skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we'd all be out of a job," said David Strom

I'm not sure if this argument is used to support monopolies (via fueling the IT industry), but if it is, it's ludicrous. It's like saying that companies insuring against vandalism should thank the vandals.

I do not see "fixing MS bugs"-companies as organic to the IT industry. Sure, more people are employed, but it does not create innovation, it does not contribute to the growth of the essence of the IT industry (different from the GDP resulting from the IT industry).

All of these problems are traceable to a lack of widely supported standards.

Pointing to a lack of standards to explain some of today's annoyances (MP3 compatibility, sync issues, etc.) is correct. However, linking the lack of standards with a lack of monopoly in those areas is wrong. I see soft anti-trust policies (in the case of DRM) or lack of motivation for creating standards-making bodies as more interesting causes. Diversity is not incompatible with the existence of common standards. Let's think of all web apps out there, offering competing products, all using HTTP.
Does anyone remember how hard it was to install a printer or SCSI device before Windows?
Interesting.

I see power a bit differently. Power is one's ability to affect the world. "Getting other people to do what you want" doesn't really cut to the core of the matter.

Jobs and Wozniak, Gates, Torvalds, Brin and Page, these people are all quite well off financially (to say the least). But that's not what's impressive about them, at least, not to me. They've all had a huge effect on the way that our world runs.

Clearly, there is a link between money and power---money buys power, and power can be turned into money---but they're quite not the same thing. Money can only affect the world by getting people to do things in exchange for it. Someone who makes a billion dollars through wise investing is not the same kind of animal as someone who foresaw a major shift in society and had the moxy and brains to push it forward.

Also in this power list are people like Tim Berners-Lee, Djikstra, and Knuth. The kind of power that politicians have seems transient and shallow by comparison. In 10 years, George Bush will be just another ex president who threw his army around. TBL's place in history will be relevant in 1000 years.

I know who I'd rather be when I grow up. :)
Really cool, love how it formatted everything- looks phenomenal.

Email registration is really awkward, though- I get redirected to Gmail to send a post, then from there to the site to set a account name and password, which I would have done in the beginning with a normal registration process.

Seems like it'd be way, way more straightforward to signup with username/password/domain, and then do the first post as email confirmation. IE "Hey, thanks for signing up for Posterous! To confirm your account and make your first post just reply to this email and attach a picture, mp3, video, or text post- we'll format it and it'll look awesome :) Give it a try!"
1. A press release is great, a lot of people pick up on it and it gets indexed heavily by Google. Go to prLeap.com for the best prices.

2. Go to adbrite.com and spend $5 a day on a run of network text ad or go into there directory and find sites with about 1000 to 5000 visitors and sign up for the CPM advertising. It will cost you about $.05 to $.25 a day per site. I use it, works good, and is a great price.

3. Search for "web2.0 directory" on Google and submit to each one. I did that and from one submission I was blogged 60 times in a span of 2 weeks. I still get good traffic from that experience. Wish they were bigger blogs but the traffic overall combined is not bad.

4. Google adwords is usable even on a small budget, I advertise on about 3 keywords and spend about $2 to $3 a day roughly. Just find some keywords where you can get into the top 3 for less then 35 cents a click. You will have to be a little creative but it is worth it. I find even if I am ad #7 it is still fine, not as good as being ad #1 through #3 but more affordable.
Some of my friends from college have a video game startup. Not every startup is a website.
Any time I see language hackery like this, I can't help but think about the perennial favorite "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

(I'll save you a trip to google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo... )

Another one for the linguistic jihadists is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_ha...
A good article, but like most it overlooks the importance of enthusiasm in an interview. All things being equal, I'll always hire the more enthusiastic of two candidates. It goes a long way, and I'd rather have someone who is excited by technology working on our important projects.
Wow yes. We're never going to launch. ever. If there is one game I can play for hours on end, it was Diablo II. Cannot WAIT for this!!!!
I've found I don't miss much from Perl 5. The only things I've found really funny are backslashing special operators that you don't in Perl, like \( \| and \{. Oh, and \s- for whitespace is very weird to me. And there's no \d. And instead of $1 in the replacement, you do \1. Once I got used to it, I found them very close to each other, at least for everything I do.

Like Steve Yegge (in Effective Emacs), I alias query-replace-regexp and use it every day. Lots of other good tips and pointers to interesting topics there.

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs
I think studying a good, popular game will give you a lot of examples of difficult design decisions that you have to make.

For example, in World of Warcraft, Blizzard intentionally decided to make the classes unbalanced in 1 versus 1 player vs player combat (one person fighting another), but instead focused on making them balanced in larger groups (3v3, 5v5, and "battlegrounds" which is potentially up to 40 players on each side).

