skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alexis Ohanian is speaking at Justin.tv Thursday the 26th at 5:30pm (Tomorrow)
Reddit co-founder Alexis and his good friend 'Pierre' will be here at the JTV office to talk about his experience in Web 2.0 startups and a bit more! Free pizza served at 5pm.

Everyone is welcome. We're located at 36 Clyde St. San Francisco. Please RSVP arram@justin.tv

You can also watch online at http://www.justin.tv/hackertv
I've heard this complaint before, but I personally use Gmail almost exclusively via IMAP, and it works fine.
To be fair no. Working for a charity isn't really going to help either (I refere you to the last 50 years where outside of disaster relief charity has done little to remove people from poverty).

If you really want to help, buy the things they make and lobby YOUR government to lower trade barriers.
Not any time soon. Domain traffic converts well for many advertisers.
You slashdotted it. Or something.

I'm in Romania, which right now is a proud member of the European Union and thoroughly civilized. Well, it's in EU, anyways. I'm talking about an ex comunist country with an literacy percent of 99 and university free education all the way. And still, every time I went into a public institution for the last 15 years I wished they'd let me write software for them for free. The problem is, they don't (i asked).

There are more software companies here then mushrooms after a rain (my own startup included) and still the main clients are foreign. Both the private sector and the government are very very oblivious to any advantages software could bring. It pains me, but what developing countries need are not hackers, but evangelists, and damn good ones at that. More like missionaries, actually.
The First Report on Scheme Revisited
RTFM:  Good Advice In Troubled Times
Knowledge Base Requirements For Human-Like Thought
Heh :-)

Back then Netscape Enterprise Server did a bunch of stuff that Apache didn't (threads, API, certs, etc). Most people were using forking and CGI scripts, but we were saving a ton of money on colo that easily paid for the license by using NSAPI instead of Perl. Even now, over a decade later, I maintain that NES 2.01 was possibly the best web server ever written. If I could use it today, I would.

What really killed Netscape was that the only thing less reliable than NES 3 was the watchdog process they included with it to restart it when it crashed! That was around the time that Apache was catching up, and the rest is history.
Recommended Firefox 3 Add-Ons | Tech Jaws
Interesting story, thanks.
The article mentions Damien and Max, founders of New Bamboo! They do very tasteful design and they're extremely keen about Ruby On Rails. Indeed, they were early adopters and I first heard about Ruby On Rails from them.

Tags: [opencoffee] [new_bamboo] [ruby] [rails] [ruby_on_rails] [design]
Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame dissects the history of his famed programming language
I wish I had declined my CS education. I, a recent CS graduate (Bachelor of Science in Computer Science), have come to the conclusion that a)my education equals squat to potential employers (and that a hand full of $300 certifications would have served as more valuable) and b)everything I learned in 4 years of CS studies, I could have learned in half the time outside of class - much of which I did, and then had to sit through it again in class.

I have been out of school for approximately 3 months now, have submitted well over 100 resumes, and cannot net even a remedial hold-over job screwing in PCI cards and fixing users' desktops. This afternoon I am throwing on a pair of khakis and heading out to see if I can net a job waiting tables - woot!

P.S. That last sentence is literal, in about an hour I am going for a restaurant interview... man, I am really happy I listened to my parents and elders and made sure to go to college, so that now I have 35k in debt and no job with which to pay it back with.
another point -- correlation != causation.

Just because pretty people tend to get it easier does not mean that being pretty is what causes them to get it easier. Perhaps it is some other factor that causes both the prettiness and the ability to get preferential treatment. This is very likely if you think about it, because attractiveness is for most people not a matter of luck or genetics but something that people actively put work into achieving.
I am not even convinced "buy the things they make" is the right way to go. Maybe they should just make other things? Buying things "they" make would be the same thing as subsidization, which I consider mostly evil. It would lead to even more investment into making things nobody really wants, rather than investment into making useful things.

Trade barriers are probably a good point, though.
I'm partial to commandshift3.com for examples of what to do. just check out their "winners" section.
Bruce F. Webster - creater of 'Sundog, the Frozen Legacy' for the Atari ST. And a good writer for BYTE back in the day. Thanks for the link.
Ask YC: Aquisition Advice
My partner and I run a sports website. We were recently contacted by a major
sports network that is interested in integrating our functionality into their
site. Their are a few ways a deal could play out, with one scenario being a
potential acquisition.

They have asked for a valuation and if we would want to become full time
employees. We've never really thought about a valuation for our company, and
are not sure the best way to come up with the figure. We have an idea of what
we'd like from the deal but are not entirely sure what the company is worth.

