skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Internally, Yahoo has always had purple and yellow as a theme. The legend is that they were the cheapest colors at the store when Jerry and Filo were setting up the office. Personally, I don't buy this; probably the real explanation is that they deliberately chose eye-watering colors like every other startup in the mid-90s.

They also say that the online Yahoo logo was made red because there wasn't a good shade of purple on old Windows 3.1 computers. Remember those days?

In recent years, Yahoo has been dominated by more cheerleaders and corporate climbers than do-ers, and purpleness has become an obsession. It's purple purple purple everything there. Proof: the move to rebrand Yahoo as purple, a color which users had never associated with the company before.
Why should every developer have to implement this. Apple should make it a system-wide setting.
Wow, congrats on the huge growth dhouston
It's true that if the government implemented such a program, they'd probably do a bad job. But they couldn't do worse than they're doing now, which is to turn people away at the borders.

pg, you already said basically the same thing in the thread tptacek linked to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557340

A response follows in that thread.
There is a difference between people who post reviews or complain on certain forums, and the actual user population.
Amazon's Kindle iPhone app has a very neat implementation of this. Wehenver the screen adjusts its rotation, a little round lock button fades in, sticks around for a while, and fades out again.

If you touch it, the screen is now locked in the current orientation. To see the button again, simply rotate your iPhone to another 90° angle range and it'll fade in again briefly.

Works really well, maybe not so great for the small plane scenario where orientation changes all the time making the continuous fading in/out a bit annoying, but great for statically holding your iPhone at an off angle.
It is, thankfully
I think it's somewhat doubtful that Apple would implement this, but I would like to be able to change it back with the "rotate" gesture that is used on newer Apple notebooks.
Incidentally, why do you keep creating new accounts?
Yes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_recession

Historian Thomas Woods argues that President Harding's laissez faire economic policies during the 1920/21 recession, combined with a coordinated aggressive policy of rapid government downsizing, had a direct influence (mostly through intentional non-influence) on the rapid and widespread private-sector recovery
Let me play devil's advocate.

People with new found faith often become alienated from their friends and family outside this circle. Sometimes it is because the conversion process is similar to rehabilitation and it is necessary to be removed from some of the problematic context. Sometimes it is lack

Church fund-raising is something quite common. Many of the most benign religious communities manage to raise significant portions of their devotees' incomes. You might not agree with the ends of some of these religious groups. But when I agree with their 'mission,' I usually don't see this as a bad thing. We live in a time of plenty. I assume few Scientologists starve.

What is the actual difference between a cult and a religion? It certainly isn't about the specifics of the beliefs. It isn't about size. If you want to make 'they are a cult,' your argument you should probably define cult and explain what is wrong with a cult. If it a specific practice or practices (cut ties, raise money) you object too and think should result in lost legal status, why not base your argument on that and drop the label.

What gives the government the right to decide what is a religion and what is not anyway?
I'm one of the 1 million users whose accounts are dormant.

I love the product, but it bothers me that it's not open source. (Not their problem or anyone else's, but I prefer not to use close-source software if I can help it.)

Also, after I don't know how long, the whole "the API is around the corner" thing began to feel like a shell game.
Because that system wide setting would break a ton of apps (think about games that only use landscape for example). I mean, I'd personally be fine with this, but I don't think it's as easy as that.
Is there some concentrated effort to promote Perl around here? I've been a regular for years and Perl comes up...well, maybe once every 2 months. The last few week has seen about 1/day.
I'd love to know what percentage of their new users come from their affiliate program:

https://www.getdropbox.com/affiliates
Anyone can explain me how this business can do money other than having some plan that cost some money. I suppose that most of the account are "free" one. I have hard time to understand how it can be profitable to run.
Maybe he should create an office to boost government non-intervention, too.
tlrobinson is right; give Apple feedback. Ask for a iPhone wide setting to lock the orientation:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
I voted for making online education free. I believe that this should also mean better education for children in developing countries. As long as there is one computer with internet access and a village puts it to good use, it has succeeded.
They charge money for more space. That's exactly how they make money. So what else are you asking?
I'm a customer. it's indispensable.
The University I'm at (University of Canterbury, Christchurch)
is switching from Java to Python for 2010.

The main reason is that we loose ~10% of the undergraduate enrolment explaining why hello world is:

public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello World"); }}
great services attract tons of users, who'da thought it.
I don't. My colleagues post on HN and we probably have the same external IP address. If you don't believe me, I will stop posting if you just ask. However, I don't see why you need to assume my guilt. I wonder if you still would have done that if I'd agreed with you earlier instead of disagreeing.
There is widespread support for the idea of allowing founders to immigrate. There is scepticism that this can be executed in a way that is a net gain. Some people are sceptical at a practical level and others at a theoretical one.
It's two years old. Give them time, they're evolving their site constantly. Also, I don't think you know what a shell game is.

