skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place

No, problems with the bitkeeper license was the reason git was started. Linus was very happy with bitkeeper as the VCS for Linux until some kernel contributor tried to reverse engineer parts of bitkeeper which caused the bitkeeper author to threaten to revoke the free license. Git is basically a rewrite of bitkeeper
The Unsaid Reason VCs May Not Back You: Resource Efficiency
Actually, I'm not sure if the Wolfram brand name is a reason to pay attention to this, or to deliberately ignore it. It's being described as a cross between Mathematica and <i>A New Kind of Science</i>; the first is wonderful, the second is a new kind of stupid, and I'm not sure which one will win.
Where's the Feynman letter from?
Unfortunately, about 2 years too late.
Xen as kernel module (like KVM)
Absolutely, I agree with all of your points. I'm suggesting the car as one more factor, not the only factor :-)
Thanks for the insightful post! I knew the procedure was something like this, but I wasn't clear on what the established guidelines were. I am still not certain this is actually ethical.
If it were a hiring mistake, wouldn't it have been letter to have let go of John? Is it really worth the risk just for linkbait?

Even extreme self-promotion doesn't go this far. People may be bad at calculating risks, but the risk of negative PR is one that we seldom underestimate.
Propaganda attack on google.

Everybody sue them! We can't compete with them in terms of innovation and services so we better sue them into oblivion by proxy.

Nice try...
I was there, youngster. The bong and pong were a natural pairing--get toasted and play pong for hours. Another plus: Saturday Night Live was actually fuuny back then.
Only if you do it in Britain!
I'm actually curious about how that business works. We had a picture (remixed from Shaq's twitter profile page http://twitter.com/the_real_shaq ), with him in a Suns jersey. Presumably he has people both for his personal brand and also those for the team he leads. I doubt the Suns would care much about, for example, a pirate copy of his music or movies.

One thing is pretty clear: Shaq is authentic on twitter, but the account is managed and monitored by a number of interested parties. That is obvious when you think of him like any other brand, but has left me a bit jaded about it.
I remember a guy I worked for showing me his new digital watch. It was a matrix of tiny red LEDs that consumed so much current from the batteries, that the display would only light up when you pushed a button on the side of the watch. I bought one myself a year or two later.
This is a very well informed community. Without coming off sounding like one of those guards from Slumdog Millionaire, may I ask, how do you guys know all this?
HTML Validation: Does It Matter?
You forgot to mention the $! How are these internet companies going to make money buy producing shows and letting the audience watch it for free? All the advertisers have not shifted their budgets online because they can get greater reach on TV and it is less expensive for them!
Simplified django-springsteen Deploy on GAE
That's a problem with our society.

One can only have a morally superior attitude that denies the restoration of trust if you imagine that you'll never make a mistake.
> Update March 6, 2009 8:10 a.m.: Another bookstore chain is getting into the e-book game. A news item yesterday indicates that Barnes & Noble has purchased Fictionwise, one of the longest-lived e-publishing companies around (it was selling e-books way back in 1998-99, when I worked at NuvoMedia, the maker of the Rocket eBook). Fictionwise has a very good e-book reading app called eReader; it works on the iPhone as well as Pocket PC, Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile devices, not to mention Windows and Macintosh computers and even the OQO handheld PC. So make that Option 4.
This is great because it will mean distributions/admins can integrate Xen faster and with less steps and pitfalls.

I've been professionally tied up with Xen for about five years and while I don't have any problems dealing with it, it is still a pain for many people to get started. And much more than just "a pain" if their nodes are using technologies sensitive to kernel changes (which is often the case in HPC).
The business is in the eBooks not in the readers.

CEOs know it...
Trying to read the entry on the jQuery UI blog and just getting a database connection error message. Given that the main jQuery UI site's 'Blog' link goes to the jQuery blog, perhaps it's not quite ready yet.
Startup launches app store for jail broken iPhones
Will we eventually get an online transcript of this talk?
Driscoll Web Development Launches iamguiltyof.com: the social confessional
Hulu back on Boxee, sort of. Boxee also launches "app box"
White House seeks economic advice from Twitter
save the federal gov't a couple of billion a year. Small change, but a start

I love that a couple billion dollars is small change now :)
Richard Worth was at DrupalCon and he demoed some of the stuff 1.7 enables and it was quite impressive.
I'm not sure. The options I get are:

Google Search
Search Partners
The Content Network

and then by "platform" .. Desktop vs iPhone + smart devices.

