skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got used to seeing it in the file manager no matter what directory I was in. In Vista, sometimes I see the free space, other times I do not.

And Vista is routinely forgetting my folder settings.
Actually the term you are looking for is "Trade Dress" and it can include things like color (UPS Brown), shape (Coca Cola bottle) and pattern.

The tests applied to meet the standard are distinctiveness, indication of origin and non-functionality. So for someone to claim elements of a design as protected trade dress, it cannot be a functional element of the design, and it must be a distinctive indicator of the origin of the product.

It's similar but not the same as trademark.
"is there anything you can do with direct logins that you cannot with Facebook Connect and full permissions"

Yes, and that is exactly the problem. Facebook's APIs enforce very strict access controls on the data available to external or embedded applications. If you have my user name and password, you effectively have full permissions.

Secure by design means no access by default. Sometimes, there are things not yet or not fully exposed to the APIs under the API's definition of full permissions. Other times, the granularity of access controls doesn't exactly match what your application needs. The user name and password lets you avoid playing by the rules and has the potential to greatly undermine user confidence in the security of their data.
Paul Krugman Forecasts Dark Days
As powerful?

As emacs?
If they don't control how people view their data, they can't serve ads. That makes any potential upside to this service totally irrelevant.
Yes, that's right. And the macros go a long way.

Actually, there is one big impedance mismatch: null. The semantics of Lisp and JS around null-zero-false are incompatible, and it leads to annoying bugs. I'm still looking for a good solution to that problem. The other big thing is that JS uses returns everywhere and Lisp doesn't. It might be possible to have the compiler add those in in the right places, but we haven't tried that yet.
It's no problem at all. What ... is anybody going to do with 5000 twitter passwords?

The typical internet user uses the same single password for all of his logins, including his bank accounts.
I had never heard of power.com until now... no such thing as bad publicity?

That said, I don't use any of the social networks they support, except Facebook...
1. Change the behaviour of Mac OS X to match Windows in terms of Window Minimizing, access to desktop, file sorting and so on. Simply, make the transition a lot more painless

You're not a Mac user, are you? Because Apple's popular because it's uncompromising in its features. The things you named, though... are the same. You minimize things the same in both. You access the desktop the same in both. You sort files using very similar systems, though each has its own flaws.

2. License out Mac OS X for specially designated high end machines by big vendors. For example, make a VAIO version of Mac OS X that works only with those laptop

Apple already does that - with Apple computers. It's what lets them integrate themselves so tightly. So, now they're going off to Vaio to do... what now?

3. Expand the Apple App store to also become an OS X App store.

http://apple.com/downloads not good enough for you?

4. Add a feature to the iPod and iPhone that only works with Mac OS X. For example, some type of 3D file manager that 'requires' OS X to work

So you're asking them to cripple popular software? Because that hurts sales for their best-selling products. That, in turn, will probably hurt Mac sales, due to damaged reputation. A lot of people get iPods then get Macs because the experience is so enjoyable.

5. Offer some type of open source framework that allows virtualisation across platforms like the iPhone, Web and other OSes

"Virtualization?" Christ, MobileMe already syncs everything. And the iPhone already runs OS X. What more can they do? (I'm genuinely curious what you mean on this one.)
How Porsche fleeced hedge funds and roiled the world’s financial markets ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350332
Dumb Networks are a smart choice.
In the context of this thread I interpreted your comment to mean that you think 37 signals is on track to become a much much larger company. From 5-15 million/year to 50-150 million/year and beyond. I think that is highly unlikely to happen. They're a trendy software boutique with a loyal but relatively tiny customer base.
Some Economists Find Reasons to Be Optimistic
How do you back up large amounts of data?
Referencing this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417762 how do you go about backing up data?

How do you do it if you have lots of dynamic and usergenerated content, and have to do it from a live server? How often should it be done?

Any experiences?
If you can fit all of your data on one large drive, then it's not hard to do a backup.
If you're selling data, this could be killer. There are apps like http://spinn3r.com/ that would no longer have to worry about scale or delivery
Ask HN: SQLAlchemy for Java?
I have used SQLAlchemy extensively and love it. Now I find myself a stranger in a strange land and I was wondering if anybody knew of a similarly awesome database abstraction toolkit for Java.

Thanks!
ouch! good thing these guys actually have a privacy policy. lol
I use tarsnap. :-)
If they had been backing their stuff up to AmazonS3, or just dragging a USB disk into the datacenter every month, they would have a copy of the data. And more than likely, if they used the S3 option, they'd have a copy current from the night before.

