skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Godin didn't mean "programmers", he did mean "corporate drones". But that's his target audience. So he writes "programmers" to give his audience somebody to distinguish themselves a bit, like "if you make awesome presentations you are not so un-hip like those".
I have to disagree. I do a lot of pseudo-philosophical and non-philosophical arguing (my s.o. is a philosophy student), and I've realized that, as years have gone by and I've gotten better at this type of discussion, the best first step is to precisely define what each word is assumed to mean in that context and then proceed to arguing what does that mean to the topic at hand.

As a counter example, I was greatly unnerved the other day at watching a bar discussion between two friends that revolved on whether or not one could make money daytrading. Friend A said "obviously you can't, the market is random", while friend B insisted that "well, with mathematics you can predict the way it will go". This went on for hours (I refused to join) while they both had clearly very different meanings for the words "random", "luck" and "mathematics". I believe that, had they stopped early enough to define those terms, they wouldn't have argued.

Of course, sometimes the discussion is specifically about the definition of a few key words. Even then, I find what really helps is agreeing on some restricted definitions for other "primitive" words and using those primitives to build up definitions for the words in question. For example, person A could argue that selfishness is actually a form of blindness, while person B insists that it is not really so, and one can be selfish while seeing what others are doing. This way they can argue, by having pre-defined what "blind" "see", etc mean in this context.

Discussions about the meaning of words are easily just philosophical traps where one person says A and the other hears B.
How betting online began: An easy birth
$10 to anyone who can successfully summarize an idea that all the buzzwords on this page might be trying to form.
* What are the reasons you would apply and accept funding from YCombinator? *

If I applied that's because of

- Place: I live in north-africa, so US would be better for business.

- Support: I can't handle tax/company issues and papers myself, if i hire a lawyer, it'll cost a lot.

- Promotion: More odds that I'll get better investors.
i agree with you - Yahoo finance, Yahoo sports and Yahoo movies are very popular ... also one might be surprised that yahoo has huge loyal fans in asian countries like china, hongkong, singapore, india, indonesia etc.... people from these countries started their internet life with yahoo search and email services and they still use it, so yes, there are many yahoo properties that are undoubtedly leading the competition...
> "Hey, you know there’s this guy Zed who wrote the software I’m using, why don’t we hire him as a consultant?"

This seems wrong. For example, let's say we use Apache webserver and Rails. They aren't our core business. I really don't want to need core contributors from Apache webserver and Rails to help us use them. Now, if our core business was building a new server or framework on top of Apache or Rails respectively, that would be a different matter.
This is an advertorial.
I don't feel discussions that break down to the meanings of English words are interesting. Scholasticism went out of favor in part because proving things based on the assumption that Aristotle or the Bible is correct does not help once you question the source. And arguments based on the definition of "is" are also built on a shaky foundation.

Keep pulling and you have two options. You can base things on what you observe, which leads to science, or what you on things you assume which leads no where when others don't agree to the same assumptions. It's only when people have the same assumptions that you can have really interesting discussions such as Math or a good logic puzzle.
Because Apple knows that people will pay.
Yes, it's something of a joke. :D
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124391
Invisible flash takes photos without the glare
It doesn't say what job they do. I bet it's manual labour and not something like programming or consultancy.
Whoa - he didn't put a time scale or units on his graph are we looking at one month, one year, or 50 years?

His graph definitely looks more attractive but I would add that it's very important to put scales and units on your graph. And don't trick people by playing with the units. Make sure that they are meaningful.

This is not one of those rules you want to break.
I don't know, isn't that just a lot of phraseology obscuring the simple fact that consenting adults have made a deliberate decision to make software available under permissive licenses, hoping to benefit in some indirect way?

How much you have to tell anybody about using a particular piece of software and whether you can use it for commercial purposes, that's all in the licenses. I don't understand the fuss and I don't understand what not exploiting OSS would look like or what not employing Zed Shaw has to do with plagiarism. I just don't get it.

I do understand Zed's anger because he has put in a lot of quality work for very little in return. That's because he gave his work away with no obligation for anyone to even mention him. And he has given his work away to people who don't seem to care much about quality of implementation. I think he should consider writing closed source software, shocking as it may be. I don't think there are any moral or ethical conclusions for OSS whatsoever and all the talk about plagiarism and venture capital is nonsensical in my opinion.

