skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On Cartooning
Reading this it gave me a feeling that he was writing of something more than cartooning but in living lives of passion, in general!
I haven't taken a look at GWT but I know of at least one ex-Googler that was trying to do a startup in Java/GWT and was hitting some major roadblocks/slowness of dev speed; they've since switched to RoR.

I also worked on SproutIt's Mailroom app, which is about 80% of the functionality of GMail, implemented by 2 dudes (one backend, one part-time front-end) over the course of a year (also in Ruby on Rails). Sprout's since released their toolkit, called SproutCore, but its docs are still a bit sketchy.

My $.02 -- too much of the plumbing for web 2.0 takes place on the server, which is why time to market on the server-side has been so important over the past few years. With Prototype, MooTools, YUI, etc. a lot of the fancy front-end tools can be bolted on after the fact.

Also -- how many apps fit the mold of a 100% full-screen AJAX app? Email, spreadsheet, word processing, calendar... what else? Reading news, surfing blogs (outside of an RSS reader), googling for information, etc. do not fit the mold of a 100% AJAX app.
I don't understand this. But I can't say I am surprised.
3G is a must in European and Asian countries if apple would like to compete with Nokia.

Apple always had a penchant for trying harder after victories, I believe this is another case of lets tear apart the market before somebody else plays catch up. I think they did something similar with the Ipods.
No, GWT has nothing to do with Gmail or the JS compiler. GWT was actually a startup that Google acquired a few years ago and made open source. I think it was probably released before any Google project made significant use of it.

Personally, I prefer JS. My current project is mainly written in JS (using Rhino on the server).
Google loses one billion dollars per year to fraudulent ad clicks
paul,
I was wondering, recent post of Steve Yegge extol the virtues of great coding standards/uniformity across google.

In your opinion how easy would google cope with a need for a complete rewrite of Gmail?
Nice hack nostro. What process did you use to scrape? Been working on a newsyc scraper

- extract & parse with python + beautifulSoup, display with YUI

- parsing the RSS feed for user, story points, story title and date posted

- then grabbing user details via homepage for karma, inception date

- exporting to xml

- skinning with YUI

Will display when ready, heres a screenshot ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/1400863977/
So that's why people go to YCombinator for startup funding... the free Ramen!
2nd choice.
The very concept is somewhat nonsensical. Gmail is a big system with many components -- there is no reason that Google would ever need to do a "complete" rewrite. That said, the individual components are frequently rewritten, and it already supports at least 4 completely different interfaces (AJAX, plain HTML, XHTML mobile, Java MIDP mobile, POP3, and probably others that I'm forgetting or can't mention). Adding a new UI for Joel's magical library wouldn't be a big deal.

There are a number of real threats to Gmail. This isn't one of them.
They are a little different.

With Wesabe you download a desktop app, put you bank credentials into that, and then the desktop app uploads your data to the Wesabe site. With Mint you give their webapp your bank credentials and they store them on their server.

http://mint.com/safe.html

http://www.wesabe.com/page/security
You will definitely be very slow in building stuff initially, if you have not used GWT before. Much slower than using RoR. Unless maybe you've done lots of SWT/Swing programming, then you will at least have a general understanding on how to layout stuff graphically and use event listeners.

Everything in GWT is treated as AJAX app, in that all RPC's are asynchronous. But all GWT apps dont have to be "100% full screen". You have the freedom to do whatever you want visually, including wrapping JS libraries for animation, drag drop, etc (which I've done with my current project).

In theory, you could write everything in native javascript and then just wrap it using GWT's JSNI functionality. Then you can use GWT for debugging and reliable RPC's. Or if you have your own server side JSON XML parsing for an existing Ajax framework, simply adapt your client side XML parsing to use GWT's XML libraries. Then everything is type safe and can be debugged and unit tested. You can also refactor your JS more easily this way, and everything is more modular. Bottom line is GWT is very flexible. It is designed this way so it can be integrated with existing JS projects.

That being said, I agree with your comment about not everything fits the mold of an Ajax app. Like if you are not building a web application. Rails will be faster and more immediately gratifying in most situations.
1) Musashi's Book of Five Rings
2) Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People
3) Machaivelli's The Prince
4) Sun-Tzu's The Art of War
5) Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action
6) Steven Johnson's Emergence
7) Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
8) Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
9) Mark Buchanan's Nexus
10) C. S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain

Taken together, these books cover just about everything there is to know about the sciences, about human history, human nature and how to understand and communicate effectively with other people. Only one other book besides these needs to be studied/read: The Bible.
Look up Peter Drucker if you're having to deal with big institutions. If you're trying to understand web startups, then you probably need to read Gonzo Marketing
Any hints about what threatens Gmail?
A big selling point for Wesabe is just that - they never store your banking credentials.
Ask News.YC: Video Advertising Services Similar To AdBrite InVideo?
I've looked around a ton and found that there's very few real competitors to AdBrite InVideo. Their product is mostly quite good and basically exactly what I want. The problem is that it's highly unstable and there's a hugely variable delay in the time videos are added to their database and the time they're playable (resulting in errors for users). Attempts to get them to implement a workaround to fix the problem have received only friendly lip service.

