skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder whether the stereotype of geniuses being manic depressives exists to keep people from being geniuses? Of course, there are manic depressive geniuses, but there are plenty of manic depressive non geniuses. Plus, the stereotype can easily form a self fulfilling prophecy, due to social stigma.
The idea that Seattle is more supportive of "hybrid" business models than the Valley is nice bit of spin. Seattle is perhaps supportive of these models, but only to the extent that it isn't very supportive of models that are purely digital.

The first time I walked into a startup event here, I was cornered by one guy whose "startup" involved heavy industrial manufacturing, and another two whose "online" business involved selling things in web-based stores. There are definitely good people making online-only plays here, but it goes against the grain.
The CRV QuickStart Seed Funding Program
up mod:
http://reddit.com/info/69l9m/comments/

http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Who_has_the_most_grassroot...
different people learn in different ways just like different people teach the same subject in different ways. To me having more variety helps out a lot.

Techwise - Rails and Django are more or less the same (compared to the other stuff out there). Rails just has a bigger community than Django. I think that really helps for someone just starting out (with a deadline to boot)
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

edit: seriously:

noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
I won't be surprised. His field is HCI or something like that.
This is an EVIL site. It sucks in your gmail contacts without even asking for confirmation. And I can't delete my account once I create it.

These guys are potentially HUGE email spammers (why else would they pull in emails without asking) and NO PROFILE DELETE??? Hello.. look at what happened to Facebook when they tried to pull that crap.

STAY AWAY from this site.
Yes, you can get away with doing web programming without a CS background, so this practice does not "require" such a degree - but having a CS background will only make you better at what you do. In addition, you will utilize some of the knowledge you acquired in college in places where you would least suspect.

That and the real point of education is to learn how to learn and think. View it as a mental workout if you truly do tell yourself "this is pointless, I am never going to need to know this". Remember that it will only make you stronger in the end.
As much as I admire Feynman, the stories about his magician qualities are, honestly, so far beyond most people and end up being more entertaining than inspiring.
Credibility and visible user activity are the 2 things I think are needed the most as of now. You need to give users more voice other than tipping in order to escalate conflict (which is the driving force of the website, right?)
Not only is he working on some really cool stuff; I think that one of the most powerful things about Jonny Lee, is that he's such a great communicator. I'm sure the guy has a pretty big brain between his ears if he's getting his PhD in CS at CMU. But, he really does have a gift for being able to break down a subject and be able to communicate it well. He also understands the video medium and uses it to his advantage.
Good idea. I'll add a disqus thread.

[edit: done in 9 minutes. Go disqus!]
I'm not sure I understand your concern about the 37signals article: 99% of articles will be irrelevant once you've read them.

Also do you not think the top stories should be the same for everyone? It's the easiest way to keep the community focused and self-serving.
When was that, 10 years ago? I was just at lunch 2.0 last weekend and it was very reminiscent of Silicon Valley.
Microsoft Says Vista SP1 Blocks Third Party Apps
Any article title with "sex" in it should be harder to get to the first page, also any article title with curse words. Both are instant indicators of low quality.
This isn’t a zero-sum game
Google Vulnerable, But Not From Lack of Features
A History of Hacking Culture
An ideal solution, although I'm not saying it's easy to get it right, would be to measure the weight of the story based on what portion of clicks are long term clicks, i.e., clicks after which people spend considerable amount of time (presumably reading the article) before coming back to perusing other stories on news.yc.
Curse words aren't necessarily an indicator of low quality. Plenty of cogent arguments (and plenty of great literature) have been written that included cursing.
Newegg has it really cheap also. $299 with free shipping

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828118...
My workflow/tools looks like this: I mostly use Emacs as my main editor. I also do debugging from Emacs. In other terminal windows I read manual pages for libc and other standard libraries, compile my code with http://a-a-p.sf.net or simply (GNU) Make. I also test my projects from the command line since most of them are daemons or command line tools anyway.

Library wise I try to stick to STL and Boost for most of my C++ projects. Both are well documented in online and offline resources. I recently also added the Intel Threading Building Blocks library to my personal toolset.

You did not mention anything about doing GUI work, but in that area there is a good amount of options too. I would certainly pick the one with the best community support. That will help you most in the long run I think.

S.
Research Team Finds Security Flaw in Popular Disk Encryption Technologies
Researchers: Disk Encryption Not Secure
I'll try to turn this crazy post into something more usable for this crowd:

From a startup point of view I think outsourcing the development of your core product is very dangerous. You need to be in constant touch with your product and have a direct feedback loop during development. That can be very hard if you outsource.

Setting up a remote team and building up a good relationship with them can be very fruitful however. We've done it too and we consider those people first class colleagues. It does take a lot of effort; lots of Skype calls and visits. But it works very well.

