skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked this rant, immature as it might be.

Just about every month, some business student will come to me and say they've got some "amazing idea" and just need someone to do the work of implementing it.

Before I even hear their idea, I do a simple mental calculation.

First, I have to see their skills at least exceed mine in the same areas. For instance, I'm a competent but mediocre designer and marketer in addition to being a programmer. They better at least match that and have actually worked on (and finished!) some project that they started themselves.

The person needs to be as competent in their supposed field as I am in mine. The value that people who are good at selling and networking bring is incalculable, I'd kill for a co-founder that could bring that. But they have to be as crazy and devoted to it as I am towards my coding, or else it just can't work.

Maybe that's why I suck at finding people to work with. :(
A neuroanatomist discusses the day she realized she was having a massive stroke
traditionally the hackers have been the most undervalued in the whole equation.
I started out with British Telecom's Prestel, moved on to a VAX-based BBS that all the kids in my town had accounts on, moved on to local Wildcat! BBSs and ended up on a telnet-based BBS (which has been around since before JANET supported TCP/IP) and I'm still there. I did meet my wife online, but not on a BBS (and not on news, and not on the web).
I hear that he mostly reads and responds to real emails people send him, even if he complains about email overload.

But I'd probably pay a couple of dollars if it made sure he read it.
One of my principals told us a story about a boy he know who was insulted about a physical deformity all throughout his school career. He ended up a vegetable in a mental institute.
I used for a couple of years in Brazil.
Lots of people are Jacks of All Trades, but masters of none. Take, for example, the Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen movie franchise. Everybody had skills and roles to play. It wasn't possible for one person to be in all places all the time, nor was it possible for a single person to perform each job.

This blogger...lots of attitude, but doesn't sound like a team player. Attitude will take you only so far.
Brand Security Experts publish a book of subversive content
Big Teams - Barriers to Innovation?
Venture Capital, In a nutshell
Guilty, regional and national. Quite the little phreak.
yeah, he def tries to do what he can. tons of email are a problem regardless.
Unicode In Python, Completely Demystified
To make it social, let people define other (non-wikipedia) documents that are tied to terms, at least for linking up their own work. This will make it more useful for SEO, and specific unique domains. Then let people share wordlists, and select wordlists to use on a per-post basis (or maybe your code already has the smarts for this.) The result should be that if I write a post about an arcane topic, the jargon is linked to my favorite references on the subject.

Something to consider: instead of embedding direct links, use redirection so you get a record of every time a link is clicked on.
There's some interesting subtext here. TechCrunch is for sale, Mike affirms, in the same conversation he mentions that TechCrunch may take investment to grow larger. The message to acquirers: Would you rather buy it when it's small, or buy it when it's big?
Sure I need a brilliant CEO, brilliant marketing guy, etc, etc. But first I need a great product. I'm going to make that, not the other guys.
Please do!

I haven't got much time to work on Tweviews at the moment - I did it as a little diversionary side-project-burst-of-creation thing. My main focus at the moment is my start-up.

I also used Ruby/Rails. I find projects like this to be both ideally suited to, and hampered by, the use of RoR. They're nice and quick to code, but setting up the hosting environment is a time-consuming bore.
I heard a Hollywood producer reference Ocean's Eleven in the same way. Moviemaking requires a ton of skills spread out over a large number of specialists. So what if the author has a business degree. Does he have mad business skills?
“Founders at Work” is an interesting book because you realize that there is no One Right Way to make a successful startup, not even the Paul Graham way! Some are started by hackers only, others include capable business people who were friends of the founding hackers. Some sold a product from the get go and others just went for eye-share. There are many additional degrees of freedom.

The needs of your startup will vary based on your business model. Smart, motivated people have a way of being useful, regardless of their education.
Not too young for that. I actually used BBS software, sort of, to run a UUCP node at home and receive low-volume mailing list digests.
One of the more entertaining discussions I've read about this is in Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal." There is a great discussion of monogamy, polygamy, and the circumstances that tend to generate both.

The thesis (as best as I can recreate it) is that monogamy comes naturally in hunter-gatherer societies, because there isn't much stratification (wealth can't be hoarded). So a 1:1 pairing makes economic sense. Polygamy tends to happen only in more stratified societies where wealth is unevenly distributed (if you need an answer for why some men would rather be poor in absolute terms in exchange for more wealth in relative terms, look no further). Because a very wealthy man may have multiple wives, weath distribution is more even for women than it is for men.

Then there are rare societies which have institutionally enforced monogamy with lots of wealth stratification. In these societies, wealth inequality between men will inevitably lead to substantial inequality between women as well. Suddenly, the stakes are much, much higher for women, which creates a far more competitive "marriage market." This is advanced as a theory for why, in American society, women tend to dress in flashy colors with elaborate displays, while the men tend to dress like penguins (the reverse of most of the animal kingdom) - it's a reflection of where the fiercest competition is taking place.

