skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Game startup to feature figurines (Will create your WoW Avatar)
Reasons to live the entrepreneurial life
Google disables Steve Yegge's site
I don't think that J2EE on Windows is an environment most hackers would work with by choice. Enterprise software, as I understand it is not intended to be simple to install or use; it's intended to be set up in a custom way every time. The Java language is similarly annoying, requiring lots of boilerplate before you can do any real work.
Anyone know what this was about? No pornography, not hateful content (well, except towards Perl), not violent, not impersonation, unlawful use, or spam. Maybe copyright for some Amazon stuff he had there? I'd like to make sure Stevey gets back online.
How not to not not start a startup...
I would be willing to bet you that they have no interest in becoming a service economy. The US built its power up by having a mighty manufacturing sector - it's what let us build tanks and planes and all the other instruments of war so well in WWII. Another point to consider is that manufacturing jobs produce many more jobs to support the work than than do jobs in the service industry.
Facebook growth continues in spite of Beacon
Select Internet content and stream it on your cellular phone: John Kelley from Buzzwire
Harvard, on How to Cope with things Simple to Choatic
LOL!!!

I guess I'm the only one who got the ref.

(For all you uncultured lamers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_metamorphosis) :-)
My startup's first press article
Your post is the answer to your own question of why Java is so popular in the enterprise.

Because colleges teach students to deal with it. By the time you graduate, you'll know how to install J2EE on Windows, see?

Yes, enterprise is all about saving money. And they will save a ton on recruiting because there are plenty of CS grads who are "java-trained".
Embed charts in webpages with one of our simplest APIs yet
It might, depending on the talent of the person running the campaign. My talents aren't suited to being effective politically, but I wish more people who did have such talents would use them to change things. Many of the world's biggest and most important problems are political, not technological.
I recommend AppleCare for their laptops. Normally product insurance is a scam but I've had issues with 3 mac laptops so far (still love 'em though).
> and no drive for improvement or automation

How does that explain your iPod?
Thinkpad T60 or T61

I love mine, even wrote a little mini-review here:
http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2007/08/best-notebook-for-linu...

Thinkpads are designed for doing actual work - "UltraNav" unit and the keyboard are to die for. They are #1 reason why I picked ThinkPad over Mac.

My distant 2nd choice would be MBP, and 3rd - Dell Vostro.
I guess there was some truth in the discussions on a wider market makes for a larger target leading to more deceptive and malicious software on the platform.

/ side note if you can't view it straight away /

ugh registration required, i bypassed it by copying the URL into my address bar directly since it is checking for referring site

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c79b814e-a364-11dc-b229-0000779fd2...
it's less profound, but MUCH easier to read without training. the 'pick up and go' factor is pretty high.
The Back Button is Not an Undo Button
Impressive. I actually know someone that started something similar to it in Toronto, and it resulted in a flop as well.
http://www.dexit.com/ It is basically toast from what I understand.

On the other hand, MC's paypass seems to be excelling.
I second edw, find a niche, don't try and compete with Amazon. Plenty of niche markets with relatively high margins.

Drop-ship availability will determine whether you can start out of your garage or not. (unless you have a reallly big garage and make that your fulfillment center)
grr @ account-required news sites
Technology Has Turned Us Into Voyeurs
OpenID 2.0 - Final(ly)!
Using JSON to Exchange Data - BetterExplained
Glad to see it getting off the ground Matt. I remember when you told me about it a few months ago over lunch.

likewise, the first press article for a startup I work for (excluding a pre-launch techcrunch post): http://www.techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=42...
This is very cool. And just too easy.
Perhaps it got too popular. I don't imagine GooglePages puts up with large volumes of requests?
This is weird. I am too have been ThinkPad fan for a long time and I only found their build toughness increase over time, including Lenovo era.

