skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
save-excursion could just be a function though. Here's what the implementation would look like. I don't know Python syntax, so I'll use Lisp, but I'll keep Python's featureset in mind. No macros, no lambdas.

(defun save-excursion (function)
(let ((point (point))
(mark (mark))
...)
(funcall 'function)
(set-mark mark)
(goto-char point)))

Then you would say:

(defun do-something nil (...))
(save-excursion 'do-something)

Ideal, no. Possible, yes.
Ask YC: Feedback on my startup - social media market analysis
We call it a "consumer exploration tool" - a quick way to tap into the wealth of information in social networks to get a better picture of what people are like. The target market is marketing professionals - brand managers in consumer products companies and such.

We tried to build a tool that's easy to understand and use - our hope is that you go to the website, and after just a few clicks you get it. We'd appreciate any feedback from the HN community on that point.

Oh, and it's absolutely free for now, so if you can use it to get some insights into the market for your own startups, that'd be awesome! - Let us know if you found anything interesting.
Google's man behind the curtain
Lisp hacker writes an outstandingly popular book
It's a novel!
David Sifry, Technorati - Scaling Innovation in a Network Effect World
A trivial search turns up plenty of copies including this one http://www.silobreaker.com/DocumentReader.aspx?Item=5_873749...
I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me [CSPAN - vid]
Decompression (Comics)
This is a report about a vulnerability in Internet Explorer. It has nothing to do with Gates. The title is probably a human or software mistake.
To put it simply:

"Hey... Your competitor just signed this deal that allows them to include our OS for pennies. I see you will have a tough time competing with them unless you sign it too".
What the World Eats, Part I - Photo Essays
Here's Part II:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1645016,00.htm...
It would be nice if this article's title was true but from the number of recent Gates submissions I doubt it is.
I got to two pages: (1) asked me to login, and (2) "In order to access articles on HBR Online, you must agree to the terms and conditions that apply. Click 'Accept'"

I clicked Accept and was in but come on - I have agree to TOS to read?
I don't agree Billg as one of the most brilliant people of our time. He is certainly a clever strategist, but not much more than that. He got incredibly lucky a couple times: The non-exclusivity IBM deal, the PC clone market (that could have not existed if the BIOS were harder to reverse engineer - say, like a Mac). MS has also at least one failed attempts to create a PC-like environment: MSX. They saw that a commodity computer running an OS they controlled was a way to get big money.

I would also like to know if they somehow covertly helped the BIOS reverse engineering process.

Everything they did up to Windows 3 derived from that - do whatever it takes to secure a market for their OS. They did not leave OS/2 to IBM because the codebase was bad. They needed control of the OS in order to keep it a commodity and having a competitor developing the OS that runs on commodity PCs was out of the question. Up to the launch of Windows 3, the public discourse was that OS/2 was the future. It changed dramatically at that minute.

They played dirty tricks all the time. Threatening Apple not to renew the Applesoft BASIC license was a way to secure Apple would endorse Microsoft BASIC on the Mac and ditch a competing product. I don't know what else they got from Apple while their cash cow had a piece of MS software within. It certainly made Apple's contracts better the next time.

They got lucky a couple times and IBM got fooled twice. Their dominance is the consequence of luck and borderline criminal tactics. I see no huge genius here beyond one that
was willing to bend the law (and morality) as much as he could.

It's also unclear how much of this came from Ballmer.

As far as I know, the big genius among the Microsoft founders is Paul Allen.
I don't really understand your idea, but I do have a few comments:

1) I'm skeptical that most corporate users know or care much more about the security of the applications they are using than anyone else. They might take more interest in cases where failure on their part may lead to individual criminal liability however.

2) I think it's more likely that most companies purchase desktop apps rather than web apps (where there are equivalent versions available) because they don't "get" web apps and because something installed on their PC would appear to the less technically minded as being more of a tangible purchase.

3) SSL/TLS connections can encrypt data between user and server. Databases on the server can be encrypted to prevent your hosting provider snooping on your data. You can authenticate your browser to a server using mutual SSL authentication (certificates at both ends) in addition to using log in passwords if you are that paranoid.

Would you like to expand on your idea a little? - I don't see what benefit it really provides.
I like the idea (or at least the direction you're heading).

If I understand you correctly:
One reason a lot of companies don't use Basecamp is because they prefer to have the data under their control (regulations, corporate policy, or preferences). So XYZ Mega Corp would pay you a service charge to run it in your environment?

Here are my questions:

1) What makes your environment more secure and safer?
2) How would this be implemented by the service provider? Install another version in your secure environment or are they hosting everything in this secure environment?
3) I'm still not sold on the fact that this is still outside XYZ Mega Corp's control. So how would you market this to them?
Isn't this already trivial with EC2? What's the difference between what you're proposing and just signing up for an Amazon account, uploading your certificates and launching an AMI with whatever application you want?

