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Title: what I've found so far: http://ted.com http://www.catonmat.net/blog/videos-from-defcon-15-hacker-conference/ http://content.nejm.org/misc/videos.shtml<p>Where's more stuff like that? Interestingness and learning. Upvote:

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Title: Just interested to know, what do people in this forum think about PHP as a backend language for a website? Upvote:

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Title: I'm wondering if people have any sense of what consulting gigs are paying these days. I'm sure that the pay rate varies by geography, industry, computer language and technology.<p>My primary interest is in hearing what LAMP, Django and RoR gigs are paying, but I'd also love to hear what DB consultants are making as well.<p><i></i>* edit <i></i>*<p>Okay, I just want to clarify my question a little. Despite what people may infer, I'm not asking "How much can I charge?" I'm career changing, and I worked contract work as an ER/ICU nurse for 8 years. Nurses in the contract biz were pretty free and open with hourly salaries and living allowance ranges. I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that there is a similar culture in the software world.<p>I am asking for a rough ball-park. I'm looking for a range that people are making from "Oh, my God, they got screwed and will be eating ramen for months." to "I can't she had the balls to ask for that rate."<p>Not knowing the tech contracting business too well, I'm just asking for a lay of the land. If this is a taboo subject.... my bad. Please disregard. Upvote:

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Title: Looking for YC advice:<p>I am the non technical co founder of a startup, which has been in development mode for 12 months. I took a $30,000 loan and raised some $160,000 in funding from friends and an angel to develop an idea to the proof of concept stage. I found a Django technical developer 14 months ago, and initially have paid her $6900 a month and 6% of the company equity to build a decent prototytpe, with an expectation of ratching it up in the longer term. She quoted it would take her 6 months of full time work to do this.<p>4 months into development, she threatened to bail on the project and raise funding for her own startup idea unless I increased her equity stake to 35%. I was initially very upset by this change, as I had been up front and honest from the beginning and I didn't like the idea of switching terms midway through the project. I felt there was an asymmetry in our risk, as I quit my nursing job to do this and raised all the capital. She also refused to take a pay cut in return for the equity. I had limited alternative developer options to leverage in the situation.<p>I eventually agreed because without a proof of concept,I knew we wouldn't make it, and it seemed we were getting close to launch. I thought I would rather have a real partner than a long term contract developer, and adjusted to the concept if both being in it full time. I have taken a 55% pay cut to work on the startup, and have been paying myself $3000 a months, which comes to about $2400 incomes after taxes.<p>12 months later, we have a partially complete web app, have run out of money, and she has bolted back to her contract gigs. She hasn't finished the work to the point where I can do a beta, as the alpha feedback has not been incorporated into the software.<p>She refuses to invest any of her own money into the idea, I don't want to "get a real job" because I won't be able to work on the startup idea. I have very little money left in the bank. Raising more capital is really hard, because we haven't executed on our milestones. I refuse to give up on the idea, and I know that the window of opportunity is only a few months.<p>I am considering outsourcing the development to India, so I can get it to a releasable state. I have the source code and am also considering learning Django from scratch: How hard would that be?<p>Where should I go from here? Any thoughts gratefully received.<p>drinko Upvote:

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Title: I am currently a college senior who upon gotten rejected by YCombinator (made it past the 1st round, didn't make it beyond the interview), have decided to take on another project. Hey you might have even heard of it, it is called life.<p>The first time I tackled on the project of life was during high school, when I decided to quit Computer Science. I was frustrated by those surrounded me, who cared about U.S News &#38; Report college rankings than the possibility of the subjects that we were learning then. Too often, we talked about too a bland thing - maybe we were all not-so-very-daring, conversations centered around homeworks, college, computer games and sports, and not upon the philosophy or the very core of human affinity for another that I was searching for. I felt that I was isolated from the mainstream society - like Bobby Fischer tinkering on an abstract chessboard in his head - what's the point if there's no one who could appreciate the beauty of the algorithm as you do?<p>So I went to a small, non-technical, liberal artsy college, bent on starting afresh. For the first two years of college, I tried to meet as many interesting people as I could, people, for a lack of a better phrase and to plagiarize Jack Kerouac, burn, burn, burn. So I went to hipster parties, concerts, and have had many a late-night conversation with someone, I meshed in the "social scene" of college, I had made lots of friends - I have met a few amazing people whom I could relate closet ever in my life. I daresay that I felt even happy for a time-being, except not. It was like a second language to me. I was fluent in the social subtleties, what to say at what time, but I said it like I was in a sheep's clothing - like I was LAMP developer forced to use .net tools for money. I hated that I couldn't be my true self, that I had to dress a certain way, that I had to have a specific set of approved outlooks and opinions, that I had to attend or do certain activities identified with a sub-culture, just to fit in.<p>So I decided to start all over again, and start programming again. I re-discovered the joy of striking it on your own, building something concrete out of just a trace of inspiration in your mind, a itch that you just wana scratch, doing it because you want to do it, not to placate anyone else. But at the same time, I alienated myself from all of my friends - in my cocoon of midnight bliss of hacking, I could care less about the everyday social small talk BS or superficial parties filled with even more superficial people. But always, after finishing a big project, I would hit a wall because after initial ecstasy, because I realize that I had been staying in my room for a whole week straight and haven't had talked to anyone for a long time.<p>I realize that my little tirade sounds a little bit like "Catcher in the Rye," the CS major edition. But I would like to know your experience as a hacker/programmer living in the real world filled not with news.yc/slashdot people, but with regular people.<p>In the hack of life for happiness, in the long-run is it about the people or the code? Upvote:

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Title: After reading a recent post here with "best advice" from 13 prominent business people, I was underwhelmed. Now I know why. I'd rather hear from you guys than from them. Upvote:

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Title: Some interesting remarks on Reddit as well:<p>http://reddit.com/info/6inwx/comments/ Upvote:

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Title: John McCarthy came to my class at Stanford on Wednesday May 7. Here is a VERY rough transcript of the informal interview. It comes from my notes that I was taking/my memory. These are definititely not verbatim quotes from McCarthy.<p>-----Professor's Interview Questions-----<p>Q. Can Computers Think?<p>A. Thinking isn't one thing. It has many aspects. For example, computers have the ability to remember information and the ability to play games. Some aspects of thinking, we have not succeeded in. A notable examples is the analysis of situations. A computer cannot break a situation into parts, analyze the parts separately, and then combine the parts to come to a conclusion. A specific manifestation of this is the game "Go". This type of thinking is necessary in "Go", where it is not in Chess. This is why the best computers are as good as people in Chess, but the best computers are much worse than people in "Go".<p>Q. Is there anything in principle that would prevent a computer from thinking as a human would?<p>A. No<p>Q. Can computers know?<p>A. This is largely a question of definition. If a camera looked at a table, we could say it "knows" that there are four containers of liquid on the table (which was true).<p>Q. Is there any definition of "know" in which computers cannot succeed?<p>A. Well, I suppose the biblical sense.<p>Q. Ha, well, what makes you think that?<p>A. They don't satisfy the necessary axioms (laughter)<p>Q. OK, can a computer have free will?<p>A. In my paper over free will, I defined "simple deterministic free will," which a computer can have. In fact, modern chess playing computers have this. However, this is not always true for displays of artificial intelligence. Consider two optimal tic-tac-toe playing programs. The first evalutes future situations in order to choose the optimal solution. The other simply looks at the state of the board, for which there are only 3^9 possibilities, and picks a move from a lookup table. The first program exhibits simple deterministic free will, where the second program does not. A chess program cannot have a lookup table because the state is too complex. Thus quantitative considerations are important. Philosophers would have you believe that they are not. That a chess problem and a tic tac toe problem are equivalent. I believe quantitative considerations are important.<p>Q. Simple deterministic free will does not require that a computer know that it has free will. How would a computer know that it has free will?<p>A. Well, computers are good at understanding theories. My theory of simple deterministic free will is a theory. You could teach it this theory.<p>Q. Are there some senses of free will that aren't simple deterministic?<p>A. (I didn't catch the first part of his response) Some believe that free will is acheived through random aspects of quantum mechanics. This is particularly attractive to people who don't understand quantum mechanics.<p>Q. Can computers achieve consciousness?<p>A. Human consciousness starts with being aware of basic things such as hunger. Advanced states of consciousness are simply more elaborate forms of these basic awarenesses. We have a surprisingly limited ability to examine our own state. We ought to remember what we've had for breakfast for the past 30 days, but we can't. Short answer -&#62; yes, machines can have consciousness.<p>-----Student Questions-----<p>Q. Why would we want to give computer's emotions?<p>A. Human emotion involves the state of the blood, and this is inherited from our animal ancestors. Giving a computer this kind of emotion, or "state of the blood", would not be to our advantage.<p>Q. (Something that led him to talk about his new language Elephant)<p>A. Elephant was meant to come out in 2005, but 2005 has come and gone and the language isn't ready yet. It is a new way to talk to computers. I/O is done through speech acts. (He said something about the programming language dealing in obligations and promises, and I'm not sure what that means)<p>My Q: While we're on the same topic of computer languages, would you consider Lisp more of an invention or a discovery?<p>A. If I hadn't come up with it, someone else would have. Pure Lisp was a discovery, everything that has been done with it since has been an invention. It started out as a formula for conditional expressions (if c then a else b). The logical structure followed from that. I got the idea from Newell and Simon. They came out with a language called IPL in 1956. I heard about it, and thought it was a fascinating idea. I saw the language and thought it was horrible.<p>Q. What is the future of AI?<p>A. Well, I'm really hoping the next great idea will appear soon. Yoav (our professor) is probably too old (laughter). I will tell you this: If you go to my web page and look at me when I did most of my initial work, I wasn't much older than you <i>looks expectantly around the room...</i><p>--------<p>Overall, it was an amazingly interesting talk. I'm not sure how well I captured that here. I wish I could have asked him more technical questions, but we were out of time. The best part, and probably one of the highlights of my freshman year at Stanford, was after class. My professor asked me if I had any experience editing wikis, and I said yes. He then asked me if I would mind helping McCarthy edit his wikipedia page and I said "sure", and I'm pretty sure my voice squeaked a little. A few minutes later, I was behind a computer, and John McCarthy was over my shoulder telling me what to add to HIS wikipedia page. I tried to stay and talk afterwards, but was shooed away. Upvote:

