skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate to be "that guy"

~700$ cheaper? For the base model, yes. Make the specs comparable to the MBP:
2x2.2ghz, 2 gigs of ram, read/write drive, comparable battery: ~200 cheaper.
They still dont exactly match, the MBP now has a better vidcard still, and the Sony has 1280x800 resolution instead of 1440x900.

Apple hardware is very comparable in price to most other providers.
Not everyone needs 1440x900, or a $2k comp. I am simply providing an alternative to the largely unjustified, yet astronomically priced MBP. I guess I should have looked for a budget.
The Kid's Human - entrepreneurial mistakes
A lesson for entrepreneurs
I have another theory on Facebook's massive valuation, or at least an adjunct to. Facebook is pretty much headed to an IPO and the IPO valuation will be far less than the Microsoft valuation. This will create a false sense of value driving the stock price up.

What's in it for Microsoft? I'm guessing Facebook is an important part of their online advertising plan, and they are going to get preferential treatment and power in excess of their share.

At least thats how it might play out, the root cause could still well be Zuckerberg's arrogance.
Fractals and gnuplot
The trick is you need to solve them in less than a minute (of computer time, of course). Believe me, it gets tricky.

52% complete, Rank 369 out of 7362.
I have an x61s, and highly recommend it. Lightweight (<3lbs), durable, great battery life, performs well (Ubuntu 7.10). If you are willing to wait a few months, a mac ultraportable is in the works and likely to be released:
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/12/04/apple-orders-13-3-led-ba...

The two constraints you have that will conflict the most are lightweight and large screen. If you are using this as a primary desktop replacement, I'd go with a 20"+ LCD for desk usage.
Lets Build An API
Oh right, I'm an idiot.
No complaints here either, I've been using Fedora 7 on a T60 for the past 5 months or so and it's been great. Hardware feels solid. Driver-wise everything works except hibernate.
Another reason Comet is an appropriate name:

"The data cometh to thou on its own!"
Because they're puzzles. It's a fun challenge.
The hundreds of millions they took from Microsoft should not be thought of as a venture capital investment. It isn't made by people that are engineering a 5x + ROI and that maneuvered for the power to prevent Facebook from exiting with anything less. As I understand it, it was largely an advertising deal.

I think Beacon is a lot like the news/mini feeds. Both were radical ideas that faced heavy privacy opposition. Facebook rode out the wave once and seemed to be planning to do it again, but I think they miscalculated on one thing: since Beacon is openly commercial, Facebook looks more evil than misguided. I think there's a new idea behind Beacon that is plainly good: aggregating stuff about your friends that's happening in the general internet. (Paul Buchheit's new company is doing this.) The right move would have been to release that function with no commercial facet, and work that in later when this idea is no longer new.
Google Chat now includes your AIM contacts
Social Skills /or/ Of Geeks and Startups
> - Screen resolution is very important to me.

> - I think a 15" would be good, not much smaller and bigger

But then:

> - It must be light, I will have to be able to take it around easily and all the time must have long battery life

and

> - the rest is simple, 1G+ RAM, 150GB+ hard drive, good graphic card ...

You may may to make some choices. I was laptop shopping recently, and wanted basically the same features you listed, but found that light + powerful was an odd combo.

I decided on a Dell D830 with WUXGA 15" screen (19020x1200) and the 9-cell battery.

Weight: ~6 lbs.

I was considering the MacBook pro, but wanted the higher rez screen.

I got the FreeDOS version; Ubuntu will go on it, and went for the least amount of bundled RAM, since it is WAY cheaper to buy that separately. It's even cheaper to buy it as a separate item from Dell themselves. But better yet to go through Fry's or newegg.com
How about...
How the mind works (Pinker)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (Pirsig)
Sophie's World (Gaarder)
I'd rather see the poorly-edited version. It gives me confidence that Zuck simply said what he meant, rather than run ten different versions through focus groups to see which one would get the best reaction.
I've has some success with Inkscape. And I was liking DENIM for a while, though it seemed to get flaky with larger sites. However, its ability to exported clickable, navigable site mock-ups is very slick. (When it works.)
The Dictatorship of Talent
HomeTips: There's a Lot to Like
Great article, this is a good quote:

>You try to tell them that China isn't a communist country anymore. It's got a different system: meritocratic paternalism. You joke: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army.

