skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem exists, at least for me. I even see it happening here. Someone posts a link to 5000 word blog entry and then posts a comment about whihc bits are interesting. This might be good improvement on signal to noise ratio.

If they can add more features to this, like pinned comment notes on a web page, they can find a demand from web designers as well.
Huh! Currently I have Programming Collective Intelligence and Art of the start on mine. Just started reading Prog Coll Intell. So far, I am impressed.
Make friends and influence people -- will help you understand why people react as strange as they do.
E-mail inventor: I didn't foresee spam
Ask YC: Can we have a report spam button?
Could we have a report spam button for submitted links?
- Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

- Copywriting (Teach Yourself series), by J. Jonathan Gabay

- The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz
Hear hear. The Notes adoption curve he points to can be explained by other factors -- marketing, bundling, competition (or lack of it), etc.
What it looks like you're trying to do is go beyond market analysis and into industry analysis for your startup. Your market is much broader and includes your industry as well as your consumers and everything that affects both of those.

Probably the best way to get the information you want is to get a job working at one of those places for a few months. You will learn the industry inside and out if you keep yourself open to gathering information.

Another (probably obvious way you've already considered) is to call the companies as a potential customer. Ask them questions about their products/services that you would expect them to answer for a regular customer.

That should be enough to get you started. Good luck!
The Feynman Lectures on Physics

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

A Latin/English dictionary for new company names
Hopefully, I'll be posting a case study from our site within the next couple weeks.
Google could be superseded, says web inventor Tim Berners-Lee
I guess if the rest of the world went broke, it would be bad news for export. Good products, but no buyers. But the exporting country would still have their presumably superior efficiency, so they can't be too bad off.
What economic blogs would you recommend? I only have Greg Mankiw on my list, but I don't read him all the time.
Some plants for better air quality.
EXPLAIN SELECT username FROM users WHERE username = $dc_user

Then look at the output, and either

CREATE INDEX users_username ON users(username)

Or cache the result, or do something else to fix the performance problem...

If you meant "How do you find out it was in the registration check?", that's what the slow query log and query profilers are for...
It really depends what sort of hacker they are. There's a sort of hacker you buy a copy of "Pro JavaScript Techniques" for, a sort you buy the Dragon Book for, and another sort who you give a copy of TAOCP.
[K]now your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your [naive] ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

It's actually very humdrum advice. I remember reading Robert Frost's biography, and when he taught high school he coached the debate club--he told kids that, when they had some important point to make, always attribute their own words it to George Washington or so-and-so, in order to be more persuasive.

It's an annoying fact...anybody could give Feynman's advice and it would be passed over without another thought. But when words get attached to someone in authority, they are suddenly "moving".

Lin Yutang said that it was desirable in China to grow old because there is a basic rule that old people get to speak first. So something quite manifestly bad, aging, is considered good because of a rule of manners. I think that, in general, people want to become famous through science, or art, or basketball, or anything, to ennoble their own words.
Wow, I am surprised #13 is listed as a 1-star problem.

I was told a story about this problem by a professor while in class. Supposedly, Edgser Djisktra couldn't sleep one night due to jet lag. He was currently going through a phase in which was exercising the power of thought, practicing thought-exercises such as these without a pencil and paper. While in bed that night, awake due to jet lag, he solved this problem. The professor told us that none of us were smart enough to solve this problem. Hardly seems worthy of one star. :)
Bob Ippolito: Exploring Erlang [VIDEO]
designing the obvious - a common sense approach to web application design by Robert Hoekman Jr

The New New Thing

Masters of Doom (story of id software, great story)

Smart Start-ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities

steven levy's Hackers and crypto also for the history.
Programmers at Work, by Susan Lammers.

It opened up many many ideas to me, including flying, writing software for people, why simple software is harder to write than complicated software, and gave me some indication of what 'being smart' really means.

