skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting post, even if it was your own (although you might be better off omitting the "--agree?" in the future)

I'm not sure that it's true that "young people are prone to alter or repurpose software and devices to their liking" in any majority, now or ever. There are always a lot of hackers, but they've never seemed to me to be a significant percentage of their age group.

Bricolage is VERY interesting, especially when compared to traditional 'engineering'. Here's an excerpt [1] from Claude Lévi-Strauss (the term's originator):

"The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand'"

[1] full text at http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/info/levstcld066savamind....
This is the original entry:

http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200801#31

Same person who brought us "Tracking an entire Windows sytem inside Git" last month:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455320

Note the title could be construed the wrong way, the author means it is the next unix only as an analogy: it's a new, underlying platform where atomic building blocks can be combined and hooked up by higher level programs to do a lot of great things.
I think you're misunderstanding what they're trying to say. I think they're trying to escape the perfectionism that can stall a project and halt progress.

They have a very extensive testing framework that tests for correctness. Even if they didn't, if a browser isn't doing something correct, people would notice right away. Their "we don't care" assumes people working on the project are competent and will produce code that is good enough™.

Modern WebKit browsers tend to be extremely stable, enjoys a clean code base, and very fast, so they're doing something right.
Article is actually about the necessity of being able to run tasks outside of the request/response timeframe for web stacks.

In case, you know, the title was less than obvious.
That doesn't update every second of every minute of every day. Verifying immediately that you did in fact feel an earthquake is a perfect example of twitter's power. As a San Francisco resident I can tell you this definitively.
Strange -- when I've had to use Zimbra in the past, I've found it to be a very painful and frustrating experience. In comparison, GMail is an utter joy.
In general, you can do this in any language which lets you pass functions around as values, and which supports closures. And languages in which you can fake it somehow.
Next time you have a problem with your machine or with some code you're writing try your search on Google and on Twitter Search. Next time you want to buy something try Google and Twitter. Next time you want to look up the population of Tanzania try Google and Twitter.

Twitter provides "real-time search," but that is just a small, almost miniscule subset of Google's capabilities. You can in some cases get real-time data from social aggregators and Facebook; I think those are the real competitors to Twitter.

Twitter is not even in the same league as Google. They don't cover the same areas, they don't have the same business models, they don't have comparable numbers of users, they don't offer the same services. There is absolutely no competition here.
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Perhaps. I am sick of this "Yes, it is a myth. Calories in versus calories out. It's as simple as that." being portrayed by people as a fact. It's just not so simple, and it's wrong.

I could write long winded responses with references. The problem is you end up explaining most of biochemistry along with it, as the rabbit hole is truly deep. And people still don't get it, because most people even with undergrad degrees in biochem don't (you don't get to see the rabbit hole until you reach postgrad at most unis and read tons of papers).

It's kind of like trying to explain why functional programming is better than OO to someone who just uses excel.

None of the terminology used should be esoteric if you have studied biochemistry. Apologise for the tone, it is really frustrating seeing someone promote the same old myth.
I don't 'hate' companies that see advertising as their only revenue source, I just question both it's effectiveness in running a sustainable business and the hesitation that software developers working as founders have in charging real money for the quality services they are building.

I don't count media companies, as I'm not sure of any ycombinator start ups focused on media (in the sense of being blogs, such as tech crunch or hpost, etc.), and those list of technology service-oriented companies you list, it's fairly questionable how great any of their business models really were/are.

Everyone likes to point out Google and YouTube, but they forget google owns online advertising, period. And YouTube never really made any money.

Don't get me wrong - it's great being an acquisition target and it's a great way to make some quick cash, but I think generally founders under-estimate the potential of their own company of being self sustaining and being very profitable with a paying customer base.
A 301 redirect will typically pass most of it, except when it doesn't. (There are a variety of reasons why that could happen. Most involve automated filters designed to make the technique less effective to spammers. They're not perfect.)
I hate the blending of terms in this article. It makes for a shitty read. Here's an example:

"Zimbra actually has 31.4 million users in the United States, squeaking by the 31.2 million unique monthly visitors Gmail received in the US during the month of January."

Take note. In the first, they put out 31.4 million, but that's a total user count and in the second, they put out 31.2 million, but that's unique monthly visitors.

Two totally different statistics, but they act as if they are the same. GMail likely has a LOT more user accounts, plus, this doesn't account for people who get their email through SMTP/POP or IMAP..

Shame on you VentureBeat. Shame on you.
I'm sorry, but usually it's the opposite for me.
I especially appreciate social technologies before they jumped the shark.