We're also curious about employment deals that have worked for other startup
acquisitions. Are there founders at YCnews that have become full time
employees after acquisition (like reddit)? Have these deals been just a
salary on top of acquisition price, or is there potential for a vested interest
in the site continuing to be successful.
Ask YC: VC/Angels in Vancouver BC
Does anyone know about any VCs or angels in Vancouver BC?
Not to totally discount gigawatt's advice, but I've watched many a graphic designer fail miserably at web design. Be wary of trying to apply print principles online, in particular.
After staring for 10 seconds at "Loading" thingie I gave up and hit "Back". I live in 2008 with dual core machine equipped with 3GB of RAM and hooked to the Internet via 8MBit fiber connection. I don't need to wait even a second for anything, let alone 10.
if not confidential, i'd love to check out your site.
My resume, sir: http://wademeredith.com </shameless self promotion>
You might help out with a project like OpenMRS (http://openmrs.org/wiki/OpenMRS). This is an open source medical records application used in several African countries, primarily for HIV/AIDS care.
This guy did it, but don't parachute in cuz you might break something and cause more harm...

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/9/3/151048/0948
If they charge a German company to advertise on a German user's email account and they are trading a GMail then it could be a trademark infringement. It doesn't matter where they have offices and it doesn't matter that they don't have control of gmail.de

Tags: [google] [googlemail] [gmail] [mail] [webmail] [german] [germany] [trademarks] [advertising]
Arguably this makes the card stand out even more than some boring one-sided text-only card, especially if your occupation happens to be something that would benefit from that.

And arguably, there are other uses for business cards. Given how I've seen the moo minicards being used, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these are going to be used for more artsy stuff vs. business-y.

My business card is almost all black on both sides, and I haven't come across anyone having problems writing something on it since it's matte and even if you write with a black pen it'll show up pretty nicely.
Spore creature creator and steganography
You're not easily going to be able to print out 1000 cards with _any design_ for $30. That's half the appeal of Moo, and I have a lot more fun giving out my custom minicards (to friends, mind you) than I do of my identical looking business cards (for general use).
Pure entertainment value. As long as we are running 25:1 on entertainment to valuable info, I'm good with it.
> pun intended

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=puns

;)
Perfect. It should decline even more, because lets face it: big percentage of CS grads aren't really "into it". The article points at year 2000 as the peak of CS enrollments, same year when I met an ex-taxi driver and the history teacher both turned Java programmers.
My wife made me a T shirt with this thing on it.

This is as old as the shell, although most implementations I've seen use a '_' for the function name instead of the colon. Maybe the update is more smilified for modern eyes? Meh.
How to make an 18 ft tall robot and celebrate Firefox 3 in style
Skill X, can not fix or much help a broken state.

Even a doctor could only help those in close physical proximity and in no need of advanced medical tech or much expensive drugs.

The fix for broken states is to fix the state, then the economy takes off and your stills are needed.

Most broken states are run by undemocratic governments, to "fix" them you need a change of regime. Undemocratic states often spy on their citizens to stay in power. So l337 crypto skill could help a democratic underground communicate and organize.
Flowgram really sucks. During my visit, whenever I clicked the forward button, it either redirected me to a page extraneous to the advertised presentation, or just didn't do anything at all.

Granted, this is my first experience with Flowgram.
A short answer: Politics. That's where your hacker skills have leverage: Education, research, documentation, analysis, logistics, fundraising, diplomacy.

Of course, we can't discuss many details here, because politics is anathema on news.yc unless IP law is involved. :)

[And that, BTW, is why we see all these posts lamenting that hackers "never do enough to solve the world's big problems" -- most of the world's big problems are intensely political, and politics is to news.yc as sex was to Victorian England. Of course, just because we don't talk about political issues here doesn't mean we don't work on them, off camera.]

Actually, though, IP law is relevant: If you can successfully lobby to reduce the patent lifetime for AIDS drugs you will save an order of magnitude more lives in Africa than you could ever do with your own two hands.

Another source of leverage is, obviously, invention. Hackers are good at inventing things, much of which you can do in your own shop (where you are most productive).

None of this should stop you from traveling to Africa, but the most useful thing you can do there is learn: Once you have a first-hand look at the life and problems of an African person you may have a better idea of how to apply your leverage.
The other more lucrative part of this is:

1. bid on high traffic, low cost keywords.
2. Use landing pages with content geared towards attracting High paying adverts
3. profit!

For example, you bid on "free stuff", pay 5c a click. Then send people to a page about class action lawsuits or something, where adsense is showing them some adverts for lawyers, with a $5 per click...