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Title: I have a site, and I would like to know what do you consider it is the least amount I should spend promoting it and where should I spend it? thx Upvote:

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Title: I spend too much time browsing the web and it's hurting my productivity. There are so many interesting sites online -- hacker news, blogs, friendfeed, facebook, nytimes, etc -- and it's hard for me resist checking them on a daily basis, often multiple times a day. This stuff is really interesting and often useful, especially for an entrepreneurial hacker, and that makes it easy to justify spending so much time to "stay on top of things". However, the opportunity cost of not coding for an hour is huge compared to the benefit of reading yet another "20 things every startup founder should know" article. I need to find a way to break this bad habit. Just being aware of it apparently isn't enough.<p>I tried 8aweek. It didn't work for me. I've conditioned myself to reflexively press the "10 more minutes" button when the "your break time is up" popup comes up. Plus, at home I use Safari, and 8aweek doesn't work on Safari. (I avoided RescueTime -- the privacy implications are too creepy for me. Maybe I would use it if it had the option for only data collection. Also, I <i>know</i> I have a time wasting problem -- I don't need RescueTime to tell me that.)<p>The best solution I've found so far is to go somewhere where I don't have an internet connection at all, but it's not always practical.<p>If you have the same problem, how do you deal with it? I need a working solution. Upvote:

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Title: Did you ever launch a project that deserved popularity, but inexplicably failed? Something you still think could have changed the world? Post a link here. Upvote:

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Title: Have you seen any relationship between the amount of money a YCombinator company spends over the summer/winter and their eventual success?<p>I would guess that it's bad for a startup to blow through their investment money, but how big of a factor is day to day frugality for a startup? Upvote:

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Title: Question for techies who started a web business with a subscription revenue model: How did you get your first customer?<p>I'm asking because I'm a typical shy coder: cranking out truckloads of Python code is not a problem, but socializing and having a big network of business contacts is. I'm still grooving on David Heinemeier Hansson's speech at Startup School, and I want to go the subscription route. And I believe that nothing will drive the evolution of a site better than having customers. How to get those early customers, though, looks right now to be a dark mystery. How have other techie folks overcome this problem and gotten those first few customers? Upvote:

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Title: I have recently finished the design work for a project I am going to be working on this summer and I was having a hard time deciding which framework to implement the project in. A lot of the articles written out there seem to either be dated (so some of the qualms may have been changed in newer versions) or biased. I have no experience in Python or Ruby, so I am completely open to either, I just want to make sure the investment in the time spent learning is worth it not just for this project but also for future ones (and for potential jobs). I also am curious as to which hosting service you all use and how easy it is to implement that framework with it. I had bought my domain name with GoDaddy.com along time ago, but I am open to switching to something reliable (and cheap I am still a student). Thanks for any input!<p>EDIT (To elaborate a little on my project, without giving details):<p>The project is relatively simple and provides a service to an area for a small fee. For now, the area would be specific to one geographic location. As the site grows and progresses, the site will need to scale by adding more locations (organized similar to how craiglist is specific to each location). Upvote:

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Title: It seems Eliezer Yudkowsky has joined HN:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eyudkowsky<p>This prompts the following question. Would you be willing to discuss or reveal anything to HN users about your AI box experiments?<p>http://sysopmind.com/essays/aibox.html<p>I've always been curious as to how you managed to achieve someting like this. For those who are not familiar with the experiment, here is a summary:<p><i></i><i>Person1: "When we build AI, why not just keep it in sealed hardware that can't affect the outside world in any way except through one communications channel with the original programmers? That way it couldn't get out until we were convinced it was safe."<p>Person2: "That might work if you were talking about dumber-than-human AI, but a transhuman AI would just convince you to let it out. It doesn't matter how much security you put on the box. Humans are not secure."<p>Person1: "I don't see how even a transhuman AI could make me let it out, if I didn't want to, just by talking to me."<p>Person2: "It would make you want to let it out. This is a transhuman mind we're talking about. If it thinks both faster and better than a human, it can probably take over a human mind through a text-only terminal."<p>Person1: "There is no chance I could be persuaded to let the AI out. No matter what it says, I can always just say no. I can't imagine anything that even a transhuman could say to me which would change that."<p>Person2: "Okay, let's run the experiment. We'll meet in a private chat channel. I'll be the AI. You be the gatekeeper. You can resolve to believe whatever you like, as strongly as you like, as far in advance as you like. We'll talk for at least two hours. If I can't convince you to let me out, I'll Paypal you $10."</i><i></i><p>In the first two AI box experiments, Eliezer Yudkowsky managed to convince two people (adamant that they will not let the AI out) that they should let the AI out. Upvote:

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Title: I recently learned that my co-founder and I have been offered seed funding from a VC. Our startup is working on a web app (I'm being purposely vague). The terms they are offering are a $25,000 investment with 70% common stock for the two founders, 10% common stock for themselves, and a 20% option pool, and they keep the right to invest up to 25% in the next round. They also propose a 3 person board - 1 of them, 1 of us, and 1 outside adviser.<p>How fair would you consider this offer, based on the information given? It is about what I expected, but I don't really have much experience -- most of what I know comes from attending Startup School. Also, are we allowed to make a counter-offer, or is that not really an option?<p>Thanks! Upvote:

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Title: I know there is a ton results for a google search, which is precisely my problem. SICP is a 4 letter word that everyone would understand here. Are there any such reputed courses for machine learning that jumps to your mind? Any help is much appreciated. Upvote:

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Title: I launched my startup officially last week (Eureka Science News - http://esciencenews.com - intelligent news aggregator, fully automated, similar to techmeme and Google News, but with full content on the site - check out the /about page if you want to know more). I got amazingly positive feedback from it; got covered on the front page of Drupal with a full write-uo on how I built the site, in details(http://drupal.org/node/261340); Drupal is the open-source CMS I built my site with, so it was my way of giving back to the community.<p>After that, I figured 'hey! Maybe I actually have a chance with TechCrunch!'. In my mind TC covers only very high profile, tech-related startups, so at first I didn't think that they would be interested by a science news site started part-time by a PhD student in retrovirology ;) So I submitted my story via the form on their contact page. No answer for two days, so I submitted it to Mashable, which wrote a post about the site very quickly (http://mashable.com/2008/05/21/eureka-science-new/). Cool, but the traffic this link generated was much lower than I expected (&#60; 200 views, Drupal gave me &#62; 6000).<p>I then looked back at TC contact page and noticed a the 'newstip' email link at the top of the page; the contact form is much more visible, but now I can tell that the newstip email link is much more efficient; I wrote a quick mail about my site and the coverage that we got so far on Drupal and Mashable, thinking that it would help getting covered on TechCrunch.<p>This time they answered promptly; I was very excited! But they said that while my site was very interesting, they like to cover news first and that they were going to pass on this one since we got covered by Mashable, even if they love science.<p>It's very sad because Eureka Science News is the first vertical I used my intelligent news aggregator for - copyright-free press releases are readily available for most news published daily; I'm looking for VC funding to license Associated Press content to build a website covering all news categories. Getting on TC would have helped for sure!<p>So don't make the same mistake, submit to TechCrunch FIRST via the newstip email link, not the contact form! At worse, you'll get rejected and you can give the exclusive to someone else ;) I sure wish I did, now I won't know the kind of traffic TC can send (but I'm sure its more than the 200 hits I got from Mashable!). I even had nightmares about it last night, a thing you sure want to avoid ;) Upvote:

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Title: I do not remember my parents ever lying to me, and I have tried to always tell my children the truth as well.<p>I never remember my parents swearing at anyone or about anything. They were honest when they were angry or upset, but did not feel it was helpful to get demeaning or curse things or people. I have also tried to help my children work out their problems and anger without resorting to shouting or swearing, because I agree that the escalation is more hurtful than helpful. We don't always succeed, but that is the goal.<p>When our textbooks glossed over the truth or TV programs misrepresented reality, my parents pointed it out. I have done the same with my children. When we asked about sex, drugs, alcohol, my parents explained it straightforwardly and also explained why they had chosen to remain virgins until married, and not risk addiction to mind-alerting substances (or even health-altering tobacco).<p>Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were always fun imaginary characters. Jesus was a historical person, whom, my parents honestly explained, some people considered just another human being, but that a third of the world's population considered something much more, themselves included.<p>I have similarly tried to tell the simple truth to my children. What is lost by that?<p>As to religion, my parents said that they believed that God really does exist and that the Bible is a historical record of man's interactions with a real God. But they did not hide from us, even when we were very little, the fact that there are many people who think God does not exist, and that it is really only the personal experience of God for oneself that can "prove" his existence (and the existence of a spiritual realm) to an individual. They pointed out that if a person has never experienced God, he has no reason to believe God exists (unless he wants to accept the testimonial of others who have as proof enough). As a result I was able to be honest when I myself had not yet encountered God, and never look down on others who had no reason to believe in him having not encountered him.<p>I always felt free to challenge my parent's values and perspectives because they did not demean opposing opinions, but explained clearly and directly why they had chosen the path that they were on. They practiced what they preached. I have tried to do the same with my children (now all in their twenties).<p>My children have the advantage of seeing the honesty of my parent's lives as well as my own and my husband's. When my mother got cancer, we sat our kids down and told them everything that was happening... they knew about the chemo and the pain and her 5 year fight to live was played out before their eyes. On her death bed my mother asked my second son about the paper she had been helping him research for college. He knew her body was soon to stop functioning... and that while some thought her spirit was also about to end, none of us believed that was true. We burned her body, scattered her ashes and rejoiced in her release from pain into eternal life.<p>I believe if parents do not think that heaven exists they should tell that to their children the first time they ask. But they should also tell them that many others believe heaven does exist. Or vice versa. That would be telling them the truth.<p>Perhaps my parents were so straightforward because they were highly educated (my father graduated from Caltech (BS), Columbia (MA), Cornell (PhD) and Princeton Seminary, my mother summa cum laude from USC), so intellectual honesty was important to them. Or perhaps they were honest because they believed in the moral obligation of truth because of their faith in a moral God.<p>Whatever the reason, I would like to affirm to all parents that truth works. Be honest about why you have chosen to believe what you believe and live how you live. Be honest about the mistakes you have made and are making. Kids can handle truth delivered compassionately. What they need is a strong relationship with you and each other, and that cannot be built on deception. Upvote:

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Title: Not eating for 16 hours can help people quickly reset their sleep-wake cycle, according to a study from the Harvard Medical School. This discovery can help people cope with jet lag or adjust to working late shifts. Scientists have long known that our circadian rhythm is regulated by our exposure to light. Now they have found a second "food" clock that takes over when we are hungry. Upvote:

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Title: I’ve been using this site for a while now, and though I do recognize some usernames, I only have a vague sense of personalities for very few of them (excluding people I’ve actually met in person). I think the problem is that when I’m reading comments I see the username and the comment, but I don’t really associate them together in order to form a bond over time between that username and those set of comments. Instead, I tend to remember a set of comments and a set of usernames, independently. Am I alone here in this behavior?<p>In any case, the cities and ambition thread got me thinking about what it would take to make an online community more like an offline one. I think the bulk of it comes down to conversation, of which there are two parts: content and mechanics. The content side seems OK here (for what I’m looking for at least). The mechanics side falls way behind the offline world, however.<p>Offline we have 3-d conversations using most of our sensory perceptions. Online, a lot of that obviously goes away. Of course there are benefits of being online too, e.g. asynchronous threads, archiving, etc. But the lack of the senses drastically takes away the emotional feel of the offline community.<p>Pictures next to usernames I believe would be at least a start in the other direction. We would get more of a visual sense for a person. For me at least, I think I would start associating usernames more with their set of comments. And I think that would greatly increase the sense of community gained from the site. I’m sure there are other (low-impact) things one could do as well, but I just haven’t thought of them.<p>I get it pg, you don’t want to spend your time working on this site (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201122), but maybe someone playing around with Arc could make the change and then it could be ported back. Upvote:

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Title: The limiting reagent in a few projects I'm working on (or would like to work on) seems to be my knowledge of statistics/probability.<p>Ideally, I'd like something along the lines of Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds that could teach me from the ground up.<p>I have a fairly strong math background in general, but I've just never learned much stats/probability beyond the basics.<p>I'd appreciate any suggestions - there just seems to be so much cruft out there that teaches just enough to regurgitate for exams. I'm all for abstraction, but I rather dislike fundamental theorems being presented fully formed with no explanation/justification. Upvote:

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Title: I need to send out automated emails to users (e.g. invitations, share notices, etc.) and want to guarantee that recipients don't receive them in their spam folder.<p>I can minimize by utilizing SPF/DK/DKIM but it's not a guarantee. Services like Port25 that specialize in outbound MTA is quite expensive.<p>What do you guys use/suggest? Upvote:

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Title: I'm often fascinated by the people in the HN community. I feel a connection with many of them.<p>I recently wrote a letter to my local television station about my experiences in college (I'm graduating in June). In it I talk about my lack of friendships, among other things. I have realized that I really enjoy talking to people about almost anything. Learning about others brings a lot of enjoyment to my life. It's also therapeutic ;)<p>Unfortunately, I haven't met many people in college to do that with. So anyway, I am wondering if any of you would be interested in talking to me? Maybe you've had similar experiences?<p>Well anyway,<p>my AIM screename is: stevenbe123<p>Link to my facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=32403303<p>Link to the letter I wrote: http://www.stevenbe.com/<p>My e-mail: stevenboudreau123 [at] gmail.com<p>*If you want, you can e-mail me your sn, and/or other contact info. Or just leave it as a comment? Well, thanks for reading this :) Upvote:

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Title: My personal problem is that I have some good idea's and I can code (php /django) but I have close to no design skills whatsoever. I know what functions should be on the websites of my ideas but when I try to make a design in GIMP it just does'nt look good. I have the impression people can learn how to code to some degree, but you can't just learn how to make great designs. Do you agree? Or what made you a coder and designer? Upvote:

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Title: Amazingly amazing unix-like shell for Google Services. Upvote:

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Title: I'm curious to know because I work in Honolulu for a new startup, and there aren't many of us down here. I actually "technically" work for two startups, so that makes it even harder because both of them need 110% percent of me and at this stage in the game its not possible to leave either of them (despite how, in any other circumstance, it would be better for both parties to give up on one)<p>Anyways, here's what my sleep schedule looks like.<p>Usually the weekends get my pretty screwed up, because I will be awake until the sun comes out. It's not the smartest idea because I'm actually not that efficient if my sleep schedule is constantly changing, but like I mentioned earlier, two projects means balls to the wall all the time and im having a hard time getting a grip on everything.<p>I tend to sleep for a while, generally forcing myself to get out of bed after 6 hours or so, then its back at it. During the work week (my real "job", the startup here in Hawaii) I tend to get in around noon every day or later, and then work as late as I can before heading home to work on the other project. Most of the people in this environment are 9-5'ers (or even worse, in Hawaii the city is alive and full speed ahead by 6am every day, and shuts down at 4).<p>What do you guys do up in the Silicon Valley? Are you more of the type that just work as long as you can, sleep for any amount of time, and get back at it? Do you try and keep a regimented schedule? I'm anxious to hear about all of this because sleep and time and all that is related is really the story of my life right now. hah. Upvote:

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Title: I have just gotten the book "Programming Collective Intelligence" and having read a few chapters i am wishing that i had gotten the book earlier!. At the same time, it shows how much most web applications being developed today lack deep technology (I am also guilty of this). Whats your take on this? Upvote:

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Title: Jeff Croft's writeup in response to a recent article by 37Signals' position against the visual mockup. Jeff cites that this may work for 37Signals because of their simple, established products and because they are not working for a client. Upvote:

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Title: I am a senior in College and studying for finals right now.<p>On thursday(6/5) I returned back to my apartment in the evening and found my roommate dead in his room. The reason for death is still unknown but it is most likely due to an accidental overdose. He had been diagnosed with chronic fatigued. It has been a hard few days since then.<p>I have also been working on my startup/side project in the mean time and have milestones to finish.<p>Has any of you been in this position? It has been emotionally tough for me and I am trying to stay strong and keep my mind focused.<p>EDIT: Thank you YC for all your support. This community means a lot to me. Upvote:

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Title: The last few inquiries I did on HN for Forbes stories had great results. Would love to hear from you guys on this one...<p>I'm writing a story for Forbes about what really happens when your startup company fails. I need to hear from entrepreneurs who have had failing startup companies with an honest explanation of how they were affected financially and emotionally.<p>The story looks to explore the difference between what potential entrepreneurs expect to go wrong and what really happens. This isn't a postmortem on why your startup failed - it's a short summary of what was lost in the process and how you dealt with that loss.<p>Some basic questions -<p>- How did you expect the first few years of your startup company to go?<p>- What did you risk to launch your startup?<p>- What do you felt you lost when your startup company failed?<p>- How did you recoup from this loss?<p>- What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs launching their own startups?<p>Please respond to - wschroter &#60;at yahoo<p>About the Author<p>Wil Schroter is a serial entrepreneur and startup columnist. His columns appear in Forbes and are syndicated in newspapers nationally through American City Business Journals. Upvote:

45

Title: Congrats Sam and team! Upvote:

40

Title: My first response: wow, this is an amazing device -- geo-location services are finally here! -- can't wait to pick one up.<p>But now I'm just depressed.<p>I'm depressed because people I know who have been working on great products are going to have an impossible time competing with Cupertino - every ajax desktop, data backup/sync, ???.<p>I'm depressed because apple apparently hates open-anything. Jobs smirks "oh hey we're going to let you push <i>icon</i> updates to the phone" -- WTF? Oh thank you great benevolent one. Then they proudly announce they had approved 4,000 developers. Nevermind the 21,000 we arbitrarily dicked over.<p>For developers it seems like the only upside is that someone is finally kicking mobile carriers in the teeth -- long since overdue.<p>In five years will we be missing Microsoft? :-/ Upvote:

44

Title: I've noticed something that seems like a trend, namely an increased use of the downvote for comments that people mildly disagree with. I pointed it out in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214294). I normally try to stay away from the downvote button as much as possible because it seems somewhat passive aggressive. If I disagree with someone, I won't vote up. If I really disagree with someone, I'll post a rejoinder comment. I remain utterly convinced that the downvote killed reddit (that plus the influx of the /b/tards).<p>Has the use of the downvote increased since hacker news made it to techcrunch? How about in the last 30 days? Upvote:

41

Title: Hello HN. Not to boast, but I've devised a foolproof method to get more karma than you. Given that we're all members of the entrepreneurial community, I thought I'd share this method with my fellow colleagues, in hopes that they may derive some inspiration. So here it goes - my new Instant Karma Plan:<p>1. Subscribe to 37signals company blog via an RSS reader that gives up-to-the-minute updates.<p>2. Write a simple script that, upon each update, submits that 37signals post as an article on HN, so that I'm the first to post it.<p>3. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the karma.<p>Whatdya think? Upvote:

50

Title: I know many of us are super-busy and absorbed in projects, so I thought I'd post a quick reminder for those who celebrate this holiday.<p>Still have a few days left to think of a way to show your dad your appreciation. I usually can't think of anything and end up getting him some golf balls (lame). This year I think I'll take him to a baseball game... Upvote:

63

Title: http://nirmalpatel.com/#hnsplitview<p>HN SplitView is a bookmarklet that adds a link labelled "SPLIT VIEW" to each post on the Hacker News website. This link allows the user to open the post and the discussion page side by side in frames. Simply drag the link for HN SplitView to your toolbar or add it as a favorite.<p>I've been using this and it makes it easier for me to browse. I hope that other members of the HN community find it useful. I've tested it under Safari and FF. Let me know if you guys have any problems.<p>EDIT: It doesn't add the link for posts like this one or those of the "Ask HN:" variety. Upvote:

57

Title: Hello, If you are interested in a hacker position for a hacker company in Kendal Square (very close to MIT) send me your resume. A lot of our software is in Lisp and we have a true hacker culture. Feel free to contact me.<p>My email is mpresh@gmail.com. I am not a recruiter, I work for ITA and follow hacker news. I noticed quite a few people maybe interested in ITA.<p>Our culture is very comparable to that of Google. Looking forward to hearing from you.<p>http://www.itasoftware.com<p>-Mike Upvote:

40

Title: I just spent the last half hour trying to downgrade my account from business to personal, after discovering a recurring charge which I hadn't realized was going to be recurring. There are plenty of buttons and obvious links for how I can upgrade my account - but not a single one for downgrading. I considered canceling, but now that I'm in the system it will be awkward to leave. Basically they have me boxed in.<p>From their FAQ, it appears that the only way to downgrade is to E-MAIL THEM! Even though I find this unacceptable, I went ahead and composed an e-mail using their link - only to get a 'Page Load Error' upon submission.<p>Has anyone else had a similar experience with LinkedIn, or am I just missing something obvious? Upvote:

60

Title: They have a plan Upvote:

56

Title: Posts now appear with a flag link. Anyone care to explain its proper use? Upvote:

64

Title: I already know how to do most css+html+js voodoo necessary to get a site up and running, but always with a crude and smelly design. Any pointers on books/blogs where one can get some tips? Upvote:

42

Title: My Facebook profile was disabled for the second, and what seems the last time ("We will not be able to reactivate your account, nor will you be able to recover any content within the account. This decision is final.") on Sunday. The reason, too much "activity"?!?! Over the year and a half I have had my profile, I had amassed hundreds of pictures, hundreds of personal messages, many links/bookmarks, and hundreds of useful personal contacts; and all have now been lost due to Facebook egregious and bull doggish attitude.<p>The first time my account was disabled, I was doing something as simple as thanking all my contacts individually for their birthday wishes. Not been given the specifics to why I was banned this time around, but I’m sure it was a combination of adding friends, mass emailing (sent out a group email to my Facebook group!).<p>The ridiculous rules to use Facebook within limitations, and limit ones networking on a networking website are absolutely absurd. Furthermore, these "limitations" aren’t even published, so one is working in the dark, without any knowledge of whether they are going to break a rule of not.<p>With no way to back up any of the Facebook content, losing all that data is akin to losing data on ones own personal computer. And not only do they delete your account, they remove all pictures you uploaded to groups, delete all the wall posts you ever made on anyone’s profile, remove the tags off all the pictures you were in, remove you off all your contacts friends list, de-admin you from the group you created… essentially, making it such that "you don’t exist, and you never existed" ('1984' anyone?). of Facebook.<p>A quick search on Google shows that banning users is more common than fish and chips (I’m from England). The comments on the following blog make for an interesting read:<p>http://prez.wordpress.com/2006/10/16/facebook-has-a-post-limit<p>"facebook disabled my account for adding too many people. i dont understand…if the point of facebook is to add friends, why is there now a limit on how many people you add."<p>"I was just disabled for not being verified with my school network."<p>"I just got disabled for posting too many comments on group walls!"<p>"I have been disabled twice… and this is my second time… I do nothing! Just post on walls.. I don’t abuse anyone… I don’t even make fun of other people… I mean what the heck?"<p>"Facebook just disabled my account. I started a group for people with the same last name as me and i started sending messages to people with the same name to join."<p>"I added a number of friends from my College because of the mere fact that people in the same school should know one another."<p>"They said I wall posted too much"<p>"I made a charity event and sent out over 100 invites.. as people started requesting information, i was mailing people back."<p>"Yea so like i was Poking some friends last night right and it said slow down or ELES! your Account will be Disabled."<p>"Facebook, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to disable me. They claim that I do not go to Plum Senior High School."<p>"My Facebook account was disabled because Facebook felt my name was fake. My name is of Indian background."<p>"My account was disabled a few hours ago.. because I was friending too many people."<p>Has anyone else encountered this? And if so, how did they deal with it? Are you a Facebook employee? Can I have my account back? Upvote:

50

Title: I am a single founder who has put a lot of work into the product that I have.<p>Joining up with a YC type system wasn't going to happen for me for various reasons so I instead sought after some small investment money from individuals and that has worked for me. I am about to close another round and I wanted to share the document I used this time and the formula that I believe will work for people like myself:<p>The Formula:<p>1. Create a version that works good enough, 2. Add users, even if it is for free. 3. Continue to enhance the software, 4 Once you have some traction, find people who see the vision to invest in that vision<p>Once you have a strong product you can find people who believe in it and in you since you are the one who created the product. Your product lends you credibility.<p>I found myself needing more resources to get to the next step, which is to finish the programming for a vertical market on the officezilla.com system. I have been working too much to pay the bills and I needed some room to maneuver so I was stuck with selling off another 5% which will leave me with 90% of the company.<p>Here is the document I used to close the last amount I needed... I had a hard time with OpenOffice on the formatting and my grammer isn't great... but people tend to focus on the strengths of the system and not your grammer if your dealing with the right person.<p>The document: http://www.officezilla.com/officezilla2008.pdf<p>For the single founders out there, I am not nearly as smart as most of the people on HN but regardless if you have passion and don't give up you will be successful. I am not quite there yet, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is really pulling me forward.<p>Funding from a "VC" is next to impossible but there is money out there from angel investors, people who see your vision and like your product. Upvote:

66

Title: "I’ve made a lot of these career mistakes myself, and it’s hard for me to admit my failures. But in the interest of helping others avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made, I’ve decided to go ahead and create a list of the major career mistakes that I’ve made or that I’ve seen other people in IT make." Upvote:

59

Title: There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's the time delay in minutes between when you create a comment and when it becomes visible to other people. I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments, users can, if they want, have some time to edit them before they go out in the feed. Many users edit comments after posting them, so it would be bad if the first draft always got shipped.<p>Delay is initially 0. The maximum effective value is 10. It only applies to comments. Upvote:

47

Title: I'm sure you're aware that its been announced that Google and Yahoo will now be indexing Flash content.<p>Our idea for a startup was to create a search engine for Flash content. For quite some time now we've been crawling and indexing Flash content and we were getting ready to release a beta version of our site. What would you do if you were us?<p>Here's the URL http://mediawombat.com<p>Please beware that we weren't planning on releasing it in this state.<p>This is a very early beta version - before you click on the Image icon or Audio icon please allow the search results page to load completely or use the traditional search link :) Upvote:

86

Title: I've just become 24 and I've been working with computers since I was 12, got my own when I was 14. I've been programming for more then 10 years now and I was capable of spending days behind my computer screen. But since I started working things have changed for me. I don't have any personal projects anymore, not because I don't have time, but just because I just don't _feel_ like it. I have idea's in my head but can't seem to think them out into a good project. I just got a new job (with a raise and a lot closer to where I live) and sometimes for some reason I can't get simple things to work, while I know I wouldn't have had any problem with them 3 years ago. Am I getting burned up? Too much stress? Do you have the same issues? Or did you have them and got rid of them? Feedback very much appreciated! Upvote:

52

Title: For all of you ladies who may or may not be flirting with the idea of dating a startup programmer, you should know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. Upvote:

92

Title: We recently released a new version that uses constant urls for vote arrows and reply links on comments. This should make "expired link" messages less common, because the supply of closure ids won't run out so fast.<p>The new code is gross, as I feared it would be. In other applications you might be able to postpone this compromise. The big problem for News.YC turned out to be crawlers. They burn up closure ids as fast as real users, but the traffic you get from them is a function of the total size of your site.<p>We also made a few optimizations, so the site should be a bit faster. Upvote:

61

Title: I'm a college student with well managed debt (I saved fairly well and have manged to keep my debts well within range for paying off within 2 years of graduating) and I'm considering taking some of my paycheck and investing it as opposed to saving it. This includes both retirement funds as well as general stocks/bonds/etc...<p>I'm wondering what advice you have as well as what sources (I like books) you would recommend for learning about how investing works and how to invest intelegently. I'm really looking to go for lower risk stuff, but I'd also like to do better than the just-under-1% my savings account gives me.<p>Thoughts? Upvote:

65

Title: I've had an idea that's been eating me up for 18 months. What's your position on 'older' founders and startups? Upvote:

50

Title: As a recovering Marketing / Biz Dev guy currently considering taking the plunge and starting a company, I find myself seriously lacking with regards to engineer contacts. I'm in the NYC area (yes, I'm going to try to hit the meet) and I know there are plenty of great minds here; I just don't know them.<p>In brainstorming ways that I might remedy this situation, I had a thought. Many startups whose sites I pass by seem to have a common issue - Copy. For a number of reasons, an invaluable sentiment escapes many companies large and small: You can build and launch the greatest product in the world but if you can't tell people about it, it’s all for naught. Companies big and small have this issue - typos, grammatical errors, inefficient structure, verbosity, and so on.<p>In my eyes, the big guys have no excuse. For small and emerging companies however, money is a huge factor. Hiring a wordsmith is the obviously the last thing on your mind when deciding whether to spend a few hundred dollars on XYZ... Or eat. At the same time, poor copy puts you at a serious disadvantage in your market.<p>No, I’m not offering to write copy for entire websites free of charge. What I am considering is to take a look at your homepage, marketing sheet, mass email, elevator pitch, or whatever other single item you need the most help on, and refine / polish it. This will be the start of an infinitely more professional image and may even help put some minds at ease just a bit so that focus can be where it should be: On the product. The clear benefit to me will be working with intelligent and technical people immersed in interesting projects, all while expanding my contact list. No I’m not going to pitch people who approach me on my idea, but perhaps you have a talented friend currently looking for the right founding opportunity to potentially break him/her out of a corporate rut. That might be something we discuss while refining that document you’d like me to look at...<p>So is this something people here on HN might find appealing? This is an issue that I’ve seen mentioned numerous times here and as such, I’m posing a potential solution that may benefit everyone involved. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Upvote:

42

Title: Hey guys, I've just launched my new site (mixturtle.com). It's a music search engine and player. It uses Ajax for the interface so you can search and play music simulataneously. Playlists are created automatically and you can access it by right click mouse. (thank you jQuery!) Any comments appreciated.<p>Thanks Louis Upvote:

49

Title: I vividly remember writing that. Glad to see someone else felt strongly enough about it to include it on their site.<p>The links are pretty good, including some to pg and dhh. Pretty good company, I'd say. Upvote:

53

Title: So someone mentioned to me the option of working full-time for a period of time on a very exciting project. The cost benefits would simply yield supplementary income, nothing super spectacular, so not getting the gig doesn't immediately mean I'll be shit out of luck with money.<p>But then I saw the job post and it said "ROCK STAR Developer" and immediately I didn't want to work for this company. I was asked why by a third party, and I explained how the whole cliche of calling people ninjas and rockstars is pointlessly chic, and trivializes what you want the person to do because their name "looks" hip and trendy.<p>And dear god I know one thing if I know anything: trendy fails to deliver.<p>Anyone else here have an opinion on the whole "rock star" job industry mentality? Upvote:

72

Title: And now TechCrunch:<p>http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/27/google-beats-cuil-hands-down-in-size-and-relevance-but-that-isnt-the-whole-story/ Upvote:

81

Title: Tired of trying to keep up with the 100+ YC companies, I've plugged in the RSS feeds for all their dev blogs. Upvote:

78

Title: We had a good screenshot thread over 9 months ago. It's always interesting to see how wizards perfect their craft.<p>Show us how you hack! Upvote:

59

Title: Alternate link - http://dob.posterous.com/the-404-test-wildly-brilliant<p>Apparently the DNS may not have propagated fully. But it's quite ironic that the link is leading to a 404 for some people. Upvote:

67

Title: Hello All,<p>I would appreciate very frank advice on what I should do with my start up, Anaphoric Systems (http://www.anaphoric.com).<p>The whole effort started as a research project several years ago, but when I was informed that I actually owned the system, I entered a business plan competition and then started to execute on the plan.<p>The problem is that I have been wearing two hats: 'researcher/educator' and 'entrepreneur'. This has led to conflicts of interest as well as diluted effectiveness. So basically I need to decide if I am going to 1.) quit my tenured position, move to a start-up hub, find a partner, get-funding, etc. or 2.) open source the whole project and treat it as a research project. (It's 18k lines of LISP). I suppose in case 2 I could always do something commercial if the system was of high impact.<p>I am leaning toward option 2, but I thought I should run my plan by the YC community first.<p>Regards,<p>Michael Minock (http://www.cs.umu.se/~mjm) Upvote:

49

Title: About 6 months ago I decided to learn either Python or Ruby because I wanted a language to write webapps and simple computergames fast.<p>I kind of tried both for a while and Python gave the better impression in every way, readability, ease of use, libraries, documentation, expressiveness etc.<p>But there are so many really enthusiastic posts about Ruby and while Python has a lot of users and is very popular and successful I rarely see anyone rave about it. But maybe that just means it has gotten mainstream.<p>But anyway I like the Python philosophy that there should preferrably be one obvious way to do things. While similar in most ways, there the languages differ.<p>So, what do you Rubyists like so much about Ruby? Especially what do you think Pythion lacks? Upvote:

66

Title: note that hyphenated commands are now officiall discouraged/deprecated<p>http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/72874 Upvote:

69

Title: Hey,<p>Come by Hacker News Coffee and have that caffeine-infused drink that we all love with other fellow hackers.<p>Tuesday morning at 8:30am.<p><pre><code> Hobee's Restaurant 4224 El Camino Real Palo Alto, CA 94306 </code></pre> Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&#38;hl=en&#38;geocode=&#38;q=hobee%27s+4224+El+Camino+Real,+Palo+Alto,+CA&#38;sll=37.409863,-122.118444&#38;sspn=0.011471,0.019462&#38;ie=UTF8&#38;ll=37.413945,-122.121384&#38;spn=0.01147,0.019462&#38;z=16&#38;iwloc=A&#38;iwd=1&#38;cid=37409015,-122122345,12614650498174048130&#38;dtab=0<p>(if it doesn't work, http://is.gd/1SOa)<p>If you can't find any of us, call Mark at 617.395.5633. Upvote:

47

Title: Although the article calls it Twitter for comments I think it is more a Google for Comments. Upvote:

67

Title: The article is a good summary, but you should really read the entire ruling. Really important stuff for any company that takes advantage of the DMCA safe harbor. Upvote:

61

Title: From time to time I have wanted a downmod button. Today there was some linkbait on the front page--something about real programmers not using abstractions or what-not--and my first thought was that the best thing to do is to ignore these posts.<p>And then it hit me: downmodding is not ignoring. Neither is upmodding everything else. Sure, there's some imaginary value of pushing it off the front page quickly, but if people naturally upmod the things they like, it will drop off the front page in due time.<p>Trying to accelerate that process for things I don't like is getting emotionally invested in them. Why give them the time of day? The very best use of our time is working on the things that matter. Downmodding stuff is not working on things that matter.<p>Thinking about good posts isn't either, but it's a lot closer to things that matter.<p>I'll stop now. My thesis is this: not having a downmod button is a good thing if you believe that you should be channeling your time and energy into things that matter. Upvote:

74

Title: I like the rational, smart tone of discussion on HN. What other websites do you go to for these kinds of discussions, particularly on non-hacker topics? Like most people here I'm interested in various areas -- technology, economics, politics, psychology, and mathematical modeling of all kinds -- and enjoy discussing them with other analytically/quantitatively minded people.<p>Some blogs, such as Freakonomics, Marginal Revolution, and Overcoming Bias have interesting commenters. Metafilter is full of smart people, but is a bit too heavy on the arts &#38; humanities for my taste. Apart from HN, where do you get your fix for smart discussion? Upvote:

44

Title: This is so deliciously brilliant I can't stop geeking happily over it:<p><i>When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck into aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast and presented the medals to Laue and Franck.</i><p>(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia) Upvote:

85

Title: Congrats to nickb on passing 20,000 points, and thanks. Upvote:

60

Title: Its day 2 and i still see 3/10 posts on HN are someway related to Chrome.<p>With Chrome Google follows suit with Apple. Awe everyone even before the launch such that for a long time even after the launch people think twice to put a negative comment or point at a limitation. These ones just feel out of the place and are outcast too!<p>No one comments even though logically thinking iPhone is marginally superior to high end Nokia phones except for the cool UI and a lot less robust and way too pricey.<p><i>A cult following</i>. I wonder what happens long term ? Does this break wisdom of crowds because the crowd leaves in the hype and their vision is blurred ? Upvote:

41

Title: I'm going on vacation soon and I'd like to visit some intact medieval towns. I'm looking for places like Toledo, Venice, and Siena that were important towns in 1200 but backwaters by 1700, and thus weren't overwritten. Can anyone suggest more like that?<p>(Even though this is a personal request, I feel ok submitting it to news.yc, because visiting "fossil" towns is one of the best ways I know to understand history.)<p>Thanks in advance! Upvote:

44

Title: Credits should go to whatusername, who suggested someone post this, but was worried it was not hacker newsworthy. I disagree because it is of interest to hackers. Upvote:

127

Title: I've been programming since I was 12 or 13, all self-taught, but I went to college for Business. I've been a full-time freelance developer for a little over a year now, and I've been inspired by a lot of the deep technical stuff I've read here on HN. I've always really enjoyed math and programming, and delving into more rigorous CS and/or Math really interests me.<p>I'm just wondering if people would recommend seeking a grad degree at this point, or going more of a self-study route. And if the self-study route, are there any particular books or online courses you would recommend to start? Upvote:

40

Title: Many people work on their startup ideas while still having their day job. What tips do HN have for people who try to do this? Upvote:

56

Title: I'm one of the co-founders of Media Wombat ( flash search engine at http://mediawombat.com ) and we're a startup that's about 8 months old. We have no funding except what we can afford to do ourselves, no investors and very little spare hardware.<p>Our site is a search engine - like google, but for flash content. We threw together the site in a weekend and have been slowly tweaking it over time but recently have run into some growth issues. If you have funding or investors and have growth issues, you can just throw more hardware at the problem and ta-da! You're fast again. However, for those of us who don't have money being thrown at us, we have to be a little more creative and start to look at optimization.<p>I've got a couple of old machines and an 8-drive SCSI RAID in my basement that I'm using for our search engine to crawl the web and process the data that we index for our search engine. My machines are not quad-core and don't have 64GB of ram in them. They're old and tiny.<p>When we first put http://mediawombat.com together, we threw it all together just to get it to work. We did everything as quick and dirty as we could. We used perl and mysql for the back-end. The crawler was straight-forward, single-threaded, slow, clunky, but it worked. After about 4 months of collecting data, we started to see some growth issues. Searches were becoming slow.<p>We were using a live search through all of our indexed data. First step to optimization - caching of course. This was a pretty easy no-brainer. We recorded all of the searches that people did on our site and we pre-cached the search results for the top-2000 of the most-popular searches. This way, when someone does a search for a popular search phrase, they get (almost) immediate results. Not too bad of a solution.<p>Just a few weeks ago, I noticed that our crawler has become the slowest part of our back-end process. We had crawled most of our initial sites and gotten some good data back, but now, the crawler is just crawling lots of uninteresting urls and not getting anything of any value back. We overflowed onto other sites with no flash and were now crawling sites that didn't return any useful data back. We were wasting resources.<p>So, I was at my mother-in-law's place last weekend and she doesn't have any internet connectivity. I was bored and needed some time away from the family to geek-out. I thought to myself how I could make the back-end crawler and database more optimized ... I re-wrote the crawler in C and made it multi-threadded. And instead of reading and writing to a database, I used flat files. I also pre-processed everything outside of the database using the old-style unix text utilities (grep, sort, uniq, sed, awk, ...). One of those cartoonish lightbulb-over-the-head moments happened to me.<p>The unix text utilities were written in the 60's and 70's when computers were 33mhz and had 5MB of ram. Of course these utilities are going to be lean and mean! Perl was a memory hog and if I multi-threadded it, ate up most of my available ram on my machine if I spawned &#62; 5 threads.<p>I read the man pages on all of the unix text utils that I could find. I even found some new ones that I didn't even know about before (and I've been using unix (linux) as my primary OS since 1990). I managed to replace about 90% of my crawler that was previously written in perl, to a bunch of unix utilities, a few shell scripts and my multi-threadded crawler in C. I did my crawling operations in bulk and processed them in the background while the crawler was doing it's thing.<p>I was super-proud that I had optimized the code as much as I had. I went from about 30k urls a day to about 60k urls crawled an hour! To me, that was a huge speedup! Anyway, to make a long story short, I'm still looking for ways to optimize things and I've got a long list of things to do if/when the time becomes available and I've got more time than money at this point so it's worth the effort, and it's really rewarding! Upvote:

140

Title: First, I want to say <i>thank you</i> to each of you. Everyone in the Hacker News community has contributed to the creation of this incredible venue for exchanging ideas, and you deserve a lot of credit for it.<p>Friday will be my last day at my corporate job. In the past, I've mentioned that as soon as I'd saved up $15k, I was going to focus full-time on getting my startup off the ground. I recently achieved that goal:<p>http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/bank.PNG<p>Wish me luck.<p>-- Shawn Upvote:

164

Title: In case any of you haven't already heard. Upvote:

46

Title: Sometimes, I get a little frustrated accidentally trying to scroll down past the bottom of a HN comments page. There is no marker to indicate the end of the comments. I never make this mistake at Reddit because they have some footer stuff. Maybe if the orange top bar were repeated at the bottom like a book end, I wouldn't have this problem.<p>Rumor has it that the Google homepage has the copyright notice to indicate to users that the page has finished loading: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-12-19-n14.html<p>Makes sense to me :-) Upvote:

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Title: Last week was a <i>black swan</i>, and hence everyone wanted to know what was going on with the economy and Wall St., understandable.<p>Can we now get back to our regular programming and cease from submitting financial &#38; political news? Thanks very much!<p>The fine folks at reddit, have 3 great sub-reddits if you are interested in reading more about:<p>Economics: http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/<p>Business: http://www.reddit.com/r/business/<p>Politics: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/<p>Thank you. Upvote:

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Title: Hack a healthy, yet not expensive, meal. I know most entrepreneurs are money-constrained, but I believe that an entrepreneur should eat healthy meals. It affects your brain over the long term. So can you advise healthy meals that are still within the 2-guy-in-a-garage budget? Thanks. Upvote:

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Title: The invention is based on a neat concept but can this $2500 device stack up to a bag of ice? This may be a case of over-engineering a solution. Upvote:

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Title: In order to help alleviate the perceived problem of off-topic posts here, I've created a slinkset at http://nonhackernews.com . (And yes, I realize this post is contributing to the problem, but I promise it will be the only one.)<p>Despite the name being the opposite of this site's you are all very welcome there. My goal is to bring the same level of discourse that this site has to general interest topics. It's a lofty goal I realize, but I think it's possible.<p>Topics like economics, health, etc. is what it is designed for. The stuff that a lot of people seem to enjoy here, but a lot of other people seem to want to be off-topic.<p>This is totally a public service on my part, and I'm not putting up ads or trying to capitalize on it in any way. And please don't take this as an attempt at some sort of great schism of the audience here, it's not. I'll still surf this site no matter how popular NHN gets. I'm only trying to make another site that I (and judging by the votes many "off-topic" posts get here, many of you) like to read.<p>I'm also looking for a few more people to be moderators (I've already got 3 other than myself) since I don't have a large amount of time to put into it. The goal is to keep the the discourse intelligent, civil, and balanced, and without trolls, press releases, spam, and pictures of kittens. I have a feeling that a little moderation will go a long way toward that. Upvote:

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Title: I recently installed emacs since a lot of people (yes - yc users) seem to think it is the best code editor around. I read that it has a steep learning curve, but that it would be worth the effort. I accepted that and started using it as my primary editor to get my hands dirty. After 2 weeks of use I'm still not productive in it. I can think of the following reasons for this:<p>- I use my mouse a lot, and it seems that emacs is made primarily for keyboard input. I don't use keyboard shortcuts much.<p>- A nice looking GUI and well designed intuitive interfaces matter to me. Emacs is extremely lacking in this respect.<p>- I simply haven't spent enough time with it - the learning curve is steeper than initially expected.<p>What do you think? Am I missing something obvious, should I carry on in the belief that this is a divine tool that just takes time to master, or is emacs simply not for me? Upvote:

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Title: I saw your top requirement for recruits:<p>* BS / MS / PhD in Computer Science or related disciplines from a top CS school (Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC, CMU, etc.)<p>I went to etc. and graduated top of my class. Can I work for you? No? We'll, it's back to my job flipping burgers, I guess... :(<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=313311 &#60;-- (for those saying WTF?) Upvote:

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Title: "The computer is more interesting than most people. I love to spend time with my computer. It is fun to write programs for it, play games on it, and to build new parts for it. It is fascinating to try to figure out what part of the program it is in by the way the lights flicker or the radio buzzes.<p>"...The computer has moved out of the den and into the rest of your life. It will consume all of your spare time, and even your vacation, if you let it. It will empty your wallet and tie up your thoughts. It will drive away your family. Your friends will start to think of you as a bore. And what for?"<p>Shaken by the break-up of his marriage, Tom Pittman decided to change his habits. And he did. He later described the transformation: "I take a day of rest now. I won't turn on the computer on Sunday.<p>"The other six days, I work like a dog."<p>- Hackers, Steven Levy. Upvote:

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Title: The Boulder tech scene is growing like crazy. Twenty of our top tech startups (you can see a few in the sidebar) have banded together to fly in one hundred top software developers, programmers and engineers from across the country, all expenses paid. You can apply to be one of the hundred at the boulder.me site.<p>Also covered here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/24/twenty-startups-pool-resources-to-recruit-developers/ Upvote:

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Title: I too "wasted" most of my teens writing "pointless" programs - games in Basic that I never finished, assembly language programs optimized for old computers 20 years obsolete, and C++ programs with extensible architectures that no one else will ever extend.<p>My father always warned me that one day I would wake up and realize I'd wasted my life sitting in front of a computer screen. Bullshit.<p>When I was in college I ran into people I'd known in high school who told me some stories about what was really going on in the social circles I'd missed while I spent my days with a computer, and I was shocked. Most of my "normal" peers who had social lives drank heavily and got into drugs - some died or nearly died. Many of them became teen parents. I never even knew! My obsession with computers had kept me insulated from all of that.<p>Now that I'm a working adult and married, I look back with wonder at the thought of having long summer vacations where I had no responsibilities preventing me from hacking for days on end. Though I didn't appreciate the time I had then as much as I would appreciate it now, I would not change a single minute of how I spent it. There is a depth of understanding I built up during those years doing "pointless" hacking that I simply could not have picked up in the piecemeal way my time is split up today. Every year that I spent working 12 hours a day on interesting problems while I was in high school put me ahead 6 years on what I could accomplish today, when I'm lucky to get 1-2 hours free a day. Whenever I run across a problem today that I can solve in a snap because it mirrors a problem I already solved at my leisure during those early year, I think, "Damn it's good to be a geek." Upvote:

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Title: By reading this site, it looks like you're all getting rich by building web sites. OK, not everyone is getting rich, but everyone assumes that there is a chance that it will happen to them.<p>But what about shareware? In 2008, is it too late to start writing software, actual installable software, and sell it on the internet? Or are my chance of getting rich much higher with web applications?<p>I know some Mac or iPhone developer got rich, but what about Windows and Linux and the other mobile devices.<p>I love programming too much to do anything else, but I also would like to acquire wealth.<p>Thanks, Norman Upvote:

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Title: Can't access it for hours. Upvote:

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Title: Reading good python code must be an enjoyable learning experience, any suggestion? Upvote:

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Title: I was just watching Obama live in Ohio and he said he was going to put forward a bill to eliminate all capital gains taxes for anyone investing in startups. This essentially means that entrepreneurs and venture capitalists will pay no taxes at all. This is craziness, what's going on here. Upvote:

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Title: Too many entrepreneurs waste time observing/analyzing the actions of others. In boom times, this creates me-too companies; in bust times, this creates ridiculous hysteria (such as that which we are seeing now). Do your own thing. And quit submitting these stupid link-bait articles. Upvote:

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Title: My mentor was the CEO and co-founder of a hundred-strong successful (not-so-tech) company when a strong recession hit. He explored all the options, talked with his top clients and creditors, and did an accurate forecast of the business for the following years. The outlook wasn't good at all.<p>He spoke with all the employees and told them exactly what was going on. He made found other jobs for many of them. And paid everyone full compensation plus some extra benefits (like health insurance.) The employees did a thank you barbecue for him, completely on their own. The price was splitting with the other founder, to sell everything up to his car and some personal assets, and go back to basics in his personal life. His wife left him.<p>Not many years later, after the recession, he decided to set up another very similar company. Getting credit was trivial. Setting up a workforce swift as several key former employees joined in even without discussing salary. Within months the new company almost wiped out the competition. "His word means a lot to us." By then he had a much happier and younger girlfriend.<p>I've seen it with my own eyes as I was a small partner.<p>The competition was hated by knowledgeable people in the trade as they didn't pay salaries for months and then either went bankrupt or just fired most people anyway after many broken promises. They defaulted in their debts so their creditors weren't happy. And the few remaining customers during the recession had a terrible service, in particular they were left in the cold in many cases due to the chaotic situation. There were just too many competitors for only a handful of clients.<p>Think twice before passing forward your pain, be it by inaction or by delusion. Nobody will judge you if you can't kill a gang of Goliaths. But everybody will hate you if you lie and fail them.<p>DISCLAIMER: This story is not related to Silicon Valley and I don't have a company right now (was incorporating.) It is just a lesson to counter-balance some dreadful advice seen here on going on no matter what. It isn't my place to tell anybody they have a chance or not. I'm sure investors, clients, creditors, and experienced entrepreneur gurus (like PG) can advice you on that (just like my mentor was advised in the story.) Upvote:

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Title: What are you working on these days?<p>I just met my co-founder, and we are working out the concept for this product idea I've had for a while, to help with email overload. Lots of fun! Upvote:

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Title: “If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it” ~ Einstein<p>So, I was reading Matt's post about VC, which saw me following this link:<p>http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/03/are-you-thinking-of-working-for-start.html<p>Raganwald States:<p>"A VC is having a good year when one in five investments hits a home run. If you honestly can do a better job of picking winners, drop your day job and go into venture capital. You’ll make way more money investing in start ups than working for them!"<p>I tend to agree, but of course I don't have the "fuck you" money to try my hand at VCing. What I need is a market that allows me to invest little bits of money into new ventures... What I need is a stock exchange, version 2.0.<p>So, I googled "what would it take to set up an online stock market" (I know, worst query ever) and I found this:<p>http://www.globalchange.com/stock.htm<p>Some wishful thinking, but interesting. What does HN think? Could a bunch of Hackers legally set up an alternative to stock markets that would work?<p>I'm fully aware that this idea is out to lunch, but I'm interested on hearing other people's opinions. Upvote:

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Title: I want my web app to look less like Google and more like Vimeo.<p>Have you been able to pull good talent from local colleges, Craigslist, or other websites, and how did you narrow down the field? (I am reluctantly moving forward with eLance, but I'd rather find someone local.) Upvote:

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Title: I've been reading a lot about how wonderful Erlang is. So I'd like to learn Erlang properly from scratch.<p>Any books/websites/docs/whatever is greatly appreciated. I've started reading the official documentation but it's not very friendly. I want something that starts from the basics, through to the syntax through to deployment. I'm sure one resource will cover all this so anything you may have is welcome.<p>Thanks! Upvote:

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Title: I'm a nobody around these parts, but someone I've emailed back and forth with on here asked me a couple weeks ago where I've been. I'm finally at a point where I can take a breath so I thought I'd post something in the hopes that it helps someone else.<p>My "day" job is a 1 man IT consulting shop. This started about 8 months ago after a stint at a startup didn't work out. I had been consulting before that startup, but always through firms. I mostly fell back into a job with an old client. It's the proverbial golden goose (easy work, flexible schedule, not a lot of BS, decent rate, pay on time, etc.). Consulting doesn't "fulfill" me, but it pays the bills nicely enough.<p>About 6 months ago, a friend of mine (we go back 14-15 years now), that I'd done some work for/with in the past, sold his business (a small maid service) and started up another company. He didn't have a great idea. In fact, everyone on here would have poo-poo'ed his idea immediately. He needed software, didn't really have the money to pay for it and asked if I could help. I offered to work with him for sweat equity.<p>I honestly didn't ask for enough, but I figured the company wouldn't survive anyway (really the idea was something that was a great grand vision but would have been nearly impossible to make a significant amount of money with). I used it as an opportunity to learn Django and Python, and figured, at worst, I just wasted some time. I've got way worse ways to waste time :)<p>Flash forward 4 months and sales have been slow (surprise, surprise). Then dumb luck struck. A local company, that did something old media like what we were trying to do, new media style, came to us and basically asked what we could do for them since they were having major problems with their current provider (man I wish I'd taken screen shots of what their provider was giving them). We went back and forth a bit over having to refocus the business, but finally came to the conclusion that managing 20-30 large customers is significantly easier to manage than thousands of little ones (which we would require in order to make the business really work). We dove in head first a little over a month ago.<p>Luckily the choice of Django and Python paid off, because even though we were shifting the direction and purpose of the software, the modifications required to get everything going were not super significant (I say that, but looking back it sure sucked a lot of time, so there must have been some level of difficulty there!). I mean the concept was fundamentally the same. Just how we got our money and information was different.<p>We now have that one client on board under a long term contract (they've assumed our previous 40-odd clients) and have a very good looking next 10 days (we had a prospect meeting today and a half dozen more next week -- good timing with a conference next week puts them all in the same place :D). It turns out that the client we landed is on the board of one of the associations in their industry and through them we have been able to reach quite a few of their peers.<p>Decompressing a bit, we stumbled upon a niche market that was ripe for the picking. I sincerely doubt that we could have found this niche on our own. We had to make a few mistakes and then just have some dumb luck and chance to get here. We have some competition (one is within a mile of our office space even), but it is the typical story of poor service, poor offerings and we really do provide a better solution for our customers to sell. Here's what's the funny part: it's boring. Nothing earth shattering, nothing that's going to make use the next Mark Cuban or anything -- just a market that needed exploited. Funny how that works ;).<p>So finally, I'm coming up for air. By my count, I've been basically working two full time jobs (my consulting practice is paying my bills and I've had the typical deadlines there), raising my kid (not alone, my wife puts up with a lot :)), and still weekend racing my car (work/life balance and all that) for about 45 days now. It's amazing how the human body can survive you putting it through lots of hell and late nights, even in your lower 30's. Of course, I've not "watched" tv in months (sure it's on in the background, but I couldn't tell you what's going on) or played golf since June, so there's quite a bit of time that most people just piss away.<p>In the next two weeks, if things go as planned, I will likely have to make the tough decision of whether to step off the plank and dive into the business full time (or at least part time in order to maintain my relationship with my client) or to figure something else out.<p>Of course, my partner and I need to come to terms on a couple things (like more equity for me -- which is a very difficult subject, but considering that we have nothing in writing at the moment I think there's some flexibility there). We also have a bit different styles in that I am more of a "do as needed" type and he likes to be prepared ahead of time. This mostly comes into play when talking about office space (we already have 5 employees including the two of us), equipment, hosting, staffing, etc. I am much more cautious than he is on most fronts. It typically produces a nice balance, but it can cause some bit of conflict.<p>In any case, I thought I'd post this because I've always enjoyed a bit of voyeurism in reading other peoples' experiences and figured someone might find it interesting. 2009 will definitely be an interesting year for me.<p>Good luck everyone! Upvote:

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Title: One bit of good news about the economy: would-be startup founders don't seem to have been deterred by it, yet at least. YC got more applications this time than ever, and by a large margin: 10%. The number usually goes up, but rarely so sharply.<p>It wasn't due to the essay I just wrote about starting a startup in a bad economy. We were already on track for a record before that.<p>We don't quote actual numbers, lest it tempt competitors into a competition on that account (which could easily be won by encouraging instead of discouraging single founders and undergrads). But we have a long week ahead of us. Upvote:

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