skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I honestly don't understand your "religion" line towards Stallman's position. Yes, he's been consistent and kept saying the same thing for years, that's the only grounds you can base your analogy on.

Free software is a wonderful thing and keeping a source code "secret" or patenting stupid shit like "single click buy" is indeed evil, what else you want to call it when closed-source systems are forcing the entire world to reverse-engineer their file formats, communication protocols, etc. How many programmer-hours have been wasted re-implementing JPEG compression, TCP/IP stack, XML parsing, etc etc etc?

Tell me, how is it NOT evil to hold font-rendering patents forcing the entire non-Windows (or OSX) world to stare at fucked-up unreadable fonts? ... and at the same time borrowing anything they want from OSS community when they feel like it (look! there is "etc" folder in windows/system/drivers!) How is it possible to look into SCO vs Linux case and not call Microsoft's envolvement "evil"? If not evil, what is it then?

Moreover, the modern history of computing is actually proving that Stallman's views make perfect sense, even from commercial perspective: look at Adobe, who's actually being forced to open-source because they suddenly realized that this gives them an edge over Silverlight. Just compare that to Macromedia's not so distant dreams of selling crazy ass expensive "Flex servers". Or look at poor Opera fighting against the whole world's efforts of improving FF.

Even your own examples of better software don't apply. On features and flexibility alone, OSX can't hold a candle to even (!) Gnome and wins user's hearts purely on looks. What's more important, however, is that OSX itself is a giant example of open source (BSD) taking over commercial (Windows) with a for-profit company cashing out in the background - I still don't understand why OSS community lets Apple to get away with it: they took all they wanted and haven't given much of their own stuff back. Majority of code you get installed with OSX isn't written by Apple, yet they get to charge you for it. So don't use OSX as an example of successful closed-source product because it isn't.

Also, look back in time: open source systems have been innovating and are responsible for nearly everything we see around ourselves: languages, compilers, internet itself, the list is huge: commercial and closed-loop development hasn't produced anything with an impact, merely playing "catch-up -> copy -> resell" game.

You're an intelligent guy, you like to speak your mind directly and I enjoy your blog. There is probably something in your argument that you just can't get across.
On Google's Web, the User is #1, Google is #0
Java's email library sucks. You need to sumbit to the JavaMail way of looking at email to do the simplest thing with it. First you need to understand that JavaMail is 'cross-platform' in the sense that it's for any hypothetical messaging system, not just email. So it has layers and layers of lame abstractions. Lots of configuration needed to do the simplest things.

That's one of the worst examples, but my overall feeling is that dynamic languages on the JVM aren't worth it. You're probably better off with an independent language environment.
It really depends on what you call "mainstream" and the media you consume, watch, or listen to.
HotOrNot, Slide, Flickr, Digg, Reddit, Last.fm, WordPress etc.

These are ones we know because we are in a western society. There many other big hits in other countries that we have not heard of as they are not reported by western media e.g. until recently I never heard of shaadi.com and thats a big Indian player with a western bias which only gets reported as it is in English language and also doing well in English speaking countries

There are many more big players in China, Russia etc., all depends on what your assessment criteria is as they did not mention that in the article.
I'm definitely interested in hearing about people's experiences with these. I had pre-ordered one of their development phones last year, but gave up because of the constant delays.

I kept up with the dev list for awhile, but there were a lot of complaints about the hardware - battery life in particular, so I stopped paying attention.
I'll check those out - cheers
Top 10 Tips for 10 Million Women
Opera! I have 6 windows open with a total of maybe 200 tabs (yes, I have a problem). I think firefox would struggle in such cases. Not sure though. Also, I'm making rationalizations for my emotional choice of browser. So there.
Twitter: User Co-Creating or User Co-Opting?
I wanted to write an app to do usability testing for a while, and then screenflow came out and my first thought was "This is exactly what I wanted, and even better to boot." I have a hard time believing no one else is using it for this.

I'm glad it's working out well for you. We'll be starting to use it for this in the near future.
It's pretty elegant in principle, but you might lose whatever usability points you gain with the multi-use form by having to explain to the user that it's meant for both signup and login. I can't think of a really simple way to do that.
@tortilla - after n retries, we will lock the account and email a randomly-generated password to them that is valid for 24 hours. On login, they will need to enter a new password.

@bayareaguy - email offers two advantages over username. 1) it's unique and 2) it can be useful for communications.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really describe the algorithm. It would be interesting to see what the differences with vanilla PageRank might be.
Applications open for winter 2009 YC funding
"That means that when not rendering 3-D graphics, [Larrabee] can also add a few dozen processing cores to pump up performance in all regards."

