skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
<nit/rant>

"..there would be some serious PhD research in this area."

PhD research? I think you mean just 'research'. PhDs aren't the only ones doing research in this world. Neither are they the ones doing the 'hardest' or 'highest' research. Academia is just a different community from that of founder/VCs, or writers, or movie makers, or chess players. It has its own language, its own jargon, and its own objective functions for assigning value to work. But it's not more 'research-y'.*

'PhD research' means 'research work for which the audience is in academia'. The way it's normally used, one can just drop the first word without loss of meaning. Just like in the phrase 'personally believe' that William Zinsser picks on. (http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-25th-Anniversary-Nonficti...)

</rant>

* - Nor is it more open anymore, with all the emphasis on open software in industry, and the increasing commercialization of academic projects.
I would highly recommend using JavaScript unless you have a compelling reason (of which there are several) to use Flash.

Often times using flash it like using a sledgehammer to put a picture up on your wall. You might just end up with a big whole in the wall.
Gecko's Stickiness Inspires New Surgical Bandage
except, pdfmenot has zooming and scrolling. how could you have a pdf reader without scrolling?
"The average person isn't buying toothpaste becuase someone famous is, but they do drive escalades and hummers because they saw it done by "influencer's"''

I think Watts' point is that the influencers are not part of some special core sect of mavens and connectors, but simply people within one or another social sphere who, for whatever reason, happen to get attention. It's more random that Gladwell suggests.

(I tried reading the book, but just didn't have the attention span and it went back to the library before I finished it. I think I skim-read about half of it.)
The site was launched privately for YC founders about half a year before it was available for the general public...
'Bit of an ego blow to those styling themselves as "influentials."'

I wonder if Galdwell's conjecture gained traction because, deep down, most people really like to believe that some people are simply special.
I love Pirates.
tinypy 64k 1.0
I don't think too many startups outsource. Certainly not the type that YC funds, and certainly not development which is where you would hope to gain an edge.

The issue with outsourcing development is that to judge the quality of the outsourced job and whether it satisfies your requirements, you have to be competent enough to build it yourself. But if you could build it yourself, then you wouldn't be outsourcing.

So if you can, build it yourself, and if not, then hire somebody who has the skills that you lack. You really only should be outsourcing urgent one-off things and highly specialized non-core areas like PR and legal.
Summary: School system alters math curriculum for students. Parents, being naturally curious, read up on the relevant academic research into math pedagogy using ERIC and JSTOR. The parents listed the pros and cons of each curriculum, carefully comparing the two options. Then, just to be sure, they cross-validated their findings with the latest research in cognitive development and educational theory.

While realizing that science is an ongoing and imperfect process, they were sufficiently convinced of their correctness to proceed with creating an informative and emotionally compelling website to spread their newfound knowledge.
"Is it actually possible to make money writing development tools any more? "

TextMate seems to have won the hearts and minds of many developers using Macs, and it's not free.
Anyone know how you would go about creating such a player?

Also curious if anyone knows if docstoc and pdfmenot are simply using flashpaper or a customer player like scribd.
You know Adobe has a similar product, right? FlashPaper? Maybe you've seen it before, like on Scribd yesterday...
I've done a couple sites in the past that used SMS messaging for notifications -- I found the quickest, easiest was to ask the user their provider and send the notification using one of the email->SMS gateways listed above by Elven.

Teleflip is nice. I remember giving them a try a long tim eago, only thing is I remember them inserting their brand into the message. I didn't particularly want that.

Also, speaking of Teleflip... I've heard people speculate how they're able to find the correct provider. Anyone know? Initially sending the message to all providers and then seeing which one doesn't bounce back seems spammy, but who knows. (And I suppose if you then cache the results for future requests, it ain't so bad.)
Sharpen your Axe (Cartoon)
Passing resemblance to Paul Buchheit, I'd say... http://bp0.blogger.com/_4sbxCBha3lY/RfoW9T8Tm3I/AAAAAAAAAZ8/...

http://www.useit.com/jakob/photos/jakob_mouse_big.jpg
"Day 32: All three buddies come through. Now have enough serial numbers to open up a Microsoft distributorship. Install Office 2008 on Air."

