skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, I've seen these sliders somewhere before :) maybe you need a real-time recommender too? contact me.
Well, I only boot into windows for CS:S and Excel anymore.

Maybe it's time I installed wine.
Nah, I used YUI. Comes with keyboard shortcuts and other nice things. You wrote yours js by hand? You've got me on the style though:)
Virtual and real blur in Eve Online
TechCrunch: Our Master Plan
LinkedIn, Now For Companies
Joost disappoints as next YouTube
up vote for pendulum being the first thing i see!
Ask YC: quitting job and starting a startup
i'm in the process of quitting my (money-wise: decent, work-wise: crap) job and starting a startup. But i don't feel as confident as i'd like me to believe... i was wondering if this is normal or i'm, in fact, not ready to start a startup yet?
Footnote [1] ("When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean by evolution.") makes me wonder...

If the most prevalent state of affairs at present is that people go on to work at large companies, and by most accounts these people are reasonably successful (in fact, in a reproductive sense they may be even more successful than the average startup founder, since they have more time to pursue relationships), wouldn't one logically assume that over time the footnote, and the point of the article that it isn't how humans evolved to work, no longer hold true?
Sounds normal to me. Definitely try and get someone else to work with, that'll at least mean that someone's got your back.
Sounds pretty normal. Don't worry about quitting your job, worry about doing the startup well.
well i'm not worried about quitting the job. its 'doing the startup' well part. i have a couple of ideas and not too afraid to fail either. its just that sometimes these voices at the back of my mind keep telling me otherwise :)
i guess those voices will fade away as i start getting busier with the startup :)
Pretty scary during the process of untangling yourself from your job but...

The next day when you sit down at your own desk with only yourself as boss is just the greatest feeling.
As I read this article, I realized that if you scale its message up to include not just companies, but the way modern society is structured, you will see exactly the arguments presented by Theodore Kaczynski: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut.... If you read his words (ignore his actions for the moment), he is saying the same thing about society in general.
I think someone's watched A Bug's Life recently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSrwEYJBrg
getting a co-founder turned out to be a problem actually. though most of my friends appreciated the idea/effort, none is actually willing to give up the security of well-paying jobs to come work on a startup.
PS: i'm in India. and startups have not really caught on as well here as they have in US.
yeah.. i can already smell it :)
HHhmm lets see.

There are x barrels of oil left on earth, Exxon gets most of them. Would it rather sell them at $50/barrel or $100/barrel.

Whatever else they say about production, there's always this.
Introducing the Google Ajax language translation API
in response to Notes: 1
why then always talk about evolution like its some mysterious magical force able to "design".

"I'm sure if I studied it more intensively it would all make sense"
A non-believer! We must throw the non-believers into the volcano, or the Singularity won't happen!
Ohh, AI. Every decade we say human-level AI is merely a decade away. And every decade we are again disappointed.

Poor Kurzweil. He's spent a lifetime on this obsession, and computers are no closer to being true composers than they were in 1965.
Thanks for the article.
I found your articles professional quality and for free. :-)

My father worked for a chemical company(10000 workers in Asturias, Spain) as chemist . He realize that he could buy a conventional ceramic oven for doing the same that another specific one that costed 100 times more. He tried to convince management. They denied the permission.

He tried again with different ideas, it never worked.

PD: Well, it worked better in another (later) smaller(100) company.
The trick if he had a good idea, was to say it was an american method (Seems they didn't trust in local intelligence, this was in Madrid, Spain)
I can't see any ad's at that URL ... maybe something is broken?

One thing thats kept me in my big company job is that I am in a part of the UK where there isn't a massive choice of places to work - there are other big companies, but few if any startups :(
Amazon are truly pioneers here. We use EC2 and S3 and are looking at their database (thought our guys are fighting it a little!) so in theory someone can now run not just a digital business, like we do, but if you actually sell something now you can do it all from home and run the whole thing on Amazons platform. Kudos to them for their forward thinking
Why do we give AI so much leeway? Most other fields, this level of performance would have caused it to be ditched ages ago. I'm guessing because it implies so much, and it seems so possible: mind from brains, brains from evolution.
I want the singularity of useful information.
Why does everyone want to move into space? Isn't it much easier and practical to live undersea? The structural constraints I imagine would be similar, its closer, and there is a much richer supply of necessary organic material.
I read the implication to be more along the lines of Butz being in the pockets of the agriculture corporations, not as a government method of feeding occupied countries.
This is a riddle? Just work outward; Each of the destination's adjacent nodes point to it, and recursion does the rest.
Danger of software patents being granted in the UK
How long do you think it will take you to launch? (then multiply by 3...)
Another similar rule I like to follow is that if a user of your site cant figure out how to do something, it is your fault not theirs
You should never do that. Either tell them before hand, or only apply for part-time jobs.

