skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a MacMini which I use EyeTV on and FrontRow. Its not perfect but its still impressive and beats an Apple TV in terms of functionality. If the Apple TV was a bit more powerful and allowed for watching/recording of TV then it would be a winner. I use mine with a projector and love it. It is a shame but Apple have a tendancy (such as with the ipod/iphone) to try to lock people into their way of doing things
Not Possible to Use IE’s Web Slice Icon In Other Browsers
I think one reason Apple has always kept a fairly hefty cash balance is that it makes hostile takeovers harder.

The other thing you can see from Apple's history is that they tend to buy smaller companies only when the software those companies own matches Apple's strategy.
Capturing the Power of Trillions of Footfalls
Biofuel flying will take off in three years, says Boeing
Archaelogists reconstruct detailed picture of Martin Luther's life
Alarm raised on teenage hackers
Awesome. I've been using ImageWell on Mac for photo resizing, but this might be even easier.

Is this the same people who do SEOMoz? Just ask because it has a similar header style.
Cocoa with Love: Debugging tips for Objective-C programming
That's a quarterly dividend, so if you automatically re-invest dividends thats .5% compounded 4x during a year.

If you're investing in stocks, you're usually not thinking that the dividend will be your greatest return. Dividends usually indicate one of two things - 1) the company is healthy and profitable 2) the company has a massive cash pile.

In the case of Microsoft it was both, but primarily the mountain of cash they used to have (>$60bn) that got investors complaining that MS do something with the cash mountain. MS would easily have more cash than Apple if they didn't put in the effort to get rid of it over the past 5 years or so.
Soulseek (P2P filesharing) for iPhone
Cher Wang, the most powerful female tech executive you've never heard of
UCA Shooting
Douglas Crockford: "Quality"
Microsoft Goes Far Afield to Study Emerging Markets
Target micromedia
Ah yes, but you see the telcos don't own the content, and content owners don't own the pipes.

And yet both hate to share profits, additionally the content owner are still trying to find out what price the markets will bare.

To do that they start high and slowly work their way down.
And that slows down adoption.
Obesity and (the loss of) Pleasure
Future of Media & Ads: A survey
The iPhone App Store - A Classic Protection Racket
Nothing demonstrates love like a custom ROM hack
I wrote one of those "advice for college graduates" articles after only working for 2 years -- 1 year in a cube farm where you were a thing, not a person, and another in larger company that gave people offices, windows, had wellness programs -- basically gave a shit. People have told me that I would "regret my writing X s/months/years from now" but I still don't.

I (still) wouldn't willingly work in a cube farm. If they're so pressed/cheap for space, I'll gladly work from home instead.
Scaling ActiveRecord with MySQLPlus + ConnectionPool
Twitter Goes Mainstream
Well to be fair, you CAN do 3D with JavaScript, it's just not as practical. ;)

See some of the posts at http://blog.nihilogic.dk/search/label/3d
I know plenty of people who love to test everything and for some things it can be useful however I think the problem is more basic; Know The Code.

If you write something that you think might work test it. If you know the code works, let other people test. Testing crap does not get rid of the smell even if it works but sometimes you do what you need to do.
http://canvaspaint.org/#
> Test everything. Test it early. Test it extensively.

While in some contexts appropriate and many times helpful, testing is not the way to create reliable software.

Willingness to learn from mistakes, knowing your limits and biases, practicing complete concentration, disciplined reasoning and careful thinking is.
Yes.

In a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious secular environment, personal mores and values should extend quite a ways from the minimum amount that we can all agree on. Traditionally communities have addressed moral issues through the use of volunteer-based civic groups.

I like this idea because the majority is not forcing it's definition of morality onto the minority. It also does not involve going to a local or national politician to make a moral case why charity money should be spent one way or another. It does not promote "one size fits all" solutions that are supposed to be applicable in wildly varying conditions. In addition, it seems that politicians can get elected simply on the moral persuasion of their arguments instead of their practicality, which is leading us to make promises we can never afford to pay for.

