skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At first when I read the article, it seemed like Dude (I hadn't yet made the GK connection) was being ignorant and rude. Then after checking out the site and re-reading the article, I realized I would have asked the same questions, though not as rudely.

I wonder what Apple product he was comparing the interface to? It certainly does not look like any Apple interface I have seen (that said, I am a PC user).
Indeed, and it's not that all startups do marketing that's borderline spam -- only the successful ones.
Web 2.0 Media: All Your Personal Sites In One Place
Coding never gave me a hangover or visual hallucination.
Thats a great idea - but boy could that be disorienting unless they included some sort of amazing stabilization mechanism. (Think spinning balls). One way to pull it off would be to make a clear ball with a camera mounted on a gyroscope on the inside so the camera could move independent of the ball. On second thought, maybe the value added here doesn't warrant the expense?
pale not pail
1/4 your spam volume with onmouseover
Marc Andreessen: The Truth About Venture Capitalists, Part 3
Just use a software solution. Put 6 or or so cameras pointing out radially and then stitch the views together for a full 4pi view. No need for a fancy gyroscope. There's an idea for a startup...
Top 10 Entrepreneurship Lessons
So what would the default view be? Is there a view that would work for most sports?

Also what about having flying robocams? How would they work?
As long as you're going to use a software solution, you might be able to get the number of cameras on the ball down to zero: have a bunch of cameras in the stadium, and reconstruct from them what the ball would be seeing.

(I suspect you'd want the view of wherever the ball was projected to land.)
How about a football? I can't think of a way to mount a camera on one of the ends, but a camera inside could work if it could be stabilized.
When Mono started, I warned people that MS would use their patent portfolio to cripple the stated goal of Mono (allowing Linux to run .Net apps). While my prediction hasn't come true yet, I'm feeling pretty smug right now, given all the MS patent threats of late.
Is this list of on-line resources stunning?

It's handy, I suppose; without checking each one, though, I'm not so sure it's any better or worse than the lists I've seen at A List Apart and other top-notch Web design/development sites.

What would be stunning would be if he had added these sites to del.icio.us, and told us his user name, so that more people could have more flexible means to search/group/annotate/back-up these URLs.
A List Apart: Who Needs Headlines? (Killer copywriting tips)
This would be the exact opposite of "making something people want". Ask your average sports fan how high they are on the NBA's below-the-basket floor cam or (even worse) the wavering camera that floats down the center of the court over the action.

Thanks, but no thanks!
What percentage of Java/C# developers can write a generic sort?
Has F-bounded polymorphism become common knowledge?
I think it would make a sport like golf a lot more fun to watch.

Also, pitch movements in baseball would become more obvious.
I think it could make both these sports more fun to watch, but then I'm not a fan of either. It seems to me that a lot of people following golf and baseball are purists easily turned off by this kind of thing. I could be wrong.

I am a fan of basketball and football, and do know that the innovative camera angles introduced so far fail the pub test; whenever I'm at a bar and the TV switches to one, people either complain or say nothing. I've yet to hear any support.
Real leather footballs aren't perfectly pointy on the ends. You could introduce a thin tube running through the primary ball axis containing all the imaging and transmission electronics, without throwing of the balance. Think endoscope.
Could Open Source overwhelm the Second Life economy?
In theory, it would be a good idea.

However in most sports, the ball spins rapidly, anywhere from one rotation every few seconds to 50+ times / second.

Personally, seeing that on camera would probably make me barf.

Also, it would be almost impossible to compensate for this, since they usually rotate around more than one axis.
How do you know it would be almost impossible to compensate for this?

Could you elaborate?
Well, theoretically, if a ball was spinning around only one axis for the entire trajectory of the flight, then you could have a camera at the center of the axis and use some combination of gyroscopes / image processing to stabilize the image.

However, the axis on which the ball spins may change during the flight. The ball can also spin on more than one axis at the same time.

