skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just went through a period of being unmotivated; I hit the perfect storm of being sick, having guests, and worst of all having a really chunk of code that was completely undefined as to what approach I should take, and how it could nicely fit in with everything.

1. Take a break.

2. and 3. Most of the time I want to stop, it is not time to change. A perfect analogy for me is I was working on a really difficult puzzle (yes, a real puzzle), and with about 100 pieces remaining I would have swore with a 99% certainty factor that a bunch of pieces were missing. I was so close to finishing, but I started to think a handful of pieces were missing so I almost quit. It turns out, one piece was missing and that is what planted the seed of a bunch of pieces missing, and the other pieces were just difficult. So for me personally that last push to finish and stay motivated and not quit is very difficult.

Different people deal with things differently, but that puzzle analogy relates to a lot of things in my life. I almost quit right before I am about to make a breakthrough, and forcing myself to struggle and churn is quite difficult but necessary.

Often having someone else help me get through that part is useful, for example just working on something with someone else will give me a reason to finish. Sometimes they can even help do that finishing part - some of my best working partners are great at polishing and tweaking right at the end, since thats what I lack.

Just wait until I release my next app, I am sure this will be reflected in it.
"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."

What a lot of startups don't get is that you can only push people to work crazy hours a very limited amount of times.

If the startup is just fragging around and not working towards a real moment where 'it happens' but still pushes people to give it all then the backlash will be huge and people will become demotivated and start asking the questions I see you asking.

It sounds like you guys need better management. Better management to get the show on the road. Better management to give the startup a meaning. Better management to motivate people.

Talk to them. They are probably struggling with the same issues.

(Or maybe you are management, dunno, you didn't really specify your position)

S.
Happy Birthday, RDF
Users are also a pain in the *. But I guess that can also be a great way to motivate your team to do better :-)
but it is a well established fact that the standard of living in norway, denmark, finland, germany... well exceeds that of america.do tou really think that any of these countries are more capitalistic than america?
This is just my perspective as a parent, but I think the underlying premise is just fine, thanks. My daughter will have her entire life to learn how to deal with inequality by simple dint of being American. I don't need a playroom to teach her that particular lesson. Besides, there are outside forces to consider...if I pay for my child to have access to an after-school playroom, I have a right to expect her not to be unnecessarily or arbitrarily excluded from play. Again, just my perspective.

As I noted in my other comment, I think you can question the teachers' methods, certainly.
Tip joy delivers Amazon gift cards so I don't know what the legal implications of that would be.
I'm not sure how to fight fluff, but I think there's a strong case to be rather zealous about it.

It seems obvious that the direction of these communities is highly reflexive, in that users are determined by content, which is determined by users, and on and on. Neither users nor content is an "independent variable"... they depend on each other.

So there's no reason to assume stability in the system. A big influx of new users + a few badly timed fluffs, and things could roll downhill in escalating fashion (the fluffs attract a few extra fluffers from the new users, who then produce more fluff, which attracts a few extra fluffers from yet-new-users, ...)
I wish I had a Wii developers kit. It would be so cool to create games using this technique.
Here in The Netherlands there is Toool, http://www.toool.nl. They are an officially registered sport club with contests and 'practice'. I think most of their members are computer hackers too. It's all perfectly legal here also btw.
> Why would a startup want to relocate to DC

Personally, I'm not quite sure why relocation is part of the deal, either for YC or Launchbox. Seems like a way to exclude people who are not in the US, people who have strong family commitments, anyone who happens to like living where they are already. It would be interesting to see if this kind of thing could be done using modern communications rather than physical proximity, but maybe it has been tried already.
Learning to Smoke
The examples are numerous - please look around. Simple examples would include the rent control policies in New York and San Francisco. The intention: provide low cost rent for tenants at the expense of landlords. The reality: because of the rent control, the ROI for entering the rental business declined dramatically. This caused less development of rental units and rapidly increasing rents for the scarcer supply left. The result of rent control: chronically higher rents for all but those lucky enough to already be renting and a chronic under-supply of rental units. Other classic examples are the minimum wage which increases unemployment, medicare/Medicaid which drives up the cost of health care for all, excessive taxation to pay for all of the entitlements which is a disincentive to business, etc.
My dad was a mechanic and long story short, he could open any vehicle in under 30 seconds with the 'jimmy sticks'.

I worked with him a lot during my youth, and I am decent at it. However, the way new cars are designed it is getting a lot more difficult to do this, so most people will pull at your window now around the edge and slip down basically a coathanger to hit the unlock button.
Well you did not mention that you had to distribute it outside of your own organization. In that case it might make sense to invest in the dreadful autoconf/automake tools.
I'd be interested to see some evidence for this well established fact.
A way to decide which political candidate has the most grassroots support
Despite which, the US economy remains one of the largest and most productive in the free world. Your examples do not support your assertion.