I really highly recommend this book.
Recommended:

* Everyware: Dawning of the age of ubiquitous computing

* Never Eat Alone

A few biographies of people you admire too. My favourite is "Buckminster Fuller's Universe".

Has anyone got a recommendation for a good biography on Walt Disney?
Harry Potter, Goosebumps, choose your own adventure stories...

Oh, wait, I have to look like I'm really smart. Um, Knuth.
ok, let's hear your explanation then.
Notes was pretty advanced for its day and big companies bought it because it actually did what it was supposed to do.
To be honest news.yc doesn't need a report spam button, a few editors in different timezones and the problem would be beaten.
Not that typical in a merger, especially a "growth seeking" merger (like what Google does) vs "cost cutting" merger, like what Oracle does.

This is unusual for Google, for sure. What that tells about them (i.e growth expectations etc) is anyone guess ...
Upcoming:

"High Performance MySQL" (O'Reilly) (New Edition)

"Advanced PHP Programming: Developing Large-scale Web Applications With PHP 5" (Developer's Library) by George Schlossnagle

Released:

"Building Scalable Websites" (O'Reilly) by Cal Henderson

"Scalable Internet Architectures" (Developer's Library) by Theo Schlossnagle
yeah I agree I have never seen any spam on here so they must be doing a good job.

Plus whos going to vote for spam?
This is, of course, easier to do when you're adding to an existing production application. You can launch a new startup site with one small feature, you need a compelling package of features. Once you're up then this advice is more useful.

I do like the short iterative feature/flow based approach in general though. It really does help keep you motivated, and it gives you something useful to show your users/clients/etc... on a more regular basis, which in turn gets you access to feedback and usage patterns earlier, etc...
Yes we should. We've never seen spam here so far, but when the sites gets more users, spam will be obvious. That's just my opinion.
A subversive thought: as it becomes cheaper & cheaper to build start-ups, prices would fall too. Granted, start-ups are not interchangeable commodities, but given that so many are being created, that ought to impact pricing (aka valuations). Asymptotically, this could lead to a start-up being valued "at cost" (or below it in a serious downturn).

As I said, just a subversive thought. I am sure it doesn't apply to any of us here ;-)
You're right. I'm infinitely more irritated at the mentality conveyed by Shaw's document, that "security" is a combination of using the most "advanced" crypto constructions and using parsing tools to avoid superficial overflows than I am at you for arguing with people about a post you didn't bother to read.

For that, I apologize.
Getting Things Done, by David Allen

anything by Edward Tufte

The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil

Dip, by Seth Godin
I look forward to all improvements and they should make this a firefox plugin for max adoption and ease of use :)
Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?
I was a 7 out of 10. Unfortunately I'm not up on my foreign serial killers so much.
TED | Nicholas Negroponte: From 1984, 4 predictions about the future (3 of them correct) (video)
We already got spam here. See this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135256
and this
http://3rr0rists.com/.

We need a REPORT-SPAM option.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135252 This is spam.
In general, I don't like this idea, but I just checked the new page and I count no less than 4 submissions that seem strange to me:

1) Free Software Download

2) a dude soliciting help for red5

3 & 4) InkomHolic and 3rrOrists that violate the posting guidelines.
I might email Mike Arrington to see if he wants to contribute some time to flagging the spam.
hack? tsk tsk. if you get anything under 1000, it's probably quicker to subtract multiples of 70 until it gets to 2 digits - you should just memorize all the 2 digits multiples of 5,7,11,13, etc. Seriously, there aren't that many!

for example, here's a quicker way for 1353 than what staticshock posted. 1353 - 1100 = 253. and 253 - 220 = 33. And clearly 11 divides 33, so 11 divides 1353.

modular arithmetic ftw!
Made to Stick

I've won several marketing competitions, an elevator pitch contest, and made countless connections with others, using ideas from this book.
Too often, there's a wall between a company's IT department and everything else.
data transfer rates, processor usage, hardware acceleration

(Market Analysis?) Since you don't seem to have the vocabulary down, I recommend starting with the basics:

http://www.va-interactive.com/inbusiness/editorial/sales/ibt...
Let's see:

Mankiw is ok, even if a bit "snippy" and political at times.

