skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using same here. Main UI criticism of S4b is the placement of the tabs on top of the window, which has overloaded their usage semantics. In any event, I switched to safari when Firefox 3 something kept crashing on me. Switched to safari and haven't looked back.
Microsoft takes aim at IBM in Web campaign
EBay’s two enormous data warehouses
Tough room.

For what it's worth, it's generally considered polite here to respond to things you disagree with in comments rather than downvoting them. Downvotes are reserved for things that detract from the discussion such as personal attacks and spam.

That said, it's surprising to find so much disagreement and denial to a common sentiment like this. I used to like Firefox a lot. Then it didn't substantially improve itself for 4 years. Then it added an inch of toolbars to the top of itself. And it started taking 10 seconds to load up (often announcing that it needed to close again so that it could update something.)

Then somebody else came out with a browser that pointed those things out, and it felt like a breath of fresh air. It just seems to me (and the author of this item) like Firefox has lost its way a bit.
Minneapolis SEO | Web Development
DKS Systems is an award winning web development and design firm that now offers SEO services to its clients.
I like it, almost as nice as GitX which I'm sure it will match it soon enough :).
5 cool javascript apps
"Let's establish some fundamentals. If I throw a glass against a wall and it breaks, does that mean I am qualified to make a glass or repair the broken one? If I drive a Ferrari into a wall and wreck the car, does that make me qualified to repair it?"

How about "If I read a newspaper, does that make me qualified to write about IT security?" Why yes, it looks like it does.
A music recommendation engine: http://theperceptron.com (code: will be open sourced soon).

A site for writing your autobiography in songs: http://playmary.com (code: http://github.com/maryrosecook/playmary/)
as any good writer will tell you, once you've written it down, there are another hundred revisions to go before it's actually ready

Not necessarily. Some writers write publishable first drafts, at least some of the time. Heinlein famously started out thinking that rewrites weren't worth his time (though he still did some on at least some stories).
Ask HN: Review my free iphone app which helps you to commit to your startup
Check it at: http://appshopper.com/productivity/dont-break-the-chain

I hope it helps some hackers to commit daily to their startup or goal!

After years of reading JoS forum and HN, I finally managed to build something that could possibly be monetizable. The idea and implementation is quite simple and now start the hardest part: promotion!

The good points are :

- Catchy name... (Don't Break The Chain!)

- KISS (Doing only one thing and not the kitchen sink)

- FREE (Can't beat free, isn't it?)

- Should have ads with high click ratio (Nothing to do when the day is checked except clicking ads. User should come back to the app daily)

I've submitted to lifehacker and use admob with the maximum ads exchange mode to gain some momentum. What other marketing trick should i do? Some video promotion maybe?

PS:Submitting to HN is part of my promotion tricks

PSS:I plan to release numbers in a month about install and ads revenue..
clickable url: http://appshopper.com/productivity/dont-break-the-chain
Wanted to try the aforementioned Blurst, but they seem to be lacking Linux support. :(
I guess so. I don't know if I would take time to subscribe to all the people that interest me on Facebook though, since I already have, you know, Twitter.

One thing I like about the Facebook feed is that I can narrow it down to just Links/Videos, which improves the quality of the content somewhat. What I would really want to do is narrow it down to actual profile updates - status updates. Important stuff such as contact info changes gets lost in the stream of "having coffee," "traffic is bad today" style status updates.
Stellar explosion reveals most distant known object in universe
Clojure: It’s About the Libraries
Because it reduces predictability at first. It used to be that I could predict what site would be at the top when I typed even a single letter, so I could triple-click, hit a letter, down-arrow, enter, and not have to actually parse what the dropdown list says. Safari (on my Mac, anyway) still has this property, except without the down-arrow, so it's even faster. With the "ultra-cool bar" or whatever it's called, I have to pay attention each and every time, which slows my browsing to the eight or ten sites I actually visit most, but which I don't bother to bookmark because I know exactly where they are.
Part of the deal with IBM & Motorola was large chip sales thanks to all the Mac Clones. When Steve killed them off, there was little more investment in Apple's CPUs.

