skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used Windows 95. It didn't crash as often as people said it would. Why would I bought Mac OS back then? Any reason other than it doesn't crash as often as Windows?

I also used Windows 98, and 98SE. It rarely crashed unless when I did not reboot it more than 2 days. Who left their desktop on for 48 hours (except me for my own reason and probably people who leeched pirated illegal stuff)

Ditto with Windows 2000.

For desktop, Windows is okay. Yeah so there are viruses due to popularity (or being targeted). If Mac OS 7-9 were more popular back then, it'll suffer the same fate (virus wise).

People were always afraid of anything that they don't know how to operate. My parents used OSX once in a while lately. But they're still afraid to click on certain things. They said "If I messed up, I don't know how to get it back to the previous state".
Ask HN: Issues with music and video related application
I have toying with an idea of building an application that is music and video related. This is first time iam venturing into building a product that is music and video focused. I was little worried about legal issues.
So the question to HN is-
•What are the issues one needs to be aware of before building product that is music or video related
•Any open source web and mobile platform that I can use
•Any general information that I need to be aware off.

Thanks
Josh Hartnett, David Bowie. It's gonna suck. Though props for the obscure reference to the first season of Saturday Night Live. Landshark?

Someone has already done the real thing,and everyone should watch that rather than give money to bullshit Hollywood movies:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
I think he meant his site didn't degrade gracefully without CSS and Javascript. Illogical page structure without CSS, broken basic functionality without Javascript.
hahahahahaha

a business based on SourceSafe.
MS salary is above average for fresh grad.

Their benefits are better in overall (depending how you view it I guess). If you're young and single, you probably don't care much of this-n-that. But if you're planning to own a house and family, MS compensates you quite well.
Here's a bit more info plus a video interview with Schmidt:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/25631974/site/14081545?__source=yahoo...
I could have used this just the other day. I was all set to actually pay, and then it tried to make me install software. I decided just to hack on some code offline instead.
I'd say about 70-80% of the engineers I know in the Bay Area, including me.
Articles like this completely miss the point that the so-called "digital immigrants" built everything that the "digital natives" take for granted. Chatting to friends on MySpace vs inventing TCP from scratch - tell me which generation is the more digital...
Uhh, pretty much everyone these days, dude.
Err, the logic is sound

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_tollens

That's not the point. In politics, if you can trick people into believe rubbish X causes trash Y which leads to bullshit Z and make money off it, then that's what you do. Generally, it's best to have a semi-reasonable argument. In the case above, the flaw is in the statement "Men and women are equal", which is obviously not the case. (Nothing is equal to anything, except in pure mathematics.)

Really, saying "men and women are equal" is a moral statement, with built-in failure, like the commands in the sermon on the mount. This leads to built-in transgression. Which leads to guilt. Which leads to submission. And so on.
Rock Band is where it's at.
The New York Times said that it would double the national debt instantly. Pretty scary.
The analogy with Stonehenge I expect, arguably one of the earliest computers.
What do you code on?
Ask PG: Karma Inflation
I'm curious about the ratio (total karma given today / number of users), through time. Can we get some stats on that? I'd also like to know how many lurkers there are.
Google built an application out of theirs, and monetized it. Their search engine could also just have been a proof-of-concept, used as a demo in selling PageRank to another firm.

You should investigate patents (preferably with a patent attorney), and figure out just how easy it would be to reverse-engineer your algorithm.

Keep in mind that many programmers find the idea of secret algorithms distasteful. Hiding these processes is often a necessary evil in order to make profit, but do not do it if you don't have to (recent example: reddit).
Debian on a powerbook (eat it).
Not sure where to begin here without knowing anything about what you're "algorithm" is about, what it would be used for, etc.

If you've created something useful, why not build a business on top of it yourself?

If you don't want to do that, I suppose you could patent your algorithm and then grant licenses to use it. If what you're licensing is literally just "the algorithm" as opposed to an implementation of the algorithm that you write, than I don't see how you can get around telling them "the math behind the algo".
BSDi merged with Walnut Creek, then sold its software operations off to Wind River in 2001. That was a bit of a rocky period for FreeBSD releases, if memory serves, since a good chunk of core had worked for Walnut Creek before the merger...
Top 5 Signs of Emotional Over Eating-
That's why the study broke it into two groups and then compared across many different countries (also groups). When what you are studying is the difference in cultures then it seems its impossible to isolate a variable like its a simple drug you're introducing.
That is mere statistical manipulation. Here in the UK, we have a "Minister for Women", Harriet Harman. She compares the hourly rate paid to full-time male workers to the hourly rate compared to part-time female workers in her statistics to conclude that women are worse off, which in turn she uses to justify advocating quotas etc. The Guardian's politics are very similar.
I certainly wouldn't watch it for a realistic take. Actually, I probably wouldn't watch it at all, since so far it's ranked somewhere between Made of Honor and Meet Dave: http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/august
There's something about lists like this that bother me. I know it shouldn't -- it's meant to be light and humorous. I think what bothers me is that the person she describes is really, godawful boring.

