skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The guys at Joyent are some of the smartest in the business (and not just because they're currently the biggest host offering Virtualmin GPL and Virtualmin Professional). Their support guys know quite a lot more about modern web apps than most hosts. Solaris Zones, which Joyent uses for their accelerators, are also among the most stable virtualized systems available. Xen is also very good, but if I were building a large-scale virtualized environment today I'd probably use Solaris Zones for it.
FWIW, here's how I read reddit as well as hacker news:
http://scruzia.blogspot.com/2007/09/reddit-greasemonkey-scri...

Goal: See any headline exactly once. Ever.

In reality, it kinda resets itself whenever you restart the browser.
SparkIP--Data Visualization for Patents
Yahoo! Says the Future Will be Modeled on Facebook
A surprising idea for "solving" climate change (video)
Man, I had no idea server-side GUIs had gotten this good... if it ran a little bit faster, it would feel close to a desktop app.
The study, sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Angel Capital Education Foundation

A bit like Microsoft sponsoring studies showing Windows beats Linux, isn't it.
What's In It for Them?
> Thin slicing can work REALLY well if you do it right.

Any "X" can work REALLY well if you do it "right". Doing it right, now there's the trick...
Disney's full of bad messages, like Believe In Yourself, Express Yourself, Be True To Your Friends, Follow Your Dreams, isn't it.

"Absorb what is useful" regardless of the source.
Can you make it so, one can read the comments as well?

It's certainly a good idea, as the hystry.com site shows.

It appears, though, that this site (yc news) doesn't have a comments feed, so adding them would be a bit involved.

The O.P. does a nice job of it on his site, which is probably why this entry rose to the top of yc news so fast.
"Thiel and Levchin also wanted workaholics who were not MBAs, consultants, frat boys, or, God forbid, jocks."

It's a small sample, but the guy who wrote "The Paypal Wars" (http://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-Planet/dp/09...) was a consultant before getting hired by Paypal.
This is a great book, but it's definitely not introductory. I think Segaran's "Programming Collective Intelligence", mentioned above, is the best first bet, primarily because it's fun. And the code is good.
Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument
Fireside chat with Tim O'Reilly
Facebook for Loners: Lonerbook launches
New site to go toe-to-toe with Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster.
Excellent. I was looking for something like that. Thank you!
> As a Catholic, I find that objectionable.

Object to all the straw men you care to erect.

> But what happens when all your startups have failed and you're 40?

What happens when you're 40 and all the companies you've worked for have gone under and you can't get hired because of age discrimination?

We can play the "What-If" game all day long.

College doesn't matter in the sense that I know people who went early, got A's, and then it's like, "now what?" The people who care tend to be those who are interested in pigeonholing you.

And eventually nobody cares whether you went, let alone what your GPA was. The great majority of your post-college life is like this.

Learning what you need is useful; college tends to have some overlap with this but they aren't equivalent. Looking back, I'd say the best time to do a start-up is when you have the most energy and enthusiasm, which tends to be somewhere in the teens to around 21ish. High school and college dampen enthusiasm and people are given to rallying their jaded spirits through frivolous amusements, as RWE put it.

Jumping through other people's hoops is a major diversion of time and energy.
Hmm... Interesting... Well to start, here is mine raju.gandhi

Though between delicious, tumblr and firefox bookmark syncing, my bookmarks are flung far and between.

I think one interesting experiment out of this would be to see the tag cloud that gets generated out of all the bookmarks that ycombinator hackers bookmark... assuming we get a good sample space
I would like if my mouse turned into a different icon when I am using a tool.

Example: I was cropping an image, but my mouse still looked like the standard mouse pointer. Later I clicked on the image and forgot I had the crop tool still in use. Not sure how photoshop does this, but I don't remember having this problem with PS.
London based, and lecturing at London South Bank University. Just put up a few social networking sites around climate change, poverty, peace and wildlife. They're gathered on http://www.bippr.com.

Good to see what else is going on.

