skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I detect sarcasm. I'll pretend it isn't there. There is a Sonicare model that runs on AA batteries. Buy that one. All the rechargeable battery models are designed to become trash when the batteries wear out. And they will, believe me.

Sonicare cleans better than other electric toothbrushes. I've owned the Braun, and there is no comparison. The fully charged Sonicare makes my teeth feel the same as after a visit to the dentist.
Let the idiocy begin.

"On the surface, the event features a continuation of the alliance between Salesforce and Google’s Apps services. Behind the scenes, this is an old fashioned land grab for developers, trying to pry them off Visual Studio and .Net and into the benefits of collaborative on demand services."

Salesforce's platform competes with .NET? How?

Salesforce provides business applications which interoperates with third-party applications. .NET is a Windows-based development platform -- it includes desktop, graphics, and all manner of things that have absolutely nothing to do with ASP.NET, which is a general platform for making any kind of web application you want. You know, a lot of .NET development consists of assloads of SQL Server stored procedures along with enough C# wrapper code to hook the database up to a web page. The database is fucking God in .NET land -- the interface is an afterthought. Microsoft's tools encourage this by being extremely data/model-oriented.

There is no migration path from .NET to Salesforce, except "let's throw away all our code, chuck all our valuable relational data, and instead use a precanned web-based suite with an API we can develop against in ways preapproved by a for-profit enterprise who now has us by the balls."

Note that I have not even bothered to dignify the retarded utterance that Salesforce is somehow comparable to Visual Studio, a desktop IDE, with a response.

If instead Gillmor meant to compare Salesforce to all of Microsoft's "Live" services that no one really cares about or uses (awful design, awful marketing, awful products), he should get his product families right.
Maybe it is the neighborhood you were in, or that you don't make an effort to aproach people?

I live in San Francisco, and I know at least two of my neighbors. We are not friends or anything, but a hi and a small talk once and a while doesn't hurt. Unfortunately, i live in a building where people stay for few years, and move somewhere else, so I guess that doesn't help.

I also sub-leased an apt. in North Beach, for my visiting parents. The girl I subleased from, had lived in that apt. for about 10 years, and she knew most of her neighbors. She gave me three numbers, of neighbors that could help me, if something happened, and my parents were talking to her downstairs neighbors everyday.
Very nice people.
I also picked the key from one of her neighbors, so she trusted them.

Living in a place where people are less transient helps a lot.
From now and on, I am going to try to be more friendly to people I don't know. I have seen the opposite, where people are unfriendly, and I don't like it.
Gah-- Steve Gillmor? That guy is largely unintelligible. Every time he posts on TechCrunch, the comments are full of people who haven't the slightest clue what he's saying.

Joel Spolsky is a huge fan of Gillmor's communication skills:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/23.html
I'm happy to say the problem is Fixed. FF3 is nice and fast now. :)
The Mountains of Pi
well, this particular page is a blog.
Dare we hope that Obama shares the 'libertarian paternalism' of two of his former University of Chicago colleagues?
Its definitely worth a day if it takes you that long to set up an account. They tell you who to approach, how to approach them. The pitches section is great, you can now pitch VC's directly through the site. As long as you are looking for funding it is the way to go.
That wasn't obvious to me at first either. I checked the url and saw it. Presentation is HUGE.

On top of this, your service, so far, consists of me entering my email address. I think I'm doing YOU a service if I comply. Not sure why I should care yet though... Like I said, presentation is huge.

Work on making me (and everyone else) excited about what you're doing. And, since we're on the topic, the blog is arranged oddly. It wasn't obvious to me that the huge black text saying 'A Y COMBINATOR TO CHANGE THE WORLD' was merely a blog entry title and not the title of the page.
Definitely do the bachelor dinner!

After a recent trip to Charleston, I experienced first-hand some excellent hospitality w/ gracious hosts. I realized that it's something that's been largely missing from my life and I want to be more intentional about encouraging community growth and real relationships through hospitality.

I'm already diving in and am going to have several people over for dinner on Thursday night. It's mostly bachelors, but this is a low-key way for a bachelor like myself to start out. All that's needed is a large pot of spaghetti and some games and we'll see how things go!

The biggest realization I've had regarding community and hospitality is that you can't wait for somebody else to start it because if you do most of the time you'll end up lonely and waiting when you could be having a great time instead if you start it up yourself.
Last time I looked, UIUC was in the top 5 for CS and CE, and it'd surprise me if it wasn't in the top 10 still. I'd definitely recommend it, as it gives you a top-tier education at a middle-tier price (or low-tier price, if you can swing in-state tuition).
I went to U of I and am pretty happy with the education there. It is generally very good in engineering so you'll be able to explore a lot within that discipline (I started in computer engineering, and finished in physics), and engage in some great research opportunities. I was in-state and the extremely affordable tuition is probably the biggest reason I went, though I doubt the out of state tuition is unreasonable. I'm not sure what it takes to get legal residency in Illinois, but if you plan carefully you might be able to get it after your first year.

