skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This would be nice, but most terminals only support 8 colors from what I've seen, and 8 colors should be enough for anyone!
I'm sorry, Mark, but there's a ton of open-source CRM software written over the weekend and published in a matter of days.

As a matter of fact, if you'll go through the backlogs here at Hacker News you'll see a large number of "Game/Site/Tool/Language Written, Released in 3 days!" stories by members of this very community... in languages from C# to Lisp to Java to C and even ASM.
http://jeromekahn123.tripod.com/kooks/id5.html
http://www.grandtimes.com/eyes.html
http://my-healths.blogspot.com/2008/10/five-eye-myths.html
http://www.everydayhealth.com/vision-center/the-healthy-eye/...
Not bad, but I think you forgot to include document unique identifiers on each important tag. Also, where are the namespaces? You need to be able to embed this image in a document without having tag name collisions.
This is something like asking if there are developers who will do a mockup interface/database schema/class structure for your web app for free, so that you can choose the best one before the application is developed. You can probably find some people willing to work this way, but they probably won't be very experienced, as the experienced people will have figured out that it is hard to earn a living wage this way.

For logo design in particular, the initial design can be the hardest part of the process, so it doesn't make sense to give it away for free.
I've not heard of that. Can you provide more info on how/why the standardization process happened prematurely?
>The only "contest" that is regulated by law is legally called a "Sweepstake".

What about, for example, poker tournaments?
Seagate reports a big loss due to restructuring and downturn
Fake Warning for StumbleUpon Addicts a Hit
I'd rather make the system of home buying more efficient.

I want to own my home, but I want the act of moving from home to home to be as easy as moving from apartment to apartment.
It could (theoretically) make any data gathered during that log session illegal in a court of law, depending on how it's worded.

While EULAs are on shaky legal ground, they do at least give you some form of protection that a good lawyer can use to invalidate a case on technical grounds.
It's the other way around for me, but to each his own.
Rails versus Django
> "[...] take a look at http://www.snapcrm.com which is a CRM and Collaboration Suite far superior to all open source CRMs and it was coded entirely using X# in 4 months."

How about that hubris, then?
"Kakuteru is an experimental lifestreaming service that pimps up your online activity"

Also: "Web 3.0 Enabled"

If anyone can figure out what they actually do, please reply to this comment.
The Failure of One Laptop Per Child: What Went Wrong
Thanks iamdave (Dave?).

Our contention on punctuation is that its an artifact of text annotated for display on a static medium. With a TextFlow on an active display device, timing and white space can be used to convey those same aspects, as well as others.

Tony
Here's an ab testing plugin I wrote for rails: http://github.com/flyingma/rails_ab_split_tester/tree/master

I'm hoping going to get something similar working for merb soon.
Your network of contacts. (You do have one, right?)
my point is you are, but few people are aware of it.
A word doesn't become proper by virtue of merely being defined...

For what it's worth, my comment was on a PC bent. Nowadays, "waitress," "stewardess," etc. are frowned upon, and your use of "authoress" needlessly draws intention to the distinction. It's a clumsy word as well, which makes it seem that you find this distinction notable enough to decide against the far, far more common "author."
People who liked this also liked:

http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/

and:

http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/data/256colors2.pl

which is a perl script to show you what your terminal can do. PuTTY answers 8 to tput colors (CentOS 4.7) but is capable of 256.
i would actually put it to the top of the right column: the news stories are the most important, so you don't the submit form to get in the way.
age per se is not a problem – just look at Erlang, which is one of the "cool" languages at the moment.

the issue is, in addition to the 3 i mentioned in my post, that there isn't a problem that you think of and then you think that CL is the answer:

* an enterprisey app → Java or C#

* a web app → Ruby, Python, Perl or PHP

* an HTTP/XMPP-based server → Erlang

* a bunch of scripts to glue things together → Ruby, Perl or Python

* a desktop app → C, C++, Objective-C or C# (depending on the OS)

* ??? → Common Lisp?
I agree, but they don't have the number of features that we have.
I'd be happy to write you an example if you specified more clearly than the linked website what the problem is.
I think it means cocktail in Japanese.
Sure, conceptually. I didn't know of any big ISPs using proxies in the last 5-7 years, though, until the Comcast DPI fiasco happened.