But, Apple's been designing custom support chips forever, so this isn't completely out of line for them.
MVC: No Silver Bullet (No Easy Route to Web Development)
Free Software vs. Microsoft in the Cloud of Web Servers
Berk Ülsoy compares usage numbers of Apache,IIS,nginx usage numbers per country and world. With data by Netcraft and Alexa.
The thing is, social concerns about impropriety aside.. for securing your stuff, a good 'hacker' is exactly what you need.

Because the really good ones are the people with the ability to think in the non-obvious ways. From what I have seen, there are legions of "computer security experts" who seem to just have a degree in some kind of computer field.

These people are quite adept at telling you ways to fix the person trying to break down your door. But to find the guy secretly tunneling through your foundations?

For that, you need a 'hacker'.
YC Terms are Poor
Back in 2005, the ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) and Erasmus program already worked perfectly - I have spent one year away in Spain without any problems (except too much partying which bombed my grades). And many of my colleagues did the same.
i wouldn't call it torture until over 50% of the people it's used on freak out and actually ram their faces into the wall to escape.

man up, USA. on the scale of bad things that can be done to you, living in a box is far down on the list
Well, I'm not really sure the effect of the Bologna process in Portugal, because I finished my degree still in the "old" model. But I do know that it is a source of confusion.

In the old model there were four degrees: Bachelor (3 years), Licenciado (5 years), Master (6+ years) and Doctorate. Now we have Licenciado (3 years), Master (5 years) and Doctorate (6+ years). This means "Licenciados" and "Masters" from the old model must disambiguate by adding "(n years)" as not to be confused with the new (shorter) versions. Madness.
Chrome sometimes decides that I have too many tabs open and none of them should render. Just as annoying. :(
Nokia 7100 BLACK Supernova Unlocked
The Nokia 7100 Supernova is a phone geared for style and entertainment. This sleek handset delivers great features in a design that is easy to use. The slide mechanic works without a problem and offers seamless access to the keypad. This is particularly handy when the need to call of type out a text message quickly is necessary.
The irony is that there's a nice little conference that happens every year just for this purpose. They call it Defcon. ;) People need to get over the monikers, labels and just realize what we really are. Hackers are exactly what you need to take in the whole picture of security. We're multi-talented, able to take on problems from multiple angles, and get around the norm and best of all we're passionate about it.
Don't banks routinely hire safe crackers to help them make the safe more secure?
sucks for this guy: http://socghop.appspot.com/student_project/show/google/gsoc2...
You're right that content creators should have intrinsic motivation to create... but that's not what the GP suggested. He's suggesting that content creators should not be anti-motivated to create (via problems like piracy, for one example).
Rate my Startup: inamoon.com
In-a-Moon enables micropayments from consumers to producers based on the amount of time spent on their content over the course of a month. Can this help newspapers by providing them a new revenue model? Website at http://www.inamoon.com and Slides at http://www.slideshare.net/mankins/inamoon-overview
Do you have a new live score api
How PostgreSQL Processes a Query
How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds
Why can't they just say: "Hack into the Government's System and Tell us about the exploit. We'll give you $200". Its much simpler then hiring a bunch of people, and it will give them more people testing the system.
Now, if HAProxy could just handle HTTPS. Sigh.
"""I'm not going to lie—not even a little bit, in 2003, Emacs was slow."""

Really? In 2003 most of us were working on G4 Macs, Pentium IVs at 3Ghz or even Xeons. Emacs worked fine and very fast on all those machines.

Personally I have been using Emacs since around 1997 and even then it was not slow. Not on intel machines that were slow by today's standard and it was certainly not slow on the Sun Sparcs that I used to work with and develop on.

