skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, making an OS with pre-emptive multi-tasking with a modern graphical UI that could be installed (and be fast) on an affordable family PC with just 4MB of RAM, is "software mediocrity". The stories of "old glory days" should be reserved strictly to true geniuses who wouldn't touch anything cheaper than 10K UNIX workstations.

I used to work under a CTO who's been in OS/2 kernel group at the time of their cooperation with MS. He's still claiming them all idiots and arrogant pricks, only "their" OS/2 eventually worked out, but "his" OS/2 silently died.

You can't beat at the same time the mighty gorilla (IBM) and ambitious uprising young startup (Apple) on marketing or luck alone, you'd need an engineering arm slightly above mediocre level.

So... I call BS on your comment. I bet Microsoft in the 80s was more exciting place to be than Google is today.
> You can't copyright the way scrabble is played any more than you can copyright the game of "football" under the laws governing "the NFL rulebook" (an actual document).

As companies other than EA have discovered, you can use the non-copyrighted rules to the game, but you can't use the NFL team names and logos in your version. Scrabulous picked a name that was a trademark problem and copied the board exactly to add a copyright problem to the mix.
Peeking into Google's use of data
It's merely a difference of approach. Balsamiq seems to be a very nice business...but it's not a startup according to pg's definition. The goal does not seem to be "get acquired or have an IPO". Building a lifestyle business as a solo founder is entirely feasible...if a little exhausting after a while (I ran a solo founder business for seven years before starting my current business).
that image was probably from here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001080.html
I just saw the Omnisios last night, and there wasn't a hint in their manner that this huge news was about to break. Great poker faces guys, and congratulations!
But that's not the question. The question is: where is your best bet as a founder to make the most money over the long haul factoring in the relative odds of any success at all (which are likely different).
YouTube and Omnisio Join Forces
Please don't link stories directly to PDFs; it does odd things with the RSS feed.
Leverage the Wisdom of the Crowds With Wisia
Inspirational blog and success story. Congratulations and thank you for sharing!
SpiderMonkey. Brendan Eich started Narcissus, and was going to bootstrap JS2 off of it (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/005689.html), but I don't know if that's still the plan now that SpiderMonkey is merging with Tamarin.
Google will aquire GitHub.com (prediction)
Google Code should be revamped. It's a great resource, but lately GitHub is a total change.
From my own experience as a GNU/Linux NOOB, I believe that if you research the hardware and the distro you want to run in relation to that hardware BEFORE you purchase, you will be fine. Sticking to the Intel chipsets (as I believe Linus himself recommended) will go a long way toward a smooth experience. And that's coming from a noob. I am on my first Ubuntu install on my soon to be old machine. I just built a new machine, and Hardy installed without a problem. Ran my 24 hour burn in test, no problems. So a diligent noob can indeed have a smooth experience provided he/she does his/her homework.
My conclusion:

If the profit is your the only goal then sometimes (as Starbucks demonstrates) you can (and should actually (to reduce operational costs)) undercut basic customer service.
Gears, BrowserPlus, and Web 3.0, baby
"Except that energy saving is capped. If we're using 5kw and we want 100kw, saving that 5 is nice but only 5% of the goal."

Your argument is flawed because you are assuming that you either have to create new electricity or conserve electricity and you can't do both. The least expensive way to get X units of new energy is always going to be some mix of conservation and creation, and the free market lets us find the most efficient point along the spectrum.

"People don't spend more money than they have to. As energy costs have gone up, the low-hanging fruit has been picked."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/28/energy_efficien...
Samsung i8510 INNOV8 8GB unlocked 
Introducing New Samsung i8510 INNOV8 8GB, with great intriguing 8 megapixel camera. If we enumerate the the features of this cellphone, it has almost intriguing features like 3G, Digital camera, WI-FI, GPS, Music player. Deal Price: - $459.99
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=261437
Troll.

