skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bought the vile Quickbooks. You know, the classic kind that runs on Windows. (The Mac version gets bad reviews, and it's different from the Windows version.) I have to boot Windows XP in a VM to use the damned thing. I'm embarrassed to tell you how many months behind I am in my data entry.

The reason I'm not broke is that I don't use Quickbooks for invoicing. There are several good solutions for online invoicing. I use Harvest and I think they're great. No P.O.s, though.

The thing that sold Quickbooks to me is the existence of lots of Dummies-style docs -- you are hardly alone in your pain when you're a Quickbooks user -- and the fact that my accountant accepts the files, which is the real killer feature.

I'm still stuck in Gnucash for my personal finances, but I didn't consider using that for the business. I have little faith in my accountant's ability to make sense of Gnucash's files, I'm not confident that it has the features I need, and I can't seem to get it running easily on the Mac. The damned thing seems to be linked against every single library in Linux.
I often like Schneier, but his arguments are weak in this article.

"My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect."

I do agree with Schneier's examples and reasons of the importance of privacy, and I agree that the point is not about hiding a wrong.

In addition to "an inherent human right" it's also "a basic human need," he says. I would say that the right to life (including property) is fundamental, and privacy of different things is something one can choose to protect or not depending on the issue. Most people don't care about phone number and address being public; they don't cover their faces walking around town; they don't care that grocery stores and credit cards track purchases. Privacy as an extension of life and property makes more sense. You protect it where it's important.

I don't see that he argued any points about dignity and respect being essential to his point - I think those are just some of the reasons you want to keep some things private, not essentials.
Personally, I was most impressed with the concept of BuyPlayWin -- the current design isn't great, but I think the idea is very novel -- if the prices are right, and they can reach a critical mass, I could see this becoming quite popular, especially with the college-aged crowd. I'm pretty sure every kid would think they were guaranteed a win, and I could see the process becoming somewhat addicting. Plus, who doesn't want a shot at something free?
fatalism
They're not lazy, they're looking for a good story. It's good business to spin a mundane story as sensational news. They're after the same thing as Avril Lavigne, views.
Wealth? What wealth?....you mean the temporary time of state that is only an illusion to some and a reality to others...PLEASE.....get "REAL"....and since when does a toy becomes a weapon?.....do not forget this temporary life is for everyone .... including the wealthy!!!!! can the rich take his wealth with him...mmmmmmmmmmmm(maybe) Bill gates will sell his soul to the "DEVIL"...I bet that he can!!!! ....what ($$$$) do you think he will get for his stupid wig?
I've been told by a few mathematicians that the article itself is rather nastily written -- the interviewed parties shows people at their worst and often out of context. In addition to portraying certain people (notably Yau) in a rather negative light, the entire mathematics community is depicted as petty and argumentative. As such, the article is not taken seriously in much of the math community. People have their flaws, of course, but things have been taken to rather an extreme in this article.
I think one way that dignity is essential is that we all have secrets and all humans have a strong desire to keep them that way. It breaks a person down to not have it. An example might be during boot camp where there are few secrets and humiliation and lack of privacy are used to break a recruit.

For example, in some churches, a list of the highest and lowest tithes from parishioner. Of course, the goal is obvious: to humiliate and subject people. Of course you don't have to go to that particular church but if one is devout and that church is the only local representation of your particular denomination you can see how that would be ...undignified.

I could go on. Vis a vi: Revenge of the Nerds II when the Alpha Betas are plotting on how to humiliate the Tri-Lams.
I think if you're going to swear, you should do it in British. The King's English offers a greater spectrum of colorful expressions.
I should also point out that it is extremely selfish when people repeat the "If you've got nothing to hide" argument.

They advocate giving away their rights and yours at the same time.

miffed
I'm not sure how you can charge 250 euros a plate and come out at a loss. It would be interesting to see their books, but I'm guessing that loafer lightener at 400 dollars/month is involved.
Thats what happens when the barrier to entry gets lowered. We probably have the same amount of Googles coming out each year, but now they are just diluted more since a lot more people are cranking out code now.
"... and I'm pretty sure PHP came with a library (aka a shotgun blast of functions in the global namespace) that could understand ini files ..."

LoL
#2: Sorry i consider this moot:

- the docs for tsearch are dense, not terribly friendly, and acts_as_tsearch appears to be under documented and possibly not maintained/updated. So if tsearch has any deal winners over sphinx and solr (for me, key ones would be custom tokenizers/stemmers, UTF-8, column weights, indexing short words and acronyms, faceted search, indexing instance methods and has_many child records along with what's in parent record) they're not readily apparent. Granted i only tried to understand tsearch for ~20 minutes)
and a_a_tsearch did well in benchmarks, see comments: (teh tsearch count for "god" in index by book does indicate a possibly serious problem)

http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2008/03/17/rails-search-...

