skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chess, absolutely. My father taught me chess when I was around 4 and have been playing on and off ever since. I've learned so much from chess and owe a lot to it. For example, chess is one of the greatest teachers of strategy. It also clearly delineates strategy from tactics. Chess teaches you how to think in abstract terms and plan ahead and it teaches you how to formulate and spot patterns. It's also a superb decision making 'simulator' and it teaches you how to make sacrifices (something that children tend to learn late in life), how to value things and how to trade things.

Chess is probably the best game that exudes all of these characteristics.

And bets of all, it takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master... so you will never get bored.
I had a relatively strong reaction to you grouping C# (and .NET) with Java (and Java's libraries). :)

Why did you say that it costs $8,000 to be trained in... something? (A language feature? A library? A development tool?) Anything you need to learn can be found in the free MSDN docs or by using Google. A developer that needs an $8,000 training session may not be worth his $60k salary.
I stopped reading at this sentence: "Ruby itself uses 'green threads,' which is basically faking it." Erlang has green threads, too, and it has excellent threading performance and ease of use.
That hasn't stopped the lingerie industry, has it? I don't think we'll ever see a swing towards more women implementing games. We have, however, seen lots of women making it in game design recently.
Taffy - an in memory JavaScript database
I'm no javascript developer, so I see it only from the user perspective. Maybe the developers aren't doing a good job, I don't know. But all javascript gui I've tried (gmail, mibit, meebo) are far slower than any other e-mail reader, irc client and IM client I've seen, respectively. And the javascript clients lack lots of features, which I think is probably due to javascript being so hard to program.

If the goal of the web is to deliver a good platform for running programs, shouldn't javascript, DOM, or whatever it takes for writting programs for web be reviewed?

When I said I wasn't a javascript developer, I meant I never actively wrote big programs in it, but I did a bit of hacking with it. I found it much more annoying to program than python, for instance.
I think that is an accurate description of PMOG.
Indeed. What a great site also. The F104 was like the aircraft version of the Venus de Milo - you just can't stop looking at it. A great example where a solution to a need (at that time, need for a high-speed interceptor) transcended the solution itself.
Duuuuude... ;-)
Management is persuaded by smooth-talking consultants looking to win more project hours, not by measured effectiveness. (I'm talking about industry overall, not anybody in particular.)
The day coders pick Java/C#/Cobol because that's where the jobs are. Companies might have chosen them for sound technical reasons (or not), but day coders won't learn languages/tools that don't pay the bills.

For reference, a Monster search for .net jobs in Chicago gives 266 results. Java gives 403. Lisp gives 22 for the entire country. Not something to learn if you just want a job to fund your real life.
Ask YC: Recommendations on how to make demo video (60 sec tour) for our starup?
Are there any (free) products on the web that help make demo videos? We want to make a 60 second tour for our startup, and were wondering if people had any good recomendations. Just need to show the screen and capture mouse movements/changes with some voiceover or text.

Any ideas?
Why Rails will Reign Supreme
He's basically saying that after a lifetime of listening to what people want, he's going to second-guess them and decide for himself. This may be charitable, but it's also arrogant.

I am completely missing how you are making this leap. After reading the article, it seems like the whole point was that this guy wasn't an arrogant prick... paranoid about people seeing him eat grilled cheese sandwiches maybe... but not arrogant.

Would you rather he keep his money? Or are you taking issue with his choice of where to donate it?
I love MightyQuiz. It really locks you in. They have trouble in presentations at YC because everyone immediately focuses on the app. That's an excellent problem to have.
I'd agree about the insularity of the press and community around the MS ecosystem.

I got a job programming blub in VB.Net straight out of college and am writing C# at the moment. I don't have anything to back it up but I have always found a general suspicion of anything that didn't come from MS or an related source. The obvious example would be formerly non-mainstream programming features which are now getting very popular with C# 3.

