skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure from this post if I understand what happened. Did they steal his computer and his backup device? Did they steal just the computer (if so what are all the references to the backup device)? Did they steal just a backup device? If so shouldn't the data exist on the actual computer itself? Or was it not really a backup but more of an archival device?
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the 2 year cookie policy affects GMail. I remember being prompted for a password every so often even if I tell Google to keep me signed in. I'm guessing the 2 year cookie is for correlating search results. And even if the cookie itself has an expiration 2 years in the future doesn't mean that GMail will accept that session ID.

Can anyone confirm whether or not you can stay logged in to GMail for 2 years using just a cookie?
I hate it that all links to facebook arrive at a login screen. I don't want to login just to see what that app is all about.

Facebook - nah...
The fact that Facebook is not as "rich" as face-to-face interaction is a feature, not a bug.

Live interaction is great, and we will always enjoy it, but it doesn't scale: you can't go to the pub with more than a handful of friends at a time. If you take a group of fifty people out to the pub you will obviously have to break into a bunch of little sub-groups. If your two best friends end up in different sub-groups, you will either have to ignore one of them or pursue the "mingling" strategy: talk to one small group for half an hour or so, then stroll away on the pretext of getting another beer and wander into another small group.

The "live interaction" version of your Facebook page is your wedding reception. Now, I enjoyed my own wedding reception, but I also have to say that I wouldn't be anxious to hold another one. The good news is that I got to see many of my relatives, my high school friends, my college friends, my grad school friends, my music-playing friends, and my wife's relatives and friends. The bad news is that I talked to each of them for exactly two minutes before moving on to the next. Since I was the guest of honor, I was socially obligated to mingle rather than stick with a single small group, so I ended up exhausted and vaguely unsatisfied.

The "live interaction" version of news.yc is a technical conference with several hundred attendees. The good news about a conference is that nobody is obligated to try and talk to every attendee, so you are free to break up into managable little groups. The bad news is that if you're eating lunch with your colleagues in one room while DHH, PG, RMS, Woz, Bill Gates, and Al Gore are engaged in a passionate technical conversation in another room, you may never realize what you were missing. Even if you spot the PG table, you may find it rude to simply abandon your colleagues mid-lunch in order to go over and kibitz. And there are both physical and social limits to how many people can listen over PG's shoulder.
this is a really cool concept at least when searching for people. After searching for my name it gave me a list of sites that have my name in them (usually mailing lists) and in the related email addresses section the first 3 email addresses were mine. The other two were people that I have talked to on some mailing list. The site is REALLY slow at the moment but I'm hoping these are issues they can work out.

Do they actually crawl the web for this or do they do some sort of searches in the background (it does take a long time to get the results back)?
I think apple quality control has gone downhill in the last few years. I've been an apple customer on and off for a long time. And I've been totally on the day they went back to OSX.

1) The wireless on my MBP has been an on and off disaster. When I first got it, wireless transfers from machine to machine were way slower than my old PBK. When I click the wireless signal button to choose a network it takes a full second+ for the networks to show up. Used to be instant. Their latest wireless driver (their 4th version!) dropped me from my network every 15 minutes requiring an archive install to get back to the last version. Wireless on my PBK was NEVER a problem at all.

2) I got the airport express for my parents a few years ago. It almost never worked. The music would incessantly drop out and no amount of network settings tweaking would fix it. Magically in Tiger the problem disappeared.

3) When the latest airport extreme came out I HAD to have the airdisk feature. I've had an old G4 tower as my file server and itunes repository for a while and it was annoying to move around. But my recent experience taught me to wait. I routinely monitored the forums and it turned out that the airdisk wasn't even close to ready for prime time. Hundreds of messages were posted about dropouts or their disk not even working at all. It took two firmware updates for the forum complaining to subside. I now have it and it works but...

