skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No.

Sites I want YC to fund include a new product review site. One that focuses on the details of a device's software rather than pure hardware spec. The iPhone/iPod touch is far from just a tablet with firefox (safari) on it.

It's understandable, affordant, responsive, coherent, slick, sleek, predictable, wonderful. It has QWAN by the bucket load. It DWIM.

And you don't get a feel for that in a review that talks about its 128Mb RAM and 400Mhz processor and IMAP email support. That makes it sound identical to my Windows Mobile HTC, yet between the two is a vast yawning cavern of difference.

What he describes is, frankly, a crap idea. It's got a big touch screen, processor, memory, storage, OS, power supply, video card, mainboard, USB controller, WLAN, but No keyboard, and with extremely limited software.

Yes, a general computer with extremely limited software. Exactly what drives the development of OpenMoko, pwnagetool, Linux, ipodlinux, DD-WRT and openWRT, linux for the PS2 and on and on.

Has he seen the Asus EEE inspired Dell E? The other dozens of small, cheap, wireless-enabled, flash driven linux subnotebooks?
Can you elaborate? I thought this was an interesting read.
The Mystery of "b := (b = false)"
You're forgetting that first you have to make the right application active. And the only way to tell which application is active is the slight brightness.

And even worse the applications have no titles, so you have to be able to recognize the application you want by the shape of the window instead of it's name.

And that's why I don't like the unified bar.

With multiple bars you can directly click on the action you want, even if the app is not active.

And it's easy to tell what application it is because it's titled.

Plus it's impossible to use focus on mouse (i.e. move the mouse over an app and it's active, but doesn't move to the front) with a single bar. And I find focus on mouse increases productivity quite a bit.

And even fitts law isn't right, because the mouse will often be in the window you are working on, but to get to the bar you have to move all the way to the top, do it, then come back to where you were. With separate bars the distance is quite less.
Most people can only afford one computer, let alone two of them.

But I do agree with what is being said here. The only time I watch television these days is when a good game is on ESPN. Even then, I watch while sitting at the computer, working on my blog (PaulsHealthBlog.com) or writing email.

Okay, back to work now...
Why don't they do this?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210434
Anyone ever use brainf*k ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck#Language_design

I was googling something at work today and stumbled across brainf*k, a "minimalist", but still Turing complete language with only 8 instructions, including the io. "<" means decrement the pointer location, ">" means iterate the pointer location, "+" means iterate the pointer byte value, "-" means decrement the pointer byte value, "[" means enter a while type loop until pointer byte value is 0, "]" ends that while loop, "." means put a char to standard out, and "," means read a char from standard out.

Anything "real world" one can use this for? Like it is small, so I should imagine it is fast? So like maybe for large problems involving lots of "number crunching"?
Note: There are currently 21 comments - and rather a bit of discussion - about this over on RubyFlow - http://www.rubyflow.com/items/666
I'm not religious and religion makes me somewhat uncomfortable . This may be in part since religion is largely considered a private/personal matter in Canada (or at least Ontario :P).
Yes actually. But with a graphical aid to make it (hopefully) more intuitive.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de St. Exupery

One of my favorite quotes. All programmers should keep this in mind when working.
No, there are plenty of religious hackers, it's that they don't talk about it because there is nothing much to say: every single religious argument has been argued over and over for thousands of years. What's the point in doing it again?
I haven't given religion much thought (as a coding problem),

But have you looked at sites like,

http://www.beliefnet.com/
Sort of, I believe that there is probably a higher being that created that initial micron of matter. But I don't believe that there is a "god" that watches our every move.

And I believe that organized religion is nothing more than a huge thousand year old scam. Make lots of money and convert as many people as you can to make even more money. 400 years from now Scientology will be on the same level as Christianity.
I took a fair amount of religion courses in college, but I am not religious (believe there is no God, etc). However, I do find religion very interesting.

The irony here is that the tech community is extremely "religious" in another context. Vim or Emacs? Mac or Linux? Java/.NET or Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP? In that sense there are a ton of religious communities.
Just stopped drinking it 3 weeks ago.
While I understand the issue at hand, I have to say that this is just dumb.
I'd consider the Monome a successful open source hardware project. There are three production versions, a kit, and a lot of community created software. It is popular enough that they auction for over the original price and there is a waiting list to purchase them.
Apple Reports Best Quarterly Revenue Earnings in History
I don't consider myself religious, but I have incorporated some buddhist practices into my life.

Also, not to derail, but I think that it's pretty ambiguous whether buddhism counts as a religion, per se, according to the (generally unstated) assumptions in discussions like these. Some schools of buddhism are athiestic or agnostic, some are not, etc.
Well, I'll be the first to set up a NuYen<->KongBucks exchange then.
The main reason I've never done anything with D is that - as I understand it - it's mostly a cleanup of C++. One can write object-oriented code in C, but C++ lets you do it in the language. C++ enabled a new way of programming in C. I don't see D as enabling a new way of programming.

