skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... On how many employees the 300-person company will have in a year:
700. ..."

Compared to Craigslist this is lot. What are all these people going to work on? Anyone care to guess the programmer/phb ratio?
well, someone must not have liked my response. you can update without reinstalling, Ubuntu makes that pretty easy. From experience however I've found that it works more reliably if you reinstall Ubuntu as some community supported packages can cause problems otherwise.
I assume you mean doing it "distributed" ?
cause branching and merging is something I do all the time with SVN. Although, yeah, I don't use it as much as I could for that sort of stuff.
Never saw that "The Other Road Ahead" essay before, thanks for the link. He proposed a web service quasi-operating system for people uncomfortable with normal computers in that essay and I applied to YC with that idea.
Wow, that's old. Here's what really happened:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fgyu1WwSWfQ
Thanks for checking out our clock and your feedback, esp. on bugs.
Oops, jay beat me to it!
No problem. It's something I'm interested in as well.
we did most of ourself; http://www.nolo.com/resource.cfm/catID/BAAE1B67-F54A-41B4-91...
then paid our lawyer to go over it. It was really successful process.
Adquisition competence is always good for all of us :)
That guy took a bunch of rules without understanding them and tried to follow them. That is NOT living biblically.

He is more like this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharisees#.22Pharisees.22_and_C...

"An important binary in the New Testament is the opposition between law and love. Accordingly, the New Testament presents the Pharisees as obsessed with man-made rules (especially concerning purity) whereas Jesus is more concerned with God's love; the Pharisees scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them out."
"Bill Gates didn't know that creating a computer operating system would lead to the largest computer software company in the world anymore than Richard Branson knew that signing Boy George and Phil Collins would make Virgin the music label that it became."

Somehow, I doubt this. ;-)
Well, I would recommend moving off Windows simply to save money if you need to scale to multiple servers. Server grade Windows costs quite a bit and the licensing is too complicated for me. Because of this I have made an effort to code in cross platform languages. However I would not start a rewrite of 100,000 lines of ASP (on the other hand 100,000 line is a LOT of code, perhaps it would be a lot less if written in something more powerful).

I don't want to start another language war so I won't recommend any specific language, I just wanted to comment on the fact that you are limiting yourself to one OS and that might hurt.

I like the idea, if executed and marketed well it could really help. Combine this with great real estate listing and search functionality and you might have a winning software.
Do you think it's a good idea for people to publicly announce their failure/success, when their comments are connected to their usernames?

Personally, I would rather keep that kind of information private. This isn't a radio station contest.
I've used the Company Corporation in the past. I haven't used any other services so I can't compare but it was a pain free easy setup. Paid a small fee online, everything arrived in the mail a few days later and the deal was pretty much done.
What would be really interesting is if the social networks start using eachother's APIs to import and track friends from rivals. You could add the myspace app to your facebook account, and then you could track your facebook friends while using myspace (vice versa ad infinitum). After the carnage, there would be a single portable social graph. And the sites themselves would be commodities.
The challenge of teaching yourself a programming language
Ask YC: anyone want to be testers for us
We applied to YC, and are waiting for their response. Instead of waiting, we thought, why not just get started. Our first steps are to find some startups to help us test our seed-funding knowledge-base. If you're a startup looking for seed-round funding, write me to get invited as a tester. Email: donna (at) genuus [dot] com.
Facebooker is the new AOLer.
I've been very happy with them as well. Corporate.com.
You don't get it. AIR solves all of that. It's offline web-based app. You don't have a connection, fine. Do what you need to do but the second you're online, we validate your application and send you live updates.

Imagine a world 10 years from now where everyone bought a fully enclosed computer like you would buy an iPhone now, but you have to pay a monthly subscription service to get updates or to use it. That's why all these companies are making web-os, thinking that's the way of the future. It's going to be horrible.
The Web is the Platform, not Facebook, not Myspace
Clearly Mark Zuckerberg has a good understanding of social networks. I think all of this talk about adult supervision is insulting; it is no surprise the interview ended there.
Let's see... $19.99 a month indefinitely or $400 a pop. SAAS is going to be everyone's new wet dream.
Most law firms use CT or CSC. The important part of incorporating is not just being recognized by a state, but everything else that goes along with it when you do it properly (bylaws, ownership, etc.). If you are at the point where you need to incorporate, you need to do this other stuff too and should probably talk to a lawyer that works with small companies regularly.
Startup Camp : Sun's unconference for the Startup Community
Startup Camp is an unconference-style event that's dedicated to bringing together the various members of the startup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup where its the attendees that drive the agenda [in true unconference fashion]
In Ruby, the subscript operator is just another method name. There's no essential difference between an operator and a 'normal' method like to_s.

To know which method is called, you need to know the class of the receiver and the method name - together they determine unambiguously which method is called, and hence there is no surprise.

