skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Side note: I was always amused by the fact that they won't let you rent a car until you are old enough to drink.
I'd do a Lisp operating system. The Lisp VM would be a part of the kernel. User Mode C programs would compile to Lisp bytecode and would all run sandboxed. Then I'd add support for languages like Ruby and Python by compiling them to Lisp.
i am the young genius hacker !
I love my MBP, but in my experience AppleCare support is horrible compared to the competition. If something goes wrong with your Dell laptop, they will send a technician out to you the next day and repair it on-site. If something goes wrong with your Mac, you have to make an appointment to take it to an Apple store, and you may have to leave it there for up to a week while it gets repaired.
Most animals have something like half a billion heartbeats of life. This can be extended to a billion through limiting diet and sex, or basically asceticism.

Humans, on the other hand, have three billion.
What college?
2500? Microsoft has ceased being a software development company and has become an employment program for programmers.
No, there shouldn't be a drinking age. Let parents decide. Why is this on Hacker News?
Yeah, I like Germany's style: 16 for beer and wine (unless with a parent, then whatever), 18 for "schnapps"

That way, drinking is something you are first exposed to at dinner with the family gasp
the 'proof' of benford's law at wikipedia is very elegant.
Screencasting: How To Start, Tools and Guidelines
I've thought for years that the Upper Midwest would be a future hotspot. Around 1999-2000, I had the sense that Manhattan would grow very strong during the 2000s, which it did, and that Chicago/Twin Cities would come up during the 2010s in a major way, which seems likely.

One important demographic trend is that, even though people may be marrying later, they seem to be forming long-term, serious relationships earlier-- often in mid-college. This means that people are actually less mobile/nomadic than they were in the past two decades, and so you're not going to see the bulk of the talent gravitating to 3 or 4 coastal cities; you'll see it gravitating toward 10 or 20 more well-distributed cities.
If $20/year for a cert breaks a nonprofit, what are they doing with a website to begin with?
You know what? I changed my mind, I agree with you. It's pretty manifesto-ish, and it really appealed to my emotions.

I posted the link because I really like several of their projects (dwm, dmenu, libixp) -- they seem to have the same aesthetic as the core Unix/Plan 9 people (e.g. K&R, Rob Pike) and djb. I'm also suffering through maintaining a rather large codebase right now. :/
As a lawyer, I laughed and laughed about the lawyer not being able to admit "he'd screwed up". It's such a common problem and start-up founders are well advised to carefully vet not only their own advisors but also the VC's or Angel's ones. The truth is that many, many advisors are inexperienced (no one knows all of the answers in a world where human knowledge doubles every few years) but it is the advisor's failure to admit a lack of experience or knowledge which is potentially fatal to YOU.

Congratulations on the great article, Graham. I've read tones of this sort of stuff over the years and I believe that your article is the closest to an honest, sensible guide to fundraising I've ever seen. It should be mandatory reading for all would-be startup founders.

Please, please keep up the good work!
Are you from the UK? The US drinking age law is broken all over the place, especially in college. Taking out people who tee-total for religious or health reasons, I suspect that less than 5% of people have their first drink at or after 21.
"Design Products for Yourself" works in the brave new world of the long tail.

'You' are probably representative of a bunch of consumers worldwide. Enough to make a market.

'He' isn't in that world. He's in the mass market world where you need 'market share' and 'mass appeal.' So being very appealing to some people is no good.

In that world, you needed to be 'good enough' for lots of people. Problem is people will move away from good enough to good when it becomes available. And it almost impossible to be good for everyone.
I wish, it would probably be more profitable. Too labor intensive though.

I knew about that interpretation of the name going in, but thought it might help. No way of knowing if it has or not, but the site does surprisingly well, so it at least isn't killing it.
Great presentation last night at the JS meetup!
If you can admit you are clueless, then the next honest move is to resign.
Engineers + A Paper Tablecloth = ...
Top 10 Note Taking Applications : Great for code snippets
"in ten years all media consumption will be through an IP network"
Steve Ballmer. Beginning at 29 seconds he specifically states, “there will be no media consumption in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network, there will be no printed newspapers, no printed magazines…).

what an ass

woops.. the video is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2008/06/05/VI2008060500273.html?sid=ST2008060403830
The post was two weeks after Palm CEO's remarks. And a month before the iPhone was even announced.

