skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 hands-on
In episode 6 of our podcast we asked the question, "should netbook manufacturers standardise on a single distro?" Well, as netbook manufactuers continue to find ever more obscure distros to fit onto their systems, Canonical has stepped into the fray wielding a mighty cluestick: Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR).

When we interviewed Mark Shuttleworth a few weeks ago, he agreed that Ubuntu was late into the netbook arena. But the arrival of Jaunty Jackalope means that UNR has finally seen an official release, so there are lots of questions that need answering: how is it different from normal Ubuntu? How well does it work on average netbooks? And, most importantly, is it any good?

If you've already read our group test of netbook distros and want to know what Ubuntu can do to pull ahead ahead of the pack, you can read our full review of Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix below. Read on!

Lots of people loved it, just as many hated it, but few can doubt that Asus changed the computing world with the original Eee PC. Suddenly you can could get the functionality of A Real PC out of a laptop you could slip into your bag and still have room for lunch and a good book. Sure, it might have looked like something Toys 'R' Us would produce, but the Eee PC 701 has been followed by dozens of other devices that add more style, more power and more refinement.

But, despite having an early lead, Linux managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and Windows XP has managed to forge a home for itself on netbook devices. In fact, at the computer store nearest to TuxRadar HQ, nearly all the netbooks ship with Windows as standard, and most of them don't have a Linux option.

Part of the problem people were facing with Linux was that it simply wasn't Windows - they wanted their Start menu, they wanted My Computer and they wanted Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org, good as it is, just doesn't cut it if someone is looking for the ribbon toolbar from Office 2007. Another problem was that some of the netbooks were ridiculously oversold. The Eee PC 701, for example, was marketed as being a great laptop for photographers on the move, which is remarkable given that it came with nothing more than mtPaint.

But by far the biggest problem with Linux netbooks was that too much stuff just didn't work out of the box. People don't know what codecs are and they don't care. What they want is to be able to double-click on an MP3 and have it play. They want to watch kitten videos on YouTube. Someone called us once because they were having trouble installing Skype on their Acer Aspire One - they were double clicking a setup.exe file and, unsurprisingly, nothing was happening.

Thanks to its aggressive marketing, we all know that Ubuntu is "Linux for human beings", but can the Wizards of Polish really take the bruised and fragmented Linux market and make it work? Yes, they can.
"I do think the most important metric is how Y Combinator alumni feel about the terms afterward."

That's not a metric, that's an emotion.

How to you measure a "once in a lifetime experience" that did happen vs. one that didn't?
Disability Law & Benefits 
Workers' Compensation Defense Los Angeles. The Law Offices of Kenton Koszdin specialize in Workers' Compensation claims and all related California disability, subrogation defense in California and social security related claims.
Thought experiment: if YC invested $0, for the same stake, how much would it reduce their number of applicants? My guess is that the reduction would be minimal. A small number of people would decide that it wasn't worth it, lots of people would live off of savings, and most of the rest would borrow (or find very early seed investors to do a preferred round) rather than miss out.
Lateral stability; the board will slide until it reaches the edge and then it will fall off or flip over.

Unless you have some sort of lip to catch the suspended part, it's not going to be stable.

Or you could use a tension member to hold it in place, although that breaks the aesthetic slightly.
There's actually a way of calculating how good the YC terms are.

Basically what you want as an entrepreneur is to maximise your exit. The exit sum for a founder can be calculated as %ownership X salesprice. So if you add up all the founders that have exited, and see how much money they made on average, and then compensate for the companies that didn't make it you will come up with the average salesprice that a founder will get paid when his copmany is sold. Since YC has a track record by now you can simply do the calculation for YC and your seedfunding outfit of choice and see which gives a better payour for the average founder.

There are a lot of nuances of course, maybe there's an extraordinarily large exit, some incubators hold on to companies longer, you can only estimate companies that heve either been sold or gone bust, etc. but it will give a pretty good rough idea.
The article asks “Is it worth 3 months working by yourself to get 10x a better deal?”

It’s asking you to make a false choice. Which e-mail is a VC or Angel more likely to reply to:

a)	We worked three months on our own and built a prototype

b)	We were funded by YC for three months and built a prototype
Microsoft goes social
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Facebook might have a larger audience than the population of Brazil (200 million users vs. 191 million citizens), but the site doesn't yet have a viable business model. Twitter is wildly popular but it loses money. Could the codgers at software giant Microsoft (a Facebook investor) be the guys who end up figuring out how to make money on social networks?

The company on Wednesday will begin testing a new social-networking platform called Microsoft Vine, and chief strategist Craig Mundie tells Fortune the company is planning on pursuing a subscription-based model instead of trying to support the platform only with advertising. Vine's other twist: It plans to target public safety officials and concerned citizens seeking emergency information.

