skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why did this get to the front page?

1. This is old news. There's even link to a TC post from 10/3.

2. The post is 112 words and added NOTHING to the conversation. No new updates, no insidery info, no insight, no analysis.

3. The freakin' employee rank isn't even right. How about elaborate on who Justin Rosentein is without CrunchBase?
Right, hence the sometimes.
Target Disk Mode is indeed an awesome feature of every Mac with Firewire since ~2000.

Someone should hack together a "USB Target Disk Mode" live-CD based on Linux or something. Surely it's possible.

Or not? I'm not to familiar with the USB protocol, but isn't there a distinction between hosts and devices, hence the asymmetry of USB cables? (unlike Firewire)
RubyCocoa and NSTables De-Mystified
CEO & Director
Core i7: Your essential guide to Intel's new killer
If you can make something that people want, but don't want to pay for, then you can probably make money indirectly from it: by selling t-shirts, giving after-dinner speeches, or whatever.
But "solving the money problem" is about gaining the freedom to do what you love, without having to worry about putting food on the table. The problem is really a problem of freedom, which it just so happens can be solved by acquiring a load of dosh. So it's only about making money as a means to the end of freedom.
YC Winter 2009 application is due today (Friday).
Who's giving it a shot?

We're a bit too far along, but we might.

http://ycombinator.com/w2009.html
That article was over 9000. 4chan slang got 10/15'd.
Using Partitioning to Manage Satellite Networks
Elbot isn't really that impressive. Not much more than a keyword parser, like Eliza was some 35 years ago.

Although if you point this out to Elbot, he does flip into ELIZAMODE, which is clever.
Free copy of first issue of H+ transhumanist magazine
It's been on the to-do for ages. I think it's a good idea, but I think having someone else do it for you completely defeats the purpose. Points in favor of a business plan:

- Makes you block out how much stuff will cost. How much will your offices cost when you have 10 people? What about their salaries, insurance, etc.?

- Vaguely, what does profitability look like for you? When do you want to try to reach it?

- Who are you competing with? How are you different?

- How do you want to balance revenue and growth? Do you want to be profitable as soon as possible, or throw as much money as it takes, as often as it takes at growth?

- What sort of company do you want to be?

- In an ideal world, where are you at in three years? Don't worry about this changing, just set something down and use it as a benchmark.

Those seem to be the good reasons to do a business plan -- it makes you ask, and seriously consider some relevant questions. Blathering on about your paradigm shifts is wankery. What are you going to build? Who are you going to need? How long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost? And how will you make money?

The reason that ours isn't finished isn't because we don't think it's important; it's that we know to reasonably answer the questions above we need to do more research.
Money is a proxy for other evolutionary factors. Is there are a good reason to disagree with this?
Money by itself does not promote the well being of its holders, the underlying factors do. Lottery winners squander theirs within a few years, let alone a generation.

Observing that money is a proxy for many desirable traits, and helps, and has helped, in bettering survival chances is not social Darwinism. To assume that the unintelligent wealthy are somehow more lucky, and that morons must be filtered out is.

Inherited wealth is much a tradition in the same way gestating your young (outside of the womb) is. Happy equilibrium or not, that is the way culture and nature have co-transformed, and determining the causative reasons is not necessarily blind Darwinism.

Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that? Or do you agree, but attribute the correlation to happenstance?
Keep meaning to make it to an annual meeting. I'm not sure if this year's circus will be better or worse.

Thank you for elaborating on the dividend comment. I certainly was not trying to imply that it was a negative. It just emphasizes that while Mr. Buffett may have as much money as anyone in the world, he does not have it in a private or liquid form outside of his role at Berkshire Hathaway. Like many growth of company-based Billionares (Gates, Bezos, etc), there is a great deal of transparency (an annual report!) in investment philosophy. Contrast with someone like Stephen Schwarzman.
Tell me, how does that make you feel?
"It may be completely unfair that you are born super-capable but society does better when you get ahead in life because of it."