I love the product, but it bothers me that it's not open source. (Not their problem or anyone else's, but I prefer not to use close-source software if I can help it.)

They created one of the fastest and best methods of syncing there is, maybe the best one if simply being intuitive counts. They make their money by licensing it to you. How would you take that and open-source it without killing dhouston's method of making a living?

Also: What's this about not liking closed-source? That's like saying you dislike songs that you can't download as individual tracks. Maybe it's cool that some things are broken down and easy to tinker with, but it's silly to turn that into disliking the ones you can't break.
ASP.NET MVC devastates all web platforms I've dealt with but rails. I realise it's a personal preference thing but you should look into it - it's open source, they got prominent community figures to design it and it lets you use C# (a great growing language) online properly without worrying about ASP.NET crap.
If anyone could explain a better intuition for this phrase, I would greatly appreciate it.

Consider the example from wikipedia:

Person 1: He is mad right now.

Person 2: How do you know?

Person 1: Well, because he is really angry.

If you think of it in terms of the meaning of beg as evade, then Person 1 is begging the inquiry of Person 2. She is evading it by restating the premise.
Seriously, come on, its called Hacker News, not Hacker Archives. I know its not completely unheard of for the site, but it just seems like this one has been posted a few times now. Where was that search function again so I can look it up? But anyway, when this was news, I seem to remember someone mentioning that Gerald Sussman made a few comments on it. I think he said it's still used for many classes, including some of his more advanced classes, and that when asked why he thought they chose it over Scheme for SICP he said probably because of libraries, especially to control the robots they were using in the class.
I absolutely agree. Python is a wonderful language that made me rediscover how fun programming can be.

Still, SICP was transformational experience for me. And it wasn't transformational because it was a kind and gentle intro to CS. On the contrary, it was a slap in the face of my silly imperative programming habits. It made me pause and reconsider my preconceptions about computation and computers.

In this sense, Python's biggest strength (expressiveness and ease of use) is also its biggest weakness. It will let you get away with having a bland and linear understanding of computation. A good intro program should make you acutely aware of how little you know, and still yearn for more.
Not to turn this into a huge circle jerk but for me it's the simplicity. I can recommend it to my friends without worrying that they will ask me to troubleshoot later.

Edit: And I am sure it is the same for other people. The simplicity adds to their ability to spread like "weeds" because people aren't afraid to recommending it.
Red Herring implies deliberately misleading. It would be more accurate to describe it as one thread in an intrinsically parallel process.
That is almost same as what Indian MNCs would pay their employees with 2-3 years of experience in India.
Any info on how many are at $10 and $20? I love it, but I'm a freeloader.
the best services usually attract the customers.

don't be a bottom feeder.
if there was one service that deserved a good circle jerk it'd be dropbox, though.
You know what's really cool about this? Microsoft and Apple have both taken stabs at this problem multiple times. The companies that make the operating systems on about 99% of PCs have both tried this. They've had some success at it, but it's never been a killer app or a feature that people rave about.

Knowing that, dhouston still created DropBox. He did a fantastic job. He knocked it out of the park. Now 2 million people have used the thing and he's well on his way to building a very successful business with it.

Don't let the big guys scare you.
The author of this article unwittingly makes the argument he was trying to oppose, which is that money drives your choice of location.

He acknowledges that his startup was 100% bootstrapped and profitable. In those happy circumstances it doesn't really matter where you are located, unless taking venture capital would help you grow faster (if fast growth is your goal).

However most startups wouldn't exist without some capital, and Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of wealthy tech investors. Those investors like to be able to keep a close eye on their investment, ergo all the entrepreneurs cluster where the money is.
Agreed. I actually got introduced to it by a client who you wouldn't expect to use a startup's product. Fastest I've ever gone from free account to paying customer.
It sounds you we're pretty much in agreement and you just find memes annoying in some contexts. No argument there. I wouldn't look for them to go away anytime soon, though. If anything I'd expect things to get considerably "worse" in terms of some especially prevalent memes becoming further embedded in culture. It doesn't look like lolcats are showing any signs of slowing down, for example.
I completely agree with you and it frustrates me to no end. But I'd be willing to bet money Apple has probably seen the feedback and they decided this is whats best for you. Sometimes the things you'd think would be the most obvious in an apple product are the least likely to be implemented. For instance, I have no way of turning off my monitor on my imac, I have to set the screensaver idle time really really low. It took them 9 versions of itunes to add the ability to "watch" a music folder, and they still implemented it the way they wanted, by just giving you one folder to drop music into. IMHO I think they are hurting themselves with this attitude, but then again, I doubt they care what I think anyway...
I am not sure this was a very good link, other than to say 'I can write this shorter than you and omit optional variables, oh and karma sucks'. Not a shining example of how cool perl is.
Answered:

http://feeds.space.com/~r/spaceheadlines/~3/3n9zA4b63i0/0909...
Downloadable Engine Sounds
We'd be willing to help spread the word through the IndyHall community, a bunch of multi-disciplinary hackers hang out in our crew, as well as on the periphery.

