skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So let me get this straight:
Microsoft offers your university worthless software that provides no value to end users. The university knows its worthless software, you know its worthless, but the university is forced to buy it anyway because the dirty rotten scoundrels at Microsoft set the price so low.

University S/W Buyer: "We have to buy some MS Software."
University S/W Boss: "Why?"
University S/W Buyer: "Its $5.00 dollars per CD"
University S/W Boss: "Ok, then I guess we have no choice."
It's not dead, just a paper tiger. The final nail in the coffin will come with Web 3.0/4.0 when the operating system will be accessed on the web in the same way apps are now and the need for a system like Vista or OSX will go the of the dinosaurs.
Rather amusing!
I would say that Geeks make better targets as they get rich fast (very fast) now a days ;-)
Y Combinator interview tips
That's easy: Doug Engelbart's "Mother of all demos"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097
They are so enormous that they stifle themselves. Sometimes Microsoft seems to put out something, from some division, that makes one think: "Hey, this is a good move -- maybe they're starting to get it." But before one can utter those words, another of Microsoft's many appendages does something to completely nullify those sentiments.

That "appendage" is usually the head itself. Microsoft often acquires a good thing (many times a catchup move) but this thing only stays good for a short time. When integration is complete, it's a single bumbling Microsoft entity once again.
Microsoft used to be my hero, ever since the day I turned on my first TRS-80 and saw the Microsoft Basic copyright notice.

For 20 years Microsoft was my whole world. MS-DOS, old Windows, new Windows. DLLs, ODBC, IIS, and all the rest of it. Keeping up with Microsoft was a chore. I'd learn to program DLLs, and by the time I was good at it, they were pushing Active X. Or I'd learn to use named pipes, only to find that everyone was using sockets. Everything was a confusing mismash of competing APIs, old code, new code, multiple ways of doing the same thing with no good explanation. Finding help in MSDN was a nightmare. Sometimes they'd just repackage or rebrand the same technology for no other reason than to confuse you. DNA? What the hell was that?

One day my boss asked me to do a project in Java. What an eye-opener. Everything made sense. Everything I needed was there, but without tons of redundant, obsolete material. Today I run Linux servers, program in Java, deploy on JBoss with MySQL databases. I ditched Visual Studio in favor of Eclipse. I love working with this stuff. I feel truly sorry for people who are forced to limit themselves to Microsoft technology.
I feel lucky to have experienced Solaris which I loved back in school... of course now I am into Redhat / freeBSD ... and of course Windows!
They had the ability to throw their weight around -- and they did. One popular example: competing browsers such as Netscape or Opera hardly stood a chance against an integrated IE in Windows. What changed this landscape? A few things, one of which was US v Microsoft.
Sorry, but saying you're a Jobs doesn't make you one. There's more to Steve Jobs than being "non-technical" with "business experience." While he wasn't a programmer, Steve Jobs is a bona fide hacker in the bigger picture.

And comparing most hackers to Woz is like trying to compare professional basketball players with Michael Jordan.
With VB6 your chance of finding a good hacker diminishes quite a bit. May I inquire why do you need VB? What do you use it for?
This isn't a fair analysis. XBOX is probably one of the only groups that is moving in a positive direction at Microsoft. Yes, they've lost billions, but Microsoft expected that going in. The billions they've spent over the last few years is a small price to pay for making Windows technology the center of the home entertainment experience as well as owning a significant content pipeline into the living room.

However, despite my confidence in XBOX, Microsoft is still going to experience a lot of bleeding because XBOX at its best isn't enough to cover for the fact that the Desktop and Windows OS are becoming irrelevant.
Monaco is really nice. It is included in the Mac.
Windows has its quirks, but it is still the OS regular users choose. Visual Studio (THE BEST PRODUCT FROM MSFT!) beats everything out there! Although, my startup is not using ANY Microsoft technology, I am using Windows to code! Unix is GREAT for server-side....terrible for client-side and Windows is GREAT for client-side, but terrible on server-side!

Google owns search but they are losing focus, just like MSFT. Remember that if it weren't for MSFT, Apple wouldn't have taken the PC market too far .... this is just the beginning of the IT revolution!

IBM - MSFT - GOOGLE - ADOBE - WHO'S NEXT?