- The four leading search plugins: acts_as_[ferret, solr],ultrasphinx , thinkng sphinx work equally well with MySQL, and postgres, as far as i know. They're all pretty painless installs, if not terribly fast to build indexes, in the case of ferret and solr
The idea of making sure to keep your side project's code fresh in your mind is a really excellent one! One of the hardest problems with side projects is being forced to neglect them long enough that it's painful to dive back in.
I have the ultimate Craiglist killer idea. Really do. If you are a hacker of considerable intellect, contact me.
Ah yes, yet another "Get Rich Quick Without Working" scheme. The world needs that.
By the way, one of the authors of this article is the author of the well-known book A Beautiful Mind.
Fuck is actually a much prettier, more direct word. Fornicate? That sounds terrible and disgusting.
Y Combinator Dataset Of Users Version 1.6 - 10,000 Posters
A 1MB archive of Y Combinator user profiles is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news-profile20080821.tar.gz
MIT Students Get Top Marks for Hacking Boston Subway
Things I look for when hiring
Hmm. I'm not generally a fan of profanity-spewing in speech. However, I would agree w/David in that it can be an effective tool, but would add the disclaimer of occasionally; it's effective if it's used rarely enough to garner an actual response from the intended audience. As per his example of speaking at conferences. Most of the time, however, a person is known as either someone who constantly spews profanities or someone who doesn't. People who are the latter lose their shock factor quickly.

Writing, on the other hand, rarely calls for it . . . except in contexts like fictional writing where it can be used to paint a character, usually someone with a low IQ.

And it's not very effective in non-fiction writing / blogging, but for the rare instances it's meant to be funny. If I'm writing some fuming diatribe, typing just to "let off steam," or whatever, I've found that it is much more effective (and satisfying) to craft perfectly-reasoned logical sentences about the reason(s) I'm pissed off without the repeated use of four-letter words.

edits: indie also has a difficult time crafting logical or gramatickally-correct sentences when tired ;)
The Creative Personality
site:www.techstars.org YCombinator
In other words, techstars.org officially does not mention YCombinator.

BTW, techstars.com does not belong to techstars.
i use corduroy - http://corduroysite.com - but i'm a bit biased since i wrote it.

it doesn't do purchase orders because i've never had to use them, but i may be able to integrate what you need if it's not too complex.
i can't connect to or ping your web server so i guess it's a bust.
So? Back in the day they were. That's his point. And IE, that people hate so much, came up with them.

Would you way wheels aren't innovations because they've been around for a long time?
Wow. Color me inspired.
Eh, it's not that bad really for the little guys. And the mega corporations can afford it.

It's clearly gone overboard and stifled the IPO market (which I guess you'd call mid-sized companies) but the only real headache for startups is that you have to make sure your investors are accredited. And, apparently, you can't post a term sheet on Twitter.
Most of the laws that pertain to small companies are designed to prevent con artists from robbing little old ladies of their pensions. I'm not really sure how much more that would happen than it does now.
What is the difference between this and Techcrunch saying that one of the Techstars companies is raising 300k? Would it be ok if someone else twittered that Social Median is raising money?
If Linus Torvalds Were A Lawyer...
$500 per hour startup legal advice for free...
http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/posters/
It most certainly is related. If the author of the article is questioning why one race dominates in a certain sport, then asking the follow up question of why that same race is noticeably absent from a different sport is related. We're talking about black people and why they do well at some sports; you could also talk about black people and why they seem not to do as well in others.

And a world class zimbabwean kung fu master could exist.
Cheating on ERB with HAML
As per Bagley Shootout http://dada.perl.it/shootout/craps.html

C++ score = 27.63
Python score = 27.0
I have to disagree, I think this one is most likely to fail. The concept is based on the idea that a group of people will somehow collectively gather on an unknown website and buy the same product, at the same time. I mean common, what are the chances?

They'd have to spend big big bucks on marketting to get the amount of visitors needed for this concept to fly. If it was amazon who was launching then it might work.
Greener Cleaners
And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window also works!
BREAD, not CRUD
Actually, these are really interesting problems. Multi-homing isn't an issue for most startups though (not that this is true multi-homing since their second DC is read-only, meaning that they can't really survive the loss of the primary).
The NSA & FBI admit they listen to your cell phones - on or off
Exceptional circumstances do not invalidate codes of conduct. I don't believe I ever asserted that there was no circumstance that warrants an expletive. Thinking that your behavior can be guided ultimately by 'do this' or 'do not do this' is naive at best. I disagree with the article in that I believe cursing isn't something to be used in business communication or presentations, and my arguments support the case for infrequency in use.

Further, I wanted to make the case that refraining from cursing is not necessarily out of fear. I chose to refrain from cursing because I think there is a better way to behave.
I think Government must always be smarter than Businesses!
Free Book Giveaway: Adobe AIR For JavaScript Developers
It’s official—SitePoint readers love quizzes, and they love book giveaways even more.

