skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought it was obvious: It has to have a really big red button.
So no matter how you define it, the big red button page wins!
As a london based Imperial student, YC news is turning into my number 1 events listing service.
Ask YC: Quality time on the web
I frequently find myself looking through reddit, news.YC and my RSS reader too often.

I was wondering, what can you recommend doing on the web that's educational?

I can think of watching TED. Do you know of any other good educational video sites?

Of course, taking a break from the computer is always an option which I also pursue, but what do you consider quality time on the web?
What time on Dec 13?
Yeha I will also shamefully confess. the audio/video is impressive. if you need a FOSS back end for the media storage, red5 works a treat.
What about geocities? I vaguely remember using it in 1995 :)
It's from Cilibrasi and Vitanyi. They have shimming factors, so you take the min of A|B and B|A, then you throw in some logs to not penalize low probabilities.
This guy with an unholy Slashdot ID claims Xerox had one in 1993. http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11972&thr...

http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/mapdocs/
In Hollywood, the future belongs to the writer-entrepreneur
Amazon already has a partnership with Borders. Why not have Borders install Espresso Book Machines?

On-demand publishing at a bookstore/music store/cafe? Just imagine some dreamy-eyed teenager, who writes bad poetry (oh noetry) all day and can make a book out of it in the evening! And publishing your work is an even better conversation starter than a dog.

Espresso Book Machine: http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/21/new-york-public-library-g...
Live air traffic
> I was hoping that Python threads split across processors, but it seems that they don't.

Understanding concurrency in Python: They're called process-ors, not thread-ors... ;-)
Do we really have to go through the same mess as with music once again? Hopefully not - in any case, the outcome will most likely be the same... ("We were wrong, we should not have treated our customers like dirt etc...").

I would really like to create the iTunes equivalent for books...
> This whole article reads like what I said run through a blender.

"UK Business Journalism 'Sucks', says prominent Silicon-based life-form"...
I googled for it, but I only found a "Mechanize" library for Ruby. What does it do?

I actually like the way regular expressions are being handled in Java. The only problem is that "\" has to be escaped in Java Strings, so the regex patterns tend to have a lot of slashes.
I think you should take a moment and calculate the possible damage a short-lived lie can take, if people make immediate, long-term-consequential choices based on the word of a trusted friend.
Why are there question marks randomly placed throughout this article?
it gets worse: http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-y-combinators-graham-...

Now apparently UK entrepreneurs suck.
"... I am a former lawyer (UK) currently looking at a start-up but feel the need for a "hacker" co-founder for my venture to succeed. ... I know nothing about software code etc. Am I doomed without a hacker "

Hey Sam. You have 2 immediate problems. No hacking skills and no co-founder ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80108

So if I was to be facetious I'd say give up.

But I also happened to have worked for a startup focusing on legal software [0] where the principal was a) legally trained and b) a hacker of sorts. So what you are attempting is possible. But not having a hacker background leaves you in a position of weakness. Every time you are making a decision in startups technology comes into play. So aside from not being able to build your ideas you have to rely on others to tell you what is possible.

There is a flip side to this however. In domain specific industries such as law technology. You can make lots of in-roads. The legal system in Australia [1] is slow on technology uptake and archaic compared to other markets. So anyone who can build products, services for the legal industry really has a leg-up compared to pure technology companies.

So what do you do? Well you will have to get a technical co-founder. Depending on the problem domain you are solving a technical co-founder will not be at any greater advantage than yourself . Why? Because they will not have the deep understanding of what is required. Your strengths will be that no matter what technical solution any technical person creates, the stuffy, inherently conservative legal market will probably not endorse an unproven product without both legal provenance and precedence . [2]

So yes, without a hacker or someone who can turn your legal ideas into code you will fail. Just as equally I imagine most hackers will fail (miserably) without your expertise and pedegree. So I would not give up on building a startup for the legal services or professionals. [3]

[0] Ringtail Solutions ~ http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2005MAR202250.html

[1] I imagine the English legal system is just as backward as the Australian system.

[2] Ringtails secret weapon here was to create a "discovery" gathering tool and casebook for legal cases. Then having a very close relationship with a top Australian legal firm ( http://www.bdw.com.au ) and to not only get the software to be used in a Royal Comission but also have the good skill (luck, timing) to be on the winning side ~ http://www.legaline.com/oct1999.htm and http://www.canberra.edu.au/ncf/publications/emilyhilly1.pdf

[3] Shots taken showing Lawyer desktops and the amount of information legals have to juggle each day dealing with cases ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/31777304@N00/sets/1180151/
Currently playing with (separate of each other):

- Android SDK (though it was kind of surreal to realize that I was coding Python for work and Java for play... @_@)

- Cairo vector graphics (it's not that hard to get Cairo-rendered buffers into OpenGL textures (though you do have to un-premultiply the alpha values :P))

- Working on a lightweight embeddable lisp compiler (currently hosted in Python). Stealing good ideas from Arc, so get coding, Paul! ;-)

- Working on an interesting, erm, "lifestyle-enhancing" webapp in Django [one that already provides value to me just by having it for my own use!]