I agree, and say the same about being rich and providing capital to the smart, or passing it on to your own progeny who stand a relatively better chance of ending up with the "good, success determining, bouquet of traits.
Microsoft has always been a little slow on the uptake

No, our industry is slow on the uptake.

Microsoft makes products. They don't make languages to be cool or expressive or powerful, but as products to sell.
These could be significantly improved by superimposing them over pictures of cats.
if Apple had added an additional USB 2.0 port, that would have been better, than just removing the Firewire port altogether and leaving just two USB 2.0 ports. I would need a hub if I were to upgrade to this MacBook, which now I don't plan to do. I'll just be using my Dec '06 MacBook for a few more years I guess, which isn't really a bad thing either as it is a very nice Mac indeed.
"Inherited wealth exists irrespective of effort." I look at it from a pan-generational perspective. If the correlation of your habits/traits/capacities with those of your progeny was purely random, then yes, your progeny has lucked into wealth. What if I assume a significantly greater-than-chance correlation? Then, your offspring can be considered to be minor perturbations of yourself, now attempting to continue success in the same or other fields.
If, you agree, that these capacities are inherited, then you must answer why giving these lucky offspring an advantage is bad.
For those who aren't familiar with the name, Jenny Holzer is a conceptual artist (so take these truisms with a grain of salt):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Holzer

I was first introduced to Holzer's work when I found the "Green Table" in the corner of a courtyard at UC San Diego. It's engraved with the following statement:

"IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY"
Low-level MS guy says: Windows 7 is different, better
Repurposing Dead Trees
13 Employees Laid Off At VoIP Startup Jaxtr
Tracking the Silicon Valley Shake-Ups
The Visual Design of Wordpress 2.7
The less ports the better. Ports look ugly. If you have that many peripherals that need to be attached at the same time, a hub is probably best.
I agree, but the correlation also applies to adopted children of the wealthy. Would you attribute that to happenstance, or dispute it?

The children of the wealthy are also richer than the rest of the population. Would you dispute that?
> You don't get opportunities in life simply because you're smart,

I really wish I knew this earlier. For a significant part of my adolescence, even through part of college, I believed intelligence alone would prove your worth. Now, I feel like people think you're actually dumb if you don't have a list of major accomplishments in your wake; you tend to get that feeling when interviewing for a job.
Here's a list (might want to double-check with other sources) of contributors from the video game industry:

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/10/01/game-biz-types-leanin...

You know, after spending years and years to get Spore out the door, I can understand why Will Wright would be fond of dinosaurs...
Fast Multiplication Algorithm: Toom Cook Multiplication
Hackers on steroids.
Ah - but the argument is that society would be better off with a real meritocracy rather than the current wealth-distorted one. Not to speak of a society where everyone was given the opportunity to succeed as thoroughly as possible. "No Child Left Behind" - really.
Economy Woes Hit Tech Industry - Software Companies Get Scared
I would have assumed that tracking precision was built into all applications that use math. 0_o
Kanban Systems (minimal marketable feature scheduling)
Does a person at college age learn different from a 16 year old?
Anything is better than a "parking lot meeting".
Summary if you don't have 50mins to spare is available at their website:

http://www.bvp.com/saas/default.aspx

Addition information on some of the laws that you don't get from the website:

1. They say there is a white paper on CMRR, but I couldn't find it. The presenter has a summary on his blog though: http://cracking-the-code.blogspot.com/2007/07/saas-business-...

4. Separate Hunters from Farmers - Rule of thumb, every one additional $ of CMRR is a $ of bonus.

5. Focus your Business Development on Business Service channels, not IT ones. You need to partner with ADP, E&Y - not IBM, Oracle, etc. As this is a new set of partners, it is not easy to ramp up.

6. Part of what being good at online marketing means is automation, integration, using technology to make this work well.