Somebody has to eat the broccoli and do the shit work of making sure that the data is backed up; if you can't do that or you hand off the job to the sort of person who is going to sabotage your company because they don't feel appreciated... you aren't a startup, you're a hobby.
Ask HN: Are Paid RSS Feeds Possible?
I am wondering if it is possible to offer paid rss feeds, where a user has to pay to subscribe to the feed. Not being a hacker myself, I am wondering if this is technically possible to manage? I don't think there are any services that allow for this functionality, however I just don't know if that is due to some technical aspect of stopping pirating or if just no one has found a use for the service?
Two other things to consider:
1) if it's not something you or someone close to you needs or wants, then it won't be a very good beginner project because you will be lacking that immediate positive feedback you spoke of.
2) the bigger problems may be more "useful" but these apps are being submitted to other developers for approval. Most devs won't know that you just solved a major problem in healthcare and will just shrug. If you submit it to a healthcare blog "i did this in one day!" You'll immediately start getting negative feedback from a bunch of non-techies who (as they should) are looking at its usability, not the core technology you implemented.

To throw out an idea: two of my "pet projects" that I have yet to work on are a basic inventory system for small manufacturers and a basic job quoting/scheduling system for manufacturers/job shops. Technologically they're both easy and it shouldn't be hard to find people to present them to (despite what so many online think, the US is full of small manufacturing businesses). Unfortunately, neither of them is "fun" so don't make good beginner projects.
Three rules for technological fixes: How to decide which problems will yield to technology
Agreed. It's a complex issue. However historically the combination of small government, trust and openness has proved to cause growth throughout the world.

The economist Mauricio Rojas wrote a very detailed analysis of the Swedish Economy and the Welfare State throughout history, which is available here:
http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175665891.pdf

I haven't read the full report yet, but it looks very interesting.

We have to be careful about the education as being treated as the golden ticket for growth. I believe a combination of good primary education and a strong research culture is of vital importance to growth, but without the right infrastructure for entrepreneurs it wont do anything.

Just look at all the people educated to the nth degree in failed communist economies to see what I mean. Also see the reoccurring debates here about the value of higher education for an additional counter point to education.

Sweden by the way were pioneers in using School Vouchers, something that the Democratic party in the US is heavily against.
I don't like how you're being downmodded for going against the grain - your post was cogent and appropriate, though I still disagree :)

1 - Mac users like the behavior differences, and as one myself I can say there are many ways where Apple's format is superior to Windows. One of the major complaints for recent switchers is the lack of a "minimize" button, and IMHO this should not be "fixed". The lack of a full-screen button allows people to focus on sharing screen space between apps, which is something Apple does extraordinarily well and where Windows fails horribly. The inter-app cross-compatibility (allowing robust drag/drop features) is key to the Mac platform.

2 - No way. Apple makes most of their money off hardware, OS X is merely a selling point for their laptop and desktop products. Not to mention Apple is in a very good position to push hardware/software synergy like nobody else. I recently saw a demo of the Windows 7 multi-touch features, and the main thing that struck me is: "this is useless, the quality of touchscreen on 95% of tablets out there is not enough to make this useful". Apple is in a unique situation where their hardware can work precisely as well as they need, and vice versa. There's no waiting for either side to catch up like MS does.

3 - Agree, though not necessary. I wouldn't put much effort in it, but rather maybe build something that increases exposure for small-time app builders. App distribution on the Mac platform is already problem-free (unlike Windows, with is myriad of non-standard installers). This seems like a solution looking for a problem.

4 - That's going to piss a lot of people off - and I doubt anybody makes a $1500 purchasing decision based off a single "missing" feature.

Can't comment on #5, my brain is too fried :)
So what if they do? :) You wouldn't even know who to sue if they let your info out.
The best you'll find is hibernate -- http://www.hibernate.org/ . It's not exactly like SQLAlchemy because Java is statically typed, but it's better than using the Java db layer directly.
You can use HTTP authentication for feeds, which will allow you to enforce some sort of payment scheme. However, not all readers support authenticated feeds.
The reason it's not calleld init_time_after_boot - well, first of all Microsoft coding standards call for CamelCase. But secondly, there are several "times", and there are several ways to "initialize" something, and there are several meanings to "boot."

You're either going to have a naming conflict, or you're going to have a bunch of idiots who wanted to initialize a different clock, who start posting to forums saying "i don't understand???! i called init_time waht's wrong???"

Sure, they could call it

SendTheIOCTLCommandToInitializeTheRealTimeClockForTheOEMAbstractionLayer

but sometimes the names of functions are going to be ugly.
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Looking at the e-mail adress on the website I strongly presume you're the guy behind tarsnap :-)

It seems like a great service, and judging by your comments here I'm sure it's a rock solid solution. But I think you need a pretty serious design/usability/marketing effort before it will take off.