4) If I leave my house w/o dismounting the network drive, the machine hangs for a full minute before it says the drive was disconnected. 30% of the time I wait two minutes and have to hard reset. On my PBK it was a consistent 15 second wait w/o ever having to hard reset.

Perhaps there is something rotten with the wireless engineers at apple. But really a bit of testing should have smoked these problems out. It used to be unusual for something to come out of apple so rough around the edges.

As for the iPhone, I really love mine. I haven't had time to play with the hacks and I'm glad I didn't. But I went to the iphone hacks sites yesterday and saw how prolific the extra apps had become. This phone only came out a few months ago and they have lots of useful apps with mature package management systems. It was sad to see such a promising developer community squashed at the dawn of its life.
I've got to admit feeling more and more disenchanted with FaceBook and MySpace.

There's a difference between addictive and useful. FaceBook is addictive, but are all those people really my friends? (Real friends are people who will help you move furniture) Isn't it a lot like the devil spawn between a phonebook and a gossiping game?

LinkedIn to me seems a little more honest. It's there for business purposes. FaceBook looks just like a huge time sink. A online video game designed around human's social instincts.

Hey. I'm old and probably don't get it. I like to spend my time doing things that have impact in the real world, even if it's programming or engaging in discussions. What does FaceBook do? Exist? Perhaps there is some new kind of socializing and friendship that's being created with Web 2.0. Fine. That makes sense. But the individual still has to do the cost-reward work. At the risk of being branded a heretic, I'm afraid "Do something users want" might be incomplete, at least from a consumer's standpoint.

Note that I'm talking about FaceBook and MySpace exclusively. The whole "how many people can you actually physcially relate to at any one time" is a different question entirely. Discussion boards, especially good ones, seem to me to be a different animal.
I agree...
I like facebook for 2 reasons:
It lets me find old friends I've lost touch with, and it shows me what they're up to every now and then.

The rest of the crap (Feeding virtual fishes, 'poking' each other), they can keep.

The whole 'myspace' mentality of 'requesting friend' then adding ad infinitum - I think that's the weirdest thing. People who religiously seek out 'friends' to add etc. When you have hundreds or even thousands of 'friends' they become meaningless.
Couple of years and we'll have all pretty much forgotten about facebook IMHO. It'd be a gross miscalculation for them to believe they're the next google. They should take what they can while they have the hype.
Ask YC Hackers: What's the best text for learning Javascript?
For a long time I've treated Javascript as a "second class citizen" and eschewed it in favor of Scheme, Java, Ruby, and (lately) Erlang. Now that I'm managing and coding with not just server-side hackers, but hardcore UX hackers as well, I'm realizing that I would like to become a solid Javascript developer as well.

What's the best Javascript text for an experienced developer?
"Classic: a book which people praise and don't read."

http://www.twainquotes.com/Classic.html

In other words: Yes, in a world where every coder had an MIT degree, nobody would be especially impressed by DSLs.

Or maybe that wouldn't be enough. I've met several people who had SICP for their first-year programming class and did not like it at all.
Interestingly, I just came upon a nice blog entry with several good web-based resources: http://www.juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2007/09/09/learning-...
Learning Javascript: Videos, Slideshows, and Web Tutorials
Couldn't you do that with my website instead, please? ;-)
> It might be fun to build you own CMS but, for many of us, could be a distraction from what we actually want to make.

Yes, my answer was a bit tongue-in-cheek. It's almost always better to see if there's some open source code you can build on.
Virtual robots duped by illusions help to explain human vision
Presentation Zen: Learning from Bill Gates & Steve Jobs
Everytime I visit Wikipedia I contemplate writing a Greasemonkey script that would get rid of the "this article lacks citations" warning. I think they are definitely on the wrong track, hopefully they'll be able to change the direction again soon.
Lisp as an Alternative to Java [PDF]
I recommend "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide". I read a couple of pages in B&N to see if it was any good, and it paid for itself right there.

edit: Get the 5th Edition. See nickb's comment.
+! for "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide"

Once you have learned javascript, DHTML: The Definitive Reference is a great desktop reference, although it's less important now that javascript libraries are so good.
the rhino book by far.
wow you're easily influenced by internet memes, I have trouble seeing how a site with a reasonably complete api is a walled garden.
What is the Monkeysphere? (and the surprising implications for social nets)
Maybe this will change when Google releases its competing platform.
Rhino book

http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Definitive-Guide-David-Flan...
agreed.

