skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lack of GPS on the phone might not be that bad. Apple seems to be betting that WiFi is going to become more and more pervasive and as a result you can uses "GPS-Style" services through the internet, like Google Maps.

It's something I think a lot of currently generation Mobile services (i.e. Loopt) should strongly consider.
I'm surprised it's not Ron Paul
I'm going to wait until I can use it on Verizon. I really don't want any more accounts with AT&T at this point. (They absolutely screwed me recently by charging $4+ for long distance calls per minute - yikes!. I'm getting rid of my home AT&T phone (will just use cell) and getting rid of their expensive DSL, and going with Comcast cable internet - which is theoretically much faster and half the cost)
Amazon announces Alexa Web Search service
"Hacking/breaking/gaming a live system is not really a cool thing to do. But what if the target is too lazy and careless ?"

That doesn't really matter. That's like saying "Judge, I only stole this car because the lock was lame and whoever designed it was lazy and careless." See how silly your argument really is?!
Ahh I get it. Now the period/full stop makes sense. :)
Yes, I will get an iPhone but not the day they come out. I'm going to wait for my service plan with t-mobile to expire and then make the switch...should be in early 2008. Hopefully that will be enough time 'in the wild' to evaluate if this thing is as cool as it seems to be, the status of 3rd-party apps, new calling plans, etc.
Can be very state dependent.

If you're non-smoking 22, you should be able to get catastrophic coverage ($5,000+ deductible) starting around $80/month (but more like $110 if you want it from a company you've heard of)

Vermont on the other hand, $5,000 deductible HSA's are $191, so it definitely depends.

None of these plans will have much (any) in the way of preventative care, etc. And a broken arm will come right out of your pocket for a couple k. You're max should be 5k if you get something terrible.

For a full featured plan I'd budget $400+. When I quit, my CORBA rate was going to be $542/month. (That's what my employer was paying for me)
Lol. I just figured out why everyone keeps upvoting this. I left the title blank, so you can't actually visit the link it points to.. So people keep clicking around and eventually accidentally click the upvote button.

Or they just like me a lot. :)
geeks.
Have you ever worked on Mac? Basically there is no such a thing like "installation" on MacOS. PC users usually don't believe it until they see it themselves.

Simplicity requires some effort and thinking, and on the contrary, it is relatively easier to design bloated software.

And I'm sure, when some Microsoft installer pretends it's "analyzing system configuration" and freezes for a dozen of seconds with no disk or CPU activity - I'm sure it's just a trivial call to Sleep().
I didn't see anywhere where he said economic inequality is the sign of a good economy. In fact, I believe he's suggesting that there is a link between economic inequality and social inequality and he tries to offer a solution to delink the two.
no confirmation on submit bookmarklet means this is an accidental submission I can't delete.
He seems to be more on the shady/darkhat side of things. I think YC readers are more interested in the "create something cool/valuable/fun and love what you do" method.

Personally, I would rather be building things and creating value, rather than playing cat-and-mouse with search engines and ad networks.

Maybe I am misinterpreting him though.
Do folks build this into their business plans?
Never buy an Apple r1.0 product.
What Joel doesn't get (or at the very least 'forgot' to write down) is that as the pixel density of the screens (DPI) increases, MS's method will fall apart. Apple's tech is clearly superior in that respect. Just look at the iPhone... it has a "huge" (by today's LCD standards anyway) pixel density and Apple's font rendering looks really amazing.
Microsoft needs to let staff innovate (where's your "20 per cent time" suggests google Alan Noble to Balmer)
Not all along for ride with Google gears (is it what users want? will they bother installing?)
Google Web Accelerator won't follow the link, because it's got query parameters (a ? in the URL). See their help: http://webaccelerator.google.com/webmasterhelp.html#prefetch3

It's just as well, too -- GETs are used so often for this kind of stuff that any web acceleration tool which ignored this would break lots of sites.
The iPhone SDK was released on Monday: www.apple.com/safari

Why would they include a "desktop sdk" when the desktop applications are going out of business? I don't want native applications on the iPhone, but cheap data rates would be a killer feature!