Btw this isn't meant to be degrading in any way, just a suggestion from a fellow HN'er ;-)
Sure, it's possible. No backup plan is fool-proof. But if you set the hurdle high, you can make sure only a determined fool will exploit it.
OAL is "OEM abstraction layer" and IOCTL probably means that the RTC is set by sending an IOCTL command.
PHP too (Rasmus Ledorf).

But where do all these people you mention live now? On the other side of the Atlantic.

Another success story is Skype, which was founded by a Dane and a Swede. Did they decide to start the company in Denmark or Sweden? No, it's a Luxemborg company.

Denmark has a history of a relatively free economy. In the 1960's the government was smaller than in the US. And the biggest companies in Denmark today were founded a long time ago. Before the welfare state in Denmark grew really big. Maersk, the biggest container shipping company in the world, for instance.

Today the average child born in Denmark is going to be a net cost to the Ponzi scheme called the welfare state. So it's an unsustainable system. I think the country is still coasting on the culture and work ethic of the previous generations. But the work ethic is deteriorating now that the welfare state has been around so long there are families where the parents have always lived from welfare and never really had a job.

It still "works" despite the big government, not because of it. Also, it could be worse, Denmark is #11 on the Economic Freedom Index. It is easy to start a company, there are relatively few restrictions on investment etc. But - the taxes are very high.
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.cf...

Denmark has something a similar to Milton Friedmans idea of a school voucher system, where you can put your kid in a private school and you'll get a subsidy from the state. So you kind of get the taxes paid for government school back and the private school gets the money. The parents just have to pay a smaller fee to the private school in addition to the government "voucher money". There is no good reason why government should run the school. But they do. Some of them are private though. So if you think Denmark's school system is so great, maybe you should support getting the government out of schools in the US.

- another Dane who left Denmark.
The suspected culprit was the chief IT person at the company, and I think we're being led to believe he was both clever and motivated. USB disks would likely contain garbage data N days before the culmination of the sabotage, where N is whatever it takes to make sure the full rotation schedule gets ruined.

On the other hand, it probably isn't a coincidence that this happened to someone who had no backups at all.
I also have to point out being Danish myself that the Danish education system is under heavy attack in Denmark as being uncompetitive.

I'm too lazy to google it right now but I remember Danish test results being amongst the worst in Europe.

That said I think Denmark has good enough education and improving it is the least of our problems.

Denmark has had several high profile people in Computer Science. What is interesting is that they have almost without exception been forced to find a home outside Denmark.

Danish culture is very conformist. And it's IT culture doesn't disappoint here. J2EE with Struts and the Waterfall Development model is still seen as cutting edge. Mainframes (proof that we were advanced a few decades ago) are still in wide use in even relatively small companies.

I know lots of great Ruby, Python etc programmers there, who are frustrated beyond belief at the lack of momentum for such languages there. I keep preaching to them to start companies.

The funny little secret about the Scandinavian model is that at least for Denmark and Norway it has essentially been funded by North Sea Oil. Most Danes don't even know this, but it is reported every year by the ministry of finance. They have also been hit really hard by the recession and I'm not sure how they are going to do with lower oil prices now.
Yes that is the contradiction - an apparently great educational system paid for by taxes that are so high that the smart and successful Danes leave the country and make their money elsewhere in order not to pay the high taxes.
2008 - A Year of  JavaScript
Skype for Windows Mobile 2.5 Beta
there are feeds and sites that work like this and provide the functionality. i've subscribed to several pay-based podcasts that have done authentication in several ways and/or through services.
Daring Fireball does this. See:

http://daringfireball.net/members/info
Yes I know. I thought the same thing. But she really loves Christmas and really adorns her house, I suppose she is thinking about next year.
Speaking of off-site backups, I have recently discovered
http://www.jungledisk.com/homeserver/index.aspx

It backs up your stuff to S3, and it can work on your Mac/PC, or on Windows Home Server. Have't tied it yet, but looks pretty neat.

Also, new NAS from HP has built-in S3 backup: http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/29/hp-mediasmart-server-ex48...
"...	I am wondering if it is possible to offer paid rss feeds, where a user has to pay to subscribe to the feed. Not being a hacker myself, I am wondering if this is technically possible to manage? ..."

Bend the idea slightly & use the feed as (everyone else does) to disseminate (title, summary & word count restriction) & restrict the access to the document at the server. Unless of course the feed is time sensitive?
CatholicGoogle, Conservopedia for search
Tarsnap isn't very flashy yet, but I decided to start with the core functionality -- secure efficient backups -- and work out from there rather than starting with style and having substance languish on a to-do list.