I guess that it was "difficult" by your definition then.
I remember this one. The problem was that it depended on all your friends also having Android phones. I don't think the quote is accurate though. I wouldn't say either "quite possibly" or "worst x ever."
Windows didn't take over the market because Mac OS sucked. It won because it allowed scores of OEMs to make all sorts of computers targeted at all sorts of consumers.

That's the same with the iPhone. Believe it or not, a lot of people hate AT&T. Or they have family on Verizon, and get free minutes when talking to them, so they sign up with Verizon. Or Sprint or T-mobile or whoever else. Or they get 15% off from work.

No matter how great the iPhone is, being tethered to AT&T means that >2/3 of customers won't even consider it. What this means is that Android, by being on whichever carriers want it, immediately appeals to at least 2x the number of customers. It could be significantly less good than the iPhone, and it will still sell more.

Then there's the form factors. It might be hard to believe, but most people just want to talk on their phone. Android can be on a cheap-ass clamshell. People with cheap-ass clamshells might still want to check the weather, play simple games, etc, so there will still be a market for apps there.

A lot of people use their mobile for business. They care about call quality, battery life, and a keypad, all things the iPhone sucks at. Those people will, on whichever carrier their company has a deal with, have Android phones available to them that fit that needs. (No idea if any will make inroads on Blackberry though.)

The iPhone has Apple/AT&T's marketing budget. Android has Google, a bunch of OEMs, and a bunch of carriers.

All of those are inherent benefits of openness.
As I understand it, in addition to any other problems there's currently short-term budget problems with many Federal grants. Various spending bills are being held up in Congress while Congress waits to see who the next President is going to be, and many researchers currently have grants which have been officially awarded, but which they still can't spend.

Expect this short-term clusterfuck to clear itself eventually sometime after November regardless of who wins.
Growth is tough in general. A team getting larger forces a leader or leaders to emerge. Not everyone can lead or manage. Not everyone takes direction well. All separate skills from just being able to code or design.

Larger teams is where politics come in and where I don't want to be. Ideally I only want to work in smaller teams.
Still doesn't make it the worst idea ever. Hell, you could have an app which depends on the cube of the adoption rate of a vaporware platform.
After 6 months you'd have a rushed prototype. What good is that? Building a Lisp operating system may be interesting from an academic point of view, but it fills no need. A waste of 6 months.

In 6 months you can only do something mundane. For instance, adapt SBCL so it flawlessly interacts with CPAN and remove all the legacy lisp stuff. Then you'd have a clean lisp with a great library environment. People could actually -use- it. Still not a great business idea, but it has a small chance to rock the world. Especially since Ruby and Python are slowly becoming popular the ahead-of-the-curve guys are getting edgy. They want to move on to the next big language, and they want that language to be Lisp.
...this thread emphasizes how much I need to get out of St. Louis.
PG said the same thing when I demoed my Jump to Conclusions Mat. =(
I've used Camstudio and really liked it. Works brilliantly on a dual monitor setup. Have your script and outline on one monitor, and drive the screencasts on the other.
1.36GB transferred in 1.2e+03 seconds (20min) across VPN - fast or slow?
I setup a new firewall today and just achieved the above rate across a VPN. Is this fast or slow compared to your VPN?
They don't seem to have huge amounts of time and money to invest in a complex project I'm not quite sure how to monetize.
Posting a question on Hacker News about how to meet Hackers is a good start. If you are not in SC, which you are most likely not, you might post where you are.

I'm always trying to meet more hackers in my area which is Denver.
After spending 5 mins with the site: Fuzzyshot doesn't do anything that Flickr doesn't already do better.