Anyone know of a video ad service that lets you instantly wrap your videos in an ads in a simple and reliable way?
Paul Bucheit on safely storing user passwords
I do :]
http://www.adotube.com/

http://www.brightroll.com/

I searched for "preroll postroll ad" on Google to find these.
I have no experience with adotube or brightroll. http://www.MochiAds.com does flash advertisements very well, but apparently only for games. I'm not sure if you could hack their ads into a video.

There are also a lot of different video advertisers that are advertising on Google.
This is awesome! You may be able to improve it further by considering other things besides common comment posters to determine the angle measure for a story. I haven't seen this good of a web information graphic since the treemap used at "newsmap" found here: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
I want those 3 minutes back I wasted reading this!!!
I'm a data point on the side of YC not having an Ivy League (or "top tier") school bias. I went to community college. For audio recording and music--I've never taken a single computer class after high school AP classes. My co-founder went to a good school in Australia, but I didn't know what it was when filling out the application so I just said, "some school in Australia, probably a good one, and probably for computer science".

That said, the number of Stanford, CMU, UC, MIT, etc. students and graduates is quite high in YC, and I can't think of any other community college bums in the bunch.
How do you guys (and gals) hire programmers in Silicon Valley?
I'm a grad student here and wondering how one goes about hiring a programmer to help with a project that I started and is pretty far along. Post something on Craigslist?
O2 is having to dig up and reactivate old 2G broadcast hardware in the UK JUST for the iPhone. Yes, a 2G phone is definitely a step back for most European and Asian mobile phone users.

But they do have a cool solution using the Cloud WiFi service. O2 iPhones automatically hop between WiFi routers on the Cloud network as you move between nodes (seamless to the user).
Thank you. I actually missed Adotube, but they're lame like lots of others: 200,000 minimum uniques/mo to get an account. Brightroll has a similar rule and rejected my application. MochiAds seems to be exclusively for games.

All these damn companies suck and Google isn't in this game which sucks.

Thanks again.
I think there is, although all I've been doing is limiting how many CPUs a VM is allowed to use. Every VM starts out with vcpus=1, and we add more when the load factor gets up too high.

This is quite effective on a server with 8 cores (two quad Xeons) and 4G of RAM, as by the time you've given each VM 512M of RAM, there's plenty of cores to go around. It would be more problematic on a single or dual core machine, though.

There are still a couple of ways a single VM can kill the box, though: it can max out the disks (so you really don't want to be running out of memory, unless you have a dedicated swap drive, so swap doesn't compete with normal disk access) and it can max out the network bandwidth.

In a hosting environment you'd probably want to set up some sort of internal traffic shaping so the each VM has a fair go at the available bandwidth, and you'd also want to keep swap partitions on a separate disk to data. This way if a couple of VMs run out of memory, they compete for the swap disk but other VMs that are within their limits and don't touch the swap disk don't see a problem.

I don't know, but I imagine you might be able to do some magic with LVM to balance disk transactions/throughput between logical volumes...
The fun part of the game for me was the strategy of where to place and where to aim, not actual aiming itself.

Therefore how about having eight directions to aim, and the pods placed on a grid? Then you have to think about pods getting in each others way, and you can try and set up chains of the enemy's pods to be clever.

Also, the computer is too quick and accurate at placing pods. Make him a bit slower and stupider...
I don't think so, I still hate Flash, and I am not the only one. In fact, I just switched to Linux, only to find that flash makes firefox crash (seems I was unlucky, it works fine for others). The point: just as always, flash simply doesn't work for everyone, so it is out. The last big company I worked for also didn't provide it's employees with flash.
Agreed. The computer is perfect with his aim...the only time I did reasonably well was when the computer put his pod behind his base and was shooting himself (of course, eventually one of my pods starting shooting him and took it out of play, and the game ended soon after).
The Fabric of Reality.

Why? Find out for yourself. Read the opening paragraphs here:

http://www.qubit.org/people/david/FabricOfReality/FoRExtract...

Also, I second GEB.
The Fabric of Reality (Opening Paragraphs)
It's not addicting. It is frustrating for many reasons.
The aim is not obvious.
There is no obvious logic and strategy in play. Don't know how to protect, don't know what to do in fact.
Maybe adding a beginner level where we learn the working principle of the game and the basic strategy one can use.

