skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd first like to say that you've managed to wholly miss my point and turn this into an adversarial discussion. My response was an attempt to help you modify your pitch and understand the failings of how you present and, even perhaps, how you think about, your business idea. I have no desire to argue with you about the merits of your idea, or about why people (engineers or otherwise) do what they do when it comes to startups. I have no interest in your idea, or your business, except as someone who's started two businesses and enjoys talking to others who are starting a business. I'm not the engineer you are looking for and never will be, but I do believe my advice could be useful to you. I am in the category of technologist who has more ideas for businesses than time to execute them, and I'm in the middle of one that I believe very strongly in...no amount of money or persuasion would make me join your cause (or the cause of anyone else--I'm not picking on you).

"Well, where to start. First, considering all the crap on the internet, I'd say having a really cool idea is a good start."

Sure. Problem is, since you can't or won't execute on the idea yourself, you have to convince someone else that your idea is worth more than the dozen ideas they already have brewing. Engineers don't have a shortage of ideas...they have a shortage of time in which to implement those ideas, and sometimes a shortage of patience for the boring crap that surrounds making a business of those ideas. Convince a good engineer that you are capable of managing the boring crap, and have a good idea, and you might get them to sign on.

"As for the "for free" part, see above. As for the "and share the results with me." part ... well, I'll tell you what. I'll keep my idea and financial contacts to myself, and you can keep all the results you get from not working with me on this idea all to yourself while I keep looking for other people. That way you make all the big bucks all by yourself. Don't spend it all in one place ..."

You've got yourself a deal.
Operation MySpace Has Real Tech Behind It: Debut of Kulabyte
Truely richer than Putin?
SeaDragon and Deep Zoom (Jump to 8:55)
Some really interesting new technology. Someone said before that zooming is much more natural than scrolling and I think that's true. I expect UI's will slowly start to migrate towards a more zoom-oriented approach.
Steve have an article you might find useful. http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/do-it-now.htm
Top 10 list of Information Security Slogan
Are you running your IT Departement and need the slogan for IT Security awareness? here is some list you can choose
Make something people want, and then keep wanting :)
IE8 (beta) is for us JavaScripters
But you can change a will. Can he back out of this?
The HTML PostMessage feature feels a bit like something we used to have back in the old DEC PDP days - simple but effective in the right hands.
I use the latest Netbeans Ruby IDE dev releases, so OS isn't much of a concern.

Just for the record though, I use linux with Gnome, Ubuntu 7.10.

Your dev environment matters less than having two or more monitors in my opinion, though.
Flashamizdat: Cyber-Rebels in Cuba Defy State’s Limits
I'm from Atlanta and never knew of anywhere that hackers spent a lot of time aside from in small gatherings with other hackers.
Something like Compiere (or OFBiz) is probably going overboard for a hacker-oriented shop. Use good tools for the stuff that's important to you, make due for stuff that's of secondary importance. Of course... all this depends on what you do and how you want to grow. A quick-turnaround sell it type of deal just doesn't need the overhead - indeed, PG seems to focus on not needing all that crap in the early stages of a startup, because you can just work well with the other people.
He steals company data, but he ain't no hacker
Happy to be one of them.
Customers who purchased this item also purchased:

* Centrifuges

* Aluminum Tubes

* The Complete Idiot's Guide to Nuclear Fission
New Patentable Idea: A Way to Invalidate Vague Patents
Let's just say it's something that I know more about than however many PhDs they have looking into it and no matter how smart they are or what their budget is, it will be impossible to replicate the conditions that led to the insights I've gained about why things developed as they did and how to apply it to the business world.

Then why not reveal the idea? I'm curious...
Jaguar Marketing System CEO Sets Personal Goal of $1,000,000
AOL's Open AIM 2.0 SDK license requires apps to include ads
There's recursion in there somewhere...
"Have you ever been on a web-site that asked you for your Google username and password... Did you think twice before giving out that information, hoping the web-site would not use it to access your credit card information..."