According to both the IMF and the World Bank, the world's 10 largest economies in 2006 were, in order, the EU, the US, Japan, Germany, the PRC, the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain and Brazil. Very mixed economies, every one. I really don't see how this supports the idea that they're being "dragged down."
Winners of the What is Graphic design poster competition
I went to your site, skimmed the FAQ, skimmed the "About" page, and I still don't know what your service actually does or looks like. All I know is that you think email is bad for coordinating "micro-events", and so I'm guessing that somehow you're going to help me organize my micro-events without email (which is a problem I didn't know I had).

I know what you're going to try and help me do, but I have no idea how, and until I see that it's a how that actually makes my life easier, I still haven't seen a problem in my life that needs to be fixed by you.

Would like to see screenshots or something.

Just my $.02, probably nothing original. Best of luck to you.
Web 2.0 in South America: Palermo Valley is real
This is just fantastic. How do you invoke arbitrary programs with option arguments? I saw you can use dir["file.txt"].vi, what if i want to run

<someprog> <someoptions> <somefile>

?
iPhone LoJack - Track your [stolen] iPhone with Twitter
TinyML - Lexer, Parser, Interpreter, and Polymorphic Type Checker in Under 700 Lines of SML
Facebook Is So 2007
I hypothesize when I came home drunk last night I thought you wanted to build the printer himself. This is clearly not the case. How embarrassing! Please excuse me.

One of these days I am going to write a sobriety test to save me from using my computer and phone when I shouldn't.

This is also why guns are stupid.
Do you understand the point that the result of rent control is less rental units for renters, higher prices for renters, and less profit for landlords? How is that not dragging down what would otherwise be a sphere of creativity of landlords going out of their way to provide greater value to renters (to increase their profits) if the regulations were removed?

Also, how does the fact that the US economy does well in comparison to other more socialist countries in any way show that removing the socialist controls we have now would not improve our economy even more?
Some PHP guy trolls Rails, but it's funny.
I don't think I said we wouldn't fund a co that did exactly the same thing as a previous one. The real answer is that we rarely (never, so far) get two companies doing exactly the same thing. They may be in the same general business, but they tend to each have their own approach to it, and any good market has room for multiple companies approaching it from different directions.

E.g. Snipshot and Splashup. Both are web-based imaged editors, but the similarity ends there. Snipshot is an easy editor for end users. Splashup is Photoshop.
Ahhh, I see where you're coming from. I'm really interested in the socio-economic aspects of this, and the article was written in a way that prompted thought from that angle. Since I don't have kids and the concerns that go with them, I took that line of thought and ran with it.

I don't deny that the playroom might not be a good place to be doing socio-economic experiments. But since the article didn't seem to take that view, I'm interested in the discussion of the experiment. The question of whether they should have been performing the experiment is not a big deal to me.
I bought a cheap set of picks and got a copy of the "MIT Guide to Lockpicking" and tried to get into it. It was kinda fun at first, but I never had much success. How long do you have to work at it before obtaining any proficiency? All I ever managed to do was bend my picks.
The author's thesis:
"I really would like to challenge the conventional wisdom that stored procedures are the best and/or that hand-crafted SQL is the only way to achieve good performance."

The author is obviously confused.

Both stored procedures (SPs) and dynamic SQL queries are "hand-crafted". Any craftsmanship difference between the two is the level of craftsmanship of the code author. In most shops SPs are written by more experienced SQL coders, usually a good thing.

In current databases (IIRC SQL Server also) execution plans are created at runtime for SPs as well as for dynamic SQL queries. So dynamic SQL has no guaranteed efficiency advantage arising from an updated execution plan.

Other advantages of restricting developers to use of SPs:

Security - SPs allow access control. By restricting developers to using SPs a DBA can restrict users and developers to particular operations/tables/fields.

Efficiency - SPs execute inside the database engine. Minimal network I/O (if any) is required. But a series of dynamic SQL operations may require moving the data outside the database proper, mandating record locking, network I/O, etc.

Maintainability - SPs allow data hiding. The DBA can restructure the database internally without requiring application rewrite.