The apparent logic of the game is too basic.
Tower of defense is more interesting because the options are obvious and there are many way to try and explore.

However a more addicting game would involve randomness in patterns to deal with. Thus even if we manage to understand the strategy, it will have to adapt to the terrain pattern. This requires learning and repeated tries, which makes it addicting. Tetris is such kind of game. Very simple but introduces some randomness.
It was a fun read, on the other hand, couldn't it be condensed down to five lines or so? OK, or maybe two pages? It seems to just put forward lots of variations of the same theme, which might be more confusing than clarifying in the end.
I think several of the stories in it have been debunked. I remember at least reading that the story about the drug dealer turned out to be a hoax - unknown to the authors of the book, but I was disappointed to not at least find a statement regarding the issue on their homepage.
I think it would be interesting to see if the GWT "back end" compiler (which works off its own AST) could be integrated with another language front end. the GWT compiler is indeed impressive - so it would be useful to see it used in general (even if it was from javascript to start with, this sort of compiler would be useful). Although, GWT java code is 100% static, which means they can analise the heck out of it, and compile it tightly. A more dynamic language would not have so much luck unless you forced people to follow certain conventions.
will NEVER be main stream. too many people are too scared to give out their most sensitive information over the web, to be used for dog knows what. i wish them luck.
Hiring is probably the #1 challenge in Silicon Valley right now. The tight labor market -- especially the top tier -- is affecting both established companies and startups. You can advertise on Craigslist, but I don't know what you'll find. I think you'll have a lot more luck through your personal contacts than by posting job ads looking for strangers.

My guess is that you'll have better luck working your personal network. So, where are you a grad student? You probably know some other students there, right? Have you taught any undergrad courses, where you might have worked with some pretty good students? Have your friends taught any courses? Many times your fellow students can be great partners in this kind of situation, because they're quite motivated and don't have the salary requirements of someone with an established career.

Also, what about your other contacts away from school? Your friends may all be employed, but presumably they will know people who are looking for part-time (or full-time) work.
>I haven't taken a look at GWT but I know of at least one ex-Googler that was trying to do a startup in Java/GWT and was hitting some major roadblocks/slowness of dev speed; they've since switched to RoR.

That is a bit odd, its a bit like saying you couldn't get Dojo to scale so you switched to Postgres. I assume if their startup was happy with ajax idioms in RoR, then they would be mad to build it in anything else, as it does so much for you (but if you stray too far, ouch).
It's not intuitive. I had to google for stuff like "how to rename a file in OS X", because Apple felt too good for putting such things into the menu for the right mouse button. Windows might be messy, but there is essentially just one rule to remember: when stuck, try the right mouse button. I don't see an equivalent for that in OS X.
I think Cambrian House and others do that.
kinda nice plugin i guess. They need a new name. Thats a FACT. The trend is going more to web based e-mail clients so i guess they should make Xobni for Gmail.
Non hacker books:
From Good to Great and
Built to Last
Learning guides for Wikipedia
The music was really quite irritating. Aiming was very hard to get right. Gave up.
Storewriter.com, What do you think?
I've been working on http://www.storewriter.com for a while and finally got a preview version online. What do you guys think? What kind of improvements would you like to see? Any feature requests?

Thanks in advance.
Want to taste success? Exploit capabilities
This made me laugh too: "But then, while you're sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug..."
The Tesco and Wal-Mart can do it on the ground then its also possible to do the same online - internet superstore are yet to come - can you imagine NOT going physically to Wal-Mart or Costco and buying everything and anything online with a click of a button.
Fred Wilson: "Blown away" by Xobni
Between that and the ramen quip, Spolsky comes across as pretty smug himself.
Another open question is how difficult it will be to obtain the different APIs. If NewSDK and ExtremeSDK are both compatible with your system, and both free/inexpensive, then monopoly conditions may not occur. People in the 90s had more reasons to choose only one platform.
UPDATE: Always email the founder! I did. Philip Kaplan replied (on his iPhone) within a couple hours and thanked me enthusiastically for letting him know. Hopefully I'll be able to use AdBrite after all, which is awesome.
PCLinuxOS gets number 1 spot on Distrowatch; Ubuntu is now number 2
Announcing SoftTech VC's $12M seed fund X the Return to the Dark Side
Most of us probably blog, isn't that writing?
Religious Social Networks on the Rise
If you want to hire a programmer for a free, when you'd better try your personal contacts indeed. Otherwise you should try various communities and job sites.
Like:
Craiflist
jobs.37signals.com
rubyrockstars.com
etc.
I'm still scared to give out my most important credentials to a 3rd party. Maybe I'm paranoid.

I'm with you, and no, it's not paranoia, especially when stories like this (also on the news.yc front page right now) are still making news: http://www.venturecake.com/layered-technologies-hacked/

From the article:

Major US hosting company Layered Technologies have been hacked. Credentials for 5-6000 hosted accounts - and the data stored in them, including customer details in web stores - have been compromised.