All of this is a "just-so" explanation, and isn't scientific, but still an interesting evoluationary and economic argument.
The problem is this: If Wozniak had the mentality of a 14-year-old with a thing for Marilyn Manson records and huffing glue, he would have said the same thing to Steve Jobs.

Who is upmodding such rubbish? Seriously--
Send them to an outsourcing site. Tell them you'll offer a competitive rate. Most of these guys won't think of spending a dollar.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I personally love working with other people's code. Better or worse than what I would have written, at least its a starting point. Plus it puts a new perspective on a problem that I wouldn't have gotten without tinkering with the open source solutions first.
Is Hacker News the new slashdot or what? How come this entry made it to the top of the page?
And a note for Erik Peterson: some future day when you discover that you need some help for something you don't quite understand fully, you might regret having written that blog entry.
I have to agree with huhtenberg, I never heard about Jottit and I went there to check it out but a big blank field with a "create a site" button tells me nothing. Honestly, that is a lot missing in there...
What they say "features" they mean simply pixels! I have no idea why. So, if you have a collection 100x100 images, they are all points in a 10,000 space. This seems to be a common approach in pattern recognition. Now for face identification, the approach could only work under the assumption that people are "linearly independent": no face in the collection can be represented as a linear combination of the rest of the collection. It’s a bold assumption. If it is true, then the challenge is to make the algorithm efficient enough. The idea is that you don’t need all of those pixels/features and they in fact could be random. That must be the point of the paper.
A little late?

http://www.primidi.com/2004/12/07.html
Please critique my startup: FuseCal.com
Hi folks. We've got a new web app at http://www.FuseCal.com that lets you pull calendar events out of a regular web page and into your personal calendar. No microformats needed... it looks for event-like patterns right in the HTML document (kind of like Dapper with AI, for events only).

We're pretty new, far from perfect, and looking for your standard agonizingly-critical feedback... Please tell me how we can make FuseCal more useful to you. Thanks a lot!
Thanks.

<friendly troll>
That voting thing does not sound fair. Or the other way - seems aimed at putting some bias. "Only those that agree with majority can vote against" stuff.

Like in communist countries (hey, I live in a former one): only ones that agree with the Party can vote against it.
</friendly troll>
Sounds like you are describing OpenID. Once i thought about a little software that would work like a real world id. Every time a web service ask you for personal info you would just click on a icon and show them your id (that means that the software would pass all the details to the service).
Would that work? It sounds a lot like google checkout...
Yes they have, probably because hackers are the only ones in the equation who don't need to be good at selling, bullshitting and staking out territory.

Hackers should try and become better at selling themselves and knowing their worth. This, however, is an art - selling yourself well is a very subtle and hard thing to get right. Underdo it and you won't get results. Overdo it and you'll sound like a pretentious asshole.
Well, try this. Click on the chinese course and spend 1 hour on it. You should be able to do 2 lessons in that time. Write down all 30 words you learnt on a piece of paper. Sleep on it, wake up the next morning and read the paper and see how many you still remember. It won't be 30, but I think it will be more than 5. Don't forget to click the button to view the pictures for the words.
Hit the same button again to get more pictures.
100$, more if I'm funded
I sure hope he doesn't need as many lines of code to build something as he needs cuss words to make a point.
The characters only display if you have eastern languages enabled on your PC. This is microsofts fault, not mine!
Have a good source for browser stats?
I'm looking for a solid source of browser use stats on sites that appeal to the general public, e.g. Yahoo, eBay, NYTimes, Expedia, etc. Most of the data I see online comes from niche sites that might throw off the numbers in favor of FF, Safari, Opera, etc. Any ideas?
Weekend startups prove challenging
When I got started, there were BBS'es, but there was also a local internet "onramp", which was, I decided, way cooler than screwing around dialing into a bunch of BBS'es.
do you think he should get a cut of the $100 or should the service youre paying to make sure he gets it receive all the money?
There are two main differences:

1) Apple was a hardware startup. Hardware startups need funding and someone to aggressively sell the product in person to big vendors. Software startups don't usually need that kind of person (unless they're going after the Enterprise cookie).

2) It was in the 70's, and startups were, in general, harder to start than they are now.
Why not try again for Anybots?
Companies are generally very open to collaborate with universities. I've been on both sides of this for robotics -- doing research at CMU and doing research at robotics companies.

The best approach would be to troll available grants, pick something that you think would be fun to work on, and work on a proposal with a company.

Some grants are really easy to get, like SBIRs. Some are designed for collaboration between universities and companies, like STTRs.