YC funds single founders all the time. There were several in our batch.
How did you do the marketing for Balsamiq? Or is that covered in one of your blog posts?
New Media set to reshape the future of New Zealand journalism.
That's a very busy site. That problem is shared by all the snippets. Start deleting stuff that doesn't change (e.g. the icons), till what's left is mostly stuff that does (titles, usernames).
I made the filters interface and I agree that its horrible.

Maybe only the keywords and languages filter should be shown by default with a small '|> more filters` link that expands the rest of them.

We could have an autocompleter for all the different filter types but then one can not 'browse' things when bored... but I guess if it's a drop-down box it may work as well.

Also making the search 'really nice' would be awesome but it's the same problem as above... there's no way to randomly browse for stuff. Although having the search nice and the filters hidden would allow people to find stuff and also browse for things.

The search is currently 'not so bad'... it takes into account language, keywords, license etc. So you could do 'Python UTF-8' and it will return the correct things.

Having language specific versions is a good idea, and it would be fairly trivial to add.
Not true. Zoho is cleaning up.
That was the algorithm I used, though of course it was in Java. It's actually amortized constant time (assuming a sensible dequeue implementation), because each number you push on can be popped off only once. If you end up popping lots of entries at once, it means that you went a long time without popping anything as the dequeue was populated.
Searching for my name returns my linked in profile as the first hit ... with a picture of Charles Nutter.
> Within a few months, most of the participants had resorted to exercising as much as they chose to. That left researchers with a slightly different data set than they had planned for...

This self-selection tends to invalidate the study I think. It is possible that the people who chose not to exercise much were exactly the ones who needed it the most. The people who chose to exercise a lot are more likely to have been fitter in the first place.
Cuil made the mistake of telling the user they found 0 results. Instead they should have used Cuil for main results, and then if nothing was found should have displayed Google or Yahoo results(probably Yahoo because of the whole Boss thing).

That way at least half of your results would be relevant.
It was an example. And to your point, I was assuming you'd be serving an app using ASP.Net or PHP or something, not serving static files.
I agree. White americans, are similiar to Europeans (more like a mix), yet they are a lot fatter.
And how do you explain people in North California, or northern VA/DC/Maryland being a lot slimer than people just a state away.

It seems more a enviroment/culturual/city walkability thing
Visual search engine Like.com raises double digit millions
I haven't had to deal much with IE in the last couple of years, but when I did, the only sane way I found to debug JS code was to have Visual Studio installed, and to use the VS debugger to hook into JS code.
Yankee apologists are bad enough. Now we have fat people apologists. It really isn't hard: exercise moderately, take walk breaks, get enough sleep, consume primarily vegetables then fruit then meat/carbs. Eat five small meals a day and focus on lower calories.
Vista SP1 won't install on dual-boot systems (Trusted computing veers its ugly head)
But if all that's left is the title and user name how would someone know what language or license the thing is under? Or if all the icons are deleted how would you know that 'Python' is the language and not the license...

Also stuff kind of gets deleted as you apply the filters:

http://www.siafoo.net/snippet?owner_id=5&language_id=59&...

But it is true that most people will not care who owns something or what the license is... so maybe that sort of thing should only be displayed in some kind of 'advanced view'
This self-selection tends to invalidate the study

Not to mention the fact that almost no treatment of a "study" in popular media distinguishes between correlation and causation. There is a difference, a fact lost on almost everyone these days.

[I lost .4 pounds last Thursday commenting on Hacker News. Therefore, typing causes weight loss :-) ]
Thanks, I had no idea it existed, passenger is kind of a mod_ruby? isn't it?
Watched the video. I'm very impressed by the resolution of the 3D x-ray scans.
The walkability and culture things are pretty critical, but my armchair opinion is that the biggest factor is fat consumption. Americans eat something like 20% as much fat as they did in the 40s, and the drop off since the early 80s has been fairly sharp. People are eating much less fat and much more starch, with all the insulin and fat storage implications that brings.

