skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I could find an article I read a long time ago. The general message was that most people give up to early, and that most people do things like give away money too early to people that will waste it.
It reminds me to make it to a billion networth before distributing that wealth.
No, there already is a comment tag in every item, so perhaps your reader is not recognizing or using it?

But the real problem with the feed now (as others have mentioned) is that there's no slash between .com and item.

I.e., http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=102297 shows up in the feed as http://news.ycombinator.comitem?id=102297
what do you do when Amazon misconfigures their switch?
Del.icio.us is exactly the kind I referred to when I said "web-based to-do lists". Those are companies that discovered a market need for something technically trivial and filled the niche. While this does sound attractive and "let's all get rich this way!", the reality is that the percentage of businesses that had been started this way is very very very small, while number of people who is trying is very very very big and growing because of the media coverage.

Media plays a big role here, as always, because it loves such incredible success stories. Publishing an article about boring and typical long way up isn't going to help selling your magazine. When I look at small-to-medium sized companies I personally know someone working for, I do not see a single "del.icio.us" - they all took lots of work to get going: coding hours, equipment, office space, etc.

One of the reasons young founders succed more often that has not been talked about, is that fact that they DO NOT HAVE full time jobs, mortgages, wives and kids with high medical bills and "family time" they need. Young guys have more time and since time == money, they kind of already have "funding" when they're starting.

Therefore I do not see an answer to the dilemma the author is talking about. If your job pays $7K/month (after taxes) plus about a thousand more in benefits, and your startup needs 12 man-months to develop a prototype, plus 3-6 months of fundraising after that, you're essentially looking at the need to find $110-130K somewhere just to let yourself work full time on your idea. If you have that kind of savings - great. If not, quitting your job won't help since you'll starve to death. Short and simple, not even enough for a good blog post.

Just my $0.2
I know this is amateur question, but I am taking my intro to programming class this quarter, and we are learning with Python(and pseudo-code, if that counts) am I doomed to being a crappy programmer? I was notorious for being a Lego addict when i was a kid, and i am taking the classes because i need a formal education on programming, so i would like to think I am not part of this group, but am I getting off on the wrong foot?
No, python is great to learn on.

What school do you go to?
In fact, it's the best place to work four years in a row and then quit promptly. Or so it seems anecdotally.
Very true! We'd be interested in talking to anyone from within the EU.
> Do you have a reference?

Sure: tautological by my definition of "really interesting" ;-)
Bay area foreclosures rose 482.5% in Q4
Try learning and using regular Python (CPython) first. Unless for some reason your job requires the use of lots of Java libraries (in your own start up, that should NOT be the case ;-), I don't see any reason to favor jython over CPython...
so, you're saying that a "real small-to-medium sized" company cannot begin to be built while working a day job? get a beta out and see if it picks up steam?

the author faced that dilemma and gave us his take, and you gave us yours. why all the 'this is childish' hate? :)
Windows 7, the Vista Successor, to be Released Next Year?
If something like that we're to happen, we'd fire up another instance and reroute - in 3 minutes from our desk.
We are in total agreement.
I think you're wrong.

Although both humans and AIs are essentially doing a tree search, the methodology is sufficiently different that the resemblance becomes superficial.

An AI's heuristic for evaluating a position is fast and crude, sometimes as crude as just counting material. Instead it spends its processing power on looking as deep as possible.

For humans, it's all about the heuristic. We evaluate a position by examining the "shape" of the board in a way that we don't know how to express well enough to translate into code. The brain circuitry we're using for this is visual/spatial. Whatever we're doing is not just a deeper tree search: we simply don't have the right wiring that we'd be able to do that at a pace that yields the ability level we're getting. We're only fast enough to examine a few positions per minute. An AI that ran at that pace would be laughably easy to beat.

Also, the order in which we search is more like "most interesting first" than "best first": we search the branches which our intuition has the most difficult time predicting the outcome of in advance.
It's true. But from the guy's description, it sounded like he cared about it a lot. I thought his question was about when one should let a startup go.
Xobni Corporation Selected to Join Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program
There doesn't seem to be any reason to fuel the fires of any intended or unintended conflict here. You know - high road and all.
I mean it's difficult to discover non-trivial algorithms on your own.
Line-up: Macbook Air and The Usual Suspects
I can't see that it would work. Too different a culture, and really what would Google get out of it?
Recommended reading for anyone interested in what's going on in the world economy. These are just starting points.

http://www.marketthoughts.com/z20060921.html (yen carry trade)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency (fiat currency)
MIT recently changed their curriculum from Scheme to Python.