- Pyglet (python multimedia and windowing lib)

For work:

- Coding web apps in Pylons. (SQLAlchemy is a manly ORM that makes other ORMs look like babies' toys ;-)

- Further investigating haXe and OpenLaszlo (did this for fun on my own a while back, but didn't have time to do much with either of them)

As you can see, I love to code lots and lots :D
12:00PM says http://www.justin.tv/hackertv
I can't help but wonder if

Silicon Valley > Boston

a triumph of Berkeley-Stanford over MIT-Harvard?
Amazon launches an e-book
hey it would be great to talk about coding on android, email me bkmrkr at yahoo.com
Giving away SliceHost invite
If anyone needs a SliceHost reservation, drop me an email.
Kindle: $400. Asus eee: $400. Duh.
None of the examples given this far match "something like a desktop application, where the user actually builds things on the server."
Because the server is returning charset=ISO-8859-1 but the body contains microsoft charset chars. The question marks should be hyphens.
This is what I see from android:
"Cell phone OSes, historically, have sucked. So it's easy to fall into the pattern of believing that they will always suck, and that if you make them suck 500% less, you have reached nirvana."

It's case #2 of google, using it's power as "the honest, open company" to gang up on the big guy (facebook - openSocial; blackberry, iPhone - Android). But, truly, as it turns out, is not that innovative; which , unfortunately (because some of their things are still pretty good cough reader*), I've come to only accept innovative things from them.
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Why is an inquiry like this voted up?
Sent a mail to kfischer@gmail.com.
Because otherwise the rubber dog poo factory would close down?
Here's recipe for earning a lot of karma: submit all links from paulgraham.com.
The Garden in Tad Williams' novel "Otherland"
In that novel, Mr. Sellars arranges his information like a garden, if he gathers more information, it results in some "plants" growing etc.

Just wondering if anybody has given that deeper thought, or if there are any technologies already that go in that direction?

I have no obvious mapping of information to a garden in mind (except trees and mindmaps), but I know that my bookmarks collection is an unmanageable mess in parts. I am also very interested in memory techniques like the loci method. It seems the human brain is very good at remembering things attached to geographical and visual "things". So maybe there could be a neat way to combine those things. Somehow map web sites and their content to a "space"?

Also, does moving to a bookmarking social network like delicious improve bookmark handling by much? I guess it would add tagging and searchability?
If you're looking to kill time, but don't know how, help someone else out, go to the forums for things that you're good at and answer a few questions.
Buglabs in action and CEO interview
Check the bug in action (powered-on) and hear a few comments dealing with market and possible killer app from the CEO himself.
Exactly... no offense pg but who the hell cares. Is this about bragging rights?
12 points by rms 8 hours ago | 14 comments

It was not posted by pg...
You call being slower by a (sometimes) 34 msec over 10000 network io requests as slow ? Most of the io stuff for php etc. is pure C. If you have /any/ non trivial application then the stability and performance of CL systems become apparent. If that is your problem, then try benchmarking string operations of CL vs. the rest of the gang.
Ten Quick Reasons the Kindle Will Fail
I don't think the difficulty of installing a zip file is going to stop many programmers from using D. Anyone who has a real problem with closed binaries will be using gdc on linux. The libraries are open source on any platform, which is really what people care about. D is not targeted at kids, and anyone who wants to learn programming would be well served to start with a different, more powerful language.
I know it wasn't posted by pg, I was referring to the cult of pg in here.

If the same question was asked about any other early web property, no one would have given it a second look.
But what is the point in getting more karma?

Can you hire engineers and pay them with YC.news karma? When you try to secure VC funding, do the general partners check what is your karma on YC.news before they decide whether or not to fund you?
Take a week off, if you can. When you come back, it'll all be new and exciting. Or maybe you'll discover drugs or sex and never come back!
Just because something is evil and shitty doesn't mean it will fail. Examples: SUVs, Windows.
Creative accounting is why this does not work though standard channels. Hollywood loves to talk about sharing profit but never total revenue. A $40-million marketing blitz sounds like a great idea when they get a cut of that 40 million. Etc.
I have no moral opposition to contract work - I've been a contractor, and I've hired contractors.

There's a trade off.

Contractors cost more per unit time than do employees (in the short term), and are usually looking for the next gig. At a startup, we don't have tons of free cash, but we do have tons of potential. We'd rather reward someone with a promise of sharing in our success (which we have) than with twice as much cash (which we don't have).

