skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our IT setup is Linux for everyone who is developer or QA (15 Dell Ubuntu machines) and Mac OS X for everyone else (20 people). We also have 2 windows QA machines.

We might not be "Enterprise" yet but it works well for us.

Macs may seem more expensive up front but the cost of buying the machine is not its whole cost. Total cost of ownership is important. Downtime for highly paid employees is just as bad if its their desktop as if it is a server.

Mac's have fewer problems and have fewer downtime. Over 3 years we've never had a Mac desktop go down. I can't imagine a similar statement coming from a similar sized business running Windows.
I feared the day when HN would be taken over by people who don't even bother to read the article
First reprapped circuit
There is a direct correlation between employee morale and the machines they work on. It's ok to bootstrap, but if I can get more out of employee by buying them a machine they actually enjoy using, it's worth it in my eyes. Though, I'll concede that large companies will probably have a tough time switching because of existing network infrastructure.
Why does this page say up to 200k? http://nycseed.com/apply.html
To help soldiers make sense of data, the US military now issues the iPod Touch.
Macs are extremely overpriced as compared to their PC counterparts: 30% - 50% more!

Do you have any analysis, or are you just spreading old FUD?

Here's a 2006 link finding that a Mac Pro was cheaper than a comparably equipped Dell of the time. (Though, as you can see, you can spend all day arguing about what "comparable" means.)

http://www.macworld.com/article/52540/2006/08/dellmacprofoll...

Here's a 2007 Computerworld analysis:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...

Of course, the difference is that Apple simply stays out of low-margin markets. So it's definitely possible to get a box with "PC" stamped on it for much less money than the cost of any new Mac. The most conspicuous current example of a market which Apple does not deign to enter is the netbook market.
I know this is blasphemy (being on Y Combinator news, and all), but someone should compile a list of all these funding programs.

I think it'd be helpful for all of us.
Have a look at Microsoft's sales figures for the past few quarters: http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/10k_fh_fin.html

They're still making money hand over fist despite having a lame duck OS and one of the worst economies in decades. Their revenue increased by $10 billion and had profits of $3.5 billion.

I really wish that people would look at these numbers before declaring doom and gloom for Microsoft. The market isn't exactly running screaming from Microsoft as some would hope.
What I'd like to do about this in Chicago is to arrange free classes. My office has a really excellent conference space, but in a different city you could book the meeting room at the public library (usually also an excellent space).

We do a lot of training work, and I'm always interested in ways to test new courseware in a casual setting.

That that's what I'd do about wanting to present to local hackers, is book a seperate event for that purpose only. For that event, I'd get RSVPs up front, and I'd use a private space.
I feel like an idiot for even posting this, but WTH.

http://dl.btjunkie.org/torrent/Neil-Strauss-Style-The-Annihi...

There are some "algorithms" in there, but there's also a lot of discussion about how to apply them. Body language and execution is critical. The seminars on opening (introducing yourself to a group of strangers) are really interesting. I don't think there's a single way to do this, but there are probably a few important principles that always apply. (Be strong, trust yourself, don't be afraid to fail).

Ultimately, what makes nerds fail on subjects like this is just the fear of going out into the world and getting some experience. Attraction is a practical skill, you won't get anywhere by spending a lot of time researching on the internet. Actually, I wish I had a group of friends I could try this out with, but the patheticness and taboo of being a loser in this area isn't very easy to manage. There's no way I'm mentioning this to any of my existing friends.
"Mac's have fewer problems and have fewer downtime. Over 3 years we've never had a Mac desktop go down. I can't imagine a similar statement coming from a similar sized business running Windows."

In past 10 yrs I have used Unix (Solaris, IRIX, Linux and OS X on x86) as well as Windows (XP & Vista) and have never had downtime on any of those, except for explicit and deliberate OS patches/upgrades' installation time.

I have come to believe that the computer downtime is usually a function of the hardware, people managing the infrastructure and sometimes, the users.
If all you want is VPS that is cheaper than AWS then Slicehost may be the thing for you - http://www.slicehost.com

EDIT: I forgot about Linode since I haven't used them myself. Here's a comparison between the two from last November: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
There are a ton of people using Unity for game development. Unity's quite awesome, and they get extra bonus points for supporting Boo: http://unity3d.com/unity/
Are you trying to tell me that Apple's equivalent USB optical mouse was significantly cheaper than Dell's? That would be a surprise.