First, we gave you multiple chances to receive a free copy of Jack Herrington’s pocket guide to Flex 3 (the dead-tree version). All you had to do was read an article or two about developing with Adobe Flex and taking a short quiz.
CO2Stats (YC Summer 2008) offsets the Internet carbon footprint
'The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching'
>People are paying for good apps. As in, they’re giving you money in exchange for software.

You gotta hand it to Apple on the market creation side of things.

No one pays for music. No one pays for small consumer software. Micro-payments don't work. It's as if that stuff doesn't affect them.
Household Auto Finance
How to send very large files (1 GB +)
Auto Loan Finance
If it takes 14 cooks to run the kitchen, each managing antigriddles and sous-vide controllers and pacojets, and your ingredients include absurd amounts of truffles and morels and caviar and better-than-sushi-grade hamachi, and you can only seat 6 tables in a night --- because dinner takes five hours --- then yeah, I can see you coming out at a loss.
Best Auto Finance
Web design services 
Speed Limit Studios is a professional full-service web design company. We specialize in web design and development, but we also place a lot of focus on marketing web sites and businesses. That's because we know that having a great web site isn't enough.
game theory wouldn't be interesting if it was the study of the actions of perfect bayesian reasoners. that's the whole point, studying where we DON'T make the purely rational choice and why. Exposing cognitive bias is very important for every field of science.
Dell and Facebook prepping 'significant' announcement
Javascript injection on HN (move mouse to the [Y] menu bar on this user page)
Every now and then an article or keynote like this comes around and makes our day. Very good keynote by Chris, totally must read for everyone who wants to create something.
Free templates
Templates are already made designs for sites and according to user’s needs they can be modified and adapted. They provide the basis for easy, fast and quality website development. Website templates are the excellent tool that can speed up the designing schedule with improved quality.
I can't guarantee its safety, but I glanced at his JS, and it seems harmless.

(later edit: I probably should have posted this during the day to give someone a chance to fix it so no one new actually exploits this... should I delete it?)
Well, I'm a transhumanist so I don't believe that I will necessarily die. I would guess the best bet for a compsci major is to try to invent a AI or something that enhances cognition so that scientific research is sped up enough to find a cure for death before you die.
Having spent a year trying to compete with Craigslist (albeit entirely on my own), I can say it's a damn hard market to break into. You're competing with free. Your market by definition scrimping on money. You're competing against a very well-known brand name.

I'd love it if my little hobby project (http://dibs.net) managed to take off, even a little bit. It'd be dead-simple to write apps against the API. I'd encourage it! IMHO, Dibs is what CL would be if it weren't built a decade ago.
For one thing, it means that Justhackit's got a few people on it now.
You do know what PhD stands for don't you? Everything is philosophy at high enough (or you could say low enough) level.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics

educate yourself.
This is the biggest influx of spam I've ever seen here.
I always remember will smith talking about how he doesn't swear in his albums, doesn't he swear a shitload in Bad Boys?
Microsoft has PM, SDE and SDET roles. As you can probably imagine, the employee concentration (of the 2500), might very well be in SDET.
True. They did come down on Slinkset with a sort of :

"You don't need a push button news site. Installing your own is easy enough."

>"So is Slinkset really necessary?'
Amusing that you dismiss philosophy in the first paragraph and then go right ahead and engage in it in the second.
Am not sure if this is bad. The life of a startup probably begins after that initial launch(that bloggers, media covers). What happens after that is what probably decides if they become successful businesses.
Millionaire Dating Club
dating introduction clubs experience
"I don't think JustHackIt will take off, but I..."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281199

Still?
This is what happens when you start a website called hacker news.
I've heard parrots are one of the smartest animals around. I think it's because being able to talk is complex and means a transcendental difference in terms of abstraction, even for birds.
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - persistent storage
Think of it like this: Would you rather have an operating system that has a bunch of little ads in the corner by the clock that are periodically "hidden" under a chevron, or would you rather that the crap wasn't there in the first place?
Verisign’s Personal Identity Portal Is Half Way To Password Bliss
Simple solution: Use C++3735928559 instead.
So use the network effect!

Why not target a city other than SF or NY..

melbourne.craigslist.com.au looks pretty dead to me... (And melbourne is about 600k people larger than the SF urban area)
Pretty clever too.

Click on the logo & letters on the bottom and you can throw them around.
Hehe. I've seen this before. When a News.YC user dataset was released I downloaded it and noticed that this user's file was the largest, so I checked it out.

Now out of curiosity, how did you find this user? He hasn't been very active it seems since he signed up over a year ago. (I see only one comment for this user).
I (think) I managed to get in by taking off the https://. Not sure if what I was looking at was the app you wanted critiqued as I didn't see any blog, but unfortunately it was pretty bust.

