skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, but I don't consider it too wrong to use flash block, since a) flash is slow and b) flash makes it impossible to read while something is spinning around next to the text. Like pop-up blocking, it only filters out the stuff advertisers shouldn't be doing anyway.
"It is widely known that IE starts almost instantly because of of the DLLs it uses have already been preloaded by Windows apps (regular file explorer in particular)."

That's not my experience. It seems to lock the OS as it tries and grab some system-wide resources (DirectX?). The cursor stops moving and mp3s stop playing for a good half minute.

The same happens with Windows Explorer. Even Firefox comes up quicker than Windows Explorer.
Don't fear to start your business with a few bucks
we (buxfer) have been happy with layeredtech till now as well.
Because there are still a lot of transaction costs out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase#The_Nature_of_the_Firm

Hiring is, in other words, not obsolete.
Watch the WWDC 2007 Keynote
The graph has 2x the aspect ratio of graphs we're used to looking at. If it were the usual shape, growth would
look twice as steep. Also, the giant spike in the middle expands the scale.

Here's the same data with a more usual aspect ratio and scale:

http://ycombinator.com/images/ycnews-4mo-v2.png
This thread has some suggestions as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18363
I don't mind text ads, or low-key static images. What I can't stand are ads that bounce around. By design, they distract you. When advertisers abuse the user, I have no problem blocking them.

Curiously, there is a startup in the summer cycle that's working on the problem of how to make tolerable ads.
Joining a newly founded startup is different. It may legally be hiring, but in practice it can be more like being a cofounder.
Piracy on Facebook is as Easy as Mosoto Remix
YouTube To Test (Own) Copyright Screening Technology
Nothing (yet :-) ). I took a solid-state physics course in undergrad; the course was unoficially labeled "the mathematica course". We derived a 3D model of an H atom using Heisenberg's equations. So when I recently saw mathematica in the news, I checked out their website and saw that they seem to be heading in the "general programming" direction. That made me curious about what people are using it for.
They worked well for ourdoings.com too. I've been using them for about 18 months. When I had a hardware failure (memory) they took care of it reasonably quickly.
I don't know what your ultimate goals with news.yc are, but I like the site how it is. Unfortunately, as has been seen at reddit and digg, the bigger the site gets, the lower the quality of the posts and conversations (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September ). While I appreciate that you want to see growth, I'd hate for it to turn into yet another collection of amazing pictures. I'm happy with the high quality crowd of 4000 daily ips. I don't know what the tipping point would be, but if it doubled or tripled from here I have a feeling the quality of posts would drop significantly or the initial community will have to be more active in voting/moderating posts.

Regards.
Very nice result mainly if it's generated by 3 db tables and few lines of code!
The ultimate goal is to make it useful for everyone interested in (computer) startups. That may mean low tens of thousands of users; probably no more.

We have a bunch of editors who kill offtopic links. So far that seems to be keeping the site focused.
Jobs talks strategy / Apple OS, browser more Windows-friendly
Educational computing for the masses
Kyte.tv hooks up with Nokia investment arm
Apple iPhone Follows Facebook In Creating A Web 2.0 Platform For Third-Party Applications
Curiously? No, not curiously! YOU picked them. OF COURSE there is a startup doing something you feel there is a need for. YOU are the judge! :)
'And if you ask people why they build web apps, the answer will not be "because desktop is dead"'

I actually started my career in desktop apps and moved to web "because desktop is dead". My first couple tasks projects at my current employer were Swing apps, IDE plugins, etc.

I was pulled onto web development because we basically can't sell desktop interfaces anymore. I'd prefer to do desktop software, IMHO it's easier (particularly in Java, where the web frameworks suck), but there's just no demand for it. Almost all new development at my employer uses a web front-end. Almost all of our competitors are still using thick-client desktop apps. When we go out to prospective clients and give demos, our web interface is a significant selling point.