Email? It was awesome before everyone and their mother used it.
Friendster? It was like the wild wild west, free and easy, until everyone and their mother got on it (and then facebook).

Twitter right now is okay. I forget who mentioned, but they said that everyone would be on twitter in five years. That just sounds horrendous. Twitter is already too diluted with "I have to go to the bathroom." "Nothing is coming." "Okay, things are coming nicely." "I just went to the bathroom." There is going to be one hunded times as much shit on Twitter come five years. Pun intended.
Making generalizations about rich and poor is very dangerous. It may well be cultural, and many areas which are poor happen to have that cultural attribute. Perhaps it is also related to media exposure. I doubt that happiness is directly related to wealth or lack of wealth. Obviously there are many happy middle-class people and many sad poor people.
Sorry but the body doesn't burn just-eaten food that quickly.
> Reference please? Are you sure? :)

Unless you somehow burned through all your carb stores before bed you're not going to be burning much fat while you sleep.
> Explain ketone levels increase in the morning regardless of nightly meal composition

Plus sleeping itself burns very few calories so don't expect to be melting away pounds by sleeping.
> Exercise causing EPOC can be used in conjunction to reduce energy efficiency, increase energy loss as heat etc etc. You can alter BMR/RMR if you try.
> If you don't use the OMG acronym its completely meaningless.

I don't use that acronym and I knew what it meant.
I think the kind of education and training needed for most software development situations is not widely available. What's needed, and starting to show up is a software engineering degree that bridges the gap between code-monkey and computer scientist.

Vocational education programs in computer programming tend to produce code-monkeys who produce internal applications that don't do anything especially interesting. The applications are usually web and desktop GUIs over some database, and tend to be written in Java, C#, VB and the like. Most people with this level of training would have trouble picking up a new language without more formal training.

Computer scientists tend to know massive amounts of theory. I suspect most computer scientists could pick up a new language simply by glancing over the documentation, and write a paper describing the theories the language implements. If you asked a computer scientist to create an application the accounting department at a big company could make use of, however, you'd probably have bad luck.

What's often missing is education and training for software engineers. Finding solutions to difficult problems requires a good grounding in theory, but actually implementing them requires a background in tools that meet real-world needs. It does appear that degrees in software engineering are starting to appear, though I know essentially nothing about the programs. Most hackers fall in to this category, though their learning tends to come from less formal sources.
> Who’d have known so many things ending in ‘anola’ would be untaken?

It's surprising that people don't want "anal" in their name? Really?
Uhm, yes it does. It's realtime data.

And since it's backed by actual scientific instruments, you can tell immediately if it was a magnitude 3 in Berkeley, or a magnitude 6 in Parkfield, which is better than some tweet of "I just felt an earthquake".
> only so much depth and value can fit into 140 characters

If someone can't fit their whole message in 140 characters, they use a link to point you elsewhere (e.g., their blog).

The worst case is that you have to click one link for each search results to see all of the content, which is the same as with google results.
Any title describing success or rants on GIT, Lisp, Haskell, or Ruby gets automatic up-votes.

And maybe it could be stretched to be "the next Linux." Still wrong.
It's unclear to me since it says Gmail gets 31.2M and Google Apps (which includes email) has another 10M. Also, I think the article may be wrong, it seems like Zimbra is only claiming 20M. Also note ajkirwin's point above, the measurements also seem to be conflated.
OTOH being happy all the time seems like an obvious failure mode of human cognition.
This belongs in the summary: {higher-order functions, closures, potentially-inefficient elegance} FTW.
agreed, the great part of making users pay, is that you are profitable from pretty much day one, since you aren't spending an arm and a leg on infrastructure.

There are thousands of websites out there that make their founders millions of dollars every year that noone here has heard of. Why? Because they are a paid service with only a few thousand users.

A little math lesson: 3,000 users, at $99/mo = 3.564 million per year. And since they have a low volume of users, they aren't spending a lot of money on servers etc.

By comparison for a free service to reach 3.5 mil profit per year, they'd need to have 3 million users.

The great part about internet, is that there are millions of people using it. And a large portion of these users have never heard of all the free solutions we all know about since we read HN.
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I dislike Happiness Research because it sets the dangerous precedent of thinking you know better than other people what is best for them. Happiness study results reflect averages, not perfect happiness equations. I see this type of thing leading to a BNW scenario. I find BNW scarier than 1984 because 1984 is obviously bad while BNW doesn't really bother a lot of people, happiness researchers probably included.
Where is the actual source of this information? The Zimbra front page says 20M mailboxes (does not say how many are paid or not). There's no press release or RSS entry.