I have a Windows Mobile based Smartphone and have only 2 applications installed. A Sudoku game and a homescreen application.
One more point: you can set your registry values when your application runs for the first time. It's a common practice especially on UNIX and MacOS to generate configuration silently, when needed instead of focusing user's attention on that during installation.

Other than that, installation is essentially copying. The proper place, file-type bindings, version checks etc can be done by the system automatically, again, without annoying the user (and the developer, too). And that's exactly what MacOS was doing since version 5 in 1980's.

(Besides, Windows Registry is one of the main sources of complication).
You'll be in high demand if you keep this up. I know I'd want you beta-testing my site!
This was asked a while back, and had some interesting responses, so here's a link to the last discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=8676
Welcome to America, land of the free.
I tend to agree, it would be cool to be able to access some of the internal features but there is so much you can do with a web application now that it's not really an issue.
Real World HTML Alignment
There is evidence to say that marshmallows are bureaucracy and office politics, and eating them is engaging in those activities, but there is also strong evidence to support that marshmallows are bugs (and eating them is fixing them). They are likely both.

Remember the third M. This essay seems to both comment on Google and its bureaucracy, and Wyvern, full of bugs and a poor architecture created by a less experienced Steve Yegge, which he has been trying to improve since taking it offline nine months ago.
Slashdot and Search Engine Patent
A patent company Geomas that claims to own location-based search is sewing Verizon. By the way he raised 20 million or so he claims.

This is related to search engines and is also on slashdot at
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/06/12/196234.shtml
By the way I'm looking for someone who is interested in a related search engine I'm developing.
Use style="cat-align: right" for better lolcat standards compliance.

(A cat picture makes the front page? Isn't that the social news equivalent of jumping the shark :P)
James Hong: Facebook Apps
I don't see why. Could you elaborate? Won't they both look good with higher DPI?
Why There Are No Indian Software Startups
How to get rich in America: A dozen entrepreneurs, a dozen success stories
Why your Workplace May Matter More than your Skills
iinnovate Podcast: Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch
iinnovate Podcast: Chip Heath, Author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
iinnovate Podcast: Max Levchin, Founder of Slide and Co-Founder of Paypal
Hi jwp,

I think I tried or wanted to do f3hops. Either I did it and I was stretching the 2GB memory limit, or I couldn't. As you exponentiate the sparse matrix more and more you get a less and less sparse matrix. I was really hurting for memory.

Yeah, I really wish I could have spent more time exploring the algorithms side. If I didn't start Xobni during summer 2006 the plan was to write a book on machine learning, in practice. One of these days..

P.S. Would love to get in touch. Can you post your email or send me a note? My email is adam dot smith foo xobni.com where foo == @.
dude, any chance I could get in touch with you?
Older Programmers are Faster Programmers?
"Eat up Martha" springs to mind
Thanks! I didn't know that Podcast. I suggest as well http://www.venturevoice.com/ and http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
for tech company founder interviews and conferences.
Not a very interesting hack.

I am sure that when they created the website they did not want to take a ton of security precautions in order to prevent things like this.

I am sure that you can create a hack that will start 1 million threads, post 1 million comments, and create 1 million users.
Verizon is just as bad. I can't wait to get off their wireless service. I recently moved to the SF Bay Area and found that my cell on a nationwide plan was roaming continuously. Somehow the phone I bought from them won't update its network listing so the options given to me from their reps were 1. Renew my 2 year plan and get $100 towards a new phone or 2. Buy a phone off of craigslist and pay them $20 to transfer it. I'll be glad to switch to a GSM network where I can buy phones online and swap the SIM cards if I need to.
sure,

ben (at) imthere dot com
I'm not averse to using it. Just never got around to it till now.
I've updated my profile with my email addr.
Yes, that will be good. It's definitely an area that needs improvement. There are some key differences between the "people search" approach and mine, though.