It sounds like Instapaper could handle it, and their sign up is the polar opposite of yours. I had to fill out a CAPTCHA and I'm still waiting for a verification email. Instapaper doesn't even ask me to make a password if I don't want to.
Kkkkkk
The founder of SocialMedian was CEO of Jobster when they bought my first product startup (I worked for him for exactly 365 days). He's a really sharp cookie in a lot of ways, but did stuff like this from time to time.

He's got some great posts about the stuff he's learned since raising $48m for Jobster.
With a write-up by Om Malik! Shibby! Congrats, Adam! :-)
one problem right off the bat with dibs.net is that, as with seemingly 100% of US-based sites relying on geo-location information, it fails horribly outside of the (US-based) developer's market: I'm currently in Lucerne, central Switzerland, yet it put me in Emmen, a sleepy suburb north of Lucerne.

Edit: A quick re-test with the google map thingy shows me that dibs.net doesn't even want to know about Lucerne, and instead is fixated on suburbs and villages around Lucerne :(

My advice: Until there's some magical geolocation service that works 100% all of the time, don't offer it. I know I can change it on your site, but many many many people won't be doing that.
The mythical bitmap index
Even labor, of any kind requiring humans to do something, can be made more efficient by automation. So although you can't compress manually labor at all, you can make workers more efficient by giving them machines to help them.
A better design for Craigslist has already been done here:
http://craigslist.thebignoob.com/
Rearranging the letters shows that he wrote the code when Hacker News was still Startup News.
To be fair, I've encountered far fewer arbitrary and rude TSA personnel who like gratifying themselves by throwing their weight around. But a few years ago, they were obnoxious.

One time, I was ordered to consolidate my luggage -- just before the point at which we take our laptops out and reshuffle items into the bins to put them through the X-Ray. WTF? The number of items you are going to take on the plane is not their business! It's the airline's. According to the procedures they make you follow, it's actually their business to make you take your luggage apart.

Perhaps it's coincidence, but I'm encountering fewer of these bullies. I wonder if enough people complained about them.
Sounds pretty straightforward - he wants backups of all server content and he wants to have them maintained not overwritten.

If this was a problem explain why. I can only imagine resources being the problem. If the servers were particularly large you may need to explain that some sectors would take longer to backup.
a) it sounds better

b) Browsing is a very important web function
> I suppose it's easier to read Plato than to study evolutionary psychology or game theory.

Uh, no.

Plato wasn't writing a textbook. You're not supposed to read it and accept it and be done. You're supposed to fight back with Socrates on every page, and this is the mental training that is supposed to make you able to be your own Socrates. As such, Plato seems really boring to most modern people who read it, since they're reading it wrong. "Why would Socrates say that? That's clearly wrong. Oh well, I guess he was dumb."

> Modern biology tells us the soul doesn't survive death any more than 'treeness' survives the fireplace.

I would be very interested in hearing any evidence that you could give to support these two assertions. In particular, I'm curious as to why you think the concept of a tree can be destroyed by destroying an individual tree. That seems like spooky action at a distance to me...
"... how did you find this user? He hasn't been very active it seems since he signed up over a year ago ..."

The term 'arglebargle' is used by a current HN member. So don't make this assumption.
How to get on main page on YC
YC secrets to get to main page but not sure :)
QuerySelectorAll in Firefox 3.1
>Slightly less basic economics states that when a market becomes commoditized, its complements should raise in expected returns. So we ought to be seeing higher returns for web frameworks, scripting languages, open-source databases, scalability services, web hosting, startup boot-camps, and services that help people make sense of the Web 2.0 clutter.

I bet hackers' wages will rise a lot.
I did the same thing... I just downloaded the user dataset and noticed that he/she had just a tad bit of javascript.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213891
I am really not predisposed to becoming anybody's fanboy, but I've gotta admit, the more I hear from DHH, the more I want to hear.

I think he has a very sensible, "grounded" perspective, and he presents it well.
Where Google and Facebook are fighting the next monetization battle
Interesting.

Browse, Read, Edit, Add, Delete

It'd be nice if REST actually used those verbs rather than:

GET, PUT, POST, DELETE
Aurora Concept Gesture Recognition
Tricks Facebook uses to synchronizes geographically distributed databases
Sure, but how are the RESTafarians going to map the HTTP verbs to BREAD? It's chaos, I tell ya!
Er, you mean the opposite. There is no advocating telling, only doing, in this article.
Absolutely. But I'm skeptical that most comedians are like Carlin and Hicks and Pryor and Rock.

For every Carlin who could craft the use of "fuck", there are three who think "motherfucker" is a hot-wire to the funny bone.
Improvements are mutations that fill in the gaps where information is missing. Some mutations might be improvements. Most aren't.