skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Instead of focusing on cutting interest rates and pumping liquidity into the banking system, he says, the Fed should be forcing banks to disclose and realize losses and raise capital."

This is so true - the Japanese mortgage downfall of the 1990's was only made worse by the fact that the banks did not purge their loses and move on (with the government only making matters worse by helping them hide it), effectively prolonging their recession.

Right now the Fed is pumping so much money into the economy, and a lot of it is, ironically, going into commodities due to fears of inflation (oil, metals, etc) driving up prices even more - shooting ourselves in the foot, effectively.

I'm really curious about the impact on software/technology though still - does anyone see this seeping into their various sectors of technology they work/have companies in? There was a WSJ article talking about how programmers were doing an effective "flight to quality" in terms of jobs (moving to big companies in preparation of a recession). Any more observations?
you mean push out Vista as an upgrade, oh wait never mind :-)
To sum it up - i want to know where and how to find these hackers?
Of course it isn't. What a silly idea. Enhancement is always good, that's why it's enhancement and not harm.
Well then electrical engineering and even some projects in mechanical engineering are not engineering either....

In nearly all forms of engineering, it can be far to tell exactly how close to completion you are. And there are no qualitative aspects of other forms of engineering?
Don't use hashes for primary keys because they are verbose and they cause a huge amount of cache churn ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122869 ). Use a composite key instead.
The problem with his argument is that other forms of engineering are not necessarily "engineerized" any more than with software.
I signed up to try it out.

I actually think the convenience could be a huge win. I already see lots of potential in the UI. Some thoughts I had:

1. Bridging the gap between digital and analog is not a bad strategy if you can bring all the advantages of digital along with it.

2. Already their UI lets you queue up letters to send, schedule letters for particular days, save drafts, etc.

3. It could track more metadata in the digital world, i.e. all sorts of other mechanisms like custom fields/notes to help you track these against customer problem numbers or account numbers at a business. Automatically support using a Google Doc, etc.

4. I suppose an API to tie it into your own applications could be pretty nifty. Especially if they get to the point of allowing businesses to get more bulk mailing options that are much cheaper than $1 a letter.

5. As I mentioned earlier, add support for a community of user-generated content of greeting cards that can be voted/upvoted,

6. Add support for viral/political/consumerist letter templates that can be shared/embedded. Provide a link and let people pile onto a letter-writing campaign. It might look like astroturf, but could allow people to at least scribble an electronic signature.

Lots of potential here. Just need to follow through. I'll see how my first letter looks.
I'll make sure he sees this. I just sent him the link.
Web developers, Web developers, Web developers (Steve Ballmer)
The indian post office has been doing this for over 10 years.
'Odd Couple' keynote engages audience at MIX08
Amazon: What are you hiding? (Kindle a failure?)
How to make your startup successful
Dude your profile is interesting. I have similar interests and similar singularitarian ideas :-)
Let them define part of the problem.
From first principles, actively looking for such a person is IMO a major mistake. You are essentially looking for someone to invest in your company, but to buy their shares with labor instead of cash. So you need someone who is 1) financially able to make such an investment, 2) a savvy enough investor to be able to assess whether or not your company is worth investing in (or foolish enough to make the investment without due diligence) and 3) able (and willing) to program. Such a mix of skills and financial means is very rare.

This is not to say that if you should happen to be lucky enough to find such a person that you should not hire them, but actively looking is not wise. Division of labor is a very powerful tool and should not be discarded lightly. You're much more likely to succeed if you get investors to invest and hackers to hack and not try to fram these two disparate skills into one brain.

IMHO, YMMV, etc.
Academia is different from sports. Despite what many people may think, academia and science are not a game. Your goal is not to be better than someone, but to do good research. If you feel the need to take drugs and you're willing to take its risks, then by all means do. It's not cheating.

Now, requiring people to use substances that might be bad for them is not a good idea. People have to have the freedom to choose if they will take those substances or not. Neither should be mandatory. The reason for this is that we want people to be able to make their own decisions and do whatever pleases them the most; may it be using drugs or not.
Start going to meetups (meetup.com) for web/hacker/entreprenurial topics in cities with hacker communities.
I would find a mailing list at a technical university. Try the LUG lists or the compsci lists. If your idea sounds like it will make some money, someone will probably take it. Emphasize that it will look good on a resume too.

You're more likely to find someone to do it if they are still in school and don't need the money yet.
This site is not a bad one to pitch to hackers, being Hackers News. There are also a few other sites:

http://www.partnerup.com/

http://programmermeetdesigner.com/

In a way it depends on how discrete you wish to be about your idea.