I could well be out of the loop and not aware of any huge Squid or comparable installations, but I believed them to be archaic until recently because of how much faster commercial/service provider type WAN interfaces (DS-x, OC-x) were growing relative to consumer interfaces (DSL, cable). Of course FTTH (large bandwidth to each node) and wireless data (shared upstream + carrier optimizations for signal quality instead of bandwidth + physics) may turn this on it's head.
I started using 256 color terminal a couple of years ago...there are a handful of really nice vim color schemes that take advantage of it. I'm a sucker for nice syntax highlighting, and this change made me happy for days. I found myself wanting to write more code so I could see it in the all it's colorful glory. That feeling has passed, however, so maybe I need to find another color scheme to try.
"Some do not understand Camping and lash out with spears reaching 4 to 6 feet in length."

Some context might help: http://redhanded.hobix.com/bits/campingAMicroframework.html
http://github.com/why/camping/tree/master
Obviously

meta-optimizing semantic evolutionary search -> Common Lisp

duh.

http://code.google.com/p/plop/
Hmm and maybe have a "peer reviewed" planet?
Yeah, this was an unpleasant surprise for me when I started using a Macbook for some coding. My 256 color vim color scheme (desert256, highly recommended!) would just blink repeatedly until I typed in t_Co=8 ... never thought moving from a Linux machine to a Mac would mean decreasing your colors!
Apple Hints At Palm Pre Legal Battle
Wow, thanks. That's why I like HN. You learn something new every day.
Ask HN:Payment Platforms for Validating Users
Hi,

I am starting a new project, and I want all users to be valid users and preferably unique.

I was thinking of using Paypal, and depositing a cent or so into their accounts to validate them, and then as such I know they are most likely unique and valid users.

Does anyone else have any suggestions of different payment platforms to do the same? or another way to validate a user and have a mechanism to pay them at the same time?
Different approaches to positioning a comment icon
The Obameter: Tracking Obama's Campaign Promises
Big problem --> New DSL --> Common Lisp
Genetify (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376331) is one system that was recently open-sourced. A good discussion about it is on John Resig's site:

http://ejohn.org/blog/genetic-ab-testing-with-javascript/
Let's just couch it as an intellectual exercise - no assault on religions or followers intended.

Having said that, people of faith spend varying degrees of time trying to know some deity, through study, meditation, revelation, whatever. What I'm suggesting is that technology, and even more so, the human urge that drives it, might yield the same result that people of faith want to reach, except that this technology-driven result is probably not what they expected.

How will people of faith rationalize what the soul is, if we don't need it anymore? It's been replaced by something new and improved, along with our internal organs, limbs, etc.
Goodbye to Google
Brian Kernighan: sometimes the old ways are best
The voice that says “Putting several programmers in an open room where they can interrupt each other doesn’t work, we tried that at Bell Labs in 1973” is the voice of someone who cannot appreciate that circumstances have changed, and that if you change a bunch of other things at the same time, putting an entire team in a single room can be more productive than putting them in offices with doors that close.

What would make this work now if it wouldn't work then?
Interesting that both of those mediums are broadcast/multicast only, not unicast.

All of these video streams (with maybe the exception of CNN's P2P plugin) are unicast, TCP/IP data streams. To really survive a crisis, ISPs need to implement real multicast data streams correctly so that one server can broadcast the video feed without requiring all of the clients to have their own individual copy of the feed going out.

Edit: Sorry, looks like this is already being discussed down thread.
Restitution can indeed be part of a criminal suit. However, copyright cases are generally not tried as criminal suits; they're RIAA vs. Joe Schmoe. Thievery cases are tried as criminal cases. Different standards are applied in each case.
How I edit Django templates
Good question. I have met some teams that insist on private offices, and some that get very good results with "project rooms," where everyone in the same room is working on the exact same project.

