skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a YC W10 startup, we were lucky to have dinner with Zuckerberg and I asked him afterwards why he chose that blue for Facebook... Cause he's color blind. Not a majestic response about how color influences mood, buying habits, etc.

He used a color that was personally best for him. And a lot of the top brands in the world now, started in garages & workshops... where the branding research consisted of a couple rounds "what if we..." before a name was born and then a logo & design.

My favorite example of this is Mercedes. The brand now stands for luxury cultivates a significant vibe... but why did the founder call it that? Simply, he named the company after his daughter... and now people name their daughters after the car!

A lot of YC companies get greif for their names (most.ly the ly.ly ones) but how much does a name / brand have on the actual product being successful.

I think it can have an influence, but at the end of the day... the quality of what you build will determine its success.

With that in mind, my fellow hackers & founders... from a guy that runs a website about color... Be more adventurous with your colors. Have some fun.
If you were going to do the dollar redefine, why not have 1 dollar = 12 "coins". Only mint one coin and 12 has a lot of nice divisors. It would also have the advantage of no minted coin really being practically worthless.
> Writing a program for all of them meant writing it over and over

Not quite correct. Companies ported programs, even assembly-language programs, to different processors all the time. Visicalc ran on z-80s, 6502s (on Apples, Ataris and Commodores) and 8086s. the hard part is to write it the first time. Porting then is more or less straightforward. OSs were so minimalistic at that time they didn't create any significant difference.

> Businesses were confounded because some of the software they wanted ran only on one stack, some ran on another

Most business software for microcomputers in the high 70's and very low 80's ran on CP/M. Even the first DOS blockbusters were straight ports of CP/M titles. CP/M (I am talking about CP/M 80) machines were all based on 8080-like processors, but, besides the common processor, had very different hardware - disks from one computer often could not be read on another. Transferring through serial ports usually solved this.

The market that was more fragmented was the home computer market. There Apple IIs, Ataris, TRS-80s and Commodores competed with one another. Choosing a home computer could be confusing at that time.

The higher end of the spectrum had mainframes, just as incompatible with each other as they are now (I think Unisys still makes them and they are incompatible with IBMs), minis that ran proprietary OSs or UNIX-based OSs. There were a couple high-end multiuser "supermicros" that ran Unix-like OSs. I have used Cromix for some time.

Most of the software was not easily portable at that time because it was written in hand-tuned assembly language. I remember how revolutionary Unix seemed for being written in C and, thus, being portable across different architectures. Faster computers and HLLs (can't believe I am calling C a HLL...) eased the pain of porting.

My bet? Were it not for Gates, today we would have a diverse computing environment, with different OSs and processors, with cross-platform software being used in combination with open formats (like GIF was intended to be) to exchange data between non-portable (or non-ported) programs. There would be large software companies but hardware makers would compete with far more latitude than they can now and those software companies would do their best to use the tricks those hardware makers would bring.

> You may not like it, but IP suits and lobbying are as much a part of big business as dribbling is basketball

You're right. I don't like it. I think software companies should gain market through technical merits that benefit their users, not backstabbing each other.
YC's star is rising still-- the most recent "class" was pretty epic IMO. It's not a talent show-- it's a hacker-optimized machine that's always getting better at picking, mentoring, promoting, and funding teams/startups.
Why not just use the standard print queues instead of inventing your own print queue standard and calling that standard?
Ask HN: number of applicants for a position?
I frequently come across a claim that only 2% or 5% or some other minuscule amount of applicants for most software development positions come close to being actually qualified. (Most recently in the discussion about Google hiring process, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1690792).

I've been wondering what the overall number and therefore what number of remotely qualified applicants might be expected to be. Assume a junior position, asking for new grads to maybe a year or two of experience, at a non-Google-caliber company in a major city. Advertise on a job site or two, and perhaps with a couple of nearby technical post-secondary schools, but without spamming the posting absolutely everywhere. How many applications would you expect to receive in a week or two? Fifty, one hundred, five hundred? Answers from people who have done this and screened the resulting applications especially appreciated.

Thanks!
Not quite, you should read the press release[1] more closely (emphasis mine):

HP’s existing and upcoming ePrint enabled printers will be the first to support printing direct from iOS devices.

Also, if you have access to the iOS dev program, read the release notes for 4.2.

1. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/15airprint.html
This guy's posting pictures: http://www.razorianfly.com/2010/09/15/breaking-ios-4-2-beta-...

Interesting that the hardware orientation lock is now "mute" (so, more like other iOS devices) and they've moved the orientation lock function — and added brightness control — to the multitasking dock.
have it working and installed now. it's great. runs well and smooth.
Meego : Linux based set top box emerges
> Thin doesn't use Mongrel [...] Rack is not a non-blocking concurrent library.