You can try these for part-time work

http://jobs.smashingmagazine.com/freelance/programming

or you might find some short work in the site point marketplace
http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/
GlTrail - realtime website usage visualization
Version 2.0 of mod_wsgi is now available.
Tribune Co. Posts $78M 4Q Loss
I live and die by this. I've spent a number of years muttering to myself "It's not the compiler. It's not the compiler." (Though, strictly speaking, these days "It's not the interpreter.")

And then I remember that day that a coworker tracked down a microcode cache-sharing bug on dual processor servers that he notified Intel about.
You really should read up on the work of Clare Graves.
Whether people work better independently or with a boss is dependant on their dominant 'values' system - this can change but does so slowly. As people grow through life we develop through psychological states that oscillate between 'we' centred and 'I' centred. There are four main values systems that a programmer is likely to be inhabiting. In the first(DQ) a boss is essential. The second(ER) will work very well as their own boss. The third(FS) craves peer support - but not a boss. The fourth(GT) can work in either way - as long as they don't get board because they are out of there if they do.

(in reality people are complicated and can be inhabiting multiple values systems - but most have a dominant one.)
Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize.
maybe google should buy joost
Comparison between (Israel's) Silicon Wadi v Silicon Valley
Paul

I couldn't agree more, although my background in advertising was inverse as well. From the world's largest agency (3 years at JWT), I spent 10 years at a mid-sized outfit, and then I finally put my name on the door when I was in my mid-thirties. What may make this different than programming, is that in agencies we all tend to be given as much room to create as possible (the exception being at JWT). However, to live is to create. Humans are in their soul creative, as that is part of the life force, the source. Let that atrophy and you become a waking/walking part of a whole. I love both your analogy to animals and food. Great Post!
ieclectic.com
Well, here's one way to think about those commentators: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxxPLDZnqwA
Good luck, just don't use the credit cards!
This has little to do with limited liability. In fact, the problem here is that groups within the company do NOT have limited liability (from each other), thus necessitating some oversight.

The only role limited liability plays here is that investors in this company to lose only their investments (but not their house and car) should the company die.
It does make for a nice fantasy...I got swept up in it for a while. After thinking about it for a while though, I started to have doubts, at least about his time frames.

You are right about the information singularity though, I still trip over how easy it is. I remember my earlier computing experiences back in the 80s with the commodore; the computer was a toy. Even back in 91 with my crash-prone
Mac classic; it was still a toy. Then in 96 people kept talking about this "Internet". I went to a PC at my school,
typed in a few words and answers came back. At that moment I thought Holy s---, it happened without me.

In a way, I've been in that state of shock ever since.
Thanks, I'll put in lots of really good selections before the full launch. This won't be anything like what they make you listen to on the radio!
Security is Mathematics
I had a great part-time setup for a while. I left a job, and they called to see if I'd come back. At that point I was in a good enough position to negotiate the arrangement. Eventually, a pointy haired boss decided that I "had to go full time." Sad part is, I'm not sure if the extra 2 days upped my productivity much. When I knew I only had to do it for 3 days a week, I was a rock star for those 3 days. Eventually, the extra days caused me to leave years sooner than I would have.

I agree with marrone and tjr, if you're looking for part-time right off, be upfront about it. It helps if you have specialized knowledge, or a skill that will make up for not being full time.
Advertising and the web - a match NOT made in heaven
the contradicting voices will bother you all the time till u get settled with ur startup - in the beginning you will feel very lonely but doing something from scratch will make u happy as well - i'm in the same boat so i understand u well - make sure that u can survive for at least 6-12 months financially. if u want to contact me then visit my profile "ideas101" on http://programmermeetdesigner.com/ - u can send me a message from there. good luck
I agree with the assay, and I have personal experiences regarding workgroups (mostly hackathons) that match precisely the (1) small group requirement -7 to 10 people-; (2) the avoidance of any tree structure: horizontal and unguided development; and (3) the avoidance of mediocre people.

Yet I have a concern nagging my mind about the reduction of freedom in hierachies. Ender's Game book seem to argue the opposite: that giving general orders to a group while leaving the implementation details to each member is the best of both worlds.

[Remember the school master Graff describing to Ender the hierarchical army he had built with his toon leaders: moving in synchrony, yet each piece showing initiative and creativity -as opposed to the single-minded, single-track insector army lead by a single queen.]
Whenever I run into a frustrating "bug in the compiler" type problem I find it's useful to take a walk or revisit the problem again the following day.

Many times my mistake becomes obvious right away.
Nano-breakthrough: Dramatic Increase In Thermoelectric Efficiency
GoCrossCampus
Skulls Of Modern Humans And Ancient Neanderthals Evolved Differently Because Of Chance
Disclosure: I work in the oil industry and have worked for ExxonMobil in the past.