Also given that corporate types seem to have no problem with Salesforce.com, I'm not sure they would care. But perhaps if you came up with some tricky multi-party protocol that ensured Salesforce.com or no other single party could redistribute your private data even if they wanted to then you may have something worthwhile.
"You can't fix stupid!" -- Ron White
This is a great article! I don't agree with everything it in, but it's packed full of wisdom obviously backed by blood, sweat, and tears. Just a few thoughts off the top of my head:

if there isn't a product for it already, it's probably because there just isn't a need

This may be true for software packages, but it is most certainly not true for custom apps. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard, "Now if you can get it to do that, you'd have something there." Oh wait, I do have those nickels.

you have to convince businesses or organizations they need it

Not if it's their idea. And that's where your ideas should be coming from anyway.

I knew I could make it better so that's where I happened to get my idea.

Yes! Sometimes I think the last thing said before conceiving a software product is, "Who wrote this crap?"

I know if I decided to make automatic parking garage systems, I'd at least want to hang out at some garage and shadow the workers for a few days. Not to figure out what they're doing wrong and how my software could fix it, but just to learn their job, learn what their current system does, and find out what they like and don't like about what they currently use.

This is solid gold! If you're not sure what "analysis" is, then re-read this paragraph. Better yet, cut it out and put it on your bulletin board. Everything here is necessary but not sufficient. I would follow this up with: Ask questions to everyone about everything they do, preferably in groups, until you have no more questions to ask. Get a list of every single data element you'll need from paperwork, screens, or people's heads. Don't stop until you know you've "got it".

In some markets, business customers may not want to use the same things their competitors use, and will be willing to try a new or unproven system in the hopes of getting an advantage (better productivity, lower overhead costs...). The unproven product may fail, but some are willing to try.

This is an almost always overlooked factor in buying decisions, even by the best of sales people. I don't think I've ever seen it mentioned in an article like this. Kudos to OP for bringing it up.

See? A one-person company is actually a good thing!

Addressing the concerns about a one person operation is again, solid gold bulletin board material. I love the "hit by a bus" question. (Does anyone here actually know anyone who was ever hit by a bus?)

Excellent material from someone who has been in the trenches. Thank you, Bill!
We all get distracted and specially when we are not really interested or enthusiastic about what we should be doing.

I read in Flow (the book), procrastination happens when either the task is too challenging (for one's skill) or too mundane.

I have noticed, when I am really interested into work, I never get distracted and have total control over things (IMs, Twitter, etc).

I have recently started doing some side projects (small ones), so whenever I am kindda loosing focus on main task, I switch to other tasks.. So eventually, I am getting distracted but the outcome is positive, learning and being in flow state.

As someone said, addiction can replaced by something else, for smoking can be replaced by chewing gums or chocolates, but if you stop it doing all of sudden, it's not gonna work out..

my 2 cents

-abdul
You're right, /me flags it.
10x as much time selling it as writing it

This is not my experience.

I'm guessing my split would be more like:

sales & marketing - 10%
analysis - 15%
design - 5%
development - 50%
implementation - 10%
support - 10%

Testing is not a phase, it's included in everything. Implementation includes deployment, training, and documentation.

Sales and marketing was never a problem. There is business everywhere. I mention what I do everywhere I go (who doesn't), and find business almost anywhere. Everyone uses software these days and everyone needs something. I've gotten 5 figure deals at parties, family functions, networking events, and mostly from word of mouth.

I love to hack, but I also love to talk about what I do. I may not be typical, but isn't helping people with cool tech what it's all about?

In my mind, the problem isn't the time needed for selling and marketing. The real problem is that this kind of business (consultingware, one-off packages, lite package with customization, whatever you want to call it) isn't scalable.

If my competitive advantage is better value because "the boss" (not some lightweight on an 800 number) is supporting you, then it's also my biggest limitation. I only have so many hours in a year. Sure, I can extend myself with advanced methods and technology, but sooner or later, I hit my limit. That's why it's so important to find a way to convert your consultingware business into a product business. Not an easy feat, but certainly worth the effort.
I guess it could be done using some combination of first placing into every HTTP header: "Refresh: 2;URL=htpp://www.grisoft.com/", which would then allow a piece of Javascript on the web page up to 2 seconds to figure out if the visitor is a real browser (maybe even including some DOM checks too), and then acting accordingly (ie: sending the user to a page without the redirect header). If AVG's http fetcher doesn't execute the Javascript or fails to pass the browser test, then it gets redirected back to AVG's site because of the HTTP header.

