skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PLEASE crush Evite...they're my least favorite internet company that everybody uses. Good luck.
Wow, that's amazing; never knew of that feature before. Thanks.

Nice to know someone was thinking about this problem at WebKit. Does Firefox do anything similar?
I was just over 200 and now I'm below. I tend to have agree the larger the comment tends to get you more karma.

I also noticed that if you try to be funny or be sarcastic, no one really will ever get it and people jump on the downmod train.
It's just a matter of convenience and taste. CSS is for presentation and JavaScript is for behavior.
We would be more than happy to oblige! Whatever you can do to spread the word about Anyvite would be much appreciated ;)
RIAA's wishlist includes gutted DMCA, mandatory filters, restrictions on materials
I think this is like when Joel S talked about the problem with the 80/20 rule - sure, most users only use 20% of the features, but they are a different 20% for each user.

37s and others don't seem to agree with this, and want to have a pure 20% - and claim that the interfaces that result with Joel's way are "enterprisey" (a term I have heard a lot to describe anything which isn't consumer level simple).
I opened a >120Mb genome sequence in Emacs, no problem. This was on a 64-bit machine with 3 Gb of RAM, running Ubuntu.
Almost every class I develop needs some thing to run it while I build it. I just make that thing Test::Unit in ruby.

I started off with simple scripts for test harnesses long ago, and realized there was no reason not to use a test as my harness. The tests, for me, catch the most stuff initially. The value later on of some basic test cases is less, but that is all bonus as they're already written.
Oops, I meant FORTRAN. I learned it for a college class, and the next semester they wised up and took it off the required list.
Good luck on this but everyone I know just uses Facebook to coordinate events. Plus Facebook Mobile lets you keep updated even on the go.
In this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176999 I obviously humoured a few people, but I have read on another post that the value in HN comments is that they remained intelligent conversation, and didn't descend into one-liners or cheap insults.

We respect intelligent conversation, and you have to support that!
Agreed. If you are a no-body than your submissions need to be topnotch to get up-votes, where as well known submitters get special up-vote treatment for mediocre submissions.
On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
In the long run, maybe.

But I certainly think it's plausible that a startup could out-develop Google in a relatively unexplored area over the course of a year or two—and that's all they need, since their exit strategy is (presumably) getting bought out, not IPOing.
I don't think you can really think of them as #1/100 like an art print. The increased price has more to do with the relative scarcity of the item when it was purchased.
We realize that Facebook is a dominant competitor in this market space and a lot of people use it for creating events, but there are still some people we've talked to who aren't entirely happy with it, as well as some market segments out there that aren't avid Facebook users.
That would lead to dilution, I think. We are looking into marketing our cart technology b2b on the side.
One word: nethack.

I use Emacs for everything (including this comment), but every so often I find myself craving a fix of hjkl;
The problem with Justin.TV is the illegal content - the NBA Finals, etc. can't stay there forever. It can't survive on that - it'll get crushed. uStream's content is higher quality and legal.

Of course, maybe its legality just doesn't matter on the net.
"Again, interesting idea definitely more rewarding than buying from Cafe Press or Threadless!"

Oh, god, thank you so much! That's what I wanted to hear.
That's valid. We know we're going to lose customers over the ship date. As we become more liquid, we may try a costlier work around on this, but as of now, we have to try and overcome it with other positives.
I don't particular use Evite (I mean, I know what the site is, but that's about it.)

What are these problems that Evite supposedly has? From what I seen, people in general don't have a problem using them. Lay people, I mean.
Database partitioning/sharding [video]
Antikythera mechanism: a complex astronomical calculator from 100 B.C.
Parts of TextMate [still have an effective age under 4 months]. Emacs has had decades of development.

