skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think thats missing a big reason, google adopted it.

I have seen a resurgence of applications built on xmpp and instant messaging in general, I dont think a lot of people will know they are using xmpp, but it will be lurking in the back
And most of the rest of the world is above average, most worrisome being the polar latitudes.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/02/chart-day-2142...

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_la...

That's why they call it "global climate change" and not "oh noes it's cold in my neighborhood global warming is a lie lol"
This is a take on a rather classic business ethics question.

In the case of Carsonified, I don't think it was necessary to post that much detail about the decision to lay people off, or even to post that he was doing so at all.

On the other hand, of course, when failing to inform potential customers of things you know might lead to a worse experience, or may result in the customer losing money, it's usually better to be honest about it up front.
I don't like his pieces, and I found that the title of the article didn't give an indication that that was what I was getting.

OTOH, 'friedman' was in the URL, so I should have looked at that.
That's the nice thing about the "shoulders of giants" though.

By and large, scientific progress is cumulative. The cutting edge of quantum theory a few decades back is now undergraduate-level.

Yes, there are probably theoretical limits to human understanding, but the analogy with fish breaks down because fish don't (as far as we know) have cultural accumulation of knowledge.
This one is a running joke in designer circles. It's called a "Name My Design Company machine" -

http://www.breadlinedesign.com/naming_machine/index.htm

Just something to keep in mind when trying to avoid naming pattern cliches.
Flagged. This isn't news; it's one step removed to an "Ask HN: Do You Believe In Global Warming?"
Hmm, 1 month of data does not a pattern make.
Thank you very much! I'm sorry I missed the distinction between "loyalty to the party" and "loyalty to the country" or patriotism. I think you have illustrated better than I ever could that China in the 1960s had much bigger problems than cram school.

From your post I think I might have offended you but I am not sure how. Please accept my apologies.
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Great advice! What's your latest project called?
"You can put the best engineering in the world into your product, but if you don't know how to market, your project will rot in the source repository."

Worth pointing out that this applies to commercial software too. If you can't market your stuff to your target audience, you fail...
I would broaden the question to, how do you name anything properly? Or even more abstractly, how do you categorize anything intelligently?

Names are delimiters; In your case you're delimiting your product in someone else's mind. And while names may be arbitrary, humans understand things in terms of things we already know.

Think of baby naming. I have a two standard names stuck together. It's an Anglican/Christian English name. Though I think Christopher may be derived from Greek. Maybe it's too generic. Compare that to Shanacqua-Tibea. Nobody would know how to pronounce it, and it's too unfamiliar to remember immediately. For social reasons, you might have to remember it (to prevent embarrassment), but that pressure isn't there when someone searches in Google.

I like a mix between the familiar and different. You need to hook them in with something they know, while adding a twist to it.
I've heard this from other people too, but as an owner of both LLC's and Corps in the past, why is it so difficult? Just sell one company's assets to a new company.

If everyone is on board for the 'new' structure, then this should be trivial. If you have investors, you grant them new shares equivalent to their old LLC member %.

LLC"s have huge advantages too, if you dont plan to raise money, or only do it from a few people. The fact that you can allocate losses and gains regardless of ownership % means that you can allocate tax losses to an investor who may only own 20%. Them taking a tax loss is effective to them not paying more taxes, so it is a form of benefit for them.
Despite the fact that the 10 warmest years on record occurred since 1997, this will be seen as proof that global warming is a liberal myth.
I use Apisnetworks.com. You can add as many domains as you want to one account. Servers are fast and I haven't had any problems with them.
Fred, I still haven't seen that convincing, peer-reviewed source disproving global warming. Where is it? All of this anti-global warming stuff is just so anecdotal compared to an overwhelming scientific establishment consensus.

What makes you think you are right and that there is a vast conspiracy among the mainstream scientific community?
No, the revenue share is not 70%:

'Nokia shall pay You seventy percent (70%) of the Net Revenue[...]For purchases made by credit card, "Net Revenue" shall mean the purchase price paid[...]less all applicable taxes[...]. For purchases made via operator billing, "Net Revenue" shall mean the purchase price paid [...] less all applicable taxes[...], charges and fixed aggregate billing charges as determined solely by Nokia.'

"charges and aggregate billing charges" are likely to be a very high percentage as these will ultimately be determined by the greediness of the operators. Plus, apps sold in the EU (where most of the customers are) will undoubtedly be subject to VAT which is over 10%. Normally, a non-European business doesn't have to collect VAT (EU law says we do but you don't have to follow European laws outside of the EU).

That means developers are likely to get less than 70% of 70% of 90%; that is, less than 50% and maybe as low as 33%.