Similarly though, you'll get penalized for this now, as having a non-relevant landing page, and your bids will go up.

I'm glad they got shut down. Sitting in the middle doing nothing in a loophole isn't a valid business model for long.
As omouse pointed out, "fuck" was starred out. Besides that, "Fuck tha Haterz" was what was plastered on the faceparty site. I actually am glad that the OP included "F*" in the headline, because it's accurately conveys the newsworthiness of the article.

Shutting down your social site with a profanity ridden rant on the front page isn't something I've read of anyone doing before, and it will be interesting to see the result (if anyone ever follows up).
Unlike Twitter, you've got to have good uptime for this sentiment to be effective.

Tags: [Faceparty] [Twitter] [uptime] [reliability] [denied]
I don't think charity really helps the world much. If you want to help poor people you need to create an economy that creates steady jobs for people that can work and can sustain the dead weight from people incapable of holding down jobs.
The thing that always confuses me about these articles is how IT and computer science get equated. Its like saying doing research in applied mathematics is great training for being an accountant. Theres certainly a relationship, but theres certainly a huge difference between the two.

I guess the question is then: how does computer science pull a physics? Does there need to be some analogue of Feynman + Hawking etc, where theres both epic insight and just generally an outgoing ridiculous persona and also some reasonably good popular expositions of deep ideas?
Here are some more pictures of the event on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ews/sets/72157605764311990/
7 Words You Can’t Say On The Internet  (Without Starting A Flame War)
Been there done that, it gets better.

I got out of school with my BS in CS right at bottom of the .com bust. 2+ months of resume sending and nothing, eventually I got "network engineer" (glorified PC repairman) job. It was fun for about a month, then it got repetitive. 6+ month later I finally got a break and started (for slightly less $) as junior software engineer.

So yeah right now it feels like your CS is worth less then a bunch of certificates, but don't worry things change and in the long term you are better of.

In fact waiting tables might be better then what I did. It could pay more if you get lots of tips and you can keep your skills sharp outside of work, and the temptation to specialize in your new job and forget CS isn't there.

In summary: Suck it up kid!
This was a damn good time, luckly the police didn't come over and bug us about a permit.
So you can say hand on heart, if you worked out a way to 'game' a couple of systems, in order to make money with little or no effort, you wouldn't do it? Just a little bit?

You could say the same about "direct to advertiser PPC" - people who use adwords to bid on keywords, then drive the traffic straight to other affiliate programs, and skim off the profit. Yes, on the one hand they are parasites, but on the other, they are doing keyword research, generating more sales for the merchants, etc. They are value adding.

Granted though, search arbitrage is not in the same boat, and doesn't really benefit anyone.
In the end a company is just another system and working out how to make it do what you want can be just as fun as programming a computer to do what you want :)
Contribute and Edit Maps Data using Google Map Maker
Its too bad each idea can't be taken on its own, however incoherent or badly thought out it is perceived as and actively worked on until until some understanding is reached. One thing I've always wondered about is whether a request can ever be too small. Its extremely disheartening to see even the most basic requests turned down, as it suggests the real ideas with a potentially larger company wide impact have a near nil chance of success.
Wow, but then again, I'd be pissed too. People's attitudes about what they are 'owed' can be offensive sometimes and the Internet just seems to bring out the worst jerks. Maybe if Faceparty shuts down for good, people will learn to not expect things for free? Hopefully, but I doubt it.
Steganography has always interested me but using it in this way never really occurred to me. It would be cool to see someone do the same kind of thing with hCard info. You could embed your hCard in a profile picture and then by just dragging, or saving, the picture you would have their contact info.
I do know little about the development process, but that wasn't the point of my comment. I think it's perfectly acceptable to discuss things that justify general points without having in-depth knowledge about the specifics. Nor was my point that video is necessary for every web app. These are points that, when taken as a whole, explain why I think the new frameworks are not a revolution in web app development.

Web apps are dominated by Flash, and to a lesser extent, Silverlight, for a reason. The hype around these new frameworks just isn't justified. If the title was more to the effect of 'new frameworks are a good step forward in the javascript-based web-app approach' then I'd happily concede. The title says completely changing the web app industry!! The point of the article seems, to me, to be about how these new frameworks allow for simple web-app (aka RIA, more or less) development with more support from big players. My point is that this isn't as much of a game-changer as some people seem to think.
Congratulations!

Once you have bitten the apple, it's tough to go back to a world where you have a boss. Do you really want to hear someone give you a 'performance review'?

Performance metrics are ok, but now that you don't have full control over your future, you might not be able to hit them because the 'marketing department' got it's budget cut. I would take as much possible up front, and keep the 'required' time to be there as short as possible.