The last number I see approved in some way by Zimbra is a 20M paid mailboxes article from January on http://www.zimbra.com/about/news.html

What, they gained 20 million new paying customers in the last six weeks (with no big, new deal with another mail provider)?

And where is that chart from in the venturebeat article? There are no sources for anything listed.

I don't find this information credible.
An endless procession of "all ____ is actually ____" seems very appealing to the human mind because we seek to overlay patterns on reality that make it easier to understand. Beware leaky abstractions when trying to create simple models.
It seems to me like a cross between Wikipedia with curated data, Mathematica, and Google Calculator. You can ask it a wide variety of things, in natural language, and it is supposed to get the answer right fairly often. We'll see.
And there's a new CNET entry that says 40M but... it references the venturebeat link as its source not any actual Zimbra statement.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10190071-16.html

EDIT:

The author of that says: "I talked with the company. They just haven't released the formal PR yet"

I guess we will see later. Interested to know what the number actually means and how on Earth that amount of recent growth could be possible.
Did you actually try your example? If I search on google for "earthquake san francisco":

http://www.google.com/search?q=earthquake+san+francisco

the most recent earthquake it tells me about is 3 hours ago (as of this writing).

The time, place and links to maps are all right there at the top of the serp where I expect.

If I do the same query on twitter:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=earthquake+san+francisco

The most recent result is 19 hours old and then I have to start clicking tinyurls in people's tweets to find more info.
Definitely agree with apprenticeship. I've learned more through a couple hours of pair programming with an experienced coder than I did at the university.

This isn't to say university is bad. Data structures, algorithms, etc.. should all come at an instructional level, but good design practices definitely come from coders.

As a side note, is there any sort of organized apprenticeship program, or are we dependent on introductory training at a job/Open Source level?
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I agree that university education shouldn't be vocational training, but CS graduates need good programming skills. Computer science is very useful stuff, with a lot of applications in the Real World, and just because there are subfields in CS that don't have any obvious application, that doesn't mean that CS folks shouldn't at least try to be useful. Have a look sometime at Simon Peyton-Jones' Haskell-related papers: they're pretty far removed from grunting-in-the-dirt Java monkeying or hacking up a quick Perl script, but they're very readable, and someone who knows Haskell can generally see the usefulness of them on the very first page.

(Also, CS people should be comfortable slinging code around. Some would argue this point, but having decent programming skills makes anybody whose work involves computers much more effective. Ideological purity be damned.)
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The prize is just a free class - valued at $1295. Lame!
Okay, so we're 2 hours before our 3/6/09 opening of applications date. So sue us. We're hyper-excited to launch this thing and hyper-excited to see a bunch of companies get to work this summer in Atlanta. Want to be one of them? Go apply!
Shotput is good.
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But it isn't Y Combinator...
That's a good point. But where is the 40M figure even coming from or what possible event could have added 20 million new paying customers in the last six weeks (see my 20M comment).

EDIT: CNET employee says he confirmed with Zimbra.
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In many cases they are banned from the stores where they shoplifted -- both by the company explicitly, and sometimes restraining orders are filed with the local municipality.
Considering the lack of technical sophistication on the part of the vast majority of facebook users, it seems that Zuckerberg and company are just asking for trouble.
But you can use Gmail tags exactly like folders, if that's what you want.
Can you explain why you can't get all your FOSS project emails "in one place" with labels? Can't you just create a filter in Gmail to tag them as "FOSS" and then auto archive them?
Yes, and that is terrible. To be fair, those others have to pay structure behind to support customers properly.
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I think Google is in the fortune 500. Anyway they seem to go out of their way to not treat basic drug possession as a black mark. I interviewed there, and on the application form they had a question like "Have you ever been convicted of a crime (do not include basic drug possession)?"
"Let go an incredibly smart and talented webdev b/c of economy. Please help find job"
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

edit:

found out this little gem - Sergey Brin, before google, was an intern at Wolfram

source: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2004-10-13/google/

and a letter from feynman to wolfram (only res I could find)
http://bp3.blogger.com/_6pUR-THE-y4/Rh0pW_ZhckI/AAAAAAAAACI/...
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But it's certainly possible to increase your average level of happiness. I wasn't happy at all in junior high, for example, and my life has gotten monotonically happier since then.
Works! I'm new to Justin.tv but here are two tips:

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* Don't worry about the meter showing the video as only 2 minutes long.. after the 2 minutes are up it wraps back to the beginning and keeps running.
This is going to be a great program! I just wish I didn't have a fulltime job so I could do it! I plan to hover nearby and try to glom on to the luminaries and bask in reflected glory!
Actually, back when I used to frequent dating sites (10 years ago or so), I met most people when I had a paid membership.

