skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A more modern game that looks worse to me is Big Rigs: Over the Road (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs:_Over_the_Road_Racing). There is basically no game play, no physics, and no real goal (since your opponents don't move from the start line). The video review at http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/driving/bigrigsotrr/review.html is also worth watching to see just how awful this game looks.
A New Approach To Facebook
Melbourne / Geelong here too! I was impressed when I put the SB blog post above together too. There is a nice range of events happening, and a good amount of code happening too :)
Go ahead and post it.
Running a Genetic Algorithm on the iPhone
Very Good Points, For me though Distraction is a difficult thing to get rid of - I have found setting out my day into blocks of 30 min periods are useful, having a timer go off after those 30 min keeps your mind in check. However, having the time to do this each day is not easy and not to mention the fact that life throws curve balls at you all the time which can lead to your allocations being a bit out of whack.

Marc
same here

anyone else from Copenhagen want to meet send me a mail.

:-)
I agree with froo. This is definitely not a powerless situation, as you got to advise the startup. If you had less integrity, you could easily come up with plausible arguments why should they accept your funding before getting acquired.
We're busy porting Pootle (translate.sf.net) to Django and it's painful. Webapps don't seem to be Django's strong point (though I'm sure that it excels in other arenas).

I've only played with Rails before, but I get the impression that it's far more suited to the kind of thing we're doing.
Which is more useful, MBA or starting something?
I asked a few startup founders, MBA graduates, and industry figures such as David Heinemeier Hansson what they thought on the idea of an MBA vs starting a startup.

www.short.ie/mba

The impression I got back was generally in favor of a startup, but that an MBA was definitely worthwhile. What do you guys think?

Dave
I think you're entirely wrong about the "copy of the GPL" business. The LGPL consists of the GPL plus a bunch of extra stuff. The LGPL document found e.g. at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html lists only the extra stuff. Therefore, whenever it imposes any requirement to distribute a copy of the licence, it says "a copy of the GNU GPL and this license document". That's all. If there were a requirement to distribute your stuff under the terms of the (not-L)GPL, then it would say so. (Merely distributing a copy of the GPL along with your code would not put the code under that licence.)

Those terms to which you object mean, I think, the following: If your object code includes bits of the library header files, and if those bits are substantial, then you have to (1) say that you're using the library, (2) say what licence the library is covered by, and (3) include a copy of the documents that define that licence.
Try Chimay.
Everyone has SMS or email. More than have twitter clients.
awesome bias there
Dear lord, did i just spend 5 minutes reading what was 90% almost religious in nature praise with 10% viable information?

This article is patently useless. Let me sum it up for you in 3 sentances. Apple 3.0 sdk = could be good. Android sucks with viruses. The iphone is so superior to everything ever.
Cork, Ireland
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Sparkle: The iPhone Gets Its First Virtual World (And It’s Completely 3D)
Online game gets a banking license
I would agree on DHH, If you really think you can build something cool, why would you wait for two years to learn business aspect of it. As PG says in how to start a startup, "I found that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard, like tax law or the pricing of derivatives, but you don't need to know about those in a startup. All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities" so, why not try out building a startup
I don't get it. What does it even mean to be "the next desktop platform"?
Contextual User Interfaces
Nonsense.

As an iPhone developer and an OS X developer I can say that it doesn't compare to the capabilities of a real desktop.

The iPhone has serious constraints in CPU, memory and UI interaction that really encourage simple single purpose applications. Try to do anything more complex and things fall over fast.

Not to mention the absurd app store and it's get in to the top 25 of downloads or die stupidity.
France but I currently live in Malaysia
HN is not a good place to look for contrary views - it is almost a given here that:

Start-up = Good
MBA = Bad

Depends upon where you expect to be in the future - working for a large corporation then an MBA would be just the ticket - working in a start-up / small enterprise then the opposite would be true.
Really surprising that it beats cPickle with binary protocol. Good stuff, thanks.
I for one was ecstatic the first time someone declared me their archnemesis. If I had a moustache, I would have twirled it.
Prices go up when babies are born, and down when homes are built.

Except that in many cities there is no room to build any more houses, so prices go up based on how many people want to live in a city.

People want to live in a city usually for economic reasons. (Close to jobs, cheap services etc).

So basically, unless you are buying rural property, prices will go up when people want to move to cities.

All that's economics - but the real world is a bit more complicated. People determine how much to pay for a house based on two things: how much the seller wants, and how much money they have.

Easy loans made it such that people had lots of money for houses. Sellers like to make a profit when they sell a house (it's emotional, not logical).