Across time and between nations now the role of fat is pretty clear. More fat, thinner people. The recent studies that have put people on high fat, low carb diets are unmatched. People lose the weight and keep it off when you tell them to cut the potatoes and eat butter instead.
One theory says that the food you eat can affect your set point. High-calorie, strongly flavored foods that are easily digested (which make up most of the modern American diet) raise your set point. Breaking the flavor-calorie association with flavorless calories supposedly lowers your set point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet
I thought they solved that problem when they invented the <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags.
If I read correctly all they even looked at was light treadmill exercise. Yeah, you have to do that for hours to impact the body. You have to burn through glycogen stores to really get anywhere. It's different for more intense sessions and strength training, though. They can be short and have impact beyond calorie arithmetic.
Damnit, can we please stop this "TPM = Trusted Computing" FUD that's been floating around. The TPM is a hardware-secured cryptographic assist that anyone can use. It is extremely useful in security applications, and if you read the article what Microsoft is trying to do is both correct and secure.

Trusted Computing is part of a larger effort of which the TPM chips were only one small part, and a part which is arguably one of the most beneficial-to-the-consumer parts of the system.
Pygame 1.8.1 released.  Pygame gives multimedia to python.
Who the hell could eat primarily vegetables? You'd be on the shitter half the day.

Also, a fruit heavy diet is particularly bad for weight loss. Humans don't deal with fructose too well.
People also consume many more calories in places where they didn't in the past. For instance, a soy latte from Starbucks has 210 calories. If you don't change anything in your diet or exercise habits and drink one of these every work day, you'll gain 15 pounds in a year.
I do and I'm not. You should eat a lot more vegetables than fruit - I should have articulated that better.

I'm not saying you have to follow such a diet, but the fattie excuses are laughable when solutions are right in front of them. For more information on diet:
http://www.lesmills.com/files/globalcentral/Consumers/Health...
I don't understand why people think staying fit is such a god damn mystery. Exercise a few hours a week, eat a well balanced diet, get enough sleep. How hard is that?
I don't know this for sure, but if I recall correctly people eat fewer calories now than they did in the 70s. I know it's not a dramatically different number either way. It's the composition of the calorie that has changed. I'm firmly convinced of the fat vs starch theory. People eat much less fat and oils now and eat more starch.
It depends on the vegetables. I eat mostly vegetables, chicken and fish and don't have that problem.
India's '$10 laptop' to cost US$100 after all
The "seven a day" recommendation seems to be baseless myth. Nobody can figure out where it came from. Surveys find no correlation to life span or health beyond two servings of vegetables a day.
Cloud computing with Amazon Web Services, Part 1: Introduction
What makes code beautiful?
Apple iTunes University (lectures for the iPhone)
The classified puzzle
You could even throw in a free latex keyboard cover as a promotional item.
> High-calorie, strongly flavored foods that are easily digested

I think French cuisine is WAY more flavorful and calorie dense, and they're thin.
No Browser Left Behind - Canvas support in IE
And if I do recall, one of the points in "Getting Real" is to copy design of a website that is completely unrelated field.
Interesting - do you happen to have a source? Here's some for me:

http://docnews.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/3/10/8

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-03-15-fruits-vegeta...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070415183652.ht...

Regardless, I definitely agree with your starch points at the top of the thread.
Vista Blind Taste Test
The article is from March. Not news.
"Google Code should be revamped" is that the only reason you make this prediction?
A live streaming vote-a-thon
Is that how much the US dollar is worth these days? It's worse than I thought...
Google won't acquire GitHub because a) they're not for sale just now, and b) Google has a history of avoiding companies that don't share at least some of their underlying technologies. GitHub's Rails/EngineYard combo is probably enough to put GOOG's technical M&A team off the track. Plus, they would have no interest in Git internally, having built a ton of cool tools around their version of Perforce.
Btw, you can also read this: http://www.devlounge.net/publishing/things-to-consider-when-...
More interesting question: how do you keep a running standard deviation?
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 (W3C Recommendation)
Actually, the two services are quite different. GitHub hosts git repositories and integrates with other services. Google Code hosts SVN repositories, but also includes bug-tracking, easy analytics, bandwidth, and downloads.

