skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wired wrote a story in March about how the public SDK terms would prevent Firefox and Opera specifically from being allowed on the iPhone...

You are correct on the SDK terms, I had completely forgotten about that. IIRC, Opera would be considered an emulator since it allow you to run Javascript, yes?

...and the story about Apple declining "competing" applications is months old too.

Which is exactly why I said it's no surprise that Opera was turned down, although there is obviously much more to the story.

I'm sorry for ribbing you for wanting to work on Android; I'm just being snarky...

No need to apologize, I hadn't taken any offense.

...although I really don't share your politics.

I assume that by "politics" you mean my feelings towards openness, choice, and F/OSS (since we seem to have similar feelings towards US politics, but I digress).

All I'm saying is that options are good. Apple limits your options with the iPhone, so I'm looking forward to getting an Android phone in the future.
The big question now is whether or not the American People will endorse him or not. He seems to have every other possible endorsement.
Still trying to be stealthy (hence the new HN account). What I can say is that we're building a portal for a really cool niche.
Who Will Win the Battle for Your Living Room in the Next 24 Months?
Wikipedia et al. work because they can be divided into a bunch of little orthogonal fiefdoms for a bunch of internet tinpot dictators. It's accretion, not collaboration. You can't crowd-source a rocket to the moon.
Only someone who NEEDS a job will agree to go through this process, and in my limited experience, the best hires usually DO NOT need a job.
I for one am certain, that I would neither give 15 references nor agree to work on a take-home project as part of an interview process
Netbooks and the End of Windows Vista
I don't know man - it just seems wrong that I should be paying a fee to Mastercard or Visa everytime I pay my rent, no matter how small. Bank transfers in Europe are free, as they should be.
http://notebook.google.com

It has great copy and paste functionality for capturing snippets of information from web sites. The loose organizational structure of the notebooks is great for jotting down quick ideas.
Sun Microsystems Reports $1.7 Billion Loss and Falling Sales
Ask YC: Dealing With Flash10 Upload
So Flash10 has broken flash uploaders on a lot of sites and apps including wordpress, flickr, publictivity, vimeo, and more. This applies mostly to SWFUpload library. More background here: http://www.centernetworks.com/flash-10-uploading-swfupload

Has anyone found a good work around or have any suggestions? Some say make an image or flash based button. Least thing I want to do is revert to something else.
We're trying to get a private beta up in 2-3 weeks from now.
Physicists find a new state of matter in a 'transistor'
But even the fact that you have to decide on the buffer size is a matter of understanding the theory. Choosing to multiply by 5 too. Why is it 5 and 12? Why the buffer size is not the half or double the size that it has? How can you prove that you have chosen the correct values if not by theory?
That's quite a high compete rank you have there. Where do you get those nice maps from?
'Digital dark age' may doom some data
iPhone growing among "lower income" customers
The most fundamental knowledge a university has to offer is to learn how to learn.
I don't think it was verbose criticisms. I was focusing more actually on an architecture for increasing the level of abstraction.
Accept credit card payments from your iPhone
I think we can see additional funding to primary research atop of what's focused on energy.

I also think that the focus for alternative energy as a primary mission will really alleviate the traditional hurdle of infrastructure or critical mass requirements: instead of just dropping the technology as before, people will start considering them seriously.

OTOH, I'm a huge optimist and fan of this candidate, so take everything I say with a huge grain of salt. :-)
Most people don't realise exactly how easy it is to make money off the internet. I remember when I made my first piece of software, and 3 days later someone bought it. I thought to myself - what? The software sucked big time! Then the next day, someone else bought, and so on.

A year later, I put up my first > $500 software, not really expecting anything to happen. A week later, a sale came in, a few days later, the same.

There was no marketing plan, no competition analysis, no snazzy web designer or any of all that. Just put up the site, list it on download.com.

