skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working feverishly over the holidays to get my project, Bibdex, running on production legs. It's an online bibliography service meant for collecting and sharing references and notes.

http://www.bibdex.com

One of my personal goals for the project is to spend absolutely no money on it except for servers, domains, lawyers, and accountants. While seemingly insane, I wanted to do this project to learn the full 360 degrees of how to create and launch a web product so it could help me in my day career. No better way to learn than to just dive right in and do it yourself, eh? It's a slower process, but rewarding. (Also, I'm cheap.)

Here's an example of why it's valuable. Over the last year, I got pretty far except for the logo, which used to look like I drew it in MS Paint. In fact, the old one is still here: http://bibdex.com/images/logo.png . I was hunting around on BrandStack (http://www.brandstack.com) and LogoPond (http://www.logopond.com) and contemplating spending up to $1000 on a logo designer when I realized a common theme to all the logos I liked.

1. They all looked good in black and white because they were simple geometric forms.
2. They only had two elements that played off each other.

If you go through those two logo sites, you'll see what I mean. Complicated logos are worse. Logos by their nature are small, short attention span, high impact communication forms. Keep it simple and deliver the message through some tension.

I decided I'd try my hand at it, so after a few hours of sketches, I loaded up Paint Shop Pro (yes, PSP. I mentioned I'm cheap, right?) and drew the new logo myself. The constraints of simple geometric forms and limiting it to two concepts led to something I'm happy with: a book that is also a rocketship to demonstrate 'bibliographies in action'. Even if I ultimately find it an unsatisfying implementation, I like the core idea and can later hire a designer to redraw it.

So, what did you do this weekend?
The Alan Kay quote does not say you should waste 90% of your time, Kay says you should fail 90% of the time. It is only wasted time if you don't learn from your failures.

Further, the quote in the original post from Hamming is that "at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation." Hamming does not call preparation and presentation "waste". Reading the Hamming quotes, I find nothing that indicates he thought being friendly, conforming, making, or giving presentations was wasted time.

On the contrary, Hamming spent quite a bit of time criticizing his contemporaries for wasted effort (his words) by ineffectively swinging their egos rather than working within the system (or judiciously bypassing the system).
YC peeps can message each other, not open to everyone.
I'm baffled by your fury. What are you objecting to?
True, it seems half the California male highschoolers go for the homosexual look of wearing girls' pants these days. Some influence of "emo" music bands, perhaps. Not sure how trendy baggy pants are any more.

Of course, my claimed observation of "half" could be way off the mark.
That is interesting, thanks. I did not realize how few projects use the AGPL.

One problem with the AGPL is that it seems to work for projects that are totally owned by one individual or company because there is a clear stratgey for supporting alternative commercial use licenses with no software distribution requirements. If alternative use licenses are low cost for received value and if the commercial license passes corporate lawyer scrutiny, all is good.

The big problem with the AGPL is projects with multiple contributers - makes a paid for commercial license difficult.
> We have

Who the hell is we? Do you really think you're important enough to use the royal "we"? I have no idea who you're talking about. Your post sure as hell doesn't make it clear, and I guarantee you you're not important enough to use "we" unambiguously.
Google's evil policy on shutting down blogs
Pokémon Indigo | Online Game
In high school, I was somewhere in the middle. Although closer to the smart kids, I always maintain a cool look, not to try and fit, but just because I liked it. I hung out with both the cool popular kids, and the smart ones.

Parents should teach their kids to be broad and have friends with different interests and background. To this day (11 years later) I am fairly the same. Hang out with both engineers who talk about Java during lunch and we exchange emails weekly about their latest project, next startup, and I also hang out who love to cash a check, go buy Rock Republic and spend the rest at the W on Saturday night.
Just for reference, my regular browser refuses to open the mobile version.
No matter how much I have tried to understand twitter, I have never really gotten it. I can only see it as being a fad.

The character constraint forces people to say whatever they want to say concisely which I can see as being valuable - it's all too easy to otherwise get lost in the sea of data that is the internet. But that's about it.

How do people use it? Are most people using twitter from their laptop/PC or from cell phones? I can understand the need to keep messages small if you are using a hardware interface that provides a constraint on what you can practically write. But those limitations will go away in time.

I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less. I can see people putting up with SMS type messaging for now, but I'd bet they'll ditch it when they can buy a working star trek communicator.

