skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's something that I hope (and trust) Apple will fix. That said, I don't use it very often, so its crashing isn't a constant annoyance. And it's still superior to every other mobile phone.

.48 is pretty impressive after slightly over a year. I'd like to see when and where it peaks.
i'm curious to know too
I loved it. Comics are way underused in marketing. They're the best of both video intros and text.

Also, the scope of what they're trying to explain in that comic? Extremely impressive. Virtual machine architecture. Heap fragmentation. Fuzz testing. They had Scott McCloud draw it? Porn!
http://www.southgatearc.org/propagation/2008/august_29.htm is also quite useful for context and trends with the current solar cycle. An exciting time to be looking at the sun, no doubt!
There was another time Apple was "remarkably profitable" and had an even higher market share than it does now -- the early 90s -- and they somehow lost that position. And the strategy that drove Apple to the margins -- and that built the largest financial success of the PC era -- was Mirosoft's broad licensing.

Then again, Apple tried a form of licensing their OS to clonemakers in the late 90s, and did not get the hoped-for benefits at that time.

So it's more complicated than Gruber's simplistic "Apple doing great right now -- licensing silly" sentiment. Different eras require different strategies, and Apple may yet hit (or already be at the point) where the winning move is to put MacOS on others' hardware.

I suspect if Jobs announced a licensing program tomorrow, we would hear from Gruber how brilliant of an idea it is.
I wanted a quick side project, building a Ruby Shoes IM Client
My score was 12 (on an old laptop screen). Cyans ruined my "intelligence" :)
Google just signed a 3 years deal with Mozilla. So, personally, I don't think that Google Chrome would be direct competitor to Firefox. They are in fact in two different market - normal browsing VS web application.

Refer:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrati...

http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2008/08/26/firefox-summit-ref...
Py 2.6: multiprocessing module
I loved the multiprocessing module. Getting rid of the GIL is a major win.

I would prefer not having a GIL, anyway, but this is far better than nothing.
Oh, wow! Thanks a lot. Good list of startups
From reading the headline, I imagined something on the lines of a new server... ;-)
3 Things They Should Have Taught In My Computer Science Degree
Hard Times Hitting Students and Schools
Google Chrome Comic: The Readers' Digest Version
I applied as a single founder last time, and nobody checked the working prototype I linked to. So it appears that you shouldn't spend your time working on that.

Edit: Or maybe I just didn't make the first cut as webwright suggests below.
You know, it's entirely possible to discuss this story here without getting into partisan politics. Can't we just stick to the relevant stuff?
Google already represents the internet to a lot of people as a result of it being perceived by these people as the entrance to the internet. "The portal is the network." From this perspective a Google browser is a seriously good way to lock these users in further. The multi-functional use of the address bar is also important - many people use it like this already.
I don't think this is an attack on Firefox over 50 million bucks. I think this is Google looking at the web and saying we need a faster, more stable, more rich, browser that has these 20 features to allow us to push our web apps forward. Their game is to make web apps equal to desktop apps so that they can sell advertising on them - and hammer Microsoft. This goes towards that goal. I'm looking forward to it. Firefox is in a lot of ways IE done right. This looks like a step forward in a new direction. Maybe not revolutionary, but a step forward none the less.
If you don't mind, what did you do? Did you go after other sources of funding? What are you doing with your prototype now?
Find a co-founder. If you think you can successfully run the company alone, then don't worry about it. Otherwise, you will need to find more people at some point, so you may as well address that now.
We have a color copier in the shed out back printing money. The whole software thing is just a clever ruse.

Actually, we have both an Open Source version and a proprietary version. The proprietary version adds a few nice features, primarily in automating installation of about 85 popular web applications, as well as some other features related to making money with virtual hosting systems. And, it has a price, and people pay us money in exchange for the software.

I don't know the author (I don't think, though maybe I've talked to him on our forums or issue tracker; we have 1400 or so paying customers, and many thousands of Virtualmin GPL users, I can't really keep up), but we're happy to have him as a Virtualmin GPL user, regardless of whether money changes hands, and not just because he wrote a really nice blog post about us. We have absolute confidence that if ever he does need the features that Virtualmin Professional offers, he'll buy from us. We've found the single best marketing we can do is to get people to try our Open Source projects...nothing else is as good an indicator of whether they'll eventually buy our product than use of Webmin, Usermin and Virtualmin GPL. Which is good news, since we have several million Webmin users that haven't bought anything from us yet.

So, perhaps the interesting question will be whether we can build a company bigger than Parallels (or even cPanel) on a mostly Open Source basis. We're doing OK, so far, and growing at a nice pace, but nothing anyone would point to as an overnight success. But, we'll see.