If it's good enough for MIT...
Wow reading this post was like replaying one of my interviews with Google...
Eastern Washington. Heard of it?
Once I saw this, I looked on the Xobni blog to see if they had a better story but there wasn't anything. If you have a better link, post it as a comment.
He got faulted bigtime.

He pretty much got ousted by the faculty. Harvard lost hundreds of millions in alumni donations because they were upset Summers was treated this way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Summers.27_opp...
Good point - thanks.
Flipping Out over Technology in Education
I actually enjoy looking at the ads in Wired because they are usually highly relevant.
Interesting. This gives me the heebs a bit... I wonder how valuable it is, in the end. I suppose it's a good set-up for potential acquisition, but I wonder how much they tie you to their platform. Could a site that uses rails get in if they had a .Net client app, for example?
You can get a good education at almost any school in almost any language. Like much of your life, it depends entirely on what you put into it. If you only do enough to satisfy the core requirements of the class, and you are not motivated to explore the field on your own, then you're going to end up being a "crappy programmer."
There are a number of reasons not to put critical business systems on top of EC2.

First and foremost, if you don't have control of who can physically access your hardware, you can't make any real assurances about the privacy and integrity of your data. I don't care how much you trust Amazon with your personal credit card and shipping information -- you are taking a big risk putting your customers' data there, too.

Secondly, EC2 has no SLA at all. Given Joel's (strong) argument about the limited usefulness of SLAs in general, that may not seem like a big deal, but the lack of any firm commitment on Amazon's part pretty much means that you're SOL if there are any major problems.

Finally, EC2 absolutely does not protect you from issues like mis-configured network hardware. Amazon may have incredibly redundant connectivity, including data centers in different geographic regions, but that redundancy doesn't necessarily benefit your virtual machines in the way it does Amazon's core business applications. One VM instance is still tied to one physical box hosting it, and if that box goes down, you'll lose that host and any data it hasn't flushed elsewhere on the network.

That's not to say that EC2 doesn't have its uses; I just couldn't imagine putting your mission-critical apps on it. Stick with prototyping, testing, batch-processing, and the occasional extra capacity for unexpected spikes in load, and you should be fine.
At Yahoo, even the layoffs are botched
LinkedIn chairman hints at IPO in 2009
The Biggest Successes are Often Bred from Failures
Reddit Adds Ability to Create your own Reddits
Introduction to semantic HTML
About @#%@ing time. So will Dave Winer still bother with his version? http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/11/26/theNextStepInDig...
Seriously. I'm jazzed about this too.
Thoughts on motivation
While I agree that trade schools are a Good Thing &#x99;, I have to respectfully but strongly disagree with your assertion that theory of computation and programming language semantics and implementation are somehow unimportant for any student of programming, whether vocational or theoretical.

True, it may not be terribly illuminating for a game programmer to rigorously prove historical theorems in computability or complexity theory. However, understanding the practical importance of big-O notation, the equivalence of any Turing-complete language, (as well as the lambda calculus, partially-recursive functions, etc.) and compiler design will all be of massive benefit when they're looking to actually distinguish themselves from the rest of the assembly-line game coders.

Overall, though, +1 on the idea of a solid two-year "Computer Programming" degree. Leave CS as a truly academic realm, and give those who are just looking for a solid white-collar career path a respectable path there.
Scenario: Consultant on-site. Application not working (Oracle, app server, and/or network issues). Training scheduled for next day. Diagnose/Fix the problem during the teleconference or else..
Hate? Wooo, that's a strong word :) I appreciated author's post, if anything, I was pissed by Matt's suppressing comments, especially since he's not too shy giving advice himself, which I also find useful on a regular basis.
Doesn't mean it's true. In Austin we have AT&T (DSL) vs TimeWarner (Cable) and both of them have voiced their desire to become "evil corporations" following Comcast.

And why is that a mistake? We're looking at the monopoly that starts milking its monopolistic status. The article assumes that competing technologies will emerge. What if they won't? AT&T is bidding on those frequencies too.

P.S. Fck AT&T and TimeWarner and their greed.
That seems to be the prevailing wisdom, but in ten years, I have yet to meet a programmer who was 5 to 6 times as productive as I am. Also, I assume I must be average, because I'm certainly not 5 or 6 times as productive as my co-workers. Maybe twice as productive, a bit more during those wonderful, 24 hour frenzies.

Just out of curiosity, where do you know these programmers, and what is used for productivity metrics?
Possibility of marking a story as "not interested".

Marking a story as "not interested" means it will never appear on your pages anymore. It doesn't count as a downvote.

