skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent stuff! I'll be pointing my friends to this site from here on out.

My few notes:

1) I concur with the others, excellent design that is clean and intuitive to navigate.

2) Your seller rating stars in the left column on pages have a grey BG and for cleanliness these need to be on white. I understand you used the same pics from the standard ratings section which is on grey

3) There're two glitches with the top search bar where on some pages it is too long and overlaps the search button (FF3 on Mac). Also on FF3 on Mac if someone activates the thickbox, the grey overlay is under the search bar so it remains white and thus looks odd.

4) Kudos for not diving in head first to the gaming sphere. Most people would add forums and news sources and such and when you're starting out all that does is clutter the site and require more work on your part.

Overall I think it's a sound concept, and the site is very well done. The question becomes how the money is made? Is it per transaction? Ads?
Great design, easily one of the best I've seen on a 'rate my startup' here. Browsing is also easy to use and simple to understand. I filtered down to PC games > less than $10 and got no results, but figured out within a few seconds how to remove the 'less than $10' filter (before I resorted to just clicking 'back'). Great stuff.
Which is exactly why paleo-futurism can be quite funny.
I'm not the OP, but this would be competitive with Amazon.com if they go the individual seller angle. It's a fair amount of work to become a 3rd party seller on Amazon, which excludes all but dedicated businesses.

I think the concept is sound, if only as a meas to replace eBay, which as of late has been stagnant, unsafe for users, and just a pain to use.
I think your statement sums up exactly why people from the west should fear people from the east taking over the world.
Is the site down now?
XMLReader::open(http://feeds.feedburner.com/DawdleBlog) [<a href='function.XMLReader-open'>function.XMLReader-open</a>]: failed to open stream: Connection timed out
With mobile devices growing - I think the website of the future will have a strong component on accessibility from various screen sizes. Another feature that will become important is having offline mode/app to enable data access, synchronization, etc.
Netbooks' achilles heel isn't processing power, it's screen size
Perhaps that was the historical reason boys are high prestige, but modern China has huge opportunities for women (who "Hold up half the sky", as Mao put it).

China was a society of prima genitor, like Europe; boys are high prestige because they carry on your family name. All praise to the eldest son!
Poll: Version Control
Which version control system are you using, right now, for your startup and/or for personal projects?
Darcs
svk
Monotone
Visual SourceSafe
Other (write in)
The recession will have a cleansing effect on the startup landscape. All the "me too" companies that got funded by dumb money chasing the next Facebook will fail. Startups that don't provide value and generate revenue will fail. It will be much harder to get funding, but its the perfect time to bootstrap a company that can help businesses cut costs or consumers save money.
Does the free market corrode moral character?
Mozilla rolls out geolocating browser add-on
Capital scarcity gives a huge advantage to those with the means to fund their own venture. You'll be able to start a business without being attacked by 20 funded "me too" outfits. The flip side is that if you don't have a war chest of savings or funding now, you're the loser.
Please point me to these strong fundamentals. All the fundamentals that I see: national debt, incredibly low treasury rate, whacked out LIBOR rate, and inflation tell me otherwise.
Where and How am I Investing in Early-Stage Today?
Palin e-mail hacker indicted
Yeah I'm getting the same thing.

if(isset($assoc[0]['val'][1]['val'][4]['val'][0]['val'][0]['val']) && isset($assoc[0]['val'][1]['val'][4]['val'][0]['val'][0]['val'])) {

That's a hell of an if statement on line 235, which is funny because you're running an isset() on the same array key twice.
Actually, the second isset should be $assoc[0]['val'][1]['val'][4]['val'][0]['val'][1]['atr']['href']

Ah accidental public code reviews.
I liked DuckDuckGO - and SocialMention the most - SM offered a way to find out about obscure websites mentioning your business genre' -- Also the one that helped with plagerism is nice..
Yes. I want money.
I'm a big fan of the 'grunge' trend we're starting to see