Anyway, the author is not mistaken. We do make money, and the amount of money that we make is increasing at a respectable pace. It's enough money that I feel like my initial optimism about the business was well-founded (I feel like I picked the winner from among my stable of ideas) but not enough that I can slack off. So, it's probably just the right amount of money for this company at this stage.
Weird, I didn't identify myself so much with the "Do you know someone like this?" essay but I totally did with that "hyperbrain" thing, even though they're supposedly talking about the same thing...
Have you guys SEEN the respective code bases for Mozilla and WebKit?

Really, this was inevitable. Their whole tabs-as-process thing is too, when you think about it. Just imagine the potential for a browser-as-OS-with-processes-and-everything and how much they must be salivating to get it on devices and desktops NOT running Windows. It's a hell of a trojan horse in their winning battle to make Microsoft irrelevant...

And open source? <3
That is a badass presentation. I wouldn't have read 10% of that information had it been delivered as paragraphs of text.
Single founders get accepted all the time.

IMO, it's a pretty simple formula.

1) Build something people want-- ideally, prove it. Have users. Show that they log in every day and would sooner gnaw off their own arm than lose your app. There are other ways to prove market demand other than loyal users. Find them. Leave no question that people desperately want what you're building.

2) Prove that you can build stuff. Have an impressive and interesting resume for getting stuff launched/shipped-- ideally, you can show that you've build/shipped stuff under great adversity. Show determination.

3) Show that it's a big opportunity. I remember there was a team talking about building a tool to manage D&D campaigns online. That's not a big opportunity. YC only makes "keep the lights on" money with the 10-20m exits. You should hopefully be playing in a space where there is a ghosts chance of a 9-figure exit. They're pretty lenient on this one, I think-- ya never know what can get big.

(IMO) The biggest risk YC is taking on is that no one will want what you're building. The second biggest risk is that you aren't capable enough or determined enough to get it built. Your adding the risk that you can't find a decent co-founder-- which doesn't help.
Introducing Python for Series 60 Community Edition
I don't mind at all. I simply continued working on it - the good thing about creating software is that it doesn't cost money, it just takes time - especially when you have to earn a living on the side. It has taken me a bit longer than it would for a seasoned programmer, since I had to learn to code first. Particularly since I use quite a bit of javascript and CSS, which I find to be tricky to get right in all major browsers. I currently have all functionality nailed down, and spending time going through the UI (which I think is the most important part of development for most web-based startups) and checking up on security issues.

Probably ready to launch in two or three months time.
No offense, but I think it's a safer assumption that your application didn't make the "first cut".

I imagine they do a first pass over the apps to get to a "short list" and then dig a touch deeper, discuss it, etc. Given that YC has said over and over again that a working prototype is helpful, I think it's a pretty terrible suggestion to NOT spend time on it.
Is it possible that there are sunspots on the other side of the sun or are they pretty uniformly distributed on the surface?...
Google introduces its own browser
If you think you can do it alone you vastly underestimate how much work is involved in running a company. We've got two people and even working 16 hour days we're still swamped. Coding is like maybe 20-40% of the total work, depending on what sort of product you've got.

Start frequenting the OpenCoffee or similar in your area and start talking to people about what you're doing. There's a reasonable chance that in a couple of months you could fish up a nice co-founder.
I think it may indicate the project started as a Chrome layer on top of Gecko and they decided mid-project to use WebKit instead.

Just a tought.

They may as well change the name.
None taken. And I suspect you might be right, so maybe OP should disregard my parent comment. I have problems explaining the concept in simple terms, and this has probably not helped me. Particularly since I relied on the prototype to do the explaining visually. I remember reading a comment PG made about why some teams were chosen and some rejected where he wrote that some applications they simply didn't understand. I might fall in that category. Or maybe my idea just sucks ;-) Also, it probably doesn't help that I'm not a programmer.
Distribution was the marketing. The big blue e was all the marketing/branding they needed. Most users associate the Internet with that damn icon.
Not cool (cuil?) .
There are actually very few inconsistencies in browsers implementations of the JavaScript language, it's the DOM that's the problem. If all they're doing is swapping out the engine for a JavaScript 1.5+ compatible engine, then we should be fine.
The progression from the roundworm example is enlightening.
Hooray! We love it when that happens.

In all seriousness, though, being the Open Source nerds that we are, we cleverly trick our users into learning lots of interesting stuff about Apache and Linux and other stuff. When things need to be complex (as things occasionally do in a virtual hosting deployment) we don't make up our own complexities and leaky abstractions and slap them on top of the existing ones--we allow the user to see through to the Apache/Postfix/BIND complexities. For example, with redirect rules and match patterns. Very basic match patterns can be setup automagically, with very little effort...but when things get complex, the user can dig down to see the actual Apache rules. Likewise for almost all of the services we manage, if the user needs fine-grained control they can get to it without having to completely break out of the comforting Virtualmin UI. Baby steps to system administration competence.