Not to say it can't, but as-is it doesn't.
Well, if 18 year olds are good soldiers because they aren't fully mature, why not allow 14 year olds to be soldiers? Or 8 year olds for that matter... after all, as African warlords have shown, even a small child can be a great soldier with enough cocaine.
Q1. Throw up a portfolio site for them and hire them out at 2x what you have to pay them.

Q2. Taken care of in Q1.
A Visual Message for Peace
No, I don't think you've ever used a phone with a decent keypad. I used type on suretype keypads about as fast as I could handwrite, and even faster on full qwerty models.

As far as typing goes, my iPhone is just comical. It is not even responsive enough to register all keypresses, let alone get them correctly.
Sorry, did you say stable and maintainable?
Looking at Verisign's prices ( http://www.verisign.com/ssl/buy-ssl-certificates/secure-site... ), certs range from $400 to $1500. And other certs (Digicert, etc) range from $150/single domain/year to $500/wildcard for domain/year.
The LXF Test: OpenSolaris 2008.05
Good job Breck, I took the liberty of kicking the whole thing off for us!

Enjoy!
Serious question for the Lisp wizards in the audience: Hasn't this been done? What aspect of this did the Lisp machines lack? (Disregarding the obvious fact that the specific languages "Ruby" and "Python" hadn't been invented yet, back in the Lisp machine's day?)
Sometimes a turd is just a turd.
Thanks for explaining the slow-burn/patent correlation.

I'm looking at Justin.tv, and I've never seen smooth live video online before. It's consistently smooth (though minor freeze-frames every so often). Your implementation is a better method for live video.

Is this because your implementation is coded better - tighter, more efficient, cleverer - or is there a fundamental new insight behind it, that makes it faster?
Will the site double as a coffee table in case you don't have a coffee table?
In many ways the Bold isn't a competitor to the iPhone. You want one for the same reason I bought one - a large screen for multimedia and web.

Now, if depended on your smartphone to get stuff done, you'd be scratching your head over the iPhone. It may have eye candy, but what about the features, reliability or stability that you'd actually need? I don't think the HN crowd appreciates how many people out there can do 80% of their job with just a BlackBerry. I didn't understand what the big deal around the BB is until I actually used it in such a scenario for a bit, and I know using the iPhone like that would be a no-go.
Why would you have to go back to school to learn a new programming language?

Learning a new language would be the excuse, and meeting new hackers in school the goal.
Plan A: Stage a programming contest in which the 4 CL programmers compete for the honor of being your cofounder. The graphic designer can act as judge.

(You may have better luck with 2 teams of 2. That's the conventional wisdom around here, at least -- better for everyone to have a cofounder.)

Plan B: For extra credit, try the Ender's Game version of Plan A. Make the contest be "building a product that people want" and have each of the CL programming teams work on its own project. If, at the end of six months, any of the projects is attracting users or (praise be) making money, offer to invest more money in those projects.
Bigger screen, but the same resolution as the Bold. The text on the Bold is so much sharper than anything else -- I can read it at the smallest font setting at arms length, no problem. Besides, the keyboard isn't just for typing novels. I type Lots of emails from it too.

Really, the bold and the iphone are competing in different markets though.
you might post where you are.

In LA. Moving to San Fran in January.
hmm the yc title is a bit inaccurate. MS has 2500 employees for Windows 7, with 40% of that being developers (it would be really sad if most of the other %60 were just paper pushing managers). Moreover, the size of the dev team does not necessarily mean it's a quality dev team
Another alternative is http://listen.grooveshark.com/
You can be "problem seeks solution" or "solution seeks problem". Both work, but the former is easier.

Are we solving a customer pain with Fuzzyshot?

But what customer pain are you solving? You describe your solution but not the problem...
for a masochistic corporate culture that has the motto for something pretty good as 'it doesn't suck', I somehow doubt Apple will have the 'Resting on their laurels' GM syndrome until after Jobs leaves

(I have had no problems with the new intel macbooks and pros)
JustHackIt - Post your idea and find people to start building it with
The only thing you're going to find in sleep.fm is corn.
Communication is actually bad. It inherently involves a loss of information.