Although your tone suggests you want to use this as a justification for sticking with TM, it sounds a point in favor of Emacs to me.
Sadly my compromise of using 0.5 was flat out rejected.
thank you a lot for sharing this!
You may find the shell in plan9 really interesting, incidentally.
Does anybody here actually use gedit? And why?

edit : genuinely curious. not trying to put down gedit.
VCs Reap What They Sow - GigaOM
Using Evite is not the most intuitive thing in the world. We hear from lots of people who won't create invites using it because it's just too confusing to use.
Some minor suggestions/bugs:

1. It would be nice to have a button which pops-up a small calendar (something like on kayak.com or any other flight site). The automatic parsing is nice, but for the less web-savvy, a button would be easier to grok.

2. The time parsing is a little funky. If I type in 9:30, it auto-detects as PM. If I add a space after that, it suddenly switches to AM. This might catch people off guard.

3. The auto date parsing is awesome (with the 'natural language' feature). However, I found that the word 'tonight' doesn't work...perhaps you want to add it to your dict?
Most Corporate X Are Unimaginative Failures

For what values of X is the above not true? It can't be right to just assume the empty set, but...
Havent you guys checked purpleTrail.com
It has even more features; please check out
Great suggestions! We're definitely going to add the pop up calendar ASAP and will look into the other bugs with the date and time stuff.

Thanks for the recommendations!
User Experience in real world....
if you use your fingers to type, it is much less mouth-intensive.
I guess nobody cares about digg any more, but imagine if they can make it work, and apply to comments too
Yeah, we have seen purpletrail. As the article said, we're going for simple and straightforward. We're also pretty big believers that "more features" does not mean something is better.
A few weeks ago, I did a survey trough Google Docs "Forms" and I didn't want to embed the survey on a blog, so I can't get a track of the visitors of my survey.

But now, you can get full statistics with Google Analytics, so just think about the future that Google Docs could have in a few months.
this is just great!
I'd rather not have to install a plugin to compensate for the lack of a feature in a website.
The Enigma and the Bombe
I just started a party at my house in an hour!
How are you guys planning to get traction? This is a really crowded field, and adoption doesn't appear to be driven by rational behavior. For example, Invitastic (http://invitastic.com) is already a pretty darned good replacement for Evite, but nobody knows about it (no personal association; they just happen to be a local company in the space).

Also, a few seconds of googling turned up this laundry list of pretenders to the throne:

http://www.scurrilous.com/blog/archives/2007/03/30/evite-alt...
Not much.

The biggest complaints has always been the placement of ads on the invitations and their insistence on drawing you to the site to look at any relevant information (which in turn increases the pageviews and expands their ad inventory). But that's their business model. Few other people have hooked on a more clever way of making money off invitations.

These toys that people make, and yes they are just toys, flame out quite quickly despite people clamoring that Evite's evil and so on. Here's a list of other similar services taking on Evite:

Mypunchbowl (complete event coordination)

Planypus (fuzzy arrangement)

Goovite (simplistic invitation system)

Invitastic (pretty invite templates)

Eventful

Imthere

Madeit

Crush3r (hipster/pretty invite templates)

Partee

Renkoo (friends getting together)

Skobee (dead)

Socializr

Upcoming

Zvents

Pownce can also be considered a similar service. Tack on the current trend of location-aware social apps like Loopt and you have another layer. Those apps are likely where these apps will evolve into. Plus the old standbys of email and phones.

In the end they all do the same thing: you type in info and it gets sent out, sometimes you get to gussy up the invites. The strategic advantage you have is simply size and inertia. If there's going to be anyone that's capable of crushing Evite it would only be Facebook.
Wow. Over 400(!) slides to say: "Identify a problem your customers face and make something worth paying for which resolves it. Don't get distracted by the technology of implementation -- it's the solution customers are looking for, not the tool which implements it."

...or did I miss something while furiously clicking through it all?
Not Much? I think you may be in the minority of people who think that evite doesn't have many issues...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evite#Criticism

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,16383...

