skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem might be that most users are used to the Windows UI experience so in order to reduce the learning curve this might have been the easiest option. However if the call it Windows and has a Windows GUI look and feel they are really asking for trouble.
What's 'middleware'?
Web OS will take off when you can run Win32 native apps on them... or GTK apps, or OSX native apps...
I've been asking myself the same question for a while. I would like a unified experience so I have to spend less time worrying about interoperability, etc. On the other hand having a choice about every application means I can have the best application in every category. I wonder where the middle ground lies.
It could be about their particular software (eg apache vs proftpd) rather than the underlying protocol.
Thanks - that comment helped. I'm at that verge now.
Facebook is probably one of the best unified experiences, but I guess if you're looking for something very OS-y, something like this is more your bag. Users shouldn't have to be the ones to worry about interoperability, but c'est la vie. Now if I can only find a French phrase about balancing trade-offs...
Microsoft and LISP?: Fun street sign in Casablanca
Saw this fun street sign in Casablanca and thought of ycombinator. Developer humour is rarely appreciated by those immediately around you!
I think recently they changed the law a wee bit so its easier for Aussies to go to the U.S.
The war between Nokia and Apple
I've had enough of being a mindless drone.
I've submitted my application for Winter 08 funding.

I am a 21 year old full time college student/full time employee for a Disney contractor doing tape backups for 12 hours a night. After I get off work at 7am I go directly to school. Not fun at all.

My partner and I hope that by submitting this application we've entered a rewarding new chapter in our lives.
No offense, but if I had the money (there's six of us, so I'd need a bit) there's a list of places I'd rather go besides the US.
His bit about sugar, and feeling better - that's become more accepted, that sugar is just bad for you. We didn't evolve with so much of it. It does bad things hormonally over the long run. See Kurzweil's 'Fantastic Voyage' or Shallenberger's 'Diabetes Breakthrough' for specifics.
Are there any good mmobile live streaming solution?
I was looking for some live solutions that allow me to transfer a live feed from my mobile to a friends mobile. I could not find any good solution. If anyon e knows abt it, then please do inform.

Also, given such a platform, i came up with some interesting use cases, which you might agree as well. I posted it on my blog.

Given that you have a framework which can deliver real time video feeds from your phone to anywhere? How would you use it? I'm sure justin's job would be much easier in case it allows him to stream his video on web.
Brian Kernighan created Awk. And who are you again?

You've misunderstood the fundamental UNIX nature of these quotes. They are said by people who use the tools in question regularly. jwz doesn't avoid regular expressions for everything (he'd be a fool to do so, and he's no fool)...he's merely pointing out that regexes can be misused, and often are. Likewise Awk.

By cloistering yourself into Lisp, and nothing but, you're missing out on years of aggregate wisdom from some of the smartest people in computing. Lisp is one of those really valuable pieces of wisdom. But it is not the only one, or even the most important. Deny yourself the rest of the history of computing, and you are doomed to reimplement it...and you'll almost certainly do it poorly.
It already exists (probably since webcams appeared).
Nokia has been acquiring quite a few mobile startups recently. Apparently the new CEO is trying to push the company to be a mobile content leader.

In the US, they've got a long way to go in order to compete against Apple though.

Whats interesting is they plan on having Ovi an open platform, meaning it will interface with 3rd party services like Flickr. I somehow dont see Apple doing that..
AT&T Video Share does this, but it is limited to select 3G phones and I dont think it has yet been rolled out to all regions.

And its damn expensive.
Capgemini to pitch Google Apps
FTP can return sane directory listings that can be analyzed by a program - something that's still missing in HTTP.
And that's overkill, as most of the time we don't need data to be encrypted. In fact secure authentication and insecure data transfer would be enough, but SSH lacks this possibility.
I thought this is politics without even reading the article and was so angry I downmodded all 3 or 4 comments that were here. Sorry about that. I just don't want HN to be another reddit.
What about equipping stars with the camera? Can you just go today and rent a justin cam for a day easily? There should be enough events in the world to find something interesting to broadcast all the time.
Why people spend money on costly software while they are free
Why people spend money on costly software while they are free: Barcode maker is free and full !
But people don't use it much
Why ?? They buy costly program while this one is free
Must I make it paypable so they use it ?
Can't the first problem (phishing) be overcome with a simple browser plugin?
I know of at least one company that uses this as a way to determine the growth of their competitors. They simple poll weekly and understand growth and the trend over time.

John.
Or maybe people reacted because they disagree.

Who knows, maybe they even heard these arguments from people in mainstream society, coworkers and friends, who they thought were otherwise reasonable; perhaps they were shocked to hear such things from people they previously, but no longer, considered thoughtful, reasonable, and kind.