This statement is incredibly naive. Let's not get swept away on a wave of hype.
Publicly accessible version?
Back to Basics: Capture Your Ideas
4 Effective Presentation Techniques
it's unique

What do you mean by that? An email address does not uniquely identify one person.

it can be useful for communications.

Indeed, especially for spam marketers.

If you make me provide an email upfront I'm probably going to ignore your site or at best give you a temporary address. The only services that have my real address are ones that have proven their value to me. If you can't do that then chances are all the data I provide your service will eventually end up in the wrong hands anyways.
To keep you in line unfortuneately.
Unfortuneately that seems to be needed to be pointed out.

Why do people insist on calling things startups when it is just a cool app that will never make any money?
Otherwise what you are doing amounts to premature optimisation.

That's a good insight - what language you use is also a form of optimization.
Maybe I'm confused, but here's where I think there could be a problem:

Let's say I register with tortilla@domain.com, pw-password

2nd visit, I think I'm logging in but instead I have a typo in my email. tortill@domain.com, pw-password (system thinks this is a new user and registers and gives the user access). The user thinks he's logged in with his original account, but instead has created 2 accounts.
You too Dawie.
That seems really early... is it normally around this time?
Well at least for me:

At work, Firefox 3 won't even start under Window Maker...still trying to figure out what's going on. So I'm stuck with Firefox 2.

And I don't use it on my Mac at home, because OmniWeb 5 is better in my opinion.
Microsoft Fixes Feature.
The selection of software at Wal-Mart is probably limited to closed source.
They probably have Ubuntu running on them anyway... :)
If ideas are worth nothing, why do we try to have good ones?
You probably have a point but your statement is a little extreme. You have to look at the benefit the software provides as well as the cost and there are times when a closed source system is better than no system at all.
So wait, does the new device run Android? Their site doesn't lead me to believe it does, and google searches only return stories of people failing to run Android on the last one.
Specially when it means they can't use other peoples software... their patents, on the other hand...
People were sending us a lot of emails asking about applying. The deadline's still around the same time.
This article is about Acrobat, and I have to agree with its ridiculous transformation into bloatware.

It seems companies like to release major new versions of things that don't need to become "better", instead of focusing talent elsewhere.

I can't name a single feature I use in acroread that wasn't available and done less obnoxiously in 5.0.9. On Linux, I still run 5.0.9...it's ugly, but it works.

I also now tend to use "xpdf", because it is very quick and works fine for almost any PDF I come across.
Hey, look what Og do!
"Here is some information which has been done to death everywhere else, except this time, it's even less useful. And oh, we're really just using this to shill our product, which is just like scribd, but worse."
I saw this earlier today and I was appalled - What kind of issues do you have to have with women to start making death threats over software?

I really hope they turn this matter over to police or FBI - people can and do get charged for this kind of stuff.

example:
http://richmond.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel08/onlinethreats...
No, 77 is the age of the IE3 users.
So that we'll have something to implement, thereby creating value?
Is apropos not just "man -k"?

OSX does come with gcc, it's in Xcode. That's not (IIRC) installed by default but installation is just a matter of dragging a folder off the DVD you get in the box.

I expect that if you were using OSX to develop WebObjects apps to run on OSX Server, it would kick ass. If you are targeting LAMP I agree it has (few) advantages over Linux.
Google gives away free Web application security scanner
bad idea, most people will just get confused because they can't find a "Sign up" or "Register" link on the page. So they will just leave in frustration.

And it won't help to have a few sentences telling them what to do, because the whole concept is so foreign, noone does this.

Do you really want to bother with teaching every user this concept? I mean this is such a trivial thing, and will cause nothing but problems.

And like someone mentioned you'll flood your database with a lot of typo addresses and will frustrate users even further, because instead of them getting into user@hotmail.com account, they ended up in uswr@hotmail.com
"Do any founders have other commitments between June and August 2008 inclusive?" -- probably not relevant to the January to March 2009 cycle.

Also, it's nice to see the weed-out question added: "Are any of the following true?"
While true, there is the problem with the GPL that it allows your competitors to leverage your own efforts against you. That's suicide for dumb resellers of commodity applications. But the successful open source companies have proven that for more complex things you can easily make plenty of money if you dual-license your software and use the distribution the GPL allows to build up an established brand.
Acrobat Reader is probably useless to most people, but Acrobat Professional is pretty indispensable for print design.

And Adobe makes more than Acrobat, you know.
If possible, maybe YC could do a third session per year with a smaller batch.
That might be the simplest method, but it isn't the simplest interface.

Problems include typos, past users not remembering which email addy they used to sign up with, messaging (do you put a "forgot your password" under a signup form? That'd feel kinda weird). I think Reddit had some variation on what you're talking about and recently moved away from it.

