skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I develop in - and enjoy - node, but that Inception metaphor is brilliant! You do get used to it though. :-)
US lawmakers bring in worldwide censorship laws
Why? Do not see anything special about this compared with the Samsung, or any other tablets that are coming out? It will come down to the software, and damn do I hate blackberry OS (not played with 6 yet). I look forward to having everything displayed as lists.
Maybe an eventual next step is creating a YCombinator for YCombinators - a program to help your successful alumni do what you did and become successful incubators/angels/VCs, while keeping them under the overall YC umbrella.
Should I get a job & work on my idea or work on my startup right now -F1 student
I am a grad student in my final year of grad school who will be graduating in May 2011. I am working on my startup idea part-time balancing time along with school work. Since, I am on a F1 visa, I need to get a job as soon as I graduate or I have to leave the US 3 months after I graduate when the OPT period ends.This being the case, what would be the right course of action that I should be taking? I am highly motivated and am thinking about applying for YC Winter funding cycle. But, I am not sure how I can maintain legal status in the US if I work on my startup.I have heard of the startup visa, but to my knowledge it has still not been approved. Has YC funded startups with co-founders matching my profile in the past?
If you read the post and substitute "design pattern" for "algorithm", it sounds quite reasonable. Design patterns are not algorithms though, they're more like language-specific templates. I don't think they deserve the crowning glory of being in every CS degree.
The Blackberry PLAYBOOK, The IPAD Killer? [Video & Pics]
I'm not convinced 7" displays are the right size for tablets. Using the iPad 9-10" feels right to me. That might just be experience bias but I don't really see any advantages of going smaller. Might as well just get one of the bigger SmartPhones at that point. If anything I think the future of tablets might be larger -- not smaller. I would love to have a 13 or 15" iPad.
Same thing happened to me on a Qantas flight out of Adelaide.

Takeoff was crazy turbulent, and the pilot got on the PA several times pleading for "ALL your devices" to be shut off.

Kinda scary. :)
Facebook Places Already Having An Impact
I'm actually thinking about doing some work on this. Would you mind if I drop you an email at some point?
This is an amazing post. I've been at it for 7 years at FreshBooks...experience tells me patience is more valuable than most people building start ups want to believe.
Apple created the first (affordable) personal computer with a GUI interface and a mouse, too. Just because Apple created a new category doesn't mean they own that category. By your argument, the entire PC industry as we know it shouldn't exist.

I, for one, think the iPad is a little too limited for taste and I'm waiting for some other company to produce an reasonable alternative.
If they're going to compete with Apple, they need to work on their presentation and connection with the consumer. The guy in the pinstripe suit and tie is simply no comparison to having a passionate Steve Jobs in jeans up there on stage walking you through it live like you're sitting at a desk with him.
Right, so probably nothing to do with outsourcing or this article.

I believe the normal advice is to go get some of your work out there, contribute to open source projects or something. Make yourself more attractive to employers (or maybe even try and be your own boss)
7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn in College | Magazine
Sometimes we do :(
How it feels to have a stroke [TED]
I've worked with Plan9 and Inferno. I think they both failed for two reasons:

1. lack of device drivers for commonly found hardware at the time.

2. Ugly looking graphics and desktops and difficult (relative to what was widely used at the time) to use as well.

IBM's use of Plan9 with BlueGene uses the server side benefits so they need only a small number of custom device drivers and the GUI is not used at all.
Low-Emission Shale Gas to Discourage Nuclear, Carbon Capture
I wouldn't pay for this. I can not really think of any situation where I would rather get a call vs many emails or sms reminders. Best of luck.
Badgeville Wants To Layer Social Gaming (And Yes, Badges) Across The Entire Web
Don't forget to CC licensing@fsf.org, so the FSF gets a copy and the USPTO knows there's a large organized body opposing software patents.
The evolution of the Apple mouse
I don't understand how you use your mouse when using Google, other than to select a search result? Normally I just press Return.