Software is an easy business. The hard part is in learning all that stuff so you can actually make the software (or know how to tell people what to do), afterwards it's pretty easy if you just release your stuff.
I have renewed hope in my startup SocialHelix we have had some new and interesting interest. Plus I know how I want to build the backend now. Graph services are tough.
Hiring for Startups: From burger flipping to B-to-B
AdSense helped boost our number of daily visits when we experimented with it, but we've had much more success getting traction other ways. Once we stopped advertising the boost subsided. We get better kick for the buck directly sponsoring private forums with decent niche traffic.

We will probably experiment with higher value keywords at some point. The major issue is mostly conversion rates though - you need to charge a high price to justify spending a significant amount to attract one paying customer.

SEO is a much better approach, but it's interesting to see Google getting taken to the cleaners here by some of the more spam-oriented sites out there that really push the keywords into their domain names. Even the market leader in our field is not listed on the first page for the most important keyword related to their product.
I'm in the US. When I use my credit card there is no per-transaction fee, and no monthly fee outside of you know, the interest on the balance. Which I pay off monthly so it never accrues.

On the other hand bank transfers do have fees associated, and I'm not even sure how I'd go about initiating one. That does make transferring funds between individuals a pain. Cash and check are standard but each has its drawbacks.

PayPal sorta, kinda, addresses these difficulties but they claim their own pound of flesh on the transactions. I suspect it's a great startup opportunity but it's a regulatory minefield, and the entrenched behemoths are very efficient at maintaining the status quo.
You may not be able to crowd-source a rocket, but you sure as hell can crowd-source a moon crawler robot. The size and skill level of the robot building community is amazing, and these people can only find themselves now because of the intenet. And only now is there so much information available for the new ones.

One guy writes the motion detectors, another writes the pan-tilt, everyone reviews everyone elses code and suggests improvements. If this were effective today, we could have giant leaps forward. Soon it willl happen.
Yep, still waiting. I am slightly worried that something is wrongs with us in general, cause seems that everybody here received a question or two from PG :). We haven't.

Either we were incredibly clear (having sent out the form long before the deadline and tweaked it numerously since then), or they just tired of reading our form, which slightly (but intentionally) breaks the "200 word" request almost everywhere.

Hard to fit into 200 words, when you have almost everything in mind preplanned and thought, from the scalability-related technical questions and repayment strategy, up to the image-creating plans...
I tend to follow the GTD approach, and rely heavily on todo.sh (http://todotxt.com/library/todo.sh/). I keep my todo.txt file in an rsynced directory so I just push/pull to/from whatever computer I'll be working at that day.

If I'm away from a computer, good old pen and paper fills in the gaps.
It is easy to keep experts around and say things which people want to hear. May be Obama is doing that.
It takes guts to say what you believe in like McCain has done on certain issues.
That shows McCain will do what he is speaking currently once he gets in power, if Obama is just speaking what his experts tell him to there are lot of chances he might not do what he is currently telling, the reason he gets elected.
In Germany, you enter the account number and bank number and you can send money to a person over your online bank. It's free and takes a day or two. This process can be optimized if they would standarddize the bank interfaces, but it's pretty good.
A few things:

- Bank transfers aren't universally free in Germany. Mine cost about 30 cents.

- Rent was one of the few things that I mentioned wasn't paid with credit cards.

- "As they should be" is problematic. I for instance, find the whole process of founding a GmbH insanely complicated (even with the new reforms), but hey, they're different countries. I could make a long list of things about each country of things that work better in the other, but it wouldn't be the most useful means of comparison.
I'll keep using Wufoo.
We ran into this. Our website admin uses SWFUpload and broke.

But our ecommerce service for photography (nextproof.com) uses a Flex upload component and still works fine. So, I think we're gonna move towards using the Flex one for now.

You can find it here:
http://weblog.cahlan.com/2006/12/flex-upload-component.html

You can download the Flex SDK from Adobe (free) and compile it via terminal on a Mac.