The line that stands out for me: "If you want to understand your boyfriend, understand computers. It’s not that difficult."

I...I just don't know. I'm an engineer at an early-stage startup and computers are a big part of my life, but I certainly hope they're not the best way for my girlfriend to understand me.

I'm not ribbing the article. It's cute. But when I read it I cringe and maybe worry a little bit that I actually am like that.

I'd also feel terrible if I treated my girlfriend like that.
Or... "why you should never date someone who writes blog posts named 'why you should never be a startup girlfriend'"
Yet another response from someone who missed the whole point of one of pg's articles.

In my experience, "great hackers", or stevie's "done, and gets things smart" types, and so on, are exactly the ones who seem to care the most about users.

Great hackers don't suffer inefficiency; they correct it. If you want your nasty little problems solved elegantly, expose the great hackers to them. If you want to throw warm bodies at annoyed customers, find someone mediocre and reliable.

Great hackers are the ones that cringe in revulsion at a sloppy code structure, not (just) because they're OCD about that kind of thing, but because inconsistency gets in the way of creating beauty.

Erik seems to say that pg is suggesting we should hire a bunch of prima donnas who don't do "real" work. What I got out of the GH essay is that, if you can hire Edison, it's madness to put him to work installing light switches. Great hackers are the game changers, and if you're not a game changing institution, you won't get them.

Hire people who care about users.

Great hackers do. More than Eric seems to realize.

Hire people who understand the difference between a job and a hobby.

The difference seems to be that you enjoy your hobby and not your job. I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

Hire people who want to contribute in lots of different ways to the success of the product.

Great hackers turn mediocrity into gold. They make everyone on the team more productive, and add value all over the place.
We need more user statistics!
"I think you need to travel more"

You're making false assumptions about where I've lived or travelled without refuting my points about New York. I live in San Francisco (the bart+muni+caltrain system here is actually quite horrible - it's inefficient, expensive, the coverage is weak and frankly it's smelly) and it's nickname as "the most East Coast city on the West Coast" is not well-earned at all, it's just due to the rest of California being completely and utterly car-based and without decent public transportation.

I've also travelled a lot, including Europe since all of my relatives are in Turkey. Barcelona is great, it's kind of like a cross between my hometown of San Diego (it's also 2 million people and sunny) and New York (great art scene, up-til-dawn nightlife and a city-wide metro) but it's on a much smaller scale.

And it's not simply a bias towards big cities - trying to find my way around Tokyo was a nightmare. I love Japan and it was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, but the trains inside cities (not the bullet trains between them) aren't even run by the same companies, there's several parallel networks in place.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Tokyo_sub...

I can see London being very similar, considering New York modelled its subway system on the London Underground. Just looking at the two different subway maps makes me think NY is a vast improvement though, considering that one is a grid that maps directly to the streets and the other is a confusing circular spaghetti-looking mess. Most large European cities tend to have a similar layout of concentric circles (due to castles and moats and whatnot) and I find that using polar coordinates to get around isn't very intuitive compared to simple square x-y grids. If I look at a map of New York, it's easy to say "ok, I need to go two over and 5 up to get where I want to be."

Saying that cities are "uniquely great each in their own way" is fine, I'm not saying any other cities aren't great and that New York is better than them in all respects. In fact, New York is a horrible place to get lonely - if you don't already have a lot of friends, nothing's lonelier than being surrounded by millions of people all in a rush to get somewhere else and too busy to meet new people.
Serial monogamy is de rigueur these days, no?
SingAlong, I think both commenters are right. To put it in more explicit terms: You can't sell the algorithm, you can only sell its output. I.e. Google has an algorithm to determine the relevance of a web page to a search result, but what they are selling you is the output, i.e. the relevance for a given combination of search term and page.
In order to do that, you will have to host the software that implements the algorithm on a server yourself and your customers will have to feed the input to it and pay for the output in a subscription-like model or similar. Email me at jerry5@p2pbroking.net if you are interested in an exchange of ideas.
note the post date:
Wednesday, August 04, 2004

I knew the article is old; however, i hang around just to read comments from specific users
How Facebook Can Monetize Birthdays
I am always suspicious of people who won't use their own money for their own gear (of course, modulo them being able to actually afford it given their circumstances).
HTML 5 data- Attributes
What do you do when your systems break?
haha...RMS didn't post that ad for himself on craigslist, I posted it on his behalf! It's so strange to see oneself indirectly referred to in an article which one otherwise has nothing to do with.
That may be true, but I assume he meant to say "I loaded the page, and the CSS was indeed broken, as mentioned in the bug report." I like his wording, but he didn't quite get it right.
I would rather find the answer to the question, "How can we make it more interesting for them."