OSS is a good tool for learning, for passing on knowledge, for getting into a market and for big corporation's to ruin the competitions income stream. At the end of the day you need to sell your open source software or yourself to BigCorp. That's the only way to monetize it and everybody should be aware of this simple fact by now.
Car Leasing Contract
Car leasing and contract hire portal from Swiss, BMW, Ford, Volkswagen, new cars and new vans from your UK high street dealer.
They mention software testing.
Wikimedia portrait case is about the future of museums, not the public domain
Context is everything, though. My concern over password security for a meaningless survey is much lower than for a site that stores my credit card details, for example.
If the password to your survey got stolen, I'd lose nothing.
Apple is only charging for videos from WWDC. They provide a whole bunch of free iPhone development video tutorials if you sign up as an iPhone developer (which is free also). I'm not sure why they don't provide WWDC stuff for free, perhaps they're worried that it would discourage people from turning up to the conference.
Ask HN: The most affordable Premium SMS solution?
Hello, I would like to use premium sms solution for some web application. I would like to know, what PR SMS has the best coverage and payout rates?
?

You can infer from both engines that "SBCK" is in reference to Taco Bell's "substitute chicken" fee. Or am I missing something?

mmmm taco bell
Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL (or really any database)
Thanks, I stand corrected!

The overall point is that people with autism can perform well on technological tasks, and if that's taken advantage of, then great!
Collection of Best Professional Photo Retouching Tutorials
Probably, but I'd expect some part-time developers to defect just to have a better experience. It's not like everyone makes a ton of money on the App Store anyway. It took me significant frustration and annoyance to get my app out, only to have 100 people buy it. If there was a mobile platform that was fun to develop for, I'd switch to it immediately and make stuff there.
They address that last issue in this podcast (with the techstar founder):

http://www.venturevoice.com/2009/01/david-cohen-techstars.ht...
I can think of two reasons for doing that:

1) You're trying to deceive your audience. It's one of the many ways covered in the classic, "How to lie with statistics"

2) You're presenting secret data. You're allowed to show the trends, but not any of the actual units.

Also, I thought the title on this graph was misleading. it said "Rapid Growth", and certainly, it was going up, but rapid compared to what? You always want to be asking yourself, "compared to what?" when you're looking at visualizations.
I would not. I might, however, donate.

Paying is upfront, before I even know if the add-on will be useful. I don't like paying for anything upfront without some kind of evaluation.

Also, seeing as my use of the add-on depends on the continued existence of Firefox as well as the developers commitment to keeping it up-to-date with breaking changes in Firefox, I don't see a long life expectancy for add-ons anyway. I've already had some favorite add-ons fall by the wayside. I have no interest in paying for something that suddenly becomes unsupported without explanation 6 months later.

Finally, my use of add-ons is relatively limited anyway, and most of the ones I do use have very obnoxious features that I wish I could do something about. Right now, the only things I can see giving any money in any way for are Firebug, its extensions for analyzing page speed from Google and Yahoo (though I'm not as likely to "donate" money to a major corporation), and Web Developer.
The same applies to Commodore.
Hulu reveal why they are blocking PS3 streaming
After quietly blocking access through PS3’s internet browser just two weeks ago, users who queried the situtation, surprisingly recieved a “content-less” apology through email. The Hulu representative said that blocking streaming was in the best interest of the PS3 users and Hulu. Reports have suggested it could be as a result of pressure from their content providers.
MobileBeat -  Four Ways to Make Money Off Mobile Apps
You're basically suggesting that people learn the current fashions. Which is fine, as far as it goes, just stay skeptical, because unlearning falsehoods is extremely difficult for most people. Empirically speaking, it seems almost (but not absolutely) impossible for humans.

People should learn economics like you learn physics [1]. You don't start out with string theory (fortunately). You start with the Greeks, then move to Galileo, Euler, Newton, Laplace, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, etc.

In macro economics, that might read: Bastiat, Locke, Smith, Mill, Malthus, Marx, Engels, Mussolini (who would typically be expunged, despite his continuing relevance, for obvious political reasons), Mises, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard.

[1] There are obvious differences, of course. Economics has more forks and fewer merges in the tree of thought (which makes knowing the history all the more important). And unlike physics, old, discredited theories get dug back up, polished, and repeated for a new generation (how many times do we have to endure CNN talking about how a hurricane will help the economy before people understand the broken window fallacy that Bastiat articulated in 1850?). And economics also overlaps with both politics and morality. Value-free economics exists only if you consider "you could do X, but more people will starve" to be a value-free argument.
This question is probably as hard and as interesting as "what makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial"

Cant wait to see your results!
As a complete outsider I can tell you that, in my mind, the only thing separating Y-Combinator from the others you mentioned are Hackernews and PG's essays. Both of which are of such excellent quality that I would apply here before anywhere else. That's it, I don't know anything else about the people behind the program.
Must Google Reader copy Twitter and Facebook? "Features" add clutter
Off the top of my head, I can think of way more than "four reasons I can imagine [I] would want to show someone a graph." How about "look at this interesting pattern in the data," or "look how data set foo correlates with data set bar?" Neither of those fall under "help me figure it out", and they're both telling at least as much of a story as "everything is going great".