They are all gonna slow down at some point.... I am not afraid of Google... Even if a company is a mammoth, it HAS its limitations!!!
Python-a-day: Sort a List
Where Are the Tech Startups?
Isn't this it?
I would agree with that if you wanted to pick up the syntax.
The initial chapters of either R5RS and Ansi CL don't make it obvious how scheme/lisp are different from Algol, except the (()).
Nope, here anyone who is a sneaky guy can get evesdrop on things. I would say people who have applied as contestants could only interact otherwise any disgruntled person who doesnt like YC or PG or who likes MSFT can do some mischief ;-)
So in short i was hinting at this one...say someone is really good but couldnt get selected, they can redraw/regroup with other talented folks.
I can't even tell because I am not tracking anything at the moment....to keep things simple, the database is not even in the picture right now!
'... it's actually true. I hate job interviews - they're very artificial and weird ... The YC interview is a conversation that honestly is exhilarating ...'

excellent, no fear.
I don't think the carpet shop played a role. They owned some office space on University Ave, which they rented to startups, including I believe Google and Paypal, and got some warrants as part of the deal. This made them so excited that they decided to try to do more of that.
I disagree with one part here. It's not always good to be passionate about your idea.

The Zenters happened to be working on a good idea, so we were glad they were psyched about it. When people walk in with a fully-formed idea, we just start the YC process right there-- ok, how do you make the perfect web-based Powerpoint killer? But when a group walks in with a semi-broken idea, which is much more common, the conversation becomes: what good idea can we morph this into? In that case, being passionately attached to your initial idea is not a plus.
Submitting a trivial YC application is no indication of anything. But that's ok, because worrying about sneaky guys is isomorphic to worrying about keeping your idea secret -- sheer overhead.
Nice. I use modd which is very similar.
http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts
The user-facing part of the system is currently a VB client app. It's horrendous, but guess what - users love it because it meshes with the rest of their work environment, which is hardware devices connected to their PCs as well as other VB apps. The reason I would like at least one of my co-founders to know VB well is that when migrating this app to a web based equivalent, we want to preserve the essence of what is working. That delicate transplant surgery can be successful only when the team is well versed in web technologies as well as VB.
Need not be. No one cares about idea getting leaked as ideas are dime to a dozen. Its about seeding mis trust by quoting some stupid things by disgruntled elements that worries. One can just go ahead and say YC cheats and give some cock&bull story and thats enough to cover up u r idea. So thats one thing i say about 2 faced / double headed sneaky guys
chill, bro...it's just a silly metaphor to grab some attention :-)
Quick reply for architects, well here in japan it's the contrary... Try to find an architect that doesn't use mac based software - you can't. (and even though autodesk tools are nicer than vectorworks....)

They are dead in the sense that while they still keep their old monopoly, it's slowly crumbling away...
Files in word format can be read on almost any plateform now (maybe not always perfectly but still good enough) and the file formats for texts or other things will change as people start using new software (web applications).

As a matter of fact, you can see the death of microsoft by the fact that it's not a problem to run another platform anymore (in 90% of the cases) and that it becomes more and more easier...

It's mostly because microsoft doesn't bring anything new to the table anymore... Before, they didn't really innovate but they often came with really good implementations of good ideas other people had (lotus 1-2-3 - excel, wordstar - word, netscape - internet explorer) and took the market. They don't seem to be able to do this anymore
Good point. There's a fine line between being passionate and being stubborn - I've added a section to the original post to reflect this.
Java used to be my hero, ever since the day I learned it would manage memory for me, while still scaling to the heights demanded by the enterprise.

For 10 years, Java was my whole world. Servlets, old EJB, new EJB, JSP, JDBC, Spring, Hibernate, JSF, and all the rest of it. Keeping up with enterprise Java was a chore. I'd learn to program EJB 1 and by the time I finally figured it out, they were pushing EJB 2. Or I'd learn Entity Beans or Struts, only to find nobody was using it anymore. Everything was a confusing mismash of competing APIs, old code, new code, multiple, dogmatic ways of doing the same thing with no good explanation. Finding help with this J2EE crap was a nightmare. Somtimes they'd just repackage or rebrand the same technology for no good reason. Hibernate? EJB3? J2EE? JEE 5? WTF?

One day, in spite of my boss's mandate that we were strictly a Java shop, I started to rewrite a struggling project in Ruby on Rails. What an eye-opener. What took months and 5 people now took days and 1 person. Everything I needed was there, but without tons of redundant, repetitive lines of boilerplate code and XML -- and without endless compile-deploy-restart cycles.

Today I run Linux servers, program in Ruby, have abandoned JBoss, and use Apache and Mongrel with MySQL databases. I ditched Eclipse in favor of TextMate. I love working with this stuff. I feel truly sorry for people wo are forced to limit themselves to Java technology.

(Sorry for the too-obvious, too-easy parody. But I couldn't help myself -- it was the natural response to someone praising the virtues of Java during a discussion about a dying, irrelevant company.)
One of the problems with our YC interview was that we were overly attached to our idea. The idea was to develop a web based operating system for people that have never used or are uncomfortable with current computers. We had initially envisioned it as a product bundled with hardware but decided we would be unable to finance that, so we'd start with just the software.