The combination of (1) the difficulty associated with determining which axis the ball will spin on, and (2) preventing the ball from spinning on another axis, along with (3) putting all this hardware in the ball without changing the physical performance of the ball, would make this idea difficult to pull off.

However, your idea might work if we're talking about still images. Then you only have to worry about creating a ball that performs the same as traditional air-inflated balls, but has a camera inside.
Defense is the best attack.
I don't see why software can't handle such spins, particularly if we assume that the spin pattern does not change quickly.
I live a block away from the Craigslist office (which is, yes, in a normal-looking house/storefront with a charmingly ugly sign above the door). I often walk past it during business hours, but the gate is always closed and locked.

I bumped into CEO Jim Buckmaster (a friend of mine) near the office, and I asked him about the locked gate. "We all work upstairs now," Jim said. "We had to keep the first floor locked up because people kept dropping in to say how much they love us."
Think of it this way:

You would think that at the north pole the sky above you won't actually change, and that it would only rotate around you. However, if you stand there long enough (several thousand years), you'll notice that the earth rotates more slowly along a second axis. This is why the "true" north star changes over time.

See:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/121/lecture-2/precession.html

Apply this to sports balls, and if there's more than one axis, it would probably be hard to stabilize the image with software. One second you're looking at the ground, then the crowd, then the sky, then the foot of the player, etc.

You could put several cameras in the ball, but since most balls are inflated with air - you'd probably significantly change the ball's weight by doing so. My guess is that there are very few situations where a league would be willing to play with a heavier ball.

You could also have one camera with just an extremely high frame rate, and then use image processing to select the few frames every second where the camera's actually pointing in the right direction. However, you'd still want the camera along the major axis, which would be very hard to predict before-hand.

My guess is that if you did this (with only one camera), you might get a few good frames, but not enough to create an actual video. Maybe that's OK - I could see you getting some stellar shots.
I accidentally read that as "Google Paper is a good read..."
Jailed Chinese Reporter Joins Yahoo Suit
A "glove" cam for boxing would be easy to implement and would give boxing fans exactly what they want.
thanks for the feedback. I hope to do as much as i can to make it as useful as posisble for as many people as i can. I appreciate your comments and feedback, I hope to be able to apply this kind of funtionality to other ideas in the future as well.
See http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
AdSense's Twisted Nature
The only sport I think this would be interesting in would be (American) football. It would be a neat perspective to watch the quarterback get blitzed and chuck a hail mary, looking down on the WR right before the ball gets a view of the grass.

If you put a camera on both ends, you get a forward/backward view for the most part. Then write something that takes the video and orients the field to the bottom of the screen or something like that.

This reminds me of a post on reddit a loong time ago. Camera software for use with blurry surveillance video that sharpened the image by adjusting it with frames seen immediately before/after. Anyone by chance remember that?
You might partially compensate for the weight of the camera by using lightweight materials (and paying the monetary cost) and by filling the ball with hydrogen.
You may not see an IPO, but a good chance of becoming profitable or getting bought out. Think of SportVision, who make the "1st & Ten" first down line on televised football games, and glowing hockey pucks.
Outcomes vs. Activity - Have you been bitten by this?
Correlation between personality type and entrepreneurial interest? - Lets find out
I'm an ENTJ

I've always found these (especially Jung) to be scarily accurate in predicting what I am like.
Forget about Techcrunch -- Mashable is The King of Startup Reviews
Why (some) journalists should learn (some) code
I know a guy who works there, and indeed, he likes it quite a lot, even though he's not wild about the Perl code.
A camera from every player's POV seems way more interesting to me.
Is this list of on-line resources stunning?

No, not really. But it's potentially helpful and that was my initial reaction in context of all the other stuff he's put out recently.
Time Flies When You're Unprepared - Ben Stein
That's hardly crazy. It's just an application that fetches data from a server. The cool thing is, of course, the underlying symbolic system for solving equations, and graphical capabilities, that have been there for 20 years or so.