Thinking outside of the box. One kinda interesting place to find up-and-coming young hackers is to check gaming coding sites. New gaming mods and game scripting communities are often a doorway into for-profit hacking. Quality may be hard to control for, but most of the potential candidates there don't yet know they have marketable skills.

For example:

* Eventscripts/Python scripters: http://forums.mattie.info/cs/forums/viewforum.php?f=90)

* C/Pawn developers: http://sourcemod.net

There's also major development conferences like PyCon (next week in Chicago):

http://us.pycon.org/2008/about/
C'mon. Where else can you get your message enveloped in "Jakob Nielsen Green"? That's startup gold, IMO.
Amazon S3?
I don't think you'll be very successful recruiting from universities for this sort of thing. A student with debt is not going to want to work without salary, unless your startup has amazing potential or you have an excellent reputation. In either case, you'd probably have funding to pay them anyways.
well thats what founders do .. work for shares. they dont get paid in the beginning when they start in a garage. we are looking for founder who is interested in such propositions and risk.
> where and how to find them?

Linux User Groups ( http://www.linux.org/groups/ , http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/Operati... ), Perl User Groups ( http://www.pm.org/ ), 2600 Meetings ( http://www.2600.org/meetings/ ), DorkBot ( http://www.dorkbot.org/ ) and amateur radio meetings.
J.S. Bach. Accept no substitutes for true greatness.
Earthclassmail.com does the reverse - it's for people living abroad who still need access to postal mail

"Thousands of customers in over 130 countries are using our service right now. They have their postal mail forwarded to one of our processing facilities, instead of to an office or home address, and then they can view scanned images of each envelope’s exterior (via a secure online account) and direct us to..[open it+scan the contents/discard it/shred it]"
Here's another sneaky trick I just thought of.

Set up a Google Blog Alert (or other blog search alert service) for the technologies you think make a good hacker. For example "python", "lisp" or "arc".

As you get new personal blog alerts on those topics, you probably could get a decent sampling of hackers talking about technology. Approaching them individually on their blogs might be something that could work out for you.
thanks a lot ... how do i contact you? email?
The non-parallelism in the name of this service is really a problem as far as brand and influence goes, but I'm interested to see if the service is actually useful.
thanks again...
It's worth noting that caffeine, in proper doses, enhances both physical and mental performance. So be careful of the slippery slope: slide far enough down and you'll kill your cappuccino.
"Imagine if the guys at Google just sat around waiting for their server to kick the bucket before they fixed it; they'd be out of business."

Funny that you said that. Somebody correct me if I'm mistaken but I've understood that's exactly what they do at Google. Due to their scaling, self-replicating, and dynamic architecture, they figured out that it's cheaper to just let the boxes fry and replace them rather than trying to maintain and service their gazillion servers. I don't know how many boxes they replace each day but I'd guess it's routine.
I find the advice "make something people want" is not catch-all.

How are you separating want and need?

People want McDonalds or Starbucks. But if they live in a cold state they NEED heat, which will require natural gas, electricity, coal/wood stove, or solar power -- or some other type of fuel (i.e. hydrogen, nuclear, etc.)

Maybe because everybody is only thinking technology applications, it makes sense, but I think the focus on "what people want" is a little misleading.

Think of the products you use and consume daily, and you will see there is a certain quantity that you need but may not want or like, and a certain quantity that you want, but may not need or be able to afford.

Creating something people want, although great advice, is not the end-all and be-all of startup advice.

Ditto for never giving up.

Read this: http://www.theintellectualviewpoint.com/reading/thecommonden...

Sometimes, it's not just never giving up, but it's also doing the RIGHT things.
Why don't you tell us more about what you're working on? I'd think that this would be a pretty good place to find a hacker.
One danger about "eating your own dog food" is that your entire company can get blind to the faults they forced themselves to overcome/stomach initially.

"Eating your own dog food" gets you to find major flaws that get it working for yourself, but once it is "working for you" (even if that took a lot of workarounds and sacrifices) you've become accustomed to it "not being as bad as it was".

Working at a major MS partner and seeing Longhorn alphas/CTPs/betas/etc, I got a sense that they got too much into "this is acceptable" mindset while others were screaming "don't ship, don't go, ouch, danger".

This doesn't imply that eating your own dog food is bad. But perhaps you should always be aware that you can fry your taste buds on bad dog food.

I think it might be better to swap eating your competitor's dogfood and your own every other month or so to keep it fresh.
this reminds me of what happened with the Xbox 360... if they only spent a little more time and money with quality upfront, then MS wouldn't have had to spend an estimated 1 billion dollars fixing it...

a 33% failure rate in an industry where 3% is the norm is just ridiculous - especially for something that costs people 350 - 450. (quality has recently been improved so that 360s only have a 10% failure rate; it's still over 3x the norm)

Sadly, I'm one of the morons that bought one, with wishful thinking that if MS controled both the software and hardware like Apple things would be better...
why did you find it inconsequential ?
Hrm. That's a good point.