On the typo front, here's what will happen: I try to log in but screw up the email addy. You create an account and send a welcome email to an addy that may or may not exist. If it doesn't exist (likely), the receiving mailserver might flag you as a spamming domain. In the meantime, I now have two accounts and might be confused given that the new account appears "empty".

By the by, @mooders-- why aren't you replying to people via threaded responses?
At the time? Any place which would pay!

Here's the dynamic a recent graduate faces in a severe recession:

No companies in your field are hiring. Period. Contract work is out as well, since larger companies are now scooping up all of the 'crumbs' which used to sustain junior contractors. There are no boring Q/A jobs to temporarily take, no support jobs, no documentation jobs. Nothing.

You could bump your expectations down and try for work for which you are 'overqualified', but there are tons of experienced, desperate and unemployed people fighting for those jobs too. They will accept less pay than you and any employer with half a clue knows you will bolt the moment you get an offer that fits your qualifications anyhow, making you an inevitable cost and waste of resources to train. Barring an awesome network or family favours, those are out.

So, where does that leave you? I'm sure the seasoned Gen-Xers on the board remember :-)

My own low point was sitting in a basement, handling dispatch phones for a school board's janitorial service, while the 'senior manager' of the group was briefing me on the arduous tasks I'd be facing; at one point explaining to me how to add a column of figures by hand ('you have to carry the one here...').

Most of my friends have similar recession stories and we can all laugh about them now, but things can get far shittier far faster than you'd ever dream possible.

I wouldn't suggest you face the future with dread, but don't kid yourself when you plan out what your 'worst case scenario' could be. Bad economic times can be _really_ bad and it's often a struggle to get through them.

You will, though. It's all cyclical and prospects do improve with time.
Thanks, fixed.

(We added that question last cycle. There are no changes to the questions this time.)
So, where does that leave you?

http://news.ycombinator.com/apply
no these are the ones you know because you are an internet junkie. Your average person in the real world never heard of any of those. The ones I listed everyone knows because they either use them every day, or hear about them during the day.
Oh, and this just showed up in my RSS reader:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/04/web-form-design-p...

Good read if you're focused on signup forms right now. :-)
Most practicing doctors don't do research... and most medical researchers don't "practice" in the typical sense of the word.
Indeed. What bothers me especially is that these comments are made by managers with combinations of elite business degrees and experience which will enable them never to be limited in the kind of work they do. And yet, they are practically demanding that CS students be neatly packed turn-key packages that can do no more and no less than what is required of them in typical business programming roles. "Limited career prospects" cannot begin to explain what I see in this scheme of things.
Software patents sereve no purpose other than inhibiting the progress of us a a species. And lawyers go "YES!".

And about Google: That's how it starts. Let's see when everyone's favorite Google changes their motto into "Don't be too evil".
Not sure how this applies to "30 years" of "IT BS". Previously, with shrinkwrapped, if you bought something, and it worked fine, you were in a position not to upgrade, and not have to pay for it. And if it works fine, you don't need support for it either. (this, of course, ignores the network effects of everyone else upgrading other than you, which forces you to, but this is not the provider's fault, other than creating built-in obsolescence).

Now, you maintain a relationship with the provider of your web-based software (one could argue that Internet Explorer does not provide a good "web" experience because it is so broken), it doesn't come in a shrinkwrapped package that you install and use. How this is different from anything else the customer owns is that the customer doesn't own anything in this case, they are paying for a service (technically, because of the law and license agreements, they don't "own" shrinkwrapped software either, but that's a side point). The service they were paying for ("ability to use the service on IE6") is disappearing. It's not economically viable for IE6 to be supported anymore (especially for user who are not interested in paying for maintenance) -- are IE6 users part of the long tail?

It's not 37signals that is forcing you to upgrade to use their service. It's Microsoft, who wrote the busted browser to begin with. It's also Microsoft for not easily allowing multiple versions Internet Explorer to co-exist on the same computer, thereby making upgrades more difficult to people to deal with.

As for if it is a benefit for the supplier for the customer, it's a benefit for both. Customers get a better, more consistent experience (including features deployed faster, quicker load times, both because there is less code to maintain), and suppliers do less work for providing the same kind of product.

(obligatory car analogy) Does anyone complain the same way about parking garages that have height limits, and about how they are losing customers because they don't cater to customers who drive oversized vehicles? They just choose not to support the incompatible customer.
"it [C++] was used by other people for simulations of various network protocols and traffic management algorithms."