I cannot say, how laughable that sounds to me.

I would never even think first about giving one website my passwort to another website.
Maybe I wasn't too clear. The employer didn't ask me or expect me to work overtime. In fact my manager was asking me to go home. But I was enjoying the work so much, I did it for the fun of it. And I would do it again if I come across interesting projects.
buy a grad student for 20-30$/hr and work on your own project in your spare time. leverage quickly (i would estimate 6-10 months to get on the bottom rung) to get a job in CS. rinse and repeat.
You're making the assumption that I'm advocating 80 hour weeks, and then continuing to argue against it. Maybe I wasn't clear. Expecting employees to work overtime is obviously not the right approach. Creating an environment that's so much fun that employees would choose to work overtime is. I like Google's approach better than 37singals'. Google created a fun environment so that employees stay longer because the love it, not because they have to.
Much as I like the idea, and feel it should be introduced, in 10 years I've never encountered a tester who could code, let alone one who does.
.net vs05(vs08 seems like it needs a service pack) on windows

php coda/code igniter on mas osx(using mamp)
With all of my other obligations and work I take 4 classes which works out okay because most of these are senior+ level project classes that take up a bunch of time anyways. (as opposed to taking 6 classes).

I definitely feel you on the "it takes a day to switch modes" thing. I only really get into the mood on the weekend . My big problem is that many of my assignments are group projects so I can't just get them out of my way at my own leisure. I can only multitask in class so much without losing what the prof is saying so I don't tend to get much other work done in class than taking notes.
Give up. You're six years into a development project that requires programmers but you don't have any programmers. You seem to think that a company will hire you because you have experience - if your work is really that valuable why haven't they hired you already?

Get a job and continue to work on this in your spare time. Fund development and be smart about making what you build as generally-useful as possible (an enabling technology rather than a solution). If the market pans out for this other company, there will be opportunities for you... assuming you executed.
one word: butterflies
Yeah, I'd try this. Failing that, you'd be running on inspiration alone, so I'd start my own project.
Where is the "Smartest person on YC" option?
My preferable development environment would be an IDE I built myself, perfectly tailored to the peculiars of MY workflow. It would also need to feature easy extensibility to make it affordable to extend it, sometimes on a per-project basis. I'd eventually end up working on optimizing my productivity in a quite direct manner, by analysing what the bottlenecks (anything that hampers Flow) are in my different projects and devising solutions.

When you work in Lisp by making DSL's and generally problem-specific extensions, I think the next logical step is to extend the IDE to support it directly (especially if you use the extension in many projects). If for example you make a CSS DSL, it would be great to have full property completion support, syntax highlighting and the other usual suspects.

Two areas I expect to work on a lot is 1. making the operations of my IDE more "semantic" (as in, adapted to what I want to do. If it's easy to think about, it should be easy and quick to carry it out) and 2. Making a system of views that would let me bypass the traditional file-based view of a project. If you program in a mostly functional way, most of the time the load order and segregation into files is much less important than other possible views of the project.
As I said in another recent comment, most OSS coders start off bad; it's being part of the community over time that makes them good. So get a couple sets of asbestos underwear for when the first flames roll in and start small. Find something small that annoys you, fix it, generate a diff (if you don't know how to do this, figure it out, it's easy and will win you a few points right off the bat) and send it to the mailing list. Rinse, wash, repeat, for increasingly large values of "small". :-)
Treasure trove of scalabilty stories
Ubuntu + Emacs.
here's another reason http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/arti...

you can get four years for 0.05 of a g of cannabis
MacBook + TextMate + RoR
As a lawyer, I would advise you to consider your options with an accountant or lawyer
very awesome this. We've just been working on getting our sync engine to work with GMail, using crappy gem's and been writing specs to use their undocumented JSON calls. Which would have been fine, but this is even better.

Looks like Google is actually doing something with their Dataportability membership!

