skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And it goes much deeper than just the API. The whole architecture is a shambles. Some of this may have been fixed in the four happy years since I touched the platform, but some of the highlights I can remember:

+ No static data. The linker pukes if you have a global variable somewhere. If it's not on the stack or heap, the OS can't handle it. This, of course, means that basically all useful C code from other platforms will fail to build by design on Symbian.

+ Their "linker" was this awful two-stage thing that used a custom ARM gcc build to generate a windows-style PE-COFF DLL (?), which then got munged by another gadget into their actual native format. Yes, it seems they literally could not figure out how to write a GNU ld linker script...

+ No blocking I/O calls at all, again insuring that otherwise common idioms (like, say, reading a file) require elaborate contortions using their "Active Object" abstraction, which is a clumsy event handler with a ton of scaffolding around it.

+ No notion of users, or file permissions, or anything that might be interpreted as a security model.

I could go on, but this is the stuff I can pull off the top of my head. Really, this platform is a disaster. Just let it die.
Maybe the idea is to watch these startups.... explode?
I think the problem of list comprehension is that it is not as flexible as combination of map() and filter(). For example,

[F(x) for x if P(x)]

is equivalent to

map(F, filter(P, S))

but what about the equivalence of

filter(P, map(F, S))?

Without using any map() and filter(), this is the solution came up to my mind

[x for x in [F(y) for y in S] if P(x)]

Pretty ugly, huh?
Correct. The problem is that I am still running into people who are making "Youtube with a twist". That boat has sailed.
Psion: the last computer (2007)
You're still much more up on tech than most people I work with. To them, if it's not in bloomberg it doesn't exist.
i feel like it is possible, as i do know some people who've made it work. luck does play a significant factor in it. you earn your money based on the time you put into researching good investments.

however, thats what they do. its their job. i'm not interested in doing that for a living, and i feel like most people would agree. i'd rather make money doing the stuff i enjoy and throw my investments into something i know will generate me extra revenue without having to worry about it.
Ask HN: Seeking Hacker/s for Co-Founder
Looking for hacker/s ready and thirsting to start hacking out a project that will disrupt the Small & Medium business SaaS market.

If you are skilled in Ruby and Javascript, wants to get your hand dirty with Merb. Buzz me at khang<dot>toh-at-gmail<dot>com

In additional, I know this has been discussed many time. How does one go about finding Co-Founders? Online, Social Events, Hackfest , etc.

Any good online sites to go find one? I know of programmermeetdesigner.com is the best attempt so far but other attempts to start such a community seem to frail.
You are not taking the efficiency argument far enough: if the market is efficient, it isn't a good use of time to do your research. But if it's not worth anyone's time to do research, the market will no longer be efficient.

The market may be 'efficient' in the sense that people inclined to do research have a fair tradeoff between time spent researching and the benefits thereof. But it is incoherent for the markets to be perfectly efficient, in the sense that investors are able to rationally appraise the value of every single stock, but are fully incapable of appraising the value of their own time.
Ok. Right here. Right now. Deadpool. I vote "Pingo" or Pingeroo" or whatever that first voice IM thing was.
Old but gold.

I especially like the last page...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/psion_special/page10...
The author has apparently discovered that Sturgeon's Revelation applies as well to start-ups as as it does to science fiction.
Ask YC: Where do you buy RAM?
I'm in the market for some RAM, and wondering where people usually buy their RAM.
I tried it in Opera, got the 'unsupported browser' message, copied the URL and opened it in Firefox. When I got the same message again, it took me a second to realise that it was because the URL was now http://www.streetread.com/browser rather than http://www.streetread.com/.

Also, the name 'streetread' made me think it would be something like Google Maps rather than a stock quote site.

Looks very nice, though.
A somewhat misleading article, in that most businesses are putting off deploying Vista internally; the fact that Intel has access to the source code has little bearing on the situation, since they aren't going to waste resources trying to fix integration problems that Microsoft couldn't.