Nice one, Guy. Guess it's OK to pirate software and brag about it on your blog if you can use your influence to glom serial numbers.
Newspond - Techmeme competitor
Mining knowledge from Wikipedia with WEX
Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash
List of important publications in computer science
How Not to Release Software
But, its java - you can't do anything cool with java, its just not allowed ;)
Ask YC: feedback on my startup
I've often wanted something that'll alert me when URLs change, and show the resulting diff (e.g. changes to the terms of service or privacy policy of the sites I use, or the page for tracking some FedEx parcel I shipped, or areweatwarwithiran.com). ChangeFeed is designed to basically turn any page into a completely impartial RSS feed.
Suburbia these days draws a strong parallel to the NHL in the '90s. The major expansion binge which created hockey teams where they, to be frank, had no business being, watered down the product by spreading talent thinly and damn near killed the sport in the US (it will probably never die in Canada no matter what happens).

In the same vein, most of the country never had a housing crunch like the Bay Area and metro Boston, but home building has been consistently outstripping the economy. Population grows at 0.9% annually, or about 2.7 million people per year; From 2000-2006, the net increase in housing units was 9.0% over the whole span, or 1.4% per year. In 2006 alone there were 1.8 million family units created, and over 2 million in 2005. With 2.3 or 2.4 people per household on average, there should only be 1.2 million new homes per year.

Unless household size is rapidly shrinking, there just aren't enough families to fill the houses being produced.
I think the problem is that the auto industry is so entrenched in gas-based cars, and the system has been running for so many decades that it's hard to start producing an entirely new product. A car has thousands of pieces, many coming from different suppliers.
Oil Closes at $100.01 per Barrel (Sooner or later, won't this affect us entrepreneurs?)
Whats relevant to the world is still relevant to us hackers. We might be a special population interested in something like MSFT's bids on Yahoo, but we're just as interested, (as you can see by this upvoted thread) in the happenings of the "real" world outside of our digital cages.
Jelly is a semi-weekly work-together, and you're invited
I've often wanted something that'll alert me when URLs change, and show the resulting diff (e.g. changes to the terms of service or privacy policy of the sites I use, or the page for tracking some FedEx parcel I shipped, or areweatwarwithiran.com). ChangeFeed is designed to basically turn any page into a completely impartial RSS feed.
Buying a blu-ray burner and all that jazz might not be worth it...might as well repurchase the HD-DVDs you bought, in Blu-ray.
Book recommendation: the dip (http://www.amazon.com/Dip-Little-Book-Teaches-Stick/dp/15918...)
What Penelope mentions is not necessarily true. The interview candidate can give a number an set the bar at the high end.

Read Bargaining for Advantage by G Richard Shell -- this has more info on what I am talking about and is probably the only book you need on the subject.
Let me clear my point. Speaking about outsourcing, I was talking about offshore development, outside US.

Well, still, a lot of startups are always looking for someone, either programmer, or designer, or database developer, etc. There are also a lot of single founders. To start a startup one man is not enough. Even if you are a hacker, it's always nice to have one more hacker.

Here is my point: a lot of startups are looking for someone to join them for a tiny salary plus huge chunk of equity. So why wouldn't they consider outsources, using the same amount of money, they may not give any equity at all or just a small piece of it.

kingnothing: you sound to me like you think that outsourcers require more money, than local people. Did I get you wrong?

mercurio: I'm not talking about corporate level outsourcing, B2B. I'm talking about using power of freelancers. They still stay below the US market rates.
Nice feature, but you need to explain what it is on the homepage.
We've had success outsourcing some of our non-core activities in our shop (4 p2p hackers working on distributed storage). For example, we've outsourced our website implementation and our Facebook app. Though any one of us could do them, it was much more efficient to draw up a set of screenshots and functional goals along with our API and then get back to working on our core project.

