skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd summurise as "Trust. Be friendly. Take genuine concern for your clients point of view." These are pre-requisites for "win-win" situations.
Melodyne -  change individual notes within chords - like Photoshop for music (amazing video)
I'd suggest learning Flex. For the longterm, I think this is the true winner.

If you are absolutely determined to learn Javascript
- I agree with others read the articles by Crockford and watch the Yahoo UI videos
- Read the code for dojo. Alex is one sharp javascript guy.
- For ajax frameworks look at DWR

Good luck... and have fun !!
Not really. It turns out that you still end up falling behind, just not as quickly.

Run to the wood and brick and get those roads built!
On the Process of Becoming a Great Scientist
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (a.k.a. the Rhino Book, published by O'Reilly) is a great place to start as well as a great reference.

In fact, Douglas Crockford (mentioned elsewhere in this topic) says it's the only JavaScript book he can recommend.
Hi javascripter. First of all, welcome to news.yc!

There's at least one thing you're already doing right: you're starting out with a problem that interests you. However, I don't think you have quite the right goal. You don't want to be the best Javascript programmer ever. You want to be the best programmer ever. Javascript should just be one weapon in your arsenal, and a rather specialized one at that.

That said, you have to start somewhere. Usually I recommend that people start with Scheme and read SICP (online at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html), but since you've indicated that you're interested in web programming, that's probably not the right first step for you. The trouble with web programming is that it's messy. Any non-trivial website requires you to understand a whole alphabet soup of different programming languages and markup languages, some of which were designed for each other and some of which weren't, and then to top that off you get to worry about Internet Explorer dain bramage. If you're just programming for an audience of you and nobody else and you choose carefully what to work on, then you can ignore some of these issues, but sooner or later they'll leak in and it's going to seem overwhelming. (This isn't necessarily bad; coping with information overload is one of the most valuable skills a hacker can learn.)

So, here's what I suggest. Start by learning Python. It's a clean, reasonably powerful, easy-to-learn language, and it's very good for web programming. I assume you already know HTML; if not, learn that first -- it'll take you a couple days max. You can make a pretty capable website using just Python and HTML. You could almost write news.yc, except for the AJAX up-arrows which require Javascript. A site like this would be pretty big as a first project, though.

I'll let someone else recommend a Python tutorial. I just learned it from the reference manual, so I don't know a good one.

Once you feel confident making web pages using Python and HTML, then it's time to start learning Javascript. It might also be a good time to go back and learn to write standards-compliant XHTML-strict and CSS, since this will make working with the Javascript DOM a bit less of a headache, but this is optional and you can do it in parallel with learning Javascript if you do it at all.

Finally, here are some bits of non-technical reading I recommend:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

http://paulgraham.com/gh.html
panda3d - python c++ graphics library
http://panda3d.org
I don't see how the square could be partitioned, maybe I am reading it wrong? My informal counter proof by contradiction (decrypt with rot13.com):

fvapr gur cnegvgvba vf svavgr, gurer vf n fdhner Z jvgu gur fubegrfg fvqr. Abj pbafvqre gur fdhnerf nybat gur gbc fvqr bs gur havg fdhner. Gur fznyyrfg fdhner nzbat gurz unf n fvqr yratgu < 0.5, yrg'f pnyy vg F1. Abj pbafvqre ebj bs fdhnerf pbirevat gur obggbz fvqr bs F1. Gurer unf gb or n fznyyrfg fdhner nzbat gurz, jvgu yratgu < 0.5* fvqr_yratgu_bs(F1) = 0.25. Yrg gung fznyyrfg fdhner or F2. Abj pbafvqre gur ebj bs fdhnerf ng gur obggbz bs gung fdhner. Gurer unf gb or n fznyyrfg fdhner F3 nzbat gurz jvgu fvqr yratgu < 0.5*0.25 = cbjre(0.5,3). Naq fb ba - gurer vf nyjnlf n arkg ebj bs fdhnerf, nf gur fznyyrf fdhner va gur ebj pna abg gbhpu gur obggbz fvqr bs gur havg fdhner. Urapr V pna tb ba yvxr gung vasvavgryl, orpnhfr yvz cbj(0.5,a) = 0 riraghnyyl V'yy svaq n fdhner gung vf fznyyre guna Z, pbagenqvpgvba.
Am I the only one who suspects spam?
Geosign, Google and the Decline of the Search Arbitrage Business Model
I think so. Why do you suspect that?
10 year rule?