"All governments have this issue. Many of them struggle with safety as a problem," Mundie says. And he says he is optimistic that Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) can crack the code for making money off social networks. (More on that in a moment.)

Think of the platform as the updated version of a 9-1-1 call or the local public radio station. Consumer users of the service can create profiles and make groups "my family" or "my softball team," to whom they can send messages. Activity will be limited to two actions: alerts and reports.

A tree down in your neighborhood? You could post a report about that. Practice canceled because of the rain? Send an alert to your teammates. And in more serious situations, a flood, say, the site will provide information on how to handle the emergency. Vine will also offer updates from sources such as the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

So far public officials have been reluctant to use social media as a formal way to interact with citizens. Barbara Graff, director of the office of emergency management for the city of Seattle, is willing to test the service with Microsoft, in part because she's eager to get more data and insights into how the city can use these new communications tools.

Microsoft says it would make basic service available free, but would charge for premium services, such as access to the platform via smart phone. The world soon will know if consumers are willing to pay for social networking, or if the subscription model is destined to die on the vine. To top of page
Exploding star is oldest object seen in universe
Edo Berger got an alert early last Thursday morning when a satellite detected a 10-second blast of energy known as a gamma ray burst coming from outer space.

Telescopes around the world swiveled to focus on the explosion, soon picking up infrared radiation, which is produced after gamma rays in this kind of event. Berger was ready to view the visible light, which should have followed.

It never arrived.

"We were kind of blown away. We immediately knew what that meant," Berger said.

What it meant was that he was looking at the oldest thing ever spotted -- an enormous star exploding 13 billion years ago.

"At that point the age of the universe was only 600 million years," he said. In other words, Berger said, he was looking "95 percent of the way back to the beginning of time."

The star which exploded was 30 to 100 times larger than our own sun, and when it died, it gave off "about million times the amount of energy the sun will release in its entire lifetime," Berger told CNN by phone from Harvard University, where he is an assistant professor of astronomy.

Full Story: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/29/gamma.ray.burst.space/index.html?eref=rss_tech
I've heard this old "it's easier to break things than to build them" chestnut a thousand times, but never once from a serious practitioner.

That's because it isn't easier to break things than to build them. Most crypto attacks require more cleverness and more sophisticated math than the original algorithm required, a point that is all but spelled out for you in the crypto books when they say "don't even bother trying to build your own cipher until you've broken several others first".

Or take software. Does anyone actually believe that it was harder to write code for the ActionScript interpreter than it was to get Dowd's exploit (http://bit.ly/13OjyR) working? Lots of people have written interpreters (even fast threaded stack interpreters). Nobody has written an exploit this sophisticated. And this is just an exploit! It isn't even a clever vulnerability!

This is Ira Winkler's big thing. Ira has, as far as I can tell, no discernable technical skills. He's never published any research. He's never published any code. He's written and contributed to several third- and fourth-tier books, and he pundits for the trade press. From what I've seen in my career, people that fit this mold generally fall into one of two buckets:

* People who try to make up for their lack of technical ability by worshiping researchers (like Dowd) and developers (like Fyodor).

* People who try to make their lack of technical ability seem irrelevant by tearing down other people.

Winkler has always been firmly in the latter bucket. If you want to talk about "things that set the computer security industry back three years", let's start with articles that conflate actual criminals (like the "Twitter hacker") with people who have chosen breaking systems as a research topic.
Next time you say this, say "Black Hat" instead of Defcon. They're sister conferences, but Black Hat is where most of the actual research gets published.
Server Fault Private Beta begins
I don't know about the safes, but obviously banks do routinely hire companies like ours to help make their software more secure (by beating the hell out of it).
you guys didn't play the original Sim City did you. I used to leave my Mac Plus on all night to grow the population, I could run the game on a single 800k floppy, wow. Amazing how quickly the senior members of YC will vote someone down. Guess it's your way of keeping YC an elite site, and it boosts your morale knowing you're all better than us small-time users. Yawn, how boring is that?
I reaaaallly hope they are kidding.
Startups Cashing In On Swine Flu
Curiously, this comment is so old it predates Emacs by almost a decade.
Handcoded XPath-like scriptlet interpreter for JDI and it's UI as eclipse plugin. Now giving finishing touches.

Code: http://github.com/niravthaker/evars/tree/master
Short Intro: http://evars.googlecode.com/files/evars.swf
Corporate America sucks
This is just a repost of the TechCrunch story.
What's wrong with running your browser fully maximized? I, personally, cannot stand having a half-screen browser open. Feels like I'm wasting space.
My Synchronous Javascript Solution
"The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year."

