skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lamp-effect depends on your monitor. I hated white screens when I was using a CRT. Now it doesn't make any difference to me with an LCD.
Haven't they heard about Postgresql? :)
Music Industry Changes Tune of New Program to Fight File Sharing
Southwest is a fantastic business and a competent airline. The business-hacker in me gets thrilled by all the little refinements one can see in the Southwest process.

Things that let them offer better service significantly more affordably than their competitors. Processes to make due with fewer attendants, for example.

All I know for certain is that I can fly a 1.5 hour Southwest flight, check my bag for free (if I so desire), get a free soda (or 2), and a free snack.
"is this artifact objectionable to humans"

is the same as

"will this incorrect behavior be noticed" and then removing the test that failed.

And testing was always about testing everything that could conceivably break. Unless you are developing math libraries, you should not need (or be expected to) test if 2 + 2 is 4 or that if 1.1 * 3 is 3.3 and not 3.30000000000003.
This is exactly how our "interview" went.

Despite being given the same advice by others that had been through the process we still foolishly wasted time preparing a short 1 minute pitch.

We might have had a better result if we'd invested more time in getting the user experience in our demo right and answering the one critical question - "Why would people want this?"

Don't make the same mistake we did. :)
The one between correct and works-for-the-customer?
London Dreams 2009 Free Hindi Movie Mp3 Songs Download
"Download London Dreams Mp3 Songs, Mp3 Music
Director : Vipul Shah
Cast: Salman Khan, Ajay Devgan, Asin, Om Puri, Khalid Azmi, Michael Gamarano, Rannvijay Singh, Babsy Artner
Music Director: A R Rahman
Screenplay: Shridhar Raghavan
Year: 2009
Download all London Dreams movie songs in one clicks and also London Dreams wallpapers can be download here in"
Linux is a system by, and for hackers. That pretty much sums it up.
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14213.html gives background info on what the crossdomain.xml file is for, for those like me who hadn't come across it before.

Wouldn't you use htaccess rules (or similar) to prevent the .xml file from being accessed except from domains who were to be allowed flash crossdomain access, belt and braces as it were?? Certainly you'd put it as a deny in robots.txt, no?
We should play together in a game some time ... because if all this wasn't obvious to you, I would love to take some of your money!
I did notice the point about apt-get as being broadly applicable. However, thanks to Fink I have apt-get on OSX which works dandy for almost everything I've tried to install.

You wouldn't have mentioned it if you hadn't run into problems, so I would imagine there are probably some pretty rough edges around native libraries. As such, I considered that those comments must also be specific to native programming.
This webpage is much better than the one launched earlier. Good luck :)
New Resque Web UI
I also found this:

"VoltDB is an independent, Boston area-based company co-founded by DBMS R&D pioneer Mike Stonebraker and startup veteran Andy Palmer, working in stealth mode on the next-generation of OLTP DBMS."

So it's a biased legend. Sincerely if one is investing a lot in something like VoltDB this buzz about NoSQL DBs and especially the fact that they are starting to be actually used to get work done can be a problem.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, that is what these type of tools do.
Why would he be?

I don't mean to troll, and perhaps I missed the tongue-in-cheek element, but this kind of corny quote means nothing. Canada did not fight a war for the "land of the free" and is doing quite fine in its slavery to the British crown, thank you.
I'm using Twitter as a link recorder. I modified a Python-based bot to scrape links off an IRC channel and publish them on a private twitter feed that only my friends from that channel can see.
The Byzantine empire had its ups and downs like any empire. It lasted longer than Roman Empire (per conventional definition of the term).

It is a shame that the Western education system downplays the significance and influence of the Byzantine empire on the world. The period known as the Dark Age, was only "dark" in the Western Europe. During the period, Byzantine Empire was a refuge for civilization.
I wish someone would hire the people the team behind Pixlr to create an Office-replacement. Pixlr is the first (and to date, only) web application that has truly felt like working on a native, desktop application to me.

I think if someone were to adopt the Pixlr model and create a lightweight Flash-based solution to this, I think they would have the flexibility to create an experience as rich as Office, and start stealing customers.

However, I'm more and more impressed with the Cappucino apps I'm seeing, so there are clearly many possible solutions to this problem.
get real mate
Slight sidenote. On an 800x480 screen, overflow:hidden is a royal pain.
Network Effects And Scale Economies (aka Spolsky vs. Heinemeier)
Rickety old planes and charging for things that are free on other airlines (headphones, drinks). What's not to love? Did I mention the competent and attractive staff?
Visual Studio 2010: Visualizing dependencies
Unreal Development Kit Released
Jason Scott: Preserving Our Digital Pre-History
I'm sure they have. One of their founders wrote it.

