skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is not necessarily a good thing for end users when there's a handful of different versions of Vista. Assume the average consumer in the US...that's Vista Home Basic and Home Premium and possibly Ultimate to choose from. At first glance do you know what the differences are? Or whether or not you need an upgrade or full version? (Let's not even get into the other versions of Vista, System Builder/OEM, EU versions, Windows Server et cetera.)

Compare with OS X (ignoring OS X Server). There are only two versions, period: OS X and OS X Family Pack. How obvious is it what the difference is between the two? Very. You just count the number of computers in your household you want to install OS X on, and buy accordingly. No upgrade/full version worries, no "what does this have over the other one?" worries, no buying something you don't need...

Sure, OS X doesn't come in so many "flexible" configurations as Vista does, but the thing about it is that you could just do that on your own if it meant so much, and otherwise you get a default config that works for most people.
"Honestly, if Myspace let bands sell MP3s on their profile page, it would probably be good enough and 10x better than anything currently out there."

You mean, snocap? It's a myspace widget for selling tracks. A lot of bands use it.
Visual studio part of "server stuff"?

Yep, take a look at any Microsoft org chart (http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/sample/DOMIS/orgchart/s...)
I'm always amazed by this. Why would you keep your computer running if you're not using it? just for comparing lengths?
Real Snail Mail
Ah, under the server and tools division. Interesting, thanks.
Yesterday I spent some time online looking for a new laptop. I would like 14'', thin-and-light, and long battery life. I needed no more than five minutes to know all the offer from Apple.

Other companies like Sony or Asus are extremely annoying with dozens of "lines" of very similar products with confusing names. I didn't look at HP, but I remember it was weird, because they kept the Compaq brand so it was even worse.
Lenovo's T series is probably the best one in that class. Linux is well supported. Not sure that it is a better buy than a Macbook though.
If you're running a server on it, or just want it ready to use whenever you need? There's always sleep/power saving modes anyway.
Agreed. I have had users suggest I use right click to open up a contextual menu on my webapp... All well and good until you're using an iPhone, or wii, or something else without a mouse.
Google applied to Y Combinator but was rejected.
Completely uninsightful, or whatever the opposite of insightful is. I think by now everyone here has heard how great unit tests are and everything. This article brings absolutely nothing new.

I also don't see how unit tests have that much to do with design. Unit testing "proves" in a more or less conclusive way that the implementation conforms to the specification of the program. But there are countless ways to screw up a design big time and still satisfy this objective correctness constraint.
Financial freedom book reviews, or tipping black swans for 4 hours a week
Good examples: Alarm clocks with Snooze functions & people smoking cigarettes
how's it different than friendfeed?
http://sleep.fm/
This effect last seen in your neighborhood grocery store. Want a shorter wait? Get rid of some of that crap so you can stand in line for the express lane.
Since you believe you are irrational and make decisions based on bias, and Bayesian anti-science positions forgive you for this, whereas I do not (for example, science says the source of an idea is irrelevant, so you are wrong to be concerned with whether the source is a stranger), might it be that you only believe these anti-science ideas because of bias? They offer you comfort, and you revealed earlier that you do think about ideas in terms of which are more comfortable.
Hacking a Print Server for Ethernet Home Automation
If you're spending lots of money on a never-seen-before shot, that ends up on screen, and the moviegoer benefits from it; the product gets better, more people go and see it, and that pays. If you spend a lot of money on first-class flights and Cuban cigars for founders and staff, it doesn't - from my experience - make the product better. So there's a difference.

The cigars tasted nice, though.
For Opera, you might want to consider showing a warning instead of completely blocking access.
Dr. Ramachandran relates this case (capgras syndrome) in his TED talk as well. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/184
Know What Google Knows About You
How do you type while doing that?
Ubuntu MID Edition 8.04
The biggest problem with Apple's lineup is for people who already have a monitor they like. Your options are the mini, or a ridiculously expensive Mac Pro. There's no middle ground.

Also, I don't think the mini is really price competitive even on the low end. I can get the same hardware specs for considerably cheaper elsewhere, though, of course, not with the awesome form factor/design.

I really like the mini in terms of hardware, but it's not a bargain.
Well, unless you're hotmail or YouTube, it takes more than 2-3 years to be "really successful". YC has only been around for something like 3 years. Give it some time.
I love the idea, but the site looks horrible in IE7 (lets not get into the reasons I'm using IE7 right now ...)
Splash pages: when Blizzard does it, it's cool
Ten most densely populated technology startup regions
Shel Israel: About Loren Feldman & Michael Arrington
'the scientific method is obsolete' ?? data can provide correlations and if you are just trying to match 2 things together to error<x difference then yeah, grab enough data and you can do it. that hardly makes the scientific method obsolete - a good piece of science indicates things that you don't know e.g. dirac's anti-electron, einstein's gravity waves. generally if you can't derive a correlation from first principles i don't think you can claim to 'understand' it (warning - metaphysics ahead). i'm also thinking correlations allow interpolation, theoretical basis allows extrapolation.
I'm surprised someone like Paul Buchheit only realised this several years ago!