8. Rule of thumb: Need more than $2Mill of CMRR before 2nd datacenter.... How this works High-Availability wise I'm not sure. Apparently SalesForce.com was single datacentre until post-IPO.

9. SaaS isn't software, it's a Service. So you need to Monitor, Gather Feedback and Benchmark your Service as a Service.

10. "Be prepared to cross the desert". SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front. You need enough invesment to fund 4+ years of runway. SaaS companies have historically raised average $30-65mill before IPO. That said, capital costs are coming down, but it's still a big number.
There have been many times throughout history where children learned in mixed age groups, or teenagers learned from being in the company of adults. Homogenous age group classrooms are a modern invention.
I rely on Python's built-in unittest module. While this is most seamless for Python code, with some customization you can make it manage anything (e.g. running external test programs and writing assertions on the results).
The other poster is right: half of the reason people BUY these things in MMOs and on the SA Forums is because of social status. I doubt many people would buy a shiny Sword of Infinite Destruction +5 in their MMO if they were the only ones who got to see it. People are by nature vain creatures, and if you give them a chance to pimp out their gear and appear more elite than the rest, it's a big bump to the incentive to purchase.

This works great in social networks or game worlds - not so great if you're running a site that does poll aggregation technologies.
Crazy Singleton Methods
Webbr Launches a Very Visual Social Network
I concur; if you study MMOs carefully (okay, not even that carefully), you will notice that the most successful ones tend to be loot-oriented ones, and after a player has hit the level cap, the reason they keep paying their subscription is e-loot, and to a lesser extent, e-friends.
yeah , that was very jarring.

is it weird that it was? he's clearly a very intelligent and accomplished man ..
Amazon Discount Finder
Sorry - how exactly do you mount the disk of an unbootable Mac on another machine, via an Ethernet cable?
Enterprise Software: Focus on User Adoption, Not Features
I'm not trying to be insulting. But your post is interesting. You claim not to be motivated by money, but are motivated by a desired to be remembered (fame). I can't properly dissect the ego, but I think both the desire for money and fame stem from similar places. That is, I'm not sure they're that different.

I have often though that if we ever do want a society based on merit and humanity, we need to get control of runaway egos. Maybe this requires a gene modification, so maybe we are too many years from it. Who knows. I would love to locate and find remedy for the "asshole gene".
JUnit, FlexUnit and nightly build scripts with ant. Everything is complicated by working on an OSGi based project, so eclipse test framework is a core piece and reports from ETF are formatted with an XSLT and mailed.
It would be trivial to beat the 400/480/800mbit of FW/USB/FW800 with a LiveCD, and all of the pieces are more or less already there. Use the Gig-E wired ethernet connection.
I'm doing performance testing through ant nightly, just running a custom package to exercise the server and grabbing metrics through a diagnostic call and outputting periodically.
Most "white male Americans" have inherited "wealth". They were born white male Americans. You start at the top of the global order even if you are penniless relative to a few others.
The best solution here is to just not allow HTML, require all markup to be Markdown. It's not hard to do and is actually a feature in the Python Markdown module. I had to make a public form Markdown compatible the other day in a Django project, it's brain-dead easy:

{{ foo|markdown:"safe" }}
The Spreadsheet Psychic: profile of Nate Silver, the brain behind fivethirtyeight.com
The protocol you'd use is iSCSI. You could hack this together with commercial iSCSI initiators on the working machine, and some kind of LiveCD target, but Apple would need to release an initiator in OSX to make it slick and easy. There is one for Windows, Linux, and the BSDs, and Solaris, so asking for this feature in OSX doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
The horror, the horror.

The freakin after-images...
TV Guide Sold for a Buck
Categories vs Tags
Do it survivor style and have your employees vote a new guy/gal off each week?

Then...

blog about it, become an internet fad, get lots of free press / attention, attract customers, expand business, hire more devs.
Rolling with the punches
Entrepreneurs do not always have their brightest days. Just keep going..
What they should have done is used the ethernet port for 1394c:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire#FireWire_S800T_.28IEEE...
So intelligent he was able to figure out that Adam Smith was secretly an American!
1. I've got mine.