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/s...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13wwln-medium-t.h...

http://www.evitesucks.com/

http://www.jabrams.com/thetruthaboutevite.html

http://venturebeat.com/2006/09/19/why-i-hate-evite/

http://valleywag.com/tech/modern-and-awkward/8-companies-we-...
But isn't this really a supply side problem? If we had cost competitive green sources of energy which are trending to be cheaper then carbon emitting ones - how much optimisation can we do just to minimise carbon?

Its like someone loosing their job, and then thinking "I know, I'll just cut back on spending money" - no, you find an income source (and maybe cut back as well).
Ask YC: What domain name registration service do you use?
I heard many times that there are some companies that practically steal your domain, or even, they register their own information besides yours.
Probably you will tell me, "hey did you heard about enom.com, godaddy.com, etc"... but the thing is that the worst comments I heard, are coming from that big companies.. and I recently read(via Slashdot), that these companies also allows their employees to bid on domains.
So I'm wondering, wich domain registration service do you trust and can recommend to do a "secure" registration process, and don't be scare about losing domain names.
You did. I don't know if I can sum it up any better than you, but the message was certainly lost in translation.

Let me try anyways:

A persistent pattern can be observed: new tech is created, producing endless amusement for many people but with little practical (i.e. monetary) value. Since it's fun and old guys want to feel hip they just pay for it one way or the other.

This invention frenzy produces a glut of innovation, soutions in search of a problem. Most of them are even worthless ($-wise) but there are few gems to be found, distilled and reused for some practical purpose. Eventually, build up of useful knowledge reaches critical mass and produces a breakthrough, productive innovation that solves real problems in a new, possibly unrelated area.

The author claims that Web 2.0 is one such invention frenzy that has produced a few gems, and one will do well for himself to learn those and build up skill in isolated and combined use. Once so equipped, enterprising hacker will have half of the success in his pocket. Second part will be knowledge of domain areas where people have problems that are waiting for these solutions.
Agreed, it is a crowded market space with different sites targeting different sub-segments. We have some ideas that we're working on for user adoption and growth.
I've used GoDaddy pretty consistently for about three years across about twelve domains. I don't know about the allegations against them, but for what they do, they do it well and fast.
Perhaps it's just semantics, but I prefer to be called a "computer programmer".
Dreams
Dreams. Happens to all of us. Some of us enjoy them, some don’t mind them and then there are the few who are troubled by dreams. What are dreams saying to us? Are they saying anything at all? Is it a figment of imagination …? It has been a topic of debate and research for centuries now.
Yeah, I went through the same exercise with developing a product in this field and went through all those links and used it as justification of how an Evite killer is possible. All those links end up talking about the same 2 things over and over again:

- ads on the invites

- email bait you to visit the site

Great, but that's how they make money and they've been profitable with a small staff for a long long long long long long long long time.

Most of the other invitation sites focus on niches, Renkoo on the concept of friends getting together, Crush3r on hipster stylings, MyPunchbowl on coordinating the whole event, Socializr on being a social network, so on so forth. Besides Facebook, MyPunchbowl is the only other service getting quite a bit of traction. But it ends up being the same concept: single input info, multiple output info. I really believe this is a game of user conquest and attrition. Without the momentum and money to stay in the fight for the long haul, Evite (which has already been genericized) will just keep on chugging along.

Either way, good luck with the site and I'm sure you're much smarter than me at figuring out how to make this work.
I've used VIM pretty consistently for the past two years, and I love it. The only other editor I use is Dreamweaver, and that's such a different beast it's not even funny.