It's true, except recently in China it's no longer Harvard alums with the army, it's MIT (Tsinghua) alums.
Spolsky - Where there's muck there's brass
"Yes sir, there's a lot to like about Don's story: do what you love, focus on a niche, find a viable business model, and work for yourself."

That's what I'm trying to do (and most YC readers) but it ain't easy and determination/perseverance is probably the #1 criteria for success.
Buh-bye XHTML... this is really a nail in the coffin of xhtml.
V. by Thomas Pynchon

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but
very enjoyable)

Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

Shogun by James Clavell

Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that LOTR guy, Tolkey or sommat. (In all seriousness, though, all of these authors are phenomenal, if well-known for being such)
an apple with those specs isn't 2k. I bought one for a little over 1200 including 2GB ram
William F. Buckley wrote: "[I'd] rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty."

Posted without comment.
Glad you liked it. Brooks is sometimes controversial because of his politics (and I hesitated to post it because of that), but I usually find his social commentary refreshing. And I thought this was just an interesting, and very well-written, observation on China's society.
Oh So Shiny Yahoo Messenger for Vista Released
No Web 2.0 Bubble Here
Peter has 2 good points..
Ask YC: How fantastic is Mister Splashy Pants?
I stop by reddit once a day for a quick skim. And I have no idea what the true story is. But since it keeps hitting the hot list, and it's working in the actual poll by a ridiculous margin, how fantastic is the name as a marketing gimmick for Greenpeace? Not only has it given me a smile each time I read it, but I had a few belly laughs too. Even better, while some stooges could see it as a hijacking of their contest, it's obvious that the name will have the intended effect - to raise awareness of these mammals and to rise above the normal pr din.

Well done, reddit!
How about this:

_User_ triggered apps/windows/dialogs are allowed to take focus, because it's clearly the user's intention to open/use that app. This does not hold true for automatic updater windows, such as update boxes, new chat messages, etc.

OS X for example gets this half right, with the play sound and bounce dock icon features. The perpetually bouncing icons can drive me crazy, so the best solution would be if cmd-tab automatically put apps demanding user attention first in the open apps list, so that as soon as there's a dock bounce, I can get to it with one quick cmd-tab. That way I can get to it fast and I don't run the risk of the spacebar-ok|cancel disaster (which in minor forms has happened to me before too).
This is totally my type of App. Facebook is outa control but I added this and it's totally hillarious. Nice work there man.
How do you plan to differentiate?
Wish I knew enough about China to know how accurate that is.
It's a good observation, but of course, not a complete one. China is still mired in thousand year old traditions and the country as a whole is more analogous to a diverse Europe than an evenly developed country like the US.

This article obviously focused on the city dwelling folks, while some other articles I read focus on the poor, undeveloped countryside. On the whole, all views of China are correct - it's simply that diverse.
2. Heads up no limit, yes. A player who simply pushed all-in every hand would only lose something like 45% against another player using optimal strategy, and would actually be a long term winner against more players than you'd think. I could write that bot.

3. They may, but they do a very poor job of it.

6. A computer can easily tie at roshambo, and the roshambot beats most humans in the long run. And poker is much different and far more complex than blackjack. The two arent comparable at all.

7. Irrelevant. I never contended that a bot couldn't win a tournament. They probably have. That's not really a good measure of ability.
I'm pretty sure it's much harder when heads up.
New  enabled experimental Firefox builds
1. I disagree, as do the few people I've met who work on it.
2. The dedication required is, in large part, due to the number of people who study the game, social attitudes towards it, and the wealth of information available. It has nothing whatsoever to do with complexity.

Poker is far more competitive than chess. Show me a chess game that runs every night with buy-ins in the hundreds of thousands.
How do you manage tasks with your team?
I love using rainlendar on my desktop, and I love that it is iCalendar compatible.