1. The people search approach is O(n) amount of work for the person searching. Mine is O(1).

2. The people search gives immediate results. Mine occur sporadically. For some purposes (e.g. planning a reunion), mine is clearly inferior in this regard, but I kind of like it. Delayed rewards can be very refreshing.
First of all, you're 23+ and ante-ing up in the big game so stop f-cking around. This means no fights, no drinking & driving and quit doing the stupid shit that impressed girls when you were 15.

This will seriously reduce your need for insurance.

If you don't have the stones to live with bad insurance (unless you have serious prescription needs) you probably can't handle the risk associated with starting a company anyway.

There are cheap policies that keep my parents from flipping out. I pay $37 a month through anthem.
Speaking of which, have you guys seen what Facebook has turned into with the advent of the platform? I was over at my friend's house tonight watching the NBA Finals. He was on Facebook, and every page he visited had some stupid little application. One was some survey app which has you answer questions about a person, then he had about 5 or 6 requests (they weren't friend requests, something entirely different) that said, "Hi, you are free to poke, tickle, or do whatever you want with me." We loled at that because it was just so bizarrely worded. And then some strange fortune cookie request (?).

I don't even use Facebook that much, but it was clear that all this extra stuff was just annoying and in the way. It was noise, not signal. I really think that Facebook might drive its core users away with adding all these extra nuisances to every page.

Facebook is turning into MySpace. Yeah, I'm surprised, too.
(Not until Ron Paul shows up... ;-))
Evolvist.com looking for a hacker for the Summer in NYC
We have recently received some funding and want to bring some programmers on board for the Summer. If you are interested please email marvin.hidalgo@gmail.com by June 20. Include a list of your technical skills, any open source projects contributed to, and cool projects worked on.
We plan on building a Facebook Application...
me
redrory ( at ) gmail ( d0t) com
"As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts it if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming methods..."

That's such a load of crap... (And I say that as another CS alumni from IIT Mumbai itself!)
Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. - Charlie Munger speech at USC Law School.
Plug & Play Tech Incubator in Sunnyvale. Are they any good?
I came across Plug & Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale (plugandplaytechcenter.com). It seems they have a lot of Internet startups working there. Have you worked there, or in any other incubator? Was it worth it?
Women have less access to capital - Researchers explore pursuit of angel funding
hrm. Perhaps someone should send the paper referenced in this post to Zuckerberg, though I doubt it would change his mind.
Seems correct to me. I am a much better and faster programmer at 32 than I was at 22,
Ron Conway: Third-rate VCs are paying off entrepreneurs
Looks like the first paragraph sums up all the real findings... the rest is a bunch of speculation, and statement of need for further research.
Andrew Chen: How to fool VCs - Confusing them with date ranges and hits/pageviews/uniques
'... Unless you're already operating your own systems at Facebook levels of scale, your servers will promptly explode from all the traffic ...'

if you do read this thread first 'Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in' ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27532
the author 'kds' was a member of osaf (Chandler) team ~ http://www.webfoot.com/blog/2007/01/22/dreaming-in-code/
Would you join a Reddit that charged $5 a year and was invite only? You'd get to invite five new users per year.
'Dreaming in code' retort (KDS reply to joel spolsky review of dreaming in code)
What's the big, mostly blank, turquoise box in the middle for?
I would have. I wouldn't now... the quality isn't there anymore.
Check out www.ehealthinsurance.com

I bought mine there.
I can only pray what happened to reddit doesn't happen here.
I agree, grand pas club performs very well :)
I like to ask myself what I can develop that will make someone's job obsolete. I haven't implemented any of these ideas yet, but it seems like a good way to find something that should be made. If a robot or computer can do it, why shouldn't it?
Mark Hedlund: Would an RIA platform like XULRunner be the best way to develop iPhone apps?
I really dig the UI. Very clean looking. Nice job! What libraries are you using?
Joe, why do you want "desktop to die" so desperately? I have really tried to get your point, but all I see is a marketing pitch: "pace of innovation... it will be years... higher efficiency..." Come on, this is not a business school restroom. Be specific please.