I'm on twitter at http://twitter.com/helptheworld.
Up next: Cameras that know who you photographed
very impressive - i've been awaiting the release of this app and it surpasses my expectations so far - this is huge - congrats and thanks for building this!
Startup Weekend Common Misconceptions
23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies
Would it be possible to add an option where you can design your own (3x3, 5x5, etc.) filter?
November's coolest gadgets
Pharmacy software vendors embrace e-prescribing
yeah, the idea is that if we get an email with a correct response, that should bring people to the top of the pack, as it demonstrates at least a certain basic understanding in JS debugging, basic concepts, etc.
[SF] Weebly is hiring
Right, Disney has effectively made copyright forever by making it last more than a lifetime.
Cooking for Engineers. No more ramen!
"In the short run, it's good for the economy when young people believe they need to buy an entirely new wardrobe every year, for example."

The broken window fallacy is back, wearing an all new suit of clothes!
When a blog entry cites Fight Club and Mad Magazine, well...

I'll say this, though: When I was a child I had a funny addiction to the sensation of getting a few dollars and rushing out to buy something. That impulse is all but gone now...I suppose I associate materialism with childishness as a result.
Ruby is serious business. Real business and totally bankable. Fact: You cannot do it late at night.
You generally mention that "ideas are less valuable than they think" but still I believe that to become successful - you have to have good idea. If you have bad idea but still founders are dedicated then over the time they could change that idea and they could become successful but thats longer process ( changing idea on the way is going to take long time to release the product compare to starting with right idea..) and sometime timing is also very important ...
First Netflix Progress Prize Awarded to at team at AT&T, $1m still open
Breakthrough in primate cloning
Congratulations Dave and Hugo!
congrats dave! congrats hugo!
This article and Tim's are both a little long-winded. All that is happening here is a discussion about when to hold ruby conferences: on weekdays so the pros can go, or on weekends so hobbyists can go.

I am a bit put off by the zealotry of the ruby camp (i.e. The Ruby Way, why_'s midnight genius). Ruby is an interpreter. There are lots of them. When you boil it down, there are lots with similar capabilities, so it comes down to a preference on which to choose.

I want a choice between interpreters, and not a choice on which cult to join.
Ex-AOL CTO McKinley and Partners Start VC/Incubator (Competes with YC)
I read hacker news in Safari, which precludes me from viewing slides three through eleven.
http://vr.org/
I wouldn't call this a "server side GUI"... It's a client side application that happens to be loaded from a server and run within a browser.
Well, for starters, I'm from Canada, and went to a Canadian university. I dropped out in 7th grade, and in lieu of a diploma or a GED (I couldn't write one until I was 19), I wrote the SATs and took programming classes at Community College, doing well enough to convince the math department at my university to start me out in a trial period.

I took two classes per term in my first year, and I got A+'s. When I called up the dean of science to thank him for letting me in, I found out that he had died of a heart attack. Before passing away, however, apparently he had enrolled me full-time. From that point on I was a full, legitimate student.

I know several people who have gone into college with a GED, and a few others that went into college before they graduated highschool. Some were in the USA, though it was markedly fewer. Often you have to talk with the math departments to get anywhere.

Scholarships are quite attainable in college, but since the tuition is much cheaper in Canada it makes more of a difference. You can also win summer research studentships, and these are lucrative enough on a student budget as well. Finally you can get paid to tutor, mark assignments, and teach classes.
Inbox 2.0 isn't coming, it is here.
My response to a recent NYT article on Inbox 2.0
Are keyboard shortcuts going to be added?
When they have a web-based (or thunderbird-based, at least) client, then they'll be competitive with the Yahoo and Gmail hypothetical offerings.
'We can't hire the guy. Everyone I knew in college who liked to play hoops was an idiot.'

This rule still applies.
This is why we work so hard
So future kids with dreams can become inspired by our success. This picture was taken a few weeks ago in Stanford, shortly after we submitted our YC app.
First off, super impressive app.

When I went to submit feedback while demoing, it asked me to authenticate after I submitted it - not sure if it went through.

