skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you investigate this story a little you find that the same thing is happening in Southern Africa right now. This 'trade war' can be attributed to African network engineers who do not know how to properly manage their machines.

CHECK -> http://www.digital-m.co.za/seo-blog/2007/10/yahoo-hijacked-b...

Please people . . . 'Fact checking'.

A little less alarmist tone in our posts would go a long way. China has so many things that we could legitimately complain about that I see little reason to concoct stories.

We could complain about their government. The hypocrites who profess to believe in the communist ideal of all men being equal, and at the same time deny all men an equal say in the selection of their leaders. Oh I forgot, it's not communism . . . it's 'communism with Chinese characteristics'.

We could complain about their business leaders. Who profess to believe in fair trade, and at the same time manipulate their market to prop up domestic companies at the expense of foreign competitors. Which, if this story were true, would almost certainly be the reason for it.

But MOST of all we could complain about the people. I imagine many people on this board have been to China. So you are already aware that even if one were allowed to shout about democracy and human rights from every classroom at Fudan, the students would ignore it. Why? Because they are all greedy little snots only interested in getting rich. . . . There I said it. We in the West are too concerned with hurting the feelings of the Chinese people to state the obvious.

And speaking of the Chinese . . . right now Yu Yen is looking at me with that smug Chinese smile and chuckling . . . I have to decide between smacking her around, or going for a run.

I am reminded of a scene in the Bruce Willis film 'Hudson Hawk', where the security guards are chasing Bruce through a museum and two of them end up splayed out on the floor. The third one runs by, still chasing Bruce and yells back at the other two . . . "Get up! You're embarrassing me."

Get it?
This is what I'm running: whatever they (ATI) are saying I should on the website. And it works great, except Beryl/Compiz won't work, people said I should install XGL server first... Which seems a bit too heavy to me.

And since I have very little time to experiment with my workhorse, I decided to wait for "native" support.

Oh... Look what I found:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/AMD_8_42_4_Display_Driver_AIGLX_I...

.... This does not include support for the FireGL series, but the workstation compatibility will be introduced next month in fglrx 8.43...

It appears I need to wait a little more :-)
Is Greed Good?: Scientific American
Corporations Won't Lead the Way on Solving Global Warming
ditto - did the same thing without realizing.
Just throwing in what has worked for me. Obviously, not universally applicable. Sounds like you have a lot to think about. Best wishes - keep us posted.
IBM XT (8088)
Yup, we were actually assigned hypercard presentations in grade school on the IIgs (although I was more into getting it done quick to play Oregon Trail and Number Munchers than hacking at the time)
Maybe this is a kind of ultimate test to check if founders try everything to not let slip their chance of being taken...
Yeah, that's a great idea. Nobody's gonna stare at the hot chick's boobs when they've got her DNA on file! Totally scalable idea, amichall.

Well, maybe in your world it is. See, in the real world, people don't give a crap about your dna. What matters is that you are a lazy black or a slut or whatever other stereotype they want to put on you.

Profiling on DNA would just give another thing to discriminate against. Go watch Gattaca sometime, kthx.
This anger about the Dalai Lama is just a bunch of posturing on their part, absolutely nothing will come of it.
I often do work on an hourly basis. Suppose I charge $500/hour and write a function in one hour that a less skilled programmer charging half my rate does in four hours. Guess who gets paid the most.

John.
FastInit: a faster window.onload
I found this nice JavaScript class few months ago. Thought I would share it... The class implements a kind of onload function queue. This will ensure that your initialization function(s) are called once the browser DOM is ready and not have to wait for all the images.
Discrimination is a form of probabilistic reasoning in the presence of incomplete knowledge. Provide more information about the individual and discrimination will go away eventually. Companies aim to maximize their profits and it is in their best interest to hire the best people.
What makes programming so hard? Can non-programmers invent algorithms?
Microsoft Launches Drag-And-Drop App Builder Popfly
Fuzzy Math few IPOs
Companies aim to do many things, because they are a gestalt entity. In many companies, the higher-ups aim to perpetuate an 'old-boy' network, rewarding their friends with high-paying cushy jobs. They are actually aiming to discriminate, amichall.

In addition, nobody is going to sit down, go through someone's DNA sequence, and say "oh, now I have more knowledge about John Freeman. I am going to discard my prejudices against black people because I have a sequence of letters in front of me! Rational thought is so great!"

No, you eliminate discrimination through education and confrontation. Each generation that mixes with other groups will discriminate less than the one that came before.