I'm for doing something about healthcare, for instance, because I think the buying and selling of health services is not happening in anything like a free market. Most people don't have anything to do with the cost of healthcare (other than paying insurance premiums), and there is virtually no shopping around for services. So the buyer doesn't use his own money, there is no open pricing, and there is no competition on price or quality. In addition, if a company developed a pill that cost a million dollars but let you live to be 150? It's obvious that there are multiple, legitimate players involved that each should have an equal say.

So please don't take my response as "there's nothing wrong." It's broken, but not everything that is broken needs an immediate, rubber-stamp solution. We work best in complicated environments by setting goals, iterating, re-factoring, trying different solutions -- all things that centralized solutions do not offer.
The start and end dates on those graphs is somewhat arbitrary. If you compare the long one with a graph starting in 2000 and ending now it's going to look vary similar. But as they say past performance is no indicator of future performance.

If because of the credit crunch people pay down their debts then we are going to look at a few boom years but that's going to take a while.
I agree. Furthermore, it's important to choose the right type of company. Find one where software development is a core competency and a direct part of the value chain. When senior management sees you as just a cost to be minimized your opportunities for growth and advancement will be limited.

I've been interviewing a lot of job applicants lately and have found that most of those who have worked for years in typical corporate IT departments are basically ruined. They only know how to do high-level "fill in the blanks" development and don't have what it takes to work for a software product or service vendor. Now to get back on track they would probably have to return to school and start over from scratch. Don't fall into that trap.
While these sites offer more variety, the current limited stanford offering has better quality. By quality I mean you get all the lecture videos , course notes, exams, and hw solutions. If you compare this to the relevant classes at MIT and Berkeley its just plain better. At MIT you have no video for their intro CS classes and you don't have access to all the lecture notes and Berkeley is just video. Kudos to Stanford , this has been a great resource to me.
Government computers used to find information on Joe the Plumber
http://a.viary.com/home

These guys are doing some pretty cool stuff...
And why not?

Because of software patents.

Microsoft isn't paying them all.

No, it is threatening them all if they don't pay. In the name of "innovation".
In Defense of Raising Money: a Manifesto for NonProfit CEOs
Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems
How to generate awesome test candidates for A/B testing
Will Microsoft and Apple lead the programming job market in ten years? (Will they exist?) I would rather hedge my bets and just focus on learning to program.
I couldn't agree more, Paul Graham's article really was, as Kevin Rose put it, "spot on." Scrappy startups based off honest, truly valuable ideas benefit from the lack of competition and otherwise overwhelming noise that the masses of companies forming during economically favorable times produce. It's definitely harder to start a company during a recession, but struggling and working through hardship builds strength.
Yes, testing is the way to create reliable software. How else can you find the 'mistakes, limits, biases', etc. which come from the 'concentration, reasoning and careful thinking' you THINK you have?

Learning how to break your software is one of the best ways of ensuring you stop writing software that breaks!
I actually forgot I'm using browser for a moment :-) Brilliant.
As an iPhone user and geo-buff, I must say this is exciting. I wonder if they'll make it possible to add your own KML files.

One thing I've noticed already--the Current Location is less accurate than in the built-in Google Maps app.
George Soros Takes 10% stake
That graph is rather confusing. The lines are all grey initially with no easy way to follow them without trying to hover on the one you want. Then the interpretation also becomes a hassle. Ugh.
Ruby's Roots: Smalltalk Comeback and Randal Schwartz on Smalltalk
So what? Let's create an open icon and use it instead.
I think Steve Jobs is right in saying that it will likely remain a hobby for this upcoming year, but in the same sense I believe thats because nobody is really taking a truly proactive, innovative, or scalable approach to it, Apple (and Boxee) included.

The industry has before been isolated because of the lack of content. However, more recently there has been an explosion of content availability. But further adding to the problem has been the usability of that content.