It reminds me of Joel Spolskys' idea about the 'Five Worlds' - MS stuff, Java stuff, Unix etc - that they all come with fairly distinct cultures.
That's prety cool. I had 4/4 right and started to suspect it was saying right to everything as a joke, 'cos I hadn't signed up. That's when I found out I didn't know the proper term for cat whiskers!
Is this better than ProgressQuest?
Bigger Computer Monitors = More Productivity
Ah, but see...that's life. That's the beauty of a great Risk strategy - it takes into account probabilities that bad (or good) things will happen.
Camtasia is easy to use. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp
Ask YC: What do you do if American economy enters a downturn?
An economic downturn seems to be very soon. What do you do then? Will there be many startups break down?
There is a great shortage at the high end. I know a bunch of startups that are desperate to hire really good programmers.
Black Google
Is there any statistics on amount of enery saved so far by Black Google?
As someone who attended a liberal arts college for a short while, as well as a top-tier "big" school, I feel somewhat qualified to comment on their argument.

(1) The quality of a liberal education that makes it so effective is that the subject matter studied is not “use-eh-full.”

>> So, a liberal arts education is better because it teaches you useless stuff? That makes no sense

(2) The best teaching is at liberal arts colleges.

>> There is some truth to this one. A great deal of truth, in fact.

(3) Your life will be fuller and richer if you read Aristotle, Descartes and Rousseau.

>> Yes, but liberal arts colleges don't have a monopoly on Rousseau - you can read them and get just as much out of them from big schools too!
I certainly understand; I was just wondering.
Could a "pro" CEO have gotten Facebook to where it is now? Very unlikely. So what evidence do we have that this is the point (or that there is any point short of being GE) where an outside CEO would start to do better?
But the results page is still white!
Do you know if Game On has a website or anything that lists where they're going to be next? I'd love to go if it was near me.
Ouch! The latest example in a recent spate of bad names.
the problem with simple ideas for aws, is that you need to either pay via data, bandwidth or instance hours.

i would love to pay for process hours on some software. i wish there was standard way for aws customers to exchange services based on process time.

in all likelihood amazon has done some of this work for simpleDB, but it would be great to build a piece of code on one linux box and then to sell that time to other users.

i could think of a number of situations where I would love to pay for process time instead of instance time. email, databases, caches, load balancing, etc...
the red name seriously sticks out, not in a bad way though...
I'm guilty. I wrote something like this awhile ago for my site... http://tlrobinson.net
Probably. But others will spring up in their place, and will have less of a frothy environment to grow in.
this looked interesting too

http://thrudb.org/
Chuck Norris the only WMD in Iraq
Not really, since Norman started this discussion. Of course they could have chosen to ignore him.
I'm not so sure about this code. Personally, I'd use jQuery, which has stuff to make this a lot easier. I haven't looked at the code, but Google turns up http://www.ndesign-studio.com/blog/design/css-dock-menu/
I think in #1 they were trying to convey that Liberal Arts schools don't necessarily focus on teaching 'applied' skills. Some colleges get turned into job-mills, and have curriculums full of 'Applied X' courses, meant to enhance the resume more than the knowledge of the student.
Our family enjoys lots of games but our favorites are Settlers of Catan, Sequence, Talisman, The Apprentice and Risk 2210.
That's pretty cool, although the writer pissed me off in the beginning by likening it to Frankenstein, and not his -monster-. A slightly crazed scientist who gets chased to the arctic before his death isn't really much to fear, the big thing that killed people by accident was something to fear... at least if you're a scientist.
Thanks for the comments and all the good ideas - we'll revisit the font complaint below and think through some of the other suggestions.

International goes online within the next few days, as does the ability to include a photograph (4x6 glossy print).