'"web software" is almost never considered valuable enough to get people to open their wallets for'

Our customers give us close to a million dollars a pop for our webapps.
All Transactions are based on Trust - Reddit Case Study
Is googling creeping you out?
I don't think Microsoft had any part in convincing anyone that apps need heavy installation procedures. It evolved as a generic way to do some basic things: moving the executable to a place the user wants, and setting up some registry values. Isn't that a reasonable solution for desktop applications?

There is nothing wrong with the MSDN site. When you're storing millions of pages of documentation, things may get a little bloated. If you need to look up anything about the Windows APIs, or any information about .NET languages, you'll quickly see that MSDN does the job well.
No matter how many times I take this test I always end up ENTJ, there's something to be said for consistency I guess.

My employer uses a similar style test called "Personalysis" (http://www.personalysis.com/), where they send all new hires to an 8 hour seminar for employees to "learn" how to better interact with co-workers based on personality traits.

The funny part is that it cost my organization more than 3k to send me to this seminar and I personally think the free online humanmetrics (ENTJ) by far more accurate. I guess it goes to show that you can convince giant corporations to buy anything if you pitch it to them correctly.
[video] At WWDC, Jobs shows off new Leopard features
Windows Safari Crawling with Bugs
ian at songkick dot com
40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS
Google Integrates Powerpoint Viewer Into Gmail
I think I get the marshmallows (beaurocracy?), but how do the wolves relate to the marshmallows, and why do they make sheep look like marshmallows with ketchup?
Part of the problem, IMO, is that none of these sites purposefully aims for the creation of small "communities within a community" of around 100 people that seems to be a good number for people to deal with:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/06/11/dunbars-number-and-online-communities
Track your visitors live straight from the desktop
For Yahoo, an Ordeal of Dissent
I think Yegge was deliberately obtuse with the marshmallows until the very end. He finally reveals that they represent eating your own dog food, i.e. a company using its own tools whether they're best for the job at hand or not. Programmers whose productivity has been killed in this way are the mangled sheep, or marshmallows with ketchup.
No, but they look like procedural programming languages to people who are deep into, for example, Haskell. Maybe loopt wants to present itself as on the forefront of functional programming.
I hope not; he seems to be hitting a foul.
What makes it so much better than, say, picturesync?
Zoho launches Creator 2.0
When Are Photos Like Penny Stocks? When They Sell.
gvim, cygwin, firefox, open office, the gimp, visual studio, mysql, sql server express, itunes, aim
Big guns 'wrong about mobile future', says Blyk
Justin Kan #1 on Business 2.0's Most Influential People List (and i am responsible)
Business 2.0 has implemented a flash based voting system to pick the Most Influential people(from their list!) .The sleek interface looks great, but actionscript that runs behind the scene is amazingly lame.

Exercising democracy is far more better than,editors handpicking a top 10 list over a pizza.But if the system built to exercise democracy is lame, then all your fun are belong to coders!

Hacking/breaking/gaming a live system is not really a cool thing to do. But what if the target is too lazy and careless ?
I've used Camino 1.0.4 extensively but I've not looked at 1.5 yet. 1.0.4 is closer to what I want than Firefox is but it was not quite "there". Basic things like .pdf files NOT being viewed inside the browser bothered me. Maybe that's fixed in 1.5?

Point taken on OED vs. OAD. Regardless it's a fine dictionary and lookups are really fast.

Using the services menu to look up words is a good idea but I'd need to have a compelling reason to go though the effort of retraining myself. Plus the process will never be as fast and natural as a right-click.