A lot of things have changed since 1973, but also don't forget that this straw-man argument is being made by someone with a sample size of one. Sometimes when people say "We tried such-and-such and it failed," they are not describing something that always or even usually failed, just that they failed when they tried it once.

Somebody else may have tried it in 1973 and gotten wonderful results. Who knows?
That's a sweet Meinl Byzance ride he's got in the youtube vid.
Good point on the namespaces. But I'm an idea guy -- the standards committee can work out the details.
The author mentions Google Analytics, but it's not entirely clear whether he means that to include Google Website Optimizer (www.google.com/websiteoptimizer). I just completed a project with it and it is quite well implemented. The biggest downside is that you have to rely on JavaScript and requests to third-party servers.
Or maybe... read hn, learn some new things, then get to work.
i second that. some deep thoughts conveyed in an entertaining way :)
Ask HN: basic word wrap in vim
I'm getting back in touch with my inner (g)vim due to an unscheduled MacBook mother(board) of a meltdown (my emergency backup Linux box won't run TextMate). All told I'm happy with vim's efficiency and power, but I'm mortified at how hard it is to get the kind of word wrap that even stupid HTML textareas achieve with no apparent effort.

Consider the text

Etiam ornare mollis tortor. Suspendisse sed neque. Nullam in elit. Cum sociis nullam.

By default, with an 80-character width vim displays this as

Etiam ornare mollis tortor. Suspendisse sed neque. Nullam in elit. Cum sociis nu
llam.

Of course, you can turn on word wrap, and get this:

Etiam ornare mollis tortor. Suspendisse sed neque. Nullam in elit. Cum sociis
nullam.

The problem is that vim inserts a newline at the linebreak, which I most emphatically do not want. In other words, I want the text to display exactly as vim displays it with word wrap turned on, but without inserting a newline. (This way it can be pasted into HTML textareas and email programs, among other places.)

Web searches have yielded nothing of use, despite diligent effort; I hope Hacker News can succeed where my Google-fu has failed.
It's not dumb. As a developer I care about install base and this is a valid comparison.
Starting this summer, YC will be in California year-round
Apple on netbooks: Mostly garbage
But the same doesn't go for people with the dedication to get good at doing various other things, like cooking or cutting hair. Or does it?
Aussie ICT industry 2009: MEGA predictions roundup
Yes, it truly was fascinating. I had forgotten I'd watched it until you mentioned it... perhaps I'll have to watch again!
Getting paid out can be painful. Make sure do everything possible to make that easy. Properly document your time/efforts and send proper invoices at the proper time.
Side Project Overload - How do you balance side projects w/ paying gigs?
Official Google Blog: Back to the energy future
Contracting is a date. Salary is going steady. Equity is getting married.

You can get out, but not without a lot of pain and legal fees. Be careful who you give equity to.
Hey Ben, totally didn't mean to leave you out! Like Dan said, the pic of Tom (wearing lipstick) is a running joke. You get just as much love as the other YC companies involved!
One of the best quotes from Scott Adams: "the difference between a bad idea and a great idea is that you're the author".

It's so true. Everyone else thinks your startup idea doesn't make any sense. That's not a reason to give up. Listen politely to the feedback. Try to extract the few ounces of truth (your idea surely is not perfect, it can be tweaked to be made even better).

But don't be discouraged by negative feedback. Keep coding. Stop polishing your Powerpoint deck.

http://fairsoftware.net: have an idea for a business? Find co-founders!
perhaps reason #2: they are all off doing their own thing. get a bunch of them together in the same room, working on the same project. more consolidation people!
Personally I think the issue is with advocacy. I would have a hard time selling Lisp at a lot of places because it's been around long enough that the management has heard of it, but they heard about it "in the eighties", which I think gives them some pause. A lot of people lump Lisp together with COBOL and the like, just out of ignorance.
Awesome site, bookmarked.