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/29/grunge-style-in-m...
Hmm, I see a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue.. How do you configure the IP address if there's no monitor or input devices? Most colocated sites I've worked with requires static IPs.
Perhaps it could be burned on the CD - add a tool that takes that info, and makes a ISO specific for that server. CD-Rs are expendible anyway these days.
I could have used that last week. I had to drive serveral hours to go onsite to install a Debian server. If I could have mailed a CD-R to the guys, and done the install remotely, I could have saved a bunch of hours.
Now is the time to bootstrap your new business : Fort Worth Startup Blog
Mozy launches business level online backup
Oh, and I could have done without the "PS. I am awesome" bit at the end.

Eliezer has made a few arguments against false modesty in the past, but I can never tell how serious this stuff is.
HOWTO cook the perfect steak - using a vacuum cleaner and a blowtorch
SafeCode Releases Guidelines for Secure Code
The site looks like an established website and tells the users that it can be trusted. Very clean and well designed.
That's not the problem though. The problem is that there's a layer on top of the flash which clicks still register to. There doesn't have to be a button at all, it just so happens that this example uses a button (controlled via javascript on this extra layer) that knows the pattern of where to click to allow the cam/mic to be used.
I'm surprised by how well it works. It could be great for presentations with text in the slides.
Irreplaceable is good. It means that person is a superstar. Keep them happy (and safe!).

One danger I have seen manifest itself when splitting code up into well defined areas is that participation in the code base as a whole drops significantly. You might get a few drive-by bugs between areas, but not the kind of serious review you give your own code.

Also, when one person is "responsible" for an area, one area is almost always the limiting factor (for development speed, quality, etc.).

Finally, having clear areas of responsibility like this mean that the manager of the developers can reinforce bad behavior (i.e. this bug is not MY fault, see, it is in HIS area). Then, everyone sits around and complains instead of someone just pitching in and fixing the bug.
Will human powered search last in the future ?
Ask HN: Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore?
We've been hiring for RescueTime (a funded YC company) for about a month now. We found our first hire right away (a rails guy) - a classic YC-style hacker-- passionate, crazy-smart, seeking a small team with a clean slate, etc.

At the same time, we've been looking for a hacker to help us with the (installable Mac, PC, and hopefully Linux) RescueTime client (as well as other startup duties, ranging from our API to helping with product strategy). We've looking at local Seattle folks as well as remote people in nearby timezones.

We have some good candidates, but I've been struck by how FEW fit the YC hacker mold...

So, out of curiosity-- does the idea of writing client software appeal to anyone in the Hacker News demographic? This isn't a plea for candidates-- I'm more curious if people find the idea of writing client software appealing anymore.
Yeah, it's pretty much on par with what you'd expect:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_cen_gov_deb_tot_of_gdp...

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_deb_ext-economy-debt-e...
Is Your Snazzy New Site Cloaked in Invisibility?
I adopted mercurial when git was "painful" to use. It seems as though this has changed, but I see no compelling reason to switch just because all the Rails kids think git's cool right now.
It's not a virtue, you see - just a bias either way.

I think his point was showing up in a clown suit is not a "correct" choice because it's non conformist. Their are times a places where dissent is correct and others where going with the pack is correct and you can't arbitrarily say one is better than the other in all cases.
- pro look. I'd think there was a large company behind this if I didn't know better

- good idea, the ebay for gamers. Marketing is going to be the challenge here, of course.
[Google] Get in the game with AdSense for Games
Get ready for mass predictions of the future based on conjecture.
Very mature product, I was impressed. Some of the things I noticed:

1) This many sound stupid, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the logo was (is it a button?). That's probably just me though.

2) I agree with zhyder that it would be best if you don't show games that have no sellers. The whole offering a price to a seller was a little weird for me.