Furthermore, we'd be happy to host something downtown in the coming months! Drop me a line.
Well, the relevance for "golf" to anything is debated already inside the Perl community.

I don't really think there are more or less Perl stories if you compare to a few months ago.

Edit: And I might also add that it would be easy to find more interesting stuff on that blog, I don't understand why people vote this up.
An interesting question is what sort of bets are better placed in India.

Presumably, business models that require labour more or less linear to scale would be the right kind to base in India. That is the opposite of what startup generally gets thought of as otherwise. I see no reason why a services 'startup' is a bad idea. There is plenty of improvement to be made there.
Ask HN: Have I earned the right to edit my HN username?
When I first signed up for News YC as a junior in college, I gave myself one of the few throwaway account names I was using on other tech-oriented forums at the time.

Well, two and a half years later, and I'm increasingly unhappy with my username, although I know the only solution is to create another account. An alternative I'd like to propose is that after hitting a great enough amount of karma, I've earned exactly one chance to change my HN username.

There are some technical considerations. Would the old profile URL simply redirect to the new one? Perhaps it would require some refactoring of user models or queries. There may be other issues I haven't even considered.

But aside from implementation details, are there any opinions about whether or not I should be able to edit my HN name?
SAS Institute is the worlds largest privately owned software company. $3Bn revenue last year.

There are probably literally dozens with revenue in the tens of millions of dollars though. All the ones you listed are B2C, there'll be tons of very successful B2B service providers.

Two local [to me, Cambridge UK] ones spring to mind: Jagex and Red Gate Software both employee 150+...
A bureaucracy meant to increase entrepreneurship...maybe he should make an Office of Government Non-Intervention, too.
I was actually just curious. Usually when people create new accounts, it's because they want to say something they don't want associated with their main account. A few others do it to vote up their own comments. But neither seemed to be the case here.

The reason I thought you weren't a new user was that you used HN's idiosyncratic markdown subset on your first comment. That's very rare. But if you say you're different people, I'll take your word for it.
its probably backwards to look for exits in private companies. Usually the founders are 110% committed to building a long term company, and strive to ensure they own the majority of the company so they aren't told what to do.
I'll be honest: most of the new music I like sounds a lot like the music I was listening to in the early 1980s. :)
I've looked through these companies many times and never noticed the Bootstrap category until now. Thought I would point it out - http://crunchbase.com/companies?q=bootstrapped
Bravo! These observations seem more insightful than the essay itself and are certainly worth exploring in more detail.
"Everyone fails to mention now much more advanced and nicer developing in VS is compared to any other platform."

Everyone fails to mention that since it's completely a matter of personal opinion. I am of the opinion that you're dead wrong...
Sorry to be all negative about this. I am guessing this would be another IIT/IIM circle jerk. Everyone else will be filtered out. I will change my mindset when I see the proof. Till then, cynical.
make a new account, leave a note in your profile saying who your other account was, sorted.
I found 1M messages/day rather too low. So I checked the video, sure enough they have 1B messages/day using close to 10Gbps at peak, with 100+ servers. A correctly built (epoll/reactor based) C/C++ based system should be able to handle that with ~10 servers.

I suspect that erlang is successful despite of the language itself, mostly because it's also a mature product: a well tested production quality actor system with decades of tweaking.

I liked the Q&A especially whether a better type system would catch the "horrible bugs" they had :)
Northeastern University (right across the river) uses Scheme/How To Design Programs for the intro CS course then uses Java/How To Design Classes for the second CS course.

We've got one of the best (I think) CS programs in the country: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/undergraduate/data/ug2009/CSBS2009_Sp...

FP Scheme -> FP Java -> Java with mutations -> other languages is a great way to build on people's intrinsic knowledge of programming.
Newbie
Greets. I just learned of this community.

I have a product which is designed to adress an environmental concern: electrical energy waste.

According to Edison Power Research Institute, 25% of all electricity in the USA used in residential serviuce is wasted by people simply forgetting to turn off unused and unneeded lights.

BY addressing this issue, i can save the average consumer about 20-25% on their monthly electricity bill, reduce the loads on overloaded local electrical grids, reduce pollutution at generating plants by reducing load, and put numerous people to wqork all over the USA installing and maintaining the system s I have designed.

They are primarily targeted for new construction, though retrofitting is entirely possible at a slightly higher cost.