Also, did anyone else check out his first Executive Order?
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1155201977?b...
I'm pretty sure these two lines do what you want. It keeps it as one physical line, but wraps at word boundaries instead of at the exact character when doing logical wrapping.

" Break lines intelligently when wrapping
set linebreak
set display+=lastline
Boooooo.

Just kidding, but I was looking forward to you guys returning to Boston.
Yea I agree. Technically he could be correct, but he's fighting a losing fight. These things are clearly not against the law in every country and so to try to ban them on the internet will just move it out of America to countries that do allow it.

That's how things work on the internet, just ask the online gambling operators.
Awesome news. Congratulations PG & JL!
Ah, good catch. I thought those were rolled up together, but I've edited the post to make it clear I'm talking about GWO.
I agree, its like ColdFusion...only it validates.
Definitely document your time - very well, I like web-based apps like Freshbooks to handle my time tracking and invoicing.

Also, make sure your communication/planning between yourself and the client is fully documented. Often times what the client says, and what they actually want, are two entirely different things. You may need to fall back on your previous communication quite often - or at least have a place where you can outline "here is what is going to be done."

I find the combination of Freshbooks, Beanstalk, Basecamp and Highrise to be unstoppable.
Stay in school and get a job. I think you can handle working and studying. That way you can pay part of the tuition now, plus school can be useful.
I think he's referring to how the standard says nothing about threads and GUIs and sockets and other crucial features. (But I think other standards like C don't even say anything about that either...)

But most implementations address those issues and there are even libraries that expose those features in a uniform way across implementations.
I like it.

However, my personal primary issue with your app is that when I go to it to find lunch, it's just too much information. When I'm looking for lunch I don't want to spend 10 minutes browsing around and researching. I want something quick.

Suggest me a few places that might fit a criteria. Have a quick-access menu (e.g tag cloud) or search so I can quickly type in what I feel like and get the results filtered.

I know this is all available in your app, but in my opinion it's to hard to find to engage the user.
Ah, tracked down the problem - it was related to a last minute URL change I made. It should work now, sorry!
There are a lot of problems that could fit in those ???.

* symbolic computation (there are many Computer Algebra Systems written in Lisp like Maxima/Macsyma, FriCAS/OpenAxiom, Reduce, bergman)

* language processing

* artificial intelligence

* generally complex and dynamic tasks in science and engineering.

Some of the software is being continually improved since the 70ties and while it doesn't have millions of people staring at it, it is useful and appreciated.
The site was so slow to render that I gave up almost immediately.
Unless that one user is a government or large corporation which is funding all future development.

If this is the case just try to maintain your growth numbers!

;)
We will miss you crazy kids sniff

Oh well, more excuse to come visit all our friends in SF soon!
Awesome, good to have you guys here permanently, and congrats in advance!
Oh, we'll be back a lot. We love Cambridge. We're just not going to run YC there.
Congratulations.
I am curious. Why is Palo Alto a better place to raise kids? The weather? schools?
I don't have the source handy, but I remember reading that during his lifetime, Euler was responsible for one third of the entire world's output of new work in the Mathematical Sciences (Maths, Physics and Optics I guess).

ONE THIRD!

(I think it was from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Journey-through-Genius-Theorems-Mathem...)
The Javascript on the page always seems to increase the score. You have to reload to be sure if it did.
Maybe most entrepreneurs fail because success is a very hard problem? Picking the one great idea that can succeed is hard - even if you have many great ideas. Working hard in a way that focuses your effort is hard even if you work hard.

Maybe 99% of generalizations fail because .... it is easy to generalize and hard to produce useful, clear understanding.
I live in the "bay area" up in Sonoma County. There is tons of stuff to do up here. I live 15 minutes from a redwood forest and 45 minutes from the coast, which has good bouldering. Mount St. Helena is 45 minutes in the other direction, with great top-roping.