You can set content network to targeted though, but I don't see any way of totally opting out of parked pages. I agree with you, however, that this is not necessarily what advertisers want, although ultimately I think it could work out if Google maintains quality.
Pizzeria Employees Wear T-Shirts With Quotes From Nasty Yelp Reviews
Okay, what he says sounds plausible - I guess consulting is an example of a business with linear "resource efficiency". But he doesn't explain the faster than linear resource efficiency case very well. The obvious answer is a case where you get x% more customers per unit time then your effort on your product produces x% more value. Okay, so how do VC's identify businesses that will have X% growth in the number of users? Inform please.

Also, just a pedantic gripe, but someone should really inform this guy of the meaning of exponential growth. His definition that an "exponentially" growing firm the next million nets more value than the previous million would also apply to quadratic growth.
Why Minds Are Not Like Computers
Original Sony Ericsson W705 Themes
Apparently, they're having some trouble with the server load: http://twitter.com/jeresig/status/1288325448

(either that, or their server really IS on fire...?)
Did he have an explaination as to why the images are so small on the actual profile?
Facebook is adding 700k+ users a day. But they aren't facebook.
Yes, pg said (about 3:30 into the video) this talk will soon be online as an essay.
Wow these guys have been busy. The backtype alerts are excellent, let alone all the other services they provide.
Why did he write it in his bedroom? Did he not have a living room or some other more appropriate room?
Machines that can see (computer vision in advertising and more)
Have you noticed....
1. That when you are waiting for some-one, you may see some look-a-like before the actual person appears?
2. That when you have nothing to do, you wake up early, yet sleep bothers you when you need to have an early morning?
3. That at your desk, the pen drops and always goes to the farthest corner you cannot reach easily?
More please....
Starter Web apps for small businesses | Webware - CNET
Mobile industry undergoing promising transformation
The rendered images of the chromosomes are amazing...
Amusing. I was trying to download jqueryui earlier - and wondered why it was so slow... obviously wasn't paying attention to the homepage.
Only if the paper is a quantum state
I'm still pretty new to git -- care to give some spoilers and explain some of the "wow"?
Really old, but it's a good one.
I want BackType to figure out that I'm not the other Sachin Agarwal. God, you think it'd be able to tell the difference between two good-looking Indian guys who are co-founders of internet startups focused on reducing friction and making it easier to do everyday tasks.

Seriously, though, congrats! Alerts and analytics around commentary around the web are going to become huge for everyone: these guys are going to be Summize for the web and that could seriously be a huge part of health care and journalism, let alone the "softer" stuff of branding and customer service.
That is so true. I live here but even to me it seems that the entire county's under construction!
Give your medical career a new start
Merchant Money is a leading payment processing company provides Payment processing services, Small business cash advance, Merchant cash advance, Small Business Funding, ,Instant Cash advance with no collateral or personal guarantee required
Impossible to compete with free software
I think the point of HTML validation is that there was a time when there were many browsers that behaved incredibly differently with malformed HTML - the days when everyone was creating their own rendering engine and all of them were terrible; the days of HotJava and iCab. I'm assuming that the people back then assumed that we'd get more, not fewer, rendering engines to deal with and that if there were standard, valid ways of writing HTML, they could all conform to the standard and life would be good.

Little did they know that Microsoft would come along and tear down that world. Today, we've seen it bounce back a little, but really there are three rendering engines - Trident, Gecko, and WebKit. And, compared to what we had back in the Netscape days, they're all good engines. Sure, we might consider Trident crap by comparison to Gecko and WebKit today, but it's clearly a cut above what we were seeing in the Netscape days.

I think the reason that people today don't care about validation is that perfectly valid code can render differently in the three different rendering engines. If valid HTML doesn't give you the benefit of proper rendering, then what value does it give you? If a rendering engine is "wrong" in how it renders your page, you can bet that's your problem and not the rendering engine's problem - at least it will be according to your visitors. And three rendering engines aren't too hard to test - especially given the similarity in a lot of the rendering between WebKit and Gecko.

As for XHTML and HTML, Apple's "Surfin' Safari" blog has a great post on it: http://webkit.org/blog/68/understanding-html-xml-and-xhtml/. I guess XHTML never really fulfilled its purpose as having machine readable data in HTML - possibly eclipsed by things like RSS.
There are some good comments there.

I think that Free Software, in all forms, has helped raise the bar for paid software. I remember paying for some really simple and crappy stuff (commercial software) back in the 80's and early 90's. A lot of it was stuff that has a comparable free counterpart today.

I do not believe that any legitimate valuable software product has lost a significant piece of their marketshare to free software. The free options HAVE required that the paid software have a true value though.
Is domain extension .eco logical?  Al Gore thinks so.
Political Humor of the Day
"Well, how much is Rush Limbaugh loving all his recent publicity? He is everywhere now, since he said he wanted Obama's policies to fail. This is the greatest thing to happen to Limbaugh since they started making that center-cut bacon."
-Jay Leno
Interesting... we haven't tested from a linux OS yet. I'll look into it. Thanks!
Wow, thanks for the kind words! All the design credit goes to Squeejee co-founder Wynn Netherland. He's a genius! (@pengwynn on twitter)
Just curious: what is YC's motivation for hosting AngelConf?
more angels = more money to invest into YC companies after graduation. i.e. in the talk they pretty much covered that VCs mostly want to invest in the million dollar range.