I did't expect much from the site, and their plans seem quite grandiose. Then I saw the founders, and suddenly it seemed plausible.
Thank you for the great post on a subject near and dear to many of us.

I am a single founder who constantly wonders if I should be. I have founded 2 startups before and both imploded solely because of founder issues. One had 4 of us and I spent more than half my time playing referee. I will never go through that again. AFAIC, nothing is more important than being in business with the right people (except having plenty of customers, maybe.)

I am working hard and steady on my new venture, but I do not actively recruit potential co-founders. I freely share what I'm working on (hinting at opportunities for co-founders) and sit back to see what happens. Since I believe the single most important trait of a good co-founder is sheer determination, I hope someone will come to me insisting, "We should do this...," "I could do that...," "Let's try this...", etc. Sorry to say, this strategy hasn't worked too well, but I'd still rather be alone than be with someone who doesn't push as hard as I do.

I know about half a dozen excellent people who I'd love as co-founders, but all have mortgages, families, and other commitments. Our startup would always be a child to me, but only a step-child to them. So I don't push.

I understand pg's concern about single founder startups; they're a lot of work! There are many times I wish I had someone to share with or help me out. But under the circumstances, I'd rather plow along, always positioning myself to have a co-founder, but just as ready to launch alone if need be. I'm not afraid to do that and I don't think other single co-founders should be either.

OP's links were great and for a single co-founder, a little reassuring. Who is fauigerzigerk? I don't recognize him here.

OP's discussion about the "bozo" factor was just silly. Sure, if you're still in school, you should have no trouble finding suitable co-founders. But as you get a little older, there are many good reasons for being a single founder without being a bozo. Those of us who are should remain open to accepting the right co-founder, but in the meantime, just keep on working hard.
Wherefore Art Thou Agile?
If I ask the client between shipping a bug now and then and developing twice as slow, I know what he'll tell me.

(edit: twice as slow is about the same as twice as expensive)

Shipping bugs is not a show stopper. It's not even serious. What is serious is developing a live, production app without any consideration for bugs: backups (at least a couple of very different kinds) and control keys. A control key can be anything which will be visibly not ok when there's a bug somewhere.
Patrons get to directly tell you what to create, where a fan is get's to tell you if they liked what you created.
Heh, waiting for the post-interview phone call was a real nail-biter, we basically spent the entire evening waiting for the phone to ring. But it didn't.

It didn't even occur to us that they might call our land line back home until we got the email the next morning. Remotely checking the answering machine was fun too, hadn't used that feature in ages and the code didn't work (turns out you can't send DTMF tones when calling via Skype).

At the time we weren't sure if they give everyone a call or just the ones they accept, so we didn't take the absence of a call as a 'no', but kept wondering. In the end, we got the answer about 26 (pretty exciting) hours after we left the interview room.

So, unless you're a thrill seeker, put your cell number in the application :-)
I think the key point is more about how YC operates. At least from afar, it seems that they stick to the model that worked for PG and company, which means they strongly favor having cofounders. PG has also said, repeatedly, that they do occasionally found a single founder, so they're not dogmatic about it, just heavily biased.

An important thing to keep in mind is that you don't want a "cargo cult co founder", where you are trying to sign someone up "because you're supposed to have one".
Thanks for the insight into the process. That sounds a lot more useful than an actual interview, because it seems like you are learning something from the meeting through the brainstorming.
It's amusing to actually look at the source code of this. It's a single file, here: http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/forgeplucker/trunk/bugplucker.py?...

Reading it, it looks like a total hack job by a poor programmer. For example, HTML parsing it done by a bunch of regular expressions. Which include stuff like

# Yes, Berlios generated \r<BR> sequences with no \n
text = text.replace("\r<BR>", "\r\n")
# And Berlios generated doubled </TD>s
text = text.replace("</TD></TD>", "</TD>")

All the pain of maintaining these little cases could have been removed by simply running the page being walked through an actual HTML parser that produces a DOM tree. Similarly the function dehtmlize contains a limit set of HTML attributes that it will convert (e.g. it does not convert &nbsp;).