In conclusion, you, sir, are either severely misinformed about the world or an idiot. Or both.
Personally I think there might be something genetic. The same people that get computer science are good at a lot of other things that folks that don't understand programming don't seem to be great at. Look at Calculus or Physics. 20% of the students just get it, most of the class needs to memorize formulas and 20% of the people just don't get it at all.
But remember: you have to have a compatible bluetooth phone (and data plan) to use network features outside of wifi range.

- $479; more expensive than iphone

- phone not included!

- tethered data plans usually much more $$ than att/iphone unlimited data plan

+ GPS

+ EVDO/HSDPA (via whatever phone you have)

+ physical qwerty

+ linux/openness
No demo and you don't want money... I'd say that your only missions is to get them excited about what you're building, ask for their sage advise, and get permission to contact them about the app once you have something to show (a biz plan, a demo, etc).

But focus on the advice. Ask questions like "Do you think we're focusing on the right problem?", "What do you think we should do differently?", "Should we get a business plan together or focus on our demo?", etc.

You want to vet this individual for their brain, their interest, and their wallet. :-)
You bring up an interesting point. On one hand, to be a part of a community, one has a responsibility to contribute from time to time. On the other hand, if you practice what you preach, there probably shouldn't that much time available for posting...
Watch Gattaca to see this idea in action.
Helping Startups Win Investors
Have you thought about buying some land in Guyana, clearing out the brush, and starting a new settlement...?
Developers on iPhone SDK - did webapps fail Apple?
A "bootstrapper" is not a permanent state of mind.

Basically all entrepreneurs of the past were bootstrapping entrepreneurs in the sense that they view outside investment (whether from VC's or angels as "working" capital and not R&D money). In other words, a bootstrapping entrepreneur is someone who is determined to take their venture to a point when ALL they need is money.

So in that sense, you always need to speak (aka pitch) to potential investors (these are your future partners who would provide capital and only capital when you need it and only when you need it). One way to understand this is that as an entrepreneurs, we are not here to build products or features, but we are here to build companies (which is our ultimate product).

You should embrace every opportunity to speak with a VC, to practice, to articulate your dream and to understand who they are and what they do. VC's are simple people with very simple objective (to make money). And sometimes, that simplicity is all entrepreneurs really need.

I have written an article on my experience with VC's and my own perspective on who VC's are and they are not. I hope this helps.

How to Turn Your VC into Your Worst Enemy?

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/vc-worst-enemy.html

Good luck with the meeting and good luck on your learning.

--Denny--

Denny K Miu
The 7 Interview Questions You Must Ask
3 Themes to avoid now in your VC pitch
Malaria?
I am afraid I entered the game a bit old. My first computer was a IBM 386 whose clock I fail to remember now. It had a green monochromatic monitor, and two 5.1/4 floppies and a 80 MB HD, but I might be mistaken about the capacity, it was probably less. I wasn't really knowleadgeable about computers by that time to really understand what those meant so I don't remember.
The iPhone comparisons make me laugh since the N810 is not a phone!

John.
Its been about 3 months since we switched, so far its useful, when we have new features, we create a new branch just for that feature so we can isolate the code from the rest of the base. Then when the feature is done, we merge it with the main branch. Its also awesome to be able to commit when you don't have internet access.
Details:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/17/nokia-n810-gets-official/
Internet startups going social
Oh thank that you guys told us. We totally forgot. I was wondering if we should write our emails on this post too, or it's just enough to update our profiles with our email address? I already put my email on my profile, but just in case, my email is gabrielsarmiento@gmail.com or gabriel.sarmiento@emprecol.com from Bogota, Colombia, South America.
I will be there, it would be nice to meet other people from the ycombinator community.
I think it's not about Calculus or Physics, it's about Logic.
A heads-down flight display I built in the off-moments of a business trip. Surprisingly enough the most satisfying code handled text display (remember the text is constantly moving). Also, a python script to automate our build and unit tests; whenever something broke or failed a test it would look up the latest check-in and mail the error to the offending developer.
Yes, I have used English Query and its pretty bad. But when I tried it out several years ago I knew we could make something a lot better. So we did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWio8bHq4wQ
http://www.anaphoric.com
BitLet an effective startup that allows to download torrents from browsers
This is one of those pieces of code that has been done a dozen different ways (probably hundreds, even). I like this implementation though. Nice and clean and short and sweet.
Atari 260 St, that I upgraded to 2,5MB RAM soon after the purchase.
I guess they figured the best approval process was "Do people like this app enough to add it?"