Also note that Nokia hasn't negotiated terms with the operators yet. That isn't a good sign since Nokia hasn't been able to convince AT&T to even carry their phones.
Bjørn Lomborg (http://www.lomborg.com/) has an interesting story on polar bears.

Polar bears have been at the attention of the media after a study that showed a 40% decline in polar bears due to melting ice caps that destroyed their natural habitat. There was even a picture of a lonely polar bear stuck on a piece of drifting ice in the middle of the artcic ocean with nowhere to go. Lots os environmental organisations picked up the story, and the heartbreaking picture, and ran with it. The polar bear has become the poster boy for the melting ice caps, and the global warming disaster.

But when he dug into the story he found that the study was on a small group of ten polar bears, of which four had died. Two of the polar bears died because they were shot by hunters.

I'm not arguing for or against global warming, just pointing out that you should look at the evidence and not at the media, which are appallingly bad at conveying the facts.
The paperwork issues are a red herring. The same things will bite you in the ass any time you convert from any structure to any other structure; it's just a coordination problem.

There are minor tax benefits to an LLC, and there's a major simplicity benefit. The driver (for us) to move to S-Corp is to safely grant equity.

There is no reason to overthink any of this. Just do what's easiest. But don't run a sole proprietorship just because an entry in the YC FAQ says you're easier to fund without incorporating. News flash: YC isn't investing in you anyways; by all available evidence, your odds of being accepted are low, probably lower than your odds of just succeeding with the company.
I was once told there are two ways to get a beautiful woman: "charm the pants off her, or buy her.". When it comes to domain names your only option is to buy.

I am not a "domainer" but by necessity of having tried to find some goods ones over the years I've accumulated around 50 that I hold on to "just in case". I am sure there are others here in a similar position as myself. I'm not saying HN is the best place for asking for domain name sales (it may greatly annoy some here), but maybe we are a friendlier community for having a few interesting ones in our pockets as opposed to the cold open markets?
Why making a comparison with handicapped people ? ...
Tv Stands Links
More people are using home theater entertainment centers in their homes. That's because these centers are great in that they create movie theater style experiences in the home with great picture quality and amazing sound quality for the home.
I think is a great idea if you can manage the cellphone-scanner thing, then the possibilities are endless.
I picked the first 4 and the last 1. It's a pretty good position to be in!
- GCC was a necessary prerequisite to starting in on a kernel. What good would a free OS have been if it wasn't self-hosting on free software?

- Emacs was a politically important project because there had been a serious free-software kerfuffle among emacs-like editors. The most popular such editor for unix, Gosling emacs, had recently gone from open source to closed source without warning.
Giving money to the founders:  In 2009, is this still absurd?
It may be nice to think of the law as common sense, but in most countries this is not the standard. Because 'common sense' changes, frequently and without cause.

'Common Sense' can be misleading in many situations -- medicine, law, business strategy, crime, etc. What is common sense to you about software may not be common sense to someone with no IT knowledge, and vice versa with regards to, say, how cheese is manufactured.

The law adapts, sure, but it also tries to maintain order by being resistant to quick change. The fact that most of our legal system defaults to prior case law should say something about this.

That said, I am not an attorney. I just know using common sense seems like an incredibly bad basis for determining legality.
I have the TripleHead2Go. It works, but I wouldn't rate it as "works fine".

The driver it came with didn't work (at all). So I had to download a new program. That one works, but it won't remember it's settings. So every time the computer sleeps or turns off the displays or anything, you have to quit the Matrox PowerDesk app, restart it, re-auto-find the attached displays, and reapply the settings.

And then it asks you to reboot so it can remember it's settings.

Also, it sometimes has a bit of noise on the monitors.

It works, and I love having the Macbook Pro's 15" plus two 23" worth of desktop real estate, but I'm not sure it's worth the 300 bucks.
I usually take 1 of 3 approaches:

1. Look for a metaphor - like for instance, "digg" because you're uncovering stuff, or "YCombinator" because it's a company that spawns other companies

2. Be descriptive - like "RemindsYou" or "SalesForce" or "FriendFeed"

3. Kind of like JasonLBaptiste said - drop some or all of the vowels can work sometimes as well... so like "RCRDLBL" or "MSTRKRFT" or "PIPL" or "TWTPoll"
Well said. I read this headline as "We should all stop riding our bikes and start driving big SUVs!!11!"
I'm curious to know if anything of this sort has happened since the article was published.
How search engines are getting smarter
It's sort of ironic that they're using blogger to publish this, which of course isn't open source...
It will rot until someone needs it. Isn't this a beautiful form of preserving investment and pooling resources across barriers of time?
You can still log with OTR, and if you use AOL/ICQ/MSN/Gtalk etc. there will always be at least one network still kicking.
Grove: HTTP access to mnesia data with erlang (screencast)
My first erlang project, hacked together over the last month.
Dupe of another frontpage story.
But the result of GPLed software is also that it can be freely modified by anyone who cares. I think your stance is to one-dimensional, while remaining interesting. I also cannot prove you wrong. I will think about it. My guess at the moment is, that RMS changed his views over time.
> The purpose of a system is what it does

Therefore the purpose of the internal combustion engine is to waste the 82% of energy? :-)
This may not be the smartest way to do it but here's what I did: I gave myself 30 minutes to brainstorm a bunch of names that I liked. (I did this with a pen & paper to avoid getting bogged down in needless WHOIS lookups, etc.)