ExxonMobil may be the world's largest publicly traded oil company, but it is nowhere near the largest oil producer, nor does it have the the largest reserves. These honours go to the state-owned oil companies eg. saudi aramco, PDVSA (venezuela), NIOC (iran), CNPC (china), kuwait petroleum, etc. To give an example, in 2004, saudi aramco had proven oil reserves of 261 billion barrels, iran, iraq had around 130 billion each. Meanwhile exxon had 22 billion. Even the state-owned comapnies in nigeria, qatar and libya have more proven reserves than exxon.

My take on this: the rhetoric seems to be about return on capital, and betting on high future oil prices. But I strongly suspect the real reason for ExxonMobil not producing more oil (and the story alluded to this) is that there haven't been any major new fields discovered to grow beyond replacing their existing depleted fields. Also, the large new discoveries have typically been deepwater, which is difficult and expensive with current technology.

In my experience with Exxon, they are astute managers when it comes to their investments, but ultimately they are an oil company. Unlike most of the other big oil players (BP, Shell, Chevron, Total), Exxon has openly said that it is in the oil and gas business only and won't diversify to alternative energy sources (eg. BP has started tagging their brand Beyond Petroluem with investments in ethanol and other renewables). So I certainly don't think they are holding off on projects simply to leverage higher prices in future.
China and Darfur - Orchestrated I.T. assults?
All kind of fractals
Its also possible I haven't been looking in the right places either. From what I've noticed, its hard to pinpoint jobs at small companies since they don't seem to advertise as much as the larger ones.

However, Jamie from snaptalent was nice enough to email me and pointed me to their job ads page. Unfortunately there's only one company on the east coast listed so far, but I'm hoping once they get rolling with more job ads that my chances for finding a small startup or company to work for will increase.
Is the MacBook Air a Dud?
Agreed. A project I worked on in grad school involved developing a thick client (Swing) for a large corporation. Well, we pushed the envelop with Swing, and it was several times where a bug was actually in Swing, and we had to find a workaround in our code while we waited for Sun to fix it.

But on the flip side, everytime we saw something weird happen, our knee jerk reaction was, "Its a bug in Swing". And our project leader would look at us and say, "Java works". His philosophy there was that if your basic assumption is that the tools you are using are broken, you can never get anything done! Start by assuming you made the mistake, and work away from that point.
They'd rather sell for $200/barrel. Their plan to hold volume production flat is a good a reason as any to break up the company for the benefit of consumers. I wouldn't let them near 'green' energy development either as their interests aren't served by viable alternatives to oil.
Mark Cuban to provide live hoops game in 3-D in Dallas theater
Billion-dollar IT failure at Census Bureau
MacBook’s mysterious WiFi dropout problem is still unsolved
Lessig Bets 'Wikipedia' Approach Will Transform Congress
Very cool :)
I just integrated it into a test version of Mibbit (IRC client)...

http://media.mibbit.com/translate.png

(Source on the right, auto translation on the left client)

Have to checkout privacy and things like that, but it seems to work pretty well.

Now I can go in a russian language channel and have a clue what's going on :)
Storming the Campuses
I'm curious how you do the real time recommender, can I email you too?
If and when machines reach the point of self sufficiency, given that they'll supposidly be driven by rational and logical thought (though post-Singularity irrationality and illogical thought could be conceivable) they'll see humans as, well, irrational and illogical, and question our need. Once they begin to think of how we've destroyed eachother, the planet, and how we may do the same to them, they'll probably see us as a risk to their survival and do the logical thing: elliminate the risk.
Did I assume it was a negative outcome? I didn't say so--why do you think I'm assuming its negative?
Sony charges money to deliver clean pc
Humor - 22 Signs You May Be Working for Sprint Nextel
I think that's crucial. I also worked for a huge software company for a couple of years before striking out on my own and the experience was worth it just to satisfy my curiosity about it, alone. The knowledge of what it is like and resulting lack of second guessing is valuable.

Lastly, I think this sort of testing, if you will, is worth doing in general. There were a couple of things I was really curious about trying as a freelancer. Each time, even when it didn't pan out was invaluable in terms of getting to know my own motivations more and refining what I liked, was good at and what I didn't. Sometimes you think you love something but you really don't know until you do it. You might like only parts of it but its worth doing it to learn that.
That's funny, because I have always had this notion internally (don't blame the tools, look in your code first), but in a recent project it actually was the tool that was broken more often than not. Consider the issue where:

String s = (String)(vect.remove(vect.size() - 1));

... throws a NullPointerException, where the code:

Object o = vect.remove(vect.size() - 1);
String s = (String)o;

... works fine.

Can you spot the bug? No, because there is no good reason for it to fail. There is no good explanation for a bug like that. And, when it's in expensive proprietary enterprise software you can count on support NOT giving half a rat's ass about the problem.
Thanks. I did not know that!