The main problem is that Vista tried to do too much, too quickly, for too many special interests -- including Intel, who only benefits from an OS that needs the latest, most expensive CPUs. What businesses wanted was an incremental improvement on XP; what they got was an attempt to out-Hollywood Apple's UI. It's not surprising that businesses are sitting out this round.
I'm not going to burn bridges with people when it really wouldn't add anything. The point is valid with or without specific examples.
I looked at the funding for all of them: 71 million, 11 million, 4 million, 11 million again. Do these ideas really merit or need this kind of capital?

Maybe I'm just jealous. :-)

Back to the GPS... I'd love something that gave me real time traffic and construction updates. Maybe they plan on using "wisdom of the crowds" for that data? What no one needs is one more distraction from driving.
Qik is definitely worth watching!
I'm interested in where people go in general, but in particular I'm personally looking for 4 GB (2x2GB) ECC DDR SDRAM (at least PC2100).
Hacking Videos
I couldn't read the article... if I wanted to go one page at a time I'd buy the freaking magazine!
Things to considder no matter what.

1. Is it short?

2. a. Is it easy to spell / misspell?

2. b. Can a person tell a friend about it and is there a chance the friend will actually be able to just type it in?

3. Is the .com version available? If not, are you trying to do the delicious thing?

4. Is it really witty, or have you just convinced yourself that it is cause it's all you could find?

5. If you're going for the straighforward thing, is it really straight forward? Or again, have you just convinced yourself it is.

Good luck.
why $9.5mil - isn't it free for educational institution?

anyway, if google focuses only on schools and universities then half the battle is won against MS as millions and millions of student will have their primary email from gmail and when they join the workforce they will automatically become a marketing tool for google to implement similar products in the companies.
User: Feature X makes it unusable for me.
Developer: There isn't anything wrong with feature X.

That is not a very healthy attitude towards feedback... good luck training users to do something they don't want. You have to account for dumb user behaviour and prevent unexpected results.
I use Crucial (http://crucial.com). Usually pretty cheap and the service is terrific.
I liked the first startup as well Pinger
Tell it to Warren Buffet.
Some Haskell Misconceptions
Social Network Faceparty shuts down after users complain
Top Attractions To See While In New York | Travel - Eat - Sleep
This is the only one from the list that I think is going anywhere.
print page :)
What the fuck ever. VFINX and SPY consistently beat actively managed funds. Cherry picking a single swing and saying you could have gamed it isn't a convincing argument.
I usually use Newegg.com but if you watch the deal sites (like slickdeals.net) you can get some very good deals on RAM
And there's room for more than one winner, especially if they can find a sub-niche. Flickr seems to specialize in "photographers" and Photobucket has crappy myspace photos. They both "won" in their respective areas.
It seems games companies need to stop expecting graduates to already have all the required knowledge and instead train graduates in house
"Pigeon-toed triple-flopped oat-and-tree formation"? Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter!
Before You Buy That Small Business
I would seriously like to be educated as to what is interesting about Qik. I don't pay enough attention to mobile.

I'm going to say though that a spot update on the Duncan Hunter campaign is not a compelling story about value. =)
Facebook Now Available Offline - Might take some getting used to
Rands In Repose: The Coffee Mug Affair
I go to newegg for just about everything. Occasionally you'll find a better deal elsewhere, but newegg is consistently priced pretty competitively and it's just not worth the time a lot of times for a savings of a few bucks.
Another vote for Crucial. It always works, and the price is great.
Apple isn't even in the smartphone market yet. You can't install apps.
While me-too ideas have their place (see my other comment), the game has been to profit by getting VC money more than profit by having a valid business model. People know they can get funding for a relatively "safe" idea possibly easier than a "cazy-but-just-might-work" idea.
Should you take 'Torture Game' seriously?
To reiterate what I meant about costs. For sure Web Optimizer is Free, but the software isn't the only thing you need, for multi-variate testing you need many variants of the item you want to change, you somehow develop without directions,which can be very time consuming and (maybe) expensive.

