skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I loved Coupland in college and thought he was so damn smart.

Then a few years later I saw him at a reading of JPod, and instantly changed my mind.
Thanks, but I wasn't wondering if YC leadership would sign an NDA. I was wondering if all the founders had to sign an NDA for the dinner conversations, since they were "off the record".

I'm sure I'm being too nosy. It really isn't any of my business. I was just curious.
jPod wasn't meant to be Microserfs 2.0. It's a parody -- of the first book, of pop culture, of the tech industry, and of Douglas Coupland. The characters are supposed to be cartoonish and one-dimensional. I mean, come on...the middle-aged, drug-dealer housewife and mother? The abducted, heroin-addicted Schlumberg boss? The lesbian-hippie-turned-bimbo? How can you possibly take the book seriously, with such silly characters?

Anyway, if you follow Coupland's progression as a writer, jPod makes perfect sense (c.f. Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, which were surreal in similar ways).

I wasn't very into jPod, either, but not because it wasn't like Microserfs. It just wasn't his best work. For my money, Hey Nostradamus (his last book, I think) was his best recent work. Weird, but still incredibly touching and humane.
an unmaintained PHP library with a significant design flaw? no way!
It's amazing how easy Intruders.tv makes it to stop watching their videos. One erring click outside that god damned lightbox and the entire viewing experience grinds to a halt. Sheesh.

See also http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/592-been-lightboxed-latel... .
If you need a web designer, I would start with any designer you might have a personal connection with (even if it's a friend of a friend). Those are usually the situations that work out best in my experience. Otherwise, try putting up a Craigslist post for a designer in your area or Google for a designer in your area.

As for cost, it really depends on what the state of your current app is (i.e. what does it look like now, how complex is it, how unique do you want the design, and how compliant do you want the site (flash/no flash,png's with transparency or just jpegs...)). Personally, I'd try to steer clear of anyone who quotes you a price without really examining the site first.

However, so as not to just brush off the price question, I'd charge anywhere from a couple hundred for a crazy easy redesign to a thousand for a more conceptual and custom design.

Deliverables: You'd want to get the CSS file obviously, any additional IE style hacks that may be contained outside the main CSS file, and all associated images. And the flash stuff if there are any embedded flash files (I'm assuming that for a webapp, you're not referring to a full flash site, because that would be ludicrous and highly unusable).

Legal: Make sure that you have a fully "Contractor" arrangement in place and that there are no ambiguities that could cause the person to be confused for an employee, because the IRS doesn't like that much. Also, try to get full ownership of the artwork if possible, so that you can reuse images on print stuff later if you want to. I always give my designs to the client to do with as they please, but it's not unheard of for them to retain ownership. Either way, it should be outlined in the design contract.

Wow, that was long, but hopefully it answered your questions.
Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?
I believe they have to as a good show of faith or else risk hypocrisy for not touching their own dog food.
On the topic of deliverables--if you're adept at HTML and CSS, you can probably save money by asking the designer to just send you the Photoshop (.psd) or Illustrator (.ai) file, and maybe image slices if they can do it quickly. I've done it this way quite a bit and it's worked well.
Super Digg: Gaining 300k Hits from Google in 24 Hours with January 1 TCP/IP
How much is Mozilla worth? And when will it go public?
IE8 to be standards compliant: Good for devs and users
This wasn't always true...the first xkcd comics were more the random thoughts of someone with too much time on his hands. This is true for the latest ones though. They're just all the...same.
Heh. I saw this on Reddit today and thought, "for all its faults, at least news.yc would never have that on the front page".
This is funny, but it really only applies to a single xkcd comic. And it's way more mean than it has to be. xkcd is hardly shit.
Most competent web designers should be able to provide any level of deliverables. If all you need is Photoshop because you can handle the HTML/CSS in house, ask for that. Should save you some money.

On the other hand my experience is that if they can't provide you with the HTML/CSS, skip them. It takes some understanding of markup in order to design a good web site. I've worked with too many designers that do mainly print work who decide to try out their skills on the web. Usually leads to a poor result.
That big 3rd paragraph seems to be the center of bogosity. "Her comparison helps to delineate differences between the two groups and provides a useful format for discussions." Translated that means - this is some bogus education theory that has no scientific basis behind it, and if you take action based on it, then whatever mess you create is your own fault.

I had to take a survey course on education research during my postgrad days - the first thing the prof said was that basically education is a research ghetto where every half-baked methodology, and every bit of post-modern drivel can find a home.
How to Write a Good Press Release
Despite the "written with crayons" writing style, there's some good insight here.
Debugging Comments: Robin Hanson on the problems with comment systems
My view is: if it's something I'm allowed to do manually, then I should be allowed to use a tool to help me do it faster.