I think a real successor to C++ will be one that does to C++ template programming what C++ did to C object-oriented programming. Which should get us close to Lisp-like macros.
Nope. Edit: As Dawkins pointed out, most Christians are atheists in regard to Thor and Zeus. Atheists just go one god farther.
It was an interesting read, but it wasn't 'brought down by the man'. A better title should be: know and follow the applicable laws before making a startup.
A whole new generation of people could learn the original meaning of "Your money's no good here."
Personally? Anywhere from 4 to 6 Mt. Dews a day.
A coffee or two, sometimes tea as it gets later at night.
Google In Final Negotiations To Acquire Digg For "Around $200 Million"
There is a realm of things that are 'interesting' but 'very controversial', in the sense that most mainstream economists, right or left, view the gold standard as more or less nutty, and of course, the 'nuts' don't like being viewed as such. The ensuing discussion is never pretty, and is completely unrelated to hacker news. Some of us would prefer to just not see it here. You can talk about that kind of thing here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/
I know Windows is their flagship product, but they need to restructure themselves for the future: the Web.

Vista has some neat little visual items that XP didn't, but beyond the visual there's not a whole lot of benefit to upgrading. I mean, most of the boasted visual items can be pulled off inside a browser.

From all my experience with Vista, they somehow messed up badly on the networking layers: everything is bogged down under traffic.
Pardon me, but STFU. If you want to criticize, more than one sentence is required to convey your meaning.

This story is very relevant in that it warns what happens if you carelessly try to innovate in a regulated field. As far as I know, it is far between every Web company that suffers this fate. The banking industry scores in the world class for lameness, and now we know why. On another note, this could happen in other areas as well..aviation is my own favorite oh-please-someone-get-your-act-together business. This could just as easily have happened if someone made a perfectly good airplane that insulted the wrong officials.

I am aware that the subject of gold-backed vs. fiat currencies is a regular theme on reddit, but this article doesn't even touch the matter.
Fanboy is probably a better term for that
I didn't even get what that ad was supposed to mean until I read the interpretation of it. I'm not sure the general public are really going to hook on to it. Ads have to be catchy and understandable or at least witty.. this has none of those characteristics. It's just confusing.
To each his own, I suppose. I really do not go to the library much, but it'd be a bit sad if they had to confiscate my "How to Do Magic" reading list.
No. I consider the scientific method valid and not something to be taken on faith.
I think that's a great convention. Using = for assignment introduces quite a bit of ambiguity, especially the common typo of "if (x = y)" when "x == y" was the intention.

If I ever get around to making a real language (ahem), I will probably use either "<-" for infix assignment (left arrow) or "set" for pre/postfix; "=" will be a value comparison, and "is" will be a pointer comparison (i.e., symbol equality, capable of comparing non-terminating data structures, etc).
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

In terms of "be wary of regulations"... well... yeah. But do you think anyone would vote for an article about me trying to serve alcohol to 20 year olds in the US? Following the laws should be one of those things that people basically take for granted. Whether those laws are sensible ones is most likely best left to other forums, with, perhaps, the exception of very pertinent things, like software patents.
Facebook: Sea Cow of the Internet
$25k/month burn rate on Joyent. I don't see any obvious applications to LinkedIn which is what makes me curious in how long they will sustain it. I think they could sell it to Slide, Inc. or one of the other Facebook companies.
Same here, green or black. Sometimes coffee or diet pop, but not much, they make me jittery and moody.

(For the record, green tea has a small amount of caffeine.)

Tea, particularly green, also has Theanine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine), which smooths out the caffeine jitters. I'm pretty sure theanine is a big part of why green tea feels subjectively different in effect from coffee, even when drinking enough to counterbalance the lower caffeine content.
Truly Epic Lulz !!!!1

Ahem .. quote, unquote
At this point you may as well be writing in assembly, but compilers are advanced enough that it's usually more efficient to write in C and let the compiler convert to assembly.

In short: no.
If you believe in God, especially if you're a Christian, you're going to suffer all sorts of censorship and ridicule on all the socially moderated hacker sites such as YC, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc... For examples, you are not allowed to say anything against atheism, materialism, evolution, the big bang, CO2 global warmning, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, time travel, etc... You must fall in line and contribute to the myth that science and technology belong to atheists and atheists alone.

I am a Christian and I am as passionate about science and technology as anybody else. If that bothers you, fuck you and the atheist mule you sleep with. How about that?

