skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not doomed at all. Less chance than programmers? Not even. I know a product manager-ish person and he leads projects from proposal to finish for his company. He reads a description, drafts a spec, and scrutinizes every step.

The advantage of being a programmer yourself is that you have intimate knowledge of what's not possible, what is, what limitations there are, and what approaches to take. If you know enough of the whole plan, leave the details to others. All you need to know is what you want to do and exactly how to do it, not as in "we will do a POST XHR here," but "the user submits this, and we will look for this keyword, and they will see that." If you can write a good spec, you're good to go.
I learned I lean toward being a purist.

I learned that uniformity in good (by uniformity I mean the everything is a list feature).

I also learned that if you are mildly obsessive compulsive, (counting) the brackets will drive you crazy, and you will just give up.

Which led me to learn that if a language achieve type uniformity without syntax uniformity, it will be awesome, it will have all the goodness of lisp but with more forgiving syntax
I let the masses use it an see, which scripts and queries use the most resources.
>If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

...utter brilliance there. It's amazing how the poems I thought were cute in high school ring so true now that I'm in my 30's.
That's actually a common method for breaking captchas...
"The quickest route to describing a seed's output is to sprout it."
- Kevin Kelly, 'Out of Control'
Wisdom is seldom related in one sentence.
Guy Kawasaki: "Too many companies duke it out on the same curve. If they were daisy wheel printer companies, they think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points. Instead, they should invent laser printing."
I've always just visited the site throughout the day. I find that the homepage doesn't change much and the new page is always changing, and using something like google reader isn't the best way of keeping track of discussions on the home page and new submissions both. Also, I've been surfing this site a lot more using my iPhone and was just wondering if pg was fine with someone designing an iPhone friendly version.
How about #1+2 and absolutely not #3?

That is, if I liked my day job, I wouldn't be looking for ways to fulfill my family finances by doing something else?
We've ordered a lot of Chinese food, and accordingly amassed a lot of little soy sauce packets. They usually give us ten or so, while generally one or two would get used. I kept these on my desk for a while, before moving them to a folder in my file cabinet. When that overflowed, I started dumping the soy sauce into a cardboard box on my desk.

One day, to my horror, I came in to discover that someone (an over-zealous janitor?) had discarded our mass quantities of soy sauce, box and all! I was very disappointed.
I use RSS (NetNewsWire), pick out interesting-sounding articles, skim the comments. If it still sounds interesting, I read the article, then read the comments in detail.
left to right - top to bottom. i sometime mix it up a little but i never seem to get better results.
Political brain is addicted to rejecting contradictory evidence
The folks from Buxfer (YC Winter '07) have built a nice News.YC web app for the iPhone (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134386):

https://www.buxfer.com/yc/#___home__
I can't wait until the Web 4.0 demo
Aahz says later on in the thread that they did it to keep attendance cost down.
I'm surprised that 'Getting Real' hasn't been suggested yet, perhaps it has something to do with the recent backlash against 37signals. Anyway I'll stand by it. Fantastic book. I might even go as far as to say 'essential'.

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php
First off, I want to thank everyone for the ideas. Just so you know, the problem we are having isn't a technical one. I feel that our application isn't getting 'the love' it would get if I wrote it myself. Our service providers rely on us to find problems instead of being proactive. To summarize - there just isn't the sense of ownership that drives quality. The problem isn't going away, so that is why I thought we might be doomed.
yeah. you might also be interested to look at my thread history to see some of the other stuff i get downmodded for. a few are: a question about what dates someone meant, a comment that lotto odds are public knowledge (questioning the point of the post which asked about what the odds "really" are), a "+1 informative" joke that's at -9 for some reason.

edit: btw this thread wasn't a representative example. disagreeing with pg increases downmods. if it'd been someone else it might not have happened.

and i was getting some downmods by people who didn't like the link or title but who can't downmod the submission itself so downmod comments intead.
Also here is MY ineffecient way of doing it:

function article($link){

print_story($link->id);

print_comment(0,$link->id);

}

function print_comment($parent_id, $link_id){

$comments = $db->get_col("SELECT comment_id FROM table_comments WHERE comment_link_id=$link_id and comment_parent = $parent_id ORDER BY comment_votes DESC");

if ($comments) {

$comment = new Comment;
foreach($comments as $comment) {
$comment->print();
}
print_comment($comment_id,$link_id);
}

}

}

TABLE `table_comments` (

`comment_id`, `comment_parent`, `comment_link_id`, `comment_votes`

)

If you store and manipulate all the data in memory, I don't see why this would be that bad?
I don't know why I didn't think to mention this before, but there are HR outsourcing companies that will let you set up a co-employment agreement with them. Basically, these companies get tens of thousands of small businesses together, and then bargain with insurance companies as a group. This way they can get much better rates than if you tried to buy individual insurance.

