skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"act more like an entrepreneur at your current job. Be a maverick. Put in longer hours, give yourself a crash course on your company’s operations and strategic goals and, most important, locate a problem outside your realm of expertise and solve it."

I think this is more reflective of someone looking for growth, than an entrepreneur, and I say that to say this: standing out from the crowd and working like you're worth they money they're paying you will most certainly bring you the kind of attention outstanding entrepreneurs get and you may just get a promotion out of it

However showing the spirit of someone who is supposed to start things should mirror actions that look like you're wanting to start something. Make suggestions, present solutions like the second half of the quote says to, but in addition to this build momentum behind your ideas and show why they matter and how they'll make improvements.
No. Looks like a startup from Seattle:

http://www.picnik.com/app#/home/aboutus
Like drunk dialing, sometimes sending embarassing emails help remind you that you've improved.

When did you reach the tipping point (was it a group or individual decision) with Tipjoy?

The best quote about focus that I've ever heard:
A 100 watt lightbulb can light up a room but that same energy focused in a laser apparatus can cut through steel.
Two common mistakes when using databases
Yahoo has entered the live video streaming space; YouTube will follow.
I use it too, for about 10 years now. I agree with what everyone else is saying--it may not be faster, but it is definitely more comfortable. I use emacs, and I've never found the commands to be a problem.
Is it true he boned Martha Stewart?
Ask YC: Book on Lisp
A long time ago, someone posted here a link to a book on lisp that went out of press and thus was being offered for free as pdf. I downloaded it, but I lost it, and I can't seem to find it again. Could someone please point me to the book again?
I use Dvorak exclusively. I've started using it right when I started touchtyping (I'm 21, I started touchtyping something like a year and a half ago. Previously I was a "fast" hunt-and-pecker, except I didn't really hunt at all).

I got frustrated with touchtyping Qwerty very quickly because... well, it just felt dumb when I tried typing "street" or "states". Why should two such common nouns with common letters be so awfully awkward to type?! And there's the seemingly random arrangement of keys, which incidentally is ACTUALLY random...

Anyway, I found out about Dvorak, read about it, started using it and never looked back ever since.

You say you started using a Dvorak keyboard... do you mean a Dvorak keyboard layout?... Typing Dvorak on a Qwerty keyboard is not a problem at all. In fact, I'd say it's beneficial. When I started touchtyping Qwerty, I kept looking down at the keys out of habit and lack of confidence, and that impeded my speed and learning. Whereas when I started touchtyping Dvorak, I couldn't "cheat" by looking at the keys anymore. For the first 2 days, I printed the Dvorak layout on a sheet of paper that I put beside my keyboard, and I'd refer to that only when I didn't know a key. After that, I scrapped the paper and was typing very slow but autonomously. My habit of looking at the keyboard died a quick death because my keyboard had Qwerty printed on it and thus was useless!

I don't see why you say Emacs is a nightmare in Dvorak, because the key combinations are based on mnemonics, not physical key location. Ever tried Dvorak in vi? Now THAT is a problem.

I bought a TypeMatrix 2030 and with some remappings, it's a charm to use Emacs with it. In particular, I can press CTRL with my left thumb, so if for example I have to type C-x C-f (qwerty equivalent: C-b C-y), I don't have to switch between the right and left CTRL keys, I just press and hold CTRL and then type x and f. By the way, I bought a Qwerty-labelled version so I wouldn't be tempted to start looking at the keys again :) If they had a blank version I would have bought that.

You ask for a Dvorak-friendly editor, but I think you should be looking for a keyboard-layout-agnostic editor. In my experience, Emacs is one such editor.
Dinner Tonight for FOWA Miami
Anyone here at FOWA, if you want a few developers and myself are meeting for dinner at Sushi Samba on Lincoln Road:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&q=sushi+samba,&near=Miami,+FL&fb=1&cid=0,0,17310792519516735062&ll=25.792608,-80.134299&spn=0.008539,0.017338&z=16&iwloc=A

Time: 7:30
What I meant was that it takes a certain skill to translate a business problem into something a computer can understand. You need to think extremely logical, rigorous. You have to consider everything that may go wrong.

That takes natural aptitude and experience. A minority of non-programmers have the aptitude, and extremely few have the experience.

That's what makes programming hard. And that's why this article is bullshit.

Programming is not hard because of esoteric programming languages. It's just hard, period.
See, this is why I love this place so much. I'd never heard of Church Numerals before. From the wikipedia entry:

>Many students of mathematics are familiar with Gödel numbering members of a set; Church encoding is an equivalent operation defined on lambda abstractions instead of natural numbers.