Marginal Revolution

Econlog

Economist's View (Mark Thoma - in Eugene, Oregon:-)

Oxonomics

The Undercover Economist or anything else by Tim Harford is pretty good

The Economist's Free Exchange.
I haven't met someone who doesn't hate it.

I certainly have. And it led me to a little theory: that Lotus Notes' value was in enabling non-programmers to build a certain class of apps. If this is correct, then its value was pretty big (think of spreadsheets). It also explains why programmers hate Lotus Notes so much; systems built this way get messy very quickly (again, think of spreadsheets). But to dismiss the value to users is missing something big and important.

In other words, this dispute about "is Lotus Notes good software or garbage" is beside the point, because it's based on two different definitions of "good software". Software that helps users get things done that they can't easily otherwise do is certainly good by their definition even if it's the greatest garbagey kludge ever known.

(But I never used Lotus Notes, or even, as far as I know, touched a computer that had it installed... this is just based on stuff I've been told.)
MS paper touts Unix in Hotmail's Win2k switch
Neglecting Conceptual Research
Digg Hates Me
woke up this morning to find out Digg had unreasonably blocked me. When I tried login in to my account I got this unexpected message: Digg Hates You.
I'm using Beta 4 on XP. It feels fast, and the memory usage has definitely been improved. I'm not sure how I feel about the new address bar, but I'm going to give it some time.

I've had one crash in 24 hours, and Google Reader didn't work for me until I created a new profile.

If you do have to create a new profile and set everything up again, be sure to exit so everything gets saved. I lost a few minutes of work in that crash.
Inside Wall Street's Black Hole - what if Black Scholes pricing model is wrong?
Secreto Postal
PostSecret en spanol
Ask HN: Consulting on the side
I have a 9-5 job at a large company and intend on keeping it until my student loans are paid off. I know in the future I will gravitate towards joining/starting a startup, however the option of consulting (nights, weekends) is more accommodating to my schedule and lifestyle now.

Does anyone have experience with balancing a 9-5 job and a consulting business on the side? How did you get started? What are some of the pros-cons you experience vs. starting a startup? Any advice, lessons learned, or experiences you can share?
The World Writes
The World Writes is a new community art project created by Ariel Delgado. It gives everyone the opportunity to "write out loud." We invite the whole wide world to participate in this innovating and unique adventure.
i would also disagree. this problem exists, but most people work around it. i often see legal/compliance feedback on customer facing web pages. they'll either copy/paste the text of concern into an email and make comments (which are now out of context design/layout-wise), snap screenshots and draw on them in paint (arts and crafts fun!)... something like this might make more sense in some cases.

it's a way to virtually stand at someone else's monitor and point at stuff.

1. why just highlight? why not a basic set of drawing tools? (solve the screenshot issue. i'd rater go to a url than get a giant html email.) ...hell, animated overlays, watch me gesture with a mouse... getting into screen capture apps, i know.

2. gotta work better in IE. i could see this being popular in a business/corporate setting, but you are largely dealing with IE there.

neat idea.
That's not really very fair. Yes, a lot of advice is pretty "humdrum", but we admire Feynman because of the person he was altogether, not because he rehashes tired old advice. There are plenty of other Nobel Prize-winning scientists and plenty of other wacky characters, but there are really not many people who approached life with zest as Feynman did. Many people will pay lipservice to Feynman's ideas and ideals, but few actually take it to heart and live their lives by it. Our society's screwy ideals have too strong of a hold on us.