The problem with Instant is precisely the risk of distraction. It's the same reason I don't use Suggest - and in fact, I now am forced to avoid www.google.com completely, as there is now no easy way of disabling Suggest on the web page. It used to be you could switch between Suggest and non-Suggest; now, your only choices are between Suggest and Instant.

I'm sticking with the search box in the browser.

(Actually, there is a way to disable Suggest: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0 ; but that's impractical except as a bookmark or home page.)
RIM really has nothing to lose -- they're not going to get this tablet out in time for Christmas 2010 so they might as well announce it now. They have little to gain in saying nothing until they launch because they're going to launch too late.
I agree. I recently wanted to comment on something on codinghorror.com and had to use the OpenId/Facebook login. It wanted to be able to use my FB credentials to login - fine. But then it also wanted access to my friends and activities and to be able to post things on my wall. WTF?

I denied that second query and was able to log in fine, but the question is, why the hell did they ask in the first place. Seemed underhanded to me (most people would have been confused and probably said, "Yeah, I want to log in, I guess so, sure").
Same here. I think a lot of the draw is that it's so easy to make little tweaks. I'll be wandering through my home cave structure, and think "oh, this room needs to be a little wider" or "I need an arch here" and within seconds it's done. Over time you can build out some really elaborate structures this way.

Of course, that's also the part that makes it hard to put down: you'll start off just adding a few torches for visibility and end up building a lighthouse or similar.
What would happen if you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider
shit happens. doesn't mean they can't try again.
> On another subject, why is RIM even in this business?

Because these modern tablets are not scaled down PC's, they are scaled up phones.
Significant cheating by FBI agents on exam
Stopped reading after you tried to insinuate that Apple invented the Portable MP3 Player, Smartphone, and Tablet PC market categories. What they did was enter existing and established markets, make an Apple-branded product with a good UI/UX design, and marketed the hell out of it.
And on the other hand, not all shiny new things are an improvement on the old. For a company as allegedly fearful of opportunity cost as Google[1], we should expect that well over 90% of the new stuff they do sucks more than their old stuff.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895
Hey HN: jQuery animation framerates are jacked up. This smooths them out.
Short answer: They don't know.

Longer answer. It won't be good, but it might not kill you - probably won't give you superpowers. But nobody's going to let you try anyway.
What do you recommend to the founders that can't move to the bay area? Like people who own homes, have a family, etc? I know the YC requires it. I once emailed and asked about commuting because my co-founder and I both live in Sacramento, but the person who answered my email basically said that commuting is not feasible.
Every television food/restaurant ad I've ever seen.

I've never eaten at Red Lobster but oh MAN do I want to. That half lobster, flames lapping up and engulfing it, charry grill lines, being dipped in fake yellow butter.... mmm...

And Olive Garden. I have been and think its awful. But every time I see the commercial I want to go back. It just looks so good and tickles my brain in exactly the right ways.

I know that eating at these places will leave my disappointed, but somehow the rich visual imagery (planned by food stylists, not chefs...) just appeals to me on some visceral level that short-circuits the rational mind in me.

Lucky for me there's not "order now" button on my TV thats hooked up to a credit card.
Method-chaining has been there for a while.

I keep happening upon projects with their own craptacular homebrew MVC framework, and their own abysmal homebrew caching.

Fix is a swap for yii and memcached -- feel free to choose your faves.
++ isn't defined in Clojure, and in Haskell ++ is used to concatenate lists. Using (inc) isn't considered an abomination, though.
1.)I agree saves me the instance of having to press enter.

2.)I usually know what im searching for and type fast enough where most suggestions are not a distraction, and barely pay attention to it.

3.)When trying to refine a search its actually very helpful, and fast, when deleting a word or suggesting an added word to add to the query... i can refine search, scan results, and know right away if results are getting better or worse.