So what you do is file your new business paperwork with the state, and then buy an HR contract with one of these companies. I think the largest one is Administaff, but my company recently switched from them to another one called TriNet, which is supposed to be cheaper.
the double underline ads? Opera lets you fix that problem with a user script:

window.opera.addEventListener('BeforeExternalScript', function(e) {
if(matchBlackList(e.element.getAttribute('src'))) e.preventDefault();
},false);
Second that, we had tons of problems with IE and sIFR on a fairly large site - and it is only good in SMALL amounts.

We were doing the drop-down top navigation, the side navigation, footer links and some more aux links and it was slow as hell - I wouldn't recommend it if you can get by without it.
Google Reader, intermixed with various other tech news sites, including Slashdot, Ars Technica, Digg Technology (ya ya, I know) and Tech Crunch.

With interesting topics, I make it a point to read the comments, too.
This is exactly my point, that technical people are interchangeable. Your problem is not finding technical people but technical people whom you are comfortable with. In another words, the selection criteria here is not their technical ability (which there are plenty) but their compatibility with you. Again, none of these matters unless you have a good product idea.
That one's Napoleon Hill, from "Think and Grow Rich."
My sentiments exactly.

As a Python outsider (Ruby won the coin flip, so I still haven't learned much Python) can I ask for a translation from the Python wizards in the audience? Is this a Zed-Shaw-style rant with 80% fewer swear words? i.e. "I'm annoyed because marketing departments have discovered my favorite tool and now my breakfast cereal is full of tchotchkes?" Or is this a symptom of an actual problem in the Python core community?

One of the annoying side effects of developing a reputation for success is that corporate IT wants very badly to talk to you. I'm watching the Drupal community go through this now, I've seen the Ruby folks trying to cope with Rails mania, and this looks like it might be the same thing. It's annoying, like a headache, but in the immortal words of PG, headaches can be a sign of good things -- for example, you might be recovering consciousness after a blow on the head.

In this case, we might be seeing a sign that Python is developing a popular reputation for success! And that's good... although it may mean that people need to start holding smaller, less formal meetings in odd corners if they want to actually discuss anything.
I believe we all have technical talents. I might not know the latest web-based programming language but I bet my ability to solve partial differential equation with time-varying constraints is relevant when it comes to judging technical people. In startup situations, it all comes down to having a desire to win. If you have a strong enough desire, you will (eventually) win. So even if you have the best programming skills in the world, you might not do well in a startup if you don't want it bad enough.
A local lisp implementation in my community saved an entire boatful of drowning puppies! Lisp is awesome!
I believe things change quickly once you have a prototype and you need to start to sell (to customers) or start to create channel (with partners). I think it is also wrong to divide the world so neatly into one that is technical and one that is not. My experience is in a startup, everyone is technical. Some focus entirely on technology and some can cross over to non-technical activities (sales, marketing, business developmen, etc.) which are still quite technical but have a non-technical outcome. Startups that are consisted of only technical people who can't find room for a "non-technical" person is probably more focused on building "features" than "products".
How exactly is this Web 3.0? I never even really made sense of how you could call Web 2.0 "Web 2.0" when a) almost everyone who develops web 2.0 rich applications only create banners with gigantic, multicolored texts (eg. tutorials "How to make a fancy Web2.0 Logo) and b)This site uses the same technologies as web2.0 in the same ways as I've seen in other places.

We need to stop playing this game of semantics, and stop being so anxious to evolve without the real need to.
The original headline editorialized.
Google Reader - click nteresting items, Ctrl+click to put them in their own tabs, branch from there.
livejournal.com, Reddit, Google.
How To Be Creative
>...you can think of an idea as a multilplier...

Mixmax, you don't seem to realize that in your explanation execution is a multiplier too!

Let me rewrite your comment below:

So you can think of execution as a multilplier, where the better execution will give somebody with a good idea a better output.

To explain:

bad execution: x0,5

OK execution: x1

good execution: x5

great execution: x10

etc
Google’s Hunger for Power
ha, reading right now on my iPhone on the elliptical at the gym
Two Sides...All the Answers - GirlsAskGuys
GirlsAskGuys is an interactive website dedicated to popular topics on the minds of men and women looking for advice about the opposite sex.
Online Business Networking: 2 Horse Globalization Race
how about you just delete my account Paul. I am done posing and joining in here so no lose to anyone.
This is a cool idea. Nice design too (number of colors can be reduced though).
Oh is Web 3.0 in beta already? Where can I sign up?
Looks like a new approach for a Q&A website that focuses on questions about same or the opposite gender. Another good point was that it is swarmed by many male users, unlike most other gender-based websites.
I went with more or less what nostrademons described. So far it's working well.
No, because a good idea without any execution is worth nothing.
Goot pt. Wanted to say this as well, just couldn't find the words.
lucene is pretty cool and it's a lot better than anything I've seen so far (including ferret). The only problem I've experienced with it was index corruption, which is fairly common and frustrating (though in fairness it could have been due to my sys admin skills)
Someone I know has already begun executing this idea. He has big plans for it.
This is a great point--at what point specifically did things go from 1.0 to 2.0? Were there no 2.0 betas?