I have no idea what Stage6 offered, but I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't be able to get (more) funding if they had passionate users and dramatic growth.

Making money is, of course, another can of worms. I could start a business of sending everyone $100 (for free) and I'd see a lot of love and growth. Maybe that's what Stage6 did? If they can't make the argument that scale can get their total cost down enough that $2.50 CPM could support it, then they are "buying love", no?
The hour long lecture at CMU is available at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=362421849901825950&#...
If I'd never used Linux I wouldn't know as much as I so know about OS's, if I'd used a Mac all these years I'd probably know naught (or a lot less). But, that's part of the value of using a Mac, you don't need to know about the OS which is probably a good point for non-techie or non-geekie users.

I don't have a Mac but do think they're cool, hardware that works, OS that works, but I'd be concerned about the lock-in that comes from using proprietary software that comes with it; such as managing my 12GB photograph collection.
Microsoft's Vista : Software = White Star Line's Titanic : Transportation
How to comment your code better
"Commenting your code is like cleaning your bathroom. You never want to do it, but it really does create a more pleasant experience for you and your guests... "
I suggest you get out and talk to friends and their friends at your school, about the problems in their fields, that you might be able to help with. They might not identify their problem as needing ML, but you can connect those dots yourself.

I think your chance of success is much higher if you work directly with someone who knows the problem domain in depth. Cross-domain work is where its at.
Reminds that marijuana is classified as a performance-enhancing drug by many national (NBA) and multi-national sport governing boards
I've played around with Top Coder. Good scores mean you know your algorithms very well, and are really fluent with your language of choice.

That said, I'd be just as inclined to hire someone who had an impressive side-project or two on their website.
Yes, arrogance is subjective. I'm not contesting that.

Successful douchebags (by whoever's standards) are still douchebags.
I've had good experience with Panther Express: http://pantherexpress.com/
What value do you add to the relationship? Why would a hacker want to work with you? If your business plan involves extensive sales and marketing from an early stage, non-hackers might be able to add some value (you need someone to place all those Apple II's at the computer shops).

Remember that an idea is worth nothing. A funded idea is worth something, but it doesn't sound like you have funding since you're asking someone to work for free.

Most of the non-hacker founders that I heard of were personal friends of the hackers involved. It's hard to convince a hacker to take a chance on you otherwise.

"Great opportunity to work for free!" is not a good value proposition.
The entrepreneur in me say, no, no, no, there has to be the perfect gem that fits this profile.

But the "experienced" entrepreneur in me say this is totally right.

FOUNDERS are founders and are with the idea from the start to the end. Founders may be entrepreneurs, hackers, painters, lawyers, etc... But once the company has started, the idea is theirs. Any further development on it from outsiders is only of value to them once there is a semi immediate upside.

No One I have meet is willing to invest in someone else's Idea, until they know the money is there.

I ALSO recommend that you do not pay other people full time until you are paying your own rent with the business. Paid employees work 9-5 for a paycheck, not to save your business. I was burned on this before.

AND consultants work only the hours you pay them, unless you can get them to agree to a project fee, at which point the project may never get done.
some guy has a misconceived opinion about steve jobs' arrogance? so what? that isn't going to hurt anyone, or mess up anything important.
I have tried unsuccessfully several times.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132532
Interesting...and kind of scary. I think I'll keep relying on my parents for a while yet:-)
How about cost/speed of delivery? What if you live in India, and you want to send a b-day card to your cousin out in the States? Instead of $.42 or whatever, you have to pay and wait for international travel.
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig hates corruption
Someone who doesn't take a salary for six months doesn't get "generous stock options". They get a founders stake. You're going to fail.
font-family: "lucida grande", "lucida sans", verdana, tahoma, arial, sans-serif;

Bad call on the font choice...

It's sad that the first thing I notice when visiting websites nowadays is the usability/design of it
I meet half of my current core team, buy not building a startup, but by building my local tech community.

I started a casual think tank, Fireseedgroup.net to help focus the community on tech related projects. When barcamps started up, well the Fireseedgroup was there to throw one in Milwaukee. I helped get other communities going. Now we have a lot of interesting things going on.

MilwaukeeDevHouse is next weekend, it starts on friday, and its a code party. We have also thought about throwing hackerweekends, and startupweekends. We have a great place to use, bucketworks.org for these events in exchange for helping others with their technology needs.