I found a bug as well: Open an image, select an area, go to edit -> copy, and then the image disappears.
Most people in corporations are using Outlook, so that's why we're initially targeting that client. Our product is definitely less hypothetical than any of the announced offerings out there, though. :-)
That's "_why". Not "why_".

You're never gonna get into the club at that rate. ;)
Congrats Dave and Hugo! Fauxto was awesome but this rocks so much harder.
Yeah, good point, but _why's idiosyncratic writing is wacky fun.
Makes a lot of business sense, but doesn't help poor Gmail users whose Contacts app falls well short of the bar set by the rest of Gmail. Nice that it auto-adds contacts, but other than that it feels like a bastard stepchild feature to date.
impressive....useful when I'm at school and don't have photoshop but need to crop/edit an image.

I doubt it can be used seriously for design though...still lacking too many features. I'm using Photoshop 7 and it still doesn't quite compare...
The thing about Xobni is that as much as I like it (having been doing interesting things with email for a very long time) and I think they are right to focus on Outlook (since it sux0r), I can't help thinking that Xobni is a _feature_ and not a company.

Perhaps the Xobni guys can talk about what makes them think that it's a stand alone company? Perhaps the answer is that they don't, perhaps they just hope Microsoft will buy them.

John.
hmm I go down the front page from top to bottom.

=]
The government tends to...mess things up like this...

Just saying.
mkay... and Darpa and ARPAnet came from what again? ah, right goverment.

So, did the first computers (used in WW!!), etc. Nuclear power. Etc.

A good Goverment can do a good job and seeding and incubating technologies that might be intersting in the future (for the humankind), but they are not profitable or interesting to Companies, as they don't have a clear Roi.

Same with shutles and space. Goverement started space exploration, few decades from now, private companies will build on the knowledge amased thru all these years and create a space toursism industry (and make profits, and create thousands of jobs).
Really? :((

One workaround: hover over the bottom right corner region and click on the 'O' to see all the slides in a single html page. Does that work?

Sorry about that.

off-topic: news.yc munged the 'phi' unicode character I laboriously copy-pasted between apostrophes above.
:) I suppose I could make the limits programmable. At some point they'll take forever to load.
Still don't know what 'hoops' are.. does that make me a genius?
I'd say that the PayPal mafia have personal enemies - from those whose accounts they illegitimately cancelled, and resulted in sites like: http://www.paypalsucks.com/
Google search was probably seen as a feature rather than a company. I don't know first hand though.
I didn't quite get that. Was he taking the piss out of Tim Bray for being older? No I don't find _why at all helpful, nor amusing. Some folk do though.
it's right behind his back?
You're right, of course. What I DO like about this is the fact that Obama (seems to) know enough to say that he needs someone to help his administration understand technology. I can't fault that at all.
How would you motivate people to learn on their own as an alternative to going to university?
Assignments and exams in university do provide great incentives to force people to learn things.

But can you provide incentives like that without a university where people do the learning on their own?
so xobni's an outlook plugin, right? why not write xobni's frontend in javascript (that a bookmarklet downloads), so that you can have the xobni experience in ie/ff when browsing gmail.
_why wrote the hpricot html parsers for ruby, as well as tryruby.org, which i showed my dad (who was impressed by it). some people swear in their code, some people write "chunky bacon".
Congrats fellas!
For what it's worth, there's already a bunch of guys who are supposed to be doing that. I believe there is a national CIO and a national organization of federal CIOs. I guess it couldn't hurt to have one more, though.
I think the fact that I have to pay 650 bucks for a new version of photoshop makes this an attractive option for potentially lots of people. Great job guys !
What grad degree were you working on at the time Matt?
I actually greatly prefer Outlook to gmail anyway, so I'm glad you chose that route.
Way to go guys, look and feel is fantastic. This is a great step for the world's most jaw-dropping web app.
Having met one of Xobni's co-founders recently and hearing more about Xobni's vision, I can tell you that they are not just planning to be a plug in for Outlook. Xobni Insight is a plug in for Outlook, but it is just a starting point for the company. They do want to expand into Yahoo and Gmail clients, various instant messenger clients and who knows what else to help organize your personal information. Give them some more time and I'm sure you'll be seeing more offerings before long.
Being a webapp Splashup can do some things Photoshop can't, like saving directly to your Flickr or Facebook account (among others).
Xobni has been a great productivity tool for me personally, I just wish they would release a public beta already.
My co-workers keep asking me to 'hook them up', but my hands are tied at this point.
Cult?
Why am I being downmoded?