I don't agree with FB blocking Scoble, nor do I agree that Gmail should block FB.
> John Baez is no longer enthusiastic about working on quantum gravity.

On first glance I thought, "Joan Baez? When did she start doing advanced physics?"
Wouldn't this be better built as a Facebook app? Just because users already have profiles there and won't need to signup for a new service. Just a thought.
why don't you just avoid writing one.
What's Your Consumption Factor?
Technically speaking, the TOS allows Google to kick any user who gets their stuff from Facebook This would be bad for Facebook, but it would be bad for Google and Yahoo, too: they would anger their users by frustrating a reasonable use of their service. Those users might just take their email and leave.

Is the same true for Facebook? If you get kicked from Facebook, where else will you go? You might say "I'll just take my friends and start my own Facebook!", but you won't be able to unless you somehow got around their monitoring. (Not a difficult problem in principal, but tough for the non-savvy.)

Would a service that exports Facebook contacts be illegal? What about a piece of software that does so?
no, you have a contract with citibank and there are laws in place that govern what they can do.

technically, he is probably more than correct about the "private property". In some "terms and service" listing I'm sure they state that using the service means they can do X, Y, Z with your data. You agree to it implicitly.

But talk of rights on private property and abusive terms is ridiculous for a service based company. The whole point is to make something users wants. Users don't want enemas or prison.
Google Jet Launches For Meteor Viewing Mission
Permit me to ramble for a bit.

There is no idea so great that a one-sentence description, made by a stranger, will cause me to send an email asking for more. There are too many scammers, cranks, and clueless people in the world. There are too many people who have no idea how hard it is to complete a successful project. There are too many people who are looking for something for nothing.

Of course, you folks are strangers, and yet you got me to give you some design advice -- twice! But you did quite a bit of work for this "free" advice -- you had to build an entire prototype site and post a link to it. That is the kind of presentation -- a working, criticizable prototype -- that might get people interested in joining a random project. It's a lot more than one sentence.

Read this essay:

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2005/05/08/finding_discord_in_h...

and this more recent one, that cites it:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001017.html

Other than providing working code -- or extensive mockups, or a detailed written proposal, or a compelling story -- the easiest way to get me interested in a collaboration is to get me interested in you. I don't care if you plan to cure cancer -- I want to know who you are, first. That takes time, and it takes words.

So, if people are going to meet and start collaborations on your site, you need to give them lots of room to converse, to get to know each other. You need to give them long comment threads and rambling discussions. (Like, um, news.yc. Score one for PG's design sense.) If you don't feel like building an entire social network (and you probably shouldn't) you need to encourage people to introduce themselves with links to Facebook, or LinkedIn, or their own blogs, or something. And you need to encourage them to put as much flesh on the bones of their proposals as they can -- because nothing attracts builders like something that's already half built.

As it stands, my fear is that your site just doesn't have enough words. Whitespace looks clean and professional, but it doesn't tell me what the site is for, and it doesn't tell me what the individual projects are about.

EDIT: changed the link to the first essay to the one that I really wanted to cite. :)
[From: Pirates of the Caribbean - The Curse of the Black Pearl]

"You're either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid."

Jack Sparrow: "It's remarkable how often those two traits coincide."
Somehow those volcanoes just arrived in this conversation out of the blue. I figured they were just an example, but I was slightly worried that your knowledge of California might be derived entirely from Hollywood. ;)

The good thing about volcanoes is that you do get a certain amount of warning, these days, before the big one comes. Earthquakes continue to defeat the geologists, though.
Uhm, I don't get it Adam - why not just load up the radio function on iTunes and get all the songs you want all day?

Is the iPod "radio function" like FM radio or similar? (I honestly don't know) Does Napster let you choose what songs you want?

If so, there's your answer.
I said the same thing in a job interview once, and I believe that I got the job because of it. The key is to be able to say it with absolute conviction; you cannot fake it.
Reflections of an Interface Designer
never never never
People. It is for nearly all tech companies.
i asked 'Where to find designers" this was the response, hope it helps

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=91204
10 tech trends that will shape 2008
Did you offer to buy them out and they turned you down? I hate when that happens!
Meraki, the cheap Wi-Fi guys, get $20 million
Django on Jython: Minding the Gap
Err, a string?
I don't think so. He mentioned in his first post he was going to follow up with a part II where he will thank a few people.
There might be something there, good observation. Notice his latest post talks about how his site survived the slashdotting, redditing, etc...and his promise of more info about his deployment environment in a future post. Pretty soon, he's going to be the deployment guru for Ruby (and probably Rails) projects.
Thanks for the response. Are there any sample "Contractor" legal documents that one can download from scribd , docstoc or anywhere else?
Here's some info on slurp:

http://www.scribd.com/upload/slurp_explanation
We do :)

This would be a great feature, guys! Unfortunately the conversion process takes a bit of time, and depending on the processing queue typically means that slurped documents aren't immediately available for viewing.