Is "the middle of May" the result of a computation? If so, then a more precise model may take until "the middle of June".
People may not have noticed it out of a desire to avoid the cesspool that is TechCrunch.
The impedance mismatch between Scheme and the JVM is a lot less than what the writer thinks. Here's the comment I just added to the post:

You don’t need primitive-static-method in Kawa as of several years ago. It’s just there for backward compatibility. Newer syntax for calling Java methods is much easier:

http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/Method-operations.html
An interesting idea. Just some comments:

The explanation of how it works is pretty confusing. For instance you say "As an example, if a consumer spends half of his time reading the wikipedia, the wikipedia would get a $4.50 credit at the end of the month." Does that mean that the service costs $9 a month or $10 because you've removed 10% for the free pool? If so why do I have to figure this out from that bit of text? If this is just an example amount then a better explanation like "Say a user pays $10 a month, and they spend half their time reading wikipedia, then at the end of the month wikipedia is paid $4.50 from that user."

I would remove the formula on the "how" page. That seems like something you might need to change later. Perhaps say that producers get a share of the revenue provided by users' subscription fees that is proportional to the amount of time each user spends on the producer's website.

It seems to me that you should separate the explanations for producers and consumers. Consumers probably don't care about how the producers get paid, they just care about what content is available and how much it will cost them a month to access it (yes I realise you're still in the finding the content phase and this may well be your plan, but the site currently has text clearly directed at consumers). Producers on the other hand will want to know in detail how much they can expect to make a month from this service. Also the front page is giving me mixed messages. On the one hand "Support the sites you depend on, without lifting a finger.", on the other "Start monetizing your web traffic today. Login". Sounds like you're talking to two different people there. Should I not login if I just want to access content?

The iframes in the examples are pretty horrible, but that's just my opinion. I would prefer a link to an example.
The proof of this pudding is in the eating. We'll all be testing it out with questions and seeing if we are satisfied with the results.
Fair point, but if I type "n" I could well end up with news.bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com or any number of other sites I've been looking at. There aren't many sites with the "yc" combination of letters.
I may just have to try it huh? Where can I buy a whole lot of cheap magnets?
The problem is that someone edited the title of my post. It was "seasonal flu kills 36,000-odd Americans every year".
Except that the TechCrunch story got killed by the editors and so this one is likely to get killed too. Just because it's rebadged as Washington Post doesn't make the content any better.
Collection: Design Patterns
Ventrilo tracker: http://www.ventstatus.com

Another Ventrilo tracker, but this one allows people to search for usernames, games played, etc. Also can generate a timeline of past users online.

Examples

Status:
http://ventstatus.com/servers/status/bladeradio.clanvent.com...

Timeline:
http://ventstatus.com/servers/timeline/bladeradio.clanvent.c...

What I've learned for this project so far

- CodeIgniter

- Database optimization

- PHP CGI

- Character encoding
You get voted down for not adding value deemed relevant.
I used to live in Markham too - Pacific Mall rocks. Is the hacker job market better than it was in 02?
Maybe once tiled window managers (something like dwm, xmonad, awesome, wmii) become less obscure?
I ended up choosing the University of Michigan.
We ran into some issues yesterday but they have been fixed. Try it again and you will get better results. Also this is just a preview demo. A new and better interface is coming soon. You can follow us on twitter (http://twitter.com/collectadotcom) for more announcements.
> How are they computing "brand value" ?

I found page 6 of this pdf: http://www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/Optimor/Media/Pdfs/en/Bra...

The summary is that it's the NPV of the brand's future earnings, multiplied by the fraction of that revenue due to the "brand" itself and not location/price/etc (this is estimated by market research experts), multiplied by an estimate of future growth (more market research hand-waving).
Not really. He recognizes that YC might be worth some premium over another investor. He just questions the size of the premium.
Well, if they want to kill it, then they can.
I really enjoyed these screenshots, and learned more about Twitter in 5 minutes than by reading 10 Techcrunch posts about Twitter combined.

It could make an interesting site even, backendwatch.com (or something else more palatable)
It's not yet fine tuned for that kind of speed. The real site will have these issues addressed.
"The main failure of PlayCafe was marketing."

Sort of buried at #5, so felt it worth repeating (and conversation here).
To be fair, noone knows if your advice is good or bad(essays notwithstanding). Can you give an example of some specific advice you gave to one of the YC startups recently?
This is still going on?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490216
I wonder if someone is going to get in trouble for leaking these...
An Introduction to Corewar
An Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation
I like to run all apps maximized. That way, I can focus on the task at hand and not be distracted by stuff going on in other apps. Also, less clutter = more productivity.
Also, the type of advice you're able to find online hasn't always been there. When did you start YC? 3 years ago? 4?