How do you make a large game environment that has a variety of environments but also feels like it's a part of a whole? How do you entice casual players to really get into the game and play for quite a while but also reward hardcore players for putting in lots of time? There are so many tradeoffs to make, and considering what an organization like Blizzard must have had to think about is a good exercise.
tektonic.net
This is on the front page of HN? Must be a slow news day.
But just because a clock is broken doesn't mean it's wrong, especially if non-broken clocks are showing the same time. That's exactly the problem in this case, we're ignoring credible people who don't have a long history of crying wolf for being too close in proximity to those that do.

The fact is, most people can't (or can't be bothered to) tell the difference between a respectable climatologist and a hippie worried about global cooling.
I once read that for every question you add to a form you lose 40% of the people viewing it.

Putting it into action- currently working on a web development firm with leads gathered via AdWords, and trying to optimize the deal pipeline. At first there was a "Click to Contact" button that then forwarded to a Wufoo form- just email, website, (optional) phone number, and a comment.

I read that stat, and put up a "Quick Contact" form (also Wufoo- they rock :) ). It just had email, and website, and said "Plug in your email and website and we'll respond with a full proposal for the project." (We only provide one service so it's pretty standardized.). Whereas before we were getting about one lead every other day, we started getting 1.5 a day, an increase of 200%.

We then removed phone number and website from the contact form, since the majority of respondents put that in the actual contact form- immediately, we went from 1.5 to 2 a day. When dealing with leads for development gigs at a couple thousand a pop, that extra .5 helps a lot.

Anecdotal, evidence ahoy, but hopefully that helps some.
I don't agree with the comments here and on TechCrunch about it allowing people who don't understand how to blog to create an account. Those same people are pretty unlikely to even have an email account in the first place.
Well, as of right now I am using siteground shared hosting, and have found it to be excellent for the money. Their tech support is fast and knowledgeable,and respectful (I don't expect people to KMA, however, the Godaddy people for example have proven themselves to be incompetent AND disrespectful) their interface is clear and usable, and everything has worked great so far, I feel that they provide a lot of value for the money. I am surprised to not see them mentioned here, they HAVE won a couple of awards, and are the best I have seen since 2003. Disclaimer: I mostly used Godaddy before them (yuck!) yet I have had to use a couple of others for clients, and they were all - invariably - not that great at ALL. Now, if anyone has had a bad experience with them, I would certainly like to know, as I am considering reselling for them as part of a "includes great hosting" feature in a comprehensive service package for future clients of mine.
How will you get <fake>@gmail.com?
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
I know plenty of people who use email regularly but claim ignorance as to what a blog is. In fact, I'm related to a few. My guess is that I could get them up and running with Posterous pretty quickly.
I'm going to have to agree with the MT route.

I joined up recently, and they're fantastic. Handle spike traffic well too :)
It's primarily solo entrepreneurs who bring a bias against teams or growing larger than one person can manage. If you are a solo entrepreneur and want to learn how to be successful in that mode there is a lot of practical advice.
Free SQL Injection Vulnerability Scanner By HP
M-x re-builder can help you learn them interactively, though.
From the way you explain it, you seem like a nice guy, giving nice guy advice. It's a bit ironic, however, that you were supposed to be running leadership conferences - shouldn't a "good leader" rally people against perceived injustice? Surely, it would be hard to argue that criminal mismanagement is just. Could there have been some way you could have "created your own future" without letting criminal actions stand?
RapidVPS? I use them to host a few small sites on the cheap (starting at like $9 a month I believe). It probably wouldn't scale, but it's irreplacable for development.
Been using JaguarPC (jaguarpc.com) shared hosting account since the past 5 months. The support is good. And they have these tech support guys who could actually can understand my noob language(and showed me around the settings) when i tried to play around with my account.

One of my friends from US told me that slicehost is good and i see a lot of fan comments above.

I have also been using Google AppEngine since a week. Its blazing fast. But they currently have only free accounts and have mentioned on their blog that they will start a paid cloud hosting service soon for those who reach their free hosting limits. Yahoo! too have announced that they will soon offer cloud hosting. So if u you wait for a couple months you might get to choose between EC2 and Google and Yahoo and slicehost and others. Because if you are using php, i have a wild guess that Yahoo's hosting will be php inclined(most of their services are php-inclined). If u are comfortable with python, go for Google AppEngine.

