skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree mostly but just want to add:

If your entire company is going to fail from just one bad hire, you need to re-examine your processes.

It's the nature of the game. Some people are more capable than others. Of course try to get the most capable people you can, but in between superstar and loser, there are a lot of people who can create more value than the total cost of hiring them. (counted in terms of compensation but also training time from other employees, botched tasks while they are learning the ropes, etc etc)
Revenge of the Experts: Is User-Generated Content Out?
See, I told you we disagree. I'm going to drop it now since you aren't interested in my ideas.
- A solid UNIX underneath. I don't care in the trademark sense. I care in the "beats Cygwin" sense. Real terminals. Most things you need from Linux will build.

- A solid GUI on top. Everything is largely cohesive. No half the apps running KDE themes and the other half of the apps running Gnome themes.

- Better supported by hardware and software vendors than Linux.

No need to mess figure out wireless, Bluetooth, power management, sleep/hibernate multi-button mice, free vs non-free drivers, multi-monitor mirroring/spanning etc issues. It all pretty much just works.

Someone said since this is "Hacker News", you shouldn't mind spending some time figuring it out. Bullshit. I don't have enough time to hack the stuff I want to hack, let alone the minutiae I don't want to hack.

I work with Linux all day. I don't feel particularly enlightened by knowing how to config X by hand (I am quite excited that we're past that point now) and how to use multiple mouse buttons with imwheel.
Firefox 3 with Proto, FireBug Beta.

Still has some problems with focus, but otherwise, really really great, and they seem to have fixed the TextArea bugs.
So is this piece of startup advice a lie?
NYTimes: The Evolution of Cyberpunk (1993)
Anyone else here interested in things cyberpunk?
Gothic radio on the net. R1Live, darkwave or www.gothicradio.tv.

All that screaming behaves almost like white noise for me :-P

I once downloaded a recording of heavy rain from a nature site. I found that sound very very conducive to coding :)
Yes. Self-evidently.
I am despising Firefox lately.
Switch statements?
Try Kubuntu; KDE has a completely new file manager, Dolphin.
I can't think of any startup that's failed from over-emphasizing both of these points together, but I can think of a few that died from following each of them in isolation. For example:

The startup I left in September has now been around for 7 years. They're profitable (obviously; otherwise they wouldn't still be around), but don't have product-market fit: they have fewer than a dozen customers and need to go through a laborious and often fruitless sales process for each new customer. IMHO, their problem is that they're too focused on "Don't stop" and not enough on "Build something people want." When one of their product ideas fails in the marketplace, they usually assign an engineer or two to maintain and update it, in the hopes that if they add a few more features or make it a little faster, someone will buy it. As a result, they had something like 7 products when I left, only three of which were bringing in revenue. They might get much farther by concentrating resources on really trying to get a breakthrough with one product than scattering their resources across 7.

It's harder to find examples for companies that made something people want and still failed, but they're out there. AllAdvantage.com comes to mind: they gave away free money, lots and lots of people wanted it, but they still failed because they weren't making more money than they were giving away. Friendster too, sorta: lots of people wanted them, enough that it killed their servers, so nobody could get to them, so everyone went to MySpace. Both of these were at least indirectly because they didn't view the startup as a long haul and work out a sustainable infrastructure.
MyProps.org
Man, I wish I could get a look at the elite physics engine hiding within Mario's jump routines. I probably would have faked it out, you know: x+1 y+1 repeat 10 times, x+1 y-1 repeat 10 times.
Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run
I'd say, ALL sites should stop asking for username and password from other sites (which they don't control[1]).

It's bad when you get screwed, for obvious reasons.
It's also bad when you don't get screwed because it reinforces your false sense of security in an inherently insecure practice.