This is the reason I allow myself full latitude in arguing with people, including the freedom to change my mind completely from one argument to the next. After all, whatever your opinion is right now, it's only the best you've come up with so far - a better, truer truth may be just around the corner. This unsettles some people, when they hear my passionately arguing a point one week, and then passionately arguing the opposite point the next week.

This is also why I make a conscious effort to allow opposing viewpoints to exist in my head. After all, both might be true - even together. Just because I've rationalised them to be opposing doesn't mean they're not both true.

An interesting point that's not made in the article is how to train this rationalisation engine. It's a very powerful tool, that brain of ours, and I believe there are ways to feed our subconscious with "good data" that it can use for more effective heuristics. I'd argue that reading good books (particularly classics) does a tremendous job of making our subconscious more effective.
tried SproutCore... doesn't work on Opera so it's no use for my needs.
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Good measure of how on-page the team is though.

It bothers me when developers aren't working on hard problems and fail to make frequent commits. They are used to working in isolation and without scrutiny. Unless people are actively breaking things they should be updating.
I think you got that the wrong way around. The cat is the one who proposes an action.
The Impetus for the GPL: Gosling Emacs
Service From Google Gives Crucial Data to Ad Buyers
I found what I think is a flaw in the "picking the attractive" examples mentioned in the article - Why exactly is it not rational to pick/vote people based (among other criteria) on their attractiveness? I am not saying I know the answer, but assuming something is not rational, without rational arguments - even if it looks obvious - is exactly what the article wants to criticize. ;-)
Very common. Extremely common. Albini isn't even saying much about publishing, and the zillion ways for musicians to get screwed there (never sign away your publishing rights!). For a good introduction, try Donald Passman's "All You Need To Know About The Music Business".
The Boutique Website
Google the keyword "ICT4Dev".

I think it's pretty much what edw519 already said: Build something of value and you are already making a difference.

I think the step one for you is to figure out what community (target user) you feel connected and want to serve. Then, step two is to find a solution that A) you can realistically build; and B) it is sustainable (resource-wise)

The world is full of problems for you to solve. Just pick one and do it!
Because Apple's dev tools have always had such a huge impact on the software development industry, and web-based variants of those tools will obviously completely change the industry?

Apple is not that important. Seriously. They make very pretty products. But they aren't shaping the developer landscape, outside of a few segments of the industry. I went to YAPC::NA a week ago...350-ish people, 10-15% Mac users. I went to a Sun-sponsored, Open Source focused event a few months back...~1200 people, 15% Mac users, tops. Even at Startup School (where folks like to talk a lot about "wow, look at all the Macs!"), 800-1000 people, 30-40% Mac users.

It's really easy to look around at all of your friends and say, "Wow, everybody is using this, and thinks it's awesome! It's really going to take over the world!" But, your friends are not a representative sample of the development world.

So, Objective-J is a cool idea, and if it helps 280North (who are smart, nice, cool guys doing great work) get their product out the door faster, I'm excited about it. But, I've also looked at Objective-C and Apple's development environment, and came away far less than impressed. While it may be superior to working in C++ (or plain ol' C), it's probably not even better than Java for getting things done (and that's not all that good), unless your problem set happens to overlap very closely to what it was designed for.

There are already several revolutionary JavaScript libraries and toolkits out there (jQuery, YUI, ExtJS, Dojo, Mochi, etc.), and they're all making an impact...but let's keep the hyperbole under control.
jQuery FTW
No, my plan is to leave nursing behind. My knees,legs and back can't handle another 15 years of this. I'm 35 and I'm going to have to have surgery for my varicose veins in a few months. I need to get out.

The dream is to start making a little money with the site, and then be able to cut back a shift or two a week as I have more money coming in. We'll see how it goes. It's a lot of work to develop part time and work full time, even though I'm only working 3 days a week.
Dissecting SimpleDB BoxUsage
XML can be parsed by every language, but other than that they stink compared to s-expressions.
There is a lot of talk in this thread about your target market. They're right, you'll never beat bloomberg. But... I come from a family of Wall St. people and I can attest to the fact that most "street" news is consumed by non-insiders. My dad is a financial advisor and essentially spends his day telling people that what they saw on CNN Moneyline (or whatever it's called) isn't true. So there are plenty of non-pros who you could target.

