skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmmm... my own list of memorable programming books would look like (in no specific order):

1. The Mythical Man Month, Brooks
2. Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister
3. Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, Norvig
4. The C Programming Language, Kernighan and Ritchie
5. The Ruby Way, Fulton

I had a hard time deciding whether or not to include the Pragmatic Programmer, in the end I decided to go with The Ruby Way because it was an unusually enjoyable read for a language book.

I know the original list was supposed to be more esoteric books, not classics, but I'm anticipating this becoming a thread of everyone's favorites. : ))
The Very Model of a Modern Media Mogul
Preparing for the Recession: How to Market Your Way Through It
I'm not running a server from this, but for personal use (and some ftp to with the server) we have a FiOS (AT&T Uverse - Elite - Download Speed: Up to 6.0 Mbps, Upstream Speed: Up to 1.0 Mbps -from their website) that gives us around 3-6 consistently. Our server is hosted in Utah somewhere (OC-48 Backbone Connection). I'm in CA.
I suggest the entrepreneurship week conferences, I met a lot great people there. Hundreds attend.
http://www.entrepreneurweek.ca/section/view/
Hollywood, Silicon Valley and AT&T? It’s a Deal
It's also useful knowledge for spammers. If they have a list of people who are interested in topic X, then they can craft an e-mail with a subject and body that is relevant enough to topic X that the people will be likely to click on a link in the message. The reason that spammers do not already do this is because it is too much trouble to track the topics associated with e-mail addresses and because the number of e-mail addresses easily found for a topic is too small to justify the expense of writing a custom e-mail. With your proposed service, it sounds like it would be easy to both track topic associations and retrieve large numbers of addresses.

Really, it sounds like you're trying to solve two different problems: (1) given an e-mail address, find relevant topics and (2) given a topic, find relevant e-mail addresses. A solution to either of these problems has the potential to enable spammers, if it is standardized to the point where address/topic extraction can be automated. In this regard, it's hard to beat the current system of listing your interests on your web page (which at least solves problem 1).
I had a quick look at the firmware (file "NK.bin" in the firmware .zip file I found on Samsung's website).

From "strings NK.bin|less", I learned that your frame was designed around an RMI (formerly AMD) Alchemy DB1200 reference board, running Windows CE 5.0 on an Au1200 CPU (MIPS32 architecture). More info about this stuff here: http://www.razamicroelectronics.com/products_alchemy/

IIRC, the Windows CE development kit contains tools to read filesystem dumps such as this one.

edit: there's some open source stuff in it but it looks legit (libFLAC, which is BSD-licensed and dual-license GPL stuff).
A lot of comments here have focused on implementation details. Let's ignore FPGAs, startup costs, etc... One huge advantage of hardware, is that you actually have something you can sell. As an interesting hardware startup archetype, consider Body Bugg:

http://www.bodybugg.com/

Long story short, they built a device to monitor health, but realized, only after being harassed by clients, that the real market was weight loss. Like ebay, they literally had clients begging them for a product.

Personally, I'd love to work at a hardware startup :)
Implications Of How A VC Is Funded: Diverse LPs
In my post, How A VC Is Funded, I listed four way in which VCs obtain capital to invest in startups. Each of these four sources of capital has slightly different implications for entrepreneurs.

Fundraising Cycles
Investments made in a VC fund by a diverse group of limited partners are integrated in closed end funds. As a result, VCs who raise money from a diverse group of LPs have to go and raise capital from limited partners every 3-5 years. Money is raised, the fund is closed, the capital is invested and then another fund is raised.

As a result, entrepreneurs can be affected by where the current fund is in its lifecycle. If you receive an investment from a VC when they are raising another fund, the VC will likely be slightly busier than they would otherwise be. Fundraising is a very time consuming process for VCs, making them very busy. This doesn’t mean that they won’t have time for you, it just means that their schedules will be more complex and they will be slightly harder to reach.

However...
How Super Mario Bros Made Me a Better Software Engineer
Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden
Have to put in a strong seconding of Peopleware and MMM. Certainly two must reads.
I use EveryDNS. Never had any problems, and even donated.
Ruby hacker proposes to quit his job and work only on OSS while living on donation money
I'm working on a new commerce app for a well known large company, with GWT on the front end. In the past I've worked with most of the well known Java frameworks - spring, struts, JSF... It's a different way of thinking, but it has been pretty enjoyable to learn so far.
Why do you need low ttl's? Can you clarify the problem you are trying to solve?
This is a good thought process for software, where the marginal cost per user is near zero.

Unit costs matter in hardware though, so first thoughts should tend more toward markets and demographics -- "what problem should I solve... for how much?"

A new Ferrari (or a new Prius) would solve my getting-places problem better than the POS I drive now. I could buy a new Tesla Roadster, which would be better than either one, but that's even less affordable.