A more plausible thing for google would be to build a backend for git so they could store git objects, either on bigtable or on GFS. They need this to make the hook into their infrastructure. As soon as that backend is done, they don't need that much work to get a service akin to GitHub.

It doesn't really ring with me that they should want to acquire GitHub.
Ask YC: Logo Crowdsourcing/Competition sites?
I was wondering if anyone here knew of any logo competition sites, similar to this one:

http://logosauce.com/

all help is appreciated. Thanks!
Plombiers Sans Frontieres. That is a brilliant name. Someone really should do it.
Collections of Interface Design Elements
Really? Are you sure the repeal of the Corn Laws had more effect on economic growth than Boulton's investment in Watt? I'd be reluctant to claim that.
I'm suprised that no one mentioned the irony of the google street view driver not wanting to have his picture taken in a public place . . .
I don't think IB produces executable output.
Is it really a blind test? I can't see any results.
The video begins like an advertisement, continues like and advertisement, i'm not sure i can trust it, it doesn't look like it was done by an independent company.

I'd love to see the results of a usability test between OSX, various flavors of Linux, and varios versions of Windows.
Asking first time users to acheive simple tasks like sending and reading email, using the web, storing and sharing pictures and listening to music.
Much of what you're referring to is Microsoft in the 80s, while much of what Chen writes about is from the 90s.

Windows as a platform is an epic achievement in software: they managed to create a commercially successful OS that's pretty stable/usable/responsive even in the face of a combinatorial explosion of possible off-the-shelf hardware configurations.

However, it used to crash all the time and it still has a terrible security model. It wasn't pre-emptive until at least Windows 95, after a decade of work, when a typical PC had much more than 4 MB RAM. The hard work of designing a good, modern GUI was done by PARC and Apple; Microsoft just had to reimplement it for different hardware.

I don't think Windows was good until Windows NT 4/Windows 2000.

Don't act like Microsoft's success is entirely due to engineering, nothing to do with IBM's retarded decisionmaking, nothing to do with Bill Gates's extralegal bullying, and nothing to do with John Sculley's mismanagement of Apple.

Getting back to Raymond Chen, he finds Windows' annoying quirks and flaws to be amusing. He also acts like a condescending jerk a fair amount of the time by disparaging users or developers.
My whole point was that what actually helps children in developing countries most is not heroic rescue missions but boring infrastructure improvements. That is, the stuff that helps children in developing countries most is the stuff that helps everyone, like making power transmission more efficient, or cloth manufacture cheaper.

Lots of YC funded startups make the world more efficient in some way. Octopart, for example. They make the electronics industry more efficient, and that helps everyone, just in a quiet, diffuse way.
http://99designs.com/
Are we using the same OS? I find the color difference between focused and not focused very hard to see. I hate that the maximize, etc buttons are just colors with no symbols, I can never remember what each one does.

The finder folder windows have tons of unused space that should be filled with buttons for useful actions. I recently did arrange by name on the desktop instead of the folder because I had to go to the menu bar on top and didn't realize the folder was no longer active, so it did the desktop instead.

The folder itself should have buttons that do these things, so I can go directly to what I want. And to make it worse there is no undo arrange!

The mac desktop is not polished - it's sparse. Apple fixes usability and polish by removing functionality.
I just quickly went through the references and every one of them is either: a pooled analysis (inscrutable), a relative risk factor analysis (worthless; assumptions piled on assumptions), or doesn't indicate anything about servings.

I have in the past seen actual population studies, not pop media articles, looking at relative vegetable consumption and coming up blank. High rates of heart disease in indian vegetarians, very low rates of heart disease in low vegetable consumption mormons, etc.