Consequently any dynamic SQL operation can be rendered more efficient by rewriting it as a SP.
Revenues, revenues, REVENUES!! They've created wealth (something people want) but if they can't monetize it, they will fail as a company. Right now people are actively saying they want Facebook instead of its competitors by using it. Their competitors now are the Internet giants - Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google. Their size and valuation has put them in that category (not a niche startup) so now they need to find a way to earn billions to stay there.
Would you be happier to say that the utilisation of raw materials 'tends towards' a zero-sum game, then? ;-)

I don't disagree with what you say (although I would argue the likelihood of this theory playing out in practice and over the long term seems low), however this is largely irrelevant to my original point which was that many people who aren't successful (by some measure) will complain that inequities 'in the system' are unfair, and much discussion will ensue because of that.
imho Rails has that too

besides the Python community is in the midst of consolidating web frameworks... there's a reason for that

I could be wrong but doesn't Django only have one book? Do the other Python frameworks even have a book for them (as opposed to chapter or two in a general programming book)?
Actually the problem is that Google's apps are self-service, and this is not what enterprise customers are used to. Most startups discussed here don't have the option to provide the non-scallable phone support either, so it is a very relevant problem.

Hiring 1000 people in a support center in India is a very un-googly thing to do, so I guess Google will keep the prices low and persist educating their customers to be able to use the services themselves. Maybe someone can invent a better way to do just that.
http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/

the next one has you as number 3 in nort america:
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/social_scienc...

this one puts the happiness in relation to environmental impact:
http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm
Five steps to enlightened expectations (for an IT consultant but can apply to startups as well)
SWFIntruder - Analysis and Security Testing of Flash Applications
"Any additional effort obtains diminishing returns and he cannot scale this success as a business with employees."

Most webmasters who make money operate more than one website (usually by themselves) and if they need more work done, they simply outsource it by hiring writers (if it's a content site), having someone do some PHP work, etc.

I guess this is why most webmasters make a lot more money than the average hacker here. It seems a lot of those on Hacker News fall into the "build one site, one unique idea, pitch it to an investor, form a company for this single website, receive a lot of money and try to monetize it later" idea and waste a lot of time on something that probably won't work, or, if it does, take an incredibly long time to see any returns. In contrast, most of the people making real money don't worry about forming a company (until they start to make enough money to justify it), do everything themselves, and don't try to build the next "killer web app" (most probably have limited programming knowledge) but instead create useful websites that they can monetize via AdSense and CPM networks right away while working on SEO and building content.
It's not possible at the moment.

You can pass options to vi/textmate by passing a string to the respective method as an argument.

A generalisation should be possible by resolving the PATH and adding the various executables as methods to the appropriate classes. The metaprogramming abilities of Ruby should make this a breeze.
The real problem is inertia.

'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM', remember? It'll take a generation to get rid of the crap, but it will happen. The CIO at USC arranged a campus-wide rollout; more will follow. Once students (who then enter the workforce and, eventually, make decisions) decide that $free >> $discounted for Office, and things like a proper mail merge/track changes/export to Word are implemented, it's all over.

Things like Scribd and ever-improving ajax applications, along with hopefully forthcoming solutions to permit web browsers to exploit multicore 'puter power, should help a lot. It always blows me away when managers make excuses for paying (out of habit) for features that their workers do not use. Free is not always better, but all other things kept equal, free+no-local-maintenance is very good for a company.
17 Unbeatable Ways to Create a Peaceful, Relaxed Workday
I would say you should just buck the autocrap trend and require SCons. Alternatively, you can check out "waf" which is very similar to SCons in its philosophy, but the entire application is just one python file that you can distribute with your code. I haven't tried waf yet, but I'm planning on eventually switching one of my projects to use it. http://code.google.com/p/waf/
You can try IRC: #c and #c++ on Freenode (irc.freenode.org) or EFnet (irc.efnet.org).
Yes, I understand that.

I maintain that it doesn't support your argument that our economy is being dragged down. You may argue that it's not growing at the rate you think it would, and I can respond by arguing that the resulting society isn't one I'd want to live in -- that's a different discussion. But the general trend of growth year over in real GDP (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Macroeconomics/Data/HistoricalR...)
is not evidence of being "dragged down." The trend is broadly up.

Regarding your second point, this is a canard. The fact that the 10 largest, most successful economies in the world (in fact, most if not all of the top 20) incorporate elements of socialism (most to a much greater degree than the US) demonstrates that mixed economies can, and do, succeed. Your initial argument at least implies that a mixed economy is not a successful one. If I read that incorrectly, please tell me, because by most metrics, mixed economies are not only surviving, but prospering.
I think you'll find it hard to find a more representative microcosm of what an unfettered capitalist society would look like than that of an unsupervised classroom...
pg, I just left them a comment on their page, and I'm hoping you might be able to clarify this over here:

"TipJoy folks, while I think this experiment of yours is interesting, it contains a serious flaw. Campaign contributions must meet certain requirements, which a contributor must agree to.

From Ron Paul's campaign site:

1. This contribution is made on a personal credit or debit card for which I have the legal obligation to pay, and is made neither on a corporate or business entity card nor on the card of another.