Seriously, if anyone can provide me with the true enlightenment on this please do so. It sometimes seems as though I'm the only person alive who just doesn't get it.
Is that really true? I'm not a part of the 'startup community' but looking at a few of the startups that have achieved some success (Google, Reddit, Balsamiq, Dropbox) it doesn't really seem like they were a result of personal challenges faced by the founders. Maybe there are lots of other good examples of where startups are inspired by challenges faced by founders.
What are you, autistic? (Let me guess - the answer is yes).
Perl programmer Tim Bunce (DBI/DBD) has been sending mass emails to support this cause, and I didn't understand it either. There's some mumbling about how you can't really fork mysql but no clear explanation as to why. GPL is GPL, and the whole codebase is under GPL. You can do what you want. If they need to come up with a new name, because Oracle starts asserting a trademark issue, so be it. Mandriva survives, doesn't it? I had to think for a second to remember that it used to be called Mandrake.
Top Ten Digital M&A Deals For 2010
Wishful thinking? That's an awfully nice way of calling bullshit for what it really is.
because companies weren't just paying for support, some were paying for non-gpl'd versions of the code to integrate/resell in their products. only mysql ab (now sun, soon oracle) was able to sell those licenses.

this is the same situation with asterisk. digium forces all users that contribute patches to hand over copyright so they can sell a private version of their open-source product to companies.

whether this is fair is up for debate (and is partly why many users hate gpl software, preferring more "open" licenses like bsd/isc). a company open sources an initial version of their product with the gpl, giving everyone access to it, its users contribute many bug fixes, new features, and free support (through forums, mailing lists, bug trackers, etc.) but are unable to sell their own versions of that software. the company that retains copyright and distribution rights is of course able to bundle up everything contributed and make a profit directly from it without having to give anything back to those users.
I think this kind of openness is great. It attracts curious entrepreneurs to the site who might be thinking of hacking together an app and are interested in how other people have succeeded. Those same people might just use Mockups to help them. Great marketing.
This will all correct eventually, and it will be huge for those who are currently getting themselves in position to reap the benefits.
Ads are not only used for conversion, they are also good vehicles for building brand awareness. Sometimes they're just fancy "Spite Fences"; look at the harbour skyline of any major city like NYC, Hong Kong or Sydney; you will see a row of giant buildings, each with an electronic manufacturer's name (Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Hitachi, LG, etc.) They have the appearance of "head quarters", but look close .. it's most likely a rented spot. Why do they all congregate at that corner? why not spread somewhere else?

A good chunk of advertising, specially billboards, is actually "defensive" in nature.
I would really like it, especially if it defaulted to "off", and you could set certain account age, karma, or karma-per-last-timeperiod thresholds for people to contact you. Even if messages just got forwarded on to email vs. a mailbox on the site.
I did take a look at their site, and while they similarly have the goal of circumventing Hollywood, my main goal is to provide a better drm-free digital distribution method.
zynga is not a scam and never was. that's the point. i kept my mouth shut because it was shitstorm and there was no way you could have a rational discussion during it
The kids "somewhere in between" "strive to become popular and have all sorts of angst"?

That's a pretty big claim for ALL the kids who are neither nerds nor popular. I speculate that a great deal of those kids don't obsess about highschool drama, don't "strive to become popular", and don't end up with "all sorts of angst."

Also, one could safely consider that perhaps the author of a lengthy article about middle school and high school popularity has some undealt-with angst issues...

I'm just saying that I'd be careful about making sweeping generalizations, unless you want to come across as harboring that angst yourself.
@gvb the use of the word waste stems from the fact that many technical people (previously including myself) make the mistake of thinking that the time Hamming is talking about spending on presenting your ideas is waste.

Clearly, I am arguing against that in this piece.
It would be awesome if it happened, but what's the motivation? Usually such ambitious projects only happen for regions of national pride. National pride's the same motivation that gives us war, and without the sort of mutually-assured destruction and memories of the last war that we had during the cold war, it's easier to whip up the people into a shooting frenzy.
i think you need to understand the limitations of what i can say when our companies get in the news. i can't talk about stuff twitter is doing without clearing it with them first. i can't talk about stuff zynga is doing without clearing it with them first. i can't talk about stuff that etsy is doing without clearing it with them first. etc, etc.

and my wrath is not at you, it's at all the misinformation out there, spread by blogs who did not work and just repeated the misinformation about zynga
Fred Wilson's ability to make great investments is, among other things, a function of his knowledge, timing, network and luck. He's probably tried out loads of advertising and affiliate schemes so he knows what he's talking about and, more importantly, he knows what to look for in investment opportunities.
Ask HN: I have the domain hackerbrain - what would you like to see on it?
Recently I purchased hackerbrain.com and hackerbra.in.

I want to develop it, but would like to adapt it to the community's desires.

What do you want to see on it?

Hackers for hire?

Hackers for dates?

Some type of jobs or freelance board?

Brain exercises?
Siracusa: Antacid tablet
That's why you @reply them.