[1] I don't mind as much about situations like logging in to Youtube with your Google credentials since I know google controls both sites.
Maybe it's just supposed to be (really) cool. Certainly it recommends sah extremely well if he's looking for work or, say, funding.
This is a little embarrassing to admit, but after codepad and this post, I think I'm developing a man-crush on Steven Hazel.
I just read an article about the guys who won the spock challenge
http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_spock_challenge_winner
Meh. He was a deliberate troll? Now I feel like a doofus for arguing with him in like three different threads.
http://www.songworm.com/lyrics/songworm-parody/EternalFlame....
Damn, Neuromancer was good. Gibson created and transcended the genre in one book.
Devo, Gary Numan, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Drexciya, Dan Curtin.
They wish. But they could answer this question from their own traffic stats. Has newsweek.com traffic been growing sharply? Has wikipedia.org traffic been falling?

Actually newsweek.com traffic has gone up a lot in the last 6 months. But I think this is because Newsweek got their act together more than that user tastes have changed. There's no similar uptick at usnews.com.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/newsweek.com+reddit.com+usn...

Notice incidentally that reddit is ahead of both of them. Not bad for 4 guys.
"3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure,
A true name."

Ever since I've read and re-read this book, this perplexes me. What was the true name?? Isn't it revealed like in Wizard of Earthsea..
Does anyone else here affiliate themselves with the cyberpunk movement? Is anyone here interested in cyberpunk ideas? Glossy fashion and role playing games allowed, I guess, but I'm more interested in people who actually code and have a little socio-political chip on their shoulder. ;p
Fox3 for a simple reason. Fox2 is a memory hog on ubuntu. I checked the mem each was using w/o add-ons & F2 was almost double the RAM.
All I do is constantly think about the next project-euler challenge (www.projecteuler.net).

...Religiously.
Thank you. That was exactly what I was trying to get across, but you did it much more eloquently.
not really what i am looking for. i want something less grandma friendly and more hardcore friendly.

where are the file trees for instance?
"... In the fall of 1981 I was going to college and became addicted to the Atari arcade games Centipede and Tempest. I knew a little bit about the hardware of the Atari 400/800 home computer systems ..."

Guess who just got back from Game On? (retro exhibition of 125 console 'playable' games :) ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2319687705/
Us = geeks.

( geeks are nerds who can get laid ;) )
I use Safari because it doesn't crash as much as Firefox 2, Ffox only when I need Firebug or Live Headers
Oops, They Fired All Their Workaholics
This whole article is a complete mess. This part is one of the funniest and shows how clueless the mainstream media really is:

>>Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits

Huh?!

As soon as you read a huge misconception like that, most people have a tendency to completely disregard the whole argument.

Finally, as we all are aware, experts never argue among each other and they are never wrong. Right.
I prefer to Enjoy the Silence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7y6A-5uTY
Ah, then it must be true.
I don't buy it. You'd have to have some pretty thick skin to survive in the ad industry anyway.
Really? Do you have a bayesian filter that can tell trollbait from irony? Some humans have trouble with false positives when it comes to irony...
some of his comments seem serious, imo
Aquamacs is very good
Software Engineering is a Joke
This question seems to come up once a week. People never get tired of answering it.
Erm, people label it as an engineering discipline because it uses some of the same principles of system design, use of modules and reuse that other engineering disciplines share...

Engineers solve problems. Understanding physics is a means to solving some problems. That's it.

"The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems." http://www.thefreedictionary.com/engineering
Opera for web browsing and Firefox 2 (with FireBug and Venkman, of course) for development tasks. Also, I have three virtual machines with FF3, IE6 and IE7 installed for testing.

But I am thinking about switching from second version of Firefox to the third for dev tasks. I just did not test FireBug there and have no idea about its reliability on that version.

And for sure, I will switch one of my virtual OSes from IE7 to IE8 after its next beta because it's IE7/IE8 rendering modes support will make possible to test webapps for both versions.
The Celebrity Solution
How do you generate unique id's, how do you plan against ceilings?
Those of you familiar with the amazing problem that flickr had recently when they touched the ceiling of their numbering schemes for images.

in the erlang world , apart from having to hack our auto auto-incrementor for mnesiaDB. you also get to do interesting stuff like tuples that are'nt serialised as unique id's.