Are there any services or tools that use the iCalendar standard that will allow us to send tasks and events to each other within our team? What do you guys do?

My first go at this was using BaseCamp and Google Calendar, but neither export tasks in their webcal features :(
as the other poster said, you are going to have a hard time finding such a large screen in such a small package.

just get a nice lcd monitor, keyboard, and mouse. when you're at your desk you have a desktop, and when you're out and about you have a small little window into the internet.

imo, though, the thinkpad x series is the best out there. amazing how well engineered it is.
oookkaaaayy...
so how does this explains chinas "manufacturing" "talent" ? As in, shameless shifting of the lowest quality goods legally allowable (and no drive for improvement or automation, contrasting with Post WWII Japan).
CAFE society
>George Bush objects to other parts of an energy bill that requires energy companies to produce 15% of electricity from renewable sources and ditches billions of dollars of tax breaks for oil companies.

Ah, Bush. What would we do without him?
Mobile software anytime anywhere
Youpark.com is fun. I just selected my devices and found lots of exciting applications. Try it. Its so simple n fun
The macbook. Just plain macbook. I have both MBP and MB and I use the MB by far more. Longer battery, cooler running, lighter, no hooks to latch shut - all magnets and here comes the most important thing of all...

Sleep. Yes sleep. Before I got macs I didn't think it was possible for a computer to come in and out of sleep so well. You can open and close the lid and it sleeps in seconds! Every time. Open and close it three times in a minute just to jot down a note or two. No prob. I can go days without recharging just popping it open when I need it. Forget to recharge, no prob, it has silently placed a hibernate image on the disk, just connect power, open lid, get back to work.

This is a class act all of the way that no other manufacturer has even come close to imitating. Sleep on windows machines is laughable at best. Linux alomst universally bungles it unless you have "lucky hardware".

I know, lots of people say "hey my XP laptop sleeps just fine"... No, apples do this spooky good. You just have to see it to beleive it.

Get it for the good hardware and good support. Love it for closing the lid and never worrying that your work will be right there for you at a moments notice when you open it again.
> and no drive for improvement or automation

How necessary is automation in a country with a billion people?
Let's tax the stupid to pay for the time wasted in reading their proposals....
yes, it isn't for economic reasons. But perhaps consistency,quality, producing non toxic goods etc...

if their one child policy sticks, it will be a rapidly aging and shrinking population one day.
When I moved from reddit to hacker news, I was hoping Coding Horror wouldn't follow.
I love my macbook pro. It has native unix (for work) and a great desktop environment (for everything else). It's also light and thin. I like that I don't have to worry about the sysadmin shit that I'd have to deal with on a regular basis with Linux, or FreeBSD, etc.
1. Your constructor has its entire contents commented out.

2. You should remove the $i in the function multitask(). You don't need it because the foreach is storing $arrayofupto5tasks[$i] in $value.

function multitask($arrayofupto5tasks){
//I can easily manage 3-5 small tasks
$i = 0;
foreach ($arrayofupto5tasks as $value){
$query->storeIntoDB($value);
$execute->task($arrayofupto5tasks[$i]);
$i++
}
}

3. It's disappointing that your showDemo() function has a hard coded number 2 in it ($site = rand(0,2);) since you could get that from the array length. And also the header() bit has an extra ' in it.

4. Your learn() function returns false in one case and doesn't return anything in others.
Me. I'm currently using FogBugz at a company where I'm consulting. We haven't been using it for long, but it's nice enough. (In the past I've used Jira, Trac, Bugzilla). Overall favorite is Trac.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams,
he found himself

transformed in his bed into a PHP class. He lay between clumsy pointed

brackets, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his soft-referenced

underbelly, poorly indented and divided into giant blocks with redundant loops

and parallel data structures. The tests were hardly able to cover it and seemed

ready to slide off any moment. His many built-ins, pitifully feeble compared

to the bloated code they had to support, thrashed about helplessly

as he looked.
I can't, it is considered bad form to write up a god object.
"They instill in you ... the values of hierarchy and hard work."