And, you'll probably have a pretty decent social experience. Going to a Big 10 school with one of the largest greek systems in the country can be fun, even if you're not a big college sports or frat fan (and, who isn't a sorority fan?).
Someone needs to learn basic page layout and design.

A Flash text headline? This couldn't be achieved with a simple .png? The lead sentence is jumbled next to it but then gets a quote box to follow all that? All these quotations and call out boxes just jumbles everything together.

It's a jumbled mess. Which makes me sad. Because it contains so much enthusiasm and hope. But it's way too much information all presented in one long page.

EDIT: I now understand why these design elements are on the page. This is just WP theme. I see. I think you guys need to pick another one because this design doesn't match with what you guys are doing at all. And those Flash banners need to go. Seriously.

RE-EDIT: So I thought this was the blog for a YC-like funding venture but it's not. It's just a blog by another company talking about the potential for one. Ignore my previous request to change the WP theme.

RE-RE-EDIT: Interesting idea.
Stanford ($), Berkeley, Caltech ($), LA, SD, USC ($) are all great. This is in an approximate order (at least for graduate level).
The easy way to solve any math problem: Reformat it to look like a Google problem set, and then tack it to the corkboards in the hallway.
Marc Benioff's mantra: Anything but Microsoft
UC Berkeley (myvote) and Stanford are awesome school with startup culture. Must note: They are rivals, so if you are deciding between them, take your time.

Also: Your scores are good, good enough for berkeley I think.
My 2000 Corolla LE gets at least 30 mpg, averaged between fillups every 300-350 miles. We bought it five years ago for $8400 (not including tax/title/blah blah blah). It was a fleet vehicle returned after lease expiration at a Saturn dealer. We haven't noticed any shenanigans, just your run-of-the-mill maintenance.

Don't buy a new car. Owning the depreciation is stupid. You might try the rental companies if you want to avoid the uncertainty of the for-sale-by-owner market.
Ditto on having no idea that it was a blog or what the 'point was'
Why not re-use one of the numerous existing payment gateways? Most of them take only a very small cut if you have large enough volumes, and it'll save you a lot of hassle. Even integrating with an existing gateway is a lot of hassle - writing your own is considerably more painful.
Google can help you there..
The "funny" thing is that all these problems are not new. They are all manifestation of Eternal September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Even the Eternal September itself was a reflection of a problem that happened earlier when USENET has grown beyond size where most people knew each other and quality of conversation went down. Alas I am not able to find the links for it, it would be really nice to find those complains.

The other funny thing is that there is a well-known way to preserve the comunity - maintain very strict set of rules and punish all deviations by a singular authority (THE Moderator) and his minions. Fidonet used to work that way and it worked very well. It only fails when The Moderator loosens the grip for even short time - the place gets overrun and can not be taken back. The problem is that any moderator will have a moment of weakness and so Fidonet got entirely overrun in the end.

The more things change the more they stay the same.
Learning Smalltalk is a great idea, but be warned - its workflow is very different to most other languages (for example, it doesn't really have a command line in the same sense that Ruby or Python does). If you can get over the first couple of weeks of frustration, you'll probably learn a lot.
First N users get beta accounts. Then they get grandfathered into free accounts, which new users have to pay for.
ahh found it, scrolling halfway down the page:

"What We Do

MutatioMundus does seed funding for startups that are going to radically change the world in a positive way. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It will pay your expenses, research and development, and prototype development while you’re getting started."

very interesting, this needs to be more obvious!
I went to UIUC for CS undergrad and I can attest that it is a great program. And very difficult. I graduated near the top of my high school class, but I felt very average when compared with my peers in college. There are some very, very smart people in the CS curriculum at UIUC.

Another great thing about UIUC is the diversity. It likes to present itself as an engineering college (and rightly so, top 10 in many engineering disciplines), so it attracts many students from other technical areas around the world (India, Korea, China, Japan, Russia, Bulgaria, etc.). I'm plain old whitebread, but I was the only one in my study group for several years. It was a great chance to meet people from very different backgrounds.

Lastly, they just recently (2004) constructed the Siebel Center for Computer Science which is where they hold most/all of their CS classes. A very modern, high-tech building that can make any CS major drool. Not to mention the other buildings which surround it: NCSA, Beckman Institute, and Grainger Library (will become your 2nd home)

http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/about/siebelcenter.php
"Why is it that in an age of cheap long-distance rates, discount airlines and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?"