Of course, since a hardware startup requires some hefty NRI that you'll probably have to borrow from someone else, you might want to start by polishing up your resume.
Tell us more!

I'm not doing embedded gigs right now, but as I'm once again leaving my 9 to 5 job, I may be forced to sell myself soon :)
The trouble with the C++ paradigm that the implementor of a class does a bit more work so that the user of a class doesn't have to is that it's recursively extra work: I do extra work in a low-level class so it's user can do less - but wait! I'm the user of this class. And in the class in which I use the class I just worked hard on, I further have to do extra work for the benefit of the users of the second class. And so on - a hall of mirrors of extra work. Not to say that it's zero-sum, but the effect is more one of shifting the work downward in the hierarchy and I only get a net benefit if I reuse the most basic classes roughly at least 3 times. Not all classes are created for re-use; some are created just to divide up the code into smaller human-readable chunks, and that's where the extra work for the implementor of a class is more overhead than it saves.
+1 for healthy sleep habits, happy child. Also recommend Happiest Baby on the Block (http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0553381466/pchristensen-20)
I think the URL you're looking for is:

http://codeclimber.blogspot.com/2008/03/education-is-it-wort...
Microsoft: Gates launches Google Docs killer, encourages headline cliches
thanks jgc

ive heard a lot about the arduino, i think im gonna get one or build one

but i also want to be able to build my own circuits, to learn to program the microcontrollers, so i can get closer to the idea of designing the hardware for my software
Ask YC:  Free advertising to encourage greater user participation and promotion of your service?
The idea is to complement paid advertising with free advertising to reward your users.

For example, given a participation/merit factor k for each user (e.g., karma in a social news site), you could show a user's free ad with probability proportional to k.

This would also encourage users to promote your site so that more people would see their free ads.
I'd throw in some cash the second he decides to try this. Working full-time on something is much more productive than working evenings.
Charisma seems to be a thread through most of these examples.
But then you have to contend with IIS, more expensive hosting, a smaller pool of knowledgable people on the subject of windows hosting. Not to mention the less reliable operating system/webserver.

OK I guess this could just turn into a flame war, but I just don't see why you would choose ms for web development, instead of all the free tools with great communities.
Charisma is the fume in an otherwise empty fuel tank.
Scary but very interesting (her face follows the cursor)
Ask YC:  Would it make sense to build a social news site using bounce rate instead of voting?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate:

"The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page."

You could approximate this in a social news site by seeing what fraction of users quickly return after checking out a link.

Given that most users don't vote at all, perhaps something like this would be desirable?
I went to a conference recently about AIR and it looks quite interesting. Adobe understands that there is a divide between programmers who make web-based software and programmers who make desktop software and their idea is to bring web-programming techniques to the desktop. For example, you could download an AIR program that gives you a more fluid and responsive front-end to Amazon.com which pre-caches the parts of the catalogue most interesting to you. Could be interesting once the runtime is more widely installed.
I use primarily my own DNS servers (linux/bind), but also some addresses uses domainmonger.com and godaddy.com DNS.
Plus Adobe can't be faulted for the adoption of ECMAScript in AIR and Flex/Flash.
Something similar happened before with the Haiku OS project back in 2005 when Axel Dörflel worked on it full time for a few months using donated funds. (Link: http://haikunews.org/print/1125)
Ohh wow, thanks! I totally needed that.
What's he re-vamping and why?

Look and feel? No need to switch from PHP.
Performance? A framework might help, but it might not.
Maintenance time? Could be looking ground up here.

Again, if this is a redesign for the sake of redesigning, it doesn't really matter what you use. If there is a specific goal though, changing frameworks/languages should only be done if it provides a way to reach the goal.
No metric is perfect, but this one really sounds like it's worth a try.
By embracing technology instead of competing with it. Free WiFi, better seating / accommodations for groups, lots of places to plug in, improved atmosphere. It's not impossible for libraries to get "mainstream" again, there are plenty of students needing places to study / hang out and others that would prefer not to have to pay for their WiFi at Starbucks. They should've been capitalizing on the coffeeshop craze, and remodeling themselves to grab some of that market.
is he working on something you need, or would you just support him for the sake of idealism?

if you do need the end product, then it seems reasonable enough. but if it's idealism you seek, how many hackers should set up donation bins before you stop donating to each new one?
The Perl Foundation (http://foundation.perl.org/) has done this quite a bit. There's a good model to follow.

Hacker News' own benhoyt has http://micropledge.com/ which seems well suited to the task.
I think that that's an important piece of information that's rarely used. Like brlewis says, not perfect, but I think you could use it well.