It seems like startup-advice blog-type sites have only sprung up since then.
Most admin panels look like that, there is no point wasting valuable time building something "pretty" that noone will ever see.
Very cool stuff, and it sounds like they nailed their original goal, which was to provide a more accurate replacement for the Boehm collector for their PLT Scheme code. But in case anyone is excited about this being a general-use solution, the first sentence hints that it won't work with most C code:

Magpie is a source-to-source transformation for C programs that enables precise garbage collection, where precise means that integers are not confused with pointers

Later, to crush your hopes completely:

Precise GC requires that a C program obeys many restrictions - the same ones that apply to using conservative GC, and more - or the program can crash. For example, to use precise GC, a C program must never extract a pointer from a variable typed as long, at least not if a collection may have occurred since the value was stored in the variable.

Yeah, definitely not going to work with any large program that has been touched by an average C programmer.

These extra constraints are, however, satisfied by normal C programming practices.

-snort-
‘Cause if it’s ever been done, anywhere, by anyone, someone’s done it in Java. Twice.

If only. If I could get something like Python's Numpy on the JVM, I'd be using Clojure on my current project(s).
Possible but I'd be surprised if Ashton Kutcher's publicist was using an aol.com email address.
Earnshaw’s theorem applies to electrostatic fields (ie, from non-moving charges) as well as magnetic fields. I think electrostatics are a bit easier to visualize than magnetostatics.

There’s also a good analogous physical situation. Imagine you have a rubber sheet stretched into a plane. The challenge is to create a local minimum in the sheet by pushing it up in places. If you push it up with a tube to try to create a bowl, instead you’ll get a flat circle on top of the tube.

My freshman year physics professor had us play with a program that simulated kinetic physics for point charges. You could “glue” charges to a plane, and then release other charges to see how they would respond. The end of the assignment said “Try to create a cage that can hold a charged particle. If you do, you might be eligible for a prize.”
Flickr Co-Founder Butterfield and Chief Architect Henderson Working on Stealth Start-Up
Thanks for that feedback! Much appreciated. I definitely agree that a segmentation between consumer and producer would be cleaner. It'll be in the next revision.
IPhone Sweeps JD Power Consumer Smartphone Ratings — Except In Battery Life
On the technical side, there's no reason that FireFox should lose out to Chrome, but I think the argument that he is making is that Chrome has a better design, and user experience - an idea he sums into FF not feeling right.

If Chrome add-ons in the future cover the needs for most people, and both are rendering things well, then it may just come down to a design choice for most people.

Personally, I don't care much for google on my personal computer and hope that it doesn't come to be the case. One of the biggest holes in my current set up, is that all of my e-mail goes to Google. I don't trust Google so I consider this a security threat.
A movie costs millions of dollars to make. Good luck finding enough public-minded cinephiles to pay for them.
Yeah ... comp.lang.lisp ... that group has turned into a huge flame fest where actual discussions about the language are rare. Very sad.

The group is dominated by a small group of agressive and rude hardcore lisp programmers who turn most (innocent) questions and discussions from newbies into language flamewars and personal insults.

It is very unfortunate. When I was playing with common lisp about a year go I got more info from the group's archives from the late 80 and early 90s than from those folks who are there now.
I think the point of the essays and this community is to give startups an idea of the sort of advice they'll be getting [1]. Any "specific" advice would either be too close to the issues to have any meaning outside the company. As far as I can tell, PG has no qualms about "trade secrets"--if he thinks the advice would benefit everyone starting up a company, he will probably write an essay about it.

If those ideas and themes resonate with you, you have an idea of what benefits you'll reap from the support of the YC staff.

[1] Work hard to create wealth. ( http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html )
This is the "Seinfeld" method, isn't it?

Nice idea for an application- I've got far too much work on my plate to install and run it at the moment, but the screenshots look very nice.

I'd certainly be interested in seeing your revenue numbers next month, but a word of advice- Telling people that you're only submitting it to them as part of a "promotion trick" makes them less inclined to want to take a look.

LifeHacker might be a good place to talk to, they often run programs like this as part of a round-up review.

Here's what I'd suggest, first, check to see if they've already done this- If so, find another plan. If not, you're gold.

1) Find a bunch of other GTD/planning apps for the iphone. Choose the most popular. Ideally, you should already have this list from your internal comparisons.

2) Write up one or two sentences about each.

3) Write to LifeHacker and say - I thought it might be useful to have a comparison of iPhone productivy apps. Here are the X most popular on Google, plus my own, using the Seinfeld method, which I think you might enjoy.

Submitting Screenshots of all 10 couldn't hurt.

With any luck, you'll have made their life easier, and they'll revise what you sent into an article.
The first thing I see is the 3.6% difference in equity taken.

If I can bring in 3 great advisors and give them 1% equity each then I am ahead in terms of cash investment and advice.