skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting idea about "telepresence," but terrible execution. I doubt that the presenter could even see the other two.

I would imagine that for meetings you would want to physically interact with the other presence (position yourself at different places relative to the other, maybe even attempt a virtual handshake with light), but if it's just a projection onto a wall then it's really nothing more than an expensive and slightly more effective video conference. I can do that with two macbooks.

Sorry if this looks like a rant. I guess I was expecting a step towards the holodeck on Star Trek.
The #startups channel is booming. Lots of great discussions and once the good articles on HN have been read its a great place to go talk.
I don't think it is or has to be either. But when I was "learning to become a programmer," I just found myself becoming increasingly disconnected from the world. It was as if I was constantly thinking about programming, etc. and I didn't want to be bothered.
Good thing we banned Valleywag.
100Mhz?! Well now that would be nice but let's be reasonable here. :)
Simple crop feature would be awesome
Maybe they're having problems with their new system that they implemented? I wouldn't worry too much anyway, it's not like Alexa is particularly accurate, our site is getting more traffic than ever before but somehow Alexa doesn't think so...
Mozilla goes for a world record
I finally grasped the concept of "Intellectual Dishonesty"!
Are they unable to find programmers capable of doing that, or unable to find programmers who have "5 years experience writing parallel processing applications" on their CV?

I suspect the latter.
we rag on TC for shit headlines and then nickb does the same =(
Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble
here is the stanford daily article ad

http://ketankhairnar.blogspot.com/2007/11/message-from-paul-...
Think of your RSS readers and website readers as different demographics with different habits. RSS readers are more tech saavy, easier to piss off, more willing to add or drop you, going to visit your site ONLY when they feel it's worth their time, and more constrained for time.

Basically, they're not the market you want to piss off, and partial feeds aren't going to be tempting for them. You want to keep them happy: Go full feed. I suggest simply finding innovative ways to advertise within feeds!
Anything but Northwind - please anything...
Isn't $500k enough for an investor visa?
What to do if you are a good developer but no designer?
My personal problem is that I have some good idea's and I can code (php /django) but I have close to no design skills whatsoever. I know what functions should be on the websites of my ideas but when I try to make a design in GIMP it just does'nt look good. I have the impression people can learn how to code to some degree, but you can't just learn how to make great designs.
Do you agree? Or what made you a coder and designer?
I'm actually a dual citizen, so I can go up anytime, I believe. thhhhhp!

But seriously, are there good reasons for me to go from the bay area to Vancouver? I imagine I would just be paying more in taxes...
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. It's good to identify those areas where you're deficient, the next step is to find ways to compensate. Partnering//hiring a designer is a pretty popular solution.
I don't agree. In order to prosper, you may do what you feel you have to, but you should have at least some integrity, for example, you should not lie, especially when you are trying to be a reporter of news. (Why he was lying is explained in the blog post).
This is why I want to make software that helps people meet each other in real life, other than for dating purposes.
Very nice.

Couple of ideas:
* It would be nice if freehand mode used some criteria to separate "changing direction" from "wobbling a bit" in order to straighten out edges, so I could use it to draw a perfect triangle.

* It would be nice if entering text used some sort of edge detection to automatically fit text into a box/circle/etc.
Join the club:-)
Does Cebu have air pollution like Manila?
Hm... seems to be an opportunity.

What is the best language to learn to take advantage of this market demand? Criteria: 1) manages complexity involving multiple processors 2) has utility libraries (or easy adapters can be written for existing C libraries 3) either has existing mindshare in the industry or at least is not too esoteric and can be sold there.

Any other criteria? What languages can we select?
I'm interested in hearing where you end up going.
Notice weredone's profile. Is this a joke on Yahoo employees?

user: weredone
created: 3 hours ago
karma: 5
about:
Yes, there's a certain amount of raw artistic talent involved in design, but you can get a lot of the way with two rules:

1) Be Simple.
2) Be Sparse.