I think it's more suitable for a single site rather than a link aggregator/social news, because once you follow a link on the site, how do you know when the user leaves that page?
The article has a pretty good explanation of night owls vs. morning people, namely that the real reason people are one or the other is not the time of day they prefer, but that the night owl has a circadian rhythm that is longer than a 24 hour day, so they get out of sync and go to bed later and later until it bumps against the time they have to get up for work! Reading that is a personal vindication for me because I've said for years, and no one would believe me, that I run on a 28 hour rhythm. When I have no other commitments (like during the summer when I was still in high school) my sleep schedule would wrap around and around the clock. I believe I have an unusually long circadian rhythm compared to the norm, so going to bed at the same time just doesn't work for me; what actually happens is that throughout the week I get progressively less sleep until I crash and sleep all day, resetting the cycle.
Comment that turned into a blog post:

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/why-were-not-in-a-...
That was a great one. His malloc wrapper was a life saver, and getting into the habit of adding lots of assertions was really helpful for me.
As an approximation, you could see what fraction of users quickly return to the social news site after visiting the link.
Well it works pretty well for Amazon.

And since I discovered lats.fm I have never listened music elsewhere, since their recommendations hit my (somewhat obscure) taste in music perfectly.

There's definitely data to be mined, and meaningful results to be extracted. The problem is that the people doing the algorithms are not good enough at what they do. Admittedly it is not an easy problem.
first MySQL, then Python, Sun seems to have melted its brains.
Like his critics say - his politics come first, and then the evidence follows.

Anyone who thinks averaging brain scans directly leads to information that can be used to set policy is fooling themselves.
I think this model would work better if he wanted to take time off to start up and develop a new OSS project.

I can see a lot of people donating to get 'Some really cool project' built.

But I doubt that faster bug fixes and improved documentation in open source reporting software is worth 60$ to too many people if you take away the feel good factor of donating to open source
What about if you open up every article you find potentially interesting in a new tab, and stay on the page?

This is how I use YC news, and I don't think im alone.
Real hackers run their own hand-coded DNS server.

Seriously, though, I run a DNS server on the same machine that runs my [small] web server, etc. There is an argument to be made that you need failover machines for DNS, but my counter-argument is that if my web server machine is dead, no amount of DNS redundancy is going to fix anything.
Joel Spolsky's list: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html
"...perception is reality: if users see file copying as slower, it is slower. Despite all the algorithmic improvements, in spite of the superior file copy benchmark results, Vista's file copy performance is worse than Windows XP."

Amen. "Real" optimization is useless if it doesn't optimize the practical uses of the system. After all, computers are tools. Objective optimization doesn't make them better tools, since it doesn't make them any more effective when they're being used by people. Perceived optimization, on the other hand, allows people to better use their computer.

As the maxim goes: "Use better tools." It's no accident that it's not "Use better algorithms."
Scale your website by splitting your data streams
I love how he quotes that paper, and yet the paper concludes:

"Although our results could be used to enhance progress bars system-wide, there are many cases where modifying progress behavior seems inappropriate. In general, processes with known static completion conditions and stable progress are not good candidates – standard progress bars can visualize these effectively and accurately. In addition, these types of processes tend to be less affected by pauses or other negative progress behavior (sufficiently so that they are frequently accompanied by accurate time estimates). Examples of this type of process include copying a file to disk..."

Although I'm more inclined to think the paper is wrong about file copies rather than Atwood.
My site klipboardz.com ups the vote on each story for any registered user that reads it, then a user can down vote it if they didn't like it. I assume that if you care enough to read a link then it should get an up-vote.
We run our own using MyDNS. It has a few bugs, but by and large it works.
I wish this happened to me. I do often do the "subconcious solves the problems" thing, but "sleeping on it" rarely seems to help, and it usually happens somewhere where I'm a long way away from anything to code on (computer, paper, or otherwise.)

Result: I've turned into an obsessive carrier of pens and paper. I've basically come to the realization that my muse strikes unpredictably, without warning, and almost ALWAYS at the least convenient time.
IT Conversations Interviews Johnny Lee
I find it hard to convince a corporation to donate money for an OSS. It would need approval from people not familiar with OSS.
May be the model is to do it, thru consulting. For example, start working in Ruport, then advertise your self as a Ruport consultant, find some customers that are willing to pay for support or consulting, as you are able to charge for it, you can spend more time working in the project. I think several people have been able to do it. Companies are used to pay for support or consulting, they are not used to pay for something that is already free.

Some companies have been able to do it with great success. SpringOne, JBoss, JGoodies come to my mind.
Bram Cohen (who supports his family off of grateful BitTorrent users) is the exception. A lot of programmers are paid to work on open source (however, they are mostly employed by large Open Source advocates like IBM).
Always Be Audacious
Cobol was designed on the premise that it would be so "English like" (and by using business expressions as keywords) that it would allow business people to express things in familiar terms so that they could write their own programs and fire all their programmers. Instead, programmers were still necessary and they ended up having to deal with a horrible clumsy language. This is the same thing, only applied to visual representations.