Other than that, we have an alternate upload screen with 10 html file fields.
I had a similar experience using the mail in US. I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that one could send a letter with a handwritten address and have it arrive at the right place.
It's very good for getting an easily digestible survey of world news, but the business and economic analysis articles are horrible. It's all so "pop" and way behind the curve if you read better newsletters. It's also annoyingly leftist and pro-war; they pushed hard for the Iraq invasion, for example.
i googled it, and to me, more importantly, the economist also endorses obama
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2008/10/th...
Money shot: I would have loved to release the coin under the GPL, which could maybe solve the financial crisis. However for obvious reasons I was not allowed to do that.
Brad Fitzpatrick (inventor of OpenID) linked to this article, from his blog, without commentary. Brad is a Googler now, so maybe this is his way of telling us what he thinks.

http://brad.livejournal.com/2394939.html
> "If only the real John McCain had been running"

That pretty much sums up why I ended up voting for Obama. McCain of 2008 != McCain of 2000, and the Presidential race was the lesser for it.
I'll never understand why someone would want to hire a "Rails developer". That makes as much sense as hiring a "Blub developer". Rails is just another framework in a sea of similar products that all do similar things.
Wouldn't it make more sense to hire skilled and intelligent developers who can learn Rails if necessary?
Hacking a Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Don't know if I could congratulate you or sympathize... but you definitely are much less strained now, then other remaining poor souls suffering from uncertainty.

Good luck. Maybe we'll meet one day, in Sequioa Capital or somewhere, and share a laugh on good old YC application times ...
The Network-Attached Storage or NAS was designed for the enterprise file sharing services. Now the consumer NAS (Network-attached Storage) has integrated many additional features including BT/eMule downloading, digital media server and video surveillance.
just my impression from there steadfast support of US in Iraq. good to see they go both ways, its a great news mag that I love to read.
Models eh? Isn't that what those banks relied on...
It's probably worth remembering that the last time YC talked about the number of applicants (a couple of years ago), it was something like 800. They usually accept about 20, and given the way the model works it's probably not possible to handle more. Now, of course half of those are probably applying on a whim--just finished college, or whatever, figured "Hey, what the heck, let's try getting rich...or at least continuing the college lifestyle for a little longer."--but even if we can assume that 50% of applications are complete non-starters, that's an awful lot of potentially great companies that get the "no" from YC.

The tech industry lived without YC for decades. You can definitely start a company without YC approval, and it can be successful.
Yes Tim O'reilly and Eric Schmidt also endorse him. have you thought why you endorse him?
September was a month I won't forget for a while!

The SWF is something we wrote ourselves, but all of the sources/images/layers are public info. For example, you can download the base imagery from NASA here: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
> its talent for making an argument

As usual the Economist says little with a lot of words. This particular piece is a shallow recitation of campaign impressions with zero actual policy analysis. You don't learn anything by reading it.
Valuing Community from an Investors Point of View
Ask YC: Patent Web 2.0 invention or not?
Wondering what the communitys' thoughts on this are? Understand ideas can not be copyrighted (body of work) or patented (steps taken).

What about if your product received a lot of attention in press & has users. Could another try to apply and then successfully obtain said patent? Wouldn't the patent office reject their claim and point to the many articles on the Internet about said service/invention - state its obvious?
Concurence déloyale
Perl6 ftw:

my $factorial = sub (Int $x) {
$x < 2 ?? 1 !! $x * &?ROUTINE($x - 1);
}
My only source is my business partner, but it's a pretty good test. At 10-15 feet, you can only see features as geometric shapes, but on very well-designed sites you can probably tell what you're "supposed" to do. This is most effective for signup and purchase flows, where simplicity matters most, but I think it can lead to insights on pretty much anything.
Quite the contrary: it has a reputation for conciseness and well-expressed, informative views. What would you have us read instead?