This question is its own answer... We formely didn't have much choice over who we communicate with because distances were a real impediment. Now that we can communicate with "anyone", the opportunity cost is that we'll necessarily communicate less with the only ones we could communicate with before.
I once built an app similar to this, where all the dom elements were built by the script. Good concept, but I thought the search engines handed out penalties for displaying different facets to robots vs users?
Start out by looking at open source projects... Linux kernel if you're into low level systems programming, Mono if you're into higher level systems programming, the countless web apps out there in your favorite language, etc...

The bigger the project the better because more people have looked at it and offered suggestions.

Look for great code, terrible code is everywhere.
I can't agree that creating something new is more special than being one of the best in chess, math, tennis, or another ranked field.
Good: Quake - cross platform, fast, clean & easy to read ~ http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/

Bad: Sendmail - it works but is continually plagued with bugs ~ http://www.outpost9.com/exploits/sendmail.html
It's the same content that is sent to spiders and users, but the robots just get it optimized and without anything extra like JavaScript or styling elements. They get text, images, and links, which is all they want anyway.
I bought a 1996 Ford Ranger (4 cyl, no extras) that had been totaled due to flood damage for $1600. Runs great, gets ~22-25 mpg.

It's an aluminum frame, two cloth seats, a powertrain, wheels, and a bed for loading crap. Most modern feature is power steering. Radio tends to fall out of dash.

Exactly what a car ought to be (although I'd like to strip it down and replace the engine/powertrain with batteries and this: http://www.pmlflightlink.com/motors/hipa_drive.html).
Just like Eric Raymond said that you become a hacker when someone else who is considered a true hacker calls you one. I think with most arts the entry into "greatness" is this way.
Why do you recommend them highly?
Guilty as charged. I apologise to asnyder for my negative tone; to his credit he's done a great job of answering the critics. The marketing of the product touched a nerve seeing as I'm part of a large movement of developers who embrace HTML and client-side development in general as disciplines that are worth investing significant effort in to.
We relaunched similarity-search based on Y Combinator feedback. Thoughts?
His screenshot clearly shows that he's accessing Gmail over HTTP
http://neosmart.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/gmailsecuritylea...
Compared the the influence the Paypal gang the M$-types are just irrelevant in retirement as they are in computing science.
Interesting. I just know a few of the Summer 07 (I think?) YC groups came out of Davis--and they all seem really smart and capable. YC doesn't care about schools (much) and smart and capable people can come from any school, so this is probably not meaningful.
Journalist saved by Twitter wants to start a Twitter-driven emergency network
Sorry, my bad... but this isn't my web app. I saw it was a blog from the link url, when I read it originally, so I didn't have that confusion.
Note: Use common sense, if you want to look at really good code, look at code in a critical part of a system... I bet that Linux's memory management routines are really interesting to see. Look at those, make a class diagram out of them (or entity-relationship diagram), and look at the design. Good code is borne out of good design. If the design is good, chances are the code is equally good and vice versa.

Why do I cite Mono? It's not becuase I am a Microsoft nut, but because Mono is a re-implementation of MS code. Mono people had a great reference for design, which allowed them to focus only on writing good code. What I have seen of Mono's implementation is really good code.
Tried on this article "http://gigaom.com/2008/06/22/fr-interview-futurist-paul-saff... has not been posted." but it was posted ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224492 Still like the idea though. Could I suggest some simple visual indicators:

- add favicon (red) for failure, green for success. The w3 validator does this. the favicon loads before the page so you know quickly if it fails ~ http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpostedyet.com

- on the result page add a "Tick for pass" and a "Cross for failure". If you miss the favicon colour you can read the result much faster.

I like this service. Is there going to be an api so I can check via code?
My start-ups have both been entirely self-funded so far. The first one was profitable (though not overwhelmingly so). The second one is raising a second round of capital, from wealthy friends and family, so you could still call it self-funded (or, at worst, angel funded). We don't intend to need another round of funding after that.

I don't see why self-funding should be surprising at all. It's very cheap to start an online start-up nowadays.
We received a lot of valuable feedback on our similarity-search engine, which we launched a few days ago.

Based on your feedback, we've made some major changes to improve recall. Specifically, we've begun to include data from our web-crawler.

We've also started to prune many of the similarity-search results in order to improve precision.

Finally, we cleaned-up the UI to make it more clear what the website does. I think that we still have some work to do in this area, however.

Unfortunately, many of the changes we've made to the algorithm have _dramatically_ slowed down performance. Most searches now take over a minute to complete!

We're hard at work on fixing that, though. Specifically, we're playing around with implementing multi-level counting bloom filters, count-min flajolet-martin sketches, and quntile fm digests.

We should have some major performance improvements up over the next few days.

We're also looking at launching a pre-alpha of a stand-alone software package that implements the ESer algorithm so that people can run similarity-searches on their own private data sets.