Not in a spammy manner, of course. But if someone's talking about your business on Twitter, engage them.
I haven't studied the stories of those companies that closely, but to be successful, you have to use the resources you have wisely. One of those resources is personal experience.

You have to experience a problem to know how to solve it; and the problem isn't always as serious as being homeless. 37signals built their own Project Management platform, for example.
really? i'm not surprised at all that nasa uses git to manage open source projects. i'd be more surprised if they didn't.

hearing/confirming that nasa uses git internally for all of their mission-critical code would be something different.
For context, he was homeless about fifteen years ago. And is still very involved in helping the homeless.

My impression is you wouldn't have been able to guess that he was homeless X years ago based solely on his middle-class life now. Real bootstrapping

I believe one of everyone's worst fears is to be homeless (whether acknowledged or not - I hate inevitably thinking about it whenever I see someone on the street).

http://paradox1x.org/pages/1989.shtml
I was talking more about announcements.

I do the @reply thing, but it's a little sucky, since that @reply shows up in everyone's feed.
12. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images.

Does anyone else think we'll have the ability to "download" ourself into computers quite a while before we extend the life span of the human body beyond 250 years?
Yeah, that and that we've had continual economic development over the last 500 years, while nations (and central banks) have come and gone.
He's just trolling: his account's been open for 15 minutes and he's already at -7.
It's a place for real-time news.

Although the news reported in any particular tweet may not be reliable, you can easily examine many tweets (as they are short) perhaps taking into account follower count to try to figure out what's likely to be true.
I can guarantee that for the $1Bn Sun's shareholder's paid him for it - 14% of the total price Oracle is paying for all of Sun - Monty could buy MySQL back from Oracle and do with it as he pleased. So why doesn't he?
Yep, I agree. Thats what I meant by the 'Above The Line' reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Below_the_line_(advertising)
b) i'm not an investor in bit.ly. i've written that i think link shorteners are bad for the web

a) disqus is not a feature. its a social network for commenting and the blog owner owns their data in partnership with disqus. if they want to turn off disqus and put their comments somewhere else, they can do that easily.

c) virtual goods are an elegant form of freemium that allows game developers to offer their games for free and still get paid by power users

d) can you provide some examples of our companies rewarding bad behavior?

e) zynga has raised almost a million dollars for poor students in Haiti with its sweet seeds offer. etsy allows people to make a living making things. mongoDB is a free datastore for web developers. i could go on and on. i think our thirty portfolio companies are doing so many good things for the web. i take this stuff seriously. i could ignore this comment but i won't because this is important to me.
I am currently looking at applications of Machine Learning and have been thinking about launching a startup. I would have started programming 6 months ago except that my geographic area is sub-optimal for finding people who are sufficiently motivated to make the necessary sacrifices.
Something like this would be really nice, even if it's just something like how Wikipedia does it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/Jimbo_Wales
(You'll need an account to visit that page.)

It sends an email on behalf of the user, and the recipient can reply back to the user via email (the sender's email address appears in the From: field.)

It works pretty well there, and there could be a karma threshold and a setting to disable it here on HN if it were to be implemented.
> Free Software: I found a loophole in my student loan documentation that lets me defer payments for decades, so long as I stay in the Ph.D. program!

I'm sure Stallman and the like who have given their whole life to free software will appreciate. Meanwhile, this guy hasn't done much and yet not only complains about free software while using them but also calls them lazy at the same time. Shameless.
The real kicker? The US has been using Japanese methods to try to dig itself out of the most recent recession. Even though these methods have already proven to be ineffective we haven't stopped using them.
Still, just saying "some piece of the federal government uses it" is a very strong case for it being enterprise-ready.
That's a good answer. Our main goal is to get a lot little nuances right, as well as some big things. When you distribute online you'll get a bunch of services which offer the mechanism to online distribuion, but don't take proper advantage of the new web like social networks.

There are people who scour the Internet for indie films. This usually takes place in scifi, horror, and documentary genres. I'll agree that most people wouldn't go around looking for indie films otherwise, especially if there is no price difference between a low budget indie and a hollywood blockbuster. However my main goal right now is to provide a service for the smaller indie films out there. Making commission off sales is an added bonus, but the main monetization effort is to provide a service for indie content producers, big or small. Now hopefully when we've built something great enough to make self distribution more viable option, hopefully better more mainstream-popular type films can make their way onto the platform. That's when it would be ideal to roll out an iTunes type store to let people discover content, and profit largely off of commision.

I think YouTube is a great example of letting anyone find their audience. And I believe that if indie filmmakers go digital, they too can find a larger Audience, especially if we go social like YouTube.
Let me rephrase my comment this way: The photo is unprofessional and coupled with the related drama reinforces the impression that the guy is full of it.