MBP is a nice machine too, but it's touchpad/buttons unit is nowhere as ergonomic/productive as Thinkpad's.
Thanks, I'd love to take credit for it, but there are at least a dozen companies that are already doing this:

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/cat/131

Tell you what, if you go with the idea and make a buhzillion, you can buy me a beer sometime. ;)

As to the cost issue, adding $200 onto the purchase price of an enterprise appliance is peanuts. Most enterprise software sells in the $1000 - $100,000 range depending on what you're selling. In fact, you can charge even more for bundling it with VMware. "It's a feature!"

Another plus for doing it this way, the very fact that you're using a virtual appliance makes your product buzzword compliant. "Virutualization" makes your product tre' cutting edge--very sexy for CIO types to talk about how they just spent $50,000 on the latest tech.
Web 2.0 Bubble Video
nice video with a parody on web2.0 u will like it :)
I was thinking the other day about why American scientists are so successful, given that they tend to work much less diligently than the Chinese or Indian scientists I've known. Of course issues of funding and infrastucture have a lot to do with it, but I think there's something else as well...

As a lazy American I spend a lot of time wandering around campus or at home not-working, instead I dream up new ways to adjust my methods so that they take less time and effort. In the long run, tinkering with methods leads to a lot of innovation. It's this link between a tolerance for laziness and creativity that has made American science so successful.
Cookie variants can be used to skirt blockers, anti-spyware tools
Yep, which we'll be using shortly on our blog. Nice work on that.
Sir, your argument by vivid imagery has succeeded!
Regardless of how people should do something, you're forced to consider what you know, based on experience, they will do. You're not supposed to go off the road and crash your car, but if you do, hopefully you won't run into concrete dividers because a lot of times those have those plastic drum things filled with water or sand or whatever.

Similarly, when one lane at an intersection gets a red light, the other lane's light doesn't turn green for a second or two, just because people go through yellow lights when they shouldn't and so cars could be in the intersection when the light turns red.
Dr. Seuss URL Names
Yes, it is technically inaccurate for people to view the back button as an undo. However until new browsers come out that are designed for web applications, this will continue to be an issue regardless. As long as you judiciously use AJAX - only use it to power a true 'app' - you may largely overcome the issue, as people who feel they're working in an application may not be as inclined to hit back when trying to undo.
Man, I was toying around with this idea for so long. I hope Google makes this into some kind of an open-source project...
Hmmm... You're number $30B actually seems really low. A quick Google shows this from the census bureau:

http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/data/html/06Q3.html

|Total retail sales for the third quarter of 2006 were estimated at $991.7 billion, an increase of 0.7 percent (X0.3%) from the second quarter of 2006.

so, assuming that sales are close to $900 billion per quarter, I think that we can safely say that retail sales probably do business in the 2-4 trillions of dollars per year.
I hope it was something more dangerous than this: http://web.archive.org/web/20070601015846/http://steve.yegge... (taken from June 1, 2007)
YSlow-er? New YSlow!
No, back is undo on a certain level of granularity. You need to figure out which actions in your application intuitively correspond to the "back" operation, and make the back button actually do that. Undo could be for a finer grained edits, like edits within a certain "page" of your app.

Seet the new GMail for a perfect example of how it should be done.
LinkedIn Turns On Its Own News Feeds (in Beta)
i actually think Beacon is a great idea, and i really like it. i use gamefly, and when they shipped a game awhile ago, an old friend saw it and sent me a msg, and we reconnected talking about the game that i got.

not anything terribly useful, but neither is facebook really. it's a neat feature though.

for those worried about privacy, my response to these things is always the same. if you don't want people to know about it, don't do it on the internet. why would you sign up for facebook if you dont want your personal information on the web?

also, for those of you still complaining about the latest update to Beacon, he said it right in his post. Beacon will no longer collect data sent to facebook by vendors if you opt-out. thus, they will not continue to collect your data as they have in the past.
SourceForge.net Launches Open Source Services Marketplace
It reminds me of the time I saw a dog rolling around in poo for fun, and I was thinking, "Jesus Christ what a stupid retard."

