skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They ought to be working hard trying to sign up Europeans, with their strong Euro, to the service. Maybe it's mistaken, but I actually get the impression that they're kind of weak in Europe, and still very much centered around Mountain View.
Comparison of online photo editing tools (aviary, ps-express,picnik,fotoflexer,splashup)
I just booked my flight, looking for somewhere to stay Friday night.
As always -- it depends. =)

First, BigCo experience can be good at this stage because you learn how they do it. A BigCo is a BigCo because they have a process that works. (maybe not perfectly, but enough...) It's important early on to see how real software is shipped. It is messy and inelegant, and forces you to make tough choices. But a BigCo survives because most of the time through process and culture things work out.

A startup can be awesome if they give you real experience and a chance to make a real dent in the product. But sometimes you won't get that if the situation isn't good. e.g. Engineering team isn't up to snuff, bad process, poisonous culture. In enterprise startups I've seen this to be more true than not... your mileage may vary.

Final question you should ask yourself about each option:

Who will be my manager, do I have a lot to learn from them, and how much time are they willing to spend with me?

This may well affect your experience more than any other factor.
Thank you.

Why are people down-voting for asking a simple question? Is THAT what "25 karma" gives them?

This community seems to be getting a little too overcrowded with self-important downvoters. Sad, really. I used to like it here.

There is so incredibly much I could contribute here, but now I ask "why bother" if the community begins its inevitable slide (thanks, Tech Crunch!) into Diggland and Reddithood?
I voted your original comment down because I didn't really like the Ritalin comment (it's refreshing to see someone so exuberant and happy to be alive), but I voted this one up for the link and the insight into the differences between TV/radio and the Internet.

The main shortcomings in his predictions seemed to be underestimating our ability to solve what looked like (to him) impossible problems: search and secure transactions. He did, however, have some good insights about the negative social changes the web (and other technology [1]) has introduced.

Physical human interaction is a powerful means to evoke empathy and understanding towards others. It's much too easy to look at text on the screen and forget the person behind it. As we spend more time interacting in such media, we spend less time interacting physically. Will we reach a point of extremely limited physical interaction, or will we eventually lose interest in spending our time reading text from a screen?

[1] I have considered a few times how different it must have been to hang out in libraries or walk across campus before the invention of iPods (actually, I guess before tape player + headphones). These days, it is rare to talk to a stranger that you happen to run into because they are typically immersed in their own audio world. I suspect that may be one reason we don't see student activism on the level of the Vietnam riots these days: there aren't as many diverse individuals interacting and sharing ideas.
DaaS - Data as a Service
No shit, who? ;)
Volatility is one of AAPL's trademarks. Had you bought in January '05 , you were already at a decent loss halfway through the year. Same sort of big loss from the beginning of 2006 to halfway in. Not to mention the huge drop since the beginning of this year.

Had you had the balls to buy and hold AAPL these 3 years, you'd be happy, I guess, but with a few years off your life worrying whether they'd rebound. Meanwhile, MSFT has been pretty steady, all along paying dividends...
Ask YC: How you developed your first projects?
source : Independant Scholar by Ronald Gross

The important thing about your first project is not that it is your first, but that it is "yours". Because it is your first piece of original research, you do not have to worry about whether or not it succeeds. One of the project's purpose is for you to begin to explore what success means to you in this kind of activity. It is real experiment that, while it should be enjoyable in itself' is designed for what you can learn from the way it goes.

The course of your project may be irregular, unpredicatble,serendipitious, but that is no problem whatever as you are not following a prescribed course of study. Unlike someone taking a course and following a road that has been laid out in advance, you are adventuring. Sometimes there is no way to plot out beforehand how you will proceed as your problem or subject unfolds before you.

my question now:
I would like to know typical approaches by good programmers while attacking a problem for which there is very little information at hand or maybe you have this super idea and then you build whole pciture in mind. How you did something like this?

I myself did this while working on json 2 years back. I liked it so much that we changed whole api,implemented test automation, clientside tools for QA team and sort of polished the product on which I was working then. This was not difficult on technical level though but it was rather change in the way we relooked at everything and made it work as we thought (2-3 people)

What are your stories from simple ideas/problems to solution
Really excellent video - be sure to watch the other 3 parts of the interview.
I thought this was going to be a post about how reading news sites is a waste of time.

That said, I'm not sure this is the best viewpoint to have. It fails when everyone holds this viewpoint, because if everyone expects the news to find him, there will be no news. Someone has to actually be out there seeing what is going on and reporting on it.