2. I am a United States citizen or a lawfully-admitted permanent resident.

3. I am making this contribution with my own personal funds, and I will not be reimbursed by anyone for this contribution.

4. I am not a federal government contractor.

5. I am at least 18 years of age.

From Barack Obama's campaign site:

1. I am a United States citizen or a lawfully-admitted permanent resident.

2. I am at least 16 years old.

3. This contribution is not made from the general treasury funds of a corporation, labor organization or national bank.

4. This contribution is not made from the funds of a political action committee.

5. This contribution is not made from the treasury of an entity or person who is a federal contractor.

6. This contribution is not made from the funds of an individual registered as a federal lobbyist or a foreign agent, or an entity that is a federally registered lobbying firm or foreign agent.

7. The funds I am donating are not being provided to me by another person or entity for the purpose of making this contribution.

If TipJoy donates these funds in whole on behalf of those who donate here, they violate several of the above requirements. If TipJoy is simply holding these funds until the candidates "pick them up", it's denying tippers the opportunity to see and agree to the requirements for donation, which means no candidate's campaign committee would be able to accept them. If TipJoy in that case follows it's stated policy regarding unclaimed tips: "Since tips are not refundable, as long as the money remains 'unclaimed' it will remain with us indefinitely", then you are knowingly soliciting money from users that you cannot deliver and keeping it for yourself.

I don't think that's what you're trying to do. But some clarification would be nice."

Has TipJoy considered these requirements? Or are they in some way donating via a loophole?
Yes, I'm one.

I almost always have my HPC lockpick set with me, although there are really only 1 or 2 tools that I use regularly.

Comes in handy at times...
If it's open source, you can't dictate what people do with it. That's part of the definition. You could use a license like the GPL that means they're not going to take it proprietary, but it's simply not open source if you can't use it for what you want.
Alternatively, three mentally I'll geniuses and a fourth who was tortured into suicide after great service to his country. (to be fair, I only know about Turing and Godel...)
Not a question I can answer. ;)

But I want one because the quality of Blu-ray (or whatever hi-def format) simply beats the snot out of anything I can get via download. So perhaps that's a subjective thing. I'm not ready to kick my physical media to the curb at this time, though I do wish I could rip the hi-def formats.

Let me know when you find that deal on 32GB flash drives...I'll be right in line behind you for 2 or 3!
Not directly related to the article, but let me mention a patch for Quake II my brother wrote a while ago, which creates another kind of 3D illusion using red-blue glasses: http://www.jfedor.org/red-blue-quake2/
Completely fascinating rant.

Somewhere there's a counter argument in favor of non-critical systems achieving planned obsolence through joint failure and the economic benefit of consumers purchasing replacements. I'm not about to make it myself, but it is available.
this is one of the coolest things I've seen. ever.
Better yet, go to someone's office who isn't; someone who has spent 10-20 years in a cube at megacorp and is still bitching about where he/she is in the company. That will really get your ass in gear.
How about this idea to save Hacker News from fluff?
Any Hacker News submission that is also on Reddit front page need to be flagged for review or hidden until approved by admin. Exceptions would be (programming,math,science etc).reddit

While this won't solve all the fluff related issues, it will still do a lot of good I think.

What do you think?
As someone with a materials science/engineering background, I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that no-one knows why the whiskers grow. Usually a given material changes its state/configuration because that's the lowest thermodynamical configuration for that material to be in given the particular temperature/pressure. Maybe I'm way off base here, but I think the whiskers are growing due to elevated temperature caused by resistance heating...?
"this is not what enterprise customers are used to"

Another excellent reason to adopt them.

"non-scallable phone support"

Here's how to provide the best scalable support: Make your apps easy to use and do exactly what their supposed to without bugs. No need for "support centers". Problem solved. Woo hoo!
Yeah, and did you see him bustin' moves toward the end? Awesome.

How exactly do people interface into hardware like the Wii remote? What he's doing doesn't actually seem computationally difficult--the hard part seems to be...you know, getting the xyz coords from the device.
Ha, was thinking about that last night. Anything already on reddit should automatically be deleted.
Uh, yeah. That was a joke.
The "Green" agenda (or at least the one pushed by marketing departments) always seems to ignore the fact that money has an environmental cost attached to it.

That $400 "green" desk lamp? There is probably more environmental cost associated with buyers working jobs to earn an extra $400 than with just manufacturing a more traditional $20 lamp in the first place.
Exactly. In 5 to 10 years, enterprise apps as we know them today will be like VHS tapes.

The only people really complaining are the middlemen who add no value. Imagine that, technology that makes you add value or get out of the supply chain.
"someone who needs to hear what I've written"

Humbly spoken.
math.reddit and science.reddit should be considered exceptions as well I think.
Sure! I meant to include that too. Fixed now. Thanks.