Other questions to put this anecdote in perspective: Was that a list price or the result of a negotiation? What were the competing products in the UK at the time, and why would a bank choose Dell if those products where significantly cheaper?
There have been several releases of the dataset. This is the most recent one I've been able to find: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=296919

An updated version would be great, though.
The Lean Startup Presentation at Web 2.0 (with audio)
They didn't take your personal info. You gave it to them, because you like what they do with it. I'm sorry, but I think you're going to find that you don't actually have "rights" here.
thanks allot, although, too cheap is a bit risky.
A 165 second chunk from the end of the song passed as well. One may only need a slightly altered mix of the song to circumvent the audio filter.
The thing is that gold-plated mouse might be making up for the 30% discount on the desktop it was attached to. If you've been a Dell corporate customer you can always tell when the end of their fiscal quarter is coming because your personal rep will be calling you with excellent deals to pad her numbers. And if you are reasonably good at vendor poker you can get some real deals simply by saying "Well, we're thinking about ordering x in a couple of weeks." Because that's too long for the reporting period; and this quarters numbers are all that matter to the person on the other end of the line.
I know this is blasphemy (being on Y Combinator news, and all)

It's not blasphemy, it's quite the opposite. AFAIK, YC is happy that it had set off this chain reaction that started all these Seed funds.
Nanogenomic-robot
Minor Updates for Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 Released
"Apparently they don't really care about repeat infringers"

I would be careful about operating under this assumption. Google's habit of locking out accounts across all of their services is well-documented. You wouldn't want that to happen over something silly.
Well, he's obviously a boolean.
Eh - what's the bet some do-gooder Googler reads HN and lowers the thresholds / throws in some more types of checking, and it's an arms race, and this person will have just helped them to improve. Still, /someone/ had to do it.
What is wrong with Brooklyn? If you start your company in Manhattan, you're just needlessly increasing your burn rate and reducing the amount of time you have.
This $10k program is a special summer funding session.

NYCSeed is actually an established angel investment firm that does invest significant amounts.
I will add my vote to OLED and e-ink.

Additionally, transformation of everyday electronic devices into low-power consuming devices, and for this, I think nanotechnology will help us get there.
Venture Capital Under Attack
The awesomeness lies in the explanations and reasons, not the intrinsic tech.

This guy is currently doing a series on procedural generation of a city terrain, and it's the same deal. It's not going to win awards for "teh aw3som3st cty evar!", it's that you don't often see someone do something like this while posting reasons, dead-end experiments, and other such commentary.

It's less awesome to look at, but radically superior as an article to read and learn from.
Definitely not into this for FUD :)

Also have no intention for starting PC brand war here.
One can go visit a PC vendor's web site (say, dell) look at the notebook/desktop/workstation hardware configuration and prices and then compare with what one can find on say, Apple Store.

This year, I recently purchased a gateway laptop:
http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668231.php

(17" HD display, 64 bit Intel Core 2 Duo 8400 2.26 GHz CPU, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 320 GB 7200 rpm hard disk, NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GTS
Graphics with 1GB of GDDR3 Discrete Video Memory).

I got this for $1270 after tax.
For the same amount of money I also bought a Macbook:
http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html
(13.3" display, Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2.0 GHz, 2 GB DDR3 RAM,
160 GB 5400 rpm hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory).

I would like to point out that I love both of these
notebooks. I would give Apple extra points for build quality, fit & finish and better user experience.
That said, one can very well see, item-by-item, how do the technical specs compare between the two mentioned here.

When a for profit company has to make a decision,
cost of purchase becomes a big factor and that is the only point I am trying to make here.
Sweet Lord grant me the strength.

The whole reason why we posted (notice I didn't say give, we didn't give them anything) our info was because of the inherent understanding that they wouldn't do anything stupid with it. Like saving it forever ever even after we want to delete it.

And once again, like I mentioned in my first comment, once this trust was breached, people exercised their right (yes, we do have rights here) to delete their accounts.

Bottom line - if they want to use our info to market ads towards us, fine, the site is expensive to run and I can certainly understand and support their efforts, for as long as I maintain my info there. It's an equal give and take - I use the site and they make money off my info.
But once I delete my info, it's only common sense for them to delete it all as well. How is this so hard to understand?
Web design company
web design company offers best usable and accessible web site design layout, application design, web development, brochure design, corporate and product presentation. Our main source of business is through website design and redesign, e-commerce website development, and web applications.
Also it could be called "best goals" instead. I've seen a lot of companies that lie about what they really do, specially those certified with ISO and family.
Is it just me, or are these seed funding firms popping up everywhere? It looks like YCombinator is really starting to have an influence.
No offense, but that was dumb of you. You will never get that information back. You might as well organize a protest in front of Experian. You had no contract with Facebook requiring them to do anything at all with your information once you left.
I searched by "ingredients" and got a selection of recipes, but when I used the exact same search term on "keyword" search, I got nada.