Another problem is that if you've ever played telephone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers), you know how information can get distorted as it gets passed along. A non-trivial issue I've seen in this US election is that non-news-seeking individuals hear from someone that Obama is Muslim (never mind that they also have incorrect notions of what being a Muslim means based on various pieces of "information" that has "found them"), and that affects their decision (note that I'm not actually an Obama supporter).

In other words, I think the post promotes something that may turn out to be a dangerous practice which could eventually result in an echo chamber of news which fails to reflect many of the things that are actually happening. It takes true investigative reporting to uncover real conspiracies and dangerous secrets. Would anyone who believes, "If the news is that important, it will find me," be willing to do that?
And the engineers are brought in to meetings limited with what they can say; if the truth has a hard edge, its the sales persons job to smooth it over. Essentially, the engineer or tech is handcuffed.
dead easy
Thank you! i'll check it out!
yippiee! My first time :).
I wouldn't care, and I'd bet that neither would you.

Think of it this way - were you ever shocked by the teleporters in Star Trek? After all, this is precisely what they did: make a copy of someone, then dissolve the old copy.
From my perspective the ideal solution involves a network attached 1TB+ of storage which all my machines can back up to (similar to Time Capsule). This drive in turn should rsync to one or more off-site locations.

You have some cool technology, don't get me wrong. But from a user perspective I don't care how my data is stored as long as I know I have n copies, where n depends on my paranoia level (one local and one remote copies probably works for most people).
RogueWave has been around since the 1980s. It may qualify as a small/medium company, but I wouldn't call it a startup.

This means that you may not have the same ability to create features/policy/products/etc as you would in a tiny startup. It is still a smaller company with technical products, so you may be to punch above your weight and make a real difference.
I'd say go for the large company.

I interned at a large company the summer after my freshman year, and I feel I learned significantly more by noting what they did right/wrong with all of their influence and money than I would by working at a small startup that had fewer glaring issues and less leeway to screw up. The difference is that if a startup has a major issue, they will either fix it quickly or won't be a startup very long. A large company is almost certain to have major problems that they don't fix because the impact on the bottom line is a negligible percent at first glance, even though the issue could be crushing. I find I learn more from seeing mistakes made than thing done right.

Also, at this stage this is mostly working as a resume padder and not an actual career choice (at least not now), and assuming you will be working on similar things at either company the name recognition of Cisco make them a better choice. I specifically recall internship interviews after my first internship where all they did to their copy of my resume was put a giant circle around that company's name. Even if you do more skilled work and learn more at the startup, Cisco is more likely to get you into an interview at another company in the future.

Also, IANAL, but I think naming the companies is at least poor etiquette, if not a breach of something (perhaps an NDA, depending on your interview process). If you haven't discussed wages yet, that means you haven't made an official offer, and they could in theory retract it if they find out you were talking about the offer. A slim chance, but something to keep in mind in the future.
What if consciousness is not an algorithm?

Then it can be simulated using one. If chemical reactions can, it's just a matter of processing power.
It sounds like a sensationalist rant, in my opinion, especially the part where he compares accidental software failure to life-or-death non-accidents (removing stop signs, locking doors). Does anyone know of any cases of death-by-buffer-overflow? Expecting someone to get the same punishment for a programming error that someone else gets for removing a stop sign is silly.

What's the difference between "real-time garbage collection" and ordinary garbage collection? Wikipedia says that Baker "has made contributions in garbage collection", but is it sufficient for him to state that he invented real-time garbage collection? Did Reddit invent a "better news aggregating site"?

The part where he's ranting about how terrible C is really irks me. While it's true that a lot of people have used C in situations where it was not the best option, it certainly has its uses, and to deny that C was a major step forward in programming is fallacy. Programming in assembler has all the shortcomings of C and none of the benefits, and there are always going to be certain software applications that need to be close to the hardware. Not to mention that if you've mathematically verified the correctness of your code, runtime bounds checking really is a waste of CPU cycles.

The article sounds more to me like someone who is bitter that he hasn't gotten more recognition for his contributions and is upset that what seems to him to be an inferior technology has more market share than the tech he has been involved in. Baker may be a great guy who has made important contributions to computer science, but that doesn't mean that resentment wasn't clouding his judgment in this instance.
A New Version of the iPhone SDK is Now Available. Now includes Interface Builder.
Comments get downvoted if they don't add to the discussion, and particularly if they're off topic from the thread they're on. Asking how posts get negative value is a fine thing to do. Create a Ask YC post and someone will gladly answer. Asking this otherwise reasonable question in the wrong place however can lead to downvoting.