Regardless of whether or not mathematics interests you, it's a vital skill like reading. I don't really like "reading"* per se, but I still need to do it anyway.

* s/reading/analysis of fiction/
Guitar hero looks like fun, and a good game. It's just a shame all the songs it comes with are godawful :(
You'd sort of expect a guitar hero type game for the iPhone sometime soon. For extra points it'd analyse your mp3 library and write the guitar part itself.
Of course you can monetize it without revealing the algorithm, just expose an API.

The questions you need to ask yourself is what are the advantages of your algorithm in comparison to known algorithms for tackling the same type of tasks, which companies use algorithms to accomplish these tasks and what is the monetary worth of the improvement in their results your algorithm generates.
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Yeah, you need to iterate to refine the process.
Anyone serious about coding.
Many of these points are nullified when you find a girlfriend that is also in the startup world. Share the pains and joys together!
Linux or BSD is where it's at for hackers. MacOS is nice too, of course, it's simple enough that my mom can use it. Just that if you really want to be in control of things, you probably want Linux. If I had to do sales or something else where looking flashy was important, I guess that would be another place where Apple's very nice looking products would be a good pick, but Dell+Ubuntu is a much better price/performance bet for someone who just wants to hack, a lot, and enjoys the freedom and control that come with free software. Admittedly, not for everyone, but then again, this site is for hackers, right?.
Yup! I just updated thread with more info. I had created a thread with a generalized title thinking others with different algorithms would find replies useful too. :)

And still more info: The algorithm doesn't generate tags but instead generates precise topic results as shown in the thread title/description. But I am still tweaking it.
I guess someone needs to write an article for the 1% of people who fall into the "startup boyfriend" category.

I appreciate men who understand computers, use Macs (or, well, I'm platform agnostic but prefer !windows), know what twitter is, and will wait in line with me to get a new iPhone. :)
If you really can do natural language parsing that well, the most upside is in starting your own search engine.
If every iteration hurts then is iterating a lot really a good plan?

In each iteration one believes this is the final iteration that will last forever. If not, you're doing it wrong. How is that compatible with planning to iterate?
Stallman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant, that's a cool $1M.
There are distros with BSD or Solaris kernels and a GNU userland.
duh :p
it's not the movement of the character that's obnoxious.
Hmm... Its not so good right now. Right now its working with a few sample data sets I chose: python, gates and sun

I am currently downloading the wikipedia database which is about 5gb(on my slow internet connection should take another 3-4 days). The reliability of the algorithm will then be known.
Please review my realestate site: hunting4house.com
hi,

i just launched this site.please provide me your feedback.
Thanks,
I read the parts related to Facebook/Zuckerberg, while it was online a while back.

Even though it's written by Greenspan, it makes Greenspan look like a lacksadaisical worrywart, and Zuckerberg a driven executor.

See my previous comments here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294 ) and here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24748 ). (Greenspan has broken the direct page links, but you can get the general idea without buying his book.)
It's safe to say that many copyright owners are skeptical of these claims. For years, rumors have circulated in the technology sector that some of YouTube employees salted the site, especially in its early days, by posting clips from popular TV shows in order to bring attention to the site. No evidence of this has ever surfaced.

If I was the author of YouTube and did this, certain records would have been removed from the database long before Google bought my company. Asking people to incriminate themselves is never a good strategy.
I don't get how the post date's relevant. maybe you're responding to somebody else's comment and you clicked reply on mine by accident? I was saying that the fact that the HN community in aggregate thought that this blog post was worth sharing with each other for any reason meant that the inevitable point-of-no-return signal/noise collapse had occured.
true and better you both read HN sitting opp each other sipping coffee :)
Cool, didn't know that existed in the spec. Looks very powerful.
Create a proof of concept and make it publicly available.
It's the same as creating a company... If the failure rate is high, trying more than one time bring the failure rate down...
But when you are creating a company if you start by thinking that it's going to fail, you are already out of the game ;-)
This is a nice feature, but I prefer the XHTML approach. Why invent a new feature when you already have it?

All this repeated feature-ing is why browsers are so huge, memory-intensive, unmaintainable, and unreliable.
As a rule, when water flows uphill, the government is intervening. What free market do you know of in which the failure of a firm isn't a boon to their competitors?
I do, I used to code on a laptop running gentoo but got tired of spending too much time working as a sys-admin on my own system...