The only surprises occur when the programmer is mistaken about the type of an object - those are the risks of dynamically typed languages.
Who owns my Friendships?
Boulevard R - releasing from private beta
We created a 5 step process to get people on track for retirement which includes: defining a meaningful retirement, identifying short-term goals, selecting options to achieve the retirement vision, receiving a custom plan & getting support (track progress, get tips, etc).

Next we plan to to extend the support step by building a community around it. I think a good idea is to start with tips, goals and then let it develop from there. Any suggestions on this?

From a technology stand point, we use a combination of JBoss Seam and Flex.

All feedback is welcomed.

http://www.boulevardr.com
Midnight would be the time they would absolutely have every email out

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68677
I think I would be pretty happy with his performance thus far if I were an investor. Anything he says about anything is going to either blow up in his face or come back to bite him in the ass. Saying nothing and continuing to have explosive growth and app development along with massive valuations seems like a pretty good way to handle things.
There's always going to be free services, don't worry. I'm sure the open source crowd won't stay far behind, they're able to innovate far faster.
Well, you can always look at what others have done.

For example, I had no idea what DNS hosting service to use, so I looked up which one ycombinator.com used and went with that (EasyDNS). Not scientific, but what the hey.

Similarly, you can look up any company registered in California here and find out who they use:
http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/list.html
You can get most of the Nolo books on eMule for free.
Do it yourself. Seriously. Any online incorporation service is going to give you the same caliber boilerplate document that you can find online for free.
Simplicity
Something funny just happened that I wanted to share.

You've probably seen Yahoo's new Search Assistant. If not, check it out.

Well, I thought it's a pretty neat feature.

Until I just saw a young child use it, a regular Yahoo user, who was baffled at the recommendation popup and what it was for, thinking he had to click on one of the recommendations.

There goes the actual product, the search engine, out of the window. :)

It is soo easy to build in too many features. KISS
Would it be considered ironic to steal legal documents?
How about those sites that have the underlined key words. Let your mouse stray across one accidentally and wham! There's a little popup advertisement related to the keyword.

That drives me nuts. You know, there's something to be said for a plain vanilla site that does the one thing I want it to do, and nothing more.
That's exactly what they'll do in Nov: open up Gmail's connections.
The Platform Is What Matters
The importance of the platform and what it has done for some software organizations.
What about people who don't have (never have had, and never will have) their computer hooked up to the net? They are screwed...

Some people keep their computers off the net for security reasons. My father keeps one of his off the net so that he doesn't have to worry so much about viruses.

And no, he doesn't want to use Linux... And even if he did, ProTools isn't available for Linux.

Note: to be fair, he doesn't (to my knowledge) use Adobe programs on his studio computer.
I agree, those are annoying. Slightly less annoying but still frustrating are the sites now that try to help you by opening a pop-up whenever you select text.
"... I like your comments about making our message simpler and to the point ..."

It's much easier to remove text and is something that an editor would probably suggest. I really like the idea you have ... demonstration through video - very effective. Reminds me a lot of say Google ( http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=genre%3Aeducational+so... ) or Yahoos ( http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ ) video collections on technology & software.

I've got a question for you Ryan. When you decided to develop your app did you specifically try to be general in learning or focus in one specific area? The reason I ask is that the service can be made to cover all areas but at the risk of dilution in making what users want. The other extreme is you tailor you app to such a small market you don't get enough users.

How did you make this decision?
Reminds me of the Daily WTF one where a customer complained about the length of time a batch data processing operation was taking, so they optimised the hell out of the routine and did the same job in 1/100th the time, and charged them $x.

The customer decided that, obviously, something must be wrong since something that is doing so little work can't be accurate, how can they trust it? etc. So they added a delay 5, charged them an extra $x/4, and everybody was happy.

I'd try to find the link, but pretty much every Daily WTF article contains the same search terms...
"... techniques for rapid authoring of NLIs ..."

Haven't heard of this. How do you do this? Any cites?
Dang, that site was eerily accurate.

I filled out a few forms, then when I got to step 6 I got this message:

"If you do not change the amount you are saving, you will run out of money when you are 14."

Strange thing is, I DID run out of money a lot when I was 14. It was that stupid vending machine they put in my Junior High School. (grin)

Liked the site and the graphics. Found it strange that the TOS popped up when it did. Might want to check those overflow conditions.
doesn't work on the iPhone
The benefit that I see in these services is the free year of registered agent service and the other side features. I would do it myself if I thought I could find comparable prices on the individual elements if I did it myself.

Its not for a startup, I just need an entity to test some projects out and have some liability protection. If I was doing a startup I'd go with a lawyer no question..
That's great, cuz I'm looking forward to AIR; a single platform that covers all the bases, plus NBL.
Google closes in on $200b market cap!
After earnings today they are flirting with the $200 Billion market capitalization mark!!!
That gives me a great idea! What about adding sound clips to those little ad popups? Would that not be the best?