Convoluted? Yes. Will it work? It should, unless AVG decides to implement a full Javascript engine and DOM stack in their http fetcher. Also, the initial re-direct doesn't have to go to Grisoft, it could go each time to a randomly selected site from a list of their competitors <evil grin>.

I think AVG is really playing with fire, it's really only a matter of time before things like this start popping up as defense mechanisms.
i think the benefit shall be something like this: instead of feeling insecure about your data and having to request information about security from the webapp provider himself, you would have a single endpoint in the hoster, which commits himself explicitly to security. plus, you could be safer to believe that no harm is done with your data.
It'd be cool to have a behind-the-scenes style show like I've seen done on Dirty Jobs where you kind of get to know the camera people and sounds folks, etc. that are always behind the camera.
Make your Terminal Sing (Mac)
If I had to sell a product that had sub-standard usability or UI response times, I'd feel like an asshole.

Then don't.

Excellent usability and response time are minimum requirements for any software.
YC Feature Request: Marking new comments from last visit
I frequently read comments for some story and then come back some time later. It would be really nice if the comments posted from the last time checked would be somehow marked (maybe the poster's name in some other color, a 'new' sign -- or something else, it doesn't really matter.)

Thanks.
I agree and would go even further - most designers that start out as graphic designers are doomed to fail as web designers and I've rarely seen any that made the transition completely. The high profile people making high bandwidth flashturbation for movies, rock bands or new vodka brands don't count - just because an ad agency can sell it to a big corporate client doesn't mean that's what the website's visitors will enjoy or be able to use easily.

Web design is not graphic design. It's not a subset of it, not even a sibling design branch and if anything, it's a distant cousin. Making stuff for the web is much closer to industrial/product design and architecture than anything in the communication arts. It's a different matter to design things simply to look good than it is to design how they work.

Longer explanation at alistapart:
http://alistapart.com/articles/understandingwebdesign

So then how would you learn fundamental design principles without getting polluted by the biases of print design? The best answers below are a bit dispersed (too many pointers to the css/html/js skills you said you already know) so I'll distill: 1) learn only the core graphic design principles - see endlessvoid94's book recommendation. 2) I second PStamatiou's advice to get your own site and start tinkering with it immediately, preferably a blog. Can't stress this second tip enough, actually.
and don't forget that 32% of the statistics is made up on the spot.
86.7% of which is usually inaccurate
This is an awesome little book and a bit of a secret, probably because the title, color scheme of the cover and relative thinness make it look less like something to be seriously and more of a "design for dummies" book. Not at all - it's a short and excellent distillation of core graphic design principles down to a few short fundamentals.

An even shorter and online version of the same idea - the blog post on "how c.r.a.p. is your design?" on the role and usage of contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity:

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/how-crap-is-your...
[web appli]wit4f
I created a information web site
(like this site!)

I created a information web site for foreign
people living in Fukuoka.

Please feel free to use it!
Let’s enjoy Fukuoka!

[wit4f]
http://wit4f.com/

[guidelines]
http://wit4f.com/default/guidelines

I want to convey my utmost appreciation
for everyone who supported me.
Particularly, special thanks for Mr. Itose,
who listened to my idea and test, and Toko,
who helped me out by translating everything
into English.

Thanks everyone!

日本語：
http://sora2hs.blog70.fc2.com/blog-entry-334.html

rails ver: 1.2.6

how about this???
"I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong" - new Gladwell book
“YouTube didn’t have PowerPoint, just product and stats, when it made the rounds on Sand Hill Road.”
You will just end up with software which feels unloved. Plus you will treat the project as a job and will likely not have much fun building it.

Maybe I'm a counterexample, but this is not my experience.

I love what I do and everything I write is for money. Somehow I have a feeling I'm not the only one.
Do you mean "Just dump ajax and use flash" or "flash get's around the cross domain problem"?

nevermind, google is quicker than asking questions: http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000280.html
Best tip ever Paul - having your own personal website where you can try out new styles, programming techniques or even just write about them is critical for a young designer. Or old ones! I don't use my personal site that much anymore (I'll revamp it after the wedding) but it was more useful during my first few years than any book I ever picked up on css, actionscripting, design, usability or anything else. You'll find new things to experiment with over time - I'm going to redo the portfolio section of my site as an excuse to tinker with django and blueprintcss.

It's a bit dated but there's a good book on the topic by Joe Shepter called "Personal Web Sites: Top Designers Push the Boundaries with Experimental Design and Graphics" - Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/3wxy7h
What I don't understand is why they don't invest some millions in fixing up their mess. Like it or not twitter is a better name than friendfeed, and features can be easily copied if friendfeed gets more functional.
Easy.

Test them in cold water, hot water, and a control group, in gasoline. Be sure to include dryer footage.
Where is the evidence the fellow did what he says he did? What's the company name? Who is he? What product did he sell? Who uses it?