Of course, the YCs immediately understood that the associated hardware was an important part. They suggested that a good starting point was an "internet picture frame with email." Instead of going with their suggestion, we defended our own.

They also spent a lot of the interview comparing our product to yahoo.com which was another direction we didn't think the interview would go.

In the end, we were rejected because we didn't have a functioning demo. It was a dumb move on our part, and I would say a demo is an absolute must for the interview. I really regret making it as far as we did and not having a demo. We threw away our opportunity. I've heard that one demo-less team was told at their interview to make a demo in the next 24 hours, so be prepared for a serious test of your ability to get things done if you don't have a demo. Being undergrads didn't help us either. If you're an undergraduate, make it clear to the YCs that you are absolutely committed to starting a company and that you intend to drop out and work on it whether or not you get funding from them.

For me, it's all moot because I got myself banned from Y Combinator after I made a really dumb Techcrunch comment. I've burned my bridges, but at least Paul lets me post here. :) One of my partners that didn't go to the interview was reading one of Paul's Lisp books at the time and commented on how surreal it was to be blacklisted by the guy who wrote the book he was reading.

When I was younger, I always separated the internet and internet-based friends from the real world. They weren't the same. My internet persona and the real me were different. I've since come to understand that the internet now is the real world. The real world is the internet. My internet persona is me and actions in both worlds truly impact each other.

They also had really good drinks and cheese available. I could tell by the cheese labeled with the country of origin that Y Combinator was an amazing company. We waited in a coffee shop because we didn't want to be too early, but I wish we would have gone earlier so we could have talked to more people that were also interviewing. We did got a chance to talk to the Zenter folks and I'm glad they seem to be doing so well.

To all YC applicants, I wish you the best of luck and I hope no one else is dumb enough to become a member of the banned from Y Combinator club.
oh thanks for the correct info. There was an article that talked about how they owned a carpet shop in silicon valley, during the boom time many new startups went there to get some carpets. AT that time many used to go to the shop to buy carpets, and in the process meet others. This guy also would hang around the biggies and slowly started investing when he saw some potential. But this is what i had read some time back.
Could this have any practical application to software testing?

If there is any analogy here, perhaps one could transmute a program into something that crashed or failed more immediately if it was buggy. Of course even if that worked, one might not be able to trace the failure back to an actual line of code; it's not clear that this "smearing" process preserves information like that.
All I Need To Know To Be A Better Programmer I Learned In Kindergarten
Amazon reveals new web service: Amazon Simple Database
I think the path is really very straightforward. Assuming you're a developer, get a job, preferably with a local startup. Live really cheap. Work really hard, save %50 of your gross income. Do this for 6 months to a year and you won't need YC or TS funding.

In the evenings and weekends, build your idea.

If you've got funding to finish your university degree, then build your idea in your spare time and stay in school. Not as good, but a number of stratups have come out of college started projects (eg: napster, facebook.)

The really important thing is not so much your idea, but the skills that will come with trying to make your idea a success.

Trying to make it a success and totally failing is much more valuable than getting a job writing enterprise software or staying in school.

Assuming you're an engineer, and your idea is a web based one, you don't need money- you don't need investment-- what you need is living expenses. Get that covered and you're in a no lose situation. (Just make sure you have something to show for it if it fails- so that you can use the epxerience to get a job if you need one....)
It's worth pointing out that you won't get far without doing the exercises in the book too. In fact, I recommend working through the book and only watching a video lecture if you're unclear on the material.
Definitely Monaco (coupled with Carbon Emacs on OS X).
If you think that Unix is terrible for client-side, then I don't think you've been working in Linux for long. How about the ability to install any of 20,000 programs from a convenient package/portage/rpm directory for free in seconds? How about updating every single program on your computer, including the OS, and recompiling everything, with one command?

And as for programming, whenever I'm working in Visual Studio, I feel like I'm working in Notepad. Honestly, if you take the time to learn the keybindings for vi or emacs (I won't say which, I use both :-), you will find that a much more lightweight program can manage projects just as well, and you can code many times faster.

Honestly, it's hard to get away from what you're used to, but immerse yourself in a non-Microsoft environment for a few months (I've been using Unix heavily for less than a year), and you'll realize that Microsoft is the one with the bad interfaces. For years they have been catering to the lowest common denominator. The people who want true control over what they are doing use or write an open source program.
I did a presentation a few months ago on Microsoft's DRM technology in Vista:
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~mintern/601/presentation.pdf

It was when I first read about that and researched it that I realized just how bad it was. It's like the customer isn't even #2 or 3 anymore. It goes something like:

1. Money

2. Killing competition (including open source)

3. Hollywood

4. Locking out hobbyists and increasing licensing restrictions

...I'm sure I'm missing some...

n. Serving the customer
Mossberg: Using Even New PCs Is Ruined by a Tangle Of Trial Programs, Ads
If you haven't heard about a free program that does everything that Microsoft Office does and more, then you should really be looking at OpenOffice.