But yeah. The vampire app should just be more honest: "One of your friends wants to infect you with AIDS. When you have AIDS, you can give it to all your other friends!"
And this is why techniques for rapid authoring of NLIs are so crucial. And why the approach should not be based on idealizations of languages, but rather on ad hoc phrasal patterns.
It's not the rates and terms -- it's handing over piles of cash to corrupt governments and hoping they'll spend it wisely.
It's meant to be funny and it was funny, but in reality, this this dude wouldn't keep working for that manager unless he had severe self-esteem issues. I've managed to write some functionality that was scheduled to take a month in a weekend (I'd figure most programmers have at some point), and it definitely didn't come back to bite me in the ass at all. If this is what happens, get another job. Someone else will be more than happy to hire you.
Right brain vs Left brain
The Anxiety of Waiting to be Successful
Dilbert: Just like reality
Some people are good at constructing mental models from a symbolic or linguistic description. Most need help constructing the mental model. That's why Montessori math education includes so many hands-on materials.

DrScheme has a stepper that helps visualize expression evaluation. I think that can go a long way toward helping "non-programmers" learn.
Just updated. Thanks for the reminder.
Gattaca is fiction.
Sorry and thanks for the reminder.
Exactly. Algorithms are simply ways of approaching and solving a problem, and the ability to devise clever ones is portable between disciplines. At my college, several professors in the CS department hadn't programmed anything since the '70s.

The balkanization of science and liberarl arts is probably the worst thing about university education today. The unwillingness of either to import valuable concepts from the other ends up hurting both.
If hiring the best people means the difference between your company succeeding or failing, then maybe you will put aside your prejudices and hire the best candidate for a job.

As for going through a DNA sequence, obviously you would have software to look for patterns that are beneficial to your company. The check would be automated and quick.

And please, no need for ad hominem attacks.
Lights Out San Francisco Oct 20th
prior planning prevents poor performance ; )
I've noticed the same thing. There's really just a handful of News.YCers I recognize that have posted consistently since before the last round. Incidentally, its these folks who's opinions I value the most (for the most part).
Adobe will drop desktop apps to become web only
Ask 37signals: The genesis and benefits of Rails
Is China really blocking all the US search engines?
The answer seems to be unclear!
Absolutely - I count you among those folks. Nostrademons too.
AskYC: YC Result Tracker
How about an unofficial poll of who submitted and who got the OK.

Would be interesting to see how many people submitted and how many was invited? Submitters, please post your results here in this thread.
It's really interesting to note that he thinks the biggest benefit from rails for 37 Signals has been hiring contributors. It makes a lot of sense and is something to keep in mind. Though obviously not easy, any company that can open source part of their product and get people excited about it will garner an invaluable recruitment pool.

It's even applicable to YC; open sourcing Arc would likely be a very good pipeline for future YC founders (my guess is better than news.yc).
Let's keep it that way.
That's not an ad hominem attack. I wasn't saying your argument is wrong because you don't know how the world works. I was saying your argument is wrong because of X, Y, and Z, and incidentally you don't know how the world works.

Your responses continue to show that you don't know how the world works. You aren't going to find DNA patterns that are beneficial to your company. Identical twins with identical DNA can have incredibly different personalities. Humans share 94% of our DNA with chimpanzees, amichall.

In conclusion, please go watch Gattaca and then go join the real world for a bit.
I feel that way sometimes when I can't do something cool. But it passes. No restrictions on user processes is a major reason why "Windows security" is a contradiction, for example. It doesn't work in an adversarial networked environment.
A few years ago I wrote a blackjack game for iPods. Since the iPod can't execute third party programs (without alternative firmware), However, they can display interlinked text documents, so I wrote a program in c to generate a document for each possible state of the game. Blackjack made this possible, since there are only 5 or 6 states in any game.

I don't think I ever actually used it except for testing, it was more of a "just because I can" project. To my amazement some people actually used it for fun. I think it got into MAKE blog and a few other cool places.
If they do that, then they should specify how to escape literal semicolons so that Robert'); DROP TABLE students;-- doesn't file a discrimination lawsuit.
My HS had a PDP-8 (http://www.pdp8.net/) with line printer terminal and paper tape for storage. The programming language it had was FOCAL with a tri-branching if statement (<0, =0, >0).
Learning to program means mastering lots of new abstractions, becoming comfortable with them, and being able to use them. And I know that if I encounter too many new abstractions at a time, my mind simply shuts down. This happens each time I try to learn Haskell for instance. I'm following a tutorial, and suddenly I encounter this:

parseNumber = liftM (Number . read) $ many1 digit

And then I've hit a road block. This can be solved by better teaching materials. Most education in general is simply bad and terribly inefficient compared to what it could be (but I'm working on it...)

Another thing is attitude. Everyone programmer encounters really hard or confusing problems all the time - the trick is being really stubborn, and never give up. That doesn't come naturally to most people.