We also spend a lot of time in our forums talking about the whys and wherefores rather than just the "Click here, click there, and save it".

We genuinely love the software our products manage (mostly). And we've both written books on the topic of system administration, in total ~1100 printed pages, which have now been combined into a massive wiki ( http://doxfer.com/Webmin ) and that's also a pretty good source of traffic and potential buyers for our products. Interestingly, our books are still selling a reasonable amount five years after publication (folks like tangible products, I guess).

We actually view education as a good marketing tool. The more people know about system administration, the more they'll understand why our products are dramatically better than cPanel or Plesk. The first time someone hits the command line with our competitors products they'll learn a hard lesson in the difference between template generated configuration files, and a product that understands the configuration files and respects non-generated directives and comments and file order. People don't go back to other products after spending enough time with Virtualmin and Webmin.
This took me about 5 mins -- score 0. Gender: female, age range: 16-19.

My method: I first grouped them in a rough approximation, and then treated it like a bubble sort -- I compared two at a time and moved them if one was closer to the goal color.
I thought it was great. Stuff like this works on so many levels:

- Presents a bunch of information in a memorable, easy to digest fashion.

- Kept my attention from beginning to end (the mind - mine at least - loves novelty)

- Recruiting tool - underlines what a cool place Google is can you see a Cisco or IBM ever doing this?

- Nice way to credit the engineers and designers.
" ... alternative therapists, the media, and the drug industry all conspire to sell us reductionist, bio-medical explanations for problems that might more sensibly and constructively be thought of as social, political, or personal."

<rant> Bingo. Unfortunately, I feel that most in our society will continue to have difficulty coming to this level of understanding until they can learn to see the purpose of their lives as more than the mere avoidance of death. A testament to the depravity of our destructive consumerist culture. </rant>

Though a more appropriate takeaway in this context might be a recognition of the genius of the pharmaceutical industry in their ability to define(or invent) problems to create markets for their solution.

(no matter how grotesquely obvious, destructive and unintelligent) http://abilify.com
How to Demo Your Startup (Part Two)
get a co-founder, really.
The thing that got me excited about StackOver flow was that it was announced just a few days after I spent days attempting to dredge information out of those Bulletin board type forums where there are 100's of non threaded replies/discussions to a question (and the experts are reluctant to help the noobs).

If only the correct answer could bubble to the surface, or the question asker would take the time to update the question with the discovered answer, so I reckoned Stack Overflow sounded like a great idea.

I have not used it yet, but I reckon it will solve more problems than it causes.

Jeff and Joels podcast and current following didn't have solve the chicken and egg problem either, so they are off to a good start!
I scored 7 on my macbook too. Let's agree to blame the macbook.
How to Write Your Own IM Bot in Less Than 5 Minutes
I work in projective space.
I'm a sucker for charts, so I hope X-rite releases some bell-curves based on the cumulative data they're collecting here.

The eye's lens tends to develop a yellow tint over time, so that suggests the older age ranges would have more points in the cyan range. And colorblindness is more common in men, so that might show up too. Or, more likely, the charts would just show which group has the best monitors. Useful marketing information, anyway.
Somewhat Less Del.icio.us
This is interesting, but this is a bit more hackish than simply re-rolling the dice. Most people would just reroll.

My personal opinion is that dice-hacks should be done to reduce the amount of thinking necessary, not increase it while producing a slightly better result.

I designed a role-playing system once based on the median of 5 d10s. That worked pretty well. It generates a similar bell-curve distribution to the one you get by adding dice, but doesn't require mental arithmetic with large numbers (e.g. 5d10 involves a range of 5-50). I think m5d10 is better than 5d10 because it's easy to develop a feel for "difficulty 7" vs. "difficulty 8"... whereas if the numbers are 37 vs. 38, it gets to the point where 1 point doesn't mean much, and the numbers seem completely made up (which, of course, they are, but they shouldn't seem so).
Ok, how about expounding this way: Unevidenced, unfalsifiable hypothesis presented as an explanation, with all the rigor of an armchair Olympics viewer armed with a 6 pack. Lame.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292142
I think you can be a one man band if you make iPhone apps (or something equivalent).
Very cool stuff in a big and technically demanding project. 1) Sites, tabs, and plugins as OS level processes. 2) Automated testing based on pagerank 3) WebKit 4) Advanced JS VM 5) Properly detachable tabs 6) Complex sandboxing 7) Google tools and services integrated
PHP Frameworks Benchmarks
Well, I mostly meant for YC-like startups where you're shooting for large-ish returns, having to deal with fundraising and all that jazz.
If a startup already gets significant press, does that lower or improve its chances of entering the YC program?
That's very interesting, and seems right, but I think you misread the original text. He was speaking about the impact on research funding. Regardless of the military consequences, the invention of nuclear weapons spurred much greater research funding.
What's the deal with this 'funding' talk? Why can't you let your customers 'fund' your product?
It's not the end of the world if your cofounders aren't ready to work full-time. It depends why. If they're in grad school, for example, and only willing to work on the startup on the side, that could be ok, so long as one of you will work full-time. (That's how it was with Viaweb.)