I understand the difference, but you know the gold standard. I suggest to "emulate" Google: one search box only please.

As a cook myself, I like the idea, but honestly, I don't see how the pay model will be popular. I can do exactly the same thing in Google if I enter the exact search term as for your web site, and then add the word "recipe" to the search term. And other recipe sites will do as well. So I am not sure how you can get away from ad-supported revenue model. Good luck nonetheless.

BTW, I agree about the logo comment. Maybe you can try to change the web site name or create a cute story about why use the "puppy".
You're right. There was no contract. It was based on a silly thing called trust. It was dumb of me to blindly trust them.
No argument there. Lesson learned.

I know now that when I launch my startup, my focus will be on maintaining customer trust. The first question I will ask myself when it comes to any changes will be "can I achieve the desired outcome without hurting my userbase?"

Facebook taught me that.
I need to correct that spelling error. Eeek.
This is an entry level book, it should be called Data Structures for Beginners (presented with Java).
I wonder if this is a growing trend in regions across the country. Last week there was a post about AlphaLab providing $25K, but it too is a subsidiary of InnovationWorks which offers $100K.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550892
Creating a World in Holograms
All my interactions with Mac (I'm a windows user, my brother got a fair dose of Macintosh fever a few years ago) have been exceptionally easy.

I never had a problem connecting the computers, the biggest problem was that file types weren't compatible. However, with any incomparability problems I just went the old fashioned way of RTF and CSV to get the job done.

For everything else, well there's always Boot Camp.
That must some good crystal you are staring into..

The election started only 2 days back and will go on till may 13.

Advani is a PM aspirant, not a PM-in-waiting.
Ask HN: Open-source project as startup?
Would it make sense to apply to YC (or to one of its recent imitators) with an open-source project?
If not, then why?

It might be a weird idea, but after all, an open-source project makes something people want, it has leverage, and it can sure use some money.

So can anyone give a good reason why this will not work?
If anyone is wondering what the project is about, it is a framework for writing simulations in Python. It could take any kind of simulation: Physics, game theory, epidemic spread, electronics, whatever.

(Yes, I know of SimPy, it's something different.)
I'm pretty sure YC doesn't have anything to fear. They will likely get the cream of the crop (according to their standards) since the program is well-established, is in the startup capital, and is lead by someone who has provided a wealth of resources on startups. YC is like the Harvard of seed funding programs: few people would turn it down if accepted.
The lithium ion batteries need more work. Top Gear on BBC America was testing the new Tesla, and the think completely sucked!

I think the new hydrogen powered Honda holds a lot of promise, and so does the air car!
Why Free is Doomed
In terms of profitability, a simulation software would be hard to monetize as "software as service"; anybody technically inclined to want to do simulations will probably have a lab unix flavors, parallel libraries and other goodies to just download your tarball and run it themselves.

Simulation is not exactly sales automation, data capture, billing or inventory.

Your best bet is to reach out to federal safety and security agency, and sell them a heavily customized version of the tool (usually the problem du jour; few years ago was terrorism, now it's home foreclosure, job loses, etc.) you will be prepared to have a few PhDs on board to sell it to the governments and you might need to reach out to your local governments and municipalities.
1. Business school people are more entrepeureally minded and tend to have more of a personality (no duh...)

2. You can take school courses that would help you later in your career, like several business courses. I would take the more concrete ones, like business law or introductory accounting, otherwise the value can be questionable. With business law, those contracts you sign suddenly make ALOT more sense. (And what implied statues would be put in your business activities). With accounting, you know how all the financial statements work. I've found 1st level marketing classes tend to be a bit stupid although. Too abstracted from real applications.
I think his point is that DVD upscaled to 720p is as good as 1080p blu-ray for most poeple's TVs.
Could any other company have done the same? Google is big, has a lot of resources, public goodwill and instant echo in the media. Who else?
I got one of the 40GB and did the exact same when the 80GB came out.

I personally don't store that much music, but I love video. So it now completely sucks that I can't store much video on it, certainly not enough for me not to spend an hour every week changing up the videos.