On the other hand you can also have direct usability testing for free, think family, friends (I would use my mother, because she is a user who is interested in the Internet in general but not very tech savy)
Trying C and implementing a Scheme in it would teach a lot about C and Scheme as well.

It is sort of like learning Haskell and Scheme simultanously with "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours - A Haskell Tutorial".

(http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~jdtang/scheme_in_48/tutoria...).
I agree only with the strong form of your statement -- the one that requires us to define slavishly imitate as "with no distinguishing special feature, and targeting the same market".

But I think the weak form of your statement is wrong. Here's Eric Sink, urging you to start a company in a field where there are already competitors:

http://www.ericsink.com/Choose_Your_Competition.html

"The big problem with avoiding competition is that you are also avoiding customers. The existence of a competitor indicates the existence of paying customers. If you can't find anyone who is making money with your idea, you really need to wonder if there is any money to be made there at all."

Let's consider the original article's example: cloning Flickr. There may be lots of good reasons to clone Flickr. It's a really new idea, and we haven't had much time to explore the space. For all we know, there might be all sorts of niche markets for Flickr-like services: Flickr for amateur baseball, Flickr for fashion designers, Flickr for medical illustrators, Flickr for architects. Each of these apps might have slightly different features (perhaps Flickr-for-architects would allow you to estimate the sizes of rooms by pointing at the corners of various objects in the photo, or provide various easy-to-use UI elements for matching photos with locations on a floor plan), and each would certainly be sold to a different market (or else they would likely fail -- in the Generic Photosharing market, they risk being crushed by Flickr itself). But there's no reason why they should not all coexist, just as the existence of Starbucks does not, in fact, doom all other coffeeshops everywhere to extinction.

Now, if you clone Flickr but don't add a differentiator, that's probably a mistake. And if you clone Flickr but don't have a revenue model that will keep you afloat, that's a mistake. [1] But there's no reason to expect successful businesses to be novel. Novelty is irrelevant. Only making money is relevant.

[1] This is the real reason why it's easy to laugh at many of the Flickr clones: Many of them have also cloned Flickr's revenue model, which involves being acquired by a company that has deep pockets and a large number of servers. It seems unlikely that this plan will work out for everyone...
The Problem With Music
do they report their velocity back to a home server somewhere? so then everyone who buys one would be reporting back to home-base that, e.g., there's congestion on I-5 because there's a ton of our "Dash" GPS units stuck theree, not moving?

If so, cool idea. (If not, feel free to "steal" my idea)
The article seemed a little misguided at what a social network is. I think the idea has awesome potential - think about a live display that has all the information you could gather if all the vehicles on the road were equipped with dash. You could come up with some fantastic and useful displays. It said the guys were keeping the API open, which leads it in that direction. And they make money for each sale: a good solid business model. I predict success for this company.
I thought the ticker symbols were associated with the logos above them at first. I think you need to edit the layout a bit or improve whitespace somehow.

Scrolling broke in a strange way when I moved up. Also, there must be a scrollbar.
You can use more than one dot in python. (Or is it bad style?)

You can even use more than one pair of parens sometimes:

fun()()

(If fun returns a function.)
http://oempcworld.com/ -- good prices and pretty good service.
Despite their current market share, it is a desperation move. Why else would a market leader open their product? They are trying to stay relevant because they know iPhone and Android are going to steal a lot of the growth in the industry from them.
I wonder why my innocent, self-deprecating, and not-all-that-interesting comment got modded down and back up to zero so often.
I hope I have your kind permission for doing this: I love your essay so much that I would like the german speaking community to be able to read it too. I therefore translated it to german and published it on my own blog here: http://www.heiniger-net.ch/archives/167
You don't necessarily need to give people a specific task.