sry joels, doncha know that the singularity is near?
"Becoming a Technical Leader" by Gerald Weinberg

Unconventional perspective on management

"How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand

One of the best books about designing long-term architectures. Excellent coffee table book

"Envisioning Information" by Edward Tufte

"Walt Disney" by Neal Gabler

Excellent biography of maybe the greatest imagineer ever

"The Art of Software Testing" by Glenford J. Myers

~100 page classic. The central premise is that the successful test is one that finds bugs/issues not one that doesn't.
His alias is "Javascripter"... he wants to be the "best in the world"... he's 12 years old... just the overall wording taunts me with a hint of spam.

I don't think a 12 yr old would have that enthusiasm for pure javascript.. would definitely ask about HTML (if he knows html he knows how to find out about javascript?)...

what 12 year old knows about YC.news?

Seriously... I'm calling this one out... spam.
Another great place to start is Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting book (published by Friends of ED), it's really well written and a great introduction to unobtrusive, clean Javascript. There's a sample chapter on his site: http://domscripting.com/book/

On a side note, don't learn a library as the first thing you do as you'll be learning how to code in jQuery, Prototype, etc, rather than in Javascript.
Snaptalent Launches (YC Winter 08)
Well, I assume you really mean "troll" rather than "spam", and given the earnest and constructive answers he's gotten so far, I'd say that if he's a troll he's the least successful one ever :-).
I've not read Peopleware but I've read Why Does Software Cost So Much? by Tom DeMarco and Slack by Tom DeMarco. The former focuses on technical issues and the sunken cost of software. The latter focuses on the agility of organisations. Tom DeMarco started as a programmer and subsequently became a consultant increasingly focusing less on technical issues and more on business issues. Therefore, reading his books in order would be most relevant as your start-up develops.
I use IBM Lotus Domino server software (Notes is the client side piece) as the underlying platform for some healthcare web applications. It would be more accurate to describe Domino as a loosely-structured document database with multi-master replication and a public-key security infrastructure. There is a whole application development layer on top of that, plus additional native features for messaging and workflow. Lotus (and later IBM) then built e-mail, calendar, and groupware applications using those basic building blocks. Those applications ship as part of the product, but you can build your own custom apps that operate on an equal footing. It works extremely well for certain classes of applications.

Usually when someone has a bad opinion of Notes/Domino it's because he used an old version of the e-mail application at some previous company, and it did have a sucky user interface. But the current version is on par with anything else out there.
A) inappropriate for a site called "Hacker News".

B) You don't understand the problem, so you can't ask the right questions. There are just over 4000 Democratic primary delegates, total. There are just under 2400 Republican primary delegates, total. Thus the Democrats have about 1 and 2/3 delegates per Republican delegate. HOWEVER. Mississippi, which just voted, has a total of 40 Democratic delegates and 39 Republican delegates. What? Why don't the Democrats have 1 and 2/3 times the number of Republican delegates?

The answer is that the states are ALREADY weighted. They are weighted so that reliable states have more weight, and unreliable states have less. So the Republicans want more (proportionally) delegates from Mississippi than the Democrats do, because Mississippi is a red state whose votes they will need in the Presidential election. If we take Massachusetts, the Republicans have 40 delegates total, and the Democrats have 121 - because it's a blue state. If we take Ohio, a swing state, it's 181 to 88, which is 1.8 to 1, pretty close to the "proper" delegate ratio.