One key success factor is to find a high quality group to work with. We used recommendations, but I've also seen a few 2-person shops use oDesk find people for prototypes of applications they didn't have time/interest to build. The prices are extremely competitive, and often you can hire 3 people and use the best result.
I really like it as a utility. However, it's hard to imagine the use cases that would justify a pro subscription over just writing your own scripts.
(note: I am trying to be funny)
Are you for real with the "unlimited" part of the pro accounts? I.e. I will definitely get one if I am allowed to interact with my account programatically (ie I am free to write a script to add urls to monitor I?) this is functionally I have to use in a lot of the little tools i develop.
Techcrunch --> http://www.techcrunch.com

Lifehacker --> http://www.lifehacker.com

NYTimes --> http://www.nytimes.com

Discover Magazine --> http://discovermagazine.com/

Onion --> http://www.onion.com

Valleywag --> http://www.Valleywag.com
Do you think it is silly to complain that a story doesn't belong when it is voted to the top?
From today:

"I'm sorry, but i really am tired of this reddit content making the front page of Hacker News." (about the [cool] map)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119375

"Important world news, which is why it's on cnn.com and pretty much every other news site out there. Pretty much irrelevant to hackers." (about castro)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118936

Although, I am pretty frustrated that porn (not art) made the front page of reddit today...
http://reddit.com/info/69b35/comments/ (of course nsfw)

Please comment under yes or no.
My intent is that unlimited would be basically unlimited, but I suppose if things become crazy I might have to put a cap in place (1000 URLs or something). The API already exists in a sense; check out the bookmarklet.
yes or no

under

Please comment
The article is a lot of wishful thinking on behalf of its author. The news of the death of the suburbs has been greatly exaggerated.

No doubt, basic bedroom communities with a lack of transportation options for commuting will suffer with increased energy costs. However, the suburbs that provide a balanced business, commercial, and housing ecosystem and have diverse transportation options to the main destinations outside will actually thrive and prosper.

The simple fact is that not everyone likes nor wants to live in more densely populated areas. Believe it or not, walkability can be nice, but not everyone cares about that.

Signed,
A Happy Suburban Dweller

/ I actually do love visiting downtowns like Boston and San Fran and walking to places.

// Fortunately, my home suburb in the Twin Cities (Eden Prairie) has hundreds of miles of dedicated bike paths to get around...

// ...and my commute to work is within the suburb itself.

/// Economically, it would take a tremendous shock to get me to move away. Perhaps, I'm just lucky to live in the RIGHT suburb! ;-)
Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep
So to summarize third-party proprietary dev tools on the Mac:

10 years ago: Metrowerks (photo of their HQ: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/47/MetrowerksBuil...)

Today: TextMate (hi, Allan!)
The time required to write and maintain your own scripts perhaps?
It would be cool if you indexed the sites people are tracking (with their permission) or at least had an index showing changes on the top N sites on the web. I'd like to be able to browse changes across Facebook, Google, etc., without having to set up a feed, add it to my reader, and wait--it'd be great if I could see a history right away.
The problem with email->SMS is that if you 'abuse' the system, and abuse can be loosely defined here, you might find SMS messages disappearing. If you're only sending messages in the hundreds per month, it's fine. Anything more than a thousand you really need a gateway.
Are YOU Replaceable?
Step by Step - Create Guided Interface Tutorials with JavaScript
There are thousands of extremely talented developers around the world that will work for much less than US salaries. I think every company should at least consider outsourcing as an option, especially if you are working on a "one zebra stripe" product or you are incredibly cash-strapped - which probably describes most young startup entrepreneurs.