Thanks for mentioning the unicode as well; we'll be sure to begin testing that. As for pre-written and shared political letters, that's a great idea we've been considering.

email2postal.com
It isn't very strange actually. Bill Gates's value is based on the last closing price of Microsoft, and Zuckerberg's is based on the last "closing price" (although a few months ago) of his company. Shares of Facebook have been sold but they are not sold on a regular basis (such as every few seconds, as is the case with MSFT). That's the only difference.
Now, you might argue that Facebook is overvalued, but then it would no longer be an objective list.
why is your name orange?
Same feelings... but its only recently i started playing GO more often( after a hacker gifted his GO board to me )so maybe i'll get better... prior to that, it was only CHESS
BitNami releases JRubyStack
This seems like it should have been studied long ago. I guess it takes a while for academia to get new monitors (and notice that they have bigger ones available).
"The next day, our flight profile was duplicated on the SR-71 flight simulator at Beale AFB, Calif. The outcome was identical. Steps were immediately taken to prevent a recurrence of our accident."

Anyone else feel that testing before actual flight makes more sense? wtf....
Air density at high altitude is insufficient to resist a body's tumbling motions, and centrifugal forces high enough to cause physical injury could develop quickly.

Holy crap. You can be spun to death.

Let's not even ask how this fact was established. Let's just say that, if you know a test pilot, you should probably buy them a beer.
I don't know what you're talking about. It's a simple combination of the words "topic" and "testicle."
So true, it made me smile because just recently I had a great discussion with a very smart .NET programmer who truly believed that Microsoft's LINQ is a revolution in programming languages. When I explained to him that a similarly weak DSL serves as an example in the introductory chapter to Lisp macros (Practical Common Lisp), he looked at me like I was an idiot, and when I showed him traditional Rubbyish 2.times { puts "Hello" } he said "yes, but where is the IDE? where is an integrated debugger and MSDN-like 2GB of documentation?"

Funny thing is that he DID find a Lisp book (which one he did not explain) and proclaimed that there is nothing in Lisp that beats C# 3.0, and "3.0" part was dropped with an authoritarian tone.

He hasn't programmed in anything but "Visual Blah" since college graduation in 98.
I think it says that there is a large, underserved market waiting to be tapped.
Who has time for unit testing? We'll do that after we ship.

Seriously, though, there's a lot of phase space in a typical SR-71 flight, and not a lot of time to explore it all. It's a lot easier to home in on the bug once you know it's there...
Ditto. XP Since 2001, never any problems except when I tried to setup a dual boot to a Linux partition.

That's across maybe 10 machines, between home, school, and work.

Might not be the world's greatest operating system or most programmer-powerful, but it is stable. Very stable.
Yes I do. Yes, yes I do.
In other news, computers run better with electricity.
ishowu for the mac is pretty cheap. i am afraid there aren't too many free options that are easy to use. there is http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/ i've used it before, but honestly spending a few bucks in this department will save you time in the long haul.

there was some sort of hack with using yui as a guided tour a few weeks back, sorry no link. applying a voiceover could be a problem though.
The really lucky part was that he got to tell this story for decades afterwards.

I figure that the only reason to be a test pilot is the pleasure of telling stories like this one.
Mark Cuban: We Live in an "Open Book" World, the Lie of Information Overload
For the record, the funniest goes to Catbert interviewing the phb, asking "Do you worship Satan or just respect his no nonsense approach to discipline?"

http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080223.h...
This is really pretty amazing. If there are thousands of uniques to this site, I'm in the top fractional percentile measured by karma. Nickb has 5X my karma. Wow
The divine gift of a bold orange username is presented to those that reach the nirvana of 10.000 karma points.
Generally, what do you think about founders stepping aside to let others act as CEO? I would imagine you're heavily biased towards founders. VCs seem to disagree. What do you think about that, and are really good VCs closer to your opinion?
Yes, but their deliberately provocative attitude (dhh more than the company as a whole) brings out the worst in some people :)
Norman just took the bait.
The "No Laptop" Meeting Rule
Sorting At Speed
I agree that there is a parallel but the difference is very real. While both Bill and Mark have their net worth based on their assets only Bill could actually sell those assets today to achieve that net worth. Also, as you mentioned, Microsoft is traded nearly every second so the value of each of Bill's shares are infinitely closer to their actual value.