If I were younger and looking for a job in sociology, maybe I would have done some of that formal research instead of posting half-assed speculation on news.yc. :)
Swotti: a semantic-web based, opinions aggregator
A Company Promises the Deepest Data Mining Yet
Socialized Compensation: The Government Bails Out Wall St's Bad Bets (NYTimes Editorial)
GM: We'll Lose Our Shirts on the Volt, But That's OK
Ask YC: Why do so many people always write their own logger?
I've seen applications where every major project had a logger written by the person who wrote the project, rather than at the very least a common logger. But what really bugs me is the people who bother writing one anyways and it does nothing novel to justify its use over some LGPL/BSD/MIT licensed library. //end rant
Social Bookmarking 2.0 - Diigo Sets The Standard for Others?
A good online productivity tools.
Remarks from 2 mentors I have never forgotten:

1. Everything worked fine. You came along and did something. Now it doesn't work. I wonder if it has something to do with what you did.

2. I seriously doubt that the operating system, which has worked perfectly well for 20 years, suddenly and unexpectedly messed up on the exact same day you arrived.
What I don't understand is how they always escape investigations into price-gouging. It happened also with the first Iraqi-American war (Bush 41). Sen Al D'Amato (sp?) was supposed to lead an investigation into why the companies have record profits in stressful times.

They always claim it's "volume"; their percentage profits are reasonable, but they sell a lot. Last year I don't think that held--I believe (but am not certain) that usage fell because the prices were so high.

But that may just be civilian usage--perhaps total usage increased. I'd love to see info on that, because I am skeptical and in this election year we may have a shot at changing things.
Wow, you created Mibbit? Props to you, I use it all the time. I don't use a desktop client, and firing up Chatzilla can be annoying as I have a bunch of auto-server and channel joins that take a while to load up (useful for more regular IRC use, but not so much to check a quick channel). I was going to make myself a basic AJAX/Comet web IRC client, but then I found Mibbit, and life became good. :-)
Fun to use, and a pretty good example of semantic web.
It's normal. Now close your browser and get back to work.
hehe thanks :) Glad it's becoming useful for people. Still a ton of work - logging, scripting, open API, skins, etc etc But these things all take time eh
Those voices fade away as soon as you accomplish something.
What about the availability of credit? It's probably easier to buy the big TV on credit now than to steal it.
There are a lot of social games like these being played in colleges. It's nice to see them being talked about!
So I looked through the last 10-15 or so of the xkcd comics, and maybe 3-4 of them were what I considered HN material (Feynman, this one, etc) and a bunch that were not (tripping band kids, punch buggy, tapping, etc). The appropriate ones (like this) have a lot of upvotes, the others don't. I'm happy to announce that the system is working, the good ones are rising and the bad ones are getting ignored.

Remember, commenting to complain about the bad ones makes them rise to the top of the front page!
It natural to lose enthusiasm as your responsibilities (to others) grow and your comfort zone gets smaller.

This also applies for the software industry (especially mid-to-large size companies). Youthful programmers want to learn the latest hot/cool/interesting technology. After several projects and as they gain pratical experience, youthful programmers start to realize that it's not about what technology is used, there are common problem parameters, regardless of technology. As they start to realize this, they might start settling down (getting married, having a family) and their priorities shift from pounding out interesting code to developing a life. I see this unspoken everyday in the happy-where-I-am-and-just-doing-my-job-nothing-more actions of some people in their 40+s (and shockingly 30s and yes some 20s) in my broader development org. So, the people with the most experience are those who probably delegate to those with the least experience.
>Credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It is a trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish.

Best line of the whole article.
Walmart Growth Video
"Friends not competent enough to use mouse."

"guidance on what should be done differently"

OK. Have a little more respect for your users.
Why are people downvoting this? Jealous of their success? Hate the smugness? Regardless, people in the Rails, entrepreneur, and design communities, like the stuff they write. They have 85K subscribers and it is a huge part of their marketing. 85K subscribers drives a lot of traffic, referrals, and awareness.

Anyone seriously interested in promoting their product should take a good long look at the success 37s has had with SVN. It's no different than pg's arguments about Lisp.
What about those of us who couldn't care less about social status? I mean, is everything everybody wants for all time based on status signalling? For me it really hasn't been an issue since middle school.
Compiler problems suck, because you start wondering if the rest of your code will start failing in weird and wonderful ways once it reaches the customer. I've had a fair share of compiler/system library issues in game development; the console SDKs I've used were unbelievably flaky, all the way from compiler, build system, debugger to system libraries and hardware itself. Not fun. For many people it becomes difficult to maintain the "it's always your code's fault" mantra in that situation.
A Modified Turing Test