I tend to keep up with hacker news but I'm getting tired of eyeballing the titles of all the old articles I already decided I didn't want to check out + the old ones I already checked out and know I won't want to check out again just to find the new ones.
Reddit Adds Ability to Create Your Own "Reddits"
Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The New York Times, on the other hand, is about _creating_ information. They also maintain a big archive, but that's not their first priority. Doesn't sound like a good fit to me.
1. Without password and encryption keys, access to the hardware is meaningless from a data security perspective.

2. I am pretty confident that Amazon's ability to keep the computers running is better than most other options. And unless their entire service goes down as well as the entire S3 grid, we can very quickly launch a new instance with no data loss (we have a hyperactive back up strategy to S3 to prevent data loss in case of an EC2 instance failure)

3. We can launch a new instance in a very few minutes. So if anything, this seems like an ideal environment where uptime is extremely good, and in the case of a failure, recovery is extremely fast. I'm not sure where we can get similar service? The S3 is especially good in terms of multiple backups in different regions - hard to beat for assuring business clients who can't afford to loose data that their data won't be lost.
Wow, a comment so long it needs a summary. Here's the condensed version: It takes lots of practice to be a good hacker. Young (HS) girls have more pressure to be popular, which takes time away from recreational hacking. Older (college and above) girls are at a disadvantage because they didn't start young. They get discouraged and major in something else. Repeat over a statistically significant population and voila! Also, kids haven't lived long enough to accrue the practice.

Long version:

I'll bite. While we can't how much of hacking (or anything) is because of innate abilities and how much is from practice, most of the research I've read says that excellence in any field comes from sustained (years) of meaningful practice. This means that even if you're really smart, you need to spend lots of time to be really good. And no matter how smart you are, if you don't spend time on something, you won't accidentally get good at it. (nothing controversial so far)

So I'll make the claim that if men are statistically better hackers, it's because they're statistically more likely to have spent more time hacking (solve the children question). It also explains why people in their 20s who have hacked meaningful projects are better than older, more "experienced" 9-to-5ers who do the same types of things over and over again and don't expand their knowledge and experience.

As for women, I would say that women statistically find greater rewards for pursuing other interests than computers. More to the point, I would say that there is more pressure for girls to be attractive and popular than for guys, and greater consequences for not being so. This both cultural and biological, and I believe that much of it is because most girls have to be asked out by guys. So, average girl needs to be popular, and as pg explained in "Why Nerds are Unpopular" (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html), being popular is a lot of work. So much work that it crowds out everything else.

Fast forward to college, and girls that would then want to learn computers are at a disadvantage to guys that have been hacking for years because they didn't bother taking the time to be popular. They're mentally capable but years behind in practice, and it makes them feel inadequate, so they choose a different major. Note: this also works for guys that didn't hack in high school - they're at a disadvantage to those who did, no matter how smart they are. Most people don't like discouragement so they go somewhere where that makes them feel better.

Thoughts?
You mentioned intuition - so what is it anyway?

There is an interesting mechanism in our minds: when we find an algorithm for doing something and we do it often, the brain decides to hide it under the water - sort of passes it over to our subconsciousness. After that the algorithm or whatever calculations are performed there, in fact much, much faster - sometimes in orders of magnitude. This starts with walking, our first steps, and then continues on in whatever we do in our lives. Chess is no exception. Good hackers can intuitively - and very quickly - find bugs, etc. That's just subconsciousness with its high-performance computer. The only thing subc. needs from us is a well worked out algorithm - that's all.

So our intuitive moves or evaluations are just a result of a faster tree search which is performed "under the water". We are not aware of it - it's a subconscious process.

As for spatial vision of the board - of course we see the board and the position in its entirety, it's a spatial game after all. But whether this vision is of any help in deciding the next move in chess is a big question for me. Or show me exactly how that works. We sometimes can visually evaluate the position, but how accurate is that assessment? Something tells me that purely visual evaluations can be (and often are) wrong.

And yes, AI's heuristic is terrible, but the thing is, AIs (and why on Earth we call them AI?) do heuristic evaluation to cut branches in the tree search. If thorough search would be feasible, AIs would be able to give very precise evaluations, obviously. Meanwhile, we pre-program our AIs with best chess heuristics known today - something that can be beaten easily by genuises like Bobby Fischer.
Wow. Thanks PG, it's good to hear your response on this matter. I'll send this response off to my friend and tell him to stop telling ppl this and/or tell Brad Feld to as well.
Finally. A list-serv, I.ve been on will definitely use this.
I was obviously joking about Boulder being behind Sheboygan, but it's so distantly behind SV that it's essentially worthless.

Also, that 80% stat means nothing. Who funded them, for how much, with what terms. Getting some funding is trivial, getting good funding is not.
I have AT&T expressly because, of the two options in my town, it's the one that doesn't transfer-limit cap. The other option is the local cable company, which offers higher speeds, but caps monthly and bills for overages. I seriously hope AT&T doesn't follow suit.