Zuckerberg's net worth is based off the inflation that Facebook's shares have received after the latest round of investment. He doesn't have the option to sell those assets and as such shouldn't be able to count that as his net worth. I highly doubt that Mark Zuckerberg could sell his shares of Facebook for $1.5 billion right now. I also doubt that had that latest round of financing happened this week that it would have valued the company so high.

To place someone on a list as the 'Youngest Billionaire in the World' when he actually has only the chance at $1.5 billion is a mis-understanding. Therefore the term Zuckerbucks should be used to state what his net worth COULD become if he is able to reach a liquidly event.
Anyone remember sniglets? I used to have a book of them. I'm not sure Zuckbucks qualifies as a 'Meme'
Play on the DPjudge. www.diplom.org is the place to go online for Diplomacy.
thanks, i figured it was something significant
Short summary of the article:

>Those wealth-seeking, “what’s in it for me” philistines are not buying our product. Rather than changing ourselves to serve them better, we should instead be inflexible, and demand that they change their desires. They should love our product, which even I acknowledge is useless. Diversity rocks, I support diversity! Professors should be paid more.

By the way, I'm not exaggerating. The article actually describes students as "wealth-seeking, 'what's init for me' philistines".

It's attitudes like this that make me strongly consider leaving academia.
Diplomacy.

http://www.diplom.org for a great magazine and to play online http://www.floc.net/dpjudge (from the same people)
Liquidity is the huge difference.
Who is a CEO anyway? I have talked to a few business guys and answers varied from "salesman in chief" to "just an administrator with connections". In that regard there is really nothing to hold on to if you are a product guy. The article implies that CEO is the "product guy" though. I wonder who is right.
I remember reading a study by Microsoft about the number of monitors vs. productivity. From what I recall, they found that 3 is the optimal number.
Here's to hoping my bosses read this. There are so many engineers here working on single 18 or 19 inch monitors it's not even funny. I consider myself lucky to have two 19 inchers...

But it's still very cramped compared to my set up at home.

Anyone know where the study is? I want to know if they did widescreen vs. flatscreen, or if they tried out more than 2, and what 'jobs' they had the subjects do.
Look, if people come to you and say "I would give you $5 if you did X, and $1 if you did Y," it's clear that they value X about five times as much as Y. Feeney is the guy who spends his career doing X superlatively well, until he's accumulated huge sums of money, then starts spending that money on subsidizing people who do Y. This sounds to me like a rich guy manipulating prices in order to accomplish his unpopular goals. The fact that people would rather spend money on what he sells than give money to the causes he supports is a signal, and it's a signal he's ignoring.

It's very easy to understand this in a simpler economy. Imagine that farmers consume coffee and soybeans, and they can grow coffee or soybeans. Different farmers have different preferences, which they express by swapping soybeans for coffee or vice-versa. Assume these cost the same amount to produce, and the ratio of their prices should tell each farmer what to plant: if the market price for one unit of soybeans is two units of coffee, a smart farmer will just grow soybeans, and swap some for coffee when he wants coffee. In this case, Feeney is an incredibly productive farmer, who grows an insane amount of soybeans, sells some for coffee, but just keeps on accumulating the rest. Deciding that he is tired of taking from the community and wants to give something back, he announces that he will trade his soy for coffee at a 1:1 ratio. What does this accomplish? It's 'charitable' because it helps the poor coffee farmers -- but it's also manipulating the market to give people an incentive to do something unproductive (ie. grow coffee) instead of something productive (grow soybeans).

What a jackass! If he just kept growing more soybeans (or maybe even started growing corn, or trading his bean-pile for assets like land) he would have made all the farmers better off. As it is, he's a market manipulator who tweaks price signals so people produce more of what they don't want. This is shameful.
Poll: When is a startup successful?
There are quite a few people here that have done and exited startups - some successful, some not.

But what is a successful exit? Some might think it is selling to google for no less than $20 mill. and some might think that selling to your uncle Jim for $1000 is a success.

IT would be nice to have some datapoints on what people think constitutes a successful exit.