I am worried though if someone is using a directory structure they can't memorize. Isn't the point of a directory structure to keep things organized in a reasonable fashion?
well, my experience is as anecdotal as anyone else's. But I've used namecheap.com which is an enom reseller. they allow you to handle multiple domains relatively easily. I've been happy with namecheap and the prices are competitive. ($9.xx/year)

no problems with registrations or losing control of a domain. I have 200+ domains.
Pending Patent Applications for Review: Novel Inventions or Troll Garbage? - Help the USPTO
That's basic regular expression syntax. Learning that will go a long way in helping you learn a lot of tools in Unix, including grep, sed, vim, emacs, perl (which generally has a slightly different syntax, but one that matches in this case), bash programming in general, and more.
In fact, if you're a mac user, there's a Service that will open a highlighted URL in your default browser. Combine that with they keyboard shortcut tool in System Preferences, and you can make a hotkey to open any highlighted link.
Thanks for sharing your opinion... 200+ is a valuable experience on GoDaddy

EDIT:
I added you on my twitter
Technical co-founder/CTO looking for a new startup to work at
I started off using Xemacs during my undergrad, but I never really learned how to use it efficiently. When I later returned to Unix, I picked up vim and started using it for everything. When I later returned to emacs, even having learned some keybindings (thanks to GNU readline in gnome-terminal), I just felt handcuffed in my movement abilities.

The thing that makes vim great is the many (confusing for initial users, perhaps) different ways of moving around in the file, entering Insert mode, etc. Once you get the hang of that, you'll find yourself cursing any editor that doesn't have an easy way to move to the end of the 3rd word from the current location.

That said, I think I'll eventually find myself using emacs in viper-mode, especially if I ever get around to migrating to Lisp (from mainly Python).
Can't they just make a deal with all the major operating system vendors to solve the problem in software?
So because you're lazy, you'd rather use more keystrokes to accomplish the same task? (I voted you up because I didn't see any need for you to get -1 karma for that comment.)
Basically, it's like stone carving--you can shape the stone, but once you've made a dent, you can't put the chips back without restarting. If you have severely invested into some really boneheaded design choices, the best way out might actually be to spawn a sub-company, have it create a "lightweight competitor" to your own product (designing it the correct way) and then merge the company back in, throwing away your product and using its.

Thinking about it, I'm surprised Microsoft doesn't do this.
Amazon's Page Recommender: Foreshadowing A New Web Service?
IBM supercomputer to aid osteoporosis treatment
He should probably fix his wordpress theme before writing heady theories about software development.
E-Commerce
AJ Square Incorporation's eComSolutions enable businesses and companies to avoid all the costs associated to developing a complex E-Commerce, and instead add E-Commerce functionality to their website with a professional-looking and easy to manage E-Commerce solution. Through AJ Square simply include everything that you need in e-commerce.
Study Refutes the "Long Tail" Theory
I would like to see if you can publish this statement in context on http://iden.tify.us :)
Alan Turing, the Father of Computer Science
Not sure, many of the tasks never really seem to come up. When I used emacs, I used the macro recording facility a lot, for example to change larger chunks of code.

Eventually I had to switch to Eclipse, and didn't really need the Macros anymore, because of the refactoring functionality that comes with Eclipse. For example, in Emacs I used a macro to quickly generate getters and setters for my class variables (Java - I know...). Eclipse has a Source->Generate Getters and Setters Menu item, so I don't need to fumble around with Macros anymore.

Not saying that Eclipse is better, but I simply don't seem to be the kind of person who can remember 100 key combinations. I couldn't for emacs, either, even though sometimes I tried to learn new Emacs tricks.

I didn't learn that many keyboard shortcuts for Eclipse, either, even though I keep telling myself that I should. But I can only remember the most important ones, and I learn them because the menu items display a keyboard shortcut.

By the way, I seem to remember a quote by some Apple employee who said that in experiments using the GUI was actually faster than keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcut people thought they were faster, but they weren't. Not sure if it is true - hard to believe, but still.
servintdomains.com
:-) Congrats! Hope you guys made some money off the sale :-)
As long as they don't buy Yahoo, you don't need to sell msft anything, they will buy it, so you are right :-)

In fact VC's should start a fund, similar to Iphone apps fund, called "msft not buying yahoo, so lets make them use that 44 billion" fund ;-)
btw: you might want to change your profile from Powersetter to softie;-)
Is SproutCore worth it?  The Reg finds promise, limitations.
I'm not a huge Prototype fan, so SproutCore initially turned me off, but the more I look, the more potential I see. Anyone used it for more than experiments, and have opinions to share?
If you don't check a pointer before dereferencing it - the code is wrong.