Reality is that there are always 3 big components to any software: code, data and runtime. You can download/cache any of the 3, in different proportions.

Now define "online app". Is it something that downloads all 3 components? Nope, since runtime is always local (browser/flash/silverlight).

My original point is that it makes alot of sense to push as much code down to customer's computer as possible, distributing the load (because it simply makes sense). The runtime will always sit at consumer's computer, because runtimes are fat, ugly and a paint to install securely.

So... basicaly it all comes to where you want to store your data.
Heh, this is a perfect example of why languages matter. All these people are employed churning out reams of boilerplate Java.
I think total visits multiplied by average stay is a pretty useful single number. "Our users spent over 100 man-years on our site in the past month". According to Compete.com the number for this site is 79 hours of user time per month, and Reddit is at ~4 years/mo.
Practical Common Lisp author Peter Seibel writing "Coders at Work" companion to Livingston's Founders at Work
It won't be long before a viable option to accomodate fast growth is availale. S3 does a great job scaling storage, and Amazon is already planning to make EC2 easier to use for web applications.
Incubators can be good or bad depending on which one you choose and which stage you're at. There is no easy way to answer this. Although it'd be interesting to hear what others have experienced.
I could never stand this stuff in english literature classes. "What does the blah blah represent?". My brain is not wired for that stuff. I vastly prefer direct, cut-the-crap, tell it to me straight up if you have something to say style comunication. I just don't have time for manatees that represent jesus and sheep that are your father's conscious or things of that ilk, sorry:-)
For automobile industry [or any direct consumer product for that matter,say ,Gmail ], a lame product will be replaced by a competition. Thats how better products dominate the market.Thats how 'survival of the fittest' works.

But for lame practices, the answer is it to break it down and show them why they should care. This is a humble reply to an extremely careless coding practice.

I am not proud of what i did.For a beta product, if glitch exist, it can be reported. But come on..this is freaking CNN! Cant they just care to implement a decent system for The Worldwide Campaign they run?
Paul can say this, but,

{update the server first} - {return a value} - {update the UI}

doesn't require much "effort".Its just a good practice.
I am just suggesting Paul.
Zoho is an indian startup
Dumping that good-for-nothing co-founder of yours
Now, i am sure some of you have encountered a good-for-nothing co-founder who seems like a good fit early on but turns out to be a disappointment as time dictates. Assuming you've decided enough is enough and you decided to look for a new co-founder, what should be your course of action. Note that your existing co-founder has some equity in your startup.

Should you start a new company with the new co-founder replicating the old startup (which should take about a month at most) or stick with the old company?

P.S. I'm assuming a web startup here. So replication here means doing a similar site.
I've got Unicare's cheapest plan and pay about $80/month. It'll cover anything terrible, and otherwise I'm an active healthy vegetarian non-smoking 30-something male. Women pay more in this age range, but not a huge amount more.

If you can't handle paying $30 co-pay for doctors visits, and similar on prescriptions, and having no dental or vision, then you're probably not quite ready to dive into business--unless you raise money. You do need health insurance. A single illness can wipe out your company in very short order--and not just because you're not on the job while recovering. The corporate veil is thin very early on, and if you've got corporate money in the bank, your debtors will want it.
What geeks fight/drink to impress girls?
Startup Idea: Car Related Mobile Applications
I wonder if a kind of natural selection is present here. Wouldn't the only old programmers left be the ones who didn't get fired, or got sick of the industry? In other words, would only the good, "for the love of it" programmers remain?
A partial cash-out helps the founders diversify a bit, which can be good because they can then afford to take big risks.