To quote its Wikipedia article, 'The publication boasts a tight writing style that seeks to include the maximum amount of information in a limited space. Atlantic Monthly publisher David G. Bradley described the formula as "a consistent world view expressed, consistently, in tight and engaging prose."[12]' -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist
I have an iPhone and have used Android on the G1 extensively... the best (if not lacking in creativity) comparison between the OS's is Android is like Ubuntu on the desktop and the iPhone is like OS X on the desktop. If you're happy using Ubuntu, you'll probably be happy using Android.

I think it's going to come down to values--easy and flashy vs. open. If the Linux vs. Windows/OS X battle of the last 10 years is any indication, my guess is that the iPhone will dominate the market and Android will only win geek cred.
The sentence is particularly acute if you adopt this interpretation of the word "vim:"

http://www.unilever.ca/ourbrands/homecare/vim.asp

It's time for Conservative America to clean house. Where did it go wrong? Entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts should be falling over themselves to vote Republican. Speaking from the outside, it looks to me like the Republicans are on the verge of losing a generation of its strongest natural supporters.
One thing for sure we are not enough informed. Look at this comment where Tim O'reilly endorse Obama. How many of who support Obama know this?

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/why-i-support-barack-obama....
Find me one fact or analysis angle in that piece that the representative reader didn't already know. It's like getting Joe Blow's take down at the bar except with tighter prose.
vim -r filename
"on the verge of"

Probably already happened.
Union Square Ventures: Return Path
Patent Court: You Can No Longer Patent Thin Air
Jonathan Schwartz's Blog: Understanding Sun's Business - Q1 Results
Bug Labs: The credit crisis in action
Let's save the political stuff for reddit.
This is the business newspaper of record from the land of Margaret Thatcher. That they endorse Obama is not surprising, but that they don't mention a concern with his tax pan is. Crazy times.
Maybe we should form a spinoff like hackerpoliticalnews.com or itshackernewsandpoliticalnews.com!

I mean seriously guys, I come to YC News to avoid the blasting of politics I get on any other website.
interesting, but I don't see this catching on, nor do I see my grandparents getting this at all.
Hmm, I didn't know that some banks actually charged money for transfer. Germany does make it incredibly tough and complicated to wade through all the neccessary laws and paperwork to get a business started. I guess that's why most people prefer to just be employees.

In england, it's WAY easier, and most things can be done online. The UK generally has a much less formal feel about most things compared to Germany.
Leave your ego at the door and master your tools
The US Postal Service has pretty sophisticated OCR software for classification and routing of mail. Its ultimate fallback though is an outsourced office with illegible writing being deciphered by human beings!
This is why there is no Apple developer ecosystem.

Is this a known fact or your personal opinion?

I only develop for the web but I always thought Apple had strong support from developers which is why it has some of the best designed software.
I'd take this blasting for 4 days if people can learn and make informed decision rather than taking 4 years of blasting.
Ideally a patent like that should be denied ( or can be challenged in court) based on prior art. Prior art refers to documentation of an idea prior to a patent filing. So for example a person would not be able to patent an idea that was described in an a magazine , newspaper , or academic paper, before the patent was applied for.

If you want to patent something, use it more as a defense mechanism, so that other people can't claim that you stole their idea.
Hope that helps.
Hmmm... The Economist is a UK magazine, isn't it? There is a suggestion that another UK publication - The Guardian - helped win the election for GW four years ago when it asked its readers to write to American voters in swing states pleading with them not to re-elect Bush. If I recall correctly, many recipients were angry at this perceived interference in US affairs (from the former Colonial Masters, of all people!) and this may have persuaded them to vote Bush although initially they were wavering.
Should this apply to human relationships as well?
Pogue reviews MacBook and talks to Steve Jobs about death of FireWire
7 projects from Microsoft Research
"Using spam filters to find HIV vaccines" and "Beating programming bugs" sound rather interesting.
Academic economists are overwhelmingly left of center. It's a different story when you talk about industry economists without financial ties to universities.
It's purely an opinion piece, an endorsement. It summarizes the existing arguments for and against and comes to a logical conclusion. I, for one, didn't know that they conducted their own global presidential poll - http://www.economist.com/vote2008/ I also wasn't aware so many conservatives had jumped ship, including 27 newspapers (last week's 'Lexington'): http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displays...