Also check out 'Pro Javacsript Techniques' by John Resig.

Read this article on closures which is the best description I have read of such a crucial crucial aspect of the language:
http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/closures.html

Also read Crockford:
http://javascript.crockford.com/
There's a lot of good stuff to read on Douglas Crockford's site (http://javascript.crockford.com/) including a good survey (http://javascript.crockford.com/survey.html).

I would also recommend his series of videos on js (I think they are from internal yahoo presentations). There are 3:

"The JavaScript Programming Language" http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=111593&fr=

"Advanced JavaScript" http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=111585

"Theory of the DOM" http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=111582
I've asked THE JS MAN himself, Doug Crockford of Yahoo!, what the best book on JS is and he says its: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (5th Edition) by David Flanagan (edition is important... 4th one is not that good). Doug says a bit more about the lack of any good JS books:

"Bad Books

Nearly all of the books about JavaScript are quite awful. They contain errors, poor examples, and promote bad practices. Important features of the language are often explained poorly, or left out entirely. I have reviewed dozens of JavaScript books, and I can only recommend one: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (5th Edition) by David Flanagan."

http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html

Also, make sure you watch his tutorial videos. They're awesome! There is a series of four intro videos and three advanced videos:

http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=111593
http://101out.com/js_advanced.php
I always found Mozilla's JavaScript site very helpful: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/JavaScript

+1 on Flanagan
you know maybe if the poster changed to the title to something that actually related to startups or thinking differently then this article would be fine... or if the article was about the man finally overcoming memento hell with some system or technology... but there's none of that in the post
Vista Kicks Ass
Matt's take on Vista.
>And why do you think Lenovo uses better hardware than Dell?

I used to think that. My Thinkpad Z61m is starting to convince me otherwise though.
There's an IDE plugin using Eclipse that has a nice tool for IPhone development (regardless of your language I think):
http://aptana.org/iphone/
>Is any one Mac Os X upgrade "significantly better" than the last?

Yes. 10.0 seemed like a public alpha. It was unbearably slow and missing important features. 10.1 was like a beta - faster and more polished, but still slow and a bit rough. 10.2 was significantly better. Since then, they've been more like point releases.
Aren't embedded languages (languages built "on lisp") superior to DSL's? Embedded languages can integrate with each other seamlessly if need be... and they can be manipulated in terms of the parent language.
Pulsars are a secure time source
"Nature provides clocks that are oblivious to the malicious intentions of any outside parties. In the case of a remote high-energy system such as a pulsar, this means anybody. Pulsars are many orders of magnitude more accurate than random delays that face attackers on the Internet. If critical Internet servers were synchronized to natural clocks in a secure and timely fashion, they would be immune to attacks that relied on uncertainties in timing."
"Nature provides clocks that are oblivious to the malicious intentions of any outside parties. In the case of a remote high-energy system such as a pulsar, this means anybody. Pulsars are many orders of magnitude more accurate than random delays that face attackers on the Internet. If critical Internet servers were synchronized to natural clocks in a secure and timely fashion, they would be immune to attacks that relied on uncertainties in timing."

Forget GPS, syncing your clocks to a pulsar is much sexier!
Why does the fact it appears in SICP make it any less interesting? Also, how often do LISPers use Macros for actual metalinguistic abstraction, rather than as a tool for code generation?
See http://marshallk.com/social-media-for-marketing-what-weve-do... and http://marshallk.com/thoughts-on-product-launch-promotion for my thoughts on the question.
I own the 4th edition and so far I've been happy with it. What has improved?
Ask YC: How do you intend to spend your YC investment?
If you're accepted, what are your plans for the money invested? I think I'm a little confused. THE YC FAQ says we can spend it any way we see fit. However, the only thing I expect to spend money on are living expenses while in Mass (rent, food, bills).

