skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. I am halfway there. One of the things that I am experimenting this time is "self-Publishing". When I wrote my first book about 15 years ago, it was the standard practice. I typed up the manuscripts and worked on the graphics, then made about 10 copies and started shopping for publisher. Once I signed the contract, it was totally out of my hand and I just get a (small) check every year after April 15th. This time I am putting the contents on the web so essentially the book is free. But once I finish, I plan to publish the hard copy on my own (even audio book). It is an experiment and it should be fun. Either way, I get very little money for writing a book (which is not why people write books).

Anyone has any experience with self-publishing that they can share?
Designing for Internet scale
I think this is the one I saw many years ago.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

It isn't exactly as mechanical_fish says, but it's along the same lines, and critically, it tries to explain why scientific contributions fade dramatically after marriage.

Another interesting article, while doesn't count as research, likely because there isn't much of a sample size, and probably wouldn't be one anymore, is the Richard Hamming talk pg posted here: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

After these inputs, a valid hypothesis is "monotony kills creativity." There are studies that show this idea is generally correct; if you ask, the ones I would cite to support this hypothesis would be ones about education, where stimulating environments correlate to achievement. Research in this area should be easy to find.
Zed Shaw: "My Bear Stearns Employees Need A Job"
Take any fish fillet about 1/2-3/4 inch thick. Sprinkle with the seasoning of your choice. Stick it in a toaster over set to 400 degrees. (Put a sheet of tinfoil in the baking tray and you won't even have any cleanup.) It will be done in ten minutes. While you are waiting, boil 1 cup of water. Turn off the heat and throw in 2/3 cup of couscous. This should put you at about the five minute mark. Throw a veggie of your choice in the microwave. Everything will be done, hot, tasty and nutritious at ten minutes. It's pretty foolproof and east-cleanup too. This is pretty much our standard dinner most nights. (And I'm not even doing a startup right now!)
"When they looked at how often ingredients appeared in recipes and ranked them accordingly, they saw a precise mathematical relationship across the board between an ingredient's position on the list and how commonly used it was."

Isn't this a tautology?
As a 9-to-5-er that feels caged, I can attest that I read the 'you' as me (and people like me). It seems like everyone that dislikes working the day job just loved his article, and everyone that likes their day job loves Jeff Atwood's... does it really matter?
Dell a Sub-Prime Money Lender: Who Knew?
#1 Mistake by Coders who Are Doing UI Design
4 months; I had a really good lawyer and qualified for EB1. Another thing to consider is what processing office you will go thru - the line is longer say in San Francisco than it is in Pittsburgh.
Spaghetti is always an option as my cuppoards rarely have anything else, including sauce. Quick and dirty alfredo is always a good substitute. melt a tablespoon of butter in a sauce pan, add flower and stir till it becomes a thickish wad of dough, add milk (At this point it looks real thin but it will thicken) add garlic (salt or powder if you have no cloves), parmigan cheese, and cracked black pepper.
It seems like everyone is focusing on this 'caged lion' thing just like they focused on the lack of unicode support in Arc at first.

You have a decently sized essay and the entire internet goes berserk over one line. Did Jeff actually read the whole thing or did he get to the lion part, have some overly-emotional gut reaction, and turn on the flame machine?

Talk about blowing something out of proportion.

I guess you can consider the article a huge success by the criteria of 'the more people that you piss off, the closer you are to truth' ... http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Hogwash.

The problems lie squarely with the investment banks and firms who (1) failed to perform due diligence in their en mass purchases of morgages and (2) who sorted those mortgages into hi-, medium-, and low-risk "tranches" and then sold each tranch to other firms as Collateralized Mortgage Options (CMOs). The fault also lies with the bond rating firms who gave incorrect ratings to the CMOs so created.

To add to this morass, some investment firms bought up multiple hi-risk CMOs, then combined and re-tranched them into second-tier hi-, medium-, and low-risk tranches! They then somehow got high ratings for these second-tier CMOs from the bond rating firms!

Sure, savings and loans were giving out loans w/o checking properly, but had the investment firms been performing proper due diligence, the savings and loans would not have been able to sell them and the problem would not have occurred.

And since the concentration of leverage occured at the investment bank/firm level and only due to their creation of CMOs and meta-CMOs, they bear the responsibility for this snafu.

Unfortunately, all this makes no difference. The taxpayer will bail out the rich investment banks, the dollar will continue to weaken, our capital will be used up to protect large investment firms and less capital will be available for productive uses by small and large firms.

Wall Street wins and Main Street loses once again.
Why, thank you! :)
You and me are cousins too.
there are often cycles in newstories

the first cycle is characterized as something found, launched, or created. (gold in california)

2nd, is everyone is doing it, most important thing ever and you are missing out (gold rush)

3rd, is more subtle and often missed as a trend, it is characterized by counter thought, (nobody actually got rich in california) (which is mostly true about gold)

you can see it in a lot of places.