I'd like to see a game show, "Dogs vs. Humans: Who is smarter?" And they could have really, really easy questions like, "True or false: Dog food is acceptable food for dogs." And the human would say, "True", and the dog would say, "Woof woof", and that would be that.

No contest, poochie. Humans win.
Ask YC: What is the yc news algorithm?
I've recently seen a post on yc news reach #5 of the front page with only 3 points and 2 comments, each comment with no more than 2 points. What makes such a submission reach the front page? Human editors? Inconceivably high karma of the submitter? Or is there something more interesting going on here?
Apparently YCombinator companies are about 1-4 people minus iguana. And most of them are just fresh-grad or 1-2 years away from college. So Joel statement stands.
The Death of Main Street: Are big chains to blame, or is excessive regulation?
Slice off the ?parameters from the article URL. :)
PG answered this a while ago. I actually found it referenced in a thread from the last time someone asked.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704
@jey: doesn't that mean that the back button isn't an undo button? Those "finer grained edits" are undos. Navigating from page to page is what the back button is about, and thats why well written ajax apps (like gmail) allow the back button to navigate through various elements of a page (inbox, spam...etc)

Or does it? It used to just load your page to the inbox when you hit back cause the pages were built into the ajax app. It shouldn't do that because that limits the actual use of the back button.
I actually liked beacon too. But perhaps its cause I didn't buy anything; I think that was users' biggest concerns, that their shopping habits were being displayed.
Interestingly, the "Contact Us" page doesn't give any to indicate that the page was blocked in error. I had to report abuse as "Other" and hope someone read my message that it really wasn't bad.

Looking at the archives, I was reminded of the "It's nothing really" article where he roundly criticized the way his father was treated at a hospital. He did mention the UC Davis hospital by name, and they might have been mad about it.
Playing Dirty: Automating computer game play takes cheating to a new--and profitable--level
Boy, that is a reason not to use Googlepages...
Why is this an either-or question? They're both factors, but probably minimal compared to simple economics. Small businesses are experiments, and big companies are experiments so successful that they've become formulas. Big chains know their business, demographic requirements, and financial projections so well that they can determine before hand whether they will succeed in a given area. This is also why you rarely see them fail or fold.

Imagine starting a startup if you had to compete directly with companies that already knew how to win the game you're learning. Internet/software startups give you so much more advantage because you can play an entirely different game that big companies aren't suited to.
Steve is a Google employee.
This guy is completely mistaken. It did at least occur to him that the two most successful web startups to date, Google and Yahoo, both did what he says startups shouldn't. He replies to that by saying that you can only get away with a goofy name if people love what you build.

If he had followed that line of reasoning one step further, it might also have occurred to him that, conversely, if you make something users hate, it won't matter that you have a good name.

In other words, what matters is what you build, not what you call it. Names just don't matter much. Which means he's wrong, since the thesis of this article is that they do.

Startups choosing random names are in fact pursuing a near optimal strategy: just choose something reasonably short and catchy, and spend your time working on the product, because that's what matters.
Facebook users don't care about Beacon ... not yet anyway.
Sorry for the poor url. Go to the following for the full story:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-paybytouch6dec06,1,634...
Most users think it is.

Ignore your users at your own peril...
Dunno about that. One of my former teachers is over there now setting up schools (and doing some management consulting on the side - he's a former startup founder), and he said that it's very different than the charter school I went to. China's educational system is great for the 1% that makes it into a top university, but they really don't care about the 99% that don't, and there are few opportunities available for them.