Really? This might be true after a malloc or another system call, but in general, your modules should have specifications. If you have written a function which states that the incoming value must be a pointer to some value, that pointer shoud never be checked before dereferencing it. It's the caller's job to ensure that a valid pointer is sent.

Blindly checking for errors that will never come up is not much better than not checking at all.
Thanks, deleted the post :)
how come I didn't get an SMS invite? I'm so bored at home...
Why does almost every startup have to be a social web site or some other web app? The web is surely not the only thing in the hacker universe, is it? The biggest opportunities in computing today are in parallel programming tools and multicore architecture and design. How come nobody seems to care about those things?

I note that your Phd dissertation was titled, "Prefetch mechanisms by application memory access pattern". Surely this qualifies you for all sorts of computing projects.
well, the thing with these comparisons between vim and emacs features is that they mostly come down to "do you know how to do feature X" because both emacs and vim (vim, not vi) will surely have feature X somewhere.

In this case, vim allows tabs and split windows and the Tramp functionality is built in. I'm not sure about the python terminal, but then again, I've never felt the need.
The Great Robot Race: NOVA [video]
I personally thought the article was garbage. The author rehashed a lot of old ideas and lumped together a bunch of anecdotes without giving much new insight.

The thing that really bothered me is that I got the distinct feeling that the author is only parroting old advice, without actually trying anything himself.

In particular, he said that exceptions are expensive in any language. In Python in particular, exceptions are no more expensive than any other control structure, as that was an explicit design decision.

Exceptions work, that's all there is to it, but they have to be documented. The Python documentation is a very good example of this. For the built-ins in particular, every single operation states what type of exception is thrown in what case.

Exceptions can be very effective if:

1. Each function/method documents what exceptions it throws under what circumstances.

2. Exception causes are thoughtfully separated into different types. One example of a violation of this principle that has frustrated me recently is Python's os.makedirs function, which recursively creates a hierarchy of directories. This can cause an exception if one of the directories cannot be created for some reason (permissions, desired directory is an existing file, etc.) or if the leaf directory already exists. In some cases, the latter case really is not an error (you just want "mkdir -p" functionality), but it's hard to distinguish between the two cases.

3. The proper exceptions are caught. Too often programmers attempt to catch every exception and re-propagate it (or worse, ignore it). In many cases, exceptions are only meaningful during debugging, and once minor issues are worked out, the exceptional case is guaranteed to never occur. These types should be allowed to propagate to the top-level and crash the program, that is the whole point of the exception. In other cases, the programmer needs to be aware of what exceptions may occur (see 1), to reason about how such cases should be handled (if at all, perhaps allowing it to pass up the stack makes sense), and to handle it appropriately. Only in a top-level logger for a long-running program should a catch-all exception ever be used.

...and that turned out much longer than I initially planned. I am just tired of hearing the same old "exceptions are bad because people will use them to mask real errors" argument repeated over-and-over, when no programmer worth anything would ever do that. Also, this popular comparison of exceptions to GOTOs is ridiculous. The article on GOTOs was written at a time when spaghetti code which jumped all over the place to save repetition was not at all uncommon. Thanks to more recent constructs like do...while, break, continue, for loops, function objects, and more, crazy "old school" code patterns are much less common. To march that argument out today any time someone dislikes a given control flow structure is a disservice to the original paper (which was actually addressing real problems in code structure), because the comparison invariably is between apples and oranges.
Parallel programming tools may make for interesting research, but that doesn't mean that it will be a good business. In general, tools startups haven't been terribly successful.