For me its a awesome.. not so much concerned with bandwidth or cpu as author.
I've always thought of YC as more of an incubator for young 20-somethings trying to get an idea off the ground. The impression has been fortified by the reported small amounts of 'seed' that is given out. I know a lot of people in older age brackets (30s-40s-50s) with a family and Silicon Valley mortgage who have great ideas and experience but wouldn't even consider approaching YC.

My one suggestion is if you want to expand your age/experience bracket and get these people to apply, you may want to address issues directly relevant to them. One suggestion is to relabel the investment to something more like a 'stipend' and explain clearly that it's not expected to cover salary and life expenses, but only to help defer company expenses. That way, people know that they need to set aside enough savings to cover their family.

The other is to spell out clearly the policy of working on outside projects (to bring in some money) during the YC 3-month period. Leaving it ambiguous keeps out people who need a part-time gig to bring in some money but could spend the rest of their waking time working on a cool product.

I know people who work as consultants and make $10K-$25K in a month. To these people, the YC 'investment' is more of a deterrent. The main attraction would be to get wired into the network and tap into the experience YC and its alumni can offer. It would be good if you could clarify whether it makes sense for them to apply or not.

Overall though, a good write-up with a decent level of detail. Thanks for putting it up.
Will they just integrate it with Engadget or how will that work out? Keep both separate but competing? Like the way Kellogg's has their divisions competing against each other like Rice Crispies vs. Mini-Wheats?
Do you generally advise single-founder companies to add cofounders (it does have its benefits), or do you think single founders are fine if they pass the filter?

I guess my question is, do you see single-founder companies as missing something (a cofounder), or does it depend on the founder?
If you were to start YC again, from scratch - i.e. if your brain was teleported into your body 5 years ago - what would you do differently? Would you start it directly in SV instead of Boston? Would you focus more on building the alumni network from day one?

There must have been many mistakes along the way, while this article talks mostly about the successes. I'm curious what mistakes you made and avoided... maybe that's a topic for another article though.
Briefing on U.S. Competitiveness [video]
You can just let users initiate a request with their login name, no?
No, UTF-8 was invented by Ken Thompson. Source, by Rob Pike: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

Key quote: "Looking around at some UTF-8 background, I see the same incorrect story being repeated over and over. The incorrect version is:
1. IBM designed UTF-8.
2. Plan 9 implemented it.
That's not true. UTF-8 was designed [by Ken Thompson], in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992."
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-...
Actually, another case: Vladimir Yaroslavskiy recently came up with a dual-pivot quicksort method where the number of swaps is reduced from 1nln(n) to 0.8nln(n). Yes, he's only twiddling the constant factor, but the benchmarks have been promising, with some sorts being reduced to 25% to 50% of their previous running time. Josh Bloch, one of the shepherds of Java, took the time to implement it as the default sorting algorithm in Java 7 (whenever that gets released). More details at: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.core-libs...

How timsort from Python stacks up, I don't know offhand. But that's a different beast instead of an improvement to a fundamental algorithm.
Congrats to MA & crew if it's true. Regardless of whether people care for his style of writing or what TechCrunch has become (I don't mind most of it), it warms me up to see people who bust their asses get rewarded handsomely (assuming the payoff will be good.)

I just hope AOL won't kill it by injecting content from random Seed.com writers, similar to the way Demand Media turned eHow and LiveStrong into content beds. Sure the quality of TC isn't as great as it was in it's early days but it could a whole lot worse.
Make something patients want is particularly alluring to me.