I think a lot of this might be driven by marketers/advertisers trying to sell their clients on "a new way" of selling their content. Remember when some company (Was it Slate.com?) came out with the full-page interstitial ad? That was a new way of advertising content--wouldn't you say that would have earned atleast a Web 1.1 rating?

"Web 2.0" _seems_ to be driven by sites being "interactive", I guess above and beyond just clicking around using 1.0(?) navigation. Furthermore, elements like mob behavior (Digg), social networking, RIA expereinces seem to let someone slap 2.0 on their site--not that it's wrong, but that seems to be the criteria. What else might I be missing in that list?

What would you call Hacker News? Just because it's born in the Web 2.0 "era", does it make it so?
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

- Anais Nin
Not all H1-b visa holders are programmers. A good chunk of them are actually IT workers with specializations like implementing SAP, PeopleSoft etc ERP packages. Same for Database administrators. Even bigger than this list is the number of people engaged in maintaining some godforsaken legacy MIS or such software at a huge corporation.

While these jobs might not appeal to a hacker or a good computer science graduate, there are just too many such jobs. Most H1-b aspirants are quite happy to take them.

About the H1-b visas for foreign students at US universities, I think it is a good idea, though not at the numbers listed in the article. I think 30-40000 H1-b visas
for students graduating from US universties should be good enough to cater for the niche companies like Microsoft, Google etc. Imagine a Stanford or MIT graduate go away from US because he cannot work here? While not all students at MIT or Stanford is a foreigner, those who are there still have to apply from the same pool of H1-b visas which is open to just about any one.
Command+L, 'n', tab, enter

at sporadic intervals throughout the day. Many times it's just something to keep my fingers moving while I'm thinking. I usually just glance through the headlines and move on. I try to only read noncritical news in the morning when I wake and later at night.
Before you can sign up, you have to download the latest version of the Internet.
This is what you said: good idea x 0 = 0. Execution is a multiplier, according to you.
hey bootload, thanks for your detailed response. you raise a lot of good points. we've definitely spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.

first, you're right that just extracting info from twitter doesn't require username and password. our initial twitter interface is an update though, which does require authentication.

- we do use SSL for all usernames / passwords that are submitted, though we should make that clear, b/c right now we don't give an indication.

- because twitter does not offer token-based authentication, and because we do not currently want to store passwords, we are actually submitting to twitter via the web interface; that means we submit the u+p just once, and then we hold onto a cookie, but not the u+p. when we login to twitter on your behalf, it is via https.

- one goal in the near / mid term is to give users a choice about the combination of privacy / convenience that they want. right now we have opted on the side of privacy, since we're not storing usernames and passwords. but some users have told us they would like wundrbar to basically act as a password manager, so we'll be building in that option.

- i hope twitter (and other sites) implement open auth soon, because i know there are alot of users who will be more comfortable using wundrbar through that authentication mechanism.
I thought this was a lisp hangout? Shouldn't it be:

(doomed (= founders programmers))

:-)
I'm not sure I agree that we're not talking about relational data. I mean... each record is -related- to others in a parent-child sort of way. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by relational?
It is good until your programmers run off with your idea and you have not seen one line of code.
Interesting for a proof of concept project, but totally useless in the real world where one of the obstacles to get a successful social news site up and running is to get submissions.

Besides I don't see a strong correlation between users ability to solve a puzzle and their ability to find and post interesting content. Which would result in a pretty random front page...
I agree that flash-only web sites endanger all of us.

I unistalled my flash player, and it would take a compelling application indeed which has no HTML/CSS/JS equivalent to induce me to reinstall it.
Wow. There is some great and striking stuff in there. Examples:

Your wee voice doesn't want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something.

If you try to make something just to fit your uninformed view of some hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed.

Frankly, I think youʼre better off doing something on the assumption that you will NOT be rewarded for it, that it will NOT receive the recognition it deserves, that it will NOT be worth the time and effort invested in it.

Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.