His information is current (as of last year), but as part of the "establishment", he might be unaware of an underground subculture, so it doesn't necessarily contradict your cousin's experience. As far as the official system is concerned, though, it's still a vicious meritocracy with few opportunities for niche players.
You don't have to say @jey. News.YC has nested comments.
Some of the names are thought out! Kijiji means village/small town in Kiswahili and gives a sense of locality.
YSlow 0.9 Release - Better Support for Web 2.0
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Google's anti-spam algo probably screwed up.
Acer makes really good laptops at decent prices. I've had my Travelmate for 3 years without a problem, not even a failing jack. The Sony Vaio I had before it was falling apart after less than a year.

My next computer may be a Mac, though. I've heard lots and lots of good things about the new MacBooks.
Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop (Nooooooooo)
> So little imagination is on display nowadays, you could create an algorithm that spews out comparable domain names with the click of a button.

pwgen! :-D
Objects Have Failed
Guido van Rossum on Python 3000 (video)
What to expect when dealing with potential investors
Brace yourselves.
Amazon Gives Away a Billion Songs - Fighting Apple?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
Some pains need to be solved and some need to be managed.
Startups tackle the first type better.
Dogs are better at grammar than cats.
He wrote about NDA-ed Google items. That's all.
I must have missed something? Everything seems to be working fine right now.
Depends entirely on how much those billion people are paid.
This is a complete non-story. For one thing, this is the old blog (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/). For another, the blog isn't even disabled anymore.
He's back! YCombinator saves the day!
It is the old blog, but it's where most of his best stuff is. And it was disabled when people commented.
The article emphasises the importance of equity (for a founder) but I'd be happy with 10% of $100 million as opposed to 90% of $10,000.

Surely a more important (but perhaps slightly more subtle) point is that VCs will perhaps impose additional constraints on the company. A good example is bringing in a new "business savvy" CEO (and/or board of directors) to potentially replace you.

Are there any legal tools that allow a founder to maintain control of the company (in a voting sense) even if the VC firm wants 50% or more equity?

If Sequoia invested in your startup and asked for 50% would YOU complain?
I've started to do the exercises in Erlang now, which is also my first practical experience with Erlang, and it is actually a lot of fun. Thanks for posting!
I don't think he understands the extent of the availability problem. We wanted to avoid the Web 2.0-ish name, since our audience is a little more pedestrian, and ended up having to write a script to combine keywords and check for availability.

And there were certain keywords for which there was just no good option left. For instance, sports. Our keyword list returned thousands of total availables, only two of which contained the word sports. One of which was sportshit.com.
That's fine if your audience is a village in Africa. If you're targeting English speakers, it's essentially nonsense.
Did you write this yourself?
JSON really is so so so so much nicer than XML.
Yeah, that would seriously blow if MSFT could increase the USA's export market, as well as provide healthy salaries for programmers.
Yeah, that would seriously blow if a security flaw in XP allowed the global mesh network of XO laptops to spread a worm, power the biggest botnet ever, and destroy the hardware of any XO receiving tech support.
Except when you're missing package X or dependency y.

UNIX is designed to be a configurable, custom system. There's nothing wrong with that, but I believe him when he blames UNIX/Linux and the multitude of varying installs cause him the most grief. You can't pin it all on PHP.
Top Ten Signs That Your Startup is Doomed
Portents of doom.
I would hazard a guess that the same businesses that would prefer to host their own solution are not looking for an "appliance".
"papers and talks explaining and advocating new ideas might sound like propaganda or fiction or even poetry"

Well this talk reads like literary theory, and that's no compliment.
You're missing his point completely.
RubyWorks: A Ruby Production Stack Courtesy of ThoughtWorks
Google Docs & Spreadsheets Usage Increasing - But is Google Apps the Market Leader?
Boy Survives Moose Attack Thanks To World Of Warcraft
Steve's a nice guy and I enjoy reading his rants, but there's one thing he's wrong about: Amazon. A horrible, horrible company, where bright engineers are managed by horrible horrible idiots and nothing is done very well... Amazon doesn't believe in having engineers do management so they hire people with no skills other than asskissing (its the most political work environment I've ever seen) to manage engineers-- thus you have the joyful experience of having someone who knows absolutely nothing about programming telling you that you're doing something wrong based on a misunderstanding of something he overheard someone else say about a whole other programming language.