That is: the states ARE weighted, they are weighted exactly opposite to the manner that you propose, and you have absolutely no power or influence to change that weighting unless you start your own political party.
You can see a Snaptalent widget on the jobs page: http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
Community Plumbing with Drupal
Pirate Bay to Hollywood: Open your Own Torrent Site (text summary + 3 part video interview)
Awesome idea. I've been telling people for years that a great way to teach physics would be to write a FPS where c = 10 m/s.
You've already got the atitude to be an excellent programmer. Your success is assured if you learn more than one programming language. For you purposes, learn Pascal, learn C, learn Perl, learn JavaScript. This will minimise your learning curve and risk of failure while giving you increasing power and understanding.
Ugh. Pascal? What for?
Matrix: Simulating the world Part I
This is the first part in a really interesting set of articles on using bio-inspired algorithms to model the physical world around us.
Principia Discordia; or How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her
You're right. I got the names and logos confused. I went by the BoxCloud booth. http://www.boxcloud.com/
SEO poisoning attacks growing
Fantastic, I've been watching these guys execute for awhile and I have no doubt Snaptalent will be big!
A Mathematician’s Lament [pdf]
This article is rather naive. No one ever claimed the B-S model is "right". Everyone who uses it professionally knows it is only an approximation that works reasonably well in certain limited cases. Sort of like how a physicist might assume a complex object is spherical just to simplify the calculations.
Bookmarklets: done. See http://fyynd.com/bookmarklets/. As for rating links programmatically: it is a simple POST to "http://fyynd.com/links/[link_id]/rate/" with a parameter "rating". "rating" should be a float between 0 and 5. A rating of 0 will delete that vote.

Thanks for your interest.
Hey Guys - Please Digg

http://digg.com/tech_news/Snaptalent_Targets_Job_Candidates_...
I know there's some redundancy in this advice but I thought I'd mention it to support the great tips already here.

Practice. Read and write a lot of code. You might try to work your way through set problems like Project Euler or the Ruby Quiz or other competitions.

Learn the "laws of physics" of programming - some things are harder to do than others. all programming is an interplay between making a tiny, trivial and deterministic step on one hand and managing complexity through abstraction on the other.

it's most instructive to try things for yourself - even if you fail - but on the other hand make sure you attempt things you will definitely succeed at too because the feeling of success will fuel your passion. you will never be a great developer without passion!

Watch Douglas Crockford's JavaScript videos.

use Flanagan's Rhino book.

Try and use different programming patterns and styles in javascript: imperative, functional, object oriented, continuation-passing, dependency injection, fluent interface.

Always use var and semicolon.

Never use "with" or "eval".

Plan to learn another programming language (which smart people recommend you) and it will also greatly assist your javascript programming - you should not be too tied to a single language that you can't change. If you really like web 2.0 you should learn a good server side language as well. As a second to JavaScript for a youngster I would recommend Ruby or Python, (or PHP if you must). Other languages are really great for that purpose but these will be easier to learn first and will be readily available on cheap hosting providers. Those others may include: Lisp/Scheme, Smalltalk, Java, C#, Scala etc. Do not learn VB.

Get firebug.

Read "The Pragmatic Programmer".

Reuse code.

Write automated tests. You can use a unit test framework.

Write lots of cranky cryptic puzzle code right now. Get it out of your system. Then seek to write clean comprehensible code forever more.

Port code from another language.

Recognise that lots of people in professional development have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Others are absolute genius gurus who's words you should memorise and meditate on. Good luck telling the difference!

Use the force.
Why every 24 months?
Congrats! These guys are going to be huge!
Cool site. I am working on the same thing (but for school/fun). You should look into Support Vector Machines as they are much better at text classification then kNN.
Rootless Root: The Unix Koans of Master Foo
I wrote TagLib, JuK, a couple other small KDE applications, and a handful of the library classes (inline spell checking, search widgets, maintained the listview classes for a few years) and more recently implemented a number of algorithms and classes for ChucK (music orientated programming language).

I'd recommend working at least tangentially in one of the larger projects since I feel like hooking into those cultures is a really instructive and challenging environment. Don't underestimate the social component of OSS projects.