1) facebook platform launched

2) land grab in progress

3) nobody makes money on facebook apps

newpapers have to tell a story, and these stories are the kinda angles that work over and over. there are many variations and subtleties and articles which don't fit, but in any big news trend, you can find some articles which fall directly in to those three categories.

this story is category 3, readers! everything is ok! you've been hearing about something, but everything is ok! you aren't missing anything!
Retrieved cat.

Conducted Experiment.

Cat -> Fail.

The cat did however recommend a down-mod on the account of your species-ist comment.
http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/news/magazine/99f/success.asp
Because Reiser is hierarchical, no?
I'm sorry, am I on Reddit?
This, judging from the fact that it's in bold, appears to be his
main gripe:

"The problem with this particular essay is the way Mr. Graham
implies the only path to true happiness as a young programmer
lies in founding a startup."

whereas the essay actually contains the sentence:

"Working for yourself doesn't have to mean starting a startup,
of course.

I mean, how much clearer can I be?

As for this point about "participatory narcissism," you can make
the same attack on practically every nonfiction writer. Every
(good) essayist writes from experience. Most people who have the
freedom to work on what they want, work on things they admire.
Every book on robotics or carpentry or surfing has woven through
it the sinister subtext that robotics or carpentry or surfing is
an admirable activity. But to accuse the writer of "participatory
narcissism" is to confuse cause and effect: the writer of the
robotics book isn't claiming robotics is admirable to make himself
look good; it was because he thought it was admirable that he chose
to work on it.

A claim you could make with equal justification about any essayist
isn't much of a claim. But people will still believe it means
something if they disagree with him.
> 10 gallons of water an hour on 500 watts of electricity.

Maybe this has changed, but it's perhaps silly to talk about bringing clean water to a lot of dirt poor communities with this kind of energy requirement. People barely have enough fuel to cook with. They can't feed a generator and they can't order parts for it either.
Well here is evolution making a "mistake":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143251
I've learned a lot (as a coder who sometimes thinks if it is functional that the UI is good enough) from going to CHI (Computer-Human-Interaction) type lectures/events/meetings. It is nice to see what the other side thinks - a valuable perspective. And you may learn a new method to think creatively.

You can find your local CHI chapter here:
http://sigchi.org/local-sigs/
Arc, obviously. Inventing a programming language is like founding a religion. As history bears witness, that's one hell of a challenge.
Cooking eggs can take 10 minutes (start from cold water, then at 10 minutes the yolk is semi-solid), but to do it properly you need 20 minutes to half an hour at least.

At 62 - 68 degrees centrigrade, that is.

If the temperature gets any higher, the egg white gets rubbery and the yolk grainy. We think of this as the way eggs should be, but if you've ever tasted a properly cooked egg you'll know those are much, much better.

(oh, and salmonella bacteria die at around 60 degrees so that's not something you should be worried about with this technique).
Not bad. Now do it without the letter "e" and I'll really be impressed.

http://www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/
Somewhat off topic (this is certainly not cooking in ten minutes or less) but the English chef Heston Blumenthal is something of a cooking hacker whose work some of you might find interesting.

There's a whole bunch of his writings here:

http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search?search_target=%2Fsearch&...

(look for the links called "The appliance of science" - that's his weekly column)
If you aren't counting calories I have the best way to eat tacos.

1 bag of doritos.
1 bag Monterey jack cheese shredded
1 bottle pace chunky salsa
1 lb ground beef
1 pack mcKormic taco seasoning
1 bag lettuce shreds

*optional sour cream, green onions chiles, avacado, etc.

Brown ground beef. usually takes 4-5 mins for a lb. Mix in taco seasoning. mix all ingredients in a big bowl. Engorge yourself with delicious carbs.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/19450818/wells

Actually, I think writers in general just like to pretend that writers are more powerful than they are. Even The Making of the Atomic Bomb played up the weapon's literary precedent.
It's the same with schools. My kids are at an eco school with a maximum of 12 in a class, and 3 classes in the whole school, by choice. They will not 'expand' but encourage other schools to start up and follow their model. It is all about sustainability. Like the Transition Towns initiative - small communities leading the way, because governments don't initiate. They don't lead.
http://www.transitiontowns.org/
rice, ketchup, pickles and onions. are you pregnant? My wife eats like this. Hahaha.
way to disrupt HN's anti-Microsoft agenda, Seth ;)
This chart gets passed around a lot, and it doesn't really pass the smell test. Even in the typically knuckle-headed majors like Education and Sociology, I just can't see an appreciable number of professors with sub-100 IQs.
Personally I think that usability is the most important factor in a webapp. I bet that most of the people here could code up the logic of a dating site, wikipedia or del.icio.us in a week or two - many webapps are pretty simple to code.