(BTW for those interested check out www.soocial.com our sync tool)
That's an interesting question. Buffet is clearly the "world's richest man" measured by the criteria used by the author of this article. I suspect there are many people in the world who are 'richer', but we don't know about them because they operate in the 'black' economy or appear much further down the 'official' list.
>>6. There were issues with labor exploitation, and I can't argue that this isn't a problem. Unless you're working in construction or something along those lines, this isn't going to affect you. I have never met anybody (neither has anybody I know) that has had their passport taken from them for a decade.

Well hey unless you hang out with penniless migrant workers you're not likely to hear of it are you?!
Ask YC: Would you take a short break before the final push?
Say you had one final push required to complete the beta phase of your startup, maybe 7 days of work total. If you'd been working on the startup for months and felt exhausted, would you a) take a short break now, aiming to complete the project in ~14 days or b) keep marching through clenched teeth and have it done in a week?

Option b) could be considered DIFN, I guess, which appeals to me. But a short break is also an attractive prospect right now. I've read elsewhere on Hacker News that the hard work doesn't really start until you launch, so is this all the more reason to go with a)?
12" PowerBook with Carbon Emacs 22 (if you're not using Emacs 22, you definitely should be).

It's as portable as I can get without getting cramps from typing. I am looking to check out the Lenovo U110 when it drops though, in which case I'll run Debian 4.0 with Xmonad.
Perhaps we have a different definitions of "direct descendant" in this context. I don't see how the similarities, and thus the philosophical lineage, could be any more clear or direct than it is, without actually being made by the folks who made Dungeons and Dragons. I don't really care to argue semantics. The influence is obvious and inarguable, whether you wish to call it descent or something else.
How does a 'Warren Buffet' company handle climate change?
by just getting on with it and using it as a point of difference?
Zuckerberg on Facebook's Future
Well, they use ':' and indenting for defining blocks, but they also seem to have taken the 'nonlocal' keyword from Python 3000.

Also, I haven't looked too deeply into it, but my assumption is that classes in Converge are implemented similarly to Python.

They've borrowed a bunch of ideas it seems, but aside from multi-line lambdas and the "macro" facility, they seem to have changed syntax for the worse. ':=' for assignment, using what have become standard bitwise operators for logical or and logical and--those types of things turn me off right away.
Quit school.

I had severe attention issues with all my classes. I'd spend class after class day dreaming about my hacks. But I still went to class, often without a laptop weirdly. I think I realized it was a rare time I could be away from my laptop. Suffice to say I had more db structures and site flows in my notebook than class notes. It didn't make for pretty grades but heck.
Same here, however I've started treating my laptop as a 'thin client'. All my files are hosted on my iMac, which I access over Wi-Fi when at home, or via iDisk/Back to My Mac when elsewhere.
And that right there is why I haven't been to any non-required classes in quite a while.

I really don't want to advocate my ways but it works pretty well for me: I don't go to class. All of my classes have notes online, I just attend the review sessions before exams. If you're interested in the topics covered you already know the basics, and if you're good at it (strong correlation to interest) you should be able to teach yourself the lessons via Wikipedia and the notes.

The reason I don't advocate this is because it's a pretty good way to get low B's, but makes A's very difficult. I feel that one of two things make this ok:
1) you're going straight into a startup out of college, where GPA doesn't matter
2) you already had a big-name internship, and potential employers won't even care about GPA (except Google, but that's a whole other debate)

I've found the second to be true from personal experience. It's a very dangerous path, but the free time payoff is huge.

I guess there is a huge advantage to finishing your general education requirements early...
MUMPS? MUMPS?? MUMPS???

And they specifically cite the $TEST variable????

The one programming language that I know of in which you can execute both x and y in a "IF t THEN x ELSE y" (not the actual MUMPS commands). That happens because the "t" test sets the value of $TEST (a global variable). The "THEN" part checks if $TEST is true, and if so executes "x". The "ELSE" part checks $TEST and if its false executes "y". If "t" is true "x" calls a subroutine which has a IF that sets $TEST to false then you get thrown in the deepest places of debugging hell.