->{ node() , erlang:now() }

-> myReadLastIdAndIncrementByOne(table_name)

-> erlang:phash2 ( <List> )

-> erlang:term_to_binary(<List| Tupel|Integer>).

1) how do you generate unique id's for your app ?

2) Assuming you're thinking to grow real big (dont all YC'ers :) ), how do you plan to handle such ceilings ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
Apple is too good to merge with Sun who is too good for Apple.

So you really think that round table could support those two CEOs?

I think it is more likely for Apple to scoop up AMD. In 2 years Steve Jobs will need a reason for all Apple users to buy new machines and the AMD Fusion processor which will have graphics on the CPU die would be a great reason to launch a new OS and a completely in compatible set of solutions in the name of progress and innovation.
Maybe three notes, like A, E, G, etc. ?
I voted for FireFox 2, but only because 1.5 wasn't there. Firefox 2, as well as 3, represent deterioration of the breed.

All of the operas after version 5 have gotten worse as well.

IE7 and IE8b are really bad--almost suprisingly bad.

+1 for Lynx (aka "other"), which hasn't gotten worse over the years, at least.
mixmax, you're my new best friend. That was awesome!
SXSW: Lessons Learned at 37 Signals
what's awesome about glorifying fighting? with any random person who says something inconsequential?
Newsweek? More like Non-Newsweek!
Wow. I have an old Sharp laptop that runs super hot. I'm terrified to put it on my pants, let along bare skin.

Hope you don't have dreams of posterity. :)
"Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."

Is he trying to be ironic here?
An Easy Tutorial on IP Tables and Port Knocking
In this case, he doesn't fall into the liar paradox. His assertion is false, since not all startup advice is a lie, just some of it. For example, his.
I loved that one: 1% of how many users? 5 million? So there are 5,000 people writing an encyclopedia for free? Wow, how undemocratic. 1% sounds small until you look at what the base is.
There are 5,000 people editing an encyclopedia for free--the majority of edits are simply small clarity/spelling/grammar/punctuation revisions, and the wikipedia "core" making them is made of mostly janitors. The content writers are by and large infrequent and/or first-time users. [citation needed]
Firefox 3 on my desktop and big lappy. Opera on my XO (memory consumption of the foxes is a problem...Firefox 3 is usable, but Opera uses about 20-30MB less on startup, and a wee bit less per open tab). I have the IEs4Linux installed for testing.
I think you mean 50,000?
Have you read this?

EC2 for Python programmers http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-people-who-prefe...
Wow, this is ignorant. There's no substance to this argument.

Software and the process of building software can't be measured because it's not physical?

"The confusion of software engineering probably comes from the fact that programmers often have the same intelligence as engineers, and most of the time share the same interests."?

One of the few things I dislike about news.yc is that something like this, an hour old with 3 points and one comment can make it to #8 on the front page. Programming.reddit actually seems more discerning.
Arrogance is not about actions or statements but attitude. It's not about what you say but how you say it. How good one's predictions of oneself are is irrelevant.

I don't understand people who say success justifies arrogance (or worse, makes it not-arrogance altogether). Success just shields you from the consequences of your arrogance.
Advertising Information
di.fm used to be good; then they grew bigger and started charging (about the same time their music selection quality started to decline).

These days I'll listen to MrsFudge Streaming Radio, which has the best music voting system I've seen:
http://gurba.sytes.net

Alternately, there's Proton radio:
http://www.protonradio.com/
Well its a good test for the comment system at least ;)
[Seattle] Mosquito Angel Fund - Benevolent: $4000 for 0% Stake
http://www.searchyc.com
They Might Be Giants
You're rightly being voted down, because YC doesn't fund ideas, they fund people (and they admittedly make mistakes).
while making something people want is obviously great advice, sometimes it gets applied in a detrimental way by implying that if you don't have users it's because your product isnt't right and you need to lock yourself away and hack some more features and then you'll have something people want.