Also, while his graph is somewhat more pleasing to my eyes than the original, it still doesn't tell me what I really want to know about that data. I have two questions about that line: what happened with that first really big spike, and does he think that the two similarly-shaped regions that follow it represent the beginning of a cycle that we might see again. His graph is called "Rapid Traffic Growth", but I think there's a more interesting story in there.
Thanks-- it doesn't have giant flashing skyscraper ads with position:fixed either.
Zawodny: Database Abstraction Layers Must Die (at least for PHP)
Great points. I think the bigger point is that it's not so much the formula (how long the program is, how much do you invest, is it a seed fund or an incubator, etc.) as the people who are doing it.

I'd travel halway around the world for ten weeks with pg & a bunch of brilliant YC geeks. There aren't many venues that have the same appeal.
I don't know when ever I see it I always think root mean square.
Great article, it is rather photoshop centric though.

PNG is a really neat format to produce from code when you're trying to visualize datastructures as well, and some of these optimization tricks can be used with the GD library as well when you select the image type.

If you produce a lot of those images the bandwidth savings can be quite considerable.
Why I won't be at my high school reunion
Of course everyone exploits open source software. That's what's so awesome about it: you can exploit it all you want. The alternative is to buy Windows and get exploited yourself. (Full disclosure: I'm not a windows-phobe. I just believe in credit where credit is due)
Special Edition Monkey Island: Something for the weekend
Are programmers are plagiarists?

Generalization. Some will happily copy and paste stuff whenever they can, which technically is plagiarism for the particular snippet. Using something that was given out for free, or reading that code and reusing the same ideas / patterns / code style / algorithm / whatever for something bigger and different isn't necessarily plagiarism.

As the saying goes, "copy one person, it's plagiarism, copy many people, it's reasearch".

I'd say that the part of the blame on the ordeal of not getting paid for your free work is that most open source projects don't make any effort to say that they want money (assuming they do).

The only example of someone doing that off the top of my head (I'm sure there are others) is Jack Slocum's Ext. He had a commercial license from day one and his site clearly explains who it applies to.

Complaining on a blog that people may or may not read / care about / agree with isn't exactly legally binding (or whatever the correct term is) and it doesn't inspire enough professionalism (for me anyways) to feel comfortable doing business with.
Symmetric Multiprocessing in Allegro CL
2008 was a very good year with a large number of high-profile, high-quality titles released.

Here are June 2007's NPD stats: http://www.playstatic.com/news/652 - you'll notice they're very much in the same range as this year.

This year's going to be a bad year, by the way. The Christmas lineup is looking very empty with most of the major titles being delayed into 2010, although MS and Sony are expected to drop the console prices. Next year's going to be a belter - it's completely packed with releases.
Possible Twitter lawsuit would dive into murky blog waters
He's saying it's a failure of spirit; of heart. But isn't it a genuine blow to one's ego, going from the unique, one-and-only to being one of a bunch?

Business-wise, competition can actually benefit you, by "validating your idea", and giving customers a choice and fall-back option.

But good for business or not, it's still a blow to one's ego. I guess the question is whether you are in it to for the the riches, the fame, the ego - or to make some positive contribution to the world.

EDIT this article's attitude reminds me of these comments (about being copied): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707278 (pg) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707307 (astrec)
> daily ejaculation results in healthier sperm and greater fertility. Causality is rarely simple.

Sure, but I think here you are being overly adaptionist. Put another way, if we lived in a world where daily ejaculation did not improve sperm quality, would we still expect animals to masturbate? I would say yes.

It's just occurred to be that was in fact answered by the comedian, Jasper Carrott:

Q: Why do dogs lick their bollocks?
A: Because they can.
NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it
He left out "Read Tufte."
Google Chrome OS can't be perfectly secure
Just like rag trade fashion costs.
Proposing a hashing standard for URLs?
>>Honestly, how many of you people who use open source tell your boss what you’re using?

Does my boss care? No. Do I tell my boss that I used the standard library instead of writing my own string class? No. In software you make use of other software all the time having done so is not some super special event that requires an epic poem be written about the original author. Second the original author gets to say how you use his stuff, if he want attribution all he has to do is require it. The rules are clearly defined when you put stuff out there for others to use and ask them to do certain things but not others why be surprised when they don't do others?
The subdivision of industry opens places that can be filled by practically any one. There are more places in subdivision industry that can be filled by blind men than there are blind men. There are more places that can be filled by cripples than there are cripples. And in each of these places the man who short-sightedly might be considered as an object of charity can earn just as adequate a living as the keenest and most able-bodied.