Also a word of CAUTION: if you are going to choose shared hosting packages, then always read terms of service agreement and whatever agreements they have. I once used a one month trial coupon with Hostgator and stumbled upon their T.O.S. It was clearly mentioned that they allow only '50000 inodes' on shared hosting accounts, which in simpler words translates that you can have a max of 50000 files. So if you are going to host something like a social networking site, beware! Your users might get to the max files limit if u are going to have a feature like photo uploading.
I'm on a (dv) extreme. very powerful box, excellent service.
i think it won't be so easy to compare because it's easy to noob vim. i know people that have been using it for a while yet still think of command mode as a "secondary" mode
HIV first infected humans about 100 years ago
User-Generated Content Makes Web the New Sweatshop
Ask YC: Paypal Down?
Is anyone else using Paypal to process transactions? I noticed sales stopped dead a few hours ago, and an attempt to buy my own game told me that the account information for two separate accounts was incorrect.

This coming so soon after the Paypal for international transactions scandal is just crazy to me. They're a well established company and all they have to do is make sure transactions go through, they lose millions if it breaks, and this happens?

By the way, does anybody know of any payment provider that supports a whole bag of payment options, eg, text on a mobile phone, bank transfer etc? We're definitely going to switch, but I'd prefer to go for a company with comprehensive payment options instead of just a low cost credit card processor.
> no brain damage

Doubtful.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are large hosts that don't check for spoofed "from" addresses. Maybe not Gmail, but I haven't checked.
China denies antitrust probe of Microsoft
Thanks. That was probably the first time I have heard an honest comparison of the two editors (well, honest-seeming at least ;-P), although I've been looking for one for a while. Also, I think you just got me to give Emacs a try. Hopefully I'll still be able to switch into Vim-mode at need (heh, so now my life is modal too... Curse you, Vim, you have invaded my soul!) Anyway, thanks.
Envisioning the “viral” in viral marketing
Excel model to help you understand the "viral" in viral marketing.
Curious to know, what would you have said in the same situation, would you have said we have 2 customers, one office, couple of customers, you would be third if we are lucky and hey guess what you are going to beta test our product.

No, but how about... "No, we are not a major corporation with millions of customers. This has many effects on how we'll do business with you. For one, it allows us to provide you with the kind of attention and customer service unmatched by our competitors. As one of our first customers, you have a strong influence on how our product lines evolve, what features we implement, and what bugs we fix first. We can also offer you {special service program}, something we will only offer our first {100} customers, to help us evolve our software to address all of your needs. Being a fresh competitor in {this market} also holds our product to a significantly higher standard - the purchases you make from us can't be justified as the 'market default', and so we have to compete on features and quality, such as {specific features and examples of better quality}."

But I'm just a programmer, not a good business person; I'm sure a good business person can make it sound much better.
I would say that you should have a good toolbox of simple practical techniques that you understand at the level that you can re-implement and combine at will. Because that's what I would love to see in a candidate, speaking as a ten-year game programming veteran.

It's also a good way to look at interviews. Some people would try to use a programming interview as a place to demonstrate the most advanced, novel or little-known cool thing they know. But even in a specialized position, interviews are largely explorations of breadth, not depth. If you want to show off your depth, write a paper, blog post or library with a demo.
"Depends, try both and see" isn't that bad of an answer. Given that I have tried one, and gotten used to it, I suppose it's time to try the next.

>unless you have the time to dedicate to both
I do. I'm only in high school, so I have loads of free time and plenty of time until I actually need to do productive work. Well, in a sense. Also, as an unrelated side note, I wish I knew how to italicize, like for that quote above.
I think it has a stupid name, but it's really useful.

2. Learn the terminology.

You wouldn't think the name was stupid if you followed your second piece of advice. A ring is a data structure that's like a queue, but after it fills up, the old elements go away. The kill ring is called such because it's a ring that stores killed text.
> Bill Gates did this stuff dealing with IBM et al.

Please cite. From what I understand, he sold them software that he would deliver at a later date, before it had been written. It was closer to contract work than deliberate deception. That's not the same thing as lying about factual, verifiable, information.

Personally, I would never associate in business with anyone prone to such factual hyperbole...
Ask HN: Any list where web developers can find development contests?
Is there any site or webpage that lists contests for web developers? I found a list of mashup contests at http://programmableweb.com/contests but most contests listed are 'US residents only' (which i found when reading the rules of contests) and there are only a few listed. Does anyone know any better list (that is updated often)?
Uh yeah, this:

(global-set-key "\C-cs" 'shell)

is deprecated now. You need to say:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c s") 'shell)
http://www.co2stats.com

Automatically purchases renewable energy to offset CO2 emissions due to your clients, network, and servers, independently of your hosting provider, so you can use it with Slicehost.
Fine, but he's certainly from the "resistance is useless" meta-school. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahi_Beer_Hall
New Feature: Delay
There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's the time delay in minutes between when you create a comment and when it becomes visible to other people. I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments, users can, if they want, have some time to edit them before they go out in the feed. Many users edit comments after posting them, so it would be bad if the first draft always got shipped.