There is, however, a Firefox plug-in to make slurping your documents a bit easier. We don't support the plug-in since it wasn't developed by Scribd, but it can be found here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5103
This is unrelated, but why does your comment have a lighter font (#323232) than the others?
"you wouldn't ask your bank for all your transaction history - I can give that they may not feel that they are obliged to return it."

huh?
Here in India you can ask any bank for your transaction history and they'll give it to you. You might have to go to the local branch and show id and wait while they print out the transaction history, but you'll get it for sure.
I remember reading that it doesn't even has to be an excuse that gives any more information. You can use, "Excuse me, may I cut in front of you, because I need to make copies" and people will tend to let you cut.
They've used Flash all over the place for product presentations and adds.
where is mit?
My opinion: I'm a live by the sword, die by the sword kind of guy. I don't really find anything wrong with an option to mine other sources for data, and I'm sure I could find some way to justify (to myself) locking out mining from a site of my own, but there's no way I'd do both.

I'm not even sure it makes business sense (most unethical practices don't in the long run). While a massive shift away from Facebook could happen (ala Friendster), Facebook would do far better trying to raise their value to users and solidify their status as a platform to prevent that from happening.
Actually, I don't think there's any upper limit to how much more relevent you can make text search. You could have an AI that directly answers your questions based on the knowledge it's gained from processing the entire net, with references supplied.

More easily implementable, you could have something that cross references a knowledge base such as Wikipedia (or just analyse the content of articles themselves) to split results into relevent categories, eg, Paris the city and Paris Hilton. Or, more tricky, one that I faced today - Flash Reflection, which could mean either a graphical effect or runtime type information.

What about reddit style voting? Google tried this, but I'm sure that ranking results by some measure of searcher satisfaction would be a great way to cut out duplicate/spammy content. Pagerank isn't.

I'm sorry, but calling it "good enough" is more of an indicator of lack of imagination than the merits of Google search.
Ow. That was painful.

Ignoring the topic at hand, D'Souza just yelled zingers about free will and the Big Bang and communist dictators. These are areas where science is just ignorant (which says
nothing about whether theism has the answer) or tragedies where atheism did play a part (although that is irrelevant to the topic).

Foolishly, Dennett followed him to that territory. He should have pointed out that D'Souza left the main topic of the day unchallenged, that religion was a man-made creation.
Chatting with Peter Cooper
Interview with the "Beginning Ruby" author and creator of the "Ruby Inside" website, the British Railer Peter Cooper.
One difference might be: FB snarfing data from Google involves a few hits on the Google site. Spidering a site rapidly involves a lot more traffic. Not that FB can't handle it, but it's a little different.
Good talk, though I've heard/read most of the points already. Perhaps the vocal and receptive audience made it more entertaining and grounded in reality or something.
Programming languages in future systems
Fair point, but its nice to see quality video displayed at high-res, and streaming quickly.
... results for text are good enough. How much better could text search get?

That's pretty much what Google's competition said, before Google came along and took their business.
Absolutely, the line between "manual" and "automated" actions is blurred. For example, is entering text using some voice recognition software automated or manual? They could as well demand in their TOS not to look over your shoulder when entering text in their form.

Many of those terms we agree to in the digital world are nonsensical.
It is my understanding that the hard part is when m/n ~1 (P/N~1 in wikipedia terms). Does your O(sqrt(2)^N) algorithm work well for 1000 numbers between 1 and 2^1000. Wikipedia says, "We give efficient algorithms for both small N and small P cases below," which would seem to imply the answer is no.

Regardless, the most interesting aspect of the article to me was the existence of a phase transition between easy and hard parts of this type of problem. I found the reference to Stephan Mertens work relating this computational problem to statistical physics, specifically spin glasses, the most interesting. See samples of his work at http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+stephan+mertens/0/1/0/a...

Incidentally, Angell has a new paper out on the glass transition. http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.4233
Anonymous, disposable telephone numbers that give you control over who can reach you and when.
Blogging agenda for 2008
I don't see the future playing out this way, mainly for the same reason that Google has standardized on only four languages: someone after you will probably have to understand it.

Most systems are refactored in the same language simply because the new person in charge wants to understand it on their terms. The same is true for languages. Don't hold your breath. Polyglot programming isn't happening anytime soon.
Ask YC: what will replace the music album?
If in the future there will be no more CDs or music albums, how will people listen to music? Will everything just be "random shuffle"? Will they select genres and shuffle through them? Will they create their own playlists by arduous work? Will playlists become valuable content?
The notion of artists releasing a collection of ordered tracks in a batch is pretty ingrained, I don't see that idea going anywhere soon. Or are you posing a hypothetical assuming otherwise?
interesting stuff - SMO, SEO is so interesting - would like to see more posts on this on YC.
It's true that the system was feature-laden. I think this was more true of the API's than the user interfaces, though, and so I'm not sure that the Steve Jobs reference is exactly appropriate. Steve Jobs is making consumer products; most customers don't care much about the API's.