I bet there is going to be a startup sometime that does that...

It could be called: ADnnoyance 2.0
Oh god, I shiver when I just think of those. Leave the innocent links alone.

Agree 100% on vanilla. Unstyled websites are actually quite sexy.
Better hush up, or somebody will throw development dollars at you. If there's one thing I know that can get funding, it's finding more and more ways to shove advertising dollars down people's throats.
No way.... Tell me that's not true. I'm one of those addicted text selecting text as I read it, that would kill me.
When the A-List Gets It Wrong: Scoble/Rubel
Well, I suppose I could edit the comment but the cat is out of the bag now.
I really like LegalZoom. They have a very good and professional online application process vs some of the other services.
As long as we can get ads for X10 involved somehow, I'm in.
Cool, but its driving me nuts.

I once wrote a countdown timer for an enterprise workflow app, that counted down until the average form completion time. It turned yellow as it got near the time, and turned red as you went past it. We were recording the average for each employee. I thought it was kinda sick, but fun to program.

I also did a google gadget in flex2/3 check it out. For them to work properly, you need to add them to your google home page. These are in beta, so any advise would be nice.

http://jdavid.net/gg/gg-count-flex2-v20.xml

and here is a javascript only version

http://jdavid.net/gg/gg-count-type-v24.xml
On the other hand, I'd love to network with people who've applied at all in the area, whether they get accepted or not...

Anyone interested in a meet up? :)
Nice picture of Ballmer there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug4c2mqlE_0
The best programmers are generally those who have learned it at a young age. Maybe that's the best time for the brain to pick it up.
Non-linkjacked: http://www.startupcamp.org/
Google VP of Engineering Douglas Merrill on the Consumerization of IT
From the CIO.com article: "Suddenly all the rules of the game have changed. Software developers don't exactly know who to listen to; CIOs don't exactly know who to buy from, and VCs and board members don't exactly understand how to value the companies that we're getting involved in. All those things are in flux. If your job is to limit risk, that's a horrible world to be in because it's all risky. Of course, there's risk in a good sense, because without risk there can be no return. The problem is I don't know how to model it. We understand the monetization models used by enterprise software; we don't yet understand the models for this."
i don't like your plan page. the typing thing annoys me. i read faster than it types and it wasn't even some kind of fancy effects.
1. Technical/Usability feedback

Call me stupid, but why over-engineer something that (usually) is done as a simple one-page form?

Slow, multi-page wizard, although a good looking one, is an overkill for a financial calculator IMO. I am on a broadband connection, I hate seeing "loading..." splash screens. What is being loaded? A form with 3 combo boxes? In fact the entire thing can easily be done on one page with JavaScript showing me results live - as I type. This way tweaking stuff is easier, more interactive and engaging.

2. Design/UI

Nicely done. Although, again, at expense of your own development time and usability

3. Usefulness

Well... I just turned 30 and retirement is kind of a depressing thing to think of... :-) There is definitely a demand for this, but I am not familiar with your market to compare you to the competition.
Well, duh.

You live by the sword, die by the sword.
Some thoughts on all this Bubble talk
Except the open source model doesn't support SaaS very well, so if all software becomes SaaS then open source becomes much less relevant.
Actually, Facebook has a very sophisticated infrustructure. Take a look at Thrift, http://developers.facebook.com/thrift/, the open-source project for cross-language development they released earlier this year. Even Google is trapped using about four programming languages (C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript). The latest version of Thrift has interfaces for 10 languages (Cocoa, C++, Erlang, Haskell, Java, OCaml, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby).
At this stage, making Facebook into a lasting, successful company (via acquisition or independent existence) is more about knowing how to run a company and make the right decisions than it is about social networks.
And if they cashed out right now, then they would remain happy. But, they're not cashing out, they're going further.

Knowing how to handle a media interview, and say the right things, is an acquired skill. Saying nothing is not a sign of a good/strong CEO.

His attitude reminds me of the attitudes of some exec's from mp3.com that I met with in 99 or 2000. All attitude and arrogance and no substance. The mp3.com guys thought that because they were on top of the world at that instant, they would remain there forever.
la dolce startup (how 1 founder inspired & integrated a non-techie onto his team)
Are you suggesting sending ads through power lines or are you suggesting that another ad could be fit into the cluttered mass that is X10.com?

As far as sending ads through power lines, thats a great idea too. Your toaster could tell you, via prompting by the power company, that Folgers is the best coffee to compliment your current toast selections.
Wikipedia: Human-Powered Search
E-gads, man, there's a startup idea straight from heck -- using power lines to transmit advertisements to all the electrical appliances in your home.