And THAT is a software masterpiece?
Steve Jobs: Flash video not suitable for iPhone
i'm not exactly sure what he's talking about, but there's 2 things Lua has here. one is that the language is functional, so you can replace, alter, or remove the dangerous functions. the other is that you can specify the variable 'environment' of a function with a table (Lua's hash.) so you can construct its environment in an 'opt-in' basis and know for sure everything you're allowing the function to do is safe. and of course these things would be meaningless if built-in functions didn't behave like user functions
Congrats Fuzzwich guys!

One question: will Fuzzwich Animator still have the same try-before-you-register feature as the original Fuzzwich? As another comment mentioned, the value proposition isn't immediately obvious without playing with Fuzzwich, so some sort of no-risk-no-hassle trial could do a lot to let people decide if Fuzzwich works for what they want to do.
Lockhart's Lament: On Mathematics at School
Brain Scanner Can Tell What You're Looking At
New Experiment Could Make Quantum Networks Possible
I guess Google can get away with it, because they are Google?

I understand vendors not wanting to give away their revenue, but in this case, I am not the person buying the hammer, I am the person who gave the hammer to the store to sell. So it seems to me at least telling me the percentage of revenue share would be fair. Then I would have to trust them on how much they sold it for, or, if things went bad, I could audit them.

With the way they do it now, they could make a million dollars off my game and never give me a penny. It just doesn't seem fair. And it is not like things like that have never happened before, think about all the bands that were ripped off by record labels. So is it really a good idea to trust here?

I have heard complaints about AdWords, too, although I forgot the details, did not pay enough attention at the time.
I'd really like to see someone mesh together IM and SMS in a seamless way. Probably won't happen while mobile phone carriers are charging per-SMS, though.
I certainly couldn't handle it - I didn't finish any of my independent projects until I got out of college. Like you said, I couldn't really give them the concentration they required when I had to worry about classes, homework, activities, eating, friends, parties, etc. Day was just too broken up. And you can't code a startup on an hour here and an hour there.

Same problem occurs after you get a day job, but to a lesser extent. The nice thing about employment is that once you go home at night, your time is yours (or should be), so you don't have any homework or studying that you should be doing. You're still limited to 2-3 hours/day of decent worktime, and that's still not enough to really start a company, but at least you can concentrate decently on it.

I'd recommend that you finish college, get a job at a software company for 1-2 years, and then do the startup. A job will let you see the sorts of problems that people are willing to pay for (they're usually more difficult than you imagine in college), and get you in the habit of writing code all day. And it'll show you what the alternative is, for the rest of your life, if you don't make the startup fly. You might even pick up some technical skills.

If you're really really passionate about computers - enough that you just can't concentrate on class - then I'd suggest dropping out, going to work for someone now, and starting a company a couple years down the line. I have a couple friends that took that route and their careers don't seem to have suffered for it at all; in fact, they seem to be doing better than others their age (namely me ;-)) because they didn't waste 4 years on something they weren't really into. But since you phrase it as "nearly impossible to work on my startup on days that I've been in class" instead of "nearly impossible to work in class on days that I've been working on my startup", I doubt this applies to you.

Do try some smaller open-source projects though, stuff you can do in a weekend. Or work on someone else's open-source codebase. That stuff looks really good on a resume, and you'll pick up some really useful skills.
I was using Emacs 21 but on your advice I installed 22. OMG! I was developing cataracts with 21, it was just so damn ugly. GTK is like corrective eye surgery. Cheers mate.
Web 2.0's Long Road to IPOs
why not mexico?
Polynomial Root-finding with the Jenkins-Traub Algorithm
> progress has been so slow. Friends have drifted away

Same here....
Death Threats, Intimidation, and Blogging
Fedora + KDE + Vim
1) I can have a terrible attitude! Keep in mind though that this can be a great way for some people get things done:)

2) If it's detailed enough, it can be extremely valuable.
Darren, you a CodeIgniter guy? If you haven't already, I highly recommend getting started with the new ASP.NET MVC framework--it almost makes working with .NET in the day job tolerable (yes, "almost").
Boldface in Cyberspace: It’s a Woman’s Domain
vim on my MBP (formerly on my Dell laptop running Ubuntu).