Also, then you get stuff like:

# First, strip out all attributes for easier parsing
text = re.sub('<TR[^>]+>', '<TR>', text, re.I)
text = re.sub('<TD[^>]+>', '<TD>', text, re.I)
text = re.sub('<tr[^>]+>', '<TR>', text, re.I)
text = re.sub('<td[^>]+>', '<TD>', text, re.I)

Why have you got four expressions there? They are all doing case insensitive matching yet there are upper and lowercase versions of each.

Hmm. The rest of the code is really pretty crappy. He could have just read the thing into lxml and have done XPath queries to extract data. It would have had the advantage of making clear what parts of the page he was extracting and made maintenance easy.
With regards to the "bozo" thing - I read it a little differently. I took it to mean that anyone can be committed to their own crazy idea; but when you are able to talk someone else into being committed to it, it acts as a kind of validation of the idea. So, that makes it a handy litmus test for investors to use since you've already convinced at least one other person that it's a good idea.
Sony Ericsson futurist on open source and the speed of innovation
Interesting read and nice success story...

On DirectedEdge home, can I enter any search term, or does this need to be a well formatted Wikipedia entry url ?
Today is the 54th Anniversary of the Invention of the Flux Capacitor
Not sure why you got downvoted. Thanks for the note, I appreciate it and will look into this.
Sourceforge launches Geeknet
What I find truly amazing is that I don't see it covered by the big news providers yet. Not on NYT, not on CNN, not on Reuters, not on NPR.
What I like about the NoSQL crowd
ops, yes of course
I believe if you feel you have found a good co-founder, go for it; it is much, much better to have a co-founder than to go solo. But a bad co-founder is worse than no co-founder.
This is probably the first time in six years that I wished I had a Windows machine or image laying around.
I hope someone will come to me insisting, "We should do this...," "I could do that...," "Let's try this...", etc.

I find that my customers are very good at telling me what I should do to make Tarsnap better. :-)
If you type the beginning of an article name it should autocomplete after a sec (it's a little slower than it should be...) There's also an easter-egg you can use:

http://www.directededge.com/?Y%20Combinator
Space elevator climbs nearly 1km high
Indeed! My Docs, Calender, Mail, youtube details, my web history at work & home(I Use Chrome), analytics for my sites, checkout for my payments, adwords for...well my advertising.

I think I forgot how reliant I am upon Google.
Belvedere is particularly mind-bending:

http://www.andrewlipson.com/escher/belvedere.html
IIRC Unreal (the game) does work on Linux. Too bad UDK doesn't seem to work on Linux. OTOH I do have a dual boot machine with Win XP (though I haven't booted into windows in years now).....
Setting Up Gitosis On Ubuntu
The Afghan military structure has not changed all that significantly in the last 200 years. We know how to beat them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinks_War

Aerial bombardment of population centres works fine, collective punsihment, having minimising enemy military and civilian casualties come behind
1. Casualties you care about
2. Cost
3. Extending treatis meant to only rule under reciprocity to people who don't give a fuck about the Geneva Convention.

If you can't follow standard U.S. Small Colonial War tactics pre-WW2 (kill them until they give up, then and only then give them sweeties) you can use the Strategic Hamlets doctrine that worked fine in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan for the Soviets after they7 stopped trying to run the country and would settle for not having any one unsympathetic to them running it.

http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2009/10/arguing-about-a...

As both the Soviets and the Americans show this probably isn't possible for demotic states. Imperial commitments aren't popular.
Looks like an over-sized gaming console to me -- like if someone created 10 times larger PS3 for a videogame store display.
It seems to me that the pitch is in the application anyway. I can't imagine why they'd want you to just repeat yourselves.
Hp tv tuner
1909 Russia... Photographed in Color
Make Thematic Maps With Cartographer.js
Another tiny UI thing- for me the search bar overlays one of the results. For the easter egg I thought they had left pg out of the results until I realized it was underneath the search bar.
You get an email when you don't get in with a nice couple of lines explaining why.

Our email came in the early hours of the morning. I'd encourage you not to respond to it, at least for a few days. I felt compelled at the time to send a few paragraphs the next morning responding to some of the criticisms. Retrospectively it probably wasn't that all that useful to anyone.

It must be an exhausting 3 days for the YC team. I don't think there are enough hours in the day for them to call all the unsuccessful interviewees. Especially when some of them (like us) will want to take more of their time responding to feedback.