In this day and age a lot of startups simply don't need that much money
How does a Brit get deported from Holland?!
Great job Mike and Chris! Backtype just gets more and more impressive.
A crisis in the making: Only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6
"The reason you failed is because not enough people want your product."

Never got to test that theory out, because even if enough people wanted the product, the business model around it is something which we haven't been able to figure out. We have the product's version 2.0 sitting ready (substantial updates from whats visible in ver1.0 demos) but we do not see a clear exit yet, so are hesitant to launch it. Being blogged about major tech blogs (from Lifehacker, Mashable, etc), some folks loving it around the world and writing reviews in ~ dozen languages - we already got that love. If we stayed out in the market more - we'd probably get more 'love'. But 'love' can only keep the servers humming for so long :)
Reading online reviews
Microsoft: Litigate on FAT, and you'll be the next Unisys
Spacecraft to blast off in search of 'Earths'
> During Depression 1.0 everyone seemed so nice.

Read about the Bonus Army
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_army

There are a thousand other reasons that the Depression was not, remotely, "nice".

> Does anyone have some MacGyver preparation tips

I personally think that we're in for a decade-long "L-shaped" / "Japanese style" recession. Unemployment may get as high as 10% ... but that's a level that Europe has lived with for decades. The "good" news is that we're headed into an era of more socialism, which means that property will get stolen, wealth will get redistributed from makers to takers, and productive behavior will be taxed and disincentivized ... but there will be higher spending on unemployment benefits.

I'm pretty handy - as the founder of SmartFlix I watch tons of videos on how-to topics. I can operate a lathe and a milling machine, build furniture, do some blacksmithing, frame a house, do plumbing, etc. ... but I honestly don't think it's going to come to that.
Great essay. I don't agree on the locality point, I think that there are enough people that a genuinely local oriented web model will succeed. But writing my reply lead me to post "The Days of the Internet as Haven for Citizen Production are Numbered." The nub of that argument is:

Despite any of the talk about Net Neutrality, networks are right now enforcing a tiered level of offerings that disadvantages production at all service levels. Where I live I can only get a 6 MB incoming line. Outgoing I’m limited to half the speed of a 1990s era 512k connection. They will not even sell me more if I am willing to pay extra!

We have seen this happen before. Broadcasting itself started out as an open platform, built by innovators, nurtured by government and fostered by and for educators. Once it was developed industry moved in. Promising improvements they pushed every notion of citizen production aside. It required, we were told, trained industry professionals to do anything worthwhile.

Cable did the same thing. Begun in rural Pennsylvania as a means to deliver broadcast signals to rural homes, CATV (CoAxial cable TV) used the promise of localism through channels dedicated to educational and governmental services and Public Access TV, to take on the broadcast network monopoly. Once it had its toehold, it starved and marginalized those channels. That same thing is happening today with the Internet.

YouTube, we’re told, is filled with marginal citizen-produced nonsense and gets most of its traffic through pirated programming. Remix culture — citizen use of the mediasphere — is criminalized as piracy. And every attempt to by you and me to upload quality versions of what we produce is literally slowed down (and deteriorated) through service tiers that won’t permit fast uploads.

Don’t get me wrong, citizens reap great benefits from the Interent and we will see vast improvements over what we had before. We’ll even be permitted to produce in the margins. But it’s obvious to me that the days of the internet as citizen’s media production haven are numbered.

The full post is here:
http://themoderatevoice.com/26956/the-days-of-the-internet-a...
Cars are definitely a reason for this. In my own experience, where I do use the car as a place to check how things side, you have to remind yourself that it's not the ideal environment. Or maybe producers today are just lazy
Of course twitter and many companies want that. But the people who keep moving onto the next big thing do it because they get tired of the commercialism - it's just noise to them.
And those users aren't paying anything.
> I remember paying for some really simple and crappy stuff (commercial software) back in the 80's and early 90's.

My company is still paying for really crappy software instead of using free alternatives. They just slap the label 'Enterprise' on something crappy, and sadly companies just eat it up. Granted, there aren't really a lot of free alternatives to most enterprise software... most likely because ERP middleware is not fun to do in your spare time.
I'm sure he'd look at you blankly if you tried to tell him that. Innumeracy is embraced by business people. They made "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" a best-seller.
I loved him in "Doubt."
Mobile telecoms in the recession
HTML validation is of great value when debugging, even javascript. It can discover things that are easy to miss like unclosed tags and repeated ids.