You should read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", I [nearly] guarantee that you'll enjoy it.
I figured it out by thinking what would happen if you only had 1 mouse (500 bottles can make it to the party), then looking at the problem again with 2 mice (there's a way to prove that 750 bottles are poison-free using only 2 mice), etc. all the way up to 10 mice.
What the site really needs is a automated moderation challenge, ala Netflix. Export all the submissions, votes, page views, salted hashes of the IP addresses where users created their accounts from, etc. Let us try to generate algorithms that generate the "best" front pages, as measured by the ultimate number of votes and quality comments each article gets.

Would anyone be interested in poking at that problem?
Invaluable tips -- stuff I've never seen in a book, and stuff I absolutely didn't know (or realize, anyway).

I wonder if this guy has considered writing a book about optimizing Rails. I think the Rails world is ready for a book like that.
Good suggestion on acting like a potential customer.

Furthermore, I agree that these questions may be at an "industry analysis" level. As such, I'd advise looking into utilizing http://www.marketresearch.com/ or http://www.gartner.com/.
Perhaps this is heresy, but I think TBL is overrated. What made the initial web work was simplicity and loose coupling. A lot of what the W3C has done since then seems to be adding layers of complexity where simplicity is best.

And the Semantic Web has been talked about _forever_. The money quote in this article, at least for me, is:

"The challenge, experts say, is in finding a way to represent all data so that when it is connected to the web, links to other relevant information can be recognised and established."

Uh huh. I won't be holding my breath.
Maybe just a vote-down button would suffice.
del.icio.us was built over several years with only incremental improvements.

Plus, early adopters are tolerant, and if you choose them right, easy to impress. To quote someone else (maybe pg, i can't remember who right now): "It [your first release] doesn't have to do EVERYTHING, it just has to do SOMETHING". sage advice. If have a good relationship with your beta testers, I'd say release every new feature as you code/test it. Feedback is god's gift to startups.
I like the idea that low voted items naturally become hidden after a while. Maybe rather than a report spam button we could be able to hide links we don't want to see anymore.
I agree it's more relevant once your up and running. But you should also follow it when you're launching.

Anyone remember what facebook's wall was when it launched?? Yep, just a textbox! And facebook had no photo albums or anything like that, just profiles and friends. It was pretty much a couple mySQL tables with some php displaying the data. And people still flocked to it.
When I started consulting I was able to find small "gigs" here and there by tapping my personal network to find out if people I knew (or people they knew) had any projects aligned with my skill-set that needed working on.

I was aslo willing to do a couple of projects in the beginning either for dirt cheap or free just to have a couple of reference customers--I found that trying to get a customer to pay for my service when I had no track record was difficult.

One thing I think I did (I was doing software development) as a consultant was to form an company (C-corp, since I planned--and did--to grow and hire on staff) was get insurance. In 2001, $1M insurance cost about $4K if I recall correctly. That was an added piece of mind to customers.

In terms of time management, you have to be careful. Back then, I didn't have a family, so coding during dinner time or late into the night wasn't an issue. a wife and kid later, that changes. Any consulting I do now is after the little one goes to bed and or on weekends.

Best of luck!
would be useful on a lot of submissions to ynews
Actually, it's not Erlang, but Smalltalk. We don't have to make sure they're unique, that's the whole point. There are far less than 4 billion objects in the system. The changes of a collision are minuscule.
This isn't a flaw in the protocol, but rather the user management features of one particular implementation.
I've rarely found blanket statements like this to be true. The exceptions so frequently outweigh the assertion.
I believe the goal should be NOT to be an outlier.

Get a good sense of how the market would value you, independent of being a founder, and get paid that.

Getting paid too much is just asking to to be singled out to be removed as a "cost saving measure."

Getting paid too little makes everyone value you less. And you're at risk of being viewed as sucker.

I have some strong memories of how annoyed I was at how much money our "new, post-series A management hires" were spending while I was still doubling up in hotel rooms with the other founders.