Now, censor this. LOL.
I don't know about most others, but I plan get-togethers with friends, look up photos of moments I didn't get to experience with friends, communicate with business associates, and generally discover things I may have never noticed without using Facebook. That's the extent of my social-network gene: the rest of my time on the computer I'm working.
Reginald, consider pontificating online about your new hobbies/passions/dangerous ideas (wreck diving et al)?
One americano and 3 mugs of tea per day.
I hold Christian faith. In some ways, I hesitate to label myself as "religious," as it seems to me that a great deal of stuff that has been done and said in the name of Christianity is a bunch of rubbish -- while I believe Christianity itself is good, I also believe that a lot of cruft and misinformation has been tacked on over the years.

Even amongst Christians, there is a regrettable amount of division. This group believes X, this group believes Y, this group believes Z, and none of them want to have anything to do with each other. It's a mess, and I really don't understand why folks act that way. But it makes it hard to discuss matters of religious belief, because as soon as you present view X, those who hold view Y are prone to get angry or cut you off or whatever. Then adherents of view X get angry, and adherents of view Z think X and Y are both wacky, and... sigh

Certainly, not all religious people are like this; I don't mean to claim that at all. It may just be, like in many arenas of life, a vocal minority really can't get along, giving the more sensible majority a bad reputation.

Several years ago, I participated in a reasonably successful online forum about Christian music production. After a couple of years, a few people totally ruined it for everyone else by turning the forum into a religious flame war, and the forum was eventually shut down. My guess is that online communities centered around religious topics could only exist both peacefully and for a long duration with heavy moderation.
Alternate theory: The Internet is a dangerous idea – cf Raganwald last post. Religions would probably prefer to keep followers away from the web and in a place of worship, where there is more direct idea control; therefore would be less interested in devoting resources to developing websites. Second, I’d suggest that the average hacker puts reason before faith, so is less likely to believe in a supernatural creator.
You realize the language is a programmer circle-jerk inside joke right?

Disclaimer: asm coder.

Also, if you want speed, write in C.
Asm is for demi-gods and the masochistic alone.
Why do you care? If you draw any generalizations from the replies on this forum, then you are committing every statistical fallacy in the book.

As for your hypothesis, the Hacker News community is built around Hacker News and not religion or the lack thereof, so I find it hard to see how it fits in. I would agree that online communities built around religion are of little interest, but only because I find the subject matter so tedious.

If you could flesh out your argument and make it a little more clear, I'm sure you would get better replies from this community.

Personally I try to never judge the people I socialize with based on their beliefs in irrelevant subject matters. But I am an oddity, being born without the seemingly common gene that causes most people to derive pleasure from meddling and prying into the personal affairs of others.
If this is true (please ;-)) I'd like to point out that valleywag has been pushing this story for about a month now.
Is there anything interesting to say about religion?
Hm... in the physical sciences we call this the Scientific Method.
The gaming market is enormous, and I'm frankly surprised they'd take this stance. Maybe it'd be wise for them to have a social video uploading sub-site similar to YouTube with equal quality to YT.

Turning away users is never a great solution, but maybe this will be a temporary one.
Last time I checked, payment startups are not off-topic here at HN. Heck, YC has invested in at least two payment-related startups. So having an interesting article that shows you that laws can sometimes be a bigger barrier than imagined when dealing with online payments, is "reddit material" how exactly?!
I feel like online applications and communities built around religion are pretty poor...

Your use of the word "poor" here is not merely delightfully ambiguous, but one of its meanings helps to explain the other: A lot of charities have poor websites because they are poor. Building sites costs money, as does maintaining them. And many people take a dim view of charities who spend more money trying to appear less poor than they spend on... the poor.

Of course, as the web matures nice websites cost less money. A lot of charities are turning to Drupal, for example, which in its simplest incarnations can be pretty straightforward to maintain, presuming you know how to set it up in the first place. ;) But beware the feeping creaturism...

I'm also pretty dubious about the facts of your statement -- not that online religious communities are poor, but that they're especially poor. A lot of online applications are poor, full stop. We're not going to run out of things to build anytime soon.
Fantastic post Reg. Insightful as always.

I hope you'll still hang out here. You're one of the people that make this site great. :)
Religion and the internet are interacting, but not just in the ways you think. For example:
http://www.opensourcejudaism.com/ (NB: I'm not particularly well-informed about Judaism, but I heard Douglas Rushkoff talking about religion and internet culture, and that was one example. Just passing it along.) Authorities who want to keep those under their power uninformed of alternatives are in no way unique to religion.

Also, I'd wager that some religious hackers don't bring it up much because some hackers are really outspoken athiests, and it's a really tedious debate.
I have seen this post on here several .
The answer, its always the same.
I know Ruby coders who wont go near python.