The difference between a good and a bad webapp lies in the interface. And interestingly the simpler it looks the harder it probably was to make.
Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers Pull Out
Surrounding yourself with younger, less experienced people (albeit very smart ones) who owe you is not an environment I would think of as one likely to create a lot of pushback.

Oh yeah? It does when they're the type of people who want to start startups.

The main thing we look for in founders is spirit and determination. We have to, because that's what makes startups succeed. And dealing with the group of people this produces is not like being a professor, believe me.
Five problems every OS should fix
Five relatively easy-to-fix problems that every OS seems to have, and that seem unlikely to be fixed any time soon. In fact, it doesn't seem that the developers even care about these problems, yet they all are real drags on usability.
3 people who have had disrupted the normal thinking track: DHH, PH, and AS, and many people hate them for it - defending their hatred or anger by accusing these people of arrogance or narcissism. think about it.
please control the urge to post political stuff, we don't want this to go the reddit way.
I agree completely about bailouts, they are ridiculous. Bear should be allowed to fail. That will teach the IB's to do a better job next time.

But I disagree with you that IB's didn't do their due diligence. Measuring the quality of individual mortgages isn't their job. The IB's job here is to build securities out of individual mortgages, given accurate knowledge of the mortgages from the ratings agencies and local banks.

It's a lot like trading commodities. A market maker in commodities doesn't need to know what a grade A cow looks like or how a cattle auction works. His job is to trust the cow raters to do their job while he packages sets of cows into financial futures. If a rancher is colluding with a cattle appraiser to pretend that 1000 mad cows are Grade A beef, it's not the fault of commodities traders (although commodities traders will be hurt).

The flaw with the mortgage market was not happening on the IB's end. The individual mortgages were not of the quality the local banks promised for various reasons you've outlined. They were then packaged into securities which were suitable only for higher quality loans. Those securities are failing now, and the market has become a lemon market (which killed liquidity) and caused all sorts of other problems.

Investment banks: "Given loans of known quality, we can package them into bond-like securities."

Local banks: "Pray, Mr. Investment Banker. If you put into the package loans of the wrong quality, will the right security come out?"

(With apologies to charles babbage)
My favorite parts...

---

"even caught a hacker or two"

With what? A butterfly net?

---

"Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen."

Sadly this part could have been written in 2008.

---

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't ..."

My how things have changed.

---

I wonder what articles we will be linking to 13 years from now. Anyone know of good present-day naysayers that we can keep track of and make fun of in a decade or so?
You've written a recursive macro. That is usually a mistake. Here (unless you mean the first argument always to be a constant) you're recursing based on values that won't be available till runtime, yet the macro could be expanded at compile-time.

You should just expand into a do.
If your GPS device told you to drive off a cliff, would you do it?
This is so wrong on every level.

He clearly doesn't understand what really happens on radio. New musicians essentially pay to be on it, indirectly of course (to circumvent anti-payola laws).

On Bebo/Myspace they get to promote themselves for free. It's a symbiotic relationship between artist and social networks.
I think the essay is much more about telling people they should seek freedom than anything else. Of course, the path Graham knows is through opening a startup, so that's what he advises you to do. It doesn't mean there aren't other means to be free, but working for big companies doesn't look like one. Is the author of coding horror saying it is? I don't even think so, actually.

Jeff Atwood is just ranting on Graham, but he's not telling much about Graham's article. He just picks on things that can be seen as polemic or too extreme and trolls away. When you read someone's opinion you have to realise that he's talking about their experience. If Graham had said the only path to true happiness is through a startup -- and he didn't say it like that -- you must acknowledge that he's just saying it's the only path he knows. It's just an opinion, it's not absolut truth. People mix those sometimes.

If Jeff wanted to be more helpful he could have told us what paths one has to follow in order to be free. Does he think working for a big company sets you free? Why is he just ranting instead of giving his say on all this?
From personal experience, MS Research (and reportedly, Yahoo Research) is an awesome place to work for researchers; lots of freedom to do what you want and push the boundaries of what's possible. What you learn there is very different from what you learn doing a startup, of course, but the point about lack of creativity or freedom aint valid.

Interestingly, Google research is not very good in this respect due to their focus on products. Restricts creativity; if you really want to do products and be creative, get into a startup instead.
Seeking a Boston YC Co-founder
I'm looking for a co-founder for the upcoming Boston YC (I will be relocating to Boston in a couple months for other reasons). I have two web startup ideas I've been vetting for the past month, and I'm open to discussing yours. See my profile for contact info.
Online 3D games. There's something incredibly satisfying about crafting a living, breathing world one line of code at a time.