So when would you call an exit a success?
sold for $0 - $10.000
sold for $10.001 - $50.000
sold for $50.001 - $100.000
sold for $100.001 - $500.000
sold for $500.001 - $1.000.000
sold for $1.000.001 - $10.000.000
sold for more than $10.000.000
I was blown away a few days ago when PG demoed Viaweb on a rickety mac laptop with a 12 inch screen. It just didn't make sense to me.

Two of the biggest reasons to get a MacBookPro:

1. The screen is best in show.

2. The video card can power an external 30 inch monitor.
can't wait to see what happens when nickb hits 100.000. But I'm sure it will involve fair maidens, mind-enhancing drugs and a very big cake.
Yeah, a 26'' monitor would give you no benefit over a 24'' monitor as it likely has the same resolution. If you want an increase in resolution you have to go to 30''. I'd try the same task again with a 24'' and a 30'' and see if there are any differences.
A New Venture Animal
Game Trees and Totally Finite Games
Founders usually make the best CEOs unless (a) they're really nuts or (b) they don't want to be CEO anymore. Opinion among later stage investors is definitely moving toward that. The top-ranked VC firms get this (and practically everything else about startups) more than the ones further down the food chain.

Incidentally, I wouldn't say I'm biased toward founders. YC is an investor in these startups just like VCs are. If the company does badly because of bad management, we suffer too. My opinions about founder CEOs are based on experience.
Einstein Versus the Physical Review
A CEO is, in theory, what the name implies: chief executive. He makes the final decisions. If two subordinates disagree, he breaks ties.

That said, I don't think Eric Schmidt is actually Larry & Sergey's boss. They seem to work more as a triumvirate. But that is a fairly unusual arrangement. I believe it's a transitional phase between outside management coming in as CEO and coming in as COO, which I believe is going to be the most common plan in the future.
A little bit exaggerated.

The iPhone is not a new invention, but Apple makes smartphones cool.

The problem here is that as soon as the suits discover it, the cool factor will vanish. I still remember one of these analysts talking about the iBook tangerine saying something like: who wants a laptop with a handle? Or a laptop that is tangerine? These guys just don't get it. And thats why either apple will not dominate because the suits don't buy it, or apple will cease to be cool.

Well, I don't see the point with objective-C at all (and besides, whatever it is, its not a fast language and its not easy, especially not the api and also not the documentation of the api.).
Open source Flash player in beta
All you need for your backing store is a dumb key/value dictionary. You want S3 for that. Even with replication, running a DBMS on EC2 is a dreadfully foolish idea. A lot of startups are going to immediately go under the moment that EC2 has its first system-wide crash, and I'm going to be laughing at their misery.
The thing that strikes me as genuine about them is that they also respond, in pretty well-thought out detail, to attacking commenters who are clearly dumb and whom they could simply ignore at no cost. They follow several principles from "How to Win Friends and Influence People" both in their response to Norman and their response to SvN comment trolls.
It might be common sense to us, but some companies refuse to spend more money simply because their employees FEEL they would be more productive. It's a good thing to actually prove this with some serious studies.
Little Known Hacker News Is My First Read Every Morning
You are correct. But I wonder what would happen to MS stock if Gates decided to dump all of his shares at once. I wonder over what period of time someone can sell their shares without negatively impacting the stock price (and thus their overall income).
If you click on it you'll see. I hacked the code on the server so that nickb's name is in orange today to celebrate getting 10,000 karma points.
> tested how quickly people performed tasks like editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets

The limiting factor in productivity for knowledge workers, excluding those working with graphics, is not mechanical tasks like copying and pasting.

This study is probably valid if you answer phones in a call center. I doubt it has much bearing if you spend most of your time thinking when in front of the monitor.
It was an unhandled exception to be sure... but test pilots, like users, are always better than any test you can think of.
We're screwed now... techcrunch isn't exactly known for its overly insightful comments.

Welcome digg-like users!
Get ready for some LOL cats.
The arrival of less insightful people is inevitable. The goal should be presenting the site such that they matter less or don't bother coming.