Please comment with your feedback.

Thanks again!
Austin is getting its first co-working space
Platform Lifts
Another thing... Beside looking at good code, buy some books. Code Complete is excellent. Writing Solid Code another... They have the bonus of not only showing you good code, but telling you WHY it's good code.
Yahoo and Microsoft: Is it on again?
David R. Hanson has a book called "C Interfaces and Implementations" that walks you through his C library (that in part replicates the standard library). If your're a novice (or a novice at C) you can learn a lot. The code is free to download.
Works in FF3 for me.
You have to wonder why you'd want to base an emergency network on such an unstable platform, though.
I go to an Ivy League school, but not Yale - one of the lesser well-known ones. There are certainly people here who have "arrived", and are skating across, partying, until they get their job at Wall Street, but there are some genuinely interesting, 'searcher'-type people here as well. They do expel people here; the school administration is pretty harsh, actually. The academics aren't easy; sure, you can pick easy classes and get your A-, but your major classes are unlikely to not require some serious work, and you have to do a major. There's definitely a sense of severe detachment with the real world, but that may be more about the isolated location than the prestige.

MIT sounds awesome, actually - people in touch with reality! Humble people! People who don't expect it to be easy, and hence complain about things being so hard! Maybe I should have applied, but apparently their financial aid isn't too good.

When I visited Yale, their sense of entitlement was very, very stifling. From anecdotal comparisons, Yale seems way relaxed, academically, as well.
Bulgaria Applies for .bg TLD in Cyrillic Script
It looks interesting, but what's the deal with Bubble2.0-ish "Register for the Beta program"? Why not just let anyone download the source and install it, assuming that's the way people will eventually use this?

You don't need to commit to any type of support, you'll probably get a lot of useful feedback and, if it's good, some free publicity too.
>It's foolish to put your SAT scores and grades up front as your flagship 'feature' that differentiates you from others, even if you've aced them.

I'm curious, have you ever known any smart, successful people that couldn't do well on the SAT?
I love it! A web application which actually feels (for the most part) like a well designed and implemented desktop app.

Two minor quirks: Back and forward button cause an ugly sort of refresh. And I forgot what the other one was because it just looks and feels so nice.

I hope this type of stuff gets more widespread. I also hope that browsers don't screw it up, as they're likely to. (Works well in Firefox 3 for me)
NASA estimates 3,000 to 4,000 shuttle job losses
I think this is a valid direction for a large category of problems--many complex applications on the web probably should use almost nothing but JavaScript for the "view" layer in the MVC paradigm, from a maintenance, usability and performance perspective. While I'm a big fan of using the simplest possible solution to any problem, and HTML is the simplest solution to almost every website problem, there's also a large class of problems where HTML templates just don't make sense--they're just an unmaintainable mess.

Applications where the UI is always dynamically generated based on the user, the state of the application and data, etc. are probably far more comfortable using JavaScript generated by code. Obviously others are going this route, as well. GWT uses programmatic generation of UI elements, for example, though it does so by compiling Java down to JavaScript (kinda).

I'm not going to rush right out and start using nohloh (I don't enjoy working in PHP, and most of my work is on existing apps), but I certainly see value in the idea. And, in fact, most of my work lately has been on converting a huge application to be friendly to using almost nothing but JavaScript for the front-end (it's an installable systems management app, so I don't have to worry about spiders at all, and the UI was never template based as it is dynamically generated based on all of the criteria mentioned above).

Anyway, looks pretty neat.
The Last HD-DVD Ever:  "Disco Pigs"
I second a vote for RIT (recent grad). kynikos is spot on with the pros / cons. If you can stand the negatives you'll end up with a great degree and a name people recognize in industry.
Thats interesting. All I hear about is VC backed startups so it is refreshing to see some self-funded ones. In my mind, it seems a startup can only be sufficiently self-funded if it has a viable business model. How has your experience been with this (given that one needs to be more creative in making money in a web setting)?
Excellent post! One of the best ever. Very pg-esque.

It must take a lot of personal strength to put your failures out there for others to learn from. Thank you.

It's very, very difficult to wear both the developer and the evangelist hats at the same time: being a developer requires that you be very pessimistic, so you can see and fix all the problems in your design, while being an evangelist requires that you be very optimistic, so others can feed off your passion.

pg has mentioned many times that a startup is very difficult for a single founder. If I remember correctly, he says that because it's too much work for one person.

This is a slightly different angle that I had never really thought about. In effect, you'd have to be "Sybil" with multiple personality disorder to pull it off.

I tend to think of myself as a "very optimistic developer". I doubt I'd even try what I'm doing if I wasn't. Does this mean I may miss major design defects because of my rose colored glasses?