"A profound image of astonishing richness and complexity that reveals something poetic about the structure of the chemical elements"

And I thought that the Google blog was rah rah rah.
Looking for translators
I know it's off topic and I apologize but there is kind community of people here at Y so ... if you are interesting ... please let me know.
This request is closed. Thanks.
Startup Resource: Building Business from Scratch
"The legal lifespan of the fund is usually 10 years"

Does that mean that Sequoia will disappear in a couple of years, or is it that VCs manage various funds? And why is there that restriction?
"Install the Apache plugin" (Funny!)
The article clearly has a point. But you've to tread carefully.

I've observed there are always two kinds of entrepreneurial stories:

1) well organized entrepreneur with a vision he lays out and then goes out and executes(characteristic of older, more experienced entrepreneurs)

2) entrepreneur playing around with stuff without much of a goal and happens to hit something which he develops into something even better (ie. hotornot, facebook).

My point: there is an extreme to both. That doesn't mean I don't value planning and goal a lot. In my case, clear goals make the actual doing that much more fun and give me that "on a mission" feel.
[SF] Come work at Scribd.com
Maybe it could be used by the referees?

I have no idea indeed, but I love how nearly everybody responded to the question by pointing out technical difficulties :)
Who Killed the Desktop Application?
ActiveScaffold and Acts_as_taggable(_on_steroids)
Leopard Pounces: New Mac OS upgrade will be showcased at conference for Apple's third-party developers. (IPhone)
I was curious about C#, started reading about it and I stopped precisely at the point when I saw this piece of code in their tutorial:

if (System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.IsMatch(s, sPattern,
System.Text.RegularExpressions.RegexOptions.IgnoreCase))
...

So Miguel de Icaza wants to bring this mess to UNIX? This is ridiculous and so un-UNIX.

(Though GNOME, too, was probably one of the messiest GNU projects so far)
Google to harness satellite power for an Amazon tribe
First Public View Of Powerset Results
Adobe's Apollo platform, now called AIR, goes beta
Hollywood's YouTube frustration grows
This time, it's Microsoft which must adapt or die (Science & Nature refuse Word07 - 'incompatible with MathML')
Weighing the Web (numerical estimates of mass, energy & horsepower)
I am usually ENTP but this time came out as and INFJ ... the complementary type - strange!
Cognitive Lock-in (cost with thinking about & using products decrease as a function of experience)
Yeah but we're renaming the alien after you and PG, so that's not bad.
Overheard: Flickr to launch several new languages next week
[Chicago] Rails developer @ Inkling
INTP.
I use similar approach, and yes, it works fine as long as spammers don't figure how to extract your email address from JavaScript code.

function em(e2, e1)
{
return 'mailto:' + e1 + '@' + e2 + '.com';
}

... and somewhere in your HTML code:

onClick="this.href=em('foobar', 'contact')"

The name of the function may be more cryptic and I just thought it may be even dynamic (random), as well as the order of arguments.
I'm really careful about companies that hype themselves up too early.
A single VC firm runs multiple funds. Some raise a new one every year.
Sun really is coming back into focus now as an innovator. This is a cool post, even if it was lower level in the details than I normally get with such infrastructure topics. I've been looking at their hardware actually for my startup, having been interesting the SmugMug dude's reviews.
I was going to ask, "What about those without JavaScript or that have it disabled?" but who cares about them. 99% of the world has JavaScript probably!
Inequality within an economy where everyone has equal opportunity might be optimal, but that's nothing like the state of the world we're in.
Good point.

And I think the number one killer of desktop applications is Microsoft, however controversial it may seem at first.

It was Microsoft who convinced developers that a commercial application along with its installation procedure must look and feel heavy, so that users feel comfortable with the money they paid for it. The heavier the better. It is so rare in the commercial desktop world that developers strive for simplicity.

Without Google though, the Web world could have adopted the same complication syndrome. Look at the MSDN web site, for example.
New: YC Jobs Page
It's 2007 and smart people stopped separating "desktop" and "online" applications a long time ago, because it is pointless: the best approach to solving any problem is always picking the proper balance of server/desktop horsepower/capabilities.