I'm generally all in favor of calling people out when they act like internet tough guys, but I'm puzzled that one use of the word douchebag qualifies with you. To each his own.
And the difference is...?
Registry Cleaner and Repair Software - Zimbio
Facebook does allow per-page-type changes in follow-verbs. For example, you don't "fan" a politician, you "support" them.

Page admins have no control over this, though, it's hard-coded per page type. So I can't imagine there's even that much work involved in changing the copy from "fan" to "follow" for certain page types (or even letting the page admin select among a few, pre-configure options when setting up the page).
A Java application will invariably use more much memory than C implementation of almost any non-trivial application. You can inline code all you want, but it'll never change that. The JVM isn't magical -- it's not going to solve all your performance problems. When you're allocating a million tiny little objects with all the necessary accounting you can't optimize that away.

BTW, if it's so obvious why haven't you still provided at least one non-trivial concrete example of Java faster than C?
Those who want to be contacted should probably just leave their email address or preferred method of contact. It takes just as much effort to use an email client as does using a messaging system; the only difference is one would be checked on a regular basis, the other, not so much. Plus, as mentioned, people don't want yet another inbox to check. For those who don't drop a link to their homepage or list their email address, I just assume they're not interested in communication.
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'Oldest' computer music unveiled [2008]
Those are exactly my thoughts - facebook is a lot more involved with the user, and so an interaction between user and business would be more personal, more viral and with a lot more info about your users.

I tried using twitter for business shortly, but it is too difficult to handle effectively. I've switched to facebook, and I'm seeing better results but I still dislike this 'fan' thing. People don't want to be fans, but they are interested in interacting.
Now Ruby(MRI) has dtrace support
If they made them secret or hard to get to they'd be more interesting. As it is there's a positive feedback loop with public trending topics.
Most people new to Twitter don’t get it or the value it provides. That’s understandable for any new social network. I joined Twitter in June 2007, didn’t understand it, and my account sat dormant until just a few months ago, when I became an active user.

The value of Twitter is entirely derived from those users you choose to follow. It's not all about banal updates about meal choices, goodnight wishes, and Twitter slang. But some people will post that stuff, so your course of action is simple: if these people bug you, unfollow them.

Pruning and managing your following list is an ongoing effort, but it can yield excellent results. I follow a wealth of different types of users on twitter - from tech journalists/commentators (@gruber) to startup CEOs (@jasonfried, @ev) to companies I deal with (@thinkgeek) to former university professors I’ve had (@edbarr) to friends and family. And that’s just scratching the surface.

These people provide me an interesting stream of updates on things that matter to me. You might not enjoy the same set of users, and that's ok, but that should be your end goal - develop your following list into something that provides you with value.

And you know what? You don’t even have to tweet. Build yourself a following list and consume consume consume. Not everyone is—or should be—a content producer. But Twitter gives you the option to be one, and if you're not, you can still benefit from the community at large.
My proposition is if we make it technically easy for films to take advantage of the benefits of digital self distribution, then good films will shift over to the new method. Then when they shift there will be competitive content for a marketplace. Until then, we can profit and sustain the service on those making the digital self distribution transition by focusing on charging publishers.
Can the UK and US prevent extremism in Yemen?
A selection of PDP-1 Music is also available here: http://www.dpbsmith.com/pdp1music/

If one goes to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View one can hear works replayed on the actual hardware by the original hacker, Peter Samson. One can listen to the recording here (scroll down to audio): http://pdp-1.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/index.php?f=theme&...

The PDP-1 did not have a purpose built audio synthesizer; the four flip-flop bits mentioned in the former link were actually programmed by controlling 4 LED/Lamps on the front panel and outputting their signal directly to an amplifier!

"During the course of the restoration project, original MIT hacker Peter Samson, rebuilt Spacewar! from source tapes to work with the control boxes the team built, and to use the intensity feature of our display. He also read the music data tapes, reverse-engineered their data format, and wrote a program to play them."
Why not just take a gigantic leap of faith and build a 2nd front-end?

I mean, keep the existing website. And create a second one, using more traditional modern UX techniques. In my perfect fantasy here, this new one would be the .com and your current site would be the .net. That's likely not possible so you may need to find a variation of the domain or, hell, a completely new name for this "non geek" version. After all, "tar" doesn't have any meaning to the non-geek IT Biz Mgr anyway. Being sticky isn't a horrible visual for a backup service, but it's nothing special.

I'm dead serious, here. You have a vision. This is your vision. It's apparently not being successful in the marketplace. So why not just say, "hey, maybe I'm wrong" and go for an approach nearly 100% opposite of your current strategy?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994584