are pretty easy to tell, but many could be done in just about any window manager.

1. Not real.
2. Mac4Lin.
3. Not absolutely clear, but note that thunar's internal menus are displayed in the toolbar instead of the window, like a mac. It could be Mac4Lin again, but I'm guessing it's not real, unless there's something about thunar I don't know.
4. Enlightenment.
5. Pekwm.
6. Enlightenment.
7. Could be anything. It does have a Gnome footprint on the bottom right, though, so I'd guess metacity.
8. Fluxbox. (yay!)
9. I'm not sure. Probably compiz-fusion.
10. Could be anything.
seems the somewhat successful strategy for building content on these community apps is allowing either illegal or unscrupulous behavior to build traffic, and then nix it when you're big enough to survive on your own

It worked for YouTube, didn't it?

Is this the strategy PG recommends, or the YC founders just think of it on their own?

I think it's a bit too obvious to say that anyone "thought of it".
Electrical engineers mainly. I don't typically deal with cables at these voltages, but I've had to purchase subsea cables at 33kV and all the manufacturers tend to have these glossy brochures. Oil-filled cable manufacturers wouldn't be any different.
"In mathematics, the limit of Fibonacci series is called as Golden Ratio."

Uh, no it isn't. They're related, but not synonymous.

Third grade writing ability and love of the mysterious? I bet this guy loved the Davinci Code.
And I found that with google and irc I became lazy. Instead of just looking at the code of the framework to understand it when I have a problem (which is good for improving myself as a programmer), I just do a quick search on google or irc hoping that someone gives me an answer...
Ray Kurzweil has said he assigns himself a problem before bedtime, triggering his subconscious mind to consider creative solutions during sleep, the list of which he reviews upon waking into a state of lucid dreaming.

Kurzweil: ...When I go to sleep, I assign myself a problem.

Interviewer: For example?

Kurzweil: It might be some mathematical problem or some practical issue for an invention or even a business strategy question or an interpersonal problem. But I'll assign myself some problem where there's a solution, and I try not to solve it before I go to sleep but just try to think about what do I know about this? What characteristics would a solution have? And then I go to sleep. Doing this primes my subconscious to think about it. Sigmund Freud said accurately that when we dream, some of the censors in our brain are relaxed, so that you might dream about things that are socially taboo or sexually taboo, because the various censors in our brain that say "You can't think that thought!" are relaxed. So we think about weird things that we wouldn't allow ourselves to think about during the day.

There are also professional blinders that prevent people from thinking creatively. Mental blocks such as "You can't solve a signal processing problem that way" or "Linguistics is not supposed to be done this way." Those assumptions are also relaxed in your dream state, and so you'll think about new ways of solving problems without being burdened by constraints like that. Another thing that's not working when you're dreaming is your rational faculties to evaluate whether an idea is reasonable, and that's why fantastic things will happen in the dream, and the most amazing thing of all is that you don't think these fantastic things are amazing. So, let's say, an elephant walks through the wall, you don't say, "My God, how did an elephant walk through the wall?" You just say, "OK, an elephant walked through wall, no big deal." So your rational faculties are also not working.

The next step is in the morning, in this half-way state between dreaming and being awake, what I call lucid dreaming, I still have access to the dream thoughts. But now I'm sufficiently conscious to also have my rational faculties. And I can evaluate these ideas, these new creative ideas that came to me during the night, and actually see which ones make sense. After 15 to 20 minutes, generally, if I stay in that state, I can have keen new insights into whatever the problem was that I assigned myself. And I've come up with many inventions this way. I've come up with solutions to problems. If I have a key decision to make, I'll always go through this process. And I'll then have a real confidence in the decision, as opposed to just trying to guess at the answer. So this is the mental technique I use to try to combine creative thinking with rational thinking.

Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art...
I don't think anyone pursues copyright infringement as a strategy, though they clearly turn a blind eye to it as one. I've never heard PG endorse this, but it's incredibly common in the Valley.