I, personally, own a Media Center PC which I built myself for the purpose of exploring the idea of accessing my TV over the internet. I must say that I've gone away from that route because everything was bulky and much more complicated than using my Satellite receiver that I already had. This is a problem that could be overcome if the effort was put forth to actually overcome it.

What needs to be done is someone needs to create a single simple box that includes the DVD player, USB ports, infarred, Ethernet port, various A/V input, and S-Video, Composite, and HDMI outputs. On this device load a very simplistic, efficient software base which can do the following... Load DVD, Load External Signal, Load "Full Internet", Watch "NET TV"... I quoted NET TV because it is something that would need to be treated different than the Internet. NET TV we could think of it as going to certain content website (like Hulu, YouTube, or even iTune's music store, NetFlix, etc.) and browing them through a simplified interface (rather than their traditional interface) and navigating through them to find the shows you want. This would be done, in a way, like tailoring sites to mobile phone users, only this would be to TV users. Included could be a new service which is truly "Live Stream" from the various news sources.

Just a concept btw...
The quoted terms don't seem to prohibit general use. The author of the Firefox plugin can't use the icon for his plugin which is sort of sad but it's hardly a crime.
Bravo! (With extra kudos for having the design sense to include the 'Jump In' button)

Now let me point you to the S3 bucket, web directory, Picasa, flickr account, etc. where I store all of my photos.

I might not have to buy Photoshop for my new Mac Mini now.
Schneier on Obama Discussing Security Trade-Offs
Dividends are useful to differentiate cash-rich and otherwise undistinguished stock offerings.

Great mounds of cash allow for some stability and for judicious bargain shopping and for product upgrades during downturns; for a longer horizon.
1929-bear-32-BULL-37-bear-42

BTW: they don't seem to use reinvested dividends - though this wouldn't change the underlying trend much.
When presented by themselves, yes. When there is some pretext leading me to the point that I want to click a big shiny "download"/"sign up"/"take a tour" button -- and then POOF, it's right there under my mouse -- I think that is sometimes helpful.
If i type a space, i'm given all of your prefixes and suffixes :-D
Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 3 - Some Language Features
The Kurt Cobain Guide to Startup Success
For me I knew twitter had gone mainstream when I was reminded that the clocks in the UK had gone back (to winter time) by a tweet from Stephen Fry!
A real-world lesson in venture financing
Ditto. One gripe in playing with it for a few minutes, though, is that it didn't ask me to save changes to my document before closing it.

A right-click context menu would also be killer.
I noticed the accuracy was off a little too (maybe 500 ft off)
How We Made Our Face Recognizer 25x Faster
Cool app.

What I don't get is why hasn't Adobe done this already w/ Photoshop? A online version that is subscription based. The industry is slowly moving towards that direction, maybe they will follow.
The Harvard Extension School has a bunch of CS offerings available through the iTunes store, for free:

http://itunes.extension.harvard.edu/

It's also possible to take CS distance ed classes for credit via the Extension School website. I haven't taken any, but one student there says some of the undergraduate offerings have the same curricula as their Harvard College counterparts:

http://www.cluehq.com/blog/2008/10/14/formal-systems-and-com...

Note the for-credit offerings are not free.
I have been using Photoshop.com for a while now and this app is much much more stable. It's also about 10x faster, I'm impressed.

It's just like Adobe to build a bloated application.

I have a copy of CS3 installed locally but I often just want to do a quick edit and was using the online PS version (I've tried aviary too) and I wasn't very happy with the other options.

If you want to compare try uploading a file in both apps. In photoshop.com it takes about 30 seconds for even the dialog box to open.
[O'Reilly] Network Effects in Data
A quick note for readers who aren't familiar with the ins and outs of Australian politics: the two senators named here as supporting these measures (Xenophon and Fielding) aren't part of any major party, and certainly not part of the "Government" as we usually use the term.