In reality your product might be just about good enough but you're not paying enough attention to smart distribution methods and thats the real cause of slow growth.
Have you looked into guids?
Select, middle mouse button click is copy and paste where I come from, and it's lack is the single most uncomfortable aspect of working in Windows or Mac OS X for me.
That's a great point-- one of the recurring themes we hear from speakers at YC is "you can't underestimate the importance of distribution".

That being said, I'm always a fan of nailing the most important distribution tool there is-- word of mouth-- before focusing too much on anything else. If you can't tell 10 people about it and have them be excited enough about your product to tell a few more, then distribution is really just pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Facebook apps are a fine example of distribution-mania that ventures into the realm of unhealthy. Turns out, no one really wants a lot of those apps-- so their active userbases are dramatically declining.
take a company of 25, 50, or 100 people. What fraction is not involved in engineering/development. How has the content of their jobs changed in the last 10-20 years compared to software development. As a firm grows less of the total headcount is in engineering, attacking these functions might yield more productivity improvement. You have yet to answer my status quo question: what is the baseline for your 10X comparison?
Slate.com had an interesting article on this topic of Web 2.0 democracy: http://www.slate.com/id/2184487 And it went in the same direction as this Newsweek article: debunking the myth that most of the users are contributing to Digg or Wikipedia, in their respective community, as implied by the Web 2.0 democracy concept. Rather, "At both Digg and Wikipedia, small groups of users have outsized authority." (Slate.com)

Think about the tight moderation at Slashdot given to a selected few, or the 1% at Wikipedia. Most of Wikipedia edits are not done by 100%, not 50%, but only 1% of their users. As a result, one cannot call it a web 2.0 participative democracy. And I think that's the message from both Newsweek and Slate.

Of course Newsweek "wish[es]" the experts had more eyeballs/attention, since that's their business, to be news experts. But while user-generated content is certainly not "out" (that's probably exaggerated wording to catch the eye), the point is that there is a desirable need to have those experts (or in other words a kind of elite) in order to have quality content.
Would Google Summer of Code count? I participated in the first one with Mambo/Joomla, but was fairly disappointed.
Your myReadLastIdAndIncrementByOne looks disturbing. Are you sure mnesia:dirty_update_counter/3 doesn't work for your needs?

As for ids in mnesia, you aren't (realistically) at risk of overflowing an integer storage size since you get automatic promotion to bignums. {node(), now()} works fine if you are working in a distributed context and don't need sequential IDs. Also erlang:md5/1, or crypto:sha/1 can give you unique IDs to use over distributed nodes. I wouldn't recommend erlang:phash2 because it only yields 27 bit to 32 bit hashes.

I'm not sure what good term_to_binary would be if you are keeping everything in mnesia.

I would recommend looking into mnesia:dirty_update_counter/3 first and then expand to either {node(), now()} or erlang:md5/1 or crypto:sha/1 if you find updating the counter at distributed nodes is a problem.
Am I the only one running on Flock?
I suppose this is a simplified explanation of the dial they mention later on, which they declare impossible.
Alternately, time travel might be possible, but measuring a discrete value for "the entire energy in the universe" might not, as that value is in superposition with the value it had before the time jump.
> in a multiverse you can't effect your own past.

But there can be events where every single version of you is guaranteed to Infinite-Hotel to the universe next door and kill Grandfather[n+1]--basically the same thing, as your grandfather does indeed end up dead.
Please, do yourselves a favor and read this instead:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130757
Nice, I've wanted to write something similar for a while.