However, I'm guessing that Ron's concern is that it can also act as a sort of bribe, causing the founders to act not in the best interests of the shareholders (which kind of screws earlier investors).
speech-to-text. i don't see how high a barrier of entry is this. bmw and the other manufacturers would most likely incorporate this in their electronic systems if it becomes popular.
A specific example of the power of one's network
I'm gonna start selling some AAPL stocks
Why did you guys down voted this guy?
Is any YC-funded company built specifically for such a platform?

Pmarca skips over the danger of being copied by Facebook, which is even easier for them than it was for MS in the Windows era.
Pretty cool, but the randomly sized band names could use some work. For example, "the police" should probably be in a font large enough to me to read without squinting.
An online game startup that really helps to save electricity
It seems to me that it's more like a network effect than a lack of education. Why are there few startups in Europe?

I read (can't find link) from an outsourcer that Indian programmers don't want stock options, presumably because they have not experienced successes like Google.

I've met a skilled Indian programmer, in Colorado. He was doing consulting, and living most of the time in the US. I assumed that he was not alone in doing this.

"Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere coders". The same can be said of the US.
Women have less access to everything in this cruel world :(
How to make a mini-YouTube w/ ActiveMessaging and Amazon s3 (RoR)
Exercise Thinking Outside the Box and Apply It to a Start-up
GWA did use to follow all GETs, including those with parameters, and did cause all kinds of grief because of poorly written web sites, so they added the query parameter check to work around it.
A partial cash-out puts founders and VCs on much more equal footing. It's not surprising that bothers him. It is surprising he's so short-sighted and stuck in his ways.

I think the best argument against it is that some founders might stop pushing as hard after becoming mildly rich.
I suppose if it isn't too much work, why not. While you are at it, also write some widgets for OS X, Google and Yahoo?

However, this is the third link today that leads me to the facebook login page. That sucks. Why do you have to login to see the available applications? I don't have a facebook account, so, whatever...
Just about the best place to find freelance programmers or designers
Let me be a little more specific about what I mean -

I'm not saying that raid is bad, it has its issues, but it most certainly has its places. The issue that I see as most significant with raid is the "brain shut down" effect - i.e. once you know you're redundancy and performance is covered by RAID, you'll be less open to other possible methods that, while in no way mutually exclusive with raid, require a bigger picture perspective. One method that has shown to scale _extremely_ well is partition and replicate (and my point about ignoring rdbms's and raid in the article was to suggest that partition and replicate is a concept that is useful outside of outside of these domains).

Another point I want to clarify - I said partition and replicate is cheap. This statement is imprecise. Partition and replicate is cheap once you've reached the point where your thinking of spending $100k (to $1MM) on a single database instance.

In summary - I believe that it's wise to consider how you'd partition and replicate your app before you need to, because once it's needed, the pain you'll feel will be massive and (IMHO) unnecessary.
How did you meet your co-founder? (or "How *could* you meet potential co-founder(s)?")
I don't think this question has been asked before (did a quick search ~ http://tinyurl.com/2p998t ). It's worthy of discussion in my view, because without one your toast.

My story is the previous potential co-founder decided that doing a PhD was a fast track to 'better understanding' the problems we had started working on. So much for my powers of persuasion ... hmm now I'm toast. I ask the question for those who might be in the same boat. I've now overcome this hurdle. But I'm still interested in finding out how others solved this problem. Maybe a better questions to ask is "how could (did) you meet your potential co-founder(s)?"

So how could you meet your co-founder(s)?
If you think the wolves are bad, look out for those that give them counsel. http://www.askoxford.com/firstnames/ralph?view=uk :-)
The paper is not accessible unless you have ACM subscription. It is not clear what about the workplace may make you a better coder.
The value of UI consistency ('different is hard')
Sorry to hear that. I've been using Verizon for years, and one of the main reasons was their amazing coverage all over the US. I've had great luck with them to date, especially with their coverage. I can't even remember the last time I had a coverage problem. I also have an associate using their broadband wireless card on his laptop, and he's successfully maintaining a good connection on his daily train commute from Gilroy up to SF (1.5 - 2 hour trip each way.) keeping a connection to our internal webapp via VPN.