Rule of thumb: Any organization that allows you to level up is out to fuck you, take your money, or both.

Examples: School, business, military, computer games, government, religion, etc.
Rant YC!  Sacrificing a CPU to the Sun Microsystem gods...
So, I thought I'd inaugurate RANT YC!

Allow me to start by blowing off a little steam about my techno-angst, and hopefully get a little "I feelz ya, Dawg" from my fellow hacker/founder peeps.

<RANT>I'm taking a survey of Web development technologies class. And, we're in the middle of our final project:
Set up and configure a Java development environment based on J2EE and J2SE on a Windows system, Set up and configure a 3 tier system using Apache+Tomcat and Oracle Modify a JSP, Servelet and an applet that connect to an existing Oracle database and do some simple querying and updating of a table.

So, all in all, I spent a good two days just trying to get the setup correct, and that's with step by step setup instructions. I went so far as to do a clean install of Server 2003, install the appropriate JDK's for J2EE and J2SE, configured Eclipse, and then set up Tomcat and Oracle. It was a freakin nightmare. Hours upon hours spent getting the Classpath configured correctly for both J2EE and J2SE (they install to different folders, one to c:\Program Files\J2SE... and C:\Sun\.) Or, wanting to put my foot through my monitor in frustration, because I'm trying get a servelet to simply run on my server. I spent hours trying to decipher opaque error messages in Java only to find out that my version of Tomcat didn't work with my particular JRE. So, I had to compile my servelets with a -target 1.5 flag, otherwise, they would crash. Sigh...

I'm doing this on Windows for crying out loud. Why do I have to sacrifice a virgin CPU to the Sun Microsystems gods and do incantations over my OS just to get a friggin development environment right? Hasn't Sun heard of an installer? Isnt' that what they are supposed to do for you? Configure things? Why do I have to go in to my environment variables and set up my classpath by hand? Why doesn't the installer do that for me? And, why do I have to manually configure two separate .java.policy files and make sure that they are the same, before I can run a friggin database applet on my dev box?

I went through similar things to update my JRE for Firefox on an Ubuntu box last year. Hours on hours of downloading, extracting to folders, only to find out that Firefox and Sun don't like each other on Ubuntu much. I was never able to get it to work.

Why, oh why is Java so popular? I don't get it. I thought that Enterprise was about making money. All this time spent installing and twiddling with Java on a dev box and on a server is just money down the toilet as far as I'm concerned. I'm planning on founding my startup next summer when I'm done with school. And, while I've rather enjoyed this class, one of the biggest things it's taught me is this: Stay away from Java. It's black death for a startup.

And, can I just say that the next time I see anyone on the development crew for either Django or Rails, I'm going to give them a big ole hug.</RANT>
Generation Y Internet users aspire to become rich and famous rather than work for their country
That's easy: talk about hacking and technology:-)
The Retail Industry
Did about $30B in sales this year, and it continues to grow at 20%+ YOY.

Is there a compelling reason NOT to go into online retailing?
Yeah, but creating a web app that gets 1 million+ users isn't an easy feat, either, Joel. You say it can be done with 3 guys and an iguana. Well, that's only if the 3 guys +/- iguana have spent the better part of the last few years learning Python + Django/RoR, MySQL or PostGres setup installation and administration, Unix administration, SSH, Apache/Lighttpd/Nginx configuration and administration, Memcached, Perlbal or Pound, Mongrel, and perhaps Amazon web services like EC2 and S3.

Really, if you're not proficient or able to quickly learn these technologies, good luck with your iguana.

And, after spending the majority of the semester dealing with nightmares associated with the "Enterprise" web stack--ASP.NET, J2EE and Oracle--creating a web application is muck. Why else is Big Co. willing to shell out millions of dollars for a startup that has created these web apps and succeeded in attracting customers? Because Big Co's aren't doing it well at all. They're mired in muck.