Well, Thin uses mongrel's parser. Which makes it a sort of a library. And by concurrent I actually meant thread-safe. But forget it.

The main point is: I cannot get any more better / optimal cpu usage with passenger (although I'm certainly getting some cpu / memory overhead). My single thin instance loads every single cpu core to 100% when attacked by httperf. And I was never able to crash it, although I probably didn't do my best.

Monitoring and managing tools are okay, though monit and munin have been here for ages and I sort of like what they're capable of.

But I still agree that ease of use is important for making ruby/rails even simpler and funnier to do. Whatever, no offense intended.
Is it really easier to make a good design with Blue vs Green? I agree it is easier, but not from an execution perspective... but rather from an inspiration one. With so many blue sites, it's much easier to get "inspired" and model after others.
Is this a bubble in the same sense? The dot com bubble was in the form of companies who made a lot of investments, predicting that there were customers (not to mention a business plan). In the case of the app store, end users are parting ways with their money here and now.

That's not to say that there won't be a malinvestment of time; the supply should increase to the point where there aren't as many customers per app, so eventually people won't make it as easily. But the whole thing isn't based on a flawed assumption, the customers really are there.
You left out (c) Facilitating Mark Dowd's awesome Bingo code injection exploits.
put a hole in them also - makes for a nicer way to carry them.
Yes, it's very likely that I know different folks. That's why I hedged my comment by noting that it was purely anecdotal: I tend to associate with computer scientists, mathematicians and medievalists. The first and last groups tend to be most interested in homogeneity, in my experience.

Besides, if we're to say that IE is "back in the game" then surely we should count only those who make a conscious decision to use IE; otherwise we're using vastly different terms.
The article seems purposefully thin on details, but there are a couple of points here:

1. The owners/maintainers thought that it was possible to lock out specific people/clients, but this is obviously not the case.

2. The owners/maintainers think that it's impossible to have unauthorized clients using the system, but this is obviously not the case.

Either the owners/maintainers are incompetent, or the system is not functioning as it was designed to. This makes it all the more likely that 'nefarious' forces can infiltrate (or already have infiltrated) the system and snoop on users.

A system that is relying heavily on secure design should not be considered to be 'working' when it is not functioning as the designers believe that it should be.
Properly Handling the Keyboard Interrupt Exception within a Python C Module
We built it using Javascript with the Mootools framework.
just a tweak, but maybe weight titles more ... salmon dishes didn't appear until far down the list.
I'm reminded of many B-grade Hindi movies I suffered through in my childhood.
In Hindi movies, this is what every mother says, with pride and tears, after her son manages to scrape through his exams:

"Mera Beta pass ho gaya!"
which translates to "My son passed!"
P.S In Hindi "Beta" means "Son"
:)
Sigh, looks like I'll be installing another virtual Windows machine specifically to test another version of a web browser that doesn't run on my operating system.
Someone has drawn a lot of inspiration from Chrome. But seriously, I love the minimalistic interface of chrome and IE9 being surprisingly similar to it is a very good reason for me switch back.
I suppose this has validity, but on the other hand, there are plenty of cut throats in the '2nd largest car dealership in Idaho' level.
If you're wondering why you can't see links to HN on my blog, this is only currently enabled on the front-page of the blog: http://blog.edparcell.com/
Thanks. Don't know how we missed that. It's on the fixit list.
> more templates, more pages

Golden. Imagine every startup company that will sign up for a free site, then they get a bit more successful and want more than three pages or whatnot.

Same with the people who go from casual blogging to putting out a ton of posts.
Wormux - Worms clone for Android - Alpha
Not at all. The reasoning is that it is simply impossible to "steal" a non-rivaled good, and it is absurd to claim ownership of an integer.
Is there any benefit to using ec2 Micro instances over the smaller Rackspace Cloud offerings (http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...), unless you need to scale the Amazon way? I'm deciding between both currently to replace a dedicated server for a few of my low traffic sites.
I am not really sure why this died? Ten minute demos are just not enough time to judge a game.
This is really slick! Great job in terms of design, UI, responsiveness, etc.

Dunno how it looks as a business, but it's a slick product for sure.
And online merchants don't take coins anyway.
I don't think that stat is too worrying. Remember, we're not talking about actual success yet, just that people manage to raise more money. In general the startups working on crazy-ambitious ideas do manage to. Maybe not from VCs, but at least from angels.

We definitely don't turn down people because their ideas seem over-ambitious. Nor do I think we ever talk people out of them. We like ambitious ideas. At most we get founders to think about what to launch first. But they should keep the big idea in mind-- not just as something to aim at, because investors want to hear about it.