And while we're at it, maybe they would be just as surprised to hear that it's their own conclusions that make them take offense. "You disagree, so it must be true." Hearing this from someone they previously, but no longer, considered insightful might be understandably unpleasant, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were to delete their comments when the reality of the matter sets in: that the human social hierarchy, in all of its stark animal glory, doesn't care about those who are born and live in a state of poverty and powerlessness; time is once again entering an era where it is increasingly socially acceptable to judge (and profit from) people based on their birth circumstances, a sad situation which has been the story of human history to date and which humanity as a species shows no signs of overcoming.

But we musn't say such things.
Schema migrations in SQL
I just wrote a post on my blog about why schema migrations in SQL are hard. http://www.offbytwo.com/index.php/2007/09/10/why-schema-migr...

I decided to ask and see how folks work around these problems. So how do you manage schema migrations?
i think where all these desktop copycats fail, approaches like NetVibes and widjets, succeed.

We all know the reasons for that, with the most important being that human kind needed to get away from desktop to web because of the decentralization of information.

oh and the "start" task bar every one of these tries to mimic, is soo 1995...come on, some innovation wouldn't hurt us...

by the way, this thing it crashed my firefox v3...
This is good news as it might open the door for more Software as a Service providers into the corporate market.
Very interesting, thanks for the link. I'd like to see some satellite images of those Gyres.

Edit: found a google video about an expedition to a gyre: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3892310789953943147
Rake on Rails.
I'm surprised the article didn't mention Google Gears...
nice n nerdy.
finally, a framework comparison article with data... I'll have to look into jQuery
cubicle67: I'm happy to report there is indeed life beyond the BigCo cubicle.

I made a similar move a few years ago, and haven't regretted.

Good luck.
According to my informal mandarin lessons, "hulu" means "to snore".
Linspire ("Lindows") had a big Windows trademark dispute with Microsoft and came out quite well. Calling it ajaxWindows is probably an intentional taunt towards Microsoft.
Berlin would cost more than the US. Perhaps Tallin would be cheaper? It's tempting as an EU citizen to move to the US to create a startup simply because of the lower costs of living.
Why PostgreSQL Instead of MySQL: Comparing Reliability and Speed in 2007
I'd like some automated rating of video feeds. Write some software to rate how 'interesting' a feed is currently.
Start with the easy - is much changing? is there any audio? Then move onto harder things - how many people are viewable in the video.

Then maybe you could display the feeds in order of current 'interestingness'.

Otherwise trawling through them gets a bit tedious.
A VC: Every Product Is A Platform
It's funny how easy it is to derail a meeting like this. Another good one is to compare yourself to the competition. It's guaranteed to waste time as everyone pulls up the same old arguments on why your better.
I hear Bruce Schneier once calculated all those in his head over lunch.
I never want any of my business data going across the Internet unencrypted.
Greylock Partners Invests In Stealth Search Engine Cuill
Plastic Dating Cards? This Clearly Isn't Going To Work
Why was I downmodded for this? The only time I really use SCP is to transfer backups, and I want those encrypted. I don't see why that is an unreasonable thing.
And my comment wasn't about ad spending at all.
best of luck ... don't give up.
Wow! That's a lot of buzzwords in one sentence.
How To Bootstrap Your Startup
Just go get it!
Shifting time to conserve energy
Introduction to Lua Programming
Description: Lua is a powerful, light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Coupled with it being relatively fast and having a very lenient license, it has gained a following among game developers for providing a viable scripting interface. It has been used in games such as World of Warcraft and Far Cry, and in applications such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Snort.
The best trick (as suggested by Simon G.) is to add a "honeypot" field, such as email or website, that is hidden by CSS (display:none). Spambots will scrape the HTML and fill in this common field. Once something is filled in in this field, you know the comment came from a spammer.
What do you mean by "should be good"? Things can still improve if the hardware configuration remains the same.

And I have no idea how long the trend for increased horsepower will continue.

My hope with my comment was to get away from prognostication and reducing a problem to a simple number. But perhaps one take away is that we should use a suite of real programs to test hardware configurations. Benchmark routines are pretty useless when hardware optimizes for the routine, which has obviously been happening for years.

A seti-at-home style system that noted top and your system configuration would be useful. Deploy it to a few hundred computers and see how things perform in the aggregate with increasing quality hardware.
Why Joining Existing Projects Always Sucks
Apple now considering bidding in the wireless auction
Nils Holger Moormann : Bookinist
Well, in theory anything that you copy over the network can be intercepted and modified to do harm to you or your business. However, the cost of a man-in-the-middle attack is usually higher than the content you are transferring in most cases.

For example, if I'm downloading sources of an open-source program from a public web site, what's the point of attacking me and changing the contents?

(And I have no idea why you were downmodded.)
The security problems the article lists can be broken down like this:

- phishing

- if a relying party is insecure, bad things can happen to it

- if your ID provider is insecure, very bad things can happen

Those aren't anything new, and they're not fundamental to OpenID.