Now I use a mac and use prefixed portage to manage all the unix apps I use.
TC: Gphone May Really Happen, And Ammunition Group May Be Designing It
I agree. I've never had a girlfriend or worked at a startup, but I hope I'd be mature enough not to care if she used Windows, had an obsolete/nonexistent gaget collection and was happy working in a cubicle. And that I'd understand her well enough to be able to show my affection in ways that meant something to her, rather than requiring her to understand that it means something to me.
Eat Healthy
You can dig for all the helpful tips for developing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle that not only keeps you in prime of health but also keeps you at peace of mind.
The effect such stories have on me:

1.) Men of chasing their dreams which passion don't lose.

2.) If they lose, they will hitback with a win sometime.

3.) These kind of stories remind me to keep trying even if I lose a dozen times trying to build a million dollar company(which I am still trying).

Senthil, thanks for sharing this.
Scarcity
Hmm... I am trying to get some bucks for the attorney fee and the patent fee. And also getting my friend's help. I currently have a webapp under dev too(Also taking part in a contest to save some money for the patent fee which is expensive in my country)

So will post the demo here soon. :)
If you have a Nokia or a Blackberry you can use them as modem. I have used a BB to get connected plenty of times and the connection is fast enough to read HN and post comments.
excellent excellent article.

dare has a fantastic way of deciphering through any amount of hype, and talking about the real situation!
This is depressing. The author doesn't seem to understand that free software and/or open source software does not mean no price.

Sometimes, release software under a free license does make a lot of business sense. Sun is a hardware company, and by releasing some of their software under a free license, they are hoping for more developers to adopt their platforms.

Remember the "developers, developers, developers"...Microsoft is trying to do the same thing. The express editions of visual studio, which are proprietary, are meant to do that. I would expect an MS employee to know that.

Now whether any of these companies succeed in increasing adoption by releasing software under an open license depends entirely on how good a job they do.
U've got a point there.

Extensive customisability is also confusing. Linux distros are great(i started running slackware to get rid of the virus problems that I had on windows). For non-superuser distros, the developer should remove the extensive customisability. The desktop environment for example, u get a lot options from fluxbox to kde to TabWindow Manager. Those kind of too confusing options should be removed in non-superuser distros. The procedure of installation of additional software, windows wins hands down. There aren't too many types. All a user has to do is to click on the setup file of most software. In linux, if a distro doesn't have a package manager, then learning how to install different packages from rpms to tar.gz to whatever, takes time. And even worse, some apps come with the tag "compile it yourself".
You use portage on a mac? How? Got a link?
Voting you down for insufficient explanation, are 5 bullet points really all you can manage when explaining something of this magnitude?
Crazy talk. Apple hardware is nice, but OSX is at best mediocre for systems programming.
Wall Street and Vine: Hollywood's View of Business
Should apes be treated like people? Which apes? Which people?
On the iPhone's Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff
I code on Kubuntu using vim. Macs are too expensive in my area + i don't really know of any advantages to kubuntu other than the prettier interface. My kde desktop is really fast and i can do my daily tasks really fast so i have no problem with it. Macs are probably cool too, but i enjoy flexibility more than pretty icons, and my crystal clear icons are pretty enough for me.

ps. Fluxbox is pretty too.
The Perfect Server - CentOS 5.2
"Slow news day"? I'm not really concerned about articles like this though... they don't wreck communities like political discussions do.
DataPortability Reference Library
>They get to decide what's available in the public facilities they pay for, not you.

Ah, I had a feeling that I was a de facto prisoner while I was there. I wasn't aware that it was official.

For what it's worth, I'm a taxpayer too, and I support giving kids responsibility for their own lives and teaching them to make decisions for themselves. But then again, most people consider me a crazy whacko radical who's not worth listening too. Opinions such as "kids should learn responsibility" tend to get one shunned from polite company nowadays.

My parents are also taxpayers, and I'm pretty sure they didn't care if I drank Coke or not. In fact, the abusive bastards even bought me a soda and an ice cream every now and then. Gasp!
Madrid (Spain): work is for other people, not you.

Alicante (Spain): only the "S": sex, sun and sand cares!

Bilbao (Spain): not spaniards allowed
Discipline is good for a certain kind of person. Religion provides discipline for those who have no self-discipline.

I don't see why so many on this thread need to convince themselves that religion never helps people. It does. I've seen it. Does it help everyone? Probably not. Is it a net positive for society as a whole? I don't think so. However, it clearly and surely helps some people some of the time.

I don't have any numbers, just personal anecdotes, but I've sure seen people saved by religion who would otherwise probably be dead, and I'm a hardcore atheist radical.
I do not need to hire extra bodies if I'm selling 1 million copies a day of my app than if I'm selling 10 copies. The only thing stopping an ISV from growing is the popularity of the software...

Give me a break. If Intuit sells 10mm copies of QuickBooks a year, why don't they just have 5 or 6 employees instead of the hundreds that they have (that work on the QB side)?

Your "Build a better mousetrap and the users will come" approach just apply to every scenario. Maybe to yours, but not to everyone's.