The sort of risk I don't want to stop taking is not a risk on ideas, but on people. E.g. I don't want to stop accepting young founders, who tend to have a sharply bimodal distribution of outcomes.
Well done! 2 things:

- make all images on the landing page clickable, maybe link them to an example that uses that design. I clicked and nothing happened.

- don't show the "delete" or "rename" menu item on the "Home" page, when you can't use them anyways.
Some junkies truly overanalyze to death.

I stopped playing it over 10 years ago because I was one of those guys. There wasn't much info on the internet back then, so I had newspapers, magazines, and Excel spreadsheets. I knew if was crap analysis, but sometimes letting your OCD side run loose is fun in its own way.
That was an interesting article. I was completely unaware how many major brands use a similar color.
Yes, search is big on our list. Should be available soon.
That's how it always is. :(
Novell breakup and sale imminent, says report
TerminalCast like youtube... for hackers
That's good to know, since the information required to log into your bank account is also easily represented as an integer. Can I have it, please?
Found nothing interesting. Its submitted by spolsky, is he looking for traffic to his website ;) Nothing bad about it though :D
The current dollar coins, with presidents on them, solve half of (a)--no feminism, but really ugly pictures. Instead of being profiles, they're portraits, with really deep eye sockets.
80% is a really high rate. About 51% of new business started will make if five years or more. http://web.sba.gov/faqs/faqIndexAll.cfm?areaid=24
Well, first, this is an argument about why it is bad for the company, not for the correct allocation of resources for society. (Although maybe you could adapt the parts about political inefficiencies to argue also for the latter.)

Second, it seems like all these problems go away (at least to first order) if you simply pay people what they are worth (as defined by the market). Being squeaky only helps if you need to do it to call attention to inadequate compensation.
Screenshot of the website in IE6, just for curiosity: http://cl.ly/ca5874e11ad4acdabb09, times sure are changing
> Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?

Why are you so sure 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs would be unable to give the world something better? Too many eggs in too few baskets...
To add to your point that there is no comparison, the claims of evolutionists can be easily checked (DNA analysis, fossil morphology, speciation in the wild etc.). The _historical_ claims of climate scientists can also be verified (pollen analysis, study of ice cores etc.), although it is much more difficult to do so (what with people throwing away the original data sets and so forth).

However, the _predictive_ claims of climate scientists only follow from the historical facts through the means of statistical, computerized models that are, AFAIK, essentially unproven. In fact, exact quantitative predictions have consistently failed for the last two decades. There is no more science in _predictive_ climatology, I believe, than there is in forecasting the stock market (where the same kind of computer models are also used extensively).
Why Two Is The Magic Number? Slate on Creative Pairs
Craigslist confirms shutdown of adult services section
Agreed. Most robber barons of their time seem to follow this same pattern - scorched earth rise to power, then spend their waning years in philanthropy.

And for a little trip down memory lane, for those who might not have been around then:

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html

The original Finding of Fact from US vs. Microsoft is worth a read too if you haven't, corroborates most of the above:

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
You have $1000 - get as much traffic as you can
Different scenarios:

- Paid service website (your aim is to get X% conversion)

- Ad-driven site (your aim is to turn eyeballs into revenue)
IE9 and the Lost World’s Fairs
The US reminds me of a company that's suffered from stagnant revenue and decreasing profit margins for years, yet whose profits continue to grow through a combination of cost cutting and underinvestment in research and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the shareholders demand an ever-growing dividend...

In relative terms, the US has been in decline since the early 1960s. It benefitted from an unprecedented situation after WWII when all it's competitors were reduced to bankruptcy and physical ruin, not to mention political turmoil and the yoke of Communism. America had a growing population and the best infrastructure in the world. Americans became accustomed to effortless growth and weak competition, while the rest of the world learned to compete with tooth and claw while rebuilding their economies and infrastructure from scratch.

The current recession is a shock, but it's hardly the cause of America's decline. The decline was inevitable--as other countries become more competitive, the US becomes less so by definition. What's almost unique about America is the refusal to face that fact and address it. I honestly don't think that American society as a whole is capable of acknowledging that other countries can be superior in certain ways. At best, there's always a nebulous suspicion that foreign systems must possess some fatal flaw that will ultimately tell against them. Hence, there's this obsession about which jobs Americans are naturally advantaged at. There aren't any. Those are exactly the jobs non-Americans covet and are working to acquire.