Insist on a lot of vacation so you can be working on your next gig. Depending, of course, on the weowneverythingyouthinkof contract they'll want you to sign.
You'd probably enjoy using SquirrelMail. It is a web interface to an IMAP server which implements an interface similar to Yahoo's old interface. You can configure your own instance to access a third-party IMAP server.

Tags: [SquirrelMail] [webmail] [mail] [IMAP] [Yahoo] [webapp]
#1) Get a mergers and acquisitions attorney NOW. It will be expensive, but you don't want to not get something you don't have coming. There are many ways to structure these deals, and if you throw employment into the equation, you are looking at even more ways to come out ahead or get screwed.

Talk to a speclialized attorney NOW. Why so urgent? You do not want to appear dumb to your potential purchaser. To appear prepared, you need to present a professional face and let them know they are not going to get away with a steal (which is bad for you). Let them know they will get away with a fair deal.

EDIT: Talking about ALL the possibilities will involve many, many pages of text, none of which is any good (better to google it) since we are not your attorney. (and only listen to your attorney, none of this friend of a friend thing).

Congratulations, by the way :-)
Thank you for posting this, it was well worth a read.

While few of us can manage to be as dedicated to an ideal as RMS is, having an icon who is genuinely committed around helps keep us moving in the right direction.

Certainly the web startup world owes a huge amount to the man (and every other programmer who writes open code) - how many startups would be where they are now without the boost that open source software provides?

In years when I don't make an OSS code donation I try and make a cash donation to the EFF instead. It's not so much giving to charity as making an important investment in my next independant project that would never exist if step one was paying $$$ for an IDE/compiler subscription.
Hack Tonights Dreams: 7 Steps to Total Recall
Agreed. You can bitch and moan at Bill Gates all you want, but he's directly responsible for creating gigantic amounts of wealth that benefit us all - and that's even without counting any of his not-insignificant charity work.
I agree, but you have to support your statement a little more.
Real Example Of How Firefox 3 Saves Your Computer from Phishing Sites Attack
The flip side, which anybody who works with lawyers on a weekly basis knows, is that lawyers can complicate stuff enough that people will walk away from the deal. This isn't advice, just an observation.
Your valuation is a multiple of your revenue. If you grossed $500,000 this year, expect $750,000 next year, and want a 2x forward valuation, you're worth --- do the math.

If you're really small, and that number is really low, remember that the bottom side of the valuation is probably what an "awesome signing bonus" would be for a big company. As in, you wouldn't accept a buyout that equated to nothing more than a plausible signing bonus, because you can get that now and not give up the company or the site.
i haven't yet worked as a programmer. so thanks for sharing insights of your experiences!
Absolutely true, but never forget: The buyer has an attorney on their side, looking out for their interests. As long as you do not, you are screwed.

What if the buyer offers employment with a 70% purchase upfront and the rest spread out over three years? Good deal or bad deal? Ask your attorney... What if this, what if that? All of them are "ask your attorney" items.

This is not simple, just look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mergers_and_acquisitions

All of this issues apply to a company being bought out, large or small. (i.e.: Does the valuation section alone seem a simple, "do it yourself" task? Large or small, companies being bought need to be valued correctly)

Unfortunately, to come out ahead, you need to spend money on the attorneys. And specialist attrneys at that...
got that too, i think that extraneous page might have been a slide from the actual presentation, not sure though
There are. I've had the misfortune of working with people like that frequently. It leads to a lot of frustration, because they tend to write very verbose and convoluted code with very little documentation, so in addition to performing poorly, it's a pain to read and debug.

Naturally, they aren't up to the task of debugging their own code, let alone optimizing it...
http://thefunded.com/ Most likely has the information your looking for, you can do search by area and level of funding.
Paul's treatment of marketing brought to mind Gladwell's What We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20. The Ockhamist dialectic -- "If we are going to be honest, then we must admit the possibility that everything we know and believe is, in fact, incorrect" -- evokes existentialists e.g. Eckhart Tolle: "The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness."
The company's business model had nothing to do with domain squatting. It is enough to have a single domain to do huge amounts arbitrage. Or should I say "it was enough". :)

By the way, there still is a number of smaller companies doing Google->Yahoo arbitrage with Yahoo's quiet approval.
read the article : Revenge Of The Angel Investor

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=12ca4a9b-cd92-470...
Your programming skills: No.

Your talents and engineering senses? Most definitely.

The idea is the same, the venue is different, that's all.
Man, can I hire you so I can surf about 90% less everyday?