I think the author is confused and really meant to say: emacs had a reputation of being slow. Considering emacs originated in 1976 this is not surprising.
Top articles for web dev and design
Facebook Rumored To Be Looking For Funding At $5-6 Billion Valuation
For the last 6 months or so I've been working on a 'wikipedia for images' type site. I'm trying to fix all the UI deficiencies that bug me about other image sites. As a personal project with no deadline I've had a lot of fun premature-optimising the crap out of it! For example the thumbnails are in strips of 50 for a huge reduction in http requests. Here's the test set I've been using-

http://imagecorpus.com/marylin-monroe

My plan is to initially scrape a lot of hard-to-browse public domain image sets, for example the Library of Congress daguerreotype collection http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/daghome.html. And then I'll solicit contributions from the public to bulk it out.

I was going to wait till I was ready to launch before posting here, but that could be a while... Any criticism/suggestions or offers to help are very welcome!
The article operates under the assumption that all dollars are equal. The effect of being invested in by YC versus, say, my grandmother, are not the same. There are alot of other intangibles in play that are almost impossible to quantify. But that doesn't mean they can be safely ignored.

It reminds me of the assumption of statistical independence in various machine learning problems where the variables are most certainly not independent... its just that including it makes the problem completely intractable, so even though everyone knows its wrong, they have no choice but to assume it.
Actors are cheap, you know. People with name recognition are expensive, but the actual acting is pretty cheap. Sets and animators can be replaced by software. Think stock sets, stock backgrounds, 3d programs that allow you create sets based of standard objects.

Reality show is the direction the industry is going in. People prefer reality! Seeing real stuff or stuff that appears real is way more entertaining than acted stuff.
I had one created by a programmer on ScriptLance.com, only spent about $300 - but it was a very simple app.
"The effect of being invested in by YC versus, say, my grandmother, are not the same."

That's a strawman argument. The OP isn't comparing YC to grandma, he's comparing it to an angel investment.
Are you making the smart money vs dumb money argument? Mark does address that:

YC argues their advice and connections are worth this premium. I respectfully disagree. Advice and connections for even idea-stage entrepreneurs are easy to find with a little initiative, and if you don’t have that, you’ll fail as an entrepreneur. YC’s connections, Demo Day, and brand are indeed value-added, but it’s hard to argue they’re worth ten times an angel and free advice and connections.

Anyway, I think the real value YC brings is they give you an excuse to focus on your startup full-time like mad maniacs for 3 months. Try doing that outside of YC and people will just ridicule you. Being in YC also provides motivation during those post-idea-pre-prototype stages which are super hard.
It's nice to be up-modded (thank you!), but contributions would be even better!
Machines Evolving to the Brink of Failure
What the author misses is that it doesn't really matter what your seed valuation is because the equity of the seed investors gets super diluted by future rounds anyway. Once you've raised a series C the difference in equity for the founders is probably .2%.
The YC companies aren't being offered the 2M angel valuation, so it seems silly to compare them directly like this.

There's nothing barring YC companies from taking more investment after the 3 months in which they go from an idea to a launched product. In fact, being in YC makes a company much more attractive to future investors.

I'd say that the difference between an idea on paper and a complete product or prototype is probably 10x, so in that sense these numbers really seem reasonable.
...that it's now in the oldest generational set and will probably never be collected. :)
Unfortunately, no code to show off but... I'm working on a site for my wife where she and her friends can post photos of themselves trying on the same outfit. I've been wanting to learn Ruby on Rails so I've been playing around with it the past couple weeks. Domain is bought, code sort of works but needs a lot of love (and javascript, ruby magic, a design) before it'll be ready to launch. Hopefully I'll get motivated and get something out there shortly.

To be honest, I've been more interested in Rails and Capistrano/Deprec than the project itself. Bought a 256mb slice at SliceHost and have been reloading the thing every week playing with configurations.
Definitive List of CSS Frameworks – Pick Your Style
I don't know. What I do know is that they'd probably get really great safe crackers if they paid on contingency::

"We're putting a million dollars in the safe. We'll sell 24 hours alone with this safe to the highest bidder."