Put those together and you have a housing price boom. But it can't (couldn't) last because it doesn't match the real economics of the situation.

At the end of the day prices should move based on population in cities, and inflation.

And BTW people are already buying up city blocks in Detroit. The biggest problem there is crime though, which makes it hard to buy a house and hold it for a while.
do you want to have your success credited to an institution that bugs you for alumni donation every year?

isn't it much cooler to credit all to yourself (or startup) and pay no tax?

some cool people even have priviledge to say "i'm a college dropout" :D
Can you tell me what exactly it is that Facebook does with Machine learning?
Good points, but not so many of them. After having first well designed site I really could use feedback:
What if the UI was semi-automatically giving feedback? Like each link could have two variations:
normal: _change time zone_
and with feedback: _change zone but why this was buried here_
Now as a webmaster I could follow up if people started to "complain" on something.
Would you consider a pageview decrease a downside? Even though they may lose some ad revenue (I don't know the details), their bandwidth costs may dip a bit, and ads aren't their real path to monetization anyway. I'm not sure it really matters as much to their long-term vision as apps.
Lisboa
Geneva, Switzerland
Exploding offers are a sign of desperation, but they also serve to filter out young entrepreneurs who have a modicum of business sense.

The VC firm that extends an exploding offer and won't negotiate it is guaranteeing that they'll only fund companies that aren't very good at business.

A few years ago I wrote:

It seems to me that a company that accepts an exploding offer is demonstrating a remarkable lack of basic business aptitude. Every building contractor in New York knows you request bids from five or ten plumbers before you award the contract. If a plumber said, "I'll do it for $x, but if you shop around, deal's off," the contractor would laugh his head off and throw the plumber out on the street. Nothing sends a stronger message that an offer is uncompetitive than refusing to expose it to competition. And that's for a $6000 kitchen installation. Getting $10 million in funding for a business is the biggest and most important deal in the life of a company.

(http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/VC.html)
How to Write Fast Code
One More!
tel aviv
It's an old article (see comments above)
Shameless plug but I'm working on the user generated content side at http://www.afterthedeadline.com
Torino, Italy
Me too. Feel free to say hi.
London, UK
a really great music video detailing what Atari did with the cartridges: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rt_3_bQVJU
Do GM scripts from Firefox work without modification?

Thinking further, most GM scripts only operate on the html received, and are independent of the browser. So all one needs is the GreaseMonkey platform to act as a holder, and existing GM scripts can run straight off, without modification. (maybe some use special Firefox functions, or their job is to interact with firefox specifics, but I think most wouldn't).
So, at the risk of asking a stupid question, does this mean the tag line on the front page ("Multiple datacenters to ensure high availability") is bunk?

I use S3, but not JD, so I don't keep up with it much. I thought that when they added Mosso, it was in case S3 went down -- am I misunderstanding how it works?
Computing's history is one of repeated disruption. But stagnant lately. Netbooks aren't really a new platform - they run all the old software. Not like the jump from Sun Workstations to PCs.

Maybe iPhone/Pre is the next disruption?
>> "if it weren't for this guy you wouldn't be starting all these startups on shoestring budgets"

I don't think you can really argue that at all. If he hadn't done some useful stuff, someone else would have.
Magazine advertising with Webwindows
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Big Data: Technologies and Techniques for Large-Scale Data
Too busy and too much information is my initial thought. I'd also probably have the two-column video section switched to the right instead of left. Also to me, the vids are the fluff of the page, and makes the product information I want to read harder to find.
Yverdon area, Switzerland
Lifting their dreams by the bootstraps
> You don't usually want to give out your email address as a form of general ID,

But why is that? Is it because people will abuse it and send you data you don't want (spam)?

The same problem applies to twitter ids, except that not many people are spamming yet (I assume).

I guess there's also a single-point to detect spammers, which might make detection easier, but I'd be surprised if that was enough to control the problem.
Cook, a smart make replacement
Colombo, Sri Lanka! But live in Dubai.
Cute. An artefact from a time when text was still written on the assumption that the primary consumption would happen through print.
In some way I think you need some form of middle-like management once an organisation gets beyond a certain size. I know Joel Spolsky has mentioned it and I agree with his reasoning. (http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-ho...)

I can even see it at the startup I'm currently at. Even though the CEO/COO's door has always been "open", it's been harder and harder to enter it as the size of the company has increased. It's not a physical barrier, although the C*O's are busier now, but a psychological one in most cases, where once is (I don't want to say it but) afraid or cautious in disturbing the busy individual.