Everyone makes mistakes occasionally and gets downvoted (sometimes it's unfortunate but you can just get downvoted for expressing an unpopular opinion). But hopefully in the long run you bring positive value to the site and your comments are voted up more often than down.
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and by 'flying' we mean 'falling'...
Clever, but as others pointed out likely to anger anyone who has to read your code.

NB: python bitwise operations are not super fast like in C. They don't get optimized down to single CPU instructions but instead are looked up like regular type methods (e.g. __str__ and __add__). An "ob[~0]" won't kill you even in a loop but don't bother translating simple math into bit-twiddling because it won't help (and might hurt if it inflates the number of operations).
One thing I'm not quite clear on with regards to OpenID is how I can be sure that my identity provider can't log in to my sites. I feel like I must not understand OpenID correctly. It seems to me that all the power rests in the hands of the identity provider; that is, the users have to trust the provider both to safeguard their data and to not use it in the way the user did not want (government gets warrant and checks out user's personal activity by asking provider to log them in).

Am I totally missing something here? I looked all over Clickpass's site, and while not having to login everywhere is convenient, I'd much rather know that I'm the only one who has the credentials to authenticate as myself. If I'm wrong, I think something should be said on the Clickpass site about how users can know their information is still in their own hands. If I'm right, I don't think I could ever get on board with a site like Clickpass, and I don't understand how others can do it so readily.
"The main focus of the initial beta is to test the unified installer for the package, they said."

This is a decent example of where I disagree with their approach. Everyone I have met that uses Google Docs does so largely because it's zero-install and a complete non-issue to co-author and distribute docs.

I don't see a paid, packaged software set with an installer (especially for something complex enough to need to be "unified") AND with Microsoft's historically super awesome help and documentation really competing with Google Docs. Maybe it will just cannibalize Office (Wordpad?) and introduce some kind of publish-to-public-SharePoint monstrosity on the average user.
Congratulations, you're paying Jimmy Cayne's marijuana bills!
I would hazard a guess that CPython (the reference implementation) hooks directly into C for bitwise NOT, and therefore, it would matter.
I don't get it, either. I mean, I realize that the OP's method would be obscure to someone who's never seen it, but at least on some level, it's more intuitive. Your example is simply obfuscated code for no other reason (other than humor, apparently, which like I said, I missed).
I have only read this excerpt, not the whole book, but the author appears to fail to understand that when you are talking about the design of a product that you only have one chance to get right, civility and head nodding is the enemy. You HAVE to be able to tell the founder that everything is wrong and the release date should be pushed, because if everything is wrong and you release anyway, you are done.

The points Steve (and Bezos) made in the excerpt were spot on and ignoring them is part of why the Segway is so expensive (they built their own plant) and ugly.
1. Start in a large pot 3cm of water to boil.
2. in a fry pan, holding it tilted, at very low heat, drop in well-chopped anchovies and garlic, in a bath of enough olive oil that they are swimming.
3. When the pool of stuff is bubbling rapidly, dump in a 200g of ground beef.
4. spread the beef around.
5. Put 3 minute pasta in the boiling water.
6. when the beef is brown, dump in a can of diced tomatoes.
7. kill the heat on the sauce when it starts bubbling again.

I routinely do variations on this in roughly 10 minutes. It is satisfying and vaguely healthy.

In 20 minutes though, you can have nirvana:

1. Cut a pumpkin into 2cm square chunks.
2. Steam for 10 minutes or so, until mushy.
3. in a fry pan mix a chunk of S&B dry curry and a can of diced tomatoes with some water along with the pumpkin.
4. smash everything together until it is a puree.
5. kill heat, add plain yoghurt.

Eat as a soup or on rice.
It was an interesting read, but I didn't like the headline, and I'm not sure that it's Hacker News material, so I didn't vote it up.
Moved over from SVN to Git for all of our Rails projects. Plugins? Doesn't matter if they're SVN/Mecurial/CVS/Git whatever. Once you './script/plugin install' the plugin is in your vendor/plugins dir. Git plays well with SVN. Give it a whirl.
Sometimes I feel crazy. There was an unclosed paren a little over halfway through the first page and it bothered me for the rest of the page. At that point, I suppose, I must have just given up and emitted a syntax error. I think it might be time for me to get back to Lisp.