The ad-blocking advantage of Firefox/Camino is not a compelling reason for me personally (at least now). So it's status-quo for me unless something changes.
Zenter - Launch!!!
So devs will have to use JavaScript? Yuck. I'd rather they used Objective-C or Python or Ruby or something else.
E-consultancy JScript error '80040e31'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired SQL Query: exec sp_visit_track_history_getID 32843689

/includes/generic/dblib.inc.asp, line 26
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect
ENTP with two companies and counting
Javascript is one of the best programming languages available. It's about 90% Lisp.
Yeah, yeah, so the engineering part wasn't that great. But were the results good? Which algorithms did you use? What were your features? Seems like an interesting experiment, especially with all the gratuitous "friending" people do. Reminds me of a related paper: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/facebook/facebook.pdf
I doubt it will take any market away from IE. Those who know anything use firefox. Like the green party candidate that steals 5% of the vote and gets a republican elected, I think all this will do is take a chunk out of firefox's base.
actually i was about to ask you how you did it

maybe this just show that how matters most now
are the developers. hehe.
who matters most now (i mean)
perhaps don't just use them on static items users are going to encounter everytime --- they'll become annoyances after the very short time users got to master their purpose.
No offence - but job items isn't a business. If you have relegated the price of a listing to zero. Where else do you provide any value?
Rejected Y Combinator company Bandsintown.com is now Live!
Look, this discussion is getting silly. I can give you a list of 100 applications that will never go online. And you can give me your list of 100 applications that should be online. And both of us will be absolutely right.

But slogans like "desktop apps are dead" (just like popular "everything will be XML" a few years ago) are plain stupid. The application you spend most of your time in front of is a "desktop app", it's called a browser.
No problem Sumon, than twitter isn't business, del.icio.us isn't business, digg isn't business, reddit isn't business and most of VC's today investing to things which are not businesses :) Btw where is the value of your demomyapp.com.
Safari On Windows A Security Risk
firefox, filezilla, puTTY, notepad++, nvu, itunes, irfanview, truecrypt, csved, calc (not what you think), excel and... nethack!
calc = http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/calc/
csved = http://csved.sjfrancke.nl/index.html
I just signed up and played with it for a few minutes... so far I'm very happy with the concept. I'm glad they went ahead with the idea on their own.
I don't think we're being honest here. I use 5-6 different media players alone. Most of you seem to be boning up on your nerd credentials, because I don't see too many mentions of Doom or Quake, or MSFT Office, or Notepad, or IM clients, or Winzip/winrar, etc. The most popular dev environment seems to be Emacs. This tells me that your favorite language is still in diapers. I develop 10x faster in Eclipse than I ever could in Emacs. (I used emacs for a year coding C--it's okay, but its whole 'culture' harkens back to 300 baud modems.)

Some things that seem non-desktop, like Flash, really are in a sense--the connection to the browser and the web is very weak.
Twitter is growing to scale - they can monetise that scale later through advertising. You can imagine a number of possible ways for monetisation of twitter later - its just kind of compelling for now. They will figure that out i'm sure.

Digg has the attention of hundreds and thousands of users which is when advertising becomes a great business model as you can target specific users as you can track what they have dugg and what they have contributed. Reddit likewise - attention.

DemoMyApp - which we're not concentrating on has no value at present but it a) solves a problem b) if pushed can aggregate the attention of those who wish to showcase apps and those who wish to find out about them. Only then will it have any value what so ever. There are proven advertising models around that early adopter audience including sponsorship/ ad sales to web hosting/investors/ etc. Its not exactly a megabuster - so we're not really focussing on it.

Is job items being pushed to scale? With so many job listings sites on the internet - why does a free one provide any value to anyone. Is it targetted? or is the software good? I'd argue to make it a business model you should charge people to create their own listings sites using the technology. I see value in the software not the site itself.

As for the comment about VC's investing in things which are not businesses - thats because you are confusing the role of investment. Investment is required in times of negative cashflow to augment the burn of building to scale. Sequioa understood that the traction shown by YouTube would mean that it would be cashflow negative for a while before building an audience which could be monetised for that attention. Doesn't mean its not a business - just needs capital to become one. Same can be said for RockYou, Slide, and whoever else. Its about scale then you can leverage scale as ad dollars shift away from traditional to social media.
INTP. Polar on N, T. Borderline on I/E. YC SFP 07 founder.
Don't know much much about tag clouds, so excuse my ignorance: But, has this basic idea been done before, except with things other than bands?