Sounds to me like Avi is in the business of telling rather than being in the business of doing.
I think that the light grey font coupled with the small amount of line spacing makes it difficult to read article bodies. Otherwise, I've registered and made my first post :)

As a side note, other than the lack of members, what makes your site stand apart from hacker news and proggit?
Freedom Stick - Freedom From Firewalls
From what I can tell, this provides two operations: interval and below. I'm not a Common Lisp user so I don't know the intricacies of CLOS but it seems to me that these functions can be written much more compactly, albeit without the extensive error reporting (in Scheme):

(define (interval a b)
(if (<= b a) '()
(cons a (interval (+ a 1) b))))

(define (below x)
(if (<= x 1) '(0)
(append (below (- x 1)) (list (- x 1)))))

What advantage does the wall of code in the article have over these two functions?
I have a Mac Book, an iBook, two Dell laptops running Ubuntu (one is our media center and my wife uses the other for work), two dell towers (one I bought 5 years ago which still has XP; the other is a 10 year old 900MHz P3 which is my file server, running SuSE 11 and Compiz), and I have two OLPC XOs (two kids; one was a gift). That's 8 computers in the house plus a server I admin that's running CentOS.

The one Dell running Windows has 1) an HP scanjet 4470c that isn't supported in OS X or SANE and 2) MS Money with 10 years of data. GNU Cash is on my todo list and I found an epson scanner on craigslist for $40 that I'm going to get tomorrow. Once I resolve those two issues I will happily abandon my Creative Suite 2 and never use Windows again.

Meanwhile, people at Starbucks ask me how to get on the internet and while I help them with their HPAcerVaioToshibaGateway $500 special, I advise them to use Ubuntu instead of Vista. I give them the link to Ubuntu and I know they won't use it. One guy was so happy he bought me a coffee, even though I'm sure he will never follow that link. They use what ships with the computer.
RIAA confirms it's behind the Muxtape shutdown
This article's a bit unfair.

If you read the interview (kinda long) the quotes' are a little out of context. At least they don't really represent the jist of his arguments.

Sure, the business model is built on artificial product life-cycles, content-container hybrids that are unnecessary and market segmentation that is being aggressively created to wring as much out of a new flick as possible.

He refers to this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13736953@N00/2762004788/
(He segments the market across 2 axis (medium - store/mail/internet/kiosk & method - rent/buy/subscribe)

But given that environment, his arguments are reasonable. They want to focus on the big market - Physical Store. VOD subscriptions, he sees as a small market indefinitely. VOD buy/rent he sees as a long term direction so.

The point about new releases sounded a little more along the lines of:

The new release market is more substantial. We have chosen to focus on those. We can, if needed support the long tail.

It's a bit cheap taking shots at everyone & anyone in an anachronistic business. What do you expect them to do throw the business out the window & start over? The in store market still exists.
is it just me or does that logo make you think of smoke and mirrors?
I enlisted out of high school and had the good fortune to be stationed in Germany. Having a drinking age of 18, as Germany did, didn't cause any problems for them (compared to our problems). As one expert said, "the 21 year-old drinking age fosters rampant violation of and disrespect for law…"

http://www.opposingviews.com/arguments/legal-age-21-erodes-r...
does anyone else think "feature teams" sounds like product death?
Streakr - Login
Microsoft could have made a mistake but it could be that his customers are also searching for "nude female midgets" and "duck porn" and he just doesn't know it.

The only way to find out is to do some advertising on those terms and track the results.
Would it help if I explained that by 'asshole,' I meant 'anti-social jerk,' and was applying it to the flippancy of a 'love it or leave it attitude,' which, irrespective of any legality thereof, still makes one an asshole?
Worse, their logic sounds exactly backwards.

Presidents who support lowering the legal age are implying that they take the law seriously. If they didn't care about the law, why would they care about changing it?
Why would anyone pay for this there is at least 2 terminals which are open sourced on jailbroken phones.
What are folks using for AJAX functionality in PHP?
I've got an experimental project I'm working on with PHP (I'm new to the language/environment).