That said, I've never outsourced development on anything that is the core technology of a company, be it the product itself or any technology that gives the firm its primary service advantage. I believe that if something can be explained and executed properly by an outsourced team at a significantly lower cost than we can do it ourselves, then it can essentially can be done by anyone else just as easily, so it isn't a worthwhile product for us to pursue. It's just a commodity. It could be an extremely profitable project, of course, but it loses its interest to me. And there are always more interesting projects to work on...projects where I or my team actually have something unique to offer.

I have outsourced several ancillary products to foreign developers, though. Every single one has been a complete nightmare. We used a few major Indian firms, including Wipro, and we even had our own dev leads move there to direct coding. All of the projects went over our time and cost budgets. The solutions were also, for lack of a better word, brittle. The Indian developers were very talented and nice people, but there was just too much communication overhead and something seemed to get lost in the back and forth. A few times, it seemed like we were paying the developers to learn and get up to speed on technology they claimed to be experts in.

We also outsourced a decent-sized project to a team of Ukrainian developers. I was ecstatic to get them (their lead developer had post-doc computer science experience and had worked for the Soviet space program, and he quoted us a salary that was about what we pay our interns. A genius for peanuts.) They finished a very elegant solution for us that was blazing fast and blew away our expectations. It was also finished four months early. But then they held it hostage to get more money. We ultimately negotiated to pay a portion of their "ransom," only to find out they had sold our solution to several other firms for the same price. We had just footed the development bill for our competitors. And good luck getting any kind of legal satisfaction in this type of scenario.

We've outsourced graphic design and the like to freelancers in the US with great success, though. Just budget extra time and money in case they don't deliver.

So, all in all, outsourcing can work out...but it is usually a bigger headache than it is worth and you need to be ultra-cautious.
Schools do not teach everything in the classroom. They send the kids home with 2 hours of homework and the school expects that the parents to know how to do it.

It would be alright whatever they tought, if they could teach it in school first before sending it home but they can't because they have so much information to cover that is on the state test they often send the excess home without teaching it or without teaching it fully.

I have two kids one in 5th and the other in 6th grade. With school, homework, and activities (scouting, guitar, drums, karate, church youth group, after school activities, etc) our kids are often pulling 10 hour days.
If you are from India,check out:
http://www.smssolutions.net/smscenters/high/1204/
http://www.sancharnet.in/BulkSMS/BulkSMS.html
Thanks for taking the time to share this info...I didn't even realize he had anything to do with the Bloomberg book.

Litman's "Conversations with Millionaires" book was pimped out by a bunch of people I think are pretty shady, so I had avoided reading it. I'll check it out if I come across it again. Unfortunately, I don't think these types of books would sell without a generous dash of the rah-rah cheerleading stuff.
What is the motivation for Joel Spolsky's post? Sympathy for MS Office file formats? Reads like a manifesto for never ever changing/cleaning up the file formats because it took a thousand man-years to come up with the current incarnation. He is even going so far as to defend the office file formats' complexity and resulting maintainability hell by saying that portability was not an issue fifteen+ years ago - well, it is now. His suggestions for file format conversion solutions are OK, but doesn't it occur to him, that developers don't want to be locked-in to having to shell out money for MS APIs forever? Ties in well with Bruce Schneier's latest post on vendor lock-in http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/lockin.html
Thanks, everyone, for making it such a good first year.

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html?19feb08
There Ain't No Such Thing as the Fastest Code
Ask YC: Finding a Website Designer
I searched for a thread like this to no avail, so forgive me if this has already been posted, but considering the incredible importance of site design, I was wondering how one could go about finding a partner for a startup. As a little background: I'm at Carnegie Mellon, which has great CS and fine arts programs, but I don't actually know where to find these types...do they tend to hang out on sites like HN? Are they usually more artsy or computery (not to stereotype)? Are there as many entrepreneurial types amongst them, as there are with CS majors? I'm worried because it's the one major aspect of a startup that I've yet to find someone capable of covering who's interested...any advice/recommendations?