Those of us outside the US are privileged in a sense, because we can never delude ourselves that success is possible without determined competition among equals. If nothing else, we're always in competition with the US--whether you know it or not.
Glenn has it wrong. Without a doubt Bill's creations at Microsoft are far more important than what he's doing now. I prefer the capitalist Gates to the egalitarian one.
HN user paddy_m reimplemented RXVT in JS:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852573

http://github.com/paddymul/rxvt-js

HTML and not Canvas, so cut-and-paste works.
A showcase for WOFF fonts, used to promote IE9. The actual demonstrations are at http://lostworldsfairs.com/, but this blog post is from one of the creators.
Yes. It should be fairly simple to generate a program that generates all strings of length 20 that will be accepted by Wells Fargo's login page. I would consider such a program a compressed version of a string containing my username and password. If you want to generate a shorter output, you might try the De Bruijn sequence.

edit: I should warn you, though, Wells is likely bankrupt, along with FDIC. If you want to plunder my accounts, you should get to work before accounting fraud becomes illegal in this country.
How to Develop a Product that Nobody Wants: The Story of ChubbyBrain
I'm curious. Do you personally arrange your affairs to maximize your taxes?

If not, then why do you think businesses should do so?
Martine elaborated on that after some Flash developers raised the issue (since that's not how we normally work either):

https://www.mochimedia.com/community/forum/topic/html5-the-o...

There is some flexibility on that issue.
Yeah but the parser has got nothing to do with I/O concurrency. Rack is not thread-safe, it's merely reentrant by design.

If you're happy with Thin right now, by all means, stick with Thin. No offense taken.
My coworkers and I have often wondered this.

My own best guess is that it's that classic bugaboo: Historical reasons. They've got a big installed base of hardware, software, and ops procedures to support 32-bit small and medium instances, and thus the marginal cost of continuing to run that hardware is lower. Given the choice between (a) a big program to compel all their existing 32-bit customers to migrate to 64-bit infrastructure, and then writing off all the racks full of 32-bit equipment; or (b) maintaining and building out the datacenters and infrastructure that they've already got established, they tend to choose option (b).

Of course, given that the price of compute hardware continues its inexorable fall, in three years Amazon will offer 64-bit at an intermediate price point: The expensive 64-bit large instance of today will be the cheap 64-bit large instance of tomorrow, and people who want real power will be paying for 32xlarge instances.
> Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play.

Are we talking about Microsoft as in "Comes vs. Microsoft"?

> Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased

He was not the first and didn't push particularly hard. The first "serious" computer I had was an Apple II (the first one was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone) and a lot of the software I ran on it was acquired well after the purchase.
My coworkers and I have often wondered this.

My own best guess is that it's that classic bugaboo: Historical reasons. They've got a big installed base of hardware to support 32-bit small and medium instances, and thus the marginal cost of continuing to run that hardware is lower. Given the choice between (a) a big program to compel all their existing 32-bit customers to migrate to 64-bit infrastructure, and then mothballing all the racks full of 32-bit equipment; or (b) maintaining and building out the datacenters and infrastructure that they've already got established, they choose option (b).

Of course, given that the price of compute hardware continues its inexorable fall, in three years Amazon will offer 64-bit at an intermediate price point: The expensive 64-bit large instance of today will be the cheap 64-bit large instance of tomorrow, and people who want real power will be paying for 32xlarge instances.
Twitter is not "broader" than Pubsubhubbub
I'm pretty sure the general direction of the comments weren't bashing on Rails specifically, just the idea that they thought the honeymoon wouldn't end (it always does).

They went from a very heavy django background, where they saw the shortcomings of the framework (or every framework, really), dabbled in Rails for a day, loved its magic for trivial tasks (protip: most frameworks make trivial tasks easy and magical), and somehow concluded it was superior to django and that they had stumbled on a hidden gem (pun intended).

Frameworks have limitations. You will always reach a point in your career working with them that you disagree with one or more design choices, and you will have to deal with a problem the developers never accounted for. Sometimes that problem is easy to solve using your existing framework, and sometimes the framework (in solving 95% of other use cases) makes handling and solving that problem a pain in the ass. It isn't unique to django, Rails, Zend, or whatever else you happen to be using. But pretending that the framework you just discovered is perfect is just silly. Take the language you enjoy working in, find a framework that suits your style and doesn't get in your way too often, and run with it.

My apologies for still giving vague, sweeping statements, but I haven't worked deep enough with Rails for it to get in my way yet (I've only done a few simple proof-of-concept sites with it).
You missed the point: people manufacture controversy in their heads when scientists say things they don't like. They don't argue against them, they erroneously think there's not a concensus.

While I agree with you in principle that healthy skepticism is good, this is not that. Whether there is a scientific consensus is a fact that people reasonably are not free to be skeptics about.
Word of mouth,I believe that on the first day of posting number of resumes received goes upto 50- for something on craigslist. Would like to know if this anywhere close to actual numbers!
That's not a debugger, it's a high-level programming language.
It is false that there wasn't a headcount freeze, it did however end.
TCPDF might be another option (it's a fork of FPDF) - it has a decent HTML layout engine built in.