I hope Mint doesn't used Layered for their hosting.
Ask yc.news: Opinions on EC2?
I'm looking into Amazon's EC2 "web service", and I'm wondering if anyone else here has looked at/utilized it. What are its strengths and weaknesses? What did you use it for? What should it not be used for?
Web 2.0 Investments Up 7 Percent
What happened to Mobile Web 1.0? Dan Applequist
Ah, so someone has tried the ViaWeb 2.0 idea (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984).

For now, I'd remove the "start now" link until you're actually ready to sign up new accounts.
Great execution. Bad concept. Been there done that. good luck.
Given your username, that's just weird, but I loaded it from Germany, and I got a web page in Spanish. Google correctly loads as google.de, so something must be wrong on your side.
Have you seen UCW?
heck of a CV...
Zak, that sounds vague. So I don't understand what you've done. And Rails can be much flexible. What are benefits from your framework for a particular types of web apps?
"Tabs should be reserved for letting users change the view while staying in the same place."

The word "view" says it all. I don't know how many times I've violated #1. No more.
Flash is the only widely available system that gives you full control over every pixel in the browser and it does that in a pretty efficient manner.

Although, yes, something intuitively stops me, too, from getting excited about Flash. Maybe it's that it's closed/proprietary and I just don't trust today's Adobe anymore. They definitely want to be the microsoft of the web.

So there's Silverlight (well, potentially), Flash and still no decent alternative from the open-source world. No Mono/deIcaza stuff please. Thanks.
Most novels can be condensed, yet, it'd suck to read the condensed version. I'd say the same of GEB.
The Evolution of Cooperation. It puts in formal terms some common sense about interactions among self-interested individuals.
Great! My congratulations to the Xobni guys. I've asked Fred to give me an private beta invitation.
Grr, I was thinking about doing this too. Which programming language are you using? Ruby/Rails? Python?

It looks good :D
That argument also implies online banking will never be mainstream.
Scaling Smugmug from startup to profitability
Smugmug.com a 5 year old company with just 23 employees has 315000 paying customers and 195 million photographs. CEO & "Chief Geek" Don MacAskill has a nice set of slides where he talks about its 5 year journey during which it went from small startup to a profitable business. The talk was giving during Amazon's "Startup project" so it talks mostly about how it uses AWS (Amazon Web services).
Customer Service Nightmares - Please share your stories
I would like the audience to share their worst stories for customer service they have experienced ... also you can share what would you expect if someone wants to be best in customer service domain.
I've not used it, but have a read of this: http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/07/04/AmazonEC2S3Does...
Hack Your Home Telephone with Asterisk
#1 is a design problem.

Getting the right navigation element and having it look good is sometimes tricky. For the upcoming new look of ourdoings.com, I hired a rock-star designer and asked, among other things, if she could figure out how to replace the incorrectly-used tabs in my current design.

She was able to deliver on everything else I asked for, but she couldn't find an alternative that looked as good as tabs. The new design will still have them.
I totally agree with what you're saying. However, this is sort of surprising because the ceo is so outspoken about how msft products are such crap and are 2nd rate rip-offs.

It's also funny because of the general Apple snobbery towards all things non-apple. Which also made me chuckle because I fall into that category with my MacBook pro, ipods, iphone, and graveyard of old Apple products. =]
I think it's super useful for certain kinds of things where you need lots of servers on-demand. For most startups I think boring old fashioned dedicated server accounts are the way to go. The price, simplicity, and control is unbeatable IMHO.
Few days(?) ago Ameritrade found out they've been trojaned for a while and hackers stole all the customer info.

I'm not saying Mint is screwed but current phisihing scams and security lapses have people scared. Financial sites will develop a stigma that many people have when you ask them to 'install' something on their machines.
My guess is that they want to get acquired by msft or any huge company that uses outlook and would have a use for inbox analytics (theres probably 1000's).

In other words, I don't think they care about gentoo geeks and gmail users.
Very interesting screenshots. Let me know when you can build the store.

PS: You should look into shopify.com and see how they do things... they seem to be much farther along than you.
Huh, I did signal processing and communication systems in college, and I don't recall anyone ever mentioning the lens thing. It says the distance from the image to the lens has to be "f" Is this the Nyquist frequency?
Regexps. John tried a beautifulSoup parser, but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. Insert joke about "now you have two problems", but it works in a pinch, and it really only had to last till we showed off our projects at 8:00 PM ;-).

I don't mind sharing the code if PG doesn't mind the potential flood of screen scrapers. It just handles the front page and comment page for individual articles, and it's pretty compact - only 60 lines including doc comments.