Desktops are very powerful. People forget (or never realize) how powerful their computers are. For a long time only games have been taking advantage of all those millions of transistors. I really hope that next generation of browsers will start moving towards that direction.

For instance: if you have a flash movie occupying 100% of the page, it becomes simply unusable if a user maximizes the window, even on 1280x1024. Isn't that ridiculous? At our age and time, a simple 2D vector graphics plays at pathetic 5-7 frames per second... (even if he's got a $700 video card) And something tells me it's not entirely Macromedia/Adobe's fault.

It's changing, though. And Google/Microsoft are moving towards that direction. Good (early) example can be iTunes or apps built on GoogleGear platform.
And, just to disagree with author, I'd recommend comparing Google's Picasa to itself.

That would be a fair comparison, because it is virtually the same application, with same set of features, done with online/offline UI's... slowly merging together.

BTW: as far as PC "desktop" software is concerned, Picasa is probably my favorite application. Even though I don't use it that much, but as an engineer concerned with usability, I always try to point our "desktop people"'s attention at it.
It's already dead, haven't you heard?
"'asterisk' died in office"
Brad Ideas:  Crazy ideas, inventions, essays and links from Brad Templeton
Google Plays the Antitrust Card Against Microsoft
Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos
Why is there no link in the top menu?
Coming soon. (The link was initially only visible to
YC founders; I'll turn it on for everyone in the next
release in a couple hours.)

Edit: It will be more than a couple of hours. The good
news is, the next release will have some big improvements.
WTF is a Goal and why should YC people do it.
Marc has come out of the gates, SWINGING!
Has anyone used mathematica as a programming language/environment?
After reading this article [1], I did a bit of looking around on the internet, and found out that Mathematica can be and is used as a programming language/environment [2]. Have any of the news.YC readers used Mathematica as a development environment? What are your impressions?

1. http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/05/computable_data_functions.html0

2. http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/analysis/content/ProgrammingLanguages.html
Podcast interview with co-founder of Inkling Markets and Y Combinator graduate, Adam Siegel
There is no reason this should have been posted to news.yc.
[Bay Area] Loopt is hiring great people who love location (funded by YC, Sequoia, and NEA)
Come work at a world-changing company--the context of location lets us do really exciting things. The company is at a stage where every individual still sets the strategy, but is far enough along everything you do has real impact.
It would be helpful to see what city these jobs are in from the listing page...
[SF] Xobni is hiring: help revolutionize the Internet's killer app (funding from YC, Khosla, and First Round Capital)
Ok, I added locations to the titles; presumably new submissions will follow suit.
Why aren't there comments on the job postings?
Picasa is great, the only reason I still have a windows PC.
What desktop apps do you use?
With web apps increasingly taking over from desktop, which desktops apps do you still use?

As a starter my mac os x dock has Firefox, Mail, Terminal, iCal, TextWrangler, Adium, NicePlayer & Democracy. Everything else has been slowly replaced by web apps. Which app will go online next?
What you really mean is, Science and Nature haven't updated their process yet for the new Office. The standard they prefer right now is MS's penultimate release, Office 2003...
I could enable it easily enough. But I thought that if people had questions they could just ask the posters, and they could if they wanted modify the post.
emacs, rxvt, firefox, openoffice covers most of it.
Firefox, Thunderbird (occasionally), Winamp, Gaim, uTorrent, Winzip, Acrobat, Ghostview, VMWare, SSH. Netbeans when I need to do work stuff, and IE for testing browser compatibility. MSPaint for quick graphic edits, and Notepad++ for quick text edits. Occasionally Civ3 or SimCity 2000 when I feel like playing a game, and the DVD burning software that came with the machine. Nothing else.
Could you prevent the job items from intermingling with the regular news page items?
itunes, eclipse, gtalk, paint.NET, NaviCat, WinSCP, Putty, Windows Task Manager.
That's intentional. The companies used to submit links when they were hiring, and I've tried to reproduce that. They'll slide off the frontpage like any story. The site just looks odd at the moment because there was accumulated demand.
BTW, why do you want to know that? :)
Wow, this just fits exactly:

http://typelogic.com/intj.html
To know which web apps need building next! If a lot of people are still using a desktop app when it can be made a web apps you've got to wonder why..
Agreed, same goes for Spock.
I have not used Mathematica as a programming environment. But I've written three long numerical codes for mathematica. One was a ray-tracer for optical design, the second was a stellar model, the most recent code is a monte-carlo type simulator