In other news, I've developed a type of brick that's so easy for homeowners to lay, that architects will no longer be necessary!
That would be a pretty cool product if it actually worked -- it could be used to automate a lot of customer support. I'd invest.
In our case, we asked friends and associates who were familiar with our product to provide descriptive keywords. We ran through those until we had a short list of names we liked. Of course most addresses were taken, but we didn't stop there, we made the effort to contact the current owners. Which required a /whois + some creative googling.

We actually found one owner who said he might be willing to sell it, but he didn't have a clue how to transfer it or even price it. We walked him through the process and he even offered it to us at a fraction of the assessed value because he said, "that price was just too much!"

We were thrilled when we landed http://realphotography.com
This falls safely into the Uncanny Valley:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120425

http://www.androidscience.com/theuncannyvalley/proceedings20...
This is an interesting point. I think you are right in some ways. People seem to admire software more then hardware. I personally have a thing for beautiful hardware and industrial design. Apple fits that bill but there are lots of other companies that have done some brilliant hardware design that stand out. My inspiration came from being part of the FIRST robotics competition in high school.
Poll: What do you look for in a job?
I'm wondering what matters most to news.yc readers when selecting a potential employer or workplace? If it's not listed, please add a comment and I will add it.
Salary & Benefits (Compensation)
Co-Workers (Culture)
Equity Distribution
Appreciation of work completed
Idea behind business (or core business)
Other (please specify below)
No slides give the full picture of a presentation but this is still worth reading. It's written by Google engineer and Mailinator creator Paul Tyma.
I've considered doing a startup that develops and sells integrated instrumentation for yachts and sailboats (lighting, wind measurements, depth, speed, motor sensors, etc. ) I have a pretty good knowledge of yachting (I live on a boat) and see a market. The stuff that's already there is expensive, a few years behind technologically, and it seems that no great hackers have discovered this niche. I have some thoughts on how to improve this, and would love to hear from hardware hackers. My mail is in my profile if you're interested.
Poll: If it wasn't YC who would it be?
If you were to apply to a "yc" clone, which one would it be?
None (they're all bogus f*%kin biters)
Seedcamp (because the UK matters too)
Techstars (cause I love skiing)
Y Europe (le france & il italia are so romantic)
Launchbox (*insert phrase here*)
Boostphase (if it ever launches)
The real reason Google's clicks are flat
I don't think parents have a fundamental right to hit their children. What about children's rights? And I don't like to analyze things in terms of rights, anyway.

But I don't think spanking should be banned today in the USA. I don't want to make 90% of families (or whatever the number is) into criminals overnight, and make the debate go underground. A ban wouldn't stop spanking; we need to persuade more people first. I do expect that some time in the future we will rightly ban spanking.

I wouldn't object to the State taking steps to discourage spanking, but I don't think the State is really any good at persuasion. Their anti-drug and anti-smoking campaigns and stuff like that don't work.

What we need is for people to start believing that rationality isn't just for doing science, and maybe your job, it's for everything including parenting and relationships. And to learn something about which ways of arguing and thinking are capable of finding better conclusions than you started with, and which aren't.
Epic cable pr0n: One Wilshire meet-me room
I could see adpinion and clickfacts possibly going somewhere to an extent ... though only because I don't know enough about advertising to figure out if they won't be able to get lots of customers

I can't help but notice, though, that clickfact's management team seems to be around PG's age so I wouldn't call it a pure Y Combinator thing based on the premise of Y Combinator as I understand it.
How are you confident of that? I'd like to be. But I have self-selected friends that don't give me any valid way to extrapolate what proportion of smart hackers advocate spanking. Similarly I don't know how to make a valid estimate of how many people here are atheists.

I have noticed reasonably frequent atheist references, so I think a fair amount of people here are atheists. But parenting comes up rarely, and people often have views on parenting that are poorly integrated with the rest of their personality.
That is very odd, but still cool I guess.... what is purpose of that exactly?
I've actually done a hardware startup, and it does face some unique problems that sofware doesn't.

I found that the most time consuming and expensive was turnaround time. If you have a bug in your software you fix it, compile, and go. 10 minutes of work. In hardware your turnaround time can be a week or more if you have to solder around on a breadboard to check changes or bugs.

For the record we managed to build a display device using RGB LED's, a FPGA to control them, a microcontroller to talk to a mobile phone unit that would be able to send and receive updates from a central server, and of course the server that controlled the displays that were scattered around the country in around 1½ years using roughly $150.000. It was an advertising network - take the display, plug it in to a power outlet, and it would wake up and receive news and ads from the central server over the mobile phone network.