It would not be so good if they merely had jobs they weren't willing to quit to work for the new co. Then it's kind of a vote of no confidence in the new co. And since they'd be the new co, that means a vote of no confidence in themselves. If that's the situation, I'd try to find at least one new cofounder who was more enthusiastic.
I want to send TC an anonymous tip saying that the Reddit founders are having kittens fights to motivate employees.

Who needs sources?

Apparently, all those sites owners that got hit by Cuil need to stay anonymous... the Cuil bot might eat their site to get revenge. Or maybe it just makes good press.
There is a certain thrill to cracking a code.
Absolutely.

You know, I've been meaning to write a blog post about the gripes I've got with Google. Poor design skills, f'rinstance. But I've found that I can't honestly depict that stuff, not well. This project reminded me why: it's because despite shortcomings, Google still has a talented, ambitious core of people with a good mind for what would be GOOD for the Internet. I have high hopes for this.
Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser
Also, it probably doesn't help that I'm not a programmer.

I don't understand. If you're a non-programmer and you're working by yourself, how did you produce a working prototype?
Confirmation from the Googs itself:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser...
And did you see the need for Google to try and compete in the search engine space when there was already plenty of competition?
This is a competitor in the AIR / silverlight / JavaFX space

Javascript can be enormously faster: compare ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0, which are implementations of ECMAscript (which Javascript is also) in Adobe's Flash.

If Google can basically get these things right - local persistence, speed and animation tools - the Web OS that Microsoft has greatly feared will be finally upon us...
I learned how to program while doing it - isn't startups all about ovecoming obstacles?
What's the angle for actually getting folks to use this browser? It's taken years to get mom-and-dad to using Firefox.
I learned how to program while doing it

Great! I still don't understand why you said that you're not a programmer, though. You programmed, ergo you are a programmer. :-)
Go visit http://www.lovelettertomontreal.com/ and then compare it to something like http://www.weheartplaces.com/places/54-copenhagen. Now, how can you make something as awesome as the first out of the latter? If you can succeed at that, you might have something great.
"Have you guys SEEN the respective code bases for Mozilla and WebKit?"

I haven't... can you elaborate?
"This is interesting, but this is a bit more hackish than simply re-rolling the dice. Most people would just reroll."

It's the point...
This is something I hadn't noticed in the earlier postings about this browser:

"By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites."

While the other features of the browser are hard to judge without active usage, this one is huge. Firefox, for all its virtues, is still too much like early 90's operating systems -- not enough separation between processes (tabs).

In fact, since the browser is now the de-facto OS for a large variety of applications, it makes sense for browser writers to consciously design it as such. This means not repeating mistakes made in the OS world (mistakes such as not running processes in their own protected memory space, or using cooperative multitasking instead of preemptive, etc.)

Also, while firebug plays its role as gdb-for-the-web admirably, we're still in need of some os-monitoring tools: top, free, and some tools to more closely look at memory usage.

With the increasing number of high-quality browsers, I'm hoping at least some of them will make this realization and push in the right direction.
You think the linked thread is filled with false reports?

Often webmasters prefer not to reveal their exact sites the same places they trade SEO and monetization tips. Some forums even prohibit naming sites in their ground rules.
I meant distribution as in partnering with AOL to use IE, leveraging Windows monopoly consumer side and enterprise side, and arguing with the DoJ on software tying.

In terms of marketing, Microsoft did very little compared to Mozilla.
Re-Reading Built to Last
Bloghology Magazine Announces its First Edition | SlashBe
i cant find anything about this danish team and their v8 jsvm. are my google skills epic fail?
While useful for some simple tasks, I found the old pyprocessing module (on which this is heavily based) to be inadequate for many tasks. It would often crash for various reasons, and because of its signals-based-communication, was often not usable.

Signals in python can only be received by the main thread of execution. Thus, webapps (where the main thread is the one listening for connections), gui programs (where the main thread is the gui thread), and other programs with long-running daemons or main loops are often not usable with pyprocessing.

In the end, I found it easier to use threads for soft-concurrency (I/O-bound), and entirely separate processes with Pyro ( http://pyro.sourceforge.net/ ) for IPC in cpu-bound programs. This has the additional benefit of more easily scaling across machines, which is frequently the next step after scaling within a single machine.
Sure, but if you pass this law you don't get free Wikipedia for life on your kindle. While the law seems well intentioned I don't think restricting business models is going to encourage competition.