At least we weren't still sharing beds...
The importance of "stay" is in the context of the acquiring company, not the acquired one.
"Lord of the Rings" and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", because seriously... you need to read something fun every once in a while.
Getting Real (37 Signals)

Programming Ruby (Pragmatic Programmers)

Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)

Javascript: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly)

a good text on database design & normalization, performance issues, and SQL

something to teach *nix basics, which I don't have but could have used
Tight US immigration forces outsourcing: Bill Gates
Why not work on your own stuff on the side, if you eventually want to do a startup, unless you just want the money?
Why be concerned about raising red flags? I don't think I would be. As PG has reminded us, the idea is far less important than its implementation.
Yeah, I could see this being useful. One drawback is that it takes away the original url - if I send my friend an un-highlighted CNN url, s/he can see it's from CNN.com, whereas you can't with a highlighted article.
Not to doubt Tim's statement, but I would reckon Google has this technology in mind and will have a plan to put into action when the time comes.
This is all true. But try saying what he said to a friend or student, try writing 2 paragraphs in response to one sentence about humble problems,and I suspect you will be thought condescending.
Interesting to see that it even wins in comparison to C/C++ implementations. - Cool. :)
Marking links as spam has 3 advantages that I can see.

1-You can remove the links so they get no more incidental traffic from people viewing the new-queue.

2-If you remove the link entirely, it removes the SEO benefit of an inbound link. I would also recommend setting rel=nofollow on all links in the new queue regardless, to remove the pagerank benefit for SEO.

3-If a spam link is a separate "veto" then a spammer creating dummy users to vote threads up doesn't work, as real users can veto the post.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...

Edit: In thinking about it, approaches 1 and 2 can apply to low-point items without a new spam feature, however, hiding spam sooner reduces the incentive to submit spam. Theoretically, editors work fine, but that seems like a lot of manual labor.
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (for thoughts on competition)

Managing Gigabytes (if you are doing anything related to search)

Writing Solid Code (especially if you are using C/C++)

Most of the research papers that come out of OSDI/SOSP: Dynamo, BigTable, Sawzall, GFS, Chubby, etc
Getting hired
Alienware Area-51 m15x plagued by overheating & cracking
Alienware m15x owners have shelled out thousands of bucks in order to take home a serious piece of gaming hardware, only to find that their machine is overheating and / or developing cracks in the frame for no apparent reason.
Agreed. I avoid clicking on tinyurl.com links for this very reason.

And are long urls a big deal? I found a titanium spork the other day on Amazon, and my friends were fine with the giant honkin' link I IMed. On blogs, forums and the like, you can always hide the giant url behind some hyperlink text.

The only good use of shortened URLs I've seen is in IRC channel topics.
>Plus whos going to vote for spam?

Spammers.
http://www.twitter.com/issackelly and http://twitter.com/servee
I agree. I wouldn't be surprised to see RDF creep into a niche of the web where hard-semantic data is already a requirement (and this would just be standardizing it), but I feel like in both psychology and web structure, meaning is something that is an emergent property, not something that's hard-coded into the raw data. Determining meaning from chaos is the impressive feat of modern search and the human psyche.
Of course he also says "I will not criticize the mouse... too much"...
What open source projects are you contributing to?
These days it is probably a given thing that hackers should contribute to open source projects to hone their skills. Except for the odd bug report, I still haven't found the time, as currently I don't even manage my own projects very well.

I would be curious though, what projects are you contributing to, and how did you get started? Are people more likely to start their own projects, or join existing ones?

For what it is worth, I consider open sourcing my unpublished mobile games, most notably a "who wants to be a millionaire" style quiz game. Perhaps if somebody else would be interested, I could work up the motivation to do so...
Thanks, will check them out. I actually alread had "Marginal Revolution" in my feeds list, but I ended up never reading it.
I read an interview with an IBM technical guy once who claimed that Lotus Notes was first and foremost a synchronization platform (desktop and server) and email was just kind of built on top of that..
Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

Build to Last by James C. Collins , Jerry I. Porras
The article reminded me of the comedy "translation" of Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia done some years ago. http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation
O' Reilly's "Dynamic HTML" is probably my most well-used book.