Interesting read, anyways. Maybe I'll get the book and/or check out the movie.
How to recognize a Persian cat
I wish, but in reality, I don't know many people with the same interests as me. I am sure that if anything important to anyone would happen, I would probably learn about it (like World War 3 starting or something), but other than that?

Example off the top of my head: I don't think anybody I know would have told me about the Netflix Challenge yet.
PDF: A System for Co-located Collaborative Web Search
This is an interesting paper a professor pointed me towards when I was inquiring about methods to improve search results. It is not exactly along the lines of what I was looking for, but it does pose a significant area on which on YC team could improve on.
I am working currently on my first major project. It is still in the research phase. I've been reading over a lot of academic papers in the area of search improvement. The basis of the problem I am looking to solve is this: Search engines today provide more info than every before, but when it comes to providing quality results that are easily found, the search engines perform poorly. There is simply too much noise in the search results.

Many of the most recent academic papers on the topic of search results list the significant problems with today's search engines, and a very entrepreneurial team with the right research stands to make a fortune if the team could solve one of the problems posted among my data set.
Commendable as this is: it's of course a lot easier for employees you think highly of than employees you dislike or with whom things simply didn't work out:

"I'm letting go Bob. Bob is an ok coder, but it didn't really work out with him. Bob is more interested in trying out new tricks than in writing solid, maintainable code. He's also arrogant and won't listen to a word you say, even when you're trying to tell him what the specifications for the project are."

Who'd want to do that?
Oldest record voices sing again
Agreed. I have a time capsule here (works very well) but we're also looking at this technology to provide that added backup level. As we all know, its only after a disaster that many people put solutions in place
Applying User Interface Design to Source Code
"Additionally, we sidelined as male strippers at bachelorette parties, to pay for our university studies."

i don't think i've had a sentence in a news.yc-posted article take me more by surprise :)
If anything, this article demonstrates the great design of reader comments - almost all of them disagree with the OP and make better reading than the original post!

Hurray for blog comments!
!NH
Why is it of interest that someone now writes this on his blog? From the start of the Netflix prize, there were countless assertions and refutations that movie information would be helpful for better predictions. You can read all about it in the Netflix prize forum.
http://www.netflixprize.com/community/
How to ‘flack’ effectively — off a startup budget
mine too, I'm really looking forward to it :)
"I don't understand why managers don't do stuff like this more often."

Because it requires insight and to put in extra effort -what is commonly known as traveling the extra mile- which most people simply lack.
Using the internet to market a new TV program
I have an idea for a new lifestyle program that can be marketed thru FaceBook and offer people a free view of the 30 minute pilot. They can sign up on a fixed term membership site to watch the series of programs. Does anyone have any experience of doing this?
Got my invite, too. Very excited.

Thanks, Trevor for getting through those applications. I can only imagine what that must have been like. Thanks, pg and the rest of the people who are making this possible. I know you must get a lot of virtual "thank yous"; I want to add my explicit thank you. What you are doing is a wonderful thing. Imagine, being able to change the lives of other people in one day. I plan to be one of them. Can't wait!
I know. They do allow you to download a version of their database in text file format.

A better option is to use PyIMBD: http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/

It's a decent API wrapper written in Python. I've messed around with it some. It's pretty cool. Although the licensing terms from the IMDB's webite were pretty strict, I thought. Basically, if you used their data for anything resembling profit, (i.e. the Netflix prize) you've violated the TOS.
"I'm thinking BigCo just because the work is similar and it's good to get at least one BigCo under your belt..."

I read in Cialdini/ Munger/ Scott Plous 's (can't remember) book about people typically asking for advice, once they have made up their mind, just to validate their decision.

Good luck with your internship!!
This is a great article.

The section concerning self-describing code really hit home. Comments can, at times, be more distracting than helpful. If one chooses to appropriately name code items, it is my belief that comments become unnecessary clutter.

One of the methods I use for clarity when writing object-oriented code is as follows: only getters and setters touch the private data members. The only problem with this approach is if performance (i.e. speed) in your system is an issue; there is a lot of overhead in calling the getters and setters.

What methods do other people use for maintaining source code readability and separation of concerns?

EDIT: For clarification, when I state that one should use only setters and getters to access private data, I mean that other public methods in the same class should be calling the setters and getters instead of accessing the private data directly.