2. I'm taking my ball and going home.

3. The sky is falling.

4. Y'all can have socialism. We'll call it "meritocracy".

5. Also, weed is kinda groovy.
But sometimes you think you've obtained the ability to create something but if/when you try to do it you realize you're not quite there yet.
"Ballmer has described 7 as being 'Windows Vista with clean-up in user interface [and] improvements in performance'"

I'm sold!
Bummer; I thought this was going to be about transhumance.
Good luck to them. Linux and Apple need some snappy competition, they're getting lazy. Also, it would be nice if (for the first time in recorded history) all the major OSes didn't suck.
I use the standard Ruby Test::Unit framework, with ThoughtBot's Shoulda extensions. I enjoy the standardization of the xUnit family, but the RSpec-y contexts and definitions are great too! best of both worlds!
Between the first glance at the tutorial and the twitter feed I get 40% why the lucky stiff and 60% Borat. Should be interesting.

I haven't attempted Haskell enough times for the Monads thing to click, this looks like it might be different enough to jolt it into me. :)
Getting Smart about the New World of PostgreSQL Replication
I love that ASCII Windows 7 logo, not to be missed.
Exactly. The guy is plainly a crackpot. Making 866% return in a single year makes you lucky, not necessarily intelligent or prone to have an intelligent take on the problems of society. His suggestion for government is particularly laughable:

*My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man's interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles.
I'm actually the opposite of the OP. I would like to have enough money for myself, friends & family never have to worry about it in my life time. But I never ever want to be famous.

One of my great fears would be having complete strangers (not founders, not YCers, not HNers) regularly recognize me. Starting your own business, no matter what it is, certainly causes some loss of privacy, but I'd prefer that 100 years from now no one gives a shit about who I was or what I did. Because if they did, it more than likely means I did something wrong.
OpenID is a steaming pile, and I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with Hotmail -- I use Gmail personally, but if you're not a heavy email user, Hotmail is perfectly adequate (and integrates better with the rest of the MSN web properties).
Answer to question FAIL.
Generally, those CEOs had a salary before they took their company public. You are compensated for your expenses though (food, travel, supplies, etc.).

I agree with you D , pay cut makes sense, but not for an early stage startup CEO. Now outside executive on the other hand is different...
You can try booting off of a live CD which in most cases will allow you to mount the disk and access the ethernet port.
Almost invariably those CEOs who take $1 a year have high net worth, plus lots of stock options. However it's reasonable (and even common) for CEOs to take pay cuts in hard times. I've heard of companies that when they implement pay cuts, top managers take larger percentage cuts than lower level employees.
Money is a proxy for other evolutionary factors. Is there are a good reason to disagree with this?

Yes, there is: wealth doesn't imply a greater number of offspring. Survival is a relatively low economic hurdle, as is raising and nurturing children. By asserting any real similarity, you're conflating survival with some modern concept of success.

Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that?

I agree that wealth is a social signal. It might even imply things that aren't immediately apparent (though you'll know someone is tall and attractive before you'll know they're rich, most of the time). But even the facile comparison of a peacock's feathers and a rich person's designer clothing doesn't really hold water in my mind. I think a lot of our evolutionary urges might be sublimated in our struggles for success, but that doesn't make them the same things.
TimeStamp vs. Date, polymorphism strikes back
People are fat 'because they don't enjoy eating'
Will Nothing Slow Wii?
Mygazines Folds  —  Controversial magazine sharing site shuttered
For sale: mile-long WW II tunnel complex under London
I waited 30 seconds, and the Camtasia thingie was at "2% loaded." Thus demonstrating rule number one about SAAS - users have an itchy back button.
Triads comprised of a developer, a tester, and a manager, operating independently?