I enjoy vim because it rewards me for learning new commands (referencing the "What software makes you happy?" thread).
Ask.com gets a makeover, lays off 40
IT salary survey: Not all technical certs created equal
Microsoft launches its alternative to Amazon’s SimpleDB
Online Pitches Made Just for You
Desktop + Arch Linux + openbox + gvim

C, Python, Common Lisp
"""In other words, there's no software that is designed to increase productivity -- to put powerful systems in place that stop negative inertia and establish a "creative and chaotic order," if you will."""

All other considerations aside, what you seem to be asking is for companies to alter their whole way of working (plus adopt new software tools) on the promise of "10x productivity". That's going to be a very tough sell, particularly if you're just starting out and have no management experience. Just as techies are suspicious of "noobs" with ambitious ideas but no code, so managers are going to ask you about your track record right from the start.

It's almost like you're saying "I want to write a program which can create love, then educate people about being in love" when really you should focus on a specific tool for a particular problem, like creating a dating website or something. Changing the insides of people's heads is the hardest thing you'll ever try to do, so something smaller would be a more achievable goal.

It's good to be ambitious, but equally you need targets you can hit immediately. Reduce the thing to its bare essentials then see where you can go with it.
10 traits to look for when you’re hiring a programmer
Oh. I think only the top 3% got it. ;-)
I'd go with 1) what works for you, 2) at that time, 3) with an eye toward future expansion. What #3 means is if you go with a simple solution per #1, make sure you can migrate your data.

For example, I've seen many companies grow from using Excel to Access to SQL Server. This path seems quite natural, and despite the issues associated with Access databases designed by non-DBAs (ahem), the process generally works (with the assistance of those of us who get paid to help).

Company B's problem is they don't realize they've outgrown their system, and need to evolve to the next step. However, I think their solution (spreadsheets) should work perfectly fine for your two-man shop.

I duplicate this lifecycle in my own personal projects. I might start off tracking fitness in vim, and decide I want sums so I migrate to Calc, etc. I recommend using simple tools, well.

Do you think if you try to adopt a larger package before you're ready you might end up spending most of your time playing with the system instead of working (like a writer who procrastinates writing)?
Might want to check Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL to see if there's a normalized way to do what you want.
No, simply because it's seasonal.
I was kind of just hoping for the person to shoot over an email address.
Don't want to associate financial info disclosed here with the company I work for.
It's funny how a lot of college students are keeping their fingers crossed for the IPO's to hold out until they graduate...a lot of them are hoping for another Google with all of the paper-millionaire employees that were made with their IPO.
The coming death of paper for information storage
NetBeans (Sometimes TextMate), Mac OS X on a MacBook Pro, with all code in a Subversion repository.

I started using TextMate, but I find a bunch of things like how it jacks up indenting when pasting, and flashes when matching tabs. NetBeans handles both these things much more nicely.
I had a funny discussion with my school's CS career center councilor (CCCC?) about this. He told me about how he is being inundated with calls from tech companies to the effect of "please please, do you have any more CS majors for me!" Put a smile on my face. It's a happy time to be a CS major...almost offsets the looming recession.
MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5.2, Emacs, Python primarily, with occasional outbursts of TextMate, Lisp, Perl, Ruby and Logo (for teaching mathematical concepts to my son.)
Windows (Office 2007 won me over temporarily from *nix) and nano over SSH. I get yelled at almost daily to switch to emacs. I'm used to it though, I use Word 2007 instead of LaTeX and will never hear the end of it.
Does it have advanced Inner Join™ Technology?