Then he goes into "what if my provider is evil?", "what if i don't want my ids unified?" and "but there's no trust!", which are usually pretty good indicators that the speaker doesn't grok OpenID.
Facebook - Fruit Flies for Applications
This is for non-hackers, as it's all about how to find someone else to do the work for you.
Bad blogger! What have I told you about depending on Javascript for basic functionality?
The strategic importance of owning the network could be incredibly valuable for any tech company. If the author is correct though, and the business really is a low margin headache, wouldn't it still be in their interest for Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc to set up some kind of joint venture to administer the network while they focus on their individual services?

I know it may be tough for them to work with their competitors like this, but it's better then being squeezed by and independent operator.
Pretty easy to guess why, none of the things reported about cuill points to better search results but all the things point to faster indexing and crawling of sites, so greylock and all the other VC are speculating on a big buyout from Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.
Nokia, the computer company?
See here for more responses:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11208
Vote for applications created during the Rails Rumble 2007 this weekend
Guide to writing technical books (blog thread, 7 interesting posts)
6 tips to making free offers to boost your business
There's a correlation/causation issue here.

I do think telecommuting causes some increase in satisfaction, but I bet most of the higher satisfaction measured is the result of generally good management. Good management also causes telecommuting, resulting in a telecommuting/satisfaction correlation.
88% are Millionaires and 6 More Surprises From Entrepreneurial Survey
I have worked with outsourcing companies before where I did QA and wrote unit tests and they wrote the code to make the test pass...
Well, I've got one out of four....
Awesome dude! Good luck, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to apply as well!
I definitely agree that in most cases Postgres is still superior to MySQL (feature maturity and variety, reliability, ...). There's just one problem: (to my knowledge) there is currently no such thing as an open source clustered version of postgres. (There is a non-free clustered version, but it's not mature and its cost is prohibitive to small businesses.)

MySQL, even with its problems, is good enough. Moreover it accounts for future growth with MySQL Cluster. While MySQL Cluster is not yet mature (though this may change soon), it's there, it's open, and it's why I chose MySQL for my startup, even though I'm a Postgres veteran.

The problem with Postgres (and most databases without clustering) is when you need more resources your only option is to buy a bigger box to replace your current one. Eventually you'll have to buy specialized and super pricey machines...

With clustering you can add x-number of cheap commodity boxes to the existing set to meet your current needs.
Cool use of mapquest driving directions API
I currently work in the ISP billing industry, with a focus on WiMAX. Yes, it really is a low margin headache. It's also filled with moribund oligopolists intent on squeezing every last penny out of their consumers (nee customers).

I'm anxious to see how the upcoming auctions on the 700 MHz spectrum turn out. If one of the new contenders such as Google or (possibly Apple) can upset the status quo it will be a huge win for customers and innovation in the wireless market. Google's proposed 4 levels of openness, for example, would be a huge breath of fresh air which could provide the level of competition and innovation which could possibly get the USA back in the game in comparison to other nations in terms of the wireless market and broadband penetration.

High-speed wireless broadband is a possible solution to the "last-mile" problem which could bypass the current broadband monopolies based on physical presence in homes (cable and DSL.)

Here's hoping that we manage to not screw this one up. We're not going to see an auction and opportunity like this again for a very long time.

Disclaimer: My views are my own and not necessarily representative of the corporation I work for.
These are good points, but from what I'm seeing it's now more in vogue to use sharding (or other favorite term for same) to split your data by user across different DBs. That way you can still scale horizontally.
Do You Submit Articles to Digg.com?
This tool will help ease that process. We take the latest five stories from your favorite RSS feeds and tell you whether that story has been submitted. If it has been submitted, you can click the digg it link, if not, you can click the submit it link.
As far as I can tell, OpenID is intended to provide a decentralized replacement for the current practice of everyone having separate usernames and passwords for each Web service they subscribe to.

On the one hand, I think this is a Good Thing, because the current way of doing things is so unwieldy and insecure.

On the other hand, OpenID's improvement over the current system is not very large.
Like you my partner and I will be submitting our application for the winter 08 funding. We're from Canada, so if selected are looking forward to getting out of the snow and hacking.
20 (Alternate) Ways to Focus on Users
The fact that the sample group was composed entirely of college students means that extrapolating "Kerry-style" vs. "Bush-style" doesn't even rate as "tenuous." Politics on a college campus tend to be a lot different from everywhere else.
Startup Weekend Atlanta
I can see how the spamming part gets done, but how is he able to get payed without getting caught?
If I see a spam link, and follow it until I get to a viagra selling website, I should be able to find either the spammer himself or someone who pays the spammer. How can he remain anonymous?
iPhoneSIMfree goes retail, let the unlocking begin
Asking "What are you REALLY trying to do?" is generally not a good first response to a user problem, even if it does turn out to be an X-Y problem.