The reason I ask: My first impression was very strongly, "This is a neat tool, but why would they limit themselves to bands?". You could do this with ANYTHING...but with branding like "bandsintown" your potential market is 0.01 percent of what it could be. I strongly recommend getting a generic name (like myspace) and then:

1) Allow different product categories (Nearest coffeeshop, nearest book store that sells a certain book, nearest movie theatre playing a certain movie at certain hours, etc).

2) Allow different views of your model. Tag clouds strike me as a flash in the pan. Allow charts, bar graphs, pies, etc, etc.
Thanks for the suggestions guys.
I'd be interested in seeing something build upon facebook. That way all your most trusted friends are there.
Dopplr - Anybody want invites?
Now they've modified their posting to be redundant:

# Excellent knowledge of C++, C#

# Knowledge of a procedural language

They are implying that C++ and C# are not procedural programming languages. Yes, they're object oriented, but they're still procedural too... C++ and C# sure as hell are not functional languages (e.g. haskell, erlang) nor logic languages (e.g. prolog), nor are they imperative languages without function calls (e.g FORTRAN before 1958, some assembly languages). </pedantic>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_programming
I've got 5 or so invites to dopplr, one of the hottest betas in town. If you spend a lot of time travelling between all the web conferences then you'll love this little app. Comment in reply to this with your email & name if you want an invite.
Amen brother, Amen. Reddit is unfortunately broken as badly as all the others.

Can't wait for part two.
Ok, I accept your opinion.
The problem with facebook, and/or linked in is that new ideas and friends are what makes a community great.

When I use facebook, I only really add people I know in real life, since I value privacy. When I use reddit, I want to learn about new things and different ideas. I just want a certain level of discourse, that's all.

Find a way to guarantee an intelligent, targeted conversation while at the same time allowing me to expand my sphere and you have a winner. Reddit tried this using it's "recommended" page, but I think they have failed, primarily because they don't place enough value in comments, IMO.
In Defense of Bosses from Hell
Your Truman Show: Organized Life Blogging
An older article. It posts a contrarian view to what the ideal manager should be. In chaotic, rapidly developing environments, individual brilliance is what can make or break a company. In more mature markets, "operational efficiency is crucial and individual brilliance takes a backseat to the importance of building cohesive teams."
I think the landowner represents the company founders. The wolves are the suites who come in later. The marshmellows are things that creep into the organization when it starts growing like cooperate BS, politics, poor internal company tool etc. The story teller is someone who just left such an organization and is attracting a cult following of young fresh faces hackers/entrepreneurs/engineers/workers etc.
Cool, I like it -- it immediately delivers on what I expected it would do. I'm not sure what the tag cloud significance is, however. Are the larger displayed bands more popular in searches?

By the way, I'm not sure why saying "Rejected YC company" is of any value. I don't introduce myself as "Stanford rejected person, Daniel Ha".
What do people want? How do I find out what people want?
Works good for me
Paul says: "Make something people want." I have read all his essays and especially like the one about million $ ideas.

I want to make something people want, but I don't know what they want. How do I find out what people want?

What do you want? and Paul anything you think people want?
Hi guys, I like this a lot. Quick feedback:

It isn't immediately obvious how to change my location. However, once I found out that you just click on the city name you detected my entry very well.

Like others, I'm wondering what makes a band's name appear more prominent in the tag cloud. I clicked on the largest name for my area.

I don't know why indy vs label delineation is broken out in detail, but genre is not. Maybe you should show five genres which users can click on as examples before entering their own.