1. It's free

2. It can read all Microsoft and open formats

3. It can export as PDF

4. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, ... (written in Java I believe)

5. It's open source

6. Various other features have been added which MS now adds to MS Office in order to catch up (like auto-completion).
Remind me which Web-based apps make money again?
Add using favicon picker:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3176
To anyone else who may not be familiar with the abbreviation Q.E.D. in the post, here's the definition from wikipedia:

"Q.E.D. is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase "quod erat demonstrandum" (literally, "which was to be demonstrated"). In simple terms, the use of this Latin phrase is to indicate that something has been definitively proven."
Wow, thanks for sharing that and being so honest about past failures. Rare quality - kudos.
I agree that Microsoft is on the decline, but I disagree that web applications will totally replace the desktop. It's still way too convenient to have hundreds of programs a mouse-click away, and to be able to fire up 50 of them at once on new hardware without any lag. It is true, however, that that desktop needn't be Windows anymore.

I agree that OS X has been partly responsible for converting people away from Windows, but equally responsible is a growing Linux community. Since Linux came out, it has been slowly gaining some of Microsoft's desktop market share, especially since Gnome and KDE have gotten more polished and Ubuntu made its number 1 bug Microsoft.

I was a bit disappointed to see no mention of open source software, because it is not Google Docs that is replacing MS Office, but Open Office. GIMP has been slowly replacing Photoshop since it came out, not Snipshot. Likewise with Firefox overtaking Internet Explorer, Thunderbird being the first to stand in for Outlook, and gcc has been the compiler of choice for years.

In summary, I agree that Microsoft is on the decline and that we are seeing software shift to the Internet, but I never think the desktop will go away. The number of desktops running Windows and other Microsoft software, however, is going to continue to decline. It's one thing to offer free software on the Internet alongside Google ads, it's another entirely to be able to install entirely free, ad-free software with no strings attached, which is an opportunity that the open source community has afforded us.
Personally, I categorize every application that updates itself as spyware. At the very least, the vendor of the software gets to monitor my habits of using my computer. Also I think this will become hell eventually when all the zillions of applications installed on a typical system try to update themselves after their own fancy.

It works so much better in debian/ubuntu, where most update requests go to a central repository.

Perhaps it would make sense to at least have one common "updater" component that all applications could use, similar to the way they now all use MS Installer (OK, sorry, I am still stuck with Windows, against my will). That updater component could be configured once, instead of having to configure each application individually. There is also the additional concern of letting applications communicate through a firewall - if I unblock them so they can get their bloody updates, who knows what else they will transmit?
Wow, just wow.
I do like the ability to install on demand! Why is Windows leading client-side? Because it is easy! I am speaking from an average users perspective. Not us! I have used VI and I love it! Visual Studio is NOT like notepad. I'm sorry but AFAIK, VI or Emacs cannot provide intellisense can it? I have used both environments for development and based on my productivity, I concluded that Windows is a better environment for ME. Ultimately, it is about getting the job done FAST and using what works for you. I have used freeBSD and it is definitely STABLE, but really not something I would like to sit and develop on. Think about the millions of END-USERS??? Windows is really the solution for them... at least for now. Although Windows has its issues, I think Microsoft has improved its product in many ways. Do you realize how hard of a problem it is to solve, making the OS secure and user-friendly at the same time? I like Windows, Redhat and freeBSD... I wish Windows stayed away from the Server market and likewise Redhat stayed away from the client!
Applicant Demographics: Location, Team size and Age?
I read about the fallout from that announcement sometime last year. By announcing that they were giving back money to their shareholders, they opened the door for savvy stock market gurus. These guys milked it for all it was worth by first loading up on the stock in order to get the cash from the dividends. Because all these people were buying the stock, its price became artificially inflated, so they proceeded to borrow against the stock at this point (in order to short-sell later). Then the dividends came, and they got the $3/share from Microsoft. Immediately after this, they proceeded to sell the stocks that got them the dividends, which led to the stock price falling sharply. Finally, to round it all out, they proceeded to make good on the short-sells once the stocks were low, leading to a nice profit all-around.

I wish I remembered where I read about this scheme; it sounded pretty brilliant to me. I always wondered, though, if a bunch of people playing the stock market profited from this, who lost out? I guess the long-time shareholders and Microsoft, itself.
Seattle, 2, [25, 22]
Los Angeles, 1, 24
Amazing, This Is The Way To Ruin Your Blog :)