S.
Hacker News's RSS feed is broken again
The comments link used to be readable, but now it's just in a CDATA free-floating within the <item> tag. Neither Firefox nor NetNewsWire show the comments link this way, and the feed does not validate (http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Frss)

In addition, I'd be really happy if you could add a GUID (or other universal identifier) to each element in the feed; that way when the title of the post gets edited five times, NetNewsWire won't think it's a new item every time.

I really would suggest looking into using Atom instead of RSS, because it's simpler to just have one specific standard, instead of trying to meet one of the nine different RSS standards, but I can understand that this is a little more unlikely to happen.
Now that News.Yc has grown: Hackers in SoCal?
Hey all,

This community has definitely expanded greatly, comprised now of users from all over the globe. I was wondering if now there are any who are hackers that reside in SoCal. That's LA/OC/SD area. If so, drop me an email kbeshay@gmail.com.

Take care.
A very interesting read, even though it was just a press release about the study, not the full results.

-----
Full findings of the study, its methodology and results are being presented this afternoon at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point, Florida.
----
Biggest Success of Y Combinator? Scribd
I, for one, welcome our new 14 year old overlords.

On a more serious note, I want people interested in Arc here. People after top ten lists and Kevin Rose gossip, not so much. (I still love Digg though. No need to be snooty.)
There has been discussion about this, and replies by PG, but I failed to find the threads. The outcome was that YC can fund two companies in the same field.
If history is any indication, then yes. The Dutch website http://www.schoolbank.nl that let you get back in touch with former school mates tried just that and saw their users leave, for example to the Dutch facebook workalike http://www.hyves.nl
The original is a great read, I would highly recommend it.
Help me get in touch with e1ven.
Since HN doesn't support PMs, I'm resorting to this...

I'm trying to get in touch with Colin Davis, username = e1ven

Colin, if you see this, would you mind sending me your email address (myoung8@stanford.edu)? I'd like to chat about ChronX and online TCGs.

Thanks!
As the author points out, he hasn't encountered that problem in the real world in 15 years. So it's one of those essentially entirely hypothetical interview problems. Maybe some insight can be gained about how the candidate solves the problem. I wonder if it's as straight-forward as it seems though.

Really, you'd be using UTF-8 these days, which was designed with unambiguously back-iterating in mind. Or you'd solve the author's shipping problem the way he did. So in fact, the most practical solution to the problem in the vast majority of cases is: use a better encoding/data structure. Even if you've got a legacy data set in such an obscure encoding, I think it'd be faster and less error prone to convert to a better encoding and work from there.

So if you encountered this problem in the real world, you'd most likely take a step back and see if you could avoid/work around it entirely, avoiding some messy, inefficient algorithmic solution. At an interview you're trying to find out if the candidate is suitable for the kind of real work you'd be hiring them for. Is it really beneficial to get them to solve some problem that you'd really try to avoid entirely in the real world? Sure, the candidate might spot the insanity of the problem, but in an interview, the problem wouldn't present itself the same way it might in the real world. There's no macroscopic context.

I'm not sure I'd have the presence of mind in such an interview situation. Nerves may just push me into autopilot and make me find an algorithm. (note: I've been on both sides of the interview game; more frequently in the interviewer's chair)
"10 years from now, facebook will be forgotten and social networks will seem even lamer than they do now."

Agreed. The only thing these applications really do for people is to make it easy to stay in touch with their friends without resorting to more standard internet techniques such as instant messaging, email and personal websites.

Those are not things you need a specialized web application for and sooner or later the "average internet user" (the core consituency of these "social apps") will figure that out.

When that will happen exactly is simply a question of marketing. It's a lot easier to sell the proposition that "here's our social app, you can use it to let all your friends know what you're doing and it's going to allow long lost friends to find you" than it is to sell something like Wordpress, which, together with Google, can do the same thing.

In ten or twenty years everyone's just going to have a blog of some sort and we'll be using Google to find people. Facebook will be history.
Agreed.

The comments link needs to go inside a <description> element, and a GUID could be as simple the HN item URL.

I've been loving reading Hacker News via Google Reader since the comments link started showing up. It was a downer to see it gone today.
I work on a compiler for a living, so yeah I kinda use my compilers course. And pretty much all the other CS courses.

I think people who say their education hasn't been valuable just picked the wrong education.
How about, simply, "only the top five stories can be downvoted?"
I've emailed you.
Well from my experience dealing with facebook's salespeople - it costs approximately $160,000 to have a facebook.com/mybusinessname page made for your company. So long as companies believe the social-media hype enough, facebook will be making money from at least that (and you'd be surprised at the companies that have already signed up).