Utter clarity. Or, at least as clear as the python code the original post points to :-)
Portability shouldn't be under-estimated. An ex-colleague had the opportunity to re-write a bad implementation. After gathering the requirements, he had a very nice specification which was portable, lightweight and extensible. Then management wanted to add direct SQL access because old systems had this feature and that made them fast. My ex-colleague didn't want to budge on this issue because the direct access was the reason for the re-write. Management wouldn't budge on the issue either because they were former techies and that's how stuff was implemented on less powerful hardware. Anyhow, the fellow got frustrated and quit. That's how he became an ex-colleague.
Actually, a lot of teachers / professors are really trying to make their curricula more effective / relevant. A mentioned before, it's no longer a matter of just having a program that work and convincing teachers to use it. Not only do you have to get involved with the DoE, but now you also have to get Regents' Boards, accreditation organizations, and other governing bodies on board.
Ask YC: Sex and founding a startup
I'm thinking of founding a startup soon, and my hacker girlfriend would be an excellent addition to the coding team. In your experience, have you found you have any sex while founding a startup, and if so, do you wish you would have? As in, would it be more beneficial to spend that time coding, or relaxing with sex? For example, would once or twice a week be enough to relieve the stress in extreme scenarios? I ask because the general picture is that you spend 19 hours coding, a little eating, and the rest sleeping; but what if a female is in that picture?
I posted three weeks ago about another start-up doing this already ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112421 ) and it got no response.
This sounds like exactly why this could be a great tool.

Programmers work faster when their edit-compile-run loop is shorter. Businesses generate applications faster when the spec-implement-try loop is shorter. If they can remove the programmer from the loop, and force the manager to put his spec straight into the computer (which will promptly show him what's missing and what's contradictory and what makes no sense), that sounds pretty cool to me.

It's true that business users don't know what they want. (We programmers don't know what we want, either; this is why we have REPLs and partial compilation and fast workstations.) Simonyi is not assuming business users will suddenly gain foresight. He's assuming they will never have foresight, and designing a system to make the inevitable "oh, that's not right, go try again" part go much faster.
Leaping Years and Drawing Lines
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126382
Ah, you must be one of those visual-learner types!
Good luck to the Xobni guys.
He's a big time marketing guru.
I certainly hadn't associated Bresenham's algorithm with leap year algorithms but it is a good explanation.
Don't listen to the quitters. Your money situation sucks but there are much more limiting, harder to recover from factors that you could be up against, possibly in the near future. Maybe what you should look at now is what you have to lose.

I've worked a day job before which gave me lots of time for a startup but that's not an easy find.
It sure was. Working there was amazing, mainly because of all the cool tech I got to build, but also because it meant that part of my job was using Audiogalaxy. Good times...
Tried Jython?
i do. felt tingling in wrists so decided to switch in may. PC also uses it. It wrecked my brain for a while. i use it with the kinesis keyboard.
"[Lloyd Grove]: What do you think of [Nick Denton]?

[Michael Arrington]: I think he's a total dick."
Unless they keep learning and reading.
This thread seems like it kinda died off. Wanna make a facebook event for this and see if a bunch of people want to come?
"... how do you go about making the transition to full-time entrepreneur ..."

Make stuff [0], release early, get some feedback and sell it.

It doesn't have to be software but it helps. If you make things nobody wants you quickly find you can't sell it. You have to listen & adapt. It's much like a multi-levered machine that only stays afloat if you are constantly adjusting the levers finely adjusting the final product according to users. Input product, make sure people know about it, adjust the 'want' lever. Listen to what the machine is telling you. Adapt.

This process can be observed from renovating houses, art ... from sausages to software. It is no substitute for the real thing. So burn your boats now.

[0] Stuff could be sausages, software etc, but make sure that it's product not service or skills for hire ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html
From the article: "Counterfeit network hardware entering the marketplace raises significant public safety concerns and must be stopped,"

Its not good for the stock price either.
"... I've tried the "just do it" approach in the past and now believe its nonsense. Be calculating and methodical, not impetuous. ..."

Nice description of "project management" which seps boys from the men [0] and makes a difference in completing a project. Does it allow you to be flexible enough to adapt to experiment & change?

[0] Max Levichin talked more about this in StartupSchool '07 - (I think).
if today had been before 1939, yes
Microsoft finds that making Vista less-expensive sells more copies.
"A long time ago, someone posted here a link to a book on lisp that went out of press and thus was being offered for free as pdf. I downloaded it, but I lost it, and I can't seem to find it again. Could someone please point me to the book again? "

Is ISBN "0130305529" it? ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html
Practical Common Lisp? gigamonkeys.com

The Touretzky book is also available as a free PDF. I didn't like it, though.
This is absolutely right. Options are a lottery ticket, and nothing more.

My brother is currently working an awful, low-paying job with a startup because he has visions of a big stock payout dancing in his head. They continue to nurture and encourage those visions, despite having no prospects for an IPO, and only marginally more for a buyout.
"Previously I was a "fast" hunt-and-pecker, except I didn't really hunt at all"

So, does that make you a pecker?