In a big project the easiest way to get started is to pick something you already use, start running the unstable version (from CVS, SVN, whatever) and sign up for some mailing lists. You'll hit bugs, and if you've been on the lists for a bit you'll get a feel for how they're handled in that project. IRC can also be useful. Often you can find someone there that will kind of informally mentor you in the project if they like what you're working on.

One big caveat that I always point out: Don't worry about your skills. You'll learn them if you're motivated, latch on to a good community and have moderately thick skin.
Really impressed by how quickly you've launched and the approach is brilliant. Makes perfect sense!

Particularly happy to see two YC start-ups this week launching products so useable that they're being used on Hacker News... and with British origins too! :D
"some other languages" a.k.a. Lisp, really
10 Ways to Improve Your Programming Productivity
A collection of some old methods, revisited. After looking back and trying to figure out what separates one [productive] day from the next [unproductive day], here are some commonalities I've noticed.
Using the Goldbach Conjecture makes it easier.
Building the Atari ST
6) Go to school, even when you are not going to learn Javascript there, you are going to learn a lot of things that are very important for your projects too.
A langauge with strong typing and bound checking is ideal when you're learning algorithms. A newbie coding a bubble sort in Pascal encounters less mysterious failure modes than a newbie coding a bubble sort in C. (Consider the off-by-one gotcha at the end of the inner loop.) I know that strongly typed languages are unpopular on this forum and I've been downmodded for mentioning one. However, consider the suggested progression of languages to be like riding a bicycle and then having the training wheels removed.
I haven't gotten through all of it, but I really like the New Turing Omnibus, by A.K. Dewdney. It's about computer science, not how to program, so it would be interesting to non-hackers, too. Even if you are familiar with all of its topics, it can serve as a reference and clarifying tool for CS concepts.
Congrats, guys. I digg.
When I was 14 (1995), I'd been doing shoddy programming for a couple years and read an article in Newsweek about genetic algorithms and somewhat naïvely decided to look up the guy interviewed (on compuserve) and drop him a mail (David E. Goldberg). He went to the trouble to not only answer me, but run off a huge packet of copies of articles and snail-mailed them to me. That seriously changed my life. That's when I learned what computer science really was. Answering questions like this is important, in my opinion, even if you get duped once in a while.

Whoa, just found it again: http://www.newsweek.com/id/103827/output/print
Advice of this type is generally not logical or scientific, so it's hard to separate bad advice from good. And being original or catchy doesn't make it good, either. So, one way is to look at who gave it, and whether you admire that person and his work and life. Why is that "annoying"?

Look at pg's advice on this site; a lot of it is basically "yes" or "no", and it's all highly rated, as it should be.
Ask YC: How many forums do you use?
I have an idea I have been toying with for a long time and wonder if you guys still used forums in this day and age of social sites like this one etc.

So

How many other forums do you use?
Are you very active on them?
What forum software are they running if you know?

thanks in advance guys.
I like static typing, but Pascal seems like a weird choice. Why not ML, or even Java?
excellent read, I agree with pretty much all of it.

my tip for not being side tracked is...

make your home page on your development machine blank.

Being a webdeveloper I found everytime I open my browser with igoogle I would get sidetracked by some story.

I have also taken to getting up earlier and reading all I can first thing and then just getting on with it.
I ran into this situation about ten years ago. (With the exact same amount of seed funding and series A funding oddly.) I didn't want to do raises and my co-founder wanted to do a huge raise that would have doubled his salary. We compromised closer to my side and just did a slight raise.

We also sold some personal stock to the Series A investor. I banked it and forgot about it. He went on a spending spree and his performance at work went down and never recovered. He ended up quitting a year later, wrangling high-dollar consulting contracts from a couple of our larger clients who later regretted it. Asshole.