Let's not forget the $1,000,000 initial retainer to do any kind of partnership with them (i.e., Beacon).
Are people not allowed to have more than one idea at once?
He also wouldn't fit into my Gmail window, I don't think.
Why not just scale the weight given to a vote based on the voter's karma? Or would this encourage group think?
Tool Turns Google into Vulnerability Scanner
What the hell has wired done for reddit's traffic? Loopt hasn't had an exit yet, but neither has scridb.
Moveable Interactive Projected Displays
plus the sponsoring of free gifts... I would be surprised if a round of free gifts was as cheap as one million.
probably worth sending something to http://www.chronx.com/techsupport.php
Things for sale that I will mail you
Ask News.YC: How to re-motivate yourself?
I have always wondered what the drivers were behind motivation. I am sure all of us have experienced setbacks and we have had to re-motivate ourselves every now and then.

We have been working on a startup idea for almost an year now. The initial days were fantastic, we were totally convinced we had hit upon a brilliant idea, there was vacuum to be filled. We worked crazy hours, got a lot of stuff done. Needless to say we were highly motivated.

But lately, I am personally having trouble motivating myself. I see myself squandering valuable time that I could have utilized. We suddenly seem to have a few competitors and it suddenly appear as though we don't have a unique value proposition.

And I have been pondering over this for some time now. I do realize that the lack of motivation is a sign that things have to be done differently, or something needs to change. We either need to course-correct, change gears, think of a different market, a different approach or just look into ourselves honestly and understand ourselves better.

I was hoping to find some answers to my misgivings through this forum. I have benefited from news.yc in the past and I have no doubt that you guys will help us bounce back.

So here are my questions to sum things up:

1. What do you do when things are not going the way you want them to?

2. When do you know its time to change? (eg: market, process, partners.. etc)

3. When do you know its time to call it quits? (to start working on a different problem)

I would really be thankful if some of you could share your experiences so that all of us benefit.

Thanks!!!
Hmmm, what is the order that you get in the rss? Feeds are supposed to be time-ordered, but here they appear in the current ranking on the homepage. So the historical ordering is not very useful...
I'm starting a new lifestyle blog for people who click on ads.
Don't use autocrap unless for some reason you really have to. SCons is nice, you just write very simple python scripts for the build scripts. CMake is also good, it can generate native makefiles or project files for your build tools, including Unix Makefiles and Microsoft Visual Studio project files.

I usually use vim, SCons, and GDB for most of my stuff. If you need a graphical debugger, try DDD. If you like IDEs, might want to try Eclipse and KDevelop. I usually use online docs in HTML format, including man pages. (So to look up how stat(2) works, I google for "stat 2 man page".)

Another indispensable tool in general is GNU Screen.
A year? That's quite a while - why not try and release something? Users are a huge motivator for me.
Better finance for more enterprise growth in Europe
To this I would also add: remove barriers to entry. If you want to tax firms that are profitable, ok, but please, please, make it so you don't have to spend upwards of 10K euro just to set up a company.
This is an example of stoking the community to drive traffic to low quality content.

At best, this should have been a local discussion link. Otherwise, this is spam.
conjecture + YC mention = linkbait
I've noticed this happens to everyone in math, especially in college. A lot of times the hardest part of finding a proof is getting over the mental block of "there's no way I can prove this".
That's what I meant when I said "accounted for inflation". I'll hunt up the study some day. I'm not so sure about you conclusion, though, but maybe my experience with people was different. I'm also skeptical that most people would reason that prices would go up in the billion dollar society. I think the biggest fear is: I am at the deep bottom of the social ladder.
shameless plug:

We've culled Ask YC threads from Hacker News and gave them their own page and RSS feed.

http://searchyc.com/askyc/
http://searchyc.com/askyc/rss

If you like the aspect of community knowledge sharing check the link out.
It would be spam if someone was intentionally and regularly submitting linkbait content of the same format as this... but a one time conjecture about a YC company is fine. It's linkbait because everyone here likes talking about YC companies. This isn't the same slippery slope as the "Programmers and Sex" story. If the front page ends up covered with blog posts about Arc and YC companies, odds are there were just a bunch of good blog posts about Arc and YC that day.
I develop an open source project which I might offer as a paid-for service at some point. But the open source bit is highly beneficial to me, because it provides:

- User testing, often from the clueful.
- Feedback and ideas from users.
- Hence, an idea of where I should take the project to keep my customers happy and interested.
- Motivation, because I'm doing something for me and not just other people. We're social animals, even if we're also hackers ;)

I find that right now (two months after starting the project) I have plenty of enthusiasm and my objectives are perfectly aligned with my users'. If I'm hunting a bug for someone, it's not a case of "why do I have to do this when I could be doing 'real' programming?" I want the bug fixed, he wants the bug fixed, we both benefit (and I've got some free user testing and bug identification into the bargain).