I don't think I could be happy working for a games company (I have a few friends who do, and they confirm what I fear - it sucks all the joy out of it, especially when you have to start from the bottom), and if I worked on it on my own it would likely be too ambitious for me to finish in any reasonable amount of time, so I would never expect to pay the bills that way.

It also wouldn't be "things people want", but just "things I want".
the revolting sight...

And what a revolting sight it is. I recall my job fresh out of school in an R&D department. I was stunned at how the technical people stood at attention and jumped as high as the managment told them. This management was clearly, at least from a techical standpoint, far less intelligent. The engineers there actually marvelled and respected people who could barely figure out which buttons to push on a product they designed.

One of the most bizarre observations of my life.
Microsoft to Offer All-Cash for Yahoo?
Well, all I can go by is what I see in the relationship from outside, and occasional comments and fragments of things, like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41257

which perhaps paint an incorrect picture.

Point being, though, is that the group you're dealing with sounds like a great deal of fun, and doubtless provides a lot of intellectual stimulation - no question about that. What they probably don't have, though, is a very dissimilar view of certain things to your own - you hand pick them after all (and vice versa). Also, in the end, to be blunt, you're the guy giving them money, and even if you try to get around it, that conditions relationships between people.

It's sort of like this site - most of us found it and got into it because we like your writing and attitude, so it's not likely to be a source of wildly different opinions either. That's not entirely a bad thing - keeping points of contention to a minimum is probably a good way of keeping the community from imploding.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be a critique of YC in any way, just my hope that you find ways to look at the world from a completely different point of view from time to time. Thinking about my own sources of information, it's probably something that everyone needs to try and do more often.
My thought on this is that there is either something wrong with this chart or the IQ test that produced it. It is possible that in a perfect world where everyone had an equal opportunity, that the high IQ ppl would tend toward high education and science in particular, and that low IQ ppl would tend toward manual labor...
But I doubt it, and we don't even live in that would.

This chart is measuring something other than IQ, perhaps the amount of education in math...

It reminds me in an uneasy way of A Brave New World where ppl intended for menial work had their IQ lowered before birth by oxygen deprivation...
>"even caught a hacker or two"
> With what? A butterfly net?

I also thought that bit was a little odd at first. But, as davidw points out above, this is the author of The Cuckoo's Nest in which he does, in fact, catch a hacker (or cracker if you prefer)?
"this is so wrong on every level"

It is not really as simple as you make it seem.

he gave his argument point by point -- if you're going to make a counter argument to his whole piece, why not do a full counter-point?

"On Bebo/Myspace they get to promote themselves for free. It's a symbiotic relationship between artist and social networks."

And the big-name artists who are on the billboard 100 (and have millions of plays on their myspace pages) aren't getting royalties while myspace is making money on advertising -- that's the point he's making.

The value of Myspace is largely staked on the big-ticket musicians it has, while other sites like amiestreet do more to promote indie artists.

It's no different than Youtube making a deal with the major record labels to bankroll on all the unsigned musicians doing covers.

There's a balance to be sought here, and this guy seems to be an established musician, and for them, they are often getting the short side of the stick (even when the labels are suing web companies)
Superbull Sees Dow 20,000 Coming
I have the same impression about ms research which is what prompted the post. I have no idea what financial compensation is at either place, but there is little, if any, financial risk and everyone I've talked to at ms research loves what they do. These comments are coming from the furthest thing from corporate drones or intellectual lightweights. They have a substantial amount of intellectual freedom and I'm assuming a decent lifestyle. So why is startup life so _obviously_ better than this?
I read the book about a year ago and con recommend it. It is an interesting insight into how a macho engineering organization works and operate. The Jobs incident is somewhat misleading. The organization and Kamen himself wanted as little interface with the financial backers as they could get away with.
An op-ed column is not the place to get into policy wonkery.
What I would tell Siberians is to wear coats because humans had not evolved to live there.
the 'more' link invokes a closure stored in a hashtable. deciding how to expire these cosures and continuations is probably the hardest problem in web development today. most often we just wind up using an LRU, which would mean that your 'more' link would go stale once some number of other such links got generated in the same webserver.
Maybe a lot of those programmers don't even realize how stressed out they are---they've probably been acclimated to it over a long enough period of time to not really notice.
We actively encourage startups to stay as small as possible for as long as possible. And like all investors we would prefer the startups we fund to go public rather than get acquired. I bet if you outsourced all the inessential stuff you could grow a company to that stage without needing more than 150 people, which you could do with only two layers.
You might want to tell us more about yourself. A startup isn't the same thing as a marriage, but they do have a few things in common, and one of them is that it's more likely to work out if you know your partner.