There are a few decent engineers who make it thru the incompetance filter (amazon calls this "Raising the bar") and become managers, and obviously steve wored for one. But the vast majority of people managing engineers at Amazon are non-engineers. And the managers managers are even worse- paper pushers whose primary goal is their own personal advancement-- not the product, not the quality of the work and certainly not hte profitability of the company.

Worst environment for engineers, ever.
The 4 types of community
He liked our company and contacted us. He did more than referrals. Essentially, he raised our series A for us. We paid him a handsome fee (funds obtained by another angel investor and our CEO, who was already wealthy) as well as giving him a chunk of stock options. He's a great guy. I'd rather not reveal who I am, but the person in question has a relatively high-profile blog.
Is it just me or does this page crash firefox whenever you open it?
I see the current Iraq war as evidence that more talent and smarts should be applied to politics.

On the other hand, the comparison isn't so useful. How many young people are choosing between politics and hacking? The two skill sets overlap only slightly.
embrace and extend. ouch. :)
No, was interviewed by the author.
TinyLoad.com File Distribution Service
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well i had to use lynx to read the article, but this is a great step up for yslow. That and firebug are my two most essential web development extensions.
Not really. Words from such languages are commonly found in the West. Microsoft named their Silverlight search front end Tafiti which is also derived from Kiswahili (tafuta - to search). Kiswahili is a widely spoken language in East Africa. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language). There are many other occurrences of the language in popular American culture! It makes sense to borrow words from other languages when there is "just no good option left" as you yourself say.
In other news, GM trials coal as fuel for its 2008 Cadillacs.
never used OSX, so if I go with the Mac I'll def give it a try, based on the recommendations
OpenSocial Still "Not Open for Business"
nice review tx thanks
do you know any details of this one? I could def wait that much if its something good!!!
never used OSX but becoming very tempted to give it a try, thanks brk
Rule of thumb: Any organization that allows you to level up is out to fuck you, take your money, or both.

Well put, I wish yet again for a feature that lets me modup*10 once a day...
Breaking News: I Just Bought Heather Harde (Techcrunch CEO)!
good point bootload, thanks... and about warranty I hope I can get a nice one from the manufacturuer themselves, don't really like the ones retailers like best buy give you, those ones are a rip off
What a cancer. On the plus side, this might put some pressure on developers to make the XO's OS really good. But, of course, OS choice is unlikely to be based on technological quality.
I love ubuntu, tis really good... and I am starting to get a feel from everyone's comments that if I go with MBP then I should stick to OSX ... so I guess I can either find an alternative like you said that would make me happy, and have my ubuntu, or switch entirely to apple and get a MBP
I have a toshiba satellite myself, and I love it... but I find them to be a bit heavy, and really bad on battery... and if you are willing to buy the high end ones then you have some other interesting alternatives!!!
but I must mention the graphic card and the LCD are amazing can't recommend it enough
def icky(should_be_hacking=True):

try:
while should_be_hacking:
yc.news.read()
yc.news.post(inane=True)
except IOError:
grumble()
hack()
Is there any evidence of malfeasance? It is more likely that someone just mistakenly disabled it, perhaps Steve himself. Who cares? Surely there are more interesting things to talk about than "Uh, the old version of some dude's blog was disabled for some unclear reason, but now it works again."
What was the message, for those of us that missed it? Was there anything to suggest it wasn't just a generic downtime page?
How fast do you think it would hit the top of the YCNews charts if pg's pre-2007 essays disappeared for no reason? (relax, pg, I know that YStore is better than Google Pages)
You order the delivery of millions of lead-based children's toys and poisoned toothpaste. You grin mischievously; it is a small sacrifice the consumerist Americans must pay for your country's increasing economic power. You know because of your pegged currency, they have no choice but to buy everything you produce.