Delay is initially 0. The maximum effective value is 10. It only applies to comments.
I largely agree with the other replier about most green options. I suspect that if you want to do that, the easiest thing to do is make sure you don't use more computing resources than you have to, and the second is to host it yourself and power it yourself (that can be very impractical).

There are places that are trying to offer green options, that aren't that slimy -- I have met the follow that runs http://burlyhouse.net/, and his operation is nice. His prices are high, but I think most of his customers are people who also hire BurlyHouse for programming or other services.
One way of splitting the people of the world is into people that would lie about business, and people that wouldn't. You don't ever want to work for a CEO that will, because he'll lie to you too. Avoiding working with people that lie about business is a good heuristic to keeping to what you do best - working.

If you think that you might have legal trouble for not telling people about this, then talk to a lawyer. Otherwise, find another job and don't look back. If you hear anyone doing business with this guy again and you care about them, warn them about what you overheard and why you left - personally, I would really appreciate such advice. Otherwise, don't mention it unless someone asks.
I don't think he's talking about consulting. I think he's talking about big ticket business software which almost always costs an arm and a leg to sell and market. Hell, that's true of almost all SMB software as well.
On a recently-became-related note: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized, if the character after the first asterisk isn't whitespace.
I've known guys to run full-page ads for software that didn't even exist yet.

That seems significantly more justifiable than flat-out lying about the company and its customers.
Ahem. Somehow I missed that, though I've been here for some time... Thanks.
I think it is because in 2008, we expect a certain level of uptime for web services. It's a good indicator of how the standards for web applications have increased over the years.

I remember about a decade ago when I first signed up for services like Hotmail or eBay, they would be down fairly often and for long periods of time, but it was understood and even accepted, since they were usually free services that did not have much direct competition. "Internet application" usually carried implications of slow, buggy, and unreliable service. However, in the last couple of years, it seems that we have to come to expect a near-constant uptime for the websites we use. It points to a general up trend in application quality and consumer expectation, which I think is healthy for both developers and consumers.

In the end, I think Twitter speaks to Ev Williams's brilliance in building an extremely sticky product, since people continue to Twitter despite the downtime and the deluge of blog posts from people criticizing them at every turn. It reminds me of how most people continued to blog on Blogspot even with its notorious bad pre-Google uptime.
Classics! And the Wikipedia pages do a great job of explaining them.

I have a real life example. A friend in college was helping a girl prepare for her english-as-a-foreign-language exam. They were looking over English verb tenses and he wanted to correct a mistake she had made. Without thinking about it he said, "If you had had 'had' here, you would have had to have had 'have' there." She freaked out.

Edit: can't figure out if that last "had" belongs in there or not. :)
Make your decision based on the ACM Code Of Ethics And Professional Conduct.

http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics
Not everyone uses webmail. Also, it's a lot easier from a mobile device. Also, we hate using web forms because they're such a pain. I hate seeing a Browse button! Now I can drag and drop right into Thunderbird.

Also: if you can use email, you can use posterous. This opens it up to a lot more people who are afraid of "setting up" and remembering another password and confusing web interface.
The audio player is definitely something we're working on. Expect good things soon.
High performance single-threaded access to SimpleDB
gotta survive

You mean the company? Surely there are companies which could survive without lying to customers/investors? The ones that can't are meant to go out of business, and that's OK. Companies aren't babies, it's OK for them to "die". Going out of business is natural if the market/business model is wrong, which happens often, by nobody's fault. It's simply due to the uncertainty of things, which comes with the complexity of our world.

There is no ethical dilemma in Social Darwinism when applied to companies as the "living beings". A CEO who holds his personal honesty as less important than the survival of a company is very misguided.

almost everyone is doing this

Really? I don't have the experience to contradict, but I really hope not...
"In all seriousness, that's retarded."

In all seriousness, that's retarded.
In our tests, what we've found is that instead people see "sign up now" and think "oh crap, another boring form I have to fill out. Yet another password to remember. BACK, BACK, BACK.

This takes the idea of no-signup try-it-out to the next step. It's the worst thing in the world to ask questions about a user before you show them what you've got going on.
How Rich People Spend Their Time
Nice! What else is in the works? :)
Did the explosion change your opinion of theplanet?
Many users edit comments after posting them

Can we have an optional preview page before comments get posted instead? It would be useful for fixing typesetting and other errors before it's actually posted. I fear that having a delay of 10 minutes will drastically increase the number of redundant comments.