A good Goverment brings prosperity and new technologies into market. Look at Japan and Korea. They have fricking 100mbs connections at homes for only $19/mo, and we are stuck with "private" enterprise, eg. ATT and Comcast paying $55+ a month for 6mbs.

Saying the goverment should not do anything about technology, because it can mess things up is not a real solution. Maybe the solution is to stop electing shitty officials and presidents that want to replace science with creationism in clasrooms.

Look at Singapore. A tiny country, and it is become a hot center for BioTech and Stem cell research, while the US is actually behind.
It's actually pretty easy to try out Xobni if all your email is in gmail. Using gmail's recent IMAP feature add, you can set up Outlook to check your gmail account, and then try Xobni without having to leave gmail.

While outlook's support for imap is pretty sketchy, at least this is a way for interested gmailers to kick the tires and see what we're all about.
Good God, another one. It's so weird reading these sites. I can remember having each of the thoughts they're paraphrasing...
> some people swear in their code, some people write "chunky bacon".

Now THAT makes the most sense to me ever. Now I get it. Yes we all like to do crazy things. I like bug tracker tickets to have cussing in them (makes for good release notes).
Wow I wish I could downvote this.
Ahh, so you assassinated the dean of science, and counterfeited his paperwork! Seriously though, thanks for replying.

I did actually take classes at a Community College at the same time as when I was in high school, and I really hated it. It was academically like high school and socially like a Dilbertesque job (especially the programming classes). Worst of all, it led me to think that I don't like math. After a couple of years, I accidentally came across a textbook on mathematical logic and proofs, and it was like being hit on the head with a brick. I thought, "Why did they hide this stuff from me?". No wonder math had been frustrating--it wasn't really math, any more than using Windows is computer science.

Anyway! There are bad things in my Community College transcript. I wonder if that will hinder me, or if I have the option of just pretending it never happened...

Is there something special about math departments in universities (less corruption? a lot of influence?), or did you just guess, correctly, that I wanted to study math?
Time Machine for Unix
So, Android is a Google flavor of Java ME?
D.C? Do VCs there even understand this stuff?
Really nice. It does suffer from a lack of keyboard shortcuts. Just for simple things like holding down shift while drawing an oval to get an exact circle.

I can't see it replacing any of my current tools yet, but it's well on the way.
Wanted: A Name For High-Tech Grief (Don Knuth)
Hi, dood. We're a small team based in Oxford, UK. Would be cool if you can make it to the event kul mentioned - parts of the event (including drinks with everyone afterwards ;-) ) are open to anyone.
E-mail jonathan[dot]black[at]sbs[dot]ox[dot]ac[dot]uk for more info. Otherwise we can meet up in London some time. In fact, are you at Minibar this week?

I recently started blogging about UK start-ups at
http://davidlanger.co.uk so am also keen to hear about more hackers, entrepreneurs etc. working on stuff this side of the pond.
there are companies whose flagship product is a plugin to a popular tool/environment. they are definitely companies.

what are the sufficient conditions for going from feature to company?
Yeah, I'm as free market as anybody and have been witness to the despicable waste of tax money in the defense industry. Face it, the beast is going to eat it's share. Better to go to research than Halliburton.
If there is a national CIO then the fact that I've never heard of him/her is evidence that he/she is doing a shitty job.

I use myself as an example of someone who should have heard of that position because I'm in the tech industry. How did you hear about that, btw?