We all love to read success stories but shouldn't we ask that the provenance of such stories be provided? Here we jump into discussing the advice of a total stranger - an unknow with no credentials. "Nukemanbill" could be sitting inside a mental institution or another teenager playing mind games. Or maybe he just read the book "All Marketers Are Liars" by Seth Godin and is testing Godin's ideas. Hell, maybe he's a SPAMmer selling Godin's book and thus this post.

The only URL on the site that has any provenance whatsoever is the one to JoelOnSoftware. Heck, I question even Joel's BS ofttimes because his is a private company and we don't know whether he's floating on his past Microsoft earnings or really makes money. Should I read someone's writings because he posts a known URL?

Taleb's right - humans are natural-born suckers. We're too trusting even here on HN. IMO if you own a company and want to give advice then you should be willing to name yourself and the company. Without that it's just SPAM.

To it's credit the advice given is worth every cent I paid for it.
Assuming the AI is built to be rational, the AI will act according to its goal system. So it's not going to do that unless you make some mistake or omission in its goal system, since it would have to find the motivation to "impersonate shell companies, human beings, etc" somewhere in its goals. This hints at two major problems in building an AI: how do you make it rational (That's the "intelligence" part) and how do you come up with a goal system that is safe and beneficial from our (the human race's) perspective?

Eliezer has written a paper addressing these questions: http://singinst.org/AIRisk.pdf. He recommends you read this paper on human cognitive biases before reading the AIRisk paper: http://singinst.org/Biases.pdf
20 Wrenches In The Software Startup Machinery
Ask YC: Resources to parsing semi-structured data
I am working at a startup, and we have to parse semi-structured documents and understand them. Any pointers that will help me get started in this? I have been trying out using a naive classifier with some success. Would like to know other techniques and/or libraries(i am currently using ruby) too.

Thanks
Windows Mobile and the planned acquisition of MobiComp
Why You Need to Worry About Web Standards, and Why Your Client Won’t
How to get heard in Washington: A tech geek's guide
Why'd you add a 2004 article?
I am under the (possibly mistaken) impression that Twitter really only comes into its own when posting from a cell phone, where its radical simplicity becomes an asset, rather than a liability.
A quick summary (though the article is well worth the read):

Perception may be mostly memory and the brain's best guess of a situation, and to a very minor extent, the outlying, sensory nerve signals.
The C Programming Language (Kernighan & Ritchie)

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (R. P. Feynman)

What do you care what other people think? Further adventures of a curious character. (R. P. Feynman)

I serendipitously found the Feynman books right after I dropped out of college while I was flying around interviewing for jobs. It was a stressful time and I was feeling pretty dejected, but then I found these amazing books: this Feynman guy was running around having fun and enjoying life, rejecting the notion of convention for the sake of convention, but the amazing thing was that he did it while being a completely real and serious scientist.

Godel, Escher, Bach was pretty good too, but it wasn't a transformative experience for me. It probably would've been great if I had read it when I was 14 or 15 when my dad first gave me his copy... but I read the first few pages and decided I didn't want to read 1000 pages of flowery literary/historical junk.
Entire Neighborhood Has Shared Solar Heating
Based on that description it doesn't sound like he's looking carefully at people who weren't successful:

"There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery — in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business — and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck." - Nassim Taleb

Gladwell's previous work on genius isn't that promising either: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/05/gladwell-and-genius.htm...

Finally, I doubt that the book will be better than this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of-Excellenc...
You must have pretty high standards if you consider his blog spam.
Haven't had a chance to watch the video, but there is some great information in the notes.

"ServerBeach had two pipes, one for redundancy, and YouTube was using one and a half of them, with rest of its customers limited to just half of the one left. ServerBeach had a great plan, $129 month for unlimited data."
LG KP220: A Complete Blend Of Style & Superlative Features
Interview with VMware Co-Founder Mendel Rosenblum
Google's wizard behind the curtain is probably Jeffrey Dean

"I'm almost certain it is Jeff Dean. During my 3 month internship at Google, his name came up EVERYWHERE.

1) He is a primary author on all of Google's major infrastructure-related publications (BigTable, MapReduce, etc)

2) I've seen his internal resume. It is CRAZY."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219667

Jeff Dean speaking at Google I/O 2008 about the infrastructure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsan-GQaeyk
Top ten essential Emacs tips
So You Want Your Code to Be Asynchonous? A Twisted Interview
Does this pass for a workplace? No, seriously!
That's a pretty cool app, I have a folder sitting on my desktop now called 'To Sort' with 77 items in it :s
Interesting idea but its a little abstract for me. Looking at the same queries might be helpful in understanding how this works but clicking on most of them gave me blank pages.