Does that alone strike anyone else here as a recipe for a high-overhead high-complexity software development disaster?
Then she complains to me about the spam.
"Counter­terrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better"
History of Mathematical Notation
I'm 39, married, have a 7yo daughter, but luckily no mortgage. But I have $425 on a savings account to balance off having no mortgage :-)
And I'm throat deep in a startup for 2 years already, it's just a beginning.
Sorry, but until it gets a desktop environment that's user-friendly for mainstream folk, Linux still falls into the suck category.
You may find this page useful:
http://pycheesecake.org/wiki/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy

I find nose particularly useful both for running tests (including unit). I have also found (fire)wait to be useful for driving a browser.
I don't think it is - I implemented my own private OpenID-provider in a 130-line Mason component (using Net::OpenID::Server) in a couple of hours, and I like very much not having to create accounts everywhere, and only sending a login/password combination to my own server.

Using and trusting some existing OpenID-provider would be a bigger leap for me - the fact that it is possible, and not terribly complicated, to create and run your own is a big plus in my book.
Well he won't be the richest person in the world after he completes giving away 30 Billion of his money the the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation either (if he is alive by then). He has stated he doesn't plan to pass on a significant share of his money to his children. Think about it.
wealth doesn't imply a greater number of offspring

It did in preindustrial times, which is to say for practically all of human history. I recently read a quite impressive study of birth records in a scandinavian country (forget which) that showed a significant difference in the number of surviving children of rich and poor women.
I am just wondering how many actually submit their applications. Feel free to cast your vote here if you did apply - http://siong1987.com/yc-winter-2009-is-due-today-at-10pm-pst... .

Current Number of Applications: 23

Then, we can see how competitive it is for Winter 2009 application.

Thanks.

P/S: I will update this comment with the latest number of applications.
Is "Recession Proof" a new buzzword these days?
Old, but good: http://particletree.com/notebook/today-is-the-day/
Or, to be more realistic, a 30k salary. It's completely workable for anyone without kids, and is likely quite a bit below what other employees are paid.

I agree with the main point. Any "CEO" who lays off workers without first cutting his or her own salary down to the bare minimum is clearly not doing what's best for his or her company.
No matter how many times I try, the security guards never let me take toothpaste or bottled water through the gate. They also had a tendency to confiscate my hair gel when i used to gel it up.

However, I was able to take my laptop + two batteries + 360 (and cables) + two external hard drives (and all the cables) + router + other misc electronic stuff through as carry on (Since I didn't trust the TSA not to steal it out of my suitcase when flying home and all) without any issues. Not even a question or odd look.
probably not as competitive as before. The whole point of YC is to get contacts so its easier to get VC funding. And with the current economic situations and VCs being stingy most will probably wait for the market to stabilize
Schneier hacking airport security
Heh, or here's a better option- if there absolutely must be cuts, first offer the employees that would be cut the ability to move to a cheaper country and telecommute and an equivalent salary, adjusted for cost of living.
How the British used a laundromat in Northern Ireland to find explosives
When you say "would like to have enough money for myself, friends & family never have to worry about it in my life time."...

there are two ways to go about this. One is to have a society that allows you to feel secure in that you will always be able to have an income stream that enables high quality of life. The second is to gather enough FU money so you can provide for yourself without regard to what the rest of society does.

The second route is what most have been doing. And for good reason; that's mostly all our society allows, there are few occupations or opportunity for taking the high road. The trouble is this route doesn't "scale" as a solution for everyone. This route is "get out of my way, I'm taking care of myself, family, and friends. This requires you grab a bunch of equity. And that's the part that doesn't scale to everyone and therefore not a sustainable model.
Selenium IDE for web application acceptance testing.
He made 866% betting AGAINST the subprime collapse? (from the opening sentence of the article). That doesn't make sense. Surely they must mean betting FOR the subprime collapse. Or am I missing something?
..because success just doesn't taste as sweet without it.
way that their reacted

Noun fail!
look up openfiler

http://www.openfiler.com/

put that on a boot cd and you're all set.