You don't need drop shadows, shiny buttons, gradients, rounded corners, animation, or complex imagery to make a good site. As any good musician will tell you, music is about what you do with the space in between the notes; graphic design is about what you do with the space around the content (and if your content is good, the less crap you need to put around it!)

If you use a simple layout, a very small palette of 4-8 colors, 1 font, and only a few font sizes, you'll find that your designs will improve automatically. If you lack even the basic ability to coordinate colors, use a tool (http://www.colorschemer.com/schemes/ is a good source), and never deviate from the scheme that you choose.

Remember: think Google, not Microsoft.
thanks, i'll check it out.
Clojure from Azul perspective: STMs vs Locks
Ask YC: Prank Hacking
This doesn't really pertain to startups, so forgive me.

So I've sort of found myself amidst a pranking war, and it's getting pretty serious, ie. finding chopped up fish and roosters at my place, etc. Revenge is the only way to go, obviously, but I'm unsure as to what should be done.

I thought that maybe this community's members might have some really clever pranks/tricks up their sleeves. I know there are many of you out there that are pretty troublesome fellows. Help out a fellow yc'er in dire need of advice. Prank hack away.
++Karma level for Robokill. I just spent the last hour thrashing my wrists on your game. Good job. It was a blast.
It's here. Have you looked at the Cell processor architecture?
Couldn't loopt run on WLAN, too?
An Interview with Jacob Kaplan-Moss [Django]
We really need a micropayments protocol. I've been working on one intermittently for about 3 years. Please let me know if you'd like to talk more about it.

I think it will take a simple protocol, like SMTP, using one-time passwords to authorize transfers. Your software will use transfer services to exchange money at different banks, streaming the money to minimize theft.

Micropayments is an important problem! (http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html)
Six free security tools you shouldn't live without
Designers are relatively cheap, compared to developers. If you can't find a friend to help you out, pay someone to do the designs for you.
If criteria are a) living cost b) climate c) geek friendliness (tech/business culture, infrastructure etc.) then Singapore will probably win. Bonus: you get exposed to booming Asia.
There's going to be a lot of interest in Erlang in the next couple of years. It is going to take a couple of years for CIO's to realize what a nightmare shared state concurrency is to engineer. After a while, they will be forced to look at different languages to solve the problem.

Or, perhaps, they won't see the problem, and startups willing to use languages with a different concurrency model will come to dominate those markets.
GooTube - Google is turning YouTube into its own kind of data gold mine
India. Technically you wont be outsourcing too !!!
"how come in international trade it’s considered evil"

It's considered evil because it was in the interests of big-shot lobbyists to make it so.
Last I checked, Costa Rica had pretty liberal immigration for high tech entrepreneurs. If you are willing to invest a certain ammount, ($30K last I checked) you can get residency. And, they do have a decent high tech sector with a number of online gambling websites being hosted there. Intel also has a fab there.

Weather is phenomenal, it's about 75 degrees F year around in the capital city, San Jose. And, because it's an isthmus, the Pacific is 2 hours away from San Jose and the Caribbean is 3 hours away.

I lived there in the 80's and it was great. My brother just moved away (had to move away because of work) and said that traffic was getting a bit burdensome, though.

If you go, drop me a line and I'll tell you some great places to go snorkeling.
I'm actually a dual citizen, so I can go up anytime, I believe.

You don't even need to be a dual citizen -- if you're a citizen of the US or Canada, have a job offer, and have reasonable qualifications (a Bachelor's degree in most fields is enough) you can drive up to the border, mention NAFTA, and get a visa on the spot.

are there good reasons for me to go from the bay area to Vancouver

I haven't lived in the bay area, and I don't know your circumstances, so it's hard for me to give a good answer here. I know when Google offered me a job in Mt.View, one of the factors which led me to not accept was that between Vancouver and what I had seen of the bay area, I much preferred Vancouver -- but I grew up in Vancouver, and my tastes have probably been molded by that. If you grew up in a dry, polluted, urban sprawl, you might prefer the bay area.