The way that senators are elected in Australia allows for people to occasionally get elected with a tiny percentage of the actual vote, usually by having a nice-sounding party name like "Family First" or "No Pokies" (the latter of which refers to poker machines in bars, which are a bit of an annoyance). Unfortunately the way the balance of power in the Senate usually works out, the government has to rely on the support of the minor parties in order to pass legislation.

The headline is thus somewhat inaccurate -- I would never defend what the Australian government is trying to do to the internet, but the _actual_ government isn't considering these measures on its own initiative, although they may be considering adding them in order to appease the minor parties.

I'm very depressed that both my home country (Australia) and my adopted country (the USA) are both seem to be taking steps away from liberty and towards statism simultaneously.
I don't get what's unique about this. splashup.com and picnik have similar services.
I agree too, but it only becomes true when people stop believing it. Until then, you're still going to see lots of startups fragmenting the early-adopter market. You need to wait until everyone's so depressed by the real economy that they can't even think of starting a startup, and then it's a good time to start one.

So everybody - it's a terrible time to start a startup. Go home and get jobs, or failing that, move into your mom's basement and play video games. You'll never see another boom like 1995-2000, or 2004-2007. Become a corporate whore and don't launch new things. It's just not worth it. ;-)
The 48 Laws of Power - anybody read the whole thing?
very good, I like how it was so responsive,
I like the idea that your business should be about helping other people make money. At least two ideas I submitted in my application to ycombinator actually build on that scheme.
Microsoft launches cloud platform Azure
Any company that disqualifies you from a job for something you did when you were 13 years old needs to seriously examine its HR processes.
Microsoft launches Windows Azure, its "cloud OS"
I don't think you're old, and I'm glad your start-up (yes, it counts) is a success. Perhaps you can elaborate on the lessons you learned and the differences this time versus previous times around in a blog post sometime. I'd be interested in reading it.
Are they all pretty much the same? Is there currently a reigning/most popular plugin floating around?
It is so much easier to put everything in perspective in retrospect. I agree with Kevin Rose 100% on the startup environment during the web 2.0 "boom". Market saturation was a killer.
"They don't even teach C++ to comp sci students anymore."

I've been wondering about that one for a while now, because throughout my career as a software developer, some of the worst programmers I've encountered have been people with comp sci degrees.
Yeah, a few years ago. It's basically the Dummies Guide To Being an Abusive, Manipulative Bastard. At a bookstore this weekend I saw the author has another book out titled "33 Laws of War", it looked to be much of the same.
a good effort at the chart, although comparisons are still a but tough..
The Personal Genome Project hits the Web
SONY ERICSSON G705 UNLOCKED
SONY ERICSSON G705 will be your new personal assistant. It’s 3.15 mega Pixel camera allow crystal clear image capturing along with video capturing and flash features. With 3G network along with secondary VGA camera.
A picture is worth a thousand passwords
I am too...oh wait, I don't have a startup at the moment. Maybe that means I should start another one...
Wow, feels a lot like Photoshop but on the web. I like it!
Download “Chuck Versus Tom Sawyer” for Free
Chuck goes undercover at a Japanese computer firm to help a video game inventor.
I can digg it!
GBF Ventures: Introducing: The GBF Germ Funding Program
Ask YC: Do I need to have breadth on accounting and laws?
Hi all,

I frequent here reading. I really value the opinions here, hence here I have questions that I felt best to post here.

1. Do I need to get some breadth about bookkeeping, accounting things myself? If yes, where can I get such resources if I decide to self-learn?

2. Do I need to get some breadth laws regarding startups? If yes, where can I get such resources if I decide to self-learn?

3. Do you do the bookkeeping (money) records yourself or hire somebody to do it?

I have completely no idea and am just reading business books. I am trying to get more sense and prepare myself some sort. Thanks a lot all!