You guys found me a show: terance blanchard at Yoshi's in Oakland. Thanks a lot!
Feld Thoughts - How Not To Impress People
A great way to polish your hacker skills before a phone interview - Steve Yegge
The Art of Ware
Start with what you want. That's what Woz did, and Larry and Sergey. If you can't find an idea there, look for things friends and family want.
I couldn't believe they allowed voting at all. Even if it wasn't hackable, it would still produce garbage results. Time tried this about ten years ago, and Attaturk won in almost every category, including, iirc, best athlete of the 20th century, and best poet.
Thanks for the advice Paul.
The link is broken or it's not pointing to the essay.
""I don't know what I'll do next, but I suspect it will involve teaching some sheep a few basic fighting maneuvers, and also a fair amount of long-overdue repair to our floating platform and our in-progress mansion."

I don't think Rauser is leaving the organization.
No. How can someone at MS and someone at Google have the same wolf? It's Google Kirkland I suspect.
sonicliving.com
I called this, btw: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546
Right... it's not about simply isolating yourself with your real life friends on line. There's no gain there. The trick would be to do something like this:

The site figures out what you like and adds you to some sort of group with other like minded people. The members of this group don't change too often, and you principally interact with them, although perhaps you see things of interest to everyone on the site.

Shrug... if I had a clear vision of the answer, I'd try and build it:-)
"You could do this with ANYTHING"

I think the answer to that lies in the idea of "focus". Trying to do too much leads either to not being very good at any of it, or worse, architecture astronaut trips into the stratosphere of making things ever more generic and able to handle all kinds of data and odd cases.
You could be right about him not leaving the organization. But I fail to understand why he would stay in the organization since the wolves are still there, he didn't say he found a way to fend them off, and they're still eating his sheep.
Marc Andreessen:  Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in
I guess my problem is that the name prevents any expansion later on, unlike the example myspace (which started out aimed at bands).
His fourth point, that any good Facebook apps will be killed by the traffic, is a pretty interesting one. In one sense, Facebook Platform lowers the barrier to entry for developers by making it insanely easy to spread the word about a new application, but it's so successful at doing so that you have to have enough physical infrastructure to handle that load. This seems like a perfect use case for Amazon's EC2 and S3, but as he notes, iLike wasn't able to use them to solve all of their traffic problems. Does anyone know of any particular problems inherent in the way Facebook Platform and Amazon's services are set up that makes it difficult to use them together?
Apple's font rendering vs. Microsoft's - why do Windows users dislike Safari's fonts?
"...the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways."
New Stats on Search and B2B Marketing
For a flash based implementation all you have to know is:

#1 Anyone can dissect a swf file and read your code .

#2 Own your swf files.This means ,make sure that your server side script runs/executes only if the swf file resides in your trusted domain.

For a voting system, some kind of IP based check is a basic necessity. Business2.0 didn't even care to implement it.Aint that lame?
Mining your email to automatically broadcast your mood.  Can also broadcast collective moods (e.g., in an organization, country, etc.).
This can give you useful information. For example, you might delay an email asking for something if the receiver is currently in a bad mood or too busy.

This could also be useful for suicide prevention. Imagine Google doing this with gmail to keep its users mentally healthy and safe. Signs of depression would be reported automatically.
Hey, I like this! Every so often I'm like "Gee, haven't been to a show lately, I wish there were some band I've heard of playing around here". So I have to find some indie newspaper to look up who is in town, but a homeless guy took them all out of the rack and is trying to sell them, and I don't want to look on all the clubs' websites so I give up. Not anymore.

Thanks,

Rejected Jessica Alba suitor Brian McKenzie
Speaking as a Performing Art
The ones I use the most are:

firefox, gaim/pidgin, rdesktop, eclipse, konsole, thunderbird, konqueror (as file manager, not browser), kedit, audacious, squirrel sql
Kyro Beshay
kbeshay@gmail.com

Much appreciated.
One thing to keep in mind is that most people here are most likely related to software engineering. It may be that other industries would show different personalities when you rate their entrepreneurs.
dreamhost. Spectacular deal for the price.

They do have technical issues from time to time (including one that occurred recently), but so does everyone else, IMO. And they're much better about handling it quickly - and communicating to you what happened and how they're handling it.