3) You have an impressive amount of games on the site, and the homepage banner (the guy holding the wiimotes) is very good. Anyone just dropping by gets the feeling that the site is very active, and that's great.

4) How does the 100% guarantee affect the company's bottom line? As a potential buyer I think "Great!" but as an entrepreneur I think "uh oh." How does that work out?

Again, excellent site. My brother's a huge gamer, and I'll tell him to check it out the next time he's looking to buy the next title.
Love your blog because you seem to meet a lot of people/go to many events. Nice insider perspective into the business of game development.

http://blog.dawdle.com
i'd like to know why people are using what they are. did you pick git because you just recently started using version control or was there really something you needed in it that made you switch?

i've been using cvs for about 10 years now and have no reason to switch to anything else. it does what i need without any extra fluff, all my projects are in cvs, and the majority of the projects i contribute to use cvs.
Wow! Lots of things to be learned from your app. Thanks.
Couldn't enter a standing offer for a game. Tried before I created an account and after. Both times, it would only do anything when I clicked "no" on the offer box.

Other than that... It was fairly easy to figure out and use (until the problem above. ;-).
Maybe a browser that has a zoom in function like the iPhone could be devised for these netbooks?
Using bzr: our development is done in Python, so it's handy to be able to a) modify things if we need to and b) bundle bzr with our company's python install.

It was the first distributed VCS I have used. I highly suggest it for personal or small projects, as it supports "dumb storage" and thus you can host a repo anywhere you have ftp or sftp access. It is also handy for working around annoying firewall restrictions where you can't really checkout code the way a centralized system does.
MySQL cofounder David Axmark leaving Sun
That's true but I think the issue lies in how slowly mathematics is taught: when you spend all of elementary and middle schools repeating the same material over and over. During elementary school I used to change all the minuses to pluses on the homeworks since I didn't like subtract but I was doing basic algebra (basic polynomials) before I entered elementary school. At that point I was reading interesting math books for fun. I was able to find some math puzzle books and was slowly making my way through those.
I'm not sure why but on my computer I can hardly read any of the text? I guess my machine is missing the font you used?
Firefox extension blocks dangerous 'clickjacking'
This Geo-Oriented approach holds a lot of valuable benefits such as optimizing personalized advertisments, change security configs depends on the user's location etc. ,
But this approach cannot get matured as long as privacy is not preserved by the platform - and that's why I recommend to 'hold your horses' and let this innovative idea pass its labor pains..
Inside Out vs. Outside In
Yes, she did, and seemed to generate more situations that actually required it, apparently because she enjoyed it.

Funny thing was, she NEVER applied that sense of urgency when it was payday, or when it came to performing tasks that only she could do, yet she certainly loved to send me scrambling.

Suits are sick people, I actually feel for them at times.
2advanced.com; when I was a young chap I'd spend hours just mulling over Eric Jordan's stuff.
My only gripe is that the narrow down box doesn't contain a "By Platform" selection. You have to start at the platform of choice then select the genre to get results for Genre X for Platform Y.

Not a huge deal, but I had clicked "By Genre: Role-Playing" link on the home page and couldn't narrow down to platform.
Common sense is not common.
Not always accidental, apparently. Wikipedia has references.
If the whole world could vote
Using mercurial -- it and git seem significantly better than the rest, but when I recently test-rode them both, mercurial felt like it worked better cross-platform, and the overall design felt cleaner. Git would be my second choice, and I'm sure github and the network effect will do a lot to popularize it.

(I've read several blog posts in which people try git and are absolutely thrilled, but in almost all cases they were previously using CVS or SVN.)

FWIW, I had been using Monotone for a while, but mercurial seems quite a bit simpler in day to day use.
Strategy: Flickr - Do the Essential Work Up-front and Queue the Rest
I couldn't get a handle on what assets were falling away from the Icelandic banks. The article says that they weren't mixed up in the now toxic subprime assets, so is it just the credit crunch that is inhibiting Iceland banks from making short run payments, or are their assets crumbling in other ways? Anyone care to explain?