Update : I'm China based.
Twitter, Terrorist Hot Spot?
awesome app!, I was so excited about splashup.com and still use it on occasion but it clear there is little dev going on around the app. this looks good, well done!
I don't think you should be bashing things you don't know much about. It is one thing to point out that the quality of instruction and general level of interest of students is lower than at Universities. It is another to paint broad inaccurate strokes, pretend to understand their mission and label the people that run them as bureaucrats. There are many administrators, teachers, and students at community colleges that are interested and passionate about what they do.
Hello Cloud: Windows Azure brings Microsoft into the cloud
I assume you are US based? In the UK there are govt agencies called "business link" which will gve you free advice on startups and getting your business off the ground. They can give you quite a bit of info related to laws and accounting. I assume that in the US there are similar initiatives (though you might have to pay).

As to employing someone?

I'd say it comes down to how much admin time you want to spend on the company - or rather how much you can spare. If you find yourself becoming too much of a manager and lose the ability to drive the project forward (IMO essential in the opening stages of a startup) then it might actually be more beneficial to employ someone.

Plus of course if you can employ someone experienced for 18 months then that is 18 months where you get to see how it is done and pick up tips & tricks from them. (after which it might then be economical to do it yourself).

I have been quite lucky. My father has run his own firm for a number of years - which is quite small (so he does all the admin). As a result he knows a lot about the books, accounting and legal aspects (if only on a small scale). In the end I decided to go with an accountant - but only because I have a friend qualified from university who is doing it on the cheap :) (if you don't know anyone like that then go befriend them! :D)
This reads like a submarine PR-post. At least Twitter is trying to woo investors and users alike with WSJ articles.
Personally I think the Rules of Acquisition may be more useful:

http://www.sjtrek.com/trek/rules/
Not to mention the inability to edit the resulting image if Excel isn't playing ball.
well it would probably help paint a clearer picture of what you need if you explain to us what you're trying to do.

like for example:

"i am a coder, i am making so-and-so product (can be vague if you're worried someone might steal your idea) for this field. i am currently partnered with someone who does design and marketing right now and we're looking to start full time work on this company in 2 months, what resources or skillsets should i be researching?"

i get the feeling that even by fleshing this out you'll realize some of the things you might need to look into.

let us know :D
Tim O'Reilly has explained this for me:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345217
Startups show their wares at Web2Expo Europe
Just read your post on your last startup - great post and seems like you learned a lot. I would really encourage you to jump in again. You sound like you're made of the right stuff! Good luck with whatever you do.
That's especially critical in times of market downturn. If your product isn't making (or saving) a company a sizable amount of $, it's going to be hard for them to justify a purchase.
lol "windows azure"

does that remind anyone of the blue epic fail screen or is it just me?

strata was a better name. more symbolic too
I think Brockover's got it right: Linux adoption will be accelerated by making its most important tools available to other platforms. Although driver support is a frustrating issue, the applications are the primary hurdle to be overcome in the sense that if they aren't available, common folks won't even get to the point of caring about the driver support (unless all they use are web apps).
The ability to understand and explain the 'big picture' of security that Obama displays in this comment is certainly confidence inspiring. To me, at least!
SEO is bullshit
The author clearly hasn't the slightest connection to the real world; probably a permanent academic.

I know quite a few individuals who purchase copies of the entire Creative Suite, and use it for freelance work; for most of them, a single gig is more than enough to pay for the upgrade price.

For working professionals, it's entirely worth it. Adobe isn't interested in marketing the suite to complainer, Adobe is interested in selling the suite to people who are using it to do what they wrote for.
microsoft and sony are the closest with their game consoles, though they have stuff holding them back:

Microsoft is unwilling to give the 360 killer features (such as internet browsing, being a media center without Media Center) at the risk of canibalizing Windows Media Center and Windows sales

Sony just doesn't have the software development expertise that Microsoft has. This is compounded by the dificulty in programming for their Cell architecture which has resulted in delays in many products.
Windows Azure launches
Very cool. Although with 4 guys, it doesn't seem to hard to launch a web app that quick :)

Seems the design was the most impressive, heavy duty work out of it all.