It was also featureful because we didn't know which features were the ones that would turn out to be most useful; if there had been a second generation, we could have pruned out some of the stuff that never really got used. It was something of a "laboratory" that way.

Also, the kind of people who used Lisp machines, generally early adopter types, really did ask for amazing numbers of features. If you had been there, you would have experienced this. We wanted to make all our users happy by accommodating all their requests. It's probably similar to the reason that Microsoft Word has so many features. Everyone thinks there are too many and has a long list of the ones they'd get rid of; but everyone has a different list! I think Joel Spolsky wrote something very convincing about this topic once but I can't remember where.

Lucid on Suns was eventually as fast, if you turned off a lot of runtime checking and put in a lot of declarations. Later it was even fast if you didn't do that; the computational ecosystem changed a whole lot since the Lisp machine was originally designed. You have to remember how old it was. At the time it came out, it was very novel to even suggest that every AI researcher have his or her very own computer, rather than timesharing! That's early in the history of computers, by today's standards.

No, we didn't teach all of our customers personally, although we did have an education department that taught courses, and some of them learned that way. There were classes in Cambridge and in San Francisco. Allan Wechsler designed the curriculum, and he's one of the best educators I have ever met. (My own younger brother worked as a Symbolics teacher for a while.)

Common Lisp is complicated because (a) it had to be upward-compatible with very, very old stuff from Maclisp, and (b) it was inherently (by the very nature of what made it "Common") a design-by-committee. For example, consider how late in the lifetime of the language that object-oriented programming was introduced. (Sequences and I/O streams should obviously be objects, but it was too late for that. CLOS wasn't even in the original CLtL standard.)

In other words, I'm mainly not disagreeing with your points, just explaining how things got that way.
Are the Cool Kids Leaving Facebook?
My guess is new music services will emerge that will analyze your digital music collections, and create playlists for you. There are, of course, many of these around already but you'll see a flurry of activity soon. If the music labels were smart, they would be right in the middle of the action by offering a free service that would pay for itself by providing download services, Webcasts and advertising.
I've read news items that the album is already going away, for example the top sellers on itunes are individual songs, not albums.
The Cool Kids aren't leaving Facebook; the Cool Kids were never on Facebook.

Facebook, like Myspace before it, gained popularity for the same reason as sports cars are popular -- people used large lists of "friends" just like powerful car engines to compensate for their feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.

This isn't to say that social networking sites have no useful purpose: Just like sports cars provide the service of getting from point A to point B, social networking sites provide mechanisms for manycasting news. But this is a secondary function of far less importance than compensating for genitalia size.
I don't get it. Don't XKCD and YC share a target audience? Or do you mean you didn't think you'd see a parody displayed as news?
Music will be free for individual use. Musicians will make money from concerts and licensing. The album may persist as a form, but lengths will start to vary more.
What he said.

I don't think that the cool kids ever were on Facebook. They're all too busy on Hacker news.
I really hope albums don't go anywhere. For a lot of groups, an album of songs showcases their artistic perspective at a certain point in time. Usually, the overall tone of a band changes between albums.

I'll even go so far as to say that the music will be less enjoyable if it wasn't for albums. For example, compare U2's The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, both of which are fantastic examples of "tone" albums. If you would have taken half the songs from The Joshua Tree and put them on Achtung Baby, and vice-versa, both albums would have sounded like a mess. I don't think the individual songs would have had the same impact as they did when combined with other songs with similar tone.

And that's not even considering concept albums, which are always interesting. A world with no Dark Side of the Moon is not one I want to live in! :)
My wife bought me a new laptop battery.

In December my users got a new feature. Screencast here:

http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/morephotos.htm
Totally agree. From what I've been able to tell, there are five ways to make money with music: performance, licensing, merchandising, advertising paying directly for content.

Performance--people pay tickets for concerts.

Licensing--companies paying artists to play their music during TV/movies/commercials.

Merchandising--Artists selling concert t-shirts and posters for $60 a piece is the canonical example.

Advertising--Artists building their own "brand" and using their brand to shill other products. Beyonce comes to mind most recently. I've been seeing her all over the place selling everything.

Direct pay for content--The business model the RIAA is based on and that is dying.

Generally, music is now a digital download, and the artifice of the "Album as artform" is finally breaking apart. Truly some albums were art, but most were filler crap that was packaged around a high budjet single or two. People are barely willing to pay for a digital single much less entire albums.