When I was in school taking econ courses every day I was always so informed about this stuff. I feel so ignorant now!
Recovering Censored Text Using Photoshop and JavaScript
You had me at "moronically something for gamers" :)

As others said - a viable idea and it is already very well executed. One major functional issue I see is this:

# Having games and systems and accessories all mixed up is confusing. I would divorce these into separate parts of the website. At the very least I would ensure that games and systems/accessories won't show up on any list (i.e. For Sale) together, at least by default.

Few comments on the appearance and visual design:

# Logo needs to be redone. Right now it's completely unmemorable and bland looking. In fact replacing it with just a word "Dawdle" would improve the appearance of the page. Tag line needs to be removed from the logo too. I'd aim at something simple and similar to GameTap and Valve's Steam logos.

# Front page feels "busy". The "For Gamers, By Gamers" insert is a high-contrast item with too much text. It's largely useless, no one is going to read it. I'd go with a more saturated background color and remove the text.

# Font in the top menu looks funny. One pixel size too small.

# Putting "TM" after a StandingOffer is cheesy.

# Looking at this page - http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/resident-evil-outbreak-pla... - Seller rating in the top-left corner says "3 stars", the rating at the bottom of the page - "4.5 stars". And I am not clear who this seller is to begin with.

# Shaded buttons on the same page are nice. But they are inconsistent with the top menu - I'd style the menu the same way the buttons are.

Lastly, a feature suggestion if I may (I haven't registered an account, so perhaps you already have it). Consider the fact that most gamers are kids/teens and have very little money of their own. It would make sense to allow their parents to fill their dawdle accounts with "buying credits". This is not easy to implement by any means, but it may prove to be a great way to facilitate buying part of the business.

Again, great idea and implementation. Good luck !
Great design, but Fonts look awful in windows. The text is unreadable. You are probably using a Mac, but I should remind you that most gamers use PCs. So you should make sure the site looks good in Windows.
Someone answer me please!

PC stands for 'Personal Computer' - right?

How is that synonymous with an operating system (Windows)???!
Very nice design...for all the others that love the design and can't quite place their finger on why, visit apple.com. Same font, layout, and a very similar color scheme. (I'm not ripping on dawdle...apple's design deserves to be emulated.)
So long as the factories run, miners mine, and farmers farm, it's true, society will see this through. But you must understand that what's at stake is our very ability to do these things.

Merely producing goods is not enough; we need to get them to consumers and consumers need to be able to compensate the producers. To this end, we need a financial system through which wealth can easily and painlessly be transfered. Without a healthy financial system, simple things like employment, commerce, shopping, become difficult if not impossible.

Key point: write all the code you want; without a financial system nobody will be able to pay you for it.

True, we'll get through this eventually, the financial system will change and adapt to new circumstances, such is the nature of the market, (It would happen faster if the government wasn't so insistent on propping up the very institutions that were failing.) but it will take a while, and in the meantime, jobs, commerce, industry, all will suffer, especially those elements dependent on easy liquidity and cheap credit, like startups.

Long story short: You should be very worried. Protect your assets. Focus on tangible goods and increase your productivity. Realize that excessive 'trust' is what got us into this mess in the first place, and weather the storm accordingly.
It's amazing how quickly I have been able to pick up EMACs. I'm no expert by far, but my mouse usage is 1/4 what it once was. :)
On Lisp to Clojure project
git because I was able to introduce it gradually, due to its great svn integration. We just switched to it fully last week.

I love DVCS because I get to keep the code on my computer version-controlled, and the power of branching, merging, and cherry-picking is awesome once you get used to it.
I totally agree that the screen real-estate is the biggest drawback of netbooks. Projectors might help (or foldable OLED screens)...
I have a number of years experience working with Tcl, and also a bit of Tk, which fits the bill nicely for that kind of thing.