I imagine I would just be paying more in taxes...

Don't be so certain. Canada has publicly-funded health care, which tends to raise taxes, but it also has much lower per-capita military spending than the US. I can't make much sense out of US income tax forms, but Google found me http://dbaron.org/views/taxes-2007.html; comparing it to an analysis I did last year http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-05.html it looks like a single California taxpayer typically pays a marginal tax rate of about 40% of income while a single BC taxpayer typically pays a marginal rate of about 26% of income -- of course, in BC we have provincial and federal sales taxes which add a combined 12% to most things you'll be buying (does California have any sales tax? I don't know), and gasoline taxes which are higher than you have in the US. In short: I suspect that the difference between taxes you pay in the bay area and taxes you'd pay in Vancouver could be either positive or negative depending on your individual situation.

Then of course there's the issue of real estate costs: Vancouver is the most expensive place in Canada, but I understand that it's still far cheaper than the bay area...
These are really good points. If you want to go beyond this, I'd suggest looking at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Beautiful-Web-Design/dp/097...">The Principles of Beautiful Web Design</a>, which is a good primer for web design principles. It's one of the few web design books aimed at people who find coding easy but design a mystery.
It's an IRC channel. You can connect using this:

http://www.mibbit.com/

#startups is the channel, irc.freenode.net is the network (it is on the list, just a ways down).
Try reporting a DoS attack to the FBI or any other US law enforcement and see how far you get. They generally don't do jack, even when you hand them the entire case.

The FBI will do absolutely nothing in this case with Revision3 and it's not because the perpetrator has a minuscule semblance of legitimacy. They're just not setup to handle this kind of crime.
It's interesting that there is a market for illegal hackers and only the Media companies seem to be hiring them.
It becomes much more likely that this kind of human interaction will have a big payoff for you if it includes a face-to-face meeting early in the interaction or friendship. Consequently, it would help people like me considering whether to take you up on your offer if you would say where you live.

Particularly, I live in the northern part of San Francisco Bay area and almost never travel out of the Bay area, so I would be interested if you lived somewhere in the Bay area (north or south) or were planning a trip out here soon.

ith@sonic.net
why not pick up a readymade template? something from template monster; or maybe even some free template (oswd.org, freecsstemplates.org)?
Not as bad. But there is a new area (city actually) within Metro Manila called Fort Bonifacio that's new and less polluted (the public transports in/out of FB are regulated).

Lots of residential buildings, restos and a few office buildings designated as economic zones (you get a 5 year tax holiday on corporate income tax).

http://www.fort-bonifacio.com/

The con: traffic in Metro Manila is bad (not bad in FB though). Wise to live and work in same area.
It's easy... you break into the victim's flat, and wait just behind the door with a machete.

When the victim comes into their flat, slash violently at their neck area, several times if necessary. Make sure you're wearing cheap clothes that you're willing to burn, and have a change in a plastic bag in the bushes nearby, as well as a number of towels.

In my experience, this always stops prank wars quickly, effectively, and at a relatively low cost.
How to pickup a VC
Air Conditioning ducts, particularly of those with Central Air.

Get some catfish bait, a few pounds of shrimp, fart bombs, or even a few dead squirrels - all of these worked well for me in High School.

Squirrels are probably by far the best and I recommend combining them with another form of attack. Place a few pounds of shrimp in one location and throw some frozen squirrels elsewhere.

About the time the shrimp smell really gets bad (about 2 days) the squirrels will be thawed and start to rot themselves. You'll get a nice delayed attack about a week after they find the shrimp.
America's suburbs: An age of transformation
I suspect the one major thing Google is looking for in acquisitions is "will this product help me to collect more data". Off the top of my head I can't think of a Google acquisition without that property very high on the list of perks.
Btw, many US-based corps/startups have presence here...

Microsoft, TI, IBM, Sun, Friendster, Engine Yard, Yahoo, etc.