The quantity and quality of the questions and feedback you get in the short 10 minute interview alone is brilliant. Even though we didn't get funded it's had a massive impact on the way I think about things. I'd fly out from the UK to do it again even if there wasn't any chance of funding.
Riot.js: JavaScript port of the lean fast unit test framework
I've been avoiding the "finding a cofounder for the sake of having a cofounder" mistake myself. It gets lonely sometimes, coding and trying to work out user experience all alone, but I'd rather do it alone (for now anyway) then have a cofounder who I have to babysit. Maybe I should send my wife to take some Web Design classes and teach her to find her way around jquery :-)
Startups.com - stackoverflow for startups knowledge
No problem! Thanks for looking out for us netbook users.
The electric eel inspires a new type of battery
The story of how the dinosaurs disappeared is getting more and more complicated
Robots for Real
Just having <allow-access-from domain="* "/> in your crossdomain.xml doesn't mean you have a security issue.

In case of an API, it makes perfect sense to allow crossdomain flash access. After all, this is what an API is made for, allowing access for third party services.

It is only problematic if you don't have proper authentication, e.g. when a flash app can use the cookie of the user to authenticate.
Sometimes growth is the problem. I've worked for companies who were great when they were small, eager companies with solid products, and screwed everything up trying to "go big".
This is really off-topic, so I apologise to everyone, but I really have to point this out to my American 'Net neighbours:

The expression is "to make do", not "to make due". Ask anyone from an English-speaking country that doesn't pronounce "due" and "do" the same (ie, not in North America).

Thankyou.
SPAM, or am I missing something?
That is not exactly what the article is about though. It's talking about the positive network externalities involved in tech products, and the conclusions that you need to draw from that. In other words, in some cases you have to go big, at least in terms of market share. Think about eBay - everyone sells there because everyone buys there and vice versa. Unless they shared data, it would be difficult/inefficient to have 100's of small eBays, whereas with a bug tracker, it's not really that big a deal if I use redmine and someone else uses JIRA and someone else uses spolsky's thing.
200 years ago it would not even occur to Joe Afghan that he could advance his strategic goals by communicating directly with the civilian population of his enemy. Now the Taliban has it own channel on Youtube. That's why I say they're 4th-generation; this is high level information warfare and it has very successfully fulfilled the strategic goal of preventing the West from bringing its full firepower to bear.

Reagan bankrupted the USSR by forcing them to compete with Star Wars. Will the Taliban bankrupt us by forcing us to spend all our money on UAVs? Maybe not, but they can still make making war on them prohibitively expensive.
You do make some interesting points.

There might be an absolute authority of this sort if we could just ask God whether or not a given theory conformed to reality, but in practice there is no absolute authority for judging work in science -- and you certainly find plenty of disagreement between scientists once you go beyond textbook material.

Yes, you certainly do, even in the text book material. In fact, we have much better theories than Newton's Three Laws of Motion, but they are still taught because they are close enough for almost all practical applications and much simpler than appeals to relatively. But, even if reality does not always yield its secrets easily we know it has them. It is not at all clear to me that there is an objective to literary criticism.

Being wrong about the kinds of subjects that the humanities touches on (e.g. relations between human beings) can also have real negative consequences, if you are not a robot.

We have been talking about literary criticism. Some areas of the traditional humanities are clearly of great practical value at least in some cases. I did considerable research into certain areas of history as military intelligence analyst at one time and it was of tremendous value. Similarly, the study of languages is of obvious utility, and I have already provided an overview of why I see utility in art. I do not see how a knowledge of literary criticism would help someone relate to human beings in general though and I do not yet understand any value to it other than to those who make their living at it.

I know you said that it has value to those who value it. And there is certainly some truth to that, but that is circular and does not explain why.

* but the notion that critical and aesthetic judgments are "meaningless" is one that's been thoroughly discredited over the past 50 years.*

Could you provide a reference or explanation? I am not at all trying to argue that they are meaningless, but that is far from obviously true.

gain, if you believe that, then you believe that there is something which has intrinsic value -- utility.

Actually I am saying that things which have utility have value because of that utility. That is not precisely the same thing, though I will admit at that point I am splitting hairs. I do take it as obvious (and you do not seem to disagree) that something which has utility clearly has value, but I do not see any intrinsic reason why anything without utility must have value.

Again, I personally believe from a Christian standpoint that there are such things, but it is not obvious to me.

In any case, it's not clear to me why someone looking at things from an atheistic viewpoint would choose utility as his yardstick for value.

I'm certainly not trying to say that they would. What I am saying is that there is no obvious reason that they would value other things, while it is obvious they would value utility.
You shouldn't expect them to remember what was in the application. If they do remember something it will probably only be one line.