However... yeah, doing client apps is not "where it's at" compared to web apps. I never thought I would say that. Web apps were, once upon a time, sort of ugly and boring compared to all the cool stuff you could do with 'real' apps. But with things like Rails, and the ability to easily deploy new versions, the world has changed, and web apps are "where it's at", in a lot of ways.

If you're interested in using Tcl and Tk, I could send out a few feelers to that community. Lots of them aren't really in the YC 'demographic' (older, families, etc...), but some of them are pretty sharp coders.
Multiple daily backups produced by rsync using hardlinks works well when revisions are too drastic and frequent to give a meaningful history. version control will just get in the way of one or two people drastically refactoring a young project.
At this age, many students in India are learning calculus. And they are not learning the product rule or integration by parts with a video game.

I wonder if you could motivate Johnny and Jane by showing them what Pradeep and Rajit, their future job competition, are up to.
Did anyone not already know this? Anyone over the age of about 21 knows how much easier it is to add to momentum than to create it. It's the difference between a stand-up comic and a funny guy at a party. Or a founder and an employee. One is creating something, the other is redirecting it.
It should also be noted that I am also trying to find my lost Lispy muscles.
I use git because the low-level design is rock-solid and simple enough for me to understand. I also like distributed version control for the work alone and on a team aspect.
This does not mean git is easy to use or that I'm even very good at it, BTW.
Absolutely true! Great companies are a result of smart and hard-working entrepreneurs who form great teams.
I believe being nice does not exclude neither the confident nor the shy types. But being confident should not mean cocky or arrogant. In a start-up you should be willing to learn everyday and sometimes you won't hear nice things. Those who learn and adapt fast, and are also nice thrive and build great companies.
This is indeed a good post! The title is actually a bit misleading. I usually don't read articles that have the word 'myth' in the title.

The best way to 'buy' time is to get a wire cutter and clip off the end of the AC cord of your TV. Instant life change.
I think YC tends to attract people who want to innovate... but who associates desktop software with innovation anymore? That's so 1983. Younger guys have never "wasted" the time to develop the requisite skill-set and older guys haven't bothered to keep up their chops.

Besides, anybody who actually goes to MSDN conferences and hacks the windows API is probably on the corporate dole and would never be so dumb as to try starving/start-up.

On the upside, if everyone around here was still obsessing over client software, somebody might have beat RescueTime to the punch! :)
For example if you spend months studying only to fail a course there is no one to blame but you.

In that situation, I think you should retake the course at the first opportunity, and keep retaking it until you pass.

There's a difference between failing and giving up.
For new projects I'm using git rather than subversion. I normally develop on my desktop system, but when I'm on the go I use my laptop. Subversion isn't useful for that kind of scenario if you don't have constant internet/network access. With git I can do commits, look at the history, etc. even when I'm on my laptop and offline. (you can keep copying the whole repository with svn but that pretty much defeats its purpose)

I'm pretty new to git though, and I haven't even touched the more advanced features.
Interview: Jeremiah Grossman provides more details on clickjacking attack
And they're off to a brilliant start: http://monkeyfiresshot.com/2008/10/blackberry-mocks-releases...
Looking at the footer section -- sort by seller rating.

Curious, is there any motivation for someone to sort by the 1-star rating?
One quick thing is I would change the tagline to "Buy Games. Sell Games." The reason is that the eye isn't really drawn to "Buy & Sell Video Games, Systems, and Accessories with other Gamers Online."

I don't like the middle panel either. The text doesn't say anything meaningful, and the buttons don't really add anything. I would change the buttons to something like "Games", "Consoles", and "Accessories".
I switched from CVS to SVN because I needed to rename a bunch of directories, and that's so incredibly painful in CVS that I might as well start a new repository.

I switched from SVN to git because I needed to work offline for a week, so I gave git a try (initially, I had my project versioned under both systems) and liked it so much I stuck with it.