I read The Economist because I don't always have time to read entire articles about every little development on every issue. How many New York Times articles would you have had to read to gain as much information as from this one Economist piece?

Again, what would you have us read instead?
I agree. They have less than 9K registered users so far. I bet theres a whole lot of ppl who want to schedule thier tweats. Your strong point is that you do it only for twitter.
This must be about the 6th different 'Y Combinator in X' I have seen on this site.
The Power of Entrepreneurial Networks for Start-Ups - Andy Hamilton
"annoyingly leftist and pro war" - that's not a combination you hear every day.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349257
Find a good advisor. I've known many people who hated grad school but when they switched an advisor they liked, their world went from hell to a great graduate experience. Its all about your advisor.
The left/right scales start getting really wonky... the liberal academic economists also almost unanimously support free free trade.
I'm a big fan of Scribd and I've been using it in numerous projects. I really hope they can stay afloat for their own (and my own) sake.
The iPhone is kinda here to stay. I've been developing with Microsoft tools for a while, and the one thing you learn very quickly is not to switch too fast to a new platform, because it may not survive. I waited till last year to migrate a few apps to Visual Studio 2005, but I'll be jumping on the iPhone bandwagon. It's here to stay.

Other phones are going to migrate towards an iphone-like interface, and there are going to spring up thin emulation layers to allow for app porting. But apple has won this war.
Yes, you missed something. And you're rude.

Read my post again.

If it still doesn't make sense, realize that most people are not computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists.
Intel wifi cards (4965 and 3945) don't work anymore?
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810#System%20lo...

I hate to sound negative, but this makes no freaking sense. Those two Intel cards have been pretty much the only safe choice for Linux laptop buyers: everything else, including Dell crap, doesn't work at all or requires using terrible hacks like ndiswrapper. The first thing I look for when getting a laptop, is to make sure the wireless card is one of those two. AND THEY DON'T WORK ANYMORE?!

To me this sounds like a distro with pretty much disabled WiFi.

FUCK.
The same as the projects - allowing anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort.
It's not odd if you don't conflate the meaning of left and right with Democrat and Republican. The Bush administration has been solidly left.
Stumbled upon this XLS of all the hacker news user names and what they do...WTF
California's NoOnProp8.com hit by massive Denial of Service attack
# Ruby 1.8.7
def Y
lambda { |f| f.call(f) }.call(
lambda do |g|
yield(lambda { |*n| g.call(g).call(*n) })
end)
end
Y { |this| lambda { |n| n == 0 ? 1 : n * this.call(n - 1) } }.call(5)
#=> 120
A breezy, superficial understanding of complex issues is worse than none at all. You'd be better off knowing that you know nothing rather than having an article like that represent your knowledge.

> what would you have us read instead?

Off the top of my head Stratfor covers similar territory as the economist, but much better. It also has its biases. For economic analysis John Maudlin's newsletters aren't a bad place to start. Go read one and see how much more information and analysis dense it is compared to the economist.
it is kind of outdated :]
Strange, care to tell us where you found it? Looks like it could have just been scraped because I did not see the email field in there at a glance.

Looks to be from a year or so back.
My research has much improved since leaving academia. I think it's best to envision grad school as a day job.
You mean adwords. You posted on the wrong thread :-)
Google Clarifies Its OpenID Implementation
You'll get to know the candidate better if you go grab a beer and just talk than by interrogating their family. And I'd expect family members to be the least honest (we look out for each other).
Well, he certainly didn't have to go far. Project Playlist is literally -across the street- from Facebook.