What are folks using for simpler AJAX development in PHP? I need relatively simple UI things, but hate reinventing the wheel.
Seeing the first code example on that page told me far more about what Cilk actually is than that entire press release.
MADD is pretty low in my opinion. They refuse to put many donated dollars towards helpful programs - and put most of their donations into TV commercials.

They also push spot checks for drinking and driving which I believe is misuse of tax dollars.

I am against drunk driving, but MADD go way past the line.
A commentary on Wiio's Laws of Communication
I liked the first and third ones.

The second, not so much.
The biggest difference is that your stores (interval 1 N) as an N-element list. Theirs stores it as an object with 2 slots, while still being a subtype of SEQUENCE so many built-in functions work as expected.
I don't think they are really against Drinking and Driving. They are against Drinking. Period. And they are also largely about inflating their own reputation and salaries.
I think most employers will have a blanket "we own your IP" policy. But most of them will also make exceptions (and in writing) on a case-by-case basis once you prove you're a valuable employee. Because obviously you're not going to actually do anything on your own time if it's going to be your employer's property, whereas if you convince them that there's a potential for good PR with no real cost, they'll go for it. Once you've demonstrated that you're good at your job, and your side activities won't conflict with that.
The main advantage that I see is that his class transparently works with any function expecting a 'sequence', which spec only defines as either a vector (i.e., 1-d array) or a list (i.e., linked list) while providing a some (extremely simple) lazy evaluation. I, for one, never realized that you could extend the sequence type in this way in SBCL.

For example, if he created an instance of his interval-sequence class with (below 100000000), he wouldn't actually have to allocate the memory for a hundred million element vector (or a 100 million cons cells). Instead, it would just use a handful of bytes to represent the start of the sequence, and the length.

By itself, it's fairly trivial. But, this sort of manipulation isn't part of the ansi spec so this post was just sort of letting us know what was possible (a 'hello world' of sorts).

I already have a few interesting ideas on how one could use this same technique to provide slightly smarter lazy evaluation, and some sort of time/duration manipulation stuff.
Simplicity is overrated because needless complexity so often goes unrecognized.

See law #5 : http://lawsofsimplicity.com/?p=54
But in the 80's, when this fall took place, MADD Canada wasn't around (it was formed in 1990) and driving laws were a lot more lax.
That's because corporations seem to feel less and less responsibility about the employees they hire.

When a company treats you only as good as they have to, you're only going to put in as much effort as it takes to not get fired.
What I'd love to see is a summary of great ways to marry both simplicity and power. Low bar and high ceiling is something of a holy grain in any given application.

Here are a few:

1) 80/20 -- pareto principle should be applied at all times to what is shown on the screen.

2) minimize what is shown on the screen -- on screen = attention. you're telling the user that something is important by showing it to them.

3) progressive disclosure -- if you mouse over or click on something, show more things you can do with it. proximity and action = the user telling you to show them more.
"For example, 18-year-olds from Ottawa, ON cross the border to Hull, QC"

I'd be interested to know how many MORE drunk drivers this puts on the road.
Warner Music: blanket internet license solution to free music
There's already a (partial) Python-in-Lisp project: http://common-lisp.net/project/clpython/
The thing is that lowering the drinking age doesn't dramatically raise the availability of alcohol for 18-year-olds. I know that when I was underage, I had no problem getting booze. And I work with teenagers now: they still don't have problems getting booze. What the higher drinking age does do is drive the drinking underground. So 18-year-olds have to drive more so that they can drink at bush parties. Or when a friend gets alcohol poisoning, they are afraid to get help.

Also, I would say that 80+% of people have their first drink before they legally can. This means that their parents usually have no clue they are drinking, and so they are less able to give their children guidance.
"Mozilla is working on a much more ambitious initiative called Screaming Monkey that will make it possible to plug Mozilla's entire next-generation JavaScript engine directly into Microsoft's web browser."

Embrace and extend, anyone?

I like Mozilla's chutzpa.
Software development management is all about balancing "one is the ideal team size" with "this project is going to take 200 man-years." You sacrifice productivity in order to complete stuff in a reasonable time frame.