That position needs to be much more front and center. Technology is only going to become more important. That should be recognized now.
Overly simple answer money. Though even if you pay them how do you know how much they have learned? Certifications such as MCSE, CCNP, RHCE or any other of the acronym certifications. Or in the case of the Finance industry the CAIA, CFA, FRM, PRM, what the hell ever tests. Work well for industry specific general information.

Another way I have found useful is give people a project a real market driven(IE come up with such and such of a product) or some safe lab project. Give basic guide lines and an incentive to finish and let them go at it. You will be amazed people come up with and what they learned to finish the project. Also always be there to help if the get stuck to give new ideas, but never do it for them.

Yet another way keep track of what above average knowledge of a topic each member of the organization, I assume we are talking about a company, has. Make the list relevant to work so people do not think you are invading their privacy and set each person up with another person who wants to learn such and such skill or knowledge base.
Many big, often quality services inspire sites like that. It doesn't take much to be hated.
http://norvig.com/21-days.html. Search for "degree".
Aaron got to Chapter 6 in his "30 Chapters in 30 Days" challenge. Better than expected, really
Upmodded for proof of first optimal brute-force solution.
Ask little kids. They do it naturally.
Forced learning is unreasonable. If you can't demonstrate the merits of something, so that a student judges it would be a good idea to learn it (now), then in what position are you to say it really should be learned?

If motivation to learn something requires external incentives, then why bother learning it? We should learn things that are intrinsically worthwhile.
Indeed. It's very impressive, and makes a great demo, but I can't think of a single type of user who wouldn't be better served by some desktop application.

For power users, the lack of different color modes (CMYK, Lab, 16 bit/channel) or any kind of color management, curves (or even levels!), the kind of rich interaction (shortcuts, modifier-clicks, etc.) that desktop apps allow, serious retouching tools, line drawing tools, precise text control, etc. etc. makes this almost completely useless. Just the lack of the curves tool is frankly enough to doom any image editor (aimed at power users) which doesn't replace it with something of similar power.

For non-power-users, this is still missing important features, but it also has the same complex photoshop-like interface that has been confusing newbies for years. The learning curve of Splashup is steeper than it is for products aimed at casual users; they are better served by those tools.

----

Clearly a lot of work went into splashup, and the technology will surely be useful for something--if nothing else it can be sold to some big company for piles of cash. But in its current incarnation it's basically useless.
You totally have the option of just pretending community college never happened. Just don't mention that you were ever there.

I got fairly lucky with community college: there was another really bright student there. He coded a 3d engine in ASM. So I learned a lot from him.

I didn't guess that you wanted to study math, though it's not much of a guess that you'd like it.

The thing about math departments at research universities is that the field has largely been written by ex-prodigies (each textbook seems to include a mini-bio on galois...), and they don't care much for rules or structure since much of the faculty had to struggle with such artificial things anyway.

So I tended to have a lot of luck talking with math departments. I was quite a writer back then too -- better than the pupils of the English department, it seemed, but there I really doubt I would have gained the traction I had gained with the math department.

By the way, if you don't read Scott Aaronson or Terry Tao, I strongly suggest that you do -- they're wonderful bloggers, and Scott has a terrific (though unfinished) set of notes called Quantum Computing since Democritus. A book you might really like is "What is mathematics" by Courant -- it's wonderful.
Call me a cynic, but I think people just don't care enough to do it. I think a lot of people go to college because they're supposed to, or to get a good job, etc. That's not wrong or bad, but it's just not going to be conducive to self-study.

Once/if you do care, you can set goals and keep working on it until you figure out what works for you.
Ask PG: How many of us frequently override our noprocrast settings?
I try very hard to not click that override button but my mouse seems to have a mind of its own. Anyone else have the same problem?
Find out what kinds of things they'd like to do but feel they aren't capable of doing. Then, demonstrate which things they can learn now which will get them closer to doing the very things they can't do.

If you can convey that each thing they learn can be used as a building block to learning things that are currently way out of their league you might have some success.
Hmm, if they didn't make their own website using Weebly, why would I ever want to use Weebly?