I am curious as to what you have in mind. (I tried to find an email address for you and couldn't. Sorry to junk up this thread. You can email me -- from one of the websites in my profile -- if you don't want to post it here.)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Apple's iAd hot on Google's heels in mobile ad sales
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Back in the early days of the iPod's success, company after company came out with iPod-killers that all basically flopped. Then, after the iPhone became a hit, everyone touted new smartphones as iPhone killers, which also flopped. Android is the only thing which has every reached the status of a legitimate iKiller. The Android tablet or some descendent of it might be your best bet for finding the tablet you're looking for.
Apple's Mobile Advertising Continues to Grow
Here is another typography solution for Baseline Grid Typography http://www.allapis.com/emastic/typography.html from Emastic CSS Framework http://code.google.com/p/emastic/
America has the foreign policy and military structure of an imperial power, but lacks a direct mechanism to collect the tribute that historically supported empires. Instead, the system depends on the US possessing relative economic advantage in a free-trade system to create prosperity which can then be taxed, underwriting the enormous military budget. That system has been broken since the late 60s; globalization and radical antitax conservatism eliminated the financial foundation required to maintain such a vast military. In the end, a state that can't pay for its military ceases to have the ability to act as a hegemon.
I guess this is the one story on which Arrington doesn't mind getting scooped.
Going out on a very frail limb here, but it seems to me that MA wants to build a (small, but "his") empire, not just make money. In that context it makes no sense for him to sell TechCrunch. That said, stranger things have happened...
They're profoundly different blogs, don't think they're candidates for a merge at all.
What I *Would Have* Said at TechCrunch Disrupt
Porn studios borrowing from RIAA playbook with P2P lawsuits
Iranian power plant infected by Stuxnet, allegedly undamaged
This is outstanding.

Worst case scenario: You fail utterly, you're a whole lot smarter, and if you really want/need to, you go back to school.

With the experience gained, you make a better decision about what you want to study, because you'll know how you want to use it and you'll know what you don't like doing. (I'd give anything to be able to go back in time and choose CS instead of what I did study, back when I was 18, stupid, and locking myself into college.)

More likely than not, you'll re-join college with awesome work opportunities that carry through until after you graduate, where great prospects are waiting for you.

On the other hand, you could build something amazing that alters the trajectory of your whole career.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1725592
When you put it like that, maybe we're missing the obvious. Maybe this isn't aimed at Apple, maybe it's aimed at HP.
"I moved my primary residence from Silicon Valley to Seattle"

Hmm, that's very specific wording there. In my world, filled with tax advisors and lawyers, this translates to "I'm trying to avoid paying California state income tax on capital gains I will accrue in the near future."

-- master's prediction http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1314487
I suspect the proportion of people who get distracted by intermediate displays is large enough to actually be valuable to Google.
That sounds like potentially a big problem. You can't even assume you will always have the stock Android Market to fallback on either.
Arrington deserves a lucrative cash-out. He's put so much hard work into TC, and grown it into such a media force.

I'd hope AOL would keep it as a separate unit. But if not, and AOL changes it, it could be an opportunity to, uh, Disrupt Techcrunch as the market leader.
Someday, the same bureaucrat at the FCC who enforces net-neutrality could also be checking ISP compliance with the blacklist!
Every business is for sale at the right price :)
"With node.js... you really, truly and most awesomely don't worry about race conditions."

Most of node.js's fanbase well and truly believes this nonsense, that you can't have race conditions simply because there is no pre-emption of your running code. In fact, single-threaded, event-based logic can very easily end up in situations where the timing or ordering of network frames impact a response in an unanticipated manner.
Apple Threatens Search Giants' Mobile Ad Shares
The iPod was an MP3-player killer. And the iPhone was a smartphone killer. In neither of those situations did Apple create the market -- they improved what other players were doing. Outside of Android, there were no new smartphone designs to tout as iPhone killers. My WinMo phone's underlying design predates the original iPhone by a long time even though the device itself is newer. Microsoft is finally getting around to making their iPhone killer with Windows Mobile 7.
FYI, Korea is divided into two countries, North Korea and South Korea. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which one is a dynastic totalitarian Stalinist state in which millions of its citizens have starved in the past 20 years, and which one has an ongoing US military presence.
Because it's still not really on Windows. Which means all the programmers stuck in Windows shops out there aren't doing anything with it, the game writing community isn't doing anything, and even people who write desktop apps are still looking at it a bit funny. Critical mass is slow to build as a result.
Dubious. I imagine you could give Steve Jobs $100 trillion and he still wouldn't sell Apple. What would he do with his life? Buy Apple back?
Crunchgear is basically the same as Engadget. And yes I agree they differ, but they have a fair amount of overlap.
Have some perspective! Monier also did the original AltaVista and spent years at both eBay and Google during their mega-growth stages.