Actual controlled experiments (not surveys) come up blank when they feed people more fruit and vegetables than a relatively low cut-off. Of course surveys are going to be very hard to get any useful information out of because of course health conscious people in America will tend to eat vegetables; that doesn't establish causation, only that they follow one piece of advice whether valid or not. Look at these actual experiments:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=Search&Term=%22Freese%20R%22[Author]&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_RVAbstractPlus

Consistently no significant blood chemistry effects from high fruit/veg diets.
As others have pointed out, Google could fairly easily add git support to Google Code. I think it would be nice to have both sites available. I don't like lighthouse, and so it's annoying to me that github doesn't have its own slick and sexy issue tracker built in.

But the politics of Rails mean that the github guys are unlikely to want to piss off the lighthouse guys by including even the simplest issue tracker.
crowdspring.com
It depends on your definition of success... I believe you can be very successful as an individual, but this will be limited by your capacity.

One person can go only so far (not that this is by any means insignificant e.g. PlentyOfFish apparently serves millions of uniques and earns US$10,000 per day with a staff of one). "Singles" will inevitably hit a glass ceiling where they will need more resources if they want to break through.

The secret to continuing your initial success is ensuring that these additional resources can leverage off your initial good work AND add value of their own in excess of the complexity added/strain they place on you and your new "organisation". Far easier said than done.
Works absolutely beautifully here with Firefox 3 on OS X.
Chris Sacca: Couldn't be happier for Omnisio
Ah, but they're a dumb pipe. We actually a) also give you your own blog with blog address, and b) host all your images, video, music and files. =)
I don't know why we use ORM in the first place. I mean, if your data isn't relational, why are you putting it in a relational database? Why not use a simpler persistence layer?
From youtube's blog,
"We believe we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible with online video, so stay tuned for other tools and features that will let you do even more with your videos. "

From Omnisio,
"We believe we've only scratched the surface in terms of what's possible with online video, and we are really looking forward to taking the video viewing -- and creating -- experience to the next level."

Omnisio was first to write. See startups are better than big companies
Yankee apologists?
Lame. Watch the individual videos:

- a lot of MS:"this is really vista." pawn:"really?"

- a lot of MS:"Here, let ME show you _randomGadget_" pawn:"huh. wow."

One thing I notice is what few actual pawn responses are given, seem to be coming from people who either a) have never touched or seen Vista aside from this 5-10 min DEMO or b) have never touched or seen a computer aside from this 5-10 min demo or a kiosk at their local mall... Again, this is DEMOED by a MS rep - these pawns don't even get to touch the box or use Vista...

Vista looks pretty at first - thats about it - and that really all that is required to convince people that an OS's UI looks friendly with just an glance. The real trick is taking the OS home, putting it on your box and continuing to like it after the novelty wears off - exactly what did not happen. Instead, countless people, MS fans and haters alike, obtained Vista, installed and used Vista and then decided they did not like it.

I was really excited about Vista - until I used it for about 2 weeks... Then I became tired of the excessive boot times, the sluggish performance on app load and the general bugginess of it all - on my new dual core 2.4 ghz, 2GB machine... Then I installed Vista, run XP virtually and could not be happier... I have booted Vista several times over the past couple years to update and try it again - always go back to Linux...

But thats just this pawn's experience.
It's not "Fuck you Starbucks" it's "Fuck you 58th Street Starbucks"
I doubt I'd recommend replacing fat with carbohydrates, but you're correct in that sugars (starches/carbohydrates break down into...) cause the body to store fat (more specifically, the elevated insulin levels that accompany this).

Regarding weight loss: I work & exercise with a variety of body types (these body types have people names too!), and, within this small sample, I've found that the dominating factor in overall weight is diet, not exercise.

Essentially, exercise controls muscle tone and how "tight" the skin is, while diet seems to control the overall body shape.