If you haven't used tarsnap, you haven't seen the worst of the lacking web design -- the tarsnap web management interface (aka. accounting interface) is minimalist to an extreme. But I think this is the right way to go -- I could be making the web interface look nice right now, but instead I'm writing code for automatically processing incoming payments... and at the end of the day, being able to sign up, send in some money, download the tarsnap code, and start storing backups in a matter of minutes is probably preferable to signing up, sending in some money, and then looking at a beautifully designed website for the 0-10 hours before I'm next awake and able to process the payment.

Making things look nice can happen later -- for now I'd prefer to have the most solid system I can produce so that everybody who uses tarsnap can enthusiastically recommend it to their friends.
"... Not all problems will yield to technology. Deciding which will and which won't should be central to setting innovation policy .."

Forget trying to read the article it's subscription.

But the question posed is a good one. My stab is to use trial and error, cheaply. But there has to be more to it than that. Maybe a surfing analogy is order. Riding the wave of problems only leads to technical breakthroughs if you choose the right wave. Go to early and it you miss the break and ride over the bump and miss it. Go to late and you also miss it. You have to exhibit good timing (luck?) to enter the wave just at the right spot and hold on.

Some old salts who have been around for a long time, say that if you squint at the market you can see those waves before everyone else and dabble and catch them before they get big. But this only happens once and a while when you least expect it.
Track Google SERPs for Reputation Management and Rankings Monitoring
Macworld site rife with concealed banners
But failure is (close to) a self fulfilling prophecy for the next venture. If you leave a project early to start a new one, you need to think about the likelihood you'll see the new one to completion. Making the choice to leave a project makes it more likely you will in the future. That alone makes the grass not so greener.

It works both ways too. Committing to stay makes the expected value of your current venture higher.

I certainly have day dreams of building giant robot armies. But I would think about it in these terms before acting.

Also, my statement was somewhat personal, as I can't support a venture on my own for long, and you can sustain a startup on venture if the space is just dead. So before I'd leave to go to the greener isles, I'd be forced to leave for lack of money.
Tiny improvements do change things.
You can get an exemption for that though...

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2008/tc200...
I have a 2 year old and spend lots of time with him. I don't think you need to work long hours to succeed. Maybe I'm wrong. I haven't succeeded yet :)
It's possible to have very efficient bureaucracy.

European Commission that basically runs European Union (500M people) has just around 25,000 employees [1].

This is tiny. Just to get an idea about the scale: New York City (8M people) government employs 250,000 people (though to be fair, I have no idea who is included in this total) [2].

EC seems to be doing something very right. They offer very good working conditions (pay, holidays, benefits, security), so they are able to attract good people. There is a tough competition for these civil servant jobs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_New_York_City
Am I Still Here?
I wrote some of my experiences here:

http://espadatalk.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/producing-marketi...
"... I never had Steve's flamethrower aimed at me, although I came close a couple of times; all in all, I was close to getting my butt fired three times – and all three times, I probably would have deserved it. I do know friends who did. It wasn't always pleasant ..."

Even if the authenticity of the article ( I put this down to the "Cult of Mac" ) is questioned you cannot deny the existence of the "Reality Distortion Field" ~ http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... You can read more here by Andy Hertzfeld & Co. ~ http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&...
That is, if their business model depends entirely on ads. I think that the net gain of allowing services to complement their web app will more than make up for the loss of a small portion of ad views by making their application as a whole more compelling. By deliberately and aggressively excluding themselves from these services, Facebook only stands to lose users.
The existing situation is this: there are standardized tests, teachers are sticking to the basics -- they have no choice since they've got to teach to the test like everyone else (lest your students score a percentage point lower than another teacher's students), students are doing poorly, students are passing anyway because of the enormous forces on teachers in the broken system.

The standardized tests are part of what's broken in the system. Also part of what's broken is that there are enormous forces preventing teachers from failing students who actually fail.
simple reason really, all those top _____ lists are easy link bait w/o a lot of effort
You can add a touch screen to nearly any netbook fairly easily (no soldering). Google and set yourself free!

;)
EBay shares lessons learned from designing site
Checkout:

Ask YC Archive: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t... and http://www.searchyc.com/
Can Tipjoy Make Micropayments Into Megabucks?
Academic & Industrial Text Mining Toolkits: A geek2geek list by Lingpipe
Playing WAV files out of data: URIs does't rely on Quicktime, does it? JS909 was pure JS, although it was more of a clever hack than a programming feat.
It's the right decision.

Just wanted to point it out :-)

Ping me if you ever want some help with usability.
Don't buy cloud computing hype: Business model will evaporate
An exploration of one button games