Asking the right question is often difficult, and it doesn't help anyone to become exasperated.
Small Business Online Spending To Top $70 Billion
Being a one in a world full of zeros
it was best said in "Antitrust".. in this business you're either a one or a zero.. alive or dead.

if you're an entrepreneur at what point do you give up on an idea? when you see a site that's similar to yours? or when money becomes an issue?

share your thoughts...
I don't think Microsoft will join this bidding war. They always try not to upset their partners.
You're right about that - and we have no desire to enter the porn industry in any case.
You're right we don't have a central place to view upcoming events yet. That will be changing...
Simple video activity isn't enough to establish interestingness in our experience. We'd like to screen "dead" live streams out of lists, but I think there's an easier, social, solution to that problem.
interesting, I'm not a sysadmin guy so could you explain the differences between clustering and sharding from a db standpoint?

Is there an open source sharding solution for Postgres?
Hidden method of reading revealed
I'm also eager to see a shift towards openness in the US mobile industry. Let startups complete fairly in this emerging space, without the telcos walled gardens.

While I would primarily like to see the major telcos fail to win the auction, I am not too keen on the idea of Apple winning either... Unlike Google I dont think they have openness objectives in mind. The iPhone, iTunes, and just about everything else with Apple recently is an indication of this. They are all about walled gardens. I wont go as far as saying they are as bad as the telcos. I think the end users would still benefit more (at least when using Apple wireless devices), but I suspect Google would better represent most end users.
Antitrust is one of the best spoofs of the software world I've ever seen. That they were shooting for something serious makes it even more hilarious.
What's in a business model?
These days more and more companies are looking into patents for their business models as a way to protect their code and site concept. Does anyone know of a Y Combinator startup that has any type of patents on their concepts?
Making the Most Out of a Time-Crunched Day
Microsoft appears to be very interested in the proposed "white space" auction. Basically, the white space frequencies are the wasted spectrum between the various frequency bands. Microsoft apparently wants in on ownership of these series of smaller bands to use for mobile devices.

But the FCC first has to be convinced that devices operating in the white space bands wont interfere with those in the normal bands.. So far it looks like they are not convinced:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/13/microsoft_says_white...
Vtap just launched. Mobile video search
In my opinion seeing a site similar to yours its called competition, and may not be a problem.
It's all about being the best in that field, or the most known, it's almost impossible to be the only one doing any kind of business, so if you see a similar site just try to make yours much better.
Money will always be an issue, think about your business as an investment.
There may be a lot of reasons for giving up on (or maybe changing) your project:

If people just don't like it at all, or no one uses your product or service maybe you have to start thinking about it.

If you are confident about your idea and passionate about your business, you should never give up because of competitors or money issues.
Presumably that lamp is powered by skooching the chair around.

I'm waiting for the addition of a fold-out bed and a toilette. Then it'll replace my house :)
Open-source strategy: Documentation = dollars
Shouldn't have named the service after one of the founders.

The company? Sure, call it "Justin Enterprises". Works as well as "Ford Motor". But it doesn't work when you name a product after a person. Ask Edsel.
It may have been posted as a political link, but the methodology was so flawed that it became interesting anyway. :)

As for my interest: I quit a psych degree after a year because the teaching of experimental psychology convinced me that it isn't a serious science. Experiments like this are sadly not uncommon - experimenters decide what they want to quantify, but then measure whatever they can, no matter how tenuous the link between the two.
Don't forget to go for your idea anyway in case you are not accepted (or another, improved idea, whatever).
Interesting - some interesting ideas, but a lot of applications didn't work. I bookmarked one, YouPlus - instant fun to read the eco-recommendations by random people over the world. Mandatory registration was also in many cases a reason I didn't check the applications out.
I wasn't intending to imply that people care who developed a website.

But I disagree that you the best approach is to throw things at the wall until you see if something sticks.
I upmodded you, mojuba. Divided America is stupid - it is tragic.
Ask news.yc: How do I break up with my co-founder?
The situation:

There are two of us. We are pre-incorporation. I had the original idea. We have done some brainstorming/discussing, and as things start to get more concrete, I'm finding out that my co-founder is not generating the quality of work that I had expected, and the personalities don't match quite right. I don't feel comfortable going forward with this person as my partner.

How do I break up with my co-founder?

My concerns:

a) personal-- not being an asshole.

b) operational-- not having this suck the life out of the project

c) legal -- I don't want a Facebook/ConnectU situation down the road

d) strategic -- not that I expect it to happen, but what's to stop my-soon-to-be-ex-co-founder from taking the idea and finding someone else to execute it? [insert standard boilerplate here about ideas being worth nothing without execution]

ideas?

(submitted anonymously for obvious reasons)