OTOH, I met my wife on Yahoo Personals when it was free. In fact, if it was only for pay we'd never have met since she wouldn't have bothered with a paysite.
i'm not sure how any of that makes it the "next unix". a good filesystem replacement/companion maybe, but hardly an operating system.
No, but its the same thing! Y Combinator went viral, yo.
More the merrier!

I wish there were more YC-like outfits in Silicon Valley itself, since YC won't accept us.
Be sure to mind when you change your mind
Hmmm, I'm not seeing it on my Twitter page.
So when someone presents you with a new social technology, how do you decide whether it's a fit for you? What words do you use?
Actually I think he's pretty smart. It's Price As Signal.
Having the free level of service may not say that you're not serious about meeting someone, but having the paid level definitely indicates that you are. In a world with a lot of people who sign up on a lark, this gives other users a tool to indicate who not to waste their time with.
The FreeBSD project has an institutionalized mentor program. So before/when you are raised from just an occasional contributor (someone sending in occasional patches) to a commiter (someone with commit access) you are given a mentor, who teaches you the culture/process/methods to commit changes.

Not quite as good as a apprentice/mentor day-in day-out but it is supposed to work pretty well.
Props on the wufoo form.
As long as it's interesting, no problem :)
No, it's not "the same thing". It's not equal-by-value, and it's certainly not equal-by-reference, which is what the title implied, at least to me: I saw it and thought "YC in Atlanta? But I thought they just decided to stick to the Bay Area!"

sanjayparekh, I think you should be a good sport and change this to something less misleading. It's great that you're launching a YC-inspired fund. The more the merrier as far as founders are concerned. Why not announce it accurately?
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Well, possibly because that's a textbook definition of bigotry right there, and I don't feel that bigotry is something we generally need more of. Even if it is - as I suspect in your case - something of an act.

Happening across some of your other posts, you seem to be a person who likes to make sweeping generalisations in the hope of offending someone. I suspect that you're well aware of what you're doing and are doing it intentionally. So I'll wish you good luck with that and be on my way.
ThankYouSearch
I read the article before upvoting it, sounds like you didn't since he made a pretty clear analogy between GIT and Unix that wasn't just link bait.
I think they had a deal with Comcast.
Is school worth it? Is your school worth it?
should probably have some required fields. i hit submit on a completely empty form and it went through.
GIT is built to manage a large collection of small files. e.g. the linux kernel repos, files that are a only a few KB on average. It is optimized to operate fast on such a cluster of small blobs, but as soon as it processes bigger files (MB,GB) its performance and advantages degrade a lot. Also, the lack of partial checkout makes it painful to get only a subset of the large files that you are storing. Probably because you wouldn't want to checkout only part of the linux kernel.

But those limitations may only be in the Git porcelain, all the plumbing underneath might be a great base for the concept of a distributed file system. GIT is the first step in the right direction, or even could be the platform to support it. http://www.wizbit.org/drupal/ is a company that tries to achieve something like that.
But does the DRM really get in the way of how most people watch shows (ie: once)?
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Another point to this: people who run these sorts of low user, high margin companies will never reveal it to the hacker news/tech crunch/etc. crowd - for the simple reason that it will seem like it's way too easy how they are making money and it would only invite competitors.

I'm not saying it's impossible to be extremely successful on the ad model, and there are certainly plenty of successes within Y Combinator itself which have been acquired based on free services - the only take away I want people to make from my posts is that you should consider charging people for your service because if it's good enough service and you do it with high quality, there really is no reason for you not to get paid.
Why would YC not accept?
Apparently various parts of the US security apparatus.

Google Techtalk by Dr. Lenat http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-7704388615049492068
Not sure what you mean, where did he say it was Y Combinator? Did the title already change?
The worst part of the design is that it squashes the photographs and makes people look awful. The photos are too small as well which makes them almost useless in some cases. The userbase is pretty bad, but that's my personal experience for my area.
It seems to be freely accessible at http://www.skype.com/go/brand/ but I couldn't find a direct link from the main site (the only thing was this: https://developer.skype.com/Docs/BrandGuideline which doesn't say anything).

In any case, great find!
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