Also, if anybody who's primary focus is design is interested, we're looking, email me if you want to know more. We're in the Pittsburgh area, but don't require that you be. College students are encouraged, since we decided not to pursue funding for the time being, and thus aren't offering salaries.
Thanks, I never heard about Jack Gannsle. His books and website looks very interesting. I will have a look at it more in details.
I have been experimenting with http://www.txtdrop.com/ - they add a little tagline at the end, but it works. You may have users that do not want their number going to some random company.

The best bet is to pay for one at some point.
I had a quick look. It seems not so easy to get an apple II. Probably even more difficult to find the programming books. I will check more in details. Probably that a development board for modern CPU will be easier to get.
I thought this was fascinating.

I know there have been a lot of new users lately, and a lot of us are concerned that the site will go downhill, but this is very interesting to me. I've never seen a more graphic demonstration of the huge size of the US economy.

To think, for example, that I grew up in fear of being nuked by New Jersey...
Krop.com seems to be the new hangout for talented creatives looking for work. Don't waste your time with craigslist, most of those designers are terrible (or worse).
Judge Orders Wikileaks Site Shut
Bill Gates Talks at Stanford
Totally valid point. Mobile carriers are very difficult to deal with, and almost universally have a policy of shutting off access first, and then it is your duty to try and figure out why it happened so you can navigate their bureaucracy in hopes of getting things restored.

I suggested email->sms for raju's question because he was looking for a solution for his "small app" that only "potentially" needed sms capabilities, so I assumed a low-volume transaction limit, for which email->sms is a cheap and easy solution.
Coding Horror, Reddit, 37Signals Signal Vs Noise, Joel on Software, blog.pmarca.com
Thanks PG for creating Hacker news.

Vaguely recalling reddit, it started going downhill, albeit slowly, after 1 year. Interestingly, one of the articles on the front page of Hacker news is about Fidel Castro.

Hopefully the same does not happen with Hacker news.....
http://www.programmermeetdesigner.com/

You're one of the few other people on here from Pittsburgh! email me if you want to meet for food/drink sometime.
He's got some valid points, though.
> Economists Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian even proved that the value of a software company is the total lock-in

How much lock-in does your start-up have?
There are quite a few designers on here and they're probably more the "computery" type since this site doesn't appeal much to design snobs. I'd guess they are fairly entrepreneurial too. Feel free to ping me (myoung8@stanford.edu), I'm an entrepreneurial, unsnobbish designer and I can hold my own in Rails.
Who do you think will use your website? Would it be throwaway monitoring (something like mailinator)? People who are not savvy enough to use a RSS reader or RSS itself?

I love the minimalist design and the very functional UI -- good job.

You might want to shorten the subscribe URL so that it doesn't get wrapped in emails. Look at how short the you tube URL's are.

Good luck!
Ask PG: noprocrast effectiveness?
PG: How effective is noprocrast? From your logs,

1. What percentage of registered users have this setting turned on?

2. Of the people visiting the "Get back to work", what percentage of folks click the override link?

Thanks!
I want that on a t-shirt!
craigslist is definitely one of the worst ways to find a good designer.
just use textmarks. they offer an api for developers and all messages in/out/unlimited are free
Yay! I love News.YC
I usually go with multiple local SMS providers. I've written a simple service that accepts a phone number and a message and then decides which gateway to use based on the country code. I've put a queue in between so that it is easy to quickly push out messages asynchronously. It's less than 1000 lines of Java. Today I would probably hack it together with Python and based on Amazon's Simple Queue service. In even less lines of code :-)
SearchYC Presents: Ask YC Archive & RSS Feed
I totally agree. Simple key/value stores are extremely valuable. Their simplicity also requires you to simplify your problems. In many cases you find out that you really don't need that 5 line sql query to join 8 tables.