So, mathematica is a beautiful language. It has symbols and pattern matching, so you can think more "mathematically." Loops exist too, and now aren't that slow, so you can think more like a computer. If you write mathematical code, the code you write is rendered in mathematical type, this is an amazing feature, and I'm glad Fortress is going to include it.

Pros aside, I've found mathematica hard to debug. The fact that the interpreter costs money is also a big minus. What are you thinking about writing in Mathematica?
Well, if they must be together, could they be tagged consistently as "jobs" (e.g.) so they can be filtered out of the feed?

Alternatively, could you consider grouping all the job items under a separate page tab, next to "new | best | leaders | submit" or just use another subdomain for them, e.g. jobs.ycombinator.com?

Not everyone who reads news.yc is looking for a job, after all.
Shall we start a matlab vs mathematica comment (troll) thread :) here please.
I doubt that MS would really change their formula editor's output format for Science or Nature. This problem probably affects less than 0.1% of all users.
Aha! I always suspected there was a secret area for YC founders. ;)
Steve Jobs live from WWDC 2007
Apple updates Leopard page for WWDC
This will be really useful for those of you who need to test your webapp on Safari, but only run windows. Actually, I'm probably the only one who does that.

Also, if you're going to develop a webapp for the iPhone, get it working on Safari and it will just work on the iPhone. So says Steve..

Shawn
Top mobile apps are extensions of web apps?
How To Develop Good Web Forms
How Startup Company Forecasting Really Works
Yick, your reaction is understandable. But know that the following is far more typical:

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

...

if (Regex.IsMatch(s, sPattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase))...
5 Signs Digg Has Peaked (and Is Now Declining)
enfp.. usually either entp or enfp :P
Would news.yc let me use this site layout...
I like the layout of the site for a variety of reasons...

-Im not a web desinger and i cant design anything to save my life.

-It works perfectly on mobile devices.

-It works for what I am trying to do.
I take it to mean that everyone fails and if you let a failure stop you, you'll never succeed. Successful people fail too, but they learn from their failures and move on, until they succeed.
"You'll see in our sidebar email link we've set the href to a fall-back page that tells users what to do if they've got JavaScript off."
Why is there a big "SAMPLE" watermark on the example? Is he afraid someone will steal his goal?
Loopt: server engineer - Knowledge of a procedural language (e.g. Erlang, Lisp, etc.)
Erlang and Lisp aren't exactly canonical examples of procedural programming languages.
Please do add comments... I don't really like being snarky, but in lieu of comments I've added a post about one of the loopt jobs - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310
In my opinion, Mono can make for linux what VB made for Windows: offer a simple-to-learn, simpler-to-use development environment, specially for the corporate world. Many managers prefer to use a "manager-safe choice" like windows/.net to risk on opensource platforms. I think VB was key to the windows commercial success and wide adoption on the mid-90's. Linux didn't had something like that in that time. Many desktop and web apps are being developed on .NET, and the possibility of running them on linux may give it a place it didn't had before. .NET might not be a good choice for a internet startup but it's certainly for corporate and desktop apps. And they can ride over MS marketing pushing the adoption of .NET.

Besides, .NET is a pretty good platform and Miguel and the community are doing an amazing job =)
I don't think it will be that flooded with job postings, given that only YC companies post there.
In that case, then how about a web version of emacs.
I fondly remember the joelonsoftware jobs section (back before it was a paid service) when he allowed comments...people really tore into some of the postings.