Personally I don't care about the market so I'm not the one to ask. But I thought your site did what it needed to do well... Godspeed.
Do you mean that your browser "hangs?" Does it hang completely and you have to restart the browser?

I've never had this problem with Firefox or Safari. I do remember Gmail telling me to turn off Firebug, because it would slow things down.
Humans are born rational, but we teach ourselves and others to loose our rationality through cultures, civilization and traditions.

Conduct the "umbrella" experiment with a child about 3-5 years old. His answer will be " I do not know". Honest, right?

As kids we always expressed our feelings and thoughts properly and truthfully through words and actions. But, somewhere between the age of 4 and 9 we start to have others think for us. We are thought sets of realities that mostly make no sense to us (as children).

By the time we reach 13 we already have all this new man made reality that we are supposed to live and think by without much questioning.

So this creates a massive database of words and actions we go to first to express our thoughts and feelings.

By doing this we ignore our highest truth. We create a conflict between what we put our there and what we really feel and know inside. There begins the war within ourselves.

We almost cannot reverse engineer in months what we have created in millenniums. I do not think this mass change in the way we think is going to happen in our lifetime.

But we can stop stopping our kids to think for themselves. Stop giving them sets of realities that are contradictory to their real honest and pure feelings and thoughts. You would think this would create an anarchy, but we will land far from that.
DRYing out Deep Checks
It can. Very easily. And more people have iPhones than have Dash... I know where I'd put my money.
I upmodded this, but

> teaching a creative or assertive skill (for example, programming or feminism)

feminism is an ideology (preach), not a skill (teach).
Why would someone downvote this? It's the guy/girl's opinion, it's about the topic, and I don't see any reason to downvote other than someone is just having a bad day or being pissy.
No, it rocks... Google apps working fine here,
Personally I use whatever the editor that the team uses uses as the default (that's right "uses uses", baby! Don't get many opportunities for that!). I'm a big fan of using the defaults when it comes to development. I want to be able to step over to a co-worker's or temporary machine, do my work, check it in and not have to worry whether we used spaces or tabs.
Ask YC: which video sharing service?
I need to find a reliable and free video sharing service that will allow our site's members to upload showreels in order to embed them on our site. High quality would be a bonus.
Do it yourself FTW
I have a lot of experience in this arena since my startup is a video training/production company. Ping me offline using my screen name at google's popular email service and maybe I can offer some advice/suggestions. It's hard to offer suggestions here when you don't give us any more info.
I don't know how you guys read that article - are those fonts are set to 1.32px? I have 20/20 vision but jeez... I had to increase the font viewing size three friggin' times to read that article.

As for the content, I don't know why folks aren't okay with it. It's clearly targeted towards newbies - why insist on including "something new"? Newbies need help :)
Thanks for the info but let me just say that not spending money is not necessarily being thrifty. If you spent the $250 for QuickBooks and find that it saves you 100 hours of time over using Office Accounting (which was free), which is the better value?

I haven't used OA 2008 but I tried 2006 and 2007 - #$%^ that ($*%.
SearchYc for this as it's been covered so often here (http://searchyc.com/)

Good post by a fellow Texan here: http://tedchoward.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/sending-legitimat...
Depending on what you're trying to do, I might suggest viddyou.com. Shoot me an email with some details on your project (address is in my profile). Otherwise, vimeo.com, viddler.com & blip.tv are good choices as well.
If you're writing Python, the convention is spaces. From PEP 8:

Indentation

Use 4 spaces per indentation level.

(see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/)

I'm partial to spaces in general. Most (all?) IDEs can insert spaces when you press the tab key, and doing so will prevent the nastiness that can happen when you mix spaces with tabs.
Seems like not much time since 8aweek launched, and now it's on the backburner? Any insight into what happened?
This is pretty hilarious, Colin. If only DB usage were more fungible.

You're kind of like a shark when you smell blood. Is it the security mindset?
OR just use parameterization/prepared statements in all your SQL. Sort of a no brainer.
This is great to hear, and just the begining for Songkick I'm sure. Ian and Pete are both very nice guys. Well done!

It is really good Ian and Pete organise YCombinator style hacker meets in London. There needs to be more things like this on this side of the pond.
Now we know. The singular intensity of Billg has meant that, even now, everyone has a bit of Bill's soul in them. A cult of personality is a modest foundation for a culture of trust, which ordinarily never springs in bigco.
I generate a lot of torrent traffic on my machine. Im seeding something like 50-60 torrents.
You're kind of like a shark when you smell blood. Is it the security mindset?