The system can also provide security and environmental control, at virtually no additional cost.

The system can be installed and used by any residential power customer, and does not require any interaction by the userr at all, though for environmental control and security, some interaction would, of course, be required.

I estimate the total cost to install such a system in a newly constructed average three bedroom home at approximatley $1200.

I actually designed this system decades ago, but micro-controller and sensor costs have only recently made it feasible to build and sell.

Unfortunately, I lack the financial resources to fully prototype and constructy a demonstration system. Looking for angels or investors.

I can be reached at tjkeller@inebraska.com

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.
Py2dce
Yes on all points! :-)
You forgot: Lotus Notes. Mishandles html emails so much, the new Outlook is pure perfection compared to it. (grumbles over having to implement a complex receipt email for a company that uses Notes internally).
How could anyone upmod that? It's pure ad hominem.
Human heart is a Turing machine, research on XBox 360 shows. Wait, what?
California Unemployment (U6) Reaches 19.9%
You should probably do them a favor and fire off an email if you think it's bad PR.
The "Fair Trade" approach seems irrelevant in the retail model of distribution (trading cartridges and discs - much like used books), but takes on vastly different implications in the service model (Xbox Live, Steam, Appstore).

I would be more comfortable with the downloadable platforms (as a curator at an archeological media lab) if it were possible to maintain the same kind of liquidity associated with the physical media by trading them in public markets (given that most game vendors prohibit or discourage transferring game licenses), even if it meant paying a royalty to an existing corporation to do so until such a time as the work enters the public domain.

What scares me is not being able to access these works in a hundred years. Would a royalty system enable one to open the markets by fostering greater income much like how the traditional used game market in brick-and-mortar "allows" for higher prices on new games.

Related: "Valve: Are Games Too Expensive?" http://tr.im/zEJW or http://www.edge-online.com/features/valve-are-games-too-expe...
It's mail in bed that's the issue for me. I can't be the only one who wakes up, reaches something like full consciousness, and then reaches for the iphone to see if anything urgent or interesting has appeared in my mail.
"The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression."

That's with version 3.5.3 of Firefox, default install on Windows xp. Any suggestions?
I suspect people underestimate how successful Microsoft and Apple have been with their competitive services.
How will he port his Karma and reputation.
> Also, I don't think you know what a shell game is.

If my imprecision bothers you, feel free to s/con game/shell game/.

>Also: What's this about not liking closed-source? That's like saying you dislike songs that you can't download as individual tracks. Maybe it's cool that some things are broken down and easy to tinker with, but it's silly to turn that into disliking the ones you can't break.

I don't think you know what the value of free and open software is. It has nothing to do with wanting things "you can break." I have no idea how you make that leap (open source == breakable?). I would add that a closed source application built (as far as I've read) on open source pieces (SVN? Python? Rsync?) is especially off-putting to me.

To clarify one other point. Ubuntu has already reverse-engineered Dropbox (as Ubuntu One), so if Dropbox's profit relies on their having the sole access to the magic formula, it's already too late. Anything can be (and generally will be) reverse engineered. I don't think that closing off the source is a royal road to success.
I really dislike this trend of adding sounds to electric cars.

One of the things I liked the most about the electric car I used to drive was the quiet, and I would have hated if it made some fake sound as I drove around.

Once any car is moving, there are plenty of other sounds, such as gear-whine, tire noise, etc, to be audible to any pedestrians. And if the car is going so slowly that there's no sound at all, then there's plenty of time for a driver to stop if they see someone entering the street.
Do you know where your Moon Rocks are?
I have to agree it was a badly worded question. I think the OP has bandwidth concerns. Dropbox could charge based off an upload metric similar to Evernote (which gives 40 MB of transfer free a month).

http://www.evernote.com/about/premium/

While that model more closely aligns to bandwidth costs, I think dropbox is in a different market. For one, Dropbox is competing with external hard drives. It's easier to understand the value proposition when you can compare based on storage.

I sure as hell have no idea how much 40 MB is in terms of use. I do some word docs and some pictures. If I do 5 saves an hour, averaging 10 kb in size and I work for 40 hours a week, is 40 MB enough storage?
"IPhone Developers: We use our iPhones" - worst fortune ever.
I see. Yes, I've been familiar with HN for a long time, partly because I've seen so many people post here.
Chris Pine wrote a great book for non programmers to step into Ruby, it really is well done.
>killed somewhere around 20 people through fear alone.

Do you mean without even biting them? How do the people die? Panic attack/heart attack?
Nope, but I was an IBM employee at the time (on DB2 nonetheless) and tried internal channels to no avail.
Specifying the link in my about section would work in most cases, but it would be somewhat kludgey.
Google Sites Data API
Blog announcement:

http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-data-api-for-...