If you're a founder, please share a little bit about your experience. Did you find it difficult to live on the investment? Did you use personal savings? Were family and friends feeding you money? How did you use the investment?
The developer community hasn't been squashed at all. The 'hacking' that causes the iPhone to brick is tampering with the SIM card interface. That's in firmware, and it's sort of to be expected that if you change things there, and then apply an Apple patch without changing things back, things might break.

But third-party apps still work, by all reports I've read, as long as you haven't tried to unlock the phone to work on other providers.
KFS won't really be interesting until they do a MapReduce-clone. You need something like that in order to be able to do anything with the data stored.
I don't know much about their API so I can't comment on that, but things like this: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/facebook-opening-up-but... don't make them look like good citizens of the Web.
I'd prefer a comparison of infrastructure (ie libraries). Nobody cares about the performance aspect anymore.
I think the point of the anti-Vista stuff is not that Vista is significantly worse than other MS OS, but that it is not enough of an improvement over XP for people to put up with the speed hit. It seems the people who hate Vista the most are people who use Mac OS or Linux anyway.
If I was a malicious coder, I'd rather go for Yahoo Mail than Gmail (they have a cookie that lasts for 2 weeks).

Based on my experience working for a spammer (long story I was mislead about the company), Gmail is the ignored red headed step child. The main focus was on Hotmail and Yahoo.

This is probably due to Gmail still not being a leader in web mail, and just having proportionately less click through rates (percentage wise) than Yahoo or Hotmail (Hotmail was the best in both). My guess is that this is either due to google having a better spam filter or smarter people use gmail.
Just out of curiosity, do many people here use version control for one-person projects? Is it worth it?
Luck is a topic that really deserves more attention, especially in business schools. Almost any successful person will tell you that luck played a major part in their success.

Being right in math is not luck; it's usually the result of deduction. It's deducing two manifestations of the same thing are indeed the same.

Being right in business doesn't mean the same thing as it does in math. I think that's where people get "being right" confused. Being right in business can mean lots of different things, but most of the time, it means some idea can generate profit. It's more similar to chess, where you can position yourself the best you can, but are still totally dependent on other factors (in chess, your opponent; in business, many many factors). Luck definitely plays a major part in this scenario, no matter how ingenious you are. It's not an insult to say one got lucky in business, as saying "you got lucky" here is basically the same as saying "other variables did not impede your plan". The appropriate response should be "that's pretty obvious".
"Ebay" by Weird Al Yankovic
Also see:

http://www.dontdownloadthissong.com/
Apple just played nice with the carriers, and screwing the customer even more.
You paying FULL price (%200 markup from apple), for a device with a CONTRACT. At least most other phones come cheap/or free with a two year contract. This just made more money to apple.

They didn't change anything on the mobile space. The only thing was a pretty UI, that's pretty lame.

I can't wait for Google Phone. It is said that it will be powerful, but cheap, and sold open (independent from the carriers), just like most phones in europe.
That would be a game changing phone.
The Unsung Heroes Who Move Products Forward
The YC money is more than enough for the items you mentioned. That is, given your bills don't include an existing mortgage or payments on your new 911 Turbo.

Btw, if you're applying for the coming session, it's in Mountain View, not Mass.
Hookers. Caviar. Purple bud and purple pills.
we spent it all on common living expenses. we spent our own money on random things we wanted just because.

we made it last forever. i think 15k lasted 4 1/2 months for two people. our rent was 1800 in a SF. and the only reason it went that quickly is we had a month where we spent more than we realized by accident. it was really easy, the only thing i did less was go out for restaurant food and beer less.