Had Mr. Stroustrup used Prolog the simulations would have been much simpler and the world possibly spared C++.
Are there any linux tools to mark-up/comment-on PDFs? I'm often forced to use the windows version of Acrobat to make and view edits on a document, because I haven't found any linux tools that will even display comments (let alone edit them).
Focus on Results Not time
Even if you are against software patents, you have to file them unless you want other people to use them against you. For example, if Facebook had patented this technique then Google wouldn't be able to use it without licensing it from Facebook, or spending a ton of money to dig up prior art.
You wouldn't need to transfer the data in or out. You can generate the data using a map/reduce program and check it using another map/reduce cluster. It takes about 4-5 minutes to generate the data (it is longer because we write 3 replicas of the input data on 3 different nodes). The checker program takes a couple of minutes to make sure that all of the data is correctly sorted. There aren't any indices, just the flat text files for both input and output.
How does one preregister a domain?
When IE6 was released isn't the issue, it's when IE7, Microsoft's replacement for IE6, was released. October 2006. We are quickly approaching IE7's two year birthday. Two years is still a long time.
Stallman doesn't have any problem with you laying down 40 dollars for a million man-hours of work if that's what you want to do.

He has more of a problem that your choice to do so contributes to the likelyhood that a billion others will have to pay for something when that is not their choice.

Think about how much money Microsoft is getting from people and organizations who don't want their stuff, but pay for it anyways because that's the only option they know. Do you think that kind of business is ethical?
What ever happened to the good old fashioned tried and true method of ass kissing?

With all the people that are meant to be innovating, surely someone can come up with something interesting (and different) to grab one of these people's attention for a few moments in their tech-filled, busy schedules.

For example
Robert Scoble: I know that he has a mild interest in Astronomy... so I would use information like that as a basis for a unique gift, something that he wouldn't normally expect - but would probably pique his interest.
Because it is easier to talk about doing than actually doing and anticipation of a dream can be better than the fulfillment of it.
So, it is the responsibility of the companies to make sure that they hire competent people and not only by the key/buzzwords. The ones who know how to hire will be more competitive.
"There is a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things" -Stephen R. Covey from "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People"
I totally agree. You might have a good idea, but if you don't implement it timely or even ever, its worthless.
With the carbon fiber chassis it'll weight pretty much like a motorcycle, meaning around 250 kg with the driver. A standard car is easy 5 times as much, so it has the equivalent of a 40 hp engine on a normal car. Not much, but enough. And if they upgrade the engine before going into production it could go to the equivalent of 60hp - or about as much as my Fiat Punto.
One Minute Productivity
This video will show you how to be more productive in one minute
Ok, looks like I'm not looking forward to reading his paper...
Anyone else notice that advice on PR these days is all starting to echo the same Catch-22: "Have a bunch of users and you'll have no trouble getting great PR!" You might as well say, "Be popular and you'll get more popular!"

While the statements themselves aren't false, they're not very helpful to those of us who have built products and are now trying to get those products in front of people. It would be great if we could get more advice / anecdotes / insight into taking those very first steps. What happened in the moments before the big bang?
I was thinking the same thing.

"Billing and Shipping Addresses: Billing records are kept at the payment processor, and shipping is likely kept in a waybill somewhere - both accessible by your application when needed. You don't need this in your database."

I don't need to maintain the user's maintenance of it in my database, but the data that goes onto the waybill needs to be stored somewhere during the ordering process (and most likely needs to be stored for future shipment records processing/reporting), so you actually have not gained much security.
So you think that was hard? Try twenty years of recession mixed with 100% annual inflation in a third world country. That is what my parents went trough in the 70s and 80s. That is why I feel confident about the future, things can be wrong but at the end we will be OK. Just avoid debt, try to stay productive, and enjoy the roller coaster.
"After citing my confusion as to why OSX doesn't have a decent package manager, doesn't ship with apropos, doesn't come with gcc, etc."

wrong: macports or fink.
wrong: apropos apropos: apropos(1) - search the whatis database for strings
wrong: gcc -v: gcc version 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)

Maybe you could actually TRY things before you make completely false claims that you haven't bothered to test... There is nothing "fussy" about it... I don't even really know what that means. 10.5 ships with xcode just like (pretty much) all the iterations before it. I think 10.0 was the only one to not include it.
At least the found out in the first year. They could have found out after four years.
Reproduction is necessary for the species but not for the individual.

Most men (and we are mostly men here, are we not?) don't usually seek hours in conversation with women. Such I deem a sign that one is unsucessful in mating.

And most men do not wish to be constrained to fucking any one particular being be it robot or human:
http://nymag.com/relationships/sex/47055/
Running C and Python Code on The Web
No, Dani has a point.

Both macports and fink are poor compared to recent linux package managers, which is no surprise since they follow an approach (bsd ports) Apple doesn't use for it's own software. What is really irritating is that macports-installed shared libraries occasionally cause linking problems.

Also it's important to keep in mind although you get XCode when you buy OSX, it requires a separate installation step that's both time consuming and easy to overlook and if you're getting OSX with a new computer you'll probably want to ignore the one that comes with it and download the most recent version from ADC which is clumsy compared to apt, yum, conary, etc.