I actually don't know much about the south bay or east bay, but the north bay has tons of good outdoor possibilities.
Even if it is the schools, the won't have to worry about that for at least 5-6 years.
Most? I tried non-Linux OSs to see what you're talking about. PuTTY on Windows works perfectly. Yes, Terminal on MacOS X doesn't support 256 colors, but iTerm does.
Its good to see these kind of improvements make it through to production cars. Personally, I would be more aware of my fuel efficiency while driving if I had instant feedback. I suppose this is the constant guilt factor.
Boy did I see this one coming :)

I agree this move is better for the statups. I also agree that Palo Alto is better for kids than Cambridge. I think Arlington is slightly better than Palo Alto though.

And let me congratulate you again on the upcoming addition. Kids are great.
Essentially, you get a hash consisting of key/value pairs, where the keys may have a format such that

"key[subkey][subsubkey]" => "some_value"

is parsed into

{"key" => {"subkey" => {"subsubkey" => "some_value"}}}

for any depth of nesting.

Valid keys would be:

"key"
"key[subkey]"
"key[subkey][subsubkey]"
etc.

I hope I got the spec right. Pretty tired right now, been coding all day. :)
Cambridge itself isn't famous for great schools, but right around there (Newton, Lexington, etc) have the best schools in the country by most measures.

When you include private schools, though, I don't know how things stack.
That's good really. The speaker lists always seem better for the California one, and the space is more conducive.

Out of curiosity, from what you can tell, has the economy affected the gap between the two locales at all? Did the already timid Boston investors just give up entirely? Or has it been pretty proportional?
Ask HN: What to do with a spare linux box?
So I have a spare Gentoo box.

I want to turn it into some sort of practical utility machine, but I am having trouble with some ideas.

So far I have set it up to stream my MP3 collection, which is quite nice.

Any other ideas?
What have you guys done with spare linux boxes?
Number 1, it's a small town-- embedded in suburbia that arrived later, but large parts of it are much as they were before. Cambridge is too urban. If you let your kid ride his bike in the street in front of your house, he'd last about 10 minutes. The other option in Boston is suburbs like Lexington and Concord, but though luxurious they have the usual suburban problems (not walkable, deadly dull).

Number 2, the weather.
Here is the YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj8IA6xOpSk
I need this for further downtown:)
http://exp-platform.com/ is an A/B testing platform used internally at Microsoft that will be made available externally at some point.
I suspect there is a fine line between events where you get to win by submitting money (gambling), nothing of value (contest) and valuable work (tender).

The former two are heavily regulated to protect "passive participants" while the latter is materially different by virtue of participant being actively involved and is not nearly as regulated.

My humble opinion is based on similar line drawn between active and passive investments in securities laws - if one gets to profit by contributing funds but not valuable efforts it's a passive investment and the law is there to protect these people. If one gets to profit by contributing valuable effort then it's not a security and the law entrusts people to take care of themselves in these cases.

not a legal advice. :-)
If I was primarily motivated by money, I would have tacked on a business model to internshipin for the mere sake of raking in immediate cash.

Entrepreneurs who think like that often fail, because money distracts them from creating true value for users.
And who is going to be pg's shadow while he's on paternity leave?
A more transparent and democratic approach to internet search.
Being in the process of launching an own company I can wholeheartly second both of your points. During our recruiting efforts we noticed that most people are mindboggingly risk averse, up to the point of irrationality. In one sentence they'll tell you how they've always wanted to start their own thing and how promising your idea sounds to them - and in the next they cop out because you can't offer them a 3yr contract with full salary and some sort of success guarantee on top...
How the hell is anyone being harmed by these contests? I'm sick of these ridiculous nanny-state laws.
Guess someone will just have to pick up the scraps in Boston.
I agree with Arlington being slightly better than Palo Alto. In fact, you could say that I'm in the process of doubling down that particular gamble! Given that my brother's raising his kid in there and I'm here, I feel like I have a semi-informed opinion.

But I'm not sure that we'd have much luck convincing the expecting couple.

Congrats!
It might be true. I like CL as much as the next guy on YC, but I would quite happy if someone offered me a paycheck to use Closure.

Hell, I'd be happy to get a paycheck using Python at this point.

(I use Java in my day job. It is alright to pity me.)