(socialmoth)
Like Scoble says, it's my online rolodex. It's a rolodex where you'll have to click at least several times to see all of who you're friends with, and by default you only see people of one particular kind, along with those who have left you messages.

So uh, it kind of sucks as a shared contact manager the way Highrise is.
What the Hell Is Microsoft Doing with My Computer?
everything is behind login screens so search engines can't index it. you consume it and interact with it on facebook's terms. whether it's a data roach motel, or a walled garden, or whatever, it's basically an AOL bromide that will make a few people very rich and then eventually fade into mediocrity and obscurity.
Lisp is a really powerful language. Unfortunately Lisp's main problem isn't technical.

Someone could prove me wrong but I think like Erlang, Lisp just doesn't have a vibrant, growing community - it's pretty stagnant

Maybe it's because there are some Lisp jerks that like it that way:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thr...

By comparison the other languages' jerks just talk smack about how the other languages suck compared to theirs (and typically they are more than willing to provide proper and respectful help to people trying to learn their language)
Ah, Fox News, that bastion of truth.
Straight from the author, what's new in the 5th edition:
http://www.davidflanagan.com/blog/2006_08.html#000110
"living expenses while in Mass"

This session is in SF
Why not use both, if necessary?

RE: Lisp <AND> Java

Check out JNIL and LINJ (Java to Lisp translator and vice versa): http://common-lisp.net/project/jnil/
I'm still divided on Vista. I've been using it for well over 2 years starting before the beta stage via an MSDN account. Lately, I use Vista, Ubuntu, and XP evenly throughout the day and XP is my least favorite. Vista has been more annoying then XP, but the added features (yes there are actually features worth using) make it worth it still. That said, Ubuntu is great, but I have had more issues with it on an old laptop than either XP or Vista which have both been on the machine. I think I am more willing to accept Ubuntu's short comings because I know it's open source, and it's what I expect.

That said, my next laptop will probably be a mac, although which OS I use most (OSX, Vista, or Ubuntu) has yet to be determined.
a good perspective on one of the aspects of game theory (or at least what I think is game theory):

Sub-systems will tend to maximize their gains even at the expense of the system as a whole...

Co-opetition is a good book on this subject
I think it might be intentionally slow to encourage you to buy the pay/GUI version. They might also pay for their API calls in that one, there are a bunch of mirrors for this search engine because sometimes a particular instance doesn't work because it is out of search engine API calls for the day.

This works best as a security tool for "penetration testing" when you search for domains and IPs.
yeah that sounds familiar. These sorts of things become self perpetuating as facts.
Al is repeating himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSnaL_UgW9s
Hm, interesting idea: lately I have been rather torn between Groovy on Grails and Ruby and Rails, and I worry that both won't suit me. I like the way Grails is done, I think something similar could be built on top of Hibernate and Spring quite fast. I was considering to try it with jRuby, but to use LISP didn't occur to me yet. Perhaps if those Java-LISPs play reasonably well with Spring and Hibernate, a modern web framework for LISP could be built?
See also Dunbar's Number:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Evolution is an observed fact and even religious leaders 150 years ago did not argue this. Natural Selection is a theory which explains, without reference to any supernatural agent, how evolution might have happened. Darwin didn't posit evolution as it wasn't a subject that was very exciting. It happened, everyone agrees.

Natural Selection, on the other hand, is more than just a hypothesis (you're using the word "theory" incorrectly). It (with refinements) is one of the most widely established explanations for all of the observed phenomena of lineages, species differences. It also made a number of testable predictions that have since been borne out (it predicted DNA, among other things). More recently, natural selection has led to the development of new sciences, like evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary linguistics, etc. which are taking our understanding of biology and behavior further than ever.

Evolution is a fact. Natural Selection is a theory (and not a hypothesis). No scientists are "moving away" from natural selection. Anyone who told you that is uninformed or lying.
Lottery tickets.