Hackers willing to learn and use a non-Enterprisey web stack will find that they can walk on top of that muck and find brass. Selling shrink-wrapped software isn't the only way to make money.
I'm sure the author does too.
I get the feeling from traveling there fairly frequently and talking to some of the yuppies there that, unlike 5 or 10 years ago, all is not lost if you don't attend college and follow the hierarchy. There is a growing creative class who were not mechanical enough to get into college, but are smart enough to channel their efforts to the arts, entertainment, literature and entrepreneurship. I think this is only true in big cities though, as I have a hard time imagining country folk being very hip at all. But who knows.

I'll give an example: my cousin is 17 and lives in Beijing. He's exceedingly intelligent but hates schoolwork. He knows more rappers (in the US) than I do and knows NBA scores before I do (I live in the US, I should clarify). He wants to attend college, but knows it's very difficult, but has backup plans as he's already making decent money as a web developer by day and a DJ by night.

Sure, "they instill in you ..." blah blah blah, but I get the sense that there's a strong undercurrent creative subculture emerging and we're going to see a lot of results come from that in the future in the form of movies, arts, music and, of course, startups.
PG already claimed the yorkshire-muck-brass analogy for startups: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html#f4

But damn does it bare repeating. A recent experience for me has been creating some plugins for blog software. It's insanely painful making them work reliably with thousands of subtly different sets of platforms/versions/themes/plugin combinations. I've learned first hand from users how much they value it, and I'm not going to give up, but wow is it ever agonizing. I almost pity my competitors for following.

There's tons of money to be made in creating Wasabi-like abstraction layers for all sorts of similarly hairy systems. I know I'd gladly pay for ones that would spare me.
Mmm, my experience may be a little different to yours but the package manager in Ubuntu/Debian made things trivially easy for my setups.

An apt-get of JRE, SDK and Tomcat coupled with a small detour via the web to get the MySQL JDBC connector, took about two minutes in total.

What required you to manually update your JRE on the Ubuntu box?
I see - I missed that part ;-)
I've more than once found myself in this sort of "recursive version hell". All you can do is learn from it.

> All this time spent installing and twiddling with Java on a dev box and on a server is just money down the toilet as far as I'm concerned.

Unless you're being paid by the hour to set it up ;-)

> Firefox and Sun don't like each other on Ubuntu much.

This should be better now - if you search the ubuntu forums or one of the associated ubuntu wikis there should be an install guide somewhere, as sadiq says, it should just be a matter of installing a couple of packages.
watching it now is like watching an unattended child play with a pack of matches in a wooden house

Actually it's like watching a typical startup founder. Which to someone used to the way big companies do things is indistinguishable from watching a child play with matches.

Zuckerberg didn't get where he is now by accident.
sproutit.com
He got 8 out of 10 right. 2 is wrong. You shouldn't be overly secretive, but it would be a mistake to go so far as talking with competitors; if you're smart, your competitors will benefit more from meeting you than vice versa. 10 is also mostly wrong, though the median startup might do better if they believed it.
Blogging Utility: JS-Kit to Deploy Navigator
False premise. Do Larry & Sergey do less for the world than politicians? Does the median politician even have a net positive effect?
That's funny, we're using jQuery to avoid IE-related problems.
I almost laughed out loud at this. At work :-)
fantastic quote.

Unfortunately all I have to offer is an episode of the simpsons where the intelligentsia take over the town for a while

The funniest bit being Comic Book Guy saying there will be forced mating only once a year, "for some, this will be much much less, for me, much much more".
Don't agree with you about #2, if you really are intelligent, control the conversation and information flow.
You should be able to gather more information about the business from your competitors than vice versa.

Especially when you are still in pre-launch mode and they don't know who you are. Talk to them as a customer/supplier/affiliate, it might be a bit underhanded but Sun-Tzu would approve, you'll be amazed at how much information you can get.
It might be ok (strategically, if not ethically) to pump competitors for info by pretending not to be one, but that's not what he meant.

Though indeed I'm not sure it would even be good strategically to do that sort of thing.
This is exactly the one big fear I have as I'm beginning my career in software. I really don't want to end up sitting in a cubicle coding boring ass software for the next 40 years...