I guess it says something when my 500GB external hard drive isn't big enough anymore. My next computer purchase is going to be a 4 bay NAS, then I can upgrade it 1TB at a time.
Many banks did not engage in the foolish investment practices we've been hearing about, and yet their lending rates were substantially affected by the credit crisis due to the ensuing market conditions: higher costs of borrowing, higher perceived risks, less overall liquidity, lower trust in other parties, etc.

No one is completely isolated from the effects of a credit crisis.
At least Google APIs are atom-based. And I do see a lot of atom feeds, although you're right there are usually along with RSS. However, AJAX is not a fialure simply because there is always a no-script version of the same page.
Augmented Reality

Yeah! There was a recent press release from Nokia about their prototype service where you can take a picture of a poster, and it recognises the event and finds the details for you, and local showings if it's a film, etc. There's a recent video link on HN of an android/G1 app which pulls location-aware data from the web and allows you to hold your G1 up with the camera looking at the horizon, and it annotates the video feed with information about the main things you can see. Shazzam has been able to recognise currently playing music for ages, and snaptell can recognise a photo of almost any common CD, book or DVD and pull up more data. Android/the G1 has a change-behaviour-based-on-GPS-location feature.

Augmented reality is here if you look for it and want it.

I hope it's not too long before I can take a picture of a sign in a foreign country, and have it OCR'd and the text run through Google Translate.
The bank's supplier for desktop computer hardware was Dell. If Dell could deliver it, it was ordered from Dell. There was no "choice". And yes, it was a list price, no negotiation involved.

There were plenty of competing products in the UK - I could have had a better mouse for cheaper by wandering down to PC World, down the road, and paying £10. But the corporate ordering process didn't allow me to get involved in that - all I could do was express the fact that I needed a mouse with a wheel.
To see ie6update in action watch this 3 minute screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TclHo_F7rsE

I wanted a demo but didn't have IE6 to hand, in the end I installed ies4linux -> Wine -> Jaunty RC and I figured that others might want to see it in action so I sat up until 2.30am making the screencast.

Nick says he'll integrate it into their blog shortly, but in the meantime...
I work as a consultant for a lot of medium sized businesses and none of them have any intention of moving away from XP anytime soon. However, that does not imply that they want to move to any other operating system. The main reason they don't want to move away from XP is the support and training costs. Moving to OS X or Linux would be even worse.

All of these columnists miss the point -- OS X and Linux won't sell for exact same reason that Vista doesn't.
People who enjoy driving will have to do is in such way as to not endanger regular commuters - e.g. on the racetracks or private roads. 45,000 deaths per year is a lot of dead people. Unlike smoking victims who brought it upon themselves a good half of driving accident victims did not and could not see it coming.
It makes a lot of sense. Imagine you have a fund that you need to invest into new, unproven companies at the early seed stage. You can find companies the traditional way by having meetings, getting referrals, soliciting applications, etc. By the end, you'll have had a total of a couple hours (at most) contact with the founders before you decide to invest.

On the other hand, you can start out by spending 200k on 20 companies for the summer while mentoring them. By the end of the funding cycle, you'd have a really good idea of which founders were hustling, which ones suck, and which ideas you believe in. Based on this unusually in-depth knowledge of the companies and founders, you can invest more in the ones you like. Presumably, this would improve the quality of your overall portfolio.
"Nothing like this will be built again" - A Nuclear Reactor Tour
disclaimer: dated materials, tax code changes every year, I don't know anything about you or your business, IANAL, yadda yadda

http://www.mbbp.com/resources/business/entity.html

http://www.themoneyalert.com/Corp-Entity-Table.html

http://www.themoneyalert.com/incorporating.html

http://www.themoneyalert.com/businesstypesofownership.html
If it really is a niche site, I would charge much more for an ad.
How is a general framework useful? Unless you're also providing access to a slew of algorithms that can quickly solve a large pool of nontrivial special cases, it sounds like you're just providing a "perl" glue for modelling code, albeit in python.

What sort of game theory problems are you thinking about, I have a pretty solid background in algorithmics of that stuff, (which will transition from solid to novel research level soon :p, so i'd be curious as to what you think are settings where someone would like to do game theory modelling)
I can't speak in regards to whether it makes sense to apply to YC, but from a general perspective, a company that produces open sources software is no different than any other business: you need to clearly understand how you will generate a profit.

The answer may be consulting but that's a difficult route b/c anyone can generate a profit from consulting. It's not unique. You need to figure out how to provide something that's better than everyone else. As Warren Buffet would say, you need a moat.