Then I opened up Google Translate and converted the words to Italian, Spanish, etc to see if any interesting variations popped up. And, finally, with this new list in hand, I started determining which ones were available.

Overall, I spent no more than an hour on the whole process and came away with a new domain name in hand.

IMHO, spend your time worrying about whether your startup actually solves a real problem for your potential users. If you can actually do that, the name won't matter... that much.
The process is pretty simple and a lot of fun: think of and write down some words that describe or are related to your project. These are the seeds, or starting point. You should be able to write down 10-50 such words. Try to write down words that are related to the way your product differentiates itself from its competitors. Also look at latin or greek translations of the words (use online dictionaries).

The goal is to come up with variations or combinations of words or related words. Use sites like morewords.com which can show you words starting with a word, ending with a word, containing a word, etc. You can try Google Sets, but it's not very useful for coming up with new stuff. Also do general Google searches for your words and see what other words pop up on the result pages. During this period, carry pen & paper around so you can write down anything you think of.

For most good names you'll come up with the .com won't be available, but that's okay, just keep trying. Be prepared to check 20 domains to find one that is available. Be sure to use non-evil domain checkers that don't automatically register the name.

A good name should be easy to pronounce, and based on the pronounciation, easy to write down, even for foreigners (names with vowels removed, used at the height of the web2 bubble, are no good). It should be related to your project (eg. Amazon is not really a good name for a hypothetical startup bookstore).

You should have 5-10 good names (which may be close to each other) at the end of the process, consult with your partners and pick the best one.

Good luck!
Is Michelle Obama an angry Klingon?
Is Michelle Obama an angry Klingon?
What's nice about this link is that it is hard evidence reported by NOAA, rather than a political opinion.
An Interview with _why the Lucky Stiff
Also, taken != unavailable. If there's no actual website there, or if the website looks neglected, or if it's one of several names for the same thing, you might be able to buy it. Several YC startups have bought .coms for between $1000 and $5000. If your company is serious, that's a worthwhile investment.
Atom and Media RSS are existing formats that let you export all kinds of data. Already OurDoings uses FriendFeed as a social networking hub, but thanks to Media RSS and SUP, you could plug in a different hub if you wanted to. And, of course, from the FriendFeed side you could plug in a different source for photos/stories of your doings if you wanted to.
You can change of social network (it's not a Microsoft-like monopoly), but as everybody's in it you have to be in it by pure network effect. In other markets like Brazil, everybody is on Orkut, so no real choice either, you have to be on Orkut. Idem for the music niche for myspace.
Book Review: The Three Laws of Performance
Some of it sounds wishfull thinking and widely exagerated.

"I'm not sure I see how TMS can actually alter the way your brain works" Thats a renown scientist apparantly. Has he not read about the experiments that the main scientist has been doing. WHy can he not see how TMS can alter the way our brain works. How can these renowned scientists not believe the work that the times is reporting, whats wrong with it, why is the times not saying anything about the seemingly contradictory reporting of the views of these scientists?
The question I have is, how do you build Super Monkey Balls in HTML/CSS/JS? And since the answer is quite clearly you don't, the next questions are, is there any alternative that gives you pixel-level control, and if not, how can the Pre hope to compete as a platform against the iPhone and Android?
I really like this but I want to be able to setup alerts for new events that are added matching particular locations and keywords. Otherwise although I like the site and I found a few useful events, I'm unlikely to come back just because I won't remember to.

Would also love to get you a custom version of WebMynd which will stick your event search results on the right hand side of Google, if you're interested...
You've never heard of Ingres?

But anyway, yeah. It's hard to find time for both coding and writing letters (that will be ignored) to the President. A classic example here is ESR -- he spends a lot of time advocating open source, but doesn't spend much time writing software. (OK, OK, he wrote vc-mode.el and maintains fetchmail. Even I do more than that!)

The free software movement doesn't need you to write letters. The free software movement needs you to write excellent free software. The rest follows naturally.
Another tip: Use a markov chain to generate random words and pick some out of those.

Here are some words I just came up with using a random word generator script I once wrote (in Python): zenthanooo, uroratou, arerent, malimanged, wastsal, matiri, rasanto ... you get the point.