As far as working on site versus off site: again, I have no moral objection to this, and I've done it myself. However, I'm not just hiring engineers to produce lines of code: I'm hiring them for their wide-ranging intelligence, their ability to contribute to the ideas bouncing around the office, and their ability to tell me when my ideas are full of shit. All of this takes place much more easily in an office. Finally, while most people who work remotely are professional about it, I have noticed that it becomes easier for someone to disengage, grow tired or frustrated, and mentally "check out"...and it's harder for me to detect this, and take appropriate action (a word of encouragement, an announcement that we're all bagging work for an hour to go get a burrito on the company's dime, or whatever else).

As much as I like the IDEA of remote work, and easily compartmentalized tasks, I have come to believe that humans have evolved to be highly social, and to work best when they are immersed in a social environment.

I note that Joel Spolsky has company lunches every day, and considers this important.
1. Seems to me Paul partly rediscovered Buddhism: great Buddhist philosophers of the Great Middle Way school use philosophy to demonstrate philosophy does not work. There is a great analysis of it:

http://www.bahai-library.org/personal/jw/other.pubs/nagarjun...

(This is where the Great Middle Way comes from: the middle way between existence and non-existence. We can prove Berkeley wrong just by kicking stone: it would be wrong to assert that that the phenomena don't exist in the casual, everyday sense. However, they don't exist in that sense that if we look deep into it the entity we casually define as a "stone" does not actually have a true and lasting essence, or identity.)

2. However, I believe philosophy, even though usually it is a bluff, is a necessary evil. How can we talk about politics without philosophy? How can one have any political opinion without at least having some ideas of what "good", esp. "a good life" is? (OK you can be an anarcho-capitalist without it but otherwise basically both Liberalism and Conservativism requires some definition of "good".)

Miklos Hollender
Rails 2.0 cookies - Security Concern
Mountain View startup Meebo aims to revolutionize instant messaging
Porting would be easy - ActionScript is just a variation of Javascript (both are ECMAScript implementation, to be precise).
I for one am waiting for the gReader.
Fun With Prime Numbers
Just post your jobs in the news area. If people like it, they will vote up (hopefully). Actually, it's a good benchmark for your job description - whether it will float on ycnews.
How much spamming experience is required to join?
Yeah, that's bad news- especially since they can modify it once it is cracked.

restful_authentication, for instance, puts only the user_id in the session. If a user were to crack the cookie and change the user_id to, say, 1 (which is often an admin account), it could be a HUGE security vulnerability.

I'm not even sure using a "really good" secret password would be a good enough security measure, since the user can do the brute forcing locally. And what about open source projects, where their environment.rb might be public?

All in all, I don't like it.
If you can abstract the DB out to something anywhere near as simple as writing to disk, then your app does not need a DB.
Make your startup sustainable at (almost) no cost
I kinda disagree with some of his points.

1) "Android apps are written in Java"
I haven't delved into the deeper end of things, but I suspect that it will be a matter of time before people start putting other compilers on there. I mean, Jython and JRuby are implementations of Python and Ruby for use on a JVM. So given that the phone is as open as it claims to be, it should eventually happen. I know the Haxe people are talking about porting Haxe onto android. I'm going to guess it's just a starting point to use Java.

As for the middle layers being closed, I don't see it mentioned explicitly in the design overview, and a browser is in the app layer, not the framework layer so you can replace that for sure.

2) "the installable application is dead"
To think that a mobile platform is simply a smaller web that you can take with you is a bit misguided, I think. As an example, currently, no web browser provides GPS data from the user. There's a plugin for firefox, but that's about it. So (as an example) until mobile browsers provide geo-location, you'll be limiting yourself to writing applications that confer the advantages of the web, but not of the advantages of a mobile device.

Native applications will still have their place. Just as TV didn't replace the radio completely, web apps won't completely replace native apps.

His other points seem to be better justified, but at this point, no one knows. Only time will tell.
Don't Seek Approval for Ideas
Why we hope Amazon's ebook fails
CiteSeer. Or join an open-source project and learn enough about their codebase that you can start helping out people who ask questions.

Almost everything that's relaxing in the sense of "feels like TV" isn't go to be a good education. That doesn't mean learning can't be fun, but it means you have to set aside a block of time and let yourself sink into the material instead of glossing over it in 30 minute chunks.

I've also found time spent socially interacting with folks over the web - in an "involving yourself in their life" sense, not in a "post on the same message board" sense - to be very rewarding. Several online friends have since become RL friends after a couple years of commenting on their LiveJournal and talking to them on AIM. LiveJournal is great for this, FaceBook not so much, since the culture on FaceBook is very much about taking pre-existing RL friends and interacting with them online.
I don't get it either.