We all have our own religions, some believe in trees others god, its all the same, experience.
Apple Launching App Store Beta Program
The commentary about PodTech reveals that everyone involved with the company is even more clueless than they realize. The lists completely miss the point. The reason PodTech failed is simply because they made something nobody wanted.
I don't agree at all with your first point. The internet is just a communication tool, albeit far more powerful than ones that have come before it. This means that it can be used to build religious organizations or proselytize just as easily as it could spread knowledge about secular humanism or whatever.
It will be very interesting to see how the Digg community takes this (if true). I think it will be a smooth transition, people don't view Google as evil (yet).
atheist, nihilist.
tl;dr.
Ponder the second sentence.
e-gold broke laws that were not in place when they started. PayPal was accused of pretty much the same things and managed to negotiate their way to compliance. e-gold had pretty much attempted to do that since they first attracted attention.

They like many other startups also went under the misconception that if you structure things outside the US, you're safe (you're not). US businesses like google are facing similar situations in the EU regarding data privacy rules.
created that initial micron of matter

Just curious, does this mean you believe there was an absolute, finite beginning of time/space?
I don't know whether to interpret that as 'Facebook is failing spectacularly at easy things with an awesome team' or 'those easy things apparently do not matter.'
So... The compiler itself is insanely efficient (I have heard that it is on the order of ~200 bytes). However, the compiled code is probably nowhere near as efficient simply because the high level constructs are hidden from the compiler. Furthermore, the time that you will save in execution, you will lose many times over in writing the program (this by the way is why no one should ever develop in C/C++ unless it is absolutely necessary). BF is primarily a joke as well as an interesting exercise in what is needed for completeness.
Digg CEO and Google's Larry Page: Did Just Wrapped Up a Deal
This is pure unmitigiated BS and you know it. Religious hackers don't talk about their belief in God on hacker sites because they get heavily censored (down-modded) and subjected to ridicule by the rabid atheists who have taken control of those sites (including YC) and are on a crusade to promote the myth that science belongs to atheists exclusively. Fuck that.

The very fact that your stupid comment was up-modded is a case in point.
The biggest problem that struck me was the reference to "The Man", reflective of the kind of paranoia that you find in the darker corners of the internet.

Aside from that, the article can't really be blamed for the ensuing gold-standard debate.
It sounds like the techcrunchies haven't actually used the Nokia N810. Just like their dream web tablet, the N810 already uses a Linux kernel, runs Firefox, Skype and plays Flash and other media. It also just hit their $299 price point.

They dismissed it, however, and said they want a bigger screen, even though it has has a fantastic 800x480 resolution and 225 pixels per inch (compared to the iPhone's 480x320 resolution and 160 pixels per inch).
deeply, but i'll argue against it until i die! err, unless you really wanna know why deeply.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/things.html
Well, what happened to him?
Whether you believe in the gold standard or not, this article was not about that.

There are many things they did that are very applicable to current startups. In particular governance models and transparency are very much issues that current startups need to worry about.

The point about Know Your Customer is also an important one. In the 90's when e-gold started there was a lot of experimenting with this. Most people in the industry were weary about government involvement, but didn't think it was going to affect them.

At some point it isn't inconceivable that social networks, email service providers and others will be required to follow similar Know Your Customer procedures to banks. Several countries are already starting to institute this.
we at Tipjoy are painfully aware of this story
> e-gold broke laws that were not in place when they started.

That kind of thing happens out there in the real world. Keeping abreast of the regulatory environment you operate in is part of doing business.
I used the term "The Man" as a satire on the paranoia of that community.
Heresies Learned At Unspace
Humorous: U.S. Makes Final Offer For Iran Talks: 700 Anytime Minutes
Egold was NOT about the gold standard, although the article makes it out to be. It may have shifted towards that in the very end due to the tightening regulations that forced them to abandon their initial purposes, but gold really had little to do with it. Get it straight.

These regulations are what make online payments that are as easy as cash legally impossible. It's a serious detriment to startups.
I truly feel it's about time they get acquired. They've been searching for a good fit, and I think everyone knew the obvious pair would be with Google.

Microsoft acquiring digg on the other hand? That would be a death notice to digg's userbase.
And who created him?
Good way to put it. I try to get people to imagine UI as coming into focus over 2-3 seconds. First you see motion, then large blocks of color, then faces, then large words, etc.
This is a weak post. There are literally thousands of sneaker variants available these days. He didn't have to buy the ugliest model. Also, if you actually run, your shoes get stankdified and munged up very quickly making them a poor choice for occasions where tasteful footwear might be important.
Ah, well that's fair enough then.

But with only seven words to go from, it's rather hard to tell the difference between satire and the real thing.
Tabhunter is like Quicksilver for tabs.

The current version of Tabhunter uses the same keyboard shortcut as OS X's "Special Characters" character palette. An easy workaround is to create a dummy entry in the Keyboard & Mouse preferences (in the "Keyboard Shortcuts" section) that doesn't do anything but uses the same Command-Option-T keyboard shortcut.