Not really -- it's more a getting-irritated-when-people-do-thing-badly mindset. I can do better; therefore they should do better. :-)

EDIT: On second thought, maybe there is an aspect of security mindset here. One of the assumptions I find to be very useful in dealing with security is the bad guys are at least as smart as I am. It's not very far from here to saying "the Amazonians working on SimpleDB should be at least as smart as me".
Actually I consider some of the new Microsoft designs to be pretty nice:

XBox 360, Silverlight, Live Maps, even Vista, are at least comparably pretty to the competition, and some would vie, even prettier.
Giles Bowkett: How I Got Started Programming
With all due respect to their work, I don't think that its an IE7 problem.
Google's Gmail verboten in Germany
Of course, the latest "platform" example is facebook. Now, they're a platform for web apps, and I'm sure that was in their original vision. But they couldn't have started out saying "hey, we're a platform for apps". So they solved a problem (namely, the "I need to know more about my friends' lives & activities" problem) first. And THEN they became a platform.
Are you using Jon Borwein's experimental math packages for, say fractionalising the numbers or finding formulas, or some of your own routines you've rolled on your own?
The rational reconstruction was just me throwing the values at Maple's convert/parfrac and looking at the convergents for sensible values. The rest was simply looking at the numbers and noticing (eventually) what 2 N^3, 20 N^2, and 80 N looked like.
Did RescueTime have anything to do with them finding the new idea more tempting? I always thought those two were awfully close to both be funded by YC. And I personally liked RescueTime more. Did 8aweek have any traction before they jumped?
I knew this before reading the article, but I just can't recall where I got it from. I find it kind of ironic how he provides all this scientific theory as a sort of rationalization of the idea...
Well, I think Bill Gates is just using common sense here. These are product management issues and he's rightly pointing them out. Any great programmer (like him) is expected to do that.
But, IMHO, when Steve Jobs talks about taste his mind operates on a whole different level.
Well, the first thing is that until Objective-J and Cappuccino are released they won't change the industry in any way, and then we will see.

One thing I don't understand is why web apps have to look like desktop apps? Browser/net and desktop are completely different environments, each with their own characteristics. And trying to do a desktop-like web app brings two problems:

1. It fails in the uncanny valley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley.

2. They use a lot more JS than it's needed, and while this is not a problem on computers it is in mobile devices. Do you really want a web app suck all the battery of your iPhone, even when it's not necessary?
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No, works perfectly via POP3/SMTP and, seldom, web. Although, last week I had some problems with GTalk using Adium, it connected but the contact list didn't refresh.
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Twitter’s Mysterious Mystique
Leadership is never given, it's taken
All the companies I have worked at have enforced spaces by setting up the editor to translate tabs to 4 spaces. I never asked why. Some battles aren't worth fighting.

'Spaces instead of tabs' wasn't the near the near-religious fervour of which editor to use though (VSlick won at my 1st company - e.g. company bought group license - though you could buy your own fave). I guess if you spend all day working with a hammer, you want the best hammer for you. I've spent hundreds of my own to buy my own editor to use at work.
I disagree, people with OCD tend to write terrible code. They want their code to show all the details, but hiding details is what programming is all about. OCD people will make your project very late as they worry about all the special cases that aren't.
A word on Social media
A word on social media and how we should react
A Letter to Apple
Tabs are whitespace.
How many German employees does Google have? It would be amusing to just close their German office and call it gmail again.
Agents fume over realestate.com.au glitch
I conjecture that the more low-level the language, the more premature optimization is necessary.

As an example, an assembly language programmer has to make very early decisions about whether to use a WORD (valuing speed), or a long (valuing extensibility) to model a quantity. If he chooses wrong, he will have to modify hundreds of lines of code. A C programmer, instead, can use a typedef and then switch between the two representations at any time, but he might have to choose between long and big-integer. Lisp programmers don't have that choice to make.

In the perfect HLL (by that metric), every parameter or constraint of the program is specified in just one place. Premature optimization is then always a mistake.

(Lisp still has a way to go to get there)
carl sagan's "dragon's of eden" also touches upon these themes, and is very cool (imho ofcourse).
How would closing their German office solve anything?

Google says: "We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany"
Its a terrible thing for consumers.
With respect, I do hope you realize that "taste" and "design" are about an awful lot more than "pretty."

I would say that MSFT products being "pretty" demonstrates how little they get it. They think that making something "designed" means smearing pretty on it after you're done, as if you can design a web application by building something randomly then hiring a graphic designer to make the page slook nice just before you go live.
I hit it by accident yesterday, hoping something like "Do you really want to flag this?" would pop up, as does in other features here. To avoid spurious clicks, I would suggest adding a two-phase commit.
The title is misleading, they cannot use the gmail brand because it was previously owned by another company, so now they've to use Google Mail as their brand. No surprise. I can not call my company Coca-Cola. Can I?
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