-- sorry, couldn't help myself.
Well, all relaxation is good, to break up the working.

But.. it doesn't neccessarily HAVE to be sex. And indeed, a dependence and/or insistence on regular, almost scheduled sex, could add more stress, especially if an interpersonal relationship becomes a working relationship as well.
For instance, resolving forward references can be difficult. If you scan backwards, they become backward references, which are easy to resolve.

I've never seen the internals of an Algol compiler, but this doesn't make any sense to me.
768 custom processors with hardware garbage collection in a 14U case is quite impressive. I'd given up all hope of seeing a Java mainframe like this 10 years ago.

Regardless, I'd like to see this benchmarked against a PlayStation3 cluster ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125829 ). If you can cope with the 512MB memory then I suspect that the PS3 offers better value for money.
SCHED the Mighty SXSW Scheduler (or The App I Built In 5 Days)
Ask YC: Have you found that brushing your teeth is beneficial to a startup company?
"... Something tells me that this visual shouldn't require additional explanation. :-) ..."

The graph looks screwy. None of this curvy point to point business. It would look more like a spike followed by a

- a) a plateau if you can't scale

- b) a dip when users exercise the back button

- b) an upward curve if your site changes with user demands
The Health 2.0 glut, and how one startup adapts
Personally, I like the post. Sometimes would-be entrepreneurs just need to know if they are going about it the same way others have gone about it to become successful.
Just be thankful you have a girlfriend who's a) supportive of your startup mistress, b) can relate to your night-long bug hunts, and c) you can sleep with.

Sheesh, some people get all the breaks! ;)
I still have my ANSI Common Lisp textbook from my K.R.a.P. class at Georgia Tech - http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html

(maybe I should get it signed, heh)
I was going to print a TShirt which said "I gave VeriSign $199 and all I got was this lousy certificate: [cipherblock]". It looks like I'll have to increase the price.
go out and buy Godel, Escher, Bach: Eternal Golden Braid. Right now!

It will make your life better.
If you're concerned with efficiency, it may be worth your time to hire a whore. That way, you can cut out all of that wasteful foreplay.
Only on Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays.
I'm going to go ahead and call this post a troll. It's a popular technique and is seen on nearly every niche forum at least once.
It's custom, but apparently similar to a few of the popular ones.
I believe California has a specific law that whatever you do for yourself is your own property, in regards to IP. I assume other states have similar laws on the books, but it isn't universal.
I wonder how often Paul Graham gets requests to signs books.
Isn't that what VC money is for?
What about native OS SMP support? Does this architecture easily map and scale linux or freebsd? Seems like the dedicated engines for java should be replaced with TCP offload engines and let the server developers code in whatever language they choose. I don't like it, too tied to a language choice.
Khoros[1], AVS[2] and LinkWinds[3] all do the same sort of thing as OpenDX.

I think these sorts of "boxes and arrows" programming systems suffer from being monolithic environments with idiosyncratic interfaces and little or no support for external software engineering tools. What's worse for them is they generally compete for mindshare with scripting languages or scriptable environments (i.e. things like Mathematica) with larger communities.

I don't think they will ever gain wide acceptance until they allow the same level of reuse as systems based on structured text.

[1] http://www.arsc.edu/support/resources/khoros.html

[2] http://www.avs.com

[3] http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/projects/LinkWinds
You'd get more calories and eat more nutritiously if you ate a diet based around rice or pasta and legumes. Canned vegetables are also quite cheap and will give you a good supply of nutrients and fiber. Get canned tuna and frozen chicken when you can afford it, and always be on the look out for "one day only" instant deals on expiring meat.
You worked there? Thanks, I remember there was one song I was searching for forever and Audiogalaxy was the only engine that found it.
A little googling turns up

ASPN cookbook recipe for a simple SSL server
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/4424...

The MeTooCrypto package from the Chandler project
http://chandlerproject.org/bin/view/Projects/MeTooCrypto
"As opposed to a novelist, who has to write a lot more than a screenwriter."

They are different art forms.

Otherwise we should be looking for greeting card writers.

LOC comparisons for literature is a goofy idea.
The blog post violates its own thesis.
Graphviz - takes in a simple text language, and make diagrams
"To correct this, Caesar decreed that 45 B.C. would be 445 days long."

Caesar got whacked in the Senate the very next year. Things that make you go hmmmm... :)
Dump the girlfriend. You need to devote all of your attention to the startup. This will just be a distraction. If she loves you, she'll still be there after your startup is done.
if !(your comment was code):
print "that was a complaint"
print "by the way this is the new way we apparently have to talk around here"
A hazardous comparison
Ask YC: Has anyone run a website on a home server?
I'm wondering if any hackers here have hosted their own website on their own dedicated server? How was it configured (Linux or Windows server; 4GHz or 8GHz, 1GB ram, etc.)? Did anything disasterous happen, like a /.ing?