For example, just ask them to discover the site, watch them in what they do, watch what they spend their time with, discover which problems they have while surfing your site. As always this can, of course, only be a part of your whole testing effort. Watching people solving tasks is also important.

Additionally I have to say, that I am not against A/B or multi-variate testing, in my experience it just is very time consuming (and therefore expensive) and the effort to get results is bigger than with direct testing IMHO. If you think you have the money or have exhausted the possibilities with direct usability testing, A/B or multi-variate testing is a valid option.
Interesting. For what I'm looking for, Crucial is charging $550, and the exact same model number (of crucial memory) is $379 on newegg.com:

http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT2KIT25...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...
Haskell 2000!
Someone wanna lend a css hand? Why is ie7 running the div off horizontally on every other content load?

http://www.streetread.com/bad.png
Reposting test
I just wanted to see, if you can link to a post on here.

(If you haven't read the article - it's worthwhile to.)
some one has already done this, can't find it right now...

the key is to have the magazine be custom made by the subscriber

i.e. outsource the editorial to the user
Visa business network boosts Facebook's ad efforts
Click-thru / Conversion Rates?
We have just launched a site for a free download for a small biz app. I was wondering if anyone has some data in regards to what are good click thru or conversion rates.

To be a little clearer, the home page is currently the landing page, the user click a "download here" button to bring them to the registration page and then they click the "download now" button which bring up the start download page. If we have a 100 users hit the landing page we're seeing somewhere around 30% actuall download the app. Anyone got any comparison data they would be willing to share?

thanks ian
> "why $9.5mil - isn't it free for educational institution?"

I guess: support contracts and legacy integration.
Is there a hyperbole hall of fame?
SearchMe Launches Stacks, Gets Serious About Search Relevance
Google Map Maker: Crowdsourcing Cartography
FWIW Symbian 9 allows static data in UI processes, uses a standard ARM ABI, and has a homebrew non-unixy security model called "Platform Security". I'm not saying it's a great platform, but they were starting to make progress before I abandoned them a year ago.
Not that I think this is a bad idea...but c'mon...with Twitters lack of reliability?
Django snippets: Command to dump data as a python script
It's only going to get worse...we build up immunity to certain channels of advertising...it's like a cold war between advertisers and the population.
attempts to start such a community seem to frail [sic]

I think that's because such communities have to be built on trust and personal relationships, which are notoriously difficult to build using a faceless and impersonal medium like the internet.
So, at this point, Nokia has invested time, money, and/or developers in the following platforms:

Mimeo (Linux, Gtk+ shell)
Qtopia (Linux, Qt shell)
Symbian (Symbian kernel and shell)

Tell me again how this looks like a reasonable strategy? If I'm a smartphone application developer, which platform(s) am I going to target? The three incompatible APIs supported by Nokia, or the three APIs which will get me onto every other major device on the planet: Windows Mobile, J2ME, and Mobile Cocoa?
I've seen two schools of thought on that, going for a keyword name (rent.com) or going for a brand name (Google).

It seems to be the companies that choose a brand name, witty or not, and build a great product or service associated with the name that do the best overall. Those that get recognized will get more than enough search engine love to rise to the top or the results anyway.

"How to pick a good brand name" is beyond the scope of this comment. :-)
If you look past the incredible success of its products, "Google" is not a great name. It's only witty to math nerds; to the public at large, it's just a nonsense word, unrelated to internet search, and not all that memorable. Its saving graces are that it's short and sounds like a plausible verb. AOL and Yahoo! both had much better names but inferior products.

Google was also fortunate to be early in the trend of nonsense/misspelled domain names. The recent ones are largely forgettable. If you are thinking of going this route, I'd suggest making the name at least tangentially related to the site's function; reddit and flickr do this and are IMHO great names, short and memorable... wufoo and meebo, not so much.
It may not be technology but it is very interesting.