However, even the "don't stop" one has the counter example of "fail early" and "know when to give something up and move in a new direction". That doesn't mean stop altogether, of course, but it may mean giving one thing up for another.
The possibilities are endless, but not all the scenarios you describe require planes that can stay in flight for 5 years. For a lot of the scenarios you describe it would suffice to have a fleet of planes that take off, fly, land, resupply and take off again completely autonomously.
Can GPL iPhone apps exist?
Great advice without the attitude (maybe because it was paraphrased by someone else).
Two months in and they still don't get the joke
No, +1 for Flock.
I'm also using FireFox for developing (FireBug).
I'm on a Powerbook, and Firefox is almost unusably slow. Safari 3 is nice and snappy, and I'm not even using the Webkit nightlies which are rumored to be 3 times faster. Still using Firefox for Firebug, which is a life-saver.
Nice tips! I just configured my UI to the following:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dskhatri/Screenshots/photo#51756...

I used:

- avant window navigator (https://launchpad.net/awn)

- Murrina Eternal Blue theme from http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Murrina-Eternal_b... (uses murrine engine)

- Humanoid-OSX Black window border (http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Humanoid-OSX-Blac...)

- Emacs theming: Clarity and Beauty (https://gna.org/projects/color-theme)

- Conky system monitor (yet to create my own config file)
Hi, is this the line for bitching about all stuff related to 37signals?

If so, my complaint goes back a couple of years - when someone on my team suggested using Basecamp for managing our web site projects.

Without too much thought, we signed up and began to use it. To pay for it, I used my personal credit card. Of course, that meant I had to expense it.

To give you some perspective, the expense system at our 5,000-plus person enterprise heavily weights ass-covering over ease of use, meaning that it takes about 30 minutes, 85 clicks, two printouts, an in-person signature from a superior, and a short jog up the stairs to deposit a hard copy in a finance department inbox, regardless of whether you have one receipt or ten.

I didn't think much of it the first or second month I paid,
but by month three, I was thinking, boy, there must be a better way. At least let me prepay for a year of service, I thought - and I looked around the site for just such an option.

Not finding one, I sent an email to the site admin to ask if I could prepay for a year, or preferably even longer.

The reply I got was: "We only bill monthly, sorry."

Thinking that perhaps they hadn't considered the reason I might be asking, I replied and explained just how arduous the expense process was at my organization, and suggested that offering a prepayment option might make it more likely for large enterprises to start using their product.

The following was the reply I got:

"I understand your position, but we are a month-to-month service. Some of the largest companies in the world use Basecamp and gladly pay month-to-month. And the smallest companies in the world love it too."
We'll definitely take a look, thanks for the info!
I also tried to check out featurelist.org, but it kept timing out. I'll try again tomorrow and let you know once we have a project created :)
> It's harder to find examples for companies that made something people want and still failed

I don't think it's that hard at all:

http://www.stage6.com/

There are numerous instances where what the user wants and what is most profitable for your startup don't perfectly line up.
FYI the 7 or 8 downmods i got in this thread came in the space of a few seconds. Likely downmodding without reading.
The suit is back.
Yeah, progressive trance, dnb, and hard house (I think it's called).
If we don't keep our supply of hacking music fresh then we could all die... I mean, stop hacking as well.
Whenever an article quotes Andrew Keen I'm pretty confident I can ignore the article in its entirety. I've read (most of) his book, and was embarrassed for him. He's strikingly bitter about having failed in the valley, and now strikes out viciously at its most recent success stories.

I have no dog in the "user generated content" race, but I can still see the reality of new media, and it definitely will involve user generated content along-side traditional "expert" generated content, with more growth on the amateur side than the expert side for the foreseeable future. No amount of wishful thinking on the part of "expert" media can alter that...but, if they accept that the game has changed and learn to play the game, they can have advantages in taking on the newcomers in the field. Conde Naste acquired Reddit because they are smart enough to see it, and want to play by the new rules rather than sit out the round on the bench. Likewise for MSNBC and their Newsvine acquisition (though it's probably less smart than the reddit acquisition, as reddit is just better than newsvine, despite the really cool tech behind newsvine). Some company will even probably be foolish enough to pay 200+ million for Digg, because they want to play by the new rules--it'll take them a long time to see a return if they pay such a stupidly high amount for a site the size of Digg, but they will at least be in the game.