That being said the quality of the person being the manager is probably the most important detail. I can see that in the company I'm in. In the group I'm in we have a really good manager, one that's able to gather our grievances and ideas and present them to the higher ups. While the other group has a pretty lack lustre manager. The difference in morale, job satisfaction, and employee retention are striking. But none of these managers have an MBA.
Why this new has currently 13 points?
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46584,opinion,mba-the-letters-...
Webwindows | Newspaper Advertising
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And I.
Liverpool, UK
Hsinchu, Taiwan
This is the kind of advice that points at something so obvious that you really never thought about it and feel silly once someone points it out :)
I thought that when they added Mosso, it was in case S3 went down -- am I misunderstanding how it works?

Yes. With Jungle Disk you pick where you want your files stored.

As far as I can tell Jungle Disk added support for Mosso simply because Rackspace bought JD and were embarrassed to not be using their own cloud storage system.
>The GPL would give it rights (it would be "free"), while >the BSD license would allow it to be sold into slavery >("non-free.")

Conclusion: The BSD license gives the freedom to to be sold. (Really-free).
Watch TV5 News | Online Telugu News | Live TV5 News
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Lyon, France :)
OK, someone else from Spain? I live in Madrid, though I'm andaluz. Hola hola...
At the end of the day if they originally wanted you, chances are they still want you, despite deadlines. They won't cut their nose to spite their face. Call their bluff. Chances are they'll want you back.

Not to mention the selection correlation - if you get into some seed organization, you're already more likely to get into YC. It isn't guaranteed, but it's already a good sign.
How about we make this thread an open forum about this? Name which firms are behaving poorly, to warn others about them or to let them respond.
Online Backup Company Carbonite Loses Customers’ Data, Blames And Sues Suppliers
IPhone game developer Ngmoco raises second round of funding
Unfortunately, this advice falls into a very common category: Simple, obvious in hindsight, and completely wrong.

Modern CPUs do not "execute a fixed number of instructions per second"; even leaving aside the fact that certain instructions are faster than others, factors such as the order in which you access memory locations and the predictability of branches can easily result in a tenfold difference in performance.

In many cases, code can be made faster by executing more instructions; I recently dealt with some code where changing a (theoretically) O(N) algorithm to an O(N log N) algorithm and increasing the number of operations by a factor of 10 nevertheless resulted in the code running twice as fast. Now, this was an extreme case -- the code went from accessing completely random memory locations to accessing completely sequential memory locations -- but it demonstrates the importance of memory access patterns.
We're getting closer... :)

I'm offering a belgian beer to the closest person!

Could you guys add your location on http://hackrtrackr.com/

and maybe update your profiles with skills and projects?
Some might say jumping from PCs to Sun Workstations would be better?
Have you considered rolling admissions now that you're in Cali all year? Those that aren't ready for demo day could wait till the next one. You could have 3 or 4 demo days yearly. That would solve scheduling problems.

It might also make the application process easier on you by trickling in the applications. No cramming to get to them all. You could still do batch interviews monthly.
This is a great introduction to memory access and management by one of the Red Hat gurus http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf
Search Engine Optimization is a Waste of Money
Your response showed me I'd managed to be insufficiently clear in actually spelling out my argument. I apologise for that and thanks for the feedback. I've included a follow up post on the subject going into more detail as to why I think it's specifically necessary to address the Apple philosophy rather than just the results of the pursuit of that philosophy at http://skepticalphoenix.blogspot.com/2009/03/why-apple-sucks...
I don't think this is wise on the YC domain. Even if the words are from users of the site it can open nasty doors.
The five things it found on my website (only five because, as zemaj explains, that's all they list if you use the quick scanner on their front page instead of creating an account) were all false positives. (Two non-English words, both in the middle of lengthy tracts of non-English; it seems to me that there might be useful heuristics for spotting this situation. One phonetic explanation of how to pronounce something; not much they could do about that. One colloquial neologism; not much they could do about that. One perfectly correct but uncommon word.)

I bet there are genuine typos, at least, on some of my pages. I find one every now and then. So whatever heuristics "spellFOCUS" is using to distinguish errors from non-errors seem like maybe they could be improved.

Nice interface.

The pay-for-service prices seem awfully high to me, but I'm not the target market for several different reasons.
Apple needs to create a new ranking system. Just going by downloads is garbage, I am sick of seeing stupid single-use (lite) games taking up the Top 25.