I have no problem with a broadband provider capping speeds and managing their network. The problem I have with monthly transfer limits is that it is hard to keep track of your own usage. I would rather be throttled down than billed more, because being billed for overage is neither transparent nor easy to control. You implement a system like this, and suddenly all those open wireless networks in my apartment complex become interesting points of extra free bandwidth for me. Would I be so nefarious? Maybe not, but a lot of people would, and there is no way you can prove to the cable company that it wasn't you. Capping speed is transparent. I know that the speed of my connection is limited to 6mbps. I know how much I am paying for it. If that is overloading your network, add more capacity or lower the speed caps or hell, shape the traffic, but don't just charge extra for it and assume it'll work itself out.

So anyway, maybe these companies can milk it in the short term, but I have faith that in the long term, any time a company tries to hold back progress by abusing it's monopoly, they eventually get smashed.
Youth vs. adults in gadget wars
Philippe Starck: Why design?
Fascinating talk from designer Philippe Starck.

"After there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it. If we take the toothbrush -- I don't think about the toothbrush. I think, "What will be [finger in mouth] the effect of the brush in the mouth?" And to understand what will be the effect of the toothbrush in the mouth, I must imagine: Who owns this mouth? What is the life of the owner of this mouth? In what society this guy live? What civilization creates this society? What animal species creates this civilization? When I arrive --- and I take one minute, I am not so intelligent -- when I arrive at the level of animal species, that becomes real interesting.

Me, I have no power to change anything. But when I come back, I can understand why I shall not do it, because today, it's more positive than "do it," or how I shall do it. But to come back, where I am at the animal species, there is things to see. There is things to see, there is the big challenge. The big challenge in front of us."
The optimal portable Internet resolution: 800x480?
Microsoft to add a 'super standards' mode to IE 8
Is anyone in the loop and testing this feature out?
PG, Are there any plans to do a similar thing with YC News?
Stuffing Six Million Pages Down Google's Throat
Sounds like buzzword bingo:-)
Stealth Job Site NotchUp Makes Companies Pay To Interview You
Traffic from Y Combinator
Best startup I've seen this month.
The 33 Things That Make Us Crazy
Reminds of classic ASP, which could actually run JScript on the client as well as the server. However, eventually, this technique results in a spaghetti of UI, logic and DB code - all in one place. Ideally, these tiers should not be tightly-coupled.
Linux popularity seems to be decreasing
It ain't radical, but it is a step...
What's the point? Subycnews for subhackers?
People might find novel ways of using it once it is available.
maybe something like sub yc's for applications questions, one for jobs, one for bay area, one for boston, etc.
Oh, this is very clever. It's a mozilla-based server-side DOM+Javascript implementation which mediates between a client browser and a backend http server. So you can do DOM manipulation and Javascript processing on the server, the client, or both. It supports connecting to local and remote web services so you can leverage your own backend or an external third-party site. And you can manipulate that DOM before sending the data back to your client! Interesting, very interesting.

It sounds promising as a way to tightly couple your server processing to your client display. Transparently calling between the server and the client is an interesting approach.

My big concern is adding what seems like just another layer in your server stack. Aptana seems to think that Jaxer can replace other server-side technologies like PHP or RoR, but I'm not convinced. I also think that tightly interweaving your server and client could generate some massively ugly code and nearly unmaintainable codebases. Proper separation of concerns could be very tricky.

Now if they'll just get it running on Linux maybe I can check it out.
Also I believe the stat from techcrunch was 80% received either funding, are profitable or received acquisition offers.

Being profitable at such an early stage and if you aren't drawing salary is a bit meaningless. Acquisition offers are almost completely meaningless without an actual acquisition. Also agree with matt, raising $500 from your parents might be "funding"
If we can keep just the UI in the Jaxer<->Browser world with logic and DB elsewhere, then this problem may be alleviated. I think that directly manipulating the DOM on the server, rather than working with raw HTML is the big win. Having the client and the server seeing eye-to-eye on the logical representation of the document being transmitted removes one of the many impedance mismatches in web programming.
Surprise Fed rate cut sparks U.S. dollar sell-off
How much traffic does news.yc have, anyways?
I work with one. The productivity is an arbitrary measure in terms of how much unit tests they write and core functionality they contribute to the project. Architecture/infrastructure has a definite skewed ratio. It's mainly all server-side. I used to work with another who was known for merciless code reviews where developers would be reduced to almost tears. I avoided him. They aren't the most social of animals but I'd hire him for a startup.