I've been interested for a while, as a 'just for fun' project, and I'd like to hear how difficult it is to do. Is it actually a possibility if you run a low/medium traffic website?
A direct link to the podcast transcript: http://talis-podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20080207_TimBL.htm...
Hells yeah, switched a few weeks ago. It's awesome.
I've used it for the last 5 years or so.
I used to have to sleep with the wrist braces - I can't be certain that dvorak has made a big difference but it seems to help
Cool, glad you liked it -- it is always fun to talk to people who used the site.

I was there from 1999 to 2002. It was exceptionally good at finding rare music, at least partially because we never partitioned our network. When you searched, it searched all 1 million+ users that were currently running the Satellite.
Then go and have sex. Starting a company doesn't make you celibate nor does it take away your free will. Why does this question even need to be asked?
I've always meant to pick that up. Looks like google books has a decent online copy:

http://books.google.com/books?id=aFcsnUEewLkC&dq=godel+e...

I had a buddy of mine in highschool who used to bring that book with him every time we took LSD. Of course, he's now got his Ph.D. in physics from Purdue.
Two of the startups acquired by Yahoo in their big Web 2.0-ification wave were 'half-assed' ventures. Upcoming.org was based out of some weekend and late-night hacks, and the founders never quit their day jobs before being acquired.

del.icio.us was a one-man band for years, and even when the site started getting major attention, the founder, Joshua Schachter, was working full time on Wall Street. He says that he found ways to be productive when he had just 15 minutes free. (I recently asked him about that and he said that one of the techniques that helped was shorter methods, nothing longer than a page. That's an interesting real-world metric for how readability = value.)
the user/pass nag thing is kind of annoying but this is a very cool implementation of a quick and simple scheduling app.

in fact, use the berkeley schedule for the data backend and i would switch to using this over the other hacked together schedulers available.

ps. i <3 hypem
Knock off 2 birds with one USB device

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/09/05/solarpowered-and-usb.ht...

Not get back to work (and play)
Internet access in Iraq is a whole different ball of wax.
I don't know where you shop if you get 8GHz processors, but usually your internet connection will be the limiting factor. In my neighborhood LAN we had a 800 Mhz desktop PC with 256MB RAM and 1GB HDD (!). It ran a Half-Life Dedicated Server, email, a small PHP/MySQL website, an IRC bot, Icecast, Squid and a few other things. The only limiting factor was the HDD.
Using it, for two years, with vim. First two weeks were hard.
I think the idea is that whatever you're coding is more interesting than fucking, yes?
Huh, is that true? I've found that if I can't sit and devote at least one hour uninterrupted, I'm totally useless at coding. Perhaps that's a restriction of the language I'm using (Java) and the overall suckiness of the apps I'm working on tho.
Functional Programming Seminar
I was thinking about this earlier today actually, when weighing the options between a VPS or dedicated box. The problem is finding a connection with a decent uplink. The two big ISPs in my area, Comcast and AT&T limit you to 768kbps, and I think both also block port 80.

And as far as I know, getting SDSL or a T1 is gonna set you back a few hundred a month, at which point you're better off getting a dedicated box.
You're talking about On Lisp. http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

Also, keep out an eye for my Lisp textbook in the Fall based on my comic book for New Starch Press! www.lisperati.com

-Conrad Barski
This is brilliant. This will be really handy for me, thanks.
For the most of startups you'll be doing fine with some old computer, which you may not consider for desktop station. Once you'll start feeling that it's not enough anymore, it's time to think why your startup makes so much traffic and can't pay a hundred for buying a dedicated server for itself.
New web sites straddle legality, allowing girls to make big bucks
Troll article. It's hard to believe this comes from the new york times, but it's definitely a troll article.
While back at school, with the 4MB/sec connection:

Ran web app from desktop -> ssh reverse proxied through to cheep $20/month ~unlimited bandwidth server. sshfs on desktop so static files that were uploaded go through the desktop and back up to the shared server so they'd get served quickly to users.

Then I got a faster laptop so I decided to run everything but the database off of that. So it was user->shared host->laptop->desktop with database->laptop and all the way back for every request.

Latency wasn't really that bad as long as the shared host was nearby.
Same here. I hope it works out for them because I don't see too many other options that would generate positive value for a company.

Google could probably implement it on their own (not to trivialize the work, but to point out that Gmail basically has all the information and fast search, they just need to mine the contact network).

The typical Yahoo user probably wouldn't care for it.

That said, it would be an ironic purchase for MS, because from my standpoint they already bought and burried the search tech with LookOut to push their Desktop search client. But that's for MS to justify, not Xobni.
Where is the down arrow???
This is the worst-written Condé Nast article I've seen.
I predicted this thread 189 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317