A very lively and, in places, shocking piece that I am going to have to reflect over.
I use ab for simple things and siege for more involved benchmarking. I write my own functionality tests in Perl with WWW::Mechanize for monitoring.
Startups high pre-money valuation is a killer
Startups like to raise fund at a high pre-money valuation. It's understandable; founders want to give up little % of their company for a lot of money. But that could be very dangerous, even fatal for startups/founders. When the company is new and unproven, it's better to raise capital at a low pre-money valuation. Founders know when the company is a few thousand line of code, or barely bringing revenue, it shouldn't be valued as high, but they raise the valuation bar anyway. Let's say the founder's wish come true, and the company gets acquired, which is the new business model for most startups now these days. Investors will get the money they invested and more, before founders get anything. Sometimes founders get nothing. It's never about founders get 45%, investors get 65% of the company's stocks. Investors always want to get their investment back, and possibly more... If taking 65% is higher than taking 10X their investment, they'll take 65%; if taking 10X their investment is higher than taking 65%, they'll take 10X their investment. Investors get paid before founders. In an acquisition, the higher the pre-money valuation is, the more likely investors will take all, if founders don't sell as high as their company pre-money valuation. Now days, before a startup gets out of beta phase, it's already valued at millions. Facebook barely bringing $200 million in revenue is valued at $15 billion. Even Mark Zuckerberg doesn't think his company worth that much. Digg.com barely has a business model, is valued at $200-$300 million. What happen to the good old fashion of buying low to sell high? Startups need to buy investor's money at a low pre-money valuation to exit the company high to make a profit.
What is my motivation to spend time solving puzzles?

I've got my hands full starting a company.

I hate to sound negative, but I don't think that the folks who have that time to solve puzzles have the appropriate judgment to figure out what I might want to read.
What's wrong with voting?
First I usually skim the fronpage, whenever I see an interesting article I open the article and the comment page. Scan the article if seems interesting and is not too long read it, if it is long scan it and read the comment page. If there is an interesting discussion read the article, else close the article and comments page.

After reading the full article, if good upvote. Read the comments, if there is an interesting conversation upvote (if still unvoted) article and comments. If I have something interesting to add. Comment.

After that, if an interesting conversation was taking place set a mental interruption on the future to recheck it.
Pfizer personal data leaked on P2P network
Is it down for everyone or just me?
A Quick Way To See If a website is down for Everyone or Just You written by Twitter developer Alex Payne
concision rocks.
Gmail lets me email nicely. Flickr lets me organize and share photos easily. reddit and news.yc give me news.

What does this let me do?
Secrets of Javascript Libraries
Clever and simple. A nice combination.
Does anyone have any theories on why Apple is acting the way they do (except the ones raised in this article), could it be legitimate?

Have we heard of any third-party developers that has been accepted into the beta program?
I use good reader as well, however I use it on my windows mobile phone alot more than my laptop.
for sure Ian. Best of luck with the launch. Glad you're connecting up with the grooveshark guys. talk soon.
Panda3D - Open Source Python 3D Engine
I really think this is the key point and problem. If the people doing the heavy lifting aren't either passionate about the product or actually using it on a daily basis, you will suffer.

I don't think you're doomed, but as a programmer, I've both had startups and been brought into ones that have been outsourced. In my experience, those little things, the fit and finish, just aren't there when the people building them are in it for the paycheck.

At the risk of sounding cliched, it's kind of like the old adage about people who are fighting for their home vs. a paid soldier. You will get a lot more fight from the guy defending his home than the mercenary.
Ask YC: Proper way to ask seperate questions in comments?
Just now, i had to ask myself what to do when i were commenting on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138249 .

Basically, i had two unrelated questions to raise for the same article. Should i have done it the way i did, asked both questions in the same comment or should i have asked them in different comments to branch two different discussions.

What is the etiquette?
So Web 3.0 = Ajax + Natural Language Processing?

heh, cute, but no.
For me, it's all about number 2 (and how it relates to #1) and my current contracts and obligations at my "day job."

I build startups all day every day, so I'm comfortable with the field. I've got what I think is a good idea and a ton of execution on it so far. I have a small group of testers that (about 20% friends, the rest random strangers) and a desire to make a great product.

There is a great monetary upside potential, but I just don't have the resources at this time to quit and focus 100% on this. Of course, I sleep so very little that I spend at least as many hours "on the side" as I do at my day job, so it might be somewhat moot anyway.
I'm working on a hosted load testing solution for this type of problem. Specifically, it will let you run full transactions against a web front-end. You record a script with your web browser and then upload it, and run a mass of virtual users executing those steps.

If you want an update when it's ready, shoot me an email. On gmail, I'm ebeland.
yeah, a cool little app
Is there any open source semantic analysis stuff out there?
It's some sites like these that make me wonder,"Why didn't I think of that?"

Plus, it would save me some time answering questions in various IRC channels.
I learned that using code as data is more powerful than anyone who hasn't used Lisp can understand. Unfortunately, most languages make it a pain in the ass.

I long for macros almost every time I program something in Python.
I think it's a great example of noticing a common problem that no one has solved (to my knowledge) and providing a solution that's damned obvious in retrospect. The domain might be too long to remember. Maybe something like downorjustme.com (available) would be better.

Oddly though, it says youtube.com is down (maybe that's your test case?).