- Henry Ford, "My Life and Work"
I totally agree. DB abstraction libraries buy you very little in terms of database portability. I use them in my projects, but only because their object-oriented APIs are nicer to work with than plain pgsql_/mysql_/etc functions.

I worked on at least 3 large projects where we went through a lot of trouble to make them work on multiple databases. All that effort was wasted as all of them ended up running on Postgres only. Unless you're absolutely sure that you're going to need support for multiple databases, my suggestion is that you use the technique from the end of the article: put all of your DB access code in separate classes so you can easily swap them with different ones should the need arise. Until then, save yourself some trouble and make your product work really well with one database engine.
The Future of MySQL
Wow, that could be me... I've also not gone to my highschool reunion, and my answer to the request was pretty much the same.

Funny thing though, I did help the people setting it up in tracking down all the other kids from the class, I still remembered each and every one of them, and where they had lived.

But I didn't feel like going there myself, too many (very) bad memories about that period.
I haven't written an app that uses the web view yet, but I'm wondering if there is something you can do so that a web view you use in your app respects any "parental security" (the "Restrictions" section in the settings panel) settings that Safari is constrained by?

In other words, perhaps the rejection is due to your apps ability to bypass the phone's parental controls?
I just posted that comment in the Twitter development group because of a problem I have with Twitter URL shorteners, but on second thought I realize it might be a good idea in general?

The idea is to have a standard for generating a short hash of a URL - in a way a web standard for URL shortening. I think this could useful in a number of situations where URL shortening is usually provided.
Let me know if you find an accelerator for SaaS
Ribosomes as Productive Nanosystems
I don't know about other developers, but "defect" might be the wrong word. At any given moment, I'm developing for at least 3-5 different platforms, so adding another mobile one, in addition to the iPhone, would make more sense than ditching one for the other.

...maybe it would even help get an app approved faster, if it was a hit on another platform first?
Correction, Sun might not have sold to Oracle directly if they didn't have MySQL on board...

Like this Oracle gets a very large number of extra contacts in the corporate database world.
It is the narcissistic middle-aged, not the young, who love Facebook and Twitter
The point of an App Store is to be a place where it's acceptable to charge money. Customers come in (at least to the paid side) expecting to pay. I would never pay $1 to login to http://www.runpee.com/ but I gladly paid $1 for the mobile app (http://www.appstorehq.com/runpeemobile-iphone-46448/app).

People have been taught that stuff that comes through the browser is free. GOOG (and MSFT?) wants more stuff to come through the browser so that people will spend more time on the interet, while AAPL just wants people to spend more money. For the sake of developers, I hope AAPL wins.
The thing is, even if all of the currently "common" hardware features become part of some standard, there will be additional features in the future that will not, and browser-based applications will not be able to take advantage of this hardware as quickly as native applications can.

So, as long as you're comfortable waiting for WC3 to "bless" support for a device, and then browser vendors to turn out apps (which are these so-called irrelevant native apps themselves), then in that case I agree.
A little bit :-) But thank you again!
Maybe it's worse with harvard undergraduates than "normal people", because they are better at recalling and rationalizing their decisions.
How to Extract Texts from Images & PDF Files | Tricks Machine
> How much you have to tell anybody about using a particular piece of software and whether you can use it for commercial purposes, that's all in the licenses. I don't understand the fuss and I don't understand what not exploiting OSS would look like or what not employing Zed Shaw has to do with plagiarism. I just don't get it.

Many of us are illiterated in use of these licenses. Even a contributor like Zed.
I could imagine a generally available rule of thumb on licensing for open source: something like dual licensing. My code is free for all peer hackers but not for big corporations.

Is that something available? Ie. a variation/combination of CC or GPL or BSD or MIT?
So...what about devices that are not always (or reliably) connected?

I'm aware that there are several "web apps offline" approaches, but doesn't that make the app a sort of native/web hybrid?

...or do they mean that native apps are not the future, except apps that run in a browser, natively?
Wittgenstein's position. I agree.
It certainly is getting a little silly.
But I am glad that there is some added control on the sharing front.
Perhaps one of the recurring topics that I think introduce flame wars on here is all of the Mac-PC articles that keep popping up. They never introduce anything new or provide anything beyond attempting to justify fanboydom.
This was my first thought as well. Not just that it was mentioned, but that it was pointed out in the very first sentence of the article.
How American Jews Toppled Paris Couture and Redesigned the Fashion Industry
Magic Wars - your iPhone is a wand
What do people think?