Through the Fireseedgroup name I am always trying to raise money for incubator projects like yCombinator, we would call ours (startupMilwaukee, or M7combinator); and other systems of change. One platform i like is called prize economics. In this system we would use prize money awarded to a themed challenge, like darpa, and the xprize foundation have done.

An example is when Milwaukee was trying to get muni-wifi setup, i proposed an option to award a prize for the best ubiquitous web application. I felt that if the prize was $250k or more that hackers would flock to MKE to compete. Have been able to talk to a number of people in MKE about my ideas and have meet with the visitors bureau, the mayor and other law makers. In many cases they get excited but it doesn't go much further. I however get on their call list for ideas and technology. I puts me in an expert position, not from success, but from effort, and powerful people always need someone they can turn to, kinda, like you are looking now. Those network connections are well worth the effort to me to support the community.

I have been able to build bridges to our community to companies like MS, Adobe, Google, Yahoo, and nVidia that were not there before. That is powerful stuff.
to sum it up, create a place for them to have fun, and they will find you.
I offer no judgement, but note that if performance-enhancing drugs become the norm in academia and industry, those who opt not to chemically alter (and perhaps harm) themselves are obviously going to be marginalized.

That's why steroids are a problem in sports. It's not that kids "look up" to Barry Bonds. It's that they're not stupid, and they quickly realize the only way to succeed is to dope.

Staying up all night coding sounds awesome to me. Having 2x focus sounds awesome. When research assures me I'm not going to be clinically depressed for the remainder of my life as a result of medicating, I might even consider taking pills for work. But I'll feel guilty about the future I'm creating for my kids.
Lol, yeah, and say it's a lot more secure.
Ask YC: Entrepreneurship Summer Program?
I'm a 31 year old Internet entrepreneur with two solid profitable successes under my belt and a couple more projects under way. So far at least, my style has been to take no investment, work with a single partner, and build lean operations that need little ongoing maintenance while banging out the cash. Recently I've also started investing in others' startups and/or advising in exchange for equity.

Before I get too deep into the next project I'm looking for some structured professional development. This summer would be a great time for me. I'm looking for a program that lasts a month or two and which will help me (a) strengthen my leadership skills, (b) gain exposure to the wider industry, (c) work with and learn from some great people.

The closest I can find is Stanford's Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship (http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sie/). But the site says you must be a current grad student whereas I finished my PhD in CS a couple of years back. Not to mention that the deadline is tomorrow and the crowd might be too 'green'. Another option is the Mastering Technology Enterprise program at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. But it seems less entrepreneur-focused and, at $40k for 6 weeks, doesn't seem to make sense.

Does anyone know of a program that might be suitable? I'm based outside the US but am more than happy to travel. I guess the Valley would be ideal but I'm open to any other biz/tech hub.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

(Another option would be to help mentor this summer's Y Combinator program, unpaid, but I don't see any openings for that...)
I think it would be nice to have explicit support to mark groups of duplicates as such... When a certain threshold of users agree that they're indeed duplicates, the two or more submissions could be "glued" together so that they always show up in a tight group on the page.

The different comment threads could be merged in a sensible way, possibly by reallocating threads from comment sections with few comments. Any comment sections that have no more comments or never had any would be disabled. This would avoid having an unnecessarily split discussion of the same topic between multiple comment sections.
Good point. Academia is not a zero-sum game.
Dr. Chatterjee: "The way this is likely to be framed is: 'Look, we want smart people to be as productive as possible to make everybody's lives better. We want people performing at the max, and if that means using these medicines, then great, then we should be free to choose what we want as long as we're not harming someone.' I'm not taking that position, but we have this winner-take-all culture and that is the way it is likely to go."

Huh? "Winner-take-all culture"? This seems like a moral issue.

I suspect that a lot of human suffering -- or at least missed potential -- is due to our cognitive biases and other mental shortcomings. I suspect there are many leaders, inventors, and researchers who would improve the human condition far more if they could think faster, remember better, and get tired less. Fighting against a drug that could unleash this potential energy and save huge numbers of lives seems immoral.
I have a Kindle and love it. It took a month to arrive, but works perfectly. I buy everything on the Kindle now, with the exception of technical books. I've lost count of the number of people who have seen me reading it, played with it, and walked away saying they were going to buy one.

Amazon is not hiding a failure--it's a huge success and this marks the turning point for e-books.
check out www.zillow.com
The important part of the Compete score is hidden: demographics. How many boomers use reddit? How many college students read newsweek.com?

I'm amazed it is taking so long for hard news sites to turn into well designed group blogs. You can still have foreign correspondents and investigative journalism. They'll just be treated like really good bloggers.

The high end of blogging has made significant moves towards becoming legitimate media and journalism organizations. Newsweek should meet them in the middle.
Geek Love (NYTimes Gary Gygax obituary)