Google gave a talk late last year:
http://randell.ph/geeky/2007/11/21/techtalk-with-google-engi...
Writing parallel-processing applications isn't easy. I run a non-profit tech R&D organization; and we have internships where under-grad students can try their hand at coding in "a corporate environment" with joint development, toolchains, and the whole shebang.

We gauge the students by how much they accomplish in how much/little time and how elegant their solution is. And at towards the end of the internship, we invariably ask the best students to add some form of multi-threading or parallel-processing to the application they're working on (in C++, C#, or Java mostly) and even our best students have trouble with getting proper parallel-processing code working (and these guys had done brilliantly elsewhere).

I personally learned it the hard way, scouring the 'net for all the different methods until I built my own "templates" that work great for me.
Just confirmed with FM: that's 2000 messages inbound and outbound per hour. Awesome!
And according to some people, Alanis had misunderstood the word "ironic".. - How.. disappointing!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic_(song)

(Parenthesis seem to mess up the link)
If you don't mind being restricted to mostly-Microsoft platforms, C# is the race horse you'll want to place your best on. It's multi-threading support is great (the best I've seen so far w/ regards to the balance between control & simplicity). The way its delegates (callbacks), thread pool, and invokes work is quite impressive & powerful.

And, of course, C# can use any C++ library you throw at it w/ P/Invoke & a lot of marshalling.
Not every Web service is expected to grow into a real company, and be sold off or enter the public markets through IPO. Many of these are hobbies. Others should be seen with the same light as shareware, in that most content is for free, and if they make a few bucks, that's just fine. Sometimes, a Web service will launch and help a developer pad the resume, or use it as a springboard to the next job. And whether it's one person behind a product or a hundred, there's no value in prematurely suggesting they wave the white flag.

A lot of people seem to have forgotten that in the light of all the money pouring into the current startup waves. I began my "startup" as a hobby, and now as a way to help others out - I'm perfectly content to run it part-time and seek money elsewhere if that's the way it has to be. It's not "dead," it's just different.
It's pretty hard to get a job at D.E. Shaw...
Many languages focus more and more on multi-core and distributed programming. Mainstream language like Java and C# will get more tools and libraries, but other languages will likely be better. One thing i like about startups is that you can freely pick technologies that are better or faster in solving a problem. You don't have to cope with the conservatism problem.

Personally i think that languages like Scala, F# and Erlang will be good to learn, depending on what platform you prefer. And Clojure also seems very cool. I know it's blasphemy around here, but Clojure is the only Lisp like language that i would like to learn.
You must be running quite a big site if you're sending out 100k+ per month messages on forgotten passwords and registration confirmation.
Plus invitations, message notices, etc.
Check out http://99designs.com and http://www.crowdspring.com to outsource your design.

Some people have natural talent with design. If you find you aren't one of these people, just get someone else to do it. I've had great experience with crowdspring and it is very good value for money. The best part about these two sites is, you get to choose the best design and give the designers feedback for further iterations.
For me it's not only interesting when i started having ideas (probably because I can't really remember) but also when I'm having "interesting" ideas...

For me it's mostly when I'm stressed out. For example when I was learning for exams I very often had interesting ideas I started to dissect and analyze. Even though the ideas were interesting and intriguing, I quashed most of them because from a business perspective (and that is my background) I could see the idea prosper. I too write most of my ideas down so I can use them later or use them as inspiration.
Trading Sugar Beet Quotas - Secure Multiparty Computation in Practice
Am I the only one wondering, why wouldn't Craigslist use a bayesian filter? Plus posting delay so they can't retry quickly.
...but wasn't the whole point of Google buying YouTube in the first place? I thought we all knew that?
Ecommerce Software
Zeus Cart offers easy-to-use features to open your first online store quickly, advanced features for store quickly, advanced features for additional customization, store quickly, advanced features for additional customization, and integration with and integration with additional customization, and integration with desktop administrator control panel.
Or the other actors manage to hire competent crackers and do not get caught.
One of my colleagues was recently welcomed back fromholiday with this addition to his cron file:

0,20,40 * * * * /usr/bin/killall -9 java

Or is that going too far?
Hi Jeff, funny running into you here. :-)

I like the EC2 compute units in general -- they are much better than keeping track of many different models of CPUs. There are, however, a couple of important limitations with this approach: First, different processors vary considerably in their integer : floating-point performance ratios, so your notion of how a modern CPU compares to a 1.0 GHz 2007 Opteron might be different from mine. Second, because the rated performance of instances is a minimum value and some instances (if you're lucky to get a new box, presumably) have slightly higher performance, it's not possible to test code on one instance and then expect it to take the same amount of time if run on a different instance of the same nominal size.

To solve these two issues, I'd suggest taking the SPEC benchmarks (yes, they're crude... but they're better than nothing), publishing minimum SPECint and SPECfp values per EC2 Compute Unit, and then adding an API call to say "tell me what the SPEC values are for my instance i-12345678".

Of course, there are more complicated approaches which could work -- I can imagine a system where instead of having a pool of "small" instances, there are some "1 core, SPECint_base2000 750" instances, some "1 core, SPECint_base2000 800" instances, et cetera, and different prices for each (maybe even fluctuating from hour to hour based on demand or an auction system).
Our current project is a multiplayer 3d flash/as3 game: http://www.ultrakillz.com/play/

Unless you're looking to do something pretty powerful you'll be fine with flash rather than shockwave, especially if you already know some ActionScript. (AS3 is somewhere between Javascript and Java for complexity depending on how you choose to use it)

Flash has better penetration and far more documentation/community support than Shockwave.

In terms of the dev environment, the above game was coded using eclipse to edit AS files and compiled through the Flash IDE, although you could use Flex to compile instead...

Roll on flash 10 - UDP support!
You might also be interested in the toy problem of 'mental poker'.
Organize Your Life, It’s Your Civic Duty
Is There a Cure for the 'Distraction Virus'?
Disclosure: I'm a Clojure user.

Clojure is cool, and definitely worth a look if you fancy using STM. However, it's still early days, and although single-threaded performance is reasonably close to Java's (recently, very fast numeric vector operations were added) I haven't heard much about performance of concurrent applications. I suspect it might be a while before the STM implementation comes close to the optimal case, but I think it's pointing in the right direction, promoting pure functional programming and lazy evaluation with the built-in immutable data structures. Plus you get easy access to all Java libraries.

Finally, the Clojure implementation itself is pretty hackable and the mailing list is active and helpful. (I've made some minor contributions to the code myself)

I've done parallel programming in C, C++, and Fortran, using OpenMP, Pthreads/Win32 threads, and even using lock-free techniques, but it's always been an incredible hassle. It'll be interesting to see if Clojure manages to gain any significant traction. Long-term though it will need to gain some kind of support for massive parallelism. Something better than MPI.
I once read a children's book about a company - actually a startup - that was in the service business of pranks and revenges.

You can find it on Amazon (http://www.amazon.de/Die-B%C3%A4rendienst-GmbH-Martin-Karau/...) - but it is in German.
Parallel programming has been around for a long time. It just hasn't been mainstream, and, apparently it still isn't. The people who are really good at it are on the bleeding edge, and presumably don't fancy working for some bank.
I love the pie chart on that page. That's the smallest 48% I've ever seen.
I can't help but get the impression that if you've got too much spare time while working on your startup, you're doing it wrong.
Design isn't exactly a commodity. I mean, look at this very thread.
We'll see a schism form in the developer community. The elite (the people who were doing Java in 1996, i.e. those who actively pursue language evolution) will make the transition smoothly to Erlang, Scala, OCaml/F# and similar. In fact these people have already done so inside their own heads, they're just waiting for the job market to catch up with them. The masses (the "Java enterprise solutions architects", who just learn what they need to pass the test/get a job) will be stuck there churning out the same old same old.
What!? Honestly, it's worked every time for me!