China arguing for open markets and deregulation isn't just ironic. There's a fascinating paradox here. Is openness going to win and China democratizes, or is the world's future in free-trading dictatorships?
Interview questions I have never been asked, Episode I
As a long-time Opera user, I can say that this incompatible browser landing page crap has got to go. Either bend over backwards to satisfy everyone, or gracefully degrade, or collapse entirely without a warning message -- but I'm using a perfectly competent browser and you're locking me out of your damn site. 0/10.
It's true. Sometimes the echo chamber out here can be almost deafening.
"The TC crowd"??? What the hell is that? This is all about marketing... To normal people who will be your consumers... Who the hell does a startup aiming it at the commentators?

Face it, the TC crowd are people who like to watch things happen. Nothing more.

If TC hates your startup, but it's a hit with consumers, who gives a $&&%??

Go to the corner until you realize that a business is about revenues and cash flow. Commentators do not give you that, your market does.

The market rules everything. The market is the only thing that matters.

EDIT: LOL... modded down because you guys did noty like to read what I typed... At least tell me where I am am wrong. Or are you guys all creating startups to please the "TC crowd," whatever that is, and my post hurts your ego?
I agree with all of this and would add just one observation: All of these valuable, profitable ideas will probably seem really boring to (e.g.) the audience at the typical Web 2.0 conference. SKU's, yawn. Call centers, yawn. Warehouses, yawn.
I'm not sure if I get it. Data has always been used to generate observations about the world, which is the starting point for the scientific method. I'm reminded of how Kepler used volumes of data to figure out the planetary orbits.

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/kepler.html
Formy - CSS Form Framework
> It's quite nice working at a small organization with a very loose management structure; our boss, Rob Curley, was cool enough to let the developers themselves decide which technologies to use, as long as the work got done. "I don't care how the sausage is made," he always used to say.

It's a shame more managers aren't like that. Would make working for someone else a little less tedious.
> If not, feel free to "steal" my idea

Thanks. Now all I need is $71 million. Actually, I'd just settle for $71 million. :-)
Perhaps your weaker version of efficiency suffices. If you are not on par with Buffett - buy index fonds.
I've bought thousands of dollars of RAM at http://datamemorysystems.com/

The one time I had issues (some very early gig chips for a AlBook), they fixed it quickly.

Cheap, reliable and friendly.
Same article, 1 page, no ads http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...
2008 Cybercities report: New York is #1, the Valley is #3
Just think about phishing attacks, how can you tell a Latin o from a Cyrillic o?
Here's my hypothesis: The cost of starting a tiny startup is now so low, and recovering from a failed startup is so easy, that people are founding "startup companies" as a way of educating themselves.

I wish I had time to build a slavish, mindless clone of Youtube. I would learn a ton of useful things about the data-center requirements for streaming video hosting, the state of the codec universe, Flash programming, how to sell in a crowded marketplace, how to look at another video site and figure out if they're competently designed... I could even practice presenting to crowds of bored investors.

Who cares if the project is ultimately doomed? If you compare it to a college senior-thesis project, instead of to a serious attempt to found a future megacorporation, it all makes a lot more sense. It's practical education. And it's probably cheaper than a master's degree (which can't teach you this stuff, anyway).

After you graduate from the silly me-too project you can use your new-found skills to either get a better job at someone else's company, or to help found a second startup with a much greater shot at success.
HN: New flag feature
Posts now appear with a flag link. Anyone care to explain its proper use?
There are starting to be a significant number of users with a hair trigger for downmodding comments. Dealing with this is one of my top priorities for the site at the moment.
Canvas UI Library Demo
That's one of mine also; I'm using How to Design Programs as a way to learn Scheme, and also doing some small Rails project work on the side to de-rust my Rails skills...

And getting started on a web site for myself. But that one will be considerably more visually oriented than most of the stuff I work on, so it's going to be a bit longer in coming. :)
Good sites for technology/ startup research