Also, this could be turned into the plot of a third-rate thriller, if the pricing model thing doesn't work out.
I just can't get used to using GUI SCM clients on OSX. I tried to use ZigVersion for svn but just couldn't integrate it into my workflow -- I'm too used to using the command line for svn, git and hg.

It does look nice though.
Here were my thoughts:

"my real suggestion is that Y Combinator should invest more"

He's missing the whole point right here.

Y-Combinator is like Twitter. Venture capitalists are like bloggers.

With Y-Combinator, like twitter, people just didn't understand how so much value could come out of so little. At first, typing to someone in 140 characters is hopeless. Then you try it, and you realize how much can come out of so little--you become resourceful and cut out the fat you don't need.

Hate to liken them to twitter, but hey, everyone's doing it... (best reasoning ever)
Heh. Obviously it corrects typos but it doesn't have ESP yet. Those guys need to work harder!
Iron-arsenic superconductors in class of their own
No, his argument is that as an entrepreneur you could get more cash for less equity by going to an angel. If you don't dispute that fact then the argument comes down to how much you value the YC network vs. an angel's network.
The expression "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark.
The Google brain drain
Can the Tesla Model S be profitable at $57,400? Not according to these calculations
French police switch from Windows to Linux, cut IT costs 70%
SYC argues their advice and connections are worth this premium. I respectfully disagree. Advice and connections for even idea-stage entrepreneurs are easy to find with a little initiative, and if you don’t have that, you’ll fail as an entrepreneur. YC’s connections, Demo Day, and brand are indeed value-added, but it’s hard to argue they’re worth ten times an angel and free advice and connectionss

I strongly disagree with this statement. As someone who was in the Valley at age 19 I can attest to how backwards many companies are run and how valuable it is to have an experienced entrepreneur guiding you. Of the companies I was around the major difference between success and failure was how much effort the Angel investors put in to mentoring their founders.

As far as connections, I mean no offense to the author of this article but it's foolish to assume people will acquire connections as valuable as those Paul Graham has simply by showing up. The more I live in the world the more I realize it's all about connections and the doors that are opened through YC are easily worth an extra 4%

In the end you can argue hypothetical numbers all you want but the reality is you have to make a company successful before it's worth anything. Good advice and industry connections are vital to making that happen.
St-Germain des Prés, Paris.
It's amazing how effective "YC terms don't optimize your pre-seed valuation" linkbait is- this has to be the sixth article expounding on the same points.
Screenshots of Twitter's internal admin interface
You've created some really awesome stuff!
All I need to do is type, say, "yc"

Why is this good? I type the letter "n" and news.ycombinator comes up. (I'm on ff 2.0). If I type "yc" I get this:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

It's deterministic, being alphabetic, and superior in every way. I don't want the fricken address bar throwing dice on my input.
Reading Accelerando was like taking drugs for me... I had a buzz that lasted about a week after I was done.
I'm referring more to startup time than I am responsiveness. Emacs has only ever been "sluggish" when I've used it on a system with little memory.
I wonder what will happen if/when we get a decent brain/computer interface, and we'll be able to write stories by thinking about them...

I think the value of clear thinking will become most obvious at that point.
Straw man.

YC is MORE about the advice from pg, the alum network you are connected to and the long-term value of the connections you continue to make. That is the CORE value of YC--not the $ amount invested.

If he thinks YC is poor, he should have based his arguments on how you can get better advice/connections etc. from raising angel than through YC. Instead he decides to take YC on the $ invested/valuation and merely glosses over the advise/non-$ value of YC. This is little more than a straw man.
"n fact, being in YC makes a company much more attractive to future investors."