It is difficult to write a whole website, validate it and fix the errors and at this point validating has little value. However by validating periodically you are getting more out of the tools available. I don't force myself to write 100% strict HTML, but minimizing the validation errors means that I will have less to read when it's time to.
The crowd there is interesting. They want to become angels. This is a ridiculously awesome way to intro them to the biz. PG telling them to "be good", for example, starts everyone out of the same page: we all want to get rich together.

Good for YC's portfolio, good for the new angels, and good for society.
Hey,

Sorry, I have not updated my profile in a long time. I used to be an environmental consultant, but am now a web-start up. So, take that for what you will.

Another thing I try and do is support smaller projects rather than blindly purchasing large corporations' software simply because someone has sent me a file in that format. Happily, open source and free software (google docs, open office, Gimp) is getting better by the minute and is replacing proprietary stuff (office, photoshop etc.)

Cheers,

JB
That derivative example is nice, but it reinforces that Lisp is a bit too "pure"/"mathy" for my taste (that and I really don't like the syntax). My equivalent of that derivative thing was probably the examples in "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby", pretty syntax-highlighting colors and all.
This is tied to the the root motivation in YC: do good for society by enabling more startups to exist. That's is a side effect not directly tied to investments in YC companies, as new angels will certainly also invest elsewhere.

This isn't to say you're wrong. More investors in YC companies is a direct motivation for the conference.
Ideas I Have For Pedals
How banks can learn from telecoms
Boxee adds Hulu support (kind-of).
I think you are right to some extent, but its fairly regular that when you are excited about something you are doing - time, sleep, etc take a backseat. You'll spend all your time thinking about it / building it. That is why it is important to be clear in your head - what do you love - the product or the business.

We loved the product we were building, so that kept us going. For geeks/hackers, the primary motivation is to build something they like, instead of $$. The money is incidental and its easy to get carried away with the 'product'. Some of us ended up working 7 days a week, 15 hrs a day on it. 4am everyday (and partly because some team members were in India). I think the frenetic pace, esp. is startups is natural and a good thing, but the key is to work smart - not just hard.

The experience has made me ask to myself almost every time I see a cool web app - 'ok, but how will it make money ?', and if it can't, then it would not be more than a short-lived dream for its founders and backers.
I hate the word "free", it always makes people think of free beer.

You can charge $$$ for Free Software and "open source" software.

One day I'm going to get pissed off enough to start selling the GIMP for $100 or something, just to prove this point. Maybe no one will buy it, but you can do it. And hey, maybe it'll encourage people to "pirate" it and increase the number of users?
Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design
Sorry, maybe my comment wasn't quite clear enough.

BitKeeper license problems caused him to look for another VCS. However, before he started git, he tried a bunch of other DVCS systems, including open source ones, and decided he couldn't work with them because they were simply too slow. Hence git. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#Early_history From the quote there it's clear that it's not a BK rewrite. git is apparently faster than BK.
I wish people who know little about HTML, XHTML and CSS wouldn't write such posts just for the hell of it. Jeff is a respected programmer, but front-end developer he is not.

I'm not going to go into details of why he's wrong, because a) this has been discussed to death by people who actually matter in this space, and b) there's a ton of comments on his post explaining what's wrong with his view.

There are ways to argue that validation is unnecessary; however, they do not include: 1) bringing up examples such as "target" attribute, and 2) saying "who cares if it works anyway."
Where do you work? (If you don't mind me asking)
Two consecutive comments to the submitted article:

"Google actually ranks it's indexed pages. The more valid the (X)HTML of your pages, the higher it'll appear in a search."

"If you do write XHTML, you'd better get it right. I heard about CodeProject practically dropping off the map because of an XHTML error that caused Google to stop ranking them."

Is this indeed documented or well confirmed behavior of Google? That might be a pretty important reason to validate.
Thanks :)

Btw, Alertle is a completely single page application - can call it '100% AJAX'. Demos still available at: http://varunmathur.net/post/83802002/alertle-current-status
Building an entire site, then fighting with it to make it validate is obviously going to be frustrating. Would you wire up a house, then whip out your electric code book and go back to fix everything thats wrong? Just because you don't agree with something, and it still works doesn't mean its a good idea...

Anymore I actually like validating, I use it to check to make sure nothing is blatantly wrong. There are a few rules that do not make much sense, but overall I find it very helpful. But to make use of it this way don't go and build the whole site, then try to fix all the problems and bad decisions made earlier, use it through out the design process.

I know this blog post comes to this same conclusion by the end, but it just feels so wimpy and pandering to everyone. Through the whole post it goes from validation is pointless, painful, useful, helpful... do whatever you want. Maybe the author should just take a stand and stop trying not to offend anyone.