Selection bias is a problem if you only look at notorious failures, as well. You seem to have an anti-survivorship-bias.
Agreed. When I first saw the headline, I thought it was Dean.
Git-achievements was a lot of fun to make. Lots of laughs coming up with the various "achievements" you get to unlock with various people on #startups. For the curious I wrote up a blog post on it when I first put it up: http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2010/03/git-achievements....

The unexpected has to be how useful it has been in showing off how easy it is to add commands to git, getting a laugh when giving presentations on learning Git and how every few weeks someone tells me about it.

Big thanks to the github guys for gh-pages. It is really a hidden killer feature of github. Rather than a master branch there is only a gh-pages branch which is what makes publishing achievements to easy for anyone to do. It makes dumping up little js apps/tests/examples in a git repo online really easy such as these other two repos:
http://github.com/icefox/js_email_link_hack
http://github.com/icefox/javascript_genetic_algorithm
The main insight I took from this was the quip about "investing in YC-funded startups is safe in the same way buying name-brand products is".

Like many people I sometimes feel ripped off when I pay 50% more for that box of Kellogs cereal or whatever. I imagine the same feeling might be the motivation behind AngelGate.
I wrote something similar a while back to offload parts of legacy sites on Google App engine.

http://github.com/silas/gaem
End of the Road for Xmarks
Selling Apple isn't up to (just) Steve Jobs. That's not how public companies work.
Tell HN: Developers please don't do anything weird on log in pages
I have a uservoice account, where I administer the help site for Windy Citizen. Today, I decided I wanted to sign in to check/update the settings I have on it. I click the "sign in" button on the uservoice front page and get this:

http://uservoice.com/signin

It's asking me for an e-mail and a username. Nowhere does it ask me for a password.

I've been thinking about this form for about 5 minutes, and I'm still not 100% sure how I'm supposed to use it. Do I enter in one? The other? I've been clicking around trying to find a password field somewhere so I can log into the account I set up.

Developers, please don't screw with stuff like this.
How's this work if I buy apps from the Verizon store and then move to T-Mobile? Do I have to repurchase the apps with the new phone?
I use the wmii window manager which is based off some Plan9 principles. Surely you wouldn't bring it home to grandma, but for fast efficient use of screen space with a keyboard I think it's hard to beat.
Poor Yahoo! Always shows up late to the party.
One could use a cloud service like Xmarks which already syncs bookmarks and browser passwords. Just because it's built into the browser doesn't mean that you can store the information in the cloud and sync it between browsers.

The difference is that you control the connection and your information directly. With OpenID or Facebook the connection is directly between those entities and site you are visiting. With a browser-based system, the connection is always between the site and you or the cloud and you.
Design is not appealing in the least.

I have no idea what you're offering when I first look at your website.

I would remove the word "hack" from the single line at the top. Most people associate "hack" with bad things.

Your form at the bottom of the page is too spaced out.

For the frequency type, I'd change it to a drop down select in order to streamline the backend of the service.

I wouldn't make the customer pick their own question to be asked.

I think you can operate around a 50% profit margin at $10/month.

Worker costs: $8/hr * 8hr/day * 30 days = $1920/month
So breakeven is 193 subscribers at $8/hr for your caller.

I estimate each call will take approximately 1 minute. So your caller can handle at maximum 480 calls per day, but more likely 400 after breaks.

So at capacity for a single worker, you have 400 subscriptions, bringing in $4000/month. Your cost for the employee is $1920 per month.
I cannot fathom why merely moving the mouse over a simple text-based webpage shall peg my CPU to 100%.