But my guiding principle for determining if a business idea is ethical is "If my friends knew everything I did, and were users of my service, could I still face them?" If the answer to that is negative, perhaps you should rethink your idea.
Look at the Sony reader sometime. I remember seeing a single letter on a breadboard E-ink display years ago, and since then I've wanted a reader with that surface. It seems like everyone that handles one wants it. The ideal is an entire library of books in your back pocket, that 'feels/reads' like a regular book. It is getting closer, but the Kindle does seem like a baby step back from the Sony reader.
Jocaml is fascinating. It's a concurrent distributed-programming language & runtime based on the join calculus (which if I had to describe it would be "pattern matching over processes", a pretty nifty idea in itself). I looked at it fairly briefly in college and it seemed really interesting, but wasn't mature enough to really do much with. Given how it's popping up now, that may have changed...
Lots of JavaScript, mostly with JQuery. Some Flash. Compilers, interpreters, & language design (which have always been a hobby of mine).

I'll also second what everyone else said about learning Lisp, Smalltalk, early windowing systems, UNIX fundamentals, and other forgotten areas of the history of computing. There're lots of good ideas in there.
Does a Rock Have Consciousness?
i think if the screen was writonable they'd have something
DIY telephone bug kit
The Infringement Age
"If the same question was asked about any other early web property, no one would have given it a second look."

I think that was the reason for posting it here.
I don't get it. My books work fine now... what are they trying to fix?

I can get a new one shipped overnight ($4 with Amazon Prime) if I really want it, or head down the street and get it from B&N now if I really want it. If I hear of a good book, I don't really have a burning desire start reading it instantly. So the value added by instant delivery isn't much.

Having all of the books I own in my back pocket... what's the point? First - value added by having a bookshelf full of books is non-trivial. Bookshelves make for great conversation. A lot of times when friends are over, we just sit by the bookshelf and talk about whatever book catches our interest. I can't imagine the experience being quite the same scrolling through each other's Kindles. Second - I don't need all of the books I own in my back pocket. I just need the one I am reading now, maybe two. A book takes days to read, which is fundamentally different from music. The newGadget:books::iPod:music analogy is flawed - having all of your music in your pocket has a lot of value; books - not so much.

And last (to kick a dead horse) - sharing is essential. Say I'm visiting a friend who is upset. On my way over, I buy her a book to help her feel better. "I got you the rights to download this book" is never going to quite have the oomph that an actual book will. In general, most of the books I buy for people are presents. Same point.
I've never gambled, but from what I've heard Vegas has a hostile attitude towards cardcounters. This always seemed highly irrational, because often times they bring their silly spouse who gives back to the casino more than the smartypants card counter earns.

Then there's the fact that unless you really have some kind of special ace up your sleeve, you can only make maybe $10-25/hr. If you have the smarts to pull off some fancy gambling thing, you can probably use your limited brainpower elsewhere in more profitable ways. It becomes work like anything else. Doing it is not fun, it requires intense concentration and extensive preparation.
Those are good points. It's just frustering for someone in DC that all the good jobs are in SF. (Except for yours of course :-) but I haven't done any RoR )

Here's another thing that's really bothered me as a job seeker.

Most employers will say something like you did "I'm not just hiring engineers to produce lines of code: I'm hiring them for their wide-ranging intelligence.." but then proceed to ask me excruciatingly detailed trivia during the interview, or require someone have X years of experience in some technology. If you're hiring for intelligence, should it really matter if the employee hasn't use technology X before? He should be able to learn quickly.

Perhaps your case is different though. RoR is more like a movement than just a technology so maybe it's a good indicator of sucess for a candidate to have already used it.
Change IE7 user-agent to IE6 in vista
Ok, so I have a question about this: wouldn't all IE7 bugs still appear, the page is still being rendered by the IE7 engine, the User-agent isn't related to the engine.
The blog writer proposes this as a way to view IE6 only pages in IE7, I'd suppose that this is almost an entirely incorrect method to go about this; the rendering engine for scripts and HTML/CSS is not affected by the user-agent, just what is actually served to the client.
Good points all around especially on the bookshelf - it is a way of showing people what you know (or would like to know) in real life

The only point I disagree with getting the book instantly. There are many times when I want a some tech book right now instead of waiting 2 days for Amazon or doing the hassle of driving.

In the end though I do agree with everyone - Kindle in its current form will fail
Books are heavy, bulky and impossible to grep.

I can heft a small box packed full of paperbacks if I grunt and strain, but I can balance thousands of of e-books on my pinky finger. That means I can tote them around and have them all available when I want them. I'm no longer tied to the physical facilities close at hand.

> Bookshelves make for great conversation.

So does a horse and buggy.