If you're a self-funded student, you should seriously consider working on whatever you find most interesting, and dedicating serious time to it. Inferior alternatives include focusing on classes and splitting time among a few projects. The ideal grade in a class is the minimal grade needed to pass. That means you're actually spending time on research.

Contact companies you think might be interested, and ask what they'd like to see made. Treat it like market research, and not a sales pitch. Don't even ask about a job. Making good things is all you need to do to get a good job.

Proposal writing is also a good way to practice both technical writing and product design.
Giving It Up to Get More Done
I believe the problem here is just microfocus. When people focus too much on one thing, they tend not to take a step back every now and then to see if things are still the same as when you started. Let's say I want to start a business in china making valves for microturbines. I spend half a year and progress is very slow. It's time to realise that things are bad, take a step back and review the process. If things are hard, you are doing something wrong.

Sometimes it's neccesary to work hard. But sometimes is not a year. One has to take life in 6 month chunks, and you only have about 140 of those. You lose one, you will never get it back. A year is two of those chunks. It's too much time to be unhappy in.

I'm one of the fastest developers I know because I was taught the technique - when things start going slow, stop, zoom out and analyse the reason why it's going slow. Then go back in, but approach things differently. This time you want to maintain the quality of work, but reduce the time spent on it. It's not difficult to optimize that.
I'm in Charlotte: http://icculus.org/~icculus/
hell, they're still around! hehe, http://members.aol.com/sfritz2994/pdxbbs.htm
I have a computer that I use for surfing with a microsoft OS that I errhm got really cheap off the intertubes and it won't let me upgrade to ie7 because of it. Guess you don't want me as a customer. Along with the roughly 30 million people with money in their wallets that have the same problem.
What's more true is that pairwise, no two of these roles really understand each other.
You make a very valid point, one which I think is consistent with what I was saying, though perhaps not obviously so.

I'd make a distinction between large production codebases that have been around for a while (let's call that "legacy code") and code that illustrates how to do a particular task (let's call that "sample code"). These are not mutually exclusive; legacy code can be mined for good sample code, and the better systems are rich sources of it. When you're trying to figure out how to do "particular thing X" there's no better way than to look at working code that does X.

When Naur talks about the theory of a program, though, he's not talking about particular thing X, but about grokking the design and structure of an entire system. That's a hard thing to do for someone who doesn't have contact with the original programmer(s). You don't need that kind of knowledge for tinkering or bug fixing, but it's hard to pull off major design transformations without it.

So what I was saying applies to legacy code, but not sample code. This matches experience, I think. When working with legacy systems, I've gotten a great deal of mileage out of asking myself "how did they do blah" and then looking to the code for blah to see exactly how they did it. But this only works for relatively constrained problems like "how did they scale that font" or "where did they get that data". It doesn't work if "blah" equals "producing the whole system".

Web apps illustrate this. We all inspect the code of other web apps to figure out specific techniques. That this is so easy to do is of course one of the biggest reasons for the rise of the web in the first place. But it's orders of magnitude harder to figure out the design of an entire system. I've actually tried - programmatically downloaded as much js and html as I could possibly scrape from another app, to learn whatever I could about how it was put together - and it was a total waste of time.

I'm curious to hear if this distinction is relevant to what you were saying.
My question would be why did rails' models take so long to do compared to django. The examples they gave the rails were shorter (granted neither were complex) I'm going to assume that they have the same number of models (5ish) so it can't be that.
Not being from the USA, I am not sure how this works. In the UK, generally the person selling a house finds an agent to sell it for them - they normally charge a fee based on the sale price that the seller has to pay.

The buy doesn't require an agent, or pay anything (apart from the price agreed for the house).

After the sale is agreed, the solicitors get involved, and both the buyer and seller will have to pay his own solicitor.

In the USA do you need to pay a fee to an agent to buy a house too? Do they perform the duties of a solicitor or provide any useful function at all for this fee?
Great essay thanks Paul. There are some who prefer to have a boss. I have managed people who just want to come to work and be told what to do, to function and know exactly what they are to do and that they will be paid for it under defined terms. These people don't like risk (maybe they have enough in other parts of their lives) or don't have the creative gumption (passion) to want to do their own thing. Either way, bosses have a place. Sad thing is for clients, you end up paying a lot for the infrastructure required to move these people collectively to some productive end.
TopCoder: breaking the development cost rules
I used to run my own BBS back in early 90th based on OS/2 and Maximus, it had an 8-lines modem pool, it was a Fidonet node hence was loaded with tons of usenet news and Fido echos and no-one knew what TCP/IP was and that was tough! Oh, I love those old days... :~-[
I wrote my app in Python/Django. My reasons were short:

1. I wanted to learn python, but was not really interested in ruby
2. Rails is too hyped. The problem here is that people pigeonhole you when they hear that you are a rails developer. If someone ever came to me and told me he was a rails developer, I would immediately perceive this guy as someone who jumps on technology bandwagons. The type of guy who listens to top40 charts.
3. Django just had a way better argument when it came to performance

and the most important reason of all

4. When I created a new Django project, it just created 3 files. Rails (when I tried it) created a bunch of folders and files. People have to understand simplicity in all its facets to be effective programmers, in my opinion!
Google's Outrageous 2007 Compensation Revealed
Ask YC: Anyone ever heard of Coset? (Ruby Webservice Framework)
I was reading this presentation^ about Rack, and it had a couple slides on something called Coset, which looked like a great way to build RESTful services on top of Rack. The problem is, I can't find Coset anywhere in my Google searches (other than the presentation). Anyone have some pointers/experience with it?

^ http://chneukirchen.org/talks/euruko-2007/chneukirchen-euruko2007-introducing-rack.pdf
(Slides 30-32)
Looks like an improvement. I wonder how much money they paid for what are essentially tiny tweaks?
1. iPods are priced quite well in their segments. I would offer that you buy other products in the future, Sandisk have quite a few dandy mp3 players.

2. How do you know AT&T is not subsidizing the $399 price point? Apple got the contract because AT&T was willing to share profits and upgrade their service backend. The other companies didn't want to, what exactly are you complaining about?

3. For what it's worth Apple has already said it's going to use iTunes and Software Update to push Safari. http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1286 And it's ultimately up to the end user to install what they want to install. Safari is not an integrated service with iTunes and someone doesn't want to install it (like me) they just uncheck it and press done.

4. I'm of the point that they're forbidding Java and Flash because of its interference with iPhone's UI. And the link your posted is sensationalizing the fact that apps written for iPhone won't be able to download other code to run. Wow. That's sure is a shocker. I'm amazed they even bothered setting up the App Store and reviewgate. It also seems quite poignant to point out that iPhone can't run all those nifty programs.

Like I said, it's a double-edged sword. Apple releases a product/machine and people jump and dance around and demand it be doing this and that and this and that and this. Then everyone and hoops and holler that it doesn't. At the end of the day it's a computer. Apples are meant to look pretty, if you don't like there's plenty of other PC manufacturers ready to take your money. That or you can donate it to save Darfur or something.
The struggles of new graduates
I only had a quick look but to me it looks great. Not really the sort of thing I would use but it seemed to work well with the example calendar. My only gripe was it added all the found events straight off the bat. Personally I would prefer it to add none and give me the option to add them all or just a select few.

My only real critique was the audio on the demo video. It really sounded cheap. You'd get a lot more "wow" factor using a proper microphone.

All in all looks like your creating a great app there.
When I didn't know what exactly went into running a BBS I paid $15 for a L.O.R.D. license in the early or mid-90s. A couple years back I thought I'd try it out again and couldn't find my key. I emailed the company and they sent it over almost immediately. I couldn't believe they were still around.
Actually, I have to say something else about this. You mention working with other people's code in an open source context. That relates to my original point - there seems to be something about open source that changes the dynamic I was describing and that relates to the value of software. After I noticed this detail in your comment I asked myself, does it feel different to work with other people's code when that code is open source, and (for me at least) the answer is definitely yes, it feels better. It would be fascinating to know why.
"This belief follows from the mistaken notion that if there are two brokers involved in the transaction where one has listed the property and the other is assisting a buyer in finding a property, then one of them has a fiduciary responsibility to the buyer. This is almost never the case in conventional real estate transactions - all the brokers involved work for the seller."

This is only true in subagency situations, which are going away in most MLS regions in favor of designated agency. In designated agency states (many, if not most) and broker-buyer agreements, the licensee representing the buyer does indeed have a fiduciary responsibility to the buyer.
There was a local paper called ComputerNews (it may still be around) that had multiple pages of BBS numbers listed. My brother and I would just keep trying each one until we got through and found a Legend of the Red Dragon game we could get in. Nothing was worse than being in the middle of the game when the connection time limit expired.
Maybe tech savvy, but not necessarily market savvy.
This article is one of the most hilarious things I've read today.

Yes, tiny tweaks it is. They removed a line.
Punchline: "decode early, unicode everywhere, encode late."

There're actually more caveats to unicode, especially if you have 3rd party code doing the decoding and encoding. There are ways to manufacture strings that are broken (not valid unicode for display, not valid __-encoded ascii), and if it happens, there's actually no way to recover inside of your app.

I'd love to see a more in depth treatment of the different decode modes ('replace', 'ignore', and 'strict') and how they can screw up your data.
This article made me suddenly realize that news.YC does not have a "Send to a friend" feature!
Looks like he included a slash on the end of his address, while you did not. Might be a good enhancement for the duplicate merging (assuming it hasn't already been implemented in the interim).
IPhone maintenence time