Finally, most things we learn, we learn by imitating others. Our brains are hardwired to learn that way, but it's not very helpful for learning to program.
I see your point. That's why giving honest answers to "why?" is crucial.
YC has stated several times that they aren't releasing their statistics from now on because they don't want to get into a numbers war with competitors. They've released them for every past cycle; GIYF.

It seems to be a good rule-of-thumb that 10% of applicants will get interviews, and 50% of those interviewed will get funding. I assume that the number of companies funded will still be disclosed (or at least, it will be hard to keep secret), so you can work backward from there.
I believe this will be a new way to force upgrade consumers, instead of buying software and running it for years now you will be forced to pay monthly and over the long run pay more and if you unsubscribe it won't work at all.
I hear you. The reason those are popping up is because after the decisions are made, the posts are almost ALL about rejection and what it means that YC said no.

A few preemptive posts the day before will balance out all the rejection posts the day after and will make the forum more "normal" in the aggregate.
Just a personal $0.2: this device does not appeal to me for two reasons (1) it isn't a phone and (2) it is quite lousy computer due to a limited storage.

If it had more built-in storage I would love to use it as a portable travel PC so I could unload photos from my camera onto it while traveling, review the pictures, write emails, and use it as a GPS you can walk with.
Nobody's pointing out the fallacy that DNA is just the start of how a person actually is? Even if there were genes that were easily identifiable for beauty, personality, intelligence, leadership or anything else you cared about, there's no guarantee that potential would have been fulfilled.
Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback. I like your comments about making our message simpler and to the point, and will work on this.
Wow.
This is a very bold double-down on Flash and Flex.

This is why Adobe bought Macromedia- They see the future as web-based applications, and they want control the API. Microsoft got to where it was by controlling the API people code in, and the environment applications run. Adobe's showing that they're in a position to control the API for what's next.

This is a very clever move. They're signaling to developers who might be tempted by Silverlight that they are eating their own dogfood on Flex, and betting the farm on their tech.

Given the huge investment that Adobe has in existing desktop applications, the implications of this are huge.
Flash/Flex is already a Cross Platform development environment that's installed on 99% of machines.

They're looking to make it a par with Cocoa or .Net in developers minds... And it has a good chance of working.
Of course, effort is required as well. But at least you can use this approach to prune out candidates where that potential is lacking.
The constant "concern" over China becoming some sort of significant world super power/super economy really puzzles me.

There is nothing about the way China is acting, as a country, to indicate that they have any real ability to scale.

It has been said, (and I happen to agree) that the thing that makes the US so attractive from a standpoint of innovation is the government. I have a lot of issues with the US Government (and I don't just mean in a me-too anti-Bush sort of way), but overall in the US are not limited to the information you can access, in your opportunity to create wealth, and in your ability to keep that wealth and do with it what you please. At least as compared to the rest of the world. I recognize the obvious problems with various FOIA requests, taxes, patents, etc. But overall you are free in the US to design, develop and sell any product or service that you feel will have a value.

Then you look at China, and the government of a few is trying to manage the efforts of billions. This is like taking everything you should have learned from "The Mythical Man Month", and extrapolating out to the worst possible case.

It may take 20 years, but China is going to implode from their own lack of management. OR, they will get smart and make massive changes to the way things are done, so that they can become something other than just another lowest-cost-bidder.

I cannot think of any case in history where their "model" has been successful.
"Finally, most things we learn, we learn by imitating others. Our brains are hardwired to learn that way, but it's not very helpful for learning to program."

I would like to disagree (respectfully). Although in most CS programs, algorithms and PL classes tend to be heavily proof-based and end up being exercises in tedium. As a TA for a intro. programming class, I would like to present the latest problem-set to students as some kind of narrative, sketch out what makes the problem interesting and the natural flow of the program structure that follows the problem, that comes spontaneously to the mind. So in a way, people are learning by imitating/doing, and not grinding out the hard theory first.

Honestly, I don't think everyone here learned for the first time about loop's, as according to proving that loop variants hold on during the iterations; or convinced themselves the way that various data structures work, by way of category theory. You learned it by doing, and you know that it just intuitively works. While functional PL is harder than Java, I think it works the same way; you change the way you think and in turns, the way you program, by doing.
Finding Creativity in Software Development
Setting up a multi-IP linux proxy server
Maybe my learnings here will benefit someone else.
I think your Camino issue may have been because you need flash player 9 installed. Normally the browser would upgrade for you, but a link was broken (has been corrected now).

In regards to the slowness - the old PowerBooks ran flash horrendously. This has now been rectified with the Intel macs - I can remember how badly flash used to run on my old powerbook, but since getting a MacBook Pro it's much better. Of course our player hasn't gone through the rigorous optimizing we have in store for it (it's just early days yet!).

Thanks for the feedback.
Abstraction -vs- Testing
You're missing a word.