Now, maybe you can't open source your stuff, either because you don't want to, or it doesn't fit your business model, or it's just not that kind of product. But maybe you could try (if you haven't already) finding some early testers who can give you the benefits I'm getting from my users: feedback, ideas and (critically in your case) an indication of whether or not your product is going anywhere. Maybe you can find a small re-alignment you can make which will allow you to reach a tipping point - it's often the small things which do it. Maybe you could get readers here to help you with this..?

Also, I would say (having worked on many programming projects of varying sizes) there is always a point in any project where you think it's not going anywhere, you're discouraged and wondering if you should go on. You have to push through that. I'm doing some client work at the moment which is really dragging me down, I was unhappy with the database structure and the presentation was ordinary. I showed it to the client and they loved it. It was a real boost. So at least I have them on-side, even though the project overall I'd love to complete and move on.
Yeah, I noticed that shortly after submitting this. If there was a way to unsubmit, I would. :/
Last year. I went to the same event two weeks ago, and the same people were there.

If, by "reminiscent", you mean that there are lots of single dudes with laptops, I might agree.
yeah but they are using blogs so virtually all the on page SEO is done automatically (title tag, H1 tag, URL etc) if they are creating good content they'll get links - hey presto
SQL is the assembly language of the modern world
your questions imply that "things are not going well, so it's time to change or call it quits"

First you need to stop asking such questions. These are just negative thoughts that you have and because you don't want to say them, you put it in a question form. but that still has the bad effect. so stop that right-a-way!

It is normal to feel this way after you finish any major part of your idea. The best thing to do it to stop looking at it and wondering. go on a short trip. do something fun. just don't be near your computer. after few days you start seeing that you haven't really completed what you had originally thought of. Doesn't mean that you need to change things or trash what you have. think back to why you were exited about your idea in the first place. is what you have now what you had pictured? maybe there are things missing that you can add. if there are similar products out there don't worry at all. lots of companies are based on the same basic ideas. what would make yours better or different is the details of the main idea. Think of it as a painting. it is done in layers. when you are painting you never erase things or change what you had in mind. what you do is add more layers and with more details. It is those details that make your idea unique and so will attract others that can see and appreciate those details.
Ask YC: To open source or not, that is the question
We would be done building our app in around 15 more days. And I can't decide whether open sourcing this makes a good idea.

What is the app:

We plan to build an ERP for SMEs, which has the essential erp functions, common to all. Right now we are building a project management/tracking applications suitable for teams between 20-200 in size.

Why I should open source it:

1. We are just two people, so there would be bugs. Given enough eyeball all bugs are shallow.

2. User testing, like all startups we are poor. Hiring a full time QA is difficult. We can only do so much QA ourselves.

3. Publicity, Well we sure can use that.

Why we should not open source it.

1. This is not a hobby thing for me. We left our jobs to work on this, of course, because we want to make money out of this thing. Open sourcing makes difficult to monetize this. There is only so much you can charge for services.

2. This is not something which is going to be used by the end users, or is not a library. So the chances that we would get open source contribution in this seem far fetched.

I am thinking on the lines of dual licensing, where we release this under GPL/similar modified license if it needs to be used for less than say by 25 users or in a open source project, but ask that a license be bought when there are more than 25 users.
Cell Phone Encryption Exploit Demonstrated
Study: More US broadband has $134 billion economic impact
but still, not even america is a purelely capitalistic society,you do have some socialism in the blend.and the 20 or so western nations with higher standard of living are even less capitalistic.so in the trade off between the two ideas i think america should move towards socialism.of course there are other nations that should do the opposite
To get started with Rails, learn at least minimal Ruby first:

http://tryruby.hobix.com/
Read "Programming Ruby" part I
On 20/2 at around 8:15 pm GMT, the comments link disappeared again for me (in Vienna). What's going on?
The only ide with a major userbase in gnu-land is kdevelop, the rest of programmers generally use emacs or vim. Automake is antiquated and clumsy, use scons instead.
The kids in the post add value by building more complex structures out of the raw materials, no? Does the author of the article think we have an infinite supply of raw materials? I read the original article as an experiment into control of raw materials rather than an experiment of added value vs. zero-sum.

As much as economists may dislike it, these arguments seem to always boil down to 'who has control of the raw materials'; those that are empowered are happy with the current system, and those that are not empowered are not. The efficiencies of the market, and whether it's zero-sum or not, would seem to be a secondary concern for most participants.
Microsoft to Open Source: You Win
Surely, it is more like Cobol. Regardless, assembley and Cobol are quite primative.