If this were Wikipedia I'd say [citation needed]. Also, are you comparing being in YC and having no support, or being in YC and having an angel investor? The latter is what the OP is talking about and argues that an angel gives more cash, for less equity.
I would say to start building things, not for the purpose that someone will hire you for it someday, but because you actually want to build it.

If your goal is just to get hired somewhere, what happens when you finally get a job? Do you stop learning until the threat or reality of unemployment forces you to learn again?

If you want to do great, cool, and fun things then you have to do them. Don't expect or wait for a job to allow you to do it, just get started. You'll learn much more much faster than most jobs (especially big companies).
Ugh. The strawman canard.

I didn't -say- that was his argument, therefore its not a strawman . I was simply providing an example to illustrate (with hyperbole) the comment I made in the previous sentence. The one you snipped out.

You've essentially repeated my point, elsewhere in this thread, by claiming that the value added comes down the "network" of said angels not just the personal networks but all of the non-financial considerations.

Does being a YC versus an average angel-funded company get you more press? How many TC writeups, on average, do you think being YC funded gets you? How much money is that worth? How much page rank is that worth? This is important because he specifically talks about "marketing" as an important early expense, and yet YC provides quite a bit of it, for free.
Depends when you believe you are exit is going to be. If it's that you are going to get Series A and then get bought by BigCo for $x million then the initial terms make a big difference.
Building a web framework in Python
A tip of my hat to you, sir -- very definitive.
To be fair, unlike many of these articles, he does address this, even if you may not agree with what he says about YC's advice versus going it alone.
Unless you're a company like Wufoo who don't get any funding beyond angel* because they reach profitability with that funding.

* As far as I know
Unless you exit before your Series A, which seems to be fairly common for YC companies: Reddit, Clickpass, Auctomatic come to mind... 6% at that early a stage might still be pretty high.
Windows7: Shuts down 400ms faster, due to shorter shutdown wav file
"According to the New York Post, which tends to be a bit sensationalist at times..."

Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot.
Emacs is an operating system, cleverly disguised as an editor.....
He makes some great points. The ideal situation for entrepreneurs is to have VCs competing for equity in their companies: the more VCs out there, the better. OTOH, the ideal situation for VCs is to have tons of entrepreneurs competing for their dollars (hello TechCrunch 50).

So while there will probably always be more entrepreneurs than VCs, dollars are almost certainly the most non-unique aspect in the value equation. I guess it's when they get into the big numbers where the little percents equal a lot that a more in-depth analysis is called for.
Precise Garbage Collection for C [pdf]
He spends ~1 out of the 12 paragraphs addressing the REAL argument. The other 11 are spent on addressing the straw man argument(that YC is good because of its valuation).
Good luck with that. I don't see Zuck staying on as CEO through another big financing round (especially at a valuation they like) unless they find an amazing revenue generator quickly. With so much foreign growth these new users are nothing but a cash drain. Cash they don't have.
then the argument comes down to how much you value the YC network vs. an angel's network

Not so. YC's "network" is not the important thing.
A small price to pay for allowing cross-border competition, I think.It would be great if this were to allow universities to focus more on their strengths, instead of having to offer every degree under the sun. It would allow European universities to improve their worldwide rankings while still remaining free/affordable.
"Many hackers are one-trick ponies who know how to use a few specific tools but are clueless after those fail."

I think he has confused script kiddies with hackers. Hackers don't just run scripts and shrug their shoulders when things don't work. Hackers make the scripts and find vulnerabilities in systems. Usually employing some very smart techniques to obtain their goals..(shellcodes, buffer overflows, etc). A fantastic knowledge of C / ASM is usually required...

"the U.S. government believes that you need criminals to think like criminals"..Just for the record (Hackers != Criminals)..
"Advice ... [is] easy to find"

This is the mistake. Advice is easy to find, but it varies in value.

This guy can correctly value our money. It's worth the same as everyone else's. But he has no idea whether our advice is good or bad, and if good, how much better it is than "average" advice, whatever that is.