I suppose this is more of a lesson about picking the right founders than whether to give yourselves raises. But I'd be a bit wary of anyone who wants too large of a raise.
The two sites I tried (cnn.com / bluwiki.com) don't work either...
Useless has a name:  Alltop
Ruby on Rails might be the Mac’s killer development platform
I still use forums a lot especially for subject related issues. It's a total different medium then a social network so I don't think it's fair to compare. I still think that forums are a huge part of the internet.
I don't have direct experience of ML but I'd definitely recommend against Java because there's a tsumani of information. It is overwhelming for a newbie. Pascal is small and concise. The grammar is unambiguous. You know when you've outgrown it and you'll move on. When you master Pascal then C looks trivial. When you master C then Perl looks positively slack. This can be done while minimising information overload.
Open Source Software Integration
Has anyone here integrated existing open source software into their own product? I don't really mean using LAMP or anything along those lines, I'm referring more to using open source software to avoid having to code something yourself that has been coded before.
Wow! Thats pretty cool. The website, and the fact that you pulled it off in 45 minutes. Great job earle.
what's a 'book'?
ubuntuforums.org - they have a very nice feature where you can see unanswered questions from beginners that you can take care of. I genuinely want Windows to die and try to contribute to Ubuntu in any way I can.
A little dated, but the site I originally learned Javascript:

http://www.jalix.org/ressources/internet/dhtml/_dynduo/dyndu...

Have fun.
Agreed. Great read. And the second point

Leave Yourself a Place to Start (or: Leave work with something small broken)

is something I do all the time. I work Java at my day job, and have found that leaving out the semi-colon at the last place I touched (so that eclipse shows a compile error) really helps me get back to what I was doing the previous evening (or the friday before) so much quicker.

And the last point, get to know your tools. I am currently trying to learn emacs, but I have pretty much mastered eclipse (and other tools that I use). Not having to use the mouse to get to different views and perspectives to browsing around for files, absolutely necessary for improving your productivity at work.

In addition to the last point, getting to know additional tools outside of the development environment really helps. I read websites like lifehacker and have learned of tools like Launchy (on windows). Yes, it takes a while to get used to these tools, but once you have figured them out and configured them to your liking, you can really fly. Though i do get made fun of at work, considering the number of shortcut key combinations that I keep in my head. Invariably, someone will stop by to ask me for a key combo, and I have to type it out because a lot of the times its muscle memory.

[My apologies for the long post]
n1 - n2 == 0 or if n1 - n2 is divisible by 11

aka

if n1 = n2 (mod 11)

Cool trick.
Time to resurrect M-x spook?
John Carmack on id Tech 6, Ray Tracing, Consoles, Physics and more
Back when I had more free time (no wife, no kids, no business) I used to participate in a few forums. Now, I usually stay updated with the topics via Google Reader and the # of forums I keep up with have dropped to maybe a handful. They mostly come in handy for when I'm searching for specific tech related subjects and certain good threads show up high ranking in the search engine.

List of forums: VMWare's VMTM Forums, Ubuntu's Forums, and Webmaster Forum at Digital Point are the top ones that come to mind.
Learning a library is not the way I would recommend learning a language. At 12 years old, javascripter has no time constraint to build a product fast.

javascripter, learn about Javascript's language features. Learn about nested function and function passing. Learn about object-oriented Javascript and prototypes. Learn the difference between Javascript the language, and DOM, the thing within the language you use to add functionality to web pages. If you find that you are repeating things, write your own library.

Is this the first programming language you are learning? If so, it will give you a leg up when you learn a more conventional language like C or Java, because it will give your mind flexibility. If you already know a programming language, understand that different programming languages have different ideas about how programs can or should be expressed. (That's why there are so many languages.) It will sometimes be helpful to see how something in a new language is similar to a language you already know, but other times you have to just say to yourself, this is different, and I have to think a new way.
Blender and Second Life. I also started some work on GIMP but I haven't submitted anything for GIMP yet.
To get started I just sent an email to the relative mailing lists.
The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites
Congratulations on picking a great language to learn with.

Lots of people have recommended the definitive guide, David Flannagan's book.

I recommend, also, John Resig's book, Pro JavaScript Techniques, and also take a look at his website.

If you'd like to learn some functional programming, and write some of the coolest code possible, take a look at Oliver Steele's website.
This is the single best YC idea I've seen in quite a while. Nice work!
10 Emerging Technologies 2008
I think it's illegal, in California, to claim ownership of something if you worked on it on your own, with your equipment, in your free time.