Use the toaster and have it sing an advertisement for pop-tarts. The refrigerator would remind you that Jenny Craig was having a sale this week. You electric toothbrush would remind you that your local dentist is having a sale on tooth-whitening, as well as reminding you to floss. Turn the light on in the bedroom and have the lightswitch tell you about Viagra. And you don't even want to know what the bidet is trying to sell.

I think I just lost all desire for smart appliances.
Its all about motivation. 20% of his students genuinely wanted to know how computers work. They were naturally curious. Curiosity is what drives an educational process. Good teachers try to get children curious, fascinated by something, and then very effectively explain how the phenomena works.

I hated physics in middle school, but in high school I got lucky and met the most amazing physics teacher the world had seen. That changed not only my grades, but my perspective on technology, world and life.
Only in the Alanis Morissette way
Unlocking the Social Inner Circle Code
[SF/NYC/Earth] Heysan! is hiring Javascript developer for iPhone app
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddtw7t2w_32gb7hvk

We have a pile of ideas for our iPhone IM app, but very limited time to spend on it at the moment. Therefore we are looking for someone with really good Javascript skills with emphasis on DOM and AJAX knowledge. Experience of building iPhone apps of any scale and JSON knowledge are big pluses, but not required.

Project type: Consultant for hire
Project start: ASAP
Project length, approx: Up to 4 weeks, depending on scope
Location: Heysan has offices in both San Fran and New York. On site development is preferred and may be required for at least a part of the project.

Please send your favorite work samples or questions to pelle@heysan.com
Feel free to forward this to anyone you think would be interested and or interesting!

I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Pelle
Developer/co-founder, Heysan!

iphone.heysan.com - Direct link to current iPhone app
m.heysan.com - For normal phones and iPhone detection
RadioLab: Great set of science podcasts to listen to while you are running.
You've missed my point.

I understand that [] is a method in Ruby. In fact, operator[] is also a method name in C++, and can be overloaded, overridden, etc. Ruby did not invent these features. Likewise, in C++, the type of an object and the method name invoked determine unambiguously the method that is called.

The difference -- and this is critical -- is that in the C++ community, there is a strong bias against syntactical games that make code behave inconsistently. Having operator[] behave differently for different subscripts would be a mortal sin in C++ design (not to mention that the type system would probably punish you for it).

We can debate the relative merits of strong/weak typing, but the principle of least surprise is a good one, and should be respected, regardless of what a language may allow you to do (cf. Perl).
So would you take out the whole typing thingy or would you just make it type faster? We had a big drop out rate on that page and from our interviews we came to the conclusion that people thought that was the end. We decided to put that animation there because it 'forces' people to read the text. We all know that nobody ever reads plain text instructions.
Thanks. Fixed the little age bug.
As a veteran Windows user this is what I will do. Old habits die hard. I want to see some evidence of clean upgrade process first. :-)

Seriously, as an engineer I doubt it will be easy: the success of this update procedure depends on reliable upgrade of every single component in the system: not just the kernel/drivers/gnome/etc, but things that I installed afterwards, including those that I compiled, including those that depend on kernel version. For instance I have no reason to believe that VMware will continue working. Similarly, I expect to see issues with video drivers.

And finally, my friend who's been running Gutsy beta got an unbootable laptop after a series of online updates. Linux is solid software. However, all software has bugs, especially if it's forcefully put on a 6-months release cycle.

There is a very good reason why you don't see new Debian releases very often.
Well, looks like they are redirecting searches to Baidu, which is a very funny way of doing nothing.
We are in Milwaukee, WI

We would be happy to meet anyone in a couple hundred mile range.
I think you should work slower and/or charge by the job rather than the clock. Capitalism is not about charging what things are worth (to you), it's about charging what the market will bear.
It's all Market Research. There isn't and won't be a bubble. 
Please. Can they stop talking about Bubble this Bubble that. If you do not have a chewing gum in your mouth, then there is no Bubble coming anytime soon. What is happening is simply a change in Market Research. Yes. That is all. I am not going to give another expose on how Technology cost is so low compared to 3, 5, 10 years ago. This single factor allows entrepreneurs to test out the market before investing the big bucks. How is this any different than the 50k to 100k they pay focus groups and consultants to find if a market is feasible or not. Now for merely that same amount of money we see companies being created to test the market. If it works then fine, if not then NEXT. This is all it is Trial periods. the only problem is that we don't hear about the consultant who pocketed 200k to google, copy and paste and tell the corporations to go or not to go. If we did, they would scream Bubble for consultant too. We see hungry and creative youngsters who do it for themselves. So please, let's keep that Bubble talk in the wrapper until we need fresh breath, from what i see there is no shortage of creativity and users. Sorry if I offended anyone.
We tried to move away from the regular excel looking calculator. Retirement planning is usually something very time consuming and boring that people keep pushing off. We wanted to make it a bit more engaging in order to keep people focused. As a result the drop out rate once the users get started is pretty low.