They might not be the best names for your startup, but they might provide a starting point for brainstorming.
bgeldof, please read the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't post things like this.
So, I do think that XMPP will become a much bigger force given the (anecdotal) rate that post-college students replace their college email with Gmail (and get Google Talk with it). However, XMPP can't just rest. It really needs to get Jingle (their VoIP/video protocol) finished and approved and adopted. With more people looking to use voice and video online, they can't be left behind because of lack of features.

With Google driving some adoption and (hopefully) smaller IM networks seeing that XMPP would be in their interests (since it would help them overcome a lack of users), XMPP could see decent enough growth. However, if other networks have desired features that XMPP doesn't offer, the interoperability argument is countered by the lacking of things users want.
Student, hacker and wannabe entrepreneur.
Complexity isn't Subjective, Our Reactions to it Are
I've found that marketing is vastly overrated. I think people think it's important because Ruby on Rails came out of nowhere and had good marketing, but that was just a rare special case. Most of the time, people will find your open source project and start using it without fancy marketing.

An example of this is the Perl OO library, Moose. It started out as some code factored out of our internal apps. Other people liked it and contributed code. Now it's the standard way to do OO in Perl. The only marketing that was done was talking about it on IRC and doing some conference talks. And oh yeah, the awesome single-page website (http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/).
44% of Small Businesses Still Don’t Have a Web Site
Nice! Just what I was looking for.
There is a growing body of research done by scientists on the role the Sun plays in global climate. Here's an example: "Do Models Underestimate the Solar Contribution to Recent Climate Change?" http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/StottEtAl.pdf The answer, of course, is yes as there has never been an accurate computer model prediction of temperature using the manmade Co2 theory.
What you're pointing here, is that even a "non-evil" company can nearly be forced by the sake of self-protection and simplicity to have abusive clauses. Maybe this shows the need of active regulation and arbitration in the domain.

In France we have somthing supposed to ensure data privacy called "CNIL" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNIL ). Is there some equivalent in the US?
Anthropogenic global warming hasn't been "proved" either. And the agreement by peer review of however many climatologists, whose jobs also depend on global warming's acceptance, doesn't really lend it any credibility in my eyes.

Of course one month is anecdotal, and you're right to say it is -- it undermines the anti-warming camp's credibility rather than helping it. But every year up until this one, any mention of the hot summers on the BBC (I live in the UK) was always attributed to global warming. So the pro-global warming guys don't hesitate to promote anecdotal evidence that favours them, too. The sooner both sides drop it, the better.

My own opinion is that the 150 years or so that the global warming discussion centres on is insignificant looking at the bigger picture. Just look at the MWP, which happened on its own without fossil fuels, etc. Trends like the one that's happening now have always happened; there's always been warming and cooling. Add to that the ~15-year periods of cooling in the 50s and 90s, and I'm hardly convinced there's correlation with CO2 output, let alone causation.

But even after that big rant, I still wish people would keep this stuff off HN. It doesn't belong here -- keep it to Reddit or wherever.
Here is more or less how I do it:

- write down a list of words closely related to the subject

- get thesaurus and add the words I find as synonyms to the list

- make a list of permutations that make sense

- ask my registrar to do searches on all of them for .com, .org and .net

- rinse and repeat until I find a good set, if the .com is free but the rest is not then that is ok too, but not preferred.

The process can take up the better part of a day before I find a domain that I'm happy with.
As other people have said, Unix was the name of an operating system, not a kernel, and the name has always referred to more than just a kernel and a shell.
Unless I'm missing something totally obvious, many of these reasons might as well be said for SIP.
I would like to add that to break this network effect, you have to add a LOT more. In my opinion for example, Facebook is starting to break the MSN monopoly using it's own, as people are using it to chat.
The other HN submission

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482772

links to a different Web source, so not exactly a duplicate. Just a hot new story.
Cell phone projectors by 2010?
Envy Code R default for me...

http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...
The company that runs the one in Paris is JCDecaux, basically the ClearChannel of Europe. They fought and won against CC to build/implement the system in Paris.
liberals not required. It's just bad science to extend scientific consensus into the political arena. It makes scientists political figures. Politics and science work in different ways. Science should always be willing to be proven wrong. Politics is about fear and emotion and statements and consensus and all of that.

We already had a bunch of smart guys who ruled by consensus. It was called the church. Didn't work out too well.
That's really the next feature we are working on. We are planning to add filtering based on different aspects -- basically, the 4 W's: who, what, when, where -- and give you a feed of it (and eventually webhook).

What do I have to do to get a custom version of WebMynd?
Feel free to generate the map for whatever date range you like.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/

The 2008 map is telling. Virtually the entire world is warmer than the 1950-1980 average:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_la...