Is there no way of looking at my previous purchases/downloads and recommending apps for me? They do it for music, why not iPhone apps?
Even if they're equal, (and the startup seems to be accepted as generally better), the MBA costs about $150,000 at a top institution. A startup (or several) shouldn't cost you more than 50k$ over two years; and if it does, you're doing it wrong.
Panama City, Panama
>> Modern CPUs do not "execute a fixed number of instructions per second"

Very true for x86, but AFAIK things like ARM based chips are quite a bit closer to 'fixed number of instructions per second'. Still penalties for badly thought out memory access etc though.
We are pretty behind, technology wise. We don't have iPhones in vending machines, they are a little expensive here (the iPhones). Some industries use machines more than 20 years old. The only startup product used here is Facebook. But Lima isn't bad, in the more rural areas, you'd be lucky to see a car that isn't falling apart. There's probably 20 guys total with internet connection.
Anti-patterns for Javascript
Am I the only one from Pakistan?
Moscow, Russia. That's why I upvoted both Europe and Asia.
Thanks for noticing. I never started a poll, so I don't have a test case. I made a fix based on how the * marker is rendered elsewhere.

Please try if it works for you:

http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnpollchart.user.j... (GreaseMonkey)

http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hn_poll_graph.js (bookmarklet include)
I'm glad to see people talking about one of the four stages of optimization:

1. Do we have to optimize this? Time is never free, and opportunity cost in terms of engineering effort is usually very significant.

2. Can we do less work? (this article)

3. What's the bottleneck? CPU, FP, memory bandwidth, lock contention?

4. How do we squeeze out better performance? Assembly, loop unrolling, etc.

I usually cringe when I hear about people talking about #4, as very few of them have asked #1, #2, or #3 yet.

And usually, you just hear people talking about doing what the compiler's already doing (writing it in assembly? /The compiler already does that/), usually doing a pretty reasonable job at high optimization levels. They just exchange maintainability for the warm fuzzy feeling that they've been as macho as needed.
If you are using the GNOME desktop use gconf-editor to
set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme to "Emacs". As far as I can tell, everything works (like I am now typing ctrl-A on firefox to go to the beginning of this line)

There is also Alt, and Meta, and you can set your own keymaps in X.

Actually, one of the reasons I didn't like the mac is the lack of flexibility in this area (like re-mapping ctrl and caps lock). Doable but not as simple as in Linux.
So the next desktop will be effectively single threaded, without the ability to show two windows at the same time?

Seriously, a modern webbrowser is already a more powerful platform than the iPhone. That's why Palm is using WebKit...
My girlfriend has a neurologic disease (Lyme) that makes it difficult for her to use a normal, full desktop. There's too much "noise" and it can be painful for her. She actually prefers using the iphone because of the fact that you can only run one app at a time.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I found it pretty interesting that the iphone was actually a superior overall experience for her.
I think a really interesting proposition would be to get together and write some GPLed javascript libraries. Things that would be immensely useful in coding up something like Google Docs. IANAL, but we may need some modified Affero type GPL for this. I'll leave licensing up to Stallman and Co. Then, you'd quickly see some GPL adoption on that side.

The key is seeding the domain (in this case javascript libraries) with code so good and tempting, people would rather give back their improvements than rebuild the base from scratch.
west coast represent!
Right, but you didn't pick the best example. After all, people need to eat to survive, and survival is a long-term value. I'd mention the whole entertainment industry :-)
Imho, that's true. At one point, the iphone will be fast and powerfull enough that you'll plug it to a big screen and keyboard and won't need a desktop computer anymore. Kinda, the fusion between the mini and the iPhone... thus you won't have any synchronization problem ever again!
If your only talking about machine intelligence that we've already created, then of course we already understand that. I was talking about the concept of machine intelligence and problems that we would like to solve and are trying to solve with machine intelligence, but haven't solved yet. Once we solve a machine intelligence problem, we tend to call it an algorithm or a technique rather than machine intelligence.
Well... that's the end of Carbonite.
How to manage Macs: An expert guide for IT
NickB is great. It was meant to be facetious because of his rank in the leaders list.
I agree with you. Initially my eyes get pulled to so many things at once, I have a hard time focusing on a single piece of information on the page. Looking at the page a bit longer, it becomes easier to absorb. One of the reasons for that is that the top elements in the visual hierarchy are the bubble background shapes (and not the text in the bubbles). So at a first glance, my eyes just pick up four big bubble shapes. I think the site would work very differently if the bubble backgrounds were very light and the text in them wasn't as tightly set.

For me personally, this semi-clutter speaks against their products and the company's focus on simplicity. I'd have preferred a more minimal approach that allows each element to breathe a little more.
+1 Scotland (Edinburgh)
5 things ie8 got right
E250 Not Charging Problem
Integrating Source Control Tools with Mantis Bug Tracker